3UC/4UC for VP: Project Coordination Thread

[pineappledan]

I have updated Iron chariot.

Fury of Nergal now set to 7% per adjacent enemy unit (down from 10%)
Shock I removed

3 unique promotions was too much, especially on a unit that can spike to +2 CP on base unit, before modifiers, in ancient. Shock I is particularly potent on Assyria because their UW stacks so much XP on units. A 0XP headstart on an XP line meant that by the time Iron chariots obsolete, iron chariots could get 2 lvl 4 promotions immediately on construction.

Any further discussion of the latifundium would be best moved to the GitHub issue made for it I think.

 

[IcyAngel]

Speaking of Rome, from playing them at length I think the design is off; let me explain: Rome has three uniques (Legion, Ballista and Colloseum) in the first half of the Classical era and one unique (Latifundium) in the second half of the Ancient era. I'm aware that this decision is intentional - the intention being that Rome is extremely powerful in that stage but falls off very hard and has to sustain itself through the territory and resources it acquired through early conquest.

I think the result is a frustrating experience for a few reasons: the obvious is the player or AI not faring well in their early wars for some reason and having no more bonuses to rely on for the remaning 90% of the game - I think the frontloading is just too great, which might account for someone's observations that AI Rome isn't doing great; all the uniques are on different tech "lines", meaning you cannot have them ready mostly at the same time... and at the time they are most effective! see the Mayans' Atlatlist, for which they can rush Mathematics and start decimating other civs. With Rome, you have to research each UU, build a colloseum in every city, build legions and ballistas -which you cannot do while building a colloseum, or vice-versa- then start going to war. There's not enough production to sustain this. Plus, and this is important, this is in a way the worst time for Rome to go to war, because AI cities will have next to no buildings (and very rarely unique buildings), so you feel like you are wasting your UA by conquering this early.

I love the design of the latifundium and the ballista individually, but the civ feels somewhat wrong all things considered. It's not a big deal insofar as unlike VP, this modmod isn't concerned with balance/playability over everything (historicity, say), and I feel bad for stating this now that the coding and all is done, but I think it should be said

 

[IcyAngel]

Other thought: could the Spanish Hacienda be made to connect strategic resources? Kind of frustrating for such a late UI to not do so.

 

[pineappledan]

Well, the easy fix is to move things around the tech tree, right? If all these latifundium changes pan out in such a way that Rome gets its plantations back then we are at liberty to put the latifundium basically anywhere we want. This has to be within reason, of course.

Proposed change:
move latifundium to construction.

• Same tech level as plantation, allows you to exploit plantation resources now on 2 tech lines instead of 1, giving you much more early flexibility.
• Construction is a prereq tech for both, Arena (colosseum) and iron working (legion)

I would keep the ballista where it is, however. putting all their techs in early classical shouldn't be that hard, and they are all on the bottom, so it's much more doable than if the ballista was on, say, sailing. As it is it is on the prereq path for courthouses, already.

Rome already gets production bonuses to get those arenas up faster from the UA, and we kept pilum on legions past upgrade so they have more staying power in later eras than before. Beyond that, I think our hands are tied. The western concept of what constitutes "medieval" begins with the destruction of the Western Roman empire.

 

[pineappledan]

You know, I hadn’t thought of this before, but this mod basically doubles the number of unique buildings, therefore it doubles the usefulness of that part of Rome’s UA that lets it keep other people’s UBs. Kinda makes it hard to feel bad for them.

 

[adan_eslavo]

v25.17 out.

 

[Hinin]

v25.17 out.

I'm sure you want to wait for the v.26 to be complete before releasing it on civfanatics, but the problem with the version obtained from github is that the mod doesn't appear in the mod list ingame (I think I'm not the first one to tell this), contrary to the TempMoreUC mod, which add the incomplete UCs for the missing civs (this mod breaks the game, so it's useless).

As always, thank you all for you great work !

 

[Infixo]

I'm sure you want to wait for the v.26 to be complete before releasing it on civfanatics, but the problem with the version obtained from github is that the mod doesn't appear in the mod list ingame (I think I'm not the first one to tell this), contrary to the TempMoreUC mod, which add the incomplete UCs for the missing civs (this mod breaks the game, so it's useless).
As always, thank you all for you great work !

Whenever anything changes in .modinfo files, you need to restart the game to see the effect. Those files are loaded at game startup.

 

[pineappledan]

@Blue Ghost, Do you agree with the proposed changes to the teutonic order?

• 3 faith on the base wonder instead of science, and reduce back down to the base +1 from heroic epic.
  • building currently gives 3/3
• add the Production scaler from the base heroic epic, but increase it to 40% (2/5)
  • Base heroic epic gives 25% (1/4)
• re-add the barracks requirement
  • The wonder is pretty crap without a barracks in the city anyways, and it's 2 tech levels behind barracks
• add the "Chapter" promotion to the dummy building
  • We haven't firmed up what the promotion will actually do, but it will be easier to go in and tweak once we have a dummy promotion implemented

Shall I go ahead and change that? The TO is the only building I haven't made text for yet, but I can't do that until we have agreed on what the "Chapter" promotion will do.

Actually, Another bonus to consider is to give the "Chapter" promotion 33% vs barbarians. The Teutonic order is most famous for having waged a centuries-long war against pagan Prussians, Poles, Lithuanians and Estonians

 

[Blue Ghost]

I’m down with all those changes. However, each building apparently can grant only one promotion, so if we want another promotion, we’ll need another dummy building.
Barbarians are much less significant in medieval, and the Slaganz already has a bonus against barbarians, so I’m not so hot on adding a barbarian bonus to the Teutonic Order.

 

[pineappledan]

Could we just make the "chapter" promotion unconditional? So Morale requires a barracks, but Chapter is given to all units once the TO is built, like Statue of Zeus?

Yeah I still like 10% vs other religions and de-conversion on conquered cities the best. It's straightforward

 

[climat]

I'm sure you want to wait for the v.26 to be complete before releasing it on civfanatics, but the problem with the version obtained from github is that the mod doesn't appear in the mod list ingame (I think I'm not the first one to tell this), contrary to the TempMoreUC mod, which add the incomplete UCs for the missing civs (this mod breaks the game, so it's useless).

As always, thank you all for you great work !

To use it, you have to manually build solution with modbuddy. (IIRC adan_eslavo mentioned it.)

 

[adan_eslavo]

@Hinin Exactly. I just mentioned about new version for github guys to go there and check. I will do soon v26 donloadable content with all stuff put in between.

 

[FoxOfWar]

Started a new game, this time rolled Carthage.

Shophet feels... like it doesn't add much. The flexibility, while somewhat nice, loses its appeal rather quickly given that your first GG or GA doesn't really take that long to manifest if you go aggressive in Ancient/Classical(with any other civ, that is). Ignoring ZoC that early is a nice thing to have though, I'll give it that.

Still, after a bit of conquering, I feel a fair bit short-changed if I start to think about having another unique military unit instead, when Shophet reads barely more than a line of UA granting your units Slipstream.

Mostly I just am left a bit... 'meh' about Shophet. It works, gives its' bonus... but you don't really notice it, nor does it change your game in any really noticeable way.

(Sorry for once again poking negatives.)

--

Tophet is cool though. It actually makes you think about where to invest your mountains of money as Carthage, after near-guaranteeing a rapid-expand religion(because you can invest one right away in a new city). I like.

 

[Infixo]

@Hinin Exactly. I just mentioned about new version for github guys to go there and check. I will do soon v26 donloadable content with all stuff put in between.

I don’t know if such versioning make sense during development. Probably takes time to even track numbers, with little value added. I always rebuild the project and start a new test game after downloading updates from master.
After the mod will be complete and published (with Ver 1, btw) then versioning should be active.

 

[adan_eslavo]

But when I tell you what vesion to look for on github you have no problem with finding it . It is easier than listing whole complex titles. I add numbers only for that. Rest is in description. I avoid adding single line commits. That does not make any sense. I always add few changes at once.

@Infixo I noticed, but it needs confirmation that FireTunner crashes after quitting game. Strange.

 

[Infixo]

But when I tell you what vesion to look for on github you have no problem with finding it . It is easier than listing whole complex titles. I add numbers only for that. Rest is in description. I avoid adding single line commits. That does not make any sense. I always add few changes at once.

Oh, I meant .modinfo Version, not what you put into commits. These are helpful, true to that.

 

[adan_eslavo]

Modinfo is still v25 until I will put new version v26 out. Then I will change it ;P.

 

[pineappledan]

I know that debugging and optimizing is important, but I would like to reiterate that I feel getting all civs code-complete should be top priority.

There have been several people who have come into this thread to say that they will not download this or help with testing until things are in some form of done. Enginseer has commented that he is delaying his own mod work until we can get our act together.

Can we reorient towards getting the mod playable before we descend into the rabbit hole of getting it perfect? Art, text and sql has been complete for all civs for weeks now, and almost no progress on the last pieces of lua

 

[Blue Ghost]

I know that debugging and optimizing is important, but I would like to reiterate that I feel getting all civs code-complete should be top priority.

There have been several people who have come into this thread to say that they will not download this or help with testing until things are in some form of done. Enginseer has commented that he is delaying his own mod work until we can get our act together.

Can we reorient towards getting the mod playable before we descend into the rabbit hole of getting it perfect? Art, text and sql has been complete for all civs for weeks now, and almost no progress on the last pieces of lua

Agreed.
I’m out of town for the weekend. I’ll help with the Lua when I get back. Also picking up some other projects, so I may have less involvement here, but I’ll at least see it through to code completion.