Civilization's 4 - Realism Mod
by jaynus

Version 0.6-BETA (Updated November 9th)
(Changelog *and* TODO list at the bottom of this post)

Download HERE (http://www.0x90.org/jaynus/CIV4_Realism_v0.6.zip)

Goal: To make an expanded and more realistic modification to civ4, allowing for longer games, longer wars, and more intense gameplay with a bit higher difficulty and learning curve to properly manage and compete in the game. Emulate issues of a large empire, supply lines, and strategic needs of different units and types.


Aknowledgements:
All the guys @ civ fanatics bouncing ideas back and forth :)
Toft @ CivFanatics for the gamespeed suggestions and discussions
CdGGabmit @ CivFanatics also for gamespeed and increment changes
dearmad @ Apolyton & CivFanatics for a nice mod that kind does the same thing but im a nutbar!
Roma Victa @ CivFanatics for saving me with a copy of a xml file AND noticing the commerce increments
Gerikes @ CivFanatics for the nifty options menu modifications
Mr. Will @ CivFanatics for the amazing idea of producing unit-building resources
Simetrical @ CivFanatics for very insightful suggestions and offer to help, im going to take you up on that!
SlayerofDeitys @ CivFanatics for schooling me on submarines ;)
Annnd JDexter, ejdacanay, Kolson, Gufnork, Youri, Kerian, Hemperor & goatmaster @ CivFanatics for all the input!


Notes:This version has had all other gamespeeds removed now that its a Mod. Im not sure how that effects saved games though, sorry guys :( We'll find out! Yay Testing!

If you had a previous version of this mod: Either follow the oldschol installation instructions, or, if you wish to install as a mod, then you must first delete *all* realism modifications in teh customAssets folder. This can be as simple as deleting the 'Xml' folder inside of CustomAssets, unless you have other mods installed as well.

Installation:
Unzip the folder to your 'Mods' folder within your game directory. As in, extract the zip file to
C:\Program Files\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Mods
After you have done this, start the game. At the main menu go to
Advanced -> Load a Mod
In this menu, Select 'Realism'. The game will require a restart, once this is complete, start a new game and your off!

If you want the mod to load by default, you need to modify your Civ4Config. This is located in your
My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\CivilizationIV.ini
You must change this:
Mod = 0
to this:
Mod = Mods\Realism

OldSchool Installation (If you want to keep saved games I guess?):
Copy everything inside the 'Assets' folder into the CustomAssets folder
(My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\CustomAssets)

Read the changelog to see the changes I've made so far.

If you want to help me out with this or think its interesting at least, hit me up at jaynus@gmail.com, Id really like to get a real project going with a few other people.


- jaynus
jaynus@gmail.com

P.S. Please people! Post any ideas or crticisms you have, I'd love to hear them all. No matter how small they are.

ANYONE HAVING SAVED GAME LOADING ISSUES
Heres the deal. There are some bugs with mod loading, customAssets, and saved games. Here are my recommendations:

#1. If your running another mod in customAssets besides mine, let me know what it is. If some are common, I will include them.

#2. some mods dont mix well. We all edit the same files, and my mod specifically is a major overhaul of nearly every single XML file there is. So, first things first; If your getting errors, backup your customAssets folder, and then delete it (dont worry, civ4 will re-create it empty).

#3. Next, if that doesnt work, delete your Civ4 Cache folder.

#4. NEXT, if that doesnt work, again make sure you have no other mods in customAssets :p If you are using the 'Load mod' option every single time you load the game, edit your Civ4 ini file (My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\CivilizationIV.ini). Replace this line:
Mod = 0
with this line:
Mod = Mods\Realism

if *NONE* of the above works, post here and I we can get together and work it out here, on aim, or via email.


Major Status Notes:

- Expendable resources have been introduced, but are not yet implemented in the game.
- Producable & Tradable production resources have been introduced, and are implemented on musketman & muskets only
- Natural disasters have been introduced, but not yet completed or implemented
- More units coming!



Changelog:
v0.6

- Thanks dearmad for some more changes
- Universal Suffrage now gives +25% War Weariness
- pacifism now gives +125% great person rate
- organized realigion now gives +20% culture
- Theocracy now gives +10% Unit speed build.
- Caste system now gives +1 free specialist
- Cannon now requires gunpowder (not steel)
- Dry Docks with engineering (not steel)
- Maceman (and samauri) now avialable with fuedilism + metal casting (not machinery)
- Knights (and camelarcher and consquistidor) now avialable with civil service (not guilds)
- Pikeman now at civil service
- Removed riflemans (and redcoats) +25% vs. cavalry bonus (a bonus against a moving target, wtf?!)
- Rifleman now has 16 combat strength
- Redcoat now has 17 combat strength
- Redcoat got +1 moves (they were extremely discaplined, and better marching skills seems appropriate)

- All gun units below rifleman got +50% vs melee
- All Gun units rifleman and higher got +150% vs melee
- All tank units got +250% vs. melee & + 250% vs mounted

- Musketman (and musketeer) got +30% defense vs. knights (knights killing musketman every first try is just stupid)

- Castle cost reduced to 80 ( was 100)
- Forge cost reduced to 100 (was 120)

- No City Razing defaulted to true. I dont like this option. You should be forced to deal with a capture.



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v0.5

- ICBM now *PROPERLY* requires Oil as well as uranium
- Nuclear Carrier now has a more presentable pedia entry
- 'Musket Factory' renamed 'Gunsmith'

- Lag issue fixed

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v0.4

- Got game working in the 'Mod' directory, as a loadable mod
- Because this is a working mod instead of a gamewide change, removed all other gamespeeds for the mod


- Framework for natural disasters has begun to be implemented. This will not effect gameplay right now.
- Next version will contain a way to turn this on and off at your leisure
- Framework for expendable resources has begun to be implemented on the Musketman only, though it is not operational yet and should not effect gameplay

- Musketman now uses 'Muskets' built at a 'Musket Factory'
- NOTE: The above is being tested still before it is implemented in all other units. Welcome to the world of betas!

- All Technologies in ren, ind, modern, and future era increased by 25% cost across the board
- Future Tech removed to make way for *real* future techs
- 'Nuclear Reactor' should show up in its own place on the tech tree now
- 'Nuclear Reactor' Pre-reqs were broken. THey are now fixed. Yipee.

- Navy Seals can now board Submarines and Nuclear Submarines

- 'Nuclear Carrier' Added
- Requires 'Nuclear Reactor' Tech now in addition to Flight
- Requires Uranium
- Costs 200
- Has Carriers standard of 5 moves
- Has 17 Combat instead of 16
- Has a Cargo Space of 8

- Axemen now have an innate +25% in woods & jungles as well as +25% vs. swordsmans
- Swordsman melee bonus is being reduced to +25% as well as +15% defense bonus vs. Archers
- Tanks, Panzers receive +1 Movement (3 instead of 2)
- Modern Armor, Mechanized Infantry gained +2 Movement (4 instead of 2)
- 'Nuclear Submarine' now *reallY* requires 'Nuclear Reactor' tech
- Nuclear Submarines now have 28 combat strength instead of 26
- Carrier now has a cargo capacity of 5 (instead of 3)
- Carrier can now upgrade to 'Nuclear Carrier'

- Nuclear Reactor tech, Musket bonus, and Musket Factory should have relivent pedia text now, only in english

- Free Speech now gives 25% War Weariness


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v0.3

- Settler cost Lowered again by 45% (now only a 25% raise from vanilla)
- Lowered research to 225%
- Lowered Construction to 125%
- Fixed 'Realistic' speed culture thresholds

- Changed Research/Gold/Lux percantage increments to 5, Thanks Roma Victa
- Hill defense modifier upped to 30% (was 25%)
- Heal rate of units in enemy territory dropped to 5 (was 10)
- Building destruction from Nuclear weapons raised to 70% chance (was 30%)
- Global Warming probability from nuclear weapons dropped to 0% for now until massive testing of this effect (Nuke away!!!)
- Base plunder for cities raised to 100 gold, and +50 gold per population. Plundering is now more lucrative

- You can now build scotland Yard with nationalism, not communism
- Spys can now be built from scotland yard with nationalism, not communism

- Submarines can now upgrade to 'Nuclear Submarine'

- ICBM Triple requirement didnt work, removed it

- 'Nuclear Submarine' Added
- Same tech requirements as Submarine
- Requires Uranium *only*
- Costs 190 (Instead of 150 of a regular sub)
- Requires 'Nuclear Reactor' Tech now in addition (now requiring fission, combustion, and radio)
- Receives 9 power (INstead of 8 of Submarine)
- Now has a Capacity of 3 Cargo (Instead of 1)
- Now has a 70% chance of withdrawl (Instead of 50%)
- Now has 9 Moves (Instead of 7), is a +2 bonus from submarines

- Added Technology 'Nuclear Reactor'
- Requires Computers, Fission, and Refrigeration
- Required by NUclear units, and Nuclear reactor
- Costs 3500 points
- NOTE: Needs a quote, civolopedia icon & description, positioning, and translations.
- GRID LOCATIONS NOT SET
- Uses Fission Presets
- NOTE: Does not show up in civolopedia


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v0.2

- Settler cost Raised another 25% (Total raise of 75% from vanilla)

- Lowered Inflation to 10% and offset to -220 to compensate for no money in ancient era and expansion
- Raised research to 275% to slow down things just a little bit more with the new year increments
- Raised barbarian encounters to 210%, they were too plentiful
- Lowered BuildPercent to 80%
- Raised growthPercent to 200% to slow down city growth a little more

- Removed Uranium requirement from the following units to add realism of oil requirements
- Transport
- Destroyer
- Battleship
- ICBM now requires Uranium, Aluminum, *AND* Oil

- Galley, Caravel, Galleon, Frigate +2 movement each
- Battleship +1 Movement
- Submarine -1 Movement (subs dont travel at 30knots submerged)
- Chariot, Egyptian War Chariot, Persian Immortal, Knight, Spanish Conquistador,
Russian Cossak got +1 Movement
- Horse Archer, Mongolian Keshik, Arabian Camel Archer got +2 movement


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v0.1

- Added GameSpeed 'Realistic', copy of 'Epic' GameSpeed
- Doubled the amount of turns in a game
- Changed Turn increments to increments posted by Toft
- Raised reasearch to 250
- Lowered Building & Training to 100

- Fission now reveals Uranium
- Wineries can now be built at Pottery (Was Monarchy)
- Cottages not avialable until Monarchy (Was Pottery)
- Railroads buildtime increased by 300%

- Raised Settler cost by 50%
- Raised Worker cost by 50%
- Thanks to CdGGambit for these changes I liked and didnt think of
- Swordsmen and Praetorian gain +50% vs. melee and cost 10 more hammers (50)
- Axemen cost 5 hammers less (30)
- Macemen cost 20 hammers less (50)
- Frigate enabled at gunpowder
- Machine Gunner enabled at Assembly Line
- Crossbowman reduced by 10 hammers (50)

- Added CultureInfo entires for gamespeed 'Realistic', copying Epic's values for culture increments (To avoid culture bomb)
- Added text for 'Realistic' Gamespeed select ::NOTE:: English Only changed
- Added text for 'Realistic' gamespeed slect ::NOTE:: English Only changed

URL doesn't work...

Swear to god it does!! Hehe. Sorry. Its a distributed server, it may need a minute or two to distribute. Its working from my home machine and work right now, so it *should* be working if you retry.

Let me know if its not and I will yell at the hoster.

-jaynus

Nice work, looks like you put a bit more work into it than I did in my Dynastic mod. :p

Not Found

The requested URL /jaynus/CIV4_Realism.zip was not found on this server.

see, it doesn't work, again

oh, it just worked... strange... well, I have it now :D

Sorry!! Hehe. Glad it works now :goodjob:

Im going to yell at him anyways, its usual instant. The price of using a friend instead of paying eh? :crazyeye:

Transport/Battleship/Destroyer requirement for Uranium was only an alternate for Oil. By removing Uranium you REQUIRE Oil to produce those ships.

That was the idea :)

Sorry, I suppose I wasn't clear enough on the changelog. I was just stating 'requirements' because they are all in the prereq section. My bad, I'll change it to make it clearer :blush:

EDIT: Oh and as a side note, im thinking about adding a 'Nuclear Reactor' tech that would enable uranium as an alternate, as well as moving the "Nuclear powerplant' to this tech, and creating a new sub and carrier units, 'Carrier' and 'Nuclear Carrier', as well as 'Submarine', and 'Nuclear Submarine', both having significant movement bonuses, while the 'nuclear carrier' would have a size bonus, based on the fact nuclear power enabled ships to get..well...bigger.

About removing the ability to make ships with uranium if you have no oil: How is that more realistic? Looking at the wikipedia article on "nuclear marine propulsion" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion), it sounds like the engines are fully nuclear-powered, and they don't need oil to run.

Im glad you guys are paying attention and giving input :)

Its moving into the idea that when you get the ability to build submarines, you may/may not know nuclear power yet (the idea of a 'Nuclear Reactor' tech), so instantly being able to produce a nuclear powered submarine (a *better*, more versatile and highly advanced type of submarine) just because you have that resource instead seems unrealistic.

Ex: WW2, the war would have gone much differently if there were major oil shortages, and the military would have to decide on how to distribute its oil properly. The idea being, oil was *THE* commidity, and they were just beginning to understand nuclear power, so the idea that they could use a nuclear powered submarine in the event of an oil shortage at that moment seems incorrect.

Rather, *new* units should be made for these power types, and given the appropriate advantages of using this power type. Examples:

Nuclear-Powered Submarine - This type of ship is much quieter than its grandfather submarine (thus stealthier), allowed to stay 'at sea' for longer periods of time, and allowed to be larger and travel at deeper depths because of the power supplies avialable with nuclear power vs. oil power

Nuclear-Powered Carrier - This variant of carrier (although both are large), enabled carriers to get even larger, carry more aircraft, and travel at higher consistant speeds.

It seemed appropriate to make these differences between these 2 types of ships apparent, #1. for the lack of variaty in the Modern and future unit trees, as well as making the game fairly more resource based.

Did that all make sense? Im just vocalizing my thoughts here...let me know what you think :)


EDIT: Sorry for the edits haha. Heres what I was thinking, input please?


- All Submarines now have a +30% attack bonus against transports and lower-tech ships
- 'Nuclear-Powered Submarine' Added
- Same tech requirements as Submarine
- Requires Uranium *only*
- Costs 190 (Instead of 150 of a regular sub)
- Requires 'Fission' Tech now in addtion (now requiring fission, combustion, and radio)
- Receives 9 power (INstead of 8 of Submarine)
- Now has a Capacity of 3 Cargo (Instead of 1)
- Now has a 70% chance of withdrawl (Instead of 50%)
- Now has 9 Moves (Instead of 7), is a +2 bonus from submarines

hmm, koo koo, maybe u could work on religon stuff (lol foreal) also for the game speed, can you code it to make a new game speed?

Regarding the "need oil or uranium for ships" issue:
Consider that even without a certain resource (like oil or bronce) a civ can invent OTHER things (like fission engines or iron working) in reality. You do not need to know what oil is to build a fission engine! Sure, it's a more advanced technique, but a nation that never had oil but was full of uranium would at some point have constructed powerplants and engines using their powerfull resource. The example with bronce and iron are just another example - stuff like this did happen in the earth's history! Not every region/continent has all resources and only through globalization it is possible for everyone to get everything (in theory at least).

I really don't see why you shouldn't be able to build nuclear submarines (with Fission as a tech prereq. of course) without oil.

Mod Installaion (Untested): Just so you all know, I don't know if this works by adding it to a mod folder. Pasting it into custom assets will work fine, but I have not quite been able to get the Mod folder working. If you want to try a mod folder, just create one in your Civ4\Mods directory named 'Realism' and paste all this in there.

Mods need to be loaded using the options.

From the main menu --> advanced --> load a mod.

This will require you to restart a game. You can load save games using mods, but if you start the unmodded game you'll also have to restart the game (the save game loads automatically after restart).

I'm pretty sure there's an option to load mods by default, but using the custom assets seems to be the easiest way.

As far as adding realism regarding different resources, maybe trying to make it so that you can only build so many units at a time with 1 resource. So if you want to have 4 cities building submarines maybe you need 2 different oil resources. Adds the realism that there could be oil shortages, but not necessarily have all of your oil cut off.

You realize of course that you made Axemen completly pointless and you might as well remove them from the game? Most likely caused romans to win every game they play as well.

Horsie speed might make them a bit too powerful when it comes to pillaging. You can't expect one to patrol every single square of your territory. But if you decide to keep the changes, you might want to up the speed of vehicles as well, they shouldn't be outrun by horses.

I've personally changed tech costs so that the first techs a cheaper, then the cost increases by 25% units each era (so modern tech costs 125% more than ancient tech). This is the only thing so far that has made research speeds seem balanced for me.

I am curious as to why you decided to increase the cost of settlers by 75%, I personally find the most tedious part of the game is waiting to build settlers early on.. seems to take forever!

I was thinking it would be cool to have the cost of settlers affected by the culture of the city producing them (if this was posible) If a city has high culture, it is less likely people would want to leave, thereby increasing the cost of settlers to emulate 'convincing' them to go. On the other hand, if a city is boring and is lacking in culture, its far more likely that people would want to find somewhere else to live.

Hey guys! :)

Thanks a ton for *all* the feedback, I appriciate it all *ALOT*. I really want to get this off the ground into a cool playable mod, and I would still love any help people can offer.

Im going to go through these posts with quotes one by one :)

Originally Posted by JDexter
Regarding the "need oil or uranium for ships" issue:
Consider that even without a certain resource (like oil or bronce) a civ can invent OTHER things (like fission engines or iron working) in reality. You do not need to know what oil is to build a fission engine! Sure, it's a more advanced technique, but a nation that never had oil but was full of uranium would at some point have constructed powerplants and engines using their powerfull resource. The example with bronce and iron are just another example - stuff like this did happen in the earth's history! Not every region/continent has all resources and only through globalization it is possible for everyone to get everything (in theory at least).

I really don't see why you shouldn't be able to build nuclear submarines (with Fission as a tech prereq. of course) without oil.
I totally understand where you are coming from now. In this latest version I added my nuclear submarines. This was more to play around with adding units but I liked the idea alot; however, I concede to your points :P I hadn't looked at it from that perspective. Heres how I am thinking of it now: I will leave the new nuclear-powered units with their requirements (no oil needed for them), and leave them slightly more powerful; Thus, a civ without oil can still produce them just fine, but has to wait a little longer for them (because the technology *is* much more complicated and requiring than combustion). What do you think?


Originally Posted by ejdacanay
hmm, koo koo, maybe u could work on religon stuff (lol foreal) also for the game speed, can you code it to make a new game speed? Im working on it :)


Youri - I couldnt get that to work :( It didn't seem to be loading my settings, and I have heard of bugs with saved games with the mod folder. I am just not going to approach it yet until someone figures it out :(


Originally Posted by Kolson
As far as adding realism regarding different resources, maybe trying to make it so that you can only build so many units at a time with 1 resource. So if you want to have 4 cities building submarines maybe you need 2 different oil resources. Adds the realism that there could be oil shortages, but not necessarily have all of your oil cut off.
You read my mind!!! I have been looking into the scripting a bit for this, and have not quite figured out how to do it yet; But it is *definitely* a major goal of mine. I will definitely need help in this respect though, because the map generators would need to be modified as well. But its definitely a goal! I want to get this aspect done asap, just a matter of learning it really; And of course, if people are going to actually play this thing enough to invest the time in it!

Originally Posted by Gufnork
You realize of course that you made Axemen completly pointless and you might as well remove them from the game? Most likely caused romans to win every game they play as well.

Horsie speed might make them a bit too powerful when it comes to pillaging. You can't expect one to patrol every single square of your territory. But if you decide to keep the changes, you might want to up the speed of vehicles as well, they shouldn't be outrun by horses.

I've personally changed tech costs so that the first techs a cheaper, then the cost increases by 25% units each era (so modern tech costs 125% more than ancient tech). This is the only thing so far that has made research speeds seem balanced for me.
#1. Axemen - Yah, I do realize I made them rather mediocre in comparision now. As far as the roman issue, I was attempting to give them a bit more of an advantage with their preatorians than they already had; Yah, giving them a bit of a leg up. But in my testing I havn't ran into issues with it yet...As far as the axemen; I didnt realize that until I played hehe. I think im going to give them a innate terrian bonuses in woods and jungles. It seems appropriate to the unit type, they are a shock infantry.
#2. Horsie speeds - Yah I didnt get around to upping vehicle speeds yet; That was my bad. But after this weekends testing, you are correct. Pillaging gets a bit more irritating. It seems managable though, I am debating on keeping this or not (Movement penalties in enemy terrorities mitigates this issue mostly; It makes them a fast-response force for a defender instead of a fast-strike force. I liked that..)
#3 I am going to be implementing that this afternoon, now that i've seen how it progresses a few times :)


Originally Posted by Kerian
I am curious as to why you decided to increase the cost of settlers by 75%, I personally find the most tedious part of the game is waiting to build settlers early on.. seems to take forever!

I was thinking it would be cool to have the cost of settlers affected by the culture of the city producing them (if this was posible) If a city has high culture, it is less likely people would want to leave, thereby increasing the cost of settlers to emulate 'convincing' them to go. On the other hand, if a city is boring and is lacking in culture, its far more likely that people would want to find somewhere else to live.
The cost for settlers is really mitigated with how many more turns their are now (which I may increase a bit more). It seems longer, but I ran into serious expansion and AI issues with having settlers produce normal speeds; The AI seemed to be able to expand better than a human player, and I wanted to make that more fair.

Anyways, I got through all that guys :) Im working on posting another update in a few hours; This is what I tested with this weekend. Thanks again for all the feedback :)

Any chance you could add random events to your mod? Like natural disasters?

As well as more resources?

Yup! Im working on it, thats all part of my 'expendable resources' research im doing. Once I get the hang of it, I hope to add all this. Let me make a TODO list on the thread and add that to it :)

Youri - I couldnt get that to work :( It didn't seem to be loading my settings, and I have heard of bugs with saved games with the mod folder. I am just not going to approach it yet until someone figures it out :(

I've just tested it, and it worked fine for me. :) No problems loading saved games either.

To make it work:

1. Create a new folder in your 'Mods' folder, and name it 'Realism'
2. Put the Realism.ini file, and all the .txt files in that folder.
3. Create a new folder in the 'Realism' folder, and name it 'Assets'
4. Put your XML folder and it's contents inside that.
5. Start the game
6. Choose Single Player
7. Choose Load Mod
8. Select 'Realism' from the list of mods and press OK
9. Game now restarts, and once you're back in the menu, just select Single Player and start a game as you normally would.

If that doesn't work, please let me know what errors or odd behavior you get.

You are correct sir :)

I will post it with the next version, I have no idea why i couldnt get it working. I was probably doing something retarded.

Some largely long-term thoughts:

1) Separate out the philosophy-type techs from the actual technologies. Ideally, these should work from a totally different system. The number of prerequisites for them should be more limited, and they should be gained semirandomly instead of via research (Great Prophets could perhaps spawn them on generation, along with a religion?). They would also spread between trading partners fairly rapidly, being much less faction-specific than actual technologies. In some cases, of course, they should still retain prerequisites, when their implementation would be completely hypothetical without a certain technology, or when they aren't logical without certain antecedents (e.g., socialism stemming from the wide use of unskilled labor in factories).

2) Put less emphasis on "liking you" in diplomacy. All nations should be self-interested enough to give almost anyone almost anything in exchange for a good deal, short of actual wartime conditions.

3) Add more diplomatic options, and have fewer of them contingent on technologies. Unilateral protection agreements come to mind, but I'm sure there are others.

4) Allow any diplomatic option to be traded for any other.

5) Eliminate the seemingly baseless hatred that some factions have for each other. If two factions aren't at war and haven't been at war, they should have no objections to anyone trading with the other. (Possibly later on more sophistication could be added for Cold War-type conflicts, but those should be corner cases.)

6) Technologies should gradually spread between factions even without direct trading. The probability per turn of spread would depend on a) strength of relationship between the relevant factions and b) an index within the tech itself (Writing would have a very high index, for instance, whereas Fission would have a very low one; in general, they would depend on the degree to which the tech could plausibly be kept secret).

7) "Future Tech" should ultimately be removed and replaced with some actual possible future technologies.

8) The Alpha Centauri win condition should be ditched and replaced with the condition of learning super-advanced techs such as Universal Nanoconstruction plus Artificial Superintelligence or the like, which would make you so powerful that actually conquering the world would be a formality. Seriously, who cares about Alpha Centauri?

9) The tech tree should, in general, be much more flexible, so that you have more options at any point, but those options should perhaps take longer. Ultimately, combined with #6, this would mean that most technologies would be obtained through gradual leaks or other cultural interchange, rather than through direct personal research.

Now some more specific and readily implementable suggestions:

1) Until #1 in the general suggestions is implementable, all philosophical or "idea" techs should be removed as prerequisites for anything (except other philosophical techs) and have their research costs and effects sharply reduced. These include: Mysticism, Polytheism, Meditation, Monotheism, Priesthood, Monarchy, Code of Laws, Theology, Civil Service, Feudalism, Philosophy, Music, Literature, Drama, Guilds, Divine Right, Education, Liberalism, Nationalism, Military Tradition, Democracy, Constitution, Corporation, Fascism, Communism. Most of these should have their prerequisites removed, too, or at least most of them.

2) Here are some examples of what the prerequisites should be for certain early technologies, as #9 above (I have reasons for all of these if you want to hear my reasoning).

Hunting: None, and all factions should start with it (we're talking pre-Stone Age here―how could any society have eaten before the Green Revolution without hunting, just foraging?).

Polytheism, Meditation, Sailing, Pottery, Animal Husbandry, Archery, Monotheism, Writing, Monarchy, Drama, Code of Laws, Currency, Calendar, Civil Service, Philosophy, Music: None.

Bronze Working, Masonry, Iron Working, Compass: Mining only. (Magnetic compasses can be constructed using lodestone or other materials that are not, strictly speaking, iron.)

Priesthood, Theology, Divine Right: Mysticism OR Polytheism OR Monotheism.

Literature, Mathematics: Writing.

Metal Casting, Machinery: Bronze Working OR Iron Working OR whatever Aluminum harvesting requires. (However, Machinery and/or things requiring Machinery will be far more expensive without Metal Casting.)

Feudalism: Monarchy.

Optics: Machinery.

Engineering: Mathematics.

Paper: Writing. (In principle, you can make paper without knowing how to write, but I can't think why anyone would think of it.)

Guilds: Not quite sure. Your civ should have to have divided labor for guilds to exist, so it should be sometime in the Classical period at the earliest, but I don't know what a good prereq should be.

Banking: Currency.

Construction: Remove entirely, since it makes no sense.


Those are just the early techs, of course, but you can see what I'm driving at: a much broader tech tree. The current one is far too fatalistic.

Wow O.o I like your ideas.....Can I steal them all? :P

Seriously though....I would love to have someone as creative as you around to talk to and bounce ideas with...

Sure thing, glad you like them. I'd be willing to help with the XML a bit, too.

Here are some of my ideas (probably mostly useless ;) )

Modern units should have more advantage over older units.

Perhaps doing something to land based artillery, like extending the range since in real life they rarely see their targets.

The ICBMs seem kind of weak for the negative reaction and global warming they cause.

The stealth bombers should have either a greater range or unlimited like ICBMS. I read you wanted to have supply issues, maybe you could have a support fuel plane that could extend their range. It may unbalance things but it would be nice if they would get hit less since they are stealth.

Since I've only had the chance to play America so far I think you should allow navy seals on the submarines :D

I am not sure about this, but it does seem weird that the helicopter can't cross the ocean. Maybe they could only move a few spaces over ocean. As I said I dunno, but it would be cool to have like anti sub helicopters on boats.

Have you considered adding modern non stealth bombers?

Some random crazy ideas: Transporting troops via helicopters, paratroopers, armored cars that can transport troops and perhaps allowing aircraft to actually destroy units (especially boats).

My last thought is it would be nice to be able to use the satellites you research or perhaps UAVs to see some of the enemy terroritory sometimes.

Nuclear-Powered Submarine - This type of ship is much quieter than its grandfather submarine (thus stealthier), allowed to stay 'at sea' for longer periods of time, and allowed to be larger and travel at deeper depths because of the power supplies avialable with nuclear power vs. oil power
Just so you know nuclear submarines are not necessarily quieter than diesels. The fact is that a diesel running on batteries is next to impossible to locate but when it snorkels to recharge its batteries, that's when it's broadcasting its location. There are also different types of nukes that have varying degrees of sophistication. You could include a Boomer and an attack sub that are nuclear powered for example and that's just talking about the US. The Swedish have developed a very interesting system for subs as well.

I will surely wait 1.0, but good work !!!

What do you think to include splitting empires :eek:

And make a normal world map not an huge plz

I play with 18 civs on normal random map ==> FUN :mischief:

I must choose English imperatively ?

Because i love play in my native language (French)

What do you think to include splitting empires :eek:

This is a good idea, but need to be careful as it might get out of hand

Im quite enjoying this mod (put in the "insane barbarian" mod on top, and its a party)

Cant wait for future releases

Lachlan - If you are willing to translate, then you can play in French!!! lol. I don't know any other languages, and really would need people to go through and translate for me. I have literally a list of things that need translating in there.

SlayerofDeitys - I stand corrected, sir. Perhaps just leaving the extended range bonus (because taht is obvious) and just get rid of the power bonuses? Or should I remove it all together and re-organize how I am doing that?

Goatmaster & Simetrical - I liked alot of both of your suggestions and observations :) I have added alot of them already. 0.5 will contain *alot* of these changes, and I should be posting it tonight.

In other exciting news, 0.5 will also contain the python framework for buildable resources (Musket Factory, Oil Refinary, etc) *AND* expendable resources (limiting units per resource tile).

This is only implemented on Musketman and Muskets (Musket Factory), but it is a framework setup to be able to copy-paste to every single other resource using unit in the game. Yay!

You read my mind!!! I have been looking into the scripting a bit for this, and have not quite figured out how to do it yet; But it is *definitely* a major goal of mine. I will definitely need help in this respect though, because the map generators would need to be modified as well. But its definitely a goal! I want to get this aspect done asap, just a matter of learning it really; And of course, if people are going to actually play this thing enough to invest the time in it!

What I would like to see is that a recource is handled completely different, more like how a regular RTS handles recources.

I'll give an example. Lets say there is some iron you're mining. Each turn, if a city would be actively mining there (so not just within your borders), that city (or the capital if they are connected) gets an amount of iron (lets say 1/turn). Once you will build a swordman, the stack of iron gets reduced by the iron cost (lets say 10 iron) to build it.

Heres an idea (if it hasnt been brought up yet)
See if you can add in a new type of mountain terrain, still impassible, except to workers (which will allow road building, so other units can pass through)

This will be rarer than normal mountains
But will at least allow some sort of passage through some mountain ranges

What do you think?

I've just tested it, and it worked fine for me. :) No problems loading saved games either.
......
If that doesn't work, please let me know what errors or odd behavior you get.


I'm not sure what I've done. It loads fine but hangs up when I try to load a saved game. It says that MODS/realism is not a valid folder. But it will start the game from it. Any suggestions?

In a few hours I'll be posting a version taht installs *only* as a Mod in the mod folders and that will be that.

As for saved games, I *believe* you have to start a saved game in the mod to finish it using a Mod-style installation. Im not sure however; I need to look into how it effects saved games. I will probably include a way to install it the old way so no one loses their saved games.

I'm not sure what I've done. It loads fine but hangs up when I try to load a saved game. It says that MODS/realism is not a valid folder. But it will start the game from it. Any suggestions?

Ah yes, it might be due to some quirk in the installation. Where did you install the mod?

Wow, great start to this Mod jaynus. I'll wait for the next version to get posted and jump right into it.

SlayerofDeitys - I stand corrected, sir. Perhaps just leaving the extended range bonus (because taht is obvious) and just get rid of the power bonuses? Or should I remove it all together and re-organize how I am doing that? Obviously the increased range makes sense but I think I would also leave the increased power that you have given it to represent better weapons technology I suppose. If you really want to get in depth with submarines it would require a lot of work given all of the different types and variables. For example the Russian Oscar II may very well be the mother of all subs being designed to take out US aircraft carrier battle groups. If you do decide to work extensively on the naval aspect I should be able to help and if I don't know the answer I know people who do. One thing I would like to see for coastal cities is to give them the ability to build an IUSS (Integrated undersea surveillance system) station. Basically it's just a bunch of cables laid at the bottom of the ocean and it is used to detect enemy submarines that may be off the coast of a country. The nice thing is you can also pick up other ships so it could reveal a few more squares of the FOW out into the ocean with the ability to see all naval vessels. It might come in handy for picking up an enemy invasion fleet. On another note just the other day I was thinking about how to implement a reserve system in the game for resources. That way when the enemy cuts you off from your oil for example you may still have emergency reserves to supply your units. Cities could also demand a certain level of oil or be unhappy due to increased gas prices. Gee sound familiar? I can't shake the feeling though that it is going to require a lot more resources if you make them expendable although that would certainly make things more interesting. Maybe you could also add a technology to cut city fuel consumption such as solar powered vehicles or hydrogen fuel cells.

update posted! You may/may not get ingame random python errors. They are intermitent.

Again, If you get python errors, just delete the Mods\Realism\Assets\Python directory to play if its too annoying, otherwise please post errors your getting. (I left it there to test it).


SlayerOfDietys - I'll post a response tonight, I definitely do want to go in that direction though :)

First off, no problems installing it or loading it to play. :D

So far I've noticed that the processing of turns is taking considerably longer than the original game. Maybe 3-5 times longer? The initial turn took over 2 minutes and now they're running 15-20 seconds from the time you hit enter until you can do anything again. I don't remember it taking that long in 3920BC before. Maybe it's doing more calculations? I have no idea.

I noticed that the tech is about double right of the bat. Is it double throughout the entire mod or does it triple or quadruple later on when the research tends to accelerate too much?

Back to playing. Thanks for the improvements.

Hahahaha Anyone notice the swordsman bonus is broken yet?

+15% Defense vs. Bear

Woodelf - Looking into the loading times now...As for the tech issues, that is the idea. I am sitting down and testing another full-length game, but my *intent* is for it to take 3x as longer ren era to modern era

I played till 1800~ BC without any lag on a small island map with only 2 other civs. Haven't had time yet to play more.

To be honest, I think the whole tech tree should eventually be rebuilt from the ground up. For now, of course, work with what we have, but eventually let's aim for a full replacement. I could maybe start work on that this weekend if you want (obviously just as a very detailed suggestion written in XML that you should hopefully be able to just plug in if you want it).

First, I'd like to say that I really appreciate the MOD and I think the slowing down of tech and increase in the unit production makes the game much more enjoyable. My only problem is the time between turns, it started out being about 10 seconds between turns and now I'm in the middle ages and it's nearly a minute which makes it unplayable. I've played previously on HUGE maps with many cultures and haven't had more than 1/5 that time between turns before.

Here's the start of a more detailed elaboration on my last post. Obviously, the stats I give are basically all off-the-cuff and shouldn't be taken as final by any means.

All civilizations are assumed to start out somewhere shortly before the earliest known Bronze Age, call it 3500 BCE. An earlier start than that is fairly nonsensical, IMO, since the extension of state control beyond a single tribe didn't really seriously exist before approximately that period. So, this will be the start of my layout here. All civilizations can be assumed to know how to hunt, forage, construct tools and simple dwellings out of wood and stone, and use archery.

Farming
Prerequisites: None.
Bonuses: Allows use of the Agricultural Society civic. Allows construction of Farms. (Agricultural Society increases the cost of all units and dramatically increases the cost of Settlers, but allows cities to expand beyond a limit imposed by the Nomadic Society civic, which certain factions may begin with as their default instead of Agricultural Society. Civilizations using Agricultural Society can build Cottages and Roads.)
Cost: Moderate. Easy transferability.

Animal Husbandry
Prerequisites: None.
Bonuses: Allows use of the Agricultural Society civic. Allows construction of Pastures. With The Wheel, allows recruitment of Chariots.
Cost: Low. Easy transferability.

Calendar
Prerequisites: None.
Bonuses: Grants 10% of research points required for Astronomy.
Cost: Very low. Easy transferability.

Astronomy
Prerequisites: None.
Bonuses: Centers World Map. Automatically grants Calendar tech. +1 to sea movement.
Cost: Moderate. Moderate transferability.

Abstract Arithmetic
Prerequisites: None.
Bonuses: ?
Cost: Low. Easy transferability.

Writing
Prerequisites: None.
Bonuses: Allows construction of Library. +100% transferability of technologies with other Writing civilizations. +20% to all research rates.
Cost: High. Easy transferability.

Alphabet
Prerequisites: Writing.
Bonuses: -10% Library cost. Further +25% transferability of technologies with other Writing civilizations. Further +5% to all research rates.
Cost: Moderate. Easy transferability.

Geometry
Prerequisites: Writing, Abstract Arithmetic.
Bonuses: Grants 20% of research points required for Astronomy.
Cost: High. Moderate transferability.

Architectural Engineering
Prerequisites: Geometry.
Bonuses: All Walls, Forts, and Castles give +10% protection points. Building costs are reduced by 5%. Allows recruitement of Ballistae (basically the equivalent of Catapults in unmodded Civ IV).
Cost: High. Moderate transferability.

Mining
Prerequisites: None.
Bonuses: Allows construction of Mines. With Bronze Working, allows Copper to be viewed. With Iron Working, allows Iron to be viewed. With Aluminum Construction, allows Aluminum to be viewed. With Fission, allows Uranium to be viewed.
Cost: Low. Easy transferability.

Bronze Working
Prerequisites: None.
Bonuses: With Mining, allows Copper to be viewed. In cities with access to Copper, +1 strength to all Melee units (not cumulative with Iron Working bonus).
Cost: Moderate. Easy transferability.

Iron Working
Prerequisites: None.
Bonuses: With Mining, allows Iron to be viewed. In cities with access to Iron, +1 strength to all Melee units (not cumulative with Bronze Working bonus). Grants 10% of research points required for Compass.
Cost: Moderate. Easy transferability.

Metal Casting
Prerequisites: Bronze Working or Iron Working or Aluminum Construction.
Bonuses: Allows construction of Forges, The Colossus, and Workshops. Grants 20% of research points required for Compass.
Cost: Moderate. Easy transferability.

Masonry
Prerequisites: Agricultural Society civic.
Bonuses: Allows construction of Walls, The Pyramids, Quarries, and Paved Roads (improved Road improvement, but takes longer to build).
Cost: Low. Easy transferability.

The Wheel
Prerequisites: None.
Bonuses: With Animal Husbandry, allows recruitment of Chariots. +1 movement for Workers and Settlers.
Cost: Low. Easy transferability.

Riding
Prerequisites: Animal Husbandry.
Bonuses: In cities with access to Horses or Camels, allows recruitment of Horse Archers or Camel Archers, as well as any other Cavalry units enabled by other technologies.
Cost: Low. Easy transferability.

Currency
Prerequisites: None.
Bonuses: +1 trade route per city. Allows construction of Wealth.
Cost: Moderate. Easy transferability.

Short post here (Im binging coding python, so im going to reply to everything tommarow...cant **** up my chi you know)

Simetrical - Do you have aim? Im going to email you some stuff...aim would be easy to collaberate :)

Lag issue - The best snag I can find about this so far is the massive increase in units that the AI has because of the extended turns. I can't confirm this though. Im going to go bump heads with the other slow-mod makers and see if anyone else is getting this, otherwise im going to need to narrow it down inside the mod.

I'm not sure how there could be a lag issue at 3900BC because of increased AI units. How could they have any built in 5 turns? Or do they start with a lot more? Maybe there was an increase in wild animals put in?

I removed the python scripts, that happens to speed it back up again

In reality siege weapons can fire from long distances, without getting in danger (except other siege weapons). In Civ 4 you have to use a siege weaopn as a suicide bomber. I'd like to see siege weapons become a bit more like they were in Civ 3.

My suggestions to change:

- Siege weapons can no longer defend theirselves, since they can not fire at point blank. Instead, attacking an undefended siege weapon should allow you to capture it.
- Siege weapons can no longer attack like other units, their attacks should be limited to bombarding. During a bombard, it can shoot only once, and the siege weapon does not get damaged (it's at a safe range, remember?). It still causes collateral damage.

This would make siege weapons more realistic, without making them overpowered.

Version 0.5 posted, its a *small* update, mostly to fix the major lag issue. I had an error in the python code I was passing, it lagged every time it hit it (it hit it alot of times hehe). That is fixed.

Tonight will be v0.6, a bigger update I promise.

In reality siege weapons can fire from long distances, without getting in danger (except other siege weapons). In Civ 4 you have to use a siege weaopn as a suicide bomber. I'd like to see siege weapons become a bit more like they were in Civ 3.

My suggestions to change:

- Siege weapons can no longer defend theirselves, since they can not fire at point blank. Instead, attacking an undefended siege weapon should allow you to capture it.
- Siege weapons can no longer attack like other units, their attacks should be limited to bombarding. During a bombard, it can shoot only once, and the siege weapon does not get damaged (it's at a safe range, remember?). It still causes collateral damage.

This would make siege weapons more realistic, without making them overpowered.
Youri - Im working on this. The engine is still a bit..hm...cranky about doing modifications like this. I've been investigating it along with all my other python changes, and it should come soon enough. I agree, its a rather annoying thing to have kamakazi catapults.

I removed the python scripts, that happens to speed it back up again
DeadZoneMDx - You are correct sir. I just posted the fix so you should not have to do this anymore.

Great news jaynus. Now I'll be able to offer some feedback since I'll get beyond 3700BC!

Any thoughts to incorporate some of the other little Mods floating around? Like the tree planting, snoopy's, or the medieval units tweaking mods?

yessir I have :) I am waiting for them all to get a little further along to ask, it would be a ***** to upkeep them with constant updates going in.

This mod seems very creative. Your server, however, doesnt seem to be working for me. Is there any reason you couldn't just host it on civfanatics? I assume the file isnt very large.

It should be working now, Im sorry :( I somehow got a typo into the post. But no, its too big to host on civfanatics...its almost 1mb

The upload size limit is 3MB. There's a little bar at the bottom right of the forum screen which has a button which says "Upload File." Try that.

Yeah, good thinking. I was going to bastardize the mods I mentioned with yours, but didn't for the same reason...it'd be a bear to keep updating. :D

It runs quick now. No more lag. :)

I'm still torn on whether or not the research should be doubled at such an early age. If your scout dies you're almost resigned to hitting "enter" a lot until something happens and you get a tech where a worker can do something. Maybe it'll grow on me...

Have you thought about tweaking the number of cities before you get penalized? On the standard map your budget goes -1g at the 3rd city and -3g for the 4th. With tech so costly should this be adjusted so you can keep up?

Just throwing some ideas out there. Now back to playing since my last game put me on an island solo and I didn't think I'd get to playtest much without some AI pestering me. ;)

Jaynus what do you think of a simulation of splitting empires ?

2 more observations.

Are 90 hammers too much for clearing a forest? It was a shock to me when I completed the Pyramids waaaay sooner than I thought.

And I like the fact that research/culture/whatever can be broken down further than in tens. Having 95% research was a nice surprise.

One last question: I noticed that the description of the techs are updated, but Sid's tips about the techs aren't. Is this hardcoded?

Jaynus - I love this whole concept, and I might be able to provide coding/xml support once things lighten up here at work...

But I have a few more Ideas-

Terrain Improvement-
Superhighways
Prereq tech - Combustion + Plastics
Effects -
Unlimited Movement (ALA old railroads)
+2 Commerce
-1 Health
High Upkeep cost
Cost-
Must Build on top of RR, twice as expensive
Reason-
Many people forget this, but the original justification of the Modern US interstate highway system was military- While in the military, Eisenhower was charged with moving a few divisions across the country- this took him almost nine months on the 'organic' highways system that existed at the time- something he considered a travestry- thus he pushed the Eisenhower interstate system through... Superhighways are very expensive (to both build an maintain), but they highly boost nation's commerce and allow instantious travel of military units between all connected squares.

City Improvements-
Railroad Yard
Prereq tech - Industrialization + Railroad
Effects-
-1 Health
A city with a rail yard can choose to 'support' the production of another city with a rail yard, adding 50% of its production to the target city. (Perhap boosted to 75% once computers come around)
Reason-
Once rail came around- nations no longer had to complete entire projects in one city... case in point - the construction of liberty ships in WWII was actually done far inland, and the completed sections of the liberty ships were then shipped by rail to the coasts where they were assembled in as little as 42 hours, stem to stern. There should be something similar in Civ.

Passenger Terminal
PreReqs-
Plastics
City already has airport
Effects-
-1 Health
City commerce boosted 25%
high upkeep
Reason-
Airports have a tremendous effect on a nations commerce, this should be modeled.

Minor Wonder (1 Per Civ)-
Passenger Hub
Prereqs-
5 Passenger Terminals
Effect-
Boosts Commerce in Target City 100%
All airports boost commerce 50% (vs 25% without).

Ideally, passenger terminals should produce barely more commerce than their upkeep costs initially, but once a Hub is in place, the commerce Boost becomes far more substantial.

First of all, great work and ideas from every one. I'm starting to see what makes Civilization such a huge success and that is certainly the fans.

One thing that would be nice is the ability to build forts on top of resources without wiping out the improvements that are on there.

EDIT: Forgot to mention the fort concept was not my idea, but spawned from this "Point of Forts?" thread here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=134339

Also, right now there doesn't appear to be a way to "turtle". Sure you can retreat to your cities and build up a stack but then your lands can be ransacked.

Maybe I'm still stuck in the Age of Empires RTS strategy mindset as it's not really realistic to literally build a wall around your country(i'll leave the Israel discussion for another forum :)

But it does seem like there should be a more effective way to put up fortifications at your borders. Pill Boxes, Guard Towers maybe? It would also be cool to have "hedgehogs" like WW2 to guard against sea landings and the like.

/two cents

cheers,

-J

Please allow for resources wheat and corn to be convertible into resource alcohol which in turn can fuel the icbm

Forgot about the fort on top of resource idea that was thrown around somewhere else. If possible to code the stacking of improvements this would be a nice addition.

Grain alcohol would find a use somewhere. :)

Hey guys!!! Thanks for a ton more good input :)

2 more observations.

Are 90 hammers too much for clearing a forest? It was a shock to me when I completed the Pyramids waaaay sooner than I thought.

And I like the fact that research/culture/whatever can be broken down further than in tens. Having 95% research was a nice surprise.

One last question: I noticed that the description of the techs are updated, but Sid's tips about the techs aren't. Is this hardcoded?
woodelf - I'll look into testing the hammers tonight, I havn't thought about it or changed it at all yet...O.o I will check it out. No clue about those tips either, I will check it out. I havn't payed attention to them yet. I'll let you know! Thanks for pointing it out.


Jaynus what do you think of a simulation of splitting empires ?
Lachlan - Have any ideas or suggestions for how it should work? :)

Have you thought about tweaking the number of cities before you get penalized? On the standard map your budget goes -1g at the 3rd city and -3g for the 4th. With tech so costly should this be adjusted so you can keep up?
woodelf - This issue I actually have thought about extensively. Im honestly not quite sure yet. I majorly modified inflation to compensate for the city penalties; but I still wanted to leave some complication to expansion, so trade and income are still a viable issue in such an early age (where money is hard to come by).

EridanMan - Phenominal ideas!!! I love the superhighway idea, its great. And the passanger terminals will definitely give something for people to work for in the later ages for money and commerce. Im going to implement these tonight most likely, they are easy changes and great! Thanks! Email me once things lighten up at work eh? ;) jaynus@gmail.com

maler23 - Yah, I've had all these issues alot too. The one thing that bugs me the most, is the AI will take pillaging over attacking your units any day, so it makes it tough to get rid of the pillaging units when they avoid yours. That of course is an AI issue, and im trying to find a way to get rid of it (perhaps getting rid of pillage income or lower it). Im not quite sure yet. What do you think?
We all know being able to build 'a wall of units' on a border, or something of the sort is realistically tactically unlikely, the only time this occured was trench-warfare in ww1, and even then covert operations and flanking were a norm. But there must be some sort of way to more realistically create a 'battlefront' rather than just sprawling your units all over the place to chase after AI stuff, it seems rather stupid. Anyone got any suggestions?

userqwerty - I can't find any sort of technical accuracy on that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_fuel
If my memory serves me correctly, I remmember the USSR used an alchoholic-mixture instead of kerosine at times in the cosmonaut missions because it was cheaper (and you didnt have to buy it from the saudi's), but I cant seem to find any reference of an icbm or any other type of nuclear weaponary using an alchohol-mixture propellant...

Dammit! 2 games and twice I've been isolated on a fairly large island/continent. :D I don't want to go the panagea route, but I may have to for the next game to try out how the AI acts towards me.

BTW, made the first era transition at 880BC. No idea how this fairs historically or versus the real game, but figured I'd throw it out here.

And about forests.... In the original game I think the 30/60 hammers are random, but in your mod it is now 45/90 hammers. If you didn't alter anything than there is a fudge factor flying around. Not a biggie if it wasn't intentional and the game is making the correction.

That is definitely one hell of a fudge factor though..im going to look into it. I think with the increase in turns it takes to do improvements, its compensating the sheilds...booo...gotta figure out how to remove that.

Simetrical - Do you have aim? Im going to email you some stuff...aim would be easy to collaberate :)Yes, I have AIM, but I'm already always idling on MSN (Simetrical, gmail.com) and IRC (Quakenet, generally nick Simetrical when I'm online and Sim|awayreason when I'm not), and I don't particularly want to use a third memory-hogging program. Maybe I should get Trillian or something . . .

Some interesting things to keep in mind when making this mod:

Horses are infact faster than early tanks. The Char Bis I, Vickers, K4, and Churchill tanks attained a maximum of 25 mph on paved road. A horse can most definitly outpace that offroad, where the tank is slowed...and keep pace on road.

This also opens the door to the next thing, the fact that early tanks, and even later more advanced tanks have very serious problems making it over rough terrain and through forests...a movement penalty, or even the possibility (if it can be done) of getting "bogged down" and stuck for a random number of turns. Catapults could easily "bog down" in swamplands or flood plains, or on rough terrain like hills as well.

Id also like to suggest that maybe early armoured vehicles have a range like fighters, to simulate having to supply oil to units in the field. Something that didnt really become anything less than difficult until units could be airlifted in and out of combat, and the reliance on heavy armor waned. Putting a tank on a transport, sending it across a globe, landing it, driving it into combat, driving it to the next city, is going to start wearing out your supply lines. Because you have to fuel that transport, and PUT fuel on the transport, send it back across the ocean, put it on a truck, drive it out to the tank, reful the tank, drive back, rinse wash repeat. Its pretty straining on ones economy. Something thats never been modelled in a civ game before. War wariness sort of takes the place of that, but your combat units are just as effective 1000 miles away as they are on your own soil

Which brings me to my last pseudo-suggest...is it possible to make it so overseas resources actually have to be loaded onto a transport and physically transported back to your linked up cities and offloaded say...once every 10 turns or so, to keep being able to use that resource. Resources you trade with other countries would be the same way, youd have to go pick it up, bring back, before you can use it. The naval game in civ4 has always lacked. It be nice to try and figure out your enemies supply lanes and ambush them, or as a great reason to bring back privateers that dont show nationality. Pirating your enemies shipments of gold or food or whatever would be cool. So would sending out a wolfpack of subs to sink a uranium shipment.

Any how...I LOVE the mod...I hope you keep working on it :) and im eager to see the next installment....

But there must be some sort of way to more realistically create a 'battlefront' rather than just sprawling your units all over the place to chase after AI stuff, it seems rather stupid. Anyone got any suggestions?

This may be impossible to do without the SDK, but I've come up with a few ideas that may help the problem. One idea is to implement Zones of Control. That is, it takes enemy units their remaining move points to enter any square adjacent to any of your [combat] units. (If anybody's ever played the game Military Madness, you'll know what I mean).

Another idea is to reduce the benefit for defending units. I find that the pillaging AI frustrates me more than it should because it's much harder to attack them since they receive terrain bonuses when defending. I usually end up letting them destroy everything because it would be far too damaging for me to leave my city and go on the offensive. If it were me, I'd give attackers terrain bonuses as well (though this will also make taking cities much easier). Defenders still receive the fortify bonuses, but those make a lot more sense.

Just some ideas, and good work with your mod!

Jaynus it has a subject on to splitting empires on apolyton forum ...

Go officicial Civ 4 website in "Latest Forums" n°4

Markezuma, extension to that thought

How about a potential attrition factor
Whereas, being inside enemy borders (while at war) lowers the def. bonus from terrain, makes sense, since the enemy is going to know more about the terrain than you
If you are inside another nations borders with a treaty, then you keep the normal bonuses

Would this be a good way of getting around the pilliaging? (ie. you can take the fight to them)

Here's something I've been jogging around in my head, though if what I state is impossible or has been hashed over before, feel free to let me know.

My head-scratcher as far as units go in Civ IV is the gunship. Frankly, they don't do very much at all in this game. They're too weak to really do much, fighting wise. I've built a few in several games, and it was rarely used, except to hit a resource or two.

In that improvement killing, I did have a thought. Would it be possible, however, to set the unit up to be something more like an Air Mobility unit? Perhaps enable the gunship to hold one unit of light troops (Infantry, Seals, Marines) so they can ferry them deep behind enemy lines to stir up a bit of trouble? I wouldn't change the stats of the gunship unit, otherwise - I think the troop carrying ability is more than enough.

Horses are infact faster than early tanks. The Char Bis I, Vickers, K4, and Churchill tanks attained a maximum of 25 mph on paved road. A horse can most definitly outpace that offroad, where the tank is slowed...and keep pace on road.Not indefinitely, though. 25 MPH is cantering speed, and horses can't canter for hours on end. To get them to move all day, you'd probably have to alternate between a trot and a walk. Substantially faster than a human, sure, but not overwhelmingly so.
This also opens the door to the next thing, the fact that early tanks, and even later more advanced tanks have very serious problems making it over rough terrain and through forests...a movement penalty, or even the possibility (if it can be done) of getting "bogged down" and stuck for a random number of turns. Catapults could easily "bog down" in swamplands or flood plains, or on rough terrain like hills as well.Excellent idea.
Id also like to suggest that maybe early armoured vehicles have a range like fighters, to simulate having to supply oil to units in the field. Something that didnt really become anything less than difficult until units could be airlifted in and out of combat, and the reliance on heavy armor waned. Putting a tank on a transport, sending it across a globe, landing it, driving it into combat, driving it to the next city, is going to start wearing out your supply lines.That's true for any unit. All soldiers need supplies: food, water, ammunition, etc. But planes are a special case, because a) they can't carry supplies with them for more than a handful of hours of flight, and b) if they keep moving, they're faster than any supply mechanism you can devise (so you can't generally have another plane set out after the first one leaves to refuel it, since it wouldn't be able to catch up without having to be refueled itself). Units of tanks, by contrast, could be accompanied by supply trucks keeping pace with them, as could soldiers and the like.

You make a good point in general, however (not just for tanks).
Which brings me to my last pseudo-suggest...is it possible to make it so overseas resources actually have to be loaded onto a transport and physically transported back to your linked up cities and offloaded say...once every 10 turns or so, to keep being able to use that resource. Resources you trade with other countries would be the same way, youd have to go pick it up, bring back, before you can use it.Ugh, micromanagement.
The naval game in civ4 has always lacked. It be nice to try and figure out your enemies supply lanes and ambush them, or as a great reason to bring back privateers that dont show nationality. Pirating your enemies shipments of gold or food or whatever would be cool. So would sending out a wolfpack of subs to sink a uranium shipment.There's going to be a better way to do that than actually forcing the player to manually move every single supply vehicle. For starters, I'd like to see blockades: if an enemy ship is adjacent to your city, it shouldn't be able to trade on the sea. Likewise for land units and land trade, actually. As for interrupting the trade routes in the middle, of course, that will be much trickier.

Excellent idea.



Thank you :)



You make a good point in general, however (not just for tanks).


Maybe a "distance from capital" or "distance from supplies" (friendly border) cost in gold? Making foriegn wars more costly than fighting on your own soil. It would achieve the same thing, without as much editing, and without drastically changing the way the game plays?

On small maps it would never be THAT bad...but on huge, or gigantic maps, you better have a stellar economy to go all the way around the world to fight.


There's going to be a better way to do that than actually forcing the player to manually move every single supply vehicle. For starters, I'd like to see blockades: if an enemy ship is adjacent to your city, it shouldn't be able to trade on the sea. Likewise for land units and land trade, actually. As for interrupting the trade routes in the middle, of course, that will be much trickier.

Hrmm...if there was a way to "automate" the trade ships. All you would have to do is hit "A" like you do for workers, theyd choose the fastest route to any resources that need to be picked up, and returned.

Or if trade routes were picked like they are now, by the computer, but a visual representation of that trade route (a coloured road? maybe like red for resources, yellow for gold, something like that) then if an enemy unit just put himself on the trade route, it would cancel that trade as long as he's there.

I dont know if guarding traderoutes would be to much micromanagement or not

Hi

I love what this mod does, I'm gonna wait til you get it all the way done beofre I install it. awesome work.

I'm very curious what other resources you are planning to give us?

Tobacco- +1 to happiness -2 health or something like that.

Canibus (I mean it is the only mind altering thing that does not have to be man made)

+2 to happines -3 economy because noone will want to work


maybe Ill think of somethign useful but now that I'm trying to think about this I am drawing a blank.

Hi

I love what this mod does, I'm gonna wait til you get it all the way done beofre I install it. awesome work.

I'm very curious what other resources you are planning to give us?

Tobacco- +1 to happiness -2 health or something like that.

Canibus (I mean it is the only mind altering thing that does not have to be man made)

+2 to happines -3 economy because noone will want to work


maybe Ill think of somethign useful but now that I'm trying to think about this I am drawing a blank. but wouldnt the economy increase the economy because people are out their shuveling huge amounts of money around to pay for the hard to get stuff? or is that......... how about if you introduce drugs as a resource have a few more legal civics that deal with drug legalization...

i could care less about drugs but my head is spinning with vague ideas

EDIT: oh shoot, double post, vary sorry, didnt think about it when i hit the quote butten


Not indefinitely, though. 25 MPH is cantering speed, and horses can't canter for hours on end. To get them to move all day, you'd probably have to alternate between a trot and a walk. Substantially faster than a human, sure, but not overwhelmingly so.
Excellent idea.
That's true for any unit. All soldiers need supplies: food, water, ammunition, etc. But planes are a special case, because a) they can't carry supplies with them for more than a handful of hours of flight, and b) if they keep moving, they're faster than any supply mechanism you can devise (so you can't generally have another plane set out after the first one leaves to refuel it, since it wouldn't be able to catch up without having to be refueled itself). Units of tanks, by contrast, could be accompanied by supply trucks keeping pace with them, as could soldiers and the like.

You make a good point in general, however (not just for tanks).
Ugh, micromanagement.
There's going to be a better way to do that than actually forcing the player to manually move every single supply vehicle. For starters, I'd like to see blockades: if an enemy ship is adjacent to your city, it shouldn't be able to trade on the sea. Likewise for land units and land trade, actually. As for interrupting the trade routes in the middle, of course, that will be much trickier.

on the idea of blockades, supply shippments for resources and the like.

im reminded of the game galactic civilization(think civ in space) trade routes to other planets would be established by a large freighter, then after that small ships will go back and forth from planet to planet, dropping off money when it gets there. what if, after the off shore rig is built a supply ship is created, you send it to one of your cities and it generates a back and forth like thing that i just described, the amount of time between shipments would equal the smount of turns that shipment gives you for lets say oil costs. the enemy could capture or destroy the shipment(capturing gives the person the resource for the amount of turns the shipment is worth but they have to cart it back to their city) but of course there should be treaties that say basicly that "i wont attack shipments" (these treaties must be canceled independently of declaring war, and the other civs frown open both canceling and attacking(more so) )


also, prehaps the same can be done on land, after a tech is researched(maybe relating to wheel or horse back riding, something like that) where you can build a shipment unit, select what to ship(rare resources like iron, or fur, or just food/hammers) and it would take a certain amount of resources from the starting city(maybe set by the player) and ship them to the recieveing city, the amounts are multiplied to account for shipping times and are also capturable


what do you think?

tar - early stage for rubber, I think. Must have tar to make a rubber plant or something.. I'm kicking around idea's please if anyone wants to chime in feel free.. my friends =)



I want new resources because a fun part for me is seeing which resources are where and race my civ to claim it =)

the Canibus thing twas a joke.. i guess it would raise the economy from the fact that more people need food cause they have the munchies!

bollox, though your joking, that does make sense, i wouldnt be agenst the idea except for the fact that it seems a little too "silly" for a game of this nature

prehaps rubber could help increase movement speed? im more for resources that help out units instead of resources that are required for units

jaynus, Ive sent you a PM

On the subject of economy.

A world bank would make a great new wonder...it would work like the UN works, except there would be no elections.

The civilization with the most buying power (Manufactured goods, minus imported goods, times gross national product, minus matience would be the best and most simplified formula) would receive a +1 to relations with all other civs, and a 3.17 percent increase in tax revenue. (or in traderoute earnings, that might be more realistic) That would simulate countries putting thier money into a country that has the least risk for radical inflation or change. With the forumala above (im not sure exactly what the numbers are, but civ generates outputs for all of them) smaller civs with more industry (forges, factories, windmills) more population, but few coastal cities, would still be able to compete with larger, less industrialized nations. Much like germany, sweden, and france compete with russia, or china.

Hey guys!!! v0.6 Posted! Was alot of monotinous changes, lots of copy paste work...but major changes I think! Yay for guns!


Anyways...Wow!! alot of input since I last checked by...Im astounded hehe..

I have a test game going atm, and I am very pleased with its performance...I dont know about the rest of you guys. Has anyone ran any decent-lenghted games? Any comments, input, anything on these games?

Heres how my game is setup and how its gone, I want to make sure we are all on the same page with the actual way the game goes, or any suggestions anyone has!

My Game:
10 Civ's on a large continents map, Prince difficulty, im playing as washington. Victory condition is conquest only; No city razing is turned on. Tech trading is allowed.
We all (oddly enough) got plopped onto the same continent like a New World map. I would say the first...hour of my game was a bit slow, ancient era with alot of exploring and waiting. Besides this drawback however, I've been in constant war and struggle with rather large forces, and they drag on (I love that!). I like the way its gone, and I am waiting to see how it progresses into the modern ages (I have not played a full game yet; My testing of my modern changes was with world editing)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have abslotely everything you have all said written down and prioritizing a list for you guys, so you can see what Im working on at any given time. Let me give you a short run down of the major changes now going in, now that I think I've finished the major sluggish changes.

Heres what the major things Im working on besides more twaeking and small things. This is in order of how I am prioritizing them (note: this doesnt include easy unit and wonder additions, eg: World Bank, Superhighways, etc are *easy* to add and going in next version):
- Expendable resources and producable resources
- Ranged bombardment on ships and artillary (yay! this is very doable, just time consuming)
- Zones of Control on units (this *IS* possible with python, easily; Im working on the framework for it)
- Outlining historical accuracy of units and needed additions. This includes expanding more specialized unit types, examples of what im doing first:
- AEGIS cruisers
- Transport aircraft
- Sapper units

I'm going through this HUGE list of all your guys suggestions and going to post it later tonight; Stay tuned!

IMHO, this MOD is too aggressive compare to another MOD "Slower Tech+Balance“, it change the game too much and without deep game balance and AI consideration.

for example, TANK+250% MOD will destroy the gameplay, with 10 point exp from begin (wonder + religion + goverment + barrack), and they get 75% vs city, it's really strong; and now, with 250%, all AI dead...

#1. Whos comparing the mods? Whoever it is needs to stop. I've taken some modifications out of dearmads "Slower tech + balance mod" (yes, with his permission), but was in no way looking to do anything near what he was. He wants to balance the game, I want to revamp it.

#2. I resent the fact you believe I did not put heavy consideration into the implications of the changes Ive made; considering the amount of time I have put into it and planning it, I find it rude.

#3. How does 250% vs. melee and mounted units ruin the balance of the AI? This mod is going for realism. Tanks should completely demolish pikeman and cavalry. If I am missing something, please; tell me whats ruining the balance so I can fix it...oh. Constructively please. :goodjob:


Thanks!!!!

Jaynus,

I like the mod and have a suggestion. Gunships (helipcopters) in vanilla Civ 4 get the same river-crossing penalty as regular gound units. Silly, since they are flying, not wading. Giving them the "Amphibious" trait (which Marines start with) solves this, making it more realistic.

I modded this into my own games (before I started playing yours) and it worked out well. What do you think?

See you at the front!

Falconius

#1. Whos comparing the mods? Whoever it is needs to stop. I've taken some modifications out of dearmads "Slower tech + balance mod" (yes, with his permission), but was in no way looking to do anything near what he was. He wants to balance the game, I want to revamp it.

#2. I resent the fact you believe I did not put heavy consideration into the implications of the changes Ive made; considering the amount of time I have put into it and planning it, I find it rude.

#3. How does 250% vs. melee and mounted units ruin the balance of the AI? This mod is going for realism. Tanks should completely demolish pikeman and cavalry. If I am missing something, please; tell me whats ruining the balance so I can fix it...oh. Constructively please. :goodjob:


Thanks!!!!

Hi Jaynus,

what i said means no offencive, i'm not native english speaker so please forgive some word may not right.


a good MOD should first think about the stupid AI...


about 250% tank: AI could not as smart as human to know "which unit counter which unit", AI should bulid inf:tank rate to about 2:1, and may have no money to upgrade cav to gunship to counter your tank, but human are smart, they build all tank, right?

Musketman now uses 'Muskets' built at a 'Musket Factory', AI stupid, how to ensure them know which city should build musket factory and them train guns? the setting give gunpower unit many advantage vs old army, so AI dead too...and how about the unit upgrade to gunpowder?

Nuclear Carrier Cargo Space of 8, if AI load it full and get destoryed by the smart human without good protection as human does, is it fun? but human seems never get carrier sunk...

plunder for cities raised to 100 gold, and +50 gold per population, so conquest a city with 15 pop will get 850, even lost 4-5 unit, it's still cost effective, is it for fun for human? AI seems less chance get bonus at all.

fast moving unit +1 or +2 movement, AI will let these unit go too fast to attack human, when they got killed, human have time to have a rest waiting for the slow inf, but human could get supply of attacking army very fast...

You're spoiling us jaynus with almost daily updates. I had packed it in before 0.6 came out so haven't had any chance to test it. Now I have 8+ hours of work first..... :(

So far I haven't played much beyond the beginning of the 3rd era. I'm still torn on whether early research is taking too long, but that may be because I always turn tech trading off. I also play Prince level, continent, ect. Hopefully I'll get a chance to test it later. Has anyone found that tech trading is better in Civ4 than Civ3? Or do the AI simply outpace the player by trading trading amongst themselves?

Keep up the good work.

After checking around the various boards I see tons of great ideas that can and hopefully will be implemented in one single, great mod.

There's a nice idea in the creation area about adding more than 1 UU per civ.

I still like the forest replanting idea.

Some new civs are starting to pop up; Celts, Cathage, ect.

I wonder how well Civ4 will handle trying to combine lots of mini mods?

Suberb mod jaynus, you are defnitily on the right track. Continue this way and you will make a perfect game. Or atleast a more realistic one. ;)

One thing that has always bothered me is that a lack of a certain resource means you cannot produce the item at all. While I do understand the reasoning behind this I think it is wrong. Let's take oil for example during the ww2. Germany lacks oil and the production is very much lowered because of that. Still they did build tanks, planes and even some ships. In Civ4 I would rather see that there was a HUGE penalty for not having the right resource instead of not being able to build the item at all. Tanks for example could be 10 times more expensive to build without oil and perhaps another 1,5 times more expensive to build without iron. The numbers could be discussed but it would feel much more realistic this way.

Good thinking Saarud. I think Civ4 does a nice job with marble/stone with regard to Wonders. I think things like that should be expanded to units. Make the penalty severe enough to encourage resource wars, but allow the civ to still painstakingly make the unit. I mean just because you don't have thousands of horses running wild doesn't mean you can't find one nag to train... :)

koo, koo try making a tree planting mod and maybe burn forest mod (as i recall forest fires are beneficial because the seeds spread better or somethin like that)

I want civ spliting, are you agree Jaynus ?

This is awsome! Lookin forward to the next update.

But are there any plans to make nukes more powerful? beacause at the moment there just not worth it (bad rep with other civs etc.) i was thinking no more pathetic kill checks for units just die on contact with it. Also the land within about 3 squares of the nuke automaticly becomes desert!

koo, koo try making a tree planting mod and maybe burn forest mod (as i recall forest fires are beneficial because the seeds spread better or somethin like that)

well some plants spread seeds during or shortly after forest fires, along with that ive heard it does make the land fertile, maybe burning a forest gives a small food bonus, then you can build a farm on it for an ever bigger bonus



oh and jaynus... will artillery damage units during bombardment? there should be multiple bombardment options besides defense, how about infastructure(buildings, if none then population) and Units(damages all units in the city by a small, premotable amount)

Suberb mod jaynus, you are defnitily on the right track. Continue this way and you will make a perfect game. Or atleast a more realistic one. ;)

One thing that has always bothered me is that a lack of a certain resource means you cannot produce the item at all. While I do understand the reasoning behind this I think it is wrong. Let's take oil for example during the ww2. Germany lacks oil and the production is very much lowered because of that. Still they did build tanks, planes and even some ships. In Civ4 I would rather see that there was a HUGE penalty for not having the right resource instead of not being able to build the item at all. Tanks for example could be 10 times more expensive to build without oil and perhaps another 1,5 times more expensive to build without iron. The numbers could be discussed but it would feel much more realistic this way.

This is a common misconception. Germany had all the oil it needed. It was just spread out and within easy reach of allied bombers. Germany had plans to take the north sea oil, and the oil in the cacauses. The oil in north africa and the middle east was well out of allied bomber range, and could produce much faster since it didnt have to worry about all the precautions that are takin due to bombing.

Countries like belgium, and poland, who had no oil of thier own, only trade agreements and stock piles, didnt build tanks at all. They built horsedrawn carraiges, and armoured cars. Which is why germany rolled right over them.

Germanys production, even after 1943 and the defeat at stalingrad, and the movement of the 8th airforce to britian, increased almost 50% every year until the wars end. Even when the 8th airforces B17s were dropping 100,000 tons of bombs a day on every target they could find in germany, thier production increased. The entire strategic bombing effort of the 8th airforce, while putting on a pretty show, and eliminating germanys airforce, was completely ineffective at putting a stop to such an industrialized nation.

Socialism was a major reason thier industry was so effective. The government had control over all contruction, public works projects, military production, resource movement, and operational planning. It was very organized and very effective.

If you flat out just dont have oil, you cant build factories, you cant fuel tanks and planes, you cant produce plastics, you cant smelt ore effectively, oil is, for lack of a better phrase, the most important resource on earth. He who controls the oil controls the universe.

Tell the poles, the chechs, the belgians, the algerians, the libyians that you can build tanks, ships, and planes without oil....theyll show you pictures of horsecarts dragging thier wounded away from the onslaught of panzers that just rolled over them.



EDIT:

Id like to say that I really like the way this mod is turning out. Its much more brutal than vanilla civ4...after you build up a city, you can churn the earlier units out like a mad man.

Im playing an archipegalo (or whatver) map right now. Standard, with 8 civs (including me) on noble. England was to my south, and was ganged by me and the mongols and japanese. I had two stacks of 12 horse archers, and two stacks of cho-ku archers (I was china) and enough galleys to carry them all. All the while having 3 defenders in each city (only had 6) my research really suffered (I left tech trading on, the AI was about 400 years ahead of me in tech, but couldnt build any numbers of advanced units I guess because I didnt see any other than a few) paying for all those armies, but it paid off when I went to attack england. They had less units, and a few more advanced ones, but I had no catapults...I used my collateral damage archers to weaken the enemy units and then attacked them with horse archers.

England fell in about 120 years.

While normally all of this would have been accomplished the same way but with maybe a 10th of the units involved, I like having all those units. It makes the game a more dangerous place...it also makes the other civs alot more aggressive. In vanilla civ4 I can go maybe 100 turns without anyone fighting....maybe even a whole game. Usually the wars are only fought when I start them. Now about every 20 turns wars are either starting or ending between the AI (and sometimes me)

Its alot more realistic, since in the real world, there hasnt been a day since human beings organized and started building cities, that there hasnt been a war going on SOMEwhere...

also it would be koo if there was a cavalry unit w/ spears or lances that get 25-50% bonus against other cavalry (lol got this from RTW)

also,

are there rpgs in the game? and guerillas?

Please forgive me if this has been covered but... What kind of world is this mod (map type). Can I use the World map mod by Rhye and then your mod ontop to give me a real life feel to my global domination.

This mod is a gameplay mod, it has no custom maps.

I'm sure there is a way to combine this (or any Mod) and Rhye's map, but I wouldn't have a clue how to.

I have abslotely everything you have all said written down and prioritizing a list for you guys, so you can see what Im working on at any given time. Let me give you a short run down of the major changes now going in, now that I think I've finished the major sluggish changes.

Heres what the major things Im working on besides more twaeking and small things. This is in order of how I am prioritizing them (note: this doesnt include easy unit and wonder additions, eg: World Bank, Superhighways, etc are *easy* to add and going in next version):
- Expendable resources and producable resources
- Ranged bombardment on ships and artillary (yay! this is very doable, just time consuming)
- Zones of Control on units (this *IS* possible with python, easily; Im working on the framework for it)
- Outlining historical accuracy of units and needed additions. This includes expanding more specialized unit types, examples of what im doing first:
- AEGIS cruisers
- Transport aircraft
- Sapper units

I'm going through this HUGE list of all your guys suggestions and going to post it later tonight; Stay tuned! Just wanted to comment on the cruiser. Aegis is merely a weapons system and while the first ships to use Aegis did eventually fall under the cruiser class it has been outfitted on DDG’s, DD’s and even frigates (obviously not the wooden kind in civ4). So instead of making an Aegis cruiser, what if you just added a CG unit, and then maybe make Aegis accompany a technology that upgrades the ships with increased strength, ballistic missile defense and anti-air (or at least a MUCH higher interception probability). I like this idea also because you could add new techs such as Ballistics that improve munitions etc. that would make your existing units stronger (all types). This would fit nicely I think due to the fact that you have increased units in a longer period of time. Maybe instead of "upgrading" the unit it could work as a promotion. Armor piercing rounds discovered with "Ballistics" could provide a marine with a bonus against infantry and tanks maybe, though I wouldn't personally want to go up against a tank with anything but a JAVELIN (anti-tank missile) and even then... that could also be a promotion however. Back to this ships I would also like to see ASW (anti-submarine warfare) Helos and normal gun ships stationed aboard the ships as they are capable of carrying one of each. Which would also give you the ability to prosecute an enemy sub even without a ship as there are fixed and rotary winged aircraft with ASW platforms. Speaking of which Aegis has no effect whatsoever on ASW for the record. This mod sounds awesome (haven't had a chance to play yet but I think I will be able to give .6 a go) and I can't wait to try it. :goodjob:

I want normal world map for this famous mod !

Anybody are interested by an algorithm of spliting empires ?

I'm not pragramer but begin with 8 civ and finish with 18 !!!

Early few civs and now more ...

What do you think ?

I loaded this mod and after that i chose the Bebep earth map as scenario. All works fine for now.

I found a typo in the swordsman or the axeman, i dont remember, it has a bonus repeated.

This is already getting too much for poor jaynus.

Another game I liked was Victoria and a few people got together and started VIP
Victoria Improvement Project

I suggest something similar for civ IV

Certainly a collaborative effort with public review could accomplish much more than poor single jaynus! :lol:

I would also like to see a mod installer/uninstaller/management interface (I think I can do that one in java myself)

I see a lot of promising work on here :goodjob:

- Musketman (and musketeer) got +30% defense vs. knights (knights killing musketman every first try is just stupid)

Heres some basic info on the musket used by the british army (probally the best representation of a musketeers weaponry and ability)

Basic Data

Furniture (fittings) Brass
Caliber of bore .75 (.75 inch)
Caliber of projectile .71 (.71 inch)
Projectile One ounce lead ball
Theoretical maximum range 250 yards
Effective maximum range (100 round volley) 150 - 200 yards
Effective maximum range (Single round) 100 - 150 yards
Favored range Less than 100 yards
Weight 9lbs 11 oz
Optimum effect at 30 yards Will penetrate 3/8" of iron or 5 inches of oak
Rate of fire (Optimum) 4 - 5 rounds per minute
Rate of fire (actual) 2 - 3 rounds per minute
Rate of misfire 20 - 40%

Here's a bit on Knight armor

Body Armor...A Historical Perspective
AUTHOR Major James P. Carothers, USMC

II. Data: As long as man has developed weapons, he has
simultaneously produced armor to protect against its threat. The
crude and unsophisticated armor of the Romans to the medieval
knights of the middle ages established a trend towards armor
modernization. Gunpowder ended the development of armor for
centuries until the famous Australian "bushranger" Ned Kelly
introduced effective armor in the 1850's. Soldiers and criminals
experimented with varying degrees of success during World War I
through the gangster years of the 1930's. World War II and the
Korean Conflict were a renaissance for body armor. Technological
innovation and combat experimentation firmly reestablished the
requirement for effective body armor. Research and development
through the last two decades have resulted in "state of the art"
body armor in the hands of the common soldier today.

In 1880, the Australian police found the famous bushranger,
Ned Kelly, a formidable foe. An "Outback Outlaw", Ned fashoned a
suit of boiler-plate iron armor, with a twin panneled
breastplate. A metal apron protected the groin and a crude helmet
with eye slits completed the outfit. Dispite the unrefined
apperance, Ned's armor was extremely efficient and enabled him
to face, and survive the concentrated fires of numerous
Australian police. Unfortunately for Ned, his armor didn't cover
his legs and after catching a few rounds in his lower extremities
the police captured him.

"Having said that, I have put on an accurate reproduction of a breast plate and had someone hitting me with a claymore (an ahistorical heavy one as well) the blow knocked me back, dented the armour in a big way but I didn't feel anything other than being sharply pushed back, this was at full swing!

In plate you do have to go for joints or gaps in the armour, certainly a blow to the center of a plate wont do anything until the 20'th blow when the armour has been bent to the point that they cant expand there lungs to draw breath.

An arrow will go striate threw the armour if it hits it at right angles, however plate was designed with a lot of angles and curves, anyone firing from directly ahead can only get a right angle if they hit the one mm ridge at the front of the plate, plate was made glass hard so that arrow points couldn't catch and would shatter when they hit (seen a slow motion camera footage, your only risk is flying splinters getting in your eye)"

Source: Re-Enactors forum

During medieval Europe, armored knights on horseback were the dominant military force until the invention of projectile weapons. While elephants and armor came and went, the speed and availability of soldiers on horseback remained to be an essential component of warfare for centuries. Although cavalry was primarily used as support for the infantry, in formation it could be used for countless possibilities, including quick attacks, chasing, flanking, reconnaissance, and breakthroughs. Even though firearms reduced the cavalry’s overall effectiveness during the Renaissance, it was not until the 19th century that guns and artillery made cavalry charges obsolete. Guns became quicker to shoot with the invention of the cartridge, breach-loader, and revolver, and more accurate with the invention of the rifled barrel

From the History of Armored Warfare

Most medivel armor ranged from .8 t0 3mms. Knights would be probally wear a heavier plate...so we'll say 2.5mm

thats roughly 1.5 eights of an inch...so at 30 yards, 90 feet, a musketeer could easily penetrate the armor of a knight, per the data above saying it can penetrate 3/8ths of an inch. IF he can hit it at a 90 degree angle. The more angle, the more armor youre giving the knight.

If you hit 10mms of armor thats sloped at a 15 degree angle, that 10mms of armor effectively becomes 11.5mms of armor.

At 60 yards, we'll say the the musketeer can penetrate 1.5 eights of an inch, half of 3/8ths...since its double the range (it would actually be less due to the ballistic of the ball) that is the exact thickness of the armor the knight would be wearing. Since no knight ever wore flat plate, they always wore rounded plate, we have to assume there was armor sloping involved in the hit. The amount of degrees (which will definitly be higher than 0 ) of sloping, would only increase the armor protection of the knight.

How fast can a horse run down 180 feet and trample a man holding a gun?

At what range do you think the musketeers would fire?

I think its safe to assume the musketeers would get one and only one volley off at the knights, before the knights closed range, and made short work of musketeers.

IF the musketeers fired at thier maximum range (250yards) its POSSIBLE that a well trained unit could fire two shots in the time the knights closed on the musketeers. However the first volley would be completely ineffective, incapable of penetrating thier armor.

The only chance the musketeers would have is if they fired from less than 45yards (which is dangerously close when you consider you have 50 guys in armor, on huge steads, carrying maces, pikes, and swords steaming at you at full speed) and ALL thier shots were true. If the muskets have a 20-40% chance of a misfire....well...all thier shots arent even going fire.

My conclusion on this subject is infact that knights should be running down musketeers left and right. Not the other way around. If anyone should get a bonus, its the knights agianst the musketeers.

Of course...if you have a highwall between you and the knights...and you have a musket...whole different story. Maybe a +75% city defense? -50% agianst knights? Or something in that ratio?


EDIT:

And sorry to be a killjoy all the time, but I have a strange obsession with realism heh...im like the realism gestapo...

Hey guys!!! Thanks for a ton more good input :)

maler23 - Yah, I've had all these issues alot too. The one thing that bugs me the most, is the AI will take pillaging over attacking your units any day, so it makes it tough to get rid of the pillaging units when they avoid yours. That of course is an AI issue, and im trying to find a way to get rid of it (perhaps getting rid of pillage income or lower it). Im not quite sure yet. What do you think?
We all know being able to build 'a wall of units' on a border, or something of the sort is realistically tactically unlikely, the only time this occured was trench-warfare in ww1, and even then covert operations and flanking were a norm. But there must be some sort of way to more realistically create a 'battlefront' rather than just sprawling your units all over the place to chase after AI stuff, it seems rather stupid. Anyone got any suggestions?


Hey Janus,

Forgive me if this is scattered. I'm doing this at work :)

As you are making changes, are you able to adjust the AI to compensate for these changes as well? Meaning, is the AI now able to take advantage of the changes you have made? Just wondering.

Also, as far as improvements go, I like the idea of "zone of control". That would help to prevent the "wall o' units/forts" requirements. I also like the idea of the attackers, if in the defender's realm, losing some of their defensive advantages(due to the attacker knowing the lay of the land etc.)

For me, the biggest thing I would like, which I mentioned before, is the ability to put defensive improvements on other improvements. My main irritation is feeling that my borders are way too "open" even with units sprinkled about. There should be a way either through defensive modifications or something to make it hard to rush control a whole bunch of cities in a single turn.

Also, does the AI currently make note if I'm massing a whole bunch of troops near a border? Will it compensate to move troops over to cities near my troops and such?

Ooh, what about mines? For both land and sea? Perhaps there would be a chance to instantly destroy whatever unit hits that space? Perhaps a minelayer unit that places mines which opponents can't see? Maybe they have to use a spy or scout unit first to find them if they suspect there are some?

i need to actually get some work done.

cheers,

-J

Please forgive me if this has been covered but... What kind of world is this mod (map type). Can I use the World map mod by Rhye and then your mod ontop to give me a real life feel to my global domination.
all standerd map types are supported(play now and custom world)

I saw where somebody mentioned giving gunships the ability to attack across water with no penalty, but nobody seems to care that helicopters are better at killing tanks than they are at killing guys with swords on horseback. They are not really better, but they get a bonus. I have had a few gunships killed by knights. I would have had more, but I quit building gunships after watching a few get slaughtered by units with no ranged attack.

My conclusion on this subject is infact that knights should be running down musketeers left and right. Not the other way around. If anyone should get a bonus, its the knights agianst the musketeers.

Well, not to be too vague here (being at work, I can't exactly go into a full discourse at length):

1) If I recall correctly from my brief studies about events such as the English Civil War, units of pikemen were used to shield the musketeers against this situation of being overrun after firing a volley, in roughly a 2:1 ratio of musketeers and pikemen. The musketeers would fire, and if discipline were up to snuff, the musketeers would retreat behind the pikemen to reload.

2) Note that to alleviate the problems associated with reload times, especially in the earlier eras of firearms, musketeers were often organized in ranks, to allow sustained fire as part of the unit reloaded their weapons. Ranks of two or three were employed - of course, good fire discipline and formation were required for this. (Oddly enough, I believe it was the Japanese that came up with ranked fire before the Europeans.)

3) One must remember that there are two crucial elements to a knight's effectiveness - first is the knight, the second is the horse. One cannot armor down a horse as much as one would a knight, unless one were willing to sacrifice the mobility and the endurance of the horse to a crippling degree. Taking the horse out of the equation would turn knights into lumbering, overarmored foot troops - not much of a charge left, there! The line between 'soldier mortality' and 'soldier ineffectiveness' is a different line.

In conclusion after my rather general statements, I would believe that the knight would not have such an easy time against the musket as you would suggest.

In respectful disagreement....

Wow we all talk alot at work huh? Addicts!!!!! haha.

Ok. Lets get down to it shall we!

bebear - No worries mate. I was a bit snappy anyways :) I have put alot of thought into the AI is all, and I am busy testing their responses and abilities to use things. As far as their usage of 'buildable resources' goes, in my test game, I am *JUST* at that point, so not sure yet ;) If they dont, its easy enough to make them do it (youd be suprised).

About Rhye's World Map - I will ask Rhye if I can include it today :)

Originally Posted by SlayerofDeitys
Just wanted to comment on the cruiser. Aegis is merely a weapons system and while the first ships to use Aegis did eventually fall under the cruiser class it has been outfitted on DDG’s, DD’s and even frigates (obviously not the wooden kind in civ4). So instead of making an Aegis cruiser, what if you just added a CG unit, and then maybe make Aegis accompany a technology that upgrades the ships with increased strength, ballistic missile defense and anti-air (or at least a MUCH higher interception probability). I like this idea also because you could add new techs such as Ballistics that improve munitions etc. that would make your existing units stronger (all types). This would fit nicely I think due to the fact that you have increased units in a longer period of time. Maybe instead of "upgrading" the unit it could work as a promotion. Armor piercing rounds discovered with "Ballistics" could provide a marine with a bonus against infantry and tanks maybe, though I wouldn't personally want to go up against a tank with anything but a JAVELIN (anti-tank missile) and even then... that could also be a promotion however. Back to this ships I would also like to see ASW (anti-submarine warfare) Helos and normal gun ships stationed aboard the ships as they are capable of carrying one of each. Which would also give you the ability to prosecute an enemy sub even without a ship as there are fixed and rotary winged aircraft with ASW platforms. Speaking of which Aegis has no effect whatsoever on ASW for the record. This mod sounds awesome (haven't had a chance to play yet but I think I will be able to give .6 a go) and I can't wait to try it.

Ohhhh, you just gave me a world of ideas there!!! Heres the idea I just got off that (Everyone pay attention here!!! What do you all think?): Instead of creating different specialized unit for all the different variations of arms and equipment in the later game; All units with this type of specialization capability starts out with enough experience to use at *least* one promotion; This first set of default promotions contains possible specializations (which have penalties as well).


So, for example:

Cruiser/Destroyer
First Rank Specializations:
AEGIS Outfit
Sonar Outfit
Artillary Outfit

Tank
First Rank Specializations:
Long-Range Firing Outfit
Anti-Infantry Outfit
Occupational Outfit

These are just ideas...those tank ones a re pretty stupid, but you get the idea.

ORR!!!! We could do it this way: We add a button to these units in their actions to change outfits/firing setups (This would take 2-3 turns). Soooo...you could just hot-swap your units to different techniques. This opens up a HUGE range of new types:
- You can setup firing formations for your infantry/musketman/etc.
- You can setup different outfits on your ships
- You can setup different ammunition for your aircraft missions
- You can setup different outfits and manuvers for your tanks

I love this idea....what does everyone think? The only issue I see with this is the AI is very unlikely to use it (Unless it was in promotion format). And I cannot modify the AI this far. But, on the other hand, we make sure specialized setups are penalized enough that AI with generalized units can fight them as well. (Until next year when the SDK comes out and I can fix it).



OKAY! Now that Im done blabbing about that:

Lachlan - Yup! Im into the idea, and looking into it :)

GroggyGrognard - You are correct sir. Firing lines were employed very quickly (in retrospect) after the wide-ranged use of them became popular. (In Civ4 standards, when grenadiers come into play is when firing lines were most popular).

Originally Posted by AlmightyOrange
This is awsome! Lookin forward to the next update.

But are there any plans to make nukes more powerful? beacause at the moment there just not worth it (bad rep with other civs etc.) i was thinking no more pathetic kill checks for units just die on contact with it. Also the land within about 3 squares of the nuke automaticly becomes desert!

I have already began to tweak them. I already upped the building destruction of nukes very very high, and there was already an undocomuented change to Nukes Combat power (I Tripled it ;) )


Anyways, next on the agenda:

Who all would be serious about assisting with this mod? If you would want to, email me jaynus@gmail.com and let me know what you can do for it (Unit creation/skinning, xml, python coding with me, etc.) I'll check people out and see if theres anyone thats looking to go the same way as me :)

In the immortal words of Dirty Harry "A man's got to know his limitations." I know mine jaynus and I'll gladly test anything you guys put out, but I haven't programmed or coded anything since 86 and I don't think this old dog is learning anything new. :D

I'll keep checking the boards (while at work, heh) and see if any other ideas can be utilized here or if someone else is on your wavelength.

And you might need a new catchy name now that you're officially making a Mod and not just tweaks. ;)

Well, not to be too vague here (being at work, I can't exactly go into a full discourse at length):

1) If I recall correctly from my brief studies about events such as the English Civil War, units of pikemen were used to shield the musketeers against this situation of being overrun after firing a volley, in roughly a 2:1 ratio of musketeers and pikemen. The musketeers would fire, and if discipline were up to snuff, the musketeers would retreat behind the pikemen to reload.


Which supports my arguement. The pikemen (+100% agianst mounted) are needed in the stack with the musketeers. Otherwise the knights (and we're talking knights, not unarmored horsemen as were used in the english civil war, all of this is theory since to my knowledge, heavy knights never fought agianst smooth bore muskets) would route the musketeers.



2) Note that to alleviate the problems associated with reload times, especially in the earlier eras of firearms, musketeers were often organized in ranks, to allow sustained fire as part of the unit reloaded their weapons. Ranks of two or three were employed - of course, good fire discipline and formation were required for this. (Oddly enough, I believe it was the Japanese that came up with ranked fire before the Europeans.)


Ok so we need to figure out how many men a unit of musketeers is in Civ4. Also we need to know how many knights is a unit of knights in civ4. 40 Musketeers, will fall to 30 knights. 150 musketeers will fall to 80 knights. (Pulled out of the old rear end but I can always work it out if need be, though as in real life, nothing is every purely scientific) However if a group of knights is 30 knights (which is alot really...alot of kingdoms had only 100 or so, its doubtfull theyd put them all in the same place) and a group of musketeers is 70 or 80 strong...the ranked fire would have an overwelming effect.

Also like you said, discipline and training is a huge factor. Possibley this means that unit XP and upgrades need a looksee to see if they can be improved. If you read the Richard Sharpe novels, alot of men were just crooks that were thrown into the army...getting them all to just aim the same direction was nigh impossible. Jaynus added redcoats, and the french have the actual musketeers not the vanilla musketmen...perhaps those wouldnt have the disadvantage...but id say your average line of musketmen would break after thier first volley failed to slow the charging knights.


3) One must remember that there are two crucial elements to a knight's effectiveness - first is the knight, the second is the horse. One cannot armor down a horse as much as one would a knight, unless one were willing to sacrifice the mobility and the endurance of the horse to a crippling degree. Taking the horse out of the equation would turn knights into lumbering, overarmored foot troops - not much of a charge left, there! The line between 'soldier mortality' and 'soldier ineffectiveness' is a different line.


Actually, I have footage of a guy in full plate doing a backflip. Mobility after the horse is taken out isnt as much of a factor as one may think. The armor was specially designed for mobility...otherwise even the heaviest armoured knight would fall to any faster opponent eventually...which wasnt the case. Knights dont "lumber", they run at you at full speed and smash your head in with a mace :P

All that big slow lumbering giant stuff is just movies.


In conclusion after my rather general statements, I would believe that the knight would not have such an easy time against the musket as you would suggest.

In respectful disagreement....

I respect that...we can agree to disagree :)

I do know, that if given the opportunity to go back in time, and was faced with 500 musketeers, and had 250 knights...I would absolutely send them agianst those musketeers, and fully expect victory.

That is of course an unrealistic situation, since pikemen, skirmershers, catapults, maybe even early cannons would all be in the mix as well.

But if you were a poor peasent drafted into the army, given a musket and 3 days to learn how to use it, then had to stare down charging knights, and that first volley didnt stop them dead...youd run...and most of your comrades behind you...

Horsemen route stationary ground troops...thats what they were designed for...be it archers, longbowmen, crossbowmen, or early musketmen...they were deadly effective at eliminating all those threats.

Whats interesting to note though...is that it was just assumed after the advent of gunpowder and the distribution of firearms to most modern armies, that knights would no longer be effective...yet no one ever tried.

Though I can always remember that movie, where the british soldiers are stationed in africa in a small post...armed with enough ammunition to stop an army, and with new enfield rifled weapons...and zulus with spears just run right over them. It is a movie granted, but from what I know about the zulu war, its pretty accurate.

Firearms really didnt become effective until the advent of the repeating rifle, and of large magazines. Then after the machinegun was employed with such deadly results in world war one, almost every army in the world gave up thier horse soldiers.

EDIT:

If its really nessacary, and I think it is, since I just cant believe that musketmen alone would be able to stop an equal sized force of knights, ill look up the OrBat of musket troops, find out how long it took them to load and fire, how thier lines worked, and at what range they opened fire at.

Ill also look up the amount of time a combat horse can close the distance between the first volley, and the musketmen. At a full run, a horse can make it 100 yards in 25-30 seconds or so...how many volleys could you get off at them in that time? How effective would they be? If you waited to fire until your most effective range (30 yards) wouldnt it be to late? A horse can close 90 feet in just a few seconds. Of course we're not even considering the tactics used by horsemen agianst lines of infantry, such as a zig zagged approach, or a circling manuver where the circle closes in each rotation (like the indians, who were masters of beating the gun without having them themselves) even short charges then feints...or lateral manuvering to waste the lines ammo, exhaust the soldiers, and minimize the fire taken...or in the best case scenerio...rotate the line to follow you, so a second unit could charge in and break the line.

One of the things I actually like about civ, was that every once in a while, a pikemen or something would defeat a tank. People have been defeating more technologically advanced armies for over a millenia....Mao Zedongs army of peasents is a good example...who defeated tanks with pitchforks basically. The zulu agianst the english. The visigoths and ostragoths agianst the romans. The vietcong agianst the united states.

Ohhhh, you just gave me a world of ideas there!!! Heres the idea I just got off that (Everyone pay attention here!!! What do you all think?): Instead of creating different specialized unit for all the different variations of arms and equipment in the later game; All units with this type of specialization capability starts out with enough experience to use at *least* one promotion; This first set of default promotions contains possible specializations (which have penalties as well).


So, for example:

Cruiser/Destroyer
First Rank Specializations:
AEGIS Outfit
Sonar Outfit
Artillary Outfit

Tank
First Rank Specializations:
Long-Range Firing Outfit
Anti-Infantry Outfit
Occupational Outfit

These are just ideas...those tank ones a re pretty stupid, but you get the idea.

ORR!!!! We could do it this way: We add a button to these units in their actions to change outfits/firing setups (This would take 2-3 turns). Soooo...you could just hot-swap your units to different techniques. This opens up a HUGE range of new types:
- You can setup firing formations for your infantry/musketman/etc.
- You can setup different outfits on your ships
- You can setup different ammunition for your aircraft missions
- You can setup different outfits and manuvers for your tanks

I love this idea....what does everyone think? The only issue I see with this is the AI is very unlikely to use it (Unless it was in promotion format). And I cannot modify the AI this far. But, on the other hand, we make sure specialized setups are penalized enough that AI with generalized units can fight them as well. (Until next year when the SDK comes out and I can fix it). /> I definitely like the idea of having a basic unit and then equipping it with whatever system it is you would like. I also like the swapping idea, it would be great for units such as archers and marines or bombs for planes. When it comes to ships for example though it is far to impractical to swap systems out.
The idea of being able to change your bombers from cluster bombs to napalm etc. sounds like a lot of fun. :D As you said however the problem is getting the computer to use these things effectively, in the short term at least.
Oh and by the way they did make nuclear powered cruisers, they stopped using them because of design problems and expense but that is a viable alternative for not having oil. For that matter while non exist that I know, of I see no reason a battleship couldn't be outfitted with a nuclear reactor.

Looks fantastic. I'll definately try it out when you;ve finshed it all.

- Removed riflemans (and redcoats) +25% vs. cavalry bonus (a bonus against a moving target, wtf?!)
It's a historical fact that when rifling was invented and implemented on guns, making them much more accurate at longer ranges, picking a man off the back of a horse became much easier -- because if you could see him, rifling meant now you could hit him, particularly if he was riding straight at you, perched up high on his horse and ever so obvious. Cavalrymen, no matter how well trained, became much easier targets for even a minimally trained man with a rifle. In the age of more advanced firearms, cavalry were used largely for flanking, but even that didn't last all that long since tight formations (which could be easily flanked) fell out of fashion fairly soon after the introduction of the rifle.

I like where you're going with this, even if I'm inevitably going to disagree with some of the changes you implement. ;)

I have a suggestion though: Knights should require Feudalism, as probably should Longbowmen too, but medieval-tech infantry should not, because many peoples with strong militaries never developed feudalism (think China). The default tech-tree works this way, but the techs that the units come with, and in some cases the time/order they appear in don't really make any sense. I commend your own rearrangements of the units, but my own idea is to add a new tech, "Fealty," between Monarchy and Feudalism. Macemen would come with this tech, and require Metal Casting (not Machinery); Knights would come with Feudalism. Then Pikemen could come with civil service, and maybe require Engineering or Construction, and should be increased in strength from the default (pikemen were employed long after other medieval units, like the knight, were gone). Longbowmen could come with Guilds (maybe their strength or bonuses should be increased?), simulating history in that Longbowmen came after Knights (Feudalism is a prereq for Guilds), and really arose as a military unit in direct response to knights. Vassalage and Serfdom could be divided, one coming with Fealty and the other with Feudalism. The question would be which came first, the chicken or the egg. Just based on the names, I would say Vassalage with Fealty, Serfdom with Feudalism, but they could easily be switched. Anyway, if you don't like or don't agree with these ideas, that's fine, I'll just have to mod them myself. :) I've got so many more ideas and quibbles with the tech-tree as it is.

It's a historical fact that when rifling was invented and implemented on guns, making them much more accurate at longer ranges, picking a man off the back of a horse became much easier -- because if you could see him, rifling meant now you could hit him, particularly if he was riding straight at you, perched up high on his horse and ever so obvious. Cavalrymen, no matter how well trained, became much easier targets for even a minimally trained man with a rifle. In the age of more advanced firearms, cavalry were used largely for flanking, but even that didn't last all that long since tight formations (which could be easily flanked) fell out of fashion fairly soon after the introduction of the rifle.


The first widely used rifle I believe was the Webley MkI, a french rifle...in the the mid to late 1800s. Cossacks were more than able to shred napoleans men who carried them.

American indians on horseback, with bows and spears, were able to put up a decent fight agianst various models of winchesters, remmingtons, and spencer rifles.

This is in the same vien as what I was saying before. Its a overly common misconception that firearms, before the 1st world war, were as effective as say...an M1, or Kar98 rifles. Even as effective as a 1903 springfield, or enfield mkII.

I could stand 150 yards from you, and you could fire a thousand rounds at me with alot of midrange (carbines or rifles) 1700s and 1800s firearms, and the chances of you hitting me, or hitting me and diminishing my ability to fight, are almost nil.

It wasnt until the very very late 1800s that repeating rifles were in wide spread use (almost 300 years after the first standardized firearms were in widespread use). The cartridges that were used were still manaully loaded, which meant it still had a slow reload time, but you, or a group of men could put more fire on a target than previously, increasing the "effect" as well as the outright effectiveness.

Even though, all around the world armies without firearms were still competing with mixed (sometimes very good) results. It really came down to each situation.

It really wasnt until after the spanish american war, that advances in gunpowder and mass production allowed for magazines, and more accurate rifles. An enfield, mauser or springfield from world war one is far more accurate and powerful than an M16, or even M14. They had thier drawbacks...they were heavy..slow ROF...and required matainence that wasnt always able to be applied. However when those rifles appeared on the battlefield, as well as the belt fed water cooled machine gun, it truely marked the end of the horsesoldier. He had been struggling for almost 500 years, but finally, after dominating the battlefield for more than 2000 years, his sun had set.

Id just like to see that translated into this mod ;) seeing as its the "realism mod".

Just for some perspective:

8 men were involved in the shootout at the "ok corral"...at a distance of 8 feet, over 40 shots were fired in just about 20 seconds. Only 5 rounds foud thier mark...one of which was a shotgun blast.

In world war two, an average of 128 THOUSAND rounds of rifle ammo were fired for every man killed. So much for accuracy.

World war one, it was somewhere in the millions of rounds per casualty.

The weapons in world war one were more accurate, and had more stopping power.

In terms of range, the average during world war 1 was around 1,400 metres, although accuracy could only be guaranteed at around 600 metres. Quite a contrast to 30 yards isnt it?

I think you guys are really over playing the impact of the gunpowder based weapons.

@Krafweerk: Interesting. Since I'm not an expert, I will have to concede your point. I had always marvelled at how the Zulu, for example, were able to fight effectively against firearms. Perhaps your explanation gives some hints as to why (there were, of course, other factors such as organization and tactics etc.).

So, if we assume that Civ4 riflemen are supposed to represent earlier rather than later rifles, should a bonus against Cavalry be applied to Infantry? Or is that even necessary, considering their base strength?

Are you going to be recuriting people to do 3d modeling for the units?

As a student physics I hate how all the civ games treat this subject. In all Civ games Physics is a tech you develop during the renaisance. In reality however, only a small part of physics was 'discovered' (Classical Mechanics, by Newton) during that time, it wasn't until the beginning of the 20th century that most physical theories were developed (Relativity (Einstein), Quantum Mechanics (Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Dirac)), however, this game gives the impression that all of this was developed much earlier. The tech name 'physics' is way too general here. (Same could be said for Mathematics, but I don't have any historical knowledge about this.)

My suggestion:

'Astronomy', move it two spots to the left in the tree. This will also allow ships to explore the ocean a bit earlier. Rename 'Physics' into 'Classical Mechanics' and place it directly right of 'Astronomy', no longer depending on 'Scientific Methods', but only on 'Astronomy'.

'Scientific Methods' (move it one spot to the left) should require 'Classical Mechanics' or 'Chemistry'.

'Electricity' (also move it one spot to the left) should require 'Scientific Methods'.

Electricity should lead to both 'Theory of Relativity' and 'Quantum Mechanics'. Both of these should be required for 'Fission'. First civ to research both of these gets one free tech or a great scientist.

Add 'Superconductivity', which requires "Refrigeration' and 'Quantum Mechanics', make this needed for all Space Ship parts.

- No City Razing defaulted to true. I dont like this option. You should be forced to deal with a capture.

I think it's a bad idea, in several games I had to raze enemy city that were near a spot for one of my futur city. And you don't want to capture city that are surrounded by desert or tundra, that will do nothing but increase your upkeep.

In fact if you could add a way to destroy cities (generaly cities you gain by revolt are to close to your other cities), that would be great (not instantaneously but in a number of turns depending of the size of the city)



Upgrade for fort (with tech or new improvement)
I've 2 ideas :
If you have 2 forts with units and close enough, the line between them cannot be crossed by enemy units. You cannot build fort near 2 or more mountains.
And/Or
Give Fort a ZoC, enemy units in it (if you have the right tech) :
cannot heal
have -x% in defense
take little damage each turn (with a new guerrilla tech ?)
etc...


New tech "high speed train", with electricity and railroad (or add to plastics) :
change movement cost of railroad to 1/15 or 1/20 and +25% on trade routes income


PS: As you can surely see english is not my native language

how about making it so we can load a multi-player save game. its kinda anoying playing a game then saving it and findin gout you cant load it up the next day and continue

Wow we all talk alot at work huh? Addicts!!!!! haha.

Ok. Lets get down to it shall we!

bebear - No worries mate. I was a bit snappy anyways :) I have put alot of thought into the AI is all, and I am busy testing their responses and abilities to use things. As far as their usage of 'buildable resources' goes, in my test game, I am *JUST* at that point, so not sure yet ;) If they dont, its easy enough to make them do it (youd be suprised).

About Rhye's World Map - I will ask Rhye if I can include it today :)



Ohhhh, you just gave me a world of ideas there!!! Heres the idea I just got off that (Everyone pay attention here!!! What do you all think?): Instead of creating different specialized unit for all the different variations of arms and equipment in the later game; All units with this type of specialization capability starts out with enough experience to use at *least* one promotion; This first set of default promotions contains possible specializations (which have penalties as well).


So, for example:

Cruiser/Destroyer
First Rank Specializations:
AEGIS Outfit
Sonar Outfit
Artillary Outfit

Tank
First Rank Specializations:
Long-Range Firing Outfit
Anti-Infantry Outfit
Occupational Outfit

These are just ideas...those tank ones a re pretty stupid, but you get the idea.

ORR!!!! We could do it this way: We add a button to these units in their actions to change outfits/firing setups (This would take 2-3 turns). Soooo...you could just hot-swap your units to different techniques. This opens up a HUGE range of new types:
- You can setup firing formations for your infantry/musketman/etc.
- You can setup different outfits on your ships
- You can setup different ammunition for your aircraft missions
- You can setup different outfits and manuvers for your tanks

I love this idea....what does everyone think? The only issue I see with this is the AI is very unlikely to use it (Unless it was in promotion format). And I cannot modify the AI this far. But, on the other hand, we make sure specialized setups are penalized enough that AI with generalized units can fight them as well. (Until next year when the SDK comes out and I can fix it).



OKAY! Now that Im done blabbing about that:

Lachlan - Yup! Im into the idea, and looking into it :)

GroggyGrognard - You are correct sir. Firing lines were employed very quickly (in retrospect) after the wide-ranged use of them became popular. (In Civ4 standards, when grenadiers come into play is when firing lines were most popular).



I have already began to tweak them. I already upped the building destruction of nukes very very high, and there was already an undocomuented change to Nukes Combat power (I Tripled it ;) )


Anyways, next on the agenda:

Who all would be serious about assisting with this mod? If you would want to, email me jaynus@gmail.com and let me know what you can do for it (Unit creation/skinning, xml, python coding with me, etc.) I'll check people out and see if theres anyone thats looking to go the same way as me :)

i think for ship outfits the actions should only be available in cities, honestly whens the last time an AEGIS system was shiped to a vessel in open seas? its not exactly legos


ive been thinking about the shipping goods idea... what if there was a unit that you can order to load goods(the cities output) into, like the production output, lets say theres 10 per turn, you order the unit to load hammers, then move it to another city and drop off the goods their, again from the vessle standpoint, its seems pretty real that some of the components can be made in say ohio and shipped to florda, like the beds for example

maybe have the unit upgradable over time, like to increase movement speed, or a multiplier where you get a slight increase in material when delievering to other cities(loading and unloading in the same city wouldnt yeild anything for balance/exploit reasons, but prehaps a solid multiplier for the units tech level and a variable multiplier based on the distance to make the unit worth using)

Mr- Jaynus I have just one more request and Ill leave ya be =)

about the world map, if he says its ok to add to your mod can you change the victory conditions to optional select mode? I dont like playing worrying how many turns i have and/or loosing because someone built a freaking spaceship or because another country is good as kissing butt(diplomacy) I want conquer or total removal off all civs to win the games I like to play =) Can this be done?

thanks Ill leave ya be :crazyeye:

Krafweerk, I get the feeling we could have some long-winded conversations about this topic. :D

Jaynus added redcoats, and the french have the actual musketeers not the vanilla musketmen...perhaps those wouldnt have the disadvantage...but id say your average line of musketmen would break after thier first volley failed to slow the charging knights.

Here's the tricky thing. 'Proper' musketry came to the fore in the time where organized standing armies were starting to become more popular, in the 1500's, mainly because it allowed for organized units to be created from those of less-than-noble classes cheaply and efficiently. Standing armies were more compatible with the rather dynamic political situations at the time, compared to having an army based mainly on nobility, peasants, and mercenaries - it took less time to muster a force to battle. And that's not to mention a heck of a lot cheaper to maintain. So when it is said that musketry put war into the hands of the peasantry and the lower class, muskets weren't doled out to just any old person, there was some organization and trained discipline involved. I'm personally in the thought that it was this sort of unit the designers of the game were trying to evince, rather than units formed in the somewhat disorganized transition from archery into firearms.


Ill also look up the amount of time a combat horse can close the distance between the first volley, and the musketmen. At a full run, a horse can make it 100 yards in 25-30 seconds or so...how many volleys could you get off at them in that time? How effective would they be? If you waited to fire until your most effective range (30 yards) wouldnt it be to late? A horse can close 90 feet in just a few seconds. Of course we're not even considering the tactics used by horsemen agianst lines of infantry, such as a zig zagged approach, or a circling manuver where the circle closes in each rotation (like the indians, who were masters of beating the gun without having them themselves) even short charges then feints...or lateral manuvering to waste the lines ammo, exhaust the soldiers, and minimize the fire taken...or in the best case scenerio...rotate the line to follow you, so a second unit could charge in and break the line.

Well, given that knights and calvary had to maintain close formation so they can crash into a unit with maximum effectiveness and weight of assault, accuracy is less of an issue for musketry than one might think. A wide front of horses compressed into a narrow front to hit a line of troops can get quite dense. That close packing would cause issues for the knights as well. As to feints and dodges, those only work as well as the army opposite the mounted troops are willing to give them, not to mention the extra strain you subject to horses and riders that's not directed at the enemy, etc.

Then we get into conversations about taking advantage of terrain and conditions (which Native Americans were quite adept at doing, btw), army discipline, just how badly crupper sores affected morale, who had the biggest case of the piles during a particular battle, and the like. I'm sure the rest of this particular board won't appreciate that, I get the feeling. :)

Though I must admit (to bring my post back on-topic, again) that this conversation brings up another possible mod. Now, for all I know, this mod might just be downright impossible to do, so if I'm reaching, I can certainly understand. With all the mention of pikemen and other auxiliary units with the musketmen, I'm beginning to wonder if we can somehow apply a 'combined arms' bonus for the units in the stack involved with the attack, but not directly attacking or being attacked. I can see it working in a 'carry the bonus over' sort of way. For example, if you have a musketmen unit stacked with a pikemen unit, and the musketmen is attacked by a mounted unit, can some of the bonus from the pikemen unit be carried over into the defense of the musketmen? Maybe in the region of 30% of the effect of full bonus, or such? And possibly with different advancements (radio, for one, then computers), the percentage increasing to 50%, 75%, etc. Of course, there are complications - what constitutes 30% of a barrage, for one. What I'm hoping is that it'll be more of an incentive to include different sorts of units in every stack. Now, convincing the AI to take advantage of the program would be a feat, of course.

Just a brief musing. (Yeah, right.)

With all the mention of pikemen and other auxiliary units with the musketmen, I'm beginning to wonder if we can somehow apply a 'combined arms' bonus for the units in the stack involved with the attack, but not directly attacking or being attacked. I can see it working in a 'carry the bonus over' sort of way. For example, if you have a musketmen unit stacked with a pikemen unit, and the musketmen is attacked by a mounted unit, can some of the bonus from the pikemen unit be carried over into the defense of the musketmen? Maybe in the region of 30% of the effect of full bonus, or such? And possibly with different advancements (radio, for one, then computers), the percentage increasing to 50%, 75%, etc. Of course, there are complications - what constitutes 30% of a barrage, for one. What I'm hoping is that it'll be more of an incentive to include different sorts of units in every stack. Now, convincing the AI to take advantage of the program would be a feat, of course.



Now THAT is a superb idea. Might be something that has to wait for the full sdk.

I think im going to have to learn how to mod civilization now. I told myself after quake id never learn all that stuff agian, but ive just got to many cool things id like to do with this.


With the muskets, I guess it really comes down to "what" the musket unit in civilization is a representation of. That seems to be where differ the most, and the probable source of our disagreement.

Ive never really understood the gunpowder progression really. It starts with musketeers, which in some versions, are shown with an arquebus (sp?), though in others its the british "brown bess". Thats almost 150 years apart. Also it skips line infantry, and goes straight to rifleman...which have had a civilwar getup at times. I was under the assumption that world war 1 was the first "riflemen", and that carried through until post-vietnam. Civilization though gives us an interim unit, the infantry...which has always had a world war two outfit. So they made a distinction between a riflemen, and slightly more modern infantry. Then of course they top off with mech.inf, or modern infantry. Which seems fairly self explanitory...those are the soldiers who have GPS, ride in helicopters, drive hummers, etc.

What I dont get is that instead of putting an interim unit between the musketeer and riflemen, they put it between the riflemen and modern infantry. So it leaves a 300-500 year gap. Though rifleman, infantry, modern infantry, only spans 100 years of technology.

Perhaps theres room for a few new units? Militia, linemen, skirmershirs....

Ohhhh, you just gave me a world of ideas there!!! Heres the idea I just got off that (Everyone pay attention here!!! What do you all think?): Instead of creating different specialized unit for all the different variations of arms and equipment in the later game; All units with this type of specialization capability starts out with enough experience to use at *least* one promotion; This first set of default promotions contains possible specializations (which have penalties as well).


So, for example:

Cruiser/Destroyer
First Rank Specializations:
AEGIS Outfit
Sonar Outfit
Artillary Outfit

Tank
First Rank Specializations:
Long-Range Firing Outfit
Anti-Infantry Outfit
Occupational Outfit

These are just ideas...those tank ones a re pretty stupid, but you get the idea.

ORR!!!! We could do it this way: We add a button to these units in their actions to change outfits/firing setups (This would take 2-3 turns). Soooo...you could just hot-swap your units to different techniques. This opens up a HUGE range of new types:
- You can setup firing formations for your infantry/musketman/etc.
- You can setup different outfits on your ships
- You can setup different ammunition for your aircraft missions
- You can setup different outfits and manuvers for your tanks

I love this idea....what does everyone think? The only issue I see with this is the AI is very unlikely to use it (Unless it was in promotion format). And I cannot modify the AI this far. But, on the other hand, we make sure specialized setups are penalized enough that AI with generalized units can fight them as well. (Until next year when the SDK comes out and I can fix it).


My idea of new equipment later on in the game is that (If you can) make a second type of upgrades that can be bought for cretin types of already existing units. The unit for, example the Cruiser, must be in a city with a harbor, barracks, or airport, depending on the unit, and buy the upgrade as well as ends the turn for that unit. This is much like a standard upgrade to the unit but costs much less. This makes sense for units don't get equipment upgrades from exp., they become more efficient from working together thus the increased speed from exp. or ability to traverse forests such as the woodsman. Also it is more historically accurate in that modern armies retrofit their units more then replace them. Maybe have a limit on the upgrades like you can only have two on each unit or study what upgrades were large enough that only one could be put on the unit for space reasons.

My examples are:

Cruiser/Destroyer
First Rank Specializations:
AEGIS Outfit
Cruse Missile carrying ability
Anti Sub Depth Charges (Increase Damage to Subs)

Tank
NBC defensive equipment (Reduces damage from nukes)
ATGMs (Anti-Tank Guided Missiles)(increase damage to tanks)
reactive armor (Reduces damage from RPGs and ATGMs)

Just my two cents
P.S. my first post

this all looks very exciting but i was just wondering if anyone can say how AI adapts to this mod?

Is it able to adjust (ie is it able to take advantage of new ablilities of units etc) and still be an effective opponent?

Akaz

Great Idea. Playing through to see if its better than vanilla.

Just make sure the changes adapt to be useable by the AI.

How about making the ICBM more powerful now? Right now they are useless. How do we all feel about stronger ICBM?

With all the mention of pikemen and other auxiliary units with the musketmen, I'm beginning to wonder if we can somehow apply a 'combined arms' bonus for the units in the stack involved with the attack, but not directly attacking or being attacked. I can see it working in a 'carry the bonus over' sort of way. For example, if you have a musketmen unit stacked with a pikemen unit, and the musketmen is attacked by a mounted unit, can some of the bonus from the pikemen unit be carried over into the defense of the musketmen? Maybe in the region of 30% of the effect of full bonus, or such? And possibly with different advancements (radio, for one, then computers), the percentage increasing to 50%, 75%, etc. Of course, there are complications - what constitutes 30% of a barrage, for one. What I'm hoping is that it'll be more of an incentive to include different sorts of units in every stack. Now, convincing the AI to take advantage of the program would be a feat, of course.

Just a brief musing. (Yeah, right.)

The game already accounts for "combined arms" in stacks. If a mounted unit attacks your stack containing a musketman and a pikeman, it WILL NOT be attacking the muskteman, but the pikeman -- it can't choose. The pikeman will automatically take up the defense because it is the stronger unit (12 vs. mounted, as opposed to a musketman's 9). So your example isn't something that would actually happen in the game unless the pikeman is injured to the point where it's strength is below 9 -- in which case we witness a reasonable representation of a force of pikemen reduced to too few numbers to properly defend their musketmen.

Obviously this isn't a perfect reproduction of how battles work, but it is sufficient, and moreover it's not overly complex. If you want to get into more complexity and alter the battle system, that's up to you, but I'd rather keep that aspect as is.

How about making the ICBM more powerful now? Right now they are useless. How do we all feel about stronger ICBM?


What we need are more types of ICBMs

Per the Wiki:

American

* Atlas (SM-65, CGM-16) former ICBM launched from silo, now the rocket is used for other purposes
* Titan I (SM-68, HGM-25A)
* Titan II (SM-68B, LGM-25C) - former ICBM launched from silo, now the rocket is used for other purposes
* Minuteman I (SM-80, LGM-30A/B, HSM-80)
* Minuteman II (LGM-30F)
* Minuteman III (LGM-30G) - launched from silo - as of June 28, 2004, there are 517 Minuteman III missiles in active inventory
* LG-118A Peacekeeper / MX (LG-118A, MX) - silo-based; 29 missiles were on alert at the beginning of 2004; all are to be removed from service by 2005.
* Midgetman - has never been operational - launched from mobile launcher
* Polaris A1, A2, A3 - (UGM-27/A/B/C) former SLBM
* Poseidon C3 - (UGM-73) former SLBM
* Trident - (UGM-93A/B) SLBM - Trident II (D5) was first deployed in 1990 and is planned to be deployed past 2020

Russian

* SS-6 SAPWOOD / R-7 / 8K71
* SS-7 SADDLER / R-16
* SS-8 SASIN / R9
* SS-9 SCARP
* SS-11 SEGO
* SS-17 SPANKER
* SS-18 SATAN / R-36M2 / Voivode
* SS-19 STILLETO
* SS-24 SCALPEL / RT-23
* SS-25 SICKLE / Topol
* SS-27 / Topol-M

All of those have different capabilities and yields...some nuclear, some non-nuclear...

Some ICBMs arent going to make it over the atlantic or pacific, and only hold small yield nuclear weapons. Other weapons, like the soviet MIRV, can hit 5 different cities with several medium yeild nuclear weapons, anywhere in the world at the push of a button.

Ive never really understood the gunpowder progression really. It starts with musketeers, which in some versions, are shown with an arquebus (sp?), though in others its the british "brown bess". Thats almost 150 years apart. Also it skips line infantry, and goes straight to rifleman...which have had a civilwar getup at times. I was under the assumption that world war 1 was the first "riflemen", and that carried through until post-vietnam. Civilization though gives us an interim unit, the infantry...which has always had a world war two outfit. So they made a distinction between a riflemen, and slightly more modern infantry. Then of course they top off with mech.inf, or modern infantry. Which seems fairly self explanitory...those are the soldiers who have GPS, ride in helicopters, drive hummers, etc.

What I dont get is that instead of putting an interim unit between the musketeer and riflemen, they put it between the riflemen and modern infantry. So it leaves a 300-500 year gap. Though rifleman, infantry, modern infantry, only spans 100 years of technology.

Perhaps theres room for a few new units? Militia, linemen, skirmershirs....

"Musketmen" would denote your typical line infantry wielding flintlock musket and bayonet, say for example, from the napoleanic times. I think they left out the matchlock (Harquebus) because it wasn't very effective... although revolutionary in that it was the precursor to the flintlock musket.

After that, riflemen would most definitely be accurately portrayed as civil war era. Rifles were the single most defining thing about the Civil War. It was the first war involving guns where it actually paid to aim (although it took them awhile to realize this). By 1863 the vast majority of infantry were equipped with rifled muskets firing minie's. In fact, in its latest stages the ACW very much foreshadowed WW1 with its trench warfare.

Infantry then would be the typical WW2 infantry I would think. I wouldn't label these as "slightly more modern". As I'm sure you know, WW2 infantry, Vietnam war, etc were all equipped with automatic, extremely accurate weapons.. carried grenades, radio communication... etc. There was a vast jump from the rifleman to the infantryman of WWII on.

Following that would be Mech. Infantry. I think this is rather obvious. Modern infantry that relies on superior training and technology, radar, advanced weapons, kevlar, etc.

I really think the most confusing part is the graphics used in game. The "Musketeer" should look more like your typical napoleanic lineman instead of an old crusader equipped with matchlock, and your riflemen should look more like your civil war era infantryman. The "Infantry" unit should look more "WW2".

Thats my take on it, and int hat context, it makes perfect sense to me.

As far as the mod is concerned, I think Musketmen would be vulnerable to cavalry to an extent, but I think that is modeled fairly. They could assume square formation after all, but still could get decimated by cavalry if caught off gaurd.

With the advent of rifles cavalry became nothing more than mounted infantry, and was only replaced when motorized transportation become more convenient and reliable. Charging men with rifles on horseback was suicide.

As far as Zones of Control I would strongly suggest not implementing it if you are after realism. Although I fully understand why people would want this, I just don't think its realistic at all. You have to keep in mind the absolutlely enormous stretch of land each tile represents, especially on larger maps. I dont think one unit could assert much more control than over that area it already is in. War is a terrible and messy affair, and if you're fighting a war with a neighboring country you should fully expect to have your lands pillaged and burned. Limiting this should be very difficult, and having a spaced out wall of infantry just seems contrived and "gamey" to me.

Remember if a unit bypasses your borders and penetrates too deep, he is endangering himself enough. Hes surrounded by enemy troops and hostile terrain. That should be risk enough to deter that kind of behavious without having to resort to human walls.

What I would suggest to balance this out, however, is something I think Civ has always overlooked. Units should get a base increase to their fighting strength when they are fighting within their borders. Say 25% increase. Anytime a unit is fighting in its homeland it has numerous advantages-- knowledge of terrian, friendly locals, shorter supply routes, while the enemy has all the corresponding disadvantages. Perhaps this "bonus" would only take effect after discovering nationalism.

In the same vien, I think amping up nukes is a mistake. Again, each tile represents an enormous area, and to think that one nuke would entirely wipe out that much space is unrealistic. Perhaps with todays more advanced nukes that would be possible, I really don't know. I do know that the nukes that were dropped in hiroshima and nagasaki weren't even powerful enough to destroy a city, let alone the vast area represented by one tile. (I look at civ4 "cities" as more of states, with the city itself being the capital) Perhaps seperating nukes in to categories, early atom bombs and the later hydrogen bombs which would be more powerful would be the answer. That said I think the bunker and bomb shelter improvements are silly and should be removed.

so i am guessing no one eles is haveing problems saving and loading this cool mod other then me and a friend.

so i am guessing no one eles is haveing problems saving and loading this cool mod other then me and a friend.


I feel your pain :sad:

I can't load saved games from it

Hmm, are you loading the mod before the savegames? Do you have some other files in your CustomAssets directory?

That was the idea :)

Sorry, I suppose I wasn't clear enough on the changelog. I was just stating 'requirements' because they are all in the prereq section. My bad, I'll change it to make it clearer :blush:

EDIT: Oh and as a side note, im thinking about adding a 'Nuclear Reactor' tech that would enable uranium as an alternate, as well as moving the "Nuclear powerplant' to this tech, and creating a new sub and carrier units, 'Carrier' and 'Nuclear Carrier', as well as 'Submarine', and 'Nuclear Submarine', both having significant movement bonuses, while the 'nuclear carrier' would have a size bonus, based on the fact nuclear power enabled ships to get..well...bigger.
If you build a ship in a city with a drydock you can give it promotions. Can't you make 'Install nuclear reactor' a promotion for naval units?

The main problem with nukes is they dont do squat dmg to the city itself. I think nukes should destroy 75% of all buildings in the city (excluding wonders) and 75% of the population, 50% with bomb shelters. I have no problem with the terrain dmg they do, that part seems fine to me.

Hmm, are you loading the mod before the savegames? Do you have some other files in your CustomAssets directory?


yes I am loading the mod up first but it still says i need to load it anyway when i open the saved game and gives me the option to restart and load the mod, but that comes up with errors.....

Ido have other files in the custom assests folder (is that whats screwing it up???)

first for all, its a good mod, and it starts making more sense then original civ4 gameplay in my opinion.
i didnt read all the post before, but i ll add my thoughts to the sheet here.

- what i find a lack is the speed, at which the space race is coming by. it almost gives me no chance to fight wars with tanks, infantery, battleships, etc, like the WW II in our history. technologies are researched so fast at this stage of the game, that a long lasting confilict almost never happens.

- unit upgrading: i would like this to be cheap. real cheap. because in my games, i still use archers, for example, as defence in the cities, for sure along with modern defenders like infantery. at least, these archers can hinder the enemy to invade the city for a turn, so they still have a purpose. so, for realism and gameplay reasons, i would lower the upgrading costs dramatically, so i have the financial possibility to upgrade my units. in no army nowadays archers are present. with some balancing it should be possible to do it in a way, where upgrading to the best units is expansive, but upgrading to a level below the last technology units is cheap.

- yes, and add some aspects to religions, as discussed often before..

greetings
ka
www.3dtowns.at

everythings great :goodjob:, but I can't load any save file with that mod. :cry:

Anyone know how to fix this?

yes I am loading the mod up first but it still says i need to load it anyway when i open the saved game and gives me the option to restart and load the mod, but that comes up with errors.....

Ido have other files in the custom assests folder (is that whats screwing it up???)

Try loading the mod BEFORE loading the game, DON´T load the game, wait for it to ask you about the mod and then load, there might be a bug somewhere.

Depending on what other files you are using it might cause conflicts, check if the ones on your CustomAssets are the same as in the mod, if they are remove them and try loading the savegame. If that doesn´t help, remove all of them and then add one by one if you want them back.

Also if your game has cache folder somewhere delete everything inside of it.

Instead of loading the game, it is also possible to load your save game directly from windows explorer.

Go to \My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Saves\single and just double click on your save file.

It will automatically start the game with the correct mod loaded (assuming you did not update the mod during a game).

im nearly done with a terra game on the new release of your mod... no real big problems(the cities all defualted to building a gunsmith when i got the tech for it, that was annoying) well.... i WAS nearly done with it....... the friggen game crashed when i came back to it after taking a shower.... one more turn you know

Hopefully ICBMs will be made more powerful in the next version. How is the current version playtesting going?

Roads and rails in Civ have always been something that bothered me a little bit.

There always comes a time in the game when you have too many workers to know what to do with them all so you end up paving roads over every square you own. (At least this always happens to me.) Later, when you get the techs for rails, the same thing happens.

I would like there to be some incentive for players to not put down both roads or rails over every tile quite so quickly. And by incentive, I really probably mean punishment. The most obvious ways I can think of to do this would simply be: make it cost x gold per road you build, and y gold per rail you build (maybe on the order of 2, 5, 10 or 20 gold.) With this you'd still probably end up putting those tiles on every square, since its just a one time fee you have to pay, but at least it might slow it down. The other way would be to make the players pay a maintenance per turn for each road / rail you place. That might end up being too costly, but maybe something along the lines of 1 gold per 2-5 rails (and something similar, but lower, for roads) would be a big enough incentive for players not to do that. This would have to be balanced and play tested out. Also, some techs could slowly reduce the cost over time. So when you first get roads, perhaps they will be quite expensive to maintain, but as your civilization grows, you can have lots of roads. In the end game you'd probably have roads over all of your land. Perhaps at this point rails still have a substantial enough cost to make you think twice before just sprinkling down rails everywhere.

Afterall, these improvements all need to be maintained in reality. Roads have to be repaved, plowed, cleaned etc. Rails require locomotives on top of the same sort of long term maintanence that roads require.

Another little side idea I've had is the concept of a canal. Its bothered me for a long time that you can never build canals in Civ. If implemented, canals would just be land tiles which allow naval units to pass through. Of course, to prevent the same sort of thing that I mention with roads / rails, I would make an extremely large monetary cost for building a canal, plus relatively high tech level (around modern age, or perhaps just before.) I would probably make it take workers a long time to build a canal plus something like a cost of around 1000s of gold to build a canal.

I'm not sure on the specifics, but I'd welcome ideas on this, and if you guys think something like this would be a good idea for a realism mod.

BTW, I like what you've done so far with this mod.

I like the idea of producible resources. Now, instead of tech dumping to nations that are enemies to your enemies, you can resource dump. This seems much more realistic and fun. For example, England might give muskets to various native american tribes that were at war with the French (or vica-versa), rather than giving them all of the information and ability to make their own muskets. Now, those tribes can temporarily build units with muskets at the whim of the country supplying them.

I could see something similar being implemented for even more units, earlier and later in history. I could also see something like 2 sets of units for each unit present in the original game. Let me clarify: if someone is trading muskets to you, but you don't have the techs to actually make them yourself, you get a weaker version, say -1 strength. This would represent that you're probably not getting the best weapons, you're getting the older weapons that the country selling them to you doesn't want anymore. It would also represent the fact that your society might not clearly understand the appropriate tactics that you should be using with the particular weapon etc etc. The second unit would of course be the regular unit: the one in the original game. If you have the proper techs and aren't just trading for some rusty old guns, you get the full strength unit.

Maybe this is too complicated, but it sounds really cool to me, nonetheless.

On a side note, I don't like the concept of tech trading in Civ very much. I don't think you should be able to simply give a tech to a country. In reality, exposure to the concept of a technology doesn't instantly give your society all of its benefits. Mere exposure to technologies doesn't mean that your society can adapt to, and integrate them instantly. Some might say that buildings in your cities represent this development, but I still don't think thats good enough.

I think the concept of "tech trading" should be more of a passive process that occurs whenever you have contact with another civilization with a tech that you don't have. For example, if you have contact with another civilization with a tech you don't have, you should maybe get a 5 or 10 percent decrease in the tech's cost. This represents the fact that even though the other civilization has the tech, your people still need time to integrate it for themselves. If you have an open border with that country, it goes to reason that there are many people going back and forth between your countries, so the people from the other country will bring that technology with them. In game this might mean a greater reduction in cost compared to just having contact. This could be cumulative with others around you. If EVERYONE around you had a tech, and you had lots of contact with them, it wouldn't take your people long to develop that tech themselves. This might also mean that very small nations might still keep up a little closer in tech to the bigger nations. Poorer nations tend to be good sources for labour, so foreign investment modernizes them far quicker than how they would be on their own.

Again, lots of balancing would be required. This might also not be practical in terms of game play, I don't know. Many factors could modify the amount of benefit you get but I would suggest the main ones being: contact with the nation (you don't get any benefit until you at least have contact with the nation), civics, open borders, and distance (perhaps for simplicity just between your two capitals.)

Under civics, free market would encourage tech flow as you freely allow your businesses to do what they please, and accept foreign investment, etc. Mercantilism might discourage it, as well as reducing the bonus your neighbours get from techs you have.

Open borders obviously allow people to flow between your two countries, and with them those citizens will slowly bring the corresponding technologies.

Distance obviously slows the flow of ideas as fewer people tend to migrate and or trade: You do the most trade (in material goods and ideas) with those you are closest to.

I think in reality technology flowed more like above than by actually 'trading'. I would personally eliminate the current tech trading, period. Whether you might want to allow both 'passive' tech trading as I've outlined on top of the old style 'trading' or just implementing passive trading is of course up to you. With the introduction of producible resources like muskets etc, you can now trade the resources instead of the technologies and it makes a lot more sense in a historical perspective.

I have absolutely no problem with every tile on the map being paved and filled with railroads... in fact i think its pretty realistic...

[QUOTE=Krafweerk]This is a common misconception. Germany had all the oil it needed. It was just spread out and within easy reach of allied bombers. Germany had plans to take the north sea oil, and the oil in the cacauses. The oil in north africa and the middle east was well out of allied bomber range, and could produce much faster since it didnt have to worry about all the precautions that are takin due to bombing.

Countries like belgium, and poland, who had no oil of thier own, only trade agreements and stock piles, didnt build tanks at all. They built horsedrawn carraiges, and armoured cars. Which is why germany rolled right over them.

Germanys production, even after 1943 and the defeat at stalingrad, and the movement of the 8th airforce to britian, increased almost 50% every year until the wars end. Even when the 8th airforces B17s were dropping 100,000 tons of bombs a day on every target they could find in germany, thier production increased. The entire strategic bombing effort of the 8th airforce, while putting on a pretty show, and eliminating germanys airforce, was completely ineffective at putting a stop to such an industrialized nation.

Socialism was a major reason thier industry was so effective. The government had control over all contruction, public works projects, military production, resource movement, and operational planning. It was very organized and very effective.

If you flat out just dont have oil, you cant build factories, you cant fuel tanks and planes, you cant produce plastics, you cant smelt ore effectively, oil is, for lack of a better phrase, the most important resource on earth. He who controls the oil controls the universe.

Tell the poles, the chechs, the belgians, the algerians, the libyians that you can build tanks, ships, and planes without oil....theyll show you pictures of horsecarts dragging thier wounded away from the onslaught of panzers that just rolled over them.
QUOTE]
I suggest you read over your material a little more, this is one article I just found on short notice in regards to some of your claims:

http://www.kasprzyk.demon.co.uk/www/WW2.html

The Polish army had built and designed some of their own tanks that were quite effective. It was more a matter of numbers and the stages in modernization that Poland was in, coupled with the fact that Russia and Germany simultaneously attacked Poland that caused the German panzer to roll over them, as you say.

This above article says Poland had about 180 tanks at the onset of the German advance. Poland's airforce was 420 aircraft compared to Germany's 2000 that they used. Though they were highly outnumbered, they did still indeed have tanks and aircraft. I'm not sure whether or not Poland actually had her own supplies of oil. If what you say is true, and Poland didn't, the fact that she still built tanks and aircraft would suggest that you are incorrect about a country not being able to build such devices with no supply of their own.

Also, what you imply about the Czechs is inaccurate. Here is a quote from this site:

http://users.swing.be/tanks.edito/edito/3403.html

"The workhorse of the German Panzerwaffe at the start of the war was neither the Panzer III nor the Panzer IV, but the Czech tanks. The Panzer 35 (t) and the Panzer 38 (t) made up one quarter of the total strength in tanks in 1940-41."

Thats a hell of a lot of Czech tanks that the Germans used in their army.

Would it be possible maybe when the SDK comes out to include unit trading in the diplomacy screen. ICBM and Spies should be the next update. By the way where the heck is the Offical Patch? Is anyone else willing to help with this mod in the future, maybe anyone will 3d modeling skills.

An idea for your mod that you could implement once you have all of your others complete. Would it be at all possible to simulate disease in the game? As it stands now, Health is the only thing tjat relates to it and I am sure some don't find that satisfactory. What I was thinking is that the health meter is retained, but for every point of unhealthiness above the city's health, in addition to the current penalties, there would be a chance that disease would break out and kill a portion of your population, growing as the unhealthiness meter grows larger.

I noticed that you have a feature that simulates natural disaster, if an idea like this has been implemented, I apologize.

Hey guys!! Sorry, I've been cranking the mod lately and not respond, but I've been watching the posts! 0.7 is almost ready, it should be good to go by monday morning.

Anyways, now down to it! I love the discussion thats been going on, I've been reading it all very carefully and taking notes along the way ;) Im glad the playtesting has been going overall good, and that everyone is responding well to the changes im making. The next version has more tweaks (of course), but also some of the bigger changes we've all been discussing here. You'll just have to wait and see what I got done this weekend! You would hate to see my working directories, I have 3 copies of civ running multiple sets of python code AND more backup directories :(

Anyways, down to brass tackles here:

ANYONE HAVING SAVED GAME LOADING ISSUES
Heres the deal. There are some bugs with mod loading, customAssets, and saved games. Here are my recommendations:

#1. If your running another mod in customAssets besides mine, let me know what it is. If some are common, I will include them.

#2. some mods dont mix well. We all edit the same files, and my mod specifically is a major overhaul of nearly every single XML file there is. So, first things first; If your getting errors, backup your customAssets folder, and then delete it (dont worry, civ4 will re-create it empty).

#3. Next, if that doesnt work, delete your Civ4 Cache folder.

#4. NEXT, if that doesnt work, again make sure you have no other mods in customAssets :p If you are using the 'Load mod' option every single time you load the game, edit your Civ4 ini file (My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\CivilizationIV.ini). Replace this line:
Mod = 0
with this line:
Mod = Mods\Realism

if *NONE* of the above works, post here and I we can get together and work it out here, on aim, or via email.


Next up, answers!

To ICBM lovers everywhere - Major nuke havock coming with the next version! YAR!

Lord_all_Mighty - I've been watching the disease thread in the main forum since it first started; I liked the idea and plan on implementing it, but Im trying to keep my plate not-to-full, and have it filed for "when i have time to copy and paste alot" work. Basically, like everyone has said, its a modification to a new religion. Add the religion, make its bonus's negatives, etc; The problem comes in on ridding it, building modifications, and abolishing it with units. This is all custom python code I need to do, so I havn't implemented anything for it yet.

JakeCourtney - I will look into it and see if I need to wait for the SDK for it or not :)


Narcio & Krafweerk - Im glad you guys are around haha. Historical debates on everything im doing is a good thing. I get a headache from crunching dates and detailed history (history channel ftw), just let me know what the verdict is okay? :goodjo[COLOR="Red"]b: Narcio, I have some modifications to the civics simulating cross-border technological/cultural influences with the free market civics etc. As for the tech trading, I *totally* agree. I usually play with it off tbh, until I can dink with it.


Thanks for all the great input guys!! After the next version release, we need to get into more detailed simantics of gameplay!

Narcio I totally agree with you both when it comes to roads and what you say about techs. A support cost for roads and railroads would be the best solution, however I'm not sure the AI could handle it.

I've been thinking alot about trading techs and I usually just like jaynus play with the no-trading-tech option on. I think another game called Hearts of Iron 2 has this much better covered. In that game you just trade the blueprint for the tech, you still have to research it at sometime but at a much cheaper price. Perhaps something similiar could be done in Civ4?

The way I see it... roads can be made with simple stuff that's everywhere, so it should be possible to build roads everywhere. Railroad on the other hand, requires iron, so with the introduction of expendable recources, it's possible to limit the production.

Jaynus - I'm currently playing a 0.5 game and I find that the industrial and the modern age are still way too fast. I barely had rifleman and grenadiers and then I had to upgrade them already to infantry and machineguns.

I was with you up to about update 0.3

after that, I dunno, looks like you're adding stuff just to add it.

Changing the religions around could very well be a sore point for religious people (not me, but still), and for those of us not of a religious bent, it can alter the game strategy too much and create preferred religions based on game balance, which I think is exactly one of the things they smartly avoided when creating civ4.

Also, I'm not sure I got this right, but when you write about uploading muskets to a ship and sending it to another place for trade, do you mean we have to do it manually?
If so, what happens when you have 20 such 'trade' items?
Some things are definitely better off abstracted.
Correct me if I got it wrong, yes?

As for natural disasters and finite resources though, I'm definitely with you on this one, as well as making all techs slower after reaching the medievil period (the game seems to positively sprint ahead from there and you hardly get to play in those periods).

Also, natural disasters and finite resources are things I'm pretty sure the AI could actually handle..

First off I really don't think he is adding things haphazardly just for the hell of it. Anything that has been implemented that turns out not to work can simply be tweaked or removed. I personally don't agree with not being able to raze cities but I am playing the game that way and deciding whether or not it actually makes sense and works well (just for the record I don't raze cities very often, however I like to have the option just in case).

Religion is a sore point with me and here's why. The designers IMHO were a bunch of *******. :mad: If you read the manual they actually have a page note on how they don't want to offend anyone and so the ******* ***** didn't add any advantages or disadvantages to one religion over another. I have been over this with people many times about looking at it from a business perspective and not wanting to lose money. While I can understand that point of view I don't agree with it. So since Jaynus isn't doing this for money but to make the game better if some little zealot doesn't like the way his religion is portrayed then don't play the ******* thing. Sorry, like I said it was a sore point for me. :blush:

I agreewith Lightzy. It would be nice to play the modern era even slower than it already is. Techs are (in RL) researched faster, but thats why they made the turns shorter in later eras. At about 80%, you should be researching techs in about 10-20 turns through the game, if all the techs will be researched by turn 1125. Mayby more natural disasters in the industrial & modern era, if you put that in

I only just started to play this game, and found it far to fast so was glad when seeing a mod like this.

So ive not even completed game yet but started using this mod and im impressed.

Sure at the start its a little slow, you have to actualy decide on what techs you need, not just research them all.
With the slow development but fast unit building, wars started early. I was begged into battle against greece, and i accepted as they were far off, but that annoyed the russians who were my neighbours.
So building up a massive force of axemen and horse archers i invaded them before they could me and reduced them to 1 city.

I then made peace as i was low on troops and didnt want to over extend, all the new cities gave me an advantage for a while, but with no razing you have to actualy plan, as most area was jungle the cost to maintain was allot and started to put a drain on me till i planned cities better. And fact i didnt have ability to build villages yet.

The Ai seems to act more aggesive as they have larger forces, i finaly made contact with the other continent who were more advanced due to better land and they instantly started to threaten me and wiped out one of the weaker civs.

So mainly just wanted to say i love your mod. Everything seems fine so far, im at about 1200AD, so aint tested it with more modern tech yet.

Cant wait for Expendable resources, they should spark more wars as they should, when you run out of horses or such as see your neighbours still have some :)
And cant wait to see how you manage Natural disasters.

Would be nice to see religion cause more tension though.

Can u include a full list of the mod changes in the first post

Hey guys!! Sorry, I've been cranking the mod lately and not respond, but I've been watching the posts! 0.7 is almost ready, it should be good to go by monday morning.

Anyways, now down to it! I love the discussion thats been going on, I've been reading it all very carefully and taking notes along the way ;) Im glad the playtesting has been going overall good, and that everyone is responding well to the changes im making. The next version has more tweaks (of course), but also some of the bigger changes we've all been discussing here. You'll just have to wait and see what I got done this weekend! You would hate to see my working directories, I have 3 copies of civ running multiple sets of python code AND more backup directories :(

Anyways, down to brass tackles here:

ANYONE HAVING SAVED GAME LOADING ISSUES
Heres the deal. There are some bugs with mod loading, customAssets, and saved games. Here are my recommendations:

#1. If your running another mod in customAssets besides mine, let me know what it is. If some are common, I will include them.

#2. some mods dont mix well. We all edit the same files, and my mod specifically is a major overhaul of nearly every single XML file there is. So, first things first; If your getting errors, backup your customAssets folder, and then delete it (dont worry, civ4 will re-create it empty).

#3. Next, if that doesnt work, delete your Civ4 Cache folder.

#4. NEXT, if that doesnt work, again make sure you have no other mods in customAssets :p If you are using the 'Load mod' option every single time you load the game, edit your Civ4 ini file (My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\CivilizationIV.ini). Replace this line:
Mod = 0
with this line:
Mod = Mods\Realism

if *NONE* of the above works, post here and I we can get together and work it out here, on aim, or via email.


Next up, answers!

To ICBM lovers everywhere - Major nuke havock coming with the next version! YAR!

Lord_all_Mighty - I've been watching the disease thread in the main forum since it first started; I liked the idea and plan on implementing it, but Im trying to keep my plate not-to-full, and have it filed for "when i have time to copy and paste alot" work. Basically, like everyone has said, its a modification to a new religion. Add the religion, make its bonus's negatives, etc; The problem comes in on ridding it, building modifications, and abolishing it with units. This is all custom python code I need to do, so I havn't implemented anything for it yet.

JakeCourtney - I will look into it and see if I need to wait for the SDK for it or not :)


Narcio & Krafweerk - Im glad you guys are around haha. Historical debates on everything im doing is a good thing. I get a headache from crunching dates and detailed history (history channel ftw), just let me know what the verdict is okay? :goodjo[COLOR="Red"]b: Narcio, I have some modifications to the civics simulating cross-border technological/cultural influences with the free market civics etc. As for the tech trading, I *totally* agree. I usually play with it off tbh, until I can dink with it.


Thanks for all the great input guys!! After the next version release, we need to get into more detailed simantics of gameplay!

eh weekly updates are just fine by me, gives us more time to "test" your mod

The game just crashed again, so I decided to let you know how things were going with your mod. Your main gripe with the main game was that techs were researched too fast, but I just finished researching the last tech at 1729 AD. I didn't notice until then that you took out future tech, so I just dumped all of my money into culture. Anyway, having nuclear reactors in 1729 doesn't seem like what you were going for, so I thought I'd let you know. By the way, I was playing on Noble with no tech trading. With tech trading, I imagine I could've finished sooner. I love the work you've done, and I can't wait for version 0.7.

[QUOTE]
I suggest you read over your material a little more, this is one article I just found on short notice in regards to some of your claims:

http://www.kasprzyk.demon.co.uk/www/WW2.html

The Polish army had built and designed some of their own tanks that were quite effective. It was more a matter of numbers and the stages in modernization that Poland was in, coupled with the fact that Russia and Germany simultaneously attacked Poland that caused the German panzer to roll over them, as you say.


I would call them armored cars, not tanks. I dont even know if light tank is a good description of them. Several mms of armor to stop rifle caliber rounds, and a swivel, handcrank, or electric turret with a gun in it, doesnt nessacarily mean its a "tank". I guess the name still fits the definition, but not the spirit of a "tank".



This above article says Poland had about 180 tanks at the onset of the German advance. Poland's airforce was 420 aircraft compared to Germany's 2000 that they used. Though they were highly outnumbered, they did still indeed have tanks and aircraft. I'm not sure whether or not Poland actually had her own supplies of oil. If what you say is true, and Poland didn't, the fact that she still built tanks and aircraft would suggest that you are incorrect about a country not being able to build such devices with no supply of their own.


Most of polands tanks were imported. Some of them Czech like the 38T. Some of them french or finnish like the Wz19...they built thier own as well. I still would classify them as armored cars, as none of them were capable of stopping a 37mm round fired from any of light or medium panzers and pak AT guns. Even the 20mm autocannons on 232s, PanzerIs and IIs could penetrate the armor of anything poland had.

Without a large supply of materials (and im sure poland had some of its own oil, oil is everywhere, but not in a signifigant amount that they could survive without importing it.) like oil, steel, and skilled labour, you arent going to be able to research and design new tanks....what you CAN do, is purchase the design, import the materials to produce a factory, tool that factory for that design, and then churn out as many as your own resources can handle (which in poland, was apparently 180 tanks :P its not like they didnt know Hitler was comming) Since global buisiness was a new thing back then, its fairly likely the course of events was something like: Company in poland presents an investment plan to a tank manufacturer somewhere else in the world, and uses the investment capital to build the factory, which will turn out so many tanks a year, and some of those tanks will be being manufactured for the investor.

Germany used alot of those kinds of things to get around the treaty limitations. Private buisinesses were building an army...not germany.




Also, what you imply about the Czechs is inaccurate. Here is a quote from this site:

http://users.swing.be/tanks.edito/edito/3403.html

"The workhorse of the German Panzerwaffe at the start of the war was neither the Panzer III nor the Panzer IV, but the Czech tanks. The Panzer 35 (t) and the Panzer 38 (t) made up one quarter of the total strength in tanks in 1940-41."

Thats a hell of a lot of Czech tanks that the Germans used in their army.

Because germany facilitated that. It was also key in building up strength before actually breaking the treaty. Though it turned out that the tanks werent really all that great. They were all replaced within a year. Though the 38T remained in service throughout the war in police units, and eventually became the design for the Hetzer I believe...

But the overall point is that it wasnt possible for Poland to design a Stug, or Tiger, or Panther, or really much of anything. Let alone mass produce it. All that infrastructure is dependant on resources...if you dont have them....you may have the capability to design and build a few of them, really bad mock offs each one, but youre not capable of produce a number or quality thats signifigant enough to warrant being able to build high technology in mass without the appropiate resources...not even building them really really really slowly.

The hoover help for the Pacifism civic says "+125% birthrate" and "100% percent birthrate with state religion".Does this mean +225% birthrate in cities with state religion or is it just a relict from the vanilla game in the help?

ok i must ask.... what the heck is venilla

The unmodded game.

ok i must ask.... what the heck is venilla


Vanilla = plain; ordinary; unchanged

Vanilla civ4 would be civ4 without any mods or patches other than offical ones.

I disagree.
I think changes to specific religions ARE changes just for the sake of change.

It's the same as if you decided to give every civilization more unique bonuses to differentiate them.
It may even be balanced, but it'll be AOE, not CIV.
And not anything to be tauted as a 'realism mod'.


Oh, and should definitely add a toggle to switch on and off the ability to raze cities.
I personally would play with it off, because I DO appreciate the added strategic element (makes it that sometimes its actually better for you to coexist with someone simply because those cities would do you more harm than good), but I suppose many would lament the lack of choice here, and it doesn't do to alienate people over such a minor thing :)

ok so i cleared my cache and droped the mod in the lionhead main mod directory and i use the click on save game to load mod. and i am able to save and load my mod games. thanks fo rthe help here and the nice person wo enabled the serch fuction on the fouroms again.

The hoover help for the Pacifism civic says "+125% birthrate" and "100% percent birthrate with state religion".Does this mean +225% birthrate in cities with state religion or is it just a relict from the vanilla game in the help?

I'm using Pacifism now and it's +225% from this civic alone now, so my total becomes 325%, not counting any other buildings.

Even with 6 units in all my cities and an offensive force, this is really worth it, especially considering I have Caste System several World Wonders.

I'm using the civic (can't remember it's name) that reduces my regular unit upkeep to reduce the expenses a bit, and the +1 happiness/soldier civic.

This is a nice mod, it looks promising, I'm sure it will develop even better with later versions. Can there be more types of civics added into Civ 4? Add more various stuff like technology, buildings, resources and this will become a perfect mod. Ofcourse everything within the borders of realism. ;) Great work btw!

(...)
Oh, and should definitely add a toggle to switch on and off the ability to raze cities.
I personally would play with it off, because I DO appreciate the added strategic element (makes it that sometimes its actually better for you to coexist with someone simply because those cities would do you more harm than good), but I suppose many would lament the lack of choice here, and it doesn't do to alienate people over such a minor thing :)

You have misunderstood him:

- No City Razing defaulted to true. I dont like this option. You should be forced to deal with a capture.

It just means that the option is now checked, when you enter the setup screen.You are still free the uncheck it and to raze again...


I'm using Pacifism now and it's +225% from this civic alone now, so my total becomes 325%, not counting any other buildings.

Even with 6 units in all my cities and an offensive force, this is really worth it, especially considering I have Caste System several World Wonders.

I'm using the civic (can't remember it's name) that reduces my regular unit upkeep to reduce the expenses a bit, and the +1 happiness/soldier civic.

Hmm, I haven't tried it...but my feeling says this is a bit too much.Why? I never had the impression that Pacifism is too weak under standard rules.

I agree, playing Gandhi with world wonders and national wonders I had a Great leader every 10-20 turns, I think it´s a bit too much.

I definitely think people should definitely be able to build multiple improvements on a tile. Because if you think about it, farms go on for miles but water mills take only a few yards, so why cant you build both? This might not apply for all improvements, but it would make the game a lot better. Also I think what would be really great is if modern artillary could fire about 10 spaces away multiple times in one turn in a Civ 3 type artillary way. It would still be colateral damage. This would make it effective just firing on enemy cities that still arent in your range of sight.

My final sugestion and greatest one is to make a much larger emphasis on trade routes. Throughout history, even as early as the Greeks and before, trading over sea and land (but mostly sea because it is cheaper and faster) has made great profits and has been the main reason for growth in empires. Harbors should be able to be constructed as early as sailing, and should be connected to the rest of your empire upon construction. For each city another city has a direct trade connection with (cities that are within say, 10 squares of a city and have a road to or cities that are within maybe 30 squares of a city with a harbor and have a harbor them selves) they should generate 5 gold profit every turn.

That's all my suggestions for now!:D

No City Razing

It forces you to be carefull and not over extend and you have to deal with your conquests. So instead of just razing city after city and weakening the enemy while you move in and build your own city, you have to try and hold onto it so they dont quickly retake and then deal with the extra costs.

So its good idea not to pillage the area for money and to starve them out beforehand.

Though one bad part is, even when you conquer a city, its often reduced to a tiny influence area. So your new population starts to starve and sometimes even reverts to another civ.

I found that even though i was destroying 1 civ, my peacefull neighbour gained more land by their expanding borders than i did from the new cities, is there a way to mod captured cities so they least start with some of their previous culture or a set amount?
Its annoying to end up with a tiny 3x3 square border or even less while your neighbour who did no work ends up with huge stretches of new land.
Often you have no land for hammers to build culture gaining buildings and no food sources so everyone starves.

So how hard is it to find the right balance between the epic feel and and correct gamespeed. We should be able to figure it out sooner or later.

Ehheh, yes, I did missunderstand.
Sorry, it's almost always about 3am by the time I'm done working and get down to posting here :) My head kinda swims..



And yes, I thought the exact same thing about trade routes.
trade routes were like, the main arteries of empires and kingdoms.. Cities situated on the major trade routes became fabulously rich (and therefor much coveted and very well fortified) even though they might have not even had many resources to trade themselves.

It might be abstracted in the game itself, but if were into creating realism here, then at least in the earlier ages, trade routes should play a VERY important role in economics!
Certain cities in certain locations should be desirable regardless of what resources they actually have, but just because their location is somehow given importance..

What I'm saying is, there should be some way to take important trade routes into consideration, but for the life of me I can't see how its possible..
I don't agree with samuelsons suggestion because.. well, you got dozens and dozens of cities in this game.. its all so dense. you'd get a huge surplus of gold.

I suppose you could create some cumbersome system like..
If you have a resource trade agreement with 2 different civs, and have a city connected by roads to both civs, you'd get 5 extra gold a day (not per city. global). or something.

Or (and this is really far reaching), you could decide to cripple economy much more for every new city, thus forcing the player (and AI, if you can do it) to expand much more deliberately, taking great pains to place cities 'just so' and preferrably in a place where more trade will flow through them.
And then ... hm. and then jolly well find a way to simulate the existence of trade routes! hah!

I'm not even sure there's hooks/triggers for stuff like that anyway.

this is game-breaking material, this.

I found what i was looking for in your mod! Thanks alot, i have just played it in multiplayer and it works fine. Havent been over the year 1300 AD yet so i dont know about the modern units. But in the early years i think the axmen have got too many advantages. You never build any swordsmen because they are crushed by axmen (+50% melee & +50& swordsmen). And maybe the knights come too soon, you will never get an advantage with your elephants because knights will join in the fight about the same time.
Thanks for a great mod, looking forward too the next update.

I found what i was looking for in your mod! Thanks alot, i have just played it in multiplayer and it works fine. Havent been over the year 1300 AD yet so i dont know about the modern units. But in the early years i thing the axmen have got too many advantages. You never build any swordsmen because they are crushed by axmen (+50% melee & +50& swordsmen). And maybe the knights come too soon, you will never get an advantage with your elephants because knights will join in the fight about the same time.
Thanks for a great mod, looking forward too the next update.

He might have some points there.

Yes I agree on second thought that 5 gold per city in 10 sqare radius is to much. But maybe 1 gold for every 3 recources per city. Then maybe once there's a market in the city it would be 1 gold for 2 recources per city. And maybe there could even be upgrades to the market like forum or modern day shopping mall. This might make it 1 gold for 1 recource per city. Sea trading would be the same, but doubled possibly?

I've got a new idea-

Instead of having units become healers, how about a new unit class called medic. They can only heal a unit that it shares a space with. There would be one for each era.

Ancient Era: Shaman(Shaman used basic knowledge of plant medication combined with rituals to heal)
Heals half health of a unit per turn
Defense:0

Classical Era: Phyilosopher Healer (Philosophers were people who knew everything that there was to know at that time, including medical things)
Heals 1 units per turn
Defense:0

Mideivel Era:???

Rennosconce Era:???

Industrial Era: Feild Surgeons??
Heals 2 units per turn

Modern Era: Battlefeild Meddic
Heals 3 units per turn

As you can see im still having trouble thinking of these. Anyone have suggestions?

i think a major problem right now is you need to specify what this mod is for. you are getting ideas thrown at you that would make sense for maps that represent much smaller areas (like map of europe/middle east) via stronger nukes, artillery that can shoot 10 tiles, etc... and much larger ideas that would be incorporated in maps where a continent might be 10 tiles wide. civ4 tried to balance the gameplay so it could work both ways, and came up lacking some in both. the more you specify your goal the more accurate you depiction will be.

I definitely think people should definitely be able to build multiple improvements on a tile. Because if you think about it, farms go on for miles but water mills take only a few yards, so why cant you build both? This might not apply for all improvements, but it would make the game a lot better. Also I think what would be really great is if modern artillary could fire about 10 spaces away multiple times in one turn in a Civ 3 type artillary way. It would still be colateral damage. This would make it effective just firing on enemy cities that still arent in your range of sight.



even on a very small map, artillery shooting 10 tiles would be rather outrageous. picture even a map zoomed in to just showing england. that shot would probably represent like 100 miles, at least.

As far as building multiple improvements, you are taking the game way to literally. Yes, its obvious that you could build farms, towns, watermills, and everything else in one tile. You could probably build multiple cities too, based on how much space a tile actually represents. The improvements are just abstractions of what you're doing with the economy of each tile that I personally feel works very well as is.

you know i've been thinking about it and i think one of the major aims is to lengthen gameplay and to slow down techs.... as of now the main way peopel have gone about trying to do this is to slow down tech research and make more turns...

what if we just added more techs? there are probably hundreds if not thousands of major technological advances that aren't included in the game, and each could be pretty easily incorporated in the game. i also always thought it would be nice if there were dead ends in techs, i.e. you didnt have to research them but they would benefit you in the short term if you did. for example, a castle building tech taht allows you to build castles. you dont HAVE to research it, but if you do you can build castles which will give you a major boost if you need them during the middle ages. ideally the different eras would last long enough that this would be a tempting option.

something to think about

you know i've been thinking about it and i think one of the major aims is to lengthen gameplay and to slow down techs.... as of now the main way peopel have gone about trying to do this is to slow down tech research and make more turns...

what if we just added more techs? there are probably hundreds if not thousands of major technological advances that aren't included in the game, and each could be pretty easily incorporated in the game. i also always thought it would be nice if there were dead ends in techs, i.e. you didnt have to research them but they would benefit you in the short term if you did. for example, a castle building tech taht allows you to build castles. you dont HAVE to research it, but if you do you can build castles which will give you a major boost if you need them during the middle ages. ideally the different eras would last long enough that this would be a tempting option.

something to think about

Great idea, I have bin thinking the same thing for some time... When I get around making a mod there will be lots and lots of technology to research, many of them will be dead ends, If there is a way to randomize some of the connection between technologies I will do that. Can probably be done with Python, I don't know for sure. There will be allot of specializing military techs unlocking different types of buildings and units. I would make UU tied to type of Wonders or Projects, that is... the one who first build that wonder gets to use a better version of some units, other units will just be a flavour unit in some cultures.
If there is a possibility to tie units to city culture I might do that to. I you build a unit in a city that is 80% Japanese but you run a Chinese empire you could train a Samurai.
Now my mod will probably be a low fantasy mod (based on our History to some extent). I don't like to play in the modern era so I will probably not spend much time modding that either.

Military research should almost always be to counter an already existing type of unit. If my enemy has Knights I will research Pike men or Longbows to counter them. If my enemy uses Phalanxes (Heavy Spearmen) I research mobile heavy Infantry to beat them, then they research Heavy Cavalry to beat my Heavy Infantry etc...
Often new technology are found when your enemy is superior in numbers and you need to counter him with more effective troop types, either you succeed or your empire fall, until another arise with a more deadlier force than you had.

a lesson from double ur pleasure mod in civ 3 was more is not always better! I cant have been the only one who couldnt navigate thru the hundreds of techs there, slowing research time is probably the most valid way to extend certain eras. Addition of a few techs could be granted, but as this is early days in the modding for civ 4 i am eager to see what everyone comes up with!

Still Extended Gameplay and Realism Mods are looking good, i think u guyz should work together, both have got some awesome ideas

The problem with adding more techs is that you make the game 'feel' faster even though its not, and that you actually have to reward the player with each new tech.
you'll soon either run out of rewards or totally destroy game balance and pacing.


I'm not sure about this, but I *think* the point of this mod is that you could more easily look at any period in our history and compare it to a 'CIV4 Realism Mod' game in a way that'll be more accurate and correct than if it were the vanilla game.

My biggest gripe really is that after a certain age, things seem to speed up like crazy, units replacing each other every few turns..
From what little I know of our history, there was time for quite a few big and long wars in every 'age'.
In fact, wars were quite the thing.. still are.
Perhaps there should be slightly more emphasis on war?

I have played with this mod for some time ,I think the speed of unit producing is a little too quick .(seems AI is more powerful)

add LOST UNITS mod! would be great!

how about land fills to reduce illness from population (the modern land fills burry the garbage in a hole with like a clay layer, prevents leakage to soil, then covers every so many feet of garbage with a layer of dirt... heck back at home theres a popular concert place called freedom hill which is basicly ontop of a land fill)

how about barges where you build, load the "illness(garbage)" on to, send it to the ocean, and sink it.... yah i might be going to far with the idea.... just thinking outloud

An idea is reinclude the cruise missile into civ4... The cruise missile has soo much potential as a weapon, but in civ 3 it was rather useless i found, anyone game enough to make a mod with one

Like aircraft it should be able to attack units or improvements, but should have like a 95% chance to kill a unit and cause collateral damage, or an 90% chance to destroy an improvement, but should b limited by a certain range .. 8 mayb

It would add a good new dimension to modern warfare in civ 4, and a bit of realism... how many cruise missiles were used in the bombing of iraq>>>?? lots!

Add a whole varity of different missles. Nuclear, Biological, and shortrange cruise missles. They can have different effects, per se the Biological could cause sickness or something in a city.

IMPORTANT
To the author of this mod !

The 30% bonus for musketman against knights - DOES NOT work.

Best regards

Cruise missiles to be launched off of subs and ships and such are indeed a great addition to have. they're special and add a real strategic element to warfare in later ages instead of it being just like earlier ages only with stronger units.


(note that if you include ballistic missiles system it might be advisable to include anti-missile batteries too)

HOWEVER, more 'regular' units is THE LAST THING this game needs.
The only real difference is the power rating anyway, so why in the hell clutter it up with meaningless junk?
Make quality, not quantity.
A great many people are sadly oblivious to the difference.

I always HATED cruise missiles in Civ, mainly because they were simply too powerful... Can't overcome an enemey's defences, or are afraid to lose your ships attacking his? Throw a couple cruise missiles at him!

Well, my main problem was that there wasn't any way to really counter them.

the sad truth is thats pretty much what cruise missles do

Just found and downloaded this mod. Had my first game (Huge, Terra) yesterday. I'm definitely loving the slowed down time and techs. All in all a great mod.

If you are still entertaining suggested additions, incorporating either the "replant forest" mod here in this forum or some other form of replanting forest, that would be awesome.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

HELLO!!!!!!

The 30% bonus for musketman against knights - DOES NOT work. -----> do you have the same???????

I like the developement of this mod and where it could be heading. :D

So I thought I'd share a few ideas.

Tech
As said by Simetrical earlier I think the tech tree should be designed from the ground up as well as expanding the modern era with more techs.

I think by expanding the tech tree and not so much of how long it takes to get would probley help slow the pace of the game.

Diplomacy
I feel that the diplomacy should be expanded with more options of treaties.
Heres a few of em:
Make Alliance with....
Open boarders should allow untis right of passage only
Trade agreements which would boost the economy of both civs
Research packs which would boost the research of both civs
Allow units to be traded (I know you can give a gift, but I've never seen the cpu give me a gift)
No nuke agreements (could work like the UN) be nice to threaten someone to halt their nuke program (building icbms)
Allow resources to be traded for research and vice versa for 20 turns minimum

Units
Is it just me or should carriers be able to transport bombers?

There should be a nuke that must be transported via land, air, or sea before ICBM's, like the one they dropped in Hiroshima.

APCs should be added to the mix to transport marines, inf, etc. with a movement of 2 or 3 and the ability to transport 1 or 2 units. Air transports should be considerd too.

I think many of the units that need oil should require iron and or copper. They seem to be not too important in the current modern era. But in real life iron is a very valuble asset.

Allow for an attack unit become a great person.

Biplanes should come before the fighter.

Explores should become zeplines, like they were used in WW2 for recon and spotting.

Buildings and Wonders
Heres a few I thought i'd mention. THe numbers are just for suggestions

World Trade Organization HQ
Grant bonuses to all trade agreements
Give a +1 to all civs realation to you

SAM sites
Bonuses to air def

SETI
Improve research and +10 to great person birth rate

Well I've got to get back to work but these are a few of the ideas I was thinkin about.

Have a good day y'all

:sad: help me! im trying desperatly to get this mod working! i have tried everything! i load the mod and it says realism in the top left hand corner of my screen, im thinking yay but i select play now and start a new game, nothing seems different at this point. so i started playing through and everything is the same, are there any signs at the start of the game that show the mod is in effect. how much should a settler now cost at the start of a game on war lord if the unit is 25% more expensive, as the norm is 25turns??? perhaps im being a complete tard but any help or suggestions would be appreciated, i just want to see what all the fuss is about:goodjob:

look at tool tip requirements for the cottage, in the mod its monarchy(winery's now only require pottery)

I like the developement of this mod and where it could be heading. :D

So I thought I'd share a few ideas.

Tech
As said by Simetrical earlier I think the tech tree should be designed from the ground up as well as expanding the modern era with more techs.

I think by expanding the tech tree and not so much of how long it takes to get would probley help slow the pace of the game.


An entirely new tech tree, not based on the same paradigm would be nice. Say something with actual branches of research. So you had independant paths...possibley to where you could master one branch while completely ignoring others...depending on the situation and what you want from your civ.

Something like:

Civil, which would open up with roads, barracks, harbors, granarys, basically all of your public works, and city infrastructure.

Military, which would be your progression of units. Also including special units and icmbs

Labour, which would all your out of city tile improvements, as well as fishing.

Pure scientific, which would get you things like +1 trade routes, etc. All bonuses, no new units or buildings...these would be the most costly, and wouldnt be tied to a "research this first to research that" system. If you wanted you could research something like +4 XP for all units (could call the tech warrior society or something) from the first turn of the game...itd take you 120 turns to research it, but you could.

Each "path" would have its own civic options available at different stages. There also wouldnt be any cross path dependant options...you wouldnt have to research archers to get camps, or you wouldnt have to research fighters to get airports.



There should be a nuke that must be transported via land, air, or sea before ICBM's, like the one they dropped in Hiroshima.


If the above method was used (for research) a Pure Science tech could be "nuclear equiped military" that could give a collateral damage strike to your bombers, fighters, subs, etc. Would simulate the low yield nuclear weapons.


I think many of the units that need oil should require iron and or copper. They seem to be not too important in the current modern era. But in real life iron is a very valuble asset.


After a certian point, say replaceable parts, or manufacturing, you should have to build a steel mill, or smelter. Wraught Iron stopped being used around the turn of the 20th century. Steel took over. Much like how riflemen dont require gunpowder anymore, since it was so common by then...a steel refinery should provide all the steel youd need for units, even if you dont actually have iron in your territorial borders.



Biplanes should come before the fighter.


I dont think Biplanes are signifigant enough to be represented...also they would be replaced in just a few turns by fighters.


Explores should become zeplines, like they were used in WW2 for recon and spotting.


I think you should look into blimps and zepplins....they were a catastrophic failure.

The only thing balloons were good for in world war two, was attaching very heavy steel cable to them, and floating them at various altitudes above cities to discourage low altitude bombing, and dogfighting right over the city. Recon was better left to ground soldiers, spies, and aircraft like the He111Z, Arado 200, and Dehaviland Mosquitos. Very light, very high altitude aircraft, or jet engined aircraft.


Buildings and Wonders
Heres a few I thought i'd mention. THe numbers are just for suggestions

World Trade Organization HQ
Grant bonuses to all trade agreements
Give a +1 to all civs realation to you


World Bank is already in the plans :)

Per my idea:

A world bank would make a great new wonder...it would work like the UN works, except there would be no elections.

The civilization with the most buying power (Manufactured goods, minus imported goods, times gross national product, minus matience would be the best and most simplified formula) would receive a +1 to relations with all other civs, and a 3.17 percent increase in tax revenue. (or in traderoute earnings, that might be more realistic) That would simulate countries putting thier money into a country that has the least risk for radical inflation or change. With the forumala above (im not sure exactly what the numbers are, but civ generates outputs for all of them) smaller civs with more industry (forges, factories, windmills) more population, but few coastal cities, would still be able to compete with larger, less industrialized nations. Much like germany, sweden, and france compete with russia, or china.

Static sam sites would be nice. I hate having to build a ton of sam infantry and run up my unit cost protecting all of my cities.

Though it still wont be as effective as good fighter cover.

in regards to "the nuclear military idea" how about depleated uranium shells? does increased damage, ilness points added after city attack and so on

in regards to "the nuclear military idea" how about depleated uranium shells? does increased damage, ilness points added after city attack and so on

Thats a great idea too...

You could have two upgrade techs (maybe even more) Depleted Uranium for gunships, infantry, tanks etc, and Nuclear Capability for Bombers, Subs, and Battleships.

If you wanted, you could even have Fission unlock new upgrades for certain units, then with a barracks, or theocracy, you could pick your upgrade. Depleted uranium shells (more strength, or collateral damage, or whatever) Nuclear Powered (+1 movement or range) Nuclear Capable (subs could launch short range icbms, bombers could drop an icmb)

SAM sites
Bonuses to air def


A little hint here, have a look at the NASAMS system. SAM sites aren't necessarily stationary (not that you claimed it to be, I'm just mentioning)

I've been stationed with one of these buggers for a year now, and can pretty much operate one blindfolded (which I won't, because that would probably injure and possibly kill me in some very nasty ways)

Kongsbergs NASAMS info (http://www.kongsberg.com/eng/kda/products/Aircraft/NASAMS/)
Pretty much the same as above, but nicer pics (http://www.gbad.org/gbad/amd_nasams.html) :)
Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASAMS)
(i have more private pics if anyone wants)

This system should be just about the ultimate anti aircraft platform available today (apart from SLAMRAAM, which is only an updated hummer-mounted version of it)

oh, and a side note, the US is currently having a look at these, last I heard there were plans to send some lucky crews over the pond to teach them how to use them properly :cool:

Just my two cents of inside info about SAMs...

GREAT MOD! :goodjob:

in regards to "the nuclear military idea" how about depleated uranium shells? does increased damage, ilness points added after city attack and so on

don't know if this is what you meant by illness points, but usage of such shells should reflect the major health problems that soldiers firing the shells experienced after operative duty...
Should be plenty documentation about this available, even if the US still denies it...(last I heard, anyway)

edit: typo

don't know if this is what you meant by illness points, but usage of such shells should reflect the major health problems that soldiers firing the shells experienced after operative duty...
Should be plenty documentation about this available, even if the US still denies it...(last I heard, anyway)

edit: typo

The US military denying that something they forced there troops to use could cause long term health problems without so much as warning... No you have to be kidding right /end sarcasm.

plus theres napalm and that new "imitation napalm" called white phosperous i think...i ment added ilness points to the city which was attacked, not exactly healthy to have those shells lieing around your back yard you know, but it should only last a few turns at most... not the hole game

More Powerful spies and Sub launched Tatical Nukes and Biological weapons would make everyones day.

An entirely new tech tree, not based on the same paradigm would be nice. Say something with actual branches of research. So you had independant paths...possibley to where you could master one branch while completely ignoring others...depending on the situation and what you want from your civ.

Something like:

Civil, which would open up with roads, barracks, harbors, granarys, basically all of your public works, and city infrastructure.

Military, which would be your progression of units. Also including special units and icmbs

Labour, which would all your out of city tile improvements, as well as fishing.

Pure scientific, which would get you things like +1 trade routes, etc. All bonuses, no new units or buildings...these would be the most costly, and wouldnt be tied to a "research this first to research that" system. If you wanted you could research something like +4 XP for all units (could call the tech warrior society or something) from the first turn of the game...itd take you 120 turns to research it, but you could.

Each "path" would have its own civic options available at different stages. There also wouldnt be any cross path dependant options...you wouldnt have to research archers to get camps, or you wouldnt have to research fighters to get airports.

If the above method was used (for research) a Pure Science tech could be "nuclear equiped military" that could give a collateral damage strike to your bombers, fighters, subs, etc. Would simulate the low yield nuclear weapons.


Thanks for expanding on the idea. Going for a more indepth tech tree as you mentioned is just what I was geting at.

I think theres too much throwing around of completely random ideas... Maybe I'm just a rigid thinker, but this is how I see it.

Key problems with vanilla Civ:

#1: Game moves way to fast, eras don't get fully played out, especially in the late game. Technologies upgrade faster than you can keep up with.

--my solution: As I said before, and I'll explain further because I see it recieved some criticism. I see the solution to this being fleshing out the technology tree--- in conjunction with adding turns. While I am definitely not suggesting that we actually add hundreds of techs, I think there are a lot of important techs in history that have been left out. Many techs give 3 or 4 upgrades, some of them are very abstractly related to the actual technological advancement. I would suggest these as the easiest targets to break down so that each tech discovery only gives on advancement. I also think there are a few that can be added. I would also suggest that the transitions between eras should be more dramatic. I would even go so far as to say it might be an idea to have to "research" these transitions. Although it is very abstract, from a gameplay vantage I think it would have several benefits. If you made the cost to research these transitions VERY high... i.e. maybe take 5 to 10 times as long as your typical advancement, it would add significant time to each era-- and if dead end techs were included, would give those who chose to flesh out eras more time to actually use them against those who chose to "move on". i.e. there would be a penalty for trying to blitz up the tech tree. I would also think it would be nice, if possible, to make researching this "transition" only so costly to the first civ which discovers it, after which it would have say 50% of the cost. This would help allow smaller civs to "keep up", and again add to the penalty of civs blizting through the tech tree, although it would still have its advantages.

#2: Larger civs are always better civs. Expansion is the key to a successful empire, making your starting location and land area available predetermined outcomes in your game.

This, I think, is one of the biggest flaws in civ4. By year 0 a.d, you can pretty well tell the pecking order for the remainder of the game. I already gave one solution to this listed above. Another solution I would suggest would be to make larger cities much more beneficial, and smaller cities a greater drain on teh overall economy. I think the current money system adequately penalizes over expansion, so I think its proper to look into other parts of the game. One simple solution would be to decrease the number of tiles smaller cities can cultivate to a simple square around them, not allowing further cultivation until a city reaches size 10-12... although I don't know if this is possible. Another suggestion would be to add greatly to the multipliers to scientific advancement and production for larger cities. This could be done by increasing the effectiveness of specialists-- which are much more possible and numerous in larger cities. The idea would be to make one large city better than having 3 or 4 small cities. In fact I think cities should be rather useless until they reach a size of perhaps 5-6 in production and science. This would make building cities a significant investment in time, with much less instant payoff. In fact, they would have to be babysat by your more established cities who would have to provide protection for considerable lengths of time. To avoid stagnation in the early game, these penalizations should not be applied to the capital. This would also make the capital a more powerful city, which would benefit smaller civs. This system would potentially allow a much smaller but advanced and fleshed out civ the ability to tackle a large, unwieldly civ (civs growing too large for their own good has plenty of historical precedent). It would also be good to soften the things that limit city growth to larger proportions (perhaps through techs and city improvements)


Those are the two main problems with civ4 I see in the game.

Ideas of tech advances that could be included:
Trench warfare: All gunpowder units gain a bonus to defense.
Sun Zhu's Art of War: Wonder - +1 Experience for all units created
Satellites: Allows the ability to create invisible units which act exactly as spies, but with 0% chance of failure.
Explosives: Workers increase their speed in building improvements
Radar: Increase interception ability of all units
Colonization: Decrease turns it takes to subjugate a captured city.
National Bank: Decreases inflation rate
Out-sourcing: Bonus to production
Vaccination: Bonus to health in all cities
Automobile: +2 movement on roads
Distillation: + Happiness, - Health
Antibiotics: + Health

anyway you get the idea, thats what i came up with on the top of my head. obviously the techs arent fully thought out for gameplay etc. just ideas. someone would have to take some significant time to tackle it all.

In my game the french are raping the other civ's with there musketeer's, i guess because no 1 can build musketmen as fast. Where they supposed to require muskets too?

In my game the french are raping the other civ's with there musketeer's, i guess because no 1 can build musketmen as fast. Where they supposed to require muskets too?

Maybe they should, I mean they use muskets don't they? Hopefully he is hard at work developing the new version of this mod. I can't wait for more powerful ICBM's.

#2: Larger civs are always better civs. Expansion is the key to a successful empire, making your starting location and land area available predetermined outcomes in your game.


What needs to happen is adding actual economy to civ4. Not just in distance to capital or a rudimentry system that calculates cost on number and size.

Civ outputs numbers for GNP, manufactured goods, life expectancy, etc (check all the screens when you win or lose a game) those numbers should be used in more creative and meaningful ways.

A civ with 8 cities, with 8 forges, 6 harbors, aqueducts, and two tiles of iron, are going to be FAR more productive than a civ with 16 cities, no forges, a few harbors, and one source of iron. At least when it comes to manufactured goods.

Whats completely ignored in Civ is what all those people in your cities are doing. You get notices in civ4 that tell you when you hit a million people and whatnot...though I always find myself asking, heck ive got a million people, everyone else has slightly less or alot less, im the smallest nation city wise, why cant I use my labour force. Im forced to pick tiles that balance between shield creation and starvation. Though one city away I have WAY more food and health +'s than I could ever use...why I cant I use that food to use my superior numbers in labour to outproduce the other guys.

If the largest nations always came out on top...we'd all be speaking russian or chinese by now.

What needs to happen is adding actual economy to civ4. Not just in distance to capital or a rudimentry system that calculates cost on number and size.

Civ outputs numbers for GNP, manufactured goods, life expectancy, etc (check all the screens when you win or lose a game) those numbers should be used in more creative and meaningful ways.

A civ with 8 cities, with 8 forges, 6 harbors, aqueducts, and two tiles of iron, are going to be FAR more productive than a civ with 16 cities, no forges, a few harbors, and one source of iron. At least when it comes to manufactured goods.

Whats completely ignored in Civ is what all those people in your cities are doing. You get notices in civ4 that tell you when you hit a million people and whatnot...though I always find myself asking, heck ive got a million people, everyone else has slightly less or alot less, im the smallest nation city wise, why cant I use my labour force. Im forced to pick tiles that balance between shield creation and starvation. Though one city away I have WAY more food and health +'s than I could ever use...why I cant I use that food to use my superior numbers in labour to outproduce the other guys.

If the largest nations always came out on top...we'd all be speaking russian or chinese by now.

:goodjob: Some nice points.

War Elephant is to slow when all Horse and Tank faster in this Mod
Ironclad is to slow, whit the Steamengine can he drive against the wind:hatsoff:

you know what id love to see? APCs. infantry-type units would be alot more valuable if you could load 4 of them into an APC which has a movement rate of 3 say...

and someone said they wouldnt like to see hundreds of techs... personally i would. i would rather have tons of techs that have very little effect on their own then the few basic techs in the game.
someone said that biplanes didnt make enough of a historical impact to really be in the game, but additional techs would allow for stuff like that, because then it would take more time to go from bi planes to ww1 fighters.

also, i know im not the first person to suggest this, but id love to see canals in the game, maybe make it so they can only be built of you use something like the road to command, and cant be longer then 4 or 5 tiles, must be built within your territory, and each tile takes 16-20 turns to construct. counts as a road to land units.
or perhaps the canal can only be built between two coastal cities.

i'll probably have a few more ideas for your awesome mod before you finish, keep up the great work :)

Krafweerk:

Dunno, man.
For some reason I can't agree with anything you say :>

For one thing, making a new tech tree is completely unnecessary and seperating branches of it (such as military, gov, bio, etc) is simply servered from reality.
Would guns be invented without chemistry, metal working, physics, etc?
biological weapons without medicine and biochemistry?

And secondly..
WE ARE all speaking chinese and russian... :)
chinese is the most common language on earth.
after that, spanish, and I'm pretty sure that after that -- russian.

Oh, and also, it was the hinderberg disaster that crossed out zeppelins really,
And that's because germany didn't have helium, so they filled em up with hydrogen instead, which is very highly flammable and dangerous. The explosion itself was probably caused by the layer of outer coating on the baloon, which made it catch fire from even slight electrical currents.
Point is, after hindenburg, nobody wanted to be in a zeppelin.

Zeppelins actually have huge potential. You can build flying cities like that.
Loaded with so much heavy weaponry that nothing much is likely to be able to get anywhere near.. you can even build armor casing AROUND the balloon. it doesn't mind.. And even if someone DID manage to blow up the balloon, you could equip the zeppelin with thrusters to give it a comfy landing..


Mayonaise:
I agree with most stuff you said.
Dividing an existing tech into 2 other techs is a good thing to do. I don't agree however to adding techs and wonders that can have too far reaching consequences.
It's just that when people decide to add more happiness and more health and core stuff like that, with every point having huge ramifications, I can just see total game breakage happening.

BTW, does the AI actually take into account new techs?
I mean, I really doubt that it can look at a tech and evaluate whats best to research at any specific point.
unless its hardcoded or something, in which case adding new techs is likely to just confuse the crap out of the AI and ruin the game.
But I have no idea really. anybody know?

I have not read the complete list yet and not tried the mod tough I will do for my next game, as soon as I have solved some crash problems.

Ideas:
- Promotions depending on action: when a unit successfully attacked a unit inside a city it should gain a free or less costly city raider promotion. Possibly more situations like this can be used (battling in jungle, amphibious etc). Or maybe even gaining experience when a unit walks through jungle a lot by receiving a gain for movement through jungle ... only beware of walking with units only to gain experience ... possibly letting units reside inside city should gain city guard. On the other hand ... it would get very easy to get a city guard promotion. Or it should be a number instead of city guard 1 and 2. but then things go out of hand probably ... guess my imagination is higher than playability. See next part.

Unit promotions as numbers instead of '1' or 2'.
E.g. a unit has City guard value of 30, a City raider value of 10 etc. Promotiosn can also be added by just being part of a team attacking or defending.

- Using barracks (or another building) should be used for training military units. For money and time units can gain experience points without actually battling.
Also a barrack can be used for upgrading units.

- Natural disasters are already mentioned. Some interesting ones:
- Flood: some land tiles will become water tiles.
- Undersea volcanos: some ocean tiles will form a new island.

- Deteriorating promotions
Units that do not battle for a lot of time will see their (promotional) skills being lowered. Tough I may don't like this idea myself it seems more natural.

- Promotions for workers
Workers that build things should be gaining experience in doing what they do.

- Limited resources, new
They are already taken into account; I assume also new resources will be created during play to cover for the removed ones.

- Events
Like the olympics in another mod on this site. I think lots of events will add lots of flavor especially if they/some are not 100% random but depending on buildings, civics, culture, religion etc.

- Advanced battle system
Probably this is way too difficult to implement but these are just ideas:
- Possibility to retreat (all or some units to an adjecent tile away from the attacker). Only if movemement points allow and not attacked or residing between enemies.
- Attacking from multiple sides should be an advantage. Or if that's too difficult to implement (attacking from multiple hexes at the same time), only the existence of units should be enough. Also retreating is not possible if attacking from two opposite sides.

- Acquiring techs from others
When techs are acquired from others (through trade typically, tough getting it by city raiding is also a nice option), a civ can use that tech immediately. While the creator has taken it several and sometimes lots of time to develop. It seems natural for a new owner of the tech that it techs some turns to get acqainted with the tech before it actually can be used. Of course this is made with the assumption that in the original creator of the tech the time to develop it includes the time of getting acquired with it. This time is concurrently with other tech times. I mean: it is possible to currently researching tech A, while tech B acquired from another takes another 5 turns before usable and tech C 7 turns etc. This acquanting time can be depending on science or maybe also culture.

- Sea mines (land mines too?)
To prevent seas becoming too easily to move through, sea mines should be able to be laid (by special ship?) and of course removal also should be possible. Sea mines should be invisible except maybe for some units or units with special promotion.

Tough I know some ideas may possibly have already mentioned and some are too difficult to implement I hope this article is useful. And almost all ideas need to be worked out but I will wait for that until requested or until I get positive reactions. Of course everyone can use this is starting for new ideas (actually that's the first place I made this for), to make so many creative ideas that the implementor(s) of the natural mod can make good decisions what to do and not to do.

Alltough I'm a programmer myself I'm not willing to program in Python since I already work now in C, C++ and dotNet projects and do not want to use another language concurrently. Besides I don't know Python ... maybe in the future I will spend time to learn but time is a sparse asset sad enough.

Greetings, Michel

Some cool ideas here! How did you increase the value of gold awarded through capturing cities (as opposed to pillaging land improvements)?

Keep the good Ideas flowing everyone.

I still think captured cities need to keep very least 200 culture or so or a % of what they had. It dont make sense culture is reduced to 0 and you have no borders. But its good no razing so you have to try and hold onto your victories.

Hmm also if its possible to have improvements stack on a square, how about a costal defence improvement, can only be built on any square next to the ocean, it has a combat strength. So when enemy tries to land units they instantly go into battle with the 'costal defences' and can be killed. (only if your at war with them)

If the defences are beaten the improvement is destroyed.
Ships maybe would also be able to bombard the improvement.

I still think captured cities need to keep very least 200 culture or so or a % of what they had. It dont make sense culture is reduced to 0 and you have no borders. But its good no razing so you have to try and hold onto your victories.

Hmm also if its possible to have improvements stack on a square, how about a costal defence improvement, can only be built on any square next to the ocean, it has a combat strength. So when enemy tries to land units they instantly go into battle with the 'costal defences' and can be killed. (only if your at war with them)

If the defences are beaten the improvement is destroyed.
Ships maybe would also be able to bombard the improvement.

city defenses are already there, just abstracted.
I think its pretty safe to assume that any city with a coastline has some coast defenses

keep in mind that the biggest problem with most of these ideas is getting the AI to use them.
you can't put stuff in just for the player, because it can ruin the game

True
Hard to get AI to do some things
Does the AI ever bother with forts as well? Ive not seen one yet.

Though i still think captured cities need to maintain some of their culture.
When expanding by war, unless you take over everyone, your peacefull neighbours seem to gain more land than you from your conquests.
But i do like being forced to hold cities, i used to just burn them down to weaken the AI, so they can never recapture.

Having to try and hold them and dealing with increased costs is much more realistic, but 1 city i captured even after the rioting was over was reduced to 3 tiles due to no culture and being to close to another friendly civs borders which suddenly expanded.

Jaynus ??? Where are you ? Can you add me to yours credits for idea splitting empires ? ;)

Krafweerk:

Dunno, man.
For some reason I can't agree with anything you say :>

For one thing, making a new tech tree is completely unnecessary and seperating branches of it (such as military, gov, bio, etc) is simply servered from reality.
Would guns be invented without chemistry, metal working, physics, etc?
biological weapons without medicine and biochemistry?

Would anyone have bothered researching chemistry if they didnt want to make a gun? Youre looking at it backwards. Nessescity is the mother of invention. You dont research something unless you need it.Only in astro sciences will you be researching something, only for knowledges sake, and end up discovering something completely unrelated and useful.

People thinking hrmm...we gotta get out of this rain, led to construction, which set the stage for people who were thinking...hrmm there has to be a better way to get water into our cities. This also opened the door for people who were thinking hrmm we sure do need something around our city to keep stuff out..though construction could be applied to all of these things, they are not interdependant. They also arent dependant on any other branch of scientific thought. While the theory can be applied to forts, aqueducts, walls, mines, etc etc, if there was no need for walls, no one would have invented them, if there were no need for mines, no one would have invented them...or researched them...or worked on improving them.

The point is, just because I research chemistry, it doesnt mean it needs to automatically give me guns. I may not need gunpowder...though I may need combustion engines. Nothing is an enevitable. Why are military and civic advancements paired together, raising research costs, and limiting my choices.

Take a look at the CivIII mod, Double your Pleasure...it spread the tech tree out enough, and removed alot of the interdependancies, and worked quite while. It gave you more options...which really is what a realism mod is about. Giving us options vanilla Civ doesnt.


And secondly..
WE ARE all speaking chinese and russian... :)
chinese is the most common language on earth.
after that, spanish, and I'm pretty sure that after that -- russian.


Because the most populated nation on earth is china...so obviously chinese speak chinese.

I certainly dont know it, and I could care less about learning it. China and prussia have been some of the largest civilizations since the beggining of time. How many times have either of them ruled the world?

Lets count shall we.

...

...

Hopefully the point has been made.

I urge you to check out the cia factbook (google it) about russia and china. They are FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR from leading economic powers. I have more sway in my small toe over geo-political issues than russia or china...its just that they have alot of really big bombs.

Oh, and also, it was the hinderberg disaster that crossed out zeppelins really,
And that's because germany didn't have helium, so they filled em up with hydrogen instead, which is very highly flammable and dangerous. The explosion itself was probably caused by the layer of outer coating on the baloon, which made it catch fire from even slight electrical currents.
Point is, after hindenburg, nobody wanted to be in a zeppelin.

Zeppelins actually have huge potential. You can build flying cities like that.
Loaded with so much heavy weaponry that nothing much is likely to be able to get anywhere near.. you can even build armor casing AROUND the balloon. it doesn't mind.. And even if someone DID manage to blow up the balloon, you could equip the zeppelin with thrusters to give it a comfy landing..


I think you just like zeppelins. I dont believe that you believe what you just said.

We'll take world war two for example...assuming you can make a reasonably safe zeppelin, as safe as a Lancaster, Wellington, He111, B17, etc...explain to me how youre going to attach enoughs to this huge floating target to make it safe from attack.

Its fact that the defensive guns on B17s were ineffective...even in good formation, with trained crews, nothing can stop a fighter from shooting you down...you may get him too, but he's gonna make it to you, and shoot you.

Battleships are another example. Or carriers...how many carriers and battleships were sunk by aircraft? How many AAA guns do those have?

Bizmark, Arizona, Yorktown, Lexington, Kyoto, the list is as long as my arm.


If world war two wasnt proof that zeppelins have no place in the modern military I dont know what does. It shows example after example that the advantages a zeppelin would have (Size, armament, ability to move large amounts of equipment and personnel, staging area for aircraft) were the same advantages other pieces of equipment had, and all of those same pieces of equipment were found to be totally ineffective.

Sheer size just makes you a bigger target. Thats why no one uses battleships anymore...armament is expensive, and usually ineffective in stopping a deterimed adversary...hence why we dont build Tiger like tanks anymore. Large amounts of troops and equipment on one transport is a bad idea. Hence why we moved to convoy "conga lines" in response to the uboats. Lastly, a staging area for aircraft is the grand prize, because if you knock that out, you knock out your opponents ability to effectively attack you. Such a prime target requires DOZENS of other smaller vessels to defend it...a "taskforce" if you will.

We already have a navy, why do we need another one in the air.

The only advantage left to a zeppelin would be fuel consumption....though since no large standing army has had fuel shortages in 100 years, I doubt that would be an attractive feature.

What world war two taught us is that small units, small tanks, small planes, that can very quickly and quietly get into, and out of, enemy territory and hit a target, is the wave of the future. A smaller faster unit is going to be more effective at penetrating enemy defense than a larger slower one.

Just a small suggestion - working the 'Lost Units' mod into this seems like a good idea! Not positive they're compatible, but I'll probably try to compare some of the files after I finish my current game to see if it works.

Jaynus ??? Where are you ? Can you add me to yours credits for idea splitting empires ? ;)

Wasn't empire-splitting in both Civ I and II? And isn't Trip working on an empire-splitting mod for Civ IV? So how can you claim that it's your idea?

i believe youve asked for a few ideas on potential wonders and buildings you could add to the mod... well in the canadian mod they were discussing the CN tower as a wonder. i like this idea, it makes alot of sense to me. you could add a tech, something like microwave communications (perhaps right before radar or whatever), that allows cities to build microwave towers that replace a radio tower when built and gives a slightly better bonus, and the cn tower would provide a free mircowave tower in every city.
another wonder that was being kicked around in the canadian mod was the NHL. some suggested that it should offer a free collosseum in every city, but then others countered that, saying thats too big a bonus... well, lets think about this first shall we? the nhl couldnt be built before refridgeration (infact it would probably come a few technologies later, but i havent really looked t see where it would fit in best). if im not mistaken, refridgeration is something like 3/4ths of the way through the game, at a time when i typically have a collosseum built in 80% or so of my cities..... suddenly a free collosseum in the others doesnt seem like such a huge bonus. infact it seems prefectly reasonable.

also, i believe someone in here suggested that you make a trainyard or something as a building (not a national wonder or anything), that would allow you to ship 50% of productivity from one city to another. i really like that idea. i also think you should be able to build something like a freight terminal, which allows you to ship your surplus food from one city to another to aid in its growth (sort of the way a settler or worker diverts surplus food into its own construction). although thinking about it im not entirely sure how you would go about making that work without the SDK. perhaps once you build the freight terminal you can then build a transport truck unit (called "ship food" say) in one turn, and you move that unit to whatever city you want to augment, and as long as the unit is in that city, the other cities surplus food is sent automatically. set it so that when the city that built it changes its production from ship food to something else, the unit is automatically disbanded.

another thing. i havent really looked into this so please lemme know if im wrong, but whats the deal with spys exactly? is scotland yard a national wonder? (i havent played civ since thinking of all this so i havent been able to check). and if not, does that mean if you arent the civ to build it, you cant build spys? that doesnt seem right to me, when there are are many agencies around the world who do train spies, there was talk of adding camp x to the canadian mod as a wonder (a very secretive spy school from the ww2 era i believe, someone posted a wiki link in the canadian mod topic if anyones interested in more info). so if it is a matter of, only one nation can train spies, perhaps you could add other spy schools aswell, but make them so that if your civilization has built one, you cant build the others.

oh, and about my earlier suggestion of APCs, well, even if you only made troop transports (trucks) that would still be awesome. or maybe like a jeep and then later a hummer. can transport 3 infantry, movement of 2, no terrain penalties. maybe make them only slightly better then infantry, and just for balance issues, can only defend.

and finally. if you need a reskinner, please let me know, my brother has been doing reskinning for some time now and has offered his skills. and if you know what program to use/how to access/replace the models, id be happy to help you in modeling (buildings or units, although i may need some help with animations; never worked on those before, just static objects)

One thing I would LOVE would be a super bridge.

You know when you have 1 ocean tile between 2 land points and you have to move men from shore, to ship, to shore...

It would be awesome that later technology would allow you to construct bridges accross these land masses (there would be maintenance costs to support them).

---

Another would be to have structure in the seas that can manufacture ships, or a place in the ocean that has a area of control that allows your units to heal / fule up while over the ocean.

I havn't really played the ocean lines yet... I usually kill the enemies 1000 AD...

sigh. just lost a long post :(

heres a suggestion. make barbs attack in groups after iron working is discovered, and also have them prioritize attacking strong cultures. and giving them horse archers\horsemen\camel riders as main attack units.

reduce food production until iron working, except on flood plains. make food production set the maximum size limit of cities and set trade as the actual growth producer.

make units built with iron cheaper than those built with bronze if possible.

all these have historical reasons. I'll explain more if needed, after thursday when I have my history exam...

i like the civ splitting, and miss it.
another one i like was from MOO and possibly civ 1 (cant remember, been a long time) was a chance of gaining a tech for capturing a city.

wouldnt want that one to allow just any tech, maybe a percentile chance of gaining 1 tech within a range of the victors current tech level. would be silly for a civ to get robotics off me if they somehow happen to take one of my cities with a horse archer. and maybe make it only possible if you founded the city or if you possesed the for x turns and possibly only after a certain population level. dunno, would make sence, how many times do they need to take cities before they start to figure out how to use stuff lying around... aslo, what are the odds the citizens of said city will "forget" what a computer is.

Hum why does a civilization advance but not in this game?

Why does each civilization use the same politics for 6000 years, why no evolution. I think it could be fun to have a certain evolution of the traits(philosophy, creative, etc...) of your leader. Maybe each era you choose one of your traits and you get assigned a random one.

That would work better if each civilization would start with random traits. (would be a fun as a side option in the beginning).

Maybe each era you choose one of your traits and you get assigned a random one.

That would work better if each civilization would start with random traits. (would be a fun as a side option in the beginning).


um... correct me if im wrong, but when you start a custom game thats already an option. although it wont change later in the game.
instead of having the civs change traits each age, would it be possible to add more leaders for each civ and then set up a random election every age, where the leaders could change or possibly stay the same?
maybe have it partially based on what kind of techs theyve discovered (or havent. you dont need to discover all the techs in an age to move up right? i havent really paid attention, although i will now) on what traits their "people" will vote for?

I have installed the Realism Mod in my \My Documents\My Games\...\Mods folder, following the instructions. I edited the Civ4.ini file to automatically load Realism at start up. I verified that "Realism" is in the upper right corner of the screen at start up. I am able to start and play a custom game.

When I try to load a saved game, I get the message "Mods\C:\Documents and Settings\{ME}\My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization4\Mods\Realism" needs to be loaded, click yes to restart. When I click yes, it can not find the file. This is obvious, if the path I listed above is correct. I tried to clear my assets folder, with no success. In the instruction page, there was some mention to clearing the catch folder. Where is this folder? Is there something that I am doing wrong?

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Karl

Thank you slaxton, that is kinda where I wanted to go... I just thoguht that each age would be easier.. and that some people won't want to go with someone else gandhi to lead them so why I didn't put up the election idea.


May I suggest that you request a folder for your mod? so that we coudl better navigate between new idea, testing bug release.. history.. stuff like that would make it so much easier. (I agree with whoever wrote about rigid thinking or stuff like that..) this is becoming chaos.

I'm sure tehy woudl do so... mod that I use in my custom asset. is Bad Ronald's Flags and Colors Mod v2.0

What I woudl liek to use is teh great person mod

Lisa:
Agreed completely.
I've just had the freakin greeks steal 2 newly captured cities from me.. I'd go further than leaving the city some of its culture though.. It can still be turned outright by a nearby civ that has a lot of culture..

I think it'd be best if newly captured cities were under 'martial law' for several turns and impossible to be flipped, in addition to keeping a bit of their culture (but not too much :>).


Kwif,
necessity is indeed the mother of invention, but you follow it through with reasoning which ammounts to saying that people invented the wheel because they needed tanks, or that people invented plastics because they wanted to build spaceship components.
People came up with ideas/products, and tried to sell what they came up with to as many different markets as they could :)
So plastics for example, is used everywhere from tupperware to bombs.


As for china and russia.. that depends on what you define as 'rule the world'.
If being the biggest and most populous doesn't satisfy you, then I don't know what would.
Perhaps its more correct to say that NOBODY ruled the world yet? and that our 'game' of 'civ' is yet far from its conclusion?

As for zeppelins.. navies don't use aircraft carriers anymore?
and if a single carrier could move much much quicker than a ship, and carry a much greater load of aircraft and munitions?
As a weapons platform its not that bad either, but perhaps we ARE getting technologically advanced enough to phase the idea out.. but back in history, if they did it right, it could have worked.

not to mention the potential of zepellins as luxury airliners :)

@Karl

The mod is installed in the wrong directory.

Install the mod in c:\programs\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Mods or where you else specified the path when installing cIV

mabey iudea was already ofered but i think special units for each age of reasserch would be nice instead of only one that we get now

I agree with belgradar. It's not exactly fair for the Aztecs to be stuck with a sucky stone-age unit, while germany gets a Panzer. The only problem you might come up with is the civs that didn't exist during certain time periods. (USA during ancient; Rome in the present) You could always improvize, give a few examples, and let the people vote on which ones they want.

EDIT: I just figured out how to load saves from inside the game without going through all those steps!
1. Rename the 'Assets' folder in 'Realism' to 'Custom Assets'.
2. Create a copy of the hard-coded 'Custom Assets' in the MyGames/Civ4 file
3. Paste the 'Custom Assets' in 'Realism' next to the real 'Custom Assets' file.
4. The game will no longer require itself to load the mod, just move 'Custom Assets' out of where it is to not play 'Realism' anymore.

i think a major problem right now is you need to specify what this mod is for. you are getting ideas thrown at you that would make sense for maps that represent much smaller areas (like map of europe/middle east) via stronger nukes, artillery that can shoot 10 tiles, etc... and much larger ideas that would be incorporated in maps where a continent might be 10 tiles wide. civ4 tried to balance the gameplay so it could work both ways, and came up lacking some in both. the more you specify your goal the more accurate you depiction will be.I agree with this. The problem is, if you do the figuring, you get stuff like 150 miles per tile minimum, assuming the largest map possible without modding is Earth-sized. (Of course, that's at the equator; the width theoretically decreases as you move north or south, which is a total headache.) You could use other reference points, of course, but that one strikes me as the most logical.

But the real problem is, any kind of sane scales result in massive ridiculousness, one way or another. A modern battleship, for instance, would take something like 20 years to circumnavigate the globe, where in reality it would take something on the order of weeks (assuming straits and canals are available, or that there's otherwise a straight path to travel). You can't fix this without either allowing entire civilizations to be conquered in a one-turn war that gives them no actual time to respond, or making one turn represent some period of time that would require you to spend years of uninterrupted real time to finish a game (I calculate about 7.4 years straight to get from 3000 BCE to 2000 CE with one-week turns, assuming a generous average of 15 minutes per turn).

This can't be avoided. Compromises must be made. The question is, what should they be?
An entirely new tech tree, not based on the same paradigm would be nice. Say something with actual branches of research. So you had independant paths...possibley to where you could master one branch while completely ignoring others...depending on the situation and what you want from your civ.Not realistic the way you have it set up. All technological advances inherently depend on prior advances, and the effect of one advance will be completely different from the effects of its prerequisites. For instance, the technology required to build an atom bomb ("military") requires the scientific method and an advanced knowledge of physics (both "pure scientific"), as well as mining ("labor") and doubtless other things I can't think of at the moment. It is simply impossible to build a nuclear bomb without all these things. The same logic applies to all modern technological advances, which depend very heavily on advanced scientific knowledge, and also to a lesser extent to many earlier technologies (you need metalworking to effectively chop down trees and the like, for instance, as well as to forge swords, etc.).
After a certian point, say replaceable parts, or manufacturing, you should have to build a steel mill, or smelter. Wraught Iron stopped being used around the turn of the 20th century. Steel took over.It didn't have to, though. There's no technical reason you couldn't make guns out of bronze, or aluminum, or plastic, or copper, or tin, or lead, or even stone. Heck, you could probably make a gun out of wood somehow. All those would just be either less effective (for most purposes) or more expensive than their steel counterparts, to a greater or lesser extent.

And by the logic that you need a steel mill or smelter to use steel, you should need to build a forge to use iron. It's assumed that certain capabilities are automatically part of civilian infrastructure.
Much like how riflemen dont require gunpowder anymore, since it was so common by then...a steel refinery should provide all the steel youd need for units, even if you dont actually have iron in your territorial borders.To the contrary, riflemen should require either gunpowder or some substitute. Any explosive will do, really, pretty much. You can make a gun that uses TNT or C4 or nitroglycerin as its propellant, or you could substitute something else for any one of the elements in black powder (the use of a mix of sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal as the first gun propellant was due largely to historical accident). Again, you'll have to account for various peculiarities of the substances you use, but it's doable.

Iron specifically is abundant in the Earth's crust. More advanced technologies should be able to extract it without an iron resource, albeit at a higher cost. An alternative would be to just use some other material.
in regards to "the nuclear military idea" how about depleated uranium shells? does increased damage, ilness points added after city attack and so onThe precise health risks of depleted uranium are disputed. That it can cause heavy metal poisoning if ingested or inhaled in sufficient amounts, no one doubts; whether the amount of radiation it produces is significant is questionable. Overall, it's probably not terribly dangerous to the population at large, considering it's released basically only on the destruction or attempted destruction of a tank (from certain antitank weapons and from tank armor), and therefore the amount released over the course of a war would be fairly low. If anyone is harmed by depleted uranium, it's probably soldiers, and even that's uncertain. Either way, it's doubtless less dangerous to the populace than the use of lead for bullets, say.
don't know if this is what you meant by illness points, but usage of such shells should reflect the major health problems that soldiers firing the shells experienced after operative duty...
Should be plenty documentation about this available, even if the US still denies it...(last I heard, anyway)Ah, here we have someone with his mind made up before the discussion starts . . . as I say, the matter is disputed, and there just isn't enough evidence to be certain either way. If you'd like to find environmentalist/pacifist documentation to argue your case, I'd be happy to counter with government analyses.
Would guns be invented without chemistry, metal working, physics, etc?Sure. None of those is necessary for guns, strictly speaking. However, they would certainly help (or at least the first two would, the last is out of place). You'd need explosives, and for explosives you'd need mining (seeing as virtually any conceivable explosive is derived from mined products), but other than that I can't think of anything strictly necessary for guns. Some inventive guy with access to some materials that are explosive when put together might figure out that they're explosives, and once you have explosives discovered you just need one more clever guy to stick it in a tube, close off the tube at one end, put in a rock, and boom. The tube could be made out of anything, even bamboo, although that probably wouldn't last for more than a few shots.
biological weapons without medicine and biochemistry?You could use a slave or prisoner infected with Ebola or anthrax or smallpox or whatever as a biological weapon. Not hard, pretty much every society has observed that some diseases are contagious. To isolate the disease and spread it in its pure form would be another matter, much trickier, requiring all sorts of things.

But overall, you have the right idea.
WE ARE all speaking chinese and russian... :)
chinese is the most common language on earth.
after that, spanish, and I'm pretty sure that after that -- russian.Mandarin is the most common language on the planet, yes, but only as a native language, and even then it's only spoken by about 13.69% of the world. English is third, with 4.84%, just barely behind Spanish at 5.05%. Russian clocks in at seventh place. (Source: CIA World Factbook (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/xx.html))

However, realize that this is first languages only. Many, many Europeans can speak English to an extent, and so can quite a substantial percentage of third-worlders. English is undoubtedly the best-known language in the world―all because of the power of the British Empire, and eventually the power of its former colonies. But this is really a side point.
BTW, does the AI actually take into account new techs?
I mean, I really doubt that it can look at a tech and evaluate whats best to research at any specific point.I think you'd be surprised―it's not too hard to code something that will analyze the costs and benefits of a tech and make a semi-intelligent decision based on that. However, I think Civ4 just uses simple weights, with each tech having a ranking in the XML files in each of several general groups (Military, Economic, Religious, etc.). This is also undoubtedly the way it gives you those helpful little suggestions on what to research.
Would anyone have bothered researching chemistry if they didnt want to make a gun? Youre looking at it backwards. Nessescity is the mother of invention. You dont research something unless you need it.Only in astro sciences will you be researching something, only for knowledges sake, and end up discovering something completely unrelated and useful.Really, now. So Newton's laws of motion, were those astrosciences or useless? How about relativity? Quantum mechanics, which promises all sorts of incredible things that it's just starting to deliver on, that's which? How about calculus? For that matter, Euclidean geometry? The list goes on, and on, and on . . . would you like me to list the things any of these made possible, or have I made my point? Theoretical advances have, since the start of the scientific revolution, made practical advances possible.
People thinking hrmm...we gotta get out of this rain, led to construction, which set the stage for people who were thinking...hrmm there has to be a better way to get water into our cities. This also opened the door for people who were thinking hrmm we sure do need something around our city to keep stuff out..though construction could be applied to all of these things, they are not interdependant. They also arent dependant on any other branch of scientific thought.No, those three ("civil", "labor", and "military", you might call them) aren't interdependent. But they are all dependent on construction itself. I don't know which branch you'd put that in, but if it's in any one branch, other branches will have to depend on it.

I agree with your point about there being too many dependencies, absolutely. But your method of pigeonholing everything into one of a few trees based on its effects is equally faulty. The dependency structure should resemble a tangled patch of shrubbery, the leaves all interwoven but mostly connected directly to the ground, than a tree, with its rigid hierarchy and Boolean dependencies.
I urge you to check out the cia factbook (google it) about russia and china. They are FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR from leading economic powers. I have more sway in my small toe over geo-political issues than russia or china...its just that they have alot of really big bombs.Indeed? The People's Republic of China has the second largest GDP of any nation on the planet, trailing only the United States. In 2004, it had an estimated $7.3 billion GDP PPP, as opposed to the U.S.'s $11.8 billion. It should be noted that both of these nations are among the world's few largest in terms of land coverage (4th and 3rd respectively). China has immense political power due to its economy, able to force virtually every nation on the planet to pretend Taiwan doesn't exist and ignore China's violations of all sorts of treaties it's signed. Arguably the only more politically important nation is the U.S.

I don't think your big toe quite matches up.

But anyway, the point still holds, to an extent. The planet's largest nation in terms of land coverage, Russia, ranks 10th in GDP, but Japan is 3rd in GDP but about 60th in terms of land coverage. A somewhat better correlation is obtained by taking population instead of land coverage, but it's still not great. And this is, to be fair, reflected adequately in Civ 4: a medium-sized nation can easily trounce a less advanced but larger nation.

(Incidentally, all figures from the CIA World Factbook, which you referred to. It'd probably be a good idea to check the sources you reference before actually referencing them.)
you dont need to discover all the techs in an age to move up right? i havent really paid attention, although i will nowI think it just advances you after a certain number of techs, or a certain number of research points rounded down to the nearest tech.

We haven't heard from jaynus in awhile. He must be hard at work.

I know its probably not a good idea to pst something after such a long post, but I want to get this up before I forget about it.

The concept of resources being used up got me thinking about synthetic resources. In WWII rubber and oil were in short supply, so ways were found to synthetically produce them. Perhaps you could add an optional tech that would allow the production of certain resources (like oil). Then you could have a city produce oil for the whole civilization through the production menu. The resource would be similar to the amount of money you have, in that when a unit is being produced it uses a certain amount of that resource per turn.

For example, if you don't have an oil resource near any of your cities you could research synthetic oil and have a city produce oil. That will add oil to an oil stockpile for your civilization. Then as you build a tank or an aiplane the amount of oil in the stockpile is reduced by a certain amount every turn.

There are other ways you could implement this. Perhaps every turn you move a tank you need a certain amount of oil or the tank will not function, rather than using oil during the production. Perhaps all resources could be put into a stockpile, so that as you mine them your civ gets that resource stockpiled but the resource is depleted on the map.

I realize this is a rough idea, and maybe makes the game too much like an RTS for some people. I think it would add more options for people who like long games.

I know its probably not a good idea to pst something after such a long post, but I want to get this up before I forget about it.

The concept of resources being used up got me thinking about synthetic resources. In WWII rubber and oil were in short supply, so ways were found to synthetically produce them. Perhaps you could add an optional tech that would allow the production of certain resources (like oil). Then you could have a city produce oil for the whole civilization through the production menu. The resource would be similar to the amount of money you have, in that when a unit is being produced it uses a certain amount of that resource per turn.

For example, if you don't have an oil resource near any of your cities you could research synthetic oil and have a city produce oil. That will add oil to an oil stockpile for your civilization. Then as you build a tank or an aiplane the amount of oil in the stockpile is reduced by a certain amount every turn.

There are other ways you could implement this. Perhaps every turn you move a tank you need a certain amount of oil or the tank will not function, rather than using oil during the production. Perhaps all resources could be put into a stockpile, so that as you mine them your civ gets that resource stockpiled but the resource is depleted on the map.

I realize this is a rough idea, and maybe makes the game too much like an RTS for some people. I think it would add more options for people who like long games.

Those are some pretty interesting ideas. I wonder how they would play out in the game if properly implemented.

i thought of this yesterday but it slipped my mind until i read kp80's post about synthetic resources.
i was going to give oil as an example as there are ways of actually converting sawdust into an oil that can replace desiel; each lumbermill you have can function as an oil source for one unit. and then theres eythanal (sp?), which can be made from whats left over in a wheat or corn field, and can more or less replace gasoline currently (sure, its substantially more corrosive, but something tells me the only reason they havent overcome that is because theres too much money in keeping us all dependant on oil. oh, and it gels in much warmer temps.... once again, not exactly an impossible to overcome problem); can build eythanol refinery instead of farm on wheat/corn for oil instead of food. and you cant forget rendered animal fats, those can be used as fuel. so a perhaps a rendering plant as a national wonder, that produces an oil source for one unit per pasture of food animals you control.

someone suggested that you should be able to make alcohol from wheat. i figure i should bring that one up again because im talking about alternate uses for resources, and that was a good idea. perhaps instead of building a farm on wheat you can build a distillery, and instead of giving you the food bonus it then gives you a luxury resource (whiskey, say).

also, you should add tobacco and marijuana as luxury resources, both that add +2 happiness and -1 health. coca beans (which you can harvest for either cocaine (with the same modifiers as tobacco) or chocolate (+1 happiness). perhaps with civics (not sure how else to adopt this part) that either make drugs legal in your country (eliminating the -1 to health) or illegal (preventing you from using them at all. and just to be completely unbiased about it, that would prevent wine and whiskey as well, as alcohol is a drug).
there would need to be some up side to outlawing drugs, im just not sure what it might be. maybe you could just set it up so that if that is another countries favourite civic and you choose to adopt legal drugs, you get -6 diplomacy. maybe someone could build on that idea, i know parts of it were suggested by someone else earlier.

oh, and i have to go on record as being for the inclusion of many different kinds of bombs/missiles. well, atleast serveral, 5 or 6, from bombs that need to be carried by planes to short range high yield warheads and long range, small (at first, medium later) yield warheads. thats on top of a tactical nuke and an actual nuclear bomb (that needs to be dropped by a plane or moved into position by a spy).

Jaynus ??? Where are you ? I want updated version ...

simetrical:
You base too many arguments on dreams of what could have been.

Guns mean guns. Like we know em. that's how it is in Civ at least.
you need chemistry to formulate an explosive, metal working to create the actual gun (.. I don't buy that wooden gun crap. when you say 'gun' everyone knows what you mean. guns like we have here today), physics to even conceptualize the idea of action-reaction with an explosive propelling a slug.. and so on.

as for ebola slaves, that's to biological weapons what slings are to M16s.. precursor but unrelated in any form other than purpose

no comments on my suggestions? (pg 12)

they are all well founded... and I think they would definately add realism to the game. especially food limiting growth and trade creating it. that way coastal cities would become more important than farm cities. as is IRL the case. kansas city isnt bigger than New York, despite kansas having a superior food production. it is trade, administration and production that makes cities big. not food supply. Rome was a city of 1 million in the imperial age, but it had no chance to feed itself. the grain came from egypt. when the roman empire collapsed rome shrunk to nothing and didnt grow out of its 200 AD city limits until after WW2...

can grain transports be included somehow?

concerning bioligical weaponry. I know 2 cases of the top of my head where biological weapons were used in older times.

first. when the mongols sieged a city in the crimea (modern ukraine) they had to cancel the siege because they were afflicted by the plague. as a goodbye present they loaded their plagueridden corpses in their catapults and flung them into the city. the italian merchants that owned the city then sailed home and spread the disease. this disease is commonly known as THE BLACK DEATH! and it wiped out more than half of europes population...

second, in the new world the indians didnt have a resistance to smallpox and thus during negotiations the whiteys gave them blankets from hospitals where people with smallpox had lain. they were infected and brought the disease home and killed off most of the tribe and the colonists could then get their land without hassle...

in fact these human induced epidemics were far more dangerous then than they are now, because modern medicine will allow for ways to counter human created diseases, or at least slow them. in those times there was no cure, no medicine and thus only natural immunity or isolation would allow for survival...