[to_xp]Gekko said:
Thanks for your feedback people

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3) city health: I guess you're right. raising the bonus given by the expansive trait would be easier to do though, so that's what I'm going to do. does a +4 seem balanced enough?
+4 might be a bit much i think +3 is right on though.
Im in the process of playing a few games with your mod and for one its fun as hell im really enjoying it,, but it also seems less challenging, again because of resource imbalances.
In my current game its 960 AD, monarch level, standard map with myself and 8 AI players. in my capital i have no grocer or market but have a 15 health and 19 happiness and only two of the happiness is coming from troop supression (monarch civic). When my grocer and market get built i will have 18 health and 27 happiness which is downright ridiculous for this early in the game. But the initial 15 health and 19 happiness are insane especially considering
I only have TWO buildings that affects any of these things:a temple and a forge for happiness. Add if i build my granery and aqueduct which i havent bothered with yet my grand total comes to 22 health and 27 happiness......
City and empire management are not even a challenge anymore with these numbers and Its only 960 AD. Im now able to go beserk attacking people without having to even bother building improvements that were once considered vital in order to sustain your economy. I can shatter trade deals and go to war at a whim without worrying if the lost resource will even affect me in the slightest bit. And with my city at only 11 pop yet with 27 possible happy people, war weariness wont really kick in and hamper me unless the war drags on til civ 5 comes out....
Once again, im not being negative. I love this mod a lot and see huge potential for it which is why im trying to analzye and provide feedback in hopes of helping to improve it. But it is extremely unbalanced right now in both the areas of city health and happiness. Things seemed ok before Calendar, but when that, currency and guilds came out things just exploded. I know people love adding new resources and buildings in their mods but if you drastically increase the ability to gain health or happiness the balance will get thrown way out of whack unless you also counter them with appropriate negatives to health and happiness. If you dont it will lessen the strategy of the game as I no longer need to focus on keeping or trying to attain certain resources. With a 22 health in an 11 person city, who cares if i lose a couple cows or wheat. I dont need to have good city management, just workers who are on auto and will put plantations on every appropriate item. The culture slider is pointless in terms of making people happy now. 10% of my commerce just to make 1 person happy? two if i have drama? This is now meaningless with this amount of happy people already in my cities. In addition whole civics like nationalism are now obsolete. Getting 2 more happy people is pointless when most my cities still have +10 happy people to spare. Thers is no point to this civic now when i could be in beuracracy or feudalism getting much better benefits. Monarchy even now borderlines on being pointless. I could easily see my cities getting 40+ happy people later in the game with more advanced buildings and tech not too mention if i focused on getting more religeons and their buildings. City management strategies have no purpose at these levels.
So, ok im not going to keep rambling you see my point. I wont just complain about this either and leave you to do the analyzing work. So here are some suggestions: (Also im not recommending you dump any resources as these are what add to the game, but to add counters to thier benefits)
1) Consider taking off the default base health and base happiness of things like grocers, markets and supermarkets. These buildings are already about twice as powerful as vanilla civ ones due to the increase in variety of resources in your mod.
2) Consider not adding anything else that gives happiness or health and maybe even remove things like the Feng Shui academy or have it do something different thats more unique. Perhaps +10% or 15% great people points or something like that.
2) Think about adding more health and happiness negatives to more buildings and improvements. Getting a big city early on that has all its people happy should be a privledge and a huge treasure, something to be cherished and guarded, not a guaranteed thing. Here are some ideas for this along with logical lines of reasoning to support them:
Health:
-1 health from barracks. Military training sites arent really environmentally friendly places.
-1 health from stone and marble quarries. These are basically strip mines.
-1 health from oil wells.
-1 health from coal mine. Black lung disease and hazardous conditions.
-2 health from factory instead of 1
-3 health from manufact plant instead of 2
-1 health empire wide from slavery civic. Unkept and sickly slaves are disease havens.
-.25 health per village/town. Urban sprawl takes its toll on the ecology.
-.25 health per farm. Utilizing the same land year after year depletes the soil quality and nutrients not to mention excessive use of fertilzers and pesticides polluting the area.
-.5 health per mine. Metal and ore residue and runoff arent the most friendly of things to the earth or the local water table.
-1 health from harbor but keep its resource benefits. Increased ship traffic pollutes the local waters.
Happiness:
-3 happiness if there is not at least one jungle or forest square in the city radius. Not having any nice outdoor areas that allow people to escape the city tends to depress them. Though this wouldnt apply to cites on the coast or inland lake water.
-1 happiness from any powerplant that isnt solar. No one wants a powerplant in their backyard and hyrdo plants even upset them from thier ugly looks and all the nice fish getting ground up in the turbines. (This will also make solar plants more useful.)
-1 additional happiness from nuclear plants. Even though statiscally safe, the prospect of an all out Cherynoble puts people on edge.
-1 happiness from the slavery civic. Seeing people beat and treated poorly on a daily basis stirs up dislike of the ruling class.
-1 happiness from serfdom for similar reasons.
+25% war weariness from universities. These beacons of free thought tend to generate anti war sentiment that can spread to the general populace.
-1 happiness in all cities but the capital for bureacracy. The rest of the nation despises the government workers who tax them and then waste their tax dollars in the capital.
-1 happiness empire wide from uranium. Accessing this substance opens the door for WMD's and puts people at extreme unease.
-1 happiness locally for city squares with uranium or coal mines. Mining these substances for a living isnt what most people dreamt of doing.
-1 happiness for supermarkets. These 20th century complexes mark the end of locally owned shops and result in faciliating food shopping through dreary chain-owned minimum-wage paying institutions.
-3 happiness for nuclear missle silos. No one wants one of these by their house.
-1 happiness empire wide with discovery of computers. Living in concrete jungles where everything is automated and cubicle life in front of a computer 8 hours a day is the norm makes people feel bleak and lacking in purpose.
3) I really thought it was insightful how your religeous temples were done. How they add bonuses for some resources but substract it for others. Perhaps this can be applied to more buildings. Example:
-1 happiness for a courthouse (or jail) if you have Hemp. The presence of the drug increases sentencing for minor posession crimes upsetting "casual" users who are the targets of this.
-1 happiness for a broadcast tower if you have uranium. The media scrutinizes any little mishap and overhypes peoples fears in any industry that uses the substance.
I hope some of these ideas strike you as possibilities. The goal of these suggestions is to basically complement your new resources and get the city health and happiness back to somewhat comparable levels as vanilla civ but with more variation, diversity and strategy in how you accomplish and manage your city health and happiness.
I realize these are a lot of ideas. My XML civ modding skills are decent though and if you like these ideas I could do most of them I think and then pass along the modded files to you. The more complex ones requiring python might be a problem though.