Beta v4.X - General Discussion

[doktorstick]

I find I never build anything other than destroyers. Cheap, fast, good damage, sees subs, and attacks planes with AA. I used to build something different now and again, but that was mainly from boredom.

 

[Thalassicus]

Thal, which thread would you like the sub discussion in?

Sure, let's shift the submarine conversation here.

 

[Ahriman]

moved

 

[Thalassicus]

v4.17 beta includes these changes:

• Reverted Destroyers back to 5-tile sight range for revealing subs.
• Reverted river-gold bonus on watermills back to 21 (on the building), and reduced maintenance back to vanilla.
• Reverted 1 on freshwater TPs/Villages back to Sailing.
• Reverted 1 on freshwater Mines back to Engineering (left the Lumbermill bonus on Machinery).

I'm scaling back experimental stuff to prepare for a public release sometime this week.

 

[Sneaks]

Thal, one concern with the river changes:

When the AI evaluates city location, doesn't it only take into account the current value of the plots, and not potential? If that is the case, the AI will undervalue riverside city locations until it gets Sailing.

 

[Ahriman]

Replaced river-gold bonus on watermills with vanilla's 1, and reduced maintenance back to vanilla.
Moved 1 on freshwater TPs/Villages up from Compass to Sailing.
Moved 1 on freshwater Mines up from Machinery to Engineering.

Oh, this isn't what I thought you meant. I thought the Compass and machinery bonuses were really nice as they were.

Moving all this stuff to fresh water now makes lake adjacency as good as river adjacency. I think thats a mistake.

What I thought you had in mind was:

Rivers give no base yield, give +1 gold at Sailing.
Fresh water Trading post gets +1 gold at Compass.
Fresh water mine/mill gets +1 hammer at Machinery.
Fresh water farm gets +1 food at CS.

And the non-freshwater bonuses at Economics/Steam Power/Dynamite/Fertilizer as before.

 

[Thalassicus]

@Sneaks
The AI has separate river and coastal priority variables. Start locations, resource placement, and some other factors also inherently weigh in rivers and costs regardless of their yield. I've been working on AI city placement a lot over the past few weeks and ran several dozen autoplays to ensure they drop cities more intelligently than vanilla. This is something we do have some measure of control over.

@Ahriman
River and lake adjacency is not equal (watermills can only be built next to rivers). It's not possible to give terrain bonuses on techs, or river-only bonuses on improvements with techs. Our choices are:

• Rivers powerful from turn 1
• Rivers powerful with a building
• Freshwater bonuses on improvements

There were some details discussed in the terrain improvements thread at some point... could search through there for more info.

 

[Ahriman]

@Ahriman
It's not possible to give terrain bonuses on techs, or river-only bonuses on improvements.

Then I'd prefer to revert to the original vanilla design of just having +1 gold base yield on river tiles.

 

[Thalassicus]

Yet then we run into the problem again of overpowered rivers, the original balance issue I'm trying to solve.

Another solution I considered is removing all river-based improvement bonuses (basically reverting to vanilla minus civil service) and go through AssignStartingPlots.lua to rework the code there, greatly reducing the resources that spawn near rivers.

I don't think that'd be as much fun to play though, and it'd cause side-effect balance issues. One of the reasons I've been working on terrain lately is due to the situation we all inevitably run into where we just don't care where we place the next city... because once all luxuries/strategics are claimed it doesn't matter much. I do want these decisions to matter. Reducing resources, or removing terrain yields instead of delaying them, makes this decision-making less interesting. I'm also very hesitant to mess around with that lua file... it's huge at over 10,000 lines of code, and complicated enough it's easy to significantly alter gameplay with tiny changes.

I prefer addressing the start location problem directly by just delaying river power to a tech in the late Ancient/Classical/early Medieval periods.

 

[Sneaks]

I guess that is where I see differently. I think rivers SHOULD be OP.

 

[Thalassicus]

Starting next to an overpowered river depends on random map generation luck, and has a big effect on how successful the game will be. There's nothing wrong with luck-based games, dice and cards are extremely popular, and the whole gambling industry is built around the concept.

I tend to take a philosophy more like chess for Civ modding though, prioritizing balance and skill over luck. This is why I've been exploring ways to delay that overpowered status slightly, moving the river bonus from Agriculture to late ancient / early medieval techs.

It balances start locations while leaving rivers just as good for long-term settlement as before.

 

[Ahriman]

I have no problem with rivers being very powerful. Basically every start position should be on a river or on a coast. If its on the coast, it should have at least a couple of sea bonuses, and those should give superior yields such that you can get the same gold income from working them as you get early game from river tiles.

If you're worried that rivers are too good relative to coasts, then boost the value of coastal resources and luxuries, or give a base +1 gold to any city adjacent to a coast tile or something like that. You don't need to nerf rivers.

 

[Sneaks]

They already are to a large degree. Games where I start in the desert generally take longer to get going than river plains hills starts. Jungle starts make me want to hit my head. Tundra starts are always a total bummer. I even dislike coastal starts on Pangea maps.

Rivers I feel are a necessary random element, but one the AI and the player will actively pursue, even if they don't get one at their start.

 

[Ahriman]

Yeah, differences in start value are part of what make some civs conquer other civs, both historically and ingame.

There are gains from terrain die-rolls having some influence over which civs become dominant.

Civ has always worked like that.

 

[Thalassicus]

Basically every start position should be on a river or on a coast.

This is what I'm trying to explain... doing this would require learning the ins and outs of regions, resource placement, location selection, and other parts of AssignStartingPlots.lua. I looked at some of this before attempting simpler alternatives. It's a massive, complicated, and in many places inflexibly-coded file. Even with dedicated effort it took a week just to figure out a good way to do a 25% reduction in strategic resources in that code, because there's no global tables defining resource placement. In comparison, it only took a few seconds to solve the river problem by delaying the economic bonuses a few techs.

I might come back and do start location balance directly when I have more experience (like maritime changes and such), but for now I prefer finding solutions that are possible through xml edits alone.

 

[Ahriman]

This is what I'm trying to explain... to do this I'd have to learn all the ins and outs of regions, resource placement, location selection and other complex parts

I basically never get a start position that is neither river nor coastal.

In comparison, it only took a few seconds to solve the river problem by delaying the river bonus a few techs.

Except that you didn't just delay the river bonus a few techs, you removed the river bonus entirely and shifted bonuses to just the fresh water bonus.

If you had a way to do things as before (fresh water bonus at CS, Machinery, Compass) and delay the river bonus to Sailing, that would be great.
But the design you posted isn't here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=10214840&postcount=124
isn't a good alternative IMO.

 

[Thalassicus]

Your only concern is lakes are a little better than before... ? On most map scripts they're very rare, even on huge map sizes:

 

[Ahriman]

Your only concern is lakes are a little better than before... ?

My concern is:
a) You've removed the entirety of the +1 gold from river tiles. In the design you posted, unless I'm missing something, a river-farm never gets any gold income, nor does a river mine or lumbermill.

b) Lakes. A single lake borders 6 tiles. I don't think a lake should be giving as good a bonus as 6 river adjacent tiles (a 3-length river).

In vanilla for example, river farm grassland is 3f1g, 4f1g with civil service.
In your design, river farm grassland is 3f, 4f with civil service.

 

[Sneaks]

My concern is that moving river gold away from how it works in vanilla in any way is an unneeded change. To me, rivers should be more valuable from the second I load the game. The only starts where I have been river starved are either starting in Tundra (which still had access to rivers if I explored a bit) or Archipelago, where rivers are rare all around.

In short, I think the river situation is a non-problem.

 

[Thalassicus]

@Ahriman
a) I don't think it'll negatively impact economic income. I slightly increased per-empire and per-city gold, and trading posts are 50% more effective than before.
b) Just looking at that example above, lake-adjacent tiles are 0.35% of the map (not just lakes alone... I mean all six tiles for each lake). It's not a significant concern for me to buff lakes slightly in a narrow period of time (early medieval to late renaissance). Lakes are not as good as rivers because watermills cannot be built adjacent to lakes.

What's confusing me is you like the idea if it's only rivers, but not if lakes get a buff, when lakes are such a small proportion of any given game.

@Sneaks
If one start location is lucky with extra /turn while another lacks this, it has a big cascading effect on the rest of the game. Power in Civ is exponential, small early effects can have huge effects on late-game success.
Tundra and desert I addressed with the changes to resources (those terrain types have four times the resource density as grassland).

This is the sort of issue where additional voices on the subject would help since the balance of luck vs skill is very subjective. To anyone reading... how much do you like success based on random map generation luck?

• About the same (vanilla Civ V).
• More luck (like Civ IV).
• More strategy (like the beta).