A Small Proposal for Balancing Liberty

Manpanzee

Prince
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Jan 28, 2014
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I think it's generally agreed among experienced players that Tradition is still better than Liberty after the last patch. I think it's also generally agreed that Liberty is pretty good in it's own right anyway, and that there are plenty of circumstances where Liberty is in fact better. So any tweaks to Liberty would need to be small. Fortunately, there are a couple of small tweaks possible that would both slightly buff Liberty AND improve the intuitive feel of the tree. They are:

1. Make the finisher Great Person truly free. No incrementing the counter.
2. Make the Representation Golden Age truly free. No incrementing the counter.

Simple and nice, right? I think these changes would be universally welcomed -- the feeling of getting "ripped off" by not getting actual free stuff is currently one of the worst things about Liberty.

There's also one more thing I'd consider changing that isn't directly part of the Liberty tree:

3. Decrease the weighting of capital population in the City Connection Gold formula.

In general, you would expect a Liberty empire to have a smaller proportion of population in its capital than would a Tradition empire. This change would slightly buff the amount of gold in Liberty and slightly nerf the amount of gold in Tradition. Considering that Tradition still gets a boatload of gold from Monarchy, I would expect the impact on Tradition to small. The marginal impact on Liberty would likely be higher, since Liberty tends to run lower GpT right now.
 
I support this. Liberty is too weak. perhaps they can add to the finished -5% unhappiness from populations? OR +0.1 per road and +0.2 per railroad.
 
1. Make the finisher Great Person truly free. No incrementing the counter.
2. Make the Representation Golden Age truly free. No incrementing the counter.
3. Decrease the weighting of capital population in the City Connection Gold formula.

In general, you would expect a Liberty empire to have a smaller proportion of population in its capital than would a Tradition empire. This change would slightly buff the amount of gold in Liberty and slightly nerf the amount of gold in Tradition. Considering that Tradition still gets a boatload of gold from Monarchy, I would expect the impact on Tradition to small. The marginal impact on Liberty would likely be higher, since Liberty tends to run lower GpT right now.

Interesting points made. Unfortunately for most, changing 1 and 2 requires .DLL access - it's essentially commenting out a bunch of "increment counter if unit type is X".

3 can be made to work if both the GPT (it does not use population!) weighting of capital and connected cities were slightly nerfed, and then subsequently buffed in a tier 2 or tier 3 policy in each of their respective trees (Tradition for capital, Liberty of connected cities).
 
Yes, I agree. Acken's suggestion is the best of the bunch. Since Republic is meant to represent the idea that society is more productive when in Liberty, it makes no sense that a 6 city empire takes 2x as long to build a NC.
 
Acken's suggestion would be a subtle but noticeable change.

Liberty is certainly difficult early on but I think in the late game it really starts to outshine Tradition.

Some have suggested this before but if shrines and monuments had zero maintenance cost & libraries produced 1 science each (maybe reduce NC science yield from 3 to 0 - leave the 50%) thus transferring more benefit to libraries instead.
 
Well I never visit ideas and suggestion :/

Honor mostly need a way to make it roll a bit faster. The problem with it is not having the free stuff from trad nor the hammer bonus from liberty. Making settlers is long, the first policies are useless until you get units and you get no real bonus toward range units... I've often though of just giving honor 3 units somewhere at the start. Would make it a lot scarier and would be useful for Military Caste right away.

Piety needs a way to get more out of Religion. Right now it mostly boost your faith efficiency. 1 faith in capital in the opener would do wonders to speed up the Pantheon too. Maybe better reformations or more stuff to do with faith or more bonuses from spreading. At one point I was thinking giving you some bonus each time a prophet is born as a function of how much followers your religion has.
 
Well I never visit ideas and suggestion :/

Honor mostly need a way to make it roll a bit faster. The problem with it is not having the free stuff from trad nor the hammer bonus from liberty. Making settlers is long, the first policies are useless until you get units and you get no real bonus toward range units... I've often though of just giving honor 3 units somewhere at the start. Would make it a lot scarier and would be useful for Military Caste right away.

Free units /are/ nice, but I find that makes them extremely toxic to balance because so much upfront power provided - it sucks up a lot of the budget you could be using elsewhere to implement something really cool. Same thing with free Golden ages... much prefer to just get a stash of Golden Age points (maybe something like 50% of missing points, or 25% of total points ... of the amount to the next GA).
 
I kinda like some bonuses giving you a spike in power. It allows to create momentum and combos. If it's way too much you could always nerf it or smooth it. Like instead of giving you 3 archers upfront it gives you an archer for every new city. There certainly are other possibilities to help honor though. But it's not a terrible tree it's just slow.
 
I kinda like some bonuses giving you a spike in power. It allows to create momentum and combos. If it's way too much you could always nerf it or smooth it. Like instead of giving you 3 archers upfront it gives you an archer for every new city. There certainly are other possibilities to help honor though. But it's not a terrible tree it's just slow.

Military units are fine (because as you said, it's fairly easy to balance), since their "power" in the budget is comparatively small. But when it comes to things like "Free Great People" or "Free Buildings in First X cities", then it becomes a bit of a hassle between trying to find a sweet spot in balancing and complying with your vision of the game (i.e. "am I giving up too much to make the surrounding interdependencies fail)....

But then again, it just devolves into "What I think the game should be" vs. "What you think the game should be" arguments, so I'll stop :p,
 
Well I never visit ideas and suggestion :/

Honor mostly need a way to make it roll a bit faster. The problem with it is not having the free stuff from trad nor the hammer bonus from liberty. Making settlers is long, the first policies are useless until you get units and you get no real bonus toward range units... I've often though of just giving honor 3 units somewhere at the start. Would make it a lot scarier and would be useful for Military Caste right away.

Piety needs a way to get more out of Religion. Right now it mostly boost your faith efficiency. 1 faith in capital in the opener would do wonders to speed up the Pantheon too. Maybe better reformations or more stuff to do with faith or more bonuses from spreading. At one point I was thinking giving you some bonus each time a prophet is born as a function of how much followers your religion has.

That's fine, it seems no one does, really.

Hm...yeah, I totally see what you're saying. It also gets new policies much slower because, unless you're Monty, then Tradition and Liberty are going to probably beat you with their more consistent culture yield. Maybe warrior code could be +15% production of all units, which would make it much better when you're making ranged units that do most of the fighting. There could also be something to reduce the maintenance of units, though a flat one instead of the more specific bonuses of Germany, the Ottomans and the Zulus. Maybe free walls and barracks, that could be a pretty big one. I never build barracks (not sure if that's a terrible move or not) and rarely build walls, but getting them for literally nothing would be a pretty good defensive and offensive bonus.

Yeah, I think the main reason Piety is so weak is that even if you dedicate yourself to it, there's no actual, practical or reasonable guarantee of getting a religion. So you might be investing in faith that you'll get to late to have the rate of generation be helpful. That mere +1 faith would be a massive assistance to getting a Pantheon and in the long term a pretty good help with getting a religion. It would also allow you to wait a bit on your shrine to work on other infrastructure or you could still rush it and further increase your chances of getting a decent religion.

You know, today I thought of a unit to replace the knight called the Crusader, a knight which can spread religion. Maybe Piety could do something like that. Most pious empires were pretty set on converting their lands, conquered or otherwise, into their religion, and being able to convert hammers into faith spread could be pretty sweet. Also, faith bought units should definitely be cheaper for their beliefs, because currently they just cost to much to be useful. Let's see, what else when it comes to reformation beliefs...well, Secret Sect should be a very strong way of conversion, but now I think it does little. How about a belief that grants flat faith from any kill, anywhere? So like God of War, but usable.
 
Meh you're unlikely to be efficient at both war and heavy religion. Don't think it would really work. That would also lock peacemonger out of the tree which isn't really its design I think. And in the end its just more faith which isn't what Piety lacks.
 
Hm, true, I'll just put it in a box of ideas to never use. I'm not quite sure if 1 faith with your first policy is strong enough to make the tree commonly used, or if that might be to strong. So early in the game, 1 this or that can be really big.
 
Well the crusader idea isn't bad but that's something more suitable to a Civ UU I think.

1 faith is just a small bonus that I'd like it to have. It surely wouldn't be enough no. I would like some further bonuses. Or different ones, religious tolerance is terrible.
 
Yeah, I was thinking the same, but I don't really have a civilzation in mind which would use it. The Holy Roman Empire isn't high on my list of civs to have ideas for.

Hm...Religious Tolerance could be a happiness bonus, maybe. Combined with making certain reformation beliefs stronger, Piety could be more tempting. One idea I had some time ago was for a Piety belief which granted a large amount faith right away, which could be an interesting boost to getting a religion up.
 
Liberty is superior to Tradition on maps with many city spots. You can easily put 10 good cities before Renaissance with Liberty and enough land. Human players don't use Liberty much because nobody plays large maps in multiplayer
 
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