Txurce
Deity
In all seriousness, I agree!
Policies
- Thread starter Thalassicus
- Start date
In all seriousness, I agree!
Txurce
Deity
It doesn't seem reasonable when Police State already allows you to annex without a courthouse and basically laugh it off. If you cut the resistance time, what penalty is there for taking a city? Why make the game so easy?
I'll be posting about a Denmark game I just completed that left me convinced that Honor and Autocracy are, if anything, absurdly OP.
I finished my game with police state, and now that I know its true benefit, it really is useful. I have to agree with Txurce that Honor and Autocracy are possibly too powerful. I was playing on version 7 of the current beta, and I know since then Thal has made many changes that may render many of my opinions moot. I think that the culture from spoils of war is too much. This is likely no longer the case (or at least less so) since Thal changed both SP costs and the rewards from spoils of war. I think 20% is also probably too much for discipline, though I am of the same attitude as Thal, that the combat trees should not make combat easier, but instead more rewarding. I focused almost entirely on gold as my means of production that game, so I did not benefit much from the 25% military unit production, but I still think that that is too much for a tree opener. In autocracy, the opener is also extremely powerful (get range 4 battleships with 2 attacks per turn, +75% vs land units and 25% vs cities and you will know what I mean). The -33% purchasing cost is also absurdly good, allowing me to pump out mech infantry for only 720g (on epic speed, stacked with big ben and mercantilism). That said, the policy didn't seem to reduce the cost by the full 33%; there seems to be a cap to how much the cost can be reduced by.
I found Fascism unnecessary because at no point in my game were strategic resources an issue, even with a large fleet of battleships, and numerous modern armor and mobile artillery competing for oil. I think the benefit from fascism would be greatest for a small empire that actually may have a shortage of strategic resources, which is likely not the type of empire that is going into the autocracy tree. This effect may make more sense in another tree (probably Honor). I would worry that by decreasing strategic resource abundance, small empires may suffer too much. The best way to balance this policy may be to increase resource costs of units or add more resource requiring buildings late game (a happiness granting, oil requiring building could create an interesting conflict for a warmongerer).
Overall, I think that Honor and Autocracy should avoid too many effects that directly strengthen units (discipline and autocracy opener) and reduce unit costs (Honor opener and militarism). Instead these trees should increasing the reward and reducing the costs (not building costs, but economic costs, such as maintenance) of warmongering. Better effects for the above policies might be:
Honor opener: two free units. This would help enable an early game rush or defending against one, or for civs that can form early strategies around barb hunting such as Germany, Aztecs, or Songhai. This would also be consistent with the other early social policies that give one time benefits.
Discipline: this may be a good place to move the effect of fascism, since early in the game strategic resources are much more likely to be an issue for a warmongerer. The effect could be reduced, as well, if needed; instead of doubling strategic resources, maybe give +2 of each discovered one. This would allow a warmongerer to start producing swordsman even with no access to iron.
Autocracy opener: move the maintenance reduction back here like in vanilla, and drop the -33% purchasing cost.
Militarism: I still like the idea of reducing resistance time. I feel that resistance times are a bit too long in TBC, since Thal changed population reduction upon city conquest to just 1 or 2, which basically doubled resistance times. At such a late point in the game, long resistance times serve as a brick wall to military expansion that makes conquest victories feel much more tedious. Especially considering that by this point in the game, I am no longer conquering cities for the economic benefits, but instead to crush the other civs and work my way towards a conquest victory.
Fascism: If the old effect got moved, then a replacement would be needed. I really don't have any more ideas right now; maybe a strength/experience bonus to units in foreign territory would have a place here to offset the defensive bonus from nationalism in Order.
Edit: fixed phrasing and grammar
I found Fascism unnecessary because at no point in my game were strategic resources an issue, even with a large fleet of battleships, and numerous modern armor and mobile artillery competing for oil. I think the benefit from fascism would be greatest for a small empire that actually may have a shortage of strategic resources, which is likely not the type of empire that is going into the autocracy tree. This effect may make more sense in another tree (probably Honor). I would worry that by decreasing strategic resource abundance, small empires may suffer too much. The best way to balance this policy may be to increase resource costs of units or add more resource requiring buildings late game (a happiness granting, oil requiring building could create an interesting conflict for a warmongerer).
Overall, I think that Honor and Autocracy should avoid too many effects that directly strengthen units (discipline and autocracy opener) and reduce unit costs (Honor opener and militarism). Instead these trees should increasing the reward and reducing the costs (not building costs, but economic costs, such as maintenance) of warmongering. Better effects for the above policies might be:
Honor opener: two free units. This would help enable an early game rush or defending against one, or for civs that can form early strategies around barb hunting such as Germany, Aztecs, or Songhai. This would also be consistent with the other early social policies that give one time benefits.
Discipline: this may be a good place to move the effect of fascism, since early in the game strategic resources are much more likely to be an issue for a warmongerer. The effect could be reduced, as well, if needed; instead of doubling strategic resources, maybe give +2 of each discovered one. This would allow a warmongerer to start producing swordsman even with no access to iron.
Autocracy opener: move the maintenance reduction back here like in vanilla, and drop the -33% purchasing cost.
Militarism: I still like the idea of reducing resistance time. I feel that resistance times are a bit too long in TBC, since Thal changed population reduction upon city conquest to just 1 or 2, which basically doubled resistance times. At such a late point in the game, long resistance times serve as a brick wall to military expansion that makes conquest victories feel much more tedious. Especially considering that by this point in the game, I am no longer conquering cities for the economic benefits, but instead to crush the other civs and work my way towards a conquest victory.
Fascism: If the old effect got moved, then a replacement would be needed. I really don't have any more ideas right now; maybe a strength/experience bonus to units in foreign territory would have a place here to offset the defensive bonus from nationalism in Order.
Edit: fixed phrasing and grammar
Txurce
Deity
I agree with much of what you wrote. Playing with Denmark (v7.1 b12) I did build lots of units (relatively speaking) - bombers, ships, missiles, and nukes in particular. With Autocracy these were always plentiful. Fascism was very useful to me - I had very little oil, and made use of the relatively plentiful aluminum. I can't imagine a major war effort without this... unless of course the war effort focused on capturing resources.
I think two free units with Honor is much too big an advantage for a rush... be it the AI or the human player. I do see the game play value of reduced resistance time, but wouldn't consider asking for it, given how powerful the military branches are.
More problematic for me was the synergy between Honor and Autocracy. The gold pouring in from Spoils of War allowed me to buy opera houses, museums and broadcast towers in all my cities. Combined with the culture gusher from every captured city, after 300 turns this left me with seven branches filled, and forced to cancel Rationalism for Piety (then back). To put it differently, I would have won a Culture game with a large empire in about 300 turns without even trying!
That is not as good as Ive done focusing its 80 turns slower. And you could argue that without these bonuses, you would be forced to stick with puppeting. However, that is how the vanilla game was designed. And it just didnt feel right to me to have so many policies pouring in that I finally had to take ones I didnt want (at a point where my game was almost over, but not all that high interms of turn count).
On a related note, I felt I exploited the AIs occasional tendency to respond to an offer of a luxury bribe to go to war by agreeing to pay an exorbitant amount like thousands of gold sometimes. How do people feel about this?
Two warriors would still be less than the free settler or free monuments from the other trees in terms of
. Even if it gave a warrior and an archer it would still be less. This policy would improve with as you research better units, but so does aristocracy. Holding off on taking honor to get, say swordsmen instead of warriors, would be akin to holding off on aristocracy to get temples. It may be to big an advantage for AIs who already start with a ton of units, but I don't think it would overpower humans in the same way.I think Spoils of War should be designed to help warmongerers from falling completely behind in culture. The equation for culture is 50*era^2. I think era^2 may be the problem, since it allows warmongerers to run away in culture at the end of the game using this policy (in the middle ages (era 3), this is 450 culture. At this point, most cities won't be able to produce more than 6-9 culture from monument, temple and unit garrison, so this is 50-75 turns worth of culture from a single city, which seems a bit much to me; in modern era (era 6) this is 1800 culture). Either making it just 50*era or removing the era dependance altogether may solve this problem, so that in later eras this doesn't allow warmongerers to run away in culture.
Txurce
Deity
Two warriors would still be less than the free settler or free monuments from the other trees in terms of
I see the comparisons you're making to the policies on other trees, but the effect at the start of the game is radically different. If I get 30 culture from a ruin two turns into the game and receive two free warriors, I have a very good chance of successfully rushing a civ and having a huge head start on winning. No other starting policy has nearly that sort of potential.
Seek
Deity
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2010
- Messages
- 3,773
Two warriors would still be less than the free settler or free monuments from the other trees in terms of
I think this idea has some merit. However, heeding Txurce's comment, it may be too powerful for the tree opener. If possible, it should play like vanilla Meritocracy with a popup which allows you to choose which unit(s) you want from those available.
I agree that SoW does need a nerf at this point, and the exponent does seem to be the main factor. If the exponent were 1.5 instead of 2 it might be enough to do the trick: the (rounded) values would be 50, 140, 260, 400, 560, 735, 925 instead of 50, 200, 450, 800, 1250, 1800, 2450. These numbers seem reasonable to me; certainly worth going for, but not as OP. I'll experiment with this change in my next dom game.
The free units certainly would not have to be the tree opener; I was more suggesting this as a replacement for the +20% production effect.
Those numbers seem reasonable to me.
Those numbers seem reasonable to me.
Thalassicus
Bytes and Nibblers
It's impossible to have an effect on the resistance timer of captured cities. It's coded in the c++, uses no global variables, and there's no lua functions to get or set the timer.
Something to point out is I significantly increased late policy costs in beta 13.
Other than that, I realized SoW balance issues are mainly due to the fact I forgot a modifier for game speed. I play on epic and with 4 trees filled costs in my current game are ~10,000
. Getting one policy at 735 per city would require conquering 12 cities. It should scale better with a game speed modifier.
I've been debating whether to use a population or era modifier. Cities are naturally larger in the late game so a culture-from-pop effect would inherently increase. The downside is population increase logarithmically while culture costs increase exponentially, so it can potentially give too much culture in the early game.
I sat down to do some analysis of police state and realized the tooltip had an error. It does not reduce unhappiness by 50%, it reduces unhappiness from population by 50%. Normal cities have 3
baseline and occupied cities have 5, so under police state the unhappiness from a city is actually:
It's not very useful in its current role since we should build courthouses in all <22
cities anyway. If I buff it though, it'll become overpowered for large cities. In other words there's no effective way to balance police state with the current setup. I haven't figured out any good solutions to this problem. Even if we have it give free courthouses to mimic the normal-city curve, that'd be equivalent to simply giving 1000
per city capture, and SoW already gives gold from warfare so I feel the two policies would be too similar.
Removing effects like the
XP from Autocracy is only possible if we can think of something to replace it with. Any building or promotion effect is easy to do, by creating a policy that gives promotions to units (like Populism), or buildings to cities. Most non-building, non-promotion options have already been exhausted.
Something to point out is I significantly increased late policy costs in beta 13.
Other than that, I realized SoW balance issues are mainly due to the fact I forgot a modifier for game speed. I play on epic and with 4 trees filled costs in my current game are ~10,000
. Getting one policy at 735 per city would require conquering 12 cities. It should scale better with a game speed modifier.I've been debating whether to use a population or era modifier. Cities are naturally larger in the late game so a culture-from-pop effect would inherently increase. The downside is population increase logarithmically while culture costs increase exponentially, so it can potentially give too much culture in the early game.
I sat down to do some analysis of police state and realized the tooltip had an error. It does not reduce unhappiness by 50%, it reduces unhappiness from population by 50%. Normal cities have 3
baseline and occupied cities have 5, so under police state the unhappiness from a city is actually:It's not very useful in its current role since we should build courthouses in all <22
cities anyway. If I buff it though, it'll become overpowered for large cities. In other words there's no effective way to balance police state with the current setup. I haven't figured out any good solutions to this problem. Even if we have it give free courthouses to mimic the normal-city curve, that'd be equivalent to simply giving 1000 per city capture, and SoW already gives gold from warfare so I feel the two policies would be too similar.Removing effects like the
XP from Autocracy is only possible if we can think of something to replace it with. Any building or promotion effect is easy to do, by creating a policy that gives promotions to units (like Populism), or buildings to cities. Most non-building, non-promotion options have already been exhausted.Attachments
Txurce
Deity
Something to point out is I significantly increased late policy costs in beta 13.
Other than that, I realized SoW balance issues are mainly due to the fact I forgot a modifier for game speed.
I've been debating whether to use a population or era modifier. Cities are naturally larger in the late game so a culture-from-pop effect would inherently increase. The downside is population increase logarithmically while culture costs increase exponentially, so it can potentially give too much culture in the early game.
I sat down to do some analysis of police state and realized the tooltip had an error. It does not reduce unhappiness by 50%, it reduces unhappiness from population by 50%...there's no effective way to balance police state with the current setup. I haven't figured out any good solutions to this problem.
Removing effects like the
I'm now playing a game with b14, and have noticed that I'm not as awash in gold or, especially, culture. (I forgot about the changes, and thought I wasn't playing as well!) I'm deep into the industrial era now. Assuming that the changes hold up more or less as they are so far, I don't see the need to reinvent the spokes on the SP wheel - just to continue adjusting them for balance.
Just as many of the civs are now addictive because of how they've been adjusted, I now enjoy just about every branch of the SP tree. Even Order was fun once I reached it in my last game.
Thalassicus
Bytes and Nibblers
I'm now playing a game with b14, and have noticed that I'm not as awash in gold or, especially, culture.Something to point out is I significantly increased late policy costs in beta 13.
To be specific, this is the cumulative culture cost as a percentage of vanilla.
Examples of how to read the chart:
- -50% culture to get 12 policies.
- +25% culture to achieve a cultural victory.
Attachments
Txurce
Deity
I just quit an academically interesting game. After playing Denmark I thought I'd try Germany and an early rush for conquest (as opposed to my original rush-to-space). But I found myself on an island, which meant I had pretty much wiped out all of Germany's advantages.
On the plus side I built a barb navy and discovered three other civs on the largest continent, just by staying in shallow water. I husbanded the island barb camps and had three barb ships training my captured barb units for centuries. That was great! I wound up with a complete army made up of barbs except for my two starting units, up until I began building siege units.
The reason the game was interesting, though, is that two other civs were on their on islands, and India and China shared one, with India dominant there. The result was that while I conquered the three civs on the large continent, the three civs on their own land mass grew very fast and had a big science lead on me. India in particular took advantage of its UB to grow to almost 200M people by turn 290 or so. The result was that even at that late stage Ghandi had a 12-tech lead on me. This never, ever happens (although I skipped Rationalism except for the GS). I had no desire to attack such large, nuclear powers, and decided to skip building the spaceship and just end the game instead. (There had been one inconclusive UN vote, with me too broke to be a player in it.)
This is in turn was a result of the nerfing of the warmongering trees in b14. My culture grew significantly more slowly, as did my gold (even before I quit getting gold). But toward the end I couldn't stay happy. I didn't have stadiums yet, and no one had luxuries I needed available. I don't necessarily view this as a problem, because the vanilla game was designed not to have huge, viable land masses. (I wound up even with India in this category.)
All in all, I appreciated India's innate ability shining in a game where Ghandi was safe, and I had an unavoidably late start in even considering going after him. The same is true of the Ottomans and Songhai staying basically even with me, just by expanding like crazy and using the Emperor buffs.
On the plus side I built a barb navy and discovered three other civs on the largest continent, just by staying in shallow water. I husbanded the island barb camps and had three barb ships training my captured barb units for centuries. That was great! I wound up with a complete army made up of barbs except for my two starting units, up until I began building siege units.
The reason the game was interesting, though, is that two other civs were on their on islands, and India and China shared one, with India dominant there. The result was that while I conquered the three civs on the large continent, the three civs on their own land mass grew very fast and had a big science lead on me. India in particular took advantage of its UB to grow to almost 200M people by turn 290 or so. The result was that even at that late stage Ghandi had a 12-tech lead on me. This never, ever happens (although I skipped Rationalism except for the GS). I had no desire to attack such large, nuclear powers, and decided to skip building the spaceship and just end the game instead. (There had been one inconclusive UN vote, with me too broke to be a player in it.)
This is in turn was a result of the nerfing of the warmongering trees in b14. My culture grew significantly more slowly, as did my gold (even before I quit getting gold). But toward the end I couldn't stay happy. I didn't have stadiums yet, and no one had luxuries I needed available. I don't necessarily view this as a problem, because the vanilla game was designed not to have huge, viable land masses. (I wound up even with India in this category.)
All in all, I appreciated India's innate ability shining in a game where Ghandi was safe, and I had an unavoidably late start in even considering going after him. The same is true of the Ottomans and Songhai staying basically even with me, just by expanding like crazy and using the Emperor buffs.
Conceptually I agree with the concept of raising late game culture. It allows players to enjoy the culture tree more even without heavy culture investment....but for the culture win it still forces heavy culture investment which makes sense to me.
Questdog
Prince
My two cents: It seems to me that the perks come a little too quickly. I like the idea of getting more than vanilla, but it seems just a bit overdone.
Also, I think any perk that you feel you have to take every game is probably overpowered, and it seems to me that the initial goodies you get from Honor are much too much to pass on. I think granting Happiness through the Honor chain is a mistake, as this path should be for warmongering and if you are warmongering then you ought to find it tougher to keep your happiness rate up.....
By the way, happiness is much too easy to come by overall. When my approval rate stands at 95% and I rank last among all civilizations, that doesn't seem quite right.
Also, I think any perk that you feel you have to take every game is probably overpowered, and it seems to me that the initial goodies you get from Honor are much too much to pass on. I think granting Happiness through the Honor chain is a mistake, as this path should be for warmongering and if you are warmongering then you ought to find it tougher to keep your happiness rate up.....
By the way, happiness is much too easy to come by overall. When my approval rate stands at 95% and I rank last among all civilizations, that doesn't seem quite right.
Txurce
Deity
I agree that some of the warmongering traits spill a bit too much onto happiness and culture. But ranking last in happiness at 95% has nothing to do with that - it's all about much-needed AI bonuses at the higher levels.
Questdog
Prince
Well, I'm certainly not advocating making it tougher for the AI to stay happy. But I think (especially at higher levels) it ought to be a real challenge for me to keep my smiley face, especially if I'm in the conquering mood....
Questdog
Prince
I see in b19 that the happiness perk has at least been moved from the intial offering of Honor and that's a good thing. (Though it ought to be removed altogether)
Txurce
Deity
That's not listed for b19.
Questdog
Prince
Well, that's the way it was in the game I just played. Military Caste was available as a second choice in Honor which boosted Happiness +1 per garrison (+2 Culture, which if anyone can explain how garrisoned troops bring culture to a town, I'd like to hear it. I was in the infantry and we brought mostly rowdiness and debauchery to the towns where we were stationed.....)
1st perk in Honor is 20% boost to military production and reveal barb camps.
Edit: Scratch that, I DL'd and installed 7.0 by mistake....
