However, most of the ideas I suggested there are now implemented:
- Anarchy
- New special unit: Early transport
- Army of Slaves corrections
- Hidden ZoCs are being discovered
- Heavy terrain is less heavy
- Pollution reduced
For details and motivation, please see my postings Intentions+Ideas and Two More on the rules freeze forum. Not implemented yet are the suggestions involving nation territory, this is left to do for version 0.11.
The changes with the biggest consequences result from a special investigation I did some weeks ago. (It's getting a bit scientific now!) I finally took the time to do what I already intended for the 0.8 version: I implemented a simplified game environment in order to simulate and compare different strategies, particularly concerning growth and improvement of cities. I compared 4 strategies:
blue - size 4 cities with optimal improvements
white - size 6 cities with optimal improvements
yellow - size 8 cities with optimal improvements
red - size 12 cities with optimal improvements
The result looked like this:
All strategies have nearly the same scientific progress. Remarkably, all of the stategies can do with 100% science rate almost all the time, because trading goods production is enough to cover the maintenance costs of libraries and universities in all cities, even with the size-4 strategy. To make it plain: In version 0.9, all improvements except library and university are useless, cities bigger than size 4 are useless, tax collection is useless.
The two main reasons for these problems are:
1. The cheapest way to get happy citizens is to found a new city. The pure city has no maintenance cost but provides two happy citizens.
2. The balance between trade income, effect of trading goods production and improvement maintenance is wrong.
The first change I did was, to cancel the trade output of the city tile. This solves the first problem, because a cities then pais for itself with its own trade. The charts then looked this way:
Small cities are much less beneficial now. But still tax is almost unnecessary. My idea was now to increase the total volume of tax, means to increase the maintenance costs of the few real important buildings and the trade resources of most of the terrain types at the same time. This allows a bigger scope for exact adjustment of mainenance costs and it enhances tax in relation to trading goods. A side effect is that the relative distance between the "rich" and the "poor" government forms, e.g. the advantage of republic over monarchy, becomes smaller. After this change, this was the strategy chart:
The big city strategy finally makes some sense now. Plus, all strategies require a considerable tax income, so market places are among the optimal improvement set of all strategies. Ok, let's stop this topic here...
Other rules changes in the new version are:
- Several improvements and wonders reworked: Theater (type+effect), University (effect), Research Lab (effect), Bank (effect), Highways (effect), Colosseum (type+effect), Mfg. Plant (pollution), Solar Power Plant (removed), MIR (effect), Sun Tsu (expiration), Stock Exchange (type+effect).
- A new formula to calculate the research costs. It's exponential now!
- Cities can only be founded on irrigatable terrain. Seems hard, but the cevo food rules make cities in other terrain almost unplayable. This change will prevent frustration for beginners and not hurt much for the rest, I think.
- I felt the navigation feature was not as useful as I intended it to be since there was almost always a connection between the continents only by coast tiles. I decided to change the map creation so that all one-tile island are removed and the poles do not make a navigable coast.
- In former versions, only city production and research depended on the difficulty level. Now it's the growth, too. In the new version, the city food storage to fill is bigger on a higher level.
- Effect of future tech "Research Technology" a bit reduced.
- New Lybertarianism rules.
- The attitude to other nations can be changed without ever having contacted them.
- Pyramids and Leo's Workshop are now also effective for a nation that captures these wonders.
- 2 luxury make one happy citizen instead of 3.
- Canals provide water for irrigation.
Last not least, I fixed some bugs:
- Buttons for city improvement and wonder page did not appear on project screen when there was only one of the kind left.
- Destroyed wonders remained effective.
- When producing units, surplus production was converted to gold instead of remaining for the next project.
- Mines in arctic terrain could not be exploited.
- Bug in luxury calculation could cause negative research in a city.
- Wrong city project images were displayed, e.g. some early wonder instead of the unit that was produced.
- Ships and aircrafts stayed alive when essential city/base/canal etc. disappeared.
- Hot seat mode: In the first turn after loading a game, players were not informed about enemy events.
Well, that's it. There are still some known bugs remaining, I'll update the list soon.
Steffen