Hi everyone I was playing 2.8 up until a few days ago and thought, hey I wonder if there've been any updates? particularly to address bugs?
I haven't played too far into 3.0.(1?) but that's mainly because I haven't liked what I've seen so far.
Also, sorry in advance for not being able to make this less verbose.
Firstly, and much less importantly, I liked the old terrain visuals a lot more. The new plains texture looks like moldy tinned salmon. It's hard to pinpoint the change between savannah and grassland but I found they looked better before, and more 'legible' or 'readable' as different terrain types
I'm not sure if the the major change in terrain and resources happened between TAC and RnR but I remember swapping over and being amazed at how beautiful RnR looked. I would be shocked if you told me the person who developed the colour palette and visuals more generally
wasn't a professional in graphic design; the contrast and vibrant colours of cotton, indigo and peppers against plains terrain was especially evocative. I distinctly remember an earlier game I had where one of my first cities landed next to gold and indigo bushels and every time I'd load up those for export I'd think to myself "wow I can totally see why the wealthy were so set on trading with Carthage/Phoenicians".
It's stylised, and not entirely realistic let's say, but RnR could pass for a legit, professional, standalone game. It's miles ahead of Civ4Col for sure. This isn't even touching on gameplay improvements, which were huge.
I also noticed there are more doodads thrown around the map (wolf lair? "raider camp" with a criminal sitting on it? "camp fire"?) These feel out of place, especially visually, and make WtP look more like a mod and less the polished and uncluttered professional feel of RnR. That said I really enjoy the addition of cactus apples and their farms lol, they look great.
The major issue I came across was the new settling system, via the new profession. I think I saw the thread about it ages ago and just ignored it, or hoped that it wouldn't be implemented. It meddles with one of the most foundational, core mechanics and gameplay elements of the game and introduces unnecessary tedium and restrictions as a bandaid fix to problems I'm not even totally clear on.
I'm going to start by considering what I think are the reasons for this change, which is basically a nerf for the sake of balance problems.
There is too much city spam, ICS, especially in the beginning.
I tend not to do this, but that is a personal restraint as I recognise this is perfectly possible and is generally overpowered. So why is it overpowered? The risk vs reward (r/r) isn't well balanced, and also in the early game going wide generally brings better profit than going tall because you lack infrastructure, but also because cities of any size gain benfits simply for existing. Wouldn't it be better to fix this balance instead of restrict what is perhaps the most core action in the game (founding cities)? I'm going to leave my alternative fixes to this issue until the end of the entire post but still cover what the actual problems in my mind are here.
the r/r is unbalanced; both the reward is too great and the the risk is too small.
When you spam out new cities, there aren't really any threats to them outside of particularly heated all-out wars. There aren't barbs, animals can't enter your boundaries, and most natives are extremely pacifistic, at least in the early game. The city doesn't have to incur costs beyond opportunity, either, so it's all upsides.
The upsides to a new city are big, especially early. You deny the territory to rivals, and can restrict rival movement with your territory. You expand cultural borders without the time or effort needed to do it traditionally. Most importantly cities gain production benefits simply for being founded. You always get the yields from the city centre tile for free, while the actual citizen can work another tile as normal. The centre tile also gets yield bonuses for free, and without pioneer improvement. It is extremely rare for a city not to at least break even on food, and because of this, 1 pop has much more impact building a new city then chopping wood than doing this activity in an already established city. Chopping wood in an established city trades 2 food for whatever the wood yield is, as by design. Settling a new city to chop the same wood is almost guaranteed to net you even more food, plus other minor goodies, plus the wood which was the goal of the whole action.
There is an exploit when you rapidly found then disband cities as a superior alternative to pioneering.
This exploit is obviously introduced by allowing cities to disband at all, being an oversight when adding that option. So a fix for this was to restrict how 'easy' it is for you to settle new cities, even if it has far reaching rippling effects on the wider game. I think someone suggested removing the road underneath the city if it is disbanded. Wouldn't it be easier to just not give a free road to begin with? what problems would this change cause? It makes some sense in base BTS because the road is needed to link passive traderoutes, and for example settling next to a river, I think you need that road to connect the city node to the river which can then further link with your other cities, or foreign ones. This saves a worker trekking out to biuld a single road on your city just for that connection. Roads are also needed to connect resources within your territory, i.e. to gain their unique benefits (happy/health gains, the ability to produce horse units), so it's mostly a QoL mechanic. This isn't true in Civ4Col, you gain all the benefits of a resources just by being able to work it in the city screen. Roads aren't even needed to trade with a city, they simply speed up the movement of land units (some of which conduct trade). In fact the free road you gain under the city doesn't even have any effect until/unless there is a road next to it. The minor downside from this change is that a pioneer has to spend a few turns building a road, assuming you choose to.
Building a city normally clears the forest-like feature from that terrain tile, so this is the second aspect of the exploit. The problem is that this is faster (and in some way cheaper, considering no need for tools) than using a pioneer to clear the forests. Would it be gamebreaking if settling a city doesn't clear the forest? My suggestion is that you settling doesn't clear a forest, but building a later building does. I would suggest the town hall (or whatever bell producing building unlocks second tier production buildings), but if you thought that was too immersion breaking then maybe the village hall would clear the forest feature. The upside is it would take a prohibitive amount of time to clear forests this way. The downsides are the city might enjoy an excessive defensive bonus (this might actually be an upside in the case of forest warrior natives), it also might be overpowered if the city gains the yields from the forest for free (but this would be avoided with my suggestion not to give city centre tiles aware for free, more about that later).
Lastly there is the issue of cultural expansion. I think this is a problem; I might have even used this exploit once or twice. I don't think I understand the underlying mechanics of tile culture and boundaries to offer a solution.
"on thing I always hated in Civ4Col was the way new cities were founded....It is extremely unimmersive" -- "And yes, the player might have to wait for 20 turns until he actually feels ready to build his 2nd colony." - Raystuttgart
This might be a more subtle or subconscious reason, but I get the impression you really want the players to "play the right way
" or more specifically "this is how a colony should look on turn 20, this is how it should look on turn 50, this is how it should look turn 100" etc. Instead of focusing on balancing the r/r of a strategy or play style you're just banning it outright because it is an affront aesthetically.
I think it's a good thing if there is variety in colony growth: some players build tall on the coast, or some go wide into the interior and risk retaliation, some string little villages along tiny island chains. Maybe they manage to pull off some deft diplomacy or military feat and expand larger than we'd expect but doesn't that mean they can post an amusing story about it on the forum for us to enjoy? ( "look what happened in my game" a la Sword of Islam, Rhyes etc). In one of my games I made a rum focused city on an island ~20N and a whaling base far to the south, with maybe 2 smaller supporting cities. Should I be allowed to play this way? Another RP game I settled a few small disparate cities all over the map with the primary objective of being a weapons dealer/smuggler to the natives. "No no NOO!! You are playing the game WRONG!
". I assume that isn't the optimal strategy, but if it was, would you try to rebalance it or just try to make it effectively impossible?
Here are some unorganised rambling points about downsides the change introduces:
Nightinggale said:
My concern is that people will find it too hard to found new colonies. Early on tools are hard to get as the two slots on the ship tend to be full. Yes you can import tools by changing civilians to pioneers on the dock, but I consider that more of a glitch than an actual way to do it. We shouldn't rely on people using that because it's not intuitive for new players. This means you can easily end up with a crowd, which is too big for your first colony, but lack of tools prevents you from building another one.
It also punishes lack of food in the first colony even harder. Imagine the setup where your first colony is low on good food production plots and that prevents you from building somewhere with lots of food.
Most players start with a pioneer and cavalry. Changing one of them to settlers means starting with less equipment. .
cammcken said:
I'm pretty new here. It's been referenced but I don't think any post in this thread actually explains why city-spamming is overpowered (besides the free roads exploit). Maybe addressing each exploit individually would be easier than a new mechanic. Are too many early settlements the problem, or are the issues caused by easy settling combined with abandoning?
Although I'm not that great of a player, I sort of like how spamming settlements and spreading out "wide" is an available option for early-game strategy. I thought the changes made in TAC (settlements no longer start with Town Halls and first tier production buildings) effectively made a new settlement nearly worthless: they start with no more than a Base Camp and a Lumberjack's House.
Also in my experience with TAC, the counterbalance for building too many settlements was the player's ability to defend them, because if they aren't defended well the natives will attack. Obviously WtP changes this. I still haven't figured out how native relations work, but it's a lot less punishing.
no pioneer to start, means less choice between say, 'will I upgrade tiles or should they both work to build a pier? I settled near silver, so that seems like a no-brainer to put a mine on, but actually I can get a chapel faster this other way (and I have an expert preacher)'. maybe there are two really good spots that I really want to settle, to claim before a rival does. but this leaves you open to attack, angering natives. this adds significant and interesting choices, and strategic depth. lack of a pioneer removes interesting choices and removes strategic depth, making the game shallower and blander, even if only slightly at the beginning of the game. Relatedly, and this point is very minor, but giving the player a pioneer at the beginning is helpful to a newbie in discovering and understanding this game mechanic and means they don't need to discover the concept of tile improvement by accident later, or wonder why the AI has these cool farm things in their territory. In reality I don't think many players of this mod are that new to these games, however.
a single starting settler makes your starting city location much more rigid and means you can't settle and then quickly change if you find a really nice spot shortly after while exploring. relatedly, I think it's a positive that you might want to rearrange the layout of some close cities to get better overlap of resources, when the cities are young at least. I like the fact that I agonize over city placement
less in Civ4Col than BTS because I feel, correctly or not, that I can take those actions back even if they might incur costs (lost buildings and maybe some stored goods). When so much value is placed on a specialised settler unit, the fear of wasting it pushes me back toward spending 20 minutes planning out early-to-mid city placements ahead of time. And I think this psychology and behaviour is detrimental.
Settlers being a specific profession or an expert which pops on the dock 'railroads' the player more into actually building those cities because that's the intended function of that unit, and it remains such a powerful use for them. When I get an expert missionary, I have the choice of creating a mission, or I might decide for different reasons to produce crosses. Personally I often use them as doctors when the time comes. The variety gives multiple satisfying options and therefore interesting/satisfying choices to the player. The expert settler only has one satisfying option, which is to create a new city, because the underlying reward of founding a city remains so powerful compared to any other options for this unit. The settler profession has only changed the frequency with which you can make this choice, not about the underlying balance of making the choice, because the benefit of not founding with that unit generally pales in comparison to founding. Similar to the last point, the change puts even more pressure on settling these specialised units to maximise gain.
making city settling somewhat dependant on specific units randomly appearing on the docks actually skews power toward randomly gaining more of these units. meaning someone who starts with two settlers and a pioneer ( or maybe seasoned scout?) on the docks is being given a major leg up. like popping extra settlers from huts in BTS. specific units from docks actually makes the game LESS BALANCED.
Instead of nerfing ICS by making settling harder or more drawn out, it's just restricted it to dumb luck at the docks.
you can gain a large number of citizens, e.g. crosses, without actually being able to settle them in a city, because for example that city can't produce enough food, and you aren't producing enough money to afford to create more settler professionals (which might require sending a citizen all the way back to europe just for the task). This creates a situation which isn't totally unwinnable per se, but in which you are to some degree 'stuck'. This isn't even immersive because you would assume that if these made it to the new world and then the city wouldn't even let them in because there was no work/no food, these new citizens might decide to homestead elsewhere, and create their own opportunities. instead someone from Europe has to give them a License to Found, which just so happens to cost 30 food, 30 wood etc.
God forbid you later add upkeep to units or citizens, which might result in a genuinely unwinnable situation of having too many citizens that cant join your cities to create wealth, but you also cant create enough wealth to buy a License to Found because of all your fees. You might come to the point where you need to start deleting your own units and marvel at this pinnacle of game design.
Anyway, I think that's enough text spam so I'll get to the point.
TL;DR (ok not really): my suggestions for nerfing ICS
Sulla said:
Instead of cities being free and all of their infrastructure costing money, Civ4 reversed things and made cities expensive while their buildings would be free. When cities were initially founded in Civ4, they were too weak to pay their own support costs and had to be supported by the rest of your empire. In other words, every new city was essentially an investment - you would take an initial loss, and then as the city grew over time and built its own infrastructure, it would start to turn a profit and could support other cities in turn. Thus in Civ4 more cities were still generally better for your empire, but one couldn't build them too fast or in too marginal locations, which would result in economic stagnation.
-https://sullla.com/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html ,
The better way to fix ICS is to rebalance the risk versus reward (r/r), both by nerfing the reward for settling, but also ideally increasing the risk.
Have any Civ4 mods tried removing the free city centre tile? Were there any major downsides? I don't suggest making it unworkable, just treating it like any other tile in the BFC which can be worked by a citizen if they are assigned to it. This would immediately remove the massive efficiency difference between joining a citizen to an established city compared to sending them to settle for freebie city centre yields. The yield from that 1 pop would be equal in the two situations, all else being equal (such as infrastructure and types of tiles to work).
In particular it would accentuate the idea of new settlements either needing to seek self-sufficency (focusing enough food not to starve like homesteading) or needing support from the rest of your empire, like delivering food to a desolate desert goldmine. This has an added minor upside that it is more immersive and historically accurate; Rayy mentioned somewhere about the number of early IRL colonies that failed due to conflict or starvation, what better way to capture that than like this? It also incentivises founding with food producers like farmers and fishers and building farms to support the new city which I think is immersive. This is another important reason for a player to start with a pioneer.
Another minor upside, at least in my view, is that it would make settling desert or desert hill tiles feel less penalising, because you aren't giving up free food for basically nothing. You're only giving up the opportunity to work a food producing tile at some point, which is no different to simply including that tile in the BFC of the new city. Currently I much prefer to settle a tile which produces significant food because I can just neglect thinking about that issue and stack miners or cash-croppers etc.
I personally also found it annoying that I would settle a city for one resource, but it would continue to yield some other superfluous resource like cotton from the centre tile, meaning I had to go out of my way to remove or destroy this form of waste product just so the city didn't hit capacity and start destroying goods I actually wanted to keep (possible worst case scenario this happens to guns, removing that city's defenses).
Another upside is you can still use expert miners etc on resources you've settled, so your prospector can still work his magic on that gold node and isn't wasted.
A city would still improve the possible yields on that tile, by maybe +1 All (or +2 food, +1 everything else, like it does currently) representing rudimentary farming or mining infrastructure. It also compensates you to some degree for not being able to build proper infrastructure to take full advantage of that yield. The trade-off becomes better yield versus uninterruptible access, plus the free minor yield increment.
A possible downside is the AI being terrible at handling reduced food availability; it might also create more cities that are effectively worthless, gimping itself. I would consider giving hills and coasts 2 food base (reduce pier bonus) so that a city can almost
always avoid starvation, but the citizen in question offers no benefit beyond mere subsistence.
You might settle an expert hunter deep in the woods and his yields from furs only cover his own food cost. The city might stay 1 pop until pioneers clear forests and build farms. Isn't this a more organic and realistic growth of such a city?
I've written enough so I'll end by saying that early game risks need to be increased, ideally through more native activity and hostility, especially from expansion. Even friendlier tribes should quickly escalate when you significantly threaten their way of life. The raid system needs a tinker because it usually starts happening too late to be a legitimate threat and I don't even know if it poses an actual threat of burning a village, just minor hindrances like dead citizens, stolen goods etc.
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