1.17 released

[Xyth]

Excellent! I'm looking forward to it.
You know, I might actually post reports of my first game in 1.18 here, with screenshots and everything.
It'll be fun, and useful when discussing 1.19, and might give me some incentive to finish a game.
(No, I haven't returned to that Egypt game yet.)

Sounds good.

I'm confused by these entries. Are you cutting free Drill promotions from Protective? Or are you fixing a bug which gave free Drill promotions to too many units?

Cutting the Drill promotion from Protective. I think it was due to a discrepancy between my notes and what was actually in game, but I don't remember now which was correct. I have no issue reversing this if its deemed undesirable.

Likewise, for Tactical: does it now give wealth for killing enemy units in rival territory only, or rival territory plus neutral and friendly territory?

Only in enemy territory but the gold calculation is changing to be based on the experience the defeated unit had accumulated. Formerly it was based on the experience the winning unit would receive. Two reasons for this; the bonus felt a bit lacklustre as you rarely got more than 1-3:wealth:, and the old method was a bit of a performance hog. The new method shares the same code as Traditional's culture bonus and thus both are much more efficient.

I like that Harbours are available before Lighthouses in HR. Why not take it one step further and swap the effects of Harbours and Lighthouses, just like in the Rhye's and Fall of Civilization mod? It makes more sense that way: Harbours offer shelter to fishing boats and provide +1 on Coast and Ocean tiles. Lighthouses offer direction to trading vessels and provide +50% trade route yield. The Cothon and Trading Post UBs can be tailored to match.

That does make sense. I'll put it in.

Great Artists are available much earlier than in BtS, thanks to the free Artist specialist slot from Creative leaders. A Great Work (+4000 on Standard speed) can be overpowering in the Ancient Era, blocking huge tracks of land from settlement and stealing tiles or even prompting revolts in culturally defenseless cities. Perhaps Great Works should have a technology requirement: Architecture or Nobility or some such?

There's no way I can attach requirements to do a Great Works, all I can do is change the amount of culture they provide and the unit can perform them. I guess it might be possible via a 'fake' unit replacing Great Artists after a certain tech but that's messy.

'The Singularity' is a much more interesting name for 'Future Tech.'

I don't think the tech in HR really represents technological singularity, just unknown as yet unknown advances of the future. Perhaps if the future era is expanded a bit more, but not at this time.

 

[Skidizzle]

Imo future tech is basically useless in this mod given the enormous amount of health and happiness bonuses you can get from elsewhere. Is it possible to code a random chance benefit for future tech? Like it randomly adds extra culture/espionage/units/build modifiers/corporate bonuses/other random things?

 

[Simon_Jester]

'The Singularity' is a much more interesting name for 'Future Tech.'

I disagree.

"The Singularity" implies specific views about how advanced technology will affect the world- one might reasonably be skeptical about them. Also, the entire point of talking about a Singularity is that the nature of the world post-Singularity becomes inherently unpredictable: the future is assumed to be in the hands of AIs with godlike intelligence, so we mere mortals can't guess or project how things will turn out as a result.

When Vinge invented the idea, his point was that we cannot see through the Singularity; a post-Singularity future will not look just like the industrial age only with ray guns, jet packs, and longer life expectancies.

And there's no mechanism in Civ to reflect this- the essential paradigm of how the game works won't change, you'll still be fighting with basically the same armies and building essentially the same kind of cities under Future Tech.

So "Singularity" doesn't really describe the technological endgame of Civ. Indeed, Civ is implicitly a non-Singularitarian game.

Now, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri... that is another story. That's a Singularitarian game in that one of the endings involves transcendence, and a future beyond transcendence which is inherently unlike any other thing in the human experience.

Although it's a Singularity that doesn't look quite like Vinge imagined, and the trigger is the merger of AI, telepathy, and Planet's consciousness. The invention of AI in and of itself doesn't change things as much or as quickly in the game as some of the wilder-eyed Singularitarians would expect.

 

[Eucalyptus]

After some testing this is the scheme I'm going with for now (using the forum's nifty new table feature!):

[TABLE="head;width=600px"]Build %|Wealth|Research|Culture|Espionage
33%|Property|Writing|Aesthetics|Paper
50%|Guilds|Printing|Education|Photography
100%|Corporation|Sci. Method|Sociology|Radio
[/TABLE]

33% means it takes 3 hammers to produce 1 of the relevant commerce, 50% means it takes 2. I decided to go with 3 ranks instead since a '4 for 1' ratio felt useless and '3 for 2' (75%) felt a bit unintuitive. Each build option (except Espionage) thus become available in the Ancient or Classical era and becomes full strength sometime in the Renaissance. Espionage starts and ends a bit later as I did some reading and it's actually a lot more powerful than I thought.

I've been watching how this works in my HR1.18 games. It takes so long for rates to rise from 3-1 to 2-1 that I've only ever really seen 3-1 rates.

As the human player, I can see that the yield from a 3-1 rate is very poor and only ever use it when desperate to bootstrap myself out of a hole after overconquering (often towards Currency around 500BC). However, I've seen the 3-1 rate to widely used by the AI (across multiple cities, and not in particular times of need), and I believe that this cripples the AI. They waste hammers on a futile struggle to compete in research where they should be using those hammers to build an army to defend against the rapacious human player.

In the light of this, I feel that it would be better to simply omit the 3-1 level and use its activation technologies to replace those of the 2-1 level. That is:

[TABLE="head;width=600px"]Build %|Wealth|Research|Culture|Espionage
50%|Property|Writing|Aesthetics|Paper
100%|Corporation|Sci. Method|Sociology|Radio
[/TABLE]

Do others have the same observations? Opinions?