3rd and 4th Unique Components for VP - Official thread 88.10

[black213]

Many of these -- the Polder, Goedendag and Horse Archer changes in particular -- are significant performance improvements, so that should make @black213 happy.

Been absent for some time, very late reply from me! I hope my bickering about performance hasn't been too much of a nuisance since you tagged me Haven't had the pleasure to give this version a whirl yet, have to do so soonish.

Regarding the Madrassah buff, I would be really conservative with any boosts to Arabia unless it's clear they're underperforming in comparison to their adversaries. As it seems to me, the change feels unwarranted, but then again I haven't played recent VP and MUCfVP versions.

 

[Enrico Swagolo]

Waag and Goedendag don't seem to have any bugs that I can pinpoint, all appears to be just fine. Just writing to confirm. Warmongering Dutch are very fun and stronger than ever, they seem to be the optimal solution demanding a luxury I needed for WLTKD/monopoly is just fun. No stars Dutchessments because no stars. Of course everything depends on a variety of factors.

Waag seems to be a great building, maybe 4/5 Choppas. For my playstyle, at least. It's pretty good, becomes amazing after many monopolies are gotten. If you're doing well, you'll be doing better, and the UA helps. If you're not doing well, it'll help slightly anyway. Snowball assistance which really encourages certain types of play, like stealing CS resources, demanding resources, expending citadels, all to ensure nice monopolies are gotten. It's helping a snowball roll as such a bonus is bound to do, and it does help in getting one - just not as much as some others. Someone who cannot get monopolies easily would maybe rate it three-four, not four-five. Can be OP, but you have to be pretty much winning for that to happen, like this game. Late Industrial, 12C/14P/14G base per Waag - except I have crushed almost everyone already and I'm more than an era ahead, and I was balling similarly hard even when it was providing just 2C/4P+G, and I have allied every single CS on the map (no Statecraft for monopolies, but I used Great Generals on some CSs to secure a few). It encourages an interesting type of play and it's fun to use.

Goedendag is good, easy 3/5 Astolfos. Very cheap, convenient, though it is stronger on paper than it is in reality. It's not winning the game by itself, it's not going to dominate the field by itself, but it helps. I considered a fourth one, but it isn't as influential an unit as it might appear - more expensive ones that destroy and outmaneuver everything are more so. Gets stronger as it's upgraded to Tercio.

Dutch UA would be 4/5 Cocoas because it's unreliable, though the yields can easily be 5 star tier. It's stronger if you get ones that can be improved early and they are on a similar/same path, while something like one being improved by Calendar and the other by Construction heavily nerfs it as the first true burst of yields from selling the resource is heavily delayed to when you'd be getting it if you had started with Truffles and Furs. It has a flaw in that every version's diplomacy adjustment can change it, too, and irrationality of AI or it's plain aggression might reduce it's effectiveness. Allying Mercantile CSs is super powerful, though. No matter the policy tree, they should be the target for your diplomatic units (unless you already get their resources from somewhere, like another Mercantile of the same type).

Sea Beggar is 4/5 Tea Bags. It does eat cities, but it's not alone in that. A Corvette with the city destruction promotion does a similar job. I like it a lot and considered 5 out of 5 which it would've easily gotten, but it's gotten great nerfs - replaced two promos for one (even if stronger), Supply's interaction with Grand Canal was nerfed, Prize Ships have also been heavily nerfed because of the War Weariness considerably more strict. After I got access to Frigate as well, I mixed the two anyway because you should always have both types. Just like Carthage's ship means enemy cities better have Walls and garrisons, this one means something coastal without Castles and garrisons is something donated to the Dutch (unless you have a good fleet or 3+ ranged units around. Some AIs do, like Atilla who kept using all his h. skirmishers to destroy Sea Beggars that ended their turn next to a city). If AI doesn't have a fleet of their own, it's going to be in a bad spot indeed.

Polder is 2 windmills out of 5. It's by far the worst of all the UIs, combining being probably the hardest to place (on an average map with less-than-generous rivers/lakes) with below average yields for an UI and lackluster impact. It requires two renaissance techs to be good enough to work which sucks. It's not very bad as it is tons of Gold, but it's not good. I cannot imagine many situations I'd prefer it over any other UI, excluding some weird maps.

Here's my assessment:
France:
UA: Okay pretty hard to use well. Highly dependent on already winning. You get the best use of the UA when you are behind in tech, and plinking a stronger, more advanced unit with many weaker units. That's not a place you want to be in just so you can use your UA better. Very potent for city-taking though
UI: Good. Solid yields which can help flip to a CV, a little. Gives France a much-needed defensive edge to help compensate for the ultra-aggressive UA.
UU1: (Musketeer): It's fine. It's meat and potatoes power and movement. Nothing exceptional about it except it hits pretty hard.
UB: Good. Strong yields that help more with wide. The production combines with the UA's production boost well, and helps push late wars or CV projects. The production gives a lot of flexibility to pursue whatever VC seems most likely
UU2 (SPAD): Fine. The best thing about this unit is how it knocks on the UA. attacks from air units trigger esprit de corp, so this unit is all about that. As with any other air unit, the limitation is HP, not number of actions, and SPAD doesn't do anything to help that.

Total: 17 stars

Sweden:
UA: Fantastic. Laser-focused on a domination victory, but extremely flexible within that VC. Has immediate bonuses in all circumstances -- offense and defense -- and singlehandedly makes Sweden a threat long before it gets its UUs/UBs up.
UB1 (Skola): Bad. A / battery, with no obvious synergies with the rest of Sweden's kit. Maybe it helps an unlikely SV, but otherwise it comes too late, and won't make up for lost time.
UU1 (Carolean): Good. Lots of staying power, and combines very well with medic ranged units. Combined with Authority's heal on kill, the Carolean just keeps on comin' Note: has been moved back to Fusilier for 4UC so it can combine with Hakka, and give more punch.
UB2 (Bastu) Our attempt to save the Skola. Skola depends entirely on to generate its yields, but Sweden has no ability (or good reason) to go tall. This building allows that SV potential to have a place to land, and gives a small bit of to help get you ahead of the tech curve.
UU2: (Hakkapeliitta) bad. Not horrible, but bad. The nice thing about it is with Charge I, you can get Charge II up at level 2. Otherwise, the Hakka gives a bit of utility and GG generation, but isn't a drastic improvement over the base Lancer.

Total: 17 Stars

If we find that GE needs a nerf. I would propose removing the 1 per 2 scaler, increase the base yields to 551, and call it a day. That would differentiate it more from the Skola, who is all about those pop scalers.

French UA 3 stars? Nope, I disagree. 5 stars easy. It's majestic. It's glorious. It's huge. You get a great help at fighting especially once you get +range/logistics ranged, Culture from great works and Culture/Golden Age/Tourism from late-game GWAMs as well as a nice, very noticeable post-conquest culture/production boost everywhere. If abused by razing cities after enemies are big enough it doesn't cripple them so they resettle, you can get 3+ works per city from the ability. This is a civ wide Artistry can work for very well. I'd also give Hakka 3 stars just because it's not Winged Hussar which can actually be worse than the regular Lancer in many cases because of it's stupid charge meaning you cannot attack or the unit will die next turn.

 

[Cebrudras]

Hi everyone and thanks for the cool mod! I have been occasionally playing it for like half a year now and all that talk about how to improve Arabia has motivated to actually join the conversation.
The straight GP generation bonus was always one of my least liked components since it is just a direct buff to Arabias gameplan and win condition, which is just much less interesting than most other UCs you all have come up with, so thumbs up for choosing the Madrasah as topic of discussion. I also like the proposal to add wide yields upon GP use to it, especially since that will finally make Madrasahs something you also want to quickly build in your non-capital cities. Having it give Culture and Science seems straightforward since those are already in the UA, flavouring stuff a bit as spreading those accumulated yields outward. It would be especially fitting if it was possible to ditch the regular scaling and instead use the amount of yield from UA in the capital, though I of course have no idea how manageable that would be to implement.
I dont really like Faith though, even if it fits with the historic building. By the time you get the building everywhere most Faith will go to buying GPs, which makes stuff boring again. Instead I would advocate for Production, as unfitting as it is. As Arabia I often accumulate a buch of sad Najrans and Kufahs I either shouldnt have settled or should have settled way earlier instead while I was chasing WWs instead. So wide Production would smooth out the "noob trap" that is built into the UA, which seems like a nice direction to spread the bonuses into. Giving the small Tradition empires a shoot at getting those sweet contest WWs by delaying the GP yields also seems like a cute way to reward careful planning.

I also finished a round of Babylon under the new patch and wanted to give some feedback. Their UNW is now definitely strong enough. My Babylon was pretty food starved and had a sad hole at the part of the skyline the Hanging Garden was supposed to be at, but it still ended up a city worthy of its name thank to all the bonus food. The bonus Science based on Capital output also nicely encourages some adjustments to your play to makes sure your capital in specific gets all the nice beakers. The new percentages are definitely big enough to actually leave a mark on the civ. The only bad thing about it is how cheap those national wonders get late game for small empires, meaning buying them in every city just for the Science is something you can pretty easily exploit.

 

[Guynemer]

I am not a programmer, and haven't used this mod enough to know all 86 additional components by heart, but does it look like the proposed End of January patch will necessitate changes with 3/4UC?

 

[pineappledan]

None whatsoever.

G isn't changing any base buildings or units in this upcoming patch. You're good to go

 

[Hinin]

Question : should the Danish Langskib be changed a bit in regards to the 'Longboat' and 'Viking' promotions modifications of the last patch (since these changes are meant to represent the same historical element that we inspired ourselves from when giving the 'Medic' promotion to the unit and it now makes too much healing power), or should we wait a bit to see if these promotion changes are kept (I know @pineappledan is against them) ?

 

[pineappledan]

Definitely. I'll change that next version

G added a Building_YieldonFaithPurchase table, so that will update the Madrasah
G changed the YieldFromVictory table to YieldFromVictoryGlobal, so the Teotonic Order needs to be updated to that.

 

[Hinin]

We can begin to talk about a suitable replacement in that case. Do you have an idea (also, I shall invoke the Danish creator, @De_Genius) ?

 

[pineappledan]

Could simply add city damage reduction and Gold on Attack to it

 

[De_Genius]

Something which would fit thematically but would be harder to code would be to give melee units embarking from a Longship a combat boost for 1 turn to emulate the Viking raids on English cities.
Perhaps the Burgmester promotion code would be reused/refitted here?

Another simpler approach would be to give it Gold on Attack, since this would also fit fine, but the city damage reduction does not seem fitting to me.

 

[FoxOfWar]

A curious thing I noticed somewhere between VPEE and this mod: Minuteman replaces Line Infantry (as it should with VPEE)... but unlike base VPEE, with 34UC it seems to 'gain back' Accuracy I(As Minuteman is a ranged unit, musketman replacement in base VP). Obviously the promotion is mostly just promotion bar clutter on a melee unit.

Minuteman also gets Shock I in VPEE(+34UC), so I reckon it was just something 'lost in translation'.

 

[pineappledan]

So how about Blockade promotion then? It's nice because I dont have to make a new promotion then. No sense reinventing the wheel.

I would like to try “fixing” the seir morb’s unique promotion, which currently fires whenever a unit moves. We only need to have it fire when a unit attacks. Hoping to consult other modders on how best to implement that.

Text also needs to be fixed for the new madrasah features, but other than that, a new version could be pushed soon

 

[pineappledan]

New version is up on github. Tested and ready to go:
Changelog:

v41: 01/29 Compatibility
   - replaced Medic I on Langskib with Blockade
   - Changed Teutonic Order from YieldsOnVictory to new YieldsOnVictoryGlobal
   - Added YieldsOnFaithPurchase to Madrasa (15% faith cost to science). Deleted old lua
   - Added 2 free iron to Alti Cur
   - Increased SPAD RCS by 2 (a little too weak after fighter nerf)
- tweaked/modified:
   - Madrasa ==> Added 5 Cu/Sci/Fai on GP expend
   - Grande Ecole ==> Removed production pop scaler. Increased base yields
- simplified:
   - Aztec UA ==> Deleted lua for dummy promotion (trait table does same thing)
   - Seir Morb ==> Lua trigger now fires on combat resolution instead of unit movement.
   - Madrasa ==> Deleted lua (see above)

@adan_eslavo, would you be so kind as to compile and push the new version?

EDIT: Here's a zipped up version of v.41 for now
I tested Arabia and the new SQL to replace the old lua for faith purchases doesn't work. I've put an error up on Github for G to deal with, but the error is not in this mod. Please wait to try out the new Arabia until a hotfix is up for VP

 

[Kim Dong Un]

Great stuff!

I do have a weird bug to report unfortunately. I finished a game as Carthage, but the Suffet mechanics were messed up. Some of them functioned properly, but there were a few that would not embark. This behavior persisted, on and off, for the entire game. At one point I embarked a Suffet, only for it to duplicate itself as a Great Admiral. At that point I knew there was definitely something wrong.

I have a fairly simplistic set of mods (mostly aesthetic) that I've used forever with no problems, so I don't think it's due to a conflict. Maybe some recent changes threw something off, and nobody has used Dido and found out the hard way that there's a bug.

 

[pineappledan]

InitUnit is unreliable... I can't say what the pattern is, but people have had complaints with that command for a while. I'll maybe try fiddling with the kill command to see if I can fix the issue of 2 GGs being generated though.

In other news, I want some feedback on the Seir Morb. The new code reworks how damage is calculated on the Seir Morb's crouching tiger promotion:
Old: 15% RCS for every move on the unit before attacking. Only works on discrete movement point intervals

ie. If you attack without moving, 2*15% = +30% RCS​

New: 15 pure damage for every move on the unit AFTER attacking. Amount of damage scales on discreet fractions of move points (ie. if you moved on a road)

ie. If you attack without moving, (2 - 1)*15 = 15 Bonus damage
​

Wondering what people's thoughts are? a solid 15 damage if you don't move is nothing to scoff at, but it's not huge either. I had contemplated increasing the bonus to 20 dmg per move. Thoughts?
@adan_eslavo, Siam is your baby, so I'd especially like your input.

 

[pineappledan]

There seems to have been a compatibility error with (3)CSD mod, so Iroquois and China's UCs weren't showing up. I got it running with this tweaked version here:

I have also attached a zip file containing a tweaked DLL which contains the fix to make Arabia's Madrasa work. G resolved the issue and it should be up in a hotfix within a few days, but if you're impatient then replace the DLL in your (1)Community Patch folder with this one.
Hotfix is up. just download the official fix

 

[Asterix Rage]

On many aspects, I do like the way MUCfVP evolves. Code mechanics, reliability, AI handling, pertinent features. It raises VP higher and higher.
3rd and 4th UC is now a standard feature for all new VP compatible Leaders MOD. Well done, your influence is outstanding.

Thank to pineappledan, adan_eslavo, Blue Ghost, Infixo, Hinin, and all of you who help here and on Git (I don't ! )

My contribution will be about promo icons indeed. A promise. I'm still on it. It takes time because it's big (80+ icons), because there are so much exotic (and welcome) promotions, because it will be as nice as MUCfVP is. I mean very very nice.

Preview :

 

[Enrico Swagolo]

Spoiler :

This is the full might of France, achieved despite most ancient/classical wonders being built on another continent but also thanks to my splendid Greek razing tactics. I'm exactly 30 policies ahead of China who is a pretty recent catch, like 30 turns ago. I've gained 2.5 sopol trees in/during that time I think? Up to the industrial (early, mid?) era IIRC I've spent every GWAM on works, but then I've decided that Writers will be expended for one/two policies each. Franchise did absolutely nothing and great works (140 of them, though a part was built by the others) and 40% Culture/Production (ended game with 404 turns guaranteed) did everything. The franchise buff is worthless for a warmongerer because it doesn't work like I thought it would - the bonus count of Franchises have to be finished international trade routes or they don't work, just making two offices doesn't give you a franchise but merely increases their limit, and it still takes years to finish TRs to CSs. Nationalization seems like it would be suited more for a warmongerer than syndicalism which is weird. The limit won't ever be reached for a warmongerer because there won't be enough people to trade with left, the building will be exactly as strong as it was before, just cheaper. I could've finished more than an era earlier (had dominant with everyone, had the required 11 autocracy policies), but I've elected to conquer all instead. I really had fun.

Grande Ecole is super strong. Best industrial era UB I think. I was playing this game with the post-nerf Grande Ecole. It wasn't all that important. Too hard to work all those specialists because I went Authority > Artistry > Imperialism, but I think in general it gave me like a bonus 12S and/or 12P per city at least from specialists alone. The benefit depended on which city we were talking about.
SPAD came just as I was taking out Delhi (final Indian city), and it did nothing. I was not impressed at all. I just made bombers, the unit doesn't seem all that good. Spaghetti's better than SPADghetti, if you know what I'm saying.

Fun fact - China and England have only one city left, and they were conquered before - I just let them reconquer their city as I took down the rest, gaining a vassal while still having the Riches. No vassal is worth losing out a few great works and guaranteed super-strong turns over.

 

[Hinin]

Grande Ecole is super strong. Best industrial era UB I think. I was playing this game with the post-nerf Grande Ecole. It wasn't all that important. Too hard to work all those specialists because I went Authority > Artistry > Imperialism, but I think in general it gave me like a bonus 12S and/or 12P per city at least from specialists alone. The benefit depended on which city we were talking about.

Did you find the UB "nicely" powerful or "game-changing, pls nerf" strong ?

SPAD came just as I was taking out Delhi (final Indian city), and it did nothing. I was not impressed at all. I just made bombers, the unit doesn't seem all that good. Spaghetti's better than SPADghetti, if you know what I'm saying.

It is a unit made for fighting against other planes and triggering your UA (it softens the target and gives combat bonus), so maybe you were at a point in the game where you were so dominant that it was indeed not that useful. Am I right, or do you think it's something else ?

 

[amateurgamer88]

SPAD came just as I was taking out Delhi (final Indian city), and it did nothing. I was not impressed at all. I just made bombers, the unit doesn't seem all that good. Spaghetti's better than SPADghetti, if you know what I'm saying.

I find SPAD to not shine when you are already very ahead. When you're ahead, you have a lot of options available to you like highly promoted Artillery and other units. These UU really shine when you lack units and need to defend against an enemy. They help you fend off larger forces easier if you have a decent number of them and know how to deal with air combat. For instance, you might be fighting a war on one front and lack troops on another and someone attacked you there. The SPAD will help you wound far more units and slow or even halt their advances until you get more reinforcements.

Did you find the UB "nicely" powerful or "game-changing, pls nerf" strong ?

I've found the UB to be nicely powerful. It won't propel you into an instant victory but it will help you get more out of your large population cities. I wasn't sure if the nerf was quite needed but I like where this building is at right now.