but also I had to start thinking more about specialized military production cities:
That was my intention. The bigger problem is that the two previous unit-production buildings, the Forge and the Arsenal, are just too limited: land units only, and requiring either local Iron or several previous military buildings.
10% isn't a lot, really, since it's additive. With a Factory and a railroad, +10% means going from 200% to 210%, so it's not going to make a drastic difference in production time. But it helps just a bit, and I just wanted those two buildings together to basically offset the Workshop. That's why I only dropped the XP boost from 15 down to 10; sure, that's land-only XP and basically corresponds to a single extra turn of fighting, but 15+10 instead of 15+15 is the difference between starting with 2 promotions and starting with 1, and that 10% production isn't going to drastically change anything.
I also just wanted to make the Military Academy better. Don't get me wrong, I love its new effect, with the Elite promotion, but this makes it something that people would really want to build in any city that'll ever make military units.
Really!?! It did for me. I'll see in my next game this evening if it show up again.
I didn't have time to see if it did this one correctly. All I did was set HiddenInPedia = true (which I'd previously used for the Wild psi units) and set the cost to -1. It SHOULD have removed it from the list, but if it didn't, it won't break anything.
I did like this in my first game. I also like the free food for each initial city, as it keeps the cities from losing pop points in the first few turns until I can get my first farm built.
I'd previously been planning to do that auto-improvement of terrain around cities in later eras (starting with an assortment of Farms, Mines, etc.), and I still intend to look into that, but this head start boost has gone a long way towards making this all workable. You wouldn't think adding two or three hammers and food per turn would make that much of a difference early on, but it does. I was tempted to change the research bonus to this sort of thing as well, and/or add some other similar tapering bonus (culture? Happiness? Gold?), but it's all worked out pretty well as-is.
Question: do the AIs actually air-drop the CP?
The AI declarations are in place for it, but no, I never saw them actually use it. Of course, the AI still doesn't seem to settle as aggressively as he should, and my test game basically ended with them just having unlocked the unit, so I have no direct evidence that they use it. Then again, they didn't use nukes until that last patch, so who knows whether the AI can handle something like this.
This was always something meant more for the player to play around with, anyway, although I'd love it if the AI took this new unit as a sign to go on another expansion spree. The same was true in SMAC; I'd build Drop Colony Pods and use them to settle hard-to-reach places, and even though the AI had access to the same upgrades I did, he'd never do the same.
2. The cost to purchase an Infantry is 740 and 220 to upgrade it to a Mechanized Infantry. The cost of purchasing a Mechanized Infantry itself costs 990. Is this intended? I can understand it from the perspective that you can save a few credits at the expense of the turn it takes to upgrade it.
It's not intentional, but it's how the math of the game works; the era-based unit cost multiplier (TrainPercent) isn't quite tied to the upgrade costs correctly, so you'll often see games where this happens. I noticed the same thing with Combat Engineers; it was basically the same cost to build a worker and then upgrade him, or possibly even slightly cheaper.
As you pointed out, it costs you a turn. And really, once you get something like the Pentagon, this tactic becomes a no-brainer anyway, if you're planning on buying your units instead of building them. (Conversely, if you get something like Big Ben it's cheaper to buy the top unit instead.) And this only applies to the player; the AI gets a massive discount on upgrade costs, so it'd ALWAYS be smarter for them to do things this way. But they don't. To me, this makes up for some AI stupidity; you as a player might now that if you're 10 turns away from unlocking Infantry, there's no point in building another Rifleman, but the AI doesn't know this. So if you made upgrades cost much more than the difference in costs, it'd really hurt the AI more than the player.
I wish there was a way to pay to complete half-built units instead of having to start from scratch, because I'd love to see it capped to where you could only pay for the last couple hundred hammers of a unit or building's cost. Sort of like how in systems where you'd rush with population, you'd want to wait until it only cost 1 instead of 2.
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Now, personally I wish they'd kept the Civ4 XP limitation, where conscripts only had half the normal XP, and applied that to all purchased units, to encourage you to build the units normally and make this a non-issue. The problem is that in this mod, if you've managed your empire well and expanded well, you'll end up gaining a few hundred gold per turn, which makes purchasing units far easier than building them.
A while back I changed the trade route income equation to match Thalassicus' balance mod. Instead of 1.0+1.25*pop, it's now -1.3+1.5*pop+0.05*capital, which means you break even at around population 8-9 compared to before. This really kills ICS, of course; the big drop in the constant hurts small cities badly, which is why I did it.
The problem is that once you get to size 20ish in every city, you're now gaining ~4 gpt per city more than you used to (29.7 vs 26 gpt), times the usual multipliers, because the per-pop part is larger than before. I've tried to balance this by the increased cost of culture/happiness buildings and the higher unhappiness rate (which'd force you to pay for more happiness buildings), but it hasn't quite worked out. Happiness is just a non-issue once you get rolling; in my last game I was over +100 Happiness, so I just didn't NEED all those happiness-boosting buildings, which'd save you enough money to make up the difference.
(I'm looking into that massive Happiness. There has to be some way to alter that; I think the big culprit is that there's no downside to having all of the luxuries. If you had diminishing returns, where the first few unique luxuries gave +6 or +7 and then it tapered down to +1 or +2 per, then there wouldn't be this massive bonus for expansion. Right now, as long as a city site has a local luxury resource nearby, it'll always be a net positive. Even if it's got horses nearby for a circus, same deal.)
So I'm thinking about changing the money equation again. How about -1.0 + 1.333*pop + 0.067*capital? Break-even is size 13 (hurting ICS even worse), but it doesn't go out of control nearly as badly at large sizes. With size 20 cities you'd gain 27 gpt, versus 26 in vanilla. Conversely, with size 5 cities you'd make 6gpt, versus 7.25 in vanilla and 6.45 in the current equation, so it shouldn't hurt you too badly at first.
But even that might not work right, because from what I can tell there's a fundamental weakness in the way the economics works, part of which I did to myself. It's the tile yield increases. Farms (+research) and Trading Posts (+production) are the only ones you can really spam, but most of the specialized ones gained +1 gold. So it adds up FAST; trade route income is really only a small part of a player's income, most of their money comes from the multiplication of tile yields and Merchant specialists. It's why settling on a river is so crucial.
This actually comes into play with some of my Nanotech-era buildings (Nanoreplicator and such). Adding a flat amount to the base gold/research/production of a city might not sound too impressive, but by that era the multipliers are so large that the effect can be huge.
3. On the Lakes map I played on earlier today there were whales in one of the water tiles: had never seen that before!
The percentages aren't set very high, but yes, it happens. I didn't touch the luxury distribution logic, so this is all part of the core game. The only thing I changed were the strategic deposits; I suppose that could interact, since more strategics means fewer open tiles to put luxuries in, but there's a hard minimum the game uses so I don't think that's a problem.
In terms of whales, and other aquatic resources, the game splits tiles into three lists: directly adjacent to land, shallow water (which also includes the adjacent category), and deep water. Pretty much every resource is linked to shallow water, including Whales for reasons that have nothing to do with reality and everything with balance.
If you try starting a game in the Transcend Era (or Nanotech, even), you'll see all of the resources on a map. This is how I tested the distributions for myself; start a game in that era, see if there's enough of each resource within reach to be playable, tweak and iterate.
I'm still not quite happy; Dilithium's still pretty scarce and Omnicytes are a bit too plentiful. But it's a lot better than it used to be. And you can see how common Whales, Pearls, etc. are on the various map types.
4. On the Lakes map I played on earlier today there was no oil or aluminum at all.
This sort of thing really annoys me. There's logic in there that's SUPPOSED to check for this, and add in small amounts of a strategic resource if there's less than a certain amount. But it's just no coded well, at all; as far as I can tell, instead of adding enough to reach the minimum, it just adds a single deposit.
That's why, for my own mod, I handled the minimum slightly differently. Instead of placing the resources randomly and then checking to see if you had enough, I placed a smaller number of Neutronium randomly, and then just manually said, "Add N more deposits around the world." The number of Dilithium in the world will be directly related to the number of fish, pearls, and whales, and then it'll add another N small deposits. And Omnicytes have a small override too, but it's not as critical for them since they're a land/sea resource.
This also applies to Coal; I added a small override like this in one of my previous updates to force a few extra small coal deposits to show up. Missing some Oil hurts your military, but missing Coal is crippling. (Especially for an Industrial or Nuclear start, since it'll be a while until a settler is ready and the chances of settling near a Coal aren't good.)
So it sounds like I could do something similar for Oil and Aluminum. Although, neither is insurmountable; an Energy Bank gets you Oil and Coal, and the Fusion Lab makes Aluminum and Uranium (at the cost of Dilithium, which might not be easy to get on a Lakes map?), so it's not like the game is unwinnable without those. So I might only add N/2 instead of N, and keep the deposits small (as with Coal), just enough that most empires will have a LITTLE but not enough to build an army around.
Was making plans on how to take advantage of the next AI on AI war when all the AIs dogpiled me
I've noticed this happening much more after the official patch. The AIs pay much more attention to how weak/strong your military is; if you lag even a little behind in building up your military on an Industrial start, the AIs will declare on you with no warning. In my game I had 4 declare on me on one turn, finished that war, then had 3 declare on me a while later, despite the fact that the civs in question were on another continent and had no navies. I literally had one enemy whose empire was filled with land units, one per hex, and yet he never embarked them to come invade me; instead, he lobbed an atomic bomb and watched as a half-dozen Stealth Bombers picked his army apart one hex at a time.
Part of it also seems to be related to the new negative Declaration. One AI condemns you, it makes all the others like you less, which makes the next one do the same, and suddenly your relations are all so low that everyone hates you and declares war. Especially if you're in first place from building Wonders and/or have a relatively weak army...
The problem is that once this happens, it all falls apart. If the AIs all declare on you, then even once you make peace they'll still dislike you. That means no more 1-for-1 luxury deals, no more research agreements, so you'll start falling behind... unless you go full military. There should be more ways to repair your relationship with other AIs, but unlike city-states, there isn't a clear benefit to giving the AI free stuff.