Community Call to Power Project

[Royco]

Hello again peeps,

Firstly I would like to thank Chrome for the continuation of CTP and for letting me post this mini mod.
Ironed out a few bugs in the Epic Speed modmod I posted, Sorry the first one was not very tested(work and sleep taking up 20hrs of ma day), Got to test version 2 a fair bit(upto medieval(700 turns longest)) few early finishes at work allowed the time for more testing.

Installation

Delete any older version of this modmod from .....My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\MODS.
Download V2 and Extract(With Winrar or similar program) to .....My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\MODS
Start Civ5 and activate in game, AFTER you have Activated CCTP. New version breaks savegames.

Changes Made

Version 1

Spoiler :

- Changed the recources spawn quantities that were set to 1min 2max to 2min 3max.
- Reactivated/Adjusted Civ5GameSpeeds.xml and Addjusted the Epic Game Speed to be a bit more Epic!
- Removed Science from population, Must now rely on buildings for Science.
- Disabled the Instant Heal Promotion.
- +1 Science to the Temple and -1 Happiness.
- Added Science Flavors to Mysticism Tech and the Temple Building.
- Palace Help Text updated.
- Great Library set Science reduced to 2.
- Temple of Heaven set Science reduced to 2.
- Koag Maio Science set reduced to 4.
- Nazca Lines Science set reduced to 3.

Version 2

Spoiler :

- Reduced the science from Buildings to 1 per 4 population.
- Increased tech costs by 12.5%
- Edited certain tech and building flavors so the AI builds Temples, Library's, Public Schools and Paper Makers as a VERY High priority. This is to
accomodate the fact that there is no science from population(Sorry if its a bit of a clunkey method, but, it works), without this the AI falls behind on Techs real fast.(Takes the AI about 170-200 turns to progress to the next Era)

Results

The resulting changes of my modifications are that Science is ALOT slower now but Units and Buildings have not been increased much(20% or so), your empire should have more access to
recources due to my changes, this however depends entierly on what setting you choose at the start of your game(Low, Standard, High(Recommended),
Very High, Ledgendary).

Known Issues

When manualy exploring with a scout, the game can randomly crash, no idea what causes this, if any1 comes across this problem(happened to me 3 times out of 7 games where i didnt automate my first scout), reloading a save and the game continues to play fine(if the scout is on auto).
ONLY works with the Continents or Pagnea Maps.

Maube it could be like this?! The crashing. http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=10638311#post10638311

 

[unhholycowgod]

I've been trolling this thread for a while now and would like to say 'thanks' to everyone who's been putting in so much work on this mod. Looks like it's turning out to be great! I actually just put in ctp2 to try a compare/contrast and see how it's going. To that end I found a link with a lot of great info on ctp over on apolyton:
http://apolyton.net/local_links/links/c-reference-240

there's an excel reference chart that has info on tech tree, gov't, terrain, improvements, etc. basically everything in the game along with their respective improvements/detractors

thought it might be of some use.

I'll post back again once I've played through the newer release here and give some feedback.

 

[roman_architect]

I just finished 60 hours of testing and here are the results. It is now the year 2015 so it is a good stopping point to compare vs RL timeline. I'm playing on emperor and at this point I'm number 1 in every demographic. Played on a huge world with 22 Civs. I own about 20% of the land in the world. Income is 30K per turn with 1370 science. Usually range between 60 and 130 happiness depending on different factors. Through the game I get social policies about every 11 or 12 turns, which seems balanced and well paced.


First of all a few comments on my playing style. I play with an emphasis on technology and economy, with expansion when it makes sense.

Game Pace:
I think the techs in the early game need to be slightly more expensive. I was an "age" ahead through most of the game compared to RL timelines. I hit industrial in 1600, modern in 1850, and then it slowed way down. There are many techs for the industrial and modern age so I'm still working on some of them in 2015, but getting toward the end of the modern now. These dates are without rushing through.


Strategic Concepts:
Because of the enormous expense of modern units, military citystates are overpowered in the extreme. It cost me about 20k gold to become their allly and they pop out units worth 65k and up for a long time. Multiply that by all of the military citystates and acquiring a modern military becomes much easier and more affordable, but the AI will never compete with you enough on this point so it is an exploit. Not sure exactly the best way to fix, but perhaps drastically increasing the time needed to produce a unit? Anyhow, the return on investment for that strategy is too high.

AI and Gold: For some reason I don't think the AI is spending enough of its gold. In the industrial some of the AI's had 2 million gold, which is a lot. Perhaps their increased production capacity made it so that they could produce all of the buildings and have all of their units upgraded, but I doubt it. It wasn't just one either, there were a few of them.

Military and Diplomacy: Only one person declared war on me all game, yet I had a mediocre army most of the game so it wasn't intimidation. This is just a comment, not sure if it means anything. In modern I built up to become the leading military, but before then I was middle of the road. I even declared war and conquered 4 or 5 civs and still didn't piss off the world enough to gang up on me.

Great People:
The relative strength of great people varies tremendously with time and space. Great scientists are overpowered with the ability to get a free tech. Here is an example, a great scientist just got social networking for me, which would have taken 24 turns to research, wow, what a great thing. The great merchant I just used for a trade route gave me less than 20K gold. That sucks because that is 2/3 of one turn worth of gold. So great merchants are basically useless. Great engineers are somewhere in between. In modern times they can finish about 1/3 of a wonder or something. Can we vary these with their age so they give different bonuses depending upon he time period? What this makes me do is manually control all specialists and only produce scientsts and engineers, period. The artists are good for getting land, but you only need that occasionally when you want to steal a resource. The amount of gold or culture you would get for making their great buildings is a joke too, that needs to upped considerably.

Research Agreements:
I think these are overpowered also. They need to be more expensive and return less science. I basically keep investing my money in these constantly because the return is so high. I did build the wonder that increases the return by 50%, but still, the way the return goes is for about 1 or 2 turns of gold production, you get about 7-9 turns of science production. This seems like a very high return on investment. If we just fixed this it would slow down science considerably. At that point you may need to reduce the expense of the industrial and modern techs to keep the timeline in tact since there are so many of them.

Unit Upgrades vs Purchase Cost:
In many instances it cost more to upgrade a unit than to purchase it outright from a city, which to me seems counter intuitive. For example, right now it cost about 300K to upgrade a bomber to a stealth bomber, but it only cost 150K to purchase it outright from my city. I ended up spending the extra money to upgrade a few because of their experience, but I still think this is backwards. The same thing with tanks, except to a lesser degree. It cost about the same to upgrade to a modern tank as to buy a new one outright. Also, aircraft carriers are not upgradeable to their larger counterpart, is that on purpose?

AI Armies:
The units that require buildings in order to produce them are extremely rare, this includes any and all air force, tanks, etc. I think the AI is getting confused and not producing the buildings. I think there is a mechanism to prioritize the importance of certain buildings, so the importance of the auto factory, and airplane factory need to be upped considerably. The entire time I have been fighting enemies I have only seen one plane, and have not fought against a single tank. I know they have the tech because most people are in the modern era right now. I haven't fought any of the big dogs but I will soon so I'll keep you posted if the major players have better militaries. Without some air protection, my aircraft carriers, bombers, and battleships are just torching their militaries. The other thing it does is reduce the importance of fighters. Currently my fighters have a minor role because they don't have to do any dog fighting... .all the killing is done by my bombers. The cost of some of the units is in my opinion too high. My best city produces a nuke in 50 turns on a standard game. That is just too much. It can pretty much build any 2 modern wonders before I can build a single nuke?

Gold in general and upgrade costs:
I focused heavily on gold producing buildings and I still had a hard time keeping my military upgraded. I probably only bought 4 buildings the entire game because the cost to upgrade the military is so high. I spent every penny of my money on research agreements and upgrading military, with the lion share on military. I would guess about 80% upgrading military, 15% research agreements. Perhaps this is by design, but just wanted to share the ratios. I was able to slowly keep a modern military by spending every penny on it, but just barely.

Victories:
The egyptians in my game won a cultural victory in the year 2006. Is this about right? I think we need to change the victory criteria if you intend to have the game played into the digial era and beyond. This was about smack dab in the middle of the modern era for the top dogs.

Most of this post was about things that were not quite right with the mod, but it would take me days to post everything that is right with this mod. It was an absolute pleasure to play and most of it is fairly well balanced and challenging. I spent a lot of time playing if you have any other questions about my experience, please ask. Thanks so much for your work on this and if I think of some more things I'll keep in touch. Can't wait for the next release. Thanks a bunch.

 

[roman_architect]

Forgot a few things:

Trade route bonuses:
Trade routes are an extremely minor part of the overall economy, and as such, the wonders and buidings that benefit them are almost useless, even though they are expensive. An example would be the interstate wonder, it took a city with good production like 30 turns to make it, but its bonus will be minimal. So my current economy looks like this, 104K for city revenue and 5k for trade route revenue, an that is after I built the interstate wonder. I think trade routes should be more important economically.

There are many buildings that I don't produce, or don't produce very many because of their expense to benefit ratio. For example, the nuclear plant cost 4725 per turn to maintain, but only provides 600 production an takes 45k production to make. This compared to the factory which costs 16k to build, provides 375 production, but has a maintenance of 700. So the ratio of maintenance to production of the factory is about 2 gold per production, but for the nuclear facility, it is about 4 times as expensive at 7.8 gold to 1 production. They are also comparable because they both consume a strategic resource and deliver production. I know we don't want to whittle everything down to equations but there are huge disincentives to producing many of the industrial and modern buildings.

Another example that is interesting is the shopping mall. So after spending 30k production on one of those suckers, a size 30 city will only yield 270 gold from it because the maintenance consumes so much of the revenue. Anything less than a size 21 city and you will be losing money for having this building. This is not necessarily a bad concept where certain buildings only make sense in densely populated areas, but there are too many other things to build for 30k production that deliver a better yield, that these won't get produced by me... i mean shoot, i will spend half that amount of production (15k) on a television and net 600 gold and 3 science. that means if i did that in 2 cities, i'm netting 1200 gold and 6 science, instead of the 270 for the shopping mall. The server farm is also like this, costing 1k in maintenace, you would have to have a size 110 city to turn a profit, although you get the 6 great scientist points, which could be worth it..... I just think most of the industrial buildings need to be looked at for relevance and whether someone would ever even build it.

That's all for now.

 

[Bringa]

All the strings seem to be missing from the file linked in the first post. I see TXT_KEY_WHATEVER all over the place. Makes it very hard to play. Is it supposed to be that way or did something go wrong in my install?

 

[Spatzimaus]

I think i remember reading somewhere that you could not use a negative happiness value only positive ones, whether that is true or not i don't know, maybe was part of a weird dream

I know this was a few days ago, but I did an ego search and spotted this question, so figured I'd answer it since I appear to be the resident expert on this particular limitation.

You can't give a negative Happiness value to Buildings. Or more specifically, you can give it, but it won't do anything. The only Happiness generators that appear to allow negative values are the Policy subtables, either the basic flat Happiness change or the building-specific change (i.e., the one used to give +1 Happiness per University). That later table is the one I leveraged within my own mod, to create five buildings with negative Happiness values. There are, however, quite a few issues:
1> You need to create a custom policy that will be given to every player.
2> Giving that policy to every player requires a start-of-game Lua event. This is very easy to code; before the last patch this event didn't work, but it's been fixed now.
3> Giving that policy to every player counts as having taken 1 policy for cost purposes, which means that policy costs will be thrown off drastically. I've already worked out what changes you'd need to make to the parameters to get something that approximates the vanilla game's curve. (In my own mod, however, I don't WANT the vanilla game's curve, so don't go by the numbers I have there.) I'll check when I get home, but the core game is 25/3/2.01 for the three policy cost parameters (which translates to 25 + (3*N)^2.01), and I believe it needs to be changed to 16/2/2.21.
4> If you place this new policy in an existing Branch, then the AI breaks horribly, because the AI has an override that forces it to finish any branch it's already started. So if you stuck it in Tradition, then every AI would see finishing Tradition as being his top priority.
5> If you place this new policy in a new branch that has no other policies (to where taking this policy completes the branch), then that'll count as 1 completed branch for the purposes of a cultural victory. This can be adjusted for by increasing the number needed to 6, but you'd want to change the display algorithm in SocialPolicyPopup.lua that shows how close you are to a cultural win, as well as the one in the Victory Progress screen, so that instead of X/5 it shows (X-1)/6.
Alternatively, you can add a second policy to that 11th branch, something that the player can't EVER normally take (have it require Future Tech or something), so that he can't ever complete that branch. No need to update the display algorithms then. (This is basically the path I took; my 11th branch is impossible to complete because of how it's structured, since each of the 10 other policies in it requires completing an entire branch.) Note that if the AI ever becomes eligible to take that second policy, it'll do so regardless of what Flavor values you give it; even with three -999s, I was seeing AIs still try to take it over anything else, and it was causing some AIs to get stuck and never take any policies.
6> You'd need to edit SocialPolicyPopup.lua anyway, because it'll break on that 11th branch otherwise. There are three or four IF checks to adjust.
7> The AI, by default, won't have more than 2 incomplete policy branches at any time. If you add more policies to the 11th branch to keep it from completing then you'll need to up this to 3, because the extra branch will always stay open.
8> You'll also need to edit InfoTooltipInclude.lua (I think that's the name, I'm at work right now), which creates the little help text popup when you mouse over a building or unit, to allow for negative values. By default it'll say "(happy face)+-X", so I just added a simple IF check to switch it to "(angry face)+X" if the value is negative. This kind of change is just a good idea in general, though, so I'd recommend doing it regardless.
9> Note: this unhappiness is inherently Unmodded. That is, it won't affect the population cap applied to Happiness from the Colosseum, Theater, etc.; if you've got a size-10 city and have +12 from happiness buildings and -2 from a negative-happiness building using this method, you'll be at +8 and not +10, because the +12 will get capped down to +10 and then the -2 will be applied.
10> The AI was still occasionally getting stuck and never picking a new policy, so I added an extra bit of Lua code where if an AI has more than twice the culture needed to take a new policy, it forces a random selection from the policies currently available.

On the bright side, once you've done this, you now have a hidden policy that every player has. This can be used to modify all sorts of other variables, like the unhappiness per population, in ways that require fewer updates to other tables. And the addition of an 11th branch opens up all sorts of possibilities; in my mod, for instance, I added ten "Super-Finisher" policies that only unlock when you take the Finisher for a branch. They're very strong policies, but they don't count towards a cultural win.

 

[FiresForever]

Are you using any other mods? you can also try deleting all mods in your mod folder apart from the procylons call to power mod

Documents/My Games/Sid Meier's Civilization 5/MODS

 

[FiresForever]

I know this was a few days ago, but I did an ego search and spotted this question, so figured I'd answer it since I appear to be the resident expert on this particular limitation.

You can't give a negative Happiness value to Buildings. Or more specifically, you can give it, but it won't do anything. The only Happiness generators that appear to allow negative values are the Policy subtables, either the basic flat Happiness change or the building-specific change (i.e., the one used to give +1 Happiness per University). That later table is the one I leveraged within my own mod, to create five buildings with negative Happiness values. There are, however, quite a few issues:
1> You need to create a custom policy that will be given to every player.
2> Giving that policy to every player requires a start-of-game Lua event. This is very easy to code; before the last patch this event didn't work, but it's been fixed now.
3> Giving that policy to every player counts as having taken 1 policy for cost purposes, which means that policy costs will be thrown off drastically. I've already worked out what changes you'd need to make to the parameters to get something that approximates the vanilla game's curve. (In my own mod, however, I don't WANT the vanilla game's curve, so don't go by the numbers I have there.) I'll check when I get home, but the core game is 25/3/2.01 for the three policy cost parameters (which translates to 25 + (3*N)^2.01), and I believe it needs to be changed to 16/2/2.21.
4> If you place this new policy in an existing Branch, then the AI breaks horribly, because the AI has an override that forces it to finish any branch it's already started. So if you stuck it in Tradition, then every AI would see finishing Tradition as being his top priority.
5> If you place this new policy in a new branch that has no other policies (to where taking this policy completes the branch), then that'll count as 1 completed branch for the purposes of a cultural victory. This can be adjusted for by increasing the number needed to 6, but you'd want to change the display algorithm in SocialPolicyPopup.lua that shows how close you are to a cultural win, as well as the one in the Victory Progress screen, so that instead of X/5 it shows (X-1)/6.
Alternatively, you can add a second policy to that 11th branch, something that the player can't EVER normally take (have it require Future Tech or something), so that he can't ever complete that branch. No need to update the display algorithms then. (This is basically the path I took; my 11th branch is impossible to complete because of how it's structured, since each of the 10 other policies in it requires completing an entire branch.) Note that if the AI ever becomes eligible to take that second policy, it'll do so regardless of what Flavor values you give it; even with three -999s, I was seeing AIs still try to take it over anything else, and it was causing some AIs to get stuck and never take any policies.
6> You'd need to edit SocialPolicyPopup.lua anyway, because it'll break on that 11th branch otherwise. There are three or four IF checks to adjust.
7> The AI, by default, won't have more than 2 incomplete policy branches at any time. If you add more policies to the 11th branch to keep it from completing then you'll need to up this to 3, because the extra branch will always stay open.
8> You'll also need to edit InfoTooltipInclude.lua (I think that's the name, I'm at work right now), which creates the little help text popup when you mouse over a building or unit, to allow for negative values. By default it'll say "(happy face)+-X", so I just added a simple IF check to switch it to "(angry face)+X" if the value is negative. This kind of change is just a good idea in general, though, so I'd recommend doing it regardless.
9> Note: this unhappiness is inherently Unmodded. That is, it won't affect the population cap applied to Happiness from the Colosseum, Theater, etc.; if you've got a size-10 city and have +12 from happiness buildings and -2 from a negative-happiness building using this method, you'll be at +8 and not +10, because the +12 will get capped down to +10 and then the -2 will be applied.
10> The AI was still occasionally getting stuck and never picking a new policy, so I added an extra bit of Lua code where if an AI has more than twice the culture needed to take a new policy, it forces a random selection from the policies currently available.

On the bright side, once you've done this, you now have a hidden policy that every player has. This can be used to modify all sorts of other variables, like the unhappiness per population, in ways that require fewer updates to other tables. And the addition of an 11th branch opens up all sorts of possibilities; in my mod, for instance, I added ten "Super-Finisher" policies that only unlock when you take the Finisher for a branch. They're very strong policies, but they don't count towards a cultural win.

That is really interesting and as you say this does open up a lot of possibilities and actually helps with some stuff i have put on hold, i would heap loads of praise on you for this but you already know how great you are so

 

[roman_architect]

@Firesforever - regarding not being able to play a map that was build in worldbuilder, I loaded and played one of those world maps with the real starting locations as a scenario. Not sure if that is similar to what you are trying to do, but that loaded fine with CTP.

 

[FiresForever]

@Firesforever - regarding not being able to play a map that was build in worldbuilder, I loaded and played one of those world maps with the real starting locations as a scenario. Not sure if that is similar to what you are trying to do, but that loaded fine with CTP.

Any chance you could give me the name of the TSL map you got to load, and where to get it (ingame browser or link)

I have been using Dales TSL for testing and loading as follows:
Activate mods then, Single player, setup game, map type: TSL Earth, then tick load scenario, then start scenario

 

[chrome-rome]

@unholycowgod: Welcome to the forums!! Yeah, I thought about playing CTP II to get a feel for the game, but the graphics are so outdated. I couldn't bring myself to play it.

@roman_architect (like the name ): Thank you soo much for the feedback!!! I haven't digested it all yet, but I will respond to your post in detail when I do. I can tell you put some time into that post, and for that I thank you.

@Spatz and Fires: Thanks for being awesome.

 

[Horem]

Maube it could be like this?! The crashing. http://forums.civfanatics.com/showth...1#post10638311

Thank you for this, I am now testing this theory with Version 3. If I get too turn 220 with a scout on manual explore and no crash then I'll post an updated version with this change and some other minor tweaks

Spoiler :

- Speeded Up Growth by 25%.
- Added 1 Science to the Library, 2 Science to the Public School and 2 Science to the Paper Maker.
- Reduced Techs from Medieval too Nano Eras slightly(around 7.5%).
- Public School now gives 1 science per 3 population.
- Paper Maker now gives 1 science per 3 population.
- Added +5 Production to Desert and +5 Food to Tundra

.

 

[knatte_Anka]

All the strings seem to be missing from the file linked in the first post. I see TXT_KEY_WHATEVER all over the place. Makes it very hard to play. Is it supposed to be that way or did something go wrong in my install?

what language does you use? English or other because the mod only exist for English

 

[Horem]

New Version of Epic Speed for CCTP is available. You can find it here.

 

[chrome-rome]

Long reply to roman_architect follows. And I do mean long.

Spoiler :

I just finished 60 hours of testing and here are the results. It is now the year 2015 so it is a good stopping point to compare vs RL timeline. I'm playing on emperor and at this point I'm number 1 in every demographic. Played on a huge world with 22 Civs. I own about 20% of the land in the world. Income is 30K per turn with 1370 science. Usually range between 60 and 130 happiness depending on different factors. Through the game I get social policies about every 11 or 12 turns, which seems balanced and well paced.


First of all a few comments on my playing style. I play with an emphasis on technology and economy, with expansion when it makes sense.

Game Pace:
I think the techs in the early game need to be slightly more expensive. I was an "age" ahead through most of the game compared to RL timelines. I hit industrial in 1600, modern in 1850, and then it slowed way down. There are many techs for the industrial and modern age so I'm still working on some of them in 2015, but getting toward the end of the modern now. These dates are without rushing through.

So the reason why I sped things up was because several players mentioned that they couldn't reach the later eras. A lot of their games ended with them either in Industrial or early Modern. At least this way, players will get to experience *almost* every era.

Strategic Concepts:
Because of the enormous expense of modern units, military citystates are overpowered in the extreme. It cost me about 20k gold to become their allly and they pop out units worth 65k and up for a long time. Multiply that by all of the military citystates and acquiring a modern military becomes much easier and more affordable, but the AI will never compete with you enough on this point so it is an exploit. Not sure exactly the best way to fix, but perhaps drastically increasing the time needed to produce a unit? Anyhow, the return on investment for that strategy is too high.

I see your point. I wish there was a function for Military CS to change the unit spam depending on the era but there is not. I will drastically lower the spam for Friends and slightly lower it for Allies.

AI and Gold: For some reason I don't think the AI is spending enough of its gold. In the industrial some of the AI's had 2 million gold, which is a lot. Perhaps their increased production capacity made it so that they could produce all of the buildings and have all of their units upgraded, but I doubt it. It wasn't just one either, there were a few of them.

Yes, this is a major problem. It's like the AI doesn't understand that it can spend gold to rush-buy units and buildings. I don't know how to fix it, and vanilla AI is bugged with the same problem, so obviously they can't fix it either. I'm hoping once the DLL is released that there will be a few AI mods to make them "smarter."

Military and Diplomacy: Only one person declared war on me all game, yet I had a mediocre army most of the game so it wasn't intimidation. This is just a comment, not sure if it means anything. In modern I built up to become the leading military, but before then I was middle of the road. I even declared war and conquered 4 or 5 civs and still didn't piss off the world enough to gang up on me.

That's interesting; in my games I usually am declared on more than I declare. It could do with you AI opponents, but I think the main reason is your play-style. I love to take as much land as I can in the early game, and the AI are particularly unforgiving of a rapid expanding player, especially if you claim "their land."

Great People:
The relative strength of great people varies tremendously with time and space. Great scientists are overpowered with the ability to get a free tech. Here is an example, a great scientist just got social networking for me, which would have taken 24 turns to research, wow, what a great thing. The great merchant I just used for a trade route gave me less than 20K gold. That sucks because that is 2/3 of one turn worth of gold. So great merchants are basically useless. Great engineers are somewhere in between. In modern times they can finish about 1/3 of a wonder or something. Can we vary these with their age so they give different bonuses depending upon he time period? What this makes me do is manually control all specialists and only produce scientsts and engineers, period. The artists are good for getting land, but you only need that occasionally when you want to steal a resource. The amount of gold or culture you would get for making their great buildings is a joke too, that needs to upped considerably.

Yes, they are a bit lol OP. I saw a mod sometime ago that limits the techs that a GS can research. That may help the problem, but it will still be the strongest GP. I have tried to compensate for that by making the GP improvements much stronger, but even then, when the late-game hits, the only thing you will do with GS is pop a tech. If it's possible, I would like to see a function similar to that of the GE, in that the amount of science you are given is directly a result of the population of the city. This will require some extra coding (lua or c++), but it will restrict the GS from popping techs outside of cities.

Research Agreements:
I think these are overpowered also. They need to be more expensive and return less science. I basically keep investing my money in these constantly because the return is so high. I did build the wonder that increases the return by 50%, but still, the way the return goes is for about 1 or 2 turns of gold production, you get about 7-9 turns of science production. This seems like a very high return on investment. If we just fixed this it would slow down science considerably. At that point you may need to reduce the expense of the industrial and modern techs to keep the timeline in tact since there are so many of them.

Hmm, I never use the RA, favoring spending the gold buying buildings and such, but if it's this good I need to switch up my strategy. I will increase the amount needed for each era.

Unit Upgrades vs Purchase Cost:
In many instances it cost more to upgrade a unit than to purchase it outright from a city, which to me seems counter intuitive. For example, right now it cost about 300K to upgrade a bomber to a stealth bomber, but it only cost 150K to purchase it outright from my city. I ended up spending the extra money to upgrade a few because of their experience, but I still think this is backwards. The same thing with tanks, except to a lesser degree. It cost about the same to upgrade to a modern tank as to buy a new one outright. Also, aircraft carriers are not upgradeable to their larger counterpart, is that on purpose?

This is backwards. Have you only noticed this effect in the late Industrial-early Modern or throughout the game? There is a function that specifically deals with upgrades. I'll lower the value to make this more correct.

AI Armies:
The units that require buildings in order to produce them are extremely rare, this includes any and all air force, tanks, etc. I think the AI is getting confused and not producing the buildings. I think there is a mechanism to prioritize the importance of certain buildings, so the importance of the auto factory, and airplane factory need to be upped considerably. The entire time I have been fighting enemies I have only seen one plane, and have not fought against a single tank. I know they have the tech because most people are in the modern era right now. I haven't fought any of the big dogs but I will soon so I'll keep you posted if the major players have better militaries. Without some air protection, my aircraft carriers, bombers, and battleships are just torching their militaries. The other thing it does is reduce the importance of fighters. Currently my fighters have a minor role because they don't have to do any dog fighting... .all the killing is done by my bombers. The cost of some of the units is in my opinion too high. My best city produces a nuke in 50 turns on a standard game. That is just too much. It can pretty much build any 2 modern wonders before I can build a single nuke?

Noted, but I don't think I will be increasing the flavor of the unit producing buildings much, if at all. The unit buildings' combined flavor ratings is between 140-220; average buildings are ~65, and even the wonders are only around 90. I actually put a limit on the number that can be built so that the AI doesn't waste all of their oil. I just don't think the AI recognizes that some units can only be built through these buildings. I haven't been wanting to touch the unit flavors, as I think the AI does a pretty good job with them, but I may need to increase the flavors of the units that require buildings, so once the AI builds the building, it will begin assembling the unit.

Gold in general and upgrade costs:
I focused heavily on gold producing buildings and I still had a hard time keeping my military upgraded. I probably only bought 4 buildings the entire game because the cost to upgrade the military is so high. I spent every penny of my money on research agreements and upgrading military, with the lion share on military. I would guess about 80% upgrading military, 15% research agreements. Perhaps this is by design, but just wanted to share the ratios. I was able to slowly keep a modern military by spending every penny on it, but just barely.

Fixed by lowering upgrade cost.

Victories:
The egyptians in my game won a cultural victory in the year 2006. Is this about right? I think we need to change the victory criteria if you intend to have the game played into the digial era and beyond. This was about smack dab in the middle of the modern era for the top dogs.

Well, I'm at least glad that the AI *can* win games, even if they shouldn't this early. When I was first play-testing the mod, I always got frustrated in the later eras because everything seemed to point to a military victory. As things are currently, diplomacy is a joke, military is long but not impossible, science takes forever, and culture is unlikely.

In the early game, each of these victory conditions get equal play; there are techs centered around increasing culture, those for boosting military flexibility, etc. In vanilla civ, your desired victory condition can be changed all the way up to Industrial. Unfortunately, it's the same here. I want to push back that stage where you go all-in for your victory to at least late-Modern. Sure, there will be ways for you to have a leaning toward one condition or another, but the real game changers should be reserved for the really late game. In Spatz Alpha Centari thread, Spatz talks about how the game was designed to end by Modern Era, with all the absurd late game buildings (Broadcast Tower, Research Lab, Nukes). It is therefore very difficult for modders to extend the life of the game, especially since we have nothing to compare to.

As it stands, I really don't like the conditions available to us. The culture victory is actually counter-productive, as it encourages players to fill out a social tree while the game wants players to shift to new governments as they become available. This is broken. As I have mentioned in other post, there is a real need to separate culture from Governments. However, I don't know what to put in its place (maybe religion ). Science is almost impossible, as the player must go to the end of the tech tree. By that point, the player could just win off of any other victory condition. Diplomacy is just laughably bad. I really like attempts by the City-State Diplomacy Mod to make it more realistic, but even then it is kind of iffy. Conquest, while not necessarily easy, is the de facto victory for about 95% of my games.

There needs to be more options late-game that actually funnel players to a victory, rather than "bonus here, bonus there." This is why I want to remove many of the extra buildings D added. In my opinion, if I can't justify why it should be there, it shouldn't be there. In other words, the mod will be complete when there is nothing left to remove. This will create a more streamlined system, forcing players to consciously pick which condition they want to pursue by the Modern Era, instead of "Oops, I guess I won on Diplomacy ." I am optimistic that the new tech system Fires and I am setting up will fulfill this to some extent, but there will still probably be some shortcomings that we must account for.

Most of this post was about things that were not quite right with the mod, but it would take me days to post everything that is right with this mod. It was an absolute pleasure to play and most of it is fairly well balanced and challenging. I spent a lot of time playing if you have any other questions about my experience, please ask. Thanks so much for your work on this and if I think of some more things I'll keep in touch. Can't wait for the next release. Thanks a bunch.

You are welcome. And thank you; I had to spend more time thinking about the mod and the direction it needs to go by answering your questions than I have for a loong time. And for the second post, I am still working on the balance for Modern Era. One challenge is making the building bonuses comparable to the amount of time it takes to build (like a Nuclear Plant taking X amount of turns to pay off the amount of production invested into it) while also preventing the bonuses from being too excessive (+5,000 production ). It's a doosy, which is why this era is taking so long.

On a happier note, artistically things are progressing again. A big thanks goes out to leeuw01 and nathanglevy for their work on the Social Policies. Nathan has been doctoring up the photos that leeuw01 assembled, and leeuw01 has been gathering icons for the actual policies themselves. So, no more for every policy icon. I've attached two of my favorites down below so you can see what we have to look forward to. The first is the art for Imperialism. The second pair are the icons for Globalization and Empire. Thanks guys!!!!

 

[roman_architect]

@ FiresForever
I don't know how to do an in game link, but the map i'm using is called RealNameEarth v.17 and a "custom scenario" button pops up, i click on that and the "load scenario" button is checked for the map. Then i start it up and boom, we are in business. The only problem is that there is only 1 of each resource, so if you are trying to make a map that matches this mod then i'm totally jazzed!!! Let me know if I can help further.

 

[roman_architect]

@ chrome-rome thanks for the well thought out response, i agree with your direction

 

[Nuukov]

On a happier note, artistically things are progressing again. A big thanks goes out to leeuw01 and nathanglevy for their work on the Social Policies. Nathan has been doctoring up the photos that leeuw01 assembled, and leeuw01 has been gathering icons for the actual policies themselves. So, no more for every policy icon. I've attached two of my favorites down below so you can see what we have to look forward to. The first is the art for Imperialism. The second pair are the icons for Globalization and Empire. Thanks guys!!!!

EPIC!!! I love that one for Imperialism! Well done Leeuw!
I look forward to seeing it all implemented, and then, the updates to governments, ideas submitted by yours truely
But yes good job to everyone.

I love it when a plan coms together

 

[FiresForever]

@ FiresForever
I don't know how to do an in game link, but the map i'm using is called RealNameEarth v.17 and a "custom scenario" button pops up, i click on that and the "load scenario" button is checked for the map. Then i start it up and boom, we are in business. The only problem is that there is only 1 of each resource, so if you are trying to make a map that matches this mod then i'm totally jazzed!!! Let me know if I can help further.

Wow that is one crazy, in a good way, map mod. It is not built in worldbuilder, seems the author has actually created it all in lua , in doing so it bypasses the worldbuilder load system and instead uses its own system for generating the map. This method is probably gonna be the only way of getting a TSL earth map into CTP. I will do some messing around to see if i can get it to point to our resource generator.


Great find

 

[Pouakai]

Hey Fires, what is the progress on that Planetary mod you were making to be for PCTP?