The Quest for Deeper Strategy....

[Tuberski]

The things I have done in my game:

+1 hp per era.

Toned down corruption to about 75% of what it was.

Change settlers to 3 pop points to build, slows down ICS quite a bit.

I flagged all modern naval units with Treat all terrain as roads. To simulate steam and nuclear power, also better ship design.

[Theseus]

player1 and Tuberski: If you combine this thread with the Best of the Best concept, do you think your mods would be a good starting point?

All: I suggest we use the next couple of weeks, whatever, until the patch comes out, to agree on some basics for the "Apolyton Mod." That and the stock game can be our standard stomping grounds.

For some reason, I can;t post on the Files thread... can someone invite all those members into this effort too? Thanks.

I sorta feel like Vel said at the start of the thread... the Mod with No Name was very interesting... now that it's several months later, doing a mod in combo with a group testing ground is pretty cool.

[alva]

Originally posted by Tuberski
The things I have done in my game:


Change settlers to 3 pop points to build, slows down ICS quite a bit.
.

Good idea, but...
I've tried this myself, and lot's of mod's have done so too.
With more or less the same conclusion: it favors the human to much. The AI can't cope with this. He often has to wait until his city reaches pop4 to build the settler. even though he has the needed amount of shields.

[notyoueither]

Some very good ideas... and a very positive step towards the 'Apolyton Standard Mod'...

re lethal bombardment. When 1.21 (or was it 1.17??? there have been many) came out I gave lethal sea bombardment to Fighters and Jets. I added a Naval Air unit (copied Fighter). Gave it better bombardment stats than F or JF, but not as good as Bomber. Less effective at Air to Air than Fighter (a bit). The AI builds them.

[Theseus]

Does range-0 bombard impact GL generation in any way?

[Jaybe]

Vel,
Don't forget changing the "Attack Bonus Against Barbarians" to zero (under Difficulty Levels).

JB,
President of the Equal Combat Rights to Barbarians Society

[Arrian]

On corruption: Vel, I dunno about you, but I think they've lowered corruption enough. No need to lower it any more.

In order to prevent AI self-destruct syndrome, maybe we should remove Communism from the game. The government system sucks, and the AI has an unfortunate tendancy to use it when it fights, even when Monarchy would really be better.

-Arrian

[alva]

Originally posted by Arrian
On corruption: Vel, I dunno about you, but I think they've lowered corruption enough. No need to lower it any more.

In order to prevent AI self-destruct syndrome, maybe we should remove Communism from the game. The government system sucks, and the AI has an unfortunate tendancy to use it when it fights, even when Monarchy would really be better.

-Arrian

Maybe change communism to a better and improved communism?
Make sure it doesn't get overpowering though

[Theseus]

There's something missing here...

I'm maybe bouncing back and forth between here and the "Best" thread I started, but bear with me.

Let's kick it up a notch... most of the ideas on this thread are unit level, with some building level.

More macro:

What about the Panag thing, whichever way is correct... Chieftain or Deity, I wanna see what it does. have a nice day ....

What about moving all AI civs up 1 in aggression?

What are we to do about AI offensive fastmovers?

Same question about AI use of Arty?

Here's one I haven't seen much discussed: The AI civs will use bombardment for resource denial, but in a totally stupid fashion (no concentration of effort). How do we fix that?

I think a major part of the AIs' problems come from lack of gold... what are fixes for that beyond just allocating a bunch of gp?

Soren was very helpful in chiming in last night... c'mon Firaxis, I know you tested a lot of this stuff, give us some hints.

My goal: Improve gameplay / balance, and generally face 1-2 killer AI civs. I'm not much of a modder, so others, please try to extend thinking to that end. Beyond that, we need to develop trials and challenges that make us better players. In the next couple of day, I'll put up some thoughts on the latter.

[Thoth]

A few thoughts:

I've played around with a lot of the Mods that Vel suggested in his first post to this thread. The 0 range bombard is great. I find myself building at least one archer per ancient era stack of sword/horse. HP bonuses for each era seems to work quite well.

Communism: Rather than removing it entirely, how about changing it to a cash based rush rather than pop rush. It should still be effective as a war govt, without allowing the AI to completely selfdestruct.

Units costing population: my gut reaction to this is negative, but it may well work for post-nationalism era units. Warriors costing 1 pop? ouch.

Helicopters: The best use I've found for these is as a "poor man's airport". Load a unit into the 'copter and then rebase the helicopter to any other city. The unit loaded into the helicopter comes allong for the ride. Either increasing the number of holds to 2 or allowing non-foot soldiers to be carried will increase the usefullness of these (at least until we can mod the max range to greater than 8 squares).

ZOC: I'm not sure about all units, but I think mobile and missile units should generate a ZOC (this would mean virtually every unit from the Middle Ages onwards would have a ZOC).

Unit tweaks: I've also given musketmen an attack of 3 to at least bring them up to par with Swordsmen, this makes them excellent footsoldiers (att 3, def 4, ZOC, 0 range bombard) a stack of musketmen is formidable defensively, and when combined with catapults/cannon it can hold it's own offensively as well. Much fun.

I've also moved Bombers to Advanced Flight and made it a required tech to advance eras.

[Gen.Dragolen]

Thoth,

Do you have a spreadsheet or something like that to track your changes? I'd like to start comparing some of them against the mod I setup. I'll try and get the sheet I have on my mod up to date and post it here for you to compare.

I've tried to balance out the units and the results have been interesting. I'm going to add the 0 range bombardment to the archers, bowmen and longbowmen to see if that has any effect on combat.

And yes many of the units become available at rather odd times. They left out jet engined bombers completely. A prop driven bomber like a B-17 or B-29 could travel from London to Berlin no problem, but a B-52 can fly from Maine to Iraq, with mid-air refueling. And the difference in payloads is ridiculous.

I should be able to post the spread sheet showing the original settings and the changes I've made tomorrow.

D.

[royfur]

Hi All,

Although I've lurked some time here on 'Poly, this is my first post here. Been at CFC for some time. Anyway heres a thought/concern I had, re: the concensous about the specialist (3 gold per taxman, 3 beakers per scientist):

Yes, they now have pre-requestites along more or less non-warmonger paths. But even warmongers will eventually research writing and currency so will have them by the time they are near the end of the ancient era. And they may get the most out of this change, as in- all those one shield corrupt conqured citys. If you have one of those on a river and so can get to 12 pop, you can often have 6 citizens as specialists, maybe more. That means now that city could be producing 18 non-corruptable beakers or gold, or 9 and 9, or other combinations. While not outstanding, thats significant, espeically if you have a lot of those cities ... and warmongers often will. For instance, in my current game the Babs and France shared a continent sepearte from mine, which I'd conqured. I invaded and wiped out France and wound up with about 25 ciites there, over half on rivers. I could be producing about 300 gpt from this conqured province of my empire. I think this will strengthen the human player too much. This makes overseas conquest too lucerative I think, and that helps the human player disproportionally, as we all know the AI can't do an overseas invasion worth a dam_. Still, one beaker or gold per specialist IS crummy! So I suggest toning the change down a little: make it 2 beakers or gold per specialist rather the 3.

Personally, I am more or less a minimalist in mods, like player1 I prefer to keep changes as limited as possilbe. I fear the "unintended effects" of more sweeping changes.

(One exception, because it is so frelled already: the Naval aspect of the game. Wish we could do more sweeping things there, like naval "caravans" or trade lines for subs/priviateers to attack to simulate economic warfare, have DD for escort against subs, oh a whole slew of other things, which are not possible with this version of civ. Maybe in Four, eh?)

Civ On!

[Thoth]

Gen Dragolen: I'll put together a list of my own changes and post it in a day or so.

(Documentation? whazza? )

[Gen.Dragolen]

Greetings All,

Here's the first version of changes I've been testing for the land based units.

I've been trying to equate the unit strengths relative to the technologies that they represent. It is difficult to decide on what scale to make the units when I estimate their strengths, but what I have here should be fairly balanced for units within their own age.

The only suggestion that I haven't included is the 0 range bombardment for archers, bowmen and longbowmen. Many of the changes I have made are revisions for when the units are available, and that most the medieval units do not upgrade to industrial age units. My reasons are historical as pikemen, longbowmen and knights were entirely replaced by early cavalry and musketmen. The feudal units can still put up a fight against musketmen in a battle, but it would be a forlorn hope to win the war. It would have been nice to have some of the transitional units between ages but Firaxis' designers tried to keep it to one offensive, one defensive and one support unit per age it seems.

I will post the next spread sheet later this week when I have a chance to verify the original settings and cleanup the modified ones. I will also cleanup the .bic file I've been using so I have a record of the defaults and the changes made to it.


D.

[jshelr]

While I find many of the suggestions about individual units here good, I'd also like to see game balance improved by changes in the UN, SS, and scoring. I'd particularly would like the espionage suggestions implemented.

For example, membership in the UN should be moved slightly later in the modern era and could be earned by a small wonder. You might be expelled for protocol violations, such as starting a war via ROP. The UN would be equivalent to MPP for member nations. So, if you want to attack Russia, you might begin with an alliance vs the Russians with Germany. Then, when you declare war on Russia, both your civ and Germany are expelled from the UN and all members declare war on you both. If you are planning to be a warmonger in the modern era, there's no reason to be a UN member. That would be a refuge for the small fry and for others seeking a peaceful path to a victory.

The UN change would make it tougher for the human player to dominate.

The SS gives the human player too much advantage now. The AI doesn't research it in a focused way or pre-build the final part.

Finally, suppose happy citizens count very heavily in scoring and territory counts very little. Territory capture would then be a path to a domination win but not a path to a scoring win. Happy citizens scoring would create a very interesting trade off between war and peace, between tech research and entertainment, or timing whether to build sanitation or replaceable parts first. Build those granaries and get those luxuries.

Don't know if any of this is doable at all. Just some ideas.

[Franses]

Only now discovered this great thread.

Vel,

I once altered the tech limit of 40 to 100. It gave no problems that I could detect and is more realistic in my opinion.

As many others I do not like the "run over the whole continent for no cost" effect of railroad. We tried to get Firaxis to make this editable but did not succeed. It seems to big a change for them. What I did in a mod was to take away railroad completely (by taking away coal, I could not think of another possibility). Instead I added two types of trucks. Land units able to transport 2 respectively 5 units at a higher speed. I did not yet test it at great length but it seems to work well.

I hate to see the map crowded with roads, mines and irrigation. So I also altered this by altering the terrain types such that roads are only functional as lowering the required movement points. Restricted the benefits of irrigation to desert and plains and the benefits of mining to hills, mountains and some other types. Worked fine for me. Again I did not test this at great length because I am only in CIV3 to play Multiplayer and expect that that means playing the original version. But if we make a widely accepted Apolyton mod that may no longer be a problem. If you are interested I can give you the details of the changes I made.

[Gen.Dragolen]

Franses,

Please send me a copy of the changes or post them here.

I like your idea about restricting the terraforming to only certain terrain types. I will have to try that and see what it does to the balance.


D.

[Franses]

Gen. D,

Here are the numbers I used (food, shield, gold):

Desert	0-1-1	Mined 0-2-1	Irrigated 1-1-1
Plains	1-1-1	Mined 1-3-1	Irrigated 3-1-1
Grass	3-1-1
Hills	1-1-1	Mined 1-4-1
Mountains	0-1-1	Mined 0-4-1
Forest	1-2-1
Jungle	1-0-1
Tundra	1-0-1	Mined 1-1-1
Floodplain	3-0-1
Coast	2-0-2
Sea	2-0-1
Ocean	1-0-0

The above assumes that you do not want to add extra benefits in gold from road building. So building a road should be set to have no benefits. It also assumes railroad is absent.

Edit: tried several times to give the above a better look. Only partly succeeded. I have no idea where all this white space comes from. Sorry for that.

[Franses]

Increase ship movement by +1 point per age over what the movement currently is.

Regarding this issue. I suggest do not alter these. One of the Firaxians remarked that they had tried it and it did imbalance the game, he said. Just having played an Archipe..... game I think I know why. It has the same effect as railroad has on movement, making it almost impossible to defend cities on a coastline. You never know where these marines will show up next.

[player1]

It also makes ships quicker then bombers (range 6-8).

And makes dumber naval AI.

[Franses]

Good point, player 1

[MiloMilo]

A PolyMod! I love it!

Vel, a few quick questions/comments:

1st, is the zero-range bombard given to gunpowder units (i.e. everything after musketmen) or only to bow-and-arrow units?

2nd, check out Player1's mod. Generally not unbalancing, generally good stuff, and approved by Firaxians (!). I won't go so far as to suggest it be used, because it was created with different golas from yours. But it has some very good ideas in it. Below are some bits of it that I would add to the current effort:

1) Musketeers desperately need to be fixed. Samurai, Riders, and War Elephants can be built earlier, and get large bonuses over knights. Musketeers should be 4/4/1. Possibly, plain old musketmen could be raised to 3/4/1. For 50 Shields they'd be worth it over pikemen.

2) Player1 also changed the prerequisite techs for certain spaceship components. They were changed to match what is written in the civilopedia (which is of course good) and a side effect is more time to play in the modern age (which is also good).

3) Ships do need to move faster, but watch that they don't exceed the range of airplanes. I'm told it unbalances things. I'd say the fastest ships should have 1 move less than the range of planes.

The rest of your ideas for the PolyMod are great. I quit my job in two days, so if you need any playtesting done...

[MiloMilo]

Also, Theseus has a good point about the AI's problems often stemming from a lack of gold. I've been thinking about this, and I believe it results from the eagerness with which the AI buys techs. I often see a lot of very advanced but very poor civs in my games. I wish the AI could appreciate the usefulness of having a working treasury. Maybe if it was programmed to only spend up to half its current treasury for any particular tech... but I don't know how to do that, and I don't know if there would be any unwanted side-effects.

[Arrian]

Actually, I think the AI's lack of gold stemms largely from the fact that the AI does not manipulate the tech/tax slider the way we do. They just peg their research rate as high as they can without incurring a loss, so far as I can tell. That, combined with their eagerness to buy tech and resources from their fellow AIs, keeps them bankrupt most of the time.

I could be wrong about it, as I don't investigate AI cities every turn, but I really don't think the AI takes proper advantage of the research caps.

-Arrian

[Gen.Dragolen]

Player1,

I've played a couple of games with increased naval movement where the galleys were limited to coastal waters and each subsequent age gave them a little more range.

It made for a much more interesting time as several of the nations actually had large numbers of privateers running about and doing damage: watched the Zulu's use them to bombard an English town just before they captured it.

What it does do is place naval units on site in a hurry and you will find that the AI doesn't do much beyond sending raiding parties to harass you. And it will only do this if you do not have much of a standing army. Rather human behaviour, eh ?

I've been rereading the posts and will have a look at some of the other settings I was tinkering with in the editor. If I get enough time tonight, I should be able to post the .bic. It should include the changes Vel mentioned and a few others.

I will add the 1 pop per unit for most of the infantry type units since the manpower would be withdrawn from the economy in real life. A neat change to the Universal Sufferage would be to end the population cost in all military units. It would also be a nice twist if the pop point came back if the unit is disbanded.

And I do like the idea of an Explorer/Settler unit. Nothing like having the restless masses go forth and carve out a new spot in the wilderness. But by the same token, troops should be able to build fortifications like a worker, but that may be pushing it a little.


D.

[Gen.Dragolen]

Arrian,

The other reason is that the AI doesn't have a floren to their name is they will only build marketplaces if it has a gold or luxury tile at the city.

From what I've been able to scry using the diplomacy "Investigate City", the CC's build to maximize their traits: if Religious, they will have temples and cathedrals so they are a culture bomb waiting to go off, if commercial, marketplaces and banks, etc...

I only looked in one game, but it explained alot of what was happening to them in combat: not many veteran troops after a while because they didn't have barracks.


D.

[Velociryx]

In that case, then the solution seems to be to simply make all of the AI's have all the traits?

-=Vel=-

[alexman]

What the AI builds doesn't actually depend on the trait, but rather on the "build often" list, found in the editor.

[Velociryx]

Simple enough then! Especially with the AI's production bonuses....should be a snap for them to build....absolutely everything!

-=Vel=-

[Arrian]

BINGO! At least I hope...

The AI is clearly capable of building improvements... it just doesn't go do it enough. This hamstrings AI economies.

If the AI can be tweaked via the editor into buildng marketplaces, that ALONE will change gameplay. The AI's citizens will be happier, the AI will be richer, and IF my understanding of the trade system is correct, the AI will be open to more straight-up luxury deals, because it will not also be benifitting from the marketplace bonus to luxuries in its cities*.

* - I remember a long discussion with Soren re: AI to AI trading (may have been the AI to AI tech trading thread) and at one point luxury trades were discussed. It's a pet peeve of mine. Sorry, but under no circumstances is 1 luxury from an AI worth 6 of mine plus 3 techs and money. I know that the AI charges more if you're bigger... but if I understood Soren correctly, it charges more if you get more benifit from the luxury... and this takes the marketplace bonus into account! I could be wrong, so don't crucify me if I am, but I'd LOVE to see a quasi-reasonable trade deal offered by the AI to a (large, successful) human empire.

-Arrian