This games need mods and rebalance

[lebeststratege]

Overall I like the game, and the core concept of the game.
I can pull a win out of almost any start because the game is'nt hard, but at the same time there are only a very little subset of national spirits, cultures and techs which are worth playing into namely :
AGE2
Raiders (OP snowball)
Wild hunter (decent early game idea, good balance)
Naturalist (if you are surounded by huge forests only)
AGE3
Kingdom (mostly because imperial is trashed due to the fact you never keep the governement expedientures so out of kingdom you retain the vassal prosperity you earned, but out of imperial you lose your palace... WHY???)
AGE4
Theologian (OP art/diplo/knowledge point snowball though monastery eureka)
Khans (in case you didn't snowballed enough from raiders)
AGE5
Feudal monarchy (because it doesn't matter if you play aggro or peaceful, you WILL end up with vassals, which WILL end up being the most of your empire... and oath of fealty)
AGE6
The game is probably decided by this point, but I find it hard not to take colonialism

The main issue in the balance of early game ideas come from either the difficulty of getting mana points or the difficulty to be competitive if you get said mana points :
Ancient seafearer looks good on paper, but to get exploration point you need to forfeit your empire in terms of developpement (buildings giving them either give nothing (lookout) or food or gold.. gold being extremely weak overall, and having 300% of food being useless)
Engineering national spirits are good, but using engineering points for their normal use is often more useful (why can't I create an outpost with exploration points also? that would buff BOTH of those idea groups).
Warfare mana points are so common (because their are "some" barbs in this game) that having a spirit giving you free usefullness from a bad situation would be OP no matter what, not including the fact those ideas are strong.

Saddly this game's idea are built around "win more" options (as many 4Xs) which barely interact with one another, and every good national spirits are the ones that do it, every bad ones either don't or don't do it enough (ie explorer, which give you access to really good one time buff form exploration, but that only compensate a normal developpement fro a while, is luck dependent AND is bugged (the same way parthenon does'nt boost/get boosted by quests, the exploring guild is an empty joke).

Mods and Rebalance could solve this.. I fear that the demo was a trap I fell into because this game can quickly become a cities skyline 2 all over again (1 year of patches only for limited mods to appear and a game still underperforming depsite really good base concepts)

[neilwilkes]

There is also the tediousness of the end game - if the AI gets ahead somehow & selects the regular age, there is literally nothing for me to do except s l o w l y build a colony ship (and boy, do I mean Slowly even with all 6 regions set to producing parts alone).
There is literally no other way to win unless I try to wipe out the other AI controlled players in a forever war, dealing with the inevitable chaos events (although I have £50,000 in the bank with nothing to spend it on so paying those off would be easy).
In all seriousness, I cannot be bothered to finish the game at this point because I have literally nothing to do except endlessly click 'End Turn'

[taomastercu]

Raiders is well known to be OP but your other points are wrong.

Mound Builders is second best Age 2 NS.
Imperial Dynasty best government of A3.
Shogun is best Age 4 National Spirit.

I can play a whole game with 0 vassals and one giant mega region with 200 pop and 200 tiles on Grandmaster Difficulty

[Celtic FC]

Originally posted by neilwilkes:

There is also the tediousness of the end game - if the AI gets ahead somehow & selects the regular age, there is literally nothing for me to do except s l o w l y build a colony ship (and boy, do I mean Slowly even with all 6 regions set to producing parts alone).
There is literally no other way to win unless I try to wipe out the other AI controlled players in a forever war, dealing with the inevitable chaos events (although I have £50,000 in the bank with nothing to spend it on so paying those off would be easy).
In all seriousness, I cannot be bothered to finish the game at this point because I have literally nothing to do except endlessly click 'End Turn'

My first game I gave up as I got way too behind - my second game I won by doing exactly this, just put all my production into the colony ship and kept pushing 'next turn' until the 'you won' screen pops up and that's it - not very satisfying to the point I'm not sure I want to play another game now.

The game is a great base, maybe the most promising since Civ 4 for me - it just needs fixes, for instance Diplomacy and Trade are way too basic - you need the ability to vassalise entire empires instead of needing to conquer every last region. The performance of the game needs fixed, takes too long between turns in late game and trying to pan the map is slow which just adds to the late game boredom after the rush of early game.

[lebeststratege]

Mound builder second best age? on what basis?
you need so much space to use them that if you have a little bit of forest around it's already bad. Plus to make the most out of them, you need engineering point to upgrade your towns AND to unlock the tree (provided you don't want any outpost)

Imperial dynasty is not entirely bad, but is overshadowed by kingdom almost as soon as age 4 in many circonstances, and that's even worse the moment you switch governement because you keep nothing out of imperial, while kingdom have lingering influence.

Shogun I didn't try it, so it might be worth a shot, though I fail to see how much better it could be compared to 10 to 30 knowledge/art/diplo points per turn (and *10 that of wealth), I may be well wrong.

200 pop and 200 tiles? how do you manage that?
Rasing every minor should grant you around 30 to 50 pop. art power hardly more than 30 due to cost escalation, and 1 pop every 4 turn means you'd need more than 400 turns to get 100 pop. discounting the fact you'd need so many amenities that 200 tiles wouldn't cut it (maybe with enough outpost to outsource luxury, and food, but sanitation, housing, data, education can't be outsourced)..
oh and I forgot that you also need to deny the AI of any settlement around your city.
And you'd need 40 town level...

[vivas]

May sound silly but i don't think rebalancing is always needed. It is a single player game and you can chose several playstyles, i don't always play to win, some times i just want to fool around with all different timelines. I like it when there are military spoken OP choices like raiders. Balancing would also mean less diverse and a more bland game where everything is equaly valued.

[CDuque]

Originally posted by taomastercu:

Raiders is well known to be OP but your other points are wrong.

Mound Builders is second best Age 2 NS.
Imperial Dynasty best government of A3.
Shogun is best Age 4 National Spirit.

I can play a whole game with 0 vassals and one giant mega region with 200 pop and 200 tiles on Grandmaster Difficulty

Can you explain what is so good with the Shogun? I don't get it. I tried them once but didn't feel any openess from them

[taomastercu]

Originally posted by CDuque:

Originally posted by taomastercu:

Raiders is well known to be OP but your other points are wrong.

Mound Builders is second best Age 2 NS.
Imperial Dynasty best government of A3.
Shogun is best Age 4 National Spirit.

I can play a whole game with 0 vassals and one giant mega region with 200 pop and 200 tiles on Grandmaster Difficulty

Can you explain what is so good with the Shogun? I don't get it. I tried them once but didn't feel any openess from them

Specifically for single region moundbuilders. You are getting +20% regional efficiency from stacking daimyo and shogun. That's multiplicative with Local Reforms also. 1.2*1.5=1.8. The you add Golden Age So 1.4*1.5=2.1. So you are getting 210-100=+110% regional efficiency.

[CDuque]

Originally posted by lebeststratege:

Mound builder second best age? on what basis?

Their 50% discount food means you don't need to care about food for the rest of the game. I feed my 40 pop city with one farm. (I'm not sure if it's a math bug or not at this point because it seems way too OP). This means you can redirect all your workers to other things.

A specialized sanitation town surrounded by its special mound building is OP as hell too. Not only do the mounds give you culture (it's a lot, +2 each super early in the game, which means you can spam culture events), but are improved further with Innovation events to give you improvement points and other things. It means you don't need to go the clay route and don't need to build many trash tiles for sanitation. It again redirects your workers towards better things.

It also expands your borders on grass very quickly, which you can use all the workers you didn't use before to do better things as you have the room.

[CDuque]

Originally posted by taomastercu:

Originally posted by CDuque:

Can you explain what is so good with the Shogun? I don't get it. I tried them once but didn't feel any openess from them

Specifically for single region moundbuilders. You are getting +20% regional efficiency from stacking daimyo and shogun. That's multiplicative with Local Reforms also. 1.2*1.5=1.8. The you add Golden Age So 1.4*1.5=2.1. So you are getting 210-100=+110% regional efficiency.

I see.. So you basically double the production of your towns?

[taomastercu]

Originally posted by lebeststratege:

Mound builder second best age? on what basis?
you need so much space to use them that if you have a little bit of forest around it's already bad. Plus to make the most out of them, you need engineering point to upgrade your towns AND to unlock the tree (provided you don't want any outpost)

Imperial dynasty is not entirely bad, but is overshadowed by kingdom almost as soon as age 4 in many circonstances, and that's even worse the moment you switch governement because you keep nothing out of imperial, while kingdom have lingering influence.

Shogun I didn't try it, so it might be worth a shot, though I fail to see how much better it could be compared to 10 to 30 knowledge/art/diplo points per turn (and *10 that of wealth), I may be well wrong.

200 pop and 200 tiles? how do you manage that?
Rasing every minor should grant you around 30 to 50 pop. art power hardly more than 30 due to cost escalation, and 1 pop every 4 turn means you'd need more than 400 turns to get 100 pop. discounting the fact you'd need so many amenities that 200 tiles wouldn't cut it (maybe with enough outpost to outsource luxury, and food, but sanitation, housing, data, education can't be outsourced)..
oh and I forgot that you also need to deny the AI of any settlement around your city.
And you'd need 40 town level...

Millennia is like EU4. You are stacking specific bonuses for a specific playstyle. So if you stack bonuses related to single region efficiency you want very specific governments and national ideas.

I was at 115 pop on turn 230, so 2 turns per 10 pop. First you have to remember that in the Iron Age the minimum turns per pop is actually 3, due to the pop growth efficiency bonus in that age. Then you need to consider that Sultan gives 15 free pop. Sultan also gives +10 region level. The max Town based Region Level is of course 16.

Mound Builders have limitless Engineering especially because of Local Reforms and Shogun.

[taomastercu]

Originally posted by CDuque:

Originally posted by taomastercu:

Specifically for single region moundbuilders. You are getting +20% regional efficiency from stacking daimyo and shogun. That's multiplicative with Local Reforms also. 1.2*1.5=1.8. The you add Golden Age So 1.4*1.5=2.1. So you are getting 210-100=+110% regional efficiency.

I see.. So you basically double the production of your towns?

For the one region which you can keep Local Reforms up permanently on and put the Shogun on, yes. 2.1x multiplier. Also maybe Communism has some stuff you can do, but someone said it is broken and doesn't work.

[Lur Nen Rue]

i get what op said, i too want to play casual monument->alchemy->utopia but dont have the power to through 200 turns on anything higher than apprentice difficulty

they should let you pick whatever age you desire on master below, restarting game can be only done so much else you just go meta

[Ricochet]

Space agency for age VIII is OP to farm innovation points with the outer space culture. There are also good choices like increased imorovement points, food on space center and increased defense on units.

[taomastercu]

Originally posted by Lur Nen Rue:

i get what op said, i too want to play casual monument->alchemy->utopia but dont have the power to through 200 turns on anything higher than apprentice difficulty

they should let you pick whatever age you desire on master below, restarting game can be only done so much else you just go meta

There's a mod someone made that as soon as I don't have to install some fancy Unity DLL injection software I really want. It lets you take consecutive Variant Ages.

I *really* want to play Monuments/Alchemy/Aether/Utopia in one game. Of course you still have to qualify for them but that is not that hard.