Thoughts on the new changes (v23)

[Txurce]

I (almost) finished a science game on Emperor with Korea on v23. I played Korea tall, building four cities and conquering one. I was able to expand exactly where I wanted, had an unusually large number of luxuries, never needed more than six units, and got off to a quick start with GL/HG/Colossus. I also got the PT, but missed the SoL altogether. My approach was to focus on science, letting gold and culture come from CS alliances. (I built cultural buildings at the very end.) I was able to stay ahead in techs throughout the game, but efficiency has been lowered enough that I would have probably launched around t320. (I quit on t300). Out of context, that’s what we were basically aiming for: a longer, more competitive game.

Here is what seems to need adjusting, but works well enough:

• Production feels a little too slow.
  
• Cultural expansion is slow enough that some second-ring hills were still unclaimed at t300. But I was okay purchasing what I needed.
  
• The AI is still not spending all their gold, although it has improved.
  
• The AI continues to have a runaway population issue. In my game, on t300 India had 114M, Siam 91M, Polynesia 48M, and my Korea 13M. While this doesn’t hurt the game (the AI needs all the help it can get), it doesn’t feel right. I think this is often due to the CS alliances some VEM players seem to feel the AI doesn’t compete for (!), but may just be the result of successful play with significant bonuses.
  
• 10-turn GA’s feel aren’t powerful enough to make up for their brevity. I would make them longer, or stronger, since I’ve lost a lot of my impetus for striving to achieve GA’s (which aren’t as easy to get anymore, besides).

Here is what I found to be not much fun:

• RA’s are too expensive to be meaningful in the late game. This is okay in principle, but may unduly limit tall civs’ options.
  
• The tech rate in the modern era seems to become sharply lower, making the game feel as if it hit the brakes. It was a bore waiting 20 turns for something with 5 cities, 3 of which had labs.
  
• Great Scientists provide so many beakers (more than ever, it seems) that I have to use them very selectively, or waste beakers.
  
• The Scout/Archer Opportunity is a no-brainer. I would lose it, but if that’s unpopular, then majorly buff the other two options.

 

[Zaldron]

I'm not sure if I should start another thread or tack onto this one, so I'll add just one thought here. I started a game in, I believe, 131.24 last night. Emperor/standard/continents and I'm taking a tall cultural approach (three cities so far with a fourth possible). I had one early war against a ridiculously close Mongolia and while my culture seems to be advancing reasonably, I missed the GL to Egypt and I'm getting destroyed in science by the AI (I'm in last place in tech with the leader ~10-15% ahead in literacy). I'm not sure if this is due to a lack of focus on tech (I founded a city before NC, haven't been explicitly running scientists, etc) or if the Emperor science bonus is just higher than I remember.

I've signed a couple of 400 gold RAs, but the tech leaders are now 800gold RAs and anecdotally I just can't afford them at this point.

 

[Aristos]

I can talk about the "pop runaway" issues (which incidentally translates into "science runaway") from my previous experience in forcing the AI to play vanilla Prince: Now that Thal has adjusted the bonuses of his custom AI handicap to replicate Prince level, the runaway in pop and science comes from one source and one source only. There is too much food in VEM. I mentioned that before, but it will become more apparent now with the adjusted handicap bonuses.

I also think there is too much gold in VEM.

Adjust those two to more vanilla-like levels, and I am sure you will get the long, competitive game you are looking for...

Oh, and something else to consider: just for a crazy test, I changed HP's to 50 for units and 100 for cities, just to have a "preview" of the upcoming G&K, and, well, results are interesting ... worth the try.

 

[Txurce]

Now that Thal has adjusted the bonuses of his custom AI handicap to replicate Prince level, the runaway in pop and science comes from one source and one source only. There is too much food in VEM.

Agreed, be the source farms, city improvements or maritime CS. But there is almost always a tremendous disparity between the runaway pop AI and the human player. It would seem to me that nerfing food wouldn't reduce the disparity, just make it less fun. Am I missing something?

 

[Aristos]

Well, what I can tell you is that I am seeing a much more balanced vanilla game (in terms of competitiveness and no-runaways) at higher levels with only forcing the AI to play on Prince... given that two of the main, biggest differences from vanilla to VEM are the tile rates of food and gold, I suspect those two as the main factors in what you see as different results also.

 

[Thalassicus]

@Txurce
I've changed production and RA costs based on your feedback. Modern research should go faster with more RAs. I agree about Golden Ages, but left them unchanged for future reasons I can't go into detail about.

I disagree about the scout opportunity. I like the 20XP choice for most leaders. In the early game it lets us explore much faster, and soon after we can get the Medic promotion. I find that more helpful than an archer. The Morale choice is more powerful in the midgame than the first two choices. This makes it useful for leaders intending to focus on Levies, such as Washington or Genghis. A strong melee defender is better for Mongolia than an extra ranged unit. Washington is obvious since his UU is a Vanguard Class.

@Aristos
I detailed in the yields thread how it's not possible to reduce yield incomes. However, reducing income is equivalent to raising costs, and I can make things more expensive. Would you prefer early or late cities to grow more slowly, and which parts of the game do you feel should cost more gold?

I responded to the conquest topic in the thread about conquest.

 

[Thalassicus]

In v131.34 the "citystate quest" and "adopt policy" notifications now display on the "next turn" button again. The citystate one is still dismissed by pressing the Enter key. The adopt policy notice brings up the policy selection screen if a) enter is pressed or b) the left mouse button is clicked. Clicking the right mouse button dismisses both notifications.

Also, whenever the script spends excess AI gold it now prints a receipt to the Lua log file. You can take a look if you're interested in seeing what the AI buys.

 

[Txurce]

I disagree about the scout opportunity.

Would you prefer early or late cities to grow more slowly, and which parts of the game do you feel should cost more gold?

Thanks for your opinion about the scout opportunities - I'm reassured!

I see the runaway pop phenomenon by the mid-game, so I would think slowing it down early makes more sense. My only concern, which I raised in my previous post, is that slowing down the AI won't have the inadvertent effect of making human city growth so slow as to be no fun. I worry the problem may have to do with the necessary AI bonuses, and so may be unavoidable.

I didn't think anything should cost more gold, but someone else may.

What about the disparity between tech costs and GS's, where the boost is so big that I often have to wait a long time to find a tech that can swallow all of the GS' beakers? This seems like a new issue to me. Are the numbers unchanged, and I'm just imagining things?

 

[Seek]

GSs were balanced for tech costs around the new year of 2011. Tech costs have been raised at least three times since then and were neigh useless after the Renaissance, so Thal asked me to rebalance them so they retain some use in the late game (when a GS only contributes 1-2 turns to a tech, it feels useless and unfun). The intended effect of them is: complete a full tech until mid-Ren era, and ~1/2 tech in the Modern era - are you seeing them give more than this? I have another formulation which would weaken them in the late game by a bit (should be about 1/3 tech in Modern) but given your comment about the late tech costs I should think the buff is desirable.

I disagree about the "slow production" btw - my core cities often run out of (useful) things to build in the late game..

I also see no problem with high-pop AI cities, can you expand on your issue with it? Unless we can do something to change the fact that the AI chops all forests, farms every tile it can (later converting to villages), and tries to grow as fast as possible (in other words focus more on production) this will be a fact of the game and probably one of the only ways that the AI will remain competitive (with more production focus making it more competitive).

 

[Txurce]

GSs were balanced for tech costs around the new year of 2011. Tech costs have been raised at least three times since then and were neigh useless after the Renaissance, so Thal asked me to rebalance them so they retain some use in the late game (when a GS only contributes 1-2 turns to a tech, it feels useless and unfun). The intended effect of them is: complete a full tech until mid-Ren era, and ~1/2 tech in the Modern era - are you seeing them give more than this? I have another formulation which would weaken them in the late game by a bit (should be about 1/3 tech in Modern) but given your comment about the late tech costs I should think the buff is desirable.

The GS buff is desirable for the late game, and Thal just helped the overall situation by lowering the cost of late-game RA's. After one game (not a big sampling) it seemed that blowing a GS on a surprising number of Medieval and Renaissance techs would be unusually wasteful. (You'll have an opinion on this soon enough, and I have no problem if you think the delay in using a GS is reasonable.)

The bigger issue I had with tech in my one Korea game was that the modern era seemed like I entered quicksand. It was so much slower than the prior era that it was no fun. My issue here would be more on smoothing the era-to-era transitions than anything else. (I'll report back on this after getting further into my Ottomans v30 game.)

I disagree about the "slow production" btw - my core cities often run out of (useful) things to build in the late game.

I had the production issue more in the early game, but it was slight. However, given the tech slowdown, I appreciate building science buildings asap.

I also see no problem with high-pop AI cities, can you expand on your issue with it? Unless we can do something to change the fact that the AI chops all forests, farms every tile it can (later converting to villages), and tries to grow as fast as possible (in other words focus more on production) this will be a fact of the game and probably one of the only ways that the AI will remain competitive (with more production focus making it more competitive).

I agree. My issue is aesthetic: the freakish disparity. I felt similarly about the AI hoarding gold. Of course the difference is that one helps the AI and the other hurts it. I think I said above that there may be no solution to this because this is how the AI gets science and production, which we sure don't want to hinder. I also speculated that any reduction in AI food intake (as opposed to production) would hurt the human, too. So there probably is no solution, as long as we play on higher levels.

 

[Thalassicus]

This is tech costs compared to vanilla. It depends on column instead of era:



Though to be accurate "vanilla" is an early version of TBC from two years ago, since Firaxis adapted it for vanilla.

Also... I forgot to scale Great Scientists to the other science/culture scaling of v131.1. They were unintentionally weak for a few versions. As Seek described they are intended to give 100% of any tech until the midgame, and drop off to the 30-50% range by the modern era.

 

[Seek]

The GS buff is desirable for the late game, and Thal just helped the overall situation by lowering the cost of late-game RA's. After one game (not a big sampling) it seemed that blowing a GS on a surprising number of Medieval and Renaissance techs would be unusually wasteful. (You'll have an opinion on this soon enough, and I have no problem if you think the delay in using a GS is reasonable.)

The bigger issue I had with tech in my one Korea game was that the modern era seemed like I entered quicksand. It was so much slower than the prior era that it was no fun. My issue here would be more on smoothing the era-to-era transitions than anything else.

I've been considering this for the last few days and concluded that perhaps the Research Lab should get a buff to offset the higher costs. I found in my last game that even after rushing to build them in every city in my medium sized empire the effect was somewhat small, and to remain competitive in the endgame requires a fair amount of focus on GSs and RAs - if a civ is isolated diplomatically it would be nice to have a powerful alternative science source.

Alternatively or additionally, what about another scientific World Wonder introduced in the Modern Era, perhaps on Ecology? I never get that tech unless I'm in a very "deserted" lol area or going for a diplo win. Though this may hurt more than help if there are civs running away in tech, as there has been quite a lot of recently.

 

[Txurce]

I've been considering this for the last few days and concluded that perhaps the Research Lab should get a buff to offset the higher costs.

Alternatively or additionally, what about another scientific World Wonder introduced in the Modern Era, perhaps on Ecology? I never get that tech unless I'm in a very "deserted" lol area or going for a diplo win. Though this may hurt more than help if there are civs running away in tech, as there has been quite a lot of recently.

I think Thal just buffed the Labs... and I don't think it's going to be enough. The same goes for a late-game "MIT Building 23" or "Bell Labs" or "Xerox PARC" building, because the AI would probably beat you to it. I am now playing an Emperor game with v44, using Babylon. The Inca beat me to GL by a lot, so I took their capital (Great Wall, Great Lighthouse, and Angkor Wat, too - thank you very much.) I built the PT, but was nipped to SoL. I built the HG, and nothing else.

On t222 I have seven cities, and am #3 in pop - pretty high for me. These are the relevant current stats for the top three civs:

................Population Beakers Techs*

Persia............89M......1183......50
Siam ............31M......1415......48
Babylon.........12M....... 768......45

* artisanal graph

I am 20 turns from Plastics (how could it be twenty!) and falling behind. I dread entering the Modern Age. Further expansion could help, but I am running out of happiness options, even with Cultural Diplomacy (I just took Representation). Besides, seven cities all with luxuries should be plenty.

I don't think the military option - somehow cut Persia down to size, for example - should be necessary in games like this. (By the way: Persia=323K, Babylon=62K.)

Population is the main culprit, but I'm honestly not sure it's a problem, in that the AI has much-needed bonuses. My guess at this early stage with the new VEM is that I should drop down to King if I want to be more in control, or keep playing on Emperor if I want the serious challenge that Immortal used to give me. I do know that w...a...i...t...i...n...g for tech after tech in the late game is not fun, and I don't think the current mechanic will give me a way to speed it up appreciably.

In summary, these are my questions more than my concerns, and I don't have any proposals yet. But I wanted to put this perspective on the table.

 

[MortalD]

Speaking of changes im thinking about translating this mod to polish.
Cant promise anything tho.

 

[Thalassicus]

Post in the translations thread if you need any help doing so.