Balance tile imps and city imps?

[MrBaggins]

Just to follow up... as mentioned, solving ICS by removing the city square would mean constant growth. You'd need to have some numerical method to parachute/stop growth as it got near and reached the max pop given the configuration and/or buildings.

You also remove the problem of hunger/starvation automatically, which reduces an important issue that players should be struggling with.

[Maquiladora]

I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say. Not surprsingly, since it's a rather confusing situation and I could've been clearer

I got it exactly, just didnt explain in one paragraph very well

Im particularly interested in how the changes would effect units Vs superior units, on the other hand that could just be a balancing issue.

Also Locutus can you move the combat replies to a new thread?

[Maquiladora]

Two reasons:
1) Because currently the city limit is the only reason ICS doesn't work, and if I'm happily out founding and conquering lots of cities, I find it frustrating when I can't continue simply because of some artificial and unintuitive limit. Making it actually harder to found new cities will make the limit feel more natural and sensible, not something that is artificially enforced on you against your will.

That will slow down more settlers, which already appears to be annoying for some players (Solver), as well as the city limit theres a risk of holding the player back artificially too much for little gameplay gains. You mention making it feel more natural to reach the city limit, but in the end the city limit is still there.

2) At present peaceful expansion is IMO too easy. This change will make it harder to grow fast in the early game, and force you to make the strategic choice of guns or butter. Currently I find that a (if not the only) successful strategy to expand my empire early on is to focus almost entirely on military units and mixing in Settlers whenever a city hits size 3 (or 2 or 4, depending on circumstances). City improvements are not worth building at all in the early game, so you're only pumping out units (and maybe the occassional wonder) anyway. In my experience this strategy is easily doable in the current game and allows you to have both peaceful expansion and development and aggressive conquest at the same time; you don't really have (to make) a choice.

If Settlers kill more pop (and city improvements are actually an attractive (but expensive) option early on), this will force you more to choose between focussing on developing your existing cities and founding cities peacefully, or on expanding through conquest with military units but building and developing your own cities less. Or compromise and do a little bit of both of course, but at the expense of efficiency in both areas. Either way, now you can't do them at the same time anymore and be very successful at both.

But will -2 pop really force me to choose buildings and peaceful expansion, instead of martial law units/explorers and settlers only? No matter how powerful city improvements become, settlers and units will always be more important until ive reached the city limit surely? When i reach the city limit all my cities now have extra martial law happiness (to help with empire sliders), units exploring around tipping huts/finding civs and now we put all cities on buildings.

We could make early units cost more in support, that would certainly slow down the early conquest. In their own ways both civ2 (small city shield support) and civ3 (low early empire gold support) both have very small limits in the early game to how many units you can produce, and it really pushes a civ into a strategy one way or the other.

[Solver]

Having defender always use the Defense value sounds like a good idea, but we'd need to play with it for a while to see how it really works. I believe it would lead to more balance in defending cities, something we've brought up in the other thread, defensive units now being really potent defenders, but again, without testing, no way to know.

City improvements are underpowered when we compare them to tile improvements. As it has been pointed out, getting a string of gold tile improvements is much better than building buildings in the city. If the early buildings provided a 50% bonus, then building Bazaars would certainly be a priority for you - and the choice of whether you want more units for an assault on neighbour or Bazaars for *way* more cash would exist.

As it is, though, you're making a mistake if you start building city improvements too early, as taking another city (possibly with ready tile improvements) is much more efficient.

[Maquiladora]

Well ive been playing a game with all +50% city imps and half resource/same PW cost tile imps and i think +50% is definately too much towards any city building. I think cutting tile imp resources in half works but buildings just own everything now. At the moment im half way through Fascism and ive got 7500 production, to put it into perspective ive got around 25 Cavalry, 25 Fire Triremes, 20 Knights and only 6% production support to units with only 23 cities under Fascism, its not just the Mills +50% prod. but the Granaries growing so quickly, worth 9 vanilla farms by themselves.

One thing i did notice is that the AI has SO many units now, its like it thinks its growing so well and producing so well it needs more and more units quickly to fit its unit support %, like scientist personalities are allowed 15% maximum unit support from prod., and warmongers 25% i think.

I started in alot of grassland terrain and i had to terraform alot of the inner rings to plains just to keep up, which makes me agree more that all combat should favour the defender. Ill try another game with something like +25% for some buildings and 20 for others, also improve terrain defence bonuses alot.

[MrBaggins]

What difficulty level is this game played on? Map size? # of civs?

Considering this.. if you've increased CI's from 10% to 50% bonus, and thats a 5 fold (or 400%) increase... which, I'm not surprised is a big production boost.

How is science going? Very quick?

[Maquiladora]

It was Impossible with Raging Hordes, Gigantic Neptune Map with 8 civs, science is bombing along too maybe 1.5 times as fast, i started rush building academies in most of my cities after i built bazaars.

[Maquiladora]

I was also starting to get crippling pollution, i was about 8 times higher on the pollution graph than everyone else, but still 8 times lower on military graph and i know we were all equal on science so they mustve been building units all over.

Anyway im thinking if city imps should really be more powerful, i mean CtP2 collects resources like no other civ game, so thats why they downplayed buildings and made tile imps so powerful, because of the way resources are collected "everywhere". I reckon make them totally equal in importance, otherwise theres no hard choices, the hard part is making them tile imps and city imps equal without totally destroying the later game with all the cumulative city imps.

edit: well thats an idea isnt it, make the next city imp obsolete the previous all the time, although im not sure if id like to see a University obsolete an Academy or an E-Bank replace a Bank, but it would be a heck of a lot easier to balance the game.

[MrBaggins]

Well.. its not surprising that we don't get the values absolutely right first time.

Any increase in CI bonuses will mean the cities be more productive, because we've done nothing with... support costs, building costs, science costs...

Halving the TI's might be offset by a 5% to 10% (so 15% to 20% basic CI improvement.) Even then we might need to nudge up costs just a bit, in some cases.

[Solver]

I think that 15%-20% bonus for CI with TI as they are would serve well. Yeah, increase the speed of production and science, but not too drastically - and should help the AI.

[Maquiladora]

Thats what i thought too Solver, because the AI doesnt know and wouldnt be able to know to choose when the best time is to build tile imps and which type to build, not as accurate as the player anyway without some scripting or something, so city imps are really the AI's best friend because it can choose to build that type of building if one city excels in a certain area, really easily.

Although IIRC at the moment the AI chooses to build a city imp in the lowest city, eg, an Academy in its lowest science city to improve science......

[SMIFFGIG]

i think irrigation should be included

and farms work in some way like in civ2 (with supermarkets)

[Maquiladora]

Ok for a next test ill try something like,

Granary +20% Food (x2 powerful)

Farm F5 200PW (was F10)
Adv Farm F10 500PW (was F15)
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These 2 city imps concern balancing commerce in other areas, such as terrain values and commerce tile imps, but commerce tile imps arent really that good, because scientists can do the work, and you can build farms and mines to make up for not rush buying, so it would seem commerce tile imps need to gain some value over food/prod tile imps, so...

Academy +20% Sci (x2 powerful)
Bazaar +20% Gold (x2 powerful)

Trad Posts - C10 400PW (was 250PW)
Ports - C15 550PW (was 350PW)
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Mills come fairly late after Mines so ive put them slightly less powerful for now, but say when you build Mills you dont need mines on Hills anymore, so Mills x1.5 effect and TI's x1.5 PW.

Mill +15% Prod (x1.5 powerful)

Plains/Grassland Mine - P5 450PW (was 300PW)
Hills Mine - P10 600PW (was 400PW)
Mountains Mine - P15 750PW (was 500PW)
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Im only playing upto the Renaissance so these are the TIs and CI's i need to test.
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I was also toying with the idea of mixing TI effects, such as Ports also give P5 or P10, im thinking of the poor civ that starts in all grassland and coastal area, they build settlers so slow its unreal, when really they should be florishing in grassland.

Thoughts?

[child of Thor]

Maq i just blasted through this thread - so i might have missed something, but what about making things LESS powerful than they are in the default game? Maybe we should be going for 0.5 modifiers all around rather than 1.5's etc?

We always seem to end up with TOO much gold/production/science/pollution etc?

Glad to see someone tinkering and play testing the values

he he i bet i've missed the point on this one

EDIT: Ok i did miss something - so just take the thumbs up for play testing

[Maquiladora]

Well the thing is city imps (CI) benefit all through the game, but tile imps only benefit to a maximum point when theyre being fully worked, and thats it. Im only starting to understand the balance needed, if the CI's are powerful they become too powerful, if TI's are powerful, they come to an end eventually, so in some ways i can see the decision originally to make TI's more important.....