If you try to posion a cities water supply on normal speed, It gives 8 :p for 8 turns. Marathon incorrectly triples both the duration, and the effect, hence:- 24:p for 24 turns. This effectively destroys a city in the middle game more completely than if it was nuked. I presume this was overlooked, and it should be 8 :p for 24 turns. Triple the duration, same strength. The same thing applies to unhappiness.It again produces 24:mad: for 24 turns instead of 8:mad: for 24 turns.

I agree with you. Is there an xml line somewhere we can change to fix it until a patch?

I agree with you. Is there an xml line somewhere we can change to fix it until a patch?

I haven't checked yet.

Do you have a save from both of these situations?

Do you have a save from both of these situations?

Fraid not, but here is the screenshot in another thread http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=5705230&postcount=497

Thanks. The XML doesn't have information for varying game speeds, so it looks like its a scaling problem in the DLL.

I thought a bit about this in order to fix it until the patch: The xml only allows one factor to be entered, i.e. the number of turns and the effect is always the same. In normal, the city is losing 8+7+6+... = 36 food in these 8 turns. Since the marathon city takes thrice the amount of food to grow vs. the normal speed, at first glance it would make sense to lose 3 times as much food, which means that the loss should be 36*3 = 108, which means about 14 turns with an effect of 14/13/12/...

Now, a normal city might switch citizen assignment in order to get more food to counter the effect. The marathon city can do the same but it can't get more food than the normal city (same 21 tiles to work with), so it would be hit harder if using 14 as starting effect.

Therefore I chose 12 as compromise for the time being: Less overall effect (only 78 vs. the 108 calculated above) but the city gets hit harder at the beginning, so it has a harder time countering the effect and the actuall loss of population might be about the same. In order to get this, open the xml and change the corresponding number from 8 to 4 before you play a marathon game.

Foment unrest works a little differently but the reasoning is roughly the same, so I suggest to use the same number.

(PS: I'm not sure where I got the idea that the effect diminishes over time but the numbers also roughly work if it stays constant)

Good thinking Hawk. It's a wonderful interim solution until they set it properly, like so:

-8 health/happiness for 24 turns, decreasing in effect by one point every three turns.

Also, has anyone looked into the fiscal costs of espionage in comparison to time? There is a potential imbalance there.

Consider this: when you research a technology at normal speed, you gain or lose a certain amount of cash. In Marathon, since you spend 3 times as many turns researching, that quantity of cash is effectively tripled. So if you're running on a gain, you'll earn 3 times as much money because it takes three times as many turns to finish researching. And likewise, if you're running a loss, it's 3 times the loss. This means that running on a gain in Marathon gives you more money.

Generally, this causes only minor problems: upgrade costs are effectively 1/3rd of normal, great merchants are effectively worth only 1/3rd as much, and the trading value of gold for a technology is miscalculated--the AI thinks a technology is worth 1/3rd as much gold as it ought to cost. But the first problem balances out, since Marathon armies are 2 to 3 times larger; the second problem is significant but not game-breaking; and the third problem isn't really a problem, since the AI and the player never stockpile enough gold to buy and sell technology at Marathon values, and it's best if the technology evaluation stays the same.

But consider espionage. If I can afford to poison the water every 10 turns on normal, the enemy will recieve 2 poison-free turns. But if the costs aren't multiplied for espionage on Marathon, then I can still afford to poison the water every ten turns, except that my last poisoning will have 14 more turns to go! In effect, I have 3 times as much money to put towards active espionage.

It seems to be generally accepted in this thread that the poison water supply should be -8 health for 24 turns, decreasing in effect by one point every three turns at marathon speed. While that sounds logical, it will result in a far higher population loss at marathon than at normal speed. The reason is that it takes exactly the same number of turns to lose a population point when out of food at marathon than at normal speed, namely 1 turn.

Lets say, you have a food storage in your city of 22 at normal speed. After 3 turns, this food is almost gone and the fourth turn, you'll lose population (assuming you can't compensate and are at the health cap). Then you will continue to have problems for four more turns, losing further population points or trying to get more food or health in the city.

At marathon speed a comparable situation would be a city with 66 food in storage. It would lose most of that food in 9 turns and the tenth turn, you'll lose population points. The problem now is that there are 14 turns left during which the city will lose population if it cannot remedy the situation. So the population loss will be much more severe.

The difference is even bigger when the happiness is lowered in the cities. Health problems can be countered quickly as the city shrinks because you'll stop using the low food tiles and thus can use the extra food to combat the temporary loss of health. The same option is not possible for happiness.

So a -8 health/happiness loss for 8 turns decreasing in effect with 1 per turn at normal speed is not equal in effect to a -8 health/happiness loss for 24 turn decreasing in effect with 1 per 3 turns at marathon speed.

Also, I would argue that in general the spy action which lowers happiness is more severe than the spy action which lowers health. If you lose 8 citizens working in a city, then you will in general lose more than 8 food per turn and the city will shrink quicker than with the health problem. It will also not be easy to combat the problem as with the health problem. Health problems can be countered by using only high food tiles while shrinking. You can barely use any tiles with the loss of happiness as the citizens won't work.

It seems to be generally accepted in this thread that the poison water supply should be -8 health for 24 turns, decreasing in effect by one point every three turns at marathon speed. While that sounds logical, it will result in a far higher population loss at marathon than at normal speed. The reason is that it takes exactly the same number of turns to lose a population point when out of food at marathon than at normal speed, namely 1 turn.

Lets say, you have a food storage in your city of 22 at normal speed. After 3 turns, this food is almost gone and the fourth turn, you'll lose population (assuming you can't compensate and are at the health cap). Then you will continue to have problems for four more turns, losing further population points or trying to get more food or health in the city.

At marathon speed a comparable situation would be a city with 66 food in storage. It would lose most of that food in 9 turns and the tenth turn, you'll lose population points. The problem now is that there are 14 turns left during which the city will lose population if it cannot remedy the situation. So the population loss will be much more severe.

The difference is even bigger when the happiness is lowered in the cities. Health problems can be countered quickly as the city shrinks because you'll stop using the low food tiles and thus can use the extra food to combat the temporary loss of health. The same option is not possible for happiness.

So a -8 health/happiness loss for 8 turns decreasing in effect with 1 per turn at normal speed is not equal in effect to a -8 health/happiness loss for 24 turn decreasing in effect with 1 per 3 turns at marathon speed.

Also, I would argue that in general the spy action which lowers happiness is more severe than the spy action which lowers health. If you lose 8 citizens working in a city, then you will in general lose more than 8 food per turn and the city will shrink quicker than with the health problem. It will also not be easy to combat the problem as with the health problem. Health problems can be countered by using only high food tiles while shrinking. You can barely use any tiles with the loss of happiness as the citizens won't work.

Excellent points. While I'd thought about how much more damaging unhappiness is than unhealthiness, I completely missed the fact that Marathon speed effectively kills starving population points 3x faster.

The question is--how many of those 14 turns will result in a dead pop point? If the end result is that in most situations, the Marathon city loses only as many pop points as the Normal city, then it doesn't need a heavy rebalancing. However, if the end result is that the Marathon city loses twice as many pop points or something along those lines, then it needs a severe tweaking.

Roland is right here, I didn't think about one important fact: After losing all food, you continually lose population. It's not the reverse of pop growth (i.e. after you lose a pop, your food bar isn't full again).

So, let's assume you have a size seven city and it takes 34 food for normal and 102 food for marsathon to grow. Let's further assume your storage is nearly full and you absolutely can't grow any more food.
On normal, after 6 turns, your storage is about empty (8+...+3=33) and the next two turns will lose you a pop each. To get the same outcome at marathon (2 pop loss), you'd have to start at 14 to lose 102 food with still two turns left.

Now, let's assume the storage is half full:
Normal: 17 food, gone after about two turns, 5 or 6 pop lost.
Marathon: 51 food, gone after about 4 turns, 9 or 10 pop lost.

Even worse, empty storage:
Normal: 8 pop lost
Marathon: 14 pop lost
(it's only a size 7 city, though, so it's down to 1 either way)

Now, using 12 as basis for marathon, we get:
Full storage: No pop lost
Half storage: 5 or 6 pop lost
Empty: 12 pop lost

So basically with 12 as basis, you lose more when your storage ist empty and less if your storage is full and about the same if your storage is half full (marathon vs. normal).

Next assumption: You can get 4 more food by reallocating your workers, reducing the poisonous effect to 8-4=4 on normal and 12-4=8 on marathon.
Full storage: no losses
half storage: no losses
empty: 4 pop at normal vs. 8 pop on marathon

I'm interested to see how Firaxis will fix this mess. I'll probably stick to 12 for poisonous effect and 9 for unrest for the time being.

Todd - There is a lot more work to be done. Two factors to consider!

1. Don't forget that a Marathon empire essentially acquires cash and (maybe?) espionage points at 3 times the normal rate. Unless espionage missions cost 3 times as much in Marathon, they will occur three times as often.

2. As pop points die and turns pass, unhealthiness decreases. The city will rapidly reach a health/disease equilibrium.

Consider this:

Size 7 Normal city, half storage capacity (assuming granary), healthiness is equal to unhealthiness (7/7). It has 17 food to burn. The player is working five 2 food tiles and two 1 food tiles, and the city is producing 2 food. As you said, the normal player loses most of his storage in 2 turns, leaving him with a measly 2 spare food. A pop point dies next turn, taking out a worker on a 1 food tile. He ends up with -11 unhealthiness (-6 from the pop, -5 from 3 turns of poison) over his 7 healthiness. Only 2 more pop points will die before his unhealthiness and healthiness reach equilibrium with 3 pop points killed after five turns of poison.

Size 7 Marathon city, half storage capacity (assuming granary), healthiness is equal to unhealthiness (7/7). It has 51 food to burn. Let's first play out the so-called standard scenario, where the city receives -8 for 3 turns before dropping down to the next level of poisoning, and so on and so forth for 24 turns. The city reaches exactly zero points of food after seven turns--one turn into the -6 poison turns. At this point, the city's unhealthiness is -13 compared to a healthiness of seven. It loses one pop point per turn for two more turns, reaching -11 healthiness. But it's also dropped to -5 poisoning, for a total of -10 unhealthiness. If you follow this pattern to its end, 3 more pop points will die before equilibrium is reached. Overall, the city loses 5 out of 7 pop points. Ouch.

Also, I calculated it out. It doesn't matter in which order you apply the turns of poisoning--as long as Marathon delivers 3 turns of poisoning, the same number of population points will die. In fact, one Marathon poisoning would be equivalent to three sequential Normal poisonings, and it'd occur at an effective 3 times the normal speed for potentially 1/3rd the cost. Triple ouch.

Well, I only wanted a rough estimate in order to figure out what value to use in the xml.

Your points are interesting, though. I really didn't think about the pop <-> unhealthiness issue.

Not sure about there being thrice as many espionage missions in marathon, though. Did you test it? I'd assume that all costs are tripled, considering the points you gain per turn stay the same. Everything else is more expensive as well, after all. But of course it's possible that they forgot about that as well when they implemented it.

To be honest, I'm starting to extremely dislike those two spy missions, no matter the game speed. It smells like lot of cheese. Want to have the greatest effect? Just conduct the mission right after the city grew. First of all I'm pretty sure the AI doesn't factor that in and secondly it's completely unjustified. Why should my town/city suffer way more from poisoning or unrest just because it just grew? It's illogical. What is needed is some way that hurts the city independently of how much food you currently stored.

Maybe let it work like this:
- all excess food generated from the moment the mission starts is accumulated
- if it reaches a certain amount after x turns, nothing happens (so you can combat the effect)
- if it reaches less, one or two or three pop points are lost, depending on how far away from the needed amount you are.
- scale this with city size

Kind of like an event. Since the excess food of a city is independent of the speed setting, it would work the same way for all speeds.

Considering how screwed up this all is, I'm thinking about deactivating the mission (if possible) or reducing its effect to (close to) zero. But that probably won't go down well with the AI. Maybe increasing the cost extremely would prevent the AI from using it?

Considering how screwed up this all is, I'm thinking about deactivating the mission (if possible) or reducing its effect to (close to) zero. But that probably won't go down well with the AI. Maybe increasing the cost extremely would prevent the AI from using it?

I plain dislike both of the missions. If I had a choice, poisoning the water would kill one population point, and the mission couldn't be repeated in that city for x number of turns. Fomenting unhappiness would add some reasonable amount of unhappiness (like +3) for x turns, and it also couldn't be repeated for x number of turns. These restrictions on repetition would prevent someone from simply locking down an enemy city in an absurd string of spy missions. This would also encourage players to choose the best time to activate the mission.

Not only would these effects be vastly easier to balance, but they would also scale across the speeds evenly. Furthermore, they would be easier to understand at a glance. The player wouldn't have to work through long calculations to determine the effect of the mission that was used against him.

Hell, imagine how easy they'd be to notice at a glance!

"Your city's water supply was poisoned! A population point is lost in ______! Security will be stepped up for the next x turns." And. "Some of your citizens are in a plot to disturb the peace! +3 unhappiness for the next _____ turns in _______! Security will be stepped up for the next x turns."

Edit: A better foment unhappiness mission might simply assign one population point as an "angry citizen" for the next x turns.

I concur.

I went ahead and removed those two missions (simply delete the entries in the xml) and I like it.

Not only due to the reasons discussed so far but also because to me a spy is mainly responsibly for gathering intelligence and maybe small sabotage missions. It's not responsible for bringing down whole cities. Of course it might theoretically happen that (in real life) a spy plants a nuke or something but that's a one time event and nothing that should happen constantly.

So by removing these missions, I can concentrate on using espionage as intelligence gathering mechanism with sabotage acts when necessary and advantageous. And waging war stays a matter of using my army instead of nuking a city with poisoning spies. Not to mention the decreased micromanagement.

I also slightly increased the cost of the other missions to make up for the two missing ones.
Edit: No, I didn't. I wanted to, but since the costs are scaled to different values, I decided to not screw up the balancing of the other missions.

A different approach might be to make the missions expensive enough that you can only conduct them very rarely and that they will lead to a huge hit to your espioinage points (and therefore your ability to conduct further missions). Since that's hard to balance, though, and I don't know how the AI will react, I won't do that right now. Maybe after many games and after checking out what Firaxis does in order to fix it.

If you try to posion a cities water supply on normal speed, It gives 8 :p for 8 turns. Marathon incorrectly triples both the duration, and the effect, hence:- 24:p for 24 turns. This effectively destroys a city in the middle game more completely than if it was nuked. I presume this was overlooked, and it should be 8 :p for 24 turns. Triple the duration, same strength. The same thing applies to unhappiness.It again produces 24:mad: for 24 turns instead of 8:mad: for 24 turns.

May I just say...

This particular bug needs to be addressed rapidly. Fortunately for myself I play on normal speed but I understand this bug is absolutely ruining the game for some players. I will be quite disappointed if Firaxis leave this bug for a couple of months - the next patch with this fix should be released ASAP even if it means it will be a relatively small patch.

May I just say...

This particular bug needs to be addressed rapidly. Fortunately for myself I play on normal speed but I understand this bug is absolutely ruining the game for some players. I will be quite disappointed if Firaxis leave this bug for a couple of months - the next patch with this fix should be released ASAP even if it means it will be a relatively small patch.

Concur with just about everyone in this thread :thumbsup:

Its very easy to do your own xml "bandage" fix, but I messed around so much with warlords, I couldn't stop, and have vowed to leave everything alone with BTS, so that would break rule one ;)

Nice analysis Roland (as normal) its not so simple when you actually do the math behind it. The point is also, that if you're city is just about to grow, and it gets poison nuked, the effect is MUCH, less than a city that's near to starving anyway. As you said, it only takes one turn to lose a pop point, but 3x the food to grow of normal. It's complicated anyway.

Let's hope for a quick fix.

Nice analysis Roland (as normal) its not so simple when you actually do the math behind it. The point is also, that if you're city is just about to grow, and it gets poison nuked, the effect is MUCH, less than a city that's near to starving anyway. As you said, it only takes one turn to lose a pop point, but 3x the food to grow of normal. It's complicated anyway.

Let's hope for a quick fix.

Thanks. I also like the discussion by Todd Hawks and Zoolooman. These missions need some changes, that much is clear. It's probably pretty difficult to balance them across difficulty levels so you will basically have to redesign them for every difficulty level. The effects are pretty big, even at normal level (which is probably the standard version of the mission). But I can't comment on that as I haven't played the game enough at the moment and don't know the costs of the missions. Personally, I also don't like that a single mission can seriously decrease the population of a city. 2-3 population points lost seems ok, but more seems very much for just a spying mission. Nukes do less on cities with bunkers.
And of course, the effect of the amount of food in the storage on the strength of the mission is rather weird.

Maybe we should discuss some alternatives here. It could very well be that Firaxis takes a look at this thread as it is in the bug report forum which is designed to be helpful for Firaxis.

2 very simple missions:

Poisson water supply: -2 population. Cannot be performed again for 10 turns (scaled for gamespeed).

Ferment unhappiness: 3 population points don't work (unhappy) for 10 turns (scaled for gamespeed), but also don't cost food maintenance. (edit after DrewBledsoe's post) This unhappiness effect cannot be reduced in any way until the mission period has finished. (end edit) Cannot be performed again while the mission (effect) is active.

Of course, both mission need an adjustment of costs because these missions are seriously weaker than the original ones. Please criticize these missions as I haven't thought long about the ramifications. The missions are very similar to the suggestions by Zoolooman. They could be used to slow down wonder production or space ship part construction. Or maybe, they could be used to harm important cities from the enemy. But they won't be able to really 'destroy' cities.

@Todd Hawks:

What was the name of the XML file you modified to remove the missions? Also, if a save is passed to another player (say in a Succession Game), do they need to have removed the missions from the XML file, or is that a change that remains within the save?

Thanks. I also like the discussion by Todd Hawks and Zoolooman. These missions need some changes, that much is clear. It's probably pretty difficult to balance them across difficulty levels so you will basically have to redesign them for every difficulty level. The effects are pretty big, even at normal level (which is probably the standard version of the mission). But I can't comment on that as I haven't played the game enough at the moment and don't know the costs of the missions. Personally, I also don't like that a single mission can seriously decrease the population of a city. 2-3 population points lost seems ok, but more seems very much for just a spying mission. Nukes do less on cities with bunkers.
And of course, the effect of the amount of food in the storage on the strength of the mission is rather weird.

Maybe we should discuss some alternatives here. It could very well be that Firaxis takes a look at this thread as it is in the bug report forum which is designed to be helpful for Firaxis.

2 very simple missions:

Poisson water supply: -2 population. Cannot be performed again for 10 turns (scaled for gamespeed).

Ferment unhappiness: 3 population points don't work (unhappy) for 10 turns (scaled for gamespeed), but also don't cost food maintenance. Cannot be performed again while the mission (effect) is active.

Of course, both mission need an adjustment of costs because these missions are seriously weaker than the original ones. Please criticize these missions as I haven't thought long about the ramifications. The missions are very similar to the suggestions by Zoolooman. They could be used to slow down wonder production or space ship part construction. Or maybe, they could be used to harm important cities from the enemy. But they won't be able to really 'destroy' cities.

Not sure about the poison water mission, maybe something like that but not quite exactly, can't really put my finger on it at the moment.

The second I like, and would also refine it, so that its flat 3 pop WON'T work whatever. Even if there are 40 troops in the city under Hered Rule. (part of the reason the original 24 although wrong, isn't quite as nasty as the poisoning,,if you have 16 troops, and say therefore a hapiness cap of around 30 for a pop 12 city, then the unhappiness isn't so nasty as the unhealthiness)

Not sure about the poison water mission, maybe something like that but not quite exactly, can't really put my finger on it at the moment.

The second I like, and would also refine it, so that its flat 3 pop WON'T work whatever. Even if there are 40 troops in the city under Hered Rule. (part of the reason the original 24 although wrong, isn't quite as nasty as the poisoning,,if you have 16 troops, and say therefore a hapiness cap of around 30 for a pop 12 city, then the unhappiness isn't so nasty as the unhealthiness)

About the ferment unhappiness: yes that was what I wanted, I just didn't describe it well. It should be a kind of unhappiness that cannot be removed until the 10 turns have passed.

Maybe you can do a better suggestion for the poison water supply mission then. In a reasonably fast growing city with granary, you could get 2 population points in 10 turns (on normal speed), so I wouldn't call that one overpowered. But if you have a better suggestion, then I want to hear it.

By the way, you could make the missions more interesting by having some buildings influence them. For instance: A jail reduces the ferment unhappiness mission time by 30% (so 7 turns instead of 10). But that isn't needed. It could all get too complicated for starting players.

About the ferment unhappiness: yes that was what I wanted, I just didn't describe it well. It should be a kind of unhappiness that cannot be removed until the 10 turns have passed.

Maybe you can do a better suggestion for the poison water supply mission then. In a reasonably fast growing city with granary, you could get 2 population points in 10 turns (on normal speed), so I wouldn't call that one overpowered. But if you have a better suggestion, then I want to hear it.

By the way, you could make the missions more interesting by having some buildings influence them. For instance: A jail reduces the ferment unhappiness mission time by 30% (so 7 turns instead of 10). But that isn't needed. It could all get too complicated for starting players.

The thing with the flat 2 pop loss for poison water, is that its naturally more punishing to a CE cottaged city than an SE city, relying on farms, which strikes me as maybe a little unfair. How it stands now already is more punishing to a cottaged city, as to use the whip analogy, a SE generally uses it more than a CE. If you are only growing at +2 food per turn, then its a much longer time to grow back, than if you have +5 or more food to spare, and of course, the cottages don't grow when they are unworked.

But no, I haven't a better idea yet unfortunately....

@Todd Hawks:

What was the name of the XML file you modified to remove the missions? Also, if a save is passed to another player (say in a Succession Game), do they need to have removed the missions from the XML file, or is that a change that remains within the save?

It's CIV4EspionageMissionInfo.xml in the Beyond the Sword/assets/xml/gameinfo/ folder. Just look at it, it's easy to see what you need to delete (or modify, depending on what you want to do).

Since changing the xml takes effect even when loading a game, I guess the change does not stay with the save and everyone needs to have the same file to get the same effect.

So has this been acknowledged as a 'bug' as in not working as designed or is it just a poorly implemented/balanced game mechanic. If its the former, I have more hope that it will be quickly rectified.

I know its been 'confirmed', but does that mean 'confirmed as bug'?

Strictly speaking, it's not a bug since it's working exactly as it should (i.e. there is no rule stating otherwise and there is no hint that the files aren't what they should be). It's just an extremely poorly implemented feature. So poorly that I can't imagine that they don't fix it with the next patch, no need to worry about that.

It's CIV4EspionageMissionInfo.xml in the Beyond the Sword/assets/xml/gameinfo/ folder. Just look at it, it's easy to see what you need to delete (or modify, depending on what you want to do).

Since changing the xml takes effect even when loading a game, I guess the change does not stay with the save and everyone needs to have the same file to get the same effect.

Thanks for the info.

The thing with the flat 2 pop loss for poison water, is that its naturally more punishing to a CE cottaged city than an SE city, relying on farms, which strikes me as maybe a little unfair. How it stands now already is more punishing to a cottaged city, as to use the whip analogy, a SE generally uses it more than a CE. If you are only growing at +2 food per turn, then its a much longer time to grow back, than if you have +5 or more food to spare, and of course, the cottages don't grow when they are unworked.

But no, I haven't a better idea yet unfortunately....

The cottage economy is a more fragile economy, that is true. It is more vulnerable to pillaging and bombing. It is more vulnerable to sabotaging tile improvements as a town takes far longer to return than a farm. And it is also more vulnerable to the poison water supply mission. I think that is just a characteristic of that type of economy. It is also true that a well developed cottage economy is more powerful than a specialist economy (as long as it is left alone and given the time to develop). I've always considered the vulnerability one of the balancing elements between the two types of economies.

Normal speed example:

City size 10 with granary is losing two population points. The specialist economy loses two specialists, going from +0 food per turn to +4 food per turn. The cottage economy loses a plains hill and a cottage, going from +0 food per turn to +2 food per turn. At size 9 the cottage city uses another grassland cottage and the specialist city uses another specialist both having a surplus of 2 food.

City size 10 with 19 food becomes a size 8 city with 19 food. The city needs 17 food to grow to size 9 and then it has 18 food (granary). Then it needs 20 food to grow to size 10 where is will have 19 food.

This takes 14 turns for the specialist city and 19 turns for the cottage city. (after 5 resp 9 turns the cities would have been size 9).

Just an example of course.

While we're talking about espionage missions, can someone figure the costs versus damage for blasting production, blasting a building, stealing a technology, or blasting an improvement?

I'm particularly interested in the default cost on Normal, Epic, and Marathon. If the cost doesn't scale properly, these missions become increasingly powerful on the slower speeds.

Tomorrow, when BTS hits Steam (and I'll have the game here on my home machine), I'll do some testing and calculations as well.

Edit: Also, Roland, I think you're on to something with 2 pop points versus 1. But we've got to be careful, as this will hit large cities harder than small cities (ironically), and we want the mission to be overall effective (multiple missions will shrink a city) without being much more effective than pillaging, sabotaging improvements, or successive nukes.

Edit2: My last edit was wrong. I thought about it, and a large city losing 2 pop points loses a small percentage of its workforce, while a small city losing 2 pop points loses a large percentage. However, since the small city can grow new pop points much faster than a large city, it all balances out.

For this reason, I think the baselines for a new poison mission and a new unhappiness mission should be what you said:

Poison Water Supply: Kills 2 population. Cannot be used again in that city for 15 (10? 20?) turns.

Foment Unhappiness: Makes 3 population points angry citizens for 10 turns. Cannot be used again in that city for 15 (10? 20?) turns.

Besides the -24 health/happiness issue, I think espionage mission costs should be increased 3x times in Marathon.
My point: in a normal speed game, leaving the espionage slider at 0%, you can conduct very few espionage missions until renaissance or so, when you have earned enough espionage points through time (and new buildings). But in Marathon game, you remain 3x time in the same age accumulating points. So you can conduct powerful spionage missions even on classical/bronze age!

It's very annoying to suffer enemy espionage missions each turn after a certain period of time (when ALL civs have earned an insane number of spionage points). You can do the same thing, of course, but the game should be renamed to espionagization or so!

I think Marathon spionage should scale to permit you only a similar number of 'spionage missions' as in normal speed. Otherwise, it is unbalanced IMHO.

It actually makes more sense for Poison Water Supply to have 24 :yuck: for 8 turns!

The reason is that in Marathon, the grain stores are three times the size -- so there is effectively three times as much food to remove before the city should starve. The starvation then still happens at 1/turn for a max pop loss of 8 if the grain store was empty at the start.

It's much harder to counter -- 24 :yuck: is quite something to replace, but most larger cities will have granaries so they won't actually face starvation until a few of the 8 turns have passed anyway.

(Alternatively, keep it at 8 :yuck: for 8 turns, and reduce the price -- to less than a third because your opponent has warning enough to counter you and prevent you poisoning him three times in succession)

The cottage economy is a more fragile economy, that is true. It is more vulnerable to pillaging and bombing. It is more vulnerable to sabotaging tile improvements as a town takes far longer to return than a farm. And it is also more vulnerable to the poison water supply mission. I think that is just a characteristic of that type of economy. It is also true that a well developed cottage economy is more powerful than a specialist economy (as long as it is left alone and given the time to develop). I've always considered the vulnerability one of the balancing elements between the two types of economies.

Normal speed example:

City size 10 with granary is losing two population points. The specialist economy loses two specialists, going from +0 food per turn to +4 food per turn. The cottage economy loses a plains hill and a cottage, going from +0 food per turn to +2 food per turn. At size 9 the cottage city uses another grassland cottage and the specialist city uses another specialist both having a surplus of 2 food.

City size 10 with 19 food becomes a size 8 city with 19 food. The city needs 17 food to grow to size 9 and then it has 18 food (granary). Then it needs 20 food to grow to size 10 where is will have 19 food.

This takes 14 turns for the specialist city and 19 turns for the cottage city. (after 5 resp 9 turns the cities would have been size 9).

Just an example of course.

Agreed as normal ;) If they just change the poison effect to 8:p for 24 turns, decreasing by 1 food every 3rd turn (which is my first assumption), then thats a total of 108 :food: lost. If a city is size 12 to start with, on marathon it needs 132 :food: to grow to the next size. Therefore, if it has 109 food in its granary and is at neutral heath when poisoned, it won't starve at all. (I think this math is correct, very tired today)

Losing a flat 2 pop regardless of city size, is therefore extremely punishing, and would in some cases be much more an extreme effect than the current system (when adjusted), especially for the very large cities. A size 23 city, would lose in a nearly full granary case, around 400:food:. The cost of the mission though, is I think scaled to the size of the city (well it should be if it isn't), plus distance from your capital etc. so this isn't so much a problem. However, if a large city is already starving,has lots of unhealthiness and lets say no granary (assume sabotage) and 1 food in its box, then the current system is devastating.

So your idea may be a lot fairer on more refection. However (again), in reality, you couldn't possibly know how many people would die from this poisoning of water, so how about a random factor thrown in, sometimes (the lesser side) only losing a few food from the granary, sometimes causing an epidemic and losing 3 or 4 pop (the severe side). Most of the time, somewhere in the middle. Just that I love how the random events bring colour and character to the civ world, making it come to life as such. Being able to cause a precise amount of people to die in a city from a hostile act seems a little out of character, however its viewed.

Perhaps the problem isn't so much these missions in particular (other than the broken speed scaling) as with starvation in general. Consider some other temporary event that reduces food production, such as a blockade/pillage of food tiles. This, too, will kill off population more quickly (relative to the growth rate) on marathon than on normal; it, too, will cause more damage to a city that has just grown than to a city that was about to grow.

Perhaps starvation itself should be changed. The most obvious fix would be to put some food into the granary after the loss of a population point, but I haven't put a great deal of thought into this.

I went ahead and removed those two missions (simply delete the entries in the xml) and I like it.

It's CIV4EspionageMissionInfo.xml in the Beyond the Sword/assets/xml/gameinfo/ folder. Just look at it, it's easy to see what you need to delete (or modify, depending on what you want to do).

Thanks for the info.

:goodjob: Ditto. :thanx:

So has this been acknowledged as a 'bug' as in not working as designed or is it just a poorly implemented/balanced game mechanic. If its the former, I have more hope that it will be quickly rectified.

I know its been 'confirmed', but does that mean 'confirmed as bug'?

Whatever the case, I feel like the whole espionage system is borke.

By the time I'm through, it's very likely I will have removed ALL of the active missions, because they feel like terrorism to me ... and unless you think corporations are terrorist organizations, I didn't buy BtS to be a damn terrorist.


:confused: Why Firaxis supports terrorism but not accurate WWII history is beyond me. :confused:

Okay, Zoolooman and DrewBledsoe. It seems that we largely agree on how these missions should be changed. I wouldn't object to some randomness in the effect as Drewbledsoe suggests, although too much randomness can also be irritating. It is of course more realistic that such a mission wouldn't have a precise effect. (I'm the kind of player who likes to plan everything into detail.)

In my first game of BTS, the second tile improvement of my civilization, build around 3200BC or something like that was destroyed by a random event. Normally, a random event that destroys a tile improvement isn't that bad, however when it happens that early in the game, then it does hurt a bit. I can live with a bit of randomness, but it shouldn't be too influential. So I can live with a bit of randomness in the poison water supply mission, but it shouldn't be too much.

These bugs are hilariously overpowered when playing one city challenge, as well.

It SUCKS to lose half your population....

These bugs are hilariously overpowered when playing one city challenge, as well.

It SUCKS to lose half your population....

I can imagine :eek: Even though, and no offence intended, OCC is a bit like playing Chess starting with all the pieces removed except the Queen, King and 3 Pawns, i.e. not really Chess or Civ.

Some people don't seem to realize that its NOT +8:yuck: for 8 turns but rather +8:yuck: in turn 1, +7:yuck: in turn 2 and so on...

As such, in theory the fact that in marathon the stockpiles required to reach next population take more food cancels it out, also starting at 24:yuck: for 24 turns means you also end at 1:yuck: in the final turn.

However this has some huge flaws:

- Unlike when a city is growing, once the food stockpile is down to zero and a population is lost, the next population point doesn't start with the granary at full food but instead goes on to lose 1 pop EVERY TURN.


One of the design philosophies of Civ 4 was that it made the game much more managable. They removed unnecessary complications and unfun aspects of the game.

As such, it still baffles me as to why they decided to do 8:yuck: then 7:yuck:, then 6, then 5 etc..

Why not simply do 8:yuck: for 8 turns.
This is much more simple and people can understand it much more quickly and easily.

Furthermore, extra complication is bad game design (just like programming - im a programmer I should know) and it comes back to bite you in the ass later, as is that case now.

if they had simply done it such that it was a straightforward +8:yuck: for 8 turns or +8:mad: for 8 turns, then the scalability would have been SOOOOO simple:

They could have either made the length scale such that it would become +8:yuck: for 24 turns, or made the potency scale: +24:yuck: for 8 turns.

I personally assumed the length made more sense until someone in this thread posted and I'm coming around to the idea of making the effect more potent in longer speeds rather than simply take longer.

Either way the current implementation is is flawed at its core and simply reeks of low playtest/quality control which wasn't the case for civ4 (it was much more polished)

There is also another huge problem with inflation and corporations but thats another story for another day.

I'm still mightily impressed with the expansion though, don't get me wrong!

If you try to posion a cities water supply on normal speed, It gives 8 :p for 8 turns. Marathon incorrectly triples both the duration, and the effect, hence:- 24:p for 24 turns. This effectively destroys a city in the middle game more completely than if it was nuked. I presume this was overlooked, and it should be 8 :p for 24 turns. Triple the duration, same strength. The same thing applies to unhappiness.It again produces 24:mad: for 24 turns instead of 8:mad: for 24 turns.

Actually, marathon speed comprises doble the turns than normal, although things cost triple (the only exception being units). So, a proper adjustment to this espionage catastrophy would be same unhealthiness (8) for twice the turns (16). For the sake of comparison a golden age lasts 16 turns and it is just fine. I can expect a natural criticism about food storages being also triple in marathon, but bare in mind it takes indeed triple to get a city to grow while food surplus from worked tiles stands as in any other speed level (although, i insist, you only have twice the turns to store food compared to normal). So, things are not quite as proportional as they might seem. Perhaps i could indulge a lightly severe penalty of unhealthiness (12, 14 .. i don't know) to cope with such a large granary and take some pop points down from a city catch off guard. Still there is the problem of pop being lost in 1 turn (as in any other speed level) but needing much much more comparatively to regain that point.

Actually, marathon speed comprises doble the turns than normal

Uhm. No. Marathon has double the turns of Epic, not Normal. I don't even know how many turns Normal has since I never played it but I assume it has 500 (Epic: 750, Marathon: 1500).

I made an Excel spreadsheet to automagically calculate the results of the different foment values.

The variables are (the cells in black if you're looking at the document):


Starting Population. 0-30.
Starting percentage of Food in store. 0-100%.
Food available for growth. 0-30. Remains constant throughout the 24-turn test cycle.
Bonus health. 0-30. Starting health is equal to the starting population plus this bonus.
Foment values (Marathon, Epic, Normal). -24-0.
Over X turns. 1-24. Determines over how many turns the foment effect decays.


A few results:

Total :yuck: caused:


Normal: 36
Epic: 78 (2.16 times Normal)
Marathon: 300 (8.33 times Normal) !!!


We can see this is clearly not balanced before even looking at the calculated test results.



20 :yuck: / 20 :health: for all:

100% food in store:

+0 food for growth
Normal: Population 20
Epic: Population 20
Marathon: Population 12


+5 for growth
Normal: 21
Epic: 20
Marathon: 18

50% food in store

+0 for growth
Normal: 18
Epic: 16
Marathon: 10


+5 for growth
Normal: 20
Epic: 20
Marathon: 13

0% food in store

+0 for growth
Normal: 18
Epic: 16
Marathon: 10


+5 for growth
Normal: 20
Epic: 20
Marathon: 13


14 :yuck: / 14 :health: for all:

100% food in store:

+0 food for growth
Normal: Population 14
Epic: Population 12
Marathon: Population 5


+5 for growth
Normal: 15
Epic: 14
Marathon: 9

50% food in store

+0 for growth
Normal: 11
Epic: 9
Marathon: 3


+5 for growth
Normal: 14
Epic: 14
Marathon: 6

0% food in store

+0 for growth
Normal: 10
Epic: 8
Marathon: 2


+5 for growth
Normal: 12
Epic: 10
Marathon: 4


7 :yuck: / 7 :health: for all:

100% food in store:

+0 food for growth
Normal: Population 6
Epic: Population 3
Marathon: Population -3


+5 for growth
Normal: 8
Epic: 7
Marathon: 0

50% food in store

+0 for growth
Normal: 4
Epic: 2
Marathon: -4


+5 for growth
Normal: 7
Epic: 6
Marathon: -1

0% food in store

+0 for growth
Normal: 3
Epic: 1
Marathon: -5


+5 for growth
Normal: 5
Epic: 3
Marathon: -2

A couple changes

Leaving the durations the same (8, 12 & 24 turns) but changing all foment values to 8 resulted in total :yuck: caused:


Normal: 36
Epic: 56 (1.55 times Normal)
Marathon: 108 (3 times Normal)


So far, at least the overall effect looks more proportional.



20 :yuck: / 20 :health: for all:

100% food in store:

+0 food for growth
Normal: Population 20
Epic: Population 20
Marathon: Population 20


+5 for growth
Normal: 21
Epic: 21
Marathon: 21

50% food in store

+0 for growth
Normal: 18
Epic: 18
Marathon: 17


+5 for growth
Normal: 20
Epic: 20
Marathon: 20

0% food in store

+0 for growth
Normal: 16
Epic: 15
Marathon: 14


+5 for growth
Normal: 18
Epic: 18
Marathon: 17


14 :yuck: / 14 :health: for all:

100% food in store:

+0 food for growth
Normal: Population 14
Epic: Population 14
Marathon: Population 14


+5 for growth
Normal: 15
Epic: 15
Marathon: 15

50% food in store

+0 for growth
Normal: 11
Epic: 11
Marathon: 10


+5 for growth
Normal: 14
Epic: 14
Marathon: 14

0% food in store

+0 for growth
Normal: 10
Epic: 9
Marathon: 8


+5 for growth
Normal: 12
Epic: 12
Marathon: 11


7 :yuck: / 7 :health: for all:

100% food in store:

+0 food for growth
Normal: Population 6
Epic: Population 5
Marathon: Population 5


+5 for growth
Normal: 8
Epic: 8
Marathon: 8

50% food in store

+0 for growth
Normal: 4
Epic: 3
Marathon: 2


+5 for growth
Normal: 7
Epic: 7
Marathon: 7

0% food in store

+0 for growth
Normal: 3
Epic: 2
Marathon: 1


+5 for growth
Normal: 5
Epic: 5
Marathon: 4

Some conclusions:


Somebody didn't think about this hard enough before committing it to code.
Cities with low populations are hit especially hard by foment unhealthiness
Cities with high food stores are hardly effected (in population)
Only a city with 100% food in store and great food tiles is even close to safe on Marathon.
Only the foment durations should scale. (Though the scaling appears to still be a fraction off even with this change.)

I thought a bit about this in order to fix it until the patch: The xml only allows one factor to be entered, i.e. the number of turns and the effect is always the same.

Todd, which XML file are you looking into?

I want rid of these broken missions as well.
So removing the info on the 2 missions from CIV4EspionageMissionInfo stops you and the AI doing the mission?

Or should i change it to 1:mad: or 1:yuck: for 1 turn so i dont risk breaking anything :)

I got the game, and sure enough had this happen to me. And given that I only play Marathon setting, I am frustrated and frankly pissed.

It's unbelievable that they've screwed up something this elemental for the second expansion in a row.

Disgusted. Patch this . .. .. .. . ASAP!

Todd, which XML file are you looking into?

Check post #23 in this thread:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=5716726&postcount=23

I just thought another thing about poisonning:

Basically, it takes food from the city. Why wouldn't you have a kind of "poisonned granary"? i.e. let's say you have to spend 36 food before additionnal food is add to the normal granary on normal speed? and 36*3=108 food on marathon?

As soon as you have more food produced than consumed, it fills the "poisonned granary" and when you reach the number (36 on normal, 108 on marathon), it fills up the granary again.

Consequences:
no more starvation, but you prevent the city from growing as long as it didn't spend enough food.
If you make several mission, it just add to the poisonned granary
If you have a surplus of 0, nothing happend, apart from preventing you to readjust tiles to grow (start to fills up the poisonned granary), make whipping of that city harder to recover (since it will need to fill the poisonned granary first) but make whipping a viable solution to deal with it.

Basically, the effect it the same: it consumes the same amount of food, it just doesn't have this starving penalty.

I don't come up with an idea for forment unhappiness in the same genre yet. If someone have an idea, just write it...

It seems that is quite easy to fix until official patch comes and does the trick. We have used simple mod that changes poison and unhappiness mission default lengths from 8 to 3. This means that at marathon game now those missions have effect of 9 turns (3 * 3 = 9 opposed to former 3 * 8 = 24).

Mod file has been attached to this post in case someone wants to use it instead modding stuff himself. Just copy and unzip it to "Mods" folder in Beyond The Sword folder and load if from game menu after starting the game.

-- Migo

Check post #23 in this thread:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=5716726&postcount=23

Cool. There's a post further down with a link to what I presume to be a version of that file. I'll either do the 12 modifier as you've suggested, or possibly look into vastly increasing the cost of those mission types (if this can be done), and use it as a bandaid until the next patch comes out.

Kind of a nuisance, really. All of my games are either Epic or Marathon speed, and I really wanted this to be a game I'd play as is out of the box -- first a DLL that allows only 18 civs per game, now this little tidbit...:lol:

EDIT: Looked into the XML file posted in this thread. I think I'll likely massively increase the cost...

Actually the basic problem (after the real buggy one of +24 for 24 turns on Marathon speed) is that speed issue of Marathon losing population faster (by scale) than other speeds

This leads to my suggestion, make loss of population affect the Duration.

At any speed:
Set N to 8*speed factor

Set unwhatever to N/Speed Factor

Each turn population Doesn't Drop decrease N by 1
Each turn population Does Drop, decrease N by Speed Factor (0.67, 1, 1.5, 3)

So that a turn of starvation has the same effect on all speed levels.

so once Food is out,
Unhealth/happy will drop by 2 and pop will drop by 1 each turn (so you will lose 1/2 of the remaining NET unhealth/happy penalty in population after food is out) until eqiuilibrium is reached on all game speeds.

Losing 1 pop = gaining 4 to the food balance (1 crowding lost+ 1 poison lost +2 less food needed) - whatever food the pop was getting
OR
Losing 1 pop = gaining 2 (2 less needed) + whatever food 2 pop can contribute to the food balance (2 less unhappy)

So the Effect will be
Phase 1 Food loss (more turns in Marathon, because more food is there)
Phase 2 Starvation (same number of turns+population loss in all speeds)
Phase 3 Stabilization/Recovery event fading (more turns in Marathon since they need more time to refill those boxes anyways)

and agreed that poisoning should probably be cheaper than unrest (or else poisoning should have a bigger effect)... but that is just Happy>Health prejudice, that relates to normal city situations.

While this would work, it has 2 elements that will probably ensure that Firaxis will not implement it:

1) The duration is not a fixed amount of turns but dependent on whether the population shrinks. That is a difficult concept to grasp for players who want to dive into the new expansion with lots of new features. It's not too difficult for experienced players, but game developers want their game to be accessible.

2) Firaxis hates fractions and fractional turns (at epic and quick speed) would of course be rounded again. It would make the thing again less clear for players who face the effects of the mission and don't know why the duration shortens in the way it does.


The idea is basically good as it would really compensate perfectly for the differences between the various game speeds. But it requires an experienced player like yourself to understand what is going on.

While this would work, it has 2 elements that will probably ensure that Firaxis will not implement it:

1) The duration is not a fixed amount of turns but dependent on whether the population shrinks. That is a difficult concept to grasp for players who want to dive into the new expansion with lots of new features. It's not too difficult for experienced players, but game developers want their game to be accessible.

2) Firaxis hates fractions and fractional turns (at epic and quick speed) would of course be rounded again. It would make the thing again less clear for players who face the effects of the mission and don't know why the duration shortens in the way it does.

The idea is basically good as it would really compensate perfectly for the differences between the various game speeds. But it requires an experienced player like yourself to understand what is going on.

I like his system, and I think it'd be more balanced and interesting than a flat population kill. It's not like poisoning is any clearer in its current incarnation either. However, I'm curious how the partial duration would be rounded off in Quick and Epic. Furthermore, the game needs to warn the player that his poison mission is completed so he can begin another one--if he chooses.

Here are some calculated possibilities:

Quick:
Duration: 6
Duration and penalty decrease per death: 1
Penalty decrease per turn of starvation: 1

This means that Poison is slightly less effective on Quick, but it avoids the nonsense of half-turns remaining on the duration.

Normal:
Duration: 8
Duration and penalty decrease per death: 1
Penalty decrease per turn of starvation: 1

This works the same as it does now.

Epic:
Duration: 12
Duration and penalty decrease per death: 1
Penalty decrease per turn of starvation: .6... See explanation.

In effect, this is a staggered penalty system. For every three turns of starvation, the third turn does not reduce the health penalty. For every turn of death, you lose a full point of penalty.

Marathon:
Duration: 24
Duration and penalty decrease per death: 1
Penalty decrease per turn of starvation: .3... See explanation.

On every third turn of starvation, the penalty is reduced by 1. For every death, you lose a full point of penalty.

Let's take a size seven city with health equal to unhealth, stagnant growth, and a half full granary. With this model, this occurs at each speed:

Quick: 2 turns of food loss followed by 2 turns of death and 1 turn of suppressed growth (if the city were a smidge larger or had literally one less food in its granary, it'd be 3 deaths.)
Normal: 2 turns of food loss followed by 3 turns of death and 2 turns of suppressed growth.
Epic: 4 turns of food loss followed by 3 turns of death and 3 turns of suppressed growth.
Marathon: 8 turns of food loss followed by 3 turns of death and 6 turns of suppressed growth.

Krikkitone's model works almost perfectly. However, it is a . .. .. .. .. . to think about. So here is the broken-down data.

Quick and Normal work like they do right now. On Epic, the count goes over twelve turns like this:

Turn 1: -8 <- Poisoned this turn. When turn ends, subtract 8 food and remove one unhealthiness.
Turn 2: -7
Turn 3: -7 <- Every third turn? No decrease.
Turn 4: -6
Turn 5: -5
Turn 6: -5 <- Pattern continues.
Turn 7: -4
Turn 8: -3
Turn 9: -3 <- Pattern continues.
Turn 10: -2
Turn 11: -1
Turn 12: -1 <- Pattern continues.
Turn 13: Counts down to zero; the mission is over.

This produces an equitable loss of food for an Epic city. However, if any of these turns ends with a death, then the Epic pattern is ignored and the full point is subtracted. Observe the size 7 city.

Turn 1: -8
Turn 2: -7
Turn 3: -7 <- Every third turn? No decrease.
Turn 4: -6
Turn 5: -5 <- One pop point starved. 1 point decrease from last turn.
Turn 6: -4 <- One pop point starved. 1 point decrease from last turn.
Turn 7: -3 <- One pop point starved. 1 point decrease from last turn.
Turn 8: -2 <- Resuming Epic pattern. Decrease one from last turn before resuming.
Turn 9: -1
Turn 10: -1 <- Pattern continues.
Turn 11: Counts down to zero; the mission is over.

Marathon:

Since the regular pattern is easy to imagine (-8 for 3 turns; -7 for 3 turns, etc. over 24 turns) I will simply post the results of Krikkitone's model on a size 7 city with a half granary.

Turn 1: -8
Turn 2: -8
Turn 3: -8
Turn 4: -7
Turn 5: -7
Turn 6: -7
Turn 7: -6
Turn 8: -6
Turn 9: -5 <- One pop point starved. It's been decreased.
Turn 10: -4 <- One pop point starved. It's been decreased.
Turn 11: -3 <- One pop point starved. It's been decreased.
Turn 12: -2 <- Resuming Marathon pattern. Decrease one from last turn before resuming.
Turn 13: -2
Turn 14: -2
Turn 15: -1
Turn 16: -1
Turn 17: -1
Turn 18: Counts down to zero; mission is over.

Look at that! The same number of dead, and the turns of food loss and turns of suppressed growth scale PERFECTLY. Krikkitone solved the problem.

It seems that is quite easy to fix until official patch comes and does the trick. We have used simple mod that changes poison and unhappiness mission default lengths from 8 to 3. This means that at marathon game now those missions have effect of 9 turns (3 * 3 = 9 opposed to former 3 * 8 = 24).

Mod file has been attached to this post in case someone wants to use it instead modding stuff himself. Just copy and unzip it to "Mods" folder in Beyond The Sword folder and load if from game menu after starting the game.

-- Migo

The only thing broke about this mission are the values on speeds other than Normal and perhaps the cost.

The effect itself at Normal is not OP.

The only thing needing to change is the :yuck: / :mad: value, which needs to be the same for all speeds.

(see this post (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=5722409#post5722409))

The problem with reducing the Normal turns is that it would make the Marathon mission hurt and a Normal mission a joke.

I mean seriously? 8 :yuck: for 3 turns ... that's like 8 for turn 1, 5 for turn 2 & 3 for turn 3 ... for a total of 16 :yuck:. HA! Any city of any size with a Granary or half-decent food production can survive that with barely a scratch.

The problem with the scaling is NOT the number of turns -- it's the value itself. If you change the foment value to be 8 :yuck: for all speeds, then you get proportionally scaled :yuck::


Total :yuck: caused in current system:


Normal: 36
Epic: 78 (2.16 times Normal)
Marathon: 300 (8.33 times Normal) !!!


Total :yuck: caused by reducing foment value to 8 for all speeds:


Normal: 36
Epic: 56 (1.55 times Normal)
Marathon: 108 (3 times Normal)


Turn scaling is also 1.0, 1.5, 3.0. So this means scaling back the value without changing the duration is nigh to perfect (Firaxis is going to have to do some incremental math to get it spot on).

I also pointed out in that post (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=5722409#post5722409) that foment :yuck: really isn't as OP [at Normal] as people think. (Yes, it's borke at Epic/Marathon.)

There are three factors that go into how effective the :yuck: mission is:


Food stored in city. The more food the city has stored, the more food you have to go through before seeing starvation.
Population. The greater the population, the more potential food can be stored in the city.
Food resources. The +:food: available to the city pads the :yuck: (i.e., 8 :yuck: turns into 3 :yuck: in the presence of +5 :food:)
Health. Positive :health: also pads the mission's :yuck:. (i.e., 8 :yuck: turns into 6 :yuck: in the presence of a net +2 :health: already present in the city.)


Solution (all things we should already be doing): Build a Granary, found cities with good food and grow bigger cities.

well your proposition is almost the same of mine, except that in yours, the spending to what i called "poissoned granary" is forced and may be influenced by positive health and that in mine, someone can stay in zero food overflow for a long time...

the only thing that bother me in your proposition is the dependency on food storage in the city...A city without granary is much more a big target then a city without granary

[B]The only thing broke about this mission are the values on speeds other than Normal and perhaps the cost.

The effect itself at Normal is not OP.

The only thing needing to change is the :yuck: / :mad: value, which needs to be the same for all speeds.

The problem with reducing the Normal turns is that it would make the Marathon mission hurt and a Normal mission a joke.

I mean seriously? 8 :yuck: for 3 turns ... that's like 8 for turn 1, 5 for turn 2 & 3 for turn 3 ... for a total of 16 :yuck:. HA! Any city of any size with a Granary or half-decent food production can survive that with barely a scratch.


I don't think you understand how it works. You can only change it for all difficulty levels, with Marathon simply getting 3 times as much as normal. And the number of turns always equals the effect value(!).
His idea was to change it so that it has 9 for 9 turns on marathon. Of course you shouldn't use that change with the normal game speed since then it would only be 3 for 3 turns.

Krikkitone's model is great. If you don't want to read through this mass of data, it basically proves that Krik's model balances the Poison Water Mission across the speeds. But please, read it.

Quick:
Duration: 6
Duration and penalty decrease per death: 1
Penalty decrease per turn of starvation: 1

This means that Poison is slightly less effective on Quick, but it avoids the nonsense of half-turns remaining on the duration.

Normal:
Duration: 8
Duration and penalty decrease per death: 1
Penalty decrease per turn of starvation: 1

This works the same as it does now.

Epic:
Duration: 12
Duration and penalty decrease per death: 1
Penalty decrease per turn of starvation: .6... See explanation.

In effect, this is a staggered penalty system. For every three turns of starvation, the third turn does not reduce the health penalty. For every turn of death, you lose a full point of penalty.

Marathon:
Duration: 24
Duration and penalty decrease per death: 1
Penalty decrease per turn of starvation: .3... See explanation.

On every third turn of starvation, the penalty is reduced by 1. For every death, you lose a full point of penalty.

Let's take a size seven city with health equal to unhealth, stagnant growth, and a half full granary. With this model, this occurs at each speed:

Quick: 2 turns of food loss followed by 2 turns of death and 1 turn of suppressed growth (if the city were a smidge larger or had literally one less food in its granary, it'd be 3 deaths.)
Normal: 2 turns of food loss followed by 3 turns of death and 2 turns of suppressed growth.
Epic: 4 turns of food loss followed by 3 turns of death and 3 turns of suppressed growth.
Marathon: 8 turns of food loss followed by 3 turns of death and 6 turns of suppressed growth.

Krikkitone's model works almost perfectly. However, it is a . .. .. .. .. . to think about. So here is the broken-down data.

Quick and Normal work like they do right now. On Epic, the count goes over twelve turns like this:

Turn 1: -8 <- Poisoned this turn. When turn ends, subtract 8 food and remove one unhealthiness.
Turn 2: -7
Turn 3: -7 <- Every third turn? No decrease.
Turn 4: -6
Turn 5: -5
Turn 6: -5 <- Pattern continues.
Turn 7: -4
Turn 8: -3
Turn 9: -3 <- Pattern continues.
Turn 10: -2
Turn 11: -1
Turn 12: -1 <- Pattern continues.
Turn 13: Counts down to zero; the mission is over.

This produces an equitable loss of food for an Epic city. However, if any of these turns ends with a death, then the Epic pattern is ignored and the full point is subtracted. Observe the size 7 city.

Turn 1: -8
Turn 2: -7
Turn 3: -7 <- Every third turn? No decrease.
Turn 4: -6
Turn 5: -5 <- One pop point starved. 1 point decrease from last turn.
Turn 6: -4 <- One pop point starved. 1 point decrease from last turn.
Turn 7: -3 <- One pop point starved. 1 point decrease from last turn.
Turn 8: -2 <- Resuming Epic pattern. Decrease one from last turn before resuming.
Turn 9: -1
Turn 10: -1 <- Pattern continues.
Turn 11: Counts down to zero; the mission continues so that the spy cannot poison the city more often than he could in Normal.
Turn 12: The mission continues.
Turn 13: The mission is over. The city can be poisoned again.

Marathon:

Since the regular pattern is easy to imagine (-8 for 3 turns; -7 for 3 turns, etc. over 24 turns) I will simply post the results of Krikkitone's model on a size 7 city with a half granary.

Turn 1: -8
Turn 2: -8
Turn 3: -8
Turn 4: -7
Turn 5: -7
Turn 6: -7
Turn 7: -6
Turn 8: -6
Turn 9: -5 <- One pop point starved. It's been decreased.
Turn 10: -4 <- One pop point starved. It's been decreased.
Turn 11: -3 <- One pop point starved. It's been decreased.
Turn 12: -2 <- Resuming Marathon pattern. Decrease one from last turn before resuming.
Turn 13: -2
Turn 14: -2
Turn 15: -1
Turn 16: -1
Turn 17: -1
Turn 18: Counts down to zero; the mission is not over.
Turns 19 through 24: The mission is not over.
Turn 25: The mission is over. The city can be poisoned again.

Look at that! The same number of dead, and the turns of food loss and turns of suppressed growth scale PERFECTLY. Krikkitone solved the problem.

@Roland: Agree it could lead to potentially confusing UI .. 2 problems
15 turns left on marathon could next turn be 12 turns left
or 3 turns left on Quick could still be 3 turns left

Fractional turns Displayed is probably a bad way of putting it, but the idea of Zoolooman is good, perhaps
Penalty=8.00 (round up.. or down..or off for actual unhealth/Happiness)
Penalty Decrease per pop lost=1.00
Penalty decrease per turn with no pop lost= dependent on map speed (1.50 for Quick, 1.00 for Normal, 0.67 for Epic, 0.33 for Marathon)

"Duration" displayed = Remaining Penalty/ normal Per turn drop... which means that one still has those problems, but only in the Pop elimination phase, and that should last at most 4 turns
(one might turn it to ?? Duration if population was lost)
Or one could say Remaining Penalty/Drop this turn... that would still lead to slightly confusing UI as the estimate would change twice (once from Ph. 1 to Ph. 2 and once from Ph. 2 to Ph. 3) and there would be the problem of fractional displays (but they have that with production as well).

In the civilopedia it could say
8 ...
(Speed*8) Turns (Faster/Slower with pop loss)

and say [in the explanation] each pop loss removes one point of Penalty, otherwise it decays with game speed.

Two things Krik:

1. Let the missions last their entire duration, even if their penalty remains 0 for many turns. This makes the duration easy to understand and prevents a Marathon player from effectively poisoning a city more often than a Normal player could. This is also easy to understand. The city will have some people die, and then in 6/8/12/24 turns, I can do it again. I don't need to know the specific mechanics.

2. Tell the player that when a population point starves to death, the penalty is always decreased by exactly one.

Though this explanation is simpler than the truth, it carries all the vital information--the poison will kill population over so many turns, and if stuff is killed, the poison decreases.

@Krikkitone

I've slightly disagreed with some of your ideas in a few threads the last few weeks. That doesn't mean that I don't respect your ideas. In general you have good ideas which are quite well thought through. Sometimes, I'm just nitpicking a bit. At other times, I just disagree. It doesn't mean that I don't respect your ideas.
I just had to say that because I've been disagreeing with you a lot lately. :)

This idea of yours is probably the best way to scale this mission while staying as close as possible to the original mission implemented by Firaxis. I personally like it, as I'm not afraid of fractions. I would infact like it if hammers could have fractions so that a city producing 5 hammers with a forge would produce 6.25 hammers. I just think that Firaxis is afraid of fractions and thus I don't think they will implement it in this way. There are some players who think that fractions look difficult and make the game more spreadsheet like. And of course, Firaxis will try to make the game as accessible and fun looking as possible. The number of games that actually use fractions (visible to the players, not in internal calculations) is pretty small.
I was pretty surprised when Firaxis started to use fractions in gold and science (and had secretly hoped that they would use it for hammers in BTS).

To be a bit more constructive.
In the description below, every time I use the variable speedsetting, the game would actually calculate the result and show that to the player. Speedsetting is 0.67 at quick, 1 at normal, 1.5 at epic, 3 at marathon.

I would change the mission description as follows:

Poison water supply:

This mission poisons the water supply which makes a part of the population sick. It increases the sickness level of the city to 8*speedsetting. This will result in an equal level of unhealthiness which will usually result in population loss in the city. The sickness will slowly die out while the water supply is renewed and sick people die. Every time a sick citizen in the city dies and the population decreases, the sickness level is reduced by 1. Every turn the disease is endured without population loss, the sickness level is reduced by 1/speedsetting.

Talking about sickness level will remove the weird notion of duration which isn't actual duration.

There is a small problem that I have with this mission. It is a bit strange that at quick speed, the death of a citizen decreases the speed at which the sickness level decreases while at marathon and epic speed, the death of a citizen increases the speed at which the sickness level decreases. You're bound to get discussion about why this would be implemented in such a strange way. This could be avoided by changing the basic mission so that if a citizen dies, then the sickness level decreases by 2 (or 3) and scale this with gamespeed. It would of course weaken the strength of the spy mission a bit.

Another problem with the basic normal speed mission as introduced by Firaxis is that the destructiveness of the mission is dependent on the amount of food which happens to be in the food storage when the mission is executed. This relation was observed quite early in this thread and I personally don't like that relation. Some other missions have been suggested that have effects that are independent of the food in storage (see post 14 by Zoolooman and 18 by me and some further discussion with DrewBledsoe).

I don't think you understand how it works. You can only change it for all difficulty levels, with Marathon simply getting 3 times as much as normal. And the number of turns always equals the effect value(!).
His idea was to change it so that it has 9 for 9 turns on marathon. Of course you shouldn't use that change with the normal game speed since then it would only be 3 for 3 turns.

I completely understand how it works.

I also understand that 92% of the 'fixes' being discussed in this thread can only be made by Firaxis programmers, so I figured mine would be just as welcomed.

The difference is that the other fixes being discussed are huge programming changes that require rethinking the entire dynamic of the foment :yuck:/:mad: missions.

We've had this game what ... a week now? And we have the audacity to tell Firaxis their years of programming and testing were absolutely wrong and that we know how to better design the system after having only played a handful of games?

All I did was take the Normal mission and figure out how to make the same overall effect happen at Epic and Marathon, which I can do mathematically by simply changing the foment value (unfortunately, we can't edit the XML to make the appropriate change).

If we want this fixed any time soon, then we need to give Firaxis a simple solution -- not an entire reworking of a system I presume they put a lot of thought into (if only they would test at more speeds than just Normal now).


-- my 2 :commerce:

We've had this game what ... a week now? And we have the audacity to tell Firaxis their years of programming and testing were absolutely wrong and that we know how to better design the system after having only played a handful of games?

24 unhealthiness for 24 turns at marathon speed. Yes, I have the audacity to say that their programming and testing were absolutely wrong in this instance. Wooo, I'm feeling very audacious now. :D :lol:

(That of course doesn't mean that the expansion pack sucks or something like that. Still a big error.)

By the way, there were a few other problems with the basic normal speed mission discussed in this thread. I don't know in how much detail you've read the thread. :confused:

1) The destructiveness of these 2 missions is very dependent on the amount of food which happens to be in storage. I personally don't think such a relation should exist.
2) Scaling it across difficulty levels is harder than you think because population point decrease is at the same rate at all gamespeeds. Therefore just increasing the duration with the normal factors isn't a correct way to balance the mission across various gamespeeds.

This has all been discusses in the first 2 pages of this thread in far more detail than the few sentences that I'm using now so I hope you don't mind if I refer you to those post for a more elaborate explanation of these problems. :)

24 unhealthiness for 24 turns at marathon speed. Yes, I have the audacity to say that their programming and testing were absolutely wrong in this instance. Wooo, I'm feeling very audacious now. :D :lol:

(That of course doesn't mean that the expansion pack sucks or something like that. Still a big error.)

By the way, there were a few other problems with the basic normal speed mission discussed in this thread. I don't know in how much detail you've read the thread. :confused:

1) The destructiveness of these 2 missions is very dependent on the amount of food which happens to be in storage. I personally don't think such a relation should exist.


This has all been discusses in the first 2 pages of this thread in far more detail than the few sentences that I'm using now so I hope you don't mind if I refer you to those post for a more elaborate explanation of these problems. :)

Saying 24 for 24 is borke is not audacious, because it is obviously borken -- as even I pointed out in my wall of text. I have no opposition to this claim.

However, introducing completely new and unique proposals (such as poison granary, etc.) is audacious, imho, because it presumes that in our one week of playing we know considerably more than the programmers who designed and worked on this for only the gods knows how long (if only they would test more at Epic/Marathon ... I presume they all alpha/beta tested exclusively at Normal).

And don't get me wrong, I don't disagree with all the new ideas ... I actually like where they are going.

The argument that the Normal mission is OP seems based primarily on our personal feelings that cities shouldn't lose population because of these missions.

And why shouldn't these missions' effectiveness be based on the amount of :food: in the food bar? The amount of turns it takes for a Catapult to Barrage a city's defenses down is relative to their Culture and infrastructure ... by this logic should we also change that.!?

If anything, this adds a new element of city management, where Granaries and the seldom used "Avoid Growth On" button become more important aspects.

2) Scaling it across difficulty levels is harder than you think because population point decrease is at the same rate at all gamespeeds. Therefore just increasing the duration with the normal factors isn't a correct way to balance the mission across various gamespeeds.

I disagree completely. I built a simulator for the effects of Foment :yuck: in Excel (and attached it to a previous post). I tested this simulator against WB data and found very similar results (mine were actually a bit harsher, since in game, :food: is shuffled more effectively.)

I punched in a value of 8 :yuck: for 8, 12, & 24 turns respectively and discovered the results at the end of the foment period were nearly identical across the 6 test cities I subjected it to.

If not anything else, I proved the overall, net foment values are nearly perfectly proportional (+3.33% off at Epic) when the value is reduced to 8 while keeping the length the same.

What I am proposing is the assumption Firaxis meant to make these missions as powerful (which really isn't that powerful for any city with a Granary or decent :food: tiles) and as :food:-dependent as they did but that they simply failed to test more thoroughly on non-Normal speeds.

I don't know exactly how this program works which you wrote but it is hard to discuss with a program and it won't get us any further. I'll just do some calculations here and we can then discuss those. That will be easier and can help us find the exact point where we disagree. Our points of disagreement won't be hidden behind some programming lines. ;)

I assume that you'd like to see the following mission at marathon speed
8 unhealthiness for 3 turns, then 7 unhealthiness for 3 turns, then 6 unhealthiness for 3 turns, then ... like suggested in the 8-th post of this thread,
as opposed to the normal mission at normal speed:
8 unhealthiness for 1 turn, then 7 unhealthiness for 1 turn, then ...

Let's assume a size 20 city, with 20 :health: and 20 :yuck: and 0 surplus :food:
We need more assumptions to get any further. Let's say that the city uses one tile of 4 food, 14 of 2 food and 2 of 0 food (specialists, plains hills). We will of course use the high food tiles to stop the loss of population and sacrifice the low food tiles first.

Normal scenario:
City is size 20, 0 food in storage, 0 surplus :health:
Turn 0 (poisoning) City is size 20, 0 food in storage, 8 surplus :yuck:
Turn 1 City is size 19, 0 food in storage, 4 food surplus, 6 surplus :yuck:
Turn 2 City is size 18, 0 food in storage, 4 food surplus, 4 surplus :yuck:
(city won't starve any further)

Marathon scenario:
City is size 20, 0 food in storage, 0 surplus :health:
Turn 0 (poisoning) City is size 20, 0 food in storage, 8 surplus :yuck:
Turn 1 City is size 19, 0 food in storage, 4 food surplus, 7 surplus :yuck:
Turn 2 City is size 18, 0 food in storage, 4 food surplus, 6 surplus :yuck:
Turn 3 City is size 17, 0 food in storage, 4 food surplus, 4 surplus :yuck:
(city won't starve any further, but won't grow for a some time either)

The difference is not only that the Marathon city is losing 1 extra population point, but also that it will take a lot longer before it starts to grow again, so in this situation the mission is more than 50% more severe.

About the influence of the food in storage thing on the severity of these 2 spy missions:
I just don't see what food in storage has to do with ferment unhappiness or poison water supply. It's the growth mechanic in the game. Why should it determine the severity of a spy mission which ferments unhappiness or poisons the water supply? If Firaxis had related the severity of the mission to the amount of hammers in the present building project or the amount of research points generated in the city at the moment of the mission, would you defend that mechanic too? It all seems unrelated to me, but is made to be related by the way the mission is implemented.

If Firaxis had related the severity of the mission to the amount of hammers in the present building project or the amount of research points generated in the city at the moment of the mission, would you defend that mechanic too? It all seems unrelated to me, but is made to be related by the way the mission is implemented.


Well for the old sabotage mission, damage Was related to how many hammers had been invested in a project.

I feel that while it is somewhat imbalanced, as it is intended as an attack against the population of the game, it seems reasonable to include the population growth mechanism.

What I feel we are likely to get (and would Sort of settle for) is a simple 8 sickness/unhappiness for 8*speed turns with a decrease happening every Speed turrns (*essentially my model without the different effect during pop starvation) This does render it more severe on Marathon, but not as significantly as it does now. (maybe by Christmas something like one of our more complicated models will be in)

I don't know exactly how this program works which you wrote but it is hard to discuss with a program and it won't get us any further. I'll just do some calculations here and we can then discuss those. That will be easier and can help us find the exact point where we disagree. Our points of disagreement won't be hidden behind some programming lines. ;)

Fair enough. (All it does is make all these turn by turn calculations automagically and displays the data.)

The difference is not only that the Marathon city is losing 1 extra population point, but also that it will take a lot longer before it starts to grow again, so in this situation the mission is more than 50% more severe.

EDIT: You also have to take into consideration tile juggling. In a size 20 city, it's safe to say there are at least a couple 0 :food: tiles/specialists being worked and a couple more 1 :food: tiles. (Yes there are exceptions, but typically few.) We shuffled the 0 :food: tiles/specialists around to get to +4, but then as citizens begin dying, they will be the 1 :food: guys -- thus leaving us with a net of +1 :food: in the wake of their demise.

Knowing this, we can re-evaluate even the 0% food city to see the results indeed are the same:

Marathon scenario:
City is size 20, 0 food in storage, 0 surplus :yuck:
Turn 0 (poisoning) City is size 20, 0 food in storage, 8 surplus :yuck:
<-- we decide to "kill off" the Grassland Hill Miner and thus now have an extra :food: he freed up
Turn 1 City is size 19, 0 food in storage, 5 food surplus, 7 surplus :yuck:
<-- we kill off another Grassland Hill Miner
Turn 2 City is size 18, 0 food in storage, 6 food surplus, 6 surplus :yuck:
Turn 3 City is size 18, 0 food in storage, 6 food surplus, 5 surplus :yuck:
Turn 4 City is size 18, 1 food in storage, 6 food surplus, 4 surplus :yuck:

/EDIT

Even without the tile juggling, if you bump up the food stores to just 10%, you'll see the missions are equivalent.

Turn Population 10% Food stored
MarathonEpic Normal Marathon Epic Normal

0 20 20 20 18 180 9 90 6 60
1 20 20 20 14 180 5 90 2 60
2 20 20 19 10 180 1 90 0 58
3 20 19 18 6 180 0 87 0 56
4 20 18 18 3 180 0 84 1 56
5 20 18 18 0 180 0 84 3 56
6 19 18 18 0 174 1 84 6 56
7 18 18 18 0 168 3 84 10 56
8 18 18 *18* 0 168 5 84 14 56
9 18 18 18 0 168 8 84 18 56
10 18 18 18 1 168 12 84 22 56
11 18 18 18 2 168 16 84 26 56
12 18 *18* 18 3 168 20 84 30 56
13 18 18 18 5 168 24 84 34 56
14 18 18 18 7 168 28 84 38 56
15 18 18 18 9 168 32 84 42 56
16 18 18 18 12 168 36 84 46 56
17 18 18 18 15 168 40 84 50 56
18 18 18 18 18 168 44 84 54 56
19 18 18 19 22 168 48 84 2 58
20 18 18 19 26 168 52 84 6 58
21 18 18 19 30 168 56 84 10 58
22 18 18 19 34 168 60 84 14 58
23 18 18 19 38 168 64 84 18 58
24 *18* 18 19 42 168 68 84 22 58

On that, I won't try to argue against the validity of your statement of disproportion, because I've also noticed that inequality. Smaller cities and cities with no food or low food will see a greater detriment at Epic & Marathon.

Considering how extremely close the speeds come to equality by changing only the foment value, I take this to mean the current system is broke in its current state and only just barely broke in its "modified" state (changing value only).

I seriously think we're grasping at straws trying to use this disproportion (the 8 :yuck: over 24 model) to propose an entirely different game mechanic.

The conditions for disproportion are a lot smaller than it seems. The city has to be less than size 15 with no tiles to juggle (plausible with size 5-10 cities) less than 30% food in the food bar (basically starving or no Granary), less than +4 :food: surplus and no extra :health: to spare.

Not to defend Firaxis or to say this incomplete scaling fix is the answer, but how many cities really fall into all 4 of those categories? Nobody disputes the value of a Granary even now, so it's likely your :food: bar will always be between 50% - 99%. Every bit of city-placement strategy advises to have at least +4 :food: surplus in any city (typically worded as "you need either a Flood Plain or a Food Resource in the Fat Cross"). And, the presence of :health: resources is typically more numerous than that of luxury resources, which usually results in the smaller cities (even in the early eras) having an excess of healthiness stuck at the happy-cap.

Honestly, I just don't see enough cities falling into all 4 of those categories to merit requesting such drastic overhauls (especially in light of alleged issues with the AI's inadequate implementation of Espionage/Corporations/Teching.)

Making the foment value change can be done very quickly and will bring the system nigh to within perfect, which I think is more than adequate in the meantime while they dig deeper into the possibilities of completing the balance or repairing other, 'bigger' issues.

About the influence of the food in storage thing on the severity of these 2 spy missions:
I just don't see what food in storage has to do with ferment unhappiness or poison water supply. It's the growth mechanic in the game. Why should it determine the severity of a spy mission which ferments unhappiness or poisons the water supply? If Firaxis had related the severity of the mission to the amount of hammers in the present building project or the amount of research points generated in the city at the moment of the mission, would you defend that mechanic too? It all seems unrelated to me, but is made to be related by the way the mission is implemented.

And what, pray tell, does stockpiling food in a Granary have to do with 'growing people'? This is simply the mechanic used to simulate and regulate population growth.

It's been this way since the very first Civilization, so it only makes sense other game mechanics should work within these same bounds.

If you really want a good, RL explanation, the city's food storage has to do with how well it can cope with (un)natural disasters.

A perfect example is something you have probably no more than a mile from your house -- a water tower. If something happens to your city's water, you and the rest of the city will rely on the water stored in that tower. If there happens to not be any there (i.e., the food bar is empty), I guarantee your city will go through some hard times (at the minimum, 8 turns is 8 years ... that's a damn long drought).

It could also be looked at this way: the fomented :yuck: could be because the city's farms are poisoned/sabotaged -- leading the population to rely upon the city's food stores instead of the harvest. Since there is little / no food stored, people begin starving and dying.

Dependence upon the food bar seems perfectly legitimate to me and adds an interesting element to the game.

Where we agree (I think):

What doesn't add an interesting element is ...


... the fact that Epic & Marathon are way past OP-borke.
... the fact that even leveling out the foment values still leaves Epic/Marathon OP-borke proportionally for low-food cities (just not near as bad).

Could someone provide an step-by-step idiot guide to how we can edit out these two missions -especially the poison water 'nuke' kerrrrazy - please. Perrleeeezz.

Could someone provide an step-by-step idiot guide to how we can edit out these two missions -especially the poison water 'nuke' kerrrrazy - please. Perrleeeezz.

1) open .../Firaxis Games/Sid Meier's Civilization 4/Beyond the Sword/Assets/XML/GameInfo
2) copy the file CIV4EspionageMissionInfo.xml into your .../My Games/Beyond the Sword/CustomAssets/xml/gameinfo directory
3) open .../My Games/Beyond the Sword/CustomAssets/xml/gameinfo/CIV4EspionageMissionInfo.xml in a text editor
4) search for the mission you want to delete e.g.
ESPIONAGEMISSION_CITY_POISON_WATER or
ESPIONAGEMISSION_CITY_UNHAPPINESS
5) delete everything from the <EspionageMissionInfo> to the </EspionageMissionInfo> for this mission
6) save and exit
7) start a game, have fun ;)

This should do - I have not checked it though... But if I understand it correctly the game does not call specific missions from elsewhere. If it does not work or you want to revert simply delete the .../My Games/Beyond the Sword/CustomAssets/xml/gameinfo/CIV4EspionageMissionInfo.xml file...

Edit: DON'T edit the .../Firaxis Games/Sid Meier's Civilization 4/Beyond the Sword/Assets/XML/GameInfo/CIV4EspionageMissionInfo.xml file directly - if anything screws up you'll have to reinstall. Files in the CustomAssets directory can simply be deleted if not needed.

What if we made the cost of doing the mission not scale with game speed, and had the effect of the mission not scale with game speed?

Ie, on Marathon, you'd get +8 sick, +7 sick, +..., +1 sick, +0 sick after doing the mission.

After doing it 3 times, the city would end up taking roughly the same amount of damage. There would be some differences.

It is true that a city with next to no food and health would be hurt more than this than normal game speed: this is because the game does not refill your food box when your city shrinks.

If you really want a good, RL explanation, the city's food storage has to do with how well it can cope with (un)natural disasters.

A perfect example is something you have probably no more than a mile from your house -- a water tower. If something happens to your city's water, you and the rest of the city will rely on the water stored in that tower. If there happens to not be any there (i.e., the food bar is empty), I guarantee your city will go through some hard times (at the minimum, 8 turns is 8 years ... that's a damn long drought).
Why would a real-life granary empty (or half-empty) when the population grows?

Why would a real-life granary empty (or half-empty) when the population grows?

Somekind of "special governamental suport" for mothers & new babies ? :crazyeye:

Don't forget that "welfare policies" ( especially at this "primitive" level ) aren't a 100% modern invention. ;)

Regards

@OTAKUjbski

Sorry that I didn't respond earlier, I didn't have a lot of time. Quoting your entire post would start to make this thread a bit unreadable.

I'll give another example of a large city, this time with a half filled food storage. Again at marathon speed, the city suffers more population loss. It is important to mention the available tiles for the city, so you'll know which low food tiles can be disabled for extra food once population loss occurs. I already did this in my previous post and you also did this in the edited part of your post. This is the exact same city as in the previous post except now it has a half filled food storage.

Let's assume a size 20 city, with 20 :health: and 20 :food: and a half filled food storage.
We need more assumptions to get any further. Let's say that the city uses one tile of 4 food, 14 of 2 food and 2 of 0 food (specialists, plains hills). We will of course use the high food tiles to stop the loss of population and sacrifice the low food tiles first.

Poisoning occurs at turn 0

Normal speed

turn | size | food storage | surplus health + surplus food
0 | 20 | 30 | -8
1 | 20 | 22 | -7
2 | 20 | 15 | -6
3 | 20 | 9 | -5
4 | 20 | 4 | -4
5 | 20 | 0 | -3
6 |19 | 0 | 0


Marathon speed

turn | size | food storage | surplus health + surplus food
0 | 20 | 90 | -8
1 | 20 | 82 | -8

12 | 20 | 12 | -4
13 | 20 | 8 | -4
14 | 20 | 4 | -4
15 | 20 | 0 | -3
16 | 19 | 0 | -1
17 | 18 | 0 | +1

You see that in the marathon case 2 population points are lost and at normal speed only 1.


I've explained in post 18, a while back why this occurs. Once the food storage empties, the rate of health increase (or unhealthiness decrease) at marathon speed is still a lot slower than at normal speed while the population decrease occurs at the same speed.

Of course, when a city with a serious health surplus or a city with a serious food surplus is hit by this mission, then the difference between Marathon and normal speed is not noticeable. The mission will just not hurt the city very much. With a 4 food/health surplus and a normal food storage from a granary, both cities won't decrease in population. It's not very useful to use the mission on such a city. But many cities will reach a fully grown state where they won't have any surplus and then these missions will hurt and will hurt more at marathon speed.

A slightly different remark: the ferment unhappiness mission will generally hurt more in a city at its happiness limit than the poison water supply mission in a city at its health limit. Losing 8 population for food generation will generally cost you far more than 8 food per turn. So it's a bit weird that both mission have an equal cost.

Some other posters have already said why it is weird that the food storage influences the severity of the ferment unhappiness and poison water supply missions.

Why would a real-life granary empty (or half-empty) when the population grows?

It's just the growth mechanism and the cycle in this mechanism shouldn't influence the severity of the poison water supply or the ferment unhappiness missions. It's especially weird with the ferment unhappiness mission.

Because a discussion tends to polarize the positions, I would like to add that the option we're discussing here (marathon has -8 healthinss/unhappiness for 24 turns and it decreases by 1 in 3 turns) is not very bad. It was already discussed in the first few posts of this thread and it's a reasonable first fix. However, since both spy missions are hopelessly broken at marathon speed at the moment, I don't see a reason to not completely fix them. Why should we be satisfied with a fairly good solution when better solutions are available?

I concur.

I went ahead and removed those two missions (simply delete the entries in the xml) and I like it.

/stuff
With this change - does this mean Marathon mode is kind of OK now?

Also 1) open .../Firaxis Games/Sid Meier's Civilization 4/Beyond the Sword/Assets/XML/GameInfo
2) copy the file CIV4EspionageMissionInfo.xml into your .../My Games/Beyond the Sword/CustomAssets/xml/gameinfo directory
3) open .../My Games/Beyond the Sword/CustomAssets/xml/gameinfo/CIV4EspionageMissionInfo.xml in a text editor
4) search for the mission you want to delete e.g.
ESPIONAGEMISSION_CITY_POISON_WATER or
ESPIONAGEMISSION_CITY_UNHAPPINESS
5) delete everything from the <EspionageMissionInfo> to the </EspionageMissionInfo> for this mission
6) save and exit
7) start a game, have fun ;)

This should do - I have not checked it though... But if I understand it correctly the game does not call specific missions from elsewhere. If it does not work or you want to revert simply delete the .../My Games/Beyond the Sword/CustomAssets/xml/gameinfo/CIV4EspionageMissionInfo.xml file...

Edit: DON'T edit the .../Firaxis Games/Sid Meier's Civilization 4/Beyond the Sword/Assets/XML/GameInfo/CIV4EspionageMissionInfo.xml file directly - if anything screws up you'll have to reinstall. Files in the CustomAssets directory can simply be deleted if not needed.
If you use custom assets will it load your completed game into the high score table when you finish a game?

If you use custom assets will it load your completed game into the high score table when you finish a game?

It should (of course there is the odd chance that something changed in BtS). If that does not work: create a mod directory, e.g.
...\My Games\Beyond the Sword\MODS\GreatNewSpiesMod\
then create the follwoing directory inside: \xml\gameinfo
then copy CIV4EspionageMissionInfo.xml into this directory and change it.
then load the whole thing as a mod - but then the HOF will definitely only show results for this mod...

It should (of course there is the odd chance that something changed in BtS). If that does not work: create a mod directory, e.g.
...\My Games\Beyond the Sword\MODS\GreatNewSpiesMod\
then create the follwoing directory inside: \xml\gameinfo
then copy CIV4EspionageMissionInfo.xml into this directory and change it.
then load the whole thing as a mod - but then the HOF will definitely only show results for this mod...

I just did a quick test game. Loaded into HoF and I "think" all went perfect. Didn't see the options... but I am curious:

Will the AI still be able to use those two espionage features against you (I'd prefer not)? I'm concerned all this edit did was eliminate it from the menu of choices for the human - not the AI.

Is there any word on when this is likely to be fixed? I play Marathon games and to be honest it's pointless me continuing playing until this bug is fixed. I was just in the middle of a game where I was doing really well and then my main unit production city got hit by the poison water supply. It's just crippling.

I just did a quick test game. Loaded into HoF and I "think" all went perfect. Didn't see the options... but I am curious:

Will the AI still be able to use those two espionage features against you (I'd prefer not)? I'm concerned all this edit did was eliminate it from the menu of choices for the human - not the AI.
No - this edit removes this mission for every player regardless of whether he is in front or within your computer ;)

No - this edit removes this mission for every player regardless of whether he is in front or within your computer ;)

Hehehe. Thanks :)

With this change - does this mean Marathon mode is kind of OK now?

Also if you use custom assets will it load your completed game into the high score table when you finish a game?

Well, the missions simply are gone, so neither you nor the AI can use them. Whether that is "kind of ok" is something you have to decide for yourself. :)
It doesn't break the game, if that's what you mean.

And yes, it will still be in the high score table.

For those of us who don't follow the maths, but would like to play with the missions enabled but as fixed as possible, what values should we put where for Epic/Marathon speeds?

Cheers :)

For those of us who don't follow the maths, but would like to play with the missions enabled but as fixed as possible, what values should we put where for Epic/Marathon speeds?

Cheers :)

That is not easy - the whole thing scales with speed but if you change the scaling in the Civ4GameSpeedInfo.xml you will end up messing with the scaling for ...

Conscripting Units of all things :crazyeye:

But if you want you can change the value of
<iHurryConscriptAngerPercent>
which is 300 for Marathon, 150 for Epic, 100 for Normal and 67 for Quick
However - they use the same modifier to determine the costs of all spy missions - so by reducing them you would also make them cheaper.
There is only one real solution to this: programmers have to split the duration and the effect of those missions and give them a separate modifier in the Civ4GameSpeedInfo.xml instead of abusing a totally unrelated modifier :)

Sorry about this bug.

The patch will simply remove game speed scaling from those two espionage missions. They will always result in 6 unhappy/unhealthy for 6 turns.

For those of us who don't follow the maths, but would like to play with the missions enabled but as fixed as possible, what values should we put where for Epic/Marathon speeds?

Cheers :)

The normal value is 8 for normal. I would go for 7 for epic (muliplied by 1.5 that is 10) and 4 or 5 for marathon (multiplied by 3 that is 12 or 15).

The amount of food destroyed by the epic mission would be 55, which is 1.52 times the amount of the normal mission which is 36. That is a fairly good scaling number.

The amount of food destroyed by the strength 12 marathon mission would be 78, which is 2.17 times the amount of the normal mission. The amount of food destroyed by the strength 15 marathons mission would be 120 which is 3.33 times the amount of the normal mission.

Note that the severity of the marathon and epic mission is slightly increased compared to the normal speed mission because population dies at the same rate at the slower speeds.

(Disclaimer: the amount of food destroyed is a theoretical number used for comparison. If the city doesn't have that amount of food in storage, then it of course can't lose that amount of food and loses population instead.)

You can only set one value in the xml file and it is multiplied by 1.5 for epic speed and 3 for marathon speed. So you'll have to reset it before you play the game so that the right value is used for the gamespeed that you're going to use. I guess that if you change the value halfway through a game, that the value ingame will be adjusted for any mission that will be performed in the future.

Sorry about this bug.

The patch will simply remove game speed scaling from those two espionage missions. They will always result in 6 unhappy/unhealthy for 6 turns.

Good to hear that a patch is in the making and that it will address this problem.

Doesn't the cost of this mission scale with game speed (I really don't know)? If the cost does scale with game speed, then the effect should also scale. If the cost doesn't scale with game speed, then it would probably still cost you more spies to repeatedly perform the mission in slower game speeds but that isn't a big problem as production of units is relatively cheap at slower game speeds.

The normal value is 8 for normal. I would go for 7 for epic (muliplied by 1.5 that is 10) and 4 or 5 for marathon (multiplied by 3 that is 12 or 15).


Cheers - I always play on Epic speed so I'll go with 7. So I change the bits for iPoisonWaterCounter and iCityUnhappinessCounter both from 8 to 7, right?

Cheers - I always play on Epic speed so I'll go with 7. So I change the bits for iPoisonWaterCounter and iCityUnhappinessCounter both from 8 to 7, right?

Yes, that would make them about equal in strength to the normal speed strength.

Cheers kindly! :)

Wrong forum. Ignore.

Just FYI. Found this in the bug forums posted this morning.
Yes and in this thread of all things :p

Sorry about this bug.

The patch will simply remove game speed scaling from those two espionage missions. They will always result in 6 unhappy/unhealthy for 6 turns.
No I don't want to start something else here, but even though 24:p for 24 turns was just completely wrong, 6 :p for 6 turns, even