Neomega said:
Civ IV experts:
Basically, this is where suggestion comes in. In all honesty, I do not have time to play civilization IV much, due to my ambitions. But when I do play it, I still find it highly addictive, allthoguh I have never come close to beating it on Monarch, which has frustrated me greatly.
It is because at Monarch the game changes. It both gains and loses strategy. At this point turn advantage is the most important thing. One thing i like about mods like yours and others is they try to not only add something different but to correct imbalances like this. I will explain in hopes it will allow you to also incorporate things into you mod to make the game more fun and better overall. Suggesting new units or techs is the easy part. Suggesting and determining which play aspects of the game need to be re-examined is harder in my opinion.
For example on monarch and higher it gets harder to win consistantly with a spiritual civ. Why? Because spiratual civs are already up to 10 turns behind from turn 1. Napoleon starts with wheel and agriculture. Isabella with fishing and mysticism. If her initial city is on land and has no fish squares then she is already two tech behind turn 1. Napleon can start to pump out workers and immedietly start farming, building roads, research mining while hes doing this and then start to mine things for production. In the meantime Isabella has shot for buddism but the AI got there first, so shes now shooting for polythesism. By the time she gets it she will be 4 techs or 30 turns behind on essential tech compared to Napoleon. Not only that but Napoleons city has been farmed, mined and has roads connecting essential areas so he can respond faster to threats. For this example we will say the farms and mines have increased the yield of the essentials by 20% in Napoleons city compared to Issabella. This means every 5 turns that goes by Isabella is falling 1 more turn behind. In contrast Isabella's city has nothing because she has no tech that allows imporvments save fishing. None of the techs Isabella has are essential because none of them further your growth, production or research ability which is the only thing important this early. Happiness is essential and she does have that from the religeon but one elephant or gold square in Napoleon's city negates this advantage. Assume a few more turns go by and Isabella feels threatened by Napoleon. So she decides to go for hunting and then archers. Shes is now 6 techs or 40 to 50 turns of research behind napoleon and the game has already been decided at this point.... If Napoleon beats her to alphabet he can form a tech trading cabal that excludes her as he trades all his essential tech for the non-essential ones she has, but from another player, not her, and hence the person playing Isabella is now around 100 turns behind by the time Napoleon has alphabet with no chance of catching up.
I type all of this because if you have not experienced it yourself you risk integrating this type of thing into your mod without even knowing it and yours seems to have much potential and I would hate it if it accidently did this. There are many ways to fix these game balance problems though and make it so the game is not all about turn advantage. One is to make non-essential techs (which in my mind means techs that dont further your food, hammers or research) more useful. Fall of Heaven did this by making the religeons (and hence non-essential techs) in the game very powerful and the special units you get from them worth getting quickly even if you have to sacrafice the ability to improve your production and commerce. The fact that some of the units you get from the non-essential techs are heros and only one can exist in the world at any one time makes these techs even more worthwhile to shoot for early on. Its possible in that mod to have a totally crap infrastructure, no roads, no farms, yet have some of the toughest units in the game (that other empires cant have). This is really the best answer to the problem. To try and make your mod so that the equivlant techs of polythesism for example does something much better than it does now so that anyone whos skilled at all doesnt just skip it at the beginning.
Another way is to make essential basic abilities like farming and stuff come later. This way your first few techs will reflect strategy and playstyle decisions and not simply choices that you make for fear of falling behind and losing turn advantage to other players.
Another good thing that many mods have also done is of course to push back tech trading or even eliminate it. Tech trading in this game gets bad. A few players can form tech cabals each researching one branch then exchanging it while excluding selected players from this. The players left out of the dominant cabal will never catchup tech wise. By pushing back tech trading (alphabet is way too early) it allows for the game to develop more and people to carve out empires and/or refuse military threats without having to cave in from fear of being excluded from the trading and never catching up. Also it will prevent tech whoring early on.
Lastly another idea which i saw in Master of Mirror mod from civ3 was to make essential techs less valuable relative to the others. For example not having farming and mining when someone else does will significantly put you at a disadvantage early on. But if the game is setup to where land without farms and without mines produces a decent yield as is, it wont be such a loss if you dont get these techs right off the bat.... Hence your first few tech decisions can be less locked in and reflect more of your personality and playstyle
Anyway you said you dont have enough time to play... Do not worry about this. Some of us like me have disected the game mechanics inside and out and can offer you any help you need. If you are unable to beat the game on monarchy it doesnt mean you arent a good strategist. It simply means you maybe are trying too hard and havent caught on to the fact that there is no strategy at the beginning in monarch level or higher unfortunetly. There is just a mad rush to not lose turn advantage and an embracing cowardice that overtakes you from not wanting to make enemies for fear of being excluded from the tech trading and losing even more turn advantage. This is not fun in my mind nor does it test your strategy skills.
I hope what ive typed is useful because there are flaws in the vanilla game like this which make it un-fun yet which many mods have tried to correct and some have succeeded with flying colors. I hope yours does too.
