Suggestions to improve balance

[opensilo]

As for your suggestion, assuming it could be implemented. Roland and i believe that Financial is strongest at the beginning of the game, and that's where it most needs toning down, which is the opposite of what you propose.

I misunderstood. I was thinking that the problem with financial was not so much that it's a bonus in the early game as that it's a bonus that just keeps on giving. Less noticeably later in the game, but that ignores the not-so-easy-to-measure advantage that getting those earlier techs sooner gives.

Easy enough to fix. Just change the penalty to:

FinPenalty=Max(0, RoundDown(CitySize/2)) with perhaps a max on the RoundDown quantity.

This doesn't work because you need to replace "CitySize" with "Number of tiles being worked at any one time which produce 2+ base commerce", and i don't know how you'd go about finding that variable!

Before my edit on my post, that was exactly my suggestion. The edit was because I realixed that I too don't know how you could determine that number.

However, I think CitySize is a reasonable compromise/estimate. If you are playing well enough to even consider this modification, you are good at specializing your cities.

That means that in your commerce cities, most of the tiles you work will get the financial bonus, so CitySize ~ Worked 2+ comerce tiles.

In your production cities, you won't have much commerce at all, and the Min() just ensures that the city won't have negative commerce. In this case, ProductionCityCommerce ~ 0.

Even in balanced cities, e.g. working half 2+ base commerce tiles, the formula would put you at the non-financial trait return (ModFinBonus ~ ModFinPenalty). Those results seem to be the ones desired in a mod: The financial trait rewards specializing in commerce, but to a lower degree than the current implementation.

You're still motivated with financial to work the coast and as many high-commerce tiles as possible, but your bonus is cut by about half. You could fine tune the effect by incorporating minimum or maximum effects, but it seems close enough in the simple form to be worth considering.

 

[Zombie69]

Having passed, Zombie, all my small life dealing with percentages, both in professional and in hobby level, I have learnt to respect them and not abuse them - and I certainly didn't say what you said. This is different from your views in many parts - but I will take opensilo's word and let it go having you with the last word. I can live with that.

Atreas, my statement was tongue in cheek (hence the ), and not to be taken seriously! Of course i don't think you view all statistics as misrepresentative!

 

[Zombie69]

Opensilo, the main problem i still see with this method is that it's very hard to explain to people who don't like math. If the effect of a trait is so hard to understand that you need high level math courses to understand it, i think it needs to be changed. I mean, take this page for example : http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/info/civilizations/

How will the table look after your change? Pretty unwieldy...

 

[opensilo]

Opensilo, the main problem i still see with this method is that it's very hard to explain to people who don't like math. If the effect of a trait is so hard to understand that you need high level math courses to understand it, i think it needs to be changed. I mean, take this page for example : http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/info/civilizations/

How will the table look after your change? Pretty unwieldy...

Yes, I see your point. Not a good suggestion for Firaxis to take.

Still, such a change might be of interest to the people who are reading this thread and willing to mod their games because they are interested in playing with more balanced traits. (And perhaps of interest to those crazy types who refuse to give up Financial because it's so clearly superior! )

 

[Roland Johansen]

This is a lengthy post. Sorry to people who don't like that. I've split it in three parts, so you can read what you like.

-Chopping

I like the ideas that Coockerygod and cabert have posted in posts 91 and 93.
In one of the firsts posts of this thread, Zombie and I were questioning whether 10 or 15 hammers would be better for the chopping value on normal speed. Maybe a better way to balance it would be 15 hammers with a double chopping time.

In the normal game, chopping takes 2.5 turns (rounded up to 3) at the start of the game. That's a quick improvement if you compare it with the other improvements. Only road building is quicker at 2 turns, but farming takes 5, mining 4, a cottage 4, a workshop 6 and a watermill 8. I think that this is rather strange as cutting down a large area of forested land must not have been that easy in the ancient age. If forest chopping was completely balanced in my opinion, then I might not have considered increasing the time to chop a forest. But it is not completely balanced in my opinion, so increasing the chopping time can be a good way to make it more balanced.

I suggest increasing the time to chop to 6 turns (on normal speed, that is 9 turns on epic) and reducing it's production value to 15 hammers. That way, chopping can still give you a good production value, but it takes some workers to get the job done if there are large areas of forest to be chopped. It also means that you have to choose between building a cottage fast on flatlands without forest or somewhat slower on forested flatlands but with the production bonus of chopping the forest.
You can get a production bonus from forests, but it requires a non-trivial investment in workers.

I suggest increasing the time to chop a jungle from 4 to 8 turns (12 on epic) and giving it a production value of 15 hammers. This may make building cities in the jungle a bit more interesting after iron working enables jungle chopping. I don't see a reason that this might be overpowered as iron working takes a while to develop and jungle tiles are quite bad to start with in this game.

It would be nice if it was possible to increase the yield of forest chopping with metal casting (as suggested by cabert). It would improve the strategy in forest chopping because leaving the forests a while can be beneficial. You would have to choose between a lower number of hammers now and a higher number of hammers later. That is always an interesting strategic choice.
If it is possible to do so, then I would suggest a value of 25 hammers as that would be the value that would make the choice somewhat difficult for me.
I'm not quite sure if it is possible to do this however because there is no similar mechanic in the game and there is no field in the related xml-file to change this easily. It might (stress might) be possible to make the original forest chopping obsolete with metal casting and introduce a better chopping improvement with metal casting. But there is no other improvement that becomes obsolete (can't be build anymore) in the original game, so I don't know if this is possible. Is there anyone reading this who knows if this can be done (preferably with a simple xml-edit)?

-Streamlining the discussion

Often when you're on a forum reading stuff and writing your own opinions, then you want to convince the other people that your opinion is the right one and their opinion is flawed. However, if you start a reply with ridiculing the others opinion or just simply stating that the other person is wrong, then the other poster will often become defensive and not listen to any of the arguments that you're using. He/she will try to show that your opinion is wrong and start ridiculing your opinion. Mostly this will end in two groups of posters where each group ridicules the other groups opinions, but doesn't really listen to the other group.
It is often more effective to first compliment the other on his arguments (even if you think that they are flawed ) and then try to point some minor flaws in their arguments and try to convince them that there is a better way to look at it. There's always a reason why someone thinks the way he/she thinks and if you try to think with them then you can get their ear then you might get somewhere in a discussion. This 'diplomatic' way of reasoning can get you further in a discussion.

The above is not meant to be condescending although it might sound that way. I'm just trying to streamline the discussion in this thread a little.

-The financial trait

Their has been a lot of discussion on this trait in the last few pages. The only trait with which it can be easily compared is the organized trait as that trait is also effecting commerce/money/research. I personally think that the best way is to look at a city and see what both traits do for that city throughout the game. And the best city to compare is one of the first cities that you build as these cities are the most important cities in the game.

It is quite easy to calculate the value of the organized trait for a single city. The civic upkeep costs for a city are close to 2 + 0.5 * N where N is the size of the city (see the civic upkeep thread in the strategy articles subforum). The organized trait reduces this upkeep by 50%, so the value of the organized trait is about 1 + 0.25 * N.
Because inflation increases all the costs in the game by a certain percentage, inflation will increase the power of this trait. If inflation were 100% (which it is in 2050AD), then the organized trait will reduce the cost of the civic upkeep by 1 + 0.25 * N and the cost of inflation by 1 + 0.25 * N.
However, in an epic speed game, inflation will be 0% for the first 160 turns or until 300 AD. After that it will rise by 1% every 5 turns. In 1000 AD, it will only be 14% (value of organized trait becomes 1.14 * (1 + 0.25 N) = 1.14 + 0.285 N), in 1400 AD it will only be 30% (value of organized trait becomes 1.3 * (1 + 0.25 N) = 1.3 + 0.325 N). I don't think that inflation will be very important in this comparison because the most important part of the game is before 1400AD (in general).
Actually, the above is true for a high difficulty level game. The civic upkeep costs are lower at lower difficulty level games and thus the organized trait is weaker. However, I choose to ignore this for the moment.

What is the value of the financial trait for a city? At the start of the game, it will typically be 0 as you will not have any cottages then and also no gold mines. Also, you will typically not be using coastal tiles because you need production and food to expand and not commerce. You might be using a sea food resource or a mine after a relative low number of turns.
At this stage of the game (size 3 city or below), the organized trait will give you something like 1 or 2 gold extra. That is a relatively large amount because the amount of commerce at the start of the game is very low.

After you have expanded a bit, you might start using a few coastal tiles for commerce, a few cottages may have been build and grown to produce 2 commerce. Your city is size 6. The organized trait gives you 2.5 gold extra at that moment. The financial trait will probably equal that or better. The reduced version will probably not because the coastal tiles don't help and the cottages have not grown large enough. The financial trait will start to overpower the organized trait from this moment on.
Some 10-20 turns later though, I think the reduced financial trait will have large enough cottages to reach the 2.5 gold mark of the organized trait. From that moment on, also the reduced financial trait will move ahead compared to the organized trait. It will however be a few commerce behind on the normal financial trait as there will be cottages and coastal tiles that give an advantage to the original financial trait and not the reduced financial trait.

The advantages of the organized, the financial and the reduced financial trait have however relatively decreased by now. 2-3 gold for a size 6 city with cottages and trade routes is not as much as 1-2 gold at the start of the game. It will not help you speed up the research as much as at the start of the game (measured in number of turns). I estimate that the reduced financial trait gets 1-2 gold per turn less than the financial trait at this point. This is probably the moment of the biggest relative advantage for the original commercial trait compared to the reduced commercial trait.

If we move forward through time to about 1400 AD, then the advantage of the organized trait has become 1.3 + 0.325 N (see calculation earlier).
The cities are probably something like size 15 and have something like 9 tiles producing 2 or more commerce and 6 tiles producing 3 or more commerce. I'm assuming not pure cottage cities here because one of the goals of this thread is to make the other terrain improvements more viable. And you also have a GP-factory and production cities which reduce the average number of cottages per city. The city also has a 60% bonus on gold/science on average (some cities have every available gold and science increasing building, some don't).
The organized trait has a gold/science advantage of 1.3 + 0.325 * 15 or about 6.
The financial trait has a gold/science advantage of 9 * 1.6 or about 14.5
The reduced financial trait has a gold/science advantage of 6 * 1.6 or about 9.5

However, the gold + science income of these cities without any of the bonuses of these traits are around 40 * 1.6 = 64 so the relative gain is not that huge anymore. This means that the increase in research speed at this moment is not as big as the increase in research speed that the organized trait offers at the starting turns of the game.

I would like to point the readers to a nice thing about the formula describing the advantage of the organized trait that I mentioned before. I said that the organized trait has an advantage of 1 + 0.25 N. This means that once a quarter of the tiles of a city (not counting the center tile) + 1 have a commerce value of 2 or more, then the financial trait surpasses the organized trait. Once a quarter of the tiles of a city (not counting the center tile) + 1 have a commerce value of 3 or more, then the reduced financial trait surpasses the organized trait.
That is a nice way to look at it and gives you a more intuitive feeling about the relative strength of the traits.

I will wait with drawing a conclusion out of the above figures until some people have looked at them and criticized them.

 

[Roland Johansen]

Ah, I forgot to reply to opensilo.

I like the fact that you try to perfectly balance the financial trait with the organized trait. However, I have to agree a bit with Zombie. It's a not very natural way to balance it. It would feel a bit gamey and artificial. Also, it is not so nice to be penalized for trying to optimize the advantage of your trait. Another point of critique that I got a while back in this thread was that balancing could lead to making the game bland. If you balance things by making every advantage very similar, then you take the spice out of the game. I personally think that the change that you suggest would make the trait a bit more bland. Reading your last post, you seem to agree with Zombie's critique.

I wonder what you think of the analysis of the reduced financial advantage compared to the organized advantage as I presented it above. Do you think that the reduced financial advantage would be balanced?

 

[atreas]

The cities are probably something like size 15 and have something like 9 tiles producing 2 or more commerce and 6 tiles producing 3 or more commerce. I'm assuming not pure cottage cities here because one of the goals of this thread is to make the other terrain improvements more viable. And you also have a GP-factory and production cities which reduce the average number of cottages per city. The city also has a 60% bonus on gold/science on average (some cities have every available gold and science increasing building, some don't).

This is the key hypothesis that needs to be true - if it's true then the trait is balanced (btw, I think you mean 9 tiles producing at most 2 commerce, and not 2 or more commerce?). Still, that hypothesis says that, by 1400 AD, 60% of the worked tiles aren't grown cottages and I can't see how you will achieve it. Of course map type plays a part, but in general (considering that Continents and Pangea are the two more popular map types) I can recall many threads where it was claimed than the bigger part of the land (even to exaggeration numbers) is covered with at least Villages by that time.

I am sure that you used some weighting based on estimation about the number of "non-commercial" cities in an empire, but I ask because from my experience this number isn't true for my games - I usually have 1 GP Farm and at most 3 purely production cities in a 15 (at least) cities empire by that time, so I can't imagine how 60% of the tiles would be tiles with at most 2 commerce. Can you explain how did you come to this estimation?

 

[opensilo]

I wonder what you think of the analysis of the reduced financial advantage compared to the organized advantage as I presented it above. Do you think that the reduced financial advantage would be balanced?

(I'm assuming that the reduced financial advantage is that financial gets +1 commerce to tiles already producing 3 commerce, instead of 2-commerce tiles.)

In a word: yes. I do think it would be more balanced.

In (many!) more words: I think one of the goals of having different leaders have different traits (and UUs and starting techs) is to give different feels to different civs. The leader personality matrix is probably designed to enhance those feels. So, the Indians construct wonders and the Romans go conquer the world and the Aztecs are insane.

One of the interesting aspects of the original financial trait was pointed out earlier: working coastal tiles is 50% more beneficial to the original financial trait compared to the others, but 0% under the reduced. You get more balance, but at the cost of a little more variation between the civs.

I would love to see so much difference between the civs that each tries to employ completely different strategies to victory. This is, however, a very tall order. At the present, the AI is really only good enough to get a spaceship victory. So, regardless of how they all start out, that's the direction all of them will end up going. And so the game out of necessity makes the AI launch date the time that the player is trying to beat for his/her own victory.

Wouldn't it be cool if some civs only found cities on the coast valuable, others only flatlands, others only mountains (hmmm...Tibet wins a cultural victory even as the homeland is a vassal state?), some liked trees, some jungle, some are just generalists and do just okay everywhere. What if some civs wanted large empires with many small cities, but some wanted just a few large cities (maybe different sizes for the fat cross!). What if some were most successful as isolationists, but others flourished with more diplomacy. What if the ecological conditions present at the start of the game were the best that that tile could generate, but that different civs wanted to improve the tile differently because of their own skills (e.g. we farmers want to chop that forest down, but the hunters want it to remain or regrow because we can efficiently hunt from it).

There are many steps in this direction with CIV compared to previous versions, but there is plenty of room for improvement.

The gameplay balance issues become *very* difficult, though. And the AI programming becomes *very* challenging because you'd essentially have to have nearly completely different AI algorithms for the various victory conditions.

To keep the Civ series alive and interesting, I think this is the direction it'll have to go. And CIV is already a good start in that direction.

At the present, as many have discovered, the most expedient path to victory is "get as many good cities as possible as quickly as you can without going broke." While at least there are several clauses in that statement, which means the game is pretty darn fun and interesting, it does mean that there will be a few optimal strategies, such as having the financial trait, cottage spamming and conquering enemy cities quickly when you have a military tech, numbers, or tactical advantage.

Most of the above is just background for saying this: the suggestions in this thread are pretty darn good for tweaking the existing game. And that's exactly what they were designed to address. There are larger issues, but they really do require Civ 5 or Civ 6.

So, my disappointment that the modified financial trait will make financial civs less attracted to the coast has to be tempered by the realization that the reason I like financial civs being drawn to the coast in the first place (different goals for different civs) is a very big issue that really can't be addressed by tweaking values in the CIV mechanics.

So, yes. I think the slight modification to the financial trait would help make it so quite so powerful. I also think the reduction in forest chopping value and/or the increase in chopping time would be good. I think I could live with jungle being unproductive. (The more realistic jungle would probably be that it gives you an immediate benefit like forests, but that the underlying terrain is no better than plains, not very useful grassland. But that's another thread.)

 

[Roland Johansen]

This is the key hypothesis that needs to be true - if it's true then the trait is balanced (btw, I think you mean 9 tiles producing at most 2 commerce, and not 2 or more commerce?). Still, that hypothesis says that, by 1400 AD, 60% of the worked tiles aren't grown cottages and I can't see how you will achieve it. Of course map type plays a part, but in general (considering that Continents and Pangea are the two more popular map types) I can recall many threads where it was claimed than the bigger part of the land (even to exaggeration numbers) is covered with at least Villages by that time.

I am sure that you used some weighting based on estimation about the number of "non-commercial" cities in an empire, but I ask because from my experience this number isn't true for my games - I usually have 1 GP Farm and at most 3 purely production cities in a 15 (at least) cities empire by that time, so I can't imagine how 60% of the tiles would be tiles with at most 2 commerce. Can you explain how did you come to this estimation?

I think there is just some misunderstanding here. I'm counting the number of tiles that produce 2 or more commerce (2 till 10 commerce) and the tiles that produce 3 or more commerce (3 till 10 commerce). The number of tiles that produce 2 or more commerce determine the bonus in commerce that the vanilla financial trait gives. The number of tiles that produce 3 or more commerce determine the bonus in commerce that the adjusted financial trait gives.
I'm trying to determine the bonus commerce for the financial and the reduced financial trait per city so that it can be compared to the reduced cost offered by the organized trait.


In reply to opensilo:

I can see that you'd like to see very different civilizations. It's the road that civilization is slowly taking. In Civ 1 and Civ 2, the civilizations were practically identical. In Civ 3, the differentiation began with traits and unique units. There was some protest against this at first, but eventually people liked it. Now, in Civ 4, this is continued and I think that the strength of the traits has increased somewhat. I can see that you'd like to see very different civilizations in Civ 5 who have a different AI, but I don't know if everyone would like that. I think, it would be fun.

In the expansion pack, there will probably be some new traits. Maybe, there will be a seafaring trait again like in the expansion pack of Civ 3. I actually thought it was strange that the financial trait of Civ 4 was a kind of mix of the commercial and seafaring traits in Civ 3.

 

[opensilo]

In reply to opensilo:

I can see that you'd like to see very different civilizations. It's the road that civilization is slowly taking. In Civ 1 and Civ 2, the civilizations were practically identical. In Civ 3, the differentiation began with traits and unique units. There was some protest against this at first, but eventually people liked it. Now, in Civ 4, this is continued and I think that the strength of the traits has increased somewhat. I can see that you'd like to see very different civilizations in Civ 5 who have a different AI, but I don't know if everyone would like that. I think, it would be fun.

I agree with everything here, even the likelihood that not everyone would want what I would. But the replayability would certainly be very high.

 

[atreas]

I think there is just some misunderstanding here. I'm counting the number of tiles that produce 2 or more commerce (2 till 10 commerce) and the tiles that produce 3 or more commerce (3 till 10 commerce). The number of tiles that produce 2 or more commerce determine the bonus in commerce that the vanilla financial trait gives. The number of tiles that produce 3 or more commerce determine the bonus in commerce that the adjusted financial trait gives.
I'm trying to determine the bonus commerce for the financial and the reduced financial trait per city so that it can be compared to the reduced cost offered by the organized trait.

Ah - now I see that the 9 is meant as the "classical" Financial measurement. It's a case of numbers that can do many works (15-6=9 also).

Your estimation thus is that 60% of the tiles (9 out of 15) worked by a civ are "2+" commerce tiles, but 20% are tiles with exactly 2 commerce. I just said that this estimation is very "map dependant" - it might be true or close for an Archipelago map, but I doubt it can be true for a Continents map and certainly isn't true for a Pangea map (less water tiles into the equation). Map size plays a part too - in Large maps it's very difficult or even impossible to have these numbers, since you have much more "inland cities" - and the number of captured cities is also important (we have all seen how AI tends to build many cities 1 tile from the coast, and it's not always feasible to raze and rebuild them).

But even that initial 60% percentage was repeatedly questioned by Fin players - in other threads, I have seen claims like "90% of my city tiles are cottages". That's why I asked you how did you arrive at that estimation. Maybe it's a good estimation for a specific setup - it's just good to know what the exact setup is.

 

[Roland Johansen]

Ah - now I see that the 9 is meant as the "classical" Financial measurement. It's a case of numbers that can do many works (15-6=9 also).

Your estimation thus is that 60% of the tiles (9 out of 15) worked by a civ are "2+" commerce tiles, but 20% are tiles with exactly 2 commerce. I just said that this estimation is very "map dependant" - it might be true or close for an Archipelago map, but I doubt it can be true for a Continents map and certainly isn't true for a Pangea map (less water tiles into the equation). Map size plays a part too - in Large maps it's very difficult or even impossible to have these numbers, since you have much more "inland cities" - and the number of captured cities is also important (we have all seen how AI tends to build many cities 1 tile from the coast, and it's not always feasible to raze and rebuild them).

But even that initial 60% percentage was repeatedly questioned by Fin players - in other threads, I have seen claims like "90% of my city tiles are cottages". That's why I asked you how did you arrive at that estimation. Maybe it's a good estimation for a specific setup - it's just good to know what the exact setup is.

You are right that the number of tiles with 2 or more and 3 or more commerce are questionable. There's no way to make them 'hard'. I just took some numbers that looked reasonable to me. I don't think that 6 and 9 are so far off if we use the balancing of cottages, watermills and workshops in the first post and increase the cost of rush buying (making cottages relatively less attractive). I don't expect to see an empire out of cottages if such rules are used.
However, as I've only played one game under these new rules, my numbers could be off.

However, to strengthen my argument, I would like to remark that there are more tiles with exactly 2 commerce than the coastal tiles (allthough those are the most prevalent). And that I tend to use lots of coastal tiles on my continents maps, I don't like to waste usefull land.
Tiles with 2 commerce:
-underdeveloped cottages in newly conquered lands.
-windmills not on a river after electricity
-windmills on a river before electricity
-watermills on ice (rare)
-a few special resources with their improvement on a river

Regardless, I just counted the number of coastal tiles within the borders of my cities in my huge continents game (lots of counting): 164 coastal tiles for 58 cities. My average city size is not far above 15 because I placed some cities inbetween badly placed AI cities. I think that my estimate for the number of 2-commerce squares is better than I would have hoped, it is probably a bit low for my continents map as I also have quite a number of windmills because of a large area of hills within my borders.

The estimate for the number of 2 commerce tiles is probably too high for pangea maps and too low for archipellago maps. So my analysis above is most suited for continents maps which I personally think are the most balanced maps (balanced in number of water tiles compared to land tiles).
It's very easy to redo the calculations with different numbers of 2 commerce and 3+ commerce tiles. I just tried to come up with a method to compare the organized and the financial and the reduced financial trait.

edit: the setup was a huge continents map under the new rules and my personal playing style. Pretty subjective of course. If you think the numbers should be different, then you could redo the calculations with a different number of 2 commerce and 3+ commerce tiles.

 

[Houman]

Hello guys,

Thank you for all these analysis which makes lot of sense.
I was wondering, do you know where I could change the Cash rushing factor from 3 to 7? Which xml file does contain this value? It is not under the civic xml file.

Many thanks
Houman

 

[Roland Johansen]

It's in the file CIV4HurryInfo.xml

If you have any other problems trying to mod the things in the first post, then just ask. I've done those modifications myself and thus know how to do them. Some suggested modifications later in the thread might be more difficult.

 

[Houman]

@Roland

Thank you so much for your help. I am right now very busy with the Modding to follow this comprehensive thread. Another developer of our Mod "Nightravn" is following your thread and has reported me as a summary the following:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3902484&postcount=566

Sofar I could implement all of these ideas into our mod. Only intercepting is a problem. ALl I could do is to set the intercept chances higher but don't know how to set the output damage by interception higher. If you have any idea, I would loveto hear them.

If there are any more ideas Nightravn forgot to mention, but you think its realistic and worth the balancing, I would also like to hear it.

Many Thanks,
Houman

 

[atreas]

the setup was a huge continents map under the new rules and my personal playing style. Pretty subjective of course. If you think the numbers should be different, then you could redo the calculations with a different number of 2 commerce and 3+ commerce tiles.

I tried to count data from some of my games, to see what difference we have (I usually prefer to play Pangea maps). As expected, the numbers are quite higher (about 60-65% for 3+ commerce tiles, about 70-75% for 2+ commerce tiles). Still, in this there is "included" the difference in playing style, the difference in playing decisions (since these games were played without the new rules for Kremlin and Free Speech) and, most importantly, I was playing a non-Fin civ - that means, it wasn't so much of a priority to cover immediately all coastal tiles. In such a setting Fin would get ~11 * 1.6 while modified Fin would get ~ 9 * 1.6 (too much, even compared to Organized).

Another thing that troubles me is that in all this analysis we examined only Organized: even in this case, the fact that the difference between the two is smaller doesn't say that there is no difference (in fact, an ever increasing difference). Still, there are other traits too, and none of them has something to show for the end phase of game - that means, even in your Continents scenario the reduced Fin is still a good 15% per turn better than all the other traits, and Washington is still an overpowered leader. Maybe less powerful than before, but is it enough, compared to all others? I personally don't think that you can really achieve balance unless you completely eliminate the Fin advantage at some moment.

 

[Roland Johansen]

@Roland

Thank you so much for your help. I am right now very busy with the Modding to follow this comprehensive thread. Another developer of our Mod "Nightravn" is following your thread and has reported me as a summary the following:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3902484&postcount=566

Sofar I could implement all of these ideas into our mod. Only intercepting is a problem. ALl I could do is to set the intercept chances higher but don't know how to set the output damage by interception higher. If you have any idea, I would loveto hear them.

If there are any more ideas Nightravn forgot to mention, but you think its realistic and worth the balancing, I would also like to hear it.

Many Thanks,
Houman

Ah, the realism mod is implementing this! It's good to see that that mod is interested in game balance (not every mod is, some are mainly interested in fun or in multiplayer balance which is different). A balanced mod is always more fun in the long run as it improves the replayability and the challenge of the mod.

I must say that I have not been following that mod actively. (I'm still interested in the original game and thus have not really looked deeply at any mods or started any serious modding myself.) The balance suggestion in this thread are for the original game and if your mod is deviating considerably from the original game in basic gameplay, then these suggestions might not work well.
I see that Nightravn has been actively following the thread and thus probably has followed the discussion and knows if the suggestions apply to your mod.

About making air interceptions more lethal. That was in the last part of the first post and I have not really looked into (modding) the things that I mentioned there. Maybe, it is not possible by simple xml-modding and more complicated things are necessary. Nobody wrote a strategy guide about how interception works, so there are a lot of unknowns in that part of the game. I took a look at the xml-entries of the fighter and have an idea how it might (stress might) work. I'll perform some tests in the world builder tomorrow and report back here. I don't think that setting the interception rates higher would be a good thing, the interceptions should be more lethal.

About more ideas: I have a lot of ideas for modding the game completely. I did a lot of modding of civ3 once some game elements started to really irritate me and that culminated in a totally changed game. But I don't know if those ideas would apply to your mod. The most imbalanced parts of Civ4 vanilla have been discussed in this thread (I think). But if I would start modding the game, then I would probably also change most of the civics a bit. For instance, environmentalism is underpowered in my opinion. But it isn't a huge game imbalance. I think that the expansive trait should be improved a bit, but again it is not very imbalanced.
When I would really start modding the game, then I would change how units were affected by resources. I would add lots of units and change the balance between them (especially when they are a few era's apart). I would add buildings. All of that would require more technologies.
I took a quick peak at the changes listed at the first page of your mod thread, but I see that there are many changes listed there. And many different mods are being used. To get a good feel for how the mod changes the game would mean reading up on all those other mods or playing the mod for a while. So I can't give any good ideas without doing that first or my ideas would be completely unbalanced.

The goal of this thread is to get some consensus on the most imbalanced parts of the game and how to change them. You can think of some changes all by yourself, but without any discussion you are probably missing something about the balance. Balancing an extensive mod like the one that you're making is very difficult.

 

[Paulk]

My thoughts on the traits and balancing suggestions.
Expansive seems to be one of the traits that is less useful. In most standard games health isn't usually an issuse for most cities (unless built on massive floodplains or jungle). An idea for the expansive trait to make it more useful for all cities would be to change it to +1 food per city. This would be far more diverse than the health bonus. This trait would become a help for all cities (less useful the larger the food growth already is). Unfortuantely this could become unbalancing though but it would definitly be more useful than the +2 health. Also with the agressive trait to make it last all game it should apply to all land units not just melee and infantry. This would make the bonus actually useful for modern tanks not just early footsoliders (mech inf is underused and a little weak from what i've seen). Furthermore this would really help Civs with cavalry UUs, mainly Mongolia whos Keshiks don't get an agressive bonus! For Creative to last the whole game you could make it give +2 culture and +10% culture in all cities. So creative actually has a late game purpose and not just used for early game border expansion. I like the ideas of balancing finacial so far; particualarly changing it to for every tile producing 3 or more gold recieve 1 more gold along with the changes to amount of gold to rush production. Organised, industrious, spirtual and philospophical, with the other traits getting buffed/nerfed, seems fairly balanced. (industrious could be a little tweaked on early wonder production seems they build these way too easy) Thats just some basic ideas for balancing the traits.

Paulk

 

[Houman]

Hi Roland,

Yeah we really are working hard to make our Mod not only relastic but also balanced to play. The Units values are e.g. completely changed and adjusted. I know no other Mod (Fallen from Heaven is almost a different game though) that has adjusted so much the Units as we have done. It works pretty nice so far and gets improved. The AI is also quite improved by setting the IPower values correctly. So we are getting there...

Regarding the environmentalist civic and expansion trait, what were your suggestions to improve them?

BTW, you are welcome to join our OpenSource Realism Mod Project if you wishto: http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/civ4mods

Many thanks
Houman

 

[Zombie69]

Wouldn't it be cool if some civs only found cities on the coast valuable, others only flatlands, others only mountains (hmmm...Tibet wins a cultural victory even as the homeland is a vassal state?), some liked trees, some jungle, some are just generalists and do just okay everywhere.

At first thought, yes. Thinking only slightly deeper, not at all. The problem is that different map types would then be unbalanced towards different leaders. For instance, a game where financial leaders get 50% more commerce from coasts may very well be balanced on continents or pangea, but on archipelago, the game becomes a joke.

If financial did nothing more than add 1 commerce to coastal tiles (and to ocean tiles with the Colossus), add didn't do anything to cottages/towns, it would still be grossely overpowered on archipelago. This is why i believe that any setup that still gives +1 commerce on coastal tiles must be avoided at all costs.

I think I could live with jungle being unproductive. (The more realistic jungle would probably be that it gives you an immediate benefit like forests, but that the underlying terrain is no better than plains, not very useful grassland. But that's another thread.)

This is a great idea! Make jungles give +1 food, but be on plains. Then a jungle has the same production and food as a grassland forest. Also add in a small chopping bonus for jungles, but not as big as forests.

The only problem here is that this is getting a little bit too far from the original game. It does have to do with balance though, because i believe that jungle cities are a little too good currently, with all the grassland that they leave behind. The commerce cities ou can get from jungle sites are better than almost anything else in the game.