The single most important aspect of this mod is food. I think originally too much is generated early on and expansion is too fast. (This was because of the He-3 for food concept which should be scrapped IMO). What should be done about it now?

Options, not every possible one:

1 - food from buildings like the mushroom farm, but not too many early food generating buildings after that one
2 - The hothouse improvement. I like this one, but we need it to be less producing at first or it should require upkeep via the cottage improvement maybe?
3 - Specialists. We didn't use them well before. What can we do with them now?

Thoughts?

Make the farms use the cottage system to simulate the systematic growth of the bio-domes. However, further expansion to the next tiers cannot happen until certain techs are discovered and only then will the counter start.

Would they expand graphically as well?

An agronomist specialist could be used to let base facilities which have the potential to give food produce food. But only when this agronomist is active so to speak.

My biggest concern is too much food at first. We were planning on immigration until the Isolation event, but who knows now.

Well, simply remove all, but I mean ALL food yield from a basic tile.
Perhaps even from the citytile. :D

Didn't Belizan include an Isolation "event" (no tech, but a real event) somewhere in the last updates?

I still can't "read" python. :p

Didn't we try to remove all food and failed? Of course this was a year ago and maybe someone has done that by now.

Nah, the coders didn't want to go for the idea at the time. AFAIK food can easily be removed from tiles. Look at what we're planning on the SMAC mod.

"reading" python is easy enough, understanding tho... :sad:
(I do seem to remember Belizan was testing a python event for Isolation? Or was that only to gift stuff to the factions prior to Isolation?)

I'd like zero food for all tiles myself. Let's go that route.

I'd like zero food for all tiles myself. Let's go that route.

this ties in with the starting Disaster World concept currently on the table as the new starting era for the game.

however this obviously would be a MAJOR game change in that the current mod revolves soley around food and the relative plenty thereof if the corrects techs are researched after the Isolation Event.

I would vote we table discussion of food availability until at least the new era framework has been agreed upon.

The current mod revolves around food because we're trading He-3 for food with Earth until Isolation. Once you build Glasshouses you can force the tiles to produce food, but by themselves the tiles should be barren. I don't think this will effect the current mod too much, but it's debatable for sure.

The current mod revolves around food because we're trading He-3 for food with Earth until Isolation. Once you build Glasshouses you can force the tiles to produce food, but by themselves the tiles should be barren. I don't think this will effect the current mod too much, but it's debatable for sure.

the AI civs are in love with glasshouses, and for your own the civ the game continues to suggest you build them with blue circles.

however I only build one or at most two of them to jumpstart the food production in a new city, but one of my finished cities has ZERO glasshouses in it.


rather almost every single tile is worked by the engineering specialist provided by the Genetic Screening emergency civic - which does not currently have a penalty from continuing to use it, even from turn one. the Genetic Screening civic is available from the start and gives an unlimited engineer specialists, each of which contribute two hammers to the cause.

the only exception is that I do build a few custom outhouses to generate cash once that tech becomes available.

the solar outpost is a tech in the tech tree, but they cannot currently be built even after researching the prerequisite tech to building them.

the key to city improvement in this mod is getting the correct technologies in order to literally create food out of thin air.

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once all the food techs have been discovered and you are fortunate enough to also get the "Fungus Amongus" Wonder giving you another two free food, you can start a new city on a 21 grid of BARE ROCK (absolutely zero resources in any of the tiles) and still get the total food up to 20 - meaning a city of size ten.

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I originally went hog wild with glasshouses, but soon came to realize that custom outposts are a better long term improvement. (I had to systematically replace all the useless glasshouses in the mature cities of my empire.)

one glasshouse at most is usually enough to help keep a city growing as it builds its food improvements. a glasshouse is preferably built on a polar tile since it also produces a hammer to aid in the effort to get the food production improvements built.

I found that only cities started on an island in a dust sea are so food poor that multiple Glasshouse are necessary.

in any case, once a city reaches or nears its pop limit Glasshouses serve no useful purpose and need to be replaced with customs outposts.

the only rationale to keep Glasshouses is that the game rewards your score based upon population in your cities. however I found it better myself to have smaller cities producing more income from customs houses. this enables more coin to be able to either found new cities or zip through the tech tree.

the only caveat with custom houses is that it is possible to build more than your food capacity can support in your 21 tile city grid. to avoid overbuilding custom houses, one strategy would be to only keep one ahead of the number you know you need.

it might also be strategic to keep one extra customs house on hand in case an invasion destroys one of the other ones.

BTW, the AI never figured any of this this out. Glasshouses still remained in its mature cities. most cities had few if any custom houses.

the game itself continually made blue circles indicating custom houses "should" be replaced.

Geo - Can you tell me how to see the terrain to 0 :food:/tile?

Not out of hand. Have to check the xml files for that.

If you can figure it out I'd love to tinker with that for the next test version.

I'm on it. (I can still finish the BtS write-up tomorrow ;) )

I think you have time for the BtS part. ;)

Anything else you want to work on for this version, just let me know.

I think I found it.

The CIV4TerrainInfos.xml file, under Assets/XML/Terrain

Btw, if you haven't changed this file during your session with Kael, I'm pretty confident I can change it and uplink it to you. (I don't have your python-fixed version)

Upload away. I'll test it.

It's only one type of Maria Basalt that has +1 food. The rest of the basic food income is from resource types like water ice, nutrients and stuff.
Any reason to hold on different types of the same terrain?

Okay, I adapt the food some resources give too. Should be two files.

Geo - did we ever fix this or change it? I can't remember.

I started to fix it, but then other issues came inbetween. At this moment, I put 1 :food: yield on the polar terrain, that's all.
My second step is to eliminate all :food: from resources. The third step, whether an improvement on resources yields :food: is debatable, and depends on how we see the He³ trade with Earth.

I think I had it set up in XML where food decreased by 1 from He3 resources with a specific tech until it hits zero at Isolation. It was meant to not need python to show the Moon needed to stop importing food.

An event causing the cut-off from Earth supplies is better IMO. But that has to wait for now I suppose.
Btw, have you ever considered the possibility that a civ could declare independency before Isolation occurs? In this case a food cut-off should happen too I think.

Due to the costs of launching things to the moon from earth, I don't think that food imports would be feasable on any sort of long term. I think that the colonists would make it a first priority to generate their own food. So short term in fact that they should be food independant by the end of the first turn (year).
We should severly restric food imports from earth. (perhaps a single early national wonder would allow it?)
He3 should generate Money.
We could replace the food imports from earth mechanic with an imigration mechanic.
Something like this:
No improved tiles (or very few, just food resources have 3 food) produce more than two food during the time before isolation, but exactly two food is easy to achieve. This is so your citys don't grow much, but new population will be usefull and not starve.
Write a python script that generates imigrants to your citys (new population) based on the amount of He3 you control. People want to imigrate to rich colonys, right? Only add free population intermitantly, and only as long as happiness and health allow.

After Isolation there would be improved terrain improvements that allow more food to be generated, so specialists and field workiers generating no food will be feasable.

Due to the costs of launching things to the moon from earth, I don't think that food imports would be feasable on any sort of long term. I think that the colonists would make it a first priority to generate their own food. So short term in fact that they should be food independant by the end of the first turn (year).

Think of how long the ISS is orbiting Earth already and still there's no hydroponics bay in it. ;)
Also, every city has a 2 food output on its own tile. I think of that as the city's own and primary cultivation. Anything that would come in from Earth (and they have to send cargo ships anyway for getting He³ and presumely other ores) would be types of food the colony was not yet able to cultivate.

We should severly restric food imports from earth. (perhaps a single early national wonder would allow it?)
He3 should generate Money.
We could replace the food imports from earth mechanic with an imigration mechanic.
Something like this:
No improved tiles (or very few, just food resources have 3 food) produce more than two food during the time before isolation, but exactly two food is easy to achieve. This is so your citys don't grow much, but new population will be usefull and not starve.
Write a python script that generates imigrants to your citys (new population) based on the amount of He3 you control. People want to imigrate to rich colonys, right? Only add free population intermitantly, and only as long as happiness and health allow.

After Isolation there would be improved terrain improvements that allow more food to be generated, so specialists and field workiers generating no food will be feasable.

I agree mostly, and this is the point (migration events) where the mod was when it became buggy and later on abandonned by the coders.
The problem is we don't have expert coders atm (afaik) working on the mod.

Another problem is that we're (At least I am) guilty of is mixing the future versions of this mod and this one.

How much depth do we want to go into with the vanilla version? I agree that this all needs to be changed for the BtS version so do we tinker here or leave it as is and address it later?

Think of how long the ISS is orbiting Earth already and still there's no hydroponics bay in it. ;)
Also, every city has a 2 food output on its own tile. I think of that as the city's own and primary cultivation. Anything that would come in from Earth (and they have to send cargo ships anyway for getting He³ and presumely other ores) would be types of food the colony was not yet able to cultivate.

Also think about how few people are on the ISS to feed, and how much easyer it is to get to low earth orbit than to the moon.
He3 would be so valuable because it is so small. Just a few ships a year would be needed to transport the entire production of it back to earth.
I don't think that any common ores(iron, aluminum, copper) would be sent back home, just used on the moon to replace imported materials. Uranium and Plutonium might be valuable enough in weapons to validate the expence.

I agree mostly, and this is the point (migration events) where the mod was when it became buggy and later on abandonned by the coders.
The problem is we don't have expert coders atm (afaik) working on the mod.
Fear of failure is no reason to not try. We may not have any experts, but some here are proficient enough to give it a shot.
Do we want such code? I can attempt to write it.

Another problem is that we're (At least I am) guilty of is mixing the future versions of this mod and this one.

How much depth do we want to go into with the vanilla version? I agree that this all needs to be changed for the BtS version so do we tinker here or leave it as is and address it later?

I would say we should keep tinkering untill BtS is just a couple weeks away. The more practice we get changing things that are difficult now, the farther we will be when we get to start the BtS version.

I think we were also planning on immigration of citizens to help out instead of population actually growing. But the rate of immigration needs to be dependent on exporting of valuable resources or else why would anyone invest time/money to ship up more people?

These are issues Belizan and matthewv were dealing with when everything went crapola. Maybe Geo remembers more of it then I do, but I was just XML-ing away back then.

And I agree we should keep tinkering, but also keep track of every idea for down the road.

Also think about how few people are on the ISS to feed, and how much easyer it is to get to low earth orbit than to the moon.

I knew you would bring this up, and infact you're dead wrong here.
Lifting cargo in Earth orbit makes up almost (about 90% I reckon) all the fuel of an Earth-moon-Earth trip. So the extra expense to boost a ship towards the moon is negligable compared to just lift it in low orbit.

He3 would be so valuable because it is so small. Just a few ships a year would be needed to transport the entire production of it back to earth.

True that, it only depends on how accurate current predictions are of the amount of He³ needed to fuel fusion reactors. My last check on this issue learned me there's quite a difference of opinion there.

I don't think that any common ores(iron, aluminum, copper) would be sent back home, just used on the moon to replace imported materials. Uranium and Plutonium might be valuable enough in weapons to validate the expence.

Not to Earth itself, no. But Earth orbit would be a greedy market of any metals brought in from the moon. It would still be way cheaper then lifting those same metals from the gravity pit that Earth is.

Fear of failure is no reason to not try. We may not have any experts, but some here are proficient enough to give it a shot.
Do we want such code? I can attempt to write it.

If you feel up to it, I'm all for trying.
But please let us first determine more exactly how/what we want with migration and supplies from Earth.

I knew you would bring this up, and infact you're dead wrong here.
Lifting cargo in Earth orbit makes up almost (about 90% I reckon) all the fuel of an Earth-moon-Earth trip. So the extra expense to boost a ship towards the moon is negligable compared to just lift it in low orbit.

It may only take 10% of the fuel, but how much more fuel had to be used on liftoff to get that extra 10% into orbit with the craft? How much bigger was the Saturn 5 (apollo) rocket than the space shuttle?



True that, it only depends on how accurate current predictions are of the amount of He³ needed to fuel fusion reactors. My last check on this issue learned me there's quite a difference of opinion there.

here we have the advantage of the writer; we don't know how it will work, so we can pick how we want it to work for the game to play well.


Not to Earth itself, no. But Earth orbit would be a greedy market of any metals brought in from the moon. It would still be way cheaper then lifting those same metals from the gravity pit that Earth is.

If you feel up to it, I'm all for trying.
But please let us first determine more exactly how/what we want with migration and supplies from Earth.

determine away, i wouldn't want to spent the time coding something that isn't wanted.

It may only take 10% of the fuel, but how much more fuel had to be used on liftoff to get that extra 10% into orbit with the craft? How much bigger was the Saturn 5 (apollo) rocket than the space shuttle?

I'm sorry, but that's simply a dead-end logic. Why bother going into orbit in the first place? (humans then I mean)

Besides, I can imagine that in the time our mod plays, there's a piece-by-piece method of delivering stuff/people in orbit and on the moon.
Shuttles and/or ramjets bring people and supplies in Earth orbit to a station or such.
Space-build cargoships transfer this to the moon.

This is supposed to be a cheaper method since there's no need for an all-in-one return package.

You seems to forget the Space Elevator !

What about cheap nutritional powdery drinks? They'd be cheap to send!

You seems to forget the Space Elevator !

In order to build one, you need the capability to go into deep space in the first place. ;)

If we are down to discussing such details about theoretical logistics abilitys, I would say we can decide to make it any way we want to.
Base the descision on optimizing desired gameplay, and reality can just bend a little bit to accomidate.

One reason for sugesting that terrain and improvements be used to generate the food quickly is that it would be much more easily understood by the AI than the other ways that have been tryed or proposed.

Keep it Simple Stupid. :p

Okay, my suggestion:

Let the colony start with an almost full box of food, but don't let the base plot produce food on its own. The population of course will start to decrease.

The map python ensures there's He³ near the starting location, so once that is linked up for every x amount of He³ collected by the base an x amount of cargo can come in. Whether it be food, engineers, colonists, a scout rover, or even hammers, is up to the player. In the beginning the player will of course need to choose food, until he finishes a facility that produces food in the colony site so he starts to break even and can request other stuff then food.

But the problem again here is the AI.

Radical idea, SDK, not likely to be implimentable in this version of SotM:

What if we added another trade slider?
You could spend your trade on Science, Gold, Culture or Food.
The slider would be disabled at isolation.
He3 would generate trade, and thus if desired could become food.

Sounds indeed much simplier. If you can pull it off, by all means.

O yes, I wouldn't include culture in this slider. Science, money and food sound good, and instead of culture I suggest to add hammers in.

Also, 't might be an idea to let more resources then just He³ to generate trade. hydrogen, water, metal, it's all stuff that an orbital industry (the one around Earth) can use for fuel, construction and food.

Very cool idea. Very cool. I agree that culture isn't needed yet, but expansion and land grabbing will always be an option down the road.

I had gold, science and culture because those are what sliders are currently available for.
Since other mines and things like solar panels already generate trade we wouln't have to change a thing for them to workl as well

I assume that the culture slider would be disabled for several eras into the game.

It's only one type of Maria Basalt that has +1 food. The rest of the basic food income is from resource types like water ice, nutrients and stuff.
Any reason to hold on different types of the same terrain?

Okay, I adapt the food some resources give too. Should be two files.

The reason why there were two types of Maria Basalt (one that produces food and one that doesn't) was because civ 4 has a really weird bug that won't let you made so that no tile produce food. (I spent alot of time on this issue more than a year ago). I made a work around by having the map be created with the Maria Basalt that produced food and then changing them all to the one that didn't.

P.S. If any of you have any questions about any of the python the work we did a year ago don't be afraid to ask me. I'll answer what I can. I had made servral weird workarounds like the one mentioned above in order to get rid of some of the bugs we were having.

Yeah, that food bug stinks.

Most of the python (if you d/l the last version) has been completely gutted. Kael talked me through it. I don't have any problem with you looking back into it if you want.