This thread is for discussion of some possible new features which are not in the mod yet.

This seems like an odd tradeoff. There is a python function, unitCannotMoveInto, which is called very frequently by the AI. I am using it to prevent units from moving into fallout plots, unless they have the rad-immune promotion. When I have this turned on, a 350 turn, 11 player AIAutoPlay game takes about 3 hours. When I have this turned off, a map from the same start position takes about 1 hour. So, 2/3 of the total runtime is spent in preventing units from moving into fallout.

I like that fallout has "some" effect on units. Originally I wanted to have units get radiation poisoning or something, which would cause damage. That would take more CPU time, since the AI would have to *decide* whether or not to move through a fallout plot. Preventing units from moving into fallout plots has some small tactical effect on the game. For example, rad-immune units can "hide" from almost all other units in fallout. (Spiders and scorpions are also rad-immune so it is not a perfect hiding place.)

Do you think "cannot move into fallout" is worth 3x slower runtime? I have been playing with this feature deactivated locally (it is a one character change anybody could make) and it does not seem to make that much difference in gameplay.

Opinions?

This is a possible mechanic which came out of the playtest feedback thread.

Wrecks can come from two sources: a gas powered vehicle which is destroyed in combat, or a gas powered unit which is unfueled for 10 consecutive turns in enemy territory. ("Not friendly" territory technically, so unowned territory counts.) Not all of combat losses would result in a wreck.

A wreck is a barbarian unit which has move 0 and can be captured. If it is captured by a non-barbarian player, it turns into a move 1 unit. When a wreck moves into a city, it has an action button which converts it into hammers. I am thinking 50 hammers. If the city has a garage, then it converts into 100 hammers.

This may be too simplistic. But, it prevents needing a "wreck" for each unit type. Another possibility which is more complicated, is to have a "tank wreck" possibly rebuilt into a tank again, rather than turning into hammers. Also there could be a system where units can be rebuilt in the field, instead of requiring a trip to a city. This would only be possible with units that have a mechanic promotion. There could be a towtruck unit which automatically has the mechanic promotion.

Simple approach, more complex approach, or some other approach?

Do you think "cannot move into fallout" is worth 3x slower runtime? I have been playing with this feature deactivated locally (it is a one character change anybody could make) and it does not seem to make that much difference in gameplay.

The can-not-move on fallout thing is quite important... It adds tactical features to the map, like possible choke points. And it can be used by units that can go there to "hide".

3x the running time is a lot however...

Could you copy the XML for mountains and make them impassable?

You'd need a new terrain type (Rad Zone) and you'd lose the ability to clear fallout or promote your units to Rad-immune, but it might save some CPU, as the AI must understand impassable or highly mountainous vanilla games would be exccessively wasteful in CPU.

I should look into it again, but I believe there can be only one kind of "impassible". So I could make fallout impassible. But, then rad-immune would allow you to both enter fallout and cross mountains. That is not quite the right effect.

I am sure an SDK expert could easily make a custom engine which did this, and then the runtime impact would be minimal. Not me though.

Does the Final Frontier mod solve this in the SDK (for space radiation, supernovas, and black holes)?

I'm not sure. It would be a little difficult to prove if the AI avoids these obstacles except when it is worthwhile. I will look into their code at some point and see if I can figure it out.

Is there a promotion in Final Frontier which allows traversal without damage?

Finl frontier comes with no own dll, so it must use xml or python.
I never really played it however...

On the subject of restricting Highway movement to some unit types...

I looked through the SDK and there are 2 functions:
int CvPlot::movementCost(const CvUnit* pUnit, const CvPlot* pFromPlot) const; //Exposed to Python
bool CvPlot::isValidRoute(const CvUnit* pUnit) const; //Exposed to Python
One of those should be useable to override the cost reduction on movement via python.
isValidRoute sounds as it would be the easier way.
I failed to locate thos in the python files and have no idea where they would go there. It will also probably be another one of those running-time expensive overrides, as i expect the game to call this one a lot.

On the subject of restricting Highway movement to some unit types...[...] It will also probably be another one of those running-time expensive overrides, as i expect the game to call this one a lot.

This goes back to the suggestion that foot units should not get fast movement on highways. I agree, thanks for the additional code pointers. There is a route restrictor modcomp (http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=8752) in SDK which does the opposite of what I want, but I have not looked inside. Also I just found zRoute (http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=7867), which does the same (reverse) thing in python. I had not spotted this before. Since it is python I might be able to reverse it. I will put that back onto the list.

EDIT: I looked into zRoutes. It just uses unitCannotMoveInto, and it *prohibits* movement by that unitclass. What I want is regular slow movement along the roads rather than prohibiting. So the python one is (a) slow (b) not extensible to what I want. I also suspect that the SDK one may also only *prohibit*, so it may be useful for ideas rather than a canned solution.

However, it triggered a related idea. Roads make movement X times faster, while highways (railroads) make all units move at Y plots per turn. I could make highways have a higher X instead of any Y. Then foot units on highways would move faster than on roads, but not as fast as wheeled units on highways. That seems to accomplish the basic goal and it is trivial to implement.

However, it triggered a related idea. Roads make movement X times faster, while highways (railroads) make all units move at Y plots per turn. I could make highways have a higher X instead of any Y. Then foot units on highways would move faster than on roads, but not as fast as wheeled units on highways. That seems to accomplish the basic goal and it is trivial to implement.

This sounds like a very good idea - doable from XML and without any additional running time overhead from python.

If you give Highways higher X - maybe 4x and 5x after researching Highways (should be possible from XML - roads get "Faster" on Construction too)- this would make Foot units move 4 or 5 while wheeled units could have 8 / 10 moves - close to what they would have on railroad too.

I played a game of version 0.8 mostly through last night, trying for a vision victory. I spammed one of my neighbors with advocates and got him to convert; but then he built a capitol. I figured over time, he would convert all his cities back or "divide the vote", so I wanted to get rid of his capitol. I loaded up on espionage points and sent some spies to destroy it.

It turns out spies can't destroy wonders, so there is no non-military solution.

Today the diplomacy tech gives spies, but it started me thinking about the difference between spies and advocates. Add in inquisitors, which I don't have today, but that is the obvious name for a unit which removes a vision from a city. I have not yet put in any active way to defend against vision spread, just passive and counterattack.

Some random ideas, possibly implementable or possibly not.
* Give spy the ability to spread a vision, and delete advocate
* Give advocate or spy the ability to delete a vision
* Convert capitol to a project, so spies can destroy it
* What happens after a capitol is destroyed? A high decay rate of your vision in other cities, but you can rebuild it?

I like the idea of the vision victory, but as we have discussed in the playtest thread, it isn't very smooth yet.

If you give Highways higher X - maybe 4x and 5x after researching Highways (should be possible from XML - roads get "Faster" on Construction too)- this would make Foot units move 4 or 5 while wheeled units could have 8 / 10 moves - close to what they would have on railroad too.

I made this change, it seems to work pretty well. Roads give 2x, highways give 4x. Previously foot units and vehicles both moved 7 on railroads, now foot moves 4 and vehicles move 8. If you have the morale promo for +1 movement, you get lucky, and now you can move 12!

I am not sure about non-military capitol destruction - vision is something about a idea - the actual building is only a small token of it. You can't get rid of ideas via spies from underground - you have to annihilate the believers.

Spy's are different fom advocates in the way that they do not require Open Boarders. Giving them the ability to spread a vision might be fatal: right now you have to be at least at somewhat civil terms with a Civ to get OB and spread your Vision, so Vision victory requires at least some diplomacy.
With spy's you could do it even to your enemy in war.

I think a "Propaganda" mision might make sense for spy's. It could help prevent decay of your vision there (Assuming the target is running another state vision). But should not spread the vision into new cities.

------

Another note:

Is it possible to combine victory conditions ? What i thinking of is changing the Requirement for Vision victory to:

67 % Population (or wahtever threshold prooves the best)
AND
The vision must be present in every civ (At least one city - like it is now for AP victory)

This should make those early Blitz-Vision moves harder and would make some sense.

In vanilla, enemy spies can change your civics and religion, even though it is expensive. I guess this is already a type of propaganda.

I agree the spy secret movement is an important difference. Removing "open borders" gives you the chance to defend against missionaries at the cost of some diplomatic penalty.

The good news about the religious victory is the "hooks" are already there for it in the vanilla game. The bad news is then you can only use the "hooks" that are already there. There is no way to add a check about your vision being available in each civ. But, that doesn't seem so important: if there is a fringe civ with 10% of the population, and they are totally uninterested in your vision, would that prevent selection of the capitol? There are enough historical counterexamples.

I was thinking about converting the capitol to a project so spies could destroy it. Today I noticed that there is a VictoryMinThresholds field in the project conditions. I am not sure exactly how it is used; but it seems to be that you can prevent a project from starting unless the victory threshold is a certain value. So, I could add a "stage 2 capitol" which requires at least 51% vision. Not sure what happens if your vision percentage goes 49, 50, 51, 51, 51, 50. Would you have to stop, and then pick up later? At some point soon I will experiment more with this.

Several people have suggested that the AI doesn't "understand" about limited food. It seems to prefer building roads over farms, so a player who dedicates himself to growing population can easily outgrow the AIs.

I have looked at a couple of autoplay games. I usually run 350 turns, 11 players, huge map. There are plenty of AI cities with population in the 9-10 range. Maybe the human player can get there a lot faster in the early game.

The only way I can find to adjust the priority of farms is the improvement weight field for leaderheads, as suggested by refar. The improvements themselves do not have any weights, nor do the build commands, nor any other place I can think of looking.

The existing AIs in Fury Road already use the weights. I am wondering if this makes any difference. Specifically, the following AIs have "preferences" according to the leaderhead file.

Farm only: Chen/Christopher, Stein
Farm and junkyard: Aelwyn/Jane, Shiro/Ares, Mick, Max
Town: Stevie, Debbie
Town and junkyard: Montezuma/Ironhead

Where I have listed two names, the first name is for version 0.7 and the second one is for version 0.8. I renamed a couple of the AIs and also when I deleted Monty and Shiro, I moved their AI personality around to keep the trait distribution balanced.

Based on any save games you may have around, does it seem that these leaders have any better luck with food than others? If it seems that Stevie and Chen are both equally bad at building farms, then there is little point in adjusting these weights.

In case anybody wants to try an experiment, I have modified the leaderhead file so that all the AI's have a high weight for farms. You could unzip this file 183769 on top of your existing 0.8 leaderheadinfo file. Make sure it goes into the right directory, you should get a warning about overwriting the file.

Does it feel like it makes any difference? If not, I can't think of any other good way to teach the AI that farms are more important. Any suggestions?

I will try it with the new file.

I gave the whole Sity Size issue some thought (did not have time to actually try something out yet).

In my previous games i did see the AI building farms - maybe a few more were good, but it's not like it never makes them.

There is another possible reason for small AI cities: Whip. I know that the default game AI makes use of whipping.
If the AI - being un-aware of the Post Apo theme and its economic constrains - still uses whip of Fury Road it might explain the small cities.

Maybe removing the Slavery Civic (or giving it some other face than the whip) is a good idea.
I myself only rarely use whip on furyroad anyway - there is just no food to regrow.

Interesting point about whip. Since I put back the "almost full" civics matrix in 0.5, I have not kept statistics about whether any civics are chosen more often by the AI. I don't think I can specifically track how often the AI whips, but I can certainly track who has which civic. AI's that don't use slavery are clearly not whipping.

Peter and Stein have slavery as a favorite civic, which I guess means they are likely to choose it. Maybe they stay smaller as a result.

Maybe removing the Slavery Civic (or giving it some other face than the whip) is a good idea.
I myself only rarely use whip on furyroad anyway - there is just no food to regrow.I make regular use of the :whipped: so I'd prefer that you NOT remove it. In fact I think I might use it a little more in this mod than the regular game. Especially in the mid game when I've got more food than happiness. In some cases, a city with a Granary might still need 10 turns to regrow. In that case, the math in this mod will say whether it is best to whip or not. But if I've got any angry citizens ... :whipped:

Farm only: Chen/Christopher, Stein
Farm and junkyard: Aelwyn/Jane, Shiro/Ares, Mick, Max
Town: Stevie, Debbie
Town and junkyard: Montezuma/IronheadHere are some screenshots from a 0.8 game that I was dabbling with ...

Christopher:
http://img71.imageshack.us/img71/4734/civ4screenshot0003uu4.jpg

Mick:
http://img166.imageshack.us/img166/7242/civ4screenshot0004iz3.jpg

IronHead:
http://img71.imageshack.us/img71/1579/civ4screenshot0005qr5.jpg

There are very few farms outside of the capitals. Christoper was even worse, in that he had an unconnected fish resource. Yet he also had an exploring Workboat! :crazyeye: I also put it into debug mode to see if I could see any evidence of whip anger. Ironhead had two cities that had recently been whipped (1 unhappy face each). No other cities showed any whip anger.

But if I've got any angry citizens ... :whipped: I dont have any angry citizens - i work cottages or specialist when the city is at its happy cap, to prevent my economy from crashing later.

But for now it is just a point to concider, as we need more data/evidence of whip being responsible or not.

Seeing your screenshots there is something else that strikes me. There is almost no grassland on the map. I had this feeling in my games, but i was thinking it might be just bad luck.

In standard game Plains Farms do generally suck. I.e. pre biology.
In Fury Road we must aim for fertilization soon and farm plains but the AI might be unaware of this...

In these screenshots, it is not clear where farms *could* go. Christopher has exactly one farmable plot apart from his capitol -- EE of aldgate. No other fresh water. Kilobyte has zero farmable plots apart from his capitol. Ironhead has a few but his two southern cities have zero farmable plots.

You are able to grow your cities much faster. Is this because you have chosen better city locations, or maybe your start location has a more farmable neighborhood? If you had these exact areas to develop, what would you do differently?

If the problem is uneven distribution of farmable neighborhoods, that is a different solution, which goes in the mapscript.

You are able to grow your cities much faster. Is this because you have chosen better city locations, or maybe your start location has a more farmable neighborhood?Well, the AI has never been known for choosing great city locations, so you're right. And the nature of this map doesn't help! :lol: There is a new world order in Fury Road ... but the AI doesn't know that.

The AI sends out a Workboat to explore ... even though a fish resource remains unconnected. :crazyeye: There is a junkyard built on a desert tile ... even though a plains tile right next to it is unimproved. :crazyeye: The AI doesn't understand the importance of food in this mod.

If you had these exact areas to develop, what would you do differently?Well, Christopher did draw the short stick when it comes to land. But not because of the land tiles, per se. But rather all of that ocean surrounding his peninsula. But, he could have done a better job settling to grab more land than water tiles. He also has an inland lake to provide fresh water, yet only 1 farm is chained. He could have provided irrigation to both of those cities had he understood farm chaining. Ironically, Christopher was the power leader for much of the game.

Mick has some better land but hasn't developed it. And he settles his 2nd city in the middle of a dessert? His 3rd city was up in the ice, judging from the road going north out of his capital. But, he's got a lot of green down south and plains to his west. With a nice long river running through his capital, getting fresh water shouldn't be a problem. My empire is to his west-SW and there is a lot of empty land between us. Its prime real estate compared to the ice and desert that he prioritized.

The other interesting thing to note about Christopher and Mick is they have that "farm preference" that you mentioned. Notice their capitals, they are a good size compared to IronHead's capital.

Now IronHead actually has some pretty good land (by Fury Road standards ;)). That swath of desert not withstanding, he has 2 good rivers to provide fresh water. But I don't think he's laid down a single farm or chopped a single tree. Except for the occasional cottage, the land looks mostly undeveloped. Makes me wonder if he lost his Workers to barbs? :dunno:

or maybe your start location has a more farmable neighborhood?I have a single river ambling through my capital and a wheat source. My 2nd city had gold, but no food resources. It was close enough to my capital though, that I could set up a farm chain to bring in water. My 3rd city was forested grassland. Once again, no food resource but quite a few ruins for production and cottages on the grassland. I normally wouldn't have prioritized this city, except that I was afraid Mick would beat me to it. Maybe if it had more ice, he would have. :rolleyes: My 4th city picked up oil and seafood. Other than that, it is worthless. After that, I settled wheat and a bunch of ruins. It is my powerhouse production city. Fresh water is farm chained in from my capital. Otherwise junkyards on plains. More ruins and some seafood in my next city. Not many land tiles, but they are farmed with irrigation from my capital.

The other thing I should mention is that I try to keep around 2 or 4 forests around for the extra health. Otherwise, they all will eventually get chopped along with all of the jungle.

Now IronHead actually has some pretty good land (by Fury Road standards ;)). That swath of desert not withstanding, he has 2 good rivers to provide fresh water. But I don't think he's laid down a single farm or chopped a single tree. Except for the occasional cottage, the land looks mostly undeveloped. Makes me wonder if he lost his Workers to barbs? :dunno: I have another, possible connected observation here:
The AI seems to have overall much less improved tiles and less workers. Usually the AI will deploy true armies of workers, going on Lumberjack Crusades and later improving. Not so here.

I would be interested in the cuase of this. Two things i can think of:

- Forest not giving chop-:hammers:, so AI is less compelled to chop it. (In default game the AI will usually settle and chop-free dschungle cities rather late, and in Fury road Forest=Jungle)

- AI loosing lots of workers to Barbs ? The AI awareness of workers beeing under threat is overall very low - "Worker Snagging" is after all one of principal AI exploits in the default game already.
I know that me is loosing a lot more workers in Fury Road - 3 or 4 per game on average, while it is 0 - 1 in default game.
I.E. those Highway traveling Wolves are a PITA - there is not way to see them coming. If my land is adjacent to a highway i usually protect my Workes by 1 or 2 units. The AI is not aware of this pecularity.
Is it possible to collect a statisic on AI worker losses ?

We are certainly accumulating a bunch of theories about why there are fewer AI farms. It is true that I almost always keep at least a survivor stacked with my workers, especially when working in ruins that can pop animals too close. In conroe's screenies, I do not see a dense road network. That is usually the sign of bored workers.

I can collect statistics on destroyed workers with onUnitKilled. Maybe I can turn up a correlation between underdeveloped civs and civs with "more" workers killed. If this is true, then I would expect civs that are surrounded by water or other civs, to have an advantage over civs that have big wastelands around. I don't know how to tell the AI to defend workers better; but at least we can establish what is *causing* the problem.

It seems possible that the farm weight is helping some. I would be interested in feedback on the modified leaderheadinfo file I posted which has a higher farm weight for everybody. If nothing else it should reduce the number of junkyards built by several of the AI's.

I played a game with your modified XML.

I seen a lot of farms beeing built, but i also seen a lot of farms beeing built over by Cottages/Junkjards (and the other way around)

It's typical AI behaviour - it will change a cities overall strategy sometimes - like think of lets make this city production... Then 5 turns later... Oh mayabe commerce... - this will result in reevaluating terrain and building improvements over. You can often see the AI workshoping or farming over TOWNS in standard game :crazyeye:... This is not Fury-Road issue - but once again - it might be more harmfull here because of the difficult terrain.

Overall the AI seemed to have a bit more population - i was only able to achieve 23% world pop (With 7 from initially 9 AI alive) by the time i lost by Vision (More on this in Gamaplay Feedback Thread).

As you may know I have been struggling with the exact mechanism for vision victory. I had thought each capitol should found a vision for its own civ, but I was staying away from that because I thought it would require an SDK mod to support > 7 religions.

However, that does not seem to be the case! The eighth religion you define seems to just use the first corporation font character. So I have just set up a religioninfo file with 14 religions, and it seems to correctly use all 14 of the religion+corporation font characters. Since I don't want corporations anyway, this seems to be ideal. I can cut the number of leader/civs down to 14 (bye, Max and Keith) and build a font character for each city flag. Instead of letting you choose which vision you want to found when you build a capitol, you will just automatically get the one which corresponds to your civ.

I can see a couple of things I need to adjust, like making the religion screen *much* wider or making the spacing for the icons much tighter there; also the city screen doesn't support 14 religions only 7. That may be unfixable but I haven't looked into the city screen python yet.

I haven't tried a game yet. But, it occurs to me after all this planning, what I have really done is exactly duplicate the Chinese Unification scenario only with 14 civs instead of 7. Somehow, I had not realized that. Maybe it is still ok. Any thoughts?

I think it is worth a try. It will eliminate a lot of issues.

but I was staying away from that because I thought it would require an SDK mod to support > 7 religions.
And sorry i did not realized what was your difficultie in adding more visions, because that i could have told you :blush:

You can even set up more than 14 by adding icons. And you can re-append corporation icons after the expanded religions, if needed, as long as there is enought space in the gamefont file - there is space for about 24 icon pairs.

Below is a example Gamefont, where i added 2 religions, while retaining all the corps.

The screen thingy can be solved as well. Attached gamescreens Python (Initially Created by Johny Smith, and modified/fixed a few glitches by me). It will make the Religion advisor screen scroll, to display as many religions as needed (and only display those that are actually founded).
Also will make the city screen use smaller icons if necessary, so it can display more than 7 present visions (again, will only display those, that are actually present now.)

Cool! The screens thing will save me a lot of time. Of course the fun part will be building the 56! new icons I need -- 14 civs x holy/nonholy x gamefonts/gamefonts75 and then cutting them into the gamefonts files.

OK, the 14-"religion" game is up and autoplaying. I didn't make "holy" font characters, I am not sure I will bother. I also added (one line of code) so that when a religion is founded, the founder converts to it. This is the key issue from refar's game feedback. I may have a chance to manually play a game tomorrow morning, but I'll have 2-3 autoplays by then.

Something that bothered me a bit on the mod sofar on the graphic side: are people moving on to hamlets and such supposed to build ruined houses to live in? I wonder if some sort of huts wouldn't be better. Perhaps also the cities could have huts appear amid the ruined buildings once the population starts to grow bigger.

Also, asio released some time back this (http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=9884) mine graphic. Perhaps something to replace the mines in Fury Road with?

Is there a way to separately control the town graphics? I have not done anything specific to get them; it seems they are just copies of the city graphic. So I am not sure how to display one thing for the city, and a different thing for the town.

I have tried to use the "modern" mine, but it is not working; the "ancient" mine always displays. Perhaps that is overridden somewhere I cannot find. I will put asio's mine onto the to-do list.

Cottages are generated from the civ4PlotLSystem file (but you already knew that), and that file has alot more leeway then the Civ4CityLSystem file. You can mix and match about any graphic for improvements.
If you want me to, I could make an example file with say houses from the english/russian citysets Woodelf created next to his ruined cityset you're already using.
Or if you think primitive huts/houses would be better, I could use Firaxis' ancient era cityset with a retexture to let the buildings look more reddish (brickstones).

@geomodder: another playtester commented that once the cities start to get built up, it seems odd that the graphics would still show up as all ruined buildings. This is similar. I have intentionally removed all the eras from the game, but maybe it would make sense to have a "partly rebuilt" era and a "mostly rebuilt" era. We could use the same or similar graphics for cities and towns.

I have never looked into the L-system stuff except for one exploration on walls. If you are interested, it would be nice to have some new graphics which are not quite so ruined. But, I don't want to just re-use the ancient artwork. The idea is that they have knowledge of modern construction techniques (the scourge was only 20 years ago), plenty of access to scraps, but not much access to working equipment. I am thinking of rusty metal sheds and similar, with bits of ruined buildings stuck on.

Related to the ruins idea, I have never quite liked the look of the "city ruins" graphic from vanilla which I am using on the initial map. It doesn't tile, for one thing, and it looks like ruined peasant huts. I can sort of see how the 16 different graphic objects tile together for trees and such. But, I have no idea how to actually do it. I'd love it if a volunteer could make an improved city ruins terrain type that tiles.

@geomodder: another playtester commented that once the cities start to get built up, it seems odd that the graphics would still show up as all ruined buildings. This is similar. I have intentionally removed all the eras from the game, but maybe it would make sense to have a "partly rebuilt" era and a "mostly rebuilt" era. We could use the same or similar graphics for cities and towns.

I have never looked into the L-system stuff except for one exploration on walls. If you are interested, it would be nice to have some new graphics which are not quite so ruined. But, I don't want to just re-use the ancient artwork. The idea is that they have knowledge of modern construction techniques (the scourge was only 20 years ago), plenty of access to scraps, but not much access to working equipment. I am thinking of rusty metal sheds and similar, with bits of ruined buildings stuck on.

Related to the ruins idea, I have never quite liked the look of the "city ruins" graphic from vanilla which I am using on the initial map. It doesn't tile, for one thing, and it looks like ruined peasant huts. I can sort of see how the 16 different graphic objects tile together for trees and such. But, I have no idea how to actually do it. I'd love it if a volunteer could make an improved city ruins terrain type that tiles.

Well, if such a chabby (sp?) cityset existed, I could easily blend it in with the ruined one with xml. I'm not a modeler though, so if you want a cityset like that you need to ask the graphical talented.
On a tiled ruins 'improvement', I'll have a look what is possible with xml.

Okay, I'm onto something for shabby looking cottages. Give me some time to work it out. :D

On another topic, didn't you want to limit unit movement in certain circumstances for roads, David? Perhaps this (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=7067741) might be useful as a starting point in that direction?

Thanks for taking on the cottage project. Also thanks for the pointer on road movement; see my post there. Neither this new mod, nor the two previous similar mods, do what I *really* want -- some units should only get road movement rate on railroads.

The screen thingy can be solved as well. Attached gamescreens Python (Initially Created by Johny Smith, and modified/fixed a few glitches by me). It will make the Religion advisor screen scroll, to display as many religions as needed (and only display those that are actually founded).

I have played almost all the way through my first 14 religion game. The religion screen python does exactly what I need in terms of the scrollbar and the religions not appearing until needed.

However, the influence percentage field appears to be always blank. Does it work for you? It is possible it has something to do with the renaming of visions, or some further changes I have locally in 0.9. I bring up "your" religion screen and all the influences are blank. Then I save, exit, remove the mod copy of CvReligionScreen.py file to go back to the vanilla religion screen, restart the game, and load the saved game. Now the influences are displayed correctly.

If you have a chance, could you look into that? It "should" happen the same way with the present release version 0.8.

Here's a proof of concept.
I linked some modern farm buildings, the modern windmill, the modern plantation and some old graphics from Woodelf in the cottage system. There's still a few glitches which need attention, but its just to show you what's possible.

Is this something you could envision in the mod?

As a concept, I definitely agree. The ruined buildings are great for the initial position, but become less "reasonable" as you rebuild.

I would set it up so that when you achieve "construction" tech, you get half ruined, half rebuilt buildings. Since construction is required for villages anyway, that means the villages will never show up "100% ruined", which is fine. Then maybe engineering, or maybe some later tech, would get rid of the ruined buildings altogether.

As actual images, I don't think the particular buildings you picked out fit quite right. As you said this is just an example. For the "partly ruined" ones, maybe something halfway between the actual ruined ones by woodelf, and the clean, modern ones you have here.

Today the same assortment of buildings appear in the city as the town. If you make any better graphics, I would prefer to keep them in sync. Or, if they continue to use all the same buildings, that would be fine too.

Again, I can't make graphics. I'm an xml tinkerer, not an artist.

Sorry to burst your bubble there, but that's how it is. If you get the graphics you want from another source, I can put them in the mod, but that's it.

Also, there seems to be a misunderstanding here. What I showed you on the picture is that it's possible to have hamlets, cottages, villages and towns (the improvement that increases commerce output of a plot) graphics from whatever source, and I thought these graphics came closest to what could be a possible post-apocalyptic township improvement. These are NOT the kind of buildings I would put in a city if I had to decide on it.

Sorry sorry sorry. I missed your two statements that you don't do graphics. I did not miss your statement that these graphics were only an example, I understand that.

I can't do graphics either, but I can modify text files pretty well. Are your changes in the L-system XML only, or also nif? If you can explain how to do it, then later on if I get an artist type to make buildings, I can mix them in.

Would your mixing technique help at all in my other problem, which is a tiling set of ruined city features? I don't know if that is done completely at the nif level or partly at xml. If we had a set of ruined buildings made by some other artist, it would be cool if I could use them for the ruined city feature also.

EDIT: thinking about it more, maybe the L-system could help even more. I don't know anything about how it works really. But one problem I have is that I have a bunch of the improvements are built on top of ruins. If you have the mod installed, look at the bonuses like ruined depot, etc. They are obviously just "stuck on top" of the ruins graphic and they interpenetrate horribly. Similarly, if you put a recycling center on one of the ruins, it also looks pretty bad.

Is it possible to convert the whole ruins thing to use an L-system? Then a ruined plot could re-adjust itself when a recycling center was built. I was trying to avoid having a huge number of different possible tiles (16 for a tiling set x 4 possible improvements) and I kind of ran out of ideas.

No problem. :)

On your ruins problem, I was going to look into it. I already did a quick search for the ruined_city xml yesterday but sofar couldn't locate any code dictating how it works. It might be that it's "hidden" somewhere in the SDK, and I don't have a compiler so can't look there.
I will attempt to test in the PlotLSystem file, but this will take a longer time since its working week and such now. ;)

The Civ4 Runied city is a improvement, if you mean this... (You can pillage it too... But gives no gold...) Davids runied cites are terrain feature i think - so tiling should work the same as on forests...

I wonder if forest cutting like improvements do it will work on other features...

Regarding tiled features, here is what I was able to figure out a while back. If you look in a directory like art/terrain/features/treeleafy, you will see 15 nif files. If you look at the nif files in something like nifskope, just viewing them, you will see that they have all 15 combinations of corners: just NE, just NW, just SE, just SW, 6 combinations of two corners, 4 combinations of three corners, and one with all four corners. So something in the SDK or possibly XML will look to see which corners of this plot touch other corners with the same terrain, and pick out the appropriate tile.

I haven't looked further to see where the bits come from, that go into the nif file. I had the idea of copying the 15 treeleafy files and hacking in buildings instead of trees; and then somehow getting the engine to use the tiling algorithm when displaying ruins. But I have no actual idea of how to go about either part.

However, the influence percentage field appears to be always blank. [...] If you have a chance, could you look into that?

@refar: never mind. There was one line commented out in "your" religion screen, which actually printed the influence percentage on the screen. I uncommented the line and it seems to be working. (Search for "Influence" in the file and see a few lines below that.)

Not sure if this is better off in the development thread or the playtest thread.

I have completed a couple of games with the new vision setup. Each civ has its own advocate so there are 14 religions; each capitol founds the religion of its civ. Also I have changed the game so that founding a capitol automatically converts the civ to its own religion. Today I added an action button for the advocate to remove "foreign" visions from a city. This gives "active defense" against visions. I have not made the AI use it yet; that will be a challenge, although I know how to approach it.

I don't think anybody will claim a vision victory is too easy anymore!

In one game, I chose a different strategy: no oil! I wanted to go for a fast vision victory. Five player game on "noble" difficulty. I got agriculture for cavalry, then beelined to the capitol, and spammed advocates. Everybody except one guy gave me OB, and I rocketed right up to around 65% vision percentage by around turn 140. I think I may have crept up above 67% briefly, but not for the required ten turns. It may be possible to get a "vision blitz victory" this way, possibly I was just a few turns away, but that was the highest my percentage got.

I went the "south route" on the tech tree to get computers, and used the free tech to get rocketry. This enables building the strongest infantry, even though they are expensive. From my one silo, I had a couple of cruise missiles and one tacnuke.

Peter, the one guy who wouldn't give me open borders was also far away on the map. I had a small army poised on his border when things started to fall apart, around turn 160. One ally, Brian, finished a capitol, and spread vision in his own borders. That cut my vision coverage down to around 55% and dropping.

My army in Peter's territory was not able to make progress. If I could capture one city, I could instantly rebase my cruise missiles there and strike a second city, but I could not get that far. I had to use up the cruise missiles to stop a counterattack in my territory.

Meanwhile Brian had started sending advocates into my territory, so I cut off open borders, which made him annoyed. Then he declared war, so I gave up half my cash to make peace with Peter. Fortunately Brian was kind enough to put two large attack stacks near each other, in his own territory, so I dropped my one tacnuke on him. Then I was able to take one of his smaller cities, but I didn't have enough units to go any further.

So, it's around turn 200, and within two turns the other two players both finished capitols. It hasn't hurt my vision percentage yet, but I can't see how to get it any higher unless I stomp one or two of the other players. I have one depot captured from Brian and I just started another. Even though I don't have oil, I captured five fuel trucks from the one city I captured, so I could at least start an army once the depots start producing.

The game isn't completely stuck, but it doesn't seem like the horse and infantry strategy was quite the right one. So I'll give up on it for now.

Progress of sorts, but inevitably with problems.

In the attachment you can see city ruins above and on the right of a city. It's a nif file I composed from the ruined cityset.
As you can see, there's a scaling difference. I think I can solve that. As you might not see at first (look carefully to the ground level of the ruins) the subterranean parts of the model below the shades doesn't go below the terrain tile. Essentially, the shadows are hovering above the ground. It's even worse on a hill. The model simply doesn't follow the shape of it. I have no idea how to solve this issue. I guess it should be solvable since trees and jungles follow the shape of the land and have subterranean parts.

The easiest solution would be to let city ruins appear as improvements rather then features on the map, but again, I have no idea if a mapscript can handle something like that. In any case, letting city ruins appear as an improvement has the advantage that they will disappear/move aside when stuff like silos, airbases and such can be seen after the technology for it is discovered.

So, any point I continue on this approach (feature ruins)?

There are two main goals to make the city ruin a feature. The first is to allow tiling. In your screenshot, I can't quite tell if the two ruins plots tile. If you put two of your ruins tiles east and west of each other, would the border between be filled in like trees? It should be an oval, not two circles.

The second goal is to allow the resources underneath to be hidden until revealed by the right tech. The trick with revealing is that some players may have the tech and some may not. There may be several ways to make this work. I guess if the city ruin is an improvement, and the resource doesn't cause the L-system to readjust, then this would be ok. In python I can probably handle swapping one kind of improvement for another. I do not know how to cover all cases where the improvement is removed, particularly if the user does something unexpected in WB. But I may be able to get it close enough.

I definitely think it's worth pursuing as long as these two goals can be achieved eventually. What do you think?

Erm, as far as I know, features don't allow tiling. Improvements do like you can see with the cottages in the normal game. Or do you have another meaning on 'tiling'?
As you said yourself, the jungle/forest features aren't tiled, but an assembly of tree graphics put together in a single nif in the right quadrant of a tile to look proper. I've done the same with the ruin feature you see on the screenshot.

As on the double improvement thing, that can be solved by adding some buildings from the ruined cityset to the improvement itself. Essentially the same as what the farms do.

Having city ruins as an improvement solves my scaling -and tile alignment problem in one go, and there's no need to create 15 niffiles to cover all compass directions of a tile.

As far as I can tell, featuring forest/jungles works as follows: the engine looks on the neighbouring tiles, and chooses the .nif file most appropriate to fill it. So if a tile is for example surrounded by forests, it will use the Evergreen15_01.nif. If all neighbouring tiles except the NW is covered by forest, it will use the Evergreen14_01.nif, and so on...
So, there's no tiling as I understand it involved.

Btw, in which file did you put the code for where silos, airbases and such appear? I can't find a Civ4PlotLSystem.xml file anywhere in the mod...

Look, here's a screenshot of what happens if I replace the Evergreen01_01.nif with my ruined .nif file. Note that this is exactly the same building layout as on the previous screenshot. The engine simply decided that that's a spot where this niffile is appropriate for the lay of the forest.

That's what feature 'tiling' is about.

Or do you have another meaning on 'tiling'? [...] As far as I can tell, featuring forest/jungles works as follows: the engine looks on the neighbouring tiles, and chooses the .nif file most appropriate to fill it.

That is what I meant by tiling. I want the city to look like the forest in this type of screenshot:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=184735&d=1217780596

From the mapscript standpoint, those two are identical: two adjacent forest features, and two adjacent city ruin features. If only I had 15 correctly constructed city ruin features, and knew how to tell the engine to use them, then I could get that effect.

Btw, in which file did you put the code for where silos, airbases and such appear? I can't find a Civ4PlotLSystem.xml file anywhere in the mod...

I have never worked with the L-system. The most advanced thing I did is to copy the "wall" L-system twice so that I can have barbed wire barricades or rusty metal walls. There are three resources/bonuses, "ruined depot", "ruined airbase" and "ruined silo". There are three improvements, "depot", "airbase" and "silo". Just like any other resource + improvement pair, the resource graphic is drawn when it is revealed, and the improvement graphic is drawn on top of it when built.

So, in short, you want a single .nif file that fills the complete plot with citybuildings.
That's relatively easy. :)

While I'm at it, do you want the farm building graphics to look more modern or as they are now (now they use the graphics from the first screenshot)?
See screenshots below...

So, in short, you want a single .nif file that fills the complete plot with citybuildings.
That's relatively easy. :)

What I'd like is to have the city ruins show up as oval, not a big rectangle. I have added a line for emphasis. As you have said, the forest is not just a single nif file that fills the complete plot. The corners are rounded. This is done by selecting from among the 15 forest nif files.

184743

While I'm at it, do you want the farm building graphics to look more modern or as they are now (now they use the graphics from the first screenshot)?

There is something going on here which I have never figured out. In my ArtDefines_Improvement, I am only calling out the modern farm. For some reason, in the early game, the ancient farm is drawn anyway, which is wrong. But by the late game, the modern farm is drawn correctly. In general I don't want any ancient buildings. I am not sure what is wrong with my files, to cause the ancient farm to appear sometimes.

What I'd like is to have the city ruins show up as oval, not a big rectangle. I have added a line for emphasis. As you have said, the forest is not just a single nif file that fills the complete plot. The corners are rounded. This is done by selecting from among the 15 forest nif files.

Wow, you're asking much, and there's no guarantee it will work...

There is something going on here which I have never figured out. In my ArtDefines_Improvement, I am only calling out the modern farm. For some reason, in the early game, the ancient farm is drawn anyway, which is wrong. But by the late game, the modern farm is drawn correctly. In general I don't want any ancient buildings. I am not sure what is wrong with my files, to cause the ancient farm to appear sometimes.

That's because you omitted to put the correct era tag in the Civ4TechInfos file.
If you switch the <Era>ERA_ANCIENT</Era> tag with <Era>ERA_MODERN</Era> you won't have this problem. You don't even need to specifically call modern era improvements then.

Any leads/tips/code you can give me on how to get the oval shaped cities will be helpful. It bothers me that my ruined mega-city on 10-12 plots shows up as 10-12 little circles instead of one nice shape.

When I first picked up modding, I tried using ERA_MODERN, but I could not get everything to work consistently. Maybe I did not / do not understand how all the tags fit together. But what I have tried to do is make everything use ERA_ANCIENT and the "early" artdefines.

Is there something I have missed to modify, which is causing the modern farm to not show up at the beginning of the game?

Well, it of course hinders that you don't include a Civ4PlotLSystem.xml file in your mod. In that file, you can let your techs be on ERA_ANCIENT and let your modern farms appear in the ancient era.

Btw, if you put all your techs on modern era, your city graphics will disappear. Unless you change the era_ancient to era_modern in the Civ4CityLSystem.xml file too and remove all the other era cityart.

Perhaps it's best pick up the city and cottage xml and make it foolproof? ;)

Now the bad news: I did a little test, and the game engine consistently only uses the first nif file from the 15 I include when I link forest -or jungle art to the ruins feature.
It's starting to look like the forests and jungles have extra code refered in the SDK, which does not extends to other features using the same nif files.

So, at this point, there's no point in creating 15 nif files with ruined buildings. The best I can do is create a nif file completely stacked with ruined buildings like in the Jungle15_01.nif file or the forest equivalents.

I don't understand Civ4PlotLSystem.xml. I looked through the farm part, and the only thing it seems to reference is the farm improvement. In ArtDefines_Improvement, I have given the graphic as the modern farm. Of course I can trivially copy the BTS file into my mod, but you must have meant something more than that. What should I modify in it to always get the modern farm? Since ERA_ANCIENT is used in many files, I would prefer to keep that rather than trying to change everything to ERA_MODERN.

Refar has remixed the bombed building nif file so that it has the same contents as the real structures/cities/an_eu.nif, and now it is working. It also seems to be working for villages. When you suggest I should pick up the city and cottage xml to make it foolproof, I do not understand what that means. Can you help me to understand better?

I appreciate your effort to make oval-shaped ruins; if it is not possible without digging into the SDK, then let us give up on that. If you can make a completely stacked nif for the ruins feature, that is still better than what I have now.

Refar has remixed the bombed building nif file so that it has the same contents as the real structures/cities/an_eu.nif, and now it is working. It also seems to be working for villages. When you suggest I should pick up the city and cottage xml to make it foolproof, I do not understand what that means. Can you help me to understand better?

Ah, Refar did this? It's a commendable job, but a few times he linked buildings to too small a leafnode, increasing the chances city buildings are connecting.
With making foolproof I meant that I simply delete all code from the Civ4PlotLSystem file which isn't necessary. Since you don't plan to use different era's in the mod, classical to future cityart references are not needed. And your whole techtree is situated in the ancient era too (I checked).
On the modern farm issue, I'll try to let it appear all the time and reference it properly so you can see for yourself.

I appreciate your effort to make oval-shaped ruins; if it is not possible without digging into the SDK, then let us give up on that. If you can make a completely stacked nif for the ruins feature, that is still better than what I have now.

I'll compose a completely stacked city ruins nif then. If you want graphics from other sources in it (for instance flat buildings from the modern era cityset, properly retextured to look ruined, but someone else should do the retexture then), somewhere coming week is the time to tell...

The main work is done, as you can see on the screenshots. The first screenshot is ruins only, the second ruins with a fury road settlement in the centre. I think the scaling comes pretty close, if not perfect.
I did some last-minute adjustments after the screenshots so all ruins should be within their tile borders now and won't overlap with adjacent ruins.

The problem now is that the "cellars" of the buildings don't go below groundlevel.
The only quick solution I can offer for flatland tiles is to remove the shadows of the cityset, so they won't look to 'float' so offen.

For hill ruins, I wonder if you could adapt the mapscript so that hill ruins link to another artfile? I could try to adapt the ruins so that they are on different 'levels' in respect to their position (higher in the centre, lower on the edges).
Essentially, two ruins features then. One for flatlands, one for hills. Possible?

I made a cleaned-up Civ4CityLSystem.xml file too. Might be handier for you in the future if you want to add more buildings or so.

The Civ4PlotLSystem.xml file I still have to do.

These look very nice.
Am I wrong or do buildings in the city look smaller than in ruins? I'd suggest to make surrounding non-city ruins to be smaller too and maybe a bit darker, I think that a settlement should look more noticeable than surrounding tiles.

Also as far as I remember the game does not place trees on rivers. Can you use the same script for your ruins? Or does the game simply use the "nif with a river" for forests to avoid trees on rivers?

It's a fixed .nif file, no script involved so the run of the river can't be taken into account.
The buildings in the city look smaller because there's a problem with the game engine regarding the 'subterranean' parts of the ruins. In any case, the overal size of the ruins can still be tinkered with in the CIV4ArtDefines_Feature.xml file.
Retexturing of the ruins has to be done by an artist, which I'm not. I only used existing art and put in in a new .nif file.

Ah, now I see it. There are various slopes under the buildings which should be underground, right?
I didn't notice them for the first time.

DavidLallen,

I figured out how to adjust the height on which the nif file 'floats' over the terrain. Seems like the main problem was that I mixed 2 citysets in 1 file.
In my opinion it looks fairly good on flat land. It's still possible to tinker with individual buildings so there's absolutely no subterranean parts of the building showing up on completely flat land. But that will be a time-consuming job because of the need to fire up the mod, check ingame, get out of the game, tinker in the niffile until the right building is found and adjust the right subnode of it. Is it worth the effort?
On coastal/hilly edges there always will be floating buildings. Nothing I can do to avoid that.

This niffile doesn't work for hill ruins, if you can create in xml/python a new hill ruin feature and adjust the mapscript to take it into account I can adjust the niffile so that central buildings are higher positioned then buildings on the edge of a hill tile. Just waiting to hear from you before I start on that.

You just need to unrar the assets attachment and drop it in your mod folder in order to let it work. Say "yes" to any overwrite popups and have a look ingame. ;)
the attachment includes a trimmed down CityLSystem.xml, the adjusted artdefines_features.xml, and of course the ruins.nif files.

This is looking pretty interesting.

One unexpected result is that the buildings don't "avoid" rivers and roads like forest does. Does anybody know why trees never appear on rivers and roads, so we could get the same effect with ruins?

Regarding a separate ruin feature for hills, that is possible. It is easy to handle in the mapscript, one line of extra code. One possible complication is the bonuses and improvements. Presently many of the bonuses and improvements are restricted to only appear with the ruin feature.

Is it possible to use the "FeatureVariety" keyword for this? That is, could the nif for "hill feature" be treated as a variety of ruin instead of a different feature? I am not sure exactly how that works, but in the text WBS file you can see the variety keyword used to select pine forest vs general forest, for example. Otherwise I would have to go through and find all the places where something is restricted to the ruin feature, and then put duplicate tags to also allow them on the hill ruin feature.

Does anybody know why trees, and other improvements allowed on hills, do not have this problem of their basements showing?

One unexpected result is that the buildings don't "avoid" rivers and roads like forest does. Does anybody know why trees never appear on rivers and roads, so we could get the same effect with ruins?
I actually asked this in the post # 62 and GeoModder doesn't know how to handle this.
I'm a noob too in everything but XML/2d art/some python so let's hope that some great mind will help us with it.

This is looking pretty interesting.

One unexpected result is that the buildings don't "avoid" rivers and roads like forest does. Does anybody know why trees never appear on rivers and roads, so we could get the same effect with ruins?

My guess is that the game engine "reads" the river during map generation and places an appropriate forest/jungle .nif. Something that isn't possible here since the game engine only wants to read the first ruins niffile I link it to. One of those things I suspect are hardcoded in the engine. :(

Regarding a separate ruin feature for hills, that is possible. It is easy to handle in the mapscript, one line of extra code. One possible complication is the bonuses and improvements. Presently many of the bonuses and improvements are restricted to only appear with the ruin feature.

It's easy to test. Add the extra line in the mapscript, add an entry for a hill ruins feature (use whatever graphic you want to) in the artdefines_feature and see if both the feature graphic and the bonuses/improvements show up when the necessary tech is researched.

Is it possible to use the "FeatureVariety" keyword for this? That is, could the nif for "hill feature" be treated as a variety of ruin instead of a different feature? I am not sure exactly how that works, but in the text WBS file you can see the variety keyword used to select pine forest vs general forest, for example. Otherwise I would have to go through and find all the places where something is restricted to the ruin feature, and then put duplicate tags to also allow them on the hill ruin feature.

I think this is also hardcoded for the game engine. :( At least, only the forest feature seems to use it for the appropriate climate areas for trees.

Asked broader audience at this thread (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=286844).

My guess is that the game engine "reads" the river during map generation and places an appropriate forest/jungle .nif.

I am not an expert, but I think there is more to it. We have agreed that the set of forest nif's is based on which corners are touching other plots of the same type. I do not think there are additional *nifs* for each possible location of a river and/or road. I think something in the engine must delete individual trees out of the nif, if it is on a river or road. I have asked on the general customization forum, let us see if some higher level wizard knows the answer.

Actually, you had mentioned about tree cutting in this post (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=7015390&postcount=144), I guess I thought that was related to avoiding trees on top of rivers. Does that only apply to improvements?

I think [FeatureVariety] is also hardcoded for the game engine. :( At least, only the forest feature seems to use it for the appropriate climate areas for trees.

Could you try an experiment? If you put two different versions of the nif into different FeatureVarieties, you could use notepad to edit a WBS file. Put variety #0 into one plot and put variety #1 into an adjacent plot. If that works, it would save a lot of redundant coding in the bonus/improvement xml.

Will be for tomorrow or the day after. Have to call it the day.

The engine does cut trees on roads, some improvements and maybe rivers. However no one seem to have the slightest idea on how it is working.

The ruins on rivers/roads graphic glitch is a pain, but it isn't really that bad. It isn't that noticable unless you're zoomed way in. Good luck fixing it anyways.

@ geomodder, maybe refar: please see the new, long discussion in this thread (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=286844) about feature nifs.

Most of that explanation is beyond me, davidlallen. :(

I guess the bottom line is, unless a 3d artist rebuilds that nif from scratch, we cannot have the ruins buildings avoid rivers.

What's needed? 15 nifs which stay within the outline of the 15 forest/jungle nifs?

The mentioning of that slowdown of his system is probably because the ruin nif is 2 merged citysets, making the nif well over a megabyte large.

A few more details from that thread -- I took your ruins nif and one vanilla tree related nif, and put them into an identical XML framework. The tree one respects roads, and the ruins one doesn't. So the only possible difference is in the nif itself. Unfortunately the two nifs have completely different internal structures. What would be required is to study the tree nif and understand its structures better, and then rebuild the ruins nif from scratch so it "looks like that". I think only a 3d artist could do it. Even though it doesn't involve any new art, it involves much deeper understanding of the nif structure than I have, anyway.

Well yes, the tree nifs are a single entity. I joined two cityset nifs (twice the same one), and rotated half the buildings for variation. Also, citynifs keep the buildings as separate entities since that is needed for putting them in nodes for the cottages and cities ingame.

I had a quick look in nifscope but couldn't find an option to join different nodes together. But I don't know how such an option would be named either, so that's hardly definite.

Sorry for breaking into the current discussion of the feature, but while the main thread is about general development feedback I'd like to point here (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=7134889&postcount=30) because there're not tech ideas only but many others, mostly about civics and the direction of the research/actions after the apocalypse.
I ask this here too because I want to know the davidlallen (http://forums.civfanatics.com/member.php?u=142372)'s comments on this and to have a permission to do a "playtesting tech modmod" to use that techtree and new civics (not vanilla); I don't see a massive civic discussion yet so this may be a nice start.
I want to make it because I have a free time for a week or two and it may be helpful with new ideas to develop your perfect mod further (and to playtest techtree combinations).

A short question on 0.9... I see there is a dll in the release ? Which one is it ? Are there any changes, or is it to ensure compartibility ?

It is JRouteNative (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=284471), so that foot units and animals do not get railroad movement speeds. It affects CIV4UnitInfosSchema.xml and CIV4UnitInfos.xml.

Ach cool, it was a needed change.

As we were talking XP and promotions in the other thread... I had a somewhat radical idea a while ago...

How about the Leader of the Civ gaining XP ?
Since the time scale in Fury Road is short enought to -more or less- be the life span of a single leader, it would be cool to develop the character a bit...

Of course at much slower rate than units - maybe a scaling comparable with Great People generation, so a leader would gain a few (like 3 to 5) levels over the course of the game.

As reward there could be a selection of "perks" - extra traits no leader has in the beginning, but leaders can take on new level...

-----

Technically i know leaders can be given more than 2 traits... so it should be possible to add new traits while the game is in progress. AI could use pre-defined "learning plans".
It is of course some conding involved here... but i think it's not a impossible task.

How about the Leader of the Civ gaining XP ?

That is a common idea in many other games, but you are right it is new to civ. The civ leader is always offscreen, so any ability given to the leader is global. I could envision a trait tree for this leader. It might be increased strength of existing traits, or additional traits.

I was also thinking about "onscreen" leaders. I might experiment with this idea in some other mod, not Fury Road. In vanilla civ, a Great General is "onscreen" and moves around, but his main effect on combat is to give a few units, a few levels of XP. For a particular combat, it doesn't matter whether the leader is there or not.

Suppose leaders had a trait/promotion tree with effects like "+3 happiness in my city", or "+20% combat strength to all units in my stack", or "+25% food production in my city". With a game scale that really takes place in one lifetime, you might have one leader, or maybe as you advance you attract a second or third leader. Each leader would have enough impact that the exact location of the leader is important.

In a multi-generation game, you could also have a family tree of leaders. A leader may grow old and lose promotions. New, young leaders may spring up. It would be possible to have dynasties of leaders, where the child of a leader is not available to lead until age, say 16, but then has some traits related to the parent. This has also been done in other games, like the Total War series, but would be new to civ.

A on-screen leader might be a problem - there are multiple games trying this (not least Civ3 with the Regicide game mode) - and all fail miserably because the AI seem completely unable to understand - let alone defend against - the sudden death from loosing the leader.

This of course could be eased up a bit, if loosing the leader would not mean loosing the game.

Setting up a "family" sounds cool.

Good point about the AI. If you think about a leader bonus like +3 Happiness in a city, a human player would move the leader around from one city to another to make sure the city with the worst happiness problem had the leader. I am sure there is no related AI routine which would help with that.

I wasn't thinking that the game would end due to losing the leader. I agree that would be a severe game balance problem. But even if losing the leader doesn't *lose* the game, the AI would have to balance the benefit of using a combat leader in a particular combat, vs the risk of permanently losing it.

This might be somewaht simpler, with the "Family" approach - like in Total War games - the AI does keep loosing the Leaders/Heirs in dumb actions, but since the families are usually somawhat big-ish, it doe snot have too big impact...
At the same time of course the leaders become "less special" for the human as well...