Afforess
The White Wizard
Yeah, that is what I am trying to avoid as well. I'm playing some games to see.
Better RoM
- Thread starter Afforess
- Start date
Yeah, that is what I am trying to avoid as well. I'm playing some games to see.
Killtech
Discutator
an alternative to drop gold income would be to increase the maintanence cost of many buildings. players that do not upgrade their cities with everything possible would benefit from that most - and this are usually AI players.
little_cyclone
Loyal Civ4 & C2C mod player
I would concur with increasing maintance costs. Unless I'm playing on a very large map (in which case I start tweaking civics) I hardly pay attention to maintenance fees.
I'd prefer not so much tweaking, as making different elements more punchy. For example (sorry) the slavery civic above is kinda subtle with a little +5%
and +1
, and asking players to consider implications of, say, -35% vs. -25%. great people. Because RoM adds so many nuanced and well-balanced civics, buildings, etc. the cumulative result has nothing standing out as very significant. Yet real history "broke the game" all the time. Gold should be uniquely valuable, Mongol hordes should be uniquely overwhelming. I'd argue that better simulates history.A game is fun when player decisions rock the game. Also when the AI brings a bold power or strategy players need to counter with equally bold moves. Unbalance is fun.
I think that uber-izing the unique units and unique buildings would spice the game up. Traits and civics also could be purified and empowered. Resource requirements (or ridiculous bonuses) could be another means of contrasting civ identity. Ideally, each competing civ would have innate special powers, plus special powers due to wonders, buildings, etc. The key word being "special".
Afforess
The White Wizard
Really? I play on Monarch, and I have to be very careful with maintainence. 10% nationwide boost can break me.
I'd prefer not so much tweaking, as making different elements more punchy. For example (sorry) the slavery civic above is kinda subtle with a little +5%
I completely agree. That's why I've left other civics that I don't think are very balanced (*cough*caste... Bourgious...*cough*) alone. But Slavery is so ridiculously unbalanced that I've only heard one player who actually used it. The real issue is that in RoM, a subtle 5%
, can actually make drastic +/- economy changes. I certaintly don't want to kill the uniqueness of each civic by balancing them. But I don't think RoM's civics are very balanced. Most players get locked into one set civic strategy, purely because only one or two civic strategies are any good, and the rest are purely aesthetics. Do you find yourself bee-lining for the same techs, units, every game? Then we have a balancing issue. Units like the Chariot and Horse Archer are woely underused due to the abundance of spearmen and shortage of the horse resource. Historically, the opposite was true. My goal here isn't to make RoM blandly balanced, but balanced enough that players no longer will use the same strategy for every situation. It will take a long time to achieve, undoubtedly, but if I don't try, who will?
strategyonly
C2C Supreme Commander
RobO
King
The first two are fine. Slavery: See below.
- Cultural Levels are 20% harder to get.
- Two New Economic Civics, Guilds and Coinage
- The civic slavery has been completely re-written (see below)
- The Butchery and Fisherman hut now give a static +1
per resource instead of +5%
- The Artesian well now gives a static +3
- The Cannery now gives a static +1
The food changes will change the game A LOT. You need to consider possible side effects. But in general they are good, though the Cannery will be way too expensive for +1 food and need to be cheaper or give more food.
In general good, but it can be simplified a good deal.
New Slavery Civic:
- 3 times normal anarchy length
- Medium Upkeep
- -35% Great People
- -5% distance and # of city maintainance
- +1
- -300% Civic Anger (This means that for roughly each 4 population, you get +1
if someone else is using slavery. You lose bonus if you switch to slavery.)
- -100% City Growth Rate (Cities grow 2x as slow)
- +5%
- + 15%
- Unlimited Slave Count
- Can Construct Slave Market
- +1
- +1
from mines, shaft mines, modern mines, quarries, lumbermills, workshops
3 times anarchy length seems excessive. It could break my desire to use slavery and hurt the AI. Twice is quite severe.
Why +1
? I fail to see the justification.Why -100% City Growth Rate? Again I fail to see the justification, and it is a quite severe penalty that may hurt the AI.
+5%
and + 15% are icing on the cake. The gold and hammer additions from the farms, mines etc. are what provides the real slavery benefits. Consider taking these two out and sticking with the latter - perhaps increase the latter at the same time to +2.Implement my changes and you'll have a viable and simpler slavery civic along the lines you proposed. Slavery shouldn't be a "bad" civic as such until you get to around Industrialism, or perhaps a bit earlier. It was in widespread use and very effective for a long time. The reason is simple: Until we learned to burn fossil fuels to produce power, people (work power) were the most important way to effectively increase production potential.
Edit: Oh, and the Great People penalty doesn't make sense either. The Greeks used slavery extensively. They had a number of Great People.
Afforess
The White Wizard
To clarify, the cannery gives +1 food per resource where it used to give a modifier for food, per resource.
The anarchy length is longer to show the populations reaction to changing to slavery. If you just decided to remove previously free people's freedom, the backlash will be larger.
Why +1
Slaves living conditions were generally poor, and therefore would be a large cause of sickness.
I hate how everyone blatently assumes slower growth is bad growth. The AI knows that slow is bad when you have extra happy/health, but it also knows it is good when there is too much unhappy.
My justification is that slaves were often not allowed to have children, marry, and this has a negative effect on the cities growth. Also, slaves lower standard of living meant that they died earlier and had a much higher infant mortality than free people. Cities will grow slower, for good or ill...
+5%
You may be right here. The improvement boosts are quite handy.
If Einstein had been born a slave, would we have come up with the theory of relativity so quickly? Enslaving the population means that you will accidentally ruin some really influential people.
RobO
King
OK, that's fine then.
Aah, but slaves are generally imported. No sane ruler would impose slavery on ordinary citizens, unless he had a justification (oppression, crime). The ordinary people would - in general - benefit from slavery, provided they could afford a slave. But then, in those days only the people that had money made political decisions.
So the anarchy length effect is only when changing into Slavery? That makes it less serious, though 200% is still enough for me.
So what? They are slaves, not ordinary citizens (though that term wasn't invented until fairly late), and there's a limit to how many there can be in a society. Besides, some of them lived in fairly good conditions.
More slaves can be imported (and were - the Vikings, for example, made a lot of their profits from slave trade) or taken in conquest (a popular activity at the time). You could also argue that slaves helped keep the ordinary "citizens" healthy by improving their living conditions. And that slaves helped a city grow because of the increased production potential. That last one is, in fact, interesting. One of the reasons population has grown so rapidly on the Earth these last centuries is our greatly increased ability to use energy as we learned to burn fossil fuels. In the old times, slaves were one of the most important ways to increase energy usage and thus to provide a base for increased population.
Look for other means to curtail city growth.
Eisntein was not born in an age where slavery was a part of daily life. Sokrates was. Platon. Archimedes. Slavery didn't seem to hamper their creativity.
Much of the thinking about Slavery in Civ comes from our current state of mind - based on the experiences gained from the US and the civil war - as well as racial problems in South Africa and elsewhere. We have some difficulty imagining the state of mind as it was several centuries and millenia ago.
I don't like slavery but it was an important part of early civilizations.
How about the slave capturing, what's your option? I think it needs some heavy changes.. but Like capturing settlers, they turn to workers, so how about captured military units = slaves if slavery enabled. (like in ancient Greece, Egypt, Rome etc..), to modern age (Stalin's russia, Hitler's germany... Used slavery for production) You could use them to rush buildings, like engineer/merchant, but they leave some culture and it (the culture) MAY grow (if used lots of slaves) or it may not grow (if they are all killed, like in ww2 work camps in siberia.)
Sorry for my bad english, hope you can read this (and understand.).
Still waiting for you opinions.
Retrospect
Warlord
I disagree with your outlook on slavery in the ancient world.
Many civilizations nobility/upperclass/ruling elite whatever you want to call them enslaved their own populations, egyptians, greeks and many others did this. Sparta had only a small fraction of their population not in bondage and as result the ensuing rebellion was fatal to them.
Some cultures looked after their slaves better than others but in general they were treated poorly.
Thos great scholars and philosophers that you mentioned were not born slaves and if they had been i guarantee that they would now not be known to us unless they had somehow become free.
I'm not arguing that slavery was a useless method of providing labor, on the contrary It was extremely succesfull as it shaped the ancient world and those achievements can be still seen today. I only argue that it had its drawbacks, of which Afforess is simply trying to simulate in game.
RobO
King
As fas as Slavery in Civ goes, I'm thinking of a specific slave group, not local people who are in effect enslaved because of their living conditions (which happens in many places even today).
Revolts are something for Revolutions to deal with. There are specific civic settings for revolts that Revolutions use.
I didn't say they were born slaves. My point was that a society with slavery can produce Great People as well as any other society.
I agree. I just want to have some reasonable drawbacks, not ones that are a function of our modern way of thinking about slavery.
Killtech
Discutator
slavery was a fundamental part of society nearly all over the world and was generally more ma gain than a loss in these times. it's mayor drawback was of course this: it's based on havng slaves and these have to come form somewhere. so you have to invest resources to capture them. the other problem about slavery is that if an empire allowed itself to have too many slaves there were considerable chances of slave revolts. this part could be implemented by revolutions mod and aggravated by adding foreign culture through the use of captured slaves.
depite that one has to consider that slavery to a certain sense is very natural since many slaves are in fact just prisoners of war (one usually don't kill them nor let's them just free) that are used for different labour (which is not disallowed even by the geneva conventions as long as they are threated accordingly and have lower military rank). the big difference between slavery based economy and another one is that slaves can be under the authority of privat persons and therefore can be treatened as goods. additionaly capturing slaves from (foreign) civilan population is possible...
therefore i'd pledge to introduce slave units that result form defeating emeny units but are not resreicted to slavery civic alone. slavery civic should just allow you to use them for more tasks: for example a basic slave (prisoner of war) is just a slow worker normally that can hurry production a bit if used in a city. slavery would unlock further options like setteling the slave for the cost of foreign culture in that city (best would be a if count-of-settled-slaves/city-size part of produced culture would be converted to foreign culutre in your city each turn) or trading them for some gold (like caravans in foreign cities) or giving a unit a 'slave auxilary' promotion that maybe gives +1 movement for galleys - just some idaes. thus slavery would be less helpful when you don't have slaves.
Well, untill now in all my RoM games i managed to grow most of my cities into large fully upgraded metropoles with a overproduction of everything - including commerce. so even when maintanence would go up by 100% i doubt it would seriously hurt me. most games i play on emperors level but i've played one on deity too. anyway the difficulty seems only to make a difference at the beginning but appears quite irelevant later on.
but i guess i can't speak for many players since my play-style seems to differ considerably form others considering slavery civic is a important fudament of my early empire.
i think it's mostly habit that makes players play the same way. maybe this can work if the civics specialize on helping specific parts of your economy: e.g. hammers on sea plots would be a real blessing for arctic starts but they should come at the cost of disadvantaging agriculture. or significant commerce bonuses (form trading) at the disadvantage of higher unhappines/revolutionary tendencies (more ideas from other countries) could be the civic for small kingdoms to keep up with large empires or even out-tech them...
depite that one has to consider that slavery to a certain sense is very natural since many slaves are in fact just prisoners of war (one usually don't kill them nor let's them just free) that are used for different labour (which is not disallowed even by the geneva conventions as long as they are threated accordingly and have lower military rank). the big difference between slavery based economy and another one is that slaves can be under the authority of privat persons and therefore can be treatened as goods. additionaly capturing slaves from (foreign) civilan population is possible...
therefore i'd pledge to introduce slave units that result form defeating emeny units but are not resreicted to slavery civic alone. slavery civic should just allow you to use them for more tasks: for example a basic slave (prisoner of war) is just a slow worker normally that can hurry production a bit if used in a city. slavery would unlock further options like setteling the slave for the cost of foreign culture in that city (best would be a if count-of-settled-slaves/city-size part of produced culture would be converted to foreign culutre in your city each turn) or trading them for some gold (like caravans in foreign cities) or giving a unit a 'slave auxilary' promotion that maybe gives +1 movement for galleys - just some idaes. thus slavery would be less helpful when you don't have slaves.
Well, untill now in all my RoM games i managed to grow most of my cities into large fully upgraded metropoles with a overproduction of everything - including commerce. so even when maintanence would go up by 100% i doubt it would seriously hurt me. most games i play on emperors level but i've played one on deity too. anyway the difficulty seems only to make a difference at the beginning but appears quite irelevant later on.
but i guess i can't speak for many players since my play-style seems to differ considerably form others considering slavery civic is a important fudament of my early empire.
i think it's mostly habit that makes players play the same way. maybe this can work if the civics specialize on helping specific parts of your economy: e.g. hammers on sea plots would be a real blessing for arctic starts but they should come at the cost of disadvantaging agriculture. or significant commerce bonuses (form trading) at the disadvantage of higher unhappines/revolutionary tendencies (more ideas from other countries) could be the civic for small kingdoms to keep up with large empires or even out-tech them...
JosEPh_II
TBS WarLord
@afforess
In all this, there is One thing I would ask you to keep in mind, the vast majority of RoM players Are Not the Deity players. Please don't lose sight of this.
JosEPh
In all this, there is One thing I would ask you to keep in mind, the vast majority of RoM players Are Not the Deity players. Please don't lose sight of this.
JosEPh
Afforess
The White Wizard
Yes, the anarchy is only for switching to the civic.
Really? I bet if I compared a graph of the human population on earth to the number of slaves on the earth, we would find that the population really boomed as slavery was abandoned. (Of course, correlation does not equal causation, I realize, and the industrial revolution obsoleted slavery, but it still is worth considering).
But how much knowledge did we lose? Can you tell me how many great people were turned into slaves and we never heard about? Maybe Greece should have had 10x as many Great People, but they were slaves.
I agree, and this is why I am trying to re-write it as an acceptable civic. As it stands now, in RoM 2.81, it's hardly ever worth switching too, and the AI suicides with the whipping...
Still waiting for you opinions.
How about the slave capturing, what's your option? I think it needs some heavy changes.. but Like capturing settlers, they turn to workers, so how about captured military units = slaves if slavery enabled. (like in ancient (Greece, Egypt, Rome etc..), to modern age (Stalin, Hitler... Used slavery for production) (You could use them to rush buildings, like engineer/merchant, but they leave some culture and it (the culture) MAY grow (if used lots of slaves) or it may not grow (if they are all killed, like in ww2 work camps in siberia.)
Work camps with fascsim civic (Like ww2 Stalin/Hitler) could grant more prod + unhappiness. How about death camps, would those fit in RoM? Such disgusting buildings should be in this game, for realism. (They could be huge -war weariness and culture eliminator, though it is disgusting IMHO. (Would that make this mod illegal in germany and france?)
Sorry for my bad english, hope you can read this (and understand.
The real issue I've had with slave units is when do they get set free? If you switch away from slavery, do they all just vanish? That would be pretty devastating.
I'm glad I'm not alone on this.
But can societies with slavery produce AS MANY great people as free societies? I only reduced GPP by 35%, I didn't turn it off or anything.
Same issue as above...
Funny thing is I could add the hammers on coast tiles, but I haven't a clue what civic should get them at the moment.
I know. I lose 50% of games on Emperor, I'm no god of Civ myself...
Afforess
The White Wizard
I doubt this is true. We tend to create work for ourselves. Case in point, modern housewives are busier today then they were 50 years ago, before the advent of washing machines.
I tried searching for info on that but my Noble level Googling skills have failed me
Afforess
The White Wizard
Killtech
Discutator
What? why set them free? As i said before slaves are mostly prisoners of war (especially if this unis are created in combat situations) and therefore in no way restricted to a slavery civic. your civics only define what you can do with them: even in our modern society - according to the geneva conventions - prisoners of war can be ordered for different labour (civ-worker-like work) but have to be treatened accordingly (i.e. working conditions should be comparable to your worker's conditions) and they must be released if the war ends with the specific party. remembering back on WW2 this happened a lot - even my grandfather (a Polish soldier) was captured by germans and had to work for a farmer until he was send back home due to health problems.
despite: as it is now you keep your slave markets after switching form slavery (yes, the bonuses too) which is much more strange since they are explicitly bound to trading people which is only possiple within slavery.
# so you keep your prisoner units after switching from slavery. setting such units free might be done event based, worsening or bettering diplomatic relations.
# additionally slavery could allow to spawn prisoners form pillaging improvements - especially cottages.
# not sure about this: slavery could allow drafting slaves in your own towns at the cost of some unhappines
# and consider this: if prisoners could hurry production like caravans do AI could really benefit form this since it never build caravans.
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