Realism Invictus

CivEikka said:

Do you play the official or the SVN?

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SVN.

Soulmate said:

1) Alot of people already mentioned the overwhelming superiority of the Despotism over any other early civic but I found myself using it untill industrial era . How long do you guyz stick to Despotism ?

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Many times until I get Democracy.

Soulmate said:

2) I couldn't find any practical use for Crossbowman, I find idea of having any in the stack rather useles. Does someone actualy knows how to use them effective enough ?

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They will crush those that are still using mainly swordman type units. A combination of Longbowman and pikeman will be better for defense eventually, but they're not bad to beat back those bronze and iron working units and they're cheap enough as well.

Soulmate said:

3) Also I can't find any reason to build Levies/Irregulars at all. Their cost is almost as theirs proffesional counterparts and food production doesn't cover the strenght difference at all. Does anyone actualy use them ?

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Some cities have enough food but not hammers, so yeah. And cities with hammers and food can build them quite fast. Thats pretty much it. They are cheaper for sure, so they serve as good cannon fodder when trying to not waste too much production, for example when trying to conquer cities with tribal forts (heh)...

Soulmate said:

4) Again about the Great Library(I think this wonder is way overpowered). In every game I played I was able to build it even without marble, AI simply ignore this tech for some reason. Is it just my luck ?

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Its not that hard to beat the AI to important wonders, especially since you can almost always get the pyramids and the great engineer that will pop, saving it for something important. The AI doesn't really wonder whore unless its isolated (sometimes the English on the huge world map will wonder whore like crazy). In my current game with the Zulu on the the huge world map/Immortal I built 8 world wonders without trying (not pyramids though, I just started by craking out settlers and workers) and still in Medieval era with 14 cities (two more on the way, since the remaining Swahili cities lost their tribal forts).
If you think the great library is great put it together with Gondeshapur and see yourself getting the tech lead vs Immortal AIs. I had to close some borders so that they don't catch up easily!

Btw I hate that cities take so long to culture flip even when they have just the one city tile, made me lose my patience and waste like 15 units.

Soulmate said:

5) I played 2 games with tech transfer and found it enjoyable early on but not quiet what I like later on, I had to feed the AI techs through the map editor in order to keep them on pair. It is more of a personal preference but I like it when even small civilizations(or big but that fell behind in sciense too much) can posses threat strong enough to send troops on them. How do you guyz play it ? With techtransfer or in old way ?

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With tech transfer. What difficulty are we talking about? Just step it up.

Is there a way to turn off great people notifications? I'm tired of getting spammed by "Great general X has been born in a faraway city!" messages early in the game.

Is there a way to take the default name of a random leader when you start a game? Right now I have to remind myself to change my name at the beginning of each game, or just accept the other leaders calling me by whatever silly name I made up for myself at game start.

O.K., now something that's easily fixable: I tried to pillage some fishing boats with the Shift-P shortcut recently, and the ship blockaded instead. Turns out they have the same shortcut.

I've noticed that Light Infantry have a weird glitch in their combat animation where one of the guns is pointing straight up while the soldier acts like he's firing it at the enemy.

Anyway, since I feel bad for writing about nothing but minor bugs and problems, I'd like to mention that I love Realism Invictus, not just for its balance, added content, and completeness, but for the various convenience mods integrated into it, to the point that playing most other mods has me missing all the extra features in RI. Vanilla Civ4 feels unfinished compared to RI.

I played on Monarch difficulty , mostly because it gives enough challenge and doesn't force me into wars for supremacy(well at least for some time). But it looks like I should reconsider the difficulty(Immortal is too much of tryharding for me though ).
I also play on large random maps(due to 32 bit system) so things there are more intense and if some AI goes on rampage and conquers half of the map he is able to tech on pair with me but all other just drag behind without any threat(and at some point I jsut feed them techs to give them capable forces). Also on Legendary game speed 10+tech differense is insane power gap , especialy after medieval era. Does any of the factors I implied actualy affect the tech transfer or should I just increase difficulty ?
About the levies : on legendary speed production difference between the irregulars and fusiliers are 1-2 turns and it doesn't compensate the power gap at all :< I would consider reducing their cost even more , does anyone agree with that ?
The thing I also wanted to ask is about large world map(I assume now that it might be difficulty issue again). In my Aztec game All eastern factions exept for the Mongols, Dravidian empire and Japan(duo to isolation) got crushed by the barbarians pretty easily. What is your experience on that matter guyz?
P.S. Also, in the same game English empire went "wonder whoring"(no Great Libraby-Gondenashpur combo though ) and doubles my gold income with their 4 cities and soon will be ahead of me in techs by almost an era(wooho... Long live the Queen).

I never played anything but the slower speed. Maybe there's more imbalances in other speeds, I don't know.
Asia is a Barbarian fest. If I start there and don't get the great wall I just give up. Its too annoying to be worth it. One plays for fun.

I think Monarch is too easy and bores me. Emperor is okay. Immortal is already a jump and a grind on non crowded maps and if an AI somewhere gets to 20 cities easily by classical era, whats the point of continuing? (on the worlds maps its fine, besides its easy to worker steal and get an advantage early and all that). I don't think the handicaps are really that balanced for such a slow game, but whatever.

Soulmate said:

P.S. Also, in the same game English empire went "wonder whoring"(no Great Libraby-Gondenashpur combo though ) and doubles my gold income with their 4 cities and soon will be ahead of me in techs by almost an era(wooho... Long live the Queen).

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The AI bonuses are so outreageous that even with just 4 cities and good traits they tech well, heh. The ideal is for the AIs to be involved in stalemate wars. Fortunately (or not), they do that a lot.

JeremyHussell said:

I've noticed that Light Infantry have a weird glitch in their combat animation where one of the guns is pointing straight up while the soldier acts like he's firing it at the enemy.

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That's just some good ol' YEEHAW!

Soulmate said:

Does any of the factors I implied actualy affect the tech transfer or should I just increase difficulty ?

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Tech transfer is at a set rate. You receive a reduction in research cost for the first civ you have open borders with who has discovered that tech. Any additional open borders with another civ after that will also reduce the research cost, but at a lower rate.

Increasing the difficulty will have the biggest effect on the research gap between you and the AI, however it will not effect tech transfer. What it will do is give the AI an advantage by allowing them to generate more beakers from their cities than you can.

Soulmate said:

About the levies : on legendary speed production difference between the irregulars and fusiliers are 1-2 turns and it doesn't compensate the power gap at all :< I would consider reducing their cost even more , does anyone agree with that ?

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I agree. I never build irregular units for this reason unless I don't have the proper resources. If they were cheaper I would build them if I needed to defend, or launch a counter attack very quickly.

Soulmate said:

In my Aztec game All eastern factions exept for the Mongols, Dravidian empire and Japan(duo to isolation) got crushed by the barbarians pretty easily. What is your experience on that matter guyz?

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Japan usually survives, but is relatively weak. The Chinas, Korea, and the Khmers generally have a pretty rough go. I don't play as either of those on the world maps. IMO, they are the hardest civs to play as in that scenario, due to the relentless insanely large hordes of barbarians. Also on a lot of games the Mongols get pretty scary and if you haven't had a chance to build up (due to relentless barbarian attacks) they will steamroll you.

Soulmate said:

P.S. Also, in the same game English empire went "wonder whoring"(no Great Libraby-Gondenashpur combo though ) and doubles my gold income with their 4 cities and soon will be ahead of me in techs by almost an era(wooho... Long live the Queen).

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Elizabeth is the biggest wonder whore this game has ever seen! England wonder whores every game I play usually, however it works out ok with their bad starting location that doesn't allow them to expand until after the New World is discovered. Elizabeth's wonder whoring simply allows her to keep on par, or remain slightly ahead of everyone tech wise until that point.

After the New World is discovered England usually is a big threat if you let them conquer most of NA. Before that point, you don't even need a navy as long as you have a coastal city in north western France so you can easily invade them. If you don't England is no threat as long as you have a good navy.

I always get annoyed when they build the Pyramids in London... it just doesn't fit. I find it funny that Egypt usually never build the Pyramids, or the Spinx, but has an excellent starting location with all that stone and awesome food and production tiles.

God-Emperor said:

The help text function CvGameTextMgr::setPlotListHelp does things differently if there are more than 15 units in the stack. That is when it starts merging them into groups with indications of how many of each promotion type the group has, showing them at the end of the list as "Unittype (x)...".

The very first time you do this it permanently allocates a bunch of memory into a list of arrays. It has a size of max players (18 in normal BtS) times the number of unit infos times the number of promotion infos. Each of those entries is 4 bytes in size. In BtS this is something like a megabyte. In mods with a higher player limits, more unit types, and/or more promotion types it can be considerably more.

Every time it shows the help for a stack that big it starts by zeroing all those numbers. It then proceeds to determine how many of each promotion type the various unit types in the stack have. It also loops over things again to calculate the average strength of each type. This should only take a fraction of a second, but it could be just enough to cause a noticeable lag. I expect it is recalculated every screen update, so multiple times per second.

There were changes made to this stuff in C2C (I just checked my notes and it was in revision 3768, I don't know if it has been touched since then but I don't think it has) since it was a vastly larger amount of memory (something up around 100MB, I think) that got allocated due to 50 players and a lot more units and promotions so it was made more efficient.

Or it could be some other issue. (Also, I have not looked at this mod's DLL to see if anything in there was changed already.)

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You're absolutely correct about this issue. I wasn't aware of it so thank you very much for pointing it out. Our code here is currently stock BTS and the original implementation is terrible.

Our counts are somewhere around here:

MAX_PLAYERS: 63
Number of Promotion Types: 263
Number of Unit Types: 2928

This means that this function allocates 63 * 263 * 2928 * 4 bytes of memory. That's 185 Mebibytes! That's a significant contribution to our Out of Memory problems and it's a great computational expense.

I took a look at the C2C code and they made a correct use of binary search trees to handle the problem (std::map). I may or may not make use of their code directly, but this issue is going very near the top of my TODO list.

I like new science great works, that are created by great scientist, but you could completely turn off possibility of building academy with great scientist, it seems redundant.

Hi all,

something seems messed up with the Terra mapscript. It just gives a world without any sea tiles at all.

For anyone running on r4790 or later I recommend updating. Some critical bugs were fixed in r4795.

sjodster said:

For anyone running on r4790 or later I recommend updating. Some critical bugs were fixed in r4795.

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Haha I just had 20 hours long game . In renesance, so it looks like I will not see that industrial age again . I would like to have some 1st, 2nd world war like games . Well, np, I try it again .
Btw, you could consider nerfing university of sancore, I find it too good. IF it had +1 science bonus for every rel. building, it would be still op. Anyone else thinks same?
... So I tried scince works... they worked fine, they are rly good, but they go obsolete. So I wasted 4 great scientists, researched paper and they all were gone and I had 4 obsolote buildings. I will try to find out how to use it, I dont know why should I build it now .
Cultural works are just discontinued by new art era. Is there reason why science obsolete?

I am still running 3.2 (rather happy with it), one question though - was Greek quarry bug fixed in the meantime, and if we there is some easy guidance of fixing that bug in the current game manually?

The FAQ could really use a tune up to "modern times"

Just discovered this wonderful mod myself, but I can confirm some of the observations people have had. I've restarted the game 4-5 times and at least twice the Chinese and the Koreans got wiped out very early in the game. And in my current and most advanced game I've also noticed the English are wonder whoring and far ahead in tech against all except me.
In one game the Bantus went on an early-game rampage, wiping out Mali, Nubia and Ethiopia, but maybe that's just a one-off.

I also believe the AI is too eager to raze cities. It seems almost every city it conquers that doesn't have a wonder gets razed, often stupidly so. In one case the Poles razed a German city and the French settled the empty territory. In another case Mali lost Timbuktu to the Berbers and when they reconquered the city a good while later, they razed it.

With revision 4798, am I supposed to get 5 Mujahid with Attrition Tactics when I found Islam? Because that's a neat bonus.

Quick question, how big (wide and height) are the Large and Huge world maps, also the same question for the Triassic and Crusades ones.

Colon said:

I also believe the AI is too eager to raze cities. It seems almost every city it conquers that doesn't have a wonder gets razed, often stupidly so. In one case the Poles razed a German city and the French settled the empty territory. In another case Mali lost Timbuktu to the Berbers and when they reconquered the city a good while later, they razed it.

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Small update: the surroundings ended up being settled by the Carthaginians and apparantly not even cities with wonders are safe from getting razed. It'd be really nice if this gets fixed because it's a real shame to see Timbuktu, Rome and Mecca wiped out so carelessly.

Uh, oh, if I disable space and diplomatic victories then I can't build the space ship and UN? I think one should still be able do so, if only for the points and in the case of the UN it's other perks.

Couple o' questions:

1. What culture score in a city do I need to make it legendary? (Semi-realistic, medium)
2. Why do Fortress Batteries have movement points when they can't move?

Thanks.

krasny said:

Couple o' questions:

2. Why do Fortress Batteries have movement points when they can't move?

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Actions such as bombardment also use movement points.