[Vote] (5-13) Ancient Ruin Change Proposals

[ma_kuh]

The difference between a Pathfinder hitting Upgrade or Tile Reveal on your first ruin is ridiculous. Compared to anything else, there's no competition. It steam rolls so hard (too hard) into picking up all of the other ruins in your vicinity, and you get access to remote regions first (embarking, mountain walking) which compounds the issue. I don't really see a way that those rewards can be balanced, and I don't think they are fun in any way. They feel bad when the AI gets them and eats all your ruins, and they feel bad when I get them because they obviate the entire early scouting mini-game.

 

[pineappledan]

You must also be joking that a warrior has more surviveability over a speedy pathfinder.

Not joking. In the barbarian PvE phase, Warriors have more CS and 33% vs barbs. At low-med difficulties They can fortify and heal through 3 barbs surrounding them while a pathfinder can barely survive 2 hits. In an early pvp, pathfinders can't outrun a horseman except in the most ideal situations, they can't tank more than 3 hits, a pillage action takes half their entire movepool, making them a sitting duck, and their squishiness makes them a high priority target. They just don't have the stats to do anything of value without being suicides.

 

[Stalker0]

So if I have early barb problems I will go survivalism with my early pathfinder and have it tag team with the warrior. And it does a decent enough job, but no its not equal to another warrior. I would never build a 2nd pathfinder over a warrior if my goal was to deal with barbs.

The only time I build a 2nd pathfinder (which is quite rare) is when I have a very large initial landmass and my early pathfinder get hung up with barb hunting or protecting a vulnerable city or something.

 

[tade.maj]

So imbalance is fun?

1. Yes
2. Biggest adventure of civ for me was always - the map. Nothing more exciting than playing on a beautifully imbalanced pangea, where there are super rich areas and crappy ones. Everyone battling for this rich valley. Making the map "balanced", making it mathematically regular, is the worst thing that happened. That is not how our Earth is
3. In this particular case, what I am referring to, is that you plan to replace "qualitative" features (gaining technology, getting "advanced weapons" which is full unit upgrade) with "quantitative" math-based bonuses (gaining some science, gaining some experience). Much less fun. Back in the days it was a hell lot of fun stealing full technologies, now it's a chore to click through a swarm of spies leeching some gold here, some science there. What used to feel like an adventure, now feels like freaking accounting.

 

[pineappledan]

Totally agree that there is no good reason why ruins need to be balanced against each other. They are random rewards and the different value of each of them is part of their randomness.

However, I would still prefer if they all gave numerical bonuses. If the proposal that only allows scouts to get bonuses doesn't pass, then there's still that bonus on recon units that gives them 25% more for discovering ruins. That bonus only works on numerical bonuses like gold or production, it doesn't give you more if the ruin gives you a free population or free tiles.

I like the free science instead of a free tech, because if I prioritized something to research, that's the tech I want finished. Not some random other tech.
The rest of the ruin rebalancing just seems like raising the floor on the worst ruins which... that's fine. the XP one is still kinda poopy even with the change, but 1 ruin still has to be the worst one. The GAP one needs to go because it makes the first golden age too fast, so I totally support that.

 

[Zuizgond]

I noticed AI builds a lot, probably too many, pathfinders and I'm not talking about civs with a unique recon unit. I don't think it's very efficient to do so, especially in the early game.

 

[usadefcon1]

I like the free science instead of a free tech, because if I prioritized something to research, that's the tech I want finished. Not some random other tech.

That makes it a nice tradeoff. You get a tech but not necessarily the one you want.

 

[Tekamthi]

how are stuck recon handled currently? do they have any kind of unstuck function? i tend to run mine manually to avoid losing it, haven't had to deal with stuck scout in a while

 

[Rekk]

Before I realized that your can only get tech from the first two tiers, I wanted to suggest science towards a random tech. I think it's perfectly fine to get a tech that you weren't trying to research.

 

[N.Core]

You guys are going to sap all the fun from the game...

It will be perfectly mathematically balanced and a boring as hell chore

I kind of agree with this. In fact, I rather want to make all civs able to pick Native Tongue (or even come by default for all Recon units) if imbalance or unfairness is the concern here. But, sadly, AI is unable to do that and they would just pick randomly.

Do you want to upgrade your unit? Go ahead and get it.
Do you want +1 Population? Go get it.
Need a free tech? Just grab a ruin. (Although to be fair, this is a broken reward and should be replaced with something else.)

So then the balance concern is on the map and how it generates the ruins, not the ruin reward itself.

 

[CppMaster]

In this particular case, what I am referring to, is that you plan to replace "qualitative" features (gaining technology, getting "advanced weapons" which is full unit upgrade) with "quantitative" math-based bonuses (gaining some science, gaining some experience). Much less fun. Back in the days it was a hell lot of fun stealing full technologies, now it's a chore to click through a swarm of spies leeching some gold here, some science there. What used to feel like an adventure, now feels like freaking accounting.

Yeah, I meant we could still have variety by having both qualitative and quantitive bonuses AND quantitive could be balanced, so in general they aren't worse by that margin.

*Variety* is fun here, not *imbalance*. Imbalance is a sideproduct of variety, usually not wanted. That's the exact reason we have all those balance discussions. It's not to cut variety (like having only 1 civ - perfect balance, lol), but to keep variety with all the unique civ and balance them, so there are less OP and UP civs.

That's obvious for civs and other aspects. Why are ruins so different, where imbalance itself is fun instead of variety?

 

[Tekamthi]

You guys are going to sap all the fun from the game...

It will be perfectly mathematically balanced and a boring as hell chore

Aye, a game of tic tac toe, perfectly balanced.

Who here seriously claims they won or lost a game cuz they did or didn't get a particular ruin bonus in turn 5?

This change is a little silly. Can it be implemented in such a way that we can modmod back to vanilla rewards (ie not hard-coded at dll level)? As pointed out, proposal here is a shift to boringness and mundanity for the sake of math.

 

[CppMaster]

Who here seriously claims they won or lost a game cuz they did or didn't get a particular ruin bonus in turn 5?

It's a "Million Little Things"

 

[Tekamthi]

It's a "Million Little Things"

True, and yes there are definitely circumstances that lead to advantages, the early game especially where these little things count most -- I don't dispute that there are some rewards that are better than others, nor that in some circumstances these can be leveraged into even greater advantages -- but I think that's the fun alluded to by some here. The goody hut rewards are small enough in the scope of the game that they are far from automatic-wins, and the fun is trying to convert that early tech or super unit into a grand strategy, and/or find counter-play to advantages developed by opponents. Flattening everything to irrelevance is balanced, certainly: the proposed rewards are all equally unimpressive.

Religion mechanism has far greater imbalances in the early game, but we all agree it's fun to have this. Corporations another one, huge, game-breaking imbalance. If you make it to late game with no corporation somehow, you lose far more often than you do from not getting good hut rewards. But we aren't nerfing these into the floor.

Game already has difficulty settings and up to 43 civs to balance out these small inequities. If you're racking up huge advantages from the goody huts, I'd suggest your game difficulty and opponent#/map size are miscalibrated for your skill/knowledge level. And the rewards are already somewhat neutered compared to civ-series standard. Remember when these used to be a risk/reward mechanism? They've since been changed to reward-only, and flattened already at least once subsequently iirc.

 

[CppMaster]

the proposed rewards are all equally unimpressive.

They could be all equally impressive, though, instead of some impressive and some unimpressive.

 

[Hawawaa]

Ah didn't realize ai could only pick goodies with recon only, so it should be the same with human player.

 

[Rekk]

Aye, a game of tic tac toe, perfectly balanced.

Who here seriously claims they won or lost a game cuz they did or didn't get a particular ruin bonus in turn 5?

This change is a little silly. Can it be implemented in such a way that we can modmod back to vanilla rewards (ie not hard-coded at dll level)? As pointed out, proposal here is a shift to boringness and mundanity for the sake of math.

Yes, this is just an SQL change.

 

[Tekamthi]

They could be all equally impressive, though, instead of some impressive and some unimpressive.

yes; I suppose this becomes somewhat subjective, perhaps most here feel that a few generic beakers is impressive -- in any case the current roster of rewards is a much-muted form of what these rewards have typically been in prior civ iterations. Given that we've removed the barbs that used to appear from huts in past titles, perhaps the argument could be made that they average out similarly now, i am not sure, but they strike me as much more of a routine collection/reward as they evolve in VP.

There was a time in my civ career where I recall having to consider whether to bring in backup units before claiming a goody hut, or risk going for a lucky roll immediately on arrival -- while the RNG involved is unideal, there was something exciting about this.

 

[N.Core]

What I dislike about some of these changes in this proposal is that we're changing some unique stuff to "yet another yield reward" which is boring. Thankfully it can be reverted.

 

[Tekamthi]

What I dislike about some of these changes in this proposal is that we're changing some unique stuff to "yet another yield reward" which is boring. Thankfully it can be reverted.

This is a concise way to put it.

With status-quo rewards I still enjoy manually playing the first few turns with my recon, trying to guess where the next goody hut is hidden based on the map geography, hoping for one of the bigger payouts (ie the non-yield rewards) and/or adjusting my early strategy to adapt to any advantages that emerge. With relatively flattened yield-only rewards I will probably just auto-recon my pathfinder from turn 0.

I wonder, since their eyes will be on it anyway, if sponsor could pull out the existing rewards sql/xml while they're implementing this change? not sure how its deployed but if its all in one block, just paste here or in main forum and I will make a modmod from it. Thanks for considering!