K-Mod: Far Beyond the Sword

[Zacar]

As-is, lumbermills are a specific point production improvement that bring you health, being otherwise equal to mines. I'm not suggesting a radical change to this because 1. this mod is not primarily about radical changes and 2. not everything in the game has to be equally useful, because a lot of folk still play for fun.

A minor change to a better direction still matters to us who do use lumbermills even now.

Edit: Well, due to Windsor's somewhat biased analysis I'm actually motivated to throw my number analysis here as well:

Lumbermill: 2 1 ½
Watermill: 2 1
Workshop: 1 1 (1 2 with Caste)

I ignored commerce because I don't consider this stuff for my cottage cities. Extra points if you can figure out what the numbers mean / if the numbers look familiar.

 

[Zholef]

Lumbermills not only need to come earlier, they need a straight up buff.

A grassforest lumbermill is 22 gaining an additional at Railroad. Keep in mind that Railroad is a very expensive tech, almost rivaling Assembly Line.

And while a 23 tile is a strong tile, you have waited a long time for this.

A grass workshop with Caste+State Property flat out beats lumbermills. A grassland workshop is 24 Of course at some point you'll get forced into Emancipation reducing the workshops to the same level as lumbermills.

For riverside a 32 watermill is more attractive than the 23 lumbermill allowing faster growth and feeding a plains tile. Really, riverside Lumbermills? Who can afford to let a nice riverside grass just idle for that long?

It's also worth noting that the workshops are solid tile improvements as soon as you have 2 out of caste/guilds/chemistry when they compete with mines.

This puts lumbermills in an awkward situation where it is really only in Free Market games they are actually better. And corporations themselves take a long time to set up. An improvement where you have to forgo so much early and midgame shouldn't be dependent on a civic to give a small advantage lategame.

So how much better should they be? [...] As it stand lumbermills are something you use in cities captured from the AI.

This far I completely agree. The payoffs of not chopping are too small and they come too late. The other big balance problem I see lies with Serfdom, because the buff it received is really only a buff to the Financial and Spiritual traits. What it really needs to become a viable mid-game alternative to Slavery and Caste System is a production bonus. So here my suggestion for fixing both issues (changes from stock BtS in italics):

Forest
+1
Movement Cost: 2
+0.7 in nearby cities
Defending units get +50% strength

Lumbermill
Available at Machinery
+1
+1 (with Serfdom)
+1 (with Replaceable Parts)
+1 (with Railroad)

Watermill
Available at Machinery
+1
+1 (with Serfdom)
+1 (with Replaceable Parts)
+1 (with State Property)
+2 (with Electricity)

Serfdom
Available at Feudalism
Upkeep: Low
Workers build improvements +50% faster
+1 from Lumbermill
+1 from Watermill, Plantation

Between the awesome power of chopping armies and wonders on one hand and on the other the strategic nightmare of having +50%-defense tiles scattered throughout your empire for your enemies to use, this set of changes would still leave keeping forests around and running Serfdom the weaker option most of the time.

 

[Blitzconfusion]

I think Machinery would be a bit too early a tech for Lumbermill, even if Replaceable parts is a bit late. Even at risk of repeating myself, I think paper would be a better tech timewise for Lumbermill. Maybe give it 24(/10000) chance to spread forests?
If Lumbermill came at Machinery, I would only ever chop the ancient era wonders and for mines, which kinda defeats the point of Lumbermill being a bonus for not chopping everything for immediate gain.
I admit I might be biased, in my version I doubled the forest spread, allowed watermill to be built on forest and to not hinder forest spread, and made Lumbermill a Paper improvement.

 

[Zacar]

Zholef's proposal is worth considering.

Even separately, that forest health tweak is interesting (though it makes it slightly harder to count the health bonus of a largely forested city).

I find it difficult to estimate what the end result from those small commerce boosts is. Regarding watermills, it is good to remember that they cannot be built on all riverside tiles.

Now seeing this, I can comment that the current Town penalty for Serfdom is unnecessary especially because all civics of this category are to-be-punished by Emancipation anyway. If this suggestion or one of its derivatives ends up being too strong in some way, increasing the civic upkeep cost is a good way to fine-tune it.

Blitz: note that the idea is to couple machinery with lumbermill that offers no production bonus in itself.

---

An unrelated note to karadoc: Random personalities on. The AI has a special comment about not wanting to change away from their favourite civic. The foreign advisor info page still lists more than one "potential" favourite civic, even though I know which one the favourite is. Also, I wonder if this AI comment allows a bit further fav civic deduction by elimination..

 

[Windsor]

As-is, lumbermills are a specific point production improvement that bring you health, being otherwise equal to mines. I'm not suggesting a radical change to this because 1. this mod is not primarily about radical changes and 2. not everything in the game has to be equally useful, because a lot of folk still play for fun.

Lumbermill: 2 1 ½
Watermill: 2 1
Workshop: 1 1 (1 2 with Caste)

Are you comparing unimproved grassforest with MetalCasting-Workshops and Machinery-Watermills?

It doesn't matter that a forest is better when its still not worth working.

And while I agree that not all improvements needs to be equally useful, some balance is preferable. The question is really, should saving forests for future lumbermills in core cities be a valid strategic choice?

If yes, then they need to be competitive in the medieval era.

Lumbermill
Available at Machinery
+1
+1 (with Serfdom)
+1 (with Replaceable Parts)
+1 (with Railroad)

Between the awesome power of chopping armies and wonders on one hand and on the other the strategic nightmare of having +50%-defense tiles scattered throughout your empire for your enemies to use, this set of changes would still leave keeping forests around and running Serfdom the weaker option most of the time.

Trying to get people away from slavery that early is hard due to the lack of other rush options, especially when lumbermills stops chopping. Rushbuying is not strong enough and drafting is still a few techs away.

To be honest I think its hard to get serfdom strong enough. Caste struggles to be more than a civic for golden ages. Slavery should probably be high upkeep and/or suffer some other drawback, like -25% in all cities.

 

[Zacar]

A forest can be worth keeping even if you don't work it.

A forest can be worth working over chopping.

If you never work a forest, that's fine. I don't work forests that much either. But actually I don't want to hear about optimal strategies, because then I can't invent them myself . I don't find too much use for slavery - perhaps that's the difference in playstyles. The map type also matters. I probably wouldn't chop a tundra forest for example.

 

[Charles555nc]

I love the passion towards the game and agree that the Lumbermill could show up earlier. My way of balancing the 50% defense quality of forests is providing the barrage upgrade with a bonus towards hills/forests, like 5% for hills per level of barrage and 10% for forests.

Serfdom combo with lumbermills might be too close to workshops and caste system mechanic. Maybe this?

Lumbermill, machinery +1 hammer...............Watermill
+1 commerce for Paper.............................same as before but +1 commerce at paper?
+1 commerce for Replaceable Parts
+1 hammer from railroad

 

[Zholef]

I love the passion towards the game and agree that the Lumbermill could show up earlier. My way of balancing the 50% defense quality of forests is providing the barrage upgrade with a bonus towards hills/forests, like 5% for hills per level of barrage and 10% for forests.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think balance changes should be at least somewhat reconcilable with what happened in history and that makes catapults that get bonuses against units in forests rather hard to swallow. I mean, what are they shooting anyway? Agent Orange?

Serfdom combo with lumbermills might be too close to workshops and caste system mechanic.

Yes, it's close. That's the point. Slavery increases production via Farms, Caste System increases production via Workshops, and Serfdom is pretty much useless because it can't compete.

 

[Charles555nc]

For the catapults idea, barrage upgrades show experience, so experienced seige unit crews would be more accurate, kinda like the city attacker upgrade shows experience vs cities. Also, lots of seige units had ways of setting forests on fire, for example. The main technique of dealing with an army in the forest was surrounding it with a larger army and slowly starving them to death but that's probably not something for civ4 lol.

My idea for serfdom was
+1 hammer for camp, pasture
+1 gold for farm, fishing boats
-1 gold for town

But I also slightly increased the occurrence of ocean resources...and made forges provide +2 hammers and +20% production (from 25%).

 

[Zholef]

My idea for serfdom was
+1 hammer for camp, pasture
+1 gold for farm, fishing boats
-1 gold for town

So you tweaked it a little by giving it an insignificant production bonus, but the bulk of this Serfdom's modest power still comes the farms. It's still a civic that will only ever be useful to leaders with the Spiritual or Financial traits or to civilizations that are stuck with amounts of plains so massive that they don't occur on standard map scripts.

...and made forges provide +2 hammers and +20% production (from 25%).

Why would you give a buff to the second most powerful building in the game? What's next? Reducing the cost of granaries to 40?

 

[Charles555nc]

For Karadoc,

I'm seeing Augustus Caesar in tribalism every game at werid times where there are better choices, like slavery, serfdom, or caste system. 2 possible things are going on

1. Augustus has some weird tribalism favoritism.
2. Augustus is almost always the target of espionage switch civics attack.

It seems to always be Augustus so option 1 seems more likely. This is what Ive seen every game of the last 5 games Ive played...not sure if Im crazy or not.

 

[Charles555nc]

Not trying to get into an argument with you, but we were talking about taking power away from Slavery. Buffing a flat production for forge and decreasing the % production bonus seems like a fair trade to me, and a way to reduce slavery reliance.

Slavery- rapid production for population, no per turn commerce/production increase, dependent on happiness
Serfdom- commerce increase and development (worker bonus), population from farms also helps philosophic leaders, specialists.
Caste System- Production per turn, artist/merchant/scientist rushing

As long as the choices are different and have a decent balance, seems ok by me, serfdom being the "tech" choice, but I just play on emperor and not super deity or whatnot. Farming grasslands can balance out a city's trees/plains and potentially earlier lumbermills will probably help take more power from slavery as well.

 

[Zholef]

Not trying to get into an argument with you, but we were talking about taking power away from Slavery. Buffing a flat production for forge and decreasing the % production bonus seems like a fair trade to me, and a way to reduce slavery reliance.

Well, I don't think Slavery needs to be nerfed. It's powerful, but it's not overpowered precisely because Caste System and Emancipation rival it. Completely skipping Slavery is something frequently done by players of all skill levels. Even if I thought Slavery needed to be nerfed, I wouldn't think this Forge change were the way to do it, because Slavery profits just as much from it as the other civics. Serfdom on the other hand needs a buff, not because it's a bad civic, but because it comes at the cost of not running Slavery, Caste System or Emancipation.

What I like so much about my suggestion is that it's not just one change addressing a single balance issue, but a few changes addressing many issues. It buffs Serfdom in a way that doesn't favor already powerful traits, it rectifies the absurdity of Workshops being more powerful than Lumbermills, it makes Watermills sometimes worth building before Replaceable Parts, and it makes it possible for not chopping every non-tundra forest to be a good play occasionally. On top of that, the changes are noninvasive in the sense that stock BtS players switching to K-Mod would not have to adapt a lot because of these changes. They could simply continue to chop everything and never to use Serfdom. By comparison, K-Mod's changes to the Great Lighthouse and the corporations are pretty damn radical.

 

[karadoc]

Speaking of radical changes; I'm looking for ways to slow down the late game a little bit. More specifically, I want to slow down the game if there is particularly fast tech progression.

Currently, one of the key effects for slowing tech in the late game is "inflation". The way it works is to slowly increase all gold costs with each passing turn. I think it's a decent way to keep costs relevant into the late game while commerce and productivity are increasing. However, there is a major problem in that if the game goes very fast, then inflation has less of an effect in the late game. So in games with heavy tech trading or just strong economies, the effects of inflation are relatively small, and so the late game just flies by.

This isn't really a big problem, but I would like to solve it if there is a good way to get it done. But it's a bit tricky. Simply increasing tech-costs doesn't solve the issue, because that would slow down the game in all cases - which would hit particularly hard on low-difficulty games (where the AI researches slower, and so the total research rate is slower). Increasing inflation doesn't really solve the problem either, because the crux of the issue is that fast games essentially bypass the effects of inflation. Again, higher inflation would slow down all games, and would be particularly hard-hitting on slow games.

I want an effect that slows games that are too fast, but doesn't slow down games that are already slow. And I want it to be a fairly intuitive and simple system which is easy to understand and easy to implement.

I've got a couple of ideas in mind, but I'm interested to hear if anyone can come up with something better.

This may not be something that I actually change; but it's something that comes to mind every time someone mentions adding commerce to lumbermills, or watermills or whatever - because adding more commerce to these things would speed up the game even further. There are lots of potentially good changes which would have the unwanted side-effect of speeding up the late game. So it would good to have some kind of reliable counter-balance.

 

[Windsor]

The first thing that springs to my mind would be to simply add a per era modifier for inflation and scale the per turn inflation back a bit so slower games ends up equal.

This would hit beelining techs and also be a catch-up mechanism (for better or worse).

 

[Charles555nc]

In my games, Ive been lowering some of the multipliers, library becomes +20% research (from 25), and marketplaces becomes +20% cash (from 25). This makes sense as a progression, library 20%, university 25%, upped observatory to 30% (and banks down from +50%).

Another major factor in the late game is the Wall Street and Oxford University national wonders, which I dropped down to +75% from +100%.
(I even lowered Hermitage to +75% culture and allowed 2 artists to be made from citizens to keep the +75% motif)

Imo this "feels" better than increasing inflation.

Another idea would be reducing trade commerce modifiers, like the between different continents modifier.

 

[God-Emperor]

If you want to use inflation to slow down run-away teching, have each tech researched give a tiny increase to inflation. You'd probably need to reduce the normal inflation rate to compensate, particularly to keep it from having an effect in the earlier stages of the game when inflation currently does little to nothing.

Maybe something like reducing the normal inflation increase by 1/4 or so, but add an era based amount per tech researched. For example, perhaps ancient techs could give +.1% each, classical +.125%, medieval .15%, etc. Or perhaps increasing a little faster than that, maybe starting a little lower if you don't want early inflation effects to add up to much (perhaps 0.05, 0.1, 0.15, etc. instead).

Coming up with rules and values for this sort of thing is easy (although determining what the actual inflation rates currently are at various times would help), it just takes testing to see if it has the desired effect and tweaking as needed. It may, or may not, turn out to be a good way to get the intended end result but it is worth considering.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Completely skipping Slavery is something frequently done by players of all skill levels.

Really??

 

[Zacar]

Not necessarily directly related, but remember how they added a few techs from vanilla to BtS? I think it would suit the late game if the tech tree was much more broader, so that it exploded around scientific method or slightly earlier. Adding some requirements would also increase the depth in case some beeline is too obvious. Realistic for K-mod? Not very, unless you can rearrange the current tech benefits for a larger array of techs and you'd still need mr. spock to voice the new techs.

Slowing down the late game - disable tech trading; check if there are cases where AI-AI trading is too generous (though assuming the human in winning, this would only benefit us); simply increase tech cost scaling towards future (so that fast progression won't be enough); God-Emperor's idea can be simplified slightly: store the amount of total acquired beakers (either by research, GP bulb or tech trading), beaker addition multiplied by tech era-weight if necessary, and just calculate the inflation offset from this.

Commerce bonuses to whatever - if you compare to the cottage line, new improvements may give slower progression anyway; if there is a problem, you can remove the unnecessary commerce bonuses anyway.

On skipping Slavery - I play K-mod/Prince/Marathon/18civs/noTechBrokering/noBarbs/noHuts/noRand, and I can and have in a typical case researched Liberalism first without changing any civics. So this definitely covers the lower difficulty levels. Why I play at Prince? Because I prefer the opponents to be equal rule-wise.. and then I can complain to karadoc why his AI sucks in roughly equal games. I've experimented with slavery only recently, and I think it is worth one anarchy.. could probably use high upkeep but not necessarily realistic. Or a minimum-requirement of hammers put in production before whipping is possible?

In the "worst" case there could be a more experimental branch of K-mod.

On the inflation mechanic itself - I didn't like it very much in the earlier times. Not sure if there are any issues with it, other than capping related. But for ideas/analysis, it would be possible to break inflation into per-expense inflation components.

 

[Zholef]

Really??

Yes, really. Slavery has two main uses: 1) It makes up for the fact that mines are the only useful production improvements in the early game, and 2) it allows stored-up food (in the form of population points) to be rapidly converted into modern military units. However, it comes at the cost of an increased need for granaries and a turn of anarchy (which matters on speeds slower than Epic). If you're Spiritual, switching is a no-brainer, but if you're not and there's enough hills to meet your cities' basic needs, switching into Slavery becomes optional until you hit Guilds, at which point Caste System Workshops become the better solution to problem 1). And by the time you hit Chemistry, Slavery even loses its importance in the rapid military build-up role, only getting it back in the late-game with Biology, Kremlin and food corporations.

Low-level players tend to undervalue Slavery because they don't yet grasp the production power it offers, but mid-level players tend to overvalue it because they don't yet realize how costly not running Caste System becomes on the higher levels. On Immortal and Deity, the AI's fast tech rates drastically increase the importance of bulbing for trade bait. That and the need to skip most of the city improvements make Caste System (with its unlimited specialists), not Slavery, the number one labor civic.

Anyway, also worth considering (from the perspective of the modder, rather than the player) are the events that punish Slavery. Events may be unpopular on the forums, but having them on is the game's default setting. Still, increasing Slavery's upkeep to High wouldn't make me object. Especially since it would have the positive side effect of slightly buffing the Organized trait in the early game.