Some new info from the BTS chat (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=227265) yesterday clarified how the new colony split logic will work in BTS (if you haven't checked it out, the cleaned up logs are recommended). Essentially, you will be able to voluntarily release your colony to become a Vassal if it is costing you to much in upkeep. There are no civil wars or internal strife, it's a voluntary mechanic.

This works fairly well with Revolution actually, and will allow you to give up a colony that is troublesome without having to wait for a revolutionaries to come to you ...

One piece of news I wasn't too thrilled about was the inclusion of the Holy Roman Empire as a civ in the epic game. Aside from the whole Europe is already over represented thing, what kind of DynamicCivNames can really work with the HRE? I can't even figure out what their adjective and short description will be ...

Anyway, post away other things from BTS that you think may have Revolution effects, or that the mod will need to take into account.

Some new info from the BTS chat (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=227265) yesterday clarified how the new colony split logic will work in BTS (if you haven't checked it out, the cleaned up logs are recommended). Essentially, you will be able to voluntarily release your colony to become a Vassal if it is costing you to much in upkeep. There are no civil wars or internal strife, it's a voluntary mechanic.

This works fairly well with Revolution actually, and will allow you to give up a colony that is troublesome without having to wait for a revolutionaries to come to you ...

One piece of news I wasn't too thrilled about was the inclusion of the Holy Roman Empire as a civ in the epic game. Aside from the whole Europe is already over represented thing, what kind of DynamicCivNames can really work with the HRE? I can't even figure out what their adjective and short description will be ...

Anyway, post away other things from BTS that you think may have Revolution effects, or that the mod will need to take into account.

The Holy Roman Empire?!! That's the worst addition I've heard! My advice is though to just to keep the "Holy Roman" part and just change the Empire.

If a despotic, theocratic Roman civ attacks the HRE, it will be the war of the Holy Roman Empires ...

Supposedly there'll be an African and a SE Asian addition, which is good.

Isnt europe too crowded to hold another civ?

Wow... Holy Roman Empire is a pretty bad choice, IMO...

Yea the Holy Roman Empire is going to be insane, Europe will now have what?
England
France
Holland
Germany
HRE
Rome
Spain
Portugal
Greece
Byzantium
Ottoman
Russia....

It's just to much... where they gunna put HRE on a new earth map? in between France, Germany and Holland? Yea, that won't lead to overcrowding.

They'll just make Europe bigger ;)

Good God! I've just been reading through the IGN hands on article for BtS... jdog, you're going to have your hands full! :lol:

There's a lot of new stuff that will have to be modified and hooked up to the Revolutions mod... including the ability to finance rebels in another civilization.

Yeah, seems there's plenty of random events that can be modded to have effects on the rev index.

Yeah, it'll be interesting. Fortunately, I think many of the spy missions will work out without any additions ... foment unhappiness can cause unhappiness, which already is factored into the rev index. The spy mission for supporting a revolt will keep a city in disorder (I think), and thereby also produce a massive rev index increase.

The events may be different, depending on how they specifically are implemented and what they do. But, similar to the spy missions, it seems like there will be some level of connection built in naturally. Whether and how it makes sense to augment this remains to be seen ...

It'll definitely be interesting ... I wonder a little about how frequent they'll be popping, as getting free great people or relation effects are significant game events.

Spy type units become available right after Alphabet now, so the potential for early era covert action goes up a lot. This definitely expands the possibilities of giving spies to rebel troops.

Slave revolts are one of the new events apparently, see image 10 in the gamespot gallery ...

The HRE included (at some point) many European civilizations, including the Netherlands, Germany (mostly!) and if going further back (Frankish Empire) Spain, and France, and Northern Italy. What a mess!

Also, geologically and historically seen: if Charlemagne is the leader, then Aachen would be the capital, which is in modern day Germany, and near the Dutch border. The HRE was a split from Spain, and after the HRE split, what was left is Austro-Hungary (direct succesor) and the many German states, which turned the HRE into an Eastern European state with a Central European capital.

The HRE included (at some point) many European civilizations, including the Netherlands, Germany (mostly!) and if going further back (Frankish Empire) Spain, and France, and Northern Italy. What a mess!

Also, geologically and historically seen: if Charlemagne is the leader, then Aachen would be the capital, which is in modern day Germany, and near the Dutch border. The HRE was a split from Spain, and after the HRE split, what was left is Austro-Hungary (direct succesor) and the many German states, which turned the HRE into an Eastern European state with a Central European capital.
But it still doesn't make it a civilization, nor does it make it a good choice or even a very defensible one. Oh well...the rest of the expansion is great, at least...

I'm not saying it is. Heck, Charlemagne's time was before the Splitting of the Carolingian Empire (best described as France and Germany as a single Empire).

Let's... PLEASE... not carry this discussion over to this mod :)

We should set up a poll:p

Kind of hard to complete a mod when you're limbs are broken... :trouble:

;)

The new expansion sounds like it will have some really cool features and be a good fit with Revolution. The colony and espionage features seem very relevant and the UN/Apolistic palace changes sound like something I have been waiting for (you can actually defy resolutions and the resolutions are things other than changing civics).

Unfortunately I have been incredibly busy for the past 6 months and haven't gotten to play Civ 4 at all. :( I'm looking forward to doing some play testing of Revolutions Beyond the Sword this fall after I finish my thesis, get married, and move a couple of states away :crazyeye:

Also, I'm glad to see you are still working on Revolutions jdog, you have put an enormous amount of work into this and I want you to know that I haven't played a game of Civ without Revolutions for a long, long time.

You can change the name of a leader when you play him
so him your unhappy with Charley then call yourself maximilian II or Ferdinand just go for the Habsburg dynasty
anyway, not sure if i understand this spy stuff yet, but it seems that you will be able to set what level of security a nation is on. Then it would seem logical that if you had a high security then revolutions would be near impossible, but if they did happen they would happen on mass.

If you open the XML civics and copied the BTS civics into the revolution civics xml leaving the revolutions additions, then loaded revolutions in BTS would that work?

I know u people are working on it already, but please do realease a beyond the sword working version of the mod soon... I don't even use vanilla civilization anymore. It's soo silly without revolutions >,<

This is to say keep going with the good work, i think this should be basic rules of civ already.

Will there be much changes in python code?
You know, because of the german version ;)

If you open the XML civics and copied the BTS civics into the revolution civics xml leaving the revolutions additions, then loaded revolutions in BTS would that work?

I highly doubt it ... I don't think the game would let you load a Warlords mod in BTS.

I'm part way done with some significant changes to the Python code of Revolution ... this first phase is mostly clean up, correcting things that were just hacked together to see if it would work ...

There will be a second round of Python changes after the first BTS version is out that will be much more of a gameplay change. Cities will remember issues they've had over the last several turns and join rebellions more effectively, changes in civics will precipitate rebellions more directly sometimes (royalists vs paralementarians etc).

As for timing, we'll see ... the Warlords merge was much easier than I expected so hopefully things will go well and a BTS version will be up in a week.

Out of interest, could you make it easier to integrate with other mods? And Solver's Unofficial patch would possibly be nice to use.

What specifically is hard to merge? I will do what I can to make that easier.

I'm part way done with some significant changes to the Python code of Revolution ... this first phase is mostly clean up, correcting things that were just hacked together to see if it would work ...

There will be a second round of Python changes after the first BTS version is out that will be much more of a gameplay change. Cities will remember issues they've had over the last several turns and join rebellions more effectively, changes in civics will precipitate rebellions more directly sometimes (royalists vs paralementarians etc).

As for timing, we'll see ... the Warlords merge was much easier than I expected so hopefully things will go well and a BTS version will be up in a week.

If I can just make one request: please, make more of this mod a part of the SDK. At the very least store the rev index values in the SDK... please :love:

Well, some mods directly have a custom CV .dll thinger. That's kind of hard to change I guess. Perhaps you could create a guide which explains how to integrate new civics.

There's not much that can be done to make .dll merging easy ... you just have to merge source code and recompile. WinMerge (google it) should make things fairly straight forward on the code side.

There is a guide to how the civics XML changes work in the download (called XML_FAQ). If it doesn't have what you're looking for, let me know.

If I can just make one request: please, make more of this mod a part of the SDK. At the very least store the rev index values in the SDK... please :love:

I could store rev index data directly in CyCity objects instead of using script data. However, most of the mod will remain in Python cause it's simply easier to use for me and others who want to use the mod. Some of the things I'm thinking of adding, like cities remembering issues over the last 10 turns, are very easy to do using Python with mixed object lists ... C++ is more constraining.

Is there a particular reason you're looking for it to be in the SDK? :confused:

I could store rev index data directly in CyCity objects instead of using script data. However, most of the mod will remain in Python cause it's simply easier to use for me and others who want to use the mod. Some of the things I'm thinking of adding, like cities remembering issues over the last 10 turns, are very easy to do using Python with mixed object lists ... C++ is more constraining.

Is there a particular reason you're looking for it to be in the SDK? :confused:

Yes, there is a particular reason. I want to be able to modify the rev index of cities with other game aspects like techs, civics, buildings, etc. I also want maintenance to be affected by a city's rev index so a city with a higher rev index will cost more to keep. I also want to have a rev index prereq to for an event to start, or to have an event triggered as soon as a city hits a certain level.

So if you store the rev index values in the CvCity and then expose them to python and reference the values in your code, you'll still be able to keep the majority of your code intact, allow most other people to modify your code, and still me to make the changes I want too.

Yes, there is a particular reason. I want to be able to modify the rev index of cities with other game aspects like techs, civics, buildings, etc. I also want maintenance to be affected by a city's rev index so a city with a higher rev index will cost more to keep. I also want to have a rev index prereq to for an event to start, or to have an event triggered as soon as a city hits a certain level.

So if you store the rev index values in the CvCity and then expose them to python and reference the values in your code, you'll still be able to keep the majority of your code intact, allow most other people to modify your code, and still me to make the changes I want too.

Alright, will happen for BTS. Maybe not for the first beta (which will be basically a straight port of the Warlords version), but soon thereafter.

Alright, will happen for BTS. Maybe not for the first beta (which will be basically a straight port of the Warlords version), but soon thereafter.

Thank you. :worship:

The Rhye's and Fall mod has the nice ability of independent cities. That would fit in well with this, I think.

Is there a chance that you'll include an (optional) 34 civ .dll? Because that would be awesome.

Is there a chance that you'll include an (optional) 34 civ .dll? Because that would be awesome.

Absolutely. In fact, that might be the default and I'd put out a smaller one that those with older machines could use. It's a very easy switch.

The Rhye's and Fall mod has the nice ability of independent cities. That would fit in well with this, I think.

Yeah, I've been meaning to investigate how that mechanism works and how it could be adopted for this mod. I have some mixed feelings about the concept, because if you have the headroom why not just have independent but smaller civs ... sure, they're not necessarily contenders but the smaller civs can often play a part in the game when you can engage in diplomacy with them separately.

What are these independent cities??

The Rhye's and Fall mod has the nice ability of independent cities. That would fit in well with this, I think.

I am all for a Revolutions version for BTS but I can't say I really like the use of independent cities Rhye has implement for his mod in BTS.

I was kicking ass, taking names as Japan and had colonies all the way north of India and bordering Russia, wiped the Mongols off the map and making headway toward Khmer as well WHEN poof! Every colony of mine decided they want to be independent INCLUDING my three cities in Honshū (so much for trying so hard not to lose any of my cities in on my main island before 1850 as one of my victory conditions) and all I was left with was my capital. I had to struggle and fight as tyo gain back territoty and losing like almost 1000 points in the process as literally ALL my cities went 'independent'.

This happened on two separate occasions on the same game!! The first game was because it was during an anarchy phase as I was changing civics like crazy which sounded reasonable before the the Renaissance and second during the Industrial Age, probably because my empire got way too big as I had all of Chinese and Mongolian cities under my rule and I was constantly at war. Frustrating and disappointed to say the least. :(

What I would really recommend for Revolutions is to consider implementing the Extras mod (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=234906). It still plays very much like Vanilla BTS but incorporates the Next War mod into the main game, along certain features from other default BTS mods such as Infantry unit ethnic graphics (from Road To War), the four new units from respectively Alexander's Conquests and Charlemagne's Wars (Peltast, Prodromoi, Heavy Swordsman and Horseman)
along with some other 'minor' changes. That's been a lot of fun for me as of late. :D Check it out!!

i agree, this mod should be implimented or at least a walk through given to combine this mod with chuy's Extra mod, it is a great mod, just like this one =)

ps i loved how arma and this revolutions was merged. awsome erxpierence it was the only mod i played =)

pps, i think independent cities are good, its an uncontrolled variable like in real life, but they should be weak:goodjob:

Just what Civ needs, more Western units:mad: And what about those of us who don't want to play with mechs?

What is the independent city feature? I'm curious.

No extras mod, please. If I wanted mechs, I'd play Sci Fi. Or if you do feel the need for it, please make it optional and not the default. Thank you!

I think that the opportunity to merge this mod to others is already out there if you know what to copy. There are a few Warlords mods which come with Revoltions [caesium and some others are link to from one of these topics.] So if anyone is desperate enough to have other mods except revolutions in with then im sure they can work out how to do it.
But i dont think it should be up the Revolutions team, mostly because Revolutions is a fantastic mod and with all thats in the defeat with revolutions you need nothing else.

My understanding is that jdog's not simply porting the code over, but streamlining it and possibly improving it. It requires someone who knows their C++ to get it into BtS and hook it up to the new espionage, city liberation, and colony code.

I would certainly encourage anyone interested in adding other mods to create a custom mod and post it. I will answer whatever questions I can to support such a merge, but this mod will remain purely Revolution focused.

I'm rewriting the C++ code for the dll as we type/read ... one pleasant surprise is I can use the same code to create new players that the colony feature does. Other modders should note it's been exposed to Python as CyGame::addPlayer, which will make it much easier for others to dynamically add players mid-game ... it was a pain to figure out how to do it initially :scan:

The Python portion will initially be a straight port from the current Warlords version (1.00w). The Python code is actually the bulk of the mod ...

I can't wait for the BTS version. This mod combined with all the new additions in BTS will make civ close to my ideal game. The only problem is, I go back to college in a few weeks, and my laptop won't run civ 4 :(

Glad to here that you great people behind the wonderful Revolution mod are still alive and well and getting imaginative again about BTS.

Isn't BTS cool? Amazed that it holds together so well considering the changes. Only playing through the first epic game. Awesome stuff. There's one half of my head cut off playing vanilla BTS without revolutions. The deeper layer of strategy regarding domestic stability is just simply not there without Jdog's code.

The revolution "events" do bring up a smile though. Sometimes I feel like they are one dimensional versions of Jdog's more thoughtful approach to revolutions. Have they snitched some of his text?

I still worry about how the Warlords revolution concept will mesh with BTS I have to say. The strategy might get too deep for the AI to appreciate, allowing humans to be able to apply some devious espionage tricks to destabilise it. In other words upset the balance.

It'll need all your creativity and intelligence Jdog. My partner just wants BTS plus the barbarian civ component and a 34 nation dll if that keeps things simpler!

Cheers, enjoy!

So I was thinking that maybe for BtS, rebel civs should inherit the UUs of their parent civs... this will bring us a step closer to having rebel civs that aren't just regular spawned world civs but are really related to their parent civ... of course we'd need a way to be able to change a country's unique units in mid-game... why... what's this! We just happen to have such a modcomp: Dynamic Unique Units (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=237740) :D

We should have one for Unique Buildings too.. but that functionality isn't available... yet ;)

I don't mind rebel civs being unrelated to the parent civ, but I guess this would be cool.

Would it not be better to take the UU of the neighbouring Civ, so that a civil war would take your own, but a war of independance in asia wouldnt end up dressed as a european civ. [i.e. Independance of India.]
Although im guessing that'd be impossible.
and the yanks would end up as indians.
no worries.

I may have already said this, but maybe i just considered saying it. So I'll say it.
I think that the invention of Nationalism should effect Revolution. Perhaps decrease the chance of a call for independance for cities connected to the Capital [On the same continent and not seperated by foreign soil.]
But increase it drasticly for Colonial cities. [Distant, unconnected cities.] But perhaps not island Cities which are connected to the capital by cultural borders [i.e. Would effect America but not Isle of Wight for B.E.]
Or atleast that Nationhood forcing its way into the world should have some effect towards distabilitising the Empires and consolidating the supportbase of the nations.

What could work is a non-existant civilization generates its culture in your city, until it revolts. This would also work for conquered civs.

What could work is a non-existant civilization generates its culture in your city, until it revolts. This would also work for conquered civs.

Yes, that was my suggestion too.

I think that the invention of Nationalism should effect Revolution. Perhaps decrease the chance of a call for independance for cities connected to the Capital [On the same continent and not seperated by foreign soil.]
But increase it drasticly for Colonial cities. [Distant, unconnected cities.] But perhaps not island Cities which are connected to the capital by cultural borders [i.e. Would effect America but not Isle of Wight for B.E.]
Or atleast that Nationhood forcing its way into the world should have some effect towards distabilitising the Empires and consolidating the supportbase of the nations.

I like that idea.

I may have already said this, but maybe i just considered saying it. So I'll say it.
I think that the invention of Nationalism should effect Revolution. Perhaps decrease the chance of a call for independance for cities connected to the Capital [On the same continent and not seperated by foreign soil.]
But increase it drasticly for Colonial cities. [Distant, unconnected cities.] But perhaps not island Cities which are connected to the capital by cultural borders [i.e. Would effect America but not Isle of Wight for B.E.]
Or atleast that Nationhood forcing its way into the world should have some effect towards distabilitising the Empires and consolidating the supportbase of the nations.

I will definitely work on expanding the effect of Nationalism, making earlier empires a little easier to hold and grow more difficult to manage. :goodjob: One city islands are also a little to fiesty right now too, so that's also on the list.

FYI, I have what appears to be a functioning BTS version now ... had to make a near copy of the BTS included addPlayer function because it was triggering player turns out of turn (at the moment of creation, which is during another players turn) ... seems like it should be a mild issue for the base game too as it gives the barbarian player an extra turn, haven't checked that yet. [EDIT: Upon further review, it isn't a problem for the main game because the new player is added during your (or the motherland's turn), while revolution decisions are made between player turns so the game doesn't know there's a reason not to fire the new players turn yet ...]

Anyway, after a little more testing I'll post a beta version for BTS ... will probably be tomorrow morning.

What could work is a non-existant civilization generates its culture in your city, until it revolts. This would also work for conquered civs.

This is definitely on the list of things to work into the new version. Now that I can set the DLL to use as many players as I want/have civ types for, there's no longer a need to conserve player slots or overwrite failed rebellions. So it therefore becomes much more feasible to have minor civs for different regions of the world that grow culture in rebellious cities and come and go with the tides of rebelliousness. :)

Fantastic, Congratulations and seven huzzah!s for your good work.
just had a mental idea whilst reading your last post, City-States, select the option and each of your cities splits off into an independant nation, with forced Defensive pacts and Open Borders for atleast the first ten turns.
Guessing it would slow the game so much as to halt it, and complicate matters hideously, But what a way of showing off unlimited slots.
No matter, Beta whats comming will be good enough, no worries.

Also, how does the game define civilization types, like making sure that a rebelling Inca city might spawn the Maya, but not China? Is it the city artstyles?

i was wondering if u are still working on the conferderations idea, i think it has a lot of potential. i also think it would be interseting to see more than one civ rise out of revelutions in some situations. for example, if u conqured a few civs or parts of a few civs then the revolting cities should revert back to their old civs and not all clump together as one. this could also work if cities have totaly different reasons for wanting to seperate.

Also, about the HRE, i agree that it will crowd europe, but it could be used as a civ that spawns from germany or france. then one revolt could efect all of europe, like in real history.

Also, how does the game define civilization types, like making sure that a rebelling Inca city might spawn the Maya, but not China? Is it the city artstyles?

There are multiple ways, and artstyle is the second. First is the RebelTypes.py file which defines potential derivative civs for all others. I might add the BTS XML feature to define the best derivative civ or just incorporate that in the RebelTypes file.

However, if there are no RebelTypes or artstyle civs available, then the game picks randomly so it can happen that China is spawned by Maya ...

i was wondering if u are still working on the conferderations idea, i think it has a lot of potential. i also think it would be interseting to see more than one civ rise out of revelutions in some situations. for example, if u conqured a few civs or parts of a few civs then the revolting cities should revert back to their old civs and not all clump together as one. this could also work if cities have totaly different reasons for wanting to seperate.

Also, about the HRE, i agree that it will crowd europe, but it could be used as a civ that spawns from germany or france. then one revolt could efect all of europe, like in real history.

I iced the confederation concept until BTS because the visibility code was going to change with Espionage and the changes to Religion. Resetting what was visible to who was the main problem to overcome with the prior implementation (and then writing AI to make good decisions about forming and breaking them ...).

The ability to create confeds is already in the game (aka Permanent Alliances), but as you mention, splitting them into multiple players is the difficulty.

It is potentially very useful certainly, and I may return to it later. However, I've got some other plans for revolts that I think will be awesome that will take a while ...

Heres a suggestion,
How about if an inturnal revolution didnt create a random civ, but a deviation from the base civ.
Say there was a revolution in Germany which lead to Hamburg declaring its independance, what if instead of Hamburg being placed into the control of say france or japan, if it was given to a clone of Germany, with its short Description as 'Hamburg' and the adjective as 'Hamburg German' [as to have city specific adj. would be insane to do.][taken from the capital.] Long description would be taken care of DynamicCivNames and the new state would have a random unsused leader and flag but would be the same Civilisation in all but name as the one which it broke from.

Heres a suggestion,
How about if an inturnal revolution didnt create a random civ, but a deviation from the base civ.
Say there was a revolution in Germany which lead to Hamburg declaring its independance, what if instead of Hamburg being placed into the control of say france or japan, if it was given to a clone of Germany, with its short Description as 'Hamburg' and the adjective as 'Hamburg German' [as to have city specific adj. would be insane to do.][taken from the capital.] Long description would be taken care of DynamicCivNames and the new state would have a random unsused leader and flag but would be the same Civilisation in all but name as the one which it broke from.

This is definitely a good idea and among the things I will be trying to implement in the new version. One of the things I'm working on is when rebel culture should be dissident Germans (in your example) or when it should be a different civ. Certainly after Nationalism discovered cities that have only ever been German should not randomly pick Russia or something to rebel as. It's a little tricky for civs with only one leader, as randomly assigning Victoria to dissident Japanese wouldn't seem right. Dom Pedro II has also posted a tool for dynamic unique units in game, which expands the possibilities for having hybrid civs as well.

Heres a suggestion,
How about if an inturnal revolution didnt create a random civ, but a deviation from the base civ.
Say there was a revolution in Germany which lead to Hamburg declaring its independance, what if instead of Hamburg being placed into the control of say france or japan, if it was given to a clone of Germany, with its short Description as 'Hamburg' and the adjective as 'Hamburg German' [as to have city specific adj. would be insane to do.][taken from the capital.] Long description would be taken care of DynamicCivNames and the new state would have a random unsused leader and flag but would be the same Civilisation in all but name as the one which it broke from.

This has been discussed before, and the problem with this is that for many instances, you wouldn't have a leaderhead for the civ. Say that Cordoba, a spanish city, rebels to form a new civ. Since spain only has 1 leaderhead, who would be put in charge of the new civ? It would be kind of weird to have "Tokugawa of the New Spanish Empire" or whatever.

EDIT: Yay for redudancy... didn't see that jdog already posted.

There are multiple ways, and artstyle is the second. First is the RebelTypes.py file which defines potential derivative civs for all others. I might add the BTS XML feature to define the best derivative civ or just incorporate that in the RebelTypes file.

However, if there are no RebelTypes or artstyle civs available, then the game picks randomly so it can happen that China is spawned by Maya ...

The problem with the python method is that with the arrival of modular civilizations and such, it decreases the chance of these being spawned.

The problem with the python method is that with the arrival of modular civilizations and such, it decreases the chance of these being spawned.

True, so the RebelTypes feature can be disabled in the config file if you've added civs.

Is there anyway to make your Revolution mod work with the Final Frontier mod?

This has been discussed before, and the problem with this is that for many instances, you wouldn't have a leaderhead for the civ. Say that Cordoba, a spanish city, rebels to form a new civ. Since spain only has 1 leaderhead, who would be put in charge of the new civ? It would be kind of weird to have "Tokugawa of the New Spanish Empire" or whatever.

a possible solution to this problem is to add a number to the original leaders name and make that the rebel leaders name.
Ex. in the case of the spanish empire the leader is isabela so the rebel leader becomes isabelaII (isabela the second) this could also work if a civ with multiple leaders has lots of revolutions and runs out of leaders.

PS: a similar system is used in Rhye's and Fall when a civ wants to switch leaders

Is there anyway to make your Revolution mod work with the Final Frontier mod?

Sure, but it would probably take some work. There is no custom dll for FinalFrontier, so it's all just Python code and XML merging and dealing with issues stemming from certain techs missing. I will support anyone who attempts this through PMs the best I can.

a possible solution to this problem is to add a number to the original leaders name and make that the rebel leaders name.
Ex. in the case of the spanish empire the leader is isabela so the rebel leader becomes isabelaII (isabela the second) this could also work if a civ with multiple leaders has lots of revolutions and runs out of leaders.

PS: a similar system is used in Rhye's and Fall when a civ wants to switch leaders
Yes, a similar system is also used in this mod when civs switch leaders ;) One thought I'd had was picking a city name (maybe even the rebelling city I guess) and naming the leader that ... it's not perfect certainly, but Edo of the Japanese or Boston of the Americans wouldn't be terrible. Los Angeles of the Americans does sound silly though.

a prefix could be added, von Hamburg, de Orléans, da Verona.
perfectly acceptable last names, im not sure how asain names work, and for the inheriters of the British Empire [the english speaking world.] most of our last names are just english city names. Washington rebelling would be weird though.
Or else leadernames could be scraped and nations could just be represented by the short description and then if Tokugawa [named called Corboda] was chosen to lead the Corboda Spanish Rebels of Corboda he would just be someone with an ethnic background rather than a displaced foreignor.
Alturnatively a list of 20 provence neutral surnames for each civ.

jdog, I don't know if you noticed or not, but in BtS, when you kill another civ, they're removed from the scoreboard. I know that this mod was incorporated into Revolutions in previous versions, so you can take it out of the code for the BtS version.

the Saxony and Bavarian flags from the Charlemagne scenario look radically different if the player colour changes so maybe they and ones like them could be used, as then each break away civ would have a unique flag as long as it had a unique colour without lots of custom-made flags sitting on hand.

jdog, I don't know if you noticed or not, but in BtS, when you kill another civ, they're removed from the scoreboard. I know that this mod was incorporated into Revolutions in previous versions, so you can take it out of the code for the BtS version.

I did notice that when I went to merge in The Lopez's code on that ... incremental progress in the game I suppose!

I did notice that when I went to merge in The Lopez's code on that ... incremental progress in the game I suppose!

:lol: Well, I remember they came around about six months before release looking for good interface mods to include. Unfortunate that they didn't include more.

G'day there

Thanks for putting up a version of Revolutions for BTS. I'm assuming that with the new espionage system and Apoly temple, the ported revolutions code from Warlords will unbalance the game as it stands. For the moment I've turned off Revolutions except for BarbarianCiv which I assume will not break BTS game play. Has anyone played a BTS Epic game with Revolutions 1.01? What are the main unbalances now? I'm guessing that poisoning the water supply will break the balance straight up with the -12 health for 15 turns in Epic.

What about applying a passive filter to the index variables such as happiness and health, that filter out rapid changes before these variables arrive at the main Revolutions/Warlords algorithms? That way you could get a reasonable version of Revolutions working with BTS using the old tried and true code from 1.00w.

Basically the historical assumption would have to be that never ever in history, has poisoning the water supply ever led to internal revolt! Wouldn't that be convenient for coding Revolutions under BTS if it were true. I could live with the historical inaccuracies personally. No rush, BTS is already a huge improvement even without Revolutions.

Thanks for your great efforts and enjoy!

ive never had a city poisoned, but i have caused unhappiness in citys of a civ which i know to be facing instability and thus pushed them over them over the edge into civil war.
thats fun.
The posioning of a water supply by order of king would lead to a certain amount of discontent.

Anyway what i came here to add.

Would it be possible for a units mere presence in a city lower the revolutions index, i.e. an invisible unit who lowers the cahnce of a revolution in the city hes in at the end of the turn, or raised it in foreign cities, acts like a spy where one always disposes of one from another civ if in the same tile. And maybe causes unhappiness in a city if stationed there for more than three turns.
A Secret Police avilible after Nationalism is discovered, or maybe only buildable under a Police-State.

I think military presence already helps lower the rev index.

@ glider1:

The poisoned water supply isn't a huge deal unless your city starts starving ... and starving citizens may not place the blame completely on the outside party. Without starvation, as a worst case you'd be getting +9 rev index points a turn which is not a deal breaker (starvation adds +100 (all numbers for epic)).

The unhappiness mission has a big effect, as +8 unhappiness faces racks up +132 points per turn for example.

These definitely should be balanced a little for the missions so that a stable city can't be tipped over trivially by a rival. However, I definitely want to keep the effects significant so that you can influence things from afar. Perhaps if the city has been hit by a mission these effects could just be reduced by a factor of 3 as a starting point.

@ orinsul:

As Bob pointed out, military units do help in your own city. For domestic or internal rebellion suppression, I feel that buildings should really be the main source of effects (Courthouse, Jail, the new espionage buildings). For external influence, spy missions I think should be the main mechanism and any effect from posting a spy should be relatively small.

One thing I'm planning for the next big version of the mod is to implement a "Discontent" culture bin for each city, basically if the city has significant rebellion causing issues, then it will start to accumulate discontent and you'll start to see it in the % nationality part for the city. This culture would then be transfered to a rebellious civ if the city revolted. A foreign spy could cause the accumulation of discontent to be more rapid, a subtle effect that builds on existing issues. That's one idea.

If I may add...
With the colonies system now avalaible, mayhaps you can come with a code which actually allow us to choose with city to grant independence? It would be great... Not for when there is a revolution and civil war, that case independence is earn by military forces. But to grant independence on peaceful terms.

If I may add...
With the colonies system now avalaible, mayhaps you can come with a code which actually allow us to choose with city to grant independence? It would be great... Not for when there is a revolution and civil war, that case independence is earn by military forces. But to grant independence on peaceful terms.

Something beyond the BTS system? If I understand you correctly, you'd like to be able to set any city free at any time. It's certainly possible to do and would not really be hard. However, certain cities would only accept being set free if other nearby cities with the same issues/culture were also freed, I would imagine.

The thing is, with the current system, when I ask to the game to create a colony, it just gathers together EVERY city in the continent, which I think it's not needed and does not allows to certain strategies on oversea colonies. I mean, ok, the U.S. and Brazil got off with big territories and united (Brazil even achieved that peacefully). But most of the other colonies in america broke off in many different countries, as did India, breaking of in two (and afterwards three) different countries.

My complainment comes 'cause I once conquered two major nations in another continent, which obviously became very expensive, and when I went to make colonies of them, they became one united nation, bigger than mine. Competition. They weren't even that friendly with each other before being conquested. I'd rather have broken them in two different colonies (based on their former nationalities) or, better, break them in four or five, so they would compete more amongst them than with me.

The thing is, with the current system, when I ask to the game to create a colony, it just gathers together EVERY city in the continent, which I think it's not needed and does not allows to certain strategies on oversea colonies. I mean, ok, the U.S. and Brazil got off with big territories and united (Brazil even achieved that peacefully). But most of the other colonies in america broke off in many different countries, as did India, breaking of in two (and afterwards three) different countries.

Although.. remember, Hispanic South America disintegrated really after Spain had granted them independence. But certainly different areas broke off at different times and Spain basically only granted independence to what it had no way to hold on to anymore. India also was intended as one country until it broke into Pakistan and India (and later Bangladesh).

My complainment comes 'cause I once conquered two major nations in another continent, which obviously became very expensive, and when I went to make colonies of them, they became one united nation, bigger than mine. Competition. They weren't even that friendly with each other before being conquested. I'd rather have broken them in two different colonies (based on their former nationalities) or, better, break them in four or five, so they would compete more amongst them than with me.

But you raise a good point here about game mechanics and certainly you don't want to form a new more powerful country. And certainly in real life, a mother country would do well to break the colonies up to keep from creating a more powerful nation.

Also you cant keep a key city, if you example you go and start a war to take the ap. palace from an enemy state and faith you wont want to be giving it to a colony which will probably side with others of the same faith over you.
Or allow you to keep a hong-kong or other military station on the new continent to keep the colonials in check or easily intervene when a revolution occours against them.
This new dirivate civ feature from the colonial system could maybe suggest appropraite civs to break from the fatherland.

Perhaps the colony issue has already been resolved with moctezuma's Unlimited Colonies (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=237367) mod component. It seems to provide the functions people are discussing here. Not sure, though -- it would require testing to see exactly what it does.

Perhaps the colony issue has already been resolved with moctezuma's Unlimited Colonies (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=237367) mod component. It seems to provide the functions people are discussing here. Not sure, though -- it would require testing to see exactly what it does.

That certainly sounds like it would address the issues raised here, thanks for spreading the word :goodjob:

I do however wonder whether being able to free cities individually is exploitable. One nice thing is the restriction of not being able to release cities with significant culture from another player, only being able to gift them to the other player. This might be enough to address the exploitation issue, where you could otherwise take a cohesive and potentially competitive group of cities and split them into tiny countries that pose no threat.

one of the problems is that you are unable to set up a barrier of minor buffer states between you and another great power, if you take their cities you only have the option of giving them back and not setting them up as a slave state under your sphere of control.
Although unless you have a seriously large empire its probably not that much of an issue

@ Dom Pedro:

India was only intended to be one country by mr. Gandhi, the muslins had wanted to have their own nation for the whole process (and let's be honest, most of the hindu would rather they did). Which really adds to my reasoning. If I had a colony to set free, and I had two sides with different ideas, I certainly would not try to bring both sides together, but would just grant them both independence. Let them solve their problems later. In wars. Which they did, and i'm rather sure it had great part in keeping india in the 3rd. world.

@doronron:
Gonna check that mod as soon as i get back home.

it would be interesting if u could group cities together into colonies or provinces/states with regional capitals. this could be done with new building similar to the palace, except that u can build more than one. u could then specify which cities r part of that region.

This could have a whole bunch of efects such as:
reduced mantinence cost in cities assigned to a regional capital,
less negative for distanace from national capital,
more nagative for being a colony,
colinies with a capital can be released seperatly from other colonies on same continent,

on Locces concept
perhaps could build, say eight, but has to be built a certain distance from another one.
and each one gets allocated a coloured star [as the forbidden palace gets a star.] and then all cities in that provenice rather than in the capitals provenice get a coloured circle matching their provincal capitals star, and you can re-allocate border provenices to either side.
Then control-click on cities wouldnt select the continent but the province.
Perhaps representation would give happiness to provincial capitals rather than largest cities.
And local rebellions would be more likely to take cities within their own province then lose without.
who knows.

i really like your idea for stars provincial capitals and circles to match for other cities. i also liked the idea for representation and i think some other civics also have potential for change (beurocracy would effect provicial capitals as well).
the revolution thing is good too, except that if u set up your provinces to have mixed nationalities after conquring someone, rebelling cities would be more likely to side with cities that share thier nationality.

Looks like you've got time to spare on releasing a new BTS Revolutions Mod Jdog. The latest BTS 3.13 looks broken and will need an interim DLL like Solver or a the new wiz kid on the block "Bhruic" to release one. Biggest problems appear to be centred around trading and spy behaviour. This information is coming from:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=245974&page=7

Yeah, I read that thread as well ... certainly sounds weird. I've decided to release what I have working quite well right now for 3.03, then probably updated for 3.13. Been putting off some needed DLL work until the patch, but it doesn't seem like this will be the last BTS patch ...

There's a new unofficial patch too, so I may just include that depending on things look.

Well, Bhruic's unofficial patch looks like a serious piece of work to correct BTS 3.13 bugs. However civ number is still restricted to 18. I'm not sure what Solver is doing after 3.13, he may have more than 18 slots going.

In order to use Revolutions, I need to feel confident that the base game is as good as it can be, and that there are more than 18 slots, so that civ fragmentation, colonisation, barbarian civ has plenty of headroom. Cheers, hope you all are enjoying this great game!

I noticed that it doesn't cooperate well with modules.

Well, Bhruic's unofficial patch looks like a serious piece of work to correct BTS 3.13 bugs. However civ number is still restricted to 18. I'm not sure what Solver is doing after 3.13, he may have more than 18 slots going.

In order to use Revolutions, I need to feel confident that the base game is as good as it can be, and that there are more than 18 slots, so that civ fragmentation, colonisation, barbarian civ has plenty of headroom. Cheers, hope you all are enjoying this great game!

I've been looking at version 1.04 of his patch for 3.13, it plays quite well and it's actually a rather small amount of code that changed. He's kept going since then, but not all of his latest changes are obviously bugs. The arguments about whether or not they should be changed sounds almost like the Supreme Court with people discussing 'orginal intent' and invoking the Civilopedia ...

If nothing else he's probably brought these extra issues to the attention of people at Firaxis and eventually we'll get them addressed 'officially'

Regardless, changing the number of civs is really easy (if you can compile the sources :p ), so have no fear about that.

For inclusion in the first 3.13 version of this mod, I guess the options are:
1) Base 3.13
2) Bhuric's fixes of just the obvious bugs
3) All of Bhuric's changes
Of course his patch has been a real moving target since it's still evolving ... I don't have any objections to any of his current changes (assuming they work ;) ), so if any of you have opinions on what should be included let me know.

A 3.13 version will be posted either Thursday or Friday.

I noticed that it doesn't cooperate well with modules.

Huh? 10 characters

A 3.13 version will be posted either Thursday or Friday.

Yay!

And, since it feels silly to just post "Yay" I say

Yay!

again.

The arguments about whether or not they should be changed sounds almost like the Supreme Court with people discussing 'orginal intent' and invoking the Civilopedia ...

Excellent observation:lol: The debate is a lot of fun to follow!


For inclusion in the first 3.13 version of this mod, I guess the options are:
1) Base 3.13
2) Bhuric's fixes of just the obvious bugs
3) All of Bhuric's changes


Head tells me option 2)
Heart tells me option 3)

Bhuric has entered the civ elite, along with Jdog and Solver. I basically agree with the vassalage change and the state property changes, but it might not be best for the revolutions mod. You are "the one" on that side of things Jdog. ;)

Posted about an odd observation in Download Link thread but I'll move it here instead of spamming that thread. I'll let the picture speak for itself.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/73258/Impending_Doom_of_Modern_Society0000.JPG

Huh? 10 characters

What do you mean by that? I plugged in some modules, and it keeps telling me all these XML errors, yet the modules worked fine in a different mod.

For this mod, certain XML files will have to be merged to work. Civics is the main one, and the GameInfo and Unit schema files also, as the DLL is written to expect new fields of information from them. Other XML files (Civs, Leaders, etc) should be fine. Does that explain the problem?

(The 10 character thing was just that you have to post at least 10 letters ...)

Hi Jdog5000, I just wanted to say I really like your mod. I always felt the element of civil war was one of the things missing from the core game. I played with the Revolution mod all the time with warlords. With Beyond the sword it has been kinda buggy. I don't mean to come off as an annoying pest but I was wondering if there was going to be a BtS 3.13 comaptable version soon?

What's the feeling on the poor use of executives by the AI under BTS 3.13, with respect to the Revolutions mod? If the AI is really bad at using executives and spreading corporations, it could lead to some bad rebellion type collapses late game. I'm thinking especially toward trade where a human will give the AI irresistable donations for resources that suit the corporation the human has founded, but that cause the AI's domestic stability to collapse, because the AI doesn't realise what the human is indirectly up to? Or even more simply, just a financial collapse by the AI, because it's corporate maintenance is too ridiculous, leading to domestic rebellion.

I've heard that with the 3.13 patch, corporate maintenance has been lowered, so even a dumb AI could spread a corporation without going broke. So the most likely candidate for a late game rebellion collapse for the AI would be by being screwed on trade for vital resources needed for domestic happiness and health. Apparently the AI will spread a foreign corporation domestically, without second thought which also doesn't sound real good.

In a dream scenario, if Jdog felt that the AI corporations logic was too dumb for Revolutions, he would write his own slab of logic along side all the Revolutions AI logic, and then be leading even Fireaxis on that front. Hah, I know how much work that would be. Forget I even said it.

Cheers and Enjoy!

PS) I'm still playing 3.03 until I can get access to the 121MB patch. So can't test 3.13 myself.

Hi Jdog5000, I just wanted to say I really like your mod. I always felt the element of civil war was one of the things missing from the core game. I played with the Revolution mod all the time with warlords. With Beyond the sword it has been kinda buggy. I don't mean to come off as an annoying pest but I was wondering if there was going to be a BtS 3.13 comaptable version soon?

Does now work for you? ;) Just posted in the download thread, between the changes for 1.15 and 1.16 (current version) a lot of bugs have been squashed and enhancements made. Please post if you find anything that doesn't seem right though.

Glad you like the mod!

I think I just had a bug (1.15)

I invaded Spain and a few turns later Revolutions started brewing like allways. Only thing is that first I had a few Spanish cities revolt in one cluster then I had a second revolt with some cities that where in the first cluster plus some others. I have never seen that before, they got a whole crapload of units from that.

I guess it's normal they get units from my techlevel rather than Spain's though, right?

Jdog5000, have I ever told you that your my hero :dance: :dance: :woohoo: (starts singing that Bette Midler song :joke: , OK thats gay. I like you but not that much and not in that way). I am very thankful though that you made this mod though :worship:

Seriously though I stared my first game last night. I was a little ticked off because I got off to what I thought was a really good start as Sitting Bull. I was going to found a couple of religions really early and basically aim for a cultural win or at least have a kickass economy and culture. I founded Hinduism really quickly:cool: . The Hindu holy city was basically the 2nd city I had founded and it became the holy city about 2 or 3 turns after it was started but then the stupid barbarians came along :viking: :trouble: :mwaha: . I had sent out my settler accompanied by the archer but the barbs totaly came out of nowhere and ambushed me :ack:
They had about two or three archers and my one archer maybe had a 5-10% bonus fortification.

I guess its my own fault :please: and thats what you get when you play raging barbarians. Boy I tell you those barbarians sure are mean :evil: :evil: . The worst part of it is since they wiped Hinduism off the face of the Earth they and all there future descendants are never going to to get a chance to learn how they are going to burn in Hindu hell in the afterlife. I quit that game.

Right now I am on my second game and everything appears to be going along smoothly. Otto von Bismarck doesn't put up with barbarian crap he puts those punks in there place where they belong :ar15: :run:. The closest thing I have found to a bug and its not even a bug more of a case of the AI being stupid I think. I had built the Great Wall which of course keeps barbs from entering your territory. Well Pacal organized barbs and formed the Mayans who were hellbent on destroying me :mad: . They had a large army and could have easily sacked one of my cities which was within the boundaries of the great wall. For some reason they wouldn't come in my territory with any of there mellee units not even to just pillage the land. They did send an isolated chariot to try cause a little bit of trouble but he ran into the point of my spear and that was the end of that. I am wondering if the computer was treating the Mayans as barbarians for the purposes of the Great Wall effect since they spawned out as barbarians. Right now I am in the middle ages and everything seems to be going along good. Keep up the good work Jdog5000 :thanx:

I think I just had a bug (1.15)

I invaded Spain and a few turns later Revolutions started brewing like allways. Only thing is that first I had a few Spanish cities revolt in one cluster then I had a second revolt with some cities that where in the first cluster plus some others. I have never seen that before, they got a whole crapload of units from that.

I guess it's normal they get units from my techlevel rather than Spain's though, right?

Revolts can spread and pull in additional cities, sounds like that's what happened. Rebels do always spawn with units based around your units and enemy units in the vicinity of the city. This gives them a bit of a fighting chance and makes them a real threat ... rebels won't get several knights when you only have one though like used to happen :crazyeye:

Jdog5000, have I ever told you that your my hero :dance: :dance: :woohoo: (starts singing that Bette Midler song :joke: , OK thats gay. I like you but not that much and not in that way). I am very thankful though that you made this mod though :worship:

Right now I am on my second game and everything appears to be going along smoothly. Otto von Bismarck doesn't put up with barbarian crap he puts those punks in there place where they belong :ar15: :run:. The closest thing I have found to a bug and its not even a bug more of a case of the AI being stupid I think. I had built the Great Wall which of course keeps barbs from entering your territory. Well Pacal organized barbs and formed the Mayans who were hellbent on destroying me :mad: . They had a large army and could have easily sacked one of my cities which was within the boundaries of the great wall. For some reason they wouldn't come in my territory with any of there mellee units not even to just pillage the land. They did send an isolated chariot to try cause a little bit of trouble but he ran into the point of my spear and that was the end of that. I am wondering if the computer was treating the Mayans as barbarians for the purposes of the Great Wall effect since they spawned out as barbarians. Right now I am in the middle ages and everything seems to be going along good. Keep up the good work Jdog5000 :thanx:

Glad you're enjoying it!

I don't know what happened with the Mayans, there's no way the game treated them as barbs for the Great Wall. The only question is what kind of AI behavior it assigned to their units ... if you post a save with them in it I'll have a look.

I suddenly saw a message that Pacal III (yes, 3, not 2) ceded all but two of his cities to Isabella, a civ that formed then. It was odd, as though Spaniards had replaced the Mayans. Is there any coding which does this?

This new version sound great! Can't wait to download.
So are there any more briliant concepts planned for the next one?

Revolts can spread and pull in additional cities, sounds like that's what happened. Rebels do always spawn with units based around your units and enemy units in the vicinity of the city. This gives them a bit of a fighting chance and makes them a real threat ... rebels won't get several knights when you only have one though like used to happen :crazyeye:

I had some cities revolt twice the same turn is what I tried to say.

Revolt 1: Santiago, Cordoba, Madrid and Barcelona.
Revolt 2: Sevilla, Toledo, Madrid and Barcelona.

Madrid and Barcelonas defenses were pretty beat up after that and they seemed to get twice as many units too. I had another single revolt lately and that was nowhere near as bad. Was pretty interesting all in all but it still felt like it was not supposed to be that way. Maybe I'm wrong, then just slap me for being persistant :lol:

I suddenly saw a message that Pacal III (yes, 3, not 2) ceded all but two of his cities to Isabella, a civ that formed then. It was odd, as though Spaniards had replaced the Mayans. Is there any coding which does this?

Yes, his cities were revolting and most likely his options were to let them go or fight ... under certain circumstances the AI will choose to let the cities go, though things have to be really bad for them to give up most of their cities.

I had some cities revolt twice the same turn is what I tried to say.

Revolt 1: Santiago, Cordoba, Madrid and Barcelona.
Revolt 2: Sevilla, Toledo, Madrid and Barcelona.

Madrid and Barcelonas defenses were pretty beat up after that and they seemed to get twice as many units too. I had another single revolt lately and that was nowhere near as bad. Was pretty interesting all in all but it still felt like it was not supposed to be that way. Maybe I'm wrong, then just slap me for being persistant :lol:

Ahh, I see ... and no, that's not supposed to happen. You're only supposed to get one revolt launched per turn, so I'll check if there's something amiss :crazyeye:

Thanks Jdog! For making this available with extra icing like 34 civs, Bhruic's changes etc. :)

The revolutions component of the mod has crashed on me during testing though. I'm trying to test late game behaviour with this mod with respect to corporate mischief, using auto-turn. However sometimes with Revolutions turned on, it will spit the dummy during the Medieval and never makes it to the late game. I've uploaded an example autosave 780AD which is one or two turns before the crash. My config is BTS3.13, Rev1.16. The mod does not seem ever to crash if you turn off the Revolutions module and leave all other modules running.

If nothing else, Barbarian civ, dynamic names, tech diffusion, 34 Civs, Bhruic's changes, are worth their own weight in gold and excellent in their own right. Cheers and enjoy, no rush. Thanks big time.

Ahh, I see ... and no, that's not supposed to happen. You're only supposed to get one revolt launched per turn, so I'll check if there's something amiss :crazyeye:

As I said, it was 1.15. Still, I can try and dig out a save if you like. I can't promise I'll find it though.

The revolutions component of the mod has crashed on me during testing though.

Alright, I'll check it out ...

As I said, it was 1.15. Still, I can try and dig out a save if you like. I can't promise I'll find it though.

No that's fine, know right where to look in the code anyway.

This new version sound great! Can't wait to download.
So are there any more briliant concepts planned for the next one?

Up next on the addition list are some not immediately gameplay affecting bits.

- Adding some of the Revolution data for cities into the SDK, will allow further synergy of Revolution with standard game (ie, effecting BTS events, etc)
- Adding some help popups and information to help the uninitiated understand the mod
- Revolution status info for cities on the city screen
- A button in the upper right corner to open the Revolution Watch popup

Those are the main plans for the next version, after that the big project will be to rewire the Revolution launching logic to be based off the 10 turn history now collected on every city. Part of this will eventually include a separation between local and national revolts, and a measure of national stability. However, I always notice things while testing to tweak or rework, so there will undoubtedly be unexpected changes too.

Thanks Jdog! For making this available with extra icing like 34 civs, Bhruic's changes etc. :)

The revolutions component of the mod has crashed on me during testing though. I'm trying to test late game behaviour with this mod with respect to corporate mischief, using auto-turn. However sometimes with Revolutions turned on, it will spit the dummy during the Medieval and never makes it to the late game. I've uploaded an example autosave 780AD which is one or two turns before the crash. My config is BTS3.13, Rev1.16. The mod does not seem ever to crash if you turn off the Revolutions module and leave all other modules running.

If nothing else, Barbarian civ, dynamic names, tech diffusion, 34 Civs, Bhruic's changes, are worth their own weight in gold and excellent in their own right. Cheers and enjoy, no rush. Thanks big time.

One bit of good news, with Bhuric's latest changes the save doesn't crash anymore.

As for why it crashed before, I don't know. Revolution wasn't doing anything when the crash occurred. My guess as to why it stopped when you turned off Revolution is that fewer calls to the rand function are made and therefore the game picks a different behavior that doesn't produce the crash ...

I've run quite a few long tests and not had any other crashes.

- Adding some of the Revolution data for cities into the SDK, will allow further synergy of Revolution with standard game (ie, effecting BTS events, etc)

Sounds like a good idea because there is more overlap now between the Revolutions concept and BTS, because of the BTS events.


- Adding some help popups and information to help the uninitiated
understand the mod

Especially information on game play ie) cause and effect stuff


- Revolution status info for cities on the city screen

Ooooh yeah, cool.


- A button in the upper right corner to open the Revolution Watch popup

Oooooh yeah, cool.

Part of this will eventually include a separation between local and national revolts, and a measure of national stability.

Great to hear that you are thinking big. There certainly are distinctions between the two revolt scales. National stability might not have been such an issue with Warlords, but now with BTS, good idea to introduce more ways of estabishing whether a break down in civil society is justified.

Cheers, thanks.

a while back i metioned an idea for regional governments. i know this would be a huge concept, but do u think for an upcoming version the most basic parts of this compontent could be added. It would work well with seperating local and national revolts.

a while back i metioned an idea for regional governments. i know this would be a huge concept, but do u think for an upcoming version the most basic parts of this compontent could be added. It would work well with seperating local and national revolts.

Developing regions that will revolt together and develop an independent cultural identity is something I'm working towards, and does tie in very well with local/national revolts.

As for adding internal empire management mechanics, there are a few other pieces I'd want to explore before working on this specifically. I think the old concepts of confederations and federations would allow some interesting setups of multipart governments, and there is fresh hope here as the colony creation code in BTS may be helpful for providing a base of how to code some of these pieces.

... to answer your other question, yes the AI does know about bribes and will bribe its cities to keep them from revolting. If a city is fairly rebellious, the AI will look at the circumstances in the city and how much money it has and choose the appropriate size of bribe :cool:

Wow. :cool:

That explains why I'm getting whipped playing Rev1.16 on Monarch compared to the good old Warlords days! The AI is now able to build some pretty big stable empires in the midgame period, and if there is a rebellion, it seems better able to deal with them. The medium size civs still appear to be breaking up a bit if they are under territorial pressures from the large civs, but nothing unreasonable. Even seen a very early vassal partnership between a big and small ai which has acted in both parties interests including enhanced civil stability.

It's early days yet but this mod is looking wonderful once it get's a user interface. It's early days yet because with a mod like this, there has to be more game play to really understand it.

For example, is it better to control civil unrest by being extra conservative on city size according to the expected chance of rebellion in all cases, or is it better to sometimes push the limits of stability and let a city or two collapse under civil revolt? This type of dilemma is still unresolved in my mind. If after another ten games, there is no concrete formula regarding this dilemma, we are playing a great great mod for this game I reckon.

Cheers.

Just finished another Rev BTS 1.16 game on Monarch. The rev engine is much better than the Warlords days in my humble opinion. I think it's in that sweet spot again. Do like the little tweeks you have done since Warlords, for example giving you one turn to organise some riot controls before the riot begins proper.

I still don't understand fully how to gain the support of the citizens of freshly captured cities. The sensitivity is pretty critical. Sometimes you can capture a whole series of cities without issue, other times capturing one critical city causes all sorts of instability issues because of the disloyalty toward you. The solution in the early game seems to principly focus around religion and how quickly you can shift the loyalty of the citizens in your favour. Still learning that one. Of particular interest is how to win their loyalty in other ways through secular persuasions. This is particularly relevant in the late game once corporations dominate over religion a lot of the time. This mod could do with a strategy guide!

Thanks for the efforts Jdog on 1.16.

I put the militarystrength control back in and I'm playing again. There are a couple of things that I would like to see implemented in a future version.

1. Allow for an option where Barb civs declare war on ALL close civs instead of just one.
2. Make Barb civs that DoW on a civ much less likely to make peace for a little longer than a normal war, if possible. I have situations where the barb civ takes one city and still has plenty of units but the original civ sues for peace and they accept. **edit** Also, the barb civs will often capture one city and then trade it back in the peace deal, which makes no sense.

Combined with the military strength changes, I'm trying to recreate such history-changing invasions as the mongols, huns, etc. When they rampaged through empires, they didn't accept peace terms after taking one city.

Excellent mod and it keeps getting better!

I put the militarystrength control back in and I'm playing again. There are a couple of things that I would like to see implemented in a future version.

1. Allow for an option where Barb civs declare war on ALL close civs instead of just one.
2. Make Barb civs that DoW on a civ much less likely to make peace for a little longer than a normal war, if possible. I have situations where the barb civ takes one city and still has plenty of units but the original civ sues for peace and they accept. **edit** Also, the barb civs will often capture one city and then trade it back in the peace deal, which makes no sense.

Combined with the military strength changes, I'm trying to recreate such history-changing invasions as the mongols, huns, etc. When they rampaged through empires, they didn't accept peace terms after taking one city.

Excellent mod and it keeps getting better!

1) Definitely possible ... a few ways this could be implemented:

a) Declare war on anyone who has a city on their landmass
b) Declare war on any civ they meet for the next 30 turns
c) Declare war on all the civs on the current list of possible victims (a subset of the closer players in (a) plus anyone with a unit really close to the barb cities)

All of these are straightforward, and c could easily be combined with one of the other two. I guess doing both b and c makes the most sense to me.

2) This will be a bit trickier as I don't know what exactly causes them to accept peace. One thing to check is what type of war plan the barb civs start with, which I don't currently force to anything (total would be the best option I imagine). Also some negative attitude affects might keep them from agreeing to peace. I'll see what I can figure out.

1) Definitely possible ... a few ways this could be implemented:

a) Declare war on anyone who has a city on their landmass
b) Declare war on any civ they meet for the next 30 turns
c) Declare war on all the civs on the current list of possible victims (a subset of the closer players in (a) plus anyone with a unit really close to the barb cities)

All of these are straightforward, and c could easily be combined with one of the other two. I guess doing both b and c makes the most sense to me.

2) This will be a bit trickier as I don't know what exactly causes them to accept peace. One thing to check is what type of war plan the barb civs start with, which I don't currently force to anything (total would be the best option I imagine). Also some negative attitude affects might keep them from agreeing to peace. I'll see what I can figure out.

Yeah great thinking on options b,c and 2. Sorry if I'm ignorant on history (I am) but barbarians that turn into civs should still fall into two categories as far as I'm concerned:

1) Barbs that decide that they want to be peaceful builders. These barb civs decide that their barbarian ways did them no good. Their army army they only use for defense. Their attitude can change in time as they loose their naivety (how much time?!)

2) Barbs that decide that they want to be conquesting and that turning into a civ is only worthwhile to them exactly because they can better do their conquesting. This barb should declare on everyone as per options b and c focus on military strength. Their attitude can change in time as they loose their naivety (how much time?!)

The combination where you get sophisticated behaviour like being both cultural and aggressive, or financial and aggressive, or diplomatically two faced and underhanded is something that only historical civs should display. Barb civs can learn this too but only if they survive their original naivety be it peaceful or aggressive naivety.

Cheers.

1. Allow for an option where Barb civs declare war on ALL close civs instead of just one.

The problem here is that this would be largely suicidal for the barbarians unless you gave them a serious buff at the outset, which I think would be unbalancing. There should be a better selection process of who they declare war on. (See my reply to jdog).

2. Make Barb civs that DoW on a civ much less likely to make peace for a little longer than a normal war, if possible. I have situations where the barb civ takes one city and still has plenty of units but the original civ sues for peace and they accept. **edit** Also, the barb civs will often capture one city and then trade it back in the peace deal, which makes no sense.

I disagree here, I think it makes a great deal of sense. I see this as being like ransoming cities or raids where barbarians sacked cities but ultimately returned home rather than try to fulfill any kind of imperial ambitions. Managing a city is tough, especially when it's a foreign city in jdog's world ;)

Combined with the military strength changes, I'm trying to recreate such history-changing invasions as the mongols, huns, etc. When they rampaged through empires, they didn't accept peace terms after taking one city.

I understand your desire for this, and I would like to see it too. It would be interesting if we have on a continent Player A and Player B, and then Player C spawns and declares war on Player B. And then Player A gets messages like "We are receiving frightening tales of a terrible hoarde sweeping over the *Player B* Empire... they call themselves... the *Player C*"


1) Definitely possible ... a few ways this could be implemented:

a) Declare war on anyone who has a city on their landmass
b) Declare war on any civ they meet for the next 30 turns
c) Declare war on all the civs on the current list of possible victims (a subset of the closer players in (a) plus anyone with a unit really close to the barb cities)

All of these are straightforward, and c could easily be combined with one of the other two. I guess doing both b and c makes the most sense to me.

I think newly-spawned civs, if they are aggressive, should declare war on whoever they think they can beat. But perhaps this could be subdivided here... I think that aggressive barb-turned-civ societies fall into essentially two categories: raiders and conquerors. Raiders are FAR more frequent than conquerors amongst the barbarians. They come in, steal everything that's not nailed down, and then leave. You have a chance to rebuild, and they have a chance to come back for seconds.

In the case of the conquerors, they will want to take out the easiest civ to beat because they are looking for land and cities with as little effort as possible. Raiders, on the other hand, don't care about that. They will take cities if possible, but otherwise they will settle for pillaging, capturing workers, etc. In this case, they won't want to take on the easiest civ possible because just as the risks are low, so are the rewards. A raider civ will want to take on anybody that's weak enough that they can't retaliate by wiping out the raiders, but strong enough that they have something worth raiding.

Among the numerous other things I've been working on, I've also created a mod that gives different yields and commerces when you pillage a tile. Improvements that produce either food, hammers, or both have the amount of both shipped back to the nearest friendly city of the pillager. So this speeds up growth and production in that particular city.

But you can also get commerce as well. Gold already exists and you continue to get that no matter what when pillaging a tile, but you'd now have the potential to get culture sent to the nearest city, research toward the tech you're researching, or espionage points towards the player you've just pillaged. Then you could also have a leader trait that would modify the maximum amount given.. so raiders could get +100% commerce from pillaging and maybe +100% gold amount from pillaging.

2) This will be a bit trickier as I don't know what exactly causes them to accept peace. One thing to check is what type of war plan the barb civs start with, which I don't currently force to anything (total would be the best option I imagine). Also some negative attitude affects might keep them from agreeing to peace. I'll see what I can figure out.

This falls somewhere in line with what I mean by different war strategies: conquest vs. raiding. Messing with the AI, however, is not something to be done lightly. That'll take time to learn effectively.

The problem here is that this would be largely suicidal for the barbarians unless you gave them a serious buff at the outset, which I think would be unbalancing. There should be a better selection process of who they declare war on. (See my reply to jdog).

All I am asking for is an option in the INI file. "DoW on multiple civs" or something that can be set to true or false. It doesn't need to be the default. I would just find it useful since I am buffing the barb civs up A LOT as in my experience they don't tend to do much, if any conquering using the default settings.

My essential problem is that if I start a game with 5 ancient civs on a standard map, they are almost always the 5 most powerful civs at the end of the game if I run AutoPlay . Of course this is not historical at all, most cultures that were dominant a few millenia ago have been displaced by other cultures in RL. I'm trying to reach a point where only 1 or 2 of these ancient cultures survive and the barbarian civs actually have a chance to win the game.

I disagree here, I think it makes a great deal of sense. I see this as being like ransoming cities or raids where barbarians sacked cities but ultimately returned home rather than try to fulfill any kind of imperial ambitions. Managing a city is tough, especially when it's a foreign city in jdog's world ;)

In my experience, this has more to do with some kind of problem with the way Civ 4 calculates "power". For example, I have given barb civs 10x as many troops as default and set them off. When they first spawn with say, 40 axemen and 40 chariots or something, the power graph shows them with less power than any other civs despite the fact that they have 8x as many troops (the game must factor in other things here like production capability, technologies, etc). So they march off and take over an enemy city. They still outnumber their poor victim by at least 5:1 and could easily take one or two other cities, but they almost always sign a peace treaty at the first opportunity, often giving this city back. The only reason I can figure for this behavior is that they look at the (incorrect) power graph and think the enemy outnumbers them so they sue for whatever peace deal they can get.

Also you point out that controlling a distant city with another civ's culture will be difficult. I agree, and I think this makes it interesting for this unpolished, low tech civ to try to control it as it will almost certainly result in some interesting revolutions down the road. If they just give it away for no reason it takes the fun out of it.


I think newly-spawned civs, if they are aggressive, should declare war on whoever they think they can beat. But perhaps this could be subdivided here... I think that aggressive barb-turned-civ societies fall into essentially two categories: raiders and conquerors. Raiders are FAR more frequent than conquerors amongst the barbarians. They come in, steal everything that's not nailed down, and then leave. You have a chance to rebuild, and they have a chance to come back for seconds.

I think raiders are well represented by the normal barbarians who occasionally enter your lands, pillage a few tiles and then get driven off. Barbarian civs give the opportunity to represent two phenomena:
1. When a group of previously nomadic and otherwise disparate people band together to form a largely peaceful society based on agriculture, social organization, etc.
2. When a similar group of people organize a society based around military conquest. In my view, a society based around raiding only has not developed enough structure to be given their own civilization in game terms.

This will be a bit trickier as I don't know what exactly causes them to accept peace. One thing to check is what type of war plan the barb civs start with, which I don't currently force to anything (total would be the best option I imagine). Also some negative attitude affects might keep them from agreeing to peace. I'll see what I can figure out.

jdog, I was thinking you could do something along the lines of what happens when war is declared or you canceled trade deals with someone "___ refuses to talk!". I don't know how that is activated but it could keep them from declaring peace earlier than they should (due to the power graph issue I mentioned before". Playing around with the war plan might be interesting, I've noticed at times they seem to wander around aimlessly when they should be attacking. Maybe a total war plan would give them more direction. Thanks for responding to the ideas.

All I am asking for is an option in the INI file. "DoW on multiple civs" or something that can be set to true or false. It doesn't need to be the default. I would just find it useful since I am buffing the barb civs up A LOT as in my experience they don't tend to do much, if any conquering using the default settings.

Nevertheless, I don't think having them dec on several players will solve this issue. If anything what you need is new behavioral code added in which they will become serial war-deccers... so once they've wiped out or nearly wiped out one civ, they'll move on to the next one. But having them declare war on everybody at once will only lead to them getting divided up and defeated piecemeal.

In my experience, this has more to do with some kind of problem with the way Civ 4 calculates "power". For example, I have given barb civs 10x as many troops as default and set them off. When they first spawn with say, 40 axemen and 40 chariots or something, the power graph shows them with less power than any other civs despite the fact that they have 8x as many troops (the game must factor in other things here like production capability, technologies, etc). So they march off and take over an enemy city. They still outnumber their poor victim by at least 5:1 and could easily take one or two other cities, but they almost always sign a peace treaty at the first opportunity, often giving this city back. The only reason I can figure for this behavior is that they look at the (incorrect) power graph and think the enemy outnumbers them so they sue for whatever peace deal they can get.

Well, that is something worth looking into. It's quite possible that there is a cumulative aspect to the power value that would give older civs a huge advantage in this department.

I think raiders are well represented by the normal barbarians who occasionally enter your lands, pillage a few tiles and then get driven off. Barbarian civs give the opportunity to represent two phenomena:
1. When a group of previously nomadic and otherwise disparate people band together to form a largely peaceful society based on agriculture, social organization, etc.
2. When a similar group of people organize a society based around military conquest. In my view, a society based around raiding only has not developed enough structure to be given their own civilization in game terms.

Well, we'll agree to disagree here. I think that there's certainly room for higher-developed civs that pursue a policy of continual warfare with their neighbors without trying to take and hold land. But this shouldn't affect what you want which is a Mongol-style conquest.

jdog, I was thinking you could do something along the lines of what happens when war is declared or you canceled trade deals with someone "___ refuses to talk!". I don't know how that is activated but it could keep them from declaring peace earlier than they should (due to the power graph issue I mentioned before". Playing around with the war plan might be interesting, I've noticed at times they seem to wander around aimlessly when they should be attacking. Maybe a total war plan would give them more direction. Thanks for responding to the ideas.

A new game mechanic to force them to remain at war will probably not be necessary if you're going to make them so much stronger than everyone else around them. They will pursue a war if they know they can win it... but, as you pointed out, there's probably some unseen factor that's causing them to think they're actually weaker than they are.

EDIT: Ok, the issue with power is that it calculates a lot of different things to determine a civ's power including number of cities, total population, buildings, techs and finally units. So a new civ that has far fewer cities, population, buildings, and techs, the strength in units will not really make the AI think it has the advantage even if it does. I guess there will have to be some kind of mechanics in which the AI will take these immediate factors into account.

Yeah Dom Pedro's back!

Keeping things simple is never simple I know! My focus is on game balance with respect to what's immediately achievable.

What about the possibility that the underlying assumption about barbarian civs is the problem, with respect to what the current game mechanics can actually achieve?

The assumption is (correct me if I'm wrong) is that barbarian civs should get a 50% chance of becoming fully fledged civs. This is a big challenge to pull off in a balanced way with the current game mechanic limitations (power graph, AI strategy, etc etc)

What about just changing the presumption with us players, and a couple of details in Jdog's code? The presumption is simply that barbarian civs are and will always be high probability candidates for being destroyed or vassaled whether they are warmongers or builders? This result is similar to the vanilla game when you see that barbarian nations always get overrun in the end. It's just that as civilisations, they now can at least become vassals.

If it turns out that this presumption is not too unbalancing and that it is already compatible with the game mechanics as they are, then the only real change that has to happen in the code is that warmonger barb civs have to DOW on other civs according to Jdog's ideas b and c above.

If you change the presumption as mentioned, you get these benefits:

1) The warmonger barbarian civ who DOW's on everyone via Jdog's suggestions will either be defeated or vassaled, but the AI of surrounding civs knows how to deal with it and it's a case of first in best dressed for them. It solves the problem of a barbarian warmonger picking on only one other civ, when the game mechanics don't properly evaluate the situation long term causing unbalance.

2) The peaceful barb civs will either be defeated or vassaled but this too is easy for the AI to understand.

3) There is still a possibilty that a barb civ will emerge long term as per Jdog's existing code which I find to be good anyway when a barb civilisation is on it's own.

I know, it's not that simple!
Cheers.

I don't think I've ever played an unmodded game of revolution, I always mod the game so that there's an insane amount of barbarians and animals (just simple python editing of civ4handicapinfo.xml). I think the current amount I'm fooling around with is 4-5x barbarians, 5x animals, 3-4x amount of barbarian cities and 3-4x probability of forming a city. This makes early expansion and exploration a lot slower, and when barbarian nations do arise, the other players are relatively weaker and the barbarians are relatively stronger. Often times some barbarian nations will play out to be just as powerful as nations who were in the game from the start (a lot of times, a nation will form in the inner reaches of the continent that hasn't been explored or that nobody else has really gotten to, giving them plenty of time to build up and room to expand). It's a fun and challenging variant that I recommend people try sometime.

Thanks DP for looking into the power mechanics, it certainly makes sense that civs would consider more than just units. I wonder though if the new Espionage mechanics play any role here, as when BarbCivs spawn they have no espionage points against anyone and so shouldn't be able to see the power of their neighbors ... or is that just a restriction on the human player? The AI would be flying blind without those numbers, and based on the code that handles the drawing of the power graph I bet it's just a restriction on the human player.

As for the DW on multiple civs bit, I'll include it as an option that defaults to off. Because of the trouble with DW on multiple civs at once I'll probably implement as initially DW on all civs they can immediately contact (ie have units near the barb cities), if none available then one nearby civ. These massive uprisings will then DW on any civ they meet who would form a worthwhile target for the next 30ish turns, with a cap of 3 to 5 wars. Every time one of these civs picks an additional victim they will receive a few more military units. It will be interesting to see how it plays out and what choices the AI makes in these situations, and as a default off option it won't disrupt the current setup. Shouldn't take too much to code either.

As for the 'Refuses to talk!' timer, that's something I've been investigating because it doesn't seem to be set for rebel civs either. The BarbCiv should certainly not declare peace for several turns after declaring war, and this will give them a chance to maybe increase their measured power with respect to the other civ and thus prolong the war.

Another thing that could be done for these militaristic BarbCivs would be to have then generate some reinforcements in their starting cities when they capture a city (again, only in the first 30ish turns of life). Wouldn't be much by default, maybe ~3 for the first capture with more in later eras and fewer the more cities they control. This would have them come at you in a couple waves instead of one big push (and help the initially successful ones expand further). Thoughts?

Thanks DP for looking into the power mechanics, it certainly makes sense that civs would consider more than just units. I wonder though if the new Espionage mechanics play any role here, as when BarbCivs spawn they have no espionage points against anyone and so shouldn't be able to see the power of their neighbors ... or is that just a restriction on the human player? The AI would be flying blind without those numbers, and based on the code that handles the drawing of the power graph I bet it's just a restriction on the human player.

Power isn't a part of the espionage system. It's just a way to calculate score and AI behavior. Since you don't get any kind of a breakdown in terms of what a civ's power is based on (i.e. units, techs, buildings, population, etc.), it doesn't provide much useful intelligence.

One solution would be to simply turn down the power value of buildings, population, techs, etc. That way power would be based largely on units. I wouldn't recommend this though because that would really skew the power in all other cases. The way I look at it, you have two situations: 1) A country with a huge army but little capability to replace its losses, and 2) A country with a small initial army but a huge capacity to expand and maintain that army. The current power system reflects this balance nicely IMO.

So the refuse to talk timer is one possible way out of this. The other is to have the AI assess the immediate military situation.. so if they outnumber the enemy 5 to 1, they'll probably be able to overrun them before they can train new reinforcements.

Another thing that could be done for these militaristic BarbCivs would be to have then generate some reinforcements in their starting cities when they capture a city (again, only in the first 30ish turns of life). Wouldn't be much by default, maybe ~3 for the first capture with more in later eras and fewer the more cities they control. This would have them come at you in a couple waves instead of one big push (and help the initially successful ones expand further). Thoughts?

Could be interesting... sort of like rallying recruits once they've got some successes under their belt.

As for the DW on multiple civs bit, I'll include it as an option that defaults to off. Because of the trouble with DW on multiple civs at once I'll probably implement as initially DW on all civs they can immediately contact (ie have units near the barb cities), if none available then one nearby civ. These massive uprisings will then DW on any civ they meet who would form a worthwhile target for the next 30ish turns, with a cap of 3 to 5 wars. Every time one of these civs picks an additional victim they will receive a few more military units.

Oooh yeah that looks like a lot of fun! I'll be turning that option on for sure! There seems so many arbitrary constants in this big equation. I don't how you would manage to balance it Jdog. If you can pull it off should be good.

Could you make the constants scaleable to gamespeed? I'm a normal speed player.

Cheers, wonderful stuff.

DP:

Yeah, messing with the AI at that level seems too much ... in addition to the refuse to talk timer, I might be able to intercept the AI decision on declaring peace in CvGameUtils, but I'm not sure yet.

glider:

I can definitely make the turn constants scale by gamespeed, no worries there.

DP:

Yeah, messing with the AI at that level seems too much ... in addition to the refuse to talk timer, I might be able to intercept the AI decision on declaring peace in CvGameUtils, but I'm not sure yet.

Yeah, this might be worth looking into just in general. I mean, when deciding to make peace, I think the current number of units should really be one of the most critical factors if it isn't already.

This is the code for determining of peace value in CvTeamAI.cpp:


int CvTeamAI::AI_endWarVal(TeamTypes eTeam) const
{
int iValue;
FAssertMsg(eTeam != getID(), "shouldn't call this function on ourselves");
FAssertMsg(isAtWar(eTeam), "Current AI Team instance is expected to be at war with eTeam");
iValue = 100;
iValue += (getNumCities() * 3);
iValue += (GET_TEAM(eTeam).getNumCities() * 3);
iValue += getTotalPopulation();
iValue += GET_TEAM(eTeam).getTotalPopulation();
iValue += (GET_TEAM(eTeam).AI_getWarSuccess(getID()) * 20);
int iOurPower = std::max(1, getPower(true));
int iTheirPower = std::max(1, GET_TEAM(eTeam).getDefensivePower());
iValue *= iTheirPower + 10;
iValue /= std::max(1, iOurPower + iTheirPower + 10);

WarPlanTypes eWarPlan = AI_getWarPlan(eTeam);
// if we not human, do we want to continue war for strategic reasons?
// only check if our power is at least 120% of theirs
if (!isHuman() && iOurPower > ((120 * iTheirPower) / 100))
{
bool bDagger = false;

bool bAnyFinancialTrouble = false;
for (int iI = 0; iI < MAX_PLAYERS; iI++)
{
if (GET_PLAYER((PlayerTypes)iI).isAlive())
{
if (GET_PLAYER((PlayerTypes)iI).getTeam() == getID())
{
if (GET_PLAYER((PlayerTypes)iI).AI_isDoStrategy(AI_ST RATEGY_DAGGER))
{
bDagger = true;
}

if (GET_PLAYER((PlayerTypes)iI).AI_isFinancialTrouble ())
{
bAnyFinancialTrouble = true;
}
}
}
}

// if dagger, value peace at 90% * power ratio
if (bDagger)
{
iValue *= 9 * iTheirPower;
iValue /= 10 * iOurPower;
}

// for now, we will always do the land mass check for domination
// if we have more than half the land, then value peace at 90% * land ratio
int iLandRatio = ((getTotalLand(true) * 100) / std::max(1, GET_TEAM(eTeam).getTotalLand(true)));
if (iLandRatio > 120)
{
iValue *= 9 * 100;
iValue /= 10 * iLandRatio;
}
// if in financial trouble, warmongers will continue the fight to make more money
if (bAnyFinancialTrouble)
{
switch (eWarPlan)
{
case WARPLAN_TOTAL:
// if we total warmonger, value peace at 70% * power ratio factor
if (bDagger || AI_maxWarRand() < 100)
{
iValue *= 7 * (5 * iTheirPower);
iValue /= 10 * (iOurPower + (4 * iTheirPower));
}
break;
case WARPLAN_LIMITED:
// if we limited warmonger, value peace at 70% * power ratio factor
if (AI_limitedWarRand() < 100)
{
iValue *= 7 * (5 * iTheirPower);
iValue /= 10 * (iOurPower + (4 * iTheirPower));
}
break;
case WARPLAN_DOGPILE:
// if we dogpile warmonger, value peace at 70% * power ratio factor
if (AI_dogpileWarRand() < 100)
{
iValue *= 7 * (5 * iTheirPower);
iValue /= 10 * (iOurPower + (4 * iTheirPower));
}
break;
}
}
}

// XXX count units in enemy territory...
if ((!(isHuman()) && (eWarPlan == WARPLAN_TOTAL)) ||
(!(GET_TEAM(eTeam).isHuman()) && (GET_TEAM(eTeam).AI_getWarPlan(getID()) == WARPLAN_TOTAL)))
{
iValue *= 2;
}
else if ((!(isHuman()) && (eWarPlan == WARPLAN_DOGPILE) && (GET_TEAM(eTeam).getAtWarCount(true) > 1)) ||
(!(GET_TEAM(eTeam).isHuman()) && (GET_TEAM(eTeam).AI_getWarPlan(getID()) == WARPLAN_DOGPILE) && (getAtWarCount(true) > 1)))
{
iValue *= 3;
iValue /= 2;
}
iValue -= (iValue % GC.getDefineINT("DIPLOMACY_VALUE_REMAINDER"));
if (isHuman())
{
return std::max(iValue, GC.getDefineINT("DIPLOMACY_VALUE_REMAINDER"));
}
else
{
return iValue;
}
}

So right there you can see it's heavily skewed towards who has the greater economic capacity for war rather than who has the most units.


Just as an additional note to the whole barbarian invasion thing. One thing I don't want to see is the new civ going from one moment not even existing to the next having some massive army. I can see some people who have modded there game to produce exactly this. To me, choice is the most important part of a game. If you lose the game because of a random event, then it's not fun to me. It just becomes frustrating.

If this huge barbarian hoarde, however, is spawned based on several factors that you have the potential to control, then that's a different story. If there are large open sections of the map (and perhaps pre-existing barbarian cities which I think are lacking in the early game as is) this could be a factor. The more barbarian cities that get pulled into this newly-spawned civ, the better their initial army should be. I would also think that leaving some of these cities unaffiliated would be good because it would give the newly-formed civs something to attack first, and it would give the established civs something to try to beat them to.

So a player would be forced to make the decision of rapidly expanding into new territory to prevent the creation of a massive barbarian hoarde at the expense of financial stability (and indeed opening hastily built settlements to barbarian incursions). It creates a risk vs. reward situation... if you choose to consolidate your holdings, you risk a large, powerful army spawning nearby, and if you expand rapidly to reduce that chance, you risk internal collapse. Neither is assured, but both are possible.

Another thing is that maybe barbarians successfully capturing a city should cause them to spawn into a new civ. Perhaps not guaranteed, but give a percent chance of that happening.

Another thing is that maybe barbarians successfully capturing a city should cause them to spawn into a new civ. Perhaps not guaranteed, but give a percent chance of that happening.

Pretty sure that feature is already in, I remember jdog talking about it somewhere.

Pretty sure that feature is already in, I remember jdog talking about it somewhere.

Yes, when barbs capture a city there is a very good chance they will form a new civ (not immeadiately, but over the next several turns) and then declare war on the player they captured the city from ... doesn't happen with small backwater outposts as much, but very likely in cities with culture.

One thing I don't want to see is the new civ going from one moment not even existing to the next having some massive army. I can see some people who have modded there game to produce exactly this.

Here here. Exactly what I feel about barbarian civs. The progression of the barbarians is a progression of disturbance to the strategy of the estabished civs, nothing more. I think barb civs both peaceful or militaristic are asking to be either destroyed strategically or incorporated as vassals by one or other of the established civs. That is their destiny. This is in keeping with the whole notion of barbarians in the vanilla game, it's just that with Revolutions, barb nations can now be vassalled. That's not to say that the occassional barb civ will succeed in making the big time on his own.

The more barbarian cities that get pulled into this newly-spawned civ, the better their initial army should be. I would also think that leaving some of these cities unaffiliated would be good because it would give the newly-formed civs something to attack first, and it would give the established civs something to try to beat them to.

That is a brilliant idea. It kind of solves the issue about the "arbitrary" size of a barbarian civ army. Base the increase in size of a barbarian civs army on the success they are having with eliminating other barbarians not with other established civs. This gives some "validaty" to why some barb civs have bigger armies than others when you first scout them out, and adds to the strategic decisions that an established civ has to make like Dom Pedro suggests here:


So a player would be forced to make the decision of rapidly expanding into new territory to prevent the creation of a massive barbarian hoarde at the expense of financial stability (and indeed opening hastily built settlements to barbarian incursions). It creates a risk vs. reward situation... if you choose to consolidate your holdings, you risk a large, powerful army spawning nearby, and if you expand rapidly to reduce that chance, you risk internal collapse. Neither is assured, but both are possible..


Another thing is that maybe barbarians successfully capturing a city should cause them to spawn into a new civ. Perhaps not guaranteed, but give a percent chance of that happening.

Although it's excellent thinking, I disagree with that one because Jdog's code is already good on how barb civ get's spawned. However what about that being the deciding factor on whether a barb civ is peaceful or militaristic in nature, based on their prior history with war? Probably something Jdog is already doing or already has thought about....

All more work for Jdog! I really don't want to do that because so much of the code is already good. :goodjob:

Cheers

Although it's excellent thinking, I disagree with that one because Jdog's code is already good on how barb civ get's spawned. However what about that being the deciding factor on whether a barb civ is peaceful or militaristic in nature, based on their prior history with war? Probably something Jdog is already doing or already has thought about....

All more work for Jdog! I really don't want to do that because so much of the code is already good. :goodjob:

Cheers


This sounds good... a civ spawned out of barbarians capturing a city should be a good determining factor. You don't want peaceful civs emerging out of violent conquest.

And btw, jdog isn't the only one working on the revolution code ;)

And btw, jdog isn't the only one working on the revolution code ;)

Ahah, I knew it all along. With a mod this good it had to be like the Beatles with Lennon and Mccartney. Which one of you is Lennon and which is Mccartney then? ;)

Don't break up the band like they did ok? :goodjob:
Cheers :)

Ahah, I knew it all along. With a mod this good it had to be like the Beatles with Lennon and Mccartney. Which one of you is Lennon and which is Mccartney then? ;)

Don't break up the band like they did ok? :goodjob:
Cheers :)

Well, considering Lennon was the one who got shot, I'll take McCartney ;)

I'll take Ringo ... the whole Yoko and then getting shot thing is a bit much.

You know how when one civ asks you to declare war on another, you only have 2 options. Accept, or decline. There should be a third option, especially for rebels. If you support the revolution, but are not ready for war with that particular civ, you should be able to give them gold or tech or something. I know you can do this already, but first you have to decline on the war, which gives you negatives with the asking civ. If you could give support without declaring war, you could have a senario like the cold war, where the US and Soviets never actually declared war, but fought each other though their alies.

You know how when one civ asks you to declare war on another, you only have 2 options. Accept, or decline. There should be a third option, especially for rebels. If you support the revolution, but are not ready for war with that particular civ, you should be able to give them gold or tech or something. I know you can do this already, but first you have to decline on the war, which gives you negatives with the asking civ. If you could give support without declaring war, you could have a senario like the cold war, where the US and Soviets never actually declared war, but fought each other though their alies.

This is something that we've been discussing as a possibility. The problem is that the diplomacy (particularly the diploimacy screen) is something we can't really touch. Perhaps we can alter the screen you're referring to more...

i guess the screen would be hard to change. what you could do is make the AI more grateful for help during wartime. For example, you decline in going to war, but afterwards give them 30 or 40 gold, or a tech. Normally, it takes a while for this to effect relations, and even then not much. Could this aspect be modified?

I was thinking as I was playing it today that it would be nice if you could Blacklist the civs that you don't want appearing from revolutions in that game.
just a thought.

orinsul:

You mean have a list of civs that will never show up in a particular game as rebels? That's certainly possible.

Are you just trying to avoid having a civ or two or thinking of making quick scenarios with a subset of civs? This can also be achieved by commenting some of the civs out of the XML file (though it also means they won't show up initially or as barb civs ...).

You know, I think the Jaredia (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=249656) map (if it ever gets finished, but it could always be made by others) would really suit this mod.

I was thinking something along the lines of a ctrl-alt-# which brings up a list of all the civs each with a button beside them and you click and then the civ name goes red and when a revolution happens if the name is red it ignores it when generating a the revolution civ.
Not a necessity though, the Contrl-Alt-P pretty much allows you to alter any unwanted civs from revolutions.
Just a thought.

As to the funding of rebels, would be brilliant if possible.

Does anyone think that Sid Sushi is overpowered when played with Revolutions on ocean maps? I play on maps with 70% ocean. With so many ocean resources, it appears a Sid Sushi executive can bump up culture by +18 per turn in a city without too much impact on finances in Monarch level. That means you can quickly stabilise cities by incorporating the corporation.

It's not unbalanced from the perspective of the AI which doesn't seem to use executives for spreading culture to increase civil stability. I don't think the AI knows how to hog corporate resources for specific objectives either.

It's more of an issue with unbalancing the humans game strategy because Sid Sushi is a huge magnet corporate goal every single game, which could be seen as unbalancing if it is always a major objective.

Cheers.

How bad an idea would it be to combine Revolutions with Dale's Combat Mod? It sounds like fun to me.;)

I believe that Echo of Celts will be posting just such a combo in the near future ... also includes a couple others, but would probably make for an easy unmerge.

[EDIT: has posted already ... check it out here (http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=8227)]

Random idea: Would it be possible to add some options to the mod that control the frequency/strength of revolutions, to allow people to adjust the revolutions to their liking? Or just exposing some of the variables to xml?

You can do this already in Revolution.ini. There are separate variables to increase the strength (StrengthModifier), rate of rev index accumulation (IndexModifier), turns between violent revolts (TurnsBetweenRevs), and many more similar things. You can also mess with setting for reinforcements.

Figuring out if you've got a good setting, however, would take some time and scrutiny.

If there are any variables which you'd like to know more what they do, or if you have an idea for how revolts could be different and want advice on making that happen, just post.

You can do this already in Revolution.ini. There are separate variables to increase the strength (StrengthModifier), rate of rev index accumulation (IndexModifier), turns between violent revolts (TurnsBetweenRevs), and many more similar things. You can also mess with setting for reinforcements.

Oh, awesome. I've meddled with the barbarian civ stuff, can't believe I missed the stuff for the revolution part.

well since Dom Pedro has got the nomadic civs covered, here's another suggestion: why not make corporations have an effect on revolutions? Like maybe after nationalism, foreign corporations would be a negative. this could line up with the mercantialism civic somehow. And after communism (or whatever the tech is, im not sure) socialist revolutions could take place in places where unhappiness and unhealthiness are big problems, which would of course be anti-corporation and would line up with the state property civic. Both of theses have been huge factors in the last hundred years, so it makes sense to add them to revolution.

well since Dom Pedro has got the nomadic civs covered, here's another suggestion: why not make corporations have an effect on revolutions?

Does anyone have any comments with regard to the Sid Sushi Corp? As it stands now in Revolutions, Sid Sushi seems to me to be a strategically unbalancing magnet goal every game on huge maps with 70% ocean (typical earth like maps). Each seafood resource pumps up culture output by +1 per turn. On Monarch level I am easily obtaining 17 seafood resources through trade and thus Sid Sushi culture is as high as +21 per turn. Keep in mind that it only takes one executive to achieve this in a size one settlement, while it takes at least two world or national wonders to do the same.

Thus the culture from Sid Sushi corp founded in new or unstable cities, plus the indirect benefits of extra food, is making quite a bit of difference in stabilising these cities. I don't have a problem with this in the sense that modern corporations in the real world can achieve a similar effect. However in the game, there are specific reasons for not spreading Sid Sushi abroad, thus only the player with Sid Sushi gets the benefit of the culture injection.

I haven't fully confirmed that it is mod unbalancing as I am yet to win a Monarch Domination victory under Revolutions, only space race victories. However Sid Sushi would seem an ideal way to stabilise freshly conquered territory locally and abroad. I can only confirm that Sid Sushi does quickly stabilise small distant outposts, and allows foreign breakaway cities to become part of the empire that much more easily than without Sid Sushi. I can also confirm that the culture effect of Sid Sushi in a well organised city even competes with AI's that are trying for a cultural victory. Sid Sushi lessons or stops rebellions on the borders with these cultural nations as well.

Financing Sid Sushi is not that hard if you are Financial and Protective for example. Typically Sid Sushi founded alongside Wall Street, is kept for domestic use without making money in at least twelve cities, and another harmless corp is used for foreign spread, the latter funding the costs of Sid Sushi domestically. On huge maps late game, with typically thirty or so nations, you can easily find a few tin pot and banana republic nations that will sell you Sid Sushi resources for only +9, +11, +14 gold, and accept your foreign corp in a city or two. Thankfully it can be a challenge to spread foreign corporations in rival civilisations now thanks to Bhruic's 1.11 changes as well as BTS 3.13 changes.

I think Locce's anti-corporation idea has some merit. However to realise the idea within the Revolutions mod seems quite a challenge to pull off! As it stands right now, AI nations in the late game suffer from low level instability already without adding corporate instability, making Space Race victories that much more easy. However the Sid Sushi nation is one happy dude if it is acquired by a human.

If you beg to differ, please bring it on!

Cheers.

PS) The Revolutions mod is still a great achievement and works very well in many other contexts including espionage. I have not yet been able to make a stable AI nation collapse via espionage. Only nations that are already "on the edge" respond. This is good.

Does anyone have any comments with regard to the Sid Sushi Corp? As it stands now in Revolutions, Sid Sushi seems to me to be a strategically unbalancing magnet goal every game on huge maps with 70% ocean (typical earth like maps).

I think all the Corps. are unbalancing even without Revolutions. Sid' Sushi being possibly the worst. The AI just doesn't know how to minimax and take advantage of corporations like a human player will. I've modded them all to reduce the benefits.

I think that perhaps the best thing for an anti-corporation aspect is to make it so that there will be greater pressure on a civ to adopt civics that block foreign corporations... refusal to do so would then increase the revolution index. However, there is also a danger there that every civ will just simply adopt this civic... so you'll end up with nothing but mercantilism and state property, which is not a reflection at all of the real world. So I would suggest that the demand for anti-corporate civics should be done with a light touch, and it should perhaps be scaled by the negative effects of said corporation.

I would like to have corporations that take resources from one civ and give it to another. These corporations should have a much bigger negative impact on "public opinion" of foreign corporations than those that don't.

Definitely a potential for anti-foreign corporation revolts does seem in order, but DPII point of keeping it a 'light touch' is well taken ... the effects of foreign corps on rev index will be small if any, but if the civ is unstable, particularly with a poor economy, then cries for either isolationism or communism would be a logical choice.

I will definitely add something along these lines in the next next version ... 1.3 has "gone gold" pretty much and will be up soon. :)

As for the balance of corporations, particularly in Revolution, well there isn't a whole lot of it ... the AI doesn't deal with corporations in a particularly sophisticated way in BTS, and I have done nothing to attempt to improve it with considerations for Revolution. Given that there's a whole strategy article dedicated to how awesome Sushi is, we can be pretty sure that's unbalanced ...

Personally, I hope that the mythical last patch for BTS has some AI updates for things like corps and other BTS introduced features (espionage). It may not, but I can't imagine what would have taken this long otherwise.

Definitely a potential for anti-foreign corporation revolts does seem in order, but DPII point of keeping it a 'light touch' is well taken ... the effects of foreign corps on rev index will be small if any, but if the civ is unstable, particularly with a poor economy, then cries for either isolationism or communism would be a logical choice.

That was essentially my thought process.

Personally, I hope that the mythical last patch for BTS has some AI updates for things like corps and other BTS introduced features (espionage). It may not, but I can't imagine what would have taken this long otherwise.

I hadn't heard of another patch, but I hope that it exposes some more code to the SDK... probably won't though. My two biggest complaints is the inability to add new trade items and the fact that there's a function in the city class directing where to pull the city's graphic from and it does nothing (thereby preventing me from being able to keep city art of an original owner in a conquered city).

I think all the Corps. are unbalancing even without Revolutions. Sid' Sushi being possibly the worst. The AI just doesn't know how to minimax and take advantage of corporations like a human player will. I've modded them all to reduce the benefits.

Just out of interest, I've been thinking along the same lines, how much have you reduced their benefits by?

One quick fix at a guess is to put the AI on aggressive. As far as I can tell, this option seems to make even pleased AI's less willing to trade and thus it would be harder for the human to minimax corporate resources late game in the presense of large numbers of small non obliging nations. One would have to do more conquering to get the required corporate resources. More conquering means more drain on the human economy and distracts the human from a space race win as well.

Cheers.

Big thanks to Jdog and Dom Pedro for the superb quality of your coding and commenting! I've done a beta merge of Rev 1.26 and Dale's Combat mod 1.3 which was easier thanks to your high standards and forethought. Can't be sure yet whether the merge has worked 100% only more testing will reveal that. There's possibly an issue with stack attacks in the late game.
Cheers.

putting AI on aggresive is one solution, though i think this would unbalance other parts of the game and take more emphasis away from culture, religion, economy, and espianage, and into war and conquest. Great if war is your main strategy, but i tend to go more the culture/economy route. I think for corporations to be balanced their efects should be reduced slightly. In most cases, corporations, foriegn or local, should improve the economy. However, they should have negative effects as well, such as unhappiness, or unhealthiness, which would vary depending on the situation. Then u would have to ensure that the pros outweigh the cons. Otherwise, those disgruntled low class workers will rise up and kick u out.

Along the lines of the aggressive AI option to help minimise human corporate advantage, what about looking at Revolutions from the angle of diminishing corporate resource trading.

You could do something simple in concept like making the revolution index increase for a civ, if it exports corporate resources to rival civs that have the corresponding corporation. This would be the smaller socialist republics that resent the capitalists so to speak. What combination of civics would that be?

You could also do the reverse and make the rev index increase for the corporate civ, if it imports corporate resources from nations that it has poor relations with. This would be all those smaller banana republics on other continents that hate you but are too weak to attack. What combination of civics would that be?

Of course the effect would only apply to corporate resource trades not for other resource trades.

It has to be kept in mind that late game revolution instability is ok now in terms of balance, but any increase in revolutions would take the edge off the AI's chances pretty much across the board late game.

Perhaps the reverse is better, that is to decrease the rev index according to corporate resource trade deals.

Cheers.

The rev index modification from corporations should also be based in part on the attitude toward the corporation's HQ civ. I would think the attitude towards the corporation would fluctuate based on the attitude towards the corporation's home country.

Here are specific foreign corporate complaints, from my country:

1) Citizens complain that foreign fast food corp imports food resources rather than using domestic supply and local workers.

2) Citizens complain that domestic supply is being exhausted by foreign fast food corp exploitation of it, both in term of the resource and the local workforce.

3) Citizens complain that foreign mining corp is exporting domestic coal that will be consumed by an emerging super power they perceive as a threat, and not reserving enough coal for future domestic use.

4) Citizens complain that foreign mining corp will export domestic uranium to militaristic nations where that uranium could be used against them.

5) Citizens complain that foreign mining corp is polluting the local environment and abusing workers.

6) Citizens complain that the country that has the foreign corp HQ, is waging an economic war against them, despite the two countries sharing good relations.

These examples show that the citizenry can hate foreign corps and foreign corps trade deals. Unfortunately I have no examples of the citizenry's attitude to domestic corp's because in my country, every corporation is foreign owned! We would need people from the US and Finland to comment on that.

Cheers.

Well, a consensus on corporations (domestic or otherwise) in the USA is non-existant. Some see them as good, necessary and the life-blood of the economy. Others seem them as manipulative, draining on our resources and abusive to the environment and the workers of the country. Generally, however, people fall somewhere in the middle and analyze them on a case by case basis. I don't really want to get into a whole political debate here, but I'm going to essentially sum up the arguments made by those against them (since it's the opposition to corps we're interested in for the purposes of this mod).

Currently, the main concern toward foreign corporations (at least I believe) has come from the car industry. This has actually been a concern for a number of years now. There's great anxiety about foreign car makers dominating the market... but that also leads to the fact that many factories have closed down in the USA to set up shop in other countries where wages are lower and the company doesn't have to foot the bill for health care for the workers for one reason or another. Those that argue in favor of socialized medicine in the US will often cite the large percentage of the cost that business-run healthcare has in the cost of a particular product... especially for car manufacturers where the unions are particularly strong.

So right there, you have a lot of things that need to be abstracted into one mystical whole. In the game, you could have a Car resource, but you can't have brands... so competing commodities is unlikely. So anxiety over loss of market share cannot be represented directly and would have to be represented abstractly. Outsourcing is an issue of domestic companies sending manufacturing and certain services abroad rather than a foreign company doing something at home... and even if it weren't, unemployment isn't included in the game at all, so I don't know how that'd be represented even abstractly.

Environmental impact and things like health insurance are represented rather well simply with the current Health game concept. And worse health means more unhappiness which translates into increased social instability, so there's really nothing that has to be factored into corporations there... if corporate branches (such as for the Mining Co) add unhealthiness, these things will be represented simply with that.

So to give you an idea... all of these issues in America have led to a demand from some for a change in "civics" with protectionist tariffs, universal healthcare, incentive plans to keep manufacturing jobs in the country, government regulations on business practices, and much earlier on the legalization of unions and strengthening of unions.

In earlier times in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, there were some major issues with work conditions and wages that led to the rise of unions in the country. However, I'm not sure that I would tie in the horrendous work conditions people had to work in back then to corporations in the game since there's only seven corps and they're clearly intended to represent massive, international corporations whereas working conditions were an issue in any place of business.

But prior to the legalization of unions and gov't laws regulating safety requirements, etc. conditions were ripe for revolution. Bloody clashes with workers, police and even military units were not uncommon. Socialism and communism became more popular in the US than they were previously or ever have been since. I guess my point is that this is where things are juiciest for game potential. Today none of the issues are such that people are going to start a revolution (at least in America), but also as I said, the issues in labor & industry at the turn of the century didn't apply to only corporations.

What we're really interested is the reaction of smaller, poorer countries to foreign corporations (and really foreign influence in general). Many of the reasons for atagonism towards these foreign companies have been listed already. And indeed there's the attitude factor I've described already... we've seen the footage of angry mobs burning down a McDonald's restaurant in a country where the USA is not terribly popular... Aside from serving tasteless, fattening food, that McDonald's really didn't do anything to warrant the attack aside from being a symbol for "American imperialism".

But these days, there's a lot of concern regarding China as well. I know that they've creeped into many African and Central Asian countries and their state-run corporations do a lot of business in those countries. There's complaints of exploitation of labor and natural resources and one would assume that there will be an eventual organized backlash against it. Of course, there are others in these respective countries that welcome the foreign investment and see this as the opportunity for economic success rather than a recipe for economic enslavement.

An excellent and interesting write up on domestic corps. Thanks DP! I will read it again for more insights. The observations that seem relevant to BTS are:

1) That BTS corps are meant to represent huge international corporations. If they are only used on a small scale domestically, they should have little effect on the rev index.

2) That BTS foreign owned corps could with some measure of realism, effect increases in the rev index in the country of operation, even with regard to trade deals.

3) Because of limitations in the BTS model, it appears that civs that have the corp founded in their own country, should not have much effect on the rev index locally. This is because things like industrial relations and unemployment are not modelled by BTS.

From my perspective, the problem with corps in BTS is that the human has too much opportunity to minimax while the AI has not sufficient awareness about minimaxing.

This is where Revolutions could restore some balance to the game. The emphasis on the Rev index appears to fall on the country with foreign owned BTS corps operating inside it. The AI should be made to be reluctant to trade corporate resources to foreign owned corps, just because of the effect on the rev index of the presense of that corp in their country. There is already a vanilla BTS reluctance built into trading away corporate resources, but I don't understand the mechanics of how that works.

The question is, how can you make the AI of a civ that has a foreign corp inside it, more reluctant to trade off corporate resources to the host nation? Perhaps if the society is stable, it could still be able to trade the corporate resource if it makes economic sense. It is really an awareness that the AI has, about that trading resources *can* impact on the rev index.

In my last game, the economics of running Sid Sushi in at least twelve cities domestically, was financed by running a foreign corp as well. The minimax trading that magnified the benefit of Sid Sushi, came from the myriad of foreign nations willing to trade me Sid Sushi resources.

However, if they were not so willing to, or even better, that they were willing to trade with me until for some other reason, their rev index went up too much, I would have been in the poop. This is because I needed those trade deals to feed my people. If they began to starve because foreign countries no longer were willing to trade resources with me, then my own rev index would have started to rise!

Without the relationship of trade to rev index, when these nations cancelled Sid Sushi trades with me, it didn't matter because I could either find another equivalent civ, or I could just accept a higher price, which was still reasonable.

However such an option would not be so readily available to me if trade was linked to rev index in the case of foreign owned corps.

Cheers.

Thanks for version 1.3 Jdog!

to control domestic corps, maybe make the required resouses more valuable. Like for Sid's Sushi Co. which is apparently the most unballanced, if seafood was need for other things, such as the health bonuses, it would be harder to put it all into the corp.

Hey Jdog5000, I've knocked up a beta-mod integration of Revolutions 1.3 and Dale's Combat Mod 1.3 and acknowledged your own and DPII's great work. If you had any thoughts of integrating DCM into Revolutions yourself, just let me know and I'll shut down my own efforts. I'm guessing that you don't want to integrate it. I don't think DCM is quite yet as balanced and complete as your own mod.

The link to RevolutionDCM is:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=8322

Cool! Glad you pursued that and got it working. I'll definitely post a link to your work to advertise it a bit, but I have no plans of integrating the two myself. My M.O. is to keep this focused and do the Revolution thing really well, then support others merging it with other mods when I can. With this focus Revolution can shine and then be more easily merged with all kinds of other things.

My M.O. is to keep this focused and do the Revolution thing really well, then support others merging it with other mods when I can. With this focus Revolution can shine and then be more easily merged with all kinds of other things.

Well Jdog, you are spot on. As I was merging, I noticed a lot of attention to detail. Although I don't understand all aspects of how Python hooks into C++ and the underlying event and file structures of that, I came to the impression that you are following a standardised high quality approach to mod design and future integration.

Excellent stuff.
Cheers.

I try ....... :)

just a minor sugestion, there is already a penalty for a city not being connected to the capital; can there be a diffence between water and road connection, road being better. i've noticed that religion already seems to spread faster on road connecitons.

just a minor sugestion, there is already a penalty for a city not being connected to the capital; can there be a diffence between water and road connection, road being better. i've noticed that religion already seems to spread faster on road connecitons.

Actually, it doesn't. The means by which one city is connected to another is not taken into account at all when spreading religions. There's really no good way for the game to determine by what means a city is connected to another. Believe me... I've agonized over this because there are a number of things I would like to do with that ability. The best you can do is determine that if the city is not a coastal city and has no river, but IS connected to the capital, that it must be connected by some kind of route. But that also means that coastal cities with roads connected to the capital will be treated the same as coastal cities with no roads connected to the capital.

oh well, it was just an idea. r u sure road connection make no difference? becase i swear i've played plenty of games where cities have been connected by coast for ages, and on completing a road my religion spreads instantly. i suppose it could be coincidance, but it has happenned quite a few times. Maybe its a hidden game mechanic?

I have the opposite experience than you, Locce.

I usually start to grow my cities following river lines in the continent, this way the first cities are always connected and I can spare more time building farms and such instead of worrying to connect the cities. Religion spreading has never been a problem for me...

actually Komori, i also try to build along rivers and coasts. i find that those connections are very efective, just lately that religion seems to have been spreading faster on roads. maybe it really is just a coincidance.

I don't see how it can be anything other than a coincidence. I worked quite a bit on the religion spreading mechanics in the SDK to provide more variation about how religions spread and ultimately to make it so that the last religion founded would have as much viability as the first religion founded.

The problem with trying to determine if a city is connected to another city by road is that you have to actually track the route from one city to the next. The processing time needed to accomplish this would be (in my opinion) just too much. The game would have to follow every branch of a road to determine if it connected to the city in question.

The way the system works is that when a plot (tile) is connected with a road, it's placed in a "plot group". When I first started investigating this, I thought a plot group was a geographic group of tiles, but it's not. It's all the tiles that are connected with each other. If a plot is pillaged, however, it is then removed from the plot group. What I'm wondering is if there's a way to store information on HOW the plot is connected to the rest of the plot group when it's first assigned to that group which would remove the need to plot the path of the routes every time you wanted to know how they're connected... I haven't looked into it closely however.

What I'm wondering is if there's a way to store information on HOW the plot is connected to the rest of the plot group when it's first assigned to that group which would remove the need to plot the path of the routes every time you wanted to know how they're connected... I haven't looked into it closely however.

I'm not brilliant on C++ but that sounds right DPII. The obvious way would be a seperate data structure of nothing but a chain of pointers to plots, that grows progressively as roads get built? Then a function that would search the pointer chains for the connectivity of any two locations, which is a once off computation? However it seems strange that such a data structure does not already exist. If it would have to be built, the worry would be excessive consumption of RAM. But if it's nothing but pointers, it wouldn't be too bad would it?

Cheers.

I'm still playing a huge terra map game on monarch version 1.30. I've turned on aggressive AI in order to make corporation trade more difficult late game. So far Revolution1.3 is brilliantly fun and working well. As far as I can tell, aggressive AI doesn't mean that a civ is necessarily always militaristic, just that they are generally less obliging on a number of fronts. I like it.

I've got a question on a beautiful little "event" that occured upon me capturing a breakaway city Laodicea. The context is that the Justinian has been severely racked by rebellion from early history onwards. Mansa rose up and grabbed Laodicea from him. I then grabbed this city from Mansa. The event that popped up went along these lines from memory:

"The citizens of Laodicea loyal to Justinian, have fled back to the capital and formed a partisan uprising against you".

Now that is nice. I assume that although Mansa had captured the city from Justinian, some of the citizens still loyal to Justinian fled and formed a resistance to me the aggressor, not Mansa. I have no problem with that and I like it. ;)

Is that event a BTS or Revolutions event?

Cheers and a big thanks for this wonderful mod.

It's a BTS event that occurs sometimes when you capture enemy cities... originally featured in Civ2. I think it takes the highest culture owner (or perhaps the ORIGINAL as opposed to the PREVIOUS owner), so it went to Justinian.

I'm still on 1.30 but Rev is going cool :) My wife is doing 1.31 Rev starting Terra maps with no other civ but herself. She's finding that minor's are turning up a lot earlier and generally it's making her have to think a bit more! She can no longer build the great wall every game because minors are not limited by it :) However the real possibility of playing a game starting with only one civ, is now a semi serious option so long as you turn conquest off otherwise triggering a domination win first turn!

My question is regarding random personality assignments. Lately I've been playing with this option on in order to make the strategy of deducing leader behaviours a little bit more interesting. It does not seem to destroy game balance for me. I've noticed that Revolutions does work with Random personalities as well to some extent with respect to rebellious leaders.

Once a rebellious leader or other combinations like minor civs settle down into full civs, is the code sensitive to the random personality option or does it end up assigning the default personality for that leader?

Knowing you clever modders, you have already consider this possibility.
Thanks again for a superb mod.

When assigning a leader to a new civ or changing the leader of a civ, the mod does in fact use Random Personalities when that's on. When "Isabella II" takes over, she'll also get a new random personality (these fake second leaders always have random personalities ...). The one issue it that, if Isabella regains control, under random personalities she won't have the same personality as before she was deposed ... exile has changed her, I guess :p With Random off, she would return to her former, default self when regaining power.

That's good- I like to play with random personalities as well, to make it more unpredictable. But I also like to play with unrestricted leaders, and I noticed that the game always keeps new leaders with their civilizations rather than making it random. Has this been fixed with the new update?

No, it hasn't been implemented yet ... will do.

If anyone is interested I've uploaded a couple of python files that update the domestic and foreign advisor screens I find useful for playing Revolutions. The foreign advisor now has a "change" tab which shows the "change" in relationship between any and all civs you have come in contact with. This is very handy for the large numbers of civs we sometimes face in Revolutions where you have to get your head around a *big* relations matrix of civs!

The domestic advisor updates the food column to show the number of turns left before a city grows. It mimics the culture column. It is very useful if you have a large number of cities on the edge of rebellion and you want to keep track of growth so that they don't fall into ill health or unhappiness.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=6579073#post6579073

The files are attached to post number 15 in the forum.
Cheers

Did you ever think of combining the BUG mod and Civ Rev? I had to sacrifice my BUG mod's features to play this mod :( and i really miss it's reminders and stuff.

What do you think of combining Revolution with a civ-adding mod like CIV Gold?
If it's very simple, please tell me how (I don't know anything at that).
CIV Gold is using modules, but someone at their development forum said that CIV Gold civs work only with CIV Gold. Well, I gonna try it today.

What do you think of combining Revolution with a civ-adding mod like CIV Gold?
If it's very simple, please tell me how (I don't know anything at that).
CIV Gold is using modules, but someone at their development forum said that CIV Gold civs work only with CIV Gold. Well, I gonna try it today.

I've done it, except I've taken a bunch of civs from civ gold and all of the new leaderheads for existing civs out, so theres about 28 new civs (mostly ones that I thought were cool and also had well-done leaderheads) plus I have the 48 civ .dll included. The link is here if you're interested: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=BRC5UFRN (you'll need WinRAR or 7zip to unzip it)

Be aware you'll get a few xml errors on startup (I thought I deleted all the diplo references to the leaders I dropped, but apparently not; these errors won't affect the game though), and some civ first contact quotes are a little wonky. Also (I'm not sure if I did this on the version I had uploaded to myself) make sure that the .ini file is named revolution, and you need to rename the entire mod folder "Revolution" rather than "civ gold" or whatever I have it named. Finally, be aware that I changed some settings in the revolution .ini file, and that I also overall increased barbarian and animal activity, especially sea barbarian activity, and reduced bonuses for fighting against barbs. EDIT: Actually, the only barbarian settings I changed was on noble difficulty, any other difficulty setting will have default (or whatever jdog changed it to) number of barbs.

If you wanted to combine the mod with all of civ gold, it's pretty simple, the easiest way is probably to download civ gold, and then take all of the revolution mod files and drop them in the appropriate folders in the civ gold folder, and then make sure you change "enable modular loading" in the revolution .ini file from "0" to "1". Finally, change the civ gold folder name to "Revolution." Civ gold in full takes about 5 or more minutes to load the mod (or so I hear) which is why I cut out so many civs in my version.

Thanks! :)
EDIT: Decided to do this at home, and it works pretty well! Thanks for your advice!

What do you think of combining Revolution with a civ-adding mod like CIV Gold?
If it's very simple, please tell me how (I don't know anything at that).
CIV Gold is using modules, but someone at their development forum said that CIV Gold civs work only with CIV Gold. Well, I gonna try it today.

On the contrary, CIV Gold has been set up to do things like this. It's modular nature lends itself to start making your own mod, like Bob did.

On the contrary, CIV Gold has been set up to do things like this. It's modular nature lends itself to start making your own mod, like Bob did.

What about the BUG mod?

What about the BUG mod?

If you mean in combination with CIV Gold, then this is the wrong forum to ask :lol: Apart from that I'm not fully up-to-date on the coding of the BUG mod, but CIV Gold is also an "unaltered gameplay" mod.

If you mean in combination with CIV Gold, then this is the wrong forum to ask :lol: Apart from that I'm not fully up-to-date on the coding of the BUG mod, but CIV Gold is also an "unaltered gameplay" mod.

I'm talking about CivRev :p

I'm talking about CivRev :p

I'm a bit confused about you quoting me. Are you asking me about the BUG/CivRev combo?

I'm a bit confused about you quoting me. Are you asking me about the BUG/CivRev combo?

yes :lol:

i had to sacrifice the BUG mod to play the CivRev mod and i miss the nice features the BUG mod gave me. :( and i was wondering if there was a way to combine the two.

I am planning on putting some of the BUG mod announcements into the mod (plus glider's updated adviser screens should help a bit). Basically, it'll be more like the Civ4lerts component of BUG.

I am planning on putting some of the BUG mod announcements into the mod (plus glider's updated adviser screens should help a bit). Basically, it'll be more like the Civ4lerts component of BUG.

Thanks, that's what i liked about BUG.

Also you know the part of the mod where it Shows how much Production a city is producing? It is really helpful, and was wondering if you can add it as well.

I think i'm talking about the Raw Commerce (by Sevo) and Raw Production (by EmperorFool).

Also with more civs per game in CivRev, adding the Better Espionage Screen(by Almightix) would be helpful to.

Alright, I'll check out those pieces too ... :cool:

I am planning on putting some of the BUG mod announcements into the mod (plus glider's updated adviser screens should help a bit). Basically, it'll be more like the Civ4lerts component of BUG.

Glad I could be of some help to this great mod. :) My code is commented as ###RevolutionDCM_start ###RevolutionDCM_end if you want to change or improve it please be my guest. I could not work out a way of updating the foreign advisor change tab on game start without modifying more than one Python file which I didn't want to do. As it stands now, the change tab will only initialise when it is first viewed. Thus it is imperfect at this point.

Jdog, you are right to keep the interface improvements "tight", "concise" and relevant to Revolutions. That is the best way.

Cheers
PS) Rumours continue to abound that there will be another patch to BTS before the 2nd coming.

PS) Rumours continue to abound that there will be another patch to BTS before the 2nd coming.

Patch? link pls?

Patch? link pls?

Yeah hang out at the Bhruic 3.13 unofficial patch forum and weed through it regarding patch developments. It is also a good forum for generally enlightened discussion on BTS more generally.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=246057

I'm currently planning a new system for taking RevIndex and local/national effects into account

Hey Jdog. Can't think of a better sub forum to discuss this so here goes. The "new system" is probably going to be quite a big change. I've got a request for this "new system". The idea would be to make it possible for external modders to add localised effects to Revolutions via XML or the like. I think there are situations where certain mod combinations introduce extra revolution scenarios that wouldn't occur with just a BTS-Revolutions combo.

For example in RevolutionDCM you get a cool situation where Dales Combat Mod can mean that two warring civ's in your territory that you have open borders with, can be fighting it out with each other around one of your cities causing battle effect damage to your terrain around that city. If you don't break up the fight by closing borders, your city can take a big negative hit on your economy long term because of the battle effect damage.

If I could add a "localised effect" to Revolutions via XML, it might mean that in the above scenario the city might form a localised rebellion and break away from the nation state. The new break away rebel leader might close borders with the warring parties and break up the fight around the city on your behalf. That might even happen almost automatically because of the rebel leaders closed borders stance with the warring parties.

It's only a suggestion and still of an infantile nature, and it's not simple at all to implement. Something like a localised effect XML file where you add your own "effect" to the list of possible localised effects, including how strong the effect should be etc. It would take some thinking through indeed. This is because there is not just effect, there is cause and effect. How would XML tags allow modders to control both aspects?

Sounds like the too hard basket to me!
Cheers.

Yeah, I'm not sure a simple XML file would be able to allow the kind of flexible system you're looking for. One thing that would be possible would be to give events some kind of revolution effect, then you could define an event ... not trivial, but very flexible.

Yeah, I'm not sure a simple XML file would be able to allow the kind of flexible system you're looking for. One thing that would be possible would be to give events some kind of revolution effect, then you could define an event ... not trivial, but very flexible.
Yeah, I was planning to add that at some point... but by all means :goodjob:

Is there a list of exposed Python functions in the Revolutions modpack?

It would be nice to have some new Python functions that can be hooked through BTS events to create some revolutionary events.

Yeah, I was hoping that somewhere along the line there'd be some revolution-oriented random events.

Is there a list of exposed Python functions in the Revolutions modpack?

It would be nice to have some new Python functions that can be hooked through BTS events to create some revolutionary events.

I should definitely create a list of the SDK functions that have been exposed to Python in the mod (I think that's what you meant) ... there was/is an old list, but it's way obsolete at this point.

I'll try to do this as part of making events more Revolutionary ...

jdog,

not sure where to put this but how about changing the red fist rev icon to a fire symbol or something. I think I can get one off of civ3's pillage button.

Well I'll add to the list of requests for the Revolutions mod....
Excuse me if I'm out of touch on the latest version of Rev, but what about adding an espionage active mission that would allow a spy to talk to the underground and find out how close a city is to rebellion? I guess it's difficult because in order not to unbalance the game, the AI would have to be taught how to make use of such a mission as well....but that would not be easy....
Oh well just an idea....
Cheers.

jdog,

not sure where to put this but how about changing the red fist rev icon to a fire symbol or something. I think I can get one off of civ3's pillage button.
That would be great! If you come up with something that looks good and revolutiony I'll definitely put it in.


@ glider:

I was definitely planning to have prospective rebels contact other civs and ask for help, but going the other way would also be useful :scan: Currently getting to city visibility is the only way to see the revolt status of a foreign city, certainly looking into this with an active mission would also be useful.

There's a slight imbalance currently with this already, as the AI doesn't take any advantage of the revolt status in other cities to try to tip them over using espionage or other means even when it has visibility. This imbalance may be somewhat attenuated by the fact that the AI should naturally be more interested in cities where it has culture or shares religion, which would be more likely to have high revolt status. I haven't looked into the AI decision making on spy missions at all yet, but I definitely will and see if changes are easy ...

Maybe it would be a good idea to add a fist (or something) icon on the civ scoreboard to indicate a rebel civ. And when they make peace with their master civ (if they aren't crushed), that fist will go away.

Big thanks to you two great people Jdog and Dom Pedro yet again! I have released a new merge of Revolutions into DCM in case anyone wants to enjoy Dale's very cool work as well. Now that I am privileged to look at the Revolutions engine from under the hood, I can appreciate this mod's great engineering craftsmanship as well as it's great great game play. Cheers you gurus. Keep it up!!!

mercantalism should allow trade routes to vassal civs, and it should increase them. Then it would be profitable to use the colony maker in BTS.

Mercantilism actually already does allow routes to vassals, but it doesn't increase them.

Thanks for 1.42 Jdog. Love the "wrap" up of Revolutions thus far including the code changes. Cool stuff. I see that the Revolution icon top right didn't get updated. It must be harder to do than I think. You have discussed how to do it before I remember.

Is it just me or has Civfanatics gone dead quiet? Not many posts at all in the places I hang out. Is that because everyone is playing civ quietly in the background like me? Is it because people are waiting for civ console? Is it because people are waiting for a patch? Is it just my perception!

My own feeling is that the PC branch of civ inside Firaxis will do one more patch of civ 4 in order to revamp enthusiasm in PC civing and it will do that during the early stages of development of civ 5. So I guess a patch will come later this year? Wishful thinking perhaps....

Cheers.

Glad you're enjoying it! I've got some pretty significant changes I'm cooking up right now, the long planned revamp of the revolt launching and handling system for one. A new version won't be out for some time though ...

Certainly the wait for a final BTS patch is dragging a bit on the community I think but I wouldn't lose hope ... Firaxis showed from the beginning they were committed to the civ community by designing the game to be so moddable, I'd be shocked if they weren't (slowly) trying to gracefully close out Civ4.

Anyway, things will probably pick up a bit when the last patch is released and again when hints of Civ5 start to circulate ... though I'd personally rather they did something like Alpha Centauri again where they can really innovate, then return to Civ in a couple years with fresh minds. This would also give mods plenty of time to mature before going obsolete.

though I'd personally rather they did something like Alpha Centauri again where they can really innovate, then return to Civ in a couple years with fresh minds. This would also give mods plenty of time to mature before going obsolete.

That is a good idea. Innovation and fresh thinking is at the heart of it :)

In regards of "mods" maturing, the RevolutionDCM merge now tentatively combines "Influence Driven War" mod by Moctezuma with Revolutions 1.42 and Dales Combat Mod 1.5.

Now I can confirm that the combination is stable, but ye gods the court is out in my little mind as to what effect this will have on Revolutions! Perhaps you Jdog might have a better gut feel on that....

Cheers, thanks and enjoy the "emersive" experience of re-engineering Revolutions!

That is a good idea. Innovation and fresh thinking is at the heart of it :)

In regards of "mods" maturing, the RevolutionDCM merge now tentatively combines "Influence Driven War" mod by Moctezuma with Revolutions 1.42 and Dales Combat Mod 1.5.

Now I can confirm that the combination is stable, but ye gods the court is out in my little mind as to what effect this will have on Revolutions! Perhaps you Jdog might have a better gut feel on that....

Cheers, thanks and enjoy the "emersive" experience of re-engineering Revolutions!

Well, one thing to consider the possibility that retaking rebel land through influenced driven war should be easier than with non-rebels (and possibly rebels taking parent civ's land). I mean, from a realism standpoint, this makes sense because rebels would be more accustomed and thus potentially more accepting of the parent civ reclaiming control. From the game perspective, it would be one more way that the relationship between rebels and parent civs would be different than the relationship between two totally full-fledged states.

Yeah no hurry on a new release as far as I'm concerned. 1.42 is great. I'm faced with two equally good choices this game at least:

1) Continue on with high culture spending and a war as a despot in order to avoid mass rebellion....or
2) Cancel the war and switch to Hereditary rule in order to avoid a rebellion.

If I cancel the war but do not switch to Hereditary rule, or if I stay at war as a despot but reduce culture just 10%, I will get a rebellion. Hmmmm what about if I continue the war AND switch to Hereditary rule??? Doesn't sound right but hey maybe...

This decision making process is great already and I can forsee that there will be more colour, shades and variety if there is a distinction between localised effects and national effects.

Even in 1.42 there is already the possibility to allow the society to domino into rebellion if there is a clear reward that the people do not yet forsee. However as far as I perceive, the difference between 1.42 and the big picture for Revolutions is one of resolution and granularity. This is where you can better judge which regions resent you for localised reasons and which are more supportive.

No hurry because this idea of yours is going to be very very cool.

Good stuff.
Thanks Jdog.

If I cancel the war but do not switch to Hereditary rule, or if I stay at war as a despot but reduce culture just 10%, I will get a rebellion. Hmmmm what about if I continue the war AND switch to Hereditary rule??? Doesn't sound right but hey maybe...



This is a very uneducated post compare to the knowledge you guys have but ..

isnt Hereditary rule a negative ? Doesn't is tip the scales towards rebellion ?

Also I wonder to what extent wars help keep the masses calm. jdog's pop up says it does, but I usually get in deep with too much war because of money issues not to mention the new cities problems. Better to keep some cash and pay them off. Of course war is necessary and fun.

This is a very uneducated post compare to the knowledge you guys have but ..

isnt Hereditary rule a negative ? Doesn't is tip the scales towards rebellion ?

Also I wonder to what extent wars help keep the masses calm. jdog's pop up says it does, but I usually get in deep with too much war because of money issues not to mention the new cities problems. Better to keep some cash and pay them off. Of course war is necessary and fun.

Well I'm uneducated too so here goes! Hereditary rule is a negative inherently but a positive indirectly because it has counter acting elements. You can partially stabilise the society by garrisoning your army but this only is useful to an extent. If you go to war, you must be successful at it and not get bogged down in a stalemate. I think this issue is worse under Hereditary rule but not sure.

You mention many counter acting revolution elements in your question:
Government civic has an effect
The state of your budget has an effect
The state of your war has an effect
The state of your new settlements has an effect, the size and the distance from the capital as well as how cultured, defended and religious they are.:crazyeye:

A common strategy is to not let a city expand to the maximum size if it is going to be a potentially rebellious city. It's population growth should be controlled. I'm not sure but an underpopulated city that could grow but isn't could be bad too.

This is a suggestion on how to play Revolutions:
1) Have an experimental mind set and save whenever you change any Revolutions relevant condition so that you can go back and try another avenue. You have to experiment.

2) The Revolutions mod is missing a manual but at the same time it has the biggest fattest manual ever written. That manual is real history and what is actually going on at the moment too. Take China and Russia today just as two examples.

Cheers and enjoy is my suggestion ;)

Wouldn't monarchy in war time, when going well, provide even more happiness?

Glider, thanks for your ideas. It remains something of a mystery how to play out a good rev game, and that is a good thing. We already learned how to win the base game of Civ ,and Rev gives us so much more to learn .I like the idea of trial and error using the save function. It opens up options,implications,decisions...

I've been using religion big time, with the inquisition feature. I know you have your reservations about it, but I use it 'till I can control my world another way.

I'mgoing to implement some of the ideas you offered. Thanks.

I've been using religion big time, with the inquisition feature. I know you have your reservations about it, but I use it 'till I can control my world another way.

Revolution Inquisition has been handed over to me by Jdog to look after for a bit. I think it's a wonderful idea and a lot of fun, making Theology a much more exciting option in some cases! It's just early days for this variant yet.

@mice
You said:
"It remains something of a mystery how to play out a good rev game, and that is a good thing."

A wonderful thought right there mice. Most profound ;)
There is a distinction between mystery and confusion. The former is good and the latter is bad! To play Rev, it has to be a mystery, but not confusing (this is a philsophical point).

Cheers.

So, is the separation of local and national effects going to lead to something similar to the "stability" effect in RFC, where an unstable nation will collapse? I'm just curious to see where this is going.

I know most national effects in Revolutions have tended to cause want for some national change, such as a new leader, civic, or religion. I hope it stays similar; I liked the stability rating in RFC, but it always seemed unnatural to me how a low stability rating would cause an empire to either randomly lose control over regions or randomly disappear. I'd like to see something the player has more control over than the stability rating; that is one reason I like the Revolutions mechanics so much better. I do, however, definitely think there needs to be some mechanic to cause an empire to collapse to some extent.

That just set me thinking, if an empire did "collapse", how could we deal with it? It just split up into several individual cities in RFC, but I don't know if that would be historically accurate (the Roman Empire split in half first, and then the western half got taken over by many Germanic tribes, while the Eastern half survived another millennium). Perhaps we could make minor civs that weren't at war with everyone? They would still have to get some achievement to prove themselves and get full civ status along with bonuses.

In a sense I am adding a stability measure like in RFC, it will vary from 0 to 1000 with 500 meaning neutrally stable. There are two main effects of this national measure:

- Modify rev index calculations in cities, in a stable civ cities will be more forgiving while smaller problems can cause cities to revolt in an unstable civ.
- Determine what kinds of revolts to launch, requests for a new leader or the potential for civil war would be much higher in an unstable civ.

I haven't really decided what kinds of revolts might happen simply because of this national measure, or whether revolts will remain purely city driven like they are now. Either way, it will be a lot easier to determine when a violent revolt should represent a breakaway attempt by some of your cities or an all out civil war for control of everything, something which right now there is little differentiation between.

One of the goals is to decrease balkanization. A stable civ who is doing well will suffer fewer attempts by single cities to break away because the city will recognize the value of being part of a stable empire. Single cities with serious grievances will still make repeated requests for changes, but they will be more inclined to ask for changes to policy than independence. At the other extreme, if things start to go bad for a civ there's more likely to be full blown civil war instead of separate pockets of resistance.

I'm not intending to make stable civs immune to localized issues or make unstable civs always collapse in full-blown civil war but to find some middle ground where those results are more common than they are now.

First I have to say that I love this mod.

That being said I need to express the only thing I really dislike about it, namely lone spies keeping revolts alive forever. Im sure you are all familiar with the massive War Weariness that you accumulate over time with a Civ that keeps rebelling on you. Now, every time this particular Civ revolts you can beat them down and have it over and done with.
However there is an exception, being if they decide to not use one or more of their spies for any good. This keeps the Civ alive and the massive War Weariness with it. Not sure if this is a bug or a feature but I think it is over the top, Conquest with Revolutions is hard as it is.

Good news! In 1.51 I added the following:

- If a rebel has only spies remaining, there's now an extra 10% chance a spy will die every turn so they disappear a little faster

This caps the half-life of a rebel with no military units at 6 turns, less if you engage in counter espionage. Having rebels remain alive for a little while even if they only have spies is an intended feature ... it isn't taken advantage of very much yet, but having the ability to have underground rebellions is certainly an interesting prospect.

Is there an option to offer a revolting city partial independence (vassalization) when it demands independence? I haven't seen it yet so I assume not.

The rebels might be inclined to accept if they are likely to loose the war, or if their situation if they win is bad, like all ice cities or something (because they realize they can't survive on their own)

Awsome mod by the way.

Is there an option to offer a revolting city partial independence (vassalization) when it demands independence? I haven't seen it yet so I assume not.

The rebels might be inclined to accept if they are likely to loose the war, or if their situation if they win is bad, like all ice cities or something (because they realize they can't survive on their own)

Awsome mod by the way.

That's a nice idea. Maybe an "autonomy" option can be implemented into the game?

Yes, cities seeking independence will sometimes ask to become your vassal but not if they really don't like you. I'll see where it makes sense to expand this option. Once rebels get to the point of rising up to fight though the only chance to have them become a vassal is through end the war negotiations.

I don't know where else to put this, but I just have a quick comment. I'm not sure how the unhappiness code works right now, but I'm assuming it includes unhappiness from overcrowding when adding unhappiness to the rev index. The thing about overcrowding though is that it's not really something you'd revolt about in the context of civ. "It's too crowded, let's secede from our motherland so that we can be equally as crowded but independent." It seems more like revolts from unhappiness would arise from something the leader did: a choice they made, like sustaining a war, whipping the population, etc. In civ though, if you completely removed unhappiness due to overcrowding, a city would rarely become unhappy. Anyway, I'm not trying to propose a solution or make a suggestion, but just comment on the mechanics of the game.

Good news! In 1.51 I added the following:

- If a rebel has only spies remaining, there's now an extra 10% chance a spy will die every turn so they disappear a little faster

This caps the half-life of a rebel with no military units at 6 turns, less if you engage in counter espionage. Having rebels remain alive for a little while even if they only have spies is an intended feature ... it isn't taken advantage of very much yet, but having the ability to have underground rebellions is certainly an interesting prospect.

I understand the concept and it is possible my current position is uncommon, Im not sure. I'll elaborate a bit.
Some time in the 1500s I conquer all of Ethiopia until there is nothing left, them being Native Americans Vassal means I also conquer some of Sitting Bulls cities. Of course, Ethiopian cities doesnt revolt as they now count as Roman(me) after the defeat of the Ethiopians.

Now, to the problem itself; The Native American cities revolted and the rebels rose up as Ethiopia and suddenly all my cities taken from former Ethiopia gets pissed off and it slowly declines down to a Civil War that rages for ages. Since all Native American cities still revolt as Ethiopian rebels even at year 2000, the total accumulated War Weariness I face every rebellion is totally massive. The spies managed to keep this going longer and after some further pondering and very few cases of spies keeping them alive I don't recognize that as an issue, the "problem" is elsewhere - a combination of events.

Really, I don't know what to think about this situation as I don't know exactly which features are intended.

Are rebels from a live Civ meant to rise up as a former one that was vanquished if no war is declared upon rebels mother land?

Are rebel nationality related to proximity to other old Civs or religion/Civics they might have in common?

Is it an intended feature that respawning Civs pushes War Weariness so far and for several hundred turns that there is no other option but to run Police State?



Now please don't take this as overly critic, I have had a great time running Revolutions in the past and I still do except for this ankward position I am in this game.

@Jdog
I've got a couple of changes to the "foreign advisor relations" screen that I think might be useful to Revolutions. Could I submit them to the Revolutions quality control department for inspection?

It adds these abilities to the relations screen:
1) leaders now form a circle around the player and so there is more gap between leaders when the number of civs approach 34.
2) You can apply constraints on the association between leaders so that there is not such a bird's nest of lines going to and fro.

Feel free to reject these changes and I hope I haven't re-invented the wheel on what someone else has done to these screens.
Cheers.

Sounds good, I'll check it out ... it certainly can get pretty messy.

In case anyone is interested here is an update to the Foreign advisor screens (again) that might be useful for the Revolutions mod. Inspired by the great inroads that Jdog has made in the behaviour of AI's during war planning at the "Better than BTS" forum, this foreign advisor update better highlights "close border" relationships.

Such a pity that the "closeness bug fix" didn't make it into BTS 3.17. However for the future of the Revolutions mod, the "closeness" fix is all good news because AI regional warfare makes more sense now. If only an AI foreign invasion can be made better, that would help Revolutions even further. As it is now, if an AI in the old world invades an AI in the new world and makes a mess of it, his old world is more likely to revolt which is not fair, because the AI might have had a good idea to invade, but due to chronic stupidity, could not conduct the invasion properly. :p

EDIT: These screens are only BTS 3.13, forgot about BTS 3.17 sorry :rolleyes:

Cheers.