Pacing, Epic Speed: Can the Modern era occur in the Modern era?

Firstly, thank you Thal and others for all the great work! I wouldn't even be playing Civ 5 without this community. I think I played 3 games on Vanilla before giving up Civ 5 as boring and limited and went back to IV.

I just finished a cultural victory with Greece on a Large map on Prince at Epic speed at turn 409. This was my first playthrough with VEM/CivUP and CSD (I love the diplomats solution to CS diplomacy!).

I've been loving and playing Civ NiGHTS for a few months due to the well balanced pacing with longer eras, improved AI diplomacy, well balanced Civ UB's and UU's and traits, the unique choices offered in the tech tree and policy trees he's created that really make each playthough unique. However, I was getting tired of ICS being the only viable strategy with his happiness and yield mechanics (impossible to go tall and compete vs. the AI civs).

It was fun to play a tall strategy again and be successful! I felt the build times were perhaps too short as I was able to build up every single city very quickly to my chosen specializations. I wasn't really forced into any tough decisions this way, which goes against what I had become accustomed to in NiGHTS. I was able to purchase and build up a new city very quickly, perhaps too quickly. Pretty sweet to be pumping out 300+ culture in every city however, and my main wonder city was approaching 1000 culture/turn!

Opportunites? Awesome! Nothing more to say on that.

Gold felt very balanced. I was able to produce a lot of it in certain economic cities (again, specialization is fantastically easy with this mod) and manage the costs of my buildings and armies, while still being able to rush/purchase when needed and keep at least 1-2 RA's going.

I was amazed that I was able to be a cultural and scientific powerhouse while fielding a large deterrent army as well. In NiGHTS I was forced into certain specializations sooner as choices seem to be harder and force one to carefully plan each decision for the long term. The takeaway here is in VEM I felt I wasn't forced to make many sacrifices and was able to get everything I needed done. Felt great as a player to be so powerful, but prevents the tough choices that I think create immersion to play as a true leader. Perhaps I need to try VEM on higher difficulties as Prince was the most fun for me in NiGHTS, my next game will be King and I'll go from there.

In VEM I was able to use specialists to my advantage much more effectively. I'll have to check the mod files and see what the differences were there? But I was definitely producing great people much more efficiently and with much greater accuracy, i.e. I got the ones I wanted when I wanted them.

However...

The game finished with me just slightly ahead of Ramesees on culture, and myself and at least three other civs already in the Modern Era in the mid 18th century.

Cultural victory seemed inevitable between myself or Ramesees. I had been going for diplomatic initially, because it was my first go at the CSD and I wanted to see what it was like building and shipping off diplomats, while keeping Cultural victory in my back pocket just in case. This made conquest, diplomacy, or science victories impossible after a certain point (like 300 turns). That may just be the specifics of this game, however so that's not as important.

Anyhow, I would love the same game at epic pace to have reached the same (or similar) conclusion at the right time, basically about 200 turns later to allow for more development of civs and strategy and some warfare of course; Napoleon was a thorn in my side the whole game, and right before my cultural victory I was finally steamrolling him and razing his cities to put my now upgraded elite defensive army to good use! I want the eras to feel like eras.

By the way, Classical era is over in 1 tech? That's hardly an era... more like an epoch, or a period. My best science victory (with Bismarck) on epic length at Prince in NiGHTS occurred after ~600 turns in 1984. As it should, it was a truly epic civilization story with many developments and twists and turns. It may have been my best Civ game ever, but I digress...

The classical era should begin around 500 BC at the earliest, the medieval 500 AD, the rennaisance 1300-1500 (?), the industrial around 1700, and the modern at 1900 at the earliest. Or something like this, perhaps this discussion has gone round and round, but I'm sure somebody out there has a good idea of the historical times for these eras. This trick (or the hard part, rather) is pacing the game so that the eras occur when they should.

Is there some way to just increase the costs of policies and techs so that we could enter the modern era mid 20th century on average? I should run a game on Standard speed to see if there's a difference, but I do prefer the longer game lengths. Research and culture were moving way too quickly for the pacing. I had anti-aircraft guns, computers, plastics, and modern 20th century destroyers in like 1740. What gives? I felt like even on epic game length we all flew through the "eras" in just a couple techs and the race was on for victory around turn 250. That doesn't feel very "epic".

Or perhaps taking cues from Markus' tech tree from NiGHTS and extending the eras and providing more dead-ends and unique paths to take to force difficult choices as a leader and enhance the uniqueness of each new game?


Anyways, great work with the mod I really enjoyed it, I just wanted to offer some feedback and see if anyone else has had this same impression?

Again, thanks to Thal and others and this great community for making this game playable for me again!

Edit: Found this re: tech tree:

Markus on Tech tree rebalancing

Here's the default year rate on normal speed. Click Here to download and experiment with the table.



Turn 0 starts on 4000 BCE and lasts 40 years. Each turn after that increments 40 years for a period of 75 turns.

What progression would you suggest? I don't know what good values would be since I don't look at the ingame year counter. If the early turns need to skip more years perhaps we could try:



This shifts things more towards the 1800s, then slows down a lot once 1900 passes. If I recall, most science victories seem to happen in the turn 300-400 range, so that would place the Alpha Centauri space launch in the 2000-2080 period, rather than 1900-2000.

Thanks for the table! This changes my thinking on this whole problem entirely. Although I still think Epic games should be completing closer to 500 turns and Marathon 800-1000, or at least that's what I'm used to having spent a few months playing NiGHTS

Well... I achieved the culture victory at 409 on Epic and it was a very focused effort toward the end so that's not far off. Science or UN victories would have been another 75-100 turns out I believe. So nevermind on that...

I think in order to actually help with the pacing I need to play a couple games at normal speed and take notes as to how in-game events correlate with the year and # of turns. I don't pay close enough attention or write things down to present a clear picture of what I expect over the course of a whole game. Then I could just adjust the #years/turn so that my eras fall in line with the year counter!

Is there a hard multiplier that adjusts these aspects of the game speed? Something I could play with myself by changing parameters in an .xml? I'm asking you as you probably have an intimate knowledge of a lot of these parameters and where to find them, I'm just getting my feet wet with .xml adjustments.

As long as I don't change the number of turns things take the game would play out just the same and just occur at the right "time".

I know the year counter is arbitrary but I like the immersion aspect of things occurring about when they should.

Oh! I forgot to mention that yes, epic is 150% of normal. The tables I posted are for normal. So whatever you want to aim for on epic... multiply that by 66% (epic turn 450 is normal turn 300).

Achieving a culture victory on t409 would be t270 on normal, which on vanilla is the year 1800. With the proposed change, you would have completed in the year 1930. I think this would place the "modern era in the modern era" as you're looking for.

I'll also respond to the other stuff in your original post later, once I have more free time. I wanted to talk about the year thing first.

Awesome! Thanks!

Where would I go to tinker with these rates in .xml? I remember there being a gamespeeds.xml or something of the sort but I don't remember seeing a parameter like you described in that table, or is this a more complicated adjustment?

It's the GameSpeed_Turns table in Civ5GameSpeeds.xml. There's no single scaling value, however. I've included the proposed changes in v144.5. See what you think.

Slower speed means more micro-management, less time lost due to combat and so on.
Even tho I play marathon with is slower by 3 times, the game progress is actually maybe 2.5 times slower not 3.

Hope i was able to point out that little detail here

I think the default system was better. At turn 250, the year was 1700, a very nice midpoint between the old form of warfare and the new. Right now I'm playing as a warmongering Askia and my opponents are only a few techs ahead; it's turn 173, the year is 17-- and I'm still researching Physics and Steel. Turn 173 used to still be in the medieval age (by year), which would have been much more appropriate. No civ would have survived with an army of pikemen and knights in the 18th century.

I have to say I am finding the new year pacing much, much better - almost spot on. I play on Epic.