playtest feedback

[davidlallen]

A few posts above (#248) I mentioned that you should be able to negotiate with any civ organized enough to hold multiple cities. So the other (AI) players are what you have called minor civs.

It is certainly true that a lot of town/villages would survive the actual nuclear exchange, occuring on one day or a few hours. But, 20 years after, with barbs and mutants running around, I don't think there would be many town/villages left. They would have been eaten or resettled with other survivors. The goody huts you encounter, or refugees that appear in the ruins, are supposed to represent those.

There is a middle category which might be interesting, which is stalled, single city civs. A while back the FFH explorable lair thread was mentioned. One of the capabilities of this mod is to have goody huts that survive and allow you to interact in several ways. It's a cool idea but hard to integrate the code with Fury Road.

Several people have suggested "natural wonders" like The Glow, or a Boneyard, etc. I could certainly have a small, fixed size city as a natural wonder, so I will keep this idea on the list.

 

[davidlallen]

This leaves a problem. Domesticated animals do not survive in the wild, so the resources of cow, pigs, or sheep don't make sense.

I don't want to inject too much reality here but in reality, herds of herbivores co-exist with packs of predators. It is possible the first generation of newly wild cows would have high losses, but I am sure a few would survive.

 

[arkham4269]

There is a middle category which might be interesting, which is stalled, single city civs.

Well that's exactly what I was thinking about, the key point being "stalled". There would be 1-Ring cities dotting the map. These small cities stay small because they lack a leader with Vision of the player or the AI Civ's.

They represent an opportunity for conquest or cultural absorption. Plus, we've been discussing the paradox of the 'reality' of a post-apocalyptic world where it wouldn't make sense to send out lots of settlers, but rather you'd build up one city so you'd have enough population to make things as well as be defensible. Well that makes sense, but doesn't make the game fun. However, if there are a few of these City States out there, a slower pace of being able to create settlers early could be offset by either conquering these City-States or having your higher cultural/ safety level cause them to join your Civ.

 

[davidlallen]

I have specifically turned off the creation of barb cities. If I turned it back on, that would achieve this effect, right? It would be an easy experiment to try, in file Assets/XML/GameInfo/CIV4HandicapInfo.xml. Locate your preferred difficulty level, such as HANDICAP_NOBLE. Under that are two key lines:

<iUnownedTilesPerBarbarianCity>0</iUnownedTilesPerBarbarianCity>
<iBarbarianCityCreationProb>0</iBarbarianCityCreationProb>

The same lines of the vanilla file (under BTS instead of under Fury Road) have nonzero values. For example, for noble, the unowned tiles variable is 130, and the city creation variable is 6. Change the zeroes to these values and save, then you will get barb cities just like vanilla.

 

[arkham4269]

I don't want to inject too much reality here but in reality, herds of herbivores co-exist with packs of predators. It is possible the first generation of newly wild cows would have high losses, but I am sure a few would survive.

Oh I agree that too much reality doesn't make a good game. However, 'rain on the parade' scientist say the problem is that domesticated animals like cows, sheep and pigs are to far along in domestication that they'd be killed so fast by predators like feral dogs (to say nothing of hungry people) that not enough of them would survive to evolve back to things like aurochs.

In fact, it is this defenselessness that scientists say would allow animals like coyotes, feral dogs and mountain lions to grow quickly since they'd have an ample food supply. Of course this means that for a time, deer would get a pass and would definitely expand. Certainly there would be more deer resources, that's for sure.

I was just tossing out that it might be something to fiddle with that raising domesticated animals is a lot more dangerous than just having a boy and his dog out tending sheep like in the bad old days. It would take a conscious action by that Civ to have saved the animals and then gone to lengths to try to grow their herds in the face of all the critters (and barbarians) who want to eat them.

I don't know, I was just thinking needing a resource site for animals that can be bred and moved around doesn't make sense. I mean most farms have chickens, but you don't need a 'chicken' resource. I was just thinking that maybe it's less the resource but taking the time as a player to build things like "dairies" or "slaughterhouse" to show that as a Civ you're taking the time to learn/relearn these skills over building combat units or working toward gas trucks again.

In fact, (I really need to do less thinking while I'm actually typing ) some of these buildings like dairies or butcheries might have bonuses based on how many farms you have. So a farm could represent not only fields, but also domesticated animals on them, especially since the crop rotation relies on you grazing your animals on the fallow fields. So perhaps if you have a city with multiple farms, it would get a bigger boost from a Dairy then a city with only one farm.

This, of course, would show how vital farms would be as well as make it a bit more difficult for players like me to try to just entice an aggressive AI from banging his head against my well-defended city for turn after turn until they are weak enough for me to counter-attack, because they AI would be looting my improvements and I'd starve pretty fast, which is how it should be.

So back to the whole rock, paper, scissor argument: Do I build that butchery to reap an extra food bonus for my city that will boost my population but risk starvation due to pillaging because I didn't spend that time building more defensive units?

 

[davidlallen]

In fact, it is this defenselessness that scientists say would allow animals like coyotes, feral dogs and mountain lions to grow quickly since they'd have an ample food supply.

That sounds like a one generation solution. If cows and such are so defenseless that they all get eaten, then the second generation of coyotes will be ... smaller. I prefer to assume that the number of coyotes is small, and the number of cows which can escape/hide/fight back is nonzero, so some kind of equilibrium results.

I was just tossing out that it might be something to fiddle with that raising domesticated animals is a lot more dangerous than just having a boy and his dog out tending sheep like in the bad old days. It would take a conscious action by that Civ to have saved the animals and then gone to lengths to try to grow their herds in the face of all the critters (and barbarians) who want to eat them.

... Which is exactly why, in version 9, mutant animals can pillage farms, villages, and pastures. I have accidentally had a city reduced from pop 6 to pop 3 because a deathclaw came by and all I had around was a survivor.

So back to the whole rock, paper, scissor argument: Do I build that butchery to reap an extra food bonus for my city that will boost my population but risk starvation due to pillaging because I didn't spend that time building more defensive units?

This is definitely something I can give more thought to. Having animal resources around is "familiar" to civ players, but that doesn't mean it is right. The only step I have really taken to customize that for a post-apo feel is to have wild horses attack you.

 

[arkham4269]

This is definitely something I can give more thought to. Having animal resources around is "familiar" to civ players, but that doesn't mean it is right. The only step I have really taken to customize that for a post-apo feel is to have wild horses attack you.

Well I've personally wished that some future Civ version would take a crack at breaking the game up into 'mini-games' where you start in one era and everything from the scale (time & distance), tech tree, units and the like are customized to that era. Perhaps you could use a saved game from the Ancients game to use as the start point for your Classic's game. But I digress...

While it's a good game mechanic, I've never like cows, horses, or sheep as a resource since once you have them, you can breed them and move them anywhere you want. The First Natives never had horses, sheep or pigs till those where brought to the New World by the Europeans. The same could be said for any food crop. Once you have access to them, it's just a matter of transporting the seeds.

So in a modern game, even a post-apocalyptic one, it seems that food resources don't make sense other than that plot of "Wheat" represents an area that is more productive due to soil conditions, lack of pollution or what not. However, like you said, there is an expectation of Civ players so to what they're used to.

That being said, I still believe that it would be better to simulate domesticated animals through farms rather than separate pastures and that a horse pasture would represent a specific group of horses bred for war so that if they are lost, it represents a bit more of expenditure to recreate them.

That being said, other than time, is there any sort of cost to build improvements? It would seem to me if certain improvements cost gold/hammers to make, it would fit in better with the mod. I mean mines can't be cheap with the blasting, the specialized equipment to say nothing of the cost of transporting the raw materials to the cities to be processed in forges and the like. So if improvements don't cost anything, I would think they should take longer to make. So if someone pillages that horse pasture needed to produce Cavalry, it shouldn't just be a turn or two of worker actions to replace it.

 

[jefmart1]

I think 2 headed cows might be able to survive on their own, they are mutants themselves...

Really though, resources are abstract, they represent the ability to raise those resources there in larger then usual quantities. I suppose you could say they were wild herds waiting to be domesticated. If that were the case then I would say they should be limited in amount. I'm sure some would survive and mutate/evolve to defend against predators. I would think that deer and bison might be better resources then pigs and cattle, but I do love the graphic.

 

[arkham4269]

Really though, resources are abstract, they represent the ability to raise those resources there in larger then usual quantities.

That might be true in vanilla Civ, but the population in Fury Road is much smaller and probably the animals kept on the farm plots would be enough.

I suppose you could say they were wild herds waiting to be domesticated.

As I've mentioned before, scientist who study things like "Earth Without Man" have already concluded that if there was some bio-war that killed off most humans quickly, domesticate cattle, sheep and pigs would rapidly be wiped out by resurgent wolves, mountain lions and most of all, packs of feral dogs.

Plus 20 years after The Doom of Man(tm) I doubt with all the radiation, hungry survivors, packs of feral critters, you'd have enough time for enough cows A) escape from their pens, B) survive to breed, C) have enough time to breed wild herds. Now buffalo, moose, caribou I could see, but Bessie the cow? They'd be hoof on the table.

If that were the case then I would say they should be limited in amount. I'm sure some would survive and mutate/evolve to defend against predators. I would think that deer and bison might be better resources then pigs and cattle, but I do love the graphic.

Well I don't think mutated cattle would be high on the list of things people would want to eat.

Again, I'm not trying to go nuts with this idea, but in a modern (even post-apocalyptic modern) I think that food as a resource seems a bit silly and by having a food bonus happen due to a building instead of a worker's improvement gives the player more choices.

I mean think of it this way, if you the player happen to spawn in an area without a lot of resources, you're hosed. However, if cranking out more food is a matter of building things like diaries and butcheries, then it doesn't matter other than the fact that while you're building dairies, your opponents might be building that horde of UTE's. So it puts more balance back into the game without doing much except for removing one worker improvement option.

I'm thinking that perhaps there should be more events like mimic the problems of bad crop years. No weather satellites to warn people of the weather and without a lot of time to relearn all those "Red Sky in The Morning, Sailor take warning" type folk info, you'd probably have a lot of crop failure which might be represented by farms being destroyed so the workers would have to go back out and fix them again.

 

[KillerClowns]

Finally got 'round to continuing my Fortress City game. Tank Gal is a tough one. I got her pretty early in the game, and she singlehandedly wiped out Viktor. The well-trained Guardians I had intended to serve as the spearhead of my invasion got to sit in captured cities and play Atari. Don't get me wrong, she wouldn't have been game changing if she hadn't come so early. But I think maybe a minimum tech requirement might be needed for balance.

 

[El_Duderino]

@arkham4269
on animals going feral your right about cows and sheep but pigs adapt to living without humans very fast (late night animal planet) just look at razorbacks. but for a better feel if you wanted to replace sheep, goats do very well without people around, and since they eat just about everything id imagine they would thrive in a post-apocalyptic enviroment (assuming giant spiders and what-not dont eat all of them).

 

[arkham4269]

@arkham4269
on animals going feral your right about cows and sheep but pigs adapt to living without humans very fast (late night animal planet) just look at razorbacks. but for a better feel if you wanted to replace sheep, goats do very well without people around, and since they eat just about everything id imagine they would thrive in a post-apocalyptic environment (assuming giant spiders and what-not don't eat all of them).

I totally agree about the pigs, especially since I've seen up close and personal in the middle of the night, how big pigs can get in the forests of Germany. Razorbacks in the US are just mean. However, I'm not sure that in 20 years your average domesticated pigs would be able to revert so quickly.

However, as you said, for game mechanics, it would be easy to say they did. If you've ever seen a medieval boar spear and WHY they needed those two extra prongs, well they'd make a credible critter to avoid. That being said, since the mod is nominally in Australia, I don't think they have razorbacks.

...but shouldn't there either kangaroos and mutated versions of the same? Of course if you can have giant spiders, why not giant sharks to menance fish boats? The extinct shark Megalodon grew anywhere from 38 to 57 feet in length. Modern genetics teaches that genes don't go away, they just don't always express. Not a hard jump to say a mutation causes a great white to grow that big again. Having them off your coast might also explain the difficulty of having sea vessels again. I mean sharks that big, you'd DEFINITELY need a bigger boat.

 

[davidlallen]

There's unit art for kraken and a sea serpent in FFH. If I put in motorboats, I'll definitely put in those monsters too. One problem is that there is no good unit art for motorboats. There is a "modern privateer" which is a work boat with a machine gun stuck on; that is what I would probably use.

Although we have gotten a lot of fantastic art for Fury Road, we have generated way more interesting ideas for units/buildings than we have art for them. In order for an idea to make it in, there has to be "some kind" of art to start with. I think a lot of people who downloaded Fury Road version 3 probably laughed and stopped playing when they saw that motorcycle units had the artwork of ancient chariots.

 

[arkham4269]

There's unit art for kraken and a sea serpent in FFH. If I put in motorboats, I'll definitely put in those monsters too. One problem is that there is no good unit art for motorboats. There is a "modern privateer" which is a work boat with a machine gun stuck on; that is what I would probably use.

Well I'd like to see more of the buildings used in mods like Rise of Mankind. As I've said before, since it doesn't seem like Civ IV makes it possible to have river transportation and have river gunboats (with barrage) or steamboats for transport, then at least a River Port would be nice. That and those mods have a lot of food/animal related buildings such as tanneries, butcheries and the like.

That being said, that reminds me, while I've advocated not needed resources such as cattle, horses, and sheep, but instead compress that onto farms and have the bonus come from buildings, RoM does have a resource that really makes sense and that is salt. Without salt, it's hard to keep meat fresh when refrigeration isn't available. I mean it's one things to say, hey have some plants, in a year or two I'll have enough to spread them to all the farms in my kingdom, salt is something you either have to mine from salt flats or make on the beach. From Wikipedia, "Until the twentieth century, salt was one of the prime movers of national economies and wars." Obviously a resource to have.

 

[Randomness]

Salt could also act as a reason to settle on the coast (as right now, it sucks). Salt can easily be taken from the sea.

 

[arkham4269]

Salt could also act as a reason to settle on the coast (as right now, it sucks). Salt can easily be taken from the sea.

Perhaps a salt manufacturing building that can only be built on the coast like a harbor? In Rise of Mankind type mods, butcheries give a health bonus with access to salt. Again from Wikipedia: "Such places are today called salt works, instead than the older English word saltern. An ancient or medieval saltern could be established where there was:

1. Access to a market for the salt.
2. A gently-shelving coast, protected from exposure to the open sea.
3. A cheap and easily worked fuel supply; preferably, the sun.
4. Preferably, another trade such as pastoral farming and tanning so that it and the salt could each add value to the other in the form of leather or salted meat.

 

[Deamon]

This is probably been brought to your attention already.. but to hear "you have discovered steel" when one discovers armor and so on is quite annoying.

I think they solved that part in FFH2 by removing the voice sounds for new tech all together. After all, a simple "ding" and the text telling you what you've discovered is more than enough.