HephMod: a mod combo-pack emphasizing balance, realism, and historical flavor

[Hephaistion]

I've only been playing this mod for a few weeks, but want to thank Hephaistion for all the effort; it looks like a terrific mod. One question: I'm a (very) amateur mod-modder, and noticed that the python zCivics module had been in the earlier version of HephMod, but is no longer present in the new beta. Is it gone for good, or will be reappear in a later version?

I realize zCivics is a little kludge-y, but I like having the ability to tie units and buildings to a particular civics choice (I've been experimenting with having two distinct civics choices available for Catholic-Protestant and Sunni-Shia, as a shorthand way of handling religious schisms, and zCivics made that very easy).

Sorry for the VERY late reply here -- you're right, I used to use zebra's code by way of Orion's Inquisitor mod to make Inquisitors only recruitable under Organized Religion and Theocracy. In the last RevDCM update, they had their own Inquisitor code in place, so I switched over wholesale, and I believe that detail of the Inquisitor mod dropped out of the Python. It may reappear, and I'm always toying in my mind with possibilities for civic-specific units, especially the military civics, so it is possible that this function will make an appearance again.

In the meantime, this is a very easy Python mod to do yourself: I'll refer you to Zebra himself's thread that is very clear on how to do this: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=224038

 

[Hephaistion]

Hey folks, for those of you still out there, this has been a very busy week for HephMod, and you can look forward to the BETA D release very soon. I've been on vacation, so I've had a lot of time to implement some new features and do a lot of redesigning/balancing. Some things you can look forward to:

A new civic in each category and lots of modifications to the civics for overall balance and cross-category integration, including: Absolutism, Meritocracy, Colonialism, Agrarianism, Fanaticism and Conscript Army.

New fanatic units, which can only be built if running the Fanaticism civic

New Elite National units that use the hero promotions and can only be built under specific military civics, including: Noble Chariot (Warrior Caste), Phalanx (Citizen Army), Man-at-Arms (Professional Army), Cavalier (Vassalage), Musket Guards (Conscript Army), Elite Cavalry (Military Schools) and the Pride of the Fleet (Total War).

Some important changes to unit stats making recon units (which now includes the skirmisher) and scout aid promotions a significant part of military strategy

Units go up in level more slowly now, making elite units far more valuable a commodity and balancing the wide variety of powerful promotions available in the game

Religion workover, both going back to abbamouse and Eusebius roots and introducing some innovations (still in Python experimental stage, so I'm keeping a lid on them for the moment)

Stay tuned (unless you're a Civ 5 zombie by now and are never looking back ...)

In playtest now! If you'd like to help out, I'm looking for cool gfx and buttons to represent the new elite units -- suggestions are welcome!

 

[Merce_ar]

@Hephaistion

Hi there,I've watching your mod for quite a while,one of its features says "added flavor units"....I've been wondering.....Do those new units have "polished" icons? (I know it might seem a silly thing but its has a nice feeling watching those nice unit icons )

Second,Is there any way to disable one or more features (such as the added religions and support for larger armies?)

And finally,Can I add this nation :http://www.taringa.net/posts/juegos/3539972/Civilization-IV-MOD---Civilizacion-Argentina.html?
I ask that because that one in particular has a very detailed UU,outstanding leader portraits and well chosed traits.

Thanks for answering,your mod seems like a real alternative to Total Realism

keep up the good work

 

[Hephaistion]

@Hephaistion

Hi there,I've watching your mod for quite a while,one of its features says "added flavor units"....I've been wondering.....Do those new units have "polished" icons? (I know it might seem a silly thing but its has a nice feeling watching those nice unit icons )

Second,Is there any way to disable one or more features (such as the added religions and support for larger armies?)

And finally,Can I add this nation :http://www.taringa.net/posts/juegos/3539972/Civilization-IV-MOD---Civilizacion-Argentina.html?
I ask that because that one in particular has a very detailed UU,outstanding leader portraits and well chosed traits.

Thanks for answering,your mod seems like a real alternative to Total Realism

keep up the good work

Thanks for your interest. I don't use "polished' icons for units (I'm quite sure I don't, since I actually don't know what you're talking about!). Some features are more easily disabled than others:

"Increased support for early armies" is implemented through military civics that give you more free units. Citizen Army is available earlier in the game than vanilla Vassalage and gives you 50% more free units, while Heph Vassalage gives 3x as many free units as vanilla. To change these, just change "FreeUnitsPopulationPercent" in CivicInfos.xml for these two civics ("0" for Citizen Army and "10" for Vassalage).

Religions are a little trickier. I didn't add any religions to the game, so I assume you mean the changes I made to the game's religions. This part is not modular, so you'd have to make the changes manually. For buildings, just replace the entries for all the religious buildings in BuildingInfos.xml (temples and shrines are different, but I didn't add any religious buildings in the current public version). To change the commerce bonuses and spread rates back to vanilla, just replace ReligionInfos.xml with the one from BtS' assets folder. To get rid of spiritual promotions, all you'd have to do is remove the free promo bonus from the Spiritual trait in TraitInfos.xml (Spiritual is pretty powerful as it is with all those extra happy bonuses).

There shouldn't be any problem with adding new civs to the game. Just be sure to use the existing UnitInfos.xml units as a template for the UU, since RevDCM adds a number of tags to that file. Any traits for the civ that HephMod doesn't use will have to be added to TraitInfos.xml and any Python those traits use will have to be merged (which I might be able to help you with, if necessary).

 

[Merce_ar]

Hi,its me again,i've been playing your mod,and if there is something I can assure you,Roosevelt is f****** unbalanced,I mean,look at his two main bonuses:
1+ Health
1+ Hammer plus double production of Aqueduct (!),Forge (!),factory (!!) and hospital(!!!)
-50% civic cost
and lastly +25% production of workers!
That is just overpwnage! I was able to expand and grow so fast (marathon) that I managed to glob 3 other civs before 1000 AD (Mind you im not so good!)

Almost forget,a few minor quirks:
-The description for Consumption is missing.
-For the above you can use this picture Shop Cart

EDIT:How can I edit the civics?
Sorry if I bother you making those n00b questions,but im starting to take an interest in modding.
That's all for now.

PS:I think that your mod is great one,it just needs a few fixes and it might become one of the most balanced ever made!

 

[Hephaistion]

Hi,its me again,i've been playing your mod,and if there is something I can assure you,Roosevelt is f****** unbalanced,I mean,look at his two main bonuses:
1+ Health
1+ Hammer plus double production of Aqueduct (!),Forge (!),factory (!!) and hospital(!!!)
-50% civic cost
and lastly +25% production of workers!
That is just overpwnage! I was able to expand and grow so fast (marathon) that I managed to glob 3 other civs before 1000 AD (Mind you im not so good!)

Almost forget,a few minor quirks:
-The description for Consumption is missing.
-For the above you can use this picture Shop Cart

EDIT:How can I edit the civics?
Sorry if I bother you making those n00b questions,but im starting to take an interest in modding.
That's all for now.

PS:I think that your mod is great one,it just needs a few fixes and it might become one of the most balanced ever made!

Thanks for the input -- the bonus threshold traits are always tricky and I always find myself staring at Industrious and wondering whether it's too much, especially when Slavery also gives you +1 production from mines. I tend to judge balance by how well the AI does and I don't see the AI always dominating as Roosevelt, and I never play America.

Civics can be edited in Assets/GameInfo/CivicsInfo.xml. The tags are pretty obvious in that file. As to descriptions, I haven't added any descriptive text for any of the new civics ... strategy text is at the bottom of my priority list but will be added for the final 1.0 release (which I'm daring to speculate is only one or two more BETA releases away).

Don't apologize -- if I never asked any noobish questions, HephMod would never have been made! I owe a lot to the REALLY advanced and helpful modders around here, like zebra9, Kael, glider, phungus, jdog, theLopez and others. If I can help folks with basic stuff and save their time for the really hard stuff, I'm happy to do it!

 

[Merce_ar]

I might sound like an ignorant but...isnt Republic the same as Representation?

EDIT:Been thinking about last history class....Your mod would take a great leap towards realism if you include that mod which adds alotsa ships and a special kind:
The merchant ship which allows you to make profit from sending it to a foreign city.
As anybody who studied history should know,England is what is today thanks to the rule of the seas which allowed them to control the commerce.

EDIT:You'll understand this:
"OH YEAH!"
xD

 

[Hephaistion]

I might sound like an ignorant but...isnt Republic the same as Representation?

EDIT:Been thinking about last history class....Your mod would take a great leap towards realism if you include that mod which adds alotsa ships and a special kind:
The merchant ship which allows you to make profit from sending it to a foreign city.
As anybody who studied history should know,England is what is today thanks to the rule of the seas which allowed them to control the commerce.

EDIT:You'll understand this:
"OH YEAH!"
xD

A Republic is not the same as Representation. The broadest definition of a Republic is simply, "not a monarchy." Most Republics in pre-modern history were actually oligarchies, that is, a government ruled by a small, elite group of individuals, usually the richest men of the city/nation. The Roman Republic, for example, began as basically an oligarchy (senators were the wealthiest class of people), but later expanded to form checks on the power of the senatorial class by creating a plebeian assembly and officers called tribunes, both of which represented the interests of the common people. Even in this case, however, senators were NEVER elected by the people nor even thought to repesent them ... they were there to make decisions for the good of the state, NOT represent the will of the people. Italian and German Republics of the Middle Ages and Renaissance were dyed-in-the-wool oligarchies and never even pretended to represent the common people.

Representative democracy as we know it came from Enlightenment (18th-century) European ideals (Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, et al). Ancient Greek democracies like Athens, where the citizens were actually legislators themselves (with some checks, depending on the time period), are the closest pre-Enlightenment government form to Civ's "Representation" (achievable by building the Parthenon!), though they were technically a direct democracy, not a representative one. After the Peloponnesian War, when Athens' power waned and she was no longer able to enforce democratic governments on tribute cities, most Greek cities went back to being oligarchies. In the ancient world, democracy was a flash in the pan.

Ooh, kind of went off there. Feel free to ignore lecture. (I'm a teacher in real life ... can you tell?)

BTW, Carthage was also a Republic during the Punic Wars. Also, if anyone would like to let me know how a different game as Roosevelt goes, that would be helpful. One game looking unbalanced may not mean that his trait combination actually is unbalanced: if the AI had poor starting locations, or revolution troubles, or a wide variety of variables, that might have made them ripe for the picking. Also, what difficulty level are you playing?

 

[Hrnac]

Outstanding mod Hephaistion!!! keep up the good work. I share your feelings about Civ 5 and am glad to see a few modders continue their work with Civ 4. I am looking forward to seeing where you go with your excellent mod.

-Hrnac

 

[Hephaistion]

Outstanding mod Hephaistion!!! keep up the good work. I share your feelings about Civ 5 and am glad to see a few modders continue their work with Civ 4. I am looking forward to seeing where you go with your excellent mod.

-Hrnac

Thanks for the encouragement! I've been working a great deal on the mod lately, as I've spent a lot of time at home recovering from a bacterial infection (-much health). It's pretty much in its final form -- I'm testing out some new features, code, civics and game parameters right now. After playtesting, I've rejected moving the hero promos to National units tied to military civics, as it just isn't as fun when you know you can have so many hero spearmen with Citizen Army, so many hero knights with Vassalage, etc., as when you build a new unit to discover to your surprise that it's a hero. The random element in this case is crucial for enjoyment, and the predictability of buildable hero units also means that you pretty much know exactly what the AI can throw at you in this respect, too (no more, "ha, he's fairly puny," but then, "Oh wait! His tiny army has three hero units in it!). There's nothing like getting your ass kicked by a hero horse archer to take your biochauvinist ego down a peg. I haven't really seen my new fanatic units in action yet, because I underpowered them and the AI isn't building them, but the AI does love the new Fanaticism civic that allows you to build them!

More updates to come ...

 

[Hrnac]

Not sure if this has been posted before but the Skirmishers are missing a text entry in their description. I think it was the Sid's tip section that has the placeholder text.

-Hrnac

 

[Merce_ar]

Hey,have you thought in lowering the Civics bonuses? I mean...they are like too....POWAAAAAAAA


EDIT:Maybe you would like to take a look to these civis (RoM BTS):

http://img72.imageshack.us/i/rom20civicsxa8.jpg/

 

[Hephaistion]

Civics are one feature of the game that are in a state of more or less constant tweaking. They are powerful because almost all of them come with significant drawbacks in addition to the bonuses they give. It's more important that the relative power of civics is balanced than that civics be more or less powerful; how powerful civics are translates to them having a greater or lesser effect on gameplay, that is, when civics have a greater effect (+ or -), which civics you choose make more of a difference in the game. I want civics to have a big impact on the game -- it matters what kind of social structure, legal system, economic system, etc., your society uses, and I want the player the struggle with strategic decisions about when to change and what to change to/from under what circumstances. The core features of these civics have been around in HephMod for a very long time, though as I said, there's constant tweaking, and I think are one of the things that make the mod interesting. What I watch for in terms of balance issues is when the AI favors one civic too much -- I like to see a nice spread of civics choices in the course of the game, and when I see the AI switching civics to take advantage of changing conditions, I feel I've hit a nice balance, making the civics different enough and effective enough that the AI makes the decision to switch.

If you have some specific comments on certain civics being unbalanced, or having effects that hurt the enjoyment of the game or that the AI abuses (players can self-regulate, so I'm frankly less concerned about "exploits"), I'd like to hear them. Some of the civics have actually been toned down from vanilla: for example, Hereditary Rule's +1 happy per military unit was way overpowered, IMO, so I gave +2 happy to barracks instead, and Representation's +science per specialist was split between science, gold and culture, reducing its research beef; some civics I've already changed for balance in my working version, though are Bureaucracy and Free Market, which I do feel are overpowered in the current public version; Labor civics are generally powerful; govt and legal civics were diluted when I introduced the Military Civics line, since those civics stole some of the features of the existing civics.

 

[Merce_ar]

ANother Thing....look at police state,the +3 unhapiness in 5 largest cities is ruled out by 1+ military unit in each city.Also,if you can,change that -25% great general to -15% or take out the hapiness bonus.
Im starting to love your mod

PD:As I play I will uploaded mistakes and things as such.
PD2:Look at the mod Advanced Cities or something like that.This mod makes cities far more realisitc and fun.

EDIT:Would be nice,realistic and historical to put a little unstability to the State Propert Civic,believe me,after being to the DDR/GDR,you can see people werent happy about the socialistic economoy....
EDIT2:have you thought about 1UPT or 5UPT?
EDIT3rafted army has +2 experience points.....doesnt seem too realistic or historical....see the malvinas conflict and the Rhodesian war,excelent examples of Proffesional armies vs standing armies.Remove that +2 XP and put a +10 production bonus to military units (Standing armies always had large numbers available)
EDIT4:Sorry again for my ignorance,but,does a confederate system appear in this mod?

 

[Hephaistion]

ANother Thing....look at police state,the +3 unhapiness in 5 largest cities is ruled out by 1+ military unit in each city.Also,if you can,change that -25% great general to -15% or take out the hapiness bonus.
Im starting to love your mod

PD:As I play I will uploaded mistakes and things as such.
PD2:Look at the mod Advanced Cities or something like that.This mod makes cities far more realisitc and fun.

EDIT:Would be nice,realistic and historical to put a little unstability to the State Propert Civic,believe me,after being to the DDR/GDR,you can see people werent happy about the socialistic economoy....
EDIT2:have you thought about 1UPT or 5UPT?
EDIT3rafted army has +2 experience points.....doesnt seem too realistic or historical....see the malvinas conflict and the Rhodesian war,excelent examples of Proffesional armies vs standing armies.Remove that +2 XP and put a +10 production bonus to military units (Standing armies always had large numbers available)
EDIT4:Sorry again for my ignorance,but,does a confederate system appear in this mod?

OK, lots of stuff here ... I'll address a few of the things you mention. Police state has been revamped: +1 happy per military unit moved to Martial Law, gpp and ggp modifiers removed, unhappiness in largest cities decreased to -1, espionage bonus increased, +2 happy from intelligence centers and unlimited spies. Standing Army has been removed, and Conscript Army added later in the tech tree (with Constitution: civil rights come with selective service) that trades xp for high conscript limit and military production bonus.

By "confederate system" do you mean different civs forming coalitions? This was experimented with in RevDCM, but they never got it working right, so they dumped it ... so, no. "City States" represents a loose confederation of cities internal to a given civ.

I've been experimenting with stability modifiers for various civics other than the ones already set up by RevDCM, with not so great results. In order to make the game challenging, I have to set the human revolution index modifier fairly high, and those stability modifiers really pile up in the long term if there are too many of them floating around. It's hard to suss out examples of state property in the real world, since all of our real-world examples are also police states ... are people unhappy because of communism or because they have no rights and their government is spying on them and disappearing people in the middle of the night? My gut instinct would say the latter, but that's just my opinion. That's the great thing about how easy it is to mod xml ... if you don't like a modder's bias, you can just change it yourself!

I can look at Advanced Cities, but you didn't really give me any reason to want to ... what does it actually do? If you want me to check it out, you should try to sell it a little ...

 

[Merce_ar]

Of course,Advanced cities allows you to have a more detailed manipulation of the cities,adding a new bar called "investment" which allows you to control the amount of "investment" on city,the higher the investment,the more bonus your city recibes,such as more tiles to harvest,etc.In the end its better to have a low science rate and a ultra high investment...if not,you shall suffer the consecuenses.

PD:'Bout the bias,yeah you're right,the thing is that I dont feel good with such so diverse civics and...strange (Martial Law for example,please give a example of a state or country which enfored Martial Law for a long term....),I mean,im the kind guy who goes for things which are very simplified such as:

GOVERMENT:
-Democracy.
-Communsim or Proletariat Dictatorship
-Despotism
-Monarchy
-Republic (or representation)

ECONOMY:
BARTER
MONOPOLY
MERCANTILISM
FREE TRADE
STATE PROPERTY

and so on

Thinking about it,have you seen Civilization Call To Power and/or Victoria Revolutions,they might be a great inspiration for your mod

PD2:Sorry about bad and disastrous grammar.....mind you im from Argentina and 15 years old....

 

[Hephaistion]

Advanced cities does sound interesting ... I'll have to see whether it's an SDK mod or not.

Martial Law is supposed to be a short term civic to use when your society is in real trouble of breaking apart at the seams. The AI does sometimes use it for a long period of time, though it can be used for any society where the military administrators overrule the normal legal system on a regular basis.

 

[Eusebius]

Hi Heph,

I just wanted to drop you a few lines of encouragement. I haven't tried Civ 5 yet, but I have been really enjoying using a mature Civ 4 with mature mods--and yours is my favorite. I have cobbled together my own mod-mashup built on a HephMod platform working very irregularly over the last six months. I thought I would put it out there for you to look at for ideas. Use anything you like in it. You can get it at: http://www.mediafire.com/file/5yynvg8g65rkroi/Eusebius-HephMod Beyond.rar

The only original work is a modular version of my world religions mod. It follows the WoC standard, but adds a lot of Python. No SDK changes. I have been meaning to release this on its own, but haven't gotten to it yet. It wasn't clear to me how to set up the BUG config file, so I added the callbacks old school in customeventmanager.

I tweaked a little of your stuff including the civics. One change that I feel rather strongly about is that I gave Warriors +50% versus Skirmishers to avoid Skirmishers being too powerful in the early game.

Beyond that, I also added Varietas Delectat and a number of things from Quote Capita.

Something I think I will change in future is to get rid of all the extra resources. I never seem to have happiness problems anymore because I get so much happiness out of them.

Oh, I took the six Varietas Delectat FPK files out of the rar to keep it at a reasonable size. Also, watch out when you unzip because I left the name as "HephMod Beyond"; don't accidentally overwrite anything.

Keep up the good modding!
Eusebius

 

[Hephaistion]

Hi Heph,

I just wanted to drop you a few lines of encouragement. I haven't tried Civ 5 yet, but I have been really enjoying using a mature Civ 4 with mature mods--and yours is my favorite. I have cobbled together my own mod-mashup built on a HephMod platform working very irregularly over the last six months. I thought I would put it out there for you to look at for ideas. Use anything you like in it. You can get it at: http://www.mediafire.com/file/5yynvg8g65rkroi/Eusebius-HephMod Beyond.rar

The only original work is a modular version of my world religions mod. It follows the WoC standard, but adds a lot of Python. No SDK changes. I have been meaning to release this on its own, but haven't gotten to it yet. It wasn't clear to me how to set up the BUG config file, so I added the callbacks old school in customeventmanager.

I tweaked a little of your stuff including the civics. One change that I feel rather strongly about is that I gave Warriors +50% versus Skirmishers to avoid Skirmishers being too powerful in the early game.

Beyond that, I also added Varietas Delectat and a number of things from Quote Capita.

Something I think I will change in future is to get rid of all the extra resources. I never seem to have happiness problems anymore because I get so much happiness out of them.

Oh, I took the six Varietas Delectat FPK files out of the rar to keep it at a reasonable size. Also, watch out when you unzip because I left the name as "HephMod Beyond"; don't accidentally overwrite anything.

Keep up the good modding!
Eusebius

Thanks so much, that's awesome! As you know from our working together in the past, I've long used your mod as inspiration for my own in the religions area. I'm excited to have some BtS updated Python from you to use in HephMod.

You know I just put out a merge of HephMod and Varietas, and even more funny is that in my current working version I've moved Skirmishers farther down the tech tree to Iron Working (you don't really see the use of sophisticated skirmishing tactics until the Israelites of the Judges period, as far as I can tell). Now, rather than a barbarian killer unit, they serve their intended purpose as an anti-melee option for metal-poor civs and hit-and-run support troops. Clay no longer makes people happy, either, but gives +1 health and bonus prod to granaries and aqueducts (ingredient for concrete and used to sift out impurities in grain), while Timber is now purely a strategic resource for navies and longbowmen (no health bonus).

I've been doing some religion work on the mod and have gone back to your original model in some respects. I've also been looking into implementing some the additional religions from World Religions as derivatives of the main religions: so if you have Hinduism, you could build the Sikhism founding building which would give you a resource (=Sikhism) that would in turn allow you to build Sikh religious buildings. This would enable me to add new sub-religions to the game without adding to the number of major religions (something I'm not such a fan of).

Anyway, looking forward to taking a look at what you've worked up, especially the Python. Thanks for thinking of me -- much appreciated!

 

[zarakand]

Hello, I have a question for this mod group. It seems like there is a lot of work currently being done on this mod. As someone who has never played this mod, am I better off waiting a few weeks and then coming back to download the next version?