[Balance Mod] Better Numbers

Polygleek

Chieftain
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Nov 7, 2014
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Keeping a "Not broken, don't fix it" attitude, this mod aims to tweak some numbers a bit to:

Make all units worth building

Soldier units can now compete with Cavalry units. Soldiers gain increased strength in rough terrain and Cavalry no longer gains terrain defense bonuses and can't fortify.
The power progression curve between unit levels has been flattened a bit, to make higher level less steamroll capable.

Make ignoring aliens harder

Ultrasonic Fences now require a much later tech (Human Idealism). To compensate, Gunboats are now available at Planetary Survey, so that you have something to defend your early sea trade routes with.

Make all building quest choices competitive

No more no-brainers. In general the inferior choices will be brought up to par with the better choices. Exceptionally strong choices are also nerfed.

Make all buildings worth building

Some tweaks to the ressource requirements. Only minor tweaks to base yields (before quests) if necessary.

Make Health mean something

You no longer can ignore health, as the penalties for being low on health will now be more crippling when you go really low. However, you will be rewarded a bit more for getting very high health levels.

Make all loadout choices interesting

Again, no more no-brainers. Artists and Aristocrats have been nerfed. Brasilia gets a bonus to ranged units as well. The fusion reactor yields more energy. African Union gets more growth when healthy. Free Worker has been replaced by a free Old Earth Relic.

Make CovertOps more interesting

The cheesy Coup d'Etat rush is now a lot more difficult, since this operation now requires 3 in each affinity levels. Affinity specific options are unlocked earlier and require less intrigue. The Surveillance web only makes immune to Coup d'Etat.

Make Specialists worth using

Specialists get increased yields to compensate for the absence of great people and make them less bad compared to regular tiles.

Make all Wonders worth building

Most Wonders got additional effects added to them to be more interesting, while trying to stick to the lore included in the pedia.

Make Geothermal Energy useful

All Wonders now require 1 or 2 Geothermal Energy, depending on how powerful they are. This should make Wonderwhoring harder and gives a good reason to go to war.

Make Traderoutes more balanced

The Autoplant quest is no longer related to traderoutes.

Make all tiles & improvements worth using

No improvements need quests, wonders or virtues to be viable they're now all competive with only techs and buildings. Hills are no longer inferior tiles. Resource tiles have been made more equal in power but still different from eachother.

Make all virtue trees interesting

Might is now a viable starter tree, thanks to Culture from kills instead of Outpost capture. Other virtue trees have also been adjusted, see changenotes for details.

Known Issues:

- As with many mods, there's currently a bug, pending official Firaxis fix, which glitches out the unit action UI if the promotions database is tinkered with. If you encounter this bug: Once you start a game with this mod, save, quit to the Main Menu, reenable the mod(s) and load your game. That should fix it. You may need to do this every time you boot up CivBE.
- The Coup d'Etat operation is only displayed at 3 in supremacy in the top left corner tooltip. That's just a display issue, in practice it does require level 3 in all affinities to unlock.
- The Might virtue "Liberation Army" has been changed by v4 to grant culture from (any) kills. The effect doesn't display in the tooltip, which is why the name was changed. Again, it's just a display issue, it works fine.
- The box of Planetary Survey in the Techweb has increased in width (but doesn't overlap with anything).

Planned features for upcoming versions:

- Station rebalancing
- Victory condition rebalancing (mostly delaying them all and make none of them rushable)
- Quest reward balancing (less free affinity levels)
- Iteration on existing features based on feedback
- Better Diplomacy and AI (maybe, no promises)
- French and German localization (low priority)

Any and all feedback is wanted!

While the mod has multiplayer enabled, the game client hasn't unlocked mod usage in multiplayer yet, so I couldn't test it for multiplayer compatibility.

The complete changelog is available on Steam. v4 is quite a big amount of changes, so the character limit was reached and I created a discussion for the end of the changelog. Go check it out!
 
Seems interesting. I'm enjoy in the other improved wonders mod so am interested in testing your take on all buildings in general.
 
v4 is out. Give it a try and make sure to rate and give feedback. I need feedback to make this even better. ;)
 
I see a lot of goals but no details. Where is the consolidated list of what you actually did?
 
I like this a lot so far, only on about turn 200 on Vostok with it (stepped back one until I'm more familiar with the modified tech/virtue trees). Keep up the good work, haven't encountered anything ludicrous yet really dig your approach on tile yields.
 
Thanks :) Keep the feedback coming, even if it's not so good, it will help me with the next versions.
 
Given your use of Civ5 promotions is producing the notorious unit action UI glitch, I'd suggest looking into the perk system, which is what I did to get rid of such annoyance in Alien Strains. Unfortunately, things like Rough/Open Terrain Defense/Attack can't be done with perks (same with the submarine invisible-unless-adjacent effect), but there's a bunch of stuff. And you can apply said perks automatically via Lua, similar to how I did it, without having to fiddle with the actual unit upgrade screen.

Just my two cents. Keep up the good work. :)
 
Hi Lord Shadow,

Thank you for your advice. To be honest, I don't know how to use LUA, but I'll look into how your mod solved the problem if I find the time. On the other hand, given how long a game of BE is, I (personally) don't mind having to reload the mods before I start playing. Good to know a workaround does exist though.
 
I'm a big fan of this mod overall. In particular the vanilla quests needed a lot of fixing, and I really appreciate you've taken the time to go over all of them and rebalance. That has a huge effect on gameplay for me.

Also really like the +25% terrain modifier for soldier units. Makes them much more tactical, both in early and late game.

And adding Geothermal reqs to all Wonders is very inspired. Makes GT a resource I actually have to pay attention to, which I very much like, and slows down Gene Vault and Ecto Pod rushes, another big plus.

Lots of other changes I like, but so many it's hard to go over all of them here.

Just two quick suggestions to take or leave -- first one is small -- the v4 Vivarium buff seems a bit strong since it will stack on desert tubers and give +2F, making the tile yield 5F when improved (before plantations buffs). In fact the main use of the building already seemed to be to give +1F on tubers, since they only appear on desert and tundra. (That and to buff desert terrascapes, which get the +1F stacked on their base yield -- actually very powerful.)

I'd recommend switching the +1F on tubers/fruit to Cytonursery, which is a super useless building -- +1F on marsh doesn't do much since it needs to be removed to build an improvement. Alternatively, the Vivarium's build cost should probably be bumped up to reflect its new value.

-- I'd also like to see the production cost of late game wonders moderately reduced. Wonder costs scale really weirdly -- on standard early wonders take 9-12 turns in high-production cities, but late game wonders take 20-25 turns in high-production cities. Even with the buffs, the amount of hammers and lost turns I have to put into late game wonders makes me rarely go for them. With the added GT cost, I feel like there is already an adequate disincentive to spam wonders; some of the outer ring wonders could definitely take a -200 to -250 cost hit.
 
Hi Omniclast,

Thank you for your feedback.

I know that the vivarium is very strong now, but my initial thought was that it was okay because the ecology tech didn't grant ultrasonic fences anymore. Moving the ressource bonus to cytonursery won't "fix" the gripe you have with desert tubers tiles though. However, I think it's a good idea to move some ressource bonuses to other buildings.

Lategame wonders can be made a bit cheaper, and early game wonders a bit more expensive, that's a very good point.

I'll probably start to work on v5 once the first official patch is out, so that I can make all the adjustments to existing mod content according to it.
 
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