Rome

Maybe it is just me, but I find it odd that a Civ whose UA is called 'The Glory of Rome', has literally zero bonus to the capital, only to other cities

The Glory of Rome
When you conquer a City, the City retains all its Buildings and you immediately acquire additional territory around the City.

+15% Production towards Buildings already present in your Capital.

It doesn't fit historically either, since Rome grew massively, off the back of the rest of the empire. Egyptian and North African grain fed the city, goods poured in from the rest of the empire, and the Roman elite basically enjoyed a level of luxury that wouldn't be reached by the elite again until the Industrial era.

The first part of the UA also sounds like it has caused a lot of issues, and is a bit of anti synergy with the second part, the extra building production. You don't need as much catchup production if conquered cities already have everything they already produced. And the territory is just an odd, cut-rate version of the Shoshone.

A small addition to the second line. Production of the Empire feeding back to the capital.

+5% Production towards National Wonders, for every base building present in your empire, capping at 50%.

This would go with the second line. Keeping up to date with building in the rest of the empire then feeds back when producing National Wonders. This also reduces the wide penalty from National Wonders, since they can get a lot more expensive if going wide. Rome at the moment is doubly hit by this since they need to produce all the building first, so their secondary cities can save on production AND then building national wonders that are super expensive because of all these extra cities.

The base building refers to the building that unlocks the National Wonder, so Barracks = Heroic Epic, Monument = National Monument, etc.

Not sure in terms of a larger change, replacing the first line. But I feel it needs to add a bit of power to Rome the city itself. Like more powerful internal trade routes going to the capital, yields/percentage bonus in the capital from a wider empire, instant yields to the National Wonders, for each base building built/already built, etc. Anyone of these could work as possibilities.
 
Maybe it is just me, but I find it odd that a Civ whose UA is called 'The Glory of Rome', has literally zero bonus to the capital, only to other cities



It doesn't fit historically either, since Rome grew massively, off the back of the rest of the empire. Egyptian and North African grain fed the city, goods poured in from the rest of the empire, and the Roman elite basically enjoyed a level of luxury that wouldn't be reached by the elite again until the Industrial era.

The first part of the UA also sounds like it has caused a lot of issues, and is a bit of anti synergy with the second part, the extra building production. You don't need as much catchup production if conquered cities already have everything they already produced. And the territory is just an odd, cut-rate version of the Shoshone.

A small addition to the second line. Production of the Empire feeding back to the capital.



This would go with the second line. Keeping up to date with building in the rest of the empire then feeds back when producing National Wonders. This also reduces the wide penalty from National Wonders, since they can get a lot more expensive if going wide. Rome at the moment is doubly hit by this since they need to produce all the building first, so their secondary cities can save on production AND then building national wonders that are super expensive because of all these extra cities.

The base building refers to the building that unlocks the National Wonder, so Barracks = Heroic Epic, Monument = National Monument, etc.

Not sure in terms of a larger change, replacing the first line. But I feel it needs to add a bit of power to Rome the city itself. Like more powerful internal trade routes going to the capital, yields/percentage bonus in the capital from a wider empire, instant yields to the National Wonders, for each base building built/already built, etc. Anyone of these could work as possibilities.

Rome = city, but Rome also = empire. It do be like that.

G
 
So on Rome. Rome was one of my favorite vanilla civs, it was a civ where your plan was often one good solid set of warring with your awesome UU, and then you settled in and enjoyed your economic UA bonuses for the remaining of the game. That is a play style I greatly enjoy, and Rome was the highlight of that for me.

With the various changes, Rome feels like its in a weird place. Its been shifted to a more true warmonger, but its not at the level of full warmonger, but its economic bonuses for no warring are also weaker now....so its a civ I rarely play, which is a real shame.

Am I alone in that assessment, do people like Rome as is?
 
I agree with your assessment, but I don’t think much was lost. Rome didn’t even have a UB in vanilla, so it’s hard to draw a comparison there. Rome has been oriented more as a perennial warmonger, but with a firm infrastructure focus as well.

you should join us in 4UC land. I think you will like the peaceful expansionist tools the latifundia brings to peacetime Rome, and with the re-addition of the ballista for an even bigger early expansion spike.
 
So on Rome. Rome was one of my favorite vanilla civs, it was a civ where your plan was often one good solid set of warring with your awesome UU, and then you settled in and enjoyed your economic UA bonuses for the remaining of the game. That is a play style I greatly enjoy, and Rome was the highlight of that for me.

With the various changes, Rome feels like its in a weird place. Its been shifted to a more true warmonger, but its not at the level of full warmonger, but its economic bonuses for no warring are also weaker now....so its a civ I rarely play, which is a real shame.

Am I alone in that assessment, do people like Rome as is?
Rome's niche is that you can conquer strong cities and have them immediately do great, and sometimes even better than your own settled cities (because of UBs). As long as happiness permits, you can conquer non-stop without worrying about the science/culture hit.
 
Rome is a great civ to play, either peacefully (you really get a lot of extra production) or aggressively, like azum4roll said.
 
What I like for Rome is the conquer & administer side, with a fat world city as capital.

Preserving the buildings is a great ability. I would maybe give a slight help to grow the capital: give the capital some food on settling or conquering new cities. Or some %growth to the capital based on the number of owned cities and vassals. Rome could then occasionally be played with progress or even tradition. In exchange for this food boost I would drop the tile gain aspect of the UA.
 
I wonder if Spain's old food-on-settle/capture bonus would fit in with Rome. Obviously not with the same numbers, but food on settling (representing people moving to new coloniae) benefits peaceful Rome in getting new cities up and working production tiles faster, while food on conquest (spoils of war) boosts the capital. Dunno if they really need the buff though, even if the conquest-tile-gain is removed.
 
We were talking on the discord about what could be done to improve Rome.

I'll try to summarize here:
Spoiler things I don't like about Rome :

  • Rome's design is hostile to modders
    • Rome's ability to steal unique buildings means that any mod that gives any civ a new unique building needs to make sure that Rome can use the building too
    • This means Rome has to be added to all lua functions. In practice this means that Rome triggers every unique building's lua function every time he does anything in a game. This has a heavy cost on performance, and can make games with rome unstable if too many custom civs or large mods like events or 4UC are added
    • Rome steals UBs, but he has a UB of his own. This means that Rome's own UA blocks him from being able to take any unique Arenas from other civs. This is frustrating for modmodders, because in effect it causes a mod conflict with any civ or with a unique arena
    • Rome also violates the NeverCapture rule with his ability. This is totally unnecessary, and breaks an important tool for modders who want to implement different dummies, placeholders, and buildings for various purposes. If we wanted Rome to be able to capture things that other civs can, we could just change the ConquestProb value to 0, but instead VP breaks an exception with another exception.
  • The Unique Building steal is fiddly, extremely inconsistent, and not all that fun
    • So first off, the ability to steal UBs rewards Rome for conquering other civs after they have built their UB. This is often much later than Rome's military power spike, which makes this part of the UA difficult to use, because it is not supported by any mid or late game conquest bonuses
    • The power of this bonus is inconsistent, but in the case of a few UBs like the Ikanda and Dojo, or the unique national wonders like the Royal Library or Cothon, it can be game-changing and quite unfair. The Dojo, and Ikanda are particularly troublesome, because even with 1, they are nearly half of the total power of their original civ's kit. Rome can easily funnel military unit production through a few captured cities, or buy mercenaries through them, and come out with a full army of Bushido or buffalo promoted units. It is my personal opinion that this ability to steal and then leverage a large portion of another civ's kit trivializes the game
    • For the rest of the time, it's very inconsistent to even manage to get the unique buildings you want to steal, and if they aren't that powerful, or they don't mesh well with Rome's existing focus, then they are forgettable, and hidden away in a list inside a minor, fringe city.
    • The human player can completely counter this UB steal ability by just selling buildings before they are captured
  • The tiles on city capture aren't that interesting either
    • The free tiles on city conquest are rarely a factor; this is a very minor bonus that has almost no benefit. If the free tiles ignored city ownership and let you steal more land, then maybe it would be a bit more useful? but overall this just isn't a great mechanic

New Rome UA (credit to @Rekk for the idea)

Pax Romana
15%:c5production: towards Buildings already present in your :c5capital:Capital. Captured cities retain more Buildings and provide a free Unique Unit when available.

Spoiler Technical notes: :

  • Rome increases all conquest probabilities for all buildings to 100%, but does not violate the NeverCapture rule
  • Military training and defense buildings are changed to Conquest probability of 0, and NeverCapture = false, so Rome can still capture these buildings without breaking any rules
  • Unique buildings are changed to default buildings when Rome captures them now, like any other civ
  • Instead, Rome gets a free Unique Unit for each city captured (if possible):
    • Rome receives a free UU based on that city's founding civilization
    • The free unit is given once per captured city at the earliest opportunity:
      • If Rome has already researched the prerequisite technology for that unit before it captures the city, the free unit immediately appears in the :c5capital:Capital
      • If Rome has not researched the prerequisite technology a unit before it captures the city, the free unit appears in the captured city once the tech is researched
    • The free unit has the Auxilia promotion (costs no supply), and gets the military XP of the city is appears by
    • Unique naval units will only appear in coastal cities, so if Rome or the captured city is landlocked when the conditions are met, the naval unit will not appear
    • Units that are not in the pool of minor civ gifts are never given (eg. no Assyrian siege towers or Mongolian Khans)
    • Free units appear once per city, per unique unit. ie. a mod that adds a 2nd UU to a civ would mean that this UA would trigger twice.

Spoiler my own opinions of the new UA :

  • The auxilia were a major component of Rome's war machine, so it is a historically relevant inclusion
  • unique units appear on the map and are more interactive than buildings tucked away in non-core cities
  • unique units obsolete and having a limited supply of them prevents even the most powerful UUs from overpowering the rest of Rome's existing kit, like some really powerful UBs or UNWs do
  • Giving UUs is much more modder-friendly. limiting component-stealing to units will give modders more flexibility and improve the performance of modmods, which always have trouble integrating support for Rome.
  • This ability is a more stable, consistent version of UU stealing in comparison to the Hunnic version, but doesn't have the potential to steal unlimited numbers of units, and only gives UUs on a per-city basis.
  • With regard to power, it is comparable to CS unit gifting. free, obsolete units appear in the Capital, and can be upgraded to the current era, while free units given in the captured city from a tech unlock are at the cutting edge of military tech and can be deployed immediately.
  • I think free UU stealing is compensation enough for losing access to UB stealing and tiles on capture. It is probably a slight buff in most games, mostly thanks to its consistency, but doesn't have the potential for be OP like some UB steals
 
Instead of on capture, it could be when a courthouse is constructed. Then it could always appear at the captured city without immediately contributing to the current war effort. It also makes the acquisition of Naval UUs less swingy with regards to whether Rome is situated on the coast or not (or a lake? :crazyeye:).

Maybe it will hurt too much to annex so many cities, but Rome is one of the civilizations best suited to annexing because his conquered cities always have very good infrastructure compared to their (newly reduced) population.
 
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"The Unique Building steal is fiddly, extremely inconsistent, and not all that fun" - I disagree. This UA is one of the most interesting UAs in VP. Yeah, it introduces some randomness, because sometimes it's busted, but other times it's just meh.
As for difficulty for modders... I'm not convinced that the base VP should redesigned just because of that. A clean solution for this, without impacting the base VP, would be to create a mod mod for Rome to have the changes that you've mentioned. That way people who want to play with base VP Rome could do just that and people who want to play with other modded civs AND have problems with current Rome, could just add it as a mod mod. Everyone would be happy, I guess.
 
"The Unique Building steal is fiddly, extremely inconsistent, and not all that fun" - I disagree. This UA is one of the most interesting UAs in VP. Yeah, it introduces some randomness, because sometimes it's busted, but other times it's just meh.
As for difficulty for modders... I'm not convinced that the base VP should redesigned just because of that. A clean solution for this, without impacting the base VP, would be to create a mod mod for Rome to have the changes that you've mentioned. That way people who want to play with base VP Rome could do just that and people who want to play with other modded civs AND have problems with current Rome, could just add it as a mod mod. Everyone would be happy, I guess.
so there’s really two complaints, and even changing/fixing 1 of them would have a big impact on modders.
1. Stealing UBs hurts performance because Rome has to have access to every possible lua-based ability, whereas other civs can bounce off expensive checks for other civs’ UBs with a pretty cheap filter.
2. NeverCapture being violated creates all sorts of shenanigans with hard coded exceptions to certain rules, like national wonders and dummy buildings. It also makes the whole system more opaque and Byzantine. The best way to fix this would be to just make everything you want no one but Rome to be able to capture a Conquest probability of 0, but don’t let him violate the NeverCapture check.

fixing point 2 potentially has no impact on players at all, they wouldn’t even know the difference. I think at minimum I would like to see the database rules followed again.
 
I have played quite a few games with Rome.

As for the unique building capture, it sounds more interesting and stronger than it is in practise IMO. As mentioned before, many UBs come after Rome's power spike. And even for the jewels to capture (ikanda, dojo, ...) it is not as good in practise.

I had one game where I selected all those civs with the best buildings to capture. I managed to conquer Zulus as my first target, using legions and ballistas. That gave me a few cities with ikandas. But my army was already large, so I did not get that many new infantry units with the buffalo line. And without the Zulu UA, they took a long time to level up. Capturing the ikandas had very little impact over all.

So for me it would be very OK to cut the UB capture, even though I love the flavor of it.

I strongly favor keeping the bonus to not lose regular buildings on capture. Keeping defense buildings is very good for taking contested cities and prevents recapture.

As for getting a UU on capture: it feels quite random to me and also overlaps with the Huns. At the same time it is much harder to achieve than just killing unit.

I would favor some other and more consistent boost in Rome's fighting ability. I find their fighting power quite underwhelming atm. Especially after their UUs are outteched. You only keep the cover 2 for infantry and movement bonus for siege. Compared to Greece with the strong discipline promotion and 25% bonus for ALL units from city states that is weak.

Some ideas to boost Rome's military:
Legions also keep pilum and building ability after upgrade. They can be fortified while building.
Move colosseum to iron working to make their power spike more pronounced. Currently, they feel weak compared to other power spikes (cataphract, mandekalu, winged hussar,...). So at least allow Rome to build them earlier after getting colosseums and give them more stuff to carry over after upgrades.
 
I have played quite a few games with Rome.

As for the unique building capture, it sounds more interesting and stronger than it is in practise IMO. As mentioned before, many UBs come after Rome's power spike. And even for the jewels to capture (ikanda, dojo, ...) it is not as good in practise.

I had one game where I selected all those civs with the best buildings to capture. I managed to conquer Zulus as my first target, using legions and ballistas. That gave me a few cities with ikandas. But my army was already large, so I did not get that many new infantry units with the buffalo line. And without the Zulu UA, they took a long time to level up. Capturing the ikandas had very little impact over all.

So what? If Rome is strong enough, because it used it's power spike, it'd probably conquer more cities after the power spike, so the UA stays relevant. IMHO it's wrong to assume that Rome could only capture cities during Legions period.

As for your game, maybe it had a very little impact, because you already had a big advantage, but what if you hadn't? Any bonus has more impact, the less advantage you have, I think.
Also, consider AI, that is likely to lose many more units that players. Ikandas would impact them much more.
Moreover, there are plenty of other UBs other than Ikanda, that weren't discussed here yet.
 
The ikanda, dojo, and any UNW are the major culprits because capturing 1 city effectively has a global impact. All new units can be produced/bought through that 1 city for access to extra free promotions. And UNWs have global effects by design. These buildings have effects that retroactively affect even your core, Roman cities, and other cities captured from other civs.

on the other hand, a quarter of all civs don’t even have anything special for Rome to steal, because they have UIs that everyone gets to take. But there’s only 2 civs out of 43 who don’t have UUs to steal. That’s much more consistent. And, if they will give you a free UU regardless of if the UU came before you captured the city, or if it has yet to be unlocked, you’re almost guaranteed to get something special. Unlike the current UB ability, which is tech locked, excludes lots of civs with nothing to steal, and can be perfectly blocked by a player selling buildings. This ability may as well not exist in multiplayer because it can just be shut off by human players.
 
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As for getting a UU on capture: it feels quite random to me and also overlaps with the Huns. At the same time it is much harder to achieve than just killing unit.
i could argue the tile expansion on city capture overlaps with Shoshone to the same degree, and that’s pretty random in its own right. Huns can capture ALL units, while Rome just gets 1 UU per city. Huns capture units at 15 hp and with 0 XP while Rome’s appear in a city, away from combat, at full hp, and get XP based on the city they appear at. Overall that makes them less plentiful than Huns’ free units, but much more survivable and useable. Huns’ converted units usually just result in sacrificial meat shields, sapping the attacks of the enemy to take them off the board permanently, with the side benefit of essentially letting you draw back your horsemen from riskier kills by 1 tile.

From my post above, I would argue it is substantially LESS random than what Rome has now. I would also suggest that by virtue of being units that can move and do actions on a map, rather than icons in a list in some tertiary city, free unique units are exactly as unique as UBs, but more “special”. Not only are there more of them to collect, so you get more unique things more often, you get to do more with them.

this change would also serve to give Rome a bit more consistency in being a conqueror too, because free military units augment your military production, while free tiles… don’t. And captured UBs could do all manner of things that Rome just doesn’t really care about or have a complimentary kit to take advantage of. Why should Rome care about a more % :c5greatperson:GPP from a coffeehouse in some backwater captured Austrian city? He could meaningfully use a free, no-supply Hussar though. Foreign UUs just fit Rome’s existing kit more naturally.
 
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Instead of on capture, it could be when a courthouse is constructed. Then it could always appear at the captured city without immediately contributing to the current war effort. It also makes the acquisition of Naval UUs less swingy with regards to whether Rome is situated on the coast or not (or a lake? :crazyeye:).

Maybe it will hurt too much to annex so many cities, but Rome is one of the civilizations best suited to annexing because his conquered cities always have very good infrastructure compared to their (newly reduced) population.
interesting. It also fixes the issue with cities flipping back and forth. You could just implement a unique capture, but a courthouse takes at least 10 turns of holding that city.

it also gives players more control. You can just choose to leave a city with a ho-hum or obsolete UU as a puppet. This also addresses @azum4roll ’s concern that free UUs could sap your strategic resources if they all come at once from a tech unlock. This gives another lever in the player’s control to determine the number of free units you could get.
 
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I'll admit I have practically no knowledge of the coding concerns so I can't really speak on that.

I agree that the UB stealing is pretty inconsistent and tbh not as powerful as expected in practice considering there's so many other factors when capturing a city. I wouldn't mind if UB/UNW stealing is no longer a thing tbh.

I am going to miss not being able to capture a fully loaded city though, missing out on buildings like Walls, Monuments, Barracks, etc. is going to be a significant change to Rome.

How does the UU stealing work? You can steal any unit before it's unlocked? How does that work with late UUs like Fusilier UUs?
 
I am going to miss not being able to capture a fully loaded city though, missing out on buildings like Walls, Monuments, Barracks, etc. is going to be a significant change to Rome.
No one is saying Rome shouldn’t retain more buildings. I’m only talking about changing how the under-the-hood code works. Rome won’t keep UBs, but they will keep walls, barracks, monuments, etc.
How does the UU stealing work? You can steal any unit before it's unlocked? Ho
You get a free UU in the captured city, based on the original owner of that city. You get the unit when the tech for that unit is researched. If you already have the tech for that unit, it will appear when some other condition is met, either immediately in city capture, or once a courthouse is built there.
 
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