Getting Started

Another and final thought for my evening:

Can "First strike" promotions be reintroduced? I rather liked them. The only units that should bombard should be artillery.

All "ranged" combat units then could be given first strike (non-obtainable) promotions.

First strikes would be damage delivered (like now with ranged attacks) prior to melee.
Units would both apply their first strike damage to their opponents, damage would be distributed, THEN melee combat would begin (at the new strength levels). For units which attack without a melee attack, combat would end immedately after the first strike round. (Archers, Crossbowmen).

The number of first strikes should be dependant on the fire rate and/or range of the weapons available.
Archers would have 2 first strikes (but low strength) and no melee attack
Crossbowmen would have 1 first strike (but higher strength) and no melee attack
Musketmen would have 1 first strike and higher strength WITH a melee attack
Riflemen would have 2 First Strikes and high strength (representing volley distance/size) and a melee attack.
Infantry and rough near equivilants would have 3 first strikes and a very high strength and a melee attack.
Mechanized infantry would have 4 first strikes OR even higher strength.

Sea units could follow similar rules.

Aircraft should not be affected by first strikes at all.

Er, a "noob" question:
Can I play a mod with no internet connection used live when playing (that is, "offline" playing)?
I mean, I would put it some folder and reach it somehow from game menu,
or make an exe for it...?

Extract the zip into <Documents>\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\MODS
To play the mod in game, click "Play Mods" on the main menu, open the Mod Browser, click on the "Installed" tab on top, and check the mods you want to play.
Go back to the Play Mods menu and click single player, then set up the game as normal and the mods are in effect. Note that if you go all the way back to the main menu and click Single Player there, your mods will NOT run. You have to access it through the mods menu.

MasterDinadan said:

Extract the zip into <Documents>\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\MODS
To play the mod in game, click "Play Mods" on the main menu, open the Mod Browser, click on the "Installed" tab on top, and check the mods you want to play.
Go back to the Play Mods menu and click single player, then set up the game as normal and the mods are in effect. Note that if you go all the way back to the main menu and click Single Player there, your mods will NOT run. You have to access it through the mods menu.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the specific help, and it is good news!

Delgar said:

... modify the way food works in Civ games, to basically make it the way gold currently works. Gold is accrued in every city but you can spend it wherever you want. Why can’t we do the same for food? Let food be accrued in every city the way it is now, but allow the player to distribute the food to every city according to the player’s needs/wishes.

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Oh snap, I like this
An added thought, perhaps food can only be distributed to a city with a market + (road or harbor) after X tech is aquired
or have a Food Bucket like the Culture Bucket, and you can send X to B City from A City at the cost of A City's growth
very intriguing idea

City specific food is a grandfathered concept dating back to Civ I, but they have broken out of it in the past when they had food as a moveable resource in Colonization. I think they could have made a change in this game to make continent specific food supplies. They already have a partial concept with Maritime City-States, but they could have calculated the surplus food per city and divided that among all the cities. Maritime city-states would not be as powerful either because they could just send their food to this pool (instead of to every city). Why did they not do that? I have no idea. The world's largest cities, London, New York, Los Angeles couldn't feed many of their millions of citizens if they had to rely on the area immediately surrounding them.

It's a mess and I'd love to see it changed, but it's probably too hard to just mod in that cities share their food

Spendoza said:

Oh snap, I like this
An added thought, perhaps food can only be distributed to a city with a market + (road or harbor) after X tech is aquired
or have a Food Bucket like the Culture Bucket, and you can send X to B City from A City at the cost of A City's growth
very intriguing idea

Click to expand...

I wholly support this lovely idea!

I just hope the game can be modded so...

On a sort of related but not really note, I am very pleased with Firaxis's decision to release the game in the state it's in. Some might complain "oo the game is broken what a bunch of douchearella's!" but I'm having almost as much fun in the community and coding as I am playing the game itself! Learning is fun!

As a noob (and theoretically speaking) it shouldn't be so difficult to MacGuyver the culture bucket into a food bucket... The distribution system would be the tricky part...

Would I be correct in saying there is no existing in-game mechanic to distribute anything other than units amongst the cities?

OH SUPER SNAP! I just had the most amazing idea:
NEW BUILDABLE UNIT:
Food Caravan - similar to the ones in Colonization. Requires X and X to build (Food Bucket still necessary to go that route)
functions sorta Great Merchant from CIV, except instead of +/t it just deposits a one time lump sum from bucket A in bucket B

I am reminded of the Quest system from CIV, some of them asked you to give X food to Y civ/city, could the code held within that section help?

Another ambitious idea, but I have no idea where to start... I gotta practice my xml/coding lol!

Thoughts?

With SDK, it may be pretty simple to make a food wagon that is "constructed" with food in the same fashion as settlers, but does not take hammers at all (your hammers would just be wasted while the food wagon was building)
So the food wagon might cost 50 to build, and it just uses excess food to apply towards this cost. Once it's done, you can move it to another city and deposit, and that city gains 50 food.
It will probably be a lot easier to do than a food bucket.

Maybe a Wagon would become available at Chivalry or so, which was somewhat inefficient (costing more food to build than the amount it would deposit). It would still have utility but you could not just move food around willy nilly.
Much later, when you get Refrigeration, you make a Refrigerated Truck that can move food with no losses

I'm certain that nothing like it is possible just by XML modding.

One thing to consider is that food in this game means population. Therefore, we need to look at how population functions in the real world. I lived for years in Indiana. While they have good population in Indianapolis, and some of the northern "rust belt" cities around the Great Lakes, in the more rural areas there are constantly articles and such about "brain drain". Basically, once people get to a certain point they move away from the rural farming areas to big cities often in other states.

Yes, the food is an issue, but at the core of things is that food can be moved to where people are or want to be.

That said, perhaps what could be done is that population loss from starvation could be removed and a function could be added that would drop the population of one city by one and you could then move the resulting unit across your nation to supplement the population at your metropolis. The metropolis doesn't grow naturally (too many people and not enough food), but the people there don't starve because the food from other places makes its way there.

In a mechanics sense this could probably work, but it would dramatically change the game. You could set up feeder cities that did nothing but work five or six tiles and then send any new citizens to your capital. This would lead to massive cities with more citizens than tiles and the like which could mean massive production, science, or the like. If you think about it though isn't that how our cities work today?

An option would be to make a "immigrant pool" representing this group. They don't consume food, but they've lowered the population elsewhere to make the population in your metropolis greater. They work as normal citizens in every other way. This way you could limit it by various means...
Granary? +1 immigrant pool due to it's ability to store excess food for them.
Trade route? For each one the capital has it can have one immigrant (signifying the food that is coming in as well).
University? Brain drain begins and capital or other metropoli can have two more citizens.
Currency? Trade becomes more prevalent and you can have an empire wide +1 immigrant pool.
Refrigeration? Food becomes a non-issue and a much larger group of immigrants (10 or even 20) can be settled in a particular metropolis.
Other techs/buildings? All of them add more citizens that can be sent to the big city.

In the end, this now could be my favorite mod idea! Either way though I hope something is changed.

It may be neat and somewhat realistic, but it seems to me that it won't result in more interesting gameplay. Just move all of your population to one city, like you said, and put all of your national wonders and such there to make it a mega center of everything. Why waste time building another big city when you can just keep moving people into the one you've got which already has a university and everything, etc.

At any rate, we've gotten really off topic. This should probably be discussed in a new thread because it has nothing to do with the balance mods.

MasterDinadan said:

At any rate, we've gotten really off topic. This should probably be discussed in a new thread because it has nothing to do with the balance mods.

Click to expand...

lol no doubt, i'll make a new thread after i feed my baby lunch

Here!

I'm finally done with disaster relief drills at work, been busy with that the past few days. I'm exhausted today but will try and really sit down and read through everything tomorrow since my last major post here. Just did that for the culture mod thread, and it takes a while.

Civilization II had caravans, did not miss them to be honest. I preferred Alpha Centauri's method where the supply crawler could transfer a steady supply of food. It would be a relatively simple way to somewhat nationalize the food supply.

If possible you might want to start removing the redundant mods from the CIV V moddatabase. As trying to go through and update them became a bit of a guessing game as to which mod held which changes, and I'd not want to have older versions interrupting your combinations.

Thalassicus said:

Civilization II had caravans, did not miss them to be honest. I preferred Alpha Centauri's method where the supply crawler could transfer a steady supply of food. It would be a relatively simple way to somewhat nationalize the food supply.

Click to expand...

Why not have trade routes generate food with certain buildings?
Maybe that's what the "granary" should really do.
+2 Food per trade route.

Spamrific, but another independent thought hit me.

I complained earlier about the happiness bonus the AI seems to get so that running large empires without happiness issues annoyed me.

I had an elegant and simple solution - the AI is notorious for running deficeit spending. What if debt (less than 0 gold in the bank) incurred a +1 unhappiness per gold missing? This could bring those spendthrift AI's to a halt. They could keep their bonus then. IF they can take the happiness hit - no worries. If not, then they shouldnt be able to wage war.

Downloaded the whole bunch, thusfar liking the changes "alot" excellent work

QES said:

If possible you might want to start removing the redundant mods from the CIV V moddatabase. As trying to go through and update them became a bit of a guessing game as to which mod held which changes, and I'd not want to have older versions interrupting your combinations.

Click to expand...

I wish I could, but as mentioned in the Improvements and Buildings&Wonders threads, it's not possible. If I try and log in to my old username, modbuddy crashes.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=388115#post9718549

If it helps, search for "thalassicus2". This is the new username I was forced to create to get around this bug, recent updates are through it. And yes... when this one inexorably breaks like the first one, I'll have to create a thalassicus3, and thalassicus4.... so I hope it doesn't take them months to fix the problem. Since I prefer an iterative development cycle with frequent updates, I could easily go through 4-5 usernames per month. I have to create a new email each time too.

Once I think I'm reaching the critical crash limit, I'm going to create thalassicus3 early, so then I can go back to thalassicus2 and disable outdated mods.

The really bad part is is I'm forced to subtly change the name of the mods due to this, since an identical name brings up the "not owned" error. I'm going to run out of name variations. Maybe I'll just start tacking a 1, 2, 3, 4 etc on the end... actually, I guess that will work. I'll just have to use major and minor versions.

Thalassicus said:

I wish I could, but as mentioned in the Improvements and Buildings&Wonders threads, it's not possible. If I try and log in to my old username, modbuddy crashes.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=388115#post9718549

If it helps, search for "thalassicus2". This is the new username I was forced to create to get around this bug, recent updates are through it. And yes... when this one inexorably breaks like the first one, I'll have to create a thalassicus3, and thalassicus4.... so I hope it doesn't take them months to fix the problem. Since I prefer an iterative development cycle with frequent updates, I could easily go through 4-5 usernames per month. I have to create a new email each time too.

Once I think I'm reaching the critical crash limit, I'm going to create thalassicus3 early, so then I can go back to thalassicus2 and disable outdated mods.

The really bad part is is I'm forced to subtly change the name of the mods due to this, since an identical name brings up the "not owned" error. I'm going to run out of name variations. Maybe I'll just start tacking a 1, 2, 3, 4 etc on the end... actually, I guess that will work. I'll just have to use major and minor versions.

Click to expand...

Well that's unfortunate and tedious. Perhaps you should contact Kael or the 2k people. As I'm sure that's not working as intended.

I sat here for a bit trying to think of a better temporary solution than you have and failed. Godspeed.

First I want to thanks not only Thalassicus, for the great work he's doing, but everybody who participate on the forums. It's great to know that lot's of people are interested in making Civ V a better game.

After reading some pages of ideas from everybody, here's what I want to say right now...

- the "food bucket" idea doesn't sound very good to me, tough I understand it's reasons. I'd stick with the food caravans, builded like settlers, and the idea that trade routes could give food. But +2 per route is too much, and it should be added to a mid/late tech or building, rather then the granary, otherwise cities would grow too fast too early...

- about the water tiles, I think +1 Gold in coast tiles would be reasonable, this way coast would give 2 Food 3 Gold with lighthouse, wich is pretty decent. I think that if you apply this to ocean tiles things could get unbalanced. And +2 science in whales resources with university sounds good and realistic.

- altough the balance mod make the most common tiles better, I see grassland + horse giving me only 2 Food 2 Hammer, or cows giving 3 Food 1 Hammer... In Civ 4 a city built near these resources was desirable, but now it seems that only the strategic and luxury resources indicates where you should build a city. I think this need to be discussed, 'cause this tiles need to be better.

- I think granary has become OP! +2 Food plus +1 per food resource in the very beggining of the game is too much...

That's it for now... Thanks again everyone for the good discussions and the applied results.