Overall List of Civilization Adjustment Ideas

[Gyra Solune]

Welp time to list out my own ideas for how I think existing Civilizations should be changed or adjusted. The primary point of this is to ensure every Civilization has only one Unique Unit, but I figured since I intended to do that, I ought to just go the full mile and revise everything.

America

Spoiler :

ADDED:

Unique Improvement - Amusement Park: Available at Railroad. Provides +3 Happiness and +3 Culture. Tourism derived from this Culture is doubled. Must be built adjacent to a City in locations without other Resources present.

REMOVED:

Unique Unit - B17: Made available instead through a modified Pentagon (changed to add 2 Air Unit slots to every city, and fills one of those with a free B17, which is otherwise unchanged). May still be gifted by City-States (adjusted to be able to give unique Air Units provided there is room - a similar property would apply to Maritime CSs with Naval Units, this may be where those Air Units are made available as well)

ADJUSTED:

Unique Ability - Manifest Destiny: Land units have +1 Sight and double movement along or across Rivers. 75% discount when purchasing tiles. Double free Social Policies and Tenets from Wonders or early Ideology adoption.

Unique Unit - Minuteman: Replaces Musketman. Keeps existing bonuses, gains an additional base movement point.

These changes are kind of across the board, really. The Amusement Park was picked as it was a very American sort of phenomenon, and during the late 19th to early 20th century, what was formerly more of a park or garden became unique, widespread locations that made extensive use of cutting-edge manufacturing techniques and integrated themselves firmly into the blossoming culture of the country. From a gameplay perspective they basically support a very wide and tall empire that can provide loads of Tourism even if previously one had missed the ball on that.

While the B17 is the more solid of the two unique Air units, it's ultimate still kind of ill-fitting. While the limit on air unit number made them more valuable, yes, they're still just kinda okay and are largely useful on the merits of Bomber mechanics themselves. I figured one should kill two birds with one stone and make the Pentagon more useful while freeing up a civ's UU slot.

The UA changes are just a few more small things that help on a wide spectrum of things. I reduced the tile buying cost even further mostly because that bonus just sorta paled now that the Shoshone exist and it was only marginally helpful in the first place - now that same amount of cash does 50% more territory buying, still not too game-changing but very useful. The doubled free Policies were mostly intended for Ideology tenets, based around America's functional super-early adoption of Freedom and pioneering the tenets thereof (though of course, their playstyle is more of an Order proponent if anything), but I figured that doubling up the free policies in general was decently powerful and useful across the eras. And then the typical scenario-found "rivers are not such a big pain to units" ability that we see on the Franks and Belgium. A frequently-suggested addition that works nicely in creating a generally more mobile military, which works well in conjunction with the Minutemen upgrade - a slight thing that turns them into a very fast rapid response force indeed.

Arabia

Spoiler :

ADJUSTED:

Unique Ability - Ships of the Desert: Doubled Oil removed, land trade routes gain a base 1.5 multiplier to gold.

Basically this is just a personal thing that I don't like doubled strategic resources. We'll get to that on Russia. But yes, I put in a 1.5x Land Route bonus mostly to support Arabia's Caravan focus - now they don't miss out on as much Gold by utilizing the rest of their UA. Sea trade routes will still almost always be more profitable, but as the Arabians were masters of trading networks on land, I felt I ought to represent that stronger.

Assyria

Spoiler :

ADJUSTED:

Unique Building - Royal Library: XP bonus boosted to 30.

Common complaint that the XP bonus for this is just too small, especially given that to get it, you need something you can only get an era later and have to put in a decent amount of work for. With a bonus of 30 instead of 10, this means the Royal Library will pretty much give units trained there three promotions in conjunction with a Barracks, which is far more potent and worth the cost of a Great Work to obtain.

Austria

Spoiler :

No changes. Honestly, Austria doesn't need any. They've got one of the more potent UAs, an overall awesome UU, and one of the best UBs in the game now that Great Works are so important. Rock on, Holy Roman Empress.

Babylon

Spoiler :

ADJUSTMENTS:

Unique Unit - Bowman: Ranged and Melee Combat Strength increased to 10, removed Cannot Melee Attack promotion (which it passes on to upgrades).

Unique Building - Walls of Babylon: Alongside its current defensive and offensive bonuses, gains +2 Faith and +1 Culture, and an additional +2 :c5tourism: Tourism upon researching Archaeology.

Overall just making Babylon's lackluster uniques more interesting. The Bowmen are now hybrid attack units just slightly weaker than a Spearmen - this is mostly meant for defensive purposes, so that alongside being more resilient, they counterattack for more damage and are capable to move in to take cities. The Walls are also made into a more yieldful building, which I did mostly because the Walls of Babylon were equally legendary for their cultural significance, especially to historians. The +2 Faith might be a bit much, revising it to +1 is perfectly reasonable, it's just that on paper +1 Culture and Faith seems weak for a building that basically doesn't do anything in the first place. ^^;

Brazil

Spoiler :

ADJUSTMENTS:

Unique Improvement - Brazilwood Camp: Provides +3 of each yield now, and may also be built in non-Tundra Forest.

Unique Unit - Pracinha: Has an additional promotion that also gives Culture for kills (at double the enemy's combat strength), and starts with the Charge and Ambush I promotions.

Smaller buffs, mainly centered around making the Camps a bit more powerful and less restricted in location, and pumping up the Pracinha more now that the Minutemen do what they do with more bonuses and available earlier. I considered also making it replace the Great War Infantry over the regular kind, but in a way that kinda makes very little sense.

Byzantium

Spoiler :

ADDED:

Unique Building - Peristyle: Replaces the Amphitheater. Provides +2 Faith with +1 more for each Great Work slot filled. Has an additional Great Work slot (theming bonus for works being from different Civilizations but the same era).

REMOVED:

Unique Unit - Cataphract: Made into a normally-produced unit. Tech tree shifted around some to where Horseback Riding is an Ancient tech (this may require three tiers), and the Cataphract is made into its Classical-era upgrade. Unit itself gains +1 movement, and by the by all Mounted units now have their city attack penalty removed and may gain defensive terrain bonuses, so the Cataphract gets those too.

ADJUSTED:

Unique Ability - Patriarchate of Constantinople: Founding and enhancing a Religion each provide an additional belief. +5 Gold for every foreign Trade Route going through a city.

Unique Unit - Dromon: Gains the Bombardment I and Indirect Fire promotions.

A bunch of stuff here. Most notably is the Peristyle, which is mostly meant for lots of cultural Faith output, and the ability to get two bonus beliefs - though the second one comes upon enhancing it. The trade route thing works if those trade routes are not going to your civilization, only passing through it, and is meant to simulate the wealth Byzantium acquired from being at the crossroads of numerous trade routes. The Cataphract is removed, largely because it wasn't even a specifically Byzantine thing - it was additionally used all across Persia and was basically just the prototype for armored knights. The Dromon was upgraded to be better effective against land units and cities from the get-go, as its firing range is not impeded by hills and can do more damage even without a Barracks.

Carthage

Spoiler :

ADDED:

Unique Building - Cothon: Replaces Lighthouse. Gives an additional +1 production from Sea Resources, alongside +25% Production and +15 XP towards Naval units.

REMOVED:

Unique Unit - Quinquireme: Made into a generic unit available as a Trireme upgrade at Compass (or maybe Optics, I don't know), with its Combat Strength adjusted to fit the era.

ADJUSTED:

Unique Ability - Phoenician Heritage: Units only take 20 damage from ending their turn on a mountain, otherwise the same.

The Quinquireme basically doesn't do anything, so it's better fit to be a Trireme upgrade than replacement. Biggest bonus here is the Cothon. I didn't want it to replace the Harbor, as that would nullify the point of the building, so the Cothon replaces the Lighthouse and basically ramps up the ocean production, especially towards naval units, so yay, buffs in general to make sense. Also the 50 damage for being on a mountain seems a tad too much.

China

Spoiler :

ADJUSTMENTS:

Unique Ability - Innovations of the East: Technologies only require one of their prerequisites to research.

Unique Building - Paper Maker: +2 Gold is removed (it is still maintenance-free), but in its place it gains Science for resource diversity in Trade Routes, even if China is ahead in tech.

Unique Unit - Chu-Ko-Nu: Basically gets Art of War via promotions - Great Generals II and Great General Combat Bonus.

I have never been a fan of China's UA, as it is the very definition of powerful yet boring, and totally underselling China as a civilization. A major cradle of human advancement and one of the longest-standing continuous cultures in the world, famed for its incredible technological achievements that were seemingly magical to the rest of the world, and it gets..."Hey, that Sun Tzu guy was born there, right?". So basically this China is a tech beast. The UA is to represent how they basically tech-beelined in real life, developing stunning innovations still used today despite not having invested heavily in all the other stuff that other peoples needed to even try and use it. The UB changes are something I hoped for ever since I heard about trade routes being in BNW, but alas, it did not come to be. Basically the same Resource Diversity mechanics that apply to Gold on regular trade routes will also apply to Science when a city involved has a Paper Maker - this works both ways. Trade routes with China are henceforth of extreme value throughout the game, and will basically always provide the most Science from those routes no matter where they are on the tech tree. And basically I put the Art of War stuff on the Chu-Ko-Nu because why not.

Denmark

Spoiler :

ADDED:

Unique Improvement - Runestone: Available at Drama and Poetry. +1 Culture and Faith, with an additional +1 of each yield for each destroyed Level 5 unit the city working it produced. Must be built adjacent to a Strategic Resource, and may not be next to another Runestone.

REMOVED:

Unique Unit - Norwegian Ski Infantry: I dunno what to do with this in the game itself. In lieu of a Norway civ that I would prefer, I...guess it would work as part of an Exploration policy? I have no idea. Otherwise it would be unchanged.

ADJUSTED:

Unique Ability - Viking Fury: Alongside existing benefits, gain triple Gold and health for pillaging, and double Culture and Great Works for conquering a city.

Unique Unit - Berserker: ...is this thing gonna be at Metal Casting or not? If not, add that. If so, no changes.

The Runestone! A sort of interesting improvement - basically the idea is that it honors your deceased "heroes" - any units that reached level 5. This is of course not easy to do, as to my knowledge there's no way to just churn out units with 5 promotions off the bat no matter how much military buildings you got in there, which you know, is the point. The idea is that should one of your elite warriors falls in battle, you get something out of it - only for the city in which it was "born" though. At level 5, that unit is probably valuable to the point where you wouldn't just go "yay, now die for culture!", but it could be a veritable choice. And of course, as the Vikings you'd have that guy go out in a blaze of glory. This...might not work out so smoothly, especially from a coding perspective. In which case I guess an alternative would be to get those yields from each unit that died on the offense - basically, lost a stalemate. Same sort of honoring blazes of glory idea there.

And of course Viking Fury giving more rewards for razing and pillaging, yay, always nice.

Egypt

Spoiler :

ADJUSTMENTS:

Unique Building - Burial Tomb: Provides +1 additional Faith for every Era passed after its construction.

Unique Unit - War Chariot: Remove lack of defensive terrain bonus, make it start with Accuracy II and the ability to move after attacking.

Egypt's pretty solid - it's just the War Chariot that's overall meh. A starting Accuracy II means it'll be deadly in open terrain from the offset, and a Barracks means that's a free level III or a second-tier alternative promotion. And of course moving after attacking is always appropriate for so-called masters of charioteering. The Burial Tomb bonus is just a more context-neat buff since it states right there that Egypt was big on ancestor worship - what better way to make that work than making the worship harder the older that ancestor is? ^^:

England augh holy crap I'm a bit burnt-out on this and England is going to be tricky to do because I want something more interesting than "fast boats!" and I am torn as to whether the Ship of the Line (less interesting and awesome, more iconic and appropriate) or the Longbowman (more interesting and awesome, less iconic and appropriate), alongside no idea as to what the building or improvement should be. I'll finish this later, mostly just posting it now so that it's here and a sudden computer crash or volcano eruption doesn't completely erase all this typing.

TO BE CONTINUED/EDITED LATER

but yeah what do you all think of these so far, kinda christmas-list-ey I imagine. Yes yes yes, I know, a lot of these might be a bit too much, but I honestly think that buffing civs is better than nerfing them, because nerfing inherently makes civs more generic and samey-feeling, while buffing makes them more interesting and diverse. So yeah say things

 

[FeiLing]

Y u no balance?

Unfortunately I can't agree with much there, only:
-Doubled strategic resources is such an awful ability, whether it's UA or an SP/Tenet.
-Your ideas about China are quite interesting.

 

[Pepo]

I like your ideas(you are going for one UU and UB for each civ)but i dissagree with some:
-UU for america should be the b17-there aren't a lot of late UU and it also boost america late game.also the minuetman could be recalled militia and be made a generic unit.they can be easily made,but are weaker than musketmen
-Ski infantery could be just more costly riflemen avatible for all civs.they get bonus on tundra and ice and move double,but they are weaker on deserts and plains

 

[black213]

Babylon deserves no buffs (more like nerfs) because their UA is the best of all.