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Post by Avogadro on Apr 18, 2006 11:37:36 GMT -5
d'oh!! You were heavily involved in original, was sure you where on Warlords as well
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Post by Onan on Apr 18, 2006 11:49:20 GMT -5
I did a quick read through the first couple AGAs and even posted a comment...but that's the only surface scratch I've put into it so far. Have fun!
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Post by islandia on Apr 18, 2006 12:14:02 GMT -5
On a bright note... You can tab in the lobby and it doesn't screw up the grid anymore!!!
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Post by mrgametheory on Apr 18, 2006 12:31:04 GMT -5
In terms of actual strategy. The game is in fact a race to Math now on ancient. There is no time to go to Iron working out of not being able to lose the 6-11 turns where you could be chopping. And if you are forced to go for Iron working and your opponent is not, than he will be sending his flux of armies to you from trees and its obviously over. If either person has Bronze or Horse and the other doesn't, that player has a significant disadvantage. I am not saying they are flat out dead, I am just saying that they have a fairly large disadvantage, especially horse. In fact, If I have horse and my opponent doesn't have horse or Bronze, I can pretty much guarantee victory. This shouldn't be the case in strategy games.
Trees are just like a 4th resource. There used to be Bronze/Horse/Iron/Trees. If you had one of the resources or a nuts load of trees, you were in good military shape, because the trees allowed you to find a military resource fast!!!!! The fact is more things should be added to balancing the game out and not less. We should become less dependent on certain resources to be able to survive against other players. Maybe allow Ivory to have a special kind of military unit in the beginning who has a bonus as long as they are inside their culture borders, or with the Cow resource you can build Cow archers or something, nuts, maybe even make Iron Working have a second Military unit you can make that would make it somewhat worth it to go for instead of Math or even make Metal Casting give a super special unit or something that can compete with 50% bonus for chopping. Than on top of that Make Monarchy give something great to compete with 50% chopping. All you are doing is adding more "Kremlin" and "Liberalism" things to this game and that makes for a boring game.
Of course I am going to destroy newbs who dont know how to tec, by getting math before them, but with advanced players its just going to be the same exact tec game for both of us. And don't think I am just talking about Ladder games and I am ignoring 1 player and epic games. I play all, and what I am saying applies to all. Even in a always peace game I am going to go for Math, or an AI game I am going for math, in any kind of game unless I am on an island with 0 trees, I am going for math. If you want a strategic game, you have to make it so there isn't 1 main tec path. There should be 3. The only serious tec path choice in this game is going liberalism instead of Knights and thats not really a choice for me. The rest of the tec path choices inevitably start to die and one solid tec path choice becomes optimal to serious gamers.
The new changes slow things down a little bit for the tree chopper, which is somewhat good, but at the same time, it makes starting resources significantly more important which is terrible. There shouldn't be starting races towards math, there should be starting races towards 2-4 different possible tecs. maybe even make it so (Metal Casting gives 25% towards chopping, Math gives 25%, Monarchy gives 25%. If I chose to race towards Math, I should Be at a disadvantage to whoever tries to go for Monarchy or Iron working or metal casting and each of those should have a weakness towards the other. It becomes a 3 way balance between the 3 and there should be like 3-8 balancing stages in the game for this.
If I am Gandhi and I get math at the same time as my opponent, I am going to magically pull 10 Extra turns outta my ass from time saved on tree chopping. Obviously every main resource is going to be worked by the time I get math, so what else are my Workers going to do besides Cut trees (And work new cities) - Gandhi is going to have a ridiculous army coming at their opponent within 8-12 turns after they get math and since he is obviously going to take the military lead for this period, he can expand and just go for Catapults and forget Iron Working all together. There is no wonder why Gandhi thinks hes number 1 on one of the covers of this game.
Organized should be -50% Gold for Civics and -25%- -50% gold for costs of having multiple cities.
Give Finacial 50%+ production on markets and Grocers or atleast bring back banks.
Spiritual Only has to wait 1-4 Turns instead of the 5 to change civics or religion.
Expansive should give 5-10 health ( Finacial or Industrious shouldnt be any better than any other trait, all have to be amazing in their own sense)
Creative should give 5-50 Culture ( Making it easier for them to get a culture victory or expand like crazy) (There is a reason why you don't see Culture victories, thats because its almost impossible to get them, make it easier for creative people. (Id take Finacial or Indutrious or Agressive over creative 99% of the time) this shoulnt be the case. And (No you wont be converting enemy cities liek crazy, especially when an Instant 2500 Culture cant even do it 99% of the time.
Agressive should be 1 free rank for (all Units)
Only idiot game creaters would resort to taking Gandhis Fast Worker away from him. Why not bring everything up to his fast workers level.
This game needs balance.
ps. Fix these damn connection problems you Computer science newbs!
lol
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Post by tommynt on Apr 18, 2006 14:16:20 GMT -5
hm, pretty long post by mrgt - I agreeto kinda every lil word and think it sums up strategy and flaws in game design pretty much
espacially this is true - before patch it was a decision wether to chop or work bonus tiles - now u just work bonus tiloes and prey for fast math. Oh well in fact i d say after some games that game design did not get worse but it didnt improve aswell. maybe increased chop at machinery and make machinery a bit cheaper d have been better - the tech path goes to math and catapults anyway in agreesive games and to great lib in epics.
At least there s no reason to make these new design before tackling connection problems
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Post by eiffel on Apr 18, 2006 17:14:09 GMT -5
You both were "crazy choppers". I agree something had to be done about that. Cutting trees down can't be the only way to win in a strategy game and i'm sure it is not. We'll see if there is only one tech path and if math is the only way to go so we can all chop trees like before...
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Post by Onan on Apr 18, 2006 21:54:07 GMT -5
::waltzes into the conversation a bit late::
I guess, um, when you've researched math, your chop yield now goes up (or back to what it was pre-patch)?
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Post by Necrominousss on Apr 18, 2006 23:24:40 GMT -5
As soon as we got the leak that the next patch would be less chop yield, I stated that starting land becomes more important then every. Good, bad, whatever, but you can't deny thats it's not true. I see my advice was not heeded.
Does this make Ghandi more equal to other leaders? In some ways it does, but in others, it makes India a stronger choice.
The era(ancient) I thought had the best balance has now been made out of balance in my opinion.
The first 4 paragraphs of MGT post is exactly right. Make several different tech paths keep adding 10 or 25 percent yield increase would have at least been better.
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Post by zzZhenon on Apr 19, 2006 1:00:46 GMT -5
heh I've been winning alot since chopping was nerfed.. YAY CHOP NERF!! The mathematics path to increased chopping is on the way to Music for ye olde culture bombe -- perfect
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Post by zzZhenon on Apr 19, 2006 1:46:09 GMT -5
change your name to zzZerza and confuse the hell outta everyone like Elledge and Ellestar
lolol
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Post by Onan on Apr 19, 2006 2:09:15 GMT -5
My god, Zerza's up to 7 posts! Ack! It's just too much!!! ;D
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Post by Necrominousss on Apr 19, 2006 2:37:22 GMT -5
zerza you prove MGT's point. Now there is only one viable tech path option. Only one good option=boring after awhile.
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Post by tommynt on Apr 19, 2006 3:09:53 GMT -5
I was never a "crazzy chopper", in fact I was winning more games as others by finding a for me perfect balance between choping working land and connecting resource. what happened now is just pointless, a "waiting period" of about 15 - 20 tunrs before game gets rolling - and in this waiting period the guy with bronze in cap (and maybe some other bonus res) is just so much better off as the guy without.
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 19, 2006 5:35:56 GMT -5
This game needs balance. ps. Fix these damn connection problems you Computer science newbs! lol The problem is that this game is more or less balanced for an average singleplayer game. And Firaxis will never balance it for competitive multiplayer, especially if it will break their singleplayer balance. And i doubt that they'll ever make a mod or scenario for us themselves. It will not improve their sales, they don't have enough betatesters for it and they release patches too infrequent so to be able to balance it according to player feedback. So, the only way is to make our own ladder community mod. After all, Counter-Strike was a mod and Battlefield was a mod (two most popular online multiplayer FPS according to xfire statistics). DotA is a Warcraft 3 mod. So, multiplayer mods may be quite popular and they may be even more popular than original games. I think we can make a good one as well. In fact, If I have horse and my opponent doesn't have horse or Bronze, I can pretty much guarantee victory. This shouldn't be the case in strategy games. It doesn't guarantee victory in singleplayer games so i doubt they'll do anything about it. That's because generally there are only 2 sides in multiplayer and significantly more than 2 in singleplayer. Maybe allow Ivory to have a special kind of military unit in the beginning who has a bonus as long as they are inside their culture borders, or with the Cow resource you can build Cow archers or something, nuts, maybe even make Iron Working have a second Military unit you can make that would make it somewhat worth it to go for instead of Math or even make Metal Casting give a super special unit or something that can compete with 50% bonus for chopping. Than on top of that Make Monarchy give something great to compete with 50% chopping. All you are doing is adding more "Kremlin" and "Liberalism" things to this game and that makes for a boring game. Half-serious Cow archers Let's then add stone golems, elven fighters, goblin warg riders, halfling pig riders Well, actually i doubt that it's possible to add enough historical units. I like Fantasy because there can be practically everything Organized should be -50% Gold for Civics and -25%- -50% gold for costs of having multiple cities. And probably 75% army support cost. Though Organized is about equal to Financial when you have a big empire so it's too weak only in multiplayer games where empires are smaller and commerce isn't that important. Also, in multiplayer Financial gives a better boost if only because Financial gives a better percent bonus when cottages aren't grown yet (3 instead of 2 is much better than 7 instead of 6). In singleplayer, cottages are at their full power during a bigger part of the game so Financial bonus is effectively smaller. Spiritual Only has to wait 1-4 Turns instead of the 5 to change civics or religion. Spiritual is still a very good bonus for rushers in later starts. And i don't think that this change will make it significantly higher. Creative should give 5-50 Culture ( Making it easier for them to get a culture victory or expand like crazy) (There is a reason why you don't see Culture victories, thats because its almost impossible to get them, make it easier for creative people. (Id take Finacial or Indutrious or Agressive over creative 99% of the time) this shoulnt be the case. And (No you wont be converting enemy cities liek crazy, especially when an Instant 2500 Culture cant even do it 99% of the time. Well, creative is weak because it doesn't multiply culture from buildings and +2 culture adds next to nothing to later culture expansions. Culture victory is hard to get because you need to focus on it, stopping research at some point in the game so to focus on culture. It will never work in standart multiplayer games because it's balanced versus a spaceship victory. Instant 2500 Culture is overpowered in multiplayer. As i see, on land maps everyone tries to make early Great Artists for that. It's not a good sign as well. IMHO it should be significantly nerfed in multiplayer. Agressive should be 1 free rank for (all Units) IMHO it's too much. Only idiot game creaters would resort to taking Gandhis Fast Worker away from him. Why not bring everything up to his fast workers level. Well, by adding more imbalances we'll not make a game better balanced. With the bigger bonuses, it's harder to make other bonuses equally powerful in a wide variety of situations.
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 19, 2006 6:15:21 GMT -5
Just because only half a dozen or a dozen techs are discovered doesn't mean that the -speed- of the techs aren't important. The first team to cavalry carries a very strong advantage until the other team gets it; likewise with frigates and riflemen. Cavalry - yes, though a lot of games do end before it. 2.5 months ago teams researched liberalism first etc. and it was a tech race. Now everyone has too much cavalry so it's hard to survive until rifles, and frequently game ends even before cavalry). At least i remember only one game with rifles in the last month. Ancient and Classical are simply all about tech and who stays alive and gets to the key units and techs first; axes, knights, and so forth. At least that's my experience, and that's what I play toward, and it works. I never saw Knights in ancient teamers. Noone survived until them. Everything ends with catapults/elephants/axes. Sometimes teams get Civil Service, but knights are just too far from important tech paths. And if eveything is about equal then expansion and unit upkeep significantly slows down research.
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Post by Elledge on Apr 19, 2006 7:08:06 GMT -5
Three things:
1) COW ARCHERS
2) The philosophy of having useful and unique UU is one that is fun, but by nature imbalances the game further and further.
The problem is that everyone's UU has a different moment in the sun. Over the course of an ancient game that goes to a 2000 victory, they might all be fairly equal, but how many of those do you play?
Instead, even now there are only *maybe* ten civs that anyone even considers playing in renaissance, and it's almost completely because their UU is strong in that era. (Gandhi, at least until this patch, falls under that category because Serfdom has had such wonderful synergy with fast workers, although uniquely his UU is also useful in other eras, if not as much.)
Do you really want to accentuate that by "making other UUs equally useful?" Do you want every single ancient game to be Huyana, Mansa Musa, Hathesput, Caesar, Alexander, and Genghis Khan versus the same on the other side? It's just depressing.
Giving civilizations unique advantages is a cool idea and a great way to add diversity to the game. The problem comes in when each of the unique advantages is good for a particular 500-year-period.
3) I bet I haven't played nearly as many ladder ancient teamers as you, so I'll take your word for it. I just like sitting back and teching so much that I want to think it's the definitive path to victory ;D
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Post by friedrichpsitalon on Apr 19, 2006 7:19:28 GMT -5
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Post by zerza on Apr 19, 2006 20:04:43 GMT -5
My god, Zerza's up to 7 posts! Ack! It's just too much!!! ;D and 4 deleted
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 20, 2006 2:30:48 GMT -5
Here's the change list btw * firepower is now average of curr and max strength In SDK it's (current + max +1) / 2 Firaxis should release patch to their patch notes ;D
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 20, 2006 11:06:53 GMT -5
... Maybe it's so in SDK, but according to test in the game it's definately (current + max) / 2, as they say in patch notes. I'm really interested, what do they store in their variables? Crazy coding.
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