Summer 2017 Patch Notes Discussion

[antimony]

The settler change is not great but the core problem is that this mechanic front-loads the cost of expanding. Civ4's maintenance costs were more natural and applied both to founded and conquered cities.

 

[WillowBrook]

The 'commerce' government is a leaf tech now. I think thats new? Couldnt find it in the changelog.

Pretty sure it's always been a leaf civic.

 

[Brutus2]

It's certainly a nerf to settler spam, but unlikely to be enough to cause players to migrate en masse to domination-oriented expansion strategies.

I've only played one game post patch but so far I have to agree. It does make war more attractive in the early game which I think syncs with the way they designed warmongering penalties to be small in the ancient and medieval eras when war was common but once you get a few mines or an an IZ you can crank out settlers without trouble.

 

[Canadian Bluebeer]

Egypt asked for a buncha stuff, one of my cities, and open borders, but said it wasn't a good deal. huh?
No way giving up a city, removed open borders from the list, and oh ok, deal. (standard I want a buncha your goodies for gold)

 

[Dark_Jedi06]

• Added Restart button to regenerate the map

• Added the saving of game setup configurations to reuse when starting future games

This is enough to get me playing again.

 

[Human Crouton]

Combine that with the new nuclear war messages and the new CS UI upgrades and it seems to me that we got some buggy features from the expansion.

Spoiler everybody: diplomacy is being focused on for the first expansion. I see a new victory condition on the horizon .

You thinking that one of the late game mechanics is going to be nuclear proliferation to rogue city States?

Because that would be cool.

 

[Leathaface]

It appears the Colonization policy card (+50% Production toward Settlers.) now works properly. Before I could have 18 turns for a settler to be done, and that Colonization would only bring it down to 13 or 14 turns. Now it brings it down to 9 turns.

 

[Craig_Sutter]

Can we still declare peace with a city state even when we are still at war with its suzeraine?

 

[Dearmad]

So the beginning game is still a barb fest? Where you'll be at turn 12 and have four barbs in your territory?

And the CS's still crank out ridiculous amounts of units?

How hard could it be to fix that stuff?

The barbs are fun. Turn em off if you hate em. I quite like them.

Fix CS units (warriors right?) by adding a warrior upkeep of 1.

 

[Browd]

It appears the Colonization policy card (+50% Production toward Settlers.) now works properly. Before I could have 18 turns for a settler to be done, and that Colonization would only bring it down to 13 or 14 turns. Now it brings it down to 9 turns.

That may be an optical illusion. A +50% production bonus should not cut production time in half. It should only reduce production time by about 30%. To illustrate, if the pre-card cost to produce the item (settler, or any other item) is 200 and your city has 10 production per turn, the item should spit out in 20 turns (assuming constant production). A +50% production card would increase city production (solely for items covered by the card) to 15 (10 + 5), resulting in the item spitting out in 13.33 turns (200/15), which means 14 turns in-game.

 

[Bleser]

Fantastic patch contents. I'll await a few games to judge the AI changes but I'm quite surprised I didn't see anything about the cost of military units being adjusted or the AI's desire to even have an army past the Classical Era fixed. We'll see! Happy overall!

 

[Brutus2]

The font changes are definitely a bug. They don't resize properly in windowed mode and generally provide too little negative space on the diplo buttons.

Also if you look closely you can see the background box around the text appears to be behind the leader background art rather than on top.

 

[Esperr]

The old Acropolis was one of the biggest balance issues in the game. Sure, maybe it makes the Greeks as a while a bit stronger, but the old Acropolis was actually worse than the generic theatre districts.

IIRC it costs half as much as a normal theatre disctrict, with the only drawback being that you had to build it on a hill which isn't realistically much of a drawback. Is there something else im missing?

 

[stealth_nsk]

I'm pretty sure developers aware what increased settler cost encourage conquest. If anyone here could understand this just by looking at patch notes, there's no way large team of developers and playtesters could miss this. So, probably it's actually balanced with other things, like AI better defending themselves (including walls buff), etc.

It appears the Colonization policy card (+50% Production toward Settlers.) now works properly. Before I could have 18 turns for a settler to be done, and that Colonization would only bring it down to 13 or 14 turns. Now it brings it down to 9 turns.

This also could be a part of the balance.

 

[Bleser]

Combat Preview UI has received multiple improvements

I have no idea what this is, but I've noticed two new bugs in this area:

- The text describing your combat strength overlays other text to the point where you just can't read anything. Don't have a screen shot yet but it is a mess.
- The bombardment arrows (showing ranged attack from your unit to the city/target) is now not aligned with the hexes; it is just off by some delta of pixels and not pointing to/from the right stuff.

Note I am playing with the standard UI scaling, not enlarged.

 

[Archon_Wing]

IIRC it costs half as much as a normal theatre disctrict, with the only drawback being that you had to build it on a hill which isn't realistically much of a drawback. Is there something else im missing?

With production being so valuable, anything that competes for a hill better be worth it. And theater districts are already so niche.

 

[Esperr]

With production being so valuable, anything that competes for a hill better be worth it. And theater districts are already so niche.

Well there never worth it in the first place if your just trying to win, my point was more why are you buffing one of the best civs, even if it is mostly irrelevant.

 

[bbbt]

Well there never worth it in the first place if your just trying to win, my point was more why are you buffing one of the best civs, even if it is mostly irrelevant.

I think it was more a buff because a unique district should be stronger, not because of the civ as a whole. Not only is a unique version of the weakest district, it has more difficult placement rules, and there was almost no benefit to it above the normal district (the only thing extra it had was a city center adjacency bonus). All the other unique districts have a much more significant bonus over the normal district.

 

[Miravlix]

So did they ever fix the issue with France, where she disliked you for having no spies.....even though she didn't have any yet herself?

She doesn't dislike you for not having spies, she dislike you for not spying.

Sending delegations counts as spying....

 

[Seadoba]

This is enough to get me playing again.

Haha, i register only to give u my like. So enjoy it.