[R&F] The most significant change in Rise and Fall

I'm pretty sure the upgrade path being so much better than building advanced unit is a conscious design decision. It incites the player to have a standing army from the start, rather than farmer-gambit his way to economic dominance that then trumps all. For all the flaws of this system, I think it's good that you have strong incentive not to build only civilian units and buildings, even in the early game.

I agree.

It would be appalling if only the AI or only human players could use some upgrade
mechanisms, but both can so I don't see much of a problem.
Arguments from realism don't amount to much when you can, for example, upgrade
pikemen to ATs, and you can see future techs, civics, and details of the score
of your opponents in the world rankings etc. Cherry-picking one peculiarity and
ignoring all the others in the game is like some hilarious weird form of wilful blindness.

Just disable unit upgrading totally. Units should die naturally after 5-10 turns or old units could become terrorist and start pillagin lands of their previous owner and maybe even capture and burn couple of cities. They should totally destroy lands

That would be very reasonable if units were treated as being comprised
of actual individuals. But they're not. To me they are more like different
types of pressure applied to different regions during the game.

You might view them completely differently, e.g. A scout is just one
man who cries when his trusty dog Old Yeller dies. :)
 
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A potential fix to this would be you must be in the land of a city with an Encampment to upgrade with only 1 resource and any city with 2 resources. Only one resource, can't upgrade due to no encampment. Get the Encampment, can't build the old units any more and limited where you can upgrade. Can never reverse, so even if you lose the resource, can't build older units again so one can't just 'remove improvement' and the make the improvement again.

Of course, just eliminating the ability to build old units once an upgraded version is discovered would be the simplest fix, even if it can't be done due to no resources.

Yeah, that seems to be an easy "fix" to this 1 resource issue.

Not letting you build older units had problems, since then if you get knights without iron, you can't build chariots either, so you can get to a point where there's literally no units but anti-cav that you can build if you have no resources.
 
It should be incumbent upon the player to settle or capture them though. One of the things I really don't like about Civ 6 is how the importance of strategic resources is downplayed. A single iron mine can conquer the world and that's not right, imo.
 
I agree.

It would be appalling if only the AI or only human players could use some upgrade
mechanisms, but both can so I don't see much of a problem.

Problem is that AI's don't read CivFanatics forums. So they wouldn't learn about this exploit.

It should be incumbent upon the player to settle or capture them though. One of the things I really don't like about Civ 6 is how the importance of strategic resources is downplayed. A single iron mine can conquer the world and that's not right, imo.

Yeah. And then 1 Gem can't even keep 5 cities happy.
 
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I've just played 100 turns as Korea. I started with a random deity map. My result is not good, I entered normal era in both Classical and Medival due to poor control. At T100 I only reached 170 Science and 90 culture per turn.

One thing I found is that if you have 1 iron and no encampment, you can still build heavy chariots with +50% bonus and upgrade them to Knights with -50% cost instantly. (You cannot do that in vanilla)

This is the most significant change in Rise and Fall I guess, allowing you to spam more than two dozen knights using saved money and emergency money. When you capture a capital, there's a chance to trigger emergency, and when you eliminated all the emergency members, you get 400*era*member num gold. That's a huge amount.

I guess the worst district is encampment now. Negative effect... (although its General point is still good)

The problem with Korea is that in my games my science by far outpaces my culture. So, the production & upgrade civics come too late. That's why I switched to 3 cities/seowon/mines clusters + apprenticeship & hard build/hard upgrade units.
 
In Alpha Centauri you had to build a prototype of a new unit type before you could upgrade, and old units remained available indefinitely. (You could remove them yourself if your production selection was getting too clogged.) The prototype cost more than a regular unit. I think those features, along with higher upgrade costs, would make Civ VI more flexible and interesting. You could still upgrade powerful armies for conquering, but you'd either need a strong economy or to save for a long time to do it. In fact, I'd love to see them bring back Alpha Centauri's whole unit workshop idea, but that would be a major change not just a patch.

Barbs and aggressive AIs already create plenty of incentive to build an army early. I think it is a mistake to make building a large army early a dominant strategy if you ever plan to conquer anyone, especially when you have civs like Brazil in the game which are geared for later conquest and hammer starved early.
 
In Alpha Centauri you had to build a prototype of a new unit type before you could upgrade, and old units remained available indefinitely. (You could remove them yourself if your production selection was getting too clogged.) The prototype cost more than a regular unit. I think those features, along with higher upgrade costs, would make Civ VI more flexible and interesting. You could still upgrade powerful armies for conquering, but you'd either need a strong economy or to save for a long time to do it. In fact, I'd love to see them bring back Alpha Centauri's whole unit workshop idea, but that would be a major change not just a patch.
Maybe? I kind of thought the unit workshop was better as an idea than it worked in practice.
 
I know saying this about upgrades makes me a very old player, but... I miss Leonardo's Workshop.
 
I really don’t understand the evil that was trying to be fixed here. If you don’t have x resource, and so can’t build super new shiny awesome unit, and now you can’t build old rubbish unit anymore, then, we’ll, tough. You build ranged, maybe build spears, and just get on with it.
 
I really don’t understand the evil that was trying to be fixed here. If you don’t have x resource, and so can’t build super new shiny awesome unit, and now you can’t build old rubbish unit anymore, then, we’ll, tough. You build ranged, maybe build spears, and just get on with it.
I think that you are missing the point. Knights require a lot of production, 1 knight is roughly 3 heavy chariots (180 production vs 65). The whole process of getting knights is easier in r&f because you can still build chariots when you have 1 iron and upgrade them really cheap.
 
No, I think I got the point.

I understand that allowing players to build both chariots and knights allows them to build knights at a discount and get around resource requirements. That’s broken.

It seems allowing players to build obsolete units was to avoid situations where you couldn’t build unit x because you don’t have some resource, but can’t build the precursor unit because that’s now obsolete. What I was saying was that this ‘problem’ either really wasn’t a problem or was a problem that didn’t need to be fixed. If you can’t build unit x, and some other unit is obsolete, then, well, bad luck. Build something else.

But in any event the current solution to this problem - you can build both x and the earlier unit - is clearly broken.
 
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So was this Chariots to Knights things the only reason some of you were building Encampments? I usually build at least one unless I capture one early since they help with a few other Eurekas, but they aren't a huge priority. I'm not sure I would agree with Negative effect or that this upgrade thing is the most important change in R&F. Of course, my armies tend to be heavy on Melee and Archer sequence units, with maybe a Chariot/Knight/Tank, Spear sequence or Scout sequence unit thrown in to the pile for special situations.



As I already noted, my Domination game strategy doesn't focus on the Chariot/Knight sequence, so this wouldn't save me much gold...

From my experience this works with all resource dependent units. If you usually focus on melee and ranged, but get stuck with 0-1 iron or nitre, you can build warrior unit in 1 turn then upgrade to swordsman... or build crossbow for cheap then upgrade to field cannon.
Only ever need to have 1 of the required resource. If 0, trade for 1 instead of 2 (if no encampment). If 1 but not 2, no problem, you are set.
As your cities grow, early era units become very cheap to build and trivial to upgrade.
It seems broken to me.
 
There's nothing wrong with being able to build obsolete units if they were never obsolete to begin with. Why would you suddenly be unable to build tanks just because you might have thought of a better design? The problem is upgrading is too cheap.

Reverting back to Vanilla solves nothing, because you are just going to spam a bunch of chariots anyways to upgrade to knights anyways. At this point if they're just keeping it as is, I just consider it a QoL change.

I mean, they had it right like 10 years ago....
 
I like the idea of no upgrades. Makes that first knight or battleship really extra sweet.

I used to dislike the x # per resource limit. But I'm game, as long as you can go negative through trades.
 
I would increase the upgrade cost by about 75%, and get rid of professional army altogether. Also possibly make it more expensive to produce old units when you get new ones, or have the production bonus cards become obsolete earlier. I like the idea of still being able to produce older units when you get new ones though, but it shouldn't be exploitable.

Also in general selling resources early on is much too powerful. Mass knight is far less viable when you don't have thousands of extra gold due to optimizing luxury trading.
 
Remove upgrading with gold and make Unit upgrade an Encampment project: place a Unit in Encampment and produce the project to upgrade it. The Production cost of the project should be proportional to the difference in Productions costs of the original and upgraded Units.

Let all CS build Encampments to avoid Warriors in the Modern era.

Simple and immersive.
 
Nice idea, but then people would complain about the tedious micromanagement of moving every unit into the encampment for upgrading....
It's bad enough upgrading them one by one with gold, unless there is some global command I don't know about.
 
You could select a unit for upgrading through the project without having to move the unit to the encampment. And of course, if they invent some feature like a building queue, you could even order multiple upgrades at once...
 
No, I think I got the point.

I understand that allowing players to build both chariots and knights allows them to build knights at a discount and get around resource requirements. That’s broken.

It seems allowing players to build obsolete units was to avoid situations where you couldn’t build unit x because you don’t have some resource, but can’t build the precursor unit because that’s now obsolete. What I was saying was that this ‘problem’ either really wasn’t a problem or was a problem that didn’t need to be fixed. If you can’t build unit x, and some other unit is obsolete, then, well, bad luck. Build something else.

But in any event the current solution to this problem - you can build both x and the earlier unit - is clearly broken.



Dynamic resources? They are now fixed, and empire wide available, which isn't too bad, given random roads are built by unprofessional traders. One more requirement for upgrading to knights could be pelts (maybe furs amenities could be used as resource in that way) and some resources and amenities could depletes over time, or being newly discovered, or respawn, giving more balance to the upgrade process.
 
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