New Game Speeds

[Thunderbrd]

Scale as you see fit but I'd base your first attempts on an understanding of the intent that the vanilla settings declare.

Let's fix the wording on this... the AI has always and still does play at Noble level. But its true that they are further adjusted by the human player's difficulty setting and that can make it very different to the usual Noble level experience for them.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Been doing some comparison of vanilla BtS to our current set. More yet to do.

One thing that stands out immediately is the <iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>5</iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>, this is BtS Warlord for example. Now this is C2C Warlord <iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>15</iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>, 3 fold more than Vanilla.

Now for Noble with BtS 1st, <iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>5</iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>. You see it's the same. But for C2C we have this: <iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>25</iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>. Now it's a 5 folder increase.

Prince: BtS <iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>6</iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance> vs C2C <iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>30</iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>.

I'll jump to Emperor: BtS <iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>7</iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance> vs C2C <iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>50</iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>

And finally Deity: BtS <iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>8</iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance> vs C2C <iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>100</iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>

Did someone get confused on what this does? Or were they trying to scale for our added Eras, larger Map sizes, and Longer GS?

If I understand this tag in BtS (big if ), this sets the limit on how many Cities per Handicap level that can have the NumCitiesMaint applied to an Empire. Some clarification is needed here to understand this better.

 

[Toffer90]

If I understand this tag in BtS (big if ), this sets the limit on how many Cities per Handicap level that can have the NumCitiesMaint applied to an Empire. Some clarification is needed here to understand this better.

Yes, in "BtS Deity" the "number of cities maintenance" would not increase for all cities when settling city number 9, 10, 11... infinity, so after settling 8 cities there would be no particular financial hindrance in settling any more cities (other than distance to capital, overseas maint., and such).

Spoiler Illustration :

I personally would prefer to have this at significantly higher values in C2C than what was seen in BtS, but not necessarily with a big difference between the difficulty levels.

What conflicts me a bit with that tag is that it isn't scaled by world size, so what would be an appropriate increment change between the difficulties...
A difference of 3 cities per difficulty would be huge on a duel map while an increment of 2 cities would be somewhat insignificant on a gigantic map.
The value used for the tag also has the same issue, e.g. a value of 10 cities on settler and 14 cities on chieftain (18.. etc.) on a dual map would make little difference as you probably won't even reach 10 cities before winning the game.

 

[JosEPh_II]

So should we keep the BtS values for Difficulty levels below Noble?

Is 100 for Deity C2C way too much? ( I think it is). We don't support Gigantic map anymore (according to SO) even though it's till a choice for map size in C2C. So would Deity be better served with a value like 40? Then we could scale down from there to Noble.

 

[Toffer90]

I don't know... it could be 5 on settler and then increment by +5 for each difficulty. It's your choice, I won't complain later if I form a stronger opinion on this.
It isn't a very important tag in the big scope of things. The way it is now doesn't pose a problem really.

It could increase exponentially or linearly per level, or it could even be the same value for all difficulty levels.
If you feel it should be changed, you are imo free to follow your gut feeling on this.

 

[JosEPh_II]

It would make a difference in Pits UEM scenario. But it wouldn't do much for my Normal GS test games on a large C2C world map start everywhere.

This was just an example of some of the things that have been tweaked before. There are more and more important ones still to be discussed.

 

[Thunderbrd]

One thing that stands out immediately is the <iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>5</iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>, this is BtS Warlord for example. Now this is C2C Warlord <iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>15</iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>, 3 fold more than Vanilla.

We found that the more you increase this amount, the more you control the vast spread and hold players back from being able to bite off too much for the era so that the game can continue to later eras. It serves our needs well to increase this and I'm strongly feeling that every time we've expanded it, it's been a positive and you can almost see when the benefit stops because we kept some level of constriction (and someone pipes up saying that they have no gold challenges past a certain point in the game now). If it were me, I'd turn it to 1000 to make it, in essence, unlimited. Then regulate the impact of it by civics rather than limiting how many owned cities continue to cumulatively add to the penalty.

I personally would prefer to have this at significantly higher values in C2C than what was seen in BtS, but not necessarily with a big difference between the difficulty levels.

What conflicts me a bit with that tag is that it isn't scaled by world size, so what would be an appropriate increment change between the difficulties...

Agreed... if it's going to scale, scaling it by map size makes more sense. But a sharp and strong curve from very low at the lowest difficulties and very high at the highest does go a long ways towards helping to give the AI a strong economic advantage over the player in more difficult levels so it does still apply well there. I don't think 100 is too much for deity at all. Down to like 10 for Noble might make for a good spread to extrapolate out.

 

[JosEPh_II]

We found that the more you increase this amount, the more you control the vast spread and hold players back from being able to bite off too much for the era so that the game can continue to later eras. It serves our needs well to increase this and I'm strongly feeling that every time we've expanded it, it's been a positive and you can almost see when the benefit stops because we kept some level of constriction (and someone pipes up saying that they have no gold challenges past a certain point in the game now). If it were me, I'd turn it to 1000 to make it, in essence, unlimited. Then regulate the impact of it by civics rather than limiting how many owned cities continue to cumulatively add to the penalty.

How many Deity players or AI ever reach 100 cities for their Empire? Not too many I would wager.

 

[Thunderbrd]

How many Deity players or AI ever reach 100 cities for their Empire? Not too many I would wager.

Probably not. The idea is to mostly make it almost impossible to exceed at the hardest setting. The AI would be playing a much easier game since for them it would be the noble setting that applies.

 

[Faustmouse]

Immortal, Snail, giant map (its small world).

I have to say I really like the balance as it is right now. In early Modern I was on +/-0 gold and had to work hard to get it back positive. Education is pretty annyoing; in most cities it is well at 3000+, in some (those 120+ pop monsters) it is -1000 or less and there is nothing you could do about that (like you could do with crime fighters). Those Entertainers are not impactful enough.
Air Pollution was never an issue, but I like to spread factories out and build the countermeasures, so that's probably very good as it is; plan ahead, don't overbuild fatories and you've dealt with the challenge.
Water Pollution on the other hand wasn't an issue for the whole game. I like the proposal someone mad a few months ago to make it spike in Medieval and allow powerful countermeasures (like Sewer Systems) quite early. This would mean increasing the impact of popsize on waterpollution as well.

 

[Thunderbrd]

in some (those 120+ pop monsters) it is -1000 or less and there is nothing you could do about that (like you could do with crime fighters)

Hopefully not too far off we'll get some later game professor units that split off from entertainer line units. After a point, entertainment stops being about education at all and more about distracting from education and anything else of an intellectual nature.

It's good to see it offers some challenge later in the game though.

Strong corporation balance is going to be key to making this end of the game really good. It's nice to hear that later game economy is in a pretty sufficient state to enjoy right now though.

 

[Faustmouse]

Corporations could use an overhaul. IMO, if you'd make them generating their bonus based on the amount of manufactured goods instead of map resources they'd be much cooler. The special building could still generate it's bonuses from the map resources, but then you'd only need one. But a corporation that generates based on the amount of pencils you have... This would be a nice step towards volumetric resources.

Now that I think about Factories, these would need an overhaul as well at some point. IMO, they should create the resource and maybe add , but no ; they don't sell the goods, they only produce them. The should come from the shops and malls. And the bicycle shop actually produces bikes right now

 

[Raledon]

(deity nightmare, normal speed, large world)
In my personal experience, economics have a bit of an issue. You go over most of the first 4 eras having wild shifts in income. At the prehistoric era you to be on a constant 100% research as you have only one city. In the ancient era it falls off to about 30% research (4 cities, usually), and dwindling down to 0% research till the end of the classical era. A few key inventions like the bank and a few civics at the start of the medieval era can easily skyrocket you back to 100% research, with money to spare. (This usually leads to change civics later to more science oriented over income oriented ones, which reduce the income to ~50%).
The above flow goes with pretty much fully built cities, as techs can yield, and research coming from certain effects such as stories and building research.
I believe that streamlining it a bit, so that the player will tend to be on ~50% research during all of these eras. I think the trend comes from many buildings in the first 3 eras giving flat +gold, and an influx of buildings around the medieval era (bank, for example) that suddenly bring a lot of +gold%.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Corporations could use an overhaul. IMO, if you'd make them generating their bonus based on the amount of manufactured goods instead of map resources they'd be much cooler. The special building could still generate it's bonuses from the map resources, but then you'd only need one. But a corporation that generates based on the amount of pencils you have... This would be a nice step towards volumetric resources.

Now that I think about Factories, these would need an overhaul as well at some point. IMO, they should create the resource and maybe add , but no ; they don't sell the goods, they only produce them. The should come from the shops and malls. And the bicycle shop actually produces bikes right now

I have identified both of these as factors that need major overhauls. I'm eager to start working on the solutions I have to make these both improved systems and I agree with a LOT of what you said there. Supply line systems problems and internal conflicts of the process abound in C2C and need to be smoothed into a singular approach. And don't get me too started on Corps... they really have a lot of things I think need to be improved but the supply line stuff needs to happen in general first... in part to help setup for the corporation system improvements.

(deity nightmare, normal speed, large world)
In my personal experience, economics have a bit of an issue. You go over most of the first 4 eras having wild shifts in income. At the prehistoric era you to be on a constant 100% research as you have only one city. In the ancient era it falls off to about 30% research (4 cities, usually), and dwindling down to 0% research till the end of the classical era. A few key inventions like the bank and a few civics at the start of the medieval era can easily skyrocket you back to 100% research, with money to spare. (This usually leads to change civics later to more science oriented over income oriented ones, which reduce the income to ~50%).
The above flow goes with pretty much fully built cities, as techs can yield, and research coming from certain effects such as stories and building research.
I believe that streamlining it a bit, so that the player will tend to be on ~50% research during all of these eras. I think the trend comes from many buildings in the first 3 eras giving flat +gold, and an influx of buildings around the medieval era (bank, for example) that suddenly bring a lot of +gold%.

Mostly agree. I'd goal more for 75%. Keep in mind that the shift to most buildings and income being represented as gold rather than commerce has narrowed the field of income that the slider manages, which also means that when you start having financial difficulties, you don't have as much margin to play with. So it's very easy to go too far in making gold a challenge and making it too challenging for the AI to operate effectively.

 

[Raledon]

Mostly agree. I'd goal more for 75%. Keep in mind that the shift to most buildings and income being represented as gold rather than commerce has narrowed the field of income that the slider manages, which also means that when you start having financial difficulties, you don't have as much margin to play with. So it's very easy to go too far in making gold a challenge and making it too challenging for the AI to operate effectively.

In all honesty, I'm quite curious about the reasons that the economy was designed to be this way. While having certain buildings such as banking giving % bonus to gold, and science/religion bonuses to science, why most of the normal buildings work around gold instead of commerce? In general, commerce yields are very low, as opposed to vanilla BTS economy design.

 

[Thunderbrd]

In all honesty, I'm quite curious about the reasons that the economy was designed to be this way. While having certain buildings such as banking giving % bonus to gold, and science/religion bonuses to science, why most of the normal buildings work around gold instead of commerce? In general, commerce yields are very low, as opposed to vanilla BTS economy design.

It was a design theory concept we moved on. Since then we've seen some of the reasons not to but then we saw only all the reasons to. One of the problems here is that it's hard to really define the difference between what gold is and what commerce is exactly. Finding that dividing line was our main goal and I do think we may have gone too far but it's pretty baked in at the moment and would take a lot of debate and discussion and effort to change it from here.

 

[JosEPh_II]

In all honesty, I'm quite curious about the reasons that the economy was designed to be this way. While having certain buildings such as banking giving % bonus to gold, and science/religion bonuses to science, why most of the normal buildings work around gold instead of commerce? In general, commerce yields are very low, as opposed to vanilla BTS economy design.

BtS economy does not have 7 more Eras to work with. BtS does not have games that can last 8250 turns. And where the shortest C2C GS Normal is Twice the length of BtS Normal and 1/4 longer than BtS Epic. Nor 1000 tech vs 84.

It's really not even fair to compare C2C to Vanilla BtS in this regard.

And now with the Pepper2000 Modmod added in to flesh out the New Futuristic Eras and all units, buildings, and Tech costs redone, the balance is a WIP.

 

[SirJohnEh]

Game speed results running on code base SVN 9751 with no leader traits at Marathon speed and Monarch difficulty. Reused a previous map generated at SVN 9734 as a Small Temperate Earth-like "C2C_World" map with Low Sea levels, Old World Start and Plenty of Rivers. Plan to use these results as a "baseline" for comparison to future tests at updated SVN levels and different Leader traits.

Other key game option settings (full list provided in attachment spreadsheet and PDF)
- No Tech Handicaps for Humans set “On”; Win For Losing set “On” and No Tech Diffusion set “Off”. Note that my code base (SVN 9734) is prior to the SVN 9782 fix for TD/WFL bonus "leakage" to the player (which I noticed a couple of times, but I don't think enough to significantly impact game speed results).
- No Tech Trading and No Tech Brokering both set to “On”.
- Beeline Sting set to “Off”.
- Upscaled Building and Unit Costs set to “On” (change from my previous test settings, and I am hoping for a positive significant impact on game speed).

Results:
1) "No Traits" Leader reached Sedentary Lifestyle at turn 349 in 6122 BC, 2 techs behind leading AI, earning 193 beakers and 10 gold at 100% science allocation on this turn number (37% of science from gold, 62% from city buildings). Player leading on scoreboard (183 versus leading AI at 160).
2) "No Traits" Leader reached Classical Lifestyle at turn 768 in 804 BC, 7 techs behind leading AI, earning 1000 beakers and 47 gold at 80% science allocation on this specific turn number (73% of science from gold, 16% from city buildings, and about 10% from TD/WFL "leakage"). Player leading on scoreboard (1121 versus leading AI at 1017).
3) "No Traits" Leader reached Medieval Lifestyle at turn 969 in 936 AD, 8 techs behind leading AI, earning 3091 beakers and 74 gold at 100% science allocation on this turn number (82% of science from gold, 16% from city buildings). Player leading on scoreboard (183 versus leading AI at 160).

Observations and Other Notes
1) Apologies for reporting at Medieval Lifestyle (instead of continuing to Renaissance or further), but I will not have much testing time over the next 2 weeks, and want to report before my SVN code base of 9751 is totally out-of-date.
2) These 3 dates seem to be in the right range to me (based on Joe's previous feedback).
3) I research all technologies (except extra religions) before researching the next gateway. It gives me better consistency between tests, but does add a few extra turns to my reported gateway dates.
4) See the attached 7-Zip file for more information: save files at start-up and at completing each gateway technology, plus the spreadsheet I used for results recording and analysis (in Libreoffice and PDF formats).
5) From these limited results, it looks like gold-generating buildings and civics and resources are significantly more important to technology progress than beaker-generating buildings and civics and resources. Which I think proves one or more of the the following: (A) "Money makes the world go around", (B) I should build more science buildings, and/or (C) I missed some other significant source of beakers toward technology progress.
- My Calculations: I calculated the per-turn direct beaker generators impact as the total beakers created by all cites at 0% gold allocation, and the indirect gold allocation impact as the total beakers for all cities at the current gold allocation percentage minus the beakers for all cities at 0% gold.
- At Sedentary Lifestyle, about 40% of per-turn beakers came from indirect gold allocation versus 60% from direct beaker generators.
- At Classical Lifestyle, about 80% of per-turn beakers came from indirect gold allocation versus 20% from direct beaker generators.
- At Medieval Lifestyle, about 85% of per-turn beakers came from indirect gold allocation versus 15% from direct beaker generators.

 

[Thunderbrd]

3) I research all technologies (except extra religions) before researching the next gateway. It gives me better consistency between tests, but does add a few extra turns to my reported gateway dates.

Interesting, I wonder how far off this is from the opposite approach. Where would the dating be if someone basically did their best to get to the lifestyle techs as soon as possible and would it change things for 2 or 3 eras in? With or without Beeline Stings? hmm...

- At Sedentary Lifestyle, about 40% of per-turn beakers came from indirect gold allocation versus 60% from direct beaker generators.
- At Classical Lifestyle, about 80% of per-turn beakers came from indirect gold allocation versus 20% from direct beaker generators.
- At Medieval Lifestyle, about 85% of per-turn beakers came from indirect gold allocation versus 15% from direct beaker generators.

Very fascinating analysis. Makes sense.

5) From these limited results, it looks like gold-generating buildings and civics and resources are significantly more important to technology progress than beaker-generating buildings and civics and resources. Which I think proves one or more of the the following: (A) "Money makes the world go around", (B) I should build more science buildings, and/or (C) I missed some other significant source of beakers toward technology progress.

Were you able to run at 100% research allocation most of this time or no?

 

[SirJohnEh]

Where would the dating be if someone basically did their best to get to the lifestyle techs as soon as possible and would it change things for 2 or 3 eras in? With or without Beeline Stings?

Very interesting suggestion! I'll run 3 tests in my next series:
(1) "full path" baseline: research all techs except extra religions and unattainable (eg Waterproof Cement), Beeline Sting Off (but effectively no impact whether On or Off in this playing style)
(2) "fast path with Beeline Sting Off" (this can run on same map as #1 since it is a change to playing style not to set-up options)
(3) " fast path with Beeline Sting On" (or possibly Beeline Sting "simulated as ON" and save testing time by checking for and recording each time I have to research a previous-era tech, with the number of turns taken times the Bee Sting penalty impact) However, I don't remember what the "penalty" is - something like 2X the number of beakers for each era backwards?

II was able to run in the range of 80% to 100% on almost all turns. Usually in the 90% to 100% range.