DESIGN: Terrain part II - First Official Source Code Patch

[Maquiladora]

Terrain Values part I.

This thread is to give your opinions on what, if any, terrains are most in need of a change for the first official patch release, whenever that may be. Realism or Gameplay? Original or mod? Balance or imbalance more fun?

Right now my opinion is that we should definitely rebalance Forest from 10/5/10 to 5/15/5 (food/prod/comm) as it is in the Super Apolyton Pack 2. Forest had 5/20/0 in CtP1 and I think they changed this for CtP2 because they thought each terrain needed more commerce because a large portion of science is derived from commerce in CtP2 and not from mostly trade monopolies as in CtP1. Unfortunately this change made forest terrain useless, since scientists specialists in large cities create far more science than commerce improvements on forests. Low production on forest also encourage the player to terraform them to plains as soon as possible too. Another big plus for giving forest more production is because forest occur mostly adjacent to grassland than they do to plains, the lack of production on grassland compared to plains will be offset (somewhat) by more production on forests. You can also include Jungle here, since they only accept commerce improvements too I would change those from 5/10/5 to 5/15/0.

In the first terrain thread there is a big discussion about the clear advantage of plains over grassland to produce settlers faster and so more cities. I think the current values these terrains have are very intuitive to the user, grassland = high food low production, plains = average food average production, so it would probably not be the best way to rebalance them. Instead I think we should look into improving grassland via another part of the game. To quote Mr Baggins in the original thread "Its about PW in CTP2, not whales or cows.". Plains have more production so can produce more public works and so build more farms quicker, which at the end is better than grassland. So what if we reduce the effect of farms on plains or increase it on grassland?

CtP2 is mostly about production and how to constantly increase it, mountains are a massive part of this, if you have a good mountain chain you can sometimes double your total production with mines on all those mountains, which means you can collect public works twice as fast, which means your cities get farms faster, which means they grow quicker etc etc production can't be overstated. The power of mountains isn’t just the base values, but the bonuses you get with mines. I think mines should stay the same though. Original values for mountain are 0/15/10, in SAP2 its 0/15/5 I would say it should go even further to 0/15/0.

IMO these are the most important issues with terrain and I probably wouldn't change any others for a first official source code patch release.

As for the change of beaches from 10/10/10 to 10/0/10 I'll quote Mr. B again,

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.

As I mentioned above production is way too important all throughout the game, a human would look for forest near the beach to offset the lack of production, but you can't always expect the AI to do it, so as Mr B says the AI is the one that gets hurt here. Even if you had a production improving tile improvement on the beach it would still not cope beforehand. In the unmodded game beach has always been a safety terrain, if you start on an island with swamp you know that if you find beaches you have at least some chance, the change would kill that, and kill the AI even more in such a situation.

To sum up:
(original) new

Forest (10/5/10) 5/15/5
Jungle (5/10/5) 5/15/0
Mountain (0/15/10) 0/15/0
Polar Mountain (0/10/5) 0/10/0
Desert Mountain (0/10/10) 0/10/0

And an extra idea, to quote myself: All terrain defence values multiplied by 2. e.g. Mountains now +200% defence, Hills now +100%, Forest now +50%. The aim is to make terrain more strategic. Because of the CtP2 combat system that always uses defence AND attack in every battle, the defence value is halved in importance in the outcome of a battle, so to have any reasonable effect, terrain defence needed to be higher.

I haven't looked totally into the terraforming yet, but from what I can see of the changes in SAP2 it generally takes more turns and in some cases costs more, which are both good. I also think some terraforming should be removed, like building mountains or hills, thats just silly, flattening them fine or planting forests for production, but not mountains or hills.

[Solver]

I would agree on making forests better... they're supposed to be good tiles, not something you want to get rid of quickly. The SAP2 way for Forests seems nice to me.

Grasslands and plains... both are, of course, better to Farm. However, sometimes mining plains might be a good idea, while mining Grasslands can not. A little bonus for Grassland would be nice, either an extra +5 from farms or maybe even extra commerce, though that's unrealistic.

I've barely played vanilla CtP2 at all, but the values there were bad. So we need a SAP2-style rebalance for the official patch. Coastal cities were killers in vanilla, with great beach production, they would grow fast AND have better production than most land cities.

[Ekmek]

I argue that deserts swamps and jungles should be more penalizing tiles with little value, if not for gameplay atleast it would model the world more

grassland should be the fopod makers
hills mountains all production
forsts production and very little food

plains should be the balanced equal "standard" tile
everthing should deviate off that I think. is it more productive than plains? moere food?

as for beaches I'd give them some production to model how coastal cities develop economies fasters, but most of there bonus should be in trade/commerce

but why are we only doing it in increments of 5?

[Maquiladora]

Grasslands and plains... both are, of course, better to Farm. However, sometimes mining plains might be a good idea, while mining Grasslands can not. A little bonus for Grassland would be nice, either an extra +5 from farms or maybe even extra commerce, though that's unrealistic.

If we were to make mining plains worth it (right now its 300pw +5 prod. compared to farms 200pw +10 food) we would have to increase the benefit too, which would make plains even better than grassland than they already are. Instead we should approach it from the other side, farms on plains give +5 food 200pw or +15 food 200pw for a farm on grassland.

I've barely played vanilla CtP2 at all, but the values there were bad. So we need a SAP2-style rebalance for the official patch. Coastal cities were killers in vanilla, with great beach production, they would grow fast AND have better production than most land cities.

How do you know the values were bad if you hardly played vanilla CtP2 then? And whats a "SAP-style rebalance"? I could see reasonable arguement for 10/5/10 on beaches but no production on beaches is silly and creates knock-on effects with AI and long term balance that would be easier to avoid.

but why are we only doing it in increments of 5?

I guess because it looks better and its easier to remember each terrain value that way. The range is from 0-15 usually so any differences lower than 5 don't have such a great effect anyway. But not good enough reasons why we can't use other numbers I suppose.

[Flinx]

These are text file changes. Every modder and mod will set his or her own values for each terrain type. Scenarios have been fixed (except for a bug in quicksaves) so that ModSwapper/ModManager are not needed. I think an official suggested scenario similar to ASP2 is a good idea, but I would like the option (whether I use it or not) of playing with the default Activision values.

[Maquiladora]

Flinx, its obvious the original values are bad in some places, why not change them, and perhaps have a seperate mod that includes the original values for you and anyone else?

I don't want to make a habit of this but to quote Mr. Baggins again:

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.

[Solver]

How do you know the values were bad if you hardly played vanilla CtP2 then? And whats a "SAP-style rebalance"? I could see reasonable arguement for 10/5/10 on beaches but no production on beaches is silly and creates knock-on effects with AI and long term balance that would be easier to avoid.

Because one of the reasons I disliked vanilla CtP2 and wanted a mod ASAP was exactly because of the terrain values. I remember being absolutely disgusted by the balance, not only the terrible AI. My coastal cities were absolutely killers, and that's something I remember very well. A SAP-style rebalance is something with values rather close to SAP2, but with looking at doing something clever to plains and grassland mainly.

Beaches appear like they'll need even more discussion and testing to set them right.

And Flinx yes, as Maq says, we want to present a game which is by default (that is, with out patch) already pretty balanced and nice. People may dislike it if they know they need to get a mod for proper balancing, like it is now. So indeed, we should provide a possibly balanced set of text-files.

And I say screw the Activison values. They're not holy or anything, and they were, for the most part, pretty awful. Not only in relation to terrain types (though Forest terrain value was a bug by itself), but I also believe that science and some other numbers were way off.

[calvitix]

Originally posted by Solver
[q]

And Flinx yes, as Maq says, we want to present a game which is by default (that is, with out patch) already pretty balanced and nice. People may dislike it if they know they need to get a mod for proper balancing, like it is now. So indeed, we should provide a possibly balanced set of text-files.

And I say screw the Activison values. They're not holy or anything, and they were, for the most part, pretty awful. Not only in relation to terrain types (though Forest terrain value was a bug by itself), but I also believe that science and some other numbers were way off.

I Agree with you Solver (I also already changed some values in Goals.txt and strategies.txt to improve and balance the AI).
We can keep the original values in a 'as Original' mod.

[Solver]

to your work on the AI. I really hope that your work, coupled with SLIC scripts, will make for a decent AI at release.

And as for the 'as Original' mod... well, why not, but I'm saying yes here only because that takes no time to do. We all have the original gamefiles after all... but why anyone would want to play with those values is beyond me. I'd even suggest that we have a mention in the documentation saying that the original values are not very balanced.

[Maquiladora]

So......... apart from one or two people who don't want to see any changes at all (which we seem to be agreeing an "original mod" would be best there) we're agreed the SAP values are OK. Except for beaches.

I played a game with SAP terrain this morning and I still think 0 production on beach is too much, but one new thing I noticed that does make up for this in SAP beaches, you can terraform to forest from the beginning of the game (was agri. rev. in vanilla). If you have a coastal city you can terraform grassland/plains to forest relatively cheaply (200pw) so you can actually make a coastal city more self sufficient with a little work. Also because the coastal cities have most commerce you place trading posts on the new forests anyway, which makes the coastal cities specialized commerce cities, which you would never see in vanilla CtP2 in the ancient/ren. age, and adds some new diversity to gameplay.

Whether the AI can figure all this out and fix the very low production in some of its cities though is another problem.

[Peter Triggs]

IIRC, the AI can't handle terraforming.

A couple of years ago a bloke figured out what changes you had to make to the text files to get the AI to terraform. But I think the problem was that once you got it started, it would keep terraforming until everything turned into grassland.

[Flinx]

Originally posted by calvitix
We can keep the original values in a 'as Original' mod.

This I can live with. Scenarios have been fixed so we can add an 'Activision Original' scenario.

Good luck coming up with values everyone agrees are 'balanced'

[Solver]

So......... apart from one or two people who don't want to see any changes at all (which we seem to be agreeing an "original mod" would be best there) we're agreed the SAP values are OK. Except for beaches.

Yep, although grasslands/plains may need a bit of a readjustment also.

I played a game with SAP terrain this morning and I still think 0 production on beach is too much, but one new thing I noticed that does make up for this in SAP beaches, you can terraform to forest from the beginning of the game (was agri. rev. in vanilla). If you have a coastal city you can terraform grassland/plains to forest relatively cheaply (200pw) so you can actually make a coastal city more self sufficient with a little work. Also because the coastal cities have most commerce you place trading posts on the new forests anyway, which makes the coastal cities specialized commerce cities, which you would never see in vanilla CtP2 in the ancient/ren. age, and adds some new diversity to gameplay.

Whether the AI can figure all this out and fix the very low production in some of its cities though is another problem.

Ahh yes, good point, I tend to mine around coastal cities, too, to offset the production hit in SAP. Coastal cities are still very strong due to rapid growth and commerce. As for the AI, I want to see it place tile improvements correctly first, before terraforming. For instance, it has the tendency to mine plains, so cities in plains have huge production, but barely any growth. Or even worse, trading posts on plains...

So... 10/5/10 for beaches, maybe?

[Maquiladora]

Yep, although grasslands/plains may need a bit of a readjustment also.

What would you suggest as the best way?

Although I'd like to change the terrain values of them, I think the default values are nice an intuitive so maybe we should try and stick to fiddling with tile improvements to balance them.

Ahh yes, good point, I tend to mine around coastal cities, too, to offset the production hit in SAP. Coastal cities are still very strong due to rapid growth and commerce. As for the AI, I want to see it place tile improvements correctly first, before terraforming. For instance, it has the tendency to mine plains, so cities in plains have huge production, but barely any growth. Or even worse, trading posts on plains...

I think a reasonable amount (at most half of total tiles) trading posts on plains are fine, as long as scientists are weaker than they are now, since we want commerce to contribute a lot more to early science than it does now because the AI doesnt use scientists (or specialists in general) very well, so this is one of the big reasons it eventually loses the science lead, that and also not continually building more cities as the advances take longer.

I agree terraforming isn't as important for the AI as at least placing tile improvements right first.

So... 10/5/10 for beaches, maybe?

That makes sense.

[Solver]

What would you suggest as the best way?

Make Farms on Grasslands produce an extra +5 food compared to other farms.

I think a reasonable amount (at most half of total tiles) trading posts on plains are fine, as long as scientists are weaker than they are now, since we want commerce to contribute a lot more to early science than it does now because the AI doesnt use scientists (or specialists in general) very well, so this is one of the big reasons it eventually loses the science lead, that and also not continually building more cities as the advances take longer.

Yep, but as it is, commerce posts on plains aren't that good. You're generally better off putting it into something else, and using scientists. Specialists are very powerful as it stands and everyone knows that.