Getting Started

[Txurce]

This discussion begins with the question of resources. I think they should be available enough to make every starting position viable, but in unequal enough proportions to generate early-game strategic decisions. In my opinion tiebreakers should go for variety rather than equality, just because it’s more fun and more traditionally Civ-like.

For example, the way coal is presently distributed seems perfect to me so far: choice as to what city gets it, variety as to how many. More equal distribution would lead to the logical extreme of eliminating coal altogether, since it would become effectively irrelevant. (You would just raise factory hammer cost and maintenance.) I don’t think many of us would want that. Similarly, I like the idea of uranium being limited enough to have to choose between equally desirable peaceful or hostile use.

Following this tack, I much prefer having to go with horses instead of swords or vice versa due to terrain, rather than being guaranteed a perfectly balanced core army in every game.

Given the welcome overall reduction of iron and the strength of cities, siege units should be resource free. This will create more flow in the game, especially for the AI.

I don’t consider archers and spears useless. Archers are good defensive units in the early game, and spears can take cities, especially with buffed catapults. Neither of these uses are remotely optimal, but they should be desirable options due to either resource unavailability or just going for quantity over quality. Again, quantity vs quality (or resource vs resourceless) should be a legitimate circumstantial decision, rather than a no-brainer in favor of the resource units. Given that, I lean toward making spears and archers cheap but weak.

Having horses be somewhere between spears and warriors in effectiveness vs cities seems conceptually right to me. Knights and crossbows should seemingly have equivalent adjustments to their antecedents. And I noted back in my English game that never mind the manufacturing plant - the longbowman was out of control.

Following along the choice-always line, I love the idea of a siege promotion coming early, so as to choose between anti-city and anti-personnel. But take care not to make the siege promo too powerful, or there won’t be much choice at all.

And on a tangent, the reason gunpowder units are range rather than melee is that battlefields proportions changed with their arrival in that they remained closest-to-the-front… hence, melee.

Finally, MI being slowed to 3 – and not being nearly as powerful as modern armor – seems essential to justify it being resourceless.

 

[ShadowTek]

Compatible with patch 1.0.1.141

Yeah Thal rules!! Thanks man!!

 

[Tomice]

About Mech Inf vs Tank, we had the discussion already, approximately here:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9961216&postcount=489

I suggested that tanks should hard-counter mech inf, both for realism and gameplay. We haven't finished on the topic back then.


It might be useful to read some old posts before starting the discussion from zero.

 

[Txurce]

About Mech Inf vs Tank, we had the discussion already, approximately here:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9961216&postcount=489

I suggested that tanks should hard-counter mech inf, both for realism and gameplay. We haven't finished on the topic back then.


It might be useful to read some old posts before starting the discussion from zero.

I think I was a part of the earlier discussion. The present discussion seems to span the whole game. It has included mentions of mech infantry and oil. My omnibus response includes a response on other comments regarding MI already made here.

 

[Ahriman]

On another topic: What you experienced with longbowmen definitively has to be considered and changed if necessary!

Its worse than I realized; the extra range promotion gets converted to Mobility (+1 move) when I upgrade them to rifles.
So now my rifles are all 3 moves. Wow.

In terms of the rest:
I worry about a pair of spearmen being able to take a city in the early game.
I worry about strength 10 hoplites being as good as swords (and strength 9 hoplites being a terrible UU if
[A thought: could hoplites have a 20% penalty vs ranged attack promotion "Close formation"? That might balance them at strength 10.]
I worry about cheap strength 8 archers killing elite expensive strat resource swordsmen in ~2 shots.

I worry about everyone trying to make spears a good, powerful unit that is supercheap, rather than the fodder units that you get to hold the line. Put them on rough terrain with Drill promotions, and use their ZoC to protect your archers and your siege and to force the enemy to attack them rather than your precious elite unites or your squishy ranged attackers.
Swords and horses can only shine if archers and spears are fairly weak.

What does confuse me is the view one-shotting requires promotions or rare circumstances.

Fair enough. Not that rare.

* * *
Oh, and I *really really really* hope you don't start changing rifles into ranged attackers. Will break the game.

 

[Ahriman]

Given how rare the resources are now, Ironclad should probably also lose coal requirement, carrier should lose the oil requirement. Otherwise outfitting a carrier wing just isn't worth the oil. Aircraft are already marginal.

So we should probably have oil requirements for:
Tank, battleship, bomber, modern armor, stealth bomber.
And then bombers, stealth bombers and battleships probably need a buff.

Not sure about fighters/jet fighters. Maybe leave them oil-less, but then AA guns are probably too weak. So maybe buff them rather than removing oil?

Then Uranium for:
Atomic Bomb, Nuclear missile, GDR, Nuclear power plant, spaceship factory.

 

[Txurce]

Given how rare the resources are now, Ironclad should probably also lose coal requirement, carrier should lose the oil requirement.

Not sure about fighters/jet fighters. Maybe leave them oil-less, but then AA guns are probably too weak. So maybe buff them rather than removing oil?

Totally agree on ironclad, and good point about carriers.

In my ideal scenario, fighters would need oil, there would be more oil available than there is now, but not nearly enough for everyone, quite possibly leading to conflict (especially if the AI can be modded to target those tiles).

 

[Txurce]

Double post.

 

[Thalassicus]

My goal with unit balance is to achieve a scenario where a combined-arms force is sufficiently superior to unit massing that it's the ideal composition, but someone capable of creating fewer unit classes still has a decent chance of survival. Combined arms takes more effort and skill (and I find more fun!), so it makes sense this effort should be rewarded.

But take care not to make the siege promo too powerful, or there won’t be much choice at all.

I agree. The 50% modifier was due to the fact shock/drill used to affect damage vs cities. Now that's been stealth-nerfed somewhere in an undocumented patch change, I dropped the effect of the Siege promo to 40% today.

I agree longbowmen are the best thing going for England. The question is, do we feel this makes Elizabeth more powerful than say, Babylon, Greece and China? I haven't played England enough to know for sure. If it does overpower her I'll happily tone longbows down... I'm sure most people would agree it's better for England to have 3 good uniques instead of 1 fantastic one. It has precedent too... China's chu-ko-nu start with Logistics but also have lower attack strength than normal. Now that I think about it, that actually makes a lot of sense... CKN have -2 strength and Logistics, so Longbows could start with -2 strength and +1 range.

A ranged defense penalty seems reasonable for Hoplites, or what about a reduced bonus vs horses? In Civ IV the concept of Greece's spearmen was they were effective all-around units that could make up the bulk of the Greek army. They were decently effective against cities, melee, didn't have the Chariot penalty, and could be built with either bronze OR iron.

Vanilla CiV is:
..50 ..7 Spearmen ...+100% vs mounted
..60...9 Hoplites ..iii..+100% vs mounted
100 10 Pikemen .i....+100% vs horses
..80 11 Swordsmen

What if it's:
..50 ..8 Spearmen.iii+100% vs mounted
..80 10 Hoplites ..ii..+50% vs mounted or -25% vs ranged, or possibly both
100 10 Pikemen..... +100% vs mounted
..80 11 Swordsmen

I know pikes require more tech, but Civil Service isn't *too* hard to get so it's worth taking into consideration. Also remember modifiers and promotions act on base strength, so spears/hoplite/pikes become less effective in relation to swords/horses as bonuses stack up.

CC have also concerned me a while. It's difficult to balance a unit with +2 strength, 5 moves and faster great general creation. Maybe either equal strength or movement to regular horses?. Like England I feel it'd be more fun as Greece to have 2 useful and well-balanced UUs instead of just 1 fantastic one, so I'd like to buff the Hoplite a bit while slightly reducing CCs.

I'm happy with where archer attack/defense strength is already at, and don't intend to improve it since Archery is a tech that can be researched at turn one.

I've seen discussions about gunpowder melee status buefore, but like Txurce pointed out the reason they're melee is battlefield scale changed. I feel altering their mechanic would be beyond the scope of a balance mod, and city capture mechanics are based around melee-only.


Removing the Ironclad coal requirement is something I did way back in October, one of the first things in the Combat mod. I had to revert this because of the way CiV calculates if a resource is strategic. By removing (or changing) the coal requirement, coal became non-tradeable and disappears from the top bar. There was actually quite a lot of comments about this in one of the threads.

To work around this I have to either A) fix the bug with a single extra check to the loop detecting strategics or B) invent a whole new dummy unit, invisible in the Civilopedia and unbuildable, that serves no purposes but has Coal as a requirement. Since A requires c++ access and there's still no word yet on when we'll get the full sdk, I've been procrastinating going to all the trouble of B.

 

[Pouakai]

Or you could have a proper unit that requires Coal... artillery maybe?

Are you aware in the dev version the new UU / UB are all TXT_KEY_

 

[wurstburst]

My goal with unit balance is to achieve a scenario where a combined-arms force is sufficiently superior to unit massing that it's the ideal composition, but someone capable of creating fewer unit classes still has a decent chance of survival. Combined arms takes more effort and skill (and I find more fun!), so it makes sense this effort should be rewarded.

I agree longbowmen are the best thing going for England. The question is, do we feel this makes Elizabeth more powerful than say, Babylon, Greece and China?

I've been using the mod quite a bit - great work and thanks for the effort. I think you've achieved your goal of a combined arms force. I find that without 2 seige units, it's real tough to take a city, especially when they have defensive buildings. Unless a civ is really behind on tech, I won't go in with straight melee units. The mix and strength of the various types of units feels "right" now, as it never did in the early vanilla patches. I don't feel stupid for building various types of units now and usually have a mix of archer types, melee and seige, with the occassional horse when I get around to teching to it.

I don't think longbow are OP. Good solid UU, for a civ with not much else going for it. I'd rather have seige that keeps promoting through the modern era, all things considered.

 

[Thalassicus]

@Pouakai
If you mean the descriptions, tooltips and civilopedia stuff aren't showing up, maybe try clearing your cache? I don't know what else could cause it; the descriptions are displaying properly for me.


@wurstburst
Glad you feel that way!

It's what I'm going for, which is why I don't want to make any dramatic changes. Basically there's two ways of balancing a unit like spearmen. Originally when looking at this unit I asked myself the question: would adjusting cost or strength be better? I tried out -5 cost first, now going to try +1 strength instead, and see which feels better in gameplay.

 

[Pouakai]

Clear my cache?

Could it be a downloading bug?

 

[Polycrates]

I agree that it's problematic that aluminium is so much more important than oil, but I think getting rid of it completely would be a mistake. Like the iron vs horses thing, I think oil needs a balance so that it isn't the only thing that's worthwhile in the modern era. Particularly since the modern era is where we see an explosion in the number of unit types from the tiny handful in previous ages.
Nukes are just such a separate tech stream that I don't think uranium really cuts it as an alternative.
I'd cut down aluminium down to really be "high tech"/aerospace stuff, and perhaps make it more economic as well. Jet fighters/stealth bombers (and maybe helicopters) as the only military use - missile cruisers, nuclear subs, modern armour and rocket arty could definitely all be oil-based. I'd keep hydro plants with an aluminium requirement, and also solar plants, especially now that they're buffed. And I'd make aluminium a requirement for each spaceship part. So useful, but not so much so that you'd foreswear oil.

That way, a civ with aluminium could take a lead in airpower and get a boost in production (military and non-military), while the oil-based civ can dominate with raw land and sea power. Both would give a top-end siege option; one with range and one with power. And aluminium would be something you'd really have to go after to win a space race, but not so vital otherwise.

I also think it makes a lot of sense for a carrier to still require oil. The ability to project air power outside normal range limitations is very powerful and can really let you dominate an intercontinental war without the other guy even getting so much as a blow in. A fully-laden carrier uses one oil deposit, which I think is quite nice. It's useless to someone with no resources, and it balances against the aluminium-only civ, whose fighters have longer range anyway.

 

[Thalassicus]

I believe the best way to sum up my instinct on the matter is...

• Gameplay: 3 resources are crammed into 1 era, and two of them are only really needed for 1/2 an era.
• Realism: aluminum is abundant and relatively unimportant in world affairs, the opposite of CiV. Abstraction is important in games, but picking an ordinary resource and making it important isn't really abstraction, just feels a little clumsy.
• Options: everyone seems to have wildly different opinions on what should be done about the problem. Eventually I'm going to have to settle on one solution... statistically that means the eventual solution can't satisfy everyone, but should at least be an improvement over vanilla, so please keep that in mind.

Since there's so many ideas floating around, I think it might help to discuss options in terms of advantages and disadvantages.

With any solution involving an increase in the importance of oil, "minor" oil deposits would be scattered across the map so no one would be completely shut out (as per Tomice's suggestion) but a civ might simply have few of the resource. Mech infantry are also still quite powerful for combat. "Major" nodes would be left on desert/tundra/water as before. I'd increase the abundance of oil deposits in water, so it acts as a new form of "bad terrain" like deserts/snow where oil is abundant.


Option A (Ahriman/Thal): Aluminum deposits and requirements replaced with Oil.

• Advantages
  • Accurately portrays oil/uranium importance in world events.
  • 2-resource oil/uranium split has precedent from earlier horse/iron split.
  • Simple to balance and implement.
• Disadvantages
  • Potentially good or bad map luck (though 'small' deposits are scattered around the map, see above).
  • I've seen a few statements in favor of / not in favor, but couldn't find details as to why (mostly alternative suggestions). Could you help me fill out this part further? I genuinely want to identify what potential problems with this could be.

Option B (Alpaca): Add oil as a requirement to aluminum-users (double requirement).

• Advantages
  • ?
• Disadvantages
  • ?

Option C (Polycrates): Aluminum as niche resource like Uranium, needed for advanced aircraft, hydro/solar power and spaceship parts.

• Advantages:
  • Fewer changes than option #1.
  • "Closer to iron-vs-horses dichotomy from the earlier game, with nukes as a wildcard."
  • "Oil is militarily dominant and uranium is scary."
• Disadvantages:
  • "Aluminium still makes very little sense as a rare resource."
  • "Perhaps a bit harder to balance."

Option D: Focus oil on military, aluminum on economy, and uranium as a split. (or some other form of role-focus for each resource)

• Advantages
  • ?
• Disadvantages
  • ?

Option E (Alpaca): Add more units and buildings to the modern era to help provide more ways to differentiate the 3 resources.

• Advantages
  • ?
• Disadvantages
  • ?

Option F: ???



I suspect they did the vanilla method to try and keep some resemblance to Civ IV, but it ends up a bit messy since CiV has fewer things to do and build (also has very different strategic resource mechanic).

In addition, I'd like to avoid sidelining the importance of uranium in this discussion. From a perspective of gameplay, I feel all resources in an era should be equally important for consideration by the player, just as a matter of balance (like horses/iron). Realistically, if you think about it the mere possibility of nations or groups having access to uranium often has global repercussions. The front pages of news sources like the bbc, new york times, wall street journal and so on frequently have articles about some topic related to oil/uranium (there's some up on all of them today), but very rarely any other form of depletable resource. I've always felt the impact on world events from nuclear energy is underrepresented in the Civ series.



@Pouakai
The cache folder is located here:
C:\<username>\Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\cache

It stores temporary data. Whenever there's some bizzare problem, deleting the cache sometimes fixes it. The odds of it being a file transfer issue are rather remote... I've probably downloaded/uploaded millions of things in my life, and likely only seen one or two corrupted file transfers, none of which had targeted issues (whole thing works or not at all).

My guesses are it's either:

• Conflict with lingering cache data
• Conflict with another mod

So I'd try it out with the latest dev version, a wiped cache, and only the Leaders mod active. If you're still encountering an issue I'll try and help find the problem.

 

[Polycrates]

I'll think it over a while. I believe the best way to sum up my instinct on the matter is...

• Gameplay: there's 3 resources crammed into 1 era, and two of them are only really needed for 1/2 an era. I suspect they did this to try and keep some resemblance to Civ IV, but it ends up a bit messy.

• 
  But that final era crams in just about as many units as all the other eras combined. It's also go-hard-or-go-home time, and it gives an extra little something that can be taken advantage of to push you or an opponent over the line from a stalemate. That's why I like aluminium being part of a space-race victory.
  And really, for regular military, it's just oil vs aluminium in the same way the classical age has iron vs horses - uranium is really its own game. You do get plenty of warning of where the resources are before you can use them as well, so you can plan well ahead and it's not a total crapshoot.
  
  

  [*]Realism: aluminum is abundant and relatively unimportant in world affairs, the opposite of CiV. Abstraction is important in games, but picking an ordinary resource and making it important isn't really abstraction, just feels a little clumsy.

  Yeah totally granted. I guess it's supposed to approximate something like the HOI series' "rare materials". Remember Civ IV had "stone"....
  
  Mostly unrelated thought, but given that iron was a limiting resource once again in WWII, would it also be a worthwhile option to make some late-game units require iron? Mech inf and mobile SAM and subs perhaps? Maybe even artillery? So it doesn't become entirely useless, and to put a gentle cap on mech inf...
  
  

  Also, I'd like to avoid sidelining the importance of uranium. I feel all resources in an era should be equally important for consideration by the player, just as a matter of balance (like horses/iron). In addition, if you think about it the mere possibility of nations or groups having access to uranium often has global repercussions. The front pages of news sources like the bbc, new york times, wall street journal and so on frequently have articles about some topic related to oil/uranium (there's some up on all of them today), but very rarely any other form of depletable resource. This importance might be overemphasized by the news, but it's still there.

  
  I wouldn't be worried about the importance of uranium. Nukes are crazy powerful in this iteration of civ. A civ with just one source of uranium and the Manhattan Project would scare me far more than a massive civ with several sources of oil and aluminium. Nothing else lets you effectively wipe out a whole civ in the opening turn, but you can do it with just a couple of well-placed nukes.
  And Giant Death Robots, once you get them, cut through every other unit like butter.
  The only thing I would do to make uranium more important is to prevent rush-buying nukes. They're powerful enough they feel like they need to be earned the hard way, and it prevents someone using their 4 uranium to make two nuclear missiles, then using them and rush-buying another two the turn later.

 

[Polycrates]

Ah sorry, got in my reply before your edit...

First option: aluminum deposits and requirements are replaced with Oil. Balance Oil and Uranium for equal importance.

• Advantages
  • Precedent from earlier in the game (2-resource horse/iron split).
  • Simple to balance.
  • Can implement in an hour or less.
  • Accurately portrays importance in world events.
• Disadvantages
  • I've seen a few statements for/against this, but couldn't find details as to why (mostly alternative suggestions). Could you help me fill out this part? I genuinely want to identify what potential problems with this could be.

• 
  I guess the problem is that oil then becomes an all-or-nothing. If you've got it, you're at a massive advantage over your opponents who are pretty much stuffed in a conventional military sense - no planes, no tanks, none of the powerful ships, really just infantry and artillery. Aluminium gives a second resource for fighting conventionally without having to resort to nuking everything to have a chance. Uranium is more of a wildcard thing in my mind...it's a road the world may or may not go down, at least militarily. Nukes are so different from other military that I don't think you can really compare uranium to other resources like iron vs horses.
  
  

  Fourth option: I'm not sure exactly how to summarize your suggestion Polycrates, if you could help me with that.

  
  Oil as the dominant military resource, for pretty much everything. Replaces aluminium for modern armour, rocket arty, nuclear subs, missile cruisers and probably something else I've forgotten.
  Aluminium as a hybrid military/economic resource. Needed for jet fighters and stealth bombers. Can make a civ dominant in late-game air power, vs oil's dominance in ground and sea power (and early air power); I think this approximates swords vs horses decently well. Also needed for hydro and solar plants, as well as spaceship factories and all the spaceship parts.
  Uranium pretty much as-is. Almost an "I win" button, but requires devotion of massive tech and production to something that's rather one-shot.
  
  Advantages:
  minimal changes from what's currently in the game
  I personally think it's a bit closer to the iron-vs-horses dichotomy from the earlier game, but with nukes as an additional wildcard
  oil is militarily dominant and uranium is just scary
  
  Disadvantages:
  Aluminium still makes very little sense as a rare resource
  Perhaps a bit harder to balance
  
  
  EDIT: I just googled "rare resources" and this was one of the first things that popped up...pretty interesting, I think. And you could probably rename aluminium to "rare earths" and make it fit pretty well...might sound a little silly, is all. Wikipedia on rare earth elements.

 

[Thalassicus]

Thank you for helping clarify that, I updated and hopefully got the essence of what you're saying in the summary.

One thing to consider is that even though technically the modern era has so many units, most of them are simply upgrades of one another with the same roles. (I consider the WWII stuff 'modern era' since bombers are in that era, and we typically can't get the rest out on the battlefield right away.)

In addition, with anything that increases oil's value (your option or mine) I'd follow Tomice's suggestion and scatter small deposits all over so people are very unlikely to be shut out.

 

[Tomice]

Thanks for the very informative overview, Thal!

I don't think we'll come far by theorycrafting, though. Since we all agree that aluminium in its current form (needed for most units and oil becoming obsolete) is plain stupid both in gameplay and realism terms, I suggest removing it, replacing it with oil and thinking about an use for alumium afterwards.

I think aluminium being necessary for air forces and space race (high-tech) would be interesting, but we probably have to buff air units first. Until then, air should probably be ressourceless.



You asked for the potential problem of an 90% oil-dominated lategame. Primarily. I don't see an alternative to grabbing as much oil as possible. If you have little iron or horses, use the other strategy. I'd like to have an alternative in the lategame, and I don't think uranium fills this role well, it's too special.

Oil could be the heavy, offensive troop SR like iron is, while aluminium would be the ligh unit/map control SR, just like horses.

 

[Thalassicus]

I'm going to test out middleground solutions for resource abundance and oil/aluminum balance for now, we figure we can go up or down from there. I've uploaded a new version of the dev testing build with the latest changes.

The readmes should now contain information on all changes in the "version history" sections. I'll migrate this information to the details/rationale sections once I'm ready for a wide release.

The changes to strategic resource abundance are now too complex to describe details, so I simply state the summary in the readme: goal of -25% total map-wide quantity for all strategics.