Realism Invictus

[Harrier]

A few quick thoughts:

• ALT-TAB on occasion to leave the program and come back. I think this reloads some of the graphics into memory and may help to clear out cached assets from RAM.

Also try using a memory manager. CleanMem is free and flushes (cleans) your memory every 15 minutes or so (you select when).

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Still investing your commerce in espionage should be worthwhile. We get extra benefits when shifting slider for culture, then why not some bonuses for espionage.

Yes, but you usually spy on your friends for reasons different than on your enemies.

Yes it would be more interesting to have espionage work without too much micro. For example a spy dedicated to tech stealing would continously give you beakers but it would consume your espionage points per turn. Or it could give you a tech boost modifier.
Similarly a spy could be placed to learn about the approximate size of the enemy army & so on.

Yep, this is a very worthwhile idea. Improving espionage might actually be one of our first priorities after Rev.

One big thing we could use is the ability of spies (or diplomats, separate units that would still use espionage points) to influence opinions of civs on each other (framing others, etc.). It could add more depth to diplomatic routines.

Iam sorry to say but this mod is totally unplayable save for the "Earth" map scenarios (which play out fine for some reason).

Still waiting for this guy to produce something I could see; he posted in two other places as well, and never replied to anything.

I think that may be helpful

Spoiler :

Well, if one day we decide to get a lot of religions in RI, we could go with it. For now, I see no gameplay reasons why we would need more religions than we have now.

As long time lurker i can remember that some time ago another forum user was complaining about prince difficulty level. Maybe there is something wrong with Prince. Maybe for some reason Prince difficulty give bigger bonuses for AI than it should be.

Double checked it, and the XML values at least seem fine.

The city maintenance costs seem to be slightly too high for the human, and too low for the AI. City productivity and research also seems to be a bit slower overall. I'm finding it difficult to expand and keep progressing at a decent pace, but the AI seems to have no problem. In past versions I would easily be around 12 cities by the Renaissance. I also find that unless you rush for writing and switch to Despotism right away you're screwed, since without it maintaining even 2 cities is quite challenging and 3 puts you way too far behind economically.

Well, that's Immortal you're playing at. I think complaining that a difficulty level that's supposed to be crazy hard is unfair to humans kinda goes against its purpose.

Gold producing Holy Wonders have always seemed to be one of the big factors in dictating which civs are going to be runaway civs. Would there be any way to scale how much gold each city with a religion would provide the appropriate holy city in proportion to the map size? and do you think it could be beneficial to increase the production cost of missionaries?

Yeah, we have some considerations on how to tone the role of Shrines down. Indeed, currently they are too important.

Lack of horses on most maps.

What scripts do you usually use? In general, horses aren't supposed to be plentiful (IIRC there is supposed to be less instances of horses than there are civs on the map), but not lacking.

Cottage has much lower yield compared to farms so the you have to manually get your cities work on them to make them grow, this is very tedious micro for the player. Suggestion is to maybe give them some hammer & food yield with tech so they can compete with farms.

Well, the purpose of the cottage is to provide commerce. I agree that AI shifting production back from them is annoying, but adding food or production to them goes against their intended purpose, and I think that adding more commerce could be unbalanced.

Levies don't serve much purpose unless you have very low production cities. Levies were quite common in most medieval armies. I would suggest reduce their maintenance cost, as levies should be much cheaper to maintain than professional armies. Same could be done about other levy type units.

Hm, yes, there are some ideas on how they could be made more useful. We might implement those in future. But actually, armies relying on peasant levies were far from ubiquitous even in medieval times. In most cases, they were considered a desperate measure, for when kings needed lots of troops quickly, and couldn't afford to equip and train them (or hire mercenaries).

Remember that levies in RI represent not every type of levied troops, but only the untrained and unequipped hastily assembled peasant militias. The same peasants under less desperate conditions would be, in RI terms, formed into units of skirmishers, or pikemen, or archers, or even light cavalry in certain areas.

So the levy units are actually a fallback measure for when you have no resources and desperately need some troops - or for cheaply garrisoning places that aren't expected to be attacked.

Trebuchets aren't much of an upgrade compared to catapults, they also get obsoleted fairly quickly. Similarly crossbows have limited use. I would say increase trebuchet's strength to 5.

Yep, that's fair.

Not sure about crossbows though, I almost never build them because of their very niche role which can be performed much better by other units such as heavy cavalry & pikes. Surprisingly they require a resource to build but a resourceless longbow is generally better for all purpose usage.

Different civs have differently balanced crossbowmen vs longbowmen. In some cases, like England, crossbowmen are mostly useless, while in other, like China, they can be quite powerful.

Cruel trait is a bit 'harsh'. Perhaps reduce the penalty so that it doesn't effect 1st promotion. Similarly foreign is very dangerous too. Sure negative traits are supposed to make you weak but these 2 are more harmful than others. For example excessive (-10% gold) & barbaric (-20% culture) aren't really punishing early in the game where it matters most.

I actually think Cruel is one of the more forgiving drawbacks, especially compared to, say, Schemer. Like Barbaric, Cruel only works in certain situations, and in those situations if you come prepared it doesn't prevent you from dominating, just slightly hinders you.

A building idea : Stone works. Provides some hammers & commerce on nearby stone resource, and maybe 1 happiness from marble.

While in the particular form you suggested it, it doesn't strike me as having a lot of gameplay purpose, it might be a good idea for a different reason... So I'll keep it in mind.

Food crops plantation aren't really strong yield wise compared to normal farms. I would suggest boosting them a bit.

Will look into it.

AI shouldn't generally pursue building the wonder which gives all religious civics unless it wants to get cult of personality or free religion or has no other wonder to build.

I think it generally doesn't. In my experience, that's one of the wonders that gets built last.

there are plans to make version realism invictus 3.3 ?

Yes; the most likely release date is Christmas, as per our tradition, but it might not be the nearest Christmas.

i prefer wait and play in full test and unbugged version. First impression is rather important ( thats why i play in 3.2 not in this what should be called bugism invictus 3.25 )

I guess to each his own, but 3.25 was actually supposed to be a balanced and de-bugged 3.2

 

[Babri]

i prefer wait and play in full test and unbugged version. First impression is rather important ( thats why i play in 3.2 not in this what should be called bugism invictus 3.25 )

For me it is quite stable. There would be some balance issues here & there but you can always help the team then by reporting bugs/balance issues to get them fixed quickly.

Yes, but you usually spy on your friends for reasons different than on your enemies.

Yes but that doesn't explain the lack of benefit for moving espionage slider. Everything other slider offers some good boost in some form, so why not for espionage slider?

One big thing we could use is the ability of spies (or diplomats, separate units that would still use espionage points) to influence opinions of civs on each other (framing others, etc.). It could add more depth to diplomatic routines.

Sounds like a good idea but I would say that we should try to stay away from espionage that mostly harms your enemies. Because that can get pretty annoying when 4-5 AIs are continuously harassing you with their agents & so on.

Yeah, we have some considerations on how to tone the role of Shrines down. Indeed, currently they are too important.

Hmm... Maybe remove or reduce the gold bonus & add an effect depending on the religion? Foreign trade route yield boost & espionage per city converted for Jewish shrine (capped at some limit), extra culture & trade routes for Islamic one & so on.

What scripts do you usually use? In general, horses aren't supposed to be plentiful (IIRC there is supposed to be less instances of horses than there are civs on the map), but not lacking.

I faced this issue when playing Pangaea. What maps would you recommend for RI when playing on Standard/Large map size?

Well, the purpose of the cottage is to provide commerce. I agree that AI shifting production back from them is annoying, but adding food or production to them goes against their intended purpose, and I think that adding more commerce could be unbalanced.

But still we need to add some incentive so that AI city manager doesn't screw with this. At start this is fine to micro but when you have a 10 city empire it quickly becomes annoying to manually force the city to work on the cottage because otherwise it would almost always work other tiles.

Remember that levies in RI represent not every type of levied troops, but only the untrained and unequipped hastily assembled peasant militias. The same peasants under less desperate conditions would be, in RI terms, formed into units of skirmishers, or pikemen, or archers, or even light cavalry in certain areas.

How about giving the ability to draft levies when possible? Currently drafting comes a bit late. We could get 2 levies per pop, the disadvantage would be that they would get the disorganized promotion that barbs start with.

Different civs have differently balanced crossbowmen vs longbowmen. In some cases, like England, crossbowmen are mostly useless, while in other, like China, they can be quite powerful.

I still find them very underwhelming for most civs, on the other hand longbows are more than decent in most situations. There was one fundamental difference between xbows & lbows, xbows required minimum training compared to lbows which required years of training. Perhaps we can represent that in some way & buff xbows a bit. I know lbows requires an archery range & xbows don't, but we still need to make it a major difference. For example levies could be upgraded to xbows for some quick defence, give xbows some defensive perks, they might not be better defenders than lbows but still they should get non-attacked focused bonuses against melee units & so on.

I actually think Cruel is one of the more forgiving drawbacks, especially compared to, say, Schemer. Like Barbaric, Cruel only works in certain situations, and in those situations if you come prepared it doesn't prevent you from dominating, just slightly hinders you.

Well after using 'Revolutionary' I think cruel is quite forgiving. Last time playing as Meji almost everybody hated me because of religion+revolutionary & 4-5 civs declared war on me because of that.

While in the particular form you suggested it, it doesn't strike me as having a lot of gameplay purpose, it might be a good idea for a different reason... So I'll keep it in mind.

The point of my suggestion was to in some way add local buildings depending upon the local resources of the city. This way we might even be able to simplify some of the consumption & production of resources we currently have right now. Currently industrial era onwards it is quite hard to trade resources because many industries would stop working because you traded a resource with the other civ.

 

[HannibalBarka]

Some general feedback about Realism Invictus. Right now I am playing the latest SVN available.

1. Lack of horses on most maps.
   

1. 
   
   Yep. in my last game on a Pefect Mongoose script, I had to build a city on a remote island just to get the horses .
   
   

   [*]Cottage has much lower yield compared to farms so the you have to manually get your cities work on them to make them grow, this is very tedious micro for the player. Suggestion is to maybe give them some hammer & food yield with tech so they can compete with farms.

   
   never use cottages. RI seem to be heavily unbalanced towards specialist economy, so I tend to use farms and very rarely cottage.
   
   

   [*]Levies don't serve much purpose unless you have very low production cities. Levies were quite common in most medieval armies. I would suggest reduce their maintenance cost, as levies should be much cheaper to maintain than professional armies. Same could be done about other levy type units.

   
   never build them either because of that very reason: useless and not even cheaper
   
   

   [*]Trebuchets aren't much of an upgrade compared to catapults, they also get obsoleted fairly quickly. Similarly crossbows have limited use. I would say increase trebuchet's strength to 5. Not sure about crossbows though, I almost never build them because of their very niche role which can be performed much better by other units such as heavy cavalry & pikes. Surprisingly they require a resource to build but a resourceless longbow is generally better for all purpose usage.

   
   Agree definetly on both. Trebuchet are cheap to upgrade though and do not need bronze compared to bombards. I also tend to build less crossbows and prefer longbow as they also come earlier, I beeline towards them because I love the Doctrine that comes with them
   even in my last game as China, I didn't build much of crossbows since I unlocked my super crossbows UU (chu ku nu).
   
   

   [*]Cruel trait is a bit 'harsh'. Perhaps reduce the penalty so that it doesn't effect 1st promotion. Similarly foreign is very dangerous too. Sure negative traits are supposed to make you weak but these 2 are more harmful than others. For example excessive (-10% gold) & barbaric (-20% culture) aren't really punishing early in the game where it matters most.

   
   the one I hate most is Revolutionary I think as it gives -2 diplohit !!!! given how important diplomacy is in this game (for trade routes as usual and also because it fasten your researsh and keep you out of trouble early) rev is the setback I fear most (and never play). for the same reason, Polititian (gives +2 diplo) is for me the most powerful (and thus I tend not to play it either as it's just tooo unbalanced)
   
   

   [*]A building idea : Stone works. Provides some hammers & commerce on nearby stone resource, and maybe 1 happiness from marble.

   
   I'd vote NO. Stone is already a too powerful of a resource (I think it should be made less powerful) as it guarantee early key wonders (when it's better build wonders cause cities are too costly) , gives you cheap walls (defense + 1happy i.e. 25 % more happiness usually early in the game !!! )+ better roads (50% better ). If it were me, I'll remove stone as it is just too powerfull.
   
   

   [*]Food crops plantation aren't really strong yield wise compared to normal farms. I would suggest boosting them a bit.

   
   farms, farms farms Plantation are usefull only for the resource they provide. I very often build only one to get the resource and farm all others (unless I see a trade option)
   
   

   [*]AI shouldn't generally pursue building the wonder which gives all religious civics unless it wants to get cult of personality or free religion or has no other wonder to build.

I very often see the AI that build ShewP adopt CoP or FR

 

[civman110]

Well, that's Immortal you're playing at. I think complaining that a difficulty level that's supposed to be crazy hard is unfair to humans kinda goes against its purpose.

That wasn't exactly what I meant... I wasn't complaining about the difficulty per say it was more so it's side-effects. While this is more difficult it makes for a very slow game on that difficulty level, since you can't afford a large enough army to attack with, you can't afford to keep any captured territory if you did, and it takes a long time to build things so you're just ending your turn over and over with no action.

I built a holy city and its wonder, 2 other WW, 4 academies, and settled 2 GS, 2 GM. Normally this would provide me with a lot of freedom to pursue different strategies, but I still couldn't economically afford to do anything besides just build and end my turn over and over. After achieving these things there should have been some sort of pay off. It also seemed like the production costs for buildings were increased (I could be wrong) which adds to this whole cycle of continuous building.

I also think that having to rush for Writing at the start of every game if you want to have more than 1 city is problematic.

What I was trying to say is that the restrictions seemed to be slightly past that point where they would be ideal (difficult, but without the need for continuous building). Difficulty is good, grinding is bad.

Edit:

Another thing I noticed. If you happen to capture an enemy city from a civ who has owned it for a long time, but has previously taken that city from another civ (ie. You capture Berlin from the French) if you raze it you take a -2 diplo hit with the Germans for razing it. The Germans don't ask for you to "liberate" it when you capture it, but are upset with you if you raze it. It doesn't make sense.

 

[Babri]

never use cottages. RI seem to be heavily unbalanced towards specialist economy, so I tend to use farms and very rarely cottage.

Hmm... I have a similar feeling. I think we should buff cottages with some early techs so that they remain competitive with farms early on, and we also need to buff villages/towns late game so they still remain somewhat competitive to specialists for some time especially for not so well developed cities.

the one I hate most is Revolutionary I think as it gives -2 diplohit !!!! given how important diplomacy is in this game (for trade routes as usual and also because it fasten your researsh and keep you out of trouble early) rev is the setback I fear most (and never play). for the same reason, Polititian (gives +2 diplo) is for me the most powerful (and thus I tend not to play it either as it's just tooo unbalanced)

Agreed completely. Revolutionary could be reduced to -1 with some other small penalty. Politician should be reduced to +2 from +3 relations.

I'd vote NO. Stone is already a too powerful of a resource (I think it should be made less powerful) as it guarantee early key wonders (when it's better build wonders cause cities are too costly) , gives you cheap walls (defense + 1happy i.e. 25 % more happiness usually early in the game !!! )+ better roads (50% better ). If it were me, I'll remove stone as it is just too powerfull.

See my above post for the explanation.

farms, farms farms Plantation are usefull only for the resource they provide. I very often build only one to get the resource and farm all others (unless I see a trade option)

That screams some balance issues. Food crop plantations could be buffed a bit. Similarly pastures should be a bit better food wise than they are now. Maybe some tech could boost them in medieval era.

Some more feedback:-

1. Making supporting units cost increased with numbers is a good idea, however it might be too punishing for unlucky civs who lack horses. My suggestion would be to apply the cost increase after 5-6 unit limit, so that you can't have too many skirmishers etc.
2. Some wonders cost absurdly high to produce. Examples include Colosseum & that Theatre wonder. While happiness is great early on but a Classic wonder costing more than an average Medieval wonder is kind of crazy.

 

[PKSRoman]

I guess to each his own, but 3.25 was actually supposed to be a balanced and de-bugged 3.2

my bad, sorry. i had on mind 3.1 of course

 

[Nicopathe]

Playing RI SVN 4719.

On the World maps, i don't understand why AI are constantly attacking tribal forts far from their frontiers (Bantu kings for i.e) with pre-powder units, even though they have zero chance of winning, wasting dozens of units, which could be far more wisely used against their pesky neighbors to expand their empire.

 

[civman110]

Playing RI SVN 4719.

On the World maps, i don't understand why AI are constantly attacking tribal forts far from their frontiers (Bantu kings for i.e) with pre-powder units, even though they have zero chance of winning, wasting dozens of units, which could be far more wisely used against their pesky neighbors to expand their empire.

It has to do with how the AI is coded. Once they have no more room to expand the AI tends to hunt down weak civs and gobble up their territory. They perceive minor civs like the Bantu Kings as being weak since their power rating is much lower than theirs, so they send an army to attack them mistakenly thinking they will be an easy mark.

To the AI's credit tho, I notice most of the time they realize they can't win and don't actually attack, but sometimes they do if they have a large stack and can maybe slowly wear the tribal fort down. I have seen them capture tribal fort cities per-gunpowder many times.

 

[keldath]

finally im doing well,
500 turns already, im about to crush my arch enemy the incans, one more city to go.

i like the game a lot


question:
i still dont understand the logistics thing, can some1 explain me?

 

[Drakarska]

finally im doing well,
500 turns already, im about to crush my arch enemy the incans, one more city to go.

i like the game a lot


question:
i still dont understand the logistics thing, can some1 explain me?

Check the 'pedia Kel, there's a decent write up about it. Also, I think I saw something written about it in a sub-thread. I'll see if I can find it and post you the link.

 

[Nicopathe]

It has to do with how the AI is coded. Once they have no more room to expand the AI tends to hunt down weak civs and gobble up their territory. They perceive minor civs like the Bantu Kings as being weak since their power rating is much lower than theirs, so they send an army to attack them mistakenly thinking they will be an easy mark.

To the AI's credit tho, I notice most of the time they realize they can't win and don't actually attack, but sometimes they do if they have a large stack and can maybe slowly wear the tribal fort down. I have seen them capture tribal fort cities per-gunpowder many times.

I see... Which also explains why it happens even more on the large world map.
In my games, never saw a civ win against tribal forts whatever the stack of units, 'cause the more they won battles, the more promotions they got from XP, which means A LOT, when i finally defeated them.

Would it be possible to tweak the way AI evaluate the strength of tribal forts to be less suicidal?

 

[civman110]

Would it be possible to tweak the way AI evaluate the strength of tribal forts to be less suicidal?

I have no idea. You'd have to ask someone from the RI Team.

 

[ETyrell91]

Trying to alter map sizes so they're at a 2.5 ratio instead of a 1.5 (this is more accurate to the climatic zones represented in the game, and should make the globe view look a lot better). I've altered the WorldInfo.xml to that effect, but using the PerfectMongoose script the maps are still showing up with the old ratio. Can anyone help me sort this out?

 

[ETyrell91]

Alright, looks like I forgot to restart the game. Problem solved.

 

[ETyrell91]

For anyone who's interested, I've uploaded an alternate PerfectMongoose.py with 1:2 map size ratios, I think it looks a *lot* better. I've also finished the religion mod I was working on earlier, that restricts religions to only being founded by their historic civs. Go check them out!

 

[Babri]

I like the new SVN changes especially the politician trait change & food crops planatation change. Lets see how revolutionary works out now.

Edit : I've noticed something odd recently. Many of the cavalry units don't require horses anymore (modern cav for example). Is this intended?

 

[Shuikkanen]

Edit : I've noticed something odd recently. Many of the cavalry units don't require horses anymore (modern cav for example). Is this intended?

IIRC this has pretty much always been the case for many later cavalry units.

 

[Babri]

IIRC this has pretty much always been the case for many later cavalry units.

Not really, IIRC previously US had this ability (and some other civs which had camels) & their cavalry was quite expensive when built without horses !

 

[Drakarska]

Agreed. Why go through all the trouble of getting (and holding onto for that matter) horses, only to have your enemies be able to get calvary for free at the appropriate tech?

on a side note. Anyone know why I can't use the spy specialist button in the city screen? and yes, I have all the pertinent techs. I can select any of the others, just not the spy. It's really irritating.