New Beta Version - June 9th (6/9)

[intelli]

I'm not sure it needs to go to Bombardment 2 as it finally makes Range worth pursuing now, Logistics was always the no brainer to go for and grab the XP boost from double shots.

 

[Gazebo]

I don't know. I already use melee ships a ton for ship v ship combat. Two melee boats will kill a ranged boat in 1 turn for minimal damage almost every time, and melee boats will win a 1v1 against ranged boats most of the time.

Is it possible to give a 200% bonus to naval damage to a city when all the coastal tiles it has are occupied by boats or something? It would already take a while to take cities with a fleet of 2 range boats sometimes.

Now you'll often have only 1 or two tiles to attack a city from, and can't shoot away the ranged units bombarding you.

If we don't add a whole new line I think this will disable the ability to take most cities with boats.

And if that's gone, then there's almost no need for naval combat. Many games you could literally just ignore ever making a single boat. Even if you're warmongering you can simply move your troops over to their land at some time in peace.

As I said CS/RCS may need to be looked at. Slippery slope 'boats are irrelevant' arguments are not useful though.

I do like the idea of blockade penalties.


In the end taking a coastal city _exclusively_ with a navy should be difficult. Holding it will be almost impossible in most cases anyways.

G

 

[theMisterRud]

+1 on Field Guns retaining indirect fire.
Food for fought: if the problem of naval warfare becomes city capture in the case of heavily defended cities, maybe forcing to bring a ground force with your navy can mitigate it

In this direction, maybe giving Amphibeous promotion to ground units produced on requirement X might help

Again, throwing it out there

 

[CrazyG]

Anyone having success with progress? It seems to me that the first policy costing 50 and the second costing 70 is really bad for progress, much more so than the other two trees.

By the time I get to my second policy I already built a worker and every available building so these two policies aren't very good. I had plenty of military (archer + spearman via ruins), IDK what else to use production on.

You won't get the bonus science for growing for as many citizens as before, or culture for techs, unless you purposely avoid growing or discovering techs, which seems dumb and somewhat gimmicky.

Even a strong start on amber, getting a culture ruin, and building a monument first, I couldn't get enough culture to really do anything. I tried delaying settling a second city until I had equality, like I did pre-beta, but it came far too late. Re-loaded and tried settling earlier, but my my culture just stagnated

Edit- I'll throw a naval idea out there, you could give ranged ships access to volley

 

[ElliotS]

In my current game I tried to capture coastal city for a 15 turns... Only 2 little dromons can attack it from coast side...
Gazebo, maybe we need make Range promotion available after Bombardment 2?

If you make the range promotion too early, it's basically reverting the change. I think that's a poor idea.

Slippery slope 'boats are irrelevant' arguments are not useful though.

If boats can't do anything but kill boats, wouldn't that make them useless though? Because of the war weariness you can't even prevent someone from bringing troops over during peacetime by perma-warring them anymore.

In the end taking a coastal city _exclusively_ with a navy should be difficult. Holding it will be almost impossible in most cases anyways.

That's not my experience. You can blow away the defenders before taking the city, and then normally hold it long enough to start buying units to defend it.


I've seen two ideas to improve naval combat. One is a line of new units, and another is to allow land units to board and fight from ships. (like this mod.) This might be hard to train the AI for, but it could be really cool.

 

[ashendashin]

That's not my experience. You can blow away the defenders before taking the city, and then normally hold it long enough to start buying units to defend it.

I like the navy changes for this exact reason. Naval superiority was as easy to achieve with dromons as with cruisers, which is weird. I think taking MisterRud's approach is the best way to look at it. It's weird to support entire coastlines with only a navy for so long.

 

[Gazebo]

Anyone having success with progress? It seems to me that the first policy costing 50 and the second costing 70 is really bad for progress, much more so than the other two trees.

By the time I get to my second policy I already built a worker and every available building so these two policies aren't very good. I had plenty of military (archer + spearman via ruins), IDK what else to use production on.

You won't get the bonus science for growing for as many citizens as before, or culture for techs, unless you purposely avoid growing or discovering techs, which seems dumb and somewhat gimmicky.

Even a strong start on amber, getting a culture ruin, and building a monument first, I couldn't get enough culture to really do anything. I tried delaying settling a second city until I had equality, like I did pre-beta, but it came far too late. Re-loaded and tried settling earlier, but my my culture just stagnated

Edit- I'll throw a naval idea out there, you could give ranged ships access to volley

I have noticed progress civs start a bit slower. Gonna try bumping culture on opener to 15 from 10.

 

[Dawnpromise]

Haven't played the beta but I am very concerned about the idea of ranged naval being tied to coal. There's just never enough coal most games often times I'll only have one deposit in my territory for a whopping 4 to 6 coal. Combined with the other changes I'm concerned if naval units are just going to be made redundant and the best strategy will likely just be to cover you units with melee naval until they can land and fight normally.

On the one hand recreating the Normandy landing could be fun. On the other the lack of naval warfare will be saddening.

 

[tu_79]

Haven't played the beta but I am very concerned about the idea of ranged naval being tied to coal. There's just never enough coal most games often times I'll only have one deposit in my territory for a whopping 4 to 6 coal. Combined with the other changes I'm concerned if naval units are just going to be made redundant and the best strategy will likely just be to cover you units with melee naval until they can land and fight normally.

On the one hand recreating the Normandy landing could be fun. On the other the lack of naval warfare will be saddening.

The first one already demands coal. By the next generation, most civs have access to coal but they need to trade and befriend States. This would make it harder for jerks without access to coal.

 

[Gazebo]

To note, the AI is really loving this naval change:

 

[Funak]

Can a fleet even capture a city with 2 or less coast-tiles now? I mean that was still a huge challenge even before this change and I don't see any positives here at all.

 

[Gazebo]

Another beta. Prolly last one before release.

• bugfixes for the AI
• smaller adjustments to tech/culture rates based on expansion (dropped by 1% at all sizes)
• adjustments to naval units (blockading a city causes it to produce -25% gold, RCS/CS of ranged naval units increased, ranged naval units can move and shoot)
• all civs start with a pathfinder instead of a warrior

Link: https://mega.nz/#!vZlQnJQb!Noi-DdJdr1rOblEfBpWMYjxVq9_1g2Xi77pYsxqE-nQ

G

 

[Owlbebach]

I'm following VoxPopuli for more than a year now and thats probably the first time i strongly disagree with the change (naval units range). Playing on deity i can't imagine a single situation where i build any naval units at all, they just become absolutely useless (unless it is an archipelago map).

I understand the idea of making naval combat more strategic, but lets look at this from another angle: The whole point of the war is the seizure of cities. You do not start a war if you do not want to capture cities, thats just waist of production and money for units, you don't want to do this.

With that said, lets take a look at naval units role in a war. Previously naval units were very strong and you were forced to build naval army if you want to capture a coastal city. Otherwise you have no chance of capturing it, your army will be destroyed from sea! With the new units (even with move after attack) they can do almost nothing to land units. Once you've dealed with land army, you can take a city no matter how much naval force your enemy has. In worst-case scenario you can just stand near the city and shoot naval units forever as they can't strike back. Same thing with defending cities, well-placed city can be attacked from 2 tiles only, 1 trireme and you are safe against unlimited naval army. Seriosly, thats a bad change.

 

[Owlbebach]

Anyone having success with progress? It seems to me that the first policy costing 50 and the second costing 70 is really bad for progress, much more so than the other two trees.

By the time I get to my second policy I already built a worker and every available building so these two policies aren't very good. I had plenty of military (archer + spearman via ruins), IDK what else to use production on.

You won't get the bonus science for growing for as many citizens as before, or culture for techs, unless you purposely avoid growing or discovering techs, which seems dumb and somewhat gimmicky.

Even a strong start on amber, getting a culture ruin, and building a monument first, I couldn't get enough culture to really do anything. I tried delaying settling a second city until I had equality, like I did pre-beta, but it came far too late. Re-loaded and tried settling earlier, but my my culture just stagnated

Edit- I'll throw a naval idea out there, you could give ranged ships access to volley

Thats another thing that i wanted to mention. The recent change to policies cost was a huge indirect nerf to Progress (not to mention that Progress was the weakest before). It has zero culture, 15 culture for technology is almost nothing. Problem is that progress needs a lot of cities, but all cities are soooo bad early on that you just can't build new cities fast enough. And in addition you have zero culture and you usually end up 4-5 policies behind by the end of medival. I think that Liberty policy should be changed. Two ideas: 1) Liberty gains +50% to settler production - that will not be imbalanced at all, you will have a lot of cities, but they will be really bad; 2) Swap equality and liberty - this early hammers will help to expand.

Progress really need something early on, worker isn't enough. It supposed to have a big amount of cities of moderate quality, wich are better together, but currently it ends up with small amout of awfull cities.

 

[Sub6]

Hidden patch notes?

• Naval Target Penalty (RCS penalty when attacking naval units) increased from 25% to 33%.
• Now Siege units receive Naval Target Penalty.

 

[Gokudo01]

Thats another thing that i wanted to mention. The recent change to policies cost was a huge indirect nerf to Progress (not to mention that Progress was the weakest before). It has zero culture, 15 culture for technology is almost nothing. Problem is that progress needs a lot of cities, but all cities are soooo bad early on that you just can't build new cities fast enough. And in addition you have zero culture and you usually end up 4-5 policies behind by the end of medival. I think that Liberty policy should be changed. Two ideas: 1) Liberty gains +50% to settler production - that will not be imbalanced at all, you will have a lot of cities, but they will be really bad; 2) Swap equality and liberty - this early hammers will help to expand.

Progress really need something early on, worker isn't enough. It supposed to have a big amount of cities of moderate quality, wich are better together, but currently it ends up with small amout of awfull cities.

dont be overzealous, progress is almost fine, i played brazil progress in immortal and won in 340 turn. I won with india too(emperor) diplomatic victory while building the last part of my spaceship in 364 turn.
Progress needs a good bump early on but it's overall fine.


About the naval change, I don't like it. Overall navy needs to be impactful not an optional secondary game that you can ignore if you are not playing on archipelago. As it stands, navy has got no impact on war until industrial. boats are awful to take cities now and bad to clean up the coast. it's a mini-game that you play on the ocean until peace is signed. then you can move your land units to the next land mass.

But cool, AI handle it better.

 

[intelli]

No indirect fire for field guns yet?

Naval changes look decent,

 

[Owlbebach]

dont be overzealous, progress is almost fine, i played brazil progress in immortal and won in 340 turn. I won with india too(emperor) diplomatic victory while building the last part of my spaceship in 364 turn.
Progress needs a same bump early on but it's overall fine.

Well, the gap between immortal and deity is the biggest one in the game. I was defending progress too when i was playing immortal, try deity and you'll see. Also win on 340-360 turn seems really late, i recently won Austria tourism deity between 260 and 270

 

[vyyt]

I don't want to judge the naval changes just on paper until I actually try them out, but IF beta testing proves ships are now less effective, then maybe introducing a new resource consuming "siege" ship with a longer range (and low CS???) can be introduced by the times the frigates show up? We'd have a melee corvette, 1-range resourceless frigate and an iron-consuming SOTL (we can give the longbowmen back to England).

I am usually against senselessly adding new units, because if we have too many units, they do not feel enough distinct from each other. But this could make sense and unlike for example the scout line, there are plenty of ship 3D models to pick from.

 

[Y.O.]

I'm not as adverse to the boat changes because 1) The AI (from my experience) barely builds ships. Even in games where I'm not the leader militarily, the leader only has a bunch of land units--barely naval ones at all. 2) In the instance in where I was more further inland and unable to build boats, taking coastal cities early meant facing a lot of ranged ships I had no ability to defend against. Besides, I barely focus on Navy combat until I get astronomy since--IIRC--range ships can't even go through ocean tiles until then. At least with Caravels, you can travel through ocean tiles, just not end on one (may have to double check this one).