unit-promotion balance thread

[Bernd-das-Brot]

Another gap that is discussed very little is, imo, far more annoying: The gap between the AI's capability to use a unit effectively and ours!

That's a gap with a serious detrimental impact on gameplay.

Imagine if chess programs could move the queen only like a bishop .. What would you do about it? I know what I'd do.

We all know, how abysmal the AI is in naval warfare, for example. Strengthening the naval unit tree without improving the AI's capabilities in that area only means that the gap gets wider, not closer.

I would suggest to identify any ability the already present units/classes have that the AI is simply incapable of using adequately. And then discuss if it's either possible to remedy the disparity by improving the AI or by removing/pruning such an ability .. unless, of course, a) that ability counters an advantage the AI has, b) the effect isn't crucial anyway or c) it's just too cool to lose.

=> 2. IMO, changes to units shouldn't be focused on higher historic accuracy or awesomeness. They should make the game more diverse, challenging, interesting. And that means: the AI needs to be able to use any unit present or suggested effectively. Anything else results in skeet shooting.

I totally agree to this! Some of the changes I propose will aim at this problem.


Some changes I would like to see in the mod:

(1) Please remove the -15 % CS-malus for being attacked on open ground. You still get "a malus" (missing the bonus exactly) for not being on more defensible ground (hills, trees). So why add another malus so the difference gets 40%! And the AI is not aware of this. So we would remove one reason for its bad combat performance.


(2) I think early archery units (archers, composite archers and crossbowmen at least in medieval times) are too dominant on the battlefield. I would reduce there rCS a bit, too make them less dominant.

Archer (now: rCS 7/ CS 5) - reduce rCS to 6, archers are too strong especially against warriors, who they often will kill one-on-one.

Composite Archer (now rCS 11/ CS 6) - reduce rCS by one to ten, but make them a bit less squishy adding one point to CS (rCS 10/CS 7)

Crossbows (now rCS 18/ CS 13) - reduce rCS by 2 to 16 (same as pikeman) and reduce their cost from 120 to 110 prod. They are even weaker then in renaissance, but this problem could only really be solved with a renaissance ranged unit.
(Which I would like to see. Perhaps some kind of Sharpshooters, who existed next to the Infantry of the line in 17-early 19 century)


(3) More a question of personal preference than balance, but I would like to see the instant-heal promotion removed and a small healing of hp (+20) added on every promotion.


(4) Integrate the Cuirassier fully in the Mounted units line. Knights should upgrade to cuirassier (with a CS of 26-28, and perhaps formation) and upgrade themselves to cavalary.


(5) Remove the Anti-Tank gun. The AI has no clue how to use such a specialised unit and even for the player its nearly useless. An infantrist (CS 70) with at least two promotions (which he should have on start in this era) and who is available an era earlier will be nearly as strong as the ATG against tanks and is of course way superior in every other combat situation. ATG are just too niche for a global strategy game like civ. Let them stay at Panzer General but please remove them from civ.


(6) Reduce the AA-Guns and SAMs bonus against Aircraft from 150% to 75%-100%. Both have good base CS (mostly higher than the units they should fight), so they don't need that much of a bonus. Seems overkill to me.


(7) Communitas raised the CS of embarked units, so they do not get one shooted by every archer attacking them. I liked that very much as it helps the AI, who often acts very careless embarking its units before the enemies guns. I think a good balance would be if a ship or ranged attack from a unit of the sam era would severly damage the embarked unit (50-75%), but not kill it with one attack.
(Ignore my comment, if this is still added!)


(8) Would a general bonus to sight help the AI in combat? If yes I would suggest to give any AI unit a +1 or 2 Sight promotion for free.


(9) Give the AI xp-boni on the higher diffculty levels. Like +10 (one free promotion) on king and emperor and +30 (two free promotions) on Immortal and Deity. This and my suggested changes to promotions (see the other thread) could perhaps lead to a point were we can reduce the production-boni on units a bit and still have challenging combat, without just endlessly killing mass spammed AI units.


(10) I think that the way how the National Epic works is a huge advantage to the player over the AI. An experienced player will build most his units in the city with the NE. The AI doesn't do this. So most of the units of the player are stronger than ones of the AI even of the same type. And as the AI perfomces generelly very poor in combat we should be careful with boni to players CS. They only widen the gap in combat between human and AI. So I would suggest give the NE another combat related bonus (perhaps prod for military units or some combat/culture bonus) without raising the CS of produced units. Alternatively remove it or at least weaken the bonus to +10 % (instead of +15%).

 

[Crimson13]

It's been a while since it was mentioned but does anyone like the Sniper unit idea? It adds an Archery type unit to the later game that nothing really replaces later on. Crossbowmen is the last kind of people units that have an attack range at/over 2 tiles. At least I'm pretty sure, I'm kinda tired so I'm a bit off right now.

There was one here but doesn't work now because of the DLC and updates. There's another one Steam (That I use.) called 'Sniper (G&K/BnW Version)'.

 

[Bernd-das-Brot]

Some suggestions on units:


(1) It was mentioned before and I totally agree - there is definitely missing a unit between crossbowmen and Gatling Guns. Crossbowmen do not only lose their use as the other units get much stronger. In addition it feels wrong to have them around for such a long time next to gunpowder units. So we should add a ranged unit (grenadier or sharpshooter or whatever) at Metalurgy (or Economy) with stats like rangedCS 22, CS 18, cost 170-185. This would than upgrade to GGuns, which I would move to Steam Power.

Steam Power could need a little extra as it's totally useless for land empires at the moment (only naval advancements) and I think it's historically more fitting. And Industrialization has Factories and Coal so it's one of the most important techs even without GGs.


(2) The gap between Frigates and Battleships is too big. Two solutions for this:

- (A) There should be another ranged Ship at Steampower (or Electricity).

- (B) I would prefer a more radical change. With the removal of the ancient ranged ship the first step is made, let's make two more in this direction. No ranged ships before Battleships! I don' think ranged ships are needed from a gameplay perspective and the diversion between ranged and melee ships is strange at best (Galleas ranged, Ironclad/destroyer melee with x-time their range and so on).

So I suggest the following navy line:

Melee: Trireme-Galleas-Carrack (exploration)/Frigate (combat)/Privateer* (Gold Stealing and Prize Ships)-Ironclad-Destroyer-Missile or Stealth Destroyer (at Advanced Ballistics)

Ranged: Battleship (range 2?)- Missile Cruiser (range 3)

And Submarines as melee units with huge attacking bonus or some first strike ability.

*It would be cool if Privateers could have some kind of hidden nationality like in Civ4. Although they should be clearly weaker than frigates, but get gold from naval and city combat! Generally I am no friend of highly specialised units, but if there should be room for a Privateer in this game it should not be only just another warship.


(3) Submarines are too early available. My navy often consists of Fregates/Caravels and Submarines. I would move Subs one tier later to Plastics. With the Infantry moved away from Plastics to Atomic Theory this would be ok I think.


And a possible bug: There is no entry in the wikipedia that battleships can be upgraded to Missile Cruisers. Not sure if it would be possible ingame.

 

[Funak]

Some suggestions on units:


(1) It was mentioned before and I totally agree - there is definitely missing a unit between crossbowmen and Gatling Guns. Crossbowmen do not only lose their use as the other units get much stronger. In addition it feels wrong to have them around for such a long time next to gunpowder units. So we should add a ranged unit (grenadier or sharpshooter or whatever) at Metalurgy (or Economy) with stats like rangedCS 22, CS 18, cost 170-185. This would than upgrade to GGuns, which I would move to Steam Power.

Steam Power could need a little extra as it's totally useless for land empires at the moment (only naval advancements) and I think it's historically more fitting. And Industrialization has Factories and Coal so it's one of the most important techs even without GGs.


(2) The gap between Frigates and Battleships is too big. Two solutions for this:

- (A) There should be another ranged Ship at Steampower (or Electricity).

This has already been suggested and seems to be a work in progress.

Other than that I wouldn't like to remove the ranged ships from the game, would remove any chance of ships capturing cities on their own.

 

[lefuet]

Concerning scouts dead end and useless marines:

In my games I moved marines one tech down to electronics, made them weaker (60 instead of 65) and gave them the ignore terrain cost promotion. There is still quite a gap, but now scouts upgrade to marines, then to paratroopers and finally xcom.

This is much more fun for me. I often had some elite scouts around that did not manage to find bows in ruins. Now these veterans of survival in foreign lands become the special forces of modern times.

 

[Gyra Solune]

Just my two cents on a few things. I think the Dromon should be the Byzantine UU and the Cataphract made a generic Classical Horseman upgrade before the Knight...somewhere, maybe Iron Working or so? Cataphracts were kind of a general thing used by many in the near East, but Dromons were a very iconically Byzantine thing.

Anti-Air should probably be the late-game upgrade for Archery, since Machine Guns were used initially as the earliest form of AA. So simply instead of the Bazooka, they upgrade to AA, then SAMs.

The whole convergence of the Warrior and Spearman line is weird, I sorta get it but...hm. IMO the simplest solution is to keep the Warriors and Infantry as is, and have the Pikemen upgrade to a genericized Pike & Shot for the Renaissance, the Anti-Tank Gun (why do people hate these so much) for Modern, Bazooka for Atomic and Helicopter for Info. Don't quite know what for Industrial...hm. Lancers can be Renaissance Knights!

 

[Funak]

I'm going to revive this thing here to bring up something that have been bothering me lately, the ship-promotions are just way less interesting than the land unit promotions.

I'm going to start off with the ranged ships:
10% RCS vs land units and ships
or
20% RCS vs cities.

Both the land unit replacements are straight up better (in fact one of the ranged land unit promotions does the same thing as both of these ). My suggestion wouldn't be to just to copy-paste the land-promotions onto here, as that wouldn't be very creative. Instead I would suggest tuning them more for the naval game.
The big difference between naval combat and land combat is that there are just a lot less naval units, instead of siege-weapons and archery units you just have ranged ships. Instead of knights, pikement and longswords you just have meleeships.

That pretty much leaves the promotions as the tool for building your army, you want anti-city-promotions to emulate siegeweapons and you want navigation(or whatever it's called)-promotions to fight other ships. To that extent I would suggest raising the anti city promotion slightly and possibly add another siege-promotion outside of the tree (kinda like the 'bombardment' promotion for siege-units) let it require one or two ranks of the anti-city promotion or something, it helps you take cities but severely slows down your progress towards range and logistics.
Simply adding more power to promotions would probably leave the game unbalanced, so I would suggest compensating the increased promotions with lowered base-values in RCS for the ranged ships.
With the base power of the ships lowered, the other promotion (navigation?) would also need to get more powerful, which makes sense, it being really low and static at the moment.

End result for the ships would be somewhere along the lines of:

20% RCS vs units
or
30% RCS vs cities

With all ranged ships getting lowered base RCS (some more than others probably, SoTL could probably take a bigger one)



Onward to the meleeships, their current values are.
+10% CS vs units and cities
or
+15% CS vs cities, attacking cities awards 33% gold.

I'm kinda bothered by the fact that both of those promotions help vs cities. It makes the first option feel like a pretty easy choice, more often than not you're going to be attacking naval units with your melee naval units anyways. Not to mention that the gold plunder effect really doesn't do much at all.

I would suggest having the first promotion raised in value a bit either straight up CS, or some weird third party effect, like reduced damage from ranged attacks? Extra CS when attacking ranged ships? Something along those lines.
The siege-promotion I think needs to get its value increased to perhaps 25(possibly 20)%, attacking cities with melee-ships is really painful anyways, feels like you need some extra power for it.¨

Somewhat on-topic, can ships actually make us of effects like flanking and cover(defense vs ranged units)?

 

[iwiws]

attacking cities with melee-ships is really painful anyways, feels like you need some extra power for it.

One little thing here :
I feel like the main disadvantage of attacking cities with ships is that coastal cities usually have 2-3 neighboring sea tiles, meaning that you can't get that many melee ships attacking them, if they don't have the double-attack promotion. A "can move after attack" may be a nice idea, as an extra promotion after a city-attack-2 (like 'bombardment').

(On the other hand, with the big movements, it may be too dangerous quickly)

 

[Deadstarre]

One little thing here :
I feel like the main disadvantage of attacking cities with ships is that coastal cities usually have 2-3 neighboring sea tiles, meaning that you can't get that many melee ships attacking them, if they don't have the double-attack promotion. A "can move after attack" may be a nice idea, as an extra promotion after a city-attack-2 (like 'bombardment').

(On the other hand, with the big movements, it may be too dangerous quickly)

with a move after attack, it would be really easy to take a city in a single turn. i agree it can be a problem for a naval invasion when the city has a small number of coast tiles, but thats probly the time to rethink a naval invasion.

i played a game recently where my capitol had only 1 coast tile. When the AI come with a DOW and about 15 corvettes, i was completely unprepared for dealing with a navy of that size. It felt unfair, but they never took my city for the reason they could only attack once per turn- at the time, i was grateful heh though it did feel cheesy watching the AI struggle with such a massive army, impotent.

 

[Funak]

One little thing here :
I feel like the main disadvantage of attacking cities with ships is that coastal cities usually have 2-3 neighboring sea tiles, meaning that you can't get that many melee ships attacking them, if they don't have the double-attack promotion. A "can move after attack" may be a nice idea, as an extra promotion after a city-attack-2 (like 'bombardment').

(On the other hand, with the big movements, it may be too dangerous quickly)

I'm actually really not a big fan of 'move after attacking' at all, it just feels way too easy for a player to cheese it. With horses it is kinda fine because they are squishy and and inland movement gets limited.
Boats on the other hand have like 8 moves, and there is no 'sea-terrain' blocking stopping your movement.


Also settling a city with limited coastal access is clearly strategy, just like settling behind a hill stops most ranged ships from attacking you.

 

[Gazebo]

Funak, if you want to break things down into more granular steps, that'd help me understand what you are trying to accomplish.

i.e., actually illustrate what you think each promotion in the couple of promotion trees you are looking at should look like.

G

 

[Funak]

Funak, if you want to break things down into more granular steps, that'd help me understand what you are trying to accomplish.

i.e., actually illustrate what you think each promotion in the couple of promotion trees you are looking at should look like.

I actually tried doing that but I fell asleep writing it repeatedly. I also managed to erase the entire text twice, so the last time was written really badly. Anyways

End result for the ranged ships would be somewhere along the lines of:

20% RCS vs units
or
30% RCS vs cities

With all ranged ships getting slightly lowered base RCS (some more than others probably, SoTL could probably take a bigger one) to compensate for better promotions

BY that I meant to change the existing base-line promotions, 'bombardment', and 'targeting'.
End result would be

Targeting: 20% RCS vs land and naval units
Bombardment: 30% RCS vs cities.

On top of that I would like to maybe add a promotion similar to the siege weapons Volley.
Maybe something like +50(or 60)% RCS vs cities. This promotion would require Bombardment/Targeting 2(possibly 1) and would be an alternative for gaining early power while delaying other strong promotions (like Range and Logistics).

EDIT: I would also like to see a slight nerf to the Logistics promotion, making the attacks from the units a bit weaker after it has been picked up, ships have a ton of movementpoints, so this isn't going to be that big of a deal. (for ranged land units, such a change would be devastating, as they are usually dependent on moving and then attacking. Anyways, here goes:

Logistics: -20% RCS May attack twice, but the second attack expends all movement.
This would require you to create a separate Logistics promotion for Naval units, as they currently use the same one as ranged land-units.

Adding this to the ships as they are now would probably make them too powerful, so the idea was to lower the current RCS of the ranged ships slightly, making them weaker in the start, but stronger with promotions.

For Meleeships I would change 'Boarding Party' and 'Coastal Raider' because I don't like how weak Coastal Raider feels in comparison. New promotions would like something like this:

Coastal Raider: +25% CS vs cities steal gold equal to 33% damage inflicted to a city.
For Boarding party I have a few suggestions.

• Boarding Party A: +10% CS +25% Flanking bonus
• Boarding Party B: +10% CS +10% CS vs damaged units
• Boarding Party C: +10% CS +10% CS when attacking
• Boarding Party D: +15% CS

Other than this I would like to see some other promotions for melee ships, possibly directly stolen from melee land units. Stuff like Charge, Cover, Siege. Possibly a promotion that gives CS vs Ranged boats and one that gives CS vs melee boats.

 

[Gazebo]

I actually tried doing that but I fell asleep writing it repeatedly. I also managed to erase the entire text twice, so the last time was written really badly. Anyways

BY that I meant to change the existing base-line promotions, 'bombardment', and 'targeting'.
End result would be

Targeting: 20% RCS vs land and naval units
Bombardment: 30% RCS vs cities.

On top of that I would like to maybe add a promotion similar to the siege weapons Volley.
Maybe something like +50(or 60)% RCS vs cities. This promotion would require Bombardment/Targeting 2(possibly 1) and would be an alternative for gaining early power while delaying other strong promotions (like Range and Logistics).

EDIT: I would also like to see a slight nerf to the Logistics promotion, making the attacks from the units a bit weaker after it has been picked up, ships have a ton of movementpoints, so this isn't going to be that big of a deal. (for ranged land units, such a change would be devastating, as they are usually dependent on moving and then attacking. Anyways, here goes:

Logistics: -20% RCS May attack twice, but the second attack expends all movement.
This would require you to create a separate Logistics promotion for Naval units, as they currently use the same one as ranged land-units.

Adding this to the ships as they are now would probably make them too powerful, so the idea was to lower the current RCS of the ranged ships slightly, making them weaker in the start, but stronger with promotions.

For Meleeships I would change 'Boarding Party' and 'Coastal Raider' because I don't like how weak Coastal Raider feels in comparison. New promotions would like something like this:

Coastal Raider: +25% CS vs cities steal gold equal to 33% damage inflicted to a city.
For Boarding party I have a few suggestions.

• Boarding Party A: +10% CS +25% Flanking bonus
• Boarding Party B: +10% CS +10% CS vs damaged units
• Boarding Party C: +10% CS +10% CS when attacking
• Boarding Party D: +15% CS

Other than this I would like to see some other promotions for melee ships, possibly directly stolen from melee land units. Stuff like Charge, Cover, Siege. Possibly a promotion that gives CS vs Ranged boats and one that gives CS vs melee boats.

Current Working Version (based on post above and own thoughts):

Bombardment 1-3 now grant bonus RCS (+5%) and +20% RCS vs Cities
Targeting 1-3 now grant bonus RCS (+10%) versus Wounded Units and +10/15/20% RCS vs Units
Boarding Party 1-3 now grant bonus CS (+10/15/20%) vs Units and +25% Flanking Bonus
Coastal Raider 1-3 now grant bonus CS (+20%) vs Cities and +33% Gold Theft when attacking

Also, naval melee will get Medic I/II option.

G

 

[Funak]

Current Working Version (based on post above and own thoughts):

Looks good, although I don't see why the promotions would necessarily need to get stronger with every promotion (no other promotion really works that way)

Also, naval melee will get Medic I/II option.

Won't be very useful considering ships can't heal outside of friendly territory.
I was thinking of some advanced promotion requiring Supply as well as 3 ranks of boarding/coastal giving 'march' to meleeships but I'm not really sure how useful that would be either.
Maybe let them have a promotion that makes them take less damage from land-units? Or just ranged attacks in general.

 

[Gazebo]

Looks good, although I don't see why the promotions would necessarily need to get stronger with every promotion (no other promotion really works that way)




Won't be very useful considering ships can't heal outside of friendly territory.
I was thinking of some advanced promotion requiring Supply as well as 3 ranks of boarding/coastal giving 'march' to meleeships but I'm not really sure how useful that would be either.
Maybe let them have a promotion that makes them take less damage from land-units? Or just ranged attacks in general.

Won't be useful outside your territory, but it will be for defenders (or, if you take an enemy city, it lets you get back up to speed more quickly).

The promotions scale as they do in order to make them more interesting once the biggie promotions like range come up.

G

 

[Funak]

Won't be useful outside your territory, but it will be for defenders (or, if you take an enemy city, it lets you get back up to speed more quickly).

Maybe, but I'm not really a fan.

The promotions scale as they do in order to make them more interesting once the biggie promotions like range come up.

Well, you need two points for range and 3 points for logistics anyways, I don't think scaling is very necessary.

 

[phantomaxl1207]

Do Naval Units benefit from Land Units with Medic?

 

[Gazebo]

Do Naval Units benefit from Land Units with Medic?

Don't think so. Haven't looked at code.

G

 

[Funak]

Do Naval Units benefit from Land Units with Medic?

I know they don't benefit from embarked medics, but medics standing on the coast-line, I don't really know. Possible I suppose.

 

[Gidoza]

After playing and particularly warring for a while, I`m starting to think that the +1 range bonus is just...not necessary. Quite frankly, it just doesn`t `fit` in alot of ways.

How is it, exactly, that archers are having the same attack range with an upgrade as a battleship? And how does experience in using a bow suddenly make the arrow fly further? The ranged bonus always gives me (or my opponent - but usually me) a pretty ridiculous advantage in almost all situations. And this goes on top of city assaults as well: city return damage is already pathetic enough as it is: it`s even worse when the city can`t retaliate at all because my range is longer.

In a nutshell, I dislike the attack range promotion - everything about it sings of imbalance. Double attack is bad, too, but at least you have to work a bit more for it.