Scythia is broken

[elitetroops]

I had this thought watching the streams, but felt confident the devs wouldn't allow it. However, it turns out this is how it works..

Gold purchases cost 4 gold/hammer. When you disband units you get 2 gold/hammer. Scythia builds 2 units for the price of one with 100% production bonus from a military policy. You do the math. If you want you can even add in +25% production boost towards classical units from a pantheon and maybe meet some militaristic city state to get free hammers to even further boost this exploit.

I tried this and my capital making 17 hammers/turn kept building double horsemen in 2 turns. Then I could immediately sell them for 320 gold and purchase 80 hammers worth of production in any city. So basically a empire wide hammer transfer at greater than 2:1 ratio. Not bad! Any civ can use the 100% production towards mounted or naval units to transfer hammers at 1:1 ratio (better if you have additional bonuses to military production or CS boosts). And any civ can exploit Venetian Arsenal to transfer hammers at 2:1 ratio. Or maybe pump out a ton of naval units with Venetian Arsenal to sell before you build Big Ben and transfer the hammers at 4:1 ratio...

Perhaps they should dramatically cut down on the amount of gold you get when disbanding units? Or rather cut it out all together, no reason why you should be able to sell your army.

 

[Acken]

Yes. Disband gold is ridiculous.

 

[Luckystrike77]

Yes. Disband gold is ridiculous.

Agree. Saving upkeep is sufficient reward for disbanding units.

 

[Plus Ultra]

Interesting.

Are there no limitations/drawbacks to this strategy then?

 

[Acken]

No. But scythia is in general stupid as i expected prior to release. It may be okay without the 100 bonus policy but right now its just a civ likely to be banned from multiplayer.

One of the biggest reason is that spearmen are as strong as horsemen despite the bonus 35 vs 25 plus 10. While spearmen cost less they also only receive a 50 bonus policy.

Oh and Scythia units heal and have added strength against wounded

 

[rpgalon]

I think the biggest balance problem right now is the 100% cavalry production bonus policy, so much exploits and broken horseman rushs are generated from it and there is no reason why it is not 50% like the others +military production policies.

just a stupid decision to make the best unit type (light/heavy cavalry) get 2x production bonus from the policy. why the **** it's not 50% like the others?

And them you get a Civ that puts another 100% production on it, so they are getting like 400% production towards light cavalry (with is by far the strongest unit you can rush). And I'm not even talking about the heal and + strenght vs wounded units.

 

[Manifold]

No. But scythia is in general stupid as i expected prior to release. It may be okay without the 100 bonus policy but right now its just a civ likely to be banned from multiplayer.

They should be also banned from singleplayer because of the unreasonable city names.

 

[elitetroops]

Interesting.

Are there no limitations/drawbacks to this strategy then?

Only limitation is that not everything can be bought with gold. Other than that, it makes no sense for Scythia to ever build anything but mounted units and sell them.

It's effectively a +100% production bonus towards any district buildings and units, with the added bonus that nothing needs to be produced locally. Everything can be produced anywhere in your empire, then assigned to where it is needed. Want to settle a city without fresh water and no hammers to build a granary? No problem, build two horsemen anywhere at half the cost, sell them and buy the granary. Is your army at the wrong side of the world when your newly settled vulnerable cities are attacked? No problem, build some horsemen anywhere, sell them and buy defenders.

 

[Martin Alvito]

Yeah, that's busted. A lot easier to use than the BE release exploit that let you take all the AI's money every turn, too.

Can be solved by nerfing the production bonus or by deeper changes like halving the disband gold. Probably needs to be the former; as any SMAC player could tell you, even a mild early game production bonus (Yang Colony Pod spam) is insane.

 

[Nikolai II]

Problem isn't really Scythia, though, is it?

 

[Mort_Q]

They could also have just the 2-for-1units get half disband gold.... but that would likely be harder to code.

 

[bbbt]

Well, clearly Scythia has efficient production of in-demand mercenaries

With mods allowed in multiplayer, it should be much easier to do this sort of balancing. Mods can pretty easily just remove policy cards from play (or balance them) instead of everyone agreeing not to use them.

For single-player, I'm never that worried about these sorts of exploits. If someone really wants to spend their game building horsemen and then disbanding them, that's fine with me.

 

[Magil]

For single-player, I'm never that worried about these sorts of exploits. If someone really wants to spend their game building horsemen and then disbanding them, that's fine with me.

Which isn't to say it shouldn't be changed, because it's always problematic when meaningful choices are diminished by obvious exploits. You can't just ignore the gaping holes in balance.

 

[SirLemonWinks]

Too bad the Horse Archer counts as Ranged Unit but doesn't count as Light Calvery unit; horse archers don't benefit from the 100% production towards mounted units policy.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Yeah, that's busted. A lot easier to use than the BE release exploit that let you take all the AI's money every turn, too.

Can be solved by nerfing the production bonus or by deeper changes like halving the disband gold. Probably needs to be the former; as any SMAC player could tell you, even a mild early game production bonus (Yang Colony Pod spam) is insane.

disband gold is probably the one to get rid of.

If you have one of the gold projects they give 0.15? gold for each production (and great person points at the end) but that should be the primary way to get gold from production. So units disbanding should probably be something like 0.5 gold per production. (since that is low, you could allow it anywhere)

 

[Abraxis]

I had this thought watching the streams, but felt confident the devs wouldn't allow it. However, it turns out this is how it works..

Gold purchases cost 4 gold/hammer. When you disband units you get 2 gold/hammer. Scythia builds 2 units for the price of one with 100% production bonus from a military policy. You do the math. If you want you can even add in +25% production boost towards classical units from a pantheon and maybe meet some militaristic city state to get free hammers to even further boost this exploit.

I tried this and my capital making 17 hammers/turn kept building double horsemen in 2 turns. Then I could immediately sell them for 320 gold and purchase 80 hammers worth of production in any city. So basically a empire wide hammer transfer at greater than 2:1 ratio. Not bad! Any civ can use the 100% production towards mounted or naval units to transfer hammers at 1:1 ratio (better if you have additional bonuses to military production or CS boosts). And any civ can exploit Venetian Arsenal to transfer hammers at 2:1 ratio. Or maybe pump out a ton of naval units with Venetian Arsenal to sell before you build Big Ben and transfer the hammers at 4:1 ratio...

Perhaps they should dramatically cut down on the amount of gold you get when disbanding units? Or rather cut it out all together, no reason why you should be able to sell your army.

Jeeze, even without that exploit I would have said they are too strong. I think they'd be strong even without their Unique improvement as well. Any early aggression civ is very strong. Scythia is the best of them. So far of my 4 games,

Spoiler :

50-70 turns each,
1 on king, 3 on emperor,
Played as Japan x2, Egypt and Russia

I have gotten completely stomped trying to play peacefully -after the AI teamed up on me and either by coincidence or clever design, all gathered their forces and cooperated, attacking me at the same time.

My last game I was producing nothing but units for defence for half the game and I still got worn down. My capital was even surrounded by river on four sides, didn't matter. The whole time, start to finish, city states were dropping like flies too.

All my settings were on standard, but I did add 3 to 4 extra civs to the standard size default. So maybe that's why. Even if that's not the cause, early aggression unless it has serious consequences later in the game I haven't seen yet seems absolutely dominant.

I can't figure out if this gold refund could be intentional or not though. Certainly on paper, Scythia seems dull compared to other civs, I always wondered if there were some less than obvious mechanic their abilities could exploit. This would certainly be it. But gosh darn, they are just way too strong.

 

[RedRover57]

A streamer/youtuber with an advance copy noticed this yesterday a couple of hours prior to the US launch. He was playing as Gilgamesh and realized that he could spam out the war carts in 2 turns and sell them immediately for 110 gold each. So with a couple of good production cities one could easily make hundreds of gold per turn very early in the game just turning over hammers for gold. Gilgamesh is kind of crazy also since those war carts cost no maintenance. He was fielding an army of about 30 of those (they become obsolete around turn 80 on Deity however, standard speed).

 

[Acken]

Well its two problem at once. The first one is disband gold being too high. Im not even sure disband gold should be a thing even less at 50% cost. This create a problem with production bonuses.

And for scythia its amplified by their ability to double production on top of everything. But even without selling units Scythia is just too strong because horsemen are good units and scythia will just swarm anyone. To a point worse than genghis or attila in civ5.

 

[bbbt]

Which isn't to say it shouldn't be changed, because it's always problematic when meaningful choices are diminished by obvious exploits. You can't just ignore the gaping holes in balance.

I guess, I don't really consider exploits like that - that depend on the player doing specific things - as balance issues in single-player. Just don't use them if you don't want to. I.e. the whole 'pillage-repair' exploit in Civ 5 seemed stupid to me, so I never used it. But players built entire strategies around it.

Edit: I'll add, to concede your point, that there's no reason not to fix it if there's an easy way to do so. But these sorts of things are never that high on my to-fix wishlist for the above reasons.

 

[elitetroops]

Disband gold is definitely too high and can be exploited in so many ways. Another example is that you get full disband gold for disbanding builders, regardless of how many charges they have left. If you have 2 builders with one charge left, you can disband both and get enough gold to buy one with 3 charges. Later when you have the policy for 5 charge builders, or the pyramids, this gets a lot more powerful. Builder cost goes up a bit with each builder, but not enough to counter this exploit.