That's really funny. I played an RPG once where you could develope certain skills (like smithing, hunting...) and/or fight the hardest of monsters. One of the most impressive archievements was a cloak for that you needed to master all those skills, among other things. Then, one day, the developers added a requirement for that cloak that included killing each of these boss-monsters once. HEAPS of players who prefered the skilling side over fighting where complaining as hell about that, whilst none of the combat preferring people ever complained about spending hours and hours skilling to get it.
It's quite the same here: Those people who like the warfare part of the mod more never complained about how they have to micro manage more and more things, build much more buildings and aquire strange resources just to build some units and go conquer. But on the other hand, building-people seem to avoitd everything that has to do with combat. Both sites are part of the mod, IMO. If Hydro went the same way and added all his buildings and properties as options - or DH did it with the whole animal-related stuff - then C2C would be truely an absolutely unbalanceable mess.
You have to pick a certain options and use these as a base for further balancing. And then you have always someone complaining that he is never playing with for example Barbarians and how imbalanced the mod is since you won't get any science early on from animals etc. Of course that is an issue, but it's not an issue of an imbalanced mod but more of the option itself.
I see TB's combat additions more of an "you can switch it off if you want to" option rather than an "you can switch it on if you want to"option. It could be easily switched around by reversing the options effect and call it "no size matters" (or "size doesn't matter"
).
To have it more diplomatic, maybe we should use a poll to determine which options are mostly picked by the players and then use these as a base / the core game. On the other hand I think that the votes of modders that made this stuff should matter more since they put a lot of work in it (unless it hurts the mod).
Thanks and well put Mouse.
Another factor exists here too and that's that since the combat side was so under-developed, it was making us stretch to assign game values to many buildings that COULD have been far better purposed if strategy were a little deeper. As I saw this problem continue to worsen as more and more buildings were added, I also could see ways to address the issue. Not that the vision is more than about 5-10% complete of course...
As you say, both sides are important. One shouldn't be developed without the other. Had some predecessors spent more efforts on combat strategy then I'd probably have looked more towards civil matters.
I've considered turning this modmod into a full fledged promotion rebalance modmod.
Here are my first thoughts:
View attachment 394601
This would also include some reordering of what promos are required for specific promos.
First that comes to mind is:
-City raider I require Combat I
-City Raider III require Combat II
-City Raider V require Combat III
Edit: I've reconsidered hills defense for city garrison, should not be there
You might not want to package it all together as it would make it harder to import what works as separated from what didn't. I suppose I say this because I think the adjustments you made to healing promos should be implemented immediately.
That said, I don't have any particular problem with that suggestion as long as city garrison follows similar lines of prerequisites. I tried something along these lines with the Sophistication promotion line. I'm not sure how I felt about it in play though. I felt a little frustrated with it tbh but perhaps that's because not everything else followed similar lines.
One thing you might run into when attempting this is the limitations of the promotion prerequisite xml itself. It's not particularly keen with OR prerequisites - it allows only one alternative. It also doesn't allow us to vary the prerequisites for a promotion by the CCs of the unit. On one hand this is good because it keeps it simple and from getting to be a nightmarish mess but on the other hand it's a little limiting when thinking about perfecting the prerequisite tree.
Actually, if you want to rework all promotions, I'd really suggest to limit promotion effects to two effects at most. Having 5 effects on city garrison is both too complex and a bit unrealistic. You want them to be excellent in fighting off enemies from outside the city. This won't make you better in avoiding revolts.
And I remember spending hours and hours in going through all promotions and apply both capture and capture resistence to all that seemed appropiate. In hinsight I overdone it IMO; while I still see a reason that a unit good at defending a city is less likely to be captured alive, I can see the excact opposite as well. And maybe then it should be dropped on this promotion altogether. I think having promotions with a very clear effect and reorder these so you have offensive and defensive and non-combat etc promotions that branch off is a very good approach.
I'm going to go on a limb and for the most part agree here. It depends of course, but yes, I do generally support a more pure and simple promotion definition. Let that not disturb the balance between promotion values though.
And I have to disagree with TB here: If you have a line against Melee and a line for withdrawing, I don't really see the point in having promotions that increase withdrawing against Melee units
It was just a conceptual point that depending on how you try to structure and limit the promotion tree, these kinds of concepts start becoming obvious next steps.
Honestly, the thing that makes me a little uncomfortable with the whole narrow tree concept (which I have considered myself previously too until I looked closely enough at it) is that it really limits the player when they try to specialize units for their various functions.
For example, although the proposed concept for city raider above might seem like a way to enforce that the greater benefits are awarded for greater earnings, it also makes combat promos feel like nothing more than road bumps. Now, instead of having a unit be able to get 75% City Defense, you'll be forcing the unit to have +30% general combat skill on top of that to get there.
It starts making the generic Combat choice a requirement for greater real improvement rather than a default choice one would make for a unit they want to be more generically combat valuable but at the cost of not being quite as valuable in a specific situation. It begins to erode the concept of 'interesting choices'. But I suppose the whole proposal generally stems from players expressing frustration over having too many choices so I dunno... maybe it would be better.
One could just as easily increase the XP cost for leveling and apply some generic combat modifier to city garrison, like taking 5 away from City Defense and adding +5% combat modifier to each one and effectively you're doing much the same thing except this way you're not taking away the generic vs specific combat modifier choice in which promotion to select.
I'm just thinking aloud here with much of this, expressing some game theory from having looked at this stuff so long.
Another concept would be to level limit. This would mean that you stop making Combat the prerequisite 'must pick' and start making it so that say, City Raider II, with a level prerequisite of 3, cannot simply be taken right on the heels of the first City Raider I effect, with a level prerequisite of 1. Now, instead of HAVING to select Combat in between them, you could have to simply select something OTHER than City Raider II, forcing a side specialization choice onto each unit we're trying to specialize into a city attacker.
Does this help with complexity though? No... it makes it more complex.
@Joe: Given how many options we have to adjust and address things, perhaps you can see why getting to the heart of a complaint, the real essence of the frustration in play experience, is what becomes important.
You want to remove the Self-Heal promos... is this because you don't want new ideas adjusting how the game plays? Or is this because you feel they imbalance the promotion selections? Or is it too frustrating to tell which is obviously the BEST selection? Does it make you feel like you can never truly perfect any given unit because there's simply too many ways to improve a unit? Is it just frustrating that you can't remember the details of all the promotions you have available when you go to make selections? Is it that it introduces a set of numeric benefits that you find impossible to compare against normal combat modifiers (apples and oranges syndrome?) I simply have not been able to get a clear concept of what it is that really frustrates you there. And I fear our race to try to address the 'underlying issue' is an attempt to do so without really understanding what the underlying issue IS.
Just to prod into a better understanding a bit, if we were to suddenly graphically relabel, rename, redefine, and rebuild the entire promotion structure, but with half of the promotions in play, would you be just as frustrated because now NOTHING is familiar? Do you think your irritation stems more from unfamiliarity with the new things being added and how they may have unforseen strategic consequences to take or ignore?
Would you prefer a game that didn't have promotions at all?
(Actually that's a serious question - I remember the days of Civ I - III. Unit TYPE was all you needed to know about a unit and there was never the unsettling sensation that the individual people in a unit would be dead or retired with each round given the amount of time that a round represents, which would, if we were truly modelling things, mean that the unit would never truly be specialized as new recruits would always be bringing in new green inexperienced fighters.)
Noted.
I did however reduce the amount of effects in the city garrison line by removing combat bonuses against gunpowder, mounted and melee units. thats three less effects.
The more I looked at this aspect of the city garrison line, the more I felt that those bonuses should be removed as well. Because it's very era appropriate perhaps but not too useful in the later game and to try to update it for the later game makes it just start getting stupid complicated. Definitely agree with this move. You could also thus remove the combat class specific bonuses on the street fighter line that were only there to balance against those being removed from city garrison.
One problem with these 'side benefits' is the same thing we just found with the healing benefits on Combat promos... it can really silently upset a game balance and a perception of what's taking place. We ignore the modifiers in our heads but they do actually add into things and makes a given combat situation harder to predict - and not in a good way. I mean, has anyone ever been swayed to select City Garrison because of the anti-melee effect?
The idea of just adding more side benefits to existing promotions came into play before I started working with the promos here and I'm all for purifying promos more. Again, to an extent though... there are some that still need generic bonuses to still make them somewhat valuable.
Take the To the Death promotionline for an example. This is one that many players have said they would like to see out of the game. I get that. I get it because despite the promotionline being there to setup units as being just about immune to being captured, most players would feel that the best way to keep a unit from being captured is to make sure the unit wins or withdraws and never to PLAN for the unit's death. However, once a unit has been fully specialized in other ways, would it not be a prudent decision for a unit to get a LITTLE generic combat benefit while also making the unit heavily resistant to capture? Particularly with units you're wanting to specialize towards generic combat - those pinch hitters that are good in just about any situation but not great in any specific situation? Therefore, giving these promotions a +5% combat modifier becomes important to make the promotion valid for selection in some situations. I can't see how it would ever be worthwhile to take this promotion without it unless we made the promotion ridiculously OP with capture resistance.
Just saying there are times when side benefits actually serve a purpose. So it's not about a 'count' of how many benefits there are on a promotion (look at the terrain ones - most of the benefits there do matter even though its more than 2 types) but an evaluation of necessity for the promotion's purpose.
from disease reaching 50 after just a few turns and there's literally nothing you can do to prevent that. If that's a way to limit city growth, I don't think it works well (compared to simply reducing base free
): it hampers early city (to the point that it makes early food irrelevant due to too many
