Time to clean house!

[Kael]

A game has to be as consise as possible. We bloat during the deisgn process, which is normal. But we should make an attempt to cut all unnessesary fat to better emphsize the good stuff that we have.

These are the things Im considering for removal:

1. Combine Stone and Marble?
2. Move the Armageddon spells to projects.
3. Remove the advanced temples (golden wood, shadowed vale, runevault, halls of granite, inquisitional halls, enforcement office, overlords residence). Make the demons altar into a ansen veil specific building. make the theatre of dreams into an octopus overlords building.
4. Remove the runeguard.
5. Remove the Monastary, make the Monk into an Elohim UU.

 

[woodelf]

I can't argue with any of those cuts.

 

[Chalid]

Combine asylum with theatre of dreams?

Otherwise i still would like if we could somehow differentiate between the forbidden research and the demon aspect of the veil. If i come up with some code for it how about introducing a building/civic that allows the veil to sacrifice population for research? Maybe a civic in the last row.

If we combine Stone and Marble i would cut the stone. Than we can reuse that resource for the hellstone in hell.
But we have to make sure we do not make sure we really want to remove either of the two. Lets consider what their effect is.
a) Both allow wonders to be built more easily
b) If you have one you gain easier acess to some wonders.
c) The effect of having two of them is that you are good at building part of the wonders and not so good of building the others. So removing one of them means that a civ with has much bigger chance of getting most wonder and civs without it nearly loose all chance to gain those wonders. So actually the two resources guarantee that almost no civ (as they are very seldom) has a chance to monopolize wonders. I'm not sure if we want to give that up.

So I'm coming to the conclusion that i would object against #1.


But as we are on differntiating. Right now good and evil are very similar in terms of their feel (diplomatical):
Right now:
Good: +2/0/-6
Neutral: -2/0/-2
Evil: -4/-2/2
How about changing it in a way that good ones clump together as hey like each other, neural ones as well but to a lesser degree, but evil ones should not clump together because they like each other - evil ones do not like anyone - but because they really hate everyone that is not evil (and thus fight wars together)
Good: +3/0/-4
Neutral: -2/+1/-2
Evil: -7/-4/-1

 

[Chalid]

Remove one of the +1 Hammer from the workshop and let ist start with 2 hammers.

 

[woodelf]

Maybe you should post in the Public thread and ask the players what they never build.

For me I never build herbalists, inns, hawks, ravens, windmills, watermills, horsemen.

I could live without pagan temples, workshops, smokehouses, lighthouses, harbors, and most likely more things.

 

[Chalid]

Obviosly you do not know the power of those things (excerps hawks.. those could need a bigger range to be useful)...

Oh and Horsemen, i only built those (or their replacement) as Hippus
Watermill can be cut or reused in a different way if you ask me..

For Herbalist, maybe we put the reagents back in?
Smokehous is a bit expensive (same thing as granary but double price) but otherwise really useful
Lighthouses?? Have you ever built a costal city woodelf? But they are rather expensive, that true as the costal cities often have not much production.
Harbors are again expensive so that i bult them not to often.
Inns are great with their extra trade route.

Maybe we should simply list all things we have, check what their use/price is, rebalance and cut them if possible. I think i do that tomorrow morning for the buildings using the building.xml. Can someone upload the actual version of that file as i have no acces to my civ PC this weekend?

 

[woodelf]

I'm not saying anything on that list is useless, just that I don't build them for one reason or another. The reagents back with herbalist would help. And for the most part when something takes 15-20 turns in a good city it's not worth it when you've got angry neighbors and barbs running around.

 

[Chalid]

Year. Can you upload the file for me? There are some buildings which i consider overcosted.

 

[woodelf]

Not for another 8 hours....

Maybe someone in the Public forum can?

 

[Chalid]

I wont need it until in about 17 hours

 

[woodelf]

If no one beats me to it I'll try to get it up here in 17 hours.

 

[Kael]

Here you go.

 

[Kael]

Okay, I'll implement the following changes:

1. Move the Armageddon spells to projects.
2. Remove the advanced temples (golden wood, shadowed vale, runevault, halls of granite, inquisitional halls, enforcement office, overlords residence. theatre of dreams).
3. Make the demons altar into an ashen veil specific building.
4. Add the chance of a crazed promotion to the asylum instead of the theatre of dreams.
5. Move the treant spawn boost from the shadowed vale to guadian of nature.
6. Remove the runeguard.
7. Remove the monastary, make the Monk into an Elohim UU.


I like the idea to change the alignment based attitudes around, but of these:

Good: +3/0/-4
Neutral: -2/+1/-2
Evil: -7/-4/-1

I dont like the fact that Evil like Good the most. Good should hate evil more than anything else. How about:

Good: +2/0/-6
Neutral: -2/+2/-2
Evil: -4/-2/0

What do you think?

And let me know what you think about more things to cut or recost.

 

[Chalid]

The question how one reads them

I thought: Evil hates everyone - yes even other evil guys) so they give -1 to evils, and to archive an effect that the evils are kind of forced together by need i wanted them to hate the good guy really much (thus -7)
I dealt +1 to neutral neutral as i thought the neutral ones wold not work as well together as the good guys.
Thus the + 3 for good guy (they simple love each other)

So a world dominated by evil guys would be constanly at the brick of war, whereas a world of good guys would most probably never see bg fighting.
When good and evil were there the good ones hate the evil ones (which fight with each other as well, but as they really hate the good ones they would fight many wars togheter and built an alliance this way.)
But defensive pacts and such would be seldom seen between evil ones, but often between good ones.

 

[Chalid]

Just starting with the buildings and her two general rules:

a) AI_weight should always be given when a building has an ability that is not represented in the XML (I'll mark buildings when i go through the list)
b) The Flavors do only something for Leaders that have a preference for the Flavor. And it is multiplied. So military_flavor 10 means that a leader with flavor military=20 gets 200 points added (Yes that is the same as AI_weigth 200) so one should only hand out those flavors if a building is much more important for an military/scientific usw leader than for other leaders. And flavors in the range of 40 are really insane ... 10 alone is high for most leaders...

And as i said on other places both effects take only place if the building is a valid class. So there are two ways to make the Ai into building Unit_Prerequisite Buildings. One is to Add some special code (i have written it already) which makes the Ai intelligently select from those buildings. But the easier method which we should use now is to trick the Ai into thinking the building makes its units stronger (what it actually does).

So i would recommend giving all the Unit_Prerequisite buildings +1 XP for some unit types. Than the Ai will build them in its big production cities.
Archery Range +1XP for Archers, Barracks +1XP for meele, stables +1Xp for Mounted, Hunting Lodge +1 XP for Recon and Siege Workshop +1 XP for Siege. 1 XP does not make such a big difference so i think it is a valid method to trick the AI. If you feel it is to much we could cut 1 XP form the trainings yard.

 

[Chalid]

Here first proposals for cutting:
Brewery: +1 Happy with wine is not worth the building
Alternative add +1 Happy with Wheat and make it require a river (tag can be looked up on teh hydro plant i think)

Second Proposal:
Preréquisite Buildings for most tier 4 units. Simply ove those to barracks/archery range/stable and so forth.
Reason:
a) Those Unitsprerequisite buildings will only be built in the most productive citiesanyway, so humans will built only one of each, the Ai will built them at the most places.
b) What is their use ? (i) they make the units effectiveley more expensive and (ii) they limit the number of cities that can be used to produce the units. Simple Solution: increase the Price of the Units. This way it makes only sense to produce them in the most productive cities (and you can produce only three anyway), and the effective cost will stay the same (maybe reduce upgrade costs by a small percentage)

This would get us rid of: Bear Totem, Boyer, armorer,weaponsmith, large animal Stables

Third proposal:
Same applies to the hidden court/thieves guild,
move the untis to the inn or gambling house/moneychanger.

 

[wilboman]

Actually, the brewery should give +1 for rice, corn and sugar (and, strictly speaking, even bananas make alcohol, but let's ignore that) - but that might overpower it.

Apropos other things: the tech tree has an awful lot of dead-end techs (particularly the mana-node-activating ones). Any way we can fold them in to the rest of the tree?

 

[Kael]

Actually, the brewery should give +1 for rice, corn and sugar (and, strictly speaking, even bananas make alcohol, but let's ignore that) - but that might overpower it.

Apropos other things: the tech tree has an awful lot of dead-end techs (particularly the mana-node-activating ones). Any way we can fold them in to the rest of the tree?

Im hoping the towers make those 4 worthwhile. I cut meditation, and Im willing to cut more. I think Necromancy is worthwile just because it enables such nasty manas, Im hoping the tower helps with Divination.

Also I was thinking abotu requiring the appropriate tech to be able to learn rank 2 of the spheres. What do you guys think?

 

[woodelf]

Also I was thinking abotu requiring the appropriate tech to be able to learn rank 2 of the spheres. What do you guys think?

Yeah, much better than dead end.

 

[Chalid]

Nah dead end is good Requireing the techs for spells makes mages even weaker.

How about declaring them to prerequisites for the veil and order second level techs ? that would fit.

Or Simply tell the people that we want to add some techs that follow in fire/shadow