Feedback for unballencing mod

[sorcdk]

I have just set up a small personal civ-altering mod for vikings, mainly intended to make the more powerfull, as a sort of inverse handicap for trying out higher difficulties than normal.
I would like to have some feedback on how powerfull what I ended up with is, such a measure for how many (if any) levels of difficulty this would allow one to go higher than normal. I would also like some feedback on which aspects have the larger influence (and I therefore should be carefull when adjusting), and which of them have negitible effect (and therefor easily can have significant changes on them).

The mod affects 2 things unique to the viking civilization/only leader (Ragnar): It improves the UB trading post (lighthouse), and gives an extra special trait to the leader (mainly focused on more promotions). I am mainly interested in the effect of the UB changes, and when evaluating the handicap level it is the main part I am interested in getting feedback for, though a sperate evaluation including the extra trait is also welcome.

The UB has been changed to have the following effects:
production cost: 10 (normal speed, 60 is normal for lighthouse)
requires cost: no (normal lighthouse do)
yields: +1 food, +1 production, +1 commerce
yield bonus on sea tiles: +1 food, +1 production
food kept: +10%
maintaince: -25%
trade modifier: +50%
experiance bonus: 1
free promotion: navigation 1 (the normal bonus for trading post)
modifiers to all cities: 1% food, 1% production, 1% commerce, 1% science, 1% gold, 1% culture, 1% espionage, 1% defense, 1% great people points
other global modifiers: 1% golden age length, 1% worker speed, 1% great general points

It mainly have the effect of having Dike and courthouse/barrack UB rolled into it. The production cost and base yeilds is to make it behave like the Recycling Tanks from SMAC, so you want to build it in every city (and get the global stacking bonuses) without necessarily hurting your economy.

The extra trait is very simple:
promotion exp cost: -95%
free promotion: leadership to all relevant (mainly enables some other promotions)
max anarchy: 0 turns (same as spiritual)

Before you go up in arms over the ridiculous promotion exp cost, remember that promotions costs are quadratic, specifically 1 + level^2, so you "only" end up with about 4.5 times as many promotions.

 

[f1rpo]

The flat (tile) yield increases strike me as the most consequential because they provide a relatively big boost in the crucial early game. Some of the 1% modifiers may get lost through rounding.

As for difficulty levels, the AI Auto Play mod could be helpful. Unfortunately, when the AI assumes control of the human civ, a mixture of the human player's difficulty level and Noble difficulty gets used. So one can't just pick the Vikings as the human civ on Emperor difficulty and then see how they fare on Auto Play. Still, an Auto Play game on Noble difficulty could provide an impression of how powerful the abilities are overall. Can also be done without any mod by calling game.aiplay through the Python console – though, in that case, the human civ gets destroyed, so the Vikings would have to be assigned to an AI player from the beginning.

 

[sorcdk]

The flat (tile) yield increases strike me as the most consequential because they provide a relatively big boost in the crucial early game. Some of the 1% modifiers may get lost through rounding.
(...)

The basic +1 food, +1 production, +1 commerce yield bonuses are flat and not applied to any tiles (unlike the smac version where they are applied to the equivalent of the city tile). Your wording seems to indicate that you probably are not referring to the extra sea tile production yield, which I do feel changes gameplay in the sense that you can build coastal based economic cities with okay production, without having to look at specific land based sources.
The +1% bonuses do work correctly, but the rounding does mean that you need to stack up a lot of them before you start to see any effect (for a 10 food city to get another food you would need it built in 10 cities). This means it will start to show up at the late early game or mid game, depending on the map size and such.

 

[f1rpo]

I meant to refer to both the flat building yields and the sea tile yields. Sorry about the confusion. Both sound quite powerful to me because they have the potential to speed up your early development. I realize that a city can't have an ordinary Lighthouse in addition, i.e. it's really mainly +1 production on watertiles (like Moai Statues).

(for a 10 food city to get another food you would need it built in 10 cities).

Ah, that hadn't really registered with me – that it affects all cities. Similar to the progressive bonuses that the AI receives (those that increase with each era). That's not shabby either. I think all the commerce types are calculated at a times-100 precision actually.

Another random thought: +1 production on water tiles could allow you to place cities pretty densely all along the coast to ramp up the Trading Post count.