C2C Balance Thread

[BlueGenie]

From having looked through how the espionage mission XML is built up and used I think the case is that which I posted.
There's only one spot in the XML that uses iCityInsertCultureCostFactor (base price per tick) and iCityInsertCultureAmountFactor (tick size) and that is the ESPIONAGEMISSION_CITY_INSERT_CULTURE mission.

iCost is used for most missions to set a base cost to perform the mission.
Quite a few missions have their cost depending on other factors, like hammer cost for destroying buildings/projects/production, tech cost for stealing tech, civic cost factor for force civic switch, religion cost factor for force change of religion.
The two iCulture ones govern the cost for buying culture, and at what increments, while the rest of the entries have one mission that it is used for determining cost. iDestroyBuilding for destroying buildings, iDestroyUnit for assassination, iDestroyProduction to halt production, and so on, leading me to believe iCulture is only used for steal/buying culture and can not be applied on any other mission. At least not yet.

Cheers

 

[Sgtslick]

Are you sure it only govern the cost of buying culture? I know thats what it is used for but what i was asking was if it could also be applied to other things. No use assuming really.
ill quickly test it to see

yeah your right doesn't work.

 

[Sgtslick]

AI needs to ♥ tribes more

Wonders are WAY too cheap - playing on snail with marble + stone you can literally build every wonder and none of them will cost you more than 10 turns really. This means 1 team can just hog them all.

Lastly, can we reduce the cost of all the prehistoric techs, game takes too long to get going.. really boring when you cant even build a decent unit that doesn't get owed by animals/ can't improve land/ can't do sh1t lol

 

[ls612]

AI needs to ♥ tribes more

Wonders are WAY too cheap - playing on snail with marble + stone you can literally build every wonder and none of them will cost you more than 10 turns really. This means 1 team can just hog them all.

Lastly, can we reduce the cost of all the prehistoric techs, game takes too long to get going.. really boring when you cant even build a decent unit that doesn't get owed by animals/ can't improve land/ can't do sh1t lol

1. It is quite rare to get both stone and marble in the same city, I have only ever got one or the other. I'm fine with the current Wonder costs myself.

2. I'd like to do that as well, but the tag that is supposed to do that apparently calls a function out of nowhere, ie does nothing. Not certain when/if that can be fixed.

 

[Sgtslick]

1. It is quite rare to get both stone and marble in the same city, I have only ever got one or the other. I'm fine with the current Wonder costs myself.

2. I'd like to do that as well, but the tag that is supposed to do that apparently calls a function out of nowhere, ie does nothing. Not certain when/if that can be fixed.

Stone seems to be everywhere and its easy to trade for marble, i got marble in my current game, asked for it early (late prehistoric) and it cost me nothing.. hows this deal sound?? um ok.. freeee

 

[Hydromancerx]

Stone seems to be everywhere and its easy to trade for marble, i got marble in my current game, asked for it early (late prehistoric) and it cost me nothing.. hows this deal sound?? um ok.. freeee

How did you trade it before Writing?

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

How did you trade it before Writing?

If you have it in your city screen then you can trade it. (Enabled = can be traded.) Writing is only for techs.

 

[robomani]

Or if he don't play with start as minor civ

 

[BlueGenie]

2. I'd like to do that as well, but the tag that is supposed to do that apparently calls a function out of nowhere, ie does nothing. Not certain when/if that can be fixed.

Just checked if the iResearchPercent tag worked in ErasInfo xml, and it does.
Setting that to 75 (or 50) for the Prehistoric Era effectively makes research cost that percentage of the real cost instead, so Prehistoric can move along a little faster.

Years passing would have to be changed too then though so not a quick fix, just a hotfix.

Cheers

 

[Sgtslick]

yeah no start as minors coz AI just sits in there city building 50 stone axemen and never build a tribe, although koshling might have fixed apparently.

 

[ls612]

Just checked if the iResearchPercent tag worked in ErasInfo xml, and it does.
Setting that to 75 (or 50) for the Prehistoric Era effectively makes research cost that percentage of the real cost instead, so Prehistoric can move along a little faster.

Years passing would have to be changed too then though so not a quick fix, just a hotfix.

Cheers

That's not how that tag works. It modifies the cost of ALL techs based on what era you start in. Since you start in C2C in the prehistoric era that change would mean that ALL techs, not just those in the prehistoric era, would be 50% cheaper.

There is another tag, something about BBAI tech cost, which is supposed to allow you to modify the costs of techs by era. However, AIAndy looked into that for me and found that that tag is non-functional. That leaves us with no way, save going into the TechInfos file, which would take forever, to changes the tech costs by era.

 

[BlueGenie]

BBAI does something. I have tried with having it both low and high. It seems to be that the number set is the percentage of your research you lose when researching something from that era. At least setting it to 100 left me with 1 tech per turn.

Seems like 100 is the highest count it uses but that it also adds up from previous eras in some way. (no, just rounds down)
iResearchPercent @ 50 (from Prehistoric), checked research times with my whooping 93/turn and then I modified the BBAI as
Pre-0 (as expected, half the costs so half the time to tech)
Ancient-25 (Sed Lifestyle went from 22 turns to 30, Writing from 28 to 37, an increase of 32-36%)
Classical-50 (Monarchy doubled with 34 turns to 73 turns, Aristocracy more so with 85 to 183 turns)
Med-75 (Ouch. Feud and Education is what I looked at, 202 turns to 1125 turns for Feud and 361 turns to 2009 turns for Education. Still somewhat in line with retaining 25% of your research, minimum quadrupling the time to tech, x5.6 to be more precise)
Ind-90 (Steampunk. 1283 turns to 1 tech per turn, or 93600 turns. Here's where I really felt the addition from previous ages BBAI setting.)

So I changed Medieval and later Eras to 50 BBAI to check while keeping the 0-25-50 from the first three eras.
As expected no change in those Eras but Feudalism went from 202 turns to 426 turns, Education from 361 to 760, and Steampunk from 1283 to 2530. No carry-on from previous eras then, 90 or higher BBAI is just too much when one has less than 100 tech per turn. *laugh* Is probably why 75 seemed so high too, it drops fractions after modifying the research you get to keep.

There, a quick and dirty fix for the times to research even if not for the base cost of the technologies themselves.
Of course, rather than setting 50 iResearch from Prehistory you can set it at 100 and half the SpeedInfo research values instead. That way it's uniform even if starting in a different era than Prehistory.

Cheers

 

[Sgtslick]

can u rewrite what your saying and simplify it a bit, i don't really get it.

 

[BlueGenie]

Not sure...
Let's see, there's two tags that concern Research Rates.
iResearchPercent is the first and changes the basic cost of all technologies and affects the whole tree but only if you start in the Era it's modified for. It's set in percent so setting it as 50 means all research costs are halved.
The BBAI tag iTechCostModifier works per Era, regardless of what Era you start in. It also works in percent (though seems to be changeable by modifying the TechDiffusion file, I've not played around with that though) but instead of changing the cost of technologies it reduces the modified amount of beakers you have per turn. 10 would be -10% research rate, 50 would be -50% research rate.

With the changed workings of Speed in Eternity and Snail research costs have been increased but I thought Prehistoric and Ancient Eras went a little slow. As there is no way to change the cost of technologies for just one Era I devised a work around.

The changes I wrote half the cost for all technologies.
Prehistoric thus takes half the time.
Ancient I set the BBAI tag to 25, thus reducing the research rate by 25%. A little faster than what was set originally but not much as half cost and 25% reduced research rate ends up at 33% faster than original (100 turns would be 66.67 turns).
Classical, and all Eras after that, I set the BBAI tag to 50, reducing research rate by 50%. This ends up being no change, techs cost half as much but take twice as long to research.

That's as simple as I can make it...

Cheers

 

[Cosmic Fox]

All for it! I was blaming the gold reduction from the new Crime additions. Which may still be part of "My" problem with too little gold in the game.

JosEPh

Those opinions are spot on, keep them coming please, you and I feel nearly exactly the same

The gold issue is only a problem if you don't have time to do empire building. I tend to play Gigantic maps with 14+ land masses and medium islands, I always have a good quantity of gold once I use Patrician and Monarchy Civics (others I use as well that give me a bump, however this is NOT during wartime.

Off Topic: I haven't finished a single C2C game yet due to old computer being under powered for the Mod. My new i5 quadcore overclocked @ 4.4 ghz 8 gb of ram Nvidia 470 gtx handles it wonderfully now.

Love everyone comments, they help to improve this incredible mod. One of the best teams I have ever seen I want to say, you are the heart of the great modding community we have. I have been playing since civ 1, I have a star wars account sitting there whilst I play C2C

 

[Sgtslick]

Not sure...
Let's see, there's two tags that concern Research Rates.
iResearchPercent is the first and changes the basic cost of all technologies and affects the whole tree but only if you start in the Era it's modified for. It's set in percent so setting it as 50 means all research costs are halved.
The BBAI tag iTechCostModifier works per Era, regardless of what Era you start in. It also works in percent (though seems to be changeable by modifying the TechDiffusion file, I've not played around with that though) but instead of changing the cost of technologies it reduces the modified amount of beakers you have per turn. 10 would be -10% research rate, 50 would be -50% research rate.

With the changed workings of Speed in Eternity and Snail research costs have been increased but I thought Prehistoric and Ancient Eras went a little slow. As there is no way to change the cost of technologies for just one Era I devised a work around.

The changes I wrote half the cost for all technologies.
Prehistoric thus takes half the time.
Ancient I set the BBAI tag to 25, thus reducing the research rate by 25%. A little faster than what was set originally but not much as half cost and 25% reduced research rate ends up at 33% faster than original (100 turns would be 66.67 turns).
Classical, and all Eras after that, I set the BBAI tag to 50, reducing research rate by 50%. This ends up being no change, techs cost half as much but take twice as long to research.

That's as simple as I can make it...

Cheers

Thanks so much

I kinda understood what you were saying originally but was hard to see how you actually did the workaround.. well for me anyway
Ill definately use this workaround in my next game, im already half way through ancient now as mongols on GEM immortal snail, bloody tough! Had to cheat a little bit coz had a revolution that took a 1/3rd of my 9 cities and I thought it was totally unfair how the revolutionaries spawed out of no-where AND moved in the same turn, so they kept spawning and killing all my workers, so i would delete them and give myself the workers back
China died to barbs like 10 turns into the game and i've totally killed korea now so i got all of china and korea yum yum..
I have a negative income on 10% science tho

 

[JosEPh_II]

@Joseph: I don't think my changes were supposed to rescue your old savegame, any inflation that was already there will remain unfortunately.

To try my new numbers, you'll need to start a new game.

Current game my Civic upkeep is 2/3rds what it had been before. Inflation is just a smidgeon over 50% of the previous levels I reported.

The only thing that I see right now on Epic is that the game years per turn once you hit Medieval Era need to be adjusted/shortened to give more turns for the Ren and Ind. Era in particular. Current game is 1916AD and just researched Navigation and Economics. I'm still in the Ren Era too. The current game years to turn rate is 6, iirc.

JosEPh

 

[ls612]

Current game my Civic upkeep is 2/3rds what it had been before. Inflation is just a smidgeon over 50% of the previous levels I reported.

The only thing that I see right now on Epic is that the game years per turn once you hit Medieval Era need to be adjusted/shortened to give more turns for the Ren and Ind. Era in particular. Current game is 1916AD and just researched Navigation and Economics. I'm still in the Ren Era too. The current game years to turn rate is 6, iirc.

JosEPh

Those numbers sound about right, how's your Budget Deficit and Research Slider?

I am going to (soonish) redo the dates for Epic, to more match the slower gamespeeds, so don't worry yet about being in the Rennaisance in 1916 AD.

 

[JosEPh_II]

I'm running 50% on research slider and 10% on Culture and Esp. Because of trade I have a decent 800+ gold/turn. But because I'm in a long protracted war with my neighbor my treasury is only a bit over 2000 gold (upgrades and hurry builds). If I wasn't at war I could be running research at 70%.

Sidenote: the AI is Loving all the new promotions! And this war has been one of the toughest I've had for sometime. Those Ribauldiquin he has with 4 1st Strike promos Plus 40% vs mounted has put a serious dent in my Muskets and Crussaires (sp)! ;P I'm still trying to figure out how he got that many 1st strikes as I can only get 2 for my Ribaulds. The new marksman promos have helped my cause.

JosEPh

 

[Hydromancerx]

Sidenote: the AI is Loving all the new promotions! And this war has been one of the toughest I've had for sometime. Those Ribauldiquin he has with 4 1st Strike promos Plus 40% vs mounted has put a serious dent in my Muskets and Crussaires (sp)! ;P I'm still trying to figure out how he got that many 1st strikes as I can only get 2 for my Ribaulds. The new marksman promos have helped my cause.

Would you say that the new promotions are a good thing or a bad thing?

Do you like having a more challenging game?