Armies

[Armandeus]

OK, then if you are going to make this change, change the tooltip for the Iron Working tech that still says "reveals iron," and please offer a rationalization in the Civilopedia entry as to why bronze working somehow reveals iron. Since there is neither a copper resource nor a bronze one, you could even change the name of the Bronze Working tech to make more sense in revealing iron.
Otherwise, I think you should instead either reduce the science cost to get to iron-revealing Iron Working, or make Horsemen require iron or something else to reduce their numbers (maybe two horses for one unit).

 

[Thalassicus]

@Armandeus
As Txurce pointed out the goal is to make it less of a risky endeavor to go for Swordsmen, when compared to the relatively safe bet of Horsemen (whose resource is revealed with a first-level tech). Otherwise you can get to Swordsmen and then discover you don't even have iron anywhere near your civ. I also reduced the cost to 125% of horseback riding, down from 150%.

In addition, as MouseyPounds pointed out, most resources have their reveal before the capability to use it.

From a realism perspective, I'm no expert on the history of metallurgy but I do know early bronzes were made from a copper and arsenic compound, up until the late Greek - early Roman period. The processing of arsenopyrite in air (the primary ore containing arsenic) produces iron oxides. Therefore, bronze working would produce the necessary precursor to iron. Iron oxides are what are smelted to create metallic iron. It's logical that people learning how to produce bronze would notice iron oxides in rocks (or as a result of the bronze making process), and start researching ways to work with that too.

 

[Armandeus]

@Armandeus
As Txurce pointed out the goal is to make it less of a risky endeavor to go for Swordsmen, when compared to the relatively safe bet of Horsemen (whose resource is revealed with a first-level tech). Otherwise you can get to Swordsmen and then discover you don't even have iron anywhere near your civ. I also reduced the cost to 125% of horseback riding, down from 150%.

As MouseyPounds pointed out, most resources have their reveal before the capability to use it.

From a realism perspective, I'm no expert on the history of metallurgy but I do know early bronzes were made from a copper and arsenic compound, up until the late Greek - early Roman period. The processing of arsenopyrite in air produces iron oxides. Iron oxides are what are smelted to create metallic iron. This is probably why iron working followed bronze working, and it'd be logical that people learning how to produce bronze would notice iron oxides in rocks (or as a result of the bronze making process), and start mining those too.

Yes, and at that point they would have researched iron working, wouldn't they? There being byproducts of bronze smelting without the knowledge of what to do with them does not seem convincing enough to me to justify a civilization at that tech wanting to excavate for iron ore. They don't know what to do with it if they are only at bronze working. That is the point of researching iron working, isn't it?

It sounds like you want "bronze working" to also be "iron working," but still want another "iron working" tech as well.

If you want iron revealed earlier, fine, but I think that also requires changing the tech names, descriptions, and tool tips to make your game balance change believable and logical. Perhaps you need to change "bronze working" to "bronze and iron working" and "iron working" to something else.

But if horsemen are such a problem, why not just nerf them some more until balance is achieved? Certainly there is always the risk that one of the resources is not within the ranges of your cities early in the game. It's also possible there may be no horses nearby, right?

 

[Thalassicus]

Think of it this way: is it possible to figure out how to work iron before it's discovered or mined? With the way it's set up in the vanilla game, civs start learning how to turn iron into swords before you've even found it exists at all.

It's logical for a substance to be discovered, then research uses for it. This is the pattern other resources in the game follow, and it fits within a realistic historical context. The process used to create bronze produces iron oxide as a byproduct, thus it's believable that the tech should reveal iron.

 

[Armandeus]

Think of it this way: is it possible to figure out how to work iron before it's discovered or mined? With the way it's set up in the vanilla game, civs start learning how to turn iron into swords before you've even found it exists at all.

It's logical for a substance to be discovered, then research uses for it. This is the pattern other resources in the game follow, and it fits within a realistic historical context.

Perhaps, but those other techs are described or named in such a way that the discovery is consistent with the explanation. Not so with Bronze Working.

However, I still think that fixing the imbalance between horsemen and swordsmen should be a matter of adjusting those two units.

Either that, or move the mining tech, and the next few metal techs back in the tree to begin where Agriculture is, and keep iron revealed by Iron Working.

As I've said before, my complaint is that while you may have successfully adjusted game balance, you have not done it with a believable explanation, and with no updates to the Civilopedia or tool tip.

I think believability and consistency are as important as game balance.

 

[Thalassicus]

You do have a valid point that I should pay more attention to the civilopedia entries.

As a practical matter, I haven't been making many civilopedia edits for the reason it wouldn't be efficient to update a pedia entry for a change if there's the possibility it might just be changed again in the future, potentially wasting time. I already spend a lot of time keeping documentation up to date for the mods - this week's release of a new version took 6 hours to transfer all the new information from readmes to the appropriate threads and website locations.

 

[Armandeus]

Thanks for acknowledging that. I know it can be a big pain to update the pedia.

I thought of something last night. If I am not mistaken, the mounted melee fighter became a powerful force only after the medieval invention of the stirrup (represented by the Knight in CivV). Without the leverage of a stirrup, striking the enemy could dismount you with the inertia of your own attack. Horses were used by infantry who dismounted to fight, by archers, or for scouting. Either that, or they pulled chariots.

So, in CivV terms, we make the Scout upgrade to the Horseman (which already receives visibility promotions), and decrease the strength of the Horseman to reflect this. The problem of having too many powerful Horsemen in the game is solved. It may no longer be necessary to make iron appear earlier, because the Horsemen problem is no longer a problem.

Horsemen, vehicles, and helicopters are examples of cavalry scouts, so I think the progression is logical. Now we have something to do with all those Scouts that become useless mid-game.

 

[truetom]

I love the way units improve and upgrade, Thalassicus. Just can't imagine to have it any other way. Is unit upgrading / promoting / improving possible to have in a separate mod?

 

[Gaster]

I noticed submarines lost their attack animation with the update that changed their promotions - any chance of getting it back?

 

[Thalassicus]

@truetom
I'll split off those edits into their own file for the next version so it's easier to keep just the parts you want.

@Gaster
Hmm, I see what you mean. I've been investigating and it seems the relationships between UnitCombats and attack animations might be hardcoded, which is frankly bizzare. I can't find anything equivalent to Civ 4's ArtDefines*.xml files.

 

[truetom]

@truetom
I'll split off those edits into their own file for the next version so it's easier to keep just the parts you want.

Love ya.

 

[BomberEscort]

Do you have a handy list of what promotions expire with upgrade? I didn't see anything that mentioned this in the first post.

 

[Txurce]

Do you have a handy list of what promotions expire with upgrade? I didn't see anything that mentioned this in the first post.

I believe there's an equivalent for all of them.

 

[Thalassicus]

Instead of expiring specific promotions, I took the opposite approach. I set everything to expire, then switch it back for each unique unit ability individually (including the Scout's ignore terrain ability, since it's the same one as Musketmen). This was simpler because there's dozens of promotions but only a handful of UU abilities.

 

[jeffrockson]

If they simply made the 'CanMoveAllTerrain' promotion flag to do what it claims to, all this would be unnecessary.

I found the same lack of effect from that promotion option. There's been a short discussion about air units' movement in this thread, in case anyone wants to follow up and research separately from this balance mod.

Thanks for reading,


JeffRockson

 

[Shoryn]

Hi everyone,

Thank you Thalassicus for creating such great mods - currently playing with CCMat which uses every Balance mod you did and I must say your mods add so much flavour to the game

However I have an issue with this component, as the promotion swap doesn't occur, which is pretty bad when you play with, say, mongols. Well, it's bad with everyone in fact

I don't understand why. At first I thought it was a problem with CCMat (that's why I posted a similar reply in its thread - I thought it was worth posting here too, for you to know this bug still happens), so I tried downloading this component and play with it alone, clearing the cache - no changes, swap definitely doesn't occur. I joined a screenshot where you can see a Rifleman with a ranged promotion (it's even showing in the Combat Tooltip, "A distance terrain accidenté", but it's not added to the total strength - 46.25 which is 25*1,85).

The other changes included in this component are working fine (walls/castle strength, scouts>paratroopers, etc.). This is the only one thing that doesn't want to work

If you have any idea, thanks in advance

 

[truetom]

Hi everyone,
...However I have an issue with this component, as the promotion swap doesn't occur...

Yes, I can confirm that. The first post says it will swap after the end of turn but it doesn't.

 

[Thalassicus]

Could you provide a savegame file so I can test what the problem might be?

 

[Tomice]

Hi Thal!

I'm sorry if this has been discussed before, but have you ever compared chariots and archers directly?

Cost:
While Chariots need horses, this is rarely a problem. IMO, chariots can be considered cheaper (90 vs 105 on epic). Furthermore, stables can boost chariot production, I think? Or are they archery units in this regard?

Tech:
The wheel + animal husbandry are more versatile than archery, making me often want to choose wheel before archery - although it's two techs vs one. The two paths merge very soon, anyway. I wouldn't say the shorter tech path to archers is a real advantage.

Mobility:
Chariots lose much of their advantage on rough terrain, but with move after attack I'd still say chariots are way more mobile.

Attack:
They should be perfectly equal with 7 each.

Defense:
Archers have one point more and receive terrain bonus. I'm not sure if chariots are affected by the negative modifier on open terrain. I'm also not sure how garrisoning works in detail.


SUMMARY:
I'd say the chariot's mobilty bonus is often more worthy than the better defense of archers. IMHO, the cheaper cost of chariots is not justified. I'd make archers cheaper or even switch the costs.

Oh, and thx for making chariots so awesome and fun to play with!

 

[Shoryn]

Could you provide a savegame file so I can test what the problem might be?

Thanks for the quick answer

Here you go !

The only mod activated on this save is Balance Combat (last version) although the game see it as a regular save.

I created another quick test game as I don't have the game showed on the screenshots anymore, there is still the same issue