Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

Thanks, I tried a few other "future" mods out there since the bug, but frankly, I think I prefer your work the most, so I am just gonna wait around till your fix is completed, and then start it up again. Appreciate all your work.
 
Okay, here goes.

I've tried to adjust to the big patch as much as I can. This version isn't quite as playable as the previous one, although it's got a couple neat little extras like I've mentioned previously.

Custom Notifications are still broken; this mainly affects the Nethack Terminus (since that's its primary function) although it also makes it hard to know what's going on with the spaceship, transcendence, and several other custom wonders.

Resource creation is completely broken until Firaxis patches again. If they do that while I'm on vacation, it SHOULD immediately start working again, assuming they don't break something else. This means that the Planetary Datalinks and Clinical Immortality don't generate their custom Luxury resources, and buildings like the Energy Bank and Fusion Lab won't generate strategics. I'm not going to try rebalancing these buildings around this bug; once it's fixed they'll be back to normal, but for now, know that they're a bit weak.

Other than that, I THINK I caught all of the bugs introduced by the patch. If you find one I missed, well, I won't be able to fix it until January; you could try patching the code yourself, of course.

So here it is.
v.0.11, dated 12/19/10
(Patch fixes):
> (Crazy Spatz) Since the official patch changed the city HP/regen to 25/2 from 20/1 (the exact same that I did), there was no reason to keep my change.
> (Crazy Spatz) Since the patch reduced the penalty for flat land from –33% to –10%, my change to –20% wasn’t needed.
> (Crazy Spatz) Since the patch increased the City Strength Tech Exponent from 1.8 to 2.0, I decreased the Tech Multiplier from 4 to 3 (it’s 2 in the core game).
> (Crazy Spatz) Since the patch increased the City Growth Multiplier to 8, there was no need for me to do the same.
> (Crazy Spatz) Since the Forbidden Palace was reduced to –25%, there was no need for me to do the same.
> (Crazy Spatz) Since the Bomber and B17 now upgrade to the Stealth Bomber, there was no need for me to do the same.
> (Crazy Spatz) Since Cavalry now upgrade to Tanks, there’s no need for my previous patch, which upgraded them to Gunships.
> (Crazy Spatz) Since Tradition’s effect was changed from +2 food to +50% growth, there was no need for my fix.
In other words, a lot of what they patched were the exact same things I'd changed. Kind of makes you wonder...

(Non-patch-related changes)
> (Crazy Spatz) Because of their previously altered effects, I’ve changed the cost of the Temple and Colosseum from 120 and 150 to 90 and 180, respectively. (The Temple change also includes the Mud Pyramid Mosque and Burial Tomb UBs.)
> (Crazy Spatz) The cost of the Stock Exchange was reduced from 650 to 500. It cost more than most Nuclear Era buildings before, despite coming a couple eras earlier, and this was crippling to the AI.
> (Crazy Spatz) The Hospital no longer gives +2 research; instead, it now makes units in this city heal twice as fast as normal, in addition to its 20% food storage.
> (Crazy Spatz) The Medical Lab no longer gives a flat +5 research; instead, it gives +10% to research (which’ll usually be considerably less since it’s additive to the research buildings) in addition to the 20% food storage.
> (Crazy Spatz) Most of the Flavor modifications made in the previous patch were put in the Content mod, when they should have been in the Balance mod (where the actual changes to the buildings were made) These were moved to the correct location; anyone playing with both mods will see no difference.
> (Crazy Spatz) The +1 Happiness from the Aqueduct, Sewer System, and Recycling Center were also changed to UnmoddedHappiness. The whole point of these buildings is to help with cities that are capped out in various ways, so it seemed appropriate.

> The Transcendence Victory now uses a 20-turn timer; in the absence of a working save system, it instead puts you into Anarchy for those 20 turns (no science output, no production, no income) AND shrinks your cities by 1 population per turn (minimum size 1). After 20 turns, you win. (So anything that adds more Anarchy would delay your win. I’ll have the GPs sacrifice to subtract anarchy, but that’s not ready yet.) Also, completing the Project causes everyone to declare war on you, since it’s their last chance to avoid a loss.
(Note: currently there’s nothing stopping you with making peace after a couple turns. I’m going to fix that eventually, but try not to abuse it.)
> The various .lua files are now loaded through the content tab, so there’s no need for InGame.xml any more. This should greatly help with compatibility issues.
> Dilithium was changed from “coast_list” (meaning any shallow water) to “coast_next_to_land_list” (explicitly adjacent to shore). This now puts all Dilithium deposits within easy reach of land, although little 1-hex polar islands still count as “land”, so it's still possible to have it be in places you can't easily reach.
> The Planet Buster’s range was increased to 25 (was 15) to match the increase in the Nuclear Missile’s range. Its Flavors were also adjusted to include the new Nuke flavor, and it now requires the Manhattan Project. (I'm tempted to just give it worldwide range, but I think that'd overlap too much with the orbital weapons.)
> The Subspace Generator’s primary flavor was changed to Nuke.
> The Plasma Artillery added AntiAir flavor
> The “Total Evasion” promotion now adds a –100 interception damage modifier in addition to the evasion increase. This SHOULD make the units entirely immune to interception damage, which is what I'd wanted; the only remaining issue is that the defender will waste an interception on a unit he can't hurt.
> Vertol, Skimmer, Chiron Locusts, and Gravtank now default to the Fast Attack AI.
> The Psi, Energy, and Titan unit types gain the Defensive Embarkation promotion when everyone else does.
> The Happiness boost from the Human Genome Project, Longevity Vaccine, and Virtual World wonders was switched to the new UnmoddedHappiness, which doesn’t cap at city size. The Centauri Preserve’s +2 was also changed this way, just to make it a bit more unique.
> Since Landed Elite’s effect was changed to basically the same as Fundamentalist (although much stronger than mine), Fundamentalist is now changed to “+5 culture per Wonder per turn”. (There’s a ReligionProductionModifier, which’d be perfect thematically, but there’s no Religion in the game.)
> None of the new Policies had flavors before, so those are now added, and the Planned Economy flavor has been changed to match its new effect. The ten new policies have total Flavors of 30 (all previous policies were 20) to encourage the AI to take them when available in preference to the lower policies.
> The Free Market policy’s effect is doubled; it now gives double influence when completing a mission, instead of +50%.
> Deleted TechTree.xml, SocialPolicyPopup.xml, and TopPanel.xml from the mod; in each case, I had edited the Lua file but not the associated XML, so there was no need to keep the XML around.
> Deleted TechHelpInclude.lua, since I hadn’t edited it.
> The World Peace event for building the spaceship now ensures the other civ is still alive before trying to make peace with them.
> All existing negative promotions (sight penalty, naval penalty, mounted penalty, etc.) now have the new “LostWithUpgrade” flag set to True. If you upgrade units with these into units that don’t have that drawback, the drawbacks go away. (Just like how “must set up before attacking” now goes away for artillery.)
Several other modders have also decided to remove the POSITIVE promotions, so that you don't have Riflemen getting the Pikemen bonus against mounted units and such. Personally, I'm okay with keeping most of these, as it's a good incentive to keep old units around, and most of these benefits don't stay useful for much longer. The only real exception is the scout that upgrades to archer types from a Ruins...
> Needlejets (and their Secondhand variants) now get the Naval Penalty drawback promotion (-50% vs naval units). I’d left this off previously because when stacked with the Weak Ranged drawback of the fighters that would upgrade into them, they’d be pathetically weak.
> The Cyborg Factory’s promotion has now changed. Instead of giving the March promotion (which allowed infantry units to heal when taking other actions but didn’t affect non-infantry and is a normal, selectable promotion), it now gives a custom promotion that increases the healing rate of any unit by 2 whenever it would heal normally. (So it won’t really be like regeneration unless you ALSO take the March/Repair/Air Repair sorts of promotions. Psi units get the equivalent of March automatically, so this is really good for them.)
> The Spaceship Factory was improved further; now, its production bonus for Titan and Orbital units is +50% (was +25%), and the building also adds a flat +10% production to ANY construction in this city. I needed to justify the high cost and Aluminum somehow.
> Several basic building modifiers that were in the Content mod were moved over to the Balance mod: the Palace air defense bonus, the Broadcast Tower’s reduction to 50%, and the Laboratory’s reduction to 50%.
> All Psi units (Mind Worms, Isle of the Deep, Chiron Locusts, Nessus Worm) now get a –25% penalty when adjacent to an ally, but I’ve boosted their base power levels a bit to compensate (Mind Worm 40->45, Isle 40/90->45/100, Chiron stayed at 60 but went from 5 move to 6, and Nessus went from 120 to 130). This makes them better raider units, and more dangerous for Barbarians to use, without skewing the balance too badly.
> The Paratrooper (Nuclear era unit) was decreased from 40 strength to 35, but gains the Sentry promotion (+1 visibility). The Scout now upgrades to the Paratrooper, who in turn upgrades to the Scout Powersuit.
> The Paradrop promotion (used by the Paratrooper, Scout Powersuit, and Assault Powersuit) is range 6 instead of 5. Based on my playtesting, it was just too difficult to use paradrop to get across narrow bodies of water into a decent position. That 1 hex makes a difference.
> The Scout Powersuit’s strength was increased from 40 to 50. The +50% vs Gunpowder units just wasn’t enough to make them survivable before, and now that they're the upgrade of the Paratrooper they needed a bit more.
> The “wild” Psi units now have “ShowInPedia” set to false, and they now use the same text string as the default units. This makes them harder to tell from the player-controlled versions, although it'll still say "Barbarian Mind Worms" and such (for now). The city-state “Secondhand” units still show in the Civilopedia, because their stats differ slightly from the normal units’. The Psi units will still say what empire owns them. My ultimate goal is to just have them say "a Mind Worm" so that you can't tell who owns them, sort of like Privateers in earlier Civ games.
> The Paper Maker (Chinese Library replacement), Longhouse (Iroquois Workshop replacement), and Wat (Siamese University replacement) are now given for free at the same eras as their normal counterparts, if you start in a later era. The only UBs that aren’t given for free now in late-era starts are the Mughal Fort, Krepost, and Floating Gardens, because their normal counterparts aren’t given for free. (In the Krepost’s case, they used to be but I changed that.)
> Apollo Program’s Flavor was changed back up to 100 (was 50, was originally 150 in vanilla) to make the AI prioritize it a bit more once it has the Rocketry tech.
> The game will automatically add an additional (N/2) small (3-unit) deposits of Coal to hill tiles, where N is the number of players. This might be too many. I could use some feedback; start a Transcendence-Era game to see all resources, and that'll give you an idea of how common they are.
> Instead of the nonfunctional +1 UN vote, the Empath Guild now improves your relationship with all city-states by 1.5 per turn if you’re enemies or not friends, 1.0 if you’re friends and not already allied with them, and 0.5 per turn if you are their ally. For everyone other than Greece this will only mostly offset the normal decay for non-allies.
 
Now, before I forget, there's one thing I've been tossing around that I really want some feedback on.

I'm thinking of adding a few more techs.

Yes, really. Specifically, 2-4 of the following; Social Psychology, Ethical Calculus, Intellectual Integrity, and/or Cyberethics. I'm not planning on adding any new buildings, units, etc. at these techs, just moving some of the existing things to them.
(Correction: I AM going to add one new unit: the Colony Pod. Upgrade of Settler: 3 MP, can defend itself pretty well, and can paradrop 6 hexes. But other than that, it's all old stuff.)

There are a few reasons for this:
1> The techs in the Digital Era are getting a bit too crowded. My guideline is "3 things per tech", with a "thing" being a Wonder, Unit, terrain improvement yield change, rule change, new promotion, or new policy. But a few techs in the Digital and early Fusion now have 4, and even the Nuclear Era techs are getting a bit crowded.
2> The current techs might be too science-y, not enough fiction-y. While I like the futuristicity (and if that's not a word, then it darn well should be) of the current setup, a couple of these wouldn't hurt that too badly. While Civ4 had plenty of "social" techs related to religion, most of those seem to have been removed, but you get strange ones like Globalization in there still.
(Besides, I'd like to make a Psychohistory joke in the Civilopedia entries for one of these. I realized that I'm appallingly short on Asimov references in the current lore, although I still haven't written the Wonder civilopedia entries yet.)
3> This gives me a good way to rearrange a few of the items I'm not happy with. There were a few items I put at their current techs for balance reasons, but flavor-wise were kind of a stretch. (Habitation Domes at Subatomic Alloys, putting both Citizen's Defense Force and Command Nexus at the same Neural Grafting tech, that sort of thing.) And a few of the existing buildings aren't really balanced at their current locations; as several people have noted, while the top of the tree is mostly happiness, culture, and growth, the bottom is all military-oriented, and it's just a bit TOO military-oriented. So if I can move a few things upwards, it'll be better.

For instance, if I put Social Psychology at T15 (beginning of Digital Era), then I could put the new Colony Pod there, move Fundamentalist to it (makes more sense), and move the Hologram Theater over from Planetary Networks. Seems like a pretty worthwhile tech to take.
Then, let's say I add Ethical Calculus at T18 (beginning of Fusion Era); it could have the Citizen's Defense Force (putting a nice defensive military wonder up in the "soft" side of the tree), the all-important Habitation Domes (which make more sense in a "social" tech), and the Eudaimonia policy. (Or flip Eudaimonia and Fundamentalist. Either way works.)

Then we'd have to move a few other things around to balance it all out.
Free Market would move to Planetary Networks to replace Eudaimonia's loss. The Bioenhancement Center would move to Subatomic Alloys (again adding a military structure to the top of the tree, in a place that makes more sense anyway), the Genejack Factory would slide down to Neural Grafting to replace the CDF (although I worry about the balance of putting a good production building down in the military area), and the Planetary Transit System could move over to Planetary Networks to replace the Hologram Theater.

There, now everything has three, there are no more policies unlocking in the Nuclear Era, and the tree's a bit more balanced overall. (It'll be even more so in the next patch; I'm trying to make the Ranger and Troll a bit more useful.)

That's with two new techs. I wouldn't want to add all four, but I could justify a third at T21-22 if I had something to put there; there's a pretty big gap in the tech tree there that I've never been happy with. The only problem is that I'd really wanted to use the icon for some of these (like Intellectual Integrity's) for the custom promotions. But I can figure something else out for that.
I wouldn't add a third tech unless I had something useful to put there. I can't add any more new buildings or Wonders; okay, I COULD, but the custom icon atlas is full, so I'd have to create a new one. So I'd either have to move existing items to that tech (Cloning Vats?) or find some other useful changes to put there.

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So, thoughts? Are the Digital and Fusion Era already too crowded as-is, with 15 techs apiece? Would these sorts of "social" technologies feel too out-of-place with the hard science techs I've mainly gone with? Does anyone other than me really care about the thematic balance of the tech tree? Will Batman and Robin escape the Joker's dastardly trap? Tune in again in two weeks, same Spatz-time, same Spatz-channel!

(I'll be here for another 12 hours or so, although at least half of that will involve unconsciousness, but then it's vacation time. No Civ5 client, no ModBuddy, but I will have access to this board every once in a while. So I'll be able to discuss any feedback you have, but no chance of a new version until January.)
 
I'm thinking of adding a few more techs.

Yes, really. Specifically, 2-4 of the following; Social Psychology, Ethical Calculus, Intellectual Integrity, and/or Cyberethics. I'm not planning on adding any new buildings, units, etc. at these techs, just moving some of the existing things to them.

There are a few reasons for this:
2> The current techs might be too science-y, not enough fiction-y. While I like the futuristicity (and if that's not a word, then it darn well should be) of the current setup, a couple of these wouldn't hurt that too badly. While Civ4 had plenty of "social" techs related to religion, most of those seem to have been removed, but you get strange ones like Globalization in there still.

Off the top of my head (or "thinking at a high level") I do believe adding the listed techs is a good idea, and I've selected Reason 2 as why. The background on this is that since the new patch I've been re-baselining ciV gameplay (i.e. playing the game un-modded) so I can understand whats changed at this level, and to make a long story short, why since the patch I've had to really make some tough choices in the Social Policy tree, which bubbles up to which buildings I think I need to build (I've placed more emphasis on culture buildings post-patch), and ultimately which techs to research in order to make these buildings available. So therefore I think if you were to to link up some of the Social Policy unlocks with these new techs (or otherwise re-arrange these within the scheme your developing), which then makes the tech tree more convoluted (in a good way), it forces the player to have to make more difficult choices in regards to their tech research choices/ branches to pursue. (Edit: after re-reading the above, I'm not sure if I am being completely clear here, but hopefully you get the gist that I am for the new techs).


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So, thoughts? Are the Digital and Fusion Era already too crowded as-is, with 15 techs apiece?

I don't think so, especially after going back and playing the un-modded game where I am whipping thru techs (and eras) at break-kneck speed. If anything I think you should advertize this feature, as it offers a great change of pace from the base game in this regard.

Would these sorts of "social" technologies feel too out-of-place with the hard science techs I've mainly gone with? Does anyone other than me really care about the thematic balance of the tech tree?

I care, but it is your mod. I would say that if you think it fits the overall theme and direction your going in, then thats good enough.

Personally speaking I plan on taking a darker stance with the Social Policies, turning it into Big Brother's Social Engineering network.


(Correction: I AM going to add one new unit: the Colony Pod. Upgrade of Settler: 3 MP, can defend itself pretty well, and can paradrop 6 hexes. But other than that, it's all old stuff.)

I am glad this is going to be added (I think I've pestered you more than once on this). Question: are you going to make it the default starting Colonizer for advanced starts (i.e. beginning at the Nuclear Age)? I would recommend not, as keeping with the AC theme these should be survivors stranded on an unforgiving planet. Also, will the AI's use this unit correctly? Again, if not then I would suggest not having it be a starting unit. Otherwise looking forward to playing with this new toy!

I'll be here for another 12 hours or so, although at least half of that will involve unconsciousness, but then it's vacation time.

Have a good vacation, and see you on the other side.


D
 
So therefore I think if you were to to link up some of the Social Policy unlocks with these new techs (or otherwise re-arrange these within the scheme your developing),

I think this'd be a good structure if you built the game that way from the beginning. That is, if the previous 50 policies and 10 branches unlocked at specific technologies instead of en masse upon entering an Era. Unfortunately, without changing the earlier policies, I'm reluctant to lump the new ones up on single techs. Part of this is just a selectability issue; in ye olde SMAC days, whenever a new Social Engineering option came out, you'd immediately go to the appropriate interface to decide whether switching over to it was a good thing. For the first 9, the answer was often "yes", although there was a certain combo (Democratic/Planned/Knowledge) that I almost always went with for the long term. The last three were much stronger, so again, you'd be really tempted to switch as soon as one became available.

But in Civ5, it just doesn't work the same way. Just because a policy unlocks doesn't mean you'll have the culture points to select it any time soon, and since these are at the bottoms of the trees, it's unlikely you'd have access to more than one or two of them even if you DID have the ability to select an SP. (This is one of the reasons I made building a spaceship give a free policy; by the time you build it, you'll have unlocked at least half of the new policies, so chances are you'll use the free token to choose one of them.) The same logic applies to the new Soporific and EMP promotions; only if you have the prerequisites AND can select a new promotion would they be useful, but since a Barracks/Armory or Harbor/Seaport combo can reach them, they're far more valuable.

So when I say "each tech gets 3 things", I've always kept in the back of my mind that not all things are created equal. Some terrain improvements will add tons to your empire (like the Trading Post +production at Industrial Economics, which is another reason I want to move the Planetary Transit System somewhere else), while others will be so rare as to almost never come up (Quarries are only used for Marble and now Neutronium, so who cares that they get +1 production at Superconductors?). Policies are closer to that later group in terms of desirability; while their effects might be huge, there's no benefit at all to unlocking a policy in a tree you'll never take. That's why I'm okay with making them a bit stronger than a "normal" policy.
In other words, I could put all ten new policies at a single tech and it STILL wouldn't be as desirable as a normal tech. So I spread them out, one per tech, paired with things that are far more universally useful.

Now, I'd definitely already figured that each new social tech would have one Policy, and that'd allow me to move the two that I'd put in the Nuclear Era (Free Market and Fundamentalist). But I wouldn't want to double them up on these new techs.

(Side note: I've actually been considering going back and assigning the 50 existing policies to individual techs, now that I've edited the Policies UI to handle this better. This'd make the earlier tech tree look a bit more crowded. The big barrier to this? Policies don't have an icon in a small enough size, so I'd have to stick with that stupid star icon.)

which then makes the tech tree more convoluted (in a good way), it forces the player to have to make more difficult choices in regards to their tech research choices/ branches to pursue.

This sort of convolution is actually why I made that 3-item rule in the first place, and only used 45 of SMAC's techs. I could have easily put in the full SMACX tech tree (74 techs, I think?) and had 1-2 per tech, just like in the original game. But I wanted each tech to be at least a little desirable no matter what strategy you followed; take Doctrine:Initiative as an example. Maybe you don't care about building a Stealth Ship and someone else beat you to the Maritime Control Center (probably England), but you'd still want it because it unlocks Dilithium. As a result, picking a new tech is always a hard choice, because each side has at least something you want; if the alternative was Optical Computers (a single-city world wonder, a national wonder, and a new policy) or High-Energy Chemistry (very good large-empire world wonder, the Plasma Artillery unit, and a new policy), it becomes a hard choice.

This also helps the AI out tremendously, because it has no ability for long-term planning. It won't want to take a tech that gives it something it can't use just because that tech chain leads to something really good down the road. And if you force the AI to still value that tech, then you're making it choose things that give it no benefit, which is a huge advantage for the player. But if you make it so that every choice is still valuable, then the AI doesn't suffer as much.

I don't think so, especially after going back and playing the un-modded game where I am whipping thru techs (and eras) at break-kneck speed.

Yeah, I just can't bring myself to play an unmodded game any more. There are too many things that just feel WRONG, and the tech pace is a big one. (Also, my playing time is in short enough supply that if I didn't playtest my own mod it'd never get done.)

But think about this. If the core game's techs were doubled up to where each gave the same 2-3 bonuses that mine give, and the research times increased to compensate (meaning the same number of turns to complete an era), each era would have < 10 techs. Conversely, if you added more techs (like I'm doing here) and spread the benefits out to match the lower density typical of the vanilla game you'd have 20+ techs per future era.
So my eras are already quite a bit "heavier" on content than the norm. Now, personally, I'm okay with that, but it's why I asked the question; I don't want the user to hit a point where they feel like they're never going to finish an era because there are just too many barriers in the way. One new tech per era probably wouldn't hurt this, but any more than that would be too much IMO (although I can be convinced otherwise).

I am glad this is going to be added (I think I've pestered you more than once on this). Question: are you going to make it the default starting Colonizer for advanced starts (i.e. beginning at the Nuclear Age)?

You don't actually explicitly control the default starting units for late-era starts; the game will just use the best available resourceless unit in each category. That's why a Transcendence Era start uses Combat Engineers and Laser Infantry, even though they're three or four eras behind the times: every later unit in those categories has a resource cost. (I was actually worried that the game would start you with a Geosynchronous Survey Pod, as it's the only other resourceless unit, but thankfully it's lack of combat power blocks it there.)
So an easy way to prevent the Colony Pod from being the default settler would be to make them require, say, one Oil. (Or heck, Horses or Iron. As long as it's SOMETHING, it'll work to prevent this.) Presumably the player would have a supply of Oil by then anyway, and the Energy Bank is T15 also and will generate Oil (once that's working again). And since these units are short-lived and you won't stockpile them, it's not going to hurt you to lose a single unit of Oil for a few turns.

The AI knows how to handle a Settler, and the AI knows how to paradrop units (although I don't think I've ever actually seen it do so), but I don't know for sure how well it handles the combination of the two. But then again, I have the same concern about half of my other new units, so this is hardly new.

And side note: it definitely wouldn't be the default starting unit for a Nuclear start, since it won't unlock until a tech in the Digital era. Which'd also make it ineligible for a Digital start, so really, it'd only be a possibility for Fusion/Nanotech/Transcendence anyway, and who's going to start there? (Other than me, for testing purposes.)
Obviously, someone making a "true" SMAC conversion would put the Colony Pod at the Agriculture-equivalent starting tech, but that's not really an option here.
 
small random bug (assuming you want bug feedback, if not, ignore this), the specialist slot (the one, I know you intentionally decreased it from two) on the library seems bugged; doesn't add anything, what it claims it adds (artist, engineer, ect.) changes from time to time, and it eliminates some in city-view info when I try and put anything there.

Thanks again
 
small random bug (assuming you want bug feedback, if not, ignore this), the specialist slot (the one, I know you intentionally decreased it from two) on the library seems bugged; doesn't add anything, what it claims it adds (artist, engineer, ect.) changes from time to time, and it eliminates some in city-view info when I try and put anything there.

I just realized what caused that. And yes, it was my fault.

My mod edited the existing XML table to reduce the number of slots from 2 to 1. But the patch changed the core game from 2 to 0, so now there's no entry in the XML for it to edit. Or more specifically, there IS an entry (it's part of the base Buildings table), but it's now set to NULL values for the specialist type and 0 for the value. That is, my mod now is changing the number from 0 to 1, but since there's no valid "type" entry for the specialist, it won't work. The slot won't take any specialist, and the UI will display the name of the last specialist type you moused over. (I've seen it do that with other things when you try using an unset variable.)

I can fix that easily when I get home for v12, but in the meantime you can fix it yourself by doing the following:
> Open Buildings/CIV5Buildings.xml
> Look for the <Update> entry for the library that changes the number of specialist slots
> Change the Set to explicitly set the type as well, something like
<Set SpecialistCount="1" SpecialistType="SPECIALIST_SCIENTIST"/>
<Where Type="BUILDING_LIBRARY"/>
(I don't have the files in front of me, so I might have the variable names a bit off. But you get the idea.)
Editing the XML files within the module should fix the problem without having to wait for me to do it. When I get home I'll do more of this myself, making sure every entry is explicit enough to ensure this doesn't happen the next time they decide to rebalance everything.

Really, that whole specialist slot rebalancing was the one part of the megapatch that I didn't really look into too closely. I don't like the idea of removing ALL specialists from the Library, since it seems like that's too much anti-ICS overkill (and I think I've done plenty to discourage ICS in other ways), so I might just keep it with the numbers I have now.
 
Okay, as someone pointed out in another thread, there's a hotfix scheduled for tomorrow (12/22); by the time you read this you might have downloaded it. The patch notes include a line:

[MODDING]
* Re-enabled LUA library unused in the core game. It was removed because we didn’t think modders were using it, and apparently many, many are using it.

The library in question is almost definitely the GetScriptData and SaveScriptData functions used to save long-term variables, the linchpin of (among many other things) the building resource generation logic. Hopefully, that part will now work correctly. The problem I have is, I can't test it until my vacation is done. So I'm going to need someone else to tell me if this fixes the big problems with the mod; there will almost definitely be other things that need fixing, I'm sure (like the specialist slot thing above), but I'm hoping that a couple of the other instabilities I was running into are just a consequence of certain Lua functions failing partway through when they tried calling the save/load functions, and not aborting gracefully.

On the bright side, I've figured out a couple good solutions for some design problems I was running into, so hopefully v.0.12 can include things like the Great Empath's "Peace Bomb" ability, or the ability to sacrifice a Great Person to speed up the Transcendence timer.
 
I'm going to need someone else to tell me if this fixes the big problems with the mod; there will almost definitely be other things that need fixing, I'm sure (like the specialist slot thing above), but I'm hoping that a couple of the other instabilities I was running into are just a consequence of certain Lua functions failing partway through when they tried calling the save/load functions, and not aborting gracefully.

OK, I can DL your latest and exercise it. If you can give me specifics that you would like me to look at (like the Library Specialist thing) then I can set up the game and focus on these items.

D
 
If you can give me specifics that you would like me to look at (like the Library Specialist thing) then I can set up the game and focus on these items.

Well, it's less about specifics and more about finding out all the little things the patch broke. The problem that I was having was that the broken logic in the resource generation code (thanks to having that save/load removed) might have been causing other things to not work. So I can't tell if restoring those functions will cause everything else to work, which I could do if I were at home. My main worry is just that the patch changed so much, and I'm only one person (two if you count my other personality), so things could have slipped through, like the Library specialist bug. There could easily be more like that out there.
And it's not always about something noticeably breaking. For instance, a couple negative promotions now remove when you upgrade the unit, and the devs are adding more to that list in today's hotfix. This may or may not cause the balance of the future-era units to be a bit screwy; I didn't put negative promotions on the future-era units, because they generally upgraded from older units and would keep those limitations. But does that make the new units too strong now? (For instance, I added the Naval Penalty back onto the Needlejet, but do I need to add the City Attack penalty back onto the units that upgrade from tanks?)
Or just numbers: the Infantry used to be 32 power, and Mechanized Infantry were 50. So I lowered MechInf to 42, right? Well, Infantry are now bumped up to 36. I'm still okay with leaving Mech at 42, since they also get the movement increase, but does that imply anything about the balance of Laser Infantry (45)? Does the Mobile SAM's new ability to attack directly now make the upgrade to Plasma Artillery less valuable? That sort of thing.

And I still just need general feedback. Now that I've upped the flavor ratings on many key buildings, are the AI cities now developing at an adequate rate to where they'll still be competitive? Are the AIs still making enough military units, and upgrading the ones they have at an acceptable rate? Are the AI's incomes in gpt (which you can see) staying competitive with your own? At what point in the game are you hitting that inevitable threshold where you just KNOW you have an insurmountable advantage over the AIs and it's just a matter of mopping up (often at the same point where you realize you're picking up every Wonder)? With the decrease in research percentages, is it worth building the University/Observatory/Public School/Research Lab in anything but your core cities? Does the increase in base unhappiness make the Rationalism tree untenable and basically force you to go Piety? While these things aren't easy to set up test cases for, I could really use the feedback if you feel things still aren't balancing well.

Also, I keep thinking up new problems. It occurred to me yesterday that I don't actually know how the city-states and Barbarians gain technologies. Do they just get them automatically based on what the main empires have? The real question becomes, do they have a way to get the locked Centauri Ecology tech and the ones that it leads to? (If they can't, then they won't be able to unlock Mind Worms and such.) It'd be easy enough for me to code in an override for this, but it'd be helpful to know how the game would handle it by default.
 
Well, it's less about specifics and more about finding out all the little things the patch broke.

And I still just need general feedback. Now that I've upped the flavor ratings on many key buildings, are the AI cities now developing at an adequate rate to where they'll still be competitive? Are the AIs still making enough military units, and upgrading the ones they have at an acceptable rate? Are the AI's incomes in gpt (which you can see) staying competitive with your own? At what point in the game are you hitting that inevitable threshold where you just KNOW you have an insurmountable advantage over the AIs and it's just a matter of mopping up (often at the same point where you realize you're picking up every Wonder)? With the decrease in research percentages, is it worth building the University/Observatory/Public School/Research Lab in anything but your core cities? Does the increase in base unhappiness make the Rationalism tree untenable and basically force you to go Piety? While these things aren't easy to set up test cases for, I could really use the feedback if you feel things still aren't balancing well.

OK, so I started my first game this evening Continents/ Emporer and the game locked up about 20 turns in : this was right after the first time a CS made a diplomatic communique (see first pic). Second game started same set-up, and progressed np regarding iniital CS diplo. Money and Happiness don't seem to be problems at all (in fact I had relatively huge surplus's of each), so I am able to focus on military and culture production.

A new unit (Scout) has appeared in this version, which the AIs are building. The AIs shouldn't be building these units - correct?

Interesting observation of the day: I noticed the volcano shows as spewing lava if a unit is adjacent, however if there isn't a unit adjacent then the volcano seems to go dormant: why did Firaxis invest the time and money to produce the dormant volcano graphic?

I do believe the upgrade cost of riflemen to Infantry is good (i.e. 160 Gold): I did have to consider upgrades during this phase.

Gandhi asked me to declare war on Darius (an AI on a different continent) and I did. Not once did I engage Darius, but Darius offered all sorts of stuff to declare peace with me. This is a continueing problem which needs to be fixed, as its a complete exploit to accept an AI's request to declare war on an AI on another continent just so you can then receive the AI's peace offerings later.

Concerning the Plant Forest advisement pic: is there any way to get the advisor to consider a strategic assessment of the terrain and nearby enemy states when offering the Plant Forest options?

Rome (who was on my northern border this evening) declared war on me and used their fighters effectively at first by engaging my frontline units. However after an initially effective thrust where Rome's combined infantry/artillery/ aircraft succesfully engaged and killed my frontline units, I counterattacked and destroyed the Romans mobile forces, and my units assumed positions of defense. The Romans then switched their fighter aircraft to bombing my nearest city, and continued to bomb it turn after turn even though the city was completely defenseless while my adjacent units were completely unscathed (i.e. the continual bombing of my defenseless city accomplished nothing).

The game crashed again shortly after this. Don't have a reason why at this point.

D
 

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OK, so I started my first game this evening Continents/ Emperor and the game locked up about 20 turns in

Do you run FireTuner while you play? It would be useful to know if there were any error messages preceding the crash. Sometimes there isn't anything like this, but when there is, it goes a long way towards tracking these down.
I had a similar crash in my own test game, except it was when an AI empire (France, I think) wanted to make first contact. The game just froze up for no apparent reason. When I reloaded and waited a turn before sailing into France's territory it worked just fine.

A new unit (Scout) has appeared in this version, which the AIs are building. The AIs shouldn't be building these units - correct?

I'm not sure what you mean; as far as I know, Scouts have always been a possibility for AIs. It's just that until this last patch, the Recon flavor was given such a low weighting that the AI rarely wanted to build units related to that (like Scouts) when it could just make a Warrior. Now, I think Scouts are disabled for the Barbarian faction, but they should be fair game for everyone else.

why did Firaxis invest the time and money to produce the dormant volcano graphic?

If a volcano spawns in the forest and no one's around, does it make a sound?

I think the idea is that there's no point wasting GPU cycles on an animation the player isn't seeing, and if there's no unit nearby, he won't be looking in that area. I wish there was a way to override this and have all animations on all the time for those of us with decent computers, but it's probably not a high priority.

I do believe the upgrade cost of riflemen to Infantry is good (i.e. 160 Gold): I did have to consider upgrades during this phase.

I actually didn't have anything to do with that; upgrade costs are purely tied to the difference in the units' base costs. What it looks like is that in this last megapatch, Firaxis increased the power of Infantry (32 to 36) and adjusted their cost upwards to match. This would substantially increase the upgrade cost as a side-effect.

This is a continueing problem which needs to be fixed, as its a complete exploit to accept an AI's request to declare war on an AI on another continent just so you can then receive the AI's peace offerings later.

Yes, this is a problem in general. For a more egregious example: as part of my new Transcendence victory, all of the AIs declare war on you when the timer starts. But I didn't put a lock on the war state yet, so after a few turns the AIs will all contact you asking for peace, and they'll ALL offer something extra (since, by definition, you're more powerful than they are and didn't actually DECLARE the war on them).

Personally, I think the willingness of an AI to throw in that little something extra should be tied to how much damage was actually done in the course of the war; a "Cold War" with no actual fighting should always lead to a straight peace offer, while a small empire that manages to fight a perfect defensive war should be offered a more generous settlement despite still being weak relative to the other side.
But right now, it's purely a question of current power (which does tie to the number of surviving units and cities). And that leads to the abuses.

Concerning the Plant Forest advisement pic: is there any way to get the advisor to consider a strategic assessment of the terrain and nearby enemy states when offering the Plant Forest options?

Not that I can see. As far as I can tell the logic is very simple:
> Does my city need more production? If so, let's value the improvements that add production.
> Hey, the "Build Forest" improvement says it adds +1 production and has a Production flavor. Let's suggest that!

So in theory, a city that already has plenty of production shouldn't suggest nearby workers plant forests, but that's so flaky that I wouldn't really depend on it.

I don't know if the worker suggestion logic is handled in Lua; if it is, then I might be able to tweak this a bit. But really, I think it's probably hopeless. My worry is that the AI is spending way too much effort building forests on top of other forests or something, so I'd at least like a way to forbid that. But so far, no progress on that.

One thing I want to do is increase the Flavor rating of the Lumbermill, so that the AI is more willing to develop the forests he has instead of trying to plant more. That should help this a bit.

The Romans then switched their fighter aircraft to bombing my nearest city, and continued to bomb it turn after turn even though the city was completely defenseless while my adjacent units were completely unscathed (i.e. the continual bombing of my defenseless city accomplished nothing).

The aircraft AI is pretty bad, but I think this is also a consequence of the increased (2 HP/turn) city regeneration; back when it was 1 HP/turn, it wouldn't take much to keep a city "pinned down" at 1 HP, an easy conquest for any local units. But now it takes more, and the AI doesn't know when it's a lost cause to bombard a city.

It doesn't help that Fighters get the "Weak Ranged" promotion, which gives them -75% strength against anything other than other Air units. So they're just not very GOOD at unit bombardment; the AI sees them as having a strength of 10 or 15 or something versus the opponent's strength of 36 (infantry) and figures that it's a lost cause to bombard. So the solution might be to reduce Weak Ranged to -50% instead of -75%; I'll try that when I get home.

The game crashed again shortly after this. Don't have a reason why at this point.

I'm going to guess "Karma". You know what you did...
 
Do you run FireTuner while you play? It would be useful to know if there were any error messages preceding the crash. Sometimes there isn't anything like this, but when there is, it goes a long way towards tracking these down.

I don't use FireTuner while I play, but I can start using it.

I'm not sure what you mean; as far as I know, Scouts have always been a possibility for AIs.

I don't think I've ever seen a scout while playing your mods before. It happened again this evening.

On to this evening's playtesting:

1. Concerning the first pic: this is only a little ways into the game. I actually got to see the Settler heading down to build the city, and almost immediately El Dorado was incorporated into the British Empire. Very good coding in this sense - understanding the importance of El Dorado! :goodjob:

2. The Barb ship just sat there turn after turn. Would've thought it'd be sent out to pillage/ make a nuisance of itself.

3. Game CTD'd again this evening. I had just discovered Flight, and the Barb ship in pic 2 had just been bombarded by an AI ship, otherwise no real indication as to why this happened. A shame really - I think the British were about to invade my "weak" territories. :(

D
 

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I don't think I've ever seen a scout while playing your mods before. It happened again this evening.

It might be because you usually start games in later eras; after all, which should the AI prefer to make, a strength 4 scout, or a strength 36 Infantry? If you start in the Ancient era then the Scout makes more sense, but in an Industrial or Nuclear start, how long would you expect a unit like that to survive? But in this last megapatch they changed the AI so that it emphasizes exploration a bit more, in preparation for that second-wave settling, and the Scout's the only unit with a Recon flavor...

Personally, this is why I've long thought that they should have followed the pattern in earlier games and had the Scout upgrade to an Explorer (Conquistador) and then to something else. That's why I have Scouts now upgrading to Paratroopers and then to Scout Powersuits, but really there should be some Explorer-style intermediate step. Maybe I'll add one myself.

Very good coding in this sense - understanding the importance of El Dorado!

I'm torn. On one hand, it's good to know that the AI can adapt to unusual circumstances like that, and it's nice to see Natural Wonders that are actually worth working the tile of. (2 production and 3 gold just isn't enough to be worth settling near, especially since it's zero-food.)
On the other hand, I think El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth are completely unbalanced. 10 gold for a tile is just too much, and the Fountain's healing effect is just insane.

For a long time, I've wanted to change the Natural Wonders to providing 1 food, 1 production, 1 research, 1 gold, 1 culture, and 1 Happiness when worked, which'd make it the kind of thing you'd want to settle near no matter what your emphasis was. The Happiness and culture parts were giving problems, though, but I figured I could handle those through Lua if need be. (One other possibility I had was making a "Tourist Center" Improvement that could only be built on Natural Wonders, for increased gold/culture, but the problem is that the NWs are all set to Impassible, and I'm not sure I want to change that.)

2. The Barb ship just sat there turn after turn. Would've thought it'd be sent out to pillage/ make a nuisance of itself.

Part of this seems to be exploration-related. The AI won't really perform "missions" to areas it hasn't seen, so AI naval units tend to either hang around their home ports, or focus on the shoreline of a single enemy they've previously found with a barbarian camp or something.

3. Game CTD'd again this evening. I had just discovered Flight, and the Barb ship in pic 2 had just been bombarded by an AI ship, otherwise no real indication as to why this happened. A shame really - I think the British were about to invade my "weak" territories.

Did it crash at the same point if/when you reloaded the most recent save (or autosave)? Things like this are why I have the game autosaving much more often than the 10-turn default.

I'm sure quite a few of these crashes are my fault, and it might be related to the Library issue we've discussed previously. (Did you fix that in your version already, or are you waiting for me to do it?) But I wouldn't be surprised if the core game is crashing after that huge patch, because given their past track record I have a hard time believing Firaxis got it all right on the first try. And these sorts of mods are really pushing the limits of the game's flexibility, so I'm not surprised it's a bit unstable.

--------------
I've been planning out a revised tech tree, adding three new Social techs and moving a few others around to compensate. It actually flows a bit better than the existing tree, and one of the things I like is that I'll be moving Homo Superior (the tech that adds the Ranger and Troll units) up a tier, from 19 to 20. That means I need to make those two units a bit stronger, since they'd now be MORE advanced than, say, a Gravtank, and they're a 2-resource unit (Neutronium and Omnicytes). So the question is, what can I do to make them worth that higher tier?
I could bump their power ratings up from 60 to, say, 70, but I'd rather be more creative. Things I've been thinking of:
Ranger:
> Any unit a Ranger attacks has a 25% chance of dying at the end of the combat, regardless of how the fight works out.
> First Strike. (No idea how I can code this, but if I could, it'd be the best outcome.)
> Rangers get +25% vs. Titan units (since nothing else in the game gets a bonus vs. Titans)
> Bushido (as the Japanese ability, the unit fights at full strength regardless of wounds)
Troll:
> If a Troll wins a fight, it immediately gets an additional movement point.
> +50% vs. Ranged attacks (so you can't wear them down with bombardment)
> Trolls already get +25% vs. Psi, maybe increase this to +50%. That way they could stand toe-to-toe with a Nessus Worm.

Or maybe just give both units twice the normal chance of spawning a Great General and be done with it. I'll probably just do that as a placeholder.

So, anyone else have any ideas for these two?
 
I'm torn. On one hand, it's good to know that the AI can adapt to unusual circumstances like that, and it's nice to see Natural Wonders that are actually worth working the tile of. (2 production and 3 gold just isn't enough to be worth settling near, especially since it's zero-food.)
On the other hand, I think El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth are completely unbalanced. 10 gold for a tile is just too much, and the Fountain's healing effect is just insane.

Completely agree with you in regards to El Dorado being over-powered: my observation was more about the AI recognizing the importance of the landmark and reacting (IMO) correctly to it.

If a volcano spawns in the forest and no one's around, does it make a sound?

And if a fish swims alone in the ocean should anyone be able to observe it? And if a bird flys alone over a fish, should anyone be able to observe this? And if a cow grazes alone in an abandonded pasture should anyone be able to see this? And if whales get frisky in a tile should anyone be able to observe this? I just find it interesting that the volcano is treated differently in this regard.

Anyways, on to this evenings questions/ observations:

1. Concerning "Good naval Pillaging 1": the AI did a good job of pillaging my naval improvements this game! :goodjob:

2. Concerning my pic about why I can plant a forest on a tile which already has a forest: why can I do this? I think this is a known issue, but thought I should ask this anyways.

3. And on a simlar note what is the rationale on why I can't plant a forest on a desert square?

4. Another observation: when a C-S declares war on you and you get the emblem notification, then when you click on the emblem why doesn't it then re-direct you to the C-S which has just declared war on you?

D
 

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2. Concerning my pic about why I can plant a forest on a tile which already has a forest: why can I do this? I think this is a known issue, but thought I should ask this anyways.

Basically, you can do this because you can't not NOT do it. You can make an improvement require a terrain feature or a terrain type, but as far as I can tell you can't make it require the ABSENCE of features. Although in theory you shoul be able to, since Null is a value, so you should be able to require the FEATURE_NONE or its null-feature equivalent, which'd prevent you from building a forest on any tile containing a forest, jungle, or oasis. (Hills I'm not sure on. In theory they're a Feature, except the game handles them as a Plot type for most things.) I had to mess around with all of this when I did the terraforming logic, so I think I know how to code it, it's only a question of whether the XML can recognize it.

I'll see what I can do with this when I get home next week, but don't get your hopes up. If it doesn't work, I think there are a few things I can do with Flavor settings and yields to discourage the AI from getting stuck in an infinite loop.

3. And on a simlar note what is the rationale on why I can't plant a forest on a desert square?

Because forests don't tend to grow where there's little or no water. Deserts are almost always at thirty or ninety degrees north or south of the equator because of what are known as "Hadley Cells" that create permanent high and low pressure areas every 30 degrees north or south. The lack of moisture at those latitudes, then, is very real and explains why forests are few and far between at those locations. (Side note: I live in Los Angeles. Yes, there are trees around there, especially up in the hills, but those are the exception to the rule.)

A simpler answer is that since the game won't spawn forests on desert tiles by default, I didn't want to give you the ability to plant forests on desert tiles. The Plant Jungle action is similarly limited; I tried to use the same logic the existing features used.
For a while I'd toyed around with allowing terraformers to create an Oasis on the desert tiles, or create Flood Plains. There was just one big problem: no reason NOT to make them. Forests and Jungles, at least, are bonus-neutral with tradeoffs to keep them from being too desirable. But a desert full of Oases would just be a bit much. (One possibility was to have the worker sacrifice himself to create the Oasis, but with them costing less than 1 turn by that point in the game, it'd be about as limiting as the Work Boat's sacrifice.)

4. Another observation: when a C-S declares war on you and you get the emblem notification, then when you click on the emblem why doesn't it then re-direct you to the C-S which has just declared war on you?

Because the location-centering logic of the notification system is
A> Extremely buggy
and
B> Mostly unused
I try to take advantage of it more in the custom notifications I added for my new Wonders (although I think those notifications are still broken from the patch), but I'm not surprised that a lot of the existing notifications don't center correctly.
Conversely, maybe they DID work better pre-patch and whatever broke the custom notifications also broke them. Something to think about...
 
Note that I have made the correction to the Library slot, which seems to have stopped the crashes that I was experiencing.

Some more feedbacK:

1. After four games with this version of your mod, why the pace seems a little slow IMO: buildings and units take a little too long to construct.
2. Concerning the Combat Engineer pic: that unit sat in the water till my arty sank it.
3. Concerning the city strength pic: doesn't look like the stats window is capable of displaying that many decimal places correctly. Bug?


D
 

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Note that I have made the correction to the Library slot, which seems to have stopped the crashes that I was experiencing.

Good, I'm glad it's a known issue causing the problem.

1. After four games with this version of your mod, why the pace seems a little slow IMO: buildings and units take a little too long to construct.

In a specific era, or just in general? I know that when you start in a late era your first few buildings take a long time. I added the food and research "head start" boosts to the mod to help with those, but I didn't do anything to the production or gold outputs.
Maybe I SHOULD add some sort of boost, but I'm not sure how. It's not like research (which is empire-wide) or food (which can use Get and Set on a city-by-city basis).

2. Concerning the Combat Engineer pic: that unit sat in the water till my arty sank it.

Those 1-hex lakes have always caused problems. I see units get stuck there all the time.

3. Concerning the city strength pic: doesn't look like the stats window is capable of displaying that many decimal places correctly. Bug?

Yes. I've seen it screw up the math horribly when you exceed 100, and it's probably similar to how the Happiness window screws up; the game probably just wasn't designed for numbers that big. I'll look into the UI window for this when I get home, but it's a low priority since the combat does seem to work correctly (it's just a UI thing).
 
In a specific era, or just in general?

I'm playing all my games starting in the Industrial era. It seems like I'm hitting the return key quite a bit while waiting for things to be produced. While I've got money (i.e. I'm not hovering around zero gold) everything is too expensive to buy. So I wait.

On to last night's observations:

1. The Japanese asked me to DoC the Iriquois, which I said I'd do after ten turns. After the ten turns the Japanese requested I honor this agreement, which I did. The very next turn the Japanese publicly denounced me, saying I couldn't be trusted. I'm not sure if this is good AI programming or not: it could be considered good in that if my backdoor agreement with the Japanese were secret, then the only thing everyone else would know was that I was essentially dogpiling the AI and so deserved the diplo hit from the Japanese. It would in effect have been very sneaky of the Japanese to do this to me. Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

2. The game locked up when I tried to exit without saving. Not sure what happened there. I actually had to manually power down the computer and restart it.

3. A strategy I've developed on the Continents maps is to take one or two infantry and go explore the map, with the idea of meeting as many C-S as possible in order to get the money (as well as explore Ruins). There really is no downside to this strategy, as I can also take these units and gain experience by battling Barbs. One thing I ran into last night was that there were several small island groups I had to navigate around. I think if there were consistently more of these small worthless island groups around, then it might be a small nerf to this early exploration strategy in that a player has to navigate around these island-groups, thus slowing down this strategy.

4. Update: just got nuked for the first time by an AI. Unfortunately right afterwards the game locked up.

D
 
I'm playing all my games starting in the Industrial era. It seems like I'm hitting the return key quite a bit while waiting for things to be produced.

It sounds like I really just need to code a wider-ranging "head start" setup, where production and gold are boosted for the first few turns in the same way research and food are. Although, I'd point out that in an Ancient Era start, the Monument takes 15 turns to build, so it's not like this is unique to late-era starts; the game is always sluggish at first. And once you get the railroad links up, coal linked, and factories build, production in an Industrial start works just fine.
The big problem with an Industrial start is how Coal and Oil are distributed. You'll only have three cities, so the chances of being close enough to a Coal to grab it are low, and Oil won't even be visible yet. So in a "normal" game you'd have both of these resources, but in an Industrial-start game it's actually pretty unlikely. (And even if YOU are willing to go far out of your way to grab a Coal deposit, the AI won't, despite how badly it wants Factories. One possible way to fix that would be to boost the base production bonus from Coal by 1, which'd make the AI really want to settle near it without totally unbalancing everything.)

Actually, I think a more general part of the problem is just that tiles around your cities won't be improved, so your Workers will be spending a LOT of time just getting everything set up. When your city is starting at size 1-2 this isn't a big deal, because the city will just work the resource tiles until you get some Workers out. But when your cities start at sizes 5-7, this can be a big deal.
So rather than add more starting Workers to each empire, I actually thought that a way to handle this would be for cities in later eras to automatically improve a number of tiles around the city when you found them. Even if it didn't place the RIGHT improvements, it'd help get your empires started. For logic I was thinking:
> Loop N times, where N is the era number you started in (so 4 for Industrial, 9 for Transcendence); instead of hard-coding this, I might just set it in a table in the Eras file
> For each iteration, pick a tile near the city (preferably in the first ring, but I might prioritize resources)
> If that tile has a resource, place the appropriate Improvement. (Concern: what if it has a strategic resource that hasn't been revealed yet? I'll have to check to see if the resource has a tech prerequisite.)
> If it's not a resource tile and is near a river, place a Farm. (Even though there's only a certain window on the tech tree where this matters, it's still a pattern people follow.)
> If it's not one of the above and is a hill, place a Mine.
> Otherwise, do a probability draw based on terrain type; Grassland might be 2/3 Trading Post, 1/3 Farm; Plains 1/3 Trading Post, 2/3 Farm, Desert or Tundra would always get a Trading Post.

I figure that this'll free up starting workers to build the road/railroad links you need without sacrificing productivity, and should really help with getting up to speed. Sure, you can go back and trade out tiles as appropriate, but this'd give a good head start. I'll probably still keep the food and research boosts I'd already coded; the Food boost sort of mimics a Maritime ally, and the research boost just compensates for the low number of cities/population.

So I'll try to code something like this when I can, but I'm not sure whether I can trigger an Event on "city founded"; I'd hate to have to do this as a start-of-turn check every turn.

It would in effect have been very sneaky of the Japanese to do this to me. Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

The AI does quite a few things that might be brilliant or might be stupid, and it's hard to differentiate. Personally, I'd just guess stupid, that it didn't connect that your "dishonorable" actions were its own fault. But at least it makes games unpredictable, which is almost always a plus.

3. A strategy I've developed on the Continents maps is to take one or two infantry and go explore the map, with the idea of meeting as many C-S as possible in order to get the money (as well as explore Ruins). There really is no downside to this strategy, as I can also take these units and gain experience by battling Barbs.

I've done this in every game, and I HAVE seen a downside: those units aren't at home, and that seems to affect the AI's assessment of your military strength. You seem to get a lot more early war declarations when you follow this strategy, unless you IMMEDIATELY churn out more units. This is especially true in a Transcendence start, where you only have four Laser Infantry that are completely outclassed as soon as any empire links up a strategic resource.

But in general yes, this just goes back to the earlier AI problem where they wouldn't prioritize exploration/contact. I'd see a city-state that literally bordered an empire (with their borders actually touching), and I'd STILL get the 30gp for first contact when I came by. I think the patch helped a bit with this, but in general you still have the problem that the only units the AI will use for this recon are ones with FLAVOR_RECON settings, and there are very few of those.
I've actually been thinking of adding small Recon flavors to a variety of appropriate units, but that might cause the AI to do some stupid things with them.

4. Update: just got nuked for the first time by an AI. Unfortunately right afterwards the game locked up.

Do you know which unit he used? Atomic Bomb, Nuclear Missile, Planet Buster, or Subspace Generator? (That is, what era were you in when it happened?) I know the Subspace has problems (it won't rebase, for instance), but I haven't tried the Planet Buster recently. It could be as simple as trying to use an animation not appropriate to the unit; I don't remember which unit I used as the placeholder for these.
 
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