Civilization 5!!!

[CogDissident]

It appears to always tell you to build farms+settlers if you have a high happiness. Since happiness really is the biggest barrier for city building/expanding.

[Coin]

The game does seem to have lot of problems which are posted all over the Civ-fanatics fora and my guru Sullla isn't very happy with things as they are now according to his writing.

So what's the verdict from you guys? Is it worth spending my cash on this?
Should one wait for later? Should one boycot it?

[Spambot5546]

Well, as someone who had only ever played a civ game once or twice before, i'm enjoying it.

So...question. If you're only building farms and markets won't you have fuck-all production? It seems like it would take forever to make troops or buildings that way.

[infernovia]

I am disappointed at the release and I will buy it when they fix the stuff.

I heard farms were actually pretty bad? Use Maritime cities to get your food, not farms. Gold is actually pretty important so you should try to get those instead. Something you can do is create scout and sell it for money for a much faster gold production.

Food has usually been important because of how the game works. More food means more tiles that the city can work, it also means a faster growth, which means those production tiles that you had decided to forgo for a few turns will be online sooner plus you will be able to use one more tile. This meant that the effect of a higher food would give you exponential advantage.

However, the way Civ V works, it is usually not that very good to get a massive population due to the unhappiness drain. Production is really important in this game. It is also better to expand horizontally rather than vertically [>]. These factors force me to believe that farms are really not that great.

[Vaniver]

Good to know. So, food > production? Really? Because in most civ games, I've always felt hammers/shields were generally better than 2 food. I'll have to rethink my strategy... that's a big one.

This actually may be incorrect, but the reason I suspect that it's better this way is because now 2 food is worth 2 specialists instead of 1 (with Freedom) and an additional research (from population). As pointed out by infernovia, there is a happiness cost involved.

The game does seem to have lot of problems which are posted all over the Civ-fanatics fora and my guru Sullla isn't very happy with things as they are now according to his writing.

So what's the verdict from you guys? Is it worth spending my cash on this?
Should one wait for later? Should one boycot it?

Every Civ game has been different. I and II were probably the most similar games out of the group. It's not clear yet what this one will do better than the other ones- I was always a SMAC guy, which put Civ 2 and Civ 4 high on my list (really only 4 since 2 was worse than SMAC), but I hear some unfortunate souls prefer 3 to 2 or 4. So far, it seems like 4 will fit my playstyle better than 5.

But 5 has some engine improvements that I could see becoming significant. It will depend on how they patch it and how the modding community develops.

But, it's really hard to say "ok, what I want out of Civ V is X," because you're trying to define the unknown. The real question of whether or not it's worth your money is this: Why do you buy strategy games?

If you buy them to play them repeatedly, then definitely wait. SMAC has strategic depth, Civ 4 has strategic depth, Civ V might fall short on that account. Whether or not I'll be playing Civ V in a year is still up in the air; whether or not I'll be willing to play a game of SMAC in a year is not.

If you buy them to experience them, then I'd suggest getting it. I've enjoyed playing it so far; I've enjoyed thinking about the strategy so far; and it's actually somewhat interesting to contemplating fixing the game. A problem- Stonehenge is too awesome- becomes a puzzle: "How do I make the other early-game wonders as good as Stonehenge?". I own a large, large number of strategy games that I do not play now and do not foresee playing in the future, but got them because I wanted to explore that part of the strategy game space. Oftentimes, that means disappointments (Spore, for example) but being disappointed still has exploration value.

[infernovia]

Btw, I was answering the farm question in a more general sense, because working a mine tile early when you can have easy growth is a bad decision (especially in Civ4). I think farming a hill and getting a 2/2/1 tile seems to be a good way to go (but always try to let maritime do most of the work for you).

Edit: And yes, you will have really bad production. But what else can you do? The best you can do is make mines... only in hills though. But you can simply cash rush everything. And with buildings being so expensive, and not requiring many buildings per city, its not really that important. So yeah...

[Spambot5546]

So i went through last night and got my workers busy putting farms next to every lake or river, lumber mills in every forest not next to a lake or river, and trading posts everywhere else. However, some of my riverside farms were producing 4 food while some others were only producing three. I also had some non-riverside farms that were producing 4 food. Is there another factor i'm not aware of?

[Vaniver]

So i went through last night and got my workers busy putting farms next to every lake or river, lumber mills in every forest not next to a lake or river, and trading posts everywhere else. However, some of my riverside farms were producing 4 food while some others were only producing three. I also had some non-riverside farms that were producing 4 food. Is there another factor i'm not aware of?

If they are plains instead of grasslands, they should be producing 1-2-3 food (no farm, farm, farm with civil service / fertilizer). If they have wheat, they should be producing an extra food (so before you get civil service, the wheat farms are worth 4 and the rest are worth 3, on grasslands).

There might be a factor I haven't thought of, but I think that's it.

[Spambot5546]

So plains < grasslands for food? If it's producing 4 food on a non-river tile should i keep it as a farm?

[infernovia]

Depends on what you are going for. Like I said before, Maritime city states provide magical food for everyone and having more population really isn't optimal at all. The city tile is basically the most important tile in the entire game, and the other tiles are a distant second.

Lets explain why:

Founding a city costs two unhappiness, there is a social order which makes you have +1 for each city cutting that down. In addition to communism, these are really powerful social policies that scale with every city. The forbidden palace also gives +1 per city. Whereas there really isn't an ability that scales well with vertical growth.

The basic buildings like Colosseum and library providing the most significant jump in happiness/technology and growing past a certain point without hospital or any other late techs costs enormous amounts of food.

Other tiles are not very good compared to city tile. With communism and maritime can get +4 food from maritime and +5 hammer from communism. Oh and lets not forget, a free road tile allowing you to get beneficial trade routes. What other tile can match up to that?

You can cash rush everything. Got a city in a really crappy location? No problem, just cash rush the initial essential buildings and now the city is now giving you research and production (and commerce if you pull it off right).

Golden Ages are really common and do not provide a bonus to farms. They do provide a huge bonus to trading posts though, and the huge jump in commerce will allow you to just cash rush everything.

GSes are brokenly powerful due to how fast you can beeline with them.

More cities = more research.

So again, it depends on what you are going for, just don't spam farms because after a certain point, its really diminishing returns.

[JudeMorrigan]

In fairness, they were only recommending putting farms on river tiles. Golden ages should provide a bonus to farms on river tiles, shouldn't they?

[ArgonV]

Well, a gold bonus, not a food bonus

[infernovia]

On river you get +1 commerce I think, so yeah it will get a bonus (it will be +2 commerce). But non-river tiles won't, which is what they were talking about.

[Vaniver]

More cities = more research.

This doesn't really seem true, though. Research scales with population (1 per pop, +.5 per pop in a town with a library) and buildings (+3 per scientist, plus an additional 50% for each science building, plus great scientists from scientists+wonders+GP growth buildings).

I can see a fun game being Tiny Islands + no barbarians + lots of city states + liberty,patronage,commerce,freedom, and order; you rush harbors to connect a city dropped anywhere to your capital, and do almost everything through specialists + city state bonuses. But I don't really think that's an optimal strategy.

[edit]Tried out this economy mod. Liking it so far: some things seem really good (fishmonger is +20% food? That's... kind of massive), but the decrease in building cost and increase in tech cost make the game flow a bit better. It seems to further cement Great Scientists as awesome, but oh well.

[infernovia]

This doesn't really seem true, though. Research scales with population (1 per pop, +.5 per pop in a town with a library)

Well, this was said in the context of vertical vs. horizontal debate.

Yeah, if you expand vertically you can also increase your research. But expanding horizontally is cheaper, and you can support more people on less resources. Plus the many other benefit (better trade network etc.) I am trying to say that the horizontal expansion is faster.

[Vaniver]

I'm still not convinced. Horizontal expansion requires significant resource input (you've got to make all those settlers) and also for there to be a place to expand to- also, Communism is so late-game it's not really going to come into play unless you have cultural and diplomatic victories turned off.

I think that's the main issue I have with the idea of horizontal expansion, especially if it's contingent on Liberty or Order policies: there are massive costs associated with those things. I don't know which one is superior- ideally they're "balanced" and dependent on the situation- but I strongly suspect that a small empire focused on winning will do better than a horizontally expanding empire that then tries to progress through the ages or a small empire that's focused on exploding lategame.

[infernovia]

Yeah, the idea is you are packing as many cities in as little tiles as possible. So the "space" issue isn't too big of one. And there really isn't a huge cost to cities besides the unhappy faces and the initial investment... unlike civ4. And, since you reminded me of the tree, the social policies also cuts down settler production by 50%.

As for the cost, I see players get it pretty early... its not that big of an investment (especially with france).

And yeah, communism is "late game," but this isn't Civ 4. Smart use of GSes will get you to industrial era real quick with super bee-lines. Again, GSes are too good in this game with the techs that they can bulb.

Edit: Actually, I don't think you should read these... you said you had more fun exploring the system, no need to ruin that.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=390302

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=388793

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/liberteordre.html

[Vaniver]

And yeah, communism is "late game," but this isn't Civ 4. Smart use of GSes will get you to industrial era real quick with super bee-lines. Again, GSes are too good in this game with the techs that they can bulb.

Edit: Actually, I don't think you should read these... you said you had more fun exploring the system, no need to ruin that.

I'm familiar with beelining- you'll see that before the game came out I had a strategy to rush Renaissance

Those were worth reading, though, since they crystallized the problem: Communism is way too good, terrain is way too undifferentiated, and city states are broken.

Actually, it's sort of horrifying to try and make a list of what Civ 5 got right. Some of the things fit- a dramatic increase in the usefulness of specialists midgame- but the implementation is wonky. Instead of the industrial revolution making engineers dramatically better, and the printing press making scientists better, it's adoption of "secularism" that makes all specialists better at researching. The game's biggest change in production is not when you discover how to use non-biological labor en masse,* but when you adopt Communism, whose real-world impact on production is pretty negative, actually.

*Remember, one of the main differences between the wealth of the Old World and the New World in 1532 was that the Old World had better work animals than the New World. Steam engines weren't invented until the late 1600s.


And so that leaves the question: can mods save Civ V? I'm not sure: the economy mod I'm using has a lot of cool ideas (it's about 7 UI mods plus two gameplay mods) but this needs a total rework from the ground up, not tweaking. There's still the ability to do that, as far as I can tell, but that's a daunting proposition, to say the least.

[infernovia]

Other benefits of ICS:
Easy defense. 3-4 cities can bombard incoming units if you have the right pattern. Plus you can actually support a nice road network.[>]
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The five problems with the game:
AI sucks at providing a challenge.
The combat doesn't make sense with the world they created.
No Civilization feeling.
Unbalanced core mechanics.
Exploitable everything. Did you know you can sell everything? Well you can also buy everything too! What this means is that you can sell some decent stuff and buy enormous benefits in response.

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The biggest problem in Civilization 5 at the moment is that the AI sucks at anything militarily. If the AI provided something dangerous, something that the user had to be wary of, a lot of things could be forgiven and I would have bought it right away despite its numerous bugs and its dullness. But, as it is right now, you can master Civilization 5 way too fast and you can get away with way too much. Considering for a moment how long it took me to finally understand balancing the many systems of Civilization 4 (let alone mastering them), this seems like a piece of cake. And if you can't balance it right, no problem, the area of effect is very limited since gold is not connected to research is not connected to happiness. Here, you just get to artillery and you are pretty much invulnerable. I hope they work on this, this is the biggest long-term challenge the game has. That and fix up the multi-player bugs.

The second thing is that there is a lot of things that are nonsensical. Archers can fire two spaces away, but rifles can't? AI does not really understand ranged combat at all either. And why are flatlands so horrible for defense? The AI doesn't account for it, they just go to flatlands and you can pretty much rush em dead (which btw is a first, attacker's advantage terrain). My experience with hex combat similar to this had a lot of problematic situations, I don't think they have solved it. Much better would have been solving some sort of stacking thing. Either that, or make the world larger and make the cities work differently to compensate. If you want to have a ton of tactical military maneuvers, you need to give them enough room to maneuver. Its a hard thing to balance, but it should have been done if they really wanted multiple tile combat.

Third, where is the epicness man? Late game you should have like 56 units, legions, under your command. Yet due to the way resources and 1upt works, you can't do it. The severe handicap of production does not seem to be a good idea and makes everything not fun. And is it really ok to research so fast it obsoletes your unit before you come out of the gate? In Civ 4, I realized I had a time window for Janissaries before people could get rifles (did you know that those two techs before rifling takes like 35 turns?). Here you will obsolete musketeers by the time they walk to the first city. Plus, shouldn't my universities be providing more research than a measly library? What gives man... I also understand why they did the whole building are expensive thing, but totally kills the city feeling.

Fourth, wonders are lame.

Fifth, things are unbalanced. Great Scientist, Golden Ages, Trading posts, Maritime City-states, Artillery, Communism. Trading post is a really really big tile-improvement that outshines a lot, especially with how powerful center tiles are. Its also boring. Great Scientist is like a free oracle at any point in the game. I remember rushing oracle and liberalism due to how good it was, now everybody pretty much has em, whenever. Whatever, this can be easily fixed, but things like trading posts is going to be harder. The solution is to make the other resources better (food and hammer), but its hard to do that without dramatically changing the game.

So yeah, its going to be tough.

[iop]

The game does seem to have lot of problems which are posted all over the Civ-fanatics fora and my guru Sullla isn't very happy with things as they are now according to his writing.

So what's the verdict from you guys? Is it worth spending my cash on this?
Should one wait for later? Should one boycot it?

I enjoy playing Civ5. I find it's pretty, I like the 1 unit per tile combat, I like that different civilizations play differently, I like the social policies, I like how promotions make your units powerful (which means that you no longer need to field massive armies, which I have found boring since the original Civ), I like the idea of resources limiting what you can build, and I like that they made it possible to play and win the game without building tons of cities.

Having said that, there are plenty of things wrong with the game. The most glaring is how horrible the AI is at combat, and how little it is trying to win. I feel like Civ2 again where I'd just cruise to victory on the highest level, and that is sad. I'm especially disappointed about this because all the pre-launch claims about how awesome the AI is (and how good the automation supposedly is. WTF? There was a dude whose job was to write worker automation. That guy totally failed!). There are also some balance issues and exploits, though that was to be expected.

If you buy the game, you'll get free updates (patches). I like being able to play now during what little time I can spare (and I might not have the time anymore in 1-2 years), and I'm positive that the game can be fixed. But if you want a polished game, it might be better to wait.

[infernovia]

I wonder if they could have done this pattern:
http://www.ciaspalette.com/patterns/06/01.jpg

Hexagons within hexagons. This way the city view can still put farms in the big hexagons while the tiny view will have the military. The military will be a lot easier to produce and will be able to move in either the big scale view or the tiny view with movement specified in both terms. This way, archers can still maintain ranged combat, but only in the most limited sense while rifles will be able to fire across tiles. The biggest benefit is that military will be able to maneuver around.

I can see some complex design required for this, but if they had gone the 1upt route, they should have done this as well.

[|Erasmus|]

Having said that, there are plenty of things wrong with the game. The most glaring is how horrible the AI is at combat, and how little it is trying to win. I feel like Civ2 again where I'd just cruise to victory on the highest level, and that is sad. I'm especially disappointed about this because all the pre-launch claims about how awesome the AI is (and how good the automation supposedly is.

It does feel rather simple to just cruise through a game and not really be under any pressure from the AI winning. I'm not playing on hard settings, but I'm also a total civ noob. The one thing that annoys me about the AI though is it's complete inability to negotiate. I want some luxary resource, I have to offer two, plus most of my gold, half my gold per turn for 30 turns and open borders. fuck that shit.

Especially hilarious was last night when I was totally kicking ass against the germans attacking me and a pair of city-states I was allied with, and he was trying to sue for peace by offering to take 2 of my 3 cities and have me pay him a tonne of gold, and anything less he claims is unacceptable. It's really not negotiation, it's just me getting the shits and deciding that I'd better just fold to some of these stupid demands because I kinda want that resource/peace treaty.

[Spambot5546]

Having said that, there are plenty of things wrong with the game. The most glaring is how horrible the AI is at combat, and how little it is trying to win. I feel like Civ2 again where I'd just cruise to victory on the highest level, and that is sad. I'm especially disappointed about this because all the pre-launch claims about how awesome the AI is (and how good the automation supposedly is.

It does feel rather simple to just cruise through a game and not really be under any pressure from the AI winning. I'm not playing on hard settings, but I'm also a total civ noob. The one thing that annoys me about the AI though is it's complete inability to negotiate. I want some luxary resource, I have to offer two, plus most of my gold, half my gold per turn for 30 turns and open borders. fuck that shit.

Especially hilarious was last night when I was totally kicking ass against the germans attacking me and a pair of city-states I was allied with, and he was trying to sue for peace by offering to take 2 of my 3 cities and have me pay him a tonne of gold, and anything less he claims is unacceptable. It's really not negotiation, it's just me getting the shits and deciding that I'd better just fold to some of these stupid demands because I kinda want that resource/peace treaty.

Interestingly you'll sometimes get the complete other end of the spectrum. I once got attacked by the Turks and paid the Japanese to attack them. Instead of making peace with the Nobunaga, Suleiman offered ME, who's whole army was three pikemen and a trireme, two cities and all his money and resources. After paying me off the Japanese took another of his cities. Sometimes i'll go to unload some luxury resource and the AI will offer me all their gold and a good chunk of the Gold Per Turn. They need to learn how to low-ball.

[Toeofdoom]

Heh, when I tried a 1 city challenge on prince I tried to avoid wars with everyone (and completely succeeded)... towards the end I asked the AI for some gold in exchange for one of my luxury resources clicking "what would make this work"... they basically threw extra money, strategic and luxury resources at me. Worked out well enough, won culturally fairly soon anyway.

[iop]

If the AI likes you, you will get 300 gold for a luxury resource, or roughly the equivalent total in gold per turn (if they can, and on higher levels, they do have this kind of money). If the AI hates you, or believes you are too weak, or already has the resource, the deal will be much worse. Strategic resources are almost always accepted, even though the AI may not need them at all - which is probably another bug.

The capitulation is a known problem, and it's quite horrible. What is worse is that you can then turn around and sell the crappy cities you have acquired to other civs, who will give nearly all you ask for (because a small city is worth ~5000 gold, which makes ~1000 gold a lopsided trade "in favor" of the AI). If the AI's empire is not too big, the additional city will put it into negative happiness, which means it will go into happiness-building mode and not do warmongering for a while.

By the way: If you want to be a pacifist and still get drawn into a war, just kill the AI's units and do some pillaging for the money, but don't take any cities. Then, the AI will make peace and will like you again pretty quickly and be willing to trade again. As soon as you take a city, the AI starts hating you forever.

[Spambot5546]

Did you know that city-states can take cities? Like any good American i started working on wiping out the Iroquois in my game last night. They had a city right next to an allied city-state, so the city state hopped in to help me. Imagine my surprise when, after spending a turn shelling a city i then saw my allied city state attack the weakened town with a company of spearmen and take it.

[mmmcannibalism]

Did you know that city-states can take cities? Like any good American i started working on wiping out the Iroquois in my game last night. They had a city right next to an allied city-state, so the city state hopped in to help me. Imagine my surprise when, after spending a turn shelling a city i then saw my allied city state attack the weakened town with a company of spearmen and take it.

Did it become yours or theirs?

[Spambot5546]

Theirs. I have a two-city city-state ally now.

[ArgonV]

Yeah, that's happened to me before. WIth a wonder-filled captial

Since you can't trade cities with city-states, I could either take it by force or let them have it...

[ArgonV]

How the hell is unit maintenance calculated? Seriously. It would seem to be some sort of higher-degree/exponential function determined by the turn and number of units. It would be really nice if they explain such a crucial aspect of the game.

[iop]

Did you know that city-states can take cities? Like any good American i started working on wiping out the Iroquois in my game last night. They had a city right next to an allied city-state, so the city state hopped in to help me. Imagine my surprise when, after spending a turn shelling a city i then saw my allied city state attack the weakened town with a company of spearmen and take it.

It gets even better: City-state tech seems to be somewhat tied to the tech level of the most advanced player. Since I had overtaken the other continent in a recent King game, city states had rifles, while the AIs had pikes. In order to have a bridgehead for my invasion, I bought a city state, which promptly declared war along with me when Darius wanted to know what all these troops meant that were swimming across the ocean. As I would have, the city state tore through Persians with its rifles (as did a second city state I allied with for fun). One of the city states razed the three cities it took, the other kept two cities.

How the hell is unit maintenance calculated? Seriously. It would seem to be some sort of higher-degree/exponential function determined by the turn and number of units. It would be really nice if they explain such a crucial aspect of the game.

I agree it would have been nice to have the formulas for unit maintenance, or city growth and culture cost in the manual. However, the manual was apparently written quite some time before launch, whereas there was (and is) still some re-balancing going on, so instead of just giving the general formula, they were trying to play it safe and just not publish anything detailed. You will find the info here.

Unit maintenance is calculated as follows:

c(t,n) = ((0.5 + 8/1000 t) round(n,2))^(1 + 2/7000 t)

where n = number of units, t = number of turns and the round function is meant to take the next lowest even number if n is odd.

[ArgonV]

Thanks, at least I know how it's calculated.

I'm having a very annoying bug right now. I offered a deal to Catherine in order to help defeat the treacherous Ottomans, but I made that deal in 600 AD. It's now 1984, and the deal (15 gpt/wine and silver/open borders for her) is still going strong and it's costing me the game. Aren't they supposed to end after 30 turns?

[iop]

Thats a bug that should be fixed in the patch.

[Yakk]

I just had a thought about wonders.

What if the cost of per-era wonders went up for every wonder you have built from that era?

50% cost for the first wonder (yes, 1/3rd!)
+50% cost for each wonder after that.

This means that you can "b-line" for a single wonder, and get a 2nd cost -- but after that, they get increasingly expensive, which should spread wonders out more than a bit.

Line that up with "make wonders more awesome", and you avoid the "a pure-wonder strategy breaks the game". The only way to amass large numbers of wonders becomes "let your neighbors build them, then conquer them" practically.

<- Looking forward to having the DLL source code.

[ArgonV]

That might be moddable. Don't ask me how, I'm just getting started.

I did make a small 'mod' today, it's basically a 4 line SQL file that does the following:
-Reduces building construction costs by 20%
-Doesn't reduce wonder construction costs, but gives each wonder that produces culture and additional +2 culture
-Reduces unit construction costs by 30%
-Doesn't change tech costs yet, but could be changed

I made this to try out modding and because I feel you build too slowly.

[Yakk]

I'd also be tempted by a "diplomacy-style" mod.

Each city can support 1 military unit (or maybe 2). The kinds of military unit it can support are determined by what support structure you build (a stable, a barracks, a drydock, etc).

The actual building of the unit is very quick, a nearly nominal cost. The building of the support structure is not.

So you build unit infrastructure, rather than units. And you take cities, which have unit infrastructure in them, and then can quickly build the unit (like, it takes 1 or 2 turns to build an era-appropriate unit).

High-end units require high-end infrastructure buildings.

[headprogrammingczar]

Perhaps make units time-consuming, but relatively inexpensive. That way, you tie defensive ability more closely to economy. To bring diplomacy back into it, buff trade routes.

[Vaniver]

What if the cost of per-era wonders went up for every wonder you have built from that era?

I'm not sure much would change.

It would be somewhat harder to amass large numbers of wonders- but you can build 3 wonders per age at the same cost as the current system. The main change seems to be that the strategic decision of which wonder to pursue first is even more pressing- you should only expect one top-tier wonder per age, essentially, unless you're breaking away from the pack (or there are very few players). It would make it so everyone has a strong chance to get some boost that could define how their empire works (Ok, do I want a giant culture building, a giant gold building, a building that boosts all military units produced in my capital, a building that makes all scientists produce more research, ...)- but it's not clear to me that that should be exclusive. If I built the Great Library to have a scientist-focused empire, why should you be prevented from doing that? Because I finished it a turn before you did?

Similarly, I'm not sure I like the idea of getting those benefits from conquest. It half fits- the Romans and the Greeks, the Yuan dynasty of China, etc.- but it seems like the wrong mechanism.

I do like this idea, though, when it comes to policies. Particularly if, instead of a bunch of trees, there was a 'policy grid' of some sort- think like the Social Engineering in SMAC, except now each of the choices is instead a tree. From my poking around in the policy system, it appears robust enough that you could have individual policies conflict with each other, not trees- what I'm not sure you could do, but what would be awesome if you could do it, is have policy costs only depend on the number of policies done in that row. So when you adopt a Governance policy, it doesn't make it more expensive to adopt Economics policies, and so on.

The main benefit of this is it would change policies from an alternative technology tree to more like the social engineering of previous days- you actually make choices, but you can do so on a much more fine-grained level. We have free trade- but also heavily subsidize agriculture.

I wonder how difficult it would be to make wonders that occlude other wonders just for your nation, and if that would be beneficial- it gives you more interesting choices to make that you choose by producing things.

I'd also be tempted by a "diplomacy-style" mod.

A tempting idea, but I'm leery of any benefit dependent on the number of cities, since that boosts ICS (and ICS does not need to be boosted).

It seems like there are two possibly easy ways to implement it: add a strategic resource that each city produces (you should be able to do this by having a "recruiting station" or something automatically built in every city that produces one "recruit;" you could also have later buildings that increase the amount one city gives. This might accidentally give Russia twice the number of units; I don't know if that works for buildings or not) or see if you can adjust the game's built-in cap on number of units (I believe it's currently a function of population) to just be 1 per city.

One big thing to consider is that currently city defenses are such that you want 2-4 attacking units per city (or a large tech advantage). I could see this working well if city-state city defenses were reduced to 0 (or something suitably low), so major powers can just waltz in and claim them, but the thing to remember is that Diplomacy is a good game not because of its mechanics but because its mechanics and its scenario are paired so well. Script-generating a map that works well for mechanics that are heavily tied to the number of cities you *can* make seems problematic.

Perhaps make units time-consuming, but relatively inexpensive. That way, you tie defensive ability more closely to economy. To bring diplomacy back into it, buff trade routes.

How would you make units more time-consuming but less expensive? They're run off the same cost.* Or do you mean that the maintenance would be lower? That seems like it would be a poor change: you could support larger armies at less opportunity cost, and it would be more difficult to fend off surprise invasions by raising troops.

*You could fiddle with the hammers cost and a % bonus/penalty for building military units, but that seems like it could have a number of unintended consequences.


More thoughts about strengthening non-ICS:

Make specialists give percentage bonuses instead of flat amounts. If a scientist gives you +25% science (or +.25 science per pop or whatever) instead of a flat amount, specialists in heavily populated cities are significantly better than specialists in sparsely populated cities. The main reason so much research goes on in universities is not that there are a bunch of smart people there, but that the smart people there are all talking to each other. That also suggests the buildings (or, at least, a few of them) might be better off as flat science boosts than as percentage boosts- though that runs the risk of running into the Autolab problem from MoOII, where production races were better at research than research races.

Make food cost to grow constant, or raise for a bit then flatten, rather than explode to keep cities small. Again, thinking back to MoOII- which was somewhat different because you could ship people cheaply- the best way to grow was to colonize a rock where people would have bunches of babies, and then ship those babies to your quality world. That's just odd.

Make higher tier buildings similar, or the same, cost as lower tier buildings, and increase their effectiveness. Particularly when it comes to happiness: a stadium should be significantly better than a coliseum so you have a reason to specialist buildings instead of just drop the first tier buildings of all types in a town then stop.

[headprogrammingczar]

Perhaps make units time-consuming, but relatively inexpensive. That way, you tie defensive ability more closely to economy. To bring diplomacy back into it, buff trade routes.

How would you make units more time-consuming but less expensive? They're run off the same cost.* Or do you mean that the maintenance would be lower? That seems like it would be a poor change: you could support larger armies at less opportunity cost, and it would be more difficult to fend off surprise invasions by raising troops.

*You could fiddle with the hammers cost and a % bonus/penalty for building military units, but that seems like it could have a number of unintended consequences.

I meant inexpensive as in the rush-build price, which is adjustable, and in gold, not hammers.

[ArgonV]

Ok, here's some other things I'd like to try out, what do you think?

Most buildings will remain intact when conquering a city
All buildings providing defense, courthouses and palaces will be destroyed when conquering a city
All buildings providing experience have an 80% chance of getting destroyed
All buildings providing units production bonuses have an 60% chance of getting destroyed

This to simulate war a bit better

Adding upgrades for 'dead end units' such as scouts and cavalry
Adding an improved, midgame scouting unit (explorer or something similar)

This because it's a shame to waste experienced scouts and cavalry. I was thinking about turning a scout into (explorer >) mechanized infantry and cavalry into helicopter

Adding the Dutch civilization (because I want to play as the Dutch! )

Leader will be William of Orange (duh)
Civilization trait: Trade routes bring in 33% more gold, ocean hexes produce +1 gold
Special Unit: A ship with stats like The Frigate, but it doesn't require Iron
Special Building: Dutch Windmill, same as the normal windmill, but produces +2 food in the city and can also be built on hilly terrain

Comments? Unbalanced?