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Isabella Tweak

Seven Cities of Gold: First finder gold bonus removed. Now, all discoveries reward 200 bonus gold. Text updated to suit change and also to provide a little more clarity over the default text phrasing.

Isabella: Recon flavor increased to 8 instead of 6 (other leaders with a value of 8: Bismarck, Washington, and Kamehameha). Naval Recon flavor remains the same at 8.

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This mod tweaks Isabella’s existing ability so that gold bonuses are less random.

The default game rewarded a bonus of 500 gold for discovering a wonder first and 100 gold for discovering it after someone else. Now, it’s only one flat bonus of 200 gold, regardless of whether you were first or not (also, don’t worry, the pop-up text is edited so that it doesn’t identify you as the first and such).

This also removes the great urgency (and gamble) to scour the map at the start of the game to find some wonders first (which is usually only successful if they’re near your starting city or out in the middle of nowhere). Now, you still get a nice bonus from them, but it’s more predictable and you don’t have to worry about others discovering them first and your ability going to waste. Also, you actually have a slightly “greater” incentive to really get out there and explore since you’ll gain a nicer amount of gold from far away wonders that have most likely been discovered by other civs.

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How the new value was derived:

Note: the game is primarily balanced around standard settings, which is also the only way I play, so these example numbers are based off of it and what I typically design around.

DEFAULT: 500 gold = discovering all 5 wonders after others.

DEFAULT: 900 gold = discovering 1 wonder first and 4 after others.

DEFAULT: 1300 gold = discovering 2 wonders first and 3 after others.

MOD: 1000 gold = discovering all 5 wonders.

At first, I was going to make the flat bonus represent a value close to the average of the typical scenarios – finding only 1 wonder first or finding none of them first. So, the simple average between the two (even though discovering none of them first probably happens more often) would’ve been 700 which would give a clean (increments of 25) bonus value of 150 (150 x 5 = 750).

But, I felt the overall ability could use a little more love, so I simply made the bonus 200 gold instead. This puts it slightly over the default game’s scenario of finding only 1 of the 5 discovered wonders first.