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

[beetle]

Yes, England gets two good UU and helpful buffs in addition to that. All the civs with two UU are stronger than Denmark. And they all have a buff that is good for something other than conquest.

The Berserker is literally all Denmark has that is worthwhile. It's a 1 trick pony.

The zerkers upgrading to Ski Infantry is decent. All units getting extra move from starting embarked next to land can usually be put to use. The auto pathing mostly ignores the UA though. Both of those perks are mostly for a human player.

I will be posting a lakes map for in the CDG series in a couple of weeks. Will you give Denmark another try?

 

[Acken]

Acken I see you've set NumCitiesTechCostMod=0. Have you added increasing science costs per city somewhere else?

That line should be commented out (between /* and */)

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Has anyone actually managed to beat Deity at this point? Haven't played in a long time, still no win in sight

I like most of the new changes, be careful of overnerfing the NC tho.

 

[Akbarthegreat]

- Does the AI denounce you if they have set their sights on a CS you have protected? Some denounciations seem quite illogical.

- When two AIs DoW you together, I've noticed that one of them seems to be unprepared for a war sometimes.

- When making a peace settlement, what things does the AI consider? In my current game, Mongolia launched an attack (late classical era) on one of my cities and one of my allied CS. We fought them off and I killed like 4-5 of his units. However, his military was still much larger than mine so he refused to make peace unless I gave him 5 of my 6 cities and even 60 or so turns later, he had not launched any invasion but he still refused to settle for anything less than his previous demand.

- May I ask why you nerfed walls? Atm it seems quite easy to take walled cities with just melee and some ranged units. Honestly I would have vouched for buffed up walls, making siege units more important and making properly walled cities much harder to take without siege support.

 

[Acken]

-No.
-Yeah it's a problem with the original code. Probably above my abilities to fix it.
-This is something that I'll be trying to fix in the next version, that if 20turns pass without a unit killed or 40 turns without a city lost, the AI will always accept white peace. This problem is not my fault but by removing the white peace bug it becomes apparent.
-The problem with this tactical gameplay style (having to huge siege etc) is that it's a nightmare to make the AI threatening that way. However city health may use a small buff. On a side note walls aren't completely nerfed in value, they give half as much as they used to but also cost half as much.

 

[Akbarthegreat]

Yeah I guess that's fair.. 1Upt really complicates things. Walls atm aren't vital.. they just buy you 1-2 more turns when being attacked. Regarding the half cost, I haven't noticed it as such because I usually start with tradition. Can't give up the faster border growth

 

[bonniepbilly]

Regarding trading posts, I very much welcome the changes, but while I understand the 2:1 G:H ratio, should the F:H ratio stay at 1:1 ? As it is I (and Acken based on his LPs) farm every tile that can be farmed. Wouldn't it be more interesting if H and G were more competitive compared to F ?

 

[Acken]

Well food is a bit special. It's basically your economy yield. You invest in food now to get a better economy later. It's at 1:1 in offered yields but it isn't at 1:1 in value throughout the game. Food has a high value early and then its value diminishes with happiness and time.

Basically it's like making workers in starcraft 2. You don't want to stop making them for a while but you may want to if you want to do a rush or defend against one or pull your ressources in something else, or when you reach the end game.

I think food is fine, if anything what I don't really like is science coming from it. Civ4 simply had a better model with science coming from gold and food being purely for a better future economy (or production through slavery).

 

[bonniepbilly]

Fully agree with civ4 science model being more interesting anyway, there was a real trade off between farms and cottages.

So after your changes:
- river side hills will still get farmed
- non river side non hills tiles might get trading posts instead of farms currently
- non river side hills might get trading posts instead of mines
?

On the different question of the excruciatingly long end of domination games raised in a previous post, did you consider gradually increasing the cost of units with time/era (compared to vanilla) to reduce their number in end games?

 

[bonniepbilly]

Fully agree with civ4 science model being more interesting anyway, there was a real trade off between farms and cottages.

So after your changes:
- river side hills will still get farmed
- non river side non hills tiles might get trading posts instead of farms currently
- non river side hills might get trading posts instead of mines
?

On the different question of the excruciatingly long end of domination games raised in a previous post, did you consider gradually increasing the cost of units with time/era (compared to vanilla) to reduce their number in end games?

 

[Akbarthegreat]

On the different question of the excruciatingly long end of domination games raised in a previous post, did you consider gradually increasing the cost of units with time/era (compared to vanilla) to reduce their number in end games?

This would be nice.


On another note, can an AI bribe another AI to attack a human?

 

[Acken]

Fully agree with civ4 science model being more interesting anyway, there was a real trade off between farms and cottages.

So after your changes:
- river side hills will still get farmed
- non river side non hills tiles might get trading posts instead of farms currently
- non river side hills might get trading posts instead of mines
?

On the different question of the excruciatingly long end of domination games raised in a previous post, did you consider gradually increasing the cost of units with time/era (compared to vanilla) to reduce their number in end games?

Only river side hills annoy me to be honest because of civil service coming way before chemistry. I don't know if a similar effect could make it into the mod like civil service buffing both for example.

You mean the maintenance cost ? I don't have plan to raise it no. I now that it can be a long grind to kill an AI late game but a rise in maintenance costs would affect the player more than the AI. Moreover I believe this is a negative aspect of 1upt that we have to live with.

 

[sugerdady87]

I also have the following changes on the current drawing board:



I'd like to know your opinion guys.

"TP can only be built adjacent to a luxury and not adjacent to another trading post"
There's no way I can agree to that; Seems like a unnecessary change. In my domination games, the way I have fun is to TP all puppets and buy troops with Big Ben and Mercantilism.

Maybe moving TP forward would be a good step, but I don't know about the other changes you have proposed.

 

[bonniepbilly]

You mean the maintenance cost ? I don't have plan to raise it no. I now that it can be a long grind to kill an AI late game but a rise in maintenance costs would affect the player more than the AI. Moreover I believe this is a negative aspect of 1upt that we have to live with.

I meant production cost.

 

[Acken]

I feel it would nerf the human player more due to AI production bonuses. Also numbers are kinda where the AI difficulty comes from in a 1UPT game.
But you can make the argument that the late game AI production allows it to make units too fast making it hard to slog through its carpet. A problem I'm on the fence about... Ultimately its mostly a difficulty issue I think.

 

[DeAnno]

I feel it would nerf the human player more due to AI production bonuses. Also numbers are kinda where the AI difficulty comes from in a 1UPT game.
But you can make the argument that the late game AI production allows it to make units too fast making it hard to slog through its carpet. A problem I'm on the fence about... Ultimately its mostly a difficulty issue I think.

I think the difficulty of a few human units vs. a normal amount of AI units is more fun than a normal amount of human units vs. a humungous AI carpet. The latter just bogs down forever.

 

[bonniepbilly]

Acken, when are you planning to post the first challenges with your mod btw?

 

[Acken]

No idea. I've said some dates in the past and then didn't respect them so I won't do that again.

Some time... could be in a few weeks or a few months depending on how lazy I am. Users are free to share maps on this very thread though.

 

[Damthe]

I hope you will include more changes for civilization traits in further versions. Other than that, mod seems great !

 

[Ravellion]

I was wondering if you could help me with something. If I want to play with Barathor's More Luxuries and his More Luxuries pantheon add on mod, but keep your follower, enhancer and reformations beliefs, I thought I could just delete only the Pantheon beliefs of your mod from beliefs.sql and be done. Sadly, that doesn't seem to work, as that means your follower, enhancer and reformations beliefs also don't load, despite them still being in the file. Should I instead build in a dependency one way or the other, or should I use another method entirely? I cannot really merge the the two mods easily as yours is SQL and his is XML.