What should be changed in a next patch - your opinions

Why do people want Hungary nerfed? It's a strong faction, true, but I do not find it any more OP than Nubia, Sumeria, Australia or Korea. If Hungary gets gutted, I want to see those civs knocked down a peg.

 

1. For Online speed only give 3 iron/niter/etc.. from mining a strategic resource, and 1 from a mine anywhere else. Give 3 horses with horses and 1 with pastures. Online/Multiplayer resources should just be a limiter not a deciding factor. The other speeds the current system is fine.

2. Bid with Diplomatic favor to host of the World Congress. Two winners each get to pick a resolution. If possible allow choosing between this an the current model.

3. Make Wood a resource. Make it a requirement for some units like Archers that currently don't need resources and building and repairing buildings.

4. Like everybody said keep working on AI, Map Generation, Bugs, etc...

 

There's a bit too much Ski Resort spam in the late game for my liking, needs to be pegged back somehow.

A good start would be not allowing them to be built on Desert Mountains.

 

1. Build Railroad to... option, so that I don't have to slowly walk the engineers across the map
2. Increase output of factories/PP/Power
3. Let you build districts/improvements over geothermal vents. Or maybe hide them until the industrial era or something. It just feels weird to have a tile that you discover in the ancient era that you cannot improve until the modern era
4. Decrease unit/building/district/pillaging/etc.. costs. Some of this might come with increasing power output, but seriously, I'm rocking through the eras, into the information era, science is coming every 4 turns (or less when I have a group of mines that I can pillage), but my cities are just failing to build things. My top 3-4 cities can build stuff in 5 or 6 turns, but every city less than size 15 or so just can't keep up.
5. And probably most important, Fix the damn AI so that they actually do something with their lands. It still pains me that we're in the modern era, and they have massive amounts of unimproved tiles. And I'm not talking about chopping or farming everything. I'm talking about an iron tile in the 2nd ring of their 2nd city still not having a mine on it. Luxury resources with no plantations. And where are their builders? Walking across the tundra to who knows where. Seriously, I bet the AI would be a level tougher challenge if they simply improved the tiles they had.
6. On a similar note, have the AI actually use their envoys. Yes, I'm a couple eras ahead of everyone else in my current game, but I don't understand how I can literally be suzerain of every city-state in the game. There's 3 or 4 opponents in the game - you think they each would have at least one city-state they tried to invest in.

I know they're not going to change the cost issues right now, sadly, and if they did, they'd have to totally rebalance everything else. But it is pretty insane how on a standard map, less than 200 turns in, I can pull in almost 1000 science per turn, yet not have built a single research lab yet.

 

I do not want the pillaging changes. Maybe the scaling value is too much?

Also ski resorts should be restricted to snowy and tundra tiles. I find the ski resort in the middle of desert a bit... jarring.

Planting trees should lower the CO2 levels.

 

On top of a few other things in this thread, I'd like to see more ways of gaining Diplomatic Victory points other than voting in the WC.

-Maybe modders can do it, but I'd love to see things other than natural disasters like diseases pop up where we can send aid to civs crippled by it.
-Maybe find a way to add peacekeeping into the mix where a civ could negotiate another civ from going to war/ending it.

 

Band-aid the jersey system by:
- adding an on/off switch as an option
- add jersey selector drop-down into singleplayer setup

Pipe dream would be to build upon the jersey system by:
- expanding the colour pool and introducing more unique, civ-specific colours like tyrian purple, prussian blue etc.
- improving existing colours to remove duds like Arabia's muddy dark yellow and Poland's washed out pink
- tightening the criteria as to when certain colours are considered too similar (Teddy's blue and Trajan's purple are not easy to mistake despite what the system claims)

 

Agree

 

Agree too.

 

- I like the idea of Ironman mode
- Early endings if you are winning easily

 

I was very surprised they are blockers. Wouldn't it make more sense to have them as valid tile for aqueducts? So you could place the water source on them for the bonus amenity instead of next to... The Bath especially portrays this. I'd be happy if you could improve them like floodplains, or place AQs, and maybe grant AQs a geothermal plant building like dams have the hydro plant. That would be fun to make players agonize more over city placement.

The complaint, as far as I can tell, centers around the fact that an early levy can be such a fatal knockout blow that there's little counterplay. Unlike warmongers, hungary doesn't have to build up its military; it need only secure a Suzerainty near the target, levy for a piddling amount of gold, (the bonus envoys keep others from stealing it easily) and then turn the 3 warriors into 3 swordsmen that all have 41str, 4 move. All you need is 1 envoy and Amani - so you can pull this stunt before players hit t1 governments and before they've even accumulated enough iron to build their own swords.

Especially if timed for iron working.
Raven King has a lot crammed into it:
-Move/Strength boost a la leaders with Casus Belli specific bonuses
-Free upgrades
-Envoy bonus for levy
(It also grants the Black Army UU)
This makes it very much a three legged stool that can stand on its own. I think the real hidden power is that the upgrades are free, which makes this so deadly early on. Persia can declare an early surprise war and get similar power units, so can India; but these civs have to build their army while hungary doesn't. IMO they could keep the no resource cost but keep the gold cost, or only reduce it 25%.
Later on, when players have mercenaries tech, they can be ultra cheap again, and the Foreign Ministry GP building still adds +4 strength, but it pulls back some of the crazy power hungary has in the opening turns.

Remember, Hungary still has the pearl of the danube ability, and thermal baths, and huszars; they would be a competitive civ abusing Black Army+levy troops even if the levies got no bonuses but movement.

 

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.

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Yup. Completely on this band wagon.

GS is great. Balance is much better than at any point prior ... but still not quite there. The above would be a great start.

Honestly. I think one good patch and, at least for balance, we’d be good.

 

Just further to this, earlier today I repeatedly tried to pillage a coastal Ski Resort with a Submarine unit and although it appeared to let me do it, nothing actually happened. There was no damage to the Ski resort and no pillage reward.

I suspect this is a bug, unless Ski Resorts are protected a bit like how Mountain Tunnels are.

 

Show all your resources both native and from trade on the trade screen. I am currently importing 3 dye from trade because I cannot remember what I have and when it all expires.

When in the build queue, if a building can be built in an unbuilt but scheduled district, allow that building to be added to the queue after the required district (like in CQUI)

When in the build queue, display the location of scheduled wonders and districts so that you know if a tile is already set to receive a build.

When an obsolete unit is encountered in the build queue, if the necessary resources are available to be build the upgrade, offer to build that, don't just skip it.

 

Levy is a great mechanic. It's like a whole bunch of you just discovered it for the first time after playing with a civ with a good bonus built around it.

It has never been hard to deliver a crippling blow with CS units. A halfway decent economy has always been able to support a levy and upgrade costs (just slot the policy), and if you're not building your own units you'll be able to support the resource costs too.

Hungary doesn't need a nerf. Stop calling for the devs to take away abilities which make a civ stand out and be fun to play.

 

I don't think their ability is problematic in terms of power. Heck, teddy gets +5 in most situations on all his units. It's more about how exploitable the timing is.
Having stronger swords isn't a problem; rome exists.
It's that hungary can get several boosted swords out the moment he gets iron working, which means instead of having to deal with some +5 units the target has to deal with several +21 units (warriors v levied swords.) Let's not forget hungary ahs their own military too.
The downside is how extremely aggressive the deity AI is at taking CSs early. But, of course, it's a different ballgame in MP.

The middle ages deathball when they wombo combo Foreign ministry (+4cs for all cs units, even when levied) and black army is perfectly valid IMO. By the medieval you can actually engage in some counter play to protect yourself - which is much harder to do if hungary nabs an early suze over a semi close CS right away (1 envoy for quest or first meet, send amani for suzerain. Levying gets them to 5.) At that point you're basically dead.

 

But you've laid out a perfectly doable counter to Hungary in your own post...conquer the city-states near you, or simply explore aggressively and make sure to rack up envoys in those closest to you. Hungary has a powerful bonus, sure, but it can be countered in several ways. Something that has several counters which anyone can do is not OP.

 

If a thing is so powerful that the best counter is "prevent it from even happening because if it happens you are screwed", isn't this a perfect destription of unbalanced thing? You could use this logic to defend almost all OP things.

Also, another definition of unbalanced: civ requires extra steps to counter that no other civ requires in such amount. Few other civs, if any, require "drop everything, change playstyle and run like madman just to survive". If every civ had such metaphorical atomic bomb in its arsenal then they'd maybe be asymmetrically balanced (everybody is op). But when you put crazy instant army generation ability next to civs which get stuff like "slightly more yield but in a different way"...

 

Yes, you can take over CSs nearby. But how fast can you do it? Can you do it in the time it takes me to research Early Empire+Iron Working? What if there's 2 nearby CS? The envoy from first meet just makes it easier- you can always just run GodKing and then snag mysticism to get the third envoy if they don't have an easy quest. The entire reason this doesn't work well on deity is the AI gets extra starting cities and military units. Humans do not.
Raven King levies get +2 move. They don't have to be that close. The only defense is conquer CS or rush amani yourself. After you have swords or horses yourself the threat is massively diminished to normal warmonger bonus levels.
I am not saying Hungary's ability is super OP for all eternity, just the edge case around swordsmen. I really like the ability and think it makes a great niche.

Exactly. I think Maori are a way worse game balance offender because there's no counterplay to maraes and toa. It's just pray to the map generator they get bad RNG. Middles ages hungary - tons of options to counter that. Turn 35? Ehhh...