Improvements & civics rebalancing - again

[readercolin]

Ok, this is the last prettified post... damn image limit.

Now lets compare the actual output of these two theoretical cities, counting in the base terrain bonus, though ignoring buildings/rivers/etc. Note, each case counts the city getting +3 from the center tile, +2 from center tile, +2 from center tile, as well as +3 extra but 0 /0 from a pair of resources). A grassland forest economy at size 20 is going to produce +27 , +38 , +20 . A plains forest economy, size 20 city, produces +9 , +56 , +20 . A grassland size 20 city, cottage economy produces +14/26 :hammerss: (-20%), +50/62 . A plains cottage economy provides +12/22 (-20%), +42/52 . In each case, the extra /extra will tell you exactly which economy I would choose.

-Colin

Ok, a few points that I forgot. This time, I'm not prettying it up (damn forums)

The biggest point that I forgot that makes the Forest Economy so much better than the cottage economy is GoN/Forests. 1 forest (IIRC) provides .5 health. 1 forest under GoN provides (1 or .5?) happiness. This means that a size 20 city is very easy to achieve, with the forest economy, as having most of your squares as forests means that you already have 10 health and 10-20 happiness just from existing. Add in the base 4 health, base 4 happiness, and only the grasslands forest economy actually needs to worry about health/happy. This is due to it being so easy to get half a dozen sources of heath (3 land food resources, each doubled by the building), and voila, you have 20 health. On the other hand, the cottage economy, given those same health sources, is now sitting at 10 health. Meinwhile, the forest economy has 14/24 happy already, and picking up a few happy resources is so easy. However, the cottage economy has 4 happiness… getting the extra happy to support a size 20 city is significantly more difficult. This generally means that a forest economy not only gets better results from its tiles, but it also gets to use all its tiles in the early/midgame, whereas the cottage economy may be unable to.

Another point that I forgot was the timescale. Do note, I compared turn 200. Generally, in the early game, production/food/commerce are all equally prized. You need food because you need to grow. You need production because you need to expand/defend yourself. You need commerce because you need to advance tech wise to get better armies/etc. Lategame however, Production is usually the most prized. This is because you have gotten all the techs that give better food (usually), and you can afford to have cities dedicated to holding strategic areas/resources, and doing nothing else. You also have the techs that you need to conquer the world, or win by whichever victory you desire. But, the one thing that you may be missing is production. So you focus on production, so that you can pump out a unit a turn, or pump out a wonder in 5 turns, etc. Lategame, the cottage economy gives you 12-24 hammers, 60 commerce. Commerce doesn't translate well into hammers - buying something with commerce generally costs 3 gold/hammer - and here, we have 2.5-5x as much commerce as hammers. On the other hand, the forest economy actually gets ANOTHER hammer at commune with nature, bringing a forest economy city to +56 hammers, not counting base terrain. Well, gee, that’s almost 1hammer/1commerce ratio with the cottage economy. As I value production the most in the lategame, I wonder which economy I would rather use? And a grassland forest economy, using the example I had used before, gets a grand total of 87 food, 56 hammers, 20 commerce. Add in say, serfdom and a market? Suddenly, I have 113 food, for a max population size of 37 - that’s 17 specialists. Gee, I wonder, which one is NOW going to have the extra commerce? Or that can be another 34 extra hammers, for a total of 80, before any modifiers. Lategame, health and happiness shouldn't be a problem, especially as in this case I can just run scientists, put all my commerce to gold, and get +10 happiness from the gambling houses.

To end, how do you balance this? I'm not sure. However, one of the biggest points about this is that increasing maintenance costs will not balance this. Why? When I can have 1 city that produces that much (that’s definitely a unit a turn), and a few other cities that have similar numbers, why in the world would I both having a gigantic empire. I can just burn down everyone I come across from a nice safe haven of 3-4 supercities. This means that this is the Ideal civic to run for small maps, though it does loose a little power on large ones (not much though).

 

[readercolin]

Ok, now that I have spouted enough about the economies, let me spout about some more sore points of mine.

First off, commerce. I don't know exactly why, but commerce is WAY to easy to come by. To use an example of a game that I was just screwing around in, on monarch, playing it while I worked on my homework, I was playing as the khazid, following RoK, on a somewhat hilly map. This was playing multiplayer with someone else (yes, we were both working on homework). Obviously, our minds were distracted, and we were making no pretense at powergaming, just idly building stuff as we went along. For me, it seemed that commerce appeared almost out of thin air. By turn 350, I had researched the most of the tech tree, founded ALL the guilds (except for the research providing ones) by myself and was raking in 400 gold and around 1000 research a turn at 100% research. Can this be done by powergaming? Heck yeah. But by going through and semi-randomly building stuff without thinking much about it? Building improvements simply so I could get each city to be able to use every tile (I was stuck mostly near plains/plains hills, etc., so most of my improvements were either farms or quarry's, not much commerce produced here, not much in the way of specialists). And yet somehow I was able to acquire enough commerce to not only get through the tech tree, but to speed through it.

This is just an example. Most of my games end up like this. Mildly disturbing however is this also generally leads to me having 2-3x as much research as the person I'm playing with, and that’s not even mentioning gold, so maybe other people don't have the same problems as I do. Even trying to play in character (dwarves follow RoK, dovollio FoL, etc.), this always seems to happen to me. However, this only seems to happen in orbis - I don't suffer these same problems playing FFH or FF. Playing solo, I can easily bump my difficulty up to deity and still outtech/outproduce the AI every time. Even using no guilds, the same thing happens. Where is all this extra commerce coming from? I doubt that I'm just so good that even brushing the AI with my intellect causes it to shrivel up and die - again, it certainly doesn't happen in FFH or FF (and it sounds rather pretensious too, which I usually try to avoid - it gets my girlfriend to try to beat me up to "reduce the swelling of my head").

That leads me to another gripe of mine. The guilds are just way to OP. Especially since I seem to be the only one that gets them. For a while now, I have been avoiding using the guilds as it just leads me to steamroll the AI even harder. Now, admittedly part of the issue is that when I get a guild, I then try to get the most benefit out of it, but that isn't really that odd, is it? But when suddenly a brand new city of mine starts out with +20 food, +30 hammers, +10 culture, +40 gold… there is a problem, right? Yes, there are maintenance costs. However, these are EASILY gotten rid of if I decide to play with guilds. The most obvious way is to just get mercantilism for the -75%. Or I can run shadow court and guilds for -100%. But, I can also reduce it by 40% just for having a courthouse, another x% for having law mana, and possibly even another 40% beyond that for having a basilica. Which means that when the guild provides me with say, 15 hammers and 5 gold, but costs 10 gold, I can easily drop it so that the guild STILL provides me with a profit. And then there is the guild synergy, for example between the bank of vivaldi and the one that unlocks at smelting. Bank of vivaldi +2 gold(ish) per gold/silver resource. But, the smelting guild provides +1 gold resource per resource it consumes, in addition to the hammers and gold it already provides. So suddenly, between these two guilds, I get +15 hammers, +25 gold, for the cost of about oh… 10 gold or so. And I can drop that cost to 0…

Guilds need to be changed. The bonuses and such that they provide are ok, but the issue is that you can get these bonuses practically for free. To fix this, I would say that it should be either A. impossible, or B. possible only with a combination of all 3 civics to completely remove the cost of guild maintence via civics. Also, having a guild in the city should increase the city maintenance costs. Suddenly, it becomes impossible to have free benefits for nothing, which solve one of my major gripes with guilds.

My second major gripe with guilds is that I always get them, and I never see the AI get them. Even when I make no attempt at getting them, the AI never gets them. Maybe I'm just an isolated case here, but the AI really should put a much higher priority on them, AND a much higher priority on spreading them, and maximizing its benefits.

Ok, I think that’s enough rambling/ranting for now. But hey, you asked for our opinions.


-Colin

 

[tokala]

And yet somehow I was able to acquire enough commerce to not only get through the tech tree, but to speed through it.
-Colin

Some things that might contribute to this:
- Higher luxury resource density and yield compared to FFH/FF
- Bigger effect of commerce enhancing buildings (I'm looking at you, river port)
- Fast access to early worker techs
- Faster acccess to writing (libraries, GL)
- Some more free great people
- Higher Happy cap (more productive cities)
- Inflation probably unchanged (Didn't check for this)
- Lower Cost of High-End techs
- More pronounced Beeline techpaths

Each of this alone has not that much of an impact, but it not only adds up but is mutually amplifying in some cases. The only major factor leading to a slower tech progression compared to FFH/FF is the low productivity of farms in the face of 3 per pop, which tends to get compensated by the abundance of resources.

In fact I really like most of this, but I think a reevaluation some buildings and the costs of mid-late techs is in order. Also with the scheduled increase of farm output by one , an even faster pace is to be expected

 

[Bootsiuv]

Wow, readercolin...that's quite a lot of info. I'm at work, so not enough time to read it all. Will peruse what you said when I get home.

 

[Ahwaric]

readercolin, you just got me steamrolled with your posts...

Regarding guilds, I agree, they need some nerf. You think the output is fine, right?
So, maybe I should cut the reductions of maintenence form civics? Or increase the base cost? Or both?
But I really do not find it easy to get a lot of guilds. Mybe you need to up difficulty play with more opponents?

I will increase tech costs. I guess ancient ones are fine, How about classical? And how much do you think I should increase the costs.

I have just tried improvements output with new settings. Check the cities on the attached screenshot, the output was almost the same (+1 -1 in forest one).
But if I added some lumbermills, forest one was better. Same will come with ancient forests.

So, I think you are right, nerf is needed.
I thought about -1 from lumbermills at some point, and maybe changing from lodges to . Or should I just remove the lodge hammer or commerce bonus?

 

[tokala]

I will increase tech costs. I guess ancient ones are fine, How about classical? And how much do you think I should increase the costs.

I don't even know which tech falls in which categoy
Worker techs are mostly fine, mining could be cheaper as it is of quite limited usefulness at the moment. Bronze working on the other hand is quite strong for the cost, maybe +50%?
I think writing and construction should move in the 1000 range, Great Library could use a steep cost increase (doubling?).

For the middle/late game I don't have much experience, apart from the one game where i got to divine essence in turn 200 (normal speed), with my capital pumping out 800 per turn; it just felt wrong
Maybe start with a blanket +30% cost after the half-way point, and in addition try to reign in the gameplay mechanics which leads to the inflation, then see how this will play out.

 

[Bootsiuv]

So, I think you are right, nerf is needed.
I thought about -1 from lumbermills at some point, and maybe changing from lodges to . Or should I just remove the lodge hammer or commerce bonus?

My vote remains with the being removed. It sort of specializes the two economies in a sense.

If you want high , you'll opt for the cottage economy.

If you want high , you'll go with the forest economy.

Even though, the forest economy and the cottage economy aren't completely isolated.

I ALWAYS run a hybrid economy in my games, and it seems to work quite well. I regularly dominate on emperor without even trying that hard, so much so that I've been considering making the jump to the next level.

However, hybrid economies are almost impossible to balance and outside the scope of this discussion.

I still think farms should be given an additional at an extremely late tech. Possibly taxation or currency. It would hardly be unbalancing so late in the game, more of just a "I win more" thing, due to the fact you usually know if you're going to win or not by then. No biggie though.

 

[readercolin]

Guilds output is fine on small maps, being a nice supplement to whatever you're already doing. Guilds output on standard size maps is pushing it, you can almost run your economy solely on guilds. Guilds output on any maps larger than standard is OP - you can literally have a brand new city start out, put its population as just a plain old citizen, not working any tiles, and still get 20-30 hammers, 20 food, 15 research, and 40 gold (rough numbers, but they are actually smaller than I have gotten in some games).

What makes guild output ridiculous is that you can get it for free. Running Mercantilism, you can drop the cost by 75%, or make it completely free by running any two of guilds, mercantilism, and shadow court. Most of the time, running just Mercantilism is enough. Even without running all this however, there is still the issue of courthouses+law mana+basilica - avoid gambling houses/etc. that add to your maintenence costs (or get more law mana nodes), and guilds are again free. This is especially important to consider that guilds have the BIGGEST impact with a city spam strategy (not only do the guilds affect more cities, but more cities also means more resources). So even running whatever you want, if you're running order, you can still get free stuff from guilds.

Changes I would make here would be to change the % reduction from the civics - I would propose mercantilism at 50%, guilds and shadow court at 25% (that or 40%/20% respectively). This would change free output from guilds from just civics, or would force you into possibly following a religion you otherwise wouldn't, as well as forcing you out of survival/agrarianism, and forcing you out of serfdom, etc. if you want free guilds. The second change that I would make is to have a guild increase a city's maintenence costs by 10% per guild. This directly counteracts the effect of the guilds/city spam strategy, because each guild you have in your city makes your city more expensive. 4 guilds in your city, and suddenly your courthouse is going just to pay the guild maintenece increase - this isn't even counting the monetary costs of the guild itself. However, it doesn't punish those who put in a single guild too badly, as 10% is the same amount as building a gambling house. But it does punish those who put all the guilds in every city, which currently is a great (and OP) way of running things atm.

I was going to type more on the lodges... but it was starting to look like I was going to do a repeat and steamroll the forum readers again . So sometime later I'll actually check actual resource values instead of blathering about stuff that I'm only partially sure on.

-Colin

Edit: Looking at your picture, I wasn't aware that you could build quarries anywhere other than on hills. This leads me to wonder - what then is the point of workshops/etc. Also, is that without ANY civics? Because quite frankly, the foresters lodge by itself always struck me as perfectly balanced. The issue came in when you factored in the ancient forest AND survival. You would get a similar issue with that setup you posted there if you were running Arete, as you could have every tile be a quarry, able to feed itself, and you were running slavery, which added another hammer to the output. Suddenly, you have the same amount of commerce, a little bit less food, but ALOT more production. Which goes to show that those two can be balanced against each other, ish (I personally feel the extra food would be better than the extra hammers... you can decide whether to have that food turn into commerce or hammers, but with more hammers, once you can already produce a champion a turn, more hammers are of little consequence), but suddenly they are both alot better than the cottage economy. If you were to look at the improvements in a vaccum, with no civic affecting anything, I think that they would all be reasonably balanced. Its when you get not just 1 civic, but Multiple Civics/Religions affecting things that is causing the problems.

 

[Bootsiuv]

I have read the above proposals and think you are making a mistake. I will discuss it on the following post as it is quite compact:

Can we please discuss only foresters?
Financial leaders apply not only to foresters, so it is not relevant.
River tile yields modifiers are the same for all improvements or even without one. While it needs balancing on its own, it is not part of forestry
So, what we keep?
Base 1 1 1 (includes WotF bonus and all techs bonuses)
Compare that with town (5 1 ) or any other improvement except farm. Not so good.
True, it gets bonus 1 from forest tile. First, that requires forest to be there. Second, still not that great. Quarry starts with 2 :hammers, with blasting powder and WotE you get simmilar yields to maxed forester's lodge. And extra hammer from lodge comes from Commune with Nature, a really late tech.

True, ancient forest tile with forester gets 2 2 and 1 on top of terrain yields. It is more than farm, even after the proposed changes (3 1 ).
But are you sure we should change it?
It requires FoL and late techs. Plus, I think it fits the flavour that FoL nations get a lot of forests.
Elves will be better than now, as they can builds farms in forests and farms will improve

Ok, I know I'm addressing an earlier post after I addressed a later one, but I didn't really have a chance to read all of these long arse posts this morning before work.

You're comparisons to the cottage improvement fails to mention a few important factors.

1) There is no civic that directly makes the cottage improvement better (at least, that I can think of, please correct if I'm wrong) They're is certainly some which may supplement it nicely, but direct effect does not exist. There are TWO that help the forest economy, and both were likely too good in their current form.

EDIT: Actually, after further thought, that statement isn't exactly true. There are civics which directly help the cottage economy, but they don't have the impact that GoN/Survival have on the Forest economy.

2) The health and happiness provided from the forest economy is a HUGE deal. Sure, I can have a great many towns spread throughout my empire, but unless I have every happiness resource in the game, I'm not going to be able to work them all AND still use the leftover citizens as random specialists.

If the forest economy existed in isolation, with no GoN/Survival, I would agree that the cottage economy would likely have the upper hand.

The forest player would still have to seek out happiness resources to work all of those lovely lodges and mills.

What if forests provided a happiness bonus only to elves, like the way dwarves can work peaks. That way GoN (or FoL if religious civics are done away with) wouldn't be the "I WIN" button it is right now.

FINAL EDIT: Anyways, the original point of my post was that we should address the easy access to happiness if we want to fix the forest economy.

So a few final suggestions, as I don't want to beat a dead horse, so to speak...

1)+1 for farms is nice (and was my original reason for posting in this thread way back on page 1 )
2)-1 for lodges at WotF is also a good idea IMO. If I want commerce, I'll have to cut down that forest and build a cottage (hopefully, although, like readercolin said, seems to magically appear for some reason).
3)Nerfing Survival is great. How to do that? I'm not sure I like the idea of -% research....might lead to overcorrection and make the civic rather worthless. High number city maintenance sounds nice, and don't give so many free units.
4)Forests should only make elves happy really. Axe the happiness bonus associated with forests for non-elf civs.

 

[tokala]

3)Nerfing Survival is great. How to do that? I'm not sure I like the idea of -% research....might lead to overcorrection and make the civic rather worthless. High number city maintenance sounds nice, and don't give so many free units.

Of course there is the potential with -% research to dig yourself into a hole from which you can't get out again. But survival getting "worthless" for well developed cities is the point of the nerf. Maintenance penalties have no significant effect on a few super-cities, and can be circumvented by some maintenance reducing buildings/civics.

Is there some existing mechanism that can be leveraged to make a few large cities unviable, while still allowing for a fair number of small cities?

 

[Ahwaric]

I don't even know which tech falls in which categoy

Use editor and add yourself classical and renaissance techs. Now check tech advisor

I still think farms should be given an additional at an extremely late tech. Possibly taxation or currency.

Farms already get extra at taxation. No plans to add another one.

Edit: Looking at your picture, I wasn't aware that you could build quarries anywhere other than on hills. This leads me to wonder - what then is the point of workshops/etc.

You can't. I just experimented with both quarries & workshops. But as they have exactly the same yields, it does not really matter what is on the picture.

I have made some further changes to improvements. Check them at 0.30 changelog in 0.30 workshop thread (it is here)

Edit:
Forgot one thing. Windmills and watermills will have the same high yields, but watermill does not remove features. So, you can build it in ancient forest. What do you think, should it stay as it is or should I change something?

 

[Bootsiuv]

Farms already get extra at taxation. No plans to add another one.

Really? I thought they only gave +1 to towns, villages, and enclaves.

My mistake then. Farms should be good if that's the case.

At least healthy debates have ensued and progress has been made.

Good things.

Looking forward to playtesting .30.

 

[readercolin]

Personally, I find that watermills are balanced enough by the rarity of rivers in most maps I play. Yeah, I might manage to get 1-2 cities with 3-4 watermills each, but that is usually the max. Of course, there are occasional games where I do a little better (there was one game I played as the kurotaes and managed to settle my capital where every single tile in its three ring radius was floodplains...) but those are usually exceptions that are going to be OP anyways, no matter what they have.

As for your nerfing lumbermills, why? Lumbermills aren't the problem, I usually don't bother building any when running a forest economy. Just spam lodges except on resource tiles - no thinking necessary, and with FoL and survival you DEFINATELY aren't lacking in results. The problem is that the economy is excessively easy to setup/maintain, requires little effort, and your entire BFC looks exactly the same throughout except for on resource squares.

Anyways, on to other subjects that I didn't answer earlier. On the founding of guilds, I can usually manage to get every single guild on emperor difficulty, on a standard pangea map with 2x civs (note, this means 14 civs - also note, similar results even with 7 civs total). If I don't focus on them, I can still get most of them if I bother holding onto great people (and with the benefits of guilds, being able to found a guild is almost always a much better option than anything else a great person can do). As for why, I usually have at least 1 city dedicated to great people. Due to some of the effects with food, and bonuses to great person growth, I have upon occasion managed to get my tenth great person from this city in 17 turns or less, and doing so around turn 200/250.

As for tech costs, ancient techs are fine. They all tend to cost me about 10-20 turns of research, which is about the same as in regular FFH (less as I develop my economy). Once you get past the third rank (bronze working, philosophy, etc.) and into fourth rank techs (smelting, magic techs, etc.) they are a bit easy to come by unless you beeline it. Here I would look at increasing tech costs by about 10-15%. Fifth teir techs (sorcery, iron working, etc.) would probably use an increase in tech cost of again 10-15% (this leads to a 20-30% increase in time required to get to these techs). Beyond that, increasing costs is up to you, though some of the lategame techs could probably use a slight reduction (the techs that unlock teir 4 units), as it is generally better/easier to just wipe out the world with your teir 3 units than bother waiting for teir 4's.

The biggest thing that needs changing though is the economy techs. Increase things like sorcery by 10-15%, but increase things like currency etc. by 30-50%. The reason why I say this is the economy techs provide a MASSIVE snowball effect. Grabbing an economy tech helps you everywhere, but more importantly, it makes grabbing the next economy tech easier, which then makes the next eco tech after that even easier, etc. Therefore, even when I'm playing a massive warmonger game, I'll tend to stall research on new pwn techs to grab the eco techs, as it will still lead me to get more pwn techs faster than my opponents. Another possiblity is to take these eco techs and spread the benefits out amongst more techs, as it means I would have more choices to make in this field. One issue at the moment is that eco techs make up a total of MAYBE a fifth of the total techs in the game, meaning its VERY easy to grab them before moving on to the military techs. If you were to increase the number of techs and spread out the benefits a little, so that eco techs make up closer to 1/3 the total techs in the game, then I might actually have to look at the eco techs and decide what kind of economy I'm going to specialize towards, or risk being beaten to the teir 3 units, instead of just grab all the eco techs and then grab whatever other techs I want because iron working only takes me 3 turns.

I hope that my input has been useful. Anyways, now back to studying for those tests that I've been avoiding...

-Colin

 

[Ahwaric]

Personally, I find that watermills are balanced enough by the rarity of rivers in most maps I play. Yeah, I might manage to get 1-2 cities with 3-4 watermills each, but that is usually the max.

I think you are right - freshwater tiles are so valuable because of farms & cottages requirements that watermills need to be good to be valid option. No changes for now then.
As for your nerfing lumbermills, why? Lumbermills aren't the problem, I usually don't bother building any when running a forest economy. [/QUOTE]
That is probably because you run FoL as well and lumbermills can't be build in ancient forest. But in standard forests these are good I think - better build lumbermill than to remove forest and build quarry/workshop.
But I might nerfed them too much. The commune with nature commerce is back

Just spam lodges except on resource tiles - no thinking necessary, and with FoL and survival you DEFINATELY aren't lacking in results.

I thought on it some more and reverted base lodge yields to what they were to make them valid options. The yields are fine but no better than workshop/quarry, and worse than lumbermill.
Also, you can run farm/cottage economy earlier than forestry is good. Most of the game, it is just +1 and . You can get almost the same results with new yurts - auls at horseback riding give better yields than forest with lodge.

Survival and FoL changes it.
I am fine with FoL and forester synergy - you might use lodges instead of farms. The commerce is still low, and mid-game are the same from both forester & town,
It is the survival needs big nerf. That is the route I think I will go. Something that will make it good for small empires only.

I can usually manage to get every single guild on emperor difficulty, on a standard pangea map with 2x civs (note, this means 14 civs - also note, similar results even with 7 civs total).

Ok then, no idea how to change it.
But AI likes to found guilds and is quite good at spreading them.

As for tech costs, ancient techs are fine...

Thanks, I will change the costs of later techs.

The biggest thing that needs changing though is the economy techs. The reason why I say this is the economy techs provide a MASSIVE snowball effect.

Ok, I have added two new economy techs. Both worthwhile I think and make economy research a bit slower.
Also, some bonuses moved to weak techs. (mercantilism)
I will take a look at costs next. I think things like taxation might need to be more expensive

I hope that my input has been useful. Anyways, now back to studying for those tests that I've been avoiding...

Good luck then

If you want to check the details, I update changelog every time I change something.

 

[Imuratep]

Why does survival anyway have a bonus for forester's lodge? I think it would make a lot of more sense if it improved camps as those have something to do with the survival of the fittest. Forester's lodge IMHO should only be good for FoL worshippers. As it is right now they are better than Lumbermills in their yield income. IMHO both should be differentiated a bit more. Monocultures are really really boring. Forester's Lodge for and , Lumbermills for . Thus increase the commerce income of forester's lodge at GoN by 1 and remove the income at Survival. For those who want a hammers on them, remove the income on Commune with Nature and put it to Animal Handling instead. It's an expensive tech, but nevertheless one you can reach.

 

[Bootsiuv]

Why does survival anyway have a bonus for forester's lodge? I think it would make a lot of more sense if it improved camps as those have something to do with the survival of the fittest. Forester's lodge IMHO should only be good for FoL worshippers. As it is right now they are better than Lumbermills in their yield income. IMHO both should be differentiated a bit more. Monocultures are really really boring. Forester's Lodge for and , Lumbermills for . Thus increase the commerce income of forester's lodge at GoN by 1 and remove the income at Survival. For those who want a hammers on them, remove the income on Commune with Nature and put it to Animal Handling instead. It's an expensive tech, but nevertheless one you can reach.

It does improve camps by giving +1. Deer are also quite abundant on many popular mapscripts.

Increasing the bonus of forester's lodge even more would be a mistake IMO. It isn't necessary. A non-financial leader running a riverside forest economy can already pull 4 after the river port is built. That's enough.

I would like to see the happiness bonus toned down significantly (or removed completely) for non-elf civs who decide to run a forest economy. I really think that's the root of the entire problem. It's the only economy that can provide 30 useful, happy citizens in one city. This is really where the power of the forest economy lies.

 

[Wauthan]

Remove the +Happiness/Forest for the FoL civic. Replace it with a +Health/Forest instead. The entire problem with the civic is the enormous cities you can create since you simply don't need to worry about keeping the inhabitants happy. I accidentally removed the happy bonus while modding and the results were interesting. You suddenly have to hunt each of those happy citizens if you want your city to take advantage of the forest economy.

I favor this approach for flavor reasons as well. It sort of stretches ones suspension of disbelief when the largest cities in the world belong to the slow-breeding forest-dwelling elves. I can actually imagine elves being even more annoyed, compared to other civs, with the "It's to crowded!" unhappiness. High quality tiles limited by high amount of unhappiness.

 

[Kalina]

I completely agree about GoN civic, as I have said many times before I usually remove happiness and health bonus and add +50% XP within borders and +50% GG points within borders just after instaling new patch.

 

[moshi]

idea:
in order to encourage different strategic use of forests in the early game raise the received from chopping from the current 13 to 30, with a 50% bonus at bronze working, when axemen are buildable. right now you currently get half a warrior per chop. but if per chop were increased, deforesting your empire in order to attempt an early axe rush on a neighbor would become a viable option, and you'd have to decide whether the short-term benefits of an early war are worth the loss of long-term benefits and the reduction in civic options available in the midgame.

plus as a bonus those early rushes can make for more exciting gameplay in the first 150 turns, which are usually pretty tame in orbis compared to BtS (imo)

 

[JeffSteel]

It has always seemed a little strange to me that even a small city can somehow gather two food from a patch of undeveloped grassland, or that somehow sending a gang of workers into a region of plains devoid of resources can get both significant food and production from naught but tufts of grass and the occasional rabbit. What would happen if all the base yields from tiles were removed? Say, if everything, even forests and hills, produced nothing, like deserts do. Innate river commerce could also be removed.

This way, one could remove the 3 food per pop, and food would still be hard to come by. Forrester lodges could stay the way they are, farms could produce 3 food, but only with irrigation, otherwise they produce only one. Rivers are still important, and remain so throughout the game, but don't get overpowered later on, whilst Aqueducts become quite important for cities without access to fresh water otherwise. Seems like it would also delay the whole map getting filled with cities too.

Just something that struck my mind, haven't planed it out in depth or anything.