Terrain Adaption Mod

Sorry for throwing the second mod in a few hours at the board, but it's the last for the forseeable future.

What's this one about?
Ever since Civ1 I wondered whether a civ that had its roots , say, in the desert would not adapt to their home environment in some way. This little mod will try to reflect this in CIV.

What does it do?
When you build your capital, the mod will check the environment of your home for the presence of several terrain types. Your civilization will then adapt to the dominating one, giving you a unique tech which reflects your roots in one of several ecologies.
Here's a list of all current adaptions and the rewards they will yield (anything will probably be subject to changes and/or balancing)

Grassland and Plains
Irrigated Grasslands will give +1 Food and +1 Production
Irrigated Plains will give +1 Food

Forest
New Improvement: Hunting Lodge, +1 Food and +1 Trade in Forest plots

Hills
New Improvement: Terrace Farms, +2 Food on Hills

Desert
New Improvement: Desert Irrigation, +2 Food in Deserts
New Improvement: Nomad Camp, +1 Food, +1 Production, +1 Trade in Deserts

Jungle
New Improvement: Treehouse, +2 Food, +1 Production, +1 Trade in Jungles

Tundra and Snow
New Improvement: Hardy Farmers, +1 Food, +1 Production on Tundra
New Improvement: Trapper Camp, +1 Food, +1 Production, +1 Trade on Snow

Sea
+1 Movement to all Sea Units
+1 Trade Routes for every city
Some bonus yield for Fishing and Whale Boats

So, if anybody is willing to try this one, I'd be glad if you gave any feedback / bug reports / suggestions that helped me improving this mod.

Thanks in advance and ... have fun.
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rezaf

pretty good idea, but probably hard to balance.

sounds cool. ill give it a go.

I'll try it out.

quick questiono, will the other civs know how to do these?

ejdacanay said:

quick questiono, will the other civs know how to do these?

Click to expand...

What do you mean?
Every civ will get an adaption tech according to their starting city.
If you're asking whether or not the AI will build the new improvements ... haven't really tested that in depth yet.
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rezaf

Haven't played it yet, but I share Gr3yHounds doubts about the problem of balancing the mod. But it's really a great idea. Perhaps you should rebalance the standard terrain effects without the terrain adaption, too. Especially the combined effects of standard terrain and terrain adaption in case of hills and jungle seem to be to much to me. In your mod Jungle with Treehouses yield 3 food, 1 production, and 1 commerce -- this is a much better than an irrigated grasland tile (only 3 food).

But as I said: It's a great idea, so keep on balancing it!

CivCinque said:

In your mod Jungle with Treehouses yield 3 food, 1 production, and 1 commerce -- this is a much better than an irrigated grasland tile (only 3 food).

Click to expand...

That's kinda the entire idea about the mod. If another player has adapted to grassland, his grass tiles will yield 4 food and 1 production each, allowing for BIG cities with production capabilities ordinary mainly-grassland cities could never provide. And upon discovering Biology, his Farms will be at 5/1/0, whereas the treehouse will STILL be at 3/1/1.

I initially wanted to provide basic terrain bonuses/maluses only, without implementing any improvements, but much to my dismay, CIV doesn't allow for this. There can be no techyieldchanges for basic terrain.
So much for the most moddable game ever.
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rezaf

But that's my point: I think its unrealistic even for a civilization used to live in the jungle to get more out of a jungle tile than out of the grasslandtile next to it. It's no critique on the concept of terrain adaption, though. I find it perfectly plausible that a civilization adapts to its geographical environment. But as I said, I would like to see a more balanced version.

Ah well, looks like the next release of this mod will have to revert back to base terrains only anyway. For some obscure reason, Firaxis decided to hardcode Hills and Peaks as game entities, which completely screws up any terrain based modding efforts. Unless there's some option I overlooked so far, it doesn't seem to be possible to restrict improvements properly, to have them only buildable on certain terrains. If you check out the current version you'll quickly see what I'm referring to.
I'll try to find a remedy for this, but I can't guarantee anything. Firaxis sub-optimal design decisions already got in my way more than once. :thumbdown
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rezaf

rezaf said:

For some obscure reason, Firaxis decided to hardcode Hills and Peaks as game entities, which completely screws up any terrain based modding efforts.

Click to expand...

Hills and Peaks aren't Terrain types in CIV. That's not really a hardcoded thing, that's just a design decision. It may be a bad thing for this mod, but it's done the way it was to allow Hills to combine with Terrains, so you can have Plains/Hill, Grassland/Hill, Desert/Hill etc.

They both have entries in the TerrainInfos.xml, so you can make them seperate terrain types if you want (set <bGraphicalOnly> to 0), but then they won't combine with other Terrain types of course. And you'll have to modify the map generation routines to get them distributed too.

Though, once the SDK is out, you should be able to pull off what you want in an easier manner, I think.

Unless there's some option I overlooked so far, it doesn't seem to be possible to restrict improvements properly, to have them only buildable on certain terrains.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure exactly what you want to accomplish, but have you tried using <TerrainMakesValids> and <FeatureMakesValids>?

I think its partly a good idea. I always felt that a civ that gets stuck in a bad start filled with desert, jungle, or tundra should get a small benefit that still allow them to succeed. I don't believe those types of squares should ever end up being better than a default grasslands or plains though.

This could be expanded in so may ways, and has reminded me of a thread I made 2 and a half years ago.

Basically, I think it would be awsome to completely do away with pre-determined civ specific traits, and instead have them generated during the game. UUs coming from the unit type you used the most, traits coming from how agressive you played, and so on - building you a personality which suited your playing style, and giving your empire advantages on the terrain on which it was built.Here is the thread outlining the ideas which I had. Some of the stuff is quite outdated (posted from a Civ 3 format), but the same sort of ideas run through Civ 4. I only got one reply

I'd be tempted to make it myself, but I think I need to get a tiny bit more used to python beforehand.

Another suggestion would be to allow movement across mountains. In my first game I was next to a civilization with mountains between them and me and I had like 10 cities and he only had 2 the entire game because they couldn't cross mountains, and my culture expansion wound up taking over two of his city squares. I had to send workers in transports to even get to the terrain. This was never an issue in the other Civ versions.

This is very interesting. I like the terrain mod idea. You can see historically civs were pretty much on equal footing until certain technologies were being developed. For instance, you can only do so much with deserts compared to grasslands. In this game you are pretty much SoL if you start in a desert area without a river running through it.

You're ideas would work with this Great Apple. I don't like the idea of predefined anything. It is more fun for the game to adapt to your playing style. For instance, if your warlike, you're units would generate xp faster, and your military buildings would provide more bonuses. If that is all you did the entire game, that's pretty much what your civilization should reflect. Now, I do agree with predefined Civ's because they are reflecting these historically, but I think it would be cool to have an option to be able to pick an unpredefined leader. Just another way to rewrite history.

This mod is certainly a good idea and in my view realistic that the land makest the people, as many have stated already the issue is balance and whether the effect is abit overdown insofar as tundra outdoing grasslands for food.

It is terrific to start seeing some real creativity on show however

This is simply genius IMO Keep up the good work!


Errr.... I seem to be having trouble with the second archive... I keep getting error messages, and when I don't get error messages, it simply indicates its copied the files to the folder but has actually done nothing...

If you give one movment bonus on sea squares, does that apply to ALL sea squares? If it does, that makes for some extremly unbalanced naval battles. Please clarify this one for me.

If one throws out the idea of bonus to production in certain terrains, and instead add bonuses to movement and defense in certain terrain, you should solve the balance issue and be realistic at the same time.

A civilization adapted to desert enviroment will fight and move better in the desert than some civ adapted to a jungle enviroment.

So far, the really problematic things I've found are A) the fact that one can be able to build the Desert Irrigation not only on irrigation but on other terrain as well. That's probably just an oversight, but a serious one. Secondly, you should definitely see if there's a way you can make is so that you can't build the Desert Irrigation on floodplains... that is over the top.

I personally disagree with a lot of the balancing criticisms. I think that production bonuses can indeed be balanced, but you've got to shore up some of your code to make sure that these improvements are limited to the places they're supposed to be limited to. You might want to play around with some of the numbers too... but aside from that, I think it can and will work.

As for the suggestion that a +1 MP to naval units will lead to "extremely" unbalanced naval battles, I say: how? It merely increases a unit's speed.. and even then, only by one tile per turn. It will have virtually no impact on any actual battle except that one side will be able to get to it slightly faster.