With that, I will first respond here to a recent comment regarding Holo's ability to generate tons of Gold with 17+ trade routes by turn 200+ allowing her to buy large armies and generally do everything easily.

For the moment, that seems fine to me for several reasons.

One reason is that she is still paying more than other Civs are for those units, and to get many trade routes, you need to have a really wide empire, which typically means more Cities to buy stuff for to drain that Gold.

To get 17 trade routes, she would need to have at least 14 cities, and have built the Trade Guild branch buildings in all of them -- not something that can be done very quickly between her production penalty (and she can't buy those unique buildings) and that fact that those buildings themselves are locked behind the Rowen HQ, which itself requires a Market in all cities. Those Trade Buildings also increase in cost as you found more and more cities.

As well, she is definitely designed to snowball after a certain point, as you can see -- the best way to stop her is to do so early on, before she can get her trade routes entrenched and her economy stabilized. In the early game, when you only have 2 or 3 cities, your income is not high enough to be able to continuously buy out armies, and with the penalty, it's tough for her to train an army either.

If by turn 200+ she hasn't been disturbed, rightly so she should be a powerhouse in my eyes.

Even so, it's not like she becomes invincible -- She's still pretty dependent on those trade routes, so if an enemy decides to start going after and pillaging all of them, her economy will begin to buckle.

A second response to another comment, since it's too long to put in the comments section.

This is in response to a comment regarding Holo's ability to accrue a large number of trade routes, with an example being ~60 routes with 20 cities.

I did indeed gear for Holo to be more of an expansionist and have a wider play style, so it would fit well with Liberty, though she is still very strong with a Tradition start if you have a specific strategy -- I've done both styles myself pretty successfully.

Only question is.. how would you have ~60 trade routes on 20 cities? Holo only gets 3 "free" trade routes, and after that, she is limited to only 1 trade route per city. Even assuming she got both the Petra and Colossus, that would be a maximum of 25 trade routes on 20 cities. It sounds like a lot, but at the same time, you have 20 different cities to worry about, and all that territory to protect.

Not to mention, by your 20th city, the Trade Guild Inns start requiring more production to build than lategame World Wonders. If you insist on expanding trade routes even with all of that, I have no problem giving Holo more economic power. She is technically capable of infinite trade routes, IF you are prepared to invest all that time.

I'm not sure if you might be including trade routes from techs, of which she gets none of.

Well, i used word "what if" b/c i end the game even before i can have 20 cities, my game was just 7 cities with 17 trade routes (funny thing that i dont even build full trade route b/c omg 500 + gold is enough for me to deal with them). So i assumed what if i have with 20 cities, maybe 60 trade route ?

Play other civ, i don't like trade route with CS, but with Holo. I really like to trade with CS. Even you said, i will war with all other major civ but i don't care. CS keep my civ ecomony high (thanks to value trade gold of Holo civ ) and use gold + combine with other mods like CSD and Reform, i totally use gold to allied every single CS i met (even i set competet CS of CSD is very hard mode, they are just hopeless to pick allies with me).

But you are right one thing, first 100 turns was nightmare but you just can turtle your civ and after 150 turns , you will open your true form. At this time, Holo snowball pretty hard, unlikely other civ. So you play a civ that will determinate a game after 150 turns, what is a reason for you to play more ?

Pls notice: I played Holo and totally focus on everything related to Gold, so i passed every other else and that what i got.

Thanks for the clarification.

However, I'm still a bit confused - with 7 cities, you should only have 10, maybe 12 trade routes max with both Petra and Colossus. Where are the others coming from? Are the other mods giving you extra trade routes?

20 cities definitely won't give you 60 trade routes, as I've designed Holo to ensure that you normally only ever get 1 trade route from her per city. Any more routes would be coming from other mods, and I can't exactly balance around that because I don't play with those mods.

Even so, if you manage to get 20 cities, I think you've basically won the game with any Civ.

She does get great bonuses to the trade routes, though in terms of number of routes, Venice should have her beat consistently early on, because Venice gets 2 free routes just for researching certain techs. Just from Animal Husbandry and Sailing, Venice has 4 trade routes to Holo's 1 (3 if she rushes for the HQ.)

In terms of Gold income from those routes, she has fairly substantial bonuses, but I feel they're offset by the fact that everything is more expensive for her. By the time you have 7 or 8 cities, her buy-out costs are about the same as other Civs, though, but that's because she has more Cities to buy stuff for.

I have tried to balance this Gold income a bit in the past, but unfortunately, the game really sucks at having two different ways of "making stuff." Virtually everything is based around building, so when I introduce the prospect of regularly buying stuff, it screws that up. However, trying to tone that down heavily merely makes Holo more like any other Civ -- bland and boring, because you can't really use your wealth all that often.

I have toyed with the idea of making her progressively worse at building -- and by extension, more heavily reliant on trade income -- as her Empire grows larger. I'll have to see how that works out, and how it changes the feel of the game.

She is also supposed to be very happy to trade with City-States, although her Gold bribing is much less effective than anyone else. While 250 Gold will get other civs 10 influence, it will only get Holo 5 or so, and they also decay a lot faster.

Still, your point is something I have considered, and it's good to be reminded of -- I have been trying to make more incentives to trade and stay peaceful with the major civs as well, so you can't simply DoW the world and just trade with CS's.

The early turns being a nightmare sounds about right, and is what I wanted to go for -- she's very vulnerable early on, and that ends up being the best time to pester her in order to slow her down. If she's left alone during this period, then she'll grow very powerful.

In either case, I don't believe that her victory is at all guaranteed by turn 150. She has no real bonus to a Science victory, and her gold may help in a diplomatic victory (which is what she's supposed to naturally gravitate toward) but it will cost her twice as much to bribe CS's. She has some minor bonuses to Tourism to help with a culture victory, but nothing to inherently increase that rate of generation, and as far as domination goes, I think that period is about as competitive as it will be, because many other Civs will peak and get their UU's at about that time period.

Finally, I believe that if you actually focused everything on Gold (including picking up the Commerce tree,) well, of course you'll end up with tons of Gold, haha. That's the whole point of focusing on it! However, I believe in going for Gold focus, you must have given up something else to get there, and for Holo, most of the things I've built in revolve around trading science for gold.

Are you suggesting that you got all the gold along with everything else you normally get?

All 7 cities i built all trade guild + petra + colossus + commerce policy. I dont remember exactly but surely under 10 city, since we are in an big island with 3 major civ here. maybe 9 cities but it 17 trade routes.

Bad thing i don't save that game b/c i used quick save instead. It really hard to clatify right now. But my feeling about this is really ez to play (after 100 turns). Well just 3 Liberty and 3 Commerce at my game. Maybe play with Reform and Rule (completely overhaul Socity tree) make civ really strong. I spam Great Merchant like 20~30 turns / 1 one.

In short, i thought your civ is fine, just b/c ur can get many trade route through buildunique bulding of Holo is somehow abuse... I really love the different gold value through trade route but when it combine with a tons of trade route.... thing will be not finest as it is.

Hmm, I'm not sure. I looked through Reform and Rule, and Citystate Diplomacy mods, but I didn't see anything where they added more trade routes.

I really can't figure out where your extra trade routes are coming from, though maybe if you play with her again, you can keep track of how many Cities you have so I can see if maybe there's a weird bug that's giving you more trade routes than you're supposed to get.

I will have to look into it.

With Reform and Rule (RaR), there actually is one policy in Commerce-tree that gives an extra trade route. As for some weird bug giving granting extra trade routes, I have never seen this happen here but I have played with a mod that had this kind of problem (fixed now). So I guess that could be possible.

Speaking of RaR, from my experience it makes wide playstyle much more powerful than it would be with unmodded policies. The Liberty tree has a policy that gives +2 happiness per luxury, which you can get by investing 4 policies (the opener+3 more). In base game you would have to fill the whole Commerce tree to get that benefit. In RaR Commerce-tree also gives pretty large percent boosts for City Connections and cities’ gold production. Since Holo also gives boosts for City Connections and Trade Guild Inns give flat gold from resources, I suspect that combining these bonuses might make Holo appear much more powerful than she is in base game.

As for the Guild Merchant spam, it delays or even denies you from getting Great Scientists. This in turn slows your late game science down significantly. So while Guild Merchants are indeed strong, from my experience they aren’t really broken.

For the comment of Holo’s early game being hell, I think that’s an exaggeration. True she builds everything more slowly than everyone else and founding a religion as her might be pretty futile. She, however, is really good at quickly claiming her initial settlement spots with quicker settlers. Also since building workers isn’t slowed down she doesn’t really have any troubles with improving her land. Also having wheat or sheep anywhere near her pretty much guarantees quick growth and big cities in early game. Lastly since she has bonus for both internal out external trade routes even with only one trade route in early game she can choose between stable early game economy or even feeding her capital, making it even bigger. So while the production penalty might make things rough at times in early game, she definitely has many advantages there.

As for the later game, I personally have found that Holo’s greatest strength in middle game is not necessarily constant expanding and getting more and more trade routes and more gold, but pretty standard 4-6 cities tall empire which feeds all her cities to grow larger. Since you can basically get your normal trade routes ahead of time (with four cities you can have 7 trade routes by Medieval era, the same amount normal civs can get in total without wonders) you can start the city feeding process well ahead of everyone else. And since bigger cities mean more gold from City-Connections and Trade Guild Inns provide gold from worked resources, you don’t necessarily even need external trade routes at all (it might be worth it to send some trade routes to City-States to keep them allied). While this strategy sacrifices gold, it also provides more science and is less prone to happiness problems. Also, like DarkScythe said, more cities means slower building times of new Tarde Guild Inns, which in turn might make them pretty impractical to build after certain point (to my experience, after ten or so Inns they become more trouble than they are worth).

In late game, if Holo is not stopped, she does indeed dominate. Not only can she buy units really fast and therefore maintain constant military campaign but she can also found new cities much more easily and between feeding them and buying their buildings actually make them useful. Is this a problem? I don’t really think so, since I have found that once human player gets ahead of AIs, they cannot really catch up anyway. Therefore the question is how much easier it is for Holo to get to that point?

From my experience it really depends on two factors: how much wheat and sheep she has and how much early war she has to wage. More wheat means more population than other civs would get with the same resources, more sheep means that the happiness cap is much higher than normal. From my experience, you can realistically expect to get about 3-4 wheat and/or sheep in your general starting area. And also since I believe that sheep give global happiness instead of local, it is also really flexible source of happiness.

As for early war, while it slows down every civ, it hits Holo especially hard since she still cannot buy many units and her production penalty hits really hard when it comes to military production. Therefore it is really important when playing as Holo to always maintain big enough army that AIs don’t really want to attack you. Early war is a huge pain, so it’s better just to sacrifice some of your early production for war prevention even though it can be pretty strained as it is.

If Holo’s early game is successful, then the game starts to get pretty easy since the gold starts to pile up pretty fast. Whether you follow wide or tall strategy, her income starts to grow pretty rapidly. Therefore I think that the possbile balance problems lie in the middle game. And I don’t think the problem is really the extra trade routes but rather Inns’ extra gold and various City-Connection boosts. Extra trade routes require work to get rolling, get harder to gain the more you have them and can also be vulnerable to barbarians and enemies pillaging them. City-Connections, on the other hand, don’t require any extra effort and their yield also constantly increases as your cities grow. Inns’ extra gold is also totally passive and strong source of money. Because Holo gets these two easy sources of gold in addition of her extra trade routes her income starts to get pretty huge in middle game.

So do I think something should be changed in her design? I wouldn’t really touch her trade routes since they actually require active effort and become harder to gain with more cities. What I would do is probably decrease or remove Inn’s gold yield from resources and also decrease or remove the City-Connection boosts. The early game bonuses work mostly fine, although I think that wheat’s bonuses could maybe be decreased: currently wheat can be pretty crazy if Holo gets two or more tiles of it in her capital.

Overall this is a really fun civ to play, but it can get out of hand in middle game. If it is deemed that there is a need for nerf, I think it would be better to nerf her passive strengths instead of active ones. That should lead to much more exiting and involved gameplay.

Ha, thanks for the extensive run-down.

With regard to Reform and Rule, I only looked at it briefly, and looked at the couple screenshots of the policies posted on the OP of his CivFanatics thread. I noticed that one policy boosts trade route gold income by 25%, but otherwise I don't see anything that actually provides more trade routes.

However, I don't think I can tweak balance to account for all these different mods, because Reform and Rule by its nature changes gameplay balance significantly, and if I had to choose, I would have to balance for Vanilla gameplay, so Reform and Rule will mess with her balance.

I can potentially look at providing specific tweaks only for Reform and Rule, but that is unlikely to happen, and would also have to be put into my upcoming 'add-on' mod instead of the base Civ.

Guild Merchant spam is indeed intended to make it harder to get Great Engineers and Great Scientists, since they share the same "points pool" but they will hopefully be getting a better Customs House in the next update, so that they're not just mindless one-trick ponies.

With regard to her progression through the mid-game, I have to point out: Aren't City Connections only active and able to bring in Gold only when the player has connected the Cities to the Capital with roads? This would tie up her Workers for many turns building roads instead of building tiile improvements.

Having said that, I do agree with the idea of limiting her passive income more, and push her to be more reliant on the much-more-vulnerable trade routes, and I can look into re-adjustment of the City Connections as a starting point.

However, I'm not sure I'll budge on the Trade Guild buildings' gold boost of resources. This is a small passive boost, yes, but it also offers incentive for Holo to expand aggressively and take extra copies of resources, even if she cannot trade them. That, and the whole merchant mantra of "Sell everything!"

Similarly, I'm okay with the Wheat boosts, specifically because Holo is the Goddess of Bountiful Harvest, and is extremely closely aligned with Wheat. Wheat itself can be plentiful, but it's also a limited resource, and I had intended for it to be a possible source of conflict -- Holo could actually do very well to attack an enemy who has taken control of lots of Wheat.

I don’t think you should worry about possible balance issues with Reform and Rule. It is honestly totally unreasonable to expect any modder to take into account every possible mod combination people might use. The only reason I brought it up in the first place is that it might be closely linked with the balance problems reported earlier.

Better Custom Houses sound interesting: currently they are probably one of the least seen features in the game since they are so bad.

Yep, City Connections require road connection between a city and the capital (or Harbor in both the connected city and capital). This means player must take into consideration the distance between his cities and capital. However, I don’t really see how this is anything special for Holo since all civs have to decide how much of worker time they dedicate into making roads. If anything Holo’s improved City Connections make the decision even easier since she will have much better pay off. And if she decides to use wide style and therefore will need more roads to connect her cities, well that in turn just means more money in return (assuming that road maintenance doesn’t grow like crazy, although in that case her cities are probably unpractically far apart anyway). She might need more workers in this case, but that would be true for any other civ also. And even though she might have less available production time to make those workers, I guess that could be considered a payoff between extra City Connection and building stuff.

I don’t really have any exact numbers for how big part of Inns’ gold has been from my cities overall gold production. I only remember that it has been significant. I would have to play a new game with the mod at some point and check. That said I can understand the reasoning behind not wanting to touch this gold boost since it does indeed encourage expansion. Also your idea of making her worse at building stuff as her empire grows sounds like a more interesting power limiter than plain income nerf.

Wheat bonus isn’t a huge concern for me, just something I thought I should point out.

The Biggest issue is watching this Civ when the A.I. is controlling it. Holo become's nearly helpless after the first war, she declares, because the A.I. doesn't understand the nerf penalty the Wolves suffer, and since in the early game Wolves are her basic melee and as per normal the civ A.I. throws it's units at cities, her melee is gone in just a couple of turns and the A.I. she's up againist just wipes her off them map, In every game, she is obliterated around turn 100 by the A.I.'s around Holo. I've not seen her survive in since all the new changes were added, even in Emperor she's toasted. I've seen her go from 1 place in army standings to out of the game in under 20 turns.

Holy crap, I don't know how I missed this message, haha.

Thanks for bringing that issue up, but unfortunately, there's very little I can do about the AI being an idiot.

One of the last revisions of my Beta was focused heavily on tweaking her Flavors and Biases to help the AI make better decisions, especially regarding army composition and management.

Unfortunately, there's a limit to what we can do without outright modifying the AI logic/code. I'll try to look at it again at some point, but does this happen all the time, or just once in a while?

In my testing it looked to me like AI Holo was properly building more varied armies, with some focus on ranged units before assaulting Cities. For reference, the Wolves' default AI settings cause the units to be treated internally by the AI as a "Counter" unit -- the same role Spearmen and Pikemen have. I know they will bring a couple of these to attack Cities with, but the primary City attackers should still be the units set to "Attack" or "Defense" roles.

My biggest hunch has been that perhaps when AI Holo resorts to sending waves of Wolves to their demise against City walls, they don't have any Iron to build Swordsmen with. Without Iron, most AI have to resort to building Pikemen as their standard melee unit, which Holo doesn't have (replaced instead with the Wolves.)

Please do keep me updated if you can observe more trends, but I will put it on my list to look into this again. This is not the first time I've seen reports of her doing poorly as an AI. (It's something I rarely test myself, since I'm typically playing AS Holo.)

Also wanting to address another balance-related comment recently posted in the comments section.

Originally posted by BlackLaser:

is it really necessary to have the cost for buying stuff in your cities increased?

isn't it very unlogical that a nation lead by 2 smart traders (yes I also think of Holo as a trader) has this kind of debuff?

Do note first that I enjoy debating these issues, and I welcome counter-arguments. I do have a certain vision for the way this Civ works, but I also look for good arguments in both directions. If I can be convinced that it's a bad idea, I can look into changing it. With that said...

The biggest reason for this penalty is my desire for this Civ to be about decision-making, and everything having a tradeoff; Holo can generate loads more Gold than anyone else, so she should also have to spend more to balance that out.

The gameplay-related reason is that such a penalty works to mildly punish a Holo player for playing tall -- she is meant to be played wide, but she is also punished in a different way if taken to the extreme in an ICS playstyle (Guild Branches start becoming ridiculously difficult to build.)

Story-wise, as a "new" leader (starting off with just one City) you would be perceived as a "newbie" Merchant, and would lack the purchasing power to get the best deals, thus other Merchants will want to take advantage of your poor position and try to profit off you as much as they can, thus charging excessively (125%.)

As Holo expands (thus cementing her presence) and most importantly, builds more Trade Guild Branch buildings, this increasing influence allows her to pressure these Merchants into giving her greater discounts, with the end result (at 10 Cities+Branch buildings) being that she has a base purchasing cost lower than anyone else in the game (95% vs. 100%.) This number is before any additional modifiers such as the Big Ben and such. This is balanced out by the fact that she'd have at least 10 different Cities to buy stuff for.

Hopefully that made sense, although again, if you still disagree, I do welcome positive discussion.

Okay^^ if you are open for suggestions...

I hope I did understand your position (English is not my first language) => btw => a german adaptation of your mod would be super awesome deluxe XD...

cutting to the chase...
I guess a pro can have a game with 10 cities... but I have played (hmm lets see) about 25 games of Civ V and never ever had more than 8 cities (which was once)

except for the 3 times I took all capitals (but that doesn't count cause it happend at the end of the game, where buying stuff becomes pretty much obsolete, except maybe for troops but usually one does not Pursue an army if one does not already have the money or the technology to begin with... soo if I would concentrate on that many cities having enough happiness I don't think I could achive either of those 2)

also if you are looking for gameplay reasons...
If I remember correctly you have some things that might balance the issue of happiness that would surely arise with 10 cities in any other difficulty than "settler"
but pursuing this would limit the options greatly as to how you could play this civ having to rely on happiness buildings every turn of the road (to victory XD)

last but not least there would be a personal reason
It is a lot of fun to buy stuff and thinking "now I did something smart and thus I am ahead of everyone else..."
with this civ I most of the time in a game think "well I would buy this and that now but It would hurt so much I don`'t think I can afford this" (which I gues yes... falls under decision making but isn't this the wrong kind?)

also the reason I already stated which was a logic one which you answered with your rather emotionally one
which was why to knowledgeable trades should be charged more instead of less (just reffered to, to have a stronger argument in hopes of persuation XD)

but since I see your point of view...
I thought about how this penalty could be shifted according to what you wrote

Originally posted by DarkScythe:

Story-wise, as a "new" leader (starting off with just one City) you would be perceived as a "newbie" Merchant, and would lack the purchasing power to get the best deals, thus other Merchants will want to take advantage of your poor position and try to profit off you as much as they can, thus charging excessively (125%.)

maybe you could make it so that instead of having a money penalty in your own cities
you have a trade penalty with A.I.'s (I usually get 6-7 gold for any luxury and vise versa) and/or getting less city state loyalty when making Gold offerings (cause the wise wolf does not offer she gets offerings XD)

I hope you can consider this Idea
(if this destroys the balancing in your opinion please bare in mind that everyone plays civ differently and also that I don't know every last detail about this mod cause I did not make it XD)

I remain (hope you know Sips XD)
BlackLaser

BTW My issue on the Wolves has to do with emperor or higher as on Immortal the other AI's just run her over, Holo tends to go to war, like Dido. What really aggravates the issues is that Holo rarely gets her needed resources and many times has no river to boot. I've been watching the games both as AI only no fog of war, and playing against her, so I can see why, having a more balanced army is of little use, for example, on one town, in Holo's first war, she lost 9 wolves before the ranged units got there , she made peace on the 3rd turn. Now, I understand why You put the penalty on, because its why the wolves don't attack large groups of men in the story, but following that to the letter in Civ5 makes the problem. the AI will never be changed much, it seems they only tweak it for each change of game play, like currently the AI has big issues going from stack based Civ4 play, to single army play of Civ5, and they've not done much at all to fix that issue.

on another note to BlackLaser, the costs of the buildings, balances out the very large amount of gold Holo can make. I remember feeling just like you when I first started using this Mod but that's no issue at all to me anymore, because Holo can make torrid amounts of gold.
Learning to change Your game play using mods, is what makes mods fun. Look at all you get when you play Holo. an extra lux to sell, that is easy to get to, Holo's building'S, because she has more then one like most civ's don't, provide a a huge bonus' and unique units that, if played correctly are fantastic. Adapt Your play, actually you have to with every Civ in the game, you must alter your play style in some area of play or you'll lose, way more often. In closing on this, in all civ's you need their unique buildings to make them shine, with Holo to do that easily you must add a point in the correct social policies tree, and you have to build the Tech tree to fit Holo, You can't get impi's unless you build to that tech. There are many ways to get extra policy points in Civ so putting one in a tree that cuts down build time is more then worth it.

And on that issue, I have no issue in my own play, when I play Holo. because I changed my game play to match Holo's design. I just would like to see her be there at the end more often, when I play against Her. With Civ You need to play to the flavor of the Civ you have. While it may appear you don't have to change you do. If you always play your games the same you will grow bored of Civ very soon

Also several of the tech's in the tech tree still have place holders on them even though it now official and no longer true beta. I should of written that stuff down, I'll try to do that soon.
supposedly there are groups for how the AI act's like when it uses a nuke when it goes to war, perhaps her war stance needs to be lowered a bit, but I have no idea if those statements are true or not but since Gandhi Nukes like crazy and other civ's seem to be way more reserved at using them, it seems there's a truth to that. Not all Civ's go to war like Dido or Shaka, but they get early special units, but no Civ seems to run over city state like Monty, so?

I'm going to post this, but I accept Holo as she is. It's your right to build her as you see fit, some civ's are weak against other A.I.s but I wish Holo's wasn't one of them, Holo is probably too strong in the hands of a player as is, and that in itself means fixing AI play would end up making Holo way OP in my hands anyway and I'm not looking for that at all, really what fun is gaming without a challenge.

Oh boy, two very long posts to respond to, covering a lot of topics.. this will be a bit long, haha.

In order, responding to BlackLaser first:

Originally posted by BlackLaser:

I hope I did understand your position (English is not my first language) => btw => a german adaptation of your mod would be super awesome deluxe XD...

Your English is actually better than some people I talk to, haha, so no worries on that.
I, unfortunately, don't know any German, so a German version would be impossible, but I am open to people translating the text files and submitting a copy to me. If I can get a translation of my text, I'll be more than happy to include it into the Civ.

In the future, I will probably include support for multiple languages without me having to update the mod entirely, by allowing the user to simply replace or edit a language file.

Originally posted by BlackLaser:

cutting to the chase...
I guess a pro can have a game with 10 cities... but I have played (hmm lets see) about 25 games of Civ V and never ever had more than 8 cities (which was once)

except for the 3 times I took all capitals (but that doesn't count cause it happend at the end of the game, where buying stuff becomes pretty much obsolete, except maybe for troops but usually one does not Pursue an army if one does not already have the money or the technology to begin with... soo if I would concentrate on that many cities having enough happiness I don't think I could achive either of those 2)

8 Cities is actually fine for Holo -- her bonuses and penalties are designed to "cancel out" at roughly 8 Cities, with the bonuses increasing up to 10 Cities for a slight "boost."

The bigger thing is that, before I made Holo, pretty much every Civ I played, in every game, played the same way: Rush Science, play tall on 4 Cities, win game. To me, that got really boring, so I really wanted Holo to make things different, mix it up, and really try to make the game play differently.

In this case, I am trying to encourage players to play wider than they are used to (I used to play 4 Cities all the time, and it took me some time to change my own play style for my own mod, lol) and by extension, deal with all of the "problems" that come with having more Cities. I'm not preventing Holo from playing tall, though, but she will deal with a smaller set of bonuses than if she went wider.

Originally posted by BlackLaser:

also if you are looking for gameplay reasons...
If I remember correctly you have some things that might balance the issue of happiness that would surely arise with 10 cities in any other difficulty than "settler"
but pursuing this would limit the options greatly as to how you could play this civ having to rely on happiness buildings every turn of the road (to victory XD)

I typically play my test games on King difficulty, though normally I really should play on Emperor instead. I honestly have no problems with happiness, especially because Holo's buildings have some Happiness bonuses built in -- Her Palace gives +2 Happiness, and her Wheat Wolf buildings give +1 Happiness each. It generally allows her to build one more City than other Civs normally in the early game. By the middle and late game, you should be working on the Ideologies which give tons of Happiness bonuses.

I posted this imgur album a little while ago[imgur.com] in which I had 13 Cities, yet by the end of the game I still had 55 Happiness.

That's not to say I never had Happiness issues, because there were a few times that game where I almost dipped into negative because of everything growing (and I had to halt growth as a result) but I find it gives you things to do instead of just watching the same 4 Cities grow huge.

The other reason, in terms of story and roleplaying, is that as a Merchant you are supposed to be greedy -- this means gobbling up land, gobbling up resources, etc; Generally trying to get as big as possible.

Originally posted by BlackLaser:

last but not least there would be a personal reason
It is a lot of fun to buy stuff and thinking "now I did something smart and thus I am ahead of everyone else..."
with this civ I most of the time in a game think "well I would buy this and that now but It would hurt so much I don`'t think I can afford this" (which I gues yes... falls under decision making but isn't this the wrong kind?)

I'd actually argue the opposite here -- Holo gets way more Gold than anyone else in the game (except maybe Venice) so for most normal Civs, buying something means you can't buy anything else for dozens of turns since costs get pretty high and your income is generally fairly small. With Holo, if you set up your trade routes properly, you can buy stuff much more often than anyone else, so the decision becomes "What is most important to buy right now and what can be put off for a couple more turns?"

Originally posted by BlackLaser:

also the reason I already stated which was a logic one which you answered with your rather emotionally one
which was why to knowledgeable trades should be charged more instead of less (just reffered to, to have a stronger argument in hopes of persuation XD)

I have a bit of trouble understanding the meaning of this, so apologies if I misunderstand, but I assume you're talking about the Gold penalty, and my explanation of Holo being a "newbie" Merchant.

Whenever you deal with new merchants, whether it's in a story, or a game, or in real life, they don't know you, and they don't know your reputation. As such, they will not want to give you the "best" deals (those are reserved for friends/family and such.) In Holo's case, she is graduating from being a mere "trader" to being a "leader" which means dealing with an entirely different set of Merchants for goods. I wanted this to show that she needs to build a new set of business relationships throughout the early game.

This also goes into the idea that, for a Merchant, they have to work for everything. Lawrence said this early on when he met Holo: "The life of a merchant isn't easy." I wanted that element captured in Holo's gameplay, so the early game was intended to be "more difficult" (even though it still feels a bit too easy.)

Originally posted by BlackLaser:

but since I see your point of view...
I thought about how this penalty could be shifted according to what you wrote

maybe you could make it so that instead of having a money penalty in your own cities
you have a trade penalty with A.I.'s (I usually get 6-7 gold for any luxury and vise versa) and/or getting less city state loyalty when making Gold offerings (cause the wise wolf does not offer she gets offerings XD)

I'm very reluctant to affect the Trade Routes in that way, for a few reasons. The first reason is really the fact that it will be difficult to inform the player what sort of bonuses and penalties are affecting their trade routes at any given moment in the game (the game's trade route calculations are very difficult to change.)

As well, the amount of Gold the AI will give you is modified by how friendly the AI is with you, but the base exchange rate (roughly 7 GPT per Luxury) is hardcoded as a relation to the amount of Happiness that resource provides, so I can't change it without having to change the amount of Happiness given from Luxury resources.

The other reason is that Trade Routes are supposed to be the highlight / centerpiece of the Civ, and I would rather not place anything on it that might discourage the player from building them. As long as you rush a couple Trade Routes early on, the small Gold penalty is largely invisible.

As far as less City State influence, this actually is already in effect for Holo -- her Gold bribes are only 50% as effective as anyone else, and she loses influence twice as fast as anyone else, unless she has a Trade Route going to that City State. Reasoning: It's hard to trust merchants since they will do anything for profit (even backstab allies,) and so they will forget about you faster, unless you are constantly lining their pockets.

Originally posted by BlackLaser:

I hope you can consider this Idea
(if this destroys the balancing in your opinion please bare in mind that everyone plays civ differently and also that I don't know every last detail about this mod cause I did not make it XD)

I remain (hope you know Sips XD)
BlackLaser

I, uh, actually have no idea what/who Sips is/are, haha.
But yeah, I definitely have a few changes I'm considering, but I would like to hear more arguments (from you, or others) about your points first.

In the end, as Rei'No Otoko stated above, people do play every Civ differently, and Holo plays more differently than others -- this won't change. I want Holo to play very differently, and to not necessarily force, but to encourage the player to really try playing differently than how they are used to. Before I made Holo, I was really bored of Civ5 because I played every Civ the exact same way; I made Holo so that I could do all sorts of things, and her Civ would change according to the decisions you make.

I can still play tall with 4 Cities as Holo and still win a Science Victory just like any other Civ, but the tradeoffs I need to deal with make it more fun for me than sitting there hitting End Turn on other Civs.

Finally, don't misunderstand my meaning and/or tone here - I wholly appreciate your arguments, and I welcome more of it, but I do enjoy debating my view on this. In short, I feel I need more convincing.