Leaders

Finally the Arabians seem more interesting to play! I will have to try them on a map with temperature as hot.

I'm now far enough into my first game with the buffed Germany to say that I am having a great time, and don't find it OP.

The focus is on the fun. To my surprise, while early footsoldiers promote to landknechts, horsemen promote to knights... and you can capture slavers, which promote to caravels! The combination of the SA buff with Mentos' Barbarians mod makes the Germans not just strong, but also having a really varied and colorful military.

I was able to rush America and take the capital with three archers and a bunch of melee units. Did this feel OP? Not more than if I had targeted an AI and sped to Iron Working or HBR or Math. But it definitely gives Germany a fast start, which only needs luxuries to finance. By the time longswords become dominant, though, much of the German SA advantage is gone. By then the AI has had time to build up its own military. And of course, I am paying the price for being branded an early warmonger.

On a side note, I captured two cultural CS without a diplo penalty, as a result of their declaring war on me. This was the first time I ever received those 600 culture points. They worked out to one SP each, and this seemed worth losing their potential culture-sharing as allies for the rest of the game. Along with puppeting, this was yet another way in which playing with Germany shook up my standard playing style.

Thalassicus said:

For Elizabeth my plan is to let all her ships start with +2 and +15 XP. This extra promotion should be useful because in TBC ships can now get the Scouting line of promotions. Right out of the box a Trireme can be a very fast and powerful unit for coastline scouting and ranged support:

7 7 4 3 sight.
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Reconsidering this, I wonder if it would be better to give the English ships only one additional move and two promotions of the player's choice. This puts the second additional move within easy range if desired, but doesn't put the English ships inherently on another class from those of others. That may be splitting hairs, and I'm fine going either way.

What I've always had a problem with is longbowmen being able to move after shooting. (They still can, right?) Again, this has to do with what I see as basic ground rules. Chu-ko-nus firing twice can be rationalized as an early promotion. Longbowmen having extra range is unique until artillery, makes them preferable in some ways to cannon, and I would prefer that they simply have higher strength. But again, that's just my opinion. What I really don't get is giving them a move after firing. No other footsoldier in the game has this, and for me this breaks a basic principle of the game.

The primary advantage of the movement bonus is it doubles embarkation speed, making water the fastest method of travel for areas without roads. Even with roads, water is still sometimes better until Engineering. I wouldn't want to shift this too much towards the more situational bonus of extra ship experience.

The capability for Longbows to move after attacking was removed in December when I added the Steam Mill.

Thalassicus said:

The primary advantage of the movement bonus is it doubles embarkation speed, making water the fastest method of travel for areas without roads. Even with roads, water is still sometimes better until Engineering. I wouldn't want to shift this too much towards the more situational bonus of extra ship experience.

The capability for Longbows to move after attacking was removed in December when I added the Steam Mill.

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Good point. And I guess I haven't played with the English in a while, since I wasn't aware of the lost move-after-volley. I'm looking forward to playing with the upcoming version... but I'm still way too into Germany!

Honestly, this feels like a great new game experientially a lot of the time. I can't explain my constantly renewed enthusiasm any other way.

I just noticed something for the first time. Playing Germany, I was told my empire can only support x units, and since I'm exceeding it by one, my hammer output decreases 10%. Apart form this being undocumented, it makes no sense. I have plenty of gold, and in my prior two games happily ran a deficit. Could you explain the rationale here?

That's part of the vanilla game, actually. It's a strange feature because they set the limit so high that it's almost impossible to reach it anyways. I've only hit it once, and that was also with Germany. It's a very pointless and un-fun feature.

SlightlyMad said:

That's part of the vanilla game, actually. It's a strange feature because they set the limit so high that it's almost impossible to reach it anyways. I've only hit it once, and that was also with Germany. It's a very pointless and un-fun feature.

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That's good to know. Is there any way it could be modded out?

Also, I just sank a slaver in the Renaissance era and destroyed its camp, but received nothing for either. Is the German SA effective only through the Classical era?

Txurce said:

I just noticed something for the first time. Playing Germany, I was told my empire can only support x units, and since I'm exceeding it by one, my hammer output decreases 10%. Apart form this being undocumented, it makes no sense. I have plenty of gold, and in my prior two games happily ran a deficit. Could you explain the rationale here?

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I ran into the same problem in my recent game with Germany, I also had no idea this happened. I was definetly ticked off and resulted in starting a new game with the Ottomans. I just don't like disbanding units...the financial penalty for having lots of units seemed plenty to me, the production penalty was just annoying.

My guess is they created it to prevent 1upt from breaking, or possibly curb other unit-spam tactics. Since additional units continue to lower your production, in theory you'd reach a maximum unit limit. There's two problems with this:

• Map-fill problems occur long before the cap stops it, since adding cities increases the limit.
• Doesn't affect unit purchasing.

I actually first ran into the problem when testing mods. I'd often place a bunch of units in the scenario editor to try out something, and it'd say I'm over the cap ingame. I do remember seeing variables to control this in GlobalDefines. Since it's mainly just an annoyance and appears to not really have any gameplay benefit, I could alter the unit cap.

I think a better solution would have been to only reduce unit production, not production in general. It doesn't make sense to reduce building construction speed just because you have a lot of units.


Edit:
Hmm, well there's a "MAX_UNIT_SUPPLY_PRODMOD = 70" in global defines, and AIUnitSupplyPercent modifier for each difficulty setting in the handicap file. I'm not finding anything that might control the size of the cap for humans directly, though there's a "UnitSupplyMod" attribute for policies.

I guess the only option is to disable it entirely. I'm somewhat concerned that might let the AI run rampant with units in the late game, since the AI isn't exactly well-designed.

The only time I have run into this is when playing a one city challenge. Guessing that this cap number is effected by the number of cities you own? Pretty sure it was 18 units.

Yeah, the sheer lack of any noticeable impact on the player tells me that either it was found in early testing to be crippling and nerfed into insignificance, or it's actually there more as a trigger to the AI to stop building. I personally would love to see lower unit caps in the game, since they would make combat more interesting in a smaller scale, and greatly improve late-game performance. Unfortunately, if the AI wasn't able go keep numerical superiority over the player in their military, I suspect they'd be even more of a push-over than they already are.

If they ever fix the AI so they can keep their own precious units alive, I'd love to see a cap on military units of something like 4 base + 1 per city + 1 per 10 pop, with possibly something in the honor tree to increase it.

I think the AI issues can be solved by giving them experience bonuses (as done in this mod) instead of numerical superiority. I prefer the XP bonuses because of the map-fill issue. Most of the AI is inaccessible to us, though.

Okay, so I've got the changes for Genghis, Bismark, and Elizabeth done. I've playtested a few games with each leader to fine-tune things. Now on to the Ottomans. As mentioned with his previous trait:

The Ottomans were known to have good administrative policy, even tolerance and inclusion of ethnic groups like Christians and Jews into the bureaucracy of what was predominantly a Muslim nation. In metropolitan areas artisans and merchants were strongly supported. The Ottomans were also famous conquerors. Suleiman in particular was known as Suleyman the Lawmaker, a philosopher-king, warmonger, poet and patron of the arts, and promoted changes to law and administrative practices.

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No other leader has a specialist focus, and it does seem to fit the Ottomans and Suleiman. Just a flat boost to great person generation is rather boring though. What I'm testing now is:

Governance
Specialist yields increased by 1.

So in other words specialists become:
3 - Engineer
3 - Scientist
4 - Merchant
4 - Artist

Thalassicus said:

I think the AI issues can be solved by giving them experience bonuses (as done in this mod) instead of numerical superiority. I prefer the XP bonuses because of the map-fill issue. Most of the AI is inaccessible to us, though.

Okay, so I've got the changes for Genghis, Bismark, and Elizabeth done. I've playtested a few games with each leader to fine-tune things. Now on to the Ottomans. As mentioned with his previous trait:



No other leader has a specialist focus, and it does seem to fit the Ottomans and Suleiman. Just a flat boost to great person generation is rather boring though. What I'm testing now is:

Governance
Specialist yields increased by 1.

So in other words specialists become:
3 - Engineer
3 - Scientist
4 - Merchant
4 - Artist

Click to expand...

I like the specialist boost. It probably isn't (and shouldn't be) better than the Lawmaker SA, and it's pretty similar but - it does seem to feel like more fun. Now let me ask a question - why is the Lawmaker SA any more boring than Babylon's?

Germany is great, although in thinking of the Ottomans' original SA, I couldn't help but think how outrageous it is that you get a free navy as well!

Are the new Mongols and English already in play, or do you just have them ready?

Babylon gets a free scientist too, a unique effect no other leader has. I considered giving the Ottomans a free great general but couldn't really decide on what tech to put it. Historically they weren't prominent in either footsoldiers or horses, and Mathematics feels too late and restrictive. The usefulness would also overlap with the Honor policy.

I've been playing the Mongols in English in personal games. I'm making an effort to slow down releases due to the rather serious version cap problem. At the rate I was going, it'd become impossible to update the mod by June.

With a maximum of 1 release per week I can stretch it out for 8 months. Hopefully they'll have the problem solved by then. If not, I can loop around and go from version 100 down to version 20 or so and reuse a few skipped numbers, then it'll be until next year before I get stuck.

Can we have an update on the planned new traits?

Click here to see the planned traits.

Since Firaxis made the mistake of using a chaotic system for Culture where it isn't technically considered a yield, I can't increase the yield of artists. Right now I'm giving Ottoman artists +1 instead, letting cultural-focused Ottoman players get larger cities (free food with Freedom tree). I could switch this to a gold bonus instead if people would rather have that.

I'm working on unifying all the yields in the code, including culture and happiness. This will fix the problem but is a very long process (spent ~30 hours on it so far).

Great changes to the leaders. . I just feel that 2 for Mongols could become a bit OP when combined with their already strong Keshliks.

I made a typo, it's 1. Basically all I did there is extend the movement bonus to recon units (scouts, lancers, anti-tank, helicopters, paratroopers). I also forgot to actually implement that change so it's having no effect... fixed that now.

Wow the ottomans was really fun! and powerful. Im up at 120 bpt on turn 70. Dont know if its OP since i lack on other areas. Going to test this some more