Revolution: with BarbarianCiv, Rebellion, AIAutoPlay

I'm a bit confused by this... so do you have control over this lion? And what, after that, becomes of the rest of your civilization? It simply remains under AI control?
 
Ant509y said:
Alright, this looks to be one of the most awesome additions I've ever seen to a Civ game.

I had two questions/suggestions, though.

1.) This whole revolution idea is well and good, however... when part of your own nation has a revolution, and becomes a new nation, is it possible to give you the option of becoming the leader of the new nation instead of continuing as the leader of the old? That would be quite wonderful.

Thank you! I'm really excited about the potential for this as well.

It would certainly be possible to offer control over either the rebels or the "base" empire ... I hadn't thought of doing that, but will certainly add it to "the list." :) It will be a while before the Revolution part is game ready, but I have been working on some simple mechanics. Some version of parts of an empire splitting off if the capital is lost will probably be in a testable state soon.

Ant509y said:
2.) Another thing. If you successfully rebel, and manage to stay free, you should add a new negative diplomacy modifier to the original nation, say a -5 or something, due to rebelling. "You rebelled against us! -5" That sort of thing.

There will certainly be something, but probably temporary as the UK and the US get along alright these days.

Ant509y said:
3.) Another interesting idea would be a limited way to undo a rebellion. It's similar to the idea of creating a new nation when you take an enemy capital, only its opposite. If you can retake the rebelling region's capital, in, say, 20 (or 15, 10, or whatever) turns, the whole nation reverts back to you, albeit with extra unhappiness and an added chance to rebel again. Is this one possible? (If you decided to become the new nation, and it failed, your leadership reverts to the old nation, perhaps.)

Another interesting idea ... Kind of a long range goal, but it would make revolts much more game play friendly, so people wouldn't be inclined to reload if they lost part of their empire. I'm also thinking about what kind of a revolution makes most sense ... should they new civ just get a bunch of cities (and units) or should they get just units and have to fight for the cities or something in between? Maybe they get ~33% of your units in the area (some of your army defects) plus a bunch of new units? Definitely a lot of options that will have to be tried out.

Ant509y said:
Ahh... now THAT would be the greatest Civ game of all time. Wouldn't it?

A civ game to stand the test of time, if you will ...
 
Dom Pedro II said:
I'm a bit confused by this... so do you have control over this lion? And what, after that, becomes of the rest of your civilization? It simply remains under AI control?

It's one of the Firaxis debug functions, but I believe your civilization is destroyed and then you get a little lion as a place holder so the game doesn't exit and you can see what happened using the world builder ...

My mod code leaves your empire intact, but the AI controls it for [int turns] and then you retake control, much more of a sensible version I think.
 
jdog5000 said:
It's one of the Firaxis debug functions, but I believe your civilization is destroyed and then you get a little lion as a place holder so the game doesn't exit and you can see what happened using the world builder ...

My mod code leaves your empire intact, but the AI controls it for [int turns] and then you retake control, much more of a sensible version I think.

Surely is. This could be very useful for what I have intended for the future... however, I'd rather be able to leave the human player with control of something while the AI has the helm... otherwise, I'll have to be content with creating a place-holder civilization to hand over to the human player.

Personally, for civil wars that are not separatist movements, I'd rather be able to flag some of a civilization's cities and units as hostile while others as friendly.

Essentially, I want to be able to divorce player/leader from civilization as much as possible.
 
Dom Pedro II said:
The new civs, on a terra map at least, easily caught up with the others and indeed, the second civ (after me) was one of the late-comers. And indeed, since the late-comers had that continent to themselves, the second highest ranking civ also happened to be the largest geographically.

They probably would not fair so well on maps where the initial players are distributed more evenly, but either way, they did pretty well for themselves. On the other hand, they also settled into full civs fairly early. Somewhat later on, there'd have been very very little free space for them.

Thank you for the feedback! Trying to strike a balance for both Terra maps and more crowded maps is challenging, as they are almost opposite situations ... how was the tech divide when you first met the new world civs?
 
Dom Pedro II said:
Surely is. This could be very useful for what I have intended for the future... however, I'd rather be able to leave the human player with control of something while the AI has the helm... otherwise, I'll have to be content with creating a place-holder civilization to hand over to the human player.

Personally, for civil wars that are not separatist movements, I'd rather be able to flag some of a civilization's cities and units as hostile while others as friendly.

Essentially, I want to be able to divorce player/leader from civilization as much as possible.

If you look in the Python code for AIAutoPlay, there are traces of some effort I put in to try to have the AI handle all unit movement and let the human control everything else (tech, war, construction) ... is this sort of what you're talking about? I haven't found a good way to do it yet (my initial attempts didn't work), and it's basically on the back burner for now.
 
jdog5000 said:
NOTE to avoid confusion: This is a discussion of a Firaxis created debug function, not the code used by the AIAutoPlay functions of this mod.
Oops - sorry. Fixed my post to be slightly more clear.

Your method does indeed seem better. One of my problems watching the AI using the other function was that there was always a hole where my Civ used to be. Made fair tests rather tricky.

One of the things on my wishlist at the moment is a mod which makes the AI play against itself in a set number of games in a row, say... 100 times. This would be with the same map, but randomised starting locations. I'd use this to test how differently programmed AIs perform against each other, so that tweaks can be made in the code to make a better AI. I feel slightly relucant to ask because I think I could write it myself, but I'm away from home for the next 5 weeks, so I can't, and I think this may help other people as well, so is there any chance of this?

It's the sort of thing I'd run on a spare machine while I was doing other stuff.
 
The Great Apple said:
One of the things on my wishlist at the moment is a mod which makes the AI play against itself in a set number of games in a row, say... 100 times. This would be with the same map, but randomised starting locations. I'd use this to test how differently programmed AIs perform against each other, so that tweaks can be made in the code to make a better AI. I feel slightly relucant to ask because I think I could write it myself, but I'm away from home for the next 5 weeks, so I can't, and I think this may help other people as well, so is there any chance of this?

It's the sort of thing I'd run on a spare machine while I was doing other stuff.
It sure would be a nice feature to be able to run batch games ... right now my plate is full with other things unfortunately, but maybe some day. Sorry.
 
jdog5000 said:
If you look in the Python code for AIAutoPlay, there are traces of some effort I put in to try to have the AI handle all unit movement and let the human control everything else (tech, war, construction) ... is this sort of what you're talking about? I haven't found a good way to do it yet (my initial attempts didn't work), and it's basically on the back burner for now.

Yes! That's precisely what I'm talking about. I hope that you can get that working.

As for your earlier question about the AI on a terra map, I actually didn't come into contact with those new civs on the second continent until very late in the game. But when I had, they were fairly caught up in terms of their technologies. They were behind me, but so was everyone else.
 
From Jdog5000:

It would certainly be possible to offer control over either the rebels or the "base" empire ... I hadn't thought of doing that, but will certainly add it to "the list." It will be a while before the Revolution part is game ready, but I have been working on some simple mechanics. Some version of parts of an empire splitting off if the capital is lost will probably be in a testable state soon.
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Ahh. Well, I'm glad I mentioned it then! Sorry to give you more work, but this is the sort of thing which will make revolutions very interesting. Hmm, empire splitting might have a prototype soon, huh? Sounds good.

Btw... I wouldn't mind doing some playtesting for some of these mechanics, though I have no knowledge of code. If you or someone else could show me how to add these to the game, that would be appreciated.

Also, in the end when all of these aspects are finished, how will you package it? As in, will we be able to dl it wholecloth, or will we have to make changes to the game code as we go to make it work, once it's done?

From Jdog5000:

Another interesting idea ... Kind of a long range goal, but it would make revolts much more game play friendly, so people wouldn't be inclined to reload if they lost part of their empire. I'm also thinking about what kind of a revolution makes most sense ... should they new civ just get a bunch of cities (and units) or should they get just units and have to fight for the cities or something in between? Maybe they get ~33% of your units in the area (some of your army defects) plus a bunch of new units? Definitely a lot of options that will have to be tried out.
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Exactly. As you said, it would make revolts much more game friendly, even when you decide not to become the rebelling portion. Again, reverting back to leadership of the old nation if you lose would be a good failsafe. Or... perhaps, no, maybe not. If you lose there as the new nation, it'd be interesting to make it so you lose completely then. After all, that would be more realistic. Joining a rebellion would be a more permenant thing. Just like declaring war. You CAN lose, and lose big. It's all a matter of risk.

Now, as for the revolution and what sort of units they gain:

In the American Revolution, practically all of the military basically sprung up from almost nowhere, as people basically grabbed their guns and massed to fight for their freedom. Using that sort of logic, that people who support the revolution will just up and grab their weapons and go off to war, I'd say yes, definitely get some units.

However, how many? Should it be based on population, number of cities, some standard sum? Population would probably be too difficult... perhaps a certain number per city (maybe two tops) to appear in either the city square or somewhere randomly within the city radius. (depending on what's easier.)

As for the units of the former nation... it'd be immediately at war with you, so any units that stay with the former nation would exit your territory, correct? This one is more difficult than how many units appear.

Back in Civ 2, units all had home cities. With that mechanic, it would be very easy to just... make the units go to the nation where their home city is. But we don't have that in Civ 4.

On the one hand, that could be added. (though it may clutter things up some more, wouldn't it?) Or else, you could have, yes, a random percentage of units within the region go with the city. Maybe something like a 33% chance would be best.

As for how it would work, it would depend on how you're planning to trigger revolutions in the first place. What factors are involved? Distance from capital? Unhappiness? Size and relative power? Influence from other cultures? Being across the sea? Lacking a connection to the capital? (no road or water connection?)

I don't know what mechanics you're going to use, so I'm uncertain what to suggest.

However, I can give a couple of suggestions. It shouldn't always just be one city, though it should be possible for it to be a single city. It should also be possible (and under certain conditions likely) for a large number of cities to fall away.

For example, in a game of mine I had a large set of twelve cities on a far contient, in addition to my main empire. If there was a rebellion in that far-flung continent, it should be more likely than not that a large number, if not all, of those twelve nations become a brand new one.

Also, I had a trio of cities that many years before I'd taken from Spain. They still had Spanish cultural influence, though my own French was still in majority by this point. If there was a rebellion in one of these cities, I'd imagine it more likely that those cities nearby with similar cultural makeups ( a significant spanish influence) would forge together as a new nation.

Now, if an isolated city on a small island somewhere rebelled, I'd find it somewhat unlikely that mainland cities joined it. If it was the only city in the region of a certain religion, and none of the other cities around it had that religion, I'd imagine it less likely for those cities to join it.

Though if there are a number of cities that are not of the official state religion, I'd imagine them more likely to, when one rebelled, all join together as a new state. Especially if you have a civic like Theocracy.

Now, these are all very general and vague statements, as I do not know what particular things you intend to influence rebellions. I hope it gives you some ideas, though!

Again, I'd love to do some test-playing for some of the features... if someone could teach me how to do it. Anyway, that's enough for now. Later.
 
Hello, with this mod it's possible that a city of your nations with a rebbelion can become an indipendence state ?
 
Ant509y said:
In the American Revolution, practically all of the military basically sprung up from almost nowhere, as people basically grabbed their guns and massed to fight for their freedom. Using that sort of logic, that people who support the revolution will just up and grab their weapons and go off to war, I'd say yes, definitely get some units.
This was the mechanic in Medieval: Total War as well, which did a better job of reflecting the fact that gameboard units are only a tiny fraction of the real population, any number of which could suddenly arm themselves (as Iraq is now illustrating).
Ant509y said:
Back in Civ 2, units all had home cities. With that mechanic, it would be very easy to just... make the units go to the nation where their home city is. But we don't have that in Civ 4.
One of the most frustrating mechanisms in Civ3-4 has been that expulsion from a civ leaves a unit at the nearest friendly/neutral tile, rather than as close as possible to the homeland. It's slightly more calculations, but expulsion should lead to the latter effect. This should be a "fix" separate (but integrated into) this mod...
 
Ant509y said:
Also, in the end when all of these aspects are finished, how will you package it? As in, will we be able to dl it wholecloth, or will we have to make changes to the game code as we go to make it work, once it's done?
I will provide a new download with all of the new code. The one thing you might have to do is, if you decide to use custom settings in your Revolution.ini file, copy those special settings over.

Ant509y said:
Now, as for the revolution and what sort of units they gain:

In the American Revolution, practically all of the military basically sprung up from almost nowhere, as people basically grabbed their guns and massed to fight for their freedom. Using that sort of logic, that people who support the revolution will just up and grab their weapons and go off to war, I'd say yes, definitely get some units.

However, how many? Should it be based on population, number of cities, some standard sum? Population would probably be too difficult... perhaps a certain number per city (maybe two tops) to appear in either the city square or somewhere randomly within the city radius. (depending on what's easier.)

As for the units of the former nation... it'd be immediately at war with you, so any units that stay with the former nation would exit your territory, correct? This one is more difficult than how many units appear.

Back in Civ 2, units all had home cities. With that mechanic, it would be very easy to just... make the units go to the nation where their home city is. But we don't have that in Civ 4.

On the one hand, that could be added. (though it may clutter things up some more, wouldn't it?) Or else, you could have, yes, a random percentage of units within the region go with the city. Maybe something like a 33% chance would be best.
I've been thinking about this, and definitely think the revolutionaries should get a bunch of units and maybe a set of "core cities" - ones that are unhappy or have strong cultural influences. Some of the empire's units stationed in the revolting cities would join the revolutionaries, the others would be injured and moved out of the cities. I'd be inclined to leave them close to the revolting cities, just a couple space away perhaps. Then they could try and regroup, or be caught in retreat by the revolutionaries. How does that sound?

Ant509y said:
As for how it would work, it would depend on how you're planning to trigger revolutions in the first place. What factors are involved? Distance from capital? Unhappiness? Size and relative power? Influence from other cultures? Being across the sea? Lacking a connection to the capital? (no road or water connection?)

I don't know what mechanics you're going to use, so I'm uncertain what to suggest.

However, I can give a couple of suggestions. ...
All of your suggestions are good ideas, thanks for putting a bunch of time and thought into it! If you dig into the Rebellion code, you'll see many of these concepts are already there in some form, so I think we're on the same page. Fine tuning all these different factors will certainly take a lot of effort, getting things to the point where they're both sensible and work for gameplay ...

Ant509y said:
Again, I'd love to do some test-playing for some of the features... if someone could teach me how to do it. Anyway, that's enough for now. Later.
When I release this much talked about next update, I'll include some notes on how to test out the features and optimally provide feedback on the different components, specifically those under development.

Ofcourse, there's always the "I was trying it out and did/didn't like this thing that happened" which is also always welcome.
 
Padmewan said:
This was the mechanic in Medieval: Total War as well, which did a better job of reflecting the fact that gameboard units are only a tiny fraction of the real population, any number of which could suddenly arm themselves

I was considering that a rebelling city should get "Rebel Militia" units or something equivalent... the number, I think, should be equal to half the city's population (or 1 in cases of cities with only 1 population). So a size 10 city will get five militia, and all cities will get at least one defender. The militia would, of course, not be as strong as regular units of the same technological era...

A rebelling army could then start to build regular units including artillery, tanks, etc. provided that they have the resources to build them.

Another possibility is that maybe a percentage of non-personnel units could be turned over to the rebels... in other words, if the civilization has been storing a lot of its armor and gunships in the rebelling ciites, there's a certain chance that they could be "captured" and used by the rebels. Of course, for rebellions earlier on in the game, this might not be an issue, but certainly artillery units should be vulnerable in these cases.

There's also a question of what civic should they start out with? Now, in the mod I'm working on, that question is answered simply enough, but without those components included, I'm not sure what would be the deciding factor. Nationhood seems like a good default in that category although you'll probably want to limit the choices to whatever technologies the rebelling civ has at that time. You don't want rebels in the Middle Ages switching to State Property and Police State long before they've discovered the respective techs.

jdog5000 said:
Some of the empire's units stationed in the revolting cities would join the revolutionaries

I'd say that should heavily depend on whether or not the rebellion is, shall we say, a nationalist rebellion or not. I mean, if it's formerly conquered territories rising up against oppressive masters, then its unlikely that the occupying military units are going to be sympathetic. On the other hand, if this is a true revolution intent on overthrowing the entierty of the government and the rebels are of the same nationality as the rest of the civilization, then I say it works.

I guess there just has to be different criteria for different kinds of civil war.
 
How about further adding to the population of the cities that rebelled to simulate that while your populations in unaffected cities have remained the same, the fractions of the population increases would head towards the newly made nation as those people think differently.
Some of them could even spawn lower level units as they have less organization and technology than an empire has.
 
Dom Pedro II said:
I was considering that a rebelling city should get "Rebel Militia" units or something equivalent... the number, I think, should be equal to half the city's population (or 1 in cases of cities with only 1 population). So a size 10 city will get five militia, and all cities will get at least one defender. The militia would, of course, not be as strong as regular units of the same technological era...

QUOTE]

Maybe you could make a unit called the rebel militia. It would be the only unit that rebels get. Maybe you could also make it so that you could give them a lot of xp when they start so you could easily specialize them into attackers or defenders.
Another idea is to make 2 kinds of rebel militia- an attacker militia and a city defender militia. The city defender could have maybe half the power of the attacker but it would have +300% city defense.
Of cource, the militia's power would be determined by what technological age they were in and they would go away after they won the civil war.
 
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