Mega Mod

[Slowpoke]

Yeah I am going to start a Game of the Month basically with balanced-combined (I have Thal's permission ) and mega mod. I originally wanted to try out game of the month but was too dissapointed with the terrible strategies developing there due to vanilla's imbalance. So I waited for the patch only to find it's not going to solve much of anything. So there's really no choice but to start a mod-based competition if I want any interesting competition

 

[Seek]

Cool, I will certainly be participating! I tried the first HOF, learned a lot; haven't done any others because vanilla seems unbalanced now. Will any of the prevalent UI mods be included?

EDIT: Forgot to ask about CSD - also included?

 

[Slowpoke]

All UI mods are acceptable. I'm actually writing up the thread right now. The easiest way to get a standard set of Balanced Combined version levels is to put them in a zip, so I'm not going to wait for Mega Mod v11 to be available on Mod Browser, I'm just going to put both up as zip files. The thread should be up in an hour or less at strategy forums if you want to take a look. Just leave the second post to me if you see only one, I need to reserve a post or two.

Edit: Didn't include CSD sorry. Totally slipped my mind. Probably will have it in the second set of competitions.

Edit: Apparently you can only have one file uploaded at a time on the forum, so I'm temporarily taking down the v11 files here and placing them in the competition thread.

Edit: Competition thread is up!

 

[Bluebird]

This mod looks very promising. I'll make sure to give it a try once I'm done with my current game. Which could take a while, but still.

 

[Panda_Power]

Edit: Competition thread is up!

Where is the thread? I looked in the GOTM forum, but can't see it!

 

[Slowpoke]

Ah, it's in the strategies forum. I don't think it'd be allowed to go in GotM since it's sort of a site-supported thing.

 

[Panda_Power]

Thanks, found it!

Balance-Combined/MegaMod Competition!

 

[Slowpoke]

Ah thanks for putting up the link Not that anyone's actually participating in it but me lol.

Also, YAY Mod browser starting working again. When you see v14, it's actually v10 in drag. 10,11,12, and 13 were all randomly blocked.

 

[alpaca]

You asked me which parts I don't like about MM so I'll take some time to answer you, at least in short. In general, one of the biggest gripes I have, and which applies to many of your changes, is that you treat symptoms rather than fix the underlying game mechanics. And if you remove things, you often don't provide adequate replacements. This mostly doesn't make the game more fun for me but more dull. Please note that these are subjective, I can't prove you that you're wrong and I'm right, nor does it make sense to try. So I didn't offer them out of my own initiative without testing, but you specifically asked for my opinion.

-Caravans added! Basically, these are like mini-great engineers. You build them for 55 production and can use them to hurry buildings, and only buildings, for 45 production.

Removes all tension of having a low-production city.

Resources:
-Strategic resources amounts now are completely changed.
-Horses always have 2 horse units
-Iron always has 10
-Oil is now always 2. However, they are MUCH more likely to appear in deserts.
-Coal is now always 2, but are more common in hills
-Aluminum now has a single unit per resource, but it slightly more common in hills
-Uranium is also a single unit

Goes somewhat in the wrong direction IMO. Aluminum and Uranium in particular are too rare in vanilla already. Iron is common enough, although I would remove the 6 iron source

A.I.

-A.I.s now defend their cities. They used to have a single unit per city for defense, this is increased to FOUR. On prince and king, this might make the game a bit easier, but on higher difficulties the A.I. should become terrifying

Can't really comment without testing but this sounds like it might make the AI pretty passive, especially on low difficulty settings.

Happiness

-"Very unhappy" now takes -20 happiness
-All nations function like India: 4 happiness per city, .5 per population.
-Monuments add +1 happiness
-Colosseums and circuses are cheaper but provide only 2 happiness
-Stadiums are more efficient

Most of these are bad imo. I don't need a higher unhappy buffer, I don't want anyone to function like India except India and the happy buildings are quite bad now. This is maybe the chunk I dislike most.

Social Policies
-Policies are now slightly cheaper, and increased policy costs for building a lot of cities is halved.
-You CANNOT SAVE A POLICY. For that matter, you can't right click to end turn for any reason (so no skipping great library techs either).
-France nerfed to +1 culture per city. However, it goes obsolete from globalization.
-Utopia project now requires 6 filled branches (don't be an autocrat if you want cultural!)

Don't agree with any of these

Buildings
-Courthouse costs only 80 hammers
-Buildings have 25% less cost and 50% less maintenance
-Forbidden palace is eliminated
-United Nations is eliminated
-Forge affected too many things it shouldn't, some with awful consequenced (caravans, workers, settlers, spaceship parts) so it is now simply a more powerful barracks till it's fixed

You're treating symptoms, not the disease. Once again, I don't agree with any of these.

Wonder balance
-Pyramids now 250, workers are 75% faster

Pyramids are one of the strongest wonders already imo. With this they are absolutely ridiculous

City States:
-Culture buffed
-Bribe power massively reduced
-Quests more frequent

In vanilla there's no sensible way except bribing to gain CS favor. Cultural CS are far too strong already.

Specialists
-Golden ages for specialists now start at 4 and all thereafter are 3 (down from 8 then 7,6,5,4,3)
-Great Sceintists can no longer be used for a free tech.

I don't like this at all. Sacrificing GP for a golden age is not such a great idea if they are properly balanced. You also make GS useless. Once again you treat symptoms, which isn't very helpful.

Miscellaneous
-Conquered cities can no longer be puppeted

Way to remove an interesting part of the game

 

[Slowpoke]

Ah thanks for the input Anyways, I think by reading this Mega mod will never be for you, although some of those "symptom" treatments you speak of are just temporary. I could either treat the symptom in 2 seconds and release early and then do the real fix later, or force people to play a crappy vanilla for 2 months. E.g. I am currently rebalancing all 50 policies right now so I can take out "no skipping of policies", but that takes forever (5 hours so far, 2 or 3 to go for texts and testing), while a symptom treatment takes 5 minutes.

Anyways, here's some thoughts, though:

At caravans: Mainly the idea was to make wonders possible on immortal/deity and late era help of conquered cities. I will probably reduce their gain to 40, so they are used more to that end.

At resources: Iron is basically infinity, because having no foot soldiers is rediculous, historically and gamewise. It should not be limited. The others are reduced so fascism and catherine have more purpose, and since foot soldiers cost more, the game is a battle for resources. Might buff aluminum to 2, but no more than that.

AI:They actually do use that extra army Not sure why it's called defense in the xmls.

Happiness: High unhappy buffer is to do with annexing late game causing happiness tanking. Rest we just don't agree on.

Policies: Just not going to agree I guess XD

Symptoms: They're temporary

Pyramids: Not the point, it's cost was increased too. By the time you get it, most workers aren't too difficult to build.



GS: Even with harder free tech they are imbalanced, now they are STILL the most powerful. Again, a 5 minute symptom fix.

Puppets: Just gonna disagree

Missed some stuff, but I gotta log off now

 

[alpaca]

Workers cost upkeep and production, though. And no amount of workers can speed improving that juicy tile you want to improve, while pyramids can.

But yes, I think you can see now what I meant when I wrote I don't agree with some of the fundamentals underlying your changes

 

[Slowpoke]

Yay, version 17! Some minor tweaks were made to make bribing and RAs slightly more viable than before. As well there is a MASSIVE SP rebalance, effectively making early policies more powerful, removing policy prereqs, and rebalancing all of them as a result. Generally speaking, I overshot a bit on terrible policies like monarchy and United Front, but I want to get people using them so they get playtested for better balance.

Also caravans are nerfed a bit to 40 production, so they are more used for wonders/stuffing late game conquered cities.

Note: Next version is going to be using alpaca's city maintenance, so there will be a significant rebalancing of the happiness system. I'm switching over, because while I am quite against ICS strategies, I don't believe in "hard caps" to expansion.

Edit: Whoops! v17 united front wasn't working (used policytype instead of type) so v18 now has that fixed.

Edit: Also, for whatever reason liberty's settler production buff isn't working either. Can't find the reason yet. Nvm It is working, the policy just doesn't work on food only production. So it will be buffed to maybe +90% since that'd only actually make settlers be produced at about 60% the rate.

 

[wurstburst]

I gave a whirl at this. Played up a bit past turn 100. Pangea, standard size, Emperor, Aztec.

A few comments:

1 - No extra gold on river tiles? The tiles are bland enough in vanilla. Making river tiles no different just makes the tiling even more bland.

2 - Not being able to puppet, combined with being required to take SP as they come gave me the feeling that I was never going to see any of the late game SP. I got about 6 SP early on (the aztec UA helped a little) and then hit a brick wall after I went to war with Japan and built my empire up to 10 cities. I'd rather see inferior puppets that let me go for a cultural victory than no puppets at all. You've really nerfed cultural victory with this mod. With domination the most common way to win, hurting the ability to win in other ways seems to be a fun-reducer.

3 - I like the early boost to research and the +1 happy for monuments. I spammed monuments everywhere.

4 - The AI expands fast. Japan had 6 cities by turn 65 and built a 7th soon thereafter. This is good from a challenge perspective. They may be scrimping on building military though, which made them particularly vulnerable to early rush.

5 - Too much iron, not enough horses. In a 10 city empire, I had 40 iron in my borders and only 2 horses. I don't know what you where trying to achieve here.

6 - Courthouses where very buildable. yeah!

7 - the -20 happy limit didn't come into play until I hit my 10th city (2 settled and 8 annexed). I rush built a colliseum and problem solved. I feel this is a bit too easy.

8 - gold was never a problem in the game, even without trade routes or markets built. In vanilla I usually hit a period where money was tight. Never an issue here - made things a bit too easy, I think.

9 - libraries GS production nerfed. This is good.

10 - Granaries. I built 'em. Heck, I even rush built one, for a city in starvation. No maintenance for +2 food is well worth the hammers.

Overall, it was a fun game. Your mod produced a much different feel than vanilla civ, which is what you where shooting for, I think. There's a few too many things that aren't to my personal taste, but you have some good ideas in there. Will definitely give it another go as you refine it further.

 

[Slowpoke]

Cool It's definately going to be reworked a lot. Here's some comments I have:

1. River tile gold was reduced because in previous versions there was just too much gold floating around. Since I will be adding alpaca's city maintenance and reowkring happiness in next version, I will readd it.

2. Yeah I felt mass conquering to get cultural was too powerful and a bit weird. I'm going to continue decreasing the policy exponent until culutral is viable and probably bouncing back the policies needed to 5 full branches. IMO More policies is never a bad thing.

4. Next version they will expand slightly faster even Not a whole lot, but I don't want any empty space by rennaisance.

5. This was most likely due to luck honestly. I did not change the horse prevalance on the map, just the horse yield from the resource, so with a 10 city empire on average you would get about 6 horses. Mainly I want to make the game so that horses are powerful, but they are in short supply, so you can't just make a full horse army. Probably going to buff horses (and probably the only mod to do so lol).

7. The problem is late game annexing can cause a huge happiness dip. I guess I could lower it back down to -10, and just hope people learn their lesson and build a little happiness surplus and some caravans for a courthouse before taking a city.

8. That's gonna change a whoooooole lot next version. Probably going to take a lot of balancing, but oh well.

Anyways glad you liked it, and thanks for the comments

Edit: Also I noticed you said 2 settled/8 annexed. that is quite an impressive conquering! What difficulty was this achieved at?

 

[alpaca]

5. This was most likely due to luck honestly. I did not change the horse prevalance on the map, just the horse yield from the resource, so with a 10 city empire on average you would get about 6 horses. Mainly I want to make the game so that horses are powerful, but they are in short supply, so you can't just make a full horse army. Probably going to buff horses (and probably the only mod to do so lol).

Not quite. I will relatively buff knights in the next version, too

But horsemen will get a different role: flanking. Glad to hear I'm not the only one thinking about strategic resource abundance, either.

 

[Slowpoke]

But there's already a flanking bonus. Are you considering raising horseman movement so it's even easier to flank?

And oi, I can't wait for this patch. There's nothing really poductive I can do without knowing the scale to which the new stuff is changed. So bizzare that the patch has been worked on for nearly a month now with no ETA.

 

[alpaca]

But there's already a flanking bonus. Are you considering raising horseman movement so it's even easier to flank?

And oi, I can't wait for this patch. There's nothing really poductive I can do without knowing the scale to which the new stuff is changed. So bizzare that the patch has been worked on for nearly a month now with no ETA.

No, I think 4 moves are plenty. I did increase the flanking bonus to +25% which means you often have a situation where horsemen are very useful to provide a passive bonus, then retreat to safety again. Apart from that, there's also a different kind of flanking: Horsemen can go around the enemy melee units and harass archers and catapults. I've even seen the AI do it but that was probably just one of its usual suicide attacks.

I'm mostly waiting for the AI changes in the patch. If AI really starts using siege units, this might make some more things possible with city defense. At the moment if you set it too high, the AI will never be able to take a city.

 

[Varvar]

Just tried your mod (whatever version was online yesterday), and overall, great job!
Played Russia/prince, I generally play vanilla on Immortal, but wanted to see the balance.

Here are my first impressions:

Low building cost - win. No/low maintenance cost = double win.
Monument=overpowered. I guess that's the idea...
Overall combat was pretty similar (I guess you are no longer doing the healing nerf), but no healing promotion was nice, lower open grounds was nice, higher river crossing penalty was double nice - attacking a city with horseman from behind a river was way too powerful imo. I did prefer higher defense value of rough terrain in vanilla.
Taking cities overall feels harder - do they have more HP?



Social policies... Overall win. They feel stronger, more game changing and easier to get (esp with monument spam).

On my first try I felt Honor was overpowered in early game. After adopting honor I had +108% against barbs, so even my scout was clearing camps easily. Also the ability to get double XP before great general and power-up those warriors is very strong. With monument being my first build, those policies came very fast.

Any race with an early sword/warrior unit would be very strong (Iroquois, Romans, Aztecs), as those warriors can get their experience up very quickly.
Russia obviously gets a huge boost, since it can still launch 4 horseman of the apocalypse...


Anyways, in vanilla +1 happy per connected city is very strong, so I take it more often then honor... But in your version liberty doesn't have any +happy modifiers (the only tree to not have one), and anyways with -4 happy per city, +1 wouldn't be as strong.

I understand how liberty would be useful in the long run with all that +gold once you can City Spam (I assume after theaters can go up, filler cities can finally be happy/neutral or happy positive if my math is correct).
Tradition got a nice buff, but since I always prefer large sprawling empires to small ones, it was never my cup of tea.

Piety - interesting... Most changes make sense though.

Medieval policies - very nice. I like what you did with Patronage being the only cost efficient way to ally with CS. Cultural CS seems too powerful though.

Commerce - needed the buff, although with triple silver near my capitol +50% is super strong. Reduced road maintenance - big win, and makes sense too - there was a feel that something big happened once I got to middle ages.

I like the fact that one has to choose now between Commerce and Patronage - as both are very strong and very juicy. Autocracy being medieval - also nice and goes well with honor which is nice for an underused policy tree.

Haven't gotten further yet, but I assume Freedom is more powerful by virtue of larger cities/more specialists.
Planned economy is now a must...


Happiness mechanics is more interesting than vanilla, I especially like smaller courthouses. There is however a bug, at least I believe it to be a bug:

I have 7 settled cities and 6 annexed ones. Yet my unhappiness from cities is 28, and not 52 once I built all the courthouses. Unhappiness from population is working as advertised.

Needless to say I was confused for a while seeing my happiness fluctuate widely as courthouses were going up, and my empire is probably bigger then you would have intended by this point in the game.

Overall good job though - game-play feels very different but overall better, I build different buildings, and teching up gradually increases the efficiency of my empire giving the game an exponential, rather then linear growth. Teching speed is way slower - but ICS I was using before was probably overpowered anyway.


p.s. What's the point of the caravan? Rushing courthouses? Or wonders/spaceship as well (it says buildings)? I imagined waiting till industrial with few cultural cities grabbing planned economy, and then exploding in a settle - caravan rush monuments, Coliseums and theaters in the new cities.
But then the bug I described is probably making my gameplan quite different - free happy from annexed cities is very powerful

p.s.s. Do the modded games not autosave? I miss-clicked and burned my GG on a golden age lol. Had to roll with it, since my only autosave was 4000BC

 

[Slowpoke]

Yeah I don't know what's up with autosaves and mods, I don't seemed to have gotten any with a different mod as well.

Thanks for the input That's a lot to respond to, so I'll just hit the more important points

Taking cities is harder for two reasons: A.I. builds more units and cities have nearly double hp.

Liberty's meritocracy was nerfed because I found I always picked it lol. The patch is going to merely lessen the happiness, so I'm going to probably revert it to whatever the patch does.

Yeah freedom really needed no change now that rivier cities essentially have as many specialists as they want.

As far as high defense on rough terrain, that was nerfed bcause people could sit on a hill and the A.I. would just suicide on them. Now that that's getting fixed, it too will be chanegd a bit, but it will still be a bit lower. And fortifying will definitely stay at the lowered +20%

And that's a nasty bug with courthouses. I'm reverting the happiness system to normal and replacing it with alpaca's maintenance next build, so hopefully that will get rid of the bug.

Caravans fill a niche, and definitely aren't to be spammed now that they have only 40 rushing power. They are excellent for courthouses, since I am going to increase their production from 50 to 65 or 70 next build (Still a lot lower than 200!), and they are excellent for early wonders or powerful ones. Furthermore, they can be useful to fill up a conquered city with buildings that lost all of them, since early buildings have a higher worth per production. They can't be used for the space race as space parts are units and not buildings (good thing too! That would've made science victory way too easy)

Lastly, I will be making an upgrade for the caravan (can't be physically upgraded with gold, but it will go obsolete and a new unit will be buildable) for the late industrial era called freight, which will cost 200 and give 180 production, so it'll be much more efficient and involve less micro since its a large lump.

 

[attackfighter]

I played your mod a few games and here is what I think:

Egypt's special building (ceremonial burial) has no advantage over temple that I can tell. It says the advantage is it costs no upkeep, but temples no longer cost upkeep either.

The mod componant "no healing" is a slight nerf to Immortals since they no longer benefit from their double healing ability. I would suggest giving them a bonus vs barbarians would be a nice safe compensation.

I think ranged units are still OP just like in vanilla.

Also I think "no healing" should be with the main mod since it's so important balance wise. It makes AI far better like you say and also makes barracks/armory/etc. almost worth building