Acken's Minimalistic Balance for singleplayer (and AI improvements)

hey,
i love what i hear about your mod. i definatly want to do some fresh piety and honor. But i downloaded last mod and got no lux and ruins. do you know the resaon?

Just a quick question. Did you somehow alter the way workers detect threats? I've had a scout stay near a CS to try and get a second free worker but the worker simply stayed inside the city even thought i was outside of border detection range (there was 1 empty tile on flat ground).

Not complaining if you fixed this exploit but it's good to know. I would have built some workers myself if i had known i couldn't count on capturing more than 1

Harbor gold and seaport production only apply on ocean, not cost :-(

Edit:
Sry, works fine on newly built harbors og sesports. Was in a savegame...

I've partially played through two different games now and had a different blast on each one of them.

First up was an Immortal game as Boudicca. I just read your Wide guide yesterday which used the Celts, so I decided to just play copy everything you said there. Adapting a bit for the mod, of course... I was in a T-shaped continent with Polynesia and The Maya. Pretty funnily, even though I forward settled Polynesia with my second city, they took a huge while to start hating on me. Even as I made a total of 7 cities, he just never got around DoWing me... Kamehameha and Pacal were too busy trying to murder each other, I guess.

I eventually joined the war against Polynesia and took a single city, while Pacal is still best friends with me to this day. Though he wiped out Polynesia, so I'm SURE he's coming for me next... >_> Too bad Rome was in a nearby continent (connect by coast!) and decided to storm one of my coastal cities first. Even though I had nearly 10 gattling guns, they were no match to Cesar's infinite Galleass's. He even came with some Ironclads later. That city is still mine, but not for long. And I'm not sure I can hold him back from invading my continent. >_>; Are these naval attacks a new feature in v4? I never had those happen before. Though this game IS quite atypical, with Cesar alone in a separate continent which connects to mine via coasts. So he had plenty of space to cityspam and build a navy of death. Things look grim, but maybe I can defend myself and still win this.

That was quite depressing, though, so I decided to start a completely different game to freshen things up. I went the totally opposite way, still on Immortal, and picked Venice to see how long I'd last on a single city. And the answer was... not too long, heh. I had China and Carthage on my continent and they both opened Honor. I managed to bribe them into killing each other (guess I wasn't that nice of a target or threat with only one city and all) and their war was... quite stale, really. A central city kept flipping owners and that was it. Eventually, I decided to build some Great Galleasses and join the fray by taking some of Carthage's coastal cities. That went nicely! Way too nicely in fact. After I took those two cities, Wu Zetian managed to completely wipe Dido out of the face of the planet... And came after me. Guess my capital doesn't have much of a chance against her 10+ cities. Still, it was a fun game. Just teaches me that I should let people murder each other rather than helping one side.

I'm trying another game as Venice now, but I also think it won't work very nicely. As you can see, I'm not a very good Immortal player. But it's nice to see how long I can last before everything goes down the drain. And I still have some chance in my Celts game, so there's that!

Bob Morane said:

Just a quick question. Did you somehow alter the way workers detect threats? I've had a scout stay near a CS to try and get a second free worker but the worker simply stayed inside the city even thought i was outside of border detection range (there was 1 empty tile on flat ground).

Not complaining if you fixed this exploit but it's good to know. I would have built some workers myself if i had known i couldn't count on capturing more than 1

Click to expand...

The AI sees 2 tiles beyond its border so yes it's very difficult to farm workers.

@Deaga I helped naval attack on an earlier version. Venice's weakness show a lot in the mod. I'll have to find a way to fix them at some point.

jekosto said:

hey,
i love what i hear about your mod. i definatly want to do some fresh piety and honor. But i downloaded last mod and got no lux and ruins. do you know the resaon?

Click to expand...

This would be a problem with the mapgenerator. Are you using any other mapscript like Communitas or NQMap already installed ?

What usually creates problems is the natural wonder selection of the NQMap which I'll probably remove to decrease the number of time this problem happens.

Have you uploaded a v4 lets play? Cant find it in your lets play thread, so guess not?

Acken said:

The AI sees 2 tiles beyond its border so yes it's very difficult to farm workers.

Click to expand...

OK. So i need horses to farm workers now. Too bad there were no horses in the entire half continent i controlled after taking care of Pacal I really have to remember to activate Strategic Balance.

Well, that game wasn't that bad until Isabella decided to coup the CS that provided me my horses (as it was a 2 city CS after some war against France). I had a spy there too but after Isabella's Coup i had 0% chance to take it back. I thought coups would drop the existing ally to the level of the Civ making the coup. If it's true i should then have the same chance to coup the city back as she had. My prior to the coup was way above 200 BTW. Does AIs receive a bonus to coup chance? (she don't have an ideology yet)
Of course she invaded me next and my horseless knights got butchered by Tercios. I couldn't even use a great general to take horses as they were all in the far north of that continent and i started in the south

Was playing as Byzantium this game. Cataphracts are really nice when you can get them, but i'm not sure about Dromons. Optics is not a priority tech, especially now that Fishing Boats give you more and lighthouses less on sea resources. Previously i would use Dromons marginally as defenders (like an additional archer) and as support to land units operating near the coast. Now i didn't use them at all cause i had compass right after optics and access to the stronger galeasses

The Royal Library doesn't show it's Great Scientist slot when you are using EUI.

Reported to bc1 as this can probably only be fixed on his end but i wanted to let you know.

Can be worked around by deleting the CityView folder from EUI. You'll get the old city view, but the rest of EUI will work.

I rolled England for my first game with version 4, so I'm loving the new harbour and seaport benefits. Wow. Great change, making water tiles relevant again.

I'm wondering, though, why you have made cities weaker. Sure, it's easier to conquer but it's more difficult for the AI to defend itself. In Civ 4, the defender advantage was almost non-existent, and I didn't like that. I thought one of the best changes in civ 5 was a real advantage to the defender, but you continue to reduce this. Why do you think this is good for the game?

Also, while there is an NQContinents.lua script inside your mod's folder, i can't select it when creating a new game (neither in the "Additional maps" pack on the main screen or the drop-down menu in Advanced Setup mode)

Bob Morane said:

The Royal Library doesn't show it's Great Scientist slot when you are using EUI.

Spoiler :

Reported to bc1 as this can probably only be fixed on his end but i wanted to let you know.

Can be worked around by deleting the CityView folder from EUI. You'll get the old city view, but the rest of EUI will work.

Click to expand...

it works fine on my rig, if you could post a save game thanks

Dahebbie said:

Have you uploaded a v4 lets play? Cant find it in your lets play thread, so guess not?

Click to expand...

Indeed and I'm busy for a few days after NYE. For this and before I can tackle the problems arising from every new versions

noto2 said:

I'm wondering, though, why you have made cities weaker. Sure, it's easier to conquer but it's more difficult for the AI to defend itself. In Civ 4, the defender advantage was almost non-existent, and I didn't like that. I thought one of the best changes in civ 5 was a real advantage to the defender, but you continue to reduce this. Why do you think this is good for the game?

Click to expand...

The new change only affect strength 80+ cities and not by much. Weaker cities is good in my opinion to make conquering flow more easily. It helps creating future AI superpower, helps melee units be relevant in an attack, forces you to make units to defend etc.
I just hate cities acting as a turret in civ5 in general. There's still a defender advantage though not as big.

Bob Morane said:

Also, while there is an NQContinents.lua script inside your mod's folder, i can't select it when creating a new game (neither in the "Additional maps" pack on the main screen or the drop-down menu in Advanced Setup mode)

Click to expand...

That is because I forgot to do something and it will appear in "Hellblazer Continent map". Will be fixed in the january update

The Royal Library works also fine on latest version of EUI for me.

bc1 said:

if you could post a save game thanks

Click to expand...

Here are 2 saves.
Turn 33 save is when i took the screenshots. The RL had just been built and i used the Great Writer to produce a Great Work. I didn't check for the specialist slot before (the mod gives a free great writer so i had him waiting for the Library to finish building)
Turn 65 is a bit later, after i used the workaround to fill the slot.

Now for the interesting part. I just found out is that the specialist slot showed up filled when i loaded t65 with full EUI. I removed the scientist and the slot stayed visible. I then reloaded T33 and the slot was visible (and the tooltip correctly reported the slot too) so i'm not sure what happened exactly. Even loading T33 after exiting the game has the slot visible.

And now i can't even reproduce it myself with or without EUI so maybe it was a database error or something not related to EUI at all. If that is, sorry for the wrong report. Strange part is i fixed it by removing EUI, but maybe it was merely restarting CiV that "fixed " it. However i'm almost sure when i first loaded T33 just prior to starting this answer (and after reinstalling EUI) the slot was not visible and only showed up after i loaded T65 but i can't be 100% sure of that

thanks for the saves - I guess it's no use if now it works for you too
the game seems to behave strangely when loading modded games directly from an unmodded (or differently modded) game, or if civilopedia is accessed pre-game in a specific sequence before (or after ?) enabling mods

Cheers

Bob Morane said:

Well, that game wasn't that bad until Isabella decided to coup the CS that provided me my horses (as it was a 2 city CS after some war against France). I had a spy there too but after Isabella's Coup i had 0% chance to take it back. I thought coups would drop the existing ally to the level of the Civ making the coup. If it's true i should then have the same chance to coup the city back as she had. My prior to the coup was way above 200 BTW. Does AIs receive a bonus to coup chance? (she don't have an ideology yet)

Click to expand...

Haven't touched anything about coups beside giving you a bonus with the freedom policy.

Was playing as Byzantium this game. Cataphracts are really nice when you can get them, but i'm not sure about Dromons. Optics is not a priority tech, especially now that Fishing Boats give you more and lighthouses less on sea resources. Previously i would use Dromons marginally as defenders (like an additional archer) and as support to land units operating near the coast. Now i didn't use them at all cause i had compass right after optics and access to the stronger galeasses

Click to expand...

Dromon occupy a quick rush spot for water maps. You're right though that this spot is somewhat taken by galleas.
I'll think about putting it back to sailing.

Dahebbie said:

Harbor gold and seaport production only apply on ocean, not cost :-(

Edit:
Sry, works fine on newly built harbors og sesports. Was in a savegame...

Click to expand...

Good to know but sadly you'll have to deal with that change not being retroactive

@Bobmorane
I've looked further into the coup code below:


You get her previous value of influence and then -20. Note that spy level also affect the chance of coup and the method GetCoupChanceOfSuccess has no special condition for the AI.

bc1 said:

thanks for the saves - I guess it's no use if now it works for you too
the game seems to behave strangely when loading modded games directly from an unmodded (or differently modded) game, or if civilopedia is accessed pre-game in a specific sequence before (or after ?) enabling mods

Cheers

Click to expand...

If not for the screenshots, i would think i was drunk or something Not sure what i did that might have caused it. I tried again from the start just to check whether using a great writer without first opening the city view would cause the same error but no. Works right.

Acken said:

You get her previous value of influence and then -20. Note that spy level also affect the chance of coup and the method GetCoupChanceOfSuccess has no special condition for the AI.

Click to expand...

OK thanks. That -20 (i wasn't aware of it) and the spy level might explain this (my spy was level 1). Still looks like she was lucky as hell. I don't even think she targeted that specific CS knowingly in order to kill my horses supply

And now, happy new year cause i won't post again this year

Acken,

Any interest in posting your DLL changes to github? I think it would be a worthwhile effort to try and keep all custom DLLs as interchangeable as possible.

G

Trying out version 4 Demigod, NQ pangea standard.



Chose Egypt to see if 1) I could snatch some early wonders and 2) to try for a really wide start with liberty/piety religion. I had a good production start but limited land with 3 good city spots close by so I went for Glib into Philosophy and a 4city NC turn 80 and great temple directly after. I also built warriors and rushed my close northern neighbor with 6 upgraded swords and some support units at the same time (2 spears, 2 comp bow, 2 catapult). That brought me to 9 cities so I upgraded to longswords/trebutchets to conquer my more distant western neighbor razing two, keeping three cities. Diplomacy was successful in keeping rest of the AI:s locked in stalemate wars pitting the three weaker against the 2 stronger. Now I have built up infrastructure and gone for order to supercharge it. Social policies: liberty until collective rule, piety to organised religion, rest of liberty, rest of piety, commerce to mercantilism, order to scyscrapers, young pioneers, hero of the people, party leadership and workers faculties.


I'm crushing the demographics with order, my food, production, gold and pop is more than twice the average and probably my science too. I Will be at labs turn 182 without rationalism and I can buy all 12 of them. I can probably win science or domination in 50 turns or so and with my infrastructure the Ai can not do anything about it. Though it will not be faster than the Aztec game without floating gardens, high food land and early cities and with the nerf to science in V. 4.

I think order is too good as it stands now. Freedom took a hard hit from the nerf to secularism. Before there was an early sweet spot where you could slow down growth to work max specialists from pop 15 onwards, get high science and the maximum benefits from freedom early. That will no longer cut it as you stunt your long term science too much for 1 science per specialist. Max specialists will rather be optimal at 25 pop ish in a science game. That means a lot of turns where you are not getting extra food/hammers/happiness from freedom.

The higher number of policies in the game also benefits order versus the other ideologies as it has so many generally useful policies for infrastructure/happiness(9). (Freedom only has suffrage, capitalism, civil society). The extra infrastructure from party elite, five year plan and skyscrapers, iron curtain, spaceship pioneers and the 3 happiness polices helps you with most victories and defending against AI aggression. With the nerf to science in general the extra 25% from Order feels crucial for early science victories.

I suggest the following changes:
- Add a +1 science from specialists in freedom, at free expression.
- Nerf young pioneers by removing happiness from workshops on it.
- Nerf party elite by removing the 2 production on it (you already get that from five year plan).
Perhaps move scyscrapers to freedom if this is not enough.