[DLL] (8-NS) Austria Alternative

[DoveCDog]

Current:

Spoiler :

1. Hapsburg Diplomacy
+50% rewards from CS quests
Can arrange marriages with CS you were allied for at least 10 turns by paying 200 Gold + 200 Gold for every previous marriage
While at peace with a married CS gain: +75 resting influence (scaling with era) and +15% GP points in capital

2. Coffee House (replaces Grocer):
+3 Food, +20% Food per citizen and +1 Happiness
-4 Gold Maintenance
-1 Unhappiness from poverty
15% of City's is carried over on population growth
+33% GP points
10% of City's Culture is converted to Science

3. Grenzer (replaces Fusilier):
Available at Rifling
625 Production cost
35 CS
2 Movement
"Field Works"
"Home Guard" (+25% CS in Friendly Territory)
"Grenzer" (+1 CS per Diplomatic Marriage on Empire (CS adjustment on level up))

4. Schützenstand (replaces Arsenal - Gunsmith in EE):
Available at Military Science
1500 Production Cost
5 Gold Maintenance
Does not requires a Castle
+1 City Attack Range
Heals Garrisons by 5 HP, regardless of action
+3 Production and +3 Culture
+1 Production and +1 Culture for each allied CS
+15% Production towards Land Military Units and +30% to Gunpowder Units
+15 XP to Gunpowder Units on Training
+12 City Defense
+300 City HP
+25% Military Supply Cap from Population
-5% empire needs modifier

Proposition:
1.Hapsburg Diplomacy
Marriages cost 150 Gold + 150 Gold for every previous marriage
While at peace with a married CS gain +200 resting influence (scaling with era)
Marriage resting Influence decays by 2.5 every turn (standard speed)
City States can be remarried after at least 15 turns pass from the previous marriage
Having an Embassy in a City State reduces resting Influence decay by 33%

2. Remove Coffee House.
Add Ballhouseplatz (replaces Printing Press):
Only 1 allowed per empire
+5 Culture (vs +1)
+3 Paper (vs +1)
+3 Diplomat specialists (vs +1)
+1 Great Diplomat Points
+20% Production of diplomatic units in this City
All diplomatic units receive the Literacy promotion: Grants +5 Influence when you conduct a diplomatic mission, +1 movement for diplomatic units, and the ability to ignore terrain costs
+25% GP points
10% of your empire's Culture is added to your Science
Reduces resting Influence decay with Married City States by 17%

3. Grenzer (replaces Fusilier):
38 CS
"Grenzer" (+1 CS per Embassy in an independent City State)

4. Schützenstand (replaces Arsenal - Gunsmith in EE):
+1 CS, +1 Production and +1 Culture per Embassy in an independent City State

Rationale:
Initially my proposal only included points #3 and #4, as the potential CS boost on huge maps with dozens of City States was quite frightening. But when I thought about it some more, I realized that the same could be said for the +15% boost.
So, I decided to try and rework Austria by having the Influence gained from marriages decay over time. Currently marriages are a once done affair. After you marry, you can forget about the CS, you're set to keep it for the whole game. Because of how cheap marriages are, it is quite easy to marry every single city state and get huge bonuses. By having marriage influence decay over time, the player will have to keep spending money to keep the City State in his sphere of influence, and he shouldn't be able to get all the city states.
We introduce a few new mechanics that encourage the player to build embassies. Besides getting the WC votes, the player will now also be able to help extend his marriages for longer and gain stronger Unique Components with the Grenzer and the Schützenstand. This will fit nicely to make up for the lost WC votes that was passed a few congress sessions back.
Regarding the Coffee House, it is a weird building that doesn't do much to help Austria as the GP boost is given to every city, which doesn't help much given that Austria usually plays tall. With the Ballhouseplatz we will give the boost to the capital, further reduce the Influence for all city states to help out in the late game, and all for more specialists to train Great Diplomats.

Note:
Credit to Solic and PineappleDan for the underlying ideas

 

[pineappledan]

Should restore the base CS to 38 in that case too.

Please write out the full unit in good form.

 

[KlHannibal2]

Proposition:
1. Grenzer changes
Remove bonus CS from City State Alliances
+1 bonus CS from each Embassy in an independent City State
2. Schützenstand changes
Remove bonus production + culture from City State Alliances
+1 bonus production + culture from each Embassy in an independent City State

Rationale:
Both of these bonuses can get crazy when playing on huge maps with dozens of city states. Allying City States is super easy, and so the player could easily stack upwards of +20 CS on his units. He wouldn't even want to upgrade into Riflemen in that case.
I originally proposed capping the bonus at +5 CS, but thought that was a bit gimmicky. Moving the bonus to embassies would achieve the same goal (as the player won't be able to get that many embassies) without the artificial +5 limit, and it will also encourage Austria to build more embassies, playing more diplomatically.

I see the problem, but I would keep both bonuses based on marriages and add a cap. Reason why: marriages are Austria's thing. Embassies are more general and other civs have better bonuses to get many of them.

 

[pineappledan]

I think you should just go ahead and propose your full Austria rework that recenters the marriage mechanics more on augmenting Embassies.

 

[DoveCDog]

I think you should just go ahead and propose your full Austria rework that recenters the marriage mechanics more on augmenting Embassies.

Do you mean the Ballhausplatz? That got a pretty strong negative reaction from the guys last time it was proposed:

[Complex] - (6-52) Austria UB Change

Current: Coffee House (vs Grocer) +3 Food (vs +1) 15% of Food carried over when Citizen is born +3 Gold to Tobbacco tiles, +1 Gold and +2 Production to Coffee tiles; +2 Gold to Bananas tiles; +2 Gold and +2 Production to Tea tiles -1 Unhappines from poverty +33% GP boost +1 Merchant specialist...

forums.civfanatics.com

I have half a mind to propose changing the UA wherein your resting influence decays by 1 point every turn (on Standard, scaling with era), but you can remarry the same city state as much as you wish. Maybe if maintaining marriages was harder voters would be OK with adding back the congress vote per embassy?
I do still think Solic's idea of giving the player the incentive to build more Embassies is a cool idea, but besides giving CS, yields, votes, not sure what else we could do. We could tie it to GP % boost but that would make marriages kinda less useful.

 

[DoveCDog]

I think you should just go ahead and propose your full Austria rework that recenters the marriage mechanics more on augmenting Embassies.

Decided to give it a shot, would appreciate your feedback!

 

[pineappledan]

Austria
Non UA change: Austria can be issued special quests to marry CS
Marriage Proposal quest reward: Influence and GDiplomat Points

UA: Habsburg Diplomacy
+50% CS quest rewards
Can marry City-states with Gold after being Allied for 5 turns, giving +100 Resting Influence

UNW: Ballhausplatz (Printing Press)
+6 +5 (up from 1 )
+3 GDiplomat Points (up from 1)
2 Civil Servant Slots (up from 1)
+1 paper
All diplomatic units receive the Literacy promotion: +5 Influence from diplomatic missions, +1 movement, ignore terrain costs
+15% Great Person Rate in this City for each Marriage on Empire
Embassies in City-states increase Resting Influence by 50

Grenzer (Rifleman):
Available at Rifling
625 Production cost
38 CS
3 Movement (up from 2)
"Field Works"
"Home Guard" (+25% CS in Friendly Territory)

Hussar: No Change

Schutzenstand: No Change

 

[Recursive]

@pineappledan You didn't convert the Discord formatting to CivFanatics formatting.

 

[DoveCDog]

The GP bonus is a core part of Austria. If we remove it marriages become much less useful, much less fun. At that point, the only reason to marry is to make it easier to retain alliances and for the yields, which is something that Siam does better.

 

[pineappledan]

The GP bonus is a core part of Austria. If we remove it marriages become much less useful, much less fun. At that point, the only reason to marry is to make it easier to retain alliances and for the yields, which is something that Siam does better.

Reformatted my post so it’s easier to see.

The GP rate is moved to the UNW.
The current coffeehouse gives 33% GPRate. Moving the GP bonus off the UA and onto the UNW would simplify the UA and remove redundancy.

I really want to get rid of the coffeehouse for a few reasons:
- it’s a pretty banal thing to have as a Unique building
- coffeehouses were invented in the Ottoman Empire. The civilopedia entry even admits the Austrian coffee shops were started up by a Pole who copied the idea from the Ottomans.
- Vox Populi integrated the More Resources mod which adds Coffee as a resource into the game. Thus, we have a UB in the game that references an in-gameresource without augmenting it in any way. Coffee house does not house coffee; literally unplayable.
- the specific bonuses that VP has come up with for the coffeehouse are completely redundant with the UA and just plain old bad. W.r.t. the things that the building does in a vacuum It’s arguably the worst UB in the mod.

 

[Rekk]

+ An icon freed up for a new base building!

 

[hokath]

Can't agree more. Denounce the Coffee House.

 

[DoveCDog]

If we are able to influence the quest rate behind the curtain so that it goes down significantly based on the amount of marriages the player has, I think this could be a better option. In limiting the player's agency with regards to choosing which city states he marries, we're adding an extra element of randomness which will make games more interesting. At that point it would be fine to go with the original Grenzer proposal.
Say, if the standard quest rate is 10%, we can have it go down by 2% for each active marriage. When it reaches 2%, it can stay like that for the rest of the game.

Couple other points:
1. Moving the GP bonus to the UNW means Austria will be significantly weaker for the first half of the game until it gets the sudden power spike. Not convinced that is warranted. Instead we could say UNW gives an additional 10% per embassy; balance it out with the marriage quest rate.
2. Last vote we decided on the scaling influence per era. Is there a consensus that it was a mistake? Wouldn't want to correct it if not - instead we could say 60 + 30 with Embassy, scaling with era. Eras scale 4 times, right???

 

[Anarcomu]

Ancient Era : x1
Classical Era : x1
Medieval Era : x2
Renaissance Era : x3
Industrial Era : x4
Modern Era : x5
Atomic Era : x6
Information Era : x7

Unless I forgot one Era (which is possible), all "era scaling" effect end with 7 times the base bonus. The current Austrian marriage means 525 resting point in the last Era.

 

[Cebrudras]

- it’s a pretty banal thing to have as a Unique building
- coffeehouses were invented in the Ottoman Empire. The civilopedia entry even admits the Austrian coffee shops were started up by a Pole who copied the idea from the Ottomans.

Your other points are valid, but I would argue that Vienna's coffee culture was at least as notorious for being an intellectual petri dish as the German pubs you picked as their UB. I also think that the trio these two form with the French Salon is neat.

 

[pineappledan]

I think the crucial difference theee is that many of the largest and most important breweries and beer halls in the German sphere were run as state enterprises. The Hafbrauhaus pictured in the icon was founded and operated by the Bavarian crown

 

[pineappledan]

Even when that era scaling was originally proposed I considered it a poison pill for the rest of the proposal, which had the stuff I felt was even more important (removing the WC votes).

Era scaling on resting influence has never made sense or been a good idea, and that has only become more true with the introduction of more mechanics that increase resting influence. Austria’s era scaling dwarfs those other sources of resting influence, trivializing them. And for what? The threshold for allied status does not increase with era, and resting influence increases continue to be felt even after you have surpassed the resting point because of how they reduce decay. There is no justification for why Austria’s marriages should have ever scaled.

 

[hokath]

Marriage resting Influence decays by 1 every turn (standard speed, scaling with era)
City States can be remarried after at least 15 turns pass from the previous marriage

This part seems weird. So the influence decay mechanic is itself decaying?!
I would just remove this and keep it clean.

 

[ma_kuh]

Scaling resting influence doesn't make any sense without scaling Ally thresholds.

Also, if you're reducing resting influence, which itself only exists to slow overall influence decay... isn't that (part of) the Greek UA?

 

[DoveCDog]

This part seems weird. So the influence decay mechanic is itself decaying?!
I would just remove this and keep it clean.

No, that is the decay mechanic. Perhaps it can be phrased better. Basically what I proposed is that over the course of 75 turns you linearly lose your marriage influence bonus. After 75 turns, you are no longer considered married. You can remarry after 15 turns of your initial marriage to reset your resting influence back to the max (+75, scaling with era). (EDIT: In other words, since your resting influence scales with era, I proposed the decay scales with era. So it should always take 75 turns on standard for your marriage to expire, regardless of era.)
My goal was to make it so that you can't marry every City State without setting an artificial cap. With this system, you would have the remarry all of your city states after 75 turns (and pay an ever growing premium each time). But I kinda like PineappleDan's idea too, because the cap would be hidden from the player so it wouldn't seem that unfair.

I agree that having influence scale with era is weird, I only kept it because it passed the congress vote the last time.

Would an expert kindly share the details on how City State Quests are generated so we can try to work something out? I'm thinking something like:

1. The chance of you getting a marriage quest decreases based on the number of marriages you have, down to a certain minimum
2. If you have already married this era, you have a much lower chance of getting another marriage quest this era
3. When you marry one City State, all other active marriage quests are failed
4. Have friendly City States and those in closer proximity be much more likely to propose