Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

[Spatzimaus]

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%)

It's not a question of whether you know it, it's a question of how much +25% is really worth in the current game, as opposed to what it used to be worth in the pre-patch game. Back in Ye Olden Dayz of long-ago 2010, cities' base income was almost purely a function of its tile yields, so having a Commerce ability add 25% to your capital just wasn't worth a whole lot. But now that practically everything has a flat component to it, it's actually quite a bit better than it used to be, in terms of absolute gold increase. And with certain changes, specialists are a lot more desirable than they used to be, so there's even more gold.

The other problem, that I tried to allude to earlier, is how this interacts with the future eras I've added. Think about it; the Commerce branch can unlock in the Medieval Era, right? You'll probably have a Market in your capital, but you won't even have reached the Bank yet, so the Commerce +25% really will add a substantial percentage to your empire's totals. And the tile yield improvement tech increases won't have kicked in yet. But go until the Digital Era, and suddenly that +25% starts looking a lot less impressive now that you'll have four economic buildings adding to your city; you might take Commerce on the way up, while you're still in the Medieval, but you won't have much motivation to take it as your fourth or fifth branch down the road.
This is why I've tried to change certain Policies, to where they'll be universally useful regardless of whether they're your first branch or your last. I'd mostly focused on Piety and Order for this previously, I've tweaked Commerce a bit in v.1.04, and Freedom's really going to be the last one to be modified.
(I wish they'd made Commerce's 25% be TRULY multiplicative. That would have been fun to balance.)

At the moment, I've just made two changes to Commerce:
> Trade Unions: in addition to the road maintenance decrease, it adds +1 production in all cities. (Not all coastal cities, ALL cities.)
> Merchant Navy: instead of the +2 production in coastal cities, it's going to add +10% to trade route income.
(I'm looking to tweak a couple others, but this is a start.)
Between these, the impressive Finisher (+1 gold per specialist), my Super-Finisher (more gold), and the overall reduction in the Market/Bank/Stock Exchange/Energy Bank, I'm trying to make it so that anyone who really wants a significant income goes Commerce. (Similar to how anyone who wants good research goes Rationalism, anyone who wants culture goes Piety, and anyone who wants to bribe city-states goes Patronage.)

Anyway, this flat-vs-multiplier debate is something I've tried to keep a close eye on. If you look at my tech tree, you'll notice that things along the top half tend to have lots of flat bonuses (Children's Creche: +8 food), while things along the bottom are pure multipliers (Genejack Factory +50% production, Fusion Lab +20% science and +20% Gold). I'm still trying to see if this is too problematic.

One final thing: which would people like to see Eudaimonia as?
A> (The current version) +10 Happiness, +1 Happiness per Empath/repeatable tech
B> +5 Food, Production, Science, and Gold in your capital; +1 Happiness per Empath/repeatable tech.
Since the two preceding Tradition policies are heavily Happiness-based, I'm inclined to switch it to B.

Edit: Huh, thought it was the Civ4 -> Civ5 conversion that didn't work...

Yes and no. I'm definitely having problems translating the Civ4 animations over, but even the base models were having some issues with the IndieStone tool. I think I've got that almost straightened out, though.

What this means is that the first units to get new models will be those without moving parts. The Colony Pod, Needlejet, Gravtank, Skimmer, Vertol, Gravship, and the various satellite weapons. None of these require any complex adjustment to account for moving limbs, so the animations can be left out and they'll still look okay. I've been using the Colony Pod as my test case, as it's a VERY simple model, and I think it's close to working now that I've spliced in some code by hand, but I can't test it until I finish my current game.

 

[dezuman]

Problem with B would be that by the time you can actually get it, the flat yields won't be all that hot. If you switched out that with the growth bonus from the finisher instead ... Ah, I dunno really. I just feels like the flat stuff would be neat by the time you finish the tree, while the growth isn't all THAT useful until you can run a real specialist economy...


See it this way: Both A and B will, when you got a few tall cities, not be a top priority policy. If you gave the super-finish the growth of the normal finish, it would be quite a no-brainer in said situation


Now, if only I could figure out why Civ5 refuses to launch

 

[Spatzimaus]

Problem with B would be that by the time you can actually get it, the flat yields won't be all that hot.

Well, remember two things:
1> These are pre-modifier yields. So that 5 production might actually be 10 thanks to your Factory, Windmill, etc., the 5 gold will be more like 10 thanks to the Market, Bank, Stock Exchange, and Energy Bank, and the 5 research will be closer to 15, more if you've gone Rationalism. These are not small differences.
2> The Order finisher is "+1 food, production, gold, research, and culture in every city". I multiplied that by 5 and replaced the culture (which we already had in the opener) with the Empath happiness, which is a significant boost in its own right. So for empires of less than 5 cities, this would be significantly stronger than the Order finisher. (Planned Society, my Order super-finisher, doubles that Finisher and adds 5 happiness.)

If you switched out that with the growth bonus from the finisher instead ... Ah, I dunno really. I just feels like the flat stuff would be neat by the time you finish the tree, while the growth isn't all THAT useful until you can run a real specialist economy...

That'd be extremely problematic. For one thing, remember that Eudaimonia is the LAST super-finisher to unlock, in the mid-Fusion. So if you put the growth bonus there, you'd entirely miss the specialist-oriented Nuclear Era. While +growth is really useful for tall empires, I really don't want to wait THAT long to get it. And +15% growth is generally less useful than the four +5s I gave, for small empires; if your core cities are generating a +20 food surplus (which won't happen until LATE in the game) then that's +3 food per city. Add the flat +2 from the finisher, and that's +5 per city. So if I swapped the two, then small empires in the earlier eras would get FAR more benefit out of the +5s than they would from the existing Finisher. This'd heavily skew things towards players beelining through Tradition to unlock the Finisher in, say, the Medieval Era.

Also, just in general I'd like to leave the existing policies/finishers like they are unless they're horribly unbalanced. So, I'd rather tweak the numbers than try to swap positions with the Finisher. If those +5s aren't enough, then I could move them up further; instead of a flat +X, I can switch to a Monarchy-style "+1 per X population"; adding +1 gold, food, production, and research per 4 population would be the same as my +5s for a size-20 capital, but after that it'd be better, and by the time you reach Eudaimonia your capital should be ~30ish.

 

[Jayman1000]

In my current game I am in the renaissance era; and I noticed something a little peculiar. Already several of my cities crave Neutronium; which will only be available much later. Ressources that I already have is wine, cotton, silver, marble, furs, gems, silk, pearls and whales. I have only used mod files from this thread. I am playing as India.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Already several of my cities crave Neutronium; which will only be available much later.

Actually, they don't. Look more closely; if you go into the city screens for those cities, you'll see that they're actually demanding something else.

What happens is this: when a city decides to demand a resource, it picks one at random from the list of ones you don't have yet. For obvious reasons, this means that Neutronium demands would get more common as the game goes on, since it'll always be on the list of things you don't have yet. So, I inserted a start-of-turn check; if any city demands Neutronium (or any luxury with a tech prerequisite), the game will cancel that demand and pick another at random for that city, even if you have the tech required.

Since the demand action happens at the start of the turn naturally, what happens is that you'll see the notification that Washington demands Neutronium, followed IMMEDIATELY by a second notification that Washington now demands, say, Silk. The Neutronium demand never actually kicks in; I just can't stop the original notification, resulting in a double notification. So when this happens, look for the second notification. Or, just go into the city screen for that city to see what it's demanding now.

Now, if by random chance it re-picks Neutronium on that second random draw, then it'll simply wait until the start of the NEXT turn to re-pick. So you might, on rare occasions, see the Neutronium demand stick around for a turn. But unless you've already acquired every other luxury in the game (not likely), it'll quickly be replaced by something else.

 

[dezuman]

Actually, they don't. Look more closely; if you go into the city screens for those cities, you'll see that they're actually demanding something else.

What happens is this: when a city decides to demand a resource, it picks one at random from the list of ones you don't have yet. For obvious reasons, this means that Neutronium demands would get more common as the game goes on, since it'll always be on the list of things you don't have yet. So, I inserted a start-of-turn check; if any city demands Neutronium (or any luxury with a tech prerequisite), the game will cancel that demand and pick another at random for that city, even if you have the tech required.

Since the demand action happens at the start of the turn naturally, what happens is that you'll see the notification that Washington demands Neutronium, followed IMMEDIATELY by a second notification that Washington now demands, say, Silk. The Neutronium demand never actually kicks in; I just can't stop the original notification, resulting in a double notification. So when this happens, look for the second notification. Or, just go into the city screen for that city to see what it's demanding now.

Now, if by random chance it re-picks Neutronium on that second random draw, then it'll simply wait until the start of the NEXT turn to re-pick. So you might, on rare occasions, see the Neutronium demand stick around for a turn. But unless you've already acquired every other luxury in the game (not likely), it'll quickly be replaced by something else.

So if you acquire every luxury before Neutronium all your cities will demand it every turn?
Flawed workarund right there
Edit for clarity: Kidding

Oh and BTW in case you wonder why I keep suggesting mildly ******ed stuff ... It's partly because I'm bored, but also cos I've got this notion that bouncing ideas is good for creativity

 

[Darsnan]

Hi Spatz,

sorry I haven't been posting much lately - been real busy with RL. One thing I encountered this evening was that I lost the UN Vote to the English (they had two cities left!?! ) but I chose the option to "play a few more turns". I then tried to build spaceship parts, however I couldn't mate them to the spaceship: I could move the parts into my capital city, but the option to mate the parts to the spaceship never occured. Since the Spaceship isn't a Vctory condition in your mod, then should this happen?
Anyways, I am still enjoying your mod - just not getting to playtest as much as I had in the past.

D

 

[Spatzimaus]

So if you acquire every luxury before Neutronium all your cities will demand it every turn?
Flawed workarund right there
Edit for clarity: Kidding

Don't think that that didn't occur to me; it's the main reason for the 1-turn delay if it re-picks Neutronium, since I didn't want it getting stuck in an infinite loop. I COULD explicitly parse for every other resource, and abort the process if every single resource available has already been picked, but the overhead involved in that quickly grows too large, so I decided not to.

There are several issues like this, where under extreme situations my fix can make things worse for the player. But in nearly every one of those cases, the triggering event is something that can only happen LONG after you've already won the game. While I understand the temptation to play that one...more...turn, it's not something I'll lose sleep over.

For instance, take the Ascetic Virtues. The version of it I've added to v.1.04 is this: in addition to unlocking Titan units, it also gives you +2 Great Person Points in your capital for each Great Improvement (Academy, Manufactory, etc.) in your entire empire. So if you have three Academies and two Manufactories scattered around your empire, then your capital will gain 6 Scientist and 4 Engineer points per turn. (Plus whatever percentages you get from the Garden, National Epic, etc. At the moment, Citadels don't count because I haven't figured out how to increment the Great General spawn cycle.) This is intended to drastically increase the rate at which Great People spawn during the Nanotech Era, especially when combined with the Temple of Gaia, in preparation for the transcendence.

Now, you ask, why put those points in the capital? Why not have each city gain points based on what's local to them? Simple, really: I can't do that without a LOT more work. And I don't mean programming work, I mean processing cycles; I'd need to waste a huge amount of time looping over every hex on the map, figuring out who owns it, seeing if that player has the Ascetic Virtues, and then figuring out which city works that tile. A huge amount of overhead for such a simple bit of code. Now, if I had code that already looped over the entire map then it'd be easy enough to insert this logic into it, but I don't (yet). The closest I come to that is the Terraforming code, and that only triggers if it sees someone has just completed a new terraforming project; since it won't loop on most turns, it doesn't help to combine the logics. I COULD limit the Ascetic loop to only trigger once the game's reached the Fusion Era, but the every-turn nature would still slow things down badly once you reached that point.

Oh and BTW in case you wonder why I keep suggesting mildly ******ed stuff ... It's partly because I'm bored, but also cos I've got this notion that bouncing ideas is good for creativity

Being bored is pretty much a prerequisite for message boards. I mean really, I'm sitting at work right now, waiting for a pile of data to process (cue the obligatory xkcd strip), and this is pretty much all I can do. If I were at home, I'd either be playing a game or modding one.

And don't get me wrong; I'm not trying to sound dismissive of other people's ideas. But I think about this mod a LOT; you should see my notebooks (yes, plural) detailing every potential change I've ever considered since I started the mod last year. Heck, I added half a page of ideas today during my lunch break! Things like:
> Children's Creche: bump it from (+8 food, -1 happiness) to add even more food, and -2 happiness? (Probably not.)
> Nanohospital: should I change the (+1 research per 4 population) to be +1 per 2, or should I split it as (+1 research and +1 food per 4 population)? (Probably split research/food.)
> Right now, there are certain buildings that give extra bonuses (+1 gold or +1 production, or more) for most of the luxury resources... except for Gems, Furs, Silk, Spices, and Cotton. Should I find ways to add bonuses related to those to certain simple buildings, like the Opera House or Museum? (Silk and Cotton sort of make sense for the Opera House, and Furs and Gems kinda fit with a museum... not in 1.04, but I'll try something out for 1.05.)
> Same as above, for Strategics? Forge and Stables for iron and horses, but there's really nothing after that. A few buildings that consume Aluminum or Coal, but nothing that requires local deposits. (Maybe later.)
> Should the Mint give +2 gold if you have a local Neutronium, like it does for gold and silver? (Maybe. Check tonight.)
> The Weather Paradigm has two basic problems: +10% to food is proving to be just a little too strong for a Wonder, and second, that it always goes to whoever builds the spaceship first. Should I drop it to +5%, and change it to a National Wonder so that anyone can make one? (Maybe later; this ties into a known issue where some AIs don't prioritize the spaceship nearly enough since they still see it as a "victory" condition.)
> I need to re-examine all tech costs starting in the Industrial; in my last few games, the number of turns per tech has steadily decreased as time went on, too quickly. (Tonight.)
> Nanoreplicator should get +1 happiness. (Do it.)

See what I mean? Most of these will either get dropped, or will be added without comment; I only tend to explicitly ask about ideas when I'm ambivalent enough or if it's REALLY important.

Despite all of this, I still plan to get a new version out tonight or tomorrow. Once that's done, the post-patch balance pass will be complete, and it's time to make another attempt at custom unit models.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Since the Spaceship isn't a Vctory condition in your mod, then should this happen?

Because it IS a Victory condition in my mod; it's just got the <WinsGame> flag turned off. This is why you needed to keep the Science victory turned on in previous versions, and why I stopped giving you the option of turning it off in 1.03; without it, I couldn't do the space race.

This has been a major headache for me. If I remove the Victory entry and leave the Projects, then you'd be able to still make spaceship parts and you'd be able to sacrifice them in your capital, but you wouldn't get the launch animation and it wouldn't show up in the Victory Progress UI. (My spaceship-related logics would still work, though, since they key off of project completion.) I could hack the progress UI to force it to show the space race in spite of this, but that's a lot of work too.

But I'll probably do it, because I discovered something about the AI. Basically, when you get to the Industrial-ish era, the AI picks a single Victory path, whether it's conquest, spaceship, culture, or diplomacy. Presumably Transcendence is on that list too, but I'm not sure.
The result is that it seems that the AIs will often pick one of the other victories to pursue, put the spaceship as a low priority, and just not build the parts regardless of their Flavor ratings. What I'm going to try out (in 1.05) is to see what happens when I break the Project-Victory link; will the AI know to move spaceship parts to his capital? And will it cause him to try making more parts of a specific type than he needs (2 cockpits, for instance)?

 

[Spatzimaus]

I hope that this is really the last heavy balance changes to adjust for what the patch did. I'm now going to focus more on art assets for a bit.

v.1.04:
BALANCE:
* The big one: the Market, Bank, Stock Exchange, and their various UBs were all lowered to +20% Gold. If you want more gold, take some Commerce policies.
* Great People no longer cost unit maintenance. This mainly helps with Great Generals, but it also applies to random great people that the AIs would keep around when it hadn't figured out what to use them for.
* I'd changed the Library (and Paper Maker UB) to add +1 Culture when I reduced their research benefits, but this was somehow removed. I've put it back, because there was a real problem with early-game Culture, especially now that the Colosseum no longer produces any.
* Fixed the help text for the Eiffel Tower to say +2 Happiness instead of +5.
* The culture bonus at Free Speech wasn't being added correctly. It's fixed now.
* The yield increase to Wells at Lasers was changed from +1 Gold to +1 Production.
* Instead of the previous boost to the U.N.'s culture, it now adds 25% to Great Person production in its host city.
* The base Commerce policy now, in addition to adding 25% to gold in your capital, adds 25% to production when building a financial building (Market, Bank, Stock Exchange).
* The Naval Tradition policy (Commerce Branch), in addition to its boosting of naval units, increases production by 50% when building a Harbor or Seaport. Not a huge benefit, since these are pretty cheap, but it adds a bit of flavor.
* The Trade Unions policy (Commerce branch) now adds +1 production to all cities in addition to its road maintenance reduction.
* The Merchant Navy policy (Commerce branch), instead of +2 production per coastal city, now adds +10% to trade route income. This is in addition to adding +1 gold per Harbor or Seaport.
* The Military Base also gives +5 XP to Land units. Combined with the Arsenal, Barracks, and Army, this brings the total XP pre-future to 30 for land and sea, and 20 for air units. This amount was deliberate.

CONTENT:
* Increased the late-era tech cost scaling. This is especially noticeable as you get to the late Fusion and Nanotech Eras. I'm going to keep a closer eye on this one for a bit.
* The reduction in the Stock Exchange (from 33% to 25%) to compensate for the added resources is now removed, since it would conflict with the change in the Balance mod. If you use the Content mod but not the Balance, be warned. Yet another case where the two mods are really intended to work together.
* Disabled the "Reload Landmark System" flag. This flag is supposed to tell the game to override the Landmark art defines file, but it doesn't seem to actually do so regardless, and this flag has been linked to some crash bugs. This is the big stability issue. I still get the occasional freeze with the DX11 executable, but I haven't been able to crash the DX9 executable since fixing this.
* The Ascetic Virtues, in addition to unlocking Titan units, now also adds +2 Great Person Points to your capital for each Great Improvement in your territory, of the correct type. (That is, if you have three Academies in your empire, your capital will gain 6 extra Great Scientist points per turn.) This value is multiplied by the GP modifier for your capital, so you'll want to put the National Epic there. The Flavor values for this project were adjusted accordingly.
* Projects, World Wonders, and National Wonders now include an explicit label in red text in their Help tooltips to indicate which type they are. Similarly, units that are limited to 1 per player/team (currently only the Subspace Generator and Gravship) will say "Hero Unit", while those that are limited to 1 in the world (not used) will say "Legendary Unit"; units will also say their combat class (Armor, Gunpowder, etc.) in the help text now, so that you don't have to go to the Civilopedia to find that info out. While this is purely cosmetic, and can easily be removed if needed, I've found it very handy, and I MADE the mod. Presumably it'd be even more valuable for the rest of you.
* Increased the Flavor values for all custom National Wonders by 10-20. These national wonders should now be seen as MORE desirable to build than a normal Wonder of the same era. This was especially noticeable for the KGB, Hollywood, etc. early wonders, where the AI often wouldn't build the full set and so wasn't getting the tech stealing/specialist boosts.
* Because of the hotfix to Finisher costs, the exponent in the Policy cost equation had been increased by 0.01 in the vanilla game. I did the same in my mod.
* Year numbers have been fixed, again, on all speeds. I think this'll do it; you'll still get strange year numbers if you start the game in a later era, but an Ancient start should be tuned correctly. The year numbers might still fall apart in the future eras, but it should be more or less accurate up until then.
* The Great Empath no longer costs unit maintenance.
* Buildings that add a percentage to Food output (like the Water Mill) will now say so in the automated help text, like they do for all other Yields. While this should really go in the Balance mod, other changes to InfoTooltipInclude.lua were made in this mod (specifically the negative happiness on buildings), so I can't split the change.
* In addition to its effects on the yields of Bonus resource tiles, the Pholus Mutagen adds 25% to Food production in its host city.
* Instead of adding +1 research per 2 population in its host city, the Network Backbone now adds +1 research per specialist in ALL cities. It's much stronger now, since its old effect was from back when it was in the Digital Era. It still adds gold to its host city.
* Used the quote audios from the removed Future Era techs to introduce each future era, at least until I gain the ability to add my own sounds.
* Added a few more lore entries. All that's left are some Nanotech-era buildings.
* Clinical Immortality adds +1 food per population, instead of the old +1 per 2 population. This was necessary since the Ambrosia resource is a bit less valuable than before thanks to the Happiness changes.
* Cleaned up the help text for the Nuclear Era techs to reflect the new positions of several wonders..
* Fixed the help text for Penicillin, which wasn't being used at all before because of a typo in the Update.
* The Labor Mech was changed from an Energy unit to an Armor unit. Among other things, this means that it'll now use the GDR attack animations correctly.
* The user will no longer have the ability to turn on Quick Combat at the setup menu. It conflicted with too many abilities.
* The "New Random Seed" option in the setup menu will now default to ON. I just like it that way.
* Instead of Nationalism being a prerequisite for Socialism, it's now not a prerequisite for anything and requires Planned Economy. THe reason for this is that with the way Finishers trigger, I don't want branches to always end on the same policy. Honor and Autocracy are the only two remaining branches where there's only one possible policy to finish with.
* Instead of +10 Happiness, Eudaimonia gives 1 food, production, gold, and science per 3 population in your capital. The doubled Empath happiness is unchanged. The original version's happiness is no longer needed with the changes made to the other Tradition policies in the last patch. Given that this policy isn't available until the mid-Fusion, your capital will generally be size 30ish.
* The Nanohospital, in addition to the +1 science per 4 population, also gives +1 food per 4 population.
* The Nanoreplicator gives +1 Happiness, in addition to its other benefits.
* The Green Policy gives +1 food for a Centauri Preserve, Brood Pit, or Temple of Gaia in addition to its earlier food bonuses.
* The Thought Control Policy removes the unhappiness penalty from the Gravity Shield as well as the Children's Creche.
* The Wealth Policy's bonus for sea resources was increased to +1 production and +1 gold, instead of just +production.

PLAYER PACK:
* No changes. I'm going to try putting a few custom maps in the next version.

------------------------------------------
Some comments.

The biggest balance issues are mostly resolved now, I think. My philosophy is simple:
If you don't take the Commerce or Order branches, you'll always struggle with money; you can make profits without it, especially in Golden Ages, but never enough to go on massive buying sprees. So, when I'm testing money balance, I don't take either of these.
If you don't take the Piety, Tradition, or Freedom branches, you'll always struggle with Happiness (and often Culture) unless you get some World Wonders of the appropriate types. Same as above.
If you don't take the Rationalism branch, you'll always struggle with research rates, never pulling far ahead of your competitors.

So I'm hoping that this'll do it; the Gold balance seemed good to me, at least up until the Fusion Era, and the Happiness seemed to work pretty well, too. I'm still tweaking research rates, and my big concern is a runaway tech leader sweeping up all the future-era Wonders. But it's still an ongoing process.

As you might have noticed, nearly every change I've made to policies in the last two versions has been to make them more powerful; the Commerce changes in this version are just the latest round of this. I don't want to get into a "power creep" situation, so if it turns out to be too much I'll either reduce a few, or increase the culture costs of policies so that you'll have fewer of them. For this, I need to know how easy people find it to win a Cultural victory; do you get close to having 5 branches by the mid-Fusion, in a typical game?

 

[Shumpitostick]

I tried the mod and I think that's the best CIV V mod ever made!
But i'm having one small trouble with it: When I enter the social policies page the close button looks like it had been pushed off the screen. The policies with your extended part are taking all the page and the close button doesn't appear so I can't exit the screen.
Can you help me with this problem? I have version 1.03 and my screen resolution is 1024x768. I can't play this way

 

[Spatzimaus]

I have version 1.03 and my screen resolution is 1024x768. I can't play this way

The resolution is the problem. In the vanilla game, the Policies box is set to be 1024x768, regardless of what resolution you're playing at; if you're playing at 1024x768 it'd fill your entire screen, but at higher resolutions it's just a small area in the middle. To add this new area to the Policies menu, I obviously had to make it bigger, so it's now 943 down.

What I can try is to add a scrollbar. I'll see if that works, and if so it'll be in 1.05. Since I generally play 1280x960 Windowed, I haven't had problems. So the question is, are you playing on a laptop or something where 1024x768 is the best it can handle, or is it possible for you to turn it up a bit?

 

[Jayman1000]

I dont know if this is a general issue of vanilla civ, but when a unit has to many abilities then the unit icon graphic will cover the first four abilities making it impossible to read what they are.

 

[Spatzimaus]

It's an issue of vanilla civ. It's not the first four it's covering; it's stacking the icons from right to left, and if there are more than eight or nine icons then EVERY additional one is covered, so it could in theory have problems with an almost infinite number of them.

It's just that in this mod, the future units tend to have a LOT more abilities than those in the vanilla game, because I prefer units to get more powerful through getting more abilities instead of just ramping up the combat strength. So you won't see it happen often in the vanilla game, while you will see it in this mod.

Now, I've looked into it, and I probably WILL alter the Lua function that draws those icons to force it into making multiple rows. It just takes time, but I was actually thinking of doing that today.

 

[dinobot386]

Ran a game last night and didn't get a single crash, what you did last patch seems to work, can even replace improvments more often

 

[Spatzimaus]

Now, I've looked into it, and I probably WILL alter the Lua function that draws those icons to force it into making multiple rows. It just takes time, but I was actually thinking of doing that today.

It worked. Took a few hours, but I changed the Unit panel just enough to add a second row of promotion icons. I've attached a screenshot below; this is on the "small" UI (which seems to be the default), since the large-icon UI didn't change nearly as noticeably. It alternates top row with bottom, and you can now have about 18 promotions before it starts overlapping with the picture, instead of 10ish. The box is now 32 pixels taller, but I lowered the width by 48 pixels, so it's not taking up any more screen real estate than before.

And I even managed to use some of the space room created by this process to add an Edit button that'll let you rename units even when they don't have a promotion pending. This was always something that just really annoyed me. (It's in the upper-left corner of the box on the small UI; on the large UI it'll be at the left end of the promotion area.)

(Oh, and you might want to look at the rest of the picture, too. Might be some interesting things there...)

 

[dinobot386]

OMG, YES!!!

That picture just made my night

 

[Spatzimaus]

That picture just made my night

Yes, yes, I know, having an Edit button is a big deal. It took about three hours to get right, but it's something I've wanted for a long time.

-----

To be fair, those units were the easy ones to convert; they were only a single object with a single texture, and had no animations to translate over. There's one other that isn't shown, the Orbital Death Ray, but I couldn't easily show two satellite weapons at once.

Basically you have, from the left:
Gravship*, Colony Pod, Subspace Generator, Gravtank, Isle of the Deep, and a Combat Engineer. The Combat Engineer is actually just three workers and two Great General jeeps at the moment, I'm still trying to translate a bulldozer model over to replace the jeeps.

*- I'm actually looking to have certain key units have civ-specific models, with three or four variations. So some civs might have the Gravship that looks like a Narn Cruiser, but I've also got an Earth Alliance cruiser from B5, a PK Command Carrier from Farscape, and so on. I want to do something similar with the Needlejet, since there are so many possible aircraft models to use. Possibly the Leviathan and Gravtank also, if I can find a couple more of each. You'll notice that most of the unit types I mentioned are ones that don't need any animations; ships just sit there and fire, they don't have any arms to animate or anything.

Now, none of those have any animations or combat effects. They move, and that's about it. But since that's all the previous placeholders did, I'm okay with that.

 

[dinobot386]

On another note, the change to the market etc. has made a HUGE difference, gold is no longer pouring through my empire like candy, and happiness is taking a hit as I try to build sparingly to stay out of debt

 

[Panda_Power]

OMG, YES!!!

That picture just made my night

All of the units in your screenshot are included in the latest version?