BeBa - Beyond Balance

[Logik]

It's this mod downloadable because i don't see a download link? Thanks.

Edit: My bad i see you have to download it through steam workshop.

 

[brucethem00se]

Any news on the standalone AI mod albie? I still want to experience the vanilla game/balance...but the AI could use some help

 

[Cepheus75]

Albie - I thought of a possibly better solution to purity 1 today but am having trouble finding a way to do it. Basically to keep the flavor of it, but take away some of its over poweredness how about giving it a withdrawal chance (maybe even 100) for explorers instead of the tile immunity. I looked in to the files and tired to figure out how to do this with no success as the with drawal is a unitperk and it looks like affinities can only use player perks, but thought you might have some more insight in to it.

 

[Cepheus75]

Working at hospital myself you really don't want a ship full of doctors. "Clincian" is a more general term that would include nurses, doctors, and allied health professionals.

 

[fireundubh]

Alright, Medicians will be changed to Doctors in the next update.

I was really hoping you'd add Nietzscheans next.

 

[Bernd-das-Brot]

Great mod! I really appreciate your work, Albie!

I agree with nearly all of your changes, so only some comments on the ones I would like to see changed:

Explorer CS 6 seems a bit much to me. It has more offensive use than it should have. CS 4 and +50% def or CS 5 and +25% def could be better.
I also would like if the Explorer would get 3 Movement points, but lose its ability to ignore terrain costs. Wouldn't it be more logical (and fun) if the Explorer is faster on open terrain and needs more time for "harsh" environment like forested hills.

Pharmalab with +3 Health (and +1 from quest) seems a bit strong for such an early and cheap (95 prod) building. 2+1 would be better for me.

I like that Stations spawn later, but I don't think they should spawn further away from the players and get clustered. Makes early trade with them harder and takes away the decision to attack them or not if you "like" their terrain.

The reduction of the number of trade routes is great. 1 TR per city makes the game playable. Why the extra TR for the capital? Two early TR have way too much influence over other decisions (buildings, tiles) in the very early game.

Brazils UA is very exploitable for human players. Moving ranged units after attack is way too strong. Only for melee units would be ok and interesting for a human player. But can the AI use this?


And some suggestions of things I would like too see changed and that seem to be relatively easy (from balance and coding):

Make Ships and Alien Sea Dragons less squishy. As they defend with CS and not ranged CS, their CS and ranged CS should be equal, so they cannot one shot each other. Its bad design that always the first attacker immidietly wins.

The CS (not ranged CS) of all ranged units (including aliens) should be sligthly buffed. I like that ranged units are weaker in comparison to melee units (they are too dominant in Civ5), but they are total pushovers once they get attacked in melee. That really hurts the AI as it is really bad in protecting its ranged units.

(Like in Civ5) the capital gets no MagRail prod modifier (+20%) because it does not get connected. (@Firaxis) Perhaps this could be added when the tech is discovered (via a free building or quest perhaps).

As far as I see there is no bonus for movement of embarked units in the the tech web. Perhaps this could be added in a mid game tech.


Really great work and thanks for your efforts. I hope you continue the mod! Wouldn't like to play without it.

 

[Bernd-das-Brot]

Sorry, double post.

 

[Cepheus75]

Explorer CS 6 seems a bit much to me. It has more offensive use than it should have. CS 4 and +50% def or CS 5 and +25% def could be better.

I found straight up 5 is good enough. This is what Jaden Korr's mod does and it is a good balance.

Brazils UA is very exploitable for human players. Moving ranged units after attack is way too strong. Only for melee units would be ok and interesting for a human player. But can the AI use this?

Agreed- make it unit class melee only. (Simpy Delete PROMOTION_FIERCE_LOYALTY FROM UNITCOMBAT_ARCHER, UNITCOMBAT_SIEGE, UNITCOMBAT_NAVALRANGED)

New Suggestions
What do you think of setting defines min_city_range to 4? I like it as that meas the border between them will equal the total distance of their firing ranges. Right now it feels very crowded.
What do you think of giving Franco-Iberia a new tech every 7th virtue. 10 feels too long and 5 (as some of the mods have done) seems too fast to me.

 

[dr_AllCOM3]

You should look into making mid- and endgame buildings more expensive, starting with the leafes of the first ring. Right now you can spam all the buildings in every city and you're not really forced to make a decision.

 

[kirbdog]

What do you think of giving Franco-Iberia a new tech every 7th virtue. 10 feels too long and 5 (as some of the mods have done) seems too fast to me.

Franco-Iberia is in everybody's top 4 sponsors and needs no buff without a major overhaul to sponsors.

 

[Stalker0]

I found straight up 5 is good enough. This is what Jaden Korr's mod does and it is a good balance.

I will echo this. Strength 5 gives them enough juice to survive a wolf beetle hit or a manticore attack. that is enough imo. Exploration should still be dangerous work...but the explorer should not be tissue paper either.

 

[Lanth]

Just won my last game playing as Polystralia. I was playing with a self-modified version of 0.102 which added the capital trade-route, removed the explorer module and +1 health for each trader unit for that industry virtue.

I have to say, the changes to specialists are unbalanced. I usually leave the AI to do the population management because I can't be bothered with it, and in the mid to late game it favoured specialists, especially Engineers and Growers, over my city tiles. It basically meant that any basic tile improvement was ignored - it would use some of the enhanced resource tiles (algae, biomass, titanium, geothermal), and would generally use terrascapes, but many of the other slots were replaced by specialists. It pretty much never worked farms (only had +1 food on them), mines (with +1 science), biowells or generators (no buffs). Only some cities would work Acadamies (with +2 science). Once I saw this happening, I ended up deleting my workers once I'd set up the magrail network and cities had more tiles available than they'd ever work. If I was really min-maxing, I could have gone and replaced the expensive maintenance tiles with free improvements, since they weren't being worked anyway.

What this means is that in late game you can spam 1-tile island cities and buy-out the specialist giving buildings and end up with perfectly viable cities. This is something that TR could also achieve and were considered unbalanced.

All in all, while specialists did need a bump, what has been done here is too much, and I think what they really need is an additional mechanic. It's hard to think what could be done though. I had seen one suggestion that specialists would add to TR yield, for international routes that would add to what you received, and for internal routes they would add to what you sent to the other city. This last one seems like it could have some interesting strategic elements, but the international one is just another way of giving a straight-up bonus. Also I doubt the AI would utilise this well.

One possibility would be 5 trader specialists = +1 trade-route.

 

[darkedone02]

congrats, you made it into PC gamer magazine!

http://www.pcgamer.com/the-best-civilization-beyond-earth-mods/

 

[waffles111]

is there a source for this that is not the steam workshop? I couldnt get that steamworkshopdownloader link to work either

 

[Umbral Reaver]

Would it be possible to instead of having fewer trade routes, have diminishing returns?

i.e.

First trade route sent has full value.
Second trade route sent has half value.
Third trade route sent has one third value.

 

[gemeciusz]

Hoy!
Registered just to thank you for the good work.

Sidenote #1: every 30-70 turns the game hangs up, eating all free memory (restarting the game loading last autosave makes it run another 30-70 turns, so its not that bad).
I play it on an eee pc netbook, so i dont think its really a problem with anyone else, but still, vanilla runs smooth, beba hangs up the system.

Sidenote #2: Tall could be made stronger/more viable if you could somehow tie in secondary/tertiary trade routes with population, like depo gives one, pop 15 second one, pop 20 third one, or with even higher pop numbers (most of my cities end up pop 12-17 without a single green virtue) so if you want to abuse the trade system you either need lot of cities or very large cities.

 

[Chaos Blade]

Hoy!
Registered just to thank you for the good work.

Sidenote #1: every 30-70 turns the game hangs up, eating all free memory (restarting the game loading last autosave makes it run another 30-70 turns, so its not that bad).
I play it on an eee pc netbook, so i dont think its really a problem with anyone else, but still, vanilla runs smooth, beba hangs up the system.

Sidenote #2: Tall could be made stronger/more viable if you could somehow tie in secondary/tertiary trade routes with population, like depo gives one, pop 15 second one, pop 20 third one, or with even higher pop numbers (most of my cities end up pop 12-17 without a single green virtue) so if you want to abuse the trade system you either need lot of cities or very large cities.

Not sure about 2, but one sounds like a memory leak. did you reported it in the forums? it is a serious issue and proof that the dev team was probably half assing it.

 

[Acken]

Sidenote #2: Tall could be made stronger/more viable if you could somehow tie in secondary/tertiary trade routes with population, like depo gives one, pop 15 second one, pop 20 third one, or with even higher pop numbers (most of my cities end up pop 12-17 without a single green virtue) so if you want to abuse the trade system you either need lot of cities or very large cities.

I disagree, most people have that notion that wide is in opposition to large cities, which is rather false in CivBE. Wide is only in opposition to small empires. Any form of per city mechanics will favor large empires at least as much as small empires. For growth increasing your empire size doesn't really slow your overall growth that much in that game (settlers becoming quickly cheap and growth penalties being only for -20 health).

If you want to make 4-5 cities game a competitive option you'd have to instead give bonus relative to the size rather than on a per city basis.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

A heads up: I had to fix two critical bug in my wonder mod, so if you want to incorporate it make sure to use the latest version. :x

 

[Thalassicus]

I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.

I like how the move-after-attack bonus you added to Rejinaldo changes gameplay in a fundamental way, instead of providing a little percent increase to a part of the game. I feel the percent bonuses are a little bland.

I'm glad you improved specialists. I almost never use them, even with the +2 energy bonus.

Do you know if anyone's working on a mod to reintroduce "sort by yield difference" for trade routes? The trade panel already shows yields, and has sorting methods, so we just need to combine the two. I'd like to sort by the difference of summed yields... add our gold+science together, and subtract their gold+science, to get a sense of which routes provide the best advantage to us.

Consider revising the handicaps table. Firaxis tends to just give AIs flat percent bonuses across the board on higher difficulties, which is boring. It's more interesting to make the AI play differently. Think of how humans play at different levels of skill. Newcomers to the Civ series tend to play peacefully and build all the wonders. Veterans are more likely to go to war and focus less on wonders. It's not a universal pattern, of course, but polls I've taken (and personal experience) reveal this is the overall tendency. I simulated this in communitas by adjusting wonder construction rate and military bonuses for various difficulty settings.

Explorers are mainly useful in the early game, so be cautious of moving the Purity explorer bonus to the midgame. If rank 1 purity is too strong compared to other rank 1 affinities (which I'd agree with), then consider improving the others instead of changing Purity. I feel the rank 1 Supremacy bonus is particularly weak - possibly add an Explorer sight or movement bonus to it.