New Version - November 26th (11/26)

[Stalker0]

. This type of advices should be taken into consideration if they are given ONLY by Deity players.

Those are StarCraft 2 and Dota 2 (actually WC3 and SC:BW also but they are too old).
Why is that happening? Because the developers take into account only balance feedback made by top 1% of players. Of course they say that they value all feedback, but i know for sure that this is not true.

I can say definitely that your note on SC2 is wrong. Many balance changes are designed to address concerns at the lower levels and are not a big factor at professional play. I play SC2 and keep up with a lot of discussions. Now your right that high level play is definitely a greater factor, but not the whole.

Ultimately what makes Civ different than other games is that the game you are playing is the not the game I am playing. The diety experience is fundamentally imbalanced, it is designed to give the AI a massive advantage. If would be the equivalent of playing baseball against a team that can field 10 players instead of 9. The experience you have is therefore fundamentally different, and so your response to balance changes is also different.

A great example of this was a large debate about Authority some time ago. Lower level players found Authority to be weak, Diety players found it incredibly strong. The reason....Diety players fight against a mega crapton of units...so that culture on kills really stacks up. That has nothing to do with how good a player you are....it is a fundamental difference in game experience driven by the difficulty level.

 

[Gazebo]

Is it enough to get the moderator whip without serious thread pollution? These terms are so easy to highlight the toxicity with!

Quoi?

G

 

[Jarula]

Oh if I can propose a easy change that would be super cool. Make all UBs 100% capture a reason to take your neighbors cities...? It would be really cool and fun.

 

[Rafs]

Oh if I can propose a easy change that would be super cool. Make all UBs 100% capture a reason to take your neighbors cities...? It would be really cool and fun.

I think rome ua does this, from what I've tested they seem to keep all UB except palace ones (because they can't keep a palace).

 

[ElliotS]

Oh if I can propose a easy change that would be super cool. Make all UBs 100% capture a reason to take your neighbors cities...? It would be really cool and fun.

I don't know if this is balanced, but it does seem fun. Also a nerf to earlier civs and buff to later ones by shifting the cost/benefit analysis of who to war at. (Which is a good thing.)

 

[DarkZero]

Oh if I can propose a easy change that would be super cool. Make all UBs 100% capture a reason to take your neighbors cities...? It would be really cool and fun.

To be fair you also get to keep any tile improvement other civs make, you can even repair them if you pillaged them previosly, so there is a precedent.

 

[Jarula]

No way romes UA does that that is super cool. I've never taken civs unique buildings with Rome.

And it really would be fun.

 

[Gazebo]

No way romes UA does that that is super cool. I've never taken civs unique buildings with Rome.

It does.

G

 

[Jarula]

Gives me a reason to play Rome on ynaemp take those agoras burial tombs etc...

 

[bigcat88]

Dont like that on some difficulty Ai has a free tech. If they wasting their production, then maybe just remove one scout on Deity for them? Or if there is a problem with settling then force ai to research pottery in first 3 techs... Deity is already a very hard challenge, no need to make it harder. Already many people was complaing that deity is much much harder then immortal, and they want a difficulty betwwen immortal and deity. After a free tech on Deity i will just forget about that difficulty, cause ai start using cheats...

I like the idea, when units just get 50% exp from fighting with minor civs. It removes the “exploit” totaly. It much better then 45 xp cup, 45 xp is nothing...

If there is a problem with warmonger player veteran troops, then in some topic we disscus about idea to give Ai free xp for units scaling with era... not a flat bonus like now.

 

[DarkZero]

I would also like to bring to the discussion the massive yeilds you get from international trade routes whit allied city states, one of my recent games i was getting 23 cultere per route, and tech wise i had about 5-6 of them whit almost half my cultere from trade routes alone.

 

[Owlbebach]

Hey mates, why do you all take this so personally? I love you all, i have nothing against anyone of you. Ask @ElliotS or @ashendashin, they spoke to me couple of times. I'm nice and polite, why the hell everyone sees toxicity and acidity in my posts?
Though i have my point of view, it is apparently different, but this is my point of view.

I have a huge issue with pantheons in Deity, because most of them have a faith generation that is either too low or comes too late to allow founding a religion. If we were to balance pantheons around Deity, they would be hugely different! Yet the ones we have now work just fine for lower difficulties.

Well it is not that all pantheons should give you religion, i haven't said that. What i'm saying is that EVEVRY pantheon should have theoretical situation, where it is the best, or 2nd or 3rd best option. Right now Earth Mother is just unplayable. Even if you have with 4 mining luxuries in your capital, Flood Plains and mining monopoly - it is still worse than a bunch of other pantheons. This is what i call "imbalance". Every pantheon/policy/whatever should have its role on Deity, a situation where it is better than anything else. If there is a very small amount of situations - it is okay, but they should at least exist

a quick check on a league by league case will show how for example some heroes have absolute monster win % on lower skill leagues while having almost non existent win % on the top leagues, averaging out to an 50%.

Exactly. Does this mean that they are imbalanced? No. This means that people on this level do not understand how to use those heroes. They learn, improve themselves, and suddenly this hero is not that strong (that weak) anymore! You know, its like business, if your company is suffering losses - its your own problem, not anyones else.

I can say definitely that your note on SC2 is wrong. Many balance changes are designed to address concerns at the lower levels and are not a big factor at professional play.

As i said, its okay when it about general gameplay, but it is not okay when it is about precise numbers. Since you play SC2, here is a question: 12 pool for zerg, proxy Barracks for terran, proxy Gates for Protoss. These 3 strategies have 90% winrate in Bronze/Silver and 75% winrate in Gold leagues and you don't need any skill to do it. Is this imbalanced?
EDIT: I know for sure that devs speak only with professional players when tweaking numbers. My friend was ~top40 GM back in time
EDIT2: Bronze+Silver+low-Gold = more than 50% of players
EDIT3: Imaging you are a businessman. Your business is suffering losses. Should government help you, or should you try to cut losses and increase efficiency of you business?

 

[tu_79]

The AI techs up VERY quickly at first. I've never had a game where I lead the AI all game. In 99% of my games the leader is 5-10 techs ahead of me in classic-medevial, and the game closes hard later.

• In my Denmark game you can see an image of Assyria attacking my spearmen and archers with longswordsmen. I ended up winning. I wasn't playing poorly. It's just pretty insane most games.
• However I never seem to be behind in tech going into modern era. It seems 100% of the time I make it there I'm in the lead or neck and neck.

• I think the AI's science cost reduction should start lower and increase by era. (Slower to level up until Renaissance or Industrial where it balances out and then progressively cheaper.)

This is interesting. What you are really proposing is a different handicap curve. Moving some power from the early game to the mid-late game. It's the way VP is tricking players, letting them think AI play with the same tools, but buffing AI every passing era. You could trick deity players too.
If you weaken early AI, human players could potentially snowball faster, so the bonuses for mid-late game AI need to be much stronger. It could be difficult to find a nice curve, though.

If the AI needs more things to build could you just enable them to build some early buildings without actually giving them a tech? Like AI can build Council and focus science/gold in ancient but not actually get the techs?

• This would obviously help prevent the impossible wonders to grab, while fixing the 'problem'.
• I'm not actually sure having too much bonus production is a problem that needs to be solved, but this is the best solution imo.

Seems good. But I still don't understand why AI cannot do any other useful thing, like start producing a worker, or farming, and change the production queue when a new technology comes online.

It's impossible to balance around other difficulties because players are a mixed bag of skills

Yes and no. Obviously the game cannot be perfectly balanced for every x difficulty player, but when there's a trend, you can balance for the majority of players. Right now, there's a trend in settler difficulty reporting that AI is attacking them too often, because players are considered too weak, what proves to be wrong assumption because those players can beat the incoming AI attacks without problems. Well, maybe three reports cannot be considered a trend, but there is not much feedback from those difficulties (reddit forum is less vivid than this one). And we need feedback from noob players playing in such difficulties, because seasoned players experience is different. I tried to play settler myself, and faced 0 problems.

 

[LukaSlovenia29]

I like Elliot's proposal of adjusting AI's science bonuses. I too have noticed that on Deity in the early eras, I'm always behind the AI in science, in the middle eras I catch up and in the later ones I pull ahead. So if it's possible to tweak the numbers, that'd be great.

I like the proposal of 100% capturing other civs' UBs.

I think the slave promotion expiring after a certain amount of turns is a good idea (though I'd prefer sooner, like 35 turns or so).

I think we could simply move the council building to Agriculture and have the AI not start with any free tech. That way, the AI will have shrines, monuments and councils to build from the get go, more than enough to keep it productively occupied without a need for a free tech.

As for the whole Deity-nonDeity debate:
- I think the current system works really well, Gazebo has been doing an amazing job of balancing everyone's comments (and it's important to give lots of attention to non-Deity players' opinions) and an even more amazing job working on the mod.
- I have accepted that it will be impossible to perfectly balance the mod for each difficulty, so I'm ok with some imbalances on Immortal/Deity where I usually play. Once the final version of the mod will be out, we can put out instructions for players on how to tweak the game files to adjust their level to their desires, or someone will create a modmod called "Deity VP modmod", intended to balance the game for different difficulty levels. Or if we're really lucky, we'll be able to persuade Gazebo to release several slightly different FINAL VP versions for each difficulty (for example with slightly different pantheon numbers for Deity level).

But all in all, I'm really happy with the progress and the direction of Vox Populi.

 

[randomnub]

Conceptually, I don't like frontloaded freebies to the AI, the main selling point of this mod to me was the removal of bonus AI settlers/techs at higher difficulties while making the mid and late game less of a pushover once you finally catch up. Having a (small) chance to compete for any wonder was also a nice novelty, I've never been a wonderwhore by heart but more options are always welcome.

Stonehenge gone at turn 13 now. Puts you in a bad mood, then you realize Spain got it. Yes, the most useless wonder for a civ that needs just 10 Faith (or a settler) for a pantheon. Isabella would have played smarter before this.

Free Pottery is just cheap, if you felt Deity AI had nothing to do for the first 10 turns, remove the free units and give it more subtle innate advantages to production. Being able to produce settlers straight away is not even that great option in some cases: it delays early tech/culture gains, causes early border disputes and for authority settling every available spot pre-Imperium is just bad. Most important of all, I'm not buying the idea that AI had nothing to do in those first 10 turns, between monument/shrine and why not some more units or farming, it might be inefficient but it helps staying ahead.

Instead, this just happened. Deity all standard.

Turn 81 pantheon. For the early game God Pocatello. Behind me in score, the early game Slug Bismark with what was probably my worst early game luck ever Surely he could have built a shrine in those 10 turns.

 

[ashendashin]

Quoi?

G

I was only joking around at the time and hoped that it'd be enough to get at least Elliot to look at how we was talking to people on here. Mods don't like personal stuff like belittling people you consider to be bellow you, but once you start using stuff like 'salt' then it gets real obvious where the thread's been going. I found it funny that both people arguing for holding their views higher are commonly associated with such terms outside of civ. I doubt they found it particularly insulting.

Hey mates, why do you all take this so personally? I love you all, i have nothing against anyone of you. Ask @ElliotS or @ashendashin, they spoke to me couple of times. I'm nice and polite, why the hell everyone sees toxicity and acidity in my posts?
Though i have my point of view, it is apparently different, but this is my point of view.

You can fault Elliot's tone. You should know by now that he's not the best at being nice to people, and I can assure you that he's made that perfectly clear in this thread. Besides that, associating your position with highly competitive games isn't doing you any good. Civ has never been like that, nor should it be.

Of course all you want is high quality tuning, but I honestly don't see much tuning that comes from prince players. Or anyone besides those times CrazyG or someone else comes up with a whole list of numbers. G is quite good at picking through our mess of posts, if missing a few things. Most number changes seem to be his view of things from AI tests or a want to experiment. I'll say it again for everyone, let's present well reasoned arguments after playing the game, yeah? That's what G listens to. He does a great job at that, if you ask me.

 

[Giza]

I just tried a few games yesterday and i'm getting mauled by the AI in Diety. In three games, the top AI was up more than 10-12 techs by the time I hit classical (and they hit medieval). In one of these games, I built councils early, had a coral monopoly and even built the great library (I usually never do this). I also minimized expanding (2 cities plus my capital, just to get the coral monopoly) and still fell back. The top AI (Maya) managed to have a 12 tech lead and reached the renaissance while I was in mid-classical.

BTW, Oracle now gets prioritized by the AI, which is logical, but makes it harder still.

I use to be competitive in Deity, but I think i'm going to go back to Immortal... for now.

 

[Owlbebach]

In three games, the top AI was up more than 10-12 techs by the time I hit classical (and they hit medieval). In one of these games, I built councils early, had a coral monopoly and even built the great library (I usually never do this). I also minimized expanding (2 cities plus my capital, just to get the coral monopoly) and still fell back. The top AI (Maya) managed to have a 12 tech lead and reached the renaissance while I was in mid-classical.

Dunno, seems like a normal game for me

 

[CrabHelmet]

12 tech by Renaissance is unusual; on the other hand it was the Maya.

 

[ElliotS]

You can fault Elliot's tone. You should know by now that he's not the best at being nice to people, and I can assure you that he's made that perfectly clear in this thread. Besides that, associating your position with highly competitive games isn't doing you any good. Civ has never been like that, nor should it be.

I mean it's less that I'm not nice and more that I don't care if what I see as true offends people. I'm not trying to offend people, but it happens anyway. Not so much a defense as a clarification. I'm perfectly happy to wear the mantle of villain if that's how some people want to see it.

Dunno, seems like a normal game for me

This is my problem. 12 is a little more than normal, but not unusual. Keep playing and you'll probably be leading by Modern.

I think the game would be more fun with bonuses changed to keep pace with player on a similar play style.

@Gazebo are the AI bonuses described in depth somewhere? I want to make a separate thread on them but don't like speaking out of my ass.