Current v1.13 Development Discussion

[youtien]

I thought it to be an AI-only feature, but you know what, now that you mention it, there's absolutely no reason why it shouldn't apply to the human player as well.

I agree that all UHVs are on a too tight schedule, so I would say that for players it should only apply after the deadlines for the 3rd UHV have passed.

...

On the matter of the rice, I agree that the UHVs that require "make this the largest city on the world" are extremely annoying and should be changed. I simply stopped trying the historical victories for Cordoba and the Aztecs because of that. An option would be to have the UHV be "reach this or that size by this date", but I would still vote to change them altogether to some other thing.

Also, this kind of UHV discourages player to found ahistorical capital. I always want to try other spots than Paris or Berlin, but that means I have to give up UHV.

 

[Arizael]

It was mainly intended not to penalize cities founded on islands that have next to no spots without a resource (which is why it still applies to small islands).

It was never meant to open up new overpowered city spots, which was exploited by players to an unexpected degree. Furthermore, people were starting to request placing resources on historical city locations (like spawn points) because those tiles were not competitive anymore. They were also very advantageous in the early game because they allowed extra yields from the start without spending time on training workers and building improvements.

The fact that founding on a resource constitutes a loss constrains player choices of viable city spots which makes it easier to balance city locations with lots of locations without creating a super city spot. Keeping the rule would have required me to rearrange resources almost everywhere on the world under these more difficult circumstances.

Since the consequences of the rule were never intended to apply to most cities in the game in the first place, I decided it was the preferable solution to remove it again.

Well the immediate yield boost was definitly quite overpowered. On the other hand it saved a lot of headaches when settling areas where precious high yields tiles would either be wasted, or the cities would have huge overlap (i.e. Egypt, Italy, Ethiopia or my personnal nightmare - Central Europe).

I believe that some sort of compromise would be best here. Perhaps the bonus should be available only after special worker action in the city, that would consume the worker. Also it could provide less yield than when improved normaly.

 

[Leoreth]

Well the immediate yield boost was definitly quite overpowered. On the other hand it saved a lot of headaches when settling areas where precious high yields tiles would either be wasted, or the cities would have huge overlap (i.e. Egypt, Italy, Ethiopia or my personnal nightmare - Central Europe).

I believe that some sort of compromise would be best here. Perhaps the bonus should be available only after special worker action in the city, that would consume the worker. Also it could provide less yield than when improved normaly.

Just live with the city overlap. The thing you dislike is exactly the thing I want to encourage.

 

[ales_]

I don't know if you watch Jeopardy at all, ales, but if you followed Arthur Chu's winning streak, resource denial is extremely powerful and a winning strat.
He would hunt for Daily Doubles even if he wasn't strong in the subject and lose $5 guessing wrong, which he knew he would do, just to make sure it didn't fall in his opponents' hands.

I even don't know what it is. Yes, I haven't thought about denying. Then, as Leoreth said, check both players' ability to build it.

- adjusted some starting territory in the 1700 AD scenario

For example?

 

[Tomorrow's Dawn]

I thought it to be an AI-only feature, but you know what, now that you mention it, there's absolutely no reason why it shouldn't apply to the human player as well.

Okay? Apart from not having a good reason to do so, that's just asinine and you know it.
Do you have any idea how high inflation scales for you if you're playing China or India on 3000BC? To deal with recession on top of that?
I know you said before that you didn't play to win, but the rest of us here still very much care about doing so.

On the matter of the rice, I agree that the UHVs that require "make this the largest city on the world" are extremely annoying and should be changed. I simply stopped trying the historical victories for Cordoba and the Aztecs because of that. An option would be to have the UHV be "reach this or that size by this date", but I would still vote to change them altogether to some other thing.

Exactly what I mean. Having the Moors and Aztecs swap over to "Reach Size X" saves a lot of headaches and certainly a lot of time spent rerolling starts.

So here's the problem:

The game is designed in a way where cities clump together.
I understand you (Leoreth) have designed this with purpose in mind; you want to see historical cities in places and you don't care if it goes against optimized city placement.
I can actually get behind that, but this concept is tied to many others and herein lies the problem. Civs rebirth and respawn based on three factors:

-Cutoff dates; certain civs cannot respawn before or after a certain time period.
-Guaranteed rebirths; Russia, China, Egypt, Iran are all parts of this.
-Number of cities in their cores, razing to one city stops respawning

Here's the conundrum. A player who wants to stay in line (as I experimented with) with your ideal style of play is screwed (keeping tight cities, achieving UHV).
You can't encourage a certain line of gamestyle without making sure it's adequately supported.
As Japan, I conquered China, didn't raze any cities and hoped to capitulate them so I could:

A. Keep with the encouraged plan. I did not raze any cities to save my stability.
B. Fulfill UHV with a minimum of pain without China respawning

So, case in point, there's one aspect of the Japanese and Prussian UHVs that needs to be re-examined because it intersects with these concepts. The conquest portion.
Why is China so hard to capitulate? There's one of two things that happens when I conquer China.
1. I take most of their cities and leave them with a few peripheral ones (Shenyang, Chengdu) and make peace. I can't capitulate them, even if my war successes are great.
2a. Because they don't capitulate, they collapse and then rebirth, either taking many cities with them, or just taking Beijing, because I am Stable. This has the effect of culture choking Xian, which is a lose-lose because if I give up Xian, it culture chokes Kaifeng and Nanjing. And if I don't, I'm saddled with an awful city that can barely work any tiles. Denying the rebirth is not an option because the stack that they come back with is unapproachable; I would lose immediately because there's only so many Hammers to go around on Normal speed.
2b. I'd like to make a quick mention that this is why civs are so prone to collapse lately. The other biggest offender being that every civ seems to hate each other just for running Buddhism or something for a State Religion. Try it, you'll get a -9 different religion modifier against France or Spain and and rack up those Foreign penalties. Now multiply that by the number of Euro + Islamic civs alive. But back to the rebirth stacks; they take their starting armies and start a mass conquest against Indie cities, then promptly collapse again.
3. Even if I could capitulate them, they'd collapse anyway and come back again, resulting in #2. It's circular.
4. I lost stability permanently due to Overextension from taking Beijing and never got "refunded" when it flipped back to China on their respawn, meaning I slimmed my chances of winning even more.

Apply everything that was just said about the Japan-China situation and apply it to Prussia-Russia.
My reasoning is this. If I'm doing well enough that I'm winning all of my battles, it would be preferable to vassalize them in context of a system that would stabilize my vassal. That should be a reward for the player.

Tight City Placement In Conflict With Area Control UHVs:

Options:
1- Don't play for UHV
2a- Razing all cities but one in the Core, it screws over your stability and wastes a lot of time in doing this (waiting out raze penalties) but there's no upheavals to worry about.
2b- Keeping all/most cities in Core to save a bit more stability but you become vulnerable to rebirth/respawn
3. Don't play to win at all

Vassalizing:
-It's difficult to vassalize civs
-Even if you do vassalize a civ, they are not very stable, they collapse easily, leading to the 2b result

Tell me if I'm wrong, but I thought the 2b option was what was intended with the redesign of stability mechanics.
The biggest, most broken aspect of this currently is how the vassalization mechanics interact and intersect with the stability and respawn mechanics.

My suggested fixes:

War successes should be increased if your Power rating is lower than your targets.

Civilizations be made easier to peace vassal or capitulate as it was before. It's downright impossible in some cases now, like Russia, Mongolia or China. I can win all battles with no losses and they still wouldn't budge.

Multiple methodologies available to the player to inject Stability or manually stabilize a vassal; this may entail Spy missions and Diplomacy

More simple than above. Vassalized civilizations do not collapse. The master civilization serves as a guarantor of their existence.

Getting rid of the religious differences malus period. It's so disruptive and the primary catalyst for civilization collapses across the Old World.

Reduce the stack number that arrives on rebirth/respawn. Better yet, have some kind of concessionary option to give to the respawning civ. If China comes back and Mongolia is collapsed, let me offer to help them set up (lose some troops/Gold to them at my discretion) in Karakorum and they can live out as a civilization in exile. Alternatively, selecting a batch of cities a la Congress for them to settle/occupy. Or let them come back and take their cities in exchange for a vassalization arrangement. Anything other than the current system. I don't actually mind rebirthing civilizations, and they actually are already weak when they spawn from under an AI occupation,
but they need to be more fair with respect to how respawning mechanics and player occupation and the choices it imposes on a player work.

Retool stability (again). It's still possible to collapse civs or knock them down a peg via a tech trade.
It's tiring to still get hit with minor and moderate crises constantly for doing nothing other than playing the game normally,
or dealing with things I have no control over or would hurt me to deal with in that there's no winning play, such as religious maluses or Era based civics maluses.
I'm getting a little tired of seeing civs collapse all the time that I wasn't directly responsible for.

Remove Anarchy and change the Cristo Redentor effect if civics maluses aren't done away with.

Some of these are quite extreme, but I feel like the game has gotten to the point where every turn is loaded with methods to make sure you can't win the game.
I just feel that we're overdue with a re-examination of the difficulty and the barriers set in place for conducive play.
I can't imagine I'm the only one who thinks this. But I won't speak for everyone.
Feel free to disagree.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

About historical city placement, I suggest that tiles with fully grown towns receive a sign naming them as if they were a city. This way we could cut down on bunching cities closely together while still representing important historical cities.

 

[Leoreth]

New commit:
- AI will ignore the value of wonders in techs if they cannot be built
- Watermills receive +2 commerce with Electricity
- Lumber Mills become available with Guilds
- new Guilds civic effect: Medium upkeep, +1 gold per specialist, double production for Forge, Market, Grocer
- new Dynasticism effect: Low upkeep, +1 happiness per military unit up to a maximum of 4, +1 happiness from Palace
- new Theocracy effect: High upkeep, +2 happiness with state religion, double priest slots, +2 experience with state religion, +1 unhappiness from non-state religions

 

[Leoreth]

For example?

Mostly border adjustments in Europe for accuracy:
- Portugal receives more territory, in particular the full first ring around Lisbon
- more Russian territory around Kiev and Sankt-Peterburg at the expense of Poland
- more Polish territory at the expense of Germany in East Prussia
- more German territory at the expense of Austria in South Germany
- more Dutch territory at the expense in Germany to guarantee the full first ring for Amsterdam

So here's the problem:

[snip]

Sorry for cutting most of your post, but it's long and I'm tired.

The main thrust of the post seems to be against the stability system and respawns, which has little to do with city density. The only relation I can see is that razing most cities in a foreign core denies respawns.

This is a strategy to prevent respawns that I definitely do not want to encourage, which is why prohibitive raze penalties are a thing. Now if respawns are annoying and hard to deal with that is another issue, but it definitely should not be solved in terms of city density.

Furthermore, I have seen multiple games posted where people with fairly large empires (definitely in the ballpark of UHV Japan) were solid. In other words immune to foreign respawns. It seems that it's not that hard to stack bonuses in the Society and Economy columns to counter Expansion penalties, especially considering they are capped.

I accidentally already removed the part of your post, but I want to comment anyway: none of Russia, China or Egypt are scripted respawns. They are all dependent on the stability of the civ controlling their core. The only scripted respawns to date are Iran, Mexico and Colombia.

4. I lost stability permanently due to Overextension from taking Beijing and never got "refunded" when it flipped back to China on their respawn, meaning I slimmed my chances of winning even more.

What did you lose? A stability level? Or score in the advisor?

More simple than above. Vassalized civilizations do not collapse. The master civilization serves as a guarantor of their existence.

Provided they are not completely driven out of their core, that might be an option.

Getting rid of the religious differences malus period. It's so disruptive and the primary catalyst for civilization collapses across the Old World.

I was actually thinking about that in the context of buffing Japan. The effect could at least be limited to Abrahamic religions where those things mattered more. Will think about it when revisiting religions.

 

[Tomorrow's Dawn]

The main thrust of the post seems to be against the stability system and respawns, which has little to do with city density. The only relation I can see is that razing most cities in a foreign core denies respawns. This is a strategy to prevent respawns that I definitely do not want to encourage, which is why prohibitive raze penalties are a thing. Now if respawns are annoying and hard to deal with that is another issue, but it definitely should not be solved in terms of city density.

Actually, the crux of my post is that if you want to support city density and discourage the razing, vassalizing should be easier and vassal stability should be sturdier.

Furthermore, I have seen multiple games posted where people with fairly large empires (definitely in the ballpark of UHV Japan) were solid. In other words immune to foreign respawns. It seems that it's not that hard to stack bonuses in the Society and Economy columns to counter Expansion penalties, especially considering they are capped.

I am staying Solid/Stable over a long period of time, but I can't maintain that forever, especially not with the ridiculous Foreign penalties. Economy is iffy because it fluctuates more greatly, and it's something that I haven't been able to rely on since the overhaul started.

I accidentally already removed the part of your post, but I want to comment anyway: none of Russia, China or Egypt are scripted respawns. They are all dependent on the stability of the civ controlling their core. The only scripted respawns to date are Iran, Mexico and Colombia.

They respawn 100% of the time in all my games due to Mongolian and Arabian instability.
With Japan, by the time the Mongols collapse, it's difficult to maintain anything over Shaky, at least in my experience.

What did you lose? A stability level? Or score in the advisor?

Score in the advisor. If you are refunded for points as the population/ahistorical tiles goes down, it's not intuitively apparent.

 

[Leoreth]

That just means there hasn't been another check since then. The scores in the advisor only reflect the situation at the last check. When it is calculated again you won't receive any penalties for those cities anymore.

 

[Tomorrow's Dawn]

That just means there hasn't been another check since then. The scores in the advisor only reflect the situation at the last check. When it is calculated again you won't receive any penalties for those cities anymore.

Losing cities period still gives you a hit, doesn't it?

 

[Leoreth]

Usually, no.

There can be a hit if you lose many cities in a specific timeframe, but that's unrelated to your score.

 

[mrrandomplayer]

I kind of have to concur with Tomorrow's Dawn here. Before I took my break from CFC, I pretty much only played DoC as part of Civ 4. One of the biggest reasons why I left (and why I still don't play much DoC right now) is that it felt like a lose-lose regardless of how I tried to play. Whenever I tried to snowball like crazy as an ancient civilization (I'm gonna call these strats "unfair" strats for categorization purposes and because they operate on a different axis from UHVs and regular Civ 4) I just sputtered and died from stability because of the AI's inability to vassalize before collapsing. Because of this, I would have to either vassalize a civ when it had one or two non-core cities left (making them collapse soon after, even if I gave their core cities back to them) or I would just raze everything and be essentially walking on an unstable tightrope (get my pun???). If I try to play "fair" (ie keep strictly to historical context) I get screwed over by the stability system for not growing enough unless I'm playing as a European civ or America.

The point is that vassalization, which makes the most sense historically (in whatever historical context of the time, ie protectorates, tributary states, etc), is not an option due to the stubbornness of the AI and the frequency of them collapsing when they vassalize or respawning when your stability still plummets and you didn't raze their cities. I think there is a historical solution that's kind of a win-win for everyone:

1. Make civs much more likely to vassalize, especially during war but also during peace.
2. Make vassals unable to collapse as long as they control at least x/y of their core (I was thinking 1/2 or 2/3).

I also think being able to release a group of your cities as a vassal and/or with a huge relations boost (I think it was +10 in BTS) would certainly help the vassal system.

 

[LacsiraxAriscal]

About historical city placement, I suggest that tiles with fully grown towns receive a sign naming them as if they were a city. This way we could cut down on bunching cities closely together while still representing important historical cities.

The geography nut inside me loves this idea a lot.

As for the TD talk... I don't really play UHVs often so I can't comment, but I agree that vassals shouldn't be able to collapse. Annoying when you're running vassalage, and just doesn't make any sense to me - I'm upkeeping your empire, essentially holding up your government. I suppose you could argue it's like a revolution, but then idk. Especially now indies are harder to take back - my previous strategy was just to march in and claim the land myself.

 

[Shadow Warlord]

- new Guilds civic effect: Medium upkeep, +1 gold per specialist, double production for Forge, Market, Grocer

The new guilds effect is nice, but we still need to buff Mercantalism to keep guilds from being always preferred. Maybe double production speed for Banks & Lighthouses to boost local commerce?

 

[need my speed]

While we're at it, do away with the 'oh, you have an X amount of vassals, now we'll never ever become your vassal' thingy. It annoys me that it is literally impossible to vassalise every civilisation (well, unless you exterminate most of them... ).

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

Watermills receive +2 commerce with Electricity

:heavybreathing:

As much needed as that fix was, it still doesn't adress balance in the High Middle Ages.

With this new commit late Medieval improvement yields now look like this:

Farm: 1F1C
Lumbermill: 2H
Workshop: -1F2H
Watermill: 1H

The Lumbermill is twice as good as the Watermill, though I'll let that slide since at least it finally addresses the problem of chopping everything ASAP being the optimal strategy always and everywhere.

Still, getting back to my thought experiment of improving a given pair of tiles while staying food neutral:

Farm + Workshop: 2H1C
2 Watermills: 2H

This problem hasn't been solved. Granted, the difference isn't quite as big as it used to be, but Watermills still give a worse yield while taking longer to build. It was exactly for this reason, the late Medieval improvement balance, that I would have preferred if you had restored the Watermill's second commerce with something like Engineering rather than Electricity again.

One could of course make the point that Agrarianism is supposed to make Farms overpowered, but even without it Watermills would still be slightly worse because of the longer build time, and Watermills were used fairly often in Medieval Europe and I think the game should represent that.

Btw here's an unorthodox idea: Have Mercantilism make trade routes provide food and/or hammers along with commerce. Never again will it be called underpowered, I guarantee it.

 

[youtien]

Now guilds is even stronger than before.

 

[Shadow Warlord]

Now guilds is even stronger than before.

Well, maybe not so much. You lose the extra workshop hammer and it's actually high upkeep, not medium. But having double production speed for forge, market, and grocer is a real game changer.

 

[Tomorrow's Dawn]

Well, maybe not so much. You lose the extra workshop hammer and it's actually high upkeep, not medium. But having double production speed for forge, market, and grocer is a real game changer.

I agree, Markets & Grocers can often be a bit of a sink to build, and a Forge is a pretty critical improvement for any city, so I'd say the Guilds change more than makes up for the losses.
I almost never use Workshops anyway, unless I'm France or Prussia.