Suggestions and Requests

[Chep]

Would you be willing to change the Byzantine UP, Leoreth?
Right now they're the only civ that would be better off without their UP. Some civs have low-impact UPs, but theirs is the only one that I can think of that is actually detrimental to their game.

 

[Leoreth]

How so?

But I'm not very attached to it, so if you have a good suggestion I could change it.

 

[Chep]

well, it means you can't really trade with the AI, it gives you half gold for your maps, basically nothing if you want to sell a tech to make some cash and charges you something like 5 techs for 1 of its own.

and the "bribe barbs" option seems interesting, but given the fact that you need all the gold you can get pre 1000AD you basically wont ever use it, since after that time there won't be many major barb raids (or rather you'll have had to build a defense to repell them anyway).


How about something along the lines of a "capitol"-boosting-UP? I mean the whole Civ is named after this one single city after all.

So maybe "starts with Absolutism" (if that works, I remember other civs having trouble when they start with civics without the proper techs.)

or something that ties it more closely to Rome since (especially for the muslim world) it was usually regarded as the continuation of that empire. No real idea right now though.

OR: slightly reduce their core (after the flip, just before Arab spawn?) and give them an UP that is somewhat similar to the Portuguese one, allowing them to really maintain an Empire with lesser stability issues (making them one of the few civs to actually try domination victories with).
however I have to agree, that all of these dont really sound too great even to me.
It's just that the current one is really annoying and feels like it was intended to hamstring their diplomatic options.


edit: also, could we get some sort of info which techs are considered "Medieval" when playing as Japan? Sure by now I pretty much know them all, but for anyone new to the game this will be hard, since once you enter the Renaissance you have no real way to tell them apart from others.
(and also I am unsure when it comes to techs I usually acquire late, like Military Tradition or Education)

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

There is a BUG option you can enable that shows you in the tech tree which era any given tech belongs to. Why isn't it enabled by default?

Anyway, can we do something about culture? It's not quite as useless as earlier with the new border system, but it still has the fundamental drawback that its effects are purely local while research, gold and espionage are all global. I have several suggestions as to how this could be addressed:

1. Maintenance reduction: More culture means more loyalty to the ruler, which means your citizens are less likely to actively work against you and are easier to organize. Reaching a new cultue level could reduce city upkeep by a certain percentage, and maybe reduce inflation by 1% as well.
2. Happiness: Reaching new culture levels could provide a "We enjoy the fine arts" happiness boost.
3 Golden Age: A variation of Civ5's golden age system, there could be a counter for global culture across your civ that launches a Golden Age once you reach certain thresholds.
4. Influencing other civs: Having a lot more culture than your rivals could make life harder for them, by making their citizens unhappy ("Other civilizations are more cultured than us") or increasing their inflation. Perhaps this should only apply to civs you are at war with or civs that have on average worse than cautious relations toward each other.

 

[NerfCothons]

These screenshots show my idea for culture spread to vary by civ + region + time. The most simple concept is that non-tropical civs cannot colonise tropical Africa until discovering Biology. So your cities can now act as commercial and ship-repair ports, points of sea control and bases for fortification of the surrounding area, but not really centres of production. Now I'm no programmer so I don't know how to generalise it efficiently, but at least it can work.

I like the idea but it goes a touch too far. Cities should probably be able to get access to adjacent resources without too much culture. After all if you build your citadel next to a sugar plantation you ought to be able to trade the sugar. Other than that though I'm on board.

The other way in which the mod fails to represent the actual historical difficulty in colonizing Africa is that the African barbarians are just too easy to defend a city against. Historically speaking the technological limitations in settling Africa contemplated by Panopticon's suggestion had an effect, but Africans also proved difficult to conquer until the era of the maxim machine gun (Whatever happens, we have got: the maxim gun, and they have not). While it's true that those speedy impi can wreak havoc on unprotected workers and horse archers, but they don't do well against fortified cities and really any other medieval unit and beyond. It really doesn't take that many crossbowmen to control giant swaths of Africa as early as you can get the settlers down there. Perhaps 2 speed pombos should start patrolling sub-shararan Africa earlier and in greater numbers. After all by the age of exploration a glorified spearman is going to be little more than a speed bump for any reasonably technologically advanced civilization. This might have a profoundly negative effect on the Mali but their UU could also be compensated to counter.

 

[Chep]

@Knoedel: while I like the general idea, all your suggestions do is make big empires stronger than small ones.

There are so many factors already in the game that make big empires more stable & productive than small ones, I don't think we need to actually introduce even more.

 

[Leoreth]

There is a BUG option you can enable that shows you in the tech tree which era any given tech belongs to. Why isn't it enabled by default?

Anyway, can we do something about culture? It's not quite as useless as earlier with the new border system, but it still has the fundamental drawback that its effects are purely local while research, gold and espionage are all global. I have several suggestions as to how this could be addressed:

1. Maintenance reduction: More culture means more loyalty to the ruler, which means your citizens are less likely to actively work against you and are easier to organize. Reaching a new cultue level could reduce city upkeep by a certain percentage, and maybe reduce inflation by 1% as well.
2. Happiness: Reaching new culture levels could provide a "We enjoy the fine arts" happiness boost.
3 Golden Age: A variation of Civ5's golden age system, there could be a counter for global culture across your civ that launches a Golden Age once you reach certain thresholds.
4. Influencing other civs: Having a lot more culture than your rivals could make life harder for them, by making their citizens unhappy ("Other civilizations are more cultured than us") or increasing their inflation. Perhaps this should only apply to civs you are at war with or civs that have on average worse than cautious relations toward each other.

I agree that culture should have more tangible benefits, but I disagree that they should be global, echoing Chep's arguments. Culture should be one of the ways of going "tall". My current ideas for culture benefits:
- National wonders require culture levels. First national wonder enabled by Refined, second by Influential, third by Legendary.
- Specialist GPP scale with culture level, +1 GPP per level

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

@Knoedel: while I like the general idea, all your suggestions do is make big empires stronger than small ones.

There are so many factors already in the game that make big empires more stable & productive than small ones, I don't think we need to actually introduce even more.

Well we could just take culture averaged across all your cities then, or increase the needed threshold for this or that seizably for every new city.

 

[Atlantic Pacf.]

Maybe we can take some of these culture ideas and fashion them into a new Byzantine UP. That would synergize with their culture goal and introduce these ideas without affecting the whole game. Plus, the Byzantines are a civ that's supposed to grow "wide."

 

[Hojsimpson]

Byzantine UP. As long as you hold your capital, your stability can't go below shaky. All reconquered cities don't suffer turns of unrest and get a huge culture bonus. Can use espionage points to hire barbs mercenaries. 1+ trade routes per cities connected to Capitol.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

I know it has been this way since Vanilla, but why does Liberalism of all things give a free tech to the first civ to discover it? Wouldn't it make more sense to give that bonus to Scientific Method to make up for the loss of research from Monasteries?

 

[KeeperOT7Keys]

I think giving a +2 air unit experience to the multilateralism would be a nice bonus because
first it would represent the air operations of organizaitons like nato, and superior air forces of the member nations especially US,
and it would also look nice along with the +2 naval and land unit bonuses of naval dominance and standing army civic

 

[Leoreth]

I know it has been this way since Vanilla, but why does Liberalism of all things give a free tech to the first civ to discover it? Wouldn't it make more sense to give that bonus to Scientific Method to make up for the loss of research from Monasteries?

To represent the superiority of liberal democracy over authoritarian ideologies such as Marxism.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

To represent the superiority of liberal democracy over authoritarian ideologies such as Marxism.

Link to video.

 

[Bernd-das-Brot]

Mercantilism seems relatively useles to me in its current state.

Economically you lose a lot of trade in most/nearly all cases. And stability does not get better with it as you receive heavy diplo penalties for not having any open borders or for having open borders with welathier nations.

Example from my actual Portugal game (1.13, UHV, Paragon, normal, 1700AD). I switched to Mercantilism to see its effect (it is build for civs like Portugal). I closed my borders to every civ with more points then me.

Result: Lost 1/5 of my research and my stability went down to -25. (see attachement)

 

[Bernd-das-Brot]

One wrong attachement. Here is the right one.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

Tsk, tsk, isn't that just tragic? Oh if only someone had released a modmod that made Mercantilism actually useful!

 

[Alpaya]

Tsk, tsk, isn't that just tragic? Oh if only someone had released a modmod that made Mercantilism actually useful!

I've never use this civic, it's completely useless. It should have more positive effects to be attractive.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

I've never use this civic, it's completely useless. It should have more positive effects to be attractive.

Like low upkeep and the reduction of distance to Palace city maintenance?

 

[Alpaya]

Like low upkeep and the reduction of distance to Palace city maintenance?

Yes, something like this. If you lost your trade routes with other countries and spoiled relationships with them, you have to get something instead. What this civic offers now is not equivalent to the losses.