Version 4.0 Discussion Thread

just thought to copy your E-mail to the forum and answer it right here.

LunarMongoose said:

Were you okay with Pacifism now that it has a big second penalty on it? (Plus the other Great People rate effects in the game having been nerfed...) Or is it still too high at +100%?

I thought maybe it would be overpowered with the new category unlock for it on the Oracle (whereas it's normally not available til slightly later), but then I realized it's actually hard to have a state religion yet at the point you build the Oracle, b/c religions are just starting to be founded at that point, and then you have to spread it to your cities. So maybe the unlock would still be okay with Pacifism at only +50% without a state religion. Not sure, hehe.

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I have never used Pacifism in Version 3.6.1 except when I had built the Great Library. For some reason I always used to get caught up in quite early wars , and didn't like the +1 military support cost on Pacifism then. So I cannot say much about it.
But it is definitely a useful civic, even with the additional -50% military production handicap in version 4.0. It can help for example when you start on a small isolated island, or when you are on VERY good terms with your neighbours.

So you should not nerf Pacifism further. It works mainly for isolated players, with the high military gold and production costs. I agree with you that with the oracle and an early religion, Pacifism could well be too powerful, giving a too strong boost to isolated players. But then, better remove the stance-civics unlock from the Oracle instead of nerfing Pacifism. There does not have to be a great wonder with that ability. It sometimes seems that you are a bit crazy with those civic-unlock great wonders (old Silk Road )

LunarMongoose said:

...

Plus, what do you think of 4.0, just in general? I know the Industrial Lag problem is a big problem, but I'll fix it soon, and there's a new Prehistoric Era, an overhauled civic set, an overhauled leader trait system, and a bunch of scaling improvements for world sizes and gamespeeds that aren't Huge / Eternal... Bunch of new units, and a huge amazing update to the PM mapscript which I still think is the biggest thing of all... Just seeing what you thought overall, since you haven't really said much yet.

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I have only played half a game so for, because of the renaissance lag problem [btw., I was wrong about industrial age, it's somewhere in the start of the renaissance age].
The new prehistoric era is excellent, much better than in version 3.6.1. The woodland cottage, the new techs and most of the new units - all of that makes sense. I have not tested all of the new units yet however, and didn't meet many of the new wild animals yet.

Plus, I like the 3 new tech invention rules - diffusion(1), doubling rates for unresearched techs in previous ages (2), and the 25% research bonus for double prerequisites (3).
I'm not sure though, how the tech diffusion is exactly calculated, although I understand the general meaning.
And, you need to make sure that the AI is able to consider those three new rules properly.

I can't comment yet on anything else, because having played only half a game is not much.

......

@EVERYBODY:

Is there anybody out there who played a game with Mongoose Mod 4.0 against the AI, and did NOT notice a strong time lag in the AI calculations, once the AI has reached the early renaissance age?

Rakete4 said:

But then, better remove the stance-civics unlock from the Oracle instead of nerfing Pacifism. There does not have to be a great wonder with that ability. It sometimes seems that you are a bit crazy with those civic-unlock great wonders (old Silk Road )

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The reason I added it was b/c the Oracle seemed a little weak before. "Just one free tech" is what Sedentary does, and what any great person can do if used that way. After you build the Oracle it has no lasting effect, and that just seemed bleh for a really early Ancient wonder... particularly one that you have to do a different tech path to get, taking you away from the Masonry and Pottery ones.

The Theory of Evolution later is fine b/c it gives 2 free techs, and that area of the tech tree is very busy anyway. But the Stance category on the Oracle made such beautiful sense, too: the priestess can predict the future for you, and you can decide what kind of military policy to use as a result!

Rakete4 said:

Plus, I like the 3 new tech invention rules - diffusion(1), doubling rates for unresearched techs in previous ages (2), and the 25% research bonus for double prerequisites (3).

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Diffusion had been in the mod for a long time, b/c it was part of BetterAi. There was just no display showing you the effect (it came across as weird turns-to-finish times for the techs that usually didn't add up exactly right based on your research output alone).

There's also Welfare from BetterAI, which is a strong additional research boost that is only given to the players that are the furthest behind in the world (and even then it's only given to them on techs that other players already have). This also did not get displayed before, but will show up now in the info as well.

My new "older era cost doubling" effect I just love. It makes all those great long-way-back secondary tech requirements meaningful now!

The double-prereq bonus was actually a vanilla effect, so it's been active since the beginning. However it was slightly weaker before (20% instead of the new 25%), it didn't display anywhere obviously, and the system that applied it was also unintentionally making the costs higher for techs that didn't have an arrow link on the left side, like Horseback Riding. I always tried to avoid those as much as possible when designing and modifying the tech tree, but I had to use them in a few cases, and the costs were wrong as a result, but that's fixed now.

Rakete4 said:

I'm not sure though, how the tech diffusion is exactly calculated, although I understand the general meaning.

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I looked at the code for this for the first time while working on 4.0, just out of curiosity. It's complicated math that would be very hard to visualize; you kinda just have to let the game spit out the crunched numbers on it, heh.

(There's at least one exponent where the base and power are both calculated from a number of different values... I honestly don't know how JDog came up with the formula in the first place it's so obtuse, but I do trust it to work right b/c the author is awesome. )

Rakete4 said:

And, you need to make sure that the AI is able to consider those three new rules properly.

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The AIs are automatically aware of what the tech costs are at any given time, and they tend to plan out a path based on a ton of different factors. They have no control over the Diffusion and Welfare bonuses b/c those are entirely based on what the other players in the game do, so they're fine as-is. The additional prereq bonus is a vanilla effect so I'd assume they already account for that, and I remember even checking this, so I think it's fine too.

The only thing the AIs don't actively take into account is the old era cost doubling, but I figured it was pretty safe to not bother, b/c they don't evaluate leader switching when crossing certain era boudaries either and that works out fine... and b/c they already go for the techs they want the most in a certain order anyway, so I figured I should basically just let them keep doing that. It's pretty much what I would do as a human anyway: the doubled costs don't really change my tech strategy much, they're just something I have to deal with as they happen.

wow im very happy to see v 4 is out!!

im gonna try it on multiplayer with a friend !

how nice!


(i guess ur not gonna release the source code like b4?)

keldath said:

wow im very happy to see v 4 is out!!

im gonna try it on multiplayer with a friend !

how nice!

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There's a Rennaissance-and-onward major lag bug with the AIs, and a few other mostly-minor things, I need to fix in a small update that should be out pretty soon, but otherwise it's good to go, yeah.

keldath said:

(i guess ur not gonna release the source code like b4?)

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Nope, sorry.

well then ill w8 for the update then

Nope, sorry.

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i wish i could understand what the big deal, i just like to play with a few other mods that i like

bummer, but your the boss here.

Wow, you weren't kidding about the lag problem, Rakete. Btw, in those two save files you sent me three weeks ago, the players are all in late Medieval, so it's not really a Renaissance problem per se. As it turns out, it's not triggered by any one specific thing, like an AI reaching a certain era; it's a gradually-escalating problem throughout the whole game.

Thus, my suspicion about what was wrong would not apply. Except, of course, that it turned out to be right anyway, lol.

The whole thing is a result of the new AI evaluation code for the new Buckingham Palace global unit upgrade discount effect. (Which was inspired and motivated, btw, by the original Leonardo's Workshop wonder in Civ2 or Civ3 (I forget which) that did the same thing. )

Basically I coded it badly. It was checking all of an AI's units with every building it ever considered building, regardless of whether the building had the Buckingham Palace effect or not (which, obviously, only the Buckingham Palace does). And each of those unit checks is against all unit types in the game each time, b/c the vanilla code is stupid about how it looks for upgrade types and just brute-forces the search. In addition, each unit checked for any possible upgrade types in each of the AI's cities seperately, since resource availability can affect that and I didn't want to miss any upgradeable units when evaluating the BP. So, triple-whammy disaster. Oops.

I didn't rewrite the vanilla upgrade check system b/c that would take more time to do, but I set it to only search the nearest city, and to only bother at all when actually evaluating a building with the BP effect. I also applied the latter restriction to the Golden Dawn effect, and I'll put the vanilla rewrite on my long-term to-do list. (Just recursively following the upgrade tree will be drastically faster, but the vanilla code avoids using recursion anywhere, so they didn't do it here either.)

Long story short, Rakete's savefile turnover went from taking 12 minutes to taking 20 seconds, on my very slow PC that's 8 years old now (don't worry, in preparation for Diablo 3 I'm finally building a new PC when Ivy Bridge comes out in 2 weeks, woohoo!). AI turns should now be marginally faster than in 3.6.1 thanks to the Golden Dawn condition, rather than so-much-slower-it-becomes-unplayable. Sorry about that.

The two major problems are now fixed on my end (the other being the Africa map not working), so version 4.0.1 will be released very soon. I have a few other minor things left to do, and I'm gonna be busy tomorrow, but it should be out by Monday or Tuesday for sure, and later tonight if I can stay awake long enough.

Great to read that the time lag bug is solved

Some more minor issues before you launch version 4.0.1.:

-Why can the new pirate unit not attac without declaring war? Is it intentional? I didn't test the unit yet, I just saw that the ability is missing in the description

-After one of my cities was hit by a hurricane, all my units in the cities were activated in the next turn. What is that useful for?

-This hurricane destroyed one of my granaries. I had only two granaries left then, so I got the "cannot continue building Haramat Yusuf" when it was already half finished. I guess that this is intentional, since it requires 3 granaries. However, please make sure that I will still get the gold payout when another player builds the wonder. It was built by an AI shortly afterwards, but I forgot to check whether I got the money or not. I couldn't even finish to rebuild the 3rd granary before the AI finished Haramat Yusuf, so I couldn't even check if the build points were saved.

-in the beginning of the game (and probably also later), I seem to get an additional research point. It displays "+11 research", but I get only 10 research points in my city. I'm not sure if you understand what I mean, so tell me if you need screenshots.
I assume this is because you replaced the truncating functions with rounding functions.

-aren't 3 national wonders per city too much? I think 2 whould do, because it requires you to carefully choose which ones you really want to have in a certain city.


Bugs carried over from version 3.6.1.:

-I am using a low 1024x768 screen resolution. When I start a game, it displays only "Eternal Mongoose" and "Marathon" game speeds, because the other speeds are below the bottow of my screen. I can still select them "blindly" with the arrow keys, however. If it's too much work to change that, then leave it like it is, because I think few people are still using that screen resolution.

-When another player kills a barbarian monster, for example a sea turtle, or when barbarians are unloaded from a ship, I do not only get a message, but there is also an icon displayed in one of my cities. However, this is displayed at the wrong place. Can you maybe remove those "Event icons", because they are not useful anyway.

4.0.1 is almost done, and should be out later today, just fyi.

Rakete4 said:

-Why can the new pirate unit not attac without declaring war? Is it intentional? I didn't test the unit yet, I just saw that the ability is missing in the description

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No unit will have a vanilla ability without saying so on the description; that part is automatic for existing effects.

The reason is the longstanding situation where there is no AI support for the Hidden Nationality or Can Attack Without Declaring War abilities on land units. You can give them to them just fine, but the AIs will not use these abilities; they will treat any such units as normal combat units.

Thus it is a significantly-unfair advantage for human players, b/c they will know how to make full use of this extra capability. Some other mods have gone ahead and added it anyway, but it steps too far over the balance line for me.

It has been on my longterm to-do list for a long time now, to try and write an AI script for this purpose, for possible use with the War Dog, Marauder, Sith, Dragons, etc (as well as the new land Pirate unit, obviously). But this is an extremely difficult undertaking, which is why no one else has done it yet as far as I know, and I'm not going to be getting to it any time soon unfortunately.

(I suspect JDog, Fuyu and Afforess are among the only people even capable of doing this, but with enough effort I MIGHT be able to hack something together... I would definitely need to study the AI code a lot more closely than I ever have so far.)

Rakete4 said:

-After one of my cities was hit by a hurricane, all my units in the cities were activated in the next turn. What is that useful for?

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It probably has to do with the Thunderstorm that appears over your city when there's a Hurricane (at least I think that's what happens now). Whenever a feature with a damage effect spawns, it automatically wakes up any units under it in case the owner wants to move them, or change their mission, or give them an emergency promotion, or whatever, so they don't take as much damage, or die.

Rakete4 said:

-This hurricane destroyed one of my granaries. I had only two granaries left then, so I got the "cannot continue building Haramat Yusuf" when it was already half finished. I guess that this is intentional, since it requires 3 granaries. However, please make sure that I will still get the gold payout when another player builds the wonder. It was built by an AI shortly afterwards, but I forgot to check whether I got the money or not. I couldn't even finish to rebuild the 3rd granary before the AI finished Haramat Yusuf, so I couldn't even check if the build points were saved.

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Negative events like this one, and others, can destroy buildings in vanilla, and while I'm not sure if there are any wonders that require "x amount of normal buildings" in vanilla, that IS a vanilla stat, so this is, theoretically, a situation vanilla supports. Just saying, lol.

As far as the gold refund, I'll double-check here in a bit, but from what I remember of the relevant code off the top of my head, I would guess with 95% confidence that yes, it will refund the spent hammers. Admittedly this is a very clever, interesting, and unusual situation I've never run into, or thought of, before though hehe.

Rakete4 said:

-in the beginning of the game (and probably also later), I seem to get an additional research point. It displays "+11 research", but I get only 10 research points in my city. I'm not sure if you understand what I mean, so tell me if you need screenshots.
I assume this is because you replaced the truncating functions with rounding functions.

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Actually, no. This was mentioned in the 4.0 release notes, but given the book-size length of that document I don't blame you for missing it.

In vanilla (and all previous versions of the mod), when you have no cities at the beginning (or later if you lose all your cities but have the Require Complete Kills option on), there is a minimum research per turn value of 1 that you get when you're actually doing 0 research. I suspect they put this in just to avoid a division-by-zero error in the research progress bar (cost of the selected tech / research per turn = turns to complete).

This felt slightly wonky to me, so in version 4.0 I went ahead and made the free research point permanent, rather than poofing after you lay your first city. I consider it a neat empire-level contribution to research.

Rakete4 said:

-aren't 3 national wonders per city too much? I think 2 whould do, because it requires you to carefully choose which ones you really want to have in a certain city.

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Didn't you ask me this a couple months ago? I could've sworn it came up already...

Vanilla's limit is 2, and I'm only slightly higher at 3... I dunno, I really like 3, and any qualms I may have had about it kinda got smushed into a pile of goo with the new National Wonder stat nerfs in 4.0. Actually that was part of my motivation for doing that - so I could feel okay with keeping the limit at 3.

For me personally, I still struggle picking which 3 to use in a given city, and there are a lot more possible combinations this way (as well as a bit more satisfaction and less frustration that I can at least do some of the combinations I want). If you really think it's overpowered I'm not 100% unwilling to reconsider, though... Just 90% unwilling.

Rakete4 said:

-I am using a low 1024x768 screen resolution. When I start a game, it displays only "Eternal Mongoose" and "Marathon" game speeds, because the other speeds are below the bottow of my screen. I can still select them "blindly" with the arrow keys, however. If it's too much work to change that, then leave it like it is, because I think few people are still using that screen resolution.

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It has nothing to do with screen resolution. The windows are all set up to handle that res, and don't generally get any larger at higher settings. (You can add that behavior like my Civics Advisor screen does, but it's not how vanilla windows behave by default.)

As for this window in particular, I actually took a look during v4.0 development. I may have missed something (in which case feel free to point it out, other modders!), but as far as I can tell it's hardcoded and can't be changed at all.

You can get around this problem by always using the Custom Game and Custom Scenario options though, which I personally have always done anyway.

Sorry, I know that window looks uncouth in the mod, but I'm fairly sure we're stuck with it.

Rakete4 said:

-When another player kills a barbarian monster, for example a sea turtle, or when barbarians are unloaded from a ship, I do not only get a message, but there is also an icon displayed in one of my cities. However, this is displayed at the wrong place. Can you maybe remove those "Event icons", because they are not useful anyway.

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They're displayed in your capital (or your first city if you don't currently have a capital (or not at all if you don't currently have any cities, to avoid a Python error heh)), which I did b/c they're basically empire-level reports that you, the leader, receive at your Palace about worldwide-news-type-stuff. I always envisioned an out-of-breath low-level courier bursting into your throne room, interrupting your important business, and informing you about these terrifying events.

I can't really put the icon over the units themselves b/c they're often in unexplored areas which the icon thingy won't allow, and b/c the pirate message is about the sum of all worldwide pirate activity, and not localized to any specific location.

That being said, I do like the icons a lot, and don't really want to change them... sowwy.

Hey, I have come up with 7 bugs/issues just to learn that each of them is either no bug or can't be changed.

Ok but at least this will fasten the launch of Mongoose Mod 4.0.1

LunarMongoose said:

Didn't you ask me this a couple months ago? I could've sworn it came up already...

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Yes and no. I had come up with it, but I had been complaining about the wrong scripts. I think there is a mouseover or something else where it says "1 national wonder left" when in fact there are 2 left.
I hadn't been complaining about the rule itself.

LunarMongoose said:

Vanilla's limit is 2, and I'm only slightly higher at 3... I dunno, I really like 3, and any qualms I may have had about it kinda got smushed into a pile of goo with the new National Wonder stat nerfs in 4.0. Actually that was part of my motivation for doing that - so I could feel okay with keeping the limit at 3.

For me personally, I still struggle picking which 3 to use in a given city, and there are a lot more possible combinations this way (as well as a bit more satisfaction and less frustration that I can at least do some of the combinations I want). If you really think it's overpowered I'm not 100% unwilling to reconsider, though... Just 90% unwilling.

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I think 3 makes it too easy to plan for "super cities". That benefits players who are only hiding behind their borders, and maximizing their economy.

4.0.1 is officially done, and I've put the notes in the Change Log sticky. I'm heading out right now, but the documentation work will be pretty trivial this time so I see no reason why I won't be able to get it posted tonight. As usual, sorry for the delay.

Rakete4 said:

I think there is a mouseover or something else where it says "1 national wonder left" when in fact there are 2 left.

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I wasn't able to find this anywhere. I could've easily missed it, but I didn't want to waste too much time looking right now.

Rakete4 said:

I think 3 makes it too easy to plan for "super cities". That benefits players who are only hiding behind their borders, and maximizing their economy.

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Alright, after thinking about it extensively the last 5 days, I'm forced to conclude I more-or-less agree with you, albeit very reluctantly.

I left the limit at 3 on the smallest 3 map sizes though, because players don't have as many total cities on those, and I didn't want them to have to fill up a high percentage of their cities just to fit all the National Wonders in.

From email:

Rakete4 said:

Generally, most of your civics have got too many effects. It might be balanced, but it's too complicated for occasional players.
Ideally, a civic should not have more than 3 effects, 1 or 2 out of which should be the main effects that characterise the civic.

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A lot of them do still have only one or two effects... And my options with civic stats are fairly limited as it is, so I really can't afford to impose unnecessary additional restrictions on myself.

Also, the civics with lots of effects are designed to have a transformational effect on your empire, which I think is a good thing when we're only talking about a handful of them that're like that.

I really feel like all the effects make total sense and are easy to read, so I'm happy with them. Sure it's a bit more complex than vanilla (though vanilla had several with 3 or even 4 abilities too!), but it's still not a bloated mess like I've seen elsewhere, in my opinion.

LunarMongoose said:

4.0.1 is officially done, and I've put the notes in the Change Log sticky. I'm heading out right now, but the documentation work will be pretty trivial this time so I see no reason why I won't be able to get it posted tonight. As usual, sorry for the delay.

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Sounds great!
I'm really tired of playing Command & Conquer on and on.
Going to read the change log sticky now.

Hi Lunar Mongoose, just stumbled across your mod and it looks very promising. Me and two other players have downloaded it. It seems from first impressions that your mod is very well thought out and if your claims are true about MP stability/balance then it's exactly what we've been looking for! Having read through the most recent posts on this thread I would love to have v4.0.1 when it's released because I'm not keen on having to sit through 14 minute turns! Is there any advice for us setting up a MP game later today? Anything that needs to be adhered to in game setup?

For the record, we use Direct IP MP through LogMeIn Hamachi to connect.

The 4.0.1 zip is uploading now.

Antmanbrooks said:

if your claims are true about MP stability/balance then it's exactly what we've been looking for!

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There are definitely several multiplayer groups, including my own, that swear by it, soooo... yeah.

In particular there were a ton of fixes, tweaks, and polish in the 4.0 update (in addition to the carpload of major changes, of course) that should really make it a professional-feeling experience. 3.6.1 was great, but it was still pretty rough around the edges even after years of development.

Antmanbrooks said:

Having read through the most recent posts on this thread I would love to have v4.0.1 when it's released because I'm not keen on having to sit through 14 minute turns!

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Sorry about that! I don't usually write bad code, but there was a lot of stress and pressure with v4 development just from the sheer size of the update, and from trying to get it done as fast as possible (which was still really slow, heh). At least I was able to fix it easily.

Antmanbrooks said:

Is there any advice for us setting up a MP game later today? Anything that needs to be adhered to in game setup?

For the record, we use Direct IP MP through LogMeIn Hamachi to connect.

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I've always used Direct IP with, well, nothing, heh. Just a straight internet connection through a router and cable modem. As long as you have the ports forwarded that Civ4 needs I would think you'd be fine.

And please be sure you read the Stuff to Know sticky if you haven't already.

LunarMongoose said:

And please be sure you read the Stuff to Know sticky if you haven't already.

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Already done! Had to find out as much as possible before downloading, there's a lot of guff out there.

One other note, do you have the 0.1 stuff so I don't have to download the full mod again? Oh and is it save game breaking?

Antmanbrooks said:

Already done! Had to find out as much as possible before downloading, there's a lot of guff out there.

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I updated it slightly in the text version in the new download (will copy to the sticky thread here in a minute), but that document could probably stand to have a more thorough going-through since v4 was huge, heh.

You can also read the patch notes in the release posts at the bottom of the Download sticky if you want... The most important items are in bold, at least for the last two updates.

Antmanbrooks said:

One other note, do you have the 0.1 stuff so I don't have to download the full mod again? Oh and is it save game breaking?

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Each update's save-breaking status is always mentioned in the Download post for it.

I used to release the minor updates as seperate, stand-alone patch downloads, but I noticed a lot of people weren't bothering to grab them and just stuck to the main download, so they were missing out on some short-but-very-important updates. Thus, I stopped doing it that way a year or two ago. I guess I could do it both ways, updating the main one AND providing the small update, but you're the first person who's ever asked for that so far, and it's a bit of a bother to put the extra zip together, so I didn't do it, heh. I'm actually very busy IRL right now, so that's my reasonably-serviceable eggskoose.

If it's any consolation the download speed you get from Apple's server is insane... My friend got 80-at-first-then-gradually-slowing-down-to-40 megabits per second when he grabbed it last night, which made the whole thing take only 2 minutes. Just saying.

Unfortunately they're discontinuing that service here in another month or two b/c of the move from MobileMe to iCloud, sooooo I'm gonna have to find a sucky free file-hosting site to replace it. Grr.

LunarMongoose said:

I updated it slightly in the text version in the new download (will copy to the sticky thread here in a minute), but that document could probably stand to have a more thorough going-through since v4 was huge, heh.

You can also read the patch notes in the release posts at the bottom of the Download sticky if you want... The most important items are in bold, at least for the last two updates.



Each update's save-breaking status is always mentioned in the Download post for it.

I used to release the minor updates as seperate, stand-alone patch downloads, but I noticed a lot of people weren't bothering to grab them and just stuck to the main download, so they were missing out on some short-but-very-important updates. Thus, I stopped doing it that way a year or two ago. I guess I could do it both ways, updating the main one AND providing the small update, but you're the first person who's ever asked for that so far, and it's a bit of a bother to put the extra zip together, so I didn't do it, heh. I'm actually very busy IRL right now, so that's my reasonably-serviceable eggskoose.

If it's any consolation the download speed you get from Apple's server is insane... My friend got 40 to 80 megabits per second when he grabbed it last night, which made the whole thing take only 2 minutes. Just saying.

Unfortunately they're discontinuing that service here in another month or two b/c of the move from MobileMe to iCloud, sooooo I'm gonna have to find a sucky free file-hosting site to replace it. Grr.

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That's all ok, I'll have a read through. I downloaded it anyway... couldn't wait.

Antmanbrooks said:

I downloaded it anyway... couldn't wait.

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Now that's the attitude we here at Mongoose Industries like to see.

p.s. - Don't forget to check out our brand-new forum signature, found at the bottom of most Mongoose Industries employees' posts.

p.p.s. - Mwa ha ha.

I tried the perfect mongoose map script but found it was really unbalanced in mp.

I haven't tried the mod itself yet, but am downloading at the moment and will give it a try in mp later.

What map script would you suggest to play with two humans and some ai??

Ri-Hatz said:

I tried the perfect mongoose map script but found it was really unbalanced in mp.

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Hrm, that's unfortunate. I've done the best I could with it. The river placements and starting location placements could probably still use some work, but I've been using those as-is from the original PerfectWorld versions.

I would point out that the MME version of PM, the one included with MongooseMod, has a lot of improvements to it b/c it's able to use the mod's custom features and whatnot. It helps balance Jungle and Tundra areas better imo, but it's not drastically different.

Ri-Hatz said:

I haven't tried the mod itself yet, but am downloading at the moment and will give it a try in mp later.

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Thanks very much for your interest. Please let me know what you think either way!

Ri-Hatz said:

What map script would you suggest to play with two humans and some ai??

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Well, that's pretty much up to you. All the stock / vanilla mapscripts are still available, so if PM MME also seems unbalanced to you, any of those should work... It's been a long time since I've used any of them though, so I can't really say specifically.

So I've played an MP game with your MOD and it's the bestest Civ experience ever!

We haven't reached the modern ages yet but everything seems well balanced and LOTS of fun so far. All the extras you put in are far from beeing superfluous, in fact they make the game feel more complete then ever.

What I don't get is the symbol you use for the plot yield commerce!? WTF is that? It looks like some kind of nasty candy for children. I want gold, man! Not candy..

A question about the barter civic or + in general: If I understand correctly barter gives +50% Gold in Capital, so if I run 100% research there will be zero bonus for me, whereas I get the most absolute profit in gold out of it if running 100% commerce.

About your map script: We've had some starts where one of us had a small good starting location surrounded by ice and ocean and desert to all sides giving no real expansion possibilities.
That resulted in playing a few turns, comparing our future possibilities and.. restarting.
Also the option 'start in old world' does not put all civs one one continent. I havent't tried the 'do not brake pangaes' option a lot yet..
Apart from that the map script gives beautifull results!
Any suggestion on how many civs goes well on small or medium maps?

What tech enables tech trading??? Couldn't find it anywhere!!

We play with the 'no elite units' option 'cause of the sci-fi stuff. (I'm a big sci-fi fan but would prefer FFH or Alpha Centauri for that) BUT we like the units like master swordsman and the legends, especially as national units which are limited in numbers. They add lots of flavor to the game.
It would be nice to have two options available: 1. No unrealistic units. 2. No elite units.

Whats the deal with falcons? They seem very powerfull for just one strength. Falconry is for hunting. How could a falcon defeat or even attack a raft or archer anyways?
The idea of implementing birds is nice, but as it is now it feels strange to use falcons as military units or scouts.
Also why can they travel on coast? There should be a hunter who trained the bird with the bird at all times. It makes exploration along the coasts a bit too easy in the early ages compared to using boats.

The leader changing is nice, but also could limit some leaders and make them less usefull and limit their potential.
E.g. I played modern America and started with Washington and after beelining to some next age tech I switched to Lincoln. So there was no real chance to use Washingtons traits.
It would be so lovely to HAVE THE OPTION to change to the next leader. A simple pop up would do nicely here. The player would feel more in control that way too and can make the decision himself allowing to take leader change into strategical considerations.

About the tooltip for wonders: In the build menu when mouseovering a world or national wonder it says: "National wonder: 1 left" or "World wonder: 1 left". That sounds like I can only build one world or national wonder in that city. A bit confusing.

There are some missing text entries. Especially when enabling new civic options theres the txt_key_whatever text in the popup.


That's all I can think of for now.

You did a great great job on the MOD and I will continiou to enjoy it!!
You really should do some advertising! More people should enjoy this aswell..