A very interesting LP and review in progress

[JosEPh_II]

Sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic/spirituality/gods.

This says that you've watched too much Star Trek.

 

[raxo2222]

This says that you've watched too much Star Trek.

Or science fiction in general
Quote from my signature is from Arthur Clarke, so it was application of it.

If you look carefully at future techs - for example reading them in chronological order in pedia (techs can be displayed in that order), then you will see development of simulation technology and various worldbuilding techs:
First bacteria, then animals, transhumans/androids, entire ecosystems (and terraforming), artificial planets, solar systems, galaxies and universes.
At end game you are reality writer. At this stage you can easily start religions on primitive planets if you want
Magic, spirituality and religion is Galactic or more advanced civ having way too much fun

 

[Thunderbrd]

Dang... he hit an overflow in his research, probably on that limit we recently considered for research in a single city. He doesn't know it yet but the game is screwed for any kind of proper functioning at this point. Sad.

 

[raxo2222]

Dang... he hit an overflow in his research, probably on that limit we recently considered for research in a single city. He doesn't know it yet but the game is screwed for any kind of proper functioning at this point. Sad.

Maybe this only fails when single tech costs more than 2 million beakers, and you select other techs turn before research is finished?

City can't overflow research - there is simply not enough research sources in game.
You would have to make all space buildings buildable on Earth - this is how someone managed to get research overflow in city.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Maybe this only fails when single tech costs more than 2 million beakers, and you select other techs turn before research is finished?

Maybe queing multiple techs that add up a temporary total beyond the limit? Possibly. One would have to do some poking around with his game to evaluate the problem.

He seems to be doing fine now so that may well be the problem. I'll have to really think on how that can be avoided... hmm... I'm thinking it may be in the python that this takes place which would complicate it even further.

 

[raxo2222]

They are now in Cosmic era.
Spreading over cosmos.

Also they invented Purestrain Gold to explain currency civics imbalances

 

[Thunderbrd]

It's interesting to me that we've gotten enormous detail on what kind of ink color corded ware pottery cultures might have used in 8000BCE but at the point where the game explicitly breaks physics and everything can be conceivable...it's incredibly impoverished. They're all variants of "insert magic here" with bigger numbers. Finally freed to let their imaginations run rampant, there's in the end, nothing of interest.

Got a chuckle out of this. This is actually pretty true, but it's not like it's a completed work by any means. That end of things will probably be truly crazy as more and more development is done on the mod.

They don't seem to often express any understanding that this is an ongoing work in progress and so much they are looking at is placeholder material and guideposts for further design. That's ok... it just gives us room to keep getting so much more interesting here. TBH, these kinds of playthroughs are so inspiring to work all the harder on things. I've been putting in more and more work on the planning and conception stuff.

Apparently the late game units are not working with SM and I'm pretty sure I see why. We'll get to that too soon.

 

[raxo2222]

They reached Transcendent era.
I hope he updated game because I changed pedia entry of last tech a little (simulation analysis).

 

[raxo2222]

did the dev guy actually post why gold standard is still the optimal choice, in his view

Mod still is in alpha balance wise especially civics and buildings.
Civics are balanced to point where Gold Standard is unlocked roughly.

Obsoleteing stuff to free up memory isn't political statement.
Unbalanced civics, buildings, units, techs aren't political statement.
Adding stuff for sake of stuff and blindly copying wikipedia and other stuff isn't political statement.
Content of techs leading to or requiring other techs is not political statement.

Creative chaos has right wing bias apparently.

@ssmage they are completely unaware, that mod is far from being finished.

Someone would have to Thanos-balance civics with each other lol (within same civic category).
Also buildings need deep review too.
Like per pop only instead of flat and percentage increases
Percentage modifiers would be left to wonders and special buildings.

 

[raxo2222]

@ssmage this guy completely missed point

Eat poo poo. Being LGBT is not a progressive ideology that can be obsoleted, it's a fundamental part of who someone is.

Obsloteing pride parade doesn't mean obsoleteing LGBT itself.
This means LGBT doesn't need pride parades anymore - they become fully accepted and being treated equally.
Maybe Pride Parade should be changed to encompass everything minority related?

There are some buildings, that never obsolete, but could obsolete at certain point.
I guess some sort of disclaimer should be added, that things in mod doesn't represent views of devs.

 

[JosEPh_II]

I guess some sort of disclaimer should be added, that things in mod doesn't represent views of devs.

It's a Freakin' Mod! We do Not have to disclaim anything for anyone to use it. If they find "things" in it objectionable to them they can voice their concern. But that does Not mean it will be changed to suit just them. To make them "happy". I as a Team Modder object to many things in this Mod. But I do not go out of my way to have them removed. If I don't like it, I ignore it or do not use it. The same is expected from the players. Get real people and stop asking to be pandered to because you consider yourself "special" in any way, shape, or form. This is a Generic Mod.

Civics are balanced to point where Gold Standard is unlocked roughly.

Correct. And if any player has a problem with that so what? It's still a work in progress and it will lean to certain ways of seeing, using and interacting with economies and economic ideals. It will inadvertently and advertently favor some and not others. Again so what.

Someone would have to Thanos-balance civics with each other lol (within same civic category).

Also buildings need deep review too.
Like per pop only instead of flat and percentage increases
Percentage modifiers would be left to wonders and special buildings.

And these statements are just opinions. And should be noted as such. They can even be design intended o unintended. But to obsess over them is ridiculous.

 

[raxo2222]

It's a Freakin' Mod! We do Not have to disclaim anything for anyone to use it. If they find "things" in it objectionable to them they can voice their concern. But that does Not mean it will be changed to suit just them. To make them "happy". I as a Team Modder object to many things in this Mod. But I do not go out of my way to have them removed. If I don't like it, I ignore it or do not use it. The same is expected from the players. Get real people and stop asking to be pandered to because you consider yourself "special" in any way, shape, or form. This is a Generic Mod.



Correct. And if any player has a problem with that so what? It's still a work in progress and it will lean to certain ways of seeing, using and interacting with economies and economic ideals. It will inadvertently and advertently favor some and not others. Again so what.


And these statements are just opinions. And should be noted as such. They can even be design intended o unintended. But to obsess over them is ridiculous.

Yeah they are complaining too much and making weird theories about our views.

Someone even suggested making game from scratch.

There is no way this megalarge hell project is gonna get anything close to substance. They can retweak and rebalance but its still gonna be an overwhelming amount of stuff that doesn't mean anything. The only way for this to reach anything close to good story telling is stripping out everything and build up the house properly to not be a bloated mess of meaningless numbers and ignorant bigotry.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Also if the ~*future*~ is going to get more fleshed out, I'd like to hear about these fantastical concepts that are lurking since placeholders tend to indicate the conceptually finished but unpolished bits but you can see where the creators are going. A bare stage with a single table on it isn't a placeholder. It's a bare stage.

We have had some 2 or 3 developers independently and without any 'team consensus' go through and design their views of the future portion of the game to give us platforms on which to work with, ideas to crystalize around. TBH, this play through is the first time I've seen a vast amount of this content at all and... it's interesting but incomplete. Every now and then new ideas are injected into the futuristic stuff but the team core has been working on pretty much the game up to the industrial era. Beyond that it's a lot of stuff that's there from other devs, many of whom are not even on the project anymore, known areas with big problems that have to be addressed, and a massive work in progress. The game core cleanup and debugging has taken center stage for most of the time here while other planning is taking place and on occasion one new developer comes in, flash-fleshes out a huge segment of the game before the team really gets the chance to see much of it and leaves before completing it in full. The future works better than I'd have expected and it's a pretty good road map or skeleton of a design but it's nowhere near what the end expectations are and was largely someone playing with ideas for the purposes of testing out some material before we get multimaps in play.

We've had some 20 or so team members that have committed material, time and effort and very little of it was done as a group. It's a highly liquid project with a vast diversity of opinions and positions various contributors have been coming from. Only some % of this has been determined as a community.

I think the best way I can put it, aside from to say what rax did earlier regarding the known facts that buildings and civics are completely imbalanced and will need an absolute overhaul and redesign and we know this already and are working on it, the current focus I personally have is on designing the core unit lists all the way out through that future tech tree and preparing for an AI overhaul so that it can strategically keep up with even skilled human players. This will be critical to the game not being just a sandbox romp through exploratory concepts, to it actually being a strategy game as it has always been intended to be.

In short, most of the game is right now in a highly 'proposed' state and most of what is in it is the expression of previous thoughts and ideas and a first draft of how those things might be included but very little of it is likely to not be changed, updated, improved, and reworked according to a more sweeping master plan. As it is now, most of it is just creative chaos, as Rax put it. But it's being ironed out. Every year we make massive strides in improving things and it's actually really extraordinary how one can now actually PLAY through all that future stuff without being subject to the game completely falling apart. The tech queuing bug has been noted as well and will be fixed soon.

And no, as creatives, we don't feel the need to go consulting every possible marginalized group of people to make sure it fits their desired worldview expression. Again, you had the choice to see the statement, if it even is one, that was being made as being Trans or anything along those lines simply stops being a controversial matter in the least, which it will eventually, particularly as species (not racial but entire species) identification due to human diversification gets to be a bigger issue than gender identification, particularly when you can be whatever gender - or anything else physically - you wish, not from surgical means but from genetic therapy means, OR you can see what we're saying as being some kind of offensive statement. It's up to you and the perspective you choose to adopt. That said, we have always been here and receptive to comments on our forums - which are free.

As for politics, we've generally all expressed things with our own worldviews as we design them in an attempt to be as politically inert as possible. I realize that for anyone looking at anything, that's probably impossible as they'll always interpret from their own position of political bias. But hey, the effort is there and y'all have some interesting views I've certainly never heard before. (Still a little lost on how the Alpha-Omega thing is controversial at all but since I've had it explained that y'all have identified it as being some right wing viewpoint, I guess I understand that.)

Now certainly there's an argument to be made that in the era of transhumanism, heterosexuality should be equally obsolete because the entire concept of gender has become irrelevant, a quaint attribute of primitive biologicals, but frankly, these writers' chops aren't up to the task of imagining a truly transhuman society.

Not sure why you'd think that. I mean, I just wrote the above before reading what you just said and am basically making this exact point. In fact, I'd think this is the obvious point that was made with the design in the first place. Thus why I say you have the choice what perspective you assume we're coming from here.

I wonder how multi-map would work in a way that doesn't blow through the memory limit. Would the non-earth maps be smaller or would they not be loaded into memory until selected? I haven't had the game crash from using too much memory in a long time but the space maps being as large as the earth map would seems like something that would bring that back.

We think we have that mostly solved for but it's all so experimental and so many fragments are yet to be completed to see if it can really pan out. I'm fairly confident eventually we'll get it going but it's... a really big project and as y'all have noted thoroughly, there are a LOT of things to sort out here and this is just one of them. It's also a useless one if the other things cannot be resolved, best first.

 

[raxo2222]

@ssmage

basically if they had stuck to purely historical things they might be able to claim neutrality but once you move into speculative sci-fi stuff it reframes the whole thing as an opinion piece and taking that alongside a lot of earlier stuff like the alpha/omega thing, socialism/welfare being comedically bad, hitler as leader, etc. it doesn't look that great

(not that a "purely" historical thing could be claimed to be truly apolitical or neutral anyway)

Alpha Male/Female and Omega Crew Children were renamed to something similar - its now Ancestral Male/Female - equally cool names.
Also Omega Children Crew is now simply Children Crew - something inline with other child themed buildings in Prehistoric era.
Clearly too much New Brave World lol.

Socialism/welfare being bad is simply balance issue.
Hitler is here, so we can kill him, and that we aren't hiding dark stuff in history.
Jossar should update to latest version and see some fancy texts on abandoned civilization bonus pedia entry and simulation analysis tech.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Alpha Male/Female and Omega Crew Children were renamed to something similar - its now Ancestral Male/Female - equally cool names.

Actually... I don't think those names actually mean anything now. The original meant that leaders of their genders had emerged and become powerful motivations for progress. I'm not sure what Ancestral Male/Female would mean... maybe the development of established traditions? Sure, they could be renamed, as if the original isn't cool sounding which it is to me because I don't feel any bias against understanding that dominance and submission are part of nature, but I'd maybe suggest Male or Female Dominance and go back to what I had proposed before - that only one may be constructed making it an interesting decision to go one path or the other.

Omega Child Crew - Child Labor Crew might be more direct at expressing what it is. And yeah, it's a terrible practice that perhaps should come with some unhappiness or other penalty for all the production it adds.

Socialism/welfare being bad is simply balance issue.

True - it's hard, when the player is the state - to see how these would be seen by the state as a positive thing unless they are in desperate need of increasing health and such, but yes, I think a little discussion to open up some rebalancing could be helpful for us as a team.

 

[raxo2222]

Actually... I don't think those names actually mean anything now. The original meant that leaders of their genders had emerged and become powerful motivations for progress. I'm not sure what Ancestral Male/Female would mean... maybe the development of established traditions? Sure, they could be renamed, as if the original isn't cool sounding which it is to me because I don't feel any bias against understanding that dominance and submission are part of nature, but I'd maybe suggest Male or Female Dominance and go back to what I had proposed before - that only one may be constructed making it an interesting decision to go one path or the other.

Omega Child Crew - Child Labor Crew might be more direct at expressing what it is. And yeah, it's a terrible practice that perhaps should come with some unhappiness or other penalty for all the production it adds.


True - it's hard, when the player is the state - to see how these would be seen by the state as a positive thing unless they are in desperate need of increasing health and such, but yes, I think a little discussion to open up some rebalancing could be helpful for us as a team.

Well for Alpha Male/Female I was thinking that leader is Alpha Male/Female and his wife/husband is Alpha Female/Male - effectively directly helping empire grow.
So Ancestral Male/Female is leadership lineage.
First settler is called Ancestral Band (if it wasn't changed).

 

[Toffer90]

I prefer alpha male/female as the name suggest that someone has taken upon themselves, or been awarded, more responsibility than normal within the early settlement, a leadership position, a male for the hunter (expedition) role and a female for the gathering (domestic) role.

Whereas ancestral male/female seems to mean some kind of ancestor worship practice being started in the early settlement; blood lineages weren't really a thing that decided social status in the prehistoric band societies or tribal societies, the closest thing to social status that existed then was a recognition that this individual is a good hunter, or that individual knows where to look to find the most berries each summer, etc.
No one thought this person is above me because his/her parents contributed more than my parents did, everyone was seen for what they were, what they did, how they did it, in those more egalitarian times.

 

[raxo2222]

I prefer alpha male/female as the name suggest that someone has taken upon themselves, or been awarded, more responsibility than normal within the early settlement, a leadership position, a male for the hunter (expedition) role and a female for the gathering (domestic) role.

Whereas ancestral male/female seems to mean some kind of ancestor worship practice being started in the early settlement; blood lineages weren't really a thing that decided social status in the prehistoric band societies or tribal societies, the closest thing to social status that existed then was a recognition that this individual is a good hunter, or that individual knows where to look to find the most berries each summer, etc.
No one thought this person is above me because his/her parents contributed more than my parents did, everyone was seen for what they were, what they did, how they did it, in those more egalitarian times.

They are happy with Alpha Male/Female and omega child crew rename.
So for us Alpha/Omega is completely innocent but for them it isn't.

Those are good changes. Hopefully they can rebalance the civics to have less unfortunate implications.

Also someone said, that civics have capitalist bias, but that's because we didn't balance them that far (socialist ones are in Industrial and later).
Moderately socialist ones like Subsidized/Socialized Welfare could add to education, reduce crime and increase health for example.
All civics could use properties per pop and health/happiness per pop.
Gold Standard is best civic because later ones in category weren't balanced yet.

I'm imagining someone's blindly accepted pull request adding hitler, nerfing socialism, buffing fascism and the gold standard and then the other devs not noticing for a few years

I think it was each separate dev doing separate thing within 10 years - I wonder if Hitler could be even from Rise of Mankind.
Totalitarianism/Single Party seems like easy target for being powerful - "let these strengthen military" or something like that.

 

[Yudishtira]

I prefer alpha male/female as the name suggest that someone has taken upon themselves, or been awarded, more responsibility than normal within the early settlement, a leadership position, a male for the hunter (expedition) role and a female for the gathering (domestic) role.

Whereas ancestral male/female seems to mean some kind of ancestor worship practice being started in the early settlement; blood lineages weren't really a thing that decided social status in the prehistoric band societies or tribal societies, the closest thing to social status that existed then was a recognition that this individual is a good hunter, or that individual knows where to look to find the most berries each summer, etc.
No one thought this person is above me because his/her parents contributed more than my parents did, everyone was seen for what they were, what they did, how they did it, in those more egalitarian times.

Alpha Male/Female are clearly better than Ancestral ... I don't know why so much time is wasted on SA's ridiculous criticisms.

I do think we should allow for the possibility, especially but not only in Matriarchy civic, that the "Alpha Male" is occasionally female and/or vice-versa. However, rather than get tangled in knots trying to degendrify the building name texts, I'd say leave them as they were.

Regarding LGBT, I think it's safe to say that these kinds of 'alternatives' were celebrated by some civs in antiquity (Classical certainly, Ancient quite likely), so a much earlier equivalent to the Pride Parade would not go amiss (although the taboo seems to return globally early in Mediaeval). It should probably be dependent on a (new) civic.

While on the topic of 'broad-minded' sexualities, pederasty (man-boy "love") was clearly celebrated (by some civs) in Classical also - a civic and building should allow for that also.

As an aside, we have the Gymnasium as a Hellenist religious building. Gymnasium means 'place to get naked'. It was for males only, including some who even at the time would have been regarded as children. All athletic sports were conducted in the nude. Including wrestling, which is truly a contact sport. Not judging - just sayin'

 

[raxo2222]

Alpha Male/Female are clearly better than Ancestral ... I don't know why so much time is wasted on SA's ridiculous criticisms.

SA watches and reads to much American poolitics.
I guess there are leftist versions of Fox News and Infowars.

I added back nuclear meltdowns to annoy people at SA too
Apparently nuclear meltdowns aren't transparent enough - that is they could have icon and text notification.

So apparently Alpha Male/Female is controversial like nuclear energy or climate change for them.
What could be other good names for those buildings?
Prime or Dominant Male/Female?