Realism Invictus

Walter Hawkwood said:

Actually playing with 31 civs can cause copper to become more scarce. Since the map generator tries to place enough of all resources for every civ, it of course simply runs of placement places if the map size is not adequate to the number of civs, thus causing some resources to be barely present at all. The first victims are usually crops - on an overcrowded map you will be lucky if there is more than one instance of corn or rice present.

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Can you disable this behaviour of the map generator?

JeremyHussell said:

Well, I think the reality is more complicated than that. Population tends to cluster along major transportation routes, whether those are shipping routes, roads, rail, or something else. At the very least, major rivers and lakes attract population just as well as oceanic coast. The Great Lakes, for example, are home to the 3rd largest U.S. city (Chicago) and the 1st and 2nd largest Canadian cities (Toronto and Montreal). However, climate has a much larger effect. Most people live where food is easy to grow, and only secondarily congregate where food is easy to transport to.

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Yep, I obviously oversimplified quite a lot. Unfortunately, one thing we won't get in any near future is navigable rivers in RI.

Here's a rough population density map for the last 2000 years: http://whyculturedmeat.org/images/human_population.png (won't claim it to be 100% accurate, but it is quite illustrative). It shows well how populations spreads inland from coastlines and fertile river valleys. And yes, it is of course linked to climate a lot obviously, since continental climate of inland territories is usually (not always, as you pointed out quite accurately) much harsher than coastal climate of comparable latitudes.

Also, an example from my personal experience would be cities that were initially situated on coastlines, but as the sea receded (as it tends to do in some places) lost their wealth and importance. A good example of that would be Ostia and Ravenna in Italy.

MilesBeyond said:

Is there a comparison of all the different civs floating around anywhere? The more I play this mod, the more I love it, but the more I wish there was an easier way to see how one civ's unique and national units and buildings stack up against another's without having to pour through the Civopedia.

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Not quite, no. We were thinking of making something like that within pedia, but it proved a bit too complicated.

EDIT: Also, apologies if this is a stupid question, but after reading the manual and searching the forums, I'm still not really sure why every trait says "Max 3 turns of anarchy." Is it possible to have a lower or higher amount of anarchy? AFAIK they all have max 3.

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Nope, pay it no heed.

EDIT 2: Hey, since I'm asking questions, is there any chance of RI picking up C2C's system of "leader evolution," where, if the option's enabled, your leader grows over time and acquires new positive and negative traits?

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I don't think so, no.

JeremyHussell said:

Well, if generic names and icons are good, why not make some of the existing religions more generic? Ancestor Worship (Taoism, sort of), Polytheism (Hinduism), Monotheism (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), and whatever the technical term is for a non-theistic religion like Buddhism. Oh, and Dualism (Zoroastrianism). Then you can treat them all like Solar Cult. Existing art/icons can be used for one of the regional variations. Maybe the planned schism mechanic would work well with these sub-religions, too.

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Well... That would, in many cases, be terrifyingly bland. Also, in some cases (like Christianity/Islam) it would be counter-realistic, because then Christian and Islamic civs would actually get a relation bonus with each other, not a malus. I guess this is more or less realistic with various advanced polytheistic religions, since they were quite relaxed historically about infiltrating each others' pantheons, but monotheistic religions seem to all be quite at odds with each other.

Michkov said:

Can you disable this behaviour of the map generator?

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Nope, it's hard-coded. Also, it's not a bad thing, as it actually lets it adapt to a changing number of civs - provided this number isn't too high.

Must admit that's my most played mod atm(it is unbelievably polished). Can't imagine how cool it will be with Rev
Here's some things I noticed while playing it :
1) Great Library wnder is overpowered , please consider nerfing it. I feel really cheating on AI if I have any source of Marble nearby(luckily enough in my 2 games it was near).
2 free scientist is just too much, once you build it you just spam GS like there's no tommorow.
Here's an example of my Capital generating 60% of sciense of whole 19 citites empire :

Would be fair to make the fixed bonus to sciense from Great Library(50% for instance) , or 1 free scientist and 10-20% bonus. But great scientist every 40-60 turns is too much.(I play in legendary speed)

2) AI didn't care about seige units untill bombards become available, after that he just went nuts and prioritized them over any other unit , here's his cannon stacks of *Doom* :


At least he didn't suicide them on my heavily fortified city.

Oh, also I quiet liked the tactical AI in your mod guyz, enemy tends to carefuly wage could he take city or not and I was quiet amuzed when at the start of my English game I was almost obliterated by the AI stack pillagilng all my lands and eventualy finding not enough protected city(I had no offenseive force atm to stop them). That was quiet cool

3) Some people already adressed the warmongering state of mind for AI and that did applied to both of my games in this mod(I used all the victory conditions exept the space race). But somethingtha bothered me is not the fact that AI don't care about relations or anything at all exept the power projection(or is it something else ? ) but the fact that sometimes he declares wars without any practical reason. Here's an example of romans trying to wage war against me with militia and archers (yes I was at war with turks , maybe that's why they decided that it's good time to jump in ? ):

Poor fellows lost their border city almost instantly.
Also in my Transaxonian game Korea was winning a war against Ethipia pretty succesfuly and then they decided that it is good time to threaten me (1.1 power projection against them) and declared war on me when I rejected. Obviously they had no forces to stop me from steamrolling all over their cities. No screens sadly. It doesn't happen too often and most of the time aI tends to fight only at one front, but when it happens it is quiet werrd and I can't find any reasonable explanation for this behavior.

4)Just some random thing that quiet surprised me were this guyz :

I can understand why do they need to be stronger than in previous age but... But srsly, peasants stronger than any foot soldier unit(including you own proffesional areuqbuisers) ? And you do realise that it was not so easy for them to equip the whole unit with guns ? It was quiet impossible .(Pitchfork model would still apply I'd say, would it ?)
Ir's nothing to complain about though, I jsut found it quiet disturbing( just imagined bunch of peasants making fun of Musketeer regiment)

I hope you find some parts of this report usefull for your next update, cheers =)

Walter Hawkwood said:

Not quite, no. We were thinking of making something like that within pedia, but it proved a bit too complicated.

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Ach, that's a shame but not particularly surprising, given the amount of work that would go into something like that. I guess I'll just have to play the game more

Walter Hawkwood said:

I don't think it is, at least there shouldn't be less of it than of other resources. What we did change relatively recently is that gold now doesn't "cluster" and should be dispersed, but that doesn't seem to what you're reporting. What are your settings?

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It is dispersed but just in 1 continent. It should be dispersed but also have some dispersed in the other continent.

I played terra, large with 12 civs.

Also please address this issue:

I can understand why do they need to be stronger than in previous age but... But srsly, peasants stronger than any foot soldier unit(including you own proffesional areuqbuisers) ? And you do realise that it was not so easy for them to equip the whole unit with guns ? It was quiet impossible .(Pitchfork model would still apply I'd say, would it ?)
Ir's nothing to complain about though, I jsut found it quiet disturbing( just imagined bunch of peasants making fun of Musketeer regiment)

I hope you find some parts of this report usefull for your next update, cheers =)

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Because it does seem totally urealistic how peasants got muskets faster than my army everytime.

Is there a way to disable voluntary capitulation so that vassal states can be used on the world maps either by straight modding the option out, or making it less attractive to the AI? I really don't want to play huge world maps without vassals and colonies, but I haven't been able to find any xmls on diplomacy yet.

also I'm frequently having trouble with the world map loading up with all black graphics. I don't know if the game is to blame, but so far I haven't been able to find a solution on my end. I thought maybe it was the ram. It seems to be fixed by restarting the PC, breaks when the PC sleeps, and is sometime fixed by running gamebooster.

Hi again I have a problem when hovering mouse over a stack of units equal or larger than two horizontal rows -> the game lags. When there is only two rows minus one -> everything's smooth but add one more and it's the "laggggtown" Why is that and how can I fix it ? I have not experienced it in other mods. I think it might have something to do wit the tooltip info but Im not sure. Is there a way to disable or somehow crop this tooltip info that appears in the left-down corner of the screen when You hover Your mouse over units ? I have tried various in-game "plot list" options but all I can change there is how unit icons are displayed and I cannot do anything with the tooltip info but to change colors of unit names and even that seems not working - they are all yellow desipse the option I choose.

To visualise what my problem is here are some screenies

There is a LAG here (hovering mouse over stack with two horizontal rows :



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There is NO LAG here :



note that I've just removed 1 unit from a stack

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And why I think it has something to do with the tooltip info :

when I hover mose over this SOD I get LAG:



but when I press and hold ALT to show odds there is NO LAG


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To find a solution I tried these but no success Also tooltip section of this menu seems that is doesn't work at all :

The help text function CvGameTextMgr::setPlotListHelp does things differently if there are more than 15 units in the stack. That is when it starts merging them into groups with indications of how many of each promotion type the group has, showing them at the end of the list as "Unittype (x)...".

The very first time you do this it permanently allocates a bunch of memory into a list of arrays. It has a size of max players (18 in normal BtS) times the number of unit infos times the number of promotion infos. Each of those entries is 4 bytes in size. In BtS this is something like a megabyte. In mods with a higher player limits, more unit types, and/or more promotion types it can be considerably more.

Every time it shows the help for a stack that big it starts by zeroing all those numbers. It then proceeds to determine how many of each promotion type the various unit types in the stack have. It also loops over things again to calculate the average strength of each type. This should only take a fraction of a second, but it could be just enough to cause a noticeable lag. I expect it is recalculated every screen update, so multiple times per second.

There were changes made to this stuff in C2C (I just checked my notes and it was in revision 3768, I don't know if it has been touched since then but I don't think it has) since it was a vastly larger amount of memory (something up around 100MB, I think) that got allocated due to 50 players and a lot more units and promotions so it was made more efficient.

Or it could be some other issue. (Also, I have not looked at this mod's DLL to see if anything in there was changed already.)

Thank You God-Emperor I think You're right about that issue. Thanks a lot for such a great explanation. If I understood correctly I cannot do anything about it unless I know how to edit dll files ?

Does the game still crash due to MAF? What I mean to ask is if there has been any improvements at all to avoid crashes due to this? I played this mod a few years back using two different quite high end computers, both with 64Bit Windows, 16GB Ram etc, but I had crashes on both due MAF about when reaching the industrial age. Even on small maps the game would crash before or just about reaching modern age. I'd really like to play Invictus again, but if no improvements has been made on 64Bit systems I don't want to spend all that time again just to get MAF in industrial age again.

I havn't had any, and I usually play the Earth Huge scenario.

Drakarska said:

I havn't had any, and I usually play the Earth Huge scenario.

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That's great to hear, did you play long into modern age?

Pretty much. I usually play on MON difficulty on this particular mod, as all the nice little tweaks and peaks that the RI team have done have a way of biting you in arse if you don't pay attention . My last game I was in a 3-way race for a SS vic with Brits, China, and India ( I was playing as Inca) and I managed a win with only 14 turns remaing ( close game ).

Drakarska said:

I havn't had any, and I usually play the Earth Huge scenario.

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Now I've got serious case of World Map envy ! I would MAF there by the middle ages I guess.

@Jayman1000: I think the problem still exists. I got MAFs but am using an old machine with 32-bit system Win XP home edition. I've employed 3GB switch trick which alleviated this issues but large world map still MAF's by the time Industrial age or thereabouts so Im pretty stuck with random maps. I think MAF shouldn't be any problem to You with 64-bit OS and so much RAM :O It's very weird that they still happened on the kind of machine You've described.

AdamCrock said:

I think MAF shouldn't be any problem to You with 64-bit OS and so much RAM :O It's very weird that they still happened on the kind of machine You've described.

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Especially since it happened on two computers, both with 64Bit and lots of ram

Been playing this mod for a while now and loving it.

Playing AW on the large earth map even at noble is a big challenge. I just found out a feature I didn't know which is the fact that the more units in a city, the less fast they heal. And if there are too many units, healing won't work at all anymore. Nice tactical feature here

I've wondered since a while if it is possible to have religion-specific versions of the Apostolic Palace, like there a different version of the wonders related to the Solar Cult. For Buddhism the AP would be replaced by the Potala Palace, for Islam by the Madinat as-salam, the original administrative center of Baghdad, for the Solar Cult maybe the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, for the Orthodox version the Magnaura. As for Hinduism, Zoroastrianism etc. I'm sure appropriate buildings can be found.

Long time since I've played this mod, particulary the SVN version.

What settings do you guys prefer? I like them large maps with many civilizations (so wars are unavoidable)

What's your favorite settings?

Just reinstalled the mod as I finally got a 64 bit system and a lot more RAM, and I've run into an issue I haven't had before.

There's a lot of silence.

In between every piece of background music, there's usually a few minutes of silence. Is this intentional? Either way, do you know how I would go about changing that?