I completed a
gradual research mod. It took much longer than anticipated as there's limited information on what SQL commands are available to us. If you try this out for a game or two, I would love feedback on how you feel this makes the tech progression. Too small, just right? I chose rather small values to start with, and it curves upwards.
It's not strictly a balance mod, but I included it on the first page and zip file. You can also search the mod browser for "Gradual Research."
Thank you for all the fantastic feedback! I'll read through it now that I'm done with that modcomp.
@MasterDinadan
I do agree some sort of bonus to improvements next to the city might be interesting. I feel there is choice involved though - if the tiles are not plains. On freshwater hills you might need a mine or two to boost production if the city is surrounded primarily by grassland, desert, coast, etc. Building TP's close to your city also has the advantage of making them more defended against pillagers (though the combat AI currently doesn't pillage at all, I think, unless it's barbarians). In late game you could also conceivably work a lot of freshwater farm tiles for specialists, but you start reaching specialist caps. Eventually, there comes a point when other improvements are more valuable than additional food.
I'll think it all over a while. In the meantime, if you really want to try it out the necessary information is in the CivVImprovements.xml file. The option is named
Improvement_AdjacentCityYields. So you could do something like this, I think:
You could even create and release your own mod based off this, would be a great way to learn the tools.
@R0GERSHRUBBER
Civs being crushed by others is rather common in Civ V now. When they go to war, if either AI gets the upper hand they start going on a rampage across the continent. Tech does go rather fast, I've been working on the gradual research mod mentioned above to adjust it. Glad you like the mod!
@Gorey
Thank you for the feedback, it is helpful to see various perspectives on how people specialize their cities with these changes. I see you have 170
/turn, were you using the Fewer Bad Buildings mod? Seems to match what I've seen in my test games.
@Kadath
Thank you for the feedback. I'll look into the AI settings to see if things can be tweaked.
The AI does dynamically alter their strategies based on potential yields for each improvement, I've seen quite a few farm-heavy cities. Even before I started modding I noticed a lot of leaders tend to build dozens of farms in their empires, the changes seemed to actually benefit the AI those situations. It does depend though, this has been on large continents maps with immortal epic settings. This is why it helps to get different perspectives, so thank you, and I'll see what I can do to make the AI favor certain strategies a little more.
That said, I've actually been considering changing the -
/turn in the Fewer Bad Buildings mod to -
cost instead. What are everyone's thoughts on this, if you've been using that mod? This is the approach I took with most underwhelming wonders.
@Burrito_X
I'm glad you like the better GP tile improvements, that seemed to be one of the more controversial mods I released. It's good to see some people are enjoying it. I always felt the default GP improvements were very weak when compared to the power of golden ages or the immediate-use abilities.
I've been very careful about tweaking culture settings on buildings, specialists or improvements as I haven't played many cultural games. Feedback in one of the other threads seemed to indicate even +1
to landmarks made them overpowered for cultural victories, so I changed it back and have been avoiding further adjustments in the realm of culture.