PlayWithMe

[Slowpoke]

Ideally, your mod would have the A.I. expand more, so actually GETTING a large empire is, in and of itself, difficult. E.g. smellymummy's ICS mod, my expansion strategy changing, or maybe even a simple settler flavor increase.

 

[alpaca]

Yeah, I normally play on small maps because the game length on enormous ones is just too much, but on a huge map the current formula would make really powerful empires unmanageable. I figure it is important to note that though as it is a design constraint.

I have another thought about your upgrade paths: Why have upgrades at all if you are going to only have so few? Having upgrades means that everyone will want to build Muskets/Swordsmen/Warriors/Knights but never Cavalry/Rifles/Pikes/Longswords. I tried a build just today where all upgrades were turned off and it felt really good. It was a *huge* buff to the AI since I have to continually churn out more modern dudes but even on lower difficulty settings the AI put up a stiff fight a lot of the time because I did not have high level units. It also drastically improved the buildings that give +production for unit creation and the XP buildings, which is nice. Of course you would have to do something with the SP that interact with upgrades and change the Pentagon (which is terrible anyway).

The idea behind having upgrades at all was that each unit type only has a very limited lifespan because it will be made obsolete by the unit following it.

However, I also intend to increase the lifespan to the unit after that, allowing you a choice between an outdated elite unit or an up-to-date non-veteran one. So maybe I will give your suggestion a go and remove upgrades entirely (which I had thought of earlier but dismissed for the above reason).

The question is: How to make promotions interesting in such a scenario? My first idea would be to change the way Barracks work by providing a free Drill upgrade rather than XP. Armories and stables could provide different upgrades while I would keep the Military Base as it is, for variety. The Drill upgrade would allow you access to a certain set of specialisations that give you the really good promotions (Blitz, March, Logistics) already after two upgrades. That way, you would be able to get some veterans even without healing outside of cities and no upgrades. Combined with these continuing to be useful an era later (but not as effective) I think this might work.

Buffing the AI was one of the main reasons for considering the change so I'm glad that it works out

Edit: Slowpoke: The AI has a problem only with early expansion, which is too slow. Later on it seems fine to me, but in the early game it often only founds two or three cities (at least on low difficulties)

 

[alpaca]

I decided to push the tech tree changes back a little. Doing that properly takes a lot of time and a friend once taught me that spending a lot of time on something doesn't make sense if there are still important things with similar impact but that are implemented a lot more quickly.

So I decided to tackle combat balance in the next version. My current changelog (likely to change):

v3:
Bugfixes:
- fixed bug with dye plantations yielding too little gold
- fixed bug that made buying plots extremely expensive
Economy:
- formula for culture spread and food bucket now again have contributions that grow faster than linear
- culture: 25 + (3n)^1.2
- growth: 20 + 2n + n^1.6
- unhappiness per occupied pop increased to 1.5 (so police state doesn't make annexed cities better than built ones)
- happiness golden ages are back to where they were in v1, I didn't really like the "oh, another golden age" feeling that shorter GA produced
UI:
- added city maintenance to economy overview
Combat:
- unit HP now 20
- city HP now 50
- city healing 5
- unit healing ONLY in cities at 1 hp / turn
- removed flatland defense penalty
- hills defense bonus up to +50%
- river attack penalty -50%
- flanking bonus 25%
- ranged attacker of power x now does as much damage as melee attacker of power x
- garrison now adds its full strength to a city
- city attacks more powerful
- cities now have 3 range
- city damage now only 20% (was 50%)
- melee combat now always yields 4 xp
- ranged combat now always yields 3 xp
- all non-goody hut upgrades removed
Promotions:
- instant heal removed
- medic removed
- air repair removed
- repair removed
Unit changes:
- decreased unit costs through the board, but more so for expensive units
- re-visited unit strengths so that they aren't obsolete in the next era but only the one after that if they have some XP
- ranged attack strength is now a bit lower but ranged units are more powerful
- horsemen now at 8 strength, 70 cost
- siege units now half ranged strength but +100% against cities
- janissaries now only heal 4 hp when killing a unit
- khan heals 1hp now


Edit: In case anybody would be interested to test my dev builds, drop me a PM with your email addy and I'll occasionally send you a new copy when I have something playable.

 

[zambies]

- unit healing ONLY in cities at 1 hp / turn

I like pretty much everything you're thinking about doing with this mod but this change is, IMO, a bad choice.There was some discussion about this same change in the MegaMod thread starting at post #33.

Combined with making city defense stronger, it seems to me that intercontinental invasion becomes just about impossible. If an important unit becomes damaged, you would have to send it on a double-digit turn trip back across the ocean to heal, then another double-digit turn back to the front. That would pretty much grind the game to an aggravating halt. Even less fun would be cycling units through cities to heal if you're playing with a small civ and have a larger army than the number of cities you control.

It also would likely turn dealing with barbarians at the beginning of the game when you only have one or two warriors from an annoyance/chance for experience into a never-ending pain in the ass. However, the most important problem with it is described in post #40 of the above thread, where it was discovered that the AI has no idea how to handle this change, so it ends up just leaving damaged units laying all over the place forever.

It's not a perfect solution (as the AI still likely wouldn't know what to do with it), but maybe only allow healing within cultural borders and, if the code allows it, have out-of-border healing be an experience-gained promotion?

 

[alpaca]

I like pretty much everything you're thinking about doing with this mod but this change is, IMO, a bad choice.There was some discussion about this same change in the MegaMod thread starting at post #33.

Combined with making city defense stronger, it seems to me that intercontinental invasion becomes just about impossible. If an important unit becomes damaged, you would have to send it on a double-digit turn trip back across the ocean to heal, then another double-digit turn back to the front. That would pretty much grind the game to an aggravating halt. Even less fun would be cycling units through cities to heal if you're playing with a small civ and have a larger army than the number of cities you control.

It also would likely turn dealing with barbarians at the beginning of the game when you only have one or two warriors from an annoyance/chance for experience into a never-ending pain in the ass. However, the most important problem with it is described in post #40 of the above thread, where it was discovered that the AI has no idea how to handle this change, so it ends up just leaving damaged units laying all over the place forever.

It's not a perfect solution (as the AI still likely wouldn't know what to do with it), but maybe only allow healing within cultural borders and, if the code allows it, have out-of-border healing be an experience-gained promotion?

Yes, I just noticed the AI problem, too. I'm not overly concerned about the implications for the player. If a unit becomes damaged, you have to use another one. The idea behind the healing in cities was that you have some peace-time healing.

Due to the AI problems I will probably set healing to 1hp everywhere (as the AI also tries to heal in neutral territory) until we get SDK access. Healing 1 hp at 20 hp max is still very slow so it kind of still satisfies my condition of making healing a (mostly) peace-time thing.

I'm not sure what to do about the Khan. Without the healing ability it's a crappy UU and if I just boost the bonus instead they become a lot like China. Maybe I will just put him at healing an additional +1 for everyone, which makes the Mongols fairly unique.

Welcome to the forums by the way, even though you joined in 2003

 

[Slowpoke]

I agree with you alpaca, but I had the exact same thing in mega mod a few weeks ago, and I quite simply had to take it out, too many people didn't like it. Because I still thought it was integral to the mod, though, I released that section of it as a mod component called "remove healing", but it was optional to download.

 

[alpaca]

I agree with you alpaca, but I had the exact same thing in mega mod a few weeks ago, and I quite simply had to take it out, too many people didn't like it. Because I still thought it was integral to the mod, though, I released that section of it as a mod component called "remove healing", but it was optional to download.

I know, but I don't think removing it is the right choice. I guess people were just upset because it means they can't ridiculously promote their units anymore (which plays a big part in why the game is so easy). Since I wrote from the outset that this mod is meant to improve my enjoyment of the game, if people don't like something they are welcome to fire up a text editor and change it back themselves. I'll even help them to do it. But I'm not going to provide optional packages I can't realistically test the balance of. Having all those options in the game that vanilla has is already bad enough.

 

[orangecape]

A little more feedback from my 'no unit upgrades' testing. It is brutally difficult to build infrastructure while being at war. I have to constantly be producing new units and those units are not heavily promoted so they tend to die much more than usual. Also since my army regularly consists of half units that are below current tech levels it is extremely difficult to steamroll the AI, even with good tactics. When a longswordsman attacks my swordsman he dies, even though I do have a longswordsman myself nearby.

This leads to the situation that constant war is *harsh*. You will be devoting tons of production or cash to producing new units and your economy will suffer tremendously. In peacetime you can live with a smaller army that is more outdated and get your infrastructure going again, but the old strategy of constant warfare combined with excellent infrastructure is completely impossible. I was definitely able to make war profitable a lot of the time but taking over an enemy civ or just snagging a few border cities was costly to attempt and disastrous if the attack failed. Maintaining a two front war would be catastrophic.

I personally love it. War, instead of being a source of experienced soldiers and golden ages through redundant GGs, is a huge drain on your economy. It is really good to get back to peace as soon as possible if your war is going nowhere fast.

The most critical point is this: What happens when you first get Steel in a normal game? 1 turns later you attack your enemy with half a dozen heavily promoted Longswordsmen. With no upgrades what happens when you get Steel? 8-12 turns later your first 2 new Longswordsmen arrive at the battlefield with between 0-2 promotions each and they start helping your remaining low tech troops. This is exactly how the computer plays (it upgrades, but rarely) and not having access to masses of max tech, heavily upgraded troops makes battles much more fair. The difference in difficulty level is *staggering*.

 

[zambies]

I know, but I don't think removing it is the right choice. I guess people were just upset because it means they can't ridiculously promote their units anymore (which plays a big part in why the game is so easy).

I obviously can't speak for anyone else, but that's not at all why I object to removing all ability to heal outside of a city. Unit healing and unit upgrades are two completely different functions. I personally really like removing the ability to upgrade units to new types when they become obsolete for the same reasons orangecape wrote.

I'm also concerned that decreasing unit production costs by too much, combined with doubling unit HP, will just exacerbate what struck me as the worst flaw uncovered by that RB3 succession game: 1UPT plus unit spamming by the AI making war a tedious slog. This means that the computer can afford to pump out more units much quicker, and it takes a lot longer for each unit to die.

I guess I'll just have to play the next version to see whether the combination of no healing, no upgrades and cheaper units combine in a beneficial way I'm not really appreciating at the moment.

Welcome to the forums by the way, even though you joined in 2003

Thanks. I joined back during the Civ3 days purely so I could more easily track which threads I'd read and completely skipped Civ4 due to getting out of gaming for a goodly long time.

You should be proud that I find your mod intriguing enough to relinquish my crown as King of the Lurkers. *grin*

 

[wcil]

You just made the March promotion useless as well.

And do we really need the heal only in city rule for scouts? I mean -- these guys are outdoorsmen! (And they have Survivalism - another healing skill).

In addition, have you thought about how this change will this affect UUs that have healing bonuses, such as the Jannissary, Jaguar Warrior and Persian Immortal? I mean -- this will make the Immortal no better than a regular Spearman.

Also, would it be possible to increase healing rate should the city have a Barracks / Hospital built?

-------------

Personally, the thing that irks me the most is how cheap Wonders are (or how expensive regular buildings are). I was playing a no mod multi game with a friend recently (king difficulty) and I was playing Egypt. It was ridiculous, as I remember after discovering Writing, it gave me the options of (a) Library : 9 turns (b) Great Library : 9 turns. WTH SO CHEAP? NO WAI!

At the end of *that* game, I had built *every* wonder in the game. Ridiculous.

 

[heinous_hat]

Hey Alpaca, I'm 95% certain that you are the same named fellow from TW Center, but have to ask anyway

Looking forward to giving this a go.

 

[alpaca]

A little more feedback from my 'no unit upgrades' testing. It is brutally difficult to build infrastructure while being at war. I have to constantly be producing new units and those units are not heavily promoted so they tend to die much more than usual. Also since my army regularly consists of half units that are below current tech levels it is extremely difficult to steamroll the AI, even with good tactics. When a longswordsman attacks my swordsman he dies, even though I do have a longswordsman myself nearby.

This leads to the situation that constant war is *harsh*. You will be devoting tons of production or cash to producing new units and your economy will suffer tremendously. In peacetime you can live with a smaller army that is more outdated and get your infrastructure going again, but the old strategy of constant warfare combined with excellent infrastructure is completely impossible. I was definitely able to make war profitable a lot of the time but taking over an enemy civ or just snagging a few border cities was costly to attempt and disastrous if the attack failed. Maintaining a two front war would be catastrophic.

I personally love it. War, instead of being a source of experienced soldiers and golden ages through redundant GGs, is a huge drain on your economy. It is really good to get back to peace as soon as possible if your war is going nowhere fast.

The most critical point is this: What happens when you first get Steel in a normal game? 1 turns later you attack your enemy with half a dozen heavily promoted Longswordsmen. With no upgrades what happens when you get Steel? 8-12 turns later your first 2 new Longswordsmen arrive at the battlefield with between 0-2 promotions each and they start helping your remaining low tech troops. This is exactly how the computer plays (it upgrades, but rarely) and not having access to masses of max tech, heavily upgraded troops makes battles much more fair. The difference in difficulty level is *staggering*.

Good to hear, I'll keep a look for my own experiences.

I obviously can't speak for anyone else, but that's not at all why I object to removing all ability to heal outside of a city. Unit healing and unit upgrades are two completely different functions. I personally really like removing the ability to upgrade units to new types when they become obsolete for the same reasons orangecape wrote.

I'm also concerned that decreasing unit production costs by too much, combined with doubling unit HP, will just exacerbate what struck me as the worst flaw uncovered by that RB3 succession game: 1UPT plus unit spamming by the AI making war a tedious slog. This means that the computer can afford to pump out more units much quicker, and it takes a lot longer for each unit to die.

I guess I'll just have to play the next version to see whether the combination of no healing, no upgrades and cheaper units combine in a beneficial way I'm not really appreciating at the moment.

I understand the concern, and if it proves to be well-founded I will revert my changes. At the moment healing is set to 1hp everywhere, allowing you to heal your units if you have time to retreat them behind the combat lines.

You should look at the changes in whole, not only at the healing change: I adjusted a couple of values to make staying in formation more fruitful. A higher flanking bonus, removal of the flatland penalty, and doubled HP mean that you can maintain a solid line. Maintenance will be lowered, which means you can also afford it. No healing means you need reinforcements to swap out for your front troops once they are badly hurt or dead. The formation and no combat healing means archers become quite useful because you can protect them and they can attack without being damaged themselves, which is a boon without the ability to heal a lot of xp.

Stronger cities and longer range mean you need to bring superior forces, if possible siege weapons, to capture a city, especially if they have defensive structures like walls.

I also lowered the abundance of strategic resources (undocumented yet), so you won't be able to spam things like and army of swordsmen anymore with just a single deposit. Since you can't combat heal, you have to pre-produce an invasion army, so your mainstay will be spearmen even if you have access to horsemen or swordsmen.

The AI, of course, will still just throw units at you. We'll have to see how it plays out in the end. Without further testing I can't safely predict what will happen but this is my view on the issue.

You just made the March promotion useless as well.

And do we really need the heal only in city rule for scouts? I mean -- these guys are outdoorsmen! (And they have Survivalism - another healing skill).

In addition, have you thought about how this change will this affect UUs that have healing bonuses, such as the Jannissary, Jaguar Warrior and Persian Immortal? I mean -- this will make the Immortal no better than a regular Spearman.

Also, would it be possible to increase healing rate should the city have a Barracks / Hospital built?

-------------

Personally, the thing that irks me the most is how cheap Wonders are (or how expensive regular buildings are). I was playing a no mod multi game with a friend recently (king difficulty) and I was playing Egypt. It was ridiculous, as I remember after discovering Writing, it gave me the options of (a) Library : 9 turns (b) Great Library : 9 turns. WTH SO CHEAP? NO WAI!

At the end of *that* game, I had built *every* wonder in the game. Ridiculous.

Hence I removed March. Survivalism stays in and gives the scouts a kind of special role because they can heal more quickly. 20 hp means they also don't die to a single barb attack so they actually have a good survivability now. As I said, healing is currently at 1 hp everywhere so there's not much reason to adjust UU much. Immortal heals 2 per turn, which is quite good. Jaguars heal 2 when killing, Janissaries now heal 4 instead of 10. Khan heals 1 in his tile and all adjacent tile, which makes him very strong, maybe too strong, but this is something I'd like to test before I nerf him further.

I don't think the healing rate can be adjusted city-specifically unfortunately. Maybe through complicated lua tricks but in no easy way.

I agree about the wonders, and will change them significantly at a later time. Right now, they share the same issue as extensive tech tree and building changes: Time. There are many things that can be fixed a lot more quickly and efficiently than addressing all buildings and wonders with a new design perspective (which is what I'm planning to do).

Hey Alpaca, I'm 95% certain that you are the same named fellow from TW Center, but have to ask anyway

Looking forward to giving this a go.

You must be mistaken! Which preposterous impostor stole my nickname and used it for such base activities?

More seriously, I lost my motivation for Total War modding some months ago, and wasn't able to rekindle it.

 

[alpaca]

Just to let you know, I'm still testing the changes for v3. At the moment I'm still in the "multiple notes per game start" regime, which means I'm still trying to find the right balance for the things I changed.

I was having quite a blast playing a Prince game that forced me to use combined arms of siege units, melee units and some horsemen for flanking maneouvres to be good at capturing cities but unfortunately I doubt that level of difficulty can be handled effectively by the AI, so I reduced the city bonuses somewhat again (especially the ranged city attack). I've also been twiddling with a lot of other things, here's the changelog (compared to v2) of the build I'm currently testing

v3:
Bugfixes:
- fixed bug with dye plantations yielding too little gold
- fixed bug that made buying plots extremely expensive
Diplomacy:
- increased the value the diplomacy AI puts on gold
Economy:
- formula for culture spread and food bucket now again have contributions that grow faster than linear
- culture: 15 + (3n)^1.3
- growth: 25 + 4n + n^1.6
- unhappiness per occupied pop increased to 1.5 (so police state doesn't make annexed cities better than built ones)
- happiness golden ages are back to where they were in v1, I didn't really like the "oh, another golden age" feeling that shorter GA produced
- city maintenance code is now difficulty, game pace and map-size dependent (game pace doesn't change anything, but an XML is available)
- Economics now adds +1 gold to trade posts
- Dynamite +1 production to mines
- SPs now start at 45 culture
- maritime CS capital food bonus reduced (now +2 for capital, +1 for all if allied)
- +1 food, +1 gold for Fish when improved (instead of +0, +2). Now yield 5 food 3 gold with Lighthouse (awesome things, fish)
- banana yield +2 food when unimproved, +4 food +1 gold when improved
- added a 30 turn cooldown period for the We Love The King Day to prevent getting the boost all the time
- scientists back to 3GPP
UI:
- added city maintenance to economy overview
Combat:
- unit HP now 20
- city HP now 50
- city healing 5
- unit healing at 1 hp / turn
- removed flatland defense penalty (except for Marsh and Fallout)
- hills defense bonus up to +50%
- river attack penalty -50%
- flanking bonus 25%
- ranged attacker of power x now does as much damage as melee attacker of power x
- city melee damage more powerful
- city damage now only 20% (was 50%)
- melee combat now always yields 4 xp
- ranged combat now always yields 2 xp
- all non-goody hut upgrades removed
- barb spawn rate reduced
- barb camps now yield 75 gold
- palace now adds 5 defense (was 2)
- base city defense boosted to 10
- city strength now increases faster with tech
Promotions:
- instant heal removed
- medic removed
- air repair removed
- repair removed
Unit changes:
- decreased unit costs through the board, but more so for expensive units
- re-visited unit strengths so that they aren't obsolete in the next era but only the one after that if they have some XP
- ranged attack strength is now a bit lower but ranged units are more powerful
- lots of rebalancing
- siege units get +100% against cities if cat or treb, +50% for cannon, artillery and rocket artillery
- siege units have -50% against land units
- janissaries now only heal 4 hp when killing a unit
- khan heals 1hp now
- unit maintenance reworked; each unit now has a fixed maintenance value dependent on the unit type
- siege units don't require strategic resources
- egyptian war chariot can now move after attacking
- roman ballista can attack without setting up
- knights now require iron as well as horses
- melee knight type units, horsemen units and cavalry units now -30% against cities (Songhai just don't get a bonus anymore)
- tanks -30% against cities
Technologies:
- all techs more expensive (depending on era)
- iron revealed with Bronze Working
Map:
- changed strategic resource abundance and varieties; horse and iron 1-3, modern 1-4
- coast tiles should now be easier to get with culture spread

 

[Slowpoke]

Hey alpaca, after playing around with your city maintenance I've got an interesting idea. 2 gold for each extra city is too much, 1 is too little, and anything in between gets out of hand with very large empires, no matter how much tech you have. I'm not sure how this looks like in the lua language, but what do you think of this formula for city maintenance?

floor((n(n-1))^.92)

And if you could show me what that looks like in code, that'd be awesome.

Edit: Also, I've noticed even very small changes to the exponent have drastic effects. Anything outside of .85 to .95 is way off. At .85 you need 10 cities for it to be the original 1 extra gold per city (45 gold total), at .95 it takes over 900 cities to get to 1 extra gold per city (409828 gold total).

 

[alpaca]

If anything I would probably replace it with a power law: x*n^y or a different polynomial

If you drop the +1 more maintenance for each new city, it makes sense to just use any mathematical formula that is tailored to the behaviour you want. I don't think n maintenance for the nth city is too little but it's your mod

-----------------------------

I attached a test build for v3 to the first post. If you would like to give it a go and give feedback, any feedback is very much welcome. The changes are both extensive and substantial, so please, if you test, give the new balance time to lodge in your head. The game plays very differently from vanilla so don't assume everything that works in vanilla will work in the mod. Keep an open mind and think about new strategies. I will update the documentation in the first post, so if you check back in a few hours you can get something more detailed than the changelog.


Edit: I will have to add the description here for now because the first post is too long. I never understood why forums introduce so small arbitrary post length restrictions.

v3 (build 06.12.)

Spoiler :

Resource Yield Changes
One of the things I thoroughly missed when migrating from Civ4 to Civ5 were the awesome yields of some resources, mainly food and some of the luxuries. The high yields of, for example, Corn, always got me excited when I found a spot with three corn fields in the vicinity. I just knew this city was going to be great, that I would be able to turn it into a Great Person machine, a production powerhouse (if hills were nearby) or a research center.

In Civ5, on the other hand, special tiles are often only marginally better, sometimes actively worse, than base tiles. Not only does this remove a lot of interesting decisions and emotions concerning city placement, it also contributes to the fact that small cities are so good in this game. High yields for certain tiles make it more interesting to add them to a larger city rather than to your next ICS city, and they give you more of an incentive to spread out your empire rather than settle a dense cluster of cities.

Improving resource yields also allowed me to add some more diversity to resources. Some are better at certain things than others: Sheep add some gold, but Cows are better at generating food. Wheat is best, especially if improved by Civil Service or Fertilizer. Gold, Marble, Dyes and especially Incense now add some culture when improved, allowing you to set up cultural powerhouse cities if you have multiple copies.

The new yields are (first column base yield, second column improved yield)

Iron 2H 4H
Coal 2H 4H
Horse 1H2G 2H4G
Oil 1H2G 2H4G
Aluminum 1H1G 2H1G1S
Uranium 1H 2H2S

Wheat 2F 4F (plus CS, etc.)
Cow 1F1H 3F1H
Sheep 1F1G 2F2G1H
Deer 2F 4F
Banana 2F1G 4F1G
Fish 2F 3F1G

Whale 1F1G 1F2G2H
Pearls 1F2G 1F5G
Gold 2G 3G1C (6G1C with mint)
Silver 2G 5G (8G with mint)
Gems 3G 6G
Silk 3G 6G
Fur 2G 5G
Cotton 2G 5G
Marble 1G1H 2G1H1C
Incense 2G 2G2C
Dyes 2G 4G1C
Ivory 1G1H 3G1H
Spices 1F1G 1F4G
Sugar 1F1G 1F3G
Wine 1F1G 2F2G

Note that some of these are done by adding new dummy improvements, so don't worry if "Build a Mine" appears three times in the Mining technology, this is working as intended.

Changes to City Growth and Culture Spread
Testing turned out that the previous balance for both food and culture was off in the late game, and even felt a bit fast in the early game. Higher food yield for food resources and hospitals in the late game interacted in unattractive ways with this, to aggravate the problem.

I returned to using something closer to the vanilla functions, with superlinear increases in bucket growth to slow down the late game land grabbing and city growth. The formulas I'm currently using are:

Food: 25 + 4n + n^1.6 (vanilla: 15 + 10n + n^1.8)
Culture: 15 + (3n)^1.3 (vanilla: 20 + (10n)^1.1)

The aim of the culture formula is to allow enough growth in the early game but slow it down enough that you won't get new tiles every other turn once you have broadcast towers up. In vanilla, this was a lot higher especially for small n

The food formula is meant to allow you to grow to something like size 15 quickly enough if you focus on food. Keep in mind that I slowed the tech speed, so compared to your research, this will be a lot faster than vanilla.

I created some tables for your reference

Food

0	25
1	30
2	36
3	42
4	50
5	58
6	66
7	75
8	84
9	94
10	104
11	115
12	126
13	137
14	149
15	161
16	173
17	186
18	198
19	212
20	225
21	239
22	253
23	267
24	282
25	297
26	312
27	328
28	343
29	359
30	375
31	392
32	409
33	425
34	443
35	460
36	478
37	495
38	514
39	532
40	550

Culture

0	15
1	19
2	25
3	32
4	40
5	48
6	57
7	67
8	77
9	87
10	98
11	109
12	120
13	132
14	143
15	155
16	168
17	180
18	193
19	206
20	219
21	233
22	246
23	260
24	274
25	288
26	303
27	317
28	332
29	347
30	362

City maintenance and other anti-ICS tweaks
The fundamental reasons why city spamming is so effective in this game are twofold: Firstly, the cost of founding a new city is quite low, even compared to growing your old cities. Secondly, a new city will become profitable quite quickly because happiness fails at seriously hindering expansion.

Most mods I've seen that try to address ICS focus on tackling the second reason by nerfing happiness. In my opinion, this is the wrong way to go and similar to using an axe when a carving knife will do the job. Yes, happiness can be made so bad that you can't ICS anymore, but the result is almost invariably a gameplay that doesn't appeal to me because you can't expand anymore even if you have a good spot for a new city.

My approach is somewhat different and closer to how things worked in Civ4. Below are the changes I made to the system:

City Maintenance
I re-introduced a City Maintenance cost that increases non-linearly with the number of cities. It is quite simple at this point: The nth non-capital city you found costs you n gold per turn. So the first city after your capital costs 1, the next 2, the 10th 10 and so on.

This city maintenance isn't very noticeable at first but depending on your playstyle it can soon develop into your largest expense. For each new city to be a profitable addition to your empire, it has to provide more in terms of research, gold or production than the last one had to.

It still makes sense to found or conquer your 20th city, if it's in a good position allowing it to grow quickly to a decent size. But it won't turn in an immediate profit, like in vanilla.

To find out how much city maintenance you pay, hover over the gold income in the top panel or open your economic overview. The City Maintenance tooltip in the economic overview will also tell you how expensive the next city you found will be, so be sure to check it when you make your decision about founding a new city.

City maintenance is influence both by your difficulty level and by the size of the map you play. The way these modifiers work is that they are multiplied, not added. So if you have a 1.5 multiplier for playing Deity and a 1.5 multiplier for playing a tiny map, you'll end up with 225%, not 200%:

[B]Difficulty setting[/B]
Settler: 0.5
Chieftain: 0.75
Warlord: 0.9
Prince: 1
King: 1.1
Emperor: 1.2
Immortal: 1.3
Deity: 1.5

[B]Map Size[/B]
Duel: 2.0
Tiny: 1.5
Small: 1.25
Standard: 1
Large: 0.75
Huge: 0.5

Trading
Trading in vanilla yields 1.25*pop + 1 where pop is the population in the city you connect to your trade network. This favours small cities because of the fixed +1

In PWM the formula is pop - 1. It is, overall, lower than in vanilla - but then again you can more easily get large cities in PWM so it's ok in my opinion.

Base Tile Yield
Another reason why founding new cities rather than growing old ones is so good in vanilla is because the base tile is generally quite powerful. It adds at least 2F2P1G and each maritime city state ally adds +2 food to it. There are also a number of policies that increase it, such as Communism.

In PWM, I lowered the minimum yield to 2F1H. Your city will now not be as productive from the get-go, and in fact needs some hammer tiles (improved ones, preferably) to become useful. This also makes city placement more interesting: If you found a city on a hill, it will have +1 production. Near a river, +1 gold. On the other hand, an improved hill adds +3 production so you may still end up better in the mid-term if you settle next to the hill.

Additionally, Maritime city states now only add +1 food per city when you're at friends, with an additional +1 for the capital. This doesn't increase with hitting the Renaissance anymore. Maritime CS are now a lot worse than before but I think they are still useful, because growing your capital is useful. Cultural CS are still a bit OP but I will address this later.

Settler Cost
Settlers cost 200 hammers now, their cost more than doubled. In vanilla, settlers were a lot too cheap. Your city growth is now halted for quite some time when building a settler, which introduces some interesting decisions re buying settlers or stopping horizontal growth altogether.

Improved Palace Yield
The palace is now even stronger than before. This change is partly to compensate for the lower base yields and increased settler cost but also to make expansion not quite as science-savvy. I was also unsatisfied about the low culture yield of the palace, especially compared to playing France.

The new yields are: 3 culture, 5 gold, 5 science, 4 production

Specialist changes
I would dearly like to separate the GPP pools for each of the Great People but this would be very hard to do without access to the C++ sources. For now, I settled on tweaks:

- Removed a scientist slot from the library
- Scientist now yields 2 research, 3 GPP
- Merchant now yields 4 gold, 3 GPP
- Artist now yields 2 culture, 3 GPP
- Engineer still yields 2 production, 3 GPP

Combat Changes

Combat Modifiers
Flatland now doesn't yield a penalty anymore, except for Marsh and Fallout. Hills and forests provide a +50% defense bonus now. The flanking bonus has been upped to +25%

What these (plus increased hit points) amount to is that staying in formation is now a much more sensible decision. In fact, I've seen the AI use the flanking bonus exceedingly well, better even than I did because I wasn't used to the new balance, sometimes piling a +75% or even +100% bonus on my poor defenders.

Unit Maintenance
Unit maintenance now doesn't change with time anymore. Instead, maintenance is now a unit attribute. This change has, in my opinion, a lot of interesting effects: Workers are now not so expensive to maintain anymore, you have considerations of quantity vs quality (the most extreme example of this is the Knight), Great People don't cost maintenance, it makes sense to keep old units as garrisons for Military Caste, and you don't have invisible unit maintenance creep anymore even though you don't change your army at all.

The new maintenance costs are displayed in the unit tooltip in the game. I haven't added it to the Civilopedia yet.

Unit Cost
All units are now cheaper, the more so the more modern the unit is. This is likely to not be spot-on balanced yet so be sure to give me some feedback

Upgrades
Are removed. There are a number of reasons for this change, the most important one is that the player is much better at keeping his units alive than the AI, and highly upgraded veterans that are immediately upgraded to the best techs are a huge part of why combat is so easy in Civ5.

Without upgrades, you have to constantly create new units if you want an up-to-date army. It also creates a situation where veteran units with older weaponry can compete with newer, but untrained units. This point is further strengthened by a flatter unit strength progression when compared to vanilla.

Hit points and healing
In vanilla, units die fast and heal fast. This contribtues to a situation where the player can get insanely good combat results against the AI. In PWM, units have 20 hitpoints and healing of units is reduced to 1 hp, everywhere.

These changes combine to turn hitpoints into more of a resource: Unit hit points can not be easily restored anymore while at war, so you might be better off to let your old units die and produce reinforcements to replace them. Some healing is still possible, which allows you to keep a few veterans alive should you so desire, and to avoid some AI pitfalls.

All healing promotions, including March, have been removed. Especially instant healing.

City Defenses
Cities are now stronger. They start out at 8 strength, the palace provides an additional +5 instead of +2. Walls and Castles have been boosted and make cities very tough to take without siege units. Cities also have 30 hp and heal 3 hp per turn, so you'd better bring reinforcements and do a lot of damage to capture them.

This goes in the reverse, too, however: It's easier to defend against a random strike by the AI, but sometimes the AI manages to get a proper attack together and just overwhelm your defenses.

Defense buildings have no maintenance anymore and are now an excellent way to bolster your defenses. Walls provide 7 defense now, which can make a city very tough to take in the early game without siege units. Rush buying walls to defend yourself is a good investment.

When cities are captured, they now only lose 20% of their population rather than 50%, making a loss and recapture a lot less painful than before.

Unit strength
The unit strength progression over the ages is now significantly less steep. This, together with no upgrades, removes some of the worse effects of slingshotting army techs and makes for a more continuous development of your armed forces. Old veterans or unique units can now successfully fight against newer unit types.

I should also like to mention that ranged unit damage is now calculated in the same way as melee damage. So a unit of ranged strength 6 can be expected to do as much damage as a unit with melee combat 6. Therefore, ranged unit strength values have been reduced for most units.

Experience from combat
Has been simplified a bit. Melee combat now always yields 4 xp, ranged combat always yields 2, no matter if you attack or defend or what you attack.

Strategic Resource Abundance
The strategic resources in vanilla were very boring in my opinion. Most of them had one large source and one small source. If you got a large source, you had enough for a small army, especially with Iron, and strategic resource access rarely put a cap on your army size.

In PWM, strategic resources are much more scarce, and the yield is more random. Horses and Iron can yield anything between 1 and 3, the modern strategic resources can yield between 1 and 4 per tile. This makes hunting for the best iron deposits much more interesting and also makes strategic resources work more like they should: As a cap on the number of strong units.

Siege units
Siege units now have a different role than in vanilla. The catapult and Trebuchet are both weak against land units (get a -50% penalty) but get a +100% bonus against cities and a +50% defense bonus against ranged attacks.

More modern types of siege units, cannons and beyond, don't get the penalty against units but also don't get the extra city or ranged attack bonuses. They have a higher base ranged attack, though, so they shouldn't be worse at taking cities.

Because they are so important for taking cities, siege units don't require iron anymore.

Mounted units
I followed the community-established logic that will also be featured in the next patch and gave mounted units a -30% attack penalty against cities (tanks also have -30% now). In addition to this change, I redesigned the roles horsemen and knights fulfill.

Horsemen are now a flanking unit: They keep their 4 moves but their strength is reduced to 9. They have two primary roles of providing flanking bonuses to other units, possibly attacking with high flanking bonuses, then retreating to safety; and to harass enemy archers and catapults.

Knights are now a very strong unit that dominate the flatland. They keep the 18 strength from vanilla while Longswords are now at only 15. Knights, however, now cost 1 horse and 1 iron and they have a high maintenance cost. Basically, knights are meant to break enemy formations and destroy their units but if Longswords have strong terrain, they keep the advantage.

Barbarians
The role played by Barbarians has been revised as well. In vanilla, they are a minor nuisance but in PWM they are now an important part of the game. Barb encampments are harder to take and spawn fewer units but they yield 75 gold on being destroyed now. Barbs are also indirectly boosted by the no healing and higher HP because they never healed before.

One of the most important government functions in the early game is now to protect your citizens from barbarians. Consider yourself warned in case your empire is pillaged.

Tech and Policy Changes
I haven't done much in these areas yet, but there are some small changes that I felt were too important to leave out

Tech costs
Techs are now significantly more expensive, with a multiplier that depends on the era. The best way to check this out is to see for yourself. I'm not sure modern techs are properly balanced because I only really tested up to medieval so far.

Iron
Is now revealed with Bronze Working so you don't waste 20-30 turns researching Iron Working if you have no iron nearby. You can build mines but they won't connect the resource until you research Iron Working, so no Knights before IW, either.

Tile yield changes
As a very humble start I added a +1 production boost to mines for Dynamite and a +1 gold boost for trade posts for Economics

Tech Overflow
Thanks to smellymummy something is now available to us that should have been in the base game: Tech overflow. If you research a tech but overpay, the beaker overflow will be added to the next tech your research. If you change your mind, tough luck, the beakers will still be added to the first tech you chose. So make sure you're sure what your next tech should be before choosing one.

Other changes

This is a small assortment of changes that don't really deserve their own category.

Cheaper happiness golden ages
I didn't like how in vanilla you got a first happiness golden age (which was balanced ok) but then the cost of the next one doubled immediately, making it bad compared to spending your happiness on growth. The cost for each subsequent golden age now only increases by 100, so the first still costs 500, the next 600, and so on

We Love The King Day
I like the idea but at +25% to the food surplus, the WLTKD just meant another notification you have to click away. I increased the bonus to +100% so you get a more useful reward for acquiring the resource. It is, however, shortened to 10 turns now and has a (30 turn) cooldown period that should be active in vanilla but apparently doesn't work.

The idea behind this is that a WLTKD now provides a short-term population boost for your city (a quite significant one, I might add). It also allows a city to grow through unhappiness a lot more easily, so be aware of this if you're getting close to the very unhappy threshold. Obviously, a strong short boost is much preferable to a small but longer boost because it makes a lot more sense to switch to food working tiles. Make sure you time things so you're in a happy phase!

Sea tile yield
Is increased by 1 gold per tile. Sea tiles (both coast and ocean) with a lighthouse are now like a Trade Post on grassland, without the option of getting +1 science. This allows you to go for a commerce specialisation for coastal cities and makes working sea tiles at least somewhat useful.

Occupied unhappiness
Population unhappiness in annexed cities without a courthouse is now at 1.5/pop. This was changed to prevent Police State annexed cities becoming better than cities with a courthouse or self-founded ones.

Professional Army
Now provides +15 xp for melee, archery and gunpowder units. With upgrades removed I felt it necessary to change this to something more useful. I didn't address the Pentagon yet, so just don't build it.

Early Social Policies
With a higher palace culture, the first social policy was now changed to 45 culture (you get it in 15 turns with a normal civ, still faster than the first policy in vanilla).

Culture Spread
Coast tiles are now easier to get by culture. Your city will spread to a coastal tile before a forest or hill but after a flatland tile.

 

[Slowpoke]

Well n maintenance for the nth city is just too small at the start of the game, that's why I'd rather use 2n with some exponent.

 

[alpaca]

Well n maintenance for the nth city is just too small at the start of the game, that's why I'd rather use 2n with some exponent.

It's meant to be small at the start of the game

If you want it higher, you can add a linear contribution, like 2n, which will be equivalent to starting at 3 instead of 1.

 

[pi-r8]

I love that you're removing the instant heal promotion, but why did you also remove medic? (and air repair)? Especially with units being at 20HP, don't you think it will take way too long for them to heal back to full strength after being damaged? There's a good chance that they'll go obsolete before they can heal.

 

[Slowpoke]

well I've got it working now, looked up lua stuff. Blah, I have to type math.floor(the stuff)

I love that you're removing the instant heal promotion, but why did you also remove medic? (and air repair)? Especially with units being at 20HP, don't you think it will take way too long for them to heal back to full strength after being damaged? There's a good chance that they'll go obsolete before they can heal.

The intention is that you don't heal your units period. Which I prefer, but like I said, I have to remove it for popularity in my own mod.

 

[alpaca]

I love that you're removing the instant heal promotion, but why did you also remove medic? (and air repair)? Especially with units being at 20HP, don't you think it will take way too long for them to heal back to full strength after being damaged? There's a good chance that they'll go obsolete before they can heal.

That's precisely the point. Healing should be a mostly peace-time thing but it's fast enough with increased tech costs that you can still train some units to veteran status if you don't have them attack fortified positions and provide them with support.

I added an explanation of most of the changes to post 55 because the OP got too long for the forum rules.