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

[Lily_Lancer]

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)

 

[Ziel]

I am not sure to understand, I mean building heavy chariots from scratch and upgraded them to knight asked only one Iron in vanilla also. So where is the difference ?

Meanwhile I find that early war is realy harder than before due to ai change and dont always brings rewards.

 

[Stylianos]

I dont think heavy chariots require any resource. You can build them without any iron but in order to upgrade them later to knights you need at least 1 iron.

 

[Ziel]

I think ive got: when you have discovered knights you can still build chariots and then upgrade. Which means you dont need any encampment. Right ?

 

[Stylianos]

I think ive got: when you have discovered knights you can still build chariots and then upgrade. Which means you dont need any encampment. Right ?

Probably this is what he wanted to say.

 

[Victoria]

What he means is this

In the old days, as soon as you discovered knights you could no longer build chariots even if you only had 1 Iron.
Now you can still build chariots as long as you only have 1 Iron mined.
This allows a huge amount of different situations but most importantly that you can build chariots rather than knights long after you discover them allowing for cheaper knight armies.

It’s not really to do with the encampment which does count in 6 eurekas... but of course you should be able to get that enccampment off an enemy. Sure encampments allowed you to build more knights which now you do not need but it’s really about the chariot still being available.

However this kill members thing I was unaware of and is very strong ...around 10k gold.... wow Are you sure @Lily_Lancer ?

 

[Stylianos]

So a vaible strategy might be to not improve 2 resources but 1. In this case you are able to built earlier units and then upgrade them with gold.

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)

I suppose using "Manuever" and "Professional Army" policy cards.

 

[Japper007]

Hmm I did this accidentaly, but I thought it was a bug. It might now actually good to be far behind in culture vs science as you can still knock out cheap Chariots with the 50% manoeuvre policy and then upgrade them into knights.

 

[Lily_Lancer]

However this kill members thing I was unaware of and is very strong ...around 10k gold.... wow Are you sure @Lily_Lancer ?

Usually there's only 1 member. But 1,000 gold is a dozen knight, fair enough.

That's an emergency(not sure if it always happens when you capture a capital but not that Civ's last city) and depends on how many AIs want to join.

 

[acluewithout]

... In the old days, as soon as you discovered knights you could no longer build chariots even if you only had 1 Iron.
Now you can still build chariots as long as you only have 1 Iron mined.
This allows a huge amount of different situations but most importantly that you can build chariots rather than knights long after you discover them allowing for cheaper knight armies...

So, if you've unlocked Knights, but only have one iron, you can just keep building chariots and then upgrade them to Knights? So, this lets you get around the requirement to have either two iron, or one iron and an encampment, to build new Knights?

...that just seems broken and wrong...

I mean, there no longer seems to be any huge value in having two of a resource. And encampment suddenly seem a lot less useful. And then, how does that work even conceptually? If you're society is in the Medieval era, what's it doing still building chariots? Would anyone even still know how to build chariots at that point?? (Remembers Civ is a game, not sim. Smacks head with palm of hand.)

 

[Softly]

I noticed this as well, very broken, especially considering by the time you tech stirupts most of your cities can build a chariot every two turns on normal speed. Sometimes I wish they would increase the gold cost of upgrading units (buying units is a 4g/prod conversion but upgrading is a 1.5g/prod even before the 50% card) but this will probably lead to swordsmen being around in the modern era again.

 

[Victoria]

I noticed this as well, very broken,

This is EXACTLY why they did not allow it originally. It’s a classic case of design. People complain the previous is not available when you only have 1 resource and then it becomes OP when they cave in.

 

[Arent11]

This is EXACTLY why they did not allow it originally. It’s a classic case of design. People complain the previous is not available when you only have 1 resource and then it becomes OP when they cave in.

The mechanism that you can build x units per ressource was better anyway.

 

[Japper007]

This is EXACTLY why they did not allow it originally. It’s a classic case of design. People complain the previous is not available when you only have 1 resource and then it becomes OP when they cave in.

It's an easy thing to fix though, just make upgrading less ludicrously cheap. A fix that should've been made in Vanilla in like the first or second patch, even before the expansion introduced this exploit on top of the already in place one. Civ IV had the balance right, upgrading was usually not more efficient than just building the new stuff and as a result you only upgraded the well promoted stuff (city raider 3 units) and just put the rest to garrison duty or as cannon fodder to bulk up a stack. It's ridiculous that buying a crossbow costs me 1200 gold and upgrading one is only 100 (with Professional army). It just makes it impossible to counter the guy who snowballs on a large starting army, he keeps upgrading his stuff for like a turns worth of income a piece while you are stuck slow-building units for 20 turns or buying them for insane prices. This game really needs a quick levy mechanic like civ 4's drafting or slaving. Maybe something like "sacrifice 1 pop for a unit"?

Sorry, went of on a bit of a tangent there...

 

[Athmos]

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.

 

[EditorRex]

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.

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.

As I already noted, my Domination game strategy doesn't focus on the Chariot/Knight sequence, so this wouldn't save me much gold. But on the title question for this thread, I think the biggest change is with era length and all players being locked into the same era even if they lag behind in tech, as well as the introduction of the Loyalty and Dedications that are based on results for these eras. Still working on how this will affect the game strategically, but it seems like a big structural change that will affect everyone regardless of play style.

By the way, is the Chariot/Knight change specific to R&F or just part of most recent Vanilla patch?

 

[Eyswein]

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.

 

[civtrader6]

What are you guys thinking about this one - to me it seems this is finally a clear unintended exploit - probably devastating for multiplayer as well?

 

[Lily_Lancer]

What are you guys thinking about this one - to me it seems this is finally a clear unintended exploit - probably devastating for multiplayer as well?

Maybe in MP you won't get that much money? Also, stirrup is already a late-game tech in MP I guess. In MP Mercenaries is seldom reached in fact.

But this is absolutely the most significant exploit in PVE games.

 

[BlackWizard]

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