Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

[Hulfgar]

They really just need an across-the-board 50% power increase and a removal of those penalties, but that's a little more balance work then I want to jump into.

That's true but if the AI doesn't know how to use the navy efficiently that will probably be usefull only to the human player no ?

 

[Jayman1000]

I have installed thes mods and the playerpack, and I am about to start a game. I just have a question if it is only those 3 maps from the playerpack that works with this mod? Or does all the other standard maps also work with it too?

Got nother question. I started a new game with the highlands from the playerpack. I managed to build a road from my capital to my second city. Being a 8 tile long road I am paying 8 gold in maintanance for it. When I look at my gold income I can see I am getting +9 gold from cities and -1 from traderoutes connected to my capital, so a total of 8 in income.

Why am I getting a negative income from traderoutes? I even connected the capital with a road to the second city. Is this something to do with this mod? I dont recall this happening in vanilla civ5.

 

[Spatzimaus]

That's true but if the AI doesn't know how to use the navy efficiently that will probably be usefull only to the human player no ?

No, the AI will handle it just fine. In fact, it'll actually handle it better than before if I did this, because the Flavor values really aren't built to deal with a crippling vulnerability like that, so if I remove the vulnerability then the AI will do better.

The problem isn't that the AI isn't using a navy efficiently, it's that he's not taking the extraordinary measures that a player has to use to keep his navy alive. Like never ending a turn within 2 hexes of shore, or getting the Logistics promotion as quickly as possible both for the doubled damage and the ability to move after attacking so that you can retreat away from shore.

I have installed thes mods and the playerpack, and I am about to start a game. I just have a question if it is only those 3 maps from the playerpack that works with this mod? Or does all the other standard maps also work with it too?

All normal map scripts will work, EXCEPT for Great Plains, Lakes, and Highlands. For those three, I provided alternate versions that work since the originals won't.
Also, these mods will have problems with any pre-made scenario maps, including most TSL Earth maps or things like the pre-order Earth maps.
I generally just use Continents or Small Continents, myself.

Why am I getting a negative income from traderoutes?

In the vanilla game, the equation for a trade route's income is
-1.0 + 1.10*population + 0.15*capital's population
It can never be negative, because even a size 1 city will offset that -1.0.

In my mod, the equation was changed to
-2.0 + 1.20*population + 0.10*capital's population
This makes trade income a little more important in the late game (where it was previously drowned out by building income), makes it a little less critical to keep your capital large, and helps prevent ICS by having a larger negative value.
But yes, it means that if you connect a city while it's still size 1 and your capital hasn't reached size 8 yet, there will be a very slight negative income.

 

[Jayman1000]

I see. My capital is size 2 and the second city is size 1. I'm playing on marathon; which is some of the explanation for the slow growth of my capital. I am . I build the road to have the possibility for a quick route for my military units, and I wouldn't mind extra trade income to support some of the road maintenance.

I think it would be better to rework the formula; just to counter this. Giving negative trade income as a result of connecting a small city to a small capital does not make sense, also it makes me feel punished. In worst case I should either have null trade income or perhaps just a tiny trade income. But connecting capital and second city with a road should never give negative income, no matter how small the city/capital. I know I could just grow my capital more to begin with, and I probably will from, now on. But tbh this particular bit felt as being punished for not following the true path. Hope it makes sense.

I haven't played much of this mod yet, but I am really looking forward to the rest of it Until now I can say I like how killing barbarians can earn culture, and later gold; it makes barbarian hunting/killing a lot more fun and meaningful! The policies, from what I have read of it, also looks really interesting.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Giving negative trade income as a result of connecting a small city to a small capital does not make sense

Actually it does. Small towns and colonies were often drains on resources, taking much more than they contributed in trade. They were long-term investments or ways to get new resources, but in the short term you'd lose money by having them. Civ5 already reflects that through the road/harbor maintenance costs; if you consider road maintenance and trade route income to be two parts of the same thing, then you already needed a city to be size 5-6 before it'd break even on costs, depending on distance and the size of your capital.

And in this case, you're talking about -0.6 gold per turn, instead of the +0.4/turn of the vanilla game. That's like adding one hex of extra road between each city.
Besides the fact that the road connecting you to that city is costing you FAR more than that (and again, should really be considered to be part of the same cost), it's really a nothing cost compared to the income your empire will have. You could pull up short on the road and not connect it to save a little money, but as you acknowledged, it's really useful to have the connection for military purposes. (Also, certain policies like Meritocracy benefit from trade routes, making it worthwhile regardless of cost.)

If I were to fix the equation so that it bottomed out at zero (and again, road costs), then I'd have a real problem with ICS again and/or too little trade income at the top end.

 

[S400]

Correct.

This has made my entire week. You must have spent quite some time devoted to this. I'm currently finishing off a game and will try out your mods right after that. You're a scholar and a gentleman for doing this. Can't wait!

Also, thank you very much for the instructions. I would have had to look up how to apply the mods, and you saved me some grief. Awesome.

 

[dezuman]

While the exact value is subject to tweaking, the idea was that the SF effect for Eudaimonia should be a flat benefit, the kind of thing that would still be significant for an OCC game. 10 Happiness means 8 more population in your city, and in a one-city challenge you won't have many luxuries. It's not just for one-city games; small empires won't have many luxuries, and won't have enough to trade for more, which seriously inhibits their growth. And don't underestimate the benefit a flat +10 Happiness gives to a larger empire; that's Wonder-level effects right there, even without the doubled Empath part.
I'm not saying that I can't boost it a bit more; it was set to +10 back when most Wonders were +5 to +8. So I might bump it to +12 now. The thing to remember is that nearly all Happiness is capped by population, so it's a bit more powerful than just building a few Colosseums.

Don't underestimate the Empath bit; you'll have up to 3 per city by the end of the game, except that cities with local Omnicytes have 2 more through the Centauri Preserve, and the city with the Empath Guild will have 2 slots. So it does help a sprawling empire quite a bit, but only large cities will really have the food to spare for specialists in the first place so it's still mostly the vertical emphasis I wanted for Tradition. You'll only see huge empire-wide benefits once you get to the Nanotech Era, but before then you'd still have a few of these.

If I boost Eudaimonia further, it needs to be another Happiness (or maybe food) bonus, preferably something that benefits vertical development (OCC, specialists, etc.) more than sprawl. Even if it's as simple as "+10 food per turn in your capital" (which I can do).

It might just be me, but when I go single-city I commonly get so much happiness I can just sell all my luxuries ... Might be that I'm India though. Seriously, their trait breaks even at like what, size 5? Only problem is if you plop down cities early ... Like everyone exempt me do

Monarchy gives a quite huge happiness boost in a small (tall) empire, while that "one happiness per 10 pop" is neat too (Although a bit weak IMO)

Just to be clear, I didn't change ANY of the policies within this branch. This is all the same as in the vanilla game; any shift in emphasis was on their part, not mine.
To me, Tradition wasn't really so much "small empire" as "all-around useful no matter how big your empire is"; the Liberty branch is sort of a trap, in that it basically forces you to expand quickly without giving you much Happiness support to do so, which then basically forces you to go Piety. So I've found myself going Tradition fairly often lately, especially on maps where you don't have a huge amount of room to expand.

Take the Wonder production bonus, for instance; that actually does favor vertical development, because the ICS-style sprawl of Liberty doesn't tend to leave you with enough production to win any Wonder races. In the early game, that bonus allows you to use your large capital city to grab a couple early Wonders, instead of only using it to spit out more Settlers. Adding extra Wonder production to a bunch of small cities isn't going to do anything, since none of them would ever win a Wonder race, so that one does fit the pattern.

And I do have to say, Tradition's Finisher is one of the stronger ones out there; it's just strange that they'd use it for Tradition. In fact, I'd say that Tradition and Liberty should just switch Finishers; Tradition get a Great Person (good for a small empire that could use another GP improvement or an early Great General), Liberty get the food bonus in each city.

That's the point, I want you to change them
I'd like tradition to be small-empire branch for real, liberty to be a no-brainer for an expansionist, and preferably Honor to be less of a happiness-booster (srsly?)

I agree some Tradition policies ARE small-empire focused, but some are not. hmm ... Is it possible in civ5 to give boost to the X largest cities? (without lua...)

Agree on tradition finisher, I feel like your Liberty super-finish is a clone of it
I'm not sure I'd like Tradition to have the free GP trough ...

That one I'll give you. The 4 free building thing is just weak, and I'll be looking into ways to boost it. Also, remember that in my mod the Temple isn't in the Culture chain any more; it goes straight from Monument to Opera House.
Now, if they'd said "the Monument is free in EVERY city you make from here on out", that'd be something. But that might overlap a bit too much with the Liberty opener. I'd prefer something like "Cultural buildings are always free within your capital"; that would have some real potential. (Can't actually do that, but still, there ARE some things I can do.)

Yeah, boosting culture should benefit a small empire more than a large one due to policy cost scaling. Suppose you COULD make it some boring +xx% more culture in capital or something, since that's where the most culture is in a small empire ... No?

That might be part of it, too. I know that this is part of why they tried changing Honor to be a bit more well-rounded; I think the idea was that Tradition, Liberty, and Honor were all supposed to be a bit weak, with some real clunkers along the way, but that each would favor a different development strategy (vertical, sprawl, conquest). Each of those strategies also ties to one of the late-game trees (Honor -> Autocracy, Tradition -> Freedom, Liberty -> Order), so I guess the idea is that it encourages the AIs to pick one of these three basic paths and stick with it. This is why it's so strange that Commerce is underwhelming; those middle 4 are supposed to be how you really distinguish yourself.

Honor should have a policy that reduces unhappiness from puppeted cities ... I recon that back in the days before speedy communication the large empires were pretty much coalitions of nations led by a conqueror, and that keeping the puppets happy was the only way to keep the empire together
Do want that, if so only to replace that silly +happiness from def structures.


Also ... Remember you said before that I would have trouble getting the spaceship if I played single-city? By that time I had like 150 base production, that combined with all the boosts made it take like 5 turns to build one part
That was on marathon speed, immortal difficulty.
After climbing some on the extended tech tree I realized that, with my huge production and like 200 GPT, I simply WOULD win in the end, so I quit

Edit: Did I mention huge tech advantage? When I hit Fusion most others were like industrial or something, while the lead after me was barely digital. All while my own research was like 150 per turn. Research agreements FTW?!?
Seriously, porcelain tower is just sooooo good ...

Also, is spore tower supposed to be so weak? I could solo one with 1 mech infantry ...

 

[Jayman1000]

@Spatzimaus: Hmm good explanation, I can see your point that it's just not a big cost/income difference. Thank you for making such a nice mod; I'll go play some more now

 

[Spatzimaus]

Before I start on the responses, there's something I need to say.

I generally don't read through most other mods' threads, because I only have so many hours in the day, but the other day I went into a few of Thalassicus' threads. One of them was about crash bugs; about two weeks ago, he figured out that the "Reload Landmark System" flag is what was causing most of the crashes that would happen when a unit was moving; apparently, the game was continually trying to reload all of the landmark (improvements and resources) art definitions on the fly, and it just couldn't handle that much workload.

Two days ago, I went and turned that flag off in my own mod, then played a complete game. ZERO CRASHES. The points where it'd previously crash you'd see the game slow down for a minute, possibly blank the screen, but then it'd come right back up.

So what does this mean for you, the users? Simple. You can either wait for v.1.04 (which I'll try to push out early next week), or just go into the Content mod's .modinfo file and change
<ReloadLandmarkSystem>1</ReloadLandmarkSystem>
to a 0.

I'd appreciate if some people tried this and could tell me whether it really makes a difference for them. No idea if you can do this for a game already in progress, of course. I need to know two things: first, if it reduces crashes, and second, whether you have any display issues afterwards.

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Might be that I'm India though. Seriously, their trait breaks even at like what, size 5?

6 in the vanilla game (3 / 0.5), 6.67 in my mod (4 / 0.6). Slightly different for occupied cities, but same basic idea.

When examining balance in various areas, I don't use a civ that gets a bonus in that area. That means no India, Persia, or Egypt when balancing Happiness. Persia, through their UB, gets +2 happiness per city, so they have a HUGE advantage in large empires.
This is why I use America when I'm testing; no UB (only two UUs), and their traits don't screw up my balance equations. (Extra visibility for land units obviously don't, and cheaper plot purchases only slightly does.)

Monarchy gives a quite huge happiness boost in a small (tall) empire, while that "one happiness per 10 pop" is neat too

It's really aimed for that, since there's no fractions involved. The problem I'm running into with it was that Eudaimonia used to be really the only +Happiness in the Tradition branch, but now the two policies before it also add Happiness. So if I keep Eudaimonia the same, then I'm effectively having THREE policies in a row, all of which add at least 10 Happiness in a typical game, which turns Tradition into the undisputed Happiness champion for anything other than a huge empire.
I'm okay with this, but it's definitely a shift in emphasis.

That's the point, I want you to change them

Generally speaking, I change policies if/when I think they significantly impede the ability of the AI to reach the future eras, either because they're substantially underpowered (to where the AI who takes them is at a significant disadvantage) or overpowered (to where the player who beelines for them is at a significant advantage). I don't WANT to start tweaking every policy in the tree to my own personal tastes; besides the fact that it'd make it too confusing for someone who's coming into this mod for the first time from the vanilla game, it's just a never-ending process.
It's the same reason why I've made almost no changes to techs before the Nuclear Era; while I COULD do a ton to those earlier techs, it isn't what my mod is for. I've long talked about the Third Mod, a hypothetical Balance mod that doesn't limit itself that way and represents all of the things I'd really want to do, but I haven't done that (yet).

Now, I've violated that guideline before, in specific cases where I felt the effect of a Policy completely contradicted the theme of the branch or the specific name of the Policy. (See: Planned Economy, Theocracy.) Obviously, the "theme of the branch" is what you're going for here, but I have to ask, which policies do you think violate it?

I'd like tradition to be small-empire branch for real, liberty to be a no-brainer for an expansionist, and preferably Honor to be less of a happiness-booster (srsly?)

To be clear, my Honor is far less of a Happiness-booster than the vanilla; Professional Army was dropped to 2 buildings instead of 4, so at best you'll get +3 per city, and that's only if you garrison everywhere.

As to being a "real" small-empire branch, it already is. It's just not as obvious.

Starter (+3 culture per capital, cheaper border expansions): this is obviously skewed towards small empires, although the second part helps large ones as well.
Aristocracy (+15% production when building Wonders): small empires are better at making Wonders, because you need high-production cities.
Legalism (free Culture building in your first 4 cities): obviously aimed at small empires. Funny balance note: if you start the game in a later era, where Monuments are already free, then this policy gives a free Opera House to each city, which is NOT cheap. (I'm assuming it'd use Temples in the vanilla game.)
Oligarchy (no maintenance for garrisons, x2 city ranged strength when garrisoned): this helps all sorts of cities, but since city ranged strength scales with size, this policy is best when you develop vertically.
Landed Elite (+1 Happy per 10 population in a city): Really favors vertical development, since if you're doing an ICS-style sprawl none of your cities will ever reach size 10.
Monarchy (+1 Happy and +1 Gold per 2 population in the capital): Duh. Oh, also, that help text isn't actually correct; it's not +1 Happy per 2 population. It's actually "-50% Unhappiness from population in the capital", which since I have 1.2/pop, means it's adding 0.6 per population, not 0.5.
Finisher (+2 Food and +15% Growth in all cities): On the surface, this looks like it favors large empires more than small, which is why I'd thought it'd fit better in Liberty. But the +15% is on GROWTH (meaning net food), not on Food like my own Super-Finisher for Liberty, so it favors empires where you still WANT all of your cities growing and have large surpluses, so it helps large cities out a bit more. Overall, though, still mostly a sprawl-favoring policy.

So I'd still like to swap the two Finishers. Getting a single Great Person really seems more like a small-empire thing, especially since you'll generally use it to place an Improvement near your capital.

Is it possible in civ5 to give boost to the X largest cities? (without lua...)

No, it's not possible without Lua. You can give a lot of bonuses to a Capital simply by saying "do X if a Palace is present in this city", and one of the thoughts I had for changing Eudaimonia would be to do this; instead of +10 Happiness, it could just add +5 Food, +5 Production, +5 Science, +5 Gold, and +5 Culture to your capital. (Sort of the inverse of the Order Finisher.) I'd keep the doubled Empath happiness, though, because I really want that effect somewhere.

Suppose you COULD make it some boring +xx% more culture in capital or something, since that's where the most culture is in a small empire ... No?

Can't do that. Here are the things I can do involving the Capital:
> Reduce unhappiness from capital population by a percentage (see Monarchy)
> Add flat yields to the Capital (not used directly)
> Add flat yields based on the population of the Capital (Monarchy)
> Add yield modifiers to the Capital (Commerce opener). Note that Culture is not a yield.
> Add Happiness when a certain building is present (no point in doing this for the Palace, since you can already just add a flat Happiness to an empire)
> Add flat Culture when a certain building is present (Tradition opener)
> Give individual units for free near the Capital (Warrior Code, Collective Rule, Citizenship, or the Liberty finisher)

Honor should have a policy that reduces unhappiness from puppeted cities

Back before this last patch, Autocracy had a policy that subtracted a percentage of population Unhappiness from Occupied cities (meaning anything that didn't have a Courthouse, which'd include puppets). This stub isn't currently being used for anything directly, although it's included in my Thought Control super-finisher for Autocracy.

The problem with putting it in Honor is that it's just too early. The AI is unlikely to HAVE any occupied cities at that point of the game, so if he's taking a policy that he can't get any benefit from, it's a big advantage to the player. And in general, a city often doesn't stay occupied long enough to justify a policy, so if I did add this somewhere, it'd be as a secondary effect of another policy.

After climbing some on the extended tech tree I realized that, with my huge production and like 200 GPT, I simply WOULD win in the end, so I quit

Every game hits this point. In the vanilla game, you'll often reach that point in the late Renaissance/early Industrial, where the game is clearly over and it's just mopping up while you want for a victory condition to arrive. This, obviously, is not a good fit for a future-era mod, so nearly all of my balance changes are aimed at making it so that you generally don't hit that point until right around the start of the Fusion Era.

Also, is spore tower supposed to be so weak? I could solo one with 1 mech infantry ...

Basically, yes, they are.

Digital-Era Spore Towers, which is what you were probably facing, have this:
> 60 strength, 60 ranged strength, range of 2
> Heals 2 HP per turn, AND 1 HP per combat (both when defending AND attacking)
> Attacks twice per turn. (Two shots per turn at 60 strength is nothing to sneeze at.)
> Two randomly-selected promotions from the following list: Cover I, Volley (that's attack-vs-fortified), Accuracy I, Barrage I, Spontaneous Healing (10% chance of +5 healing per combat). Cover I is twice as possible as the others, and if it's picked twice then it gets Cover II the second time. As a result, a Spore Tower is likely to be very difficult to kill through bombardment.

For all of this, you get 100 gold per kill. Fusion Era towers gain the Range promotion (+1 range), and bump up to 150 gold, but this obviously doesn't make them harder to kill, just more dangerous if you leave them alone. Nanotech Era towers gain a third randomly-selected promotion and the Bioenhancement (+10% combat) promotion, and give 200 gold; these WILL be tougher to kill.

Now, the 60 strength is like all Psi units; it adjusts up or down based on the strength of the opponent. So if a Mech Infantry (42) attacks a Spore Tower (60), the Spore Tower will drop 25% down to a 45 base. If the MechInf has a lot of promotions, it could easily have the advantage, but it's likely that you'll have a hard time bombarding it down first, and if you don't kill it the tower will be able to do a lot of damage. Note that a 70-strength Modern Armor would have just as hard a time, because the 60 would move UP to 70 to match. (Same goes for air units. Stealth Bombers will do 3-4 damage per attack, assuming no Cover or Spontaneous Healing.)

Basically, Spore Towers aren't meant to be very durable when facing land units. What they're meant to be is exactly what you seem to have noticed: a motivation to keep some ground units around, instead of just using long-range bombers to control. City-states and small empires should have no problem with this, and the smaller your empire is the less chance one will spawn in your territory. What this does, though, is force people with large empires to keep a number of units scattered around their empires to react to tower spawns... which is exactly how the AI already plays. A human player would move his entire army to the front lines, which'd make conquest much easier, but the AI wouldn't do this. So by giving the player a valid reason to do the same, I remove a significant advantage over the AI.

 

[liucij]

Hi, I have a problem with tech tree. When i learn "Industrial economics" there is nothing i cam learn further. I mean that the game then redirects me to the the tech tree, where i see planty of unopened technologies (plus Ecology and Globalisation) which i simply cannot choose

 

[Spatzimaus]

When i learn "Industrial economics" there is nothing i cam learn further.

Standard questions.

1> Are you using any other mods besides my two mods? And I mean ANY other mods. (I'm not saying every other mod is incompatible, but an awful lot are.)
2> Have you edited any of the core game's asset files by hand?
3> What's the average airspeed of an unladen swallow?
4> Can you take a screenshot of your tech tree and attach it to your post?
5> Are you using v.1.03 for both mods?
6> Have you launched the spaceship yet?
7> Are you trying to run a scenario game, or use one of the less common map scripts? (i.e. anything other than Continents, Small Continents, Pangaea, Fractal, or Archipelago?)

Incompatibilities can manifest themselves in strange ways; if you're trying to combine my mod with someone else's, it can easily break like you've described.

 

[Sjru]

3> What's the average airspeed of an unladen swallow?

Lol, ROFL, he's not going to answer that, because the answer is; An african or european Swellow?,

BTW; I believe he hit the point where to proceed he needs the Centauri tech, which means nobody has built the spacehorsehocky.

Also; what's the capital of Assyria? Anyone knows?

 

[Spatzimaus]

BTW; I believe he hit the point where to proceed he needs the Centauri tech, which means nobody has built the spacehorsehocky.

Interesting Freudian slip there. But no, if no one builds a ship you can still progress all the way up to Super-Tensile Solids (end of Fusion Era); that's the last tech that doesn't require Centauri Ecology. If he's stalling out at Industrial Economics then something else is wrong; chances are, it's conflicting with some other UI mod after the first custom tech. For that, I'd need to know what other mods are being used.

Unless you've disabled the space victory (which shouldn't be possible any more), the AI should build a ship long before you can get to that tech, even if you don't. So it shouldn't be possible to get trapped at a point where you can't research anything. It MIGHT only force the space victory on if you went through the Advanced Setup menu, but really, who doesn't?

Also; what's the capital of Assyria? Anyone knows?

Originally Assur (hence the name), then Dur Sharrukin, then Nineveh... it moved around a bit. There was also the "religious capital", Kalhu, and provincial capitals, and the capital may have briefly been in Shubat-Enlil. Nineveh was the capital at its peak, and for the longest, so it's generally the correct answer.

-------------------------------
I'm putting the finishing touches on a new version now. The highlights:

1> No more crashes. Or at least, in two full games I haven't managed to get it to crash even once, although I'm still using the DX9 executable with graphics settings turned down a bit. You can thank Thalassicus for figuring this one out.

2> Money is going to be a bit harder to get. Specifically, the pure financial buildings (Market, Bank, Stock Exchange, Energy Bank) now all only give +20% Gold, instead of +25%, although each still has its other effects (Market: +gold for cows, fish, etc.; Bank: +gold for gold, silver, gems; Stock Exchange and Energy Bank produce resources). Still testing the balance on this one; I'm hoping that it'll avoid the late-game buying sprees, where I'd be making 200+ gold per turn even outside a GA. I'm boosting the Commerce policy branch a bit to compensate, just like how the Rationalism branch boosts my now-reduced research buildings, so if you still want high incomes that's an option.

3> Lots of little boosts to future-era Wonders. Things like the Pholus Mutagen giving +25% food in its host city in addition to the tile boost, or the Network Backbone now giving +1 research per specialist in all cities, instead of the local research boost it had before. Oh, and the Ascetic Virtues now does something beyond just unlocking Titans: for every Great Improvement in your empire (Academy, Manufactory, etc.), your capital gains +2 Great People points of the appropriate type. (For technical reasons it needed to be the capital instead of the city working each one. For now.)

My main concern now are Research Times. My ultimate goal is that once you get a developed empire, every tech should take 8-10 turns to research, barring a Rationalism bonus (which should drop it to 6-8ish). It's just not turning out that way; in my last game, Industrial start, by the time I was in the Fusion I was down to ~3 turns per tech with Rationalism and most of the late-game Wonders. That's obviously far too fast, since it doesn't leave any room to make buildings and such. So I might need to go back and re-price techs again in the near future; I'd just like to know what typical research times are for other folks.

 

[Cross Cowboy]

Thanks for posting that possible fix...ive been having strange crashes like the one described so ill see what happens when i fix this. Also going to try out your mod and see how it goes!

 

[dezuman]

One thing that always bug me is that the Mint only boost yield of gold an silver, making gems less valuable ... Maybe make the Bank boost gems some more?

From my one-city viewpoint, nerfing gold gain is OK. I WAS getting around 200 GPT from my city non-golden age a bit into the future ...
Also commerce needed a buff IMO, I only opened it for the 25% gold in capital (hence 25 to my entire base income )


Edit: Wonder if there's any artist you could ask to (re?)make the graphics you need... A gallery just doesn't look ALARMING enough even when it chews up a couple of destroyers
Edit2: is it possible to like, recolor them or something? I could easily learn to fear a pink gallery


Edit3: One more thing: When something f.e. boosts more than one thing, why do you write "boosts x or y"? I mean, it's not like it either boosts x or but rather x AND y ... no? Just keeps nagging at me

 

[Spatzimaus]

One thing that always bug me is that the Mint only boost yield of gold an silver, making gems less valuable ... Maybe make the Bank boost gems some more?

There's a lot of imbalance with this in the game. If I was going to do this correctly, I'd make Gems get more of a benefit from the base Improvement (+2 gold instead of +1 when you place a Mine), since they're more immediately valuable. Same for Pearls.
Of course, if I wanted to REALLY do it correctly, then not every luxury would give the same +4 happiness in the first place. You'd have Gold giving more than Silver, Silk giving more than Cotton, and so on.

Also commerce needed a buff IMO, I only opened it for the 25% gold in capital

The problem with things like the +25% is that it adds to all of the other +X% buildings. So you're not actually getting 25% more gold; it's more like it's bumping you from 175% of base to 200% of base.

This is the root of why I had to make that change to the Market, Bank, etc. In the olden days, way back in December-ish, cities had fairly small base production values for Gold, Production, and Research. These values would be multiplied by large values through various buildings.

In more recent patches, the devs have shifted the design more towards smaller percentages and flat bonuses. So +50% production became +3 and +25%, then +4 and +15%. I've made this even worse; take Hollywood, for instance, which among its other effects adds 1 Gold to all Artist specialists in your empire. With that and the flat bonuses from things like the Mint, National Treasury, etc., cities' base incomes will be considerably higher than they used to be.

Perversely, this has made +X% buildings and abilities even stronger than they used to be, so what used to be well-balanced at +25% Gold is now overpowered. Hence the reduction. What I'm aiming for is that a civ without Commerce would stay above zero fairly easily, but not exceed 100 gpt unless they're in a Golden Age, at least until you get into the far future.

Wonder if there's any artist you could ask to (re?)make the graphics you need...

It's not a function of needing someone else to make the graphics. The Nexus suite of file importers is broken. It just doesn't work correctly as of a recent patch. Without that, you just can't translate to the GR2/DDS/FXSXML formats that Civ5 needs.

Now, for a while some people were getting around this by using outside programs (most notably IndieStone NexusBuddy), but even those have apparently broken now. (Plus the people who made them have since given up on Civ5 and no longer support the tools.) You'll notice that the Unit Graphics forum hasn't been touched in quite a while... not a coincidence.

I'm still making some progress on the units, simply by setting nearly everything by hand in the FXSXML files. What should have been a trivial process using the Nexus tools has become a tremendous chore, and animations are pretty much out of the question for now.

 

[Skajaquada]

Just replying to this last thing there's really no problem with the IndieStone-importer. The Nexus' Asset Importer have never worked but the IndieStone one have worked as well as it works from the start. The DDS-files are also produced with Gimp or Photoshop with a special plugin. About the unit-forum I'm guessing it's more because there's no DLL-thingy, so there're no really advanced mods in the making, the general interest in Civ 5-mods is down, so there's no abundance of people wanting to make graphics.

I think you should ask for icons or just PM OrsonM. He was sketching some things for my WH40K-mod some time but quit. I took it he rather worked on an original sci-fi mod than one associated with some IP. If you remove Alpha Centari from the name (as I think I read you were thinking about that anyway) I think it'd be just fine.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Just replying to this last thing there's really no problem with the IndieStone-importer. The Nexus' Asset Importer have never worked but the IndieStone one have worked as well as it works from the start. The DDS-files are also produced with Gimp or Photoshop with a special plugin.

I've got the DDS plugin, and I know the Nexus importer never worked correctly, but the IndieStone importer also stopped working right for me in the March patch, and I've seen many other people say the same. It was just crashing whenever I'd try to do anything animation-related, and not just from the part where it'd crash when it wasn't in the Nexus directory.

The problem is that I think I've got an out-of-date version, because the download links here at CivFanatics (which SAYS it's NexusBuddy 1.0, dated January 25th) actually gives you the older v.0.1a from October, and the later versions are no longer being hosted on the developer's own website. Since they were up to at least 0.5 before stopping, that might be the problem. 0.1 does some things just fine, so I HAVE been able to make some progress. (I'd had a better version, but when I upgraded my OS I lost the old version.)

If worst comes to worst I can do some of this by hand, but it's a slow process and I've put art overhauls on hold while I try dealing with balance issues. After all, I need to play actual games when doing that, and tweaking art generally means restarting the game each time. The 20% gold change, especially, has taken some work. For instance, in a game I started in the Industrial, it went like this:
> At start: losing money
> Once the improvements were made around my cities, I was slightly positive.
> Once the trade routes were hooked up between my cities, I was gaining ~40 gpt.
> At one point in the later Industrial I was making ~90 gpt outside of a golden age.
> But then I put down railroads and started building the expensive early-Nuclear buildings (Stadium, etc.) and suddenly my profits went away. I was actually running slightly negative at one point.
> Building Hollywood jumped my income up ~25ish
so now, in the mid-Nuclear, I'm back up to +35ish. Basically, it feels like it's running at a good pace. Now, in this game I'm probably going to lose the space race, and I've been beaten to quite a few Wonders (stupid Catherine...), so I probably won't pick up all of the Digital money-boosting Wonders. I'm hoping this'll stay under control, then.
(This is without taking any gold-boosting Policies, meaning Commerce or Order.)

 

[Skajaquada]

I've attached the version I've got that's working at the end of the tutorial-thread here:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=10706171#post10706171

It seem to indeed be version 0.5a that the broken link in the OP seem to point to.

 

[dezuman]

Great job Sparz, now you FORCED me to post this just to declare the fact that I DO know that modifiers stack linearly in Civ (that 50% + 50% is 100% and not 125%)

I was pointing to the fact that 25% on a quite neat BASE income (Slightly less than a hundred I recon) really is worth it when I had no other tree to open

Edit: Huh, thought it was the Civ4 -> Civ5 conversion that didn't work...
Aaaaanyways
IndieStone huh? I had one of those mods for the Sims before