Beta v4.X - General Discussion

[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.

Its not about total income, its about relative income.
River-adjacent tiles *should* be superior to lake-adjacent tiles and random other tiles. Always.

In your design here, river-adjacent tile yields are no better than lake-adjacent tile yields, and they are no-better than non-freshwater tile yields once fertilizer/steam power/dynamite are reached.

lake-adjacent tiles are 0.35% of the map

I *very* often have a lake when I have a coastal start. If I have a coast start, with the superior yields from fish and the like, *and* get all the bonuses from a nearby lake, thats nontrivial.

Lakes are not as good as rivers because watermills cannot be built adjacent to lakes.

That difference is trivial compared to a yield difference.

What's confusing me is you like the idea if it's only rivers, but not if lakes get a buff,

I don't understand what you're saying here.

My preferred design (that addresses your issue of delaying river value) would be:
No base yield modification for river/lake adjacent tiles.
+1 gold increase to river-adjacent tiles with sailling.
+1 food/hammer/gold to freshwater tiles with CS/machinery/compass.
+1 food/hammer/gold to non-freshwater tiles with Fertilizer/Steam power/Dynamite/Economics

I would be ok with a design that was:
No base yield modification for river/lake adjacent tiles.
+1 gold increase to river-adjacent and lake-adjacent tiles with sailling.
+1 food/hammer/gold to freshwater tiles with CS/machinery/compass.
+1 food/hammer/gold to non-freshwater tiles with Fertilizer/Steam power/Dynamite/Economics

But I don't like a design that is:
No base yield modification for river/lake adjacent tiles.
+1 food/hammer/gold to freshwater tiles with CS/engineering/sailing.
+1 food/hammer/gold to non-freshwater tiles with Fertilizer/Steam power/Dynamite/Economics

right now when we start next to a river we get gold equal to a free worker by turn ~50-100... not due to any personal skill at the game, just because we happened to begin there.

There has *always* been a big variation in the value of start positions in Civ. Its nothing new with Civ5. Actually Civ5 has much less variation than most previous games.

 

[Thalassicus]

Okay, I'll change it to your second paragraph.

Civ 5 does have more balanced start locations than Civ 4, and it's something I like a lot, which is why I'm trying to move things further towards that balance. In Civ 4 I'd have huge swings in endgame scores just based on start location, even when I knew my skill at completing the games hadn't really changed.

 

[Sneaks]

Can you actually change fresh water tile base values with a tech?

 

[Thalassicus]

I think there might be a way to do so with Lua I'm exploring by manually altering plot yields, but otherwise I'll just do Ahriman's second suggestion.

Edit: The tests were successful so I'll do terrain-based tech bonuses through lua eventually. I've got Sneaks' custom notifications first on my todo list, and I estimate it'll take about five-ten hours to code in the terrain effect to the game... I have to add a new table, update the tech tree to show it, and update things whenever plots change cultural owner.

 

[rhammer640]

So i was gone for the weekend and BAM 3 pages of conversation, lol. I like the change that the +1 river gold bonus comes back at sailing once you can make that happen, although how is the next general release going to deal with it? r u just keeping it as vanilla where they give +1 at the start or keeping it on the watermill? It might make sense to hold off the general release until the river thing is worked out unless your just leaving off all changes to river gold until the next one.

To reinforce the change to adding it to sailing with game-play results, i had a lot less gold then before you moved the river gold to watermills even with the bonuses to gold in cities and whatnot. The problem is that while my first city might have been more balanced to non-river starts, once i had 3 or 4 cities that i could have gotten river gold from but wasn't then my gold plummeted. Just wanted to post this to reinforce the change you said you planned on making cause you said you wanted feedback from others a page or so back.

 

[Thalassicus]

v4.18 beta

• Reverted rivers and gold per city / per empire back to 4.0 numbers.
• Swapped 1 and 1 bonuses on coasts and lighthouses.
• Added to the unofficial patch (for compatibility reasons):
  • Sneak's custom notifications system.
  • Alpaca's DiploCorner.
  • Morlarkhttp://forums.civfanatics.com/member.php?u=167260's "Smarter TechTree Pipes" bugfix.
• Capturing cities now displays a notification on the right side of the screen instead of at the center.
• Disabled several files to isolate the diplomacy freeze bug.
  • Trade deals display of turns remaining.
  • Diplomacy window display of who's protecting citystates.
  • Ingame explanations of how declarations of friendship work.

Figuring out what's causing the freeze at the diplomacy screen is my top priority right now. I disabled a bunch of files that might cause the issue, but it's very difficult to test for this bug directly. If anyone encounters the freeze bug in v4.18beta or later (or plays a game successfully without encountering the bug) please post about it.

 

[Thalassicus]

v4.19 beta

• Fixed a bug with food display on the production panel (it now rounds decimal figures).
• Updated SaveUtils to v8, which should solve some caching warnings.
• After adding "Smarter TechTree Pipes" in 4.17 I realized I needed to move some techs around. This is purely a display adjustment and no actual tech prerequisites were changed. Hopefully the new arrangement makes it easier to follow tech progression.

 

[rhammer640]

Well i played a game last night and had no diplomatic issues with freezing or crashing but i didn't get all the way through so not sure if they would have happend.

3 notes from the game:
1. I chose archery as my first tech as i had a tundra start! It was very helpful as i could build archers for scouting and taking out camps and i got a lot of gold that way. The problem is that archers can just tea off on barb camps without reprisal most of the time. I took out 5-10 camps with the same archer. I understand that they are supposed to protect the camp and whatnot and if they left it would make it easy to trick them into leaving but is there any way to make this a little less easy to do? I dont know if you could have them attack more if getting attacked?

2. I am still finding that im progressing through techs way too fast in the early eras which is making my decisions seem inconsiquential seeing as if i go for one first it doesn't take that much longer to get the others. Maybe im alone in this but i seem to remember another comment regarding this. I dunno, how do you feel about tech progression thal?

3. This is just something im noticing now as ive started playing on higher difficulties but i lost the race for a wonder and the hammers i spent were converted to gold? I wasn't sure if this was a vanilla mechanic, but it definitely makes going for wonders a lot less risky.

 

[Sneaks]

The gold conversion is a vanilla thing.

 

[Ahriman]

1. I agree that it would be good if barb warriors were more willing to charge archers. They do so sometimes, but not always. Maybe they only do it if they think they have a chance of a complete unit kill?

3. This is in vanilla AFAIK.

 

[Joneill]

1. I chose archery as my first tech as i had a tundra start! It was very helpful as i could build archers for scouting and taking out camps and i got a lot of gold that way. The problem is that archers can just tea off on barb camps without reprisal most of the time. I took out 5-10 camps with the same archer. I understand that they are supposed to protect the camp and whatnot and if they left it would make it easy to trick them into leaving but is there any way to make this a little less easy to do? I dont know if you could have them attack more if getting attacked?

I see this just as a minor incentive to build archers early on, which imo is a good thing. I do play with raging barbarians though, where the increased spawnrate makes this much less effective.

 

[Thalassicus]

What if Brutes had some sort of innate combat bonus against ranged units?


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v4.20 beta

• More work on the resource display. Colors should show properly now, and luxuries no longer show a "used" entry.
• Increased Maritime food to 2/3 friend/ally per era.
• Reduced Maritime capture bonus to 4.
• +25% cost for Longswords' tech.
• 1/turn Hoplite maintenance (same as Spearmen).

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

v4.21 beta

• Fixed some bugs with maritime food distribution.
• Aztec sacrificial captives are now sent to the lowest-culture city to be sacrificed (adding to that city's culture).

 

[rhammer640]

What if Brutes had some sort of innate combat bonus against ranged units?

I dont know that it would solve the problem of them never attacking though and if they had a bonus and could one shot an archer. I like that archers can usually survive enough to run away and nurse their wounds. Also the biggest issue is that bandits (barb archers with the barb mod) dont attack back against archers even if they could without moving from their camps. I know there isn't much you can do with the tools we have though.

v4.20 beta

• More work on the resource display. Colors should show properly now, and luxuries no longer show a "used" entry.
  

I'm glad they dont show used anymore as that really bothered me cause i always felt that meant i had used it in a trade or whatnot.

 

[SSgtDuke]

Increased Maritime food to 2/3 friend/ally per era.

I don't think there's a big enough difference between the friend and ally bonuses. I think the friend bonus should be relatively quite small compared to the ally bonus. It's fairly easy to be a friend, but sometimes you really have to fight to be the ally. If an ally should get 3 food per era, then I think a friend should only get 1 food per era.

 

[KeyCey1995]

Don't forget you get luxuries as allies too... That's 50% of the reason that I want to ally with them, for keeping my happiness high

 

[Joneill]

Don't forget you get luxuries as allies too... That's 50% of the reason that I want to ally with them, for keeping my happiness high

But you can be friends with all city states on the map (for rather low cost), while you have to compete for ally status. But, gotta play with it first before saying it's overpowered .

But for feedback: Don't like the steel cost increase. A tech's beaker cost should at least somehow reflect what you get out of it. There are some exceptions to that already (e.g. bronze and ironworking), but I wouldn't want to see that in even more techs. While longswords are currently the main medieval troop, there is nothing else on steel. A higher techcost for a specific tech is rather rare in standard CiV and actually signals a special bonus (Civil Service food-increase). Of course, this is more of a design than balance issue, so feel free to ignore .

 

[Thalassicus]

Yeah... the difference from friend to ally is:

• +50% more food
• Grants luxuries and strategics
• Blocks everyone else from allying

I think those bonuses are big enough to be worth it.

Iron working, steel, gunpowder, and rifling each cost more than others techs of their tier. The steel cost has precedent from the other footman-unit techs, and brings knights/longswords to almost equal cumulative tech cost.



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

v4.22 beta

This is my first pass at compatibility with the next major vanilla patch. In addition to dozens of small miscellaneous changes, there's two big ones I've described below.

-----------
The developers seem to be following a trend of deflating gold numbers. Since release we've seen:

• Reduced income (less powerful trading posts)
• Reduced expenses (lower building maintenance)

Overall this means revenue should be about the same. I've adapted these changes and the cumulative difference from vanilla to this mod will roughly be:

• Buildings: cheaper to purchase and maintain
• Units: more expensive to purchase and maintain
  (this brings both categories to about an equal purchase modifier)
• More gold on coasts and water

To adapt the balance mods to this in v4.22 I've done:

• 1 villages (vanilla)
• Reduced purchase costs
• Reduced unit maintenance costs

I also redesigned the purchase modifier on tooltips so it's easy to tell, at a glance, how cost-efficient things are. It now shows c5gold:/) as a percent multiplier. So for example:

• 100 with 200% multiplier = 200 purchase cost
• 050 with 400% multiplier = 200 purchase cost

-----------
I shifted the resource yield bonuses on buildings to more closely match post-patch vanilla. The places they moved my bonuses to actually make a lot of sense.

• Sheep/Cow → Stable
• Fish → Lighthouse
• Smokehouse is now Granary again
• Spice/Sugar/Banana → Granary
• Wheat → Granary

Differences:

• Deer → base improvement
• Kept luxury bonuses on the Temple instead of techs.

 

[Lachlan]

I played 4.20 and while i clicked on Isabella's Spain, the diplo screen was freezed...

 

[SSgtDuke]

In 4.22 I'm getting the tile glow and sound (like to highlight some event) at my capital every turn. I would guess it's related to getting food from a maritime CS.

 

[Gamewizard]

Briefly played 4.22, none of the buildings had a description, only hammer cost and maintenance was visible. Even so, I built the granary and it gave me 2 food, so I assume it is just a text problem and that all buildings prolly work.

Also "Allows bridges over rivers" was visible on both construction and engineering.

I didn't play long enough to test the diplomacy screen bug.