ICS? Icey No!

PieceOfMind

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Icey No mod​

ICS? Icey No!

NO LONGER IN DEVELOPMENT

This is a mod that tries to curtail the effectiveness of the hard ICS strategy, where many small and mostly infrastructureless cities packed in tightly can be more powerful than an empire of similar population size but with more developed core cities.

The aim is not necessarily to just throw nerfs at ICSing, but to also add incentives to alternative paths. Importantly, it tries where possible to avoid nerfing early expansion because this is a normal part of most strategies. Unfortunately it's unlikely that this will remain completely untouched. To hurt big-scale ICS, REXing or smallscale ICSing may suffer a bit too.

Note that this mod may have a short lifespan because it will be built with the current modding limitations in mind. This makes things difficult because many good proposals for how to combat ICS are just not possible yet. If the balance is changed with a patch, or when the c++ sdk is released, this mod may no longer be needed.

In the meantime, the aim is to keep this thread as a place to discuss ways to counter ICS.

The mod is now available on modhub.

You can also download the zip here.


For your convenience, this is the readme for v1.

Spoiler :
Icey No Mod
Homepage: http://tinyurl.com/IceyNoMod (or http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=396258)

For more info, please visit the above website. At the moment I welcome any and all suggestions or criticisms. If you have any questions about the mod, that's also the place to ask them.

This mod makes a few balance changes in an attempt to encourage the alternatives to spamming small and mostly infrastructureless cities.


List of changes:

v1. Experimental - not very well tested yet!

Buildings
---------
-Colosseum 3:) from 4, 3:gold: maint unchanged.
-Theatre 5:) from 4, 4:gold: maint from 5.
-Stadium 7:) from 4, 5:gold: maint from 6.
-Circus 2:) from 3, 2:gold: main from 3, 120 cost from 150.
-Forbidden Palace now -25% unhappiness from population, from -50%.
-A science specialist slot moved from the library to the university.


Trade Routes
------------
-Old formula was (1 + 1.25*citysize)
-New formula is (-1.3 + 1.5*citysize + 0.05*capitalsize)
(Ideally I'd like to put a quadratic term in there, but it's not possible yet)

Social Policies
---------------
-Landed Elite (Tradition) SP now gives +20% growth to all cities, rather than +33% to the capital.


Miscellaneous
-------------
-Unhappiness per city increased from 2 to 3.
-To help reduce the effect of the previous change on the early game, default :) at all difficulties is increased by 1. At Prince and above, this means from 9 to 10.


To do / Proposed changes:
-------------------------
+Reduce unhappy per pop? Not even sure if this can be made non-integer


Ideas:
------
+Halve the bonus from maritime states (I'm not sure this is possible with current mod limitations)
+Granary gets 2:c5food: and +20% growth, but for a new maintenance of 2:c5gold:
+Hospital reduced from 50% to 35% (maint 2:c5gold: unchaged), and Medical Lab reduced from 25% to 20% (maint 3:c5gold: unchanged).
 
Original post (for reference sake) (now out of date)
Spoiler :
All that said, the current state of the mod is this:

Buildings
-Colosseum 3:) from 4, 3:gold: maint unchanged.
-Theatre 5:) from 4, 4:gold: maint from 5.
-Stadium 7:) from 4, 5:gold: maint from 6.
-Circus 3:) unchanged, 2:gold: maint from 3.

Trade Routes (We are currently limited to a formula of the form (a + b*citysize + c*capitalsize)
Changed from (1+1.25*citysize) to:
(-1.3 + 1.5*citysize + 0.05*capitalsize)
This generally makes trade route values from small cities smaller than the vanilla game, but they get more attractive as the capital grows (e.g. as the game goes on). With 0.05 in each city per population point in the cap, we have a situation where growing the capital by 1 point increases the total trade route values by 1.25 when there are 25 connected cities, or 1.5 when there are 30 connected cities.

The citypop multiplier of 1.5 means there is now more incentive than before (1.25) to grow cities. The -1.3 initial base is perhaps newbie-unfriendly, because it means that small cities will find it difficult to turn a trade route profit if connected by road or harbor. Cities will need to grow to probably at least 2 or 3 pop more than before, before they turn a profit. Later in the game, when the capital is large (size 15+), things get a bit easier for new cities.

Happiness Balance
-Unhappiness per city increased to 3:mad: from 2. This is probably the biggest change (compare it to captured cities which have 5:mad: per city). I'm not completely sure how it interacts with other modifiers. It's possibly too high at 3, if it means that captured cities with a courthouse go down to 2.5? Perhaps I could just set it to 2.5 and call it a day? The disadvantage would be that thanks to rounding, settling new cities would be either 2 or 3 extra :mad: alternating (I think?).


To do / Further proposals
-It has been suggested that libraries need a little bit of nerfing. This is a bit controversial with some players, because it would significantly change the balance right away from the early game.
-Another suggestion is to level out the growth rates of larger cities. The aim then is to make it easier to grow larger cities larger, so that small cities which can grow very quickly (especially with maritime food) don't have such a big advantage.
-Another obvious, but possibly with significant gameplay alteration, chnage would be to nerf the maritime CS bonus. I haven't yet seen how to change it... does anyone know if it can be changed with the current modding limitations?
-Culture?
 
ICS from a happiness perspective involves both producing happiness buildings, and grabbing +happiness-per-city bonuses. This is 3 separate policies (though Honour's Garrison isn't the big one), and the Forbidden Palace. Freedom's unlock policy should also be considered. I think you should plan on nerfing those, maybe even change them in a way that doesn't involve happiness? Also, other per-city effects like Order's crazy +5 production per city are causing people to build massive empires and see ridiculous benefits.

The other change that needs to happen is helping cities grow. As long as big cities require so much food, you will see people creating massive empires to soak up spare happiness. I suggest the following changes to Tradition. Right now, Tradition doesn't scale with map size at all. A "small empire" on a duel map is a lot smaller than a "small empire" on a huge map. This means Tradition gets too weak the larger the map size.
- Change "+33% growth rate in capitol" to "+20% growth rate in every city".

Part of the problem is there's too many policies that greatly benefit a large number of cities, and not enough policies that benefit a large population city. You can literally turn the happiness maintenance into a happiness benefit by policies, not to mention give out a tonne of extra production.


I'm trying really hard to conform to only things I know can be changed by altering XML values. Let me know if I deviate from that. :)
 
I think these are all good ideas, and good places to start looking. But before you decide how to fix the game, you should decide how you want it to feel when you're done.
-Do you still want large empires with lots of small cities to be viable? Or should this be made impossible?
-Do you still want large armies to be possible, or do you think that ~10 units is enough, even for a late game army?
-Is it OK for players to use gold to rush buy almost everything, or do you want to greatly restrict gold?
-Do you want large cities to more powerful than they are now? (either faster growth or better buildings) Or do you only want to nerf small cities?

There's plenty of ways to nerf ICS- the question is, how do you want the game to look after you've done that?

Oh, also- I know we can't change the trade route formula yet, but if anyone ever figures out a way to do that- please allow gold multiplier buildings to increase trade route yield.
 
I think these are all good ideas, and good places to start looking. But before you decide how to fix the game, you should decide how you want it to feel when you're done.
-Do you still want large empires with lots of small cities to be viable? Or should this be made impossible?
Ideally, they should still be viable, but less attractive (than they currently are) compared to other options. An example of what I think is flawed is that for a large empire with all the happiness resources already, the best way to produce happiness is to build a new city, build a colosseum and stunt its growth (correct me if I'm wrong). Some may like this, or even consider it realistic somehow, but it seems right now that empires are required (or 'strongly encourage') to expand regardless of their strategy. (With some exceptions of course, like empires going for culture win) Maybe this is even by design, so that the map fills up and try to squeeze out someone to win the game.
-Do you still want large armies to be possible, or do you think that ~10 units is enough, even for a late game army?
Hopefully we can keep this a separate issue.
-Is it OK for players to use gold to rush buy almost everything, or do you want to greatly restrict gold?
-Do you want large cities to more powerful than they are now? (either faster growth or better buildings) Or do you only want to nerf small cities?

There's plenty of ways to nerf ICS- the question is, how do you want the game to look after you've done that?
All good questions. I hope that with this mod, and with some attempts at games with it, we will (try to) solve this iteratively.

Ideally I want to have as little impact as possible on other aspects of the game like army size, but I appreciate that some of what I've changed will reach far into the balance of other areas that I'm not very well anticipating.

This is somewhat of an experiment

Oh, also- I know we can't change the trade route formula yet, but if anyone ever figures out a way to do that- please allow gold multiplier buildings to increase trade route yield.
Good suggestion. :)
 
Trying a quick game with it at the moment.
Things I've noticed:
-Even with a capital of size 3 and a second city of size 2, already can hit unhappiness. Note that settling a city now takes 4:) away instantly, due to 1 from pop and 3 from number of cities. The capital counts in the number of cities, so that's already 2:) less than in the standard game. This means either the Piety tree or at least one or two lux resources are important to get early. This mod will therefore perhaps put more emphasis on rexing towards lux resources than before.
Because of the above, I might look into increasing the free happiness for every difficulty by 2 (or possibly even 3 if really necessary)

-Also to note, with colosseums only giving 3:) now, settling a size-1 city and rushing a colosseum will now produce a net -1 happiness. Compare it with before where it would produce +1 happiness.
-Expansion at all in the early game now depends on ability to attain lux resources, colosseums (Construction) or circuses (Horseback Riding).
-Generally speaking, one now wouldn't want to build a road to connect cities until the city is of size equal to or greater than the length of road required.

Just found I can make the change to the Landed Elite social policy that Celevin suggested - instead of +33% capital growth, +20% growth in all cities.
 
Sorely needed mod, it somehow drains the fun out of playing "normally", if you know plopping down cities left, right and center would be so much more effective :(

My 2 cents:
-Happyness building changes are minor, but will make beelining horseback riding an even better choice compared to iron working.
-Making c>0 will benefit ICS
-Unhappyness per city could be even larger than 3, as a reducion by 2 per city is pretty much standard for an ICS approach (FP,Liberalism)
-Would it be possible to reduce the unhappyness per pop by something like 10-15%?
-Libraries need a nerf. Those 2 specialists is really what makes ICS scientifically viable. Reduce it to 1 specialist slot, period. Universities should get that second slot. In addition it might be a good idea to reduce :c5science: output to 2 per specialist.
-a solution to limited city growth could be to introduce an early "granary" with someting like 20-30% stored after growth. Reduce the hospital effect accordingly (30-40%?).
-There is at least one way to reduce the food by maritimes, the doubling when going from "Friend" to "Ally" can be disabled.
-Food output of improved bonus resources could be increased by 1:c5food:
 
My 2 cents:
-Happyness building changes are minor, but will make beelining horseback riding an even better choice compared to iron working.
That's a good point. Perhaps the circus can be moved to another tech. Or I'll just change its maintenance back to normal. It would still be a useful building considering it's cheap and can be built before Construction if Horseback Riding is researched earlier. It wasn't exactly a bad building before, so the boost to it will most likely be reverted.
-Making c>0 will benefit ICS
Yes that is technically true, but the significantly smaller value of a (now -1.3 where before it was +1) means it's going to be very rare or take a very large capital city to make settling new cities a bigger benefit in terms of trade routes then in the vanilla game. Plug it into a spreadsheet and have a look. Even if the capital city is size 30, the new city will only just start to pull out in front of the vanilla version when it reaches at least size 4.

Also, note c is only 0.05 at this point. It's a very small figure compared to the -1.3 constant, and the 1.5 per city pop.
It's also intended to make it a little bit easier to ICS once the capital city is very large. This helps to incentivise growing the capital city large, using up valuable happiness points in the process. Importantly, I want growing the capital to actually have an impact on trade routes comparable to what other cities have when they grow. Currently in this mod, it takes 30 cities (31 if including the capital) before growing the capital by 1 point equals growing another city by 1 point.
This changes a bit with the social policy that affects trade route yield, I suppose.

-Unhappyness per city could be even larger than 3, as a reducion by 2 per city is pretty much standard for an ICS approach (FP,Liberalism)
In that case, it's looking more and more likely that FP will be the target of a nerfing. Not sure about Liberalism though...
-Would it be possible to reduce the unhappyness per pop by something like 10-15%?
That is possible. How would it interact with other game mecahnics though? e.g. India, the Order social policy (can't remember the exact name).
-Libraries need a nerf. Those 2 specialists is really what makes ICS scientifically viable. Reduce it to 1 specialist slot, period. Universities should get that second slot. In addition it might be a good idea to reduce :c5science: output to 2 per specialist.
Not a bad suggestion. Hopefully I can avoid nerfing the scientist yield though.
-a solution to limited city growth could be to introduce an early "granary" with someting like 20-30% stored after growth. Reduce the hospital effect accordingly (30-40%?).
I'm not in favour of re-introducing a building of that sort back to the early game. As per my prev post, I'm thinking about putting 20% on the Landed Elite social policy (buffing the Tradition line, while requiring one to at least nearly complete that tree), and I think in civ4 the granary's effect was too powerful that it was too often one of the highest priority buildings. Even if its effect had been smaller than 50%, like 30, it still would have been much the same situation.

-There is at least one way to reduce the food by maritimes, the doubling when going from "Friend" to "Ally" can be disabled.
Still would prefer allies to give greater benefit than friends, but I think overall the bonus from maritimes could be roughly halved. I still haven't seen where this can be changed, but I'll keep looking.
-Food output of improved bonus resources could be increased by 1:c5food:
Probably won't be necessary, I think.
 
Is it compatible with Economy mod? Can't play without that other mod right now, building times are too big.

But Id install any balance mod coming from you, since PiG was my favourite civ4 balance mod.
 
The mod is very limited in what it affects. Nothing UI related, so as far as I can tell it will work ok with Economy mod.

It's not even available for download yet, but it'll be up soon.
 
-There is at least one way to reduce the food by maritimes, the doubling when going from "Friend" to "Ally" can be disabled.

Do you know how this can be disabled?
 
To do / Further proposals
-It has been suggested that libraries need a little bit of nerfing. This is a bit controversial with some players, because it would significantly change the balance right away from the early game.

I have to second reducing the slot of Scientists in the Library from 2 to 1, but as was brought up in the other thread, this would also nerf smaller empires, and not necessarily just ICS.

MkLh brought up the idea of increasing the +25% :c5greatperson: bonus from National Epic to +100% :c5greatperson:. That way, a vast majority of your Great Scientists would be coming from one core city, rather than consecutively popping up in the many little cities of ICS. It would remove a bonus of ICS without penalizing smaller empires.

Though I still think the Library specialists slots should be reduced to 1 just to reduce the abuse of the many slingshots available in the game currently (Civil Service, Rifling, Acoustics, etc.) and to balance out the new increase in Great Person production with a more powerful National Epic.
 
Boosting all the national wonders would go a long way towards making big cities viable. In Civ 4, the main reason to make a big city early on was to take advantage of a national wonder.
 
That is possible. How would it interact with other game mecahnics though? e.g. India, the Order social policy (can't remember the exact name).
India could be reduced to 40%. Most of the time the food supply will limit growth in a Bollywood style game, not happiness. This is valid for culture games in general, making Theocracy a bit underwhelming in the piety tree. It could maybe be changed to buff temples and monastaries. Police State affects only cities under :c5occupied: and will mostly only soften the :c5angry: impact of a conquering spree, a bit less base :c5angry: won't change that.
I'm not in favour of re-introducing a building of that sort back to the early game. As per my prev post, I'm thinking about putting 20% on the Landed Elite social policy (buffing the Tradition line, while requiring one to at least nearly complete that tree), and I think in civ4 the granary's effect was too powerful that it was too often one of the highest priority buildings. Even if its effect had been smaller than 50%, like 30, it still would have been much the same situation.
The granary was way stronger in Civ4, because of the easy availability of high-yield tiles and Slavery. In addition, the :food: requirements for city growth increase way slower than in Civ5, so city size is most of the time limited by the happiness cap, the granary just gets you there faster. Valkrion has a +20% building in his Economy mod, though it's tied to the availabily of wheat. It is not nearly as good as a Civ4 granary, but it's useful for getting a few >10 pop cities in a reasonable timeframe. The only problem in the Economy mod is the cumulative 95% you get with penicillin :crazyeye:
Still would prefer allies to give greater benefit than friends, but I think overall the bonus from maritimes could be roughly halved. I still haven't seen where this can be changed, but I'll keep looking.
As stated in Seven's Balance Tweak (you will have to look there for the mechanics):
* City states do not double their gifts when allied. Allying "only" also gets you their resources, military help, vision, and patronage bonuses.
Not good enough? :D
 
Here is the current state of the mod:

Spoiler :
List of changes:

v1. Experimental - not very well tested yet!

Buildings
---------
-Colosseum 3:) from 4, 3:gold: maint unchanged.
-Theatre 5:) from 4, 4:gold: maint from 5.
-Stadium 7:) from 4, 5:gold: maint from 6.
-Circus 2:) from 3, 2:gold: main from 3, 120 cost from 150.
-Forbidden Palace now -25% unhappiness from population, from -50%.
-A science specialist slot moved from the library to the university.


Trade Routes
------------
-Old formula was (1 + 1.25*citysize)
-New formula is (-1.3 + 1.5*citysize + 0.05*capitalsize)

Social Policies
---------------
-Landed Elite (Tradition) SP now gives +20% growth to all cities, rather than +33% to the capital.


Miscellaneous
-------------
-Unhappiness per city increased from 2 to 3.
-To help reduce the effect of the previous change on the early game, default :) at all difficulties is increased by 1. At Prince and above, this means from 9 to 10.


To do / Proposed changes:
-------------------------
+Reduce unhappy per pop? Not even sure if this can be made non-integer


Ideas:
------
+Halve the bonus from maritime states (I'm not sure this is possible with current mod limitations)


I have to second reducing the slot of Scientists in the Library from 2 to 1, but as was brought up in the other thread, this would also nerf smaller empires, and not necessarily just ICS.

MkLh brought up the idea of increasing the +25% :c5greatperson: bonus from National Epic to +100% :c5greatperson:. That way, a vast majority of your Great Scientists would be coming from one core city, rather than consecutively popping up in the many little cities of ICS. It would remove a bonus of ICS without penalizing smaller empires.

Though I still think the Library specialists slots should be reduced to 1 just to reduce the abuse of the many slingshots available in the game currently (Civil Service, Rifling, Acoustics, etc.) and to balance out the new increase in Great Person production with a more powerful National Epic.

Boosting all the national wonders would go a long way towards making big cities viable. In Civ 4, the main reason to make a big city early on was to take advantage of a national wonder.

Ok, let's go with this thought. Can we develop it further? Give me cold hard numbers as suggestions - I'm not usually the ideas guy. Is the 100% suggestion for National Epic a good idea? I'm thinking it's going to completely blast the effect of the garden making it near useless in any city but the Nat Epic city, or if not worthless at least not worth the cost. Would somewhere in between the 25 and 100 be better?

India could be reduced to 40%. Most of the time the food supply will limit growth in a Bollywood style game, not happiness. This is valid for culture games in general, making Theocracy a bit underwhelming in the piety tree. It could maybe be changed to buff temples and monastaries. Police State affects only cities under :c5occupied: and will mostly only soften the :c5angry: impact of a conquering spree, a bit less base :c5angry: won't change that.
I think I will hold off from changing the happy per population point until at least the second version released.

The granary was way stronger in Civ4, because of the easy availability of high-yield tiles and Slavery. In addition, the :food: requirements for city growth increase way slower than in Civ5, so city size is most of the time limited by the happiness cap, the granary just gets you there faster. Valkrion has a +20% building in his Economy mod, though it's tied to the availabily of wheat. It is not nearly as good as a Civ4 granary, but it's useful for getting a few >10 pop cities in a reasonable timeframe. The only problem in the Economy mod is the cumulative 95% you get with penicillin :crazyeye:
Ok, I was starting to already doubt what I'd written earlier, as soon as I posted it. Something like 20% could work I think.

How about this?
-Granary gets 2:c5food: and +20% growth, but for a new maintenance of 2:c5gold:
-Hospital reduced from 50% to 35% (maint 2:c5gold: unchaged), and Medical Lab reduced from 25% to 20% (maint 3:c5gold: unchanged).
-Reduce maintenance of watermill from 2:c5gold: to 1.



As stated in Seven's Balance Tweak (you will have to look there for the mechanics):
* City states do not double their gifts when allied. Allying "only" also gets you their resources, military help, vision, and patronage bonuses.
Not good enough? :D
Ok, thanks. I'll have a look at his mod.
 
How about this?
-Granary gets 2:c5food: and +20% growth, but for a new maintenance of 2:c5gold:
-Hospital reduced from 50% to 35% (maint 2:c5gold: unchaged), and Medical Lab reduced from 25% to 20% (maint 3:c5gold: unchanged).
-Reduce maintenance of watermill from 2:c5gold: to 1.

The problem with this, is this:

Social Policies
---------------
-Landed Elite (Tradition) SP now gives +20% growth to all cities, rather than +33% to the capital.

Like tokala said above, is that in the end game you're getting 95% of your food back after every point of growth. Granted, I haven't played Seven's Balance Mod, so I have no idea how this plays out, but I can see how problems could arise.

I do like the idea of getting the growth modifiers there earlier in the game. The current problem with them is that they come too late. They're definitely not overpowered, but by the time you get hospitals your infrastructure is generally set, and you don't think/care/worry about getting your main cities up to huge sizes.

Ok, let's go with this thought. Can we develop it further? Give me cold hard numbers as suggestions - I'm not usually the ideas guy. Is the 100% suggestion for National Epic a good idea? I'm thinking it's going to completely blast the effect of the garden making it near useless in any city but the Nat Epic city, or if not worthless at least not worth the cost. Would somewhere in between the 25 and 100 be better?

The Garden is useless as is. It's far and away much better to have many smaller cities accumulating individual points towards a great person than once city, and having a +25% :c5greatperson: in one city doesn't change that. You could spam them in all cities, but they can only be built next to lakes or rivers, and they're just not worth the 2 :c5gold: in maintenance.

The Garden is like the Colosseum in Civ4. Except perhaps even less useful.

For the National Epic to be any good it has to be stronger than +50% :c5greatperson:. I mean, right now it's basically a very expensive but maintenance free Garden. I also feel that if you want to go ahead and reduce the specialist slots on the Library from 2 to 1 (which I still feel is a good idea) then +100% :c5greatperson: would have to be the minimum.

Maybe others have a different perspective on this. This is just my current perspective.
 
Just uploaded it to the online modhub.

However, the homepage hasn't shown up in it.

In any case, this is the homepage.

Note there is a readme included in the mod folder which describes each of the changes.

For your convenience, this is the readme for v1.

Spoiler :
Icey No Mod
Homepage: http://tinyurl.com/IceyNoMod (or http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=396258)

For more info, please visit the above website. At the moment I welcome any and all suggestions or criticisms. If you have any questions about the mod, that's also the place to ask them.

This mod makes a few balance changes in an attempt to encourage the alternatives to spamming small and mostly infrastructureless cities.


List of changes:

v1. Experimental - not very well tested yet!

Buildings
---------
-Colosseum 3:) from 4, 3:gold: maint unchanged.
-Theatre 5:) from 4, 4:gold: maint from 5.
-Stadium 7:) from 4, 5:gold: maint from 6.
-Circus 2:) from 3, 2:gold: main from 3, 120 cost from 150.
-Forbidden Palace now -25% unhappiness from population, from -50%.
-A science specialist slot moved from the library to the university.


Trade Routes
------------
-Old formula was (1 + 1.25*citysize)
-New formula is (-1.3 + 1.5*citysize + 0.05*capitalsize)
(Ideally I'd like to put a quadratic term in there, but it's not possible yet)

Social Policies
---------------
-Landed Elite (Tradition) SP now gives +20% growth to all cities, rather than +33% to the capital.


Miscellaneous
-------------
-Unhappiness per city increased from 2 to 3.
-To help reduce the effect of the previous change on the early game, default :) at all difficulties is increased by 1. At Prince and above, this means from 9 to 10.


To do / Proposed changes:
-------------------------
+Reduce unhappy per pop? Not even sure if this can be made non-integer


Ideas:
------
+Halve the bonus from maritime states (I'm not sure this is possible with current mod limitations)
+Granary gets 2:c5food: and +20% growth, but for a new maintenance of 2:c5gold:
+Hospital reduced from 50% to 35% (maint 2:c5gold: unchaged), and Medical Lab reduced from 25% to 20% (maint 3:c5gold: unchanged).
 
Like tokala said above, is that in the end game you're getting 95% of your food back after every point of growth. Granted, I haven't played Seven's Balance Mod, so I have no idea how this plays out, but I can see how problems could arise.
Good point. I'm getting forgetful :lol:
I do like the idea of getting the growth modifiers there earlier in the game. The current problem with them is that they come too late. They're definitely not overpowered, but by the time you get hospitals your infrastructure is generally set, and you don't think/care/worry about getting your main cities up to huge sizes.
Well, at least it's now a possibility with the tradition tree. Though it takes three policies (four if you count the target policy) to get there.

The Garden is useless as is. It's far and away much better to have many smaller cities accumulating individual points towards a great person than once city, and having a +25% :c5greatperson: in one city doesn't change that. You could spam them in all cities, but they can only be built next to lakes or rivers, and they're just not worth the 2 :c5gold: in maintenance.

The Garden is like the Colosseum in Civ4. Except perhaps even less useful.

For the National Epic to be any good it has to be stronger than +50% :c5greatperson:. I mean, right now it's basically a very expensive but maintenance free Garden. I also feel that if you want to go ahead and reduce the specialist slots on the Library from 2 to 1 (which I still feel is a good idea) then +100% :c5greatperson: would have to be the minimum.

Maybe others have a different perspective on this. This is just my current perspective.

Ok, how about boosting garden to 50%?
 
I think it's a touch out of the scope of the mod, but rather than give Granaries both effects, it would be cool to add a new unit (like an Aqueduct) that does that, but has high maintenance (so you'd only build it in critical cities). But, like I said, that's probably something somebody would add on, not necessarily the base of your mod.

For Maritime, instead of halving it, it should ideally apply to a limited number of cities, prioritizing large cities over small ones (the idea is to help run a specialist economy, not keep size four cities viable as four specialist cities). Making it half as strong only means you have to get twice as many and it makes them useless for anyone not running this strategy. I agree this isn't possible at the moment.

My week is killer, but I really want to test this out and let you know how it feels. I'll download it and play it next week and give as much feedback as possible (especially early in the game). I'm not an ICSer, though, so hopefully somebody with more experience can exploit those flaws and see how this stacks.
 
Ok, let's go with this thought. Can we develop it further? Give me cold hard numbers as suggestions - I'm not usually the ideas guy. Is the 100% suggestion for National Epic a good idea? I'm thinking it's going to completely blast the effect of the garden making it near useless in any city but the Nat Epic city, or if not worthless at least not worth the cost. Would somewhere in between the 25 and 100 be better?
To be honest I find this whole approach of iterative rebalancing to be kind of misguided. You can balance the options, sure, but without some sort of vision for where this is going, you'll just end up with a game where it doesn't matter what you do because every option is "balanced" and the same. But anyway, if you're going to do it this way, the game is so imbalanced right now that you might as well start off by making some big changes. The way it is right now, I look at a lot of buildings (or wonders or social policies) and I think "wow, you could double or even triple that bonus, and I still would never bother to use it".

You want to balance great people generation. Adding one small city with a library adds 6 gpp, so adding the national epic should do the same initially. Make it +100%. (for what it's worth the only meaningful values are +34%, +67%, and +100%, because gpp round down. The garden just adds 1 gpp basically- it should be improved also to +34%) Make the national college +100% also so that it's rougly the same benefit as adding cities. Also give the observatory 1 scientist slot so we have a reason to build it.

The area where small city spam has the biggest advantage right now is gold, and unfortunately there's no national wonder to help that. I suggest adding a "wall street" national wonder, available at banking, which adds +100% gold and +1 merchant slots. I also suggest doubling the gold bonus of a merchant to +4, and doubling the gold cost of rushing units.

Straight production is fine, larger cities already have the advantage there. It would be nice to have the "heroic epic" do more though- double it to +30% so it's not something you can just ignore.

Happiness is more or less OK. I think if you change the per city penaltry to +3 :mad: it will be enough. As good as a coloseum is, I would never build a new city JUST to get extra happiness- I do it for extra research and trading posts.

I like the idea for the granary. But you'll also need to reduce the gold cost of purchasing new tiles, so that people can afford some land for the new citizens to work. As it is now, only Washington with monarchy can really afford to buy land in the 3rd ring. I'd cut the base gold cost in half, if that's possible.
 
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