General A New Dawn discussion

Spirictum said:

Well, I have another question, if anyone can answer this too:

Spoiler :

There are few civics which give +1 military support cost.

Many may not know this so I'll explain what I could gather about this mechanic:

There are 2 types of support cost, Unit Support cost and Military Unit Support cost.

The Unit Support cost follows this: There is a number of free units based on difficulty and your total population. You may get events or civics which give you free units, that add to this value. All the units pass this value start costing 1 gold every turn (if you don't play on deity there is also a handicap which reduces this cost in %, e.g. in easier difficulties you may cut in half this additional cost).

This means for every unit (any unit, including GPs, GGens, workers, settlers, land units, ships, airplanes, etc.) you have above the limit of free units is counted and 1 gold is added to the expenses of your empire.

The military unit support cost works differently. It has the same mechanic of a number of free units, in this case free military units, which don't count toward the expenses. Any military unit (which doesn't include non military units) above this minimum is counted and gives an extra 1 gold cost per unit (again with easier difficulties' handicap) to your expenses.

But this only is active (at least in vanilla BtS, and in LoR too) if you have a civic which has the +1 military unit support cost. Even when this tab in the Financial advisor says: Military Support Cost for 80 units (free support for 40) and you don't have the +1 military unit support cost civic option, this tab will be totalizing 0 expense to you. The numbers are just there because they are always calculated, but only taken in effect if you have the civic option enabled.

Which makes me think Monarchy (which has +1 support cost for military units) surely benefits a lot from Standing Army (which gives + a lot of free military units). But when you are not using any civic with this (which I think are only Monarchy, Paradise and Pacifism), the bonus from Standing Army seems useless, and you would surely opt for another military option.


Or, and here the question finally comes: There are special units which give extra support cost (e.g. Tank). As I never reached as late as the first unit of this kind in the game I'm not sure, so that's why I ask:

Those units which have the extra support cost, this cost is added to the Military Unit Support Cost or not? So if I use Standing Army, will the + a lot free military units be filled with this extra unit cost?

So if I use Standing Army and no +1 military unit support cost civics, my Tanks will only start costing when the total extra I have to pay for them exceeds the limit of free military units given by Standing Army and other factors?

I know there are three questions, but it's actually only one, I just wanted to be sure you understand my question.

Because if this extra cost is added separately, in a way you can't counter it, Standing Army and other + free military units options are useless if you don't use a civic which gives +1 Military unit support cost.

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Afforess said:

I am pretty sure this is wrong, and you always get charged support for units past your free military units support count. The +1 essentially doubles the support costs.

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Spirictum said:

Spoiler :

This is using Monarchy (which gives +1 military unit support cost)

Spoiler :

This is after I changed to Republic (no anarchy as I'm on a Golden Age)

I guess it was like I said

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Spirictum said:

Honestly,
Does anyone know about what I asked? In a mod full of civics with less military unit support cost, has any modder considered if this was a good option?

I mean, if the extra cost doesn't count for the Military Unit Support Cost tab, it's useles to run any combination of civics which give a discount in military unit cost and doesn't give a +1 military unit support cost.

So some combos should be avoided like Fascism + Nationalist + Standing Army and not Paradise, but if you change it to the famous Pafacism (Fascism + Pacifism) or Parafascism (Paradise + Fascism) or even both together (Fascism + Pacifism + Paradise) then you may truly enjoy the free military unit support cost. Also any other combo without Monarchy, Pacifism or Paradise and with Standing Army, Conscription, Fascism, Intolerance and to a lesser extent (because there are lots of bonuses and few military support cost discount in these civics) Nationalist, Prophets, Communalism and Vassalage is not using the free military unit support cost.

Unless the + of special units is counted in the military unit support cost, then it'll make sense.

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Afforess said:

The code seems to verify your claims, incredible as they seem. I never knew about that, it is never explained. The free military support civic text should not displayed if it is not relevant IMO.

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I'm bringing back this discussion now that I have more time. I agree with you Afforess, but I think this is the least of our problems in this subject.

Without knowing if the extra cost of some units (like the Tank) is considered in the Military Unit Cost it becomes hard to believe things are balanced.

The way things are now there is a strong synergy between Monarchy, Pacifism or Paradise and all civics which give free military unit (specially Standing Army, Conscription, Fascism and Intolerant).

OTOH, Standing Army seems a poor choice if you are not running any +1 Military unit support cost. I'll put it alongside Volunteer Army, because both seem to be applicable in many strategies to the same purpose:

I'm taking the information from my Gigantic Marathon, so some numbers may be explained by this. And I'm taking civic buildings into consideration as well

Standing Army
+35% GGen emergence
+25% Maintenance Cost from distance to Palace
-50% Maintenance Cost from overseas cities
+1 XP for new units
+25% Military Unit Production
+129 Free Military Units
Can Draft 4 units p/turn
+3 Local Stability
+1 National Instability
-20% City Distance Instability Penalty
25% Increased Supply Cost for Distant Units
+2 in each city
Can build Parade Grounds: +2 XP +1

Volunteer Army
+25% GGen Emergence
+5 XP for new units
+1 Local Stability
+2 National Stability
+50 one time Stability Bonus for adopting civic
Can build Recruitment Center: +25% Military unit production +5% needed to grow cities.

Now in comparison (SA for Standing Army and VA for Volunteer Army, and considering the buildings in all cities):
GGen Emergence: SA +10%
Military Unit Production: equal
XP: VA +2
Stability (not sure how this works though): VA +1

SA also has +25% Maintenance from distance, -50% Maintenance overseas, -20% distance instability, 25% increased supply cost, 4 draft and +1 in all cities, while VA also has +50 stability by adopting civic and +5% to grow cities.

The +129 free military units is only counted if you're using Monarchy or Paradise (Pacifism is in the same column of Standing Army).

So if you're not running neither of these, is there much reason to go to Standing Army? Besides trying to be a colonizer of the New world, or doing a game on archipelago, I can't see many advantages. Conscription OTOH let you train units with , which is a viable option even if you are not using the +51 free military unit support cost, and gives 7 draft per turn.

And you may use Nationalist to get that 4 draft and several other bonuses, a lot better then relying on SA.



This is an example, but the best one is Pacifism and all things you never thought would combine perfectly with it.

Pacifism is an awesome civic. There are only 3 problems:
+100% War Weariness
+2 for certain military buildings
+1 Military Unit Support Cost
-75% Military Unit Production

But to counter these you may use Fascism and Intolerant which will give:
-70% War Weariness
+121 Free Military Units
+50% Military Unit Production

Junta and Nationalist add 56 Free Military Units to this, so you actually can make a Pacifist nation with all these to have a sizeable army to defend yourself

If you are the owner of your religion's capital it's an outstanding combo, with stability from your religion and from intolerant (to counter pacifism and fascism ).

I don't think all this synergy should be available in this combination. Of course if you want to use other civis which will boost your economical side, this may seem not so useful.



But the issue is not Pacifism, or Standing Army but the duo: +1 Military Unit Support Cost and + Free Military Units. It just doesn't feel right.

If the special units which give +1 cost are counted to the Military Unit Support Cost, I don't think it's not balanced, but I didn't test it yet, and no one was able to answer me yet. If not I think the civics that rely mostly in Military Unit Support Cost decrease get a lot worse when not combined with Monarchy, Pacifism or Paradise.

I'm not trying to change all civics in the game or give a lot of work to anyone, rather trying to discover how this mod works because I'm new to it, these are my impressions.

Rezca said:

Alright, I'm not sure I understand exactly how the "Pay War Reparations" feature is supposed to work. I know what it's supposed to do, but the way it works... I'm not sure if it's supposed to work like this.


All right, so what it's supposed to do is to repair the diplomatic damage done by razing cities and declaring war on a leader. Fine, that much works.

But here's what is confusing me.
I come to Genghis Khan. I've got -9 from declaring war on him, and -20 for razing numerous cities of his. I make him my Vassal, and a few turns later I "gift" him the War Reparations option on my half, and he goes from Furious to merely Cautious - all of the negatives from repeated declarations and city razing gone. For free.

Next I go to Abu of Arabia, and ask him what he wants for Pay(ing) War Reparations. He wants 2,100g. I've seen it be much more expensive than that before, but I decline it anyway. I then move in to "gift" him the very same thing, and the diplomacy hits for declaring on him are gone without me needing to pay what he wanted for it.


So my question: Are you intended to be able to remove potentially dozens of diplomacy hits for free and in one go like this? I was really surprised when 30 points of anger just vanished in one turn when I gifted that option to Khan like that!

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FYI, fixed in Rev738: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=13287730&postcount=825

Spirictum said:

I'm bringing back this discussion now that I have more time. I agree with you Afforess, but I think this is the least of our problems in this subject.

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I haven't forgotten, and I've taken time to address this in Rev739. I will run down the changes in detail with you.

Spirictum said:

Without knowing if the extra cost of some units (like the Tank) is considered in the Military Unit Cost it becomes hard to believe things are balanced.

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I checked, extra military gold cost for units (like the tank) are completely separate from the unit support, and are simply tacked on the unit cost at the end. So having extra support does not eliminate extra unit cost.

Spirictum said:

The way things are now there is a strong synergy between Monarchy, Pacifism or Paradise and all civics which give free military unit (specially Standing Army, Conscription, Fascism and Intolerant).

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Agreed. I decided the easiest way to fix the military support/+1 military unit support cost civic issue was to simply avoid it entirely. From Rev739 onwards, no civics will have any military support cost, or give any free military support units. No extra costs, no extra confusions. Less is more.

Spirictum said:

OTOH, Standing Army seems a poor choice if you are not running any +1 Military unit support cost. I'll put it alongside Volunteer Army, because both seem to be applicable in many strategies to the same purpose:

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Yep, and the change I mentioned above made Standing Army a quite terrible civic. I added a fancy new XML tag & DLL code to spiff it up: iFractionalXPEarnedInCity. It does what the name suggests, each turn a unit finishes in a city, it earns a certain amount of fractional XP. It scales with gamespeed, but on normal speed it is 0.05 XP / Turn. On your marathon game it would be 0.02 XP / Turn. Again, this only applies to units ending their turn in a city.

In addition, Standing army also produces military units from . I also tweaked the maintenance and support costs.

Finally, because Pacifism no longer costs 2 per military unit, I had to find a new way to nerf it. My solution was to jack up the distant unit supply cost by a massive 200%, and increase the war weariness to 100%. I also simplified Conscription and Vassalage slightly. Chiefdom, Despotism, and Monarchy were similarly tweaked. No other non-mentioned civics were changed.

Afforess said:

Yep, and the change I mentioned above made Standing Army a quite terrible civic. I added a fancy new XML tag & DLL code to spiff it up: iFractionalXPEarnedInCity. It does what the name suggests, each turn a unit finishes in a city, it earns a certain amount of fractional XP. It scales with gamespeed, but on normal speed it is 0.05 XP / Turn. On your marathon game it would be 0.02 XP / Turn. Again, this only applies to units ending their turn in a city.

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This is quite an interesting new mechanic!
Though I'll probably mess with the values to see what makes more sense to me.
With the numbers you give, it seems to me only garrison units would get any meaningful exp out of that, especially on lower speeds.

Also would it be possible to teach the AI that when it switches to this civic, it should keep most of its units inside the cities and not roaming around as it usually does? Except when there's a war going on, obviously.

Last question: is this xml tag applicable to buildings/wonders? Seems to me it might make sense with stuff like the Secret Military Base and/or West Point, rather than a straight exp bonus on unit construction.

Noyyau said:

Also would it be possible to teach the AI that when it switches to this civic, it should keep most of its units inside the cities and not roaming around as it usually does? Except when there's a war going on, obviously.

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I don't think its worthwhile to teach the AI that. The XP gains from combat massively outweight the benefit of keeping units stationary.

Noyyau said:

Last question: is this xml tag applicable to buildings/wonders? Seems to me it might make sense with stuff like the Secret Military Base and/or West Point, rather than a straight exp bonus on unit construction.

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It's only for Civics, but extending it to buildings would be fairly easy if you wanted to. The code is fairly simple.

Afforess said:

Yep, and the change I mentioned above made Standing Army a quite terrible civic. I added a fancy new XML tag & DLL code to spiff it up: iFractionalXPEarnedInCity. It does what the name suggests, each turn a unit finishes in a city, it earns a certain amount of fractional XP. It scales with gamespeed, but on normal speed it is 0.05 XP / Turn. On your marathon game it would be 0.02 XP / Turn. Again, this only applies to units ending their turn in a city.

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Is there any kind of a cap on this XP? It seems to me that if a unit sits around for a very long time, it'll become an uber-unit. Especially with Field Commanders.

Vokarya said:

Is there any kind of a cap on this XP? It seems to me that if a unit sits around for a very long time, it'll become an uber-unit. Especially with Field Commanders.

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Nope, but remember XP levels are not linear. If you kept a unit in a city for the entire 5000 turns of a marathon game, it would only gain 100XP. Clearly not worthwhile. (Especially considering the negative factors in the Standing Army civic)

Not to mention you get Standing Army roughly at 1/3 of the game and you should keep it all game long to get maximum XP. I think it's good as it is, but we'll do some test anyway.

Afforess said:

...
Agreed. I decided the easiest way to fix the military support/+1 military unit support cost civic issue was to simply avoid it entirely. From Rev739 onwards, no civics will have any military support cost, or give any free military support units. No extra costs, no extra confusions. Less is more.
...

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I think this will be great. The free support and free mil' unit support costs were always tricky to figure out. So just to clarify: every unit (mil' and worker) now costs 1 gold per turn, always, regardless of civics, but some late-game units have an extra unit-specific cost also. I always had difficulty (and looking through the BTS forums suggests that I wasn't alone) in making sense of the unit costs, with the advisor giving those ambiguous "+ free support for..." descriptions.

This might make the start a little slower, as you'll need to drop off 100% science as soon as you build your first worker.

Overall, I think I will like this.

I think we need to look at the extra costs associated with late-game units. There are some glaring inconsistencies, in my view. (I plan to write a summary of my late-game experience once I finish my current long-term marathon game).

Cheers, A.

Thank you a lot Afforess! I'm glad I could help with my diggings through the game to its development. I was right to forget LoR and start playing RoM-AND (and a special thanks to Noyyau for showing me this mod). Now things seem a lot more balanced.

I would say if you find Pacifism is not balanced because of this big change, I would guess bringing it back to +1 Military Unit Support Cost and keeping no civics which give free military units would be ok, because you wouldn't try to balance Pacifism with Military Discount civics (which was the problem before). But maybe it's already balanced, let's see through gameplay.

But wasn't Marathon only 2400 turns long?

And besides Field Commanders, I agree that sitting won't bring much benefit to normal units, because:
1- If they are normal units when they get more then 10XP they will revert to 10 XP when you upgrade them (if this mechanic was changed please let me know, last time I played I think this was still true). So stationary normal units are better upgraded then gaining fractional XP forever.
2- If they are General-attached units they will surely make more XP going around and killing other units then keeping in a city (and you'll probably do this anyway because it'll be your elite units)

For Field Commanders (which don't upgrade) I'm not sure, but I guess you'll use them as your general-attached units because it'll get you more XP and it'll ease your conquests (like the normal General)

aggri1 said:

I think this will be great. The free support and free mil' unit support costs were always tricky to figure out. So just to clarify: every unit (mil' and worker) now costs 1 gold per turn, always, regardless of civics, but some late-game units have an extra unit-specific cost also.

This might make the start a little slower, as you'll need to drop off 100% science as soon as you build your first worker.

Overall, I think I will like this.

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I think this is not what he changed. There is a difference between military unit support cost and unit support cost:

Spirictum said:

Many may not know this so I'll explain what I could gather about this mechanic:

There are 2 types of support cost, Unit Support cost and Military Unit Support cost.

The Unit Support cost follows this: There is a number of free units based on difficulty and your total population. You may get events or civics which give you free units, that add to this value. All the units pass this value start costing 1 gold every turn (if you don't play on deity there is also a handicap which reduces this cost in %, e.g. in easier difficulties you may cut in half this additional cost).

This means for every unit (any unit, including GPs, GGens, workers, settlers, land units, ships, airplanes, etc.) you have above the limit of free units is counted and 1 gold is added to the expenses of your empire.

The military unit support cost works differently. It has the same mechanic of a number of free units, in this case free military units, which don't count toward the expenses. Any military unit (which doesn't include non military units) above this minimum is counted and gives an extra 1 gold cost per unit (again with easier difficulties' handicap) to your expenses.

But this only is active (at least in vanilla BtS, and in LoR too) if you have a civic which has the +1 military unit support cost. Even when this tab in the Financial advisor says: Military Support Cost for 80 units (free support for 40) and you don't have the +1 military unit support cost civic option, this tab will be totalizing 0 expense to you. The numbers are just there because they are always calculated, but only taken in effect if you have the civic option enabled.

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The unit support cost is still normal I guess. The starting free units number comes from Difficulty (Deity is 5 I guess), and for every 4.X (don't remember exactly but it's betwen 4 and 5) pop points on your empire, you get an extra free unit support cost. This is for all units. There are civics which give a discount on this (BtS Vassalage and AND Communalism). I guess this didn't change, so your starting worker will only cost you when you have more units then your free unit support cost.

Cool

Question:
Does iFractionalXPEarnedInCity affect GreatCommanders and Spies also?
Does it affect your units also, ifthey are stationed in a foreign city? (Spy on misson; military unit in vassal's city). If so, which civ has to run SA/VA, me (owning the unit) or the other civ (where the unit is stationed)?

I just realized that there's no 'Soundtrack' folder in the AND Assets/Sounds directory
Which is a bit confusing since I clearly remember going in and changing around some of the music in The Transhuman and Modern eras a long time back...

I was going to put a few tracks from the Prehistoric/Ancient era from C2C into the Ancient era here but once I opened the directory there was no Soundtracks folder. There's one in the 'Affores' folder but all the files are just lumped there instead of being sorted by Era. I'm so confused

Sogroon said:

Cool

Question:
Does iFractionalXPEarnedInCity affect GreatCommanders and Spies also?
Does it affect your units also, ifthey are stationed in a foreign city? (Spy on misson; military unit in vassal's city). If so, which civ has to run SA/VA, me (owning the unit) or the other civ (where the unit is stationed)?

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In order:

1.) Yes
2.) No.

Hi,

in my opinion, Android Worker specialists shouldn't produce Great Person Points (normal citizens don't either).

Cheers. A.

Just a strange little thing. Rome - a relatively freshly spawned minor civ - already spawning rebels?
Haven't seen such yet

Sogroon said:

Just a strange little thing. Rome - a relatively freshly spawned minor civ - already spawning rebels?
Haven't seen such yet

View attachment 377823

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Aahhh if only that city was one tile south

But yeah, terrible luck for poor Rome there!

Rezca said:

Aahhh if only that city was one tile south

But yeah, terrible luck for poor Rome there!

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1 tile to the south east would be even better. But the AI "likes it's Fish it does, golem..."

JosEPh

JosEPh_II said:

1 tile to the south east would be even better. But the AI "likes it's Fish it does, golem..."

JosEPh

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Well 1tile SE would pick up the stone but also have more useless peaks in the vicinity - useless only if you're like me and don't ever use the Useable Mountains modmod anyway
Which is why I suggested 1 tile South
One tile south east would be better (IMO) if you have Useable Mountains, but if it's disabled you'd want less Peaks in your workable radius. Then again, with all the fancy buildings AND has to offer, is optimal city placement really that important anymore? I'm looking especially at you, Mr. Food Processing Plant

Rezca said:

Well 1tile SE would pick up the stone but also have more useless peaks in the vicinity - useless only if you're like me and don't ever use the Useable Mountains modmod anyway
Which is why I suggested 1 tile South
One tile south east would be better (IMO) if you have Useable Mountains, but if it's disabled you'd want less Peaks in your workable radius. Then again, with all the fancy buildings AND has to offer, is optimal city placement really that important anymore? I'm looking especially at you, Mr. Food Processing Plant

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Yeah, from the industrial era onwards cities can grow quite large regardless of surrounding terrain. But that's not too far away from the truth, is it?