Suggestions to improve balance

[atreas]

I just had a look into the CIV4TraitInfo, there is no Happiness Bonus, how did you do that?

With "I gave" I mean "I gave them in my proposal". Still, now the SDK has come and it's time to play seriously with cIV "from inside" .

Too bad the new patch only applies the chopping reduction and the Kremlin. I was really hoping for something more. Especially the change in Financial seems really a joke to me.

On the other hand, with the new change about the GPP from Wonders, it might make quite a bit of difference - so I think there is no need for change in GPP until we test the new stuff.

 

[DSChapin]

Especially the change in Financial seems really a joke to me.

Yes! They took a trait with one bonus that is widely recognized as massively overpowered, and another bonus that is recognized as the weakest of its kind, and got rid of the second bonus without touching the first...

 

[malekithe]

Yes! They took a trait with one bonus that is widely recognized as massively overpowered, and another bonus that is recognized as the weakest of its kind, and got rid of the second bonus without touching the first...

I wonder what play-testing led them to believe that a cheaper rennaissance era building was what caused the imbalance in financial. No one ever noticed that financial's biggest relative period of advantage was shortly after cottages and hamlets come into the picture? In all honesty, who gives a crap about the cost of banks? If you're financial, you're going to have money, so just buy them in a few cities. The change basically makes it such that you no longer consider a bank in your lowliest commerial outpost. That's about it, nothing else really changed.

The simple fact that they modified financial implies that they saw it as being imbalanced. But, I'm thinking they may have missed the bus here.

What I'm also curious about is the change to some of the civics. The change to nationhood looks good, someone may actually use it now. The small nerf to Representation makes some sense when you consider it's availablility with the pyramids. But if you, instead, assume it's a mid-game civic, I think it's an unusual nerf. It's really all the mid-to-late-game specialists had going for them, and it just got worse. The change to stateproperty is welcome, though may not go far enough in some cases. The change to free trade is the strangest of the bunch to me. Was it over powered? Looks like it's gradually shifting from a free-market to a state-run socialist psuedo-marketplace. Is this just to make environmentalism more attractive?

 

[uberfish]

Or perhaps Financial isn't really as overpowered as people claim it is The late game numbers for Financial vs Organized really don't tell the whole story because the numbers tend to work out the other way around in the Classical and Medieval ages when organized civs should be out conquering (and the cheap courts really help.) While Financial civs get more out of each city, Organized civs should have more cities which balances things out.

On a different subject I really like the way chopping was changed since it adds a third level of choice.

 

[malekithe]

While Financial civs get more out of each city, Organized civs should have more cities which balances things out.

If the financial civ's cities are producing more commerce and have a higher likelihood of being solvent than the organized civ's, why wouldn't the financial civ want to expand more? Take a look at Roland's and others' posts throughout the thread. You'll see that the benfits of each trait can be calculated on a per-city basis, meaning the total number of cities can be essentially ignored. If organized saves me 3 gold per city and financial adds 4 commerce per city, does it matter how many cities I have?

The cheaper courthouses are definitely a big help to organized and why I think it is probably the second best trait.

 

[uberfish]

Organized saves you more in Classical/Medieval military expansion phase, because in a game where you're going for military expansion this era, you are not only health/happy capped but running a significant amount of food resources, farms and mines in your core to produce the necessary infrastructure, workers and troops, and therefore not really getting up to that +4 commerce per city average yet. And that average goes down even further when you start taking AI cities as very few of them are cottaged up.