Realism Invictus

Walter Hawkwood said:
Hm, do you have any realistic suggestions regarding that?
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Don't know much of the history of jungle living, but there are plenty of tribes and natives that prove it's possible, and cultures have prospered in them. RI already recognizes this with several cultures, but fails to allow any civ to achieve it aside from those that actually are jungle/tropical civilizations.

I think all that's necessary is boosting forest/jungle with the Hunter Gatherer civic, and some improvements that can increase yields on resource tiles, but without providing access to that resource (ie, the resource can be cultivated enough for nearby inhabitants to use, but not enough for it to become a main trade item).

Walter Hawkwood said:
Rams are low strength by design, and are not intended to provide aid. Because really, how helpful to you is a battering ram in combat - not for bringing gates down, but in actual combat? A catapult could serve as a primitive form of artillery support for you, but ram?
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I've been thinking for a while that it would be cool to see different types of siege units provide different types of bonuses. So a battering ram wouldn't provide much benefit, but a siege tower could provide a fair boost specifically against archers, etc.

Yes, perhaps you are right regarding too much health early on. We should probably redesign health system in such a way that it too would be a real growth limiter in early eras.
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I always thought it would be a huge improvement if cities had to be founded on fresh water tiles until some technology is reached (aqueduct?). Perhaps different technologies can increase the range from fresh water (default to requiring fresh water, when a well is available it can go one further, aqueduct can make that two tiles further, etc).

In terms of game play, this forces all early cities to have a natural health source (fresh water), and the global health bonus can be dropped/removed.

It also limits how many cities can settled. The game currently has a ridiculous ancient/cultural eras expansion boom. This change would help reduce that boom and put an emphasis on building fewer, but strong cities early on, rather than rushing to build as many settlers as possible before all the good resources are taken. This also makes the Creative trait more useful, as it will be a way to claim resources that are too far from fresh water to settle directly.

Lastly, it also will put much more emphasis on waging wars over the good river tiles, which would add a nice realism to the early game. It always frustrated me that the Fertile Crescent era isn't well represented in RI, but putting an emphasis on settling rivers can easily recreate such history.
 
I recently completed a game with the latest SVN and wanted to give some feedback.

It was a custom game on a Huge map (I customized Totestra for RI, it makes amazing maps), 12 players, Monarch difficulty. I played as Russia for the first time.

While I really liked a lot of the changes you guys have made since 3.25, the balance seems to be a bit off. It was one of the easiest RI games I have ever played; none of the other civs ever attacked me as my strength rating was so impressive, I was nearly a full era ahead in techs, and was able to build nearly all wonders. I won in 1715 AD by a cultural victory (possible because I founded Zoroastrianism).

It's tough to say exactly why the AI struggled so profoundly in this game. I will start a new game on a higher difficutly level, and with a less overpowered civ, and see how it goes (It takes me a few months to finish a game though, so you may have a new build out by then!). I suspect some of the problems stemmed from the new unit cost upgrade. The AI warmongers like it did in 3.25, seemingly unable to calculate that the higher unit costs result in a civ falling behind in infrastructure if they are constantly at war. I do like the concept of higher unit costs to reduce the "stack of doom" effect, it just needs some tweaking.

The new "great works of science" built by Great Scientists are cool and add some enjoyable flavor, but the AI did not build any of them in this game. As such, I was able to monopolize all of them in one city. Undoubtedly this was another factor in the ease of victory. I don't know if the AI just needs to be taught to value these new great works appropriately, or if they aren't actually able to build them due to some bug.

I've noticed a lot of players complaining about the AI razing every city on the map. I had this problem for ages, too, and was very frustrated with it. This game, I turned off culture flipping of cities, and the excessive razing problem was completely gone. It seems the AI is placing too much value on the culture present in a city, so they just go around razing the entire map. Not sure if there is an easy fix for this other than disabling the culture flipping option - I have tried editing the AI razing function and have had no success.

One last balance issue, regarding the "Trained Archers" doctrine. I have always viewed this doctrine as overpowered. Once a unit gets to level 3 and has the full line of promotions from this doctrine, it is virtually indestructible due to the combination of first strikes and first strike immunity. With the change in this SVN to 8 strength longbows, the need for a nerf has only increased.

Thanks for your work on this wonderful mod! :D
 
Anyone tried 3.25 version over multiplayer ? Is it stable (no OOS) ?
Also - is it better to play long multiplayer games over steam or via direct IP ?
 
Dejagore said:
Anyone tried 3.25 version over multiplayer ? Is it stable (no OOS) ?
Also - is it better to play long multiplayer games over steam or via direct IP ?
Click to expand...

3.25 is stable with direct IP, as my 4 boys and I usually play on my days off ( much to the chagrin of the significant other... Well, at least we still rate fresh baked cookies :)). There is also a couple of game sites ( forget which, I'll ask my oldest) that you can connect to and find peeps to MP with. As for long game, Direct IP is best ( We usually play Earth 18 or modded games) as the OOS issue is significantly less than using steam.
 
Drakarska said:
3.25 is stable with direct IP, as my 4 boys and I usually play on my days off ( much to the chagrin of the significant other... Well, at least we still rate fresh baked cookies :)).
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Sounds perfect :)
 
Wow, it seems that the version 3.3 has been released as a christmas surprise! Really curious to see what has been added to the mod in the last few months since I haven't played the SVN for a while.

Happy holidays for the R:I team and players! :)
 
33_line0_GUb.jpg

Hey everyone! For this Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, we are proud and pleased to bring you the official 3.3 version of our mod. For those who have been waiting specifically for that, no, we didn't implement the Revolution component fully yet, so it is not included in 3.3. Still, here is a short list of changes as compared to previous 3.25 version (that is, one and a half years' worth of changes).

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• Buildings almost never provide %production bonuses, workshop tile improvement does not exist anymore
• New specialist: craftsman, generates no GP points, but with appropriate technologies and civics can generate large amounts of production
• New buildings and effects to simulate gradual shift to industrial production (craftsmen) from cottage industries (worked tiles)
• Electricity now very important for industrial production and many modern buildings

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• Two new playable civilizations: Hungary and Mayans. Both have NBs, NIs, lots of flavor units, leaders etc.
• All playable civilizations now have at least 5 leaders
• New leader trait: conqueror. Improves cavalry, siege units and rural logistics
• Many existing leaders had their traits and favorite civics changed
• Zulu civilization expanded to include all Nguni peoples and renamed to reflect that

33_line3_N6F.jpg

• Reworked late-game health and epidemic prevention; pandemic colony gone, many new medical projects for increasing global health and lowering epidemic chance
• Castles totally reworked and can be improved with various add-ons under Feudal Aristocracy
• Effects of pagan temples now better balanced and more diverse
• Rebalanced and switched around gold, commerce and trade bonuses
• Religious shrines now provide a fixed gold income instead of scaling to number of cities
• New buildings: Trade Fair, River Port, Tax Office, Workshop, Print Shop, Newspaper
• New wonders: Ford Motor Company, Bayer AG
• Many wonder effects rebalanced
• Many buildings now get flavor versions for various cultural artstyles

33_line4_HWR.jpg

• South China and Germany have new National Improvements
• Mines for precious metals now a separate improvement that advances differently from regular mines
• Food crop plantations are now more useful
• Flat terrain features (such as fertile soils) no longer block line of sight
• PerfectMongoose map script tweaked to produce more hospitable maps and correctly place flood plains and oases

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• WW2 armored cars and Humvees removed
• New units: Composite Bowman, Early Crossbowman (both only available to some civs), Galleass, Mountain Infantry (WW1 and WW2 versions)
• Added many new flavor units to various civilizations
• Rebalanced and reworked upgrade lines for most ships
• Reworked upgrade trees for most land units
• All combat unit classes increase in costs per number of units already built

33_line6_3YS.jpg

• Great Scientists are now able to construct era-appropriate Great Works of Science
• Great Merchants are now able to found three types of enterprises in industrial-modern era: car factories, pharmaceutical companies and movie studios. Most civilizations have flavor versions of those
• Any playable civilization, when running out of historical Great People names, will now spawn people with random, yet plausible civ-specific names

33_line7_Kb6.jpg

• AI should now be less eager to attack cities with cavalry
• AI will refuse peaceful vassalization
• AI leaders will remember good things done to them longer and will quicker forget bad things
• AI will be much more rational when deciding whether to raze a city they have taken
• AI should now be smarter when deciding what tiles to work

33_line8_w4M.jpg

• Rebalanced and replaced many civics; many civic combinations now have additional effects through special national buildings
• Reduced relations bonuses and maluses from traits
• Rebel slave and serf strength now depends not on era, but on weapon technology available to player (same as player’s irregular unit line)
• Many tech prerequisites and costs reworked
• Open borders no longer provide free culture under any circumstances
• Reworked many in-game buttons, especially for units and resources. Units no more use vanilla-style buttons
• Some tweaks to pedia: filter leaders by playable status, show unit upgrade trees for a selected civ, show building upgrade chart
• Significantly improved performance due to various dll optimizations
• Special characters in unit and building names should no longer display erroneously in some cases
• Upgraded the version of K-Mod used in RI to 1.44b
• Merged in graphics paging for dealing with memory errors (can be toggled in graphics options)

Get the new version here:

Full version (download link).

Light version (download link).

Happy holidays everyone!
 
Many thanks to Realism Invictus team for this holiday gift. Will start a new multiplayer session right now!
 
civman110 said:
You may be right that both Civic Law and Common Law are too similar to warrant two civics, but I do believe that Civic Law (the Civil Service civic) should be a very viable option late game and receive additional benefits throughout the ages (or a Civil Law or Common Law option should be made available during the Middle Ages and then a Supreme Court later on) to reflect the progression of the Roman Legal system into modern day Civic Law. Many countries often have a mixture of both Civil and Common Law systems, but are predominantly one or the other.
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You see, here I think we run into different interpretation of what "Legal" civic category represents. You are being very straightforward in your opinion that it represents the legal system of a country. I had a less direct thing in mind when I designed that category - "Legal" to me was "where the current government derives its legitimacy", that is, mostly the underlying ideology of the state.

In this light, "Civil Service" is what we saw in, say, Roman Republic (and other classical republics), where the government was founded on the eagerness of citizens to enter service to serve the state. Basically, it is an ideology of channeling personal ambition into government service.

With this interpretation in mind, I am not sure if it should be able to survive until modern times. I don't think there are states anywhere founded on that principle. Most modern states are founded instead on the idea of representation - of being founded by and for people, and of government (or at least the legislative branch in most modern democracies) existing as a means of their participation in ruling the state.

[Y];14100057 said:
Don't know much of the history of jungle living, but there are plenty of tribes and natives that prove it's possible, and cultures have prospered in them. RI already recognizes this with several cultures, but fails to allow any civ to achieve it aside from those that actually are jungle/tropical civilizations.
Click to expand...

Notably, none of these cultures seemed to have continuously prospered. Neither early Indian civilizations, nor classical Khmer, nor Mayans did not survive for long, and jungle was quick to reclaim what was left for them.

I think all that's necessary is boosting forest/jungle with the Hunter Gatherer civic, and some improvements that can increase yields on resource tiles, but without providing access to that resource (ie, the resource can be cultivated enough for nearby inhabitants to use, but not enough for it to become a main trade item).
Click to expand...

But from gameplay point of view you make a valid point and a plausible suggestion. I will consider how this could be done in an interesting way.

I've been thinking for a while that it would be cool to see different types of siege units provide different types of bonuses. So a battering ram wouldn't provide much benefit, but a siege tower could provide a fair boost specifically against archers, etc.
Click to expand...

I believe that currently the stack aid system is abstract enough so as not to go into this kind of detail. We can't really make combat in Civ series very realistic, as it is already a rather bizzare mix of tactical and strategic.

I always thought it would be a huge improvement if cities had to be founded on fresh water tiles until some technology is reached (aqueduct?). Perhaps different technologies can increase the range from fresh water (default to requiring fresh water, when a well is available it can go one further, aqueduct can make that two tiles further, etc).

In terms of game play, this forces all early cities to have a natural health source (fresh water), and the global health bonus can be dropped/removed.

It also limits how many cities can settled. The game currently has a ridiculous ancient/cultural eras expansion boom. This change would help reduce that boom and put an emphasis on building fewer, but strong cities early on, rather than rushing to build as many settlers as possible before all the good resources are taken. This also makes the Creative trait more useful, as it will be a way to claim resources that are too far from fresh water to settle directly.

Lastly, it also will put much more emphasis on waging wars over the good river tiles, which would add a nice realism to the early game. It always frustrated me that the Fertile Crescent era isn't well represented in RI, but putting an emphasis on settling rivers can easily recreate such history.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't want to restrict early settlement options too much. Though I agree that the importance of arable land in early history is somewhat downplayed in our mod, but there have to be other ways of representing that without nerfing everything else too much.

eadric said:
While I really liked a lot of the changes you guys have made since 3.25, the balance seems to be a bit off. It was one of the easiest RI games I have ever played; none of the other civs ever attacked me as my strength rating was so impressive, I was nearly a full era ahead in techs, and was able to build nearly all wonders. I won in 1715 AD by a cultural victory (possible because I founded Zoroastrianism).
Click to expand...

Well, this demonstrates an unfortunate truth of Civ series as a whole that we didn't yet fully prevent in our mod as well - if you get ahead, you're ahead for good. You must have gotten a lucky start, and just kept on building on that.

It's tough to say exactly why the AI struggled so profoundly in this game. I will start a new game on a higher difficutly level, and with a less overpowered civ, and see how it goes (It takes me a few months to finish a game though, so you may have a new build out by then!). I suspect some of the problems stemmed from the new unit cost upgrade. The AI warmongers like it did in 3.25, seemingly unable to calculate that the higher unit costs result in a civ falling behind in infrastructure if they are constantly at war. I do like the concept of higher unit costs to reduce the "stack of doom" effect, it just needs some tweaking.
Click to expand...

OTOH, it should have helped those civs that would otherwise be easily crushed by such warmongers. Despite one's perceptions, not all AI leaders are compulsive warmongers. I have some suspicions on how to make AI more effective, but I have to test them out first.

The new "great works of science" built by Great Scientists are cool and add some enjoyable flavor, but the AI did not build any of them in this game. As such, I was able to monopolize all of them in one city. Undoubtedly this was another factor in the ease of victory. I don't know if the AI just needs to be taught to value these new great works appropriately, or if they aren't actually able to build them due to some bug.
Click to expand...

They are able to build them, and they normally do. Once again, you must have gotten un/lucky.

I've noticed a lot of players complaining about the AI razing every city on the map. I had this problem for ages, too, and was very frustrated with it. This game, I turned off culture flipping of cities, and the excessive razing problem was completely gone. It seems the AI is placing too much value on the culture present in a city, so they just go around razing the entire map. Not sure if there is an easy fix for this other than disabling the culture flipping option - I have tried editing the AI razing function and have had no success.
Click to expand...

I think we already dealt with this issue by now. Currently, AI should be much more rational in the way it handles cities.

One last balance issue, regarding the "Trained Archers" doctrine. I have always viewed this doctrine as overpowered. Once a unit gets to level 3 and has the full line of promotions from this doctrine, it is virtually indestructible due to the combination of first strikes and first strike immunity. With the change in this SVN to 8 strength longbows, the need for a nerf has only increased.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the observation. I'll consider a nerf.

Michkov said:
Have you got an archive version for 3.3 to download as well?
Click to expand...

Do we need to? I was under impression that it wasn't really needed.
 
keldath said:
3.3 yeay! the best mod in the world of civ4.


EDIT
i keep getting fails upon download, something with down loader not verified,
could you please supply another source link? perhaps for the lite version at first?
Click to expand...

Sourceforge has a lot of different mirrors for downloading, just select a different one. Anyway, you can also get it from ModDB if it doesn't work: http://www.moddb.com/mods/realism-invictus/downloads
 
Michkov said:
Just a preference of mine, I can live with the installer too though.
Click to expand...

I think (don't quote me on that, I'm not the guy who builds our installers) that it should create a set of blank configuration files. So if I just zipped and sent you my RI folder (which I guess I can do, if you want it), you'd end up with my configs.

Muninn said:
Is there a particular reason that building "Local Crafts" produces gold and research, but not culture?
Click to expand...

Yep, it would be too easy a source of getting culture early on. In ancient age, culture is very scarce.
 
It's been a while since I played the previous version but from what I remember it used to be quicker to start up and play. I also have this issue wherein I start up the application, in RI, and when load a save or a new game, it tells me to restart the application (in RI, naturally). During restarting it also sometimes crashes when I load a save.
 
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