v131.15 Beta

[wobuffet]

I know I was a strong proponent of reducing mid- and late-game Gold income, and I agree with Seek that the balance is, without a doubt, much, much better now. That said, it seems to me that building roads and routes should be at least a break-even endeavor for reasonably close, medium-sized cities by the early Medieval Era.

Perhaps road maintenance costs could be halved to 0.5 per tile? I'd also reduce railroad costs to 1.5 per tile, and make the Guilds policy in the Commerce tree halve both road and railroad costs.

But maybe a more elegant solution would be to make the Market increase trade route income (not regular city income, as it now) from that city by, say, +3 and 33%? It's boring, after all, to have the Market, Bank, and Stock Exchange basically all do the same thing (+ modifiers).

 

[Thalassicus]

@Jaybe

It's 15% of the capital population, not 5%. 1 base, 20 capital, 4 target city:

1 + 20*.15 + 4*.25
= 1 + 3 + 1
= 5

@wobuffet
What do you consider "reasonably close" and "medium-sized"? I typically grow my cities to size 10, which breaks even with 5 tiles of road per city.

 

[Txurce]

But maybe a more elegant solution would be to make the Market increase trade route income (not regular city income, as it now) from that city by, say, +3 and 33%? It's boring, after all, to have the Market, Bank, and Stock Exchange basically all do the same thing (+ modifiers).

Should an adjustment be needed, this is the sort I prefer. However, can the human player afford to lose the present market income boost in exchange for trade route boosts? I would consider spreading the trade route boost over all three financial buildings. I don't find how these three buildings enhance my income boring or interesting; for me the only decision is when is it worth my while to build one and gain its benefits.

 

[Thalassicus]

It's possible for a building to increase national trade route income, but not the income from a specific city. However, gold-from-population is possible to do on buildings and is basically identical.

 

[Txurce]

I typically grow my cities to size 10, which breaks even with 5 tiles of road per city.

To be clear, is this a spoke layout with the capital in the hub? Or do you measure distance link by link, from city to city?

 

[Thalassicus]

The arrangement doesn't matter. If we have five 10 pop cities and 25 road tiles connecting those cities in any pattern, trade income equals road costs. I build roads in a pattern which minimizes travel times to major destinations.

 

[Txurce]

It doesn't matter what the arrangement is, since only the average matters. If we have 5 cities and and 25 road tiles, that's 5 per city.

This answers my earlier question about a civ with its capital at one end of a peninsula. The ratio you set up looks like it fits the overall income model (whether overly punitive or not) very well.

 

[wobuffet]

@wobuffet
What do you consider "reasonably close" and "medium-sized"? I typically grow my cities to size 10, which breaks even with 5 tiles of road per city.

That sounds about right: 10 population, and 5 tiles from the nearest city. I quite often build cities 7–9 tiles away because I'm a perfectionist, but I'm fine with implicitly having to pay for that somehow.

It's possible for a building to increase national trade route income, but not the income from a specific city. I suspect a national bonus on markets would favor wide empires too much, since it would have an exponential effect.

In that case, make Markets initially weaker but shift the National Treasury's benefits to boosting trade route income?

This might encroach a bit on Machu Picchu, but I never thought the thematic tie to trade route income was all that great anyway. The workable mountain change to it in VEM is awesome, incidentally: I've said so before, but I think ideally, all Mountains would be workable for, say, 2 1 or something upon discovering Archaeology or having some building).

 

[Thalassicus]

What goal are you aiming for? I think I'm confused about what you want to accomplish.

 

[Jaybe]

@Jaybe

It's 15% of the capital population, not 5%. 1 base, 20 capital, 4 target city:

1 + 20*.15 + 4*.25
= 1 + 3 + 1
= 5

Ah, it's the tool tip then: Says 0.05 gold per Citizen in capital.

 

[wobuffet]

I guess gold's always been pretty boring to me. The passive + boosts to various improvements from discovering certain techs never appealed to me, and I never find myself excited about being able to build the Market, Bank, or Stock Exchange.

I think shifting income from Villages and River tiles to trade routes could help change this, especially if choice is involved (e.g., should I build the Market or a Catapult first)? Yes, Village vs Farm is a choice, but in my experience it's typically pretty obvious one way or the other.

 

[Thalassicus]

@Jaybe
Where is the tooltip you're referring to?

@wobuffet
Trade routes are a national form of -per- pop, so if we want to do that for a specific city it would be something like this...

1 per : Library
1 per : Market

I originally did that for the "Medici Bank" national wonder. When Firaxis added it to vanilla, they changed the name to "National Treasury" and changed the per-pop bonus to a percentage bonus, so I adopted their modifications as a compromise. I'd be okay with changing it back to the original form. The reason I originally did a per-pop bonus for that wonder is it gave synergy:

Library: per-pop
Wonder: percentage

Market: percentage
Wonder: per-pop

The variety this provides might be more interesting than doing science and gold the same way. The switch between the two is because there's no science improvement, so a percentage bonus on the Library wouldn't have a significant difference until later in the game.

 

[Jaybe]

@Jaybe
Where is the tooltip you're referring to?

F2 city list; left column: Trade Routes; the tool tip that appears as you hover over a trade route amount (either aggregate or individual city).

What other Trade Route tool tip is there?
If YOU didn't put it there, then someone is displaying some strange info!!

 

[Thalassicus]

There are three tooltips I can think of which discuss trade routes: the Palace, the gold display on the top bar, and the economic overview. I think there's one more but I can't remember where it was. I see the problem... Firaxis hardcoded the economic overview's tooltip to show 0.05 value instead of reading from the data files. I've fixed this now. Thank you for pointing out the error.

 

[pthmix]

Welcome to CivFanatics, pthmix!

Adding or removing forests/jungles/marshes would be a great opportunity for economic development. I plan to continue expanding the opportunities system with ideas like that once I have access to the game again.

You've got good ideas for ways to make the specialist policies more interesting. Each of those ideas should be easy to accomplish. Even if it doesn't go directly on a specialist policy, it could be an effect of some other policy.

Glad you like the ideas.

Regarding Korea:
Hwach'as have a ranged strenght of 25 against land units, cannons of 26*0.5=13, artillery of 32*0.5=16 and rocket artillery has 55*0.5=27.5...
If you are on the defence (which is a) very likely since korea is a tall-game-type civ and b) where the hwach'a shines) there is just no reason to upgrade. Sure you can get indirect fire and +1 range but you can also just use a normal promotion for that. I think it would benefit from having a special promotion which stays upon upgrading.

Looking up Sejong on wikipedia gave me an idea: he helped farmers with new technologies. A unique granary (replacing the turtle ship - naval UUs are just not good because the AI doesn't know how to conduct naval combat) with +1 science on farms, plantations and fishing boats could work nicely. You could simplify his passive to just +2 science on specialists to balance it out.

All this would be a lot of work though...

 

[Txurce]

Looking up Sejong on wikipedia gave me an idea: he helped farmers with new technologies. A unique granary (replacing the turtle ship - naval UUs are just not good because the AI doesn't know how to conduct naval combat) with +1 science on farms, plantations and fishing boats could work nicely. You could simplify his passive to just +2 science on specialists to balance it out.

This is an interesting idea, if it doesn't set back Korea's science too much.

 

[Hubay]

I like that idea a lot. If anything it will up his science output, not weaken it. And you could call it a Mumun granary, if we can't come up with a better name for it. The mumun pottery period is an early era of korean prehistory where they developed better pottery techniques and improved agriculture.

 

[Thalassicus]

I like the Mumun Granary idea. Creating a new building actually requires very little work. I just copy fields from other buildings and change the numbers. I agree with you completely about naval UUs.

I'm okay with keeping Korean Hwach'a for a long time. There's other examples of long-lasting UUs like Mongolian Keshiks.

I'd like to point out most midgame siege units have at least 2 promotions and a great general. Since these modifiers depend on base strength, Hwach'a are still better against units than cannon/artillery, but not as much as their raw stats imply.

If we consider a more advanced scenario where the siege unit is level level 5 (required for the Indirect Fire promo you mentioned):

• Hwach'a
  45 effective strength
  2 range
  60% terrain bonus promos
  Indirect Fire
  .
• Artillery
  42 effective strength
  3 range
  60% terrain bonus promos
  Indirect Fire
  Blitz - two attacks

It's clearly advantageous to upgrade high-level hwach'a to artillery if we have sufficient gold reserves. The cost is very high, however, so that's another factor to consider. Artillery come rather late in the game. Korea will likely be focusing on the top half of the tech tree at that point, skipping Artillery.

 

[albie_123]

I can see the Mumun Granary being a very powerful UB, not that there's inherently something wrong with that.

However, I suspect that when Gods and Kings rolls around, Naval UU's might not be so useless anymore, and they could very well become a fun part of the Civs that have had them removed. I hope that this will be considered when VEM becomes GEM!

 

[Thalassicus]

A melee turtle ship would be less useful because it can't bombard land units to defend our terrain. Considering that led to other thoughts... I've added a writeup to the Navies thread.