Affinities As Yields

HandyVac · Feb 16, 2015

It bugs me a little that the main way to gain affinities is by researching techs, since to my mind affinities should be more like an ideology or philosophy, representing how your people use what they know, rather than what they know. And what better way to judge the ideology of your civilisation than by what it chooses to build?
So in this mod I remove the affinity rewards from researching techs and instead make tile improvements and buildings yield affinity points per-turn.

Key Changes

- No techs grant affinity points when researched. I.e. Affinity comes from what your choose to do with your knowledge, not what you know.

- Many (but not all) buildings and tile improvements yield affinity points per turn, so what you build dictates the affinity you progress towards. I.e. The work and living environment of your colony influences the ideology of your citizens.

For example, and not an exhaustive list:
farms, mines, domes, vivariums and old earth relics yield Purity points
generators, manufatories, nodes, autoplants and networks yield Supremacy
paddocks, plantations, biowells, xenonurseries and alien preserves yield Harmony

- User interface changes show the new yields in tooltips, production lists and techweb filters. New icons in the city view screen show the total produced by that city, and the dropdowns from the top menu show the total produced colony-wide.
Hopefully all this makes it clear to the player what to build to persue which affinity.

Screenshots:

Spoiler :

Now compatible with Rising Tide:
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With alternate version for use without Rising Tide:
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Original first post:

Spoiler :

Diemex · Feb 16, 2015

Interesting idea. I suspect late game you're affinity will go through the roof.. I'll have to try this one out. (Can you actually 'work' an alien nest ?)

HandyVac · Feb 17, 2015

updated to (v 10)

Now supports yields from buildings, both as a flat yield and a percentage modifier for that city.

Added modified versions of InfoTooltipInclude.lua and PlotMouseoverInclude.lua, to show the new affinity yields in tooltips for map plots, city build lists and techweb.

Minor Annoyance · Feb 18, 2015

Gooooood stuff.

Gorbles · Feb 18, 2015

Great work, been looking through the mod files. Really nice stuff!

Diemex · Feb 18, 2015

Hope you don't mind some feedback.

I gave this mod a shot and it was ok, though the affinities came way too fast for me. Here's how my game went for an idea of the pace :

Standard Size, Gemini difficulty.

After only a few turns I was locked down into a dominant Affinity. Not sure how that happened but I was forced into harmony almost straight away... (I guess from making plantations) So ok... mindflower it is !

Turn 110
3 Cities, population total : 11
5 Harmony, 5 Purity and 3 Supremacy
Its very early in the game, my cities are stuck on a little isle and underdeveloped.

Turn 170
3 Cities, pop 23
Affinities 13/7/6
Its still rather early in the game.. I have no army to speak of and not a lot of tech yet, at this point I see my affinity is going to max out and so is the AI so I better start racing towards my victory conditions.

Turn 200
3 Cities Pop 27
18/9/7 (I have reached maximum harmony affinity)
At this point its an all out race... as the AI players mostly have 18/18/18 affinity levels ! But I dont think they understand the new system as they are not progressing towards victory.

Turn 303 (victory)
3 cities 38 pop
18/15/12

It was an interesting game and quite fun, but I'm not sure how to properly pursue/lockin an affinity during the first 10 turns. Also it seems that you really don't have time to explore/research much at all... you pretty much have to beeline to your victory conditions... not necessarily a bad thing though.

I did notice one other odd thing... though this is not really mod related... can probably happen in any game under right conditions. I had over 10 affinity ea when I researched tech for the aircraft carrier unit. It was odd because all my units were 'green' / harmony affinity based but my carrier was given the option to select any of the upgrades... thus I could have a supremacy(yellow) carrier while the rest of my units were harmony. I think the devs never expected anyone to have such high affinity levels when they researched that tech.

ShadoWarrior · Feb 18, 2015

Diemex said:
...I could have a supremacy(yellow) carrier while the rest of my units were harmony. I think the devs never expected anyone to have such high affinity levels when they researched that tech.

This is true for all unit types that have different versions based on affinity. I have played several games over the past few months in which I had selected a supremacy or purity option for an upgrade despite harmony being my primary. I do, however, play with only the total domination (conquest) victory enabled, so tech-rushing becomes quite important in keeping ahead of the AI opponents, and I gain a lot of affinity from techs of course.

HandyVac · Feb 19, 2015

Diemex said:
Hope you don't mind some feedback.

I gave this mod a shot and it was ok, though the affinities came way too fast for me. Here's how my game went for an idea of the pace :

Standard Size, Gemini difficulty.

After only a few turns I was locked down into a dominant Affinity. Not sure how that happened but I was forced into harmony almost straight away... (I guess from making plantations) So ok... mindflower it is !

Turn 110
3 Cities, population total : 11
5 Harmony, 5 Purity and 3 Supremacy
Its very early in the game, my cities are stuck on a little isle and underdeveloped.

Turn 170
3 Cities, pop 23
Affinities 13/7/6
Its still rather early in the game.. I have no army to speak of and not a lot of tech yet, at this point I see my affinity is going to max out and so is the AI so I better start racing towards my victory conditions.

Turn 200
3 Cities Pop 27
18/9/7 (I have reached maximum harmony affinity)
At this point its an all out race... as the AI players mostly have 18/18/18 affinity levels ! But I dont think they understand the new system as they are not progressing towards victory.

Turn 303 (victory)
3 cities 38 pop
18/15/12

It was an interesting game and quite fun, but I'm not sure how to properly pursue/lockin an affinity during the first 10 turns. Also it seems that you really don't have time to explore/research much at all... you pretty much have to beeline to your victory conditions... not necessarily a bad thing though.

I did notice one other odd thing... though this is not really mod related... can probably happen in any game under right conditions. I had over 10 affinity ea when I researched tech for the aircraft carrier unit. It was odd because all my units were 'green' / harmony affinity based but my carrier was given the option to select any of the upgrades... thus I could have a supremacy(yellow) carrier while the rest of my units were harmony. I think the devs never expected anyone to have such high affinity levels when they researched that tech.

Yep, looks like affinity levels are gained much too fast at the moment, I'll have to increase the points-needed-for-next-level thresholds some more. It's gonna take a while of trial and error to get that pacing just right.
I suspect the aparrent tardiness of the AI in progressing to victory is another symptom of fast affinity leveling, since if they haven't researched the tech to build that victory wonder they can't start winning yet, no matter how many affinity levels they have.

Another problem with pacing here is affinity-level thresholds don't scale with the selected game-speed. I've been testing the mod on Quick game speed, but levels are going to be gained in the same number of turns in Standard, Epic or Marathon too, which is obviously not ideal. :mischief:

I'll need to figure out a way to change the level thresholds dynamically via lua depending on gamespeed (another thing to add to my to do list), but until then I reccomend playing this mod on quick.

Diemex · Feb 20, 2015

Thanks for your work in any case. Its still a worthy mod as is. I look forward to any updates it may receive.

HandyVac · Feb 22, 2015

Updated to (v 17)

- Increased the spacing between affinity levels by roughly three times. In my test runs the AI now gets it's first affinity level around turn 30, and maxes out it's dominant one around turn 400, which seems reasonable on quick gamespeed.

- Added support for player perks which change the affinity yield from buildings.

- Added modified version of UnitPanel.lua, to show affinity-yields-changes for worker builds.

- Added modified version of TopPanel.lua, to show you colony's total affinity-yield-per-turn in the affinity level tooltips.

Japper007 · Feb 22, 2015

This sounds really good! Gaining affinity this way seems a lot more lore-friendly.

I had a similar idea a while back, though I didn't create a mod (no time, and I'm a lousy coder).

Japper007 · Feb 22, 2015

Diemex said:
as the AI players mostly have 18/18/18 affinity levels ! But I dont think they understand the new system as they are not progressing towards victory.

I don't think this has anything to do with the mod, the AI seems to just kinda stumble into a victory, or not do anything at all. I played an Apollo game recently where a runaway Koslov had fully conquered ARC (he had like 30 cities) and had full Purity, yet didn't make progress towards any of the victories. :crazyeye:

HandyVac · Feb 24, 2015

Updated to (v 18)

- Bugfix. Mod will no longer make the game freeze when you get a "choose a free affinity level" quest reward.

- General pass over buildings and wonders to give them appropriate affinity-yield values. Buildings from further out in the techweb give larger yields, wonders either increase the percentage yield in that city, or increase yields from a certain building type.

- Increased spacing between affinity levels, to accomodate the increased yields from buildings.

- Manufactories now yield 2 supremacy. Should make supremacy levels a little easier to get, and gives supremacists more of a chace to get production.

HandyVac · Feb 24, 2015

Japper007 said:
I don't think this has anything to do with the mod, the AI seems to just kinda stumble into a victory, or not do anything at all. I played an Apollo game recently where a runaway Koslov had fully conquered ARC (he had like 30 cities) and had full Purity, yet didn't make progress towards any of the victories.

On a related note, several times now playing with this mod I've seen the AI building a victory wonder for an affinity other than their dominant one. I.e. a harmony civ building the Emancipation Gate, or a purity civ winning with a Mind Flower.

I'm not sure if thats the AI following some grand strategy to level-up affinity A but accidentally getting affinity B instead from the yields system, or if the AI just picks a victory at random when it happens to meet the prereqs for all of them.

Minor Annoyance · Feb 27, 2015

I think the AI perhaps doesn't understand how to get affinity so it picks a goal and doesn't know how to get there. This may be why Firaxis didn't go this way with affinity. It's hard to get the AI to effectively build cities, and even harder if they also have to follow a bigger strategy when doing it.

Ryika · Mar 1, 2015

When it comes to victory wonders the AI will usually just build whatever is available first, as they have insanely high flavor-numbers (200, while everything else has about 5-25, going to 50 for some wonders).

@Topic: That's a REALLY cool project, so much more interesting than what we currently have in the game.

I personally would remove the affinities from the standard builds though, as they're not really divided by affinity - a supremacy player will for example not be able to spam generators and still do fine overall. Everyone goes for farms early on. I personally think a more balanced version would be to instead add these yields when certain affinity-related techs are reached - you could display that in the tech web via dummy-playerperks.

lilgamefreek · Mar 1, 2015

Since you've modified some UI elements, it would be relatively easy to modify the techweb to use the old affinity icons instead for yield modifications. It would make things clearer. This may have the additional bonus of allowing the same improvement to have different affinity yields, depending on which research path you take.

HandyVac · Mar 4, 2015

Updated to (V 22)

- Optimised code to run faster (by saving info about yields in a lua table, instead of doing the same database lookups an ever-increasing number of times each turn)

- Changed filters in the techweb screen, filtering by affinity now highlights all buildings and improvements which give that affinity yield. (Should make it clearer for the player which techs to prioritise when persuing a certain affinity).

thecrazyscot · Mar 4, 2015

Awesome awesome work! :goodjob:

Have you thought about adding/changing some quest decisions to increase affinity points for certain buildings?

HandyVac · Mar 12, 2015

Update to (v 23)

- Now works properly again after the winter patch.

Affinities As Yields

Gentleman

Chieftain

Gentleman

Deity

Load Balanced

Chieftain

Chieftain

Gentleman

Chieftain

Gentleman

Prince

Prince

Gentleman

Gentleman

Deity

Lazy Wannabe Artista

Warlord

Gentleman

Spiffy

Gentleman

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