Age of Mythology

[Lplate]

the Favor counter on the top bar seems to be stuck

This happened to me in one of my early games. Is the Favor maxed out in all of the cities you have? Try establishing a Shrine in a new city or researching tech to increase the Favor limits.

 

[Spatzimaus]

This happened to me in one of my early games. Is the Favor maxed out in all of the cities you have?

Actually, the Global Favor cap is entirely separate from the City Favor caps. City Favor is entirely tech-limited, capping at 300 for a Focus whose level cap is 1 (Shrine), 600 for level 2, 1000 for level 3, and 1500 if you have a Basilica. All City Favor is linked to a specific Focus, so adding a new Focus won't affect the caps in your existing ones.

Player Favor, on the other hand, is purely POPULATION-limited, at 200 Favor per population in all your cities. So if your cities have 20 population between them, then you can't have more than 4000 Favor in total (this is the amount on the top bar), no matter how many Foci you've unlocked. Right now there's no message telling you this; if you see it stuck at something like "4000/6400", the 6400 just indicates the amount needed to unlock the next god, but that doesn't mean you can continue to gain Favor up to that point. Effectively, this means that your civilization needs to have a total of 1 population to get its first god, 6 to get its second, 17 for the third, 32 for the fourth, 53 for the fifth, and 78 for the sixth. It shouldn't be possible for it to get stuck at some odd number like 3970, although there's some scaling with map sizes or game speeds that might explain the math oddity. In my test games that scaling has worked out well, with new cities quickly adding to your population much faster than they generate Favor.

Note that you can continue to gain City Favor even if your Player Favor is capped, and vice versa; you just effectively lose part of the benefit of gaining the Favor. It's supposed to be VERY unlikely that both would be capped at the same time; if you're consistently running into these caps, I'd like to know. There are a few specific phases of the game where it's intentional that you reach the caps (like the early Ancient, when nearly every Focus caps at Shrine and where you might not be in the Settler expansion phase yet), but through the Classical and Medieval these limits shouldn't be prohibitive.

The reason for adding the Player Favor cap was because battle-heavy Pantheons like the Norse or Aztecs were getting far too much benefit out of dragging out an early war, and unlocking four or five gods before you'd even left the Ancient. Since the AI wouldn't do that sort of thing, I had to tweak the system to encourage players not to do it either. Since City Favor was already capping by technology, I wanted to use an entirely separate cap mechanism for Player Favor, to keep from creating the vicious circle where adding more Foci would raise your player cap, which'd unlock new gods, and so on. So it needed to be something that wasn't directly linked to technology.

Now, it's also possible that something is just breaking internally, causing the access functions to not work correctly. I obviously can't debug that for you, but if you run FireTuner you should be able to see any error messages.

 

[JanusTalaiini]

Ahh, okay, I see. Thanks for the explanation!

 

[dinobot386]

Have you thought about adding any new pantheon beliefs once the expansion comes out? An idea I had was that you could make each god be sort of a "container" for some pantheon beleifs, this way you could possibly have different gods of the same foci (like Isis and Thaloc) do slightly different things on top of the foci bonuses.

I would also like to request that you make some new religions (really just names and icons) to corrispond to the pantheons (except Shinto and Hindu, which are already covered)

 

[Spatzimaus]

Have you thought about adding any new pantheon beliefs once the expansion comes out?

I haven't decided exactly what I'll be doing to integrate the two systems. I've had plenty of ideas on what can be changed, but until I have the actual expansion in my hands and have a chance to look through it, I'm not going to make any final decisions, because too much of what we know is tentative. I know I'm going to have to do SOMETHING to reconcile the two, but there are just so many variables involved that I'm just not sure whether I can still get something playable out of it. My current concept is to keep the existing Foci (toned down a bit), adding the G&K bonuses on top of that, and the Enlightenment would simply cause my bonuses/penalties to disappear but you'd be left with their ones (which basically represent cultural differences caused by your worship). But there are a lot of unanswered questions, like the spread of religion; it looks like they're copying the Civ4 Missionary logic to go city-by-city, which is very different than the way I've handled it. Likewise, you don't start with a religion, but my system effectively requires the ability to generate Favor on the first turn. And then there's the whole Faith yield they've added, which shares a lot of similarities with my Favor system. Reconciling the two systems may take a while.

Adding many of the current Pantheon bonuses as new Beliefs might be an easy way to do some of this, even if they're still Lua-dependent. This'll depend on whether the Lua functions are in place to remove Beliefs, though; many of the things I add need to be able to be removed at the Enlightenment. And it also assumes the religion UI is moddable enough to add more categories of Beliefs.

As to your specific example, Isis vs. Tlaloc, that sort of thing is exactly what I'm worried about; I'm afraid that they're already too different, and that adding any god-specific bits in G&K would make it even worse. Yes, the two share Fertility, so they both add Food yields to their cities. Both are in Pantheons with weak Priest Favor, and the 3/2 shift between Battle and Building isn't a huge difference, so the basic playstyle can be very similar. But they've got completely different anti-Myth bonuses, Pantheon-linked units, and High Events. More importantly, one's got Healing and the other Storms, and they have a very different set of seven Banned Foci; Isis can't take Beauty or Wealth for minor gods while Tlaloc misses out on Crafts and Knowledge. Given that, I'm not sure I'd WANT there to be even more differences between the two, because they should already play fairly differently.

When I first started this mod, the idea was that it was supposed to be a "what you see is what you get" system. Someone who played god X in his last game should be able to play god Y in his next one and not be hopelessly lost; a big part of that was that the Focus effects, the core of the mod, wouldn't depend much on which god they were tied to. Along the way I've gone away from that a bit, with more and more differences between Pantheons cropping up, but I've tried to keep it relatively balanced between these two philosophies.

-----------------
STATUS REPORT:

Right now I'm in the middle of adding/overhauling the High Events for the remaining Pantheons; the version you're using only has the Norse events, with everyone else using placeholders, but the next version will have custom events for all seven options. The hard part has been balancing them while giving each a unique feel; for instance, the Aztec events are a "sacrifice" theme, where you pay a cost (Favor, yields, and yes, population) to get a really powerful effect (a top-tier Myth unit, a really big yield boost, etc.) The Sumerian events are mostly yield-based. The Greeks focus on awarding Major Heroes. And as you can see from the previous version, the Norse events are almost entirely militaristic. And so on; I want each Pantheon's custom events to have a distinct feel.

One of the things I've added is a "More Events" option in the setup screen. In the final version this'll double the chance of events occurring, and reduce the lockout timers. For my debugging purposes, though, I've got it just making events happen on every turn, so I'm hopeful that it shouldn't take too much longer. I might leave that debug option in for those of you who want to see all of the events, but it'd completely unbalance the gameplay.

Plans are that one more new version (0.14) will be out within the next week (probably Sunday, at this point; I was going to finish it last weekend, but Real Life sucked up nearly all of my spare time, and will continue to do so for the next few days), and assuming I don't find any further issues, I'll release 1.00 by the end of the month with the last few bits cleaned up. Two weeks later is the expansion, of course; my top priority after the expansion comes out will be fixing all of the inevitable compatibility issues, so the first patch with actual CHANGES to merge the two systems won't be for at least a month after that (i.e., mid-July).

 

[texdionis]

As for units art, I suggest to take a look at the Faerun Scenario available in the mod browser (latest version of a couple days ago), at last a bunch of relevant fantasy units have been successfully designed for CiV: mages, druids, giants, assassins, clerics, demons and.... dragons! Yay! Nice work


EDIT: Actually, maybe only a couple of these, basically dragons and demons, may fit for your mod, but whatever

 

[Spatzimaus]

It's been a couple of weeks since I posted here, so I figured I'd give an update.

I've got the pantheon-specific High Events all in place, all 42 of them, but I'm still going through verifying that each one works. To check 4 options for each event, you can see that it'll take a little while. Most of them are very straightforward (add a building, add a unit, add a yield), but there'll always be a few that are more intricate than that.

I'd like to get one final pre-expansion version out this week, although that might mean Sunday or Monday depending on how much free time I have in the next couple of days. This version, 1.00, will be the last before the expansion is released, and will also be part of an update to the other mods (especially Ascension, where I've been fixing the transcendence victory). My goal is to have this be a stable, feature-complete version that can be used without the expansion.

Two weeks later, the expansion will be out, and most likely my mod will stop working until I fix the incompatibilities; I'm actually surprised that there hasn't been an official "compatibility patch" to get the basics of the new content into the files, like there has been when the earlier DLCs were released. So there'll be a 1.01 at that point that adds basic compatibility, but has no other mechanical changes; the goal is to have this done within a day or two of release. While this'd be technically playable, my Mythology system and the expansion's Religion system will probably overlap far too much to be used together. By the end of June, then, I'll release a version that attempts to merge the two systems together in a more coherent way.

The question becomes, do I make the assumption that anyone who plays the mod will have the expansion? I can't merge the two systems together well without making the mod incompatible for any folks who choose not to get the expansion. I'll keep 1.00 around for those players, for a while at least, but in the long term I'm going to have to require G&K for ALL of my mods.

 

[JanusTalaiini]

The question becomes, do I make the assumption that anyone who plays the mod will have the expansion? I can't merge the two systems together well without making the mod incompatible for any folks who choose not to get the expansion. I'll keep 1.00 around for those players, for a while at least, but in the long term I'm going to have to require G&K for ALL of my mods.

Yeah, that makes sense. As I recall, it's the same route most Civ 4 modders took when Warlords (and later BtS) came out.

 

[Spatzimaus]

I'm pretty sure that every mod will be G&K-reliant in the future. The problem in this case is twofold:
1> I'm still not quite done with the Mythology mod, which means that a non-G&K version would become quickly outdated.

2> The incompatibility wouldn't just be a question of UI elements or something; I'm going to have to totally redesign the mod's internal mechanisms to reconcile the overlap between my system and the official one.
For instance, they're adding a new "Faith" yield, to fill a somewhat similar niche as my "Favor" system. So do I merge the two, where my gods now unlock through Faith? Do I convert Favor to some sort of strategic resource instead? That sort of thing. Or consider the Empires mod, which was supposed to be about overhauling the diplomacy and espionage systems; with improvements to both in the expansion, that one's obviously going to be changed heavily.

So while the first post-patch version will just be fixing the crashes and such, a month from now this mod will be VERY different, mechanically. In that sort of environment, there's not much point in keeping old versions around. And unfortunately, to make one of my mods compatible with the expansion, I have to make them ALL compatible (since most of the UI elements are in the Base mod). So there's no way to update the Empires and Mythology mods without also requiring the expansion for the Ascension mod.

And that causes the problem, because it means that anyone who wants to use my mods from now on will have to have the expansion; sure, most of us probably WILL get it right away, but it's still a problem.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Update:

The Norse, Sumerian, and Egyptian high events have now been tested, and seem to work correctly, and the Aztec and Shinto are nearly tested. The Hindu need to be reworked a bit (they didn't really feel balanced), which I'll work on tonight. I'm still trying to track down bugs in a couple of the Greek events, mainly the logic for awarding the Argos. (It's SUPPOSED to only be selectable if there's a coast within your territory to put it next to. This was the cause of the problems people had reported before.)

Hopefully I'll get this wrapped up tonight, but it might need another day to get the kinks worked out, and I'm trying to also fix some issues in the Ascension mod for the same release. With 42 pantheon-specific High Events, it takes some time to ensure it's all working, and I'm not finished writing up all the text for the ones I've done so far. After I post the 1.00 version, I'm going to go back and spend a while cleaning up all of the text I've added, and make it all quite a bit longer.

There's just one question I have for people:

Some pantheons have Events with a cost. Get a really big effect, but pay some Gold, Favor, population, etc. The Aztec pantheon events specialize in this sort of sacrificial gameplay, but pretty much everyone has a couple of these sorts of options. The question is whether I should put some checks on this to block these options if you're below a certain threshold.
For instance, there's a Sumerian event where you get a bunch of Myth units (four Utukkus and a Mushussu), but you have to spend 250 Gold to do so. Right now, there's nothing stopping someone from choosing this option if they have no gold in their treasury, and dropping your treasury to -250 will KILL your research output from the penalties.
So the question is, should I set this option to only be selectable if you have 250 Gold in hand when it's offered? While this'd avoid any AI problems, it means that a player who has 249 gold, and who could therefore handle the one turn of negative treasury, would miss the opportunity when it's offered. And since High Events can't repeat in a single game, it'd never come up again.

Anyway, new version in a day or two, and that'll likely be the last before G&K comes out.

 

[dinobot386]

If you're going to add new religions based on pantheons, i've taken the liberty of finding names for them. Egyptian=Kemetic, Greek=Hellenism, Norse=Asatru, Aztec=Teotl

I'll look up more later

 

[Spatzimaus]

Egyptian=Kemetic, Greek=Hellenism, Norse=Asatru, Aztec=Teotl

I'd already looked into that, except I'd use Olympian instead of Hellenism for the Greek pantheon; besides the fact that "Hellenic" just means "Greek" in their own language, I'd want to represent that the Olympian gods were not only the Greek and Roman gods, but they also were the foundation of many other mythologies (like the Celtic one), simply from the Roman influence in those areas. One possibility is to make these explicitly geographic, as in "Mesopotamian" or "Mesoamerican", but I'd rather focus on the pantheons as self-contained units that can be assigned to any civ.

Also, "Asatru" is a modern word for the 20th-century revival of that form of paganism, sort of like Druidic worship (which has very little in common with the original Druids), and is very focused on the religious side of things and less on the mythology. Since this mod focuses on the mythological side of things, I might go with "Valhallan" or something similar.

The core question is which of the following I should do:
1> Keep my mythology content as a completely unique system, unconnected to the religions. I'd have to do the renaming you described, but nothing else would really change. That is, you could play a Christian Olympian civ, with the various Christian bonuses from the expansion, and with the Greek mythological content (gods, foci, pantheon units, etc.). There'd be no explicit overlap at all between the two systems, except that I'd tone down my bonuses and penalties a bit to keep it from being too overwhelming when combined.
On the bright side, this would require the least work to make a version that players who don't buy G&K could use. But that may just not be possible, so I'm not really considering it a real advantage.

1a> Now, I might do #1 and still let the two share the underlying resource system. That is, the current Favor system would instead use the core game's Faith yield, allowing me to drop a ton of the bookkeeping logic. I'd expand the Faith system to generate through my four methods (Buildings, Specialists, Battles, and Base) instead of just the single system the Faith system looks to use, and adjust the costs of things accordingly. What this'd allow me to do is make Favor into a strategic resource to use for Mythological units and "spell" abilities, more like how it's used in the AoM strategy game. Instead of Myth units being explicitly limited to 1, 3, or 6 units per player, I'd simply make them cost one to five Favor resources, and have certain religious buildings create Favor.
The downside is that I'm not sure I could keep the existing Focus-specific Favor allocation if I change to Faith. Or I COULD keep it, controlled through Lua as it is now, but that'd remove a lot of the advantages of using Faith in the first place.

2> Add this content as another layer to the existing religion system. So when you're adding various levels of belief to your pantheon, there'd be one to three more layers to pick an entry for, which'd control the mythological content you use. Maybe one layer would let you pick which set of deities your religion can use, while another would control the mythological units/bonuses/Events and a third would control Favor generation. So maybe you pick Christianity, then choose to go a x3 Building, x1 Priest bias instead of the default Balanced (2/2/2) system, then pick the Kemetic set of gods/Events/bonuses/uniques. The result might not make much sense, thematically, but it should be balanced. It could even be a single choice at the start of the game; at the start you'd pick your pantheon, which'd persist until the Enlightenment and would modify your events, biases, and so on, all behind the scenes.
I don't know enough about the specifics of the two systems to know how easy this'll be to do. And if I went this path, I wouldn't want the new categories to be too much more complex than the existing ones, which might require some simplification. The biggest drawback here is that I'd probably have to drop the 21-Focus system entirely, rolling the effects into various choices within the religion system.

3> Add this content into the existing religion system as-is. That is, picking Hinduism as your religion would automatically give you access to their Pantheon units, events, and so on. Taoism would give the Shinto bonuses, that sort of thing. The first problem with this is that they're implementing several religions (like Christianity or Buddhism) that I just don't have mythological analogues for. But the biggest problem is that if it's anything like Civ4, then the game will allow you to change religions mid-game. My mythology design just is not built for that.

The common problem with all of these options is the Technologies. I rearranged the first four eras of the tech tree to make room for 15 new techs, and I'd prefer not to just toss them out. Besides just being nice to have, in general, the tech-based setup leads to a very specific effect at the Enlightenment, where you have to choose between delaying it to take advantage of the high-end Myth content and taking it ASAP to remove the penalties. So if I do try to merge the two systems, I'd still want to keep the Enlightenment in there somewhere as a way to disable certain parts of the religious content, sort of like how the "Free Religion" and "Empancipation" civics in Civ4 changed the entire game. I'm not sure whether that'll be possible, but it'll depend on how many techs (if any) the expansion adds and what it does to the early eras' timing.

Anyway, we'll see. When the expansion comes out, I'll spend a couple days just fixing things to stop breaking, and THEN I'll spend a couple weeks playing the expansion without mods (or with my Base+Empires for balance changes) to see what parts I think I can work with. So the first real post-expansion version won't be out until the end of the month.

 

[dinobot386]

2 seems to be the most interesting.

Before organized religions are founded in the expansion there's a pantheon system, with sets of beliefs, what you could do is have each god represent a different pantheon belief, i'm not sure how that would work with each foci, but AoM could deal specifically with the pantheon aspect while leaving the rest of the religion system as it is.

 

[Seventh Star]

There seems to be an issue with annexing cities and faith. I've captured and annexed cities twice now, one was a city state, one a player, and each time all favor growth stops cold. Shrines stop developing, so its not the cap. I had one city sitting at 99 favor, with a 100 needed to make the shrine to a minor god, for 6 turns, even with a monument and burial thingy (Egypt temple UB) as with the Egyptian pantheon. The city I annexed didn't get the insta-shrine from having priesthood either.

 

[Spatzimaus]

I had one city sitting at 99 favor, with a 100 needed to make the shrine to a minor god, for 6 turns, even with a monument and burial thingy (Egypt temple UB) as with the Egyptian pantheon. The city I annexed didn't get the insta-shrine from having priesthood either.

That sounds like the Lua is crashing before the part where it increments Favor for each turn. Needless to say, that shouldn't be happening. I think what's happening is that the data structure used needs to expand whenever a new city is added to your empire; I've got it triggering correctly when cities are founded, and I thought I'd fixed it to where it'd also initialize the new substructure for conquered cities, but apparently that part is breaking. I'll put that on my list.

---------

I haven't had time to even start updating the mods to be compatible with the June 14th patch (i.e., the expansion compatibility patch), but I'm planning to do that this weekend. So hopefully, within a few days I'll have a version compatible with the patch, and THEN I'll look at the actual religious content to see how to integrate.

 

[Seventh Star]

I'm almost certain it has something to do annexing. This never happens otherwise. I don't know if it matters or is even a bug, but the first time I had this happen, I had 3 cities before the capture and had the first four cities get free culture building policy. The annexed city didn't get that either.

 

[Folket]

This looks really interesting.

But what is the reasoning of not having Frej (perhaps Freyr in English) among the nordic gods. He was among the three most worshipped gods. (Odin, Tor and Frej)

 

[isnorden]

This looks really interesting.

But what is the reasoning of not having Frej (perhaps Freyr in English) among the nordic gods. He was among the three most worshipped gods. (Odin, Tor and Frej)

You can say that again! I'm planning a Nordic modpack that includes some form of the ancient religion, and leaving Freyr out of the pantheon would be a terrible mistake.

 

[Spatzimaus]

But what is the reasoning of not having Frej (perhaps Freyr in English) among the nordic gods.

Because game balance is more important than historical accuracy.

I've explained this before, but in a LOT of cases the choices of gods were based on which Foci needed representation in the game, with a close eye on making sure pantheons didn't overlap too much. Freyr is many things, but mainly a fertility god... which Freyja already had covered as a minor god. So I'd have to drop her to fit him in as a MINOR god, and if I'd wanted to make him a major god I'd have had to demote Loki (not going to happen, EVER) or Frigg. We'll get to this below.

As I've mentioned before, this mod is based more on the classic "Age of Mythology" video game, and less on actual mythology. That game had 11 Norse gods (including Freyja); I was only going to remove one of those 11 if I absolutely had to, and I needed 12 gods for each pantheon. Besides being extra work to find artwork and such for gods outside those 11, I just didn't want to deviate too much from what THAT GAME used as the specialties for each god. Freyr wasn't in that game, and neither was Frigg. I needed to add a 12th god, so I had to pick between one of those two.

Now, why did I pick Frigg over Freyr? Because I already had major fertility gods in the Egyptian, Hindu, and Aztec pantheons, and just didn't need another. The other Norse major gods are offense-oriented, and I wanted to give them a defensive option, preferably with Earth and Balance foci; I also didn't want a "mixed" god (like Fertility/Earth), I wanted someone with combat-based Foci because I wanted to separate the Norse playstyle from, say, the Aztec (where Tlaloc already has that mixed playstyle). Frigg fit those criteria much better than Freyr could, not to mention that I wanted to have more female options for major gods.

----------------------------

Since a few of you are apparently just seeing this mod for the first time, I'll lay out the current status for those of you not up to date:

The mod does not function right now. This is why you can't download it. All of my mods rely on a combat event that was broken back before G&K was released, and I decided that there was no effective way to work around the problem.

The mod cannot function until we get the DLL. Too many bits were broken by the 674 patch, and can't be fixed until we have better access to the game engine.

There have been a couple patches since the mod stopped working, and nothing in the mod has been updated to fix any conflicts those patches created. This shouldn't take that long, but normally I'd be paying closer attention to what is changed in each patch.

Even if we got the DLL today, it would be a while before the broken bits COULD be made functional, because it would require someone to write C++ code to make combat event stubs. This person will not be me; I can program, but my time's in short supply due to RL issues and I'm not going to spend it on that.

Because Firaxis destroyed my mod, and I haven't played WITHOUT my mod in almost two years, I've never bought the Gods and Kings expansion and haven't played any Civ at all since June. Even if the DLL issues were fixed today, I'd have to buy the expansion (just to be compatible with everyone else) and figure out how my mod would need to be changed to work with things like the Faith system; this would not be quick. For one thing. how do I reconcile my seven Pantheons with the various belief systems the game uses for its own religion system?
Also, making the mod compatible with G&K's internal changes would take even more time, but at this point that's a minor problem.

In fact, some of the bits of this mod aren't even DONE; I was in the middle of adding the Events when the patch broke everything, and so more than half of the pantheon-specific Events have never been tested. Yes, I could do that without the DLL fix, but I'm not going to spend any time trying to debug stuff if there's a chance the mod will never work again.

Even if the DLL fixes did happen quickly, I have two other mods in this set. Fixing the Ascension mod is higher priority, since that mod was effectively complete before the game broke. The Empires mod is lower in priority, but is also more fundamentally linked to the new G&K systems and so I'd spend some time adding its new features as soon as possible.

----

I'm not saying this mod definitely won't work again, but there is a very real chance that you'll never see another update, because I'm not going to sink several months of work into something like this until I'm confident it WILL work again. Even under the best of circumstances, it'd be a couple months before this was fully operational; frankly, I'd be surprised to see this work again before Christmas.

 

[Folket]

Yes, I did read about the problem with the combat events. I'm sorry for that. I still think this looks interesting.

I was just asking for your reasoning. I'm sorry if you had had to repeat yourself many times.