Age of Ascension
formerly known as Spatz's Mod of Alpha Centauri

The chronologically third part of the Content triad (but first completed), the Ascension mod is a content mod inspired by the classic game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. The Age of Ascension goes from the original space race upwards through three full Eras, the Digital, Fusion, and Nanotech. This is capped by a final 2-tech Transcendence Era, replacing the old Future Era as the scientific endgame.

Overview
This mod consists of 48 new techs (replacing the 4 Future techs in the original game), with an accompanying set of Buildings, Wonders, Units, Resources, and Policies. These are designed to allow for a more interesting endgame than the vanilla game allows, as each victory condition is significantly altered by various rule changes. Each Era is designed to support a somewhat different playstyle, and much of the mod was structured towards keeping the existing AI competitive despite the unfamiliar content, without the need for any new AI behaviors. This content is very technology-driven, but multiple elements of this mod are designed to keep all players at comparable technology levels; how well you use many of the units and building is intended to be more important than the raw power involved.

The mod is primarily balanced around an Ancient Era start, allowing you to progress from cavemen to ascended being in a single game. However, if you want to ensure being able to see all of the new content, I suggest starting a game no earlier than the Renaissance Era, with the Industrial start being best for a players seeking a competitive space race. If you start in the Digital Era (or later) then the space race is automatically disabled and psionic barbarian units begin spawning almost immediately; this results in gameplay intended to feel very similar to that of the original Alpha Centauri game.

Compatibility
As with all other Content mods, this requires the Base mod to function, preferably loaded first. It is designed to pair with the other Ages of Man content mods; much of the game balance will be designed around the assumption that you're also using the Age of Empires mod as well, as it adjusts many critical aspects of the base game's balance, especially in regards to the scaling of buildings and units in the Nuclear Era that leads into this new content. However, the Empire mod is not absolutely necessary; if you'd prefer to pair this mod with someone else's balance mods then the game should still be functional, barring conflicts with UI elements. I'm in the process of improving this part. My goal is that at the very least, this mod should be compatible with Thalassicus' balance mods. It is important that anyone using this mod use some form of game balance mod; the vanilla game is not structured well to support the addition of future eras, as most of the game is balanced around the idea that all victory conditions will be achievable in the Industrial or Nuclear Eras.

Because the Ascension mod adds new strategic resources to the map scripts, it is incompatible with any mod, map, or scenario that alters resource distribution, as well as any maps using pre-set resource locations. The Player Pack (see the Files thread) contains altered map scripts compatible with the Ascension mod, designed to replace the three existing map scripts (Great Plains, Highlands, and Lakes) known to be incompatible with this mod, and will eventually contain a custom world map adding the new resources.

While this mod adds a large number of technologies, it does not move or add any technologies before the Nuclear (formerly "Modern") Era. It is therefore compatible with mods that alter the tech tree in the earlier Eras, unless those mods shift the positions of all later techs or add new Eras of any kind. The Mythology mod includes this sort of shift, but its SQL is specifically written to adjust the future eras of this mod at the same time.

ERAS and TECHNOLOGIES

Notation: if something (a tech, a unit, a building) is listed as T15, this means it is tied to a technology with a GridX value of 15. In other words, higher numbers mean higher tech levels.

I have added four new Eras to the end of the tech tree, removing the Future Era. (So effectively, three new eras.) The distribution now goes:

T0-2 is Ancient Era (12 techs, one of which you start with, Agriculture)
T3 is Classical Era (6 techs)
T4-5 is Medieval Era (11 techs)
NOTE: If you use the Age of Mythology mod, these numbers are shifted to 0-3 for Ancient, 4-5 Classical, 6-8 Medieval, and everything later shifts by 3.
T6-8 is Renaissance Era (14 techs)
T9-11 is Industrial Era (11 techs)
T12-14 is Modern Era (15 techs), renamed Nuclear Era in this mod. I added one tech in this era, bringing its total to 16.
In the core game, T15-17 is the Future Era (4 techs), but we toss all of that.
In this mod:
T15-17 is the Digital Era (16 techs)
T18-20 is the Fusion Era (16 techs)
T21-23 is the Nanotech Era (13 techs)
T24-25 is the Transcendence Era (2 techs, 1 of which is repeatable)
I use the values assuming this mod is added to the vanilla game. If the Mythology mod is being used as well, then this significantly changes the lengths of the earliest Eras and shifts the later Eras by 3. The Empires mod does not affect this, yet.

In total, I have added 48 technologies, all drawn from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (albeit with a few name changes). These technologies are from the core SMAC game, none of the expansion's "resonance" technologies were included; I also rearranged a few things for gameplay and thematic reasons (primarily, I moved gravitonic techs earlier and nanotechnologies later). While scientifically speaking we're probably closer to nanotechnology than we are to gravitic manipulation, it was important for balance reasons to get the gravtanks into the game in the middle era. Likewise, fusion power probably isn't that far off compared to some of the other techs, but it was important to separate it a bit from the fission level of units.

Attached are screenshots of the new eras. Obviously the icons won't mean much to someone who hasn't played SMAC recently, but it should give a good general idea of the dependencies involved. SMAC's icons are generally color-coded, with military techs having red icons, growth techs green, "social" techs yellow, and "scientific" techs white. A similar color scheme applies to buildings and Wonders.

The new Eras break down as follows:
The Digital Era is all about two things: making the tiles your city works more productive, and building a lot of Wonders. This causes cities to go away from the specialist-centric economy of the Nuclear Era, and grow substantially in the process. Happiness starts off plentiful but runs out quickly, while gold production starts out in short supply and increases significantly; in a lot of ways, it's analogous to the Renaissance Era in the core game. Militaries doesn't get much of a boost here; there are some decent specialty/support units, usually combining several earlier specialist units into a single type, but your core units will still be the Modern Armor and Mechanized Infantry of the Nuclear Era for most of this period.
The Fusion Era centers on Buildings in your cities that increase production, science, etc., so you'll see a substantial boost in raw power. This era contains the final, powerful versions of most of your staple military units, like infantry and tanks, so this becomes a prime era to go on a conquest spree if you didn't have one before. It's very similar to the Industrial Era in feel; by the time you're done with it, your cities will be big and productive, and your army will be very powerful, especially on offense.
The Nanotech Era focuses on specialists and generating more Great People. The few buildings and units in this era are incredibly powerful but incredibly expensive; nearly all of the units in this era are Titan-class units, with insane combat power but tremendous costs. If you haven't conquered your foes by the time you get here, well, it's your own fault, but that can be easily rectified. A lot of the building and Wonder effects give substantial empire-wide boosts, and nearly every type of victory can occur at this point, similar to the Modern Era in the core game.
The Transcendence Era is the end of the game. One tech containing a game-winning Project, one repeatable tech.

Okay, now for the technologies, by Tier. These are basically top-to-bottom on the tech tree, as you can see from the attached screenshots. Nearly every tier has 5 technologies in the Digital and Fusion eras, but the tree tapers off a bit as you get to the top end.

Notation: (W) means World Wonder, (N) means National Wonder, (B) means Building, (U) means Unit, (S) means Social Policy, (P) means a new promotion is available to appropriate units, (*) means a Project, (I) means a terrain improvement change or new resource, and (R) means some other rule change (like the "all units move faster on roads" bit from Machinery).

NUCLEAR ERA (formerly known as the "Modern Era")
TIER 14:
Globalization: (U) Colony Pod
Advanced Ballistics: the SS Engine was moved here. Note that this means three out of the four spaceship components are in the Nuclear Era. Only the stasis chamber requires a tech from a future age.

And the new tech for this era:
Centauri Ecology
Prerequisites: No techs, but you get it when you build the spaceship, OR when the Breakout occurs. Since the project requires one component that doesn't unlock until T15, you might wonder why I'd put this tech at T14. It looks better this way, but it also means that a Digital Era start (which closely mimics a SMAC start) would give you the tech for free and disable the spaceship race.
(W) Weather Paradigm
(I) unlocks Omnicytes
(I) Farms: +1 research if fresh water

DIGITAL ERA
TIER 15 (techs cost 6800)
Gene Splicing
Prerequisites: Ecology (yes, a single T13 tech. So you COULD research it before many Nuclear Era techs.)
(W) Human Genome Project
(B) Children's Creche
(I) Plantation: +1 production

Planetary Networks
Prerequisites: Globalization and Robotics
(W) Planetary Transit System
(N) Planetary Datalinks
(S) Free Market

Industrial Economics
Prerequisites: Satellites and Robotics
(B) Energy Bank
(I) Trading Post: +1 production if no fresh water
(S) Wealth

Doctrine: Flexibility
Prerequisites: Satellites and Stealth
(N) Skunkworks
(*) SDI
(I) Fishing Boats: +1 production

Applied Physics
Prerequisites: Stealth and Advanced Ballistics
(I) Perimeter Defense
(U) Laser Infantry
(*) SS Stasis Chamber

TIER 16 (7700)
Centauri Empathy
Prerequisites: Centauri Ecology and Gene Splicing
(N) Empath Guild
(U) Mind Worms
(I) Pasture: +1 food
(P) Trance

Bioengineering
Prerequisites: Gene Splicing and Planetary Networks
(W) Longevity Vaccine
(I) Camp: +1 food
(S) Green

Social Psychology
Prerequisites: Planetary Networks
(B) Hologram Theater
(N) Citizens' Defense Force
(S) Fundamentalist

Optical Computers
Prerequisites: Industrial Economics and Doctrine: Flexibility
(W) Merchant Exchange
(N) Nethack Terminus
(S) Knowledge

Doctrine: Initiative
Prerequisites: Doctrine: Flexibility and Applied Physics
(W) Maritime Control Center
(U) Stealth Ship
(I) unlocks Dilithium

High-Energy Chemistry
Prerequisites: Applied Physics
(W) Planetary Energy Grid
(U) Plasma Artillery
(S) Power

TIER 17 (8700)
Retroviral Engineering
Prerequisites: Centauri Empathy and Bioengineering
(U) Doppelganger
(U) Golem
(P) Soporific Gas, Soporific Bombs (same effect, but for different unit types.)

Pre-Sentient Algorithms
Prerequisites: Optical Computers and Social Psychology
(N) Hunter-Seeker Algorithm
(W) Virtual World
(S) Thought Control

Neural Grafting
Prerequisites: Optical Computers and Doctrine: Initiative
(N) Command Nexus
(B) Genejack Factory
(U) Scout Powersuit

Superconductor
Prerequisites: High-Energy Chemistry and Doctrine: Initiative
(W) Supercollider
(I) Quarry: +1 production
(P) EMP

Graviton Theory
Prerequisites: High-Energy Chemistry
(U) Skimmer
(U) Vertol
(I) Mines: +1 research if no fresh water

FUSION ERA
TIER 18 (9800)
Centauri Meditation
Prerequisites: Centauri Empathy and Retroviral Engineering
(W) Xenoempathy Dome
(B) Centauri Preserve
(U) Isle of the Deep

Subatomic Alloys
Prerequisites: Retroviral Engineering and Pre-Sentient Algorithms
(B) Bioenhancement Center
(I) unlocks Neutronium
(I) Offshore Platform: +1 research

Doctrine: Air Power
Prerequisites: Pre-Sentient Algorithms and Neural Grafting
(B) Aerospace Complex
(U) Needlejet
(U) Leviathan

Mind/Machine Interface
Prerequisites: Neural Grafting and Superconductor
(W) Cyborg Factory
(U) Assault Powersuit
(S) Cybernetic

Fusion Power
Prerequisites: Graviton Theory and Superconductor
(B) Fusion Lab
(U) Planet Buster
(S) Planned

TIER 19 (11000)
Centauri Genetics
Prerequisites: Centauri Meditation
(W) Pholus Mutagen
(B) Brood Pit
(U) Chiron Locusts

Ethical Calculus
Prerequisites: Centauri Meditation
(W) Clinical Immortality
(B) Habitation Domes
(S) Eudaimonia
(*) The Ascetic Virtues

Ecological Engineering
Prerequisites: Centauri Meditation and Silksteel Alloys
(R) Labor Mechs and Formers gain the ability to Raise and Lower Hills.
(I) Lumbermill: +1 food
(R) Workers work 25% faster

Advanced Spaceflight
Prerequisites: Doctrine: Air Power, Subatomic Alloys, and Mind/Machine Interface
(W) Cloudbase Academy
(B) Sky Hydroponics Lab
(B) Orbital Power Transmitter
(U) Geosynchronous Survey Pod

Applied Gravitonics
Prerequisites: Mind/Machine Interface and Fusion Power
(B) Gravity Shield
(U) Gravtank
(U) Mobile Shield

TIER 20 (12300)
Homo Superior
Prerequisites: Centauri Genetics and Ecological Engineering
(B) Temple of Gaia
(U) Ranger
(U) Troll
(*) Utopia Project

Environmental Economics
Prerequisites: Ecological Engineering and Ethical Calculus
(B) Hybrid Forest
(I) Fishing Boat: +1 gold
(I) Camp: +1 gold

Monopole Magnets
Prerequisites: Ecological Engineering and Advanced Spaceflight
(W) Theory of Everything
(I) Magtubes: railroad movement costs are halved. The math is a bit more complex than that, but basically a unit can move 9-10 hexes per MP on railroads now.
(I) Well: +1 production

Digital Sentience
Prerequisites: Advanced Spaceflight
(W) Self-Aware Colony
(W) Network Backbone
(U) Bolo

Matter Compression
Prerequisites: Advanced Spaceflight and Applied Gravitonics
(B) Lunar Mining Station
(U) Quantum Missile
(U) Orbital Ion Cannon

Super-Tensile Solids
Prerequisites: Applied Gravitonics
(W) Space Elevator
(*) Orbital Defense Pod
(U) Labor Mech

NANOTECH ERA
TIER 21 (13700)
Centauri Psi
Prerequisites: Centauri Genetics and Homo Superior
(W) Telepathic Matrix
(U) Nessus Worm
(I) Monolith: +2 gold

Biomachinery
Prerequisites: Environmental Economics, Homo Superior, and Monopole Magnets
(W) Cloning Vats
(I) Landmark: +2 food
(R) Formers and Labor Mechs can create Deep Mines

Nanometallurgy
Prerequisites: Digital Sentience and Monopole Magnets
(N) Living Refinery
(B) Robotic Assembly Plant
(I) Manufactory: +2 production

Nanominiaturization
Prerequisites: Digital Sentience and Matter Compression
(W) Nano Factory
(B) Nanohospital
(I) Citadel: +2 production

Quantum Power
Prerequisites: Matter Compression and Super-Tensile Solids
(B) Quantum Lab
(U) Combat Mech
(I) Customs House: +2 gold

TIER 22 (15400)
Intellectual Integrity
Prerequisites: Centauri Psi and Biomachinery
(W) Universal Translator
(N) Neural Amplifier
(I) Academy +2 research

Nanomatter Editation historical note: this was the original name of the tech in SMAC, they dropped the "nano" part later on
Prerequisites: Biomachinery and Nanometallurgy
(U) Former
(R) Mine: +1 production

Nanorobotics in SMAC, was "Industrial Nanorobotics", but that felt too redundant
Prerequisites: Nanometallurgy and Nanominiaturization
(B) Nanoreplicator
(U) Orbital Death Ray

Matter Transmission
Prerequisites: Nanominiaturization and Quantum Power
(W) Bulk Matter Transmitter
(B) Jump Gate

TIER 23 (17200)
The Will To Power
Prerequisites: Intellectual Integrity and Nanomatter Editation
(W) Dream Twister
(N) Paradise Garden

Temporal Mechanics
Prerequisites: Nanomatter Editation and Nanorobotics
(W) Manifold Harmonics
(N) Stasis Generator

Singularity Mechanics
Prerequisites: Nanorobotics and Matter Transmission
(W) Singularity Inductor
(U) Subspace Generator

Quantum Machinery
Prerequisites: Matter Transmission
(N) Quantum Converter
(U) Gravship

TRANSCENDENCE ERA
TIER 24 (19,000)
Threshold of Transcendence
Prerequisites: Every previous tech. Or realistically, the four T23 techs, which depend on every other tech.
(*) The Ascent To Transcendence (the victory condition wonder for the Transcendence Victory. Starts the transcendence timer.)

TIER 25 (21,000)
Transcendent Thought a.k.a. "Future Tech"
Repeatable technology. Every time you research it, you gain a permanent +1 happiness.

COMMENTS:
Most new techs depend on two others. This was deliberate; if you examine the screenshots, it looks like a lattice with lots of diagonal connections. Effectively, you have a "pyramid" setup, where to get to a typical tech you have to take two techs from the tier before, three from the tier before that and so on down the line, which makes it nearly impossible to "slingshot"/beeline for the techs you really want; to take any Fusion tech, you'd basically have to take all of the techs in the lowest tier of the Digital era, most from the middle tier, and a few from the top tier. It's not a perfectly regular pattern; certain technologies, such as Advanced Spaceflight (T19) are more of a "linchpin" technology that everyone funnels through. But the result is a tech tree layout that discourages beelining for a specific technology, which means the AI isn't at as much of a disadvantage.
I wanted every tech to do three things, no more than one of which is a World Wonder, so that each tech will always be desirable. So you see most techs having a building, a unit, and an Improvement change or something similar. This also helps the AI, and it makes the decisions harder for the players. There's still some variation, with a few techs having multiple units or multiple buildings, but it's much more AI-friendly now.

The tech tree is laid out in a pretty simple way: the biological techs are up top (with the Centauri techs forming the top row), the pure physics ones are on the bottom (fusion power, gravitonics, quantum power, etc.), and the ones in the middle are what you get when you mix the two approaches (cybernetics, bioengineering, nanotechnology, social sciences).

RESOURCES and IMPROVEMENTS

I have added three new strategic resources:

Omnicytes
Tech: Centauri Ecology (T14, technically, but it's the one you get from the spaceship)
The core of the physiology of the mindworms, these are basically like super stemcells, capable of being altered into whatever you want, making them the core resource for all bioengineered units.
Besides being a strategic resource, Omnicytes provide a massive food bonus (+1 food base, plus an additional TWO for the improvement), and the Centauri Preserve building heavily boosts the yields of Omnicytes tiles further. They can appear on land (harvested with a Camp) or in shallow water (harvested with a Fishing Boat), representing the species that have been engineered to produce them.
Generally speaking, Omnicytes are found in a good number of very small deposits, which often makes them more useful as a simple +food resource than an actual Strategic. Very few things other than Psi units require them, so it's not hard to have a surplus. Brood Pits, Centauri Preserves, and Temples of Gaia generate an additional Omnicyte for each city, while only the Nanohospital consumes a unit, so the majority of your Omnicytes will be found through buildings instead of natural deposits. Since this resource is unlocked directly by the tech given by a spaceship launch, it's a little harder to reach than other T14 techs for the leaders but easier for everyone else; everyone will get the tech unlocked when the Breakout occurs.

Dilithium
Tech: Doctrine: Initiative (T16)
Dilithium is a stable transuranic element used as a catalyst for fusion reactors. This is ONLY naturally available from coastal water tiles (meaning in a water tile directly adjacent to shore), with an Offshore platform; these crystals cannot be created artificially (until quantum power is researched) and can only be found naturally underwater. It is possible in the Nanotech Era to use Deep Mining to extract Dilithium on land, however.
Besides being a strategic resource, Dilithium provides +1 production for the resource and another TWO production for the improvement, plus the tech-based increases in Offshore Platform outputs; add a Seaport and this becomes a fantastic production hex for a coastal city.
Dilithium is really the hardest resource to consistently get enough of. Being water-only makes it difficult to acquire on some maps, and it's used by a lot of advanced units (including the Labor Mech, which is the last upgrade of the Worker) as well as the all-important Fusion Lab building. Quantum Labs generate an additional unit of Dilithium per city, while the Fusion Lab and Gravity Shield cost a unit. Since Fusion Labs are really the only "must have" future building that consumes a resource, this is a substantial drain. Note that as a coastal resource, city-states will control a disproportionate share on most maps.

Neutronium
Tech: Subatomic Alloys (T18)
Neutronium is a metal that has been manipulated at the subatomic level to be stronger and harder than previous alloys by removing the nonessential subatomic pieces (protons, electrons...). It is incredibly dense, which also means that it can be made incredibly thin while still being excellent armor. Unfortunately, it requires a mixture of a variety of rare earth elements to produce; it only appears on land, and is harvested with a Quarry.
Besides being a strategic resource, Neutronium is also a Luxury resource (as a civilization that has Neutronium can make all sorts of fantastic statues and artwork), giving the usual +4 Happiness. It gives +1 production for the resource, +1 gold for the improvement.
Neutronium is fairly common, which is good considering how useful it is. Quantum Labs generate an additional unit, so in theory it would be plentiful... except that most advanced military units need it, and Titan units tend to require multiple Neutronium to construct, so you'll go through it quickly if you want a competitive endgame military. The Nanoreplicator and Robotic Assembly Plant each require 1 unit, both of which would be in high demand in the endgame.

There are three additional Resources, all Luxuries created by buildings:
Hit Movies is produced by Hollywood (national wonder), and adds +2 happiness. You get 3 units of it to trade around, but since it's made by a national wonder that has other benefits, in the long term everyone will have some and it'll be a flat +2 happiness (barring any bonus for difficulty, etc.)
Information is produced by the Planetary Datalinks (national wonder), and adds +3 happiness. You get 3 units of it to trade around, but as above, the other civs will eventually have their own.
Ambrosia is produced by Clinical Immortality (world wonder) and adds +5 happiness. You get 3 units of it, and since it's a world wonder no one else will ever have any unless you trade it to them, making it an excellent trade good in an era where most civs have most or all of the luxuries.

Note that I've also added a group of buildings that add strategic resources, in addition to the Wonder-produced luxuries above. The Stock Exchange adds 1 iron and 1 horses, The Energy Bank adds 1 coal and 1 oil, the Fusion lab adds 1 uranium and 1 aluminum, and the Quantum Lab adds 1 neutronium and 1 dilithium. Three separate buildings produce Omnicytes: the Brood Pit, Centauri Preserve, and Temple of Gaia. None of these are wonders, so if your civilization completely lacks a given late-game resource, you can use these buildings to produce enough to support essential city structures or build the one unit you really need. If a city produces an Energy Bank, for instance, it can use the coal to produce a Factory. Note that each of these buildings appears 1-2 eras after the first building that consumes the resource, though, so you can't depend on always having these resources. Additionally, each strategic (beyond iron and horses) has a World Wonder that produces 10 units of that resource.
As for luxury resources, the Paradise Garden and Quantum Converter (both Nanotech Era National Wonders) create a unit of each of the existing luxuries (with one giving the "organic" luxuries and the other handling the minerals). These are very expensive endgame buildings with other powerful effects, though.

The distributions of resources on the map was altered; every resource now has an effective minimum number of deposits based on the number of civilizations at the start of the game; for instance, on a map with 8 players, three small Aluminum deposits will be placed before any other resources are allocated, with the percentages for random aluminum reduced somewhat to compensate.

The only truly new permanent Improvement is the Monolith, the special structure for the new Great Empath person. This structure will provide +3 happiness (even without being worked) and the tile now generates 2 food, 2 gold, and 2 culture when worked, regardless of what the tile's base yield was (although resources still add to the total, as do bonuses for rivers and such). In the later game, it also adds 2 research, and eventually 2 production. While that yield sounds great on paper, it's actually considerably less in practice than what other GP buildings produce, to compensate for the Happiness. It's inspired by SMAC's 2/2/2 obelisks.

In addition, between the Renaissance Era and early Fusion Era, nearly every type of tile improvement receives a boost analogous to the food boost for Farms/Pastures/etc. at several existing techs. For instance, at T15, you have Plantations, Fishing Boats, and Trading Posts getting bonuses at different techs. (Many of the boosts here are production-based; the Digital Era is filled with Wonders to build, and the following Fusion Era is all about Buildings, so it is important to have decent production in all cities.)

The common improvements not requiring resources (Farm, Mine, Trading Post) start at +1, gain two alternating half-time (fresh water or not) +1s to their specialty, and then get a single half-time +1 to something outside of their specialty. So the Farm gets +1 food for freshwater farms at Civil Service, +1 food to non-freshwater at Fertilizer, and +1 research for freshwater at Centauri Ecology (good motivation to build a spaceship!).
Resource-specific improvements (Plantation, Quarry, etc.) get +1 to two things, to make them more desirable, and these don't depend on the presence of fresh water.
The Great Person-generated buildings (Landmark, Customs House, etc.) are so specialized and rare that they get a total of three +2 boosts (one in the late Medieval/early Renaissance and one in the late Industrial/early Nuclear in the Balance mod, and then another one in the early Nanotech in the Content mod).
The three "pure" GP improvements (Manufactory, Academy, Customs House) get three +2s all reinforcing whatever the specialty of that building is. The Customs House gets +2 gold at all three, making it a whopping +9 gold in the Nanotech era. The other GP-made improvements (Citadel, Landmark, Monolith) instead have three differing increases, resulting in more all-around useful improvements; the Monolith, for instance, adds happiness, food, research, gold, culture, and production in the endgame.

Also, in the core game, City Ruins are basically worthless, something to be cleared away to build a farm or trading post. To me this is backwards; ruins should be seen as valuable, so in this mod they give +1 gold, +1 culture, and at Archaeology, +1 research. Also, ruins give a +25% defense boost to units defending from them. (All of the advantages of fighting in a city, without the collateral damage!)

There are several terraforming options in the game.
At Penicillin and Ecology, two Nuclear Era techs, Combat Engineers and their upgrades gain the ability to plant jungles and forests, respectively, to boost food/research and production. This planting takes a bit longer than other terrain improvements.
At Ecological Engineering, a Fusion Era tech, you unlock the ability to create or destroy hills. Only Labor Mechs and Formers can do this action. This takes about twice as long as planting a forest.
At Biomachinery, a Nanotech Era tech, you gain the Deep Mine ability. (Again, only Labor Mechs and Formers can do this.) This can only be used on tiles without a resource, and creates a new resource semi-randomly; Dilithium (harvested with a Mine) and Neutronium are the most common, but Aluminum, Uranium, Coal, Oil, Gold, Silver, and Gems are also possibilities. This action takes a LONG time compared to the other terraforming options, but the results are often worth it. Especially on a Pangaea map where you don't have Dilithium nearby.
Finally, the Former (a T22 unit unlocking at Nanomatter Editation) has the unique ability to Terraform. This can turn Snow tiles into Tundra, Tundra into Plains, or Desert into Grassland. (Doing this on any other terrain does nothing.) This would take a long time, but the Former builds at 5 times the speed of a Worker, so it won't take long.
NOTE: The Raise/Lower Hills and Terraform actions change the terrain but do not update the graphics in either regular or Strategic view. You will see the correct terrain the next time you load your game. The forest/jungle planting and deep mining, however, show up immediately. Although, in each case you might see a remnant of the placeholder graphic until reloading the game.

VICTORIES
Obviously, a key part of adding a future era is ensuring the players are not forced to end the game beforehand, either by their own hand or by an AI winning one of the victory conditions. Each of the existing victory conditions is therefore altered as follows:
Time: The standard game, on normal speed, lasts 500 turns. I have extended that to 1000, with similar scaling added to other game speeds. The year count might have some ridiculous numbers, though, if you start in an era other than Ancient or a game speed other than Standard.
Cultural: The Utopia Project requires the Homo Superior technology. Additionally, 10 "Super-Finisher" policies were added, one per branch; these policies are stronger than normal policies, but do not count towards a cultural victory and require specific technologies in the future eras, so taking them slows a cultural victory down.
Diplomacy: (These changes are in the Balance mod, but are included here for reference.) In the vanilla game, you need 47% of the votes on a small map, and 35% on the largest maps. In this mod, you now need ~67% of the votes on a small map and 50% on the huge ones. The math changes a bit as you conquer other empires, though, so if enough city-states are destroyed, it might become mathematically impossible for anyone to get enough votes to win without liberating captured states.
Additionally, it's now significantly more expensive to bribe a city-state, while the effects of non-gold ways of gaining Influence have been boosted. Gifting units to a city-state, or completing its quests, is now an excellent way to gain and keep Influence; this reduces the ability of a player to buy the loyalty of half a dozen city-states right before a vote.
Conquest: No explicit change, but many components of the Balance Mod above are designed to make rolling over opponents much harder.
Science: In the core game, launching the spaceship wins the game. Here, it doesn't. Instead, there is a Transcendence victory at the end of the now-expanded tech tree. Building the spaceship will instead do the following:
> Gain one Social Policy of your choice
> Gain the non-researchable Centauri Ecology technology
> Enter a Golden Age (5 turns on default settings)
> All of your current wars end immediately. You can start them back up again, if you want. This has the negative that if the other empire was losing, you miss out on some good peace terms.
However, the first civ to complete the ship gets additional benefits:
> Gain one free technology of your choice
> The free Golden Age mentioned above lasts twice as long
Centauri Ecology is a prerequisite for many later technologies (and by the end of the tree, all of them), but you don't actually need to build the spaceship to get it. 10-30 turns after one civ builds a spaceship, the Breakout will occur, when mindworms escape into the wilds of Earth. The more civs that build ships, the faster this happens. Once the Breakout occurs, every civ gets the Centauri Ecology tech (meaning you don't HAVE to build a spaceship to continue), but none of the other benefits of a spaceship, and civs without a fully built ship can no longer build any new spaceship parts. The Breakout has other effects, though, the biggest of which is the periodic spawning of Spore Towers around the world, immobile units that generate new Psi units as long as they survive.

The new Science victory condition, the Transcendence Victory, is more complex.
Once the Project is built, a 20-turn timer begins to count down. When the timer expires, you win if your empire still exists, assuming no one has won through any other mechanism (like conquering your capital).
When the timer starts, everyone declares Permanent War on you. This is because they know that the only way to stop you from taking over the world is to conquer you.
During those 20 turns, your empire is in a state of Anarchy; no science, no production, no income, no expenses. This may or may not be temporary.
Each turn, each of your cities loses 1 population, to a minimum of size 1. Your people start to ascend, and this reduces the city's productivity as they no longer worry about material things. The "population" reflects the number of citizens that are still creating and consuming resources.
Sacrificing a Great Person reduces this timer by 2 turns for the first GP of a type, 1 turn for each later GP of that type. This one isn't implemented yet. The idea is that when a famous leader ascends, you'll see a lot of extra people follow his example. It's assumed that a human player would have stockpiled a few Great People before this point, but the AI won't do this, and probably wouldn't know how to manage it even if he did have them.
Losing your Capital adds 5 turns to the timer. Losing any other city adds 1 turn. These aren't implemented yet.
As 40-population cities won't be uncommon by the time you reach this, the 1 pop per turn isn't likely to truly cripple any of your cities, but it would keep you from settling new ones. I'd also like to add a few other tweaks, like you can no longer annex cities and all puppets immediately begin to raze.
NOTE: You cannot disable the space race or Transcendence Victory. They will always be available.

CITIZENS
I have added two new Citizen types:
Empaths add no production, culture, research, or money. Instead, they add +1 Happiness and +2 food; while this sounds like a large amount, remember that these unlock after the national wonders that boost other specialists by +1. They also generate points towards the new Great Empath unit, which can build a Monolith (+3 happiness, plus terrain effects), or can be sacrificed for a Golden Age 50% longer than a normal great person could get.
To me, a +1 happiness citizen is an essential addition to the game, and should have been added as an Entertainer specialist in the core game. It gives a level of tunability to the happiness part of the game, allowing you to easily go from -1 to 0 without rush-building a new Colosseum.
Transcends are extremely productive: +1 to food, production, science, and gold, and +2 culture, plus any bonuses from Wonders, Policies, and such. But they generate no great person points, and only three buildings have slots for them, all end-game (T23) National Wonders.
The balance factor here is that these are in very limited supply, and I'm basically assuming that the three National Wonders with Transcend slots will always use them when I balance things out.

UNITS

Before we go further, I wanted to make one point absolutely clear: I will not, in any way, attempt to reproduce SMAC's unit-building system. While I loved that system, I don't see how it can be implemented well into the Civ 5 engine without some massive recoding, and given Civ's new Promotion system there's less need.

In the core game, there are something like ten unit Combat Classes (Armor, Gunpowder, Mounted, etc.). I've added five more:

Psi: Bioengineered alien units from Alpha Centauri. There are five of these (four buildable by players), covering the basic combat styles.
These didn't come from AC directly; the genomes were transmitted and they were built on Earth by placing constructed genes in various Terran lifeforms. This is why Centauri Empathy, the technology that grants Mind Worms, depends on a non-Centauri tech, Gene Splicing.
Psi units, while a distinct unit type, can be of any Domain and can mimic pretty much any other unit type. So you can have a Psi naval unit, a Psi melee unit, and so on. While Psi is a unit type, it is also a Promotion that all units within this type get. The most important characteristic of Psi units is the "psionic combat" system; Psi units' base combat strength will adjust up or down by up to 25%, depending on the strength of their opponent (so Psi units get stronger against powerful foes and weaker against weak units), although they get +10% when attacking to help make up for any decrease.
These units are constructed with both production and food (like Settlers), gain XP at double the normal rate (but don't generate Great General points at all), and they regenerate at least 2 HP per turn even if they take other actions. They also make fantastic Raider units, as they can enter rival borders and will have the Hidden Nationality trait once that is working; however, to reinforce this role, all Psi units get a -25% penalty when adjacent to an allied unit. They're not very good as part of a huge attack wave, but very strong when raiding alone. This makes them very dangerous Barbarian units, which is good since they basically take over the Barbarian role in the future eras.
In most cases, their combat strength isn't an even match for comparable "mundane" heavy units (Mindworms have considerably less power than the strength 70 Modern Armor despite coming later), although Psi units automatically adjust their base strength against various foes to make up for this. They're very limited in which promotions they can pick (none of the exotic ones, just the basics like Shock), and they never upgrade. But if you want something that can drive a more powerful rival crazy, they're ideal, and they build up experience so quickly that the extra upgrades of Shock and Drill they'll have can become enough to swing the balance in their favor in any individual fight.
There are two promotions (Trance I and Trance II) that give +25% versus Psi units, and a few Wonders that help as well, but their biggest advantage is that they're not one of the more common unit types, and only one unit (the Troll) has an inherent defense bonus against Psi.
All Psi units start with one free "mutation" promotion, randomly selected from a list for each type. Barbarian-trained "Wild" Psi units get 2-3 of these promotions, as well as other benefits.

Energy: Infantry. Basically, the future equivalent of Gunpowder units, although with a bit more variety. There are 6 units of this type, all land-based, although the Labor Mech is not really designed for heavy combat.
While they don't have much more firepower than a Modern-era unit (ranging from 45 for the Laser Infantry to 70 for the Assault Powersuit), they tend to be loaded with special abilities and free promotions. For instance, the Assault Powersuit gets +50% versus armor, has better odds of intercepting aircraft, can paradrop, has 3 MP and only spends 1 MP per tile, and is amphibious.

Titan: The endgame units, replacing the Giant Death Robot. There are six classes of these in the game, although only four of them are true combat units and two of the six aren't actually classed as Titans. Each costs as much as a Wonder, but they're worth it. (Also, building a Spaceship Factory boosts production of Titan units by 25%.) Also note: you cannot rush or purchase a Titan. They must be built, fully, the old-fashioned way.
Titans, like the Energy units above, are loaded with special abilities, and Titans also have access to practically every promotion in the game. They have higher maintenance costs than regular units, though.
As an example, the first Titan unit is the Bolo (T20). (If you have to ask where the name comes from, turn in your geek card.) 150 combat strength, a bombardment rating of 75, and a ton of promotions (+10% vs cities, indirect fire, amphibious, all terrain 1MP, movement of 4 MP, gets two attacks per turn, and +20% interception rate against aircraft) but it costs 2000 hammers, more than most Digital-era Wonders and more than double what an infantry unit of comparable technology costs. Also, it doesn't get terrain defensive bonuses, because it IS the terrain.
Other Titans are similar; generally speaking, they're the equal of at least two normal units. No units ever upgrade to Titans, no Titans upgrade to anything, and there are no selectable anti-Titan Promotions (barring any anti-Psi promotions used against a Nessus Worm or the inherent anti-Titan ability of the Ranger).
All Titan units start with +10XP, attack twice per turn, are immune to nukes, and have the "Damage Reduction" promotion, which reduces all incoming damage by 1 point per fight.

There are two other new Unit classes: Multirole (used only for the Needlejet) and Orbital (used for the satellite weapons). Both are Air types; Multirole units have both Fighter and Bomber promotions, while Orbital weapons use the artillery-style "Rough/Open" ranged promotions instead of the land/sea/city ones of the Bombers, and are nearly impossible to intercept. Other than that, they both act like normal Air unit types, with the usual rebasing, immobility, etc.

This is not to say that all new units are in these classes; I've added quite a few Armor units, a couple Navals, and even a couple Gunpowders.
One of my key design philosophies for the units is that most of the early-future units shouldn't be substantially STRONGER than modern units; someone with these isn't going to just flatten the Modern-era civs (until Titans, which are designed for exactly that sort of brute-force approach). But the units are loaded with special abilities that make them far more useful and flexible; most have much better mobility and few have any explicit drawbacks, although most Titan units lose the ability to get a defensive terrain bonus (because they're just too big to hide behind terrain).
The upshot of this is that once a civ reaches the modern era and has Modern Armor, Stealth Bombers, Mobile SAMs, Rocket Artillery, and Mech Infantry, it should be good enough to put up a reasonable defense even against a Fusion-era civilization. And so, a well-played Digital or Fusion army that takes advantage of all the special abilities will wipe the floor with a poorly-led one without those tools.

The full list of units, in order of technology:

INDUSTRIAL ERA:
Combat Engineer (Dynamite): An upgrade of the Worker. Works at 150% speed, has 3 movement points, moves like a scout (all terrain 1 MP, amphibious), but costs substantially more. This does NOT obsolete the Worker right away, though; I waited until the Digital Era to obsolete those, because they're so cheap to build. This is the last resourceless worker unit, so the AI will have many of them in the late game. Note that unlike the standard worker, Combat Engineers cannot be captured; they simply die if attacked, because they won't switch allegiances.

MODERN ERA:
Several existing units were modified.
The Anti-aircraft Gun and Mobile SAM now have the "Melee Penalty" promotion, making them weaker vs. non-air, non-ranged units and cities.
Mechanized Infantry (T12) had its power reduced from 50 down to 42. (Note that Infantry are 36 and only move 2, so it's still a substantial upgrade considering how few techs lie between the two units.)
Modern Armor (T13) had its power reduced from 80 down to 70. (Note that Tanks were 50, so again, still an upgrade, especially considering they're only a couple techs apart.)
Colony Pod (T14, at Globalization): An improved Settler; both can found new cities, but the Colony Pod has several significant advantages over a Settler: increased movement (3), a combat power of 50 (but can't attack), and the ability to airdrop like a Paratrooper. The Colony Pod requires one unit of Oil and one of Uranium, and cannot be purchased. You can't actually upgrade an existing Settler to the new unit, though. And since it has a combat strength it can't stack with a military unit escort; it IS its own escort. But this means it CAN stack with a Worker/Engineer.

DIGITAL ERA:
The Digital Era doesn't add a lot of units, and the ones it does add are generally not in the "bigger is better" theme common in the previous era. Several combine several previous unit types into a single flexible unit, others are basically new styles of unit designed to turn combat into less of a brute force slugfest and more of a finesse battle. Lots of raider or hit-and-run units, not as much that can stand toe-to-toe in a heavy fight.

Laser Infantry (T15): A balanced all-around cheap Energy infantry unit. No resources needed, only moves 2, and costs a bit more than half what a Mechanized Infantry does; its combat strength is 45 (just slightly more than the revised Mech Infantry), but it gets an inherent +20% when allies are adjacent. Inspired by the infantry in Starship Troopers; the movie, not the book. With the ever-increasing costs of units, I figured there should be at least one unit that can easily be constructed in your fringe cities that find themselves under attack unexpectedly.
Mind Worms (T16): As mentioned above, a cheap Psi land unit. Great raiding unit; it's outgunned by most combat units but builds up combat strength very quickly though normal promotions. I really want them to have the Hidden Nationality trait, so that if the game ends up stalemated you can start flooding the other side with cheap units he can't declare war over.
Stealth Ship (T16): Naval unit, combines the best features of Submarines with Destroyers and can carry missiles like the Missile Cruiser. Basically a sub that can bombard land targets, which makes it VERY hard to stop if you don't build a navy.
Plasma Artillery (T16): The game's final true Siege unit. Besides being an excellent mobile artillery unit, with a movement of 4 and great bombardment strength, this is also the last true anti-air unit in the game (upgrade of the Mobile SAM). Very handy to have, after an era dominated by bombers and such, a good anti-air unit that can still fight back in other ways. There are quite a few later units with bombardment attacks, but no more true Artillery units after this, so you'll continue to use them extensively until the end of the game.
Doppelganger (T17): Energy unit that, at the start of each fight, can steal a promotion possessed by its opponent and keep it permanently. Handled well, this can become an extremely strong unit. Starts off very weak, but regenerates.
Golem (T17): A Melee unit. It's very cheap, and only has 40 combat strength, just enough to keep from getting wiped out by ancient-era leftovers. But these constructs regenerate, heal fully if they kill a foe, get a bonus against cities, require no unit support costs, and act as Workers at 75% of normal speed; they can't build specialized improvements (Pastures, Quarries, Plantations), but can do Farms, Mines, Roads, etc. just fine. Great in an era where you don't need many new terrain improvements and don't want a bunch of defenseless Workers clogging up your empire.
Also, Golems can be sacrificed in a city to rush production; while the amount they give isn't nearly as much as the Great Engineer gives, it's approximately equal to what the Golem cost in the first place, so you can use them as a way to transfer production to your outlying cities or "disband" them once they're no longer needed.
Scout Powersuit (T17): Energy infantry unit, a cross between Mechanized Infantry and a Scout. Only 50 combat strength, but +50% versus Gunpowder units, 4 MP, all terrain costs 1 MP, is amphibious, +2 visibility, and can paradrop. Inspired by the infantry in Starship Troopers; the book, not the movie. 50 strength isn't enough to really hold up in a fight against modern tanks and such, although the Gunpowder bonus helps you clean out any leftover Mechanized Infantry. And while you don't need terrain recon now that the map has been revealed, there IS a good use for "spotters" for aircraft, artillery, and long-range missiles, especially nukes.
Vertol (T17): upgrade of helicopters. Siege unit, a whopping 7 movement points, only 50 defensive strength but it has a 70-strength range-1 attack. It also gets +50% versus Armor, and it can move across all terrain for 1 MP including oceans, something no other units can do before the Nanotech Era. It can't capture cities, though, and gets -33% when attacking them. Since it is not a Helicopter type, anti-air units have no bonus against it. Inspired by the AV-4 from Cyberpunk, basically an armored car with a Harrier's VTOL engines. Note that because of its ocean ability, it must be built in a coastal city, although inland you could just build a normal Gunship and then upgrade.
Skimmer (T17): A futuristic upgrade of Mech Infantry that can do a little of everything. Armor unit, 56 strength, 4 MP, all terrain costs 1 MP, and can move after attacking. It gets a +50% Interception bonus, allowing it to engage aircraft targeting nearby units or cities as if it were an anti-aircraft unit. Inspired by the "combat cars" from the Hammer's Slammers novels, but really it's that I didn't like how the cavalry line sort of petered out and the Gunships were too specialized to take the role. A good all-around support/skirmisher unit.

FUSION ERA
This is nearly the exact opposite of the previous era; quite a few of the new Fusion Era units are brute-force combat units, the kind of things designed to be used in a major war. Frankly, I expect this era to be one with LOTS of high-attrition wars, which is good since these units are more resource-heavy than before.

Isle of the Deep (T18): aquatic Mindworms. While slow, they have good defense against bombardment, regenerate health well, and have a very strong bombardment attack that isn't limited to sea targets. Park one of these off the coast of a city and it can work wonders. The one thing they lack is range. Note that the Psi strength adjustment does NOT apply when making ranged attacks; only the Isle's defensive strength will do so.
Needlejet (T18): what you get when you cross a bomber with a fighter. The last true Air unit, the Needlejet is basically a fighter with excellent ground attack abilities and Stealth-like evasion, with less of the drawbacks of the earlier air units. I wanted the various air units to upgrade to something useful, just like I did with the Naval units. These are the most cost-effective bombardment unit, even after Orbitals come out, but they feel like Cavalry, a sort of "end of an era" unit that will become outdated fairly soon after.
Leviathan (T18): Naval unit, combines a Battleship with a Carrier. Basically a carrier that can bombard land targets, but also has good anti-air ability. With the ever-increasing range of aircraft and the eventual addition of orbital weapons, pure carriers aren't very necessary outside of "beachhead" assaults, but they have enough bombardment range to supplement artillery on most maps. Unlike the units that upgrade to them, Leviathans can also see submarines. This allows you to upgrade your existing heavy naval vessels into something useful; the Battleship and Carrier were weak against aircraft, too slow, and/or too specialized.
Note: these are the last naval units in the game. At higher techs, quite a few units can fly over water or airdrop as necessary, and orbital weapons take over the "artillery" role, so there's little need for further naval units on offense, although they're still important for pillaging water-based resources like Dilithium.
Assault Powersuit (T18): Remember the Scout Powersuit, above? It's like that, but more so. 70 combat strength, only 3 MP, but +50% versus Armor instead of versus gunpowder and it doesn't get the visibility boost. That anti-Armor boost means that an Assault Powersuit actually outguns the Gravtank, slightly, in a straight fight.
Planet Buster (T18): ICBM. Same basic effect as the Nuclear Missile, but it's got unlimited range and SDI is half as likely to intercept.
Chiron Locusts (T19): Helicopter mindworms. 70 strength and a movement of 6 is nothing to sneeze at in a commerce raider unit, especially one that can regenerate health; they also get +25% versus wounded units, dangerous in a regenerating raider. While these are outgunned by most Armor units, they actually compare favorably to the infantry of their era. They don't have many inherent promotions, but the double-XP-gain of Psi units makes them kind of scary if they can survive for a bit.
Geosynchronous Survey Pod (T19): A cheap infinite-range recon unit. No damage, but it gives a huge visibility radius around whatever city it's currently "based" in, and can move to give visibility anywhere in the world through a very quirky method of movement that snaps it back at the end of the turn, AFTER the opponent has had a chance to kill it (with the ability to spot submarine units as well, if you're short on Destroyer-types). Great if you're getting ready to bombard a city but don't have anything in the area to spot for you.
Gravtank (T19): The final true Armor unit. 90 strength, 4 MP, all terrain costs 1 MP, but costs 1000. While these can still be outgunned by dedicated anti-armor units or bombarded down from range, it's an all-around capable heavy unit. While it's only one tier before the first Titan units, you'll have plenty of Modern Armor around to upgrade into these, so it'll make a big difference right away. It's also much cheaper than a Titan, in both hammers and resources.
Mobile Shield (T19): A unit that makes all adjacent friendly units stronger; besides a general defense and healing increase, the shield bestows an anti-nuke, anti-orbital promotion on all nearby units. As an added bonus, it's on a hover chassis, so all terrain costs 1 MP.
Ranger (T20): A bioengineered Human with the unobtrusive genetic modifications needed for special-forces combat. Only 65 strength, but it gets +25% in forests or jungle, +25% versus Titans (the only unit to get an anti-Titan bonus), mindworm-like regeneration (2-3 HP/turn), and a massive +50% when attacking in ANY terrain. While it doesn't have the now-ubiquitous "all terrain 1 MP" ability, it does have the Commando ability to use enemy roads. Finally, all Rangers have a 10% chance to deal an automatic 5 damage to their opponent at the start of any combat. Very expensive, at 800 per unit, but starts with +30XP. Not nearly as fast as the Skimmer or Vertol, but an excellent first-strike unit for any heavily fortified front line and a good anti-Titan unit.
Troll (T20): A human who has been heavily adapted for high-gravity and hazardous conditions; unlike the Ranger, a person choosing the Troll conversion has given up attempting to still look human. Like the Ranger, this is a 65-strength unit that costs 800 and starts with +30XP, but where most other units are optimized for offense, the Troll is all about defense: +50% when defending, another +50% versus ranged attacks, +25% versus Psi units (the only unit with an anti-Psi bonus built in), and the Troll regenerates FULLY every turn regardless of what actions he takes. Also, Trolls have a 10% chance of healing 5 damage at the start of any fight. In a fort or Citadel or at a choke point, these become practically impossible to budge; forget about bombarding them down. They're also good as the first-wave attacker in a tough city assault, since they'll fully heal afterwards and aren't very vulnerable to counterattacks. But their mobility is lousy compared to any other Fusion era unit, although they can move across mountains, so you'll primarily use them within your own rail network.
Bolo (T20): Mentioned above, this is the first Titan unit. Basically, take a Gravtank and double it; it's a lot like getting a Giant Death Robot in the core game (150 strength), where it's practically unstoppable if supported right. Like most Titans it adds a bombardment attack as well; it's a relatively weak one, compared to other Titans, but "weak" still means a 75-strength bombardment capable of wiping out practically any weaker unit caught in the open field. Effectively, this is a 1-unit invasion force, capable of taking down a city single-handedly, and is designed to be the spearhead when attacking a heavily fortified defense line.
Quantum Missile (T20): Non-nuclear missile. Good damage, especially against Titans; when used against units in the open, it also damages all adjacent enemy units and places fallout in the target's hex.
Orbital Ion Cannon (T20): Orbital weapon. The damage isn't very impressive (only 50 strength, with a free EMP promotion), but again, you can hit pretty much anything indiscriminately. This effectively takes over the Air units' "pick off the retreating skirmisher units" role, and is great for a first shot to soften up an even-match opponent, but it's not going to be killing any modern units outright and its damage against cities of this era is pathetic.
Labor Mech (T20): a super-Worker unit, builds at 200% speed. It's actually an Armor unit with 50 strength, so it can defend itself pretty well, but it's not cheap. Workers and Engineers upgrade to this directly (but since it costs Dilithium, not always), and Workers obsolete when these unlock, so in the Nanotech era many of the AI's workers will become these. Most importantly, the Labor Mech can perform some of the more advanced terraforming options, which Combat Engineers can't. The combat power is essential in an era when each side is raiding the other with psi units or vertols, and pillaging everything in sight. It's also nice to have a construction unit you can send in with the combat forces, to repair the damage caused by your invasion, taking over that role from the Golem.

NANOTECH ERA
Nearly every unit in this era is a Titan, a massive, expensive engine of pure destruction. If you like military conquest then you've probably already won by this point, but if you haven't, these are "Game Over" units.

Nessus Worm (T21): It's Godzilla. Seriously, it's an amphibious Psi unit that acts more like a Titan. 140 defensive strength and a 100-strength range-1 attack, can travel on any terrain (including oceans) for 1 MP, and regenerates its health fully each turn. One of these comes out of the ocean and levels Tokyo on a regular basis. (As a Psi unit, it'll have the hidden nationality and ability to enter borders without a war, eventually.) But it's not cheap, at 1500 hammers, and it's the last combat unit without a long-range attack. Conversely, it has a massive bonus when attacking cities, so unless the defender has loaded up on defense buildings, a Nessus Worm can often one-shot a city (but can't capture one); a smart defender won't let it get close. The Nessie's other advantage is that it only requires only Omnicytes, and no Dilithium or Neutronium (which tend to be in shorter supply in the late game).
Combat Mech (T21): It's the Giant Death Robot, souped up. A Titan that specializes in bombardment; only 100 strength, but a staggering 120 bombardment strength (with a range of FOUR), and it can carry missile units. Also, it has a big anti-air boost, can see 2 hexes further, and has the usual "all terrain 1 MP" ability. With that firepower, it can generally take a defending city down to 1HP for other units to deal with, and do so at range while taking no damage.
Former (T22): A Titan unit that doesn't fight. It has heavy armor (combat strength 100 but can't attack), it builds Improvements like a Worker at 500% normal speed, and it has access to Terraforming options that smaller workers don't have. A Former can turn hills into plains, snow into tundra, tundra into plains, deserts into grassland, and it can plant forests and jungles. It can move across water as well, which allows it to place water improvements like Fishing Boats without sacrificing itself.
Orbital Death Ray (T22): The Orbital Ion Cannon, dialed it up to 11. 150 combat strength that can hit anywhere in the world and gets a large bonus when attacking cities, but it costs 1400 hammers. While not technically a Titan, it's comparable in price. Unlike the Ion Cannon, this CAN one-shot most non-Titan units. It's horribly expensive, of course, but worth it.
Subspace Generator (T23): What do you get when you cross a Death Ray with a Nuke, and then make it a Titan? Instead of a single-target attack, this unit drops a level 2 (Nuclear Missile-equivalent) nuke anywhere in the world each turn. It costs a 3000 hammers, more than most land-based Titans, but given time one of these will level an empire. (Which is good, since you can only have one.) It's completely impossible to intercept, of course.
There are a couple buildings that reduce the effects of nukes, so by the time you get this, your opponents' cities will often be nearly immune to nuke damage. But that doesn't stop you from nuking their terrain instead; you can easily cripple opponents this way. And unlike earlier nukes, SDI-type projects have no effect on Subspace Generators.
Gravship (T23): the ultimate weapon. Concept-wise, take the Terran Battlecruiser from Starcraft. Then add fighter bays. 200 combat strength, 200 ranged attack, moves 5 hexes across any terrain (including oceans), repairs itself by 2-5 every turn, and is basically immune to air units. It also acts as a Great General, buffing anything else nearby. But it costs 4000 hammers, and you can only have ONE. I would KILL to have the game play the Starcraft "Carrier has arrived." soundbite when you build a gravship.

Barbarians and City-States
The only units listed above requiring no strategic resources are the Combat Engineer, Laser Infantry, and Geosynchronous Survey Pod. Because the minor factions have limited access to strategic resources, special units were created just for them.
Barbarians have access to "Wild" versions of the four Psi units, the Mind Worms, Isle of the Deep, Chiron Locusts, and Nessus Worm. These units are identical to their player-made counterparts, except that they require no resources and begin with additional "mutation" promotions to make up for the lack of +XP buildings for the barbarians. There's also one additional unit unique to Barbarians, the Spore Tower; once the "Breakout" occurs, each turn has a chance of a Spore Tower spawning somewhere in the world. If it's not killed, then each turn the Spore Tower has a chance of spawning various more Psi units. Killing a Spore Tower gives a player 100-200 gold, depending on era, as well as stopping the flow of new units; Spore Towers, however, possess good artillery and defensive abilities and so take some effort to kill.

City-States have access to "Secondhand" versions of the Tank, Modern Armor, Fighter, Jet Fighter, Helicopter Gunship, Rocket Artillery, Plasma Artillery, Stealth Ship, Skimmer, Vertol, Needlejet, and Gravtank. These units are noticeably weaker than their player-made counterparts, but again, require no resources. On the plus side, most Secondhand units can repair improvements or clear fallout, to help offset city-states' defenses against nukes.

These units are treated as Unique Units for these nonplayable civilizations. Players cannot make them, even if you'd rather have that resourceless alternative.

Promotions
For Promotions, I've added four selectable ones:
Trance I and II (+25% vs Psi units), available to anyone. You can't really get an anti-Psi bonus any other way.
Soporific Gas / Soporific Bombs (+15% versus Gunpowder, Energy, Mounted, Melee, Recon, and Archer units), available to Armor, Siege, Helicopter, Air, Naval, and Titan units.
EMP (+15% vs Armor, Naval, Siege, and Air units), available to Gunpowder, Energy, and Titan units.
Note that neither EMP nor Soporific hurts Psi or Titan units.
However, I've added far more promotions. Several wonders and buildings (Command Nexus, Citizen's Defense Force, Bioenhancement Center, etc.) add free promotions, either to all units trained in that city or to all units everywhere. Others (Hunter-Seeker Algorithm, Space Elevator) add temporary promotions to certain units under certain conditions. Psi units get a unique "Psi" promotion that gives the benefits of the type, above, Titans and Orbitals each have a unique class promotion as well, and many other units have type-specific promotions.

WONDERS and BUILDINGS

Wonders and Buildings adhere much closer to the SMAC design than units did, although here I've changed quite a bit too. For instance, there were no National Wonders in SMAC, a feature I've taken significant advantage of.

Again, in rough order of technology:

World Wonders:
The Human Genome Project: +2 happiness, all cities grow 1 size
The Planetary Transit System: Trade route income +10%, and all of your units gain +1 movement within your borders
The Longevity Vaccine: +2 happy, all Specialists generate +1 Food.
The Merchant Exchange: All strategic and luxury resource tiles worked by this city generate +2 gold, and the city gains +1 gold per 2 population
The Maritime Control Center: all Naval units get +1 movement and +20% versus other naval units. All units in all cities get +5 XP; must be a coastal city
The Planetary Energy Grid: all cities get +10% gold, get a free Great Merchant, gain 10 units of Coal and Oil
Clinical Immortality: +1 food per 2 citizens, creates a tradeable luxury resource Ambrosia (+5 Happiness)
The Virtual World: +3 happy, gain a free Social Policy
The Supercollider: +100% research in this city, get a free Great Scientist, gain 10 units of Uranium
The Xenoempathy Dome: All Psi units are 10% stronger, have +1 movement and can pillage for free. All units in all cities get +5 XP.
The Cloudbase Academy: +1 airlift, air units all get +4 range and get extra interceptions, Air units get +20% vs other Air units, and the city's strength is +100% vs. Air bombardment. All units in all cities get +5 XP.
The Cyborg Factory: All units in your empire increase their healing rates by 2 when they rest, and this city produces units 50% faster
The Pholus Mutagen: +25% Food in this city, and all food resource tiles (cows, sheep, etc.) near this city gain +2 food, +1 production, and +1 gold
Theory of Everything: +10% science in all cities, gain one free technology
The Self-Aware Colony: +1 happy per city
The Network Backbone: In this city, +1 base gold per 4 population, and all specialists in your empire generate +1 research
The Space Elevator: Land units that begin their turn in this city (including those just built there this turn) gain the "Orbital Drop" promotion, which allows them to paradrop anywhere on the planet you have visibility. This ability goes away at the end of the turn if the unit is outside the city.
The Universal Translator: Start a Golden Age and gain a free Social Policy
The Telepathic Matrix: Gain any tech that any other civ knows. Gain a Great Empath.
The Cloning Vats: All cities gain 2 citizens instantly
The Nano Factory: All of your units upgrade for free, purchasing units costs 25% less, all units in this city build 25% faster, and gain 10 units of Aluminum
The Bulk Matter Transmitter: trade route income +33% and unlimited airlifts from this city
The Dream Twister: Gain one Great Artist. All other civs get -10 Happiness from now on.
The Manifold Harmonics: for this city, +1 gold, food, production, and science per 2 population, and gain 10 units of Omnicytes.
The Singularity Inductor: All cities get +10% production, you get a Great Engineer, and gain 10 units of Dilithium and Neutronium.

National Wonders:
Note: none of these require any previous buildings to be in every city, although a few require specific buildings in the city you build them in.
The Weather Paradigm: Workers work 20% faster, and all of your cities generate 5% more food.
The Planetary Datalinks: Each turn you have up to a 4% chance to learn a tech, stacking with the KGB. Also produces 3 units of the "Information" luxury resource, which adds +3 happiness and can be traded.
Skunkworks: All upgrade costs reduced by 25%, all new units in this city gain +10 XP regardless of type, all units in all cities gain +5 XP regardless of type
The Empath Guild: Gain a free Great Empath. Every turn, all city-states gain free Influence with you depending on your current Influence level (+1.5 for no relation, +1 friend, +0.5 ally). This generally just offsets part of the natural decay, although it IS possible to move upwards as Greece or with the right policy.
The Hunter-Seeker Algorithm: All non-Psi enemy units within your territory get -1 visibility, -1 to range (for artillery/naval units), -1 to healing rate, and -20% combat strength when attacking your cities.
The Nethack Terminus: Gain a technology automatically if more than 50% of the other civs know it, adds a 1% chance of stealing randomly, and warns you when and where other civs are within 5 turns of completing a Wonder. If you can't beat them to it, then this lets you switch to something else without wasting any more time.
The Citizens' Defense Force: All of your units get +10% to combat within your borders, increase healing rate by +1 within friendly territory, and gain +10% strength when defending a city.
The Command Nexus: All of your units get +10% to combat outside of your borders, and gain +1 range (important for naval and artillery units, marginal for air)
The Living Refinery: +50% production if the city has local Dilithium, +50% gold if the city has Neutronium, +10 food if the city has Omnicytes, and it costs one unit of each. Also, all Empaths in all cities gain +1 Production. Basically the Ironworks on steroids.
The Neural Amplifier: all your units get +25% versus Psi units, gain +1 visibility, and gain +10% when adjacent to a friendly unit.
Paradise Garden: +2 Happiness, +25% Great Person rate in all cities, creates 1 unit of all "organic" luxuries
Stasis Generator: City gets +100 strength and immunity to nukes, and all specialists within your empire produce +1 food. Basically makes the city immune to attack. Put it in your capital and never worry about a domination loss. I'd also like it to add the ability that all enemy units within 2 hexes of this city only have 1 MP per turn, and/or that you can't bombard the city. The food boost actually makes more sense than it sounds; a strong stasis field also allows for perfect unspoiled food storage.
Quantum Converter: All hurry costs reduce by 25%, all specialists get +1 production in every city, and gain one unit of each "inorganic" luxury resource (Gold, Silver, Gems, Dyes)

Buildings:
Children's Creche: +8 food in this city but -1 happiness for your empire
Energy Bank: +20% gold, and produces one unit of Oil and one unit of Coal
Perimeter Defense: +10 city strength and 20% nuke defense, but no prerequisites and it's cheap to maintain
Hologram Theater: +3 happy, +25% culture
Genejack Factory: +50% production, but -2 happiness for your empire
Centauri Preserve: +2 happy, all local Omnicyte deposits greatly increase in yield, gain one unit of Omnicytes, two Empath slots; can only be built if the city has local Omnicytes.
Habitation Domes: +1 happy, +2 food, +10% Great People, +10% food storage, city must be Large size note: "Large" means size 13 or 14ish
Aerospace Complex: Air units in this city start with +15 XP and produce 25% faster, city gets +50% defense vs. air attacks, and it's required for all satellite units. Also, Land units that start their turns in this city gain a temporary "Airlift" paradrop.
Bioenhancement Center: units trained in this city get +10% strength. A bit boring, but I did this for a reason; by the Fusion era, you'll have been upgrading a bunch of 100+ XP units for several eras, like a Modern Armor that has Blitz and Repair. This allows newly-constructed units to close the gap a bit and still be a threat, which primarily helps the AIs.
Fusion Lab: +20% research, +20% gold, creates one unit of Uranium and one of Aluminum
Brood Pit: Psi units train 25% faster and start with +15 XP, creates one unit of Omnicytes, +2 gold for Oasis
Sky Hydroponics Lab: all cities get +2% to their food. Unlike in SMAC, you can only build one of these per city.
Orbital Power Transmitter: all cities get +2% gold.
Gravity Shield: +30 city strength, and -100% nuke effects, but it's not cheap and adds -1 happiness to your empire.
Temple of Gaia: +2 happy, +5 culture, +25% Great People rate in this city, create one unit of Omnicytes.
Hybrid Forest: +1 happy, +2 gold per forest or jungle hex near this city. Since Workers will long have had the ability to plant forests and jungles, this could lead to civs "re-greening" their empires and removing the ugly Trading Post sprawl. Unfortunately there's not a stub in the XML for it to check to see if there are any forests or jungles nearby.
Lunar Mining Station: all cities get +2% to production
Robotic Assembly Plant: +1 production per population, but -2 happiness for your empire.
Nanohospital: +5% food storage, +1 research per 4 population, units in this city heal fully each turn
Quantum Lab: +20% research, +20% gold, produces one unit of Dilithium and one of Neutronium
Nanoreplicator: +1 production for each local strategic resource deposit, +1 gold for each local luxury resource, +1 food for each local food resource
Jump Gate: Each turn, you have a 2% chance of triggering a 1-turn Golden Age for each Jump Gate you control. (So if 10 cities have gates, you have a 20% chance.) Every city gains +2% to Research per Jump Gate in your empire. Also, unlimited airlifts, the city is always connected to the Capital for trade networks.

Projects
SDI: Nukes are intercepted ~40% of the time (x1.5 for atomic bombs, x0.5 for Planet Busters), but the SDIs of all enemy civs combine against you with diminishing returns. Also unlocks Orbital units.
Orbital Defense Pod: Nukes are intercepted an additional 1-3% of the time, and all orbital weapons' damage is reduced by 5%. Can be built ten times throughout your empire.
The Ascetic Virtues: unlocks Titan units, and your capital gains +2 Great Person points each turn for each Great Improvement in your territory (of the appropriate types).

Finally, there's the Ascent to Transcendence Project. When built, this starts a 20-turn timer. Each turn, knock one turn off (obviously) and your empire is in Anarchy. Each turn, each of your cities loses 1 population (minimum 1, and normal growth isn't stopped although research IS.) At the end of the timer, you win (assuming you're still alive and no one else has won in the interim).

I'm still tweaking a lot of these effects, but this should give the general outline.

SMAC was loaded with Wonders. One of the thing that annoyed me about the core game was that when you reached the Modern Era, there were almost no wonders to build, which made Great Engineers nearly useless. I tried to make up for this by having the Digital Era be filled with Wonders, but many of them were changed to National Wonders to prevent the first civ to launch a spaceship from sweeping up every powerful effect.
As a result, many of the National Wonders duplicate the effects of World Wonders from previous eras. Since every civ can build a National Wonder no matter how far behind they've fallen in techs, this is a nice mechanism to prevent the tech leader from running away with all of the good effects. However, I disliked the core game's "must have X in all cities" mechanism, so all of my National Wonders only require certain buildings to be present in the city they are to be built in, nothing more.

Attached is an image of a wonder-heavy capital city in a late era, using v.1.03 of this mod. Obviously, a size 30+ city with the massive bonuses we're discussing here will be insanely productive, so don't pay too close attention to the raw numbers in this screenshot.

SOCIAL ENGINEERING

Ten new "Social Engineering" Policies were added, one per tree in the existing game. Each unlocks at a certain technology; a few are in the Fusion era, but most fall in the Digital. These are not actually part of the branches they are linked to; instead, each of these "Super-Finishers" is in the separate Social Engineering branch; each becomes available once you complete an existing tree and recieve the corresponding Finisher policy bonus. As a result, they do not count towards a Cultural Victory, but are significantly stronger than normal Policies.

The 10 Social Engineering options, by branch:
Tradition: Eudaimonic (+1 food, production, gold, and science per 3 population in the capital; doubled happiness from Empaths or the Transcendent Thought tech) at Ethical Calculus
Liberty: Green (+10% food in all cities, +1 food per Water Mill, Solar Plant, or Hydro Plant) at Bioengineering
Honor: Power (All units gain +1 movement and +1 visibility, +50% Production when building military buildings) at Neural Grafting
Piety: Fundamentalist (Gain culture when you kill a unit, one unit is maintenance-free per 10 population) at Social Psychology
Patronage: Free Market (fulfilling quests for city-states gives +100% Influence, golden ages take 20% less Happiness) at Planetary Networks
Commerce: Wealth (+1 gold per Market, Bank, Stock Exchange, or Energy Bank, and +1 production per sea resource) at Industrial Economics
Rationalism: Knowledge (All Farms and Mines give +1 research, all four types of laboratory gain +5% science), at Optical Computers
Freedom: Cybernetic (+1 production per specialist, unhappiness from the Genejack Factory and Robotic Assembly Plant are halved) at Mind-Machine Interface
Autocracy: Thought Control (-10% to all unhappiness, remove unhappiness from the Children's Creche and Gravity Shield) at Pre-Sentient Algorithms
Order: Planned Society (+5 Happiness, and +1 food, production, gold, science, and culture per city), at Fusion Power

Several existing Policies were changed in the Empire mod, to be more compatible with the new mechanisms added by the various Ages of Man content mods. For more information, refer to that thread; the screenshot below shows the rearrangement done in the Empire mod as well as the new Social Engineering area containing these 10 Super-Finishers.


Other things I need:
> I'm still adding 3D art assets as I go, but for now I can't add those for buildings and such.
> Sounds are not easily imported, so that's still on hold.
> The ability to play wonder movies instead of using a flat picture. Either .avi or .mve formats are available.

Hi Spatz, first of all, congratz on the new subforum :). I'm not sure if this goes here, but it's the closest I think. After a few games, I've noted the tech stealing mechanism, and I feel that it kind of ruins all that I loved about civilization. I'm a tech-muncher, so I used to love keeping at least 10-15 techs ahead of the other civs. The idea of the mechanism is nice, it helps bring other civilizations in the same tech range as you, though I think it's a bit overpowered. 3% to learn a tech if everyone has it is quite a lot, especially if it's PER tech. Basically this means that throwing your tech out the window doesn't have such an impact as it used to...

Again, I'm all for tech diffusion, though I feel that ESPECIALLY after the interplanetary links wonder which adds +4% chance of stealing a tech it just gets rediculous. It's impossible to gain the tech lead, which is really a bummer for me... But that's me, I don't know if other players will agree with me. I'm sure there are players who at times enjoy the fact that they can't fall behind even if there's a runaway civ, so I understand if there's some level of diffusion, but as it is now, it feels way overpowered, even more with datalinks... The extreme case was with the story of Germany in my previous post, where they skipped up 30 techs in about 30 turns. Now THAT just made me want to cry :(... ;).

Still playing that game! The AI is so much more challenging this time around :)

I'm a tech-muncher, so I used to love keeping at least 10-15 techs ahead of the other civs.

That's about the number you'll get with a 3% max steal rate. It won't cause anyone to actually catch up to you, but they'll hover about 10-15 techs back if they have no research of their own to speak of. There's quite a bit of randomness involved, of course, but do the math:

If every other civ had the tech, you'd have a 3% chance per turn, so on average you'd steal a tech in 33 turns. Assuming the other players are gaining one new tech every ~10 turns, you'd end up staying about 3.3 techs behind the leader. But what happens in practice is that all of the city-states (and the Barbarians) gain a new tech at the same time, so that 3% is actually only 1% in practice, at most. That'd put you 10 techs behind the leaders, as long as you can stay ahead of the city-states. In reality, it'll be even lower, because the other major civs will not all be at the same tech level; you might have only a 0.2% chance for a couple techs that only the leader has, 0.4% for a few more, and so on, with the average being about half the civs having a given tech. That puts you up to 20 techs behind, but that'd be below the city-states. Hence the 10-15 estimate.

Again, I'm all for tech diffusion, though I feel that ESPECIALLY after the interplanetary links wonder which adds +4% chance of stealing a tech it just gets rediculous. It's impossible to gain the tech lead, which is really a bummer for me...

Even with the other bonuses, it shouldn't be impossible to keep the tech lead; it SHOULD, however, be impossible to keep a lead in every single area, and be first to every tech. Even with all three tech-stealing National Wonders, a civ that doesn't do research of its own will remain ~5-6 techs behind you, which is close enough that they can, in theory, pass you in areas that you don't emphasize for yourself.

If you go for a balanced approach, mixing infrastructure/growth techs with military ones, then you might get passed in one area by a civ beelining for a later tech. Or conversely, if you beeline for a key military tech, then there's a very good chance that one of your opponents will pass you in some other area. You'll still be the tech leader, with a measurable advantage over your opponents, but you won't be guaranteed to be first to every single tech.

This was necessary because of Wonder sweeping. It was too easy to get twenty techs ahead of the AI, and be able to not only get every Wonder, but to place Wonders in fringe cities to benefit from the "+50% Culture if this city has a Wonder" policy. With this sort of change, you'll often lose a few Wonder races in the future eras, which'll keep the game a bit more competitive. You'd see Elizabeth beat you to the Maritime Control Center, because that's her favorite Flavor, and I regularly get beaten to the Merchant Exchange.

It's also just generally the theme of these eras. It's not about who has the tech advantage any more, it's about how well you develop your cities, how well you use the more complex units, and how well you've done on picking Policies. It was just too easy in the core game to get 30-40 techs ahead, at which point it no longer mattered how well you played. That's what I wanted to avoid, so you should try to get away from the idea of having the tech lead be your top priority in general.

The extreme case was with the story of Germany in my previous post, where they skipped up 30 techs in about 30 turns. Now THAT just made me want to

That's obviously an extreme case, but I'll bet Germany ended up hovering ~15 techs behind you at the end of that process. They still shouldn't have been a threat to you in any real way, but they'd at least be able to field units that could put up a token defense. Without this sort of diffusion mechanism, they'd have been fielding Musketmen against your Modern Armor, and where's the fun in that? This would at least let them get to Infantry.

And it's not just about defense against you; if they're that far behind, then they'll lose to a single Barbarian camp or city-state that attacks them, and once the Breakout happens and the Spore Towers and Mindworms start spawning, it'd be all over for them. Watching an empire be crippled because it can't remove a Spore Tower that happened to spawn nearby isn't fun, and it ruins the game's balance (since the AI is invariably worse at this). So some form of diffusion on this level was necessary.

Some tweaking can still be done, but it'd be useful to know exactly how many techs behind you everyone was. I'd like the weakest major empires to be ~12 techs back with KGB, ~6 with the Planetary Datalinks, and ~4 with the Nethack Terminus.

Now, one issue may be the randomness of the process. That was a necessity to avoid any save/load issues, but if need be I CAN shift the system to be a bit less random, to where the chance of stealing is reduced depending on how many turns it's been since your last steal, or something along those lines. But remember: randomness hurts the player (you) more than the AI, because the AI has no long-term plans and bases his choice on random numbers anyway. So removing the randomness from this process will help you more than the AI empires, making things easier.

I should also mention, the numbers for this tech-stealing are VERY easy to modify. In the CIV5Buildings.xml file (in XML/Buildings, obviously), there's a custom table at the very bottom of the file. You should see entries for the buildings in question labeled something like "TechStealChance"; KGB should have a 3, Planetary Datalinks a 4, and Nethack Terminus a 1.

So if you're uncomfortable with how often techs are being stolen, you can lower these numbers (say, to 2, 3, and 1) and see what it does to the gap between the tech leader and the lower civs. This would only affect new games, not ones already in progress.
Before you do this, though, I'd suggest using FireTuner to see how far behind everyone actually is; it should be a simple Lua command like
for index,pTeam in pairs(Teams) do print( pTeam:GetName(), pTeam:GetNumTechs() ) end
(I'll check the syntax when I get home tonight.)

This should allow you to keep an eye on how far back everyone else is, and see if it matches the guidelines I mentioned above. The important thing is that no major civ should ever fall noticeably below the City-States and Barbarians, who gain techs through both normal research (for the city-states) and a tech-stealing mechanism of their own (for both).

Okay, I see your point, I actually agree that it's better to make the game emphasis playing well more than simply out-teching the enemy. What I am worried about is that all my "hard work" on teching up is for naught, because the other AI's basically just get for free something I worked hard to get. Now this wouldn't worry me in the early ages, but later on, closer to trascendence victory, this becomes quite an issue. Since everyone will be within 4 techs of each other, the "science" victory is kind of drowned out, because everyone is reaching that finishing point very closely to eachother. The entire game a player could have ignored tech, and then around the end start working really hard on it... I understand this is kind of an "end-game" function, also it helps to know the fact that being 4 techs ahead is enough to reach it before the others... But it still feels too close for comfort. I could try changing the XML files and see how that feels... For now I'm sticking with your settings, maybe it makes more sense to balance it like this :).

Also, even with the tech diffusion mechanisms, Iroquois beat everyone to every single wonder (besides 3-4, including the space-program). Now I understand that it's possible to have VERY high wonder flavor, but he seems to have high flavor on everything. He has INSANELY high gold, something like 80k right now, gaining 4k per turn. He has insanely high culture too, something like 2000 culture/pt (woah!). Also insanely high tech, he's always neck to neck with me. There seems to be nothing he's NOT emphasized in... Just thought i'd note this - The tech diffusion did not prevent him from hogging every single wonder there has been so far.

What I am worried about is that all my "hard work" on teching up is for naught, because the other AI's basically just get for free something I worked hard to get

I understand, but remember that the earlier Civ games all used a form of diffusion anyway, where later civs would pay less to get a tech. This simply takes the place of that mechanism; I used to use the Tech Diffusion Civ5 mod fairly regularly, before I implemented this system to fill the same niche.

Another part to keep in mind is the amount of "hard work" you've actually done. In earlier Civ games, going for techs actually had a cost, since you'd have to put less into Culture and Gold to do so, and the larger your empire was the more you needed to set that slider towards gold (to offset corruption). But in Civ5, research is very hands-off; you have to build research buildings, but beyond that you can just sit back and let the beakers roll in, at a pace the smaller empires could never hope to match; the biggest empire would invariably be the tech leader, unless you played on the highest difficulties.

This is HORRIBLE for game balance, so something had to be done. I compensated using these buildings; Thalassicus, over in his mod, compensated by changing the math on Research Agreements to where the civs with fewer techs were given extra beakers while the tech leaders would get much less. Same basic idea: make research easier for smaller empires. I modeled my system on what the game already uses for Barbarians and City-States, who steal techs from the major civs instead of researching them. (City-States do both, but their research rate is tiny compared to major civs, so in the later eras the vast majority of their science comes through stealing.)

One of the things I'd considered a while back was lowering the KGB to 2%, and putting 1% on the Palace, just so that it wouldn't be quite so abrupt a transition; you'd have been stealing a few techs here and there throughout the earlier Eras, and the chances would just get better at a few points. If a 3% maximum is okay but the game is just untenable at the ~8% the other national wonders give, then one possibility would be to cap the steal percent at, say, 5%. That is, you'd still be the same rate as now when only a few civs had a tech, but you would hit a wall where once half of the civs had a tech you wouldn't get any bonus for even more of them having it.

the "science" victory is kind of drowned out, because everyone is reaching that finishing point very closely to eachother.

Remember, though: when you get to the end and go for Transcendence, it's first-come, first-served. Whoever starts the process first will end it first, so if the other civs are even one turn behind you, that's all it takes to make the difference between winning and losing. Since the transcendence requires having researched every tech in the tree, there's no way to beeline for it; as long as the AI didn't beat you to the Telepathic Matrix, you should be able to maintain a tech lead right up to the end.

The entire game a player could have ignored tech, and then around the end start working really hard on it...

If you completely ignored your own teching and relied on stealing from others, then you'd never have built any Wonders because you'd always unlock a tech at least one turn behind someone else (and generally ~10 turns behind at best). The cumulative effect of all of those would be enormous; the civ with all of the wonders should have been able to easily crush you militarily, or won through Culture, or bribed every city-state with his massive gold surplus. Ergo, the only way to get to the science victory in the first place would be to stay truly competitive and have picked up your own share of the Wonders, and the only way to do that would be to be the first to some techs along the way.

He has INSANELY high gold, something like 80k right now, gaining 4k per turn.

What difficulty are you playing on? That sort of income nearly always means a Golden Age, and even on a Huge map it should be hard to reach that amount without sweeping all of the financial wonders. This is the one balance factor the devs seemed to get right: larger empires have less spare Happiness, which translates to fewer Golden Ages, so you shouldn't be expanding just for the sake of expanding. It was MUCH worse back when the AI was always playing on Chieftain with its x0.6 unhappiness factor.

This is also linked to a problem I'd run into; it was very easy, if you won the space race, to stay in a sort of perma-Golden Age for thirty or forty turns and build up such a huge amount of money that you'd be untouchable. Especially if you're playing Persia. I've tried to tone that down a bit, but it's still fairly common to see.

The tech diffusion did not prevent him from hogging every single wonder there has been so far.

Do you mean that he's the tech leader and you're not able to easily catch up? Or are you the tech leader, and he's still somehow beating you to all of the Wonders despite being several turns behind in unlocking the techs? There is a major decrease in costs for the AI at higher handicaps, so if you're playing on the highest levels there could be a problem.
For instance, if you're playing on Deity, the AI:
> Has only 60% of the normal Unhappiness. (Previously this STACKED with the Chieftain issue, to only be 36% of what you had.)
> Has cities that grow twice as fast
> Buildings, Units, etc. all cost 50% of their normal values
> Units cost half the normal maintenance and half the normal upgrade costs
On King, these are all in the ~85-90 range instead, but if you're playing on Immortal I could see losing the Wonder races pretty often even if you were the tech leader.

Hi Spatz,

First of all, I think I've found a clue as to why sometimes a player will get more than 2 techs. I was recently playing, and I lost the tech lead and am now trailing 5 techs behind EVERYONE (I have no idea how that happened, but oh well). On the last turn I played I received 2 techs at once, and the notification stated on one tech that it was stolen by KGB, and on the other that it was stolen by interplanetary datalinks. Maybe the one tech limit is per-wonder, and the multiple tech stealing is due to the fact that there are two wonders? Hope this helps.

Also, I always wondered what exactly the breakout is (I'm not familiar with the alpha cetauri game).

I would also like to note that the mindworm-barbarians totally K.O.ed me, I was only a few techs behind the rest of the civs, and yet these 140 strength brutes were spawning all over my empire wreaking havoc. Most of my units were in war, and the remainder that were defending were pummeled by these super-units. It's insane!

An update on the game I've been playing: I was the tech leader until around turn 450. Around then I was in war so my happiness dropped and my breaker production took a hit. From that point until around turn 500, the rest of the civs were only slightly higher than me in their tech production. And yet they ALL passed me in tech, and not only that, ALL took the lead and are ALL at least 4 techs ahead of me. I feel that if I had a buffer of 10-15 this wouldn't have happened, and even with the gap being 4-5 I still don't see how this could have happened, but still, like I said before, I think this reinforces the reason I think 7% is overpowered. OR to limit the amount that can be stolen, like you suggested earlier - it would put soft brakes on the tech train. Also, as I noted before, Iroqouis was beating EVERYONE to ALL the wonders and he was TRAILING me in tech, but since he was getting many techs "free", as were the others, he kept beating me (he has a very tall empire and is production CRAZY). He also seems to be in a constant golden age, I can't explain how else he would have a constant 4,000 gold income (according to info addict, this is actually the average!!!).

That's my update for now, hope it helps :)!

On the last turn I played I received 2 techs at once, and the notification stated on one tech that it was stolen by KGB, and on the other that it was stolen by interplanetary datalinks. Maybe the one tech limit is per-wonder, and the multiple tech stealing is due to the fact that there are two wonders?

I thought I'd fixed that already; it wasn't even supposed to be possible to steal one tech through KGB/Datalinks' random method and another through the Nethack Terminus' flat 50% threshold. I'll double-check the logic.

Just realize that while fixing this will eliminate the 2-techs-on-1-turn phenomenon, it won't really change much in the long term, as you'll just have two techs stolen on consecutive turns instead or something. The gap betwen the tech leaders and the trailing civs won't really change.

Also, I always wondered what exactly the breakout is (I'm not familiar with the alpha cetauri game).

It isn't in the AC game. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri took place entirely on Planet, the habitable planet around Alpha Centauri A (the slightly larger component of the inner binary; Alpha Centauri is a triple star system, one small red sun orbiting around two larger yellow-orange stars that orbit each other at a distance of ~11-35 AU). In AC lore, contact with Earth was abruptly lost soon after the ship left, implying a worldwide nuclear war wiped everyone out.

When you arrive on Planet, with your one dinky Colony Pod, the planet is already covered in Fungus, a reddish plant that spawns mindworms, and occasionally spawns Fungal Towers that spawn worms faster. Later on, the fungus will spawn Locusts of Chiron, which are a lot more dangerous, and Spore Launchers, which are basically mindworm artillery. You've got a few turns to pick a good spot before the worms start to appear, but it's pretty much a threat from the start. Your "Former" worker units can remove the fungus nearest your cities, but doing so makes Planet unhappy with you and makes mindworm spawns even more likely in your area. Also, later in the game, after you unlock certain techs or pick certain policies, fungus' yields are higher than improved terrain AND act as roads, so you don't always want to clean them up.
This helps reduce empire-on-empire conflict early on, as you'll have a tough time even reaching your neighbors and the game's a lot more defensive than Civ as your workers need to be protected. There's also fungus in the oceans (and you can make Sea Formers who can plant Kelp Farms, add improvements to those farms to add minerals or energy, and clean Fungus) that spawns Isles of the Deep and, later, Sealurks (i.e., the Nessus Worms).

My mod, however, is still set on Earth as it's intended to flow smoothly from the existing content. Earth, despite our best efforts, isn't covered in fungus, and our current inability to change terrain graphics in Civ5 ruled out any attempt to add fungus to the existing game. So I needed a transition from one playstyle to the other, some excuse to have worms be the new Barbarians. There needed to be some point at which mindworms and such would start spawning; it could have been a simple on/off, but I also needed some excuse to give civs that hadn't launched the spaceship the Centauri Ecology tech, and I needed it to be something that would happen fairly soon after the first ship was launched, or else it'd be in the player's best interests NOT to launch, to research as far up the tree as he could, and the use the ship's free techs and policies to grab more valuable stuff.

Hence, the Breakout; the idea, lore-wise, is that the colonists on Alpha Centauri sent back maps of the genomes of the local wildlife, and most of the powerful nations attempted to engineer their own worms in captivity; after all, they're psionically active creatures, so you could use them against an enemy without him having any way to trace it back to you, controlling them telepathically from your own territory. Inevitably they escaped into the wild; a few through inadequate safeguards, a few through military actions, and a few through a particularly stupid group of P.E.T.A. terrorists. That last one's actually based on an old Heinlein story about a anti-animal cruelty group that tried to release engineered dinosaurs from a zoo.

I would also like to note that the mindworm-barbarians totally K.O.ed me, I was only a few techs behind the rest of the civs, and yet these 140 strength brutes were spawning all over my empire wreaking havoc. Most of my units were in war, and the remainder that were defending were pummeled by these super-units. It's insane!

Nessus Worms only spawn once the Barbarian civ enters the Fusion Era, which means by the time they appear, you should be fairly close to the end of the Fusion Era. That means you'll be building your first Bolos and orbital weapons, and you should have dozens of Needlejets sitting around as well. Even Gravtanks with a few promotions should be able to hold them off pretty well, and Trolls are DESIGNED to go toe-to-toe with the Nessi.

Basically, it's like an old Godzilla movie. Godzilla shows up and attacks Tokyo; the military is completely ineffectual at first, barely slowing him down at all... and then MechaGodzilla shows up. I'm not saying they'll be complete pushovers, but once you have a few Bolos, Combat Mechs, and such, it shouldn't be too hard to pound a Nessi down. And they don't spawn very often at all (10% chance per turn per tower), so the only way you'd see more than one would be if you had quite a few intact towers near your territory. (Now, since Nessi are amphibious you need to be careful about monitoring any offshore islands...)

City-states should have a real problem defending themselves from Nessi as they can't make Titan units. But you'll be entering the endgame at that point; either defend your CS allies, or let them die while you race for the end.

Around then I was in war so my happiness dropped and my breaker production took a hit.

The Happiness system in this mod is really designed around a few key phases in the game; the late Nuclear/early Digital should have plenty of surplus Happiness (but short on gold) and trigger a nice Golden Age just as you're finishing the spaceship, but once you start cranking out Creches, Genejacks, and Gravity Shields, you'll run out of happiness VERY quickly (unless you picked the policy branches whose Super-Finishers remove these negatives). It's supposed to go back up again near the end of the Fusion, as you unlock the Temple of Gaia and such, although if your cities have been growing quickly then it might never get far above zero. (It'll also depend on how many Empath slots you fill.)

It also depends on which Policy branches you took. If you picked Rationalism over Piety then you'll have had a big advantage in science in earlier eras, but now that choice will be less useful as the tech-stealing keeps everyone close to you, while Piety (which isn't really that great early on) starts to really shine as Happiness becomes more of an issue.

From that point until around turn 500, the rest of the civs were only slightly higher than me in their tech production. And yet they ALL passed me in tech, and not only that, ALL took the lead and are ALL at least 4 techs ahead of me.

Sounds like something else is going on here; that can't happen through the tech steal mechanism. The AI can't steal what you don't have, so there's no way for stealing to move someone AHEAD of you; sure, they can steal what you research and then take their own techs through research, but you're just as likely to steal that from them. And unless every city-state has been wiped out, the chances of stealing techs should be much lower than your own research rates regardless.

What difficulty are you playing on? If it's Emperor or above, then I can understand that sort of discrepancy; your only hope on the higher handicaps is to have a significant advantage in beaker production, and that'll only happen if you conquer one of your competitors early on and have the largest empire in the later phases.

One other question: are any of your opponents DLC civs? One thing I haven't done in this mod is make any attempt to adjust UUs and UBs from DLCs, so if one of the AI civs is using a DLC civ that has some sort of UB variant of a building I'd modified (especially a research-oriented one), then it wouldn't have accounted for that.

Also, as I noted before, Iroqouis was beating EVERYONE to ALL the wonders and he was TRAILING me in tech, but since he was getting many techs "free", as were the others, he kept beating me (he has a very tall empire and is production CRAZY).

Well, that's a pretty good reason for you to build vertically. If you'd been using Avoid Growth a lot to allow for expansion, to where your cities will be noticeably smaller than the AI's, then yes, you'll lose most of the Wonder races by default. This is actually intentional; empires that go around conquering their neighbors or stunting their growth shouldn't be ABLE to win Wonder races in their newly-added cities, which means that small empires aren't nearly as penalized as before.
Now, this can also go back to difficulty; AIs on higher difficulties need less food to grow, with Deity opponents only needing HALF as much food as you do to gain a size. So they can quickly outstrip you in size, especially India or Persia (due to their Happiness changes). But on King, you should have no problem winning Wonder races, because even if the AI does develop vertically you'll be more efficient at how you develop.

He also seems to be in a constant golden age, I can't explain how else he would have a constant 4,000 gold income (according to info addict, this is actually the average!!!).

If you're playing on a Huge map then I could believe that number for a Golden Age, but even with vertical growth it'd be hard to have Golden Ages THAT often. It could be that he just had a number of great people appear in a short period (especially if he's maxed the Patronage tree and is getting great people from his allies), and sacrificed them all for GAs, resulting in a forty or fifty-turn period of permanent Golden Age, but it'll run out eventually.

It'd be useful to know his current Happiness surplus. If it's over 100, then that would explain the near-constant GAs, but the only way to get that high would be to NOT expand your empire beyond its core cities, not build the buildings that subtract Happiness, and to specifically pick the Policy branches that boost Happiness. (Tradition, Piety, and Freedom especially.) If he's doing that, then he should be a pushover militarily, even with a tech lead and plenty of production. Heck, just toss a dozen Planet Busters at his biggest cities, and he'll never beat you to another Wonder again... max interception chance on a PB is 50%, so at least half will get through.

----------------------
Now, I do intend to reduce the tech-stealing Wonders down to lower levels, like 1% for KGB and 2% for Planetary Datalinks, but only once the unit-based espionage system in the Empire mod is in place. And that'll require the DLL to do, so it'll be a while. But eventually, the process WILL get a bit less random.

Hi Spatz, I just finished playing the game I was telling you about, I lost due to the Iroqouis completing the Utopia project (I did my best to stop them, halfway through the massacre he finished the project :(). All in all, the game felt very well balanced, was very challenging and this time I got much further into the tech tree than last time (Finally had gravtanks and needlejets). I think the loosing point was around the Titan project tech. I have a few notes:

First of all, it's not clear to me what role exactly the Vertol is supposed to play, since it didn't seem very effective against any unit. I preferred to use Plasma artillery due to their 3 range (+1 command) vs. the Vertol's 1 range. The mobility is nice though, but it doesn't feel all too useful.

Second, the AI does not seem to understand or want to use PlanetBusters. I built a few and totally blew the AI away, and while he was nuking me left and right with nukes and atomics, none of the AI's used even ONE buster, and I'm not sure if they built any either.

Also a small note on CSs, I liberated their city states after a long oppression by the Iroquois, and the next turn Persia bought them away from me with gold and declared war on me. First of all, this is annoying. Second, it's annoying :). The amount of influence I gained from liberating them was something like 80-90 influence I think. I don't think that's an adequate thank you for liberating them (also to prevent the other AIs from pulling crap like in my last game).

Another note on CSs... For some reason all the Nessus worms would mass towards the CSs and leave me alone (not complaining), even if they spawned over 15 hexes away, they'd make their way over to the CS and harass them. Why is this? o_O

Also, I don't know if this will help, but along ALL the games I've played, everyone is extremely tight on aluminium. Last game I had a hoard of Uranium and a ton of everything else, but it always feels like the game is seriously lacking aluminium, and not just to the point of "making it scarce" - Many of the later units and buildings require it, and as it is you're choked up on aluminium for the units, so no way are you going to build a building that requires it. It's sad for me, because I want to use all those cool units but I can't because aluminum is so scarce!

Iroquois had something like 7-8 landmarks all over his empire, and as such, beat me in a culture victory. It doesn't seem he's burning them on golden ages, but by the looks of it on info addict, he really was nearly constantly in a golden age (100+ happiness). I guess he was a GP spammer + all the other things he did... Well played... !!

First of all, it's not clear to me what role exactly the Vertol is supposed to play, since it didn't seem very effective against any unit.

It's primarily the same role as the Helicopter Gunship it upgrades from: a highly mobile anti-armor unit. Gravtanks don't have many of the weaknesses that the Modern Armors did, so there needed be a good countermeasure. And Vertols aren't nearly as vulnerable to anti-air units as Gunships were, so they're harder to bring down.

But Vertols have a secondary use: raiders. Because they can move across any terrain, including water, and don't embark, they're great to send on an end run around your enemy's front line. Sure, they can't capture any cities and can't really stand up to heavy attacks, but they can harass workers, pick off support units, or pillage improvements. They're sort of like the land-based equivalent to submarine units. They're not built for the sort of static slog that tanks and artillery are, but they have a lot of utility in a more mobile environment.

This also brings in a third role: city-state protection. On maps where your CS allies are on small islands of their own, or when they share a continent with a hostile empire, it's very hard to protect them from an aggressive enemy. You won't send unaccompanied land units, so rather than build additional naval units (which get less and less useful as the game goes on) you can send a Vertol or two instead.

Second, the AI does not seem to understand or want to use PlanetBusters. I built a few and totally blew the AI away, and while he was nuking me left and right with nukes and atomics, none of the AI's used even ONE buster, and I'm not sure if they built any either.

I can look into this again, but one thing to check: had the AI ever connected any of its Dilithium? It's a water-based resource, and I've seen city-states get confused and never hook it up; it's a major bug that I'm still trying to track down. So if the AI never hooked up any of its Dilithium, then it would never have been able to make PBs, or build Fusion Labs, or make any Titan or Orbital units. Not even Gravtanks.

It's also possible that it did hook them up, but spent all of its Dilithium on Fusion Labs and upgrading tanks instead of cranking out PBs. But first let's check if he'd hooked them up.

Also a small note on CSs, I liberated their city states after a long oppression by the Iroquois, and the next turn Persia bought them away from me with gold and declared war on me.

Unfortunate bug in the vanilla game. The liberation bonus needs to be MUCH higher. and I'm trying to reduce the ability to bribe city-states. I keep lowering the amount you get per gold, but what really needs to happen is a limit on how OFTEN you can bribe.

Another note on CSs... For some reason all the Nessus worms would mass towards the CSs and leave me alone (not complaining), even if they spawned over 15 hexes away, they'd make their way over to the CS and harass them. Why is this?

No idea. I haven't done anything to the AI's logic. Maybe it just sees them as being an easy target (which they are).

Also, I don't know if this will help, but along ALL the games I've played, everyone is extremely tight on aluminium.

I can look at the balance of this, but aluminum is supposed to be tight. It's the most combat-heavy resource in the game, and I don't want it to end up where whoever gets the largest share is unstoppable.
One of the things I've been looking to do is simply remove the Aluminum consumption of the Hydro Plant and Spaceship Factory. Make it a unit-only resource; I know in my own games, I just don't build those buildings, even if I can, because every unit of aluminum means another tank or bomber I can field. Doing this will change the production amounts in the Digital Era, though, so it's something I need to be careful with.

Now, I have had games where I had tons of aluminum, although those were really the exception. And if resources are scarce, then it encourages you to take the Autocracy branch and/or the Patronage one, since those have policies that boost resource amounts. And once you get to Fusion Labs you should be adding quite a bit more. But yes, it'll still be scarce.

Iroquois had something like 7-8 landmarks all over his empire, and as such, beat me in a culture victory.

This is one of the things the AI actually gets right. Now, you saw all of those Landmarks, but did you see a lot of Manufactories and Customs Houses? It's likely that whenever he got an Engineer he looked at all of those forests and said "nah, don't really need more production" and used them for GAs. Same for Merchants, and he probably bulbed scientists for techs. But that'd give him enough GAs to do well, especially if his city-state allies were gifting him people.

Just to confirm, should we be seeing any change to the models that weren't displaying in this new version?

Just to confirm, should we be seeing any change to the models that weren't displaying in this new version?

No changes, but I'm attaching some DDS files here for you to try, ones that have no compression. I'd have done this last night, but I'm on some prescription medications, one of which acts as a sleeping pill. So if I don't get everything uploaded by about midnight, I literally CANNOT stay awake any longer. Last night I barely managed to get the updated files into the threads before passing out, so there just wasn't time to do the rest.

So here goes. I've attached alternate texture DDS files for the Colony Pod, Gravtank, and Spore Tower inside a zip file. The Colony Pod one uses no compression at all, the Gravtank one (texture2.dds) uses BC3/DXT5 (the same compression the icon files use), and the Spore Tower one is a no-compression version of the previous BC3 file. So take these, replace the existing file within each unit's Art subdirectory with the appropriate name (just drop the "2" from the name), and see if any of these three units works for you.
I tried getting a variety here; the first two units are ones whose texture was directly taken from the Civ4 unit with no modification other than compression, while the Spore Tower is one that I re-mapped myself. So if one of these three works, then I'll know what's wrong.

Good stuff, I'll give it a shot as soon as possible and update. It might be worth noting that the spore tower *does* work at the moment... so possibly the re-mapping is the key.

Sadly the new textures made no difference, BUT on the plus side everything works just fine in the DX9 version (I was sure I had tried it previously but perhaps not...).
In DX10/11 mode, the following do NOT appear: Needlejet, Bolo, Gravtank, Stealth Ship, Colony Pod, Isle of the Deep, Vertol, Gravship.
The Titan Mech, Assault Powersuits and Spore Tower DO work in DX10/11.

I also tried GIMP with DDS plugin and I can view all the textures no problem.

Do you use DX9 mode yourself or does it work in 10/11 for you?

Even without animations the new models make a huge difference, looks awesome. If the solution is to just play in DX9 mode then I can probably live with that :)

On a separate note, I've only had time for one real game with the new version and a few test games to check on the texture issue but maps seem to be *very* tight on Dilithium and Omnicytes. Aluminium, Uranium and Neutronium are much more plentiful. My last game had just one hex of Dilithium in the whole world (duel map), same for Omnicytes.

The water based resources:
Still no sign of the AI improving water oil/dilithium tiles but I'll keep an eye on that over the next few games. The new improvement looks decent, though. Can we get something similar for Neutronium?

On balance:
Adding oil to the carrier may have fixed that issue as they were building destroyers/subs instead now. Makes for a much more threatening navy. Defensively the AI seems quite tough now. I had a lot of trouble making any kind of progress offensively, short of nuking them into oblivion... On the subject of global thermonuclear war... is there any kind of logic built into the AI whereby it might NOT immediately take every conflict nuclear? They really don't seem keen on conventional warfare.

In DX10/11 mode, the following do NOT appear: Needlejet, Bolo, Gravtank, Stealth Ship, Colony Pod, Isle of the Deep, Vertol, Gravship.
The Titan Mech, Assault Powersuits and Spore Tower DO work in DX10/11.

Strange. There's no real difference between how I made those three versus the others, and in fact, the Gravtank, Colony Pod, and Gravship's textures were completely unchanged from their Civ4 versions.

Do you use DX9 mode yourself or does it work in 10/11 for you?

I nearly always use DX9, because it's less crash-prone in general and I don't really care too much about having reflective water and such. But I thought I'd tested the units in DX10/11 at some point.

Even without animations the new models make a huge difference, looks awesome. If the solution is to just play in DX9 mode then I can probably live with that :)

That may just be the solution for now. If need be I'll go back and make the textures again; it's not fun, and it's not easy, but I more or less know what I'm doing.

My last game had just one hex of Dilithium in the whole world (duel map), same for Omnicytes.

That can't happen. Or more specifically, if it's happening then it means AssignStartingPlots is crashing partway through, and not placing them, because each resource has a minimum number of deposits; it's 1 in the vanilla game, and I kept that logic in, but in my mod there will be more.

Take Dilithium, fo instance. The mod adds two sizes of deposit:
> The large 5-unit deposits are placed based on the number of pearls, fish and whales: take 2/3rds the number of pearls, add 2/3rds the number of whales, add 1/3rd the number of fish, and round the result down. That's the number of 5-unit deposits that will be placed.
> The small 3-unit deposits are much simpler: 1 per civ. (Not counting city-states and barbarians, so it'll be 2/4/6/8/etc.)
On abundant, the sizes are 7 and 4, but the numbers won't change much; the largest will change a bit as the numbers of pearl/whale deposits shift a bit, but that's all.

If you're running FireTuner and start a new game, then it should say "Adding Dilithium resources to the Sea." followed by the number of large deposits, then "Adding Supplemental Dilithium resources to the Sea." followed by the number of small deposits. Same for oil and water omnicytes; the first entry will be based on the amounts of land-based resources, while the supplemental line will only depend on number of civs.
So there's just no way it can only be one deposit unless something else is breaking. The most common is that you're using a map type with its own custom spawn table (Highlands, Great Plains, Lakes, most earth maps...) and so it doesn't know how to place deposits.

The new improvement looks decent, though. Can we get something similar for Neutronium?

It's possible, but the problem is just that I really wanted Neutronium to use a Quarry, to gain the various benefits of that improvement. If I changed it to a new improvement then I'd need to change a few other bits. But yes, it can be done.

Omnicytes are harder, because they're a dual land/sea resource, but it can be done there as well.

On the subject of global thermonuclear war... is there any kind of logic built into the AI whereby it might NOT immediately take every conflict nuclear? They really don't seem keen on conventional warfare.

Unfortunately, no, there isn't. If the AI has nukes, he'll use them early and often, because there's no downside. One of the first things people will do once they get the DLL, I'm sure, is adjust it so that there's a major diplomatic penalty to using nukes, but until then there's just not a lot I can do.

This is a huge problem for me, since my computer refuses to run DX9 properly, I has just assumed you haden't completed the model textures yet

This is a huge problem for me, since my computer refuses to run DX9 properly, I has just assumed you haden't completed the model textures yet

I'll see what I can do, but I'm learning as I go here. I have no idea why some of those won't work, so I'd be guessing blindly if I try to figure out what caused it. It's strange that anything would work fine in DX9 but fail in DX11, so I'll look into it, but you likely won't see much before the end of this next week.

Minor typo/bug, in the Game Info text for the Fusion Power research, the "Planet Buster" is called a "Fusion Buster".

Also, I've just discovered the flavour text for a lot of the buildings etc... Love the various sci-fi references. There's an interesting idea hidden in the Space Elevator text... could it be made to *actually* require an equatorial (roughly speaking) location? :D

In my current game, I've completed all research but can't seem to build the project to trigger a science victory... Am I missing something?

Minor typo/bug, in the Game Info text for the Fusion Power research, the "Planet Buster" is called a "Fusion Buster".

I'll fix that tonight but besides a whole lot of Real Life time commitments this week, I'm in the middle of transitioning from the old Balance/Content split to the new Base/Mythology/Empires/Ascension split. (And yes, it'll move to v.2.00 in the next update.) While the XML distribution is straightforward, the Lua's a lot more complex to distribute, so it might be a week or two before I even hint at releasing a new version. In the meantime, if it bothers you, just edit the entry. It should be in CIV5GameTextInfos_Civilopedia.xml, in the XML/NewText/En_US/ directory.

For instance, one big thing I've run into: if mod A adds a new table definition to XML, mod B's XML won't accept tables using it. Originally the thought was to move Building_Bonuses, Building_Resources, Project_Bonuses, etc. to the Base mod, since all three content mods would use those stubs and the Lua could be kept in the Base without duplication. But it isn't working; the content mods just won't link to it correctly.

Also, I've just discovered the flavour text for a lot of the buildings etc... Love the various sci-fi references. There's an interesting idea hidden in the Space Elevator text... could it be made to *actually* require an equatorial (roughly speaking) location? :D

I'm still missing some of the flavor text entries in the Nanotech; I never quite get around to adding them, but I should have them in by the next version. But yes, a lot of sci-fi references, especially on the Unit entries, although I'd be very surprised if anyone catches all of them. A few entries mix three or four different novels together, and some of them are kinda obscure. (To be fair, one of the upcoming ones is going to be RIDICULOUSLY obscure, so it could have been worse.) As you can probably guess, I read a lot of science fiction.

As for the Space Elevator, yes, there are ways to do that equatorial bit. It's not quite as simple as it was in the original SMAC or in Civ4 (where that wonder did have that exact limit at one point), but it can be done indirectly. (Easy way to do it: create a new resource that's only distributed to equatorial areas, and then make the Elevator work like a Forge/Monastery/Mint where it needs a local supply. The harder way involves the new Lua CanConstruct function.)
But I doubt I'd change it that way; it's just a bit too player-biased. So for gameplay reasons, I'll ignore the fact that it'd be physically impossible to have a space elevator lead to a stationary orbital point unless it was an equatorial anchor or you used a split anchor (a V shape where the points are equidistant from the equator with the same latitude). I am an astrophysicist, after all; this sort of thing bugs me, so I had to at least get it into the lore entries correctly even if I'm willing to ignore it in gameplay.

In my current game, I've completed all research but can't seem to build the project to trigger a science victory... Am I missing something?

If you've researched the Threshold of Transcendence tech, and no one else has won the game already, it should be giving you the option to build the Ascent to Transcendence project. If it's not, then something's wrong; the project doesn't depend on anything else. Actually, even if someone else HAS won the game already it should still give you the option to build the thing, although for a time it wouldn't have the correct effect if someone won.

One possibility is that the Transcendence victory condition isn't being enabled correctly from the start. If you don't know the Lua syntax for checking this in FireTuner, I'll look it up for you when I get home. (At work at the moment.) It SHOULD be forced on by default, but I might have screwed it up in the last version when I was disabling the space race victory once and for all. In that case, my bad.

Quick question: when you enable the mod, are you going to the Advanced Setup menu, or just doing a quick start? The override logic is in the Advanced Setup code, so if you didn't go into that menu it might never have triggered. I'll see about fixing that by inserting the override into a standard start-of-game event as well.

I always use the advanced set-up. One thing I've noticed is that although the domination victory condition is ticked by default it sometimes unticks itself when you start changing the various options. It might just be a visual thing where it's *really* still selected in the background since you can still start the game with no victory conditions (apparently) enabled. Is the transcendence victory always enabled regardless of which other options are selected or does it depend on the domination victory in some way?

One thing I've noticed is that although the domination victory condition is ticked by default it sometimes unticks itself when you start changing the various options.

That shouldn't be happening, and no, it's not just a visual thing. If that's happening then it means something is going wrong internally, and it's likely dropping some of your settings. I'll try to look into it tonight (and yes, I'll post the Lua command I mentioned yesterday), but it'll be a little while; today's pretty busy for me.

The problem, I think, is that most maps/scenarios made in WorldBuilder set which victory conditions are allowed, and I had to override that in a pretty crude way. If the override is "leaking" onto other variables, then it'd cause what you saw. (There are actually three separate parts of the Advanced Setup screen logic where it manages which victory conditions are allowed. Yes, it's needlessly complicated.)

Hello first of great mod! im using the 8 version.

I to cannot complete the sience victory (ascention project) Tried everything its not there ;(
Its not in the set up game choose victory conditions menu i was assuming its automatily on.
Lolz sucks im recording and uploading and was waiting for that so so much.
http://www.youtube.com/user/MrReeve3
Uploading the last vids now Part 11 will be last Will probs take me all night.
(first videos are on my old sucky pc the Reloaded ones are on my high performance pc)
Civ 5 in 3D looks fantastic!

Some units missing textures will try DX9 if it makes any difference for me.
Oh and the 3 AI's have huge problems handelling the barbarians.
Will it be possible to upgrade to v.1.09 and load my save or do i need to make a new game?

One more time ty for the mod Im sure not easy to do.

Okay, for those of you with the Transcendence problems, go into FireTuner and type

print( Game.IsVictoryValid(GameInfoTypes.VICTORY_TRANSCEN DENCE) )

and

print( PreGame.IsVictory(GameInfoTypes.VICTORY_TRANSCENDE NCE) )

If these don't both say "true" then something's seriously wrong. (It works fine for me, but I tend not to pile on lots of options.)

Will it be possible to upgrade to v.1.09 and load my save or do i need to make a new game?

Nearly every version change requires a new game. You can TRY loading an old savegame, but chances are it just won't work. It's just the nature of Civ5's design.

Are you going to try to get the textures working for DX10/11 in your next version? My computer will not properly load a civ map in DX9

Are you going to try to get the textures working for DX10/11 in your next version? My computer will not properly load a civ map in DX9

Trying to, but I really have no idea what's wrong. I can blindly guess at what's breaking, but there's just not a whole lot I can really DO without a better idea of why DX11 can't handle those textures.

Chances are, the 2.0 version of the Ascension mod will be functionally identical to 1.09. The only major difference is that it'll be fully integrated into the four-mod design. Running Base+Empires+Ascension will be nearly identical to the old Balance+Content (although I HAVE made a couple improvements in the last few weeks).

Unless, of course, I discover the cause of these graphical issues and fix them at the same time, but I wouldn't count on that. I'm not a graphic artist, I'd never used Blender before this project, and I'm learning as I go. This is the real reason for the slow pace of this mod's development; I'm doing nearly everything myself, and there's a lot of trial and error involved when I move to a new phase. It's funny; over the weekend I added 61 new units, with a lot of Lua abilities, to the Mythology mod, and it's pretty likely that they'll all work immediately. A year ago, when I was doing the same for the AC mod, it took forever to get them all working just in XML, and Lua was way beyond me. So it WILL get better.

Now, if someone who knows more about creating unit graphics wants to take a shot at fixing this one problem (or converting some Civ4 units for me), then I'd be more than happy to hand it off. But failing that, the DX11 issues go onto the big list-o'-broken-stuff with all the rest, and there are a couple things that are more critical (like the water resources thing).

I soppose you could make a thread on the unit's graphics page, im sure someone there probably knows the answer

Questions;

Do the orbital defence pods give you increased chance to intercept nukes or do they just reduce the DAMAGE they cause to a city after they hit?
Should the Hybrid Forest require a local forest/jungle to build?

Do the orbital defence pods give you increased chance to intercept nukes or do they just reduce the DAMAGE they cause to a city after they hit?

ODPs have two effects:
> Increase the chance of nukes being intercepted, by 1/2/3% per. SDI is 20/40/60%, for comparison, so a full set of 10 ODPs and SDI means you have a 90% chance of intercepting an Atomic Bomb (which hits the cap of 83%), a 60% chance of intercepting a Nuclear Missile, and a 30% chance of intercepting a Planet Buster. (I'm looking into reworking the math a bit for this, so these numbers might change in the future.)
> Decrease the damage dealt by all orbital weapons by 5%. (With 10, that's -50%.)

The only buildings that reduce the effects of Nuclear weapons are:
Military Base: -20%
Perimeter Defense: -20%
Gravity Shield: -100%
Stasis Generator: -100% (kinda redundant since you'll almost definitely have a gravity shield as well)
Now, from what I can tell that just applies to the HP damage dealt to cities; it won't stop the auto-kill of units from level 2 nukes (Nuclear Missile and Planet Buster), the fallout generation, the population reduction, and so on. And it won't reduce the damage an atomic bomb deals to units caught in the blast radius (except maybe for garisson units, I'm not sure). I should really test that, but for obvious reasons it rarely comes up.

Should the Hybrid Forest require a local forest/jungle to build?

It SHOULD, but there's no XML table for that, unfortunately. It might be possible to tweak this through some of the CanConstruct GameEvents, but I'm still learning those. So for now, there's nothing limiting which cities it can be built in. That's why I gave it +1 Happiness; the AI will build it even if there are no local forests or jungles to boost, but that Happiness means that it won't really be hurting itself by doing so.

Also, since this'll be long after you gain the ability to plant forests and jungles, it'd be pretty much a pointless requirement. And that's probably why they never added that requirement in the first place; requiring the presence of a local resource is easy, since those all get placed at the start of the game, but if you require a destroyable feature (like a forest) for some later building, then it punishes the AI who chops all of his forests early on.

I think there is a bug regarding the Red Cross as I can build it in the same city as I have already built Hollywood in, but can't build the Red Cross in a city that I have the prerequisites for (i.e. I think you have a sign crossed here).


Well, I've never been able to duplicate this, so I'm going to chalk it up to a mistake on my part.

Anyways, not really to much to report in playtesting, which is really a good thing: I've got over 600 hours logged on ciV, and its been All Spatz, All the time. :goodjob:

Only a few things to comment on over the last two months:

1. Concerning Poison Brute 1 and 2: a strategy I've developed/ explored while playing as the Germans is to gift all Brutes to a nearby C-S. I initially thought of doing this as a way to attenuate the Greeks getting gifted units from C-S (i.e. I wanted the C-S to gift the Greeks Brutes instead, something that would not be a good return on invesment to the Greeks). However I have never seen the C-S gift the Brute units away. An alternative strategy, because the C-S can't typically upgrade these units, is that by gifting the Brutes to a C-S, it ties down their economies on essentially worthless units (the C-S don't seem to be able to delete these units, either, as ecvidenced by the pics). This also seems to have the benefit in that C-S only "build" so many units (i.e. I think there is a counter the C-S use in determining how many units they should have), so because of the 1UPT I can then blitz right thru these speedbump units and get right at their artillery/ cities. I don't consider this an exploit, but rather a nuanced strategy that sometimes works for the Germans.

2. Concerning Digital Era Calvary: at this point in the game I can't build Infantry or APCs, but I can still build Calvary. Just curious, but whats the rationale for this?

3. Concerning 2 UNs: I've only seen this once. Don't know what caused it.

4. How come Fungal Towers can bombard? Not that I'm complaining, as I tried to mod SMAX Fungal Towers to use arty, but there was a bug which prevented the Towers from having any offensive capability. I like it, but how come you did this?

5. How come there aren't Ruins in the Industrial era start anymore? Or do I need to use one of your modified map scripts for this?

6. Too many times I've been lured into building Wonders and Buildings when I should have been building a larger army. Very alluring benefits from a lot of the items you've placed on your tech tree! :goodjob:

7. I have developed beelines for both the tech tree and social policies. Won't go into details here, but taking into account starting positions/ luxery resources, then its pretty consistent what I beeline for.

D

Well, I've never been able to duplicate this, so I'm going to chalk it up to a mistake on my part.

I actually HAVE been able to duplicate it, but only when a cache issue or a version change altered the mod files between saves. So if the cache wasn't cleared correctly and you started a game, saved it, exited the game, and then at some later time loaded the savegame, it would corrupt lots of little bits like this.

In other words, if you play the entire game through in one sitting, there's no problem, and if you're sure to clear the cache (or if you're like me and never use any other mods) then there's no problem.

However I have never seen the C-S gift the Brute units away.

When a Militaristic CS gifts a unit, it's not actually giving a unit it HAS. The "gift" logic is handled entirely behind the scenes; the CS doesn't build the unit. That's why CSs can gift units requiring strategic resources, even if they can't build those units for themselves.

As for loading the CS up with useless, weak units, it's a problem. I mean, in vanilla you can still be building the Scout into the endgame, and gifting one of those gains you as much Influence as gifting a tank or something. Really, the whole setup needs to be changed; you should get lots of Influence for giving a unit that's better than what the CS can produce, and almost nothing for giving a unit that the CS would consider obsolete.

An alternative strategy, because the C-S can't typically upgrade these units, is that by gifting the Brutes to a C-S, it ties down their economies on essentially worthless units

This is one of the reasons I added the Secondhand units; it allows the CS to upgrade some of the earlier units without worrying about strategic resources. But those are mainly Industrial/Nuclear units, so it can still get stuck on Brutes and such. I can fix this easily enough, by having Brutes upgrade to Muskets or something to bypass the iron-using tiers entirely.

2. Concerning Digital Era Calvary: at this point in the game I can't build Infantry or APCs, but I can still build Calvary. Just curious, but whats the rationale for this?

Units follow the Rule of Two. Once you're two generations beyond the unit, it goes obsolete. So since Cavalry upgrade to Tanks, they should go obsolete as soon as Modern Armor unlock. But I might have accidentally left it at the wrong tech; originally, Cavalry didn't upgrade to ANYTHING, and I changed them to upgrade to the Helicopter Gunship (which'd mean Cavalry would go obsolete at Superconductor, when the Vertol unlocks). When the devs made Cavalry go to Tanks, I removed that Gunship link in my upgrade chain, but I might not have changed the obsolescence tech. I'll check that when I get home.

Similar logic explains the Scout. Since I currently go Scout -> Paratrooper -> Scout Powersuit, the Scout doesn't go obsolete until the late Digital. I'm planning on adding an "Explorer" unit in the Empires mod that'll go between Scout and Paratrooper, which would make Scouts obsolete earlier. (Maybe even two units, like Explorer and Conquistador.)

3. Concerning 2 UNs: I've only seen this once. Don't know what caused it.

See #1. If the database is corrupted by a cache issue when you reload an existing savegame, then it'll throw a lot of things off. Some of the things that seem particularly sensitive are the "1 per world" and "1 per player" limitations on buildings. I've seen this happen, where two players end up with a World Wonder or two cities in your empire end up with a National Wonder.

4. How come Fungal Towers can bombard? Not that I'm complaining, as I tried to mod SMAX Fungal Towers to use arty, but there was a bug which prevented the Towers from having any offensive capability. I like it, but how come you did this?

In SMAC, Fungal Towers weren't the source of all mindworms. The Fungus was, and you could never really clear it all out (although you could try), so the threat of mindworm attacks never really went away if you blew up the towers. But in this mod, there's no Fungus; if the player can eliminate the towers quickly, then they're in no danger because the towers are the source of all post-Breakout Psi units. That's why the Spore Towers are a bit harder to kill than the FTs were in SMAC.
But even worse, a player could simply choose to NOT attack the Spore Towers, and just farm the worms they produce to get more XP. To keep that from being possible, I had to make them more dangerous, to where you'd want to get rid of them ASAP. Since I didn't want to add a Spore Launcher unit (1UPT makes unaccompanied artillery less than useful), I put the ranged attack on the tower itself. Realistically they'll almost never get to use that attack, but it's there to prevent you from just ignoring the things.

5. How come there aren't Ruins in the Industrial era start anymore? Or do I need to use one of your modified map scripts for this?

That's set in the Eras file; I haven't changed it, as far as I know, but the devs might have tweaked it in a patch. I'll look into that tonight.

6. Too many times I've been lured into building Wonders and Buildings when I should have been building a larger army. Very alluring benefits from a lot of the items you've placed on your tech tree! :goodjob:

There are a few that still need reworking. The Nano Factory, for instance, really needs to be better, and I'm still looking into the balance on some of the Digital Era stuff. But I'm pretty happy with most of them.

7. I have developed beelines for both the tech tree and social policies. Won't go into details here, but taking into account starting positions/ luxery resources, then its pretty consistent what I beeline for.

In an Industrial start, this is pretty common. Your choices in the Ancient Era can vary wildly based on your local terrain, resources, etc., but the Industrial techs are pretty obvious; I nearly always take Steam Power first to get Factories, then I try to unlock Oil and Aluminum, and take Dynamite to get Artillery. It's a very consistent pattern.

There's not a whole lot I can do about it, but I'll look into this in more detail once I expand the Empires mod. If I add a few new techs here and there to support the expanded diplomacy and espionage systems, then it'd give me an excuse to reorganize the techs a bit, which'd help me eliminate that beelining. (Look at the revised early-game tech tree in the Mythology mod, for instance.)

When a Militaristic CS gifts a unit, it's not actually giving a unit it HAS. The "gift" logic is handled entirely behind the scenes; the CS doesn't build the unit. That's why CSs can gift units requiring strategic resources, even if they can't build those units for themselves.
And it only took me 13 monthst to find that out. :blush:


This is one of the reasons I added the Secondhand units; it allows the CS to upgrade some of the earlier units without worrying about strategic resources. But those are mainly Industrial/Nuclear units, so it can still get stuck on Brutes and such. I can fix this easily enough, by having Brutes upgrade to Muskets or something to bypass the iron-using tiers entirely.

A thought I had would be if you were to update it such that the C-S could upgrade Brutes after researching an early Nuclear era tech, then this would create a situation where a human player could still employ this strategy in the early game, but it would be under the terms that “I need to do this quickly” (or to put it another way, it would set up an interesting choice for the player whether to pursue this strategy or not).


In an Industrial start, this is pretty common. Your choices in the Ancient Era can vary wildly based on your local terrain, resources, etc., but the Industrial techs are pretty obvious;

A thought I had concerning this was that, because there are only three immediate tech choices (and a limited number of follow-up techs) in an Industrial era start, then it makes it harder for the AIs to screw it up: since a human sets up the game parameters, and because of their familiarity with previously having played using the same map settings, then the human knows how to optimize their play-style versus the environment they’ve established, thus giving them an advantage the AIs don’t have. Having only three starting tech choices mitigates this to a certain degree.

To segue a bit here, a thought I had today regarding giving the AIs a “memory” of how to play in certain environments would be to create individual store files on Steam that held certain information. Say each file held the map type, AIs involved, proximity of each AI to the human player, game difficulty, AI power ranking (sampled throughout the game), Victory condition chosen, and human players’ skill level, and these store files were in place for each map type, game difficulty, and AIs involved. Since thousands and thousands of games would be played (and each of the game results would be uploaded to the individual store files), then even though there would be hundres of such files on Steam, the store files would be populated very quickly with game results. Then at the beginning of a game when a human player chooses the AIs, the AIs are then able to poll this online data and determine that given its starting position (map setup, difficulty level, experience of human, and proximity to human player), then choosing Victory condition X was proven statisitically more advantageous.

Anyways, my wild thought of the day regarding how to improve the AI.


I nearly always take Steam Power first to get Factories, then I try to unlock Oil and Aluminum, and take Dynamite to get Artillery. It's a very consistent pattern.

I’m just the opposite: I research Dynamite first, then immediately build Arty units to start gaining XP (because There Will Be War! Many, Many Wars!). Then I research Oil so I can immediately assess where I need to expand/ conquer. Only then do I go with Steam Power. Or to put it another way, whyin the early game I have very stable build queues I follow game in and game out (to include Sistine Chapel and Cristo Redentor), and my lack of Factories hasn’t prevented me from typically (say >95%) building the items in my queues.


D

A thought I had would be if you were to update it such that the C-S could upgrade Brutes after researching an early Nuclear era tech, then this would create a situation where a human player could still employ this strategy in the early game,

I'd prefer not to have it be a strategy at all. A tactic that wouldn't work against the AI empires (assuming unit trades were even possible) shouldn't be possible against the city-states. And on a more general level, receiving a gift should never be a bad thing. Now, if the AI knew how to disband weak units for money, then sure, I'd be okay with this sort of thing, but it doesn't.

because there are only three immediate tech choices (and a limited number of follow-up techs) in an Industrial era start, then it makes it harder for the AIs to screw it up

True, but one of the main points of a late-era start is that it occurs at a time when you have plenty of fallbacks. It's not quite so important to beeline for the next +gold building (the Stock Exchange) since you'll already have the previous two (Market and Bank) in every city. It's not quite so important to get Factories, thanks to the Windmills, Workshops, Forges, Watermills, etc. So in my opinion, the main reason an AI can't screw it up has less to do with the reduced options and more to do with the more developed starter cities.

When I get the Empires mod underway, one of the first things I'll do is add a half-dozen or so techs to the Renaissance and Industrial. This'll probably change an Industrial start from three possible techs to five, and will almost definitely involve rearranging other techs to reduce beeline strategies.

Having only three starting tech choices mitigates this to a certain degree.

Actually, I'd say it enhances the disparity. A human player KNOWS that by researching X, then Y, then Z, that he'll know where all of the Oil and Aluminum on the map are. If you start near a desert, for instance, then you might hold off planting a city there until you take Biology and can confirm whether there's oil in them thar hills... an AI won't know to do that. Randomness (or at least lack of predictability) hurts the human far more than it does the AI, because the AI has no ability to make long-term plans.

Increasing the number of options won't generally impede the AI, because all of his decisions are probabilistic anyway, but it'd make it much harder for a human to settle on one optimum strategy. Take the Ancient Era as an example; your choice of Mining, Animal Husbandry, Pottery, etc. will depend on local terrain, local resources, who your neighbors are, and so on. There are enough variables there to make it impossible for a human to firmly settle on one optimum strategy, but the AI already understands weighting biases by the local terrain, so it's not really impeded.

To segue a bit here, a thought I had today regarding giving the AIs a “memory” of how to play in certain environments would be to create individual store files on Steam that held certain information.

It'd be nice, but I really doubt we can do anything close to this without the DLL. Even if we had an easy way to store the necessary information, we really have no way to adjust the AI's decisions on the fly.

I’m just the opposite: I research Dynamite first, then immediately build Arty units to start gaining XP (because There Will Be War! Many, Many Wars!)

I prefer to develop infrastructure first, because an Artillery that takes 10 turns to produce without the Factory might only take 6 turns with; you'll quickly make up the turns lost to producing the Factory, and it'll put you in a far better position in the long term. Obviously, this assumes a local Coal supply, though, but at least that's visible on an Industrial start.
But it really depends on difficulty. I don't go above King when testing, and on Prince/King you can usually trick the AI into a bad war by looking weak long enough to make them think you're an easy target, and then churning out an army (especially artillery) or upgrading your Rifles to Infantry at the last second. Above King, that strategy doesn't work because they really WILL roll over you if you don't establish a strong army ASAP.

I keep saying I'm going to add more, but given the choice between learning how to use WorldBuilder to create a custom Earth map, and spending the same time writing the Mythology mod, it's pretty clear which way I've leaned.

You just want an Earth map? What size? And what era (like Industrial where there are still sizeable Jungles, or Nuclear era with fallout in Ukraine and Japan)?

D

You just want an Earth map? What size? And what era (like Industrial where there are still sizeable Jungles, or Nuclear era with fallout in Ukraine and Japan)?

The idea, at least for the initial version, was just a standard Earth map (probably based on YNAEMP) of whatever size is convenient. The difference would only come down to resource placement; besides adding a number of deposits of Omnicytes, Dilithium, and Neutronium, I'd also tweak the deposit sizes and numbers a bit for the other resources (especially Oil, Aluminum and Uranium) to better match my revised spawn tables.

It's just that a lot of people like using Earth maps, and the ones with pre-set resource distributions don't work with this mod thanks to the resources I've added and changed. I've got lore-specific justifications for where these new deposits would be placed (I posted a list somewhere in the old thread, but I'd have to search for it, keyword "Antarctica"), but it's pretty flexible.

I'm sure it's not too difficult to learn, but my plate has just been really, really full with the Mythology rollout/debugging and integration of Ascension into the 4-mod design. So I keep putting it off.

Now, there was also talk of a scenario map for games starting in the Digital, for a SMAC-like experience, and THAT one could have plenty of fallout, spore towers, etc. pre-placed. But who knows when I'd get to that one.

The only problem I ran into using the map editor with the Ascension mod was that the 'scatter resources' (or whatever it's called) function doesn't work properly. It just drops tons of Dilithium everywhere. It's pretty easy to edit one of the Earth maps that's out there and add the new resources to it manually, it makes for a playable map but feels a little like cheating (I know where I'll be starting and where I put the resources...). Random would be better, random within certain bounds (Neutronium in Arctic regions only and so on) would be cool, not sure how to make that happen :/

And it might be something for way down the line but I'd *love* some pre-made scenarios to go with the mod :D

OK, I must be doing something wrong. I've installed your "Age of Empires", "Ages of Man -Base", and "Spatz's mod of AC" mods (and thats it - no other mods installed), and am seeing the following on an Industrial era start:

1. The GDR is immediately in my first city's Build queue. Only reason I can't build it is because I don't have uranium. There is also a spaceship part (forget which one) immediately available as well.
2. In the start-up screen and the Civilopedia the last three future eras have text issues (FUTURE_ERA_TEXT_7 etc). Civilopedia also can't open the Future eras in the Units submenu.
3. Even after building the National College (second item in my build queue) research times are immensely slow.

I'm assuming I'm just doing something wrong here and just can't figure it out - if not I can provide screen pics.

D

OK, I must be doing something wrong. I've installed your "Age of Empires", "Ages of Man -Base", and "Spatz's mod of AC" mods (and thats it - no other mods installed), and am seeing the following on an Industrial era start:p

The Ascension mod (the version that'll be compatible with the Base/Empires/Myth setup) hasn't been released yet. I'm still working on it, converting the old AC mod (the one still linked in the Files post) into what'll be listed as "Ages of Man - Age of Ascension" in your mod browser. That's why the files are split the way they are in the Files thread; the two files in the first post, v.1.09, are a month old (pre-split) but we KNOW they work, while the Base, Empires, and Mythology mod in the lower posts represent an entirely separate set, of which Ascension will be a part once I fix it. You can't mix the two.

I THINK I've almost got it fixed, so I'll release Ascension v.2.00 within the next day or so. I've just got some icon atlases to fix, and a quick test game to run to make sure it all still works. But for now, they just won't work together the way you've described. For instance, the Magna Carta, KGB, etc. will appear in both Empires and AC and so conflict, and the same would go for the Combat Engineer on the unit side, along with all the text keys related to those.

Something to think about while I work on getting my home machine back to functionality again (which is the only thing holding up the official release of the Ascension mod):

The Alpha Centauri mod (v.1.09) was functionally complete before I began the transition to the new mod structure. A little unfinished artwork here, a minor balance tweak there, but nothing really critical needed changing to make it playable, as evidenced by the hundreds who'd downloaded and played it.

At some point in the far future, post-DLL, I intend to modify quite a few aspects of this mod's content to mesh with the new diplomacy and espionage mechanisms I'll be adding to the Empires mod. The Empath Guild will become more of a true diplomacy thing, the Planetary Datalinks, Nethack Terminus, and Hunter-Seeker Algorithm will shift to the new espionage system, and the Doppelganger will become a hybrid combat-spy unit. That sort of thing. This WILL happen, but as this requires both the DLL and a good understanding of what it contains, it won't happen any time soon.

The issue, really, is about what happens before then. As you may have noticed, this particular mod was the springboard from which the Mythology mod was launched; the creation of the AC mod was a major learning experience, and I've been putting what I learned into the early eras with systems designed from the start to take advantage of things I now know are possible. More Lua-reliant combat abilities, a tunable Event system, even the terraforming and psionic combat systems have been appropriated for mythological content, and much of the mechanics were scavenged from my previous work.

The question, then, is this: Should I migrate some of the things I've learned to do in the Mythology mod back to the Ascension content?
There are definitely pros and cons involved; if I make the two eras too similar, then it defeats part of the purpose in using both of them, so in one sense it'd be good NOT to add any of the more distinctive parts of the Mythology mod to this one. But many aspects of the future eras were compromises necessitated by my inability to create the effects that I REALLY wanted to make, and in some cases I've since learned better ways to do things.
Now, I don't need answers immediately. Once the Mythology mod is stable (which it would have been last week if not for my crash), play that and see if the extra abilities give that mod a much deeper feel, and whether any of them seem appropriate here as well. It's just something I'd like people to keep in mind as they play this mod; while I don't feel that this mod absolutely needs major changes, I'd prefer not to see it become the least popular of my three content mods just due to age.

The question, then, is this: Should I migrate some of the things I've learned to do in the Mythology mod back to the Ascension content? There are definitely pros and cons involved; if I make the two eras too similar, then it defeats part of the purpose in using both of them,

Personally speaking, I am sci-fi exclusive, so would never play the Mythological mod. Therefore my vote would be to reverse-engineer back in anything which would make the Age of Ascension mod better.

D

I'd love to see an event system in the Ascension mod like in AoM

Therefore my vote would be to reverse-engineer back in anything which would make the Age of Ascension mod better.

I guess the question is the definition of "better". Take the Event system discussed below; it'd make the Ascension game experience more complex, more unpredictable, but that's not necessarily what the players who use this mod would want. One of the things I was deliberately trying to accomplish in the future eras was a gradual simplification, where the many types of units and buildings narrowed down to a smaller set, while the Mythology mod was intended to go the other direction (adding tons of content that the player would never use even half of). So I'd be wary of translating stuff over just because I can, as I want the two mods to FEEL different.

Or let's use a different example: Social Engineering. The SE abilities are treated as policies, bought as super-Finishers, but handled through the usual culture mechanisms. Very easy for a player to understand, and fairly easy to implement in an almost purely XML manner. With what I've learned since starting the Mythology mod, and its Mandala system, I could fairly easily reconstruct the ACTUAL SE interface from SMAC, where you had four rows of four elements and selected one element in each row (sort of like Civ4's Civics), with no "interesting" effects but lots of small yield pluses and minuses. But would that be a better game experience than what you have now?

I'd love to see an event system in the Ascension mod like in AoM

To be clear, the "non-interactive" Event system of the Empires mod WILL extend into both the mythological eras and the future ones, assuming you use the Empires mod with this one. And really, why wouldn't you? But those'll only come up rarely (say one per 50 turns), apply to all players, and have no choices to be made. There's not much choice involved in "city gets hit by an earthquake" or "you enter the Dark Ages" or "Piracy is on the rise", after all.

Now, as for the multiple-choice events of the mythology mod (one per ~10 turns, four choices per event, applied only to you, and the AI might get completely different events), I'd be open to adding something like these to the Ascension mod, although I'm not going to implement the sort of two-axis Alignment system I had in the myth mod; it'd probably be more like the three-choice events from the Galactic Civilizations games, where there was a clearly defined good choice, a neutral choice, and an evil choice. Or if you prefer, the "nice" choice, the "practical/ruthless" choice, and a compromise choice that falls halfway between the two. (Or, using Mass Effect terms, the Paragon and Renegade choices, plus a neutral one.)

The question, then, would be whether there should be any kind of underlying Good/Evil alignment to go along with these, or whether each event's effects should include any drawbacks within the effect itself. For instance, if your choices were "a city gains +100 Food", "a city gains +200 Food but you lose 200 Gold" and "a city gains +400 Food but you lose 800 Gold", then the good/evil part would basically be window dressing, with no lasting effect.

So what sorts of events do you have planned? I've heard a little about them here and there, also would some events be linked to random cities or are they world wide? Also, about what time would you say the Ascension mod will be compatable with the Mythology mod?

My dream is to play a 1000+ turn game from ancient era to ascension on the YNAEMP Giant map

So what sorts of events do you have planned? I've heard a little about them here and there, also would some events be linked to random cities or are they world wide?

We're still talking about the Empires mod's events, I assume, but to answer your question: most likely, a little of both. The original idea was to create pseudo-eras, where for a 10- or 20-turn period everyone would have extra food but less research, or something like that, sort of like a more balanced version of the current Golden Age mechanism. These'd be worldwide effects, benefit-neutral (more or less), applying to every player and every city in the same way. As these sorts of events would only come up every 40-50 turns, you'd still spend most of your time under the normal rules, but it'd add a little bit of unpredictability to the game.

I didn't originally want it to include the sort of targeted disasters you'd normally associate with a random event system, where one player gets crushed while everyone else is fine, but upon reflection I thought that it could be good to have something "local" if it was handled fairly. So if I do add a "Natural Disaster" event, it'd be one where every major player (i.e., not city-states) has its largest non-capital city hit by some kind of negative event at the same time. Is it unrealistic that all of these would happen on a single turn? Sure, but it'd be necessary for balance.

Generally speaking, though, the majority would be global things that are less "events" than "eras", and most would involve modifying yields (an age of enlightenment, when research and culture are boosted but production suffers), but not all. You might have an age of piracy, when Barbarian ships spawn all over the world (kinda like a certain event in this mod...), an age of warfare when diplomatic relations between all major empires get worse (or when your empire is just outright forced into a war, whether or not you wanted one), and so on. A few of the events might be "instantaneous" (Everyone gains one tech! Every city's production progress resets to zero!), but most would be persistent.

Like I said, I'm trying to design these parts of the Empire mod such that they'd be usable with either Mythology or Ascension content without causing problems. So if you're doing Empire+Ascension, you'll have these long-term events as you play through the future content; that's why my last post tried to draw a distinction between the two event styles, because if you're using both mods then you might not feel like the Ascension mod needs its own dedicated event setup as well.

Also, about what time would you say the Ascension mod will be compatible with the Mythology mod?

It WOULD have been mostly compatible* this last weekend, if my machine hadn't fried itself. Pretty sure it's the motherboard that's gone kaput, but replacing that will involve replacing the CPU and RAM as well, which means a week or two from now until I have my machine back up.

The "mostly" in the first sentence is almost solely in regards to the number of promotions. The Mythology and Ascension mods just have too many promotions once they're combined, and there are only a couple obvious places to trim. My best hope for making up the difference is my previously stated plan to remove the Accuracy and Barrage promotion lines (the vs-Open and vs-Rough ranged attack promos the archers and such get) and roll those effects into the Shock/Drill lines. That, right there, frees up 6 slots, and I THINK the database is dynamic enough that this'd count against the hard limit; there are a couple others that might get merged (Blitz vs Logistics). If I can get the total number low enough, then Mythology and Ascension will work together, but if I can't then it just won't work.

Beyond that, the only remaining conflict involves turn numbers/game speeds. What I really want to do is have the Base mod set up a 700-turn baseline, with the Ascension mod adding 200 turns to the high end of the list and the Mythology mod adding 100 turns on the low end. That's going to require some strange SQL modification to adjust the percentages, and I'm honestly not sure how well it'll work, but I THINK I've worked it out.
Other than that, everything should be perfectly compatible*. I've tried to be very careful with my UI modifications to ensure that it all still works together, even if that made certain bits (especially TopPanel) way more complicated than they needed to be.

*- There's one remaining issue I haven't mentioned: cross-tables. The original idea was that the Base mod would include things like the "Building Resources" mod and the <Building_Bonuses> table to handle all of the Wonder effects, with each content mod simply adding the necessary elements to that table to give the effects to its own Wonders. Unfortunately, it just doesn't seem to work; if I define the table schema in the Base mod, and try to fill the table in the other mods, it fails the Database initialization, saying that Building_Bonuses is undefined when it tries to add the content mods.
So right now, each of the three content mods has a duplicate version of everything like these. There's a Building_EmpiresBonuses table that has the exact same layout as the Building_MythologyBonuses table, and the Empires mod contains a "Empires_Buildings.lua" file parsing the former while the Myth mod contains a "Mythology_Buildings.lua" file parsing the latter. It's VERY ugly, but it works without the cross-compatibility issues. It's playable. (Note: this is one of the reasons why the Mythology mod has no buildings that generate resources, even though I was originally going to do that.)
My hope is that the devs will add the mod dependency logic in the near future, and this layout will work the way I'd intended.

My dream is to play a 1000+ turn game from ancient era to ascension on the YNAEMP Giant map

We've discussed your masochistic streak before. Again, in theory it'll work; in practice, you might hit a point in the Industrial-ish where you know you've won and it's all mopping up. Also, I'm not sure if YNAEMP has any sort of conflict in terms of resource allocation. I wanted to check that one this last weekend, but my computer fried.

Ran my first serious game against your latest build. As usual I'm playing German/ Emporer/ Continents/ Standard, with the Greeks as they are a good litmus of how the C-S are swaying.

1. The Greeks didn't go for the UN right away as they usually do. They did eventually corner all the C-S, but by that time there weren't enough to gain a UN victory.

2. I think I had mentioned this before, but when I finally take control of a puppeted city I am finding that the city hasn't built a Courthouse yet. I would think this would be the A#1 priority for the puppeted city? Or is it because I've selected the "Humanism" Social Policy, as I do see the puppeted cities building Univerisities?

3. Concerning "Couldnt bomb" versus "Could Bomb": the only difference between the two pics is that I moved a Destroyer up to the target city so that it was visible. I thought that bombers should be able to bomb anything within their range?

4. Concerning "New graphic": where did you get this from?

5. Concerning "Plasma Artillery Gift": that is a REALLY good gift from the C-S!

6. Concerning "Stacked Barbarians": I think you'd mentioned something to this effect before, but just thought I'd confirm this was intended behaviour.

7. Concerning "No CS Gold": this occured after I'd discovered Satelites. Is there some sort of cut-off as to when C-S stop giving gold?

8. Concerning "Really stealthy ship": my first thought when I encountered this was "that ship is so stealthy even the iceburg can't see it!" :lol: I looked it up in the Civilopedia and saw that this was indeed intended behaviour.

D

Ran my first serious game against your latest build.

Just to be clear, version 1.09 (the latest version of the future content) is more than a month old. I'm VERY close to the integrated Ascension mod being ready for release, now that my machine is back up and running; it won't be included in the version I plan to release today (since that's just going to be a bug fix version for the Mythology content), but the next one WILL have it.

1. The Greeks didn't go for the UN right away as they usually do. They did eventually corner all the C-S, but by that time there weren't enough to gain a UN victory.

The Grand Strategies really dominate which victory an AI will try for; while the Greeks usually pick the diplomatic one, they don't always. And if they pick something else, it'll reduce the diplomacy Flavors enough to do what you saw.

It's something I really dislike; a Human is able to go for multiple victories at once, but an AI over-specializes. I've been trying to fix that; the next version of the Empires mod will improve the AI's desire to get city-states, even if it's not going for a diplo win.

2. I think I had mentioned this before, but when I finally take control of a puppeted city I am finding that the city hasn't built a Courthouse yet. I would think this would be the A#1 priority for the puppeted city?

A puppeted city can't build a Courthouse; you only do that once the city gets annexed. And the Courthouse in general isn't being given a high priority, although I just tweaked the Flavor values in the Empires mod to make it a bit better.

What I'm still trying to figure out is why the AI never seems to annex its cities. Puppets just aren't as good.

3. Concerning "Couldnt bomb" versus "Could Bomb": the only difference between the two pics is that I moved a Destroyer up to the target city so that it was visible. I thought that bombers should be able to bomb anything within their range?

Bombardment units ALWAYS need visibility on their targets; the only things air units and the more advanced artillery units get is the "Indirect Fire" ability to hit targets that they themselves can't see. But you, as the player, still need to see the hex.

This is why I add things like the Scout Powersuit and Geosynchronous Survey Pod; these have increased visibility so that they can give you that visibility without parking your units within counterattack range.

4. Concerning "New graphic": where did you get this from?

It's just the Scout graphic scaled up. Placeholder.

5. Concerning "Plasma Artillery Gift": that is a REALLY good gift from the C-S!

Very, although the biggest problem is getting it back to your territory when the CS in question's out on an island. I often just leave them there, to help my allies deal with mindworms or other AIs.

6. Concerning "Stacked Barbarians": I think you'd mentioned something to this effect before, but just thought I'd confirm this was intended behaviour.

Not intended, but known. All-terrain units (the Nessus Worm, Vertol, Former, and Gravship) are technically Sea units. This allows them to stack with one land unit, with the stronger unit taking any damage. So yes, the Nessus Worm can screen weaker barbarian units; while I hadn't intended that when I created the units, I like the idea. This makes the Nessus a bit more desirable for the human, relative to the other Titans, to compensate for its lack of a ranged attack.

7. Concerning "No CS Gold": this occured after I'd discovered Satelites. Is there some sort of cut-off as to when C-S stop giving gold?

I have never seen that before. What might have happened was that particular City-State declared "permanent war" on you; they do that, and obviously you wouldn't be able to continue to bribe them if it'd have no effect. But if that AI wasn't at war with you at the time, I'm not sure why that'd happen.

8. Concerning "Really stealthy ship": my first thought when I encountered this was "that ship is so stealthy even the iceburg can't see it!"

It IS a submarine, and all subs do that, but yes, it's kind of silly.

Love your new quote:
"Soon to be released as a major motion picture."

MXX

Ascension is finally posted, over in the Files thread. However, I've already found one minor bug: the Head Start buildings aren't being placed in your cities when you do a late-era start. It's not broken, I just forgot to include that logic in the new version of the file.
These buildings add food, production, and gold so that your newly-founded cities don't starve before you improve the area around them, and without them it's easily possible that your size 4 new cities will drop to 3 or even 2, depending on terrain.

I've fixed it already in my own version, and I'll post it when the next iteration of the Mythology mod is ready to go. If you don't want to wait and want to edit the Base mod yourself, here's what you do:

In the Base mod, open Lua/AoM_EndTurn.lua. Find line #61:
CapHappyCount = math.floor((delTech+1)/2);

and replace it with
local numBonus = math.floor((delTech+1)/2);
CapHappyCount = numBonus;

for pCity in pPlayer:Cities() do
pCity:SetNumRealBuilding(GameInfoTypes.BUILDING_HE AD_START,numBonus);
end -- loop over cities

This fixes it. Now I don't THINK it'd violate any checksums if you added this in your own post-build versions...

I played through a complete Base+Empires+Ascension game last night. "Complete" in this case means a diplo win in the late Digital, despite starting in the Industrial on King, and the AIs never even built any spaceship parts.

Now, in the process of playing this test game, I fixed a couple minor bugs, but I also found three repeated Runtime errors that I have yet to track down. One is definitely in the Base mod's unit Lua, specifically line 25 in the OnUnitCreated function. Somehow, it's possible to enter this function without a valid unit number, and I'm not sure why.

But there were also two other errors that I have yet to track down, because FireTuner goes to the ellipsis long before you get to the part of the filename that actually matters. All I know is that one of them is a pairs declaration on line 112, and the other is a number being compared to nil on line 75. Neither of these seemed to cause any major problems, and they all happened during the interturn so they could be caused by a lot of things.
I'm pretty sure these errors did NOT happen during my last mythology game, which means they're probably in the Ascension mod's lua, although they could relate to things like the Work Boat AI override (which is in the Base mod). The problem is that in any file that includes utility functions (which are most of them) the line numbers won't match correctly. So I've got to go back to a lot of print-statement debugging, which is not fast.

I also hadn't tested the Transcendence victory, which people have reported problems with. I'll try that tonight. The plan is to release an updated version this week, alongside new versions of the other mods. So if you find any more bugs, say so; after tonight, most of my testing time will be back on the Mythology mod while I try to resolve some major issues there.

Confirmed the bug with the Transcendence victory. It seems to be tied to the PreGame.SetVictory() function, which is SUPPOSED to set whether a victory condition is valid, but it doesn't seem to work for any victories beyond the ones in the core game. So you can turn OFF existing ones, but new ones won't do anything. It's a lot like the yield type issue I ran into with Favor over in the Mythology mod; the game creates a few reference arrays BEFORE mods are loaded, and then never updates them even when it should.

So what I've done is decoupled the Transcendence Victory from the project. That way, the Project will always be buildable, and I'll handle the Lua directly, like I used to. It won't look QUITE as nice in the Civilopedia, since it won't list that project as a prerequisite for the win, but that's easy enough to spell out in text. And I've confirmed that it works in an actual game, so there's that.

Just some minor feedback. Still playing the game at Standard/Emporer/Continents/ Industrial start/ Germany.

Observations:

1. Concerning "Geosynchronous selection screen": I'm assuming your aware of this resizing issue?

2. Concerning "Combat Engineer movement": at this point in the game I had selected the "Power" SE, which gives all combat units +1 movement. However that doesn't seem to apply to the Combat Engineers. Is this intentional?

D

1. Concerning "Geosynchronous selection screen": I'm assuming your aware of this resizing issue?

Yes. I haven't decided whether I should shorten the name or widen the box.

However that doesn't seem to apply to the Combat Engineers. Is this intentional?

Not so much "intentional" as "unavoidable". The only way to have it apply to CEs would be to declare them military units, which'd prevent them from stacking with other units. Too many of the Policy effects are hard-coded that way.

----------

I WILL get the new version out tonight; the problem is that Ascension games are still giving two runtime errors that I can't track down. They don't seem to be actually breaking anything in practice, so it might be okay to leave them in, but I want to make one more attempt to find them before posting the new version.

i got a really annoying problem.
When i earn a policy and i click the symbol, nothing happens. Even when i click the one on top.
can someone tell me whats wrong here?

And can someone tell me how to put my save file in here? I uploaded it but somehow its not in this post.

Are you refering to when it lags after you choose a policy? That happens to me too, but it should be fine, just takes a few seconds for the game to process that you chose a policy.

Hey Spatz, I was thinking, would you want to add some of the promotions you made for your Mythology mod into Acension? It would be interesting to see promotions like Venom and Disease in there (I could see a missle or bomb that gives units in the area of effect Disease)

I mean that it just doesnt respond at all,even if i wait. Everything else responds except this. I can do anything but i cant get to the policy screen.

btw, love that biobom idea

Hey Spatz, I was thinking, would you want to add some of the promotions you made for your Mythology mod into Acension?

A page or so ago, I asked people if they wanted stuff like this. It's easy enough to do, it's just a question of whether people are happy with the Alpha Centauri content as-is. I've obviously migrated some functions in the other direction (the Damage Reduction, Critical Strike, ,Spontaneous Healing, and Synthesis promotions appear as-is in the Mythology mod, and the logic used for the Psi promotion is duplicated for the Balance promotions).

Now, I wouldn't want to make this sort of thing TOO pervasive. If both mods have units with the same abilities, then it starts to feel too much like you're playing the same mod in a different era. Mythology units are supposed to be very specialized, while the Ascension end of the game is designed to merge specialized units into more generally useful units (like the Plasma Artillery), so these sorts of effects wouldn't be appropriate for most units. But the few specialized ones (Troll, Ranger, etc.) could definitely be tweaked this way.

307852
this is the save with my problem

Amadee, your problem is very, very simple: to use any of the three content mods (Mythology, Empire, Ascension) you MUST also use the Base mod. Your savegame doesn't have that mod activated.

Without the Base mod, none of the others will work correctly.

ty, i should have seen it.
About the stuff dinobot said, you can put it in a extra mod you could use with this one.

About the stuff dinobot said, you can put it in a extra mod you could use with this one.

Not really. For reasons of balance (units being equally powerful with and without the changes) and function (requiring a tech that doesn't exist in the core game means load order becomes VERY important), it all pretty much has to go here. As it is, I've got four mods that are supposed to work together, I wouldn't want to make it five.

I mean, just look at what you went through with that savegame. The game SHOULD have been able to know that the Base mod was required, and not only would have prevented you from starting the game without it, but would have also ensured that it loaded first every time. But since the devs never enabled the mod prerequisite functions, we just can't do that. Until they fix that (if they ever do), it's VERY difficult to make a mod that's an expansion of another mod.

I would prefer the Ascension content to be compatible with other balance mods for the 'original' eras, actually. And I'm not the least bit interested in the Mythology part of it; i.e. I'd rather add SMAC-like stuff to play after launch, w/o the other two mods.

You only really need the base mod to run Asencion, but Empires is recommended

New version posted. Among other things, I've finally fixed the Transcendence victory to work correctly, so this mod should be fully playable. The main things remaining:

> Figure out why the unit models aren't working right in DX10/11
> Add the remaining unit models
> Add custom images when you build the new Wonders
> One major balance pass, using what I've learned in developing the Mythology mod to improve the Ascension mod. For instance, now that I can use counter-type variables correctly, I can finally remove the Anarchy from the Transcendence 20-turn countdown. (It made things awfully boring when you could literally do nothing for those 20 turns.)
> The Promotion integration, which'll be done inside the Base mod, allowing the Ascension and Mythology mods to finally be compatible with each other.
> Create a good pre-placed Earth map containing the new resources.

I make no guarantees as to timing, but I've got the Mythology mod almost functional. Once I add the last few major features to it, I'm going to let it simmer for a little while while people give feedback on its balance, which should free up a little time for Ascension work. (Of course, there's that whole "Christmas" thing...)

----------------------------------------------
Now, a disclaimer. There are two known issues I have yet to track down, bugs I've experienced when playing Base+Empires+Ascension:
1> The Players:GetUnitByID() function is failing in rare situations. I might have an idea why, but regardless, it's just failing to return a valid structure in very rare cases. This never seems to happen for the active player, and seems only limited to a small number of AI-owned units. (Not city-state or barbarian, I mean units belonging to other major empires.) This error crashes OnUnitCreated, RunCombatSim and EndCombatSim, so whatever special Lua-driven abilities these units have (if any) aren't functioning.
2> In VERY rare situations, the game reports an invalid "pairs" access on line 112. (Since the FireTuner truncates file names, I have no way of knowing WHICH file's line 112 that is. Pretty stupid.) I've tried tracking this down through print statement debugging, but it never seems to give that error when I need it to.

Neither of these seems to significantly impact the game experience; I simply mention them in case anyone has ideas about what could be causing them.

> Add custom images when you build the new Wonders

Just out of curiosity, is there a technical limitation on this one (is it not possible at the moment)? Are you looking for artwork for these (like the Myth gods) or are they coming from SMAC? If you need artwork it might be something we can all pitch in on.

If you don't have a model for the Skimmer, the Gravtank model would probably do just fine, scale it down and add another 2 or so to the 'pack'?

> Add custom images when you build the new Wonders

Just out of curiosity, is there a technical limitation on this one (is it not possible at the moment)?

It's POSSIBLE. The problem is that what I really want is for it to play the actual wonder MOVIES from SMAC. So I've been looking into WonderPopup.lua and seeing if I can override that static image with some sort of video option. Because of that, I haven't really bothered with trying to make images for it; if I can't get the movies to work then I'll need a good set of fallback images, even if they're just screenshots of the movies.

If you don't have a model for the Skimmer, the Gravtank model would probably do just fine, scale it down and add another 2 or so to the 'pack'?

I've got a model for it, the one that Planetfall used that, in turn, was based on SMAC's original grav vehicles. I just had technical issues converting it to Civ5 that kept me from including it in the first batches.

With the unit problems in DX10/11, does the problem keep the game from being playable? DX9 doesn't like to start on my comp, so I pretty much am forced to use DX 10/11. Basically, can I use the Ascension mod even though I'm using DX 10/11? While I'm sure that somewhere in this thread or forum the exactly problem has been discussed, I don't really understand alot of the technical jargon thrown around in mod threads, so I miss most of the specifics of what's going on.

With the unit problems in DX10/11, does the problem keep the game from being playable?

What happens is that the units are invisible. You'll still see the unit flag icons hovering in the appropriate spots, but the 3D models will be invisible for the Gravtank, Isle of the Deep, Vertol, Gravship, Bolo, Combat Mech, Orbital Death Ray, Subspace Generator, Spore Tower, Orbital Ion Cannon, and the Assault Powersuit. It makes things quite a bit harder to keep track of, but it's still playable.

I'm still trying to figure out exactly why this is happening, but regardless, it's a problem. Note that while switching to Strategic View would help with the unit icons, that mode prevents the various combat abilities from triggering and so is not recommended.

In my games the game starts to crash frequently as soon as i get near the end of the 19th century. mostly happens between turns.sometimes it happens only a few turns after i (re)loaded. (and i apologize in advance for the dorky name)

308173

For some odd reason, the AI Civs in my game (Just Base and Ascension BTW) will not go after the dilithium deposits off the coast. I know that this was a problem with AI work boats not being able to go after them and what not.

The part that bugs me is that while the Civ, in this case Greece, would not go after the several dilithium deposits it had sitting around South America, I saw a C-S with a Dilithium harvester up.

The C-S in question was even one of Greece's neighbors.

Of course, I am running an older version of the mod, but it just confused me that a C-S was able to put up a harvester, and a Civ wasn't.

Then again, maybe said C-S had already placed a fishing boat on something else, and when Dilithium was revealed, one happened to be under said boat.

Another item I thought I should mention, is the possibilities granted by the Plant Jungle improvement.

University+Jungle surrounding city= Bawss.

Also, in some way I still don't understand, my Babylon civilization has about 600 GDP, while every other nation in the world....yeah, they're pretty much in the negatives. And they apparently don't even have that big of armies.

I am fielding an army larger than any other civ, one large enough that when they declare war on me, they admit they are going to lose. And yet I stay in the 6-700s (W/o Golden Age) while all of the other nations have the crappiest economy, even though they aren't fielding a large army (At least no ANYMORE in the case of Greece. Lovely, lovely Planet Busters).

Might be the fact that I am a Wonder Whore, and with Babylon already giving me +50% to Great Sci creation, your wonders are putting me far enough ahead of the rest, due to my flood of Great Scientists as some of the wonders increase my GP creation rate, that it has gotten to the point where I get all of the wonders first.

Literally, once in the Nuclear Age, and up to my current point in the Mid Nanotech Era, I have built every single World Wonder you added. In one game.

While on the topic of wonders, with that Space Elevator and the use of a Great Artist Culture Bomb, it is now possible to create a cannon that grants you territory every time you use it. Course, its fueled by Great Artists, but those aren't too hard to get.

Well, back to creating Chaos in Civ V with my Bolo/Nessie/Combat Mech squads. :king:

Of course, I am running an older version of the mod, but it just confused me that a C-S was able to put up a harvester, and a Civ wasn't.

There should be no difference in behaviors, with one exception: the only cities that will choose to improve a dilithium will be coastal ones that have enabled the "want to connect a resource" AI path. City-states seem to go into that category a bit faster, probably because their needs aren't getting averaged out with the non-coastal cities.

And it's not about version number; if it's called "Ascension", then it should be fully functional in this area.

Then again, maybe said C-S had already placed a fishing boat on something else, and when Dilithium was revealed, one happened to be under said boat.

It doesn't really work like that. The AIs will only make work boats if they think there's something to use them on, and the auto-placed improvements only apply to Oil, Dilithium, and Omnicytes, not fish. The AI seems to recognize the resources just fine for the first part, and will make the boats, it's just that the BOAT's AI won't move it to the right spot. That works fine for local deposits, but if city A is landlocked and city B is coastal, and the Dilithium appears within A's area, the AI won't know to build a work boat at B and then drive it over.

Another item I thought I should mention, is the possibilities granted by the Plant Jungle improvement.

Yes. Jungles are a pure improvement on grassland (not so much for Plains), while Forests are a pure improvement on Tundra. This is deliberate; if you want those hexes to be nonproductive for the dozen or so turns it takes to plant a jungle/forest and THEN place an Improvement on the tile, just to gain an extra point of Food and maybe some research from Universities... well, it's not always going to help that much.

Basically, in the long term you wouldn't work that tile very much anyway. The yield bonuses in this mod are structured such that once you're into the future eras you'll really only work tiles with resources on them, or with Great Improvements, while normal farms/trading posts/etc. just won't be as desirable as using another Specialist of some kind. This'd be more pronounced if you were using the Empires mod as well, as this is the reason for the Red Cross, Wall Street, etc.

Also, in some way I still don't understand, my Babylon civilization has about 600 GDP, while every other nation in the world....yeah, they're pretty much in the negatives. And they apparently don't even have that big of armies.

Some of this depends on your Wonders. Quite a few of the Wonders in the Digital Era are financial, while there were very, very few Wonders in earlier eras that added any kind of income. I've tried to fix this a bit, lowering the monetary benefits of the wonders in exchange for something else (like how the Planetary Transit System is now primarily a movement boost wonder), and I might do more of this. (Like I'm looking at changing the Merchant Exchange to boost all four yields instead of the current effect, but obviously boost them much less.)
It might also depend on your choice of Policies; I've tried to boost Commerce, but the fact is that there aren't a lot of policies with financial benefits, so if the AI isn't taking those, it'll have a hard time staying competitive.

But what it really comes down to, in my eyes, is that you're not using the Empires mod. Nearly all of my balance changes went into that mod, not this one. In that mod, I've changed the Happiness scaling, the gold production of various buildings, many AI Flavor values, and so on. So playing Base+Ascension is about as well-balanced as playing vanilla Civ5 (i.e., not really balanced at all); once you get a significant developmental lead, you'll run away with the game. The KGB, alone, would normally be enough to prevent you from building up an insurmountable lead over your opponents, and even if you're completely dominating you'd still lose a few Digital-Era Wonder races this way.

Basically, the Mythology and Ascension mods are about content, with only minimal changes made to the core game's balance, while the Empires mod is about balance, and its only "content" are a dozen or so buildings designed to correct the game's balance. Empires also adjusts the balance on a lot of existing buildings, by slowing down the research pace and spreading bonuses around more (which doesn't penalize the AI nearly as much as the game's default overspecialization does).

In the long term the Empires mod will add all sorts of complexity to the diplomacy and espionage areas of the game, but we're still far from that point. At the moment, it's really just a balance mod. So, I HIGHLY recommend going Base+Empires+Ascension (or Base+Empires+Mythology), even if you have no interest in those middle eras.

and with Babylon already giving me +50% to Great Sci creation

I should point out that none of the things in this mod are in any way balanced for DLC civs. If DLC civs have unique buildings or unique units based on items that I've re-balanced, then the DLC UBs/UUs won't get the same changes. (Usually.)

To clarify, I'm not saying that you have to use the Empires mod for this mod to function. I'm saying that only using Base+Ascension will have the same core balance as the vanilla game does. Without it, it's not uncommon to be ~30 techs ahead of your closest rival by the time you reach the Fusion Era, and yes, you'll sweep every single Wonder that way.

If you're not going to use my balance mod, you should use someone else's. I'm trying to ensure the Unofficial Patch is compatible with my mods, as well as several other common balance mods, but until then, the Empires mod is the only balance mod that I KNOW will be compatible with this content.

Couple small nit-picky things to post:

1. Concerning Flood Plains: how come their destroyed by nuclear blasts? Once I clean the "Flood Plain" tiles of fallout I am seeing that they no longer have the "Flood Plain" designator, and the +2 nutrient modifier is gone. There is no mention of this in the Civilopedia.

2. Concerning the "Power" SE: the description states "All units gain +1 movement". However aircraft don't get the +1 movement, nor do Paratroopers get +1 drop range, and Great People don't get +1 movement, either. Should the description be changed?

Otherwise, nothing much to report other than I am still playing some pretty intense games with your mod! :goodjob:

Edit: I'm also seeing that Artillery (which has been obsoleted at this point in the game I am playing) did not get +1 movement, either.

D

1. Concerning Flood Plains: how come their destroyed by nuclear blasts? Once I clean the "Flood Plain" tiles of fallout I am seeing that they no longer have the "Flood Plain" designator, and the +2 nutrient modifier is gone. There is no mention of this in the Civilopedia.

This wasn't me, that happens in the core game. The reason is that Flood Plains are a Feature type, not a terrain type. A plot can only have a single Feature type at a time, whether it's Ice, Forest, Jungle, Marsh, Flood Plain, Atoll, or Fallout. So if the game decides that fallout should be placed in a hex, it'll destroy whatever other Feature is there. For forests and such this isn't a big deal, as those can be cleared (or in my mod, replanted), but Flood Plains are obviously different.
(Note that Hills, Mountains, and Lakes, while they do have "fake" feature entries for graphical reasons, are not actually Features. They're Plot types instead, and so don't affect the Fallout placement.)

Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do about it without the DLL. Like most other things, I can't interrupt the AI's process to prevent the Flood Plain-removing effect from happening (except for the nuke interception logic that prevents the ENTIRE nuke effect). Personally I'd have made it so that Flood Plains and Atolls can't be replaced with Fallout, but they didn't really ask my opinion after all.

2. Concerning the "Power" SE: the description states "All units gain +1 movement". However aircraft don't get the +1 movement, nor do Paratroopers get +1 drop range, and Great People don't get +1 movement, either. Should the description be changed?

Aircraft movement doesn't affect range, they're two different stats. All aircraft units have two movement points, solely so that if they get the Logistics promotion they'll be able to make two attacks in a turn (since each attack costs 1 MP). Adding +1 movement to them wouldn't really do anything; to add to their range would require giving the promotion +Range separately, and that'd screw up any archer or artillery units. Similarly, the paradrop range is set through a promotion and can't be altered, but the paratroopers should be getting increased land movement regardless. When I say "+1 movement" I mean exactly that; paradrop range and air unit range, despite their utility, aren't classified as "movement" by the game; it's just that adding to movement isn't as useful for some unit types as for others.

As for Great People (or Settlers, or Workers, or any other kind of unit that doesn't have a Combat Class), promotions given by buildings or policies NEVER apply to them. What's happening internally is that the game is giving the promotion to every unit that's eligible for that promotion (through the UnitPromotions_CombatClasses table). I control which combat classes can get the promotion, so I can easily change whether something applies to air units or not, but I can't do that for units without a combat class. This same logic applies to all of the old-style promotion-giving buildings/wonders as well, but does NOT apply to things like the Planetary Transit System (which uses Lua logic I made myself, and which therefore can give those promotions to noncombat units).

Really, what they should have done was create a UNITCOMBAT_NONCOMBAT group to put all of those other units into. It would have made this much, much easier to manage. In the meantime, I should change it to "all COMBAT units get +1 movement", which'd at least rule out the great people, settlers, and workers.

Edit: I'm also seeing that Artillery (which has been obsoleted at this point in the game I am playing) did not get +1 movement, either.

I'll check that one. Probably just means that I didn't put UNITCOMBAT_SIEGE into the list of classes that can get it. They SHOULD be on the list, so that one's definitely a bug.

Hi all,
First of all I'm a really big fan of the mod, it's amazing the extra features you've managed to achieve.

Now, on to business: I've been inspired by a mod (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=407825)that seems to be abandoned to suggest a new feature which I think fits this mod perfectly: Interstellar colonization.

As described in the link, you would never actually see the colonies on a map, rather you would direct their founding, growth and direction from a colony management screen, looking something like this:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=291478&d=1306871691

The ability to expand to the stars has been one I've yearned for in my Ascension games since I started playing them, it made no sense to me that constant references were being made to the colonies, but they were intangible. Well now we have a chance to make the late game a lot more interesting. So what does everyone think?

EDIT: Taking a closer look at the forums, it appears I should have posted this in the Age of Ascension thread rather than giving it its own thread :cringe:, apologies. It's probably best if you merge this post into it.

EDIT: Taking a closer look at the forums, it appears I should have posted this in the Age of Ascension thread rather than giving it its own thread :cringe:, apologies. It's probably best if you merge this post into it.

Threads merged.
Please use the "report post" button (http://forums.civfanatics.com/images/buttons/report.gif) to bring things to the attention of the mods, else we will not see it (thanks to CivOasis who took care of that in this case :hatsoff:).

The ability to expand to the stars has been one I've yearned for in my Ascension games since I started playing them, it made no sense to me that constant references were being made to the colonies, but they were intangible. Well now we have a chance to make the late game a lot more interesting. So what does everyone think?

In the long term I'd like to create a variety of scenarios to go with this content, and this sort of thing would go very well into that. I'd been considering something a little less abstract; something like the original Master of Orion, where the map consists of a bunch of planet "islands" and they're managed through an outside interface like the one you've shown. But either way works, as long as we're talking scenarios.

My primary worry about integrating this into the core mod in the near future is the usual one of AI capability: adding a new mechanism like that that bypasses the usual Civ5-based systems really favors a human player. (I've run into that repeatedly in the Mythology mod, for obvious reasons.) If the bonuses are large enough to have a significant impact on gameplay then the AI needs to be adjusted, and if not, then what's the point? Unfortunately, without the DLL we're just VERY limited on what the AI can do, but once the DLL comes out I do intend to go back and redesign some of the Ascension mod's systems to make it a bit smoother.

Now, there's another aspect I'd originally planned and then dropped. In SMAC, you had the four satellite types (orbital hydroponic farm, lunar mining station, orbital power transmitter, orbital defense pod) and you could build as many of each as you wanted. In this mod, because of its Civ5 roots, these satellites were reduced to a one-per-city building that had a global effect. I was never really happy with this change, but without adding an entirely new mechanism, there wasn't much else I could do; while I could also remove the one-per-city logic, that'd just lead to the AI getting stuck in a loop too often thanks to the ridiculously crude Flavor system. I'm a little better at this now than I used to be, so replacing those with this sort of "colony" mechanism is possible. So at Orbital Spaceflight you can make colonies, several later techs boost the yield gains you get from your colonies, and so on. It'd be nice to integrate this into some sort of diplomacy/revolution system like the Empires mod will have.

The primary problem with this is one of timing. At the moment, it's just too easy to win the game in the Digital, when I really need the game to still be competitive through the late Fusion. Without this, there's just not any point in adding complex mechanisms that don't start until the mid-Fusion. So I'm still trying to improve the balance of my mod set to extend this competitive phase a bit further than it is now. I'm trying to make the Empires mod add a few elements that help this by making espionage and diplomacy easier for the small empires, but even so it's just too easy to roll over the others once you get a modern, mobile military.

So, I'm looking at doing a major balance pass on the Ascension mod in the near future (once I get the major bugs in the Mythology mod knocked out), and balance suggestions are welcome. For instance, right now it's just too easy to use an overpowering air force (especially once you get Logistics to attack twice per turn, and ESPECIALLY if you play America, whose B17s start with an extra promotion and so only need 30 XP to reach Logistics) to kill the defenseless siege units and then pick off the rest of his army at your leisure. But imagine if every anti-air unit gets two weaker interceptions per turn instead of one strong one, and fighter units get a larger bonus against bombers (to where an intercepting fighter will often kill the unit it intercepts unless it has Evasion abilities)... suddenly, it becomes possible for an enemy civ to create an impenetrable defensive wall that a smart human can't pick apart. This was always the intended goal, but the present balance doesn't quite reach that yet.

If I can improve the balance to where the Fusion Era is still a viable era for competition, then I'd be open to the sort of conceptual redesign you're suggesting. But I'd limit it to only our solar system, no extrasolar colonies, and the colonies would never dominate the home planet; part of the theme of this mod is that it's the Earth-based counterpart to SMAC, where the slowship-founded Alpha Centauri colony is our first and last attempt and leaving the system.

In the long term I'd like to create a variety of scenarios to go with this content,

I've had several ideas for scenarios using your mod, however have refrained from posting them as you'd mentioned before you wanted to concentrate on getting the core elements of your mod working first.


I'd been considering something a little less abstract; something like the original Master of Orion, where the map consists of a bunch of planet "islands" and they're managed through an outside interface like the one you've shown. But either way works, as long as we're talking scenarios.
My primary worry about integrating this into the core mod in the near future is the usual one of AI capability: adding a new mechanism like that that bypasses the usual Civ5-based systems really favors a human player.

When discussing Mods versus Scenarios, I've always taken the approach that Mods need to be balanced, but Scenarios are intended to give players different experiences than what they can get with the base gameplay. Or to put it another way, Scenarios don't necessarily need to be balanced.

Another thought I've had which sort of mirrors Talkie_Toaster's comment of "The ability to expand to the stars" is that I'd love to be able to explore strange new worlds in the Ascension mod environment (i.e. new graphics representing different worlds).

I don't know what direction you plan on taking regarding scenarios, but when you feel its time post a thread and I'll see if I can contribute within the scope your imagining for this.


D

I've had several ideas for scenarios using your mod, however have refrained from posting them as you'd mentioned before you wanted to concentrate on getting the core elements of your mod working first.

Ascension is pretty much there. I'm not done with the unit graphics, obviously, and I've still got some balance issues, but it's close enough to start working on stuff like that. My intention is to make one more good balance pass in the next month to try to make things stay competitive for a bit longer (I'm aiming for the late Fusion/early Nanotech), add a few more minor abilities to units (now that I have them all working for the Mythology mod), and make a few more minor tweaks (like having a few different repeatable Transcendent techs to choose from, each with a different stackable effect).

Another thought I've had which sort of mirrors Talkie_Toaster's comment of "The ability to expand to the stars" is that I'd love to be able to explore strange new worlds in the Ascension mod environment (i.e. new graphics representing different worlds).

The only thing really holding that up is that we can't modify terrain/improvement/resource graphics. It's a bit of a pain for a mod taking place on Earth, but it'd be crippling if we wanted to make something more exotic like another planet.

One of the nice things is that I've already made modifications to AssignStartingPlots, so it's easy enough to add a set of "non-Earth" randomizations. So you can create a desert world, a water world, and so on simply by removing some of the safeguards in the core game and increasing the randomization a bit more. Add some new terrain colors for each, and you're basically there.

I don't know what direction you plan on taking regarding scenarios, but when you feel its time post a thread and I'll see if I can contribute within the scope your imagining for this.

There are a few obvious ones, the foremost being an actual Alpha Centauri setting with the fungus and such. Beyond that, pretty much anything can work, although if you want the sort of space-as-islands setup the tech tree would need some heavy modification to add spaceships and such instead of the large number of planetary units I have now.

Ascension is pretty much there. I'm not done with the unit graphics, obviously, and I've still got some balance issues, but it's close enough to start working on stuff like that.

OK, so I can post a new thread in this forum discussing some background/ concepts on each scenario. Then you/ others can review and see if its in-line with what your anticipating for these scenarios.

Or I can just post the concepts in this thread and we can go from there. Let me know which you prefer and I can proceed from there.

The one scenario concept I think which puts your mod in the spotlight is a saga involving Parachutists. This unit is unique to the future eras, so it gives traditional players (i.e. people who have only played the vanilla game) a new perspective on ciV (i.e. if pitched correctly, its a good marketing hook). Its easy enough to mod in that all I have to do is start the human's civ with Parachutists instead of riflemen. I then place the other civs into a context where the human player is challenged but not overwhelmed (i.e. the human player isn't completely surrounded by other civs), and gives the human player the opportunity to employ the Parachutists as they are intended (or not, depending on the skills of the human player....). As the game progresses then the Parachutists get upgraded into Drop Suits/ etc.


Ascension is pretty much there. My intention is to make one more good balance pass in the next month to try to make things stay competitive for a bit longer

And speaking of Parachutists, maybe its just because its a new-found toy for me, but I'm finding them to be a huge advantage, as follows:

- Drop Medics: quickly placing a medic where its needed (i.e. not having to move wounded units) is a distinct advantage that an AI isn't programmed to do (i.e. advantage - human)

- During the late Nuclear era I find myself chunking out Parachutists every chance I get in all my cities (maybe one or two per city, but cumulatively its significant). The non-skilled of these (i.e. units produced in cities without Armory's) I drop behind enemy lines during offensive actions and use as speed bumps: if the unit survives the AIs initial counterattack, the parachutist usually gets it first promotion, which I then use use to immediately heal the unit, and next turn the AI has to again try and batter thru my Parachutists to relieve whatever objective I am driving towards. This strategy of Drop-n-Plop is something the AIs aren't programmed to deal with: instead of using their own Parachutists to jump over my roadblock, they'll use their Parachutists to attack my speed bumps. Advantage: human.

- I place my Parachutists outside the two-tile city radii that are effected by nuclear blasts. If I deem it necessary I can then employ these units as replacements along the defensive perimeter by dropping them into gaps in my defenses, thereby mitigating the offensive effectiveness of nuclear weapons. This strategy also holds true for situations involving conventional offensives by the AIs where they are grinding down my defenses: a well-timed para-drop can very quickly turn the tide against an AI.

The one thing I've thought to mitigate or tone down the effectiveness of Paratroops would be to take away their ability to insta-heal. Rationally speaking this makes sense, as they are highly specialized troops who are usually behind enemy lines, so it doesn't make sense that they should be able instantly re-enforce themselves. From a gameplay perspective I think it would also help tone down the human's advantage in the use of this unit.

The other item I think could be toned down would be the Supercollider: 10 units of uranium means 5 nuclear missiles, and I've optimized my playing style such that I'm usually in position to immediately purchase one missile, and shortly thereafter start building the next one. I've also marked the Supercollider as one of my Benchmark Wonders, and almost exclusively I am able to snag this (that's of course if I've survived the game long enough to get to that point, but that's a discussion for another post).

D

Or I can just post the concepts in this thread and we can go from there. Let me know which you prefer and I can proceed from there.

I'd say keep it in this thread. I can't really think of any scenarios that won't be explicitly linked to one of the three content mods, so it's best to keep the discussion in threads like this.

And speaking of Parachutists, maybe its just because its a new-found toy for me, but I'm finding them to be a huge advantage, as follows:

If you're referring to the Paratroopers, those ARE in the vanilla game, you know. Sure, no one really pays attention to the Modern Era units because the game's basically over, but I didn't add those. (I tweaked their stats a bit, though, and inserted them into a new upgrade chain.)

As to drop units in general, I abused the heck out of that mechanism in SMAC. All of my Rovers or Hovertanks would have drop pods. All of my Colony Pods had drop pods. I'd have a few Workers with drop pods for beachhead improvement, although I generally wouldn't bother with anything beyond that. It was a great feature, albeit one the AI was horrible at using.

This strategy of Drop-n-Plop is something the AIs aren't programmed to deal with: instead of using their own Parachutists to jump over my roadblock, they'll use their Parachutists to attack my speed bumps. Advantage: human.

And the disturbing part about this is that the paradrop function is something the devs put in years ago, so it's not like the AI has any excuse not to use it correctly. Just goes to show you, if we get the DLL and someone remakes the AI behavior, things could get scary.

The other item I think could be toned down would be the Supercollider: 10 units of uranium means 5 nuclear missiles, and I've optimized my playing style such that I'm usually in position to immediately purchase one missile, and shortly thereafter start building the next one.

Yes, but remember: compared to the vanilla game:
> I have FAR more units that require uranium, so you'll be spreading it thinner. Using all that uranium for nukes when you've got destroyers and subs waiting to upgrade to stealth ships, or helicopters to vertols, or fighters and bombers to needlejets...
> Uranium deposits provide more units of it, to account for the above, but it's still a net loss until you get Fusion Labs or the Supercollider.
> Nukes will get intercepted some of the time.

Now, I'm not saying that it can't be tweaked. Make it require dilithium, reduce the amount to 5, even move it to a Fusion-era tech if need be. I'll look into it.

I'd say keep it in this thread. I can't really think of any scenarios that won't be explicitly linked to one of the three content mods, so it's best to keep the discussion in threads like this. .

Scenario ideas are as follows:

1) A Hop, Skip, and a Jump: as society on a planet crumbles, you are in charge of the last contingent of Peace-keeping forces, which happens to be a Brigade of Paratroopers (i.e. 4-ish Paratroopers). With global anarchy reigning, can you re-assert authority on this frontier world?

If you're referring to the Paratroopers, those ARE in the vanilla game, you know. Sure, no one really pays attention to the Modern Era units because the game's basically over .

And the last time I checked vanilla ciV the balance was very poor on an Industrial or Modern era start, so probably not too many people play a lot of games starting in these eras, and even fewer would develop strategies for drop troops in the ciV environment. So the thought here would be that by giving the player Paratrooper units to begin with, that it would "introduce" a lot of people to this unit, and put them into an environment where the players could explore the various uses and strategies these unique units provide them.

2) Pax Galactica: concerned for our planet's safety, a "benevolent" alien society has deemed that there will be no nuclear warfare on our planet, and have established Sentinels around our planet to intercept any nuclear weapon launches (this can be accomplished by giving C-S SDI's and Orbital Defense Pods, and setting the C-S to hating the regular AI civs and the human player). The senario name is actually from a short-story with the same premise.

3) The Black Forest: one of the things I've noticed on the Standard sized Continent maps I play on is that generally speaking, the AIs who start out in the middle of the continents (i.e. bordered by 3 to 4 other civs) usually end up on the short end of the stick. So I wondered what AI civ would be a good candidate to be placed in the middle of the map? One thought I had was the the Iriquois with their ability to use forested tiles as roads would be a good candidate for this. I'm envisioning creating a large swath of forested land within the Iriquois cultural borders where the Iriquois can quickly move from one front to another as needed, while the forested tiles would also impede human and AI invasions into the Black Forest.

4) A Plague of Machines: Alistair Reynolds has a series of books which has a plague that is capable of infecting both man and machine. My thought would be that if I could give the Barbarians cities and pump up some of their other abilities, that I could make them into a threatening civ that is capable of conquering other AI civs, and even overwhelming an entire planet. The premise for this scenario would be that a bio-engineered plague has gotten loose on this world, enslaving man and machine. Or to put it another way, its a "Zombie Apocalypse" style scenario.



And the disturbing part about this is that the paradrop function is something the devs put in years ago, so it's not like the AI has any excuse not to use it correctly. Just goes to show you, if we get the DLL and someone remakes the AI behavior, things could get scary. .

:goodjob:


D

And the last time I checked vanilla ciV the balance was very poor on an Industrial or Modern era start

Calling it "very poor" is generous, in my experience. The devs had been using a strategy of cost reductions for earlier eras, and extrapolated it to a ridiculous extremes in the later eras. Techs costing only 20% of their original values, that sort of thing, and the AI just couldn't handle that well. An awful lot of the balance changes I've made have been trying to fix this.

But yes, one of the things I think the game is really missing are good late-era scenarios. Every Civ game always does a WW2 scenario (either in the base game, an expansion, or a very early mod), but nothing beyond that. Most "modern" settings don't really do much with it. Back when I was mapping out the "official" timeline for use in the Civilopedia entries, I brought up a bunch of later wars to explain the development of the high-tech units. So I could easily make a few later war scenarios, like the Resource Wars (especially the Neutronium battles over Antarctica, which'd allow for a custom map) to use all of my custom units without having to deal with the balance issues of having a fully developed industrial world.

One semi-scenario I'd been considering was taking my existing mod, and just ramping up the Psi units into a sort of "zombie apocalypse" playstyle. Instead of a slow trickle of Psi units that can be contained with a few units, make a flood of them. Give them the Spawn ability (used by Zombie and Vampire units in my Mythology mod) that lets them create copies whenever they kill a unit. Raise their power levels, giving them enough extra promotions that they'll often win. Make Spore Towers spawn a psi unit in each adjacent hex when they're created and each turn, instead of just one unit in the same hex. Make the more dangerous Psi units (Chiron Locusts and Nessus Worms) appear immediately instead of waiting until the Nanotech Era. Have the percentage chances increase with time, so that a 20% chance of getting a Mind Worm on turn 1 becomes a 25% chance on turn 10, a 30% chance on turn 20, and so on. (This last one I've been looking at adding to the core game, albeit not ramping up that quickly.)
Instead of a nuisance that can be contained over time, you'd face an ever-growing wave of enemies and it'd only be a question of how long you could last. You'd be nuking your own lands, just to kill the Spore Towers that you can't reach to buy some time. Thing is, I don't even need a scenario for this; since it's all Lua-driven anyway, I could simply add it as an option in the setup screen, sort of like a OCC or Always War game. The only real problem is that the AI players would be quickly overrun, so I'd need to add one additional element: World Peace. When the Breakout happens, all nations would stop fighting each other and would join forces against the horde, permanently. It'd be better if you turned on Always Peace from the start, so that the AIs would use the pre-Breakout time to build up their forces; the game actually has that option, it's just hidden by default. (And obviously, turn off all of the victory conditions.)
There are still some balance issues with this, like Improvements. The psi units would pillage them all and you'd never be able to get a Worker out to fix most of them. So maybe I could change the wild Psi units to not have the pillage ability; you wouldn't be able to work hexes they're standing on, but once you cleared a hex it'd be back to full production.

But there are other options as well. The running theme of my civilopedia timeline was a series of narrowly averted catastrophes; obviously, for the world to survive long enough to reach transcendence you couldn't have a true apocalypse. But if the Rain of Fire (the brief nuclear war of 2077) hadn't been stopped cold by anti-nuke systems, you'd have the Fallout universe. If Skynet's robot uprising hadn't been stopped, you'd have the Terminator universe. If one of the plagues I mentioned hadn't been stopped, you could easily have a scenario like the Years of Rice and Salt, where an entire continent is resettled by the rest of the world after the nations there were utterly destroyed.

2) Pax Galactica: concerned for our planet's safety, a "benevolent" alien society has deemed that there will be no nuclear warfare on our planet,

That could be handled easily as well, since nuke interception is managed through my Lua code. Just destroy all existing nuke units and add a CanConstruct check to prevent anyone from building a new nuke. Or set interception to a much higher value, if you want it to still be remotely possible to nuke someone.

I'd actually been looking at giving all city-states the equivalents of SDI/ODP projects automatically at certain techs, since they can't build projects normally. (Or, make CS-specific buildings that do this.). But I'm trying to implement better nuke logic, now that I can get the target hex from the mission info structures, so I'm overhauling the whole math. And once we get the DLL, the first thing I intend to add will be diplomatic penalties for using any nukes.

3) The Black Forest: one of the things I've noticed on the Standard sized Continent maps I play on is that generally speaking, the AIs who start out in the middle of the continents (i.e. bordered by 3 to 4 other civs) usually end up on the short end of the stick.

Everyone who starts out in the middle suffers, because the AI's hatred is based too heavily on proximity, hating anyone whose borders impinge on his own. Being on the edges means most AIs won't hate you for that. Rather than make a scenario around this design flaw, I was looking to replace the whole thing with better logic in the Empires mod that cares a bit less about position and more about second-level (friend-of-friend) relationships. But that'll have to wait until the DLL.

4) A Plague of Machines: Alistair Reynolds has a series of books which has a plague that is capable of infecting both man and machine.

Back to the zombie apocalypse idea, but now with cities. You wouldn't want to use the Barbarians for this; simply spawn another major empire, give it massive bonuses, and set it to Permanent War with everyone else. While you could do this for the Barbs, they have too much hard-coding, like the various anti-Barbarian policies and the overrides for all the unit types and buildings. But another major empire wouldn't have those problems; you'd probably want to prevent that new empire from building any Wonders, but that's easy enough to lock out with Lua's CanConstruct function.

If you've played Master of Orion 3, they had a race exactly like this. It had much bigger bonuses than the other races, but had huge diplomatic penalties that nearly always resulted in a state of permanent war with at least one neighbor. (That game had a LOT of balance and design issues, but its race design/relationship mechanism was actually pretty nice.) So make a new civ, prevent the player from choosing it, and when you reach the trigger point it starts "corrupting" fringe cities to form a new, hostile empire. There are plenty of different stories with this sort of theme to choose from, whether it's Berserkers or Zombies.

That could be handled easily as well, since nuke interception is managed through my Lua code. Just destroy all existing nuke units and add a CanConstruct check to prevent anyone from building a new nuke. Or set interception to a much higher value, if you want it to still be remotely possible to nuke someone.

My thought from a marketing perspective would be to highlight how effective your SDI/ODPs are, so would want to leave the nukes in-game, so the scenario players could "experience" (witness?) this element of your mod.


I'd actually been looking at giving all city-states the equivalents of SDI/ODP projects automatically at certain techs, since they can't build projects normally. (Or, make CS-specific buildings that do this.). But I'm trying to implement better nuke logic, now that I can get the target hex from the mission info structures, so I'm overhauling the whole math.

Concerning the "Pax Galctica" scenario:the pic below shows what I'm running into in seeing what I can do to generate the scenario. I can build the cities, but I don't get the option to selct the SDI or ODPs (and I remember now that this is controlled via Lua, so these items are not "buildings" or "units" per se). I can give the individual players the money to purchase these items, however I don't have that option with the C-S unfortunately. Rather frustrating! :mad:

Regardless, you can see the approach I am taking regarding the cities I plan on using for this scenario in that I am making them inaccessible to being conquered (land equivalents would be surrounded by mountains). And placing a nice range 4 Plasma Artillery in each city should condition the players to steering clear of these "cities" as well.


Everyone who starts out in the middle suffers, because the AI's hatred is based too heavily on proximity, hating anyone whose borders impinge on his own. Being on the edges means most AIs won't hate you for that. Rather than make a scenario around this design flaw, I was looking to replace the whole thing with better logic in the Empires mod that cares a bit less about position and more about second-level (friend-of-friend) relationships.

I was looking at this from the slant of how can I as a scenario generator build a scenario where the center AI is competitive. One of the underlieing themes for scenarios I've always pursued is to give the human players different experiences than what the base game can give you: a strong AI in the center of a map definately falls into this category. That plus its good info for a scenario generator as to what works (and conversely what doesn't work) in regards to building a strong/ competitive AI in a scenario (i.e. I consider it a good educational experience).



Back to the zombie apocalypse idea, but now with cities. You wouldn't want to use the Barbarians for this;

Here again I think what I am pursueing here is 1) a different experience for the players, and 2) a better understanding for me of what I can do with the Barbarians in scenario environments. Modifying the xml files that control what the Barbs can build (i.e. a mod to your mod in a sense) I think should make them more challenging in the fixed environment that is a scenario (i.e. I would build the scenario around the strengths of my villain).

Another idea that I had for a scenario was "Ice, Steel, and Water" which would take place on an icy water world. The map would have free-floating ice even in the equator region, and I'd have to edit the units to emphasize naval warfare ( I was thinking about sort of modeling the unit selection after Schafer's "Final Frontier", which to a certain extent can be viewed as similar if you just replace space with water, and solar systems with archapeligos). Because of the ice, submarine warfare would become a more viable option. One thing I noticed when I was playing around with the map generator for waterworlds was that there wasn't very much uranium placed naturally in waterworld style maps. Not a problem in a scenario, but I wonder how players who enjoy waterworld environments deal with it?

D

Concerning the "Pax Galctica" scenario:the pic below shows what I'm running into in seeing what I can do to generate the scenario. I can build the cities, but I don't get the option to selct the SDI or ODPs (and I remember now that this is controlled via Lua, so these items are not "buildings" or "units" per se). I can give the individual players the money to purchase these items, however I don't have that option with the C-S unfortunately. Rather frustrating! :mad:

Yes, because they're Projects you'd have to do it through Lua. At the start of the game, have a simple Lua function give everyone one copy of SDI and/or ten ODPs. I'm honestly not sure what this'd do for City-States, who are normally banned from all Projects; I'm trying to implement something for them right now.

The other option is for you to create a new building in XML. The nuke interception chance is handled entirely through Lua, so it'd be trivial for you to modify the Lua logic to recognize a building type as adding to interception chance; the only catch is that it'd have to loop over all cities, whereas Projects can be directly counted from the Players structure.
In fact, you wouldn't even need a building. In the Lua code I set the minimum and maximum chance of interceptions; you could simply remove SDI from the game, and set the minimum interception chance to 50%. Currently, it's 30% for A-bombs, 20% for nukes, 10% for planet busters, and 0% for a subspace generator. (You'd need to modify the logic to ensure the Subspace Generator isn't destroyed when its shot is intercepted.) Yes, I know this means you'll be missing out on some bits of artwork and such, and it'll make certain techs less desirable, but you can do it.
(Note that ODPs aren't just nuke interception, they also reduce the effects of orbital weapons through another Lua override. So if you remove their anti-nuke effect, you should increase the other.)

If you don't want to destroy the projects and want to still have a very nuke-unfriendly world, you could always just boost those minimum percentages by a flat amount; instead of 30/20/10, make it 60/40/20. You'd probably hit the maximum caps very quickly, though, as those are 83.3/66.7/50%.

Regardless, you can see the approach I am taking regarding the cities I plan on using for this scenario in that I am making them inaccessible to being conquered (land equivalents would be surrounded by mountains). And placing a nice range 4 Plasma Artillery in each city should condition the players to steering clear of these "cities" as well.

If you want them to be unconquerable without the inaccessibility bit, you can just give the cities a custom building that adds a huge amount to their Defense value; the unfortunate downside is that those cities' base ranged strike would then be incredibly powerful, even if its range would still be 2. That can be adjusted through Policies, though.

And remember: just because a city is surrounded by mountains doesn't mean it's actually inaccessible; quite a few units in my mod can move freely over mountains. Skimmers, Gravtanks, Vertols, Chiron Locusts, Nessus Worms, Formers, Combat Mechs, Labor Mechs, Bolos, and Gravships. Plus the orbital weapons can hit the cities, even if they can't capture it.

Modifying the xml files that control what the Barbs can build (i.e. a mod to your mod in a sense) I think should make them more challenging in the fixed environment that is a scenario (i.e. I would build the scenario around the strengths of my villain).

The problem there is that, as I mentioned, Barbarian camps just stop spawning once you reach a point in the game where the map is explored. If you want to keep Barbarians a threat after that, you MUST use a Lua override like my Spore Tower logic; since it's Lua, you can easily tweak it to spawn whatever you want, really.

Another idea that I had for a scenario was "Ice, Steel, and Water" which would take place on an icy water world. The map would have free-floating ice even in the equator region, and I'd have to edit the units to emphasize naval warfare ( I was thinking about sort of modeling the unit selection after Schafer's "Final Frontier", which to a certain extent can be viewed as similar if you just replace space with water, and solar systems with archapeligos).

You might want to consider looking into the book "Seas of Venus" by David Drake, downloadable here (http://www.baenebooks.com/p-364-seas-of-venus.aspx). (It's free to download if you use the links on the left side of that page.) Obviously not ice-based, and there's no mention of submarines, but it's all about a waterworld where the little bits of land are basically uninhabitable (due to incredibly powerful native wildlife) and everyone lives in undersea domes that are more-or-less immune to attack, with "wars" basically being organized skirmishes between mercenary forces where the loser capitulates immediately.

The biggest problem for any of this is that with increased naval emphasis, you'll just need more units; part of the reason for the Stealth Ship and Leviathan in my mod is that I was trying to REDUCE the number of types of naval units, since they became less and less important as time went on. With long-range air units (and eventually orbitals) taking over the bombardment duties (and having more than enough range to hit targets without needing to base on a vulnerable carrier), Vertols and such being all-terrain units, and most land units now having more than enough mobility, I was trying to close down the naval operations.

You'd basically need to do the opposite, creating an even larger number of naval units to fill the roles that many of the land units filled. Or, modify some of the existing ones; the Skimmer could be given the Vertol's all-terrain promotion, to allow it to fill the mobile defensive infantry role while the vertol remains the offensive tool, although you'd want to reduce the Skimmer's other stats to compensate. The Chiron Locusts could easily be given this ability as well, as-is.
You'd want some new naval unit, to replace things like the Gravtank; it could be sort of a Battleship/Submarine hybrid, to balance the Leviathan. Give it some missile racks as well, instead of fighters, and remove the missiles from the Stealth Ship; you'd now have three naval units that each have their own pros and cons. Likewise, you'd need to modify the Bolo and Combat Mech (the only two Titans without the all-terrain ability) to be naval units.

One thing I noticed when I was playing around with the map generator for waterworlds was that there wasn't very much uranium placed naturally in waterworld style maps. Not a problem in a scenario, but I wonder how players who enjoy waterworld environments deal with it?

There are basically three options for this:
1> Remove Uranium as a resource. You don't have to actually remove the resource itself, just make any units that require it use, say, Oil instead. So less "nuclear sub" and more "modern sub", like how the Modern Armor replaces the Tank. Maybe have it require Aluminum as well.
2> Adjust AssignStartingPlots (and a few bits of XML) to spawn water-based Uranium. You'd need to expand what I went through to get the AI to improve its own water-based Omnicytes and Dilithium, to include this new resource.
3> Use the Building Resources mod component (which is already included in my mod) to create buildings within each city that generate the land-based resources. So if each city gets a free building that generates 1 unit of Uranium automatically, then there'd be no need to have large numbers of deposits on the map. You don't even need to create a new building for this; just give it to an existing building that every city gets automatically, through one simple XML declaration.

The thing is, on waterworld maps you'd be short on all the other resources as well, especially Aluminum. If you're sticking with only futuristic settings then you can ignore Iron, Horses, and Coal; Oil will be present in the water, but unless you change the Lua it'll be much more spread out than in the vanilla game. That leaves Aluminum and Uranium. So option #1 above isn't really practical, but the other two can be expanded to include both resources.

The real problem, as always, is the AI. If you make a map that requires a very specific playstyle, the AI just won't adapt well to the changes. In a waterworld, naval bonuses become very important, but the AI's flavor values don't really change so it wouldn't be any more likely to build these as before... unless you change those as well. And if the city in question is on a 1-hex island, the AI will continue to build land units there even if it has nowhere to put them.

Hi there, still on my first game with your mod (marathon :) )
It is great, but I have some questions:
1. Does the Breakout occur only in unseen land, as do barbarians, or is it anyhow linked with the average technical level of players? I researched the ship with 50% of the civs in renaissance, 45% in industrial and one civ just beginning nuclear. Now about 20 0turns or so later I'm in fusion (thanks to a little abuse of research agreements), the oponents are 70% in industrial and 30% in nuclear. No psi units.
2. Unit graphics - Am I doing it wrong, or are unit graphics from normal units being reused? (For example: skimmer=horseman, quantum artillery = artillery, stealth ship invisible)

1. Does the Breakout occur only in unseen land, as do barbarians,

No. Psi units, both during the Breakout and for the Spore Towers after that, are placed on any unoccupied (no units or cities) hex in the world, whether or not that hex can be seen. The entire point of the Spore Tower mechanism is that it's NOT limited only to invisible hexes like barbarian camps are.

The only modification I've made is that if the hex chosen is a water hex within a few hexes of land, it'll find the nearest land hex and spawn units there instead (assuming that hex is unoccupied). Otherwise, you'd have far too many Isles of the Deep roaming the oceans and too few mind worms. This also, in practice, helps city-states since they're more likely to be located in coastal hexes and have their units covering most of the nearby land area.

or is it anyhow linked with the average technical level of players?

Sort of. It's tied to the tech level of the Barbarian faction, which tends to lag behind the lead player by a fairly fixed amount, but there's also an explicit timer override: when you built your spaceship, the game picked a random number between 10 and 30. Each turn, you subtract a random number between 1 and N from this, where N is the number of civs that have launched a spaceship; once this timer runs out, the Breakout occurs. At that point, all city-states, barbarians, and players are given the Centauri Ecology tech and all future spaceship construction is disabled.

So even if you were so far ahead of the others that no one else had even started building a ship, you'd have 10-30 turns before the Breakout. It wouldn't matter exactly how far behind you everyone else was. If you were in a very close space race with another civ, to where they'd complete their ship soon after yours, then it'd go quite a bit faster as it'd often subtract more than 1 from the counter each turn.

If you're several eras ahead of everyone else, then there's really no point in continuing to play the game because you could wipe everyone else out whenever you felt like it. So, the mechanism is designed around the assumption that everyone's close enough to each other to not be completely overwhelmed in the Breakout.

2. Unit graphics - Am I doing it wrong, or are unit graphics from normal units being reused? (For example: skimmer=horseman, quantum artillery = artillery, stealth ship invisible)

The units that I haven't finished importing custom graphics for still use placeholders, generally a UU unit model that fills a similar role. Yes, that means the Skimmer uses the greek Companion Cavalry artwork, and the Plasma Artillery uses a basic artillery model. Most of the humanoid units don't have custom artwork yet, while most of the mechanized ones do.
The Stealth Ship, however, should NOT be invisible; this is something we've run into before. In the DX9 executable the custom unit models that I've completed work just fine, but they seem to be invisible for anyone using the DX10/11 executable, and I just don't know why.

If you're several eras ahead of everyone else, then there's really no point in continuing to play the game because you could wipe everyone else out whenever you felt like it. So, the mechanism is designed around the assumption that everyone's close enough to each other to not be completely overwhelmed in the Breakout.
OK, in the session tonight the breakout occured. And about the eras ahead, it's getting interesting, because your technology difusion concept works just fine - I only have one tech in fusion, and another 3 civs are also in fusion.

The Stealth Ship, however, should NOT be invisible; this is something we've run into before. In the DX9 executable the custom unit models that I've completed work just fine, but they seem to be invisible for anyone using the DX10/11 executable, and I just don't know why.
Loaded the game with DX9 and stealth ship, isle of the deep and vertol are still invisible. But I can see the spore towers (sort of a large red mushroom).

Very nice mod :)

I noticed a problem though: some units have strange animations (they seem to be running when they should be having their idle animations... this was a barbarian unit at the early (digital era) game).

Anyhow, I'm getting too overwhelmed by mind worms and the like. Is there a way to stop them from spawning (as can be done in regards to usual barbarians by destroying their encampments)?

Keep up the good work!

I noticed a problem though: some units have strange animations (they seem to be running when they should be having their idle animations... this was a barbarian unit at the early (digital era) game).

Yes. This is an unfortunate side-effect of one of my bug fixes. You see, if you deal extra damage to a unit through a Lua function, or heal the unit, then it won't update the graphical representation of the unit right away. This is most noticeable with Barbarians, because one of the changes in my mod is that all Barbarians heal at least 1 HP per turn, no matter what action they take; the result of this is to make the Barbarians much more of a threat, since you can't just whittle them down so easily.

What'd happen is that if a unit healed enough damage through a Lua function to increase the number of little people it needs to draw, and you attacked that unit before it had a chance to do anything that'd cause it to update its graphics, then you'd see one guy come running in from the other side of the planet, and your unit would try to meet him halfway. A similar problem would occur if the unit had taken extra damage through Lua, in the other direction.

To avoid this, every time I have a unit heal or take damage through Lua, I tell the unit to move to the hex it's already standing in. This forces a graphical update on the number of people to draw, which is good, but it unfortunately leads to that "running in place" animation. I figured it was just the lesser of two evils, and I've been trying to see if there's some other way for me to force the graphical override. No luck so far.

Anyhow, I'm getting too overwhelmed by mind worms and the like. Is there a way to stop them from spawning (as can be done in regards to usual barbarians by destroying their encampments)?

Destroy the Spore Towers. They're what spawn the mind worms, isles of the deep, etc., basically filling the same role as the classical Barbarian camps. They tend to be pretty strong against bombardment, but weak against ground units; a single Mechanized Infantry should be able to take off most of a spore tower's HP in one shot, especially if you took the Honor tree (because wild psi units count as barbarians).

The way it works is that a Spore Tower spawns somewhere in the world (generally one tower per turn), and then at the start of each following turn it has a 40% chance of spawning a mind worm in the same hex, a 20% chance of an isle of the deep, and once you get to later eras, a small chance for Locusts of Chiron and Nessus Worms. So you want to take out the towers as quickly as possible, before they have a chance to generate a few "screening" mindworms (on the turn the worms are created, they'll be stacked on top of the tower, and you'll have to kill the worm before you can reach the tower. This was deliberate.)

Other than the few mindworms and isles of the deep that spawn during the Breakout, every worm will be spawned by a Spore Tower, so you just need to get into the habit of prioritizing their destruction. The whole reason for this mechanism is that I wanted to encourage the player to keep some of his military units in his back-line cities, like an AI would, instead of throwing everything towards whatever front he's currently fighting on. This also means that if a spore tower appears in the territory of one of your city-state allies, it becomes really important for you to help them clean the infestation out, because city-states will rarely have enough of a military to take out spore towers by themselves.

Yes. This is an unfortunate side-effect of one of my bug fixes. You see, if you deal extra damage to a unit through a Lua function, or heal the unit, then it won't update the graphical representation of the unit right away. This is most noticeable with Barbarians, because one of the changes in my mod is that all Barbarians heal at least 1 HP per turn, no matter what action they take; the result of this is to make the Barbarians much more of a threat, since you can't just whittle them down so easily.

What'd happen is that if a unit healed enough damage through a Lua function to increase the number of little people it needs to draw, and you attacked that unit before it had a chance to do anything that'd cause it to update its graphics, then you'd see one guy come running in from the other side of the planet, and your unit would try to meet him halfway. A similar problem would occur if the unit had taken extra damage through Lua, in the other direction.

To avoid this, every time I have a unit heal or take damage through Lua, I tell the unit to move to the hex it's already standing in. This forces a graphical update on the number of people to draw, which is good, but it unfortunately leads to that "running in place" animation. I figured it was just the lesser of two evils, and I've been trying to see if there's some other way for me to force the graphical override. No luck so far.

Yes, it sounds like the best option between the two.


Destroy the Spore Towers. They're what spawn the mind worms, isles of the deep, etc., basically filling the same role as the classical Barbarian camps. They tend to be pretty strong against bombardment, but weak against ground units; a single Mechanized Infantry should be able to take off most of a spore tower's HP in one shot, especially if you took the Honor tree (because wild psi units count as barbarians).

The way it works is that a Spore Tower spawns somewhere in the world (generally one tower per turn), and then at the start of each following turn it has a 40% chance of spawning a mind worm in the same hex, a 20% chance of an isle of the deep, and once you get to later eras, a small chance for Locusts of Chiron and Nessus Worms. So you want to take out the towers as quickly as possible, before they have a chance to generate a few "screening" mindworms (on the turn the worms are created, they'll be stacked on top of the tower, and you'll have to kill the worm before you can reach the tower. This was deliberate.)

Other than the few mindworms and isles of the deep that spawn during the Breakout, every worm will be spawned by a Spore Tower, so you just need to get into the habit of prioritizing their destruction. The whole reason for this mechanism is that I wanted to encourage the player to keep some of his military units in his back-line cities, like an AI would, instead of throwing everything towards whatever front he's currently fighting on. This also means that if a spore tower appears in the territory of one of your city-state allies, it becomes really important for you to help them clean the infestation out, because city-states will rarely have enough of a military to take out spore towers by themselves.

I thought it would be the spore towers; mine are unreachable though. As it is, I'm in a situation in which neither am I able to get rid of the worms, nor am killed by them. My impression from this playthrough was that the combination of extra healing and spawn rate made the aliens too prevalent, and from too early on. But of course, this is just the impression from one playthrough.

On another note, do you plan to convert implement more Alpha Centauri technologies and facilities? I noticed the absence of a few early-game facilities and technologies, such as Network Node and Recreation Commons.

I thought it would be the spore towers; mine are unreachable though.

How are they unreachable? If you've got two or three stealth bombers based on the same continent you shouldn't have a problem knocking down any screening mindworms, and like I said, all you really need are one or two mechinfantry or armor units in the area to kill a spore tower. Air units are really not very good at killing spore towers; like all Titan units (and the Battleship and Leviathan), Spore Towers have the "Damage Reduction" ability where they'll heal 1 point every time they take damage (effectively reducing the incoming damage by 1), which means dinky 1- and 2-point bombardments from weak air units won't do much. You've got to send in something that'll do 5 or 6 points per fight, which means melee units, preferably ones with the Trance ability.

With railroads, it should be very uncommon for a land unit to take more than 2-3 turns to reach the towers, as long as you haven't been moving all of your land units to wherever your other wars are (which, like I said, is the entire point of this mechanism), and even a couple Stealth Bombers on the same continent should be able to hold the infestation down until the land units arrive. Even if the terrain makes it hard for earlier units to reach, most of the future-era units I added have the ability to ignore terrain costs, paradrop, or move over mountains; the Vertol even moves over oceans, so there isn't anywhere it can't reach.

As for the spawn rate, the logic is that the game will try to place at most one tower, unless you had Raging Barbarians on. Most turns it'll be less than 1 (percentage chance based on the number of other towers already on the map). Even if you controlled the entire planet, to where it'd HAVE to put the tower in your territory, it shouldn't tie up more than a half-dozen units to kill a single infestation. But because of the healing mechanism, you can't just send one unit to deal with an entire infestation; it really requires two or three land units and about the same number of air/artillery. It's possible that you just had a streak of bad luck, with a spore tower appearing in your area for several turns in a row, with each spawning worms right away. But in the long term it should be manageable, as long as you prioritize killing the towers whenever possible. And as long as you get into the habit of leaving a few units on defense in each area of your empire (like the AI does), you'll be fine.

(I'm looking at adding a zombie-type scenario where I just crank the worm spawn rates WAY up, to where it really WILL be possible to be overwhelmed. But that's a low priority.)
On another note, do you plan to convert implement more Alpha Centauri technologies and facilities? I noticed the absence of a few early-game facilities and technologies, such as Network Node and Recreation Commons.

No. It's not that I didn't like those buildings, but they basically represented the "getting up to speed" period of SMAC, getting the various essential structures into newly-created cities. Since this mod takes place on Earth, you're not starting the game from scratch at the point where the future content begins; even if you chose to start the game in the Digital Era, you have an entire tech tree full of buildings already available. Effectively, I knocked off the bottom tier of techs from SMAC and spliced the existing Civ5 tree into its place; the Rec Commons' happiness boost is effectively replaced by the Temple, Colosseum, Theater, and Stadium. Same for the others.

Now, at one point I was looking to put some of them in anyway, and just not tie them to the simple effects they had in SMAC. That's basically what I've already done with the Energy Bank and Children's Creche; the difference is that I really NEEDED a straight +Gold and +Growth building in these eras, because it had been so long since the last one of each, so I made room for those, but I didin't need another straight +Happiness building sandwiched between the Stadium and Hologram Theater. I just felt the Ascension tech tree is already a bit congested in the Digital, and I didn't want to stretch it out any further.

I understand :)

Are you going to convert their icons anyway like you did for Biogenetics and etc.? You could utilize such icons for other functions and it would provide icons to modders looking into adding to their own mods or personal games those buildings you don't want.

Are you going to convert their icons anyway like you did for Biogenetics and etc.

Already did. Quite a few of the icons from those unused techs and buildings (or at least components of them) are already being used for new techs, buildings, unit flags, promotions, build actions, and policies in this mod. I've got a full list at home to keep track of where each icon came from; obviously, nearly all of the techs and buildings/wonders I translated just use the icon of the corresponding SMAC buildings/techs, but I changed a few to use a better icon and/or quote. In other cases, I cannibalized an unused icon for the new types of components; for instance, the Terraforming build action icon (only usable by the Former unit) is the old Recycling Tanks symbol, while the Chaos Theory symbol was used for the EMP promotion and the Superstring theory symbol for the Fundamentalism policy, and most of the unit flag icons come from unused techs.

But if you mean, am I going to convert all of them as-is to create an extra library for others to use? Then no. I converted what I needed, and the graphical files this mod needs are pretty full as-is. Any more and I'd have to increase the side of the mod's download further, and it already takes an uncomfortably long time to build when I'm developing it.

I have made a splash image for the Merchant Exchange by scaling a shot of it's movie:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1732902/Civilization%20V/TheMerchantExchangeSplash.png

Since it was enlarged, the quality is not top-notch, but it is still decent enough that it is better than no proper splash for the wonder, so this could be useful to you.

My hope is that in the expansion they'll add the ability to play movies of some kind. If they do, then I'll just import the SMAC movies directly; I've got the original .bik files as well as Planetfall's .mve conversions.
Also, it'll depend on whether they also add the ability to include new sound files in your mod; currently, you just can't without replacing an existing asset. If they do that, to where I could include an MP3 of the old wonder movie's sound, then a screenshot might still be sufficient even in the absence of actual movies.

The main reason I hadn't wanted to do all of those yet was because it would kind of bloat up the mod's size, but I might as well just go ahead and do it for now. I just need to figure out the size I'm supposed to be cropping it to.

The dimensions of wonder splashes are 972x568. My .dds version of that image is 539 KB, so it shouldn't be too large an impact on your mod's size (as it's approximately 38 MB already), specially since you have implemented many of the Alpha Centauri secret projects as national wonders, which don't have splash images. The amount of splashes could be further reduced by implementing some of those secret projects (like The Self-Aware Colony) as projects, since the +1 happiness per city effect can be done by projects through Lua, as discussed in that thread in the SDK/Lua subforum.

If you are interested, I am also going to do the splashes for the Cyborg Factory, the Living Refinery and the Nano Factory, so I could send them to you.

My .dds version of that image is 539 KB, so it shouldn't be too large an impact on your mod's size (as it's approximately 38 MB already),

539 kB, times 38 wonders (national or world), is not negligible compared to that 38MB size (most of which is from the 2048 icon atlas files or unit model textures). And if they fix it to where we can import sounds, then add 38 wonder audios and 48 tech audios to that number. Like I said, it adds up fast. I'm not going to let the size hold me back, but I'm not sure if I want to blow it up just for placeholders that'd be removed if/when the devs give us the functionality I REALLY want, to show movies.

specially since you have implemented many of the Alpha Centauri secret projects as national wonders, which don't have splash images.

That's something I'm going to look into; in terms of the XML, the vanilla game's national wonders just don't set the WonderSplash variables, and presumably the UI doesn't trigger the popup, but there's no reason that it couldn't be told to do so if those variables did exist for a National Wonder. All of the Wonders were drawn from SMAC, so it'd be a shame to import the content for half of them and not for the other half, given that my choices for which were World and which were National Wonders was pretty arbitrary (or at least was heavily based on the type of Civ5 content available in the existing tree).

The amount of splashes could be further reduced by implementing some of those secret projects (like The Self-Aware Colony) as projects

I don't really WANT to reduce them, though. What I'm aiming for is the maximum amount of content possible within a reasonable size. I'd rather find a way to make those DDS files smaller, to fit more of them in. Maybe a tighter compression scheme, maybe the game can be convinced to accept a .jpg instead, maybe a smaller size of image can be used. Like I said, the reason I hadn't worked to import screenshots for the wonders was just that I didn't want to overload the mod for what's potentially just a placeholder. But if I'm going to do this, I'm not going to do it halfway.

Also, Projects have a few other negatives that makes them a poor substitute in most cases. They're not tied to a city, so you can't prevent an opponent from keeping the effect once he has it. The game gives a popup to all players whenever one finishes (although I can override that somewhat). Nearly every effect has to be applied through Lua, which is just not as convenient and is very prone to cache issues; since we don't HAVE Lua triggers for most types of completion, the effects can't begin until the following turn and have to be checked every turn. That sort of thing. So I try to minimize the number of Lua hacks needed, to only use it for things that can't be done any other way in the existing XML.

In fact, one of the things I'm looking at right now is that with my new method for the Transcendence victory, there's actually no need to award a winner through Lua. If the game is told that it needs 50 copies of that project, it can handle the completion checks itself without needing me to do it (unlike before, when it had a 20-turn timer). So it's likely that in the next couple versions I'll switch that victory back to WinsGame = true and remove a big chunk of that Lua. It'll also require me to adjust things like the Advanced Setup UI, so it's not a trivial change, but it'd be better in the long term.

I don't recall if you already have a similar function to hide the "effect" buildings so they don't appear in the interface, so perhaps this code will be helpful to you:

First, it would be needed to add this line in a .sql file:


ALTER TABLE BuildingClasses ADD COLUMN 'Hidden' TEXT DEFAULT false;


Then, "<Hidden>true</Hidden>" would have to be added to every building class you wish to hide from the interface; for example:


<BuildingClasses>
<Row>
<Type>BUILDINGCLASS_ALCHEMY</Type>
<DefaultBuilding>BUILDING_ALCHEMY</DefaultBuilding>
<Description>TXT_KEY_TECH_ALCHEMY_TITLE</Description>
<Hidden>true</Hidden>
</Row>
</BuildingClasses>


Then in CityView.lua, line 1215 would have to be replaced with this:


-- Andrettin
-- if thisBuildingClass.MaxGlobalInstances <= 0 and thisBuildingClass.MaxPlayerInstances <= 0 and thisBuildingClass.MaxTeamInstances <= 0 then
if thisBuildingClass.MaxGlobalInstances <= 0 and thisBuildingClass.MaxPlayerInstances <= 0 and thisBuildingClass.MaxTeamInstances <= 0 and thisBuildingClass.Hidden == false then
-- Andrettin End


And in CivilopediaScreen.lua, line 1032 would have to be replaced with this:


-- Andrettin
-- if thisBuildingClass.MaxGlobalInstances < 0 and thisBuildingClass.MaxPlayerInstances < 0 and thisBuildingClass.MaxTeamInstances < 0 then
if thisBuildingClass.MaxGlobalInstances < 0 and thisBuildingClass.MaxPlayerInstances < 0 and thisBuildingClass.MaxTeamInstances < 0 and thisBuildingClass.Hidden == false then
-- Andrettin End


...doing such changes will have the result of hiding the buildings you so desire from the city view and the civilopedia screens.

I don't recall if you already have a similar function to hide the "effect" buildings so they don't appear in the interface

I do; my mod's hidden any of my effect buildings for the last six months or so. Instead of adding a new flag, I just set it so that CityView (in the Base mod) never shows any building that has the <NoLimit> flag set in its building class entry. I might change that to require both NoLimit and have its Cost be negative, in case I ever want to add a buildable building with the NoLimit flag set. But since I'm sure the AI would never handle that sort of flag well, I've left it as-is for now.

So this forum has been pretty desolate these last few days. Have you figured out why most of the models haven't been showing up in DX10/11? The Assult Power Armor has been showing up for me. Also, I reuploaded your mods to try and fix the tile replacement issue, the games still been pretty unstable however...

So this forum has been pretty desolate these last few days.

Well, like I said in the Mythology thread, if no one's posting any feedback, there's not a lot of reason for me to keep posting new versions here on a regular basis. The entire reason I post files here, instead of just playing them for myself (like I did with my never-released Civ4 Alpha Centauri mod) is so that I can get the feedback needed to make the mods better. Since the currently posted versions are stable for most folks, I'm going to leave them here until I've got something noticeably better to replace them with.

The end result of this is that I've just been working on the mods on my own machine, adding stuff as I go without worrying about whether it's stable enough for others to use. Well, I've been modding in between games of The Old Republic, Mass Effect 3, Skyrim, Minecraft, work, socializing, various medical problems, and sleep, so it's not going quickly. And tonight I'm going to a lecture by Steven Hawking, so not much time for modding until tomorrow.

Because of this lack of feedback, my main emphasis has been on less obvious things. Getting the turn number-to-year number conversion to work correctly for the Mythology mod, making it so that clicking on a Focus on the mandala shows the area covered by that Focus, adding lots of Civilopedia text and updating the Concepts page, that sort of thing. It's slow, low-priority stuff that I normally wouldn't bother with during the balance phase, but at the moment there's very little balancing going on.

Have you figured out why most of the models haven't been showing up in DX10/11? The Assult Power Armor has been showing up for me.

Wait, that one HAS been showing up for you? From what most people have said, absolutely none of the new models were appearing for them in DX10, even the ones that (like that powersuit) were simply straight conversions of functional Civ4 models. I'll admit that I haven't checked those in any detail lately; when I run a test game I'm often testing three or four things at once, and so I tend to stick with DX9, and most of my recent testing has been in the Mythology mod.

Honestly, what'd really help here is if someone else tried to do a Civ4->Civ5 conversion using the same input files that I did. That way, if their version worked, we'd be able to figure out what I did wrong. But there really haven't been a lot of folks working on unit graphics, and the few that do tend to concentrate on earlier eras (especially WW2). So I've really got no baseline to compare to.

Also, I reuploaded your mods to try and fix the tile replacement issue, the games still been pretty unstable however...

It's very strange, since it's been completely stable for me (well, barring the few test versions after I overhauled the memory storage mechanisms and UI), at least in the DX9 version. If there's a conflict with DLCs, or some specific setting on your machine, then I could understand the instability, but there'd be no way I could debug anything like that if I can't reproduce it for myself. If it's not giving you an explicit Lua error when it crashes, and if there's nothing suspicious in the database log, then I don't think it's going to get much better any time soon.

If you're using the DX10 and it's crashing, then it's possible that the crash is because of whatever problem is causing the unit graphics to not work. In other words, fixing one problem should fix the other. But I have no idea when/if that'll get fixed.

Ok, so i keep trying to delete and reinstall your mod to fix the problem with changing improvments, but ive noticed that the game dosen't even need to "reinstall" them in the mod menu after ive copy/pasted the new files into my mods folder. The mods are there, just turned off once i put them back in.

Could this be the problem? Also, any idea how to stop it from remembering your mod aside from a clean reinstall?

Could this be the problem? Also, any idea how to stop it from remembering your mod aside from a clean reinstall?

Well, deleting the Cache is supposed to take care of that, but it's possible that there's a list file somewhere else that just remembers the IDs of whatever mods you've had loaded. I'll look into that; it's strange, though, that you'd have problems with that since functionally speaking there's no real difference between you copying new versions into your Mods directory and me rebuilding the mod on my machine.

Well, like I said in the Mythology thread, if no one's posting any feedback, there's not a lot of reason for me to keep posting new versions here on a regular basis.

First off, apologies for not continueing to provide feedback as I had in the past. One of the things I'd mentioned during my playtesting was that I would document the things that caught my attention once, and move on: I think this is the best approach for playtesting someone else's mod, as it gives you the modder insights from other people that you can then consider whether or not it meshes with your overall mod or not. Your mod is simply to the point now that I'm not running into anything I feel that needs to be commented on/ commented on again. Or in other words, no news is good news. :goodjob:

The other reason I've slacked off on feedback is that I've gotten a promotion at work and am now a test lead (although it seems more like an Administrator position from all the paperwork I do - I'd pay serious money to flog whoever came up with the concept of Earned Value Management!). I still play your mod exclusively (I think I'm over 1k hours into ciV now - almost all using your mod), however its more escapism now where I just want to go and play the game and not have to think about the underlieing dynamics and balance.

Anyways, I do hope you plan to update you mod against future patches so people like myself can continue to play it.

D

First off, apologies for not continueing to provide feedback as I had in the past.

Wasn't really trying to point fingers or anything. It's just that my internal versions are generally pretty unstable as I throw new mechanics and content into them (especially the Mythology mod at the moment, for obvious reasons). Before posting a version here I have to make sure none of the unstable bits are in the version I post, which often means pulling a few bits out that I hadn't quite perfected yet. This takes time, and with work I haven't had a whole lot of time to spare in the last few weeks.

If there's not a lot of feedback on balance, then most of the changes I make are internal, and it's just not worth replacing the posted versions (which generally work) with ones that add little or nothing to the player's experience and that might be less stable. And by not having to back out the unstable stuff, I save time for myself, so you can see why I haven't posted anything new in a while.

Anyways, I do hope you plan to update you mod against future patches so people like myself can continue to play it.

I'm trying to have a new version of the Mythology mod out tonight, which'll also involve some changes to the Base mod. As for Ascension, really the only things I'm still planning on doing (besides the patch compatibility changes):
> Fix the unit models that don't work in DX10, and convert the remaining models. Including animations.
> Some integration work with other mods, trying to remove some of the incompatibilities I have with other folks' balance mods.
> A bunch of Civilopedia work. I'm having to overhaul the Civilopedia already, to account for the Mythology content, so I'll probably squeeze in a few new categories for this mod as well.

Beyond that, there's just the question of possibilities. For instance, now that I've got a better data storage structure, I can change things like the tech-stealing national wonders to be a bit less random (weighting the chances by how recently you've stolen a tech). So the question is whether I should make these sorts of changes; one thing to consider is that when the expansion comes out there'll be all sorts of new systems to co-opt/enhance, which means I'll have the option of changing some of these to use things like the new espionage system, instead of relying solely on my own Lua.
So most likely, you won't see any major changes to this mod until after the expansion is released.

So it's been a while since this forum has been active. My guess is that the expansion will bring some life back into it. I still look at the forum every day or so to see if theres an update.

Was wondering if you've made any progress with the DX10/11 unit models. Any idea why they arn't working?

I still look at the forum every day or so to see if theres an update.

Well, like I said before, if there's no feedback on balance in these threads then I just keep editing my own copy internally to add whatever features I come up with. (I have a 3-post rule; unless it's something important, like patch notes, I won't post more than 3 times in a row in a thread without someone else commenting in between.) It's a pain to try to sort out which changes are ready to be posted and which aren't, so by not uploading anything I'm free to experiment a bit more.

But it's funny you posted this when you did, since I was just about to post a new version of the Mythology mod with a pretty hefty set of updates. (Base mod would be affected too, but nothing for Ascension or Empires in this batch.) I'll probably wait until tomorrow morning since each night I'm under the influence of some pretty strong medications (side effects include mania, psychosis, obsessive behavior, and depression) and there'd be a good chance I'd screw something up and not notice.

And no, I'm not waiting for the expansion; while I know it'll change my mods quite a bit, I'm not holding back for it. For instance, I'm going to try coding up the persistent Event system for the Empires mod soon; since that doesn't require any of the DLL bits, I can at least get something done there. Likewise, the Policy changes I made in the Ascension mod (changing dependencies and positions in the branches) will probably get moved to the Base mod soon, since I think I want those changes in the Mythology mod as well. But like I said before, most of the major changes won't involve the Ascension mod at this point.

Now, that being said, there haven't exactly been a large number of downloads in the Files thread. I know this forum's off in the hinterlands, so I'm going to ask for an announcement when my Mythology mod's ready for real play (aiming for next Friday, the 13th, for v.0.13...), but it's likely that after that I'll slip back into offline mode after that point until either the expansion or until I figure out the problem with the unit graphics, whichever comes first. Not much point in constantly updating the files if no one's using them.

Was wondering if you've made any progress with the DX10/11 unit models. Any idea why they arn't working?

Nope. I'm guessing that it's related to the DDS compression I use, but I've played around with that with no luck so far. At this point I'm thinking of just re-learning the process from scratch to see if I did something stupid along the way; after all, the models I released before have no animations, so there's still quite a bit of work to do before they'd be done anyway. (That's why the ones I did release are mostly animation-free mechanized units.) Since no one else seems to have reported similar problems with custom unit graphics, it's probably something really simple that I set wrong, but who knows how long that'd take to track down.

Yesterday a Spore Tower showed up in my DX11 game

edit posted in the wrong place

Will you be using models from G&K's Empire of Smokey Skies senario? I could see the landship being excellent for the bolo, also those other vehicles could be used for something else

On another note, how do you intend to deal with the new combat system balance-wise? The spearman is now ten strength so it could be scaled in a simular percenatge based way, where the vanilla strength is 70% of G&K's new strength

Also are you going to add a new type of sea unit that can capture other sea units like the privateer?

Will you be using models from G&K's Empire of Smokey Skies senario?

No. It's just not the aesthetic I'm looking for; the Steampunk thing is too distinctive to mix well with the high-tech theme I'm going for.

On another note, how do you intend to deal with the new combat system balance-wise?

I'll need to see a lot more of what they've changed to know that. Chances are I'll just need to scale up everything appropriately; most of my future units' stats were directly based on their predecessors, so it shouldn't be hard to find new values for them. The only question is if they'll be adding any new mechanics to this system, which might allow me to do a few of the things I'd wanted.

Also are you going to add a new type of sea unit that can capture other sea units like the privateer?

Yes. Quite a few of the existing units were originally intended to do more than what they do in this mod. I was going to add Privateer units, but couldn't get the "hidden nationality" part to work; if they've got that fixed, then all Psi units will gain that ability (and get re-turned in other ways). The Stealth Ship would likely get changed in a similar way, to act as the future-era privateer. And the Doppelganger was originally going to be an espionage unit, so if I can get the Empires mod to include spy units, then I might give espionage abilities to several of the future-era units.

-----------

Really, though, it's all going to depend on how many new XML stubs and Lua functions they give us, and how long we'll have to wait for the DLL. I won't be able to give detailed answers to what'll change until I actually have the expansion in hand and have time to go through it with a fine-toothed comb. I'm trying to release one more solid version early next week, something stable to use as a baseline once the expansion is out. But there won't be any more mechanical changes until after the expansion.

Encountered a problem with the Ascension victory using the latest build - by the time I got the tech to go for the ascension victory, my cities were gaining population every single turn due to buildings, wonders, and policies (whatever it is that adds food to specialists or unemployed citizens is a serious balance issue - there's really no limit on growth because of that). Since the ascension victory requires you to wait for your population to "ascend," there's really no way to win with this method that I can see.

Since the ascension victory requires you to wait for your population to "ascend," there's really no way to win with this method that I can see.

It doesn't require anything of the sort. The victory trigger isn't when your population hits 0, it's when you have 50 copies of the Ascent to Transcendence Project. That's it; the population reduction is a side effect, it's not the victory mechanism.

Note that once you build one copy, you'll get 1 for free each turn, so even if you do nothing else, the game will end 50 turns later. Building more copies of it just speeds the process up, so a typical game should end 20-30 turns after completing the first one.

I'm looking towards having the Victory Progress screen give a count of the number of Ascended people, so that you can see how close each player is to the threshold, but that won't make it into the next version. So right now you just have to keep track yourself of what turn the process started on and how many copies you've built since then. I may have left a debug print statement in Lua turned on, so that FireTuner would show how close you are, but I'm not sure.

Ahh, okay! That makes sense. Yeah, the victory progress screen was the first place I looked for a possible counter. Not finding one anywhere, I interpreted the tooltip that pops up each turn as meaning you had to get your whole population ascended.

Okay, I need an answer on something.

In the process of updating the Victory Progress screen to include the number of people who have ascended, I found out that something internally has been changed in the last few versions of the core game. PreGame:SetVictory USED to work for my new Transcendence Victory, allowing me to turn it on in the setup screen, but now it doesn't. Effectively, the game will now NEVER allow you to turn that victory condition on... and this limitation will apply to any new victory condition added by any mod. It's not just UI-related; you can normally use PreGame.SetVictory in FireTuner to turn a victory condition on and off during a game, but no matter what I do the Transcendence stays off. It's insane that they'd do this. I'm really hoping it was just an accident, but it has to have been in there for a couple months now with no one noticing.

The problem is, some of you have reported triggering the transcendence process. I'm wondering how you could have, given this issue; without this victory being valid, the game won't let you build any associated Projects. So, are you still using v.2.03 (from back in February)?

Regardless, I've got a problem here. The only two options I have for making it work, then are:
1> Go back to the old method, and trigger Game:SetWinner by hand to decide the winner
2> Roll my transcendence victory into the existing VICTORY_SPACE_RACE, which obviously CAN be enabled.
For now I'm going to go with #2, and I'll post a new version after this weekend (when I post the final pre-expansion version of the Mythology mod as well). I still can't believe they broke this, though.

was playing tonight started at the digital era (after nuclear) got all the way to transcendence but the wonder ascent to transcendence never appeared it was impossible to win i'm using the latest patch.

also the planet busters should be banned or made so a unit can always intercept them like the plasma cannon they almost always get through flattening your cities nothing can intercept them that's not fair. no matter what army you have the damn AI just keeps spamming them and flattening your cities :mad:

also the planet busters should be banned or made so a unit can always intercept them like the plasma cannon they almost always get through

PBs CAN be intercepted, just not most of the time. The minimum chance of intercepting one is 10%, the maximum is 50%, and there's a 50% multiplier. That means SDI has a 20% chance of intercepting a PB, and each Orbital Defense Pod you build increases that number by 1% (max 10). So you should have a 20-30% chance of intercepting each one if you're by yourself. The thing to remember is that nuke defenses are pooled among all enemies of the launching civ, with a diminishing return logic. If you've got a 30% chance of intercepting one, and the launching civ is at war with someone else who also has a 30% chance, then there'll be a 45% chance of interception if he launches at either of you. This gets you pretty close to the 50% cap. So you should be trying to get some other major civ to fight your enemies at the same time, if you're worried about nukes. But no matter what you do, at least half of his Planet Busters WILL get through... and that was deliberate.

Each of the future eras is designed to have a very specific feel. The Digital is very defensive, all about grabbing lots of Wonders and improving terrain yields while defending from the new Mind Worm barbarians; the Fusion is about offensive warfare, production, and scrambling to control the new strategic resources; and finally, the Nanotech is Titan units and Specialist boosts, preparing for the end. By the time you get to the Fusion Era, you can't just sit back and turtle your military any more, because the Fusion is supposed to be a time of heavy, mobile warfare, sort of like the Industrial was in the normal game, and so I didn't want it to be possible to be conservative. Nearly every unit line hits its endgame unit in the late Digital/early Fusion, so you should have an excellent military.

You can build city structures that reduce missile damage, like the Gravity Shield, but PBs are SUPPOSED to be really tough to defend against. Your best defense is a good offense; build a few gravtanks, escort them with some skimmers and vertols, bring along a couple plasma artillery, and just conquer his cities the old-fashioned way. Or, at the very least pillage his Dilithium deposits; they're all water-based, after all, which makes it VERY easy to slip a few Stealth Ships in to take out his harvesters. No Dilithium means no PBs, but more importantly it means no Fusion Labs or Titan units; Dilithium was designed to be a very contested strategic resource, and you won't have a lot of it to split between PBs and Fusion Labs. Honestly, I'd be less worried about the AI throwing a PB at you and more about him building a Fusion Lab and using its Uranium to make even more older nukes.
And if you think the PBs are bad, wait until you get to the Nanotech and someone builds a Subspace Generator; one free uninterceptible nuke per turn basically makes you want to finish the game ASAP.

pillage his Dilithium deposits; they're all water-based, after all, which makes it VERY easy to slip a few Stealth Ships in to take out his harvesters. No Dilithium means no PBs,

i'll keep that in mind. how about making it so you can only build 1 death ray or ion cannon per city the ai spams these too and mows down my army before i can even get near his cities to capture them even the titan units.

And if you think the PBs are bad, wait until you get to the Nanotech and someone builds a Subspace Generator
yes i was having fun with that i built it :P

but no matter what i do the ascent to transcendence wonder never ever appears to be built...

i'll keep that in mind. how about making it so you can only build 1 death ray or ion cannon per city the ai spams these too and mows down my army before i can even get near his cities to capture them even the titan units.

I CAN do that, but it'd take more effort than it's probably worth since it'd require a CanConstruct Lua override as well as a rebasing check/override. Realistically, they'll already be very capped by resources; an Ion Cannon requires a Dilithium, while a Death Ray requires a Dilithium AND a Neutronium. So no one's ever going to have that many of them in play at one time; of course, with infinite range they'll be able to use all of them every turn (except for the ones healing), but they shouldn't be able to throw up a wall of defensive fire thick enough to stop a concerted assault.

What you have to do is use the two specific countermeasures to Orbital units:
1> Having a Mobile Shield within 2 hexes of a unit gives that unit a temporary promotion that adds +100% defense against all ranged attacks, which includes all orbital weapons other than the Subspace Generator. (It also makes them immune to nukes, which is something you might care about if the opponent is throwing Planet Busters around, but all Titans are already immune to nukes. And immune to nukes means immune to Subspace Generators as well.) Mobile Shields do cost 2 Dilithium, but they also count as a Medic, and they hover, so they're really handy to bring along.
(Note: I've been considering changing Mobile Shields into an All-Terrain unit, i.e. can travel over water as well as land. Doing this would make them a naval unit, which'd mean that they'd now be able to stack with land units AND Great Generals... I'm still testing to see if that's just too awesome.)
Basically, Mobile Shields are supposed to be a bubble of invincibility from bombardment for your attack forces, while you protect your cities with things like the Gravity Shield and Perimeter Defense. Your improvements might get wiped out, but your population and cities will be fine, which is really not a problem given the brevity of lategame wars.

2> Building an Orbital Defense Pod reduces the damage dealt to your units by any orbital attacks by 5%, in addition to their nuke defense bonus. Since you can build 10, that's -50%. And note that that's -50% to the BASE strength value, it's not a -50% promotion that'll be offset by positive bonuses. Since this is a Project, there's no city to tie it to, so once you build these, no one can ever take the bonus away from you.

Between those two methods, you can make your units take only 1/4th the normal damage from orbital attacks. And honestly, an Ion Cannon has a strength of 50, and by the Fusion Era your main combat units (like Gravtanks) will be in the 100 range already. Drop that 50 to a 25 for having 10 ODPs, and you don't even need a Mobile Shield to protect your units; an Industrial-Era Infantry unit would hit just as hard. So an Ion Cannon shouldn't be able to do more than 1 point of damage in each combat, and since Gravtanks and Titans have Damage Reduction (-1 damage per combat), they're pretty much immune no matter how many of these your enemies have.

Of course, a Death Ray has a strength of 150, so they're a whole other ballgame, but really, they're SUPPOSED to be the main counter to Titan units. 10 ODPs knocks that to a 75, so they'll already be at a disadvantage relative to a Combat Mech (100), especially if there's a Mobile Shield accompanying it, but they'll at least do enough to get past the Damage Reduction, and they'll make short work of your weaker units (Vertols and Skimmers, for instance).

but no matter what i do the ascent to transcendence wonder never ever appears to be built...

Yes, it looks like this was broken either in my February 17th update or in one of the game's official patches since then. What's happening is that the Project is tied to the victory condition, but the game always thinks the victory condition is turned off. If you hit Esc in game and click the little "Details" button in the lower-right, it'll list what victory types are enabled, and it never says Transcendence any more.

I'm in the middle of figuring out a solution for this. Most likely, I'll just merge the two victory types together; originally I needed the Space Race victory to stay as it was, because I was using it to track the spaceship components, but due to some changes I've made since then I no longer need to do that. (Basically, I now have my own overrides in the Victory Progress screen and the spaceship completion check.) So the next version WILL have it working again; I'm currently aiming at Tuesday or Wednesday. I just need to finish testing some Mythology stuff first.

sounds good and from now on i'm gonna smash all his dilith mines 1st :P

just curious did you get the ascension idea from stargate/atlantis?

just curious did you get the ascension idea from stargate/atlantis?

Not really. This mod's original name, "Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod" (which remains the name of this forum, even though I've long since expanded into a 4-mod set), should explain it all: this game's design was drawn (stolen) from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which was Firaxis' attempt at a sci-fi offshoot of Civ II, released back in 1999. In SMAC, you ended the game by ascending your population through a very simple 2-wonder system; complete them both, then you win.

Spoilers for those who haven't played SMAC and don't want spoilers for the story:
In SMAC it wasn't a pure "ascended being" thing in the style of Stargate; the story was that all the primitive fungal lifeforms on the planet Alpha Centauri (the Mind Worms, Spore Launchers, Isles of the Deep, Locusts of Chiron, Sealurks, Fungal Towers, etc.) were actually just pieces in a growing planetwide neural net that gained awareness as the game progressed. Humans "ascended" by downloading their minds into that giant neural net right as it was awakening into a full planetary intelligence (which would trigger a massive upheaval on the surface that would have killed any remaining humans), and the end of the game was a race to see which faction's leader would be the dominant personality in the new world-spanning lifeform.

SMAC did this by having you produce two Wonders: the Voice of Planet, to let you communicate with the developing planetary mind, and then the Ascent to Transcendence to finish the upload process. You'd unlock Transcend specialists somewhere around that time, who were just really productive specialists (and in SMAC, specialists weren't tied to a specific building), but it was basically a very straightforward 2-step process, and the first one to complete it would win.
The game's epilogue, assuming you picked this victory condition, takes place a million years later and talks about how the various personas still maintain some independence, but it was pretty clearly a "you win!" thing.

Given that this mod translates most of SMAC's concepts back onto Earth, the above scenario just wasn't possible to duplicate unchanged. And of course I wanted to do something quite a bit more mechanically complex, given how much has changed in the past 13 years and three Civ engines, so it needed to be something that could realistically be spread over twenty or so turns and not be quite so explicitly tied to a single Wonder event. So, I ended up with the ascension method; thematically it probably does share more with things like Stargate than with the original SMAC, but I wouldn't have put it in if SMAC hadn't had something similar to end its game.

Well with the expansion out in a couple of days time i'm sure it'll brake the mod in many ways. Had lots of fun playing Age of Ascension so far and can't wait to see what changes you make with the added Religion and espionage :goodjob:

Will you start releasing stuff on steamworks in the future?

Well with the expansion out in a couple of days time i'm sure it'll brake the mod in many ways.

Last week's patch broke a couple things, but they're not things that take long to fix, so my internal version is up and running.

The problem is the expansion; it changes a lot of things on a fundamental level, and that'll take much longer to clean up. For instance, Culture is now a yield, which means a huge number of changes are necessary just to get everything running again. I probably won't have all those sorted out before the start of next week.

And what this means is that all future versions of my mod will require you to have G&K. I wish it didn't have to be that way, but they've just made it impossible to do otherwise.

Had lots of fun playing Age of Ascension so far and can't wait to see what changes you make with the added Religion and espionage :goodjob:

The espionage will definitely change a few things, but not as many as I'd like. The G&K espionage system uses a behind-the-scenes spy system, instead of having actual spy units like previous Civ games did. Originally I'd wanted things like the Doppelganger to be half-combat unit, half-spy, but that doesn't really go well with the current design. I'll probably rework things like the Planetary Datalinks, Hunter-Seeker Algorithm, and Self-Aware Colony to have an espionage component, but I won't add any new Wonders, so any new effects will come at the expense of old ones.

Religion will likely have no impact on the Ascension mod at all. This is a pure science fiction mod, and most of that religious stuff belongs in the earlier eras. If I DO add anything related to the religion system, it'll be in a negative way, as in, remove what little bonuses you're still getting from your religion; the reason for this is that by extending the game, a lot of balance elements change simply due to duration.

Now, that isn't to say that this mod won't change. As we get more tools to work with, I can improve the mod in a number of ways that weren't previously possible. But it won't be related to the new religion system or anything.

Will you start releasing stuff on steamworks in the future?

Probably, but I'm not sure when. One of the reasons I never put my Alpha Centauri mod (now the Ascension mod) on the browser was because of copyright issues, but the main reason I didn't put the whole mod package on there was that it just wasn't ready yet. While Ascension is nearly complete, missing only some artwork and a couple bug fixes, the Mythology mod is going to require a major rework to be compatible with the new religion system, and the Empires mod is just getting started.

Is there any way you can salvage your Ascension mod for the expansion? It has somewhat fewer issues than the AoM mod. Your mod is the only one ive found that meaningfully goes into the future.

I don't see things like the mobile shield working, but maybe you could change the function of the ranger and troll, and turn the doppleganger into some espionage function. Plus, I think I heard something about nuke interception being in the core game now, but im not sure where.

Heres an idea; Is there a way you could work with the Espionage UI to make a planetary colonization interface?

Is there any way you can salvage your Ascension mod for the expansion? It has somewhat fewer issues than the AoM mod.

Unfortunately, "fewer" still leaves quite a lot. The big one is Psi units' ability to dynamically adjust their strength to match those of their opponents. This was the entire point of those units; they're for the player who's not in the lead, as a cheap way to counter the really powerful stuff. And Psi units are one of the key elements of this mod.

A technical explanation:
It used to be that RunCombatSim would execute before combat starts, and EndCombatSim would execute after it ends, so I'd adjust the strength in RCS and then restore it to its original value in ECS. It worked beautifully; okay, the combat preview would use the pre-shift values, but the combats themselves would work as normal. Sure, I put caps on it so that the weaker Psi units couldn't fight off Titans, but this allowed me to create a line of units that worked perfectly as barbarians and that helped semi-defeated empires defend themselves.

Post-patch, EndCombatSim won't execute at all for many units, which obviously screws up the reset. Okay, I could get around that in other ways, by resetting everyone at the end of the turn or something. But RunCombatSim was also changed, to where if one of the two units died, that unit structure is unreadable. I could have worked around that through storing the necessary info in other ways, except that this change means that RunCombatSim is now executing AFTER the combat is resolved internally, not before. (Because how else would it have cleared the structure?) And that means that I can't adjust the strengths at all any more, because I have nowhere to do it before the combat starts.

That's the sort of thing I'm running up against. They didn't just break the functions, they removed an entire set of functionality, with no replacements possible. The only way I could get this mod working again is to design some entirely new mechanism for Psi units, and I'm just not sure if it's possible to get anywhere close to what I really want.

So I was looking up when and if the DLL is coming out and I stumbled across this http://store.steampowered.com/news/8194/
It appears to be patch notes for the compatibility patch, but it says something called "DLL swapping" is now possible in game

What does that mean?

I thought of an idea to possibly fix the problem with Psi unit scaling, at least to an extent. What if you make a promotion that makes mind worms, etc. weak to gunpower and other older units, and strong vs. energy units, etc. (think of how spearmen and pikemen are strong against mounted units)

Likewise you could give negative promotions to some of the stronger units that make them weaker to mind worms.

And is there a way to make an invisible "barbarian camp" spawn under spore towers? This could then give 25g to players who destroy the spore tower and move into the space. Im not sure how that would work in players territory, though.

It's not a perfect fix by any means, but it should at least function.

What does that mean?

I'd guess, from the name, that it allows us to use a custom DLL in place of the existing one, which is an obvious prelude to true DLL modding. But since we don't have the tools yet to MAKE a DLL, it doesn't do anything for us yet.

What if you make a promotion that makes mind worms, etc. weak to gunpower and other older units, and strong vs. energy units, etc.

I'd thought of that, but it's not the same. If the Psi unit has a strength of 40, and it's facing a unit of strength 30 and a unit of strength 50, both of which share the same combat class, I want it to shift to 30 when fighting the weak one and 50 when fighting the strong one. So you might think, okay, make a type-specific -25% penalty when fighting the 30 and a +25% when fighting the 50. But I also want it to adjust to equality when fighitng a 35 or a 45, AND I want it to cap at +/-25% when fighting something below 30 or above 50.
So that means making a really, really long list of modifiers for every single unit it can face, tying each of these to a promotion for that unit. Sure, I can leave it as -25% when facing anything of type Archer or Melee, since those'll be long gone, and I can put all Titans at +25% for the Mind Worm. But units in type Gunpowder, Energy, Armor, etc. will all need unit-by-unit adjustments if I want to maintain the full flexibility of the old system. There are three problems with this:
1> It means I need one custom promotion for each Psi unit, since the modifiers for the Mind Worm won't be the same as for the Nessus Worm. (There are five types of psi units, not counting the "Wild" variants the Barbarians use.) Since I'm already running right up against the promotion cap, adding another four promotions is not a good idea.
2> If someone mods one of the late-game mundane units (like the Modern Armor or Mechanized Infantry), or adds new units of their own (like in the DLC), I'll have problems. Okay, this really only applies to Modern-era units versus a Mind Worm or maybe a Chiron Locust, since the more powerful Psi units can stick with the combat class modifiers, but it's still an issue.
3> While this'd save the Psi units, it wouldn't help the corresponding ability for the Balance Focus in the Mythology mod. For those of you who only care about this particular content mod that might not seem like a big deal, but if I'm going to spend a lot of time fixing something, I'd prefer to fix it all the way.

If they'd even given us a promotion ability for "+x% when fighting a stronger unit", I could make do. But I can't see any combination of type-specific bonuses that'd work well for all Psi units. Now, I could probably find some combination of abilities that fills the same niche as Psi units (some mix of +X% in friendly territory, Hidden Nationality, +X% when attacking, Commando, and so on), but nothing that'd feel close to how Psi units worked in Alpha Centauri.

And is there a way to make an invisible "barbarian camp" spawn under spore towers?

Not really. Barbarian camps can't be placed inside controlled territory, or if they are, they'll be immediately captured; that behavior, as far as I can tell, is hard-coded inside the engine. By the time you get to my future eras, most of the planet should be under control of the players, so most Spore Tower locations would cause this issue. I'd have to place them right at the moment of capture, and as we've already discussed, the combat-trigger events are now not very useful, since with the spore tower dying its structure would be cleared and so I'd have no way to know where to place the camp. Also, the amount of gold you get from a Barbarian camp is fixed in GlobalDefines, while I want the amounts to be substantially higher than that AND scale with era.


I can get around all of this by storing spore tower locations in a soft data structure (like MapModData) and if a tower dies I just compare the remaining spore towers to this list and see which one's now missing. This'd be quite a bit of work, but it can be done. But adding a similar mechanism for all of the other on-death effects I mentioned just wouldn't be practical; I'd have to store location, owner, type, and a full list of promotions for every single unit in the game, on every turn, and scan through the full list to figure out which unit died in each combat. That's the workaround I've figured out, and frankly, the amount of overhead this implies is a bit frightening.

Well, assuming you can keep within the promotion cap, I think the positive/negative promotions are the only way to simulate what used to happen. Id suggest making a "blanket" negative promotion to span over all units that need adjustment (laser infantry, assault power armor, skimmers, etc.) and a stronger one for titans, etc. This should save some space until the DLL is released. It wont restore perfect balance, but it should be playable at least.

I'd suggest making rangers slightly more powerful but have a defense minus, and trolls should get some type of fortification bonus (where the game treats them as if they were in a fort or citadel, which might work well for the AI since it never really builds those) and something like double or even triple healing, maybe throw in the aztec jaguar's heal after kill promotion

Unfortunately, I see no way to recover the AoM mod anywhere near what it was without the DLL, so it might be best to rebuild it from the ground up as a super enhanced religion system and extended classical era.

The spore tower not giving gold isn't that big of a deal considering that 25 gold is more or less trivial at the time of the outbreak.

Well, assuming you can keep within the promotion cap

I can't. I'm already 21 promotions OVER the cap, remember? That's why you can't use both Mythology and Ascension at the same time; I've been trying to reduce the number of promotions, not increase it. Even if you drop one of the two mods, you'll either be at 193 (dropping Ascension) or 200 (dropping Mythology), so I just don't have any room. And that's not including any promotions in Gods & Kings, so who knows how close I'd be to the cap now.

Unfortunately, I see no way to recover the AoM mod anywhere near what it was without the DLL, so it might be best to rebuild it from the ground up as a super enhanced religion system and extended classical era.

That's just not going to happen. If my only option is to scrap the entire design and just make it an early-era analogue to the Ascension mod (i.e. a predominantly XML mod with just a couple extra Lua bits thrown in), then I'm not going to be modding Civ5 any more (or at least until the DLL). I don't need two mods that play basically the same way; the whole point of the Mythology mod is that it adds an entirely new layer (or two) onto the game to create a very different game experience. Now, most of its core mechanics are recoverable, although there's obviously a conflict with G&K's religions that I still need to work out. (Or I WOULD need to, except that I haven't bought G&K because of my mod not working any more. Don't you love recursion?) But with so many things broken, I'm going to have to find workarounds for each, and some of them might not work too well.

The spore tower not giving gold isn't that big of a deal considering that 25 gold is more or less trivial at the time of the outbreak.

Which is why the Spore Towers give you 100 (Digital), 150 (Fusion), or 200 (Nanotech or Transcendence). 25 in the future eras would be ridiculously low, as you noted, but there's no way to make camps give more than 25 without breaking the early eras. So the "spawn a camp" bit just won't work. (Well, I suppose I could put it in a loop and spawn 4-8 camps in succession, but that only would work for towers inside your territory.)

So I have a question, does your terraforming and plant forests/jungles system still work? If so i'd like to request you to make a semi compatible mod for the expansion with the systems that still work while we wait for the DLL. Combat will be boring, but I'd like to see a return of this mod in some form or another.

I've found that I miss using those systems the most ever since the patch came out.

PS; I think you might be able to do something with the system that lets privateers capture enemy ships, idk how it works but it might be similar enough to the runcombatsim system to work with. (if not, I could at least see it as an interesting system to use, like a land unit version of it for zombie units, etc. Would be scary on barbarians)

So I have a question, does your terraforming and plant forests/jungles system still work?

They should; nothing related to their XML was adjusted by the patches, and there were no combat-related triggers involved. (Other than the fact that my units that could terraform now require a different art definition format, I mean.)

If, in the end, I decide that the combat changes I depended on can never be recovered, then I might create a small mod with the Lua mechanics behind the things that still work. In other forums of this site people keep asking questions that I answer with "oh, I've fixed that in my own mod long ago", so it'd be handy to have something they could download to examine for their own mods. The terraforming code would definitely go on that list, as would the hidden buildings, the hidden policies, the UI changes, happiness-generating specialists, and so on. Pretty much everything currently in the Base mod can still be used by others, but there are bits of it involved in the content mods.

But the only way I'd do that is if I've decided my mods are completely dead, because I'm not going to spend a lot of time working on something I'd never use if there's even a chance of restoring the version that I want to play, especially since I'd be cannibalizing four separate mods to make something like that. Also, note that I haven't bought the expansion, so there'd be quite a few compatibility problems for those of you who have G&K. I'm not exactly motivated to pay for an expansion to a game that I'd no longer want to play, so I have no idea when/if I'd ever buy it; the simple fact is, the core game bores me, and G&K doesn't seem to add enough to tempt me to play an unmodded game more than once or twice, and that's generally not enough for me to pay $30.

Who knows when the DLL comes out. But if it doesn't happen soon, or if it does and it takes folks a while to figure out how to add working combat trigger events, then it might be too late. I don't have a lot of free time to spare, and for the past two years I've spent a lot of it on these mods; I'm not going to hang around indefinitely in the hopes that my mods' functions become possible once again.

I just recently bought G&K, ive been playing it and have noticed a few things you might be able to take advantage from.

There's a promotion called Coastal Raider for melee ships that gives a vs city bonus, but what caught my interest is that the promotion also gives you gold equal to a percentage of damage you do to the city. Now, I have no idea how this works, but if the function is flexable you might be able to use it to recreate your old combat promotions.

Another thing I noticed is that with the religion, you might be able to recreate how foci worked in your AoM mod. In G&K there is a pantheon belief system, which works just like religion works with one important difference; pantheon beliefs cannot spread outside of your empire. There are several beliefs who's benefits take effect depending on how many followers that belief has in a city, and pantheon beliefs are separate from religions.

For example, I was playing a game where I was playing as Mongolia, I selected my pantheon belief and 1 out of 3 of my citizens followed it, then over time the followers grew. After I founded a religion not all of my population followed it, some still followed my pantheon.

I could see this as a way to imitate how foci worked if you can add more slots for pantheon beliefs, actually, if done right it might work even smoother than the old system

I was looking at some of your .fxsxml files, and some things looked strange to me. This is your colonypod.fxsxml, for instance:


<Asset>
<Mesh file="colonypod.gr2" source="Tool" />
</Asset>


It has no reference to textures or animations.

It has no reference to textures or animations.

None of the new units had animations in the version you downloaded. My first pass was just to get SOMETHING unique in there for as many units as possible, and to try debugging the DX10/11 issue, so I wasn't going to waste time converting animations if there was a good chance I'd have to do the whole process over again.

Adding animations was something I was going to get to eventually, once the high-priority stuff was resolved. Since it doesn't look like that's happening any time soon, there's no timetable for getting the animations done.

None of the new units had animations in the version you downloaded. My first pass was just to get SOMETHING unique in there for as many units as possible, and to try debugging the DX10/11 issue, so I wasn't going to waste time converting animations if there was a good chance I'd have to do the whole process over again.

Adding animations was something I was going to get to eventually, once the high-priority stuff was resolved. Since it doesn't look like that's happening any time soon, there's no timetable for getting the animations done.

I agree, but I specifically found it strange that there was no references to textures in the .fxsxml, and I imagined that that could be the reason why the units weren't showing up in DX10/11, so I tried adding that reference for the Colony Pod, but it made no difference - the unit still didn't show up on DX10/11. I wonder, by the way, whether it makes any difference to include references to textures or not in the .fxsxml files, since the .gr2 models themselves already specify the textures that they will use.

I wonder, by the way, whether it makes any difference to include references to textures or not in the .fxsxml files, since the .gr2 models themselves already specify the textures that they will use.

Units that have multiple textures (like battleships, with a "damaged" state graphic) need explicit lists in the FXSXML, and the GR2 may or may not have a texture linked at all, but ones with only one texture worked just fine with only the GR2 declaration, at least in DX9. And yes, I'd considered the possibility that the lack of animations/texture declarations/etc. may have been what was causing the DX10 issue in the first place, but the process was failing even for those test units that, to me, were direct copies of an existing unit. Something was flawed, either in my GIMP/Blender pipeline, or in the original models/textures themselves. I was still in the process of tracking this down when 674 came out.

Basically, though, my top priority was to get something playable, and then work on making it pretty only when I was sure the underlying mod was solid. That's why I didn't have any custom models at all for so long; having custom graphics makes the mod look better, and makes it easier for the player to keep track, but I'd been doing pretty well in my own games with just the placeholder graphics. This is also why I'd put the graphical work on hold while I switched over to the Mythology content; it wasn't that I'd given up on the Ascension mod, it was just that I wanted three functional mods, and THEN I'd go back to custom graphics.

And this is why the mod's on hold for now. With the current tools, I can't make a mod that I'd personally consider playable, although I've figured out enough workarounds to get fairly close. So until we get the tools needed for my mods to work again (which probably means the full DLL), I'm not releasing anything for public consumption.

Units that have multiple textures (like battleships, with a "damaged" state graphic) need explicit lists in the FXSXML, and the GR2 may or may not have a texture linked at all, but ones with only one texture worked just fine with only the GR2 declaration, at least in DX9.

Oh, I suppose I understand now. Thanks :)

Can I download any of your mods? I do not have Gods and Kings yet. And on a more broad note about civfanatics how do I send a personal message to someone?

Can I download any of your mods? I do not have Gods and Kings yet.

No. It doesn't matter whether you have G&K; the pre-expansion patch (674) is what broke the mods. I'm not going to be posting any files until the mod actually works again, and at this point it looks like that won't happen until we get the DLL (which might be several months away), barring any miracles in the near term.

And on a more broad note about civfanatics how do I send a personal message to someone?

Click on their name next to one of their posts. This'll bring up a list of possible actions; the second option will be "Send a private message to (name)", unless that person has set their preferences to block private messages (which it looks like you have).