In breaks from the turn reports, I shall attempt to write posts about the RB mod and the reasons for the design changes made within it. We are currently on hiatus as Mist has gone AWOL, and the other player for that civ, Brick, has been a bit flaky. For how long, we don’t know, but Mist might just be busy atm, and hopefully he is still OK.

Anyway, to business. In standard 3.19 BtS, the Statue of Zeus, a world wonder, has the following numbers:

• Available at Aesthetics,
• 300 hammers,
• +100% production with ivory,
•  2 to 4 monuments required empire wide (map size dependent),
• +100% war weariness for your enemies,
• +10 culture per turn,
• +2 Artist points per turn.

There were two general strategies for the SoZ. Build it in a border city to win a cultural war, as with ivory it is incredibly cheap, or build it so that you were a very painful target to attack. This is to do with the fact that a civ gains war weariness (WW) for losing units on tiles where the majority culture belongs to the civ you are at war with.  Therefore, attacking the player who has the SoZ, and losing units gives even more WW than normal, making it harder to maintain happy caps in your cities. This is not a huge problem until the modern era, when the amounts of units that can be lost in a single turn can cause upwards of +6 unhappiness, and along with bombing resource tiles causes a huge change in the metagame. It becomes very difficult to attack and defend in the modern era, and the SoZ can be an unbalancing factor considering the cost.

There are additional problems regarding the construction, that the Monument requirement favours certain leaders, specifically vanilla CHM which needs monuments to trigger the extra happiness and not CRE, who never build monuments except in culture wars. The ivory bonus also meant that as ivory tends to be placed in one part of the map, a minority of civs would have production bonus.

With these considerations, and understanding that since the introduction during the beta test it has been decried, then I accepted that the SoZ needed some sort of rebalancing. There were a few options considered:

1. Add a obsolescence tech, for example Rifling or Steam Power.
2. Decrease the WW modifier
3. Alter the building requirements
4. Alter the production modifier and cost
5. Create a new bonus in place of the WW effect.
6. All of the above

1 is a fair idea, and would have been a perfectly reasonable mechanic, if it were not for the fact that it is the defender that would need to research the obsolescence tech. Unless the obsolescence tech is set early, for example, rifling, it would be feasible to have the SoZ and exert the WW effect on an attacker with Inf and still have the problems above exist.  I was a bit uncertain that the SoZ would be balanced if it had only a short window of existence, and that was mainly during the longbow era. It could vary from completely useless to game changing.

2 doesn’t really do much good, WW as a mechanic is designed to aggressive play weaker and is tailored specifically to the size of the unit stacks you can attack with. Dealing with the WW from stacks in the modern era is hard enough, so any %age increase is hard to justify. It would have to be used in conjunction with 1, but that doesn’t make it any more feasible, as it is difficult to quantify the usefulness of the SoZ as an investment.

3 basically means removing the monument requirement so that players that use religion, libs and CRE to pop borders aren’t penalised.  There are no buildings that can be substituted in that doesn’t favour one trait over an other. This somewhat cheapens the cost, but making hte cost cheaper isn’t great, as it makes the wonder a one right choice.

4 again basically means removing the ivory component, there isn’t anything that can really be substituted in that doesn’t affect the balance of other resources, so it seems smarter to just pick a decent hammer cost and leave it at that.So, can a combination of all of the above bring the SoZ back into balance? This is now a judgement decision that involves the personal experience of everyone involved ie me, as Cyneheard had begged off by this point in the process. I would most likely attempted:

1. Obsolescence tech of Rifling,
2. Lowering the WW modifier to +50%
3. No building requirements
4. No production modifier
5. Cost of 200 hammers

My fear with these numbers would be that the usefulness of the wonder is too variable to be understood in the game, and building it is basically a crapshoot. So long as the SoZ is overpowered in conditions that are likely to found in an MP environment, the solution isn’t acceptable. The final removal of the WW modifier leaves the wonder simply as a method of winning culture wars and claiming uncontested land, same as when Henge is built in the second city. That’s…not really a good outcome, but removing the option of a cheap cultural wonder as well seems even worse.

So this is where the dreaded redesign argument comes in. The driving aim of the RB mod was to rebalance BtS, using the ideals that Soren espoused when designing the base game, and not to redesign sections to do something other than what was intended. Here I’ve just ruled out the methods of rebalancing the SoZ, so are there any real options remaining, other than just removing it?

Well, in a round about kind of way there is. In the back of the CIV manual, Soren wrote an essay about how civilization was designed, and one of the points he made was that if a concept isn’t fun the way you originally envisaged it, making it work in the opposite manner is sometimes more fun.

“However, maintenance created its own new issues. Like all penalties, there is the danger of it becoming “unfun” – a burden to the player that might balance the game back but suck the enjoyment out of it. To solve this problem, we harkened back to a similar problem during the development of Civ III. The golden ages of that game – a very popular feature – originally began life as the Dark Ages! We had wanted to show how the power of empires wax and wane over the centuries, so we implemented a decline phase for each civilization. It wasn’t a whole lot of dun, though. Rather than dropping the feature, we just flipped the concept around. We replaced 20 turns of decline with 20 turns of increased productivity, giving the game a sense of history’s cyclical nature while still fun for the player”

So instead of making the SoZ a mechanic that makes warfare painful for an opponent, turn it into a mechanic that makes it fun for the player that builds it. The concept of the wonder doesn’t alter, even if the exact mechanic changes. So what would be the potential new effects?

1. More XP for the city
2. More XP for every city in the empire
3. Decreased WW for builder
4. Free promotion on units built in the city
5. Free barracks in every city
6. Military production bonus

1 is a straight forward choice, and it is easy to figure out how useful the XP would be. It has synergy with a run to Lit for the HE and makes the HE more attainable.

2 is probably just a little bit broken, basically giving either nothing (1XP empire wide) to some leaders having no effect, but is good for CHM leaders, or 2XP plus and it’s basically a cheaper version of an XP civic and needs to be obscenely expensive to remain balanced. And it’s a duplicate of a later wonder

3 is just…boring. There are other methods of decreasing WW available later on in the game, but early on it isn’t really a factor until the rifle era. This doesn’t seem like an effective option.

4 is difficult to justify compared to 1, because the only promotion that makes sense is C2 on all units. It brings late game commando stacks much easier to realise so would have a potential problem late game, but not impossible to solve.

5 would be straight broken with barracks giving culture; it would just be a different and probably better version of Henge.

6 has antisynergy with a Lit run to HE if placed in the same city, but otherwise could provide a rather dangerous window where someone could throw out a ton of HA really quickly and just rush people out of the game. +100% production, 200 hammers with no doubler, in a city making 20hpt pays back after 10 turns…quite fast. If you have 2 cities that can make 20hpt (and that’s not that unlikely) and you can build 8HA every 5 turns. That’s…just sickening.

So, out of all of these options, 1 seems the most reasonable. How much XP? 2XP? Seems a bit low, as it has no effect on mounted units other than being a really expensive stables. You still need an XP civic to get a single city to make 3 promo mounted. To get to 13XP for 4 promo CHM mounted you need the barracks, stables, and then 4 of Vassalage, Theo, and settled GG, and a 2XP wonder only removes one of them.  3XP adds in the triple promo using just a barracks and stables, a minor boost but it doesn’t effect the 4 promo CHM mounted. It’s not a cheap wonder in terms of units produced, costing the same as 4HA or 6 2/3 chariots, but it has a niche and it lets players play with multiple promo units a bit earlier in the game. It seems reasonable.

That’s why the SoZ was rebalanced to what it is now. Some of the reasoning does appear flaky at times, but it is based on what the original CIV designer thought and did in other sections of the game.