This mod picks up once you hit Era II, which roughly correlates with both Ancient and Classical eras in vanilla Civ. However, we seem to be stuck with making Era I (Survival) work better. As people have complained here and in our dedicated forum, there's "not enough to do" in the beginning.
Here are some problems that I would like to troubleshoot:
1. There's often nothing to build. If you follow the tech tree optimally, you usually have something to build at all times, but follow it any other way and you often run out of choices.
2. Scarcity of food. Roanoke's tiles naturally have 0 food, and food is the player's (human or AI) highest priority in the early game. This leads to problem 4 below...
3. Abundance of food. Turns out that having buildings generate food is a bad idea once you can build self-sustaining food improvements. This is because the food doesn't come from a citizen, so that the population keeps growing.
4. Not enough improvement choices. Putting aside bonus-specific improvements, right now each terrain type has only one viable improvement option -- hothouse for sand, extractor for basalt, mine for hills. This wasn't the intention, but offering choice here is just an illusion: when you are starving for food, building an extractor on sand just doesn't make sense.
I would summarize the above problems as: Not Enough Choices.
What we are trying to model here is "marooned on a desert island." On the one hand, realistically being stranded is a pretty crappy situation. But since this is a game we're talking about, how do we make this scenario both convey that feeling of desperation but also be lots of fun?
Some proposals from our team have included a "do or die timer" (your colony is leaking energy or whatever and must fix the problem by X time or perish), narrative interludes, quests, or just skipping this era altogether. Some specific ideas I can think of right now to respond to the above problems include:
1. Throwaway buildings that provide some marginal benefit. Or, if the "do or die" condition is in place, you start with "Bad" buildings and have to "fix" them. (But is that fun? What are your choices here?)
2. The only big solution to this is to change the planet to be more hospitable, but then we have to give up the main premise of the game. Maybe each improvement is worth more food? Also, we could implement an artificial "fresh water" type system to limit where you can build food improvements, which is one of the interesting challenges of Vanilla.
3. Instead of generating food, perhaps there would be a "process" or a fake building / unit that adds a small amount of food to your granary. I could see the AI ending up being a junkie on this thing and never moving beyond it, however...
4. See my irrigation idea under 2. There are certainly more choices to be available in the next era. What I have always been interested in doing is to allow a choice between "medium value now" vs. "low now, high later" improvements, but the AI does not recognize these choices and apparently always chooses the latter. I originally wanted hothouses (medium value) to be different than terraforms (low now, high later), but the AI can only choose one or the other, so the choice is fairly meaningless except to the player (which then gives the player a huge advantage).
Please contribute your ideas of what would make a "stranded on a desert island" scenario fun!
Here are some problems that I would like to troubleshoot:
1. There's often nothing to build. If you follow the tech tree optimally, you usually have something to build at all times, but follow it any other way and you often run out of choices.
2. Scarcity of food. Roanoke's tiles naturally have 0 food, and food is the player's (human or AI) highest priority in the early game. This leads to problem 4 below...
3. Abundance of food. Turns out that having buildings generate food is a bad idea once you can build self-sustaining food improvements. This is because the food doesn't come from a citizen, so that the population keeps growing.
4. Not enough improvement choices. Putting aside bonus-specific improvements, right now each terrain type has only one viable improvement option -- hothouse for sand, extractor for basalt, mine for hills. This wasn't the intention, but offering choice here is just an illusion: when you are starving for food, building an extractor on sand just doesn't make sense.
I would summarize the above problems as: Not Enough Choices.
What we are trying to model here is "marooned on a desert island." On the one hand, realistically being stranded is a pretty crappy situation. But since this is a game we're talking about, how do we make this scenario both convey that feeling of desperation but also be lots of fun?
Some proposals from our team have included a "do or die timer" (your colony is leaking energy or whatever and must fix the problem by X time or perish), narrative interludes, quests, or just skipping this era altogether. Some specific ideas I can think of right now to respond to the above problems include:
1. Throwaway buildings that provide some marginal benefit. Or, if the "do or die" condition is in place, you start with "Bad" buildings and have to "fix" them. (But is that fun? What are your choices here?)
2. The only big solution to this is to change the planet to be more hospitable, but then we have to give up the main premise of the game. Maybe each improvement is worth more food? Also, we could implement an artificial "fresh water" type system to limit where you can build food improvements, which is one of the interesting challenges of Vanilla.
3. Instead of generating food, perhaps there would be a "process" or a fake building / unit that adds a small amount of food to your granary. I could see the AI ending up being a junkie on this thing and never moving beyond it, however...
4. See my irrigation idea under 2. There are certainly more choices to be available in the next era. What I have always been interested in doing is to allow a choice between "medium value now" vs. "low now, high later" improvements, but the AI does not recognize these choices and apparently always chooses the latter. I originally wanted hothouses (medium value) to be different than terraforms (low now, high later), but the AI can only choose one or the other, so the choice is fairly meaningless except to the player (which then gives the player a huge advantage).
Please contribute your ideas of what would make a "stranded on a desert island" scenario fun!