C2C Observations

I am VERY sure that even cities with negative crime values spawned criminals. I'll have an eye on that.
Every now and then, I get a message that a criminal has been found in a city. Sometimes I see them afterwards. If so, moving a unit (archer, dog, enforcer) out and back in again DOES attack (and kill) the thiev.
But do crime fighting units get a mission once a criminal has been "found" and they share a plot?

Faustmouse said:

I am VERY sure that even cities with negative crime values spawned criminals. I'll have an eye on that.

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Pretty sure its a mathematical impossibility without it being a bug. You can always get some sneaking in the old fashioned way of course.

Every now and then, I get a message that a criminal has been found in a city. Sometimes I see them afterwards. If so, moving a unit (archer, dog, enforcer) out and back in again DOES attack (and kill) the thiev.

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Really? That would be a pretty nasty bug. May explain some other bug reports recently though. I'm backed up on debugging and everything because I don't get much modding time these days.

But do crime fighting units get a mission once a criminal has been "found" and they share a plot?

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Yes. Arrest. Which is basically a stealth attack against the criminal(s) in the same tile.

1. I will put enough Control units into my cities to make sure all crime is negative. Maybe the just find thieves now that have been generated earlier when the crime was higher.

2. I will provide you a savegame when this happens again.

3. Ok I'll have a look

ok, now that I got this under control I now face another really unfun problem:

The aztecs, which I am NOT at war with, manage to capture my cities. First, the city is captured by barbarians (so I guess HN units), and in the same turn by the aztecs.
My cities have Walls, so they can't be attacked; there are dogs with maxed out visibilty (+ Build up) and Law units with maxed out disguise visibility. Plus a very strong defender, which is fully healthy after the take over. I really can't see a measure to prevent this from happening, which is really annoying. Now that I think about it, they MIGHT have Gun Powder, so could ignore the Walls (have to check that), but then again: Why isn't there any fight going on?

Probably worth noting that these were attacks done from a ship to my coastal cities.

Edit:
Ok the attack now happened again from a gally with 2 Axemen, a Settler and a Wild Cat thingy. I also have a savegame now which I can post in the bug thread if this is something new.

Faustmouse said:

ok, now that I got this under control I now face another really unfun problem:

The aztecs, which I am NOT at war with, manage to capture my cities. First, the city is captured by barbarians (so I guess HN units), and in the same turn by the aztecs.
My cities have Walls, so they can't be attacked; there are dogs with maxed out visibilty (+ Build up) and Law units with maxed out disguise visibility. Plus a very strong defender, which is fully healthy after the take over. I really can't see a measure to prevent this from happening, which is really annoying. Now that I think about it, they MIGHT have Gun Powder, so could ignore the Walls (have to check that), but then again: Why isn't there any fight going on?

Probably worth noting that these were attacks done from a ship to my coastal cities.

Edit:
Ok the attack now happened again from a gally with 2 Axemen, a Settler and a Wild Cat thingy. I also have a savegame now which I can post in the bug thread if this is something new.

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Yeah there's something wrong taking place there I'm sure. Post in the bug thread.

More observations:

I now played up until 50% of the Industrial Era. I switched to Immortal for two times for 50 turns each when I realized the AI got too far ahead of me, and then back to deity. Speed is snail on a tiny map size with one opponent.

I NEVER had any problems with . Never. Even when I had 18 from overexpansion, I was still 30+ above the faces. I controlled crime all the time and kept in below zero, but I completely ignored Diseases and Pollution up until I had Assembly Line.

was an issue during the first half of the PH era, and now becomes a small problem again. But not that much; as I said I didn't care about Pollution and diseases and still I have almost all of my cities above 20 pop; exeptions are two or three polar cities.

Now that I felt that I have to control Pollution, I built the Water Threatment Plant. This alone fixed my Water Pollution issue. Air Pollution was almost completly eliminated after building State Parks in my cities. Disease hovers around 100-200, but barely does anything; nevertheless Hospitals will fix this. All in all I think the Water Threatment Plant (and others) are too overpowered and could be tuned down by 80% or more.

Education is something I payed attention to, but it is above 1000 in almost all of my cities; and I haven't even built schools etc yet! The cities are pretty big; even my biggest city (pop 40) is very well educated.

For fighting crime, I have 2 Watchmen with Policing and the build up, plus a Watchman with Inspections (+ build up) in all of my cities. This worked well until the beginning of the Ind. Era, and now Prisons and Police Stations etc take care of the rest.

Flammability never did something, but I have to mention that I am very careful with that and avoided building too many flamability buildings in the same city.

All in all I think that properties and / are way to easy to control - which is mostly because of the buildings. Same thing goes with gold: I run 100% science and still could rush a wonder every two turns.

Oh, and regarding gold: The AI willingly pays 6000 for a Dog Worker, but only demands like 60.000 for a state-of-the-art tech it was researching for 5 turns. Good deal

Last but not least, there are some buildings that don't fit the "curve". Geology Lab is totall overpowered, as is the 221b Baker Street.

3 concerns over your observations:
1. Tiny map - extreme
2. 1 AI - extreme
3. Snail - is Known to allow more gold than faster speeds, same as Eon and Eternity. More turns more opportunity to accumulate. Penalties much much easier to overcome.

Marathon and Epic are much more balanced. Snail has 6x more turns than Normal to accumulate. 3x vs Epic and 1.33x vs Marathon. Now maybe ppl will start to see why I complain about the excessive turns in the slowest speeds. It takes an enormous effort to balance gold and other parts of the mod to scale properly for a 1,000 turn game up to a 14,000 turn game. And this gold balancing act has been going on since v17. It was one of several reasons why ls612 quit modding C2C. He tried to balance it thru scaling and still got hammered for it.

As for Crime and Disease, the Newest system turned that all upside down. What I did before the new Law and Criminal units and their associated system is all flushed down the drain. So is there imbalance there? Yep there is. And after my initial adjustment to Disease I left it alone because DH has a project planned for it.

JosEPh

JosEPh_II said:

And after my initial adjustment to Disease I left it alone because DH has a project planned for it.

JosEPh

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Oops, I forgot to get back to you on the disease stuff. My experimentation shows what I had planned wont work with the current disease system at all. I would basically have to throw the current system out and start from scratch. Since TB has plans for stuff that are based on the existing system I will forget about my project.

I only finished experimenting on it last month but forgot to report back, sorry. I got tied up in my current experiment on Nomadic Civilizations but not Nomadic Start. I have promised myself that that will come out as a self contained mod.

JosEPh_II said:

3 concerns over your observations:
1. Tiny map - extreme
2. 1 AI - extreme
3. Snail - is Known to allow more gold than faster speeds, same as Eon and Eternity. More turns more opportunity to accumulate. Penalties much much easier to overcome.

Marathon and Epic are much more balanced. Snail has 6x more turns than Normal to accumulate. 3x vs Epic and 1.33x vs Marathon. Now maybe ppl will start to see why I complain about the excessive turns in the slowest speeds. It takes an enormous effort to balance gold and other parts of the mod to scale properly for a 1,000 turn game up to a 14,000 turn game. And this gold balancing act has been going on since v17. It was one of several reasons why ls612 quit modding C2C. He tried to balance it thru scaling and still got hammered for it.

As for Crime and Disease, the Newest system turned that all upside down. What I did before the new Law and Criminal units and their associated system is all flushed down the drain. So is there imbalance there? Yep there is. And after my initial adjustment to Disease I left it alone because DH has a project planned for it.

JosEPh

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Sure, these options are on the unusual site, but things like flamability or education are in no way connected to amout of AI nor Map size nor game speed. And I can't see why my INCOME is connected to game speed aswell Sure, the more turns you have with high income, the more gold does accumulate, but why is my turn by turn income influenced by it? I'm only guessing here since I haven't really tested it, but I can tell that for Eternity, Eons, Snail and Marathon it is the excact same way: too much. So maybe the slower speeds are the imbalanced ones? Plus I can't see how civ can be fun if you get 1 or more techs per turn

I like the Crime property. Very much actually. It scales well over the game, never makes too big leaps and presents a threat to you all the time. At least that's what I call a well balanced property: It is still involved in the game and punish you when you ignore it, but it can be controlled in a reasonable way. You don't need 10+ Watchmen per city, but you have to be careful about it. And I very much like it that in the late Industrial Era, you can control it mostly with buildings, without additional Law Inforcement Units. It makes it more diverse.

Anti pollution builings just need to be tuned down a bit in the Ind Era. Hydro wanted to combine Greenhouse Gases with Air Pollution, which makes it rather complicated to do. In Europe, during the Industrial Era, Air was barely breathable. It was highly polluted with Sulfuroxides and soot (? like coal as a dust). Since then, the air got much cleaner; while still being high of CO2.

Plus I can't see how civ can be fun if you get 1 or more techs per turn

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Think about this for just 1 minute. Vanilla BtS has 84 techs, C2C has 800+ and growing. You can not compare these 2 this way. The above statement is not really thought out, sorry. And it is taken to the fastest speed we have "Normal" that "only" has 1,000 turns vs Vanilla BtS Normal that is less than 600 turns.

A more proper analogy would be comparing our Normal to Vanilla BtS Blitz (200 turns). But still our fastest game speed is 400 turns longer than a Normal (600 iirc turn) BtS game. A 1000 turn game is a decently long game for many players that come from Vanilla BtS. And I want it understood I am not advocating that everyone must play at our "Normal" speed.

Epic (2000 turns) and Marathon (4000) make for very good and well paced C2C games. There is more balance in those 2 speeds than there is in any other speeds we have. Eternity is so far from being balanced that I really have to question the thought process of those that claim it is.

Our gamespeeds should IMHPO be like this:
Normal (which really needs a new name) 1000 turns (no change)
Epic 2000 turns (no change)
Marathon 3000 turns (1000 turn reduction from 4000+)
Snail 4000 turns (2000 turn reduction from 6000)
Eon 5000 turns (4000 turn reduction from 9000)
Eternity 6000 turns ( a whopping 8000 turn reduction from 14,000)

Or at worst case:
1000 (no change)
2000 (no change)
4000 (no change)
6000 (No change)
8000 (1000 turn reduction)
10000 (4000 turn reduction)

I hope that others feel like you about Crime. That is how I used to feel about it. Can't say that now. (And I never ever thought I would end up defending Hydro's premise on Crime! (God help me! ))

The rest is in others hands because they did not want me to do it. Just read DH's post above yours. But again T-brd has plans for this area as well so it's still not for me to do.

JosEPh

Didn't Blitz even exist in Bts and Quick have 330 turns and Normal 500 in Bts?

The C2C Normal gamespeed definitely needs another name.

"Normal" is still a leftover from when there were "Blitz" and "Quick", but those two speeds are gone.

By now, another name for "Normal" is definitely needed.

Optimal game speed and map size are connected.

If for example a city of yours makes one unit every three turns, and in 15 turns you research a new tech that obsoletes that unit, it means you can build 5 units until the unit obsoletes.

If you change to a slower game speed, that city can build that unit every six turns, and in 30 turns you research the new tech that obsoletes that unit, it means you can still build 5 units until the unit obsoletes.

The difference is that at the faster game speed, you have 15 turns to move your units, and in the slower game speed, you have 30 turns to move your units. Which means your units can move much further.

So slower game speeds are best suited for larger maps.

Big map + fast game speed is not an optimum combination: it means there is a bigger chance your units will become obsolete while still moving to the front line.

Small map + slow game speed is not an optimum combination: it means you'll spend many turns waiting for reinforcements to be built once your offensive slows down due to insufficient number of units.

slower game speeds have the following effects:
1) the player has to press enter more often and wait for processing time, which depends strongly on the speed of your hardware.
2) units movement becomes faster relative to your economic production: they can move further before they obsolete.

This is mostly relevant to the first half of the game. Once faster road types become available, distance melts away as a barrier.

There of course also an element of personal preference: players that like to play a lot with their units, will have a preference for slower game speeds than builder type players.

I tend to play snail speed + large map and I'm satisfied with that combination.

Ok, Pollution is quite Broken. Not only it isn't really dangerous when it gets "out of hand" (-10 and 10 and :unhealthy: does almost nothing if your city produces 300 and has and above 50 over the and :unhealth: levels and I worked hard to get that high

And then there are the Ordinances Clean Air Act and Exhaustion Reduction or something like this, which reduce the Air Pollution by 100 each (!) in every city, for just 7.50 . With an income of 30,000+ each turn and maintenance modifiers that reduce that cost to 3 per turn, that is rediciously cheap.

Faustmouse, I do need to quibble with your evaluation about pollution; I've been having considerable difficulties with it from about the end of the Medieval period through the Industrial period - in other words, from about the time industrial production can really start growing significantly until you finally start getting some decent pollution-control options other than "don't build industry too far".

The difficulties are not insurmountable, but they can cause some pretty bad health and happiness issues - enough so that the occasional canny AI can realize some benefits to espionage actions, which would be otherwise unable to affect my civilization significantly. (Espionage missions and pollution effects, each on their own unable to rise to a level beyond my control, can combine to become much more problematic. It's made my life and times much more... interesting, shall we say?)

My only real problem with the current pollution system is a lack of Medieval/Renaissance era options for combating pollution buildup... but I'm not saying it isn't historical. (There's a reason that London was known as the Big Smoke, and tales of Parisian water were horrifying!) If earlier pollution-combating measures were to become available (say, rag-and-bone men, weirs, and other such items), then I'd say that the consequences to pollution would also need to be increased - they're about right for now when there's no real counter, but if a player-accessible counter were to be made available, then the consequences of not using it would need to be... considerable.

Correct me if I'm wrong or outdated, but I thought the Ordinances at Ecology give only a one-time reduction. If they were per-turn, then they would be overpowered, but a one-time reduction is of little value.

At Ecological Engineering, I switch to Paradise and never worry about pollution again. Maybe we want pollution to be a non-issue by the end of the game, but in general, I would say that most anti-pollution buildings needs to be nerfed.

A big thing I've noticed about the AI and crime is they don't feel the need to build those police buildings. This leads to them building the units in the one city that has the building (Takes them a while), Then not moving the new units at all. The AI thus ends with a city with -4000 crime and a whole empire in revolt from that.

I have some suggestions to help fix this AI problem.

1. Auto build the Police buildings or remove the need to for the units to built from them. If the second, Make the buildings give +xp to law units.
2. Increase effectiveness of the -crime given by these units. x2 effectiveness with an exchange of x2/x3 cost would work. This just a thing to reduce unit spam.

Ok that's odd. What do you mean by "considerably difficulties"? Is it just annoyingly high or are you really hindered by it?

Pepper, they are all time boni. At least they appear in the city as a special building and say "reduce Pollution in ALL cities." So yeah, too overpowered.

Pollution is not finished. And it is also tied into the Unfinished Tourism property as is Crime. Imho both Pollution and Tourism could be removed and/or at least Pollution tied into Disease property mechanism.

Tourism is a design that is supposed to generate Gold/Commerce in the Late game with Heavy Crime and Pollution penalties. How's that working out? And how many players actually make it to Modern Era with C2C?

Too many years of C2C modding work concentrated on the early and mid game has left the late game in a perpetual state of "unfinished". And the goal of new late late game Eras and going into space and colonizing the beyond, has been a basic pipe dream.

We still can not stop fiddling with the Preh Era.

JosEPh

I'm not sure so I'm legitimately asking: What's wrong with tourism?

I do believe that Pollution could be re-calibrated some but why remove it? Isn't it primarily our replacement for global warming basically? I've been impressed with the depth of effect work that has been done to support the pollution system... nearby tiles becoming less productive, localized terrain changes, etc... Seems a cool system that just needs more balance work is all.