This makes no real sense. Toffer just reduced what many Civic could do. Not "scale up". And who was trying to limit them more? SO wanted complexity and I kept it. But not now as it's been reduced. Circle talk.
Sorry... it's hard to explain what I'm trying to say there. What I'm trying to say is that it is hard to reduce how much gold a player brings in because there are so many sources of gold. Therefore it can be helpful if players are getting too much gold income, to not just seek to reduce gold income so much as increase consistent gold expenses. Having a bit more visibility and functionality, including the ability to modify unit upkeep costs both individually for the unit and nationally for the player, gives us more options where overall balance is concerned, and generally speaking, the intent before and after these adjustments for many units is to make them more expensive, which will probably be a little disturbing if you're trying to seek a perfect balance through civic modifiers and upkeep factors where we start to swing the pendulum a bit too far the 'other way' and players start having to spend a lot more to field their armies so will need some more wiggle room for their budget by being a little more giving in civics, which in turn gives us the ability to make certain civic changes almost critical for the player to adopt so they can overcome the limits that the civics they have are giving them. Not that this is abnormal to what is already existing, but because it stands out and is more prominent, it makes the need to update civics more powerful at certain junctures, which can be a very good thing for gameplay because it puts more tension on when to take the anarchy hit and how you might strategize to be able to make those changes without taking that hit etc...
Anyhow, that's where I was going with what I thought was a more simple comment but it was confusing and this statement is probably too rambling to be of much help in sorting it out further. Ignore me if it helps.
And neither of you want to explain why free units based on population were removed? You only want to talk about cost.
This gets very technical into the programming and why this change was necessary. It's kinda hard to explain. Again, I wanted to make free units continue to be the measure we could work with in civics and traits, representing an average overall cost of a unit. A few others preferred it to be a simpler measure of just flat gold that would go towards unit upkeep support only. Certainly from a coding perspective, that was a bit easier to establish.
The main thing this whole project is about is giving us the ability to account for the cost of a unit on the unit itself, whereas it was not previously possible to do this. A promotion, for example, can modify the upkeep cost of that exact unit, which was not possible before, or rather, if it was, it was done through very fuzzy math which corrupted the 'free units' count.
You could give a unit definition an additional cost, but a given unit ingame could not account for its total nor have its total adjusted by modifiers or scaling factors because everything was purely being based on counts of units at the player level, with a secondary addendum count for additional costs and a vague attempt to make 'free units' maybe account for that extra cost, which it was doing poorly at best tbh. This all worked in Vanilla but was not advanced enough for C2C.
The math had become very skewy and hard to account for and report to the player in any meaningful sense, both individually on the unit and even trying to break it down for the player.
Free units had become the only way to account for some units individually being free themselves and this was making it very confusing for the player trying to account for how many free units they had from traits and civics because the free unit count was being added and subtracted to by things the player couldn't track.
In all reality, a free unit only ever meant a gold towards unit upkeep since unit upkeep in vanilla was based on the established cost per unit and a count of units - the cost being 1. The real difference would've been if we'd made each unit cost a base of 2 gold instead, which WAS vaguely possible to do in the globals but I don't know of any mod that ever did that.
Note: I COULD be a little wrong on some of this stuff and invite Toffer to correct me on anything I'm not expressing correctly.
I'm not going to get into another "war" over this, like what you both did to me last time. But your collective failure to include and discuss this with me is disturbing and in very bad taste and manners.
It was being discussed in numerous forum threads. I would expect team members to review all new forum posts in the C2C threads for what might be relevant to them because as we know a conversation on a pertinent subject can happen anywhere here. Yeah SOME discussion took place on discord but not all that much beforehand, mostly after. And a lot of times when you work on a project, you're kinda sorting it out as you go. He also made this in a branch, which although I'm bad at reviewing those things, it is how teams are supposed to be able to review each other's projects before they become part of the core. I'm still trying to get used to that myself and don't expect it of anyone. Still, I think the main discussions that brought this to the fore were in Pit's scenario thread and I thought you often followed conversations there...