Leaders

[The Boz]

Regarding the Ottomans, their UA sucks, and should be remade. Something like "no unhappiness from Annexed or Puppeted cities" or "automatic courthouse" or something like that. The Ottomans were pretty famous for that ability, and that is pretty much what a Janissary is (soldier from a conquered land). The river stuff that's currently in the game makes absolutely no historical sense to me.

 

[Thalassicus]

Possibly -1 in occupied cities or something along those lines... needs to still stay small since their UU's are so powerful, as previously mentioned.

 

[player1 fanatic]

Maybe +1 happiness for puppet states?

Ottomans were good in making vassal states from conquered territories.

 

[erragal]

Regarding the Ottomans, I never see them ranked among powerful civs, in any prominent strategies, or high in polls, and something just feels "off" about them. I do agree they have good UU's. The Janissary cannot be upgraded to from previous units however, and obsoletes quickly with the Rifleman. Perhaps giving some class of their units the Amphibious promotion?

You also have to consider that the Janissary special ability is very powerful and is kept when they're upgraded to riflemen; self-healing riflemen is a very powerful modern era unit. Adding a minor non-situational benefit to their UA seems to be the best way to bring them up to par.

Maybe +2/3 ranged attack for naval units, a bonus that is meaningful early game, works with the existing ability, and becomes trivial at Frigates (the same era they already have powerful UU's)

 

[Thalassicus]

@erragal
You have a very good point about the upgrade keeping, I didn't think about that before. Makes it more powerful than the Sipahi then in some respects, as the latter has a dead-end upgrade path.

I thought of something like a trireme upgrade. There's several options: range, sight, supply, and so on. I was a little concerned with overlapping Elizabeth's UA, so refrained from making any changes just yet. Any other opinions on this subject?

 

[BomberEscort]

Washington - America
B17: 15 range (up from 10)
Minutemen: -25%, can use roads.

How did you get him to use roads and keep the terrain bonus?

 

[player1 fanatic]

He had wrong promotion.

 

[Thalassicus]

How did you get him to use roads and keep the terrain bonus?

Helicopters have this ability, so I simply changed Minutemen to use it. The promotion Minutemen have in the vanilla game is the same as for Helicopters, but with a cannot-use-roads penalty added. I wouldn't necessarily say they had the wrong promotion, but it did feel like it made them worse instead of better than Musketmen.

(Helicopters also can move over some special terrain types, that's a seperate HOVERING_UNIT promotion unrelated to this.)

 

[player1 fanatic]

Considering that current Musketmen promotion is "white", like many air only promotions, I'm pretty much certain that promotion currently used by Minutemen is supposed to be used by Helicopter.

While the one that Scouts have, and Helicopters at the moment, should be used by Minutemen.

 

[Vordeo]

@Vordeo
There's not an option for %-based trade route income, sadly, neither is there a way to have Montezuma's culture income increase with era.

Bummer. I need to look into modding myself at some point, need to find out what is and isn't doable.

Regarding the Ottomans, I never see them ranked among powerful civs, in any prominent strategies, or high in polls, and something just feels "off" about them. I do agree they have good UU's. The Janissary cannot be upgraded to from previous units however, and obsoletes quickly with the Rifleman. Perhaps giving some class of their units the Amphibious promotion?

They aren't one of the best civs, but they can absolutely dominate warfare once you get to their UUs. And the Janissary ability thing has been pointed out.

Re: the Ottoman UA - maybe free/minimal naval upkeep costs? The idea being that the units aren't theirs, they belong to the Barbary pirates, so they aren't really paying for them?

 

[Thalassicus]

@player1 fanatic
Oooh thanks for pointing that out! I didn't even think about the icon color, not something I would have noticed. Thank you.

@Vordeo
That's a good idea.

One thing to keep in mind is almost any change to their UA will require c++ access. Much of that realm is not exposed to xml edits, just changing the value of an existing attribute. I could conceivably create duplicates of their early naval units and somehow incorporate that as a hidden unique unit, but it seems it'd be simpler to just alter the effect in a few lines of code once the the full SDK is available.

Still, keep the ideas coming! These are all excellent points about the Ottomans.

 

[evanbgood]

I'm not sure if this is due to this mod or not, but I thought it was worth mentioning. In my current game, the AI Arab nation has dominated one of the two continents and has many cities. In the trade window, I see that they've stockpiled over 50,000 gold and have produced modern infantry EVERYWHERE. This could just be because of the AI flavor's love for gold production, but it seemed a bit... much.

 

[DeepQantas]

I kinda fancy the idea of leveraging Barbarian Naval units, but as has been said, the current Ottoman ability is way too situational to be useful.

I'm thinking it'd be cool to be able to instantly Bribe/Hire any barbarian ships you see. See a pirate anywhere on the map? Click it, click a Buy button (UI modding, yikes!) and it's yours. This way you don't need a navy of your own to begin with, you can always leverage it even if you see only a few ships passing by. Also it won't be overpowered if there are a lot of barb ships, because you're always paying a price in gold.

 

[Thalassicus]

@evanbgood
It's due to a bad AI and happens in the vanilla game, all of the AI's do that if they go on a continent-domination path. They use the ignore-happiness strategy and focus entirely on a research and gold-purchasing empire. If you invade them, some people have reported dozens of instant-bought artillery popping out of cities... though in my own invasion experiences, the AI just sits on all that money and lets themselves die.

I like the idea of being able to bribe barbarian ships. Possibly for like 10% of the cost of a normal purchase... early naval units aren't terribly useful anyway, and remember there's the maintenance hit. In fact, it actually hurts you if (with the current UA) you send barb ships back to your empire to delete for a refund, if the distance is more than a dozen tiles or so from your borders. The maintenance fee saps away more gold than you can gain by the time you can get home. That fee is one of the reasons their UA is so lackluster.

 

[Stalker0]

I think with your terrain changes the buffs to the iroquois are no longer necessary.

Forests are very good with your new lumbermills, and then with the longhouse you can create true production powerhouses.

 

[Thalassicus]

That's true to some extent, though it also makes the longhouse proportionally weaker. It used to provide a 50% bonus over what other civs could attain, now it's only a 33% bonus. In other words, while the Iroquois are stronger, everyone else is too. They were very situational to begin with, so I feel they need a slight extra bonus to reduce this part of their nature.

 

[Kamino]

Hiawatha is very strong. The production bonus is amazing if you choose a start with a lot of forests. You spare roads too. No need to balance imho. One of the most interesting leader.

 

[Evalis]

There is no such thing as happiness_puppet. Only happiness occupied or non-occupied. Which means basing a trait around that would be impossible. Even with the dlls it would be a chore I suspect.

There is an option for trade based percentage income. It simply involves giving them a unique palace with the traderoute bonus. That said.. +10% is in most cases equivalent to 2 extra commerce.. except worse becuase the city has to be bigger to get the bonus.

Making the ottoman's better might just involve making it so their UU doesn't become obsolete until infantry, so you can pump them out then upgrade to riflemen. Although I already have a civ boost to them out on modhub.

Good eye on the minuteman promotion. I wonder if they really did make that mistake.

 

[Thalassicus]

Since the colors of the promotions for Minutemen and Helicopters in the default games are reversed (ground unit has air color and air has ground) and the ground unit cannot use roads while the flying one can, all signs seem to point to it being a straight-up bug and not "working as intended". As a result, I decided to included a switch to the promotions in the unofficial patch mod.

About Hiawatha, I agree he's a very interesting leader. I like playing the Iroqois, and have gone through several games as that civ. Despite this, when stacked up against the powerful civs (like Greece, China or Babylon) I do feel the buffs are warranted to bring them up to that level. Remember the Longhouse is also a trade-off from the Workshop, not an addition, so cities have lower building production (compared to other civs) in regions where there's not many forests around. I feel that reducing the situational nature of the building results in smoother gameplay for the civ.

Something else to remember is the forest trade bonus requires the Roads tech, and cultural borders, both of which can be key limitations. In addition, the "road movement" part of it isn't too great. If you move from a forest tile to a hill tile with a road on it, your unit consumes all its movement points. Same thing with crossing rivers even with bridge-building, and some other situations. In the games I've played, the road movement bonus has rarely been useful other than to let workers improve forest tiles slightly sooner a few times.

That said, if you've played a game as them and feel they might be overpowered, I could remove one or both of the Mohawk Warrior buffs.

 

[teejing]

Promotions of special units should not stay with the unit after upgrading, it just does not feel right.
Would you consider doubling the boni, but make them disappear after upgrading?
I am not talking about raw strength boni since they will not be carried on.
Would make the special units more special.