How would you balance the civics?

[Lexicus]

Ok so you go banking, replaceable parts, rifles, then probably economics after. It's rare to sit on banking very long without teching economics. If you beeline rifles and ignore education then I suppose you could run it a long time. Still not that great though as foreign trade is probably worth as much.

I virtually never self-tech economics, and I usually backfill banking after having gotten liberalism. YMMV i guess.

 

[civvver]

I guess in my games that doesn't usually happen. If that were the case mercantilism would be ok.

 

[Lennier]

I virtually never self-tech economics, and I usually backfill banking after having gotten liberalism. YMMV i guess.

I like the free GM too much to never self-tech economics. I usually tech it after liberalism, unless another civ will/has beat me to it.

 

[Lexicus]

Problem is I find the AI will often tech it while I'm pushing for military techs.

 

[Windsor]

Problem is I find the AI will often tech it while I'm pushing for military techs.

Seing an AI research economics, demoracy, corporation, SciMeth and so on while ignoring the urgent need for rifling and steel is extremely frustrating. Both cuirassiers and cavalry wouldn't be nearly as popular as they are if the AI was halfway decent.

A free GM is nice, but it also delays very good military techs. NTT makes early economics more attractive.

 

[Lexicus]

Seing an AI research economics, demoracy, corporation, SciMeth and so on while ignoring the urgent need for rifling and steel is extremely frustrating. Both cuirassiers and cavalry wouldn't be nearly as popular as they are if the AI was halfway decent.

A free GM is nice, but it also delays very good military techs. NTT makes early economics more attractive.

I don't pay anywhere near enough attention as I should to the techs the AI researches but I feel like I frequently see them getting economics before I have liberalism. That usually happens when I get dragged down by the AI declaring on me because I'm too lazy to play the diplomatic game properly
Anyway, I have also noticed that while the AI can often out-beaker me (on Emperor) their prioritization of techs is awful. I can't see any scenario where a GM can get me as much as getting curs ~6 turns earlier. I guess maybe if I didn't have horses.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Seing an AI research economics, demoracy, corporation, SciMeth and so on while ignoring the urgent need for rifling and steel is extremely frustrating. Both cuirassiers and cavalry wouldn't be nearly as popular as they are if the AI was halfway decent.

A free GM is nice, but it also delays very good military techs. NTT makes early economics more attractive.

What about the AI having Assembly line and no rifling?

 

[Strijder21]

What about the AI having Assembly line and no rifling?

Ugh.

 

[mycophobia]

Not sure of the etiquette of necrobumping but I thought I'd throw in my ideas here since this thread is pretty substantial. I've read this one and others like it and it stimulated some thoughts about how I'd make some of the lesser used civics better.

Serfdom:
Add: +1 food to workshops
Add: +1 hammer to watermills
Not sure if this is "too good" or not, but this could perhaps make for an attractive alternative to slavery if you're not playing for conquest/domination, and it comes at around the same time in the tech tree as workshops and watermills so you'd have an incentive to actually build those things long before their buffs show up in the unmodded game.

Emancipation:
Add: +1 food to towns
Just to make this good for reasons other than avoiding the happiness penalty, and to complete the Free Speech/US/Emancipation trifecta of Town-buffing. Good for UN maybe?

State Property:
Remove: +1 food to workshops
Slight nerf to an already really good civic, but mainly to move it to Serfdom.

Environmentalism:
Move to Biology

Mercantilism:
Move to Compass

Think any of this would be game-breaking? Or ineffective? As I imagine is the case with many (most?) Civ 4 mechanics theorycrafters, I'm not particularly good at the game, and so it's difficult for me to imagine the far-reaching implications of changes like this. But it's still interesting to think about.

 

[mycophobia]

Messing around with the buffed Serfdom as described above and it might be a tad OP lol. But I have learned that maybe workshops aren't so bad to work in the standard game, at least after Guilds. I usually ignore them until I'm just carpeting my spaceship parts-building cities with them for the final push

 

[Tecumseh1]

Nice ideas. i agree serfdom needs some bonuses on food and production (especially food part). Maybe farms spreading irrigation should also be moved from bureaucracy to serfdom (no idea why it should be part of bureaucracy). Also slavery should have happiness or financial penalty sooner than emancipation, perhaps as early as serfdom/feudalism.

 

[Tecumseh1]

Mercantilism needs to come much earlier too (compass/optics or at currency). Make the +1 trade route contingent on switching into the mercantilism civic. No idea why that civic is tied to specialists which is just weird. This would also nerf currency a bit by requiring anarchy to get the trade bonus.

 

[Tecumseh1]

Also like your idea for giving towns +1 food for emancipation. In that case the happiness penalty should be moved to serfdom to balance it out. Also in that case Biology should also be rethought a bit, maybe it should give some additional health bonus.

 

[mycophobia]

Happiness penalty makes too little thematic sense in Serfdom though, it'd be silly. "We demand Serfdom!" lol. If anything were to be done with it I'd just lose it altogether but I don't think that's necessary.

 

[Tecumseh1]

Happiness penalty makes too little thematic sense in Serfdom though, it'd be silly. "We demand Serfdom!" lol. If anything were to be done with it I'd just lose it altogether but I don't think that's necessary.

I think just more along the lines of we don't want slavery :| More like slavery has happiness penalty when reaching the middle ages.

 

[Lexicus]

Maybe farms spreading irrigation should also be moved from bureaucracy to serfdom (no idea why it should be part of bureaucracy).

It is believed that the need to coordinate larger groups for irrigation projects ws a major driver of the development of early states, at least in Egypt and Mesopotamia and I believe in river valleys of China as well though I am less informed about that.

(This means that really irrigation should spread with Agriculture, but I can see why they had to delay that for gameplay purposes and in light of that, Bureaucracy actually makes a lot of sense as the tech allowing this).

 

[mycophobia]

I think just more along the lines of we don't want slavery :| More like slavery has happiness penalty when reaching the middle ages.

Nah I think Slavery should pretty much be left alone. Caste is already a good alternative for the right kind of player/game, it's just that that's the only Labor alternative in the mid-game outside of extremely specific circumstances with a Spiritual trait; additionally just making Slavery more annoying to run would only serve to, well, annoy those who are going to run it all game anyway. I wouldn't want to mess that up.

The problem with a hypothetical buffed Serfdom giving +1 food to workshops is that you now have, at the very least, an "add 1 hammer to any unimproved flatland" improvement, and Guilds is right there to buff it even more, so you end up with access to pretty incredible passive production in any given city with basically no effort and few drawbacks which is probably pretty big that early in the game given how scarce raw hammers can generally be. At least Slavery requires some strategic finesse to get the most effect out of it. That kind of benefit coming from State Property makes more sense because it's pretty late in the tech tree so the snowball effect is lessened.

 

[mycophobia]

Thinking on it again. If the objective is to make attractive alternatives to Slavery after the early game, we have to think of the use cases of Slavery and Caste and think of an alternate one to facilitate a Serfdom buff:

Slavery - Any city with high food is a production city through whipping
Caste - Any city with high food can provide wealth/science/culture and more GP through specialists

So for Serfdom, maybe we can provide a bonus to already established cottage-spammed cities by adding a hammer to Villages and Towns? So you can't just plop down a cottage and gain a hammer too. Or instead maybe all cottages+ on plains yield +1 food?

 

[danjuno]

I think Henrik has mentioned that Granaries really carry Slavery. Would cutting the food storage from 50% to something like 25% work, or would it be better to adjust whip unhappiness or the gain per pop?

Mercantilism: Should be moved back, comes way too late for being the first non-default civic in it's category. No foreign trade routes is a pretty painful trade-off for +1 specialist. Maybe reduce foreign trade route yield by a percentage in exchange for raising domestic TRY by the same %?