[GS] Civ Balance

[acluewithout]

How do you think we’re doing with Civ balance?

I think post GS, most of the Civs are actually pretty well balanced. Yeah, some are better than others, but most are actually really solid and fun, and I like how Civ balanced is asymmetrical. It’s really well done more or less.

To me, only Maori feel OP, and they’re a bit of a special case anyway (they’re all about the crazy start). My issue with the Maori is that, they’re so powerful, their ocean start doesn’t seems as big of a hindrance as it should be.

Are there any actual trash tier Civs? Like actually “trash”. Maybe Norway. Spain, Egypt and Georgia actually all feel okay to me now. Yes, they’re “weaker” Civs, but they’re actually all kinda cool.

Everyone knows how I feel about England, so I’ll (mostly) skip them. But although maybe they’re still not quite right, I feel like they’re going on the right direction.

I feel like there are still a bunch of Civs which are good, but maybe held back by relying on mechanics that are undercooked. Particularly, any Civs that tend towards IZs, or Walls or Forts, or Colonialism.

Coastal Civs are actually pretty good now, as are tall Civs. These Civs are maybe in the weaker end of the spectrum, but the changes to governors, harbours and trade make all of these Civs at least good.

Any Civs using Faith (except Norway) or Diplomacy / City States have got really good via RnF and GS. Good work Greece and France.

There’s also maybe a few UA or LA that sort of don’t work, even if the Civ overall is fine. Gilgabro’s Allies thing just sucks. India’s Dharma ... I think it’s actually good, because India is all about Faith not Religion, but I get that it’s an odd ability.

I do think there are also some secretly awesome Civs now (even if awesome just means fun). Specifically, Egypt, Spain, Georgia, Khmer, India.

Thoughts? Any standouts? Any laggards?

 

[bengalryan9]

Are there any actual trash tier Civs? Like actually “trash”. Maybe Norway. Spain, Egypt and Georgia actually all feel okay to me now. Yes, they’re “weaker” Civs, but they’re actually all kinda cool.

I'm sure people will say Canada, but I had fun with them.

 

[acluewithout]

Oh yeah! I forgot Canada!

Yeah. They sort of suck.

I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with Canada. But their abilities are just a collection of sort of bad or underwhelming decisions, which added together mean the whole of the civ is even less than the parts.

They maybe needed to be geared a bit more like Australia (better adjacency from Tundra) or Mali (Cities in Tundra are just better).

Building farms in tundra is an okay ability, but IRL Canada doesn’t have tundra farms; buying Tundra is not fun at any price; no surprise wars has more downsides than upsides, and honestly doesn’t make sense anyway; Mounties are poor as Canada’s only UI; and Diplomatic Favour feels all very passive and underwhelming given how the WC currently works. I guess Hokey Rings are okay?

 

[Victoria]

One issue is most people do ancient starts so ancient civs are stronger. Not a lot can be done about that.

Some abilities work all game against all units which make them quite strong.
Some civs have abilities that really gel nicely like Nubia while others are just a mash of things thrown together.

I have no real issue with different civ strengths as an SP player, I just have issue with things that just feel wrong historically.
Free English ships, what is that all about, certainly nothing to do with England ship building ability which was due to the Industrial Age and certainly unrelated to Pax Brittanica.

Different strength civs allow for a more interesting game as in what other civs are in it and if you play with a weak one yourself.

 

[acluewithout]

One issue is most people do ancient starts so ancient civs are stronger. Not a lot can be done about that.

Some abilities work all game against all units which make them quite strong.
Some civs have abilities that really gel nicely like Nubia while others are just a mash of things thrown together.

I have no real issue with different civ strengths as an SP player, I just have issue with things that just feel wrong historically.
Free English ships, what is that all about, certainly nothing to do with England ship building ability which was due to the Industrial Age and certainly unrelated to Pax Brittanica.

Different strength civs allow for a more interesting game as in what other civs are in it and if you play with a weak one yourself.

Agreed. Particularly on England.

I think another thing too is that it takes some of is a little time to figure out how to play some Civs. eg for me, I liked India a lot more once I realised they're not really about getting a religion. And it took me ages to realise Norway is about exploring and pillaging not conquest (which, in hindsight, was obvious), after which I started having a ball. Moreso after I realised Norway don't need Harbours (again, obvious in hindsight).

I think a few Civs also got introduced a little before all the mechanics they needed got introduced. Georgia makes more sense with Suzerain giving DF. And Khmer work better with Aqueducts being more useful (marginally) and Pingala.

I started this thread after reading the latest tier ranking thread. Reading the posts, it just feels most Civs are "okay" in terms of balance and fun other than maybe Canada (lame) and Maori (crazy powerful, although I admit I haven't played them).

 

[Victoria]

crazy powerful, although I admit I haven't played them).

They are not the best civ out there or people would say so. They are quite flexible and definitely S rank but certainly the likes of Nubia overshadow them.

 

[Pietato]

Egypt sucks AND is boring.

 

[Arent11]

(1) Unique units are inherently unbalancing. They are active for a short time period, in which they give you an edge, and inactive before and afterwards.
(2) Early unique units are much more valuable than late ones.
(3) Most traits are conditional & highly exploitative. I'm sure Firaxis wanted to do something exciting, but let's face it: Giving someone +20% combat is much easier to balance than "you get a worker if you defeat a unit". Hell, that is unbalanced already on paper.
(4) Giving 4-8 traits, unique units, special abilities etc. per civ is probably too much. It results in a lot of obvious 'filler' abilities the designers just create to give a civ 'something' to fill the spot
(5) The agenda system just frustrates people. Most people simply ignore it & then wonder why their long term friend suddenly declares war on them.

 

[Disgustipated]

buying Tundra is not fun at any price; no surprise wars has more downsides than upsides,

Very true the tundra buying ability is mostly crap. The only reason you would ever want to buy tundra is if there is a resource on it, or late game you want enough area to make national parks. They truly are a late game civ in all aspects. The surprise wars I wouldn't say has more downsides than upsides. On higher levels it could protect you somewhat, and at least give you time to get established.

Egypt sucks AND is boring.

I feel they are better in GS. I quite enjoyed my game with them. Their uu is strong, and can take quite a bit of land. You never have to worry about placing districts on flood plains, and you should feel free to put them there. As a vanilla civ they are less pronounced than GS civs, but comparing to other vanilla civs I wouldn't say they are boring.

 

[Sostratus]

Giving 4-8 traits, unique units, special abilities etc. per civ is probably too much. It results in a lot of obvious 'filler' abilities the designers just create to give a civ 'something' to fill the spot

A lot of people, myself included, like that they have really made the civs more unique in 6.
It's not that you can't balance this. You just need to be more active about doing it. How many civs have ever been tweaked after release? England (put through the shredder) and Scythia (reduced heal on kill) and Aussie (reduced the appeal bonus for districts) are the only ones that come to mind.
But I think they should at least use their quarterly patch cycle to do moderate balance changes. Some part of me suspects that someone at FXS thinks that if they change something they've released, that somehow they are admitting that they messed up or something. (Guys, that's not true! We all know balance is a difficult and moving target! Most fans love insight into your thoughts on game balance!)

I do think the best thing they could do would be to sit down over at HQ and write down:
-what difficulty range should the civ balance be targeted at? (Prince only? Through emperor? Etc)
-what map and mode should the civ balance be targeted at? (Small continents? Does MP matter?)
-If we had a purely vanilla civ, what is the rough bonus they would need to match the power of the real civs in the game? +25% production? 2 wildcard slots? Something to anchor the balance process.
-how much spread should we allow for power budgets on the civs? If the average bonus is 5 units, should we target 4-6? 3-7? Creates boundaries for the balance process.
-Is there any current civ(s) we feel currently hit our vision of balance right on the nose?

And then they take the bold step of communicating this to the playerbase. The biggest issue is they don't have a way to gather mass levels of data on player games. Unlike a competitive game where they could datamine their servers etc.
It gets easier over time as more and more things are brought in line.

 

[whacker]

I don`t think Maori are as consistently strong as some people claim them to be. They surely got a ton of potential if you get lucky scouting a good starting positon fast, or replay a map, but more often i find myself cruising through the ocean for 10 turns only finding other civs or cs and then settling on a mediocre spot. On paper they are very good but the play much less reliably strong than the top tier civs. Also the inability to place districs where i want them to be freaks me out.
In my oppinion the GS civs are mostly well designed and fun/distinct to play, but none of them is as reliably strong or even better than the likes of Nubia, Mongols, Aztec, Korea, Greece and some others.

 

[Socrates99]

I don`t think Maori are as consistently strong as some people claim them to be. They surely got a ton of potential if you get lucky scouting a good starting positon fast, or replay a map, but more often i find myself cruising through the ocean for 10 turns only finding other civs or cs and then settling on a mediocre spot. On paper they are very good but the play much less reliably strong than the top tier civs. Also the inability to place districs where i want them to be freaks me out.
In my oppinion the GS civs are mostly well designed and fun/distinct to play, but none of them is as reliably strong or even better than the likes of Nubia, Mongols, Aztec, Korea, Greece and some others.

Found myself continually starting at the poles with them. It might not be so bad now that I've added the reindeer mod but at the time I didn't have it and tundra starts with Kupe just seem so wrong.

 

[AsparustheSaiyan]

China is a pretty strange case since they get better every time new early wonders are released of buffed in some way (great library.) So in R&F they got better and once again a little bit in GS. The crouching tiger and great wall still suck but they are in a much better place than they were in vanilla.

All faith civs benefitted more in GS. Russia, Georgia, Indonesia etc etc. So it's great to see faith doing even more.

Canada sucks though as sad as I am to say since I like civs that use tundra.

 

[The googles do nothing]

Thoughts? Any standouts? Any laggards?

Thoughts? Resources have made the domination strength of civ's more map dependent. Civ's with Resources-less UU's are much better, or at least much better on average. Zeus has given us the god killer and it's iron, or niter, or coal, or aluminum, or uranium.

I don't feel like weather events really change balance much. Egypt got better with floodplains, blizzards helped Russia go from strong to slightly stronger and made Canada even more of a Shark sandwich.

The WC is too random to me to really effect the balance between civs. I'm still not sure if the vote for things to be +100% cost means it costs more of less. Most of the votes do synergize with other strategies, such as monumentality with the reduced faith costs. It might be worth some investigation to see if any of the votes are consistently tied with other mechanics.

Standouts? Hungary and Canada. I've seen people mention every other civ as their favorite but these two.

Laggards: Norway. Every single ability they have someone else has a better version of.

 

[whacker]

China is a pretty strange case since they get better every time new early wonders are released of buffed in some way (great library.) So in R&F they got better and once again a little bit in GS. The crouching tiger and great wall still suck but they are in a much better place than they were in vanilla.

100% agreed. China is my favourite civ at the moment. The flexibility they have in the early game is unmatched and that is when games are most fun, at least for me. If they just had a decent UB....

 

[Jewelrunna]

I think Firaxis have done good work balancing the top tiers, but the lower tiers are much worse. There's not too much of a gap between Germany and say, Arabia, but there's a massive gap between America and France. The high tiers all have really powerful tools to play with that differentiate them from each other; despite that, they're not grossly stronger than each other. It's kind of the scenario where "if everyone is broken, no one is".

Comparing that to the weaker Civs, and those poor souls just feel anemic. France, since we're using them as an example, just lacks the tools to seriously compete. Their unique unit has to be raw built (doesn't upgrade from anything) and shows up late in the game, their orientation towards spies isn't all that strong (though the +3 combat strength from the level of visibility is good), and the chateau is just terrible. Eleanor's ability nor Grand Tour are good enough to salvage the Civ. Also, it's worth noting that outside of that +3 combat strength through Cat, they have no bonuses before the Medieval Era.

Just compare all of that above to what the Maori get, and you see why the bottom tiers are not in a good place. And it's insulting how they manage to keep making England worse.

 

[Socrates99]

Thoughts? Resources have made the domination strength of civ's more map dependent. Civ's with Resources-less UU's are much better, or at least much better on average. Zeus has given us the god killer and it's iron, or niter, or coal, or aluminum, or uranium.

I don't feel like weather events really change balance much. Egypt got better with floodplains, blizzards helped Russia go from strong to slightly stronger and made Canada even more of a Shark sandwich.

The WC is too random to me to really effect the balance between civs. I'm still not sure if the vote for things to be +100% cost means it costs more of less. Most of the votes do synergize with other strategies, such as monumentality with the reduced faith costs. It might be worth some investigation to see if any of the votes are consistently tied with other mechanics.

Standouts? Hungary and Canada. I've seen people mention every other civ as their favorite but these two.

Laggards: Norway. Every single ability they have someone else has a better version of.

Hungary is extremely powerful. I'm playing my easiest deity game of all time with Hungary right now. Prioritize gold and get Amani puppeteer then it gets really easy to place an envoy drop her in, levy the military and move her on to the next CS. Just crushing this map.

 

[acluewithout]

I mostly like where France is power-wise. But yes, the Cheteau needs a small buff and the UU ... well, I'm not sure what it's meant to be used for? Defensively? But late, and why the GG points? Offensively? But I'll likely have already conquered my continent by the time I get it? Rush the UU and then go on the offensive? But I have to hard build it, so how does that work?

Norway felt okay with the buff to Beserkers. And making MT more important and buffing Pikes helps. But yeah, they feel flat with Phoenecia and Maori in the game.

 

[Leucarum]

When you are talking about secretly awesome civs, I feel like the most underrated civ award should go to the Mapuche. Their UI lets them get an early culture boost which is often on a par with Rome and +10 combat strength versus basically all your enemies on the higher difficulties is pretty damn good... their loyalty mechanics are best forgotten about but Lautaro is one of my favourite leaders...

Regardless of power my favourite civ is the weakest by far. I love how Canada allows you to be a passive aggressive jackass to your neighbours... but the starts they get where they have all flat tundra tiles and no useful resources are double plus crap.

 

[Pietato]

But yes, the Cheteau needs a small buff

Large.