ICS? Icey No!

[Irgy]

Great ideas for the mod. My hope is that much of what's there will eventually be a patch not a mod, as personally I dislike playing non-standard versions. Lets just hope Firaxis are listening. Here's some suggestions of mine:

* Unhapppiness increase for a new city = (number of cities / 5), rounded down. Maybe not possible in a mod? The idea is to make it an order n^2 factor, but still increasing slowly. This actually makes early expansion a little easier, not a bad thing in my book, breaks even at 15 cities, and gets progressively more difficult although not impossible.

* Making maritime food either a percentage or a fixed amount distributed somehow. Presumably not moddable either? Either of these changes would be one of the most effective fixes IMHO, so it's a bit of a shame if it's not possible.

* The growth equation appears to be meant to be something like:
food required = BASE_CITY_GROWTH_THRESHOLD + CITY_GROWTH_MULTIPLIER * population ^ CITY_GROWTH_EXPONENT
However, this doesn't match the numbers, so there's something else going on.
Personally I think changing the growth exponent to linear (i.e. 1) would work perfectly fine, that's what it was in civ4. In fact personally if anything I'd have made it less than 1 in the first place not more, but whatever, I'm sure they had their reasons.

So, base growth is where it starts, multiplier is how much food is added to get to the next bucket size, and exponent controls how fast the difference in bucket sizes increases (which is flat if it's 1, and would be "decreases" if it was less than 1).

* Bump up the yeild increases of the improvements for bonus resources. At the moment bonus resources are completely lame.

* It sure would be good if mined hills could produce 4 hammers, even if it was only in the late game. Currently they're eventually just 1 food worse than a lumbermilled forest.

* Make the location dependant buildings noticably better than the standard versions.

* If it's possible to modify what buildings do... well they could use a complete rehaul imho. At the moment there's distinct and completely separate lines of culture, science, production, great people, gold, military, city defense, food, growth and happiness buildings. As I've said before, it just smacks of design laziness. Bring back the hybrid buildings I say, and make every building, except maybe a handful of specialised ones, help with at least two of those categories. This helps makes heavy infrastructure more worthwhile because you can get things "for free" along with whatever you're targeting to build, but also because you can make the most of interactions. Once you've built a lot of science buildings, the incidental culture they provide might for instance give you a head start on making it a cultural centre as well. Whereas at the moment the two are just completely independent. With hybrid buildings there's an advantage to putting more than one type of infrastructure in a city over putting one type somewhere and another type elsewhere. It's all a bit radical though. Although you could do it a bit at a time.

That's about all I've got.

 

[Slowpoke]

Heya, I'm anti-ICS as well. Check out some of the things I've done in v3 of mega mod. In particular, one thing I think will help a lot is the growth rate being made more linear (halved population unhappiness from india trait is essential as well for this). Reducing the food needed for growth formula from:

base + (size -1)* 6 + (size - 1)^1.8 to
base + (size -1)* 6 + (size - 1)^1.2

seems to give the best results.

 

[Irgy]

Heya, I'm anti-ICS as well. Check out some of the things I've done in v3 of mega mod. In particular, one thing I think will help a lot is the growth rate being made more linear (halved population unhappiness from india trait is essential as well for this). Reducing the food needed for growth formula from:

base + (size -1)* 6 + (size - 1)^1.8 to
base + (size -1)* 6 + (size - 1)^1.2

seems to give the best results.

So that's the equation... ever since I failed to post the correct thing a couple of posts earlier I've been struggling to get anything to fit. I think I was getting there, but glad to see the real equation finally.

 

[PieceOfMind]

I thought in the recent patch the national wonders were changed to have their cost scale with number of cities?

You are right. In fact before when I was talking about the cost of a wonder (e.g. 140) I was reading it from the pedia in-game where it had been updated to reflect the extra cost from 2 cities.

Most of the national wonders now have an extra hammer cost of 20 per city I think. Because of that, I'm generally not looking to increase national wonder cost.


********


Current changes in v2: (WIP)

Spoiler :

mental - not very well tested yet!

Buildings
---------
-Colosseum 3 from 4, 3 maint unchanged.
-Theatre 5 from 4, 4 maint from 5.
-Stadium 7 from 4, 5 maint from 6.
-Circus 2 from 3, 2 maint 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.
-A science specialist slot added to observatory (might not be in pedia yet)
-Granary now as 15% food stored on growth as well as 2 food, but 2 maint (from 1).
-Hospital now 30% (from 40%) food stored on growth.
-Medical Lab now 20% (from 25%) food stored on growth.
-Watermill now 1 maint, from 2. (Floating Gardens UB reduced to 0 maint from 1.)
-Garden boosted from 25% to 34% effect. Reduced cost to 80, from 120.


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.


GrowthRates
-----------
Formula for food needed for next city growth has been tweaked...
Previously: 15 + 6*n + n^1.8
Now: 15 + 7*n + n^1.2
where n is the current city size minus 1.

National Wonders
----------------
-Ironworks effect boosted from 20% to 50%. Cost left as is.
-National college, effect up from 50 to 100. Cost left alone (for now)
-National Epic - +100% GPP instead of 25. Cost left alone (for now)
-Heroic Epic - boost morale bonus to 45 from 15. Cost left alone (for now)

City States
----------- (These changes thanks to Thalassicus
-Maritime CS give a little bit less food
-Gold gifts to all CS produce a bit less influence now
-Military CS gift units a bit faster now.

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)

 

[tokala]

Looks pretty good, though the exponent might be a tad too low. Uploading it anytime soon?

Edit: Morale Boost 45%? That's like a 4 free promotions per unit, isn't that a bit overkill?

 

[pi-r8]

Those changes look like a good starting point. I think the game needs a big change in gold production, though, since that's the area where small trading post cities have the biggest advantage.

One thought I had was that maybe the game would be better off with rush buy removed entirely. It doesn't really make sense, anyway, for an ancient civilization to just throw gold at something and finish it instantly. A building takes time to construct, no matter how much you spend on it. And if gold is a substitute for production, you'll have a strong incentive not to make any buildings, so as to maximize your unit production.

If gold was used only for diplomacy (shiny trinkets to bribe the other leaders) there would be no reason to cover your empire in trading posts. And you could then program the AI to use all its gold for bribing city states, which would effectively balance city states as well.

If you don't want to make such a drastic change, then I'd suggest either boosting all the gold-producing buildings to at least +50%, plus the merchant and wall street change i suggested before, or reducing the trading post to just +1 gold.

 

[Irgy]

I think removing rush buy completely is far too drastic. What you've said does give me an idea though, what if you could spend cash (say, half the current rush buy cost) to double the production rate of something? Still get half of the benefit rush buy, but you also still need to actually have some hammers and build it.

Of course that idea's not any less drastic than your idea of getting rid of it, either way it's not likely to happen in a patch, and difficult to do in a mod. Just putting it out there for posterity though.

On the whole, ICS shouldn't be particularly better for gold than large cities. The number of trading posts, and the amount of tile-food supported population (for trade route income) is actually proportional to the amount of worked land (which is how it should be), not the number of cities. ICS gets more gold only by getting population more easily and working the land faster, solve those problems and the gold problem will be solved along with it.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Regarding gold production, bear this in mind.

New small cities don't offer much in terms of trade routes any more. Connecting them may produce a loss until they reach size 5 or more.

You get 1.5 gold per population point, and population is easier to grow now, thanks to the growth threshold changes and the granary. It might be more preferable now to grow cities faster than before, focusing more on farms. It also means happy caps are going to be hit a lot faster now, especially with the smaller bonus from colosseum.

Merchant specialists now give 4 gold, making a viable alternative to trading posts.

I'm trying to figure out how it might be possible to increase the cost of rush buying units.

As for a Wall Street wonder, something like that might be coming from Thalassicus soon.

Looks pretty good, though the exponent might be a tad too low. Uploading it anytime soon?

Edit: Morale Boost 45%? That's like a 4 free promotions per unit, isn't that a bit overkill?

Probably. But at least it requires you to go down that side of the tech tree, and the cost of the wonder goes up with each new city. Also requires the barracks in every city of course.

 

[PieceOfMind]

It seems a lot of the suggestions for the mod and the changes I am making are touching more areas of the game than I originally expected. Is this surprising anyone?

It's making me want to give pause and look at the other economy type mods that are out there., because maybe they are ultimately trying to achieve a similar thing.

Are many of the recent suggestions actively trying to remove ICS or just trying to improve balance in genera? Is it just that countering ICS is a complex task that does require rebalancing of nearly every aspect of the game economy?

 

[pi-r8]

I realize you're boosting the growth and trade route gold of larger cities, but I don't think the trade route gold will have all that much of an effect. Even if you have 10 size 20 cities, that's only um... 9 * (-1.3 + 30 + 1) = about 270 trade route gold. A large ICS empire can easily make double that from trading posts. And larger cities are sort of forced to work mostly farms (to grow the city) and mines (to make the buildings) whereas small cities are free to work nothing but trading posts. Then the large cities have to pay maintenance on whatever buildings they make.

Better merchants would help but, even a "super gold city" won't really produce all that much gold. Let's say you've got a city of size 20 with a market, bank, stock exchange, and my proposed Wall Street wonder (although considering the recent history of wall street, maybe we shouldn't use that name for something that gives a net bonus to gold...). That allows 5 merchants, with a total of +183% gold production. We'll have that city run 5 merchants, 5 mines, 5 river farms, and 5 non-river trading posts.

5 (4 + 1 + 2) = 35 gold base. 35 * 2.83 = 99 gold. That's pretty good but it still can't come close to what a mass of small cities working all trading posts can do. And, if you remove the wall street wonder, that city loses almost half of its gold production.

Or you can think of it this way- a new city will very quickly grow to size 4 and start working 4 trading posts, giving a total of 12 gold with the trade route. a market costs more than a settler, and yet it only adds +2.5 gold to that city. So a settler, right now, is about 5 times better for making gold compared to a market, as long as you have some way of dealing with the happiness.

edit: yes I don't see how you can remove ICS easily without changing almost anything in the game. Well,you could simply put a hard limit on the number of cities, or massively increase the happiness bonus per city, but that wouldn't fun. Almost everything about the economy in this game encourages small city spam.

If you want to make the fewest changes possible to remove it, I'd start with improving the gold that large cities get, or decreasing the gold that small cities get.

 

[tokala]

As can be seen in the "What makes ICS so strong" thread in the main forum, it's just that so many parts of the game design promote ICS. And accordingly all those give you a handle on to how to stop it

As for Valk's Economy Mod, that one is not adressing ICS, but rather the disparity between tech pace and production potential, the near uselessness of bonus resources and UI shortcomings. With the new bonus resource dependent buildings, a semi-ICS + some(1-4) Mega-Cities seems to be most effective there. If you get lucky with the bonus resources, even "only a few Mega-Cities" works quite well, too.

 

[pi-r8]

My feeling is that a mod like that will only work if you bring back stacks in some way. I tried combining it with the "legions" mod and it seemed OK.

 

[Louis XXIV]

One thing I've thought would be useful was nerfing trading posts. I wasn't going to bring it up, but, since that seems to be a strength of ICS, what if trading posts gave -1 food? It's honestly the only practical way to hurt it, since it can't be gold support based, like roads.

 

[Celevin]

I'm part of the camp that thinks +45% morale is way too much. It's 2 promotions worth of power coming in at the low XP range (ie the next couple upgrades are cheap). At 15% it's a must have for a lot of military civs, and honestly, even in an ICS empires I manage to get it out with relative ease.

 

[PieceOfMind]

One thing I've thought would be useful was nerfing trading posts. I wasn't going to bring it up, but, since that seems to be a strength of ICS, what if trading posts gave -1 food? It's honestly the only practical way to hurt it, since it can't be gold support based, like roads.

Actually I like the sound of this idea. The main concern is how it would impact on the AI because that is a major change, probably much more significant than every change made by the mod (so far) combined.

Can we get some other opinions on this suggestion?

I would point out that one problem with it at the moment is that it can be built on tiles with no food, like desert/tundra/plains hills.

Maybe, I can figure out a way to make sure it can only be built on tiles with 1 or more food.

I'm part of the camp that thinks +45% morale is way too much. It's 2 promotions worth of power coming in at the low XP range (ie the next couple upgrades are cheap). At 15% it's a must have for a lot of military civs, and honestly, even in an ICS empires I manage to get it out with relative ease.

I do agree. I'll be reconsidering it, probably much to pi-r8's disappointment.

 

[Pazyryk]

@PieceOfMind, A lot of folks feel that production (of both units and buildings) is too slow relative to research. For what it's worth, I disagree completely. If you speed up building production, then every city will build essentially every building (as was typical for builder-type play style in civ4), reducing the need for careful planing and the need for hard decisions. If you speed up unit production, then you will have too many units on the map (which sucked in civ4 but is fatal in civ5 with 1upt). Your anti-ICS changes look pretty good. I know these changes impinge on other game elements making other adjustments necessary, but I hope you do these carefully while trying to maintain the overall civ5 balance, rather than targeting a civ4 balance.

 

[tokala]

-1 is a really massive change, and it will hurt big "money cities" more than it will hurt ICS. I would suggest to stick to the LOTS of ideas you have so far, and try to get those to work first. It might still be a good ide to restrict TPs to non-zero tiles, though.

 

[LegioCorvus]

-A science specialist slot moved from the library to the university.
-A science specialist slot added to observatory (might not be in pedia yet)

I'd leave the specialist slot off from the university, and just keep the one added to the observatory. Simply put, the scientist specialists are too good, and may be a large part of what puts the game nearly in the modern era around 1400 AD. I'd go so far as to reduce the per specialists to +2 instead of +3 , but that's me.

Really, this is your mod, and you have to be the one to decide which ideas are the ones you want to implement, and which ones actually go towards the goal of reducing the dominance of ICS. I feel the use of scientists specialists in many 4 cities to prevent growth and boost is a reason it's so effective, but again that's me.

-Heroic Epic - boost morale bonus to 45 from 15. Cost left alone (for now)

Way too strong. I think +15% was plenty for this national wonder. I just never built it because I never build barracks. I assume that's true for many people. I also fail to see how this addresses the issue of ICS, but perhaps I skimmed that post.

It seems a lot of the suggestions for the mod and the changes I am making are touching more areas of the game than I originally expected. Is this surprising anyone?

It's making me want to give pause and look at the other economy type mods that are out there., because maybe they are ultimately trying to achieve a similar thing.

Are many of the recent suggestions actively trying to remove ICS or just trying to improve balance in genera? Is it just that countering ICS is a complex task that does require rebalancing of nearly every aspect of the game economy?

I'm not surprised. The game needs a major overhaul, and when you have a modder willing to listen to ideas from the community, you're not only going to get a lot of people making suggestions that work towards the goal of the mod, but also ones people would like to see implemented.

On the other hand, improving balance in general will theoretically improve ICS.

And on yet another hand (or are we on a foot now?), some areas of the game engine are so broken that nothing can help them. Look at gold, as pi-r8 mentions. It is fundamentally flawed. You can play deity games were the AI will have 30,000+ , and still not figure out how to get a diplomacy win. That's one example of dozens where gold isn't balanced or implemented well. It's like it became a catch-all to fix areas of the game the developers didn't have time to finish. (Supposition, no evidence to support claim besides anecdotal).

One thing I've thought would be useful was nerfing trading posts. I wasn't going to bring it up, but, since that seems to be a strength of ICS, what if trading posts gave -1 food? It's honestly the only practical way to hurt it, since it can't be gold support based, like roads.

Like I said above, gold is fundamentally flawed. There may not be a way to fix it.

I don't think -1 will necessarily help. It would also be a big deterrent from people wanting to use the mod. You can reduce trade route wield, and for the most part people won't care, but take away something that blatant, and people will avoid it. Even people who claim to like the mod. The general rule for stuff like this is to add features, or subtly arrange other less visible features (like pop growth & trade route fixes).

Right now the best improved non-resource tile in the game is a hill/trading post. I think what needs to be done is to make mines & farms better. Farms are already okay, but are less often used because of diminishing returns on pop growth. If that extra food could be converted into money through merchant specialists, then better players would be more likely to use them. Casual players would still likely use trading posts.

Making mines better is a bit tricky, because they're actually decent once you befriend one or two maritime city states. This is where the problem of balance becomes having to modify many different variables in the game, and can almost be a Gordian Knot. Too bad we don't have Alexander's sword to help us here...

 

[Elenhil]

I think nerfing trading posts is better than buffing mines because lower food yields are already balanced by faster city growth while increasing mine output would require slower building times to keep the general balance.

 

[Celevin]

Actually I like the sound of this idea. The main concern is how it would impact on the AI because that is a major change, probably much more significant than every change made by the mod (so far) combined.

Can we get some other opinions on this suggestion?

I would point out that one problem with it at the moment is that it can be built on tiles with no food, like desert/tundra/plains hills.

I think it's a bad idea. To me, the entire point of gold compared to production is they are valued at a 2:1 rate, and for gold, you can buy a building for slightly more than if you were to use half of it worth in production. We can see evidence of this in both trade post / mine yields, and merchant / engineer yields.

The fault is that gold is simply so flexible (and can be spent on things that production can't) that a 2:1 rate favours gold more. Instead of messing with food, why don't we rebalance that rate? Give production a few more +% modifiers and we'll see people considering mines once again. Give mines 1-2 policies to benefit them in the same way as trade posts.

I see the buffing of engineers from 1 production to 2 not as a sign that engineers were too weak because they didn't give enough production. I see it as a sign that the gold/production ratio was far greater than 2/1. Since that's what trade posts and mines are balanced around, shouldn't specialists be balanced around the same?