NQMod for Civ 6

[notque]

Doesn't seem to be any thread on civfanatics about NQMod, and that's a shame, so I thought I'd make one.

Do any of you play NQMod? Have any opinions or thoughts about it?

 

[MaximusPlatypus]

I like it. I use it even in sp. Well, the Balance/UI parts at least. The type of MP groups I play in are more "Immersion"/ builder type players so while there are wars, we don't have a lot of rushes until at least Medieval era. The coastal buffs alone are great, we actually do tend to have naval conflicts as more cities tend to be coastal. The only complaint I've heard are the settler cost increases. These guys like to have huge empires lol.

 

[notque]

I like it. I use it even in sp. Well, the Balance/UI parts at least. The type of MP groups I play in are more "Immersion"/ builder type players so while there are wars, we don't have a lot of rushes until at least Medieval era. The coastal buffs alone are great, we actually do tend to have naval conflicts as more cities tend to be coastal. The only complaint I've heard are the settler cost increases. These guys like to have huge empires lol.

In the beta for 4 we have settler costs down again.

 

[komodowaran]

well uped settler cost was one of the parts i liked about the NQ mod while i disliked other parts

 

[notque]

well uped settler cost was one of the parts i liked about the NQ mod while i disliked other parts

Not everyone is going to agree with changes. We made different changes to wide play to make additional cities have a negative.

We have a science and gold negative per cities now. We're in beta though, so all of these changes are TBD until we release.

 

[A+ombomb]

The main reason why the settler cost is unnecessary, is the (good) change to districts, as being a function of the number of districts you have of that type. This already increases the virtual cost of a new city enough that increasing the settler cost isn't entirely necessary.

 

[Mr_Happy]

Not everyone is going to agree with changes. We made different changes to wide play to make additional cities have a negative.

We have a science and gold negative per cities now. We're in beta though, so all of these changes are TBD until we release.

Interesting to bring back the wide empire science nerf from Civ V to balance out wide vs tall a bit. I think it sort of circumvents the real issue though which I think is that a huge city vs a small city as long as they both of maxed out campuses (which isn't that hard to achieve) there's really not that much difference in science output. There's no real need to dedicate a city to science by building a million science improving things simply because there just aren't that many of those and they are well spaced out in the tech tree.

This is made most evident when playing as or against Germany and they hit Hansas and factories letting them flesh out campuses in all their cities faster then everybody else.

One thing I noticed is pretty much not utilized are specialist slots in your cities to work on say your campus. Simply because the yield is judged too low vs working an actual tile. You can imagine a real fat city be able to man the specialist slots vs a small city not being able to or suffering more from doing it production and growth wise. Upping the yield from specialists in general I think would go a long way to fulfill the designers vision we hard about during development of "specialized cities". For the campus though you could make that yield increase based on the buildings present or even use the agency bonus as the base specialist yield and on top adding building bonuses.

You guys have played with tile yields already with the coast and lighthouse changes so you'd know how feasible how dynamically editing district tile yield is with the current access we have to the code.

I guess a big drawback on specialist is also they still eat 2 food, so you can also chuck in what's been done in past civs and make specialists also produce 1 food so they essentially only consume 1 food instead of 2.

 

[notque]

One thing I noticed is pretty much not utilized are specialist slots in your cities to work on say your campus. Simply because the yield is judged too low vs working an actual tile. You can imagine a real fat city be able to man the specialist slots vs a small city not being able to or suffering more from doing it production and growth wise. Upping the yield from specialists in general I think would go a long way to fulfill the designers vision we hard about during development of "specialized cities". For the campus though you could make that yield increase based on the buildings present or even use the agency bonus as the base specialist yield and on top adding building bonuses.

I guess a big drawback on specialist is also they still eat 2 food, so you can also chuck in what's been done in past civs and make specialists also produce 1 food so they essentially only consume 1 food instead of 2.

We tried all Buildings having % yields, but that hasn't really worked for a variety of reasons in my view. We'll likely release it as a mod that's included, but off by default.

One of the negatives with heavy specialist usage is it takes a lot more time in an online game. Turns take far longer, and we're about at the limit of time it takes to get through a game already. Adding a bunch more time is hard to stomach.

I was thinking of flat buffing specialists. The 1 food idea is intriguing, but at the same time I don't want cities to continue to grow at max, even while working specialists. I'm not sure that trade off really adds to this particular discussion. It's more the yields on specialists is just too low.

 

[Mr_Happy]

One of the negatives with heavy specialist usage is it takes a lot more time in an online game. Turns take far longer, and we're about at the limit of time it takes to get through a game already. Adding a bunch more time is hard to stomach.

Doesn't the turn timer take care of the game pacing? I'm not familiar with the typical timer usage for the NQ group which is the target audience for the mod but I've found the dynamic timer to be reasonable. This is pretty subjective and it's tough to take in a balance equation since skill level also comes into play here and you want to try and balance the game for a reasonably wide skill level. That being said I like the idea of turn time as resource. It makes sense that a bigger empire is harder to manage and it's tougher to optimize everything vs a small/tall empire. In this particular instance specialist play would be tough to manage in a big empire vs a small one since you'd probably want to swap for food or production reasonably often due to timings and techs unlocking. Of course using turn time as a resource is a pretty provocative idea since the gut reaction when someone runs out of time in a turn is to get mad at the game (lag, orders slow to get in, UI slow to come up, misclicks from trying to go too fast or clicking last minute, etc.) and using frustration as a deterrent for wide empires would probably not win the popular vote.

I was thinking of flat buffing specialists. The 1 food idea is intriguing, but at the same time I don't want cities to continue to grow at max, even while working specialists. I'm not sure that trade off really adds to this particular discussion. It's more the yields on specialists is just too low.

Figuring out the exact yield buff is hard to gauge and you'd have to do some test runs. I wouldn't worry too much about giving too growth to cities considering even now housing and ammenities seem to be the real blockers anyway. Maybe this suggests cities grow too fast in online speed, or that the food/new pop doesn't scale fast enough as cities grow? I think 0 food or 0 production is a tough sell. You'd probably need to boost the specialist yield quite a bit to make it appealing and if it's too high you risk running into the same problem with campuses right now where everyone gets them because otherwise you fall behind too much. Culture in particular is tough to come by though so maybe this could be enough for theater squares to become relevant.

Figuring out the sweet spot for each specialist slot at the end of the day I think requires some play testing/trial an error. I don't know the typical release cycle for the balance mod but since you talked about a Beta I assume you have a group of play testers, could be worth running it by them see what comes out. At the very least see just how much you'd have to boost each specialists yield to make them worthwhile, hopefully it's not like +10!

Additionally it looks like changing just the base yield of district tiles (specialists) is a pretty straightforward change in Districts.xml so if you don't do any fancy scaling based on the buildings present it's a quick change.

Anyway, I love the idea of the project and look forward to playing more MP games with the NQ mod pack.

 

[A+ombomb]

You can simply make specialists get stacking bonus (cooperation). The output of specialists = total specialists of a type in a city ^2. Then allow a city to have a specialist of any type available for every 5 population it has. Or you could also allow a city to build more than one if the same district, thus also allowing a higher stack count.

 

[Soffacet]

One thing I would like to see addressed is Amenity breakpoints. Right now the benefit/drawback of positive/negative Amenities contains a needless inconsistency due to the fact that the effects activate on intervals of two. Which means that acquiring +1 Amenity might provide a city with +5% yield (if it hits the next breakpoint), or nothing at all (if it does not). The effect might average out to 2.5% over time, but the turn-to-turn inconsistency is unnecessary. Especially given the way that the game automatically shifts Amenities around your empire, I don't see any reason why Amenities shouldn't reside on a more continuous scale, with every point of positive/negative Amenity affecting yield by +/- 2.5%.

 

[Mr_Happy]

You can simply make specialists get stacking bonus (cooperation). The output of specialists = total specialists of a type in a city ^2. Then allow a city to have a specialist of any type available for every 5 population it has. Or you could also allow a city to build more than one if the same district, thus also allowing a higher stack count.

Interesting idea. Sounds like that would still make specialists irrelevant until you can stack 2 or more so that's waiting until universities etc. though which I like a bit less since by then you'd already be playing catch-up to someone whose just spammed campuses. I prefer the system where the buildings present dictate avaialble specialist slots as it forces some commitment from the city by dedicating the production towards specializing into a specific districts and its associated yield plus the buildings being at different points along the tech tree gives that number of possible slots a natural growth which I find is an elegant design. But maybe you are correct the current slot availability is too restrictive. Maybe 2 slots per building? or do +1,+2,+3 for tier 1/tier 2/tier 3 buildings so at max you have 6 slots.

How about making the adjacency bonus also apply to specialists? It might make civs like Brazil and Japan too strong but it would encourage you to have specialized cities. Specialist in 1 or 2 adjacency district isn't worth it but hey that +4 or +5 adjacency campus or theater square now that's worth using up a citizen instead of working a tile. Right now it seems adjacency bonuses aren't quite powerful enough for people to care all that much except maybe for industrial zones which has arguably the easiest to fulfill adjacency bonus with mines and quarries.

I like this idea as it rewards the player for efficient city planning and encourages choosing settling locations based on 1 or 2 specific districts, like going for horsehockey desert mountain because you can score a sweet campus adjacency or really trying to bunch up multiple cities worth of districts to boost 1 or 2 theatre squares as much as possible.

 

[notque]

Version 4 was released today on reddit.com/r/fruitymod

 

[pb1056]

Version 4 was released today on reddit.com/r/fruitymod

Hey man, awesome work. Any word on team settings ? I would love to play with friends and everone part of our alliance gets the W.

 

[notque]

Hey man, awesome work. Any word on team settings ? I would love to play with friends and everone part of our alliance gets the W.

They work fine but require edits to files within your game copy, as we can't edit them from the mod.

We can do this, but we have been avoiding it. There are other edits in their we'd like to make as well for easy of use, but again, it starts to get dicey editing people's actual files.

 

[pb1056]

A fresh reinstall would solve any problems someone might create if they screw it up, correct? And perhaps release this as a mod on this site, as a standalone from the majority of your work. I use other mods in collaboration with your stuff (More Units mod, ect.) and I have had to make changes to the files as part of the installation process. If you released the files, and a quick little explanation on where to put said files to make it run, I think alot of people would love you for that.

I play alot of single player and often go peaceful science/culture route. Its only recently that I have been playing more aggressively after watching game plays of yourself and Filthy. When I do play with friends, it turns into alot of fun for the first hour or so, then eventually they all attack me because we cant form an alliance and all go to space together.

Lastly, I just want to say thank you for all the work that you and your crew do. I think it is really cool that you put so much effort into improving the game that we all enjoy so much. I think it is really cool that you chat with the community and listen to feed back and give your own perspectives / answer questions. I do a lot of reading on the forums here, but today I actually created an account on here just to to post these comments, and now I plan on participating more on the forum.

 

[PeterChu]

I use NQ MOD v7.1 for my SP game. I am happy with the most of changes this mod made, especially regarding the rule for movement. The demographics screen is something I appreciate very much, a small thing that does a magic bringing back the good old flavor of the civ franchise . This makes me wonder why it is not out there in the Civ6 Vanilla.