Hello Everyone! My name is Medievalwarfare, and I've been following Humankind for well over a year now, and I was so excited for the game's release in August. Though the launch was a bit rough, I still really enjoyed the foundation of this game. However, it's been hard to ignore the clear balance issues with the game, and once the modding tools became available, I immediately started work on improving many of the features of this game (starting with production and unit balance but with many more changes planned for the future).
Quick disclaimer: This is my first major mod for Humankind or any game in general. Though I have done coding for years, this is a new medium I'm getting used to, and will happily accept any criticism and advice on how to improve my work. I'm simply another passionate member of this playerbase, and I want Humankind to be the best it can be.
Now, onto the mod!
What is this Mod?
The Imperium Balance Mod is a set of number changes to different aspects of the game. In this initial 0.2.0 version of the mod, I only changed district production costs, unit production costs, and the combat strength of some units with only some minor, miscellaneous changes to other features. Starting with the changes to units, most of these changes were buffs to units that have needed a buff since the beginning of the game (Such as the gothic cavalry, Teutonic Knights, and Assyrian raiders) to make them more competitive. Due to the DDLM2 patch, some of my changes were already put into place, but still, I went back and reviewed the newly changed units to see if anything may need to be adjusted again (and some were).
In terms of unit production, I noticed in the data files that through eras 4-6, the costs of units grew exponentially and were too high for players to truly benefit from late game units. I lowered these costs by 10%-30% depending on the era and what type of units. Overall, I believe this will allow for greater usability of late game units so that they can be experimented with both by casual players and hardcore players (especially air units).
How Did Production Change?
The largest change of this mod is that of district production costs. Originally, I was going to do something similar to the BetterDistrictsCost mod by @Enchanteur which would simply aim to adjust the formulas already included in the game by the developers so that the costs of districts don't grow as steeply as they did before the DDLM2 patch. However, I found a great issue with this system which ultimately led to my solution to district production costs: their current implementation forces players to play at least one builder culture.
So many strategies in this game rely on the use of districts. From agrarians to science players, to even expansionists with their garrisons, districts need to be easily accessible to all players. However, since districts cost production and will grow exponentially higher the more districts you make, this will force the player to take one of their eras as a builder culture just to stay ahead. And for those players who don't get that, they fall behind and can't build districts nearly as quickly. From a balance standpoint, this makes builder cultures way too strong as they are a necessity for optimal play if a player wishes to be able to use a fundamental part of the game such as districts in any major capacity. From a roleplaying standpoint (which I heavily considered in my decision), being forced to play in a certain way just to have the potential to win takes the fun out of playing with unique combinations of civilizations, a major selling point for a game and a massive part of Humankind's identity.
Players should be free to play how they want without feeling forced in a certain direction, and moreover, builder cultures should be good but not based on this frankly unhealthy playstyle in Humankind. To combat these issues, I made a simple change: districts now cost a certain amount of turns to create regardless of a city's production and take longer to make the more of a given type of district you have.
This makes it so every culture can use districts as much as they want and even promotes specializing in your culture's affinity (more on this later). To balance out this nerf to builder cultures, builder cultures now have a 25% discount to producing all districts, which will allow them to still produce more districts, but as soon as an empire changes its affinity, this buff goes away. This keeps the flavor of the builder cultures and their ability to produce many districts without overly skewing their necessity as a pick is a player needs to build districts.
Pros and Cons of the Production Change:
The following is the new formula for medium cost districts:
This reads that the cost of a medium cost district is 3 times whatever the production of the city is plus a percentage of extra turn (i.e. since the production net is the amount of production a city can produce in a turn, this means that value is equivalent to one turn. Therefore, by multiplying this by a given decimal, it will be a fraction of a turn). As you have more districts in your city, this multiplier increases until it reaches 1+. That way, the cost of the district would increase the more districts you make.
Here are some graphs of how production costs and the number of turns to produce a district change as you add more districts. For this graph, the ProductionNet was set to 10 for easy calculations (and ultimately this value doesn't matter as the number of turns it takes to produce a district depends on the multiplier and the number of districts of the type being produced).
As you can see, Medium Cost districts start at 4 turns to produce, High cost districts at 6, and Emblematic districts at 7. I chose these turn amounts based on the number of districts needed to get a silver builder's star in the ancient era on normal speed (which is 12). Since an era lasts around 50 turns, divide that by 12, and you get 4.2 turns. That became the number of turns for medium districts, and I based the other times around that.
Also notice that if you try to produce only one type of district repeatedly, its cost grows extremely quickly. On the other hand, if you do not produce a certain type of district, its cost doesn't noticeably change. This means that spamming one type of district is very impractical, but instead, a mix of district types is favored since the type of districts you aren't building won't increase in price by much at all.
These changes once again benefit roleplaying as districts now take a certain number of turns to be produced regardless of production. It also lowers the necessity for builder cultures to produce districts and makes them more focused simply on creating more production toward units, infrastructure, and wonders. Speaking of which, since production doesn't affect the build times for districts, the population that would be used for production can be moved to food, money, or science. This once again allows for more specialization due to less of a dependence on production for building districts. This is the benefit of my solution to balancing district production.
However, there is a con that many players will feel. Since production no longer affects district costs, there is no way to speed up the production of districts outside of playing as a builder culture or by using technology upgrades. This means that what districts you choose to build and in what order matters even more as the cost of making more will steadily increase. Some players may not like this playstyle, and that's perfectly fine. But the goal of this mod is to allow for more strategies of play to be viable, and I believe that goal is met. Because of that, my solution still has merit to exist and to be experimented on by the community.
Future Plans
In the future, I will be making changes to how faith works, namely making it a more interactive system so players feel a need to invest in it, continued rebalancing of FIMS, and eventually tweaking the different cultures so that each is specialized and does their specialization well (Looking at you America). For right now, I will continue testing this mod, receiving impact from the community, and doing my best to make this the best balance mod in the game!
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