(7a) VP Events Overhaul (Expansion Pack system)

[Amadhe]

I realize this is an extremely late reply, but I'm sending it anyways as I feel somewhat strongly on this subject as can be seen in the final few "paragraphs" of this internet discourse with random strangers online (I'm self-aware of the inherent silliness of it so.. you may now have chuckle.)

It's a first step so I can get some play-testing and feedback without people having to miss out on the system they may already be used to. The whole goal (based on community feedback) is to re-imagine the events system based on these expansion packs so players could pick and choose the packs they want to play with. I'm also reaching out to the original developers to get feedback and help so it feels more like an upgrade and less of a replacement.

The initial piece of the plan was be to completely update all of the events in both base VP and (7) VP Community Events and put them in their relevant EPs. I've done this for the base VP events and have done this for much of the Community Events, but it takes a while to work through everything. I'm about to finish updating the corporate events and that would only leave the civilization events. But it takes a while, especially when you are trying to balance events across 43 different civilizations.

At the same time, I'm trying to set up templates for each category and include them in the modpack so individuals who create custom civilizations, natural wonders, religions, etc... can seamlessly create events that would plug into the expansion pack system with the same balance, look, and game feel. I'm trying for consistent diversity...lots of different events and outcomes within an expansion pack but the Natural Wonders EP itself feels internally consistent whether you own El Dorado or Mt Kailash.

Once I have pulled the old corporation and civilization events into this system and updated them, I'll set this mod to block both the core VP events as well as the (7) VP Community Events mod, and it will be just a simple matter of selecting the mod to play it.


A lot of this is simply a result of more options. Some people want events. Some don't. Some want Enlightenment Era. Some don't. Some want more Wonders. Some don't....

It is to be expected that given such a variety, there might be some conflicts. You can buy a bunch of Lego sets and, for the most part, everything works together. But there will be pieces that don't fit with other pieces, and the more sets you dump together, the greater the chance for a mismatch somewhere.

Very well put, rsc2a. There is definitely a sizable community within the Modded Civ 5 those who enjoy playing modifying VP with a rotation of modmods made by lovely people like yourself. I for one greatly appreciate the lengths you have gone to here to allow for further user customization by separating the Event Packs and even going so far as to explain how to how use this within the existing framework even in this (sorta) early stage of development.

Thanks for the effort, really. However this is a prime example of the issues raised in the in the Gaia/Sapiens vs VP discussion.

See, however much of a great effort this is - I need to manually modify mod-mod files as if I'm a developer. I realize this surely won't take more than a minute, however it's simply unintuitive and not user friendly. Plus the entire concept lacks internal harmony and I don't get that - The Civ V community develops a COMMUNITY mod, and someone like yourself wants to upgrade a unique idea in the mod (events) - why not bring all involved and simply incorporate that into the main VP mod, or at least upgrade the (7) VP Community Events. The clutter and lack of harmony is simply insane at this point. And however much people like myself are in awe of VP - this simply drives us away from using it and updating it. The mess is simply too great, and the community is in disarray, expecting every user/gamer to try and arrange numerous conflicting mod-mods to enjoy the best Civ V experience out there.

The Democratic System of the Vox Populi Congress can be somewhat bureaucratic to work through even at the best of times with simple balance suggestion, let alone something as complex as an Events Overhaul Expansion. While we all agree that Events could do with an update, we are divided on how exactly they should be balanced and as previously mentioned, it takes ages for evens simple suggestions to make past that.

I believe what rsc2a is doing is a actually better approach to actually improving the Events System by bypassing this bureaucracy entirely. Then once the mod-mod is complete and likely well-balanced for VP, we could raise a vote to add an excellent existing mod-mod into the Vox Populi Experience (skipping the layers of bureaucracy it would otherwise take entirely). Just like how Enhanced Naval Warfare was added into VP. There is precedent for it happening in the past and it could happen again in the future.

As a final note to HyprNova and others who agree with them who may or may not see this... "Be the change you'd like to see in the world."

rsc2a is making this of their own free will and sharing it for free and despite the rather rude nature of some comment they are continuing to proceed with this project. A prime example of being the change they'd like to see in VP.

 

[JNZS13]

I realize this is an extremely late reply, but I'm sending it anyways as I feel somewhat strongly on this subject as can be seen in the final few "paragraphs" of this internet discourse with random strangers online (I'm self-aware of the inherent silliness of it so.. you may now have chuckle.)

How and where i subscribe for your internet school of writing and good manners my liege?

 

[Tekamthi]

I installed latest vp a few weeks ago but forgot to disable VP events when I loaded this -- that said I didn't really see any of the usual VP events, other than maybe one or two (the nomads were still there). What's the effect of not disabling?

I had Krakatoa near my capital, so I had it in borders early on in ancient. I recieved it's upgrade event once per era (played to medieval) -- I assumed this was intended but not sure, first time seeing these natural wonder events in action. With these cumulative upgrade to the tile it seems quite powerful. Not saying too powerful, just not sure. Also for the first two times it fired, I didn't actually have a choice to make, just had to pick the basic one due to lack of unlocks, could perhaps create one more starter choice on this one. I was playing dx9 and the texture wouldn't load, threw error and got the red box in lieu of whatever graphic was intended. Could still play through this though

Anyway, I wonder if not disabling VP events somehow interfered; was this supposed to be a series of events rather than the same one over again? That would make more sense to me...

Overall it's great to see some fresh events in this system, haven't made particular note of any of the others I've seen so far but the direction here is really interesting.

 

[hokath]

Sounds like it is working as intended.
It's supposed to give you the same event over again after some turns cooldown, where progressively more one-off options unlock throughout the game.
I made this event back before Natural Wonders had era scaling on their yields -- so they were totally useless. That's why it makes the tile so powerful, now. It's like a hacky way of doing era scaling on the tile.

 

[Tekamthi]

Sounds like it is working as intended.
It's supposed to give you the same event over again after some turns cooldown, where progressively more one-off options unlock throughout the game.
I made this event back before Natural Wonders had era scaling on their yields -- so they were totally useless. That's why it makes the tile so powerful, now. It's like a hacky way of doing era scaling on the tile.

Ah okay so this is a VP event?

 

[hokath]

No, it's from the previous events mod that rsc2a is using as the base.

 

[Tekamthi]

It's enjoyable having these -- i guess one of my gripes with the existing system is that many of the early-game triggers aren't really choices at all, just pop-ups with most options greyed out. That undesirable aspect persists in the early eras for krakatoa here (I was slow getting the classical building up so I had this single-choice for 2 rounds). Could be alleviated by starting out with 2 options, and adding one per era from there.

For some it won't matter, but I think many that like the events are thematic-minded players to some degree -- in this sense we might want to copy/paste into different event entries, so that we can have different text for repeated events like this, ie. in ancient era we have the boys exploring up the mountain or whatever, but next era there's some other explanation, even if the choices end up being same. In a perfect world where we had unlimited time to research, these events might portray some of the mythology and oral histories of the cultures local to them -- I am not familiar with krakatoa beyond the big eruption in 1800s, but I'm sure there are many stories and belief systems connected to it, ceremonies from ancient times etc. -- would be fun to have these kinds of histories told through civ events.

Beyond that, when the event fired, I noticed there were rival pathfinders exploring around nearby -- this might be an opportunity to have a 2-player event series of some kind

 

[APLion]

You might already know how to do this but I figured I'd post the example for others that do not. Here is how you would do this:

If you are playing with this mod, you must disable the events in the (1) Community Patch and (2) Vox Populi. If you play with (7) Community Events, you must disable all events except for the Civilization and Corporation events in their modinfo files.

To do this, open up the modinfo file in each mode (you can use a text editor like notepad if you want), find the relevant files and either delete or comment them out. Commenting them out would look like this:

View attachment 684707

Notice the <!-- 'stuff you do not want' -->. That's what you want to do.

0) My game can't recognize .civ5mod file, so I just extracted it as an archive. Is it enough to install the mod?
1) Can you please specify what exactly to delete in (1) and (2)? You can't just remove everything, because it would nuke the espionage system.
2) This mod uses art and audio from (7), so you have to have it installed and activated. Is it enough to delete XML folder to disable (7) events?
3) It seems to me that religious events are not working, and that's because .lua is wrong. It should be like that, not "return end end"