Probably Improved Gameplay Mod

[AveiMil]

Further I suggest giving Temples and Monastaries the following boosts when Theology and Divine Rigth is researched:

Divine Right & Temple: +1

This is actually a decent boost that improves the Religious Tech path instaed of just the building that you enable on your way to the key tech that is Monarchy anyway.

Adding an additional priest slot when running priests is not desirable is not much of a boost.

Theology & Monstary: +2

Again, with a boost like this Monastary actually becomes a worthwhile building with great syngery with the religious tech path.

Alternatively you could associate the boosts with civic's but that might be harder and more clutter.

 

[essmene]

just wondering:

These changes do seem to go after Human Player needs and having an alternate MP path.

If you boost temples / priests / ... will the AI know about it ?

There was a AI vs AI thread in BBAI forum where i got the impression that built paths for a city are hard coded. If you make certain improvements cheaper / more desirable, will the AI be able to use those changes as well, or will it gimp the AI going for GW as it used to be cheap / .... ?

 

[UWHabs]

Early religious techs, buildings etc.
Proposed changes: (note everything I suggest is in addition to existing features unless stated otherwise)
Temples: cost reduced to 60 from 80 and priest slots changed from 1 to 2.

Like the decrease in cost. I'd say keep it with 1 priest

Monastery: +15% instead of +10%.

Sounds fine. As mentioned, somewhat redundant with OR, still, but that's not a huge issue. With the culture and science, still worth building. Maybe make them a hare cheaper, too?

Organized Religion: Medium Upkeep instead of High.
Theocracy: Unlimited priest specialists.
Divine Right: +1 for priests.

I think it's still useful to keep something high upkeep in each civic category. I think it's strong enough as it is. However, if you're boosting theocracy, would changing that to high upkeep make more sense, then? It's probably not possible, but it would be kind of cool to have theocracy high upkeep, but DR change it to low or medium upkeep (with the other changes for DR, would certainly give it lots of synergy with Theocracy).

Priest specialist: Now gives 12 instead of 11.

Not bad. Makes AW/DR priests very powerful, but as mentioned, by that time, you probably don't want GProphet as your GPerson, so makes them actually be a decent yield specialist

Missionaries: Cost reduced from 40 to 30.

Fine

Colosseum:
If temples are reduced to 60, then I think colosseums should be boosted a little. I suggest changing their melee bonus from +1xp to +2xp.

Would make colosseums a stable equivalent. The problem is then you probably need to boost stables, as well. I think they're fine as is (+1 happy and +1 XP for melee is still pretty strong, especially for creative civs).

Subs:
I suggest giving both submarines and attack submarines +1 first strike chance.
Honestly I'd rather someone make a better suggestion because I'm kinda getting sick of adding first strikes to units to make them a bit better. I could change their base strengths instead... Any suggestions?

Maybe give subs +50% attack? Makes them weak defending, but strong for hit and run.

Battleships:
Require Artillery technology.

makes sense

Grenadiers:
I suggest changing them from base 12 to base 13 strength and increasing cost from 100 to 105

Machine Guns:
Cost increased from 125 to 130. Otherwise I make the grenadier->MG upgrade path cheaper.

Makes sense. Since Grens were pushed back in the tech tree, they're much less useful now. Ideally, if you could let them get CR, that would certainly be a big boost for them. But again, might not be possible.

Explorers:
Give them the ability to attack. Reduce strength to 3, give them +50% bonus against barbs. (they're not likely to ever encounter animals I don't think.)
This will finally let you do something about those barb huts in the new world that are guarded by barbs.
I can't think of any balance problems off the top of my head, that would be a result of this change. Let me know if you can think of any.
This is basically the suggestion JujuLautre made a couple months ago.

I'd still keep them at strength 4. Then with +50% vs barbs, they'd at least have a small edge vs. barb axemen on flat ground.

Great Wall:
Cost increased from 150 to 250. This may be increased later to 300 depending on feedback.

Makes sense. If you make it too expensive, it really stifles development early. Still need it to be cheap enough to be useful to build before it becomes mostly obsolete.

Environmentalism:
+2 from Recycling Centre.

Sure. Recycling centres are pretty marginal as is. I'd probably even give them a base +1 or +2 health.

Flood plains
Flood plains are not removed when a city is built on them.
This one appears to already be in the mod and I didn't mention it. Can anyone confirm this in their game?

That's probably not too bad. As long as the bonuses are applied properly, so that settling on a FP gives you a 3 food city and not a 5 food city.
[/QUOTE]

 

[Minor Annoyance]

If you’re worried that the Standard Priest with 2 hammers is better than a Engineer I don’t see any big problems with boosting the Engineer to 3 hammers.

I would agree with that. It's hard to get any significant number of engineers until much later in the game, so that increase will not have an unbalancing impact.

 

[EmperorFool]

I'm concerned a little about the GW change. Multiplayer notwithstanding, if the GW costs more then you'll need to build military units to fend off the barbs because the GW will take too long, but that will make the GW take even longer, which will require more troops, . . .

 

[PieceOfMind]

Thanks for all the comments guys. I'll answer the quicker questions first...

just wondering:

These changes do seem to go after Human Player needs and having an alternate MP path.

If you boost temples / priests / ... will the AI know about it ?

There was a AI vs AI thread in BBAI forum where i got the impression that built paths for a city are hard coded. If you make certain improvements cheaper / more desirable, will the AI be able to use those changes as well, or will it gimp the AI going for GW as it used to be cheap / .... ?

In general the AI does take into account the value of buildings when making a random decision what to build. It's possible that with enough changes, a building's value would be different enough to warrant increasing its hardcoded asset value, to assist in AI's use of it.

Some changes are pretty much AI neutral. As an example, if I changed the temple from 1 slot to 2 priest slots it's not gonna make much difference to the AI. It's not building the temple with the specific intent of using priests in the first place.

Anyway, some of the proposed changes to the buildings should actually bring the AI's value of it more in line with its real value. The AI is probably more inclined to build temples and monasteries at the moment than the human player.

Having said all that, balance changes like those done to buildings are much more likely to have an impact on the performance of the human player and at this point that is the main goal. Considering the AI acts as basically a dice-rolling machine it would be best (IMO) not to get too concerned about how its decisions will be affected.

I would agree with that. It's hard to get any significant number of engineers until much later in the game, so that increase will not have an unbalancing impact.

Ok, I'm starting to like the idea of 3 engineers and I think this will go into my revised changes list...

With that change, it won't be out of the question to give the priest a 2 as part of its yield, but maybe with a particular tech. I'll have a think about it.

I'm concerned a little about the GW change. Multiplayer notwithstanding, if the GW costs more then you'll need to build military units to fend off the barbs because the GW will take too long, but that will make the GW take even longer, which will require more troops, . . .

The great wall did strike me as a relatively cheap wonder. It used to be 250 in Warlords but back then it gave +1 engineer point instead of +2 spy points.

It's sped up by stone, which as AveiMil noted, makes stone even more useful again. At 250 it's the cost of 6.25 axemen or 3.125 axemen with stone. (remember axemen are 40 in PIG.)

I think the great wall should take a pretty big investment because its function is fairly powerful; it doesn't even obsolete.

It might make it harder to fend off early barbarians but perhaps that is a good gameplay change? Is it a crutch for many high level players? I haven't heard of that. Maybe with Raging barbs on it's a bigger change but having to deal with barbs should be part of the early game IMO. If getting the GW is a bit harder now, all the better.

If having to deal with barbs becomes so much harder it might be possible to throttle them back a little. It would have to be a pretty big problem though.

 

[Afforess]

Credits

Renegadechicken, EmperorFool for Events With Images modcomp and and Afforess for the compilation of images. Arian for the creation of the images.

Just noticed this. I didn't actually do anything, Arian deserves all the credit for the images.

 

[EmperorFool]

That's probably not too bad. As long as the bonuses are applied properly, so that settling on a FP gives you a 3 food city and not a 5 food city.

A city only boosts the tile's yield so that it is at least 2 1 1. It never adds to the tile's yield directly. Thus a desert floodplain and a grassland corn will both yield 3 when settled upon.

Given the higher cost of the Axeman, I guess a higher cost GW makes sense.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Updated change list.

Spoiler :

Proposed changes for PIG Mod v0.82:
Please post your comments of support or disapproval of any changes you care to talk about.

Proposed updates of incorporated mods:
Not updating BBAI to v0.83 yet because it has a CTD bug in it waiting to be fixed
Actually, with LunarMongoose's BBAI fix this should be possible. It is intended that v0.83 will be included.
Update BUG
Not including BULL just yet.
Unofficial patch version 1.40
Global Warming mod version 1.10

Drill promotions:
Drill I: +1 first strike
Drill II: +1 first strike, Suffers 20% less collateral damage
Drill III: +1 first strike, Suffers 20% less collateral damage
Dril IV: +1 first strike, Suffers 20% less collateral damage, +10% vs. mounted units

Early religious techs, buildings etc.
Proposed changes: (note everything I suggest is in addition to existing features unless stated otherwise)
Temples: cost reduced to 60 from 80. Gives +1 with Divine Right
Monastery: +2 with Theology.
Organized Religion: Remains high upkeep. Also gets +50% production on missionaries.
Theocracy: Unlimited priest specialists.
Missionaries: Cost reduced from 40 to 30.

Priests:
Standard priest: 21
Theology: Priest gets +1
Divine Right: Priest gets +1
(I'm still trying to avoid giving priests 3 at any point because even though I appreciate merchants are used for their respective great person, it doesn't sit well with me for the yield from priests to be strictly better than that of merchants which are a specialised specialist (poor choice of words ).

With the additions to priest yields, I'm thinking that in the late game we will see people employing priests instead of merchants or scientists when getting great people is no longer feasible (cities maybe reaching pop 20 and starting to pick best specialist yields). To remedy this, I think scientists should be given +1 after a tech, merchants given +1 after a tech.
For the scientist, I'm thinking Scientific Method is the obvious answer because Scientific Method has received pretty big nerfs - monasteries are now much more valuable and forest preserves come with Monarchy instead.
For the merchant, I'm thinking Democracy but this is definitely a less obvious choice for me. I could instead go with Corporation, or Mass Media, etc. Any ideas on which tech would be best for this? Using a realism argument as a justification would be preferable IMO.

Colosseum:
Only +1xp to melee.

Subs:
Given ability to deal collateral damage to 2 units. Both attack sub and normal sub are given the following:
<iCollateralDamage>50</iCollateralDamage>
<iCollateralDamageLimit>60</iCollateralDamageLimit>
<iCollateralDamageMaxUnits>2</iCollateralDamageMaxUnits>
This is similar to the battleship except it's only 2 units instead of the battleship's possible 5. Because subs are weaker, the collateral damage dealt tends to be lower.

Battleships:
Require Artillery technology.

Grenadiers:
What about simply changing them to have +50% vs. riflemen (instead of +50% attack vs. riflemen) ?

Machine Guns:
No change needed.

Explorers:
Give them the ability to attack. Reduce strength to 3, give them +50% bonus against barbs. Since they are a strength 4 unit that starts with some decent promotions, and I'm still trying to avoid seeing them used weirdly in combat, I'll increase their cost, probably to 50 from 40.

Great Wall:
Cost increased from 150 to 250. This may be increased later to 300 depending on feedback.

Recycling Centre:
+2 with Environmentalism.
Reduced in cost to 200 from 300.

Flood plains
Flood plains are not removed when a city is built on them.
You will get 3 on the city tile if you settle on them. I think they still contribute to the flood plains for the city. If city is destroyed the floodplains remain.

More modcomps:

Route Air Bombing
I like the look of this one and it looks like the AI's handling of it has been looked after enough to qualify for merging into PIG.

Obtain gold on disband if the AI knows how to do it.



More suggested changes:
Engineer yield changed to 3 from 2.

Forests and jungles provide +25% defense instead of +50%.

First to discover Divine Right receives free Great Prophet.

 

[EmperorFool]

I think they still contribute to the flood plains for the city.

I haven't checked (so this comment isn't all that useful), but I seriously doubt there's any special-case code to specifically ignore the city square when counting and from features.

On that note, I've always been annoyed that the from clearing a forest/jungle are lost when settling on the land--yet the feature is removed. Is the idea that to settle there the feature must be burned away, losing any production benefits? How about having the feature remain initially and only get cleared (if not chopped) once the city reaches a certain population (say 3 or 4)? This a) means you'll get the +1 (plains or hill), +2 (plains hill), or -1 (never since city gives 2 minimum) and the or from the feature, b) get a chance to clear it for in that city, and c) get the +50% defense bonus until it's gone.

This clearly isn't something game-breaking, and it may lean more towards neat and semi-realistic rather than game-enhancing, but I think it's worth discussing.

 

[PieceOfMind]

I've thought about this before as well. The problem with allowing a city to be settled in a forest is first of all you get a nice defense bonus that can't be bombarded (a big gameplay change!) and if you didn't allow that people would ask why. I assume the graphics would also look pretty bad.

Then there's only the option of should you get a benefit if the forest is cleared to build the city? I think it would be overpowered to grant the hammer bonus immediately, and probably annoying if the settler was forced to use up a number of turns clearing the forest to get that first boost.

That said, I don't think it should even be allowed for settlers to clear the forest themselves (at least to get hammers anyway).

We could disallow settling on forests or jungles until they are chopped. I was always slightly bothered that you could build a city on a jungle, clearing the jungle before IW. However, for those players who get a forest or jungle heavy start, I think it's unnecessarily hampering them to require them not to build on forests/jungles.

Giving a random chance of getting a yield from the forest would probably be not the best idea. Having lucky/unlucky events early in the game could be unbalancing, especially in MP.
If I assume you meant that you'd get a random yield, say somewhere between 0 and 50% of the chop yield, then it could have some potential. I don't think the idea is very good though.

At the moment, I think having to clear forests when you settle them is just part of the settling strategy.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Regarding explorers, what I've done for now is this:

Strength 4.
Cost 50 (used to be 40).
+50% vs. barbarians (I haven't coded this yet because it looks like it will take a SDK change)
Cannot capture cities
-100% city attack.
Starts with Woodsman I, Guerilla I
Better results from huts

What do people think of this? They're going to be hard to get the balance just right. At all costs I want to avoid seeing them used extensively in any sort of city combat, including attacking and capturing barb cities. Using them as medics is ok. Using them out in the field should be alright too. Sticking them in hill forest forts might be pretty overpowered though. I'm considering giving them -100% city defense as well. That should avoid being used to defend forts (they act as cities).

 

[Afforess]

What about just giving the tile a +1 boost if there is a forest where the city is settled, and a +1 boost of for the jungle.

However, that might be overpowered... What if that boost only lasted for as many hammers the chopping would have given.

So if I settled on a forest, and clearing it would give a +40 boost, the city would remove the forest, but for 40 turns, I'd make that up with 1 per turn boost; which would disappear after it expired. Ditto with the jungle, except with food.

 

[EmperorFool]

No, I didn't intend any randomness. What I meant that the bonus would depend on the tile's terrain type just as it does normally.

I like the idea of omitting the defense bonus. For one thing, you cannot have a city among the trees where you'd get an effect. Instead you'd have to clear a small area where the city was built and lose any defensive benefit. If anything in reality your attackers would receive a defensive benefit because they'd be able to get closer to the city under cover or you'd have to attack into the forest. So leaving out the defensive bonus altogether makes sense.

People might ask why? :shrug: That's gonna happen with so many other changes; no point in worrying about that. Put it into the Civilopedia.

I like the idea of spreading the spreading the out automatically over X turns, but that can more easily be turned into having the feature disappear at a certain size unless you clear it with a Worker for the instant .

You get what you like: no instant-clearing by the Settler, and you get semi-realism.

As for +1 for jungle, I like this from a game balancing aspect for players stuck in the middle of the jungle. On the flip side, it seems odd to have jungle be -1 on all the tiles surrounding your city yet +1 on the city's tile itself. I'm happy to sacrifice logic for fun and game balance, though.

 

[PieceOfMind]

@EF,
Well, considering you can already use a worker to clear the forest before you settle, I don't see any sort of urgency for this sort of change.
I think it would take a fair bit of effort (at least for me) to achieve the sort of things you're asking. If you wanted to try it I'd be interested in seeing how it goes.

I guess I like the significance of a change on gameplay to be somewhere proportional to the effort it will take me. If a change is easy, then I'm usually happy to do it even if it is only a minor balance change and will probably not affect gameplay noticeably.

Afforess,
Similar for your suggestion... I think it sounds to be too difficult for what it achieves. Have you done something similar with a mod of yours?

 

[Afforess]

Afforess,
Similar for your suggestion... I think it sounds to be too difficult for what it achieves. Have you done something similar with a mod of yours?

It'd be really simple, actually. At least, I think it would be.

Give me a day, I'll give you the code, if you are interested.

 

[PieceOfMind]

It needs to scale well with gamespeed obviously.
You're welcome to try the change yourself and I would certainly try it out. Only thing is it might still be at least a few days before I have a compiler up and running, so I won't be able to try it straight away.

 

[Afforess]

It needs to scale well with gamespeed obviously.
You're welcome to try the change yourself and I would certainly try it out. Only thing is it might still be at least a few days before I have a compiler up and running, so I won't be able to try it straight away.

It will, since it will just be grabbing the values as if you had chopped the forest/jungle.

I just finished writing it; I'm letting it compile overnight, I'll test it tomorrow. If all goes well, you should have some code then.

(It's a pretty straightforward addition, ~ 20 lines of code)

 

[AveiMil]

Priests:
Standard priest: 21
Theology: Priest gets +1
Divine Right: Priest gets +1
(I'm still trying to avoid giving priests 3 at any point because even though I appreciate merchants are used for their respective great person, it doesn't sit well with me for the yield from priests to be strictly better than that of merchants which are a specialised specialist (poor choice of words ).

With the additions to priest yields, I'm thinking that in the late game we will see people employing priests instead of merchants or scientists when getting great people is no longer feasible (cities maybe reaching pop 20 and starting to pick best specialist yields). To remedy this, I think scientists should be given +1 after a tech, merchants given +1 after a tech.
For the scientist, I'm thinking Scientific Method is the obvious answer because Scientific Method has received pretty big nerfs - monasteries are now much more valuable and forest preserves come with Monarchy instead.
For the merchant, I'm thinking Democracy but this is definitely a less obvious choice for me. I could instead go with Corporation, or Mass Media, etc. Any ideas on which tech would be best for this? Using a realism argument as a justification would be preferable IMO.

Okey, I'm going to keep battering this point as it's crux for me.

What's the point of these religious changes? It is to offer up an alternative technology path early to mid-game. The technologies in focus are once again Theology and Divine Right. You want to encourage players to actually grab these early (or first even) by making it possible to run some strong economic setups by going this path instead of the pretty standard push for Civil Service and a Buracracy capital->Liberalism.

I don't think it is right to keep the Priest boosts enabled by Theology and Divine Right permanent. This as you said screws up the balance with other specialists later in the game. If you simply introduce an obsolete effect when you hit for instance Scientific Method or whatever other tech is relevant (like Printing Press instead perhaps (we need to play-test this)) then you really actually give an advantage to civilizations that go down this technology path early (thus sacreficing other techs).

If I can get all these boosts later by just backfilling the technologies, then why won't I just continue with my normal tech path doing what I've always done?

The comparison to the Merchant specialist is also irrelevant if you introduce an obsolete effect for the Priest Theology/DR bonuses as the Priest will only produce 3 fo a limited time IF you have invested in the proper technologies (Theology and Divine Right are quite expensive early).

Priests are pretty anti- but definetly pro-.

What I suspect will occur with a 23 Priest is that you'll be able to expand a lot and keep you research slider rather high, but at the same time you won't be producing a great deal of science beakers at that time (because Religous buildings produce wealth and not science). This means the Religious tech path and wheter or not you want to push for it might be situational.

We (or I) don't want the result being that Priests are a favourable specialist to run late game. They should have their major impact in the early to mid-game phase.

 

[AveiMil]

Explorers:
Give them the ability to attack. Reduce strength to 3, give them +50% bonus against barbs. Since they are a strength 4 unit that starts with some decent promotions, and I'm still trying to avoid seeing them used weirdly in combat, I'll increase their cost, probably to 50 from 40.

I disagree.

If you can give them the ability to attack only Barbarians then that's fine, otherwise I would not tamper with this.

Increasing the cost of the Explorer is counter-intuitive. When I'm looking to build a scout I definitely do not want to invest a lot of into it. I want the unit out quick so that it can do what it's intended to do sooner rather than later: scout.

Giving a 4 strength Explorer with 2xWoodsman and the 2xHills upgrade the ability to attack would make this an awesome harassment unit (especially in multiplayer).

I don't think this unit needs much tampering.