I realize that Revolutions has up to this point added game mechanics without adding new content such as new units, buildings, wonders, improvements and civics, but perhaps the new game mechanics warrant some of these things... I'm not saying they do, nor am I offering up any suggestions. I'm merely opening the floor for the discussion.

State your case and try to win over jdog to your point of view! :D

My position is that no such additions should be made. I think mods are best suited by doing their own thing very well, and are often hurt by watering them down with feature creep and/or idiosyncratic additions (ie, a mod that makes Marathon twice as long would be desired by some, but the person who makes it also tweaks Free Religion to cause double happiness, or Tanks to have 3 moves, or something else that he likes his games to have). I feel especially this way because Revolutions is largely compatible with mods that add units and improvements and civics already, so it would be little trouble for the end user to combine them or another modder to make a "spin-off" version.


But I have a question regarding the buildings in the game:
I've read few posts where people discuss Walls, Castles, Courthouses and Jails as needing to have an effect of reducing the growth of the rev. index in cities. Is this actually done already or just wished for?

If it's just wished-for then I think this isn't an inappropriate thread to re-request that feature, and to discuss which buildings should have such an impact. I believe that Castles, Courthouses and Jails should all have some effect on revolutions, but that Walls should not (or at least only a much more modest effect).

But I have a question regarding the buildings in the game:
I've read few posts where people discuss Walls, Castles, Courthouses and Jails as needing to have an effect of reducing the growth of the rev. index in cities. Is this actually done already or just wished for?

If it's just wished-for then I think this isn't an inappropriate thread to re-request that feature, and to discuss which buildings should have such an impact. I believe that Castles, Courthouses and Jails should all have some effect on revolutions, but that Walls should not (or at least only a much more modest effect).

Walls and Castles increase the revolution quelling potency of your garrison. Courthouses decrease the negative effects of distance/size of civ.

Currently Jails do not have an extra effect ... but they certainly could. Ideas?
- Decrease chances of revolution being violent
- Per turn decrease in rev index
- Decrease in unhappiness rev index effect
- ?

Walls and Castles increase the revolution quelling potency of your garrison. Courthouses decrease the negative effects of distance/size of civ.

Currently Jails do not have an extra effect ... but they certainly could. Ideas?
- Decrease chances of revolution being violent
- Per turn decrease in rev index
- Decrease in unhappiness rev index effect
- ?

Hmm... yes, Jails definitely need something... Of these possible suggestions, I would say that maybe decrease in unhappiness rev index effect might be best since those malcontents are being removed from the population... however there is something to be said for decreasing the chance of a violent revolution since those that actually are inclined to violently overthrow the government will probably get themselves into legal trouble prior to the uprising and be thrown in jail more easily... thus they will not be able to participate in any moves against the system (not directly at least).

Either way, a jail to me seems to have the effect of removing the most extreme elements of a reform/separatist movement.

Or you could do like Unterland and impose the death sentences for all infractions of the law :)

I'm also against adding any new buildings/civics etc. I think the main goal of the mod is to provide the revolution features, and shouldn't worry about further tweaking the game.

I agree with most of the replies. I also dislike when mods go to far out of their intended goals. I agree with Fosse, you should try to keep it just revolutions mod. However I am proposing to add one new building. Sometime in modern age (or end of industrial age) you should be able to build the "Domestic Intelligence Agency" , like the FBI, or depending on what gov. civic you choose maybe an alternate "Secret Police HQ". This build would give you options every 6 - 10 turns (or new civic cat.) on how to deal with unhappy citizens. i.e. you could choose between "Harsh Punishment" on one extreme and "Liberal Leniency" on the other. With a few more options in-between. These options could affect what revolutions you experience. Harsh punishment would cause citizens to to revolt faster but with less men and fewer cities (citizens in jail, or slain, some citizens fearful of revolting) when they do revolt. (less units , etc) Liberal would cause revolts to happen slower but be more violent (ie. extreme right revolt. (more citizens to revolt, citizens think you are weak, etc.) Citizens could also complain and/or praise what your policy is toward them.

My 2 cents

Maybe allow no revolutions in x turns after completing a wonder. Wonders are supposed to make people amazed by the civilization's greatness, even rebels

Maybe allow no revolutions in x turns after completing a wonder. Wonders are supposed to make people amazed by the civilization's greatness, even rebels

Wonders already do this... it's not a guaranteed thing, but it reduces the chance of a revolution occuring.

Dom Pedro II, brazilian independece's icon... :)

i want some previews of the game :p

Actually, one thing that might be cool would be an "incite revolution" ability for the spy unit... just park him in an enemy city and it adds a bit towards the rev index each turn or something.

Actually, one thing that might be cool would be an "incite revolution" ability for the spy unit... just park him in an enemy city and it adds a bit towards the rev index each turn or something.

There will be abilities that will do this coming standard in BTS. I'm playing wait and see with what they come up with ... From the BTS info center:

Spy Missions

* Destructive
o blowing up terrain improvements and buildings
o poisoning water supplies
o stealing gold
* Foreign Affairs
o spreading their civilization's culture into their target city
o coercing their target leader to switch civics or state religions
o supporting a revolution
o If the city is in revolt, you'll take out a large chunk of it's culture
o fomenting unhappiness
* Intel
o can provide defense against enemy espionage by performing counterespionage missions

Hmm. I think that the effects of some civics could change that of others. For instance; if you have the Hereditary Rule Civic, and combine that with Emancipation, it equals a parliamentary monarchy.

Hmm. I think that the effects of some civics could change that of others. For instance; if you have the Hereditary Rule Civic, and combine that with Emancipation, it equals a parliamentary monarchy.

What were you thinking could be different for civs in this state?

What I would like to see is a partisan/guerilla/insurgent unit that more approximates real world guerilla warfare than what we've seen in civ so far.

It should be invisible like a submarine, have the hidden nationality tag from BtS (like privateers), lots of first strikes, the guerilla and woodsman promotions, a good chance of retreating, the pick the unit you target mechanic from BtS (like elephant ballistas [that is if i correctly understand the way firaxis has implemented that feature]), but have a far lower strength that conventional military units. These units should be cheap to build, and use food in their prodution. In large numbers they should be able to bring down conventional military units, but for the most part they should be a nuisance by pillaging and carrying out hit and run attacks rather than a threat to conventional military forces. Autospawning these units from cities with a high revolution index would be a cool feature as well.

To counter these units there should be some type of special forces/counter insurgency unit that can see invisible ground units, have much more strength than partisans, may or may not be invisible, do not have hidden nationality, can paradrop, have amphibious and commando promotions, also have first strikes and retreat, but are fairly expensive.

Hmm.. I agree that I would like to see more special units for rebel governments. Guerrilla fighters, RPGs, truck-mounted Katyushas... they'd be dirt cheap but still moderately effective for hitting the enemy and running away. Not especially good for the long haul, but they'd serve well enough until the rebel civ started cranking out their own regular infantry troops or receiving foreign aid.

Giving the guerillas the hidden nationality flag is a non-starter... all it will do is lead to pointless attacks on third parties civs near the border... Giving them the ability to explore rival territory however would be acceptable... so they could attack and then slip across the border into another country.

I would give them 2 MP, but I would also impose these restrictions:

1) The 2 MP would only apply within their own borders or neutral territory. If they invade the parent civ, they only get the standard 1 MP. This is to represent them having a knowledge of their own territory but not being particularly useful crossing into enemy territory.

2) I would give them invisibility, but it would only apply for Forests and Jungles... so if they're standing on those tiles, they can't be seen unless an enemy unit tries to occupy that tile or when the invisible unit attacks or more to another tile.

Currently, neither of these two restrictions are possible, but that will change once they've been added into the SDK by me.

But should these be added to the base Revolution mod?... Probably not. A lot of people seem to like the lack of new units, buildings, etc. This is one of the reasons why I worked with jdog to get a tag added in the XML specifically to determine if a unit could be spawned as a rebel.

The solution then is to mod this mod so that the Guerrilla would be the only unit permited to be spawned after the earlier melee and archery units have expired.

What were you thinking could be different for civs in this state?

This could increase the amount of happiness. Also, parliamentary monarchies have been proven to be a cheaper alternative to universal suffrage (aka presidency) when you take in to consideration that you need not worry about constant changing of Head of State. It could have decreased cost, and more happiness.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=204082

This modcomp could be a nice addition to the civics.

While mobilization from Civ3 is missed, I don't want to disturb the civics system too much with anything not directly revolution related. And, with the amount of new things in BTS, Firaxis may even have added Mobilization back in ... we'll see.

Well, then I'd like to see my Parliamentary Monarchy idea in it. A cheaper alternative to Representation and Universal Suffrage. Heck, it even has DynamicNames possibilities: The People's Kingdom, the Democratic Kingdom, the Liberal Kingdom etc.

This could increase the amount of happiness. Also, parliamentary monarchies have been proven to be a cheaper alternative to universal suffrage (aka presidency) when you take in to consideration that you need not worry about constant changing of Head of State. It could have decreased cost, and more happiness.

I'm working on something that you might like then... I've almost finished a modcomp that adds civic modifiers from other civics. So, for example, you could get +100% Culture in All Cities from Hereditary Rule if you have Caste System, for example. I'm going to make it alter the civic anger of a civic (which currently doesn't exist) later.

I'm working on something that you might like then... I've almost finished a modcomp that adds civic modifiers from other civics. So, for example, you could get +100% Culture in All Cities from Hereditary Rule if you have Caste System, for example. I'm going to make it alter the civic anger of a civic (which currently doesn't exist) later.

Cool, I look forward to checking it out ... if you do merge it in with this mod, please post that too so we can see how things work. :goodjob:

I'm working on something that you might like then... I've almost finished a modcomp that adds civic modifiers from other civics. So, for example, you could get +100% Culture in All Cities from Hereditary Rule if you have Caste System, for example. I'm going to make it alter the civic anger of a civic (which currently doesn't exist) later.

Very nice! :) If you'd upload it as a plugin for this mod? If Revolution had a plugin system, that would be great :king:

Very nice! :) If you'd upload it as a plugin for this mod? If Revolution had a plugin system, that would be great :king:

It doesn't. My change would not be inherently compatible with this mod since it also involves SDK changes and thus the DLL file would have to be merged.

Bleh. I can do XMLing, but .dll merging is not where my area of expertise lies.

Walls and Castles increase the revolution quelling potency of your garrison. Courthouses decrease the negative effects of distance/size of civ.

Currently Jails do not have an extra effect ... but they certainly could. Ideas?
- Decrease chances of revolution being violent
- Per turn decrease in rev index
- Decrease in unhappiness rev index effect
- ?

Jails should decrease a small amount of unhappines, and with polic state civic it should decrease alot more, but not to much.

I played Roamty's Beginning.14 (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=238932) which merges Revolution with several other projects. In that mod there was a modcomp called Riot Police by TheNavySeal. (http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=5819) I think that this mod comp works well and should become part of Revolution. My motives are selfish because I now merge this component with your mod everytime Revolution improves. I urge you to check this out.

Riot Police mod comp allows you to construct riot police if your city has a jail. Riot police have a mission which allows them to stop a revolt (i.e. reduces a chance of revolution by 25%). They are worse defenders than other modern units (Grenedier tough). They have a role in a domination type victory. They also have been the cause of a few reversals as my enemies break into my territory...

The appeal to a mod like Revolution is that Riot Police give a unit that stabilizes the game and plays to the core of this mod. I like them. They look great. During the end game when my uber civ is crushing all independent thought, these are the garrison of choice in occupied land and the cure for war weariness on the home front. If there is a revolution, the rebels have a decent chance of seizing territory. An invading armed force will destroy Riot Police.

Cool, I'll check them out. Have you posted your custom merge anywhere?

It only occured to me to post as I began to do a merge last night..then I went to bed. I have an older merge. I'm going to the movie right now but I can definately gather the elder version later. Can I PM a zip to you ? Like I say, it's in Roamty's mod as well.

I have no intention of posting a version of your mod. I type like a monkey so code isn't my bag. Making a merge is often painful for me and I have success through trial and error and error. My method has Revolution, Beginning, and the Riot Police for warlords open all at once ...

If mechanics for Riot Police are included in this mod, a straightforward extension could have an ancient era gaurd (spearman strength who have a 5-10% effect on revolt and require a courthouse). Gaurds upgrade to a medieval constable (pikemen who have a 10-15% effect and require a .. castle ? ). Constables could upgrade to Riot Police.

These additions would add a total of three units to your mod and give another opportunity for culltural diversity from graphics guys like me because your mod is included in so many others. These units would change your mod somewhat and are only mentioned as ideas to bring this type of unit to all eras of history. The most cunning use of these units would be to teach the AI to use them ...

The most cunning use of these units would be to teach the AI to use them ...

That's the real trick now, isn't it ... ;)

Personally, I think Revolutions definitely needs the Inquisitor.

Personally, I think Revolutions definitely needs the Inquisitor.

indeed i agree,

ripple, of civfusion,
is about to release his mod,

and he wrote the inquisitor system directly into the sdk!

and he also have revolusion!

hes gonna release it very soon!

Just to be fair, I didn't write the code... I think that honor goes to TheLopez and mrgenie... I simply merged it into my mod. But yes, keldaths, right, my next patch (coming very soon) will have the working inquisitor...

Cheers,
ripple01

If you people are definately sure that the game nees an inquisitor, then you should be able to say why. I don't like magic buletts like inquisitor. They have no place in a modern setting. They remove a challenge from the game. Inqistion in europe sparked the reformation. Pouring molten lead down the throats of children did not pacify europe. Ther are no areas on Earth that have had such a religios purge wholesale across their borders.

Well, in Revolution, there's some pretty strong revolutionary effects if a city has a religion that's not your state religion. And currently, there's no way to get rid of that religion, so once it's there (and often times you have no control of its spreading) you'll have a city that will be more likely to rebel, and there's nothing you can do about it. I'm not sure where I stand on this, but I'm pretty sure that's why people want it in. It's less of a historical and more of a gameplay thing, I think.

As described in the events thread, my opinion is that several national level events are a better way to approach the issue than an anti-missionary unit. Check out some of the details over there, but in short the significant ripple effects of an inquisition are too substantial to tie to the actions of a single unit IMO.

Hi,

your Revolution Mod is my favorite mod, and I agree, that there is no need of hundreds of new civs, units, or whatever, it is a musthave in its compact way. :goodjob:
The only thing, that I'm missing is the Expanded City Radius / Megapolis mod. As I remember, in some modpacks there was only an option in the custom game window, where you could choose to play with the 3-tile city radius. So it can be merged as an extra, optional component, for those, who intend to use it, and I think, there is no need for extra balancing the gameplay (only the enlarged city distances should be considered).

I don't know nothing about codes, is it difficult to add this component??? :confused:

That would be great!!! :crazyeye:

As described in the events thread, my opinion is that several national level events are a better way to approach the issue than an anti-missionary unit. Check out some of the details over there, but in short the significant ripple effects of an inquisition are too substantial to tie to the actions of a single unit IMO.

Personally, I find the inquisitor unit a perfect solution. However, for game balance reasons I'd have the unit only usable between theology and scientific method (or possibly liberalism).

For the purposes of Revolution, the use of the Inquisitor unit could give a one-time boost to the local revolutionary fervor, meaning that using the Inquisitor is a short-term penalty but long-term gain for the civ.

If you people are definately sure that the game nees an inquisitor, then you should be able to say why. I don't like magic buletts like inquisitor. They have no place in a modern setting. They remove a challenge from the game. Inqistion in europe sparked the reformation. Pouring molten lead down the throats of children did not pacify europe. Ther are no areas on Earth that have had such a religios purge wholesale across their borders.

On the contrary, nearly every area of the world has seen some form of the Inquisition, right up until the 20th Century (although Mao's "Cultural Revolution" purges might not seem the same, I'd suggest they were Mao using a modern inquisitor unit to remove all non-Maoist beliefs).

Historical Uses of the Inquisitor Unit: Site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_conversion)

Catholic: Spanish Inquisition

Islam: Forced conversions played a role especially in the 12th century under the Almohad dynasty of North Africa and Andalusia as well as in Persia where Shi'a Islam is dominant.

Buddhist: In the Edo period of Japan, when the first Christian missionaries had arrived, Tokugawa Shogunate forced many newly-converted Japanese Christians to renounce their new faith.

There certainly have been attempts historically to force people to join a religion or to exterminate/drive non-believers from an area, of that there is no doubt. One issues is that there is a difference between forced conversion and an inquisition ... technically, an inquisition is to maintain orthodoxy inside a particular religion. I think many people have the Spanish Inquisition in mind when contemplating this notion, but its actual history is different than the general perception of it. There's a fairly good write-up (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquistion) on Wikipedia that highlights the difference between the actual Inquisition and the other events sometimes associated with it like the Reconquista (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconquista).

The Reconquista began in 722 and lasted for hundreds of years, and in the conquered/reconquered territories there remained a mixture of Christains, Jews, and Muslims. Certainly a lot of the Muslim population would have pulled back with the Moors, but the region remained religiously mixed. The vast majority of modern Spain was taken by ~1300 though the final pieces were only taken in 1492. The inquisition began in 1478, but it's important to note it only had authority over those who had been baptized into the Catholic faith. Technically, the inquisitors, both in this case and the other Catholic Inquisitions, didn't force Jews and Muslims to convert to Catholicism. Many had already "voluntarily" converted to both avoid persecution/death and because they were otherwise increasingly denied rights and jobs, and these converts were certainly the main target of the inquisition in the early years.

In 1492 the Spanish crown banished Jews from its territory, followed by outlawing Islam in 1502 and 1526 (Spain was actually two kingdoms at this time). At this point the Inquisition did effectively have authority over all residents, but these official decrees came from the crown (who also had a fair amount of control of the inquisition, so how independent the decrees were from the Inquisition is debatable). Estimates seem to indicate that in terms of changes to the religious make up, most people left, many people converted, and some fraction of those that converted were later tried and given one of many different punishments if convicted. The inquisition continued over the next several hundred years, alternating its emphasis between dubious converts, protestants, witches, political opponents of the crown, etc.

All in all, it was a very long process that involved many elements and a lot of bloodshed. It also seems that more people simply left than converted, departing both to avoid persecution before the Inquisition began and when their religions were banned. Shortly after the end of the inquisition in the mid-1800's, Jews began returning to Spain. Given this example of the complexity of religious change, I question whether the inquisitor unit is the right model, both from a historical and a gameplay view.

To some extent this is an issue because the religion model in the game is so simplistic, there's not even any sense of how strong one religion is in a city compared to another. If a religion represented <10% of the population in a city, maybe having an inquisitor march in "remove" the religion at the cost of temporary unhappiness would be reasonable. At larger fractions of the population, there'd be serious conflict and upheaval.

Certainly no anti-missionary could walk into a city with >50% of another religion and hope to succeed without serious military backup and quite a bit of destruction. Examples of replacement of a majority religion in an area in history took a very long time and usually involved violent military campaigns and massive displacement. Given the ambiguity of the religion model it's impossible to know what the "real" circumstance in a city is and whether a Inquisitorial squad would really be able to have any effect.

The religion model in Medieval Total War 2 was much more detailed, and there changing the dominant religion (or even just reducing the percentage on non-believers) was a long process of conversion influenced by priest units and religious buildings. This example also highlights how religious change would not really be the domain of Inquisitors anyway.

A combination of city level and national events tying into the Revolt system will allow a much more flexible and dynamic representation of what should be a complex situation than the one-city at a time inquisitor model allows.

Then I'd suggest that the revolt risks need to be toned down. The AI is utterly incapable of dealing with them, and giving no way for the AI to remove religions is a hindrance that keeps the AI countries in constant civil war.