What would you cut?

[Kael]

I appreciate everyones feedback here. This was exactly what I was looking for and this thread has really influenced the next version. Check out the changelog to see how many fo the ideas were checked in and thanks again to everyone who offered ideas.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

I'm thinking that with the new changes it would make a lot of sense to cut both the Summoning and Arcane traits; move their abilities to be passive effects of Dimensional and Meta Magic spheres, which could simply boost other spheres and do not need spells of their own. It abilities should be scaled for each level, not be exactly the same as the current traits of course.


If you have to cut techs, I guess you could easily get rid of poisons (move assassins to deception), Tracking (combine with Hunting), and Optics (combine with Astronomy)

 

[tiberion02]

I agree that Blight is a great thing, in theory, but the AI can't quite comprehend how to deal with it. They dont use Water Adepts properly, and it seems in any game I play where the AC reaches 40+, I, and any human player really, get a distinct advantage post blight. The most crippling part of it is the spamming of deserts EVERYWHERE.

I was playing a regular game of Civ4 and got into the modern-nuke era. After doing some light nuking , it dawned on me. The AI 'understands' how to deal with fallout. Now maybe this has already been thought up and dismissed as unusuable, but can Civ4 fallout mechanics be converted to FFH2 blight mechanics?

idk, change the clouds of fallout and name them blight, and just rename the 'scrub fallout' command to something like, 'cleanse the blight'. Ditch the terrain->desert mechanic, and have 90% of the world get covered in blight possibly, in addition to massive s and in cities and population death. I know next to nothing about modding and dont know if this is doable, but hey, I'm just brainstorming for you.

 

[Blackmantle]

Tracking could go (or Poisons and Tracking unified and more expensive)

Divine Right and the High-Priests tech could be unified and made more expensive.


Elemental Resistance Promotions could and should go. Magic Resistance offers enough protection allready. Used to seldomly.
Clutters Mutation (More relevant if Mutation Changed to Chaos Tier 2.)


Immunity to Disease and Diseased could go with Contagion gone. (Marys Plague should not be so easily resistable).
Clutters Mutation. Diseased Corpses should perhaps inflict Wither instead of Diseased. Perhaps even Plagued.


Building Requirements for most non-national Units (perhaps save for Mages and Priests) could go and the Buildings be made more interesting (as oposed to cutting those Buildings. Which I would dislike.)
Higher Tier (perhaps 3 / surely 4) Building Requirements should remain imo. But the corrosponding Buildings be made more usefull overall.

Inns and Taverns could be simply fully unified in Effect (without cost change, allredy expensive enough. At the Tech Level of Inns (Trade)). For Grigori unify both special Tavern type Buildings and their effects at Trade.
Following that Change Perhaps Guilds and Mercantilism Techs could be unified. Expensive enough.

Removing Domesticate Elephants and changing as planned is superb imo.

 

[Nikis-Knight]

I was playing a regular game of Civ4 and got into the modern-nuke era. After doing some light nuking , it dawned on me. The AI 'understands' how to deal with fallout. Now maybe this has already been thought up and dismissed as unusuable, but can Civ4 fallout mechanics be converted to FFH2 blight mechanics?

That's a pretty good idea. It would mean making removing fallout/blight a worker mechanic, as well as a spell, but the spell could still be useful if the worker action took more than one turn (3, say).

 

[GoodGame]

I would not cut anything although the time from the beginning game to the actual good vs. evil conflict takes a long while reach.

 

[Ur_Vile_Wedge]

My 2 cents

cut

Chariots (or nerf them considerably, so that horsemen are not puny next to a chariot. )

Elephants of all sorts. Elephants are usually used as an "exotic" creature anyway. In a fantasy setting, why not some domesticated monster?

The City States Civic. Waay overpowered and unnecessary. I typically run it until civic unhappiness forces me to go republic. (Unless I build Pillar of Chains, in which case I usually run it forever)

MASSIVE lategame WW penalties. I think most of us would agree that the game thematically should build from a series of small skirmishes between hostile civs, to full blown armageddon with major units flying at the endgame. INstead, I find that around turn 350 or so, as soon as those war trumpets blow, every city in the world starvs because you got hit with 18 WW right off the bat :S Ideally, I would like to see some sort of mechanism that WW is inversely proportional to the AC, opening the door for some sort of lategame AC 100 slugfest where the good and evil civs are really just tearing into one another.


Genisis It's broken. Nuff said

As someone said earlier, maybe cut the gunpowder resource, and perhaps the Arqubuses (sp?) I agree that there needs to be a (relatively) weak tier4 unit that can be spammed out for late game defense, but the whole gun thing just seems jarring to me in a fantasy setting like this. Maybe for the dwarves only, but for everyone else I would vote no-no. Same goes for cannons.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

I believe I heard someone say that spaces take up more disc space than tabs. If that is true, I'd cut all the spaces from all the xml files, replacing them with tabs. Doing so also just seems neater, and makes it a little easier to copy and paste without throwing off the files organization (not that either spaces, tabs, or line endings actually man anything)

 

[TheCowSaysMoooo]

I believe I heard someone say that spaces take up more disc space than tabs. If that is true, I'd cut all the spaces from all the xml files, replacing them with tabs. Doing so also just seems neater, and makes it a little easier to copy and paste without throwing off the files organization (not that either spaces, tabs, or line endings actually man anything)

It's not that a single space takes up more disk space than a single tab, they're both a single bit. However, you can replace the four leading spaces with a single tab, which reduces the size from 4 to 1 bit. In those large xml files, especially those with several layers of indentation, the difference can really add up.

Granted, the XML is only 20ish meg of the total download, and probably only a meg or two will be saved by the change from spaces to tabs. Still, if you're looking for ways to trim up the size, everything helps.

 

[Cadaveres]

Maybe this is a quite strong change, but I would remove all the Combat I ... V promotions. Personally I love strategy and strategic decissions, and Combat I ... V promotions are always the "easy choice". They improve your unit in a quite versatile way, they will lead in the end to strong promotions (mobility, hero attack...) and in the end, if you don't know the units of your enemy, they will help you anyway.

I would love that units had to be specialized since the very beginning, so the "6 combat V axemen" was not a viable strategy anymore. I would preffer a "2 axemen against melee" and "2 axemen against archers" and "2 archers for defending the stack against mounted units" .

 

[TheJopa]

Okay, people, here is my call on what I'd remove:

Disciple unitclass.

For one, what is it supposed to represent? Few weeks ago I went through every unit in disciple unitclass and each can fit somewhere else.

Crusaders, paladins- melee
Tar demon - beasts
Rosier - Mounted
etc. etc.

And priest that would remain should be merged with arcane into one unitclass (Small units?). Then assassins could get bonus against that unitclass.
It seems weird that, i.e. crusader ain't melee.

What do you think?

 

[thewyrm]

Except that there are wonders and buildings that give exp to either arcane or disciple units that wouldn't make sense giving exp to both.

 

[xienwolf]

The importance isn't that they are somehow special compared to others, the importance is in the mechanics of things. As thewyrm points out, there are buildings which give bonuses to them, there are traits which give bonuses to them, and of course there are buildings/traits which provide bonuses to other things.

Plus, if you made Priests & Adepts on combat type, then it would be possible for Priests to learn new spellspheres if they can manage to acquire Channeling 1 by some other means. That would be a bad thing.

 

[TheJopa]

Plus, if you made Priests & Adepts on combat type, then it would be possible for Priests to learn new spellspheres if they can manage to acquire Channeling 1 by some other means. That would be a bad thing.

I see, however channeling I issue has easy workaround, just make all arcane units start with Arcane promotion, and priests with disciple. Code is already in - Brewery gives XP to all units with Dwarven promotion. Altar of Lun. would give XP to those with Disciple.

But I see your point.

But, could we still have crusaders as melee, monks as reckon (so there isn't anti-monk promo) etc. etc. just leave caster priests as disciples. I.e. those who wouldn't combat, or who would cast small offensive spells in combat.

 

[Mailbox]

Brewery gives XP to all units with Dwarven promotion.

Haha! That's where those 2 XP are coming from in all my Khazad games.

 

[onedreamer]

Lightbringers are pretty pointless.

That's only because their strength was unexplicably not increased to 3 when ALL other units were given a strength bonus. I've been reporting this several times in balance threads but got systematically ignored. So I just mod it every new release. I think they need to be balanced not removed.

Golden age from great people: This encourages the AI to hold onto GP and not use them very effectively.

Yeah, Golden Ages aren't really effective. Why don't we remove GAs alltogether ?

/sarcasm off

 

[onedreamer]

Okay, people, here is my call on what I'd remove:

Disciple unitclass.

For one, what is it supposed to represent? Few weeks ago I went through every unit in disciple unitclass and each can fit somewhere else.

Crusaders, paladins- melee
Tar demon - beasts
Rosier - Mounted
etc. etc.

And priest that would remain should be merged with arcane into one unitclass (Small units?). Then assassins could get bonus against that unitclass.
It seems weird that, i.e. crusader ain't melee.

What do you think?

You haven't explained WHY ??
There should be a reasoning beyond cutting something, not just cut for the sake of it or because it might make sense. I could say that Rosier and all the mounted unitclass could be moved to either Melee or Archery unitclass. Same for Recon or others. Why not merge Archery and Mages in one unique Ranged class ? I fail to see the point...

 

[Mailbox]

The ability for Great People to Lightbulb technologies.

While the entire concept of lightbulbing makes some sense from a real life perspective, it leads to stagnation of gameplay and the development of stale strategies. Since every GP type lightbulbs up a single tech path, this means that players can exploit this to receive the exact same results from every game.

Combine this with the much easier to get specialists and the hard to reach upper levels of the tech tree and you get a way for human players to rocket far in front of the AIs in particular tech paths.

Also decrease the bonus of the Academy and give other great people special buildings as well.

 

[xienwolf]

I'd second both of those for cutting. Lightbulbing should be seriously reduced if it cannot be simply cut altogether.

 

[Willgar]

I agree that Blight is a great thing, in theory, but the AI can't quite comprehend how to deal with it. They dont use Water Adepts properly, and it seems in any game I play where the AC reaches 40+, I, and any human player really, get a distinct advantage post blight. The most crippling part of it is the spamming of deserts EVERYWHERE.

I was playing a regular game of Civ4 and got into the modern-nuke era. After doing some light nuking , it dawned on me. The AI 'understands' how to deal with fallout. Now maybe this has already been thought up and dismissed as unusuable, but can Civ4 fallout mechanics be converted to FFH2 blight mechanics?

idk, change the clouds of fallout and name them blight, and just rename the 'scrub fallout' command to something like, 'cleanse the blight'. Ditch the terrain->desert mechanic, and have 90% of the world get covered in blight possibly, in addition to massive s and in cities and population death. I know next to nothing about modding and dont know if this is doable, but hey, I'm just brainstorming for you.

Fantastic idea but a "fallout" event is much less devastating then the current blight. If i am playing a non-evil race, i will try and kill anybody that is inching up the AC counter rather than have to deal with armagedon events.