This post includes my general thoughts about the balance of the game in broad and not so broad strokes, and the changes that I feel would be advised to make the game more balanced, varied and interesting. It will not include my thoughts on military balance and religion, since I've already written up threads on those.

TL:DR
There will sadly be no such thing, as the topics covered are just too extensive, though I suppose the conclusion and afterword sections could suffice for those. Still, if anyone is brave enough to read the entire thing, I'd encourage them to leave their thoughts (on my thoughts as well as their own) so that we may help the game improve.

First and foremost - an analysis of Industry against the backdrop of the other FIMS yields.

Industry is the only output which has self-driven snowball potential, which alone makes it pretty strong - having more industry lets you build districts and infrastructure faster - which lets you have more industry, which in turn means the numbers shoot up even higher in an exponential curve. It is also the only FIMS yield which can be used to improve your other yields over time, because every district and infrastructure building costs industry (yes, technically, you can buyout with gold or pops but more on that later).

This in and of itself would not be an issue, at most it would mean building Makers' Quarters a good strategy early on, to provide your civilization with a base of industry to grow from, and that would be reasonable - it would be a good thing. However, Industry currently fulfills both its own role (building districts & infrastructure), as well as the role which is traditionally given to Money (recruiting units) - leaving next to nothing relevant for gold to matter for, that industry cannot already do except better.

Industry will snowball itself where gold will not (especially as buyout costs currently scale up with turns, making them lose all relevance as an option relatively quickly as the costs to buy a single unit in an Endless game towards the latter half are in millions of gold, whereas the industry cost does not scale up from the thousands).

Markets are a dead district because Makers' Quarters give you almost all of the relevant things which money can buy but quicker - the only notable exceptions being upkeep costs - which are hardly a concern in most games at their current values, trading for resources, and attaching outposts (which requires a civic to do with gold and is not necessary). None of the three are particularly gold intensive, meaning there is usually scarcely a need to bother with dedicated gold making strategies, and even if it were gold intensive, those three are hardly on the same order of magnitude in importance as having a potent industrial base.

On top of that, Industry features everpresent double-dipping. Not only are sources of percentage discounts in production costs for both districts and units quite plentiful, but so are the boosts to industrial output. This double dipping does not exist to an anywhere near comparable degree for any other yield of the FIMS, and makes industry the quickest to grow by far. But even all this would just make Maker's Quarter stacking extremely powerful, it would not invalidate the need for science or food, even if you can and do make do without districts dedicated to gold.

Right? Well... wrong.

Industry is, on top of the above, also convertible to science via the scientific cultural ability, Collective Minds. On the other hand, science and money yields are also convertible to industry through the use of the Builder culture ability - Land Raiser. Therefore, it is possible to amass huge amounts of industry from the start of the game, investing in nothing but markets' quarters and emblematic districts by keeping your cities in permanent Land Raiser mode - and then convert that industrial yield into a military to put the Huns to shame and cities that sprawl over every single tile of all attached territories.

But then, won't you lag in science, you ask? The answer is yet again no. You will be faster than an actual science district spamming culture, because you will switch from a Builder culture into a Scientific one, enable Collective Minds, which has no cooldown - and all your industry and money output in any cities of your choice will instantly be converted to science, allowing you to rush past eras in a matter of single-digit turns.

(How and why is it so much more powerful than just building science? -> A gentle reminder that Industry is the only yield of the FIMS that snowballs off itself, so getting more of it makes you able to grow it exponentially. Science does not work like that. Also a second gentle reminder about industry double dipping via cost reductions that other FIMS lack, as mentioned above.)

And so, players can and have managed to rush a scientific victory before turn 60 / 300 on normal speed solely through stacking Industry producing districts. It trivializes the game - but wait, we are not done here yet! An apt observer might notice that I have not said anything about Food yet. Perhaps at least our greener pastures might provide a viable alternative to just constructing markets quarters everywhere all the time?

Again, no.

Food does not scale well at all. In fact, it scales the worst out of all the FIMS outputs. This is because of the pop growth formula, that introduces heavy diminishing returns to pop growing capabilities, requiring more and more food per pop produced in a city as it sprawls - and making it so that growing one pop per turn in any city would literally require an infinite Food surplus. Why might those be an issue, you ask?

Well, first of all, you can disband units to get back their population. Therefore, it is a perfectly reasonable strategy to recruit units in multiple small cities, towns really with a scarce few farmers quarters, agricultural infrastructure and nothing else - while producing only industry (which we already established serves the roles of itself, gold and science in one, and provides greater yields in the latter two, than they do themselves should one have built their own districts).

Let me give you an example. I was playing a game on endless speed, where I had 2 cities of three territories each, both around 3000 food in the red. A giant malus you might say. Well, due to the pop growth/decay formula, you cannot actually lose more than one pop per turn. So for all the pop decay that caused, the six other mini "cities", each with a 100-200 food surplus, provided me with 3-4 pops a turn, which was quickly converted to cheap units and sent to the two cities to disband there.

Therefore, I was making a total balance of around -5000 in food production in the red, and yet I was growing pops. At a record pace, which was greater than what I would have gotten, had I made an equal amount of cities with half their districts being made of farmers quarters, each solidly in the green - since, due to the current diminishing returns formula, a big city, even almost emptied of pops will grow new ones seven times slower with a 1000 food surplus than ten small cities will with a 100 food surplus each which sums up to the same amount. This is a crucial flaw, but a separate issue from the recruitment/disbandment exploit still.

You can also just build 1 pop cost settlers to construct 3 pop cities, then build units in them in 1 turn then downgrade to outpost, while disbanding the units in your capital to get pops, after which you repeat the circle, converting industry to pops even more efficiently because you are skipping food production entirely rather than just abusing the growth formula.

I was generating population out of total famine, conjuring food out of nowhere at all. If you can disband a unit to get 1 pop, then the food cost per pop grown should not be a variable different in every city, but a fixed value, otherwise the whole system is open to exploits and in general bad side effects like the one mentioned above. And indeed - why should a pop cost a variable amount of food, if it represents the same amount of people?

And so it turns out that you currently don't need Farmer's Quarters at all, either. All you need is Industry. The all-powerful, orange Makers' Quarter. Well, correction - there's a Machu Picchu-based strategy to do a similar thing as the above strategy, but even more efficiently, though it comes online later, so I suppose Farmer's Quarters are... useful, after all.

[Conclusions]

- Industry is the only yield to snowball off itself, and also the only yield of the FIMS to enjoy common and significant double-dipping bonuses.

- Markets' Quarters are strictly inferior to Maker's Quarters because Money is both interchangeable with Industry in 90% of its uses, and greatly inferior in how much you can make. Furthermore gold costs suffer severe inflation over time while industry costs do not.

- There is no need for Science Quarters because Industry can be at-will converted to Science at a rate of 1:1 via the Collective Minds ability and snowballs itself, letting players rush a science victory by turn 60 / 300 at normal game speed, through simply stacking industry from beginning of the game until its end and using the ability.

- There is no need to build Farmers' Quarters in your serious cities, because food can be outsourced to mini-feeder-towns while your big cities starve at negative thousands in food balance, and yet can only lose 1 population per turn. Despite an overall, overwhelmingly negative total food balance per turn across your civilization, you still somehow grow pops - and not just any amount, but more than you'd grow if you had several big cities with half of their districts as farmers quarters, because the pop growth formula has severe diminishing returns in spite of being able to disband units to gain population, to which the most obvious solution would be to make growing each pop require a fixed, not variable, amount of Food.

From this, one can conclude that Industry is a King without equal or even a remotely distant rival among the yields. I do not believe that just building makers' quarters and nothing else all game is the intended gameplay loop, and yet it is undeniably the best strategy, since they do everything for you - give you unmatched Industry, grant you unrivaled Science, and do everything Money only wishes it could, all while Farmers Quarters' sob in the distance. Currently "FIMS" is more like "I".

[Suggestions on what I think should change to make the FIMS and the game more balanced]

1. Money

Units should only be recruitable for gold, not industry, and should still cost gold to upkeep

If implemented, this suggestion would disjoint industry and money from one another in terms of use, and would make market districts and other means of gold acquisition an utter necessity to manage for everyone - as it should be - rather than an afterthought.

1b. Gold buyout costs should not scale up over time. Since industry costs do not, doing so is inherently unbalanced, and there is no way that anyone will ever be able to afford millions of gold for buying out a single military unit (which is what happens in longer games). Furthermore, its an artificial gating mechanic that effectively makes any amount of money pointless past the early-mid game, and discourages anyone from building their related districts. However, gold buyout should be more expensive at base than just building something with industry - perhaps a 2:1 "conversion" ratio would suffice.
1c. Alternative to 1b would be to remove gold buyout as a mechanic altogether - it oversteps into Industry territory, which is an issue, and pop buyout already exists as a mechanic and it makes more sense to work your people to death to rush a construction than to just pay money to instantly get things done.

2. Food

The food surplus required to grow a single pop should be a static, fixed value, rather than pop growth per food unit being a formula with heavy diminishing returns that tends towards 0.

Alternatively, the formula could be something such as [% total Pop Growth per turn = 5% * (Food/Consumption - 1) ], simulating actual growth, rather than pop manufacturing, meaning for each 1% of food production over need you would be growing 0.05% of current pops, whereas for each 1% you are in deficit relative to need, 0.05% would starve.

If implemented, this would make farmers' quarters worth building past the very early turns, while fixing the recruitment/disbandment exploit that lets you conjure population out of thin air at record pace and grow in population despite being deep in the red as far as the overall food production balance across your civilization is concerned, simply because currently small cities need far less food surplus to grow X pops than sprawling ones - even if the sprawling city is literally empty and has a population of 0 or 1 - currently it might take 10 000 food to grow 10 pops in large cities over several turns, whereas the same amount will suffice for ~70 pops if spread over multiple smaller cities.

2b. There should be no limit to the amount of pops that can be grown or that can die of starvation per turn, rather than the caps those have at 1.
2c. Machu Picchu should be nerfed if this were to go through, and specialist slots generally increased in quantity.
2d. Settlers should cost 3 pops, not 1, so that you can't abuse them to make population with industry, going around the food mechanics entirely.

3. Infrastructure

Currently it doesn't make much sense to have to build infrastructure of long bygone eras you have long eclipsed. One could easily look the other way on this, except you are currently unironically better off pillaging your city to raze it to the ground, then popping a settler there to get up to date infrastructure as soon as you unlock each settler tier. One could perhaps look into making most of the current infrastructure buildings an intrinstic part of the city districts instead, things that unlock with technology as passive bonuses, rather than something that needs to be built, since specialization via districts, in addition to the actually meaningful infrastructure choices would still be sufficient while not breaking immersion.

3b. The city center infrastructure should not give flat bonuses to certain FIMS that are often practically the same as what same-era infrastructure provides per district, yet cost the same industry. This makes it never worthwhile to build (or research for its own sake), therefore these effects should be rebalanced.

4. Cultural Affinity Abilities

Collective Mind and Land Raiser should be overhauled.

Land Raiser could give a single city of one's choice +100% Industry production at the cost of -50% to all other yields for five turns, with a 15 turns cooldown (scaled by game speed) that starts ticking down as soon as the ability is used. Overall, this still maths out to a big boost, but no longer a gamebreaking one (which direct conversions between yields can often be), and allows for what I believe was the intended purpose behind this ability in the first place - rushing big projects such as wonders quickly.

Collective Mind there is many things that can be done with, but in its current shape and form it is breaking the game entirely.

- It could function similarly to the new overhauled Land Raiser, except for Science (which is a bit boring, to have two abilities that mirror each other, but that is the case currently as well anyway).

- It could be renamed to "Grand Discovery" which would allow you to spend a lump sum of influence to instantly complete any technology that you are currently researching, with a cooldown of 15 turns (scaled by game speed). There is nothing wrong with going simple I feel, and it certainly would be useful but not overpowered, especially since it does encourage you to beeline to a much advanced tech, and then use the ability to get the one after it without expending the tremendous amount of science that'd normally cost - and so it is good for both "catching up in science" civs who lacked in research output hence can really use an auto unlock, and the "getting ahead" ones, allowing them to surgically rush techs of their choice well ahead of time.

- It could retain its name of "Collective Mind" and instead of pooling the entire FIMS but food into science, it would pool the yields of the specialist population only, with all artisans and merchants counting as scientists instead. While still very powerful, it would at least not be broken. However, this does keep the same general flaw as the current ability - in that it is way more useful for cultures that are drowning in any district - any but science, that is - while providing next to no benefit to those who do properly focus on scientific superiority.

- It could be renamed to "Ancestral Minds" and while active provide a 50% discount towards all techs of the Ancient era and any eras that you have already advanced past. This is more of a catchup mechanic, however, and more of a passive ability that an activated one.

4a. Regardless, I believe that Scientific cultures should not have raised requirements for Scientific Era stars - it sort of goes against the point, after all its something you excel in, and should have an easier time gaining the stars in, not harder - and other types of cultures don't share this kind of approach.

5. Technology

Currently each researched tech increases all future technology costs by 1%, therefore it is currently optimal to just beeline to the last techs skipping as many as possible - which makes rushing a science victory much easier than it should be, since you can do so by researching a mere 30% of the techs, due to not even needing to research wheel or mostly anything to get to the fusion reactors. Even with science victory disabled, this is still the most cost effective order to research the entire tree in for the cheapest possible cost in research, since if you research the most expensive technologies first, the accruing % increase in cost formula will be inconsequential on the rest of the, mostly cheap and long outdated technologies.

Furthermore, currently the later eras fly by fast and in general I believe the science requirements per technology in the early modern, industrial, and contemporary ages should be significantly scaled up from their current values to provide a more lengthy experience in each era. This would also help with cities being able to catch up in their infrastructure and so on - it is not fun to be in contemporary era and see your contemporary neighbour's cities still field medieval infrastructure.

As far as the weird lack of prerequisites is concerned, my proposed solution would be to require all technologies of the era previous to the current to have been researched to progress to the next, in addition to era stars. This is a trivial objective to accomplish to all nations, since we are basically talking about having all ancient era technologies researched to be able to progress to medieval - and yet it fixes the vast majority of obvious inter-era prerequisites - like sending missions to mars despite not having "Wheel" researched. This would also end the issue of contemporary era civs still using medieval era cities once and for all, since there'd be a minimal standard to which you'd have to keep to progress through the eras.

As far as the tech cost penalty of +1% per tech researched is concerned, I would propose getting rid of said penalty and instead introducing a "knowledge pool" mechanic. Basically, civilizations would pool the base technology cost of every tech they ever researched, and have that be their "knowledge" value. Each technology would have a midpoint knowledge value around which its cost oscillates.

For example, a ~ 1000 knowledge tier technology, would cost 20% of its knowledge midpoint (200 research points) to acquire. If you try to research it while your civilization has around 1000 "knowledge", you would research that tech at mostly the normal price. If you tried to research a ~2000 knowledge tier technology instead, it might ordinarily cost just twice the amount, or 400 research points, but its base cost would scale by +50% for you, since you are leaping ahead of time, well ahead of the standard of the knowledge base your civilization has accrued - and vice versa - techs of lower tier than your knowledge value would be researched at a discount.

Think of it as trying to research calculus without inventing writing. Sure - you can maybe do it given monumental effort, but the more knowledge you have, the clearer and easier it will be, after all as someone widely considered a huge genius once said, they were just standing on the shoulders of giants. With this kind of penalty, beelining would be possible - it would just be rather costly, long-term.

6. Stability.

Stability currently suffers from being a fixed value that is the sum of gains and losses within a given city, and yet being used by the game as if it were a percentage range. Therefore, it is not uncommon for a City to find itself at +3000 or -2000 stability, and in those cases the value displayed will be 100 and 0 respectively. There is, as a result, almost never a situation where you are at anywhere between 100 and 0 stability, you are always at one or the other.

I believe this is rather easy to change by just changing the stability formula to equal the following, simple equation :

Stability Gain / Stability Consumption.

If you produce as much stability as your city needs, then you will be at 100%. If you consume less, then the stability will decay, though it will never reach 0%, only approach it - not without events and special effects anyway, which could well provide flat bonuses to the stability %. I feel like this is a much cleaner and indeed easier to understand and more granular an implementation than the current subtractive formula.

7. Territory Sizes relative to City Sizes.

Territories are far too small. Cities sprawl over the entire land, neighbouring civilizations often touching themselves with their walls. Cities do not feel like cities out in the middle of untamed land overgrown with vegetation - they feel like modern nations with the entire place filled to the brim with districts. There is a simple fix for this - make territories larger.

Far larger.

I feel like six to nine times more tiles per territory would be about right. This would make cities feel like actual cities - and it would allow for combat to take part out in the open, instead of every single battle being a siege. It would also give cavalry space to manuever, making it useful, it would allow intercerpting enemy reinforcements and complex army movements and tactics like laying ambush in forests out in the open. It would allow confrontations over resource extractors and outposts, far, far away from the heartlands of the civilizations, with reinforcements being nowhere in sight. It would allow for pillagers and Huns/Mongols to work properly as they should, and it would empower cavalry-based civilizations like Poles, that are currently very lacking - not because their unit is bad - it is fantastic - but because everything is hidden behind walls by the time you reach the era to which they belong.

Sieges should be rare and dangerous, not common and mundane. Therefore, territories need to be 2.5 to 3 times larger in both directions, for a total of 6 to 9 times the current tile count, or at least that is the conclusion I have come to.

[Afterword]

I believe if all of the above changes were implemented, the game's FIMS economy would be in a far, far healthier state and that most if not all districts would get built regularly, instead of makers' quarters dominating the field without any opposition to rival them. It would end the monopoly of industry, and allow for true variety of strategies to emerge, on top of making the game more balanced and interesting in general (in my own perception, at least). It would also make cultures such as Egypt, and in general all builder and science cultures - more balanced, while allowing agrarian cultures to actually do their thing - grow in population.

The stability changes would make city management far less frustrating, and the huge territory size increases (I would implore to at least give us the option to set territory tile count in the game settings), would make warfare far more exciting and strategic than just endless back to back sieges and cities locked permanently out of production because there is always a battle ongoing by the later eras. It would also make the conquest of the New World far more exciting, and make the world far more wondrous to explore.

In terms of early science rushes - it probably wouldn't stop them entirely, but whereas right now a particularly dedicated player might rush to science victory by turn 60 / 300 in a perfect playthrough (which multiplayer games won't be), I'd take a wild guess and say if the above changes were the case then serious science rushes would be hard pressed to breach turn ~170 on a science victory, even without adjusting the technology costs of the later eras, and that would already be quite a lot better than the current state of affairs, giving other players plenty of time to react.

Technology

I disagree, I think Beelining makes perfect sense.   However,

5a-Costs need to be much higher for technologies, particularly later ones (so Beelining is very hard)

5b-technologies need to "osmosis" a Lot more. (so those behind in technology don't fall too far behind)

5c-The science agreement for allies should mean when they spend 100 science on Mounted Warfare, you get X science into Mounted Warfare (if you already have it you get nothing)

My suggestion for Technology Osmosis

Every turn someone is putting influence pressure on any of your territories (not converted just pressure) you get 1 "Osmosis Point" in each technology they have but you don't. (allies get 2 points, Scientific agreements get 5 points total)

Once you get a technology through Research you lose all Osmosis Points in it

Once you have 100 or more "Osmosis Points" in at least 2 Technologies, you get to choose one of those technologies (It doesn't count for Scientist Stars, you just unlock it), the other loses its Tech points

Food

As for Food.... I think it could be fixed with a change to the Formula so that population is taken into account.

I like

Excess Food*(1+0.1*Population)/(Total Food+50)

So the Food Terms can never be more than 1, but you can get (or lose) close to 1+Pop/10 per turn... this makes feeder cities unnecessary/useless bigger cities will grow and starve faster.

Money

I really like the idea for Money, making Money key to military (like Food partially is) would be important [maybe allow a late Game Civic/Technology/infrastructure "Total War" to allow Military Production through Industry]

However, if Money is the only way to get Military units, Then I think you can should just remove buying out Districts/Infrastructure... at least one of them should be "Only Industry" if Troops are going to be "Only Money"+pop.

That way Money doesn't become the "do everything"

Stability

I like that idea  However, then Stability production and Consumption then have to use different symbols because they don't just add/subtract from each other.

Infrastructure

Those +to city center should be changed... at have the +Money also give smaller bonuses to luxury resources or Administrative Centers, have the +Culture ones also give bonuses to Commons Quarters

shakee wrote:

Die it change? The excess food needed to grow a pop is always the same. Regardless if the city currently has 0 pop or 1000. With 50 excess food you gain a pop every two turns in a city with 0 or 1000 pops.

What changes and is not static is the total food production since you need to feed an increasing number of pops.

I don't think that's true at all, given how it took my 14 / 74 pop cap city ~640 excess food production to grow a pop, and my 17 / 36 pop capacity city only ~200 excess food to do the same. That was the case before the last balancing patch at least, I haven't checked how food works since because I just exploited it with feeder towns / settlers after seeing that and never had a single issue since lol.

Edit: See below. Its.... interesting, since the numbers break at different points at endless speed (the % value obtained from X food is halved, but not the scaling). Regardless of game speed, it is faulty, since 1000 food excess produces 0.95 pops per turn, while 100 food excess produces 0.67 pops (or 6.7 pops if you had 10 cities with that, which is seven times more than having the same excess in one city). At slower speeds this becomes even greater an issue, because on Endless you will have more time to build up your districts in the smaller cities and so the formula gets even more unbalanced there despite the % yield from it being halved.

Here is a comparison of two cities in my early games on endless:



87 excess = 30.9% pop growth per turn or 0.36% per unit of food.
287 excess = 42.6% pop growth per turn, or 0.15% per unit of food.

Yes, the per unit growth decreases because of the formula with its high diminishing return at higher food excess. Please use it and check it against the tooltip when you mouse over that part. It should check out.

The value at the page are only examples at specific given food values. Anything inbetween those values has it's own percentage growth.

When I last checked the growth rate it was with the 132 version.

Also, those values are for normal speed. What exactly the change is to slower speed, I did not check.

And it should still be true, that the % pop growth for both your cities will be the same, if the excess food is the same.

For me it sounded like the current pop in a city has influence on pop growth. Yes, I concur that having massive food excess is not as affective as have that same food excess spread out over several cities.

Maybe I misunderstood your point you wanted to make because I consider a small or large city with its pop amount.

Edit: writing on mobile, so there are several edits since checking the reference post is impossible...

As for technology I don’t think they need to increase the “bonus cost” per tech researched.  They need to massively increase the base cost of the techs (especially later eras…Classical ~50% more, Mid~2x, EM ~3x, Ind ~5x, Contemporary~7x, Final techs~15x).  So you Have to beeline and rely on a new form of osmosis (that only gives you techs for free, Never a research boost) to get all the techs you skipped.

Good summary of the current game mechanics. Just to play devil's advocate for a second though, I think it's important not to make overly general conclusions based on OP strategies. 

What I mean is, in most "normal" games that I assume most players play, Market Quarters aren't a "dead" district. If you're maintaining a standing army, upgrading units, and fighting some wars throughout the eras, you will absolutely need to build some market quarters. The current game is quite a good balance - sure, you do need to focus on Industry, but you also need to work some Farmers, Markets, and Research Quarters into your build order. 

If you're going for an 80-turn Mars win, or fielding 300 archers, then sure, money is pretty much irrelevant. I'd definitely like to see money be more useful but I think that could be achieved by making a few tweaks to the current system (better rush buy ratios, incentives to maintain an upgraded army by fixing the AI maintaining a large army into later eras etc).

OP strategies and exploits are what really break the game at the moment - e.g. going Egypt/Khmer/Joseon/French and using LR and CM, or using liberation tricks, negative food etc. If you only pick non-builder and non-scientist cultures and choose not to use exploits the current balance is actually really good. I'd encourage the devs to fix the OP cultures and the straight up exploits first before changing anything fundamental about how say Money & Industry work.

fortydayweekend wrote:

Good summary of the current game mechanics. Just to play devil's advocate for a second though, I think it's important not to make overly general conclusions based on OP strategies. 

What I mean is, in most "normal" games that I assume most players play, Market Quarters aren't a "dead" district. If you're maintaining a standing army, upgrading units, and fighting some wars throughout the eras, you will absolutely need to build some market quarters. The current game is quite a good balance - sure, you do need to focus on Industry, but you also need to work some Farmers, Markets, and Research Quarters into your build order. 

If you're going for an 80-turn Mars win, or fielding 300 archers, then sure, money is pretty much irrelevant. I'd definitely like to see money be more useful but I think that could be achieved by making a few tweaks to the current system (better rush buy ratios, incentives to maintain an upgraded army by fixing the AI maintaining a large army into later eras etc).

OP strategies and exploits are what really break the game at the moment - e.g. going Egypt/Khmer/Joseon/French and using LR and CM, or using liberation tricks, negative food etc. If you only pick non-builder and non-scientist cultures and choose not to use exploits the current balance is actually really good. I'd encourage the devs to fix the OP cultures and the straight up exploits first before changing anything fundamental about how say Money & Industry work.

I don't think "balancing civs" is what needs to happen honestly. Sadly, until you fix most underlying fundamental balance issues, balancing civs themselves is pointless, or really quite impossible, because you'll be balancing them around flawed systems. To give a few examples - Ottomans are overpowered because every battle is a siege and melee units - the bane of mortars - are useless in the current combat system. Poles are quite pointless because - again - cavalry has no use because every battle is a siege. Egypt is broken because industry is broken. Every science civ ever is broken because of Collective Minds. Rome is bad because its emblematic unit is melee, its district does not matter because eras fly by, and its upkeep reduction because upkeep on the whole is currently largely irrelevant. And so on.

Sadly its the fundamental FIMS balance that is breaking the game in the first place. And some of those "exploits" that I mentioned above are not even exploits in the first place, not really, just playing properly given the game rules you've been given. You can't balance civilizations without rebalancing the CS formula nor can you do it without making industry less dominant, without disjointing it from literally being better at money, science AND food stuff than those are at their own game.

Yes, the biggest science issue is collective minds - which can be fixed on its own, but there's others like its lack of prereqs and extreme beelining, or the fact that all that science does must be produced by industry to take effect - which need not be the case as you could easily have most infrastructure-unlocking research provide passive bonuses instead of needing to be built, making science more attractive an option on its own.

And then, Money is currently fundamentally just industry's poor sibling as upkeep doesn't much matter and all other relevant things it can do are doable with industry all the same, and you cannot fix that by balancing civilizations, either.

Food is similarly a fundamental, formula issue, even if you fix the exploit of manufactoring pops via settlers - having 1000 food excess split between 10 cities gives you 7 times the growth as if it were just in 1 city, meaning you will never care about any food in your megacity because it will cost you a few dozen districts just to avoid losing a pop per turn (because of the formula's diminishing returns), which you can easily counteract by just growing one in a small town elsewhere for a fraction of the cost and going full industry in the actual cities. Even if you do not intend to exploit this, it does not take a genius to figure it out - why build 50 non-snowballing districts when you could build 5 elsewhere to the same effect, or even abuse Machu Picchu - which is an intended mechanic that does feel like an exploit, except its intended so it gets a pass.

Now, you can fix all that by making each pop grown/lost take a fixed 100 food (excess/deficit). It fixes every exploit-y issue, including the pop buyout being useless due to industry costs scaling exponentially by era while pop counts do not (due to the current formula) and makes perfect sense given how you can disband units for pops and how the pops are self-limiting anyway since the food consumption per pop increases by a % the more pops you have in a city, therefore it'd naturally reach equilibrium no matter how much food you'd produce. There is other ways of balancing it of course, such as making the surplus count split between territories - not cities - under the current formula, as that way at least a megacity with 10 territories and 1000 food excess has the same pop growth (and decay) potential as 10 cities of 1 territory and 100 excess each - which does not fix every issue obviously, because a flat threshold is better, but at least it fixes most major ones.

But the point being is that you can't balance civilizations until you balance the game systems because the civilizations are always balanced around the game's systems, not the other way around, and if the latter are broken in their implementation, so will the former be. I actually feel like civs are reasonably well-balanced in a vacuum at the moment, just that the intended, likely envisioned balance is sadly not reality, neither in warfare nor between the FIMS.

teatimeG wrote:

There are lots of balancing effects to be considered, for instance, making units require only gold to buy would make the Huns / Mongols either super dominant or irrelevant, depending on whether those units stay as they are or get a giant nerf bat to the side of the head.

Just gave up on a game where I didn't pick any industrial civs -- only the Zhou were left when I was ready to move into the ancient era and I wanted to see if I could win with the non-industry civs. Turns out, no. Probably it could be done with perfect play, but as the thread above illustrates, it would have been by ignoring what my chosen civs are supposed to do and buying extra makers quarters with no bonuses.

The insane thing that happened is as my industry puttered to a sputtering irrelevancy, my farm outputs were better than all the other civs but that meant just a small smattering of extra farmers. Nothing useful. Every new employed person had to be a farmer if I wanted to grow at all. And I desperately needed to grow to fill my land with the makers quarters I needed to balance not having picked an industry civ.

But do I want to do all the things in this thread? No. I think that would destabilize the game to the point of forcing an embarrassing rollback.

Instead, the devs should acknowledge the obvious. Industry is way better than the other things, so giving the influence civ +1 influence is not similar to some builder civ getting +1 industry.

Food --

Proposal: Food civs need much bigger food values depending on Era^2.

It seems Food is evaluated as 2:1 or 1.75:1 vs. industry when looking at what the farmer civs get. But at this point I don't think I'll pick a farming civ unless it's more like Era^2 better. So in the Ancient era, the Harappans are fine, but the English are up against builder civs that get +5 industry advantage to their districts and so need at least +45 food to make a higher pop civ competitive against a lower pop builder civ.

Influence --

Proposal: A civic that lets you use influence for buyouts instead of gold (gold is roughly 2:1, influence would need to be more like 1:2)

I either have all the influence I could ever need, or I just pick the "buy things instead of influence them" and ignore influence for the rest of the game. Influence needs a buff in the form of something useful to buy with all the extra. Most of the civics are fine, but the remainder are pointless and the cost of buying them increases geometrically, but influence increases only linearly. The point of my comments is to change things that don't have huge destabilizing impact on the game, so we don't want to just "make all the civics better lol." I think there could be a new early game civic where you can choose to do unit / building / infra buyouts in influence instead of gold similar to how inherited land changes outpost creation from influence to gold; then if you wanted or were forced onto an influence path you'd have something to do with that influence.

Science --

Proposal: +100% science for 5 turns, no collective minds.

Letting science cultures turn regular industry into science is so insanely unbalanced compared to "throw a party so the neighbors like you more." But worse than that, it's more of a buff to INDUSTRY than it is to science civs! Pick 5 industry cultures then 1 science culture at the end but lol ignore anything special about them because you're just using the special ability anyway. Just making the science bonus something like "+100% science on one city for 5 turns" would put it more in line with all the other special abilities. If you can't turn industry into science directly, you still can indirectly by building extra research quarters. It's not like industry needed a buff in a game where it's already the most brokenly awesome thing to have.

Money--

Proposal: Replace investor button with Ignore violence on trade routes button.

I don't agree with the general consensus that money needs a buff or that the buyouts are too high. I have had a lot of fun with money civs and buying out a few makers quarters totally works. I don't generally play on Endless, and if money is weak in Endless mode that to me seems like a problem with Endless mode, and not with money per say.

Where money falls over for me is market quarters are garbage unless you have a lot of trade routes. So when the world goes to war, the money civs are trash. But the builder civ says "lololololol here's some elephants rofl!" The unique "investor" ability of money civs is fun... as the Chinese... to get oil. Otherwise I don't find it handy.

I would prefer the unique ability allow merchant civs to ignore violence by pressing the "ha! I can trade during war!" button This is what actual merchant civs have been able to do during war since forever. It's how they get their reputation as merchants. Sending traders into war zones because the money must flow is the singular trait that causes everyone to say "man those people love money."

Food - You do realize that more food does nothing? 100 Excess means 0.67 pop/turn. 1000 excess means 0.95 pop. 10000 excess means 0.97 pop or something like that. Meanwhile you only need everyone employed as farmers to get any food excess because pop consumption scales with pop count, meaning the more pops you have, the higher the % of them that will need to be farmers to not enter a deficit.

Getting more food does not change anything much on that front. If you get 1000 industry, you are building stuff 10 times faster than if you had 100, but if you have 1000 food, its just 1.5x faster, its also why pop buyout is pretty worthless. Its a formula problem. not a "number" issue, that makes farmer's quarters and the agrarian approach pointless, and that's even ignoring the numerous exploits the current formula allows for (like feeder cities allowing you to grow crazy amounts of population while sitting deep in the red in overall food produced, via recruitment in small city and disbandment in a big one).

Influence - So we are doing even more inter-current conversions now? At that point, why not have everything be one currency you buy everything for /s ? Influence could use a sink sure (despite there being plenty of way overpriced things like merging cities), but what no currency whatsoever needs is a way to convert it to another - that's why the entire industry issue is an issue in the first place!

Science - I think it'd be fine, sure.

Money - "I don't agree that money needs a buff or that the buyouts are too high" -> glances at crossbowmen costing 5 million gold to buyout lategame but three digit industry -> yeah... sure. Money does not need a buff, money needs to be disjointed from industry - it needs its own niche that it, and only it, can fill. Units cost gold to upkeep and to heal, so why not have them cost gold to recruit and get rid of the gold buyout entirely, thus removing one of the overlapping currency problems that sadly plagues the game?

Trade does not really matter in Humankind at the moment, which it probably should, though the goods are certainly nice, but in the end more money for the sake of money, which you can't really use anyway? Quite pointless. So while I find that merchant ability you proposed quite interesting (though I think it'd be better as a passive trait of "can trade while at war" rather than an active ability), I think fundamental changes to what money can be used for absolutely necessary.

Here is information about food: https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/173-strategy-guides/threads/45771-food-consumption-and-population-growth?page=1#post-340019