Beta v4.X - General Discussion

[Thalassicus]

The national wonder cost is still tied to # of cities, sorry I didn't explain that very well!

I rewrote post #37 so it hopefully makes more sense now. Basically what I'm saying is if you build the prereq everywhere anyway (for useful things like libraries, markets) then cost is about the same as vanilla.

It's just not a strict requirement to do so anymore. This means there's no need to build a bunch of unwanted barracks to get a Heroic Epic and sell the barracks the next turn. Production also won't get interrupted each time a new city joins the empire.

===========
More information on how Maritime food distribution works:

The steps are:

1. Add up food reward from all maritime friends & allies.
2. Multiply by Siam's bonus if you're Ramkham.
3. Reduce -75% if empire is .
4. Round up.
5. Loop through cities to give food.

So for example if Siam has 3 allies and 1 friend in 'unhappy' mode with 3 total cities:

1. 5*3 + 2*1 = 17
2. 17 * 1.5 = 25.5
3. 25.5 * 0.25 = 6.375
4. Round up to 7.
5. Distribute 7 food to three cities:
   3
   2
   2

 

[Seek]

It's a little confusing because you're giving total hammer values including Libraries. If I understand it correctly, you've raised the per-city increase from 24 to 40 but eliminated the Library-in-all-cities requirement. So the hammer cost for the NC itself becomes much (instead of moderately) more expensive the more cities there are:
1 city=120 hammers
2=160
3=200
...
10=480
15=680
etc, regardless of how many Libraries one has built. But a Library is still required in the city one builds the NC in, yes? Sounds like an interesting workaround, great job as always, Thal!

 

[Thalassicus]

Right, the expense is shifted from (cost for required buildings) to --> (cost per city). Since we used to need the building in every city anyway, it's about the same total expense.

 

[rhammer640]

Right, the expense is shifted from (cost for required buildings) to --> (cost per city). Since we used to need the building in every city anyway, it's about the same total expense.

ohhhhh ok so the building might not require all the prerequisites but its a lot more expensive if i have a bunch of cities. I get it now and love it!

Although i hate that im so busy right now and by the time i get to play again there will be so many new changes in the beta i wont know what to look for. Is there anywhere you could keep a running tab on each beta change and just edit the main post when you add something else? I know you dont want to spend a bunch of extra time writting stuff but just a more general statement about what is changing?

 

[Thalassicus]

Sure, I could put a summary in the first post. The reason I'm putting details in individual posts now is so it's easier to follow the connection between beta progress and conversation.

The 4.08 beta build brings a lot of bugfixes, Maritimes are now 4:8 friendly:ally, and I included one thing I'm experimenting with to see how it works out in playtesting. This is similar to testing we did for a week last month in redesigning trading posts to have adjacency bonuses.

To explore balancing the economic advantage of start locations in the very early game, I delayed the gold bonus on river tiles from the base terrain to the Watermill. Realistically, this portrays how longer and more powerful rivers increase the commercial value of Watermills and Hydro Plants. I reinstated the 1 on city tiles from vanilla, and increased base empire gold +2/turn. With some balancing tweaks they're now almost identical to Lighthouses:

 

[rhammer640]

I appreciate that and i keep up on all the posts so i know whats going on but the problem is that if i dont play for 2 weeks its hard to remember all the things that happend, lol.

Keep the good changes coming though!

 

[Ahriman]

Like Hydro Plants, longer and more powerful rivers now make Watermills more commercially valuable. I shifted the gold on river tiles from the base terrain to the building.

This is something that really, really worries me.
This makes settling adjacent to the river *hugely* more important than settling 1 tile further away.

The human player can recognize this, and always do so. The AI player won't see that, and if you try to compensate by forcing it to really like rivers then you risk making it colonize river spots exclusively over going for resources or luxuries or other good spots.

I worry that you're going to recreate the balance-killing problem from Civ4 Rise of Mankind; there was an early building that gave +1food to all river tiles, that was only buildable in a city on a river. The human recognized the huge value of this and always settled on the river. The AI didn't often settled 1 tile away, and so was massively weaker in economic terms.

If you decide thats important to remove the river gold bonus to a building (and I don't see such a reason; "the watermill is boring" is not a reason to mess with tile yields), then I suggest you remove the requirement for it to be built only adjacent to a river, and allow it to be built in any city (or any city with a river tile within 3 tile range).

You're also making the watermill building an utter-no-brainer in any city that can build it. I'd remove the engineer slot, at minimum. There are too many of these now I think, particularly for something that comes so early.

You're also tinkering with the gold yields between start positions, and making luxuries the only good source of early game gold. Are you sure this is wise?

 

[Kirschi]

I agree with Ahriman. In my last game, the first thing I noticed "uh oh, no gold any more from rivertiles" ^^ (furthermore, I had no luxuries nearby so there was really no gold at my start position. Are river tiles and luxuries mutually exclusive?). I struggled along the whole Ancient Era with gpt (always between -2/-4), until i got the Monarchy policy. The only thing that kept me in the positive gold numbers was discovering CS in the early game.
While I like changes for the most part, I am not so sure about this one...

 

[Joneill]

That does seem like a pretty radical change and if it is done mainly to boost the watermill to be useful, there may be other ways to do so (such as changing the food bonus from a static to a percentage, as the floating gardens have). Nonetheless, downloaded and trying a new game to see what happens

 

[Thalassicus]

The human player can recognize this, and always do so. The AI player won't see that

This is an incorrect assumption, the AI inherently favors rivers due to variables in the global defines and AI global defines. It's been part of the game all along.

"the watermill is boring" is not a reason to mess with tile yields

Could you clarify who you're quoting this from? I try and keep up on all the feedback but it's easy to miss some, and anyone expressing feelings of boredom is a serious concern for me. My primary goal is to make the game more fun, and if just one person speaks up it's usually indicative of many others who feel the same way. Though it raises concerns for me, it didn't influence the decision to explore this possibility.

I'm experimenting with ways to improve the economic balance of start locations, and added some more detail to my original post to better explain this.

Gold in general is not a problem for me since there's typically ~200g each game from citystates and ruins. I also increased the base gold empires receive by +2/turn (equivalent to working 2 river tiles), and reinstated the 1 on city tiles I'd previously removed (worth another 1 river tile per city, including the capital). This makes the first ~50 turns of gold income about the same as before, but removes the significant early economic advantage river start locations had over the others. River starts are about the same or slightly weaker, while non-river starts are significantly buffed.

If we're on a coast we can then go for Sailing, with luxuries there's Calendar, with rivers The Wheel, and Trapping is very easily attainable regardless of starting location. All of these are just two techs into the tree. It has the potential to improve variety in tech strategies from one game to another, and improve balance of the Trapping tech, which I haven't seen as a focus of any strategic discussions.

I'm uncertain if Watermills are a no-brainer... they cost as much as world wonders of their era, and it's incredibly risky to put that much production into early buildings if there's expansion to do or hostile neighbors nearby. I tried to beeline to them in my last game and got DoW'd by a neighbor who invaded with a dozen warriors and archers.

Now... ideally I'd split it with half on river tiles and half on a building, but that's obviously not an option with the game's current very low base yields. This is one of the reasons why I did some research to see how easy or difficult it might be to scale up yield values to higher numbers across the board, so we have more fine-tune control... but overall it seems such a pursuit might be more trouble than it's worth.


In general, one of the purposes of beta is to experiment with new things to see what ideas have potential. In the past we've tried out much more dramatic things like reworking the economic system to be based off trading posts with adjacency-based yields, that was radical! Shifting yields from one place to another isn't a radical change. Sometimes these ideas work out (balancing strategic resources), sometimes they don't (variable trading post yields), but I'd rather give it an honest try to see if things can be adjusted to work. Without taking risks there's no chance of unforeseen discoveries.


===================

Today's v4.09 beta build brings a few main things (I released a .08 but it had a small and important bug, which should be fixed in .09).

• Added the "Hover Info" mod by Adam Watkins to the unofficial patch (for compatibility reasons). This shows extra information when you mouse over unit flags.
• The bonus from Maritime city-states now improves over time, giving 1friend|2ally per era. For example, in the Medieval period (third era) Maritimes give 3|6 food, close to the previous value.
• Fixed a bug preventing city tiles from reverting back to vanilla's 1 (previously intended for v4.07).
• Auto-sorting for the production list.

In vanilla the production list is manually sorted by the order units/buildings/etc are listed in the files. Like the manually written tooltips, it's a puzzling design decision, because if effects are added to or removed from buildings or technologies it takes effort to redo the order for everything. It also causes problems for anything added in mods (always went to the bottom).

Now units are automatically sorted by:

1. Noncombat > combat
2. Land > sea > air
3. Tech cost
4. Name

Buildings:

1. Main flavor
2. Tech cost
3. Name

Wonders:

1. National > world
2. Name

If anyone wants me to, I could also set up an option where this categorization can be overridden and everything sorts alphabetically. It's actually rather fun to work with this part of the code.

Here's how I categorized the building flavors, in the order they appear on the list:

• spaceship
• happiness
• expansion, growth, tile improvement, naval growth, naval tile improvement, infrastructure
• production
• military training, offense, defense, recon, ranged, mobile, antiair, naval, naval recon, air, nuke
• city defense
• gold, water connection
• science
• culture
• great people
• wonder
• religion
• diplomacy
• default

 

[Ahriman]

This is an incorrect assumption, the AI inherently favors rivers due to variables in the global defines and AI global defines. It's been part of the game all along.

The AI favors rivers, but it is not an absolute restriction. I have seen, many times, AIs build cities that are 1 tile away from rivers.

I think you are wrong here. Just because the AI has some existing preference for rivers does not mean that it will understand some *extra* marginal advantage for rivers.
For example, suppose that you created a building that cost 1 hammer and gave +20 gold and +20 food per turn, but required being adjacent to a river.
This would mean that river sites were the best in the game *by far* and that the optimal settlement strategy would be to settle as many riverside cities as possible, as fast as possible.

But I bet that even if you added this building, the AI wouldn't change its settlement pattern.
This is what I meant; the AI can have some preference favor for rivers, but it will not change its settlement pattern based on the existence of valuable buildings that can only be built in river-adjacent cities.

Now, you could use the existing AI parameters to force this behavior. But then, if the adjacent-to-river requiring building isn't *that* powerful, then you risk forcing the AI too much, and too narrowly.
Its very hard to tinker with these variables to get the settlement pattern "just right".

Which is precisely my point; you're creating a large new balance problem, and removing an interesting strategic decision (by forcing the watermill to be constructed in every river city), for no clear design gain.

Could you clarify who you're quoting this from?

Its not an exact quote from anyone, its a paraphrase of the sentiments that you have made saying that you think the vanilla watermill is dull.

I'm uncertain if Watermills are a no-brainer...

Its not a matter of if they're a no-brainer to build immediately, its that they're a no-brainer that you will eventually want to build in every river city. +1 gold yield to 4+ tiles that you were working anyway is a *huge* advantage.
If any building is "must construct in every city where possible" then it is a strategically uninteresting building.

Shifting yields from one place to another isn't a radical change.

I disagree. I think this is a very major change. It means that the differences between city-on-a-river and city-near-a-river are huge. This is very undesirable.

You could achieve the balance change you seek in terms of start positions without causing this serious problem if you removed the river-adjacency requirement for the watermill.
That would solve much of the problem.

 

[Thalassicus]

It was probably just a miscommunication somewhere, I've never felt the Watermill is dull.

The AI only settles one tile away from rivers if its 3-tiles-between-cities requirement provides no alternative. I've looked at a lot of settlement patterns over dozens of autoplays when working on the AI.

I disagree. I think this is a very major change. It means that the differences between city-on-a-river and city-near-a-river are huge. This is very undesirable.

You could achieve the balance change you seek in terms of start positions without causing this serious problem if you removed the river-adjacency requirement for the watermill.
That would solve much of the problem.

This is different from a harbor or lighthouse... ?

Its not a matter of if they're a no-brainer to build immediately, its that they're a no-brainer that you will eventually want to build in every river city.
...
If any building is "must construct in every city where possible" then it is a strategically uninteresting building.

Could you clarify what you goal would be, critera you feel makes a building balanced? I've been going over this for half an hour to try and figure out what you're aiming at... I do want to understand where you're leading with this.

I'll try and explain my own goal / building-is-balanced criteria as well.

• In an ideal situation with unlimited time and unlimited resources we'd build everything everywhere (obviously )
• Since we have to prioritize due to limited time and resources, we must have a strategy of where to put a building in the city production queue.
• There shouldn't ever be something that's always our first or last priority in all cities at all times, this is something that's likely under/overpowered. Beyond just the balance concern, variety in build orders also makes a more fun and interesting game.
• So for me, a building is balanced if its priority varies depending on circumstances and strategy. Not always in spot 3, not always spot 20... it's balanced if it requires a strategy to figure out when and where.

This is why I pointed out that watermills cost the same as a world wonder of the era (more than wonders with autocracy, marble, or Egypt). It's clearly not something we'd want to build right away in every river city - we'd get stomped by a neighbor's army. Yet it's also not so horrible we'd wait until last either. Since we have to strategize where and when to build it, the building meets my criteria.

 

[Seek]

I agree with Ahriman here, this iteration of the watermill seems a little unbalanced. Maybe leave the vanilla river gold, and have the effect of the watermill 1G for riverside farms only but push it back significantly in the tech tree. Considering that all the other improvements are more powerful for much of the game if they're riverside, it could be worth trying.

On a side note, somehow coastal tiles lost their value at some point and aren't particularly viable anymore. A fully built up coastal city (disregarding the Research Lab because it's so late) should yield 3F/2G or 2F/3G from non-resource coast imo.

 

[Thalassicus]

The reason I'm puzzled is I've seen feedback indicating:

1. Rivers are too powerful
2. Lighthouses are okay

I felt this way too, so I nerfed rivers and made watermills nearly identical to lighthouses... was I just not interpreting the feedback right in this case? I will make mistakes, after all, sometimes I don't correctly get the sense of what people feel is good or bad in the game. It's what experimenting in beta is for.

Since Engineers are 2h while Merchants are 4g, I feel the value of the specialist slot is about the same. I do also have changes on the todo list to balance the value of the base terrain. If anything I'd think the Watermill is weaker than the Lighthouse because of its higher cost and less powerful food bonus... this is why I left the +2 on it in 4.08, before removing that based on feedback.

Thinking about it line by line...

• Cost favors the Lighthouse.
• Purchase cost and maintenance are the same.
• Coasts are more common than spices and sugar, favoring the lighthouse.
• A city working 5 river and 5 coast tiles will get +5 from each building.
• Engineers are 2 and Merchants are 4, so I'd say the value of the specialist slot is very close between the two.
• Both require adjacency to the terrain type they improve.

 

[Ahriman]

This is different from a harbor or lighthouse... ?

Yes, it is different.
Non-bonus water tiles are utterly useless without the lighthouse, and are mediocre at best with it.

So there is no significant opportunity cost from being unable to build the lighthouse or work those tiles.
They are not superior tiles.

Whereas river tiles *are* superior, they will always be worked. And so the opportunity cost of not being able to build a +1 gold watermill is much higher than the opportunity cost of being unable to build a lighthouse.

Also, non-coastal cities will hardly ever acquire water tiles, whereas cities not adjacent to a river may well still acquire river tiles.

Could you clarify what you goal would be, critera you feel makes a building balanced?

Buildings should have some degree of specialization. There should not be buildings such that you always want to build them, nor buildings that you never want to build.
In vanilla, many buildings were of the latter. You have fixed this for basically every building.
But now you're making some buildings like the former. The workshop verges on being like this, as does the windmill.
The monument is like this, but as a tier0 building I think that is ok.

In an ideal situation with unlimited time and unlimited resources we'd build everything everywhere (obviously )

I disagree with this as a design goal (if by unlimited resources you mean unlimited hammers).

It should be the case that some buildings are only worth building in cities that are suited to them.

For example, if my city only has a few hammers, it should not be worth building a factory in it (even ignoring the coal requirement), because the gold upkeep cost outweighs the benefit of increased hammers.

Civ4 had the design goal you propose, but the designers very deliberately (and I think correctly) moved away from this in Civ5 by adding building maintenance.

A fully built up coastal city (disregarding the Research Lab because it's so late) should yield 3F/2G or 2F/3G from non-resource coast imo.

I'd agree with this.
I'd have coasts be 2f/2g with lighthouse, and 2f/3g with seaport, and then I'd increase the cost and maintenance cost on the seaport slightly.

 

[doktorstick]

For example, suppose that you created a building that cost 1 hammer and gave +20 gold and +20 food per turn, but required being adjacent to a river.
This would mean that river sites were the best in the game *by far* and that the optimal settlement strategy would be to settle as many riverside cities as possible, as fast as possible.

Can someone with mod-foo test this? Run the autoplay a couple of times and see if the AI does or doesn't understand this HUGE benefit? There's only upside to knowing for certain, eh?

 

[Thalassicus]

I do also have changes on the todo list to balance the value of the base terrain.

I think this is worth emphasizing... I know I don't always explain things well. I agree coasts are too weak and I do intend to solve that issue, but separately. I tend to work on one thing at a time in sequence. The reason I do this is if a dozen changes are made all at once, it's a recipe for disaster in software design... it becomes really hard to figure out where bugs are.

Also, non-coastal cities will hardly ever acquire water tiles, whereas cities not adjacent to a river may well still acquire river tiles.

If you mean border expansion, I actually removed the bias against coastal tiles a while back. It all gets documented by the time of the public release but sometimes I don't move things from my todo list to the readmes right away when testing. I'm often thinking about something, and if I stop to do other tasks I lose my train of thought.

In an ideal situation with unlimited time and unlimited resources we'd build everything everywhere (obviously )

I disagree with this as a design goal (if by unlimited resources you mean unlimited hammers).

What I'm referring to is unlimited wants:

• If we had a million gold per turn and unlimited time to build stuff (time is roughly equivalent to hammers in this game) we'd clearly build everything everywhere. This is not my goal however, it's simply one hypothetical extreme end of the spectrum.
• Now let's say we only have a thousand gold per turn and 100 turns to build what we want... probably would still build most things everywhere, though less likely.
• Keep going down to a hundred gold, then ten, and so on with more and more scarcity. Eventually we reach a point we only can build a single building, and we've reached the other extreme.

Somewhere between these extremes is the game we have before us. Given enough time, we would build everything everywhere... this is not a design goal but just a way to show everything is desirable.

Since we have a limited amount of time and gold to build, we have to create a strategy of what to build, where, and when. So long as this strategy is not always the same, and a building is not always at the front or end of production queues, I feel it's balanced enough and continue with other things.

A good example of this is the Chariot Archer.

I buffed chariots and suddenly it was the one thing everyone always wanted to beeline to, in every situation, and spend all their horse resources on. This is a classic case of something that got overpowered and was too high in our priorities. Through the course of buffing the Archer and Spearman it lessened the relative value of the Chariot Archer, and I don't believe people still go for chariots exclusively anymore (I haven't seen any comments on the subject, at least). Since it is still stronger than vanilla though so it's not useless, I feel it's balanced.

On a side note, an exception is obviously made for UUs/UBs, since they're often so much more powerful than the base unit. What I instead focus on with those is overall balance between one leader and another in a general sense.


===============

By the way, something I forgot to mention lately that's important for Aztec fans: I greatly increased culture gain from kills and removed Jaguar's starting Woodsman promotion. I liked the idea of woodsman at first, but over time decided it didn't really feel all that unique (too similar to the Iroquois trait) and Jaguars already have cool promotions. So I strongly emphasized the one true unique thing about playing Aztecs, getting culture directly from warfare. I really like this civ and play them mainly for the nifty trait.

In addition, Jaguars are now buildable all the way to Metal Casting like in vanilla (instead of getting cut off at Iron Working with other warriors). I also renamed the "Floating Gardens" to the local name of "Chinampa." Local names are used for most unique units/buildings, so it was a little odd this had an English name that wasn't even really accurate (they don't float ).

 

[Seek]

[*] Added the "Hover Info" mod by Adam Watkins to the unofficial patch (for compatibility reasons). This shows extra information when you mouse over unit flags.

I don't see it there.. How can I disable it?

 

[Thalassicus]

It's the "turns remaining" info for workers. If you don't see it there you've encountered a bug... though on the other hand if you don't see it, why would you want to disable it...?

In 4.11 I added an option in UP - general.xml to hide this worker information, if you would like to. Just change "ENABLE_ADAM_WATKINS_HOVER_INFO" from true to false.

=============================

Version 4.11 beta has the following changes:

• The resource list now show how much is imported from citystates, and deducts these from the displayed "tradable" quantity.
• Promotions now update melee/ranged status as soon as a unit is upgraded, instead of when you end your turn.
• Flag promotions might work more reliably now.
  I've also enabled some debug text for these. If you encounter a situation where promotions appear that should not be there, please open the tuner and end your turn, then copy-paste the tuner output to the Bug Reports thread. Please also include information on the promotions that are displaying incorrectly, the unit type, and owner of the unit. This is a very difficult problem for me to track down so detailed feedback is essential.
• Clicking the turn timer or date on the top bar now opens InfoAddict if you have it installed.
• +1g on sea tiles from a Seaport, and moved +1f on sea tiles from the Lighthouse to the base coast terrain.
• The Maritime food distribution now prioritizes cities that are not on "avoid growth" status.
• Maritime food distribution now correctly calculates the era.
• Issues with erroneous "turns remaining" for techs might be fixed.
  If you encounter a situation where a tech shows negative turns remaining, please post your current and required research for the tech in the Bug Reports thread.
• Various other bugfixes I can't quite remember.

 

[Seek]

It's the "turns remaining" info for workers. If you don't see it there you've encountered a bug... though on the other hand if you don't see it, why would you want to disable it...?

I'm checking out the Cultural Diffusion mod and there's info in the bottom right info popup - the hover modcomp disables this, correct? That's all I'm concerned about.