[BtS][Preview] CCJ39sMod for expanded (default) gameplay

At the beginning of this mod-project I haven't planed to make it public at any time, but as a result of some requests for it, I like to release it soon.

Please post your opinion about and suggestions here, until I've finished the last few things of the mod a start a new thread in the Modpacks-Subforum.

At the moment I'm also looking for people like to translate a few pedia-textes (and other short textes) from English or German to another missing language (French, Italian, Spanish).


Here's the list of changes to the default BtS-game (atm):
-less desert on random tropic-maps
- no obsolete tech for monastery
- wonders don't obsolete and some of them adding buildings to all cities
- Great Wall requires 10 cities
- captured cities doesn't destroy most of the buildings (buildings with chance of successful capturing higher than zero are increased to 100 percent)
- Maya leader with additional traits for funplay or testing (there'll be two versions, one with and another without it)
- huge maps are huge+
- more frequently Apostolic Palace votes (9 => 6)
- added further options for UN global civic (if more than one civic in a category was agreed, the civs can choose between them, but you can revote for single one later to disallow it again)
- extended interface with attitude icons ["MainScreenMod" by "NeverMind" with some own minor changes]
- modified the buildinglist in city-screen for better visible bonuses
- Goodies for Monarch and Emperor modified (less chance for gold, map, warrior, experience, no chance for healing, added chance for worker, higher chance for strong barbarians)
- added the additional techs/buildings/units from NextWar-Mod
- increased mapsize for pangaea (large=huge, huge=huge+ like normal maps)
- added additional settlers (Colonist: citysize 2 with some buildings, Pioneer: citysize 3 with a lot buildings, Architect: citysize 1 with tons of buildings) [by "The Navy Seal" with costs-changes to 160 in version from August 13, 2007 -- maybe later with settler religion]
- all civs will start with a Worker in addition to the Settler
- "Public Transportation" have 3 bonus yields
- bonus-resources don't obsolete
- added new resources (olives, cotton, tobacco, lemon, sulphur)
- added new wonders (Leonardos Workshop, Sun Tzu's Art of War, Sphinx, Olympia Stadion)
- added new buildings (Well, Agricultural Academy)
- added new national-wonder (Cure of Cancer)
- added new techs (Inventions, Code of Honor, Sport Events, Well Sinking, Sculpture Creation, Agrarian Revolution, Applied Genetics)
- added new climate for pangaea-maps (tropical pangaea) with little bit less jungle and less hills/mountains for more realism on a world without plate tectonics
- new era-screens [graphics by "Frenchman"]
... [used some graphics and ideas from Warlords, "Next Fantasy Mod" by "strategyonly", "3 New Future Techs" by "Ark888", "Crystal Palace" by "charly1977" and the image-search of google with different sites]

planed for later versions:
- modified civ-colors to match more historical Civilization(Game)-Colors
- add settler-religion-mod
- add new carrier and transporter sea-units (carry more aircrafts, more landunits)... missing graphics atm
- add salpeter-resources in addition to sulphur (I think everybody knows which further modifications can/will be done then)

what to do until first release:
- writing all the pedia/strategy/... textes in english and german


FAQ:
- Isn't it imbalacing, if more wonders are adding free buildings?
-- Only if you're playing on a difficulty, you're able to built most of them yourself. ... In addition the new settler-units adds free buildings to new cities too, so the effekt isn't such a big one.


Screenshots: (of german-installation, but the mod should also work well in english with other language-installations)

Techtree+Resources+Cityscreen+MainInterface
World-of-Civ.com Mod-Project-Page

edit (August 30, 2007):
- modified the buildinglist in city-screen for better visible bonuses

edit (August 31, 2007):
- new era-screens [graphics by "Frenchman"]

edit (September 01, 2007):
added some screenshots

edit (September 03, 2007):
added new screenshot for maininterface (probable final one)

edit (September 04, 2007):
added screenshot for maininterface with updated section

edit (March 11, 2010):
mod finally released as MegaDevMod on world-of-civ.com... replaced not working previews with link to downloadpage... final-mod-description and new screenshots available on the downloadpage too

Looks very cool... most loooking forward to the added techs/units/buildings from Nextwar.

I'm not sure about the Settler changes. Seems it goes "too far". I'd stop at the city size 2 Settler.

How did you decide on the new resources? Just curious.

thanks

I've tried the new settler-units with different costs and was looking how it effects the AI... in my opinion it opens some new game-strategies (e.g. technology-advanced civs can catched up with faster (=cheaper) expansion by the other civs)... but try it yourself in a few games soon

resources are still in balancing, but you can build plantation to "olives, cotton, tobacco, lemon" and mine to sulphur... wait a day or two than it's easier to me to tell you good details

CCJ39 said:

thanks

I've tried the new settler-units with different costs and was looking how it effects the AI... in my opinion it opens some new game-strategies (e.g. technology-advanced civs can catched up with faster (=cheaper) expansion by the other civs)... but try it yourself in a few games soon

resources are still in balancing, but you can build plantation to "olives, cotton, tobacco, lemon" and mine to sulphur... wait a day or two than it's easier to me to tell you good details

Click to expand...

Excellent. I think I know where you're going with Sulphur. Maybe you should have saltpeter too?

jpinard said:

Excellent. I think I know where you're going with Sulphur. Maybe you should have saltpeter too?

Click to expand...

hehe, yeah, but not with the first version

btw: what about your mod-comps (haven't full view of all of your requests, ideas and so on)? do you think some of them are useful to this mod too? maybe we can put all or most of them together

updated first post with some screenshots


@jpinard

I think the resources should be final in this way between realism and balancing

added new screenshot of the revised maininterface

new:
- added statistics for percent and value of total worldpopulation (real population, not added up city-sizes)
- added statistics for percent and value of total landmass
- added information for total cities on map, cities you own, cities you've build, cities you've razed, cities you've captured (you can enable/disable all 5 values separately)

CCJ39 - I LOVE the little Daisy's!!! They look excellent! I think you're got 4 identical pictures in one of the hint dropdowns.

And I also love most of the changes you've made. They all make perfect sense. I only have one question.

Most my games end up with slow begginning and a few wars swordsman, then clean clear through to modern age where people start building gadgilliliiions of stacks of enermy units. Everyone chopped down there forest and farms, and now just run a megacity-apolisis.

Maybe I can work with you on balancing this out for long games (slightly larger than Huge maps) + 14 civs. I think the issue late game is it's all tech and gold.... and like I said - insane amount of units. It would be great to have an expanded game perfectly balanced and tested for Marathon.

added updated section-screenshot of the maininterface... now including the cities you've lost and some unit details (total number of non-barbarian units on map, number of barbarian units on map, number of your units)


@jpinard

my games are most beginning with a phase of wonder&settler-construction while cities are growing up and building the settlers faster than enemy and I'm able to research quicker than the AI... for this reason I play on oversized huge maps with 12 players to have enough space for settle until I need to build more than one defence-unit to my cities... in the Medieval I can quickly build some knights and/or swordsman (resp. something else) to fully capture 1-3 near enemies, befor I settle again the last free plots in my region... up to this time the game is ok to me, but after it it's necessary to wait up to tanks and so on to be successful in war without wasting tons of units for citysizes 10+ with lot of enemy-units in... also when it's possible to build sawmills to the forest, most of forest isn't there anymore, but enabling option for automatic workers to leave all forest isn't quite useful for the human-player... I think a "plant forest" feature with a good balanced AI-value to build it, should be added to fix the forest-problems... in addition I like to modify the worker-AI to not build fortress to each resource in culture-borders which cannot used by a city at the moment (most of my workers are building such nonsense instead of building useful parts for the cities and if I settle near such plot and a city can use this resource now, the workers need again some time to realize and build the correct improvement)

as you says, the problem may is a to big AI-value for getting gold of all possible plots... if we're able to modify the AI-values it should be easy to fix, but maybe difficulty to balance fine

last week I've tested what's the maximum size of city (and so the real-population) without using corporations... I've added to all plots of a city (with river) maize/corn and wheat with irrigation and increased the citysize up to something 50+ (the limit befor famine)... don't know why, but the stupid workers came from the outer (unworked) part of my land to the full worked on inland and started to move half of the irrigated plots to watermills for which reason the city comes to famine and they started to irrigate again some plots (not necessary to mention what happens after the plots are irrigated again )

I didn't know this until a few weeks ago, but are you aware of the option to have the game play itself for testing? If not, I'll go through the process to explain (I forgot at the moment).

I would so love to help you do all the English translations, but I am swamped with review projects at this time. But, if you do the basic translation I can clean them up for you. Despite my previous posts (written while falling asleep) I'm pretty literate.

What I was trying to say is be careful of the tech wins all situation. In each game I've played it seems those with the tech/money always win. Though military civs stomp out some civs early, they always become nobody's by game end. If your mod enhances the tech/money angle it could further unbalance the game.

On another note, what kind of rig d you have? I thought my system was fast, but it gets painfully slow by ~1940.

jpinard said:

I would so love to help you do all the English translations, but I am swamped with review projects at this time. But, if you do the basic translation I can clean them up for you. Despite my previous posts (written while falling asleep) I'm pretty literate.

What I was trying to say is be careful of the tech wins all situation. In each game I've played it seems those with the tech/money always win. Though military civs stomp out some civs early, they always become nobody's by game end. If your mod enhances the tech/money angle it could further unbalance the game.

On another note, what kind of rig d you have? I thought my system was fast, but it gets painfully slow by ~1940.

Click to expand...

thx, as soon as I've finished the first few translations, I'll send you a pre-release version for testing and translation-optimization

atm there're more tech-enhances than military ones, but military-ones are planed for later versions, so maybe it's "easy"/possible to rebalance to military-civs with later versions

I'm playing on a AMD Barton 3000+ with 2GB memory on the oversized maps and sure in later games it's sometime not really fun to play if I wasn't able to own at least 1/3 of the world...

well, long time ago I was working on this mod... more than 2 years and no much further work, only some private testing with 10 users... but now I've finally released this great mod as MegaDevMod

if someone is interested in, please visit the latest version with description and screenshots at world-of-civ.com