Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

It sounds like I really just need to code a wider-ranging "head start" setup, where production and gold are boosted for the first few turns in the same way research and food are.

The problem I was experiencing occured later in the game: I had a military and was trying to add to it for the anticipated upcoming AI invasion. I had cash, but couldn't afford to outright buy units or buildings, so while I waited for my next generation of conscripts to be produced (and for the AI to attack) I kept pressing return. There really wasn't anything else to do at that point. This occured around the time of the mid-nuclear era: I could build APCs and tanks, but not Modern Armor yet. I'd built all the production enhancing items available at the time, yet infantry were still taking greater than ten turns to produce.

To use SMAC as an analogy here, why I believe there were times like this in SMAC as well (where you would be waiting for something to occur), however there was "always something to do" during these lulls due to NL invasions (either random, fungal pops, or the Perihelion event).

So rather than add more starting Workers to each empire, I actually thought that a way to handle this would be for cities in later eras to automatically improve a number of tiles around the city when you found them. Even if it didn't place the RIGHT improvements, it'd help get your empires started. For logic I was thinking:
> Loop N times, where N is the era number you started in (so 4 for Industrial, 9 for Transcendence); instead of hard-coding this, I might just set it in a table in the Eras file
> For each iteration, pick a tile near the city (preferably in the first ring, but I might prioritize resources)
> If that tile has a resource, place the appropriate Improvement. (Concern: what if it has a strategic resource that hasn't been revealed yet? I'll have to check to see if the resource has a tech prerequisite.)
> If it's not a resource tile and is near a river, place a Farm. (Even though there's only a certain window on the tech tree where this matters, it's still a pattern people follow.)
> If it's not one of the above and is a hill, place a Mine.
> Otherwise, do a probability draw based on terrain type; Grassland might be 2/3 Trading Post, 1/3 Farm; Plains 1/3 Trading Post, 2/3 Farm, Desert or Tundra would always get a Trading Post.

Thats sounds good - reminiscent of advanced starts in SMAC. It'll be interesting to see how closely you can get the code to placing the "correct" improvement onto the right tiles.

Do you know which unit he used? Atomic Bomb, Nuclear Missile, Planet Buster, or Subspace Generator?

Atomic Bomb. And individually that doesn't seem to be the issue, as I was nuked four more times last night (pics below), and the game didn't freeze till several turns after the last nuke attack.

On to last night's playtesting:

1. After defeating several waves of Persian troops I was confronted with an attack by a lone Great Merchant!?! :confused: I think it was trying to find a route to the C-S in the north via my lands. That code will need to be fixed.

2. Another minor bug: after I killed the Great Merchant (heah how come I don't get combat experience for this!?! :confused: ) my city still had the ability to bombard, even though there were no enemy units within eyesight. Once I selected the city bombard icon, then selected another unit I no longer had the bombard icon showing on the city.

3. The Persians nuked Berlin 4 consecutive turns last night. I wonder what the code-logic is regarding what targets the AIs select to nuke? I would think that nuking several cities would be a better strategy here. On a similar note, what is the counter to nukes at this stage in the game? I noticed my AA units wouldn't intercept the incoming nuclear bombers (I can envision the AA crews seeing the incoming bomber, going "Oh Crap!", and running for the nearest air raid shelter! :lol: ).

4. After the fourth nuke the game froze up a couple turns later. I loaded the autosave and the game froze up again in the same timeframe (i.e. a couple turns after the autosave. I can upload the autosave if you want.

D
 

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I'd built all the production enhancing items available at the time, yet infantry were still taking greater than ten turns to produce.

Well, 10 turns doesn't sound so bad to me. I mean, I understand that it's a pretty significant time investment, but I really dislike it when the balance gets shifted to the point where things build in 2-3 turns (which is what it was at in some of my earlier builds for late-era starts). For one thing, you get significant rounding errors, and for another, it becomes a huge micromanagement chore when you have a large empire. Also, I generally dislike the ability to quickly react to a war by immediately churning out large numbers of units, since that really encourages the player to keep a minimal army most of the time and only pay a high unit maintenance when he absolutely needs to. (That's why I disliked Civ4's rifleman conscription trick.)

The real question, I guess, is what SHOULD the optimal number of turns be, for cities that have a Factory and railroad connections? And did the city in question have a Forge and/or Arsenal?

however there was "always something to do" during these lulls due to NL invasions

Frankly, I think this is indicative of a bigger issue: Civ5 just needs a real "random event" system. There are already some stubs for this in place, but it really just needs more, and I might be tempted to just code one up myself (since it's NOT hard in Lua).

So each turn, at the start of the turn, the game would draw a random number, and if it's above the threshold set in the Era file, it'd then do one of the following:
> Dynastic marriage (positive diplo event with another empire, ending a war if there's one in progress)
> Some sort of negative diplo event with another empire (possibly starting a war)
(Probably also have two CS-related diplo events as well.)
> One empire gets a free Great Person of a random type
> Breakthrough (one empire immediately finishes whichever tech it's currently researching)
> Population boom (Each city has a chance of immediately growing one size)
> Plague (Each city has a chance of immediately dropping one size)
> A few espionage events
And so on. My thought is that this'd go a long way towards making the interturns more interesting, which'd reduce the monotony in those build-up turns you're talking about. None of the above are very complex, and none require the future-era content, so I could put this in the Balance mod pretty easily. I'd probably want to put some limits on it, like no events within the first 20 turns, but it wouldn't be too hard to get something like this in place quickly, once the Custom Notification logic works again.

It'll be interesting to see how closely you can get the code to placing the "correct" improvement onto the right tiles.

Probably not very, but since I'd only be improving a small number of tiles, it shouldn't screw things up too badly if the balance is a bit off. All I really want is to make the adjacent tiles be better, yieldwise, than any Specialists. If you start in later eras you'll usually see a Great Merchant within the first few turns, because the benefits of a Merchant specialist are better than an unimproved tile (2 gold and some GPPs versus 2 food or 1 food/1 production). But if the tiles around the city are improved, you'll work those instead, especially if a few of them are trading posts or riverside farms.

All I'm really trying to do is make the first 10-20 turns flow a bit better. Beyond that, the player can take care of whatever they need. I just throught it was strange that a Transcendence-era start could start a new city with 7 population, and yet the terrain around that city would be untouched.

One other possibility I thought of was to just start the game in a Golden Age for a number of turns that'd depend on your starting era. But that's probably abuseable, so I shelved it.

1. After defeating several waves of Persian troops I was confronted with an attack by a lone Great Merchant!?! :confused: I think it was trying to find a route to the C-S in the north via my lands. That code will need to be fixed.

Not my fault, the game's always been stupid this way. Once a unit has been given a "move to" command, it'll follow the path it selected to complete that mission, regardless of what else happens. So the Merchant was told "move to that city-state", picked the shortest route for that (which went through your territory), and would follow that path no matter what.

2. Another minor bug: after I killed the Great Merchant (heah how come I don't get combat experience for this!?! :confused: )

The same reason you don't get XP for capturing Workers: in the Units file, their "attack XP" and "defend XP" are set to 0. (If I recall right, those are the amount someone gets for killing that unit, while the amount that unit gets for killing things is set in the GlobalDefines file. Or maybe I have that backwards.)

3. The Persians nuked Berlin 4 consecutive turns last night. I wonder what the code-logic is regarding what targets the AIs select to nuke? I would think that nuking several cities would be a better strategy here.

Depends which type of nuke is being used. Atomic Bombs don't automatically kill everything in the area (while Nuclear Missiles do), so repeated applications would have some benefit. But I'm sure the AI wasn't evaluating the situation too closely, and was following some sort of simplistic "nuke the nearest/biggest city in range" logic.

On a similar note, what is the counter to nukes at this stage in the game? I noticed my AA units wouldn't intercept the incoming nuclear bombers

As far as I know, AA units are SUPPOSED to be able to intercept them, as the nukes are listed as Air units, but there might be something type-related in there. I really want to test that all out at some point, because it's obviously very important for there to be some way to defend against incoming nukes.

It could be that the developers never put in a counter to nukes, since the game was intended to end soon after they unlocked, but that'd just be sloppy design on their part.

I can upload the autosave if you want.

You can try that, but you should probably wait until the start of the month. The only problem is that I can't remember if I tweaked anything else in the files after I'd uploaded the last version; if I had, then the files will be incompatible and I won't be able to load it. Since I tend to tweak things often, I've generally assumed that any savegames are incompatible with my current mod; when I get home I'll be able to see if I'd altered anything on that last day before I left. (If need be, I can always back the mod version up to the v0.11 standard; it won't undo the changes I've made to the ModBuddy files, but it'd allow me to play one game as 0.11 standard.)

If you've got a savegame right before the crash, would you mind running FireTuner and seeing if it gives any message at the crash? It probably won't, but if it does, that'd make things MUCH easier.
 
Well, 10 turns doesn't sound so bad to me. I mean, I understand that it's a pretty significant time investment, but I really dislike it when the balance gets shifted to the point where things build in 2-3 turns (which is what it was at in some of my earlier builds for late-era starts). For one thing, you get significant rounding errors, and for another, it becomes a huge micromanagement chore when you have a large empire. Also, I generally dislike the ability to quickly react to a war by immediately churning out large numbers of units, since that really encourages the player to keep a minimal army most of the time and only pay a high unit maintenance when he absolutely needs to. (That's why I disliked Civ4's rifleman conscription trick.)

OK, sounds good. I think this is a personal perception issue on my part, and that its related to the SMAC observation I made earlier. Note also that I don't ICS, so I have 3-5 cities during the timeframe I mentioned, which means there really isn't a whole lot going on other than waiting for these few cities to produce something (or the AIs to attack).

The real question, I guess, is what SHOULD the optimal number of turns be, for cities that have a Factory and railroad connections?

And my answer would be that, since this is your mod, then this should be determined by you. :) I see my job of playtesting to simply report my thoughts as I observe them, which is pretty much a "fire and forget" approach: I report things as I encounter/ observe them, and I move on, and hopefully I don't repeat myself too often.

Frankly, I think this is indicative of a bigger issue: Civ5 just needs a real "random event" system.

Or some similar system which adds a layer of complexity which also is capable of consuming the empty spots in the game.

There are already some stubs for this in place, but it really just needs more, and I might be tempted to just code one up myself (since it's NOT hard in Lua).

Thats a very interesting statement regarding the stubs: every time I turn around someone is making a comment similar to this. Makes me think that what we are seeing now of ciV is like the skeleton, and that in time Firaxis is going to flesh it all out.

Not my fault, the game's always been stupid this way. Once a unit has been given a "move to" command, it'll follow the path it selected to complete that mission, regardless of what else happens.

:lol: I really didn't think this was your fault, but it brings up a good question from my end: do you want me posting observations in this thread which I don't think are related to your mod? From a certain perspective it would seem I'm infering that my observations are a result of your mod (i.e. bad press). From my perspective though, because I test stuff for a living, why my approach in RL is to observe and pass on as much as I can, and then let the brains of the outfit make the real decisions as to whether its a real issue or not. Let me know if you want me to continue with this approach or not.

The same reason you don't get XP for capturing Workers: in the Units file, their "attack XP" and "defend XP" are set to 0.

:lol: I was only being facetious with my comment here.

Depends which type of nuke is being used. Atomic Bombs don't automatically kill everything in the area (while Nuclear Missiles do), so repeated applications would have some benefit. But I'm sure the AI wasn't evaluating the situation too closely, and was following some sort of simplistic "nuke the nearest/biggest city in range" logic.

I think in this application Atomic Bombs are more terror weapons, and so spreading them around onto various cities is more beneficial from a psychological and military perspective (i.e. it was sort of a relief the AI kept targeting the same city over and over, rather than targeting my other still very productive cities, which probably would have made me quit the game at that point). Its what I do when I attack the AIs with Atomic Bombs.

As far as I know, AA units are SUPPOSED to be able to intercept them, as the nukes are listed as Air units, but there might be something type-related in there. I really want to test that all out at some point, because it's obviously very important for there to be some way to defend against incoming nukes.

I am relatively certain my AA units did not engage the incoming Atomic Bombs.

If you've got a savegame right before the crash, would you mind running FireTuner and seeing if it gives any message at the crash? It probably won't, but if it does, that'd make things MUCH easier.

The problem I had was that Firetuner was present, but I couldn't pull it up from its condensed window to see. :(

On to this evening's playtesting:
1. Encountered a graphics error in that part of the marble in the tile was red. Hadn't seen that before.

2. Another iteration of an AI asking me to declare war, and after I did the AI denounced me.

3. Question concerning hostile C-S: should hostile C-S cities be able to bombard my adjacent units? I think they should be able to. In this case they didnt.


D
 

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Note also that I don't ICS, so I have 3-5 cities during the timeframe I mentioned,

Actually, I think this may be the core of the problem. Not that you don't ICS, but that you'll only have 3-5 cities. I've talked about this before, but Settlers are just WAY too expensive in late-era starts. I'm pretty sure their cost is inflated to include all of the "free" buildings included in the new cities, or possibly to account for the increased starting population. This makes the cost of building a new Settler prohibitive, so it'd be several eras before you founded your next new city.

So I want to do one of the following:
> Remove all, or nearly all, of the "free" buildings from each city. It wouldn't take too long for you to build them all the old-fashioned way if there was some sort of early production bonus, and it'd definitely help keep the cost manageable.
> Start each player with more Settlers, more Workers, and more military units in later-era starts. You'd still be incapable of building more Settlers early on, but at least you'd have a more respectable empire.
> Add a hard-coded Lua stub, along the lines of my tech and food boosts, that boosts production. Besides reducing some of the slowness you mentioned earlier, it'd also help with that early Settler production. Possibly increase the bonus further for Settlers only. (As noted above, this could be combined with a reduction in "free" buildings to allow fast expansion.)
(The problem is this: the food boost that I coded in is handled at the end of a turn, and the way it's done means that it's NOT being used for Settler production. So while making a Settler your cities might grow a bit, but they'll take just as long as before to make that Settler.)
> Add Lua to provide the extra units mentioned above. Imagine if, after 20 turns of play, your empire was automatically gifted with an extra Settler. Not as good as starting with an extra one, but helpful for expanding anyway. Same for workers and maybe combat units. This could be tied back to the random event system I'd mentioned earlier; a free Worker showing up in your capital might be a nice random bonus.

I really didn't think this was your fault, but it brings up a good question from my end: do you want me posting observations in this thread which I don't think are related to your mod?

I'd say keep mentioning them, because even if it's not my fault, I might still be able to find a way to tweak the game to reduce those behaviors. Just don't blame me if my posts end up sounding really defensive ("I didn't do it!").

I think in this application Atomic Bombs are more terror weapons, and so spreading them around onto various cities is more beneficial from a psychological and military perspective

More than that, there's a definite strategic advantage to spreading the bombs out, if only to increase the amount of tiles affected by Fallout.

But Atomic Bombs have a VERY short range. (6? 8? I know the Nuclear Missile was changed from 8 to 15 in the patch, but I thought the A-Bomb was left at its original value.) So it might be that Berlin was the only city that could be reached without an extra turn of rebasing...

I am relatively certain my AA units did not engage the incoming Atomic Bombs.

I'm not doubting you, I'm just saying that they SHOULD engage them. The question then becomes, why don't they? Are AA units hard-coded to only engage things of type Fighter or Bomber (which'd imply bad things for my Needlejets, since they're neither)? Is there an explicit exclusion for nukes? And if so, is there a way I can get around these limitations?

The problem I had was that Firetuner was present, but I couldn't pull it up from its condensed window to see.

This is why I always run Civ5 in Windowed mode. In fullscreen it was nearly impossible to recover from crashes. It also made debugging a lot easier.

1. Encountered a graphics error in that part of the marble in the tile was red. Hadn't seen that before.

I actually see that all the time, but I don't think it's a marble thing. I'd see that on all sorts of Tundra-based resources (like Deer), and while it was never that consistent, I'd get it in nearly every game I played. Now, I'm almost always playing the DX9 executable (my machine, perversely, is still running XP), so I figured it might have been related to that.

3. Question concerning hostile C-S: should hostile C-S cities be able to bombard my adjacent units? I think they should be able to. In this case they didnt.

They should be able to, but I've seen plenty of times when they didn't. I've long since given up on trying to figure out certain parts of the AI.
 
1. The Japanese asked me to DoC the Iriquois, which I said I'd do after ten turns. After the ten turns the Japanese requested I honor this agreement, which I did. The very next turn the Japanese publicly denounced me, saying I couldn't be trusted. I'm not sure if this is good AI programming or not: it could be considered good in that if my backdoor agreement with the Japanese were secret, then the only thing everyone else would know was that I was essentially dogpiling the AI and so deserved the diplo hit from the Japanese. It would in effect have been very sneaky of the Japanese to do this to me. Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

OK, so not to dwell too deeply on this subject, but after thinking about this a while why I have to think this is a good option to be made available to the AIs.

So to take a step back, why I believe the way the AI coding in this current sequence regarding collusion in attacks should be as follows:

- If AI A is friendly with human and asks for attack on AI B, then if human agrees to attack, AI A does not denounce human player.

- If AI A is hostile towards human and asks for attack on AI B, then AI A denounces human for attacking AI B.


Now taking a step further out, I think a way to introduce a good randomizer into the equation would be as follows:

- If AI A is friendly with human and asks for attack on AI B, then if human agrees to attack then introduce a randomizer die roll, and if die roll is true (approximately 20% of the time), then flip polarity of current AI/ Human diplomacy rating.

- After diplo has been processed flip the AI/ human diplo polarity back to its original state.

This would then achieve the above effect of the AI "baiting" the human player into a war, and then inflicting the diplo hit on them. It can probably be refined from here, but hopefully you get the idea where I am going with this.

On to this evening's playtesting:

1. Suffered a CTD when I tried to build my first uranium mine. I reloaded an again started building the mine, however the crash didn't occur.
2. Concerning the below pics: very interesting that the AI is building forests in this area! These forests would definately impede my planed counteroffensive! :goodjob:
3. Right now using your mod I am seeing a trend (i.e. game after game) where I am having to reject some research agreements from the AIs: I stress "some" as I am picking and choosing based on current events in my various games, however I think this situation is intended on your part and the various game influences you've introduced are putting me into this continual position. If this is a correct assumption on my part then please be aware you are achieving the desired effect in this regard! :goodjob:

I'm in a very heated contest against the Greeks this evening. My advantage this evening is that I can build nukes and they can't. Should be interesting how this goes from here on out tonight....

D
 

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3. Right now using your mod I am seeing a trend (i.e. game after game) where I am having to reject some research agreements from the AIs:

I think this is financial. The cost of research agreements is flat, not changing with difficulty; it's tied to era, and I've increased it significantly, but it's still not a high cost. But as you've noted previously, the cost of rush-buying buildings is prohibitively high, the AI gets a massive discount on unit upgrading, and there's not a whole lot else to do with spare cash, except bribe City-States (which the AI never seems to do enough of). And the AI doesn't understand the concept of "saving up", so you get an awkward situation; if the player saves all of his money and forms Research Agreements as soon as the AIs have enough cash for one, he'll pull WAY ahead. But if the player plays "normally", upgrading or rushing things as necessary, the AIs will be at a huge advantage.
Personally, the Research Agreement concept is one of my least favorite parts of Civ5. I've been really tempted to just disable the thing entirely. I wish they'd done it as an ongoing cost (lose X gold per turn, gain Y beakers per turn until you cancel the agreement). In the short term, I think I'm going to drastically increase the era-based cost increase of the agreements, to make them far rarer at the later eras.

Now, like I said, it's all financial, so any overhauls I do to the gold production of the game will be reflected in this. I actually liked the balance back when a non-Golden Age player would stay pretty close to zero income; while this kills rush-buying, it kept this sort of thing under control. This is also part of why I tweaked the Happiness formulae, I wanted to force the player to produce happiness buildings in their cities, which'd suck up even more gold. I think the balance is still a bit off, though.

For one thing, unit maintenance just seems too LOW to me, while building maintenance is prohibitively high, and I think part of that is just the relative cost balance between buildings and units. (Why make one infantry unit, when the same amount of production time gets you a Bank?) I could try lowering unit costs across the board, but the better solution might be to add unit production bonuses to more buildings. While the Forge and Arsenal both boost land unit production, the Forge requires local Iron and the Arsenal has several building prerequisites. Also, they're both land-only; while the Harbor helps with sea units, it's not really a whole lot.
So I was thinking of adding, say, +10% production when building units (of ANY domain) to the Barracks, Armory, and Military Academy. Not enough to make up for the lack of a Factory or anything, but enough to make units build faster than most buildings. (Workshop is +30%, right? So it'd balance.)
Alternately, I could just remove the +XP from the Armory entirely and replace it with a +20% or +30% production bonus. But since I'd already removed the XP on the Military Academy, that'd reduce the starting XP for land units too low.
(Possibility: boost Barracks to +20 XP, make Armory be +10 XP and +20% production.)

I'm in a very heated contest against the Greeks this evening. My advantage this evening is that I can build nukes and they can't.

One of the reasons I want to ensure AA works against nukes is that I don't LIKE the idea that nukes can have that sort of swing. To me, nukes are supposed to be rare weapons that only get used in truly desperate situations, but in the current setup there's little reason for the AI not to build and use one on the opening turn of a war. Part of the problem is that the AIs only care about nuke usage if you use one near their empires; this is easily seen with city-states. You can nuke the center of an empire, and nearby city-states won't care, but move just a little closer to the CS and it's suddenly a -50 hit. To me, there should be an automatic negative hit to all empires, regardless of distance, and THEN an additional hit for nearby empires/states.

Of course, there's no easy way to make the AI consider these sorts of factors, so it's probably for the best that there's nothing like that. But I still want them to be interceptible; just enough that a well-armed nation is unlikely to take much damage. If I can't do that, then I'm going to have to add a "Bunker" city improvement that adds air and nuke defense, or possibly tie that effect to an Airport-style improvement. I might do that anyway, and add even more of that to the Perimeter Defense, Gravity Shield, etc. But I'd really just like to have them be defeatable through the existing Fighter patrols, because really, Fighters kinda suck otherwise.
 
1. Concerning the first two pics below: I think you had mentioned this before, however I didn't associate the significance of its meaning in-game (i.e. that the game would end due to not having a tech to select for research). Essentially because the way the tech tree is set up, then because Centauri Ecology isn't researchable, all techs which are linked downstream of this tech can't be researched, and eventually you run out of techs that can be researched, which is what happened to me last night. And of course you can't continue the game unless you select a tech to research, so it was an impassable situation at this point.

2. Concerning the C-S cultural border pic: kinda disappointed that the AI logic hadn't recognized the benefit of the nearby Feature. Also, my standard rule of 4 APCs and an arty unit still apply to conquering a C-S.

3. The last pic is of an adjacent C-S: I don't think they trust me too much.... :shifty: I wonder if this build-up is in response to my actions against other C-S?

D
 

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Essentially because the way the tech tree is set up, then because Centauri Ecology isn't researchable, all techs which are linked downstream of this tech can't be researched, and eventually you run out of techs that can be researched, which is what happened to me last night. And of course you can't continue the game unless you select a tech to research, so it was an impassable situation at this point.

Two things:

1> Did you do this deliberately, not building the spaceship to see what happens, or was this a consequence of your normal playstyle?
I tried to make it a no-brainer to build a spaceship ASAP with all the rewards you get, and the AI's flavors are set high enough that they should put it high on their lists. So if this was a deliberate choice by you then I wouldn't worry about it too much. But if it somehow took you two extra eras to be able to afford the spaceship parts, then I have a lot of balancing work to do.
(And if the spaceship just didn't work when you built the parts, then something's REALLY wrong.)

2> There's another way to break that lock: The Planetary Datalinks. A National Wonder that gives you any tech that 4 other civs know. While I explicitly ruled out Disabled techs like Centauri Ecology from being stolen by it, I did NOT do the same for the techs it leads to. So as soon as four AI civs have Centauri Empathy, you'd gain it too, and could continue on from there. (You'd still be missing Centauri Ecology, and it's an important enough tech to go back for, what with a farm bonus and a new resource.)
Now, if you've already conquered so many civs that there aren't four non-CS civs left, then this won't work. Or if you're so far ahead of the other civs that you're reaching the Nanotech era before they even get into the Digital. But that's why I suggested mods like Tech Diffusion; I really don't WANT anyone to be able to fall that far behind.
 
Two things:

1> Did you do this deliberately, not building the spaceship to see what happens, or was this a consequence of your normal playstyle?
I tried to make it a no-brainer to build a spaceship ASAP with all the rewards you get, and the AI's flavors are set high enough that they should put it high on their lists. So if this was a deliberate choice by you then I wouldn't worry about it too much. .

I deliberately did not build the spaceship: had plenty of time to build it - just chose not to in this game. Thats the good news.

But if it somehow took you two extra eras to be able to afford the spaceship parts, then I have a lot of balancing work to do. .

Now the bad news: I did have the PDL (and it does work as I was receiving free tech after free tech). I just pulled up my gamesave and checked the stats and only two of the surviving five AIs had completed the spaceship at this point in the game, so I would not have gotten CE this way. So maybe the spaceship parts flavoring needs to be tweaked some more to get the AIs to take advantage of this?

D
 
I just pulled up my gamesave and checked the stats and only two of the surviving five AIs had completed the spaceship at this point in the game,

Okay, but did they have the technologies in question? I've had games where the AI was 30 or more techs behind me; once you get a sizeable tech lead, to where you can't lose a war and get every Wonder, it's really hard for the AI to catch you. So it's possible that the smaller AIs hadn't reached the point where they could build it yet. (This sort of thing is why I'm a big fans of the Tech Diffusion style of balancing.)

It's easy to check whether an AI has built a component, since it'll show up on the Victory Progress screen, but to know whether they have certain techs, you basically either have to watch what units they're fielding (Laser Infantry come at the same tech as the last spaceship part), or use FireTuner to check whether they have the right tech IDs.
 
Okay, now that I'm back from vacation, I'm hard at work modding. Here's what I found about that Settler cost issue:

> Take the base cost of a Settler. Multiply by (TrainPercent/100).
> Add 40% of the cost of all "free" buildings. (This is in GlobalDefines as "NEW_CITY_BUILDING_VALUE_MODIFIER", at -60 by default). Multiply this by (BuildPercent/100) instead of TrainPercent.
So, in the Transcendence Era, you get free Hospitals (cost 400) and BuildPercent and TrainPercent are both 50. So the Hospital would normally cost 200 when build directly, but it adds 80 to the cost of each new Settler.
> Add 150 per extra point of starting population the city gets (again, set in GlobalDefines). DIVIDE this by (GrowthPercent/100), then multiply by (TrainPercent/100). In the transcendence Era GrowthPercent is 70, so each population point adds ~110 to the cost of a Settler.

Now, rather than play with the percentages, which'd change the rates of everything else, I just changed the base multipliers. So in the next patch, instead of 40% and 150, it'll be 25% and 100.
The result is that a Transcendence settler used to be 1230 hammers, now it'll only be 813. A similar ~33% reduction would happen for any start Fusion or later; Industrial/Nuclear starts would change by a smaller amount, but it should still be noticeable.

Also, I found an easy way to help production: remember my food "head start" boost? I just added the same amount to each city's production each turn. So you'll get a few extra hammers per turn when you're starting out, just enough to really get things going. It seems to make a real difference; for a Nuclear Era start you'd get +4 food and hammers per turn for the first tech, +3 for the next three, and so on.

I'm going to try to add those three new techs and add the Colony Pod unit before releasing a new version. Hopefully I'll have that done tomorrow.
 
On to today's (and last night's) playtesting:

1. Concerning the Flood plain question pic: I thought flood plains were only adjacent to rivers?

2. The AI attacked with with an unsupported Plasma arty last night. Good to see the AIs using advanced units, however not its wisest move.

3. Concerning the Stealth Attack: I am assuming this is what occurs when you are attacked by a Stealth Bomber?

4. Concerning the "Struggline AI" pic: the Persians asked me to attack the Mongols who were on our common border. Once war was declared I expected the AI to bring the heat, however their offensive never gathered steam. The Mongols also didn't really put up much of a fight, either, as they only had a handful of units which were very quickly routed. Do you think this has anything to do with the re-balancing of flavors that you and Firaxis have been doing (i.e. the AIs are less inclined to build a surplus of military units)?

5. Concerning the "Log in problem" pic: this happens every so often where the Windows mouse cursor is present (instead of the ciV mouse cursor icon), and the cursor is unresponsive in that I can't select anything. The way I get it to work is to do a cntl-alt-del and start Task Manager, then window back into ciV and the cursor then is the in-game cursor and works.

Since I seemed to be running out of new observations to make on Continents-style maps, why today I flopped back over to Lakes style maps - first time since the new patch: I do like how there really are lakes now, and not just one tile-wide watering holes. Am probably going to focus on Lakes maps for a while, unless your looking for feedback on a specific map type.

D

D
 

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1. Concerning the Flood plain question pic: I thought flood plains were only adjacent to rivers?

They are. Notice how that tile also says "fresh water"? I've seen this happen a few times since the patch: there's a river there, but it's not drawing it. You can figure out where the river is by looking for that "fresh water" marker, or by moving units back and forth through the area (since they'll lose movement as they cross it). This only seems to happen with very short rivers in deserts, not sure why. (I think there's supposed to be a minimum river length, and it's just not checking it any more.)

In my last test game, I was playing as America (who starts on a river by default), but my capital's starting river was invisible. VERY annoying.

2. The AI attacked with with an unsupported Plasma arty last night. Good to see the AIs using advanced units, however not its wisest move.

Unfortunately, the AI just isn't smart enough to understand that just because a unit CAN do something doesn't mean it SHOULD. They put in some hard-coding for it to protect "normal" artillery, but adding a base Combat rating to the plasma artillery (to allow it to attack and defend in a non-ranged way) seems to screw that up.

One way to reduce this, possibly, is to prohibit plasma artillery from performing melee attacks. That might cause the AI to realize it's an artillery unit and not a tank that happens to have a bombardment rating. The strange thing is that it's CombatClass Siege and UnitAI "CITY_BOMBARD", so it should already understand this regardless of its other abilities.

3. Concerning the Stealth Attack: I am assuming this is what occurs when you are attacked by a Stealth Bomber?

No idea, I've never been attacked by one. If that's the result of a successful "Evasion" roll, then that makes things interesting. On the other hand, if it's just a graphical bug, then I'm not too surprised.

Do you think this has anything to do with the re-balancing of flavors that you and Firaxis have been doing (i.e. the AIs are less inclined to build a surplus of military units)?

It could very easily be. I raised the flavors of the various "important" infrastructure buildings (banks, universities, etc.) so that the AIs wouldn't wait extra centuries to make them while it was churning out unneeded military units. It might just not be handling that well, so I might have to go back and boost the flavors of certain key military units as well.

Per our previous discussion, I've changed the Armory from "+15 XP for land units" to "+10% production for all units, +10 XP for land units", and the Military Academy now also adds +10% unit production in addition to its "Elite" promotion. Together, these would basically counteract the Workshop's building boost, keeping military units cheaper than buildings. The boost is for ALL unit types, not just land ones, so stacked with the Forge and Arsenal you can make true military cities that are made to churn out units.
10% sounds like a lot, but percentages are additive, so if you've got a city with a Factory and railroad connection, the Armory would take you from 200% to 210%, for a 5% reduction in build times. That's why I only decreased the XP boost by 5.

I'm hoping this change will help make the AI build more military units again.

this happens every so often where the Windows mouse cursor is present (instead of the ciV mouse cursor icon)

Never seen that happen. Of course, I'm using XP and playing in Windowed mode, so things might be a bit different for you in general.

Am probably going to focus on Lakes maps for a while, unless your looking for feedback on a specific map type.

I'm not looking for a specific type, just be careful with the balance comments. For instance, there are a few map types that have no oceans. On those maps, you wouldn't have any Dilithium, which obviously changes things in the future eras (although once you get to the Nanotech era you'll have two different ways to add some). So if you're playing one of these map types and don't like the balance, just be aware that if the problem ONLY happens due to that one map type I'd be unlikely to change the overall balance just to fix it. (Although as I said before, I've been thinking about adding Dilithium in lake tiles.)

I've been playing the Small Continents map lately, myself, as I thought the main Continents option was too consistently creating two huge continents and nothing else. And I might try a Pangaea map soon, just to see what it does to the Dilithium distribution.
 
Okay, report time!

Now that I'm back, I tried starting a game in the Industrial Era, on Prince. Small Continents map, 6 civs (counting me); it made three decent-sized continent with two civs on each, plus a scattering of random islands (one of which had a lot of good resources). The three continents weren't evenly spaced; there was a big gap between two. I was Iroquois, on the Eastern continent. Here's what I found:

1> The AI still isn't settling very aggressively. After placing my initial three Settlers, I built a fourth one and placed it far forward, right next to Mongolia, to lock them off from the rest of the Eastern continent. There was PLENTY of time for the AI to beat me to that spot, but they didn't. And I took that forward spot before settling better spots closer to home, which I knew I'd be able to get later; the AI does nothing like that.
Also, remember that one good small island I mentioned? The AI never settled there. I made a bunch of colonies on the various small islands around the world, but the AIs never went beyond the continent they started on, and I'd left that one alone (since it was on the opposite side of the world from my home) and yet by the Fusion age the AI still hadn't gone there. It's strange, because I KNOW the AI explored (something it wouldn't do, previously), because they had Caravels and Scouts out exploring before I did.
I added the new Colony Pod unit, but I never built one, because by the time I got to it the world was already basically full. If I'd had a raze-'n-resettle policy then I could see the appeal, though, and it'd obviously be useful for SMAC-style games starting in the Digital Era.

2> Because of the map type, I had no Oil, and none within easy reach. Perversely, Mongolia (who I shared the continent with) had two right in the middle of their territory. So they died in the Industrial Era. (Actually, they declared on me first, but fighting the Iroquois in a forest, when I also had a better navy? Bad idea.) Coal was just plentiful enough to be useful, but not enough to put Factories everywhere right away.
I think the big problem is just that Oil is almost entirely limited to Desert or Tundra, except for the ocean deposits. Hint for people playing along at home: Texas is not a desert. So I think I'm going to tweak the spawn tables a bit to add more Oil to Grassland and Plains tiles.

3> In the late Nuclear / early Digital, I was declared on by three out of the remaining four civs. But they did this the turn before I built the spaceship, which automatically made peace for me. (Kinda neat to see that actually matter!) A little later, the second continent civs (Rome and Russia) declared on me again, and so I conquered them. Rome's army was kind of weak, but Russia's was decent. Both had Stealth Bombers and Jet Fighters, and those things made my life miserable. (And I think you're right: the Stealths were invisible half the time, and I think those are the times it succeeded at an Evasion roll. Strange that they'd still be damaged, though.) And I have to say, the AI was attacking cities with AA guns and SAMs, and while that might sound stupid on paper, it worked; they recaptured one of the cities I'd taken from them. (I ended up razing it.)

4> In the late Digital, I was declared on by Siam (Western Continent), who'd just entered the Digital but had a huge army. This was incredible; they had every single tile in their terrain occupied by a military unit, and a good number were AA/SAMs. (Strange that they hadn't upgraded the AAs.) It took forever for my bombers to clear out a beachhead, and in the process Siam lobbed an atomic bomb at Cumae (ex-Roman city that was closest to their empire); if I hadn't been taking advantage of the huge range of the Stealths (by basing them further back) I'd have lost them, and as it was I lost a really good Jet Fighter. They had a second bomb ready to go, but they rebased it to their closest city on the turn I was finally pulling a Normandy and conquered the city. If they'd had Nuclear Missiles, I'd have been in BIG trouble, which makes me think the Planet Busters are even better than I'd thought. (With those, they could have reached my capital!)
My AA DID engage the Atomic Bomb as an air attack (but my Fighter didn't), and I saw them also engage Guided Missiles when the AI used those. The problem was just that the AA didn't do enough damage to kill the bomb in one shot, so it got through. I might be able to handle this by tweaking the AA numbers (give AA units and Fighters a massive unit-specific bonus against Atomic Bombs and a smaller one against Nuclear Missiles). Alternatively, I could just reduce the base unit HP from 10 down to 5 for those units (I think I can do that), so that any interception is more likely to kill them.

After I got my beachhead, taking their closest two cities and a city-state they'd allied with, their counterattack was brutal. I lost quite a few good units, despite having a big tech advantage; they especially made good use of Gunships to wipe out my Modern Armors, and Stealth Bombers and Jet Fighters again.
I'd go on, but unfortunately I ran into a very consistent crash bug. I'd unlocked Doctrine: Air Power (because my Battleships were getting pounded by Siam's air units), and started upgrading my Stealth Bombers to Needlejets. The moment I tried to rebase one certain highly-upgraded Needlejet, the game crashed. Reload, try again, same thing. It'd crash the moment I hit the rebase button, even before choosing a destination, which implies it might be a UI problem (drawing the rebase ring, or some missing animation in the placeholder?). It was especially strange since I'd already rebased a couple other Needlejets with no problems, it was just this one particular one.
I've seen this before, when I tried rebasing a Subspace Generator, so there's clearly something in the rebasing logic that isn't functioning correctly for the new units.

5> Happiness. This was a BIG problem.
First, the AIs had tons of it. Early on I got the popup telling me how much happiness each empire had, and while I was at +10ish on a good day, the AIs were at +30 to +50. They SHOULD have been using that margin to settle those outlying islands, but never did. The result was that the AIs were in golden ages very often, with staggering incomes because of it, but had half my number of cities (and therefore less research in the long term). The only AI with a large empire was Siam, who'd conquered half of India early on.
Later, I had too much of it. (+120 before attacking Siam.) The first problem is that the Theater and Stadium are just too CHEAP now; the patch reduced their maintenance costs from 5-6 down to 3 gpt each, for 5 Happiness each, so they're no-brainers now. Once my cities were developed, Happiness became a non-issue. Golden Ages were commonplace.
(Solutions: drop Theater to 4, increase maintenance costs to 4 and 5.)
The second problem is that, simply, Luxuries are too good. Expanding your empire means gaining more luxuries, so it becomes trivial to pick up more and more Happiness as you go. I really wish they'd done a tapering system (say, +6 for the first Luxury, +5 for the second, +4 for the third, and so on until you're only getting +1 for each additional one). The fact that every luxury adds the same +5 doesn't help, either. This gets even worse once you get a good gold surplus, because you'll be able to make a lot of CS allies.

6> Culture.
I tend to play culture-heavy, with the Piety tree. While the AI was slightly ahead of me early on, by the later game I was getting 700-800 culture per turn and getting new policies every 10-12 turns despite massive conquering. It's like the Happiness problem; the Museum and Opera House are both +5 culture for 3 gpt. I think I'll up them to +4 for 4 and +5 for 5 just like the happiness buildings.
The other problem is the policy that gives +100% culture if a city has a World Wonder in it. It's just too good, especially if the player is intelligent and spreads the Wonders around with Great Engineers and such. Part of it is that there are just more Wonders now, especially in the Digital era. I think I'll drop it to +50%, since the Fundamentalist policy also boosts culture from Wonders (but in a flat +5 bonus way). I'd also been lucky in getting Mt. Fuji nearby (+culture when worked) and an early Great Artist (turned into a Landmark near my capital).

7> Research.
Despite not going Rationalism, I was getting techs every 2-3 turns by the Fusion era. Granted I owned more than half the world and could have won by diplomacy long before, but still, it felt fast even before that; in the Nuclear era, when I only had conquered Mongolia, it was ~5 turns per tech.
I'm not sure how this can be fixed. I'm sure it's just a consequence of having a large empire, but I'd like to see some sort of way to add diminishing returns, where your later/conquered cities don't add as much as the core ones. (Maybe add a penalty to the Courthouse; you WILL build one, for the happiness fix. But this'd just encourage people to raze more cities and resettle.)

8> Money.
For the Industrial and Nuclear eras I liked the money balance. By the start of the Digital I was earning ~80gpt in a non-GA and ~200 in one, which was a bit high (and was probably due to the cheap happiness/culture buildings). By the Fusion era I was earning ~200 in a non-GA and 400-500 per turn in a GA, just way too high.
It's not the fault of the buildings themselves, it just goes back to something I've said before: without a distance-based Corruption setup, there's just no real downside to expansion. Cities pay for themselves quickly, and it adds up.
 
Okay, I know it's been a few days, but here goes. It's a big one, and more importantly, it seems to be more stable than previous versions. I'm going out of town for a business trip on Sunday morning, so it'll be a week before the next version most likely.

One of the crash bugs only seemed to happen when rebasing a highly-promoted aircraft. To limit this, in this version I've drastically reduced the amount of XP aircraft get (down to the level of other bombardment units, really). While this won't solve the problem, it should come up less often now, and it was something I'd wanted to rebalance for other reasons anyway.

v.0.12 (January 7th):
Balance Mod:
> As the megapatch removed all specialists from the Library (and Paper Maker), my previous edit changing it from 2 -> 1 was unneeded, so I removed it.
> I’d previously accidentally screwed up the Culture of the Wat; when I changed the University from 0->1, I did the same for the Wat, forgetting that it already generated 3 culture per turn. So now it generates 4, and still has one more specialist slot than the University (2 instead of 1).
> I’d changed the Public School from 0 culture to 1, but the patch gave it 1, so I now changed it to 2.
> Units produce too slowly relative to buildings, so I’ve changed the Armory from “+15 XP for Land Units” to “+10 XP for land units, +10% unit production” (all domains). Also, the Military Academy seemed a bit weak in practice, so I’ve also given it +10% unit production.

Content Mod:
> Custom notifications are now working correctly again. It was that stupid VFS bug again, sort of: to get Custom Notifications to work you’d have to set VFS=true, but doing so would also cause it to trigger twice, which was fixed by removing that Lua file from the Content definition. This may be important for other parts as well; it looks like anything using an Event.Add doesn’t need to be explicitly loaded in the module now, if it’s in VFS.
> Many tooltips and civilopedia entries were out of date in previous versions and needed to be updated. I'd shuffled a lot of stuff around, and not kept the documentation up-to-date.
> Since the Map Reveal ability was added to Satellites in the patch, there was no need for me to update this.
> The Giant Death Robot will no longer appear in the Civilopedia.
> While there’s a Flavor table in the Improvements file, it’s not used (except for my terraforming additions). I’ve since added a Flavor rating for the Lumbermill, so that the AI will prefer building a lumbermill instead of chopping the forest most of the time.
> The “Weak Ranged” promotion inherent to the Fighter unit gave –75% strength against everything other than air units. I’ve reduced it to –50% to make the Fighter unit more universally useful. I'm still testing this one; it might make fighters too good, but preliminary tests seem pretty good, although they might be too strong against Naval units; if so, I'll give them the bombers' naval penalty promotion as well.
> The “head start” logic previously added a free amount of food to each city equal to (number of discounted techs / 3), where the initial number of discounted techs = 2*era. (So a transcendence start would begin at +6 food and count down as you researched techs.) It now also adds the same amount to a city’s production values (AFTER all multipliers for buildings); this won’t help much on large cities, but it should help get things up to speed faster.
> By default, 40% of a “free” building’s production cost is added to the cost of a Settler. I’ve lowered this to 25%.
> Likewise, by default, extra starting population points increase the cost of a Settler by 150 (divided by GrowthPercent, multiplied by TrainPercent). I’ve reduced that to 100.
(The net result of the above two changes is that in future-era starts settlers cost about 2/3rds what they did before, and there’s a proportionately smaller discount for the middle eras.)
> Increased the resource requirements of advanced combat units:
- Gravship is now 4 Neutronium, 2 Dilithium (was 2/1)
- Nessus Worm is now 4 Omnicytes (was 2)
- Chiron Locusts is now 2 Omnicytes (was 1)
- Gravtank is now 1 Neutronium, 1 Dilithium (was just the dilithium)
- Mobile Shield is now 2 Dilithium (was 1)
- Bolo is 2 Neutronium, 1 Dilithium (was 1/1)
- Combat Mech is 2 Dilithium, 1 Neutronium (was 1/1)
- Former is 2 Omnicytes, 1 Dilithium (was 1/1)
- Subspace Generator is 3 Dilithium (was 2)
> Added the new Colony Pod unit at Globalization. This is a modern unit that complements but does not completely replace the Settler; it is a combat unit (30 strength, Gunpowder) that cannot attack but can defend itself, can move 3 (at 1 MP per tile, like the Combat Engineer), and airdrops as if it were a paratrooper. It costs the same as a standard Settler, but also requires 1 unit of Oil and 1 of Aluminum, and cannot be hurried. So if you have the resources to spare, it's a better choice, but you won't always have that option or the time to spare.
> Instead of adding +5 food, the Nanohospital now provides 10% food storage. This means that the full set of buildings would provide 100% storage; this doesn’t mean instant growth, because the amount of food needed to grow increases exponentially.
> The Neural Amplifier (all units get +50% vs. Psi units) was changed from a World Wonder to a National Wonder. Its effect was also changed to be a bit less dominating; now, all units get +25% vs. Psi units (stacks with the Trance promotions) and +1 visibility (useful even if you aren't fighting Psi units).
> Previously, the Opera House and Museum were both (+5 culture, -3 gpt). They’re now changed to +4/-4 and +5/-5, respectively.
> Previously, the Theater and Stadium were both (+5 happiness, -3 gpt). They’re now changed to +4/-4 and +5/-5, respectively.
> The Genejack Factory’s unhappiness was increased from 1 to 2. -1 just wasn't limiting enough. The other possibility was reducing its bonus from 50% down to 25%, but I like it better this way.
> Previously, an Air unit gained 4 XP for each normal attack, and 5 XP for each air unit killed in an air sweep. This was lowered to 2 XP, because it was just too easy for air units to gain massive XP compared to other bombardment units. They also previously gained 4 XP for attacking a city, and this was lowered to 3 to match other ranged units.
> The Cyborg Factory was still incorrectly using its old March promotion instead of its new, custom healing promotion. This is now fixed.
> The Planet Buster’s ranged was increased to 99 (from 25), making it effectively unlimited. It's not more powerful than a Nuclear Missile, currently, but your core cities are no longer safe.
> The Hologram Theater was (+3 Happiness, +3 Culture, -4 gpt). It is now increased to (+3 Happiness, +25% Culture, -6 gpt).
> The Centauri Preserve was (+2 UnmoddedHappiness, +25% Culture, +2 gold per Oasis, -2 gpt). It is now (+2 UnmoddedHappiness, -2 gpt, adds 1 gold, production, food, and culture to any local Omnicyte tiles), can only be built in cities with a local Omnicytes deposit, and consumes one unit of Omnicytes when built.
> The Brood Pit and Hybrid Forest no longer require a local Centauri Preserve, since it's now a more specialized building than before. The Paradise Garden national wonder now requires a local Brood Pit instead of a Centauri Preserve.
> The Brood Pit now generates +2 gold per local Oasis tile in addition to its Psi unit benefits. This had been part of the Centauri Preserve's bonus, and I didn't want it to go away entirely.
> The Constitution policy now only adds +50% to Culture in cities with Wonders, instead of +100%.
> The patch changed the dependencies in the Tradition tree, to where Aristocracy and Oligarchy were no longer prerequisites for any others. I’ve changed this back, sort of; the tree now follows a simple pyramid pattern.
> From now on, no policies are standalones, everything leads down the line. So Communism now depends on United Front, which depends on Socialism, while Democracy and Free Speech depend on Universal Suffrage. Finally, Free Thought depends on Humanism now. (This helps reduce beelining towards good policies.)
> The Chiron Locust unit (and its Wild counterpart) now start with the Charge promotion, giving them +25% vs. wounded units. This was to balance their higher resource cost and technology level.
> The Ecological Engineering tech, for some reason, had no Flavor entries. This has been fixed.

TECH REARRANGEMENT:
> Added three new technologies: Social Psychology (T16), Ethical Calculus (T19), and Intellectual Integrity (T22).
> Homo Superior was moved from tier 19 to 20.
> Many techs’ prerequisites were shifted around to make room for the new techs.
The new techs all unlock existing units and buildings, things that had previously been at other techs:
Social Psychology: Hologram Theater, Citizens’ Defense Force, Fundamentalist
Ethical Calculus: Habitation Domes, Ascetic Virtues, Eudaimonia
Intellectual Integrity: Universal Translator, Neural Amplifier
Screenshots of the tech tree are in one of the first posts of the thread.

The existing techs were modified as follows:
- The new Colony Pod is at Globalization, as previously mentioned
- the Free Market policy was moved from Globalization to Planetary Networks
- the Planetary Transit System was moved from Industrial Economics to Planetary Networks
- the Genejack Factory was moved from Retroviral Engineering to Neural Grafting
- the Bioenhancement Center was moved from Mind/Machine Interface to Subatomic Alloys
- the Deep Mining build action was moved from Nanomatter Editation to Biomachinery
- All Mines now gain +1 production at Nanomatter Editation
- The gold boost of the Customs House was moved from Matter Transmission to Quantum Power
- The science boost of the Academy was moved from Quantum Power to Homo Superior
> Because of the change in tier resulting from the above, a few buildings and units changed in effects:
- Ranger: gets +25% strength when facing a Titan unit, either on offense or defense
- Troll: gets an additional +50% defense against ranged attacks (making them nearly immune to bombardment)
- Citizens’ Defense Force: now +25% instead of +33%.

BREAKOUT
Previously, the Barbarian civilization had no way to actually unlock the Centauri Ecology technology, meaning they could never get to Psi units for any game starting before the Digital Era.

Now, every turn after the first spaceship launches, there will be a 2% chance per launched spaceship that the Breakout occurs. (So at first it’ll be 2% per turn, after a second ship launches it’ll be 4% per turn, and so on.)

Once the Breakout occurs, every civilization gains the Centauri Ecology technology, including barbarians and city-states. Note that this automatically obsoletes the spaceship components for those civs that haven’t built their own ships yet, and the Lua is coded in a way that it wouldn’t recognize the completion of the ship if you already have the tech, so if you don’t launch before the Breakout then you’re out of luck and can’t ever launch. That means no free Social Policy and no Golden Age, so there's now a real incentive to complete your own ship as soon as possible. Previously, it ended up that if you weren't going to win the space race, there was no reason to hurry, and you might actually be better off by waiting a bit to make the free Policy worth more.

Future plans: on Breakout, the civilization that launched the first ship will gain a “First Nest” Natural Wonder on a random tile, and after that point mindworms and other psionic units can randomly spawn across the world, including in controlled territory. This will encourage people to keep some military units in their rear areas, in case worms spawn there. This would also make the anti-Psi wonders and promotions more useful.
 
> Units produce too slowly relative to buildings, so I’ve changed the Armory from “+15 XP for Land Units” to “+10 XP for land units, +10% unit production” (all domains). Also, the Military Academy seemed a bit weak in practice, so I’ve also given it +10% unit production.

I've only got a sample size of one playtest to date, but I think this is spot on, as not only does it increase unit production (i.e. less lag time of doing nothing), but also I had to start thinking more about specialized military production cities: this especially because I start my games at Industrial, why I have to build a Barracks before I can build an Armory. Good stuff! :goodjob:

> The Giant Death Robot will no longer appear in the Civilopedia.

Really!?! It did for me. I'll see in my next game this evening if it show up again.

> The “head start” logic previously added a free amount of food to each city equal to (number of discounted techs / 3), where the initial number of discounted techs = 2*era. (So a transcendence start would begin at +6 food and count down as you researched techs.) It now also adds the same amount to a city’s production values (AFTER all multipliers for buildings); this won’t help much on large cities, but it should help get things up to speed faster.

I did like this in my first game. I also like the free food for each initial city, as it keeps the cities from losing pop points in the first few turns until I can get my first farm built.


> Added the new Colony Pod unit at Globalization. This is a modern unit that complements but does not completely replace the Settler; it is a combat unit (30 strength, Gunpowder) that cannot attack but can defend itself, can move 3 (at 1 MP per tile, like the Combat Engineer), and airdrops as if it were a paratrooper.

Question: do the AIs actually air-drop the CP?


On to last few days playtesting:

1. During a war with the Arabians I used the Culture Bomb to steal a Uranium Mine (heah, after getting nuked a few times you start putting a little more emphasis on prying Uranium Mines from the AIs). Even though I was at war with the Arabians the prompt came up warning me of "repurcussions" for stealing their land.

2. The cost to purchase an Infantry is 740 and 220 to upgrade it to a Mechanized Infantry. The cost of purchasing a Mechanized Infantry itself costs 990. Is this intended? I can understand it from the perspective that you can save a few credits at the expense of the turn it takes to upgrade it.

3. On the Lakes map I played on earlier today there were whales in one of the water tiles: had never seen that before! It was also another great layout of the lakes, as there were nice (relatively) wide bodies of water that added to the strategic decisions I had to make in deciding avenues for expansion.

4. On the Lakes map I played on earlier today there was no oil or aluminum at all. :(

5. Was doing quite well in my first game with this patch: the pace seemed much better, as even when there were times I was just pressing end turn, why it was more of a "Come on! Come on!" than a monotonizing waiting for something to happen. Was making plans on how to take advantage of the next AI on AI war when all the AIs dogpiled me (see screen pic).

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but also I had to start thinking more about specialized military production cities:

That was my intention. The bigger problem is that the two previous unit-production buildings, the Forge and the Arsenal, are just too limited: land units only, and requiring either local Iron or several previous military buildings.
10% isn't a lot, really, since it's additive. With a Factory and a railroad, +10% means going from 200% to 210%, so it's not going to make a drastic difference in production time. But it helps just a bit, and I just wanted those two buildings together to basically offset the Workshop. That's why I only dropped the XP boost from 15 down to 10; sure, that's land-only XP and basically corresponds to a single extra turn of fighting, but 15+10 instead of 15+15 is the difference between starting with 2 promotions and starting with 1, and that 10% production isn't going to drastically change anything.
I also just wanted to make the Military Academy better. Don't get me wrong, I love its new effect, with the Elite promotion, but this makes it something that people would really want to build in any city that'll ever make military units.

Really!?! It did for me. I'll see in my next game this evening if it show up again.

I didn't have time to see if it did this one correctly. All I did was set HiddenInPedia = true (which I'd previously used for the Wild psi units) and set the cost to -1. It SHOULD have removed it from the list, but if it didn't, it won't break anything.

I did like this in my first game. I also like the free food for each initial city, as it keeps the cities from losing pop points in the first few turns until I can get my first farm built.

I'd previously been planning to do that auto-improvement of terrain around cities in later eras (starting with an assortment of Farms, Mines, etc.), and I still intend to look into that, but this head start boost has gone a long way towards making this all workable. You wouldn't think adding two or three hammers and food per turn would make that much of a difference early on, but it does. I was tempted to change the research bonus to this sort of thing as well, and/or add some other similar tapering bonus (culture? Happiness? Gold?), but it's all worked out pretty well as-is.

Question: do the AIs actually air-drop the CP?

The AI declarations are in place for it, but no, I never saw them actually use it. Of course, the AI still doesn't seem to settle as aggressively as he should, and my test game basically ended with them just having unlocked the unit, so I have no direct evidence that they use it. Then again, they didn't use nukes until that last patch, so who knows whether the AI can handle something like this.

This was always something meant more for the player to play around with, anyway, although I'd love it if the AI took this new unit as a sign to go on another expansion spree. The same was true in SMAC; I'd build Drop Colony Pods and use them to settle hard-to-reach places, and even though the AI had access to the same upgrades I did, he'd never do the same.

2. The cost to purchase an Infantry is 740 and 220 to upgrade it to a Mechanized Infantry. The cost of purchasing a Mechanized Infantry itself costs 990. Is this intended? I can understand it from the perspective that you can save a few credits at the expense of the turn it takes to upgrade it.

It's not intentional, but it's how the math of the game works; the era-based unit cost multiplier (TrainPercent) isn't quite tied to the upgrade costs correctly, so you'll often see games where this happens. I noticed the same thing with Combat Engineers; it was basically the same cost to build a worker and then upgrade him, or possibly even slightly cheaper.
As you pointed out, it costs you a turn. And really, once you get something like the Pentagon, this tactic becomes a no-brainer anyway, if you're planning on buying your units instead of building them. (Conversely, if you get something like Big Ben it's cheaper to buy the top unit instead.) And this only applies to the player; the AI gets a massive discount on upgrade costs, so it'd ALWAYS be smarter for them to do things this way. But they don't. To me, this makes up for some AI stupidity; you as a player might now that if you're 10 turns away from unlocking Infantry, there's no point in building another Rifleman, but the AI doesn't know this. So if you made upgrades cost much more than the difference in costs, it'd really hurt the AI more than the player.

I wish there was a way to pay to complete half-built units instead of having to start from scratch, because I'd love to see it capped to where you could only pay for the last couple hundred hammers of a unit or building's cost. Sort of like how in systems where you'd rush with population, you'd want to wait until it only cost 1 instead of 2.

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Now, personally I wish they'd kept the Civ4 XP limitation, where conscripts only had half the normal XP, and applied that to all purchased units, to encourage you to build the units normally and make this a non-issue. The problem is that in this mod, if you've managed your empire well and expanded well, you'll end up gaining a few hundred gold per turn, which makes purchasing units far easier than building them.

A while back I changed the trade route income equation to match Thalassicus' balance mod. Instead of 1.0+1.25*pop, it's now -1.3+1.5*pop+0.05*capital, which means you break even at around population 8-9 compared to before. This really kills ICS, of course; the big drop in the constant hurts small cities badly, which is why I did it.
The problem is that once you get to size 20ish in every city, you're now gaining ~4 gpt per city more than you used to (29.7 vs 26 gpt), times the usual multipliers, because the per-pop part is larger than before. I've tried to balance this by the increased cost of culture/happiness buildings and the higher unhappiness rate (which'd force you to pay for more happiness buildings), but it hasn't quite worked out. Happiness is just a non-issue once you get rolling; in my last game I was over +100 Happiness, so I just didn't NEED all those happiness-boosting buildings, which'd save you enough money to make up the difference.
(I'm looking into that massive Happiness. There has to be some way to alter that; I think the big culprit is that there's no downside to having all of the luxuries. If you had diminishing returns, where the first few unique luxuries gave +6 or +7 and then it tapered down to +1 or +2 per, then there wouldn't be this massive bonus for expansion. Right now, as long as a city site has a local luxury resource nearby, it'll always be a net positive. Even if it's got horses nearby for a circus, same deal.)

So I'm thinking about changing the money equation again. How about -1.0 + 1.333*pop + 0.067*capital? Break-even is size 13 (hurting ICS even worse), but it doesn't go out of control nearly as badly at large sizes. With size 20 cities you'd gain 27 gpt, versus 26 in vanilla. Conversely, with size 5 cities you'd make 6gpt, versus 7.25 in vanilla and 6.45 in the current equation, so it shouldn't hurt you too badly at first.

But even that might not work right, because from what I can tell there's a fundamental weakness in the way the economics works, part of which I did to myself. It's the tile yield increases. Farms (+research) and Trading Posts (+production) are the only ones you can really spam, but most of the specialized ones gained +1 gold. So it adds up FAST; trade route income is really only a small part of a player's income, most of their money comes from the multiplication of tile yields and Merchant specialists. It's why settling on a river is so crucial.
This actually comes into play with some of my Nanotech-era buildings (Nanoreplicator and such). Adding a flat amount to the base gold/research/production of a city might not sound too impressive, but by that era the multipliers are so large that the effect can be huge.

3. On the Lakes map I played on earlier today there were whales in one of the water tiles: had never seen that before!

The percentages aren't set very high, but yes, it happens. I didn't touch the luxury distribution logic, so this is all part of the core game. The only thing I changed were the strategic deposits; I suppose that could interact, since more strategics means fewer open tiles to put luxuries in, but there's a hard minimum the game uses so I don't think that's a problem.
In terms of whales, and other aquatic resources, the game splits tiles into three lists: directly adjacent to land, shallow water (which also includes the adjacent category), and deep water. Pretty much every resource is linked to shallow water, including Whales for reasons that have nothing to do with reality and everything with balance.

If you try starting a game in the Transcend Era (or Nanotech, even), you'll see all of the resources on a map. This is how I tested the distributions for myself; start a game in that era, see if there's enough of each resource within reach to be playable, tweak and iterate.
I'm still not quite happy; Dilithium's still pretty scarce and Omnicytes are a bit too plentiful. But it's a lot better than it used to be. And you can see how common Whales, Pearls, etc. are on the various map types.

4. On the Lakes map I played on earlier today there was no oil or aluminum at all.

This sort of thing really annoys me. There's logic in there that's SUPPOSED to check for this, and add in small amounts of a strategic resource if there's less than a certain amount. But it's just no coded well, at all; as far as I can tell, instead of adding enough to reach the minimum, it just adds a single deposit.

That's why, for my own mod, I handled the minimum slightly differently. Instead of placing the resources randomly and then checking to see if you had enough, I placed a smaller number of Neutronium randomly, and then just manually said, "Add N more deposits around the world." The number of Dilithium in the world will be directly related to the number of fish, pearls, and whales, and then it'll add another N small deposits. And Omnicytes have a small override too, but it's not as critical for them since they're a land/sea resource.
This also applies to Coal; I added a small override like this in one of my previous updates to force a few extra small coal deposits to show up. Missing some Oil hurts your military, but missing Coal is crippling. (Especially for an Industrial or Nuclear start, since it'll be a while until a settler is ready and the chances of settling near a Coal aren't good.)

So it sounds like I could do something similar for Oil and Aluminum. Although, neither is insurmountable; an Energy Bank gets you Oil and Coal, and the Fusion Lab makes Aluminum and Uranium (at the cost of Dilithium, which might not be easy to get on a Lakes map?), so it's not like the game is unwinnable without those. So I might only add N/2 instead of N, and keep the deposits small (as with Coal), just enough that most empires will have a LITTLE but not enough to build an army around.

Was making plans on how to take advantage of the next AI on AI war when all the AIs dogpiled me

I've noticed this happening much more after the official patch. The AIs pay much more attention to how weak/strong your military is; if you lag even a little behind in building up your military on an Industrial start, the AIs will declare on you with no warning. In my game I had 4 declare on me on one turn, finished that war, then had 3 declare on me a while later, despite the fact that the civs in question were on another continent and had no navies. I literally had one enemy whose empire was filled with land units, one per hex, and yet he never embarked them to come invade me; instead, he lobbed an atomic bomb and watched as a half-dozen Stealth Bombers picked his army apart one hex at a time.

Part of it also seems to be related to the new negative Declaration. One AI condemns you, it makes all the others like you less, which makes the next one do the same, and suddenly your relations are all so low that everyone hates you and declares war. Especially if you're in first place from building Wonders and/or have a relatively weak army...
The problem is that once this happens, it all falls apart. If the AIs all declare on you, then even once you make peace they'll still dislike you. That means no more 1-for-1 luxury deals, no more research agreements, so you'll start falling behind... unless you go full military. There should be more ways to repair your relationship with other AIs, but unlike city-states, there isn't a clear benefit to giving the AI free stuff.
 
Two things from this evenings playtesting:

1. After the Americans declared war on me they had two units slowly rotating around the outside of my border, with one wounded unit circling closer and another full-strength unit shadowing it. I finally decided to attack the weakened unit to attenuate it further. However on the next turn I found that the AI had fully repaired the damaged unit (i.e. the AI used the unit's promotion to repair the unit) and used it to attack and destroy my now weakened unit, then used its shadowing unit to leapfrog right into my territory! I hope this was programmed in on purpose!

2. Concerning the Planetary Datalinks wonder: when I built this I think I immediatly received every tech ever researched by all factions. IIRC the SMAC PD only gave techs reseached by three factions after the PD was built. Which is your intent here?

Otherwise a very enjoyable playtest this evening. Will continue to press my advantages into the AIs tomorrow morning!

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I hope this was programmed in on purpose!

I don't think they explicitly coded that behavior, but it sounds like a consequence of simpler logics: don't waste a promotion on a heal until you really need it, don't stop a wounded unit to rest unless it's below 50ish%, and be aggressive once there are no enemy units around to stop you. So I don't think that unit was intended to be bait, it was just not wounded enough to take any special action until you attacked it again, and it all went from there.

But you're right, it makes for some fun encounters when the AI does things like this. Personally I wish the AI would spend a little more effort moving his wounded units back to safety before healing, instead of trying to rest on the spot. Or not embarking a unit when there are tons of naval or air units in the area. But the AI's been getting better at waging war lately, especially in terms of keeping a flanking bonus, so I'm okay with it.

2. Concerning the Planetary Datalinks wonder: when I built this I think I immediatly received every tech ever researched by all factions. IIRC the SMAC PD only gave techs reseached by three factions after the PD was built. Which is your intent here?

PD should give you techs if FOUR civs have it, not counting city-states or barbarians and excluding Disabled techs (like Centauri Ecology). In my test game it didn't give me anything, because I was the tech leader (I was only playing on Prince), but if you're playing on higher difficulties and haven't thinned out the AIs it can easily lead to what you've described. You might not be getting ALL of the techs, but if there are enough AI players the chances of four having any one tech are pretty good.
If it ends up being too imbalanced, I can switch it to a Tech Diffusion-style setup where you just get a steady stream of extra beakers when researching something that others have already researched. But I was basically trying to imitate the Civ4 Internet wonder (N=3), which in turn was a copy of earlier games like SMAC. (This mod was actually planned out as a Civ4 mod, pre-BTS, so it was originally intended that the Datalinks would be sort of like a poor man's version of the Internet for those people who were beaten to the Wonder.)

The Telepathic Matrix, at Centauri Psi (Nanotech Era) drops this threshold to 1, to where you'd get anything anyone else had, but that's a World Wonder instead of a national one. The two are coded the same way, it uses a custom XML table (Building_Bonuses, in the Buildings.xml file) and just sets the value to 4 for the datalinks and 1 for the matrix. I'd tested it through Lua and it had worked fine pre-patch, but I haven't confirmed it since then.
 
Have played a couple of games since (all on the Lakes map-style), however nothing too significant to report other than in my last game none of the adjacent AIs ever attacked me. Several times I went to war with AIs who were distant from me, however no major conflicts all the way up till I researched Transcendence 1, 2, 3, etc. The other thing was that there was a serious lack of strategic resources: there were no naturally occuring sources of Uranium, oil, Aluminum, Neutronium, Dilithium, or Omnicytes within my empire, so I could only build a few units based on the resources which became available when I built certain buildings.

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