Nere’s Rebalanced Rock Bands

Rebalances Rock Bands in several ways to make them more fun to use, and less about being lucky.

1) They will die less, but their tourism output has been greatly reduced.
2) Their cost has been greatly increased since they will now live a lot longer and thus be able to produce more tourism for you during their expected lifetime.
3) Promotion selection have been improved, to make them more equal and viable. Now the decision will depend a lot more on who you want to use that particular unit on.
4) Makes Rock Bands slightly less explosive to make the rest of the Culture game more relevant.
5) Rock Bands will be more about smart play than luck.

The current setup makes it very binary: Either your Rock Bands die right away and do nothing OR your Rock Bands become gods and win you the game singlehandedly. This mod attempts to rebalance Rock Bands, to make them 1) less dominant and 2) less dependent on luck.

First of, lets take a look at why Rock Bands are dominant. The formula for tourism generation from rock bands are as follows:

• Venue + (Venue*TouristBomb as %) + (Venue*AlbumSales as %) = tourism produced
• venue depends on the location. In vanilla GS a wonder is 1000
• TouristBomb is the result of a concert. A 4 star performance is 200
• AlbumSales is a cumulative value that might increase after each concert, and is shown along with the performance grade. Album sales (for the performance types which the Rock Band survives) varries between 50 and 200 in vanilla GS.
• Using the above values, and having 500 album sales, the formula will be: 1000 + (1000*200%) + (1000*500%) = 8000 tourism produced

As can be seen from the above, Rock Bands in vanilla GS is extremely powerful, to the point of making many other parts of the culture game inconsequential. This is especially true, since you just need to use rock bands on the leading culture civ, and not on all civs, since cultural victory technically only requires you to beat the opponent with most culture.

Lets then have a look at the luck aspects of Rock Bands. Without going into the math behind it (have a look in the civfanatics thread if you are interested), I’ll post the original changes for Rock Bands survival rate, and promotions. Note that this mod caps the level of Rock Bands at 3 instead of 4, to reduce the "immortal-ness" at high levels.

*This table assumes no venue level bonus. For example, the Album Cover Art promotion increases the level by 2 in vanilla GS.

Note that in vanilla GS there is 50% chance of a fresh Rock Band just dying outright, and 41% chance of the Rock Band living but not being promoted, which means the next time it plays there is AGAIN 50% chance of dying. There is only a 9 percent chance of "leaving Rock Band hell" by getting a promotion. But if you manage to get to level 4, there is only 2 percent chance of dying. This created the binary case where you easily could get stuck with all your Rock Bands dying without doing anything OR getting immortal Rock Bands that easily win the game.

Next up in the fight against binary win/do-nothing: Decreasing base tourism yields from Rock Bands, since they now die less. I refer to the formula given above to understand what these changes actually does to the tourism output. You signed up for technical stuff when you dug into this section 😉

*Note that the "death" results have been buffed slightly, to make them "less painful" to the player/AI.

Moving on to the scaling aspect – Album Sales. These makes a HUGE difference. In the example from the formula, try to replace album sales of 500 with 0. It turns 8000 tourism into 3000. Same logic applies: Since Rock Bands now live longer, the scaling Album Sales needs to be tuned down to not make Rock Bands even more dominant then they already are.

Finally, the promotions is looked at.

1. Right now the +2 levels promotions are the best, since levels are king (see survival rate table). Furthermore, they also target the venue which is most plentiful (wonder, TS, EC). Thus all +2 level promotions is changed to +1.
2. The original +1 level promotions opened up some new venues, specifically sea side resorts and national parks. These are somewhat rare, so to make this promotion more worth taking (in the right circumstance) the level bonus is changed from +1 to +2.
3. Roadies increases the movement speed by 4 in vanilla GS. This was not very interesting, compared to the rest. Buffed to +8. Now it can be really useful if you are in a hurry to out-race an opponent to victory.
4. Pop Star in combinations with Goes to 11 could make for ridiculous amounts of gold. In a spot with 3 civs, and using the example from the formula section, you could easily earn 16.000 gold for 1 concert. The extra gold is reduced from 50% to 33%. It is still a great combo for gold!

A few misc changes:

• Base cost increased from 300 to 450, and 50% more cost scaling
• Number of promotion choices increased from 3 to 4

Rebalanced Secret Societies mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2406253078 rebalances the Secret Societies to reduce power creep, enhance flavor. Includes malus to give some hard choices and rework of Voidsingers!

Inland Flooding mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1690507099 if you want climate change to be 1) more impactful 2) more fair so it affect both coast and inland cities.

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/ok-so-what-do-rock-bands-actually-do.642572