Building Made Fun!

Possibly the end of the world... how can one be sure?

I woke up drowsy and apathetic. Again; my alarm clock rang some 4 hours earlier. The smell of alcohol imprinted on my mind. Time to tackle the beast. I didn't want to get involved too much, but she dragged me in, conspiring all the way, growing her thread ever longer. A mysterious creature, only approachable through my buddy. I patted her, but she didn't purr, she roared, quietly. She didn't feel the same anymore, a patchwork of old and new thrown in a melting pot. I'd have to play rough. I put on a bright light, raised my voice. She just sat there, scowled, mocking the lines I added. But I persisted, and in a fit of rage, dismembered her to the spine. She yielded her secrets.
The sun rose again through the clouds over the lakenhalle and I pledged: I will sit this through...

200th reply in this topic and over 20,000 total downloads, yay

So what was the question again? Right, the answer: it would hurt my ego I invested too much time, I need to trigger my reward function to compensate. I know where to find stuff and the job ahead is really boring (looking & copy-pasting ad infinitum). I should find a day's worth of time. Hope you don't mind. In little over a week I'll be abroad and my computer stored, far away. Limitless artistic freedom!

I have a question (and sorry if it's been asked already). Why does BMF restrict National Wonders to only 3 per city? I can understand the idea that you want to encourage more strategic planning with regards to Nat Wonder placement rather than simply spamming them all into your super-capital. I like that this limit encourages to me to have a dedicated cultural city; military city; gold producing city, etc. However, my concerns/suggestions are:

i) this 3 wonder limit makes it incredible hard for small empires, especially OCC. Palace and NC take up 2 slots already, which limits the building of only 1 additional Nat Wonder for the entire game (not that we can sell / disband wonders either if we ever want to change our strategy and build a different one). To me this seems to really limit building options and is the opposite of building made fun. Perhaps we can increase the per city national wonder limit to 5? This gives some flexibility to add 3 additional Nat Wonders to the capital after the palace and NC.

ii) to my count, there are 21 National Wonders (including the Palace and the 2 from the City State Diplomacy mod). Unfortunately, if you are a wonder hoarder like me and want to build every single thing possible, this necessitates the creation / annexing of at least 7 cities in order to have the option of building all the national wonders. To me, this seems to be a pretty wide empire (especially on standard size maps). I am guessing that most builders like to build tall empires and limit their city number to 3-5? Perhaps the Nat Wonder limit per city can be dependent on map size?

iii) Since culture-based tile flipping is no longer implemented in this game, the only way to acquire your neighbor's tile involve war: either razing / puppeting the city that owns the tile or using a culture bomb which usually leads to a DoW. Would it be possible to implement a peaceful way of acquiring tiles? e.g. trading for them through diplomacy (the way you can buy / trade cities, so why not plots of land?) or buying them in the city "buy a tile" screen (except the cost would be greatly increased and the money would go directly to the other Civ that you are buying the tile from).

Thanks and keep up the great work!

You answered the question perfectly in your first paragraph

Good further points. I agree that the national wonders should all be buildable for a tall empire. Let's say 4 cities... yes, you're right I will change the limit to five immediately! Though for OCC it shouldn't matter as it uses separate XML values for that (no limit there).
Your third point would be nice but out of our league I'm afraid.

Thanks for the valuable feedback! The result coming to a server near you (well, virtually) soon
(And vastly improved on again later I'm sure!)

galious said:

iii) Since culture-based tile flipping is no longer implemented in this game, the only way to acquire your neighbor's tile involve war: either razing / puppeting the city that owns the tile or using a culture bomb which usually leads to a DoW. Would it be possible to implement a peaceful way of acquiring tiles? e.g. trading for them through diplomacy (the way you can buy / trade cities, so why not plots of land?) or buying them in the city "buy a tile" screen (except the cost would be greatly increased and the money would go directly to the other Civ that you are buying the tile from).

Thanks and keep up the great work!

Click to expand...

well, about culture-based tile flipping, maybe this could interest you

Imma try go Gung-ho on this, get rid of every reference to CivUP and then adress bugs

References are out. All moved to a separate file that can be activated. Nearly done. Tomorrow for sure this time. I'll present you with a neat package, hopefully bug-free. Also put in an icon for racecourse for you to use.

Yay! Look foward to v11 people!

And rejoice, it's done!

Everything's finished, but some further testing would be prudent. Balance probably will need further tweaking as well. One new wonder was added because of this line in the patch notes: Space victory now possible without overlapping Diplomatic victory. This made me realize the tail of my tech tree was flawed. Instead of moving Globalization around, I introduced a new wonder (see attachment). After all, world leaders are future stuff. Now the victory condition paths are balanced more neatly. Otherwise nothing new; that's up to my successor

As for CiVUP: I got it working after all, it's just quite tricky. Out of the box they're not compatible (no references to CiVUP tables in the core mod). The readme has instructions how to ensure they work together. For this mod it just means renaming two files. But the whole do-this-before-that process is the biggest hurdle.

I will make this official some time before the weekend. Pouakai: would you let me upload this a final time? I'd really appreciate that, the urge to pull this off was just too great. I announce you as successor in the mod info

Hi - sorry for the noob question but I was trying the latest version of this mod (no other mods enabled) but I couldn't get past the first turn as it was not possible to build any buildings in the initial city!

Is this a bug or... ?

Also do I understand correctly that the version 11 attached in the previous post can be manually installed? If so, in which steam directory should I put it?

Finally, is the mod compatible with any other mod, such as RED?

With grateful thanks in advance for your replies!

I haven't tried the latest version yet, but with version 10 I have occasionally experienced the same problem that kampa532 described. I would found my first city but would be unable to click on the choose production icon (or rather, the icon would be unresponsive). However, I had always assumed that it was a problem with one of my other mods and the issue always fixed itself after a reload or two. I was also running info addict, city state diplomacy, not another city state mod (kind of buggy), and resource display panel. Didn't think much of it until I read about someone else having the same glitch. *shrugs*

ps. @ Gedemon: thanks for the link to the culture diffusion mod! I had actually looked at it before but it didn't seem that all of the glitches had been worked out yet (i.e. culture-bomb effects being undone the very next turn; newly conquered cities having all their tiles flip back to ownership of their original civ the next turn; etc.). I guess I will give it a shot in my next game though.

By all means Moriboe, go ahead! You earnt the right!

kampa532 said:

Is this a bug or... ?

Click to expand...

Not a general one. To test I just cleared other versions, then downloaded the attachment, installed, played: runs fine here. Did you remember to clear your cache before installing? This can do magic.

To install manually you can use archive software like winrar to extract the mod. Make a "Building Made Fun (v 11)" subfolder in MODS and extract everything to that folder.

Compatibility: I tested RED for an earlier version and it was fine, don't know the status now. Certain compatibility goes for Unit-Tweaks by Mentos and NACSM by Iceco. As this mod is very light on Lua, chances for compatibility are generally favorable. I'd say just give it a try.

A tip: there is a file "Database.log" in the "Logs" folder (same place you find MODS) which is an indication of stuff going wrong. Errors in this file don't necessarily mean you will notice problems, and likewise some issues don't throw errors in this place. But its good info to look at and supply for troubleshooting.

@galious: I too experienced something similar occasionally: the top panel would just repeatedly state "UI didn't load!" and as you say, reloading fixed it. I just 'blamed' it on CiVUP (introduced in v10.smt) Other problems, such as no building selection, I only encountered during development as a symptom of some bug. Never had it occur (seemingly) randomly, or after I fixed said bug.

@kampa532: you could try a completely fresh install if clearing the cache is not enough: Move all contents out of the MODS folder (temporarily), clear cache and clear ModUserData (just to be sure). Only then install. No need to install manually.

@Pouakai: Great! My peace of mind says thanks

edit: tweaked a bit, now uses one Lua file less

Uploaded to the mod browser already, as I'm signing off at the end of the day.

Many thanks for the tips! works fine now...

Just... wow. But let me remind you of something Pouakai -- This!
Full steam ahead, damn the torpedoes.

hey good mod. I have downloaded some of the same wonders included in this mod independently of the mod. If I activate/deactivate those wonder mods and use this at the same time will that cause problems?

Zyxpsilon said:

Just... wow. But let me remind you of something Pouakai -- This!
Full steam ahead, damn the torpedoes.

Click to expand...

Damn straight

I have learnt since then, mainly through wonders, and IMO learn by doing.

nice to see another update of bmf

i m not entirely sure but it seems to happen only when i have bmf enabled. build a farm on a tile and then when horses appear build a pasture... and the game crashes.... anyone else observed that ?

Wandered into this thread while trying to figure out why the game won't let me build anything in the first turn...

Anyway, I just want to say that BMF has to be my favorite mod for CiV!
My only issue is that it's not compatible with SmoothPack mod--although BMF already has most of the nice interface addons, it is missing the feature where you can simply hover the cursor over the cities to see which tiles are being worked. I'm secretly hoping that this feature would find its way into the future versions.

Now what was it that I came here for again?

EDIT: v11 IS compatible with SmoothPack, with the removal of CivUP, i guess. Now if someone could merge the overhead promotion display with SmoothPack...

Evanescence said:

Wandered into this thread while trying to figure out why the game won't let me build anything in the first turn...

Anyway, I just want to say that BMF has to be my favorite mod for CiV!
My only issue is that it's not compatible with SmoothPack mod--although BMF already has most of the nice interface addons, it is missing the feature where you can simply hover the cursor over the cities to see which tiles are being worked. I'm secretly hoping that this feature would find its way into the future versions.

Now what was it that I came here for again?

EDIT: v11 IS compatible with SmoothPack, with the removal of CivUP, i guess. Now if someone could merge the overhead promotion display with SmoothPack...

Click to expand...

Hey! Could you provide me a link to SmoothPack, as I've never heard of it, and being able to see it could mean I will be able to figure out what the issue is