Getting Started

[Thalassicus]

Those are all good points about disadvantages of the other four strategics. I don't play in the modern era much... about how often are these issues encountered against the AI? Usually every game, or less common? I could go the other way and split all strategics into exclusively economic and military... though I'm concerned that might reduce meaningful tradeoffs between building vs conquest.

 

[Ahriman]

Its hard to tell, because by the modern era things are too late to matter, and poor AI performance is still largely irrelevant. Whereas doing this with iron or horses is much more problematic. Also, currently (in vanilla) oil doesn't matter much, and I don't see that many oil units in play anyway. And I normally get bored or win by then.

But I think Txurce's point is the main one; we don't really want to re-enable allowing most of your army to be the strategic elite unit. This is an inherent problem with trying to use the same strategic resources for both military and builder options.
I sympathize with the goal, but I'm not sure we could balance it right.

In particular, because the marginal benefit of an extra elite unit, and the marginal benefit an an extra superior building, do not decline much as you have more of them. If you you're trying to maximize the sum of two functions that both have a steep decline in marginal benefit, then that's fairly easily to do, but when both functions are fairly flat, its a much harder problem.

 

[Tomice]

This proposal adds more resources - something we agreed earlier would take away choice, making the resource themselves almost irrelevant - and tries to balance it by adding the building vs units choice. I can't imagine how this will ever balance, since it's clearly a matter of personal preference. Given that we all agree the game is tilted toward warmongering, the main effect will be allowing fully stocked elite armies for anyone who wants them. It would take an awful lot of buffed buildings to balance an unstoppable army... and I don't even know how much fun it would be to be able to build all the buildings of this sort that I want. The problem may be that this takes away choice for both warmonger and builder - the choice seems to be whether to be a warmonger or a builder. That's not much of a choice for most people, and once it's made, there's even less choices to be made.

I have to agree to the core points. I guess it's very hard to balance, and would lead to many bugged/unbalanced dev builds until it's done well.

The reduced strategics were a good idea and worked well, why go in the opposite direction now?

 

[Kirschi]

The resource penalty applies when you don't have any of the necessary strategic resource the unit requires. Were you using an Ironclad without the required resource? Having a unit on a resource tile does not have any affect on it's strength.

Oh my... i feel pretty stupid now ^^
So its the feature thingy
I probably wasn't aware of that before because the resources are so scarce now since the latest dev versions. So I mostly have to trade them and when that runs out of turns... everything clear now, thanks

EDIT EDIT EDIT: The second conflicting mod is Liberation Boost. I can play with all mods except Alpalca's GS mod or all the mods except Liberation Boost. Running both of them at the same time disables the unit UI.

Following that advice and disabling the Liberation Boost mod before testing latest dev did only help partially. I just don't have a menu when selecting a GS. More strangly, when selecting another unit and then selecting a scientist, it shows the menu of the last selected unit.

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There is a little bug with the Hydro Plant building, it has the requirement of Aluminium in his description but doesn't need one to be built.

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Another suggestion: Would it be hard to implement some requirements descriptions to the techtree/buildings? Because it bothered me in several games why I have not been able to build that damn Museum ^^ (to get that wonder afterwards). I had the technology, but it was not clear to me that you have to build the Opera house (or is it Theatre? don't know atm) as a building requirement. If it would be a technology requirement, ok. But you do not have to research the other things to get to Museum tech.

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Influence gifts work now again like a charm ^^
But maybe you could lower the amount just a tiny bit later on. When you got to Industrial/Modern era and have tons of gold already it's easy to bribe all the city-states.

 

[Txurce]

Influence gifts work now again like a charm ^^
But maybe you could lower the amount just a tiny bit later on. When you got to Industrial/Modern era and have tons of gold already it's easy to bribe all the city-states.

I think it's always going to be easy to bribe the CS. You either have competition for the diplomatic victory, or it's yours (assuming there's still a quorum). Adjusting the cost and amount of influence would seemingly be mainly to make sure CS aren't OP.

 

[Seek]

Following that advice and disabling the Liberation Boost mod before testing latest dev did only help partially. I just don't have a menu when selecting a GS. More strangly, when selecting another unit and then selecting a scientist, it shows the menu of the last selected unit.

Hmm, it's working fine for me with all mods in the dev package except Liberation Boost. Try this:

1. Delete "Alpaca's GS Mod"
2. Download the latest version (2.1) of Free-Research Balance Mod - the correct name for it btw - from the mod's official thread (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=407257)
3. Clear your cache (to do this, exit Cv5, go to mydocuments/mygames/civ5/cache and delete the "Civ5ModsDatabase" file).

Also, Thal has requested that questions and issues with this mod be discussed on the Free-Research thread. So if you continue to have problems with it, please post there and I'll do my best to help you out.

 

[doktorstick]

Howdy. I have a quick question about the direction the Balance* mods are taking. When I first glommed on to the mods, it was about addressing the game balance. I haven't followed the forums until recently and it appears that they are expanding beyond balance. As examples, re-organizing the tech tree or forcing dependencies, creating economic needs for resources (horse/iron), and pages of other core changes/suggestions.

Perhaps these mods are not for those of us that simply want balanced gameplay. This is fine! It may not be for those like me, though. Hence my questions.

Where does balance end and creation begin? Where are the balance mods going?

Thanks for your collective efforts. Cheers.

 

[Tomice]

If you read Kael's modding guide, you'll find a section at the end describing possible pitfalls. These include "flavor" (adding stuff only because it sounds cool, has a real counterpart, would represent history better) and "more" (adding stuff without end just because one has countless ideas). I'm very sure Thal is aware of these possible issues and tries to avoid them.

I agree changes come in an awesome speed recently, I have no idea what's in the latest dev build from the countless suggestions. But those are only dev builds for testing. In his release versions, Thal used to streamline everything into a neat package and only used tested/secure changes.

If you want to still be able to use vanilla strategy guides, this package might be too much by now. But I don't see Thal overdoing it. He is a bit hyperactive lately, though just kiddy, I'm happy about it!

 

[Txurce]

Where does balance end and creation begin? Where are the balance mods going?

The best way to answer these questions is to read Thal's introductory statement at the start of each mod thread. Most of them include the various readme's. Then you can decide for yourself whether they make sense for you or not.

 

[Thalassicus]

@doktorstick
I'm starting to dive into deeper, more complex balance issues than simple number tweaks. I'll add detailed rationale behind all these edits in the readmes once it goes into a release version - these dev versions have always been about just testing ideas. Some ideas are kept, others thrown out.

For example, tech tree organization. The reason for this is complex, and it's due to balance between iron and horses.

There's been many opinions on these forums the Iron requirement for siege units is a balance concern, and a big one. Civs without Iron have no hope of early conquest. The logical solution is to remove the Iron requirement, so if someone's iron-starved they can at least make decent progress with cats and other units. We don't want cats to be available earlier than before though, right? Cats required Bronze Working in vanilla (since cats needed iron) so I added a link between Mathematics and Bronze Working. This change in the tech tree is basically keeping things in the area close to vanilla.

There were only two other changes to the tech tree, and both of those were to deal with balance between Knights and Longswords. Specifically, the main reason Longswords are so powerful is they're easy to beeline to. I made Longsword beelines slightly harder (requires Construction), and buffed the Chivalry tech a bit by letting it research a Renaissance-era tech right away.

In other words, all the content in these mods is aimed at balance, not simple content creation. The stated goal is and always will be balancing vanilla by improving and increasing options.



--------------------

Firstly, about the topic of marginal benefit Ahriman brought. It applies very well to this subject. Compare two situations...

• With zero units, building a unit is vital.
• With 10 units, building an 11th unit will probably not be very valuable. The battlefield starts getting overcrowded.

A good example of this is my current game. I started within easy reach of 12 horse resources but only 2 iron. Iron was extremely valuable to me... while there's absolutely no reason I'd build a dozen horses (the continent's not even that wide! ). I built five and sold off excess for a little gold.

The point is, I sincerely doubt warmongers would expend all their resources on strategic units if there's better alternatives, or if those additional units are simply not needed. Likewise, it's very unlikely a builder would train no strategic units at all. As players, we each find a place between the two we want to be, based on resource availability, personal preference, and other circumstances.



Relating this to the topic at hand, I thought this over a bit at lunch. First thing I considered is how it would affect AI trades.

• Vanilla - Trade resource, AI builds units. End trade, AI has X units penalized.
• Change - Trade resource, AI builds buildings, End trade, one of two things happens to the buildings:
  • Still operate - benefits AI over vanilla.
  • Not operate - same as vanilla (no effect from the resources) or slightly better (not as many bad units wandering around). It's hard to know for sure.

I don't know whether they'd still operate or not, but either way it doesn't seem like they'd be much worse off than before, if any (and possibly better off). This is only in theory though, and it'd take practice games to see how it plays out with the AI. Since they are probably coded to deal with the economy/military split for aluminum (mostly) I suspect at least the basics are there.



On Txurce's point, I think I might not have explained the concept very clearly... probably was too short a summary. I'll elaborate.

For simplicity's sake, let's say we have 3 horse deposits for two players A and B with no changes in deposit distribution. Let's assume (again for simplicity) player A expends all strategic resources on units for military conquest. Player B is going for a cultural victory with a small empire, has less ground to protect, and benefits from citadels and forts. Perhaps they can effectively defend their smaller, more protected empire with only half as many horsemen as a result. (The exact numbers aren't important, I'm just going for general concept here.)

Vanilla:

• Warmonger
  • 6 horsemen
  • 6 from 3 circuses
• Builder
  • 3 horsemen
  • 6 from 3 circuses
  • 6/turn from saved maintenance.
  • 4/turn from trading 3 horses (going rate in my current game)

First iteration of idea, with requirements added:

• Warmonger
  • 6 horsemen
• Builder
  • 3 horsemen
  • 6/turn from saved maintenance.
  • 6 from 3 circuses

Comparing the difference in relative power loss between the two, the warmonger likely loses more (-6). We don't want to just nerf everyone, so there's two avenues to take... buff A) supply or B) effects. I agree option A was not a good choice. What about option B?

Second iteration, where circuses give 3:

• Warmonger
  • 6 horsemen
• Builder
  • 3 horsemen
  • 6/turn from saved maintenance.
  • 3 circuses at 9

Same results for warmongers as Iteration 1 (an economic nerf), but builders are about the same or got a buff, depending on how you figure the value of gold and happiness. Getting that balance right is a matter of tweaking numbers later, it's general ideas I'm exploring.

 

[Tomice]

So what's your primary concern?

Builder vs warmonger ratio or do you feel trading excess ressources is not profitable enough?

If it's the first, maybe there are other ways to fix it without changing so many buildings. If it's the second, I don't see that as really big problem. Or is it something else?

EDIT: Oh, you also thought about the problem that single iron/horse deposits are frustrating, but with 2 per node (and less nodes) it's harder to give the civs approximately equal chances of getting enough strategic ressource?

Hmm.... have to think about it. Still have a feeling that this is too big of a chance for a rather small problem.

 

[Ahriman]

I think you're missing something critical.

You cannot take luxury and strategic resource trading rates as given and extrapolate like this.
There are limits on luxury selling, and there should be more; you shouldn't be able to sell luxuries to AIs at this rate when they don't need them. The fact that you often can is a design problem to be fixed, not an appropriate way of measuring things.

Second, AIs shouldn't buy strategic resources they don't need, and they definitely shouldn't be selling you their precious strategic resources in the early game when these resources are rare.

And the rates that the AI will pay for them are not indicative of the rates that there should be, particularly if we are making strategic resources relatively more valuable.

Suppose hypothetically that we modded horsemen to be strength 50; do you still think that it would be appropriate to value horses based on the 1.3 gold per turn that the AI valued them at?

AI trading rates shouldn't drive balance valuation decisions. Instead, balance considerations should drive AI trading rates.

Also, the very fact that sometimes you'll make these trades and sometimes you won't reflects that the value of these resources changes over time. And the fact that you can sometimes buy resources at this rate doesn't mean you'd be willing to sell them at that rate.
Would you really be willing to give up all your strategic resources, and thus have a really weak military, for a few extra happiness?

So, you shouldn't use the in-game rates to drive the valuation, and its very hard to determine what the appropriate rate should be.
What if horsemen were strength 12, or 13, or 14? How would this affect the tradeoff?

The whole point of limiting resources was to make the strategic resources very powerful, but rare. If you can mass them, then you become an unstoppable warmonger.

If my army can wipe yours out, then it doesn't really matter how many buildings you have or how much happiness you have, because your cities are mine.

With zero units, building a unit is vital.
With 10 units, building an 11th unit will probably not be very valuable. The battlefield starts getting overcrowded.

This is the wrong comparison.
The right comparison is:
6 spearmen and 6 buildings vs 6 swordsmen and 0 buildings.
The former can't really take cities, but the latter can go on a conquering rampage.

It also isn't clear to me that these always have declining marginal value. 3 swordsmen is enough to take a city. 1 swordsman isn't. So the marginal value of more swordsmen is in fact increasing over some range.
Just because the marginal value will *eventually* decline for the 11th unit, or slightly sooner, doesn't mean you can assume the relationship is linear.

So I think you're relying far too much on math that has a whole host of auxiliary assumptions built in, many of which are invalid.

 

[Ahriman]

Let me put it this way: optimally, you wouldn't be willing to sell off your strategic resources, because you'd prefer to have superior units rather than inferior units.

Even if you're a builder, you'd still prefer to use your 2 iron on swordsmen, because 2 swordsmen will be better than 3 spearmen.

You'd always want to use all the strategic resources you had (that matter in the current era), for your military. Because the strategic resources should always be fewer than the total army size you want to field, and the strategic resource units should in general be superior to the non-strategic resource units.

In fact, I'd be fine if we eliminated strategic resource trading with other civs entirely, its only ever going to end up harming the AIs, who can't value them correctly (value them too high, and you can sell them off, value them too low, and you can buy theirs up).
Or at least eliminate trade in them except for other strategic resources. Its reasonable for me to trade you my horses for your iron, so I can field a mixed army rather than a pure cav one.

 

[Tomice]

To achieve your ideal, we'd have to reduce SRs by 90%, not 25

If they are so rare, but still somewhat random, we'd end up with half the civs having no iron at all, 4 having some and 1 steamrolling all others because he was lucky and grabbed 3 iron deposits early.

 

[Thalassicus]

@Ahriman
We're drifting off into details again... Tomice gets the general idea of what I'm going for.

@Tomice
The train of thought started in my current game around the mid-renaissance, when I had a broad area of terrain to pick where to settle. I realized as I was analyzing it I really didn't care where the city went; I had all the luxuries in the area, all the strategics I needed and there weren't any interesting clumps of food resources. I can just start dropping settlers down haphazardly without it impacting my game much, and this made it feel like planning and carefully thinking things through at this point aren't giving much of a reward, which didn't feel very fun.

I encounter this depressing situation in most/all my games once luxuries/strategics are claimed, so I posted this in the TI thread:

I've been thinking about something in my latest game . . .

Once we have enough luxuries to trade with partners and strategics to supply our army, what incentive do we really have to build at one location over another? High city-tile yields and low terrain yields are one factor that contributes to ICS-like casual city spam. There's not really much reason to settle at one location over another. How can we make this more interesting?

• Improve luxury/strategic yields?
• Add some benefit to additional resources, like Civ IV Corporations?
• ?
• ?
• ?

Option A (and Polycrates's response) is what led to my next suggestion in the TI thread about small luxury boosts on various buildings. Since I like exploring all options to solve problems, that led me to . . .

Option B got me thinking, how could stuff like corporations be adapted to Civ V's resource mechanics? Well, at a fundamental level Civ IV corporations consume resources and turn them into something useful. This is similar to strategic-using units/buildings in CiV, and there's even precedent with the other resource-using economic buildings. It feels like they took the corporation concept and applied it to the whole resource system.

This led to my idea about economic resource-driven options in the early game, however it might be implemented.

It was then I realized this could be applied to another issue: the balance of buildings like the Watermill and Workshop. I've been trying to find a way to balance the Watermill for 4 months straight, and Ahriman's expressed concerns about the Workshop before. It's one of those situations where improving the Watermill will almost assuredly overpower it (since it's so early game and is river-dependent) yet in its current state I don't ever build it, the construction time in particular is rather long for the small cities it'd benefit (yet reducing the cost will run into the spammable issue). Flat city-tile bonuses like the Watermill's also have the negative side effect of boosting ICS.

By tying a resource requirement to buildings like these, it's easier to balance them by nudging them over the line into "very useful" territory, while still preventing them from being spammable.

 

[Tomice]

Ah, I can understand the "no more meaningful place to put a city, but loads of average land" boredom.

In my current game (huge terra) I have so much space to fill, but none of it contains anything I really need. This is although I chose 14 instead of 12 civs in advanced options. Ok, I've crushed a neighbor early and crippled another, so there's some explanation for the huge amounts of land I have available. Also, for some odd reason, Liz chose not to build more than 3 cities until end-medieval.

I can hardly motivate myself to start the new world exploration phase. I'm second in rank, Japan leads, ICSing on the other end of the continent, behind several civs that won't give me open borders. I could try a naval invasion to hit Japan, or a tech win. But it all feels boring because my neighbors are weak, but I don't need their land, I have gaps in my empire to fill and already all ressources they have. No threat at all, so I feel I'd most likely win.

Not sure if it would solve the problem if those unsettled iron or wheat tiles would be better/more interesting, but I understand your motivation now and it might be worth trying. Then again, maybe there's another problem that's the main reason for this feeling of boredom?

I just know I'll put even more civs on the map next time...

 

[Thalassicus]

There's many ways to deal with it, too... some mods explore larger base terrain yields. The two options that popped into my mind were because a) I've seen the luxury suggestions before and b) I found corporations incredibly fun in Civ IV!

 

[Dunkah]

This thread has exploded to the point where if you are not in the middle of this conversaion you are lost.

Seems to me that we are missing a couple of things here. In cIV the presence of Copper early on was a huge boon.

The opposite of Horses is Spears. So if someone has horses and I don't then spears will protect me. Even though spears against anything else may be pointless.

Protection against Swordsman was Axemen... so if I had copper I was set. Protection against axemen was Chariots...

Seems to me this whole dynamic is missing. Each strategic unit should have a non strategic counter to it.

In cIV if I didn't have horses and someone else did i built spearmen, if they had copper and i had horses I built Chariots. If they had Iron and I didn't I built Axemen.

Seems to me that should be where this discussion be going. Inroduce another Strategic Resource or two.

 

[Thalassicus]

Very, very true Dunkah, which is why I split the conversation off a bit into the separate mod threads. Hopefully it'll help make discussions easier to follow again.

Your point about how someone with copper or chariots could decently counter opposing forces is my thought as well. Basically... someone without horses/iron shouldn't be able to go on a conquering spree (unless it involves UUs), but should at least be able to defend a bit against heavy horse/iron users.

Civ IV did have problems of its own though, since massing axes was generally a rather successful strat (even after the chariot bonus was added). This is what Ahriman's been discussing - we want to make resourceless units valuable, but not too good. I think with enough fiddling with the numbers of archers/spears, we can accomplish this with the existing resources.

 

[Polycrates]

I'm with Ahriman on this one; it really feels like a change too far.

I'm not convinced that iron and horses should be even close to equally powerful for builders - the builder approach has the advantage that you're not going and settling that crummy city site earlier than you'd like because it gives you iron; you can keep your early game expansion down if you want, or settle luxuries/food resources/natural wonders. And it also prevents beelining Iron Working or Horseback Riding being the only options (incidentally, revealing iron at bronze working was a great move). Likewise, if a warmonger can't get their hands on a resource, it encourages them to build up and bide their time. A civ can still defend themselves pretty well without the resources (especially with Tradition), it's really when you go on the offense that their punch really makes the difference (I do agree with the change to catapults though). The city-state mechanic (and the change to cats) helps ensure that someone who REALLY wants those strategic resources can probably get them, but a bit later at a cost.

I like the risk/reward of a builder civ getting more of the benefit from trading it off (perhaps aggressive AIs could value them higher if they were rarer); you're getting a gold bonus but you're arming a potential enemy as well. Or just the bonus of denying it to your neighbour Genghis and giving it to his neighbour. Plus the conqueror is going to be busy building units and barracks well before building circuses and forges, so the builder gets a bit more advantage from those anyway.

In response to Dunkah, I think the counter to swords is archers/chariots (and cities themselves). Also horsemen using their movement to catch them in the open. I think that balance is pretty good. And I really think adding/removing strategic resources is changing the nature of the game too much from vanilla.