Balance Issues (post your grievances)

[Cosmotech]

First off, this isn't the place to QQ about things you "know" won't change, but rather balance issues in civ leaders/uu's/great people/etc.

Mainly I wanted a spot where people could dump their thoughts real fast (i did a quick search for similar thread, don't blame me if i didn't see it) for ideas making the game more balanced- and I'll try to stick your name/suggestion in an edit so people don't have to scroll down.

I'll start off myself, and a lot of people already figured this out. Cash=good. Barbarian=bad/experience for units. Songhai=75!? gold per encampment AND they have a mounted unit with +city attack. As long as you take out the enemy spearmen first, it's all downhill from there.
Commence Dumpage
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City States: Make quests more helpful and more common (Rylune); Cannot start alliance through money gifts, though maintaining that alliance with gold is ok. (Rylune) Maritime Bonuses are a bit extreme in most cases, lower the output possibly. (Rylune)
Great People: Great Scientists in general need revamped (multiple people)
Improvements: Mines have a low production output comparable to other improvements (Rylune)
Cities: Lower maintenance on buildings (Pegasos)

 

[Rylune]

A few that I'm sure has been pointed out already:

It is too easy to get and maintain many city state allies. And once you can befriend a handful of Maritime city-states you can pull way ahead of the AI. I think that if they want to use city-states as a means for "helping" the flow of the game through the use of quests, they should improve the quests and reduce the effectiveness of gold gifts. My suggestion is make quests far more common (always have one per city state), make the ones that involve delcaring war on other civs or city-states better (rather than easier ones like killing a barbarian encampment), and make it so you cannot start an alliance with a money gift. Money can be used to maintain an alliance or start a friendship. But not go from friend to ally or neutral to ally.

Great scientist: Being able to pick your tech gets a little silly. As much as I hated the great scientists in Civ IV offering to bulb techs I didn't want, it made it so they were not too good. In return, bring back the Academy. Basically, allow them to still be good at setting you up for a late game advantage but make them not quite as fast making them all equivalent to Civ IV Oracles. That would probably help with Babylon being so strong in the mid and late game.

Babylon's UA: It just feels too strong. Maybe changing great scientists will help. But it seems like doubling the amount of great people is too much. I was thinking make it so they can have 1 free specialist per city (must have the building to use it though) would be a bit better. Still gives a huge bonus but not quite as huge as it currently is. Assuming people use this to pick a great scientist in every city, it would give you 3 extra research per city but far fewer great people. Now you just crank out Great Library, Stonehenge if you can get it, try and unlock Civil Service before Great Library finishes and get 1-2 eras ahead of most of the AIs. And then you set up one city to be a great person farm and push WAY ahead. And on top of it, Bowmen are a great UU so they are not TOO vulnerable early on.

Food: Consider reducing maritime bonus a tad. At the same time it may be worth thinking about reducing the maintenance of food producing buildings. That way it takes time for your cities to grow. Right now if you can maintain 3 or 4 maritime allies your cities start growing incredibly fast. If you had to build a few buildings to do this, they still could have the same potential as they do now but start off slower.

Mines: +1 production or +2 gold and +1 research (after the SP). The fact that trade posts do not need to chop means they are only 1 production lower than mines. Which means you end up many people not chopping and plopping trade posts everywhere. Or people use hills/plains on a river for farms. Either way, mines seem to be only for resources. Maybe increase their production by 1 so it is something people use more often. Another option could be increasing production by 2 and adding maintenance. Would help encourage specialized cities. One or two cities have a few mines with production buildings.

Just things I've noticed from my first few games.

 

[Cosmotech]

The thing about maintaining those maritime states is you're spending 250-500 gold every 30/60 turns. So in the long run your maintenance is gonna be a lot lower if you use food buildings, and even more so if spam farms.

 

[aryah]

The thing about maintaining those maritime states is you're spending 250-500 gold every 30/60 turns. So in the long run your maintenance is gonna be a lot lower if you use food buildings, and even more so if spam farms.

would be nice if their bonus didn't scale as much with the number of cities you have, then. given how you're spending a fairly fixed amount of gold on it however big you are. Say, lump sum of food, then, divided equally among however many cities you have, with some max per-city threshold and min of 1?

 

[Cosmotech]

I'd have to agree, because realistically.. can that (usually) one city state support a growing empire of say, 6 cities, while also supporting itself food wise. They'd have to be cloning cows or something.

 

[WuphonsReach]

would be nice if their bonus didn't scale as much with the number of cities you have, then. given how you're spending a fairly fixed amount of gold on it however big you are. Say, lump sum of food, then, divided equally among however many cities you have, with some max per-city threshold and min of 1?

That's my feeling on the matter. Minimum of +1F per city, maximum of +5F per city (and your capitol gets double). The total amount of food available needs to be scaled based on map size. On a large map where empires range from 5 to 25 cities, a bonus value of 20 total food might be about right. For the tiny 5-city empire, that's a hefty +8 in the capitol and and +4 in the cities. As they get to size 10, that goes down to the traditional +4 and +2. The big empire only gets +2 and +1, unless they go and get more.

See also: Balance suggestions compendium
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=382775

 

[Pegasos]

Another issue:

As many times pointed out, the buildings cost too much.
Also, while the military units are expensive as well, I don't think they are currently too expensive because of the 1UPT's restriction on how effectively one can fight with a huge army. The modern era units make an exception. It takes at least 30 turns to build any of the heavier warships, aircraft or nukes, even with a decent city of pop 13.

 

[Cosmotech]

I think what the devs were trying to do is have you decide if you really need that building or not, forcing you to either pop military (which costs money too) or build research/wealth. Some buildings though have stupid maintenance costs considering you probably need them, ie happiness/research buildings.