Scaling of Diplomatic Units

[Gazebo]

Basically, friendly and allied status. They're done in the tenths, but with influence scaling, diplo units increase in the hundreds.
Comparing them to missionaries is fair. Without the extra cost for missionaires, they'll be spammed everywhere. To much unit management for people and for PC memory.

Diplo units are restrained by the availability of paper. This change is what made diplo spamming bearable. But the requirements for paper only increase with the advent of new diplo units. So, crazy idea here:
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1st. Make paper requirement for diplo units increase with era.
Ancient-Classical, require 1 paper each unit. [...] Modern, require 4 paper each diplo unit.

2nd. Make national diplo wonders give more paper at key technologies.
Thus, delaying the diplomatic tech is pointless, as paper is hard to get by and it could result in diplo units not being able to produce due to the lack of paper.

3rd. Make better diplo units very expensive.
This is a boost to wide play. Wide civs have more gold, so they can purchase diplo units very often, while tall civs are usually better producing them, which means precious production turns invested in diplomacy. The technologies cannot be avoided, since it would make it impossible to produce units.
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As it is now, tall civs have spare paper, thanks to extra great diplomats and diplomatic wonders. They could sell it to wide civs, or negate them the resource.

Too much new code.

Don’t forget missionaries use faith not production. Not comparable in value.

 

[tu_79]

Too much new code.

Don’t forget missionaries use faith not production. Not comparable in value.

Fair enough.

 

[Galbias]

What would be the base scaling value ? 100?

Just to confirm, does this mean 100 production cost scaling with era? 200 Medieval, 300 Renaissance, etc. I think that would be reasonable enough as a baseline if so.

The other question is influence, do we want to keep it tied to the diplomatic units themselves? ie it could be

-Each specific diplomatic unit gives you 40-50-60-70, so you want to unlock the new units ASAP if you're playing diplo
-Have the influence also scale with era to match production cost (40 base, +5 every era would leave you with your Information era diplo units having 70 base influence like Ambassadors do now). The only advantage of unlocking the new units is the faster movement.
-Somewhere in between?

 

[Stalker0]

Just to confirm, does this mean 100 production cost scaling with era? 200 Medieval, 300 Renaissance, etc. I think that would be reasonable enough as a baseline if so.

The other question is influence, do we want to keep it tied to the diplomatic units themselves? ie it could be

-Each specific diplomatic unit gives you 40-50-60-70, so you want to unlock the new units ASAP if you're playing diplo
-Have the influence also scale with era to match production cost (40 base, +5 every era would leave you with your Information era diplo units having 70 base influence like Ambassadors do now). The only advantage of unlocking the new units is the faster movement.
-Somewhere in between?

I didn't see any issue with the current Influence Numbers, so I wouldn't see a need to change them.

I mean at the end of the day, the main thing that is being asked.....is that I start paying the production piper for Envoys and Ambassadors when a certain era starts rather than a certain tech. But I don't see any reason to necessarily change the actual production and influence numbers that we are using today.

 

[chicorbeef]

What would be the base scaling value ? 100?

I'm not totally sure if this is truly a problem here.

However, when it comes to proposals, my guess is that 125-150 would be the best bet because otherwise we would only be paying 400 Hammers for Diplomats which is drastically lower than the current 700 Hammers you pay for them now.

Another option that tu_79 mentioned is having diplo units cut down by 10 influence every era after they're unlocked. That could be something to consider, though it might nerf diplomacy a little too much as a whole.

 

[Grabbl]

I like that idea of older diplomatic units decaying in power if feasible. It's quite clean, and doesn't have direct impact on overall influence in city states (thus, no rebalancing of those values), and it even makes sense (Emissaries manage to impress city states well until other civs start to send Envoys, at which point they won't be satisfied with Emissaries anymore.). Best for me would be even something like (-10% influence for every civ that has discovered the tech for the next unit), however that detail would ideally stick to the easiest implementation of that downscaling mechanics. If it's possible with reasonable work at the beginning.

 

[Galbias]

I like that idea of older diplomatic units decaying in power if feasible. It's quite clean, and doesn't have direct impact on overall influence in city states (thus, no rebalancing of those values), and it even makes sense (Emissaries manage to impress city states well until other civs start to send Envoys, at which point they won't be satisfied with Emissaries anymore.). Best for me would be even something like (-10% influence for every civ that has discovered the tech for the next unit), however that detail would ideally stick to the easiest implementation of that downscaling mechanics. If it's possible with reasonable work at the beginning.

After thinking about it more, I like this idea slightly better if it's easily implemented. Emissary going from, say, 40 influence to 25 is a jump but not as harsh of a jump as them going from 100 to 200 production. The only odd point is that there's no diplomatic unit in Information era, so if the influence loss is consistent per era, going from Atomic to Information means you lose influence without the prospect of gaining any. You could add a promotion to all dipolomatic units on an Information Era tech to even it out though, probably Telecommunications or Globalization.

It'd also be nice to keep the amount of overall influence you can achieve on the lower side to keep the influence-affecting parts of policies and such relevant and it makes more sense from a logical standpoint as well, sending a guy with a gift basket and only moderate body odor may have impressed a City-State initially but after technology has advanced they'll expect a bit more.

 

[Rekk]

I agree that there is a strong disincentive to take techs that give new diplomatic units. I think the simplest solution is to have all Diplomatic units cost the same amount of production, and to have that cost scale with era, unless it's not feasible.

 

[Legen]

One possibility is to add an influence cap on the base promotion of diplomatic units (Initiate, Adept, Professional, Plenipotentiary) that makes it add less influence if the city-state is at or above that cap. Each subsequent unit upgrade would have a higher cap, making the upgrade a necessity to stay efficient for influence.

For instance, assume the Initiate promotion has a hard cap at 100 influence. If the city-state is already at or above 100 , then the +30 influence from the Initiate promotion is reduced to +15 on that city-state. Upgrading to Envoy would mean a higher cap, say 200 cap for Adept, so that you're not so inefficient on city-states that were already at or above the former cap.

Any other promotions the unit may have from other sources (e.g. Roman Forum's Imperial Seal and Chancery's Royal Signet, both worth +5 influence) may still apply at 100% efficiency at or above the cap if desired, as I only mentioned the base promotion to be capped.

 

[wobuffet]

I mean, wouldn't the best solution be to tie diplo units' locks/unlocks to Eras, globally? So,

• The same techs still unlock new diplo units, but do not make older diplo units unavailable.
• Instead, old diplo units become obsolete for every Civ at the same time: e.g., as soon as 2/3 of Civs on the map have entered the Medieval Era, everybody loses access to Emissaries.
• So if you research Education early, you temporarily have an option between making Emissaries and Envoys.
• Conversely, if you are a badly tech-lagging Civ, you might temporarily not be able to make any Diplomatic units until you unlock the next diplo unit.

An alternative would be to tie the unit locks to the specific diplo unit-unlocking Techs (Education, Industrialization, ...) rather than Eras.

Either way, this solves the perverse "avoid researching diplo techs if you are currently making diplo units" by making the unit "locks" global and not Civ-specific.

 

[YukiN]

A lot has been said here, but I think the initial proposal of simply tying Diplo units to era is still the most elegant and effective. Every era advance, the costs of diplo-units increase to match what we have now. The current diplo-techs can give you the upgraded units with increased effectiveness without increasing cost. For eras without diplo-units, take the geometric or some other mean for the eras before and after to fill in the costs.

 

[Gazebo]

UPDATE Units SET Cost = '100' WHERE Type = 'UNIT_EMISSARY';
UPDATE Units SET Cost = '100' WHERE Type = 'UNIT_ENVOY';
UPDATE Units SET Cost = '100' WHERE Type = 'UNIT_DIPLOMAT';
UPDATE Units SET Cost = '100' WHERE Type = 'UNIT_AMBASSADOR';

UPDATE Units SET ProductionCostAddedPerEra = '150' WHERE Type = 'UNIT_EMISSARY';
UPDATE Units SET ProductionCostAddedPerEra = '150' WHERE Type = 'UNIT_ENVOY';
UPDATE Units SET ProductionCostAddedPerEra = '150' WHERE Type = 'UNIT_DIPLOMAT';
UPDATE Units SET ProductionCostAddedPerEra = '150' WHERE Type = 'UNIT_AMBASSADOR';

So 100 production base, with 150xCurrentEra for the scaler.

G

 

[Galbias]

What does that mean in layman's terms? 100 to start, but is it 300 in Medieval, 500 in Renaissance, etc? That sounds like it'd be a pretty significant production increase overall.

One possibility is to add an influence cap on the base promotion of diplomatic units (Initiate, Adept, Professional, Plenipotentiary) that makes it add less influence if the city-state is at or above that cap. Each subsequent unit upgrade would have a higher cap, making the upgrade a necessity to stay efficient for influence.

For instance, assume the Initiate promotion has a hard cap at 100 influence. If the city-state is already at or above 100 , then the +30 influence from the Initiate promotion is reduced to +15 on that city-state. Upgrading to Envoy would mean a higher cap, say 200 cap for Adept, so that you're not so inefficient on city-states that were already at or above the former cap.

Any other promotions the unit may have from other sources (e.g. Roman Forum's Imperial Seal and Chancery's Royal Signet, both worth +5 influence) may still apply at 100% efficiency at or above the cap if desired, as I only mentioned the base promotion to be capped.

This would be cool but probably more complicated than necessary.

 

[Gazebo]

What does that mean in layman's terms? 100 to start, but is it 300 in Medieval, 500 in Renaissance, etc? That sounds like it'd be a pretty significant production increase overall.



This would be cool but probably more complicated than necessary.

Not exactly - I'm tweaking the function to match my intent:

Ancient: 100
Classical: 250
Medieval: 400
Renaissance: 550
Industrial: 700
Modern: 850
Atomic: 1000
Information: 1150

G

 

[Dimmy]

Hope it's the right thread to share my idea and sorry if it has been debated already:
Should buying instead of building a diplo unit giving the full influence points potential?

 

[Stalker0]

Hope it's the right thread to share my idea and sorry if it has been debated already:
Should buying instead of building a diplo unit giving the full influence points potential?

It’s intended

 

[tu_79]

Hope it's the right thread to share my idea and sorry if it has been debated already:
Should buying instead of building a diplo unit giving the full influence points potential?

If you do that, then diplomacy is just a matter of who makes more gold, reducing strategic options.

 

[Legen]

Note that buying a diplo unit puts a 5-turn cooldown on diplo unit purchases in that city.