Oh yes, I forgot about the Long Walls solutions...
If you wanna REALLY get creative with the long walls, make them auto-produce a "wall" unit which can airdrop within 1 (or 2) spaces. that way you can literally create a wall in front of athens. however, you could simply make it double the defensive bonus of walls i suppose (like the civ3 great wall). or maybe both. or something else haha.
I'm all for creativity...within context. Airdropping is a cool feature but I think it asks people to suspend their disbelief a little too much. I did remember that I had another idea here. It seems like such a shame to go for the easy 'just like the Great Wall' settings, given that the Long Walls were such a significant factor in this period. So I was looking into using
this.
Only thing is I've never used LM terrain and don't really know how to implement such a thing. But it could well be the answer!
tribute victory: as long as the Pangaion Mine isnt buildable everywhere, i think 40,000-50,000 is perfect. when i won my game (hegemon victory) as athens, i had about 28,000 (and i was halfway through the number of game turns, as well as WAY ahead in techs compared to other civs).
Yes, I'm now thinking that perhaps 40-50k would be the right mark. Though I think some more reports from other games are still needed before this is decided.
I had just short of 33k Tribute when I got my Hegemonic Victory. The next nearest was Sparta with 18k and that's from their early wonder building and war mongering, as well as their tribute to the Gods.
I'm thinking of tweaking a couple of the values here though. I built most of the wonders, trounced everyone in techs and I was also giving a lot of Tribute to the Gods (Libation Wine, Temple Offerings etc). The breakdown of my Tribute Points is like this:
45% from Advances, which doesn't seem balanced right.
12.5% from Wonders, which is alright, they should be important but not so much for tribute.
15.8% from actually giving Tribute to the Gods. And I was working my Aetolian butt off for those Olympians.
So I'm thinking of (a) doubling the value of Tribute Points received from the likes of Libation Wine and Temple Offerings - they are supposed to be more significant than anything else and (b) chopping the points from Advances to 60% of their current value. If I had played the same game with those settings I'd still have ended up with pretty much the same Tribute Score, but at least the greater emphasis would have been on running Tribute to the Gods.
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Some other questions on your game if you don't mind...
1) Hegemonic Victory:
- Did you find it too easy getting all the Oaths done? (Bearing in mind you got four for free!)
- Did you conquer for them mostly or trade?
2) Leagues Features: Very curious about these. I was so far ahead in techs, crushed Thebes anyway and didn't play as one of the 'big four' so didn't get to see any of this...
- Did you make good use of The Delian League stuff and did they work ok? (Aside from Pangaion Mine of course)
- Did the other three build any of their League buildings?
3) Turns, Tech Tree and Timings:
- I think the new settings for the tech costs, dates and turns is about right. I was getting all my Classical Era units from about 500BC and all the really major wars kicked off around 450BC. Did these timings feel right for you?
- I finished both the game and nearly the whole tech tree on turn 316. I think you said you won quite early too. So I think there are two options here:
a) Simply shorten the amount of turns in the game, to something like 400-450 turns.
b) Up the tech costs far more dramatically than I did already and keep it at 550 turns.
I suspect that when the game is played at people's standard difficulty level it would go much further towards the full amount of turns. This too will likely have to wait for more game reports to come in and testing by me, but do you have any thoughts on the matter?