Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

Notes from this evening's playtesting:

1. Just realized that my arty can attack enemy units which are in a Neutral countries territory.

2. Combat Engineers are overpowered as starting units in the Nuclear era. They are excellent scouts, which is something only a human would realize, and a human would also realize they don't need to build additional Workers..

3. No one seemed to be building SPs in the game I played this evening. Not sure if it was simply the AI's prioritizing things differently or what. Edit: I also seem to have adapted my gameplay to the issues of poor gold supply and poor Happiness, however I don't think the AI is able to adapt.

4. First pic: Advisor correctly recommending to build forest! Awesome! :goodjob:

5. Second pic: the Irriquois asked for peace on several occasions this evening. The below pic was from the first episode, which I think showed how weak they really were, as they had no real gold reserves at a relatively early stage in the game.


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2. Combat Engineers are overpowered as starting units in the Nuclear era. They are excellent scouts, which is something only a human would realize, and a human would also realize they don't need to build additional Workers..

While Combat Engineers have excellent mobility, they have NO combat power, which means they'd automatically die if they ended their turn within reach of a Barbarian. So they really aren't that great for scouting, and you REALLY need them to be improving and connecting your cities ASAP.
Besides, with the starting city size and production, you could just make a Scout in 1-2 turns, and they have almost the same mobility (2 MP instead of 3) while having better vision range. In the later eras 4 power might as well be 0, so there's no difference there, but the Scout is much cheaper to build, and I believe that makes the AI prioritize killing it less.

But I did this in Civ4 too. My favorite civ to play was India, because of the Fast Workers (3 MP instead of 2). While they didn't have the other benefits of the Combat Engineer, you had them in the Ancient Era. Invariably I'd use one as a scout, because they'd outpace horsemen and were cheap to replace. So you can see where I got the inspiration from, and I tried to make them expensive enough to not be desirable as scouting units.

3. No one seemed to be building SPs in the game I played this evening. Not sure if it was simply the AI's prioritizing things differently or what.

I think this was because of the economic difficulties we'd discussed earlier. In my test run last night (Industrial start) I was beaten to three or four of the earliest Wonders by the AIs. In a couple cases, they clearly built the Wonders before doing anything else (Brandenburg Gate while I was just getting started, beat me to Cristo Redentor by 20 turns, beat me to Sistine Chapel by 3 turns).

Another part of it just seems to be inherent to starting in later eras. When you start at the beginning, things grow organically. The first social policies will be Tradition (including that +33% production for Wonders one), the cities will build normal buildings before the Wonders show up, and so on. At any given point, you'll only have a few options for each city, because most stuff won't have unlocked yet. But if you start in, say, the Nuclear Era, the AI gets overloaded; it doesn't realize how critical that early coal deposit is, and might build Wonders before getting the essentials (like Factories) in place.
That's actually part of why, in my internal version, I just bumped the FreeStartEra settings on the money buildings. In the vanilla game, you get Markets for an Industrial start, and Banks for a Future start. In my mod, it's now Markets for Renaissance and Banks for Industrial. This obviously goes a LONG way towards helping the AI stay solvent; with every city having a Bank now for an Industrial or Nuclear start, you'll pretty much break even from turn 1.

And I think the Settler issue discussed above might also be part of the problem. Settlers are SO expensive on those later eras that a human knows not to bother building one until you have plenty of food and production in place. The AI, on the other hand, might be trying to make a 90-turn Settler and never doing anything else.

Edit: I also seem to have adapted my gameplay to the issues of poor gold supply and poor Happiness, however I don't think the AI is able to adapt.

Yeah. I THINK I've fixed that in my most recent version; I was going to post it last night, but I found something else that needed fixing, so I'm aiming for tonight instead. I'm worried that I might have moved it too far towards what it used to be, with money and happiness being plentiful, but this'll take some testing.

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Last night's game was very interesting. Continents map, I was America, Industrial start. There were basically three continents: one small one had Germany (who built the Apollo Program two turns after I did and are currently racing me to the spaceship), one just had 3 city-states, and the big one had the remaining 5 civs. I invaded the Ottomans, while the French took all but one Chinese city and then grabbed two Songhai colonies. (Those Foreign Legion are BRUTAL, especially since promoting to MechInfantry keeps the custom promotion.) To top it off, the French managed to ally with ten different city-states (they clearly took all the Patronage tree), so if we reached the UN they'd win... which meant that I had to invade the French as soon as I got Modern Armor.
And they wiped the floor with my army, at least at first. On Prince, and they didn't even have Oil for tanks. Just hordes of highly-upgraded Mechanized Infantry and Artillery, and a squadron of four Destroyers that attacked as a group. Between the adjacent bonus, the Foreign Legion bonus when invading and the Home Field Advantage bonus when defending, I had a horrible time dislodging them until I had four B17s going at once. And they killed quite a few of my units in the process.

The one thing I realized, though, is that city power doesn't scale enough. Their front-line city had strength 45 (Walls, Castle) and did an excellent job holding off my attacks, but their back cities lacked those buildings and so were in the teens and low 20s (including Paris, at 23); easy to seize once I got around the border by going through some forests. (Seriously, it reminded me of the Maginot Line.) However, while that 45-strength city held off the infantry and tanks, it was demolished easily by a B17, so air defense is still a real concern. (I'm thinking of adding an AirDefense rating to the Walls/Castle/Military Base now.)
So tonight, I'm going to go into GlobalDefines and tweak the city strength settings to scale more with population and tech level. Hopefully that should help.
 
Hey, after I read your feedback on the Espionage Concecepts thread I started, I discovered these posts about your mod -- very cool mod and I like many of the changes you've implemented. I presently do not enjoy C5 much, but once it improves, I'll give your mod a play.

Anyways, I was reading from the posts that there seems to be a problem with the gold yield that effects the AI especially. Sometime ago, I had the following ideas re: adding bonuses to foreign trade routes....at the time I was thinking of a way to represent establishing trade routes with more historical accuracy.....It's a rough outline, but I'm curious what your thoughts are.


In this revised system, there would be 3 ways to establish a foreign trade route with other civs: 1) via land routes, 2) overseas with civs on same continent, and 3) overseas with civs on other continents.

Global Rules:

1) Foreign trade routes require an active trade agreement that is NOT a money-for-money exchange.

2) For every foreign trade route established, the player receives a base +2 gold into treasury. Additional gold may also be provided (see bonuses below).

3) Note: it is possible for the player to NOT have a foreign trade route established with another civ, and yet still be trading strategic or luxury goods, or engage in any other sort of trade. Failure to establish a foreign trade route simply means that the player does NOT obtain the bonuses (see below).


Foreign Trade divided into three types: overland continental, overseas continental, overseas international.

1) Establishing a Foreign Trade Route:a foreign trade route is established in one of three ways:

--A) Overland Continental: trade existing from land routes between civs located on the same continent
---->requires:
--------(1) open border agreement &
--------(2) road built connecting at least 1 player controlled city to at least 1 city belonging to foreign civ.
--------------Note: Road may pass through other civs IF open borders agreement exists w/ third-party civ

--B) Continental overseas: coastal trade existing between civs located on same continent.
---->available with Sailing
---->requires:
-------(1) open borders agreement with other other civ, &
-------(2) city must be connected to the capital by a road &
-------(2) city must have harbor built.

--C) International overseas: overseas trade existing between civs located on different continents.
---->available with: Navigation
----requires:
------(1) must have open borders agreement with other civ &
------(2 )player must have city connected to capital by road &
------(3) same city must have Harbor built &
------(4) same city must have Market built.

2) Foreign trade route bonuses:
----> additional +1 gold for all foreign trade routes during Classical era. Bonus ends w/ entering Medieval era.
----> +1 gold with discovery of Economics (restructuring of economies around colonization)
----> +1 gold with discovery of Railroad per overland continental.
----> +1 culture with discovery of Flight for every foreign trade route.
----> +1 gold per international overseas trade route with Computers.


Additions:

1) Great Wonder: "The Medici Bank" available with Economics --> +3 to all foreign trade routes

2) With discovery of Scientific Theory, research agreements cost 25% less between foreign trade route partners. (IMO, research agreements need a total re-working! They should cost a lot more, nations should only be able to work jointly on the same tech and they both must have pre-req techs, and it should operate by combining their beakers -- or something like that....)

3) National Wonder: "National Embassy" available with new technology, "Realpolitiks" (pre-reqs = Banking + Printing Press). Establishes resident ambassador in each nation that player maintains foreign trade route with. +1 happy per foreign trade route (benefit of regularized and formalized diplomatic relations between nations).

4) National Wonder: "Custom House," available with Realpolitik (see #3 above). Houses public officials who process the paperwork for the import and export of goods into and out of a country. Customs officials also collect customs duty on imported goods. +25 gold yield for all overseas foreign trade routes (continental and international). City must have already built Harbor and Bank.


I think these changes (or something along these lines) would create real incentives to engage in foreign trade, but such would require managing the peace, building early infrastructure, but also exercising skill in keeping the routes open. I also think these changes could be implemented nicely along side changes in the game's coding that makes barbarian pirates more of a factor requiring more battling to keep trading lanes open. I'm thinking about how big of a role piracy has played throughout history -- I'd like to see it given more prominence in CIV.

What'cha think?


P.S. -- check out that Espionage thread again if you have a chance. I was thinking about yours and alpaca's comments and I threw out some ideas there.....wondering what you think.
 
What'cha think?

I think they're a lot of good ideas, that will be utterly impossible to implement without a better DLL SDK. Most of what you described just can't be done in any way that I can see without access to a deeper level of programming than we can get through LUA. (Just figuring out whether two empires have a road connection would be BRUTAL.) This ties back to the simplified system Civ5 uses, where all that matters is whether a city connects to its capital.

I think it's something that should be completely disconnected from my mod, something affecting all of the earlier eras. The few changes I made to earlier eras (3 growth buildings, a few tech-based yield increases, the start era retuning) were all designed for the sole purpose of increasing the likelihood you reach my future eras. And I definitely wouldn't add a new technology to the earlier eras.

I think the balance of your concept is going to be difficult to get right, as everything you described is a positive change in terms of gold, so you'll have to subtract gold somewhere else to keep it from being too strong.

And I think you need to come up with different names, as "Customs House" is an existing terrain Improvement created by Great Merchants and the "Medici Bank" is a National Wonder they're adding in the next patch.

But I think you should go ahead and try to make that mod, and if you can pull it off then it should be perfectly compatible with what I have here. Unfortunately, it's not something that can be used to solve the balance problems my own changes have made, because it's not something that I'd want to be a mandatory element for my players. (It's why I didn't put the Tech Diffusion logic into my mod. While I like that mod and use it myself, I don't want to force other people to use it.)
 
The few changes I made to earlier eras (3 growth buildings, a few tech-based yield increases, the start era retuning) were all designed for the sole purpose of increasing the likelihood you reach my future eras. And I definitely wouldn't add a new technology to the earlier eras.

I actually think that is the coolest aspect of your mod. The early game is just tweaked a bit for the purists, but it adds so much incredible and creative content to the end-game.


I think the balance of your concept is going to be difficult to get right, as everything you described is a positive change in terms of gold, so you'll have to subtract gold somewhere else to keep it from being too strong.

My thought was that the extra gold would help support an espionage system that was primarily based on gold investments. http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=401567

I also figured that some gold would be siphoned off by having to support a larger early navy given increased threats from piracy.


And I think you need to come up with different names, as "Customs House" is an existing terrain Improvement created by Great Merchants and the "Medici Bank" is a National Wonder they're adding in the next patch.

Guess that proves how little I've played C5. I haven't managed to get out of the renaissance era before the game was already decided or I was just fed up with the stupid AI.


But I think you should go ahead and try to make that mod, and if you can pull it off then it should be perfectly compatible with what I have here.

Unfortunately, I haven't tried my hand at a major modding project. I've messed around with lines of code here and there but very much on a small scale. I would like to learn though -- but, I won't be able to get to it for a few months (studying for the CA. Bar).

I appreciate the feedback though. I look forward to playing your mod at some point!
 
Unfortunately, I haven't tried my hand at a major modding project. I've messed around with lines of code here and there but very much on a small scale. I would like to learn though -- but, I won't be able to get to it for a few months (studying for the CA. Bar).

Pfft. Priorities, man. Which is more important, the Bar or a good Civ5 mod?
(On the bright side, by the time you're ready to do some modding, DLL modification might be possible.)

The fundamental problem here is that while Firaxis has given us a lot of stubs for modding, there are a few glaring omissions. Because of this, nearly all of the Policy effects, Wonder effects, and so on that I've put into my mod are things that either already existed in the XML, or were easy to add through existing LUA functionality. I had a lot of ideas on what I'd originally wanted, that I had to throw out because they just wouldn't be practical to code. That's why I think your concept should be done, if possible, as a separate mod; it's a completely different level of coding than anything I've put into my own mods so far, and would probably require rebuilding quite a few existing systems from the ground up.

There are just so many missing functions. For instance, it's trivial to check whether a building exists in a given city. But there isn't any easy way to check if that building was just built in that city on the last turn; there's no "BuiltTurnNumber" function to recall that, and there's no Event logic to trigger on completion of a building. There's already a hack over in one of the subforums to create new Events along these lines, but most of these workarounds don't feel organic, in that they only kick in at the start of the next turn. Most of these workarounds are built around a single mod component, the Save system. In the core game you can't save the value of a variable from one turn to the next, but very early on someone figured out how to do that in a somewhat complicated way. So it's easy to add changes that kick in every turn (most of my new wonders, the tech and food boosts, etc.), but hard to add something that adjusts dynamically.

Likewise, the data structure is set up in a very hierarchical way. You can't just say "loop over all cities". No, it's loop over players, then check to see if it's a valid player, then loop over that player's cities. Cities don't have a separate structure of their own, it's all a part of the Player structure.
Or technologies. Players don't learn technologies; Teams learn technologies, and Players are assigned a Team. (In most games, it's a 1:1 pairing.) So if you want to check to see if a player has a technology, there's a couple extra steps you have to do each time. Depending on exactly what you're trying to do, this can lead to some tremendously complicated logic.
And there's little cross-referencing. Want to check if a player has the Centauri Ecology tech? You have to loop over all technologies, find which one has Type "TECH_CENTAURI_ECOLOGY", and then grab the ID code, since that ID is what everything is indexed by. Sure, you could just fudge it (I KNOW it's #74 in my games), but what happens if someone then tries to play a game using both my mod and one that adds a new technology? It might be #75 then, depending on which order the mods were loaded in. So you're coding in a lot of loops just to grab the right variables.

But the one that kills me? There's no "refresh map" function. You can change what terrain type a tile is, but it won't actually show on the map, because the map only refreshes when you exit or load a new game. The Map structure in general is a bit weak; it's a lot more work than it should be to say "give me the six hexes adjacent to the hex at X,Y".

Firaxis has said that the upcoming patch will add a bunch of new functions for modders. So I'm still hoping for the best.
 
It's that time again, boys and girls!

v.0.09 changelog (12/8)
> Labor Mechs and Formers gain the “Deep Mine” build action at Nanomatter Editation. This action can only be used on land tiles with no resources. It creates a new resource deposit, most likely dilithium or neutronium. This creates the possibility of land-based dilithium, which uses a Mine to harvest. It takes an extremely long amount of time to do, however.
> Put the SS components back to their original costs, now that they actually do something. I might even increase them.
> (Crazy Spatz) As in Thalassicus’ Balance Mod, I’ve changed trade route income to –1.3 + 1.5*pop + 0.05*capital pop (was 1 + 1.25*pop), to discourage ICS and improve the income of larger cities.
> (Crazy Spatz) The increase in city combat strength due to each population point is now 0.5 (was 0.25).
> (Crazy Spatz) The Palace, by default, adds +2 city strength. I increased this to +10; capitals should always be hard to sieze.
> (Crazy Spatz) The default game’s “City Strength Tech Multiplier” was 2. I increased that to 4, so that cities in later eras should have much higher base defense values.
(An Industrial start gives 19 strength in normal cities, 29 in the capital)
> (Crazy Spatz) Because +10% food isn’t very useful to a small city, I’ve set the Watermill to only be available to Medium or larger cities (which means size 5 or 6, I think), at which point it’ll at least give 1 food. There was no need to change the Floating Garden in the same way since it also gives a flat amount.
> (Crazy Spatz) The Forbidden Palace was decreased to –25% unhappiness from city count. This still comes out to +1 happy per city, just like in vanilla, because the base value for a city is now 4 instead of 2.
> (Crazy Spatz) The “Planned Economy” Policy in the vanilla game gave –50% unhappiness from city count. This was decreased to –25% for the same reason as above.
However, in my mod, I'd moved that effect to the “Planned Society” policy. So that’s now changed instead. The only problem: both mods are trying to update Planned Economy’s civilopedia entry, and I’m not sure which will override; preliminary testing seems to always use the right one (the new Alpha Centauri mod entry), although I just don't know if it'd stay that way. (Possible solution: move that change exclusively to the content mod, and accept that it’ll make things unbalanced in a game using only the balance mod.)
> The Bank is now automatically given in the Industrial Era starts, instead of waiting until the Digital Era. The Satrap’s Court was already at that point. Likewise, the Market is given in Renaissance starts, instead of waiting until the Industrial, and the Bazaar was already there.
> The FreeStartEra entry was removed from the Theater, Opera House, Forge, Barracks, and Krepost. This greatly reduces the building maintenance costs of your starting cities in later era starts.
> The Colosseum’s maintenance cost was reduced to 2 gold per turn to reflect its reduced Happiness, and to help with the financial drain.
> The Temple’s maintenance cost was reduced to 1 gold per turn, and its FreeStartEra was moved up to the Renaissance (was Industrial). Also, its two UB variants (Burial Tomb and Mud Pyramid Mosque) had no FreeStartEra before, they’re now set to the same.
> In addition to the technology increase added previously, there’s also a boost to food production. Each city gets +1 food per 3 techs still discounted, rounded up. So if you start in the Nuclear Era (era 5), while researching your first tech you’ll get +4 food per city, the next three techs will get +3 food, then +2 for the next three, then +1 for the last three discounted techs.
It's not enough to really swing the balance of power, but it does help with getting up to speed.
> The production Flavor of the Genejack Factory was increased to 100 (from 50), to match the Factory; this encourages the AI to make one before trying to build a Wonder, especially for a start in the Fusion era or later.
> Increased the number of small deposits of strategics by 40%. (Was a base value of 25, now 35.) Large and water deposits were unaffected.
> The Quantum Lab no longer requires the Fusion Lab to be present. Instead, it just requires the Research Lab, the same as the Fusion Lab does. That way, if you lack Dilithium you’re not prevented from building the structure that generates that resource.
> The custom notification icon for non-Wonder buildings (like when the Energy Bank gives you a resource) now uses the right size of icon (was 80, now 64). You won’t get that weird crescent-shaped yellow background any more. Instead, it'll be inside a yellow circle; not the color I'd have picked, but I'll go with it for now.
> The EnemyProductionTurns logic now works; the Nethack Terminus is the only Wonder currently to use this logic (and has it set to 5). If any other civ is within X turns of completing a Wonder, you’ll get a notification that lists which civ, which city, and how many turns. (Useful to know if you're getting beaten to a Wonder, useless to the AI, except that that wonder also gives a free tech.)
> The PromotionInCity logic now works; the Space Elevator is currently the only Wonder that uses this logic, but it can be adapted to others. The logic is simple: if a unit starts its turn in a city containing this Wonder, then it gets the promotion; otherwise, it loses it. (This becomes VERY powerful, in that units near your wonder city can deploy pretty much anywhere in the world you have visibility, but they can’t return the same way.) Do NOT use this to give any promotion that can be gained through any other means, because it WILL remove it even if the unit should have had that promotion already.
> The EnemyPromotion logic now works; the Hunter-Seeker Algorithm uses this, and gives a promotion to any unit located on a tile you control if that unit’s owner is at war with you. I changed the H-SA as a result; it now no longer acts like the Great Wall (which means no Great Wall graphic); instead, it now gives –1 visibility, reduces heal rates by 1, and most importantly, gives a –20% city attack penalty for any other civ’s units inside your territory. (I had it as enemy units only, but then I figured, why not just any units other than yours? The healing and visibility things won’t hurt much, and the city attack penalty wouldn’t trigger.)
As with the previous, do not use this to give any promotion that can be gained any other way; only use unique promotions. The H-SA gives the "Hacked" promotion, for instance.
> Switched the Pasture boost at Gene Splicing with the Plantation boost at Centauri Empathy. The two Pasture boosts were too close together, and it makes more sense this way anyway.
 
Pfft. Priorities, man. Which is more important, the Bar or a good Civ5 mod?

You're not joking! 8 to 10 hour study days are brutal. But, thinking of good Civ5 mods (or just a good vanilla game) is a great way to escape in my down time ;)


I had a lot of ideas on what I'd originally wanted, that I had to throw out because they just wouldn't be practical to code.

I appreciate your describing some of the limiting aspects of the game's structure -- it's obviously important to note those when thinking of ways the game could be changed and in order to make valid suggestions/criticisms.


by the time you're ready to do some modding, DLL modification might be possible.

I guess when that time comes - and I start to learn, I will also learn fairly quickly what is & what isn't possible.


There's no "refresh map" function.

Losing that option is really annoying. Is there any way that it could be coded differently so that the option could be restored?


Well, congrats on the release of your latest version - looks fun! I'm off to hit the books.....
 
I appreciate your describing some of the limiting aspects of the game's structure -- it's obviously important to note those when thinking of ways the game could be changed and in order to make valid suggestions/criticisms.

This is a fine line. We all have concepts we'd love to see implemented, and you shouldn't throw away a good concept just because it's tough to figure out. To make things worse, they're adding more modding functions in the near future (and will probably continue to do so) and modders are continually figuring out new workarounds (such as the SaveUtils functions), so things that might not have been possible originally could become possible down the road.
But that's dealing with the unknown, and it's better to start with the known, even if you intend to go further down the road. Thankfully, the developers put in a LOT of unused abilities in the XML, variables that no existing buildings or units use, so it's easy enough to cobble a decent mod out of just those; the result would work, and wouldn't need a lot of new coding or balancing, while not feeling like it's just duplicating what's already there. That's what the first pass of my mod really was; a lot of these weren't the abilities I'd wanted to have, but instead were simply the abilities that didn't duplicate existing logic.

For instance, I added a new Policy to every tree. For the Patronage tree, I looked in the CIV5Policies.xml; there were eight abilities in there referencing city-states, and seven of them were already in use. The only unused one was the ability to change how much influence you got from completing a requested mission. So obviously, I used that as my new Patronage Policy. It's not really the effect I originally wanted to have, but it worked, and I'm pretty happy with it now (although I'm going to tweak the numbers some more).

So in other words, I took the path of least resistance on a lot of these and didn't really create the mod I'd wanted, but instead created the closest analogue I could with what was easily available. In some cases, I've kept a list of my original designs and will go back to them when I can. Take the Dream Twister as an example; originally, I just wanted it to cause 3-5 turns of Anarchy for all other civs (no research, no construction) when built, sort of like an inverted Taj Mahal, but I couldn't do that in XML. Then I thought up the "other civs get -Happiness", but I couldn't do that in XML either. So temporarily, it just gave you two Great Artists.
Last week, I managed to get the -Happiness working (easier since it's an always-on thing and not event-based), so right now it's 1 Great Artist and -10 Happiness to all other civs. But now that I've got access to a function that triggers when a building is built, I can finally go back towards the original design: 2 or 3 turns of Anarchy (which can be done in LUA pretty easily), and then some (~8?) permanent unhappiness to all other civs, and drop the Great Artists entirely.

Or take the Manifold Harmonics. Right now it's this weird cobbled-together mess that boosts the output of lake, sea, river, forest, jungle, and oasis tiles, because those are the only ones with separate yield tables in the existing XML. This fits the wonder's movie pretty well, actually, but I don't like it.
What I'd really wanted was simpler: all Grassland for this city get +1 food, all Plains get +1 production, all water get +1 gold, and so on. Or even the original SMAC version of the wonder: if I remember right, it was that any tile that generated 3+ food got +1 food, any that generated 3+ production got +1 production, and 3+ gold got +1 gold. (Overpowered in SMAC because EVERY tile would end up producing those large amounts in the end.)
I might be able to do these things in LUA pretty easily, so expect this wonder to change down the road. But what's there now should be playable in the interim, which is what I'm really shooting for.
 
Am liking this version better! :goodjob:

Now for questions/ observations:

1. Ran into a bug which effects the German Furor Teutonicus ability as follows: Encountered a Barb camp next to Ruins, and when I conquered the Barb Camp the spawned unit was placed on top of the Ruins. The Ruins then disappeared without giving any benefits. I've run into this maybe 4 times since I've been playing, but it is a bug. FYI in case anyone encounters a similar situation (i.e. playing as Germans, encountering a Barb Camp next to Ruins) and would like to verify for me.

2. Concerning the "Starving Cities" image below: had this happen several times now in both games I've played in that I get the "Starving Cities" message, but the cities never reduce in population. Is anyone else experiencing this?

3. Even though money is slightly more plentiful, am still having to make some tough choices (or at least so far I am - haven't played too deeply into this version yet). I set up some cities to produce APCs, whereas in the past I always went Infantry then upgraded to APCs. Am also having to consider when to agree to Research Agreements: some tough/ tantalizing choices there, especially as you progress into later eras! :goodjob:

4. AIs are not attacking early in the game as they have been wont (read: ALWAYS!) do: this flumoxed me as I'm sitting there goading the AIs on my border to declare war, and they didn't. :confused: However there were several small wars (i.e. short-lived) between my neighboring AIs. Still ahve yet to be the recipient of a DoW in this version.

5. First game last night I attacked a C-S with 4 APCs and 2 arty, and lost! Note this is using my mod which gives C-S Military Bases and a Shiva (2 attack/ turn, no defensive penalties). The Shiva chewed my units up in two turns, and my last heavily damaged APC died attacking the city. I looked thru your XML and didn't see where you've done anything to improve C-S defense, so I am assuming I just was the recipient of bad attack rolls. The good news here is that this is a good indicator I am close to what I want in regards to C-S being viable in the later eras. Probably if I tweak the Military Base to give it a little better defensive bonus, then it might just make it tough enough to last two rounds of attacks from human/ AI players, which should give the Shiva's time enought to devour the attacking force. FYI in case you are thinking of looking into improving the viability of C-S in the later game.

6. Concerning the "Recycling Tanks Q" image below: why not just give it +2 Maintenance (instead of +3 Maintenance and +1 Gold)?

7. Concerning the "One long-arsed railroad" pic: that indeed is one long-arsed railroad! Never seen the AI build one that far between cities before!

8. Concerning "Satelites tech Q": whats your rationale behind the Fundamentalist option in regards to this? Satelites are heavy tech, whereas Fundy doesn't seem to fit here.

9. Concerning the "Children's Creche Q" pic: understand about the problem with the +/- issue, but since you can put the unhappy face into the text, can you put the unhappiness face next to the +/- sign. This is more of an aesthetics thing (or just a curious question on my part), but I think it would be more representative if it were an unhappy face next to the +/- sign.

More thoughts later - gotta go run now.

D
 

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2. Concerning the "Starving Cities" image below: had this happen several times now in both games I've played in that I get the "Starving Cities" message, but the cities never reduce in population. Is anyone else experiencing this?

You get the "starving" message if a city's food per turn is ever negative, but the city might have HUNDREDS of stored food on hand. So, if a city is a decent size, it might be centuries before it actually starts reducing in size. Also, if it happens during the first turns of a late-era start, the negative food might be completely offset by the food bonus I'm now giving, so your cities might actually still grow. But the message just triggers based on the city's net food per turn.

The UI food storage is often incorrect on this; the green bar might be at the bottom, while the city still has plenty of food. The easy way to check is to go into a city, mouse over the Food icon in the upper-left, and see exactly how much is left and how much is lost per turn.

This MIGHT be tied to my mod, in that I changed the growth equation. It's possible that the LUA code hard-codes the original equation; maybe it sees that you're 100 food short of growth and have a negative food, which makes it think you're about to shrink, but doesn't realize that the new equation means that you're at 200/300 instead of 0/100.

4. AIs are not attacking early in the game as they have been wont (read: ALWAYS!) do: this flumoxed me as I'm sitting there goading the AIs on my border to declare war, and they didn't.

I think this might just be a consequence of a late start (you're in Nuclear Era?): short on cash, with plenty of other things to produce, the AIs don't go quite so overboard on an early military. But they still do it; my last test game was an Industrial start, and right about when I got to Tanks, my next-door neighbor Germany decided that his Panzers needed a good test drive and treated me like Poland. He actually took one of my core cities and threatened my capital. I took it back eventually, of course, but only because he pulled his army off to go conquer the Maritime city-state I'd allied with. (That left me with a size 1 city that never really recovered. I'd just built the Eiffel Tower there before the war, too...)

5. First game last night I attacked a C-S with 4 APCs and 2 arty, and lost! ... looked thru your XML and didn't see where you've done anything to improve C-S defense, so I am assuming I just was the recipient of bad attack rolls.

Actually, I did boost them.
C-S's are just civs that can't build settlers, but they do have a Palace. That means they get the +10 defense, and the Home-Field Advantage promotion (which is tied to the palace). The resourceless units are an added bonus as well, but you're not at the point where those would kick in yet. Add to that the general city boost I made (25 HP and +2HP/turn instead of 20 and +1), and city-states become extremely difficult to crack. I watched a city-state (one of my allies) hold off a concerted attack by China using only the city and one Artillery, for something like 30 turns. (It only fell when Russia decided to invade it as well.)
Your choice of units is part of the problem. Mech Infantry were reduced in power to 42, and capitals in that era should be about the same strength (if not higher), so you're not longer getting the massive power mismatch that led to quick kills. This was intentional.

FYI in case you are thinking of looking into improving the viability of C-S in the later game.

I am, but I think I'll probably just handle this by boosting the base CS production bonus. Right now, a city-state gets 150% production and 200% gold. I'm thinking about taking that to 200% and 300%. Also, I've been looking at boosting the Palace's bonuses with era, to help out players' later starts, but this'd also help the city-states disproportionately (since the humans would have multiple cities without palaces, but the CSs would have a Palace in 100% of their cities).

6. Concerning the "Recycling Tanks Q" image below: why not just give it +2 Maintenance (instead of +3 Maintenance and +1 Gold)?

Because +gold gets multiplied by the Market, Bank, et cetera, while the maintenance cost gets divided by certain policies and such. So it's actually possible for that building to end up having no cost at all this way.

8. Concerning "Satelites tech Q": whats your rationale behind the Fundamentalist option in regards to this? Satelites are heavy tech, whereas Fundy doesn't seem to fit here.

Three possible answers here, take your pick.
1> It's a reactionary, anti-intellectualism sort of thing. Aerospace technology is a very high-profile, expensive application of science, and is usually the first thing the "we should be spending the money on X" people target. So the rise of this sort of technologies would be paired with a resurgence of religious fundamentalism in developed countries.
2> It's about worldwide communications making it easier for things like televangelists to prosper. (I already made a Nehemiah Scudder reference in the Civilopedia, I think for the Hologram Theater, but I had that in mind here as well.)
3> I needed to put it somewhere and at the time, Satellites didn't have enough stuff. There just aren't many good thematic fits; none of my new techs have any kind of religious overtones except maybe for the Centauri psi-type ones. I'd put it at Homo Superior, but that's far too late in the tree. SMAC had a few non-sciency type techs (Intellectual Integrity, Ethical Calculus, Cyberethics, Secrets of the Human Brain), but I'd removed all of the early ones; the only remnants are late-game things like The Will To Power. In the original SMAC, Fundamentalist came at "Secrets of the Human Brain", for reference.
While I needed to put it somewhere, I also needed to make it come early relative to the other new policies. It boosts your border growth rate, but by the time you're in this era, your main cities will have already completed their border growth. Even a new colony will generally grow faster than you can really handle, so it's not as desirable a policy the later you get.
(In fact, I'm looking at boosting its effect to -50% right now.)

9. Concerning the "Children's Creche Q" pic: understand about the problem with the +/- issue, but since you can put the unhappy face into the text, can you put the unhappiness face next to the +/- sign.

Not without a UI mod, that part of the popup is handled automatically by the existing LUA. But that's actually an easy thing to fix, in theory: in the popup, if the happiness number is negative then use a different icon and don't put the "+" sign.
I'll look into it.
(Note that a few other buildings also subtract happiness now.)
-----------
I'm working on a few more changes now, of course, but nothing as extensive as the last few rounds. Mostly just balance tweaks, and I'm trying to adjust Flavor values and such so that the AIs won't get so bogged down in the late game. (I think part of the problem is that while the Factory is set to 100 flavor, meaning must-build, all of the Bank and University-style buildings aren't. I'm going to try upping all of those "essential" buildings and see what happens.)
 
You get the "starving" message if a city's food per turn is ever negative, but the city might have HUNDREDS of stored food on hand. So, if a city is a decent size, it might be centuries before it actually starts reducing in size.

One instance of this issue happened very early in the game, and in the past when its happened in this timeframe the cities have shrunk in population. I'll keep an eye out for this to see if it happens again, and maybe run a test routine of just seeing if it ever loses a pop point.

I think this might just be a consequence of a late start (you're in Nuclear Era?): short on cash, with plenty of other things to produce, the AIs don't go quite so overboard on an early military. But they still do it;

The AIs have always declared war early in the games (including in your last iteration where cash was as rare as blue moons!).

To segue a bit here, why I test stuff for a living, and so am using some of the same approaches here for the purposes of trying to isolate the possible reasons behind my observations. As such I try to eliminate as many variables as possible, so I very consistently play the same civ, same style map, same difficulty level, and I use the same strategies time and again. Thus when something out of the ordinary occurs I feel more confindent that "something has changed". Right now this has stuck out like a sore thumb to me, however it is a sample size of one, so it could just be just an abheration.


Actually, I did boost them.
C-S's are just civs that can't build settlers, but they do have a Palace. That means they get the +10 defense, and the Home-Field Advantage promotion (which is tied to the palace).

:o I did see that! However I had it in my mind you'd altered the Military Base value instead, so I was searching for that, and when I didn't find it, why I figured it was just a bad attack roll.

Your choice of units is part of the problem. Mech Infantry were reduced in power to 42, and capitals in that era should be about the same strength (if not higher), so you're not longer getting the massive power mismatch that led to quick kills. This was intentional.

Awsome! Between that, and because the LUA for C-S placement almost exclusively puts them on coastal tiles (or at least in the vicinity), means a player has to typically attack a C-S city on a very narrow front (say on average 3 tiles available to occupy in order to attack on). With your tweak, I think the C-S defensive abilities are now where I would like them to be. :goodjob:

Because +gold gets multiplied by the Market, Bank, et cetera, while the maintenance cost gets divided by certain policies and such. So it's actually possible for that building to end up having no cost at all this way.

Ah, OK.


More questions/ observations:

1. One of the drawbacks of starting a game in the later eras is that some of the core choices for techs aren't necessary: a player can already build ships (or units can embark), can already build artillery (after Industrial), etc. Have you given any thought to addressing this somehow? I did like starting my games in the Industrial era as then I had to make the choice of Dynamite or not, as Arty is very critical in ciV

2. Concerning the last iteration of your mod (where Gold and Happiness were darned hard to come by): have you given any thought to creating several mods, with this being one, so that if a human player wanted to be challenged by something wery different (and difficult), then they had this option as well. Say call is "Spatz Harsh Planet Mod" instead? I did like that iteration in that it really was very different and difficult to play against.

3. More for my mod than yours probably, but its been my observation that C-S don't explore Ruins: has anyone else seen C-S units exploring nearby Ruins? Also has anyone seen a C-S go to war on someone other than if that Civ declares war on them first, or that Civ declares war on a C-S's ally?

Tonight I'm going to continue the game I had going this morning: the Russians occupy a central location on my continent and appear to be the largest Civ on this planet, with the Eqyptians also sharing a border with me and the Russians. And somewhere up to the north are the English. Right now I'm researching Satelites, and once thats discovered I'll know just how big a bear I plan on attacking with my four cities. Should be a very interesting evening, and I am quite looking forward to it! :c5war:

D
 
As such I try to eliminate as many variables as possible, so I very consistently play the same civ, same style map, same difficulty level, and I use the same strategies time and again. Thus when something out of the ordinary occurs I feel more confindent that "something has changed".

That's definitely the right way to track down those sorts of imbalances. My point, though, was that a lot of the AI seems to be complex. (Not "smart", just complex.) Change one minor thing, and it can respond in ways that seem nonsensical. So it's easily possible that there's some threshold that's being crossed, where they've got JUST enough money to support a decent military but not enough to go further.

Or maybe something you think is being held constant really isn't. For instance, the Leader ratings; if Napoleon has his Conquest bias set to 7 as a default, then it might range anywhere from 5 (not really a warmonger) to 9 (attack early and often). As far as I know there's no way to disable this randomness.

And then there's the inherent randomness of the game; strategic resources are a good example of this. If you don't have Oil, Coal, and Aluminum, you're not going to be doing much in the Industrial or Nuclear eras. City-states obviously lack these, but it's really easy for a regular civ to miss out if you placed your 3-4 cities in exactly the wrong spots. No coal, and you won't have factories, which means everything takes longer to build, which means the AI won't have as many military units. No oil means no tanks or bombers, and aluminum is pretty much everything worthwhile in the Nuclear era (and well after!).

The next patch should actually help with this greatly. One of the upcoming changes is that the AI will be much more aggressive in making friends with city-states, and CS's are great ways to pick up strategic resources you don't have. So I'm hoping that with that fix, the AI civs will be much more competitive for those late starts.

1. One of the drawbacks of starting a game in the later eras is that some of the core choices for techs aren't necessary:

Well, this is a big part of why I originally intended people to start in the Ancient Era and play all the way through. If you can make the full combined arms force starting on turn one, it makes things play VERY differently.
That's also part of why I wanted to make the future era units so DIFFERENT. Technological units that basically ignore terrain, psi units that are really annoying, Titan units that can level cities, and orbital weapons that can hit anywhere. I figured that by doing this, there'd be less of that "more of the same" feel where the newer units are just minor upgrades of what came before.

But I think it's unavoidable in general, unless you want to completely restructure the existing tech tree (and I don't). Once you get to the industrial era, you've pretty much got all the pieces you need to win: factories, hospitals, banks and universities; infantry, tanks, aircraft, battleships, and artillery. That's a big part of why I made the Long Mod first; it's just too easy for the game to end once you get all of that stuff.

2. ...Say call is "Spatz Harsh Planet Mod" instead? I did like that iteration in that it really was very different and difficult to play against.

Actually, yes, I just thought of making a third "Hardcore" mod that modifies various things to make it play much tougher. The problem was that those previous settings weren't just HARD, they were completely unplayable for certain era/civ combinations. Players can get around that by playing smart, but the AI would get stuck. He couldn't gain happiness faster than his cities would grow, so he'd be stuck with a near-permanent growth penalty, making it easy for the human to pull ahead. Likewise, Egypt and Persia had huge advantages over everyone else in that they were the only civs with extra +happiness buildings.

3. More for my mod than yours probably, but its been my observation that C-S don't explore Ruins: has anyone else seen C-S units exploring nearby Ruins?

The Barbarian and Minor civs (which includes all the city-states) have really low Recon flavors. That's probably a big part of it; you could tweak this, but I'm not sure that'd be a good idea. (Too many scouts running around the map?)

Also has anyone seen a C-S go to war on someone other than if that Civ declares war on them first, or that Civ declares war on a C-S's ally?

I saw a CS declare "permanent war" on a civ, no idea why. Other than that, I don't think so, although city-states DO fight each other without prompting.

Tonight I'm going to continue the game I had going this morning:

Sounds fun. I'm just finishing up a game on King, as Persia, Standard map size; I conquered the three other civs on my own continent with Tanks and a few Modern Armor, but I'm only now invading the other continent with Gravtanks, and my first Bolo is a couple turns away. (I've got the Space Elevator, so I'm going to orbital drop it right into the middle of a war.)

The problem I've run into is that I'm getting new techs every 2-3 turns. It was stable at 6ish for a long time, but once my conquered cities got up and running, they added just as much as my core cities. This game really needs an analogue to the "corruption" mechanic that penalized cities far from your capital, because without it, it becomes a no-brainer to conquer one neighbor early on (if you can); the research, gold, and production boosts are just too critical in the later eras. Or really, just give conquered cities a permanent penalty to research and gold (say, -50%) that never goes away, so that they'll be inherently less useful than your own cities.
Yes, you could get around this with a raze-and-resettle policy, but the further you get into the game, the less practical that is; you NEED the border expansions the cities will already have, the cities might have Wonders, and all those other buildings in the city would take time to replace.
 
Some late-breaking news this evening: apparently the latest Egyptian offensive into Russian territory created enough instability that the Russians sued for peace. As such I had to re-assess my strategies and begin re-distributing my units. I've already started bombing Egyptian cities in the hopes I can coax the Egytian military into an unwise offensive against my well-prepared defenses, as well as initiating an offensive against the Egyptian puppet-states (i.e. former Russian cities with no military support in the region).
Also, when a foreign power built the Planetary Energy Grid, the activation of this Wonder apparently generated an EMP surge which briefly knocked my console offline ( i.e. it generated a Windows error message saying the texture couldn't be displayed, as well as the below pic). Interesting effect you programmed in there.....


D
 

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Some more info:

1. Encountered the same exception noted above on several more occasions, as follows:

Error Message: Unable to load texture[BW_SMAC640.dds]

These exceptions were encountered when AI's built the MCC, PTS, and the Supercollider this evening.

2. A new strategy I'm developing is one where I dogpile an AI just to gain experience points for as many units as possible: when a city is completely beaten and if I have aircraft, artillery, armor, and APCs in close vicinty, why I use my aircraft and arty first (which gains them experience), then use my weakest armor before gaining the city. The whole point here is to get as many units as possible some experience against a completely defenseless enemy before conquering it. I'm considering this an exploit, and my thoughts on how to nerf this would be to diminish experience points as an AI Defender's abilities to defend diminish. So say if an enemy cities ability to defend has been knocked down to 40%, the attacking units XP's are reduced by 33%, and if the defending cities defensive ability has been knocked down below 15%, then the attacking units XP's are reduced by 66%. Anyone have any thoughts on this idea?

D
 
You know, I think this was a record; I actually let someone else make two consecutive posts before I responded!

Some more info:

1. Encountered the same exception noted above on several more occasions, as follows:

Error Message: Unable to load texture[BW_SMAC640.dds]

These exceptions were encountered when AI's built the MCC, PTS, and the Supercollider this evening.

When you first mentioned it, I was wondering if this file might be the problem, since it's the only new art file (added about a week ago) and it's the file responsible now for the wonder-based notifications. For whatever reason, it's not present in my module directory; I'd added it to the mod, but it apparently just didn't take. (Not showing up in the modinfo file and not getting moved over correctly.)

So, I'm uploading a new version with it fixed, as soon as I straighten out a couple other things. Very little will have changed since the previous version, so it feels strange to call it a new version number, but I can't really wait for the other things I'm working on to be done.

2. A new strategy I'm developing is one where I dogpile an AI just to gain experience points for as many units as possible: when a city is completely beaten and if I have aircraft, artillery, armor, and APCs in close vicinty, why I use my aircraft and arty first (which gains them experience), then use my weakest armor before gaining the city.

I've seen this for a while. It's a flaw in the game itself, and really is an exploit, although frankly, XP isn't hard to come by. (Psi unit with the Elite promotion and the Military Tradition policy? 22 XP per kill.)

I'm not a fan of pro-rating the XP by how wounded the target is, but I think it'd be okay to just say that if your unit deals no damage it gets no XP. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if this'd be possible to code in a mod; this might just be one of those things we'd have to ask Firaxis to put into the normal patches.
 
A short one today:

v.0.10, dated 12/11/10
> Fixed several Civilopedia entries that were out of date or broken.
> Fixed the missing BW_SMAC640.dds file issue.
> The Robotic Assembly Plant no longer requires a Forge (which could only be built if the city had a local Iron supply).
> The Leviathan’s ranged attack was decreased from 70 to 50. (A Battleship is 32.)
> Increased the flavor ratings for the Windmill, Bank, Satrap’s Court, Stock Exchange, Library, etc. to make them more desirable to the AI. This should encourage the AIs to build up their cities more, instead of churning out large numbers of units that'll only become obsolete quickly.
> Added a few new flavor ratings to some existing buildings (the ones that added new bonuses, like how the Observatory gives culture).
> Increased the Flavor ratings of the future-era Wonders to make them progressively more desirable (60/70/80, was 50, and national wonders are 10 less)
> The Maritime Control Center’s flavor ratings were set too high, and the Pholus Mutagen’s and Theory of Everything’s were set far too low.
> The Subspace Generator now requires 2 Dilithium instead of 1.

Something I'm trying to get working but can't: sound. Does anyone know how to actually add additional sounds? I've added new entries to the Tech_SpeechAudioDefines.xml and Tech_SpeechAudio2DScripts.xml files, and I've added the .mp3 to the mod, but it won't actually play the file at the appropriate time. (The file in question is in Art/Techs/tech6.mp3, which is the audio quote for Centauri Ecology. This makes it easy to test, since it's the one given by the spaceship.)
I'm just using this one file as a test case, since this'll affect whether I can add custom sounds for the various future weapons and such.
 
Do you have any idea about savegame compatibility? Only a few things changed in your latest version and I just got a game going...
 
Do you have any idea about savegame compatibility? Only a few things changed in your latest version and I just got a game going...

Savegames become incompatible if pretty much anything other than the most trivial UI changes or Civilopedia text updates are made. There's really just no way around that. So if you just got a game going and don't mind being a version behind, don't worry about it too much. (While that missing file gives an error, it sounds like it's not a complete crash, and you can still play.) The AI changes are important, but I don't know that they'd be worth starting over.

Seriously, I tweak as I go, and I've pretty much had to accept that any change means starting over because attempts to work across updates just never succeed. Generally, I'll just do an Industrial start, play for an Era or two, make some tweaks, then start over. That's actually why this last update's list was so short: I actually played a whole game, and it took time away from modding.
 
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