Dune Wars 1.9.4 Patch Feedback

Hi everyone,

I've been out for rather a while now (finishing up my phd - I am now Dr. Ahriman), I justed wanted to say that its great to see people still working on this and making further balancing changes. Rebalancing tech costs in a sensible fashion is something I intended to do but never really got around to. The big thing to be careful of is that the visual "tiers" in terms of left-right distance in the tree don't necessarily map very well to the actual power tier, for many of the military units. So it would be very good if each major military tech in a particular tier took a roughly similar beaker cost to reach - but those with fewer requirements (ie fewer benefits from intermediate techs) might take slightly longer while others take slightly shorter.

I haven't tested the version you have here, but I think its great that you're giving it a go.

We had lots of plans and thoughts with the Axolotl tank - my preference was to have it give some kind of Immortality mechanic a la FFH, where each Axoltl tank could make one of your infantry units immortal (so when it died, it just reappeared in your capital - or in the city with the tank).

Hey! Congratulations on the Phd.

Rebalancing tech costs in a sensible fashion is something I intended to do but never really got around to. The big thing to be careful of is that the visual "tiers" in terms of left-right distance in the tree don't necessarily map very well to the actual power tier, for many of the military units. So it would be very good if each major military tech in a particular tier took a roughly similar beaker cost to reach - but those with fewer requirements (ie fewer benefits from intermediate techs) might take slightly longer while others take slightly shorter.

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This is something I'm open to, but haven't given considerable thought to myself yet. I've found my own experiences playtesting pretty positive in regards to the tech tree and the only change I've made is to require the later suspensor units to also require Holtzman Generators, which could be skipped before.

The other particular spot I've noticed is that it's usually easier/quicker to get to shieldfighters some time before you or the AI can get Heavy Troopers, and at that point, any cities with master guardsmen are toast. I also think caution has to be taken to not make it too balanced. It's very possible to go too far to a point where the game is no longer as fun, you take away any type of fun gambits to try, every decision gets you to the same point as another, and well, you end up like Civ5 .

And I am being serious there, it's possible to over balance. Not only does it lead to what I just mentioned, but it can take away from immersion if taken too far. I played a few games of Sephi's Master of Mana FfH2 modmod some months ago which he's done some cool things with, but in the tech tree, every thing was very perfectly 'tiered' in many instances, and everything in each tier has the exact same cost(in most/many cases). When I looked at the tech tree, I always felt like I was looking a spread sheet, not a game.

We had lots of plans and thoughts with the Axolotl tank - my preference was to have it give some kind of Immortality mechanic a la FFH, where each Axoltl tank could make one of your infantry units immortal (so when it died, it just reappeared in your capital - or in the city with the tank).

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It's not a bad idea for several reasons, but there are a few caveats. First, how would you 'appropriate' which units would be 'immortal', perhaps a free promotion with a variable max player instance?(which is definitely doable with a little Dll work) The other thing is units respawning immediately and for free after death could throw off to a degree the, ah, 'economics' of warfare in civ if it happens very often.

Follow me on this. You have five cities with axlotl tanks, so a max of five units can have, let's call it, 'clone donor' promotion (let's not entertain actually using that name of course ). You could game such a system by giving them all to some throw away melee units before attacking a city, as each is killed, you have can give the promo to a new unit, suicide him.. and down the line. If you make it a normal promo (requires a level up) I can just about guarantee that due to several aspects of human psychology, almost no one will ever prefer 'wasting' a promotion because they weren't about to send that high level unit on any suicide missions anytime soon anyway. If he dies in a freak 99%:1% odds attack, they could (and most would) just reload instead . If anyone reading has never done that, let him speak now.

I'm also not entirely happy with the current setup--the code changes I recently made and described were done to make the current system useful and useable, not because it's necessarily the best approach. It still lets you (the player) create an infinite, if imperfect, stream of clones, which is a little too powerful, even if fun. Because of the issues I mentioned above, I do think (and my ideas are still forming and changing on this issue as I consider alternatives) that forming clones of a live specimen as currently coded works best in terms of gameplay, but there needs to be some kind of breaks on the system, some way to limit the possible clones at one time that's transparent and easy to understand to the average player.

What you mentioned with

each Axoltl tank could make one of your infantry units immortal

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has given me an idea that might work. For each UnitCombatType (I don't support only applying this to melee, restricts the player too much), you can have up to the number of axlotl tanks the player has. If you have 5 axlotl tanks, you can clone have up to 5 clones that are melee units, up to 5 thopters, etc. etc. A little UI work where the BUG unit production experience usually goes to show the player if they still have clones left before trying to build a particular unit, and what it's likely to clone even... and it could work well. Clones recieve a promotion on being built that keeps our count for us, and keeps us from cloning clones, and it sounds (on paper so far) like a good system.

Oh, and sorry everyone if that was a bit long winded, just kept having ideas as I typed, but I think it might have been worth it if this works out a good idea .

And I am being serious there, it's possible to over balance.

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I know what you mean.
Basically, I would say: if you get to any tier2 unit (particularly shield fighters) before the enemy, then this should give you a big advantage for a considerable amount of time, before they are able to catch up. Its fine for some technologies to lead to big power shifts.

You could game such a system by giving them all to some throw away melee units before attacking a city, as each is killed, you have can give the promo to a new unit, suicide him.. and down the line.

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Well.... how do you suicide an immortal unit?
Through deletion?
In which case, what was the point of giving them immortality?

The few possibilities I thought of were:
a) National limit regular level up promotion, 1 per building, that is selectable, but maybe requires a level minimum (eg only 4th level units can select it - this would help the AI a bit).
b) Automatically gets applied to your highest experience melee/guardsman units that doesn't already have it, when
c) Applies to the next unit constructed in this city
d) As for a), but free promotion.

. For each UnitCombatType (I don't support only applying this to melee, restricts the player too much), you can have up to the number of axlotl tanks the player has. If you have 5 axlotl tanks, you can clone have up to 5 clones that are melee units, up to 5 thopters, etc. etc. A little UI work where the BUG unit production experience usually goes to show the player if they still have clones left before trying to build a particular unit, and what it's likely to clone even... and it could work well. Clones recieve a promotion on being built that keeps our count for us, and keeps us from cloning clones, and it sounds (on paper so far) like a good system.

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This sounds kinda complex, especially for the AI. And how do you clone mechanical equipment?
I think limiting to melee and guardsmen is fine.
I also think that 1 immortal unit per city is sufficient. Otherwise it could start getting too powerful very quickly. Late game you might have 20 cities!

has given me an idea that might work. For each UnitCombatType (I don't support only applying this to melee, restricts the player too much), you can have up to the number of axlotl tanks the player has. If you have 5 axlotl tanks, you can clone have up to 5 clones that are melee units, up to 5 thopters, etc. etc. A little UI work where the BUG unit production experience usually goes to show the player if they still have clones left before trying to build a particular unit, and what it's likely to clone even... and it could work well. Clones recieve a promotion on being built that keeps our count for us, and keeps us from cloning clones, and it sounds (on paper so far) like a good system.

Oh, and sorry everyone if that was a bit long winded, just kept having ideas as I typed, but I think it might have been worth it if this works out a good idea .

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Personally, I think it would be better to only be able to clone human units (e.g. spy units, melee, guardsman etc.) That would still be fun, but cloning thopters, seige etc. doesn't really make sense. I agree that the number of axlotl tanks built should determine the maximum number of clones that can be alive at any one time. If I understand correctly, would the mechanic work like this? -

1. City has axlotl tank built
2. Maximum # of clones not reached yet
3. for units in city (which are not themselves clones), a "clone unit" button is available (similar to fortify, sleep etc.)
4. Press "clone unit" button to select a unit to clone
5. Handle the cloning of that unit

IMHO, that would be a really good system easily understandable by the player. It would allow you to clone any unit and the player would know the unit they were cloning but could choose a different unit the next time (say for example when a better promoted unit is acquired later in the game).

@ Jester Fool

That's actually very much what I'd like to do! It's a good bit of work to do it like this though as it'd need a new user interface screen with some way to pick the unit to clone, and I really dislike UI work . So in the mean time the idea was to use the current system (or near to it) but instead of allowing infinite clones, cities with axlotl tanks build clones of the best unit of that type until you hit the limit, then switch back to uncloned normal units.

Allowing a max per UnitCombatClass would be essential for the AI I think so they didn't waste their only five (randomly picked number) clones building some guardsmen (which there is probably no highly promoted units of), then have none left if they shift to building melee units afterwards. With each being separate it allows more freedom and keeps humans from making the same mistake I just mentioned the AI could make if they aren't paying 100% attention. It's just a much more user-friendly system.

As for thopters and siege, etc, you aren't cloning the equipment any more than you clone swords and shields for shieldfighters, you're cloning the veteran commander of said thopters or shieldfighters, so I have no problem with it myself. At any rate the current code, which is just an extended version of David's, clones anything and everything that can receive experience points, so to me it was a natural extension of that approach. If the majority opinion though stays with just allowing human units, I can live with that too no problem.

I also think that 1 immortal unit per city is sufficient.

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Going the immortal approach you are right, but I was talking about limiting copies of living units per UnitCombat, and for the reasons I just covered above. Hope that makes more sense.

I really think most players have such an aversion to risking high level units that an immortality mechanic will always feel underwhelming to them because--it still sucks to have to march the 'reborn' unit out to an offensive front half way across the world, and even more so if we take promotions from the 'reborn' unit in the process (imperfect clone). It's kinda like, yaa, I didn't die, but, oh no, that still sucks... reload. Some will play it out for the role-playing, but most players won't find it as useful as you think. Or at least I think they won't(I always reserve the right to be wrong on these things )

On a separate note, I found the cause of the random crash when using the Bene Gesserit 'Buy City' espionage mission and will have it along with several other fixes in tomorrows updated patch

Here's the short list:
Chris

ChrisAdams3997 said:

On a separate note, I found the cause of the random crash when using the Bene Gesserit 'Buy City' espionage mission

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Could you write one or two lines about this code change? I haven't looked into the code in a year or so, but it is probably code I wrote.

Could you write one or two lines about this code change? I haven't looked into the code in a year or so, but it is probably code I wrote.

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Yea, I'd caught one issue back on this post that I'd hoped was it, but yesterday while playtesting I tried annexing a city and had a crash, so I went to look into it. The real key was that I heard the 'ding' sound from the successful mission message, which is at the bottom of the CvPlayer::doEspionageMission() function, so I knew at that point the crash wasn't when you annexed the city, it was after it was annexed.

That's when I remembered there is a second testSpyIntercepted() call after successful missions to see if the spy is captured or not, which assumes the spy is still in one of the target player's plots. Since it was now your plot, you were trying to catch your own spy, which you can imagine can create some problem spots in code . So in the CvUnit::espionage() which runs when you press a spy mission (and where vPlayer::doEspionageMission() is called from) I put in some logic to handle the case that the spy is no longer in the target player's territory. In such a case (annexed city), the spy doesn't have to pass the second spy intercept test, which kinda makes a lot of sense anyway. She also doesn't get relocated, which, again makes sense as after 'annexing' the city, it's safe enough for her to stay there after the mission .

Anyway, I've tested it several times in the city that gave the crash before, and in a couple of other cities on the same map with no issues, I think we've got it now.

I think the mechanic gets clunky when a particular unit has to be a clone of some other unit. It gets confusing, because there is no apparent tie between the cloned and the clonee, and because its weird and uncanonic to have both an individual and its ghola wandering around at the same time.

This is why I favor an immortality effect, accomplished through a "Ghola commander" promotion.

It's just a much more user-friendly system.

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I think forcing a unit to be in a city with Tanks to then manually give it a particular promotion is not particularly use-friendly for either the human or the AI.
I suggest we try to lean towards a system that works anywhere.

Is there some way to force the AI to apply promotions to its most powerful units?

As for thopters and siege, etc, you aren't cloning the equipment any more than you clone swords and shields for shieldfighters, you're cloning the veteran commander of said thopters or shieldfighters, so I have no problem with it myself.Z

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I guess it feels to me like the equipment is a much more significant cost part of a vehicle or thopter unit than it is for an infantry unit. Small arms and swords are pretty cheap, the main cost is training, which could be somewhat duplicated through leaders that retained their memories; tanks and aircraft are not.

Besides which, the BTl are a fairly "biological" faction in general, I think it makes sense for them to favor infantry units over machines.

but I was talking about limiting copies of living units per UnitCombat, and for the reasons I just covered above. Hope that makes more sense.

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Sure, but I think having copies of living units seems odd and uncanonic. It just feels clunky to me to have to be cloning a particular in-game unit.

Another possibility to make sure that the AI's immortal units are "good": when you build a Tank, it creates a "ghola commander" great person through python. The only ability this great person has is to attach itself (like a great commander) to a unit. When it does so, it gives +X experience to that unit and the Ghola Commander trait, which acts as immortality. X = ~10?
And it can probably use the existing great commander AI.

I really think most players have such an aversion to risking high level units that an immortality mechanic will always feel underwhelming

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I dunno, I kinda feel just the opposite. I think players have such an aversion to losing high level units that very often they don't use them because they fear losing them - and might reload if that happens. Making them immortal allows the player to aggressively use the high level unit in combat without the fear of losing all that carefully shepherded experience from a poor dice roll.

I think it also makes the immortal unit feel more "special". If I have one special unit per AT, than that mechanic feels special. If I get 5 generally experienced units per AT, and I have 5 ATs, then it feels like I'm running a whole army of clones, all of which are basically the same. This feels less special to me.

With all the transports in the game, and space ports, it doesn't take that long to get a particular unit from the capital back to the front lines.

On a separate note, I found the cause of the random crash when using the Bene Gesserit 'Buy City' espionage mission

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Nice!

Another thought: with the political building with +1 culture, maybe it should give +1 espionage too?

And maybe we should increase the monument to +3 culture to make the distinction between them larger? Going for Faith feels a bit too weak if you can get the culture expansion benefits without it.

You're starting to win me over on this. I'm trying to think over and solve any of the obvious (and not-so-obvious) issues that could be attached to the mechanic in my head before I commit to it. I'd also like to see what David thinks.

I guess it feels to me like the equipment is a much more significant cost part of a vehicle or thopter unit than it is for an infantry unit. Small arms and swords are pretty cheap, the main cost is training, which could be somewhat duplicated through leaders that retained their memories; tanks and aircraft are not.

Besides which, the BTl are a fairly "biological" faction in general, I think it makes sense for them to favor infantry units over machines.

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I can buy that, and like I said, I'm pretty easy going on this particular issue. It'll just be biological units in whatever mechanic is used.

Since there are two mechanics on the table, I'm going to make sure to discuss just one at a time.

immortality mechanic

"Ghola commander" promotion

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that's got a nice sound to it. It doesn't make 100% sense for a unit that has never been killed and had to be 're-cloned' yet, but it gets the point across. And after the first time he's killed (and brought back to life) it makes perfect sense.

Another possibility to make sure that the AI's immortal units are "good": when you build a Tank, it creates a "ghola commander" great person through python. The only ability this great person has is to attach itself (like a great commander) to a unit. When it does so, it gives +X experience to that unit and the Ghola Commander trait, which acts as immortality. X = ~10?
And it can probably use the existing great commander AI.

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Wether we used this or a free/normal promo, I think it's the right track. Once a unit has the promo he can be reborn any number of times as long as you still have axlotl tanks and never loses the promo. This I think is essential to avoid several exploits I can see in my head, and I'm pretty sure is the direction you're thinking with the promo for it (however assigned to units).

The "ghola commander" great person is a great idea for the AI as it helps them, as you mentioned, make sure the 'immortal' units actually are half way decent. I'd probably have to adjust the AI, but the great general AI is a good place to start. Getting them to 'hook up' with experienced units a long way from where the commander is born probably won't happen, but I can search for the best unit in a sizeable search radius on the same continent, preferably with an attack or attack_city unitAI to connect him to I think.

I dunno, I kinda feel just the opposite. I think players have such an aversion to losing high level units that very often they don't use them because they fear losing them - and might reload if that happens. Making them immortal allows the player to aggressively use the high level unit in combat without the fear of losing all that carefully shepherded experience from a poor dice roll.

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To make this work, we have to balance the drawbacks of cloning carefully. Number one--I don't think we could/should include any loss of promotions like the current system uses. There are considerable lore reasons to, but from a gameplay perspective, it would effectively castrate the usefulness of the immortality mechanic. People would still avoid risky attacks because they might lose their favorite promo.

Number Two--where, when, and how they re-appear is important. Imagine you are invading the Tlelaxu and they have several immortal units, and are down to one city left. If the units are reborn at full strength every time you kill one, you can never take the last city . So... the first thing is that when a unit is reborn, he should at least take a few turns to build up to full strength, so they are reborn with almost no HP and heal back up the normal way. This feels much more natural from a logical/'realism' perspective, and from a gameplay perspective keeps it from being overpowered on the defensive.

Secondly, when killed, they are reborn in the nearest city with axlotl tanks, kind of like how spies work now. Thirdly, a city with an axlotl tank can only create one clone per turn. If they've all already created a clone this turn, any additional clones killed are truly lost. This also means of course that in the second point, they are reborn in the nearest city that hasn't cloned yet that turn.

So in the above invasion example, they could have 10 clones in that last city, but after the first one killed gets cloned at low health, the rest are lost.

I really think we're getting somewhere with this idea, and I appreciate you sticking with me as I reason it all out .

Another thought: with the political building with +1 culture, maybe it should give +1 espionage too?

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It's a thought, differentiates it a bit a feels right. The reason I created this is there is a huge difference in the ability of early game civs to expand their borders. Obviously Political civs are the masters of this, getting +3 culture per turn for free, and those starting with faith have a leg up to. Of course anyone can research faith early on, but why the hell am I rushing to research faith as Beast Raban again? The design was railroading everyone into researching faith as one of their first techs, effectively limiting other potential early strategies.

Since it's absolutely critical to hook up health resources and spice in the early game, this was really hampering certain civs/leaders. So now, you can by-pass faith and still get that first border expansion in new cities, but it won't get you to a second expansion any too soon, and once you have faith, the monument is a more efficient building production wise. So essentially it is designed to be ignored if you have better options , but you can still build it in conjunction with a monument if you've got the production to spare. So I think making it give espionage, especially that early, makes it too much of a gimme, gimme building and detracts from that original design intent.

And maybe we should increase the monument to +3 culture to make the distinction between them larger? Going for Faith feels a bit too weak if you can get the culture expansion benefits without it.

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A monument still gives twice as much at about the same production cost . I don't think 'Faith' should be an early requisite tech for the more political houses. In fact I'm not a fan of how the early melee units are tied into the 'faith' line of techs, feels wrong to research divine mandate as the Corrino just so I can get to harsh conditioning. But that's something for another time.

I've also just realized the first tech is 'Mysticism' not 'Faith' I think, but I think we're all on the same page of what we're talking about regardless of any naming issues .

Number one--I don't think we could/should include any loss of promotions like the current system uses.

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Agreed. This is how it works in FFH.

Number Two--where, when, and how they re-appear is important. Imagine you are invading the Tlelaxu and they have several immortal units, and are down to one city left. If the units are reborn at full strength every time you kill one, you can never take the last city . So... the first thing is that when a unit is reborn, he should at least take a few turns to build up to full strength

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Agreed. The unit re-appears in the capital, and it is at ~10% strength, so it takes a few turns to heal up - this is how it worked in FFH. The idea being; you get the commander back, but still then have to train up more recruits. And of course if it gets killed again on the turn it reappeared in, then it is dead forever.
Basically, just steal the immortality code from FFH.

Secondly, when killed, they are reborn in the nearest city with axlotl tanks

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That works for me (as long as an immortal unit in a city with a tank still reappears, damaged, in that city). So, the only way to permanently destroy one of these units is to capture a city with an Axoltl Tank.
I'd also make the Axolotl Tank building be destroyed with probability 100% on city capture?

Thirdly, a city with an axlotl tank can only create one clone per turn. If they've all already created a clone this turn, any additional clones killed are truly lost. This also means of course that in the second point, they are reborn in the nearest city that hasn't cloned yet that turn.

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I think I would cap it that each unit can only be reborn once per turn. If I have 1 immortal unit and 5 different ATs, I don't think it should be possible for that 1 unit to be reborn 5 times. That would make it too hard to capture a city with a tank. Imagine that I keep 1 immortal defender in each of my 5 cities with tanks. Then a strike force of 5 units is unable to capture any of those cities or permanently kill and of the ghola commander units, because the defender gets recreated 5 times.

That's too strong I think.

The reason I created this is there is a huge difference in the ability of early game civs to expand their borders.

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I think this is as it should be.
There is a big cost to having Faith tech as opposed to having a tech that lets you build an improvement - particularly a water-bearing improvement. That needs to have some kind of consequent payoff.

So actually a better way might be to have +1 culture on the government building that requires no tech, and then +2 culture +1 espionage on the monument. I think its important to make sure that researching Mysticism still gives a big payoff relative to not doing so.
[My original thought was just that there is little espionage income early, and here's a building that could do it, but in retrospect that wasn't a good idea.]

The idea with the espionage was that there is currently very little EP in the early game at all.

If you can get culture border expansion without Mysticism, then Faith becomes a very weak tech.

A monument still gives twice as much at about the same production cost

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Basically irrelevant, IMO. Twice as much culture production is not twice as valuable. It is hugely valuable to have some culture income, so that you can pop the second tier and work bonus resources and windtraps in the entire BFC. It is not very valuable at all to have the 3rd tier pop a few turns earlier.

The marginal gain from +2 culture over +1 is much, much smaller than the marginal gain from +1 over +0.

I don't think 'Faith' should be an early requisite tech for the more political houses.

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I don't think it is; having a Political leader is a substitute for Faith, not a complement.
But there should be an opportunity cost for ignoring it; early on, when the political structures are weak, religion is how you get political power. In a post-apocalypse scenario when all is lost, I imagine religion and faith would probably be very powerful.

I'll get back to the discussion, but for now wanted to share a few other things.

I've been trying to cleanup some of the interface and text items as I can get to them. I pretty much always play with the resource toggle on since most can be a little hard to spot or identify on the map as you're planning cities and whatnot. Since spice is a resource of course, that means you end up with umpteen billion little 'spice' icons on the screen, and I've never thought it necessary for an icon to show spice tiles... they're pretty easy to spot.

Spice
To clean up the screen a little, I've coded the game to ignore spice when drawing the resource icons on the map (in the normal toggle mode).


At globe view, since it might be useful to see where all the spice is and who owns it, I've included a new 'Spice' layer that just shows spice, and of course removed it from the 'General' resources view.

Also, realizing some folks might prefer the old style, there's a field in GlobalDefinesAlt to revert it to showing spice with the other resources as before (you still have the new "Spice" only layer as well)

Desert Promos
Another item I've cleaned up a bit is the desert promos, along with some fixed/improved functionality. Before in the text you had +%strength for every 'desert' terrain type in the help text for the promo and units with it, 5 lines in all for what is essentially one effect. I've moved it to new 'DesertAttack' and 'DesertDefence' tags that apply the bonus on any 'desert' tile instead of needing to list them all. The text now just says the bonus on desert so is much cleaner.

A bonus side effect is it gives me much better control of how the AI picks the promos. Since it used the generic 'TerrainAttack/Defense' tags before it had no way of realizing it should be used on units expected to fight in the desert, and since it had to cover five terrain types, the AI was giving 5X as much weight as it should have. If you've noticed lots of melee units with these promos that couldn't even enter desert, that's why. The AI will now prioritize it for units capable of moving in desert only, and more so those expected to ('naval' unit_AIs).

And I don't know how many others have noticed this as well, but before, units with the desert promos weren't getting the bonus on spice resource tiles. That has also been fixed.

If you've noticed lots of melee units with these promos that couldn't even enter desert, that's way

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Honestly, I think the desert promotions should be redone; for melee units, they should have sandrider as a pre-req, so there is no possibility of getting them for any melee unit that doesn't have sandrider - since such a unit can never benefit from the promotion.

If necessary, split them into two separate promotions; one for thopters and supsensors only (with no pre-req) and one for melee units (with sandrider as a pre-req).

Or: sandrider OR stillsuits as a prereq, since IIRC stillsuits promotion can allow units to enter desert.

For the AI (which is where this is an issue), it's devalued if the unit can't enter desert tiles (e.i. needs stillsuit or sandrider for melee etc.) to the point where they won't ever take it now. Thopters and Suspensor units will only prioritize it if they have specific unit_AIs that will likely fight in the desert.

For instance DesertAttack is only fully valued for Assualt_Sea or Attack_Sea unit_AIs, while DesertDefence is highly valued by Escort_Sea and Reserve_Sea as examples. I've given a good bit of thought on how to weight it compared to alternative promotions. Considering it had no idea how to weight it before, it'll be a nice improvement. I don't think we necessarily need to create separate promotion lines as players will know not to give desert1 to their non-sandrider infantry.

as players will know not to give desert1 to their non-sandrider infantry.

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Will they, even inexperienced ones? This mod is pretty complex and its a pretty big learning curve for newer players - and in particular, there is a tendency to assume that any option that is available has some kind of value to it.
It seems more sensible to me to block the ability to choose truly useless promotions than just to make it hard/unlikely to get. It seems like poor design to be able to pick a promotion that is totally useless.

Certainly fixing AI priorities is a big improvement over the status quo, however, so its great that you've added this fix.

Will they, even inexperienced ones?

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I doubt it's caused anybody to rage quite in the middle of their first game , I don't disagree it's not a bad idea, but it's also not a high priority.

Continuing to clean up and polish things, I spent a few hours this evening to rework all of the 'hand drawn' promotions to try to make them fit in with the rest of button style better:

Alright, I've put off uploading the patch long enough, been trying to fit in as many little things as possible .

Download Patch 1.9.4 Here


Global Defines
Several new global define option were added to allow some customization. For one, while in the XML thopters have city capturing enabled again, the "THOPTERS_CAN_CAPTURE" in GlobalDefinesAlt.xml if set to false will override the XML and prevent them from capturing cities. This is set to true by default, so if you don't want them to be able to capture cities, set the value to 0.

There is also a setting added called "RESOURCE_LAYER_SHOW_SPICE" which controls if icons are shown on spice when the resource view is toggled on(other than in the new special 'spice' layer in globe view). It is set to false by default, but if you prefer the old style, set this to 1.

Several unbalanced unit costs fixed

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Can I ask which these were?
There are a few which were deliberately expensive given how powerful they are for their tech cost, to avoid being overwhelming (most particularly the quad; quadspam can be devastating in pillage-choking an enemy, so its important that quads are expensive to build).

Siege units have special Drill Promo Line of their own (more potent, only three promos)

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What was the idea behind this? First strikes are already pretty powerful on a collateral damage unit.

Civic Costs increased across the board by about 50% (experimental)

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Interesting to test.

New Axlotl Tank Code

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Which design did you go with here?