Unofficial Patch 0.21 Released

[Roland Johansen]

60 turns to pay itself off, though it's likely to have grown a bit since and after that point... It still sounds like a bad payoff. Unfortunately there's only so many +hammer buildings (forge, factory, power, the last two which come fairly late). I'd want to keep the hammer multiplier and the commerce modifier. If that's too powerful lower the hammer to commerce conversion. 1 does not necessarily equal 1

If you allow both multipliers and keep the 1 to 1 conversion factor then at the end of the game a city (without national wonder bonuses) could get a 1 hammer to 4 gold/science conversion (factor 2 for production, factor 2 for gold/science) (1 hammer to 9 gold/science with national wonders). This is clearly far too powerful as you can buy back those hammers for 3 gold with the universal suffrage civic.

If you lower the 1 hammer to 1 commerce conversion factor then building science/gold becomes extremely weak at the start of the game, even more useless as it is at the moment.

It's just a bad idea to allow multiple multipliers that grow throughout the game to apply to a single economic element of the game. It's a typical source of unbalance in games. It means quadratic growth of an economic modifier which is an unstable factor in a game where all other economic modifiers are linear.

In one of the earlier versions of civ4, there was such an element of multiple multipliers applying to a single economic element of the game namely the rush buy feature. You could get the multipliers for gold to apply to the commerce you got from cottages (and other sources) and you got the multipliers for production to apply to the hammers that were bought with this gold. This meant that gold rushing with developed cottages was way more powerful than any other method of production. In one of the earlier patches, the multipliers for production were removed from hammers that were bought with gold (gold rushing).

 

[PieceOfMind]

Mylon,

The library is probably not the best building to be talking about because it's so cheap. Building Wealth, not Research, is more likely to be useful more often (gold buildings are much more expensive) so you can keep a net positive gold rate while your science cities can still produce . Also, what happens if you already have the library and any other science-multiplying buildings you can build?

But yeah, I haven't really used hammer -> wealth/research in many games so I'm only guessing here.

 

[Mylon]

Well, gold buildings are certainly more expensive, and if you're only running at 20% gold, then not worth as much either! So I could use using hammers to build wealth.

 

[Lexad]

Just a quick question - in all versions in combat odds calculation window Combat promotion are multiplicative to others only for attacker, but not defender, for whom they are additive. This looks rather illogical, as Combat-promoted cataphract will stand 50-50 defending from equally promoted pike, but will win in ~65% cases when attacking him, both in the open, no rivers. However, this might have bben designed intentionally to stimulate attackers. Could you shed some light on the issue and whether it is changed in future?
http://ot4e.civfanatics.ru/combat.JPG

 

[PieceOfMind]

Lexad,

Yeah it pretty much makes Combat promos better for attack than defense.

Whether this was intentional or not we can only guess. Personally I don't see any urgency for it being changed. I'd prefer it if there was a document somewhere with the details of combat mechanics (like this) explained better than what the game provides us with.

 

[Lexad]

Ok, thanx for the reply.