Getting Started

[rhammer640]

Holy Liberty buff, Batman.

Tell me about it, i kept waiting for them to finish and move on to other branches, but um, not a whole lot, lol

 

[Seek]

Tell me about it, i kept waiting for them to finish and move on to other branches, but um, not a whole lot, lol

Me too. Maybe after the Liberty pendulum has stopped swinging..

 

[gandalf51]

New patch notes - seriously Thal, you deserve a check!

From the patch notes : Golden Ages now provide +20% production per city rather than +1 hammer per tile.

Great that will make everything that works with golden ages not worth it.

 

[Ahriman]

From the patch notes : Golden Ages now provide +20% production per city rather than +1 hammer per tile.

Great that will make everything that works with golden ages not worth it.

This is a fantastic change. Golden ages were ridiculously overpowered, and in a biased way.
They meant that it was nearly always better to pop a golden age with your great people as soon as you got them, rather than use their abilities or make an improvement. And they meant that plains and forest tiles (especially riverside or with trading post) were far better than grassland.

IMO, one of the best changes they made.

 

[doktorstick]

For serious. I settled on Darius a lot of the times and I would chain run Golden Ages as much as I could.

 

[gandalf51]

This is a fantastic change. Golden ages were ridiculously overpowered, and in a biased way.
They meant that it was nearly always better to pop a golden age with your great people as soon as you got them, rather than use their abilities or make an improvement. And they meant that plains and forest tiles (especially riverside or with trading post) were far better than grassland.

IMO, one of the best changes they made.

Personally I prefer to make an academy that will give me 30 science/turn, than 9(-2 each time you use one) turns of golden age. Great generals also are very strong if you do battles. Haven't tried manufacture and never got great merchant or artist.

 

[Ahriman]

30 science/turn

In vanilla? How?

than 9(-2 each time you use one) turns of golden age

9 turns of golden age that in an empire with population of 120 could give you over 2,000 extra base yield of gold or production (though probably more like 1500), then multiplied up by all your modifiers.

Great generals also are very strong if you do battles.

Sure, but you only need 1-2, the rest are golden ages.

and never got great merchant or artist

Golden ages are much better than their abilities.

Anyway, just IMO. YMMV.

 

[Thalassicus]

I like most of the changes and I'm happy they decided to add resource yield bonuses to buildings, I think it adds a lot of fun to the game!

However, there's something that concerns me with a few big changes in the patches. I dislike how often choices are removed in core areas of the game instead of fixing the underlying problems. For many key overpowered strategies, they just remove the choice from the player entirely, instead of balancing the real cause of the issue.

• Early specialists gone - overpowered GS lightbulbing
• Promotion saving gone - OP instant-heal
• Policy saving gone - OP late-game policies
• 2-tile city spacing gone - OP ICS

Sid Meir said a game is a series of interesting decisions. An overpowered strategy makes decisions less interesting, but removing choices is worse, because it completely eliminates the decision-making.

The better solution is to balance overpowered strategies:

• Nerf lightbulbing.
• Change the instant-heal promotion.
• Balance early vs late policies, and change cost-reduction policies to instead increase cultural output.
• Nerf ICS by shifting flat per-city bonuses to per-empire & percentage bonuses. (they actually buffed ICS in this patch by going in the opposite direction with many buildings...)

Game Rules

• Cities must now have three or more tiles in between them (1 more tile than before), unless separated by a sea/coast tile.
  • I don't like this and will revert it back to 2 tiles. It's a very poor way to nerf ICS by reducing choices.
• Cities now only get 1 free production and 0 free gold (1 less in both cases)
  • Already done the gold change. I thought of doing the production change, but I'm concerned it might make production in the very early game too slow.
• Trade routes get bonus gold based on population of capital; formula changed a bit so minimal gold received for hooking up very small cities
  • Already done.
• Bonus production from excess food (used when building settlers) tapers off if excess is 3 or more.
• Allied maritime city states provide 3 food per turn to the capital, not 4
  • I'll be keeping it as per-empire food instead of per-city, which I feel properly fixes the problem.
• Balance pass on production and maintenance costs throughout the game.

Buildings
It's nice to see they started implimenting resource bonuses on buildings, I feel it adds a lot of fun to the game. I think I'll switch to their version for the bonus resources (fish, cattle, etc).

I don't like the buffs to ICS though. They shifted a lot of percentage bonuses to flat bonuses, which significantly favors small cities.

• Aqueduct added (entirely new building). 40% of Food is carried over after a new Citizen is born.
  • Already done.
• Palace boosted to 3 gold and 3 production
  • Concerned about too much emphasis on the capital, something I've been trying to keep in mind.
• Granary gives bonus 1 food for Wheat/Banana Deer; cost reduced
  • Done the bonus on resources and cost reduction. I'm puzzled they improved Wheat though, considering it's already the most powerful of the resources.
• Market and Bazaar provide 2 gold (as well as +25%)
• Workshop provides 2 production (bonus reduced to +15% but affects ALL production); cost increased
• Windmill now has a +15% production modifier (for buildings only) and provides 2 production
  • Strange how they switched the workshop and windmill, I didn't really think their location on the tech tree was a problem.
• Stable gives bonus 1 production for Sheep/Cattle/Horse and can be built with Sheep or Cattle; cost reduced
  • I actually like this, it makes sense on the stable and cattle are designed primarily to give a production bonus in low-production regions.
• Lighthouse gives bonus 1 food for Fish; cost reduced
  • This makes sense, I'll do this.
• Ironworks dropped to 8 production (but earlier in tech tree now)
• Factory requires Workshop; add 3 production but boost now just 25%; has 1 more specialist slot (now 2)
• Nuclear and Solar Plants now require Factory but increase to production is now 35% and provide 4 production themselves; these two now mutually exclusive
• Hospital adds 5 food (but no longer retains food), requires Aqueduct
• Forge adds +1 production to each source of Iron
  • Already done.
• Reduced Armory maintenance to 2 gold
• Reduced Colosseum happiness to 3, and reduced maintenance to 2 gold
• Reduced Theatre happiness to 4
• Reduced Monastery maintenance to 0 gold
• Reduced Garden maintenance to 1 gold
• Reduced Observatory maintenance to 0 gold
• Reduced Opera House culture to 4, and reduced maintenance to 2 gold
• Removed the Great Person Point from Public School

Specialist Adjustments

• Temple -1 Artist
• Mud Pyramid Mosque -1 Artist
• Opera House +1 Artist
• Bank -1 Merchant
• Satraps Court -1 Merchant
• Stock Exchange +1 Merchant
• Observatory -1 Scientist
• University +1 Scientist
• Garden -1 Artist
• Laboratory -1 Scientist
• Public School +1 Scientist

Improvements/Routes

• Production bonus from Railroads reduced to 25%
• Removed 1 extra gold from Mine on Gems, Gold, Silver, Marble.
• Fishing Boats give 1 food, not gold.
• Fishing Boats give 1 gold with Compass.
  • Interesting choice of changes.
• Camps on Deer give production instead of food.
  • This one's puzzling, but probably has something to do with map region yield distribution.
• Remove 1 extra food from Sugar plantations.
• Trading Post gold reduced from 2 to 1 (increases back to 2 when hit Economics).
• Trading Post & Camp gold increases by 1 with Economics.
  • I disagree with these changes. 1 gold, 1 food and 1 production are not equal in value... this marginalizes trading posts.
• Lumbermill production increases by 1 with Scientific Theory (moved up from Steam Power).
• Mine & Quarry production increases by 1 with Chemistry.
  • It makes sense they did this, Chemistry is the midpoint between Machinery and Dynamite.
• Plantation & Pasture food increases by 1 with Fertilizer.
• Well & Offshore Platform boosted to 3 production (from 1).
• Academy increased to 6 Science.
• Landmark increased to 6 Culture.
• Manufactory increased to 4 Production.
  • All these GP improvement changes make sense, similar to what I did a long while ago.

Policies
Very interesting changes here... I'll have to see how it works out. It's mostly stuff we can't do with current modding tools. I think the “branch openers” are a little too strong though, heavily encouraging taking a little of everything (something the AI is explicitly forbidden from doing by the code).

It's interesting how they adopted the free-unit approach for the Liberty tree I've been trying out lately. I like they're focusing so much on the Tradition and Libery trees, because I feel they're the ones that have been most in need of balancing work.

• Tradition: Culture border expansion discount in cities placed on Tradition branch opener. Discount increases over the course of the game. Also grants +3 Culture in the capital.
  • Interesting to have a non-fixed effect for this
• Aristocracy: Wonder bonus reduced by 5% to 20%.
• Legalism: Provides a free Culture building in your first 4 cities.
  • Very unique and interesting.
• Oligarchy: Garrisoned units cost no maintenance, and cities with a garrison gain +100% ranged combat strength.
  • I like this, good for defense.
• Landed Elite: +15% Growth, and +2 Food per city.
  • Very strange.
• Monarchy: +1 Gold and -1 Unhappiness for every 2 Citizens in your capital.
  • This is bizzare. Why have a -50% reduction in unhappiness on one policy and -33% reduction on its prerequisite? It seems better to just buff the gold effect.
• Liberty: +1 culture per turn in every city.
  • Interesting way to let large empires still get policies.
• Collective Rule: Settler production increased by 50%, and a free Settler appears near the capital.
  • I like that they're implementing the free-units idea for Liberty.
• Citizenship: Worker construction rate increased by 25%, and a free Worker appears near the capital.
• Representation: Each city you found will increase the cost of your next Policy by 33% less. Also starts a Golden Age.
  • Wow! Totally did not see this coming... very interesting.
• Order: Reduce Order production bonus to 15%.
  • Makes sense, this tree was too powerful.
• Meritocracy: +0.5 Happiness for each city connected to the capital, and a free Great Person of your choice appears near the capital.

Resources

• Fish reduced to 1 food (but can be boosted back to 2 with Lighthouse)
• Marble boosts wonder production by 20%, down from 25%
  • Makes sense. This combined with the Aristocracy change means it's no longer an all-or-nothing thing with wonders and production bonuses.

Technologies

• Scaled up tech costs throughout the game (slight change for early eras; close to double for Modern)
  • Already done.
• Move Lumbermills up to Construction
  • Very interesting buff to forests, I think I like it.
• Move Bridge Building back to Engineering
  • Good call to swap the two so neither tech gets too powerful or weak.
• Move Ironworks to Machinery
  • Good way to buff this underpowered tech.

Units

• Workboat cost increased
  • Nerfed underpowered coasts?
• Settler cost increased by 25%
  • Cost of settlers is hardcoded in the C++... so anything in that regard is out of our hands anyway.

Wonders

• Colossus no longer goes obsolete
  • Already done.
• Angkor Wat now provides a 25% discount for the costs (both culture and gold) to gain plots empire-wide.
  • Ooo very interesting... buffs plot purchasing.

Civ Unique Bonuses

• Reduce Chu-ko-nu from 10 to 9 ranged strength
  • Already done (indirectly... I buffed crossbows for everyone else).
• Doubled culture from kills for Aztecs
  • Already done.
• Krepost now provides a 25% discount for the costs (both culture and gold) to gain plots in the city.
  • I like this.
• Paper Maker only provides 2 gold but no longer requires any building maintenance
  • Good change.

Map Generation Changes

• Increased Oil quantity per resource.
  • This is bizzare. Oil is already a rather non-important resource...
• Minimum Uranium is now 2.
• Cut Deer Appearance in Arctic regions.
• Adjusted Sheep placement so it is more spread out.
• Decreased Wheat appearance in Plains.
• Increases Cow appearance overall, including adding up to 2 Cow tiles to heavy grass start positions.

 

[Sneaks]

For those interested, I created a chatroom to discuss Civ V Modding in general, as well as a place to get faster feedback from Modders when they are online:

http://www.meebo.com/room/civmod/
password is fanatic

You do need to create a meebo account(or possibly use AIM, MSN, etc) to get in.

 

[Ahriman]

I agree with you on basically everything except:

Market and Bazaar provide 2 gold (as well as +25%)
This is a good alternative to the cost reduction I implimented.

I think its very weird for the Market to be superior to the Bank. I prefer the specialization route.

Lighthouse gives bonus 1 food for Fish; cost reduced
This makes sense, I'll do this.

I don't like this. I think Fish should give a good food yield even without an extra building. Fish are a big part of how coastal starts are compensated relative to river starts; they need to be a superior resource. Given how early you can get Civil Service and great river-farms, I think fish need to be high food easily to compensate.

Note you didn't comment on the factory/power plant changes (which I dislike).

It makes sense they did this, Chemistry is the midpoint between Machinery and Dynamite.

I prefer the current Balance method.

Legalism: Provides a free Culture building in your first 4 cities.
Very unique and interesting.

I don't really like this effect, if it does what I think it does (instantly builds a regular culture-providing building). I would prefer for policies to give you something that can't be identically replicated through buildings.

Makes sense, this tree was too powerful.

I disagree, particularly considering how late it is and the opportunity cost. The base effect was not too strong.
I think given how powerful many early-game policies are, late-game policies might need to be boosted to compensate.

 

[Sneaks]

Actually Order was vastly buffed in this patch, thanks to the added production yields in so many buildings, and probably needed the % decrease to properly compensate. As it stands, it is still one of the best policies in the game (basically a free windmill in every city)

 

[Ahriman]

Actually Order was vastly buffed in this patch, thanks to the added production yields in so many buildings, and probably needed the % decrease to properly compensate. As it stands, it is still one of the best policies in the game (basically a free windmill in every city)

I disagree.
a) In the Balance mod, buildings like windmills have a much larger impact.
b) By the time you are industrial era and have a free policy pick, the gain from a small extra yield to building construction is small because most buildings are already constructed, and late-game buildings are mostly only really needed in specialist cities. And if you have all those other production buildings anyway, then the marginal gain of a 15% boost to base production is very small.
c) There really aren't that many production boosts, and I don't think we should adopt most of them.

One other thing I should mention; if we adopted the Railway nerf, then the worker build time for railways should be significantly reduced. Just not worth it otherwise.

 

[Txurce]

Here are my questions and answers about what you dislike:

I dislike how often player choice is reduced in core areas of the game instead of fixing overpowered strategies:

• 
  [1]Blocked close city spacing (because of overpowered 2-tile city spacing ICS).
  [2]Blocked promotion saving (because of overpowered instant-heal).
  [3]Blocked policy saving (because of overpowered Free Speech policy cost reduction and other late-game policies).
  [4]Palace boosted to 3 gold and 3 production.
  [5]Trading Post & Camp gold increases by 1 with Economics.
  [6]Workboat cost increased

1. There's obviously an upside to this, and the choice reduction never felt that large to me in the period when your mod included it. But I have been happy with your reversion.
2. I have always thought that saving promotions goes against the RL corollary, where you get promoted when you earn your promotion. To me the choice is an exploit.
3. Policy saving can be activated as an option, and with the early-policy buffs, is probably no longer much of an option anyway.
4. This is a matter of what game you want. They are seemingly tilting it toward a super-city with satellites. There's nothing wrong (or right) about that.
5. Is there a possibility that this balances the various SP buffs?
6. This may be due to the buff the workboats receive with Compass.

Finally - you noted what you intended to change, and what you had already done. Will you leave the rest as is (patched), pending further consideration?

 

[Ahriman]

Finally - you noted what you intended to change, and what you had already done. Will you leave the rest as is (patched), pending further consideration?

I would advocate leaving the Balance mod as it is and considering which vanilla-patch changes to not revert, rather than taking the vanilla + patch and starting tabula rasa from reconsidering all the various Balance mod changes.

 

[Thalassicus]

While implementing some changes I realized they made an odd math error:

Aristocracy: Wonder bonus reduced by 5% to 20%.

33% to 20% is a 10% reduction, not 5% (1 - 1.2 / 1.33).


Most of the stuff I didn't comment on directly I'm unsure of, don't know if it's good or bad and will have to play with it a while to see. Some things I commented on in a more general paragraph instead of on individual items.

I'm going to do the same thing as I did with the last major patch (1.1.135): compare the files, and with each change decide whether to keep the new patched version, balance mod version, or pre-patch version. It's basically the same process someone would take merging mods.


I've been thinking things over a bit... I think the big late-game production nerfs are a result of various articles over the months pointing to the potential for late-game 'carpet of doom' scenarios where the map fills with units. I don't think reducing production is a good solution to the problem though, because we can still get tons of units, it just takes a little longer.

I believe a better solution is to shift emphasis to air units in the late game since those are stackable... literally, at different altitudes!

Something else I've been thinking about is the lower trading post yield would make sense if both income and expenses are reduced by an equal amount. To keep things as close to vanilla as possible, I've implemented the vanilla 1 base trading posts, and also reduce maintenance and purchase costs slightly (~10-25%) across the board for buildings and units.

My goal is to keep the overall revenue from (income - expenses = revenue) unchanged. I've actually been considering this global deflation of income & expenses for a while now, and the changes in vanilla make it easier to justify.


@Ahriman
I actually changed my mind about the market/bazaar when I realized all these flat per-city yield bonuses are a big buff to small cities and ICS. It's strange they'd buff an already overpowered strategy. I'm going to stick with percentage buffs instead, friendly to large cities.

I'm not going to be using the fish nerf. What I agree with is moving the fish yield bonus from the smokehouse to lighthouse. It's bizzare they nerfed fish... I think the community agrees coasts are underpowered.

I'm going to be keeping the freshwater / non-freshwater split of the improvements, but can see why they chose a middle tech instead.


@Txurce
The reason I dislike the ever-increasing emphasis on the capital it reduces decision-making. I like to choose which cities to emphasize instead of having it pre-determined.

 

[bobbyboy29]

Hey thal, just wondering on your thoughts on how it may be possible to balance honor out. Liberty and tradition have bothed received big buffs and once again, honor is just being left by the wayside. The main problem, however is that honor bonuses have to be linked to combat/ army somehow, I don't see how they can compete with, say +2 food per city or a free GP of your choice appearing near the cap without the bonus seeming ridiculous.

 

[Joneill]

I've been thinking things over a bit... I think the big late-game production nerfs are a result of various articles over the months pointing to the potential for late-game 'carpet of doom' scenarios where the map fills with units. I don't think reducing production is a good solution to the problem though, because we can still get tons of units, it just takes a little longer.

I don't think there is such a big nerf here, actually. While the total percentage multiplier is now lower (100% with workshop, factory, power plant and railroad compared to 140-165% now), there are more hammers to be gained from terrain now and infrastructure provides additional hammers as well.

Strange how they switched the workshop and windmill, I didn't really think their location on the tech tree was a problem.

Think that's mostly so that they could create the direct production boosting building chain of workshop-factory-power plant.

• Camps on Deer give production instead of food.

This one's puzzling, but probably has something to do with map region yield distribution.

Well the granary gives 1 food on deer and deer on tundra could probably use the hammer boost more than another food.

• Monarchy: +1 Gold and -1 Unhappiness for every 2 Citizens in your capital.

This is bizzare. Why have a -50% reduction in unhappiness on one policy and -33% reduction on its prerequisite? It seems better to just buff the gold effect.

Well legalism got a new effect, so it makes sense to combine these two previously weak effects in one policy.

I actually changed my mind about the market/bazaar when I realized all these flat per-city yield bonuses are a big buff to small cities and ICS. It's strange they'd buff an already overpowered strategy. I'm going to stick with percentage buffs instead, friendly to large cities.

Well, with cities giving one less gold, +2 gold on markets isn't that big a buff. The reduction in trading post gold until economics should also make it much harder to simply rushbuy buildings in a lot of small cities.

 

[juckie]

Can you mod the instant heal promotion?
If so, you could just lower it to ~4 hits. This makes a unit healthy enough to either retreat and heal, or continue after some minor damage.

---
Is there a way to give the first x cities 2 hammers, and all latter cities just 1?

---
I got a question.
On higher difficulty levels, the AI gets all sorts of bonusses.
Could you elaborate which ones they get?

I only know of a production bonus... Isn't it an option to let all AI combat units start with promotions rather than a give them production bonus? This doesn't carpet the map that way, and does give them a combat bonus.
Or, just like the barbarian bonus, give your units a -xx% penalty vs AI units.

 

[rhammer640]

I only know of a production bonus... Isn't it an option to let all AI combat units start with promotions rather than a give them production bonus? This doesn't carpet the map that way, and does give them a combat bonus.
Or, just like the barbarian bonus, give your units a -xx% penalty vs AI units.

It might be interesting to have a penalty vs AI units as difficulty increases as it would require better tactics on the part of the human player. I would be in support of this.

 

[Ahriman]

I think arbitrary penalties on the human's units vs the AI would be very not fun.
I would rather be outnumbered 2:1 than have the enemy units be inherently better than mine, and have enemy riflemen beating up my infantry.

Strength modifications get particularly dangerous because of the non-linearities in the combat function.

Free promotions/experience for the AI is a more reasonable way of getting the same kind of outcome.