Ya congratulations, now don't go modding civ during your honeymoon
I noticed your mod is on steam now? Where will you update it first, on steam of here?
Stuff I'm looking at right now, if anyone has any thoughts:
1) Biowells upped to 3 maintenance, with a +1 energy at Designer Lifeforms. They're such a strong improvement, and I think they could do with a little more downside, and a slightly better advantage for Harmony. Designer Lifeforms mainly because I feel sad for the poor Rocktopus.
I don't now if maintenance is the problem with biowells. Health is a problem on early game so sometimes i beeline biowells, but on late game there's always a virtue or something that, when it kicks in, solves my health problems forever.
Maybe each affinity should have it's alternative source of health? Biowells for harmony, buildings (like optical surgery or whatever) for supremacy, and terrascapes/culture(extra virtues) for purity, with, the hybrids getting health from the hybrid perks. Don't know, just brainstorming here
2) Culture. You get policies like crazy in the early game, but they come veeeery slowly later on, and their values diminishes significantly. I've flattened the cost curve slightly - at the moment I've set the base cost to 30 (was 20) and the exponent to 1.9 (was 2). The cost for the next policy intercepts at policy #5, the cumulative policy cost intercepts at policy #7, and the cumulative cost to get 20 policies is 7685 down from 10280 (assuming a single city).
In the late game, changing a few of my water cities to produce culture usually triples (or worse) my culture rate, and i get to fill in virtue trees like mad. The AI won't ever cheat like that off course, so it seems a change like this would make the situation even worse for me, apollo is already too easy... But i agree that "normally" the cost of virtues step up too much. I suggest you reduce the water cities bonus to culture at least, maybe halve it, +50% is too much.
3) Affinity. This is a bit of a bugbear of mine at the moment. It still just doesn't feel quite right in its current incarnation. The patch has also altered things a little, as it's very easy to get a bunch of affinity from the techs gained through spoils of war.
So what I'm trialling at the moment:
- Affinity from tech is slashed. Down to (branch/leaf) 2/8, 3/9, 4/12, 5/15, and 6/18 for each of the tiers. This reduces affinity available from tech by approx 1/4 (798 from original 1134). It also further flattens the ratio of affinity per beaker between tier 1 and 5 techs from 16.5 (original) or 8.2 (released version) to 6.9. So the affinity from tech is skewed substantially more towards the outer ring techs, and there is not a huge amount in the earlier techs. In total, there is enough affinity in the tech web to just scrape to level 15.
HOWEVER, each of the virtue tree kickers (i.e. for 5/10/15 policies in a single tree) now give an affinity level (of your choice). I really do think the cultural approach needs substantially greater rewards in the mid-late game, and this additionally helps reduce the tech-is-everything focus of the current game. Between the two, it may also promote teching towards techs that are useful for the empire rather than just racing to the finish line.
This is also compatible with other virtue tree mods (e.g. New Horizons), as it just adds the affinity levels to the kickers regardless.
Is this a step too far? My feeling is the power of tech and the power of culture both need balancing, and this is a way to do both without really introducing new systems. And there is already a little bit of affinity in the virtue trees. This also gives another avenue where the AI can have an affinity advantage over the player (since they'll tend to get more policies than you on higher levels), reduces the ability to steal affinity (via espionage or spoils of war), and helps out those who have fewer cities (by choice or misfortune) to be a little more relevant. And it indirectly buffs the culture side of the knowledge tree.
Yes, i like this idea, great changes. But maybe 1 extra level at each tall virtue synergy is too much, i don't know. Can't you make it give xp? Or 1 level at 10 and 15 virtues (tall), and maybe 1 extra level at the level 2 "wide".
The more i think about it, the more i want to see affinities gone from the tech tree. If there was a mod that removed all affinity bonuses from the techs, and granted everyone a free level up periodically (and assuming hybrid upgrades are balanced with mono affinities), i'd test the hell out of it. Civs more of less all upgraded their units at the same time in civ V, while in BE im always the runaway in affinity levels, so if the pressure of beelining xp in the tech tree was gone, i'd research the cool stuff instead, and the AI wouldn't be left behind me in upgrades (since im convinced the AI researches randomly anyway).
But in the interest of finding new sources of affinity xp, maybe diplomatic capital could be a part as well, like, what if everyone gets a free level up from reaching their sponsor lvl 3 trait. Or a spy mission that steals xp? Or maybe one of those HQ projects (each spy increases affinity acquisition by 5% or something). National wonders (there's a mod that adds some of them) could provide xp as well, so affinities from production, i dunno...
The AI is bad at getting affinities from expeditions, and i think they don't get quests? So reducing xp from tech could be bad for them, i dunno... Does changing xp around the tech tree changes the AI research priorities?
4) Affinity continued. Part of the problem is of course that the player gets expeditions and quests that the AI doesn't, and there's a fair amount of affinity there. What to do about this?
I wouldn't change the quest rewards - they're fun and they actually reward choices that have something to do with the relevant affinity.
Expeditions - The released version of this mod gives the AI one or two extra explorer modules (on soyuz and apollo respectively), and it might be wishful thinking, but my feeling is that this has made the AI a bit better at grabbing their local sites?
Reducing affinity gain from the randomly-chosen affinity rewards is one approach (e.g. from 12-14 to 6-8). Unfortunately, the game really doesn't seem to like loading changes to the quest system so it might take a bit of mucking around to get there.
Should the 'free-affinity-of-your-choice' ones be changed? My gut says no, although their prevalence could perhaps be reduced.
There's a mod that does this very well, reduces xp. I'd like to see the "free level up" gone, tbh, or made unique (can only be given once).
5) Espionage. The general feeling with this seems to be that it's a bit too slow and useless to really be worth bothering with, unless you really go hard down an espionage path (particularly as ARC), at which point it is crazy overpowered. It's also not much fun. You sit your spies in a random city and forget about them until they give you some yield or they don't and then you start again.
I'd like it to be a worthwhile investment and still feel really strong, but without the somewhat over-the-top effects currently gained by stacking espionage bonuses. I'd like it to be worth building the spy agency even for those who don't go heavily down that route. And I'd like it to be worth investing in those anti-espionage buildings/policies.
How to go about this one? It's a bit tricky. Most of the over-power problem seems to be with stacking time-reduction bonuses. A fair bit of the under-power problem seems to be that doing anything without those bonuses just takes so damn long.
- Reduce the mission times but cut down the bonuses to mission speed. Instead give more bonuses to other aspects of espionage - in particular risk and intrigue generation. Unfortunately success chance seems to be a little hard to increase.
- Reduce the power of science theft vs the other operations, perhaps?
- Reduce travel time from 5 turns to 3? Allows more of a shift of focus without feeling TOO penalised. Further reductions could be added by policy.
- Increase intrigue generation. It seems to be almost impossible to raise intrigue levels much at the moment. I'm inclined to bump this by 50%. I'm also semi-inclined to add a new mission like 'develop sleeper cells' that does nothing except raise intrigue (at a considerably higher rate than the other missions).
- Improve the national security projects. I can get a 3% bonus to city strength if I leave all my spies at home? Be still my beating heart! I'm honestly thinking of a massive boost more along the lines of 5% for each spy (except the health one). Stacking 4 spies at the headquarters to get a 20% increase in success chance for the 5th one is still gonna be veeery situational, but could be worthwhile when you really need that one mission to pay off.
- Perhaps give the AI players an additional spy at game start on soyuz/apollo? Make things a little more interesting?
- Harmony gets screwed over a bit in the spy game, should one spy be added (or moved) to a Harmony building quest reward? I feel like it's not worth changing, but I'm open to opinions.
Anyway, any thoughts are welcome.
I like some of those ideas. I think the steal science should give beakers based on time (like current game turn x2), instead a % of the currently-being-researched tech (thats dumb).
i feel like they're, slightly OP, since i feel like the AI doesn't know how to use them. When i see intrigue in one of my cities, i move a spy there and soon, i kill someone. But the AI never moves a spy to clear intrigue from his cities, so i end up hiring my entire army from defectors. Or cruising thought the tech tree with 7 spies stealing science.
And yeah, the national security projects bonuses HAVE to be increased, seriously. 1% wonder construction and stuff lol what is that. Those projects have the potential to be interesting, if they are made decent. Black markets are cool, i use then when low on resources, a project that increase the effectiveness of black markets could work as well (like double resources gain or something).
Affinities could get some perks for spies. Harmony already get a ton of extra spies from quests, harmony could get faster spies, purity tougher (hard to kill, get a bonus chance to kill when on counterspy mission etc), so each affinity does the spy game a little differently.
The spy game in civ V and BE is way more streamlined and less micro intensive, but i liked the system of civ IV.