3rd and 4th Unique Components for VP - Official thread 88.10

[pineappledan]

Did a test with Koa. Attacking a unit with a -20HP plague (lasts 2 turns)

• Koa does 36 damage, (64/100HP)
• debuff is placed, subtracting 20 total HP. current HP is reduced by half of that (54/80)
• debuff wears off, health is restored by the full amount. (74/100)

So I'm kinda liking that as a mechanic, but it's not enough on its own. What if Koa also gave -10 healing?

EDIT: I'm also thinking of not re-adding the Khopesh's -20%CS debuff. The unit is already very solid; such a buff isn't necessary

 

[ProCatGamer]

Is the mod now compatible with the new update with the Rome changes?

 

[pineappledan]

No.

This mod has not used the IsDummy() value up to this point, so it does not work with G's latest hotfix. Updates on our end are needed.

I've been preoccupied with real work and updating the promotions.

 

[jdude147]

This and your other mods that add units don't seem to be called by FreeUnitsTechAppropriate in CPE, any idea why?
My most recent experience of this was as Israel getting the barbarian horde event and a regular swordsman spawned instead of his UU

 

[pineappledan]

This and your other mods that add units don't seem to be called by FreeUnitsTechAppropriate in CPE, any idea why?
My most recent experience of this was as Israel getting the barbarian horde event and a regular swordsman spawned instead of his UU

Because I haven’t integrated any of my own mods with Enginseer’s work.

@adan_eslavo, @Hinin, at this point I think this mod needs to do something drastic with respect to Rome. I think we need to disable rome’s Ability to capture UBs entirely.

At this point it looks like Rome’s ability to capture Unique national wonders will remain intact, I have not been able to dissuade the community at large from dropping this change. 4UC quadruples the number of UNWs, so a standard 8 civ game will likely have 1-2 of these UNWs. This creates a massive, unworkable balance problem, where Rome will be able to reliably co-opt multiple powerful global effects from other civs. Rome was already made much more potent by the simple addition of more UBs for them to steal, but being able to take unique wonders is beyond the pail.

If we disable rome’s 100% capture, and simply increase their production boost to 20-25%, I think that will make it much easier to keep a reasonable balance for Rome.

What are your thoughts?

 

[Hinin]

It wouldn't be the first time that we touch a UA for the sake of the modmod. It indeed seems that Rome won't be changed in the near future, so I think that you are right.

As for the modification itself, is it possible to simply forbid NW stealing, or do you have other ideas in mind (the bonus production is nice but a bit bland) ?

 

[infidel88]

For some reason people seem to love Rome and believe it should be 'best civ ever'. I don't understand why, but that's the general consensus. Even here (or among alternate leaders) there were people offering ludicrous UBs to Rome.

On the other hand I hate 'there is a chance' sentence anywhere in strategy game. There is difference betweeen 50%, 20% and 80%. How about a copy of each UB captured in Rome, that you can maybe copy from Timurids somehow?

 

[pineappledan]

As for the modification itself, is it possible to simply forbid NW stealing, or do you have other ideas in mind (the bonus production is nice but a bit bland) ?

It's a binary, yes no. Either it's 66% for Rome, like everyone else, or it's 100% AND NeverCapture AND national wonders AND uniques

For some reason people seem to love Rome and believe it should be 'best civ ever'. I don't understand why, but that's the general consensus. Even here (or among alternate leaders) there were people offering ludicrous UBs to Rome.

Ugh... yeah that was a dark time. We had people legit asking for Rome to get 6 UCs while everyone else got 4. People have a serious hard on for Rome...

How about a copy of each UB captured in Rome, that you can maybe copy from Timurids somehow?

Then Timurids and Rome would be too similar. I don't think that's the way to go.
Maybe play off the whole "all roads lead to Rome" thing, and give +1 and +1 for all cities with a City Connection?

 

[Hinin]

Is it possible to make so that all units of the non-mounted melee and gunpowder lines can build roads and forts like legions ?

 

[pineappledan]

I like where that ability is right now... I’d prefer if it stayed just on the legion, personally.

I won’t change anything until AE is back from his bike trip, at any rate. That’s not going to be for a couple of days yet. I’d like to have his opinion on all this, since he’s much more the author at this point than I am.

 

[Hinin]

I like where that ability is right now... I’d prefer if it stayed just on the legion, personally

It's just that I've often found odd that Roman infantry, whose discipline won't fluctuate much from being upgraded, can lose the ability to do military engineering. The Legion already has a lot for it (bonus CP, Cover I and Pilum + the GG bonus), so I thought it would be a good way to make Roman armies more special throughout the game.

 

[pineappledan]

It's just that I've often found odd that Roman infantry, whose discipline won't fluctuate much from being upgraded, can lose the ability to do military engineering. The Legion already has a lot for it (bonus CP, Cover I and Pilum + the GG bonus), so I thought it would be a good way to make Roman armies more special throughout the game.

... except they kinda did.
As the Roman Empire aged, it leaned more and more on foederati and non-Latin men at arms, who completely lacked that classical discipline.

 

[Enrico Swagolo]

Anyone else finding Morocco to be bad? Riad is just forcing you to be tall if you want to get anything out of it because it has no base yields at all. The power it has goes away if you have many cities, and that was perfectly valid in base VP. Same with Corsair, it's nice for pillaging, but a wide Morocco doesn't benefit much. Again, base VP Morocco could go wide no problem, the UA's power disappears with time even with scaling to both pillaging and routes anyway and the UI likes wideness, turning even better if you are wide and take that +3 Science per UI. Why are both of them so heavily tall-centric?

Also I just saw Inca get in Renaissance while only I was in medieval era out of everyone. I know it's them because I checked the logs, the game got too unstable to continue. They have more than two times as much Science as I do and I have 50% more than the third best, so maybe their Iguana should be taken off the coffee table? I think it's a bad idea to stack their bonuses so hard. If they get RNG, they have mountains and every single economy-related unique benefits, meaning the UA, UI and UB. Their UUs benefit as well, so if they get the right RNG (is there a mountain-bias even?), they do crazy stuff.

If we disable rome’s 100% capture, and simply increase their production boost to 20-25%, I think that will make it much easier to keep a reasonable balance for Rome.

What are your thoughts?

Rome with only the faster building that requires you to build it in the capital first, meaning anything that keeps up in infrastructure with capital doesn't benefit, because if you want that Library/Colosseum ASAP, Rome and Antium will be building it at the same time, would be a worthless civ, no matter if it got 5% more. It'll help get the lesser cities up faster, but I could just play Denmark and get the same thing and combat/mobility bonuses
There's no way to balance this with a percentage, either you give Rome a crazy one or Rome disappears.

That's why if the stolen buildings are going, the civ should get something completely new and fitting to replace it. The percentage sucks because in actuality it doesn't always work. The solution of giving it more building production doesn't help. I don't think it can really be balanced with all the NWs in this mod unless you add some conditions to all of them, like Coimbra is effectively just 2 Gold per city if you're not Portugal (nobody else can get Feitorias up I think? I don't know about Prize Ship'd ones, but if someone goes through that much effort he deserves his super-strong trade route to a CS anyway), and that's too much work.

Is it possible to make so that all units of the non-mounted melee and gunpowder lines can build roads and forts like legions ?

I think that was suggested in Rome thread aeons ago, the problem is there's no animation.

 

[CppMaster]

Oh, I would miss Roman building capturing. If UNW are the problem, isn't it better to just change Roman UA to not capture these or limit to 1?

 

[pineappledan]

How about this? for the Rome UA?
Glory of Rome:

• 4 tiles claimed on city conquest
• +20% production towards buildings which already exist in your capital (up from 15%)
• +2 Gold from City connections (uses the CityConnectionTradeRouteChange bonus from pre-BNW Arabia)

So that adds som esynergy with the flavian collosseum's blobal +2% bonus to gold from city connections, it's unique, and it doesn't require any lua.

As a side note, dropping the UB capture from Rome's UA will add a lot of stability to our mod. It resolves an especially tricky issue with Rome capturing Polish Barbicans. It also means we wouldn't have to overhaul all the dummy buildings, which would require adding the IsDummy value to them all. Not a lot of work, that last one, but still .

 

[infidel88]

1. Was Rome really that bad that it needs boost?
2. My other idea of "all roads leads to Rome" - Rome should get some bonus (1) in capital per connected cities, [so they can build faster in capital and somehow represent culture they were grabbing from other civs] and +1% builidings production to all cities per connected cities (caps at +15%). And basic bonus stays at 15%. OR +1% per connection without cap and without starting bonus. Problem is - it forces you to go wide. Very wide.
3. And as a sidenote - we keep forgetting or skip on purpose Italy.

 

[FoxOfWar]

I think in this case it would be good to change Rome's UA a touch, yeah. Even if it did not cause obvious problems with the national wonders(which it does), it most certainly would end up being a whack-a-mole problem down the road, with so many UB's.

Simplest solution would probably be just the previous version - not capturing national wonders or unique buildings. More boring, but it's still a ton of infrastructure kept on capture.

If completely changing it is in the air, then I'd support a boost to capital for each connected city as per infidel88's suggestion.

 

[pineappledan]

Simplest solution would probably be just the previous version - not capturing national wonders or unique buildings. More boring, but it's still a ton of infrastructure kept on capture.

We can keep the UB capture and remove the UNWs ourselves. This would require a new lua trigger for city capture with Rome which deletes NWs from newly captured cities. That’s not particularly hard to do, and that’s the smallest possible change, but I’m perfectly happy to wait and see what more people think.

As you say, Rome’s ability to steal UBs has been a constant thorn in our side; an endless source of toil and anxiety. A clean break is attractive to me right now, but that might also be my current negative frame of mind. I’m pretty fed up with the general community and how it likes to accuse me of some ulterior motive whenever I raise a balance concern.

If completely changing it is in the air, then I'd support a boost to capital for each connected city as per infidel88's suggestion

If it’s an overwhelming unanimous outcry for a complete overhaul of the Roman UA, then maybe. Maybe. There are distinct advantages to changing as little as possible:

• Little to no lua, which would help stability (the proposed UA change would require a loop through every Roman city every turn, so that’s a bit of a non-starter for me, since we have had complaints about the amount of computation this mod already requires)
• Continuity with base VP will help attract new adopters, and require less adjustment
• Large changes require large reassessments of balance

 

[Hinin]

I would be more in favour of a non-gold capital-centered bonus like the one infidel88 suggested. Rome will have a high amount of gold from its UB1 anyway, so it seems more interesting to me to do so that connecting a lot of cities (something you see in "wide empires") can help you have a great capital (something you see in "tall empires"). Bonus production and culture seems the good types of yields to me.

As for the bonus when conquering, 4 free tiles seems a little anecdotic to me : it was an interesting bonus when added to the "keep buildings" bonus, but, alone, it isn't something you are ready to fight for. I think we should replace it as well. Maybe something more polyvalent like "Units gain +100 % construction rate when in GA" (synergizes with the UB1 and the UI, which normaly requires a lot of time to be built, and allows you to very quickly protect and connect conquered cities when in GA) or a pure conquest bonus like "After Masonry is researched, obtain free Walls when conquering a city" (so it avoids the compatibility problems we talked about, but keeps the "bite and hold" flavor of the cureent version of the civ).

What other suggestion do you have ?

 

[CppMaster]

@pineappledan would you make a poll on Roman UA too see which option is most desirable?