- The influence of doctrines on power ratings is very exaggerated in my view. Getting the doctrine which makes future siege weapons stronger, which has a very limited impact on real army effectiveness, boosted my strength rating by something like 15%...
Yes, and it's kind of intentional. As in, I agree that it doesn't reflect their real utility, but I feel having it this way is better for game balance. Remember that power is not a game stat that influences
anything apart from AI decision-making. In early game, all civs will get a roughly equal amount of generals thanks to barbarians (unless they are in relatively rare circumstances where the can control their whole landmass, but then they aren't under direct threat of a war early on anyway), and most likely get a roughly equal non-zero amount of doctrines/traditions, which means the power ratings in early game, where there are fewer units, get a major "static" component, and do not fluctuate as much. In my anecdotal evidence it leads AI to being not as reckless early on, and more civs surviving until later. Yes, it's artificial, but it's simple, it's there, and it seems to work quite well.
- Enemy spies repeatedly destroying buildings in cities can become quite unnerving. When I look at how much it would cost me to do similar things, it's hundreds of spy points, but somehow the AI can spam this mission over and over again. Even with the reduction in cost for spies that stayed a long time in place.
- I don't bother to send spies on foreign soil, because the few times I tried, they got caught within 10 turns in enemy territory, often not even lasting 5, although I didn't appear much behind in spy points gathered. Meanwhile the AI spies are feasting, and it's also mostly useless to try to make my own spies for counter-espionage missions.
Espionage is a very opaque vanilla mechanic, but the general explanation to this particular gripe is the imbalance between total espionage generated throughout the game by you and your AI rivals, and
a lot of this imbalance comes from the difficulty level, as there aren't many ways of generating espionage in the first half of the game. Here's a good writeup (even if a visually very annoying one):
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-complete-guide-to-espionage.638613/
- There should be a delay between when a city is lost to barbarians and when it can be settled as a new civ. I had the case of losing the city and it settling as a 1-city civ the very next turn and spawning new defenders. What about "barbarian cities can't be settled in new civs if the occupation timer is still ongoing"?
Yes, an interesting edge case. I agree there needs to be some kind of a cooldown.
- The upgrade cost of irregular units into new irregular units seems too high to me. I find it generally more economical to simply make new stronger irregulars and delete the old weaker ones. If slave and peasant uprisings can afford to spawn plenty of irregulars, it shouldn't cost me 100 gold a pop to upgrade a 4-Str. irregular into a 6 Str. one.
I mean, all upgrade costs are calculated the same way, it's simply the cost difference in hammers converted to gold at a ratio + 10 gold. Giving irregulars a simple discount on all upgrades would mean that building an irregular and upgrading them to a regular unit would become even more powerful (it already is a valid strategy, I feel often overlooked by players who have relatively high commerce and food and low production). And giving them a discount only so long as they upgrade to another irregular sounds very niche.
I think that "quite powerful when they first appear, but also quite niche" is underselling it. They are the best unit by far at squashing slave revolts and at eliminating invading armies, they have a good ability to survive thanks to the mobility allowing to retreat and to accumulate experience (charioteers have the mobility, but their combat odds are too low in most situations to be able to get experience, and the promotions that make them better at what they are good at are much weaker than the specialist hill fighting promotions), and they are very important in attacking stacks as long as you have some hills or forests on the way to the enemy city. They have some weaknesses when defending, but most of their fights will be attacking.
I can understand that researching the historical data and modelling the new units would be a huge amount of work, so I understand you don't want to commit to it, but I hope it could happen in the future. Just 5 Str. instead of 4 Str. would be a massive upgrade and make the wait to explorers not feel so long.
Well, as I mentioned, I did consider it and don't rule it out completely, but the scope of this would mean it's unlikely I'll start on it before the next release as it's something that would be unlikely to be done, tested and polished by Christmas.
Yeah, the barbarian player is supposed to represent many different barbarian tribes that are always at war with normal civs, not a single unified civ, so it has a lot of special rules. So not being able to really get money in is probably as designed. But I stand by my general assessment that barbarian cities are not threatening enough, and the build mismanagement I pointed out also reduces their ability to output military units.
I agree with your general assessment, but I mostly accepted it as a part of game balance - to me, the appearance of barbarian cities did indeed always signal that the barbarian pressure on my civ was going down. I felt that it was more or less intentional - "these guys have their own cities now, I guess they're less interested in constantly attacking us". I can definitely see a possibility of a different balance where barbarian cities are a credible threat, and it wouldn't be too hard to achieve (say, by supplying some barbarian versions of buildings with hefty production bonuses), but I am actually not sure we want that happening.
Although Caesar military success was built to a large part due to strategic and political abilities, such as finding good opportunities to intervene in Gaul and managing to get himself allies, and perhaps less than for others on raw tactical abilities, I don't think that disqualify him from being considered as highly accomplished militarily. His battle record, although helped by luck and competent subordinates, is excellent. His conquest of the Gauls alone make him one of the most successful conquerors in History, especially as this conquest proved very durable and influential. Caesar was not Alexander the Great, Gengis Khan, Timur or Napoleon, but he was definitely above-average militarily compared to leaders generally considered as successful.
I can easily see why you brought up a "three traits per leader" idea while talking about Caesar - there are certain keystone figures in our perception of history that capturing them with some limited stats may feel excessively reductionist (Napoleon is another great example, with a profound effect he had on all facets of European historical development). Hell, for some even assigning them to a certain civ feels too reductionist - hence no Charlemagne despite him being one of the most notable figures in European history.
My case was between Spain and France, so the sort of case where it's reasonable to have entries. On a side note, it was particularly funny because there is a big west-east mountain range, and I spawned to the north of it as the French and Isabella with Spain was to the south of the mountains.
I'll send you a dictionary update later.
Sure! I think I covered a lot of cases along French/Spanish border, but as I said, that work can never be 100% complete.
Does anyone also think that instead of the great wonder art “Minecraft” there should be a “Terminator” movie ? Minecraft as a wonder can already be built in the modern era when computers are barely invented and “Terminator” and bonus microchips somehow fits better here
When coming up with Great Works, I made a conscious effort to represent more cultures/countries/civilizations - this is not an attempt at an objective or even subjective ranking of the "greatest" ones, but rather an attempt to represent the eras through a variety of mediums and cultural influences. While some inevitably get more than others, late game already has several American pieces. Having two American movies in the same era feels redundant. Minecraft is a) originally Swedish, b) a computer game, which is otherwise an unrepresented medium, and c) originally a one-man work, which is ideal for something generated by a GA.
By the way, there is such a mission as stealing technology or disrupting rocket science. Why is the cost of espionage in remote cities less than in cities that are near the capital?
Espionage is almost completely untouched in RI compared to vanilla.
- I had full vision on a friendly civ city because of passive espionage effects. I noticed it was going for a wonder I wanted too and I made big changes to my production plans to try to get it done faster, I even prepared spies to try to sow discontent in the city building wonder. Ten turns later, I notice the AI cancelled the build of the wonder in the city that was going to get it in ~15 turns, and started to build it in another city where it would need 50+ turns.
I am actually not sure whether this is intentional or not - it kind of feels like a thing I do sometimes when I realize I need money more than that particular wonder.
How am I supposed to do that when such a mission costs hundreds of spy points and when my spy can't last 5 turns in enemy territory? And the cost of doing such counter-espionage missions on all the civs that I suspect might be doing spy missions would consume nearly all my spy points production. To only get partial protection, and if I understand what the tips about the system say, spending the points in any mission (and so also in a counter-espionage mission) would also reduce my h2h spy points, reducing the costs for the enemy to do spying missions in my cities? I might as well keep the spying points to get view on their research state and on their cities, that information is at least helpful and doesn't require me to add an entire micro-routine for doubtful benefits.
I don't know what's happening behind the scenes, but from what I can see when playing, the spy system looks completely rigged against the player, at least at the difficulty I'm playing in. To be sure, I'm not really putting gold into the spy slider, but I'm assuming that if I have almost enough spy points against a civ to be able to see its city, the head-to-head spy points spending is not a sufficient explanation.
You're very welcome to investigate behind the scenes, but I am reasonably sure that the "completely rigged against the player" part is self-inflicted by you. You mentioned that you upped the per-era bonuses AI gets, and since the total espionage generated over time figures in a lot of calculations, and sources of espionage are relatively few, you seem to have given AIs a total dominance over yourself when it comes to espionage. Most players (even playing unmodified Immortal in RI, but especially lower difficulty levels) would never run into such a gross imbalance.
The case with Minecraft is a bit weird here, instead of needing computers it needs television which is fudging weird, must have been an error. If I could give any suggestions well... this is dumb but I think it would be cool to instead of using Minecraft as the great work we should use CIV itself haha
this takes me back to a random event where some of your civilians would make Civilization INTO the actual game (fourth wall break, lol) and they let you choose some nice bonuses.
I believe I speak for everyone here when I say Civilization had a big impact in our lives. At least for us who grew up playing it. Same goes for Minecraft and many other games, they have inspired a lot of people just as any other kind of ''art'' has, since they have become, we may want it or not, a cherished part of our culture
The amount of people who found a passion for history and politics kickstarted by CIV is insane, as the kids who became interested in architecture or engineering with Minecraft. Those great works don't reflect that sadly.
I agree with a suggestion that Civilization would also be a very decent fit, but it's still American, so ultimately when I was coming up with a list, I considered it but went with Minecraft. I'm open to tweaking its effect - it works quite well from gameplay perspective, but I agree it's not very flavourful.
- I see that cities revolting because of cultural pressure still happens in RI. However, there is no notice about the likelihood of such a revolt before it happens, unlike in AdvCiv.
I think that's an AdvCiv-specific thing. I'll take a look if that's something that can be easily lifted from there.
- What about giving +1 happiness to the artist specialist? In Civ3 you could get specialists whose only purpose was to make other citizens happy.
Happiness from specialists is one of those "would be nice to have if it was already in, kinda hard to code right as AI needs to use it well" features. Also, I think the mechanic from Civ3 quite gracefully transitioned into happiness from culture slider.
- In my current game, I'm using a modmod which buffs aristocracy's free units support. I also appreciate that Aristocracy allows special noble units and a limited form of conscription which can be very practical, although the general game design of Civ pushes for constant standing armies, not reflecting at all the more temporary natures of feudal levies. I'm also with a legislator leader making the high upkeep less relevant and wanting to go to Monarchy, which is a civic which goes very well with Aristocracy. Nonetheless, I'm still thinking that civil service is probably a better option with my other civics, and Plutocracy + Hanseatic League would also be better. All that to say: the vanilla Feudal Aristocracy civic is too weak in my opinion. If you go for anything but Monarchy + Servage especially.
As I shared with you privately, I am also somewhat dissatisfied with FA and I'd like to rework it to be more interesting. I suspect that won't make it into the upcoming release version though, or if it will it'll be a rather truncated version of the vision I have for it.
- I suppose that Inclusivity's one draft per turn is merely a reflection of draft being common in the era it is available at, and still purposefully inferior in drafting to other late-game legal civics? Because I don't see how it would boost drafting at all, or how it would be more suited for drafting than Civil Service. Romans did a lot of drafting.
Broader draft base, as you are less reluctant to conscript minorities.
- Why does Monasticism gives +1 gold to cottages? Cottages are at their best when they grow into villages and towns, but as soon as the tile has been worked for 30 turns the monasticism boost of +1 gold disappear. It helps a little when building new cottages, but that's a weak bonus.
Yeah, it's supposed to be weak; it somewhat sweetens building new towns as the early stage is less unappealing for a city to work, but it's not something that's decisive for the civic. It represents smaller settlements that sprung around monastic communities (and later often grew into towns of their own).
I can get behind that reasoning, but I think that that mentality points towards making him Imperialistic. What you're describing sounds exactly like someone who should get +1 happiness from Castrum and more frequent great general emergence. What if Caesar got that, and to balance things out, Augustus got Humanist instead of Imperialistic? I wouldn't describe the historical figure as Humanist, but extra commerce per city, and longer golden ages, both feel appropriate for him.
I could get behind an Imperialistic Caesar, and the thought crossed my mind before, but I didn't do it for a simple reason of terminological dissonance - Caesar is the last
pre-Imperial Roman leader, and having him as "Imperialistic" feels too jarring to me, as if someone was calling him a "Roman emperor".
The thought germinating in my head recently is that for a barbarian city to settle, it needs to have generated some minimum amount of culture. Absolute value of culture, not the percentage ownership. Reaching the culture threshold is what entitles that otherwise barbaric settlement to now be considered a proper civilization. This could even replace the random mechanic entirely: A barbarian city that reaches 500 culture or whatever could immediately become a proper civ, drawing in the other nearby barb cities. Would also give players a reason to send in spies and destroy culture related buildings to postpone such a conversion, which would be neat when you're in the midst of building up an army to take on it and don't want to see it suddenly become a much bigger challenge.
I feel that would be a hassle to code and wouldn't necessarily be better gameplay-wise. As it stands now, you can already keep a particular barbarian city from becoming a civ indefinitely by keeping some units next to it.
Also, maybe setting barbarians should automatically be at war with their immediate neighbors, seeing as they were recently raiding those lands. Doesn't make sense for a barbarian city to settle and suddenly I'm the one getting diplomacy penalties for retaliating. Or maybe instead of war, they should get a temporary diplomacy penalty with neighbors, to assure there's no "you attacked my friend" penalties generated.
From flavour perspective, I feel them starting at peace is justified. It's not like they suddenly "became" Dutch or Japanese or Berber in one turn when they settled - them no longer being "barbarian" simply denotes a change how they're perceived by the already-established civs. They are no longer "barbarians" that can be simply attacked on sight, but rather peers who should be dealt with as equals.
- What about putting a 1-food penalty on farms (including civ-specific farms) that are built on animal resources (cows, pigs...)?
Sure, why not.
- I just discovered that vassals increase the number of cities maintenance cost. If there is one thing I would expect as an advantage having vassals over holding land directly, it would be to not increase city upkeep... What's even the point of having vassals otherwise?
Do they? I didn't know that. If it's true, I'd love to rectify it.
I rarely send spies to places that aren't near my rival's capital though.
Maybe you can't prevent them catching some of your spies, but you can definitely prevent some of them from trespassing your borders. What I mean is that they can't catch ALL your spies, like with inquisitors or missionaries eventually one will succeed and I keep the belief that the computer sends a lot of spies to you.
slider position to offset some of your penalty against their
, making playing into it yourself too costly relative to the latter. In RI, espionage has another important layer in providing stability as a countermeasure to war-weariness, as well as a greater relative value to research in many cases owing to much more variable tech costs and the lack of trading and brokering, so less than minimal or maximal slider positions are sometimes a warranted and good idea (at least on Monarch, but I feel that I can make a general comment about RI's differences to the unmodded game in this regard). This also, of course, makes plain BtS's mission cost being a function of relative spending much more meaningful, since you might actually be warranted in matching or exceeding the AI's output of EPs without going all-out on a tech stealing espionage economy, unlike the base game at high levels where you could never be competitive without doing this.
(I know what you meant of course)
