WhimpyCiv said:
(...) Interesting. How about the idea of making some of the later small wonders produce larger armies? Would that fix the balance problem?
Only partly.It would give the AI a basic chance to use them and their number would be restricted, but the human will use them still more efficient (ok, thats nothing special about (big) armies, but the more powerful a feature gets, which the AI has problems to use, the more unbalanced things get) because of the poor tactical AI (for example, their hesitating behaviour if it comes to attacking undamaged armies with single units).And to make it even worse, a bug often prevents them from filling more than one unit in an army(only possible, if there is a faster second unit available)...if you make armies bigger, this bug is more likely to occur.
WhimpyCiv said:
(...) Y'know, I've never really understood how pollution and cleaners actually work. Would you mind talking about that a little?
There are four sources for pollution:
- metropolis population
- improvements
- nuclear meltdowns in plants
- nuclear blast caused by ICBMs and tactical missiles
Every citizien which exceeds the maximum number of citiziens for city size 2 causes one point of pollution per turn, improvments a certain number of points per trun (if set in editor).Nuclear things contribute with an unknown, fixed number (one time effect).This pollution has an local and an global effect.
If a city produces such pollution points, there is chance for a local ecologic damage (the more, the higher) inside the city radius.The tile it hits is polluted and gives no more ressorces until cleaned by a worker.
The global effect is global warming.It causes jungles and forests to vanish and transforms terrain types.It is triggered when all the caused pollution(which gets accumulated turn for turn for this calculation) reaches a certain level.
Beside cleaning polluted tiles (which is only "repairing", it doesn't reduce pollution!) and avoiding it by not building polluting improvements or keeping your cities small, you can build certain improvments, which reduce the pollution output of cities.To understand how they work, keep in mind that population and improvement pollution is seen seperate.There are editor flags which reduce the one or the other to no more than 1 and it is possible to reduce improvement pollution by a certain number.However, the "building pollution reduced to 1" flag and the "-X units building pollution" thing is
not cumulative.You only get zero improvement pollution if the "-X" reaches or exceeds the improvement pollution and you will always have at least 1 point population pollution in a size 3 city.
In RaR, the Park and Recycling Center combat building pollution, while the Mass Transit System deals with populaton pollution.Sewage Treatment plant and the Labour Union each reduce pollution again by 2.If you have 9 or less improvement pollution in your city, you can keep it completly clean from it if you build all four.For the population pollution you can only reduce it to 1 with the MTS.
WhimpyCiv said:
So after Feudalism is discovered, there is no penalty in selling off all your Worker Housing?
Yes, there is no point in keeping them - they just cost after they went obsolete! However, we consider a change for the next version here (0 maintenance) to help the AI and to avoid annoying pressure to micromanage.
WhimpyCiv said:
Yes, I'm streamlining for that tech in my current game! I'm playing Tibet, located on a fair sized island totally out of reach of almost every other civ ... at least until they develop some boats that can get across the ocean, but the AI never was very good at naval war! I don't have that many land troops, though I do have a fair-sized navy, and I have a strong tech lead. Since I didn't even find any other civs until the Middle ages, I built only a few troops and went crazy on science buildings -- and with Tibet being a scientific civ, getting a massive tech lead was fairly easy. So I don't have a big army, but I do have a lot of improvements ... sounds like it was made for Social Democracy, eh? I think I'll go for a space race victory, if only I can get the other civs to stop trying to kill me long enough! (Though sending a few Hussars to take out their cities which are defended by Pikemen usually calms them down!)(...)
Since the free maintenance is so powerful, we will raise unit upkeep for Social Democracy in the next version.This way it will be more interesting to decide between Federal Republic and Social Democracy.
zxc-vbn said:
I make a map in rar mod, but i change some rule, and let those xx_shipments (for example:Gold_shipment) have some use for me. Now the xx_shipments are not prize unit, and i chagne them to footman so they can move everycity. When you move them to one of your city, the just thing can be done on them is disband them, then you can get some production shield which can help you complete some city iproment or unit. But i don't know if the computer will do such thing like me!!!!!
It would be pure luck, if the AI decides to disband them in a city.So your design will likely work only for the human player.
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