- The road building tech is missing a translation for its quote (no text is displayed)
- Using the common war to get a free "Open Borders" treaty to get techs is somewhat exploitable.
- The text in the city screen indicating if a resource gives +1/-1 epidemic is always colored red if it follows an information about religious incompatibility.
- One thing I noticed: Rome only has leaders from the Imperial era or later, except Caesar, but by that time the Roman Republic was a shadow of its former self and Caesar was largely responsible for its end. Having a leader from the Roman Republic times would be good. What about having someone like Lucius Papirius Cursor or Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus? I know Rome already has more leaders than other civs but I think it would still be justified...
- Does anyone ever use Local Crafts? While it should be inferior to the later options converting hammers at a 50% rate, a 20% conversion rate is abysmal and useless seem an appropriate qualifier for it, especially because antiquity is much more demanding in hammers than gold/science compared to later periods. Boosting the conversion rate to 30% might keep it weak, but at least then it could be useful in some limited situations.
Maybe. Generally speaking, this is a part of the moving "off the land" and into the cities to work as craftsmen. Resource improvements should be less valuable in that era for their yields and more for the resources they provide to feed the factories.
With the way the game works, for many resources that are not directly used by transformer buildings, having multiples gives nothing except trading options.
I'm playing as the French right now, and I've concluded that the "cultivate grapes" option is useful if lacking any natural source of wine or if needing two wines to get alcohol (this gives flexibility), but that the tiles with grapes are otherwise quite bad. Just having a normal farm on the chernozem tile is providing +4F (no serfdom) or +5F+1G (serfdom and manor), compared with +3F+3G +1 local happiness with the wine and the special improvement. For such a small difference, why not take the extra food and then get a proper food boosting crop in the chernozem later on? Once you can get wheat planted, the wine is completely outclassed even with a civ-specific improvement that makes it more valuable.
What I did notice, though, that AI never uses federation civic especially in early game. Its strange to have 12 empires in the bottom right around 1000BC
I think the federation civic is outright bad.
Advantages over autocracy:
- Some maintenance money savings based on city distance (underwhelming on large maps where number of cities hits much sooner, more meaningful but not great on smaller maps)
- No base unhappiness
- 1 free unit (that might as well be a joke)
- No upkeep, which is a good boost in the late game, but in the classical era civics upkeep is rather low. And iirc AIs get a discount on civics upkeep making this even weaker for them.
Disadvantages:
- No hapiness from barracks, walls, imperial cult statue - overall much worse on the happiness front
- Much slower military production speed (25% penalty and lacking the 10% bonus of autocracy)
- Lacking the -5 separatism modifier
- Unlocked
much later in the tech tree, requiring either to stay much longer in tribal union (losing a lot of benefits) or to get a second revolution. Also by that time, most cities will probably already have some of the happiness-boosting buildings linked to autocracy, so the "no base unhappiness" is in practice only helpful with newly founded cities or some captured cities, core cities will suffer.
You have very little faith in me
. I evaluated the possible solutions, and I indeed saw no satisfactory ones that would eliminate the exploit. I think I'll do the opposite and devalue it instead - I'll revert them to slow work speed and reduce the death chance on completion to 50% or maybe even less. Anyone trying to exploit around that is indeed welcome if they really need it.
I suggest removing the possibility of death on completion entirely. I'm not sure if the efficiency at 50% is sufficiently low or not, but
for every 2 slaves you use instead of a normal worker, you are paying around 1gpt more in maintenance (dependent on difficulty level, inflation) to get the same output. I very much doubt that slaves at 40% efficiency would be overpowerd as workers even if you got dozens of them because of the budget drain they would represent.
Slaves can only rush buildings, not units, but with an efficiency of 20% you'd be saving hammers in addition to upkeep costs by having them be used to rush a building and then making a normal worker.. This shows that slaves at 20% efficiency would be near useless as workers even without death on completion, and that a reasonable efficiency where slave workers that don't die on completion and are neither useless nor overpowered must be significantly higher.
I haven't done the math on the RoI for a worker and the "gpt value" of a worker improving terrain, but while workers are very important, having an army of slave workers is not going to be an outright dominant strategy. There is also an opportunity cost of using the 30 hammers building boost later rather than sooner, although it's generally moderate.
Probably the last slavery tweak I'm considering, and I'd like some input on for this version, is what to do with the slaves once one switches out of slavery. Currently they convert to workers with 50% chance, which is both too generous from a gameplay perspective (can result in a lot of free workers, as slaves can be hoarded by the dozen when you know you're switching out) and not very realistic ("I'm a free man now, I guess I'll just continue working on the same plantation"). I'm currently considering maybe a small sum of gold per slave instead, as they join the economy as earners and consumers (and taxpayers).
It's actually quite realistic for them to stay. Look at the Southern USA after the civil war, most former slaves actually kept working on the same plantation. I have less knowledge about the fall of the Roman Empire and the transition from Latifundias towards early feudalism, but iirc the same thing happened.
50% conversion rate to normal workers is however way too high for gameplay, I think.
Maybe so. I'll see if it can be done easily.
