Version 1.94 Posted

Shqype said:
Seven05 and Jet, can you guys make suggestions to prevent your cheap advantage-taking tactic? Jet, I'm pretty sure you made a suggestion in the past about other requirements for that technology but I don't remember it. Can you post it here again?
I think what I said before was suggesting moving one of the engineers to aqueduct, which was done (thanks!) Personally it seems like probably the best change would be to just remove the engineer from smithy.

Optionally you could then do other things to balance smithy, like remove one unhealth (but you want unhealth in general), or add a production bonus (but smithy is probably too early, since carpenter is also early), or make them required for heavy units.

Having an engineer only at aqueduct is closer to the way things are balanced in vanilla. I think you can still get them earlier than in vanilla, but not by that much. If engineer rushing is rare, then as Seven05 said building a wonder is more than just a race for the tech that enables it, and the Industrious trait is worth something.

Or as Seven05 suggested you could reduce the hammers from engineer rushing. That would make engineers more balanced with other great people. But to balance the effect of an engineer at smithy you'd probably have to reduce the hammers so much that engineers were clearly worse than other great people.

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Speaking of great people, I think right now building a shrine is only borderline competitive with settling the great prophet, especially since it's hard to influence which city becomes the holy city, whereas you can settle the prophet anywhere. Seems like the shrine should be somewhat better in most cases. For example they might act like Spiral Minaret, or give an improved version of the religion-specific benefits of cathedrals.
 
Greetings to all of you out here! Have been ghosting around the TAM thread for a long time now,and as all others would like to thank you for a fantastic mod!

Oh and the last update 1.94 I am now playing with rome on prince and it is truly amazing! the AI`s started whacking eachother around 2500 bc with a vercingeteroix vs viriato battle and soon arminius and argantonio were involved in the war both against viriato and a bit later basically all possible constellations among them.Not to many years later i got a message that the phoenican empire was destroyed.Meanwhile I went to war with decebal and stole one city,and although I had a great advantage over him militarywise he was very reluctant to make peace with me and it took many turns before I finally got a cease fire with him,peace treaty still out of the question.I think this was very cool and a somewhat realistic reaction to an aggressor.After a long while peace was made but i didnt secure the town i captured good enough I think, because suddenly he started demanding things from me. After the war the relation was - 3 but when he made 5 demands in 10 turns or so,and i refused them all of course, an invasion from him came shortly after.ubercool!!

If possible I would like to have the possibility in the diplo screen to make demands that are totally unrealistic like it was back in civ3, to be able to irritate them.I used to do this tactic a lot to spare me the penalties for waging war and with the new changes in relationship building with the AI, I would say this is quite important since my good relationship with agamemnon which i worked so hard for over a 2000 year period could be ruined if I had to go to war with his other best friend.I would rather see it possible that "the other best friend" ruined his relationship with agamemnon after I demanded say a city or a few techs in tribute from him.The response of course;a declaration of war against me.Hopes some of this makes sense.

And again thank you guys for the countless hours you spend to make this incredible mod!! :goodjob:



-Leiv Ericsson currently only a thousand miles from the north pole
 
Leiv Ericsson said:
If possible I would like to have the possibility in the diplo screen to make demands that are totally unrealistic like it was back in civ3, to be able to irritate them.
I can add that to the to-do list, it should be possible with some tweaking to the UI scripts. I actually use that tactic myself but I'm suprised at how often they give in, of course I have insanely massive armies most of the time so they're probably scared to death of me.
 
The huge med map still has farms etc, making the barb city strong when it appears. On the small med map I suspect the Aggressive AI setting is no longer helpful, but I haven't tested it.
 
The huge med map has grassland floodplains at 81,1 and 82,1.
 
I have to make congratulations about AI behavior since 1.94, i was very surprised when two times (in two different games) i was in bad relations with Hiram, but answered positively for a war-help demand. He opened borders immediately, and had the good idea to close them as soon as i have made peace with the common ennemy.

Really nice, much smarter than before, since it is useless to ask to declare war if he prevents his ally from reaching the common foe.
 
So LastWordz and I had a nice LAN game Saturday, made it up to about 340AD before calling it quits. I played as the Lydians, he was the Romans and we were using my test update for the AI.

I found it easy to make and keep friends, with both the Kolchis & Phoenicians pleased with me early in the game and steady trade with the Mycaeneans and Dacians. The Hittites are very unpopular in the region and I was able to encourage both the Phoenicians & Kolchis to join me in my war against the Hittites for less than 100 gold each. All of my starting cities were ok, but I lacked the "really good" cities that are possible in Greece or Italy so war moved slowly until I was able to adopt the Migration civic.

The first Hittite war gained three cities for my empire at the cost of about a dozen assorted hoplites & axemen. I really felt the lack of free promotions for my combat units during conquest compared to my experience with the Romans & Mycaeneans. I needed more units and with lower overall production it was hard to build up the larger army.

After the first Hittite war I declared war on my old friends the Phoenicians and took Tyre out from under the Egyptians who were also at war with them. Apparently that upset the Egyptians who quickly declared war on me. The war with Egypt was uneventful, they landed a number of chariots on my shores but they were quickly dispatched. I was able to destroy Egypts economy with a short pillage run around Pi-Ramses, after I finished destroying 6 fully developed towns I don't think they ever recovered (certainly not once the Romans atacked them).

Once at peace with Egypt I was able to conquer the two remaining Hittite cities and strengthen my trade relations with the Scythians, Dacians and Illyrians (open borders with all three, some resource exchanges and several resource for GPT).

Being the way I am (not happy unless I'm at war) I quickly turned on the Kolchis and took three of their largest cities in a few short turns followed by two more slightly later. By this time I had fire catapults & swordsmen so my casualties were substantially lower. The Kolchis' capital was a long three-turn fight, I had to kill probably 24 units to take it, mostly spearmen and javelineers with a few chariots that he pulled back to the city near the end. I lost my open borders with the Scythians in the middle of the war and was unable to conquer the final Kolchis city in the north.

With Babylonian culture giving me a headache I quickly shifted my armies south and slaughtered the babylonians. In a few short turns I had conquered four of their cities, their archers were effective but my fire catapults were better. And we stopped with a crash as I was preparing to take the city of Ur, their new capital.

Now, a few general observations:

The biggest issue I noticed with the Lydians which I suspect is an issue for all civs with a mounted UU is that their UU is poor at best. With the penalties for attacking/defending cities the use of their UU is severly limited. The saddleback trait (Flanking I for all cavalry) is also pretty weak. Rather than re-doing the UUs I would suggest simply reducing the cost of producing them for all mounted UUs, this way they wouldn't be less powerful and more expensive to produce. I would also recommend changing the Saddleback trait to either Combat I or Mobility promos for cavalry (since this opens up additional promotions for new units with Combat I + barracks or gives them a more obvious bonus with mobility(-1 terrain movement costs)).

A change to dense forests should be considered. Currently they act like vanila Civ 4 jungles so they are worthless. If they were to add the same production bonus to tiles that regular forests do and provide some production when chopped (perhaps even more than regular forests) that should solve the problem with them.
 
One thing about dense forests: There is no problem with them. :) They are meant to strongly disable all the northern civs until the late game. Once the northern civs can chop them, they get significantly better and cause the fall of Rome, so to say. :)

Good points about mounted UUs and the Saddleback trait.
 
Makes sense then :) Unfortunately they don't get Ironworking until it's too late to do anything about Rome (at least when a human is controlling the Romans).
 
One thing I forgot to mention was the unit upkeep. I think I figured out what is giving the AI such a hard time with unit upkeep. Since we have increased initial upkeep it affects things likes settlers & workers and the AI builds tons of workers. I lost count of how many I captured and disbanded in that last game, probably around 20 maybe more. I built four of my own and ended up keeping six that I captured so I could run around with two stacks of five workers each and build improvements very quickly.

Increasing the initial number of free units just encourages the AI to build more workers. I think a good option would be to use the additional military upkeep in civics, pick one branch of civics and have every civic in the branch increase millitary unit upkeep and return the initial unit upkeep to 1. Another option would be to return the initial unit upkeep to 1 and increase support costs since that would have more of an effect on the ability to wage war than on the ability to defend yourself.
 
I just played as Egypt until 1100 BC. I experienced two wars: One with Aetes declaring against the Hittites and one with Dido against me. As I completely forgot about the military I just decided to quit for tonight and applaud you for this gameplay were you have actually to care about military :)

I played the test version of Seven...

One additional thing: Thamis, you already know the plain-floodplains (and hills) around Memphis in the normal map, don't you? ;)
 
thamis said:
One thing about dense forests: There is no problem with them. :) They are meant to strongly disable all the northern civs until the late game.
Combined with grasslands in the north, the basic idea of the mechanism is great.

thamis said:
Once the northern civs can chop them, they get significantly better and cause the fall of Rome, so to say. :)
In my experience with the huge med map on marathon, the growth of additional dense forests stifles AI-controlled northern civs so much that by then it will be too late for them. Have you seen otherwise on that map?
 
Hello,

Is anyone else having trouble building observatories? I can't build more than one at at time and in some cities not at all.
 
Seven05 said:
On the engineer rush...

There are TONS of great people created in the course of a game, even at normal speed. Increasing the base value would make it too hard to get the first, perhaps increasing the rate of increase would be a good start but then that would make philisophical somewhat less potent. Maybe a slight increase to both would help reduce the total number you see in a game. LastWordz can attest to the insane number of wonders I can build while playing as Mycanae, very few of them taking more than one turn to complete.

With engineers specifically could we reduce the amount of production they contribute when "rushing" a building. At the current value they can build any wonder in one turn (any that I've tried anyway), so building wonders is all about getting great engineers and has nothing to do with production or access to bonuse that increase the speed of building wonders.

Why not have great engineers build a special building (like the scientist's academy) rather than complete another? It would go well with the scheme of things and if they could only build one per city it would help control the power of them without making them worthless. An example of their building could be a workshop that gives a production bonus of 10% for having access to each of the following resources: stone, marble, copper, tin, iron So, potentially you could receive a 50% bonus to production in that city.

Just some random thoughts. If you're only concerned with defeating the wonder rush you need to limit the number of great engineers or their effectiveness when rushing construction.

I agree with this completely. Engineers right now are abosulutely game breaking in my opinion. No point to even build a wonder because just about everytime, some other civ will pump out a Engineer and a city with 2 population will complete in one turn :rolleyes:. The it is now is simply not fun and it cheapens that 'epic' feeling of actually completing a wonder. Only way to counter is Engineer cheese right back.

To make matters worse, I would say 90% of all the great people born in my last two games were Great Engineers. I really like idea of a special production based building instead. It would be nice since many of the captial cities are lacking (production wise) to begin with. This would also cause resources to be bit more important/strategic.
 
a have two things,
first there are two floodplain tiles on grassland in the Nubian capitals fat cross. i didnt know if this had already been brought up but i thought i would mention it.

and second, every time i build a wonder that isnt from the original game my computer tries to load the video thing and crashes. i was wondering if there is a solution to this becasue right now if i want to keep playing i cant build any wonders.
thanks
 
There is a No Movies option in the general Civ options.

Captin Zebra said:
and second, every time i build a wonder that isnt from the original game my computer tries to load the video thing and crashes. i was wondering if there is a solution to this becasue right now if i want to keep playing i cant build any wonders.
thanks
 
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