A 6 pop city require 12 food, that really shouldn't be a problem, especially since pioneer cites start with a lighthouse. Either way I've never ran into that situation (but then again the extra pop did not work for me with pioneers so I couldn't run into that )Well you're probably right, but I still want to try it out. I think early game before you improve your tiles, working specialists could be useful to outproduce working tiles, and then later in the game when founding cities your extra pop wont immediately starve. I've upped the settle rate in the eras with pioneers (I think Sumer Pioneers give 6 pop (3 from pioneer and 3 from Ua) and then 7 two eras later) so if you settle near a mountain or desert you would immediately lose some of your UA from starving. The labourers giving food will stabalise that, if nothing else.
If the workers is the main problem (which I honestly doubt) then we get rid of the workers.Again, I'm not sure the free workers are pushing things over the top and causing AI gilgamesh to almost double everyones score, but I've done some testing and it's on average brought his power down a lot. we're still in alpha so we have to play around woth things
About bringing his average down, if you removed the extra pop and the production from specialists, and kept the workers it would also bring down his average a lot. The issue here is probably that it all works too well together early on.
Here's how it looked in my head:
Population and Worker bonus, powerful early on, falls off greatly around the midgame because you just stop settling.
Specialist bonus, (which by the time we designed it were based around keeping at least one specialist in each city for bonus) weaker early on because of limited access to specialists, strongest around the mid-game when you have your specialist buildings up and the bonus have doubled or tripled in power.
This seems balanced to me, the problem here being that we changed the specialist bonus to:
Specialist bonus, strongest right around when you get access to your first specialist buildings, snowballing your infrastructure allowing you to get more specialist-buildings, snowballing you further.
The +2 production bonus, just like the Korean UA is just way too much early on. It got some scaling in the way that you get access to more specialist slots later on, but it is going to be the strongest right when you land your first specialists, kickstarting your infrastructure.
See, the problem here is that we exchanged a mid-game scaling ability for an early-game powerhouse. I was under the impression that we were going to change the specialist bonus at some point as well, we just didn't have time to talk about it and I suggested keeping it around a bit for testing.
I'm talking about flat +happiness, I'm completely fine with that. I was worried about adding those percentage unhappiness reduction modifiers, because I believe they could interact with the rest of the game in a negative way.Good idea on Erish, could work. As for happiness, I thought we were gonna stay away from that?
As mentioned, the Satrap's court does exist, and as long as you make it kinda like the Satrap's court but a bit weaker, it should be fine. At least I think so.
Not a fan of adding paper, it's just too valuable. Not sure if we should mess with the production-bonus towards diplo-units either.Yeah, perhaps +1 paper for papsukkal, or a %production on diplo units. As for the scout god, I'm just throwing ideas out there for one
What yields do we have left?
Food
Tourism
Golden Age Points
Faith
Some kind of combination (+1 of 3/4 different ones or +2 of 2 different ones)