Age of Ascension

[JanusTalaiini]

Ahh, okay! That makes sense. Yeah, the victory progress screen was the first place I looked for a possible counter. Not finding one anywhere, I interpreted the tooltip that pops up each turn as meaning you had to get your whole population ascended.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Okay, I need an answer on something.

In the process of updating the Victory Progress screen to include the number of people who have ascended, I found out that something internally has been changed in the last few versions of the core game. PreGame:SetVictory USED to work for my new Transcendence Victory, allowing me to turn it on in the setup screen, but now it doesn't. Effectively, the game will now NEVER allow you to turn that victory condition on... and this limitation will apply to any new victory condition added by any mod. It's not just UI-related; you can normally use PreGame.SetVictory in FireTuner to turn a victory condition on and off during a game, but no matter what I do the Transcendence stays off. It's insane that they'd do this. I'm really hoping it was just an accident, but it has to have been in there for a couple months now with no one noticing.

The problem is, some of you have reported triggering the transcendence process. I'm wondering how you could have, given this issue; without this victory being valid, the game won't let you build any associated Projects. So, are you still using v.2.03 (from back in February)?

Regardless, I've got a problem here. The only two options I have for making it work, then are:
1> Go back to the old method, and trigger Game:SetWinner by hand to decide the winner
2> Roll my transcendence victory into the existing VICTORY_SPACE_RACE, which obviously CAN be enabled.
For now I'm going to go with #2, and I'll post a new version after this weekend (when I post the final pre-expansion version of the Mythology mod as well). I still can't believe they broke this, though.

 

[bladex]

was playing tonight started at the digital era (after nuclear) got all the way to transcendence but the wonder ascent to transcendence never appeared it was impossible to win i'm using the latest patch.

also the planet busters should be banned or made so a unit can always intercept them like the plasma cannon they almost always get through flattening your cities nothing can intercept them that's not fair. no matter what army you have the damn AI just keeps spamming them and flattening your cities

 

[Spatzimaus]

also the planet busters should be banned or made so a unit can always intercept them like the plasma cannon they almost always get through

PBs CAN be intercepted, just not most of the time. The minimum chance of intercepting one is 10%, the maximum is 50%, and there's a 50% multiplier. That means SDI has a 20% chance of intercepting a PB, and each Orbital Defense Pod you build increases that number by 1% (max 10). So you should have a 20-30% chance of intercepting each one if you're by yourself. The thing to remember is that nuke defenses are pooled among all enemies of the launching civ, with a diminishing return logic. If you've got a 30% chance of intercepting one, and the launching civ is at war with someone else who also has a 30% chance, then there'll be a 45% chance of interception if he launches at either of you. This gets you pretty close to the 50% cap. So you should be trying to get some other major civ to fight your enemies at the same time, if you're worried about nukes. But no matter what you do, at least half of his Planet Busters WILL get through... and that was deliberate.

Each of the future eras is designed to have a very specific feel. The Digital is very defensive, all about grabbing lots of Wonders and improving terrain yields while defending from the new Mind Worm barbarians; the Fusion is about offensive warfare, production, and scrambling to control the new strategic resources; and finally, the Nanotech is Titan units and Specialist boosts, preparing for the end. By the time you get to the Fusion Era, you can't just sit back and turtle your military any more, because the Fusion is supposed to be a time of heavy, mobile warfare, sort of like the Industrial was in the normal game, and so I didn't want it to be possible to be conservative. Nearly every unit line hits its endgame unit in the late Digital/early Fusion, so you should have an excellent military.

You can build city structures that reduce missile damage, like the Gravity Shield, but PBs are SUPPOSED to be really tough to defend against. Your best defense is a good offense; build a few gravtanks, escort them with some skimmers and vertols, bring along a couple plasma artillery, and just conquer his cities the old-fashioned way. Or, at the very least pillage his Dilithium deposits; they're all water-based, after all, which makes it VERY easy to slip a few Stealth Ships in to take out his harvesters. No Dilithium means no PBs, but more importantly it means no Fusion Labs or Titan units; Dilithium was designed to be a very contested strategic resource, and you won't have a lot of it to split between PBs and Fusion Labs. Honestly, I'd be less worried about the AI throwing a PB at you and more about him building a Fusion Lab and using its Uranium to make even more older nukes.
And if you think the PBs are bad, wait until you get to the Nanotech and someone builds a Subspace Generator; one free uninterceptible nuke per turn basically makes you want to finish the game ASAP.

 

[bladex]

pillage his Dilithium deposits; they're all water-based, after all, which makes it VERY easy to slip a few Stealth Ships in to take out his harvesters. No Dilithium means no PBs,

i'll keep that in mind. how about making it so you can only build 1 death ray or ion cannon per city the ai spams these too and mows down my army before i can even get near his cities to capture them even the titan units.

And if you think the PBs are bad, wait until you get to the Nanotech and someone builds a Subspace Generator

yes i was having fun with that i built it

but no matter what i do the ascent to transcendence wonder never ever appears to be built...

 

[Spatzimaus]

i'll keep that in mind. how about making it so you can only build 1 death ray or ion cannon per city the ai spams these too and mows down my army before i can even get near his cities to capture them even the titan units.

I CAN do that, but it'd take more effort than it's probably worth since it'd require a CanConstruct Lua override as well as a rebasing check/override. Realistically, they'll already be very capped by resources; an Ion Cannon requires a Dilithium, while a Death Ray requires a Dilithium AND a Neutronium. So no one's ever going to have that many of them in play at one time; of course, with infinite range they'll be able to use all of them every turn (except for the ones healing), but they shouldn't be able to throw up a wall of defensive fire thick enough to stop a concerted assault.

What you have to do is use the two specific countermeasures to Orbital units:
1> Having a Mobile Shield within 2 hexes of a unit gives that unit a temporary promotion that adds +100% defense against all ranged attacks, which includes all orbital weapons other than the Subspace Generator. (It also makes them immune to nukes, which is something you might care about if the opponent is throwing Planet Busters around, but all Titans are already immune to nukes. And immune to nukes means immune to Subspace Generators as well.) Mobile Shields do cost 2 Dilithium, but they also count as a Medic, and they hover, so they're really handy to bring along.
(Note: I've been considering changing Mobile Shields into an All-Terrain unit, i.e. can travel over water as well as land. Doing this would make them a naval unit, which'd mean that they'd now be able to stack with land units AND Great Generals... I'm still testing to see if that's just too awesome.)
Basically, Mobile Shields are supposed to be a bubble of invincibility from bombardment for your attack forces, while you protect your cities with things like the Gravity Shield and Perimeter Defense. Your improvements might get wiped out, but your population and cities will be fine, which is really not a problem given the brevity of lategame wars.

2> Building an Orbital Defense Pod reduces the damage dealt to your units by any orbital attacks by 5%, in addition to their nuke defense bonus. Since you can build 10, that's -50%. And note that that's -50% to the BASE strength value, it's not a -50% promotion that'll be offset by positive bonuses. Since this is a Project, there's no city to tie it to, so once you build these, no one can ever take the bonus away from you.

Between those two methods, you can make your units take only 1/4th the normal damage from orbital attacks. And honestly, an Ion Cannon has a strength of 50, and by the Fusion Era your main combat units (like Gravtanks) will be in the 100 range already. Drop that 50 to a 25 for having 10 ODPs, and you don't even need a Mobile Shield to protect your units; an Industrial-Era Infantry unit would hit just as hard. So an Ion Cannon shouldn't be able to do more than 1 point of damage in each combat, and since Gravtanks and Titans have Damage Reduction (-1 damage per combat), they're pretty much immune no matter how many of these your enemies have.

Of course, a Death Ray has a strength of 150, so they're a whole other ballgame, but really, they're SUPPOSED to be the main counter to Titan units. 10 ODPs knocks that to a 75, so they'll already be at a disadvantage relative to a Combat Mech (100), especially if there's a Mobile Shield accompanying it, but they'll at least do enough to get past the Damage Reduction, and they'll make short work of your weaker units (Vertols and Skimmers, for instance).

but no matter what i do the ascent to transcendence wonder never ever appears to be built...

Yes, it looks like this was broken either in my February 17th update or in one of the game's official patches since then. What's happening is that the Project is tied to the victory condition, but the game always thinks the victory condition is turned off. If you hit Esc in game and click the little "Details" button in the lower-right, it'll list what victory types are enabled, and it never says Transcendence any more.

I'm in the middle of figuring out a solution for this. Most likely, I'll just merge the two victory types together; originally I needed the Space Race victory to stay as it was, because I was using it to track the spaceship components, but due to some changes I've made since then I no longer need to do that. (Basically, I now have my own overrides in the Victory Progress screen and the spaceship completion check.) So the next version WILL have it working again; I'm currently aiming at Tuesday or Wednesday. I just need to finish testing some Mythology stuff first.

 

[bladex]

sounds good and from now on i'm gonna smash all his dilith mines 1st

just curious did you get the ascension idea from stargate/atlantis?

 

[Spatzimaus]

just curious did you get the ascension idea from stargate/atlantis?

Not really. This mod's original name, "Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod" (which remains the name of this forum, even though I've long since expanded into a 4-mod set), should explain it all: this game's design was drawn (stolen) from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which was Firaxis' attempt at a sci-fi offshoot of Civ II, released back in 1999. In SMAC, you ended the game by ascending your population through a very simple 2-wonder system; complete them both, then you win.

Spoilers for those who haven't played SMAC and don't want spoilers for the story:

Spoiler :

In SMAC it wasn't a pure "ascended being" thing in the style of Stargate; the story was that all the primitive fungal lifeforms on the planet Alpha Centauri (the Mind Worms, Spore Launchers, Isles of the Deep, Locusts of Chiron, Sealurks, Fungal Towers, etc.) were actually just pieces in a growing planetwide neural net that gained awareness as the game progressed. Humans "ascended" by downloading their minds into that giant neural net right as it was awakening into a full planetary intelligence (which would trigger a massive upheaval on the surface that would have killed any remaining humans), and the end of the game was a race to see which faction's leader would be the dominant personality in the new world-spanning lifeform.

SMAC did this by having you produce two Wonders: the Voice of Planet, to let you communicate with the developing planetary mind, and then the Ascent to Transcendence to finish the upload process. You'd unlock Transcend specialists somewhere around that time, who were just really productive specialists (and in SMAC, specialists weren't tied to a specific building), but it was basically a very straightforward 2-step process, and the first one to complete it would win.
The game's epilogue, assuming you picked this victory condition, takes place a million years later and talks about how the various personas still maintain some independence, but it was pretty clearly a "you win!" thing.

Given that this mod translates most of SMAC's concepts back onto Earth, the above scenario just wasn't possible to duplicate unchanged. And of course I wanted to do something quite a bit more mechanically complex, given how much has changed in the past 13 years and three Civ engines, so it needed to be something that could realistically be spread over twenty or so turns and not be quite so explicitly tied to a single Wonder event. So, I ended up with the ascension method; thematically it probably does share more with things like Stargate than with the original SMAC, but I wouldn't have put it in if SMAC hadn't had something similar to end its game.

 

[^Renegade]

Well with the expansion out in a couple of days time i'm sure it'll brake the mod in many ways. Had lots of fun playing Age of Ascension so far and can't wait to see what changes you make with the added Religion and espionage

Will you start releasing stuff on steamworks in the future?

 

[Spatzimaus]

Well with the expansion out in a couple of days time i'm sure it'll brake the mod in many ways.

Last week's patch broke a couple things, but they're not things that take long to fix, so my internal version is up and running.

The problem is the expansion; it changes a lot of things on a fundamental level, and that'll take much longer to clean up. For instance, Culture is now a yield, which means a huge number of changes are necessary just to get everything running again. I probably won't have all those sorted out before the start of next week.

And what this means is that all future versions of my mod will require you to have G&K. I wish it didn't have to be that way, but they've just made it impossible to do otherwise.

Had lots of fun playing Age of Ascension so far and can't wait to see what changes you make with the added Religion and espionage

The espionage will definitely change a few things, but not as many as I'd like. The G&K espionage system uses a behind-the-scenes spy system, instead of having actual spy units like previous Civ games did. Originally I'd wanted things like the Doppelganger to be half-combat unit, half-spy, but that doesn't really go well with the current design. I'll probably rework things like the Planetary Datalinks, Hunter-Seeker Algorithm, and Self-Aware Colony to have an espionage component, but I won't add any new Wonders, so any new effects will come at the expense of old ones.

Religion will likely have no impact on the Ascension mod at all. This is a pure science fiction mod, and most of that religious stuff belongs in the earlier eras. If I DO add anything related to the religion system, it'll be in a negative way, as in, remove what little bonuses you're still getting from your religion; the reason for this is that by extending the game, a lot of balance elements change simply due to duration.

Now, that isn't to say that this mod won't change. As we get more tools to work with, I can improve the mod in a number of ways that weren't previously possible. But it won't be related to the new religion system or anything.

Will you start releasing stuff on steamworks in the future?

Probably, but I'm not sure when. One of the reasons I never put my Alpha Centauri mod (now the Ascension mod) on the browser was because of copyright issues, but the main reason I didn't put the whole mod package on there was that it just wasn't ready yet. While Ascension is nearly complete, missing only some artwork and a couple bug fixes, the Mythology mod is going to require a major rework to be compatible with the new religion system, and the Empires mod is just getting started.

 

[dinobot386]

Is there any way you can salvage your Ascension mod for the expansion? It has somewhat fewer issues than the AoM mod. Your mod is the only one ive found that meaningfully goes into the future.

I don't see things like the mobile shield working, but maybe you could change the function of the ranger and troll, and turn the doppleganger into some espionage function. Plus, I think I heard something about nuke interception being in the core game now, but im not sure where.

Heres an idea; Is there a way you could work with the Espionage UI to make a planetary colonization interface?

 

[Spatzimaus]

Is there any way you can salvage your Ascension mod for the expansion? It has somewhat fewer issues than the AoM mod.

Unfortunately, "fewer" still leaves quite a lot. The big one is Psi units' ability to dynamically adjust their strength to match those of their opponents. This was the entire point of those units; they're for the player who's not in the lead, as a cheap way to counter the really powerful stuff. And Psi units are one of the key elements of this mod.

A technical explanation:
It used to be that RunCombatSim would execute before combat starts, and EndCombatSim would execute after it ends, so I'd adjust the strength in RCS and then restore it to its original value in ECS. It worked beautifully; okay, the combat preview would use the pre-shift values, but the combats themselves would work as normal. Sure, I put caps on it so that the weaker Psi units couldn't fight off Titans, but this allowed me to create a line of units that worked perfectly as barbarians and that helped semi-defeated empires defend themselves.

Post-patch, EndCombatSim won't execute at all for many units, which obviously screws up the reset. Okay, I could get around that in other ways, by resetting everyone at the end of the turn or something. But RunCombatSim was also changed, to where if one of the two units died, that unit structure is unreadable. I could have worked around that through storing the necessary info in other ways, except that this change means that RunCombatSim is now executing AFTER the combat is resolved internally, not before. (Because how else would it have cleared the structure?) And that means that I can't adjust the strengths at all any more, because I have nowhere to do it before the combat starts.

That's the sort of thing I'm running up against. They didn't just break the functions, they removed an entire set of functionality, with no replacements possible. The only way I could get this mod working again is to design some entirely new mechanism for Psi units, and I'm just not sure if it's possible to get anywhere close to what I really want.

 

[dinobot386]

So I was looking up when and if the DLL is coming out and I stumbled across this http://store.steampowered.com/news/8194/
It appears to be patch notes for the compatibility patch, but it says something called "DLL swapping" is now possible in game

What does that mean?

 

[dinobot386]

I thought of an idea to possibly fix the problem with Psi unit scaling, at least to an extent. What if you make a promotion that makes mind worms, etc. weak to gunpower and other older units, and strong vs. energy units, etc. (think of how spearmen and pikemen are strong against mounted units)

Likewise you could give negative promotions to some of the stronger units that make them weaker to mind worms.

And is there a way to make an invisible "barbarian camp" spawn under spore towers? This could then give 25g to players who destroy the spore tower and move into the space. Im not sure how that would work in players territory, though.

It's not a perfect fix by any means, but it should at least function.

 

[Spatzimaus]

What does that mean?

I'd guess, from the name, that it allows us to use a custom DLL in place of the existing one, which is an obvious prelude to true DLL modding. But since we don't have the tools yet to MAKE a DLL, it doesn't do anything for us yet.

What if you make a promotion that makes mind worms, etc. weak to gunpower and other older units, and strong vs. energy units, etc.

I'd thought of that, but it's not the same. If the Psi unit has a strength of 40, and it's facing a unit of strength 30 and a unit of strength 50, both of which share the same combat class, I want it to shift to 30 when fighting the weak one and 50 when fighting the strong one. So you might think, okay, make a type-specific -25% penalty when fighting the 30 and a +25% when fighting the 50. But I also want it to adjust to equality when fighitng a 35 or a 45, AND I want it to cap at +/-25% when fighting something below 30 or above 50.
So that means making a really, really long list of modifiers for every single unit it can face, tying each of these to a promotion for that unit. Sure, I can leave it as -25% when facing anything of type Archer or Melee, since those'll be long gone, and I can put all Titans at +25% for the Mind Worm. But units in type Gunpowder, Energy, Armor, etc. will all need unit-by-unit adjustments if I want to maintain the full flexibility of the old system. There are three problems with this:
1> It means I need one custom promotion for each Psi unit, since the modifiers for the Mind Worm won't be the same as for the Nessus Worm. (There are five types of psi units, not counting the "Wild" variants the Barbarians use.) Since I'm already running right up against the promotion cap, adding another four promotions is not a good idea.
2> If someone mods one of the late-game mundane units (like the Modern Armor or Mechanized Infantry), or adds new units of their own (like in the DLC), I'll have problems. Okay, this really only applies to Modern-era units versus a Mind Worm or maybe a Chiron Locust, since the more powerful Psi units can stick with the combat class modifiers, but it's still an issue.
3> While this'd save the Psi units, it wouldn't help the corresponding ability for the Balance Focus in the Mythology mod. For those of you who only care about this particular content mod that might not seem like a big deal, but if I'm going to spend a lot of time fixing something, I'd prefer to fix it all the way.

If they'd even given us a promotion ability for "+x% when fighting a stronger unit", I could make do. But I can't see any combination of type-specific bonuses that'd work well for all Psi units. Now, I could probably find some combination of abilities that fills the same niche as Psi units (some mix of +X% in friendly territory, Hidden Nationality, +X% when attacking, Commando, and so on), but nothing that'd feel close to how Psi units worked in Alpha Centauri.

And is there a way to make an invisible "barbarian camp" spawn under spore towers?

Not really. Barbarian camps can't be placed inside controlled territory, or if they are, they'll be immediately captured; that behavior, as far as I can tell, is hard-coded inside the engine. By the time you get to my future eras, most of the planet should be under control of the players, so most Spore Tower locations would cause this issue. I'd have to place them right at the moment of capture, and as we've already discussed, the combat-trigger events are now not very useful, since with the spore tower dying its structure would be cleared and so I'd have no way to know where to place the camp. Also, the amount of gold you get from a Barbarian camp is fixed in GlobalDefines, while I want the amounts to be substantially higher than that AND scale with era.


I can get around all of this by storing spore tower locations in a soft data structure (like MapModData) and if a tower dies I just compare the remaining spore towers to this list and see which one's now missing. This'd be quite a bit of work, but it can be done. But adding a similar mechanism for all of the other on-death effects I mentioned just wouldn't be practical; I'd have to store location, owner, type, and a full list of promotions for every single unit in the game, on every turn, and scan through the full list to figure out which unit died in each combat. That's the workaround I've figured out, and frankly, the amount of overhead this implies is a bit frightening.

 

[dinobot386]

Well, assuming you can keep within the promotion cap, I think the positive/negative promotions are the only way to simulate what used to happen. Id suggest making a "blanket" negative promotion to span over all units that need adjustment (laser infantry, assault power armor, skimmers, etc.) and a stronger one for titans, etc. This should save some space until the DLL is released. It wont restore perfect balance, but it should be playable at least.

I'd suggest making rangers slightly more powerful but have a defense minus, and trolls should get some type of fortification bonus (where the game treats them as if they were in a fort or citadel, which might work well for the AI since it never really builds those) and something like double or even triple healing, maybe throw in the aztec jaguar's heal after kill promotion

Unfortunately, I see no way to recover the AoM mod anywhere near what it was without the DLL, so it might be best to rebuild it from the ground up as a super enhanced religion system and extended classical era.

The spore tower not giving gold isn't that big of a deal considering that 25 gold is more or less trivial at the time of the outbreak.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Well, assuming you can keep within the promotion cap

I can't. I'm already 21 promotions OVER the cap, remember? That's why you can't use both Mythology and Ascension at the same time; I've been trying to reduce the number of promotions, not increase it. Even if you drop one of the two mods, you'll either be at 193 (dropping Ascension) or 200 (dropping Mythology), so I just don't have any room. And that's not including any promotions in Gods & Kings, so who knows how close I'd be to the cap now.

Unfortunately, I see no way to recover the AoM mod anywhere near what it was without the DLL, so it might be best to rebuild it from the ground up as a super enhanced religion system and extended classical era.

That's just not going to happen. If my only option is to scrap the entire design and just make it an early-era analogue to the Ascension mod (i.e. a predominantly XML mod with just a couple extra Lua bits thrown in), then I'm not going to be modding Civ5 any more (or at least until the DLL). I don't need two mods that play basically the same way; the whole point of the Mythology mod is that it adds an entirely new layer (or two) onto the game to create a very different game experience. Now, most of its core mechanics are recoverable, although there's obviously a conflict with G&K's religions that I still need to work out. (Or I WOULD need to, except that I haven't bought G&K because of my mod not working any more. Don't you love recursion?) But with so many things broken, I'm going to have to find workarounds for each, and some of them might not work too well.

The spore tower not giving gold isn't that big of a deal considering that 25 gold is more or less trivial at the time of the outbreak.

Which is why the Spore Towers give you 100 (Digital), 150 (Fusion), or 200 (Nanotech or Transcendence). 25 in the future eras would be ridiculously low, as you noted, but there's no way to make camps give more than 25 without breaking the early eras. So the "spawn a camp" bit just won't work. (Well, I suppose I could put it in a loop and spawn 4-8 camps in succession, but that only would work for towers inside your territory.)

 

[dinobot386]

So I have a question, does your terraforming and plant forests/jungles system still work? If so i'd like to request you to make a semi compatible mod for the expansion with the systems that still work while we wait for the DLL. Combat will be boring, but I'd like to see a return of this mod in some form or another.

I've found that I miss using those systems the most ever since the patch came out.

PS; I think you might be able to do something with the system that lets privateers capture enemy ships, idk how it works but it might be similar enough to the runcombatsim system to work with. (if not, I could at least see it as an interesting system to use, like a land unit version of it for zombie units, etc. Would be scary on barbarians)

 

[Spatzimaus]

So I have a question, does your terraforming and plant forests/jungles system still work?

They should; nothing related to their XML was adjusted by the patches, and there were no combat-related triggers involved. (Other than the fact that my units that could terraform now require a different art definition format, I mean.)

If, in the end, I decide that the combat changes I depended on can never be recovered, then I might create a small mod with the Lua mechanics behind the things that still work. In other forums of this site people keep asking questions that I answer with "oh, I've fixed that in my own mod long ago", so it'd be handy to have something they could download to examine for their own mods. The terraforming code would definitely go on that list, as would the hidden buildings, the hidden policies, the UI changes, happiness-generating specialists, and so on. Pretty much everything currently in the Base mod can still be used by others, but there are bits of it involved in the content mods.

But the only way I'd do that is if I've decided my mods are completely dead, because I'm not going to spend a lot of time working on something I'd never use if there's even a chance of restoring the version that I want to play, especially since I'd be cannibalizing four separate mods to make something like that. Also, note that I haven't bought the expansion, so there'd be quite a few compatibility problems for those of you who have G&K. I'm not exactly motivated to pay for an expansion to a game that I'd no longer want to play, so I have no idea when/if I'd ever buy it; the simple fact is, the core game bores me, and G&K doesn't seem to add enough to tempt me to play an unmodded game more than once or twice, and that's generally not enough for me to pay $30.

Who knows when the DLL comes out. But if it doesn't happen soon, or if it does and it takes folks a while to figure out how to add working combat trigger events, then it might be too late. I don't have a lot of free time to spare, and for the past two years I've spent a lot of it on these mods; I'm not going to hang around indefinitely in the hopes that my mods' functions become possible once again.

 

[dinobot386]

I just recently bought G&K, ive been playing it and have noticed a few things you might be able to take advantage from.

There's a promotion called Coastal Raider for melee ships that gives a vs city bonus, but what caught my interest is that the promotion also gives you gold equal to a percentage of damage you do to the city. Now, I have no idea how this works, but if the function is flexable you might be able to use it to recreate your old combat promotions.

Another thing I noticed is that with the religion, you might be able to recreate how foci worked in your AoM mod. In G&K there is a pantheon belief system, which works just like religion works with one important difference; pantheon beliefs cannot spread outside of your empire. There are several beliefs who's benefits take effect depending on how many followers that belief has in a city, and pantheon beliefs are separate from religions.

For example, I was playing a game where I was playing as Mongolia, I selected my pantheon belief and 1 out of 3 of my citizens followed it, then over time the followers grew. After I founded a religion not all of my population followed it, some still followed my pantheon.

I could see this as a way to imitate how foci worked if you can add more slots for pantheon beliefs, actually, if done right it might work even smoother than the old system