Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

On a related note, I've decided that the Golem needs a bit of sprucing up, and I thought of a good one: let the player sacrifice the Golem in a city to hurry production, as if it were a very weak Great Engineer. (It makes sense, if you think about it.) This definitely makes up for its deficiencies in other areas, without being too overpowered.

I really like the idea in principle, say (generally speaking) more as a parallel to how the ISS was built (i.e. one piece at a time by various countries, then assembled at one location), only here instead of countries, it would be cities building individual pieces that are then transported to the desired city to assist in the main construction project. This would sort of mimic how SMAC players used Crawlers to rush-build items. Question is would the AIs understand this? I haven't seen them utilize Great Engineers in this capacity, so not sure if this would be more of a human exploit than anything else.

The only things I did to the Stasis Chamber were reduce its Flavor from 150 down to 50, cut its cost in half, and move it to the Applied Physics tech. I don't know why its behavior would be any different than before. It could just be that since the Flavor isn't through the roof, that the AI decided it really needed to be doing something else instead.
I've seen some AI strangeness with the Work Boat as well, where it'd circle around the resources instead of improving them.

When I was first experimenting with giving C-S GDRs, I tried to change the GDR Flavor to Defense, however then all the GDRs just wandered around the maps, instead of staying home. Could be there still needs to be some tweaking to the SDK which governs the Flavor code?

Anyways, a thought I had is if you want to test how an AI is using a specific unit, then just make it free to all the C-S, and then every playtest you get to see several examples of how the AIs handle the unit in question in the various situations the C-S AIs find themselves in: quick and dirty way to get multiple test runs of a unit into just one iteration of testing. :goodjob:

D
 
I really like the idea in principle, say (generally speaking) more as a parallel to how the ISS was built (i.e. one piece at a time by various countries, then assembled at one location), only here instead of countries, it would be cities building individual pieces that are then transported to the desired city to assist in the main construction project.

I was thinking more of the "they're just constructs, so there are no qualms about working one to death to make something important", but either way works. Yes, it's analogous to the SMAC crawlers and the Civ2 Caravans. More importantly, the Golem isn't in the Worker upgrade chain; once Labor Mechs come out, there's not much reason to want them at present. I was thinking of making them tougher in combat, but they'd then be too powerful for their era.

If the AI doesn't understand how to use a Great Engineer to rush-build a wonder, then there's really nothing I can do about it. I'm operating under the assumption that the AI isn't totally incompetent.
My worry, basically, comes down to the production side; I don't want sacrificing a Golem to give more production than it cost to make it in the first place. But that's easy enough to fine-tune later on.

Could be there still needs to be some tweaking to the SDK which governs the Flavor code?

I get the feeling that there's a LOT of hard-coding going on behind the scenes, and that's unfortunate. But it's really strange that the AI's behavior could somehow change for the existing units, in a mod where I don't change those units. To me, that screams "memory leak" somewhere internal, where some array is getting overwritten by some other.

Anyways, a thought I had is if you want to test how an AI is using a specific unit, then just make it free to all the C-S,

I was actually thinking of something a little different. Basically, I was thinking of creating a handful of CS-only units, resourceless versions of the more powerful player units that only City-States can build. Because right now, the CS's stall out at Laser Infantry, since they won't usually have the strategics to go further. (The only later unit that doesn't require a resource is the Geosynchronous Survey Pod.) So each CS might get a resourceless Needlejet variant, a resourceless Gravtank, a resourceless Stealth Ship, and a new super-Worker unit. (No titans, though.) Lower attack powers for these, of course, but it'd make up for the fact that there's no continuous progression of resourceless units like there is in the core game.
This way, I can crank the Flavor ratings up closer to 100 on these, so that making that CS-only worker is a high priority for the AI, but it won't cripple the AI empires. It won't bother with other units, most likely, but that's not really a problem.


Anyway, I've been debugging some more, and found a few little things (Merchant Exchange and Pholus Mutagen don't do what they're supposed to, the Civilopedia help text for Superconductor and Graviton Theory were switched, Neutronium was spawning far too many large deposits and too few small ones, etc.). Also, I finally switched the culture-per-specialist to the Paradise Garden and made the Ascetic Virtues be purely a GPP-boosting national wonder (a la Hagia Sofia), although that might make it a little too weak now, and I don't want to just jack up the GPP percentage. Right now, I'm looking at adding something happiness-related, like "-10% unhappiness from number of cities", which with the revised numbers from my other mod means +0.4 happiness per city. But I'm worried that I'd added too many sources of Happiness (which is why I changed the Children's Creche to SUBTRACT Happiness in the last patch), so I'm not sure. Another possibility would be a global culture scaling, something like +10% to culture in all cities.

More importantly, I've got it so that Neutronium now shows up in the strategic list at the top of the screen (and its pulldown) despite still adding happiness; basically, the game (not lua, the actual source code) seems to check happiness first when classifying something as a luxury or strategic. So I changed it so that that UI will display any resource with ResourceClass set to "rush" or "modern", which mean strategics. (Strangely enough, the Happiness pulldown doesn't check to see if the resource is a luxury, it only checks to see if the resource adds a nonzero Happiness value. So it's unusual that they made one side so flexible while locking the other side down.)
Also, I've changed it to where the bombardment and rebasing will no longer try to highlight the acceptable tiles for anything with a range over 50; that MIGHT have been partially responsible for the crashes with the orbital units, since it'd try to highlight the whole world (and wrap around?). Both of these are changes that should really be put into the core game, IMO.

So I'm hoping to have a new version this weekend. I'm just trying to fix those two wonders first, and if I have time I'll try switching the orbital weapons to the Siege category and see if they can still rebase correctly. (It's actually not the end of the world if they can't, since you're not building them in cities on the fringes anyway.) The question is, if Merchant Exchange can't be "+1 gold per tile", then what should I change it to? I really wanted it to be something that would encourage working tiles (so "+1 gold per citizen" wouldn't be good since that helps specialists just as much). I may end up having to make it something like "+2 gold per local luxury or strategic resource deposit" instead (similar to the Nanoreplicator's effect) and hope the player and AI aren't too stupid about which city they place it in.
Hmm, that gives me an idea for the Pholus Mutagen; instead of +1 food per tile, I might have it be that "bonus" resources (cows, deer, fish, etc.) now give something like +1 food, +1 production, +1 gold, and +1 research. This sounds huge, but chances are a city won't have many of these, so I'd probably need to use the OR prerequisite to be sure there's a local supply for the AI's sake. I might have to remove fish from the list, or at least downgrade them a bit, since fish resources tend to cluster. (Last game, my capital had four fish and a whales within 2 hexes.)
 
I was thinking more of the "they're just constructs, so there are no qualms about working one to death to make something important", but either way works.

This is your mod, so you should flavor it the way you want. Just remember that I am working on my own mod in parallel, and will be "borrowing" some of the stuff from your mod, which this is one of, and I will then flavor it the way that fits with the theme of my mod.

I get the feeling that there's a LOT of hard-coding going on behind the scenes, and that's unfortunate. But it's really strange that the AI's behavior could somehow change for the existing units, in a mod where I don't change those units. To me, that screams "memory leak" somewhere internal, where some array is getting overwritten by some other.

I've attached a screen pic from what I saw the other night. The spaceship part just seemed to sit there all game long.


I was actually thinking of something a little different. Basically, I was thinking of creating a handful of CS-only units, resourceless versions of the more powerful player units that only City-States can build.This way, I can crank the Flavor ratings up closer to 100 on these, so that making that CS-only worker is a high priority for the AI, but it won't cripple the AI empires.

Yah, thats another good idea: I think The List of units is also probably going to be dependent on the tweaking which is currently going on under the hood. Thats one of the reasons I'm waiting on this sort of thing, so thru playtesting I can assess which units are "working" for the AI, then from that I can distill The List of units which work for the C-S.
An idea I had in parallel to assist the C-S is to give them their own Settler class unit - one which is relatively expensive to build, which would mean they would expand very slowly. This would then hopefully lead to them being less easily conquered, which even with the assistance I have given them is still something which happens on a regular basis.

So I'm hoping to have a new version this weekend.

OK, sounds good.

Here's some thoughts/ observations from the playtesting yesterday:

1. Experienced what can only be described as a soft-crash: essentially after I hit end turn the globe appeared showing the game was processing, but it just hung. I could move the mouse over tiles and the text would display what was on the tile, and I could select units and their individual stats would display (all the while the globe icon was present and the game stated it was updating other players turns). I was even able to access the drop-down menu to save the game off, which I did. I then exited the game, re-entered, and was able to load the saved turn and play on without any problems.

2. A thought occured to me last night that there are quite a few improvements for land units, but not so much for naval, air, and space. Have you given any consideration to fleshing out these other aspects of the game in regards to giving them more opportunities to gain experience for new units?

3. Concerning the counters to nuke attacks: right now the AI seems to be defenseless against nuclear attack. Maybe move down the counter for nukes so that the AIs have this available to them sooner? The AIs also need an algorhythm "Push the Big Red Button", because I've seen AI's with nukes but not use them, even when I am obviously on the verge of wiping them out.

4. Playing on continents map right now. What an exploit it is to join in a war against a civ who's on a different continent! After declaring war all I have to do is wait, and sooner or later the AI will offer up a peace treaty with all sorts of goodies (usually without ever firing a shot at me). Yeah Free Stuff! :lol:

5. Also experienced the Bottomless Pit Marsh graphic again (see attached pic). I did as you suggested and reloaded the game, and the issue went away.

6. Also attached the screenie from when I tried to kite away the C-S GDR the other day. Even though this version of the GDR has two attacks/ turn, it declined to attack my infantry and instead headed back towards its city. Good decision algorhythm there! :goodjob:

7. Attached a screenie showing a C-S with the Omnicytes resource available. :goodjob:

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Couple pics from this evening's playtesting. First, should subs have Indirect Fire capability? I thought that was for firing over items like mountains? Second pic has to do with the pirates head icon you inserted: just curious, but whats the purpose of that?

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Some more observations from tonights playtesting:

1. Some of your units the AI are handling quite well! See screen shot one.

2. The AIs are not handling the Mobile Shields well, as they are throwing these units into the front lines.

3. I killed a city this evening and was presented with screenie #2. Should the tile lose its Railroad enhancement?

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2. A thought occured to me last night that there are quite a few improvements for land units, but not so much for naval, air, and space.

It's actually not as bad as it looks at first glance. One part of the Crazy Spatz mod (the balance one) is that Harbors give +15 XP to naval units, Seaports give +15 XP to naval units, and the Military Academy was changed to give a "+25% XP" promotion to all units (whereas the original version was another +15 XP for land units). So it's already skewing things a bit away from an all-land approach.

Then in the SMAC mod, you have the Maritime Control Center for naval units, and the Aerospace Complex (which gives +XP for air) and Cloudbase Academy (custom promotion) for air units. Also, the Bioenhancement Center gives a very useful flat +10% promotion to all units regardless of type. The Skunkworks national wonder and the new Power social policy each give +10 XP to all units regardless of type.
So really, the only pro-Land thing I added was the Cyborg Factory, and that's just because it's not possible to have a building give multiple promotions. (March doesn't apply to all unit types. I may end up having to create a new promotion that DOES apply to all types and has that same effect, which would mean that your air and naval units would heal each turn.)

That being said, one of the points of this was that air and naval units kind of become obsolete in the future eras. Naval units become obsolete once anti-grav units become common, since they're supposed to be able to move across water as well. (They don't currently, but that's the plan.) Likewise, air units become nearly obsolete once you start investing heavily in satellite weapons.

As to satellites, while there aren't a lot of buildings that give them XP, you should note that they're effectively unkillable, which goes a LONG way. They'll just keep building up the XP, and you'll never need to spend the XP on defensive promotions or mobility stuff.

3. Concerning the counters to nuke attacks: right now the AI seems to be defenseless against nuclear attack. Maybe move down the counter for nukes so that the AIs have this available to them sooner?

Well, there's been a lot of talk about mods creating an "SDI" wonder for this. Personally, I don't like it; you spend all of this effort to unlock the things (they're the only core unit that requires building a wonder or project to unlock!), so I don't want them becoming obsolete too quickly. Right now you get nukes about two eras before the anti-nuke buildings, so there's a bit of a window where they're useful.

Also, there's a victory timing issue. In the core game, you get nukes so late that you really don't have to deal with the consequences. Nuke someone, and just let them sit there in their fallout while you finish up your space victory; it's unlikely they'd have time to nuke you back, and even if every other civ got mad at you for it, there's no time for them to really mobilize. But in this mod, you're going to have to live with the civs for centuries afterwards, and deal with the diplomatic backlash from all of the other civs and city-states.

I'm not saying I can't do something about this. Maybe give a small nuke reduction to the Perimeter Defense building (T15), in lieu of the defense boost I was planning to give it. I'll try it out later. But I don't want to do too much too soon.

The AIs also need an algorhythm "Push the Big Red Button", because I've seen AI's with nukes but not use them, even when I am obviously on the verge of wiping them out.

I'm sure they do, but that's WAY beyond what I can program, and it's something plenty of people have asked for in other threads.

4. Playing on continents map right now. What an exploit it is to join in a war against a civ who's on a different continent!

Again, part of the core game. It's actually one of the things behind the original design; one of the reasons I wanted the grav units to be able to move across oceans was so that if something like that DID happen, they could immediately attack the other civ instead of having to embark units, escort them across, etc. So I'm hoping that this becomes less abuseable in this mod than in the core game; declare that sort of war, and he WILL sent a vertol over the ocean to raid you.

5. Also experienced the Bottomless Pit Marsh graphic again (see attached pic). I did as you suggested and reloaded the game, and the issue went away.

I'm assuming, then, that in between games where you use my mod, you're also playing games without it? If so, it sounds like a cache issue. Which is strange, because one of the flags in the mod properties is to reload the landmark/terrain system, which should fix those sorts of things by default. I wonder; are you going straight from some other game to testing this mod, or do you back out to the main menu in between?

Couple pics from this evening's playtesting. First, should subs have Indirect Fire capability?

Subs can't be able to bombard land at all (but Stealth ships can). But the promotions are handled purely through unit class, so yes, it's possible for a submarine to select the Indirect Fire promotion (since it is available to all naval units), even though it has no use for it. This has nothing to do with me, it's part of the core game.

But I like it, because once you upgrade the sub to a Stealth Ship it CAN make use of that. So it's not as big of a penalty for the AI any more. There are a couple others like that; the Former, for instance, can take bombardment promotions even though it has no ranged attack and can't even attack other units.

Second pic has to do with the pirates head icon you inserted: just curious, but whats the purpose of that?

Every resource has to have an icon. Neutronium is the omega symbol, Dilithium is the shuriken, Omnicytes have the flower. Well, now that I've got the building resource production working, I had to have icons for the two new luxuries. Information uses the pirate, Ambrosia uses the mushroom; both of them are a bit too cartoony, but I couldn't resist the humor (the Internet is full of pirates, and the mushroom giving extra life is sort of a Super Mario joke).
I'm in the process of creating a new icon library for all of the miscellaneous stuff (policies, resources, etc.), but text icons aren't modular, so you're limited to the options they give. If I find something that works better I'll switch it, but there aren't a lot of possibilities.
 
Well, there's been a lot of talk about mods creating an "SDI" wonder for this. Personally, I don't like it; you spend all of this effort to unlock the things (they're the only core unit that requires building a wonder or project to unlock!), so I don't want them becoming obsolete too quickly. Right now you get nukes about two eras before the anti-nuke buildings, so there's a bit of a window where they're useful.

I will simply make the comment again that this is your mod, and I have no problems subordinating myself in this sense. Simply put as I see it my job is to provide feedback for your mod. Your job is to decide whether my feedback is viable in the context of where you are going with this mod. As stated previously concerning my Modus Operandi why I have supplied my feedback on this specific subject matter, and so I will proceed forward from here.

I'm assuming, then, that in between games where you use my mod, you're also playing games without it?

Not that I am aware of. However from my end why this is a communal PC, and my son could have been playing a non-enhanced game in between times.


Subs can't be able to bombard land at all (but Stealth ships can). But the promotions are handled purely through unit class, so yes, it's possible for a submarine to select the Indirect Fire promotion (since it is available to all naval units), even though it has no use for it. This has nothing to do with me, it's part of the core game.

But I like it, because once you upgrade the sub to a Stealth Ship it CAN make use of that.

Now that you've explained it, why it makes perfect sense! :goodjob: I hadn't really thought much of subs till this evening when I decided to stress-test their coding and encountered this situation. Very-very good explaination on your part regarding this extrapolation. :goodjob:

Every resource has to have an icon. Neutronium is the omega symbol, Dilithium is the shuriken, Omnicytes have the flower. Well, now that I've got the building resource production working, I had to have icons for the two new luxuries. Information uses the pirate, Ambrosia uses the mushroom; both of them are a bit too cartoony, but I couldn't resist the humor (the Internet is full of pirates, and the mushroom giving extra life is sort of a Super Mario joke).

Ah, OK. I'm outside the target audience for your humor here, but considering I've done similar things in the past why I can appreciate where your going with this.


Still in the procees of devouring Askia this evening: he is proving to be a formidable foe. I will give an update tomorrow if I encounter anything noteworthy, otherwise assume everything has gone according to your plans. :assimilate:

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I will simply make the comment again that this is your mod, and I have no problems subordinating myself in this sense.

Heh, I'm not trying to put my foot down on this or anything, I AM flexible on it. I was just giving my logic as to why I deliberately put the anti-nuke buildings in the Fusion era instead of having one of the two be in the Digital.
The thing is, there are actually a couple distinct variables for nuke reduction. There's "NukeModifier" and "NukeExplosionRand". The first is a simple integer: a Nuke Level of 2 means nuclear weapon, 1 means atomic, and I'd assume 0 means no effect. So the Gravity Shield and Orbital Defense Pod each put -1 on this, which tremendously reduces the direct effects. But then there's the second variable; the Orbital Defense Pod puts -20 on NukeExplosionRand which, if I understand it correctly, reduces the amount of damage. (I'll test this when I have time.)

So what I'm now thinking, based on your comment, is giving that same NukeExplosionRand -20 to the Perimeter Defense building; previously it was just a flat +10 defense, and I'd bumped it up to +15 yesterday because I thought it was a bit too weak, but with this nuke mitigation I can put it back down to +10 and have it still be worth the price to build.

Now, there's another hidden component to this: anti-aircraft fire. SAM systems can shoot nuclear missiles, because they're Air domain; that's the Planet Buster's big selling point, that it has an Evasion promotion to help with that. So remember how useful the Plasma Artillery was, how you'd actually want to build a few of them? If someone tries is throwing nukes at you, just remember that the modern-era nuclear missiles only have a range of 8, stick some anti-aircraft weapons in front of your front-line cities (and some jet fighters set to intercept?), and it should help.
On a related note, one effect of the Aerospace Complex is that it boosts a city's air defense by 20%; I think this includes its interception ability, so this'd help against nukes as well.

At least, that's how I'm assuming it all works. I almost never bother building nukes.

Ah, OK. I'm outside the target audience for your humor here, but considering I've done similar things in the past why I can appreciate where your going with this.

I wasn't deliberately going for humor from the start. It's just that when I pick placeholders, I don't generally spend a huge amount of time picking one, since I know they'll be replaced down the road, which means I usually go for whatever association comes to mind (when I see the Pirate in an interface window, I want to be able to know what it stood for even if the text isn't there, as a testing mechanism), and "memorable" usually means something humorous.

Now, the text icons are unusual in that I simply CAN'T replace them with SMAC-specific icons, as far as I know, so I need to find something more permanent. In the end I'll probably replace them with something generic. There are symbols named "TEAM1", "TEAM2", and so on, and I have no idea what they look like; I tried the WTF1 symbol and it didn't look good. I'm hoping that one of these turns out to be something unique enough to use for this.

I will give an update tomorrow if I encounter anything noteworthy, otherwise assume everything has gone according to your plans.

I should have a new version done tonight, with a LOT of improvements and fixes. For one thing, I've now put some better effect placeholders in place, so every Wonder now has some effect, even if it's not the one I want it to end up with.
I'm actually about to start a new test game right now, probably starting in the Fusion era to see if the Golem and such work right. Assuming nothing crashes, I'll post the new version after I test the critical parts.

(Want to know what screwed me up on this today? Someone at Firaxis spelled "penicillin" with only one L in all of the XML files. So I had things depending on TECH_PENICILLIN, it'd break because that didn't exist, and I'd be staring at it for an hour trying to figure out why it wasn't working. There are a couple others like that as well, but most of them are more obvious than that.)
 
Heh, I'm not trying to put my foot down on this or anything, I AM flexible on it.


:lol: OK, so from my perspective you should leave things the way they are for now, but keep my comments regarding this in mind. Essentially I've played (maybe) all of four games with your mod, and in two of those the nuke option has been a difference maker to my advantage, and to the detriment of the AIs. IMO this makes it a trend, but not necessarily a game-breaker which needs to be fixed. Lets play with it some more (especially after the next patch comes out) and see what really personifies the AIs in this regard.


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(I'll test this when I have time.)


I think that sounds like a great answer there! :goodjob:

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Now, there's another hidden component to this: anti-aircraft fire. SAM systems can shoot nuclear missiles, because they're Air domain; that's the Planet Buster's big selling point, that it has an Evasion promotion to help with that. So remember how useful the Plasma Artillery was, how you'd actually want to build a few of them? If someone tries is throwing nukes at you, just remember that the modern-era nuclear missiles only have a range of 8, stick some anti-aircraft weapons in front of your front-line cities (and some jet fighters set to intercept?), and it should help.

I think thats gonna be a tough concept for the AIs to understand, but we will see.


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I wasn't deliberately going for humor from the start. It's just that when I pick placeholders, I don't generally spend a huge amount of time picking one, since I know they'll be replaced down the road, which means I usually go for whatever association comes to mind (when I see the Pirate in an interface window, I want to be able to know what it stood for even if the text isn't there, as a testing mechanism), and "memorable" usually means something humorous.

IMO it was like finding an Easter Egg - I'll have to keep my eyes open for this sort of thing from you in the future! :goodjob:

The only comment I wrote down last night during playtesting was concerning Energy Banks. I didn't write anything specific so can't say exactly, but I did like its set of attributes it provided.

I should have a new version done tonight, with a LOT of improvements and fixes.

Looking forward to it. Not sure if I've stated it before in this thread but I probably would've already shelved ciV if it wasn't for your mod. Really enjoying where your going with this - keep it up! :goodjob:

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Okay, it's new version time. But before I get into the patch notes, there's something I want to comment on.

In the Buildings schema, there's an entry "SpecialistExtraCulture", as I've discussed before. I finally figured out what it's doing. Let's say you have ten cities, with 2 specialists in each. If you set SpecialistExtraCulture=1, then it's SUPPOSED to add 20 culture to your empire, right? Well, what it's actually doing is this:
The first city adds 20 culture, plus 2 for its specialists.
The second city adds 22 culture, plus 2 for its specialists, for 24 FOR THAT CITY.
And so on. Ten cities, with this pattern, would give you 580 culture.
So it's not only broken, it's broken in two different ways and makes it utterly unplayable in any form. I had an empire that was getting around 400 culture per turn (with new policies costing 7-8k, so a pretty nice ratio), and building something that gave +1 culture per specialist bumped it to over 5000 per turn.

On to the fun stuff! I'll warn you, this update is incompatible with old savegames. Enough internal things changed that I'm not sure what it'd do.

v.0.05, 11/21/10
> The resource display along the top, and its associated pulldown tooltip, now display any resource of type MODERN or RUSH, which includes all of the strategics. (The only other options are BONUS and LUXURY.) The upshot of this is that it displays Neutronium now, even though it also provides happiness. This is how it should have worked in the core game.
> The TechObsolete settings for the AI “need_tile_improvers” and “want_tile_improvers” entries are removed, which encourages civs to build workers if you start in a later era. This is something that should have been in the core game. I've already seen this change make a HUGE difference; city-states now build workers ASAP and improve all of their terrain, starting with connecting the resources.
> When using orbital weapons, the game no longer attempts to highlight the possible hexes, since that’d be the entire world. (This logic kicks in for any unit whose bombardment range is >= 50, actually, whether it’s air or siege.) I think this might have been responsible for some of the crashing.
> There were far too many large neutronium deposits and too few small ones. This was because of an artificial padding of the statistics I'd put in; while a few small deposits would spawn in deserts, hills, etc., one extra deposit per civ was being placed randomly on land, and this one was set to a large deposit. It’s now a small half the time. So now, about half of the deposits will be small (3 units) and half will be big (5 units), with the big ones mostly being on hills and the smalls being scattered on any type of terrain. Given that you’re only 3 tiers from unlocking Quantum Labs, which generate Neutronium, this isn’t bad.
> The Help text on Superconductor and Graviton Theory were accidentally switched.
> Bioenhancement Center now requires a Military Academy in the city instead of an Academy. This change is so that you can have a naval or air-oriented city without having to build a land-military building; the Military Academy is a bit more expensive than the Academy, but its benefits are now good enough that you might build it first.
> As a temporary patch, the Great Empath will use the Artist AI.
> Perimeter Defense now decreases the effects of nuclear weapons targeted on this city slightly. Assuming I'm right about how that works.
> The Gravity Shield building requires one unit of Dilithium.
> The Robotic Assembly Plant requires one unit of Neutronium.
> The Centauri Preserve requires one unit of Omnicytes.
> The Nanoreplicator requires one unit of Neutronium.
This was necessary because these resources ended up being way too common at the end. You just couldn't make enough units to make a dent. Since the Nanohospital already required one Omnicytes and the Fusion Lab requires a Dilithium, this now makes two buildings use each advanced resource. Three if you count the Living Refinery national wonder.
> Ascetic Virtues dropped its culture-per-specialist benefit and went back up to +20% Great Person Points in all cities. It also gained “-10% unhappiness from number of cities”, which with the Balance mod means 0.4 happiness per city. I'm looking into a couple alternate benefits, because I don't want so much +Happiness in the game. One possibility is to give it a production bonus when building a Wonder in that city, or something along those lines. The original SMAC wonder reduced unit support costs, which always seemed out of place for a wonder whose movie was about meditation.
> ResearchPercent for all eras other than Ancient was increased. This means that starting a game in a later era won’t give you nearly as massive a discount on tech costs, and you won’t get the 1-turn research.
> Drastically increased the cost of Research Agreements in later eras; there’s a slight increase at the Renaissance through Modern eras (+50 over the old value), but in the future eras it scales up dramatically, to 800-1000 in the last eras.
> Diplomatic victory threshold increased to 80%. Basically, if you want to win a diplo victory, you need to buy every city-state's affection.
> City-state gold gift exponent increased from 1.01 to 1.02. I'm trying to make it so that in the late eras it's not so easy to buy affection. This didn't quite do it, but I'm working on it.
> The Golem unit can now be sacrificed to rush production, as if it were a Great Engineer. But it’s very toned-down in amount; instead of 300 BaseHurry and 30 HurryMultiplier, it’s 50 and 10. In practice, this seems to mean that when sacrificed you get approximately the unit cost back.
> Internally, the Combat Engineer is now actually referred to as UNIT_COMBAT_ENGINEER instead of UNIT_ENGINEER2. All appropriate links have also been adjusted.
> A few resource boosts have shifted into the Nuclear era, to split up the doubled ones: Pasture’s +production moved from Gene Splicing to Ecology, Quarry’s +gold moved from Superconductor to Electronics, and Plantation’s +gold moved from Centauri Empathy to Penicillin (despite them misspelling it internally). This was part of a long-term goal to make the Nuclear era techs have more minor benefits. But it works nicely in practice, since these aren't common improvements.
> Wells now get +1 production at Monopole Magnets, since they were the only specialized improvement that didn’t get two.
> Barbarians can now exist one era later than before. Regardless of which era you’re in, Barbarian camps will exist at the start of a game regardless of era, but this’ll affect games starting in the earlier eras. It's fun to see barbarians using Paratroopers and Laser Infantry, but I want to add more, like barbarian destroyers.
> Trance I, Trance II, Soporific, and EMP now use actual icons (copies of existing promotion icons). Most of the other new promotions will now appear in the correct lists in the Civilopedia as well.
> Atomic Bombs now become obsolete at Fusion Power, when you get Planet Busters. This matches the usual pattern of only allowing the two most recent units of each type.
> Merchant Exchange is now “+2 gold per local luxury or strategic resource”. It no longer provides a Great Merchant; the Planetary Energy Grid still does that just fine.
> Pholus Mutagen is now “+2 food, +1 production, +1 gold per local food resource.” That means wheat, cow, sheep, deer, banana, and fish. The game will also check to see if there’s at least one of these tiles nearby before listing the wonder (to help the AI). Yes, that's a potentially huge benefit, especially since certain resources, like fish, can cluster. But most cities only have two or three of these at most, and that puts this below most other wonders of the same era in terms of power.
> Doctrine: Air Power now also requires Pre-Sentient Algorithms.
> Optical Computers now also requires Doctrine: Flexibility. This makes it a 3-prereq tech, a bottleneck that most advancement has to go through.
The above two changes are because the way I'd arranged the techs really created two distinct tech paths, a biological one and a technological one. While I like the concept behind that, in practice it meant that you'd beeline down one side and ignore the other, and I don't like that. So with these two cross-connections, it's a lot harder to ignore half the tree.
> The Information luxury now uses a different text icon; instead of a pirate, it’s the three circles of the trade icon, colored white.
> As a placeholder for now, the Telepathic Matrix gives 2 free Great Empaths and the Dream Twister gives 2 free Great Artists. Eventually I want to integrate the TM into the Tech Diffusion, though, and the DT will add unhappiness to all other civs. But this at least gives the wonders SOME benefit; I’ll cut them down to only 1 great person per once it’s fixed.
> The Space Elevator now gives the “Orbital Drop” promotion to units trained in that city, which allows them to drop anywhere on the planet. I actually want it to be for any unit that begins its turn in this city, instead, but for now this’ll do. I don't know how to remove a promotion once you leave a city, but it's probably something that can be done with LUA.
> The Nethack Terminus now gives you a free tech, in addition to the nonfunctional spying part.
There are now no buildings with zero effects; everything does at least SOMETHING.
> The Nanoreplicator gave +1 production per strategic resource, +1 gold per luxury and +1 food per food resource. The three new resources were only being classified as "strategic", but Neutronium was supposed to count as a luxury as well and omnicytes as a food as well. So now, a Neutronium deposit will get +1 to both production and gold if you build a Nanoreplicator, and Omnicytes get both production and food.
(There was a similar bug with the Pholus Mutagen and Merchant Exchange's changes above that forced me to upload a revised version of the patch a few minutes after the original.)

Major known bugs/issues
> The balance is still a bit off. I started in the Fusion era, and most techs took ~4 turns to research once I had a few cities built. Likewise, most new buildings took 2-3 turns to build and Wonders took 8-10 turns in the finished cities. I want each of those numbers to be at least 50% higher (more like doubled) on Normal speed.
> For some reason, once I get to the late eras, all specialists are giving +1 happiness. I'm not sure what triggered that, but it's extremely powerful and I don't think it's supposed to happen.
> The combat tooltips are utterly broken when attacking a city. I had a unit with a bombardment rating of 75 attacking a city (a Bolo), with two +10% boosts, and the game said its power was 270 and predicted a one-shot kill. The fact that it DIDN'T kill, and did about as much damage as you'd expect from the 90 it was supposed to be, implies that it's just the tooltip.
It's not consistent, either; I had two Skimmers attacking cities, and in one case it gave its power as 1.85 times the base (instead of the 1.1 it was supposed to be), another only had 1.4 times the base.
> Needlejet bombardment is VERY flaky. It has a bombardment strength of 90, and most of the time it acted like it, taking about half the health off most future units. But sometimes it'd do zero or 1 points of damage to things like Laser Infantry (45 power), other times it'd one-shot an Isle of the Deep. And I don't mean in a single fight, I mean one jet would do this four or five turns in a row, you had streaks of HORRIBLE damage followed by a streak of insane damage.
> There's a "cannot capture cities" promotion in the base game. It doesn't work.
> Once a civ launches a spaceship, their capital will show the animation of the launching rocket every turn, even if you then capture the capital. This stops if you reload the savegame, because since the city is no longer a capital the game won't draw the launch structure any more.
> Not a bug, just something to be aware of: if you start in a late era, the AI will now spend some real effort beating you to Wonders, but it'll still put a high priority on assembling a spaceship. So if you start a game after the Nuclear era, expect to have a significant advantage in picking up the available Wonders. I didn't want to set the AI's flavor on this to zero, because some day I DO want it to work right and there are other things (like the satellite units) that require the Apollo Program.
 
Being that you're an expert on city-states, Darsnan, I want to run something past you that I've been working on for v.0.06.

I created four new units, the Jury-Rigged Stealth Ship, Vertol, Needlejet, and Gravtank. These are treated as UUs for CIVILIZATION_MINOR, replacing the normal version of each for all city-states. Each is a bit less effective than the unit it replaces, but they require no strategic resources. After all, it's not like the city-states will ever have that many strategics to work with.

First question: Are these enough? I think I've covered the bases, heavy land, skirmisher land, air, and sea. I don't want resourceless satellite weapons, though. Other than these, the only resourceless units in any of my new eras are the Laser Infantry (which work just fine) and the Survey Pod (useless for city-states, really).

I also realized that I'd never outright banned barbarians or city-states from building certain other future units. So one change I added was that City-states can't build Titan units. The lack of resources pretty much meant this was true already, but now it's explicit. And Barbarians can make almost none of the new units.
The problem is, I also want to tweak the Barbarians to use mindworms and other Psi units. But they cost a resource, and I don't know of a way to give barbarians a supply of resources; I'm sure there's a way in LUA to hack it (probably very similar to the logic for buildings making resources, actually). For now, I might create a "Wild Mindworms" resourceless unit, along the same lines as the juryrigged ones, and let the Barbarians make THAT. Same for the other three psi units; wild Nessus Worms would be a serious threat in the Nanotech Era.

Second question: Should barbarians get the juryrigged units as well, so that you could see barbarian stealth ships and gravtanks?

Actually, what I want is to create a second Barbarian-style faction; let's call them The Swarm for simplicity's sake. The Swarm's barbarian "camps" (Spore Towers) should be able to spawn anywhere, including inside a civ's territory, and they'd spawn mindworms and such. They wouldn't be era-limited like the normal camps are, and they'd be hostile to everyone (including the other barbarians). But this is more of a long-term goal; the problem I'm having is that, no matter how I arrange it, Barbarians are still limited to only spawning in non-visible land areas as far as I can tell. So once the world gets mostly settled, no more barbarians, which means no wild mindworms. But I WANT them to spawn inside settled areas, that's part of the point; it encourages you to hold some military units back in your territory, it discourages huge sprawling empires, it makes the Trance promotion more essential since those backline units won't have the massive support your main army will, and it makes people want to use Labor Mechs, Golems and Formers to do their maintenance work instead of defenseless Engineers.

If I can get the two-faction thing working, I'm okay with not giving the human barbs any juryrigged units, and just letting them fade away in those later eras. But it might be interesting to see a "pirate" group doing this sort of thing. (Hmm, I can use the pirate faction from SMAC for inspiration here...)

Third question: if I do make resourceless mindworms, should city-states be able to make those as well? I don't want to make it too easy for them, but I'm worried that too few people will ever make some of their own. If I can get the barbarian thing working, I'd be inclined to not help out the CS's any more since worms will be plentiful.
Just remember, though; mindworms can already pass through borders when you're not at war, and they're SUPPOSED to have the Hidden Nationality thing so that they can pillage or attack your friends. That might be a bit too much to give city-states.
 
Being that you're an expert on city-states, Darsnan, .

I'm an expert, huh? Boy are you in trouble! :lol:

First off my observation is that, even though in my mod I've given each C-S a Shiva (GDR with two attacks/ turn and no defensive penalties) and a Military Base for defense, I and the AIs can still relatively easily take out a C-S. As I see it there are two main reasons for this: first, once a C-S is conquered, its surviving units disappear, thus you don't have to worry about riposte when attacking (i.e. you can throw abandon to the wind when attacking). Second is that you can walk your units right up to the C-S city before attacking (i.e. there is no declaration of war for violating the C-S's cultural border). In general I think the core game needs to be modified to inhibit humans from cherry-picking C-S to add to their empires (i.e. more stringent consequencs than "City-States grow worried").

I created four new units, the Jury-Rigged Stealth Ship, Vertol, Needlejet, and Gravtank. These are treated as UUs for CIVILIZATION_MINOR, replacing the normal version of each for all city-states. Each is a bit less effective than the unit it replaces, but they require no strategic resources. After all, it's not like the city-states will ever have that many strategics to work with.

First question: Are these enough? I think I've covered the bases, heavy land, skirmisher land, air, and sea. .

My thought here would be that the war will be won or lost on land, not the sea, so I would scrap the ship, and maybe replace it wth a mortar unit (my version of this is a 1 tile/ turn arty I'm calling an "Automated Defense Pod" - more on that later). The other thought I have here is that per your recommendation I am beginning my playtests of your mod in the Industrial era, and as such I can't effectively attack a C-S at the beginning of a game (at best it would be a Phyric victory which would leave me exposed to AI Civs): therefore if you are placing these C-S units into the tech tree such that they would then essentially keep pace with their equivalent units the human players can build, then that would be a nice counter to the benefit of the C-S. Question: are these units cheapened (i.e. less expensive to build)? If so then the C-S could potentially field a slightly larger military than it can currently.

Second question: Should barbarians get the juryrigged units as well, so that you could see barbarian stealth ships and gravtanks? Actually, what I want is to create a second Barbarian-style faction; let's call them The Swarm for simplicity's sake.

If I can get the two-faction thing working, I'm okay with not giving the human barbs any juryrigged units, and just letting them fade away in those later eras. But it might be interesting to see a "pirate" group doing this sort of thing. .

Once I get my mod going, why it is imperative that the Barbs a) be able to build all sorts of units, and b) become more prolific as the game progresses (i.e. like the fungal blooms and NL become more prevelent as the game goes along in SMAC). What I am hoping is that once the SDK is released, that its a relatively easy hack to put this ability in place.

One thing I've noticed in the base game is that the Barbs don't build arty units. Since in my mod the barbs are going to be infesting the remnants of cities (i.e. not camps), then my thought here is that these ruined cities automated defenses are still active, and have the ability to fire on units, just the way that cities have the ability to fire on units. Thus I've upgraded the Brute (which is relatively common in a game, all the way up to the end) into an Automated Defense Pod: this unit only moves one tile/ turn, but along with its arty ability it also has a good defense. Makes life a little more interesting when your going to exterminate a barb camp.

Third question: if I do make resourceless mindworms, should city-states be able to make those as well? I don't want to make it too easy for them, but I'm worried that too few people will ever make some of their own. If I can get the barbarian thing working, I'd be inclined to not help out the CS's any more since worms will be plentiful.
Just remember, though; mindworms can already pass through borders when you're not at war, and they're SUPPOSED to have the Hidden Nationality thing so that they can pillage or attack your friends. That might be a bit too much to give city-states.

An observation I had made previously was that I had taken the GDR and changed it to a defensive flavoring, however it then just wandered around the whole map like it was braindead. Therefore my thought in this same vein would be whether the C-S AIs would be able to utilize the unit effectively (i.e. would its flavoring conflict with the C-S coding for directing units?)? I'll also add the comment that I don't see the C-S build a lot of units, so under the circumstances is this one of The Few the C-S should build? Anyways, as I'd stated previously I think there is still a lot of tweaking going on under the hood, so some of this discussion will probably be superseded by the upgraded gameplay of the C-S (after the next patch?), and we'll have to consider re-tweaking these things again.

D
 
In general I think the core game needs to be modified to inhibit humans from cherry-picking C-S to add to their empires (i.e. more stringent consequencs than "City-States grow worried").

Well, there IS the penalty in place that once you've taken over two city-states you get labeled "Aggressive" and the CS decay increases to 150%, and if you take over four you get labeled "Warmonger" and it goes to 200%. But yeah, that's not much of a penalty.

My thought here would be that the war will be won or lost on land, not the sea, so I would scrap the ship,

Well, you're looking at it from the point of view of a C-S trying to defend itself from an attacking civ, while I'm more trying to make C-S be a real player in OFFENSIVE military actions. That is, when I declare war on Germany, all of my CS allies do as well, but currently they don't really DO much, because my allies tend to be the guys near me and that makes it nearly impossible for them to reach him.

But with this change, they can be a real threat. This should also make you think VERY carefully about starting a war with someone who is allied to that city-state near you.
It's a good point that there's no artillery unit for this, but I've only GOT one artillery unit in my future eras, and it's right at the start. Maybe I SHOULD make a Jury-Rigged version of the Plasma Artillery, though, to help with air defense. Since a CS will only be defending a single city (usually), that means a pretty high chance of having stacked interception abilities nearby. Actually, that sounds like a good idea, so I'll try adding that tonight, but I think I'll leave the Stealth Ships on the list for now as well. (After all, Barbs and city-states seem to make destroyers pretty often, being a resourceless naval unit, so it's not like I'm doing something that will skew the balance.)

Question: are these units cheapened (i.e. less expensive to build)? If so then the C-S could potentially field a slightly larger military than it can currently.

Yes. If the normal unit costs 900, then these cost 800 AND have no strategic resources.
One thing I thought of, though, is that once you get into the Nanotech era, nearly every building has a strategic resource requirement. Obviously a city-state will have a hard time meeting that. Actually, they should have that problem earlier, with the Factory; without coal, no city-state would have factories for that 50% boost. And with only one city, no railroad bonus either... so I might have to drop the costs further. (Or, create a zero-cost unique building that only city-states can make, that boosts production and such to make up for this. Easy enough to do.)

The limiting factor for city-states, in my experience, isn't production costs; it's maintenance costs. Without trade routes and the occasional wonder, a city-state won't have nearly the income of a player city of the same size. This'd get even worse once you start stacking all-empire bonuses (like the Sky Hydroponics Lab or the food from a city-state).

One thing I've noticed in the base game is that the Barbs don't build arty units...
Thus I've upgraded the Brute (which is relatively common in a game, all the way up to the end) into an Automated Defense Pod:

Well, you can always just unlock the existing artillery units for them instead. It's a simple enough change; go into Civilizations.xml, scroll down to the UnitClassOverrides section, and edit the ones you want. Something like
<Delete CivilizationType="CIVILIZATION_BARBARIAN" UnitClassType="UNITCLASS_CANNON"/>
would remove the existing Cannon lockout. So Barbs would now be able to spawn Cannon units. (Units requiring resources would still be off-limits.)

The problem is just that the existing arty units are all glass cannons, needing the protection of infantry, and barbs just can't do that very well. But it's a lot less work than creating a new unit.
 
from your post in the other thread..

If you know how to do it, I'd appreciate a little LUA coding help on this. (Not to hijack the thread; I'm working on this over in my mod's thread. If I get stuck then I'll start a new thread for this in the LUA forum.)
1> Everyone who builds a spaceship to get a free SP of their choice, a golden age, and the fixed technology Centauri Ecology (not available any other way).
2> The FIRST person to build a spaceship also gets a free tech of their choice, their free golden age lasts twice as long, and they get a permanent +1 UN votes.
3> For 10 turns after the first person builds a ship, the world is at peace. All wars immediately end, and no new ones can start.
4> 10-20 turns after the first spaceship launches, the Barbarians and City-States get Centauri Ecology unlocked as well. (Not sure if this is already covered by the normal Barbarian tech diffusion.)
From what I understand, #1 should be simple, #2 might be a bit tougher, #3 and #4 I have no idea on.

all really easy stuff to do. provided the peace function works, even #3
 
all really easy stuff to do. provided the peace function works, even #3

Nice to have someone in here who isn't me or Darsnan!

It's good to know that these won't be complex. I'm just getting started on the LUA coding, but it seems like these'd be trivial just because they're already something that buildings can do. So all you'd need to do is get the spaceship completion to give you a national wonder (maybe called the "Air and Space Museum") in your capital for #1 and a world wonder for #2, assuming that those "FreeTech" fields trigger when the building is awarded through some other means than construction. But it's probably easy enough to just add the schema to the Projects file directly.

I've actually put a much longer list of things I'm going to try implementing through LUA in the last "official" post on the first page. Some of them are sort of pipe dreams, but if I can get even half of them done in the near future I'll be happy.
 
well #1 starts off by tracking players that can build it, then when one is found actually building it, do a bit more tracking (as to cut down unnecessary loops checking players all the time). when the building is complete hand out rewards

#2, since there's already tracking in place, it's going to be easy to determine who's first

#3, force peace everywhere for the length of time. either that makes a mandatory 10 turn peace treaty everywhere, or maybe even possible to block war declarations (dont think so), if not, new war decs would have to be forced back to peace. cheesy, but if a custom notification can be thrown in as well, it makes the force peace a bit more plausible

and #4, since the tracking from #1 is still going on, give out the techs if they dont have it yet

major hurdles would probably be setting up the tracking tables and figuring out the best way to save the data in case a player quits the game, and then testing everything :lol:
 
#3, force peace everywhere for the length of time. either that makes a mandatory 10 turn peace treaty everywhere

Originally I'd picked a 10-turn duration for exactly that reason, I'd figured that it'd be trivial to add a single peace "event" that triggered the existing Peace Treaty timer. I'd prefer it to be more random than that, though, more like 10-20, because I'm afraid a human will just mass his troops in the right spot for that 11th-turn event when the mindworms break out.

I also want to add a similar effect to the Great Empath. Instead of a "Culture Bomb" you'd get a "Peace Bomb" that ends any war you're in (if you're in one) in an immediate treaty, and if you're not in a war gives +5 or +10 to all city-state factions instead. So I was hoping there'd be an easy way to trigger the existing Peace Treaty logic for multiple reasons.

or maybe even possible to block war declarations (dont think so), if not, new war decs would have to be forced back to peace. cheesy, but if a custom notification can be thrown in as well, it makes the force peace a bit more plausible

Well, if Peace Treaties already have that lockout mechanism included, then I'd think it'd be possible to tune the World Peace duration to whatever you needed; if I wanted a 15-turn peace, wouldn't it be possible to just declare a Peace Treaty for everyone on turn X and then a second one on X+Y (which'd reset the timer?), where Y was a random number from 0 to 10 selected by the computer at the start of the event? That'd give you a Y+10-turn peace, but with no easy way for the player to know when it'll expire.

and #4, since the tracking from #1 is still going on, give out the techs if they dont have it yet

The only reason I thought this might be complex is that if the others are being handled through some sort of simple "OnWonderBuilt" sort of event, the CSs and Barbs wouldn't be covered.
 
Well, you're looking at it from the point of view of a C-S trying to defend itself from an attacking civ, while I'm more trying to make C-S be a real player in OFFENSIVE military actions.
Currently I don&#8217;t think the C-S are capable of true offensive military operations, and I characterize them more as Switzerland (neutral and defensive minded, but armed to the teeth) than as Finland in WW2 (fierice warriors, but once their small reserves are depleted they are toast). So I am trying to optimize the C-S more for a Switzerland approach than anything else. However here again things could change considerably once the next patch comes out, as Firaxis may be tweaking things under the hood in regards to how the C-S play. For us though its sort of like trying to hit a moving target: we keep trying to optimize gameplay to current trends and observations, but because of tweaks in the patch these changes may make our updates miss the mark. Depending on how things go with the next patch, I may just give the C-S a set of units which can attack twice per turn. We will see.
That is, when I declare war on Germany, all of my CS allies do as well, but currently they don't really DO much, because my allies tend to be the guys near me and that makes it nearly impossible for them to reach him. .
Worse, if you happen to be a distance away from an enemy but one of your allied C-S is near an enemy and it declares war on the enemy, then it is most likely lost to you. That could almost be considered an exploit: getting a faraway enemy to declare war on you just so you can pocket a nearby allied C-S of your distant enemy.

It's a good point that there's no artillery unit for this, but I've only GOT one artillery unit in my future eras, and it's right at the start. Maybe I SHOULD make a Jury-Rigged version of the Plasma Artillery, though, to help with air defense. Since a CS will only be defending a single city (usually), that means a pretty high chance of having stacked interception abilities nearby. Actually, that sounds like a good idea, so I'll try adding that tonight, but I think I'll leave the Stealth Ships on the list for now as well. (After all, Barbs and city-states seem to make destroyers pretty often, being a resourceless naval unit, so it's not like I'm doing something that will skew the balance.)
OK, sounds good. Note that playtesting is going to be difficult thru the holidays for me &#8211; got stuff to do pretty much every weekend from here on out. FYI that empirical feedback is going to slow down on my front.

(Or, create a zero-cost unique building that only city-states can make, that boosts production and such to make up for this. Easy enough to do.)
Something available mid-game to give C-S a boost &#8211; I like that idea! :b:

Well, you can always just unlock the existing artillery units for them instead. It's a simple enough change; go into Civilizations.xml, scroll down to the UnitClassOverrides section, and edit the ones you want. Something like
<Delete CivilizationType="CIVILIZATION_BARBARIAN" UnitClassType="UNITCLASS_CANNON"/>
would remove the existing Cannon lockout. So Barbs would now be able to spawn Cannon units. (Units requiring resources would still be off-limits.)
Yup, I&#8217;m familiar with this. I&#8217;m pretty handy with the XML, but for others who are reading this thread and weren&#8217;t aware of this parameter, why it&#8217;ll probably help them out.

D
 
Currently I don’t think the C-S are capable of true offensive military operations, and I characterize them more as Switzerland (neutral and defensive minded, but armed to the teeth) than as Finland in WW2 (fierice warriors, but once their small reserves are depleted they are toast).

I'm not saying that I want city-states to actively declare new wars. That'd be stupid. But once a war has started, they're perfectly capable of gaining ground once they have a resource advantage; I've seen city-states conquer entire empires if I've weakened them enough. And obviously, if you start gifting tons of units to the city-states, they can roll over the other AIs.

Most of the time you'd be right. A city-state would be a very tough, compact power. If he builds ships, they'll stay near home; if he builds skirmisher units they'll park themselves nearby. But when a war DOES start, I want the city-states to be able to fight back effectively, even if their opponent is on the other side of an ocean, and naval vessels are essential for that.

OK, sounds good. Note that playtesting is going to be difficult thru the holidays for me

Me too, although I'm staying home for Thanksgiving at least.

Anyway, I did add a resourceless version of the Plasma Artillery to the city-states. So far so good.
Question: Nomenclature. Right now the five city-state exclusive units are labeled things like "Jury-Rigged Plasma Artillery", but I don't really like that term on reflection. "Primitive" might be more appropriate, but it seems discordant with the fact that we're talking about advanced sci-fi units. So what term would you use to represent the fact that these units are weaker than the norm?

Also, I played a test game last night. (New change: in the tech tree, the points where a tech improves the yield of an improvement? It actually shows the icon for that improvement now. Same goes for the road and railroad movement increases; no more star icon for those. It's a HUGE improvement for readability.) The main thing I'd wanted to test was that I've added "Wild" versions of the four Psi units to the Barbarian list, so any future-era camps should spawn psi units.
And what happened? I started a game in the Transcendence era, everything unlocked, and the first barb camp I see has a Nessus Worm. A 120-strength regenerating city-killer Godzilla titan, and all I had was a few 45-strength Laser Infantry. Thankfully he didn't move towards my cities (although he DID head for the Americans, he went back after a couple turns). Since most players won't be starting in the Transcendence Era I'm not going to change this, though.
But I encountered a bug in this: he didn't regenerate. The Wild Nessus Worm has the same promotions as the regular, and so should have regenerated 10-11 HP every turn, but it just didn't happen; I ended up whittling his health down from a distance with artillery and a rushed needlejet. So it looks like barbarians don't get a true "turn" in the usual sense, and I'll have to find some other way to handle this. (Some .lua change that says that at the start of MY turn, all barbarian psi units heal?)

Other good changes in the upcoming patch?
- The spaceship components now obsolete if you have Centauri Ecology, so if you start a game in any of the future eras, the AI won't waste time building a spaceship and will go for the Wonders. (He'll still build the Apollo Program, but that's a prerequisite for orbital weapons. Also, you can't obsolete Projects the same way.)
- I created two new unit combat classes, the Multirole (needlejet) and Orbital (ion cannon, death ray, etc.), so that I could give needlejets the promotions of both fighters and bombers (which makes them kinda awesome, actually; still testing that), and orbitals now use the promotions of siege weapons (i.e., "vs. Open terran" and "vs. Rough terrain" instead of "vs. Land" and "vs. cities", although I let them have one Siege promotion just to be fair). This also allowed me to tweak a few other things; anti-air promotions no longer help against orbital weapons, for instance.

Also, I realized that I missed responding to a post a few days ago:
2. The AIs are not handling the Mobile Shields well, as they are throwing these units into the front lines.

Not sure what I can do about this. I can try tweaking the flavor values to make them more Great General-ish, but I think the flaw here might be inherent to the design. The mobile shield is at its best when the enemy is all clustered together (as in normal Civ5 battles), but so many of the future units are highly mobile that the AI doesn't do this much any more.

3. I killed a city this evening and was presented with screenie #2. Should the tile lose its Railroad enhancement?

I think that's part of the core game. City tiles automatically get the best available route. I definitely haven't done anything to change this; all I did was make City Ruins tiles give a small boost to production and gold when worked.
 
about barbarians, they go through the same turn stuff as other players (human, major civs and minor civs)

Spoiler :
Code:
 test1: Gameturn: 0	It's Ottomans's turn!
 test1: Gameturn: 0	It's Songhai's turn!
 test1: Gameturn: 0	It's Genoa's turn!
 test1: Gameturn: 0	It's Budapest's turn!
 test1: Gameturn: 0	It's Ragusa's turn!
 test1: Gameturn: 0	It's Sidon's turn!
 test1: Gameturn: 0	It's Barbarians's turn!
 test1: Gameturn: 1	It's Ottomans's turn!
 test1: Gameturn: 1	It's Songhai's turn!
 test1: Gameturn: 1	It's Genoa's turn!
 test1: Gameturn: 1	It's Budapest's turn!
 test1: Gameturn: 1	It's Ragusa's turn!
 test1: Gameturn: 1	It's Sidon's turn!
 test1: Gameturn: 1	It's Barbarians's turn!

but if you compare to vanilla, they don't heal. for example, hit a barb at a camp. the tooltip shows they get a fortification bonus, and fortifying lets you heal, but barbs don't regenerate
 
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