Longturn Forum

Are there features or changes that should be reverted or removed? The thing with funda is one and the thing with the elephants another. Anything else you can think of?

Archers. Bombard units are fun, but the Archer's main utility was as a "Scout" to see all the defenders in a city.

I second Hans' request with regards to archers.
Mine would be to restore the traditional granary sizes as they are in civ2civ3 and most previous recent LT games.
That is instead of Now I know that some don't share my view on the subject.

Archers are no longer able to bombard.

Now reverted the granary foodbox sizes to the values they were on civ2civ3 + also reverted the actual granary effect to give 10 food instead of 50%.

Let's see what we will do with funda.

IMO, leave Fundamentalism alone.

wieder wrote: Now reverted the granary foodbox sizes to the values they were on civ2civ3

Nice, thanks.

wieder wrote: + also reverted the actual granary effect to give 10 food instead of 50%.

This on the other hand defeats the purpose of restoring the granary sizes.
I don't see why the granary should be crippled to 10 food. With such a change one would need 30 food to grow 1 size a city with a granary above size 9 instead of 25 as it was in LT44.
I'd rather leave the 50% food effect everyone expects.

The original requirements for city growth with granaries in civ2civ3 were:

10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 20, 20, 30

In previous games they were:

10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 15, 15, 20

With LT44 settings:

8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 20, 25

The problem with earlier settings is that size 6 cities are kind of to powerful when building settlers or migrants. Maybe there is some way to fix that?

I had no problem with the steadily growing granary sizes of LT44. Sudden jumps in food cost are bad, since they create clear "optimally powerful" points.

The only downside is that since food-overflow is lost, you need to recalculate the optimal surplus for a young city every time it grows.

Theres nothing wrong with the granaries...

Fundamentalism is a bit too powerful but as the changes are still new maybe let it play out for a few more games before changing.
I really like the idea of having some kind of early bombard unit as it promotes combining different unit types and more interesting strategies But yeah, archers are too weak to be effective and did just show how many defenders.

Research rate.
This was adjusted in recent games and I think now the effects are clear.
LT43 - As much as I am a fan of long slow games with higher research costs... In this game the rate at which the price increases for the later techs is too high, even the largest nations are struggling to research anything and global warming will probably kill everyone before the deadlock caused by strong defence of riflemen/marines can be broken.
LT44 - While in this game research seems too fast.. probably because its a team game with tech trading..
Some where in between for the next game?

Can we have amphibious attacks for Swordsmen back again? I miss that a lot... Maybe a specialised, but weaker, ship attack unit would be a better role for archers. Cause some opportunistic chaos in the early game but then be innefective once players get their cities properly defended.

Lord_P wrote:Maybe a specialised, but weaker, ship attack unit would be a better role for archers. Cause some opportunistic chaos in the early game but then be innefective once players get their cities properly defended.

Here’s an idea: Warriors.

It makes very much sense from the realism point of view. Why can’t Swordsmen/Legion be amphibious? Because this unit depends on their battle line and internal coordination. Once they disembark, they require time to establish a line and become effective. But once they do that, they are very dangerous.

Warriors, however, is just a bunch of armed people. Their weakness is not too much organisation - thus low attack and defence - but at the same time this means they don’t require much (or any) time to become battle-ready once disembarked.

Gameplay-wise: This would also give them a purpose besides becoming early shield-eaters and police.

And no, this doesn’t mean their successors, Musketeers, need to be amphibious, too.

About tech progress: Tech Upkeep allows you to fine-tune the tech cost progression. Someone needs to make an analysis, but it should be fairly simple if you know basics of programming. If nobody else does it by then, I will when I get home in a week or so.

Standard tech tree was, what, 80k bulbs for the whole tree, new tech tree was 500k? So we need something in between.

Still can't decide about the granaries. We could use 50% food but how to fix the step from 5 to 6 (granary size 20 to 30)? Arkan, how about changing size 5 to 24?

Sharp discontinuities in food cost are best to be avoided, so I support intermediate values.

20 to 30 (10 to 15 with granary improvement) isn't much. Or am I missing something?

If you build a migrant in a size 6 city (gets 15 food when getting to size 6) the city will have 15 food when it shrinks to size 5 and it can grow instantly back to size 6. That kind of city can produce a migrant every turn and remain the same size.

I have a feeling that simply abandoning migrants as a unit would solve a lot of problems.

Corbeau wrote:I have a feeling that simply abandoning migrants as a unit would solve a lot of problems.

And you can still build Settlers to transfer population if you want at 15 production/pop instead of a Migrant's 10/pop.

Well, ok, make it more expensive. That partly solves the problem.

I don't consider the size 6 cities with granary able to produce 1 migrant/turn to be an issue given:
1. cities can't be grown above size 8 with migrants
2. it compensates in a rather modest way the lack of rapture growth
2. tricks like that are part of the game learning process, learning and teaching tricks is a big part of the fun I got from the game, so I don't think we should get rid of them.

So I am for keeping granary sizes, granary building effect and migrants (and their cost) as they were.
Now I'm very conservative when it comes to ruleset changes. Others seem to like the new granary sizes you had introduced in LT44.
A poll could help here.

arkan wrote:learning and teaching tricks

It's a bug, and it was fixed. Instead of bug you also can call it arcane knowledge (pun intended).
It's the first time I hear from that. I guess it's save to assume that at least 95% of all players of LT44ff would
not know. And you taught it? Tell me whom ...

So either take the old thing or the new one, but make no stinking compromise.
If I hear the old thing slows down growth I start liking it ...

But no, I'm in favor of growing granary size forever. Privileging megacities is unjust. (Yes, Corbeau, I know your ruleset ...). Currently in LT44 red is stuck at size 16 because they lack sanitation. Without that the game would be already over.

fran wrote:I'm in favor of growing granary size forever. Privileging megacities is unjust.

I'm afraid it's a bit late to add to the debate, but i'd also slow down city growth drastically; size 16 cities by T60 should be allowed only by exceptional ressources.

I'd try this: granary size = 20 + 4*(city size - 1); maybe to be capped at 80 for size 16?

This would densify the land and/or concentrate nations' wealth, stressing the strategic importance of some regions.

In a similar manner i'd slow down infrastructure building; again, it's a shame every land tile is fully upgraded by T60. To not hinder early development too much the work rate shouldn't be changed, but could we add a fixed food upkeep to the workers?

Of course, early tech costs would have to be adjusted.

The basic problem with cities becoming really big happen because of the planned number of the turns for a game. At least assuming that we want to make it possible for everyone to have at least some really big cities.

120 - 150 turns seems to be the most popular range and it's also my favorite. There are some players who would like to see games ending before T100 and some who would like to play games lasting maybe over 200-250 turns.

Corbeau will be introducing us much higher granary sizes with LT42 and my impression is that it will be really hard to grow super cities with that. Maybe corbeau could make a forum post about how he expects / guesses the cities will grow there by T60?

LT46 will also use the same or slightly modified granary system we had on LT44. We could experiment there unless LT46 wouldn't have been planned to be a game where one player can't control too many cities at one time. The empire sizes will be limited so that when you reach the first limit, you will get one new unhappy to all the cities for *every* new city you build. The idea with that is to make the game less time consuming to play. And also force the players to change government much more often than one needs in a standard game. The revolution only takes one turn instead of two and there will be more than 20 governments. The early ones will limit the number of the cities between 7-10 and the last ones to 16-25. With that it kind of makes sense to let the players have really big cities even with the granaries maxing out at 50.

Then again it might be fun to create a more traditional game with bigger granary sizes. LT47 could be a game like that. That kind of setup might make smallpoxing great again and would probably encourage fighting wars. It would also be an easy change and we could even use the original standard techs costs since smaller cities produce less bulbs. There we could also try something new with the workers. Food cost sounds good. Much better than more expensive workers. We just need to figure out if that could be exploited.

Thanks for the ideas. All can't be used right away but I (and some others I think) browse the old threads for new ideas when new games are planned and some stuff may be implemented much later.

wieder wrote:LT46 will also use the same or slightly modified granary system we had on LT44. We could experiment there unless LT46 wouldn't have been planned to be a game where one player can't control too many cities at one time. The empire sizes will be limited so that when you reach the first limit, you will get one new unhappy to all the cities for *every* new city you build. The idea with that is to make the game less time consuming to play. And also force the players to change government much more often than one needs in a standard game. The revolution only takes one turn instead of two and there will be more than 20 governments. The early ones will limit the number of the cities between 7-10 and the last ones to 16-25. With that it kind of makes sense to let the players have really big cities even with the granaries maxing out at 50.

This seems like it will heavily discourage conquest.

That was the setting for... LT40? And initially it did discourage it. But after one point, when you got all the wonders and happy improvements and Shakespeare (?) was built (+1 happy per entertainer), that created so much happiness that the limitation effectively disappeared. So, early on, you get only skirmishes for a better position, while in the later game you can have a full war with no size limit.

As for granaries, did everyone forget the original Civ setting? +10 for each +1 size? And still you could make 30+ size cities, with farmlands even more.

Corbeau wrote:That was the setting for... LT40? And initially it did discourage it. But after one point, when you got all the wonders and happy improvements and Shakespeare (?) was built (+1 happy per entertainer), that created so much happiness that the limitation effectively disappeared. So, early on, you get only skirmishes for a better position, while in the later game you can have a full war with no size limit.

As for granaries, did everyone forget the original Civ setting? +10 for each +1 size? And still you could make 30+ size cities, with farmlands even more.

Ok, that seems like it shouldn't be too bad once you have enough happiness resources and good government.

As for granary sizes, the "20, 30, 40..." of Civ1/2 is a little too extreme, and was one of the things that made smallpoxing a problem. It allows for roughly constant growth-time per pop, but only if each population brings in additional food surplus, which is not the case in the early game.

I personally liked the compromise in Civ4's food box, of "22, 24, 26, 28, 30...". It still increases with population, but not nearly as drastically, and doesn't heavily favor the small cities.

Most people probably missed this, but a few days ago I upgraded my ruleset to have granary sizes like this (comments welcome):
This may encourage smallpoxing, but, then, again, we do want the early game to go a bit faster and we want things to do.