[Extension] Hokath's Proposals

[hokath]

Yes Bazooka shouldn't have 3 base range, I agree.
I will check the Free Company.

Edit: made the above to changes.
I also forgot, I was playing with changing the Egyptian UA because of its uncertain status in the 4UC now Recursive has stepped down.
However it now looks like it probably will be implemented as suggested so this won't be needed, but I'll leave it there for a bit anyway.
The change is
- loses Artifacts gain +5 Science and Culture, and Landmarks gain +5 Gold and Tourism
- gains Labourers generate +1 Production, Science, Culture, and Golden Age Point

 

[Zarrk]

-- New Founder "Mastery" - +1 Happines per 8 Followers in non-Enemy Foreign Cities if you think about it, this will actually cause DoW on you - +1 Science and Culture for every 2 Followers in City-States - max 80 followers

Does the second scaler apply to all City-States or only those not at war with ?

 

[AndreyK]

I'm not sure, it happens with this update, EE or Semper Fidelis, but seems that WW production costs went down. I have MWfVP and Hidden Wonders and in this game WW costs are much lower.

 

[AndreyK]

Sorry, that was Wonder from 2 eras before, Medieval Wonders are costly enough.

 

[hokath]

Does the second scaler apply to all City-States or only those not at war with ?

All. (there is a column that makes beliefs not work while at war, but I didn't use it. The idea is to keep this part of the bonus)

WW production costs went down

EE changes wonder costs, but not this mod. I haven't changed that recently though.
Wonder cost is mostly controlled however by things like number you have; if you run More Wonders, costs will change a lot.

 

[mrcd]

banged out a deity egypt run with the shiny new UA and didn't get much use out of the laborers past the early game where specialists are sparse and strong tile improvements aren't online yet; some kind of scaling might be in order, but i leave it to better minds

that said, during the early game they felt strong (let me hoover up lots of ancient-classical wonders when i micromanaged them) and fun to play around (let me settle unorthodox cities that had high food and nothing else going on), so props

by the way the '+1 in the Holy City for every City following your Religion.' line of the 'Eternal Glory' founder seemed bugged when i tried it in my russia game

 

[hokath]

The Labourer thing can have the "Korea scaling" where it upgrades at Medieval/Industrial/Atomic (without EE anyway, I assume that changes it..?)
But with current +4 yields my quick test suggested it was too strong. Basically if it gets better than a Specialist yields your Cities only work Labourers and some Farms (lol). I felt this was too extreme.
So then one can either lower yields and keep scaling, or have the current bonus.
I felt for the historical aspect the UA is representing, this was was better, with the early game focus.

I also really liked the unorthodox city placement I felt I could get away with. Mainly very high-food locations. The synergy with Tradition is also obvious.

'Eternal Glory' founder seemed bugged

Will check and edit once I find out what's up
Edit: Yes there's two things I didn't expect. 1) the yields go to the following City (so Belief_YieldPerFollowingCity works almost same way as Belief_CityYieldChanges...) and 2) it doesn't affect Foreign Cities.
So I've changed it to +2 from Foreign Cities only (+Courthouse part)

 

[Bysonte]

If the proposed Egypt UA/UI changes will eventually not be implemented in base VP, could be possible to include them here?
I guess it will be hard to implement it in base VP as ddl, but as a modmod that seems like it will be less problematic as a lua implementation.

 

[hokath]

I can try update Hinin's Egypt in that case, sure.

 

[Bysonte]

That would be great!
New Egypt was one of the things I was looking forward the most in 5.0, so seeing an updated version of it will sounds awesome.

 

[Zarrk]

Edit: Yes there's two things I didn't expect. 1) the yields go to the following City (so Belief_YieldPerFollowingCity works almost same way as Belief_CityYieldChanges...) and 2) it doesn't affect Foreign Cities.
So I've changed it to +2 from Foreign Cities only (+Courthouse part)

I think you forget to set the usual 25 Cities limit to the scaling effect.

 

[hokath]

It was intentional, but maybe it's too risky. After all, you might want to play giga-huge-Jarcast size and then I have no idea how many Cities you can get.
I can add a cap. I might set it a bit higher than 25.

 

[jarcast2]

In my giga-map gameplays I saw few instances of a civ reaching 20-22 cities but never 25.
The map is bigger but has to accommodate 9 more civs and 17 more City States, and warmongers after conquering a certain number of cities start razing the last-taken ones.

 

[redrum68]

Even on just a huge map, you can easily get close to 50 cities before I consider the game over.

Spoiler :

 

[hokath]

Here it's about the number of foreign cities you convert so even on a regular mapscript you can get over 25.
I think I will put it at 40 to match the Pilgrimage cap

The gameplay idea here, by the way, is to encourage you to spread to others, causing them to get angry at you and cause wars.

 

[hokath]

I realised that I removed the City Conquest effect off Hero Worship, but I didn't add it back like I did with the other two "non-scaler" Founders.
So I'm going to add an Enhancer with it +200% Str->Tourism on kill, "Dharma-Yudda".
Some civs like Japan really want this effect so it would be a shame to just remove it outright.

To keep the numbers equal (with More Beliefs) I also added another Reformation

Cargo Cult
May purchase (Airfields and) Airports with [ICON_PEACE] Faith. Double yields from Natural Wonders. +5 [ICON_GOLDEN_AGE] Golden Age Points in the Holy City for every known [ICON_PANTHEON] Pantheon founded (caps at 8 Pantheons).

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

Great Person Bulbs.
I finished a game as Egypt and, once again, the Writer Bulbs took me to the moon. No Progress but To The Glory of God.
I'd like to pursue a solution where TTGOT is split into 3 beliefs, one for each era of policy branches (so Tradition/Progress/Authority as Engineer/Writer/General). This way, with normal play, you get 2 extra GPs (3 if you Christmas-tree).
Unfortunately I can't see a way to do that with current DLL. So in the meanwhile I'm going to disable it.
If you don't want this then delete/edit GreatPeopleBalance.sql

Whilst I was at it, I wanted to try tweaking the ratios of Scientist and Writer (and to a lesser extent, Artist) turns-to-scaling.
That is, how much a Great Scientist gives in turns of science output as base, and how much % increase you get from Academies.
So currently you get 3 turns of Science, and then each Academy is +10%
For Writers it is 5 turns and then 3% more per Great Work.
Artists get 20% more GAP per theme.
I want to make them a bit more alluring to click early, and not scale as crazy -- I find I always plant everyone until post-Industrial (or even later!) which isn't so interesting and makes the late game such a dash when there could be really strategic moments to use them earlier (that just don't seem worth it, to me)
Here are the numbers

UPDATE Units SET
    BaseBeakersTurnsToCount = BaseBeakersTurnsToCount * 1.75,  -- rounds down to ~5
    BaseCultureTurnsToCount = BaseCultureTurnsToCount * 1.5,  -- rounds down to ~7
    ScaleFromNumGWs = ScaleFromNumGWs / 3,
    ScaleFromNumThemes = ScaleFromNumThemes / 2;

UPDATE Unit_ScalingFromOwnedImprovements SET
Amount = Amount / 2.5  -- 4 or 2 for celts
WHERE UnitType IN (SELECT Type FROM Units WHERE Class = 'UNITCLASS_SCIENTIST');

These are in the same file.
Will report back after a couple games.

----------------------------------
But wait, there's more!
This also includes the rebalancing to "follower-yield" beliefs as workshopped on the Discord

  -- Thrift
   - 1 gold per 2
   - max 15
   - 1 gold from merchant/engineer/scientist/labourer

  -- Asceticism/Remedy
   - 1 food per 2
   - max 15
   - 4 food if you have a specialist

  -- Diligence
   - 1 prod per 2
   - max 15
   - 2 prod for each trade route to/from

  -- Creativity
   - 1 culture per 3
   - max 10
   - 1 culture from great works
 
  -- Scholarship
   - 1 science per 3
   - max 10
   - 2 science from Universities

  -- Communalism
   - 2 food added to production

  -- Mastery/Abstinence
   - Labourers included

 

[redrum68]

I'd recommend removing the max from follower yield beliefs as they are mostly unnecessary now. Also I would buff Thrift to be 2 gold per each of those specialists. When you are unlocking beliefs, most cities aren't going to have many specialists yet and comparing it to the food one which gives 4 food for any specialist, you'd need 4 specialists to get 4 gold. It will scale a bit better than the food one but I think be closer to balanced with 2 gold rather than 1 gold per each of those specialists.

 

[hokath]

Will think about the caps. It feels like it could be desirable that religion should kinda "phase out", whereas with no cap it doesn't have the behaviour.
But maybe.

I think early on I'm valuing Gold quite a bit higher than Food, it's so much more scarce. Later (like, getting comfortably into Medieval, all routes up, etc.) they are more like parity. Do you feel early Food is as good then?

2 Gold might still be ok just because the Specialists cannot be worked freely early on---limited in number and with food+happiness requirements simultaneously.
I would have to try.

 

[redrum68]

Will think about the caps. It feels like it could be desirable that religion should kinda "phase out", whereas with no cap it doesn't have the behaviour.
But maybe.

I think early on I'm valuing Gold quite a bit higher than Food, it's so much more scarce. Later (like, getting comfortably into Medieval, all routes up, etc.) they are more like parity. Do you feel early Food is as good then?

2 Gold might still be ok just because the Specialists cannot be worked freely early on---limited in number and with food+happiness requirements simultaneously.
I would have to try.

Its actually a bit of the opposite. Food is more valuable early game because growth requirements are much lower and gold is more valuable late game where rush buying approaches 1 gold per prod. Generally you get follower beliefs fairly early and I would say food is worth a bit more than gold at that point. As the game goes on, food becomes worth less and gold approaches the value of production.

 

[Remito]

Hi Hokath

Finally made it to the Finish screen (defeat, alas...) with some of your changes. I played an Emperor game with the Hisatsinom, and lost a very frustrating Diplo game on the first world domination vote (despite having 20 votes above the threshold and 25 above the closest opponent, yet all AI decided it would be better to lose to Netherlands than to me...)
Some comments (not very structured, sorry):

- Siege and Recon Rework: loved it, simply put. I have a feeling siege are weaker than in standard VP, but i loved the new field line. Recon fell much more "realistic", as now it takes a lot of time for them to explore. New promotions aimed for combat or pillaging sound exciting, but i very rarely used them: as recon are now much less mobile, but remain rather weak combat units, they can't really infiltrate behind enemy lines to wreak havoc, they get killed quite quickly. So overall, great changes, but I'll need time to make the most of them (I felt it made the game more difficult). The Recon reworks also probably penalizes severely the Brazilian UU (will take them much longer to explore, hence delaying the yields).

- New buildings: loved those. Probably too many of them to have a proper feedback, especially in the later eras. As i was fighting difficult defensive wars for the last 20+ turns I also had to concentrate too much to my taste on building units.

- Coporations rework : I love the idea that it should only be built in a city where you actually have the monopoly. Interesting, felt more balanced, but I will need other games to really appreciate the impact.

- Pikeman: worked very well.

- Fishing boats : fantastic change. It seems taht it does not work well with "Better Lakes for VP" though (which is a shame as it's also a great mod)

I was a bit surprised by the Religion changes (I had not looked carefully enough at the Misc folder), and will probably remove those for my next game (too many changes to digest !).

I really want to try the Subterfuge mod, sounds super exciting. How stable is it ?