Double down?

[Shiggs713]

yes, i always double down on 9, 10, or 11 if the dealer is showing a 4, 5, or 6.

More seriously, other than graphically, i see no problems with this, and it really would help balance things out more precisely if done right. And yes, its likely almost anything could be changed to decimals or halves as said, but its just a matter of your determination and skill, and likely patience for the source to be released.

 

[SamBC]

Now, I've not played as high as prince (warlord I think), just down to personal preference, but I am utterly certain that, although tooltips say the roads are 1 gold per turn per tile, they really aren't charging anywhere near that much. I've not bothered actually calculating it, mind, but I guess I could next time I load up my save...

 

[JohnnyW]

Now, I've not played as high as prince (warlord I think), just down to personal preference, but I am utterly certain that, although tooltips say the roads are 1 gold per turn per tile, they really aren't charging anywhere near that much. I've not bothered actually calculating it, mind, but I guess I could next time I load up my save...

Completed roads to cities from your capital grant you gold. 1+1.25*(non-capital-city pop) per turn. This can easily outweigh the cost of the road.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Now, I've not played as high as prince (warlord I think), just down to personal preference, but I am utterly certain that, although tooltips say the roads are 1 gold per turn per tile, they really aren't charging anywhere near that much. I've not bothered actually calculating it, mind, but I guess I could next time I load up my save...

Two things:
1> There are gold multipliers tied to difficulty, starting era, etc., so it's possible you're getting a discount. Try playing on Prince, that's the break-even difficulty (the one where the AI gets no bonuses or penalties). This is why most people I know play on King or higher; the AI needs something to make up for its inherent stupidity. Anyone who can't win on Prince really hasn't mastered the game's basic strategies yet. (Not an insult, learning a game takes time. Just that once you're comfortable with the game, the only reason you'd ever go below Prince would be to play a handicap game, like OCC.)
2> Hexes outside your borders don't cost you any upkeep. So if you've got two cities 10 hexes away from each other, each with a radius of 3, then you'll be paying 6 gpt instead of 10 for a road connecting them. This isn't really an abuse; roads outside your borders can be used by anyone, including invaders, while those inside the border can only be used by you and your allies.
There's also a policy that reduces road maintenance, but I'm sure you can spot that one. But I'm guessing #2 is the real issue here.

 

[SamBC]

Indeed, 2 sounds like it. I was thinking based on information that was mentioned before launch, whereby roads that were involved in a route between your cities would always be charged to you.

I rather expect I can play and win on Prince, just feel no need to try, because I don't play games like Civ for a challenge - I play games that have some degree of twitch for challenge (because that's more of a challenge for me), and nice, long, developmental games for relaxation. There are enough mental challenges in my job/s and other hobbies, that's not what I play computer games for, generally; puzzles are an exception, but that's because there's not generally a competition or anything, just me versus the puzzle.

That said, I don't want it too easy - playing on settler is just silly; I don't want to be at serious risk of losing, but I also want to have to think a little. Warlord is where I'm comfortable and enjoy it.

 

[Spatzimaus]

I rather expect I can play and win on Prince, just feel no need to try, because I don't play games like Civ for a challenge

The problem is that Civ has a "turnover point". There'll be some point in the game where you realize that the game is totally in hand, and that it's all just mopping up from there on out. Maybe you have a 10-tech lead over everyone else and are throwing Tanks at their Musketmen for an easy conquest victory, maybe you're now getting every single Wonder first and have every single city-state as your ally for when you get the United Nations. When you hit that point, the game just becomes BORING. It's not just the lack of challenge, it's also that the core gameplay is so repetitive that you have little motivation to keep playing until the victory conditions you prefer begin to unlock; there becomes very little you do on any given turn. (It's more like playing SimCity; in the early game you face real problems, but once you get going it's purely a question of how much money you earn each year/turn and how much that lets you expand, and you spend most of your time just waiting for something to happen. While this can be a relaxing way to pass the time, it's not really a "game" at that point.)

A big part of my own modding has been to make the competitive phase of the game last longer; this doesn't mean making the game HARDER, in that you're now getting beaten to the victory conditions, just that the AIs won't fall so far behind a good player. And again, calling Prince a "challenge" isn't really appropriate, because while the percentages and such are balanced, the AI is far dumber than any human player. I haven't felt truly challenged on Prince in months; in my last Prince test game for my own mod, I had a 30-tech lead over my closest competitor, and that was WITH the balance changes I'd made. In a different Prince game I had one AI that managed to stay with me technologically pretty well (only 7-8 techs behind), but was so inferior militarily that it took me two turns to conquer their entire empire once I got around to it.

I'm not saying to play on Deity. Just that I think they should have made Prince the default difficulty instead of Chieftain. Strangely, although there's an entry in GlobalDefines.xml that looks like it sets the default difficulty, it doesn't seem to actually do it when I try playing a custom game.

 

[alpaca]

2> Hexes outside your borders don't cost you any upkeep. So if you've got two cities 10 hexes away from each other, each with a radius of 3, then you'll be paying 6 gpt instead of 10 for a road connecting them. This isn't really an abuse; roads outside your borders can be used by anyone, including invaders, while those inside the border can only be used by you and your allies.
There's also a policy that reduces road maintenance, but I'm sure you can spot that one. But I'm guessing #2 is the real issue here.

Actually, they do. But only if you built them.

 

[Thalassicus]

They could have made it a half gold, they did for unit maintenance. They didn't choose to, however.

Marketing decision?

I think a lot of reluctance to use fractions and decimals comes from that.

Hexes outside your borders don't cost you any upkeep.

I haven't tested this, but did read a while back that whoever built a road in neutral territory is the one who gets charged.

Also, everyone has different preferences about difficulty settings, there's nothing wrong with using one over another. The game is entertainment, after all.

 

[alpaca]

Marketing decision?

I think a lot of reluctance to use fractions and decimals comes from that.

I wouldn't say marketing as much as aesthetics. Certain numbers just feel more natural than others, which is why they're called natural numbers

I don't know if any psychological data has been collected on the issue but it's like I wrote above: Humans don't work very well intuitively with more than 2 or 3 significant digits (and the only third digit really allowed is 5). If you see 2147, you mentally round to 2150, if you see 2120 you round to 2100. I reckon that order of approximation has been sufficient enough during our evolution. It doesn't really matter if I see about a hundred buffalos, 76, or 119, it's a hell of a lot of meat anyways - so seeing about a hundred is good enough an approximation and certainly "cheaper" in brainpower than seeing exactly 119. On the other hand, it makes a big difference if there are four or five lions, which is why we can usually distinguish between the two without counting.

 

[Decimatus]

I wouldn't say marketing as much as aesthetics. Certain numbers just feel more natural than others, which is why they're called natural numbers

I don't know if any psychological data has been collected on the issue but it's like I wrote above: Humans don't work very well intuitively with more than 2 or 3 significant digits (and the only third digit really allowed is 5). If you see 2147, you mentally round to 2150, if you see 2120 you round to 2100. I reckon that order of approximation has been sufficient enough during our evolution. It doesn't really matter if I see about a hundred buffalos, 76, or 119, it's a hell of a lot of meat anyways - so seeing about a hundred is good enough an approximation and certainly "cheaper" in brainpower than seeing exactly 119. On the other hand, it makes a big difference if there are four or five lions, which is why we can usually distinguish between the two without counting.

This one reason why I use CtP's base 5 yields. Once you get used to the concept, it is easier on the brain. Other than that, large numbers suit empires better.

 

[Sneaks]

I have figured out the solution to this, though it is not the prettiest.

Basically, first you need to determine what you want the first 5 non-numbered icons to be, as well as the next 6 written numbers (6-11 in vanilla). In yieldatlas.dds, simply replace those images with those that you want. So, for Dec, he would probably let 1-5 stay the same, with each icon representing 5, then changing the numbers to 30-55, and the star meaning 60+.

Once that is set, open up YieldIconManager.lua

Scroll down to SetYieldIcon function and add this before the if statement:

if( yieldType ~= 4 ) then
amount = (amount/5)
end

Once you save the lua and the dds (making sure both are VFS true) I think this should fix it.

 

[Thalassicus]

At least visually, it would be easy to duplicate the icons up to 10 using the centuries-old pips scheme of playing cards. Most of the work would be the programmatic side of things.

 

[qwerty25]

At least visually, it would be easy to duplicate the icons up to 10 using the centuries-old pips scheme of playing cards. Most of the work would be the programmatic side of things.

Or you could change the color of the icons when goes above 5. Example 3 bread is brown, 8 bread only shows 3 but is dark brown.