I've updated the "Change Log" sticky with my notes thus far for this update, and will try to keep it updated every few days.

So far the only SDK change has been the Sandworm fix back in April, but I'll be getting on to more of that shortly.

XML highlights so far include two new units, one new resource, tweaking some Future Era unit stats, and overhauling many civic stats.

Feel free to use this thread to comment on the changes so far, and on this version specifically after it's finished and posted. The main thread will remain the place to discuss the mod as a whole.

(This is my debut attempt at adding more threads to the subforum btw, so please use it! :p)

So much for the dedicated "version xyz discussion thread" idea, lol. Oh well, I'll stick with it anyway. :)

PM 3.2, combined with the Marsh, Scrub and Oasis rainfall-based placement I've added, is churning out some freakin amazin mapz just so you guys know. ;) I'm REALLY excited to be able to play on them eventually.

I'm continuing to make some more XML changes at the moment. I still want to try and tackle a couple of heavy-lifting code projects in this update too, but if they're gonna drag on for a huge amount of time I'll just release what I've got at a certain point.

But seriously... PM 3.2 MME is a big deal as far as improvements to the mod go, and exhausting as it was, I'm glad I updated the mapscript. That's all I'm sayin. :p

Edit - Nevermind, I'm an idiot. Carry on...

Hey Lunarmongoose,

don't be frustrated. You are not the only one out there who is playing Mongoose Mod. We are a group of three, that is playing Mongoose Mod once every week.

It is a fantastic Mod, better than any other Variant of Civilization that I have played before.

Currently I am working on a huge map of Africa for Mongoose Mod, which I will finish sometime in February. I will post it here then. It's already more then 50% finished, but it's really big and I am trying to make it as realistic and as playable as possible at the same time, and that simply takes a while.

I am also going to post a more detailed feedback shortly, inlcuding some suggestions for improvements.

don't be frustrated. You are not the only one out there who is playing Mongoose Mod. We are a group of three, that is playing Mongoose Mod once every week.

I haven't actually played it for over a year... it's hard to sink time into something that I know I still plan to make lots of changes to, lol. Always thrilled to hear from active MM users though, so thanks for your post!

It is a fantastic Mod, better than any other Variant of Civilization that I have played before.

You know, I keep trying to TELL people that, but for some reason they never really believe me. :p

Currently I am working on a huge map of Africa for Mongoose Mod, which I will finish sometime in February. I will post it here then. It's already more then 50% finished, but it's really big and I am trying to make it as realistic and as playable as possible at the same time, and that simply takes a while.

Wow, my first-ever 3rd-party add-on component... awesome! :) :) :) Be sure to start a new thread for it in this subforum when you're ready!

I am also going to post a more detailed feedback shortly, inlcuding some suggestions for improvements.

Yep, feedback and suggestions are always appreciated! This thread is kinda intended for discussing the upcoming 3.6.2 version specifically though, so maybe put it in the main thread? Gotta try and keep things organized, mwa ha ha.

Speaking of 3.6.2, I'm gonna update the in-progress patch notes sticky pretty soon, so feel free to look that over if you want...

Also, I'm probably gonna go ahead and release the update itself sooner rather than later. Land privateers and civic exclusions may have to wait til the next version (or longer if I fail at coding them haha), but I've got a lot of changes piled up now that should improve gameplay and balance a lot, so I wanna get those out the door. Plus I'm dying to turn over the awesome PM 3.2 MME mapscript to you all. :)

It's coming along... I've added the much-requested game option to disable "unrealistic" units, got the event start and stop points showing in the tech mouseover text so those won't be a hidden mystery any more, and done a bunch more tweaking.

I decided I REALLY didn't want to move Forest Chopping up, so I found an alternate (and cooler) solution: I added a new Cottage version that can be built inside Forests but doesn't upgrade. I'm pretty sure it'll work even better as an inland commerce solution, cuz it's available even sooner than Advanced Tools, and can also be put in Jungles. Just chop down the trees and build a normal Cottage later to get the upgrades. :) (Oh, and I went ahead and moved the normal Cottage to Pottery like you suggested, but I transferred a point of commerce from the Hamlet-Town improvements to the Monarchy tech so they're still connected to it.)

In actually taking a look at things, I decided pretty quickly that moving the Slinger is NOT a good idea, for several reasons. First, it's already countered pretty well by the Stone Axe and War Dog units... Second, in Military Training you're putting the unit very close to its upgrade type, the Archer, which is bad design... Third, Military Training, like Military Tactics, was meant to be a completely optional tech, even throughout the whole game potentially. Putting something that essential in there kinda kills the optional effect, heh. Oh and fourth, the Incan unique warrior unit, the Quechua, obliterates Slingers anyway - they should be free experience for them - so if you want more difficult early defense you can always play against them lol... Also fifth, I'm pretty sure we NEED Slingers where they are to survive Raging Barbarians. Heh.

SO! Instead I've slightly nerfed the Slinger (just his Hill Defense... it's okay if hilled cities aren't automatically completely unassailable til a bit later), adjusted the build costs so he costs the most of the 3 in Fine-Edged Tools now, and buffed the Warrior and War Dog some more. It was definitely a mistake to have the Slinger be so cheap; I was going off the Archer vs Bronze Melee paradigm where the Archer is cheaper, but there the Archer also has a much lower base strength... Sorry about that heh. I think this new setup will mostly solve the strong-early-defense problem without having to move the Slinger to a later tech.

It looks like I'm actually going to be adding 2 wonders in this version... I was originally intending to put the Labyrinth in for the Economy Civic unlock, but then I remembered that's a seperate story from Midas (oops :p), so it wound up evolving into a world wonder version of an Aztec Sacrificial Altar that unlocks the Healthcare category instead haha, and I still need to find a suitable wonder for the other one. (It didn't occur to me until now that the Economy category is singularly unbalanced for early unlocking b/c 4 of the 5 available civics affect Corporation costs or availability, which are of course moot until much later, so balance is screwy going in. I COULD just leave the category sealed as a result; we'll see.)

Still gotta finish going through the suggested items from the main thread, read Andy's war weariness thread which I apparently never read (lol sorry, dunno how I missed it), adjust tech costs, add my era-based changes to tech costs and Settlers, and do some other fairly-minor stuff on my list. I'm going to release it at that point and save the heavy-lifting programming projects for later, so at the rate I'm currently going 3.6.2 might be out in the next 1 to 2 weeks, but you saw what happened when I tried to predict the mapscript finish time. ;)

Just want to encourage you in your work by saying that my work on the map of Africa is also making progress. It is now 80% finished. So I moved up from 50% within only two weeks :) Central Africa from Southern Sudan down to Zimbabwe still looks quite poor, but the other regions are mostly finished. I will upload a Beta-Version in about two weeks and a Final version later when I have tested the gameplay.


You idea about stone-age cottages is great and will improve the game a lot.
The changes in strength and build points for the stone-age military units are a good idea as well.

There was a several-day delay recently b/c my friend and I got Master of Orion 2 multiplayer working over the internet which we'd never been able to do before, and we stopped to play that... And I'll probably have to spend several more nights yet to come finishing our game... But other than that I'm pretty much working on this 24/7, don't worry. :) (Once I get into crunch mode on something I'm pretty single-mindedly obsessed, hehe.)

Great to hear your map is coming along well! Though I can't wait to show you my PM 3.2 MME script too. :) Plus the new Pirate unit is really awesome as well... 3.6.2 is gonna be an amazing update for having only very limited SDK changes in it, which seems strange to me lol.

Alright, the bad news is it may take a little longer than I was expecting to finish this update. The good news is the reason why: I'm actually going to expand the Prehistoric Era a little, and also finally go ahead with a bit of a civic overhaul I've been wanting to do for ages.

The former comes about as a result, initially, of the prehistoric military unit adjustments, followed by some re-discoveries in other mods of things I could add, and some additional thought I've put into the whole thing.

The latter comes about as a result, initially, of a day-long hunt for button icons while going through and updating some things, followed by a whole bunch of very intense brain-whipping to try and figure out exactly what I always wanted to do in the civic window and couldn't quite put my llama hoof on.

I finally figured it out, and I'm going to lay intellectual claim to my slightly-modified civic design AND my new icon selections, b/c the last time around (back in 2006) my civics and icon choices got snarfed up by RoM and/or some other mods, and freely distributed to every mod in existence from there... Without me ever getting credit for them. Which I'm still annoyed about. Just saying. :p

Anywho, this is REALLY fun work, and it's actually only gonna take me a few extra days probably, but just wanted to let you know about the detour I recently veered off on. :)

OKAY! Making excellent progress, and as a result I'm further away from finishing this update than ever! Rofl. Srsly, that's how I feel. :p

For those who may not yet have noticed the subtle change in my forum signature, this update has, as of a couple days ago, officially become so massive and all-encompassing - despite a lack of major SDK work (which still seems strange to me) - that the designation is now version 3.7. Thank you, thank you, but please hold your applause. ;)

Since my last post there's been more tweaking (when is there ever not?), got animal Native settings showing in their info (yay woohoo), accomplished something I previously thought was a practical impossibility due to the amount of work involved (shrinking the Mountain Cottage series to fit on Peaks better while still using the LSystem), AND, mainly... finished both my civic system update and my Prehistoric Era update.

I've still got another 1-2 weeks of less-flashy under-the-hood work to do before I can release this version, but I'm feeling AMAZINGLY happy with it already at this point. So you won't have to completely take my word for this however, I'm posting a screenshot of my new civic screen. It was actually done 2 days ago, but I literally didn't have time to stop and write this til now. As I said earlier, it fixes the major conceptual problems I'd been having for years with certain civics being where they were (plus it adds my kewl new Alien Worship and Neural Interface ideas), so please let me know what you think. :)

http://homepage.mac.com/klwelch/Civ4/MongooseMod/SS3/LM_Civics.jpg

For purposes of being able to lay intellectual claim to these new civics and this new use of icons in the future (so I don't have a repeat experience of my initial 2006 civics and icons going completely uncredited), here's a text summary to prove I did them this way first, as of this post date: 19 Jan 2012.

(I maintain that hunting down and picking out icons is a time-consuming and creative accomplishment worth laying claim to, even if I didn't make the icons myself. Sorry again to those who're offended by this. P.S.: I DID make a couple of the icons myself that're in my mod - U2 Dragonlady, Mi24 Hind, and Missile Cruiser - but I only do that when I absolutely have to, heh.)

Civic Sub-Category System and center-right Status Bar placement are new with LM's Civics Advisor v2.0. Barbarism: Guerilla, Belligerence: Gladiator School, Pacifism: White Plasma w/ Gold Ribbons, Manifest Destiny: Washington Monument at Dusk, Nomadism: Gray African Hut, Tribalism: Indian Chief, Caste System: Final Frontier Eye Pyramid with People, Humans Only: Purple Starship Crew, Cooperative Society: Terra Computer (Scifi Michelangelo Fingers Touching), Androids Only: Kneeling White Robot, Decentralization: Gray Treasure Chest, Mercantilism: Brown Wig Conference, Free Market: Bills with Pink Piggy Bank, Communism: Central Bank, Balanced: Yellow Dunking Bird Schematic, Industrialism: Final Frontier Factory, Environmentalism: Forest Path, Despotism: Gauntlet inside Head-Outline on Orange Background, Theocracy: my old Private Schools icon everyone copied (which is from Civ3 originally), Alien Worship: Elven Paladin with Yellow Vertical Beam, Ignorance: 2001 Monolith (which I almost used originally before going with the 3 Obelisk icon everyone copied), Neural Interface: my old Industrialism icon everyone copied (imposing male human head with yellow eyes), Shamanism: my old Herbalism icon everyone copied (rainforest pond glen), Herbalism: my old Subsidized Care icon everyone copied (mortar and pestel set on a desk).

Some of these icons came from RoM. Please note that, in cases where they do come from other mods and weren't culled from icon packs, I am not trying to take credit for the icons themselves, just this new usage thereof. :) The full-moon icon for Atheism was new in MongooseMod 3.4 (or possibly a little earlier, I'd have to check) and was hopefully self-credited in an earlier Historical Document post. Other MM-original icons I picked out and am still using years later (but that everyone copied without me ever getting credit, sigh) are Technocracy, and most of the Education and Healthcare civics; see my 2006 screenshot in the Download sticky that pre-dates their appearance in any other mod. Thanks. ;)

... And yes I feel better now. Working on this recent civic update brought back strong old feelings of "grr", so I vented a bit.

Ok. Trying to catch up as I have finished the African map now...

I decided I REALLY didn't want to move Forest Chopping up, so I found an alternate (and cooler) solution: I added a new Cottage version that can be built inside Forests but doesn't upgrade. I'm pretty sure it'll work even better as an inland commerce solution, cuz it's available even sooner than Advanced Tools, and can also be put in Jungles. Just chop down the trees and build a normal Cottage later to get the upgrades. :) (Oh, and I went ahead and moved the normal Cottage to Pottery like you suggested, but I transferred a point of commerce from the Hamlet-Town improvements to the Monarchy tech so they're still connected to it.)


I like this idea very much. This is the better solution than just moving Cottage building and Forest chopping abilities to earlier techs, like we did it in our group.
These Prehistoric cottages should not expire like outposts and lumberyards, though. This would make them too weak. It's a sufficient handicap that they do not upgrade, and need to be replaced by "real" cottages to get the upgrades.

Alright, the bad news is it may take a little longer than I was expecting to finish this update. The good news is the reason why: I'm actually going to expand the Prehistoric Era a little, and also finally go ahead with a bit of a civic overhaul I've been wanting to do for ages.


It should be ok to expand the prehistoric area a little, but I recommend to focus on A LITTLE.
Because any new tech in the tech tree makes the game last longer, and I guess most players out there do not like those everlasting games. Same with buildings and so on. I have seen a mod, in which most buildings reward only with +5% or +10% of something, and you end up with dozens of buildings, each of them rewarding you with a marginal bonus only.
Whereas for example new terrain types are a way of making a game better without making it last longer.

http://homepage.mac.com/klwelch/Civ4/MongooseMod/SS3/LM_Civics.jpg

This looks good! Well done! :goodjob:
I guess that these sub-civics require certain techs to be used, at least two out of three. Can they then be applied to any main civic or just to some?
I mean, can I apply any "stance" to any legal civic, any "workforce" to any labor civic and any "focus" to any labor civic?
Is there a singular effect then for any combination?

I think a singular effect would be good to increase the depth of the whole game, because you would need two techs then to be able to choose a certain combination, i.e. to get a certain effect.

And lastly, can you try to find a nicer icon for "Neural interface". This one looks a bit like a bison with a human face. :D

These Prehistoric cottages should not expire like outposts and lumberyards, though. This would make them too weak. It's a sufficient handicap that they do not upgrade, and need to be replaced by "real" cottages to get the upgrades.

I agree, and I did not set them to expire when I put them in, so don't worry. :)

It should be ok to expand the prehistoric area a little, but I recommend to focus on A LITTLE.

It's 3 new units (the Atlatl b/c that's a really important unit historically, and 2 birds b/c birds are awesome), 3 new techs (which are all related to the new units, and to delaying the Slinger a little), and 2 new wonders (the remaining ones from Stone Age Mod, which I've done a really good job incorporating into MM I think). The birds and bird tech are optional, just like dogs. I'll post a screenshot later if I have time.

Because any new tech in the tech tree makes the game last longer, and I guess most players out there do not like those everlasting games. Same with buildings and so on.

Yep I'm not keen on adding normal buildings very much, and MM has only a few more than vanilla as a result (compared to other categories of objects where I've added tons of stuff).

As for slowing the game down though, you made the recommendation earlier that I increase all Prehistoric Era tech costs by 50% lol, so which is it? :p

I have seen a mod, in which most buildings reward only with +5% or +10% of something, and you end up with dozens of buildings, each of them rewarding you with a marginal bonus only.
Whereas for example new terrain types are a way of making a game better without making it last longer.

Yep! Totally, totally, TOTALLY agreed. Basically what happened was people wanted a full in-depth historical simulation but only had the base Civ4 gameplay mechanics to work with. Those mechanics can be extended and expanded to a certain degree, which is what I've tried to do in MM, but with those other mods the authors just added every historically-semi-relevant thing they could think of, and to bridge the gap they started re-using the same mechanics for multiple things by dividing up the same effects into smaller pieces (5% here, 10% there, etc).

One of my core underlying design philosophy approaches has ALWAYS been to never over-extend my available gameplay tools. I've held back on adding units and wonders a number of times already in the past b/c of this. Occasionally I add new mechanics myself so I can get around this problem, which is how Golden Dawn, Trafalgar Square, Himeji Castle and Machu Picchu came into being in the mod, but yeah.

And I'm actually stretching things a little with all my new civics haha, but I think I've got it under control and they're all sufficiently unique. :)

This looks good! Well done! :goodjob:
I guess that these sub-civics require certain techs to be used, at least two out of three. Can they then be applied to any main civic or just to some?
I mean, can I apply any "stance" to any legal civic, any "workforce" to any labor civic and any "focus" to any labor civic?
Is there a singular effect then for any combination?

They're not as fancy as they may look at first glance: they're just 3 extra normal full-size categories, that are shown in the window in the same space as existing categories. But functionally they're completely seperate and normal.

One of the "heavy-lifting programming projects" I mentioned a few times before that I want to do (but which has no hope of making it into this current update), is allow civics to require or exclude other civics. It's really easy to implement, but EXTREMELY hard to teach AIs how to use completely correctly. Fuyu already worked on this problem extensively a year ago, so don't take it lightly.

If and when I eventually get this working, there will be conditions like "Theology cannot be used with Atheism", and "Pacifism cannot be used with Military Schools".

But I had a longstanding problem with, in particular, Pacifism and Environmentalism being where they were, b/c those aren't religion and economy SYSTEMS; they're religion and economy focuses / emphases / directions. You can have a pacifist country that has organized religion or free religion or anything else; and you can have a country that uses a free market system, or communism, or anything else, and which is extremely-environmentally-friendly at the same time. That had always REALLY bothered me. Just saying. :)

And lastly, can you try to find a nicer icon for "Neural interface". This one looks a bit like a bison with a human face. :D

Nooooo! I like it for this a lot! Don't judge til you see the full-size version. :p It's an intimidating male human face (who looks like a soot-covered battle monk if you ask me) with yellow eyes, which is the whole key to the civic... The idea is you plug a computer into a person's brain and just download all the educational knowledge and experience they need.

Hi!

just some more input from playing:

1. The random event "Fire" leaves the tile without forest. Wouldn't it be more realistic to change it into burnt forest?

2. If possible, can you update all terrain and features descriptions in the Sevopedia? For example, the effects of Floodplains on plains are not mentioned. They add less food than floodplains on deserts. And hills are described as "cannot build cities" but it's possible. And I think there are some more mistakes in there.

3. In the tech-tree, enabling of resources is not mentioned. Can it be added? For example, fish requires pottery to get the +1 health, but this can only be found in the description of "fish" in the Sevopedia.

4. How about new features (terreain types): Dry savanna and wet savanna? I am not sure about the effects that these should have, though.

5. And lastly, some philosophising :
how about a new terrain type "high plateau" or "high plain"? I am aware that this would probably require several weeks or months 24/7 to be implemented into the game, if it's possible at all. I have no idea about the mechanics/algorithms of Civ 4 so I can't judge about that.
I got this idea when I was creating the map of Africa, because most of the South of Africa is located on a high altitude. High plateaus would then have a cooler climate than the other tiles on the same altitude, and could also affect roads/trade network for example.
But most of all it would improve the visual appearance of the game.

Quick update on the update: Still making good progress, though I got slowed down watching tennis the last 2 weeks (and golf the last 4 days, though it was mostly on at the same time as the Australian Open, heh).

Probably still 2 weeks away, but this time when I say that it's a relatively firm estimate, lol. (It's easier to be accurate the closer you get. :p)

I actually felt like this was a really important, substantive, and high-quality update 2 weeks ago, but it just keeps getting better... Sorry for how long it's taking, but I'm working as fast as I can, and I promise it'll be worth the wait. :)

Btw I also updated the Change Log sticky again with the current list of patch notes, if you're interested. (Entries from Jan 7 and onward are new.)

1. The random event "Fire" leaves the tile without forest. Wouldn't it be more realistic to change it into burnt forest?

It only leaves it without Forest if the Forest was on a hill. This is b/c Burnt Forest and Scrub both have graphical glitch issues when used on hills, so I disabled them from spawning on hills when I first put them in the mod. (They're not in the LSystem, so the trees / cacti / etc near the edges don't drop down to fit the hill shape and appear to be floating in the air as a result, which I found very annoying. I wonder if I could add them to the LSystem though with my current understanding of it, hrm...)

A Fire event on a flatland Forest does indeed convert it to Burnt Forest. (At least that's what I told it to do in the code a while back, so it's a bug if THAT's not working.)

2. If possible, can you update all terrain and features descriptions in the Sevopedia? For example, the effects of Floodplains on plains are not mentioned. They add less food than floodplains on deserts. And hills are described as "cannot build cities" but it's possible. And I think there are some more mistakes in there.

Uhh... Hills are listed as "cannot build cities"? That's weird, I don't remember them being that way... I'll have to take a look.

But yes good point on P-FPs, I should definitely add a text note about their effect on Plains.

3. In the tech-tree, enabling of resources is not mentioned. Can it be added? For example, fish requires pottery to get the +1 health, but this can only be found in the description of "fish" in the Sevopedia.

I believe you're referring to the "city trade" requirement that allows resources to be shared with other connected cities... If I remember correctly the city that is harvesting the fish will still get the +1 health effect, it just can't share it til they have clay jars to transport them in. ;)

Anyway, great idea! I've already added several things to the tech mouseovers, so this will make an excellent addition. :)

4. How about new features (terreain types): Dry savanna and wet savanna? I am not sure about the effects that these should have, though.

5. And lastly, some philosophising :
how about a new terrain type "high plateau" or "high plain"? I am aware that this would probably require several weeks or months 24/7 to be implemented into the game, if it's possible at all. I have no idea about the mechanics/algorithms of Civ 4 so I can't judge about that.

Not likely. I don't have any available graphics for new terrain types (and specifically I don't think there are any others in Sezereth's high-res FFH terrain graphics I'm using, which I would want to keep using for consistency probably, though theoretically I could mix in some from other sources like vanilla...).

More importantly though, I'm already at the limit of what I can do in terms of different gameplay effects from different terrain types. "Food, hammers, and commerce" is a pretty limited selection of tools to work with, heh. I'll keep these ideas in mind in the future, but it's absolutely not gonna be in this update.

As far as the work required to add them though, it's actually not that bad. You just have to go through and set Animal Native values for the new terrains and features, update any units and promotions that are supposed to get terrain / feature bonuses, update where existing features can spawn on new terrain (if any), and, most significantly, update how PerfectMongoose MME places the new terrains and features, heh. (Though any new terrain types will not be used by the standard / default mapscripts without updating those as well, whereas I think they WILL use new feature types like Marsh, albeit randomly. I'd have to double-check that though.)

Hi Mongoose, just chiming in to say I still play your mod and am super excited about 3.7. Those new 'sub civics' look interesting and of all the mods I've played, never seen anything like that before. Thank you for your dedication and persistence with this mod!

I have briefly gone through the changelog. Wow, great work so far! I couldn't even finish reading, because it's so much...need to go to bed. Most of it reads reasonable fromm my experience!
Good idea to reduce culture on many early wonders and library, and to increase it for some later wonders. This will make cultural victory harder and still gives you a chance for a cultural victory when you have missed some early wonders.
The changes in build-points for some wonders are reasonable as well, from my experience. Strong wonders more BP, weak wonders less BP ;)


I believe you're referring to the "city trade" requirement that allows resources to be shared with other connected cities... If I remember correctly the city that is harvesting the fish will still get the +1 health effect, it just can't share it til they have clay jars to transport them in. ;)

Anyway, great idea! I've already added several things to the tech mouseovers, so this will make an excellent addition. :)


The +1 bonus from fish, shrimp and crabs definitely gets only available when pottery has been researched. This has nothing to do with the trade network. The health bonus is not available in any city. I often had research improved fishing quite ealry and created fishing boats. But I never got the health bonus before I invented Pottery.
Not sure if this makes sense in terms of real history, but it should at least be mentioned in the in-game tech-tree (or mouseover, I think we refer to the same). It's only mentioned in the Sevopedia. This "enabling" of resources is also required for some more resources as far as I remember, for example Uranium. Please make sure that this is documented properly in both Sevopedia and in-game tech-tree.

Got to go now!

Time for yet another update on the update: slow and steady progress. Given the amount of hours I'm putting in, and the quality of work that's coming out, I really should be getting paid for this... just saying. :p

I've updated the Change Log sticky again; patch notes from Jan 31 and onward are new. (Btw the post got too long, so I had to chop off the April-Dec 2011 entries to make room for these newest ones, lol.)

Highlights: Resource enabling clearly shown in the tech tree in two different ways, several important AI bugfixes having to do with some MM-specific features, AIR RECON UNITS have gotten a BIG BOOST in several ways, Serfdom bugfix plus work rate boosts displaying "correctly" now, the Tsukiji effect I'd been meaning to add for like 2 years now and never got around to doing (woohoo!), and the mystery of why different techs with the same costs often had different turns-to-complete is FINALLY solved! (Okay I more-or-less knew "why" that was happening all along, but now it very clearly explains it to the player, in a useful way that lets you plan your research more intelligently.)

And that's just in the last week! :p See the updated patch notes for details hehe.

Official ETA to completion is now 7 to 10 days, assuming limited real-life distractions, and assuming I have the energy to keep working 8-16 hours a day on it most days.

(Another way of putting that, is that my internal to-do list has 16 distinct items left after I finish a couple things I'm working on right now. (That's down from 35 distinct items two weeks ago.) Some are quick and easy, and some aren't. I've been averaging 1-3 items checked off per day, so I figure 7-10 more days is about right. My predictions are almost never accurate though, so cross your feathers. Version 3.7 gets more awesome every day, and I'm dying to get it out to you all, but I'm going to finish everything I want to do, darnit.)

The +1 bonus from fish, shrimp and crabs definitely gets only available when pottery has been researched. This has nothing to do with the trade network. The health bonus is not available in any city. I often had research improved fishing quite ealry and created fishing boats. But I never got the health bonus before I invented Pottery.

Not sure if this makes sence in terms of real history, but it should at least be mentioned in the in-game tech-tree (or mouseover, I think we refer to the same). It's only mentioned in the Sevopedia. This "enabling" of resources is also required for some more resources as far as I remember, for example Uranium. Please make sure that this is documented properly in both Sevopedia and in-game tech-tree.

Yep, you're right, it has nothing to do with the trade network afterall. (Sorry!) I'm not changing the enabling setup in this version (except for moving Aluminum), but it is fully documented (and then some) in the in-game tech tree now. Thanks for prompting me to do this; it's a really nice addition. :)

You know, adding a second Favorite Civic slot is a lot more work than you'd think... Oh, and I know now why there didn't seem to be much SDK work in this update (which I mentioned several times): I just hadn't gotten to most of it yet, lol.

*ahem* Right, back to work...

Since you plan to finish your work on version 3.7 quite soon, I have made a last search for things that can/should be improved. I would like to propose just one change:

Enhance the horse archer! All Mounted units are quite weak in Civ4 and Mongoose-Mod, taking into account that most of them require optional techs. And the weakest of them is the Horse Archer. As you know I have played a lot of matches with version 3.6.1 and I have rarely used it. I have only used it when I didn't have access to Copper or Iron, and urgently wanted to conquer a barbarian city or to attack any other weak opponent.
Now, after I have done some reading in Wikipedia on the history of Mounted units, I would suggest to change them like this:
- Increase speed from 2 to 3.
- Increase withdrawal chance from 30% to 50%.

The main strength of horse archers was their ability to avoid close combat. With speed 3, they could approach an enemy unit, attack and retreat by one tile within the same turn if the terrain is suitable for that. They could also be used to bypass the enemy front line and attack the enemy in its backyard where he may have few defensive units.
Moreover, the horse archer upgrades to Marauder, that has speed 3 as well. Since horse archers don't carry an metal equipment with them, there is no reason why they should be slower than the Marauder. And they should be faster than the chariot. I have seen that you have already enhanced the chariot, which is good. Also, enhance all unique units that replace the horse archer.


Gorilla/Orang-utan:
Are you aware that these are peaceful animals, that do not attack humans unless they feel very threatened? So they should not attack, like the Mammoth. They could reward with a little gold when killed.
In case of the Gorilla, you could justify that it was initially believed to be an aggressive animal after its discovery. That is reflected by movies like "King Kong", although at that time biologists already knew that the gorilla was peaceful.

In case of the rhinoceros, it should be ok that it can attack. There are two subvariants of the rhinoceros: black rhinoceros and white rhinoceros. I know that one of them can become really aggressive even when you are still far away (don't remember which one). But it won't eat you, it will just kill you. ;)



Lastly, a minor Sevopedia change:
Mention in hill terrain type, that the effect of hill terrain is -1 food, +1 production

Since you plan to finish your work on version 3.7 quite soon

Actually I got held up longer than I expected the last 2 days working on the second Favorite Civic thing, but primarily working on another big trait overhaul. I thought of a lot of new things to do with traits (in addition to some good ideas from Platyping's new trait mod that really got me started on this), and I'm much happier with the end result now, but it still took an extra day of work lol. (Don't worry, most of what was there before has been left alone; it was mainly about buffing the weaker traits. I'll be curious to see what you guys think of these changes though hehe.)

Moreover, the horse archer upgrades to Marauder, that has speed 3 as well. Since horse archers don't carry an metal equipment with them, there is no reason why they should be slower than the Marauder. And they should be faster than the chariot. I have seen that you have already enhanced the chariot, which is good. Also, enhance all unique units that replace the horse archer.

Agreed about being faster than the Chariot (and, by extension, the War Dog :)). The level 3 speed was supposed to be a Marauder exclusive for the Medieval Era, after all significant exploration is presumed done so the high speed doesn't make that too easy. And as a special differentiating factor between the Marauder and Knight.

Still, the Horse Archer is also later in the Classical Era now than it used to be (the Horseback tech used to be one column to the left if I remember correctly), and I agree with you about both the history and gameplay aspects of this. (An alternative gameplay solution I actually did consider once a long time ago, is to give Mounted units access to the Raider promotions, but that's not really their role, and it makes them compete with melee, especially Swordsmen, too much.)

So, long story short, I will gladly bump them up to 3 speed! Good idea. :) I am cautious about making their withdrawal rate any higher though. 30% is readily boosted to 60% with Flanking 1-3, and to 90% with Tactics added (and for me at least, Mounted units are always my favorite place to put Warlords, so I do usually wind up with Tactics on some of them; plus I also typically upgrade a lot of high-level War Dogs into Horse Archers, heh).

My latest version of the system reserves base withdrawal values higher than 30% for exceptional situations, which currently includes Valkyrie, Scout Mech, and Kraken (40%); Helicopters and Submarines (50%); and Sandworm and Siege / Artillery units (60%). I'm not convinced HA's are in quite the same league. 30% is standard for high-speed units, matches Cavalry which is the same basic idea, and still beats what most units have.

I did have a lot of these withdrawal values lower in the past, but that was in an ill-conceived attempt to avoid Base + Flanking + Tactics going over the 90% limit except on Subs (b/c if you do go over, it causes any remaining +withdrawal promotions to become unavailable on that unit, potentially blocking access to Flanking 3 with its FS Immune bonus for completing the set). BUT! One of the last remaining things on my now-fairly-short to-do list for 3.7, is to implement an alternate solution to this problem that I've had in mind for a while now. In anticipation of that, I went ahead and redid a lot of my base withdrawal values a month or two ago, which is why they have a lot of 40, 50, and 60%'s now. ... Just saying. :p

Also, I would point out that one of the unique Horse Archers, the Numidian Cavalry, DOES have 40% withdrawal as one of its boosted stats, by way of starting with Flanking 1. So there's that too, heh.

Gorilla/Orang-utan:
Are you aware that these are peaceful animals, that do not attack humans unless they feel very threatened? So they should not attack, like the Mammoth. They could reward with a little gold when killed.

Interesting. I sort-of knew that, but didn't think of it in any case. I can probably make that change, though the gold reward for killing Mammoths and Rhinos was specifically for their ivory tusks and horns; I'm not sure what the primates would have that'd be of monetary value.

Btw, I forgot to mention the Barbs picked up 2 new unique units a couple weeks ago, in addition to their Wild Axeman: the Shaman (a Stone Spearman) and the Witch Doctor (a Slinger). I imagine you may want to use these on your Africa map as well, so just a heads-up so you can start thinking about where you want to put them. :)

In case of the rhinoceros, it should be ok that it can attack. There are two subvariants of the rhinoceros: black rhinoceros and white rhinoceros. I know that one of them can become really aggressive even when you are still far away (don't remember which one). But it won't eat you, it will just kill you. ;)

I agree, but I don't think I can allow this from a gameplay standpoint. My initial implementation of the Mammoth a while back allowed them to attack, and it was very, very bad. For Prehistoric players they were just as good at shutting down your whole empire as Sandworms are due to their high strength, except that, unlike Sandworms, they were not restricted to Deserts, and they were not world-quantity-limited. It was a disaster, lol. My Rhino unit has slightly different stats from the Mammoth, but the same 5 str, so I really HAVE to make them passive. Sorry. Polar Bears are bad enough as it is. ;)

Lastly, a minor Sevopedia change:
Mention in hill terrain type, that the effect of hill terrain is -1 food, +1 production

I'm pretty sure you mentioned this before, but I could be wrong... I haven't gone back over the forum suggestions yet. ;)

I agree that you should definitely NOT give mounted units access to the city raider promotions. This would make swordsman and some other units superfluous when you have horses. You only need to make sure that mounted units are somewhat superiour to unmounted units in battles that take place outside of cities.

I have never used warlords and the tactics promotion, and I rarely use the flanking promotions. So I can't really judge about that. Maybe nerfe the tactics promotion or replace it with a different effect. From what you have written, I see that you have more experience in using mounted units than me, so just change them the way you think is appropriate.

Basically, all I wanted to say is that you should give the horse archer a little boost. To increase either speed or withdrawal chance should be sufficient, you needn't increase both.


Rhino: no problem, if they can not attack.

Gorilla and Orang-utan: not sure, maybe remove at least Oran-Utan from the mod? You could also let them move around without attacking and without a gold reward when they get killed. They could still be killed to get more experience.
In Reality, I think the most dangerous animals in jungle are snakes.


A nice feature would be a new building "zoo" which rewards with happiness depending on the number of different wild animals that you have captured. But to implement that, you would have to add a "capture" feature.



Hills description in Sevopedia: No, it's my first time to tell you that the effect of hills on production and food yield is missing. Last time I was telling you that the "cannot build cities" string in wrong. :D Well, is true in the sense that hills can not build cities, but wrong in the sense that humans can build cities on hills. :lol:

I have never used warlords and the tactics promotion, and I rarely use the flanking promotions.

You should; they're in there to be used! :p Plus they work pretty well too, hehe.

So I can't really judge about that. Maybe nerfe the tactics promotion or replace it with a different effect.

Nah. It's a Warlord promotion like Combat 6 and Speed, so it's supposed to be strong. :) And there's nothing wrong with the effect. It's even used as-is from the vanilla game! Getting harder and harder to find examples of that in the mod these days lol...

Basically, all I wanted to say is that you should give the horse archer a little boost. To increase either speed or withdrawal chance should be sufficient, you needn't increase both.

I gave it speed 3 and +10% vs Melee. I also made a similar change to most of the Mounted and Armor units above it in the sequence. I think it'll help a lot with making all those units as fearsome as they're supposed to be. :)

Btw, you probably haven't had much experience with high-level units (they tend to happen more in cooperative games vs insane AIs), but as an fyi, b/c of how the combat arithmetic works, high base-strength values on units become more and more significant at higher levels of +Percent combat modifiers. So if you manage to get a Horse Archer, or especially a War Elephant, up to Combat 5 or something, say with Shock added on for good measure, the result usually gets higher combat odds than you might expect (even against stuff that might normally give it trouble). The math is complicated, but I'm just saying, all high-base-strength-for-their-era units have a secret built-in special advantage. It's not always realized, and it's not THAT big a deal even when it is, but it's there. :)

Gorilla and Orang-utan: not sure, maybe remove at least Oran-Utan from the mod?

I just added it a couple weeks ago, I'm not removing it lol. (Plus it's my only orange animal!) I GUESS I can make it passive; it screws up the other stats I'd already set for em though (b/c units that can't attack can't make use of a withdrawal value either).

Btw, I literally don't have time to read the Wikipedia page on them so I'm just gonna ask you instead: I currently have the new Panda Bear unit set to defensive-only as well (more b/c of the high-strength "Rhino" argument than anything else); is that okay? And is a combination Forest / Jungle native setting okay for Pandas, or should they be Forest-only? I don't know the ideal rainfall and temperature conditions for growing bamboo lol.

In Reality, I think the most dangerous animals in jungle are snakes.

I've played the Metal Gear games extensively, with MGS3 being particularly relevant on this point. I know ALL about snakes, lol. As far as I know, no one's provided a model of one for use as a Civ4 unit though. Sadly I can only work with what's available. :)

A nice feature would be a new building "zoo" which rewards with happiness depending on the number of different wild animals that you have captured. But to implement that, you would have to add a "capture" feature.

Avain's Prehistoric Era, which he based on mine (with credit given, yay!), has a dynamic where normal city growth is disabled early on, and your early tribal cities gain food each time you kill an animal nearby, and/or from doing gathering somehow. It's genius, but at the same time my answer to it is my answer to a lot of clever things: "Good luck teaching the AIs to play that system as intelligently as they do the normal system, AND good luck balancing it with AI difficulty setting bonuses vs animals, which they do need."

I just want MM's Prehistoric Era to be a prequel introductory chapter to the main game, that's shorter and uses the same basic systems. Darnit. :p

Also, happiness is a complicated and finely-tuned quantity in the mod at this point. I can't just add a new building that adds more of it, especially not one that could potentially add a lot more. It would unbalance things, and detract from lots of other effects. Also again, it would not be fair to the AI players either, unless you give them very high bonuses vs Animals (which they have on high difficulties anyway), in which case it would not be fair to the human players. ;)

Hills description in Sevopedia: No, it's my first time to tell you that the effect of hills on production and food yield is missing. Last time I was telling you that the "cannot build cities" string in wrong. :D Well, is true in the sense that hills can not build cities, but wrong in the sense that humans can build cities on hills. :lol:

The reason this happened, I'm guessing, is that the Hill and Peak "PlotTypes" are not real terrain types. They're handled a bit like special cases in the SDK code, and aren't even shown in the vanilla Civilopedia if I remember correctly. They do have XML entries in the TerrainTypes list, but they wind up ignoring most of the values that are in them. I may be able to fix this problem just by setting a few of those values, which will display but still get ignored. If not I'll fix it the hard way, by changing the display code itself... I've certainly done enough of that lately. :p

just thought I'd let you guys know I'm checking in practically every day to see when this mod is released. It's a must-download for me! Thanks for working on it and sharing your development thoughts!

just thought I'd let you guys know I'm checking in practically every day to see when this mod is released. It's a must-download for me! Thanks for working on it and sharing your development thoughts!

Whelp, while I greatly appreciate your enthusiasm, it's still at least a week off unfortunately, and I don't think I'm gonna get any work done on it tomorrow due to a large number of annoying real-life things I have to do I've been putting off.

Also, while I'm doing my darndest to balance all the changes and additions I'm making, 3.7 is gonna be going public without much of any private playtesting first (which was not the case with many previous versions... though I had plenty of bugs and dumb ideas and errors in judgement in those too, heh).

The point being, this version has less in the way of brand-new major vanilla feature overhauls (compared to the past; there's still some of it), and more in the way of balance tweaks and gameplay changes. I believe I'm pretty skilled at game design, but nobody's perfect, and I'm just one person. Soooo... I'll be surprised if I don't wind up needing to adjust some things in a 3.7.1 release a month later. But we'll see. ;)

Now answer my Panda questions, darnit. :p

Now answer my Panda questions, darnit. :p


I couldn't answer your question yesterday, because Monday evening is the games evening of my Civilization group. :) We are currently playing the Africa map with 4 humans against 3 AI.

Ok German Wikipeda says about the Great Panda bear (Ailuropoda melanoleuca):
It is peaceful and it lives in subtropical mountains. In summer they stay in altitudes between 2700 and 4000 meters (meters, not feet!), and in winter they move down, into altitudes down to 800 meters. The climate is suptropical and rainy, they live in dense forests.

So since it's subtropical, it should be forest, not jungle, because jungle typcially is tropical. But when they are out of Bamboo, they might reach the outskirts of tropical jungle to search for Bamboo ;)

Is that sufficient?

I couldn't answer your question yesterday, because Monday evening is the games evening of my Civilization group. :) We are currently playing the Africa map with 4 humans against 3 AI.

So since it's subtropical, it should be forest, not jungle, because jungle typcially is tropical. But when they are out of Bamboo, they might reach the outskirts of tropical jungle to search for Bamboo ;)

Is that sufficient?

Almost. You forgot about their innate aptitude for mastery of Kung Fu, and their fondness for beer. :p

I am going to leave them alone then, b/c that's the whole thing with the PM 3.2.1 mapscript update: it allows jungles in sub-tropical temperatures if necessary, to get enough jungles on the map for gameplay balance when the map randomly doesn't have much landmass in the tropics.

Also, the mod doesn't have very many Jungle-native animals compared to Forest-native ones, so this'll help. :) Although, combined with the Orange-a-tang that'll make half of the Junglezoids passive (vs Gorilla and Panther), which kinda sucks... Can't we just pretend MongooseMod worlds have tribes of berserk, demonic Orangutans who're hell-bent on mindless carnage and slaughter?

Realism can be such a harsh mistress sometimes... Thanks for reading up on Pandas for me btw. :)

Oh my freakin' gourd vanilla SDK code sucks sometimes... I knew Settlers (and later Tribes when I added them) used a wonky system for setting their hammer / production cost, but I never looked into the details til now.

NO FRIGGIN WONDER you thought they were too cheap... Holy Hannibal crossin' some Agitated Alps!

Okay, so HERE's what the inexplicable vanilla code has been doing all this time: cost = "XML Gamespeed Growth Rate Modifier, treated as an absolute cost value instead of a percentage" plus ("negative XML cost value" times "XML Gamespeed Unit Cost Modifier"). This is part of the Advanced Start code, but it's been getting applied to city-founding units too.

Would someone PLEASE care to explain to me the answer to this highly-relevant question: wtf?

Alright. In the past I set the strange, mysterious negative XML costs for the Tribe and Settler on a trial-and-error basis until I got cost values that I was happy with. But I was only checking their values on Eternal speed, since that's what we always play on and I just ASSUMED the costs would scale properly to the other gamespeeds, like I know they do for all other units!

If you were playing on Quick, you were getting Tribes that were about 7 TIMES cheaper than they're supposed to be (not in absolute values; I mean compared to their cost vs other units' costs on Eternal!), and Settlers that were about twice as cheap as they're supposed to be.

Now granted, treating city-founding units as a special case with a different cost-scaling rate makes a certain amount of sense due to the integral nature they play, and the huge differences in total number of game turns the different speeds have. But right now the scaling doesn't just need to be tweaked - it's completely broken.

My sincere apologies to anyone who's tried to play the mod on any speed below Eternal all this time, heh. I am going to rewrite this absurd, nonsensical code presently, to use a "normal" XML cost (ie one that isn't just a negative discount that gets applied to something else entirely in the code), and have it scale by the Growth Rate Modifier as was, I think, intended, rather than by the usual Unit Cost Modifier. And I will try to target them for approximately the same values on Eternal that they have now.

The end result will be that they cost a significant amount more on faster speeds, particularly the Tribe. Sorry, it was NEVER supposed to cost anywhere NEAR the same as a single Stone Axeman or something. I just assumed the vanilla code knew what it was doing, and I could trust it to scale my Eternal values correctly, even if the system for setting them seemed a little wonky.

Why do I have to do EVERYTHING myself if I want to be sure it's done correctly? Siiiigh... Okay, ending rant now.

Good that you have detected the mathematics behind tribe/settler production!

They really should take longer to produce on quick speed, but I'm not sure if it needs to be 7 times longer, I think 3-4 times should be enough.
Some starting locations are located in floodplains that reward with 3 food per tile, while other starting locations have only 2-food-tiles around them. And I think higher production costs could work in favour of 3-food-per-tile starting locations, no matter whether tribes are produced with food or production.

But... in case you are 100% sure that 7-times higher production cost is fair, then change it like that. I don't have any practical experience with that while you do.

Time for another quick update on the update: I rewrote my ocean storm code from scratch yesterday, which I wasn't even planning to do until 3.7.1, but I started thinking about some better algorithms for it while I was half-asleep the other night and, well, I just couldn't let it go lol. Anyway, the results are way better now (and they were pretty decent before :)), so hopefully this will be the envy of all other Civ4 mods... though if not that's fine too. ;)

My to-do list continues to shrink, albeit painfully slowly... Official ETA is now 5 to 7 days. And that should be an accurate estimate this time. (Although you never really know with my estimates for some reason...)

I've also updated the patch notes AGAIN (note the trait overhaul details), but to save everyone - including me - some time (and b/c of the thread character limit), I'm putting only the new notes in the sticky. Read them before they update or they'll be gone forever! ... Until the update is actually released of course, which probably feels like forever. (I know it does to me...)

They really should take longer to produce on quick speed, but I'm not sure if it needs to be 7 times longer, I think 3-4 times should be enough.

... See, this is why I went into the long-winded explanation about which scale factor I was using lol.

Tribes would've been 7 times higher cost if I'd used the standard UnitTrain Modifier, which ranges from 67 to 200% depending on gamespeed (and this is what I thought it was doing all along, hence the "7x cheaper" above). But b/c I went with the GrowthRate Modifier (which ranges from 67 to 360% depending on gamespeed) and kept the total cost the same at the high end (180 production on Eternal), it ends up being 33 production on Quick, which is a 4.7x increase (you're at 7 production right now I believe).

Hey dood, what's the current ETA ? :crazyeye:

I have read your changelog-updates, but do not have any comments about it right now.

The patch notes have been updated again. This will be the second-to-last time on that before release. Sorry for the long delay; I got held up working on a number of things I didn't anticipate, like air strike and missile damage, the whole nuke system which I'd never really looked at at all before, and the StatsMod.

I am exhausted. I can't sustain this level of effort much longer. Fortunately, I'm FINALLY almost done: all SDK (and Python) programming for v3.7 is, as of about an hour ago, completely complete.

I have 2 days (maybe 3 though I'm gonna try for 1) of tedious XML work left (including War Weariness, don't worry :)), and then it'll hopefully only take one day to test a bunch of the new stuff I haven't had time to test yet, pretty-ify the whole change log into official-looking "release notes", update the Credits section, and package everything up in one ridonkulous zip file.

So 2-4 days. Btw Feb 25 is my birthday, so this thing is going to be my first, last, and biggest present to myself, ever.

After it's out I need to update my vanilla PerfectMongoose file (and try updating the Africa map for ocean tiles), but after THAT I'll be playing assorted video games in an undisclosed hibernation-friendly cave location surrounded by an army of angry pelicans and one GIANT ostrich. Attempt to contact me at your own risk. :p

Hey dood, what's the current ETA ? :crazyeye:

Awesome job quoting me quoting Disgaea Prinnies saying dood, hehehe. :)

I have read your changelog-updates, but do not have any comments about it right now.

ORLY? How about... now?! :p

I am exhausted. I can't sustain this level of effort much longer. Fortunately, I'm FINALLY almost done: all SDK (and Python) programming for v3.7 is, as of about an hour ago, completely complete.


I did not want to hurry you. I just can't wait any more to see the new techs, units, wonders, civics etc. :)


After it's out I need to update my vanilla PerfectMongoose file (and try updating the Africa map for ocean tiles), but after THAT I'll be playing assorted video games in an undisclosed hibernation-friendly cave location surrounded by an army of angry pelicans and one GIANT ostrich. Attempt to contact me at your own risk. :p

You really deserve that. I will only risk to contact you if there are any frequent Out-of-Sync errors in Mulitplayer.

I will try to update the Africa-map myself over the weekend. To replace the coast-tiles with ocean-tiles requires just 1-2 hours of mouse-klicks. I also want to fix some other bugs in the map. But my major map-update will come only in April.


from Changelog:

moved ICBM from Rocketry to Space Flight
decreased nuke damage control globals back to their vanilla values: unit damage base from 50 to 30% (goes to 130%), population death base from 50 to 30% (goes to 70%), and building destruction from 75 to 40%

That's good. This will make it more likely that any multiplayer match will last into the modern ages.


moved Guided Missile from Rocketry to UAVs, and increased its range from 4 to 6, strength from 40 to 75, evasion from 80 to 85%, and bomb rate from 20 to 25%

added Sharick's V1 Flying Bomb as Early Rocket in Rocketry to replace it


Cool. I like missiles a lot. Too pity that there weren't any medieval or ancient missiles in reality ;)


added Mongoose ACMDisplayFix to get the combat odds mouseover to show when targeting a unit in a Coast tile with a helicopter, and to get it to not show when targeting a unit in a Peak tile without the Mountaineering tech


You really pay a lot of attention to detail. Great.



Oh and I just remembered a bug in Version 3.6.1:

Sometimes there are Barbarian rafts that spawn in lakes. This happens quite often and is really annoying, because the message "Enemy spotted near xxx" appears every turn, and the lake-tile can't be worked. They can't be killed before you have aircraft.

You really deserve that. I will only risk to contact you if there are any frequent Out-of-Sync errors in Mulitplayer.

I was mostly joking. :p Feel free to talk all you want, just remember to wear ostrich-proof chainmail. ;)

I will try to update the Africa-map myself over the weekend. To replace the coast-tiles with ocean-tiles requires just 1-2 hours of mouse-klicks.

I'm pretty sure I can write code that will do it automatically in 5-10 minutes. Lemme at least try. :)

That's good. This will make it make more likely that any multiplayer match will last into the modern ages.

Also, don't forget the stronger Bomb Shelters, and the extra war declarations than can happen now when people use nukes, particularly in big games.

I tried increasing the Tactical / ICBM costs to 300 / 600 at one point as well, but decided against it... Don't want to go overboard and make nukes so difficult to use that no one bothers at all, hehe. Especially now that the mod has a very good custom global warming system! ;)

Cool. I like missiles a lot. Too pity that there weren't any medieval or ancient missiles in reality ;)

Hey, Flaming Pigs are in the Missile category... Don't complain! :p

You really pay a lot of attention to detail. Great.

No, I pay a normal amount of attention to detail, and 95% of the other humans on the planet don't pay nearly enough. ... Just saying. :p

They can't be killed before you have aircraft.

Sure they can... Build a city on the lake, then build warships! Then build a canal with Forts to get the warships out once you have Construction! :) :) :)

Also, the new Falcon unit has the helicopter-class ability to fly over Coast, and can kill Canoes and Rafts at 50% odds (though it will have negative odds to Triremes and higher), so you'll be able to use that too, potentially...

But yeah I think I can block barb ships from spawning in lakes entirely with one extra line of code... They'll still be allowed in lakes that are large enough to be considered inland seas though, just fyi.



p.s. - I'm really excited about the subs ignoring storms thing. (Note they still have their vision blocked, b/c subs have to surface to look around. :)) In conjunction with my AWESOME new ocean weather system (which is as big a deal as the new civics or anything else in this update if you ask me), it's gonna make for some very fun late-game naval warfare, hehe.

p.p.s. - Technically I was wrong: I found a couple more SDK things to do this morning after my post, lol. They're already done though, so no big delay. Yep, 10pm, just woke up, time for a full night of XML partying! Break out the llama costumes, folks.

I'm pretty sure I can write code that will do it automatically in 5-10 minutes. Lemme at least try. :)

Ok try it....



Sure they can... Build a city on the lake, then build warships! Then build a canal with Forts to get the warships out once you have Construction! :) :) :)

As far as I have observed it is not possible to build ships in cities that are adjacent to lakes. Of course the ships could be brought in from outside, but to build a canal with forts is really silly! You need to explain to me how that would work in reality. Forts can be built on hills, and the ships will then cross the hills. :spear:
I used that in a game in which I had an inland sea.


But yeah I think I can block barb ships from spawning in lakes entirely with one extra line of code...

Then add this one extra line of code, please :religion:

These rafts in lakes are fun when they appear for the first time, but become annonying over time.

Guys I'm looking to have this thing ready for public consumption around late Saturday or early Sunday. If it goes longer than that, well, I don't think it will be over by much, but we'll see.

As far as I have observed it is not possible to build ships in cities that are adjacent to lakes.

Oh? Hrm, I thought you still could. I guess that got disabled at some point. ;)

Of course the ships could be brought in from outside, but to build a canal with forts is really silly! You need to explain to me how that would work in reality. Forts can be built on hills, and the ships will then cross the hills.

It's actually not that far-fetched. The series of lock systems that connect some of the Great Lakes in the US involve gradual but significant changes in elevation.

Then add this one extra line of code, please :religion:

I already did - about 3 hours ago. :)

II tried increasing the Tactical / ICBM costs to 300 / 600 at one point as well, but decided against it... Don't want to go overboard and make nukes so difficult to use that no one bothers at all, hehe. Especially now that the mod has a very good custom global warming system! ;)

:nuke::nuke::nuke:
Production speed of Nukes (Tactical+ICBM) should be linked to Nuclear plants.
In reality, most of the industrial process that is involved in the construction of nukes and nuclear plants is the same.
There are also rumours that countries like Japan and Germany that lost the second world war, but also Brazil and other countries are using nuclear plants, because they want(ed) to be able to build Nukes quickly, once they were "allowed" to.
In Germany for example, there is so much coal that we did never really require Nuclear plants for electricity production.

Ok, long story short. I think you should double production costs for tactical nukes and ICBMs and grant -50% production cost (to reach the current level of production cost) for cities that have got nuclear plants.

Since there is already such a mechanic for shipyards and drydocks to reduce production costs for ships, this should not require too much time to change (possibly just XML ?)

I think that this change will also improve the Mod from a strategical point of view, because you need to decide if you want to plan for a real global nuclear war. Then you need to research nuclear power and build nuclear plants frist =>> More time for your enemies to crush you with tanks, or to accomplish cultural victory, domination, Anti-Nukes resolution of United Nations etc.
But if you just want to build a few Nukes for reasons like conceitedness :old: or vengeance :mad: purposes or some special tasks, then you can still build some without nuclear plants.
Also, a player needs to consider more carefully if he wants to build coal plants first or build nuclear plants straight away.

Without the Nukes-bonus, nuclear plants are not very usefull in the game.
:nuke::nuke::nuke:

You (and AIAndy... hi Andy!) have really helped spur on the development of this update with all your great input and suggestions (over half of which I've agreed with as-is, and almost all of which I've agreed with in principle in some form, hehe). That, and your enthusiasm for playing the mod, AND your Africa tribute, have really made the difference on this thing, and definitely inspired me to come up with a bunch of ideas myself that I probably wouldn't have come up with otherwise. It would've been a lower-enthusiasm, just-hit-most-of-the-major-bases kind of update. So... thanks. :)

It may not ship til Sunday night - not sure yet - but the final round of changes is coming along nicely, and I am definitely going to get this thing to you for your Monday session if I possibly can. ;)

Just fyi, I've added 2 more units that I wasn't even planning to add until I randomly decided to look into it yesterday... And I know you'll love at least one of em lol.

Also fyi, I'm 90% sure I'm changing the name of this release (I know, again) to version 4.0. Yeah, it's THAT important. This will be the first time I'm really, REALLY happy with absolutely EVERYTHING about the mod, with no known bugs left anywhere, and almost all planned major and minor things done.

In the past there were always enough things put off til later, or not investigated at all and hoped they were fine as-is (like nukes), or left alone b/c they were minor and fixing them would be too much trouble, that it always felt like a work-in-progress to me. That is no longer the case. There are no more weak links. This mod is easily the biggest accomplishment of my life so far, and it's now gone from a professional-quality-but-still-far-from-perfect project, to an absolute work of art that I am fantastically proud of. Not trying to gloat, just being honest.

Don't worry; my life sucks in plenty of other ways, so I need something to cling on to. ;) Anyway.



p.s. - Here's another patch note from yesterday you might appreciate, fresh from the Mongoose High Attention to Detail Farm™:

added Mongoose AirStrikeFix to exempt air and missile units from the river-crossing damage penalty when performing air strikes on targets one tile away and across a river, due to not having the Amphibious promotion (which air units can't get, and which would look silly on them if I gave it to them for free instead)

:nuke::nuke::nuke:Without the Nukes-bonus, nuclear plants are not very usefull in the game.:nuke::nuke::nuke:

I agree, but this particular solution to the problem never occured to me. That is a seriously awesome idea dood; I love it. :) Unfortunately it's not just XML, heh. The problem is the Drydock, etc, are using the DomainProductionModifier. Without some SDK work, all you could do would be to make it increase production on ALL air units, which would include missiles and nukes.

I can hardcode the intended production bonus pretty easily, and make it show up in the building mouseover text and everything. The problem is the AIs. There's tons of great functionality out there in other mods - Railroad Artillery that can only move on Railroad tiles, mercenary units you hire out of a Python dialog Black Market screen, Dale's ranged bombardment, detailed tactical full-stack combat, Avain's "only get food and hammers from gathering and killing animals" in the Prehistoric era (the list is very long) - but I don't put them in THIS mod unless I'm sure I can teach the AIs to use them properly, OR they are at little or no disadvantage from NOT knowing how to use them properly.

I'll have to look at the AI code surrounding power plants closely, but I suspect it's hard for them to make a permanent choice like this (since you can't selectively demolish your own buildings later) on a long-term basis. AIs build stuff according to their current and short-to-medium-term needs, and those needs can change frequently. Aside from JDog's work in BetterAI to give them long-term direction in pursuing victory conditions - which is way too complicated for me to try to extrapolate from right now - I'd be locking them into doing things they might not really want to do.

NORMALLY, if a unit requires a building and an AI decides he really wants that unit all of a sudden, he says, "okay, I'll do that building next." Whatever building or unit the AI wants to build the most at any given time, wins; that's basically how it works. They know to build up a big army if they're planning a war, but I'm not sure they know how to decide in advance, as a general principle, how many nukes they want to use, if any. They look at current conditions, empire power levels, who's vulnerable to nukes right now, the status of the UN bill, and probably a bunch of other factors, and determine if they should build a nuke right now. That's about it. Adding strategic planning for this would be a major undertaking.

But if I tell them, "if you want more than a few nukes right now, build Nuclear Plants first"... then they may change their mind by the time the Plants are done, and then they're screwed. With any other building, it doesn't matter: all other buildings are completely positive in their effects (save a few unhealth points here and there, or temporary negatives like minus empire population), AND all other buildings are cumulative, meaning they don't lock out other building choices with their own benefits, potentially. Power plants are a special case.

The Nuclear Plant already has an advantage: at the small risk of a meltdown, it provides power without the Coal Plant's 2 unhealth penalty. Which is kinda a big deal, heh. Unless you're on a river, or finish the Three Gorges Dam, it's your only unhealth-free power solution til you get to Fusion Plants (which I added specifically to avoid the meltdown thing later). I can make the ICBM require the Nuclear Plant, but that will make it take too long to unlock, and again, it locks the AIs into an exclusive choice that they're not making intelligently. I can also lower the cost of the Nuclear Plant further to give it a little bit more of an advantage, even though that's less realistic.

It would also be slightly unfair to the Japanese civ, b/c their unique building is a non-polluting Coal Plant (with a few other bonuses too if I remember correctly). But I do wonder now if the AIs are using Fusion Plants at all with their current AI programming... Probably not, heh. I think the way it works is, you can build a clean plant to replace a (non-Japanese) Coal Plant, but after that you can't change. I dunno, maybe the permanent meltdown risk is acceptable if the AIs want to build lots of nukes at the current moment. But what if they don't, they build the Dam wonder instead as a result, and then they suddenly decide they DO want lots of nukes all of a sudden. A human player would not make that mistake nearly as easily.

I SUPPOSE I could lift the restriction on building multiple power plants in the same city though... That would certainly help. Hmm. :)

I SUPPOSE I could lift the restriction on building multiple power plants in the same city though... That would certainly help. Hmm.


Oh really???? I wasn't aware that there was such a restriction. We never reached that far in our multiplayer games.

You should definitely change that, not only because of the new nuke-building system that we are discussing, but also because you will rarely see any other power plants than cole plants in multiplayer games.

Usually, what happens in the industrial age is that all players try to research either Assembly line or Combustion as soon as possible. Then, once you have researched either of the two, you start maxing out your military capacities, upgrade units and max out your production if you have chosen assembly line. So anybody will build coal plants before any other plants are availalbe. And usually, you have got access to coal, because you only reach that far in the game when your nation is big.
At least, this is what happens on quick speed, I can't tell what is happening on eternal.

Oh by the way, nobody cares about these +2 unhealthy people from coal plants at that stage of the game.....Military is everything that counts then.

We played approximately 15 games and I reached assembly line in two of them. I sent you the savegame of one of the two recently. That game was the only one that would have lasted long into the 7th age or even into the 8th age, if there hadn't been that war weariness issue.

I am not sure about the correct names of the ages in MongooseMod, I just distinguish them by the background color in the tech tree. Most multiplayers games reach only until the 4th, 5th or 6th age, because at that time it is often already clear who would win and then we stopped.

The most advanced tech that I ever researched was advanced refining, by the way.

So, I would recommend to allow to build multiple power plants.

Ideally, an existing power plant should be removed when you build a new one, but you can also handle it that way that the previous power plant just becomes deactivated.

It is REALLY unlikely that somebody will ever want to build for example a coal plant first, then a nuclear plant, and then, after nuking the whole world, use the coal plant again.

Don't forget to read my first post at the end of page 2! It got so long I decided to split it up and make a dedicated post for the Nuclear Plant response, but then that went on to a new page and I was like, oh carp, now no one's gonna see the first post lol.

Oh really???? I wasn't aware that there was such a restriction. We never reached that far in our multiplayer games.

I am going from distant memory on this, but I think so. I will want to change it anyway b/c I want AIs to be able to upgrade to Fusion plants eventually if they want to.

Usually, what happens in the industrial age is that all players try to research either Assembly line or Combustion as soon as possible. Then, once you have researched either of the two, you start maxing out your military capacities, upgrade units and max out your production if you have chosen assembly line.

That accurately simulates WW1 (and WW2 slightly later), which is really neat! (And exactly what I was going for with that part of the tech tree. :D)

Oh by the way, nobody cares about these +2 unhealthy people from coal plants at that stage of the game.....Military is everything that counts then.

Okay, THAT tells me I need to significantly increase the penalties on the Coal Plant (AND my new Industrialism civic, lol). How does 2 unhappiness and 4 unhealth sound? It's supposed to be bad enough that you DO care, so thanks for prompting me on this. ;)

I am not sure about the correct names of the ages in MongooseMod, I just distinguish them by the background color in the tech tree.

Yep, that's why I added the color-coding: to make it easy to tell where you are, and what's what. :)

In addition to the entered-a-new-era popup window, it also displays the name of the current era in the top-left of the main interface btw, so you can note the names while you're in them. But just for reference it goes Prehistoric, Ancient, Classical, Medieval, Rennaissance, Industrial, Modern, Future.

Ideally, an existing power plant should be removed when you build a new one, but you can also handle it that way that the previous power plant just becomes deactivated.

The problem is the AIs may get into an endless game of musical chairs, where every third building they build is a different replacement power plant, b/c they keep changing their minds about which ones they want. They can end up wasting a ton of production as a result.

That was the whole point of my previous (really long) post: with normal buildings it doesn't matter if they change their mind later about what they want, b/c even if they DO change their mind later, they're still guaranteed to have gotten a perfectly good building out of it that's still useful in some way (b/c no normal buildings have permanent and serious drawbacks like meltdown chance, and no normal buildings block access to any other normal buildings).

That's the reason the vanilla rules let you replace a Coal Plant with any other type of plant: to get rid of the 2 unhealth, which is considered a serious negative in vanilla, heh.

It is REALLY unlikely that somebody will ever want to build for example a coal plant first, then a nuclear plant, and then, after nuking the whole world, use the coal plant again.

No, but it's very possible the AIs will build a CP first for power, then replace it with a NP for nukes, and then, after launching a few nukes, replace that with a HP or FP to get rid of the meltdown chance. ... Then decide they want nukes again and go back to the NP, heh.

Try to imagine how long it actually takes to "nuke the whole world" on a PlanetaryMongoose map with 34 players and running Eternal speed... This is a scenario I have to actually try and support. ;)

I'll also take a look at what the default meltdown chance IS btw... It will need to be increased to offset the nuke production advantage if I put one in, I suspect.

just a short reply about the power plants issue (I will answer your other long post a bit later):

yes, +2 unhappy, +4 unhealthy for the coal plant sounds good. (No Joke!)
Maybe it is too much in real-history terms, be we should ignore about that in this case.

In version 3.6.1 the assembly line is somewhat superior to combustion. Combustion offers the stronger military, but assembly line rewards with +75% production (25 from factory and 50 from coal plant), which is more powerful altogether.
That is why in our "Mongoose Mod 3.6.1b" we had increased the costs for the dreadnought and added electricity as prerequisite for assembly line instead of steam power.
So instead of that, to nerf the coal plant is another way of achieving better balance between assembly line and combustion.

Then, for the power plants system, maybe try to code it that way that any power plant can be built only once, so that you can upgrade, but not downgrade. Always the latest power plant should be active.

I know that this solution will not be ideal for the AI as it will always end up with all plants in each of their cities sooner or later, but it will be prevented from being captured in endless loops. The AI can then maybe build nukes with double speed from nuclear plants only within a short timeframe, but forget about that. Very very few games will last that long. Hmm, maybe you can prevent the +50% nuke production bonus from nuclear plants from expiring when another plant is built?


Also, you should add +1 or +2 unhappyness to the nuclear plant.

For the chances of meltdown, maybe use real history as a benchmark. So, one meltdown every 25 years or so for ~400 nuclear plants. But since one city in Civ4 actually represents several cities in the real world, calculate the meltdown chances with a number of 50 or 100 nuclear plants instead of 400.

A meltdown will be a rather rare event then. But I think that's fine. I remember that in Civ1 meltdowns happened very often which was somehow stupid.

:bday: Lunarmongoose

yes, +2 unhappy, +4 unhealthy for the coal plant sounds good. (No Joke!)

My obscure-details deep-memory failed me on this, heh. Coal Plants actually ARE at -4 health already, and all other types of plants are at -2 health. This is from a pair of XML globals that set "power" to -2, and "dirty power" to -2, with them stacking in the case of the CP. The full health penalty was showing correctly in the city view after you built a plant, and working correctly functionally, but the effect of the first global was not being displayed in the mouseovers for the power plant buildings themselves (obviously the second one was).

Keep in mind that -4 health translates into -2 population in a city that is at or over its current health limit (pretty common but not always true), which is actually a solid counter to big +production, especially since the 2 lost tiles no longer being worked are probably 2 of your lowest-food (and thus highest-production or highest-commerce) tiles. (If they weren't 2 of your lowest-food tiles, then you'd be losing even more population. ;))

But also note that the population decrease is not immediate; the food bar takes time to empty the first time around. Whereas a happiness penalty is felt right away, so I'm okay with adding that.

A quick word about production percent bonuses btw. As a practical matter for evaluating mod balance, the Coal Plant does not add 50% production. Assuming you have a Forge (the Factory doesn't actually require one, heh), the CP adds 33% production. This is b/c it takes you from 150% of your base hammers, to 200% of them; and 200 / 150 = 1.33.

In version 3.6.1 the assembly line is somewhat superior to combustion. Combustion offers the stronger military, but assembly line rewards with +75% production (25 from factory and 50 from coal plant), which is more powerful altogether.

It has a certain amount to do with the tech tree too: Combustion leads to Tactical Nukes and some decent air units without actually having to get Assembly Line, if you wanted to rush either of those things. :)

Then, for the power plants system, maybe try to code it that way that any power plant can be built only once, so that you can upgrade, but not downgrade. Always the latest power plant should be active.

I know that this solution will not be ideal for the AI as it will always end up with all plants in each of their cities sooner or later, but it will be prevented from being captured in endless loops. The AI can then maybe build nukes with double speed from nuclear plants only within a short timeframe, but forget about that. Very very few games will last that long. Hmm, maybe you can prevent the +50% nuke production bonus from nuclear plants from expiring when another plant is built?

I'd been thinking about this situation the whole last 24 hours, and I already decided what I'm gonna do... Which is mostly what you described, except that Coal Plants can still be replaced by any other type, as usual. (The effect is just a "has power" boolean in the code btw, so they stack fine without any additional work.)

Well, plus the Hydro Plant can probably be replaced now that it has penalties too (see below), but I'll make sure they can't rebuild it, just like the CP.

Also, you should add +1 or +2 unhappyness to the nuclear plant.

I already added half the CP penalties to both the Nuclear Plant and Hydro Plant, ie -1 happiness and -2 health. On the NP it's for permanent storage of the spent fuel rods, and the more-frequent-than-a-full-meltdown "minor leak" scenario. I might change that to -2 and -1 though, heh.

On the HP it's for disruption of streams (which has gotten a lot of attention in the media recently as they're just now realizing the full extent of the environmental damage this causes), and the lack of fish and changes in flooding and whatnot that also occur.

I further added the HP penalties to the Three Gorges Dam, but in that case they only apply in the city where you build the wonder. (All the megaloads of electricity it generates are just sent on to your other cities without any local penalties. ;))

Oh, and I also got the hidden -2 health OFF the Fusion Plant (which I didn't realize was ON the FP til now, sigh) by zeroing those globals I mentioned, and using the health-and-happiness-from-bonuses stats to set it directly on the buildings for the CP and NP (that way they still don't have the penalties if you don't have Coal or Uranium hooked up).

(This solves ANOTHER problem too btw, b/c the AIs weren't even checking the values of the 2 globals; they just check if it's "dirty power" or not. If dirty power gave -10 health on the global they would treat it exactly the same. The new stats get looked at directly, so the magnitudes are factored in and I have less new AI code I have to write, hehe.)

For the chances of meltdown, maybe use real history as a benchmark. So, one meltdown every 25 years or so for ~400 nuclear plants. But since one city in Civ4 actually represents several cities in the real world, calculate the meltdown chances with a number of 50 or 100 nuclear plants instead of 400.

A meltdown will be a rather rare event then. But I think that's fine. I remember that in Civ1 meltdowns happened very often which was somehow stupid.

Not really a good idea... That approach is exactly how I ended up with much higher settings than vanilla on the nuke-damage control globals all this time lol. It may be severely lacking in almost every way imaginable, and full of hundreds of bugs, but vanilla does do one thing pretty darn well: gameplay balance. I've learned to rely on it, and whenever I have a choice I err on the side of not messing with their numbers.

I also know already that the meltdown chance is more-or-less fine as-is, ie it's very infrequent but not zero. I would continue leaving it alone, except I need to raise it to compensate for the new nuke production modifier. So I'll probably change it by an equal amount to that. ;)

Btw the thing I love the most about your NP idea (and there are a lot of things I love about it), is that the doubled base nuke cost corresponds perfectly with the extremely high cost of enriching uranium early on. In the real-life Manhattan Project it literally took thousands of workers, doing it by hand for several years, to get enough for just a couple of bombs (and they were small bombs by nuke standards). So that lines up amazingly well with the big cost increase. :)

:bday: Lunarmongoose

THANKS!!!

I feel hideously old though, and it doesn't make being single any easier... Oh well. :p

You (and AIAndy... hi Andy!) have really helped spur on the development of this update with all your great input and suggestions (over half of which I've agreed with as-is, and almost all of which I've agreed with in principle in some form, hehe). That, and your enthusiasm for playing the mod, AND your Africa tribute, have really made the difference on this thing, and definitely inspired me to come up with a bunch of ideas myself that I probably wouldn't have come up with otherwise. It would've been a lower-enthusiasm, just-hit-most-of-the-major-bases kind of update. So... thanks. :)

Thanks for that! But I have to admit that actually I made the Africa map simply, because I was having MUCH pleasure working on it. I love Geography. And I think you are updating your mod for the same reason. And you should really play in our Monday-group! To harvest what you worked on.
And now answer my mail, darn!


It may not ship til Sunday night - not sure yet - but the final round of changes is coming along nicely, and I am definitely going to get this thing to you for your Monday session if I possibly can. ;))

No need to rush it, it doesn't matter if it takes more days. I think that the Nukes-issue that i brought up will cost you a day or two alone.


Just fyi, I've added 2 more units that I wasn't even planning to add until I randomly decided to look into it yesterday... And I know you'll love at least one of em lol.

We'll see. I hope it's not a yellow and a green dragon :p


This mod is easily the biggest accomplishment of my life so far, and it's now gone from a professional-quality-but-still-far-from-perfect project, to an absolute work of art that I am fantastically proud of. Not trying to gloat, just being honest.

Yeah, you can be proud of that. My biggest accomblishment was also a computer game, that I programmed from 1996-98 called "Rakete". The 4th version was the last one I could finish. That's where my nick comes from.


Don't worry; my life sucks in plenty of other ways, so I need something to cling on to. ;) Anyway.

Very sorry to hear about that!

And you should really play in our Monday-group! To harvest what you worked on.

Maybe if you wanted to play a HugeMng / Eternal game that takes 4 months instead of 4 hours from start to finish, I would lol. As it is I kinda feel like doing it single player if my friend I've played with in the past doesn't want to. I've also got a lot of PS3 stuff to catch up on before early May...

And now answer my mail, darn!

No time lol. I literally take a break to reply on here when I need a break from staring at my PC monitor for 12 hours straight, and maybe watch an episode of something my DVR recorded for 25 minutes... then go back to work for a while, then back to sleep. I don't have 5 minutes to spare for anything until this is done.

Except my parents are visiting again starting this afternoon, and we've got some more work to do on the condo, and I've got some more stuff I need to stop and get listed on Amazon and eBay, sooooo, gonna be stalled for the next couple days unfortunately. I would've gotten this done in time if not for the nuke thing. :p

No need to rush it, it doesn't matter if it takes more days. I think that the Nukes-issue that i brought up will cost you a day or two alone.

Two to three full days of work on the power plant overhaul, which needed to be done anyway b/c it allows me to add a happiness penalty to the power effect, fixes the AI evaluation of the plant buildings, and fixes the penalty on the Fusion Plant it wasn't supposed to have.

And then half a day on the NP production effect (the AI code for this is actually pretty simple). Both of these are about halfway done at the current moment, and I still have most of my final XML to-do list items to do (though most of those will be quick).

OH, and I almost forgot to mention (my Civ4 brain is 12 hours ahead of my Forum brain at the moment... I've done so much digging around in the code it's hard to keep track of what I knew and thought and said last time I posted lol), I was wrong (again) about the plants being removed or demolished or whatever.

(Edited to fix another stupid assumption blowing up in my face): What actually happens is, through a complicated lever-and-pulley system connected to a steampunk gear-and-valve mechanism, it uses those annoying two XML globals I mentioned before to change the health penalty in the "power" category whenever you add or remove a power source, as needed. So in vanilla you CAN have all plant types in a city at once.

I was GOING to add some restrictions to that, but now I'm thinking it's probably better to allow a player to build some redundancy if he wants to, in case a nuke or spy or something takes one of the plants out later, or in case he has the Dam wonder but is worried about losing control of it soon.

We'll see. I hope it's not a yellow and a green dragon :p

No they're not, but the white dragon model I saw for the first time as a ported-to-Civ5 release a couple weeks ago is awfully tempting, now that you've reminded me of it... :p

Yeah, you can be proud of that. My biggest accomblishment was also a computer game, that I programmed from 1996-98 called "Rakete". The 4th version was the last one I could finish. That's where my nick comes from.

I'm actually hoping-slash-planning to attempt an mmorpg startup in 5 years or so, since I can't seem to find any kind of real job (even the minimum-wage places won't hire me for anything - I've tried!) despite my moderately-significant credentials.

From the suggestions you've been making I'm actually not surprised to hear you have some background-slash-interest in game development hehe.

Very sorry to hear about that!

Eh, as soon as Diablo 3 finally comes out I'll be fine... Though they really pissed me off with this latest version of the rune system, sigh. Oh well. :)

Happy Birthday Mighty Mongoose. I have a feeling I might be late.. but I hope it's still the 25th of February where you are.

Reading the conversation between you and Rak makes me more appreciate the detail you're putting into this.

As a note from my end, I only play solo so can't say much about the multi-player experience. But playing solo, I have made it to the future era before being crushed by AI controlled mechs and things. That was pretty amazing. Plonking what must have been 100+ hours into the game, thinking I was in control, and then having Darth Vader, the Skrulls and what seemed to be half of Phyrexia rock up and hammer me.

Well, that's the way I imagined it anyway :)

There is another problem in Version 3.6.1. But the good news is that this will only require minor XML work.:thumbsup:

The Great Library is too powerful, when it is built very early, because you can spawn Academies in all of your major cities, each rewarding with +50% research.

It works like this:
1. Choose a philosophical leader: +100% Great Person birth rate.
2. Research Writing and Alphabet as soon as possible.
3. Build 4 libraries and then build the Great library in a city which has got much food.
4. Add a scientist-specialist in the city. The library in that city makes that possible.
5. Research Polytheism and Literature, build the national epic in the same city as the great library.

This city then produces:
2 Great Scientist Birth points from the Great library
6 Great Scientist Birth points from the 2 free scientists
3 Great Scientist Birth points from the additional scientist
-----
=11 Great Scientist Birth points
+100% Philisophical leader
+100% National Epic
----
=33 Great Scientist Birth points!

With Pacifism - civic it can even be up to 44.


=> Happy Academy building, because you will get a Great Scientist every few turns! :D

If you don't believe me, I can send you a savegame in which I played like that, getting around 7-8 Academies very early. I was then far ahead of AiAndy which is usually impossible, because he is a very skilled player.
We later increased the costs for all prehistoric techs, and that made that trick less useful, but this has many disadvantages and I wouldn't recommend to do that. And I know that you would not do that anyway.


I have been sitting in front of the tech-tree now for quite a while and I think I have found a very nice solution to the problem:
Exchange the effects of the Great Library and the Copernicus' Observatory! So, +100% research for the Great Library and +2 free Scientists for the Copernicus' Observatory.
This would also nerfe the strong Copernicus' Observatory/Oxford-University -Combination, which rewards a single city with +200% research. With an academy in that city, a few great scientists and many towns, you could easily get 400 research points in such a city, which is too powerfull.

The Copernicus' Oberservatory/Oxford-University - combination obsoletes only with satellites, but a Great Library/Oxford-University - combination can only work for a very short time, until Scientific Method is researched.

Secondly, the first player who reaches Astromony and can thus build the Copernicus' Observatory is also often the first player to have Rifleman, so it would be good to slow that player down a little. There is also the Theory of evolution in that area of the tech tree, which is a powerful tech-wonder as well.


Also, nerve the Philosophical leader to +50% Great Person birth rate only, because +100% is too powerful keeping in mind that Philosophical has an additional +25% Wonder construction bonus. But maybe you have already nerfed it, I just can see what is in Version 3.6.1.

Maybe if you wanted to play a HugeMng / Eternal game that takes 4 months instead of 4 hours from start to finish, I would lol. As it is I kinda feel like doing it single player if my friend I've played with in the past doesn't want to. I've also got a lot of PS3 stuff to catch up on before early May...


Our games usually last 2-4 Mondays, so 8-16 hours per game actually. We only play until it is clear who will win.
And we usually don't use the turn timer, if that may help you....
But if you don't want to ....can't help you then :rolleyes:



Except my parents are visiting again starting this afternoon, and we've got some more work to do on the condo, and I've got some more stuff I need to stop and get listed on Amazon and eBay, sooooo, gonna be stalled for the next couple days unfortunately. I would've gotten this done in time if not for the nuke thing. :p

Work on the condo should be good for your muscles, bones and blood circuit. Really!
Man is not made for sitting on a chair for too long.


And about the power plants issue, I can't really follow you any more, but I think there is no more to add about that. Just do it the way you think is best.

One more input from my multiplayer experience - and this will probably be the very last input:

The turn timer runs too fast during the first approx. 50 turns, especially during the very first turn. From turn 50 to 100 it fits quite well and after turn 100 there is too much time.
We played on quick speed, and I think the turn timer was set on average pace.

We never used the turn timer in the vanilla version, so maybe it's the same in vanilla.

I wasn't going to do this again til the last of the XML work had been done, but my unforeseen power plant overhaul and nuke production mod are now both completely finished and reasonably-well tested (along with a bunch of other stuff mixed in that I did over the last week), soooo I've gone ahead and updated the Change Log sticky once more.

The current plan is XML work today and tomorrow, and release notes, credits, testing, zipping, and uploading on Sunday.

Exchange the effects of the Great Library and the Copernicus' Observatory! So, +100% research for the Great Library and +2 free Scientists for the Copernicus' Observatory.

Yep, I agree... Thanks for the detailed analysis on this point, hehe.

The only thing that annoys me about this change is the lack of Great Scientist points in the first 2-3 eras now, but I was gonna look over the Great Wonder point types again anyway.

Also, nerve the Philosophical leader to +50% Great Person birth rate only, because +100% is too powerful keeping in mind that Philosophical has an additional +25% Wonder construction bonus. But maybe you have already nerfed it, I just can see what is in Version 3.6.1.

The problem is, in this update I've buffed every other leader trait in the mod, except Philosophical. Some were minor boosts, some were significant, and some were complete overhauls and redesigns, but I knew this one was the strongest so I left it alone. If I nerf it now I'd be concerned about it being a little too weak for the new average trait strength level, heh.

It's a 5 second change to make on your end if you guys still want to of course, so there's that. :) I would ask you first give it another try with all the other changes that've gone on around it in v4.0, though.

The turn timer runs too fast during the first approx. 50 turns, especially during the very first turn. From turn 50 to 100 it fits quite well and after turn 100 there is too much time.
We played on quick speed, and I think the turn timer was set on average pace.

I already changed this a week ago, based on your previous request about it a month ago. ;) As you suggested at the time, there's less time given from number of cities, and more time given from number of units... as well as the base amounts being tweaked a little.

I'll be curious to see what you think of the new setup, but it's just a few numbers in an XML file that's now included if you ultimately want to tweak it some more.

We never used the turn timer in the vanilla version, so maybe it's the same in vanilla.

Yep, it was exactly the same. :)

Hey dood,

I am still waiting for version 4.0.

:bowdown:

First, I'm going to post a bunch of email conversation for public record, that were due to this website going down last weekend and again yesterday morning, more than anything else...

From March 3:

The forum is still down, but I hope to see your posts and changelog soon.

The only thing I wanted to discuss, really, was the Great Library / Copernicus effect swap you suggested. After looking at the situation carefully, I disagree. Some pre-existing reasons for keeping it the way it is are:

1) You give up some very desirable other paths in the tech tree going straight to those two instead. Particularly the GL, which I always set out hoping to rush to and get, but never actually do b/c I always wind up getting lots of other stuff in that era first that I want even more, heh.

1a) You give up some very desirable other Great People types pushing Scientists all in one city like that. If you get Academies up in every city, great, but that means you didn't get lots of other GP-related stuff.

2) As I said on my forum post that you can't read yet (sorry, I don't run their website; all these downtimes ARE getting pretty annoying), the GL is the only real source of Great Scientist points at all in the first three-and-a-half eras. It needs the 2 free scientists to catch up to the other Great People types.

3) You're over-valuing the "+100%" type stats again. ;) If you have a Library and Observatory already in a city, the Oxford is only a 67% increase, and if you have those 3 things, the Copernicus is only a 40% increase. If I nerf their amounts further, I'm afraid they will seem like they're not even worth getting at all.

3a) Same thing with Great People points: For a Philosophical leader, the National Epic is only a 50% increase over what he's getting without it. And it goes down from there with additional effects.

4) I understand the "getting a Great Person literally every couple of turns" thing, but that's part of what happens playing on Quick, perception-wise. Also, there ARE rapidly diminishing returns on GP generation, b/c each next one always costs noticeably more than the previous one.



NOW THEN. Given all that, I DO understand that your point is probably still valid, and going for heavy Great People is potentially a slightly-overpowered strategy. That's where these next two points come in, which are from other changes I've already made in the last 2 months:

5) I said this in my forum post too (though I left a lot of these other arguments out cuz I hadn't given it as much thought yet this morning), Philosophical has not been buffed at all, while every single other leader trait has been. Some were slight buffs, some were major buffs, and some were complete redesigns and overhauls, but the average trait strength level should be higher now, and so you're missing out on a bit more by being Philo instead now.

5a) Pacifism was given a fairly strong new penalty effect while it was getting moved into its new subcategory location. I think that GP booster in particular will be adequately balanced now.



AND LASTLY, a point from the opposite direction:

6) When you're in Classical, you have fewer cities (typically) than when you're in Medieval, and any one single city is a bigger part of your overall total research income. Being able to toss a Copernicus +100% research effect on your Palace's +8 commerce, particularly with Monarchy / Bureaucracy added in, is more powerful on the GL than it is on C's Obs.

It's fine that you do not change the GL - copernicus. The GL is not as powerful as the old Silk Road.
But maybe in your next game, choose a philosophical leader, play on an island map and try that strategy, and if you win that game on high difficulty level, then reconsider my proposal.
And this is just xml-related, hence we can mod our own version 3.7b ;-)

Well maybe I DO need to nerf Philosophical then. That would be totally fine if it's really necessary. I just don't think swapping GrLib and C's Obs is the right answer to the problem, for the long list of reasons I typed out before. :)

From March 8:

I kept having more last-minute work to do on it lol.

I'm down to just a couple cleanup things now, should only take an hour or two. But I pulled a long work session today to get as much done as I did, and I pretty much can't stay awake any longer.

I've gotta run one errand later today but that's it... will definitely be posting on the site, and hopefully releasing it, in the next 12-16 hours, 24 tops. And don't worry, I mean it this time.

K, going to sleep. 24 more hours, maybe less, I promise.

you are still awake???????
Really, go to be now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It must be 6 or 7 in the morning where you are!!

Yep, sent that at 6:38am. Again, don't worry, I'm a strong night owl... It varies, but in general I'm most likely to be awake whenever it's dark outside. :)

Now if you'll eggskuse me, I have to get back to tweaking my dragon stats, now that there's a new one and all. :p

And don't forget that war weariness issue, that's 50 times more important than those dragons.

I already changed it 5 days ago; it didn't quite make it into the last patch note update, heh. I'm done tweaking the dragons now; I have to run over to Michaels again which'll take about an hour, then I have two final XML things to do that should take about half an hour each, then I'll immediately post the final set of notes for ya to read, and get started on the packaging process. I expect to be staying up as long as it takes to get this thing released, but we'll see; doing the release notes is a real chore, and the patch notes to convert are twice as long as any previous major update this time, heh.

I have got up now, just in case you want to send me any notes prior to the release!

I'm gonna post them on the forum here in half an hour or so. I'm on my very last thing right now. This is where I THOUGHT I was 8 hours ago, fyi, but I got sidetracked by even MORE unexpected stuff I noticed I needed to do. Sigh.

...

I know I said half an hour, but my last line-item to update the build costs of the Ancient and Classical great wonders naturally turned into an update of the build costs of ALL the wonders in the game, plus the projects, including a much-needed update of the spaceship components (which are projects), since the last time I adjusted those the mod didn't have a full Future Era yet in its tech tree...

So yeah, 3 hours instead of half an hour. This sort of thing has been the typical way everything I've tried to do in the last 2 months has gone... Just saying. :p

From March 9:

1. For the city maintenance costs for distance, it's good that you reduced them, but you didn't write by how much you reduced them. Make sure you didn't reduce them by more than 20%. In our modded Mongoose Mod 3.6.1b, Andy reduced them by too much, I think 50% or so. Now the tribalism Civic and the Forbidden palace are quite useless. And setting up a coastline-nation like Chile doesn't cause any economic problems either, which is not realistic.

That was actually a mistake on my part. I usually proof-read the notes as I'm posting them to fix that sort of thing; when I first write them it's just off to the side as quickly as possible so I can get back to working on the next thing I'm doing, heh.

I DID reduce them, so there was a note about it, but then I gave it some more thought and decided to undue the change, which is why the note right after it says I didn't change anything. I just forgot to remove the first note. Sorry. :)

Basically the argument I ultimately came up with goes like this: You originally claimed inland empires were under-powered compared to coastal empires, in general. So based on your ideas I added the Woodland Cottage, moved regular Cottages to Pottery, and changed the Silk Road over to +2 trade routes in inland cities. All those things are a boost to inland empires. Which were weaker than coastal empires to start with, according to you guys (and I fully believe you :)).

So that should even things up, just on its own. Does it really cause an overshoot, where you then have to buff coastal empires by shifting the maintenance levels, to get them even again? I don't know for sure, but it doesn't seem like it to me.

In any case the change I made, since it wasn't clear, was +10% to all NumCity and -10% to all Distance maintenance values in the XML WorldSize file (they also show up in the difficulty level entries, but the ratios between those should probably remain intact). I would definitely keep the total maintenance equal, so I'd always change them by matching amounts. Btw I also increased the Colony maintenance percents, but NOT by 10%; they are linked to the Distance percents, so I set them to be proportionally equal to the new values there.

All of this is removed atm, with the same percents as in v3.6.1, currently (which is also the same as vanilla). I'm willing to put my new values back if you REALLY think I should, but I do not want to nerf the Palace, Forbidden Palace, Versailles, Tribalism, and Communism effects, AND the idea with vanilla's values is to encourage using colonies for more-distant cities anyway, which would be a bit less necessary with reduced distance costs. Let me know what you think. :)

2. I recommend to change heroic epic back to only a 4th level unit requirement, not 5. In Multiplayer games, you can't take care of every single damaged unit as much as in single player. So often you lose units before they get a lot of upgrades. Also, I think heroic epic requires literature and literature is not really a strong tech anyway, now that you nerved the national wonders (which is good, btw.). And heroic epic is often researched early by peaceful players, and the heroic epic gives them at least at small military boost, while other players go for Macemen straight.

You could easily be right about this. Keep in mind my only first-hand experience is with Huge / Eternal, cooperative survival, Raging Barbarians games where nearly all of our units have reached level 4, and many have reached level 6 to 8, by the middle of the Ancient era. Mostly just from fighting barbs, lol. And you need that high-level army to survive against the DarkMongoose-difficulty AIs soon afterward on these settings, typically. :p

Would you recommend reducing West Point from lvl 6 to 5 as well? Actually what I should REALLY do is L4 Heroic, L5 WP, and +1 to the lvl req if Raging Barbs is on... there are already a few things the AIs do differently in their AI code when that game option is set, so it wouldn't be setting a dangerous precedent or anything. :)

1. Leave all maintenance costs exactly as they were in Version 3.6.1. The woodland cottage should solve all those problems that we had in version 3.6.1. In my opinion, the woodland cottage is by far the biggest improvement of all changes that you made, I'm sure it will work much better than our solution to prepone the real cottages to an earlier tech. It will lead to a great flexibility in the prehistoric period, whether to focus on food, production or trade. Just make sure that the woodland cottage can also be built in jungle, but I think you mentioned that it can be built there as well.

Keep in mind that I did ALSO move normal Cottages to Pottery a while back, but I reduced their commerce by another point and you restore that lost point by researching Monarchy, so it should be fine.

Also wanted to point out, that while the new SIlk Road is admittedly fairly useless to them, Coastal Empires can still benefit from the cottage stuff. Not as much as Inland Empires, but it's not like coastal cities can't work land tiles instead if they want to, especially when it's early and they have a fairly low population.

So that's another reason I don't think inland will be overpowered now, and thus that I don't need to change the maintenance costs. Which is good, cuz I was willing to, but it would've gone against my better judgement. ;)

2. Reduce to level 5 for West Point, please. We never play with raging barbarians.

Yep, that's why I asked. :) :) :)

4. Please consider removing the Blitz from the Early thank, you will make Andy happy ;-)

Please relay to Andy my sincerest apologies, but I really can't. I want the Blitz to be there if you upgrade their speed with a General, AND all other tank units have free Blitz, so it feels "right" to me to have it on there.

If the General thing didn't exist and there was absolutely no way to have it do anything, then yeah I'd remove it. But I personally do actually use it when I play.

(Also, there's a second hidden / secret / promotion-upgradeable ability for tanks now too, that used to be in the mod years ago: if you give them Barrage, they will gain a weak splash damage effect. I used to love that, but the vanilla code to support unlocking it poofed in either Warlords or BTS, and I never fixed it til now. Soooo... that's an additional promotion-related special tank ability, if it makes him feel any better, hehe.)

From March 9, continued:

One last thing to mention about the cottages. Tribes and Settlers are going to be significantly more expensive than you're used to now that I've fixed the scaling on their prices, as we discussed a couple weeks ago. And that's as-intended.

But the same problem also affected Gatherers and Workers to a lesser degree. So those are going to be more expensive than you're used to as well, though not by as much. So you won't be able to build as many tile improvements, as quickly. So the RELATIVE importance of cottages, and all other tile improvements, will be going down a bit for you, in the early parts of the game.

I'm currently considering reducing the Gatherer build cost a bit more to compensate for this, but I dunno yet. Other than that I'm done. I've left the maintenance costs alone as planned, and already added the Heroic / WP reductions with +1 when Raging is set. :)

To be open, I was never aware that there were those dragons in the mod, until you mentioned them ;-)

After you get the new version, you should really open the WorldBuilder, place a few dragons, and do some combats with em... The sound effects are great now that I've got them working again (plus new ones), and in particular, THE NEW STORM DRAKE IS FREAKIN' AWESOME. I absolutely LOVE the model on it, and the combat effects... Sooooo glad I added it. :)

But it's also a major balance improvement, b/c now the dragon that can go into Coast tiles and fight ships has 60 strength instead of 90 before when that was the Blue Dragon's job, and that was a bit overpowered vs ships, heh.

Disagreed, because I'm sure it will be 10th March, hehe :) In central european time time you have got only 22 minutes left.

Well, I'm the one writing the notes, so I'm going to continue using my local timezone... Plus I always put stuff from after midnight on the previous day when I'm simply staying awake til 6am to get more done, and it's all in one work session. The next day's entry typically starts the next time I wake up, hehe.

I'm hoping to get it released late tonight, but we'll see. Tomorrow afternoon (my time) at the latest.

A simple solution would be to let woodland cottages expire when Pottery is researched. But we should leave it like it is for the moment. I am quite confident that it will work well.

Believe it or not I actually thought of doing this a week ago. My answer is that, with this change the player would probably just build Lumberyards in his Forest / Jungle instead, since they don't expire til much later (Replaceable Parts), and ignore the new Woodland Cottage due to the early expiration, even if they kinda wanted it.

So for that reason I agree with not expiring the WC. :) I could set it to expire in Replaceable Parts just for the heck of it I suppose, but it should be pretty obvious well before then that they need to switch to normal Cottages, heh.

OKAY. Sorry for being silent the last 8 days; if the forum hadn't been having problems we'd probably have had all this conversation on here to begin with. But that's why I posted it, so you guys would know I didn't die, or go on vacation, or something. :p

Next, I offer you this battle cry, which echoes through the subforum:

Release the hounds!!! ... I mean, the mod! ... Wait, the mod has hounds in it, doesn't it?

The change log sticky has been updated for the last time, with the final set of patch notes from the last 8 days. Feel free to look it over, or ignore it; up to you. :)

...

One additional note I meant to make but never got a chance to: I was actually wrong one final time (if you can believe it) two weeks ago about the power plant situation. The AIs were evaluating the magnitude of the XML power unhealth globals, and they definitely would've been more reluctant to build them at -10 health than at -2, contrary to what I said before.

The vanilla code probably didn't do this, but there was BetterAI code that did, which is why I missed it the first time through. My changes were still necessary to add happiness penalties to power, but they weren't as badly needed as I thought at the time. Just lettin' ya know. :)

...

Version 4.0 is finished, but I still need a certain number of hours (please don't ask me how many b/c I have no clue at this point) to update the Credits section, convert the patch notes into release notes, take out the custom soundtrack files, zip it, and upload it. In the past this has taken 4-8 hours, but these patch notes are longer than my last several major updates combined. Sigh.

Anyway, figure tomorrow afternoon, give or take. I swear I mean it this time.

I honestly thought I was a few days, and even a few hours, away from this point a hundred times over the last 2-4 weeks, but I kept thinking of stuff to do, finding stuff to do, having stuff to do suggested to me, and having everything take twice as long to do as I expected. I can't really apologize any more, so some of the email conversation I posted above was to further make fun of myself on this point. :)

...

I said it once before, but this version will, without exaggeration, be the biggest accomplishment of my life so far. It has so many improvements in it I've lost count. I've done almost everything I had on my radar screen to do in the future, ever. I've done a bunch more stuff I wouldn't have thought of on my own, thanks primarily to Rakete. I've stumbled into a ton of additional things simply from working so thoroughly on everything else.

This update is designed to be completely, 100% bug-free. It is designed to be perfectly balanced. Obviously I can't know for sure, but unlike my past releases, it should not need a 4.0.1 patch to fix problems that emerge after release. I have tested and double-checked everything I can. I have given everything close scrutiny with my now-very-exhausted brain.

If this update does not make the best Civ4 mod of its type for the rest of human history, I will come apologize to each and every human who reads this, in person.

Now then... release notes. *gulp*

added Mongoose PercentCommerceRoundingFix to round, rather than truncate, the higher-precision internal empire-level percent commerce income values, to help prevent alternating zero and 100% research funding levels from being slightly superior to stable intermediate values (thanks AIAndy!)


Very well!

Very well!

What I did last night before going to sleep helped, but it wasn't a perfect solution; it could still get messed up if you used 3 or 4 non-zero percents (once the Culture and Espionage spending controls are unlocked), or if you used the "Build Gold"-type processes in any of your cities. Don't worry though; I only spent 20 minutes on this last night hehe.

Fortunately, I realized the right way to solve the problem while I was asleep. (Which is not the first time that's happened in the last 2 months...) So after another 10 minutes implementing that just now, I believe I've fully solved the problem. Toldja it'd be quick. ;)

higher-precision internal empire-level percent commerce income value remainders

That's a nice term for it. :goodjob:

Actually I just asked you to fix that, because I am too lazy to alternate my tax rate every couple of turns, but I don't want other players in our group to benefit from that trick. ;)
Though at the moment we play against the AI most of the time.

And are you sure that it does not cause any problems/bugs to replace the truncate operations by rounding operations? I mean maybe Firaxis truncated these values intentionally.

Actually I just asked you to fix that, because I am too lazy to alternate my tax rate every couple of turns, but I don't want other players in our group to benefit from that trick. ;)

Bugfixes tend to apply to all players... sorry. :p

And are you sure that it does not cause any problems/bugs to replace the truncate operations by rounding operations? I mean maybe Firaxis truncated these values intentionally.

They truncated them b/c they truncate everything in their code, and that's usually fine as long as they're consistent about it. This is a special case b/c you have one value that can optionally be broken up into 4 seperate pieces.

Changing to rounding was what I did last night. It would've worked for just gold and research spending, with no build processes going on in your cities, but otherwise it was still broken.

What I'm doing now is collecting the 4 remainder values, adding them up, and dropping the result onto the gold value. It's functionally equivalent to setting gold to 100% funding and having no remainders. So yes, I'm sure. :)

A few hours ago I realized something was still bothering me about special kill gold rewards, so I figured out what it was and made one more quick update as a result. It's in the Change Log sticky if you want to read the details.

Don't worry; I'm pretty sure that's the only last-second thing I'll stop to do, and it didn't take very long anyway. :p Whelp, back to work... These patch notes go on forever.

extended Mongoose UnitGoldValueMod to also scale special kill gold rewards from 100-50% depending on world size (they are worth more on smaller maps b/c there are fewer fogged tiles for animals to spawn in so Mammoths and Rhinos are more rare; b/c there are lower quantity limits on Turtles and Serpents so THEY are more rare; and b/c, while there is always only one Kraken and it will always have room to spawn, a player has less room for, and higher maintenance costs with, a large number of cities to build and support a large naval fleet, which is needed to actually kill a Kraken)
doubled gold reward values on Sandworm, Turtle, Serpent, and Kraken to compensate
increased gold reward value on Mammoth from 25 to 120, and on Rhinoceros from 15 to 80

120 gold for a Mammoth is far too much. It's not that difficult to kill them. Rhinoceros probably, too. Gold rewards should be based on how difficult it is to kill an animal, not on how rare the animal is on the map. Otherwise they will be like mobile super goody huts.
And don't forget that without rageing barbarians it is easier to kill those animals.

120 gold for a Mammoth is far too much. It's not that difficult to kill them. Rhinoceros probably, too. Gold rewards should be based on how difficult it is to kill an animal, not on how rare the animal is on the map. Otherwise they will be like mobile super goody huts.
And don't forget that without rageing barbarians it is easier to kill those animals.

Dood... I said "100-50%" for a very specific reason. :p You only get that much for killing them on Duel-Eternal games (b/c there won't be much fogged land area for them to spawn in the first place on a map that small). On Huge-Eternal and Duel-Quick a Mammoth is worth 60, and on Huge-Quick they're worth 30. (Technically that's only true for the Planetary size, but Huge will be pretty close.)

They got a balance buff from 25 up to 60, and then got doubled along with the monsters to cancel out the new worldsize scaling.

Also, they're a bit stronger in v4.0, and Rhinos are still going to be worth less than Mammoths. :)

p.s. - I'm getting there. Still at least several hours away, but I'm getting there. Oh, and I think I'm going to set the LFB (Lead from Behind) system to be off by default from now on, since we always turn it off for our games... It's a simple XML control global if people want to turn it back on.

Oh, and I think I'm going to set the LFB (Lead from Behind) system to be off by default from now on, since we always turn it off for our games... It's a simple XML control global if people want to turn it back on.

What's that actually?

What's that actually?

It's a very popular mod component that I added into my code a while back. Basically it tries to make sure your highest-value units (ones with a lot of promotions, ones with a Great General, and probably also elite units and dragons and such) stay alive, by making units with somewhat-lower combat odds for it, still take defense combats instead of the good units.

Obviously if the valuable units are better than the best non-valuable unit by a sufficient margin it will still let them be the defender, but it adjusts the chance of that happening by how much more valuable they are.

Personally I prefer to always let the units with the highest combat odds be the ones that actually fight, so I have the best chance of winning each combat, but I can see the point; that way your best units are more likely to be available for offensive combats. (The type of game we play puts us on the defensive a lot though, so I'm probably biased, hehe.)

So yeah, up to you on whether I turn this off by default or not. Like I said, to toggle it you just change a "0" to a "1" at the top of one of the XML globals files, so it's easily adjustable, but most people don't like to touch even the high-level control switches like this.

As for the update, I probably would've been done by now, but the friend I used to play Civ4 with called, and we wound up playing Starcraft 2 for the last 8 hours, heh. Sorry for the extra delay, but it was fun, and I hadn't had any real fun in over 3 months now, so I kinda had to.

I'm currently 75% done with the release notes conversion. After that it's pretty fast and straight-forward, but I'm going to need to sleep again pretty soon here, too. I'll do the best I can.

I have never paid much attention ot those combat orders. There is always few time in the games we play. So I don't care at all if you turn "Lead from behind" on or off. I am also not skilled at all in using promotions. Usually what happens it that either
A) I have chosen a promotion but then I decide to use the unit for a different purpose so the promotion is worthless.
B) I am waiting too long to choose from the promotions and my units get killed already. :eek:

So now I sometimes just turn-on auto-promote or I just choose the combat-promotions.

What I am skilled in is to build many cities without running into economic problems, and to choose the best locations for my cities.

Today I made a few more AI code improvements related to tile damage (which all started b/c I was wondering what was really going on with that AI_PATH_DAMAGE_WEIGHT global I found and changed earlier), and also made a bugfix to the BetterAI code in one place as a result.

Next, b/c I wasn't really happy with LeadFromBehind being on OR off by default, I came up with a brilliant alternative solution that's now been implemented as well. A few other people may have thought of the chronological leader cycling thing independently from me, but I seriously doubt anyone else would ever think of this on their own: LFB is now used selectively, depending on the leader. The ones with more military skill, success, and boldness historically use the old system (taking higher risks with their valuable units), and the rest use the new system.

Oh, and I screwed up going from memory yet again in my previous post: LFB was incorporated into BBAI at some point, so it wasn't something I specifically added to the mod myself. Now then, back to work on the release notes, hehe.

Gotta note a few non-civic icon choices, sorry: Atlatl (two flying stone daggers on red background), Condor ("Thieves' Guild" with mask sitting on table), Witch Doctor (bone hand on black background), Shaman (lightning sphere on red background), Storm Drake (blue lightning bolt on purple background), Intercept mission (front view of green WW2 fighter shooting bullets on yellow sky background), Recon mission (large white UAV on dark blue water background), Bomb mission (overhead view of two B52's sitting on on runway), Strike mission (large neon green targeting reticle on black background), Rebase mission (purple and red suitcases), Explore mission (old white map with gold arc from bottom-left to top-right), Sentinel mission (dark gray Harrier with blue water background), Arcology Infrastructure (dark teal generator columns with purple lightning around them), Arcology Shield (light blue energy beam in concentric square slices coming out of scifi projector on black background), Labyrinth (teal room with giant pillars, yellow lights, and white sun beams that I used to have on the Gutenberg or Leonardo I think), and Buckingham Palace (long stretch of rectangular green garden segments with gray between them).

...

Today I fixed a bug with the Nuclear Plant effect that would've had you all up in arms if it had made it through to the release version; made one final, extremely-minor change; fixed the game crashing that resulted from that change, which I almost didn't discover; and put the finishing touches on the included documentation files.

Now then, one additional note to make: You won't get the gold reward if you kill a Rhino or Mammoth with a nuke (you wouldn't with the monster units either, except they're all nuke-immune so it doesn't matter ;)). This is intended, however: the horn or tusks would be obliterated, and if not, who would want to buy radioactive ivory? :p

Okay, the file has been uploaded... gimme a minute and it should be available. Version 1.2 of the Africa map is included, so until he updates it again you don't need to make a seperate download for that. (This version has the ocean tiles set to be Ocean instead of Coast, and has the one minor change needed to make it work in MM 4.0.)

People other than Rakete: I've worked harder on this than most people work at their jobs, and I'm not getting paid a cent for it, so please at least let me know what you think. :)

:thumbsup:

Great to see version 4.0 online!

I have already played a couple of turns to test the woodland cottages and they work great. I have got some real-life work to do for the next 2-3 days, but after that I will definitely start a single player game. And our first multiplayer game will likely start on 26th March.
And I have seen some minor things in version 4.0 that could be flaws, but I will spare that to you for the moment. You really deserve playing Starcraft 2.

The only thing I want to mention at this point is that my Africa map loads up, but crashes after ending the first turn. But lets talk about that later as well. I will try to find the cause by myself. Your ostrichs are not permitted to stop me from searching for the cause on my own, hehe. :D

MAY 15!!! They finally announced the Diablo 3 release date... Ahem.

And I have seen some minor things in version 4.0 that could be flaws, but I will spare that to you for the moment. You really deserve playing Starcraft 2.

It's also a bunch of PS3 games, and some more RL stuff I've fallen behind on again... But no, go ahead and tell me. I want to know what the flaws are in my flawless creation. :p

The only thing I want to mention at this point is that my Africa map loads up, but crashes after ending the first turn. But lets talk about that later as well. I will try to find the cause by myself. Your ostrichs are not permitted to stop me from searching for the cause on my own, hehe. :D

Ack, sorry, I only tested that it loaded. I just can't catch a break on this update, sigh. It sounds like an SDK problem, in which case you won't be able to figure it out on your own, but I'll let you take a look first anyway. :)

downloading...

thank you Mongoose! I can't say that I 100% understand all those excellent status updates... only to say that certainly appreciate the detail and effort you've put in!

thank you Mongoose!

Enjoy. :)

There's a minor problem where the wonders I added "Requires Coastal" to are displaying in the water b/c I forgot it triggers that, even for ones that're supposed to be physically drawn on land, but it's only graphical, and I'm waiting to see if Rakete finds any other issues with the update before I patch that, hehe.

Ok the day of reckoning has come! :D

Time to tell you the truth. This new version of Mongoose Mod is not as perfect as you thought it was. It's just toooooo full of bugs. :p

Ok to be serious, I have so far only discovered one major bug, but I am sure that you will be able to fix it. All other things are just minor. :)

This is the MEGA BUG:
Load the savegame that I have sent you and you will see that there is only one turn left in which the AI calculations take the usual span of time. From the second turn that you finish, you will have to wait a very long time until the AI calculations are finished. On my desktop it increased from approx. 5 minutes to approx. 25 minutes. I have got an Intel Atom, that's why I have got such a high 5 minutes normal duration. On my laptop it increased from approx. 3 minutes to approx. 15 minutes. If you have got a very fast computer, it will maybe increase from 5 seconds to half a minute or so. But I'm sure that in relative terms the increase will be as high as on my two computers.

I suspect that an AI has researched a certain tech in the start of the renaissance age which makes it use a new routine that lasts so long, taking about 3 times as much time as all other calculations accumulatively.

Since my computer is slow anyway, I have to stop that game until you have cleared that bug.
Our first multiplayer match is postponed anyway, because the laptop of one in our group is out of order. So for the moment we are a group of three only and are finishing a game on my African map with version 3.6.1.

Some minor bugs:

- why can I build 3 national wonders in the same city? I thought it was restricted to 2. Just load the savegame that I have sent you, go to the city that is located second to the top on my semi-archipel. I have built the Maoi-statues and the National epic there, but I can still build the Royal tomb.

-Why does the Heroic epic not require a unit with 4 experience? I thought that we had agreed on that. It does not have any such requirement now.

-why can I only build 2 missionaries of the same type? I thought this was increased from 3 to 4? Ok, probably my remembrance is wrong and it was decreased from 3 to 2.

-Why is Alumunium enabled long before it is revealed? Does that make sense? Even if I trade for Aluminum with a technically advanced player, what can I build with Aluminium then? Aren't I lacking the techs for those units then?

-the effect of the Labyrinth is strange. Why does it cost so much population? What does the Labyrinth refer to in Human history?

-the warrior is too strong, a real Falcon killer! The Stone axeman is quite worthless now, because the Warrior serves nearly all of its purposes and is much cheaper.

Ok that's it for the moment.
There are some other small bugs and things that I dislike but they were just carried over from version 3.6.1, because I had never told you about them. I will post them a bit later.

Sorry if I have ruined your day now.......

I suspect that an AI has researched a certain tech in the start of the industrial age which makes it use a new routine that lasts so long, taking about 3 times as much time as all other calculations accumulative.

Off the top of my head I have no idea what could be causing this, so I'll have to re-read all my AI-related code changes and do a bunch of testing. Doh.

- why can I build 3 national wonders in the same city? I thought it was restricted to 2. Just load the savegame that I have sent you, go to the city that is located second to the top on my semi-archipel. I have built the Maoi-statues and the National epic there, but I can still build the Royal tomb.

The limit was changed from 2 to 3 waaaaay back in the earliest days of the mod, years ago... This is not something I changed in 3.6, or 4.0, or even 3.0, heh. No one ever complained about it so I left it at 3, and with the recent National Wonder nerfs I figured it'd be even more okay.

-Why does the Heroic epic not require a unit with 4 experience? I thought that we had agreed on that. It does not have any such requirement now.

Yes, it does have that requirement... The code doesn't display the red text for the restriction when you currently have a unit somewhere that meets the requirement. Try looking at it on an early turn, or from the main menu. (The "not displaying the red text when the condition is met" thing is not new either; that's vanilla code, and it has always behaved that way.)

And it does add +1 to the level needed when Raging Barbs is on, as intended. I definitely tested this, with it both on and off.

-why can I only build 2 missionaries of the same type? I thought this was increased from 3 to 4? Ok, but probably my remembrance is wrong and it was decreased from 3 to 2.

Because there's also worldsize-based scaling of the maximum number of allowed restricted units in 4.0 (check Turtles, Flying Machines, Mantas, Dragons, etc). The base limit was indeed increased from 3 to 4, but the base value is only the final value on the larger map sizes now.

-Why is Alumunium enabled long before it is revealed? Does that make sense? Even if I trade for Aluminum with a technically advanced player, what can I build with Aluminium then? Aren't I lacking the techs for those units then?

Eh, this was a random minor thing I decided to do early on in the update. It doesn't really make any difference either way, but it was going on the same kind of logic that was used to set the enabling techs on the earlier resources: Metallurgy gives you the physical ability to manipulate, work with, and use Aluminum, regardless of whether you have anything to use it for, yet. Metallurgy is a more advanced form of the Ancient and Classical metalworking techs, and is needed for this particular type of metal, for realistic physical reasons.

It is revealed in Flight b/c that is where there is the first major use and need for it, so an empire suddenly starts looking for sources of it, b/c they find they need it all of a sudden now.

As a practical gameplay matter, no, it doesn't matter much, but it's consistent with how the Ancient / Classical enabling techs were chosen, so eh, whatever. :)

-the effect of the Labyrinth is strange. Why does it cost so much population? What does the Labyrinth refer to in Human history?

It's mythological. (There might have been an actual physical labyrinth built, but if there was it would've been for different reasons... myths are usually based on some element of truth).

I don't remember if a Pedia entry made it in for that wonder or not... Anyway, in the myth, it was the prison for the Minotaur. It was a giant maze, and people would be thrown inside, to eventually die to the creature if they couldn't find their way back out again. These being either criminals and such, or just human sacrifices that were thought to be necessary (I don't remember, but Wikipedia has a full article on it, as usual :)).

Anyway, the idea is the population goes down b/c of the sacrifices, and war weariness goes down and production goes up a little b/c of the extra fear-based motivation the people have.

-the warrior is too strong, a real Falcon killer! The Stone axeman is quite worthless now, because the Warrior serves nearly all of its purposes and is much cheaper.

Really? Falcons are completely optional. I was expecting players to skip that tech entirely half the time... Stone Axes are still significantly better city raiders, and still own every type of melee unit in the field...

I may have gone a little overboard with the Warrior vs Falcon counter modifier, but I used it b/c I felt Warriors still sucked... badly. The low base price on them is probably sufficient though I guess. :)

Fine, I'll re-balance them a little... I can't agree with you about Stone Axes though; they're STILL the best Prehistoric unit if you ask me. :p

So, do you get those prolonged AI calculations, too, in those savegames that I sent you? How long does it take on your computer?
If the problem is not related to the abilities of a certain tech, it could also be a consequence of city raising. In the turn prior to the prolonged AI calculations I razed a city for the first time in the game (AI city, not Barbarian). But the prolonged AI calculations seem to be enduring, I tested it for three more turns. But I razed the city only once.

Falcons vs. Warrior: The Barbarians build a lot of Falcons!!!! It doesn't matter if the AI and Human players hardly build any.

National wonders: It is displayed incorrectly in the mousover, saying "National wonders left: 0", when I have built two. But there is still one left to build then..


And yes, I have heard about the fairy tale of the Minotaur. I just didn't think about that.

just thought to copy your E-mail to the forum and answer it right here.


Were you okay with Pacifism now that it has a big second penalty on it? (Plus the other Great People rate effects in the game having been nerfed...) Or is it still too high at +100%?

I thought maybe it would be overpowered with the new category unlock for it on the Oracle (whereas it's normally not available til slightly later), but then I realized it's actually hard to have a state religion yet at the point you build the Oracle, b/c religions are just starting to be founded at that point, and then you have to spread it to your cities. So maybe the unlock would still be okay with Pacifism at only +50% without a state religion. Not sure, hehe.


I have never used Pacifism in Version 3.6.1 except when I had built the Great Library. For some reason I always used to get caught up in quite early wars ;), and didn't like the +1 military support cost on Pacifism then. So I cannot say much about it.
But it is definitely a useful civic, even with the additional -50% military production handicap in version 4.0. It can help for example when you start on a small isolated island, or when you are on VERY good terms with your neighbours.

So you should not nerf Pacifism further. It works mainly for isolated players, with the high military gold and production costs. I agree with you that with the oracle and an early religion, Pacifism could well be too powerful, giving a too strong boost to isolated players. But then, better remove the stance-civics unlock from the Oracle instead of nerfing Pacifism. There does not have to be a great wonder with that ability. It sometimes seems that you are a bit crazy with those civic-unlock great wonders (old Silk Road :lol:)




...

Plus, what do you think of 4.0, just in general? I know the Industrial Lag problem is a big problem, but I'll fix it soon, and there's a new Prehistoric Era, an overhauled civic set, an overhauled leader trait system, and a bunch of scaling improvements for world sizes and gamespeeds that aren't Huge / Eternal... Bunch of new units, and a huge amazing update to the PM mapscript which I still think is the biggest thing of all... Just seeing what you thought overall, since you haven't really said much yet.


I have only played half a game so for, because of the renaissance lag problem .
The new prehistoric era is excellent, much better than in version 3.6.1. The woodland cottage, the new techs and most of the new units - all of that makes sense. I have not tested all of the new units yet however, and didn't meet many of the new wild animals yet.

Plus, I like the 3 new tech invention rules - diffusion(1), doubling rates for unresearched techs in previous ages (2), and the 25% research bonus for double prerequisites (3).
I'm not sure though, how the tech diffusion is exactly calculated, although I understand the general meaning.
And, you need to make sure that the AI is able to consider those three new rules properly.

I can't comment yet on anything else, because having played only half a game is not much.

......

@EVERYBODY:

[B]Is there anybody out there who played a game with Mongoose Mod 4.0 against the AI, and did NOT notice a strong time lag in the AI calculations, once the AI has reached the early renaissance age?

But then, better remove the stance-civics unlock from the Oracle instead of nerfing Pacifism. There does not have to be a great wonder with that ability. It sometimes seems that you are a bit crazy with those civic-unlock great wonders (old Silk Road :lol:)

The reason I added it was b/c the Oracle seemed a little weak before. "Just one free tech" is what Sedentary does, and what any great person can do if used that way. After you build the Oracle it has no lasting effect, and that just seemed bleh for a really early Ancient wonder... particularly one that you have to do a different tech path to get, taking you away from the Masonry and Pottery ones.

The Theory of Evolution later is fine b/c it gives 2 free techs, and that area of the tech tree is very busy anyway. But the Stance category on the Oracle made such beautiful sense, too: the priestess can predict the future for you, and you can decide what kind of military policy to use as a result! :p

Plus, I like the 3 new tech invention rules - diffusion(1), doubling rates for unresearched techs in previous ages (2), and the 25% research bonus for double prerequisites (3).

Diffusion had been in the mod for a long time, b/c it was part of BetterAi. There was just no display showing you the effect (it came across as weird turns-to-finish times for the techs that usually didn't add up exactly right based on your research output alone).

There's also Welfare from BetterAI, which is a strong additional research boost that is only given to the players that are the furthest behind in the world (and even then it's only given to them on techs that other players already have). This also did not get displayed before, but will show up now in the info as well.

My new "older era cost doubling" effect I just love. It makes all those great long-way-back secondary tech requirements meaningful now! :)

The double-prereq bonus was actually a vanilla effect, so it's been active since the beginning. However it was slightly weaker before (20% instead of the new 25%), it didn't display anywhere obviously, and the system that applied it was also unintentionally making the costs higher for techs that didn't have an arrow link on the left side, like Horseback Riding. I always tried to avoid those as much as possible when designing and modifying the tech tree, but I had to use them in a few cases, and the costs were wrong as a result, but that's fixed now. :)

I'm not sure though, how the tech diffusion is exactly calculated, although I understand the general meaning.

I looked at the code for this for the first time while working on 4.0, just out of curiosity. It's complicated math that would be very hard to visualize; you kinda just have to let the game spit out the crunched numbers on it, heh.

(There's at least one exponent where the base and power are both calculated from a number of different values... I honestly don't know how JDog came up with the formula in the first place it's so obtuse, but I do trust it to work right b/c the author is awesome. :))

And, you need to make sure that the AI is able to consider those three new rules properly.

The AIs are automatically aware of what the tech costs are at any given time, and they tend to plan out a path based on a ton of different factors. They have no control over the Diffusion and Welfare bonuses b/c those are entirely based on what the other players in the game do, so they're fine as-is. The additional prereq bonus is a vanilla effect so I'd assume they already account for that, and I remember even checking this, so I think it's fine too.

The only thing the AIs don't actively take into account is the old era cost doubling, but I figured it was pretty safe to not bother, b/c they don't evaluate leader switching when crossing certain era boudaries either and that works out fine... and b/c they already go for the techs they want the most in a certain order anyway, so I figured I should basically just let them keep doing that. It's pretty much what I would do as a human anyway: the doubled costs don't really change my tech strategy much, they're just something I have to deal with as they happen.

wow im very happy to see v 4 is out!!

im gonna try it on multiplayer with a friend !

how nice!


(i guess ur not gonna release the source code like b4?)

wow im very happy to see v 4 is out!!

im gonna try it on multiplayer with a friend !

how nice!

There's a Rennaissance-and-onward major lag bug with the AIs, and a few other mostly-minor things, I need to fix in a small update that should be out pretty soon, but otherwise it's good to go, yeah.

(i guess ur not gonna release the source code like b4?)

Nope, sorry. :(

well then ill w8 for the update then

Nope, sorry.

i wish i could understand what the big deal, i just like to play with a few other mods that i like :(

bummer, but your the boss here.

Wow, you weren't kidding about the lag problem, Rakete. Btw, in those two save files you sent me three weeks ago, the players are all in late Medieval, so it's not really a Renaissance problem per se. As it turns out, it's not triggered by any one specific thing, like an AI reaching a certain era; it's a gradually-escalating problem throughout the whole game.

Thus, my suspicion about what was wrong would not apply. Except, of course, that it turned out to be right anyway, lol.

The whole thing is a result of the new AI evaluation code for the new Buckingham Palace global unit upgrade discount effect. (Which was inspired and motivated, btw, by the original Leonardo's Workshop wonder in Civ2 or Civ3 (I forget which) that did the same thing. :))

Basically I coded it badly. It was checking all of an AI's units with every building it ever considered building, regardless of whether the building had the Buckingham Palace effect or not (which, obviously, only the Buckingham Palace does). And each of those unit checks is against all unit types in the game each time, b/c the vanilla code is stupid about how it looks for upgrade types and just brute-forces the search. In addition, each unit checked for any possible upgrade types in each of the AI's cities seperately, since resource availability can affect that and I didn't want to miss any upgradeable units when evaluating the BP. So, triple-whammy disaster. Oops. :D

I didn't rewrite the vanilla upgrade check system b/c that would take more time to do, but I set it to only search the nearest city, and to only bother at all when actually evaluating a building with the BP effect. I also applied the latter restriction to the Golden Dawn effect, and I'll put the vanilla rewrite on my long-term to-do list. (Just recursively following the upgrade tree will be drastically faster, but the vanilla code avoids using recursion anywhere, so they didn't do it here either.)

Long story short, Rakete's savefile turnover went from taking 12 minutes to taking 20 seconds, on my very slow PC that's 8 years old now (don't worry, in preparation for Diablo 3 I'm finally building a new PC when Ivy Bridge comes out in 2 weeks, woohoo!). AI turns should now be marginally faster than in 3.6.1 thanks to the Golden Dawn condition, rather than so-much-slower-it-becomes-unplayable. Sorry about that. :(

The two major problems are now fixed on my end (the other being the Africa map not working), so version 4.0.1 will be released very soon. I have a few other minor things left to do, and I'm gonna be busy tomorrow, but it should be out by Monday or Tuesday for sure, and later tonight if I can stay awake long enough.

Great to read that the time lag bug is solved :goodjob:

Some more minor issues before you launch version 4.0.1.:

-Why can the new pirate unit not attac without declaring war? Is it intentional? I didn't test the unit yet, I just saw that the ability is missing in the description

-After one of my cities was hit by a hurricane, all my units in the cities were activated in the next turn. What is that useful for?

-This hurricane destroyed one of my granaries. I had only two granaries left then, so I got the "cannot continue building Haramat Yusuf" when it was already half finished. :mad: I guess that this is intentional, since it requires 3 granaries. However, please make sure that I will still get the gold payout when another player builds the wonder. It was built by an AI shortly afterwards, but I forgot to check whether I got the money or not. I couldn't even finish to rebuild the 3rd granary before the AI finished Haramat Yusuf, so I couldn't even check if the build points were saved.

-in the beginning of the game (and probably also later), I seem to get an additional research point. It displays "+11 research", but I get only 10 research points in my city. I'm not sure if you understand what I mean, so tell me if you need screenshots.
I assume this is because you replaced the truncating functions with rounding functions.

-aren't 3 national wonders per city too much? I think 2 whould do, because it requires you to carefully choose which ones you really want to have in a certain city.


Bugs carried over from version 3.6.1.:

-I am using a low 1024x768 screen resolution. When I start a game, it displays only "Eternal Mongoose" and "Marathon" game speeds, because the other speeds are below the bottow of my screen. I can still select them "blindly" with the arrow keys, however. If it's too much work to change that, then leave it like it is, because I think few people are still using that screen resolution.

-When another player kills a barbarian monster, for example a sea turtle, or when barbarians are unloaded from a ship, I do not only get a message, but there is also an icon displayed in one of my cities. However, this is displayed at the wrong place. Can you maybe remove those "Event icons", because they are not useful anyway.

4.0.1 is almost done, and should be out later today, just fyi. :)

-Why can the new pirate unit not attac without declaring war? Is it intentional? I didn't test the unit yet, I just saw that the ability is missing in the description

No unit will have a vanilla ability without saying so on the description; that part is automatic for existing effects.

The reason is the longstanding situation where there is no AI support for the Hidden Nationality or Can Attack Without Declaring War abilities on land units. You can give them to them just fine, but the AIs will not use these abilities; they will treat any such units as normal combat units.

Thus it is a significantly-unfair advantage for human players, b/c they will know how to make full use of this extra capability. Some other mods have gone ahead and added it anyway, but it steps too far over the balance line for me.

It has been on my longterm to-do list for a long time now, to try and write an AI script for this purpose, for possible use with the War Dog, Marauder, Sith, Dragons, etc (as well as the new land Pirate unit, obviously). But this is an extremely difficult undertaking, which is why no one else has done it yet as far as I know, and I'm not going to be getting to it any time soon unfortunately.

(I suspect JDog, Fuyu and Afforess are among the only people even capable of doing this, but with enough effort I MIGHT be able to hack something together... I would definitely need to study the AI code a lot more closely than I ever have so far.)

-After one of my cities was hit by a hurricane, all my units in the cities were activated in the next turn. What is that useful for?

It probably has to do with the Thunderstorm that appears over your city when there's a Hurricane (at least I think that's what happens now). Whenever a feature with a damage effect spawns, it automatically wakes up any units under it in case the owner wants to move them, or change their mission, or give them an emergency promotion, or whatever, so they don't take as much damage, or die.

-This hurricane destroyed one of my granaries. I had only two granaries left then, so I got the "cannot continue building Haramat Yusuf" when it was already half finished. :mad: I guess that this is intentional, since it requires 3 granaries. However, please make sure that I will still get the gold payout when another player builds the wonder. It was built by an AI shortly afterwards, but I forgot to check whether I got the money or not. I couldn't even finish to rebuild the 3rd granary before the AI finished Haramat Yusuf, so I couldn't even check if the build points were saved.

Negative events like this one, and others, can destroy buildings in vanilla, and while I'm not sure if there are any wonders that require "x amount of normal buildings" in vanilla, that IS a vanilla stat, so this is, theoretically, a situation vanilla supports. Just saying, lol.

As far as the gold refund, I'll double-check here in a bit, but from what I remember of the relevant code off the top of my head, I would guess with 95% confidence that yes, it will refund the spent hammers. Admittedly this is a very clever, interesting, and unusual situation I've never run into, or thought of, before though hehe. :)

-in the beginning of the game (and probably also later), I seem to get an additional research point. It displays "+11 research", but I get only 10 research points in my city. I'm not sure if you understand what I mean, so tell me if you need screenshots.
I assume this is because you replaced the truncating functions with rounding functions.

Actually, no. This was mentioned in the 4.0 release notes, but given the book-size length of that document I don't blame you for missing it. ;)

In vanilla (and all previous versions of the mod), when you have no cities at the beginning (or later if you lose all your cities but have the Require Complete Kills option on), there is a minimum research per turn value of 1 that you get when you're actually doing 0 research. I suspect they put this in just to avoid a division-by-zero error in the research progress bar (cost of the selected tech / research per turn = turns to complete).

This felt slightly wonky to me, so in version 4.0 I went ahead and made the free research point permanent, rather than poofing after you lay your first city. I consider it a neat empire-level contribution to research.

-aren't 3 national wonders per city too much? I think 2 whould do, because it requires you to carefully choose which ones you really want to have in a certain city.

Didn't you ask me this a couple months ago? I could've sworn it came up already... ;)

Vanilla's limit is 2, and I'm only slightly higher at 3... I dunno, I really like 3, and any qualms I may have had about it kinda got smushed into a pile of goo with the new National Wonder stat nerfs in 4.0. Actually that was part of my motivation for doing that - so I could feel okay with keeping the limit at 3. :)

For me personally, I still struggle picking which 3 to use in a given city, and there are a lot more possible combinations this way (as well as a bit more satisfaction and less frustration that I can at least do some of the combinations I want). If you really think it's overpowered I'm not 100% unwilling to reconsider, though... Just 90% unwilling. :p

-I am using a low 1024x768 screen resolution. When I start a game, it displays only "Eternal Mongoose" and "Marathon" game speeds, because the other speeds are below the bottow of my screen. I can still select them "blindly" with the arrow keys, however. If it's too much work to change that, then leave it like it is, because I think few people are still using that screen resolution.

It has nothing to do with screen resolution. The windows are all set up to handle that res, and don't generally get any larger at higher settings. (You can add that behavior like my Civics Advisor screen does, but it's not how vanilla windows behave by default.)

As for this window in particular, I actually took a look during v4.0 development. I may have missed something (in which case feel free to point it out, other modders!), but as far as I can tell it's hardcoded and can't be changed at all.

You can get around this problem by always using the Custom Game and Custom Scenario options though, which I personally have always done anyway.

Sorry, I know that window looks uncouth in the mod, but I'm fairly sure we're stuck with it.

-When another player kills a barbarian monster, for example a sea turtle, or when barbarians are unloaded from a ship, I do not only get a message, but there is also an icon displayed in one of my cities. However, this is displayed at the wrong place. Can you maybe remove those "Event icons", because they are not useful anyway.

They're displayed in your capital (or your first city if you don't currently have a capital (or not at all if you don't currently have any cities, to avoid a Python error heh)), which I did b/c they're basically empire-level reports that you, the leader, receive at your Palace about worldwide-news-type-stuff. I always envisioned an out-of-breath low-level courier bursting into your throne room, interrupting your important business, and informing you about these terrifying events.

I can't really put the icon over the units themselves b/c they're often in unexplored areas which the icon thingy won't allow, and b/c the pirate message is about the sum of all worldwide pirate activity, and not localized to any specific location.

That being said, I do like the icons a lot, and don't really want to change them... sowwy. :(

Hey, I have come up with 7 bugs/issues just to learn that each of them is either no bug or can't be changed. :lol:

Ok but at least this will fasten the launch of Mongoose Mod 4.0.1 :)



Didn't you ask me this a couple months ago? I could've sworn it came up already... ;)


Yes and no. I had come up with it, but I had been complaining about the wrong scripts. I think there is a mouseover or something else where it says "1 national wonder left" when in fact there are 2 left.
I hadn't been complaining about the rule itself.



Vanilla's limit is 2, and I'm only slightly higher at 3... I dunno, I really like 3, and any qualms I may have had about it kinda got smushed into a pile of goo with the new National Wonder stat nerfs in 4.0. Actually that was part of my motivation for doing that - so I could feel okay with keeping the limit at 3. :)

For me personally, I still struggle picking which 3 to use in a given city, and there are a lot more possible combinations this way (as well as a bit more satisfaction and less frustration that I can at least do some of the combinations I want). If you really think it's overpowered I'm not 100% unwilling to reconsider, though... Just 90% unwilling. :p


I think 3 makes it too easy to plan for "super cities". That benefits players who are only hiding behind their borders, and maximizing their economy.

4.0.1 is officially done, and I've put the notes in the Change Log sticky. I'm heading out right now, but the documentation work will be pretty trivial this time so I see no reason why I won't be able to get it posted tonight. As usual, sorry for the delay. :D

I think there is a mouseover or something else where it says "1 national wonder left" when in fact there are 2 left.

I wasn't able to find this anywhere. I could've easily missed it, but I didn't want to waste too much time looking right now.

I think 3 makes it too easy to plan for "super cities". That benefits players who are only hiding behind their borders, and maximizing their economy.

Alright, after thinking about it extensively the last 5 days, I'm forced to conclude I more-or-less agree with you, albeit very reluctantly. :p

I left the limit at 3 on the smallest 3 map sizes though, because players don't have as many total cities on those, and I didn't want them to have to fill up a high percentage of their cities just to fit all the National Wonders in.

From email:

Generally, most of your civics have got too many effects. It might be balanced, but it's too complicated for occasional players.
Ideally, a civic should not have more than 3 effects, 1 or 2 out of which should be the main effects that characterise the civic.

A lot of them do still have only one or two effects... And my options with civic stats are fairly limited as it is, so I really can't afford to impose unnecessary additional restrictions on myself.

Also, the civics with lots of effects are designed to have a transformational effect on your empire, which I think is a good thing when we're only talking about a handful of them that're like that.

I really feel like all the effects make total sense and are easy to read, so I'm happy with them. Sure it's a bit more complex than vanilla (though vanilla had several with 3 or even 4 abilities too!), but it's still not a bloated mess like I've seen elsewhere, in my opinion.

4.0.1 is officially done, and I've put the notes in the Change Log sticky. I'm heading out right now, but the documentation work will be pretty trivial this time so I see no reason why I won't be able to get it posted tonight. As usual, sorry for the delay. :D


Sounds great! :D
I'm really tired of playing Command & Conquer on and on.
Going to read the change log sticky now.

Hi Lunar Mongoose, just stumbled across your mod and it looks very promising. Me and two other players have downloaded it. It seems from first impressions that your mod is very well thought out and if your claims are true about MP stability/balance then it's exactly what we've been looking for! Having read through the most recent posts on this thread I would love to have v4.0.1 when it's released because I'm not keen on having to sit through 14 minute turns! Is there any advice for us setting up a MP game later today? Anything that needs to be adhered to in game setup?

For the record, we use Direct IP MP through LogMeIn Hamachi to connect.

The 4.0.1 zip is uploading now.

if your claims are true about MP stability/balance then it's exactly what we've been looking for!

There are definitely several multiplayer groups, including my own, that swear by it, soooo... yeah. :D

In particular there were a ton of fixes, tweaks, and polish in the 4.0 update (in addition to the carpload of major changes, of course) that should really make it a professional-feeling experience. 3.6.1 was great, but it was still pretty rough around the edges even after years of development.

Having read through the most recent posts on this thread I would love to have v4.0.1 when it's released because I'm not keen on having to sit through 14 minute turns!

Sorry about that! I don't usually write bad code, but there was a lot of stress and pressure with v4 development just from the sheer size of the update, and from trying to get it done as fast as possible (which was still really slow, heh). At least I was able to fix it easily.

Is there any advice for us setting up a MP game later today? Anything that needs to be adhered to in game setup?

For the record, we use Direct IP MP through LogMeIn Hamachi to connect.

I've always used Direct IP with, well, nothing, heh. Just a straight internet connection through a router and cable modem. As long as you have the ports forwarded that Civ4 needs I would think you'd be fine.

And please be sure you read the Stuff to Know sticky if you haven't already. :)

And please be sure you read the Stuff to Know sticky if you haven't already. :)
Already done! Had to find out as much as possible before downloading, there's a lot of guff out there. :)

One other note, do you have the 0.1 stuff so I don't have to download the full mod again? Oh and is it save game breaking?

Already done! Had to find out as much as possible before downloading, there's a lot of guff out there. :)

I updated it slightly in the text version in the new download (will copy to the sticky thread here in a minute), but that document could probably stand to have a more thorough going-through since v4 was huge, heh.

You can also read the patch notes in the release posts at the bottom of the Download sticky if you want... The most important items are in bold, at least for the last two updates.

One other note, do you have the 0.1 stuff so I don't have to download the full mod again? Oh and is it save game breaking?

Each update's save-breaking status is always mentioned in the Download post for it. :)

I used to release the minor updates as seperate, stand-alone patch downloads, but I noticed a lot of people weren't bothering to grab them and just stuck to the main download, so they were missing out on some short-but-very-important updates. Thus, I stopped doing it that way a year or two ago. I guess I could do it both ways, updating the main one AND providing the small update, but you're the first person who's ever asked for that so far, and it's a bit of a bother to put the extra zip together, so I didn't do it, heh. I'm actually very busy IRL right now, so that's my reasonably-serviceable eggskoose.

If it's any consolation the download speed you get from Apple's server is insane... My friend got 80-at-first-then-gradually-slowing-down-to-40 megabits per second when he grabbed it last night, which made the whole thing take only 2 minutes. Just saying. :p

Unfortunately they're discontinuing that service here in another month or two b/c of the move from MobileMe to iCloud, sooooo I'm gonna have to find a sucky free file-hosting site to replace it. Grr.

I updated it slightly in the text version in the new download (will copy to the sticky thread here in a minute), but that document could probably stand to have a more thorough going-through since v4 was huge, heh.

You can also read the patch notes in the release posts at the bottom of the Download sticky if you want... The most important items are in bold, at least for the last two updates.



Each update's save-breaking status is always mentioned in the Download post for it. :)

I used to release the minor updates as seperate, stand-alone patch downloads, but I noticed a lot of people weren't bothering to grab them and just stuck to the main download, so they were missing out on some short-but-very-important updates. Thus, I stopped doing it that way a year or two ago. I guess I could do it both ways, updating the main one AND providing the small update, but you're the first person who's ever asked for that so far, and it's a bit of a bother to put the extra zip together, so I didn't do it, heh. I'm actually very busy IRL right now, so that's my reasonably-serviceable eggskoose.

If it's any consolation the download speed you get from Apple's server is insane... My friend got 40 to 80 megabits per second when he grabbed it last night, which made the whole thing take only 2 minutes. Just saying. :p

Unfortunately they're discontinuing that service here in another month or two b/c of the move from MobileMe to iCloud, sooooo I'm gonna have to find a sucky free file-hosting site to replace it. Grr.

That's all ok, I'll have a read through. I downloaded it anyway... couldn't wait.

I downloaded it anyway... couldn't wait.

Now that's the attitude we here at Mongoose Industries like to see. :D

p.s. - Don't forget to check out our brand-new forum signature, found at the bottom of most Mongoose Industries employees' posts.

p.p.s. - Mwa ha ha.

I tried the perfect mongoose map script but found it was really unbalanced in mp.

I haven't tried the mod itself yet, but am downloading at the moment and will give it a try in mp later.

What map script would you suggest to play with two humans and some ai??

I tried the perfect mongoose map script but found it was really unbalanced in mp.

Hrm, that's unfortunate. I've done the best I could with it. The river placements and starting location placements could probably still use some work, but I've been using those as-is from the original PerfectWorld versions.

I would point out that the MME version of PM, the one included with MongooseMod, has a lot of improvements to it b/c it's able to use the mod's custom features and whatnot. It helps balance Jungle and Tundra areas better imo, but it's not drastically different.

I haven't tried the mod itself yet, but am downloading at the moment and will give it a try in mp later.

Thanks very much for your interest. Please let me know what you think either way! :)

What map script would you suggest to play with two humans and some ai??

Well, that's pretty much up to you. All the stock / vanilla mapscripts are still available, so if PM MME also seems unbalanced to you, any of those should work... It's been a long time since I've used any of them though, so I can't really say specifically.

So I've played an MP game with your MOD and it's the bestest Civ experience ever!

We haven't reached the modern ages yet but everything seems well balanced and LOTS of fun so far. All the extras you put in are far from beeing superfluous, in fact they make the game feel more complete then ever. :goodjob:

What I don't get is the symbol you use for the plot yield commerce!? WTF is that? It looks like some kind of nasty candy for children. I want gold, man! Not candy..

A question about the barter civic or +:gold: in general: If I understand correctly barter gives +50% Gold in Capital, so if I run 100% research there will be zero bonus for me, whereas I get the most absolute profit in gold out of it if running 100% commerce.

About your map script: We've had some starts where one of us had a small good starting location surrounded by ice and ocean and desert to all sides giving no real expansion possibilities.
That resulted in playing a few turns, comparing our future possibilities and.. restarting.
Also the option 'start in old world' does not put all civs one one continent. I havent't tried the 'do not brake pangaes' option a lot yet..
Apart from that the map script gives beautifull results!
Any suggestion on how many civs goes well on small or medium maps?

What tech enables tech trading??? Couldn't find it anywhere!!

We play with the 'no elite units' option 'cause of the sci-fi stuff. (I'm a big sci-fi fan but would prefer FFH or Alpha Centauri for that) BUT we like the units like master swordsman and the legends, especially as national units which are limited in numbers. They add lots of flavor to the game.
It would be nice to have two options available: 1. No unrealistic units. 2. No elite units.

Whats the deal with falcons? They seem very powerfull for just one strength. Falconry is for hunting. How could a falcon defeat or even attack a raft or archer anyways?
The idea of implementing birds is nice, but as it is now it feels strange to use falcons as military units or scouts.
Also why can they travel on coast? There should be a hunter who trained the bird with the bird at all times. It makes exploration along the coasts a bit too easy in the early ages compared to using boats.

The leader changing is nice, but also could limit some leaders and make them less usefull and limit their potential.
E.g. I played modern America and started with Washington and after beelining to some next age tech I switched to Lincoln. So there was no real chance to use Washingtons traits.
It would be so lovely to HAVE THE OPTION to change to the next leader. A simple pop up would do nicely here. The player would feel more in control that way too and can make the decision himself allowing to take leader change into strategical considerations.

About the tooltip for wonders: In the build menu when mouseovering a world or national wonder it says: "National wonder: 1 left" or "World wonder: 1 left". That sounds like I can only build one world or national wonder in that city. A bit confusing.

There are some missing text entries. Especially when enabling new civic options theres the txt_key_whatever text in the popup.


That's all I can think of for now.

You did a great great job on the MOD and I will continiou to enjoy it!!
You really should do some advertising! More people should enjoy this aswell..

Hey, it seems that Ri-Hatz is taking over the "chief mod tester" job that I had been occupying over the last couple of months. :)
That's great, because I can't spend much time on playing the mod right now. :(

Just want to add that terrain damage should be deactivated in cities. I have got a city on a flood plains/plains tile, and whenever I build a unit it already has got some damage before I can move it.

And I agree that the Planetary Mongoose map script is not perfect in choosing balanced starting locations. As an alternative until this is improved, I recommend to play on my Africa map ;) . Just go to scenarios and load the first one in the list. It's not really a scenario, however, just a map.

Hi, LunarMongoose. Just started playing this mod a few days ago (single player).

Must say I am enjoying it so far - I am almost at the end of the Ancient Era. :)

I dont usually like fantasy units in a Civ mod, but yours (so far) seem to fit in well with ancient myths etc. I do like the birds, so do the barbarians with occasional attacks and the AI Civs. My Viking neighbor has a stack of 10 in his nearest city.

A few early observations.

1. And I agree that the Planetary Mongoose map script is not perfect in choosing balanced starting locations.

My start city was surrounded by jungle and forest. When I was able to build roads, I was suprised I could not build them in the jungles and forests, so I was unable to connect resources to/from other cities. I am not a historian, but surely even in Ancient times there must have been basic tracks that allowed connection between settlements.

So allowing roads to be built in forests/jungles would be great. I have not yet reached Bronze Working so not sure what happens then.

2. I am playing on your reccommended speed for single players: TwilightLama (I know I should have chosen an easier level - first time), Small World, Eternal Speed.

I know it has been mentioned before, but it is annoying to keep on building units and then deleting them (to avoid bankrupting yourself) because you have completed all the available building and can not yet convert hammers to wealth etc. I end up building settlers which take longer and then deleting them -it lessens the fun of the game.

Realism Invictus ( a very big, detailed Mod - which I guess from reading some of your posts, you are not too fond of.) has an early build which converts 50% of hammers and splits it between gold and science. (Myself I think they should have included culture as well.) The reason I mention it is that they say the AI uses it as well. In fact that is their policy - if the AI can not use it, it is not in the mod.

3. Some of the animals seemed quite strong, Panda, Bear etc. I did not attack them due to the very poor survival odds. But as I said earlier nearly all my tiles arround the city were either forest or jungle.

Well thats my few cents worth and again thanks for a great mod - very impressive for a solo modder. :king:

Sorry for not responding til now, been busy getting ready for the Big Day (which is now in 7 hours - I can't believe I actually made it).

What I don't get is the symbol you use for the plot yield commerce!? WTF is that? It looks like some kind of nasty candy for children. I want gold, man! Not candy..

It was an icon someone posted on these forums a really, really long time ago. The idea was to make it look more different from the vanilla gold icon (which I also changed, but less drastically).

A question about the barter civic or +:gold: in general: If I understand correctly barter gives +50% Gold in Capital, so if I run 100% research there will be zero bonus for me, whereas I get the most absolute profit in gold out of it if running 100% commerce.

There are two separate sources of the commerce subtypes (gold, research, culture, espionage):

FIRST, there's the total commerce (candy :)) a city is doing. That is broken down into its parts based on your empire spending levels.

SECOND, any +x effects are added in, such as Priest or Merchant specialists, Priest or Merchant Superspecialists (Great Merchant that joined the city for example), certain Events that can make all your Granaries do +1 gold (hypothetical example), and a few buildings like the eBank wonder (which has +100 gold per turn on it).

Those TWO components are then added together, and the result has the sum of all active subtype modifiers (Barter, Monarchy, Market / Grocer, Wall Street, etc for gold) applied to it.

So if you had 10 commerce per turn in your capital, had gold funding at 50%, had a Priest specialist, had a Market, and were running Barter, you would get 6 * 1.75 = 10.5 gold per turn there. (Don't ask me how it handles fractional amounts, that's complicated, heh.)

About your map script: We've had some starts where one of us had a small good starting location surrounded by ice and ocean and desert to all sides giving no real expansion possibilities.
That resulted in playing a few turns, comparing our future possibilities and.. restarting.

Yeah, it can happen. It currently still uses Cephalo's original custom starting location code, with some updates by Fuyu and others to sweeten the starting location itself better. Unfortunately there isn't much I can do about that right now.

Also the option 'start in old world' does not put all civs one one continent.

It tries to, but there are a bunch of other complicated rules it tries to follow too, and it doesn't always work out right.

Any suggestion on how many civs goes well on small or medium maps?

The default numbers were my best guess from eyeballing some sample maps, so, whatever works for ya; I haven't playtested any of the smaller sizes really.

What tech enables tech trading??? Couldn't find it anywhere!!

Guilds. :)

It would be nice to have two options available: 1. No unrealistic units. 2. No elite units.

I sympathize, but the problem I ran into was that the scifi units basically fill the same role as the early elite units - powerful but restricted - just in later eras. So from a gameplay standpoint it made sense to allow all of them or none of them.

Whats the deal with falcons? They seem very powerfull for just one strength. Falconry is for hunting. How could a falcon defeat or even attack a raft or archer anyways?
The idea of implementing birds is nice, but as it is now it feels strange to use falcons as military units or scouts.
Also why can they travel on coast? There should be a hunter who trained the bird with the bird at all times. It makes exploration along the coasts a bit too easy in the early ages compared to using boats.

I agree that in a perfect world they should have a handler, but they were a continuation of the War Dog, which has been running handler-less for some time now, so I guess I was just used to that. :p

Ships are still critically important for defending key water resource tiles and transporting units, and after you get past the initial Raft and Canoe types they are stronger than Falcons anyway.

Falcons were put in as a highly-optional alternative scouting and harassment option, basically. They can fly on Coast because there's no reason a well-trained bird shouldn't be able to, and it's neat having Prehistoric helicopters. :) Both the tech and the unit are expensive enough to justify their capabilities imo. Which is not to say I won't tweak their stats a little in the future; I tweak stuff all the time hehe.

The leader changing is nice, but also could limit some leaders and make them less usefull and limit their potential.
E.g. I played modern America and started with Washington and after beelining to some next age tech I switched to Lincoln. So there was no real chance to use Washingtons traits.
It would be so lovely to HAVE THE OPTION to change to the next leader. A simple pop up would do nicely here. The player would feel more in control that way too and can make the decision himself allowing to take leader change into strategical considerations.

The problem is, a lot of my Unique Units and especially Unique Buildings are balanced around the leader trait sequence of each civ. I agree with you that late-era-starts are not handled very well by the system as it currently is. What I would probably do is have you just jump straight into the right leader for that era in that case. (I always play from the beginning, so I didn't give later-era-starts too much thought at the time. Sorry.)

About the tooltip for wonders: In the build menu when mouseovering a world or national wonder it says: "National wonder: 1 left" or "World wonder: 1 left". That sounds like I can only build one world or national wonder in that city. A bit confusing.

It's a vanilla tooltip; I never changed anything about it. It means "this is a national wonder building, and 1 can be built here", obviously, but I suppose I could update the text.

There are some missing text entries. Especially when enabling new civic options theres the txt_key_whatever text in the popup.

Well aware of this... Just not enough time to do them all yet. Anything that affects gameplay always gets priority over this sort of work, and I've been working on gameplay-related stuff non-stop for years now. I try to do a few more text tags in each update, but yeah there's a lot still missing, and there's no foreign language support at all.

You did a great great job on the MOD and I will continiou to enjoy it!!

Thank you very much! I appreciate your interest. :)

You really should do some advertising! More people should enjoy this aswell..

Well, it's been in my signature for a long time... Beyond that, I don't like to get too pushy with people. If you can think of a way to do advertising for it without sounding pushy, I'd be all for it. ;)

Just a heads-up, with Diablo 3 launching in 6.5 hours now, I am going to be extremely unavailable for the next 7 years or so. The mod isn't completely done (will it ever be? :p), and I've already made a few minor changes in my private version that I plan to release as a 4.0.2 update at some point here, but it's very stable and balanced in its current form, so I feel okay in leaving it mostly-alone for a while.

I apologize, but I've been desperately waiting for this game since it was announced 5 years ago, and I have the potential to make money playing it, which isn't true of Civ, so for the moment I'm dedicating my heart and soul in the Diablo direction.

I will still keep an eye on this subforum though, so feel free to keep posting! :)

Hey, it seems that Ri-Hatz is taking over the "chief mod tester" job that I had been occupying over the last couple of months. :)

Don't count on it staying that way longterm, lol.

Just want to add that terrain damage should be deactivated in cities. I have got a city on a flood plains/plains tile, and whenever I build a unit it already has got some damage before I can move it.

It's set that way on purpose... It's supposed to be an additional penalty for building on tiles like that (particularly Desert).

My start city was surrounded by jungle and forest. When I was able to build roads, I was suprised I could not build them in the jungles and forests, so I was unable to connect resources to/from other cities. I am not a historian, but surely even in Ancient times there must have been basic tracks that allowed connection between settlements.

So allowing roads to be built in forests/jungles would be great. I have not yet reached Bronze Working so not sure what happens then.

Bronze Working mainly allows you to chop down Forests, which is a bigger capability. For Jungles you need Iron Working, which realistically SHOULD require Gunpowder instead, but I tried that once a long time ago and it just doesn't work for gameplay reasons, heh.

There were absolutely roads in Ancient times. Building them anywhere only requires the Wheels technology, for obvious reasons. :) Bronze is required to build them in woodlands because of the trees you need to chop down to make room for a path. This is the same rule as in the vanilla game, so it's not like I was going out on a limb (pun intended) doing it. ;)

I know it has been mentioned before, but it is annoying to keep on building units and then deleting them (to avoid bankrupting yourself) because you have completed all the available building and can not yet convert hammers to wealth etc. I end up building settlers which take longer and then deleting them -it lessens the fun of the game.

Oh FINE, I can add something like that. Darn you. :p I still maintain it should never actually be necessary, but I suppose I could be wrong about that, haha.

The reason I mention it is that they say the AI uses it as well. In fact that is their policy - if the AI can not use it, it is not in the mod.

Yes, the AIs would probably use that without any special code. I held off including such a Process until now b/c I didn't want to have it in the mod, not b/c I was worried about the AIs in this case. ;) But yes, that is my policy as well about the AIs being able to use stuff, as you probably know. :)

3. Some of the animals seemed quite strong, Panda, Bear etc. I did not attack them due to the very poor survival odds. But as I said earlier nearly all my tiles arround the city were either forest or jungle.

Except for the Polar Bear, all the very-high-strength animals are Defensive Only, so they pose no threat. Realistically a few of them, like the Rhino, should be able to attack, but I tried that once and it doesn't work out gameplay-wise. (Trust me. ;))

Well thats my few cents worth and again thanks for a great mod - very impressive for a solo modder. :king:

Thank you very much! I appreciate the compliment a great deal. :) I've had my real-life best friend, Rakete, and a few other people helping out with ideas, suggestions, playtesting, and bugfinding as I've gone along, but yeah I'm very proud to have done all the actual development myself. Even though I'm using a lot of resources from the other modders on this public forum here, hehe.

I know it has been mentioned before, but it is annoying to keep on building units and then deleting them (to avoid bankrupting yourself) because you have completed all the available building and can not yet convert hammers to wealth etc. I end up building settlers which take longer and then deleting them -it lessens the fun of the game.


If you run into a situation that you are out of useful things to build, then most likely your science rate is too low. Instead of building and deleting units, try to do the following:


1. Check if you have built the Palace in one of your cities.

2. Stop building new cities, because they increase your maintenance costs.

3. Check your civics and choose ones with low or better no costs. For example, Herbalism and Heritage are often not really necessary.

4. Check if you have researched Early Fishing. Then zoom into everyone of your cities and work water tiles instead of land tiles wherever possible. Try to research sailing to build lighthouses.

5. Build Gatherer/Workers and build Woodland cottages wherever possible. Work those tiles then. Woodland cottages are new in Version 4 and are a big gameplay-improvement !

6. Until you are able to build new buildings/wonders, build units, but do not delete them. You can still upgrade them later in the game, because there can be times when you have got a high commerce output, but desperately need more military. Check in the trade advisor if you exceed the number of free units. If that is the case, choose Tribal law civic.

7. Instead of building military units, you can also build settlers and move them to the tiles where you want to build your next cities, but wait until your research pace has become faster.



I hope this helps! If it doesn't, we can talk about the mod itself being the problem. ;)

If you run into a situation that you are out of useful things to build, then most likely your science rate is too low. Instead of building and deleting units, try to do the following:


1. Check if you have built the Palace in one of your cities.

2. Stop building new cities, because they increase your maintenance costs.

3. Check your civics and choose ones with low or better no costs. For example, Herbalism and Heritage are often not really necessary.

4. Check if you have researched Early Fishing. Then zoom into everyone of your cities and work water tiles instead of land tiles wherever possible. Try to research sailing to build lighthouses.

5. Build Gatherer/Workers and build Woodland cottages wherever possible. Work those tiles then. Woodland cottages are new in Version 4 and are a big gameplay-improvement !

6. Until you are able to build new buildings/wonders, build units, but do not delete them. You can still upgrade them later in the game, because there can be times when you have got a high commerce output, but desperately need more military. Check in the trade advisor if you exceed the number of free units. If that is the case, choose Tribal law civic.

7. Instead of building military units, you can also build settlers and move them to the tiles where you want to build your next cities, but wait until your research pace has become faster.



I hope this helps! If it doesn't, we can talk about the mod itself being the problem. ;)

Thanks for your comments - I will check suggestions out on my next (2nd.) game.

In this game:

!. Yes built. As soon as available.
5. I built Lumberyards not cottages. Will try cottages next.
6. I had to delete them because my income could not support them. Science at 0%. Probably because of your points (2, 3, 4). I think I was runing Tribal Law ( xx free unit support).
7. I did build settlers, as they took longer to build, then deleted them. I may be wrong, but I assumed they had a support cost the same as combat units. My income was hovering over negative at zero research. I did not want the game deleting valuable units arbitarely to get out of negative income.


As a side note I was using LM,s PW3 version map script.

My initial city was surrounded by forest and jungle. (it could not connect to other cities till wood chopping). My second city had plains and some forest. (became my capital) The other 3 locations were, 1. hills and mountains. 2. Desert and forest. 3. forest and marsh. 5 cities and 2 AIs on the same landmass (small)

P.S. In Industrial age and still surviving. Just two civs on differant landmasses. Trying for cultural or spacerace victory.

5. I built Lumberyards not cottages. Will try cottages next.

[...]

My initial city was surrounded by forest and jungle. (it could not connect to other cities till wood chopping). My second city had plains and some forest. (became my capital) The other 3 locations were, 1. hills and mountains. 2. Desert and forest. 3. forest and marsh. 5 cities and 2 AIs on the same landmass (small)



It seems that you have had a mostly inland starting location. When you are surrounded by forest, jungle, plains and hills, you will have abundant production anyway. So just build woodland cottages instead of lumberyards next time. Beside rivers, they reward even with 2 commerce.
When you have got coastal cities in your next game, do research Early Fishing, Advanced Fishing and Sailing early.

And good luck with your games. I can't play much myself right now :( I have only reached the renaissance age in my first game so far. The game is still ongoing.

It seems that you have had a mostly inland starting location. When you are surrounded by forest, jungle, plains and hills, you will have abundant production anyway. So just build woodland cottages instead of lumberyards next time. Beside rivers, they reward even with 2 commerce.
When you have got coastal cities in your next game, do research Early Fishing, Advanced Fishing and Sailing early.

Three were coastal, including the tree surrounded capitol, except for one coastal tile,that I forgot to mention.. As for the sea tiles - how do you beat the Turtles and later Sea Serpents? After many attempts I abandoned the seas.

Spending all your production on work boats and canoes etc. - which then get destroyed a few turns later - is not Fun. In the early game I built 5 canoes (2 strength) and attacked a turtle (5 strength)- all died and the Turtle was still at full strength.

If the Turtle appeared randomly, that may be OK, but as soon as I placed a work boat in any of my coastal cities within a few turns a Turtle appeared.

I hate to see what happens when the Kraken (150 strength) appears.

how do you beat the Turtles and later Sea Serpents? After many attempts I abandoned the seas.

Spending all your production on work boats and canoes etc. - which then get destroyed a few turns later - is not Fun. In the early game I built 5 canoes (2 strength) and attacked a turtle (5 strength)- all died and the Turtle was still at full strength.

If the Turtle appeared randomly, that may be OK, but as soon as I placed a work boat in any of my coastal cities within a few turns a Turtle appeared.


Hmm. That should not happen normally. Turtles and Serpents should only appear when you have researched a certain tech (i.e. Naval Warfare for the Turtle). When another player (AI or human) has already researched that tech, but not you, then the Turtles and Serpents should remain near those players coastlines. This is what I have observed in MM 3.6.1 and also in my first game with MM 4.01.

Have you maybe been very close to a more advanced player?
If you like, you can send me your savegames to shamainz at web dot de.
I will then take a look.

When another player (AI or human) has already researched that tech, but not you, then the Turtles and Serpents should remain near those players coastlines. This is what I have observed in MM 3.6.1 and also in my first game with MM 4.01.

The sea monsters are Barbarian units, so they spawn like all barb unit types do: when the barbs gain techs. This happens slowly when a small number of players have a given tech and rapidly when most players have it, as in vanilla.

Once they are unlocked they will spawn randomly in the world. There is no connection to which players got the tech first. They are subject to normal barb rules, meaning they cannot spawn in tiles that any player has active vision of. So one possible strategy is to station sentries all along your coastline in advance.

Like all other barb units (particularly ones that can't directly attack cities), they will lock on to any nearby player units and try and kill them, but if there aren't any then they will move around randomly. They may leave and cross an entire ocean, or they may stay in the same general area forever.

The specific counter for Turtles is Quinqueremes, and if that unit needs to be made even stronger vs Turtles I'm willing to consider doing that. (There is also a unit with a specific bonus vs Serpents, namely the Clipper.) But these are sea monsters we're talking about, so the idea was they're supposed to be deadly when all you have is Rafts and Canoes, heh. They were put in as a random deterrent to the otherwise extremely-lucrative early use of water tiles.

It should also be noted that, since version 4.0, the maximum number of Turtles that can exist at once scales with world size from 1 up to 4, so on medium and especially large maps you will usually not be alone in having this problem.

All that being said, if you still hate playing with them, the No Elite Units game option can be used to disable sea monsters completely (along with the other stuff it disables).

Also the option 'start in old world' does not put all civs one one continent.



It tries to, but there are a bunch of other complicated rules it tries to follow too, and it doesn't always work out right.


I don't know how much PerfectMongoose modifies PerfectWorld, but I have managed to tell PerfectWorld "everyone will start on the largest continent":

http://samiam.org/Civ4/Totestra-20120524.diff

Here is the relevant code; I added the stuff in bold.


for n in range(len(continentList)):
oldWorldSize += continentList[0].size
# Don't delete "new worlds" from the list if we're going to
# put everyone on the "old world" continent
if mc.ShareContinent == False:
del continentList[0]
if float(oldWorldSize)/float(totalLand) > 0.60:
break

Here is the relevant code; I added the stuff in bold.

Oh.

Umm... oops. :p

I'll take a look at that when I have time, but it's probably something I deleted and shouldn't have. Sorry!

Ancient Temples, Thermal vents and probably also Methane ice can be traded. That does not make sense, not only because they do not have any health or happiness effects.

As far as I remember, they could not be traded in Version 3.6.1.
Any idea how this bug arised ???

The Roman Forum (unique building) is very strong:

+50% Great Person birth rate seems a bit much, maybe reduce to +25%? The unique unit of the Romans (Legionary) is also quite strong, so 25% should suffice.

Ancient Temples, Thermal vents and probably also Methane ice can be traded. That does not make sense, not only because they do not have any health or happiness effects.

As I said in my email, I'm not sure what happened. If they really WERE working correctly before, it's probably a typo and should be an easy fix. They're supposed to be unharvestable, so that trading isn't relevant. They are Resources rather than Features just so I could make them revealed by techs, which is not something Features can do.

+50% Seems a bit much anyway, maybe reduce to +25%? The unique unit of the Romans (Legionary) is also quite strong, so 25% should suffice.

Believe it or not, I realized that a month ago. Reducing it to 25% was one of the changes I mentioned I had already made internally for the 4.0.2 version, but hadn't released yet. I was hoping no one would notice the problem before then, lol.

But yeah, I already changed it to 25% a while ago. ;) I'll try to get 4.0.2 out to you guys soon... That Old World code fix is pretty important too.

Hurry production seems to be bugged. When I hover over the button the price in the tool tip seems to be correct and I can only press the button when I have enough gold for it, but when do, it only ever takes 1 gold from my treasury.

Hurry production seems to be bugged. When I hover over the button the price in the tool tip seems to be correct and I can only press the button when I have enough gold for it, but when do, it only ever takes 1 gold from my treasury.

Yikes, that sounds like a serious bug. I'll take a look, thanks for the report! :)

Btw I'm aware my files are unavailable at the moment. Sorry about that, I lost my website service when Apple switched from MobileMe to iCloud a week ago. I've been meaning to sign up for a free file hosting place but I've been sick, heh.

While I was testing my new Africamap overhaul (which will soon be released :)), I saw that sometimes a Civ does not develop properly, because they have got insufficient culture in most of their cities, actually no culture at all. This is because they do not research Parietal art and thus can not build Cave paintings, which are the only regular source of culture in the prehistoric age.

This does only happen once in a while, but it is still annoying, because these civs will never be able to catch up. After a while without any culture growth, the 4 workable tiles on top, bottem, left and right of the city even decease so that the city can not work any tiles.

Obviously this can only happen to Civs which do not have the Creative trait or a culture-iflavor in the civ4leaderheadinfos.xml.

The doubling of tech costs for previous ages, which is new in Version 4, could have worsened the problem, because the AI will be less likely to research parietal art once it has passed the prehistoric age.


There are plenty of ways to solve the problem, but it's up to you to choose the best one.

While I was testing my new Africamap overhaul (which will soon be released :)), I saw that sometimes a Civ does not develop properly, because they have got insufficient culture in most of their cities, actually no culture at all.

There are plenty of ways to solve the problem, but it's up to you to choose the best one.

It may help if you gave some pointers on the "There are plenty of ways to solve the problem" So he knows which one to choose. Just a thought - :).

It may help if you gave some pointers on the "There are plenty of ways to solve the problem" So he knows which one to choose. Just a thought - :).

Lol, well, I can only really think of 2 off the top of my head: make Parietal Art required by some other tech very early in the tree, or add a minimal culture flavor value to every leader. Or, obviously, add another source of culture early on. Given the choice I would add the flavor values. :)

Although from the current co-op game I'm playing with Daryn, I'm leaning more towards accepting defeat and caving in and adding the early build process that you guys have been clamoring for for generations... That could have a culture component potentially. ;)

Lol, well, I can only really think of 2 off the top of my head: make Parietal Art required by some other tech very early in the tree, or add a minimal culture flavor value to every leader. Or, obviously, add another source of culture early on. Given the choice I would add the flavor values. :)


Instead of adding a culture flavor value to every leader - I was also thinking about that at first - you should add small flavor-values of each kind to parietal art, like 2 military, 2 science, 2 gold, 2 espionage and so on. If you do that, every civ should research parietal art quite early. Then check if that is sufficient or if you also need to add all flavors to cave paintings itself.

If you add culture flavors to every leader you will influence their behaviour throughout the whole game, which is probably not a good idea.

Another month, another delay, aaaand another set of excuses. ;)

This time it was the 1.04 patch for Diablo 3, which forced me to play THAT 24/7 for a while again; the ongoing saga of my new PC build which STILL isn't done (but I'm stuck waiting for unreleased parts again now); followed by my parents visiting for 3 weeks, which happens a few times a year and tends to keep me busy with misc things; and MOST recently, an actual short-term job project for someone, that I'm actually being paid (well) for, but am only just now getting started on.

All that being said, I've somehow managed to get some of the work done on the 4.0.2 update already, and it's not a huge major update anyway (compared to my usual huge major updates), so I'm still hoping to get it out soon. I've updated the Change Log sticky with my notes so far.

Instead of adding a culture flavor value to every leader - I was also thinking about that at first - you should add small flavor-values of each kind to parietal art, like 2 military, 2 science, 2 gold, 2 espionage and so on. If you do that, every civ should research parietal art quite early. Then check if that is sufficient or if you also need to add all flavors to cave paintings itself.

Yep, agreed.

I've got some suggestions for the 4.0.2. My actual game is so amazing i cannot refrain to give feedback and make sure this mod gets improved (even more).

As i finish the game (still late medieval) i will write a feedback topic with my suggestions and my bugs-report (if found any :P).

PLZ leave diablo alone and continue this :P

My actual game is so amazing i cannot refrain to give feedback and make sure this mod gets improved (even more).

Really glad you're enjoying it. If you want, you could post some screenshots of your game, mention stuff that's been happening... Just a thought. ;) (Maybe use your other thread though? lol)

As i finish the game (still late medieval) i will write a feedback topic with my suggestions and my bugs-report (if found any :P).

Yep, always appreciated. A number of fixes and improvements have come via other people's feedback, especially more recently. That being said, a lot of things are the way they are on purpose but with the reasons being not immediately obvious, so I don't ALWAYS change something just b/c someone asks me to. ;) Plus I can be really stubborn and have very strong opinions about things. :p But Rakete won me over on several points in the past, so it CAN be done... Mwa ha ha.

PLZ leave diablo alone and continue this :P

But... but... the biggest patch YET, 1.05, is coming out soon... *cries*

I'm actually still working on the real, high-paying, 1-time job project as well...

I'll try though. :)

Hi LunarMongoose,

Thanks a lot for this awesome mod, it really enhances vanilla Civ a lot. I especially like terrain damage, it adds a completely new dimension to warfare. We've played around 15 games with a couple of friends and it seems to be pretty much in balance so far - with so many changes you've made to vanilla, that's definitely an achievement.

Some feedback:

1. AI doesn't really seem to take terrain damage into account when attacking player cities. I've seen this quite a few times - the AI sends a massive army to invade me, but by the time they reach one of my cities, most troops are at around 40-60% health. The AI doesn't attack (since it would be a suicide mission), but instead of retreating the army moves around my city for a couple more turns until all troops are at 30-50% health and then I destroy them with my ~3x smaller army.

2. On Standard or Large maps, the first religion is often the only religion actually used. If there is contact between a large number of civs, the first religion founded there will usually stay until the end.
The only way for the world to be divided into 2-3 different alliances based on religion (like it used to be in vanilla BTS) is when the ocean divides them so there is no contact until Astronomy.
Here's a screenshot (http://indrek.it/temp/temple_of_freyr.jpg) of a multiplayer game to illustrate my point (Large, old world start):

3. Would it be possible to reduce the number of sandworm/turtle notifications? Hearing the same sounds every turn for 200-300 turns in a row gets somewhat annoying.

Anyway, as a (web) developer and software tester myself, I really appreciate the effort you've put into this. Feel free to let us know if we can be of help somehow!

Hi LunarMongoose,

HELLO!!! *hugs new person before he can escape*

Thanks a lot for this awesome mod, it really enhances vanilla Civ a lot. I especially like terrain damage, it adds a completely new dimension to warfare. We've played around 15 games with a couple of friends and it seems to be pretty much in balance so far - with so many changes you've made to vanilla, that's definitely an achievement.

Always happy to hear I got things mostly right. :) And always especially happy to hear about groups of people playing, hehe. Hope you like the 4.1 stuff so far! I can't wait to get it released so people can start using it.

A few people in the past have indicated they didn't like terrain damage that much, but I personally love it, so I kept it anyway. ;)

1. AI doesn't really seem to take terrain damage into account when attacking player cities. I've seen this quite a few times - the AI sends a massive army to invade me, but by the time they reach one of my cities, most troops are at around 40-60% health. The AI doesn't attack (since it would be a suicide mission), but instead of retreating the army moves around my city for a couple more turns until all troops are at 30-50% health and then I destroy them with my ~3x smaller army.

I was aware they weren't trying to avoid it like they're supposed to, and I knew Barbs would often be wounded when they arrived at their intended targets, but I didn't really realize it was a large-scale AI problem. Thanks for the kick in the tailfeathers on this, I'll see what I can do...

2. On Standard or Large maps, the first religion is often the only religion actually used. If there is contact between a large number of civs, the first religion founded there will usually stay until the end.
The only way for the world to be divided into 2-3 different alliances based on religion (like it used to be in vanilla BTS) is when the ocean divides them so there is no contact until Astronomy.
Here's a screenshot (http://indrek.it/temp/temple_of_freyr.jpg) of a multiplayer game to illustrate my point (Large, old world start):

Okay, umm, I'm not sure exactly what you want me to do. Vanilla has 7 religions which is still a lot of room for unused ones, and vanilla has pretty much the same map generator scripts too... I even have a LOWER auto-spread chance on the first couple religions than vanilla.

So, unless I'm missing something, vanilla shouldn't be much different...

3. Would it be possible to reduce the number of sandworm/turtle notifications? Hearing the same sounds every turn for 200-300 turns in a row gets somewhat annoying.

LOL. Well, THERE'S a request I didn't expect. ;) Daryn and I actually LOVE the sea monster spam, we find it hilarious... It's also VERY helpful tactically, as you can get a general sense of where the monsters are by watching which players are getting attacked from turn to turn. (Or if there's a lull between attacks, that can be a sign that a monster is moving to a new area.)

Off the top of my head, I can't really think of a way to "reduce" these alerts without turning them off completely. The good news is they're still in Python for the time being (Assets/Python/Mods/NotificationMod.py), so they're pretty easy to modify.

I suppose one thing I COULD do, would be to disable Turtle alerts once Serpents start spawning, and disable Serpent alerts once Kraken start spawning. I would assume that players wouldn't still consider the previous ones to be serious threats by those points...

Anyway, as a (web) developer and software tester myself, I really appreciate the effort you've put into this. Feel free to let us know if we can be of help somehow!

Well, you could have a totally life-changing effect if you could (somehow) help facilitate me getting a JOB (or a gf for that matter), but as far as the mod goes, you've already been a huge help with this post. :)

I still seem to have a fair number of people reading my posts and presumably playing my mod, but it's like pulling feathers trying to get them to post ANYTHING, let alone constructive feedback lol. Ideally I'd like to see people posting descriptions and/or screenshots about their current/ongoing games, having active discussions about civics and leaders and tech-tree-path strategies and whatnot, etc... But only the ultra-popular mods get that level of activity I guess.

There've only been a half dozen or so active feedbackers (sounds like linebackers, doesn't? I love inventing new words...) in the last 2+ years, and they've all been very helpful. The Development Team for this project (i.e. me) tends to be feedback-starved, hehe.

Hope you like the 4.1 stuff so far! I can't wait to get it released so people can start using it.

Yesss, we're really looking forward to it! :)


Okay, umm, I'm not sure exactly what you want me to do. Vanilla has 7 religions which is still a lot of room for unused ones, and vanilla has pretty much the same map generator scripts too... I even have a LOWER auto-spread chance on the first couple religions than vanilla.

I gave this some thought and I think the situations with only one religion really spreading for a long time might be caused mostly by how AI progresses on the tech trees. I'll write more about that later.


LOL. Well, THERE'S a request I didn't expect. ;) Daryn and I actually LOVE the sea monster spam, we find it hilarious... It's also VERY helpful tactically, as you can get a general sense of where the monsters are by watching which players are getting attacked from turn to turn.

Ah, I didn't really even think about the tactical advantage. But anyway, I guess what's bothering me is the (occasionally quite loud) sounds - not the notifications themselves.
That's probably just me, though. :)


I still seem to have a fair number of people reading my posts and presumably playing my mod, but it's like pulling feathers trying to get them to post ANYTHING, let alone constructive feedback lol.

Have you considered adding an encouraging note on the game's splash/loading screen - or something like that?


Ideally I'd like to see people posting descriptions and/or screenshots about their current/ongoing games, having active discussions about civics and leaders and tech-tree-path strategies and whatnot, etc...

I was actually planning to post screenshots of a game soon, along with some thoughts on strategy :) maybe I'll get to that later today, but gotta get some work done first.

I gave this some thought and I think the situations with only one religion really spreading for a long time might be caused mostly by how AI progresses on the tech trees. I'll write more about that later.

I already put on my internal to-do list, to further decrease the auto-spread chance-per-turn of the early religions, and further increase it (vs vanilla's flat value) for the later religions. That should help a lot. :)

There's not much I can (easily) do about AI research paths though. AI programming is the most difficult thing in the SDK (although I contend my recent river project gives it a run for its money), and there've been some very skilled people tackling that themselves anyway, so I never really needed to get into the AI code too much myself, historically. Thus I have the least experience with it.

Ah, I didn't really even think about the tactical advantage. But anyway, I guess what's bothering me is the (occasionally quite loud) sounds - not the notifications themselves.
That's probably just me, though. :)

Changing the volume is actually extremely easy, you just have to change a number in AS2D_TSUNAMI's definition (in Assets/XML/Audio/Audio2DScripts.xml). :) This particular sound never really struck me personally as being too loud, but I could always be wrong.

I was going to look into collapsing them into single "A Kraken just sank 20 Viking ships!" type lines, but I'm not sure if that'll be practical or not. Disabling the alerts for old/weak/obsolete creatures should hopefully suffice, regardless.

Have you considered adding an encouraging note on the game's splash/loading screen - or something like that?

No, I never thought of that, hehe. There's no room for it on the titleplate, especially with my recent additions (I only have access to the upper 1024x256 block of the title screen, where all the text is), but it'd fit nicely on the loading photo... Thanks for the idea. :)

I was actually planning to post screenshots of a game soon, along with some thoughts on strategy :) maybe I'll get to that later today, but gotta get some work done first.

Suh-WHEAT!!! (Feel free to start a new thread for that, btw. :))

---

You know, I have a Bachelor's in Computer Science from MIT, you would THINK it would've been possible to find a job at some point in the last 13 years, but nooooo... sigh.

Oh well, I probably wouldn't have had time to make this mod otherwise. ;)

---

p.s. - One random question: what do you think of the title screen music? (Assuming you don't turn the game music off completely...) I wrote that myself too, but I just recently discovered the uppermost line of title text is hidden when using 16x9 screen resolutions, so the music credit is hidden for a lot of people, heh.

I already put on my internal to-do list, to further decrease the auto-spread chance-per-turn of the early religions, and further increase it (vs vanilla's flat value) for the later religions. That should help a lot. :)

Sounds good! We've played a couple more games since the one on the screenshot and every time the situation has been pretty much the same: one or two religions - depending on old world/everywhere start - and pretty much just one religon. Today's game actually started out with two, but the Malinese abandoned their false gods pretty fast :D which meant that roughly half of the world was converted to the Olympic Pantheon before Medieval Age.


There's not much I can (easily) do about AI research paths though. AI programming is the most difficult thing in the SDK (although I contend my recent river project gives it a run for its money), and there've been some very skilled people tackling that themselves anyway, so I never really needed to get into the AI code too much myself, historically. Thus I have the least experience with it.

Having played some games with India (spiritual -> espionage bonus) means I've had the chance to closely observe the AI play. However, I'm not sure if it's any use to point out some of the flaws I've noticed - I'm not sure how much you can realistically do about it.


p.s. - One random question: what do you think of the title screen music? (Assuming you don't turn the game music off completely...) I wrote that myself too, but I just recently discovered the uppermost line of title text is hidden when using 16x9 screen resolutions, so the music credit is hidden for a lot of people, heh.

The track is great. The instruments sound a bit synthetic, but in general it's awesome :)

Edit: How'd you create it btw? Do you have a musical background?
On a related topic - What happened to the song "El Grillo" in the soundtrack? It was one of my favorites and I just realized I haven't heard it for a long time.


Also, to continue the discussion from the other thread:


You are, of course, absolutely right, and for this reason Seafaring was at the top of my list for buffing, during my whole "thinking about traits" phase two hours ago.

It needs a global buff (meaning one that isn't weaker early or weaker later), so I had the brilliant idea of adding +1 Coastal City Trade Routes to it (a weaker version of the Great Lighthouse effect). This would also increase one's priority on Sailing and Wheels (and possibly Boating if rivers connect your coastal cities). This would be a custom ability though, so that means... drumroll please... more SDK work.

I was also going to give Industrial a stronger-early buff similar to what Financial got in 4.0, move the starting population thing to Prolific to give that a buff, and replace it in Expansive by going back to +4 Health there (which will mean more in 4.1 than it does currently, b/c I'm also planning to increase the technology health penalties, partially to make rushing the Trade tech sting a little more).

+1 Coastal trade routes sounds really good - it would definitely make Seafaring useful.

Agreed @ prolific - it's quite difficult/rare to get much use out of it before Biology.

To be honest, I didn't even know tech had health penalties. Gotta look that up.

What are you planning to do with Industrial?

Sounds good! We've played a couple more games since the one on the screenshot and every time the situation has been pretty much the same: one or two religions - depending on old world/everywhere start - and pretty much just one religon. Today's game actually started out with two, but the Malinese abandoned their false gods pretty fast :D which meant that roughly half of the world was converted to the Olympic Pantheon before Medieval Age.

That has happened in most of my games too (which are usually No-New-World on HugeMongoose, or more recently PlanetaryMongoose, playing cooperatively with the friend I usually play with trying to survive against DarkMongoose AIs, which is very difficult btw ;)). I just assumed it was normal for one or two religions to gain dominance, and never took much note of whether they were early ones or not...

Having played some games with India (spiritual -> espionage bonus) means I've had the chance to closely observe the AI play. However, I'm not sure if it's any use to point out some of the flaws I've noticed - I'm not sure how much you can realistically do about it.

There's a lot of new code from the K-Mod and C2C SDKs I am planning to merge in, though I'm doing it dead last b/c I'm dreading it, heh. To save time and get 4.1 done faster I am probably going to focus on incorporating just their new AI code and leave the rest, if applicable at all, for a future version.

I did take a quick look at their CvPlayerAI.cpp files the other day in preparation for writing the AI support for my new civic exclusion rules. The good news is they have some terrain-damage-related code that may help THAT situation out significantly, so there's probably a lot more in there too (which is, afterall, exactly what AIAndy said in the "Omg!" thread :)).

The bad news is, for AI civic evaluation alone, the K-Mod and C2C SDKs both have good, useful, potentially-relevant code in them, and they're COMPLETELY DIFFERENT b/c Karadoc rewrote the whole function himself, whereas C2C uses Fuyu's vacuum system that I've also been using since he first wrote it (but which I may have found a giant, game-breaking bug with), but adds more code too. So I have to figure out what K-Mod code, if any, I want to merge, how to merge it, and also see if I'm right about the big bug or not (after having verified to myself the other day that the vacuum system is, indeed, worth keeping), while double-checking C2C's extra code as I go (since it's more of a safe bet that I'll be using that, but I still want to look it over).

Programming is very annoying work when it's this complicated. :(

The track is great. The instruments sound a bit synthetic, but in general it's awesome :)

Edit: How'd you create it btw? Do you have a musical background?

Sort of. I've never played any instruments, but I got interested in music composition in late high school. I took enough classes in college to minor in it, except that a music minor also had a performance requirement which I obviously didn't meet, so I just used it as my required "Humanities Focus" instead. (MIT is obsessed with ensuring "well-roundedness" to an excessive degree. I would've MUCH preferred being able to take most of my classes in my major, then maybe I would've been able to find an actual JOB... sigh. I hate my life.)

Anyway, I wrote a lot of tracks in the past, all synthesizer-based like that one, most really good imo. Everyone always "liked" them, thought they were "really interesting" or whatever, but I never found many people who really LOVED them, nor any way to make any actual money off them, so I kinda lost interest a while back.

I've been meaning to get back into it at some point, but I haven't had time. As for the actual process of creating it, I have some hardware synthesizer modules I bought a long time ago, then I wrote my own composition software to replace a really-old, obsolete, no-longer-supported program that I loved.

Apparently "loops" are all the rage now, as in GarageBand, or Logic for a professional solution. I've never tried using them, the concept seems foreign to me and I don't understand it at all. I will always focus on straight MIDI-style composition, seeing as how it was old Nintendo and Super Nintendo era music that first deeply inspired me.

Some of my favorite soundtracks OF ALL TIME remain Final Fantasy 4, Final Fantasy 6, Chrono Trigger, and Xenogears, though I have hundreds of video game soundtracks at this point (and a lot of movie and anime ones too, to a much lesser degree).

On a related topic - What happened to the song "El Grillo" in the soundtrack? It was one of my favorites and I just realized I haven't heard it for a long time.

Uhh, nothing... The public release versions of MM always use the vanilla soundtrack settings exactly as-is. (Except more recently I had the brilliant idea of adding the 3 Vanilla/Warlords/BTS titlescreen tracks to certain eras, since you can't ever hear them up front any more with the mod locking the titlescreen and providing its own music.)

I just double-checked, and "Desprez el Grillo" is still included in the Medieval track list in the official 4.0.1 zip. So either you haven't spent much time in the Medieval Era lately, you've been distracted when it WAS playing and didn't notice (happens to me a lot), or you've just been unlucky, heh.

Also, to continue the discussion from the other thread:

Wewt, I love combining discussions! :) (Now I just need to get a response on my Burnt Forest and Bamboo graphics, hehe.)

To be honest, I didn't even know tech had health penalties. Gotta look that up.

Globalization does, as does the Market building (which KINDA counts as Currency having it, lol). I also added it to the Trade and Corporations techs already in 4.1 (along with corresponding increases in Medicine and Sanitation), and I'm planning to double the penalty ones here shortly.

What are you planning to do with Industrial?

+1 or +2 free hammers per city. It'll be analogous to the +1 gold per city I added to Financial in 4.0, with the same purpose: to prop it up early on, while adding very little to its mid-game and late-game strength.

Hi Lunarmongoose, indrek_k and everybody else,

it's great to follow your discussion. I am very short in time because of my job, so I will just drop by now and then to post my opinion.

I have experience from dozens of games in MM 3.6.1 (mostly multiplayer) and about ten games in MM 4.0.1, most of which were however single player test games on my Africa map.

And unfortunately, we do not play Mongoose mod any more in my multiplayer group, which negatively affects my motivation. But better times will come. For sure.. :sad:

My opinion on tile damage:

I totally agree that it hurts to see how the AI ignores tile damage. AIAndy (one in my group) was also annoyed by this. I think there is only one radical solution to this:
EITHER improve the AI (SDK work, yep! :lol:) OR remove tile damage for all frequent tile types like jungle or desert. Only leave it for rare terrain types like swamps and peaks.
Ideally, improve the path-finding routines. This would both improve the AI behaviour and the waypoint commands.

Relaying a couple of potential bugs from my friend. We haven't had the chance to properly reproduce and report, sorry about that. We'll try to do that soon. Quick overviews:

1) Slavery - hurry production sacrifices only one population every time despite the cost displayed (saw that happening);
2) Sandworms hanging out on floodplains/plains (you might already have found/fixed this one if it's related to the tundra issue, but reporting just in case);
3) Battering ram vs war elephant: battering ram has -100% vs elephant, however Tauri encountered a situation where a battering ram attacked an elephant and destroyed it;

The following two are very strange issues so it's entirely possible that he simply overlooked or misunderstood something:

4) Tauri reported that when attacking with a large stack and if the attack fails, the attacking units are destroyed in order from weakest to strongest - even though the strongest should be attacking first;
5) Tauri also reported a strange situation with attacking an AI city where the strongest defender was not used for defending before weaker ones - i.e. he made 5-6 attacks with 70-80% probability of winning, destroying all the weaker units (say, stone axemen), and the last unit left to the city was a valkyrie, reducing the odds of winning to 10%.

LM - in general, how would you like bugs to be reported, what sort of information do you need? Would screenshots or save files help? We'd like to reduce the time it takes for you to hunt down a specific issue as much as possible (and put our software testing skills to use) :)

1) Slavery - hurry production sacrifices only one population every time despite the cost displayed (saw that happening);

Yup, that's a bug. I'll take a look. :)

2) Sandworms hanging out on floodplains/plains (you might already have found/fixed this one if it's related to the tundra issue, but reporting just in case);

Haven't gotten to it yet, no. However that one makes more sense: features usually override terrain by default, and I probably never updated the Sandworm code when I added Plains-Floodplains. Still a bug, obviously.

3) Battering ram vs war elephant: battering ram has -100% vs elephant, however Tauri encountered a situation where a battering ram attacked an elephant and destroyed it;

Pretty sure that one is NOT a bug. Battering Rams are complicated - sorry, but there's no other way to achieve the exact stats I wanted within the vanilla mechanics. The basic problem is: You have to add the "+/- vs Mounted" modifier and the "+/- vs Unit" modifier together to get the intended total, b/c they both apply.

In this case it results in -50% vs Elephant, matching the -50% vs Mammoth (which is a standalone modifier b/c Mammoths are NOT Mounted, they're Wild Animal class). The intent was for Rams to only be -100% vs Siege, and for them to normally be +50% vs Mounted but with Elephants swinging it around to -50%. :)

(Btw, if you look at their Pedia entry you'll see they're REALLY called Buttering Rams... just saying.)

4) Tauri reported that when attacking with a large stack and if the attack fails, the attacking units are destroyed in order from weakest to strongest - even though the strongest should be attacking first;

Do you mean with Stack Attack enabled? I'm not sure about the bug b/c I've honestly never used that game option, heh.

5) Tauri also reported a strange situation with attacking an AI city where the strongest defender was not used for defending before weaker ones - i.e. he made 5-6 attacks with 70-80% probability of winning, destroying all the weaker units (say, stone axemen), and the last unit left to the city was a valkyrie, reducing the odds of winning to 10%.

This is probably not a bug. A long time ago there was a mod component called LeadFromBehind by UncutDragon. The idea was to make it so AIs would defend with the units they considered "least valuable" first, not necessarily the ones with the highest odds. It was even incorporated into BBAI, and got a few bugfixes as a result.

I didn't always like this, but I also didn't want to give it up completely, so a while later (specifically 12 March 2012, thus part of MM 4.0) I had the brilliant idea of having it always on for some leaders and always off for others, depending on their personality. So some AIs will behave this way, and some will behave normally. I don't remember which are which, but it's an XML tag I added in LeaderHeadInfos.xml so it's easy to check. (In general I think I gave it to the half or so of the roster that were more thoughtful and reserved and didn't fight on the field themselves, historically.)

LM - in general, how would you like bugs to be reported, what sort of information do you need? Would screenshots or save files help? We'd like to reduce the time it takes for you to hunt down a specific issue as much as possible (and put our software testing skills to use) :)

Nah, you're doing great! :D I don't usually need screenshots or save files; those are more relevant when writing huge new blocks of AI code. Given that the really sensitive stuff is mostly written by other people and heavily tested in other big mods, most of what could go wrong in this mod are things that I can easily track down and fix as soon as I'm alerted to their presence. Plus I have the SDK memorized to a disturbing extent at this point, so I usually know exactly where to look (or at least what search term to use to FIND where to look)...

---

I DO need you to post your reaction to the Burnt Forest / Bamboo graphics in the 4.1 thread though, b/c I have another neat screenshot to post, but I'm not doing it til someone says something about those! :p

1) Slavery - hurry production sacrifices only one population every time despite the cost displayed (saw that happening);

That just reminds me that a year ago or so, somebody was complaining that Hurrying production with gold (I think it's possible with the Democracy civic) also costs only 1 Gold. I never tested or observed that by myself, though.

Both bugs seem very similar, so probably they are caused by the same mistake in your code.

Do you mean with Stack Attack enabled? I'm not sure about the bug b/c I've honestly never used that game option, heh.

That was when attacking with a large group, but with stack attack disabled.
Will try to test this again tonight or tomorrow, as it's a strange one.



This is probably not a bug. A long time ago there was a mod component called LeadFromBehind by UncutDragon. The idea was to make it so AIs would defend with the units they considered "least valuable" first, not necessarily the ones with the highest odds. It was even incorporated into BBAI, and got a few bugfixes as a result.


This is very interesting. I should probably go through changelogs, as there might be other interesting stuff I didn't know about.


I DO need you to post your reaction to the Burnt Forest / Bamboo graphics in the 4.1 thread though, b/c I have another neat screenshot to post, but I'm not doing it til someone says something about those! :p

Lol, sorry, forgot about that.
I don't really have anything to say except that they're clearly a lot better than before. :)

That just reminds me that a year ago or so, somebody was complaining that Hurrying production with gold (I think it's possible with the Democracy civic) also costs only 1 Gold. I never tested or observed that by myself, though.

Yes, I remember that too now that you mention it... Looks like I forgot to make a note about it in my list. Oops. (Not something that would normally happen, either... Grr. I blame my life, which I hate...)

Both bugs seem very similar, so probably they are caused by the same mistake in your code.

Oh SURE, it's automatically a mistake in MY code... :p

That was when attacking with a large group, but with stack attack disabled.
Will try to test this again tonight or tomorrow, as it's a strange one.

Good, b/c I didn't really understand what you meant, lol.

This is very interesting. I should probably go through changelogs, as there might be other interesting stuff I didn't know about.

Technically this is what the "Stuff to Know" sticky is for, but it probably needs an update...

Lol, sorry, forgot about that.
I don't really have anything to say except that they're clearly a lot better than before. :)

Lol, alright, I'll take it. :) It's just that I spent a full 10 days working on those, hehe. The Bamboo, in particular, was a big deal: I improved the color on the green skin, made a new white skin, and manually repositioned some of the trees (which was really hard, b/c I SUCK at being an artist!). I just LOVE how well it came out. :D

Now, I'm going to post the screenshot of my new Swamp graphics in a minute... BE SURE TO RESPOND THIS TIME!!! :p

One more bug:

There's a Foreign Advisor tab/screen that cannot be closed - think it was Info. There's no exit button, pressing escape closes Foreign Advisor screen but the same Info tab is opened on F4 so there's no way to see the other information.

Hi Lunarmongoose,

When playing Mongoose Mod 4.0.1., I have always found it difficult to choose between civics, because most of them have got a large number of effects. It usually takes quite some time to figure out which combination fits best with the current state of my civilization. For casual players, your civics must be discouraging.

And I may remind you that you have always been complaining about other mods like caveman2cosmos to be a bloated mess. Also, with your new civics exclusion system, things will become more complicated anyway.

So I strongly recommend to reduce the number of effects of all civics. Ideally, a civic should have only one positive effect, that characterises it. You can add additional effects for some (positive or negative ones), but their number should be fairly limited.

Example: Nationhood

Effects in MM 4.0.1.:
- can draft 5 units per turn
- +50% espionage in all cities
- +1 happy citizen from barracks
- +1 happy citizen from dry drock
High upkeep

why not make it easer:
- can draft 5 units per turn
Medium upkeep


It can be that easy. Players will soon keep in mind: "When I choose nationhood, I can draft units in my cities". As it is now, they will not keep anything in mind unless playing MM a dozen times or more often.

And I may remind you that you have always been complaining about other mods like caveman2cosmos to be a bloated mess.

They still have twice as many effects as I do, overall. Plus they use a lot of non-standard effects, which tend to be unbalanced.

Also, with your new civics exclusion system, things will become more complicated anyway.

They have a line of red text at the top to display the exclusion effect now. It actually looks better than before imo, b/c the dull red color I chose adds some variety to the screen, separate from the bright red "Requires" text. :) Plus there's only 4 exclusion pairs now (I took out Tribalism/Communism now that the former has a secondary effect, heh).

So I strongly recommend to reduce the number of effects of all civics. Ideally, a civic should have only one positive effect, that characterises it. You can add additional effects for some (positive or negative ones), but their number should be fairly limited.

Well, you know I value your opinion on everything Civ4-related, but we're just gonna have to agree to disagree on this, I think. :( Was bound to happen eventually with at least one of my core supporters, lol.

Example: Nationhood

Effects in MM 4.0.1.:
- can draft 5 units per turn
- +50% espionage in all cities
- +1 happy citizen from barracks
- +1 happy citizen from dry drock
High upkeep

why not make it easer:
- can draft 5 units per turn
Medium upkeep

One reason, is that that's the best place to put a strong espionage bonus, and I want a wide range of bonuses to exist across the civic screen for diversity, but also for promoting use of combos (Nationalism and Fascism, for example).

Another reason, is that it's the best way to fully encapsulate the spirit of what the civics actually represent historically (particularly with respect to Napoleonic France, in this case). Everything that's on them MAKES SENSE (and to a higher degree than the other mods, imo), so it all feels natural. Plus the Healthcare civics actually ARE like what you describe, just for variety. :)

A third reason, is that there's plenty of room left in the display screen in most cases. Mind you, I'm not specifically TRYING to fill them all up, but I do think a single-line, single-effect civic looks tacky and boring. (Though I suppose they might seem a LOT more full on smaller screen resolutions, heh... A long time ago I customized my civic window to scale between 1024 and 1920 in width.)

The fourth, final, and by far the most important reason, is that that's the best way to balance everything, gameplay-wise. A single effect, or occasionally two, is not enough in many cases to make the civic useful or relevant OFTEN ENOUGH to justify its existence. If a large chunk of the civic screen entries sit idle and rarely get used, then I haven't done my job right.

Instead, with my setup, there's a LARGE number of different civic combinations that are good for different purposes and situations. Similar to the situation with my tech tree, the "build diversity" in my civic screen is significantly higher than both the vanilla game and other mods, imo, which is always my primary goal, and something I pride myself on.

(It's also something that Diablo 3, for example, did HORRIBLY BADLY with, and that most professional game designers seem to suck at in general, honestly.)

I COULD remove the happiness effect on Nationalism if I had to, but I like it; it's like a weaker version of the Monarchy effect. Though I did at least change it to display the two buildings in a single list already, heh (which actually affects a number of civics, display-wise).

It can be that easy. Players will soon keep in mind: "When I choose nationhood, I can draft units in my cities". As it is now, they will not keep anything in mind unless playing MM a dozen times or more often.

I do disagree with you on that, unfortunately... There's usually only one MAIN effect on each civic, and they're always right at the top.

This is from a PM. I figured I'd go ahead and respond on here instead:

Well, got it downloaded and installed finally. I played a bit the last couple of days, still taking in how it works, its very different. I find it interesting and I'm SO not sure what I'm trying to do!

The basic goal is the same: beat the other civs with any of the standard victory conditions. :)

I'm confused about the research - it seems as if some research was already done when I started - maybe I accidentally did an advanced start? I didn't expect to be building a variety of units when it looked like I needed to research things to build them. I'm easily confused and maybe haven't read up enough as to how it all works. :)

You probably didn't select Prehistoric as your starting era. The vanilla game starts on Ancient, so that will be selected by default when you first load up the mod.

I enjoyed the bird units, seems there are a lot of units to deal with, I'll have to learn them and which ones I want to use.

Everyone loves bird units... BA-GAWK!!! Awk! CAW! CAW!

Also, I have a question about the graphics - is it possible to play this mod with standard graphics (at least on the standard tiles)? What would I have to do to do that? I'm older and my eyesight isn't that great, the detailed graphics make my eyes work harder and give me headaches.

Not easily... You would have to unpack the mod's Art file with the Firaxis PakBuild app, delete the "Art/Terrain" folder, and, ideally for performance reasons, rebuild the pak file and put it back in the mod folder.

Besides which, in version 4.1 even THAT won't be possible, b/c I've added a number of new terrain types and there AREN'T any vanilla versions of them to revert back to, heh.

Sowwy...

I like the choice to make improvements cost things and just make it more difficult. I think I was playing the slowest speed, I'm not in a hurry.

Yes, but 4.1 will be a GIANT leap forward in every area almost, so I would highly recommend starting over immediately on that once it's out, lol.

I like the way the governments are laid out, that's pretty interesting. Most civics in Civ IV are pretty bad.

Pretty much EVERYTHING in the vanilla game is terrible in my opinion. But the potential was there.

And yep, I'm very proud of my civic design, though Rakete seems to disagree with me hehe (see the previous two posts ;)).

I have a friend that has worked on mods for us before, he makes them very hard and quite interesting. He mods the civics a lot, he might be interested in using the format you have - would that be possible?

Everything in a Civ4 mod can be taken and used elsewhere except the SDK code that creates the moddable DLL file, and most people choose to release their SDK code publically as well (though I currently don't, heh). But yes, b/c that's all handled by XML and Python, I couldn't stop him even if I wanted to; everything he needs is there and exposed and available automatically.

I do always ask that people give me explicit and detailed credit, as I always try to do (see my Credits sticky), but half the time it doesn't happen.

All anyone gets in the C2C credits, for example, is their name in a long comma-separated list of names. If you're lucky you get your name in bold. Nothing at all about WHAT you contributed, which in my case to C2C is at least a dozen different things, sigh.

Thanks for helping me get your mod to try! I'll play it more as time goes on, looking forward to it.

Unless of course you're facing away from your computer, then you'd be looking backward to it... Just saying. *ahem*