Altered assimilation time for governaments and Elerians

Joined
Jun 27, 2007
Messages
2,248
Location
Hamilton, Ontario
This has been discussed before but I'm going to outline the plan before I do it.
Elerian's can mind control planets which instantly assimilate into their empire. To do this, I'll make it so that when Elerian unit captures a city the turns the city stays in revolt is deduced to zero. There is an ability that promotions can give that will reduce the change of a city revolt that was never used in the game. I can simply give that a second effect to reduce revolt time, which would save time and work. This could also be used in another way. The Alien Management Center wouldn't work in civ the way it works in MoO because you can't build anything while the city is in revolt. So another way to implement it is to have the alien management center be a building that gives a revolt protection promotion to units built in the city, then with the new effect these promoted units could capture cities and have them stay in revolt for a shorter time. Similar effect implemented differently.
Now for governments it would work the same with democracy reducing revolt time and unification greatly increasing it.
 
There may be a snag in this plan. I'm not sure the code knows which unit is capturing a city, so having a promotion reduce revolt time might not work, but it knows which player is taking a city, so it could be an aspect of a leader trait instead of a promotion given by a leader trait that does this. That means the Alien Management Center idea wouldn't happen, but the Elerians could still have this ability and civics still could.
 
Someone also suggested making the communications technologies civics since civics can give free unit support, so I created a communications civics field.
I noticed all civics are in there own tech field, I assume because no one wanted to have to decide where to place all of them. I've heard talk about removing the whole sociology field. If that's not decided yet, I'll reorder the civic technologies while I'm placing the new governments in the tech tree. A lot of civics would be hard to place in technological fields alone, so the sociology field is kind of necessary, even though it's not the most interesting field.
 
I'm not sure if it was mentioned, but IMO Sociology is indeed perfect for civics. (Also because it's according to MoO canon to keep Sociology.) ;)
 
I've written the code for civics that alter revolt time and it works. Next I have to add in code to the AI so it understands the effects when it picks civics, and put the new civics into the tech tree.
While doing that I'll find better places for the other civic rather than have them all together.
Also if there's no objection I'll move the basic diplomacy tech to where xeno philosophy is in MoO2 since it is the understanding of aliens, and that makes sense for unlocking diplomacy options.
 
Looking at the values the AI uses for value of civics and I'm seeing some things needing to be adjusted. Since most buildings can be built about eight times per city, the feudal/dictatorship +1:) from both barracks is a possible 16:) which is huge and in MoO2 the moral bonus from barracks is actually supposed to be countering a penalty, so I'll do two things to get it closer to that. Just have the bonus for the marine barracks and give those two civic :mad: from something else. One way is to give 3:mad: to the largest cities (reverse of vanilla civ's representative), although that would only be a small number of cities on the larger maps. Another idea is to have :mad: from non-state values (the reverse of vanilla civ's free religion). It makes sense logically for dissagrement with those militant governments causing unrest and needing military presence to keep dissenters quiet. Also since the temples in this mod have more effects than in vanilla civ there is more reason to want all values, but it will be a trade off. So I'm thinking 2:mad: for each non-stare value, of which there would be potentially four, which makes for possibly 8:mad: that could be countered with 8 barracks.
Also, the unification +50%:hammers: is way to big. Remember in vanilla civ where the +50%:hammers: to buildings from organised religion was overpowered they took it down to 25%:hammers: in a patch? Well that was just buildings and just cities with the state religion, so if that 50%:hammers: was too much, a +50%:hammers: on everything would have to be. Since it's both :food: and :hammers: I'm thinking try 25%. In MoO2 it was considered way better that the science/tax bonus from democracy while democracy cost more pics. For democracy's bonus (and feudal's penalty) I think we should try the original 50%, since it is (not including the diplomacy bonus) the only advantage given to Humans.
With these numbers it still seems that unification is the best and democracy just somewhat above the other two, but this is just from what I've set up in the worldbuilder so the more diverse situation in a real game my show more fluctuation in value. I've written it into the AI to have it consider the modified capture time of civics during war so at least at that time unification gets a worse score by the AI. It's hard to make the better governments better, but no have them be so much that it's an automatic choice to change to the next, and never stick with your intended civic. Eventually advanced governments will be added and a better way to balance might be to balance the advanced form of a government against the other basics. So even if unification is still the best, confederation would beat it.
Now, before I was going to have unification have no upkeep from number of cities and the others have varying levels, but that might not be a good idea. The disadvantage of unification having increased capture time is that it produces nothing but increases cost, but if it doesn't have the number of cities maintenance then it's meaningless. So I'm going to leave that out for not. It could be put back in as just an increase on other governments with unification staying the same if another disadvantage is needed for lesser governments

The planned economy civic has a +1:) from your state value but because of multiple buildings in cities, that's overshadowed by buildings, and I don't know of the no distance from palace upkeep bonus ever gets big enough to be better than other options. So any ideas of what could be added to that? EDIT: How about, +30%:hammers: for buildings with state value.

Lastly, I've added some more stuff to the military civics that I saw in Final Frontier Plus, (mostly just more free unit upkeep) and any civic that had a :commerce: penalty is now no upkeep. Why have to pay for it twice?

All the tech table stuff is done for civics so it's mostly just these details and finishing up the AI that's left
 
Well, that certainly looks well thought through. ;)

The only caveat I'd really like to make is the Democracy bonus (although that might still work out in practice): I reduced the Human bonus from 50 to 25%, because - having played the Humans as a favourite for quite some time - I noticed that especially in economy it's a huge bonus all through the game; contrary to MoO economy never seems to pose a problem in MOO2Civ as it is now (which again, I think, is because all bonuses are multiplied if attached to multiple buildable buildings in a planetary system).

At any rate, I can't wait to see your proposed civics changes in action.
 
I've recently noticed that with the 3:mad: to the largest cities thing confuses the AI somehow and it thinks it is a good thing when choosing civics. So while I was reading the AIs value of civics with that feature I thought (because it thought) that they were better than they were. So it looks like feudal and dictatorship don't need anything like extra :mad: to make them less that the two better governments. Also population is more limited by planet size than :) so getting more :) fromp buildings isn't a huge advantage. The hereditary rule bonus is unlimited (i.e. there is no limit to the units you can station in the city) and cheaper to build than buildings, so two buildings giving the bonus isn't an out of control bonus. I'll reduce the AI's value of increased food production since it doesn't limit your max population since most planets can support themselves so it's really just changes your growth rate. Also I'll adjust the Feudal science penalty so if at war (when the unit production bonus is more highly values) it will be competitive with dictatorship.
I'm getting tired of making these small adjustments and going in circles, so I'll get something out so other people can see how it works soon rather than try to perfect it first.
 
OK this will take a while longer because I realised there was a bug where the game would crash when you try and reload a saved game. I didn't know that type of bug could happen so I wasn't checking for it after each change so I don't know when it happened. So I'm going to have to start at an earlier version and add things back one at a time.
EDIT: However, I'll get something out that doesn't include the code changes before that, since the capture time code is only one part of what I've been doing. So things will be lopsided in favour of Unification since they won't have the slow taking over of new cities as a disadvantage and Democracy won't have the corresponding advantage. I'm starting to wonder if despite all the work it's taking for that feature if it will really have that much of an impact on how the game plays out? Probably more on marathon speed, but I'll have to wait to find out.
 
The civic city revolt time changes were preventing saves from being loaded so I removed them and just left Elerian colony control part and I'm uploading it.
The iRevoltProtection field in CIV4PromotionsInof.xml now also reduces revolt time when capturing in addition to preventing revolts. The Elerian promotion is the only one that uses it. So colonies captured by Elerians are productive right away.
 
Top Bottom