Improvements

[Thalassicus]

That is way too high, I'd take some of those out.
If you boost the base coast gold yield, I'd reduce the fish yield to compensate.

And I don't see why they should get science?

Keep in mind "coast" tiles have a max yield of 222, with the lighthouse and lab. The fish itself adds +322 (with a fishing boat, smokehouse, and seaport). The numbers are all detailed in the TI/CD readmes. The resources are generally understood to be part of the discussion because they're so common almost any coastal city can get one. There's been many comments over the weeks that coastal cities are still underwhelming, even when built next to resources. That's sorta been the point of doing all these coastal experiments lately.

There was a long discussion about coastal cities... I'll try and find it, though it was back in October I think, and I don't remember if it was in this thread or the combined one...

Edit: Ahh here it is... goes on for a page or few.

In particular though, equalizing early yields between land/water isn't a terribly thrilling idea because it would make island cities more powerful than land, since none of those tiles would actually need to have a worker improve them... can just buy a lighthouse+harbor in a brand new city and poof! Everything fully developed.

This is one reason why I put the final bonus on a very high-tier building, the research lab.

There's also the issue of city placement boredom I described earlier, and water's just about the most monotonous terrain we can get. Putting good bonuses on the resources keeps things interesting.

 

[Ahriman]

Keep in mind "coast" tiles have a max yield of 222, with the lighthouse and lab

Ah, the science is from research lab. I guess that isn't so unreasonable, its so incredibly late game, and otherwise weak.

since none of those tiles would actually need to have a worker improve them... can just buy a lighthouse+harbor in a brand new city and poof! Everything fully developed.

Yes, but there's the infrastructure cost and maintenance cost, which can be increased if need be.

I don't see a problem with coast tiles with buildings being as good as land tiles with improvement.
If you don't have that, then coast cities are going to remain undesirable.

And I don't see a problem with being able to buy your infrastructure with gold for the sea. Its not that overpowered, and its the only way I can see sea tiles being useful, and coasts *should* be good in the early game, that was the whole design purpose I thought.

 

[Polycrates]

Hi Thalassicus,

I like your proposals for improving special resources!

That division of base tile improvement with rivers/is a very clear, focused design; I do wonder if it's maybe introducing too many resources into the world, with all the follow-on effects that it might have. Gold in particular; I sort of wonder whether all these gold boosts then increases to costs (eg city state bribes and research agreements) is not maybe chasing our tails a bit. It also might have the minor negative of making the tech tree look very messy. Worth trying though!

Thought I'd throw this out there as a counter-idea: rivers are already very powerful, and there seems to be an awful lot of gold around in the very early game (I can build scout/worker/warrior/settler and then often buy a second worker, which just feels wrong, balance-wise). And this mod is also adding a fair amount of extra gold. I wonder whether it might be worth limiting the riverside gold bonus to only trading posts (and plantations). That way, there's a genuine question of what to do with the valuable riverside tiles - do you take the +1 gold or the +1 food? I guess the trade-off with production is that it's relatively rarer anyway - so the choice of whether to use that valuable tile for more production or a bit of production+trade is still a meaningful one. It also makes coastal cities relatively more powerful without adding enormous gold yields to them.

Just a thought, and I know it goes against all civ tradition, but I think it could perhaps be interesting.

 

[Txurce]

I've now played most of a game with the latest dev mods, including Free Research and WWGD. I've commented on the latter two in their own threads. With the caveat that I built more TP's than usual, I felt that I had more gold than usual... enough to invest in R.A.'s eventually despite the nerf (which amazingly enough feels about right).

Earlier in this thread's discussion I advocated raising upgrade rather than unit purchase costs. I felt the goal was to encourage building new units instead of upgrading, more than it was to encourage building over purchasing. As such it was a nerf to the warmonger with the large standing army.

After playing I feel more strongly that purchase costs should not have gone up. The reason is that it hurts the builder, who is sometimes forced to rush-buy units when attacked by a much bigger neighbor. This happened to me, and even with more gold in the till than usual, I was very limited as to how many new units I could produce quickly. Given Civ 5's slow build times and the absence of a draft, I think having an emergency lever like rush-buying should be more affordable than it is in the dev mod.

 

[Thalassicus]

I do wonder if it's maybe introducing too many resources into the world, with all the follow-on effects that it might have.

It's something I've been keeping in mind, for sure. This is one reason I went for consistency in the recent additions: all the gold boosts are the same +2 for example, all improvement bonuses are on logical techs with equivalence between the buffs.

To put it in a straightforward manner, I feel that combat in Civ V is more complex than Civ IV: flanking, ranged units, multiple units instead of a stack acting as a single unit, and so on. Conversely, I feel improvement and city development was dumbed down - all corruption/unhealthiness/happiness rolled into a single global value, happiness/gold/science chains simplified, windmills and watermills removed as a terrain improvement, bonus resources not tradeable.

Basically, the build aspect was made so very simple I don't think it'll be confusing to have some extra complexity. I understand the importance of making it accessible and easy to comprehend though, which is why I'm putting lots of work into making clear, concise tooltips.

One thing I've been thinking about is consolidating some of them. While it makes sense to give culture for some and gold for others, for consistency's sake I might combine a few things.

I do feel the gold buffs are small enough they shouldn't have much impact on overall income. I agree removing the +1g from rivers would be ideal, but unfortunately we tried that and it didn't work out -- the code that analyzes terrain value for placing resources and choosing start locations doesn't check yields improved through other sources.

I agree with you about unit purchasing Txurce that 50% was too high. Can't know till we try though.

 

[Txurce]

I agree with you about unit purchasing Txurce that 50% was too high. Can't know till we try though.

I'm happy to be the guinea pig who's rolling in gold but gets no influence with the CS and can't afford to buy two infantrymen!

 

[Polycrates]

Basically, the build aspect was made so very simple I don't think it'll be confusing to have some extra complexity. I understand the importance of making it accessible and easy to comprehend though, which is why I'm putting lots of work into making clear, concise tooltips.

Sorry, I wasn't expressing myself very well. I'm not really fussed by adding more complex bonuses here and there, particularly to buildings/special resources.
I just think the danger is more an inflationary one; the total amount of gold in the world is rising and at the same time we're looking at how much to increase the costs of upgrading/city states/research agreements/building maintenance, etc. Suddenly there's a whole bunch more things that need to be balanced against each other, I guess.
I guess I'm just more reflecting that another way to think about things (or hopefully a complementary way to go) is to make the effects of these bonuses more special by virtue of their yields being exceptional.
Talking about the granary and watermill got me thinking; from the start I’ve always had the feeling that those (and a few other things, like the original Tradition +1 food bonus) were relics from a period in the design when excess food was intended to relatively scarce, so that these really would be extremely worthwhile buildings on the level of previous games’ granaries. The watermill actually feels like it was designed with the idea that +4 excess food was so exceptional that it was worth paying an excess marginal cost to stack it on top of the granary. Obviously the game moved away from this food scarcity, leaving food resources and these buildings behind, but I think it’s an intriguing concept (in an abstract sense - I'm not suggesting you actually ought to nerf excess food, which I think is pretty good at the moment).

But extending this concept to gold; by making gold more abundant from everywhere (rivers, trading posts, cheaper markets etc), it’s then more necessary to jack up the gold bonuses of special resources etc and then really rebalance everything that relies on gold.
At the moment, settling riverside gives you buckets of gold without you needing to really do anything – and you can build a lot of infrastructure etc without worrying about going into the red, just from riverside tiles. I think you could possibly make gold a bit more special, and something you have to put a little work into, by removing this river gold for everything but plantations and trading posts. So if you want money, you have to settle luxuries, build trading posts (and possibly even instead of riverside farms), and settle next to the sea. Rivers still give you extra gold, but less so - and they have other very powerful advantages. Coastal cities and luxuries (with the tamer end of boosts already canvassed) become more important because they’re providing a comparatively larger percentage of your gold income (which hopefully remains similar overall, or a bit lower, particularly early). Just seems like it might be a neater, more parsimonious way to balance things out without going for ever-increasing yields. Also seems to me like it might favour a more focused approach to city development, which I think would make that side of the game more interesting.

Anyway it might be a spectacular failure of an idea, I just think it might be food for thought. I'm planning to try it myself as soon as I can properly figure out the Civ V modding system...

 

[Thalassicus]

I see what you're saying, the issue is simply that if rivers don't have a basic yield bonus the resource placement / start location choosing engine doesn't know they're there, and balances resources accordingly.

However, I've done some work learning how this placement system works, so when I have some time I'll figure out if there's a way to deal with this. I do like the idea of making rivers special only once improvements are built nearby.

 

[Polycrates]

I see what you're saying, the issue is simply that if rivers don't have a basic yield bonus the resource placement / start location choosing engine doesn't know they're there, and balances resources accordingly.

However, I've done some work learning how this placement system works, so when I have some time I'll figure out if there's a way to deal with this. I do like the idea of making rivers special only once improvements are built nearby.

So it would mess with map generation? Or starting site placement? I knew there'd be a catch!
The AI already seems to make a stubborn point of placing all its cities one tile away from rivers anyway, so it probably can't hurt city placement too much

 

[Ahriman]

I do feel the gold buffs are small enough they shouldn't have much impact on overall income.

I don't think this is the case.

The important thing to remember, is that a lot of gold is going to building and unit and road maintenance costs.

So if in vanilla you had 100 gold income and 60 gold of costs, a 20% increase in gold revenue (to 120) is actually a 50% increase in gold profit per turn (120 - 60, rather than 100 - 60).

And its *excess* gold that gives us gold to buy stuff with.

So the buff for trading post gold and coast gold and building gold from special resources and cheaper buildings and buffed merchant specialists, combined, is non-trivial.
This is why I suggested reducing city trade yields (a la Alpaca's mod) to partially compensate.
I'd also consider increasing maintenance costs for some of the most powerful buildings; buildings with large % yields but significant upkeep costs are a great way to fight ICS and lead to "tall" developed cities.

I think Polycrates has a strong point about the risks here.

 

[Txurce]

One of the complaints seemingly everyone has about Civ 5 is how little there is to do in the early turns. Making workers cheap would address this better than just about any other fix. If the only downside is faster terrain improvements, how unbalancing would this be, and could it be adjusted elsewhere?

 

[Ahriman]

One of the complaints seemingly everyone has about Civ 5 is how little there is to do in the early turns. Making workers cheap would address this better than just about any other fix

Well, I disagree that there's a problem, after the very early game. There's always more to do if you're at war than if you're at peace, but even at peace you can MM and tweak your empire every time something new happens (like a city grows, or whatever) and you can spend gold every turn.

But I don't see why we should have workers cheaper just so there is "something to do". That wouldn't even make more to do at all, it would just mean that your worker tasks got finished sooner, and then once the midgame they would be even more useless and boring than they are now, and you'd have to either have them sitting around doing nothing waiting for railroads, or just disband them.

 

[Txurce]

Well, I disagree that there's a problem, after the very early game. There's always more to do if you're at war than if you're at peace, but even at peace you can MM and tweak your empire every time something new happens (like a city grows, or whatever) and you can spend gold every turn.

But I don't see why we should have workers cheaper just so there is "something to do". That wouldn't even make more to do at all, it would just mean that your worker tasks got finished sooner, and then once the midgame they would be even more useless and boring than they are now, and you'd have to either have them sitting around doing nothing waiting for railroads, or just disband them.

I'm talking about the very early game, where just about everyone agrees that there's a problem with just exploring and hitting "end turn." Making them cheaper by definition gives you something to do early on, and by the time they're finished, you can shift attention to the parts of the game that have by then developed. That they become useless earlier is a problem I would gladly trade for. That they become relatively useless, period, is a different issue altogether.

 

[Ahriman]

I'm talking about the very early game, where just about everyone agrees that there's a problem with just exploring and hitting "end turn."

This has been the same in every Civ game.
If you lower worker cost enough to matter, then you throw a lot of city development out of whack in general.

The very early game only has nothing to do if you don't build any units, or lose them all. Otherwise, you can explore and go barb hunting.
This is more interesting in Civ5 than in previous civs, because of natural wonders, city state discovery rewards, and barbarian camp gold.

 

[Txurce]

This has been the same in every Civ game.
If you lower worker cost enough to matter, then you throw a lot of city development out of whack in general.

The very early game only has nothing to do if you don't build any units, or lose them all. Otherwise, you can explore and go barb hunting.
This is more interesting in Civ5 than in previous civs, because of natural wonders, city state discovery rewards, and barbarian camp gold.

Throwing city development out of whack may well be too much of a downside, which is why I asked about it in my OP... although I don't know that it is.

That there is more explore/hit "end turn" in Civ 5 than in previous Civ versions is pretty well documented - just read the many complaint threads about the long early-game build times. Workers took less time to build in earlier Civ versions, so there was consequently more to do in the early stages.

 

[Thalassicus]

I do feel the gold buffs [to resources] are small enough they shouldn't have much impact on overall income.

So the buff for trading post gold and coast gold and building gold from special resources and cheaper buildings and buffed merchant specialists, combined, is non-trivial.

The conversation at that point was only about the resource bonuses. I do feel those are scattered enough, the bonuses late enough in the tech tree, and small enough they should not have a significant impact on income.

Trading posts are another story, and are something I've been thinking about.



---------------

I don't remember exactly where I saw this, but I think there was a concern expressed somewhere about complimentary balance changes (which I think Polycrates might be getting at).

To put it simply, I don't think "reduced gold here, so we need to come up with another way to increase it." This would be a poor way to approach changes. Basically, I avoid using solutions to create new problems... instead I use similar problems to create balanced solutions.


For example, if there's similar problems like...

• The community has found problem A, caused by X costing too little.
• The community also identified problem B where Y costs too much.

Independent problems acting as opposites on some shared subject, if solved, are the 'hit two birds with one stone' cliche. It provides a way to produce solutions without affecting overall game balance. For example, I've seen people in the community talk about:

Problems:

1. Farms are too good (especially on river-plains and river-hills)
2. Upgrading is too cheap / easy.
3. AIs offer too much gold for resources and open borders.
4. Too easy to buy citystates.
5. Little incentive to construct buildings like the Forge and Arsenal.

Possible solutions I know of:

1. Improve TP yields like Farms do.
2. Increase upgrade costs.
3. Reduce AI gold offers in trades.
4. Require more gold for citystate influence.
5. Increase unit purchase costs, improve Forge/Arsenal production.

These aren't the only solutions to the problems, but these solutions happen to interact on gold income in opposite directions, so it seems logical to implement them side-by-side in such a manner overall income is ideally unchanged. Getting that balance right is tricky, but possible, and a goal worth working towards.

 

[Txurce]

The conversation at that point was only about the resource bonuses. I do feel those are scattered enough, the bonuses late enough in the tech tree, and small enough they should not have a significant impact on income.

Trading posts are another story, and are something I've been thinking about.



---------------

I don't remember exactly where I saw this, but I think there was a concern expressed somewhere about complimentary balance changes (which I think Polycrates might be getting at).

To put it simply, I don't think "reduced gold here, so we need to come up with another way to increase it." This would be a poor way to approach changes. Basically, I avoid using solutions to create new problems... instead I use similar problems to create balanced solutions.


For example, if there's similar problems like...

• The community has found problem A, caused by X costing too little.
• The community also identified problem B where Y costs too much.

Independent problems acting as opposites on some shared subject, if solved, are the 'hit two birds with one stone' cliche. It provides a way to produce solutions without affecting overall game balance. For example, I've seen people in the community talk about:

Problems:

1. Farms are too good (especially on river-plains and river-hills)
2. Upgrading is too cheap / easy.
3. AIs offer too much gold for resources and open borders.
4. Too easy to buy citystates.
5. Little incentive to construct buildings like the Forge and Arsenal.

Possible solutions I know of:

1. Improve TP yields like Farms do.
2. Increase upgrade costs.
3. Reduce AI gold offers in trades.
4. Require more gold for citystate influence.
5. Increase unit purchase costs, improve Forge/Arsenal production.

These aren't the only solutions to the problems, but these solutions happen to interact on gold income in opposite directions, so it seems logical to implement them side-by-side in such a manner overall income is ideally unchanged. Getting that balance right is tricky, but possible, and a goal worth working towards.

Agreed in total.. except for #5.

I would say that making the Forge and Arsenal relevant isn't a good enough reason to increase unit purchase costs. That the costs are too low in and of themselves should be the first reason. Balancing warmongering vs building could be another. (And as you know I think the current dev mod's unit purchase costs are too high, hurting the builder more than the warmonger.)

 

[Thalassicus]

You're right and I agree, it's the reason I explored that approach though. Since there's basically only two ways to get units (buying and building), altering one changes importance of the other in the opposite direction.

 

[Ahriman]

@Thal
I understand what you're saying, but I think every time you make a change you should think about "how does this solution affect the game, and what other/worse problems might it cause?".

I wonder if it might be useful (especially with major changes like the puppet nerf) to get a single stable "set" version and leave it for a week or two in a shakedown period without further changes or proposals, and let people get a feeling for the game as it plays with all the updates.

Then we can see what kind of problems people think are present in the new version, and go through an iterative balance cycle again.

 

[Thalassicus]

I was planning on something like that, though for personal reasons (spending more time leveling with a friend through new content in Cata).