Pie's Ancient Europe

[lymond]

@Magus and Kein - Thanks for the advice...much appreciated....I will try those ideas out....today

 

[barcafana]

I thought that this was the best mod ever until i entered the endless loop of high taxes revolt. There is no way to exit it because the cities just keep revolting and because of that i have no money to increase the science research and thus lover the taxes....
Maybe you thought this was a good idea but it wasn't. I was the number one and most advanced player. No reason at all for this to happen. This taxes things ruined this mod for many i believe
Also religions don't spread by them selves at all. My state religion is judaism and i have no chances to build misionaries until philosophy??
This mod could be great without these mistakes

 

[pie_at]

Thx! But no, this is all intended! Don't go under 50% science! If you do so, then you have a chance of revolt (pick a city, one of the bars on the left) in each city. That's because, noone will keep a large country until he has a strong economy! Do you know, what happened with large empires? Every great CIV that tried to maintain a large empire broke.... Yes, that's realism! The later in the tech screen (age) the bigger you can get, because you got new civics, buildings, trade routes.. etc.
Think of the Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites, Alex the Great and even the Roman empire split! Yes, please keep in mind, that taxes are a limiter for early giant empires! If you try not to expand quick and wait for better economic possibilities to expire, than you got it.

Religion and missionaries are different in this mod. For those religions that hardly spread in history, you can only build one missionary. For Judaism two and for Christianity unlimited. It's true, that Judaism stayed in middle east countries compared with Christianity which spread all over Europe.... even while the Romans spread their religion mix.

I hope you understand and give it a second chance. Really, try to handle your taxes and stay over 50%. Then nothing will happen because of taxes! I don't know how to mirror the fact, that quick expanding and conquering (which of course needs maintainance) is very dangerous for a government! Every time! Even today!

 

[Magus Zarkara]

Hey barcafana! It may be hard to keep the tech rate at 50% after you starting growing too big but it's possible to do it. If you know beforehand that this problem will happen (it always do unless you don't want to capture your enemies cities), you can prepare for it. What I do to keep my money up after I start conquering some cities is:

• Merchant spam, if you have camel make both. Send them to the nearest city, you don't even have to have open borders.
  
• Sell slaves in a city with slave market, I just conquered a city with pop 14 and sold all the slaves, I went from something like 600 gold to 900, yes that was a lot of slaves. This is actually very important and I couldn't keep my gold up with merchant alone.
  
• Sell crappy units on the mercenary post. By crappy I mean outdated units that you have and won't upgrade because it isn't worth it. I love to sell disc chariots that I get from defected enemies, but there are many units you can do this.
  
• Watch the number of units you have, in my current game I have so many units that some cities are building research because there's nothing else to make and I don't want to increase my unit expenses.
  
• Don't build roads in places you don't need to, it saves a lot of gold.

I've being with -50~100 gold each turn for a long time now and never had to go below 50% research.

Eventually, after you research all the nice economy techs your huge empire will generate so much money it is insane. Every game after this happens I become first at everything on demographics. While I can research everything at 5~10 turns the AI takes 15-20+. Just saying that the money problem really goes always, you just have to do your best to get there. Don't give up this mod before trying this, it works and I do this every game!


Pie, something weird happened when I tried to make someone my vassal. Hammurabi and I were at war with Hiram and Hammurabi offered to become my vassal. I said yes and there was a "declare war" sound and after that the game crashes. Since I was already at war with him it's strange that there was any sound. I tried entering the world builder to see if he was at war with someone I haven't met to see if it was causing the crash but it crashes when I try to enter it.

I've attached the save file to this post, if you check it out just try to make Hammurabi your vassal. I continued the game without making him my vassal because of this but this made me lose a good chance to have a vassal.

Edit: Hmm... Every time I reveal the fog of war to the right of the city Akkad (Hammurabi) the game crashes. Probably these crashs are related.

Edit2: That's probably the problem, tried again later on the game to make him my vassal and the game crashes, I won't be able to properly continue if this keeps happening so I'm going to wait for some help! Tried on another computer and the same thing happens. I also attached the latest save file.

 

[Keinpferd]

Hey barcafana! It may be hard to keep the tech rate at 50% after you starting growing too big but it's possible to do it. If you know beforehand[…]

If you know beforehand, right… When I was a "casual player", I wasn't aware for a looong time, that there's an avoid-growth-button in the city screen. Important button in PAE! Cities growing unhappy or unhealthy will cause much more trouble than in standard BTS. How is a casual player supposed to know that? Only a few people read the full mod description online, before they give a new mod a try – or even bother going through the "mod concept's" pages within the game. I didn't. When I started to play PAE, I remember my first posting was asking Pie, why I couldn't build any improvements. – Because they cost money.

I would be upset, too, if I was new to PAE and unaware, the tax rate (=science slider) should never drop below 40%, once a city has grown bigger than pop 4, and then had no way to get out of the vicious circle, as barcafana is describing.

Maybe it would be good to introduce a couple of ingame popups, which give hints and warnings to new players regarding the most common pitfalls:

• early exploration almost impossible because of beasts
• improvements cost money
• science silder and tax revolts
• health cap and disease danger

 

[Magus Zarkara]

I didn't have these problems because I like to read about all the stuff I can before starting to play a game that is new to me, but I know that most people don't or simply don't have the time to do that and prefer to go straight to the game. I belive that the popup idea would be great, since the mod adds so many different things to the game. Maybe even a popup with all the mod highlights and suggesting to check the civilopedia for more details.

Not that I didn't have any trouble! My first PAE IV game was with Julius Caesar and I had a lot of trouble especially since I didn't know that forests could be randomly chopped for weapons production. I admit I got pretty mad once I found out! Pie didn't translate the changes to PAE IV so I had to find things out by myself.

But since I love strategy and all this stuff I like to create strategies to overcome those problems. So when I find a problem, after getting mad over it I think what I did wrong and what I can do to overcome this problem on my next game.

For example, now I check the city screen to see how many health bonus I'm getting from forests/savanna and I ignore them so that I never have health problem because a forest was chopped. I also never depend on another trade to get health or luxury resources to grow my cities because if they lose it for any reason I get screwed. So now I only trade on emergences, like unhapiness because of war or a sandstorm comes in lowering the health of the city. The only exception for this way of growing is that regardless of that I grow 3 cities to 5 as soon as possible so that I can make a Ancient Observatory.

I wish there were more strategy discussion about this mod, I love discussing strategy so I can improve my game or even help someone with what I know.

 

[pie_at]

I am very sorry, Magus. Yes, it is the plot right to Akkad. I deleted the EventManager to load the original BTS one, but with the same result. On this plot there is a simple desert with flood plains. A new scenario works. I think, this plot was crashed from CIV itself. I could image, that a previous or this save got corrupt by saving! Sorry, I can't repair. :°(

 

[Magus Zarkara]

Thanks for trying! Since there was nothing that could be done and I fell in love with Immortals I decided to keep going and avoid that plot. But several turns later I decided to check it out again and it didn't crash! I think that Hammurabi's workers changed whatever was on that plot and it fixed it.

I made a super medic Immortal and every general near him gets healed to full, or really close, at the end of the turns, it's awesome, I deleted my supply wagons after making them since Immortals make them useless, and they are quite expensive.

Btw, I gave a persian worker to my vassals so that they can make royal roads and make my travel easier, just wanted to ask if you don't really see this as a problem?

Thinking about it I could gift special unique units like Teutons or Spartans that are very strong and make some more for myself (well, in the teutons case I could just make 4 and trade him so someone else could make more). I don't see this as a real problem for playing against the AI but in multiplayer could feel kinda weird. Not sure if you think of this as a problem but thought I should mention it.

 

[pie_at]

I am glad, Magus!

That's true! This is a very good idea to trade your worker!
And that's a good fact about the terrain elite units. I will change them to global unique ones! Thanks!

 

[Magus Zarkara]

I know nothing about civ modding so I have a question. Is it possible to make a promotion that makes you not being able to gift a unit? The reason I ask this is because some civilizations have more then one leader so if both are on the same map the first to get the tech would make those units and the other would be screwed!

 

[jimmygeo]

Wow! I just began playing this mod today and I'm already hooked! I'm a retired professor of ancient history and classical archaeology so I can appreciate the work and study that went into this mod. I've played others dealing with this area of history (obviously), but find PAE the most accurate and well-balanced of the lot (at least so far). I started a game as Carthage and have played 280 turns at noble level so far. Thx ever so much.

 

[yogiebere]

Alright I played this and loved it on my desktop. But now I want to play it on my new laptop so I installed civ4 complete (I'm thinking part of the issue) and got the mod, copied it from another file like I'm supposed to but then it has an error. The Technology screen comes up as I load a map and then the map loads without any interface or hover overs.

Any suggestions?

 

[Magus Zarkara]

I'm having a weird problem, hopefully someone knows a solution to it. It seems that in my game after some point I can't load my saved game anymore. Something similar happened before when I was playing on the large map so I just thought it was because of the map size and gave up. I've played several games on standard sized maps after that and it worked fine, until now. The only difference from this one to the others I've played is that this one is on Deity, the AI makes a lot more units now so I don't know if this has anything to do with the problem.

I attached the last working save file to this post, after this one I try to save but if I load it crashes the game.

Alright I played this and loved it on my desktop. But now I want to play it on my new laptop so I installed civ4 complete (I'm thinking part of the issue) and got the mod, copied it from another file like I'm supposed to but then it has an error. The Technology screen comes up as I load a map and then the map loads without any interface or hover overs.

Any suggestions?

The only time I've experienced something similar to this was when I tried to play a bts scenario with the bug mod installed. After uninstalling it worked fine. If it's not that make sure the bts is fully patched.

 

[pie_at]

I know nothing about civ modding so I have a question. Is it possible to make a promotion that makes you not being able to gift a unit? The reason I ask this is because some civilizations have more then one leader so if both are on the same map the first to get the tech would make those units and the other would be screwed!

I don't think so!

I'm having a weird problem, hopefully someone knows a solution to it. It seems that in my game after some point I can't load my saved game anymore. Something similar happened before when I was playing on the large map so I just thought it was because of the map size and gave up. I've played several games on standard sized maps after that and it worked fine, until now. The only difference from this one to the others I've played is that this one is on Deity, the AI makes a lot more units now so I don't know if this has anything to do with the problem.

I think there are too much background information for CIV per turn (mass of units and buildings). The more units (eg higher DifLev) the quicker a CtD.
Also when switching to Desktop via ALT-TAB. Please avoid that during play!! This causes CtDs! Except playing in window modus.

I will try to limit all units so that the AI can't build that much to avoid later CtDs..... (in a new patch)

Wow! I just began playing this mod today and I'm already hooked! I'm a retired professor of ancient history and classical archaeology so I can appreciate the work and study that went into this mod. I've played others dealing with this area of history (obviously), but find PAE the most accurate and well-balanced of the lot (at least so far). I started a game as Carthage and have played 280 turns at noble level so far. Thx ever so much.

I am very, very happy, that - finally - a historical adept person played/plays the mod and I am proud of your feedback! May I use your post as quote for mod promotion?
As a historical adept, you could add some promotive words in your signature
Nevertheless, thank you very much!

 

[Hinco]

Hi,

I love this MOD and I have been playing for some time.

But now there is a CTD every time I go for next turn. Every time.

Can you check why? I included the save file.

Regards,
H.

 

[lymond]

It's good to play the Mod again, but as I recommended a long time before, I think, it could really use the BUG mod. It would clean up the interface considerably.

 

[jimmygeo]

Hi,

I love this MOD and I have been playing for some time.

But now there is a CTD every time I go for next turn. Every time.

Can you check why? I included the save file.

Regards,
H.

It crashes for me, too. I'm using Windows 7 on an HP with 3 Gb of memory so it isn't likely a MAF.

 

[jimmygeo]

pie, By all means use whatever I wrote for promotion of your excellent mod! I'll add a proomo of the mod to my signature

 

[jimmygeo]

I've suddenly come us with a problem while playing this mod. I'm playing as Hannibal at noble level, on map PAE L4000BC 14CIVs, at epic speed. I came to the end of the turn and when I went ahead, Hammerabi and his vassal Xerxes declared war on me. Then it happened. The game just stayed there (for 15 minutes!!) saying 'Waiting for other civilizations'. All the function keys work and I can switch to the desktop but the game just sits there and will not complete the AI part of the turn. The savegame just before this is attached.

 

[Magus Zarkara]

I've suddenly come us with a problem while playing this mod. I'm playing as Hannibal at noble level, on map PAE L4000BC 14CIVs, at epic speed. I came to the end of the turn and when I went ahead, Hammerabi and his vassal Xerxes declared war on me. Then it happened. The game just stayed there (for 15 minutes!!) saying 'Waiting for other civilizations'. All the function keys work and I can switch to the desktop but the game just sits there and will not complete the AI part of the turn. The savegame just before this is attached.

This happened to me a few times. While I have no idea why this happens, to avoid it I loaded a previous save and did something different.