Legendary Headstart

[MariusMagnus]

Seeing the bonuses drastically buffed would be interesting, but I feel some would be far better than others. Getting 3-9 free techs or policies would be insane! Meanwhile, I feel the 3-9 extra settlers would be a bit too much to handle (I.E. a good way for instantaneous unhappiness) and could actually backfire if a couple of your neighbors got #9, #10, or #11. All of that said, however, the more I think about it the more chaotic fun it sounds like it could turn out to be! It would just have to be something tested extensively, I'd think.

 

[sman1975]

Generally speaking, it's more like 2-3 techs/policies, settlers,/workers, and most other units. The most I've seen spawn (through about 100 test games) is 6 units popping up for a bonus #13 - War Focus. It will definitely make managing barbs much easier, but will having 3 extra war chariots and a couple extra warriors be unstoppable? Of course, in the later Era start games, it's different - when those units are 3 modern armor and 2 mech inf units...

But your point about "chaos" is well-true. I've been watching all the other civs on the maps with their various bonuses, and I have to admit, I believe the buffed bonuses in V3 will provide that "you have to play this game differently because of these new opportunities" vibe I was shooting for. V2 just didn't provide the impetus I was looking for. The bonus was just a nice little "perk" that saved a little time, but didn't tempt you to try a different approach. I think V3 will do this much better.

 

[sman1975]

Published V3. Hopefully, it's OK. I spent 10 hours today in testing - using a combination of all bonuses, with cities and without cities, and starting at Ancient/Classical/Atomic/Information Eras. Not a single crash, which of course, makes me very, very nervous...


So far, seems like the new version is ok (been testing this morning). So, I'll file this one away for now. Time to work on V5 on my "Fantasy Army" mod...

Thanks again for all the help!

 

[MariusMagnus]

I just tried out v3. I initially forgot that bonuses are assigned on turn 1 now, so was a bit confused. Maybe you could send a notification to human players telling them that bonuses are assigned on turn 1, but I don't know if that's the general consensus. After all, I can be quite a dum-dum! Other than that, I think I might have got the greatest start of all time... I found El Dorado, 4 tiles away from my starting location, and I got 3 free social policies! Someone else managed to not only found a religion, but also reform it on the same turn, too, so this should be interesting...

 

[sman1975]

I updated the Steam narrative so that the "bonus award on turn 1" changes features more prominently. Can add some in-game notification if we see complaints in the discussions.

I'm hoping that a lot of people have that "hey - it's more legendary..." response when playing V3. I wanted the mod to "force" you to play the game differently, based on these bonuses. For example, if you get 2 Great Prophets awarded, you might play the game differently than you normally would. I'm sure if you got 9 extra combat units at the start, the game would be much, much different than than your normal start. If a neighboring civ gets 9 extra combat units, I can practically guarantee you'll be playing the game in a far different manner than normal...

Appreciate all your feedback. The mod is most definitely in a better place now than when you came on board. Thanks!

 

[MariusMagnus]

Really enjoying the buffed bonuses, but the Happiness bonus doesn't seem to be working properly. I noticed that the turn after the happiness is added, it just goes back to what it was before that. Are you using Player:SetHappiness()? I'm not sure if that actually works or not. It looks like it makes the change by changing happiness provided by the players difficulty level.

I went in with IGE, re-rolled until I got the Happiness bonus again, changed my city's population and therefore my empire's happiness, and sure enough I went from 27 happiness to 6 (29 from Difficulty Level to 9). It seems to me that whenever the game recalculates the player's happiness, it will get the player's difficulty level and just overwrite whatever changes were made by mods using SetHappiness(), unfortunately.

 

[sman1975]

Hey, @MariusMagnus! Thanks for the report. Unfortunately, you have correctly diagnosed what is obviously a flaw in the "Happiness" bonus. I did indeed use the Player:SetHappiness() method to bump happiness higher. It looked good in testing...

I don't remember if I played on a few turns afterwards or not. I've looked around and found more than a few posts about the ephemeral nature of the SetHappiness method. It is obviously not suited for adding happiness for anything longer than a few milliseconds of gameplay.

From what I've read, it looks like I probably need to use the "dummy building" approach to add the happiness as intended. It's not 100% perfect, since if that city is captured later (and assuming the "NoCapture" setting for the building is on), then the extra happiness goes away. OTOH, since we're talking about the civ's capital (almost certain), I suppose a few points of happiness movement won't really be all that important when the capital falls?

So, I'll add the dummy building change to the list of fixes for the next version. I think it's actually the only thing on the list ATM. If you think there's a better technique to implement a happiness bump, let me know.

And thanks again!!!

 

[MariusMagnus]

A dummy building could certainly work, and a possible workaround to losing the happiness upon losing your capital would be to use a dummy resource instead. You can grant the resource to players using Player:ChangeNumResourceTotal(ResourceType, Amount), and so long as the player is alive, they should have their happiness bonus.

The downsides to using resources is that I don't know if you can hide them from showing up as a luxury when the player checks their happiness, and I don't believe you'll be able to stack happiness with them as easily as you can with just using a dummy building (you'd have to create multiple resources with happiness counting in base 2, and give the player a copy of each unique resource to add up to the desired happiness).

In the end, each method has their advantages and disadvantages, with dummy buildings being easy to hide and stackable, and dummy resources being harder lose.

 

[sman1975]

Attached is the modified "LH_Functions.lua" file, as request by Steam user tylergray0602. This file changes the random bonus, and ALWAYS returns the Great People Bonus for human players only. AI civs will continue to receive random bonuses.

The attached file needs to be downloaded, then copied to the mod's LUA folder, usually some place like:

C:\Users\XXXX\Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\MODS\Legendary Headstart (v 3)\LUA

Where 'XXXX' is the user account you originally installed the game.


Note: you should probably rename the original 'LH_Functions.lua' file in the LUA folder to something like 'LH_Functions.sav'

After this, copy the downloaded file to the LUA folder.

You then need to rename the downloaded file from 'LH_Functions.txt' to 'LH_Functions.lua'

Please let me know if you have any problems. Good luck!

 

[BlueSmoke]

This is a great mod, thank you very much sman.
Could you tell me if it would be possible to trigger this mod in an existing save (mid game) by modifying the script? Or is it only for new games?