Balance Factors

[Thunderbrd]

I think it depends on what is being experienced in the game but my experiences have suggested that gold gets easier to manage the farther you get into the game so it seems counterproductive to me to remove or flatten the inflation over time but I have not been playing enough to say.

 

[raxo2222]

I think it depends on what is being experienced in the game but my experiences have suggested that gold gets easier to manage the farther you get into the game so it seems counterproductive to me to remove or flatten the inflation over time but I have not been playing enough to say.

Toffer says to remove slow rise of inflation and just leave inflation from civics and hurrying.
We have 13 eras, where we can adjust maintenance (upkeep) cost modifiers if possible.
Calendar checkpoints are spaced in proportion to effective length to era - half of skippable techs are skipped before going to next era, giving space for free/traded techs.
That is slow rise of inflation could be simulated and could be more precise.
Era last 5% - 10% of game.

 

[Toffer90]

Toffer says to remove slow rise of inflation and just leave inflation from civics and hurrying.

It was not an order. ^^
I merely expressed my opinion about it.

Nerfing gold income in mature games is already necessary, and removing the ever increasing expense from inflation will exasperate the need for such a nerf.

 

[raxo2222]

It was not an order. ^^
I merely expressed my opinion about it.

Nerfing gold income in mature games is already necessary, and removing the ever increasing expense from inflation will exasperate the need for such a nerf.

I know, I just worded that badly.

 

[Yellownaut]

Hello. Recently started my first game with C2C in a few years.

It's about 7250 BC and I'm not far away from entering the Classical Era (researching Polytheism etc).

I'm playing on Noble difficulty on the principle that I generally prefer games which have an even distribution of advantages, rather than penalising the player for being more capable (or vice versa).

I played on the largest map size possible (Gigantic?), with 32 players in total. I didn't get the best start, and tend to not be as aggressive as seems optimal in Civilization games, yet have nevertheless been running away with it. At current my score is approaching 2.5 times my nearest rival, and 4 times the worst players. Meanwhile I have 14 cities, the nearest opponent has 6 cities, and most civilisations have 3-4 cities. What's more, I can see that most opponent's cities beyond their first few are 2-6 in size, where mine are more like 5-10. I probably could have settled even more cities in truth. This is because despite running up a deficit of -100 gold a turn for much of the game, I have been always stay on top by exploring the sea (my money is about 20,000 and counting). I haven't remotely maximised my cities earning potential because I simply haven't needed to. I've only just recently started hauling my deficit back in recently because my capital, Athens, is running out of things to build despite being in a deeply average location. Meanwhile I'm more 1.5x more powerful than my nearest rival, and 2.0-4.0x more powerful than everyone else. My science has been at 100% the entire game. I only found my first grain in the last 50 years, and that was from settling another continent.

My building principle has been very simple. Focus on growth first and productivity second, until cities reach size 18. Occasionally build anti-crime and disease buildings and units to keep those metrics <50 apiece. Once a city reaches the size 18 threshold, pick a speciality for that city depending on its location. Only build culture buildings when it's very necessary for that city's growth, or to crowd out a neighbour.

Some observations:

* The AI doesn't seem to build cities aggressively enough. This is despite the fact that settlers are relatively cheap, and there is a staggering amount of land to expand into.
* It's incredibly easy to abuse(?) going the Seafaring route, and exploring the entire world. I managed to prove the world is round by about 7500 BC, and picked up uncountable amounts of wealth and technology from exploring islands. There must still be about 30-50 islands left for me to explore along the coastlines and seas alone. I realise this may partially be down to my map settings (I randomly selected distance between continents, and they seem to be very close to each other) however, the principle would have been abusable, albeit to a lesser extent, on most map settings. Without the advantage of exploring islands, I couldn't have raced ahead as far as I am now, as I simply wouldn't have been able to afford it. A fair few times I had to declare war on AIs in order to traverse their sea territory. But in each instance this was worthwhile, as they were too weak and far away for me to care about the consequences of doing so, and in any case they always meekly accepted peace after 20-30 turns.
* The AI seems to like to build its cities very close to its existing territory, when a more sensible strategy is to build near a confluence of rivers and food resources. I wonder if this is because the city location algorithm now sees too many of what it regards as prime locations?
* Units that don't respect borders such as Ambushers and Stalkers are extremely powerful. Of course you can only have a handful of these at any time, but they are so powerful in suppressing neighbouring powers that it is ludicrous. I used my allowance of 8 units to lay waste to my neighbours workers and key resources, and they were never able to recover. Meanwhile, because of their superior stealth abilities, and greater overland speed, they proved to be better hunting units than the specialist hunters from thousands of years later, including Rangers.

Overall, I'm not sure it's worth continuing the game as, if anything, I'm pulling faster ahead than ever as my second and third tranche of cities reach maturity.

Thoughts welcome.

 

[Fermongu]

Noble is too easy in this mod, you can try emperor+ difficulties.

 

[raxo2222]

@Yellownaut get SVN version and play on Monarch - Immortal. Prince is too easy and Deity AI gets additional settler.
I set globals so researching ~90 techs would mean around 10% of game was completed and 6000 BC would be reached.
There was XML polishing done mainly.

@Thunderbrd what do you think about releasing path this year?
Mostly polishing was done since release of V38.5

 

[KaTiON_PT]

Correct, the human player always has an advantage over the AI.

Even without maximizing the human will always be able to plan long term which is something the AI can't do, and this is exacerbated by the sheer amount of buildings the game allows you to build.

As a player you know that you should always focus on growth and productivity, but the AI on the other hand could in one turn be building pit traps or crime-producing buildings and then in the other it builds a worker, even if it has enough workers already.

That's because the AI in Civilization is made of different parts and each communicate with one another, there is a part that decides what to build in a city, another that decides what to build in another city, a different section that deals with how to use workers, another that looks for the most optimal paths for units, etc. As you can see there are several independent sections that don't cooperate, and the result is a bad AI.

That's why you should play in higher difficulties as the additional bonuses given to the AI force it to build the necessary stuff to survive and thrive.

 

[Yellownaut]

@raxo2222 Ok.

@KaTiON_PT Fair enough.

 

[Thunderbrd]

@Thunderbrd what do you think about releasing path this year?
Mostly polishing was done since release of V38.5

I haven't seen anything to justify a new version yet. Such refinements are good but no rule advancements have been made which would make for an impression on folks who played v38-v38.5. Perhaps by Xmas there will be.

 

[KaTiON_PT]

@raxo2222 have you already balanced the research rate for the medieval era according to the % of played turns or do you want me to do that?

 

[raxo2222]

@raxo2222 have you already balanced the research rate for the medieval era according to the % of played turns or do you want me to do that?

Well Pepper added new techs, so I have to readjust calendar.

Also I just wanted to adjust Prehistoric era, later era percentages were merely for information.

Finetuning balance is hard part of it.

New ideal percentages for mid level of beelining - half of techs, that are skippable techs in given era are researched before going to next era.

That is on beginning of given era you must be at this percentage.
Ancient - 9,82%
Classical - 18,44%
Medieval - 24,81%
Renaissance - 30,74%
Industrial - 36,88%
Modern - 43,17%
Information - 54,72%
Nanotech - 63,14%
Transhuman - 72,78%
Galactic - 81,66%
Cosmic - 88,35%
Transcendent - 93,56%
Future - 100,00%

Length in percentages (In bracket percentages if all techs were researched before going to next era):
9,82% - Prehistoric (10,63%)
8,62% - Ancient (9,67%)
6,36% - Classical (6,38%)
5,93% - Medieval (5,74%)
6,14% - Renaissance (6,27%)
6,29% - Industrial (7,23%)
11,55% - Modern (10,41%)
8,42% - Information (8,93%)
9,64% - Nanotech (8,93%)
8,88% - Transhuman (7,97%)
6,68% - Galactic (6,91%)
5,22% - Cosmic (5,42%)
6,44% - Transcedent (5,53%)

In Blitz one turn is 0,1%
In Eternity one turn is 0,005%

I'll extend Prehistoric to 10% as before, so 10 000 BC (80% of Prehistoric) and 6000 BC (Beginning of Ancient era) date targets are easy to be set.
Also in Prehistoric era you have only one city for long time.
Turns will be substracted from Modern era - it is longest era in game effectively, as you will come back a lot to research techs in previous eras.

 

[raxo2222]

@Toffer90 @Thunderbrd

I think fractional day would be nice - DayIncrement is very low (<30 days) for long game speeds for eras around Modern - Nanotech (90/60/100 years long)
This results in 10 - 50 turn bias from target date, when you have target turn count for era.
Fractions of day wouldn't be displayed - in display it would be just rounded down to nearest integer day.

Should longer gamespeeds should have "sub eras" in calendar, just like Prehistoric is divided in two at 80% of it (10 000 BC)?
Here is reworked calendar after addition of new techs:

Spoiler :

I like how 50% of game lands in 1950's - beginning of USA/USSR space program and cold war.

Updated calendar is in SVN now.
I tested it on duel sized map with everything disabled, that could be turned off for maximum speed and stability - did autorun till end of calendar for all but two slowest speeds.
No crashes. Calendar can handle everything.

 

[Thunderbrd]

@Toffer90 @Thunderbrd

I think fractional day would be nice - DayIncrement is very low (<30 days) for long game speeds for eras around Modern - Nanotech (90/60/100 years long)
This results in 10 - 50 turn bias from target date, when you have target turn count for era.
Fractions of day wouldn't be displayed - in display it would be just rounded down to nearest integer day.

Should longer gamespeeds should have "sub eras" in calendar, just like Prehistoric is divided in two at 80% of it (10 000 BC)?
Here is reworked calendar after addition of new techs:

Spoiler :

View attachment 503778 View attachment 503777 View attachment 503779

I like how 50% of game lands in 1950's - beginning of USA/USSR space program and cold war.

Updated calendar is in SVN now.
I tested it on duel sized map with everything disabled, that could be turned off for maximum speed and stability - did autorun till end of calendar for all but two slowest speeds.
No crashes. Calendar can handle everything.

Please rephrase your question.

 

[raxo2222]

Please rephrase your question.

......

Even smaller unit of time would be nice - iHourIncrement - for slow speeds and for eras around modern era.
When iDayIncrement is below 30 days it becomes hard to finetune calendar.
Then for you could have 12.5 day (calendar increment would be 300 hours in this case) increment.
Its hard to finetune calendar, that has dates connected to lifestyle techs with iDayIncrements on slower game speeds and on relatively short eras yearwise.
Fraction of day wouldn't be displayed in game.
Date would be rounded down to nearest day - X.00 - X.99999999..... would be displayed as X day.

Industrial - Transhuman era have iDay increment below 60 days on slowest speed.
Here 60 and 61 days starts making noticeable difference.
With hourly increment, that wouldn't be visible in game, you essentially have 24x higher maximum precision.

In worst case you reach target tens of turns late/early (Industrial - Transhuman on longest speeds)

I made screenshoots of calendar in previous post.

 

[Thunderbrd]

......

Even smaller unit of time would be nice - iHourIncrement - for slow speeds and for eras around modern era.
When iDayIncrement is below 30 days it becomes hard to finetune calendar.
Then for you could have 12.5 day (calendar increment would be 300 hours in this case) increment.
Its hard to finetune calendar, that has dates connected to lifestyle techs with iDayIncrements on slower game speeds and on relatively short eras yearwise.
Fraction of day wouldn't be displayed in game.
Date would be rounded down to nearest day - X.00 - X.99999999..... would be displayed as X day.

Industrial - Transhuman era have iDay increment below 60 days on slowest speed.
Here 60 and 61 days starts making noticeable difference.
With hourly increment, that wouldn't be visible in game, you essentially have 24x higher maximum precision.

In worst case you reach target tens of turns late/early (Industrial - Transhuman on longest speeds)

I made screenshoots of calendar in previous post.

Would be an extremely difficult modification to add and I cannot agree that it would be beneficial. I don't even like it coming down to days and weeks and would prefer it stayed to increments of months at least.

 

[raxo2222]

Would be an extremely difficult modification to add and I cannot agree that it would be beneficial. I don't even like it coming down to days and weeks and would prefer it stayed to increments of months at least.

Ah okay.

Sadly it would be very difficult to cut down usage of month and day increments without deviating from calculated turn count per era.
While previous calendar had nice round increments, this one is tied to effective era length.
That is it doesn't need sudden changes in research rate (like 2 techs per turns in one era and 0.5 techs per turn in other era, where average is slightly less than 1) - spending slightly less than 2 turns per tech (Normal speed) for entire game game should mean that new era is reached on time if you research half of skippable (techs that aren't needed to advance to next era) techs in each era or if you research all techs but you trade/get them for free/have boost from TD/WFL.

Now each era (Prehistoric is divided in two) has their own iDay/MonthIncrement and iTurnsPerIncrement.
Round dates and increments would need multiple of these per each era.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Ah okay.

Sadly it would be very difficult to cut down usage of month and day increments without deviating from calculated turn count per era.
While previous calendar had nice round increments, this one is tied to effective era length.
That is it doesn't need sudden changes in research rate (like 2 techs per turns in one era and 0.5 techs per turn in other era, where average is slightly less than 1) - spending slightly less than 2 turns per tech (Normal speed) for entire game game should mean that new era is reached on time if you research half of skippable (techs that aren't needed to advance to next era) techs in each era or if you research all techs but you trade/get them for free/have boost from TD/WFL.

Now each era (Prehistoric is divided in two) has their own iDay/MonthIncrement and iTurnsPerIncrement.
Round dates and increments would need multiple of these per each era.

Yeah, I'm cool with your method so far as I've seen. It's at least rational and consistent and it's hard to do that with the calendar.

 

[raxo2222]

@Thunderbrd it seems like realistic corporation taxation (<iRealCorporationMaintenanceModifier>) is completely out of whack in XML:
<-100 is tax and >-100 is subsidy as defined in DLL.
-100 would be no adjustment.

Society:
Bourgeois -20 // 80% subsidy
Proletariat -50 // 50% subsidy

Economy:
Guilds -85 // 15% subsidy
Mercantilism -50 // 50% subsidy
Corporatism -75 // 25% subsidy
Planned -75 // 25% subsidy
Regulated -20 // 80% subsidy
Green -15 // 85% subsidy
Post-Scarcity -10 // 90% subsidy

Welfare:
Philanthropic -95 // 5% subsidy
Subsidized -110 // 10% tax
Privatized -85 // 15% subsidy
Socialized -125 // 25% tax

Currency:
Coinage -110 // 10% tax

Workforce:
Serfdom -25 // 75% subsidy
Engineered -85 // 15% subsidy

What numbers would be realistic here?

 

[Thunderbrd]

@Thunderbrd it seems like realistic corporation taxation (<iRealCorporationMaintenanceModifier>) is completely out of whack in XML:
<-100 is tax and >-100 is subsidy as defined in DLL.
-100 would be no adjustment.

Society:
Bourgeois -20 // 80% subsidy
Proletariat -50 // 50% subsidy

Economy:
Guilds -85 // 15% subsidy
Mercantilism -50 // 50% subsidy
Corporatism -75 // 25% subsidy
Planned -75 // 25% subsidy
Regulated -20 // 80% subsidy
Green -15 // 85% subsidy
Post-Scarcity -10 // 90% subsidy

Welfare:
Philanthropic -95 // 5% subsidy
Subsidized -110 // 10% tax
Privatized -85 // 15% subsidy
Socialized -125 // 25% tax

Currency:
Coinage -110 // 10% tax

Workforce:
Serfdom -25 // 75% subsidy
Engineered -85 // 15% subsidy

What numbers would be realistic here?

I really don't know. I've never looked at what happens with this value. Is this only in effect when Realistic Corporations (an option I'd advocate removing anyhow) is on? Maybe this was what was intended to make it more viable to have the headquarters existing in a non-financial capital center city.