Some balance issues

[Squirrelloid]

(1) Tokagawa's Industrious/Agricultural/Organized combination is absolutely brutal. I'm seriously an entire era ahead of the computer on Prince difficulty, and ahead on the power curve. And I've been playing peaceful/builder until I get interesting units, which means I probably could have annihilated one or more opponents already if I were feeling more aggressive.

Fix: Really, the combination is a problem because its so ridiculously productive. Change Ind or Agr for something else.

(2) The Great Bazaar is seriously too much, especially since all the other cash buildings provide bonus cash and not percentage multipliers. I'm running 100% science with about 10 cities at a profit. Not right.

Fix: Return market to +25%. Merge Tavern/Inn and make its effect on income small and a percentage multiplier (+10%?). Great Bazaar might be ok then.

 

[Psychic_Llamas]

ahhh i didnt even think about the potential awsomness of ind + agr, ill change ind i think

 

[Ahriman]

Tokagawa's Industrious/Agricultural/Organized

I suspect the problem is that industrious is too strong. The Industrious AIs nearly always far outperform the others. Agricultural was pretty powerful, but has been cut back somewhat.

(2) The Great Bazaar is seriously too much

I think the worst effect here is the interaction with the shrine; you building +100% gold building in a city that is providing +25 gold from the shrine is was is really funding your entire empire.
But we can cut some of the free cash from buildings too.

I agree that we should generally go back to % rather than + bonuses on markets, libraries etc.
This helps promote city specialisation, which is good strategy.
What was the logic behind making everything a fixed + bonus anyway?

 

[Masada]

I don't think any balance we make will last for very long

 

[Darkform]

never be fully balanced, it will. yes?

 

[Squirrelloid]

I suspect the problem is that industrious is too strong. The Industrious AIs nearly always far outperform the others. Agricultural was pretty powerful, but has been cut back somewhat.

Its hard to tell the difference when I'm dominating in large part because of settler advantage - both certainly contributed to that.

I think the worst effect here is the interaction with the shrine; you building +100% gold building in a city that is providing +25 gold from the shrine is was is really funding your entire empire.
But we can cut some of the free cash from buildings too.

Well, Wall Street is a *national* wonder in the real game, so +100% gold isn't actually a problem, at least not eventually. The Great Bazaar does come really early though, which may be part of the problem.

All the +gold buildings are a problem, however, inculding the two route wonders, taverns, markets, and inns, because they provide fodder for multiplication without needing to touch the tech slider.

I agree that we should generally go back to % rather than + bonuses on markets, libraries etc.
This helps promote city specialisation, which is good strategy.
What was the logic behind making everything a fixed + bonus anyway?

Agreed.

 

[Ahriman]

Its hard to tell the difference when I'm dominating in large part because of settler advantage - both certainly contributed to that.

I haven't tried an agricultural civ for a while. There is definitely an issue with the relative strength of various leader traits though. Agricultural and industrious are awesome. Imperialistic is awesome too. While besieger and expansive are pretty bad.

All the +gold buildings are a problem, however, inculding the two route wonders, taverns, markets, and inns, because they provide fodder for multiplication without needing to touch the tech slider.

The route wonders are hard to get on a real difficulty level. Taverns and inns could be merged, and markets could go back to a % bonus.

 

[Squirrelloid]

Ok, I'm on Monarch now with Aggressive AI. The AI is still anemically bad, far worse than in normal civ games I've played. As far as I can tell, the mod is not using the BTS AI improvements - why not?

 

[Ahriman]

I know nothing about AI or what this build uses.

But I still think that the fact that the AI is anemically weak mostly comes from the fact that they are crippled in the early game by forests (so they can't build any improvments, and get left many many turns behind) and watchtowers (which they build in forests instead of clearing the cottages for farms and cottages and mines).
This is confirmed by the fact that when they occassionaly get a good start position (eg floodplains and gold), they can be totally dominating (I had one game on Immortal where the Dark Elf AI had a godly start position, and fast teched up to repeater crossbows (which are away too strong) and used the workshop wonder from invention to give them monster bonding for free, and got out a dragon insanely early.

But I would also suggest that the AI in BTS is very honed to all the specifics of the vanilla civ model. Its just not design to be able to handle differences as well, so the AI in any mod is inherently going to be weaker and need to have the difficulty pumped up - FFH suffers from this too.

 

[Squirrelloid]

I know nothing about AI or what this build uses.

But I still think that the fact that the AI is anemically weak mostly comes from the fact that they are crippled in the early game by forests (so they can't build any improvments, and get left many many turns behind) and watchtowers (which they build in forests instead of clearing the cottages for farms and cottages and mines).
This is confirmed by the fact that when they occassionaly get a good start position (eg floodplains and gold), they can be totally dominating (I had one game on Immortal where the Dark Elf AI had a godly start position, and fast teched up to repeater crossbows (which are away too strong) and used the workshop wonder from invention to give them monster bonding for free, and got out a dragon insanely early.

But I would also suggest that the AI in BTS is very honed to all the specifics of the vanilla civ model. Its just not design to be able to handle differences as well, so the AI in any mod is inherently going to be weaker and need to have the difficulty pumped up - FFH suffers from this too.

Except against an Aggressive AI in BTS I expect to see monstrous stacks of units, even at monarch level. I'm not seeing that. And you can't tell me forest-lock is a problem against the Asrai - they seem to just ignore the forests when they build improvements. I've only seen one tower/fort/etc... thus far.

 

[Ahriman]

Except against an Aggressive AI in BTS I expect to see monstrous stacks of units,

You won't see massive stacks of units when the AI is so crippled by forests early game that it develops really really slowly, it will be way behind you in terms of growth, tech, production and army size. Moving bronzeworking earlier will hopefully help fix this.

In some versions the towerspam has been fixed; I'm using a beta1.5 where the fort bonuses were reintroduced by accident and towerspam happened again. I'd forgotten that it had been fixed in 1.4, so you are correct that in your version this is not a relevant issue.

I haven't looked at Asrai AI behavior yet in a version where towerspam was fixed.

There are other factors that mess up the AI too. It isn't as good at city location and often gets bad cities (it doesn't understand how bad marsh and jungle are). It adopts its favorite civics most of the time, rather than ones that are effective. Greenskins are hopelessly weak at the moment because they can't deal with animosity (which needs to be seriously reworked).
I do find though that the salvation factions, dark elves and nekehara AIs are ok.

 

[Squirrelloid]

You won't see massive stacks of units when the AI is so crippled by forests early game that it develops really really slowly, it will be way behind you in terms of growth, tech, production and army size. Moving bronzeworking earlier will hopefully help fix this.

In some versions the towerspam has been fixed; I'm using a beta1.5 where the fort bonuses were reintroduced by accident and towerspam happened again. I'd forgotten that it had been fixed in 1.4, so you are correct that in your version this is not a relevant issue.

I haven't looked at Asrai AI behavior yet in a version where towerspam was fixed.

There are other factors that mess up the AI too. It isn't as good at city location and often gets bad cities (it doesn't understand how bad marsh and jungle are). It adopts its favorite civics most of the time, rather than ones that are effective. Greenskins are hopelessly weak at the moment because they can't deal with animosity (which needs to be seriously reworked).
I do find though that the salvation factions, dark elves and nekehara AIs are ok.

Ogre Kingdoms also seems to do quite well (multiple games), and Silvania did exceptionally well one game. Cathay also tends to be quite strong. They still aren't building large stacks of units.

 

[Ahriman]

Ogre Kingdoms also seems to do quite well (multiple games), and Silvania did exceptionally well one game

I suspect these are a function of leader traits (financial is always awesome) and start positions. Industrious civs tend also to do very well.

As for large stacks of units, I don't know whether this is because there are so many gold-producing buildings to build that the AI likes (fixed partly by some of the proposed building deletions/mergers), because the AI isn't getting enough hammers (often they build cottages on hills instead of mines) or because they're worried about unit maintenance costs (not getting enough commerce)
An interesting question.

 

[Darkform]

in the 1.3 game I played the AI did build a cottage on a Gem resource. I think it was because mineing was so hard to tech.

by the time AI had mineing it was a town on Gems and the AI valued the town more than a mine.

 

[Ahriman]

by the time AI had mineing it was a town on Gems and the AI valued the town more than a mine.

This is yet another good reason to move mining to a tier1 tech, and bronze working to tier2.