Large Scale Mod

Okay I played another game with v.3 and here are my impressions on a Tiny map:

For Tiny maps (or Duel maps), I'd recommend changing the minimum city range to something smaller (4 instead of 6?) b/c on a Tiny map there are essentially about 6-10 expansion sites depending on where cities are placed (fewer on Duel). So it actually makes it impossible for certain civs to expand because another one beat them to the one or two spots on the map they could easily reach. I essentially locked off half a pangea map by placing my American cities in the two spots that were open on my side of the Pangea.

In addition, due to the distances between cities, barbarian spawning gets pretty insane (and they have 3 moves, too!). Especially early. Although I don't know what exactly happened to Seoul and Copenhagen, they both died in the first 30 turns... seemingly from barbarian attacks because I scouted most of the map and haven't found either of them being held by a major civ (which is what I initially though happened). Their cities are essentially gone... although there is on patch of ocean I haven't searched... but I can't see any of the ciz getting there within the first few turns. I spent most of the beginning of the game fending off a horde of barbarians... it didn't help that some of the computers were leaping into the classical age and thereby beefing up the barbs.

I don't know if you want to spend time on the text stuff, but I just thought I'd note that once you settle on some numbers you'll probable want to add some text files so that the popups reflect your changes (hovering the mouse over the settler still says 2 tile minimum)

A couple other notes:

I like the city bombard at range 3, it gives a nice boost to defense and was necessary to defeat the barbarian hordes.

I really like the increased moves, it solves so many issues with 1UPT.

I noticed that I was experiencing more happy-bucket golden ages in this mod. I'm not complaining, but it was noticeable. Still they were really helpful because of my slow start due to barbarians constant attacking.

Hope these comments help.

Best Wishes,
Joseph
 
Hmm, personally I think that tiny is just far too small for this kind of mod. Tiny would only be viable as a duel map the way I see it. I've modified the small map to be possible (You'll see it had the "Large Scale Mod version" appended) but I've left tiny and duel as they were because I didn't expect anyone to use them (so they've got the default settings).

Unfortunately I don't think I can change the city distance depending on the map size, because it's a global variable. Perhaps with a smart SQL statement but I'm not sure it's worth it to tell you the truth.

I like the fact that barbs becomes bit more difficult to fend off because your cities are so far away. In the vanilla, even raging barbs are a pushover.


I don't know if you want to spend time on the text stuff, but I just thought I'd note that once you settle on some numbers you'll probable want to add some text files so that the popups reflect your changes (hovering the mouse over the settler still says 2 tile minimum)

Yea, this is in the plan, but I managed to resolve the bugs so late yesterday that I didn't have time to find out where this is located and amend it.

I noticed that I was experiencing more happy-bucket golden ages in this mod. I'm not complaining, but it was noticeable. Still they were really helpful because of my slow start due to barbarians constant attacking.

True, with the reduced unhapiness, they would be far easier. I'll prolly increase their cost by 50%

Thanks for the playtesting :)
 
db0,

Cool, I figured that making map-size specific changes to the globals might be more difficult, but I figured I'd mention it just in case it was doable.

As for barbarians, they were annoying, but didn't sack my cities (though at one point they pillaged every improvement I made!). One problem you might run into with the 6 distance between cities is that the barbarian based UA traits might become too good... Germany, Songhai, and even the Ottomans could get some mad armies/gold income/navies. Another thing I noticed was how difficult it was to "seal off" borders due to the distance between cities (very expensive to purchase those 4 tiles between cities! Impossible if you have to move farther away b/c of bad terrain).

I experienced 3 Golden Ages by the mid-game (Ren). I usually get about 3 happy bucket GAs a game, so a 50% increase in cost would probably work, but like I said, I really needed those GAs to keep up with my defenses. This was one of the rare games of Civ where I wasn't able to just pump out wonders and buildings. I actually had to keep multiple standing armies around just to beat off the barbs (I needed multiple armies b/c the cities were so far away from each other). The city distances make it very important to build roads between cities... otherwise it takes a few turns to respond to barbarian attacks... which means more pillaging ;)

Best Wishes,
Joseph
 
Good stuff. It sounds like the changes I did make the game a bit more challenging and exciting at the start. I plan to decreate the tech cost of the ancient era so as to allow players to get some spearmen out before the 100 turn so that should hopefully help with barbs as well :)
 
I should note that I was playing on Prince... and returning the ancient era tech costs would definitely help speed up the early game.
 
So many mods, so little time... this sounds really cool. I was thinking my next game would be one using the Improved City Defense mod (I'd give credit to the author but this is off the top of my head and I don't recall), but I'd like to try this too. Any idea how the two would mesh? I know in your future work section you mentioned it, have you had any luck implementing a combo mod which does large scale combat AND improved city defense?
 
So many mods, so little time... this sounds really cool. I was thinking my next game would be one using the Improved City Defense mod (I'd give credit to the author but this is off the top of my head and I don't recall), but I'd like to try this too. Any idea how the two would mesh? I know in your future work section you mentioned it, have you had any luck implementing a combo mod which does large scale combat AND improved city defense?

This mod already significantly improves city defence but there should be no conflict between those two anyway. We change different things but after using both together, you might find that cities are now very difficult to take :) However playtest it and give us some first hand experience
 
Version 4 now uploaded. Barring the lower road maintenance which seems to be trickier, the main changes I wanted to implement are there. This is the changelog of the latest version

  • Scaled technology costs to be easier to get (compared to the overall increase) at the Ancient and Classical eras (so that the initial game is not very slow)
  • Increased visibility for all units by 1 to make up for the faster movement
  • Increased visibility of all owned plots by one as well (so your cities can see further now)
  • Changed tooltip for the settlers being unable to found a city to point out that you need to be 6 tiles away.
 
Good luck with this one. The 1UPT is nice for all the tactical choices but the traffic jam that comes along even during peace time isn't much fun.

The core problem is that cities are really at a strategic scale and 1upt is a tactical level. When the code core comes out, I'd like to see a mod where you have stacks as an army and then attacks taking place at a tactical level with the units in each army. Idea being to make the normal turns go by quickly, but an invasion gets a separate timescale between turns so to speak, ideally with an expanded tactical map (4 or 9 tiles per normal tile). Multiplayer would be impossible. So far, it seems that multiplayer with mods is impossible anyway.
 
I'd like to see a mod where you have stacks as an army and then attacks taking place at a tactical level with the units in each army. Idea being to make the normal turns go by quickly, but an invasion gets a separate timescale between turns so to speak, ideally with an expanded tactical map (4 or 9 tiles per normal tile).

I'd like to see this too but I doubt this will be possible to mod into the game. Of course I also hope I'm wrong :)
 
Great stuff! The slow pace on epic/huge maps is exactly what killing me. Hopefully this brings more "fun" to this type of gameplay.
 
Problem people. I discovered that because of the way unhappiness is implemented in the code, the mod is actually preventing any unhappiness due to population. I've worked around this in v5 but Gamespy is bugging out at the moment so it's stuck on either "unmoderated" or "denied" status. Until it's fixed, you can download the fixed version from this post.
 

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Ok, I've managed to work around Gamespy's idiocy. V7 is not available (same as v6 really).

Please try it out and tell me how the values affect the game. I am mostly interested on how the city spread is playing it out. Do you have enough room to build cities? Do you get larger armies? Do you have more tactical battles (or do you again stick to 3-5 units)?

In other news, I noticed that you always had 0 pop unhappiness and found a way to fix this. The bad news is, that the fix seems only to want to apply on new games :(
 
hi there, 1st post here :) thought i'd give you a little feedback as i really like your idea with this mod!

my first game stopped pretty early because i accidentaly placed two cities exactly 12 tiles away from each other, leaving no space for a city in between, though there was lots of good land there, so that pretty much ruined my strategy and i stopped the game.

next game, having learned my lesson i started carefully counting the tiles for my planned cities, but to no avail - there was a city state exactly 12 tiles from my capital! both games were played on huge continent maps. i think maybe 6 tiles is a bit too much. where are you changing it? im going to try with 4, and see how that feels.

also, for a distant future when the game code is out, i think at any setting higher thant 2 or 3, this needs some kind of graphical feedback. counting tiles gets tedious, and sometimes you cant even see the cities that are blocking yet, making you bring settlers to impossible locations which is frustrating. would be cool if having a settler selected you could see which tiles are blocked
 
managed to get a local version up and running, trying with 4 now or tomorrow and i''ll report back :)
 
Thanks Kirneh. I was also statring to think that 6 is too much. I was going to try with 5 as a change however as 4 just starts bringing cities closer together again.
 
db0, I like the idea of this mod, and I understand that this is for large/huge maps...

Do you have plans in the future to make this mod universal, so that it scales with map size,
so values, numbers scale to have a similar effect, same game experience for smaller maps, too?

I hope I was clear with my question :)
 
Soma, I'd like to but some things seem to only be set global variable (such as the distance of cities). Possibly I might be able to change it on the fly via LUA, but I don't know LUA :)

On the other hand, a lot of settings are already tied to the world-size, such as culture loss, science costs and unhappiness-per-city, so those can certainly be tweaked (and they have been already ;) )
 
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