Tweaking the game pacing via Civ5GameSpeeds.xml

I've dabbled in editing this file before in Civ 4, in order to change the pacin g of the game (which I felt was messy). Basically I play on Marathon speed, but I wanted technology research to take a very long time, so you actually had a chance to use the units and buildings of each previous one before they became obsolete.

Especially in later games where you would research modern techs every 4 or 5 turns. I also wanted units and buildings to produce at the Epic game speed pace, whilst keeping city growth and culture at their normal Marathon levels. Now I did this with great success in Civ 4 and had much fun for years, but in Civ 5 changing the same values has some undesirable effects. Basically I'm swamped by unhappiness and lack of gold in every game I play. The last game I had I had 29 unhappy by the time I learned Masonry and Sailing

My XML file currently looks like this;

<Type>GAMESPEED_MARATHON</Type>
<Description>TXT_KEY_GAMESPEED_MARATHON</Description>
<Help>TXT_KEY_GAMESPEED_MARATHON_HELP</Help>
<DealDuration>90</DealDuration>
<GrowthPercent>300</GrowthPercent>
<TrainPercent>175</TrainPercent>
<ConstructPercent>175</ConstructPercent>
<CreatePercent>175</CreatePercent>
<ResearchPercent>600</ResearchPercent>
<GoldPercent>175</GoldPercent>
<GoldGiftMod>67</GoldGiftMod>
<BuildPercent>175</BuildPercent>
<ImprovementPercent>175</ImprovementPercent>
<GreatPeoplePercent>175</GreatPeoplePercent>
<CulturePercent>300</CulturePercent>
<BarbPercent>400</BarbPercent>
<FeatureProductionPercent>175</FeatureProductionPercent>
<UnitDiscoverPercent>300</UnitDiscoverPercent>
<UnitHurryPercent>300</UnitHurryPercent>
<UnitTradePercent>300</UnitTradePercent>
<GoldenAgePercent>300</GoldenAgePercent>
<HurryPercent>100</HurryPercent>
<InflationPercent>10</InflationPercent>
<InflationOffset>-270</InflationOffset>
<VictoryDelayPercent>300</VictoryDelayPercent>
<IconAtlas>GAMESPEED_ATLAS</IconAtlas>
<PortraitIndex>0</PortraitIndex>

I know the gold and happiness mechanics work differently in Civ 5, so can anyone give me any advice or help changing the pace of the game properly?

Thanks in advance.

So I have the exact same problem, I want an actual marathon game, and civ just runs to fast for me, I changed my CIV5GameSpeeds.xml 1 tpy, but I keep getting negative gold and unhappiness plus no science points, my theory is that turns are locked with the gold/happiness etc.. and since I change the turns/years ratio, the gold and everything else only updates at the original game speed ratio, but there must be a file to change that also and thats my problem, I want to change my pace, but Am stuck here.

What I want to do after I fix this is start a 12 tpy game, that should be pretty epic.

Sigh.

Okay, first of all, stop editing the core game's files. If you want to alter the GameSpeeds declarations, make a mod the right way.

Beyond that, a few things:
1> FredNotFound, changing the turns:years relationship does absolutely nothing beyond the aesthetic bit where it says what year number you're in. And no, there's nothing "locked" to anything else; it's all adjustable in these files.
2> If you go into this changing a bunch of numbers by drastic amounts, then the AI will have no idea how to deal with it. The AI is just not that flexible. It'll continue to build the number of units it thinks it's supposed to have, even if doing so would cripple it. It'll continue to build a lot of buildings in its scattershot method, but with larger amounts of time to work with it'll generally overproduce and therefore bankrupt itself.
3> If you're worried about the tech pace in the later eras, then changing values in the GameSpeeds table is absolutely the wrong way to do it in the first place. These values apply to your entire game, so if you use it to slow down tech research, then you might get a reasonable rate in the late game but it'll take forever to get anywhere in the early game. If you want to slow down tech gains in the later game, then you need to do things like alter the base Science equation (in Defines) or reduce the effects of the various +Science buildings.
4> Slowing down the global tech pace in general has a lot of issues. Since you wouldn't also have adjusted the amount of food needed to grow cities, it'd mean that players' cities would be huge, with high unhappiness, before they reached the techs that let them hook up luxuries to mitigate that, or build Colosseums and such to deal with it. A lot of game systems are interconnected like this, so you can't just blindly change values and expect it all to still work.

So yeah, I'm not surprised at all to hear that making those changes screwed up the Happiness and Gold balance, because you didn't do anything to account for what your changes would do. And no, there's no easy answer for how to fix that; you have to adjust a LOT of other things if you want to do it right.

Spatzimaus said:

Sigh.

Okay, first of all, stop editing the core game's files. If you want to alter the GameSpeeds declarations, make a mod the right way.

...

So yeah, I'm not surprised at all to hear that making those changes screwed up the Happiness and Gold balance, because you didn't do anything to account for what your changes would do. And no, there's no easy answer for how to fix that; you have to adjust a LOT of other things if you want to do it right.

Click to expand...

Do you realize how incredibly unhelpful you were? You gave this guy zero information to help him move forward. All he (or I) can glean from this is that there's a bunch of information that we don't have and can't find and won't understand.

MasterTonberry said:

I know the gold and happiness mechanics work differently in Civ 5, so can anyone give me any advice or help changing the pace of the game properly?

Thanks in advance.

Click to expand...

Hello, I'm from the future and I'm looking for the same information that you once were. Did you ever find the answer to your questions? Please tell me that Spatz here didn't dash all of your hopes and dreams.

I'm specifically looking for information that would tell me exactly how each of those integers/values affects gameplay. I've already done much testing, but I'm still not sure on many of them.

Stonetjwall said:

Do you realize how incredibly unhelpful you were? You gave this guy zero information to help him move forward. All he (or I) can glean from this is that there's a bunch of information that we don't have and can't find and won't understand.

Click to expand...

Nice Necro
Spatzi is one of the greatest modder here on the community, ok he isnt active for a while, but he offered so much help to the community, that i have to post this.
Also his post was helpfull.
He told make a mod, dont change core files, be aware that when you change % values that this can break the game.
I know this for sure i did changes like that for CCTP, and believe me you need to know what you do, otherwise will it break the ai in many cases.

Stonetjwall said:

Hello, I'm from the future and I'm looking for the same information that you once were. Did you ever find the answer to your questions? Please tell me that Spatz here didn't dash all of your hopes and dreams.

I'm specifically looking for information that would tell me exactly how each of those integers/values affects gameplay. I've already done much testing, but I'm still not sure on many of them.

Click to expand...

There is a search function here on civfanatics, maybe it would help in that case.
But i will try to help you.




<GrowthPercent>300</GrowthPercent>
For cities, the higher the slower the citizen will be born
<TrainPercent>175</TrainPercent>
Related to units, the higher the longer it will take to create them
<ConstructPercent>175</ConstructPercent>
For buildings, the same as above
<CreatePercent>175</CreatePercent>
For Wonders the same as above
<ResearchPercent>600</ResearchPercent>
Research, the same as above
<GoldPercent>175</GoldPercent>
Gold value same as above
<GoldGiftMod>67</GoldGiftMod>
Value of gold gift

<GreatPeoplePercent>175</GreatPeoplePercent>
The rate of GP will be born, same as above
<CulturePercent>300</CulturePercent>
Culture same as above
<BarbPercent>400</BarbPercent>
Barbarians activity same as above

and so on and on.....