Rebalancing Civ4: RtR Mod

[Ruff_Hi]

Actually, better idea: What if the Spy unit couldn't see units?

I thought of that too and it would be ideal but I'm pretty sure it doesn't work. Tile visibility is binary, there's no concept of a tile being visible but units not visible.

I like this idea. How do subs work? They are invisible except for selected units. As such, the interface must know not to show the unit if there isn't a unit that can 'see' it. Can we use that approach in reverse?

The main reason I am fighting for spies is that they are useful for finding cities and then using passive EP to watch the cities.

[Cyneheard]

The main reason I am fighting for spies is that they are useful for finding cities and then using passive EP to watch the cities.

Technically, with just Secretive they can still do that...if you know where the cities are through other scouting. So you can definitely use it to scout front cities if you buzz their borders with anything. They're not great at it any more, but they can still do it. For back-line cities, you've got to work at it or guess.

Interesting point about subs, but I'll leave that to T-Hawk to figure out if it works.

[Krill]

Corps are going to be nearly impossible to balance so that they work on every map and in every game. Civic balance isn't perfect either, although it's not bad. Different tile improvements (such as Cottages and Workshops: US/FS/Caste/SP) can be boosted by different civics at the same time, while one aim of the mod is to improve tile improvement diversity.

Proposal:

State Property: loses production bonus, down to -50% distance maintenance. Without corps, SP becomes the One Right Answer if it's unchanged; this was even the case in Vanilla/Warlords before the hammer boost. This keeps the interesting part of SP (the food boost) while reducing its power.

Swap Environmentalism with Free Speech. By putting FS in the Economy column, this limits the power of a hybrid cottage/workshop economy. You have to pick one set of big benefits, +1f for workshops/watermills or +2 commerce for the towns.

Environmentalism would then be in the Economy column. It would also buffed:
Environmentalism loses the health bonus and windmill commerce bonus, but it gives +1 fpt to farms and pastures. It is now a high-cost civic. Especially useful for a specialist economy, but not limited to that.

Also, the positions on the tech tree would be moved. Environmentalism will be unlocked at Astronomy, and Free Speech would be unlocked at Scientific Method. Astronomy because this moves some emphasis away froom beeling Lib for the free tech, provides choices about economic improvements (Astro for Enviro, PP for better cottages, Education for Oxford, Lib for FR) and provides another small boost to the heavily militarised bottom branch of the tech tree as well as being close to FS. SM is chosen because of it's proximity to SP in the tech tree so both towns and workshops would hit their respective peaks at about the same time, but is after the early ren era time for warfare.

Environmentalism could arguably be the "One Right Answer" in the Legal column, but both Vassalage (XP, works well with Pacifism now) and Nationhood (drafting, Espionage Economy) would still have their value, and Environmentalism would only be very powerful if you're running more farms than just your food resources. The Biology food bonus would also be removed. Biology would still enable dry farms to be built (T-Hawk, Biology has bIgnoreIrrigation = 1 in the XML. Is there a way to let this make dry farms provide as much food as wet farms?)

Tech changes:
Without corps or Environmentalism or the bonus food, Biology (3600 beakers) and Medicine (4500 beakers) no longer do all that much.
These would then be combined into a single tech: Biology, costing 3600 beakers. Genetics would now require Biology instead of Medicine.
Biology would then provide:
Can build farms without irrigation
Hospitals and the Red Cross
National Park

[T-hawk]

Corps are going to be nearly impossible to balance so that they work on every map and in every game.

Why in the world should they? The Great Lighthouse doesn't, among many other things.

The rest of your post sounds interesting, but once again at this point you're designing a whole new mod. Go for it if you want but I think that's drastically losing sight of the unmodded game.

The Biology food bonus would also be removed. Biology would still enable dry farms to be built (T-Hawk, Biology has bIgnoreIrrigation = 1 in the XML. Is there a way to let this make dry farms provide as much food as wet farms?)

Actually I don't quite think so. Yes, bIgnoreIrrigation and the food bonus are separate effects. The +1 food for Biology farms is actually defined on the farm improvement in CIV4ImprovementInfos.xml, just like the various workshop and mill boosts.

But the fact that "wetness" gives a farm +1 food is also defined there. I don't think the XML has a way to give the "wetness" bonus early but then turn it off at a certain tech. Nor a way to separately give +1 food only to dry farms.

<Type>IMPROVEMENT_FARM</Type>
<IrrigatedYieldChange>
<iYield>1</iYield>

(Note that farms actually provide +0 food by default. They only add any yield from wetness, resources, and Biology.)

[T-hawk]

Cyneheard, have you decided for sure what to do with corporations? Tuesday this week is my last free time to do any coding before Sunday if you're trying to start a mod PBEM then.

Coding a free executive for everybody who reaches a tech (like FFH's missionaries) seems pretty easy. Put it in FirstFreeUnitClass for each tech in the XML. I'll have the DLL code for FirstFreeUnitClass check if the unit has any corporation spread type, and if so, always spawn the unit (not only the first researcher).

Do we need anything else in the DLL?

[Cyneheard]

The rest of your post sounds interesting, but once again at this point you're designing a whole new mod. Go for it if you want but I think that's drastically losing sight of the unmodded game.

I'm not so sure that this is the case? The mod hasn't just been bugfixes (i.e., the No Espionage change), it's been a lot of rebalancing and reshuffling. Look at what we did to slavery and tile improvements already: those change the game far more than the civic swapping does. What all does this set of proposed changes do? (I'm still torn between what's a better idea)

- It removes corporations. That's a big deal, but not much more than totally changing how players would access and headquarter corporations.
- It moves two civics around on the civic screen and on the tech tree (One of the civics wasn't even really used to begin with).
- Giving farms +1f at Enviro isn't all that different from existing civic design.
- It collapses two techs into one. That's unfortunate, but when we cut parts of the game design away, that can create dead techs. No one wants another Paper in the tech tree.

And I'd also move the Genetics health bonus to Refrigeration, because it's lost a lot of its oomph without Cereal Mills. It's a little late for a tech to provide just one mediocre building and a small buff to naval units.

EDIT: Re cross-post: T-Hawk, see what you can do tomorrow, and I'll try to make a final decision tomorrow night? I'd like to see some discussion on how people feel about how either Krill's idea, or T-Hawk's, would work. If you can't make it work, then we'll go with Krill's thing, which I should be able to do.

[Krill]

Why in the world should they? The Great Lighthouse doesn't, among many other things.

The GLH doesn't provide food, hammers and culture from the ether, though. The issues with corps are that they provide a positive feedback mechanism (Sids, Cereal Mills), whereby if they provide gold via merchants they either don't cover the cost of the corps, they exactly breakeven, or they give more gold. If they do provide more gold than they cost, then they are the one right choice and food generation goes straight out of the window anyway.

As Cyneheard described:

3) Converting gold into useful stuff.
Gold --> Food is functionally unbalanceable. Output being converted into an input.
Gold --> Culture changes the Cultural Victory a lot.
Gold --> Beakers and Gold already exists. It's called the research slider, and Gold --> Gold is really silly. It either works (YAY! DO IT EVERYWHERE) or it doesn't (NAY! DO IT NOWHERE)
Gold --> Hammers already exists. It's called US, preferably with Kremlin.

The rest of the effects corps have are duplicating other parts of the game, so corps needs a redesign anyway. For instance, the changes you've suggested while interesting don't solve Enviro, the econ civics as a whole, the change to farms (they are now obsolete with food corps) or the problem of HQ gold generation when everyone will need to run the corp.

The rest of your post sounds interesting, but once again at this point you're designing a whole new mod. Go for it if you want but I think that's drastically losing sight of the unmodded game.

That proposal does the following things:

• Balances Towns and workshops (as it has done from the inception, and carries on the alterations started in BtS)
  
• Makes Environmentalism useful (that's needed anyway).
  
• Balances the Economy civics

That last one is an important point: before SP was almost always the one right choice, and the legal civics were not much better off (how many players went for Bureaucracy and then swapped to NH?)

[T-hawk]

Ok, you two are the bosses, I'm just a miniboss. I'd be happy to see just the roughest edges sanded down rather than entire new boards installed or nails removed, but it's your show.

Krill sounds pretty dead set on killing corps entirely. I do understand the problem - there's no middle ground, in any particular situation using a corp everywhere is either completely right or completely wrong. Maybe an answer is to raise the up-front cost (executive cost and spread cost), so it becomes a question of time payback horizon? A corp might always be profitable in the long term but do you have that much time?

Crap, I remembered that I don't have Visual Studio installed any more after a recent reformat. I'll have to liberate a CD from work tomorrow, but just installing it will likely take most of the evening.

[Krill]

FWIW, I think corps could work, but would require completely new systems to implement them. Stuff like corps give you free population per X resources, give you resources you need in place of gold, or functioned as civ 3 style city improvements: they give you a set bonus for a set gold cost, say +food% for negative -3gpt. Lots of options for implementations there, but all of that stuff would require a huge redesign.

[luddite]

Personally I think environmentalism is already OK, it just needs to come a bit earlier on the tech tree. Switching to environmentalism after you build factories and power plants could be really useful.