Warlords patch

[DirtyMartini]

Interesting that the CS slingshot has been (nearly) eliminated. I'm wondering how popular that is going to be.

For a while it was my preferred strat, but it became a crutch and started to feel a little gimmicky, so I moved away from it. Seems that in order to safely and reliably pull it off, you needed a pretty decent start anyway, so it was mostly a good strat for making a good start into a great start.

Agree with Blake on the military academy issue -- I rarely built them before, but will now. I also like the move of reducing the requirement for the HE, now you don't necessarily need to spend that first GG on a lvl5 promotion. These changes add some depth to the use of GGs.

Good point regarding Augustus by Tau Ceti.

[Thedrin]

Frederick will be pretty nice as well; he joins Shaka in the class of "leaders with a cheap UB".

Frederick's UB is already cheap with coal.

[MasterDave]

I can confirm that the AI improvements have made the AI a lot tougher. The beta games I played on Monarch were struggles and I will only win one of four of them!

I played a lot with the new Expansive trait. The production bonus to workers only applies to hammers, so in order to benefit from the discount, you need to micromanage your cities to emphasize hammers. You do not get a whole lot of benefit from this for your first worker most of the time (the first worker came one or two turns sooner most tries, but when you have some mines built, you can pump out additional workers very quickly.

While the worker discount is not quite the game-breaker I originally thought it was, it does make expansive a legitimate trait now, more comparable with the favorites such as financial and organized.

[Solver]

Yeah, an important thing to understand is that +50% production doesn't mean building Workers in half the time.

[Diadem]

Hmm, I hadn't tried the new organized yet, but if the 50% bonus only works on hammers it's pretty useless. Workers are already cheap enough that their build-time is irrelevant late-game. It's early game that it takes long. A discount is significant for your first 3 workers, after that it's pretty much irrelevant. And your first three workers ... Are built mostely with food. In fact I think I'd prefer the +1 health over this broken worker build-speed improvement.


And why are some people calling organized a strong trait? It might be playable now that they get cheaper factories, but before that it was most definitely the most useless trait around. A 50% reduction on civic upkeep is simply not a lot. Even for a truly massive empire this is but a small amount of their total balance. The financial trait surely gives much more extra commerce than that 50% reductions saves you cash. And the turns saved as spiritual leader surely are worht more than that 50% reduction. The bonus from the organized trait is really only significant when your empire is so big that you've already won anyway.

[MasterDave]

Organized is very powerful for warmongers for one reason: The trait, and the cheap courthouses both significantly reduce maintainence fees to the point where you can conquer a largish empire early in the game without going broke. If your plan is to try to win Culturally or with a Spaceship with a small empire of five or six cities, then organized is the wrong choice. If you plan to grow beyond this, it becomes hugely powerful (especially with the cheaper factories now, nice).

[Thedrin]

Hmm, I hadn't tried the new organized yet, but if the 50% bonus only works on hammers it's pretty useless. Workers are already cheap enough that their build-time is irrelevant late-game. It's early game that it takes long. A discount is significant for your first 3 workers, after that it's pretty much irrelevant. And your first three workers ... Are built mostely with food. In fact I think I'd prefer the +1 health over this broken worker build-speed improvement.

I build my first worker with unimproved tiles. That worker will usually generate at least one square with a large hammer output. A 50% bonus to such a tile will build a worker faster than the vast majority of early game food tiles. The worker production bonus can give a much bigger boost to your game than the 1 health that was removed.

Having said all that I'd probably still choose the 1 health. Point is, I don't think the worker bonus is a bad one.

[Adagio]

Originally posted by alexman
AI city placement improvement as per Blake
Improved AI use of 'emphasize' buttons as per Blake
Pop-rush and draft AI improvement as per Blake
Worker AI improvement as per Blake
Improved civics AI as per Blake
Tweaked AI building priorities as per Blake

I'm looking forward to this

[JackRudd]

The difference between the worker bonus and the +1 health is that the +1 health is much more situational - it's better with some sorts of prevalent terrain, and worse with others, and you don't get much say about which you end up with.

[kiky]

Any changes to vassal refuse (red option) to trade tech to the master?

Organize is broken, I think.
Mehmed

This patch gonna be

[Blake]

Hmm, I hadn't tried the new organized yet, but if the 50% bonus only works on hammers it's pretty useless. Workers are already cheap enough that their build-time is irrelevant late-game. It's early game that it takes long. A discount is significant for your first 3 workers, after that it's pretty much irrelevant. And your first three workers ... Are built mostely with food. In fact I think I'd prefer the +1 health over this broken worker build-speed improvement.

The food thing does suck but there are ways to leverage the bonus, for example the whip always works properly and if you have for example a forested plains hill you can get 4hpt boosted to 6hpt which is the full bonus at size 1, or you can go for 4hpt at size 2 (ie grassland forest + plains forest) which is still a 40% bonus. The governor is quite good about figuring this out (not perfect... but he tries pretty hard).

And why are some people calling organized a strong trait? It might be playable now that they get cheaper factories, but before that it was most definitely the most useless trait around. A 50% reduction on civic upkeep is simply not a lot. Even for a truly massive empire this is but a small amount of their total balance. The financial trait surely gives much more extra commerce than that 50% reductions saves you cash. And the turns saved as spiritual leader surely are worht more than that 50% reduction. The bonus from the organized trait is really only significant when your empire is so big that you've already won anyway.

The power of Organized is first and foremost in that it has the best cheap buildings. The courthouse is a good cost to be cheap - buildings like the granary, barracks and theatre are cheap enough normally that being cheap isn't a huge saving - like they can be whipped from a size 4 city (a typical happy cap at higher difficulties). An organized courthouse, can be whipped form a size 4 city, versus a size 8 city for non-org - that's huge! Absoutely huge!

The lighthouse is also a cheap building, but that's a more useful effect as lighthouses are often needed in cities with abysmal production, cities which may struggle to grow to size 2.

The civics savings are nice too, usually equal to between 10% and 20% slider (20% would be when your economy is near-death), there ARE times when I look at my civic bill and wish I was organized. Organized cost savings have an interesting synergy with gold income from great merchant cash bombs, shrines and such - Organized can allow you to get away with not building gold multiplier buildings (or only in shrine cities).
The factory isn't really significant, this is true. Relatively speaking factories are not that expensive.

But I've never thought of Organized as being weak... it's just not that obvious how to leverage it and caters more to certain playstyles (many cities, high cost civics, concentrated gold etc).

[JackRudd]

Originally posted by Blake
it's just not that obvious how to leverage it and caters more to certain playstyles (many cities, high cost civics, concentrated gold etc).

Which is why vanilla Tokugawa was so powerful in the right hands (i.e. not the AI's). Organized is a lovely trait to have if you're continually running Police State-Vassalage-Theocracy and gobbling up everybody's cities with your cheap, souped-up units. Obviously this works rather well in conjunction with Aggressive. (It's probably pretty good in conjuction with Charismatic too - people are probably actually playing Napoleon now he's Cha/Org and not Agg/Ind. )

[Dis]

audio enemy warnings? sounds intersting. What I'd like to see is warnings after all the city maintenance popups (so I don't forget while I'm assigning production)

[kiky]

Audible or visual reminder on newly captured city become online would be great.
Needed this because almost always forgot to whip!

[Virdrago]

This patch Thanks, Alexman.

Also, thank you Blake, for your inputs in this.

Looking forward to this.