Rebalancing Civ4: RtR Mod

[T-hawk]

If a tech limit is used, then when is the best time to cash in on those trades? At the very least, that is a worthwhile mechanic worth exploring in a game or two IMO. Yes, you always need to use it, but the question is when and not a yes/no question like somethings.

This creates MORE tech alliancing, not less. Now you have to plan possibly dozens of techs ahead of time for who trades what to whom. You'll see games turn on somebody taking a trade for Horseback Riding and miscounting his trade slots and screwing over somebody else 200 turns later when he can't trade for Rifling. This already happens in SP vs AI games, via WFYABTA, and everybody hates that.

Making the maze harder to navigate isn't the answer. Some players and alliances will still manage it, taking even more time and talk and negotiation along the way. Some won't, and perhaps they would deserve to lose, but now you're jumping through hoops that are several layers away from actual Civ playing skill.

Is no trading really that bad? Has anyone in a no-trading game here seriously wished that trading was available?

[zakalwe]

IMO, the unbalancing thing about tech trading is that it creates beakers out of thin air. (It just takes two players to do it, and both of them receive free beakers). To compare, if there was a way for players to magically gain large lump sums of gold it would instantly be classified as an exploit.

The good things about tech trading are that it creates more opportunities for diplomatic interaction (at least this might appeal to some players), and that it allows for a non-militaristic way to catch up with a runaway leader. So maybe we should look at adding fun things to do diplomatically (I don't really have anything to suggest here), and try to create ways to catch up financially with a runaway. In other words, we need an effective system for creating "embargos".

I believe this could be achieved by increasing the relative importance of foreign trade routes. This would allow people to "gang up on" a leader simply by closing borders. There are many ways to tweak this; increasing the average yield of a trade might be best, but increasing the number of trade routes you get per city would also be an option.

[Krill]

This creates MORE tech alliancing, not less. Now you have to plan possibly dozens of techs ahead of time for who trades what to whom. You'll see games turn on somebody taking a trade for Horseback Riding and miscounting his trade slots and screwing over somebody else 200 turns later when he can't trade for Rifling. This already happens in SP vs AI games, via WFYABTA, and everybody hates that.

You simply can not organise tech paths that well in MP. It just doesn't work.

Question: can you change the colour of researched techs? Say, make it such that research techs are, say, blue? I doubt it but you never know.

Is no trading really that bad? Has anyone in a no-trading game here seriously wished that trading was available?

NTT games are, how do I put this. Boring.

I believe this could be achieved by increasing the relative importance of foreign trade routes. This would allow people to "gang up on" a leader simply by closing borders. There are many ways to tweak this; increasing the average yield of a trade might be best, but increasing the number of trade routes you get per city would also be an option.

HAHA. Trade routes are almost broken anyway - compare archi maps to pangaea maps. TRs are a component used to make up the shortfall of land, and increasing TR number and output simply makes city spam even better

[zakalwe]

I see your point about city spam, Krill. How about a research bonus that scales up with the number of civs you have open borders with (so we don't have to implement a separate "research pact") but which is independent of the number of cities?

[Krill]

Now that is an interesting idea, especially if it were tied to the number of cities belonging to your trading partner...

Also, why not make trade routes give beakers not commerce?

[T-hawk]

You simply can not organise tech paths that well in MP. It just doesn't work.

Players will make it work if they need to badly enough. And whoever does manage to line up trades far ahead of time will have a considerable advantage on whoever doesn't. Like a certain player in PBEM2 who is getting stoked to victory on getting fed techs by his neighbor.

Question: can you change the colour of researched techs? Say, make it such that research techs are, say, blue? I doubt it but you never know.

Should be possible. The game already saves what techs were researched (for No Tech Brokering) so it actually shouldn't be hard to look at that flag in Python and color it.

[Krill]

Players will make it work if they need to badly enough. And whoever does manage to line up trades far ahead of time will have a considerable advantage on whoever doesn't. Like a certain player in PBEM2 who is getting stoked to victory on getting fed techs by his neighbor.

Hmm, perhaps we are talking past one another: I'm talking about PB3 and PB 1 situations with 5+ players working together. 2 people working together, yeah, no problem coordinating provided you don't work with anyone else. But that was the entire point of the proposal, to limit the amount of teams working together on techs.

Should be possible. The game already saves what techs were researched (for No Tech Brokering) so it actually shouldn't be hard to look at that flag in Python and color it.

Interesting.

[Cyneheard]

Note: So a key problem is that Tech Trades are free. Well, let's put an economic cost to them.

Here's a proposal:

(2 and 3 really need each other, I think. The other changes are more separable)

1) Move Tech Trading to Paper, and Map Trading to Alphabet; Alphabet is still useful because of spies. Paper also gains 600b in base cost (to 1200b), transferred from Education (down to 1200b).

2) Fixed number of tech trades, both gifted or received, over the entire game. Each tech gift consumes 2 trades, one for each player. Set in advance at the Advanced Start box. We're going to want some sort of UI modification to allow players to access at least their own number.

3) Gold cost paid by the player who receives the tech. I'm not sure if this can be coded. However, here's how it would work (about 20% of the base cost of the average tech in that era):
Ancient Techs: Free to trade. You're consuming a tech trade.
Classical Techs: 50g each.
Medieval Techs: 150g
Ren.: 350g
Ind.: 800g
Modern: 1200g
Future: 1600g

Medieval: Banking, Civil Service, Divine Right, Eng., Feud., Guilds, Machinery, Music, Optics, Paper, Philo, Theo

Ren Techs: Astro, Chem, Constitution, Corp, Democracy, Econ, Education, Gunpowder, Lib, Mil Sci, Mil Trad, Nationalism, PP, Rep Parts, Rifling

Ind Techs: Assembly Line, Artillery, Bio, Combustion, Comm., Combustion, Electricity, Fascism, Fission, Industrialism, Medicine, Physics, Sci. Meth., Steam Power, Steel

Modern: Everything past that except Fusion, Genetics, Stealth and Future Tech.

The other option would be to have the tech always cost 20% of its beaker cost in gold, but I hate making people do math; if the UI could say "Trading Cost: X Gold" for each tech somewhere (preferably F6, barring that the Civpedia could work), then this would also be doable. Any takers on the coding???

4) I think under this, No Tech Brokering isn't a necessary restriction. Of course, people might put it into their diplo deals. Or want NTB on.

[Lord Parkin]

Is no trading really that bad? Has anyone in a no-trading game here seriously wished that trading was available?

Anyone who starts to fall behind and/or becomes unable to keep up with the pack in a game does. For instance, pretty much everyone else in this game lamented the inability to trade once I started running away with it. Admittedly that was an unusual case, but not that unusual. I managed to secure a few extra cities early through a carefully planned war and careful diplomacy, and things started snowballing from there.

The thing is, in a game that's built (for better or worse) around the snowballing principle, tech trading is about the only leveller to allow smaller civs to have a chance against goliath civs. Of course, it can make the snowball worse if a couple of big civs happen to get together, but at least it does give the little guys more of a chance in some games (even if it does completely mess up the beaker vs hammer count once mass trading begins).

[Cull]

So then civ games become huge diplomacy fests, less about MM, less about pure technical skill, more of who is the best negotiator, the most liked individual. If thats the game civ should be, sure I guess tech trading should be in every game. But civ is less of a game like Diplomacy to me, and probably closer to Starcraft(not that low level SC takes a lot of MM or macro skill, but still...)