AND Enhanced Civics Mod 1.0

Status: In Development
AND Version Support: 1.76
Version Number: V1.0
Credits: Thanks to Afforess for developing this outstanding mod, and all others who have contributed along the way.

Known Issues:
- Slave Quarters and Slave Labor Camp were supposed to have a custom button, but they were crashing my game. They are currently using the slave market button. This will be changed in a future version.
- Missing several civilopedia entries and strategy entries for new civics and buildings. This will be remedied in a following update.

Features:
- New, improved, and reworked civics as well as new civic buttons.
- Specialists now give 1 great person point instead of 3.
- Great Specialists now give 3 great person points.
- Specialists yields and commerce rebalanced.
- New Tech - Stone Weapons.
- New Tech - Suffrage.
- New slavery buildings - Slave Expedition, Slave Quarters, Slave Labor Camp.
- New resource - Slaves (+ hammers, required to build slavery buildings, supplied by slavery expedition national wonder).
- Inflation rebalanced (slightly) and should be more subtle now.
- Barter no longer give "No Inflation"
- Numerous other features which will be elaborated at a later time.

Development Plans:
*This section will be filled later*

Download Link:
http://www.atomicgamer.com/file.php?id=94689

Patches:
V1.0 patch E
- Fixes the incorrect feudal civic maintenance
- Fixes Inflation bug
- Fixes Manorialism bug
- Fixes Sovereignty bug
- Place in ~/Assets/XML/GameInfo

To Install unzip the contents and place the files in the appropriate folders. I highly recommend creating a backup before over writing or replacing your files.

Stay tuned for further updates.

Let me know what you think of my work, this took about 2 weeks. Feedback is necessary for further improvements.

Update: Development is proceeding. It will take longer than I first realized, as the balancing is very tedious. I am very close to achieving what I think is a good level of balance among the new civics.

The two new categories currency and politics have been temporarily removed for the version 1.0 as I ran into too many problems involving the AI which I do not know how to fix atm. The rest of the new civics and re-balances are being left in place however. When I am finished balancing and creating the new buttons and text entries I will release version 1.0. I expect this will be finished within the next week so check back here if you are interested.

I thought I might include some screenshots of my work so far. I am not finished, but I thought I might as well share what I've been working on. You'll notice the new civics, Subsistence and Special Forces as well as the reworked Communism civic. Subsistence was created as an early game competitive alternative to the rebalanced slavery civic which now focuses more on specialized economic factors (access to labor intensive goods which require plantations as well as production capacity to create the new slave expedition and reworked slave market).

Let me know what you think.

Oh and please note I've not yet changed buttons for alot of the new civics and civic reworks. Subsistence is actually the only original button I've created so far so let me know what you think of it.

Looks nice, peoples republic lacks info if its plus or minus 15% inflation also i would like to see what the other civics do, especaly the military ones.

Aline said:

Looks nice, peoples republic lacks info if its plus or minus 15% inflation also i would like to see what the other civics do, especaly the military ones.

Click to expand...

I'm currently dropping support for the advanced economy option (because inflation is broken and I don't have access to the SVN to fix it), so that doesn't really matter.

I am still in the process of tweaking and balancing so this is very preliminary and subject to change before release.

I will post some more screen shots of my progress in a bit.

I don't see Coinage on your screens, so it seems you replaced it. I like it, because coinage consumed silver and gold first last and all the time. It was bad bug.

antoca said:

I don't see Coinage on your screens, so it seems you replaced it. I like it, because coinage consumed silver and gold first last and all the time. It was bad bug.

Click to expand...

Coinage was actually going to be moved to the new civic option "Currency" as it is not an accurate descriptor for an economic system. However, I ran into problems with implementing new civic options, and I do not know how to fix these problems yet. So I am aiming to implement that feature in a future version.

Ready to implement into my AND as soon as you release it.

JosEPh

Ooh, looking good. I can definitely seeing myself in a pickle trying to choose between slavery and subsistence in early game (probably going with slavery if I find myself on an open flat grasslandy area or an archipelago, that +1 free slave could be a new city's entire production capacity).

If it still seems too powerful, just bring back the civ-wide unhappiness. Between that, the revolution instabilities and the occasional slave revolt event, running the civic is a balancing act. Also, AI slave states are ridiculously easy to send into rebellion using spies. This is not a bad thing! Maybe put in an espionage penalty too just to compound the problem? Only bad part is the AI never seems to send spies on unhappiness/revolutionary sentiment missions, it's always "hey lets destroy this plantation!". (In terms of realism, it's probably easy for spies to recruit agents in a slave economy, from both the slaves themselves and the citizenry who secretly abhor the system and want to work against it. Not to mention the occasional slave escaping from the secret government weapons lab where he was a janitor or test subject who happily spills all his secrets.)

Special forces seems particularly shiny. I love having busting up the AI's grand armies of 50+ green units with my smaller elite stacks in maneuver type warfare. The gold cost means I won't be able to afford good sized city garrisons, so I'd have to be more proactive in my defence or risk getting surprise attacked and having a transport unload right into my poorly defended coastal city.

JosEPh_II said:

Ready to implement into my AND as soon as you release it.

JosEPh

Click to expand...

I am aiming to release either late tomorrow or thursday. It depends on what I do about the inflation issue, I've uncovered some more info about it and I am attempting to re-balance it. After I release I will need some feed back for 1.1 update which will be mostly balances.

IronClaymore said:

Ooh, looking good. I can definitely seeing myself in a pickle trying to choose between slavery and subsistence in early game (probably going with slavery if I find myself on an open flat grasslandy area or an archipelago, that +1 free slave could be a new city's entire production capacity).

If it still seems too powerful, just bring back the civ-wide unhappiness. Between that, the revolution instabilities and the occasional slave revolt event, running the civic is a balancing act. Also, AI slave states are ridiculously easy to send into rebellion using spies. This is not a bad thing! Maybe put in an espionage penalty too just to compound the problem? Only bad part is the AI never seems to send spies on unhappiness/revolutionary sentiment missions, it's always "hey lets destroy this plantation!". (In terms of realism, it's probably easy for spies to recruit agents in a slave economy, from both the slaves themselves and the citizenry who secretly abhor the system and want to work against it. Not to mention the occasional slave escaping from the secret government weapons lab where he was a janitor or test subject who happily spills all his secrets.)

Special forces seems particularly shiny. I love having busting up the AI's grand armies of 50+ green units with my smaller elite stacks in maneuver type warfare. The gold cost means I won't be able to afford good sized city garrisons, so I'd have to be more proactive in my defence or risk getting surprise attacked and having a transport unload right into my poorly defended coastal city.

Click to expand...

I've removed the +1 free slave in favor of giving the slaves resource generated by the slave expedition (national wonder) give +1 hammer yield. I think this is much more balanced. Slave Expedition has a cost of 250 hammers so it requires committing resources to a slave fueled economy (which obviously has major early production benefits in the long run). Also slave market now gives access to 1 free slave, and there are two new slavery buildings (all three of which require the slaves resource in order to be built) which give 1 free slave each. Slave Quarters also gives +10 maintenance and Slave Labor Camp gives -1 happiness and -1 health so it is a trade in terms of production to growth.

The purpose was to offer the player two viable alternatives early on, one emphasizing growth gains and the other production gains. It will hopefully allow the player a choice in setting up his early economy.

Also yes I'm rather proud of my rework of the military civics in particular, I think they lend a great deal of variance in play style. I can't wait to try out the Grand Navy civic on an island map. I'm hoping they work out the way they were intended.

The preliminary balancing is finished, all that is left is creation of the custom buttons, strategy and civ entries and a possible rework of the inflation values.

Along with a rework of civics, I've tweaked several other aspects as well, most notably the great people and specialist system. All specialists now give 1 great person point and 3 of their brand of yield or commerce (i.e. engineers give 3 hammers), whereas great specialists now give 3 great person points and 5 yield or commerce each. This seems more reasonable to me than the random values we had before with great spys and great artists giving absurdly huge increases compared to the others. I've also changed priest to give food instead of hammers and gold yield, have not decided whether to keep this in place yet or not. In balance some of the earlier buildings now allow for 2 specialists of their type instead of one.

I've also cut the absurdly over powered +100% great person and great general emergence traits to only +50%. These traits seemed immensely over powered in comparison to most of the others imo. I've been very pleased with the results of this rework in my practice games. Great people are now more strategic, and less of a given in game play, and their impact on drastically increasing the timeline of the eras has been greatly diminished.

I've also succeeded in working in better slightly higher (and imo more balanced) city maintenance costs. Leaving the science bar on 100% for the first 200 turns of the game is now pretty much impossible without being very far ahead in tech and economy. Base city maintenance has been increase, city maintenance penalties are now attached to many of the civics (for realism), and the city administrations buildings now cause much higher maintenance penalties (200% extra maintenance for the final one, which I think is balanced considering the +6 free specialists it gives).

The free military units aspect of civics have been changed to free units as well, as the free military units was/is malfunctioning and not registering properly. This should give correct free unit bonuses now unlike before.

There are several other changes as well which are mostly minor in comparison, I may touch on them later.

Oh and before I forget, barter has been fixed and is no longer over powered.

Nice, acctualy i cant wait to try this out.
Also how is the AI going to do, will it use grand navy on water maps ect. ?

Aline said:

Nice, acctualy i cant wait to try this out.
Also how is the AI going to do, will it use grand navy on water maps ect. ?

Click to expand...

Unfortunately there isn't a way for me to distinguish that at the moment, all the new civics do have flavors though, which tell the AI and approximated value type (like how much gold or military capacity they will get out of making a selection). I would need access to the SDK to program in a feature such as giving Grand Navy more weight on maps with higher sea levels. But, that is a feature I might be interested in implementing in a later version. I'd also love to have a way to tell the AI it should choose slavery if it has access to plantations or a number of the slave buildings in place.

As for inflation, I have done some more re balancing of inflation values, at the moment they only apply to the reworked economy civics. The player should gain inflation a tad bit more gradually now, and barter will no longer be the best option when it comes to dealing with the inflation as the over powered "no inflation" attribute has been removed and replaced. This is preliminary, so while you can play on advanced economy, its not going to be thoroughly tested on release and may need to be further adjusted in a later version.

I'm about done with the new buttons, after that I am going to release version 1.0 for general use. The civilopedia and strategy entries will not be included though because I have not created them yet, but they aren't essential to the actual functionality of the game so I will aim to implement them in version 1.1.

Updated. Version 1.0 of AND Enhanced mod is released!

Will try it out later today.
On a first note, every goverment civic has the no state even though i can still convert, so it does exaclty nothing.

Aline said:

Will try it out later today.
On a first note, every goverment civic has the no state even though i can still convert, so it does exaclty nothing.

Click to expand...

Actually Theocracy doesn't have it, and allows you to switch religions. You should be able to switch religions with an appropriate religion civic selected.

Also intolerant is the only civic that gives you fixed borders(unless i missed something) i personaly like fixed borders others hate it, but i would suggest to either use the feature properly and have some more civics grant fixed borders or totaly remove it.
The maitnance for number of citys is broken with feudal.

*edit*
So is the subside for cooperations with class system the food requierment for citys with manorialisem aswell as many of the inflation values all showing a 1630932.

I started a game today and played until Monarchy. I noticed several bugs, but it seems nothing important (except Fixed Borders report above).

1. I forgot to screenshot, but Inflation parameter on civics screen is broken. It shows +65525% or something like that.
2. Also not important, but Stone Weapons tech on "technology advisior" screen is badly placed. Look first screenshot. There is also other small notice.

And... that's all.
I will continue this game (if Chingis Khaan will not get me ) and report about balance later. It will take some time.

P.S. Second screenshot is about annoying bug of 1.76. Only movement points of units are shown on tech screen, city screen, etc. Very annoying. I am not sure, but if you can repair, it would be excellent.

P.P.S. "-100%" monarchy/despotism bug disappeared.

antoca said:

I started a game today and played until Monarchy. I noticed several bugs, but it seems nothing important (except Fixed Borders report above).

1. I forgot to screenshot, but Inflation parameter on civics screen is broken. It shows +65525% or something like that.
2. Also not important, but Stone Weapons tech on "technology advisior" screen is badly placed. Look first screenshot. There is also other small notice.

And... that's all.
I will continue this game (if Genghis Khan will not kill me ) and report about balance later. It will take some time.

P.S. Second screenshot is about annoying bug of 1.76. Only movement points of units are shown on tech screen, city screen, etc. Very annoying. I am not sure, but if you can repair, it would be excellent.

P.P.S. "-100%" monarchy/despotism bug disappeared.

Click to expand...

Hmmm could you take a shot of the inflation bug for me? I'm not getting anything similar to that, if it is what I think you're talking about.

Also, yes I know about the placement of stone weapons, also i believe suffrage is similar. I forgot to fix before release. The tech tree placement will be fixed for 1.1 which will probably be released next week. Thanks for reminding me.

As far as the lack of display of strength, I'm not sure if I can fix it or not. I believe the problem would probably be in the python though (if not its in the sdk which I don't have access too). I will take a look when I start fixing things in a couple of days.

Something like this.