1.17 released

[Howard Mahler]

http://well-of-souls.com/civ/civ5_expansion.html

They are adding some new stuff to Civilization 5.

May be some stuff that will inspire some changes or additions to HR.

Very complicated and new religion system.

 

[Keinpferd]

Having fun with a really tough game as Isabella on Emperess. I decided to play a spiritual leader to get to know the civic table a little better.

It's ages ago that I played unmodded BTS last, so it's diffucult to see what's going on and going wrong for me in late medieval, early renaissance times. At this stage, the AI is teching horrendously fast, even taking in account the AI is playing on Noble. I looked into the CIV4HandicapInfo.xml and found not much of a difference to BTS. iResearch is set to 130, was 120. And the AI starts with four initial techs, was two. I rule these factors out, because in the ancient era I was on par or ahead. Has anyone encountered this phenomenon? Otherwise it must be my sleepy playing and being used to a mod that's restricted to antiquity.

Since the unlimited specialists were removed from Caste System, you are bound to build cottages to generate commerce for research – once you eventually researched Employment. You will have to wait then for Democracy to run unlimited scientists. This amounts with the now missing three beakers per specialist through Representation to a drastic dependency on the base commerce of your starting position, regarding your research speed. And there's not much to decide, to try, to risk, to do something about that initial commerce situation by your own choice, mostly because you can't snatch Representation anymore by chopping the Pyramids (free choice of government civics) very early! I do like the change to Caste System and Pyramids, but where the hell are the early beakers are supposed to come from, now?

I was lucky to have a productive starting location with horses next to the capital. I killed my next neighbour right away and his capital was excellent; that's why I stayed on par for a long time. In my first two games, I was doing very bad, though, and this aggressive approach and exploiting the building of wealth as soon as possible appears the only viable solution.

My second next neighbour was Protective. Driving me nuts with the Medic promotion. The meaning of being a protective leader turns into the opposite, if Medic promoted chariots are perfectly well suited for early rushes, really inviting you to raid the enemies instead of protecting your frontiers from raiding enemies. I wish I had had them.

Mapscripts:
When I tried the World mapscript, all settings medium and normal, culturally linked, old word start, it returned a strange Standard size map that left space to claim 25 cities for each civ without conflict, even though I added more starting civs than default, expecting some immediate fighting about settlement locations. And it returned the civs starting everywhere.

Tectonics is giving me all kinds of strange Tundra starts, and the maps look arid altogether, despite I selected temperate.

I hope I'm not putting you on the wrong track, Xyth, but in my impression, there's something buggy with those map scripts – perhaps connected to the "culturally linked Python.

Bugs:
The Olympic bug is still in, held games won't leave cities, sometimes.

I remember my warrior pillaged, civic was Militia. In Vassalage and Conscription pillaging is impossible.

Miscellaneous:
Post office, custom house and tavern seem too close techwise, although they may fit there thematically. No big problem, but you're queuing several alike buildings in your cities.

I like the cuneiform loading screen very much, starting to understand my first words while the game is loading, but in one of the info screens, it makes for a hard read.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Post Office, Custom House, and Tavern are (as I recall) placed close together because that's kind of a gap in the game- there's not so much to build in the medieval-renaissance era.


Medic promotions should only be available for 'infantry' units in my opinion: melee, archer, and gunpowder troops.

It seems to me that the Medic promotion mostly favors large stacks of units, because it means there's a tangible advantage to standing in the same square as a medic and resting a turn (or being a medic and resting a turn). That offers an advantage to siege warfare on both sides: units are harder to wear down by attrition, but city-busting stacks are harder to destroy.

Protective isn't and shouldn't be totally useless for offensive warfare- that was one of the flaws in its original design, was that it mainly benefited units by giving them a free City Defense promotion. Since the AI already tends to turtle in its cities and let you ravage the countryside, and doesn't seem smart enough to raid your land effectively... that's a problem. The City Defense promotions teach it to pile all its armies up in the cities, and it becomes very vulnerable to a clever opponent.

Many "Protective" leaders in the game (like Churchill) were successful in war when their troops finally went on the offensive, after all. "Protective" leaders should have AI priorities and promotions so that you think twice about attacking them, and have to fear their counterattack, but will probably live in peace with you otherwise. They shouldn't just be a slightly harder type of nut for you to crack open.

Whereas "Aggressive" leaders will more predictably attack you, and "Tactical" leaders could do either.

Does that make sense?

 

[Howard Mahler]

Having the frequency with which Financial gives interest depend on game speed is not a good idea.
As stated by someone else, the other money you get you get every turn, regardless of game speed. The maintanence costs apply every turn, the same regardless of game speed.
Therefore, the interest should not change with game speed.
It is research costs, etc. that change with game speed.

I did not find the interest "overpowering on slow speeds."

I am playing a Financial Leader on Oddesey speed and while the interest is better than nothing, it is now an extremely weak benefit.

I strongly recommend putting the interest back to how it worked in prior versions. Leave the cap alone.

Really? Both weapons were used contemporaneously but I always hear of javelins in classical warfare and rarely slings.



Basically there are several different European ones (Balearic, Thracian, Slavic), an Incan one and that's it.



The percentages are set in CIVProcessInfo.xml but the calculation itself is hidden away inside either the DLL or BTS itself. Anything we want to attach to it would have to be done via onCityDoTurn in CvEventManager.py. CvMainInterface.py and BugFinanceAdvisor.py would also have to be adjusted to show the changes. Even a simple change would require a ton of testing.



No. I should probably add one sometime. It's all very intertwined with map size and difficulty level though.



Yes.



When I first added Financial's interest bonus it was received every turn regardless of game speed. It was insanely overpowered on the slower game speeds, even with the caps. Drastically stronger than any other trait and Financial leaders were winning the game almost without fail. Never underestimate the power of compound interest.

However, I am going to raise the caps in 1.18 (to 100 per era) and see how that goes. I think that's a much safer and probably more effective solution. If that goes well we can consider removing the caps altogether.



Can't be eliminated without completely overhauling how maintenance is calculated and how everything is priced. A balancing nightmare.

 

[Xyth]

I understand that you made the change so that on cities can be founded on Ice.

However, that leaves a number squares with special resources that can never be exploited.
Annoying.
I wonder whether there is any way to change that.

Please read the following post and subsequent discussions to know why this was done and ideas for alternatives. Input is appreciated.

This change was made to prevent large and unrealistic polar cities. It's not the ideal solution though as the actual problem is due to the high yield of coastal waters. Some map scripts generate a lot more ice terrain than is desirable too. Consider it a temporary fix until I can implement a more finely tuned solution.

I continue to crashes in the Middle Ages as well. Still playing Kongo and Anasazi mostly. But they don't generally repeat, so I'm ignoring them.

Yeah there is something strange and elusive going on in the Middle Ages. No luck tracking it down yet but hopefully with time I'll uncover the problem.

BTW, speaking of Skirmishers, the Anasazi Atlatl is an awesome early game unit, which can be completely dominant in the very hilly terrains spawned on Terra maps.

I quite like how the Atlatl has turned out. Situationally strong in a way that makes you adjust your strategy to accommodate it. Ideally I'd like to tweak all UUs to be more like this.

The one thing I would like to adjust are the number of religions. Is it possible to adjust locally the "Fewer Religions" to 1/2 rather than 2/3?

That's not an easy change to make but I can see how it would be useful to your large games. When I get a chance I'll PM you the relevant file with the change made. Remind me if you don't receive it within a few days.

 

[Xyth]

Having fun with a really tough game as Isabella on Emperess. I decided to play a spiritual leader to get to know the civic table a little better.

It's ages ago that I played unmodded BTS last, so it's diffucult to see what's going on and going wrong for me in late medieval, early renaissance times. At this stage, the AI is teching horrendously fast, even taking in account the AI is playing on Noble. I looked into the CIV4HandicapInfo.xml and found not much of a difference to BTS. iResearch is set to 130, was 120. And the AI starts with four initial techs, was two. I rule these factors out, because in the ancient era I was on par or ahead. Has anyone encountered this phenomenon? Otherwise it must be my sleepy playing and being used to a mod that's restricted to antiquity.

It doesn't work that way. The AI doesn't have a separate difficulty level, it's all determined by the player's difficulty setting. So if you're playing on Emperor then that entry in CIV4HandicapInfo.xml determines all bonuses and penalties for you and the AI. You'll both have the same research rate (defined by <iResearch>) but the AI will be getting numerous other economic and production bonuses that you're not getting. These are all defined by the tags that begin with 'AI'.

The Custom Game/Scenario shows 'Noble' greyed out for all AI but it doesn't mean anything other than poor UI design. The entry in GlobalDefines.xml merely sets the default difficulty when the game is loaded for the first time.

HR is deliberately more difficult so I recommend starting on a lower difficulty than you would choose for unmodded BTS.

Since the unlimited specialists were removed from Caste System, you are bound to build cottages to generate commerce for research &#8211; once you eventually researched Employment. You will have to wait then for Democracy to run unlimited scientists. This amounts with the now missing three beakers per specialist through Representation to a drastic dependency on the base commerce of your starting position, regarding your research speed. And there's not much to decide, to try, to risk, to do something about that initial commerce situation by your own choice, mostly because you can't snatch Representation anymore by chopping the Pyramids (free choice of government civics) very early! I do like the change to Caste System and Pyramids, but where the hell are the early beakers are supposed to come from, now?

Your prime source of commerce in the early game is from the Redistribution civic; build many mines in your hills and camps in the forests/jungles/savannah. Slavery will also give you some commerce from your Quarries and Plantations. Build Kilns in your cities too.

Mapscripts:
When I tried the World mapscript, all settings medium and normal, culturally linked, old word start, it returned a strange Standard size map that left space to claim 25 cities for each civ without conflict, even though I added more starting civs than default, expecting some immediate fighting about settlement locations. And it returned the civs starting everywhere.

I haven't tested the Old World start recently, I may have broken something.

Tectonics is giving me all kinds of strange Tundra starts, and the maps look arid altogether, despite I selected temperate.

I hope I'm not putting you on the wrong track, Xyth, but in my impression, there's something buggy with those map scripts &#8211; perhaps connected to the "culturally linked Python.

Culturally linked starts doesn't change the map or starting locations at all, all it does is reassign which civs get which location. So it won't be that. Both of those map scripts use Tundra (alongside Peaks) to represent mountainous terrain like the Himalayas, making the terrain a lot more common than on other map types. They are also both designed for realism over balance. I'll take a look though.

Bugs:
The Olympic bug is still in, held games won't leave cities, sometimes.

Yeah, I haven't been able to figure out what's going on there. I may need to rethink its mechanics a little.

I like the cuneiform loading screen very much, starting to understand my first words while the game is loading, but in one of the info screens, it makes for a hard read.

I noticed that. I'll see if I can fix it.

I remember my warrior pillaged, civic was Militia. In Vassalage and Conscription pillaging is impossible.

The Protective trait makes one's improvements immune to pillaging. I'm guessing that's what you're seeing there, civics shouldn't be affecting it at all.

My second next neighbour was Protective. Driving me nuts with the Medic promotion. The meaning of being a protective leader turns into the opposite, if Medic promoted chariots are perfectly well suited for early rushes, really inviting you to raid the enemies instead of protecting your frontiers from raiding enemies. I wish I had had them.

Protective isn't and shouldn't be totally useless for offensive warfare- that was one of the flaws in its original design, was that it mainly benefited units by giving them a free City Defense promotion. Since the AI already tends to turtle in its cities and let you ravage the countryside, and doesn't seem smart enough to raid your land effectively... that's a problem. The City Defense promotions teach it to pile all its armies up in the cities, and it becomes very vulnerable to a clever opponent.

Many "Protective" leaders in the game (like Churchill) were successful in war when their troops finally went on the offensive, after all. "Protective" leaders should have AI priorities and promotions so that you think twice about attacking them, and have to fear their counterattack, but will probably live in peace with you otherwise. They shouldn't just be a slightly harder type of nut for you to crack open.

Simon describes my intentions for the Protective trait well.

Medic promotions should only be available for 'infantry' units in my opinion: melee, archer, and gunpowder troops.

It seems to me that the Medic promotion mostly favors large stacks of units, because it means there's a tangible advantage to standing in the same square as a medic and resting a turn (or being a medic and resting a turn). That offers an advantage to siege warfare on both sides: units are harder to wear down by attrition, but city-busting stacks are harder to destroy.

The Protective trait only grants it to Melee, Archer and Gunpowder troops. It is available to Mounted, Recon and Naval units via experience, but not until the Medieval era.

Having the frequency with which Financial gives interest depend on game speed is not a good idea.
As stated by someone else, the other money you get you get every turn, regardless of game speed. The maintanence costs apply every turn, the same regardless of game speed.
Therefore, the interest should not change with game speed.
It is research costs, etc. that change with game speed.

I did not find the interest "overpowering on slow speeds."

It was overpowered in combination with Build Wealth, but since I'm probably adding ranks to that mechanic that may be enough to warrant removing the game speed scaling from interest payments. I'm still experimenting and testing.

 

[wanderm]

Mapscripts:
When I tried the World mapscript, all settings medium and normal, culturally linked, old word start, it returned a strange Standard size map that left space to claim 25 cities for each civ without conflict, even though I added more starting civs than default, expecting some immediate fighting about settlement locations. And it returned the civs starting everywhere.

My settings and preferences were similar, save the world size (Massive). It seems here at least the Old World starting locations were honoured, as I have encountered 18/24 of the AI civs in less than a quarter of the map.

That's not an easy change to make but I can see how it would be useful to your large games. When I get a chance I'll PM you the relevant file with the change made. Remind me if you don't receive it within a few days.

Thank you. Please do not hurry, as I don't see my next game starting for a while. That said, the adjustment may be useful for others: I don't know whether number of religions has been dissected, but having all 18 in play too early distorts their benefits IMHO.

 

[Simon_Jester]

The Protective trait only grants [the Medic I promotion] to Melee, Archer and Gunpowder troops. It is available to Mounted, Recon and Naval units via experience, but not until the Medieval era.

...I fail to see how that's relevant (although it occurs to me that Medic-promoted transports may be good 'hospital ships' for damaged ground units, that's something I'll have to try).

What I mean is that there are, essentially, two kinds of ground combat in the game. One is "siege warfare" the moving of large stacks of units, typically with a move rate of 1 except in the very late game, up to enemy cities to duke it out with the defenders. In these kinds of fights, both sides usually have several units on a side, the attacker brings siege units, and so on. It's somewhat positional and predictable what will happen and when- the attacker batters down the city's defense rating, then tries to storm it with assault troops in enough numbers to overrun the defenders.

The other is "raiding warfare," usually done by fast units (or infantry exploiting rough terrain in the enemy's homeland to march into unattackable positions where they can defend against cavalry counterattack).

The Medic promotion is most useful for 'siege' warfare, on both sides of the line but especially for the attacker, because of how it affects your ability to heal up your troops after a pitched battle on enemy territory.

It is not so useful for raiders, in my opinion, because raiders are often expendable and expended (they have to get close to enemy cities and are vulnerable to counterattacks, but damage the enemy's economy and bring in money anyhow).

Now, the idea that "protective" leaders will excel at offensive and defensive positional warfare, slogging battles over strong fortresses and so on... that actually makes sense. That's where you expect tenacity, meticulous preparation, and skill at rallying the people for long pounding matches to pay off.

To take WWII Britain as an example, the British were quite good at set-piece actions (Montgomery made his career around them) but not so good at agile, mobile actions (the only general I can think of who was really good at them was O'Connor, and he played only a limited role in the war because Rommel got lucky and captured him almost immediately on the German arrival in North Africa). So for Churchill the "protective" leader to excel at positional "siege" battles actually makes sense.

Meanwhile, "aggressive" leaders with their free commando promotion would excel at "raiding" warfare, because they can penetrate deep into your territory so easily. Countering them would be hard- you'd need a fairly strong force of counterpunch units in a zone five tiles or so deep behind the frontier to intercept their raiders, and even then they could ravage the borderland just by riding a few squares in along your own roads and hitting "pillage."

The safest bet might be to not connect your road network to their at all... worked for the Soviets in Barbarossa, so to speak.

(There's a story there too, if anyone wants to hear it)

 

[Keinpferd]

You'll both have the same research rate (defined by <iResearch>) but the AI will be getting numerous other economic and production bonuses that you're not getting. These are all defined by the tags that begin with 'AI'.

Hm, there's only one line different to the BTS CIV4HandicapInfo.xml, the iResearch tag (plus the additional starting techs), or are there any other AI handicap modifiers defined elsewhere?

HR is deliberately more difficult so I recommend starting on a lower difficulty than you would choose for unmodded BTS.

No complaints about that. In Bts, four free starting techs is Deity level, in HR it's Emperor, however. I have a simple assumption, why the AI is sweeping from a one-tech-lead towards a six-techs-lead during the late medieval, early renaissance age: The AI arrives there just a little sooner and gets all those finance and science multiplier buildings up just a few turns before you. I noticed, that as soon as the human player catches up with constructing the same finance and science buildings, he is lagging behind by a more or less constant distance in numbers of techs.

I was lucky to get a GA in the right moment, which helped me to build Versailles in time. This wonder combined with Aristocracy relaxes the economy greatly. I almost caught up with the AI:

Your prime source of commerce in the early game is from the Redistribution civic; build many mines in your hills and camps in the forests/jungles/savannah. Slavery will also give you some commerce from your Quarries and Plantations. Build Kilns in your cities too.

True, but it's still much less beakers compared to the BTS Pyramids-Representation mechanism.

I haven't tested the Old World start recently, I may have broken something.

My settings and preferences were similar, save the world size (Massive). It seems here at least the Old World starting locations were honoured, as I have encountered 18/24 of the AI civs in less than a quarter of the map.

I hope I reported the right settings, I'll have to check again. My current game is on a Mixed map, normal medium settings, and everything's working fine there.

The Protective trait only grants it to Melee, Archer and Gunpowder troops. It is available to Mounted, Recon and Naval units via experience, but not until the Medieval era.

Have a Protective leader attack you with Medic promoted knights and trebuchets: You will need to build a lot of ranged units yourself to soften this enemy stack before your city, and still the recovery rate of the stack is quite threatening. It shows, the Protective trait is perfectly suitable for harassing the enemy in his territory, rather than securing the homeland. It's true, I was mistaken about chariots having the Medic promotion, but Medic promoted axes make an early axe rush considerably easier. That too reduces the idea of Medic promotion through the Protective trait to absurdity.



It's a pity, that I don't have the time to play on Odyssey speed, because on Normal I'm finding my unique unit, conquistadors, going swiftly obsolete in a matter of turns, when cavalry becomes available. It takes three to four, sometimes two turns during this stage of the game to research the next tech. This time lapse effect showed in BTS, too, but I'm not sure, whether it was so extreme. The conquistadors arrive in their "theater of operations", when you're busy building artillery in your mainland cities…

 

[Simon_Jester]

Hm. Pacing may be an issue.




Regarding the Conquistador, perhaps we should make one of its special features that it is available early? The Spanish did most of their great feats of conquest in the 15th and early 16th centuries, which was chronologically before the widespread use of gunpowder weapons for cavalry by at least fifty years. Sure, there were some arquebuses and cannon mixed in with the forces deployed by Cortez, Pizarro, and the Reconquista. But they didn't dominate, the way the wheellock pistol and the modification of tactics to accomodate gunpowder dominated 17th century and later cavalry warfare.

In the early iterations of Civ IV, before they added the Cuirassier unit, I'm pretty sure the Conquistador replaced the Knight. We might not want to go back that far, but... we could seriously consider it. At the moment, as I recall, the Byzantine Cataphract is a high-strength Knight substitute that basically gives them the striking power of a Cuirassier; the Conquistador is a Cuirassier-substitute that gets defensive terrain bonuses and a bonus against melee troops.




It would arguably make more sense for the Cataphract to be a Knight with first strikes and/or a higher withdrawal chance. That would reflect the unusual tactical sophistication of Byzantine heavy cavalry, and their use of archery.

While the Conquistador would be an early-availability Cuirassier which excels at beating up primitive units (bonus against melee as usual, possibly also a modest bonus against archers, like the Janissary or Pombos), and also more useful for taking or sacking cities.

Does this make sense?

You might even make the Conquistador lower strength than the standard Cuirassier (say, Strength 11), but its bonus against melee makes it significantly more effective against its dedicated counter-unit (the Pikeman), so it's still a pretty significant upgrade from the Knight.

That would fit well into Xyth's goal of making the unique units... I can't find where he said it, but I remember. His point was that unique units shouldn't just be "OHMIGOD SUPER!" versions of the normal units of their era. They should be superior, but their advantages should significantly affect how you use the unit- so you have to tailor your strategy to take best advantage of the strengths of your special unit. If you just use it the same way you'd use the default units, you don't get so much benefit from it.

Making the conquistador strong against primitive units and relatively good (for cavalry) at city assaults encourages the Spanish player to go find a primitive enemy to beat up while those units are available.




Also, yes, I think we need some way to restrict Medic promotions, at least from mounted and siege units. Naval units are okay, but mounted and siege units become much more dangerous when you can give them medic promotions, because they're harder to wear down in combat.

 

[Nightstar]

I think I may have an insight on the Olympics bug: Saved game loading. It seems to never leave whatever city it was in when a save is loaded (or, on rare occasions, appear and disappear *on the same turn* right after loading).

On the Medieval era crashing, I seem to recall that I really started to see performance issues and crashes on a previously stable game about the time I researched Compass. Perhaps the problem has something to do with the way trade routes over Ocean is handled?

 

[Howard Mahler]

I have done some more thinking about the Financial Trait versus game speed.

For simplicity let us assume 2 game speeds, Fast and Slow.
For simplicity let us assume each turn for Fast is 1 year while each turn for slow is 6 months.
Slow has twice as many turns as Slow.

The city maintenance costs are the same for the two speeds.
If it is 10 per year on Fast then it is also 10 per turn on Slow, which is 20 per year on Slow. In dollar terms your rent is twice as much per year on Slow as on Fast.

A cleric specialist generates 1 per year on Fast and 2 per year on Slow.

A plot with one coin generates 1 per year on Fast and 2 per year on Slow.

A technology that costs 1000 on Fast should cost 2000 on Slow, so that it takes the same number of years to research but twice as many turns on Slow.

With Financial on Fast you get +1 coin (commerce?) per city per turn, the same as from a cleric specialist,
With Financial on Slow you also get +1 coin (commerce?) per city per turn, which is 2 per year.

Let us assume the older version of the Financial Trait.

With Financial you earn 1% on your money per turn, subject to the cap.
On Fast that is 1% per year, on Slow that is 2% per year.
If you are at the cap, you get twice the dollar amount per year on Slow as on Fast, which matches the increased costs and income from other sources.

The one difference is how long it takes you to reach the cap, in other words how long it takes you to save of the maximum useful amount to benefit from the interest.

Let us assume for example a net income of 50 per turn and a cap of 1000.
It takes 20 turns to save that up, ignoring for simplicity interest effects.
This is 20 years on Fast but only 10 years on slow.

Once you are at the cap, the dollar amounts earned are in the right 2 to 1 ratio.
However, at the Slow Speed it takes half of the effort to get to the cap.

1000 dollars on the Fast speed is really equivalent to 2000 dollars on the Slow Speed.

I think the following revised version of the Financial Trait would work:
On Slow, receive interest once every other turn, in other words once year.
(Equivalent to making the interest rate per turn 1/2% rather than 1%, resulting in a rate of 1% per year on both speeds.)
On Slow, double the cap.

Then once one gets to the cap of 1000 on Fast you get 10 per turn.
Once one gets to the cap of 2000 on Slow you get 20 every other turn.
On a per turn basis, you get the same amount at each speed, as it should be.
On a per year basis, you get twice the amount on Slow, as it should be.

Now it takes the same number of years to save up the cap on both speeds.

This seems similar to the revision for 1.18 to the new 1.17 version that you mentioned.

While I have assumed a ratio of 2 to 1, similar ideas apply for any other ratio.
For a 3 to 1 ratio, one would get the interest once every 3 turns, but the cap would be three times as much.

 

[Howard Mahler]

As has been noted before, when you reload a saved game with Olympic Games in a city, it does not leave after the usual number of turns.

This happened to me in my current game.
City X had "perpetual" Olympics.
However, after a good while, the Olympic Games at random came to City X.
The games now left at their usual time!
No more perpetual Olympics.

I am guessing that whenever the Olympics games show up they set an exit date.
However, any exit date is not included on a reload of a saved game.

Hope this helps to figure out what is going wrong.

 

[Keinpferd]

To check the World mapscript again, which had appeared awkward to me, I selected one more time Old World Start, culturally linked, break Pangea, everything else medium and normal, and what I got was a Pangea map with no sign of culturally linkedness.



Aesthetically, the World mapscript produces interesting maps, and I wouldn't mind the challenge, but in that first roll I'm at an inland lake with one crab, two calendar resources both covered with jungle, and all other workable tiles covered with wood… This would make for a terrible laggy early game in HR on Emperor. I would reroll.

This start is also illustrating my view, that HR isn't offering enough sources of commerce in the early game.

Since the unlimited specialists were removed from Caste System, you are bound to build cottages to generate commerce for research – once you eventually researched Employment. You will have to wait then for Democracy to run unlimited scientists. This amounts with the now missing three beakers per specialist through Representation to a drastic dependency on the base commerce of your starting position, regarding your research speed. And there's not much to decide, to try, to risk, to do something about that initial commerce situation by your own choice, mostly because you can't snatch Representation anymore by chopping the Pyramids (free choice of government civics) very early! I do like the change to Caste System and Pyramids, but where the hell are the early beakers are supposed to come from, now?

Your prime source of commerce in the early game is from the Redistribution civic; build many mines in your hills and camps in the forests/jungles/savannah. Slavery will also give you some commerce from your Quarries and Plantations. Build Kilns in your cities too.

This reply seems a little unsatisfying to me. Redistribution and Employment may be of help, but they come too late. That's hardly "early game" anymore. And there's little point in beelining to Redistribution; other important techs are too vital to leave out: Monarchy for building wealth, The Wheel to connect your resources, military techs to deal with barbarians…

A suggestion to create "more early commerce": How about making kilns improvements instead of buildings? It takes forever, until you are allowed to chop woods, while kilns should be possible to be built from the very beginning. The according kiln knowledge is older than 4000 BC, I suppose. For the sake of balance, to grant something to floodplain starters, too: perhaps irrigation ditches very early (art existing)? And more of the like.

Sadly, I wasn't able to finish my Isabella game, and there's little chance to do so in the next weeks. But it's been great fun so far, and HR should be dragged more to the light of day. Isn't it possible to "apply" for coverage on the "front page" of the forum. I would like to see HR 1.18 as big attentionwise as it deserves.

 

[Xyth]

Hm, there's only one line different to the BTS CIV4HandicapInfo.xml, the iResearch tag (plus the additional starting techs), or are there any other AI handicap modifiers defined elsewhere?

Besides CIV4HandicapInfo.xml, there are others in CIV4GameSpeedInfo.xml, CIV4WorldInfo.xml, and CIV4EraInfos.xml. All of them affect the player and the AI though, I'm not aware of any that affect just one and not the other. The AI gets ahead because of it's bonuses to production, commerce, etc

It's a pity, that I don't have the time to play on Odyssey speed, because on Normal I'm finding my unique unit, conquistadors, going swiftly obsolete in a matter of turns, when cavalry becomes available. It takes three to four, sometimes two turns during this stage of the game to research the next tech. This time lapse effect showed in BTS, too, but I'm not sure, whether it was so extreme. The conquistadors arrive in their "theater of operations", when you're busy building artillery in your mainland cities&#8230;

If you beeline both units there are a minimum of 14 techs between the Cuirassier and Cavalry. That's fewer than I'd like, I might take a look at some of the techtree crosslinks around then and see if I can improve the situation a bit.

Regarding the Conquistador, perhaps we should make one of its special features that it is available early?

Making the conquistador strong against primitive units and relatively good (for cavalry) at city assaults encourages the Spanish player to go find a primitive enemy to beat up while those units are available.

In the early iterations of Civ IV, before they added the Cuirassier unit, I'm pretty sure the Conquistador replaced the Knight. We might not want to go back that far, but... we could seriously consider it.

The Heavy Horseman is unlocked right back at the start of the Medieval era, so sometime between 500 and 1000 CE. That's much too early for the Conquistador. Having it unlock a bit earlier could work though, and it certainly would benefit from a general redesign.

It would arguably make more sense for the Cataphract to be a Knight with first strikes and/or a higher withdrawal chance. That would reflect the unusual tactical sophistication of Byzantine heavy cavalry, and their use of archery.

As would the Cataphract. I haven't got time to look at them at the moment but I'll added both to my todo list.

That would fit well into Xyth's goal of making the unique units... I can't find where he said it, but I remember. His point was that unique units shouldn't just be "OHMIGOD SUPER!" versions of the normal units of their era. They should be superior, but their advantages should significantly affect how you use the unit- so you have to tailor your strategy to take best advantage of the strengths of your special unit. If you just use it the same way you'd use the default units, you don't get so much benefit from it.

That's the ideal, yes. Challenging to achieve it for every UU but we can chip away at it.

Also, yes, I think we need some way to restrict Medic promotions, at least from mounted and siege units. Naval units are okay, but mounted and siege units become much more dangerous when you can give them medic promotions, because they're harder to wear down in combat.

Siege units haven't been able to take the Medic promotions for quite some time now in HR. We can try removing it from Mounted units.

I think I may have an insight on the Olympics bug: Saved game loading. It seems to never leave whatever city it was in when a save is loaded (or, on rare occasions, appear and disappear *on the same turn* right after loading).

As has been noted before, when you reload a saved game with Olympic Games in a city, it does not leave after the usual number of turns.

This happened to me in my current game.
City X had "perpetual" Olympics.
However, after a good while, the Olympic Games at random came to City X.
The games now left at their usual time!
No more perpetual Olympics.

I am guessing that whenever the Olympics games show up they set an exit date.
However, any exit date is not included on a reload of a saved game.

Hope this helps to figure out what is going wrong.

Yeah the problem is definitely related to saving and/or loading games. I just haven't been able to figure out why it isn't working as intended. I'll keep at it.

On the Medieval era crashing, I seem to recall that I really started to see performance issues and crashes on a previously stable game about the time I researched Compass. Perhaps the problem has something to do with the way trade routes over Ocean is handled?

It seems to be a texture related crash so it's related to something that gets unlocked around that time, or an item that switches to its Medieval/Renaissance graphics. It doesn't seem to be related to any particular civilization which, along with its unpredictability, is what is making it so hard to track down.

I think the following revised version of the Financial Trait would work:
On Slow, receive interest once every other turn, in other words once year.
(Equivalent to making the interest rate per turn 1/2% rather than 1%, resulting in a rate of 1% per year on both speeds.)
On Slow, double the cap.

Then once one gets to the cap of 1000 on Fast you get 10 per turn.
Once one gets to the cap of 2000 on Slow you get 20 every other turn.
On a per turn basis, you get the same amount at each speed, as it should be.
On a per year basis, you get twice the amount on Slow, as it should be.

Now it takes the same number of years to save up the cap on both speeds.

This seems similar to the revision for 1.18 to the new 1.17 version that you mentioned

That makes sense but I wonder if it would actually make reaching and maintaining the cap too hard on the slower gamespeeds. I'll test it out.

This start is also illustrating my view, that HR isn't offering enough sources of commerce in the early game.

How many turns is it taking on average for each tech?

A suggestion to create "more early commerce": How about making kilns improvements instead of buildings?

Hmm. That's an interesting idea, I'll have a think about it.

But it's been great fun so far, and HR should be dragged more to the light of day. Isn't it possible to "apply" for coverage on the "front page" of the forum. I would like to see HR 1.18 as big attentionwise as it deserves.

The J usually posts the list of new Civ4 modding updates around the beginning of each month. I've listed 1.17 in the relevant thread so it should be included. I'm going to try and get 1.18 done before the end of May so it can be included in the next one. As always though, things can take longer to finish than I expect.

 

[Keinpferd]

If you beeline both units there are a minimum of 14 techs between the Cuirassier and Cavalry. That's fewer than I'd like, I might take a look at some of the techtree crosslinks around then and see if I can improve the situation a bit.

That's surprising me, it felt like much less than 14. Maybe I didn't upgrade my knights right away, so the time I "had" conquistadors appeared yet shorter.

There's no criticsm here, because on Normal gamespeed we just have to live with the fact, that the armies look a bit mixed, so to say. In my game, I had submarines before cruisers, my opponent grenadiers in an otherwise late medieval army, and there are chances, that the anti-tank-guys will show up, before you're done with upgrading your riflemen to infantry. That's all unavoidable on Normal. Realism Invictus seems to be honestly attempting to furnish all eras with a specified unit set. They must be all addicts to enjoy all these high-definition eras at full extent.

Originally Posted by Keinpferd View Post
This start is also illustrating my view, that HR isn't offering enough sources of commerce in the early game.

How many turns is it taking on average for each tech?

I didn't think of taking notes, which I should have. My measure here was the speed at which the AI was hurrying away and how long I was kind of helplessly waiting for Employment to build cottages.

The data I remember: You can't have both Writing and Employment as soon as you'd like. If the diplo endorses it, Writing is more valuable, for tech trade opportunities. I think I had Writing between 1200 and 800 in my several attempts. In my continued game I got to Employment maybe around 300 BC. In BTS you could have already built many cottages at the time.

In the last screenshot, I provided (about the World mapscript), the player will have a hard time to reach Employment and all the neccessary wood cutting techniques to build huts on wood tiles until 300 BC.

Kiln as improvement: or another improvement, that could be built before bronze age without upsetting the historians to much. The concept of Commerce in Civ is a little strange anyway. While food (space filled with edibles) and production (space filled with "workables") are making sense, commerce is representing what kind of space exactly? Trade, long before you can build a market, symbolized by coins, long before you researched currency? On water tiles, there's commerce, shortly after you learned fishing, how? I guess we must understand commerce in a broader sense, as a commutative flow of experiences, tales, news, observations, foreign unexplicable artifacts, hoards of feather and ore, divine utterances of the seven winds… Commerce is what's coming from the outer world of your little stone age village inside. A part from that will be locked away by the nobles and priests, Civ-Wealth, a part turns into knowledge, Civ-Science. Just trying to understand, what I'm asking for, if I'm asking for sources of commerce in the pre-bronze age.

 

[Nightstar]

I'm not quite sure which thread this should go in, so I'll just default it to this one.

In my current game I recently razed two barbarian cities that had lasted into the late Renaissance/early Industrial era by virtue of being on a mostly desert island that nobody really had much interest in (at least until I discovered it also had the only unclaimed source of Aluminum, but I digress). Because they had lasted so long, the barb-built cottages had had time to grow into towns/villages, which I pillaged after razing the cities. This generated the following error:

"Error in improvementBuilt event handler <bound method BUGEventManager.onImprovementBuilt of <BUGEventManager.BUGEventManager instance at 0x37b7b058>>"

(Pillaging one in a different tile resulted in the same error message except for the alphanumeric string at the end changing to "0x3a077058", so I suspect that part is just the tile identification number.)

I still got the usual amount of gold and the improvement downgraded correctly. Interestingly, I only got the error message when pillaging them at town/village/hamlet levels; the error did not display after doing so at cottage level. There was no such error after pillaging towns created by another civ.

I'm playing as Meiji (so I have the cottage-growth-rate modifiying Progressive trait), if it matters.

 

[Xyth]

Realism Invictus seems to be honestly attempting to furnish all eras with a specified unit set. They must be all addicts to enjoy all these high-definition eras at full extent.

I would like to add some more units to flesh out certain eras like that but the art just isn't available in sufficient variety. Realism Invictus has the advantage of not requiring the same set of units for every civ.

In the last screenshot, I provided (about the World mapscript), the player will have a hard time to reach Employment and all the neccessary wood cutting techniques to build huts on wood tiles until 300 BC.

Don't forget that Jungle gives commerce and doesn't have reduced food in HR. Because chopping comes later I've deliberately made wooded tiles better overall, and allowed the camp to built in them without a resource. Chopping too early can in fact ruin your economy if you're not careful.

 

[Xyth]

In my current game I recently razed two barbarian cities that had lasted into the late Renaissance/early Industrial era by virtue of being on a mostly desert island that nobody really had much interest in (at least until I discovered it also had the only unclaimed source of Aluminum, but I digress). Because they had lasted so long, the barb-built cottages had had time to grow into towns/villages, which I pillaged after razing the cities. This generated the following error.

I'm playing as Meiji (so I have the cottage-growth-rate modifiying Progressive trait), if it matters.

It will be related to that or to Protective's immunity to pillaging. I can't tell since I'm not at my computer but I've probably neglected to check whether a player is a barbarian or not in one of those two sections of code.

Should be easy to fix, thanks for the report.

 

[Howard Mahler]

It appears that once you have built a railroad you can not replace it with a highway (And vice versa?)
This is (mildly) annoying since some improvements get a bonus from and not the other.
Is there is some way to change this?