New Beta Version - Feb. 9th (2-9)

[crdvis16]

I think if I was a dev reading some of the posts in this thread it would make me want to just quit. A lot of it comes across as super entitled. Who would want to spend their free time modding a game for no pay when a vocal part of the playerbase is convinced they would run the project so much better and sprinkle their "constructive" criticism with digs at the developer's motives/intentions?

Constructive criticism is essential and useful and greatly aids the devs but there's some nuance to it required that some people seem to be clueless about. Some of the criticism just carries an air of "I know what's best and you must be stupid if you disagree, how could you allow X mechanic to exist". Everyone can be guilty of it but some on these boards just do it continually. I find myself just skipping posts as soon as I see the avatar at times. I kinda wish some of those people would mod the game themselves so that they might see how difficult the balancing act is- see how mental people get over some relatively minor change like archers with 1 range.

I will not be surprised at all if one day the devs have just had enough and disappear.

 

[JamesNinelives]

Posting a massage and contributing to a discussion are too separate things.

Exactly. Take your own advice.

This system is awful and I do not know why Gazebo is standing by it since literally everyone hate it.

Stop with the hyperbole.

I once read about VP from people who, like me were searching for a more realistic yet more challenging experience in mods, that VP developers are playing at chieftan and are not interested in contributing to creating demanding and realistic mod.

It was a post from like year ago, I do not know if that is still correct, but considering what I read around here, and that in some of you are posting that deity was eviscarated even further it may be at least partially true.

Stop speculating wildly about things if you have no idea if they are true.

It is a general rule, I do not ascribe that to Gazebo, but since I have followed this forums, I really don't see too much of enthusiasm to make CBP more realistic and challenging.

Sad to see community here is not anticipating meaningful and needed changes and is mostly interested in cosmetic stuf, along with dragging difficulty level down.

And stop making sweeping generalisations! You are insulting everyone here when you do so, and actively making it more difficult to have meaningful discussions!

 

[Rekk]

How is the new Earth Mother balanced exactly? Its directly better than a follower belief.

When was the last time you ever considered taking Earth Mother? As far as I understand, it's been one of the worst pantheons since the very beginning, even before the "yield inflation". You say it's finally worth something, good.

You should know that Gazebo makes large changes before making small ones. We just need to remember to continue to point out when something had been over-buffed/nerfed so if isn't forgotten.

 

[Cokolwiek]

We often end up with a series of short term solutions that don't really make anything better.

That was my observations exactly and I said that a couple of times already. You can see it only clearer by having so much more experience, but it is obvious to someone with as short following as me.

Pantheons are the best example. They are riddled with yield inflation and feature creep. How is the new Earth Mother balanced exactly

Well, that is not the best example one can give I think.
Earth Mother gives you nothing when it comes to the most important pantheon job - generating as much of early faith and as quickly as possible to secure a religion and then generating faith to utilize further beliefs. How many and how fast improved mines tiles with resources you will get early in the game? And if you will not secure a religion you pantheon will just disappear before giving you more than 2 production per city.
In my opinion most yield inflation is tied to buildings (herbalist, arena, chancery, well are main suspects (which not rebalance but just add yields nonexistent in vanilla), I have no idea what happens in my cities after industrial era when linear progression of yields gets a shot in the head, which makes managing and planning tiles and production a mess when everything which could be 70 or 80 becomes 583 for some strange reason) and sometimes to policies (especially border expansion gold and city capture science from authorit, progress seem to scale far better e.g. more moderate)

Constructive criticism is essential and useful

When changes to the mod become less substantial, more arbitrary, and are basically adding killjoy, hard-to-manage, obscure, unpopular elements (gold stealing, one-ranged archer, super strong cities, gazillion of promotions for every unit which you can't even see) and are balancing things like zoos instead of critical look at whole hapinness system, what kind of feedback do you expect? And there was a ton of constructive criticism every time. And don't expect to see support to Gazebo 100% of time and praise of him because he mods. Ok, he does, I get it. But it is his choice. Furthermore, not all changes are welcomed at all.

I find myself just skipping posts as soon as I see the avatar at times.

At least I have a pretty avatar.

If you are referring to me saying that Gazebo has no aim, it is just his words, according to BiteInTheMark.
And they were used by me to underscore some development mindset which he openly espouse, not as an attack on Gazebo.
Probably you and maybe Gazebo thinks of me as of someone who is just coming out of nowhere and criticizing upon his careful work. Of course I feel that and I am aware of that. But really because of what development course VP had taken (inflation of yields for example and scaling difficulty down) you receive your constructive feedback and clear signals from the community. It was in BiteInTheMark thread about happiness. It is HyperNoob's and me screens which demonstrate immortal and deity is a cake walk it shouldn't be. It is in CrazyG writing about yields inflation. It is when many players are saying that difficulty was seriously lowered. It is in some people not recommending and not playing vp because of easiness and yield inflation - and I know this firsthand. It is when people complain about one-ranged archer.
I think most people, me included, want to contribute meaningfully, but I feel sometimes mine and other proposals for more serious changes are ignored, and we get strange decisions like archer which are unpopular and shuffled enhancers beliefs which are very trivial.

 

[Cokolwiek]

Stop speculating wildly about things if you have no idea if they are true.

Everything I wrote in your quotation I know to be true. I myself was dissuaded continously for about a year from trying VP by many good civ 5 players, and by anons on the reddit and civfanatics alike, as they thought it incessantly inflated with player bonuses which drag difficulty down, and characterised by strange development decisions.

And stop making sweeping generalisations! You are insulting everyone here when you do so, and actively making it more difficult to have meaningful discussions!

I am just stating my opinion. That I don't see important and needed changes since stable version is my opinion, if you find that insulting it is your problem. That difficulty level is being dragged down, even for deity and immortal, is a fact, concurred by many people in this thread. I also think development is largely static, affecting cosmetic things or erratic, and vp is becoming more complex, strange and more obscure (for example in happines managament or promotions, archers useful only from xbows) without achieving more realistic or challenging gameplay and those voices was also heard. Don't take everything so personally.

Vp made had made no substantiall progress, or taken a regress even, from vanilla in creating unrealistic warmongering forever stable and happy empire. Meanwhile through adding many yields and taking away AI bonuses it lowered difficulty levels significantly. It is just a fact, we can compare numbers.
It also erased realistic approach of conquered cities towards an occupying power vanilla had through hapinness and made conquering endlessly without consideration of realism the vanilla had a norm(large, quickly-spread empires tend to fall apart as quickly).
As a frequent deity vanilla player I confirm I had to plan what to puppet, what raze, what annex, how I will time my conquest to not fall apart from revolts or sink into unhappiness forever, noth I and warmongering AI had massive dangerous happiness swings and that was of constant concern. And with all brilliancy needs system have in vp, all this is gone without any checking to unrelenting coquests. Many deity games I could always manage to have my happiness on at least 75% without much effort and hapinness is of trivial consideration when conquering. And I do not use avoid growth.

The fact that I do not hold majority view is not (or at least shouldn't be) insulting to any of you, and I am not gonna ask for your approval. If I feel like my further proposals will be unappreciated and my thoughts will be regarded as uncalled for and you are happy with the current development route, I don't like to waste my time, I will just shut up.

I played vp for some months, decided that some things needed adjustments because they are too easy to play with and unrealistic in my opinion, and wanted to share it with you. That is all.

 

[CrazyG]

Well, that is not the best example one can give I think.
Earth Mother gives you nothing when it comes to the most important pantheon job - generating as much of early faith and as quickly as possible to secure a religion and then generating faith to utilize further beliefs. How many and how fast improved mines tiles with resources you will get early in the game? And if you will not secure a religion you pantheon will just disappear before giving you more than 2 production per city.

I really dislike the pantheon design of OP but low faith. Usually it means its useless unless you get faith from somewhere (natural wonder, your civ, maybe a CS?), but if you do get faith from somewhere, its just OP. It reminds me of Spain's UA from vanilla, very much a "the rich get richer" design.

These pantheons basically don't exist to France, but do exist for Ethiopia. I find the civs with bonuses to religion the easiest to win with (that's been pretty consistent across many patches). Festivals (or maybe the new Earth Mother) is the best pantheon in my experience. Early culture so good.

When was the last time you ever considered taking Earth Mother? As far as I understand, it's been one of the worst pantheons since the very beginning, even before the "yield inflation". You say it's finally worth something, good.

You're basically advocating power creep. You know pantheons used to be great? Sun God, Goddess of the Hunt. They'll all need a buff soon. As is I wouldn't take sun god on a 4 wheat capital.

The problem is we keep adding faith (and other yields) to the low-faith guys when we should be removing it from the high-faith options. You push out the middle-faith choices, and then they need a buff.

The problem pantheons are War, Commerce, Expanse, Sea, Protection, new Fertility and maybe Springtime. I know people think they are helping when they want faith on fertility, but you indirectly nerf other, previously decent pantheons.

Certain pantheons produce so much faith that we have to keep buffing the other pantheons to absurdity so that they can found a religion in time. But next patch some other pantheon can't make the cut anymore.

Do people realize you can take God of the Expanse, tradition, and usually get a religion on just 1 city as any civ? I got a prophet on turn 85 last time I tried this. That's a pretty good chance at first religion on any difficulty.

 

[crdvis16]

That was my observations exactly and I said that a couple of times already. You can see it only clearer by having so much more experience, but it is obvious to someone with as short following as me.



Well, that is not the best example one can give I think.
Earth Mother gives you nothing when it comes to the most important pantheon job - generating as much of early faith and as quickly as possible to secure a religion and then generating faith to utilize further beliefs. How many and how fast improved mines tiles with resources you will get early in the game? And if you will not secure a religion you pantheon will just disappear before giving you more than 2 production per city.
In my opinion most yield inflation is tied to buildings (herbalist, arena, chancery, well are main suspects (which not rebalance but just add yields nonexistent in vanilla), I have no idea what happens in my cities after industrial era when linear progression of yields gets a shot in the head, which makes managing and planning tiles and production a mess when everything which could be 70 or 80 becomes 583 for some strange reason) and sometimes to policies (especially border expansion gold and city capture science from authorit, progress seem to scale far better e.g. more moderate)



When changes to the mod become less substantial, more arbitrary, and are basically adding killjoy, hard-to-manage, obscure, unpopular elements (gold stealing, one-ranged archer, super strong cities, gazillion of promotions for every unit which you can't even see) and are balancing things like zoos instead of critical look at whole hapinness system, what kind of feedback do you expect? And there was a ton of constructive criticism every time. And don't expect to see support to Gazebo 100% of time and praise of him because he mods. Ok, he does, I get it. But it is his choice. Furthermore, not all changes are welcomed at all.



At least I have a pretty avatar.

If you are referring to me saying that Gazebo has no aim, it is just his words, according to BiteInTheMark.
And they were used by me to underscore some development mindset which he openly espouse, not as an attack on Gazebo.
Probably you and maybe Gazebo thinks of me as of someone who is just coming out of nowhere and criticizing upon his careful work. Of course I feel that and I am aware of that. But really because of what development course VP had taken (inflation of yields for example and scaling difficulty down) you receive your constructive feedback and clear signals from the community. It was in BiteInTheMark thread about happiness. It is HyperNoob's and me screens which demonstrate immortal and deity is a cake walk it shouldn't be. It is in CrazyG writing about yields inflation. It is when many players are saying that difficulty was seriously lowered. It is in some people not recommending and not playing vp because of easiness and yield inflation - and I know this firsthand. It is when people complain about one-ranged archer.
I think most people, me included, want to contribute meaningfully, but I feel sometimes mine and other proposals for more serious changes are ignored, and we get strange decisions like archer which are unpopular and shuffled enhancers beliefs which are very trivial.

You and Bite are examples #1 and #2 of unhelpful criticism. I already learned to skip Bite's posts long ago and despite you only showing up in these boards recently I've already learned to skip yours, too.

Consider that even if your analysis is correct the chances of your ideas being convincing to others are drastically lowered by your attitude. Your propensity to state subjective opinion as objective fact makes you harder to take seriously. It's a lesson that can be applied to real life as well.

 

[JamesNinelives]

I am just stating my opinion.

Your opinion is extremely clear already. You've written whole pages on it.

Everything I wrote in your quotation I know to be true.

Gossip from last year does not count as a fact.

The fact that I do not hold majority view is not (or at least shouldn't be) insulting to any of you, and I am not gonna ask for your approval.

If you don't care what the community thinks then maybe you should.

I don't like to waste my time, I will just shut up.

I hope you do. Because right now you are wasting everyone else's time.

 

[Recursive]

If we can get a framework for diplomacy from @HeathcliffWarriors regarding what we are trying to achieve, then we can give better feedback like:

I'm sure that's more useful than "the AI hates me and dogpiles on me every game. Please fix!"

@HeathcliffWarriors have started another thread with all his objectives for diplo changes

Thanks for pointing it out @ProCatGamer. In case anyone has missed it: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/diplomacy-ai-development.655040/

In terms of better feedback, it would be helpful if feedback regarding odd/problematic diplomacy behavior was accompanied by a screenshot of their opinion table (the list of relationship modifiers, which appears when mousing over their portraits or visible approach).

I'll also be implementing a better log for debugging at some point.

This system is awful and I do not know why Gazebo is standing by it since literally everyone hate it. It i fun killing, and awful. It is obvious your treasury is spread throughout many cities in banks, vaults, financial instruments, patents, with lion's share in the capital. Yeah, how can a single spy load tons of gold ingots into his pockets and flee away?

Well, my working theory is that the city governor is using an Ender Chest full of stacks of gold ingots or blocks. The spy comes in, forces the chest open at gunpoint, and makes off with the gold faster than a Creeper's explosion timer.

In all seriousness, I agree that the spy theft is too strong, but you need to consider some things:
1) The human can do it too, and there are some means of countering spies. I believe there is even a building that blocks Gold theft.

2) Gazebo has a full-time job and the other devs have their own lives as well. When there is limited time, higher priority issues are often addressed first. As spy theft is clearly % based, it can often be annoying but rarely is it devastating. If thousands of Gold are being stolen, you likely have a large Gold income to begin with.

3) It is easy to miss certain issues when so many of them are discussed, rarely with a clear consensus on how to address them, and especially when they're not reported on the project's Github issues page. It is best to report them there, not on the forums, to get the devs' attention.

I once read about VP from people who, like me were searching for a more realistic yet more challenging experience in mods, that VP developers are playing at chieftan and are not interested in contributing to creating demanding and realistic mod.

It was a post from like year ago, I do not know if that is still correct, but considering what I read around here, and that in some of you are posting that deity was eviscarated even further it may be at least partially true.

Anyway, if vp is not aiming for a enhanced experience from vanilla, which pretty obviously would entail focusing on veteran players and higher difficulties and more punishing and real-world like mechanims, then I do not know what is it aiming for

This is completely baseless. Most of Gazebo's VP tests are done on King difficulty, but I have personally seen an instance where he tested every difficulty from Settler to Deity when adjusting city and border growth. ilteroi also does a lot of AI testing, including on higher difficulties.

I don't think there's ever been a time in the history of the mod where most of the testing was done on Chieftain difficulty.

There has also been responsiveness and changes based on difficulty concerns, including in this very thread.

I think others have already done a good job of pointing out issues in your approach and attitude here, and I second those. No one can stop you from expressing your opinion, but no one will be inclined to pay much attention to it if your feedback is rude and accusatory, particularly when it's obvious you aren't well-informed on the topic. Please be more patient and considerate.

This seems like a fair enough description to me.

Part of the problem is the order in which the diplo AI selects approaches (it selects its worst enemies first, and for subsequent players it is increasingly dissuaded from declaring war). I've considered, for example, having it prioritize players in order of highest WAR weight to allow for more flexibility.

That critic is too harsh, I am sure every developer wants to create a fun, realistic and demanding mod and put a lot of effort into it.
The point with the testing difficulty may be true. I have heard contrary statements from Gazebo, sometimes "without bonuses", which means very likely chieftain, but also remember he had made tests with prince difficulty.

Using chieftan difficulty probably didn't play any role while testing AI diplomacy or military approach. But using chieftain, even prince, might be lead to wrong results for other aspects, like happiness evaluation, cause the advantages for production projects rise much faster in higher difficulties than the advantages in tech and policies, creating differences. (AI using a lot of processes cause they have nothing more to do is only an emperor+ thing and was in my eyes one source of unhappiness the human had to face a lot of versions ago, but it's of course hard to proof by numbers from me)

What Gazebo means is that he disables AI bonuses for *one* of the AI players, not all of them (this is actually a side effect of Firaxis's AI Autoplay tool, I believe).

 

[Crag Hack]

I have a proposition out of this situation. Maybe there is a compromise solution.

Let's have 2 versions of VOX at any given time.

One version - the most current in development. Anyone playing it should know that it is work in progress and might have unexpected problems.

Second version - by consensus to be the most stable version of the past. A version that most people found "good".

This way we can have a basis for comparisons. Any new version thus can be compared directly to a single most stable reference version of the past.

So we should have at any given time two competing with each other versions. A reference patch to be compared against. So this way if people say that an old version felt way better, then it is a hint that something in that version was good and we can focus to polish on the concepts of the older version; vice versa if people say that the new version feels better then it should become the new standard framework of comparison for future patches.

You never know, the golden version might have already been discovered in the past.

 

[JamesNinelives]

I have a proposition out of this situation. Maybe there is a compromise solution.

Let's have 2 versions of VOX at any given time.

One version - the most current in development. Anyone playing it should know that it is work in progress and might have unexpected problems.

Second version - by consensus to be the most stable version of the past. A version that most people found "good".

This way we can have a basis for comparisons. Any new version thus can be compared directly to a single most stable reference version of the past.

So we should have at any given time two competing with each other versions. A reference patch to be compared against. So this way if people say that an old version felt way better, then it is a hint that something in that version was good and we can focus to polish on the concepts of the older version; vice versa if people say that the new version feels better then it should become the new standard framework of comparison for future patches.

You never know, the golden version might have already been discovered in the past.

I keep saying this, but we already have a two-version system. There is the stable version, and the beta version.

There may not be any voting involved currently, but if you dislike the changes constantly being made in the beta maybe try the latest stable verion instead.

 

[Crag Hack]

I keep saying this, but we already have a two-version system. There is the stable version, and the beta version.

There may not be any voting involved currently, but if you dislike the changes constantly being made in the beta maybe try the latest stable verion instead.

Which one is the golden reference version ? I am not aware of such poll.

 

[JamesNinelives]

Which one is the golden reference version ? I am not aware of such poll.

No, that's not what I said. There is no poll.

There is a 'stable release' which means it is bug-free and not being used to test big changes so should be relatively balanced. The most recent one I'm aware of is here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/new-version-july-17th-7-17.647817/

Maybe we should sticky it or something so it's easier to find?

 

[Crag Hack]

I did some research to determine which version is perceived as the best golden so far. My research is based on the number of posts each version generates.

2/9 - 431 and growing
1/11 - 428
12/20 - 233
12/1 - 256
11/25 - 126
11/8 - 397
10/23 - 283
10/8 - 188
9/15 - 208
8/31 - 201
8/16 - 102
8/5 - 215
7/29 - 142
7/17 - 390
6/12 - 170
6/2 - 226
5/19 - 394
4/20 - 290
3/28 - 245
1/29 - 295
1/21 - 75
11/21 - 64

It appears some of the best versions could be 11/21/2018 with only 64 post. And among the ones from 2019 it seems to be the August-September versions

 

[Stalker0]

Everything I wrote in your quotation I know to be true. I myself was dissuaded continously for about a year from trying VP by many good civ 5 players, and by anons on the reddit and civfanatics alike, as they thought it incessantly inflated with player bonuses which drag difficulty down, and characterised by strange development decisions.

I am just stating my opinion. That I don't see important and needed changes since stable version is my opinion, if you find that insulting it is your problem. That difficulty level is being dragged down, even for deity and immortal, is a fact, concurred by many people in this thread. I also think development is largely static, affecting cosmetic things or erratic, and vp is becoming more complex, strange and more obscure (for example in happines managament or promotions, archers useful only from xbows) without achieving more realistic or challenging gameplay and those voices was also heard. Don't take everything so personally.

Vp made had made no substantiall progress, or taken a regress even, from vanilla in creating unrealistic warmongering forever stable and happy empire. Meanwhile through adding many yields and taking away AI bonuses it lowered difficulty levels significantly. It is just a fact, we can compare numbers.

What JamesNineLives was getting at was not that your information is necessarily wrong, but the tone in your posts does come across as a bit insulting. That is an opinion I share as well, I like having new people giving there feedback, it is very important, but I am having trouble maintaining concentration on your posts due to the tone issues I mentioned. That said let me try to dig into this a bit.

In terms of "dissuaded continously for about a year from trying VP by many good civ 5 players", all I can say is I haven't seen it. I do go on reddit periodically, but I admit not frequently. If you are seeing examples of this please share it. Our community here can get into "group think" if we are not careful, so if there are groups in the broader civ 5 or civ 6 community that are voicing legitimate criticisms, we do want to be exposed to them.

As to VP becoming more "complex"...there is truth to this. The happiness system remains a complicated beast to players who are just coming into it for the first time, and even veteran players may not understand what all of the numbers mean. There is a part of me that still wonders if reverting all the way back to vanilla happiness...with some small adjustments, would get us 90% of what we are looking for with only a tenth the complexity. That said, I do think the local happiness introduction has been a good change compared to what the happiness system was before. I now feel I have control of the system, whereas before I felt the system was controlling me.

I would also say the spy system to me remains needlessly complicated, I still have no idea what the percentile bonuses on spies actually do....the advanced actions are just things that "magically happen", and I really don't enjoy the thief system... I really don't feel any engagement there. The recent change to CS rigging though was a breath of fresh air, I finally feel I have some options with my spies.

As to difficulty lowering, if you are saying that this version is easier than VP was a year ago....maybe. There have been diety players agreeing with that, so its worth looking at. If you are saying that VP is now easier than vanilla I will completely disagree with you. I still don't have a 50% win rate on VP Immortal....and I can waltz through diety on vanilla while being half asleep. Also you said, "it is just a fact, we can compare numbers". But what you are not factoring in with a pure numbers analysis, is that the AI is getting better and better. We pulled back numbers because the AI of today is not the AI of a year ago, its just plain better. Further, there is no difficulty number that will appease everyone, but the mods have given you the tools through the ABC system to give the AI as much bonus as you would like. If the community as a whole feels X difficulty is too easy, than I agree with updating the ABC numbers for the mod as a whole. But otherwise, respect that not everyone is as good at the game as you are, and feel free to increase the challenge as high as you want to go.


CrazyG made the mention that we should take a step back and consider if some of our changes should be reverted. That I agree with, I do think we get too much momentum with new ideas. Even though we often say "we can always change it back"....we rarely do so. Maybe pulling back the old defense numbers is a good idea, though I do like the decoupling of RCS and CS for city attacks. One thing I have noticed as well, when the new CS numbers were first introduced, my favorite thing about it was that the AI pounced on you if you fast settled and didn't defend your cities. I mean like right out of the gate. I have not seen that same aggressiveness in the last few versions....so something happened there. To me the point of the CS lowering was to curb power expansion by forcing defense....but if the AI doesn't take advantage than only humans are getting the benefit of that change.

 

[tu_79]

I

I did some research to determine which version is perceived as the best golden so far. My research is based on the number of posts each version generates.

2/9 - 431 and growing
1/11 - 428
12/20 - 233
12/1 - 256
11/25 - 126
11/8 - 397
10/23 - 283
10/8 - 188
9/15 - 208
8/31 - 201
8/16 - 102
8/5 - 215
7/29 - 142
7/17 - 390
6/12 - 170
6/2 - 226
5/19 - 394
4/20 - 290
3/28 - 245
1/29 - 295
1/21 - 75
11/21 - 64

It appears some of the best versions could be 11/21/2018 with only 64 post. And among the ones from 2019 it seems to be the August-September versions

I disagree with this metric.
Controversial changes makes more comments.

You can get the latest stable release in reddit. A stable release is the same as a beta release, but when the changes were so minor that it can be considered safe and thoroughly tested.
Experimental changes are in the not stable betas, and they might be reverted in case of not working properly.

That said, every beta is fixing some problems and concerns from previous versions, while introducing some new issues, so they are usually slightly better to play than the stable version. Usually. As we have seen, G likes to fix things big in the first attempt, then finding the middle ground in the second attempt.

 

[tu_79]

There's a clear goal, even if you don't realize, in the development policy. It's called Vox Populi for a reason. Gazebo is conducting a huge experiment on democracy, where they make the rules and we claim our wills as players.

In other words, the game is already complete. It is so since a long time ago. We are not fixing anything, but rather we are all creating a new game that we think we would like to play. Like a game where happiness is sensible and the players have agency. We agreed that we wanted old VP to change this aspect, we went through a hell of designs, tests and new code, until the current happiness system settled down. The old system worked, and it worked well, but the new one we like it better.

So here is the goal: changes that make us to like the game better. Feedback is essential to this.

Oh, and bugfixing and whatever improvements are of interest to the developers (they must enjoy what they are doing).

 

[Gazebo]

I don't know a person can compare today's pantheons to those from years ago and call it anything other than yield inflation. I know people want to buff earth mother, but in the process you nerf stuff like Sun God.




Difficulty.xml file.

It is probably in documents-mygames-civ5-mods-communitybalanceoverhaul.

A is their early game bonus, B, is mid-game, and C is late game (a small change in C is a big deal)

I agree there is yield inflation. I’ll disagree that it is intrinsically wrong. Since pantheons deal with ‘small integers’ we have to increase the overall volume of yields from each pantheon in order to provide room for fine tuning. Festivals is a good example - 1 Faith per lux was too low, 2 was too high. We need that granularity to make some pantheons work.

Setting goals like Heathcliffwarrior would be the first thing we should achieve. But I really miss the communication from Gazebo what he want to achieve. Some time ago I was trying to start a discussion which aim the happiness should have (stop early expansion, punish bad infrastructure, punish hard warmongering, how many cities should be manageable, etc.) and someone else was making a poll, but only CrazyG and Stalker0 went into a deeper discussion and Gazebo said, he has no aim, only trying to keep the system running.

What shall I think about such a comment?

I've checked it and the "gold" discussions in the balance thread is open since May 2018. We have accomplished some steps. Happiness is a bit more stable but at the price of some irrational complexity and is still too easy in most circumstances. Any warmonger counters which work by unhappiness are partly negated by that.

But on the other side, there are still pantheon adjustments, more than 1 1/2 years after people thought the gold staus is near. (as example)

Making corporations, factories, CS trade routes scaling exponential isn't marginal. I don't need to test the outcome of an exponential CS trade route influence increase. I know it's broken. And it should be already known cause the same experience was made and removed for Denmark or Greece.

Please don’t put false words in my mouth to make a point. One of my good friends in my doctoral program always reminded me to be careful of people like you, noting that pettiness grows from situations in which the stakes are low. And here we are. You have no investment in this project, which makes it easy for you to make baseless, pointless criticism.

First and foremost I love this mod.

We often end up with a series of short term solutions that don't really make anything better. It almost always becomes more complex though. We changed X, to fix it we changed Y, to fix Y we changed Z. It's just chasing your own tail. Pantheons are the best example. They are riddled with yield inflation and feature creep. How is the new Earth Mother balanced exactly? Its directly better than a follower belief.

G has done one a great job overall, but i really wish sometimes we could just go back. Just acknowledge an idea isn't working and remove things that were added. Like this entire massive wave of changes to archers, what if you just undo the major city defense changes of a few patches ago? Really city defense went mostly unchanged for like 5 years I played the mod because it worked well enough. It wasn't perfect by any means, but it worked well enough to be enjoyable. We've had chaos in the military department that threw the balance of a million other things. Our end goal for city defense is what? It's probably going to be pretty similar to what we started with.

I explained this before but I’ll do so again - city defense changed because it was incredibly opaque and in the DLL it relied on a ton of fake math and spoofed hard coded % values that made it really hard to debut and tweak. We had dozens of complaints about how pointless city attacks were, how poorly it all scaled, etc etc - I couldn’t begin to mess with any of that until I cleaned up the code and standardized it to match other ranged attacks. Ideally city attacks and defense get close to the old version, but there was no room for adjustment and the system was not UI friendly.

Universal rule of my project is code transparency. If bad code makes it hard for me to understand what it is trying to achieve, I rip it out and redo it. Years ago I rewrote the entire belief code not because it didn’t work, but because it was hardcoded nonsense. Same thing here.

I also revert changes all the time. Dunno what that’s about.

On other things going on in this thread, specifically the personal attacks lobbed at me and the sweeping condemnations of VP from ‘anons’ (what a lame word), those of you doing this can go take a chill pill.

Sent from my TzeenchPhone
G

 

[Crag Hack]

I

I disagree with this metric.
Controversial changes makes more comments.

You can get the latest stable release in reddit. A stable release is the same as a beta release, but when the changes were so minor that it can be considered safe and thoroughly tested.
Experimental changes are in the not stable betas, and they might be reverted in case of not working properly.

That said, every beta is fixing some problems and concerns from previous versions, while introducing some new issues, so they are usually slightly better to play than the stable version. Usually. As we have seen, G likes to fix things big in the first attempt, then finding the middle ground in the second attempt.

I completely agree with you that more controversial versions generate the most posts. I would like to point to you that I said that looks like 11/21/2018 generated the least posts.

It would be better to aggregate the posts of several consecutive patches rather than focusing on a single one.

For example notice how the August-September ones are consistently lower posts, low 200s and even 100s.

9/15 - 208
8/31 - 201
8/16 - 102
8/5 - 215

Could be indicator that around that time the versions got most stable and well received.

But notice how recently the 2020 patches are record in posts and likely because are introducing highly controversial changes. Me thinks

 

[tu_79]

I completely agree with you that more controversial versions generate the most posts. I would like to point to you that I said that looks like 11/21/2018 generated the least posts.

It would be better to aggregate the posts of several consecutive patches rather than focusing on a single one.

For example notice how the August-September ones are consistently lower posts, low 200s and even 100s.

9/15 - 208
8/31 - 201
8/16 - 102
8/5 - 215

Could be indicator that around that time the versions got most stable and well received.

But notice how recently the 2020 patches are record in posts and likely because are introducing highly controversial changes. Me thinks

You should also factor in how long it did take to the next release, since it is rare to discuss anything from the older release.