Realism Invictus

[TheBirdMan]

As a certain person said to one of his friends back in the Classical Era. It's not a problem to cross that lake. Just follow me - I know where the stones are .........

 

[AspiringScholar]

Some thoughts from recent play on the SVN:

- The logic for revolting slaves may need to be revisited. I'm consistently getting meandering and only partial city attacks which cause me to have to shuffle my workers around and actually fight revolts in the field rather than just defend my cities, as before.

- Aesthetic suggestion: the sprite for the epidemic could be postured a little more naturally. The way that it has all of its limbs extended seems like a default template (having seen other unit models positioned the same way). I would suggest that it hold the hourglass closer to the torso with the scythe extended, but more in front than to the side, or at least have a more natural stance overall.

- Aesthetic suggestion: plains should appear a little less chalky. I thought that the previous texture was a little too granulated, but the cool tone and cakey appearance on plains just seems a little too much. It doesn't really look like grass anymore, and it also doesn't appear semi-arid relative to actual grassland. Something to distinguish it a little more along those lines is called for, I think.

- Really liking the degree of barb intensity! I used to play with raging because the default setting almost had barbs as non-existent, but playing that way requires making the early game a tower difference, which restricts the scope of what you can aim to do at that phase. This feels like a great balance, where you are put under enough pressure that poor defense will be punished, but decent attention to your military early on is generally sufficient in managing that threat, without having to go to a ridiculous extreme of garrisoning all of your improvements or exhaustively fog-busting your immediate surroundings. Was there any change made to this in the SVN? I don't see anything in the changelog, but it feels like a night and day difference.

- The AI's preference for desert promotions should be adjusted, if possible. For some reason, civs far removed from any desert still end up promoting their units along that path, which is nice as the player but obviously not working as intended from a smart opponent standpoint.

- I feel that the Philosophy tech should either be moved or retitled. I mentioned something to this effect before (and my bad if I am failing to recall something that was already addressed), but it really feels out of place as-is. What it conceptualizes is Socratic philosophy (I think, at least) which is Hellenistic in the west and should be deep classical rather than ancient. For gameplay and balance considerations, I think it works well as a math prerequisite, but historically it feels out of place. I would suggest moving it to classical and giving it a buff, consequently.

 

[sazhdapec]

- The logic for revolting slaves may need to be revisited. I'm consistently getting meandering and only partial city attacks which cause me to have to shuffle my workers around and actually fight revolts in the field rather than just defend my cities, as before.

I'm pretty sure they are just looking for less defended cities.
If in doubt enter WorldBuilder and check AI behaviour of a rebel unit. If it's city lemming then it's working as intended.

- The AI's preference for desert promotions should be adjusted, if possible. For some reason, civs far removed from any desert still end up promoting their units along that path, which is nice as the player but obviously not working as intended from a smart opponent standpoint.

I'd go as far as to make AI promote most units to combat line first and everything else after that. Though crude this change will definitely make AI much stronger in combat.

 

[Roland Johansen]

You could add some randomness to the AI promotions, so that the human player cannot know what to encounter and because a variance of promotions is often stronger. There is a good chance that the AI stack then has a promotion that is suitable in whatever situation arises.

I'd do something like this:
For units created for the attack: 50% chance city attack promotion, 20% strength promotion, 15% promotion against a specific unit type, 10% terrain specific promotion, 5% something else
For units created for city defence: 50% chance city defence promotion, 20% strength promotion, 15% promotion against a specific unit type, 10% terrain specific promotion, 5% something else
For units created to protect a stack of units: 30% chance strength promotion, 30% chance terrain specific promotion, 30% promotion against a specific unit type, 10% something else

The promotion against specific units types could be based on the AI's knowledge of the unit types that the opponent uses. So, if it is 60% archers and 40% melee units, then the promotion against a specific unit type should with 60% be against archers and with 40% chance be against melee units.
Similarly with terrain, check the terrain which might be used for fighting (no clue how the AI determines where it wants to fight) and base the terrain promotion on the prevalence of certain terrain types available there.

 

[Roland Johansen]

But I read that there won't be any real development in this mod anymore except bug fixing. Combat AI improvements will likely not seen as bug fixing.

 

[AspiringScholar]

I'm pretty sure they are just looking for less defended cities.
If in doubt enter WorldBuilder and check AI behaviour of a rebel unit. If it's city lemming then it's working as intended.

Well, previously they would always follow through with a complete attack on whatever city they initially targeted, but in this case, they're attacking with a couple of units and then stopping and turning around, which is not something I've seen before. Perhaps it's an anomaly edge case, but I wanted to see if any code changes may have touched this.

You can check AI behavior in WorldBuilder? That's news to me! So it visually communicates what the AI is trying to do with a certain unit, somehow?

I'd go as far as to make AI promote most units to combat line first and everything else after that. Though crude this change will definitely make AI much stronger in combat.

I like this idea! I consistently end up fighting units with wasted XP on desert promotions, regardless of what the terrain actually is, and this would ensure that you're at least pitting up against a generalist improved unit in any situation. (Sometimes it actually is in the desert, admittedly, but evaluating that doesn't seem to be part of the AI's current decision logic.) I suspect it might be related to the way that utility is weighted laterally rather than effectively, such as how enemy spies always go for destroying the clock tower (i.e., "it has several different yield outputs, therefore it must be good" [even though they are all paltry and mostly inconsequential in effective terms]), though I'm not sure how the desert would be analogous in this way... I think perhaps because it is a terrain which, alternatively, very few units have any native advantage in, so therefore the relative value of the promotion is appraised higher? For instance, forests and hills are already vulnerabilities against most civs' whole recon line, but while there are a few with desert bonuses, those are rarer, so my tentative thought is that this is the reason that the AI values the promotion the way that it does. I doubt that it's arbitrary, since it consistently goes for this line.

But I read that there won't be any real development in this mod anymore except bug fixing. Combat AI improvements will likely not seen as bug fixing.

I've been playtesting and writing feedback for the mod for over a couple years now. In my experience, balance revisions and things having to do with misguided AI behavior are typically welcome.

 

[Roland Johansen]

I've been playtesting and writing feedback for the mod for over a couple years now. In my experience, balance revisions and things having to do with misguided AI behavior are typically welcome.

Good to know.

The desert promotion is likely valued higher because it gives a bonus in a bunch of different terrain types. Check the list of terrains mentioned in the promotion.

Of course that shouldn't be the way to evaluate. If you consider using a terrain specific improvement then it should be based on how likely you are going to fight in that terrain.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Asking again if there's any way to change the ratio of the minimap, or to fix the bug where units near the edge show up in the black space? I play on either 1:1 or 2:1 maps, and I get this problem with both.

There is, as with most things in Civ 4, but it is really, really involved, as multiple UI elements need to be moved and sprites for them edited in multiple places. So in practical terms and for you, the answer is "no" - there is no easy way to do it (and to preempt you not minding the "hard" way if that's the case, CvMainInterface.py is the file you want, and there are settings to tweak there - but you'll have to experiment for yourself).

Here's another bug - on the Totestra script, even if "start anywhere reasonable" is selected, civs will NOT be placed on any part of a landmass that is cut off from the remainder by mountains. Hence, you see everyone on this standard-size map crammed in to one part of the continent when there's plenty of lebensraum just a few tiles away. Would be nice if there's a fix.

That's working as intended, as for the purpose of the map script (and TBH for the purpose of common sense), two parts of a landmass separated by mountains are the same as two different islands.

[IMG alt="Marine.jpg"]https://forums.civfanatics.com/attachments/marine-jpg.690648/[/IMG]

Thats weird

Saw something similar posted a couple of times, but never ran into it myself.

- The logic for revolting slaves may need to be revisited. I'm consistently getting meandering and only partial city attacks which cause me to have to shuffle my workers around and actually fight revolts in the field rather than just defend my cities, as before.

Nothing changed there, but I also noticed that the supposedly lemming AI revolters feel more "picky" lately. I'll keep that in mind and if I notice a reason, I'll fix that.

- Aesthetic suggestion: the sprite for the epidemic could be postured a little more naturally. The way that it has all of its limbs extended seems like a default template (having seen other unit models positioned the same way). I would suggest that it hold the hourglass closer to the torso with the scythe extended, but more in front than to the side, or at least have a more natural stance overall.

Yep, it is a t-posed unit all right . I'll see if I can replace it with a more interesting sprite.

- Aesthetic suggestion: plains should appear a little less chalky. I thought that the previous texture was a little too granulated, but the cool tone and cakey appearance on plains just seems a little too much. It doesn't really look like grass anymore, and it also doesn't appear semi-arid relative to actual grassland. Something to distinguish it a little more along those lines is called for, I think.

That one is a maybe. I think the way they are now works good for practical purposes. Since a lot of stuff is shared between grasslands and plains, them being visually distinct from each other is really important from UX perspective.

- The AI's preference for desert promotions should be adjusted, if possible. For some reason, civs far removed from any desert still end up promoting their units along that path, which is nice as the player but obviously not working as intended from a smart opponent standpoint.

That is actually on my to-do list. It annoys me, hence it's a bug to be fixed. I am not sure if I will be able to make AI actually evaluate the utility of that promo line to a decent extent, or if I'll just have to forbid AI from using it, same with arctic combat. Theoretically, they are very useful if evaluated properly.

- I feel that the Philosophy tech should either be moved or retitled. I mentioned something to this effect before (and my bad if I am failing to recall something that was already addressed), but it really feels out of place as-is. What it conceptualizes is Socratic philosophy (I think, at least) which is Hellenistic in the west and should be deep classical rather than ancient. For gameplay and balance considerations, I think it works well as a math prerequisite, but historically it feels out of place. I would suggest moving it to classical and giving it a buff, consequently.

I can see where you're coming from; it does have a later "vibe" to it than other techs it's contemporary with right now, and it's been bugging me as well. I'll rejig the tech tree a bit, to have it closer to Iron Working.

 

[Roland Johansen]

That's working as intended, as for the purpose of the map script (and TBH for the purpose of common sense), two parts of a landmass separated by mountains are the same as two different islands.

I don't quite understand the answer. If he selected that civilizations may start anywhere reasonable, shouldn't they then also start on the 'island' separated by mountains?

 

[Roland Johansen]

I still haven't had time to play. But I read something about more early game restrictions to the empire growth in Realism Invictus.

I read about the increased research cost per city which gives a kind of upper limit to the research speed that you can get through expanding, even if you develop the new cities.

And I saw that the happiness and health resources that in the base game allow you to grow greater cities now need buildings to enable them and that takes time to research and build which also slows down expansion.

And the epidemic mechanic is another bottleneck which needs mostly technologies and buildings to overcome, which also takes time and thus slows down expansion.

And of course, this is all coupled with the Civilization 4 mechanic where city upkeep quickly rises to a quite substantial level which you can't pay for with early game small cities. And in this mod, the buildings that reduce city maintenance are split in two buildings, a bit later in the tech tree.

However, I got the impression that this last part, the civilization 4 soft cap on expansion through city maintenance cost was made a lot more of a harder cap. Can someone explain how that works? I don't want to hurt my civilization too much by going over an invisible limit. Can you really not expand beyond a point even if you develop your early cities very well with ancient and classical technologies? What is needed for further expansion then? I am asking here since I couldn't find anything about this expansion limit in the manual or the Civilopedia (although that last one is huge and I really didn't read every entry).

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

I will start ignoring you until you actually play. You're not the first person to do that, and it always felt rather disrespectful to me. You're very welcome to draw all kinds of conclusions from reading about RI, but I feel my time is better spent addressing feedback from actual players. I am sorry if that feels rude to you, but I don't see how that is a good use of my personal time.

 

[Roland Johansen]

There is no disrespect here about the mod that was created. I just like to look very careful at the rules of a game before I play it. And especially since a lot of the rules are settable at the start of a game, I want to make sure that I pick the set of rules that I will enjoy the most. A civilization game on a large map can easily take me months given the low amount of free time that I have, so I'd hate to find out after playing a long time that I should have used different settings. And with this expansive mod, it will likely take even more time.

Here, I am trying to find out how far I should expand. It seems something has mechanically changed there beyond buildings enabling happiness and health, epidemics and expansion increasing research costs.

I did indeed perceive your reply as rather rude. I was not giving feedback. I was investigating the most fun way for me to play this mod. I never implied that you should be spending time answering my questions. This is an open forum and I am just asking input from anyone willing to give it. A reply that you are going to ignore me is just unneeded as you could just decide on your own that you want to spend your time differently. No need for a message saying that you are going to ignore me because I research a game before I play it.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Indeed this is an open forum, and I am not taking away your ability to ask anything - just managing your expectations for getting answers from me. I figured you'd feel strange if I just stopped replying to you specifically without any explanation.

 

[Roland Johansen]

It is perfectly fine for you to spend your time elsewhere. You decide where you spend your time; there is no demand on my end. It is just not nice to take your time writing a post that you are going to ignore someone. (Maybe if someone were directing posts at you and was really pestering you for attention.)

 

[Roland Johansen]

I still haven't had time to play. But I read something about more early game restrictions to the empire growth in Realism Invictus.

I read about the increased research cost per city which gives a kind of upper limit to the research speed that you can get through expanding, even if you develop the new cities.

And I saw that the happiness and health resources that in the base game allow you to grow greater cities now need buildings to enable them and that takes time to research and build which also slows down expansion.

And the epidemic mechanic is another bottleneck which needs mostly technologies and buildings to overcome, which also takes time and thus slows down expansion.

And of course, this is all coupled with the Civilization 4 mechanic where city upkeep quickly rises to a quite substantial level which you can't pay for with early game small cities. And in this mod, the buildings that reduce city maintenance are split in two buildings, a bit later in the tech tree.

However, I got the impression that this last part, the civilization 4 soft cap on expansion through city maintenance cost was made a lot more of a harder cap. Can someone explain how that works? I don't want to hurt my civilization too much by going over an invisible limit. Can you really not expand beyond a point even if you develop your early cities very well with ancient and classical technologies? What is needed for further expansion then? I am asking here since I couldn't find anything about this expansion limit in the manual or the Civilopedia (although that last one is huge and I really didn't read every entry).

To anyone: does this mod have a kind of semi-hard cap on expansion in say ancient/classical/medieval times? There are a bunch of elements that I mentioned in this post like increased research costs per city, happiness and health resources that need a building to get enabled, epidemics, buildings that reduce city upkeep come in two parts and later and the well-known steeply increasing Civilization 4 city upkeep. All of these mean that you really need to invest in your cities before they become self-sustainable. But is there some additional cost outside of what I already know about Civilization iV BTS that will curb my expansion. Something where I have 7 cities and build an 8th one and I really shouldn't have done that since that 8th one will trouble me dearly? I was reading some earlier posts in this thread and it seemed that you should be really careful with overexpanding, and a lot more careful than in base CIvilization IV BTS. Are city upkeep costs higher in this mod? Something that I am missing, or is it just the combination of all of the effects that I mentioned before?

Thanks for any input.

 

[trashmunster]

My question about Forced labor civic was kinda ignored, are there any good uses for that civic?
I just cant imagine a situation where it might help, instead of hindering your progress.
Any feedback or opinion would be much appreciated.

 

[AspiringScholar]

To anyone: does this mod have a kind of semi-hard cap on expansion in say ancient/classical/medieval times? There are a bunch of elements that I mentioned in this post like increased research costs per city, happiness and health resources that need a building to get enabled, epidemics, buildings that reduce city upkeep come in two parts and later and the well-known steeply increasing Civilization 4 city upkeep. All of these mean that you really need to invest in your cities before they become self-sustainable. But is there some additional cost outside of what I already know about Civilization iV BTS that will curb my expansion. Something where I have 7 cities and build an 8th one and I really shouldn't have done that since that 8th one will trouble me dearly? I was reading some earlier posts in this thread and it seemed that you should be really careful with overexpanding, and a lot more careful than in base CIvilization IV BTS. Are city upkeep costs higher in this mod? Something that I am missing, or is it just the combination of all of the effects that I mentioned before?

Thanks for any input.

In general, early rapid expansion is more punishing in RI than it is in the base game, but there aren't any additional hard limits. As far as I know, the city maintenance mechanic itself is unchanged from vanilla, and so the additional penalties are indeed on top of this, but one should also account for the fact that the overall output and utility of each individual city is greater, over the course of the game, meaning that in balance, it isn't necessarily advantageous to expand minimally, though it is now much more viable to do so, should the situation demand it.

A few sketch thoughts from my own experience, if it helps you decide if/how you want to play (though I'd recommend playing a smaller map at an easy difficulty level and just going for it to get a feel of everything, yourself):

- The scarcity of happiness early in the game is severe and perhaps the greatest practical check on growth, initially. The base limit (at least on Monarch) for newly founded cities is now 2, and the means of increasing this are minimal in the ancient era. For one thing, most bonuses which provide happiness require infrastructure to be rendered effective (which, outside of temples, are found in the classical era, primarily with the market and the jeweler), so your best means of bumping the cap early on are through crude solutions such as building mob justice under rule of fear (and consequently incurring a -50% penalty, which is still rather viable if you have no border pressure in your capital and another useful tile to work, seeing as how you won't stay in that civic for long), or building Stonehenge and gaining an additional from pagan temples. However, as the mod is an entire overhaul and growth itself is more difficult due to the new food mechanic and substantially longer improvement build times, this feels more natural in game than it likely seems on paper. While this concerns vertical growth, without decent base population caps, wide expansion as well is still much more restricted.

- The research cost increase per number of cities is additive rather than multiplicative. I used to fear this one more than I should have. On a standard sized map, you'll be spending +12% more for each technology per city, but it only adds to the base cost (as with other hidden modifiers even in the vanilla, such as the number of prerequisite techs already known and the number of civs you know who already have the tech in question, even before the tech transfer applies, which is not hidden). Once again, since individual cities RI have much more potential for vertical growth and development (but must be truly invested in for this, often resulting in a core "heartland" of your empire which far outweighs newly founded or conquered cities for quite a long time, rather than vanilla's relative parity between mature cities) this is in quite a nice balance, I find. In fact, in many cases I often still out-tech small civs as one of the largest empires, but if this mechanic were not in place, they would not even be remotely competitive or able to contend with the snowballing runaway examples, as they usually can in the mod.

- Once again, I am not aware of any changes made to city maintenance itself as compared to Beyond the Sword, and your reference to being fine with 7 cities but an 8th doing you in is, I believe, the "INC" in vanilla, where after the 10th city, additional maintenance costs become exponential until something like the 30th city, where the marginal cost flattens. As far as I know, that would remain the case here, but thrown in the mix of the rest of the mod's rebalance, it never stood out too prominently, and indeed, I expect expanding to that level early enough to have a strong enough economic engine to support it to be very difficult for other reasons than just maintenance, primarily due to much more intense early warfare and AI aggressiveness.

- While they all contribute to it in general, each era of the game has a "tone" with respect to one aspect of facilitating greater expansion. The classical, I feel, widens the scope for the aforementioned happiness more prominently than anything else, which is absolutely vital for any kind of growth. Medieval is a bit more balanced overall, but I think food and culture are what stand out the most here (indeed, medieval has much more of a "tall" and static feel, especially with the way warfare is oriented with very strong city defenders and cavalry dominating the battlefield, which is not suited for taking cities), and in the renaissance, there is a commercial revolution where and explode, and this makes the financial aspect of expansion significantly less of a speed bump. With the industrial and modern eras, the cap on utility per individual city gets substantially higher with industrialization and modern medicine and food output enabling you to grow enormous cities (over 40 population is feasible in good land), but once again this requires a lot of attention and security to manage, and is not likely to be the case outside of a carefully curated core of your empire, so small civs that managed to remain safe and developed this way might even contend for a win against a wide empire. There is a really good dynamic between tall and wide here (perhaps the best in any strategy game I'm aware of, actually) which vanilla IV only quasi-tackled by forcing a pace with city maintenance rather than shifting the tone of the destination for either approach.

Tl;dr, everything is so massively overhauled and rebalanced relative to itself, that direct comparisons to the vanilla game are always going to be misleading, but the challenges of expansion are more nuanced and dynamic (and also a lot less linear, with things like era-specific bonuses expiring, pronounced power arcs for certain civs, and especially revolutions). If you were intending to try the game anyway and are just curious what settings to include, I would leave everything default and then play with revolutions on.

 

[AspiringScholar]

My question about Forced labor civic was kinda ignored, are there any good uses for that civic?
I just cant imagine a situation where it might help, instead of hindering your progress.
Any feedback or opinion would be much appreciated.

I think it's supposed to be more of a last-ditch option rather than something ideal, all historical representation of the phenomenon aside. Being able to sacrifice population as with the previous slavery mechanic could have some uses, and reduced war-weariness and a small production bonus in the final stages of a grueling war could be useful. I think I've used it once for that reason, and it worked out nicely for a little while, but I would promptly switch out of it afterwards.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

My question about Forced labor civic was kinda ignored, are there any good uses for that civic?
I just cant imagine a situation where it might help, instead of hindering your progress.
Any feedback or opinion would be much appreciated.

Sorry, yeah, that one got lost a bit. I myself saw it as a strictly wartime civic, when you need to maximise production to the detriment of anything else. It might have ended somewhat underpowered, but I tried to err on the side of caution here. Labor camp is a cheap building with a substantial production boost.

 

[Roland Johansen]

In general, early rapid expansion is more punishing in RI than it is in the base game, but there aren't any additional hard limits. As far as I know, the city maintenance mechanic itself is unchanged from vanilla, and so the additional penalties are indeed on top of this, but one should also account for the fact that the overall output and utility of each individual city is greater, over the course of the game, meaning that in balance, it isn't necessarily advantageous to expand minimally, though it is now much more viable to do so, should the situation demand it.

A few sketch thoughts from my own experience, if it helps you decide if/how you want to play (though I'd recommend playing a smaller map at an easy difficulty level and just going for it to get a feel of everything, yourself):

- The scarcity of happiness early in the game is severe and perhaps the greatest practical check on growth, initially. The base limit (at least on Monarch) for newly founded cities is now 2, and the means of increasing this are minimal in the ancient era. For one thing, most bonuses which provide happiness require infrastructure to be rendered effective (which, outside of temples, are found in the classical era, primarily with the market and the jeweler), so your best means of bumping the cap early on are through crude solutions such as building mob justice under rule of fear (and consequently incurring a -50% penalty, which is still rather viable if you have no border pressure in your capital and another useful tile to work, seeing as how you won't stay in that civic for long), or building Stonehenge and gaining an additional from pagan temples. However, as the mod is an entire overhaul and growth itself is more difficult due to the new food mechanic and substantially longer improvement build times, this feels more natural in game than it likely seems on paper. While this concerns vertical growth, without decent base population caps, wide expansion as well is still much more restricted.

- The research cost increase per number of cities is additive rather than multiplicative. I used to fear this one more than I should have. On a standard sized map, you'll be spending +12% more for each technology per city, but it only adds to the base cost (as with other hidden modifiers even in the vanilla, such as the number of prerequisite techs already known and the number of civs you know who already have the tech in question, even before the tech transfer applies, which is not hidden). Once again, since individual cities RI have much more potential for vertical growth and development (but must be truly invested in for this, often resulting in a core "heartland" of your empire which far outweighs newly founded or conquered cities for quite a long time, rather than vanilla's relative parity between mature cities) this is in quite a nice balance, I find. In fact, in many cases I often still out-tech small civs as one of the largest empires, but if this mechanic were not in place, they would not even be remotely competitive or able to contend with the snowballing runaway examples, as they usually can in the mod.

- Once again, I am not aware of any changes made to city maintenance itself as compared to Beyond the Sword, and your reference to being fine with 7 cities but an 8th doing you in is, I believe, the "INC" in vanilla, where after the 10th city, additional maintenance costs become exponential until something like the 30th city, where the marginal cost flattens. As far as I know, that would remain the case here, but thrown in the mix of the rest of the mod's rebalance, it never stood out too prominently, and indeed, I expect expanding to that level early enough to have a strong enough economic engine to support it to be very difficult for other reasons than just maintenance, primarily due to much more intense early warfare and AI aggressiveness.

- While they all contribute to it in general, each era of the game has a "tone" with respect to one aspect of facilitating greater expansion. The classical, I feel, widens the scope for the aforementioned happiness more prominently than anything else, which is absolutely vital for any kind of growth. Medieval is a bit more balanced overall, but I think food and culture are what stand out the most here (indeed, medieval has much more of a "tall" and static feel, especially with the way warfare is oriented with very strong city defenders and cavalry dominating the battlefield, which is not suited for taking cities), and in the renaissance, there is a commercial revolution where and explode, and this makes the financial aspect of expansion significantly less of a speed bump. With the industrial and modern eras, the cap on utility per individual city gets substantially higher with industrialization and modern medicine and food output enabling you to grow enormous cities (over 40 population is feasible in good land), but once again this requires a lot of attention and security to manage, and is not likely to be the case outside of a carefully curated core of your empire, so small civs that managed to remain safe and developed this way might even contend for a win against a wide empire. There is a really good dynamic between tall and wide here (perhaps the best in any strategy game I'm aware of, actually) which vanilla IV only quasi-tackled by forcing a pace with city maintenance rather than shifting the tone of the destination for either approach.

Tl;dr, everything is so massively overhauled and rebalanced relative to itself, that direct comparisons to the vanilla game are always going to be misleading, but the challenges of expansion are more nuanced and dynamic (and also a lot less linear, with things like era-specific bonuses expiring, pronounced power arcs for certain civs, and especially revolutions). If you were intending to try the game anyway and are just curious what settings to include, I would leave everything default and then play with revolutions on.

Thanks for the extensive feedback! I'm not one to go for the tldr part of a message, I like the details! By reading some posts earlier in this thread, I got the impression that there might have been some larger changes to city maintenance too. Something that you'd need to know about because otherwise, you'd make a great game-crippling error in game play and would only notice 20 or 50 turns after you'd made the error. Like how some players started playing Civ4 in the same style as Civ3 and then bankrupted their empires and complained loudly. They just realised the impact of city maintenance too late. The extension of my empire from the 7th to the 8th city was just an example and there's nothing in these numbers specific to CIv4 BTS. I just tried to ask by using an example whether there was some (semi-hard) cutoff point that I'd need to be aware off.

I fully agree and understand that the combination of difficulties that you need to overcome in Realism Invictus with happiness from happiness resources only coming later in the game with some buildings, the cost increase of research when expanding and all the other new difficulties together mean that you cannot build larger cities in the early stage of the game and that will indeed also naturally stop you from expanding horizontally. That makes a lot of sense. I however saw that when I started an emperor game, that I had a base happiness of 4 (5 in the capital) and the same on monarch, not the 2 that you mentioned. Do I have a different version of the game? I got the latest normal download and didn't change anything with regard to happiness.

Thanks for explaining how the horizontal and vertical expansion feels in the various era's of the game. That sounds like a good natural progression.

I used to play on immortal and deity in Civ4 BTS, but I haven't played in a really long time. I think I will try emperor. I do like my bigger maps though, in every type of 4X game that I play, so I won't go for the smaller map, but I also won't go for the largest maps. But that is also why I wanted to make sure that I understood some of the basics before playing a longer game. Thanks for the input.

I see you mention a huge size 40 city. Wouldn't you prefer a smaller city with a mix of farmland, cottages and some production improvements and some farmland powered craftsmen late game. I have no experience here, so just inquiring. But it seems that a bit smaller city would be easier to manage in happiness, health and chance of epidemics. Although, I could see a great person factory type of city going for lots of farmland and specialists and get really big.

Oh, one final question, if you will. The epidemic mechanic is also a limiter to expansion and it seems more chance based compared to happiness and health. Happiness and health are just a sum of plusses and minuses and you typically want to stay below their cap, especially with happiness. But with the epidemic mechanic, there is a chance that things go wrong, so you can take the gamble and may sometimes maybe have to take the gamble because you'd otherwise be limited too much. For instance, my capital in the game that I just started had a swamp directly next to it and started with a few % epidemic chance at size 1. I haven't seen a very clear description of what an epidemic does. The calculation of the chance that it happens is described. And the fact that it spreads via trade routes thereby increasing the risks in connected cities was also mentioned. And it was also explained that it hits cities below size 4 more limited. But what does it do in bigger cities? I think that it will kill off a population point each turn or something like that, but I couldn't find that description. If that is the case, then it seems quite harsh. Does that mean that a few bad rolls of the RNG, resulting in a few early game epidemics in your capital will mess up your game, or is it not that influential?

Also, the manual showed a screenshot of a city with an epidemic chance of 12%. Wouldn't that city quickly shrink by getting hit by regular plagues and thereby never be able to keep such a large size and such a high epidemic chance? Maybe epidemics work differently than I think, but I would think this city would on average be hit by an epidemic every 8 turns, needing a very big food surplus to be able to remain at that size.