I love GS. This isn't a hate thread. I just think it could be tweaked a tad for everyone's benefit.
Changes I would recommend:
COMBAT
Everyone has already talked about pillaging. I appreciate what FXS aimed for, but I think the ultimate culprit behind why this is so hard to balance is that we can get science and culture from pillaging. If pillaging things gave primarily gold, then this would be much easier. For example, perhaps strategic improvements give some of their resource; most improvements give gold; buildings give gold; the base district itself gives the yield. This even opens up the option to directly counterbalance pillaging with troop maintenance if we find eg light cav are too efficient at it.
Ditto on making the yield scale on your target instead of you.
Toa and Varu auras should lose stacking.
Toa IMO are generally way too strong for their cost. I know from the FL/gameplay demo that the devs thought that maori would settle in all these disparate places so they needed some way to hang on. So they gave them Toa. But Toa are the best classical units by a mile. IMO they should drop the strength to 35/36. Varu cost the same as Toa and have the same combat stats, but toa can also build Pa and get buffed by Oligarchy. Plant a Toa on a Pa and they are never coming off. Maori defenses will be just fine.
The skirmisher seems too fragile to me in its melee strength. I would be temped to suggest 25 or 30 melee strength for them. Why? Because at 1 range they are just too vulnerable to medieval melee units like pikes and knights. Knights can almost 1 shot skirms.
Not having oil is too crippling for modern era units. You can only make AT crews. You have no ability to make artillery. At least let players make artillery.
Ensure that if I don't have access to a resource like oil, I can still train the previous unit so I don't discover replaceable parts+refining+steel and find out I literally cannot build units anymore.
Consider adding resources like iron as material requirements for later units so it stays relevant. Ironclads, battleships, and tanks could all be decent options.
ECONOMY
Power plants are completely overshadowed by the coal plant in most cases.
@acluewithout is on my bandwagon. Give factories the coal plant's adj boost as local production; make the aura +5 but require a 3 power load (no prod without power) and, additionally, set the coal plant to have a 0 production aura (but it could interact with Tesla), and move it back to steam power. Industrialization needs a little pacing. I would rather see factories act like a shipyard, then have power plants enable a 5 production aura, than the other way around. Currently you HAVE to build factories to get to the coal plant. This change justifies having factories take power for every instance even if no new cities are affected by the aura.
Recall: harbors have shipyards too, and neither harbors nor IZs have cards to boost their building outputs. You know what's strong? Being able to pull 28 science from a powered, zero adj campus under rationalism. 23 production from a
well placed powered IZ with the adj card doesn't sound so bad now, does it? (4 adj +4 card +8 shipyard effect +5 factory aura +2 workshop)
If we don't fix power plants, and GW, coal plants become the best, and no one will want to build ships requiring coal to preserve it for power generation; no one will build oil plants to preserve oil for their military.
Reduce the Global Warming impact of units, either directly through emissions/turn or indirectly by changing their resource requirements away from oil. The AI's standing armies will flood the world no matter how green they are with power, and we can't have them keep muskets to fight my tanks. There's no choice around modern military units; you simply have to have them.
GOVT&CARDS
Delete Raid card. It's like having a Chop card.
The new Professional Army card is crazy. They need to seriously reconsider how strong that card is. We have ways to accumulate material resources 50% faster; do we also need to have a card to make the usage 50% less? This just further pushes early military->upgrade over building units later.
Synthetic Tech. seems to be better than the other governments unless you're doing culture victory. Slots aside, the bonus to city projects is arguably much better than CL's contingent-on-two-districts +20% production; free power is extremely strong; the tourism penalty is completely irrelevant if you are going for anything that isn't CV.
I would return CL's bonus to 15+15% (like in the press build) and change Synthetic Tech's malus to -10% culture.
~~~~~