@Knasp Hey, I'll gladly provide feedback and suggestions based on my experiences with the mod. However, I'd love to know how the mod is "supposed" to be played - that is, should I include the mods you suggest when playing it or would you prefer feedback based on the mod as is, that is, without including the suggested mods?

Originally posted by Duck-billed platypus:

@Knasp Hey, I'll gladly provide feedback and suggestions based on my experiences with the mod. However, I'd love to know how the mod is "supposed" to be played - that is, should I include the mods you suggest when playing it or would you prefer feedback based on the mod as is, that is, without including the suggested mods?

You can suggest things based on the mod as is, without taking other mods into account. The "recommended" mods are mostly cosmetic. I personally prefer playing with "Jam's difficulty mod", to stop A.I. from starting with free settlers and combat bonues etc. But I haven't incorporated it into my mod, since I want to leave that choice to the player.

If there are any mods that you think I should incorporate or make compatible then that could be a suggestion as well.

So, a few first notes:
Crabs are strictly superior to fish. I don't think that represents the importance of fish as a food source adequately, and it also makes finding fish a bit of a disappointment compared to the other sea ressources.

Turtles do, as far as I am concerned, appear far too late as a ressource. It would make more sense, from my point of view, to have them as an early game food ressource, and maybe add the science effect later (or whatever you feel is more approriate - culture comes to mind, as tortoise shells and leather are and were valued in art and fashion).

On a somewhat related note, the non-ressource fishing boats are a rather significant boost to Kupe's ability, making every workable non-reef coastal tile into a potential culture-bomb. I found that to be rather strong. Fishing boats by themselves become rather good with harbour buildings and the city state that adds +1/2 production to them, especially with a Civ further improving them.

I also feel that in general, civilizations with early bonuses, particularly food, but also production, are a lot less inhibited by the changes to food production than are those without them (duh). As an example, I found playing France rather tedious if not getting lucky with early ressources, whereas with Kupe, I had no such trouble at all.

I do, I think, like the city state changes, however, it also makes city state interaction a bit dull at times - mainly because a lot of the envoys you send have no or no appreciable effect -and, incidentally, shifts the balance to the detriment of nations with city state related abilities. Maybe some sort of middle ground could be found, so that even if you are not the suzerain of a city state, you still profit (perceptibly) from reaching the later tiers.

As a last note, I sort of dislike the fact that cities no longer get meaningful attacks from walls. I do, I think, see the reasoning behind this, but I like the idea of the city defending "itself", which fits rather well with the historical importance of fortifications and (to me, at least) represents the natural attrition through disease, desertion etc. as well as the defenders' measures.
Also, having prompts for city attacks that fail to do anything meaningful feels rather inelegant.

All that being said, I am enjoying myself quite a bit and totally love the premise of the mod, so please consider these not as criticism, but simply as a rendition of my thoughts.

Thank you for the feedback!

1. I see what you mean. Dunklosteus had changed it for Agricultural Revolution, which I hadn't noticed. In the next version I will revert the yields back to vanilla or something similar.

2. Good point, maybe Turtles could give +1 culture, +1 faith and minus 1 food. I really don't want them to be a food resource.

3. Yes, Kupe's ability needs to be dealt with. Do you have a suggestion on how to nerf it?

4. Perhaps some of those early bonuses need to be tweaked. I'm currently considering changing a lot of yields from features, resources, improvements, districts and particularly I'm thinking about adding a lot more adjacency bonuses overall. But until I do, perhaps you have some suggestions on what to try?

5. Personally I prefer the lesser yields from city-states, but it's not good if it feels dull. Perhaps we could give some bonuses for more envoys. A discount for levying troops or extra diplomatic favor points comes to mind.

6. I agree that the current solution isn't satisfactory. I think I'll bring back ranged strikes in the next update, but see if I can reduce their effectiveness. Perhaps by giving units extra healing from plundering (in addition to the normal plunder yields).

2. Historically, of course, they were a food ressource, even a regionally important one, as turtles were relatively easy to hunt and especially their eggs were a plentiful and accessible food source. But yeah, I can see them granting culture, and the faith would make for a nice discworld reference ;)

3. For the culture-bombing, I would simply change it so that only fishing boats on a ressource cause a culture bomb. That would be a slight nerf compared to vanilla, as you will have less ressources discovered at the very beginning (even if turtles were to come sooner, which I still think would be appropriate), but I think that's not a problem, considering his abilities are rather strong anyway. Apart from that, I think the difference between fishing boats on ressources and those without them is not all that pronounced in the late game, but tbh, that might fit in quite well with the real world and need not be a problem. I think it's fine, basically. After all, Kupe suffers rather a lot from his inability to get rid of annoying ressources that block district and wonder placement (and he can't profit from harvesting them).

4. I really, really like the idea of having more (and possible more diverse) adjancency bonuses. My favourite mod in the early days of CIV 6 used to be thecrazyscotsman's omnibus, which, to me at least, had the main forte of making choice of district much more dependent on a city's environment. I really enjoyed that a lot. Demanded more flexibility, made the cities more diverse.
I think maybe making camps grant food early on might be one idea, or making some early buildings improve ressource yields (iirc, omnibus had the granary boost wheat and rice, for example).
4. b. As it is now, if you lack early ressources and/or flood plains, city growth can be slow to the point where you can hardly catch up to the competition. That is, there are a lot more bad starts now than there used to be, and the difference between an "average" start and a "good" start seems to be more pronounced.

5. For example, yes. Or have some other minor increase per envoy. As it stands, it went from city states being a major contributor to culture/faith/science to them barely contributing at all beyond the very early game (beyond their unique abilities, which of course are still strong!). I don't think the bonus to every city with the appropriate district/building should return; I like that those are gone. Maybe another idea would be to improve trade routes going to city states you are suzerain of, and have that increase with envoys?

6. That sounds like an idea! I think plundering could be buffed, historically it was certainly a huge factor.


I'll start another game and see how that it turns out, and then pester you with more comments and ideas. :)

Thanks for taking the time to test my mod and provide feedback!

2. Turtles will be granting Culture and Faith. Reefs will lose their gold and faith bonus from the start. After researching Conservation un-improved features will be getting +2 faith and after Environmentalism they'll be getting +2 faith and +1 Science. Un-improved fossil fuels will also get +2 faith. I think it makes sense since Naturalists require Faith to purchase, and I don't think it will unbalance the game.

3. Yes, I'm thinking along the same lines. I'll change the bonuses for Fishing Boats provided by the Maori trait, God of the Sea pantheon, Kampung and Seastead improvements. I'm thinking that they should require a resource as well (except oil).

4. I'll look into Omnibus when I have time. I'm going to start by nerfing Terrace Farms slightly, since they are way too fertile.

4b. Yes, Rivers are hard to do without but in the beginning it should be difficult to get food. Perhaps allowing Farms on Hills earlier, or slightly increasing food yields to Pastures/Camps depending on adjacent terrain/features could help?

5. Yes that's a good idea. A trade route to a city state could yield +1 gold for every envoy there. Trade city states could get +2.

6. I'm considering changing most if not all plunder yields to Gold and also give units Healing. As well as increasing maintenance costs for units in enemy territory, or just increasing them straight up. It seems to me that Gold income is huge compared to the maintenance costs.

2. If you take away both the gold and the faith bonus, reefs will be a lot weaker then they are now. I kind of liked them, and they made coastal cities more interesting early on. I think the faith bonuses to boost naturalist acquisition based on un-improved features are a great idea!

3. My line was mostly NOT changing the Fishing Boat/God of the Sea/Kampung bonuses - I think they're mostly fine as they are. Coastal cities without Kampung and God of the Sea have bad production issues from my experience; chosing a non-faith granting pantheon (and not Religious Settlements, either) is already a considerable tax to pay for getting production from those fishing boats. Lowering production, regardless of balancing, mostly makes the game more tedious, because you just can't do as much.
That being said, it depends on what you plan on doing, and I'll gladly test the changes in another Kupe game.

4b. I'd love boosts for Pastures and Camps, that would probably help a bit. There will still be unplayable starts, but more of them will be interesting/decent.

6. Again, I'd say that depends. I kind of like the idea of increasing military maintenance and maybe increase it more when they are in enemy territory - that would make total sense to me. You also made early aggression stronger by removing the city attack, so that would also act as a balance to that. In general, again, I think gaining a lot of gold is not necessarily bad; some games depend on the ability to buy stuff in your cities (and some civs do entirely depend on that - Mali would come to mind). But as I understand you, you are mainly concerned with military maintenance being more or less negligible, and as to that, I tend to agree.

A few more observations (from playing Mali):

The increased movement cost in deserts really hurts Mali, as you would ideally want to settle in the middle of desert whenever you can: your settlers take ages to get anywhere, your workers take ages as well, so do your traders (and potentially, your military).

Stone is already a weak ressource in the base game, that is in most cases just harvested early. It seems even weaker in the mod (mainly due to less tiles being workable and the flat tiles stone tends to be situated in losing food and being important for early farming). Some improvement to Stone (or quarries in general?) might be a good idea.

Kilimanjaro still says Food in its description (though that is really a minor issue).


I have also been thinking about basic balancing and the shifts the mod causes. I might be wrong here, as I am, in general, only an intermediate player and one that tends to play rather peaceful games, but to me it seems as though the mod shifts balance between playstyles and victory conditions rather dramatically.

Military (especially Rush):
+ Slower technological advance boosts early military. Rushing with warriors seems pretty viable, civs with early UUs are even more formidable now.
+ Weaker city ranged attacks makes taking cities early easier, especially since those will also have lower defense strength due to lower tech level.
+ Don't care much about lowered growth; most military strats have no reason to raise cities beyond size 4 or so (though this might change if you increase unit maintenance).
- Building requirements for unit production might slow down non-rush strategies.
- Increased movement cost helps to slown down military strategies.

Rapid Early Expansion:
- The nerf to city states really hurt strategies and civs based on massive early expansion (which is a good thing in general, I think, but shifts the balance and might want some sort of counterbalancing in the long run). City + District spam is weakened massively.

Science:
- Hurt massively by the city state changes (spamming campus districts is a lot less attractive than it used to be).
- Lower population growth means weaker science output (though I love the fact that in general, going "tall" is a lot more attractive than it used to be).
- Hurt disproportionately by the slower pace of the game, giving military opponents more time to crush them.

Culture:
- Hurt massively by the city state changes (as above).
- Hurt by increased costs to great persons (I see the reasoning behind that, but it seems to be a change that mainly hurts culture (by denying them early writers/artists as well as engineers).
- Lower population growth means weaker culture output.
- More farming for growth means less old-growth forests etc. for natural parks.
- Also hurt a lot by the slower pace of the game.

Religious:
- Hurt by city state changes (as above).
- Somewhat hurt by increased great person cost (First religions go to Russia and whoever builds Stonehenge, which will NOT be the player on higher difficulties - in several games I had trouble founding a religion as Mali, even though I prioritized building holy sites and shrines and had massive faith output. This is also connected to the AI using city projects to generate GP, which it can do due to having that starting advantage).
- It has become impossible to have apostles reform your religion before all religions have been founded, which used to be a major goal in vanilla Civ6 when playing religious games (at least for me) in order to have more choices and enable more synergies between beliefs.
+ Profits from the generally slower pace of the game (I suppose).

Diplomatic:
- Hurt by city state changes, in that sucking up to city states is a lot less beneficial now.
- Hurt quite a bit by the later onset of the World Congress.
+ Profits from the generally slower pace of the game.


All in all, it seems to me that military, especially rush, strategies, profit from the mod, whereas cultural and scientific strategies suffer disproportionately.


Please excuse the lengthy comment.
I also hope that I am not merely repeating thoughts you have already had yourself, and that there is some helpful food for thought in here. That being said, I might be wrong in places; this is just how I see it and how it seems to apply to my level of play (which is Emperor/Immortal).
Again, as you can maybe tell from the time I spend commenting on it, I really enjoy your mod and am very thankful for your efforts and continuing support.

Thanks for more feedback! I'll just post this quick reply for now, since I'm short on time.

In the coming update, flat desert tiles will only require 1 movement point after Celestial Navigation is researched (as Dunklosteus had originally intended when he upped the movement cost).

Quarries will give +1 gold for every adjacent river edge and coast tile. Not sure if that makes any difference but I guess we'll see. Maybe they can get a small % bonus to production but that'll likely have to wait.

As for your victory evaluation, I'm far from an expert player myself so your points could be quite right.

I haven't tried a culture victory in a while but your points seem reasonable. Do you have any suggestion on how to buff it?

I don't understand the point about apostles, because I haven't modded this part of the game. I haven't experienced it being impossible to reform religion before all religions are founded. Can you link me to a wiki or relevant page where I can read about this,?

I would only add to your points that:

Military victory
+ Likely helped by the increased movement on water and on land in the later eras.

Religious victory
- Religious units being slower on land.
+ Religious units being faster on water.
+ Increased religious pressure from nearby cities and trade routes.

@Knasp I really appreciate you answering in so much detail, even though you are short on time.
The change to quarries sounds lovely, as does the flat desert change. Also makes a lot of sense to me.
For all victory conditions but military, decreasing the GP cost (maybe not to what they were before, but something in between) seems like a small but significant boost. For culture specifically, I have no ideas for an easy fix right now.

In general, it seems like most bonus ressources could use a boost - as it is, they are mostly being harvested rather than worked by high-skill players (due to the instant boost snowballing, and the bonus yields rarely being worthwhile over a non-ressource tile with the same improvement). Boosting bonus ressources would also boost culture victories, especially with the boosts to unimproved features you alluded to, as it might then be an option to just leave a tile untouched and work it instead of harvesting it.

As for the apostles:
The main problem here is that with the increased research costs and slower growth, thus lower base research, getting theology (and thus temples and thus apostles) is delayed to the point where usually, every religion has been founded.
Sorry, I have not made that at all clear in my previous post.

Edit: really looking forward to the next version a lot! Again, if there is anything in particular you would want me to try or have a look at, please tell me! :)

@Duck-billed-platypus:
Np, it's nice to hear others are enjoying my work.

Unfortunately you can't set GP costs for specific types (as far as I'm aware). There's a cost set for each Era and that applies to all types of GP.

But the same result could be achieved by giving more cultural GP points per turn. I'm not so keen on doing that though, because I don't want so many Great People earned before their respective Era.

Some other things that I could try which wouldn't interfere with GP would be to increase Tourism points for every world wonder (currently 2), or the points gained from each era after construction (currently +1).
Or increase the tourism-% gained from policies, improvements and buildings in later eras. Maybe add or change a policy card for tourism. For e.g. a policy card that gives +100-200% tourism and -20% production in all cities.

But I'm not so familiar with all the cultural victory mechanics, because frankly it's quite confusing and the developers (Firaxis) haven't designed the UI and in-game info to help players understand how it works and what players need to do. Last time I played for a cultural victory I had to spend quite some time in the wiki and googling just to get a grasp of how it actually works.

-----

Regarding bonus resources I decided on a risky last minute change that I hope will make bonus resources better:
Commercial hubs will get +1 gold for every adjacent bonus resource.
Harbors will get +1 gold for adjacent pastures and quarries.

Unfortunately you can't set up district adjacencies for specific resources or improved resources. But I still hope that the harbor bonuses will mostly benefit bonus resources.

Last night I managed to implement a decent system for ranged strikes that I'm expecting should work for most cases. Currently in the base game it works in the way that every time you build a stronger ranged unit it results in your ranged strike strength being increaded. So I've added a modifier to ranged units that gives a minus to your ranged strikes (trying to aim for 50% of the units' combat strength). It's far from perfect but I feel it's probably better than having ranged strike strength be modified based on the Era, which was the only working alternative.

Aiming to upload the new update tonight.

Sounds interesting!
I do not expect the district changes to make enough of a difference, but I like them a lot in terms of flavour.

I am not entirely sure, but I think Omnibus used to have resource-specific adjacency effects for districts. I might be wrong, though. Could have been types of resources only. Or maybe he was just doing something really fancy to get that to work.

Regarding culture, I am not sure how to move forward. I'll try playing another culture-victory and see what happens. Incidentally, it works decently enough with Kupe, but then Kupe doesn't rely on Great Works to get his tourism.

Anyway, I am looking forward to trying the new version!

Very, very interesting changes! A lot of the ideas seem very elegant to me and I like them a lot (say, Pasture adjacencies, Marsh changes, -amenities for power plants and so on). I really, really like your way of thinking.

The Maori suffer quite the nerf with this patch, which seems okay when it comes to non-ressource fishing boats (if a little sad), but I do not like the culture bomb replacement, as it is a LOT weaker than the "vanilla" culture bomb (and is a rather uninteresting ability that players will barely notice most of the time).

Having an improved copper resource gives the owning city: +20% production towards Ancient, Renaissance and Industrial Era military units.

First bronze weapons and armour, then cannon? I first thought it was a mistake, then I got it. :D

Looking forward to trying it out.

Thanks!

Yes, I spent a lot of time trying to put a condition on their culture bomb ability, but it wasn't possible in any way I could find. And since the culture bombing was ridiculously powerful at that moment, I resorted to this compromise for now.

An idea taken from Civ 4: having access to stone/marble could add production bonuses to (some) wonders. Similar effects for other bonus ressources would make those a lot more valuable. Another example that comes to mind is adding bonus effects for grain/rice to granaries.