DESIGN: Terrain Values

Maquiladora · January 3, 2004, 18:18

I think some of the terrains definately need a look at because some of them make terrible locations (not just swamp but forest, grassland even) and some make much too good locations (plains w/ mountain river anyone).

First of all the 2 most common terrains for a civ, Plains and Grassland. These 2 need to be close in resources because it can mean life (plains) or death (grassland). Everyone goes for them because a) its cheap to terraform and b) it can be farmed, its also good for defence later on. So i was thinking

Grassland F10 P10 C10
Plains F10 P10 C5

Its a difficult one really, ideally we need a shielded grassland, but definately grassland and plains need the same Production and Food, because settler production is too important.....

Next is Forest, its quite common to start near forest, if not on it, so it needs something better. I think we should go the way of Apolyton Pack and give them more production, i think F5 P15 C5 is pretty good, because F5, because it needs some food but also some incentive to find farmable land, P15 to get the poor civ that starts in the middle of a forest a good start to get out of the woods and C5 because zero just seems wrong, especially if your surrounded by forest! Also you will need all the P15 when it comes to clearing the forest for farms.

Mountains, i think straight away they provide too much commerce (10), i mean if youre lucky enough to find mountains then youve got production there you shouldnt get 10 commerce too, Commerce 0 i think, so F0 P15 C0, maybe F5 not sure.

Coastline or "Beach" is mostly going to be near grass or plains so it needs commerce and some encouragement to build Ports not totally ignore them! so something like F10 P0 C15 too radical? ....not sure.

Thoughts?

Martin Gühmann · January 3, 2004, 18:34

I think there is a trade off needed between plains and grassland, so one of them needs less food and the other more production and vice versa. Something like:

Plains: F5 P10 C10
Grassland: F10 P5 C10

For Beach I think it is a good way to increase the commerce value like that, I think even the default AI would use them for ports.

-Martin

Maquiladora · January 3, 2004, 20:17

I would say at such an early stage, that F5 P10 is much better than F10 P5, as a general rule, anyway thats my feeling but i will test all these things eventually. In the unmodded game, P5 for grassland is really bad for building more settlers, compared to plains P10 the gap is very big in expansion speed of more cities.

Well i tried to make Beaches and coastline generally mostly commerce because i took it away from Mountains and Forests. The only thing i am worried about for coastal cities is the production levels, it might lower sea unit activity.

Maquiladora · January 3, 2004, 23:14

Well ive been doing a little testing and as i expected production is really too low on the coast, i think ill make beach F10 P5 C10, and we could also make Ports give an extra P5 C10 for something like 600PW.

Commerce was also too high along the coast too, i had 90% of my cities along the coast and i was advancing much quicker than normal, so we can make beaches C10 as before instead.

Forests at F5 P15 C5 worked well, not too powerful, not too weak.

I used Grassland at F10 P5 C10 and Plains at F5 P10 C10 and i would say i still prefer Plains...... we could try Grassland F10 P10 C5, Plains F5 P10 C5, what do you think? Grassland is better for growth, but BOTH can produce settlers fast, which is the important thing.

edit: so to recap,

Grassland F10 P10 C5
Plains F5 P10 C5
Beach F10 P5 C10
Forest F5 P15 C5
Mountain F0 P15 C0
Hills F5 P10 C5

MrBaggins · January 4, 2004, 00:01

I always liked the complimentary nature of Grassland and Plains in CtP2... that one terrain was not necessarily optimal...

If Grassland were 10/10/5, then it would be automatically the best terrain for cities, which I'm not sure I like...

Perhaps we can use another method for early progress; perhaps make settlers cheaper under tyranny... a government that you are working to get of.

A government on plains wouldn't extraordinarily benefit from this reduced cost, by building hyperfast anyway... since settlers still cost a pop point.

MrBaggins · January 4, 2004, 00:11

How about...

Grassland F10 P5 C10
Plains F5 P10 C10
Beach F10 P5 C10
Forest F5 P15 C5
Mountain F0 P15 C0
Hills F5 P10 C5

Thus there is a reason for each of Grassland, Plains, Beach and Forest to be... even after the start of the game...

Mountain and Hills should keep their beneficial production TI's, so they are the optimal production terrains later in the game...

Maquiladora · January 4, 2004, 00:31

I always liked the complimentary nature of Grassland and Plains in CtP2... that one terrain was not necessarily optimal...

If Grassland were 10/10/5, then it would be automatically the best terrain for cities, which I'm not sure I like...

Its not just the production of settlers that makes Plains in the unmodded game better, but later in the game its the overall production generated on a plains empire, you can build so much more PW, support more units etc, so much so its better to terraform all grassland to plains then build farms on it.

We need to make grassland as effective at churning out raw production as plains..... somehow, or totally reform the game so more cities, faster, isnt always better.

How about...

Grassland F10 P5 C10
Plains F5 P10 C10
Beach F10 P5 C10
Forest F5 P15 C5
Mountain F0 P15 C0
Hills F5 P10 C5

The extra commerce of grassland is tempting but again i can produce more cities with plains, along with exploring/martial law units faster.

Maybe we arent approaching this right, its the "more cities, quicker is better" thats breaking the terrain balance not the terrain themselves.

Tamerlin · January 4, 2004, 05:16

Originally posted by Maquiladora

Maybe we arent approaching this right, its the "more cities, quicker is better" thats breaking the terrain balance not the terrain themselves.

I agree with you, the terrain values being the same for everyone, the difference will be made through the ability to manage your TI and your capacity to grow as quickly as possible. As far as I am concerned I think that the terrain values of the SAP2 are good.

Food/Production/Gold

Forest 5/15/5
Plains 10/10/5
Tundra 5/5/0
Glacier 0/0/0
Grassland 15/5/5
Desert 0/10/5
Swamp 5/5/5
Jungle 10/10/5
Mountain 0/15/5
Hill 5/10/5
Brown Hill 0/10/5
Beach 10/0/10
Shallow Water 10/0/10
Deep Water 10/0/10
Water Volcano 10/20/10
Water Shelf 10/5/10
Water Trench 5/10/10
Water Rift 5/20/5
Brown Mountain 0/15/5
White Hill 0/10/5
White Mountain 0/15/5
Water Kelp 15/0/10

MrBaggins · January 4, 2004, 11:02

To flatten out the effect of production, what you'd do is:

* Increase the "city" production bonus for each terrain
* Increase the workday divisor

This will flatten the effect of terrain on the cities production. Production CI's also gain slightly against terrain production too. If you proportionately increased production TI's, then they'd be uneffected also.

Its just a ratio thing.

This will, however mean that its the number of cities that you have which determine your strength... it rewards ICS or REX behavior.

The basic culprit for this IS the city square bonus. Thats why the more cities = better problem exists.

To solve it, you'd remove all city square influence... set it to the inverse of the terrain its on... so if Grassland's basic value is 15/5/5, you'd need the city bonus to be -15/-5/-5.

The basic terrain values need to be increased significantly to offset the loss of the city bonus, to bring them up to

Growth, production and income all become directly proportionate to city size.

Growth is increased in value directly, because more growth directly equals more production and income.

It also causes huge early game problems... the difference between production and science for a size 1 and size 2 city are significant... a size 2 city is potentially double the production, etc... You have to reduce all early game values to suit the system.

A system without the city square/ICS, magnifies the effect of locational luck. High early growth = a massive advantage.

The solution of an empire size cap, and a distance cap combined with a flatter production model (see top) work very well in combination. It should all serve to keep the number of cities everyone has closer AND make the differences less profound in terms of production.

BTW... is there any reason why we always use multiples of 5 for these terrain values? Its not like the final empire and city bonuses end up in multiples of 5 for user friendliness. Having a mid value like 7 or 8, or 12 or 13 might be useful...

Maquiladora · January 4, 2004, 12:24

We could work out to make it equal if, a grassland city with all mines was equal in production and food to a plains city with all farms.

I tried this with,

Grassland 10/5/5 - City Square gives extra 10/15/15
Plains 5/10/5 - City Square gives extra 15/10/15

Mines P5
Farms F5

Both cities are identical in every area, i mean it solves the problem and still lets the 2 terrains compliment each other.

The only thing i would say is, Slave Labour (mines) comes a little later in the tech tree, whereas everyone starts with farms (Agriculture).

edit: By the way im not suggesting this will be the only strategy, im just trying to make way for them to be exactly equal, i mean the plains player may choose to build all mines instead, or some trading posts the grassland player.

I dont know why i posted a picture really, its fairly obvious.

Tamerlin · January 4, 2004, 12:59

Your values sound good to me Maquiladora but I have just thought of another problem... if you even the terrain values you eliminate the drive to find valuable lands for your nation which is, IMO, an important part of any "civilization building" game..

Maquiladora · January 4, 2004, 13:14

Well as you can see im not going to even them really, its still the choice of the player to decide, he might build mines, he might not.

I think its important we even all city squares at least, this will balance the start of the game, to let everyone get a (more) equal start but will still mean a good player improves his land better.

Maquiladora · January 11, 2004, 14:29

I made a whole list of values if anyone is interested.

terrain - food/prod/comm

grassland - 10/5/5
plains - 5/10/5
hills - 10/10/5
mountains - 5/15/5
forest - 5/10/10

jungle - 5/5/10
swamp - 5/5/5

tundra - 0/5/0
glacier - 0/0/0
polar hill - 0/5/0
polar mountain - 0/10/0

beach - 10/5/10
shallow water - 10/10/5
water deep - 15/5/5
water volcano - 0/20/5
water shelf - 10/15/0
water trench - 10/10/5
water rift - 5/10/0

kelp - 10/5/10
reef - 10/5/15

desert - 0/5/0
desert hill - 0/10/0
desert mountain - 0/15/0

Grassland and Plains still have their basic differences, they also have 5 less TOTAL resources allocated, i did this because grassland and plains are flexible with different tile imps and above all they accept farms, but a forest can only accept commerce imps, so it has high total resources, because it cant be improved easily. I was thinking about forest 5/15/5 but i thought the prod was a little too much that was in SAP.

To compliment those changes, mines and farms should cost the same and have the same effect, except mines +5 prod and farms +5 food, obviously. Im not sure if 5 is enough, because you may just wait for Adv Farms instead, but mines hopefully will be worth it.

I knocked 5 off Beach production to make them less all-round too. I was thinking along with that Ports could be made something like +0/+5/+10, so they give prod as well as commerce.

Just little bits here and there, but i was surprised how much little changes in only terrain affected the game.

Martin Gühmann · January 14, 2004, 09:16

So Maquiladora are these values now tested very well so that we can add them to the altered source pack?

-Martin

Maquiladora · January 14, 2004, 14:50

Tested? Yes. Very well? No

I dont have much else to say as of now, but testing is still moving forward and things evolving all the time, well as much as things can with a single tester.

Peter Triggs · January 14, 2004, 15:45

Maq, while you're doing this, another thing to look at (

) is the 'score' parameter. The AI uses this to decide where to place it's cities. The bad terrains have low scores:

tundra - 0
glacier - 0

polar hill - 10
polar mountain - 10
swamp - 10
desert - 10

desert hill - 20
desert mountain - 20

The highest score is given to beach (90) so that the AI will build coastal cities and hence ships. (So I think you should leave beach production at 10. The AI will build cities next to beaches anyway, so lowering their production penalizes it. In fact you could even try increasing it to 15.)

We all know that the AI builds cities in some pretty strange places. It occured to me that one way to prevent this might be to lower the scores for the bad terrains, i.e. we give them negative scores. What do you think?

Maquiladora · January 14, 2004, 16:23

I was only testing my own performance on this terrain to see which was the absolute best way to play, then alter the terrain more and more to force me to choose a strategy every game, rather than playing the same "plains" game everytime.

Also the AI is lacking in other areas i didnt think it was worth it to look into yet.

My general feeling is that AI should stay well clear of bad terrain upto to a certain amount of turns, just like a human would. So if after searching for 10 turns through Jungle, it doesnt find Plains or Grassland, it should settle anyway where its "seen" the best place, like next to coast or mountains. Doesnt something like this already happen?

Do we know the absolute maximum terrain score you can give?

As for beaches, you certainly have a point i didnt consider, i admit most of the time i was looking from a purely human v human point of view, and the best ways to force different strategies from game to game. The only thing i dont like about your suggestion is that it makes beaches the strongest early terrain again, and i really wanted to eliminate any "super terrains".

Beaches can accept Nets and Ports, so they dont increase in production ever (using current tile imps), so there is a point for increasing natural prod on beaches..... another way is to lower natural production on beaches and give Ports a production bonus...... the latter seems more realistic IMO, and eliminates the "super terrain" factor from beaches. It also pushes the player to improve their own land, which seperates more the good player (placing good tile imps) from the lucky player (getting good start land... plains/beach).

Peter Triggs · January 14, 2004, 18:27

Doesnt something like this already happen?

Probably, but I'm not sure. I know where this stuff is, and I've glanced over it, but not in any detail. It seems to evaluate either the entire map or a portion of it, and make a list of settle targets. I don't know how often it does this.

Do we know the absolute maximum terrain score you can give?

When it evaluates a location, there's a radius involved and the maximum score will depend on how big the radius is. But I don't know about the details. OTOH, in each default strategy there's a MinSettleScore of 600 and it won't settle in locations that score less than this.

give Ports a production bonus

I like that idea. The only problem is that with the present system I don't think it's possible to get the AI to build both Ports and Nets on Beaches. Hopefully, though, we can tweak it so that it builds Ports on Beach tiles that are adjacent to its cities, but Nets on other Beach tiles.

Maquiladora · January 14, 2004, 18:38

When it evaluates a location, there's a radius involved and the maximum score will depend on how big the radius is. But I don't know about the details. OTOH, in each default strategy there's a MinSettleScore of 600 and it won't settle in locations that score less than this.

Ah yeah thats it, that sounds like we can tweak that pretty good if we know how big each radius is.... what im worried about is how to control the AI's overlapping of cities, even on the second border in some cases, maybe we can somehow tell it not to count the terrain "score" if its inside another cities border...... I know we can increase the settle distance, but thats too random IMO and wastes alot of good land if its too high, of course this wont matter as much if trade goods give extra resources etc etc... anyway this is all off topic ramblings.

Tamerlin · January 15, 2004, 08:36

Martin, even if these new values are tested and seems to improve the game do you really think they should be included in the source pack?

As far as I am concerned it would be better to consider them as an optional mod...

Martin Gühmann · January 15, 2004, 12:32

Originally posted by Tamerlin
Martin, even if these new values are tested and seems to improve the game do you really think they should be included in the source pack?

We want to improve the game and something can be very easily improved by just altering the text files therefore we have to include also text files in the alterd source pack, and by the way Activision's patch also contains altered text files.

Originally posted by Peter Triggs
We all know that the AI builds cities in some pretty strange places. It occured to me that one way to prevent this might be to lower the scores for the bad terrains, i.e. we give them negative scores. What do you think?

Alternativly we could increase the other values, but I think the negative values are a better idea so that we don't need to alter the Settle Score in the strategies.txt if we don't need to do anyways.

-Martin

Maquiladora · January 15, 2004, 14:08

Originally posted by Tamerlin
Martin, even if these new values are tested and seems to improve the game do you really think they should be included in the source pack?

If they improve the game, why not?

As far as I am concerned it would be better to consider them as an optional mod...

What dont you like about the changes Tamerlin? Or is it just the fact you dont want any terrain changes? Im open to suggestions.....

Tamerlin · January 15, 2004, 15:26

Originally posted by Maquiladora

If they improve the game, why not?

Because I think that the patch should be as close as possible to the original game. I can only say that I am happy with the SAP2 values.

What dont you like about the changes Tamerlin? Or is it just the fact you dont want any terrain changes? Im open to suggestions.....

I can't say I don't like your terrain value changes as I would have to test them before giving my opinion. I just think that such changes can modify the rythm of the game or unbalance it.

We all know that the real problem is the AI that is not able to use the terrain properly, changing the values does not solve it.

What I really like in the SAP2 and the other mods is that, thanks to modswapper, they are optional. To change the values in the sourcepack is to change them permanently without giving any choice to the end user.

Maquiladora · January 15, 2004, 16:04

Originally posted by Tamerlin
Because I think that the patch should be as close as possible to the original game.

It depends which # patch we're talking about. Testing these values i had in mind for a #2 sourcecode patch, something like

#1 Fixes Bugs adds new SLIC thingys and stuff that the 1.1 patch included etc etc, generally "under the bonnet" stuff.
#2 As #1 + Fixes all imbalances in gameplay (hopefully) <<
#3 whatever

Tamerlin · January 15, 2004, 16:10

Originally posted by Maquiladora
Testing these values i had in mind for a #2 sourcecode patch, something like.

Then I can only agree with you.

#1 Fixes Bugs adds new SLIC thingys and stuff that the 1.1 patch included etc etc, generally "under the bonnet" stuff.
#2 As #1 + Fixes all imbalances in gameplay (hopefully) <<
#3 whatever

This is exactly what has been already discussed earlier in another thread and this is a planning I agree with. I would also like the #1 patch to include changes in the AI so that the patched original game is at least as competitive as the SAP2.

Maquiladora · February 15, 2004, 00:26

BUMP

Okay after "some" testing and abit of thought ive come to the conclusion my changes were far too drastic, far too drastic in fact they totally unbalanced the rest of the game, and would only create even more balancing work in other areas (tile imps, buildings etc), which is bad.

Two changes i would stick with though,

Forests - Were 10/5/10 - Recommend 5/15/5.
Dale (or whoever had the idea for this) was right. For reasons ive mentioned before about the difficulty in improving Forests with terraform for a long time, i think they should contain mainly production and NOT commerce, because production is far more important than commerce is BEFORE you have the ability to terraform forests. Which makes forests a nightmare early game, when they should be a lush natural resource and a good defence.

Beaches - Were 10/10/10 - Recommend 10/0/10
Another one from SAP. As mentioned the biggest impact would be on sea units but i think beaches are too good for what they ARE. They are sand, seaweed, shells, used condoms, broken glass and surf. If we want to improve production on beaches we can make Ports give production aswell as Drilling Platforms, both of which are more realistic too IMO.

My only concern with this is, when to build Nets instead of covering your whole coastline with Ports. ANY production improving TI's on the right terrain (ie mines on mountains) is essential WHEREVER you can put them, which isnt good news for Nets and other sea TI's. Im not sure if this can be balanced by TI cost or not, yet.

tyrantpimp · February 15, 2004, 10:03

Whatever you do to tiles i hope its an option the player can turn off or on. Not everyones so eager to see that tweaked. . .

MrBaggins · February 15, 2004, 10:14

Can you explain any benefit to NOT tweaking these, by default, though?

Whats so wonderful about the originally designed settings?

They had definite and absolute downsides... like.. for instance, making forest a very bad initial building site.

The AI is typically the one who gets hurt by this, and it thus makes AI improvement more difficult.

tyrantpimp · February 15, 2004, 12:51

NOpe cant explain it in anyway but ive never had any problems with terrain. But i still am not convinced of the reasons why it needs tweaked.

MrBaggins · February 15, 2004, 13:06

Have you played the Apolyton pack? Do you dislike the Apolyton Pack? Are the terrain effects better or worse than default?

If so, can you explain how the changes in the Apolyton Pack adversely effect your play?