Since the release of 1.06, I've begun four and finished two games on my usual settings (see signature below). I can report that many of the "favorite.civ.detection" bugs on "begin.active.player" seem to have been squashed. I've encountered maybe half a dozen per game. Also, I've had no hard crashes.
I LOVE all the interface changes! Can't believe we've had to wait 18 (?) years to see smaller ressource bubbles and progress bars / buttons spaced and sized to make use of high-res-screens. HUGE improvement. Same goes for the cleaned up city view. f1pro deserves an equestrain statue erected in his honor just for this.
On the barb side, I think the settings are tough but playable. The AI certainly suffers from them as much as the player does. In every game, I've had two or more "failed states" due to early barb invasions. These are Civs that have had one of their cities taken (often from galleys) and stay on the back foot for many centuries thereafter. I think this is fun, but barbs sure make for a more swingy game. If you lose one city to them, it can be a major setback and they are really hard to dislodge once they build walls or connect a strategic resource. But again, I like it like this.
If you were to make barbs a little easier, you might want to consider turning off barb galleys spawning a new crew in the FOW and only allowing them to be crewed in barb cities. Also, you might want to have a lower chance for spawning axes and swords until later in the game. I really do like the effect of terrain on barb spawning: They hardly ever appear in deserts, which is a huge improvement over the original, especially if you play totestra with its huge deserts. Also like the changes to animal aggressiveness btw - perfectly balanced, imo.
I find diplomacy (-modifiers) still a bit meh - you get a plus here, a minus there, but they mostly oscillate around cautious +/- 1 for most of the game, except if you share/don't share a religion, raze or liberate cities or find yourself at war together or with one another. I don't have a good idea for how to fix this without making the AI too gameable, but things like open borders and trade should maybe matter more. I like that AIs eventually stop holding grudges about wars long ago but I wish it was easier to make lasting friends. I hardly ever get anyone to pleased, but maybe I just don't understand the system enough though. Also, I once got a "joint military" struggle bonus from an AI I had just met, when the only opposition I had fought were barbs. Bug or feature?
A bug that persists is the AI sometimes offering you gifts of gold per turn, apropos nothing. Also, they sometimes ask for a ressource at price X, but then refuse their own deal after you click "negotiate".
A while back, I commented that the AI seemed too peaceful - that surely was not the case in the two games I finshed, where about half the AIs were eliminated. In my last game, I had a strong tech lead by the late middle ages and thought I was on course for an early space race win, when six (!) other AIs dogpiled me. Spent a couple of centuries fending them off; one of the most intense and fun games I've ever played. Space race win in 1917, incidentally.
On pacifying conquered cities: I really like the changes, as they slow down attackers - but the Ai seems a bit inept at keeping their conquered cities garrisoned. Maybe this is a choice - they deem it more important to keep the advance going, but I've noticed that in some games, some AIs just keep getting revolts and even losing cities due to them. This is probably hard to fix, as the trade-off between conquering more and being able to chew what you bit off is hard to model ... and yet, it's a mjor weakness fo the AI. Also, I've noticed that unrest potential often goes UP a few turns after you have taken and garrisoned a city sufficiently to keep it quiet, before declining more steeply later on. Why is this? The effect is that you constantly have to check conquered cities for changes and add or later remove units, which is a bit of a micromanagement headache. Maybe a more linear or predictable fluctuation or degression would help.
Didn't notice any effect of the tech cost changes, but this may be due to my settings and is probably a good thing. Maybe the modern+ age techs couldn't use some tweaking - the space race techs, frex - but everything up to then feels fine to me. Don't fix it if it ain't broken.
I've taken constant notes of bugs, inconveniences and things I would like to see fixed. To make it perfectly clear - this is everything I wouid ever wish for from Santa for every Christmas ever. I'm in no way expecting that f1pro, hallowed be his name, implement any of these, they are just suggestions. The game is GREAT as is, best civ ever.
So here's the nitpicks:
1. Game Options Menu is getting rather long
- could remove some options like "aggressive AI (legacy)" or possibly "advanced starts" (does anybody play this?)
- could turn the following into radio buttons
> Barbarians: none - standard - raging
> War/ Peace: always war - standard - always peace
> tech trading: on - no brokering - no trading/off
- maybe worker stealing could also be a setting option: capture - 50/50 - kill (I prefer kill, but can live with 50/50 - stealing is an exploit, imo)
Also - and I don't know if this a totestra thing - it would be nice if the menu remembered my pervious choices. I always play standard huge maps but keep having to re-select two additional AI civs (for 18 instead of the recommended 16) plus "allow pangeas" and "start anywhere reasonable".
2. Interface / Buttons
I wish all the buttons would stay in the same place, with ineligible options ghosted (or left out until the prerequisite tech unlocks them). As is, the buttons for unit commands and promotions are added or removed, and thus change position. This can be a real pain if you go through a stack and aqccidentally hit the wrong promotion or order.
Also, I think you should not be able to pillage your own seafood. Speaking of which - in some games, i can't seem to remove city ruins, this may be a bug.
3. Scoreboard / Event Scroll
The longer the game goes on for, the more sluggish the interface becomes. I think this has to do with mouse-overs on the scoreboard, because if I turn it off, the game speeds up. This goes away if I then save, end the game, and reload; but eventually returns after some 100 turns. On a related note, I wish the military balance indicator would alwys be displayed on the list, not just on mouse-over.
I wish there was more space for the event scroll - in huge games, you get lots of notifications per turn and I sometimes miss the important ones, like wonders being built, because they scroll by too fast. A longer on-screen scroll would help.
4. City Management
Something has changed here, as cities sometimes make clearly sub-optimal choices (such as working unimproved tiles when specialists or improved tiles are an option). On this subject, I also wish I could prohbit the city from selecting specialists I don't want (such as priests or spies) or being able to de-emphasize food, hammers etc. - maybe left clicking emphasizes, right clicking de-emphasizes ...?
- not sure how hard this is to implement, but what if the city screen showed the city's rank in terms of production, tech etc as compared to the other cities in your empire? The information is available in the city advisor screen, but would be useful in the city screen. As a variant fo this, maybe you could visually show if a city is number one in each category, by adding a glow effect to the respective icon in city view, or some such?
- a production queue switch button (switch item 1 with item 2) would be handy.
- I wish the city would revert to working the tiles it did work after a naval blockade is lifted or enemy units have left a tile. With large empires and during war especially, things like re-setting a city to work water tiles that an enemy ship has passed through or pillaged is a major chore.
- same for reverting to the same tiles after you fiddle with the culture slider and cause unhappiness
5. Trade Routes and blockades
On a related note, it's really tedious if barb blockades cut trade routes and you have to re-negotiate them every other turn. That said, I like the ability for blockades to cut trade routes - but maybe they could be auto-renegotiated for the duration of the trade once the blockade lifts.
I've also noticed that enemy AIs on islands still had trade relations with other AIs even when I blockaded all their ports in the industrial age+ - bug or feature?
6. Pathfinding
Some units such as missionaries and workers sometimes walk into squares adjacent to enemies when instructed to move over longer distances - the only way around this is to move every unit step by step.Could they maybe check and stop before walking tinto threatened squares? Also, fast units like horsemen or tanks sometimes show they will take one path when you issue the order to move and attack, but take a more direct one when actually executing the order. This is really annoying as you may want the unit to first move inside a city before attacking an enemy stack (so they are protected after) only to see them attacking as soon as they are adjacent to the stack (sometimes even across rivers ...) and staying exposed in the open afterwards.
7. Sentries / Naval invasions
Would it be possible to have planes set on sentry (not intercept) to provide something like half their flight range as expanded visibility to the city; or for sentried ships to the same effect as vision range +1? The problem I'd like to see addressed is guarding against naval invasions. Moving ships and planes around manually to fogbust over the ocean is tedious - this would be more convenient without providing a game-changing benefit.
Similarly, I wish the sentried units would "wake up" if they see a large stack coimg into their field of view, even when you are not at war with the civ that moves it. Time and again, I've had an invasion force on my radar but missed it because I ddin't visually check all areas of the map.
8. Wonders & Great Engineers
I like that great engineers don't provide an auto-complete to wonders anymore - but maybe we could have them provide a small, set amount of hammers, like x% of the wonder cost? Also, I think the religious wonders could use a shot in the arm, along with Chichen Itza.
9. AI at War
Overall, i think the AI's tactics in war are greartly improved - one of the reasons I love this mod (and am grateful for Karadoc and those who came before him). That said, I wish the AI was less focused on taking out workers - they will almost always go for them, to the point that baiting them with a worker sacrifice is an exploit. Also, they still don't use their artillery and air power systematically. Often, catapults will be used to attack single units somewhere in the field, which is unwise.
A related point: Maybe it would be better if one had to declare war on the turn before moving units onto enemy territory or attacking units? I know this is a major change, but wouldn't favor either AI or player - and would give the defender more of a chance. Alternatively, attacking in the same turn could give you a "global villain" diplo modifier from all civs who are aware it - much like Japan, after Pearl Harbor.
10. Space Race
The space race is still very much a slog, and too intransparent. It might help to have a summary overview of where you and every other AI is in the race- what tech they have, what parts have been built, when everyone is projected to finish (provided the information is available through espionage or having eyes on cities). I'm no expert on that part of the game, but maybe more changes would be in order. I don't really understand how the number of components and engines works out. The idea I think was to balance risk and reward, so that civs who are behind in the race can launch early with a chance of failure - but in true effect, I always build all the parts even when having an extra engine with hindsight turns out to maybe only cut flight time by a turn or two. If the consequences of your choices were more predictable, I think it would make this part fo the game more enjoyable.
Edit: I forgot to add my notes on espionage:
11. Espionage
... adds a whole layer of largely intransparent complexity to the game - to the point that running an espionage economy apparently is a viable option. I used to turn espionage off because I thought this was going too far, but since i like many the basic features - such as having insight into opponents' cities - I've gone back to it.
The problem witth diplomacy on large, 18 civ worlds is that, in the last third of the game, you have hundreds of cities, and spies are a neglible expenditure, so the AI builds plenty of them. Ironically though, the one (imo over-powered) effect of spies I'v never seen the AI make use of is to incite revolt before attacking a city.
Instead, in my last two games, I got at least three, sometimes up to five espionage notices on every turn - either, a spy is caught, gold is stolen or some city has suffered a nuisance effect, like poisoned water, unrest or the destruction of, say, a granary. Also, as the end-game nears, often one or two AIs will focus their entire economy on stealing your tech and sabotaging your spaceship.
These events are neither fun, nor very effective for the AI - but they take up time and there is very little you can do against them. Raising espionage expenditure globally and/or focusing it on AIs that spend big takes a long time to produce a measurable effect; and is a poor investment - you are invariably better off just teching ahead and rebuilding what is destroyed because prevention is much more expensive. Building espionage improvements is very hard to estimate the effects of. In the end, I sent out spies on counter-espionage missions to every other civ every 30 or so turns - by far the most measurable effect, and put a spy in each of my cities (79, in this case) - but these are must-do chores, not interesting game choices..
Some suggestions for a least tempering the effects of espionage:
- raise the production cost of spies
- make spies expire even after succesful completion of a mission
- limit the number of active spies you can have, as with missionaries
- provide notice when counter-espionage effects are about to run out and you need to send a new spy to renew it
- discourage AI from using nuisance missions like poison water and foment unhappiness
and teach it to use incite revolt during war - or remove that option if it cannot use it
- make spaceship parts sabotage proof once built - I'm okay with sabotage during production, but they should be treated like wonders after they are complete
Lastly, could you maybe package your mod with blue marble, the ethno-varied units and, ahem, totestra? I think there are still too many civ players out there afraid to play with mods or unaware of the GREAT content out there.
And: Keep up the good work, f1pro. You're doing god's work here. I think the only reason you are not seeing more feedback here is because we're all too addicted playing ...
I'm using 1920x1080 resolution and everything works fine.
