LunarMongoose
King
MongooseMod 4.2a
for Beyond the Sword 3.19
FEATURE LIST
READ THESE IF NOTHING ELSE
DON'T FORGET TO BUILD YOUR PALACE, either when you finish Stone Building on a Prehistoric Era start or IMMEDIATELY on later-era starts. The first Palace is FREE and it is NOT automatic.
PRESS THE "Y" KEY TO BRING UP THE STATSMOD. This is shown in the mouseover for the little red button with a gold ribbon on it in the upper right corner button area, but I can imagine people not noticing that heh.
READ ABOUT THE LEADER CYCLING FEATURE ABOVE BEFORE ASKING WHY YOU'RE NOT GETTING THE LEADER YOU CHOOSE. ... Thanks.
READ ABOUT THE RELIGION SYSTEM ABOVE before asking why you can't found more than 2 religions.
I _AM_ aware half the text doesn't show up unless you PUT THE GAME IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE MODE in the Settings. I've customized a ton of strings and couldn't keep things organized over years of continuous development unless I deleted them down to just the English lines - sorry.
There is a good chance the upcoming K-Mod code merge that version 4.3 will be focused around will fix this, as Karadoc has expanded the language support code. And if not, I can RegEx copy the existing strings out eventually as a last resort, heh.
OTHER STUFF TO KNOW
Difficulty Levels
* TwilightLlama is intended for solo players. It is roughly equivalent to, umm, actually I'm not sure yet but it should be somewhere around Monarch.
* DarkMongoose is probably closest to Immortal, and is intended for cooperative players seeking a battle for mere survival.
* Both of these settings are significantly different from the vanilla ones. A few main points: AIs do not gain increasing levels of advantage in later eras; and barbarian land, water and city densities are all set MUCH higher than Deity.
* The vanilla difficulties have been slightly tweaked for use in the MongooseMod environment, mainly with the base city health/happiness levels and the Goody Hut results. They are otherwise nearly identical to vanilla and fully supported for use in the mod.
Interface
* The middle spending level buttons (the gray circles) set that spending type (research, culture or espionage) to the highest value that doesn't make gold income negative or change the other spending levels.
* Use the small PLE buttons to change the way unit icons in a tile are displayed (single line, rows, columns), or apply filters to only show certain types of units.
* There is an additional settings file for the mod itself: "MongooseMod/Options.ini". I've seen other mods add a tab to the actual in-game Options dialog for this purpose, but I haven't looked into how to do that yet, and this method was simple and easy, so for now it's staying the way it is, heh. The file can be edited just like "CivilizationIV.ini" in the User folder, so please be aware of it! It sets the initial default starting value whenever the game is launched for the Field-of-View slider on the main UI, and as of version 4.2a, also whether Alphabetical Sorting is on or not to start with in the Sevopedia.
Animals
* They do not instantly globally despawn when the barbs start like they do in vanilla.
* They are required to remain in their native Terrain and Feature types when moving and attacking.
* Animals CAN enter player borders now, and can even enter and destroy player cities, but will only do so as a consequence of their normal random movement, or b/c they are locked onto a target unit and trying to kill/eat it. The point being they will not DELIBERATELY beeline for player cities the way barbs do, but you still need to defend yourself now, as wild animals were a significant threat to early human settlements historically.
Barbarians
* Except for Wild Animals and land and sea monsters, they ignore combat odds and behave suicidally in order to prevent unmanageable levels from building up. This is the "primitive savage and brainless but still very deadly" interpretation of barbs, which is less realistic but more fun.
* They can spawn in any tile that is fogged to all human and AI players, regardless of proximity to other units including their own. Be careful.
* Barbarian ships are allowed to spawn in ocean tiles once they acquire ships that are valid to be there, ie Caravels and then Compass ships. This allows them to continue to have a SIGNIFICANT naval presence throughout the whole game.
* Barbarian transport ships spawn with a full complement of land attack units (chosen at random like standard land barbs), and they will immediately head for a coastline to unload them. These naval assaults will continue throughout the whole game due to the previous item.
Units
* The animal experience cap is 17, the barbarian experience cap is 50, and there is no cap when fighting AI units. These are all significantly higher than vanilla.
* The gap between experience levels stops increasing once it reaches 25 (which happens at 145 experience).
* Defenders can withdraw if they have withdrawal ability AND there is a "slow" unit (one without any withdrawal ability) owned by the same player in the same tile to cover their retreat. When a defending unit withdraws it remains in the same tile.
* Ships can fortify on water tiles, and gain 0-10% defense from doing so in 2% increments.
* Unit upgrades cost twice the hammer difference, plus zero. This is significantly cheaper than vanilla, and the Financial trait can lower this even further.
* Disbanding units provides gold equal to half their original hammer cost, but only if done in their own territory.
* Large lakes no longer enable military ships to be built, and military ships cannot enter them, ever.
* Ships now only require Open Borders status to use canals, ie Coastal Forts or Cities, owned by other players, rather than requiring full Friendly Territory status (which means either you're on the same Team, are their Master, or are their Vassal with Open Borders).
Terrain
* Mushrooms and Flood Plains are not removed when building a city on them, and retain their bonuses in the city tile.
* If a resource is present on the city tile, it will add its stats AFTER the minimum city tile stats of 2 food, 2 hammers and 1 commerce have been enforced, reducing the penalty for building on such tiles.
* The definition of a Lake vs an Inland Sea scales with map size, from 4 on Duel to 16 on Huge/HugeMongoose.
* Features can spread/grow into adjacent tiles regardless of the presence of units there, and can also grow/spread there if tile improvements are present as long as they are compatible (eg Camps which can exist in Forests and Jungles in the mod).
Goody Huts
* Huts that give free units spawn them at your capital, or if you don't have a capital yet (since the Cradle doesn't actually turn a city into a capital, only the Palace does) it spawns them in your first city. This is to eliminate the need to escort them potentially long distances back home, to prevent them from being able to help discover more huts in the area, to make them immediately useful back home, and to eliminate extended extra Supply cost from them not being home for a while.
* All of the vanilla turn and city restrictions on getting certain types of huts have been removed.
* Tech Huts can provide all techs from the Prehistoric Era (green color on the tech tree), and nothing else.
Free Technologies
* Goody Huts that give a tech, as well as the second Classic Literature quest completion option that now gives 2 free Classical Era techs, obey some nifty new rules. They favor more expensive techs (by approximately 2-to-1 odds for most vs least expensive), and they will avoid giving you a tech that you already have any research into (cuz that's just so darn annoying) UNLESS there are more than one such techs, in which case it assumes the player is trying to cheat the system (by herding it to the exact ones desired by putting one turn of research in everything else) and will ignore currently-spent research as a result.
Cities
* No production spent on anything a city can build ever decays any more. This was just too annoying so I took it out. You may not like the change, but I do so it's going to stay.
* Culture levels decay slowly over time when not being actively supported. This means that an enemy city you conquer will eventually become fully, 100% yours if you hold it long enough.
* Tile improvements that have upgrade levels, pretty much just the Cottage and Mountain Cottage series, are downgraded one level rather than destroyed when hit with things like Tornados, which is either more or less realistic depending on which natural disaster you're taking about (ie Volcanoes, heh), but which saves a lot of aggravation for the player.
* A city's great person mouseover (as well as the Great Person Bar on the main screen) display the FINAL odds breakdown of person types assuming things continue as they are currently, rather than the odds breakdown if the person were generated immediately (which is irrelevant). You can see what effect changing a specialist, for example, will have on the final person chances while there is still time for such decisions to matter.
* Great Person threshold levels no longer increase extra amounts beyond normal after every 10 Great People (and every 10 Great Generals, separately).
* The National Wonder limit per city is increased from 2 to 3 on Duel, Tiny, and Small maps only.
Research
* You receive a small amount of empire-level research at all times now. It doubles each time you move into a new era, but it is also scaled down on smaller world sizes and faster gamespeeds.
* Un-researched technologies in previous eras double in cost each time you move into a new era. They are still cheaper than techs in your current era, but are no longer effortless to pick up only a moderate amount of time later. This makes the neat long-distance secondary tech requirements on certain techs, units, and buildings meaningful, as was always intended.
Civics
* Civic categories have equal, uniform costs now: Medium Upkeep means Medium Upkeep, damnit. There are some minor drawbacks to this as was pointed out a while back, but overall I think it's much better this way.
Diplomacy
* ALL positive and negative diplomacy effects eventually expire now rather than some of them being permanent, and the expiration-chance-per-turn values have been more-or-less completely rewritten from vanilla to be a lot more realistic.
One City Challenge
* Human players are able to gain one extra city, by either conquest or culture flip, if they are in the Modern Era or later with a Prehistoric or Ancient start, if they are in the Future Era with a Classical or Medieval start, or if their existing city has reached the Transcendent culture level
for Beyond the Sword 3.19
FEATURE LIST
Spoiler :
READ THESE IF NOTHING ELSE
DON'T FORGET TO BUILD YOUR PALACE, either when you finish Stone Building on a Prehistoric Era start or IMMEDIATELY on later-era starts. The first Palace is FREE and it is NOT automatic.
PRESS THE "Y" KEY TO BRING UP THE STATSMOD. This is shown in the mouseover for the little red button with a gold ribbon on it in the upper right corner button area, but I can imagine people not noticing that heh.
READ ABOUT THE LEADER CYCLING FEATURE ABOVE BEFORE ASKING WHY YOU'RE NOT GETTING THE LEADER YOU CHOOSE. ... Thanks.
READ ABOUT THE RELIGION SYSTEM ABOVE before asking why you can't found more than 2 religions.
I _AM_ aware half the text doesn't show up unless you PUT THE GAME IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE MODE in the Settings. I've customized a ton of strings and couldn't keep things organized over years of continuous development unless I deleted them down to just the English lines - sorry.
There is a good chance the upcoming K-Mod code merge that version 4.3 will be focused around will fix this, as Karadoc has expanded the language support code. And if not, I can RegEx copy the existing strings out eventually as a last resort, heh.
OTHER STUFF TO KNOW
Difficulty Levels
* TwilightLlama is intended for solo players. It is roughly equivalent to, umm, actually I'm not sure yet but it should be somewhere around Monarch.
* DarkMongoose is probably closest to Immortal, and is intended for cooperative players seeking a battle for mere survival.
* Both of these settings are significantly different from the vanilla ones. A few main points: AIs do not gain increasing levels of advantage in later eras; and barbarian land, water and city densities are all set MUCH higher than Deity.
* The vanilla difficulties have been slightly tweaked for use in the MongooseMod environment, mainly with the base city health/happiness levels and the Goody Hut results. They are otherwise nearly identical to vanilla and fully supported for use in the mod.
Interface
* The middle spending level buttons (the gray circles) set that spending type (research, culture or espionage) to the highest value that doesn't make gold income negative or change the other spending levels.
* Use the small PLE buttons to change the way unit icons in a tile are displayed (single line, rows, columns), or apply filters to only show certain types of units.
* There is an additional settings file for the mod itself: "MongooseMod/Options.ini". I've seen other mods add a tab to the actual in-game Options dialog for this purpose, but I haven't looked into how to do that yet, and this method was simple and easy, so for now it's staying the way it is, heh. The file can be edited just like "CivilizationIV.ini" in the User folder, so please be aware of it! It sets the initial default starting value whenever the game is launched for the Field-of-View slider on the main UI, and as of version 4.2a, also whether Alphabetical Sorting is on or not to start with in the Sevopedia.
Animals
* They do not instantly globally despawn when the barbs start like they do in vanilla.
* They are required to remain in their native Terrain and Feature types when moving and attacking.
* Animals CAN enter player borders now, and can even enter and destroy player cities, but will only do so as a consequence of their normal random movement, or b/c they are locked onto a target unit and trying to kill/eat it. The point being they will not DELIBERATELY beeline for player cities the way barbs do, but you still need to defend yourself now, as wild animals were a significant threat to early human settlements historically.
Barbarians
* Except for Wild Animals and land and sea monsters, they ignore combat odds and behave suicidally in order to prevent unmanageable levels from building up. This is the "primitive savage and brainless but still very deadly" interpretation of barbs, which is less realistic but more fun.
* They can spawn in any tile that is fogged to all human and AI players, regardless of proximity to other units including their own. Be careful.
* Barbarian ships are allowed to spawn in ocean tiles once they acquire ships that are valid to be there, ie Caravels and then Compass ships. This allows them to continue to have a SIGNIFICANT naval presence throughout the whole game.
* Barbarian transport ships spawn with a full complement of land attack units (chosen at random like standard land barbs), and they will immediately head for a coastline to unload them. These naval assaults will continue throughout the whole game due to the previous item.
Units
* The animal experience cap is 17, the barbarian experience cap is 50, and there is no cap when fighting AI units. These are all significantly higher than vanilla.
* The gap between experience levels stops increasing once it reaches 25 (which happens at 145 experience).
* Defenders can withdraw if they have withdrawal ability AND there is a "slow" unit (one without any withdrawal ability) owned by the same player in the same tile to cover their retreat. When a defending unit withdraws it remains in the same tile.
* Ships can fortify on water tiles, and gain 0-10% defense from doing so in 2% increments.
* Unit upgrades cost twice the hammer difference, plus zero. This is significantly cheaper than vanilla, and the Financial trait can lower this even further.
* Disbanding units provides gold equal to half their original hammer cost, but only if done in their own territory.
* Large lakes no longer enable military ships to be built, and military ships cannot enter them, ever.
* Ships now only require Open Borders status to use canals, ie Coastal Forts or Cities, owned by other players, rather than requiring full Friendly Territory status (which means either you're on the same Team, are their Master, or are their Vassal with Open Borders).
Terrain
* Mushrooms and Flood Plains are not removed when building a city on them, and retain their bonuses in the city tile.
* If a resource is present on the city tile, it will add its stats AFTER the minimum city tile stats of 2 food, 2 hammers and 1 commerce have been enforced, reducing the penalty for building on such tiles.
* The definition of a Lake vs an Inland Sea scales with map size, from 4 on Duel to 16 on Huge/HugeMongoose.
* Features can spread/grow into adjacent tiles regardless of the presence of units there, and can also grow/spread there if tile improvements are present as long as they are compatible (eg Camps which can exist in Forests and Jungles in the mod).
Goody Huts
* Huts that give free units spawn them at your capital, or if you don't have a capital yet (since the Cradle doesn't actually turn a city into a capital, only the Palace does) it spawns them in your first city. This is to eliminate the need to escort them potentially long distances back home, to prevent them from being able to help discover more huts in the area, to make them immediately useful back home, and to eliminate extended extra Supply cost from them not being home for a while.
* All of the vanilla turn and city restrictions on getting certain types of huts have been removed.
* Tech Huts can provide all techs from the Prehistoric Era (green color on the tech tree), and nothing else.
Free Technologies
* Goody Huts that give a tech, as well as the second Classic Literature quest completion option that now gives 2 free Classical Era techs, obey some nifty new rules. They favor more expensive techs (by approximately 2-to-1 odds for most vs least expensive), and they will avoid giving you a tech that you already have any research into (cuz that's just so darn annoying) UNLESS there are more than one such techs, in which case it assumes the player is trying to cheat the system (by herding it to the exact ones desired by putting one turn of research in everything else) and will ignore currently-spent research as a result.
Cities
* No production spent on anything a city can build ever decays any more. This was just too annoying so I took it out. You may not like the change, but I do so it's going to stay.
* Culture levels decay slowly over time when not being actively supported. This means that an enemy city you conquer will eventually become fully, 100% yours if you hold it long enough.
* Tile improvements that have upgrade levels, pretty much just the Cottage and Mountain Cottage series, are downgraded one level rather than destroyed when hit with things like Tornados, which is either more or less realistic depending on which natural disaster you're taking about (ie Volcanoes, heh), but which saves a lot of aggravation for the player.
* A city's great person mouseover (as well as the Great Person Bar on the main screen) display the FINAL odds breakdown of person types assuming things continue as they are currently, rather than the odds breakdown if the person were generated immediately (which is irrelevant). You can see what effect changing a specialist, for example, will have on the final person chances while there is still time for such decisions to matter.
* Great Person threshold levels no longer increase extra amounts beyond normal after every 10 Great People (and every 10 Great Generals, separately).
* The National Wonder limit per city is increased from 2 to 3 on Duel, Tiny, and Small maps only.
Research
* You receive a small amount of empire-level research at all times now. It doubles each time you move into a new era, but it is also scaled down on smaller world sizes and faster gamespeeds.
* Un-researched technologies in previous eras double in cost each time you move into a new era. They are still cheaper than techs in your current era, but are no longer effortless to pick up only a moderate amount of time later. This makes the neat long-distance secondary tech requirements on certain techs, units, and buildings meaningful, as was always intended.
Civics
* Civic categories have equal, uniform costs now: Medium Upkeep means Medium Upkeep, damnit. There are some minor drawbacks to this as was pointed out a while back, but overall I think it's much better this way.
Diplomacy
* ALL positive and negative diplomacy effects eventually expire now rather than some of them being permanent, and the expiration-chance-per-turn values have been more-or-less completely rewritten from vanilla to be a lot more realistic.
One City Challenge
* Human players are able to gain one extra city, by either conquest or culture flip, if they are in the Modern Era or later with a Prehistoric or Ancient start, if they are in the Future Era with a Classical or Medieval start, or if their existing city has reached the Transcendent culture level
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