Here's some variables for city-state modifiers you can include, and can find more in GlobalAIDefines.xml. What someone was referring to is "ALLIES_OTHER_CITIES..." which doubles the food bonus of friendly pre-renaissance (reduced to +50% post-renaissance). First of each value is what I modified it to, second is the original value. The changes result in 50% less food for non-capital cities pre-ren and 33% less post-ren (this was primarily to target early-game ICS among other things).
There's no easy way with the current tools to convert it from a per-city-bonus to an empire-bonus like the other citystates (root of the Maritime problem).
Thank you muchly. I hadn't even thought to look into the AI files, though in hindsight it makes sense. I was thinking of these parts of the game like they were game rules. Firaxis have a different way of organising things.
Well of course more than one round of testing + feedback is necessary. I'm just saying that, if you're not careful, you'll get stuck in a local equilibrium of balance, where you need to change things drastically to get to a global equilibrium.
I can appreciate the meaning of your analogy in general, as it would be applied to other things, but am finding it hard to relate it well with issues of balance in the game we're discussing. Balance is one of those things that is impossible to measure objectively, and I often say that not everyone will ever agree on what is or what isn't balanced.
As I mentioned in part of the revised vision, ideally we try to keep the changes as little as possible from the standard game. This is just how I prefer to mod - I don't like to completely shake up the whole system even if it could potentially be a much better balanced game, if it means it will be a barrier to anyone coming to the mod because a whole new game needs to be learned. With any mod, there are people who think it goes in some direction too far, and those who think it doesn't go far enough. I think in this case you're really pushing at the limits of how far I'd like this mod to go, but with good reasoning it's definitely possible for me to go that far. In other words, I don't necessarily consider big changes a bad thing, but they need to be pretty much
necessary with no simpler alternative.
I mean, buffing Heroic Epic to 50% to me sounds ridiculous, as in at least one game I built it relatively early on (before the patch where we gained the ability to sell buildings), and continued to expand from there. The 50% bonus would dwarf even the bonus of a Chinese GG, and considering the number of units you need to use in civ5, it's often possible to do all your unit building with just one city, if that's the way you choose to do it.
The thing about national wonders is that their hammer cost is only a small part of their real cost- you have to stop expanding and build a library in every city in order to build the National College. So with 6 cities, that's 6*80= 400 hammers, + 140 is 540 hammers, and a lot of time spent not building settlers. 20 hammers either way makes almost no difference.
I don't really agree with this assessment. Firstly, national wonders can't be purchased, unlike other buildings. For example, if you're going to build the Nat College in the middle of a huge jungle, 20 hammers does make a difference because it can't be rushed.
As for tallying up the amount from several separate cities in the cost, it doesn't make sense unless you try and discount the positive effect of those lesser buildings in the other cities. You can't say the nat colelge costs 540 hammers unless you want to call it the nat college + 6 libraries where the 6 libraries may or may not produce much benefit on their own. Moreover, I'm not 100% sure about the high-level players' views on this (so correct me if wrong), but especially if we gave the nat college a big buff, building it fairly on in the game is not difficult. You certainly wouldn't need to wait til 6 cities.
I recognise that a big part of whether or not to build National Wonders at the moment is opportunity cost, because you have to pause expansion for at least a little while, but if you make them too powerful they just become a must build near the start of the game before the quest for grand ICS begins.
I have no idea what the exact number of hammers to balance it is, I just threw out +100% science as a ballpark guess of how good it would have to be to tempt me into pausing my expansion long enough to build it. You can play around with the exact costs after it seems like there's a reason to build it.
A good point. I agree
I was trying to think of all the national wonders, but I completely forgot about the Hermitage lol. That should tell you how often I build that wonder.
Me too, though it's nice at lower difficulties when you can have a wonder city. Hermitage ends up being a lot more cost efficient than pretty much every other culture source.
Oh I didn't really mean it that way. I just wanted to somewhat nerf the ICS advantage where you can generate gold globally, but spend it locally to build a unit in one turn. Also I still want to reduce army sizes a bit. They're definitely big changes, but I think big changes are needed to have any effect on the balance in this game. The 4 gold merchant is justified, I think, because you'll need a 4 food farm to feed one merchant, and you could just as easily run two trading posts instead, for 4 gold.
Ok, I'm seeing your idea a bit better now.
However, I would add:
-Remember the effect of the social policies / wonders that effect specialists, including reducing the unhappiness they produce, and the food they eat, and also +1
for each. A 4
1
specialist would be pretty sweet.
I was actually wondering if it should be more like 40 or 50, to justify the cost of building a barracks in every single city when you probably just need one. I don't know. It's really hard to say whether plus or minus 5% is better balanced.
Well, as you said above, maybe we should just go with a large change, and adjust down if necessary after seeing how powerful it is in game.
The windmill doesn't have any effect on gold does it? As for the medical lab, I kind of want to just scrap it entirely. It comes so late in the game- only two techs away from globalization, which can win the game!
Instead of boosting the granary, can't we just decrease the base amount of food necessary for growth?
All I meant with the windmill, is that if you make the granary a lot better (e.g. 2
, +20% food retained, for 2
), then it makes the windmill (which is situational - river dependent) look pretty crappy. From memory, I think it costs more to build as well.
As for decreasing the base amount of food necessary for growth? Yes I think this can be done. I haven't got a good grasp on the formula yet (I'm sure it'd be explained well by a bright spark somewhere in S&T though), but it is an area of the game I'm prepared to alter for this mod.
that goes into the food bucket each turn, (2) determines how much of the food bucket is carried over after the city has grown one pop.
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 think comes from the Statue of Liberty IIRC. An expensive wonder and nowhere near guaranteed at high diffs, unless one is already in a dominant position.
Firaxis.
