Spatzimaus
Mad Scientist
A bit, yes. Not too much change, because a fully developed city should have more or less the same bonuses and costs either way. I just hated how in the vanilla game, you had a grand total of three happiness buildings with tiny maintenance costs; build all three, and you were done with making a city self-sufficient, and everything beyond that was gravy (most notably the science and trade output). So by spreading the Happiness around across more buildings, it forces you to build more before a city is ready to go, which also encourages you to diversify a bit; even a "production" city would need a wider variety of constructions.
The main difference between the two options here is that A (the 4->3 change) would return more closely to the vanilla game's mechanics, where a conquered city can be ready to go with a minimal investment and so wouldn't slow down conquest. The B option takes the game even further in the other direction than it is now, where "assimilating" a conquered city takes a significant amount of time. This has a heavy economic component, in that you'd now be spending far more on building maintenance for a partially-developed city; the costs per building wouldn't be any different, but you'd need more buildings in place before a city could be considered self-sufficient. What previously could be done with three Happiness buildings now might take eight; sure, those eight all do other things as well, so you still come out ahead, but it costs more money.
The other economic things I'd be looking at:
> Removing the flat +2 from the Market and replacing it with +1 per cow, fish, or wheat (while this has the potential to be more than +2, it requires you to work the tiles, which becomes less common as the game progresses and you start shifting to a Specialist economy).
> Moving part of the gold output of the Mint to the Bank. So the Mint would be +2 per gold/silver instead of +3, but would get +1 happiness, while the Bank would get +1 gold per gold/silver/gems.
> I'm trying to rework the Planetary Transit System to have a much lower boost to trade route income (~10%) but reduce the maintenance cost of roads and railroads. Still working on that one, because route maintenance is a Policy thing.
> I still think that unit maintenance is too low, so I'll also be looking at ramping that up. The easiest way to do it would be to add a negative effect to the Palace, but I'm not sure how well that'll balance.
However, part of the bit about the new national wonders? With Hollywood, all Artists get +1G. (And with Wall Street, all Merchants get +1P, making them more desirable as well.) So you'd have a slightly increased cash flow there, but only if you use specialists instead of working tiles. And since Improvements have multiple tech yield increases in my mod, the chances are that that Artist gives you less gold than the tile you could have worked instead, so it'd actually lower income a bit on average.
Good. And remember, the Stock Exchange now generates Iron, so by the time you get to Tanks you should have plenty on hand even if your empire started in an iron-poor area. And one of the reasons I wanted to do this, actually, was City-States. When you're considering C-S allies, part of their appeal is which resources they'll give you. What's the point of having an ally give you Iron if it stopped being useful a millenium earlier? Horses, at least, are useful for Cavalry, which are still useful as a unit well after iron units go obsolete.
With Tanks, I really just wanted to stop the mad explosion of power when you unlock them. Among other things, I'm thinking of switching the upgrade chains so that Cavalry upgrades to the Helicopter instead of to the Tank. (That's actually how I'd had it in my mod before the December patch made Cavalry upgradeable.) That way, once you unlock Tanks you're still starting fresh, with brand-new units with low XP, and that takes time to shift the balance of power. I'm still looking into the promotions on these; the biggest problem seems to be the "can move after attacking" promotion, which cavalry get but the later units don't.
Let's clarify: I'm talking about a half-dozen national wonders in the Industrial or Renaissance, and they wouldn't have a MaxStartEra setting. So even if you started in the Digital age instead of my recommended Industrial/Nuclear start, you'd still have these available to build, just like how you can build a Statue of Liberty and such for starts in those eras.
It's like the Combat Engineer; those unlock way back at Dynamite, and would really fit better into the Balance mod. But I had to keep them in the Content mod because otherwise I couldn't have them upgrade to the Labor Mech correctly. So they still feel synonymous with the future content, despite unlocking several eras earlier.
If I move these Wonders to the Balance mod, then there are some effects I just won't be able to tie to them. (Notably the resource creation, but also a few other things like the espionage would either require duplicating the Lua or finding some other method.) The question really is, for those people who only use one of my two mods and not the other, would it throw things off to have a few more of these sorts of "throwback" changes in the Content mod?
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