Ahriman
Tyrant
The main problems in the game balance that I see are related to yields, maritime city states, ineffectiveness of small empires, over strength of puppets (relative to annexing), tech costs and slingshotting.
These changes are not designed to address Wonder imbalances. I think building imbalances mostly come from incentives that favor spam rather than concentrated cities.
1. Weaken puppets.
Option A
Block puppet AI from building military structures, forge, or defensive structures. They build only culture, happiness, gold, food/growth and science boosts. Puppets never construct buildings with strategic resource requirements.
Add a flat penalty (probably 30%) to the culture, science, hammer and gold output of puppet states. This makes them much less efficient, per unhappiness point, than regular cities.
Option B
Make puppets stay in permanent unrest unless they have a military unit stationed in the city.
2. Make great scientists produce a fixed number of beakers, that increases slightly with tech era. The effects of other great people doesn’t scale nearly so much.
Make research agreement costs increase by era proportionally to how beaker costs increase. Its lame that a cheap tech costs 250 gold in the early game, and an expensive tech costs a similar amount of gold in the late game.
3. Increase tech beaker costs by era for the later eras, with later eras increasing by more. Eg: industrial by 10%, modern by 20%, future by 30%.
Change the tech tree so that replaceable parts requires rifling, and Electronics requires Combustion (no mech-inf before tanks please).
4. Unit balancing.
i) Reduce the strength of the horseman and companion cavalry by 1, reduce their movement speed by 1.
ii) Increase the stats of the ironclad. It is pathetically weak.
iii) Nerf artillery somehow, they are far too strong. Either reduce ranged strength (probably the simplest) or reduce their range (but leave with indirect fire) or remove indirect fire (but keep 3 range).
5. Improve defensive structures. Defenses should be meaningful. At the moment, they aren't. This would also tend to reduce the problem where as soon as an AI loses its army, you can rapidly conquer all its cities.
Option A: Increase Strength of all defensive buildings by 50%
Option B: Remove maintenance cost from all defensive structures.
Option C: Have military base give +1 range to city bombardment.
6. Change maritime city states. Currently, cultural and military city states provide fixed bonus irregardless of empire size, but maritime give a bonus per city, and that bonus is large. It favors large empires and makes small cities grow very rapidly.
Option A: Make MCSs give +X% food in all cities. Eg X = 5%, increases 0.5% each era. (Double this if allied).
Option B: Make MCS give a flat X food, allocated across all your cities somehow. Eg X = 6 food, increases by era. (Double this if allied)
Option C: Make MCS give +X food across the largest Y cities (cycling back to the original cities if Y > number of cities). Eg X = 2, Y = 3, Y increases +1 per era. (Double this if allied.)
Option D: Make MCS give +X food per population point. Eg +0.15 food per population (double this if allied).
7. Rebalance cultural city states, so their effect is not destroyed so rapidly as you gain cities.
Rather than flat +X culture, have them give +X culture +Y/2 culture per city, where Y is the % increase in social policy cost from adding cities (30% on standard map size, 20% large, 15% huge).
8. Make it easier for cities to grow to larger sizes, so it is easier to have a large population with a few megacities, rather than just lots of medium sized cities.
Option A:
Reduce the amount of food needed to grow to larger city size at the higher end. Currently it takes roughly 4x as much cumulative food to reach population 14 as it does to reach population 7, this is too punitive.
Option B: Reduce the hospital storage bonus from 50% to 25%, and reduce hospital hammer and maintenance cost by half. Add an Aqueduct building at Engineering tech that has 25% food storage, and costs half as much as a hospital.
9. Rebalance strategic resources so that they are actually rare, and meaningfully binding. Cavalry and heavy infantry should feel elite, and not be the core of the army.
Option A
Make all horses produce only 2 copies, they are far too common. All other resources provide either 2 or 4.
Option B
Limit resources to 2 but have them increased slightly by tech. Eg: Steel (or Metallurgy?) increases iron by +2, economics increases horses by +2, railroad increases coal by +2, combustion increases oil by +2, nuclear fission increases uranium by +2.
9. Rebalanec improvement yields.
Some possibilities:
i) Make civil service apply only to farms on open terrain next to rivers/lakes. No more super hillfarms. Fertilizer boosts them as normal.
ii) Increase mine yields +1hammer at dynamite.
Make farm yield boosts also affect pastures, so that bonus resources are actually decent bonuses.
Maybe fishing boats +1 gold at refrigeration?
iii) Increase the yield of great person improvements with techs. Eg: Education increase Academy yield +2 science, Metallurgy increases Manufactory yield +2 hammers, Acoustics increases Landmark yield +2 culture, Banking increases customhouse yield +2 gold. These things scale really badly.
10. Rebalance the luxury goods, so that dyes, sugar, silk, spices, furs aren't inferior.
Add a weaver building (at what tech??) that gives +2 gold to dyes, silk, furs, like the +3 the mint gives for gold and silver.
At +1 gold with currency tech to the tile yield of sugar and spices.
11. Social policy rebalancing.
Increase collective rule bonus from 50% to 75% (or maybe just size 2?).
Increase trade unions to 25% cost reduction.
Humanism gives +2 happy with university, not +1. Or gives +1 with university, +1 with public school.
[Universal suffrage is also weak, but might be ok with the boost to walls).
[Fascism is weak, but will be fixed by strategic resource rarity reduction.]
[Puppet nerfs boost Police state.]
12. Make large empires more difficult to handle by increasing their unhappiness from # cities.
Eg:
Option A
Marginal unhappiness for the Nth city = X + N/K. Eg: X = 1.5, K = 9, scaled by map size.
Option B
Marginal unhappiness for the Nth city = X - (X-Y)*N^(-Z). Eg X (Max unhappiness) = 6, Y (Min unhappiness) = 2, Z = 0.2.
13. Various AI changes.
a) Reducing AI willingness to pay for excess luxuries, strategic resources, and cities.
b) Improving combat AI to be more careful about exposing its troops to enemy fire (especially flat terrain and tiles exposed to ranged fire), and to keep a reserve guard, and to heal units better, and to target embarked units with ranged fire.
c) Increase AI willingness to spend gold pursuing city state alliances, including out-bidding the human player.
These don’t solve all the problems, but they’re cleaner than totally rewriting the whole economy system. Any other changes (like changing core tile yields) will tend to require the entire economy system to be changed.
These changes are not designed to address Wonder imbalances. I think building imbalances mostly come from incentives that favor spam rather than concentrated cities.
1. Weaken puppets.
Option A
Block puppet AI from building military structures, forge, or defensive structures. They build only culture, happiness, gold, food/growth and science boosts. Puppets never construct buildings with strategic resource requirements.
Add a flat penalty (probably 30%) to the culture, science, hammer and gold output of puppet states. This makes them much less efficient, per unhappiness point, than regular cities.
Option B
Make puppets stay in permanent unrest unless they have a military unit stationed in the city.
2. Make great scientists produce a fixed number of beakers, that increases slightly with tech era. The effects of other great people doesn’t scale nearly so much.
Make research agreement costs increase by era proportionally to how beaker costs increase. Its lame that a cheap tech costs 250 gold in the early game, and an expensive tech costs a similar amount of gold in the late game.
3. Increase tech beaker costs by era for the later eras, with later eras increasing by more. Eg: industrial by 10%, modern by 20%, future by 30%.
Change the tech tree so that replaceable parts requires rifling, and Electronics requires Combustion (no mech-inf before tanks please).
4. Unit balancing.
i) Reduce the strength of the horseman and companion cavalry by 1, reduce their movement speed by 1.
ii) Increase the stats of the ironclad. It is pathetically weak.
iii) Nerf artillery somehow, they are far too strong. Either reduce ranged strength (probably the simplest) or reduce their range (but leave with indirect fire) or remove indirect fire (but keep 3 range).
5. Improve defensive structures. Defenses should be meaningful. At the moment, they aren't. This would also tend to reduce the problem where as soon as an AI loses its army, you can rapidly conquer all its cities.
Option A: Increase Strength of all defensive buildings by 50%
Option B: Remove maintenance cost from all defensive structures.
Option C: Have military base give +1 range to city bombardment.
6. Change maritime city states. Currently, cultural and military city states provide fixed bonus irregardless of empire size, but maritime give a bonus per city, and that bonus is large. It favors large empires and makes small cities grow very rapidly.
Option A: Make MCSs give +X% food in all cities. Eg X = 5%, increases 0.5% each era. (Double this if allied).
Option B: Make MCS give a flat X food, allocated across all your cities somehow. Eg X = 6 food, increases by era. (Double this if allied)
Option C: Make MCS give +X food across the largest Y cities (cycling back to the original cities if Y > number of cities). Eg X = 2, Y = 3, Y increases +1 per era. (Double this if allied.)
Option D: Make MCS give +X food per population point. Eg +0.15 food per population (double this if allied).
7. Rebalance cultural city states, so their effect is not destroyed so rapidly as you gain cities.
Rather than flat +X culture, have them give +X culture +Y/2 culture per city, where Y is the % increase in social policy cost from adding cities (30% on standard map size, 20% large, 15% huge).
8. Make it easier for cities to grow to larger sizes, so it is easier to have a large population with a few megacities, rather than just lots of medium sized cities.
Option A:
Reduce the amount of food needed to grow to larger city size at the higher end. Currently it takes roughly 4x as much cumulative food to reach population 14 as it does to reach population 7, this is too punitive.
Option B: Reduce the hospital storage bonus from 50% to 25%, and reduce hospital hammer and maintenance cost by half. Add an Aqueduct building at Engineering tech that has 25% food storage, and costs half as much as a hospital.
9. Rebalance strategic resources so that they are actually rare, and meaningfully binding. Cavalry and heavy infantry should feel elite, and not be the core of the army.
Option A
Make all horses produce only 2 copies, they are far too common. All other resources provide either 2 or 4.
Option B
Limit resources to 2 but have them increased slightly by tech. Eg: Steel (or Metallurgy?) increases iron by +2, economics increases horses by +2, railroad increases coal by +2, combustion increases oil by +2, nuclear fission increases uranium by +2.
9. Rebalanec improvement yields.
Some possibilities:
i) Make civil service apply only to farms on open terrain next to rivers/lakes. No more super hillfarms. Fertilizer boosts them as normal.
ii) Increase mine yields +1hammer at dynamite.
Make farm yield boosts also affect pastures, so that bonus resources are actually decent bonuses.
Maybe fishing boats +1 gold at refrigeration?
iii) Increase the yield of great person improvements with techs. Eg: Education increase Academy yield +2 science, Metallurgy increases Manufactory yield +2 hammers, Acoustics increases Landmark yield +2 culture, Banking increases customhouse yield +2 gold. These things scale really badly.
10. Rebalance the luxury goods, so that dyes, sugar, silk, spices, furs aren't inferior.
Add a weaver building (at what tech??) that gives +2 gold to dyes, silk, furs, like the +3 the mint gives for gold and silver.
At +1 gold with currency tech to the tile yield of sugar and spices.
11. Social policy rebalancing.
Increase collective rule bonus from 50% to 75% (or maybe just size 2?).
Increase trade unions to 25% cost reduction.
Humanism gives +2 happy with university, not +1. Or gives +1 with university, +1 with public school.
[Universal suffrage is also weak, but might be ok with the boost to walls).
[Fascism is weak, but will be fixed by strategic resource rarity reduction.]
[Puppet nerfs boost Police state.]
12. Make large empires more difficult to handle by increasing their unhappiness from # cities.
Eg:
Option A
Marginal unhappiness for the Nth city = X + N/K. Eg: X = 1.5, K = 9, scaled by map size.
Option B
Marginal unhappiness for the Nth city = X - (X-Y)*N^(-Z). Eg X (Max unhappiness) = 6, Y (Min unhappiness) = 2, Z = 0.2.
13. Various AI changes.
a) Reducing AI willingness to pay for excess luxuries, strategic resources, and cities.
b) Improving combat AI to be more careful about exposing its troops to enemy fire (especially flat terrain and tiles exposed to ranged fire), and to keep a reserve guard, and to heal units better, and to target embarked units with ranged fire.
c) Increase AI willingness to spend gold pursuing city state alliances, including out-bidding the human player.
These don’t solve all the problems, but they’re cleaner than totally rewriting the whole economy system. Any other changes (like changing core tile yields) will tend to require the entire economy system to be changed.
It's far from complete, as I'm atm busy playing the game with the mod heh.
