[Warlords] IsoMod

Welcome to IsoMod.

There isn't anything flashy here. No new interface, no new units, no new technologies.

The game will play very much like standard Warlords.

The changes:

AI: I've reworked BetterAI. Source code will be provided on request -- it was mostly bug fixes, and taught it a better approximation of unit power.

Graphs: The food graph works. The power graph actually reflects power, not just the "how much production have you spent on units" of standard Civ4. Units that can kill 3 units produce 3 times as much power.

Ancient Units:
I reworked every unit prior to riflemen: the ones that are less useful are better, and the ones that used to dominate are worse.

As an example: Spearmen are strength 5, +75% vs Mounted.

Combat and Promotions:
Collateral units are much weaker, but still key to victory. They can only soften up a target.

Flanking units can reach higher withdraw chances -- after your catapults weaken the target, send in the horses.

First strike is a viable upgrade path -- but you risk running into immune to first strike cavalry.

Unique Units:
UUs are now better than the baseline unit -- but often they cost a bit more to justify their increased power.

Animals:
There are many more animals, some of which are significantly tougher. Scouts can hunt down animals.

Barbarians:
"Insane" difficulty settings that mirror the standard ones produces an ancient era full of Barbarian hordes. On a larger map, entire continents will be overrun. It will take some skill to survive them.

Civics:
Slavery, Hereditary Rule, Emancipation, Police State and Serfdom have been reworked.

TODO:
Barbarians settling down.
Technology spread.
Rifleman and up UUs.
More AI improvements.
24 civ version.

Download here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=6013

Reserved for future use.

Cool, this is exactly the kind of mod I like. I only tend to play Vanilla civ with the odd small mod improvement, like BetterAI, so the extra improvements in this mod look good. Nice work Downloading now...

How do I install this?

I'm playing this mod at the moment. I like the tweaks to the units.
I attacked Mansa and got a shock. 2 first strikes. Ouch.

I had to reload and the second time I paid attention to the unit stats.

The civics play well. It's good that it's not a completely new set of civics. I find that so hard to take in. This way I can still play civics and tech tree with similar strategy to Vanilla, but with some interesting differences.

I'm not into insane barbarians. Do you have a Monarch setting which is not "insane"?

@ The Meal, just put it into your Warlords/Mods folder and run it as a mod from "Advanced" in the menu

I'm looking forward to this one. All the changes are quite appealing.
+++++
After a couple of games, I can say it seems pretty solid. You might take a look at those Viking Longboats, which seem somewhat overpowered.

I implemented Viking Longboats?

I'll admit I should have, but I don't think I did... I was going to rework the maritime game later.

There are both Insane and non-Insane difficulty settings. Insane Monarch is "Monarch with insane barbarian settings", while Monarch is the same game without the Insane setting. Note that Insane works with Raging as well -- Raging Insane Barbarians are even nastier than Insane Barbarians. Pick whichever you want.

I find the Insane setting amusing, because it makes the ancient era very paranoid and insular -- contacting a single other great civilization is a feat, and 2 is epic. For it to work right, I'd have to patch in water barbarians -- currently you can build a workboat, and have it explore your entire continent far far too early.

Here are the Barbarian changes:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=208934

You cannot turn off the tougher animals and the upgraded scout. Beware of cave bears, but the barbarian density can be dropped back to normal.

Details:




Here are the ancient unit changes (mostly -- the retreat changes are also tweaked in):
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=227227
The rock-paper-sissor cycles are roughly:


Withdraw/Collateral/Drill changes:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=212676

Summary:


The net effect is that using high-withdraw and/or first strike units is both tempting an useful.

Note that I'm using the reduced handicap BetterAI handicaps -- the AI at a given difficulty level is cheating much less than it does under the standard game. So if you find a given difficulty level too easy... kick it up a notch, or turn on Insane Barbarians.

I am thinking about recosting the Great Wall.

Civic changes:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=214459&highlight=slavery

Summary:

The installation instructions for this mod, and nearly every mod for Civ4, are here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=138043

looks interesting.
when you are going to finish Rifleman and up UUs?

Hi!

I just had a game on insane prince / marathon speed setting.

While i love the idea of boosting the barbs in the mod, there seems to be a smallish problem. The AI didnt make it.

By 1100AD, i won as the barbarians eliminated everyone else besides me. (thats 11 AI players, on a pangea map) The reason i wasnt killed is simple: Great Wall.

It is extremely overpowered in this mod, and i think you might want to consider removing it from the mod entirerily. Whoever gets it becomes pretty much invincible, as while everyone else struggles to expand, the one with the wall only has to protect his settlers for like 4-5 squares, then a city is built and it is untouchable for the barbarians.

Then there is the issue of AI survivalability. with raging insane barbarians, the AI seems to have no chance at all. (Neither do i, without the wall, but i do suck.. while the AI usually plays quite decent )

Upping the difficulty seems to be an unlikely solution, as while it would certainly boost the AI nations, it would most probably increase the barbarian activity even more..

Maybe it was because of the raging setting, i dont exactly know what that does.

Any tips on how i can make the AI survive?
even more importantly
Any tips how i can survive myself?

Great mod though, love it. It is just fun to struggle for your survival when all you have is archers and warriors. I can't say i have much of a success in it

Anyway, thanks for spending your time on making it.

EDIT: I played a new game, without the raging barbarians setting, and this time it was quite smooth.. So smooth, that i hardly saw any barbarians.. then again, it was pangea with 18 players so there was not much room left for barbarians after the first few colonies. Will try again on the same map settings with fewer players to see if that makes a difference.

You do have to tweak the density of players to land area: I often spawn 2 or 3 extra civilizations on Fractal/Huge at Monarch.

I also avoid getting Pyramids and the Great Wall, so I can't skip to Police State (and start whipping) or ignore the barbarian hordes. Those two wonders need to be rebalanced.

When I have time to get civilization respawning working, it should help: AI civilizations that get overrun by barbarians will just tend to respawn out of the ashes, possibly somewhere else. The chain wipe-out problem happens when 2 or 3 civilizations in one area go under: then all of the barbarians funnel through and overrun the next one, which increases the barbarian flow, etc.

To deal with the barbarian flow, you need to proactively create an army and try to get the barbarians to attack your troops fortified on jungle/forest hills. When you can afford to, you want two instead of one (because barbs won't always come at you one at a time), with at least one medic promotion.

Horses are great for dealing with Barbarians -- they don't spawn Spearmen.

Looks interesting. Have you thought about merging in part (or all) of the Revolution mod? I'm asking because you have "Barbarians settling down" on your to-do list, and that's exactly what the BarbarianCiv component of Revolution does.

*nod*, I have tried a few times to import the Revolutions code. However, I don't want the return to "must manage happiness in every city every turn" effect, hence I only want the steal the "barbarians settling down" code.

I've avoided tweaking the modern units, because I intend to port this over to BTS, and they redid modern units pretty heavily.

Currently I'm playing around with culture, cash and research, seeing if I can get anything balanced and playable out of it.

(Science and Culture costs cash to use. Culture production produces hammers. Redo a bunch of the cultural influence code, making a super-culture city in your core useful at the edges of your empire. Etc.)

So I'm starting up some development of this again, planning to move it to BTS 3.13.

My current issue is working out how I should incorperate flanking. I don't like the BTS flanking solution: it doesn't allow you to defend your catapults against attacking cavalry. No matter how good your "screen" is, they can get at your catapults.

So some mechanics brainstorming....

First, high-power anti-cavalry should somehow mitigate how well the attacker can flank. The relative power of your cavalry and anti-cavalry needs to matter.

Second, traditionally you used cavalry to deal with the mobility of the other side's cavalry. Ie, team <A>s cavalry would attack on the flanks, and be opposed by team <B>s cavalry. So maybe some mechanism where the flanking of the opposing side can soak flank-attacks?

I also want to work in some barbarian changes, to make the Insane Barbarians more amusing. Hordes (where barbarian units clump together somewhat), Satisfied Pillagers (where a barbarian unit who has done some damage heads off into the wilderness to enjoy it's loot, before coming back), and Barbarian Colonies (where a clump of barbarian cities can form a sub-barbarian civilization, which can eventually break free and form a new civilization).

This also involves nerfing the great wall (an attack bonus against barbarians when within your cultural borders, or maybe "barbarians take 2% damage every turn they are in your cultural borders"), and making sure that the "pathing exploit" (where you build a wall of units to prevent barbarians from trying to path into your empire) doesn't work on barbarians anymore.

Yakk said:

I also want to work in some barbarian changes, to make the Insane Barbarians more amusing. Hordes (where barbarian units clump together somewhat), Satisfied Pillagers (where a barbarian unit who has done some damage heads off into the wilderness to enjoy it's loot, before coming back), and Barbarian Colonies (where a clump of barbarian cities can form a sub-barbarian civilization, which can eventually break free and form a new civilization).

Click to expand...

I'd be really interested in the horde mechanic, and that satisfied pillagers idea sounds cool as well (perhaps something by which a barbarian unit can gain promotions or something through pillaging, and has to go outside your cultural borders to do so?). You should check out jdog500's Revolutions mod, one component of which is BarbarianCiv, where barbarian cities can eventually form into civilizations.

*nod*, I've tried integrating jdog's implementation a number of times, but it hasn't worked yet. The hard part is that I do not want the revolution part of it, as I don't want more micro-management (I like that Civ4 has taken away the happiness micro management of Civ1-3), and when I disable it the revolutions code isn't as happy as it should be.

Admittedly I haven't tried that integration for months.

In any case, my first order of business is the revamp of units and the updating of the various files to work in warlords, and then the elimination of the great wall.

I might also include the power graph changes (where higher end units impact the power graph more than they do under default). The AI changes I made in warlords may or may not work -- I need to spend some time poking at the new BTS AI to see how it makes decisions.

I'll probably use the "1000 AD" metric again. As anyone who has played 1000 AD, there are a number of decisions that should be made right off the start.

Well, the Barbarian Civ component of the mod is available seperately: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=170243

There's also a python-only version of the mod if you can't integrate the SDK.

*nod*, I tried that one as well. He isn't maintaining it:
Last edited by jdog5000 : Jun 20, 2006
That's a while ago.

Anyhow, if you are interested, here is my plans for flanking:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=6460451#post6460451