NiGHTS: General Discussion

I'm enjoying a LOT of your changes in this (especially your streamlined diplomacy stuff visibility).

I do believe I have a pretty good grasp on things with this mod now, and I must say I am impressed! Just one quick question for a NiGHTS newbie (although most certainly not a Civ or CiV newbie): what do you use to determine how much you put into specialists, since they can't be auto controlled? Do you use right up to the food (starvation) level, or do you use only a bare minimum, or is there some other method you use? I'd be interested in a variety of opinions on this. You can e-mail me at Go_Utes@comcast.net if you'd rather than post here.

GoUtes53 said:

I do believe I have a pretty good grasp on things with this mod now, and I must say I am impressed! Just one quick question for a NiGHTS newbie (although most certainly not a Civ or CiV newbie): what do you use to determine how much you put into specialists, since they can't be auto controlled? Do you use right up to the food (starvation) level, or do you use only a bare minimum, or is there some other method you use? I'd be interested in a variety of opinions on this. You can e-mail me at Go_Utes@comcast.net if you'd rather than post here.

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Hi GoUtes: happy to hear you're liking the direction this mod is taking

If you mean how fast I train them in regards to filling up slots - that all depends how much food I'm pumping out in the city I'm training a new Specialist. If there's a lot of food and the building is a 2-3 slot building I'll probably max it to get the Specialist as soon as possible. You also have to take in what Government(s) you currently have enabled as they will speed/slow things up/down. You could also have multiple buildings training the same specialist to speed things up but these combo's can be difficult to co-ordinate.

As I've probably tested the system out more than anyone, I probably still couldn't give a definitive answer to the original question. Each game is different and there's so many variables at stake. I would also be interested in players' strategies, however. Overall, I don't think there's any one dominant strategy - more a combination of strategies based on your current game.

Version 5 might employ a tweak where Specialist buildings are automatically set to manual, though, as I've found there's the odd instance where I forget to check and get an unwanted Specialist.

Sneaks said:

I'm enjoying a LOT of your changes in this (especially your streamlined diplomacy stuff visibility).

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I'm glad streamlined is being used in a positive sense here I don't think I ended up using any of your changes from WWGD? as I reset all AI weighted opinions to a -10 to +10 scale. I may take a look at your mod to see how you dealt with AI Approach types as I haven't dealt with those yet. I'd like to tweak them so there's never a case of the AI being obviously angry with you, both with the new numbered diplomacy and by their animations, while displaying a placard that they are "friendly."

markusbeutel said:

As for GP, the mechanic of veteran units and new specialists cutting into GP's earned from Wonders was a planned mechanism. I don't want the player to able to easily get whatever unit they want. The rate for GP at the moment is a little to slow, though, and this will be tweaked in a post-patch update.

Thanks for the feedback Critiques are always welcome.

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To be more specific about why I dislike this mechanic, the specialists often add less benefit than many buildings add AND they tie up a pop point both in the training of the specialist and the working of the improvement. If an enemy stands on the tile that benefit is being denied. Compare this to a townhall that's providing +1 hammer / 4 pop in a size 20 city that's getting 4 hammers without tying up a population point. And as the game goes on later these specialists cost even more, yet provide the same benefit while buildings are becoming even more powerful. I don't see some of the mid to late game elite units being useful at all, as by the time they can be trained they will be obsolete and cannot be upgraded.

I think the mechanic has a lot of potential as it's a very unique means of producing units and improving cities, but with ever-increasing costs it will only be useful early game. I could easily imagine late game I would rather have 10 unemployed citizens producing a plain +1 hammer instead of trying to spend 50 turns to produce points towards 6 different specialists, only for most of them to be wasted, or the next one to require (a concurrent) 55 turns. And with multiple cities this is only compounded. The use of specialists is already limited based on the number of tiles that can be improved. The grain harvester for example won't be very useful after maybe the 3rd one and not all civs will have a use for the gem miner.

Mylon said:

To be more specific about why I dislike this mechanic, the specialists often add less benefit than many buildings add AND they tie up a pop point both in the training of the specialist and the working of the improvement. If an enemy stands on the tile that benefit is being denied. Compare this to a townhall that's providing +1 hammer / 4 pop in a size 20 city that's getting 4 hammers without tying up a population point. And as the game goes on later these specialists cost even more, yet provide the same benefit while buildings are becoming even more powerful. I don't see some of the mid to late game elite units being useful at all, as by the time they can be trained they will be obsolete and cannot be upgraded.

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It's true that the benefit gained is greater in the early part of the game. But I don't want end game specialists to be overpowered, either. Version 4 will play different as you will have cities in the 20-30 population range and the weight of using 2-3 of these to make a Specialist will hardly be noticed. I may have to tackle unemployed citizens making 1 hammer each and possibly remove this bonus or at the very least have them have a negative impact on the economy rather than a positive one. Your points are valid, though, and I may make end game specialists on resources like oil/uranium/aluminum create improvements that offer closer to double what they currently make.

EDIT: I forgot to mention you can still affect the rate of your Specialist production to a significant extent through Governments, buildings, and through the Philosophical Trait if you start off with a leader that has it. It is quite possible to increase the rate of Specialist Training by 100-150%.

This is going to be a work in progress, though, as I have a new feature I'm eager to implement regarding the mid-game that hasn't been tried before in a Civ game and everything will have to be well balanced based on this new mechanic. It should be just as game-changing as the new Specialists...

Mylon said:

I think the mechanic has a lot of potential as it's a very unique means of producing units and improving cities, but with ever-increasing costs it will only be useful early game. I could easily imagine late game I would rather have 10 unemployed citizens producing a plain +1 hammer instead of trying to spend 50 turns to produce points towards 6 different specialists, only for most of them to be wasted, or the next one to require (a concurrent) 55 turns. And with multiple cities this is only compounded. The use of specialists is already limited based on the number of tiles that can be improved. The grain harvester for example won't be very useful after maybe the 3rd one and not all civs will have a use for the gem miner.

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Version 3 of NiGHTS introduced new Specialists and kept them pretty tame. What I mean by this is that they are currently limited to 1 new improvement each. This will change in future releases so that even if you have a Specialist like the Grain harvester in your example above, he will still be of some use to you.

Final reminder to disable automatic updates on Steam - or better yet play in off-line mode as Steam will sometimes randomly switch your status to automatically update - if you want to keep playing Civilization NiGHTS.

The patch should hit NiGHTS extra hard compared to some other mods as NiGHTS modifies a good chunk of .LUA files and there is a good chance the new Specialist Job System will start to malfunction. Also, the Tech Pyramid may start causing crashes due to UI changes. If the patch is released later today and you have your game updated, the earliest release of a fix will be next weekend. Realistically the fix will probably take closer to two weeks.

Hopefully I can get Version 5 released on the Mod Hub if it stops crashing on me. Otherwise, keep checking back here at CivFanatics --- http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=16650 --- for any and all updates, regardless of modbuddy functionality.

One issue I have noticed is that automated workers will always attempt to replace custom specialist improvements. Not sure if that is fixable. I would also default policy saving to on given the negative consequences associated with policies.

Sneaks said:

One issue I have noticed is that automated workers will always attempt to replace custom specialist improvements. Not sure if that is fixable. I would also default policy saving to on given the negative consequences associated with policies.

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I had not picked up on that as I generally never automate workers. I will look into getting a fix for this - I think it might be doable.

I don't think that default policy saving is as important as it was prior to Version 4 when food per citizen was still at 2 to 1 instead of the current 1 to 1 model. That being said, I could see people wanting to save up culture to go for a more expensive Government. This will make the game easier, though... I would be curious to hear the opinion of others on this matter.

Saving policies would avoid some micromanagement, and make the game easier to the AI I think. So I'd say, go with it.

Concerning specialists I'd strongly side with those, that suggest giving economic specialists an own unscaling treshhold. This way you don't need to make the late game specialists stronger. A realism argument could be used:

-in the stone age, there where only a few hundred thousand of humans. Out of them maybe 2-5% could be considered specialists, the shamans. So a few thousand worldwide.

- today only 10-30% of the human population is unspecialised. So approximately 4-6 billion humans are "specialists" of some kind.

Now the term specialist used in your mod is different from what I'm using here. But the specialists I'm showing are the "pool" from which the games specialists stem. Basically you can say, that it became much more common (by several orders of magnitude) for a "Civ-specialist" to show up. They do have less impact on society as a single person, but instead have become the base of our society.

So if you give the specialists an own non-scaling pool, they'll show up ingame more and more often. And while each of them will be a significant boon in early game, they'll be your bread and butter in late game.

You might even decide to make not just one specialist pool, but several. One each for each "tier" of specialists". Thereby taking into account that a 21st century specialist is a significantly higher investment than a stoneage specialist. Why? A stone age shaman was learning a few years from puberty till early adulthood (aside from his other duties), till he could "start" his career. A modern specialist takes 2 decades of dedicated education, before he can be useful in his position.

So what you might do is set up a tier system for the specialists (probably based on the epoch of the research needed to get them), and make a separate non-scaling pool for each tier. And use an higher treshhold multiplier for higher tiers. The simplest would be to use 1 for first tier, 2 for second tier and so on. This would be an easy way to scale specialist cost for late game without having the runaway cost of the growing treshhold.

I have a question about Oligarchy the advanced economy policy. Is this working? I picked it and the tip says I should get 1+ stability per trade route. I did and I didn't get any increase in stability. I had many cities and 2 open borders. I had selected it earlier in the game to test it and there was an increase of 1 (but that might have been due to something else) I then tried open borders to several civs and didn't get any increase. (also had a few city states) Thanks.

I like the mod and the way I play the cities actually start changing their focus sometimes depending on where and when I get/place the specialists etc. I guess what I mean to say is that you have a lot of flexibility added to the game.

Balerune said:

I have a question about Oligarchy the advanced economy policy. Is this working? I picked it and the tip says I should get 1+ stability per trade route. I did and I didn't get any increase in stability. I had many cities and 2 open borders. I had selected it earlier in the game to test it and there was an increase of 1 (but that might have been due to something else) I then tried open borders to several civs and didn't get any increase. (also had a few city states) Thanks.

I like the mod and the way I play the cities actually start changing their focus sometimes depending on where and when I get/place the specialists etc. I guess what I mean to say is that you have a lot of flexibility added to the game.

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Glad you're enjoying the changes Are you playing the latest build (V4) or an earlier version from the Mod browser? V4 adds some new diplomacy features and increases the rate of growth by a decent amount.

Advanced Economy should be working properly if you were playing pre-patch. Still, I'll take a look and see if I've misplaced any XML.

Alright - I've had a chance to check things out after the patch, and turns out this next fix wont be nearly as painful as the last. All of my LUA code is mostly in tact as the patch pretty much only tweaks XML.

The Tech Pyramid isn't causing crashes, the new Specialists still seem to function properly, and the UI changes I've incorporated are still in place. Overall, things still run quite smoothly and the mod itself is perfectly playable.

The new patch does, however, introduce tweaks and changes to many aspects of the game. Basically anything that's been added to policies will be given to you in the background as my tooltips do not address these changes. There's also additions and subtractions on the Tech Pyramid so I will have to reshuffle some buildings/units/bonuses.

I feel that's it's safe to say I'll easily get a fixed V5 up and running by this weekend. If everything goes as smoothly as I think it will, I also might add Gedemon's Cultural Diffusion mod component into the game. This mod adds the ability for tiles to flip based on how much culture you put out, similar to the system used in Civ 4. It doesn't yet grant you the ability to take over cities, but apparently this fix is on the way.

So V5 will be out by this weekend - V6 will introduce a new mechanic involving how you build buildings and units that will heavily revolve around the new Tech Pyramid. It should add a definite strategical layer to the game. If you like the new Specialist Job System you'll probably enjoy this coming change as well. I'll post some new screenshots to the cover page of this thread after I've released V5.

markusbeutel said:

Glad you're enjoying the changes Are you playing the latest build (V4) or an earlier version from the Mod browser? V4 adds some new diplomacy features and increases the rate of growth by a decent amount.

Advanced Economy should be working properly if you were playing pre-patch. Still, I'll take a look and see if I've misplaced any XML.

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I downloaded the last version from the Civ Fanatic's website.

But (and this isn't saying anything about your work-this is Firaxis coding) in my last game I was asked by Civ A to go to war with them against Civ B which I agreed to do. After I won a city from Civ B, Civ A then denounces me? (This is one reason I don't like wars in Civ V.)

But I'll clear the cache, start another game and try again.

Balerune said:

I downloaded the last version from the Civ Fanatic's website.

But (and this isn't saying anything about your work-this is Firaxis coding) in my last game I was asked by Civ A to go to war with them against Civ B which I agreed to do. After I won a city from Civ B, Civ A then denounces me? (This is one reason I don't like wars in Civ V.)

But I'll clear the cache, start another game and try again.

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I haven't had a chance to look over diplomacy in regards to the patch but I'm sure there's some conflicts going on there. This is one area I will focus on in the fixed V5. Civ 5 diplomacy just seems too random and jarring at the moment.

Values that I've changed revolve around your actions and how much of a numerical effect they have on the AI. I still have to address the AI's tendencies to put a bias on various actions you take in regards to how they approach you. Issues like this, along with a randomness feature firaxis has implemented, go a long way in making the AI act with no seeming rationality whatsoever. When you throw 20+ flavors for each AI into the mix, things go from bad to worse.

I've said it before, I really think rock, paper, scissors - would have made a better model for diplomacy at this point.

I have this mod but i cant seem to build my first city Do to being in a state of unhappiness and i should build improvements or building, not sure how i can if i dont have a city.. what am i doing wrong?

ultyRob said:

I have this mod but i cant seem to build my first city Do to being in a state of unhappiness and i should build improvements or building, not sure how i can if i dont have a city.. what am i doing wrong?

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The patch has wrecked havoc with the mod. What version are you playing? If it's from the mod browser it will have issues. If it's V4 from the downloads section in Civfanatics it will be playable, but you will still get bonuses that the latest patch gives without your knowledge.

I hope to have a temporary fix-version 5 out possibly later tonight.

Until then, I suggest playing the version posted on Civfanatics. If this is the version that you have, you should clear your cache and verify the integrity of the game's files on Steam and you shouldn't have any issues.

i have v4 ill do what you suggested, also im running a few other mods ill try without them, altho i do want to play as Canadian tho, lol.

ultyRob said:

i have v4 ill do what you suggested, also im running a few other mods ill try without them, altho i do want to play as Canadian tho, lol.

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I can understand that, coming from a fellow Canadian. If that still doesn't work it means there's a conflict with some of your other mods you are running. If you check back in an hour or 2 I'll probably have released V5 - it doesn't add anything new on top of Version 4, but it should iron out any kinks caused by the latest patch.

markusbeutel said:

If everything goes as smoothly as I think it will, I also might add Gedemon's Cultural Diffusion mod component into the game.

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PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE don't. I absolutely LOVE the CiV method of cultural borders, etc. and would hate to see it modified. Anyway I can talk you out of this, or at least make it an option?

GoUtes53 said:

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE don't. I absolutely LOVE the CiV method of cultural borders, etc. and would hate to see it modified. Anyway I can talk you out of this, or at least make it an option?

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Don't worry - I'm not planning on having tiles flip Civ 4 style in bunches. Tiles will still expand one at a time at the same rate. The only thing that will change is that your tiles (expanding normally) can expand into other players' tiles and flip them, also just one at a time. If enough people are against that alone, I'll either not include it or make it an option