3.9.3 impressions

[stackpointer]

Great People
Developing the infrastructure to create Great People (GP) is now more challenging and rewarding. The great person spawn rate in cities with no development is lower, while the effects of bonuses which improve GP rate are higher. The overall changes reward players who enjoy focusing on this area of the game, by giving them an advantage in GP creation over leaders who choose to invest less.

• Lower basic great person spawn rate.
• Gardens increase the rate of GP more, and can be built anywhere.
• The Tradition finisher increases the rate of GP.
• Specialists are available from more buildings, and earlier in the game, providing more maximum GP points per turn.

I realize that the last couple of builds have been missing change logs. This is because multiple people are now working on the project and making changes. But now that we have moved the releases to github, it is easier for multiple people to make running changes to a release draft and publish the change log there. See: https://github.com/Thalassicus/cep-bnw/releases

 

[Ahriman]

Thanks.

Great People
Developing the infrastructure to create Great People (GP) is now more challenging and rewarding. The great person spawn rate in cities with no development is lower, while the effects of bonuses which improve GP rate are higher. The overall changes reward players who enjoy focusing on this area of the game, by giving them an advantage in GP creation over leaders who choose to invest less.
Lower basic great person spawn rate.
Gardens increase the rate of GP more, and can be built anywhere.
The Tradition finisher increases the rate of GP.
Specialists are available from more buildings, and earlier in the game, providing more maximum GP points per turn.

So this is basically going back to the GEM design?
Gardens are already +50% so I don't think a further increase is needed, and I hope we don't go back to the GEM version where there were so many specialist slots on so many buildings that specialist slots basically became meaningless because they were no longer a relevant binding constraint.

I think there is also a need for making great person improvements scale more evenly throughout the tech tree, so they are slightly lower in the very early game but have more points that increase their value. (eg see http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=516002 )

 

[mystikx21]

There are somewhat fewer specialist slots than I think GEM had... but this is mostly because there are not artist slots aside from the guild buildings and only one national wonder per gets a slot. There are still only four spec slots from the actual buildings per specialist, as in vanilla, but they're spread out more. The only extra is from the national wonders (Oxford, Treasury, and Ironworks I think)

The main questionable aspects are engineer slots on walls and castles (although this slightly strengthens the republic policy since it's a free engineer slot and quicker access to another), and maybe the scientist slot on the library and merchant slot on the caravansarei.

There isn't a slot on the lighthouse, barracks, shrine, or mint as in GEM, so I think there's some progress there in tamping it down somewhat.

 

[Ahriman]

Thanks. I think specialist slots on national wonders are good. The way I would probably do it would be to have early game specialist slots come only from national wonders. That helps to encourage meaningful city specialization and to make the specialist slots rare and valuable. So no slots needed on walls or other early game buildings.

And I would then make sure to add at most one slot per era. So since there's an engineer slot on the smithy, but we don't need one on the castle.

This helps to make specialists and specialist slots mostly about great people generation rather than letting them substitute en masse for improvements and tile working.

 

[tlaurila]

I think this is probably the issue. Arguably it should be tier3. It's also odd seeing that I think march (? I think?) was a tier1 promotion for artillery.

Agreed for indirect fire. In my game (with 3.9.3) catapults only have the +15% vs open or rough available as lvl1 promotions. The question is, what would be a meaningful lvl2 promotion for artillery? March,, Indirect Fire, Range, Fire Twice are the good ones, aren't they? But should they be starting tier 2, 3 or 4?

 

[Ahriman]

One other 3.9.3 thing I didn't mention: AI's were conquering each other quite nicely. Of the 8 powers in the world, the Danes attacked me and I conquered them all, the Germans wiped out Ethiopia, and Russia and the Aztecs wiped out Bablyon and Vienna. So there were 4 civs left by the modern/atomic era.

On the one hand, it's a bit worrying if the aggressive civs always do better, but on the other hand, it's great that conquest is working well, and that there will be larger AI foes for the player to deal with in the late game.

March,, Indirect Fire, Range, Fire Twice are the good ones, aren't they? But should they be starting tier 2, 3 or 4?

I think Range and fire twice should be tier 4. Indirect fire and March could be tier 3. The extra bonus vs cities and fortified units could be tier 2 or 3.

 

[stackpointer]

I believe Range/Blitz is tier 4, March is tier 3, and Indirect Fire/Siege is tier 2.

 

[Ahriman]

I think part of the problem is that we're forced to have the same tier regardless of unit type; it might make sense to have indirect fire as tier2 for siege units, and siege as tier2 for archers, with indirect fire as tier3 for archers and siege as tier3 for siege units (we don't want to make them too good vs cities), but AFAIK know we can't do that.

 

[Delekhan]

Sure we can. Can't we just create another siege promotion at tier 3 and make that available to siege units? Then you'd have 2 siege promotions in the game, one of siege units and another for archers.

Same process for the other promotions.

Not an urgent change by any means, but totally feasible and it makes sense.

 

[Ahriman]

Hmm good point, we could do it by cloning promotions. I got out of the habit of thinking like that, back when there were only a limited number of total promotions.

* * *
More impressions:
The Dutch trade office seems very weak. Longer distance for trade routes is a weak ability, and the Dutch are designed as a coastal civ, so longer land trade seems out of flavor and of little value.

There are too many barbarians. And pirates in particular come too soon and are too annoying, especially as they heal every turn.

At 10 food, Banueae rice terraces seems too strong. That is the same excess food you would get from 5 citizens working freshwater farm tiles.
What was wrong with the old effect that just boosted food on hills? I thought it was good to have wonders where it mattered more where you built them.

It feels odd that gardens give twice the bonus of the national epic.

Some natural wonder yields feel probably too high (eg Sri Pada is 5 food 2 culture 2 faith from a single tile).

 

[jwerano]

There are too many barbarians. And pirates in particular come too soon and are too annoying, especially as they heal every turn.

I strongly agree with this. Coastal bombarding pirates hitting your warriors and scouts for 30+ damage as they explore and try to clear camps in the ancient era feels absurd. It would be nice to delay coastal bombardment til a later era and to make ships spawn less often.

 

[ExpiredReign]

The Dutch trade office seems very weak.

Keep in mind that the actual lua code that 'will' give the Trade Office its functionality isn't put in place yet. But I tend to agree with you, the new Dutch UB isn't up to scratch, even with the intended code in place.

Also, I can't figure out why it is costing more than the standard caravansary. It should be about the same cost. I can't see where the code is adjusting it.

 

[Ahriman]

Since the Dutch are intended as a coastal trade civ, why not make the Trade Office give naval trade bonuses rather than land trade - even as it still replaces the caravanserai?

The one other problem I have with the Dutch is that the 5% per luxury good seems to be applied at the city level - and so doesn't increase trade route income. That might be inevitable, but it then means that the trade office probably needs to boost gold in a way that does help trade route income.

 

[mystikx21]

Also, I can't figure out why it is costing more than the standard caravansary. It should be about the same cost. I can't see where the code is adjusting it.

Expired, the leaders .xml file is loading before the buildings start.sql file that increases the building cost and so the trade office gets boosted.

The gold buildings file that modifies the canvansary loads after and resets the cost for the default building to the intended level. This might be an issue for any UBs we added or modified for cost as a result.

I'm not sure if the xml files can be delayed down somewhere and still load properly or if you can just set the building cost values down 20% so they'd come out correctly.

 

[Ahriman]

The Celts are expanding like crazy. They must have more than 16 cities scattered all over the world (standard size), all settled by them, by the industrial era. Most cities are 4 tiles apart, so many can't really grow, especially those on small islands since coast terrain is useless. I worry a bit that they're going to choke themselves into science stagnation or unhappiness, but who can say - they are the second highest scoring civ.

I find extremely strong incentives to cherrypick policies and very few to complete trees: the policies for some playstyles seem scattered over multiple trees, and while every tree has some great policies, every tree also has some duds.

It's still amazingly frustrating that there is no industrial era melee ship. Frigates become near useless against cities and artillery, the gap until destroyers is too large.
It's also strange that Destroyers are only a tiny bit more expensive than Frigates.
I wonder if mid-late game city strengths are a bit too low, especially if they don't happen to have a garrison? [And the AI - including my allied city states - are very bad at keeping a garrison unit.] My modern era cities size ~16 are strength 12 without any defenses, strength 17 with walls, strength 24 with a castle, strength 35 with riflemen garrison. They take a *ton* of damage from ironclads and destroyers - if I don't happen to have a garrison, then they can take 250+ damage from a single destroyer attack or 150 from an ironclad.

 

[ExpiredReign]

@mystikx21

Thank you. The problem is though, CEC__Start.sql modifies the cost of buildings based on their BuildingClass and since the Trade Office and the Caravansary are both the same class they "should" be both adjusted the same. Since I made the Trade Office closely cost the same, 120 compared to 140, the adjustments should be close as well. The Trade Office is coming out as costing 250 for some reason and the Caravansary as 140 after adjustments.

The code block that changes the cost is lines 19 - 28. It selects buildings that DON'T have MaxGlobalInstances, MaxTeamInstances OR MaxPlayerInstances == 1. It then raises the cost by 1.8 times. This correctly works for the Trade Office which is initially 140 * 1.8 = 250 (rounded). For some reason the Caravansary gets modified by the code block immediately after this one, lines 30 -39 which adjusts the cost by 1.2 when the class DOES match that criteria.

I just can't see why. Caravansary = 120, after adjustment 140.
The Trade Office = 140, after adjustment 250.

The only thing different with their definitions, except for the obvious, is the TradeRouteLandDistanceModifier which is 50% greater for the Trade Office.

It is truly baffling.

 

[mystikx21]

So I must ask then: What is the intended price of the caravans? 140 or 250?

If it's 250, just set it to 250 in the CECgold.xml file. It loads AFTER the code is executed in the start.sql, so it would overwrite the value. Or load that file first, or take out the reference to the caravansarei cost in the file entirely. The reason it's getting set to 140 is that there's a reference telling it to be 140 after the calculations are being done, see here.

Spoiler :

<Buildings>
<Update>
<Where Type="BUILDING_CARAVANSARY"/>
<Set Cost="140"
TradeRouteLandDistanceModifier="100"
/>
</Update>
</Buildings>

This only effects the building caravansary, not the building trade office, because they're different references.

If it's 140, then using a buildingclass modifier for caravansarei might work, or just set the dutch price in the gold file and see if that works.

 

[ExpiredReign]

Doh.

See what fresh eyes can bring! Thanks. I completely missed that setting.



As much as I like this mod, and the work Thal has put in place for all those like me that come along later, the way settings are changed in so many different places is really frustrating. You can define something in one place and have it changed somewhere else because of X, and then because of Y that setting is changed again.
But maybe I'm just a bit off my game? Despite my misgivings, this mod has taught me a lot about who to do things with civ.

Thanks Thalassicus.

 

[mystikx21]

I felt that way when helping with doing some of the data edits in GEM. Thal has cleaned up the defunct or redundant edits a lot since then. Some are probably still there from things I tried to do too.

But there's still stuff everywhere sometimes simply because a thing gets changed at one stage... and then more things are changed later. I haven't had as much time to plug through the code for things, to document the precise changes. But with holidays soon, I will be able to at least do some simple catches like that and update the wikia page a bit now that a lot of the details are ironed down some more.

 

[skodkim]

At 10 food, Banueae rice terraces seems too strong. That is the same excess food you would get from 5 citizens working freshwater farm tiles.
What was wrong with the old effect that just boosted food on hills? I thought it was good to have wonders where it mattered more where you built them.

I liked the old effect too - it gave much more flavour than just a flat food bonus.

\Skodkim