Balance suggestions compendium

[Sodavich]

I didn't see a comprehensive megathread for balance suggestions, so I thought I'd start one. Please be on your best behavior - this thread is not for complaints about the exclusion of leaders or civilizations or religions, but for ways in which the current gameplay framework could be rebalanced and improved. I will update the OP periodically with interesting arguments posed in the thread.

• First, let's talk about city growth.
  The new system of growth is interesting, but problematic. The main problem is that maritime city-states are too powerful. With the help of two or so of these, food becomes trivial to acquire. Combined with the additional food surfeit from Civil Service, and later, Fertilizer, you will never suffer for want of food. This leaves you with Happiness as the only resource that places any sort of cap on your capacity for growth. Happiness is far, far more difficult to acquire than food, requiring limited map resources, expensive buildings, or expensive social policies. This problem is exacerbated by the AI's massive happiness bonuses which allow it to offer you unfair trades on luxury resources.
  
  
• Are Great Scientists too strong in comparison to other GPs?
  It seems to me that the GS's ability to beaker an entire tech of your choosing makes them significantly more powerful than any other GP. Additionally, scientists generate a respectable +3 beaker/turn, compared to the lukewarm +1 culture/production per turn of some other GPs. The GS's ability to beaker an entire tech also deprecates its ability to build an academy for +5 science/turn: only in the most well-specialized of cities would this bonus overcome the 2000+ beakers from instant research.
  
  
• Related to this, Rifling is worthless. With a GS or two, it becomes very viable to slingshot directly to Replaceable Parts. The Infantry unit should require Rifling, as it did in Civ 4. Other benefits to the metallurgy/rifling branch of the tech tree could also help balance this.
  
  
• The Liberty Social Policy is not suited to Civ V.
  Civ V has made it so that more cities is not always better. That's okay! But the Liberty policy is designed just so that a player can attempt to crank out more cities than his happiness would ever allow. It needs to be retooled.
  
  
• Bonus resources are a two-edged sword.
  The bonuses from many bonus resources are quite weak. In some cases, they are even a hindrance, since they will preclude other, more useful improvements that could be made to the tile. For example, a grasslands tile with a river and cow can only be pastured for 3f 1h 1g, no matter how much you might have liked to farm it for 5f 1g or post it for 3f 3g. Giving people the ability to mine sheep, a la Civ 4, produces novel and meaningful ways to micro your cities.

Please post your thoughts on these and other balance issues.

 

[buffbutler]

Puppet states should not build barracks, armories, or similar structures.

Courthouses should have their hammer costs halved; they should also be purchasable.

Increase the amount of happiness granted by each luxury resource or reduce the unhappiness penalty from number of cities in the empire. It's absurd that having three small cities and annexing a fourth in the early game will put you in the red, even when you've hooked up five luxuries.

Natural border growth from culture is stupidly slow. It should be at least double what it is now, especially considering how much the game penalizes you for having more cities.

Social policy culture costs should only escalate by 10% per city. Cultural victory is already the least appealing and most difficult victory in the game, and this stupid escalating mechanic (combined with the crazy maintenance costs of culture buildings) only ensure that large empires will probably never even be able to unlock the social policies they need to keep things manageable.

Ground units should be able to "follow" other ground units. I thought some of these design decisions were supposed to cut down on micro? How about dancing over a dozen workers and units around constantly because of some stupid ass mountains?

Look at how large the "standard" sized map is. The game is not designed for it at all. The game is designed for players to have three to five cities, yet that's only a tiny fraction of the available land on a standard sized map.

 

[Doubleplusgood3]

Barbs need to be redone, they pop up EVERYWHERE. I started playing with barbs off but it feels wrong. Barbs should be more centralized almost like city-states except you must conquer them to get rid of them. In my first game it felt like they only decide to show up when I'm halfway around the world.

 

[WaKKO151]

There should be a timer when you attack a city state till when you can declare peace with them. RIght now all I do is keep a warrior next to a city state, steal a worker and in the same turn declare peace with them. I get a free worker for nothing.

The AI is also incredibly stupid. Tactics should be employed.

 

[Onionsoilder]

It is kind of weird that archers get ranged attacks, but gunpowder units don't.

The AI is also incredibly stupid. Tactics should be employed.

This especially with ranged units. I have often seen many allied city-states fall because they left their crossbowman out in the open when they shot at a spearman, only to die the next turn, instead of moving into the vacant city before shooting which would have saved them. Same goes for siege units.

 

[Sodavich]

Puppet states should not build barracks, armories, or similar structures.

Courthouses should have their hammer costs halved; they should also be purchasable.

Increase the amount of happiness granted by each luxury resource or reduce the unhappiness penalty from number of cities in the empire. It's absurd that having three small cities and annexing a fourth in the early game will put you in the red, even when you've hooked up five luxuries.

Natural border growth from culture is stupidly slow. It should be at least double what it is now, especially considering how much the game penalizes you for having more cities.

Social policy culture costs should only escalate by 10% per city. Cultural victory is already the least appealing and most difficult victory in the game, and this stupid escalating mechanic (combined with the crazy maintenance costs of culture buildings) only ensure that large empires will probably never even be able to unlock the social policies they need to keep things manageable.

Ground units should be able to "follow" other ground units. I thought some of these design decisions were supposed to cut down on micro? How about dancing over a dozen workers and units around constantly because of some stupid ass mountains?

Look at how large the "standard" sized map is. The game is not designed for it at all. The game is designed for players to have three to five cities, yet that's only a tiny fraction of the available land on a standard sized map.

I agree with all these points. I'm not completely sure about the puppeted city thing, though - they're supposed to be less useful than an annexed city. On the other hand, they shouldn't be bleeding your treasury dry with worthless improvements...

Barbs need to be redone, they pop up EVERYWHERE. I started playing with barbs off but it feels wrong. Barbs should be more centralized almost like city-states except you must conquer them to get rid of them. In my first game it felt like they only decide to show up when I'm halfway around the world.

Could you explain this a little more? I didn't really notice a problem yet. I didn't think that there were too many or too few barbarians, but you might be seeing something I'm not.

There should be a timer when you attack a city state till when you can declare peace with them. RIght now all I do is keep a warrior next to a city state, steal a worker and in the same turn declare peace with them. I get a free worker for nothing.

The AI is also incredibly stupid. Tactics should be employed.

That is pretty bad.

 

[Gazebo]

1.) Obsolete military units: late game unit building options are cluttered. Remove lancers etc. from build menu

2.) Supply wagons: incorporate supply wagon system from Colonization to move food/production from one city/unit to the next. You could even use food to heal a military unit (a la supply trains). Penalty would be -1 cargo per movement space. (i.e. if you move 20 food 10 spaces, you would only have 10 food). Penalty could decline on roads and/or because of techs like railroads (simulating real life).

3.) Production too expensive
Units and buildings are too expensive and make game move too slowly. Reduce cost (esp. military units) for cities AND reduce the output of strategic resources (esp. at beginning of game). Also, units could incur higher upkeep– this would keep armies manageable but allow players to MAKE armies without taking 1000 years (literally).
4.) Too many buildings
Buildings are too expensive and there are too many of them that do nearly the same thing. Opera Houses and Theaters are similar creations– why not have one obsolete the other (a la military units?) That would really help late game cities from ballooning and speed things up a lot.

5.) Workers-->embark-->work boat
Remove work boats from the game and make fish/pearls/whales require a worker. Workers could embark, move onto the space and then 'absorb' into the resource (like work boats). This would reduce the OP benefit of coastal cities (work boats too cheap) and make these resources a bigger investment.

6.) Satellites tech reveals map (it should)

7.) Modern era doesn't feel 'modern' enough– not sure how to fix this one...somehow, though Civ V doesn't really capture that feeling of technological change that Civ IV did. Perhaps add back in airports? Allow workers to build highways for super-fast movement? Add in more modern wonders? Not sure.

8.) Finally, overseas trade routes– why not have the ability to have a trade agreement with another civ/city-state? (I.e. open a gold-producing trade route). This could (over time) generate influence for civs w/ city-states as well (longer it is in place, the more gold it makes).

 

[buffbutler]

I forgot to add that maintenance costs on buildings should be reduced by at least 1 coin across the board. Buildings that supply food (granary and watermill) should have no maintenance cost at all. Counterbalance this by reducing the food bonus supplied by maritime city states. It's utterly ridiculous that you can stack hammers or coins in every city tile of every city you own and simply buy off maritime city-states and still run an outrageous food surplus.

 

[Doubleplusgood3]

@Sodavich, I don't know how to quote but when I played my first game, on settler, I still had barbs popping up all the time. They're annoying, I've got a majority of my army on another continent while they pillage just for kicks. What I'm trying to say is that I'd like to see some sort of barbarian strategy, they never attack my cities (I'm playing on the fourth difficulty setting), they're still just a nuisance as opposed to a real threat. All I'm looking for is some sort of barbaric strategy.

 

[WuphonsReach]

Other balance threads:

Game balance issues list
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=383372

Better to build units / disband for gold than to build wealth
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=383543

 

[WuphonsReach]

I'm not pleased with city states and how their decay functions work. It should not be the same for every C/S, and it should have a slight randomness.

Some general concepts:

- Please me a little and I'll quickly ask "what have you done for me lately".
- Bigger gifts should make me more likely to remember you.
- There should be an upper limit on how far you can go in either direction away from neutral (probably +/- 180).
- Civ states should spawn with character, meaning that they decay faster or slower then normal, or are more likely to forgive / get angry.

For example:

Right now, in a Marathon/Large map, I need +30 to get friendly and +60 to get allied. It decays at 0.67 per turn and typically costs me about 10g/point. That means I need about 7 gold/turn set aside in a city-state maintenance fund, if the C/S doesn't ask for anything that I can give.

Ideas:

- A hot-head should give a bigger penalty for insults, trespass, stationing units on their border if not friendly or allied, claiming land near them. They should only give 80% of normal faction gains and should decay faster. Their neutral point should be -15 and not zero if they are a real hot-head.

- A placid, big on forgiveness, leader should give smaller penalties for the above and bigger gains for donations. As much as +120% per donation and their neutral point should be zero to +15. Decay should be slower.

- Irrational leaders should have a bigger variance in turn-to-turn decay. Extremely irrational leaders should be anywhere from zero to as much as 3 adjustment to standings per turn. Figure a bell curve of probabilities from zero to three each turn (rolling 5d6 and dividing the result by 10 might work well).

- Very rational leaders, OTOH, would be much closer to the 0.67/turn standard with very little variation (no more then -1.33 per turn decay). Probably a bell curve with the limits set to N*2 with the center of the bulb sitting at around 0.67 for an average rational leader.

- You should not be able to donate more gold if it takes you past the +180 limit.

- A big 1000g gift might reduce the maximum amount of decay by 10% each time you do a big donation or complete a big project (like the road request). A 500g give might give you a 4% decrease and a 250g gift might only give a 1% change. So if the maximum was originally 1.2 per turn of decay, the new maximum would be (1.2 * 0.9 or 1.08 max decay). Do a big donation again and the new maximum possible decay is now 0.972, a 3rd big donation and we get 0.8748. So as you can see, the more history we have with a particular C/S, the slower they forget about us. (And 10% might be too strong of a bias.)

 

[Vordeo]

Puppet states should not build barracks, armories, or similar structures.

Yeah, puppet states need to be changed somehow. Alongside this, I'd like to see you at least be able to influence what puppet states do (i.e. tell them to prioritize science/gold/culture).

Courthouses should have their hammer costs halved; they should also be purchasable.

Don't agree with this. IMO the courthouse shouldn't be purchasable, or should be purchasable at a ludicrous price. You should have to go through some hassle to annex a city, IMO. 5 gpt is a bit much though. 4 would be plenty.

Natural border growth from culture is stupidly slow. It should be at least double what it is now, especially considering how much the game penalizes you for having more cities.

My main issue with border growth from culture is that you should be able to choose what tiles get bought. The AI priorities are ridiculous sometimes.

Look at how large the "standard" sized map is. The game is not designed for it at all. The game is designed for players to have three to five cities, yet that's only a tiny fraction of the available land on a standard sized map.

You can have larger empires, easily. You just need more happiness buildings, and while the maintenance on those is pretty high it's certainly still manageable..

 

[PTM]

Clearly not exhaustive. These are just thoughts after playing ~7 games of Civ, mostly MP, on King and, later, Emperor difficulty.

+ Happiness: I'd like to see less forced-razing (well, you can play in unhappiness, but that's a different issue) early game, and slightly less peaceful REXing viability.
- from number of cities slightly increased.
- from number of occupied cities removed.
- from population in occupied cities slightly increased.

+ City-States, Generally: For as powerful as City-States are, the rep system badly needs to be expanded and rebalanced. The Greek and Siamese UAs would likely need tweaking.
- Rep from halved, possibly quartered.
- Rep from quests slightly improved.
- City-States should have a menu of 2-3 available quests to fulfill at all times. When a quest is completed by a player, a new one appears in its place after X turns.
- Quests should be made harder to fulfill, focusing more on screwing over competing City-States, particularly City-States of like type, and should be more difficult in relation to the City-State type (Maritime being harder to satisfy, Military being easier) rather than in relation to an arbitrary "mood" type. In other words, Ragusa might have quests to a) pillage all of Copenhagen's tile improvements, b) destroy Copenhagen, and c) donate two swordsmen to Ragusa. No more "destroy barb camp" easy rep. I've noticed the system is fine when one has two or three allies, especially if they are different-type CSs. But when someone stacks three patronage-powered Maritime CSs... well, balance disintegrates.

+ City-States, Military:
- Unit spawn made regular; progress bar viewable to at least allies.
- Unit type spawned scaled to friend's/ally's era's most powerful infantry unit (Ancient = Spearman, Classical = Swordsmen, Medieval = Longswordsman, etc.).
- Ally: +2 in capital, +1 in other cities.

+ City-States, Cultural:
- Slightly improve per turn received.
- fed through capital, i.e., instead of receiving +6 culture per turn out of nowhere, your capital is given a free +6 culture per turn.

+ Buildings
- Buildings made individually deletable.
- Courthouse cost halved (to 100).
- Reduce walls defense bonus to +3. Slightly reduce cost.

+ Units
- Slight nerf to Greek UUs.
- Slightly increase the gap between gunpowder units and archery units.

 

[Tutkarz]

To me cavalry is somewhat unbalanced. I started prince/marathon/large map game, managed to build nice infantry+catapult+archer+horseman army, later upgraded. And when i marched thru the world and conquering one civ after another i noticed, that i lost all my infantry, archers/crossbowman and catapult and later artilery was lagging behind and my cavalry was taking cities alone. And i never lost any horse unit. So in my current game im focusing mostly on horse army from the start and making as many as i can and dont bother with other units. To me horses should get huge negative bonuses while fighting city. And maybe they should not get bonuses to rough terrain? (i always max this)

 

[Sodavich]

Clearly not exhaustive. These are just thoughts after playing ~7 games of Civ, mostly MP, on King and, later, Emperor difficulty.

+ Happiness: I'd like to see less forced-razing (well, you can play in unhappiness, but that's a different issue) early game, and slightly less peaceful REXing viability.
- from number of cities slightly increased.
- from number of occupied cities removed.
- from population in occupied cities slightly increased.

I already feel like peaceful REX is not all that strong. The /city penalty is already quite steep. You can build a respectable number of colosseums and circuses, but the cost, both in hammers and in production, is extremely onerous. I agree that less forced-razing would be good.

I think this is a real issue with Civ V - expanding your empire is not half as profitable as it used to be. I know the devs are trying something different, but with the small radius around each city and the low number of cities in total, I feel like expansion needs a buff.

+ City-States, Cultural:
- Slightly improve per turn received.
- fed through capital, i.e., instead of receiving +6 culture per turn out of nowhere, your capital is given a free +6 culture per turn.

+ Buildings
- Buildings made individually deletable.
- Courthouse cost halved (to 100).

+ Units
- Slight nerf to Greek UUs.
- Slightly increase the gap between gunpowder units and archery units.

These all sound good to me... The cultural city-state buff I might advocate as part of a general buff to culture in general. As it is, amassing culture is pretty unpleasant because of the rotten +30% policy cost / city, the onerous cost of culture buildings, and the slow acquisition of tiles by culture (especially when gold is so plentiful and convenient).

I'm not sure if Hoplites need a nerf, but the Companion Cavalry might be worth taking down one peg.

 

[WuphonsReach]

More thoughts on city-states:

- City-states already hate each other. If you are friendly-plus with one city state, shouldn't it cost more to gain standing with the 2nd or 3rd city state? Or maybe the decay rate gets biased towards a faster decay. There needs to be some sort of ramp-up costs so that it's easy to hold 1-3 city states at friendly, but start trying to hoard more then that and it gets much more expensive/difficult.

- Alternately, since C/S are classified into different types... the first maritime is cost 1x, the second maritime costs 1.5x, the 3rd costs 2.25x, the 4th costs 3.375x, 5th costs 5.0625. Which gives a cost structure of:

1: 1.000
2: 2.500
3: 4.750
4: 8.125
5: 13.188 (+5.0625)
6: 20.781 (+7.59375)

So at the start, you're paying 1 per benefit. Then you pay 1.25 per benefit. Then 1.58 per benefit. When you hit C/S #4, you're now paying 2.03 per unit of benefit that you're getting. And at CS #5, you pay 2.64/benefit unit. Having 6 C/S at friendly-plus means you pay 3.46/benefit unit.

That calculation would need to be based on total # of city-states at friendly-plus. And possibly, keeping city states at allied-plus needs to count as double. The 1.5 multiplier might be too steep though, where 1.4 or 1.3 might be better.

The base map scripts all tend to put 2x city-states down for every civilization. That means it should be possible to have 2 city-states as friends in a perfectly balanced world. Having 4 as friends means that you've robbed one other civilization of theirs. Having 6 or 8 should be doable for larger empires, if they can afford the costs, but smaller civs get nearly the same amount of benefit with 4 C/S as the large empire does with 6 C/S, but they pay a lot less for the result.

- Decay could be based on proximity to the weighted center mass of your empire. Or costs could be tuned based on the distance to the weighted center mass of your empire. To maintain ally status with a far off city state should be harder then one that is next door to the majority of your cities.

- City-states should be given an emotional range along the axis of "Paranoid-Trusting". Paranoid C/S would decay faster, especially if you have cities encroaching on their borders. Or they would give a bigger negative standings hit for trespass.

(Basically, I want a bit more randomness in the city state favor system... a flat decrease of 0.67/turn back towards neutral is boring. Make the city-states different from each other with attributes like Paranoid/Trusting, Hot-Headed/Level-Headed. Some of that is kind of already there with Rational/Irrational.)

 

[WuphonsReach]

I'm really liking the way strategic resource nodes are done in Civ5. They limit how many units you can field, but more importantly, they're not all the same. Some nodes of iron only have a value of "2" and some have a value of "6". (I'd prefer that the range was a bit more random then that... I've only seen 2 or 4 or 6 and never 1/3/5.)

Makes me wish that luxury nodes were done the same way. Node X gets you X units, while node Y gives you Y units. Of course, you'd have to change how balance was done so that you get the best results from having a range of different luxury types instead of stocking up on a single type.

Let's say that you currently get 5 for the first node and zero for all the remaining nodes. And let's assume that a more balanced would be 5 for the first node and 2 for additional nodes. You're better off trading away the extras, but they're also not completely worthless. So for four nodes you get 5+2+2+2 = 11 total happiness.

Now, what if nodes gave a variable amount in the 4-6 range (or 3-7 range)? You might end up with: 4+5+6+5 = 20 points of happiness. But we need to scale that back because our goal is diminishing returns so that you chase a variety of node types instead of hoarding one type.

Well, you can use a calculation like:

happiness = round((total points of luxury) / (1.03 ^ N))

1 / 1 = 1
2 / 1.07 = 2
3 / 1.09 = 3
4 / 1.12 = 4
5 / 1.15 = 4 (here we start to see things slow down)
10 / 1.34 = 7
15 / 1.56 = 10
20 / 1.81 = 11

For best results, the resulting happiness number should be kept as a floating point value until you add all the different numbers from all the different luxury types together.

So as you get more of a particular resource, you get less and less happiness from each additional unit of that type. Eventually, you stop getting anything at all. So the optimal strategy remains "trade some away in exchange for something different". I picked "1.03" out of a hat, but it seems to give close to the proper curve that past 15-20 of a particular luxury (3-4 nodes worth on average) you're not getting much value from additional nodes of that type.

Luxury nodes could then be changed to have random amounts of 2-7 units in each node, and you trade the actual luxury quantities rather then trading # of nodes.

You could then add in technologies or social policies where you get more happiness from luxuries. Or maybe Civ A gets more happiness from a particular luxury (giving the different civs more of a different flavor). China being famous for silk, they might get a 10% bonus to happiness derived from silk.

(I find the currently design of every luxury being exactly 5 happiness and 2 gold to be bland and boring.)

 

[Madbaboons]

How about having to have a trade route to a city state and then having to pay GPT for food/culture (you'd be able to say which city the food goes to) the price per unit varies wth your relationship.

If the route gets broken the you lose the food/culture and while the agreement is in place your relationship won't degrade unless you end up at war with the City State.

 

[Madbaboons]

As for military city states, they could just sell you units at a cheaper rate than if you bought them yourself ie mercenaries. Your Relationship would alter the price.

 

[PTM]

How about having to have a trade route to a city state and then having to pay GPT for food/culture (you'd be able to say which city the food goes to) the price per unit varies wth your relationship.

If the route gets broken the you lose the food/culture and while the agreement is in place your relationship won't degrade unless you end up at war with the City State.

A decent idea, but one more suited to a mod. Balance changes via patch will almost certainly be limited to mere numerical adjustments or to the insertion of minor variables to already-implemented formulae.