Realism Invictus

[AllTheLand]

Nothing new; I've heard the same accusation levied at it from the moment vanilla Civ 4 was out by all the competitive players, and fundamentally a criticism of culture as mechanics - no matter how much one buffs it, it is mostly irrelevant to many playstyles. Good thing most leaders don't have that trait, I guess.

What about buffing the artist specialist if running creative, with say +1 gold? At +1 science and +1 gold, it becomes more tempting to run artist specialists, or in situations where culture is really needed (a city under cultural pressure), it becomes less costly to run an artist instead of exploiting a tile or running another specialist.

It wouldn't make the trait amazing, but I like this sort of subtle buff that reinforces the trait's specialization instead of making it more generic.

Or perhaps instead the +1 happiness I remember mentioning as an idea for the artist could exist for creative leaders only, but if I remember correctly, making the AI understand it and use it properly is a requirement before merging such a change.

Yeah, you've made your vendetta against the cost of civics known a while ago

My general problem is with mechanics that incentivize to leave large swathes of terrain unused because a city existing contributes to quadratic costs and below-average cities end up being nothing more than burdens, instead of just being low RoI and taking a long time to overcome investment costs and fixed costs. It bothers me a lot if I have to leave blocs of 15 tiles of mostly plain and grassland (without bonus resources) unused because all the costs in a city there would be too high. I can also see the argument that in real life, vast swathes of land remained sparsely populated for a long time, so it wouldn't be desirable to have a balance where everything gets used too quickly, but I think that's more related to population growth. Population growth becomes fairly fast and easy by the late classical age (and even more so with servage farms), making settlers stops being much of a hindrance on city growth, and growing new small cities doesn't require any loss on the growth of bigger cities.

While I can be annoyed by the gpt amounts that are sometimes reached, there is of course a need for expenses to be sufficiently high to limit the pace of tech research and to force having to prioritize some expenses over others. It's too easy otherwise. It's more the incentives created by how the cost works, and some balance issues it creates (populist being so awful and legislator being so good) I have a problem with.

At the same time, each city tends to come with "fixed benefits", such as trade route revenue, free craftsmen from buildings, or contributing to the pool of base buildings required by limited buildings, so obviously costs are needed to avoid the spamming of tiny useless cities. Likewise, big cities that use most of their cross should be better than medium cities sharing a lot of their cross, and the num-cities related maintenance and civics cost that I dislike contribute to that too.

So basically what you're saying is you agree with the statement in the hint? Good.

I think the statement in the hint still gives an exagerated impression of the number of situations in which they can be substitute for one another, as it gives the impression that them being substitute is a rule that suffers exceptions, whereas I'd rather say it's the opposite, them being substitutes is the exception.

Currently, the line between admitting defeat and demanding unconditional surrender seems to be far too narrow. There should be more room for a (nearly) status quo peace in between.

Yes, I think that's the issue! I'll have a look.

But when there's roughly 100 attempts at balance changes from a player who dgaf to finish one game and understand core converter mechanic before launching a rant full of demands its basically a spam tactic to push through as much taste-based balance changes as possible.

You complained previously a lot about me and my "tone", seeing my (sometimes wrong or subjective) opinions about the game and balance as a justification to start making personal attacks against me. I found your tone and attitude very objectionable, but I didn't answer. You said that you would start ignoring me from then on, and I thought that was the best solution.

However, I'm not going to stop sharing my experiences and impressions in this thread because you dislike them and make passive-aggressive comments to express this dislike.

What's everyone's current thoughts on animals? I used to not mind them so much when my starting strategy was always "build lots of stuff in capital, expand only when military is strong". Even when my starting warrior died, and my initial scout explored 10 tiles before meeting a barb archer, I'd just settle in with minimal map exploration and be fine with it.

I personally don't like barbarian animals. I understand they exist to symbolize barbarians that won't enter inside your cultural borders, which is useful to know for the player, but animals are simply too strong. In reality, almost no animal would dare to attack a group of human warriors, and although they could inflict some casualties if they did, they'd have very poor odds.

Having your initial warrior being almost doomed to die from animals when you send him exploring is quite annoying, and early-game encounters with animals are some of the biggest uncontrollable RNG elements in the entire game, because losing a single unit at that stage of the game is much more impactful than losing 10 later on.

And all this while the AI has scouts from turn 0, and on higher difficulty levels, scouts that can actually stand up against AI archers, allowing them to explore the map almost freely while I'm (literally) in the dark.

The headstart bonuses the AI receives have been long bothering me. My experience on my two games with most of the headstart bonus removed has been very positive.

I would mind this less if there was actually any game and decision making involved, but there isn't really any opportunity for that. With the opening warrior, the decision is between going out and risking it and having it sit in the starting city, and not exploring at all. There's a tad more with the scout, but barbs show up so early that it's a 50/50 chance between exploring a little with it or exploring a medium amount with it. There's little to no nuance here from a game experience perspective. I've now started loading autosaves whenever my opening warrior dies and doing something different with it, since the version of the game where it dies early has literally no fun or benefit to offer, it's just an unpleasant game experience with no real engagement.

Agreed on all counts.

 

[AspiringScholar]

Personally, I actually quite like how Civ IV included animals as a "proto-barbarian" group. (RI improves this with from the get-go tactical challenges with various animals' bonuses, too.) Mechanically, I completely agree with Sazhdapec's assessment of the early game balance and enjoy it, and while I also agree with [Y] on the alarming potency of archers when they show up and the significance of the greater relative value of investments early in the game, I am also not greatly bothered by that because it works both ways in non-game-endingly massive situations like losing an entire second city or even outright losing (i.e., winning an early combat is also a massive advantage by gaining a valuable promotion that makes this same larger fraction of your total military assets similarly "unfairly" improved), and when it actually is, it's at the very beginning of the game and so there wasn't really much time wasted anyway and you can just restart. The sense of volatility and danger is more fun to me than an assurance that I will be thrown a bone to safeguard against immediate loss; but that's just me.

Flavor-wise, having the animals as threats in the wild exudes a feel of a dying Paleolithic world where man is just now ascending and is still predominantly at the mercy of nature. Having all land up for grabs by humanity from square one is fine but it lacks an echo of the stone age which I find quite tasteful and which this simple mechanic conveys well. From a realism standpoint, having your primitive warrior mauled by a bear as he wanders into the dark is certainly within the same pale of abstraction as his hypothetically permanent existence or it taking decades to travel a few tiles.

 

[Growling]

Can we have a new release soon Walter? The SVN loading times can be a bit rough at times.
Pretty please ?

 

[[Y]]

it's at the very beginning of the game and so there wasn't really much time wasted anyway and you can just restart.

I can sometimes spend an hour rerolling maps until I find a starting location/area I'm happy with, so it can be a lot of wasted time for some of us.

Flavor-wise, having the animals as threats in the wild exudes a feel of a dying Paleolithic world where man is just now ascending and is still predominantly at the mercy of nature. Having all land up for grabs by humanity from square one is fine but it lacks an echo of the stone age which I find quite tasteful and which this simple mechanic conveys well. From a realism standpoint, having your primitive warrior mauled by a bear as he wanders into the dark is certainly within the same pale of abstraction as his hypothetically permanent existence or it taking decades to travel a few tiles.

I love the flavor of it! What I don't love is how it affects the player and AI differently. The AI starts with scouts, archers, and more, and packs a bonus against barbs (and with a greater bonus at higher difficulties) and while statistically it will lose some units, it's mostly well set up to explore a lot of the map very early on, while earning promotions and great general points, and while the player has its opening warrior typically die fast and with little to none of the map explored. While it's easy to chalk that up to providing extra difficulty, it doesn't offer it in the form of a positive experience. It makes the player feel pressured to settle land fast because if they don't, the AI won't leave anything to for the player to settle. And in a game where settling and expanding is a big part of the experience, having the AI explore and settle everything while the player struggles to explore and settle is a negative experience. It's fine if the AI and player are doing the same thing but the AI has compensation for difficulty, but it's not fine when that compensation is so high that the AI and player are almost playing different games.

Again, part of this might be a matter of map setup, since more unclaimed land yields more barbarians. So maybe it's a matter of making the target barb count depend on continent size and civ count in addition to unclaimed land, so that they don't automatically rage when the civ count is low relative to the size of the continent.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

- The tooltip for the temple wrongly identifies it as providing +1 for Anti-Clerical leaders, or at least it did in my case as Elizabeth. I have a save and can provide it if you would like to take a specific look.

Yeah, I need to redo some tooltips/pedia text strings. The new iteration of Paganism, for instance, misleadingly says that it provides +1 with state religion; while technically true, that's in addition to +1 it normally does.

- The "Net Effect" indication in the tooltip for the bronze smith still shows +0.5% epidemic chance. It is not actually added to the city in the epidemic chance indicator once built, however.

I think I fixed this one in one of the latest SVN updates too, but thanks for pointing out - I double-checked, should be a proper 1 now.

- Would it be possible to upscale the promotion icons for units in the stack tooltip? Sometimes they are not completely legible in that downsized format, and are otherwise not represented by text that you can check elsewhere when apprising an enemy's strength.

Unit tooltip unfortunately has a lot of hardcoded elements. A while ago (like a couple of years, I guess), I looked into improving it, especially for large stacks, and unfortunately, there isn't much one can do there.

- I suspect you're already well-aware of this one and there simply isn't a qualifying animation, but it is rather strange that the English man-at-arms both wields and fights with a proper longsword using only one hand, seemingly with the default swordsman animation, especially while the other is just freely there. Come to think of it, the Doppelsoldner does not: maybe have it use the latter's animation? Johannes Lichtenauer might not approve of his techniques being so shameless plundered, but ars gratia artis...

I'll probably just redo those guys. They're one of the older units, and due for a facelift anyway. Claymores weren't even their weapons of choice anyway. I'll probably give them poleaxes, I don't think there's anyone equipped with those yet, and they were really popular in England around the HYW. France got their medieval facelift, high time England got one too.

- Mont St. Michel could be more clearly documented in the Pedia to indicate that the +1 it provides to Christian monasteries is universal rather than only applying to the city in which it was built. I took a gamble experimenting in building it my capital which probably didn't need the happiness but was otherwise a better spot for it, and was pleasantly surprised that it did in fact confer the benefit to all cities, but I would rather have known it for sure before deciding to risk it.

I mean, it's the same syntax as, for example, Stonehenge, and nobody ever complained about that one. I don't think it's even possible to give a local +1 to a building.

- The European civs' boat equivalent to the "shack" indicating that a water tile is being worked (as well as the actual fishing boat, which I believe shares the same base model) resembles an Age of Sail cutter while in the medieval era, which looks quite anachronistic and out of place, all the more so when adjacent to an actual unit of a medieval ship! I would suggest moving this visual to the renaissance, or even (as it appears to be of an almost 19th century design) to industrial (or a later tech within renaissance if possible, such as Ship Rigging, which would probably be the most accurate between the two, as those designs were centuries away from the early ocean-going ships which debut the era).

It's not European, there is one per era. I double-checked and it even has cannons. Will change.

- On the note of AI stubbornness and peace evaluations, how about displaying the war score numerically? I have actually mentioned this one before, and I recall you saying that even though such a value would be easy to render displayed, you were on the fence about it, and ultimately decided against it because the player can effectively gauge the war progress by seeing what's offered when suggesting peace. In light of recent discussion where this is determined to be both too narrow and is further clouded by variable leader personalities, I think it would be a small improvement to display this value in an objective term, especially for playtesting efforts aiming to calibrate this more sensibly if that's a desired change. In my own wars, they are indeed quite stubborn most of the time (though there is still a felt spectrum here, but it does ultimately come across as white-knuckled overall), and usually won't capitulate until they're literally down to their last couple of units in their last city, which has often disincentivized me from my original intention to vassalize them in the first place, and instead to conquer them outright. This is more significant, too, if city maintenance from vassals is going to be dropped, where then acquiring vassals (which contribute towards domination score, UN votes and can provide you with military assistance and resources without economic expense of your own) makes a lot more sense as an alternative to outright conquest when planning expansion.

I'm not even sure there is a single "war score" to track. I mean obviously AI computes something to compare to the value of a peace deal, but I think this just happens within the actual negotiation, and if that's the case, externalising it to the main screen would be quite a bit of a chore. That's not a "no", as the idea is sound, but I need to look at its feasibility at some point.

I'm not sure how deserved this is, but I'm going to leverage this newfound respect to urge, nay demand, that Walter add an ice cream cone to the art for every 20th unit built. Even military units deserve an ice cream break. It should be every 20th unit across all civs, of course (even barbs) so that it feels more special when a civ does get one.

As a mental exercise, I pondered if that were possible to implement, and I'm happy to say it would be entirely possible, if very tedious (the tedious part would be adding a hidden ice cream cone to all the unit models, the coding to enable the rest would be rather trivial). Which kind of shows you that the way we have Civ 4 code split between the dll and the exe makes certain easy-sounding things (upscale the unit tooltip) almost impossible, while some crazy-sounding things are actually rather easy to implement.

What's everyone's current thoughts on animals? I used to not mind them so much when my starting strategy was always "build lots of stuff in capital, expand only when military is strong". Even when my starting warrior died, and my initial scout explored 10 tiles before meeting a barb archer, I'd just settle in with minimal map exploration and be fine with it.

I am fine with the way they are now - this is probably the least obnoxious way gameplay-wise to limit early exploration. Much better than having units just randomly die when exploring or having a set length they can travel from the borders (not to mention the latter would be a computational nightmare).

The 3-strength archer could be made into a 2-strength archer with bigger bonuses, making it easier for scouts to handle them. Then the militia's bonus against archers could be dropped since they would be naturally stronger. And this would make them less of an opposition to chariots, which currently only have a 75% chance to beat an archer one-on-one with no bonuses, when really the chariot should be a powerhouse.

This is a surprisingly good-sounding idea that never crossed my mind before. I was thinking about buffing chariots at some points, but 2-str archers actually make much more sense! The jump to composite bowmen would also be much more justified then. I will not rush to implement it, and roll it around my head a bit more, but on the surface of it, it's a great suggestion.

You may wish to look at how Arg-e Bam is calculating bombardment reduction. My Trebuchets with Bombardment I and the siege Tradition are still doing 0% damage to the defenses.

I'll double-check, but the intended effect is to make the city nearly untakeable pre-gunpowder, but a 50% modifier shouldn't reduce anything to zero. I guess there's something wonky with the formula, so I'll look into that.

However I believe that barb archer on turn ~50 is a bit too much. I had numerous situations when the game hangs on a result of a ~70% win of a single militia because not every start can generate more than that.

An important distinction about early barbs is that, while they start spawning early on, if Raging Barbarians is not turned on, their AI prevents them from entering your borders for another 50 turns or so, so it's actually impossible to lose cities to them for a while. It's not turned on by default in RI anymore, but it used to, so you're likely getting PTSD flashbacks from much earlier versions.

What about buffing the artist specialist if running creative, with say +1 gold? At +1 science and +1 gold, it becomes more tempting to run artist specialists, or in situations where culture is really needed (a city under cultural pressure), it becomes less costly to run an artist instead of exploiting a tile or running another specialist.

It wouldn't make the trait amazing, but I like this sort of subtle buff that reinforces the trait's specialization instead of making it more generic.

Or perhaps instead the +1 happiness I remember mentioning as an idea for the artist could exist for creative leaders only, but if I remember correctly, making the AI understand it and use it properly is a requirement before merging such a change.

Yeah, specialist happiness was broached before and it's not something I'd be willing to tackle. Interestingly none of your suggestions actually revolve around culture, which just illustrates the point that culture is often, if not always, a "dump stat" compared to other commerce (think about a building that gives +25% of either , or even , and compare it to a building that gives +50% - I'm quite sure which one you'd want to build first).

I think the statement in the hint still gives an exagerated impression of the number of situations in which they can be substitute for one another, as it gives the impression that them being substitute is a rule that suffers exceptions, whereas I'd rather say it's the opposite, them being substitutes is the exception.

Copper and bronze are more useful than in vanilla, and this is aimed more at ex-vanilla players who might consider copper (and bronze by extension) worthless after iron is available, which is how it works in vanilla. But I can word it differently, yes.

I personally don't like barbarian animals. I understand they exist to symbolize barbarians that won't enter inside your cultural borders, which is useful to know for the player, but animals are simply too strong. In reality, almost no animal would dare to attack a group of human warriors, and although they could inflict some casualties if they did, they'd have very poor odds.

I would actually be fine and find it quite realistic if they were dragons even. To me, they are "lions and tigers and bears", an abstraction of the dangers that lurk beyond the boundaries of the known world for an ancient man. Did many ancient explorers die from animal attacks specifically? No. Did many ancient explorers die, period? Yes. Would it be fun to have them killed by sandstorms, avalanches, malaria or eating a poisonous berry unknown to them? Probably not. As it stands, this mechanic offers at least a degree of player engagement.

Flavor-wise, having the animals as threats in the wild exudes a feel of a dying Paleolithic world where man is just now ascending and is still predominantly at the mercy of nature. Having all land up for grabs by humanity from square one is fine but it lacks an echo of the stone age which I find quite tasteful and which this simple mechanic conveys well. From a realism standpoint, having your primitive warrior mauled by a bear as he wanders into the dark is certainly within the same pale of abstraction as his hypothetically permanent existence or it taking decades to travel a few tiles.

Yep, in most cases, in general, when we're talking about a strategy game, we're dealing with an abstraction at some level. If that abstraction achieves the intended result (here, limiting early exploration) and doesn't aesthetically ruin suspension of disbelief (here, animals are era-appropriate, symbolically if not physically, as I explain above, whereas, say, aliens wouldn't be), it's a good mechanic.

Can we have a new release soon Walter? The SVN loading times can be a bit rough at times.
Pretty please ?

Oh of course, since it's a "pretty please" I'll drop everything and get a new release out tomorrow, even though I indicated multiple times when it's actually going to happen. What was I thinking!

I love the flavor of it! What I don't love is how it affects the player and AI differently. The AI starts with scouts, archers, and more, and packs a bonus against barbs (and with a greater bonus at higher difficulties) and while statistically it will lose some units, it's mostly well set up to explore a lot of the map very early on, while earning promotions and great general points, and while the player has its opening warrior typically die fast and with little to none of the map explored. While it's easy to chalk that up to providing extra difficulty, it doesn't offer it in the form of a positive experience. It makes the player feel pressured to settle land fast because if they don't, the AI won't leave anything to for the player to settle. And in a game where settling and expanding is a big part of the experience, having the AI explore and settle everything while the player struggles to explore and settle is a negative experience. It's fine if the AI and player are doing the same thing but the AI has compensation for difficulty, but it's not fine when that compensation is so high that the AI and player are almost playing different games.

Again, part of this might be a matter of map setup, since more unclaimed land yields more barbarians. So maybe it's a matter of making the target barb count depend on continent size and civ count in addition to unclaimed land, so that they don't automatically rage when the civ count is low relative to the size of the continent.

From its initial vanilla implementation at release time, it was quite clear that this was a mechanic that gives AI a starting advantage on difficulties higher than Noble, and I'm quite all right with that. Is it "fair"? Of course not. Do we need to think in terms of "fairness"? Again, I think not; this is not chess, nor is it a cybersport where one's skills are tested against someone else on a level playing field. It does what it's supposed to be doing in this case (at least, I assume Civ 4 was designed competently, and its design decisions are intentional) and gives AI a headstart.

 

[[Y]]

As a mental exercise, I pondered if that were possible to implement, and I'm happy to say it would be entirely possible, if very tedious (the tedious part would be adding a hidden ice cream cone to all the unit models, the coding to enable the rest would be rather trivial). Which kind of shows you that the way we have Civ 4 code split between the dll and the exe makes certain easy-sounding things (upscale the unit tooltip) almost impossible, while some crazy-sounding things are actually rather easy to implement

So what you're saying is that I should expect this in Christmas 2025, not Christmas 2024?

This is a surprisingly good-sounding idea that never crossed my mind before. I was thinking about buffing chariots at some points, but 2-str archers actually make much more sense! The jump to composite bowmen would also be much more justified then. I will not rush to implement it, and roll it around my head a bit more, but on the surface of it, it's a great suggestion.

It's an idea that I've been thinking about for a while. It would also go well with buffing the ranged support aid bonus to emphasize archers as support units when not defending a hill/wall, especially if it starts giving more first strikes. I know that's currently the recon aid bonus, but I think it makes just as much sense for archery units. On the other hand, even with 3 strength archers I've yet to run into any difficulty with just not building any archers whatsoever until composite bowmen become available, which has been my approach for the past 3-4 years. Making them 2 strength definitely doesn't help that--but I do think it could do a lot for game balance as a whole.

Yeah, specialist happiness was broached before and it's not something I'd be willing to tackle. Interestingly none of your suggestions actually revolve around culture, which just illustrates the point that culture is often, if not always, a "dump stat" compared to other commerce (think about a building that gives +25% of either , or even , and compare it to a building that gives +50% - I'm quite sure which one you'd want to build first).

This is a great point. I wonder if it's possible to provide bonuses based on a city's culture level. Right now culture isn't valuable because it's only useful for frontier cities and cities with a lot of foreign culture, which essentially translates to the utility of culture scaling down as the utility of the city itself increases. A city that doesn't need to compete with foreign culture or push your borders gets no benefit from culture... but if it reaching Refined status suddenly gave the city +10%, that's some actual motivation. What if the City Square building series, instead of providing +10% and +10%, provided +5% per city culture level? Instead of spreading your culture, it benefits from the culture the city is already spreading, and encourages you to add more.

From its initial vanilla implementation at release time, it was quite clear that this was a mechanic that gives AI a starting advantage on difficulties higher than Noble, and I'm quite all right with that. Is it "fair"? Of course not. Do we need to think in terms of "fairness"? Again, I think not; this is not chess, nor is it a cybersport where one's skills are tested against someone else on a level playing field. It does what it's supposed to be doing in this case (at least, I assume Civ 4 was designed competently, and its design decisions are intentional) and gives AI a headstart.

I'm fine with the AI getting advantages, the problem is when those advantages on higher difficulties shift the player experience from a 4X game to a 2.5X game, since exploration isn't something you can really do in the early game, and the AI's aggressive expansionism means most of your expansion has to come in the form of conquering cities that the AI settled right on your border and 20-30 tiles away from their own capital. I want the AI to have a strong edge, I'd just rather that came in the form of the AI better leveraging the cities it can typically settle early game rather than the AI expanding in all directions from turn 1.

Actually, looking at the handicap info, I can't even tell where this is coming from. On Emperor it was primarily the Expansionist leaders that showed this aggressive expansion behavior. I didn't see it much from others. On Immortal it became the de facto behavior of all AI civs. Maybe it's just something with how the AI prioritizes settlers based on upkeep costs and production rate?

 

[[Y]]

As an example of what I mean by aggressive expansionism, look at this pic from the game I was just playing. The Maya settled 2 cities right next to my own cities, despite originating way off to the north west, across a water gap from the Egyptians (visible in minimap). This doesn't feel like authentic real world civ settling, and it's just annoying to deal with in the game context since I hardly had the opportunity to expand there myself.

Spoiler :

 

[Takofloppa]

As an example of what I mean by aggressive expansionism, look at this pic from the game I was just playing. The Maya settled 2 cities right next to my own cities, despite originating way off to the north west, across a water gap from the Egyptians (visible in minimap). This doesn't feel like authentic real world civ settling, and it's just annoying to deal with in the game context since I hardly had the opportunity to expand there myself.

Nothing that a fast war can't fix

 

[AspiringScholar]

It's an idea that I've been thinking about for a while. It would also go well with buffing the ranged support aid bonus to emphasize archers as support units when not defending a hill/wall, especially if it starts giving more first strikes. I know that's currently the recon aid bonus, but I think it makes just as much sense for archery units. On the other hand, even with 3 strength archers I've yet to run into any difficulty with just not building any archers whatsoever until composite bowmen become available, which has been my approach for the past 3-4 years. Making them 2 strength definitely doesn't help that--but I do think it could do a lot for game balance as a whole.

That's something I'm not sure I particularly like, and I am one who prefers standard archers and often builds them early and upgrades later where strategically relevant. The cost scaling should of course be decreased, in that event, but how about just making the barbarian archer itself 2, if anything? To me it seems like trying to fix something that isn't broken. The jump between archers and composite bows is already a 33% stat increase, which is actually quite substantial (significantly moreso than, say, a swordsman -> medieval swordsman, which on its own terms still feels correct). Literally doubling a unit's raw strength on an era-margin upgrade I don't think happens anywhere else in the whole roster!

Conquest is already somewhat easy in the ancient/classical, and I feel that this would make warband spam even more effective and generally create balance issues, as everyone will have access to these for a long time before Iron Working, and having an attacker with twice the base strength of the niche city defender of the same era feels wrong to me.

This is a great point. I wonder if it's possible to provide bonuses based on a city's culture level. Right now culture isn't valuable because it's only useful for frontier cities and cities with a lot of foreign culture, which essentially translates to the utility of culture scaling down as the utility of the city itself increases. A city that doesn't need to compete with foreign culture or push your borders gets no benefit from culture... but if it reaching Refined status suddenly gave the city +10%, that's some actual motivation. What if the City Square building series, instead of providing +10% and +10%, provided +5% per city culture level? Instead of spreading your culture, it benefits from the culture the city is already spreading, and encourages you to add more.

This is a fantastic idea! As it is, culture works fine for what it does (and you do have some domestic incentive to invest in it, especially if going for the victory) but otherwise it is a "wide" asset and not a "tall" one, which feels somewhat backwards. I think this would be a great way to spin that a little bit and it would make the buildings' outputs feel more organic and gameplay contingent rather than static.

 

[[Y]]

Nothing that a fast war can't fix

If this happened one in ten games, sure. But this happens every game. I enjoy the phase of the game where I get to expand organically into the area around me without having to fight (very) foreign powers for each inch, and I feel there are ways to approach difficulty and AI benefits without compromising that phase.

Conquest is already somewhat easy in the ancient/classical, and I feel that this would make warband spam even more effective and generally create balance issues, as everyone will have access to these for a long time before Iron Working, and having an attacker with twice the base strength of the niche city defender of the same era feels wrong to me.

You aren't spamming warbands enough, they're a better city defense than 3-strength archers are! Better base strength, cheaper to build, and don't increase the build costs of composite bowman.

If I'm allowed to theorize more, lowering archers to 2 strength does open up a lot of room to fix early game power. If they're strength 2, then it would be reasonable to make warband strength 3, on par with militia but cheaper to build. That would be a nice boost for spearman, too, since there's little reason to build them at the moment. They're equal strength to warband, but more expensive to build, requires copper or iron, and the bonus against cavalry is pretty situational. Just build warbands instead. If warband was strength 3, though, then the spearman becomes much more prevalent as a primary unit.

This then further opens up the room to make skirmishers strength 3, so that their bonus against melee allows them to tear through warbands, but be slightly less effective at attacking the rank and file of trained spearmen, and definitely not at defending against them. They would also be less of a threat against chariots this way, providing another way for chariots to be a top-tier unit in the ancient era. And best of all, a 3-strength ancient era skirmisher provides justification for the much requested 5-strength classical era recon unit, which would be the check on swordsmen and axemen.

Speaking of axemen, they would be too effective at taking down 2-strength archers, but I think that would be fine if axemen only became available in the classical era, probably with metal casting. It allows the militarily aggressive civs to rush metal casting and have a capable city-attacker, but with a relatively short window before iron working becomes the standard, and again, gives more time for spearmen and chariots to define ancient era warfare.

 

[TheBirdMan]

If I'm allowed to theorize more, lowering archers to 2 strength does open up a lot of room to fix early game power. If they're strength 2, then it would be reasonable to make warband strength 3, on par with militia but cheaper to build. That would be a nice boost for spearman, too, since there's little reason to build them at the moment. They're equal strength to warband, but more expensive to build, requires copper or iron, and the bonus against cavalry is pretty situational. Just build warbands instead. If warband was strength 3, though, then the spearman becomes much more prevalent as a primary unit.

This then further opens up the room to make skirmishers strength 3, so that their bonus against melee allows them to tear through warbands, but be slightly less effective at attacking the rank and file of trained spearmen, and definitely not at defending against them. They would also be less of a threat against chariots this way, providing another way for chariots to be a top-tier unit in the ancient era.

I'll "buy" this (but don't expect anything else but virtual credits). I hope something like this will become part of the upcomming update. Else...... I know where to change it myself.

And best of all, a 3-strength ancient era skirmisher provides justification for the much requested 5-strength classical era recon unit, which would be the check on swordsmen and axemen.

This unit could be the horseman - a unit I seldom use. But with a few smaller changes it might be perfect in this job for a longer time (except in the forests and jungles - here the skirmishers should be used (as usual) - maybe with a little better forest/jungle promotion.

 

[AllTheLand]

- The foreign-trained units not requiring specific techs when receiving access to some weapon resources from trade are a really nice touch.
- What about allowing the "Local Autonomy" building for Aristocracy too?

Yeah, specialist happiness was broached before and it's not something I'd be willing to tackle. Interestingly none of your suggestions actually revolve around culture, which just illustrates the point that culture is often, if not always, a "dump stat" compared to other commerce (think about a building that gives +25% of either , or even , and compare it to a building that gives +50% - I'm quite sure which one you'd want to build first).

Yes, it's true that culture is inherently less valuable as a resource.

Kmod-derivatives like RI have cities have longer range cultural influence than vanilla Civ4, so cities that are not right on the border, but just one layer behind the border, still help shape it and to culturally convert the tiles in the border zone, but for cities that are further behind, culture generation is very weak because, unless going for a culture victory, the generated culture brings nearly no benefit, be it locally or at the empire scale.

I think the cultural ideas I mentioned to you in PM, to increase "stickiness" of foreign culture, would increase the value of culture-generation, and if empire-wide cultural level matters in how effectively your culture can be spread, it would also give more value to culture generation in cities that are not close to the border.

I remember in Civ3, it was mentioned in the advisor about how another civ thought of our civ's culture compared to theirs, and iirc it had some gameplay influence too.

I would actually be fine and find it quite realistic if they were dragons even. To me, they are "lions and tigers and bears", an abstraction of the dangers that lurk beyond the boundaries of the known world for an ancient man. Did many ancient explorers die from animal attacks specifically? No. Did many ancient explorers die, period? Yes. Would it be fun to have them killed by sandstorms, avalanches, malaria or eating a poisonous berry unknown to them? Probably not. As it stands, this mechanic offers at least a degree of player engagement.

Yep, in most cases, in general, when we're talking about a strategy game, we're dealing with an abstraction at some level. If that abstraction achieves the intended result (here, limiting early exploration) and doesn't aesthetically ruin suspension of disbelief (here, animals are era-appropriate, symbolically if not physically, as I explain above, whereas, say, aliens wouldn't be), it's a good mechanic.

That's a reasonable take, my issue is much less with having animals for the representation, and more that barbarian animals have very good combat odds against the warriors available at the start in many situations, generating new units to go explore has a major opportunity cost, and there is little player agency involved in how things end up. The outcome of the game is strongly determined by a few early dice rolls.

From its initial vanilla implementation at release time, it was quite clear that this was a mechanic that gives AI a starting advantage on difficulties higher than Noble, and I'm quite all right with that. Is it "fair"? Of course not. Do we need to think in terms of "fairness"? Again, I think not; this is not chess, nor is it a cybersport where one's skills are tested against someone else on a level playing field. It does what it's supposed to be doing in this case (at least, I assume Civ 4 was designed competently, and its design decisions are intentional) and gives AI a headstart.

The main gameplay reason I see in giving the AI a starting advantage is if rushing the AI to kill it early is too effective. Otherwise, I see a AI headstart as unwelcome, as it mostly leads to two outcomes:
- The initial disadvantage is too big and you never catch up. You are doomed to be behind in tech, economy and military, to never get any wonder, and to die at some point.
- After a very difficult early game, you manage to get close to parity in tech, economy and military. At this point, the ongoing bonuses the AI receives are too weak and it becomes extremely likely the AI is just going to be steamrolled.

So far, my experience removing most of the headstart bonuses the AI gets while otherwise keeping the ongoing bonuses very high has been positive, as the start of the game is much more of a 4X experience while the AI still presents a strong longer-lasting challenge.

This is a great point. I wonder if it's possible to provide bonuses based on a city's culture level. Right now culture isn't valuable because it's only useful for frontier cities and cities with a lot of foreign culture, which essentially translates to the utility of culture scaling down as the utility of the city itself increases. A city that doesn't need to compete with foreign culture or push your borders gets no benefit from culture... but if it reaching Refined status suddenly gave the city +10%, that's some actual motivation. What if the City Square building series, instead of providing +10% and +10%, provided +5% per city culture level? Instead of spreading your culture, it benefits from the culture the city is already spreading, and encourages you to add more.

City culture levels are not fine-grained enough for this to work well, I believe. You get one level and may have to wait hundreds of turns for the next one. Sure, generating more culture would on average lead to higher city cultural levels quicker, but a smoother reward would be welcome.

Also, while the idea is interesting, gold from culture doesn't seem very appropriate as a reward, except for some kind of late game Hotel building to represent revenue from tourism (although tourism creating gold out of nothing isn't realistic either, let's just say people are motivated to work harder to be able to spend time in the big cultural city). Happiness from culture would seem more intuitive to me, although it brings balancing concerns.

I'm fine with the AI getting advantages, the problem is when those advantages on higher difficulties shift the player experience from a 4X game to a 2.5X game, since exploration isn't something you can really do in the early game, and the AI's aggressive expansionism means most of your expansion has to come in the form of conquering cities that the AI settled right on your border and 20-30 tiles away from their own capital. I want the AI to have a strong edge, I'd just rather that came in the form of the AI better leveraging the cities it can typically settle early game rather than the AI expanding in all directions from turn 1.

Actually, looking at the handicap info, I can't even tell where this is coming from. On Emperor it was primarily the Expansionist leaders that showed this aggressive expansion behavior. I didn't see it much from others. On Immortal it became the de facto behavior of all AI civs. Maybe it's just something with how the AI prioritizes settlers based on upkeep costs and production rate?

You should try out my modified Titan difficulty. And play with goodies off. I haven't yet really tried to rush the AI early to see if it's possible to get a big advantage that way, but I think these settings will be closer to what you are seeking as an experience. And I would like a second opinion on these settings!

I'm also thinking that maybe the solution to the "early exploration" complaint would be to actually give 2 or 3 free wins vs barbs? Enough to ensure you can do minimal early scouting without being so dependent on RNG.

Spoiler Difficulty XML :

Look in Assets\XML\GameInfo/CIV4HandicapInfo.xml

<HandicapInfo>
<Type>HANDICAP_TITAN</Type>
<Description>TXT_KEY_HANDICAP_TITAN</Description>
<Help>TXT_KEY_HANDICAP_TITAN_HELP</Help>
<iFreeWinsVsBarbs>0</iFreeWinsVsBarbs>
<iAnimalAttackProb>99</iAnimalAttackProb>
<iStartingLocPercent>90</iStartingLocPercent>
<iAdvancedStartPointsMod>75</iAdvancedStartPointsMod>
<iGold>0</iGold>
<iFreeUnits>1</iFreeUnits>
<iUnitCostPercent>95</iUnitCostPercent>
<iResearchPercent>125</iResearchPercent>
<iPerCityResearchCostModifier>0</iPerCityResearchCostModifier>
<iDistanceMaintenancePercent>100</iDistanceMaintenancePercent>
<iNumCitiesMaintenancePercent>95</iNumCitiesMaintenancePercent>
<iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>7</iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance>
<iColonyMaintenancePercent>145</iColonyMaintenancePercent>
<iMaxColonyMaintenance>200</iMaxColonyMaintenance>
<iCorporationMaintenancePercent>150</iCorporationMaintenancePercent>
<iCivicUpkeepPercent>100</iCivicUpkeepPercent>
<iInflationPercent>100</iInflationPercent>
<iMetricChangePercent>100</iMetricChangePercent>
<iEpidemicBaseRate>10</iEpidemicBaseRate>
<iEpidemicPopulationRate>10</iEpidemicPopulationRate>
<iEpidemicUnhealthRate>30</iEpidemicUnhealthRate>
<iEpidemicTradeRouteRate>60</iEpidemicTradeRouteRate>
<iHealthBonus>-1</iHealthBonus>
<iHappyBonus>3</iHappyBonus>
<iAttitudeChange>0</iAttitudeChange>
<iNoTechTradeModifier>25</iNoTechTradeModifier>
<iTechTradeKnownModifier>0</iTechTradeKnownModifier>
<iUnownedTilesPerGameAnimal>20</iUnownedTilesPerGameAnimal>
<iUnownedTilesPerBarbarianUnit>25</iUnownedTilesPerBarbarianUnit>
<iUnownedWaterTilesPerBarbarianUnit>200</iUnownedWaterTilesPerBarbarianUnit>
<iUnownedTilesPerBarbarianCity>80</iUnownedTilesPerBarbarianCity>
<iBarbarianCreationTurnsElapsed>10</iBarbarianCreationTurnsElapsed>
<iBarbarianCityCreationTurnsElapsed>15</iBarbarianCityCreationTurnsElapsed>
<iBarbarianCityCreationProb>8</iBarbarianCityCreationProb>
<iAnimalBonus>0</iAnimalBonus>
<iBarbarianBonus>0</iBarbarianBonus>
<iAIAnimalBonus>-70</iAIAnimalBonus>
<iAIBarbarianBonus>-60</iAIBarbarianBonus>
<iStartingDefenseUnits>0</iStartingDefenseUnits>
<iStartingWorkerUnits>0</iStartingWorkerUnits>
<iStartingExploreUnits>0</iStartingExploreUnits>
<iAIStartingUnitMultiplier>0</iAIStartingUnitMultiplier>
<iAIStartingDefenseUnits>2</iAIStartingDefenseUnits>
<iAIStartingWorkerUnits>0</iAIStartingWorkerUnits>
<iAIStartingExploreUnits>1</iAIStartingExploreUnits>
<iBarbarianDefenders>5</iBarbarianDefenders>
<iAIDeclareWarProb>100</iAIDeclareWarProb>
<iAIWorkRateModifier>75</iAIWorkRateModifier>
<iAIGrowthPercent>70</iAIGrowthPercent>
<iAITrainPercent>80</iAITrainPercent>
<iAIWorldTrainPercent>100</iAIWorldTrainPercent>
<iAIConstructPercent>70</iAIConstructPercent>
<iAIWorldConstructPercent>100</iAIWorldConstructPercent>
<iAICreatePercent>70</iAICreatePercent>
<iAIWorldCreatePercent>100</iAIWorldCreatePercent>
<iAICivicUpkeepPercent>70</iAICivicUpkeepPercent>
<iAIUnitCostPercent>70</iAIUnitCostPercent>
<iAIUnitSupplyPercent>50</iAIUnitSupplyPercent>
<iAIUnitUpgradePercent>50</iAIUnitUpgradePercent>
<iAIInflationPercent>55</iAIInflationPercent>
<iAIWarWearinessPercent>70</iAIWarWearinessPercent>
<!-- The per era AI modifier is applied multiplicatively as a percentage to:
- The city food growth threshold
- The production speed of units, buildings, projects
- The maintenance cost of units exceeding the free units threshold
- The supply cost of units (extra maintenance for units out of their civ's territory)
- The inflation factor
- War weariness
- Civic upkeep -->
<iAIPerEraModifier>-4</iAIPerEraModifier>
<iAIAdvancedStartPercent>160</iAIAdvancedStartPercent>
<iAIMetricChangePercent>80</iAIMetricChangePercent>
<Goodies>
<GoodyType>GOODY_LOW_GOLD</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_LOW_GOLD</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_LOW_GOLD</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_LOW_GOLD</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_LOW_GOLD</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_MAP</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_WARRIOR</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_MILITIA</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_TECH</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_SCOUT</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_EXPERIENCE</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_HEALING</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_BARBARIANS_WEAK</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_BARBARIANS_WEAK</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_BARBARIANS_STRONG</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_BARBARIANS_STRONG</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_BARBARIANS_STRONG</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_BARBARIANS_STRONG</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_BARBARIANS_STRONG</GoodyType>
<GoodyType>GOODY_BARBARIANS_STRONG</GoodyType>
</Goodies>
<FreeTechs/>
<AIFreeTechs/>
</HandicapInfo>

 

[AspiringScholar]

You aren't spamming warbands enough, they're a better city defense than 3-strength archers are! Better base strength, cheaper to build, and don't increase the build costs of composite bowman.

Most of the time, I prefer them as city raiders to soften targets before following through with the "professional" army, but I usually have 2-3 in key cities as extra weight in case it comes to them. When my own archer-defended cities containing them are assaulted, they're usually not the first to fight. While from a cost-basis standpoint, they're certainly comparable in that role, a quick glance at the stats still confirms that archers win that as a "niche" between the two:

Stock archers get 3 and 50% city defense, so 4.5 total against a stock warband's 4 and possession of no native bonuses. Fortification bonuses would be equal so can be omitted for purposes of comparison, but then you have a free first strike from the archer, and if the city is on a hill, then an additional 50% for a total of 6, which a warband would still come up slightly short against even with Garrison II (and is not eligible for Garrison III) while the same archer would outperform even without a promotion, but have the same (nay, better, because they actually are eligible for the third promotion!) availability. This also ignores the fact that the only unit class with a bonus against archers in this era is the spearman, which is only a soft counter at 25% (as a percentage, half of the archer's city defense bonus), and even at a base 4, still comes up to be weaker than the archer in siege. Conversely, if you defend with warband, not only do you have a lower relative strength defending a city by default, but you're susceptible to both skirmishers and charge-mounted, whose bonus against melee is greater than their malus attacking cities, leaving them actually with an advantage in these encounters (charge mounted especially when using melee at all in classical and later, due to its higher base strength in general).

So, while I recognize that they're cheap and convenient units to defend with and are usually decent enough at this, I personally prefer to use them as "insulation" and not as primary or designated defenders.

If I'm allowed to theorize more, lowering archers to 2 strength does open up a lot of room to fix early game power. If they're strength 2, then it would be reasonable to make warband strength 3, on par with militia but cheaper to build. That would be a nice boost for spearman, too, since there's little reason to build them at the moment. They're equal strength to warband, but more expensive to build, requires copper or iron, and the bonus against cavalry is pretty situational. Just build warbands instead. If warband was strength 3, though, then the spearman becomes much more prevalent as a primary unit.

This then further opens up the room to make skirmishers strength 3, so that their bonus against melee allows them to tear through warbands, but be slightly less effective at attacking the rank and file of trained spearmen, and definitely not at defending against them. They would also be less of a threat against chariots this way, providing another way for chariots to be a top-tier unit in the ancient era. And best of all, a 3-strength ancient era skirmisher provides justification for the much requested 5-strength classical era recon unit, which would be the check on swordsmen and axemen.

Speaking of axemen, they would be too effective at taking down 2-strength archers, but I think that would be fine if axemen only became available in the classical era, probably with metal casting. It allows the militarily aggressive civs to rush metal casting and have a capable city-attacker, but with a relatively short window before iron working becomes the standard, and again, gives more time for spearmen and chariots to define ancient era warfare.

That said, I actually find most of these suggestions to be great! In the context of this, I think a 2 archer makes plenty of sense, just not in lieu of them. A few sketch thoughts of my own surrounding ancient era units as they currently are, if they're welcome:

The trump card units of this era are hands-down skirmishers and warband, which are balanced well against each other but jointly come to overshadow most of the rest of the early roster when it comes to offense. A 3 skirmisher feels totally called for to me (and as you know, this specific suggestion has been made before by others as well as myself), and when you consider the centrality of the spear as a weapon in ancient warfare (surely more readily equipped and commonplace than even a short sword in most historical examples), one would think that this would actually be the specific weapon represented in the warband rather than a fashioned blade. The visual representation of that aside, however, it begs the question why a spearman would be only situationally better against one unit class but otherwise equivalent, and more expensive (when I can't imagine that a spear is economically more costly than a sword) with the manpower aspect theoretically just as applicable to either. All representation of ancient weapons aside, it would still make more sense then, to have the bona fide spearman be decidedly better between the two in relative terms.

Working with a 3 warband, a 2 archer and a 3 skirmisher would allow the other units to shine more, I agree. (It would also avoid skirmishers being overwhelmingly dominant in rough terrain until well into the medieval era, while still remaining quite capable in many cases with both their native bonuses and their eligibility for massive additional ones via promotions.) One pitfall, however, is that by reducing the of both skirmishers and archers by 1, you ultimately increase the viability of skirmishers in relative terms (4/3 vs 3/2) if one is defending with an archer in the field, which otherwise is often effective, though they're slower and much more expensive with scaling costs if used to defend several cities as well.

I'm not sure, though, where you see chariots as lacking (especially if you like to defend your cities with warband!). If there's any unit third wheeling lol next to the warband and skirmisher in the era it is this one, in my opinion. The spearman actually offers it a quite handsome counter (and I actually always liked spearmen, though their relative price to warband means that yes, you should have one or two for a counter, but you are discouraged from offensively using the unit as infantry), but otherwise it plows through everything in open terrain while inflicting collateral damage and is fast. When AIs defend cities with melee (as they often do, at least in part) they even are relatively good at taking cities!

I actually disagree, though, that there should be a "medieval skirmisher" unless there is a good historical case to be made for such a thing really being prominent in that era. Even just a 5 recon unit is a nightmare to me. That thing would be dominating every forested hill until line infantry show up.

- What about allowing the "Local Autonomy" building for Aristocracy too?

I was actually about to make some suggestions again that Feudal Aristocracy be reworked, but even as it is, you have a meaningful difference between it and Traditional Custom with the former providing various (mostly military) advantages, while the latter offers a higher growth cap and comes with a military production penalty. I don't think it would be good to make them less distinct in that regard.

Yes, it's true that culture is inherently less valuable as a resource.

Kmod-derivatives like RI have cities have longer range cultural influence than vanilla Civ4, so cities that are not right on the border, but just one layer behind the border, still help shape it and to culturally convert the tiles in the border zone, but for cities that are further behind, culture generation is very weak because, unless going for a culture victory, the generated culture brings nearly no benefit, be it locally or at the empire scale.

Have you played a game through the whole timeline yet? Investing in culture is already negatively a very important component of in that becomes substantial in the later game when conquering and trying to hold onto mature cities that have spent a long time developing under one flag, borders or not. If you neglect it, either your growth caps in conquered lands will likely be significantly lower, or you'll have to pay some alternative price elsewhere on the happiness market.

I mean no rudeness of course (and you are obviously an intelligent person and prescient strategist), but it would be helpful to play through a whole game once or twice to gain perspective of how everything is interrelated and how certain aspects of the game wax and wane in importance and availability, and how certain yields appreciate and depreciate in value at various points, before making generalizations about their overall worth outside of the first half of the game. Even in this post, for instance, you've both said that has virtually no domestic importance outside of sealing borders if not going for a cultural victory, and then also appealed to a buff for it to be a direct source of with a bit of uncertainty (when it already is via the slider and various buildings you've constructed anyway), which clues to me that you probably haven't encountered a rather common -5 or -6 "We resent being ruled by a foreign culture!" in an Influential city, which does very strongly incentivize non-border generation in the form of the opportunity cost of 5 or 6 entire citizens' utility, or some other means of getting the same which is likely to be more expensive than directly investing in this.

I think the cultural ideas I mentioned to you in PM, to increase "stickiness" of foreign culture, would increase the value of culture-generation, and if empire-wide cultural level matters in how effectively your culture can be spread, it would also give more value to culture generation in cities that are not close to the border.

RI already models this with the "art eras" mechanic, where you get successive % multipliers in empire wide generation which are contingent upon a certain threshold of internal development elsewhere.

 

[AllTheLand]

I'm not sure, though, where you see chariots as lacking (especially if you like to defend your cities with warband!). If there's any unit third wheeling lol next to the warband and skirmisher in the era it is this one, in my opinion. The spearman actually offers it a quite handsome counter (and I actually always liked spearmen, though their relative price to warband means that yes, you should have one or two for a counter, but you are discouraged from offensively using the unit as infantry), but otherwise it plows through everything in open terrain while inflicting collateral damage and is fast. When AIs defend cities with melee (as they often do, at least in part) they even are relatively good at taking cities!

The issue as I see it is that you only need one spearman in a stack to make chariots very ineffective against that stack, and your non-chariots units can't weaken the spearman effectively as other units will come defending first against them.

On paper, chariots are also nice to fight rebel slaves in early classical with their mobility and anti-melee bonus, until you notice that three-quarters of the time you need to fight on a hill or worse in a forest (unless you clear-cut everything, personally I like to keep forests along until I can make them valuable with Guilds), so skirmishers are better than chariots in this role in a majority of situations.

Have you played a game through the whole timeline yet? Investing in culture is already negatively a very important component of in that becomes substantial in the later game when conquering and trying to hold onto mature cities that have spent a long time developing under one flag, borders or not. If you neglect it, either your growth caps in conquered lands will likely be significantly lower, or you'll have to pay some alternative price elsewhere on the happiness market.

I never got to the industrial age, but if you want to fight unhappiness in a conquered city you need to generate culture either right there or in another city a few tiles away. When I get great artists, I often use them in border cities, especially recently conquered cities, to start generating more culture there. Generating tons of culture in a city 15 tiles away will have almost no effect for this. Of course, it's true that a creative leader will be slightly more effective at spreading the new culture in conquered cities, which will help. But if a rival civ had ten thousand points of culture in the city before you conquered it, you will still take a long time to get your culture high enough, and the net happiness will be worse throughout than if you had a charismatic or imperialistic leader, for example.

RI already models this with the "art eras" mechanic, where you get successive % multipliers in empire wide generation which are contingent upon a certain threshold of internal development elsewhere.

This is unrelated to the fact that getting 50K or 20K culture in a coastal city that's 10 tiles away from your border makes almost no difference. The "art eras" are a function of tech progress, not of core cities outputting culture.

 

[RezerCuid]

And I would also like to see more beautiful arquebusiers (8) from the Aztecs, Mayans and Incas, (maybe they have already improved their appearance, I do not understand how to update the game via SVN)

 

[RezerCuid]

I think AI pays too little attention to science. Players, who feels the same way?

 

[RezerCuid]

And yet, unlike the graphics of some
European knights(10) in RI, in real life Knights didn't fight with a tournament spear.

 

[AspiringScholar]

The issue as I see it is that you only need one spearman in a stack to make chariots very ineffective against that stack, and your non-chariots units can't weaken the spearman effectively as other units will come defending first against them.

That works fine enough as it is, and is presumably by design. Do you take issue with that balancing, or with the suggestion to make them more viable as a fighting unit relative to the warband? To me, it makes more sense that spearmen should be representing a significant fraction of the all-purpose infantry, but as it is they too expensive to be worth using that way.

On paper, chariots are also nice to fight rebel slaves in early classical with their mobility and anti-melee bonus, until you notice that three-quarters of the time you need to fight on a hill or worse in a forest (unless you clear-cut everything, personally I like to keep forests along until I can make them valuable with Guilds), so skirmishers are better than chariots in this role in a majority of situations.

Fair enough, but remember that you still have greater mobility and can often choose the place of battle if they have to wander into a field in the path of their lemming, and that, once there, they're basically free XP. Getting a chariot promoted two or three times from fighting slaves and then upgrading it into a cataphract as soon as they become available can be quite significant. As for when the slaves only move along rough terrain until they get to the city they're attacking, I always aim to include a sufficient garrison to deal with a large revolt unassisted. If you have any city overlap, they can spawn from a pop 20 city and then go walk over to a pop 4 city anyway, so unless you can wipe them all out before they get somewhere, I find it's better to rely primarily on a garrison. With fortified archers or composite bows in a walled city, slaves have basically no chance to even kill a single archer. It's only until serfdom (which we can now implement selectively) that they really start to get threatening. I've seriously had nearly 20 slaves all die trying to kill a single composite bow in a city. Trying to kill them in the field is often riskier and costlier than just having a few specialized city defenders in each city.

I never got to the industrial age,

You'll have a lot to say about combat and economic balances, if/once you do... It almost becomes a different game from a strategic standpoint, and lots of previous foundational things get shuffled and reconfigured along new lines.

but if you want to fight unhappiness in a conquered city you need to generate culture either right there or in another city a few tiles away. When I get great artists, I often use them in border cities, especially recently conquered cities, to start generating more culture there. Generating tons of culture in a city 15 tiles away will have almost no effect for this. Of course, it's true that a creative leader will be slightly more effective at spreading the new culture in conquered cities, which will help. But if a rival civ had ten thousand points of culture in the city before you conquered it, you will still take a long time to get your culture high enough, and the net happiness will be worse throughout than if you had a charismatic or imperialistic leader, for example.

I think you're possibly misunderstanding me. I'm not talking about sealing a conquered border, but "swinging their vote" so to speak by increasing the percentage of your civ's culture in the city itself, which I believe is additive with the tile culture, but also its own thing. I wasn't really making a case to defend the Creative trait itself (though to the extent that itself is deemed more valuable, it becomes more important consequently) but to say that it seems you're undervaluing the output itself; for instance, in contending for artists needing a buff, when these are exactly the specialists you would run to accelerate this transition after you conquer a mature and culturally efflorescent foreign city. Culture is important in this scenario, and they're supposed to be the primary and most effective means of generating that. Influence Driven War helps to make such a city tenable in the first place, but it often still leaves a large gap to fill where investing in culture yields a valuable return in enabling a higher happiness cap (and also in indirectly extinguishing separatism, which, as you likely haven't noticed yet if you haven't played into the era, becomes a very potent source of separatism once the "Spring of Nations" happens), which is why I suggested playing through a whole game to see the full arc of everything in context before deeming an entire unit of the "Civ IV economy" to be undervalued.

Culture retains importance throughout the game: early on in claiming land and resources by sealing borders, but also in the later stages of the game when borders are already tightly wound, where it somewhat supplants a similar function to religion as a major factor of happiness under powerful civics which become commonplace and where state religions are disabled. Trade also can start generating sometimes more than negligible unhappiness as it spreads foreign culture, for instance, and trade explodes during this time period (as in, potentially being your primary source of in certain conditions, even with a sprawling empire). You have made a lot of insightful suggestions and interesting points, but it does seem that you are making sweeping judgments about balance which are premature outside of a familiarity with the whole game, oblivious to what you may or may not be destabilizing in the event that certain ideas are adopted. That aside, I would actually enjoy reading feedback from you about the later game! I just feel that you're not considering things holistically enough when suggesting fundamental changes as it is.

This is unrelated to the fact that getting 50K or 20K culture in a coastal city that's 10 tiles away from your border makes almost no difference. The "art eras" are a function of tech progress, not of core cities outputting culture.

They're also, for that matter, a function of building all the relevant buildings (which often is the case, but that means it's also a question of empire size, production investment, and research, not just the latter). I'm honestly not sure what you mean by the 50K or 20K statement. It is an empire-wide culture multiplier that applies to each city and represents the degree of cultural achievement you've reached through a knowledge and investment in "aesthetics" in a multi-disciplinary sense. What exactly did you have in mind otherwise? It would be cool if this could be expanded upon somehow, but it still is an already functional representation of what it seems you were requesting.

 

[yurv3]

Greetings, pay attention to the Janissaries, they appear too late, when there are already line infantry. Which devalues this unit. One more thing - Viking dragonboys - at one time these guys kept the whole of Europe in fear - perhaps this unit should be classified as a privateer.

 

[JDCP]

And yet, unlike the graphics of some
European knights(10) in RI, in real life Knights didn't fight with a tournament spear.

It might not be very accurate (I honestly don't know) but it's really cool if you ask me, I prefer that over any basic looking spear. I do admit the spear for the german and french knight is very cartoony, but I prefer that over the boring american knight with a damn mace