Acken's Minimalistic Balance for singleplayer (and AI improvements)

[yung.carl.jung]

Well, Aesthetics has been radically reworked, Great Works have been buffed, some culture buildings have been buffed, some theming bonuses have. I'd say Acken kept it as close to the original game as possible. I wouldn't necessarily go Rationalism for a CV now, I think Aesthetics is a much better choice. But since Policy costs have been changed Liberty/Trad into Aesthetics into Ideology + Rationalism is easily possible now. Even in Science games I sometimes get to fill 3 whole trees + almost all of Ideology. Culture in general is worth a little more now I think. I get earlier Amphis and try to get Hermitage before Word's Fair. Aside from that I feel like nothing much has changed.

 

[consentient]

OK guys I'm learning bit by bit...got an example game (with v7.) here for you to play around with. I think it's a not bad start, and I'm going to replay from this point until I beat this map.

What I've learned so far is that far from just sitting there and taking it when you have 3 capitals, the others will actually be strong enough to attack you when your troops are away a lot more, etc, than they even do on basegame Deity.

I also learned that Siege Towers are unbelievably good.

So for those that want to play around with Domination on Immortal ModAcken, this savegame gives you a load of units and an obvious first victim. Who you choose to go after beyond that is up to you. I recommend the W neighbour or the victim S of the first victim.

Enjoy.

 

[noto2]

Maybe I'm weird but I don't shy away from scientists early game just to avoid spawning them. If it's sub T100 I'll just plant an academy. Sometimes I'll plant academies longer than that, it depends on the situation (for example, as Korea).

With the changes to Acken's mod, not only do we have separate GP counters but we have more merchant and engineer slots early game. So it's true, we get a lot more early GE's and GM's.

I think the solution is very simple. Acken, you could just increase the cost for early GP, couldn't you?

Another possibility would be nerfing the hurry production ability. Make it produce just 5 turns worth of hammers from that city, or something like that.

 

[adcarrymaokai]

Enjoy.

> "Not all required mods are installed"

 

[consentient]

Sorry, forgot to say it's a v7 game.

 

[Acken]

Drastic change proposal for GP improvements :

I've always been kind of annoyed by GP improvement balance. Mostly because both their rush and their improvement give the same thing but with one as per turn and the other in one go. No need to mention the balance between the two has always been awful.

Now that at least the GPs are separate they can be balanced individually.

I'd really like to encourage making early GPs and give a choice between the improvement and the "bulb". So I just got a possible idea that to me looks good on paper.

-The trade mission, rush wonder and discover techs are now based on a formula of the type :
Value = A + B * X + C * Y or Value = (A + B * X)*(1+CY)
A B and C are constants and X is the era.
So it will somewhat work like the trade mission.
Now what sounds like a good idea is that Y would be the number of improvement you have of that GP.

Example with random numbers :
Using discover technologie gives :
50 + 500 * X + 500 * Y
This means that if you are in renaissance (era 3) and have 1 academy, the bulb will give you :
50 + 500*3 + 500*1 = 2050
You now have a choice between getting that 2050 right now or plant for the bpt and the increase of later bulbs.
Merchants and engineer would work similarly.

The other formula is multiplicative instead of additive. Say instead of increasing by a flat 500 it would increase by 25% for example. So that in the previous example you'd get (50+3*500)*1.25 = 1937

What I also like about it is that GS bulbs no longer massively scale with the size of your empire which was a huge imbalance problem compared to the academy which does not scale at all.

 

[noto2]

Well, in Civ4 GP one of the ways a smaller empire could compete with a larger. Smaller empires can produce just as much GP, if not more, and they are relatively more powerful.

Base game Civ5 didn't worry about this too much because the player never had any incentive to get a big empire. With Acken's mod, they do. So some kind of nerfing of the power of GP for large empires might be reasonable. I would never want to see GP become mostly irrelevant, though, no matter how big an empire gets.

 

[consentient]

So what you're basically proposing Acken, is that if you have X manufactories, then a GE bulb will produce some additional hammers based on X, and likewise for academies, customs houses and so on?

 

[Acken]

Yes that is rhe idea.

 

[consentient]

Sounds interesting and makes sense. One of the things I've noticed about NQ is that lategame I'm making a silly amount of GEs. In a four city Tradition game and going Order for a change, I obviously need some GEs to quickly finish the spaceship parts, but I was spawning them every 5 turns or so even without faith buying.

So whatever maths you implement, I think that no single GP should spawn more often than every 10 turns at the least. More often just becomes silly.

 

[adcarrymaokai]

Yes that is rhe idea.

It wouldn't make a difference for GE because generally a GE bulb is enough to rush a wonder to 1 turn.

Anyway, I think I found a bug. If you compare screenshots, this is the same turn of the same game: one before I pick party leadership, and the other after. You can see that I am not getting any faith from it.

 

[Chum]

So I rolled up a game with my MP buddy last night, I get China, on ABMPangea. I've got what appears on paper to be a very interesting start, with the potential of greatness later on. I've got a spot with 5 workable bananas, riverside, a spice and 2 salt. Awesome, should be fun.

Obviously early production is expected to be low, but that's not a big deal, we'll compensate with growth now and science later. My expansion spots are as follows - 2 more salt and Uluru, Marble, 2 more salt, and a jungle spice/sugar combo.

The first thing I notice is the yield on my salt is weird - after I chop the forest away it's 3 food. I've never seen a 3 food salt tile before - it was on forested grassland. Turns out both of them in my capital were. I don't think I've ever seen salt on grassland.

The second thing I notice is that I'm broke. I'm completely broke. No money. I have 2 scouts, a warrior and a spear, and I'm losing money. Part of this is CS related - I couldn't find any on the map, for whatever reason. I sat at 4 discovered CS's for 70 turns due to the way the neighbors blocked off the land, so that didn't help with the gold. But I can't figure out where my gold is going - I have no units, I can't buy any, I have no production, and I'm very quickly running into happiness problems as a result. It took me until T130ish for things to even start to turn around for me. I had trouble even building roads. Games in Acken's mod are never like this for me, I don't know what happened.

And then it dawned on me - Salt is the only lux in the game that does not provide gold. You have no idea how much gold you get in the early game off of your luxes, and how much that multiplies out towards the end game. Golden ages? Completely pointless, I wasn't getting any more gold during them because I had no gold to work! I was running a deficit from T15 or 20 onward, and didn't go positive until T120, and I had absolutely no way of fixing it. The removal of gold from salt made it so that if you have a salt start, you are completely and totally disadvantaged. A 3 food 2 hammer (or 4 food 1 hammer, as I had last night) isn't even that great of a tile - a basic pasture is 2 food 3 hammer after a stables. The lack of gold just crippled me completely.

Proposal - remove a food from the salt tile (or the salt mine, I guess - that's probably better), add back the gold. The problem with salt is the good food and the good production on the same tile - no other lux gives high food and good hammers, but every lux gives gold. The obvious solution wasn't to remove the gold, it was to remove the food.



AI -

Venice, for whatever reason is REALLY good (and really damned annoying) in games now. Venice might as well be building settlers for how many CS's they take off the map now, they've got just as large of an empire as anyone else at T100. Merchants come quick, and they're using them appropriately. They get DoF's with other AI's easily, and are wonderwhoring until the end of the game now. If I'm not there to eliminate them, they completely destroy the map. I had one game last week where venice removed every single cultural CS from the map. I was not pleased. This current China game, they are on the opposite end of the continent, friends with 5 of the 6 AI's, and have AT LEAST 4 cities now, probably another CS I haven't met.

Alexander and Cesar have a serious potential to snowball hard. Cesar's borders are actually touching my capitals, and I've been legitimately worried about the amount of Legion he's had on my borders. The only reason I'm still in this game at all is because he's been more friendly than Cesar normally is. The only reason Alexander hasn't taken over the continent is because he's not being Alexander - he only has one CS ally currently on T170. If he were putting as much effort into that as he normally does, with the army he already has (He swallowed Russia about T80), we'd all be toast.

Poland is on the map too, and he's outteching everyone hard. I'm interested to see how this game pans out, it ended up with some of the best AI in the game, and me getting the worst possible luxes to play them with.

 

[Tombaugh]

Salt is not op, but still quite nice. Cant you use external traderoutes (less food but 4 1 tiles should make up for this) or tradeposts?


Will "Unlimited exp from barbs" be a part of v7?


PS sorry for my english

 

[Acken]

Yes why not i dont have a problem with barb exp.

Thanks for the feedback guys. Ill look into the faith bug from party leadrship.

For gold with salts you have routes and trade posts. Try a caravansary for some juicy 8-9 gold 3-4 science early routes.

My p4oposal for ge would make them scale off manufactories rather then population. This means while you probably still could rush early wonders in
1 turn with them. It would not be the case for the midgame without any manufactory. Also i want to couple this with a redesign of the late game wonders

 

[Chum]

Yes why not i dont have a problem with barb exp.

Thanks for the feedback guys. Ill look into the faith bug from party leadrship.

For gold with salts you have routes and trade posts. Try a caravansary for some juicy 8-9 gold 3-4 science early routes.

My p4oposal for ge would make them scale off manufactories rather then population. This means while you probably still could rush early wonders in
1 turn with them. It would not be the case for the midgame without any manufactory. Also i want to couple this with a redesign of the late game wonders

8-9 gold? More like 4-5, and that doesn't cover the difference between salt and gold/gems/copper/whales/ anything really.

Play a salt start and see how you feel.

 

[Dahebbie]

Hardly ever see stone on your pangeamap lately...
Anyone else seeing this to?

 

[Acken]

If anything there are a lot of sheeps but the stones seems normal. Here are 2 results from 2 maps logs :

Map Script: - BONUS Resources -
Map Script: - Cow.....: 26
Map Script: - Wheat...: 15
Map Script: - Sheep...: 46
Map Script: - Deer....: 28
Map Script: - Banana..: 6
Map Script: - Fish....: 107
Map Script: - Stone...: 20
Map Script: - Bison...: 15

Map Script: - BONUS Resources -
Map Script: - Cow.....: 34
Map Script: - Wheat...: 8
Map Script: - Sheep...: 40
Map Script: - Deer....: 26
Map Script: - Banana..: 7
Map Script: - Fish....: 127
Map Script: - Stone...: 22
Map Script: - Bison...: 18

 

[Acken]

8-9 gold? More like 4-5, and that doesn't cover the difference between salt and gold/gems/copper/whales/ anything really.

Play a salt start and see how you feel.

4-5 is without a Caravansary. With one it easily reaches 8 gold and some science.

Spoiler :

These numbers are on turn 30. Trade routes value increases when the AI gets more ahead in tech, get more gold and you have more diversity and markets.

Salts are a trade between gold and more food/hammers. And the conversion is in salts favor. I'll work a 3F 2H (or 4F 1H) tile over a 1F 1H 4G tile without even thinking twice.

Finally trade posts can provide a 3 gold improvement at Guilds

Anyway, I think I found a bug. If you compare screenshots, this is the same turn of the same game: one before I pick party leadership, and the other after. You can see that I am not getting any faith from it.

Found the reason. Firaxis being dumb and not treating Faith as a normal yield for the per city function.
The policy is already good enough without it I think. Instead of having to mess with this I've removed the faith part. Didn't really make thematic sense anyway.

Will "Unlimited exp from barbs" be a part of v7?

Done

 

[Chum]

4-5 is without a Caravansary. With one it easily reaches 8 gold and some science.

You assume you can trade with your neighbor (war). Most of the time the only place you can send TR's is to CS's.

I also don't think it's fair to say "You know this useless building no one makes on any other start? Build that when you have salt, it's totally balanced."

Salts are a trade between gold and more food/hammers. And the conversion is in salts favor. I'll work a 3F 2H (or 4F 1H) tile over a 1F 1H 4G tile without even thinking twice.

I'm not proposing drop it to TP level. I'm saying a salt is 2f 1h 1g base game. Make the salt mine only add a hammer instead of a hammer and a food, and add back a gold. You'd work a 2f3H1g after chemistry.

Finally trade posts can provide a 3 gold improvement at Guilds

Cool, I was running negative from T20, but as long as I can get to guilds I'll be good. Not a fix either.

Seriously, play a salt start and tell me it's the same as the rest of the luxes now.

 

[Acken]

It's not the same. It's better. You have less gold for more raw yields with an option to get more gold. I really can't see the issue here.

But yes next test I'll switch the local luxury for salts and do my test with this start no problem.