1.24.1 Released!

I used to play and really enjoyed your mod, but stopped playing about 4 and a half years ago.
I downloaded this new version but was totally unable to unzip it using either the unacheiver or any other way.
I have Mac system 10.6.8.


Anyway you can help?

hmahler@mac.com

 

There are some links for mac in the troubleshooting thread (second post). I use 7z to unzip on mac.

 

Do you get an error message when trying to unpack it? I think The Unarchiver dropped support for Snow Leopard, which is pretty ancient now. They might have older versions available on their website, or you might try another unzipping tool. Keka is another one you could try. Also try downloading HR again, in case something got corrupted the first time.

 

Keka did the trick. Thanks!
Looking forward to seeing all of the changes since I last played.

 

How about:
cottages, somehow its really important to get the important money sooner that is available nov, but i dint want full aces to town yet. On slower early games is money income really a pain to keep up.
cottage - Leather working (1 tech required) or Record keeping
hamlet - Record keeping (4 tech required)
village - Employment (9 tech required) (currently all on it)
Town - Currency (14 tech required)
possible or not?

archers (3) - Engineering give archers +1 strength, or new builded receive +1 strength, or all new/current if they dint have receive free city defend promotion


empire dissent:

to [ (percentage of citizens of your nation in this city ) /10 - CyMap().getWorldSize() ] + [ others empires (if more that 20% is present)]


Create custom game menu:
There is option destroyable cities. (yes/no)
How about add option: large cities not-destroyable (8+?) or cities whit value > (wonders + buldings + culture)

 

I'm happy with how cottages work now. Money is meant to be scarce in the early game, and I feel tying the cottage upgrades to tech progression is unnecessary and unrealistic.

Why do you feel this is necessary?

Culture and population are already considered earlier in the dissent mechanics. This value just scales dissent appropriately for mapsize.

I'd have to look into how to do this. Probably only possible on Windows.

 

About that Archer it come from thinking about Archer and Crossbowman.
-I was thinking that Engineering can provide more bow construct option for bows for defend purpose. That will be used lately in Machinery for Crossbowmans.
-Even whit its bonuses its become soon pretty weak. And considering the price for army its better from some point to not build Archer from some point at all. The one i was i rarely upgrade, but mostly i send them as a gift or scrap. If i let them join the offense party its primary for draining collateral damage. Or as a sacrificial for assault.

 

O, Xyth, why has thou forsaken us?

Any news on 1.25?

 

The Bad News

Progress has been sporadic but then in December it became more or less non-existent. Last year went in some unexpected directions for my family and I, most of which were welcome, but all of which have been time-consuming. I started the year with some big ambitions for DLL changes in 1.25, but without consistent time to mod this proved to be a mistake. Being so much less familiar with C++ and the DLL has meant I've spent more time trying to keep track of where I was up to than actually getting any new work done. I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that I need to abandon these DLL modifications for now. Sorry everyone.


The Good News

As of this weekend, life has settled considerably and I'll have more free time this February than I've had in over a year. I intend to use it to get 1.25 finished and released. If all goes to plan it will have 2 new civs (Scythia and Armenia), heaps of new music (courtesy of @IanMusic), and as many fixes and tweaks as I can squeeze in.

 

Yes! That's good to hear

 

Current game.
37% of 50% population needed and 34% of 52% of land area needed for domination victory.
Minimum possible dissent is 322.

The current rate of increase of dissent with number of cities, makes further play of this game not in any way worthwhile.
(Already had dissent dominate game play for the previous large portion of the game.)

 

What size and type of map? What difficulty level? How much of those proportions is vassal states?

 

Pangea, large map. Prince level. (Still getting the hang of History Rewritten 1.24.) No vassal states.

As discussed, with vassal states counting as half, if at this stage I had vassals controlling an additional 26% of population and an additional 36% of land area, I would achieve domination victory. I and vassals would control 63% of population and 70% of land area, a good deal of the way to an elimination victory.

Minimum possible dissent of 322 requires the choice of mostly inferior civics.
In order to survive, most cities need to have only the state religion and a large stack of troops with Authoritarianism.
In addition to all of the above, it is critical to carefully space out any available golden ages.

At this stage, as well as for a considerable period before, dissent becomes by far the single biggest aspect of the game, dominating game play.

I think dissent is a worthwhile addition to the game, but the current manner in which it increases with number of cities is just far too much.
The game already had mechanisms to deal with increasing number of cities, particularly maintenance costs.

P.S. I was trying to play a peaceful game until the Mongols attacked me.
After the Mongols were eliminated, I again tried for a peaceful game.
Then the Japanese attacked me.
When I stopped playing, the Japanese were perhaps 2/3 eliminated and on the ropes.

 

Dissent is probably my favorite aspects of HR, but I think the balancing is off. In my opinion, I think the civics that reduce dissent reduce it to an extreme degree, and they don't have any costs associated with that lower dissent (I actually thinks some of the best civics also happen to reduce dissent). Here's my take on the imbalances in some of the civics:

Multiculturalism makes dissent nearly a non-issue when taking cities, and it also gives +50% trade route yield as prod. This is way better than industrialism, and I don't really see the tie between multiculturalism and prod anyways. I think it would make more sense if 50% trade route went to food (to represent immigration), and foreign culture influence from trade doubled. I think I would remove foreign culture reducing dissent, I think it breaks the dissent mechanic.

Social Welfare is the strongest labour mechanic in almost every aspect. No unhappiness from corps, and unlimited doctors allow you to work more tiles/specialists than usual. This can make the production gain greater than industrialism, especially when considering that when industrialism becomes available, the factories begin to produce a lot of unhealthiness, making unlimited engineers very hard to utilize. Corporations also begin to take off around this time, making the unhealthiness situation even worse. To make this civic even better, it has low dissent.

Sustainability is also way too powerful; no unhealthiness from pop or corps makes dissent even less relevant, and wind turbines and nature reserves produce commerce. The only way I can see this civic being justified in being this powerful, and low dissent is that free market is much better from a commerce point of view, so the opportunity cost is very high for not choosing it. I think this civic could be more balanced if it had some drawbacks, such as no access to coal.

For all of my playthroughs of HR, I use all of these civics no matter what (I swap sustainability with free market if dissent allows), because I don't think the civics are weak, and they make dissent nearly a non-issue. They are all late game civics though so they can't be really be used for a domination victory, because there would simply not be enough time to get the land and pop if you wait that long. For this reason, I almost exclusively go for science victories in HR. I understand that the dissent scales with the cities because large states become hard to maintain, but I think there needs to be a path for domination victory players to win. I think a good start would be if player could weight espionage points on themselves to reduce overall dissent, and also could use these points on their own cities to reduce dissent. This way, a player going for domination will need to maintain a strong enough economy to fund their espionage if they want to maintain stability.

If the "foreign culture reduces dissent" was taken away from multiculturalism, I don't think scaling dissent with city count could would be needed. In order to maintain the idea that large states and colonies of a state are hard to maintain, it could be added that barbarian culture gain could be tied to distance from capital (this would work if foreign culture produces dissent, which I think is the case, correct me if I'm wrong). The actual civil war from this could get messy though, because I don't think HR is set up to convert barbarian culture to breakaway state's culture.

Edit: just wanted to add that I rarely have more than 8-10 cities in a game (large map) so I don't have much of a grasp with the extent to which the dissent scales

 

No comment on late game civics you mentioned, since I have never gotten that far.
Way in the future for the game I referenced.

The effect of espionage is relatively small on dissent, but useful.
Running multiple spies in a city can help at the margins.
I have my doubts that your suggested solution is the way to go.
There is not a need for another economic challenge for a large civ, particularly if trying to absorb conquered cities.

Dissent scales quickly with extra cities; this is the single biggest problem I have with it.
In the referenced game I have 48 cities.
Japan who I am at war with still has 11.
Other remaining civs have: 25, 23, 12, 10, 5.

I could proceed along a clear path: eliminate Japan, and then just before revolt in cities strikes, use my 5 carefully hoarded great people to start a golden age.
This would buy some time, and I could then try to dash to a domination victory before I was sunk by the rising dissent.

However, I stopped playing because trying to fight these levels of rising dissent greater than 322, while also trying to pay attention to the many other aspects of the game,
was no longer fun or interesting.

 

tldr;
I think that if players could weight espionage on themselves and passively reduce their dissent, it would help to balance the scaling of dissent in large civs.

If you are referencing my idea about allowing player to spend espionage points on themselves to manage their dissent, then I don't think giving players the option to use espionage and spies on themselves to reduce dissent creates an economic challenge for players with large empires; actually they would only stand to benefit because currently that is not an option to manage dissent in cities on an significant scale (or at least I have not found an effective way to espionage to do this myself). If it was implemented and players with large empires thought they had nothing to benefit from it, they could simply not use the mechanic and would be no worse off.

If you were referring to the civics, the reason I point out their effects on dissent is that these civics are extremely powerful at reducing dissent in terms of their effects on foreign culture, healthiness, happiness, and corp penalties. This is all in addition to them being mostly low dissent civics. It pushes players into a set of civics that are much better than any alternatives. I'm not suggesting the civics be adjusted because I think it will penalize large empires , rather I'm suggesting it because they on't feel balanced and there are civics that are superior in almost every aspect.

.

I think it would improve the balancing if the dissent was not tied to the number of cities. I think the biggest problem is the different map sizes and types make it difficult to scale the base dissent. Civ IV does a good job of scaling the science output relative to cites by using the city maintenance costs. Players have the option to utilize the full science output of their civ, but only if they have the gold to pay for and sustain it. If espionage were to be tied to dissent, I think scaling base dissent to cities would work much more nicely.

My reasoning behind this is if the dissent scales linearly with city count, then we can also have an offset where the total espionage points you have on yourself brings down your dissent. This way when you found a city, you should be pushed into a net gain of dissent (if you were originally at equilibrium), the rate of dissent will decrease as the city develops. This is similar to how civ iv currently works with science, where you found a city, and the ratio of commerce:maintenance-costs is much lower than your overall civ, but it pays off in the long run.

Early game, I think dissent is pretty well balanced. I think most of the imbalance comes later in the game, so if dissent was made easier to manage as time goes on, the later game civics could have their effects on dissent trimmed back as I suggested in the post before this one.

Now that I think about it, using spies on your own cities to reduce dissent probably shouldn't be added because it would make managing dissent too easy, and would probably be difficult to manage the balance the costs with large maps/civs

 

With respect to espionage and dissent. Currently if a city produces espionage in a city, there is small offset to dissent.
If what you are proposing, is that the total espionage generated by the civ (or a fraction) could be set to go on own civ, on average this would just double the favorable impact on dissent of espionage on each city. This would help, but without using the slider to increase espionage its effect on dissent would be limited.

Having a spy in your own city reducing dissent by a small amount ( no extra affect for a second spy) is an interesting idea, but again just chips at the edges of the current problem.

 

I was thinking it would be more like a global effect on your cities when you put the espionage on yourself. It would be kinda hard to balance because I'm sure there are cases where you could get a ton of espionage on yourself from spies, and then the dissent mechanic wouldn't play a role.

A way that might be easier to implement is if the espionage generated by a civ (without weighting themselves) contributed to reducing dissent in all cities. So you could adjust the espionage slider when dissent begins to get out of hand. This way there's no need to modify how espionage works. Currently I don't think the slider has any effect on dissent in a city. I think its only base espionage generated from buildings in the city.