Stalker0's State of the Mod - 1/25/2021

[stii]

Apologies when I said fighters earlier I had meant fighter line in my head and not the true "fighter" unit. In my experience AA guns ace Triplanes, and then mobile sams demolish fighters and jet fighters. Now an AA gun will still do significant damage to a fighter (as you noted with your zeros), meaning that the fighter is effectively unable to sweep for several turns. So in effect even against fighters and bombers, the AA gun is disabling air attacks for several turns at a time.

Yeah it is a bit confusing with half the unit names also being generic terms for the type of units.

I think air units are good at some points and bad at other depending on tech but this applies to most military units. Any units you haven't upgraded for a long time falls off to a degree. SAMs are about 6 techs ahead of fighters so they should destroy them so that is certainly fine. Triplanes being unable to sweep is a bit more of an issue but I think it is more balanced this way. Currently the defence tends to trump the attack but this is a pretty narrow defence your anti air units don't do much else. While your air units can probably do something due to their huge range. They can pick off random CS units or anything on the edges.

 

[InkAxis]

I don't see the point of adding a new resource when it can just be done by adding a hill. The only reason I've heard not to do this is for farm triangles, but I don't think that's too much of a loss.

I also agree on the Great Merchant & Engineer scaling, it should be increased.

 

[Stickerbrush]

Ships are indeed too strong when it comes to fighting cities. It doesn't make any sense that they work just as good (if not better) than siege units

 

[youngsteve]

Ships are indeed too strong when it comes to fighting cities. It doesn't make any sense that they work just as good (if not better) than siege units

I know it is silly. I can just see the German high command in WW2. Forget about the bombers & land troops, just ram our ships into London, & it will soon fall. Thankfully they didn't think of that tactic.

 

[dostillevi]

I had a thought regarding ships after watching Master and Commander last night. What if ships could repair at sea, but in doing so used up a limited "supply" that could be replenished back in port? It would give incentive to keep ships alive without having to send them back to port to repair and effectively sidelining them for an entire war. to improve the chance of escaping, how about: if a ship moves from a tile adjacent to an enemy ship into uncontested water (not next to another enemy ship), once per turn it gains an extra movement point and can't attack that turn. This would only work if the ship hadn't been attacked by a ship with the boarding promotion, in which case it can't get the bonus speed and still loses a speed as per the current promotion effect.

My only other thought on balance that you didn't mention is with founding religion. Lately I've found it very difficult and unreliable to found a religion playing with 16 civs on a huge map on epic speed. In one recent example, I played a game with Babylon where I was in desert and took the desert pantheon for around an extra 2 faith per city on average, but the last religions were founded on the turn before I could found mine. Short of bee-lining religion and building the shrine and temple first in every city, I'm not sure what else I could have done since I already had a significant faith bonus.

Anyway, along with the above, I started wondering just how important it really is to found a religion, and my thought process is that I would be much less concerned about not founding if I could keep my pantheon. Right now if I don't found a religion and I'm not planning to conquer a holy city, I feel like I've lost the game. Even if I do conquer a holy city, the tenants of the faith may not be relevant to my plans.

So I wonder if one of the two ideas might be viable:
1. If a city had a pantheon prior to having a religion, either keep the original pantheon benefits or have a choice of adopting the foreign religion's pantheon, or:
2. Develop mechanics to allow "owned" faiths to be mixed and matched. So if I founded a pantheon and then conquered a holy city, I could merge my pantheon with that religion, overriding it's original pantheon. Further, if I captured a second holy city, I could combine founder and follower beliefs as I see fit for my primary religion from among all religions whose holy cities I control. I'd expect such a mechanic to come with a significant amount of unrest or similar penalty.

 

[Bromar1]

I had a thought regarding ships after watching Master and Commander last night. What if ships could repair at sea, but in doing so used up a limited "supply" that could be replenished back in port? It would give incentive to keep ships alive without having to send them back to port to repair and effectively sidelining them for an entire war. to improve the chance of escaping, how about: if a ship moves from a tile adjacent to an enemy ship into uncontested water (not next to another enemy ship), once per turn it gains an extra movement point and can't attack that turn. This would only work if the ship hadn't been attacked by a ship with the boarding promotion, in which case it can't get the bonus speed and still loses a speed as per the current promotion effect.

Or what if you could heal ships up to 8 tiles from your nearest lighthouse, 10 tiles from your nearest harbor, 12 for seaport, etc.

Would be much simpler for the AI

 

[tu_79]

Great admirals can heal ships twice, IIRC.

 

[azum4roll]

Great admirals can heal ships twice, IIRC.

Only once now.

 

[dostillevi]

Or what if you could heal ships up to 8 tiles from your nearest lighthouse, 10 tiles from your nearest harbor, 12 for seaport, etc.

Would be much simpler for the AI

I'm not sure how that would be much simpler from a coding/AI perspective. Either way, this doesn't scale with map size. Maybe a better (simple) solution would allow healing in neutral coastal waters, but I'm not sure I'm a fan of a fleet being able to heal up and re-engage indefinitely. Overall though I'm concerned that any of these simple solutions change a meta without really improving the depth of naval combat.