Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

[Spatzimaus]

You write so long posts

Insomnia. Woke up at 5 am after ~3 hours of sleep, can't get back to sleep, and I can't exactly do much else at this hour.

Did I mention I was playing india? Despite only owning 1 luxury resource, it seemed quite impossible for me to run out of happiness

Well, India's big advantage is that it's tuned for a smaller number of huge cities. Given how Happiness is distributed in this mod, I can see how you'd have plenty, at least right up until the point where you start trying to expand your empire through conquest.

Hey, one question: What happens to Spaceship victory in the mod? I *think* I disabled it ... will it prevent me from going to the centaur and bring back the cuddly killer-worms?

Yes, it will. I've been trying to override that, and FORCE the player to leave the space victory on. But for now, you have to leave it on or else you'll have a major problem where no one can launch a spaceship and so the techs that depend on Centauri Ecology will stay locked forever. Because of how the tech tree is laid out, this means that you'll stall out at (I think) Super-Tensile Solids where you have nothing left to research.

If you have a game currently in progress, there are a couple Lua commands you can enter into FireTuner to turn the victory on once the game has started. I think this should work:

PreGame.SetVictory(GameInfoTypes.VICTORY_SPACE_RACE, true)

But as I said, I'm trying to edit AdvancedSetup.lua to have it force you to leave that on while using this mod. You'll notice that it no longer lists the Transcendence victory in the startup screen, because I've done this for that already (forcing it to be on), but the Spaceship victory's a little harder because it'll import the initial setting for that one from the map script.

Mechanically, what happens is this: the Spaceship victory is still in the game, but its <WinsGame> flag has been switched to False. Without that Victory declaration, I'd have no way to have the game handle the components correctly or show the launch graphic, so I can't remove it entirely. Also, removing the victory would remove it from the Victory Progress UI, which is just a really handy bit of info to have when racing for the spaceship.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Okay, I've been thinking. Dangerous, I know, but it happens.

Having the player take 6 policy branches is just bad. There are too many mutually exclusive branches, to where you can't have more than 7, so I should keep it at 5. And that means making policies more expensive, so that it takes you longer to get 30 than it used to. Sure, there are a couple wonders that give a free Policy (and the spaceship launch), but for the most part you just have to generate culture. Since the Utopia Project requires an explicit tech, I'm not worried about someone rushing to a culture win in the early eras. What I'd really like is for someone going for a Culture win to be remotely able to get their 30 during the Digital Era, and then use any later policy picks to grab my SuperFinishers; this creates a sort of buffer, where you could afford to detour a bit along the way to get useful abilities and still be able to win a Culture win.

On the bright side, I've already been making many policies more powerful. Not just the SuperFinishers, but several of the existing policies along the way that I felt had horribly underpowered effects (like Free Speech). So they're worth a bit more than they used to be; you'll probably get more benefit out of 30 policies than you would 36 under the old system. I just didn't want to force people to take Honor AND Patronage AND Commerce.

 

[dinobot386]

I personally dont like that to be honest

I get the whole 5 policies thing after what you said, but its nothing the tech requirement wont solve

 

[Spatzimaus]

I get the whole 5 policies thing after what you said, but its nothing the tech requirement wont solve

Not sure if you're referring to the tech requirements for my custom policies, or the tech requirement for the Utopia. I'm assuming the Utopia, in which case no, it doesn't really solve it. It forces an endpoint, but you still have to be capable of getting the right number of policies by that point, and that implies a certain cost structure for the Culture equations. If you need 6 branches, then that means taking 36 policies in the time it previously took to get 30. (Plus any of my super-finisher policies, which no longer count towards the total.) Sure, it can be off a little in either direction, but not by TOO much.

The biggest problem, though, is that the lower culture cost structure means you're getting policies 20% more often, and that brings into imbalance their EFFECTS. Policies, in general, are stronger than they were pre-patch, so if you're now getting them even MORE often, then Policy effects really start to dominate the game, especially in terms of Happiness. And remember, the difference between requiring 6 branches policies for a victory instead of 5 only kicks in if you're going for a Cultural victory in the first place; for the rest of the people, those who'll get 15-20 policies in the course of a normal game, changing the cost structures to give them 20% more policies than before is a bad thing.

I just played through a couple games, one each way (i.e., one requiring 6 branches and a reduced cost per policy, and one requiring 5 with higher costs), and I have to say that requiring a sixth policy branch makes a HUGE difference, and not in a good way. The balance was just WAY off. So if I was going to go with the 6-branch structure, I'd really need to lower a lot of Policy effects, instead of boosting them. I'm still open to tweaking the numbers, but the next version (which I'll probably post this weekend) will use the 5-branch setup.

Anecdotal note: I just finished a test game with the 5-branch method and my new cost structure. I won a Cultural win at the start of the Nanotech Era with 31 policies (the 30 needed for the win, plus Planned Society), so the pacing was pretty much perfect. One notable thing about that game was that I didn't have a single war the entire game, due to the geography and resource distribution, so I was basically in a dead heat with two other civs for all of the late-game Wonders, and I only got about half of them.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Okay, I've run into a couple snags. First up, Professional Army. (Honor tree, third tier) Vanilla: "-33% to unit upgrade costs, +1 happiness per Walls, Castle, Arsenal, or Military Base"

It's incredibly powerful; four +1 happiness boosts, for buildings that any city can build and that have no maintenance costs, would be incredibly strong by itself, but paired with the upgrade cost reduction it's just insane. Add this to the previous policy in the Honor tree (which gave +1 Happy and +2 culture per garrison unit) and Honor becomes THE best Happiness-generating branch, at 5 per city.
(Side note: Honor got a HUGE boost in my mod, because of its base policy's post-patch "culture per barbarian kill" bonus. Take a wild guess what the post-Breakout Psi units count as... killing an Isle of the Deep gives a whopping 80 culture per kill! I'm working on fixing the amounts.)

So as a first pass, I'd changed it to where each of those four buildings still added +1 Happy but also subtracted 1 Gold. There are just two problems:
1> It would still be way too good. Even if there was no upgrade cost reduction, +4 happy for -4 gold, in every city, would be extremely strong.
2> It didn't actually work. It looks like, as with negative happiness, buildings can't actually have negative yields in certain tables.

Now I'm trying to figure out what to do with it. I'm trying to see if negative values work for any other tables, like if instead of -1 Gold, I instead change it to -5% Gold. But if that doesn't work, I need some other option.

Possibilities I've thought of:
1> Remove half of the buildings mentioned. So +1 Happy for a Castle or Military Base, for instance. Two buildings and that -33% is still strong, but manageably so.
2> Remove the -33% upgrade cost, moving it to the Finisher or something. It'd still make the Honor tree too Happiness-heavy, so I don't like this option.
3> Add gold maintenance costs to the defensive buildings, so that there's a reason not to build them. Right now, if you have a turn or two to spare, putting a Walls or Castle on a late-game city is a no-brainer. Since the Arsenal still adds +5XP for land units in my mod, and the Military Base reduces nuke damage by 20% in my mod, it's easy to justify adding a maintenance cost for those at the very least.
4> Totally rework the policy from scratch. "Professional Army", to me, doesn't sound like a massive Happiness increase. It sounds like "make all of my units stronger", possibly by giving all of them a custom promotion like the Elite promotion I give with the Military Academy. Or possibly do something like "+1 culture per Armory, Military Academy, or Arsenal".

Any other ideas?

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But the big balance issue I've been dealing with: Gold. Ever since the patch, gold has just been far too plentiful; this has obvious consequences on game balance, with buying RAs nonstop, bribing city-states; it's very unbalanced. I've looked into various changes, but it appears that at least part of the problem exists outside of my mod. So I'm considering a fairly radical change:

Currently, the Market, Bank, Stock Exchange, and Energy Bank each add +25% to your Gold. (That's 25% in my mod; several of those are higher in the core game.)
The Fusion Lab and Quantum lab add +20%, and the Stadium, Broadcast Tower, and Research Lab each add an extra +10%. Those first four also have other benefits; the +Gold of the Market and Bank when certain resources are local, or the strategic resources of the later two.

What I'm looking at doing is lowering the Market, Bank, Stock Exchange, and Energy Bank to +20%.
Then, changing the Wealth policy (one of my future-era SuperFinishers, in the Commerce branch) to add +5% to a city's Gold when any of those four are present, returning them to their original values. (Sort of like what happened with the University in the Rationalism tree, where its +50% was changed to +33% with a policy that adds +17%.)
I'd possibly lower the Fusion and Quantum lab by 5% as well and have Wealth boost those too, but I'm still examining the balance for those. And I'm looking at reducing the +10%s to +5%, but part of the reason they're high right now is because those buildings have hefty maintenance costs. (A Stadium costs 5 gold per turn, so adding +10% won't even offset its own cost until your city is absolutely HUGE. What it does, though, is offset enough of the cost that a large city should find a Stadium a more cost-effective source of Happiness than the other options.)

So, can anyone think of any other ways to reduce across-the-board Gold production? I've tried adjusting building maintenance costs, improvement yields, specialist yields, et cetera, and nothing seems to work well.
Now, part of the problem is my own doing, with Wall Street (+50% gold in this city) and especially Hollywood (+1 gold per Artist in all cities) boosting gold output. So I'll look into tweaking those, but there's not a whole lot I can do without scrapping the concept. (Especially the Artist boost for Hollywood; you can't do +1 gold per 2 Artists or anything.)
I might reduce the +50% for my four national wonders to +25%; given their specialist-boosting benefits and such they'd still be worth building, but wouldn't be quite so overpowering.

 

[markusbeutel]

For the gold problem, you could perhaps add extra unit maintenance or add a (-1) gold cost to unemployed citizens - perhaps in place of the (+1) production to signify their unemployment, or just in addition to it.

This could put more of a premium on specialist buildings, (which in turn could have their maintenance raised accordingly), and put a bit of a damper on late game production.

 

[Spatzimaus]

For the gold problem, you could perhaps add extra unit maintenance

I don't think you can. I've been trying to tweak the unit maintenance equation for a long time, but too much of it seems to be buried inside the engine. It's far too low right now, compared to the building maintenance costs, and I'd like to increase it a bit. (Ideally I'd do so, and then remove the unit maintenance from Workers.)

If anyone knows a way to tweak these costs without any sort of hard-set Lua subtraction, then I'd love to know.

or add a (-1) gold cost to unemployed citizens

Given how few tables allow for negative values (including the policy yield thing I mentioned above), I'd be surprised if this worked. Regardless, by the later eras you just won't have unemployed Citizens, because of how many specialist slots most buildings have. Now, maybe that's the simpler solution: reduce the number of Specialist slots in many of the buildings. For instance, if I made it so that no building ever had more than 1 slot, then that'd mean fewer Merchants and such generating gold. I've noticed that I almost always seem to get Great Merchants first, and part of that just seems to be a prevalence of Merchant slots.
So I'll look into that later tonight.

This might be a good idea, anyway; you'll notice that in the vanilla game there are a lot of buildings with no specialist slots, but in my mod, the majority have at least 1 slot. I wanted to ensure that large cities could continue to use population for useful jobs even after all good local tiles were used, but it might have gone too far.

This could put more of a premium on specialist buildings, (which in turn could have their maintenance raised accordingly), and put a bit of a damper on late game production.

I've tried increasing building maintenance costs, but I think I'm pretty close to the limit for that. Any higher, and you start to cripple the AI, since it won't take those costs into account when deciding whether to build a building. Also, I don't really want 80%+ of the gold you spend to go to building maintenance, which is already what we're approaching; it'd be nice if other factors (road maintenance, unit maintenance) remained significant.

Actually, it'd be nice if there were some other costs beyond those. I noticed that there's a stub for Improvements to have a gold maintenance cost, so if we could add that sort of things to a few more areas of the game, it might really help.

 

[Kemystul]

Actually, it'd be nice if there were some other costs beyond those. I noticed that there's a stub for Improvements to have a gold maintenance cost, so if we could add that sort of things to a few more areas of the game, it might really help.

It'd make a good deal of sense, but do you think the stub applies to all improvements or individual types. If it applies to all, it'll just be a matter of balancing a single number, which might get a bit annoying over the course of an entire game. But if you can adjust them separately, it'd allow you to set high ones for important rare stuff (quarries, wells, oil platforms?, maybe mines if you need more) and low or non-existent ones for things like farms or trading posts (it'd be annoying to have to pay maintenance on a improvement that's only job would be to increase gold).

 

[Spatzimaus]

It'd make a good deal of sense, but do you think the stub applies to all improvements or individual types

It's by type. So you could set all Offshore Platforms to cost 1 gold per turn, for instance.
The problem is that Offshores are really the only improvement type that doesn't unlock in the Ancient Era. Adding even a tiny maintenance cost to any other improvement would really hurt the early game, so it's really not worth changing I think. I'd thought of adding a maintenance cost to the Great Person-made improvements, but those are so rare to begin with.

My point was just that if we could get money sinks like that in areas where there weren't any before, it'd be a good thing. It'd be nice if some policies, like Professional Army, cost money.

 

[Spatzimaus]

I finally found the explanation for the unit maintenance cost derivation, so I think I've found a way to fix the economic problems:

1> Boost the rate at which maintenance costs increase. The equation is
(0.5 + 8/1000*t) * (N/2)^(1 + (2/1000)*(t/7)).
I increased the 7 to a 10 because of the slowed pace of my mod, but I've also bumped the 8 up to a 16.
So on Turn 1 the costs would be the same as before, but on turn 500 you'll be at 8.5*X instead of 4.5*X (but with a lower exponent, so it won't be quite so bad.)

2> The base Worker no longer costs unit maintenance. The Combat Engineer and all worker units beyond that will still cost the full amount.

See, in my current test game, in the Fusion Era I'm earning 400 gpt outside of a golden age. That's:
+900 gold from cities
+300 gold from trade routes
-650 gold from buildings
-50 gold from roads
-100 gold from unit maintenance (on turn 650!)

This was a peaceful game, where I never expanded beyond my own continent, but I've still got the biggest army in the world and yet my costs are only 100 gpt? That needs to be at least doubled.
(I've also changed a few other things since I started this game, so that +900 for cities is dropping to ~800ish.) While that'd still leave me with a profit of 200gpt, I DID get most of the Digital Era economic Wonders, so it's reasonable.

Thoughts?

EDIT: Forgot to add the third one:
3> Titans now cost extra gold per turn. Most Titans cost an additional 5 gpt; the Subspace Generator and Gravship, each of which you can only have one of, cost TEN gpt extra. Also, the "half-Titan" Gravtank and Orbital Death Ray cost an additional 2 gpt.
This obviously isn't going to drastically change the economy, since it's pretty much limited to the late Fusion and Nanotech eras, but I figured, why not?

-------------------------------------------
I've made a bunch of changes in the past couple days, and I want to test them a bit more, but there's a good chance 1.03 will be ready tonight or tomorrow morning. The real balance concern I'm going to have is Happiness; with some of the changes I've made to Policies (like nerfing Professional Army to only add Happiness to the Castle and Military Base, NOT the Walls or Arsenal), I'm worried that there might not be enough total Happiness available any more. So I'm going to need feedback.

 

[dinobot386]

The unit maintnece seems good, ive had some very unbalenced games where im getting around 100 gpt by the industrial era (before stock market), what I often do is plop down cities and just spam gold buildings and trade posts while ignoring expensive buildings or ones of no use in the city, this is all after ive grabed all the national wonders and the policies I wanted

I was wondering, are you planning on making a way for cities to have buildings in them when you settle them after later techs if you started on ancient? Like the later era starts, it gets old having to bulid graneries and monuments in the fusion era, also keeps players from exploiting the gold system like ive been doing


Also: Happiness is not that big of an issue, I can usually keep it from 15-25, except on conquest sprees or gold farming, theocracy not adding 25% less unhappiness has really changed the happiness to being more reasonable than when I was getting 60+

 

[dezuman]

No new version yet? Slowpoke :b

Neat with the increased unit maintenance, now you can actually get a significant advantage from having a minimal army! (I'm a pacifist )
But ahem ... Will the AI adjust for it? I'm thinking of that guy with one city and 20+ units running around in classic era

Edit: Do you have some kind of future-era roads? Like ... MagLev tube? High maintenance/tile, but increase both production and gold output of cities. Big enough a gold modifier to offset their high cost, but watch out for pillagers!
(That is, cutting of someones tubes will cripple both their economy AND production)
Edit2: Unless it's already in the mod and I'm an idiot, like last time

 

[Spatzimaus]

I was wondering, are you planning on making a way for cities to have buildings in them when you settle them after later techs if you started on ancient? Like the later era starts, it gets old having to bulid graneries and monuments in the fusion era, also keeps players from exploiting the gold system like ive been doing

Wasn't planning on that. While I see the basic point you're making, I think this would have all sorts of potential issues. Policies that reduce the costs of certain building types and/or give you free ones, that sort of thing.
Also, the FreeStartEra settings for buildings are set pretty conservatively, because of the underlying mechanism; you'll have a relatively small number of cities, and most of the buildings' FreeStartEra values come LONG after a normal person would have built them... but not all. Using this variable to spawn buildings in in-progress games in later eras might be very unbalanced for certain types.

Also: Happiness is not that big of an issue, I can usually keep it from 15-25

15-25 on v.1.02, sure, no problem. It's about the same for me.
Doing the same in v.1.03, maybe not so easy. There's quite a bit less Happiness from certain Policies, while more for others (but generally only in the future eras).

No new version yet?

When it's ready!!! I'd said "tonight or tomorrow morning, most likely", and I meant it.

Spatz's Rule #1: after making a major change, I WILL play at least a partial game to actually make sure it works. I did quite a bit to the mod this afternoon, and started a game this evening. There's a good chance it'll be ready to go Sunday afternoon-ish, but no guarantees.
Spatz's Rule #2: Real Life occasionally interferes. I spent eight hours at work today, despite it being a Saturday, and I'll have to go in for part of the day tomorrow.

This next version is a very extensive one, not exactly trivial to double-check. You'll see.

Neat with the increased unit maintenance, now you can actually get a significant advantage from having a minimal army! (I'm a pacifist )

Not just "minimal". Note that there are quite a few policies now dealing with garrison units; it's actually a good idea to have at least one combat unit per city, even if you have no intention of warring, and four different policies reduce unit maintenance costs in some way. So you can still have a good-sized army; it's just going to have a non-negligible cost.

But ahem ... Will the AI adjust for it? I'm thinking of that guy with one city and 20+ units running around in classic era

Hard to say. In my test game, that's almost exactly what just happened; Rome has a disturbingly large military, and they seem to be running VERY negative on cash. I'm barely above zero, and that's with the Colossus and such. But it's not really a unit issue for me; my unit maintenance is 11 gpt, my building maintenance is 14, and my road maintenance is 13.

The thing is, the unit maintenance equation I used shouldn't be drastically different in the Classical era. It's a function of how the exponent works. The real question is why the AI would be willing to make so many combat units in the first place. I may end up shifting the numbers back down a bit, but not too far.

Edit: Do you have some kind of future-era roads? Like ... MagLev tube? High maintenance/tile, but increase both production and gold output of cities.

See the Monopole Magnets tech (late Fusion Era). That's where it gives a movement bonus to Railroads. In SMAC there were "magtubes" as their version of railroads, and I'd originally wanted to do almost exactly what you'd said at that tech: add a new Route type with infinite movement, 4 gold per hex per turn, adds both production and gold. There were just two problems:
1> Artwork. We have no ability to have custom terrain graphics yet.
2> Without the DLL we have no way to alter the "railroad bonus" type of thing. No way to do that gold increase.
So instead, I just boosted railroads.

 

[dezuman]

Funny how I managed to suggest 2 things in row that was already implemented/intended

Wasn't really b!tching about release, I know stuff take the time it takes. I've just noticed it's the no.1 way to tease a mod dev
(Edit: B!tch is censored? )

Kay, think I'll stop wasting valuable board space now. Don't fear, I'll be back with more failed suggestions after next version for sure

 

[dinobot386]

That's funny, I was just thinking about the magtubes being added after reading the monopole magnets description

You said you were going to make policies more expensive and make the weak ones better? I was wondering if you could do something about free speech, because the current policy is, well... stupid. What does 8 free units have to do with free speech? It also seems to have nothing to do with the playstyle that picks freedom.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Funny how I managed to suggest 2 things in row that was already implemented/intended

Eh, it happens. I mean, I can remember nearly every tiny detail of my mod, but that's because I wrote the thing on and off over the course of about 6 years. (It was originally a pre-BTS Civ4 mod that I never released.) I don't expect anyone else to do the same.

And the magtubes thing is one of the bits of my earlier design that I REALLY didn't want to give up. If the two issues I mentioned above hadn't interfered then I absolutely would have had it, because of the "Rule of 50%" in this mod. Whatever there are two of in the core game, I add a third. Pretty much the entire mod is 50% longer than the core game; 50% more eras, 50% more strategic resources, 50% more votes needed to win, 50% more specialist slots by the end of the game, and so on. So adding a third route type would have fit perfectly; the only thing is, I don't think I could have waited until the late Fusion era to introduce something like that, so I'd probably add Magtubes at, say, Doctrine:Initiative and then have the Monopole Magnets tech boost Railroad AND Magtube movement.

Once the art modification works and/or we get DLL access, then magtubes are high on my list of things I'll add in. In the meantime, though, it just has to stay a simple railroad boost. Granted, it's a pretty huge boost; railroad movement basically doubles as a result of it (it's not quite linear).

I've just noticed it's the no.1 way to tease a mod dev

Yeah, teasing might not be the best choice. Thanks to some fun medical problems I haven't really slept more than 3 hours per night in over a month, so if I come off a bit harsh...

I'm playing a test game to make sure everything works, and the game's crashing quite a bit more than before, nearly always when I try ordering a unit to move far and update a lot of hidden terrain in the process. Two of them were hard crashes, forcing a reboot; granted, both of those were when I've got the game AND two ModBuddy windows (one per mod) AND FireTuner AND an Internet radio station AND this board AND Microsoft Word (for the patch notes) AND GIMP. Okay, so I'm probably asking for it at that point.

You said you were going to make policies more expensive and make the weak ones better? I was wondering if you could do something about free speech, because the current policy is, well... stupid. What does 8 free units have to do with free speech? It also seems to have nothing to do with the playstyle that picks freedom.

In v.1.03, Free Speech has been changed to add +1 culture to Theaters, Universities, and Observatories, in addition to the 8 free units. And yes, I agree that it's a stupid benefit to give that particular policy; a LOT of the new policy effects seem to have just been thrown at whatever policy was available regardless of the actual effect. I mean seriously, Planned Economy boosting research when Factories are present?
I've left the 8 free units there for now, but I'm looking at moving it down a notch to Constitution once I find another good effect to add.

There are still a couple changes I want to make with policies post-1.03:
> I'd returned Constitution to the vanilla game's "+2 culture per Wonder", but I want to move that effect back over to the Piety branch somewhere, and what I really want for the Freedom branch is a "+1 culture per Specialist" effect. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like I can do that.
> In the Patronage branch are two policies:
Cultural Diplomacy (old, third tier): x2 quantities of strategic resources from city-states, +50% Happiness for luxury resources from city-states
Free Market (my new superfinisher): x2 Influence from quests, 20% less Happiness needed to start a Golden Age.
Just given the names, what I REALLY want to do is swap the quest Influence part with the x2 strategics. Unfortunately, the stub used for Cultural Diplomacy is all-or-nothing; the two effects are a package deal and you can't tweak the effects. I could swap them entirely (but drop the golden age part to -10%) and add something extra to Free Market, but I haven't found anything good for that yet.

Policies in the core game that I've edited, in v.1.03:
Republic: same as my pre-patch version, boosting trade route income instead of building production.
Professional Army: the Happiness only adds to Castles and Military Bases, not all four defensive buildings. (The -1 gold I'd added in the last version didn't actually work.)
Piety opener: the old +2 Happiness, plus the new 15% cost reduction. (I'll replace the +2 happy with the 2 culture per Wonder effect from Constitution once I find a good replacement.)
Theocracy: +1 Happy per Colosseum or Stadium, +1 Culture per Pasture or Plantation
Merchant Navy: +2 production per coastal city, +1 gold per Harbor or Seaport
Secularism: still only +1 science per specialist. (Seriously, who thought +2 was a balanced effect?)
Free Thought: +1 science per Trading Post, +10% science for Universities and Public Schools. (Instead of just +17% for Universities. Note that in my mod, both Universities and Public Schools are now just +30% base.)
Free Speech: as mentioned above

Planned Economy: now here's a fun one. My version of Planned Economy now gives +1% Gold in each city for each building that generates Production or stores Food. That's basically 20 buildings, although a couple are mutually exclusive and a few require certain terrains. (Note that since it's in the Balance mod, it won't give any bonus for the future-era buildings in these categories.) The beauty of this is that the bonus starts off small and grows VERY quickly, first because the city's base gold increases and second because you'll be adding new buildings often.
There are two basic problems:
1> The Order tree is really supposed to favor "wide" empires, which the old trade route income boost did, but this new effect favors "tall" empires instead.
2> It's kinda hard to explain.
So I'm open to changing it back; I just wanted to see how far I could take the new stubs they gave us in the last patch.


Every other policy is currently identical in effect to the vanilla game. My ultiimate goal is that every existing policy should have two distinct effects, generally one strong and one weak, while my SuperFinishers would have two strong effects (and be 50% stronger than a normal Policy... see what I mean?) even if those two effects reinforced the same thing. I've changed quite a few of those as well, but you'll see what they do when I post the next version.

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This is post#996 in this thread. My goal was to have the new version be on or before 1000, so it WILL be soon. Try not to make too many posts in the next hour or so; I'm finally trying to fix the year numbers to be more realistic, and it takes a little work.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Before I post the next version, there's one issue that I've been thinking about lately:
The End.

In case you haven't noticed, these boards are quite a bit less active than they used to be, and not nearly as many people are downloading mods any more. In two weeks I used to get around 200 downloads, but in the 12 days since v.1.02 I've had only 83.
To make it worse, there's no sign of a DLL SDK, the two big patches they just released did nothing to help sound/art editing, and quite a few parts of the game are still as broken as ever. (In fact, they introduced a couple new big bugs in this last patch!)
So we're very quickly approaching the point where I'm going to run out of things to do; v.1.03's modification list is huge, but that's mainly because I'm still recovering from the 332 patch. I've got a wishlist of things to tweak next, but the majority of the mod really seems to be complete, barring aesthetic issues. And that means this thread is going to get quite a bit quieter. It also means that I'll probably spend even less of my time playing Civ5, and more time on other games, at least until the next major patch or expansion.

I'll continue to play Civ5 off and on, I'm sure, and I'll tweak things here and there whenever I feel like it, but at some point in the not-so-distant future the mod's basically going to stop changing and I'll stop spending so much time on these boards. I'll probably make a couple scenario maps, or a TSL Earth with the necessary resource modifications, of course, so it'll never stop entirely.

------------------------------

What's my point? It's simple, really: this is basically everyone's last chance to make substantive feedback, and I REALLY want the balance to be good before I'm finished.

Happiness. Gold income. Maintenance costs. Research times. Unit build times. Unit starting XPs. Less-used unit types. Resource distributions. The Head Start bonus for late-era starts. Combat difficulty. Nuke interception chances. Barbarians. Tech beelining.
All of these can be adjusted. Heck, in most patches I tweak at least half of the things I listed. So if you've got any opinions on any of these, there's not a huge amount of time left before it's too late.

And remember the earlier discussion about naming the mod? I want something without "Alpha", "Centauri", or "Spatz" in the name. ("Crazy" is still okay.) I'd initially joked about naming it "Earthfall" given how much I was borrowing from the Planetfall mod, and then at one point I was just tempted to name it after Heinlein's "Green Hills of Earth" in an ironic way (the irony really comes from the context in the original story), but the point is that I want something a bit more... permanent than the current name. While this mod was inspired by SMAC and a lot of the content was influenced by it, I'm trying to get away from the Alpha Centauri label because too many folks aren't even taking a glance at the mod as a result.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Here it comes. You have been warned.

EDIT: I'll update the posts on the first page a bit later. It's going to take a lot of work.
There are a few things left unresolved from the patch that I didn't quite get to; for instance, the help text for the Globalization tech in my mod still talks about the Sydney Opera House, despite the fact that it was moved. That sort of minor thing should be cleaned up by the next version.

v.1.03, dated 7/10:
BALANCE:
* The tooltip for the Seaport still said +2 production per sea resource, when it's only +1 now.
* Undid my change to the Constitution policy, returning it to the "+2 culture per Wonder" of the official game, for now. See previous post for more info on this.
* Changed the Free Speech policy to "8 free units, +1 culture per Theater, University, or Observatory". I'm looking to replace the Observatory on that list with some other building, possibly the Courthouse; I just want someplace where free speech makes a big difference, and not something too late in the game like the Broadcast Tower.
* The science bonus for Free Thought was changed to affect both Universities and Public Schools (although it's +10% for both, instead of the +17% of the base policy)
* The Public School's research bonus was changed to +30% instead of +40%, to make up for the flat +3 that was added in the patch.
* In the vanilla game, the Barracks/Krepost are given for any start in the Industrial or later. I'd previously removed it entirely, but now that money is more plentiful I'm not only re-enabling it, I'm moving it up to the Renaissance. Now that they add XP to all unit types and not just land, it's good to have them around. Also, this helps militaristic city-states, since the units they gift you will now have +XP right away.
* The Mint was moved from Currency (which is now very crowded) to Metal Casting.
* Planned Economy was changed from +20% trade route income to "+1% gold production in each city for each building that generates Production or Food Storage, up until the Future Era". There are 18 buildings that do this, so a fully-developed city would generate +18% to all gold, although a couple of the buildings are mutually exclusive and a couple others depend on certain local resources, so realistically you're looking at +15% for a developed city. I can't easily add the same effect to the future-era buildings, though. I'm willing to change this back to the old +20% trade route income version, but I like the idea of some complexity.
* Instead of Theocracy giving bonus happiness to the Theater and Broadcast Tower, I've changed it to Colosseum and Stadium. The first part should make it a decent pick in the early game, and it also works in a "bread and circuses" sort of way. I could possibly add the Circus to the list, too...
* Because I'd set the Colosseum back up to 3 happiness, I also changed its gold maintenance cost back to 2 gpt.
* The maintenance cost of the Broadcast Tower was changed from 3 to 4.
* The Watermill (and the Floating Gardens UB) are now automatically placed in any eligible city if you start a game in the Renaissance Era or later.
* The Eiffel Tower now only adds 2 UnmoddedHappiness instead of 5. The "+1 per 2 policies" part remains unchanged for now. It was just too good before.
* City Ruins now get an additional +1 Production when you reach the Globalization technology. Ruins were getting left behind. My goal is that city ruins should be the kind of thing you never want to clear, because there's some valuable stuff to scavenge.
* The United Nations generates 2 culture per turn instead of 1.
* The Museum now only has 1 Artist slot, instead of 2. All of the other 2-slot buildings had been reduced to 1 already (Factory, University, Stock Exchange); by the start of the Nuclear Era, each fully-loaded city will now have three slots of each type (other than Empath, obviously).
* Instead of a flat "+3 production per coastal city", the Merchant Navy policy is now +2 production per coastal city, and +1 gold per Harbor or Seaport (effectively +2 in all developed coastal cities). This was necessary to help compensate for the gold changes I made in other areas, and turns Commerce into a more money-oriented branch.
* The Arsenal now has a maintenance cost of 1 gpt. The Military base costs 2 gpt. In both cases, these buildings do more than just pure defense in my mod, so you need to pay a bit extra.
* The Professional Army policy now only gives Happiness for Castles and Military Bases, NOT for Walls or Arsenals. It keeps the -33% upgrade cost unchanged. +4 Happiness per city, for buildings that didn't require any maintenance until I added some above, was just too strong. +2 per city, AND the upgrade reduction, is still a very strong policy.
* The Research Lab's science output was reduced to +40%. (Was +50% before. Vanilla game is now +50% and +4.) It still adds +10% Gold.
* Unit maintenance costs were drastically increased; they'll be the same as before on turn 1, but scale up twice as fast from there. The general trend should be a ~50% increase over the current game, assuming you use both mods.
* To make up for this, Workers no longer cost any maintenance. This should also encourage city-states to make a few more of them.

CONTENT:
* Cleaned up the Advanced Setup screen a bit. Let me know what you think.
* Year numbers have been fixed, somewhat. I've tested it well on Standard speed only, but the other speeds should scale well enough; the year numbers just won't be nice round numbers until I go back and fix it in more detail. This is an ongoing process, and there are a couple things I still intend to do to improve this in the next versions, but it should be a lot closer than before, at least for Ancient Era starts.
* I hadn't realized that <CultureFromKills> (part of the Fundamentalist policy) is actually a percentage, scaling with a unit's cost. So I raised it from 10 to 100, to match the CultureFromBarbarianKills in the Honor opener. This might end up being too much, but by the time you get this policy you should be gaining at least 500 culture per turn from buildings, wonders, etc.
* Dilithium should be a bit more common now; it was messing up the placement before, and occasionally just refusing to place ANY (which'd then trigger the minimum 1 deposit).
* Small Omnicyte deposits will always be 1 unit. Since every Omnicyte deposit has a good Food bonus and also enables the Centauri Preserve in that city (which, among other things, has TWO Empath slots), it's worth having just as a Bonus resource.
* Omnicytes and Dilithium now each have two sizes of deposit in the seas; the larger deposits will be placed through the semi-random method, while the smaller ones will be allocated purely on the basis of the number of civs. There's a debug print statement in FireTuner, when the map is created, that'll say how many aquatic deposits of Oil, Dilithium, and Omnicytes were placed through each method. Don't peek if you don't want to know.
* There had been a problem based on the min/max radius of resource distribution, where it occasionally just wouldn't place certain water resources at all (basically, it would start to randomly place resources, and if it couldn't find a new place that wasn't within 4 hexes of an existing one it'd abort the whole process). I've tweaked the numbers to fix this, generally by reducing the minimum ranges.
* Great Empaths now explicitly unlock at Centauri Empathy, which is where the Empath Guild (first building to use Empaths) unlocks. As a result, you can no longer get them from earlier mechanisms, like the Liberty Finisher, and city-states shouldn't ask you to get one. I haven't seen any places that this fix fails, but it's possible that there's still a way to get them early.
* The free Empath specialist for the Empath Guild wasn't working, so now building one spawns a Great Empath. Since this is a National Wonder, this should allow every civ to get a Monolith or long Golden Age soon after launching a spaceship.
* Units that have Cost < 0 will no longer appear in the tech tree. This currently only applies to the Great Empath. I tried adding a similar logic for Buildings and it wouldn't work.
* AIs should now attempt to maintain 3 policy branches at once instead of just 2, because the starting policy was counting as 1 and effectively forcing the AI to not open new branches.
* Changed how policy costs scale. The first few will now cost barely more than the vanilla game, while the 30th policy will cost ~28% more than in the vanilla game. I've got a spreadsheet. The only problem is that currently, Finishers are counting as a full policy, meaning taking the final policy in a branch increases the next-policy cost as if TWO policies were taken. It's a bug in the core game, not mine; when they fix it, the devs have said they'll adjust the policy cost equation again, which means I'll have to make this change AGAIN.
* The Utopia Project also can't be built until you reach the Homo Superior tech (late Fusion Era). The tooltip for Utopia in the policies screen will now say this, and the bar it fills will actually fill by sixths (one per branch, and one for the tech). Based on my own testing, someone going for a cultural victory should reach the correct number of policies in the late Digital or early Fusion Era anyway, so it's not really that limiting.
* The Spaceship victory will ALWAYS be enabled now. You have no choice. Note that this isn't a "victory" in the sense that it ends the game, it's just necessary to allow for the launching of the spaceship. Too many people were disabling it and then getting stuck.
* Hit Movies and Information were reduced to +2 Happiness.
* If you loaded the Content mod before loading the Balance mod, it would ignore the change to Research Agreement costs in the Digital Era, only asking 350 instead of 800. This has been duplicated to ensure the costs are correct. However, the multiplier effects of starting a new game in the Digital Era will still be screwed up if you load these in the wrong order.
* The cost of Laser Infantry were reduced from 360 to 240, since Mechanized Infantry were lowered from 600ish to 375. Laser Infantry are supposed to be much cheaper. As a result of this, Scout Powersuits were also lowered from 500 to 400, and Assault Powersuits from 700 to 600. With the Arsenal's move over to the defensive building chain, and the continual nerfing of the Factory, they had to make all the units cheaper. I'll continue to examine these costs.
* Eudaimonia now gives +10 Happiness, and doubles the Happiness from Empath specialists (+2 each instead of +1) or repeatable techs.
* The Thought Control policy now gains the +1 Happy per Children's Creche effect, formerly from Eudaimonia, in addition to its across-the-board -10% effect.
* The friendly-territory defense bonus for the Citizen's Defense Force was reduced from +15% to +10%, now that Himeji Castle's bonus is lower than before.
* The city-specific yields of Hollywood, Wall Street, the Three Gorges Dam, and the Red Cross were all lowered from +50% to +25%. These national wonders are more about the specialist boosts, anyway. Each of these now gets 1 specialist slot of the appropriate type, instead of generating 1 Great Person Point.
* Every future-era National Wonder other than the Empath Guild should require the presence of a certain local building; many already did, but I've now done this for the rest:
> The Planetary Datalinks can only be built in a city containing a Research Laboratory.
> The Nethack Terminus can only be built in a city containing a Broadcast Tower. Can't stop the signal, Mal.
> The Hunter-Seeker Algorithm requires an Energy Bank.
> The Neural Amplifier requires a Brood Pit.
> The Paradise Garden's requirement was changed from Brood Pit to Temple of Gaia.
* The Temple of Gaia requires a Hologram Theater. The Brood Pit requires a Children's Creche. Creating chains of buildings reduces the number of options listed in each city in future era starts, which helps the AI by reducing the number of choices.
* The Fusion Lab was incorrectly adding an Engineer slot, when it should have been adding a Scientist slot.
* The Hybrid Forest's specialist slot was changed from an Empath to a Merchant, since the Temple of Gaia at the same tier also provided an Empath slot.
* The Jump Gate's Empath slot was changed to an Artist slot.
* The Children's Creche's Scientist slot was removed.
* The Virtual World was changed from 2 Artist points per turn to 5.
* The Piety branch's base ability (-15% production cost for culture buildings) now includes the Hologram Theater and Temple of Gaia.
* The Wealth policy no longer adds +5 gold per coastal city. Instead, it adds +1 gold per Market, Bank, Stock Exchange, and Energy Bank. Presumably by the time you get to this policy you'll have at least three of those in every city. It still gives +1 production per sea resource, though.
* The Power policy, instead of adding +10% to unit production, now adds +50% to a city's production when producing any military buildings (including defensive buildings from Walls to Gravity Shields, and offensive buildings from Barracks to Bioenhancement Centers and Brood Pits), along with the +1 movement and visibility for all units.
* The help text for the Energy Bank, Fusion Lab, and Quantum Lab will no longer say "adds X% to the city's gold", since the UI already shows that amount.
* Because the number of turns needed was generally increased by ~50%, the exponent divisor in the unit maintenance equation was increased from 7 to 10.
* Because of their sheer awesomeness, Titan units now cost more maintenance than a normal unit. Most cost an additional 5 gpt, but the Subspace Generator and Gravship each cost an additional 10 gpt (but remember, those are the two that you can only ever have one of). The Death Ray and Gravtank also cost 2 gpt more than a normal unit. Playing on lower difficulty levels scales these maintenance costs down at the same rate as the regular maintenance.
* The Geosynchronous Survey Pod no longer costs maintenance (like the Golem, Guided Missile, and Quantum Missile).
* The Energy Bank's probability of surviving conquest was raised to 75%, like all earlier financial buildings, instead of the default 66%. While there are other gold-producing buildings in the future eras, this was really only supposed to apply to the ones with no maintenance costs that ONLY add gold.

The big one:
* The 10 new policies I'd added are now treated as "Super-Finishers". Each now only depends on the completion of the existing policy trees. That is, Eudaimonia unlocks if you have both the technology needed (Ethical Calculus) and have unlocked the entire Tradition tree. It's no longer actually part of the Tradition tree, which means the Finisher will kick in BEFORE Eudaimonia instead of after.
* They're now part of the "SMAC" policy branch, the one that includes the starting policy that makes the negative-happiness buildings possible. This has also allowed me to remove the Cannot Take policy, which was causing problems in the past. One side effect is that the AI now puts a very high value on taking these policies once they unlock. The AI is built to complete a branch once it starts one, and that SMAC starting policy effectively started the SMAC branch, so the AI thinks that "completing" it would be a good idea.
* Because these policies are no longer part of the 10 base policy branches, they no longer count toward a Cultural victory. If you want to win through Culture, then, you might want to avoid taking these. They're considerably more powerful than a standard policy, though, so choosing not to take them to get a culture win earlier just means you suffer in more direct ways.
* The old policies were returned to their original positions and dependencies, undoing the rearranging that I'd previously added to fit my new policies in. However, I still prefer the "every policy is connected" concept, so I've re-evaluated the changes, and they now differ from the vanilla game as follows:
> Tradition: Landed Elite requires Aristocracy, Monarchy requires Oligarchy (same as I'd previously done in this mod)
> Liberty: Representation is moved down to Y=3, and now also requires Republic. (It was too much of a no-brainer to take early for the culture cost reduction.)
> Honor: Professional Army now also requires Military Tradition. This means that Professional Army will now always be the policy that triggers the Finisher. I'm willing to change that, because I dislike that sort of forcing, but for now it is where it is.
> Piety: no change
> Patronage: no change
> Commerce: Merchant Navy is moved down to Y=3 and now also requires Mercantilism. (Since I improved the policy a bit, this isn't so bad.)
> Rationalism: Free Thought requires Humanism (same as in my mod previously).
> Freedom: Free Speech and Democracy are moved down to Y=3, and Universal Suffrage to Y=2. Free Speech and Democracy now both require Universal Suffrage. I was thinking of making it an X, with everything going through Universal Suffrage, instead of the W shape it has now...
> Autocracy: no change
> Order: Socialism also requires Nationalism and United Front basically making a Y shape. Or a Psi, really.

PLAYER PACK:
No changes. What, the rest of this wasn't enough for you?

 

[dezuman]

O M F G
Umm ... gj?!?
I'm like



Ok, name suggestion ...

- Civ5 extended?

- The hitchhikers mod for Civ5?

- The 50% more mod

- Homo Superior something ... ?

I suck at this


Oh and BTW: Post no. 999 . That's 666 upside-down, hence double-satanistic
Edit: No offense to you satanists out there, I'm just kidding
...

 

[Spatzimaus]

POST #1000!!!!

(Now, if you ask me when v.1.04 is coming out, I WILL hurt someone.)

Oh and BTW: Post no. 999 . That's 666 upside-down, hence double-satanistic

If you play this mod backwards...

--------------------

Now, this version's changes were much bigger than normal, but that was only because of the patch. v.1.02 was just about getting everything WORKING in the post-patch environment, and this one was about getting it RIGHT. So future versions will tend to be significantly smaller, although 1.04 should include a few more Policy changes.

One thing was that I went back and re-evaluated all of the specialist slots. Basically...
> By the end of the Nuclear Era, a fully-loaded city should have 3 slots of each type (except Empath). (Caveat: one of the Engineer slots is in the Windmill, which can't be made in every city.) Note that this is significantly lower than in the vanilla game, where every city would have 4-5; this is basically because I changed all of the 2-slot buildings (Factory, University, etc.) to 1-slot types.
> By the first tier of the Fusion Era, you'll have 4 slots of each type (except Empath). Empaths will have two slots in the city with the Empath Guild, and two slots in each city that has local Omnicytes from the Centauri Preserve, but it still won't be even. These are the only 2-slot buildings in the game now.
> By the mid-Nanotech Era, you'll have 5 slots of each type (except Empath); Empaths will have the 2+2 mentioned above, and 3 additional slots, so it should come out to about the same total number.
Then at T23 there are three National Wonders that each add 2 Transcend slots.

The point is that based on the distribution of buildings, it should be a bit more consistent on Great People than before. (I'd accidentally given the wrong numbers of Artists and Scientists before this version.) By the late game, you should be getting all five types roughly equally.