FfH2 0.21 Balance Feedback

[Master_Hugian]

The doviellos ability to get bronze weapons at mining is a bit overpowered, lets compare the str 3 warrior with easiest tier 2 unit to get - the hunter.

(the warrior counts as having bronze weapons for all purposes and is doviello)

Hunter: 3 str
Warrior: 3 str

Hunter: 2 Mov
Warrior: 1 Mov

Hunter: -25% city attack
Warrior: +15% city attack

Hunter: can get shock I
Warrior: Can get Shock I and II

Hunter: Cannot get march
Warrior: Can get march

Hunter: Requires Hunting Lodge (100 :hammers)
Warrior: Requires no building

Hunter: Costs 60 :hammers
Warrior: Costs 25 :hammers

Hunter: Requires Exploration and Hunting (350 :research)
Warrior: Requires Crafting and Mining (300 :research)

Hunter: Cannot pillage
Warrior: Can pillage

The warrior is superior to the hunter in this case in almost all ways (except movement, but then again - Mahala's warriors start with commando)

Solution: require bronze working to get bronze weapons (and Iron working to get iron weapons else they could beeline arete and get iron weapons before the even get bronze working)

 

[BCalchet]

WARNING: MISQUOTE FOLLOWS.
The following has been changed from the original to illustrate a point.

The doviellos ability to get bronze weapons at mining is in no way, shape or form overpowered, lets compare the str 3 warrior with easiest tier 2 unit to get - the hunter.

(the warrior counts as having bronze weapons for all purposes and is doviello)

Hunter: 3 str
Warrior: 3 str

Hunter: 2 Mov
Warrior: 1 Mov

Hunter: +100% animal attack
Warrior: +0% animal attack

Hunter: can get Mobility I and II
Warrior: Can get Mobility I

Hunter: Can capture animals
Warrior: Cannot capture animal

Hunter: Requires no resource
Warrior: Requires copper

Hunter: Not countered by any promotion
Warrior: Countered by shock

Hunter: Requires Exploration and Hunting (350 :research)
Warrior: Requires Crafting and Mining (300 :research)

Hunter: Can upgrade from experienced scout
Warrior: Must build new

The hunter is superior to the warrior in this case in almost all ways (except tech cost, but then again - Exploration is something you'd need to hook up copper anyway, so warrior costs go up)

Solution: Do nothing

 

[Morganknight]

To some degree I have to agree with you, but there are always ways for diplomacy. I make my friends usually through presents like many years of delivered ressources and stuff likes. Gives you an good overall reputation in quite a short time.

All that extra mana that you have little to no use for early in the game is excellent for gifting to the AI civs to improve your relations with them. 10 turns (the minimum length of trade) is often enough to give you a +4 trade bonus to diplomacy early in the game. As alignment modifiers typically start at 2, this easilly puts you in the green. Follow up with Open Border agreements as soon as possible, and your alignment challenged AI comrades are well on their way to being your gamelong friends. This agressive trade is also good for spreading religion which is another excellent way to improve relations. Found Runes as a good or neutral player and spread it to your evil counterparts for amazing shift in attitude as they potentially lose their negative alignment modifier (Runes adjust alignment from Evil to Neutral) and gain a positive shared faith modifier. The opposite is true if you found OO as an evil or neutral player, as OO will shift a Good aligned civ to Neutral.

 

[Jean Elcard]

All that extra mana that you have little to no use for early in the game is excellent for gifting to the AI civs to improve your relations with them.

Yes, I do it exactly this way. The relationship bonus you get for gifting mana is immense. To be honest, it's almost a bug or at least a balance issue. After all the AI can't do anything with your mana at this point of time in the game. As soon as they get Knowledge of the Ether I take it usually back.

 

[Master_Hugian]

I see your point but very little of what you showed has any affect when it comes to sieging cities (although I missed out the copper bit buy yes, you would need exploration also)

But still there is the fact that warriors cost 25 hammers while hunters cost 60 hammers, therefore for every hunter there is 2 or 3 warriors.

With the hunters being immune to shock i agree that is a bonus, but can a hunter really stand against so many foes, and it would be difficult to produce enough hunters to stand against lots of warriors (and then the only way to protect yourself against a human doviello player is to beeline hunting, anything else and your warriors will fall quite quickly under there onslaught)

Hunters are powerful themself but they cannot pillage and have a penalty to attacking cities to balance them out, yes they are fast and are great for catching workers and settlers but they have problems attacking a city, this is not true for the doviello warriors, they have a bonus vs cities.

 

[Silmeran]

Real problem is that AI civs is too kind to each other while hating you. For example if you are neutral, evil civ refuses to trade and have open borders with you, but always trade with AI neutral civs. After ~200 turns they are even pleased to each other, lol.

To add: good civs often pleased of even friendly to evil civ who hates them. Yeah, they are good and love everybody, but NOT evil. imho.

Some other thoughts:
- God King is overpowered civic for early game. You have 1-2 cities at that time, so +maintenance or high upkeep is not important. You get +50% hammers and commerce for free. I think it should be moved at least to philosophy;
- I don't understand why priests require incense to build. Incense is not widespreaded resource, so most of the civs forced to play without divine casters. Let's make mages to require dye (they love to paint their spellbooks), and summoners to require something else. So we will come to game without casters at all. This is most critical for elfs, because Bloom is divine spell.

 

[Mesix]

Real problem is that AI civs is too kind to each other while hating you. For example if you are neutral, evil civ refuses to trade and have open borders with you, but always trade with AI neutral civs. After ~200 turns they are even pleased to each other, lol.

To add: good civs often pleased of even friendly to evil civ who hates them. Yeah, they are good and love everybody, but NOT evil. imho.

Some other thoughts:
- God King is overpowered civic for early game. You have 1-2 cities at that time, so +maintenance or high upkeep is not important. You get +50% hammers and commerce for free. I think it should be moved at least to philosophy;
- I don't understand why priests require incense to build. Incense is not widespreaded resource, so most of the civs forced to play without divine casters. Let's make mages to require dye (they love to paint their spellbooks), and summoners to require something else. So we will come to game without casters at all. This is most critical for elfs, because Bloom is divine spell.

I agree that priests should not require incense to build. Perhaps a good fix would be to require incense to upgrade to a high priest (the way reagents are required to upgrade a mage to an archmage). That way all players could build their priests, but getting the top tier priests would require a rare resource.

 

[Lord Buck]

Just had a game where I was massacred by 5 confessors, its kinda kills the game when you look on a stack and feel like there is nothing you can do about, they can just walk up to you city and boom, its gone.

I think it should just do collateral damage and should not kill units outright, and I think this should go for all such spells.

I agree. I was playing with the Vamps last night and realized that cursed did the same thing (annialating city stacks). Although there was the consequence of diseasing your own units (good thing), it was still too powerfull IMO. I don't feel honest casting two spells and whiping out a gigantic city stack...

I also like the idea of requiring a movement to cast...not that it takes a movement to cast, but that 1 movement is a prequiste to cast...does this make sense? Might keep us honest.

 

[Nikis-Knight]

I also like the idea of requiring a movement to cast...not that it takes a movement to cast, but that 1 movement is a prequiste to cast...does this make sense

Just like catapults.
edit: Actually, I think catapults do take a move to bombard--but I don't think that that would weaken mages too much, anyway.

 

[Ringtailed]

Some other thoughts:
- God King is overpowered civic for early game. You have 1-2 cities at that time, so +maintenance or high upkeep is not important. You get +50% hammers and commerce for free. I think it should be moved at least to philosophy;

Is God King really that powerful? It's +50% gold, not +50% commerce; if you're not producing much gold in your capital, that part of it doesn't do much. Personally, I can't remember the last time I used it... then again, I never claimed to know what I was doing

 

[onedreamer]

The changes in Republic didn't help. All the AIs, of any alignement, still inevitably switch to Republic........

 

[EvilBohdran]

Anyone else find that the four Horsemen to be weak?

Around turn 300 of a regular speed game, playing the Sheaim, I finally managed to push the Armageddom counter up high enough to spawn them (nothing the AI was doing was moving the counter up). Stephanos spawned outside an Amurite city near my border. Great, I thought, he can help me wipe them out. Disappointingly, he ignored them and pushed straight into my territory. So I sent a pit beast to intercept him, and bam, killed him in one shot. Fluke I thought.

I couple turns later Buboes spawned just a single tile away from where Stephanos had appeared. Do they always appear in the same place? Not wanting to wait, I sent three chaos maruaders to greet him, and the third killed him before he could even move.

Yersinia also appeared in Amurite territory (who I was at war with), and likewise I was able to send a handful of units to wipe him out before he could do anything.

The last guy hasn't appeared yet.

I guess I feel that this late in the game, there is little in the way of lightly defended territory for them to spawn in so as to kill and gain experience/promotions. They really seemed like sitting ducks. My thought is that they should spawn with a posse depending on tech levels at the time they appear. For example, if feudalism has been researched by one or more civs, they could appear with half a dozen Undead Knights (barbarian knight units) or similar. Somehow the threat they represent needs to scaled with tech level, as they can appear at any time (early or late), and being late to the party means they've missed the dance.

Or maybe Sheaim is just overpowered. Dunno.

 

[Go Boks]

Yeah, I think they have to be around for a few turns to build up some XP, at which point they start to get fairly strong. If they spawn in AI lands, by the time you get to them they are pretty tough. If they spawn near a human player, the human is usually smart enough to deal with them early.

I like the idea of a small entourage though. Will prevent the ability to send a bunch of weaker units to wear them down right away. Some of the horsemen are meant to create their own, but it wouldn't hurt to start with a few, or give them a temporary promotion that gives them a big defense bonus (but not attack bonus).

 

[felwar]

Couple things:

1) After playing a few games, I'm getting the feeling that the Khazad need to start with more gold. As a player it isn't bad to have to balance gold and expansion, and I understand that the AI was adjusted to build settlers at a lower gold amount. The problem is that whether or not the Khazad expand in the early game seems completely based on the random goodie huts and how much gold they can find. If they find none, they just sit with one city while the other AI players close them in, even on larger maps.

I've actually started checking the world builder after 50 turns or so and giving them more cash if they aren't at least building a settler, just to keep them competitive.

2) Religions seem to come out very uneven. FoL and RoK are usually founded around the same time as eachother, and they're not a problem. I can usually count on the Malakim or Elohim to found the Order at some point as well (as an aside, why aren't the Bannor rushing this?). The problem is the evil religions. OO always seems to be nearly irrelevant by the time it's founded because FoL and RoK have spread so far. And the Ashen Veil? It is invariably the last religion to show up, and usually long after the order.

I saw that evil civs would prioritize the ashen veil, but I haven't noticed an effect from this change. This could have something to do with the general alignment gravitation toward neutrality that happens with the early religions. In an 18-civ game on a standard or large map, it's not unusual to end up with 12+ neutral civs. And if I understand it correctly, a neutral civ will never research the order or the ashen veil. Maybe the weight that civilizations give to keeping their starting alignment could be increased.

3) Diplomacy is... weird. The civilizations that value "years of peace" are never willing to go to war with anyone for me, no matter what I give them. And the ones that are the warmongers tend to hate me anyway, so they're certainly not going to agree to it. Trade is working fine, as is asking for religion changes. But getting someone to declare war for me just seems to be deadlocked. It was definitely too easy before the modifier differential was required, but this is a whole other extreme and I'm even playing with aggressive AI turned on.

 

[mindlar]

The AI is building too many of the same type of node. In my current game the Belsaraph have 5 mind magic available from the trade window. They would be much better served by building other nodes when they get to a total of 3 of a single type of mana.

 

[kenken244]

the horsemen seem to spawn all near the same place. ive had a jump in the armageddon counter cause the last 2 to spawn adjacent to the same city. the first 2 horsemen also spawned in my territory.

 

[daladinn]

i noticed a balance issue with the calabim taking the ashen veil. the new line added to scarifice the weak can allow you to get some truely super cites (on the order of 60+ population. this is only truely scarey when your eating them for xp = pop-4.

 

[Saien]

Unlike the Ljoslfar and Khazad, the Bannor and Sheaim are not hardwired to go for their appropriate techs. This means that since the leaders don't value religion very highly it is frequent that somebody else gets those techs first.

This is at best, counterintuitive.

 

[Chandrasekhar]

Also, Hannah the Irin isn't hardwired to go for OO. In fact, the Balseraphs often seem to prioritize it more than she does. I'd suggest that some leaders bee-line for OO just to help keep spread evil's early influence. Far too many evil leaders end up adopting Runes...

 

[Saien]

Also, Hannah the Irin isn't hardwired to go for OO.

This doesn't follow as logically as the Sheaim going for AV/Bannor going for Order. In fact, as an evil religion, it doesn't follow that the neutral Lanun will go for it at all.

In fact, the Balseraphs often seem to prioritize it more than she does. I'd suggest that some leaders bee-line for OO just to help keep spread evil's early influence. Far too many evil leaders end up adopting Runes...

As I've previously suggested, AI controlled civs should not change to state religions that would change their alignment. Perhaps an exclusion could be made if they controlled the holy city.