Next patch speculation thread

[Jkchart]

And if you think coastal cities cannot be hit by tornadoes, droughts, floods, blizzards and sandstorms you would be wrong. Making things ‘rebalanced’ I doubt will be adequate in that regard.
If coastal cities as important at the beginning of the game as they were in history then in combination that may be right but it ain’t gonna happen. Especially as they increased coastal lowlands last patch.
I can agree I had a run of bad luck but about 20 hours of my life discarded based on bad luck that I had no control over is questionable.
A game with 10 K rolls and things sorta balance out but if just 1 roll can have this effect it is a crap design.

Of course they can be hit by lots. I’ve seen tornadoes jump the sea which is always LOVELY. Ugh.

But yes to have the same “bad luck” over and over again is no longer bad luck. You are very right.

 

[oSiyeza]

Why wouldn't they keep updating things for non-expansion version? We still paid for the game! I sure hope they'll update all versions when it's relevant in the future. Not sure if they'll get Norway up to date but I don't really see any good reason why they shouldn't do that even though those people didn't pay extra for the expansion, because they'd still be experiencing the same unbalance.

So far I think they have been actually fairly consistent on updating base game features where possible. Such as bringing the on map search feature to all game versions. Other game systems, are more complex and as GS is in general a more flexed out version of the game. I found understandable that not all new features and balance can be ported to all game versions. However i expect them to include bug fixes and basic balance changes for all players. Lets hope so.

 

[ghost88]

PS: Thanks for keeping the conversation polite and healthy, though. Appreciated.

I try to keep all my post as if we were talking face to face.The Internet would be a more enjoyable place if all would do so.
I will leave this part of the thread as we were skating very close to OT, and you agreed to my main point CC should be scalable.
In an earlier post I stated I would like to see Spying, CC, Disasters, and World Congress should be optional. On further reflection I would change that to a scale of zero to five with zero being none and five being "I used to complain that the end game was boring, I was told be careful what you wish for, I should have listened".

 

[Duuk]

The problem is the repair costs/times.

If this was Civ4 builders, where in the late game they're mostly sitting around, it would be more manageable. But in Civ6 we need to rush-build the builders, race them to those wrecked cities, which aren't producing, spend turns worth of charges, rinse, repeat, and pray to RNGeesus that we don't get hit again. And for coastal civs that can happen MULTIPLE TIMES per game.

It's bad game design, which they themselves admitted because they said they wanted to avoid "RNG negative events" when they did the previews of GS.

 

[CPWimmer]

Why wouldn't they keep updating things for non-expansion version? We still paid for the game! I sure hope they'll update all versions when it's relevant in the future. Not sure if they'll get Norway up to date but I don't really see any good reason why they shouldn't do that even though those people didn't pay extra for the expansion, because they'd still be experiencing the same unbalance.

It's more a matter of "what they will update" vs. "will they update".

In general, they won't spend much, if any, time on balancing Civs in the Vanilla or R+F rule sets. At this point, the supported rule set itself has moved on from these two versions. They have to take into account the full set of rules (loyalty from R+F, World Congress from GS, the balance of power between ALL existing Civs, etc.) to make those kinds of decisions. Civs in Vanilla aren't experiencing "the same kind of imbalance". For example there is no Phoenicia and Maori to attempt to balance other coastal civs against in Vanilla.

They will however continue to make bug fixes, and general improvements (Search Tool, for example) across all 3 versions of the game. These don't have to have different iterations to account for the existence or absence of certain features in the game.

In this particular case, it sounds like there may have been an unintended consequence if they tweaked the pillaging rules across all versions of the game - but I would guess it's only about a 10% chance they will go back and tweak non GS Norway (or anyone else) because of it. Most likely they will have done a regression test to make sure things still work, and that's about all the time and resources they have (and will) spend on Vanilla and R+F for patches (at least based on my experience in software development).

 

[Maquis]

The problem is the repair costs/times.

If this was Civ4 builders, where in the late game they're mostly sitting around, it would be more manageable. But in Civ6 we need to rush-build the builders, race them to those wrecked cities, which aren't producing, spend turns worth of charges, rinse, repeat, and pray to RNGeesus that we don't get hit again. And for coastal civs that can happen MULTIPLE TIMES per game.

It's bad game design, which they themselves admitted because they said they wanted to avoid "RNG negative events" when they did the previews of GS.

I would like to see them enable Military Engineers, or even melee troops to fix damage caused by disasters. Simulate sending in the National Guard for disaster relief.

 

[Kmart_Elvis]

I would like to see them enable Military Engineers, or even melee troops to fix damage caused by disasters. Simulate sending in the National Guard for disaster relief.

This would be a nice inadvertent buff to England too! ME production bonus + coastal settling = really quick to recover after disasters. Would at least make WOTW better, and wouldn't have to change anything about her either.

 

[Foulweather]

I would like to see them enable Military Engineers, or even melee troops to fix damage caused by disasters. Simulate sending in the National Guard for disaster relief.

Oh yes this needs to happen.

 

[Jkchart]

This would be a nice inadvertent buff to England too! ME production bonus + coastal settling = really quick to recover after disasters. Would at least make WOTW better, and wouldn't have to change anything about her either.

Hey @dshirk hate calling you out and pinging you but maybe something cool that you guys could look into? The increased utility of Military Engineers with dams, canals, and railroads has been great but also mobilizing them for district repairs like the national guard seems like a cool idea!

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

Hey @dshirk hate calling you out and pinging you but maybe something cool that you guys could look into? The increased utility of Military Engineers with dams, canals, and railroads has been great but also mobilizing them for district repairs like the national guard seems like a cool idea!

Seems like a good idea for a military policy card.

 

[King of Prussia]

i believe ME can already repair broken improvements. but yes, i do agree that the cost to repair districts and their buildings is far too much. IDK how the cost is set, but it needs a lot of tweaking. It gets really bad if you take a city from an enemy and most of its districts are pillaged(which for me, is almost always someone else doing it outside of spies) 20+ turns to repair just one district is obscene. Multiply that by 2, 3, 4 or even 5 districts and that city is done for the rest of the game if it just repairs.

ME for some reason still have limited uses(2?) to build roads. Just remove that limit already. It's not like roads are that great for movement outside of moving over rough terrain until later in the game. They come in at a point where roads are meh. later in the game, they will be making RR. Forts, at least in SP, aren't worth building. Having ME be able to rush repair or rush build things like flood barriers would be nice.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

i believe ME can already repair broken improvements. but yes, i do agree that the cost to repair districts and their buildings is far too much. IDK how the cost is set, but it needs a lot of tweaking. It gets really bad if you take a city from an enemy and most of its districts are pillaged(which for me, is almost always someone else doing it outside of spies) 20+ turns to repair just one district is obscene. Multiply that by 2, 3, 4 or even 5 districts and that city is done for the rest of the game if it just repairs.

ME for some reason still have limited uses(2?) to build roads. Just remove that limit already. It's not like roads are that great for movement outside of moving over rough terrain until later in the game. They come in at a point where roads are meh. later in the game, they will be making RR. Forts, at least in SP, aren't worth building. Having ME be able to rush repair or rush build things like flood barriers would be nice.

Yes, if they can make dams and canals, flood barriers just makes logical sense.

 

[UWHabs]

i believe ME can already repair broken improvements. but yes, i do agree that the cost to repair districts and their buildings is far too much. IDK how the cost is set, but it needs a lot of tweaking. It gets really bad if you take a city from an enemy and most of its districts are pillaged(which for me, is almost always someone else doing it outside of spies) 20+ turns to repair just one district is obscene. Multiply that by 2, 3, 4 or even 5 districts and that city is done for the rest of the game if it just repairs.

ME for some reason still have limited uses(2?) to build roads. Just remove that limit already. It's not like roads are that great for movement outside of moving over rough terrain until later in the game. They come in at a point where roads are meh. later in the game, they will be making RR. Forts, at least in SP, aren't worth building. Having ME be able to rush repair or rush build things like flood barriers would be nice.

A cool upgrade to ME would be to let them use a charge to repair a building or district. Might still be a gross cost imbalance, but at least that would be one way to transfer production to your damaged cities in times of need.

And yeah, given they can build railroads with no charges, building a "free" road makes sense. Heck, if you want to have a cost to it, just have it cost 1 iron per tile, and it's not something you're going to spam on every tile. But would at least be nice to have a reason to get an early ME to cap off your road network if the traders aren't going where you want it to.

 

[CPWimmer]

Have there been any changes in the Steam DB this week that would put a damper on a Thursday (tomorrow) Patch Release?

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

Have there been any changes in the Steam DB this week that would put a damper on a Thursday (tomorrow) Patch Release?

Nothing for or against it at this point.

 

[ghost88]

Yes, if they can make dams and canals, flood barriers just makes logical sense.

Especially since most of the Flood Barriers in the US were built by the Army Corp of Engineers, granted they are both military and civilian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Corps_of_Engineers

 

[RohirrimElf]

Could we write of this weak for next patch update. It is to quiet for my liking.

Would really like to read through a meaty patch note update today with some good AI stuff in it.

 

[pokiehl]

Could we write of this weak for next patch update. It is to quiet for my liking.

Would really like to read through a meaty patch note update today with some good AI stuff in it.

Well, you'll know for sure in a matter of hours. I hope it's not any later than next week; I'm really looking forward to playing without the city-state blobs!

 

[kaspergm]

Wouldn't next week make more sense in terms of calendar dates, also? Most patches have fallen in beginning of months since last expansion, if my memory serves me right.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

The patches typically take about a month after we see the qa builds start updating. The last one took a month and a week. The patch last spring took over two months, but we can tell there were issues because they had rollbacks.

This one is currently sitting at a little over a month and 2 weeks.