Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

Darsnan · Dec 4, 2010

Some quick observations to see what you think:

1. Am seeing an AI escorting Combat Engineers around the map like they were settlers. Don't think the AIs should be doing this.

2. Am running with my mod in place as well, which gives the Barbs a cannon, however they never bombarded me as I approached their encampment.

3. Cost increase for buying buildings! Ah - your killing my strategies! :lol:

When I start games I immediately pop a golden age to rush build Ironworks, then have been buying a windmill to get my production city up and running. Guess I'm not doing that anymore...

Am continueing playtesting, but thought I'd give you some feedback that I thought pertinent.

D

Darsnan · Dec 5, 2010

Some follow-up observations from this evenings playtesting:

1. To date I've alway played your mods on Immortal, and always won. This evening I survived on Immortal, however it is pretty clear I'm probably going to lose this game. Therefore I think your coding changes are definately having an impact, and that they seem to be scaling well in that the changes are now forcing superior players to scale down a notch when using your mod. Next time round I plan on starting a game at Emporer and playing that thru to see how things play out.

D

Spatzimaus · Dec 5, 2010

Darsnan said:
1. Am seeing an AI escorting Combat Engineers around the map like they were settlers. Don't think the AIs should be doing this.

I'm not sure what could be happening there. I haven't seen that happen in my own game, and there's really nothing in the AI that should do that.
(Since you're using your own mod as well, is there anything in there that could explain it?)

2. Am running with my mod in place as well, which gives the Barbs a cannon, however they never bombarded me as I approached their encampment.

Strange. One question: did this happen after you built the spaceship, or before? If it's after, I might know what happened; when you launch the spaceship it ends all current wars, so I had to put an exception in there to NOT end the ongoing war with the Barbarian civ. It's possible that it's not checking that correctly (although there should be a popup if that was the case).

3. Cost increase for buying buildings! Ah - your killing my strategies!

That one's deliberate. I didn't actually increase the cost multiplier for hurries, I just decreased the discount you get on most things when starting in later eras.
The unfortunate side-effect of this, as you might have noticed, is the insane cost of building a Settler. For whatever reason, it isn't getting any of the discounts, and the game's auto-inflation on Settlers is resulting in an exorbitant cost.

I'm really tempted to put in an override on this one, too, to where all production towards a Settler is doubled or tripled at least when starting in those later eras. But I'm still looking into that, there might be a much simpler method.

But in general, yes, I killed those strategies on purpose.

When I start games I immediately pop a golden age to rush build Ironworks, then have been buying a windmill to get my production city up and running. Guess I'm not doing that anymore...

Nope, and I used to do something similar. It was far too easy to just rush-buy everything and ignore production. Now, not only is that prohibitively expensive, but you're far less likely to have a massive gold surplus. I mean, I used to buy Work Boats when I needed them, because I didn't want to have a city spend a turn producing one (although with the overflow that probably wouldn't hurt).

I'm worried it might have gone too far. You'll notice that if you start in later eras, you generally begin with a negative income until you get the trade routes up and running and the cities to a decent size. And I don't think the AI is handling the deficit spending very well. So one possibility is to reduce the number of free buildings you get at each era.

What I REALLY want to do? Have the inherent gold, food, and research bonus of the Palace increase with starting Era. Food to help with Settler production and capital growth, gold to keep you from going negative on a later start, and research to help with that ramp-up period. I'm still trying to see if that's possible, though.
And I know I've gone back on my earlier statements a bit; while I still think the "proper" way to play is to start at the Ancient Era and go all the way through, I've definitely spent a lot of time now trying to balance the mid-era starts. (Note: the Industrial start is VERY awkward, because you get three Settlers, can't really make any more, but haven't revealed the Coal or Oil quite yet. So if you guess wrong on city placement you can be crippled.)

The questions I have for you debuggers are:
> What's an appropriate cost for the spaceship parts? I halved the costs compared to the original values (down to 350/500), since at the time they did nothing, but now that the effects of the spaceship are in and working, should I go back to the old values? What sort of costs would you think are appropriate? On my internal version, 0.09, I've already changed them back to their original values, and I'm now thinking that they still might be too cheap. If the SS benefits are so good, it might be worth making them REALLY expensive, so that people will actually use Spaceship Factories, and accepting that it'll take you half an era to build them.
> I added that whole "tech acceleration" thing to give you a boost on your first 2*N techs (where N is the era number you start in). What do you think of the progression of costs? (Not just the absolute number of turns, but also whether the cost of the fourth and fifth techs is reasonable compared to either the first or the tenth. That sort of thing.)
> The Fusion Lab requires a unit of Dilithium, because I wanted it to feel Factory-ish. The problem is that the later building that generates Dilithium (if you don't have a supply of your own) is the Quantum Lab, which requires the Fusion Lab first. So you can get stuck very easily with no Dilithium (since it's an ocean resource with very flaky placement, no way to get any, and no way to get around this.
The question is, which of the following three solutions sounds better:
A> Remove the Dilithium requirement of the Fusion Lab altogether.
B> Don't have the Quantum Lab actually require the Fusion Lab.
C> Add more Dilithium to the map. Either add land deposits (I'd prefer not) or place them in lakes as well (which'd cause a lot of awkwardness depending on city placement).
Either would work, but I'd prefer not to do both. (I'm leaning a bit towards B, I think, but it's a toss-up.)

--------------------------
Here are a few other technical questions for anyone who can answer:
1> How do you add new sound files to the game? I found the two blocks that affect this (<AudioDefinesFile> and <Script2DFile>), but as they're not <GameData> blocks you can't update the same way and it doesn't seem to be picking them up automatically. I've got an .mp3 I want to add, but I can't get it to actually play. I'm assuming that it's like the unit files, where you need to include the entire contents of the original, but how do you get the game to use it? (Is there an analogue to UpdateDatabase that you need to declare, or is it like the icon atlas files where you just need to have them included in the mod?)
2> In LUA coding, how can you tell the names of the functions within each pairs block? For instance, the Cities block within Players, or the Units block within Players; they have functions like GetX and GetY, but I need to know what else is there, and the official wiki only has the list of functions directly under Players.
2a> On a related note, if I have an X and Y value, is there any easy way to find out the current owner of the tile? I'm trying to code something analogous to the Great Wall, so I need to check to see if any enemy units are in my territory.
3> Where are the UnitArtInfos and UnitMemberArtInfos tables? As in, path to files? For instance, while I want the Combat Mech to be the giant death robot, I want the Labor Mech to use the same model but be scaled down and have three of them per unit. (At least until I can find custom art.) Likewise, the Bolo is an Ironclad currently, and if you've read the books you'll realize that it's not a bad shape to represent them in general. But I need to increase the scale.

Obviously, only a few people read this thread at present, so I'm not expecting answers right away. But these are the things I'm getting stuck on.

Spatzimaus · Dec 5, 2010

Darsnan said:
1. To date I've alway played your mods on Immortal, and always won. This evening I survived on Immortal, however it is pretty clear I'm probably going to lose this game.

When I'm testing I almost always set it to Prince, just to balance all of the discounts. But when I play for fun, I usually set it to King. The highest difficulties, to me, just aren't fun because they encourage you to go with unrealistic strategies (like ICS) just to stay alive.

So, I'm actually okay with making Deity/Immortal/Emperor extremely hard. A lot of the things in the Long Mod are designed to keep civs that have fallen behind from getting rolled over (like the Home Field Advantage combat promotion), so it's a lot harder to build up that massive advantage over the AI civs that makes the later eras trivial.

Two things, though. And both come back to the same basic point: you can use other balance-type mods while playing this to level the playing field even further.
1> Tech Diffusion. I have the mod, and I often use it myself when I'm playing for fun, so while I haven't been including it in my testing, it's something that I'd always sort of intended to go along with the mod. (For reference, this mod makes it so that if one civ is more than 6 techs behind the leader, he gets extra beakers to help close the gap more quickly.) To this point I still haven't integrated it into my actual mod, but that's definitely an option. (Unfortunately, the original mod doesn't balance very well, since it's a pure gain and I think 6 is too large a gap. But I could adjust all of that.)
2> Thalassicus' balance mod. Specifically, one of the things in it is a reworking of the Trade Route equation. In the core game, the equation is 1.0 + 1.25*population for each city. In his mod, it's -1.3 + 1.5*pop + 0.05*capital's pop. Which, obviously, favors larger cities and really hurts ICS' income.
I'm tempted to put that equation into my own Balance mod (with credit given, of course). It'd make money more plentiful for everyone, but it'd also discourage ICS. And that should make life a lot harder for people playing on higher difficulties, especially once the next patch comes out (which, among other things, makes the AI settle overseas more aggressively).

---
I'm going to go start a new test game now, starting in the Ancient Era, with Tech Diffusion turned on and deliberately avoiding ICS. I'll play through to the spaceship; my goal is to see how many of the other civs make it that far.

MouseyPounds · Dec 5, 2010

Spatzimaus said:
2> In LUA coding, how can you tell the names of the functions within each pairs block? For instance, the Cities block within Players, or the Units block within Players; they have functions like GetX and GetY, but I need to know what else is there, and the official wiki only has the list of functions directly under Players.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Are you talking about the things returned by pPlayer:Cities() and pPlayer:Units()? Those would be City objects and Unit objects respectively which both have fairly good wiki documentation.

2a> On a related note, if I have an X and Y value, is there any easy way to find out the current owner of the tile? I'm trying to code something analogous to the Great Wall, so I need to check to see if any enemy units are in my territory.

You could do something like this:

Code:

local pPlot = Map.GetPlot(x,y)
local iPlayer = pPlot:GetOwner()

Plot objects have semi-decent wiki docs but for the Map object we don't have much more than function names.

Spatzimaus · Dec 5, 2010

MouseyPounds said:
Those would be City objects and Unit objects respectively which both have fairly good wiki documentation.

Thanks, that's exactly what I needed. When I searched on that site, the only wiki lists I could ever find were Player, Team, Event, and Game.

Hopefully, v0.09 will have most of the remaining Wonders done, and I might be able to get most of the Transcendence event working correctly.

Aleph00 · Dec 5, 2010

Ok, I see you posted a new version. Has the balance mod been changed? Do you want me to test something specifically? Or shall I try to 'break' your mod again?

Obviously, only a few people read this thread at present, so I'm not expecting answers right away. But these are the things I'm getting stuck on.

Maybe your walls of text discourage them :mischief:

Darsnan · Dec 5, 2010

One other thing from last nights playtesting is that I saw two Barb destroyers right next to encampments. I think before last night I'd seen one in all the games I'd played to date. Was that your doing?

Spatzimaus said:
I'm not sure what could be happening there. I haven't seen that happen in my own game, and there's really nothing in the AI that should do that.
(Since you're using your own mod as well, is there anything in there that could explain it?)

I don't think my mod touches anything in this region (its only C-S and Barb enhancement), however you never know. I'd say just keep this in mind in case someone else reports something similar.

Spatzimaus said:
Strange. One question: did this happen after you built the spaceship, or before? If it's after, I might know what happened; when you launch the spaceship it ends all current wars, so I had to put an exception in there to NOT end the ongoing war with the Barbarian civ. It's possible that it's not checking that correctly (although there should be a popup if that was the case).

This was the first Barb encampment I encountered in game. Almost like the game hadn't set the Barbs to being at war with me yet? :confused:

After that first encounter the Barb arty worked as desired in that they were bombarding my incoming units. Oh and the Barb Destroyers were bombarding my units assigned to attack encampments - nice! :goodjob:

Spatzimaus said:
That one's deliberate. I didn't actually increase the cost multiplier for hurries, I just decreased the discount you get on most things when starting in later eras.

The strat of almost immediately (like within 10-15 turns) getting a good production city up and running by building Ironworks then buying a windmill was unbalanced, so this is good your nerfing this.

Spatzimaus said:
The unfortunate side-effect of this, as you might have noticed, is the insane cost of building a Settler. For whatever reason, it isn't getting any of the discounts, and the game's auto-inflation on Settlers is resulting in an exorbitant cost.

I've almost exclusively gone the route of cherry-picking C-S: at the beginning of a game I scout out the best nearby C-S, then when I've got arty and enough cannon fodder I gang my units up and annex it. Even with the benefits I've given C-S they can't stand up to a concentrated assault.

Spatzimaus said:
I'm worried it might have gone too far. You'll notice that if you start in later eras, you generally begin with a negative income until you get the trade routes up and running and the cities to a decent size.

All the way up to the end last night I was constantly fighting income and Happiness issues. I was continually using my Great People to pop Golden Eras just for the cash, and I was always having to weigh my research options towards techs which had Happiness benefits. Am probably going to sit down and re-assess my SP (Social Policy) choices to see if there is a better combination I can use here: I was having to make some very tough decisions for SPs last night, which was a good thing! :goodjob:

Spatzimaus said:
I know I've gone back on my earlier statements a bit; while I still think the "proper" way to play is to start at the Ancient Era and go all the way through, I've definitely spent a lot of time now trying to balance the mid-era starts.

I like that comment!

Spatzimaus said:
The questions I have for you debuggers are:
> What's an appropriate cost for the spaceship parts? I halved the costs compared to the original values (down to 350/500), since at the time they did nothing, but now that the effects of the spaceship are in and working, should I go back to the old values? What sort of costs would you think are appropriate? On my internal version, 0.09, I've already changed them back to their original values, and I'm now thinking that they still might be too cheap. If the SS benefits are so good, it might be worth making them REALLY expensive, so that people will actually use Spaceship Factories, and accepting that it'll take you half an era to build them.

Making players (humans) need to build Spaceship Factories (or make it highly desirous to build S.F.) is a benefit, as the AIs will build S.F. anyways, even if they aren't needed. In previous playtesting (not sure which iteration) I could chunk out SF parts in five turns, sans SF.

Spatzimaus said:
> I added that whole "tech acceleration" thing to give you a boost on your first 2*N techs (where N is the era number you start in). What do you think of the progression of costs? (Not just the absolute number of turns, but also whether the cost of the fourth and fifth techs is reasonable compared to either the first or the tenth. That sort of thing.)

Still seemed research rates took a ling time (10+ turns) all the way to the end last night, but here again this might have been more because I was focusing on cash/ Happiness than research. I'll keep this question in mind when I attack this mod again today.

Spatzimaus said:
> The Fusion Lab requires a unit of Dilithium, because I wanted it to feel Factory-ish. The problem is that the later building that generates Dilithium (if you don't have a supply of your own) is the Quantum Lab, which requires the Fusion Lab first. So you can get stuck very easily with no Dilithium (since it's an ocean resource with very flaky placement, no way to get any, and no way to get around this.
The question is, which of the following three solutions sounds better:
A> Remove the Dilithium requirement of the Fusion Lab altogether.
B> Don't have the Quantum Lab actually require the Fusion Lab.
C> Add more Dilithium to the map. Either add land deposits (I'd prefer not) or place them in lakes as well (which'd cause a lot of awkwardness depending on city placement).

I would go with B, reason being its more friendly to the AIs.

Spatzimaus said:
3> Where are the UnitArtInfos and UnitMemberArtInfos tables? As in, path to files? For instance, while I want the Combat Mech to be the giant death robot, I want the Labor Mech to use the same model but be scaled down and have three of them per unit. (At least until I can find custom art.)

That sounds like a neat idea: earlier I was re-skinning the Brute with the GDR graphic, as I really like it. I looked around but couldn't locate where these tables are. Would be nice to know how to scale these/ create triplet GDRs to represent different units. On a similar note do you plan on re-skinning the Settler? The Colonizer graphic from BtS Final Frontier I think is a real winner there, if it could be scaled to fit better in-game.

Spatzimaus said:
Likewise, the Bolo is an Ironclad currently, and if you've read the books you'll realize that it's not a bad shape to represent them in general.

Segueing a bit here, but Der Wacht am Rhine was the first book I read in the series, and probably the one I enjoyed the most. Sort of fitting here in ciV as I exclusively play the Germans, and I usually lay out my cities such that I am defending across rivers: because of the way the AIs like to rush you en masse, sort of gives the feel of defending against a Posleen assault. :goodjob:

D

Spatzimaus · Dec 5, 2010

Aleph00 said:
Ok, I see you posted a new version. Has the balance mod been changed? Do you want me to test something specifically? Or shall I try to 'break' your mod again?

Yes, it's been changed. I should really start putting a version number on that one as well, but I'd never intended it to be changed often. At present, the only ways to tell if I've changed the balance mod:
1> The number of times it's been downloaded resets to 0.
2> In my "patch note" posts, you'll see an entry that begins with (Crazy Spatz): this designates that this change is in the balance mod instead of the content mod.

At the moment, just breaking stuff is still useful, but beyond just breaking, I also want a feel for the balance. Do techs come too fast or too slow at various stages of the game? Is it still too easy to roll over another civ (or a city-state) militarily? Is the spaceship too cheap, too expensive, or just right? Are the spaceship's benefits too much? Are the new resources (especially Dilithium) just too hard to get?

Maybe your walls of text discourage them

I know. I've always done this. The problem is that I'm a very fast typist, and once I get going on a topic it's hard to rein myself in, so it doesn't take long to get a post that's unbearably long.

The thing is, what I could really use is just more people who come in, skim over the first few posts to see what's in the mod, and then just play it. The long discussion posts are really only for the people who are familiar enough to argue over specific points.

Spatzimaus · Dec 5, 2010

Darsnan said:
One other thing from last nights playtesting is that I saw two Barb destroyers right next to encampments. I think before last night I'd seen one in all the games I'd played to date. Was that your doing?

Don't think so. The only thing I did to the Barbarian civ was add those resourceless Psi units. I think that's just random flakiness on the AI's part; you're probably in a game where the Barbarian civ's naval flavor got randomized upwards by a good amount instead of downward.

This was the first Barb encampment I encountered in game. Almost like the game hadn't set the Barbs to being at war with me yet?

Could be. I've noticed that the AI is a bit sluggish in general on a lot of things. For instance, the AI civs might settle their capitals on the first turn, but they don't seem to actually start building anything until the third or fourth turn. Same goes for research.

All the way up to the end last night I was constantly fighting income and Happiness issues. I was continually using my Great People to pop Golden Eras just for the cash, and I was always having to weigh my research options towards techs which had Happiness benefits. Am probably going to sit down and re-assess my SP (Social Policy) choices to see if there is a better combination I can use here: I was having to make some very tough decisions for SPs last night, which was a good thing!

Glad to hear this. In my own games, I've pretty much given up on the Rationalism tree, and almost always go Piety for the extra Happiness (and Culture, which lets me unlock more SPs that help with money and Happiness). In a vanilla game I almost never built any happiness buildings after the Colosseum, but in the modded game those later buildings become pretty important. What worries me about this is that it really skews things toward a tech leader who picks up all the Happiness-boosting Wonders before the AI players can get to it. Get all of the +happy wonders and you'll be fine, but the AIs will struggle.

Which reminds me: The Forbidden Palace was -50% city count unhappiness, which meant +1 happy per city, previously. But with my increase to base unhappiness, it's now effectively +2 per city. So I'm changing it to -25%, to get it back down to the previous power level (which was still very strong). I did the same for the Planned Economy policy, although I think that's going to have problems (since now, both mods try and update the same help text entry and I'm not sure which gets priority).

Making players (humans) need to build Spaceship Factories (or make it highly desirous to build S.F.) is a benefit, as the AIs will build S.F. anyways, even if they aren't needed.

This was part of why I gave them a Titan construction bonus, but I'd originally intended them to also boost satellite units. Which, ironically, is now possible since I've created a new unit class just for orbital units. So in my upcoming version I'm putting in a +25% production boost to Orbital units (Geosynch, Ion Cannon, Death Ray, Subspace Generator).
(There's one other hidden requirement: you can't build your Gravship unless the city has a Spaceship Factory. But that's WAY down the line.)
But I'm not sure it's enough. The Spaceship Factory takes an Aluminum, which is in short supply with all of my new high-tech units. So the question becomes, is it still worthwhile to build them? Should I add more? And I'd prefer something less specialized, like a flat +10% production boost, or maybe +25% production when building Wonders (since that's not an effect any building has, but there's an XML entry for it). Or maybe some Airlift capability, sort of like the Airport from Civ4. (There are a lot of Airlift stubs in the XML but they don't seem to do anything.)

Still seemed research rates took a ling time (10+ turns) all the way to the end last night, but here again this might have been more because I was focusing on cash/ Happiness than research.

Well, my goal is that research should take somewhere in the 6-7 turn range for most of the game (maybe getting down to 5ish if you've conquered most of the world). Not bottom out at 2-3 turns per tech like it does in vanilla. There are ~120 techs total in my mod, so that'd get the pacing about right; you should be hitting the Transcendence Era on turn 750-800.

I would go with B, reason being its more friendly to the AIs.

Done. Quantum Labs now only require the Research Lab, just like the Fusion Lab does.

On a similar note do you plan on re-skinning the Settler? The Colonizer graphic from BtS Final Frontier I think is a real winner there, if it could be scaled to fit better in-game.

For a while I've been considering adding the Colony Pod as a late-game replacement to the Settler, like how the Combat Engineer replaces the Worker: better movement, maybe some paradrop ability (in SMAC I always made Drop Colony Pods as soon as I could), that sort of thing. The problem is that Settlers are already so horribly expensive on late-era starts that I don't want to make it any worse, so that's tabled until I can fix the bigger problem.

Segueing a bit here, but Der Wacht am Rhine was the first book I read in the series, and probably the one I enjoyed the most. Sort of fitting here in ciV as I exclusively play the Germans, and I usually lay out my cities such that I am defending across rivers: because of the way the AIs like to rush you en masse, sort of gives the feel of defending against a Posleen assault.

A bit of confusion here: Bolos aren't from John Ringo's Aldenata books (2000-present), they're from Keith Laumer's completely different (and much older, starting in 1976) Bolo series of sci-fi novels (which have had many other writers contribute short stories as well). I'm pretty sure Ringo based the SheVas and Tiger IIIs on them, though, other than the Sluggy Freelance joke for the SheVa.

--------------
On the bright side, in the last day I've got working:
> Buildings/Wonders that give a specific promotion to any unit that starts its turn in this city, and then removes it from any unit not in that city. (Currently used: Space Elevator, which gives the "Orbital Drop" promotion allowing an infinite-range paradrop action. If need be I can cannibalize this for a pseudo-Airlift.)
> The Nethack Terminus now gives a popup notification if any AI civ is within 10 turns of completing a Wonder, telling you which civ, which city, and approximately how many turns are remaining.
> Buildings/Wonders that give a specific promotion (a negative one) to any unit inside your territory belonging to a civ at war with you. (Currently used: Hunter-Seeker Algorithm. Instead of its previous Great Wall effect, complete with graphic, it now gives a custom promotion: -1 visibility, -1 heal rate, -20% attack versus cities.)

bobslay · Dec 5, 2010

Hello,

i have finally installed and tried this mod, as i've been reading the progress on it since there was 3 pages. [ i do not fear long forum posts hehehe ]

i planned to play this on marathon length, starting from ancient era, prince difficulty.
i have stopped playing almost at renaissance era for now because of what seems like a bug:
there seem to have a problem with strategic ressources.
i've discovered none, and none of the civs known to me seems to have horses or iron.
i have attached the savegame so you can check more easily the problem.

also of minor importance, the marsh tiles i've seen were all checkered red and white.

i'll keep up with the updates on this thread, and will try to find time to play/test a game when i can.

Spatzimaus · Dec 5, 2010

bobslay said:
i have stopped playing almost at renaissance era for now because of what seems like a bug:
there seem to have a problem with strategic ressources.
i've discovered none, and none of the civs known to me seems to have horses or iron.

Glad to hear there's another person reading the thread.

It's possible that something in this mod affected that, but more likely, you just got a really bad random draw on strategics. It happens; I just played a Nuclear-start game where there were only three Coal deposits and two Oils in the entire world, and they were all in one small area controlled by India. If it wasn't for the Energy Bank I'd have been hosed.

An easy way to test this is to start a game in the Digital, Fusion, Nanotech, or Transcendence Eras. Since the Satellites technology now reveals the entire world, it's easy to see where all of the strategics are, and you can get a good idea of how common each would be on a given map type. (A Nanotech or Transcendence start is necessary if you want to see all three of the new strategics as well.)

I'll look at your savegame, but I'd say that this is the most likely cause. The way the game lays down strategic resources is extremely random, and can cause all sorts of clumping problems. I actually went out of my way to override parts of that logic for the new resources.

also of minor importance, the marsh tiles i've seen were all checkered red and white.

A few people mentioned this before. The problem seems to be that the cache isn't being cleared correctly when you switch to mods that affect things like terrain (which adding a new resource counts as, and maybe there's an Omnicytes deposit on that marsh?). Since I ONLY play with my mod I don't see graphical artifacts any more, but if you've been playing vanilla games right before my mod then it could happen.

The easy way to test this: find a map where you see these effects. Exit the game. (The entire Civ5 application, don't just go to the menu.) Start it back up, and reload the savegame. It SHOULD go away if you do that, because exiting the game clears the cache.

This isn't just me, by the way, it's on the list of things Firaxis claims they're fixing in the next patch. One of the flags you set when you create a mod is "Reload Landmark System", but right now, the game just isn't doing that. This isn't just a graphical problem, it causes crashes as well.

bobslay · Dec 6, 2010

Glad to hear there's another person reading the thread.

and i'm sure glad someone has the time and is willing to put the work to add some alpha centaury into this recent evolution of civilization !

It's possible that something in this mod affected that, but more likely, you just got a really bad random draw on strategics. It happens

After playing the same game up to the point of seeing oil, and exploring about 80% of the map, i still couldn't see any strategic resources [horse, iron, coal, oil], and no other civ did have any strategic ressources. [ however, they were probably not all to the point of seeing oil ]

i did some experimentation by starting in transcendence era just to see the various distribution of strategic resources i get.
[ i've kept the " standard" resources distribution for all tries ]
and i kept the lakes map, size small.

and it's like you said, i probably got a bad distribution.
but this type of map seems to exaggerate the problem.

on 5 maps generated, i have never seen horses, and i have seen 1 iron spot once.
and usually 1 to 3 spot of each of the other strategic resources.

this week is kinda busy for me, i might just play only next saturday, but i'll try to provide extra details in order to know if there is a big difference between this problem with or without your mods.
i currently think the fact this mods adds other new resources might be the difference between
"always at least one of each" and "usually one or two is completely missing"
but as i have not checked at all how the distribution works, it's just an idea for now...

For now, don't bother with my previously posted savegame.

The problem seems to be that the cache isn't being cleared correctly when you switch to mods that affect things like terrain

it was indeed probably that.
i did play vanilla civ 5 before, but quited the game completely to install the mods.
also, after closing completely and restarting the game, to load my posted saved game to resume it, marsh tile was still of a checkered red and white.

however,
while creating the various maps in transcendence era to see the distribution of strategic resources, i have not seen any checkered tile.

so, cache problem, and if the fix is supposed to be in a future patch, there is no reason to continue thinking about it hehe.

Spatzimaus · Dec 6, 2010

bobslay said:
and it's like you said, i probably got a bad distribution.
but this type of map seems to exaggerate the problem.

Unfortunately, the algorithm for strategic resource distribution is depressingly easy to screw up. It goes purely by terrain type, so a map with plenty of one type of terrain and little of another will skew the strategic balance in the same way. I've been doing nearly all of my testing on the Continents map, with an occasional Fractal game. (Side note: if you try a Transcendence start on a small Archipelago map with a decent number of civs, you often see entire chains of islands where every land hex has a resource on it.)

In case anyone cares about how the game places deposits:
> First, the game places "small" deposits. The game decides to add a flat number of these (I think 25 on a normal-sized map), but which actual resource is placed will depend on the terrain. So it picks 25 random land hexes on the map; if it's a hill, for instance, it might then say "okay, I have a 3/5 chance of putting a coal there, a 1/5 chance of an aluminum, and a 1/5 chance of uranium".
Basically, if you're playing on an unusual map type, there might not be any small deposits of certain resources placed; a map short on non-Hill Grasslands will have few or no Horses, because they won't spawn on Plains.
> Then, place "large" deposits. These go on a hex-by-hex basis; for instance, the map generator might see a Grasslands tile. It then does a random draw, with a 1 in 30ish chance of a resource being placed. If it decides a resource IS in that hex, it does a random draw like the small deposits (but with slightly different numbers).
> There's a small fudge for resources near starting positions, to ensure that civs have better access to the "rush" resources (Iron, Horses, Coal).
> Then, if there are too few deposits of a given resource, add 1. Not "add enough to bring it up to a reasonable level", just "add 1" from what I can see.
So yes, it's as screwy as it sounds and I'm sorely tempted to rewrite the whole thing for them and be done with it.

The only unusual situation is with Oil; it does all of the above and counts up the number of units of Oil on land, and then places half that amount again in the water. (So if you've got 50 units of oil on land in 3s and 7s, then it might put 5 5s in the water as well.) Which means that if your map was short on deserts, then you won't have much oil in the water either.

The "Abundant" resource setting doesn't generally affect the number of deposits of these resources. It simply changes what the default deposit sizes are; instead of 3s and 7s, you might get 4s and 9s on Abundant and 2s/5s for Scarce. Given that most resources give more than enough units in one good deposit, this seems kind of pointless to me. (What's the point of having 50 units of horses instead of 40?) The only resource I ever seem to run short on is Aluminum, and that only because of how many of my new units use it.

(Note that all of the above is for strategic resources. Luxuries and Bonus resources are handled completely separately.)

Now, when I added my new resources, I not only had to change the percentage tables, I also had to increase the odds of each resource being placed. So if it was a 1 in 30 chance before and I've made the new resources have a 33% chance of using that tile type, I increased the chances to 1 in 20. In other words, the chances of placing all of the old resources should be basically the same as in the vanilla game, but hexes that'd previously get nothing would now have my new resources.

But then, on top of all of that, I added a very simple hack for my own resources, because the above method just wasn't making enough of them. Once everything is done the old-fashioned way, I then manually add one unit of each new resource per civ, in a 50/50 large/small mix. (I don't mean that I specifically place one of each near each starting point, I just mean that if there are 8 civs then I place 8 deposits randomly around the world.)
So my percentage tables underrepresent Neutronium, for instance, so that it wouldn't interfere too much with the placement of coal, etc., but I then add enough other Neutronium deposits on unoccupied tiles to make reasonable amounts overall. These added deposits will be on any random terrain, while the "normal" deposits will only be on hills. Likewise, the "normal" land Omnicytes deposits are only in marshes, forests, and jungles, but this extra distribution can be anywhere on land.
Omnicytes are also treated like Oil, with the number in the sea depending on the number on land, but the ratio's skewed a bit heavier towards the water (1:1 instead of 2:1, I think). Dilithium is a water-only resource, and the number of deposits will actually be proportional to the number of Fish, Pearls, and Whales on your map. (I think it's something like 2/3 fish + 1/3 pearls + 1/3 whale, but I can't check right now, and again, there's then a hard-coded +1/civ thrown in.)

My bigger worry has been Dilithium on Pangaea maps. With so little coastline, it'd be hard to get any of this, and I'm worried that it'd clump around some isolated little island or something.

so, cache problem, and if the fix is supposed to be in a future patch, there is no reason to continue thinking about it hehe.

The upcoming patch is supposed to have a LOT of things that'll really help, and they're already planning to change a few of the things I've changed in these mods (city HP regeneration, flat terrain penalty), so I'm looking forward to it.

A lot of the things you're going to find will be things that are problems in the core game, but feel free to list them anyway, because if I can fix them (or just make a half-decent workaround) then I will. I don't feel like waiting for Firaxis to fix everything for me.

Spatzimaus · Dec 6, 2010

Well, my goal is that research should take somewhere in the 6-7 turn range for most of the game (maybe getting down to 5ish if you've conquered most of the world). Not bottom out at 2-3 turns per tech like it does in vanilla. There are ~120 techs total in my mod, so that'd get the pacing about right; you should be hitting the Transcendence Era on turn 750-800.

Quoting myself here, but I wanted to expand on this.

There are 115 techs in the modified game (74 in the core game, minus the four Future Era techs that get removed, 44 regular techs added, and one repeatable tech added). You start with Agriculture and everyone will get three free techs along the way from buildings/projects (Oxford, Nethack Terminus, Centauri Ecology from building the spaceship), and most likely will get several Great Scientists to bulb a few. (Plus a free tech if you're the first spaceship, a handful of free-tech wonders, and one Rationalism SP that gives two techs, but I'm not counting those since they're easy to not get.) Add in a few Research Agreements that don't get broken, and you're looking at ~100 techs to research over the course of a game, possibly even less.
And then there's the Planetary Datalinks, a National Wonder at the start of the Digital Era, which now automatically gives you any tech if 4 other civs have it. (Obviously this won't help much if you're the tech leader, since there aren't any dead-end techs to skip past any more. But you still might get one or two techs out of it, and it's a useful national wonder for other reasons.) While disabled techs like Centauri Ecology are blocked from being gained this way, the techs that depend on THOSE techs aren't, so you could use this to get Centauri Empathy and such if you bypassed the spaceship; of course, since Centauri Ecology unlocks Omnicytes used for all the psi units, those other techs won't do you a whole lot of good.

Bottom line, I'd really like the game to be a steady 7-8 turns per tech, although in practice it'd be more like 9-10 turns at the lower techs and 5-6 at the high end. That puts the end of the tech race at turn 750ish (2210 AD), plus or minus a bit. Obviously, this is harder to time if you're starting in a later era, but there's not as much I can do about that without unbalancing everything. The later eras have a few more techs than the early ones (most existing eras are 11-14 techs per, mine are 15/15/12), so even with a faster pace per tech it'll still probably take slightly longer to finish each future era.

So when you're commenting on the pace of the technologies, be aware of the intended timetable. If you want to speed things up for your own personal play then you can, although the years won't really match up as well if you do that. And I haven't fine-tuned the turn-year correlations on any speeds other than Standard.

Darsnan · Dec 6, 2010

Spatzimaus said:
In my own games, I've pretty much given up on the Rationalism tree, and almost always go Piety for the extra Happiness (and Culture, which lets me unlock more SPs that help with money and Happiness).

I was able to run Rationalism at Emporer this evening. I think the main problem I had the other night was that I tried playing the same way I had developed to date, and it proved very incompatible with the changes you had made. So this evening I built a few more Trading Posts, and kept in mind early on to keep researching techs which gave me access to Happiness improvements, and I was continually around +5 Happiness and in the 20+ Gold/ turn range.

The main observation this evening is that I was pressing the space bar quite a bit. After the AI (India) declared war on me I was expecting the usual onslaught of units, however after the first rush it became just a dribble of units that I was able to easily deal with using the choke points I had created (see pic below), and I think the reason for this was because the AI was having just as hard a time as I was fielding a large military. However I couldn't find the reserves to go over to the offensive, so I was condemned to sitting there waiting for the AI to dribble more units at me, while I waited for stuff (culture and happiness improvements, as well as infrastructure like Forges) to be built, all the while pressing space bar while I waited for something to happen.

The other observation was that the AI's ships would not retreat when they were injured: they'd just sit there continually bombarding my cities until my arty sank them. Hopefully that will be fixed in the next patch.

Spatzimaus said:
Well, my goal is that research should take somewhere in the 6-7 turn range for most of the game (maybe getting down to 5ish if you've conquered most of the world). Not bottom out at 2-3 turns per tech like it does in vanilla. There are ~120 techs total in my mod, so that'd get the pacing about right; you should be hitting the Transcendence Era on turn 750-800.

I think it was taking 10+ turns consistently for me. I'll try to keep more accurate count on the next playtest, but I relatively certain it was more than 6-7 turns between techs.

Spatzimaus said:
For a while I've been considering adding the Colony Pod as a late-game replacement to the Settler.

For me its more an aesthetics thing, as I just think its more appropriate for a sci-fi mod to have a unit that doesn't look like Mary and Joseph on their way to Bethlehem.

Spatzimaus said:
A bit of confusion here: Bolos aren't from John Ringo's Aldenata books (2000-present), they're from Keith Laumer's completely different (and much older, starting in 1976)

Sorry - thats what I get for assuming! I do still like my analogy, though - very fitting for the AI onslaughts I've had to face in the past.

D

Spatzimaus · Dec 6, 2010

Darsnan said:
I think the reason for this was because the AI was having just as hard a time as I was fielding a large military.

I think you're right, and I noticed something similar but in a different way: whenever you conquer a city the default AI setting will be whatever the previous owner had it set on. So if they were emphasizing production, it'll be set to "Emphasize Production" still. Last night, when I conquered an empire, every single city was set to "Emphasize Gold". Which means that the AIs are running negative on income from the start, and never recovering; they put every city on gold production, and their growth and production suffer as a result. No production and a gold shortage is not really conducive to a large military.
A human player will take the loss for a few turns while he gets his trade network set up, but the AI won't.

But this was only when I tried starting in a middle era, and it seems to be caused by two things:
1> The Bank isn't given for free unless you use a Digital start or later, but strangely, the Satrap's Court (Persian UB replacement) is given for Industrial and Nuclear starts as well. This does explain why you'll be short on money; a "normal" game would have put Banks into each city before reaching the Industrial, since it's a pretty high priority construction. Likewise, the Market is given for free at the Industrial, but the Bazaar (UB replacement) is given for Renaissance starts. So it's clearly intentional.
In 0.09 I've moved each of these up (Bank to Industrial, Market to Renaissance).
2> Now that you pay 100% maintenance on all buildings, including all of the "free" ones the cities start with, it's hard for your starting cities to make a profit. Part of this is that maintenance costs are flat subtractions, but most of the additions to income are multiplicative off of the base tile values. Until you improve your tiles with trading posts, you won't have money.

For instance, here are a few buildings placed in starting cities:
Forge (2 gold): Industrial or later
Colosseum (3 gold): Industrial or later
Barracks (1 gold): Industrial or later
Workshop (2 gold): Industrial or later
Market: Industrial or later
Theater (5 gold): Digital or later
Bank: Digital or later

See a trend? The market's +25% won't do much when you have no base income to build off of (no trading posts), but you've got 8 gold per turn per city being paid for buildings just from those. (There's also the Monument, Temple, etc. from earlier eras, so you're actually paying even more.) And really, why do you need a Forge and Barracks in every city?

So one solution might simply be to remove some of the "free" buildings. They're cheap enough that if you want a Barracks or Forge you can just build one yourself. And actually, removing the free Colosseum is a good idea for an entirely different reason.
In the next patch, one of the changes is a simple one: no city can produce more +Happiness from buildings than it has population. Given that, what's the point of putting a free +4 happiness building in a size 1 city? After the patch, it's going to be practically worthless at first.
In my internal version, I'm going to remove the FreeStartEra entry from the Forge, Barracks/Krepost, Colosseum, and Theater. That should help with starting money.

I think it was taking 10+ turns consistently for me. I'll try to keep more accurate count on the next playtest, but I relatively certain it was more than 6-7 turns between techs.

I think the problem is growth-related. You're starting in the Nuclear Era, and the sizes of your cities will still be lagging behind the curve by the time the tech bonus wears off. So yes, you'd have a slower pace.

I really think a good solution to this would be to provide a flat Era-based bonus to the Palace. Something like 1 gold and +1 research per Era. (Maybe not quite that much, but you get the idea.) The problem is, I'm not sure if this'll work. There IS a function

void city:setBuildingYieldChange(BuildingClassTypes eBuildingClass, YieldTypes eYield, int iChange);

and I THINK I can use this to adjust the yield to the palace based on your starting Era. So since you can only have one palace per empire, this is the same as giving each civ a flat boost in gold per turn or research per turn.
--------------
Another possibility I thought of: you know how I made it so that the first 2*X techs get a cost discount (where x goes from 0 to 9 for era numbers)? I was thinking that to help the cities grow faster early on, you could get a diminishing food bonus as well. Something like (n/4 rounded up) food per city per turn, where n is the number of discounted techs remaining. It's the same basic idea as the tech boost I gave: what the original game did through a flat percentage that stayed with you all game, I'll do through a temporary boost designed to just get you up to speed.

I'll try coding that up tonight and see how it plays, but I'm trying to debug the Nethack Terminus first. (It WAS working, but now for some reason isn't.)

Darsnan · Dec 7, 2010

Spatzimaus said:
I noticed something similar but in a different way: whenever you conquer a city the default AI setting will be whatever the previous owner had it set on. So if they were emphasizing production, it'll be set to "Emphasize Production" still. Last night, when I conquered an empire, every single city was set to "Emphasize Gold". Which means that the AIs are running negative on income from the start, and never recovering; they put every city on gold production, and their growth and production suffer as a result.

Ah, I'll keep my eyes open for this in the future.

Spatzimaus said:
In my internal version, I'm going to remove the FreeStartEra entry from the Forge, Barracks/Krepost, Colosseum, and Theater. That should help with starting money.

One of the other things from last night was that my starting cities were next to rivers, meaning the tiles were all +1 Gold, which was probably helping me as well. Would probably have been different if I'd started without rivers.

Spatzimaus said:
I think the problem is growth-related. You're starting in the Nuclear Era, and the sizes of your cities will still be lagging behind the curve by the time the tech bonus wears off. So yes, you'd have a slower pace.

It wasn't crippling - it was challenging. What was crippling was the lack of aluminum and oil: the Indians had both, and I had none: if the AI had been competent, or been able to field a larger army to just bull its way thru my defenses, well, I would have been toast.

Spatzimaus said:
Another possibility I thought of: you know how I made it so that the first 2*X techs get a cost discount (where x goes from 0 to 9 for era numbers)? I was thinking that to help the cities grow faster early on, you could get a diminishing food bonus as well. Something like (n/4 rounded up) food per city per turn, where n is the number of discounted techs remaining. It's the same basic idea as the tech boost I gave: what the original game did through a flat percentage that stayed with you all game, I'll do through a temporary boost designed to just get you up to speed.

I'll try coding that up tonight and see how it plays,

Looking forward to it! :goodjob:

D

Spatzimaus · Dec 7, 2010

Darsnan said:
One of the other things from last night was that my starting cities were next to rivers, meaning the tiles were all +1 Gold, which was probably helping me as well. Would probably have been different if I'd started without rivers.

I was thinking about this. Rivers are obviously a big deal, and they SHOULD be, and the game does seem to have some logic that places a river near your starting city. (Same for the AI.) But there doesn't seem to be much motivation for the SECOND city to be near a river for the AI, and so on.

Not much I can do about it; hopefully once I fix the deficit problem that'll go away.

It wasn't crippling - it was challenging. What was crippling was the lack of aluminum and oil

Last night I upped the number of "small" strategic resource deposits from 25 to 35. Chances are, this'll add one or two of each to the map; not enough to really swing the balance, but it's a start.

Other changes I made:
> I added that food bonus, and it REALLY made a difference on a late-era start. ("Late" meaning Fusion.) It's like an early Maritime ally that goes away once you're up to speed. For my Industrial case it wasn't too noticeable (+2 per city for the first four techs, +1 per city for the next four), but it did help.
> I took away the free Forge, Barracks/Krepost, Colosseum, and Theater. You're now no longer paying massive maintenance on buildings you don't need yet. I'm actually worried that now, you'll have too much money early on in the later era starts, but in my Industrial start, I was completely neutral on income: 13 gpt income from my capital, 8 gpt spend on buildings per city, 5 gpt to pay unit maintenance on the starting units. So I'm hoping the AI won't freak out so much over money. (Non-capital cities were more like 5 gpt, but you very quickly broke even once a couple tiles were improved.)
> Not related to the above problems, really, but I added a fifth terraforming option: the Deep Mine (at Nanomatter Editation, so it's an endgame thing and takes a LONG time to build) for the Labor Mech and Former. Basically, you use it on any tile that doesn't have a resource, and it creates a random one; I skewed its table towards Dilithium, but you might get aluminum, uranium, coal, oil, etc.

EDIT to add:
I played a bit of an Industrial-start game this morning, and I think the food bonus might still be too small. So I'm looking at changing it from /4 to /3. That means that for, say, a Nuclear Era start (Era=5, meaning 10 techs get a cost discount):
OLD: +3 food for the first two techs, +2 for the next 4, +1 for the 4 after that
NEW: +4 food for the first tech, +3 for the next three, +2 for the next 3, +1 for the 3 after that.
I don't want to take it all the way up to /2 (which'd mean +5 for the first two, +4 for the next two, and so on), though.

Another possibility is just to increase the starting city size. I already increased the free population by 1 over the default, but I think it could be taken further. Right now, a starting Industrial city is size 4, and a starting Nuclear is size 5. Bumping that up to 5/6 would definitely help with money, production, research, etc., but it'd also cripple you in terms of Happiness. Right now, without the free Colosseum (but with the Temple change in the last patch), an Industrial start hovered pretty much right at 0 Happiness; thankfully I started in a luxury-rich starting area (5 luxuries on 3 cities, and oil, but no coal; I feel a Tank invasion coming on...). So I wouldn't want to bump it up too much higher; three cities for Industrial/Nuclear, 1.2 unhappiness per pop, means that +1 starting pop adds +3.6 unhappiness, meaning you'd need an additional luxury just to survive.
(I really wish there was an easy way in the XML to add a free building to only your capital.)

I got the Nethack fixed, so I think I'll post a new version tonight. I'm already starting to work on v.0.10, which among other things add the "Breakout": once you have Centauri Empathy (not Ecology), there's a small chance of Spore Towers spawning in your territory each turn. These are Barbarian psi units, immobile, with an artillery attack; as long as they're alive, there's a chance that they'll spawn a Mindworm or Chiron Locust (if on land), Isle of the Deep (if on water), or even Nessus Worm (either), so you'll want to kill them quickly. I'm hoping that with this, I can go back to disabling the Barbarian camps and such in the later eras (since those won't spawn inside your territory).

Spatzimaus · Dec 7, 2010

A couple things I thought of during my lunch hour:

1> I screwed up. My test case for happiness was as the Persians. The Persian UB, the Satrap's Court, is given for free in any Industrial start or later. This UB is a Bank... that also adds +2 Happiness. So where I was breaking even on Happiness, the AI civs would be at -6 since they wouldn't get that UB bonus. (Egypt would be similar.)
So it looks like the Colosseum is mandatory to include, and probably should be moved up to Renaissance starts, to ensure that an Industrial or Nuclear start doesn't put the AIs in negative happiness. The 3 gpt cost is going to hurt, though, which goes back to my previous idea of having the Palace give +1 gpt and +1 research per turn per era you start in (so an Industrial start gives +4 gpt and +4 beakers, plus any multipliers in your capital). Unfortunately, I don't like this for two reasons. First, because you already have a problem where your capital is your best science city AND your best commerce city, and usually also one of your best production cities. Since there's no cap on national wonders per city (there CAN be, it's just turned off), there's no reason not to stick things like the National College in your capital (and in the upcoming patch, the new +money national wonder). Adding to the palace just makes this worse. Second, because it really screws with OCC. Not that I care too much about extreme variant games.

An alternate possibility is just to reduce the Colosseum's cost to 2gpt. It's by far the earliest 3gpt building in the game, most of the other things in that era are only 1gpt, so it's always seemed a bit high. So this might be the best solution overall.

2> I think I figured out why Settlers are so expensive, although I can't be sure until I test it (which'll have to wait until I get home tonight). They're getting discounted, like all the other units, but I THINK that the Settler's "cost" is being based on the city that will result, which means having the costs of all of the "free" buildings added in to it. So you're not just paying for the Settler, you're paying for the Workshop, Monument, Temple, etc. that'll be built in the resulting city as well. In other words, the more free buildings we tack on in later eras, the higher the Settler cost goes. In the core game the discounts are large enough that this stays at a reasonable value, but I drastically reduced most of those discounts. Besides, it's not really fair to charge full price, because you'd be better off settling the city and then building the buildings, if only for the culture and science output in the interim.
If I'm right, then it seems like less is more, and the free buildings should be kept to a minimum, at least those buildings that can pay for themselves (Market, Bank), add necessary Happiness (Temple, Colosseum, Aqueduct), or the Granary and Workshop (just because). Maybe the Watermill too, since the only way to build it would be on a river and if you're at a river you'll have plenty of gold to spare. But there's no reason to push this; the city can just spend a couple turns building one.

Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

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