I didn't see a similar thread to this but my luck I just searched the wrong terms
I would like to preface this by saying I think G&K made Civ V much more balanced than it was in Vanilla. The length of this post may make it seem like the game is broken, but I don't; I find it very well balanced for its complexity(when you consider UUs).
With that being said, what imbalances are you hoping to see fixed in BNW? This is my personal list:
1)Swordsmen.
Spoiler:
Swords went from being the end-all in vanilla to terrible in G&K. They require a strategic resource that you can't see until you reach Iron Working, which is a very heavy investment and makes it hard to settle cities near, and for your trouble you get a 14 Strength unit. Especially on higher difficulties, the AI will start to field its own Swords as early as turn 50, and by turn 65-70(it varies b/c some civs ignore Civil Service) you see 16 Strength Pikemen. They also suffer from the problem all non-horse melee units suffer: having to take an attack on the approach, damage during the attack, and damage after the attack. This is mitigate later on with Siege/March/Cover etc, but at that point in the game you don't have those promotions.
Proposed changes:
-Reveal Iron at Bronze Working, allowing you to determine if going to IW is a worthwhile investment, either to grab your own Iron or see if a City-State has it.
-Change Pikemen and Swordsmen to both have 15 Combat Strength. Yes, Pikemen are farther along in the tech tree, but the Pike user did not have to deviate at all from the Philo/Education tech path to get them and also doesn't need a strategic resource.
2)Lancers.
Spoiler:
They may not be "bad" units, but they're on an odd upgrade path, going fromSpears(2 movement) ->Pikes(2 movement)-> Lancer(4 move + strategic resource) -> Anti-Tank Guns(2 movement)-Helicopters(6 movement). It puts them in the awkward position of constantly flipping between defensive and offensive units.
They're also not great at filling their niche of mounted units. The Lancer fails to take down one of the most dangerous mounted units in Stampy(aka Naresuan's Elephant); despite being very far ahead of it on the tech tree, the Lancer actually loses heads-up with Stampy because it only receives +33% vs mounted from Formation I whereas Stampy has a flat +50% vs mounted units. It's also followed very quickly by Cavalry which have the same combat strength vs mounted uints.
Proposed Changes:
-I'm honestly not sure what can be done outside of a straight combat strength buff. My preferred option would be "multiple upgrade paths" that I have wanted for a long time; that is, allow your Pike to become either a Musket or a Lancer. This also prevents players from being stuck with a bunch of pikemen they can't upgrade which is why you see City-States have tons of Pikemen.
3)Liberty. EDIT: With the information gained about BNW requiring Friendship for lump sum deals meaning Settler-buying will be slowed, this might be crossed off. Awaiting more information.
Spoiler:
I understand why the Collective Rule/Republic sawp was done and if this were still vanilla, where Tradition's finisher didn't get Aqueducts and Legalism wasn't working correctly, I would support it. However, the pendulum seems to have swung too far and made Tradition the no-brainer instead of Liberty. This swap did more than slow down the settler; it slowed down everythingin the tree and made it much more painful. Citizenship takes 4 policies, and Representation/Meritocracy take 5; this is the most annoying part, because the only happiness policy in the entire tree, Meritocracy, often has to be taken last because without Representation the cost for the last policy is very high. And if you go Citizenship first, Collective Rule often comes so late as to be meaningless.
Proposed Changes:
-Switch Collective Rule/Republic back.
-Fix the Liberty finisher. The last time I checked, selecting a Great Prophet with the Liberty finisher increases the cost of all Great People by 100 points, which Great Prophets are not supposed to do. This is an extremely frustrating thing to run into if you want to use Liberty to found/enhance a religion.
4)Honor
Spoiler:
My main gripe is the early part of it. The opener does not pay for itself because of the massive spike in policy costs after the first few. Honor is best used as a second tree to Tradition/Honor, and the opener is only useful when you should not be opening Honor. I really cannot think of a game where you could not get at least the same outcome, often better, with Tradition or Liberty.
The other issue is Warrior Code: the +15% production to melee units is painfully narrow since this does *not* apply to Horse units. The free Great General is nice but it is not particularly difficult to generate the first GG with combat.
Proposed changes:
-I'm not 100% sure what to do with the opener but it needs changing badly. I would suggest something like "free Barracks" but that opens the possiblity of "dipping" 1 policy into Honor and getting too much from it. I would also support moving the -15% unit maintenance from the now-defunct Autocracy tree to the Honor opener.
-Make Warrior Code's +15% production either apply to all military units or at least also affect mounted units.
5)Planes.
Spoiler:
This is most egregious one in my opinion. As MadDjinn has explained, the AI has a weird dislike for Fertilizer. It tends to just go hard to Flight and ignore Artillery, which creates a very stale mid-game because you are also forced to go Flight if you don't want to get slaughtered. The problem becomes worse if you didn't get Oil; the first counter for planes that doesn't take a resource is Anti-Aircraft Guns, which require Flight *and* Ballistics. This force you to not only go Flight yourself, but also down through Dynamite, Raiload, and everything else down there, THEN you can start hard-building your 250 hammer AA Guns from scratch. AA Guns are very lethal against planes, yes, but there needs to be some answer to them that becomes available in a reasonable timeframe. Pikes, Anti-Tank Guns, etc. all come before or shortly after the unit they counter, not 6 or 7 Industrial/Modern techs later. It also makes the game pathetically easy if you happened to get Oil and the AIs didn't; even a Deity AI army is shredded by Great War Bombers if there's no Triplanes to deter you.
Proposed Changes:
-Knock Great War Bomber attack strength down slightly. I'm not sure what number is good, but as-is they do a significant amount of damage even to units that have Cover I/Cover II.
-Make AA Guns more accessible. IIRC there was a change a while back that made Ballistics require Railroad, the idea probably being to get the AI to go through Fertilizer. It had the side effect of making AA Guns a massive pain in the ass to get.
EDIT(6/3): Somehow I forgot one of my biggest things: borders
6)Open Borders
Spoiler:
Borders are a huge pain in G&K. I totally get the reasoning behind it: getting 50g from each civ for basically nothing was pretty abusive. But this has the drawback of making scouting very difficult if the land is cut off by another civ; sometimes you can't even go around by sea because their borders cover the coast as well.
Requiring Civil Service for border agreements means you can be really good friends with someone but they won't let you into their lands.
Proposed Changes:
-Move Open Borders back to Writing(where it was in Vanilla) but reduce/eliminate the AI's gold value of buying Open Borders from you.
-Make it possible to get Open Borders in a peace deal. The AIs can do it with one another, and it seems like the only reason we can't is because you have to do the Embassy in a separate deal first. There's been times where I would make peace with a civ but I can't because doing so cuts me off from someone else.
You deserve a sticker if you read all my rambling crap.
I didn't see a similar thread to this but my luck I just searched the wrong terms
I would like to preface this by saying I think G&K made Civ V much more balanced than it was in Vanilla. The length of this post may make it seem like the game is broken, but I don't; I find it very well balanced for its complexity(when you consider UUs).
With that being said, what imbalances are you hoping to see fixed in BNW? This is my personal list:
1)Swordsmen.
Spoiler:
Swords went from being the end-all in vanilla to terrible in G&K. They require a strategic resource that you can't see until you reach Iron Working, which is a very heavy investment and makes it hard to settle cities near, and for your trouble you get a 14 Strength unit. Especially on higher difficulties, the AI will start to field its own Swords as early as turn 50, and by turn 65-70(it varies b/c some civs ignore Civil Service) you see 16 Strength Pikemen. They also suffer from the problem all non-horse melee units suffer: having to take an attack on the approach, damage during the attack, and damage after the attack. This is mitigate later on with Siege/March/Cover etc, but at that point in the game you don't have those promotions.
Proposed changes:
-Reveal Iron at Bronze Working, allowing you to determine if going to IW is a worthwhile investment, either to grab your own Iron or see if a City-State has it.
-Change Pikemen and Swordsmen to both have 15 Combat Strength. Yes, Pikemen are farther along in the tech tree, but the Pike user did not have to deviate at all from the Philo/Education tech path to get them and also doesn't need a strategic resource.
2)Lancers.
Spoiler:
They may not be "bad" units, but they're on an odd upgrade path, going fromSpears(2 movement) ->Pikes(2 movement)-> Lancer(4 move + strategic resource) -> Anti-Tank Guns(2 movement)-Helicopters(6 movement). It puts them in the awkward position of constantly flipping between defensive and offensive units.
They're also not great at filling their niche of mounted units. The Lancer fails to take down one of the most dangerous mounted units in Stampy(aka Naresuan's Elephant); despite being very far ahead of it on the tech tree, the Lancer actually loses heads-up with Stampy because it only receives +33% vs mounted from Formation I whereas Stampy has a flat +50% vs mounted units. It's also followed very quickly by Cavalry which have the same combat strength vs mounted uints.
Proposed Changes:
-I'm honestly not sure what can be done outside of a straight combat strength buff. My preferred option would be "multiple upgrade paths" that I have wanted for a long time; that is, allow your Pike to become either a Musket or a Lancer. This also prevents players from being stuck with a bunch of pikemen they can't upgrade which is why you see City-States have tons of Pikemen.
3)Liberty.
Spoiler:
I understand why the Collective Rule/Republic sawp was done and if this were still vanilla, where Tradition's finisher didn't get Aqueducts and Legalism wasn't working correctly, I would support it. However, the pendulum seems to have swung too far and made Tradition the no-brainer instead of Liberty. This swap did more than slow down the settler; it slowed down everythingin the tree and made it much more painful. Citizenship takes 4 policies, and Representation/Meritocracy take 5; this is the most annoying part, because the only happiness policy in the entire tree, Meritocracy, often has to be taken last because without Representation the cost for the last policy is very high. And if you go Citizenship first, Collective Rule often comes so late as to be meaningless.
Proposed Changes:
-Switch Collective Rule/Republic back.
-Fix the Liberty finisher. The last time I checked, selecting a Great Prophet with the Liberty finisher increases the cost of all Great People by 100 points, which Great Prophets are not supposed to do. This is an extremely frustrating thing to run into if you want to use Liberty to found/enhance a religion.
4)Honor
Spoiler:
My main gripe is the early part of it. The opener does not pay for itself because of the massive spike in policy costs after the first few. Honor is best used as a second tree to Tradition/Honor, and the opener is only useful when you should not be opening Honor. I really cannot think of a game where you could not get at least the same outcome, often better, with Tradition or Liberty.
The other issue is Warrior Code: the +15% production to melee units is painfully narrow since this does *not* apply to Horse units. The free Great General is nice but it is not particularly difficult to generate the first GG with combat.
Proposed changes:
-I'm not 100% sure what to do with the opener but it needs changing badly. I would suggest something like "free Barracks" but that opens the possiblity of "dipping" 1 policy into Honor and getting too much from it. I would also support moving the -15% unit maintenance from the now-defunct Autocracy tree to the Honor opener.
-Make Warrior Code's +15% production either apply to all military units or at least also affect mounted units.
5)Planes.
Spoiler:
This is most egregious one in my opinion. As MadDjinn has explained, the AI has a weird dislike for Fertilizer. It tends to just go hard to Flight and ignore Artillery, which creates a very stale mid-game because you are also forced to go Flight if you don't want to get slaughtered. The problem becomes worse if you didn't get Oil; the first counter for planes that doesn't take a resource is Anti-Aircraft Guns, which require Flight *and* Ballistics. This force you to not only go Flight yourself, but also down through Dynamite, Raiload, and everything else down there, THEN you can start hard-building your 250 hammer AA Guns from scratch. AA Guns are very lethal against planes, yes, but there needs to be some answer to them that becomes available in a reasonable timeframe. Pikes, Anti-Tank Guns, etc. all come before or shortly after the unit they counter, not 6 or 7 Industrial/Modern techs later. It also makes the game pathetically easy if you happened to get Oil and the AIs didn't; even a Deity AI army is shredded by Great War Bombers if there's no Triplanes to deter you.
Proposed Changes:
-Knock Great War Bomber attack strength down slightly. I'm not sure what number is good, but as-is they do a significant amount of damage even to units that have Cover I/Cover II.
-Make AA Guns more accessible. IIRC there was a change a while back that made Ballistics require Railroad, the idea probably being to get the AI to go through Fertilizer. It had the side effect of making AA Guns a massive pain in the ass to get.
You deserve a sticker if you read all my rambling crap.
Not rambling. You presented your ideas coherently and in an easy-to-read format. Like I said above, I think the Swordsman needs a minor boost. Lancers are awful - worse than Swordsman for sure - but I've grown so accustomed to not using them anyway that I don't care if they stay the same
Great post. I completely agree with the swordsman & planes point. AAs should come about the same time as air units, perhaps a bit weaker than they are currently to compensate.
Swords really suck! They have a hard time attacking cities or fighting pikes. Pikes already come with very good techs which makes them much more useful. It is actually better to just sell some of your iron & build pikes instead of swords unless you plan to go for full warmongering.
I prefer giving swordsmen a +25% city attack bonus and Cover I from scratch which combined with iron revealed at bronze working would buff then enough.
If knights and cavalry were a bit more dangerous (they are alredy good but still inferior to muskets and crossbows) then the need for lancets as a contra unit would increase. maby knights and cavalry could get 15% weaker but start with a 30% attack bonus making the pure attack units, this combined with lancers starting with an extra sight and slightly higher anti mounted bonus would make them useful.
I wish there were more threads like this. All of these suggestions are good, and I hope we hear a little more about balance changes the devs are considering, considering how important they are.
I wish there were more threads like this. All of these suggestions are good, and I hope we hear a little more about balance changes the devs are considering, considering how important they are.
I don't know how often if ever devs consult fans at a detailed degree, but if there was ever a time to do it this thread would be the one.
A lot of stuff here that fans seem to agree upon. But I'll have to hold my tongue to see how the game is rebalanced. Who knows, maybe these complaints won't be a problem with BNW?
I wish they'd switch dynamite and railroad in the tech tree. Artillery comes way to early, and for historical purposes. The civilopedia says the artillery units in game are based on those seen in WWII, and the railroads seen in game are from the mid 1800s.
I agree that there should be an unbroken path of non-resource units. The Renaissance is when things get messy so I'd fix that first.
Non-resource (Attack)
Archer > Composite Bowman > Crossbowman > etc. (no changes to this line)
Catapult > Trebuchet > Cannon > etc. (no changes to this line either)
Horse to Oil resource (Mobile Attack/Flanker)
Horseman > Knight > Cavalry (no resource, +1 move) > Anti-Tank (Boost speed +1 and motorize) > Helicopter
Iron Resource to Oil resource (Heavy Attack)
Swordsman > Longswordsman > Lancer (no resource, -1 move) > Landship > Tanks...
This change would acknowledge a few things that occurred throughout history. By the time Calvary and Lancer's came into prominence, Horse populations were so widespread that a specific "resource" was no longer needed. They were merely a holdover for mechanized travel. Furthermore, anti-tank guns were often motorized in order to get them placed before the tanks arrived.
Overall, these transfers would create a single non-resource melee line which could be followed through the entire game which is the big complaint. Furthermore, battle tactics become much more in tune through the entire line also. One final thing I'd like to see changed, but doubt the possibility of would be as follows...
It's pretty clear that all problem analysis and solution suggestions are quite similar to each other, just look at the various threads in this forum. So yes, good suggestions
I wish they'd switch dynamite and railroad in the tech tree. Artillery comes way to early, and for historical purposes. The civilopedia says the artillery units in game are based on those seen in WWII, and the railroads seen in game are from the mid 1800s.
I agree. The artillery is a tad bit too powerful to come this early. I very often weasel out of wars that don't go to my liking by beelining to the artillery tech...
On the topic of swordsmen... I would prefer if iron would give a kind of upgrade to your units instead of being a requirement. (E.g., you could have iron spearmen/swordsmen/pikemen which would be stronger than the regular ones). In this paradigm, Copper could also become a strategic resource, albeit with weaker bonuses.
We know that some of these (liberty change) are not going to occur, sadly.
I believe the genesis of the military problem is in the entire strategic resource system. Requiring a strategic resource for catapults, or, swordsmen only with G&K changes, defines one player cannot make war if those resources are out of reach. Yet catapults for all, leads to odd looking war parties. And as you say, swordsmen are pointless as it is.
Obsoleting warriors for swordsmen is an annoying bottleneck that makes no sense, and the limit of horses is something the game handles like this: Some UUs don't require the strategic resource, which is just wonked. They can have many UUs, and have possibly a ton of these horse archers despite never obtaining any horse land.
But so long as the game just counts up the strategic resources 1-by-1, there's no way out of this situation. Egypt and Attilla can amass horses.. that.. they don't use. Caesar and , whoever... Harun, can twiddle their thumbs with their game just removed by the city placement. It needs a visionary change that might be beyond Civ V.
Agree with much of what you write here. I would like to add a few thoughts:
@1: Iron should be revealed as early as Mining. Horses come with Animal Husbandry which is first level tech. Iron Working should be moved back one level, and Longswords should come one level before also. You can cut Longswords down a bit in strength (from my experience, 19 seems to be a good number). Give Swords a +25 % bonus vs. cities. Also, do the following changes: Nerf Pikes but give them 100 % bonus vs. Horses. Nerf archers and/or give them penalties against cities. Give Sieges Cover I. Boost mounted.
@2: Lancers should be replaced by a move-2 unit between Pike and AT. There's no other sensible solution imo. Make the Lancer an alternative to Knight with a split upgrade path from Horses - more movable, less strength.
@5: Planes are pretty wacky. No stacking limit - WTH? AA Gun should become available with Flight, I don't care about history and all, we need an air unit counter that doesn't require oil. Make them unable to melee attack and capture cities if you want to make sure they are not overpowered, this way they become defense only. Same goes for SAM.
I really like the part about liberty. Before the collective rule/republic switch, I would go for the liberty opener and then CR (collective rule) to get my second city with out wasting my early game turns, and i could get this second city in 15-30 turns, depending. Now, I could potentially get it in 25-45 turns, but the bonuses from republic arent good enough to justify getting it second, so often i get citizenship, the republic, the CR to get my second city. By this time, other civs have 2 or even 3 or 4 cities!
On planes - agree. I dunno what they've said about the new airport building, but I'm hoping for a plane cap without it.
Swords - I actually don't think they're so weak, may +1 or 2 CS is all that's needed really. Though it might be good if iron was revealed a tech earlier.
Lancers - They're not very good, but pikes are very good, so it evens out. Plus two of my personal favourite UU's (immortal and pictish warrior) are on that line and keep their bonuses on upgrade, better lancers would make them even stronger on already good civs.
Liberty - Again it's not far off, maybe it'd be better to cool tradition off a little?
One to add - I think rationalism is too strong, and could do with a nerf. It makes the later game fly by before you get to experience it.
I think Iron Working and Swordsman are in dire need of change, but unfortunately we've seen the tech tree, and their positioning hasn't changed, and we've seen the Kris Swordsman's strength of 14, so Swordsman's strength hasn't changed either. It will still be just as bad in BNW as it is in G&K.
Lancers... actually all mounted units have the same problem:
They cannot effectively attack cities (penalty) and they cannot effectively harass melee units because of how zone of control works in this game. So when considering the need for hooking up horses, and that the mounted unit for a particular era is always more expensive than the melee unit makes them all pretty useless in terms of opportunity cost.
What they need is a buff - either the ability to ignore ZoC limits from passing melee units or receive an automatic flanking buff regardless of direction they attack a melee unit from.
The speed they have needs to be become a real strength.
I agree with Feyd's post with the new progressions above too.
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