Advanced Civ

[keldath]

Guysz
FYI you can adjust ai in the uwai xml file.
There are parameters to handle there.

 

[Elkad]

Great.
How do I set city revolt to not require more power than the current pop or something?
Leaving 3 LB in a city is fine. 20 is not.
Edit: I missed the change where siege counts half, and garrison bonuses apply now. So partially my own error on the previous page (my cannons are only counting for half value, and my CR maces aren't as good as actual CG longbows/muskets).
Now that I have better understanding of the rule change, I'll give it a whirl again.


550d. tech_cost_no_trade.
Is that a percentage? (-28 is the mod default).

 

[f1rpo]

Updated DLL: (edit: no longer up to date)
Noteworthy recent changes (the 0.96e->0.97 release notes remain to be composed):
* City cycling, Privateer fixed (thx @Elkad)
* Minor revolt chance tweak: impact of population (thx @Lanstro)
* And another major bugfix (thx @SuperXANA): AI peace weight was always set to 0 at game start, meaning that the "first impression" diplo modifiers had been positive among all AI civs.

Attached: Stand-alone download and just the three modified files (among which only the DLL is crucial).
I've also put a PDF export of the updated manual on GitHub: link

 

[keldath]

great work mate.

what was the trade ai bug you mentioned?

 

[f1rpo]

550d. tech_cost_no_trade.
Is that a percentage? (-28 is the mod default).

Yes, basically means times 0.72. Though it also depends on the tech era and player count:

Spoiler :

scaled rModifier = 1;
// ...
if (g.isOption(GAMEOPTION_NO_TECH_TRADING) && eTechEra > 0 && eTechEra < 6)
{
    // ...
    scaled rNoTradeAdjustment = (
            per100(iTECH_COST_NOTRADE_MODIFIER) + per100(5) *
            (eTechEra - fixp(2.5)).abs().pow(fixp(1.5))
            ) * scaled::clamp(scaled(kWorld.getDefaultPlayers() - 2, 6), 0, 2);
    rNoTradeAdjustment.decreaseTo(0); // No Tech Trading can only lower tech costs
    rModifier += rNoTradeAdjustment;
}
// ...
rCost *= scaled::max(rModifier, 1);

That is:
Cost := Cost *

( 100% + TECH_COST_NOTRADE_MODIFIER%
+ 5% * |TechEra - 2.5|^(1.5) )
* min{2, (NumDefaultPlayers - 2) / 6},​

where TechEra starts at 0 for Ancient tech (though the Ancient and Future era are entirely exempt) and NumDefaultPlayers is e.g. 8 for Standard map size.

For a Huge map (16 players by default), this yields the following multipliers (looked them up in the debugger):
100%: Ancient, Future
83.3%: Modern
62.4%: Classical, Industrial
47.6%: Medieval, Renaissance
More impact than I would've expected, But I guess techs are rather still too expensive in your games?
<Edit1>: I've made a change to the formula: Git commit
Updated cost multipliers:
Ancient: 100%; Classical: 80.5%; Medieval: 64.2%; Renaissance: 51.0%; Industrial: 54.0%; Modern: 67.5%; Future: 100%</Edit1>
<Edit2> Partly reverted that again after an AI Auto Play test. Git commit
Apparently, Classical and Medieval do need a big discount in order to match the tech progression with tech trading. For TECH_COST_NOTRADE_MODIFIER=-30, I now get:
Ancient: 100%; Classical: 70.9%; Medieval: 56.1%; Renaissance: 50.6%; Industrial: 58.4%; Modern: 75.8%; Future: 100%</Edit2>

what was the trade ai bug you mentioned?

That's (probably) also fixed. I've added AI code that anticipates enemy trade diplo penalties when deciding whether to liberate a city and, in the process, refactored the trade memory calculations and got some formula wrong.

 

[keldath]

great.

i havnt merged changes since 01/04

 

[f1rpo]

Is there a strategy discussion thread or guide for this mod? I'd like to see how people play on Emperor+ in this mod.

There's just this one thread. I'm not aware of any full game reports or in-depth strategy discussion here or elsewhere. I did post one game report in the 5th post. It could be that such discussion is inhibited by there being just the one thread. Right now, a subforum (under Project & Mod Development) would make sense (as evidenced by the links to older posts that I'm about to dredge up), but activity in the thread has generally been spotty, and, since my goal is to gradually retreat from the mod and Civ 4 isn't getting younger ...

Is it a conscious design choice to make conquest harder and peaceful games easier?

Making early, expansive wars of conquest harder or less rewarding for both human and AI players is intentional. Is this in itself a controversial goal? Or just the extent of it and the means?

It also seems like the AI behaviour in this mod has buffed peaceful strategies quite a bit - seems like religions are much easier to found and the AI is less likely to build several good wonders.

Which wonders specifically? Not really intentional, but probably a necessary side-effect of making the AI more warlike. Might also be true for religions. The AI holding off a bit on early religions is intentional (cf. this post, toward the end), but it's probably (regrettably) still suboptimal play in most games to found one early, so that's not too relevant for the overall game balance I think.

That doesn't make much sense to me, if I've burnt their old city to the ground and brought in my own people to resettle, why would my people care about the old culture?

That's as in BtS, and I wouldn't want to give players a major extra incentive for razing cities. My interpretation is that every habitable tile of the map is constantly inhabited, can't be (fully) depopulated, and that the population represented by a Settler unit arrives as a minority that assimilates the native population and gets followed by more colonists as the city population grows. I wouldn't object to reducing the old owner's culture in the city tile and surrounding tiles upon razing. Looks like the Influence Driven War mod doesn't actually do that; it does remove culture after pillaging. I tend to think that such changes aren't quite worth the added complexity (in terms of being different from BtS).

Also if that's right re rifles, that also seems pretty inconsistent.

Just to be clear: There is no special treatment of Riflemen or units of a particular era.

So how do we deal with it strategically? Minimise pre-rifling wars? Doesn't seem to model actual history very well.

I definitely want there to be warfare in the Ancient and Classical era, in no small part for historical verisimilitude, but, if a player can use e.g. Catapults to conquer one or two neighbors in short order and then quickly consolidate those gains, then the game is decided by the Medieval era. For modeling, say, the conquests of Alexander, Civ is just fundamentally ill-suited.

If you look upthread (a long way), the intent appears to be "take a couple cites, and then park your army in them forever".

Discussion from last year (end of the post and a couple of other posts on the same page): link
And a month later (end of the post): link
It's been tweaked for the next version, or is still being tweaked. v0.97 also has XML settings (\Assets\XML\GlobalDefines_advc.xml) for adjusting revolt probabilities:
FOREIGN_CULTURE_STRENGTH_EXPONENT
FOREIGN_CULTURE_STRENGTH_FACTOR
But I appreciate that we're trying to find common ground on this as it's not clear that it's just a matter of tastes and priorities. The formula for foreign culture strength (still based on the BtS formula) is pretty arcane and may well produce somewhat unreasonable results sometimes. And game settings may play a role. Since there is much more ground to conquer on Huge maps, perhaps culture strength should simply receive a map size modifier, just as city maintenance is lower on larger maps.

Doesn't make much sense to me that a 1 pop city guarded by a Praetorian is still in constant rebellion cycles.

Culture strength is also, in addition to the current population, affected by the highest-ever population. That's inherited from BtS. In fact, BtS had only taken into account the highest population ever. Presumably so that population growth in conquered cities isn't discouraged and starvation not encouraged. (Edit: Also, from the perspective of a player who tries to culture-flip a border city – wouldn't want culture strength to decrease as food production tiles around the city flip.) That said, I recall writing in the (bowels of) manual, about the population loss on the third and subsequent revolt, that "it would be strange if cities could just keep revolting. The loss of population reduces the revolt probability so that the city should eventually end up depopulated but pacified." I've checked in a savegame now: The (long-term) impact of the highest population count was still too strong, so I've tweaked that in the latest DLL. Also, the BtS/AdvCiv formula is way too complicated, but I doubt that I'll ever get around to redesigning that. At least garrison strength is now (as of v0.97) pretty(*) straightforward, so that the effect of adding or removing a unit is predictable.

(*) Not perfectly straightforward I admit:

Edit: I missed the change where siege counts half, and garrison bonuses apply now. So partially my own error on the previous page (my cannons are only counting for half value, and my CR maces aren't as good as actual CG longbows/muskets).

I'll be sure to put that in the release notes. Also, damaged units don't have full garrison strength, but that's not a recent change.

Example. My current game.
Turn 314 (1898AD, marathon, huge, 18civs, no techtrades), I just took Amsterdam (sz14) about 4 turns ago.
A couple civs have rifling, but I don't.
5 maces and 5 cannon in the city (healing/occupying). Chance of revolt is 7.7%. It's 15% revolt empty, and if you don't have enough units, it'll revolt nearly forever. I need another 66 garrison points to get to 0%.

So the total required strength is probably around 115 (5*8+5*5+66 minus something for damage), i.e. 8 Riflemen or 14 Maces – which is unreasonable in the medium term, but you've only just taken the city (0 city culture, 0 tile culture), it's the capital of a Creative leader, perhaps still surrounded by Dutch-owned tiles. Religion could also amplify the foreign culture strength. Nevertheless, it might be too much, especially considering that not everyone has Rifles yet. At the least, 115 strength sounds scary when a player can't really gauge how fast it will decrease.

 

[keldath]

since my goal is to gradually retreat from the mod and Civ 4 isn't getting younger ...

i do hope it will be on 097++ , or 1.0...
im on fanatics for good

. Looks like the Influence Driven War mod doesn't actually do that; it does remove culture after pillaging. I tend to think that such changes aren't quite worth the added complexity (in terms of being different from BtS).

i just love this mod. i have it in my mods for 10 years. platyping also made it into an easy to merge python mod.

 

[Elkad]

More impact than I would've expected, But I guess techs are rather still too expensive in your games?

Just the opposite. Too fast. I don't care about "traditional speed" or "hitting expected date benchmarks", I want time to actually have a rifling war, or get my factories built before infantry are obsolete.
I'm going to start with chopping it in half, but I expect I'll probably just turn it back off.

I don't remember where the tech diffusion discussion was. Was your intention to just keep raising KTB, or actually give beakers to techs you aren't researching? If it's the latter, please don't ever give the last beaker. If I'm avoiding Masonry for some strange bulb path, I don't want to get it accidentally because the other 17 civs have it.

 

[Leoreth]

There's just this one thread. I'm not aware of any full game reports or in-depth strategy discussion here or elsewhere. I did post one game report in the 5th post. It could be that such discussion is inhibited by there being just the one thread. Right now, a subforum (under Project & Mod Development) would make sense (as evidenced by the links to older posts that I'm about to dredge up), but activity in the thread has generally been spotty, and, since my goal is to gradually retreat from the mod and Civ 4 isn't getting younger ...

I am working off the assumption that whoever is here now will be here for the indefinite future. And from my own experience, activity seems to spike when people are free to create their own threads and discuss things that seem out of scope for one main thread. It seems like having one main thread lends itself to being focused on bug reports and balance feedback that is mostly a direct conversation with the developer, and people tend to remain quiet on other topics to allow that. Your choice of course, but if you ever need a subforum I can help you get it.

Making early, expansive wars of conquest harder or less rewarding for both human and AI players is intentional. Is this in itself a controversial goal? Or just the extent of it and the means?

I definitely want there to be warfare in the Ancient and Classical era, in no small part for historical verisimilitude, but, if a player can use e.g. Catapults to conquer one or two neighbors in short order and then quickly consolidate those gains, then the game is decided by the Medieval era. For modeling, say, the conquests of Alexander, Civ is just fundamentally ill-suited.

Maybe it helps if you go into more detail on the design goals? It seems like the main effect of having to keep units around to prevent revolts in conquered cities is to slow down conquests overall, and to prevent a steamroll effect where the civ with superior army strength just takes their stack from target to target. Under the best conditions, this could lead to a slower, gradual conquest where the defender actually can regain an advantage because it is easier for them to keep their forces concentrated, which sounds good.

A lot of the problem seems to come from how unit strength scales with culture over time. It feels like this is backloaded, where unit strength easily outpaces culture late in the game. Is it part of the design that occupation becomes easier late in the game? Intuitively, that doesn't seem to make too much sense. Maybe it's my playstyle, but the unstoppable conquest train gets going more easily in the Rifle era and later and is actually not that much of a problem in early wars where strengths are often more evenly matched. So if anything, the pushback should be stronger in the lategame.

Secondly, I would be very careful about tilting the incentives of war vs peace, especially in the early game. That's also because it's not always a free choice: if you get lots of decent land early, you would usually prefer to just develop that. If you are boxed in, you have to go for an early war. Being boxed in by the AI is already a frustrating experience, and if an early war to respond to that is impeded by additional game mechanics, it becomes even more frustrating. I think having an equal set of options to respond to your game situation is crucial especially in the early game.

If early conquest is too powerful because it creates a runaway effect, I'd rather tune this on the economic end, i.e. upkeep costs, if necessary. Maybe it also makes sense to limit razing in some way. If you actually have to conquer instead of razing the neighboring early war target's capital, you actually incur long term costs, instead of just knocking out a rival in the land rush.

It also sounds as if the interaction is just frustrating in general: if your city is in occupation, there is nothing you can do except park your army there and wait. This may be part of the goal (keeping armies tied down), but feeling powerless about the situation still does not feel great. It might make sense to toy with the calculations in a way that makes it easier to lower the required occupation power by just accruing a little culture of your own in the conquered city, even if it is still outmatched by the original owner's culture. This still wouldn't be quick, since the city first has to come out of unrest and needs to construct culture buildings, but at least would give an avenue to do something about the problem besides just waiting.

 

[Lanstro]

Thanks for the quick feedback. Will be sure to try the new dll.

Making early, expansive wars of conquest harder or less rewarding for both human and AI players is intentional. Is this in itself a controversial goal? Or just the extent of it and the means?

The short answer is that I thought base K-Mod had the balance between rewarding war vs peace about right. AdvCiv has been jarring to me because 1. early conquest has been made much harder, both because of the slight reduction in strategic resources near the capital and the culture issues and 2. peaceful growth seems more powerful.

Overall that's a shame for my personal tastes, because I find the combat in Civ 5 and 6 ultimately not much fun, so I only play peacefully in those games. So I need civ4 to be my combat civ fix but from my limited experience AdvCiv nerfed it too hard.

Secondly, I would be very careful about tilting the incentives of war vs peace, especially in the early game. That's also because it's not always a free choice: if you get lots of decent land early, you would usually prefer to just develop that. If you are boxed in, you have to go for an early war. Being boxed in by the AI is already a frustrating experience, and if an early war to respond to that is impeded by additional game mechanics, it becomes even more frustrating. I think having an equal set of options to respond to your game situation is crucial especially in the early game.

Exactly right. From my pretty limited (<10 games that went past medieval) experience, I feel like AdvCiv takes away the viability of those games where you're boxed into a corner with just 3-4 pretty average cities and the only way out is by fighting. It limits strategic options.

 

[Leoreth]

Kind of the same argument but from the opposite perspective: sometimes the game let's you get away with a quick landgrab early. That is usually punished by being stretched thin (economically and militarily) and puts you at risk of being invaded by a neighbour. Runaway civs from successful early expansion are as threatening for game balance as runaway civs from successful early war, so it should be possible to effectively punish that by war. This consideration applies both vs. the player and vs. the AI.

 

[f1rpo]

Game I'm playing right now, BC-0150 is me right about to capture Angkor Thom, AI refuses to negotiate.

Looks like the AI code for making a peace proposal is simply broken. The AI will agree to human peace offers. There are some other, lesser problems too; I'll get back to you on those.

 

[f1rpo]

Top priority: Remove distracting bugs from the pre-release version. So:

v0.97-pre3 – noteworthy changes:
* Bug fixed in AI peace proposals (see post above)
* Bug fixed in AI city safety (evacuation) calculation
* AI city safety now updated directly in response to human moves.
* Tech cost modifier for "No Tech Trading" option tweaked (not much really; see my edit a few posts above)
* Tweak in AI calculation of units available for offensive purposes vs. units with defensive duties (UWAI component). Might lead to fewer inconclusive AI wars.
* Tightened a condition for stage 2 of the Domination AI victory strategy.
* Fix an oscillation problem with AI units guarding city sites.

Link to the updated DLL (edit: no longer the latest)
github.com/f1rpo/AdvCiv/raw/.../Assets/CvGameCoreDLL.dll
(To be moved into the files from v0.97-pre2.)

 

[keldath]

nice,
"* Tweak in AI calculation of units available for offensive purposes vs. units with defensive duties (UWAI component). Might lead to fewer inconclusive AI wars."
can you direct me to that tweak? you know me - i like aggressive ai

 

[f1rpo]

@VDNKh about those savegames:

Game I'm playing right now, BC-0150 is me right about to capture Angkor Thom, AI refuses to negotiate. [...]

The two where AI Suryavarman said that no peace deal is possible:
In 150 BC, where you had just moved a large stack next to Angkor Thom, there were three problems:
- The AI didn't make a peace offer although it was willing to accept your city of York for peace.
- When updating the safety status of Angkor Thom, all of Sury's units in a 9x9 square centered at the city were counted as potential defenders because I hadn't set a flag for checking their movement speed; only units able to reach the city in a single turn are supposed to count.
- City safety wasn't updated for Angkor Thom when your units moved next to it. That was by design, i.e. my idea was that the AI doesn't need to recognize a threatened city until the invaders are ready to move in. However, it appears that it's actually easy enough to update AI city safety in response to human moves.
With those problems addressed, Sury offers Polytheism for peace. (He still has the upper hand strategically, especially in term of production capacity.)

In 25 BC, you've just moved next to the Khmer holy city. Even with city safety being updated, Sury doesn't assume that the city will fall to your attack, and I don't think it's a safe bet either. He'll finish a Horse Archer at the end of the turn. I did conquer it in two tests, but each time with heavy losses. However, since Sury has suffered some defeats already and the power ratio has evened up, he's willing to give the equivalent of ca. 400 beakers for peace, which is almost the maximum that he'd ever be willing to pay given his current economic output. Two improvements that I'd like to make, but I don't think I'll find the time:
- The AI should not just care about cities that are all but certain to fall. There are already safety states "perfectly safe", "safe", "threatened" and "evacuating". "threatened" just means that the city isn't safe enough as a harbor for non-land units and civilians, so another state, say, "toss-up" would have to be added.
- The limit for what the AI is willing to pay for peace should be increased when the tactical situation (clearly) favors the other side. Normally, it doesn't make sense to pay much for 10 turns of peace, especially not to a human player, but it does make sense to pay extra if it gets the AI out of a bad spot.

For the time being the basic approach remains that the AI can't really evaluate the tactical situation and therefore errs on the side of letting combat resolve before negotiating peace. "If the human enemy could take our holy city at an acceptable cost, they'd probably just do so and wouldn't negotiate peace." (Yep, this reasoning is flawed.)

Then the AD 1450 save – that was mostly about a single AI civ having gotten far ahead of the others. That would seem especially difficult to avoid on an overcrowded map like this. I've counted just 28 cities among 7 players. A player that secures 5 cities at the expense of a neighbor who gets just 3 could already be headed for dominating the game.

can you direct me to that tweak? you know me - i like aggressive ai

@keldath: Sure: These two commits. In one game, I saw an AI civ with 7 cities assume that all but 5 units would be available for an offensive.

I don't remember where the tech diffusion discussion was. Was your intention to just keep raising KTB, or actually give beakers to techs you aren't researching? If it's the latter, please don't ever give the last beaker. If I'm avoiding Masonry for some strange bulb path, I don't want to get it accidentally because the other 17 civs have it.

Noted. Not sure if that aspect has been discussed; I think my best bet was free beakers but at a diminishing rate as the tech progress approaches some percentage upper bound. So no forced discoveries.

Thanks for the quick feedback. Will be sure to try the new dll.

At your own peril.

Maybe it helps if you go into more detail on the design goals? It seems like the main effect of having to keep units around to prevent revolts in conquered cities is to slow down conquests overall, and to prevent a steamroll effect where the civ with superior army strength just takes their stack from target to target.

I guess it's the "big war" pattern of play that I'd like to discourage to an extent, i.e. players producing hardly any military for a long time (meaning also that opportunities arising from wars between AI civs aren't relevant) while bee-lining to some military tech and then immediately going all-in against whatever opponent(s). No doubt there are numerous ways to discourage this. AdvCiv for example makes it harder to keep AI opponents pacified while working toward a tech lead and directly nerfs a (somewhat arbitrary) subset of problematic units. So the rule changes to revolts are intended as one of several measures. I like them for their simplicity: being outside the culture distance of foreign cities does not prevent revolts and defeated players culture is not disregarded – it's simpler than in BtS really. (Making revolts more relevant admittedly draws attention to a set of rules that isn't particularly simple.) Keeping dead culture around is also important to me for narrative reasons.

[...] A lot of the problem seems to come from how unit strength scales with culture over time. It feels like this is backloaded, where unit strength easily outpaces culture late in the game. Is it part of the design that occupation becomes easier late in the game? Intuitively, that doesn't seem to make too much sense. Maybe it's my playstyle, but the unstoppable conquest train gets going more easily in the Rifle era and later and is actually not that much of a problem in early wars where strengths are often more evenly matched. So if anything, the pushback should be stronger in the lategame.

Yes, perhaps too much so, though "once you get to rifling or so, it magically all goes away" (Elkad) is a ... pointed way of putting it. At any rate, there's is an era factor in the culture strength formula which could be given more impact. My aim has been to make revolts gradually less of an issue because:
* Managing revolts becomes increasingly fiddly as the game progresses.
* Army sizes and unit strength values eventually grow faster than city populations, and it would feel strange to hold down some size-10 city with a stack of 10 Infantry toward the end of the game. Brings to mind drewisfat's K-Mod Deity game where a size-15 capital in AD 1570 had 7% revolt chance against 30 occupying Cuirassiers (link).
* Quick expansion should be less of a problem in the late game. That's not to say that it can't be a problem too, but I don't think revolts are suitable as the primary solution for it. A player that tries to catch up from behind in, let's say, the Industrial era actually needs to be able to take a lot of territory quickly because there isn't much time left for it to amortize. Also, when one player dwarfs the others militarily in the late game, I wouldn't want to slow down the march toward Domination.

Rifleman isn't quite a late-game unit in my mind. I like to think that the revolt rule change does slow them down – although drafted Riflemen are very efficient at suppressing revolts.

If early conquest is too powerful because it creates a runaway effect, I'd rather tune this on the economic end, i.e. upkeep costs, if necessary. Maybe it also makes sense to limit razing in some way. If you actually have to conquer instead of razing the neighboring early war target's capital, you actually incur long term costs, instead of just knocking out a rival in the land rush.

There is an economic aspect to revolts. Cities can only flip when in the culture range of the revolt player (and even then, the city flips only on the third revolt), so keeping cities at a ~5% revolt chance isn't unsustainable; statistically, it'll lead to fewer yields. I guess it's not ideal that commerce is usually the least affected yield (since cities in disorder cost no maintenance), and losing production yields hampers efforts to construct culture buildings.

[...] It might make sense to toy with the calculations in a way that makes it easier to lower the required occupation power by just accruing a little culture of your own in the conquered city, even if it is still outmatched by the original owner's culture. This still wouldn't be quick, since the city first has to come out of unrest and needs to construct culture buildings, but at least would give an avenue to do something about the problem besides just waiting.

Yes, that's generally a problem with the culture system. It's a long duration from starting to construct a Theater to catching up with another player's city or tile culture. Spreading the state religion (if any and if not already present ...) is pretty effective at lowering the revolt odds. I'd like to give Jail a revolt suppression ability; that's among the many balance changes that I'm holding off on. Factoring building defense into culture garrison strength has been a consideration. One would think that spies could do something against revolts. The culture slider should actually already be effective, apart from helping against unhappiness from foreign culture.

The short answer is that I thought base K-Mod had the balance between rewarding war vs peace about right. AdvCiv has been jarring to me because 1. early conquest has been made much harder, both because of the slight reduction in strategic resources near the capital and the culture issues and 2. peaceful growth seems more powerful.

I guess there are indeed fewer strategic resources near capitals. Unrevealed resources are disregarded by AdvCiv when evaluating city sites. Maybe that's something I should reconsider. I do dislike how BtS makes players uneasy about moving their Settler when a starting location looks poor and may therefore have a hidden Copper/Iron/Horse resource.

I rather doubt that the revolt rule changes are the primary issue when it comes to breaking out of a box. Usually, that's just a matter of conquering a couple of cities. Which can be tough (or even hopeless) when the only available target is a tough one and the available units mediocre, but having units tied down after the war doesn't seem like such an impediment. Well, as with most balance and AI problems, I think it would help to analyze specific situations. Obviously, I'll try to keep the issues and ideas raised here (thanks!) so far in mind when I finally get around to play-testing. In any case, as for intentions, I don't mean to hamstring players in a difficult starting position, and any kind of early rush should be effective under the right circumstances, for all I care even the odd Warrior rush.

 

[Elkad]

Funny. Creative is even more of a warring trait now, as is Sistine Chapel and Sids Sushi. Anything to get your units free.

Rifles are a big jump in defensive power, (6 to 14), so that's probably why I feel like the problem gets much better then.

 

[Elkad]

What's with the lopsided treaties?

After accepting.

And yes, it's a one-way treaty. He can't declare on me. I can declare on him.

 

[f1rpo]

What's with the lopsided treaties? [...]

That was a result of the previous bugfix for AI peace proposals. Only AI-to-human proposals were affected by this new error; well, also, for AI-AI peace deals, the peace terms ("peace in exchange for ...) hadn't been announced. Hopefully I've gotten it right this time. Updated DLL (edit - no longer the latest):
https://github.com/f1rpo/AdvCiv/.../CvGameCoreDLL.dll
Also fixes a K-Mod bug that had caused angry citizens to consume food even while a Settler or Worker was in production; @carp made me aware of that issue. (I'll add it to the list of bugfixes that other mods could easily adopt when I finally get around to updating that post.) With a lot of help from carp, the problems on Unix (Wine) have also been fixed. Memory corruption resulting from data members I had added to a class (CvXMLLoadUtility) that gets allocated by the EXE.

Funny. Creative is even more of a warring trait now, as is Sistine Chapel and Sids Sushi. Anything to get your units free.

Revolt suppression through fine arts is pretty silly. At least culture does have an effect. Sounds like the main problem is still that foreign culture strength is too high overall. If you have a savegame illustrating that, I'd be interested to take a look.

Rifles are a big jump in defensive power, (6 to 14), so that's probably why I feel like the problem gets much better then.

Sure, I see. That's a balance problem that the revolt rule changes arguably make worse. Should I just go ahead and buff Musketman? I'm thinking 1 first strike, -5 production cost(?), +25% vs. Melee, Crossbow upgrades exclusively to Musketman. An anti-melee bonus may not be very useful, but would be needed if Crossbowman is supposed to be obsoleted by Musketman.

Regarding a subforum: I guess sooner or later I'll take up Leo's offer to get one opened. Still a bit on the fence.

 

[Elkad]

Giving muskets first strikes is near-useless. They'll typically be fighting Knights, who are immune.

If we want them to be garrison units, how about giving them the warrior (untyped +25% city defense) bonus?

Speaking of first strikes, how hard is it to make a unit ignore the first two first strikes (without giving it first strikes of its own)?