Probably Improved Gameplay Mod

PieceOfMind said:

[*]Return granary to original cost - increasing its cost has not changed strategy by much, if at all.
[*]Instead, to reduce the power of slavery, the anger from multiple-pop whips or piling on consecutive whips will be increased somehow.

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More and longer anger probably won't do much, either. People are notoriously good at calculating happiness and dealing with unhappiness.

Overall, though this is an impressive mod.

To return to the slavery question:

Would altering slavery have a negative impact on the AI, since it's been trained to use Slavery more?

What about adding large unhealthiness to all cities when Slavery is run? Killing off large segments of the population can't be good for the stability of the gene pool at large, and the penalty to growth in cities where you aren't whipping might start offsetting the bonuses where you are.

That's an interesting idea. One of the problem I can see coming is that the AI is notoriously bad at understanding the negative effects of civics.

Bandobras Took said:

More and longer anger probably won't do much, either. People are notoriously good at calculating happiness and dealing with unhappiness.

Overall, though this is an impressive mod.

To return to the slavery question:

Would altering slavery have a negative impact on the AI, since it's been trained to use Slavery more?

What about adding large unhealthiness to all cities when Slavery is run? Killing off large segments of the population can't be good for the stability of the gene pool at large, and the penalty to growth in cities where you aren't whipping might start offsetting the bonuses where you are.

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Well the AI does have a way of taking into account the slave anger timers. Sure, it's not as good as it should be but increasing the anger time would be at least one of the ways of changing slavery that shouldn't have a huge impact on the AI in its present form.

Of course, in general, simply tweaking XML values should have little effect on the AI. It could only be when the ballpark of XML values change (eg. changing the whipping timer to 0 instead of 10) or entire new strategies or lines of reasoning are required that AIs will truly struggle. Introducing new units is the classic example of something the AI will fail with unless it is adequately taught how to use the new stuff.

Civics are indeed an area of AI where its intelligence is very lacking and I agree this is something where we have to be careful with the approach.

Regarding the suggestion of a global unhealthiness penalty for slavery, I think that could work. In the BCs when cities are still fairly healthy the penalty is not likely to have a large impact, but as time goes on and cities start reaching higher average size, the slavery civic should become less and less attractive. Taking the realism stance, slavery shouldn't be as likely once you reach the industrial era but at the moment a lot of people take advantage of slavery when the multipliers like factories etc. are brought into the picture.

Bandobras Took said:

More and longer anger probably won't do much, either. People are notoriously good at calculating happiness and dealing with unhappiness.

Overall, though this is an impressive mod.

To return to the slavery question:

Would altering slavery have a negative impact on the AI, since it's been trained to use Slavery more?

What about adding large unhealthiness to all cities when Slavery is run? Killing off large segments of the population can't be good for the stability of the gene pool at large, and the penalty to growth in cities where you aren't whipping might start offsetting the bonuses where you are.

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Of course more and/or longer will do much. You can "calculate" all you want, but if you're getting more for your 2- and 3-pop whips, you're inevitably going to have to slow down on the whipping.

The problem with Slavery in the early game (if you feel that it's a "problem" at all, of course), is that you can have a barely improved city with one or two food resources function like a production powerhouse, cranking out 3-ish Axemen every 15-ish turns indefinitely. More from higher-pop whips will make that unsustainable.

You want to know something that REALLY needs fixed? The city governor behavior when you set the city to build Wealth (maybe Research/Culture too).

Building Wealth in a city causes the governor to change the tile allocation to maximize . In production cities with high multipliers but few others, this is pretty much the worst thing it could possibly be doing.

aday said:

You want to know something that REALLY needs fixed? The city governor behavior when you set the city to build Wealth (maybe Research/Culture too).

Building Wealth in a city causes the governor to change the tile allocation to maximize . In production cities with high multipliers but few others, this is pretty much the worst thing it could possibly be doing.

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I am pretty sure Better AI addresses this problem. If so, then it's likely to creep its way into this mod anyway.

aday said:

The problem with Slavery in the early game (if you feel that it's a "problem" at all, of course), is that you can have a barely improved city with one or two food resources function like a production powerhouse, cranking out 3-ish Axemen every 15-ish turns indefinitely. More from higher-pop whips will make that unsustainable.

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Isn't that the point of Slavery? I certainly don't maximize its use (I just hate losing out on working Cottages or Mines, even though whipping might be better), but what is the real problem with it? I think if you first define precisely what the problem is, the solution will present itself.

What I read earlier is that people keep running Slavery long after it "should" be run. That's pretty vague, but it's a start. Yet above the complaint is that it's too powerful in the early game. Which is it?

EmperorFool said:

Isn't that the point of Slavery? I certainly don't maximize its use (I just hate losing out on working Cottages or Mines, even though whipping might be better), but what is the real problem with it? I think if you first define precisely what the problem is, the solution will present itself.

What I read earlier is that people keep running Slavery long after it "should" be run. That's pretty vague, but it's a start. Yet above the complaint is that it's too powerful in the early game. Which is it?

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Okay yeah, that's the point of Slavery, the problem is that it's too good. (Again, if you consider it to be a "problem" at all.) As it is now, it's the best civic in the game. The to conversion ratio is incredible, and, with 2- and 3-pop whips, it comes at almost no cost. And then there's the intangible benefits of being able to emergency rush.

Of course, all of this may be by design. There's certainly no rule that says certain civics can't be very powerful when used correctly. But overall, I think having a more severe penalty for 2- and 3-pop whips would have a positive effect on game balance, making Slavery less of a given.

aday said:

The to conversion ratio is incredible

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why not to lower the conversion rate it that case?

I'm interested in trying this mod out, but I have a question first: how much lag should I expect? My computer already has problems in the late game with only plain BTS and BUG installed. Does it require much more system power?

Ignorant Teacher said:

I'm interested in trying this mod out, but I have a question first: how much lag should I expect? My computer already has problems in the late game with only plain BTS and BUG installed. Does it require much more system power?

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For all intents and purposes, this mod will run as fast as Standard BtS with BUG and Better AI. Most of the changes so far are XML tweaks and the GWMod probably does not impact speed at all.

Note the current included version of Better AI is not the latest version where speed improvements were made. This older version of Better AI does slow the game down a little bit.

Hi PieceOfMind,
I have been reading a bit about your mod and recently subscribed to this thread. I am very interested in your ideas and I think you have picked a lot of the right things to focus on and try to improve. Your careful approach to changing game elements sounds perfect for a player like me.
...Sometimes it's helpful to know that you are doing something that other people are interested in.
So, I hope that you can continue improving this mod for the good of us all!
Regarding your "To Do" list, if I may suggest, perhaps the simple changes (granary cost) could be done alone (or with a few other minor changes) in a mini update?
Keep up the good work!!

btw I haven't installed this mod yet, but plan to do so just as soon as I can finish/give up on my current game

I've completed the SDK part of the Fractional Trade feature, and it seems to work well. I need to make BUG aware of it when it's present and have a question or two.

Trade is rounded after adding up the routes for each city. In a few places (e.g. the Foreign Advisor's INFO tab) only some routes per city are summed up to show a total. In this case, no value I display can ever be totally correct.

Simple example: you have two cities each with three 1.50 trade routes to three rivals. Each city's trade total will be 1.50 * 3 = 4 rounded. However, when the trade routes are added per rival, each rival's trade total will be 1.50 * 2 = 3 . The total trade commerce is 4 * 2 cities = 8 , yet adding up the values on the INFO tab will give you 3 * 3 rivals = 9 .

Question: What should I show here? In this case there's really not much I can do. There's no way to account for the rounding. In this case, I think it makes sense to show the fractional (unrounded) value, hoping the player will realize that a value with decimal places indicates that it's not rounded and may be approximate.

The two other places are the City Bar hover (total and foreign trade) and the Finance Advisor (total domestic and foreign trade).

Does it make sense to show two decimal places in all these cases?

why not to use floating point variables to store commerce values and show integers in interface only?

Some background first perhaps:

• All arithmetic is done using integers. When non-integral values are needed (e.g. commerce), the value is stored "times 100" to allow for exactly two decimals. This allows faster calculations while allowing for an exact fractional amount.
• All yields food:, , and ) are stored and added up as whole numbers. The only place a fractional yield occurs is in this new feature, and it's only fractional while adding up the trade routes for a single city. The total for a city is rounded as soon as it gets converted into actual (and and , but in BTS the trade route yield modifiers for those yields are both 0%).

The storage and calculation of fractional trade routes aren't the problem; I've completely handled them with no issues. The only issue arrises is when displaying the values to the user not aggregated city-by-city. When displaying the total trade with a single rival, I must add up a subset of trade route yields across cities. If I do the rounding for each city individually as I would when summing up all trade routes, the lost will be wrong, producing incorrect totals.


So, what to do given that I have to display slightly incorrect trade totals? My suggestion is to show the unrounded total to indicate that it's approximate, just as the unrounded value is shown when hovering over a single trade route in a city.

I have committed the SDK changes for Fractional Trade to BULL's SVN repository. I have also completed the BUG changes to show fractions in the Trade Route and Raw Yields tables.

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but I wanted to make sure it's a known issue for the next version:

Castles have been modded to obsolete at Steel rather than Economics. However, the Spanish UB, the Citadel, is still listed in the Civilopedia as obsoleting at Economics.

The Dun (Celtic UB of the Wall) is also not listed with the +25% to Trade Route Yield bonus. (Not sure if this one was intentional or not.)

As a frequent Sitting Bull player the change to Serfdom as it stands is actually quite interesting to me; that +1 commerce seems like it could make a big difference on city maintenance management if added up across an SE empire, while the -25% gpp is a deterrent to remaining in it forever (particularly for non-PHI leaders). As it is, it seems like a good civic to use while I'm still getting my empire up and running in the mid-game, but which I might eventually want to switch out of for Caste (if running SE) or Emancipation (if I need the happiness). Very cool to have decisions to make about that.

I'll play a game with it soon and try to give more feedback, but at present I rather like the +1 commerce more than the proposed +1 hammer and so forth. (Caste System's workshops should remain the strong +hammer part of the labor tree, in my current opinion.)

Gonna play and see what ideas come to mind.

Does the AI know to build the changed forts for the commerce?

any ETA on a new PIG release?

Lenowill said:

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but I wanted to make sure it's a known issue for the next version:

Castles have been modded to obsolete at Steel rather than Economics. However, the Spanish UB, the Citadel, is still listed in the Civilopedia as obsoleting at Economics.

The Dun (Celtic UB of the Wall) is also not listed with the +25% to Trade Route Yield bonus. (Not sure if this one was intentional or not.)

As a frequent Sitting Bull player the change to Serfdom as it stands is actually quite interesting to me; that +1 commerce seems like it could make a big difference on city maintenance management if added up across an SE empire, while the -25% gpp is a deterrent to remaining in it forever (particularly for non-PHI leaders). As it is, it seems like a good civic to use while I'm still getting my empire up and running in the mid-game, but which I might eventually want to switch out of for Caste (if running SE) or Emancipation (if I need the happiness). Very cool to have decisions to make about that.

I'll play a game with it soon and try to give more feedback, but at present I rather like the +1 commerce more than the proposed +1 hammer and so forth. (Caste System's workshops should remain the strong +hammer part of the labor tree, in my current opinion.)

Gonna play and see what ideas come to mind.

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Much appreciated.

All civilopedia entires have not been touched yet. Please use the thread or the included readme as the sole authority on what has been changed. For things like the Dun and Spanish UB, I have made the same changes in the XML so don't worry that the civilopedia entires are wrong.

It's interesting you think the Serfdom change is interesting. I was thinking about removing it in the next version. At the moment I'm worried it makes Financial a bit too good because riverside farms under Serfdom for them will get the extra commerce bonus. Maybe Financial needed a very small boost anyway, and to run it means you can't exploit slavery.

Does the AI know to build the changed forts for the commerce?

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Not sure. I think the AI knows how to figure out the value of any improvement but I'm not sure if it knows how to deal with forts specifically.

essmene said:

any ETA on a new PIG release?

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Next release will probably only be a update of existing components (e.g. newer version of Better AI and BUG). I'm also planning to return granary to its original cost as I think it was a mistake. Can't really give an ETA because I'm unable to work on it at the moment.

I will try this mod out, and revert some change in promotion. Here why, as maybe the author will want to know why I edit theses :

* March should come from medic I. Because it's the main use of red cross, without this this wonder is really weakened. I know you love drill, but I don't think it's a good idea, even if it increase the power of oromo warrior at the same time.
* woodman on recon unit... I don't understand why such a cheesy change is included. It mean being able to create Woodman III explorer without breaking a sweet, and I find this borderline exploit. An explorer is NOT someone who tend yours wounds. And he gain no other benefit from it, so...

There is others changesI'm more than skeptical, but I can try them out :
* castle obsolete in steel : It weaken the spanish UB a LOT. I will not play spanish, so I can let this slip, but still I don't like to weaken them that much.
* Praetorian change seem strange to me. I would say it does not change the balance at all since axeman will not even be cheaper.

Last thing, I don't have the time to read the 9 pages, but I would like to understand the tech req changes. I don't see them as bad, but I don't see why they are here.