Brainstorming big ideas

[SpacedOutChicken]

Starting Deciv 2 as its own fork gives us the opportunity to make big changes in order to fix longstanding flaws or shortcomings. I'm starting this thread to open the floor for these kinds of suggestions. I'll start with one of my own, having to do with money.

Having water as currency makes sense in the early game, when water is scarce. It makes less sense as the game progresses. An actual economy would find new ways of backing their money as they got better at sourcing fresh water. Unciv has a few tricks that we could use to reflect this change. Buildings and tile improvements can become obsolete as the player discovers new technologies. Starting in the early game would allow you to use these water-based money boosters, but you'd have to use different tools later. Currency could change to using precious metals, and then advance to using cryptocurrency as electronics advance. How does this sound?

[MutedREM]

At the risk of getting out of my lane and giving a ranting bad take, I wanted to put my long winded opinion here. Apologies in advance.

A particular issue in my mind is flavor/ideological compatibility. Water being something everyone uses is pertinent: it's a universal need, and as such is pretty easy to justify everyone using equally, at least in the early game like you pointed out. But the political diversity of Deciv's roster makes generalized social resources (In this case, value-backed currency) difficult to standardize across each group.

For example, why would the Anarchistic/Communal Children of Rust use Crypto? The Crimson Legion might be opposed to it too, depending on how backward thinking they are towards technology you consider them. Hexlock, meanwhile, has a different reason for avoiding it, namely to avoid diverting power that'd be better used for processing.

This is just one example, but I hope it helps justify the idea that the currencies used should be more material than social (Or in cryptocurrency's case, a step removed from material). In regards to the latter, I just don't believe there is a suitable one-size-fits-all option.

I agree that precious metals idea is certainly worth considering, as long as it retains another in-game use for the player. Also maybe have it tie into scavenging, like taking the metal components from electronics, scrap metal, artifacts, etc. (Embrace harvesting catalytic converters.)

Power also looks like a suitable mid-late game currency, giving it a more wide-spread application than it currently has as a strategic resource. It could also better justify cryptocurrency, by basing it entirely as a 'Power Standard' currency.

Ultimately, I think the economy should be a balance of opportunity, where each monetary use of a resource must be considered against a material secondary use (Such as using water to purchase and maintain personnel units, and hydrating your population. This, I think, shouldn't be obsoleted in entirety).

[SeventhM]

Regarding the currency, I kinda have a bit of a hot take here (is it a hot take? Idk):

I don't think water makes sense as a currency early game either. The amount of water available at any given time would necessarily be too malleable to be a sustainable currency with a consistent value, it's too easy to argue "I'll just burn the cash by drinking/boiling", there's questions regarding if other water sources truly is that unsalvageable (which is already acknowledged by the concerns especially the further through the tech tree you get)... It's just a mess of an attempted currency that comes from trying to hard to copy a different game's lore despite it also having glaring flaws

I think best case scenario, if there was a specific thing to replace gold, it'll have to be something a bit easier to count that won't be consumed nearly as quickly. And it can't be crypto because crypto has its own problems in terms of being a primary currency

Regarding the issue as a whole, it might be helpful to get a list of topic worth looking further into. Imo, a starting list to consider would be

• Currency name
• New feature implantation (e.g. espionage implementation)
• Unit balance (the scaling kinda falls off at a point and makes balancing most stuff difficult)
• The slave system (there are imo some oddities regarding how it discourages some UBs due to losing slave benefits)
• The power system (there's plenty of ways this conversation can go)
• The role of the science to gold slider
• And probably more I forgot

[SpacedOutChicken]

First off, thanks for the feedback! Reading through this has given me some interesting ideas about how to implement water scarcity, but some of the changes are so big that I can't justify implementing them in Deciv 2, unless literally everyone was in favor. I might make yet another fork of Deciv to put some of these ideas into practice...

Big ideas aside, I think I'll avoid changing Deciv 2's currency for now because I don't yet have answers to the questions brought up here. Making changes without clear direction is dangerous.

To address the concern about the gold to science slider: let me first admit that I added that feature to the mod mostly because I could. It was an interesting feature that I saw in the list of uniques, so I used it. Should I remove it? If it's not a good addition to the game, I can take it out easily without breaking anything.

[MutedREM]

To add to the list of topics to consider:

• Religion/Belief System's role
• Policy Changes/additions
• City Focuses
• Barbarian/Raider Mechanics (Especially mid-late game)

(In regards to the water slider, I'll attest that, as a non-meta/casual player, I don't use it often. It seems like a tool more suited to more experienced and/or minmaxing players. More people needed for consensus on that, I think.)

[the-s-is-silent]

My comments on the gold to science slider (warning, may be viewed as a ranting bad take):

• The ruleset has unfortunately been balanced around it such that it becomes necessary in order to keep up with the research rate of the AI in single player (which, thankfully, does not utilize it, at least not early on (I need to let a spectator game play out longer to check to see if the AI uses it later)). It does not help in the slightest that AI bonuses are greater in DeCiv than they are in official Civ 5 - I mean, seriously, AI being given Deity level bonuses in some areas on Prince? However, its existence is also one of the greatest wreckers of balance and is one of the primary culprits behind the DeCiv meta being a Superscience meta. Its existence means that tech costs are inflated higher than their G&K/BNW counterparts, while simultaneously preventing the player from making any purchases with water (and in some extreme cases, forcing them into periods where they're training units for the sole purpose of immediately disbanding them for water) because currency sources in the early to mid game are much worse than in the official game.

• The slider's existence forces lower max income on the player in the early to mid game even while it's set to 0%. You get less currency from building all of the currency buildings available in DeCiv than you get from building the smaller number of equivalent buildings in the official game, and with tiles having no yields by default if they don't have resources on them, cities will never choose on their own to work tiles with Moisture traps unless they're working every other tile and specialist available to them that has higher total yields than the Moisture trap tile. It isn't until Radar is researched that tiles with water yields high enough to be worth working become available. If not for Constitution being the indisputably most OP policy tree and the automatic second pick for everyone who can pick it after finishing Adaptation or Sovereignty, Monopoly would be nigh mandatory to adopt and finish once it becomes available to the player to stave off economic collapse while keeping an acceptable research rate through the slider (and Monopoly doesn't have the same buff to Moisture traps that Commerce does to Trading posts, so even after finishing the tree, it still isn't worth building them). Also, the Great Merchant is even worse in DeCiv than in the official game because of the unfortunate decision to merge the Gold and Culture GIs and make the merged GI significantly weaker than either the Customs house or Landmark - unless it's taking advantage of adjacency bonuses to add large amounts of Food/Science, in which case it becomes the most powerful GI when placed correctly but still has the issues of generating far too little water/Culture to make it worth placing for that purpose. There's a reason Outlaws of the Wastes undoes this design choice and SeventhM's rebalance mod copies this reversal.

• Sullien mentioned that he felt the slider was an annoyance - but he also mentioned that one solution he was toying with was making Science even more dependent on the slider, akin to the older Civ games where the Trade/Commerce stat ruled Gold, Science, and Happiness.

My solution, at risk of making this fork of DeCiv start to take too much after the rebalance mods, would be to remove the slider and reduce tech costs to where they would/should be without its presence (about 1/3 reduction across the board). Also, address the poor choice of where the Science buildings + associated techs are located in the tech tree and nerf some of those buildings. Alas, I fear that if this is put up as a poll like with the issue of Power, the majority will actually vote to keep the slider.

[SeventhM]

To address the concern about the gold to science slider

My viewpoint on the slider is fairly clear cut: it's kinda a cancer on the rest of the balance. Either it needs to explicitly be balanced around or it should go

• As Silent said, the gold slider effectively reduces the amount of gold every player has. If you're trying to take as much advantage of the slider as possible, it effectively reduces gold to irrelevancy, turning it into a more complex second source of science. A side effect is any strategies built off of gold (e.g. gold buying and buildings/units or mass upgrading units) becomes strictly unviable unless you're immediately going to win. It also means that any uniques the reduce the cost of gold but still can end up as flavor text, which makes quite a few things worse than intended
• The gold slider comes into effect before science percentage modifiers. This means the gold slider unintentionally buff science percentage buildings further. This, alongside other factors (such as multiple science increasing mechanics/buildings being densely packed around one section of the tech tree) contributes to a point in the game where it seems like everyone suddenly gets a surge in science. Also, since Hexlock's unique buildings are science percentage buildings, this is a large part of what makes the Civ seem too strong to some
• The gold to science slider requires the amount of science needed to tech up higher to avoid science moving too quickly. This can make it especially harsh on anyone who falls behind as you can get *really* far behind if you can't reach the science surge part of the game on time alongside other players

At the cost of seeing as though I'm bragging, my rebalance got rid of the slider and could literally go back down to a normal Civ 5 tech cost, and everything plays out much cleaner than with the slider, even despite the major differences on how tiles are balanced