Age of Mythology

[Spatzimaus]

I don't know, I play on Marathon, and it's not too fun suffering through the ancient and early classical era when your neighbor is the most powerful military in the world, and you're pulling off -7-9 happiness.

If you're negative on happiness, then something's wrong. Maybe you expanded too fast, maybe you just don't have enough unique luxuries (a problem on most Earth maps, in my experience, especially on huge maps), who knows. My mods do require a slightly different pacing for expansion; in vanilla, you can generate Happiness faster in a new city than its growth can counteract, but the way I've set things up, it's the other way around. Heeping up with per-city Unhappiness is harder, requiring more attention to things like luxury trades. But it really pays to take happiness-boosting policy branches, like Piety. (Or Tradition, or Order, or even Honor... it's not all about Piety, since a lot of branches have some happiness boosters.) Or, be like the AI and just don't settle new cities unless you've got at least 10-20 spare Happiness sitting around.

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Status update time.

I've been working on it, but I still can't get the UI elements to work right. There are five UI components that I need to fix before the mod's actually playable:
1> The initial pantheon+god choice. I'm basic this on the "choose a tech" popup, where you'll see seven boxes on the left side of the screen, each of which will have one Pantheon. Mousing over this gives the general help about each pantheon (its unique units, its Favor biases, and so on), while inside that box will be four buttons representing the major gods. Clicking on one of the 28 buttons selects your god. (This part's almost ready.)
2> The Mandala, showing your current Alignment and the locations of all gods in your pantheon. (Half done.)
3> The "time to pick a minor god!" popup. While the selection mechanism will be integrated with #2, I still need to get a trigger working that forces you to make a choice. (Haven't done yet.)
4> The top-of-screen indicator for how much Favor you've accumulated. The problem is that while Favor is a yield declared in the <Yields> XML table, the game won't insert an entry for it into the YieldTypes Lua table. So I just can't seem to find an easy way to query how much Favor a person has; instead, I'll have to store everything in the usual ModData structures. It's nearly working now, but I'm not sure how reliable it'll be.
5> The Events. Lower priority, but this should have been the easiest one to get functional since it's just copying an existing mod's code. Unfortunately it just crashes, and I still don't know why.

Now, why do I bring this all up? I go out of town tomorrow morning, and won't be home until Sunday or Monday. I'll have limited internet contact, so I WILL check up on this board, but I won't be able to mod.
So what I'm trying to do is get as much as possible working tonight, but chances are I won't be able to get more than one or two of those functional before I go. IF I release the 0.01 version before leaving, you'll have to understand that some aspects might be nonfunctional. For instance, if I can't fix the interface for selecting a starting god, then I'll just give everyone a random one. If I can't fix the interface for selecting a minor god, then I'll just assign you a random one from the pool of available minor gods. And if I can't get the Event logic working, then there just won't be any events. (Since Events are a major source of Heroes and Alignment changes, this isn't good.)

If I do release it, then, you probably won't be able to play an actual game. What I'll need is feedback on specific areas: how much Favor are you generating on turn X, do any Foci seem clearly inferior to others, do the unit abilities make sense, and so on. And yes, general feedback on whether Happiness is too hard to get, whether city growth is too low (I reduced food production slightly, but I don't want it to be going negative or anything), and so on would all be useful. The thing is, nearly all of the content is in the mod right now, so looking through the Civilopedia should allow you to get a rough idea about what the balance will be like.

 

[Spatzimaus]

On vacation, sort of, so I can't write much. I got a LOT done before I left, but it was not functional enough to post. For whatever reason, it would not remember how much favor you built up from turn to turn, which obviously does not leave much room for testing.

So, I won't post files until next Tuesday-ish. In the meantime, some questions.

1. Should the amount of favor needed for gaining a minor god increase with empire size, like Policy costs do?

2. How many units do you generally field in early(pre-Renaissance) wars? I want to lower the caps on the number of myth units of each type, to encourage you to supplement them with mundanes, but I don't want to take it too far.

I'll post a bit more over the weekend, but not much.

 

[CivOasis]

1. No, but perhaps population could have an effect? Although, it seems to me like having a larger population would make sense as a benefit.

2. Not certain, but my army is generally at its largest size by the mid-industrial, then tapers off into mostly an air force once bombers become available. Renaissance is probably the biggest growth period.

During the ancient and classical eras, I will often build up a very large army (20+ units, but not necessarily all at once) and attack everyone else on my continent (non-TSL or Pangea maps).

 

[Scrambles]

1. Only if you want to punish expansionists, I figured that the Policy cost scales like that to encourage a different style of gameplay if going for a cultural victory. Does the same logic apply to building up Favor?

2. In my current game on a (modified to work properly) huge TSL Earth map I'm just now about to hit renaissance era. I've fought only one major war so far but it was fairly long. AI (Iroquois) had about 3 - 5 cities with 8 - 10 military units (a mix of spearmen/warriors, archers and Mohawks) I (America) had 4 cities and about 10 - 12 units (half catapults, half swordsmen).

My standard tactics are the same as mentioned above to be honest. I'll always try to take over my starting continent early before the nukes start flying. The AI is too trigger happy once they get their hands on them. I think it's safe to assume the player will be involved in at least one or two major conflicts and probably a couple more "AI being a jerk" skirmishes, depending on the map of course.

 

[dinobot386]

1. I don't think the favor should change, however if it becomes a balance issue yes

2. I usually try to get as many swordsman out as quickly as I can (provided they are trained) If im Rome this is even more powerful as the Legion strong enough to take on most threats up until renaissance. Then I do a Longswordsman rush after I get steel. Usually backed up by seige. I almost never use Archers or Crossbowmen, or Hourseback units unless im Mongolia

 

[dinobot386]

Another idea and possibly a solution to the Major God problem. Have every empire generate 1 favor and 1 favor only, no matter what they are doing, then after say 20 turns (20 favor) they expend it on their Major God and favor generation returns to normal, this gives players the chance to see what god they want to worship depending on surroundings.

If this works ALL civs will get their major god on the 20th turn


Another idea I had was relics (like in AoM) that work like goodie huts but only heroes can get them if they move into the space, then it makes a building or wonder in the capital (or a policy) that gives said relic's bonus

 

[Spatzimaus]

1. Only if you want to punish expansionists, I figured that the Policy cost scales like that to encourage a different style of gameplay if going for a cultural victory. Does the same logic apply to building up Favor?

Sort of. It's not about "punishment", per se. The problem is this: if Favor generation is heavily dependent on the number of cities you have (which it is), then it becomes a serious advantage to get those second and third cities out ASAP. Culture doesn't suffer quite so badly from this, as a culture-heavy strategy requires that level of commitment to be sustained over the entire game and timing quirks tend to average out in the long run.

Now, I've deliberately set this up to bias things. Someone who takes Tradition will have the growth necessary to support more Priest specialists, and someone who takes Honor can build up much more battle Favor. So the Liberty bias isn't absolute, but it's definitely the strongest of the three in terms of Favor.

I don't want to make it to where Liberty is by far the best branch to take early on, simply for the extra Settler. But that can be managed through other avenues, like the Happiness reductions.

My standard tactics are the same as mentioned above to be honest. I'll always try to take over my starting continent early before the nukes start flying.

Well, the mythological age will be over LONG before the nukes arrive. But the trigger-happiness of the AI really depends on the difficulty you're playing at and the specific AI leaders chosen. That's something I've worried about; playing with the myth content should really involve every empire playing aggressively. I'm seeing what I can do about this one.

 

[Scrambles]

You could possibly add some Favor generation to the Tradition tree, extra Favor in the capital ('until' something if it would be imbalanced later) perhaps.

Did you give any more thought to giving the AI a tendency towards their 'historical' gods or will it be kept random?

 

[Pouakai]

Also, when the Mythological age is over, would it be possible for favour to become culture or something?

 

[Spatzimaus]

You could possibly add some Favor generation to the Tradition tree, extra Favor in the capital ('until' something if it would be imbalanced later) perhaps.

Unfortunately, that won't work at present. While you can add a new Yield type, like Favor, none of the Lua functions that involve reading how much Favor something provides work. The reason is that they all use the YieldTypes intrinsic Lua table, which isn't adjusted to account for new yield types.

As a result, I've been tallying Yield increases the hard way, since I KNOW that the only way buildings generate Favor is through my custom mythology policy. Now, I could easily change a few existing policies to generate Favor, but that runs into one other problem: help text. One of the things I want to do is have all Mythology-related things disappear once you exit that age, but that means I'd need to change the help text key mid-game to stop referring to Favor after it's ceased to exist. While you CAN edit game database information like that, I'd like to avoid that if possible.

Did you give any more thought to giving the AI a tendency towards their 'historical' gods or will it be kept random?

I keep going back and forth on this. I WILL add an option on the advanced setup screen to handle this; the only question is whether the default will be yes or no. It wouldn't be absolute; I'd probably have a 50% or 67% chance of picking the "historical" pantheon, just so that it wouldn't be possible for the player to get locked out of a pantheon he wanted (or conversely, since I want the player to pick first, to create a situation where an AI wants to take its historical match but can't because all four gods are already spoken for).

Also, it'll only be a bias towards a specific Pantheon, and NOT an individual major god; the Greeks and Romans might both prefer the Greek pantheon, but it'll still be a toss-up whether they pick Zeus, Hades, Poseidon, or Hephaestus as their patron. Not too far from reality, really; individual cities within each empire would often have their own patrons. In some cases, like Marduk, a god that didn't even EXIST in the other cities' pantheons would be your central god.

And finally, not every civ will have a historical match, like America for instance, or some of the DLC civs. It depends on exactly how I implement it, though.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Also, when the Mythological age is over, would it be possible for favour to become culture or something?

It basically already does. Nearly all Building Favor is given in lieu of Culture through a custom policy that everyone starts with; in the Mythological Age, Monuments generate one less Culture to add 1/2/3 Favor, Temples generate one less Culture (and cost 1 more gold per turn) to add 2/4/6 Favor, Colosseums add one less Happiness to add 2/4/6 Favor, the Palace generates one less Culture (remember, I'm boosting the base Palace Culture from 1 to 2 already, so this just sets it back to +1) to add 1/2/3, Monasteries give less Culture and more Favor, and so on. So the simple act of ending the mythological age WILL effectively add culture generation to quite a few buildings, since it removes that starting policy and replaces it with an entirely different non-magical policy (the one that handles the five negative-Happiness buildings in the future eras).

Now, this only applies to Building Favor. Battle Favor is just tossed out entirely, and Priests will disappear as the buildings containing Priest slots go away, but then again, you really won't need them as much once the Happiness penalties of the mythological age are removed.

Additionally, the end of the Mythological age isn't an instantaneous process. Once you complete the construction of the Enlightenment project, it starts a countdown. All of your religious buildings begin to downgrade to nothingness, but this provides you with culture and Golden Age progress, and your Myth units spontaneously disband for gold and research. So you'll be getting a quick infusion of culture, which should somewhat offset the loss of culture in the early eras. Basically, as the Enlightenment winds down, you'll be getting a quick burst of techs and policies, although for a few turns your empire will be fairly crippled (since you'll still be suffering from the inherent yield penalties of the mythological age, with steadily reducing bonuses from religious buildings to offset them, and your army will be losing its strongest units).

Bottom line, when the myth age is over, your culture generation will be right on track with where it would be if you weren't using this mod, but in these early eras, Policies will be considerably harder to get than in the vanilla game.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Quick note:
When I started this project, I'd worry that some folks would be offended by the choices I made (major gods, favor biases, focus assignments), especially for the actively followed religions (mainly Hindu and Shinto). After all, I AM boiling seven pantheistic religions down to a fairly simple set of rules and implying that once you get an educated society, gods stop making a significant difference.

Yesterday, I took my niece to Disneyland, and we went on the It's a Small World ride. It put all of this into perspective; the number of potentially offensive stereotypes they used goes WAY beyond anything I'm doing. And the song gets REALLY annoying after a hundred or so verses, but that's a separate issue.

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I'm going to try to fix the mechanical problems tonight or tomorrow; I'm aiming for a Friday release of the alpha v0.01. Obviously, it'll depend on whether the fixes actually WORK, but I'm hopeful; unlike most of the other bits, the broken part at least comes from a working template I can use as a baseline. 0.01 MIGHT just have randomly-assigned gods, if I can't get the UI working right, but it'd at least be playable.

One minor question:
As you may have noticed, I go through a lot of Promotions in the course of adding all of my special abilities. I COULD hard-code to unit types, but that's generally a bad idea since I'm trying to share abilities across mods. The game is very restrictive, with only ~60 custom promotions allowed, and I'm right up against that limit once you add the Mythology mod to the Ascension content.
In the vanilla game, there are four basic promotion lines: the Open terrain bonus, the Rough terrain bonus, the Open ranged bonus, and the Rough ranged bonus. This split has caused all sorts of problems, like the crossbow-to-rifles upgrade, the mounted archers, and now my Myth units and Titans.

So the idea I'm toying with, to address both of the above, is simple: merge the two Open promotions and merge the two Rough promotions. That is, Drill would boost melee combat in rough terrain AND ranged combat against units in rough terrain, while Shock would do the same for all Open terrains. This'd not only solve the upgrade issues and therefore help the AI, it'd also free up a bunch of promotion slots for the mods' use. (And, it'd free up a few icons that I can use for other things.)

The biggest problem would be one of compatibility. Every promotion that depends on Accuracy or Barrage would need to be altered to depend on Drill or Shock, for instance, and that'd limit your ability to add any outside mods that added promotions (although by doing the change through SQL, this seems to be far less of an issue).

Thoughts?

 

[Kemystul]

So the idea I'm toying with, to address both of the above, is simple: merge the two Open promotions and merge the two Rough promotions. That is, Drill would boost melee combat in rough terrain AND ranged combat against units in rough terrain, while Shock would do the same for all Open terrains. This'd not only solve the upgrade issues and therefore help the AI, it'd also free up a bunch of promotion slots for the mods' use. (And, it'd free up a few icons that I can use for other things.)

Please do, I'd be able to use archers and crossbowmen again without feeling like they're wasted units by the time I upgrade them to riflemen.

 

[Scrambles]

No objections, actually seems more sensible than the standard system. It's something that was bugging me a little on the Titans.

For this first release, should we be using it without the Ascension portion of the mod for now?

Also, will there be any new Wonders in the Mythology portion of the mod? (Not expecting them to be in the first release necessarily!).

 

[CivOasis]

Well, I'm not sure if anyone picked up on this, but, when I recently played an un-modded game, my post-ranged upgrade units could use the ranged attack promotion bonuses during combat, despite not having a ranged attack.

 

[Spatzimaus]

No objections, actually seems more sensible than the standard system. It's something that was bugging me a little on the Titans.

With the Titans, it was a problem, but not a huge one as nearly all Titans have both ranged and melee attacks. So there wasn't really a "wrong" choice, even if the AI made some poor decisions.
With Myth units, though, it's huge. I could split these into "Myth Melee" and "Myth Ranged" subtypes, but that really starts to cause headaches in other areas.

So, it really, really makes things much easier for me if I can remove that split. On the other hand, this merging would make Titans MUCH more dangerous as they'd be able to boost both ranged attacks AND their defense (melee) in a single promotion.

On the plus side, this makes the Open promotions a bit more desirable. In vanilla I'd nearly always take the Rough option, whether it was the melee or ranged bonus. But once you realize that your Artillery, usually emplaced in an open area for mobility reasons, can get a defensive bonus from the same promotion that gives it its attack boost...

For this first release, should we be using it without the Ascension portion of the mod for now?

It shouldn't matter. I'm coding the whole thing up to work either way, so adding Ascension into your Mythology test games shouldn't break anything. The basic idea is that you MUST use the Base mod, the Empire mod will be highly desirable as it will have most of what was previously the Balance mod (plus the early-game bits like the KGB, Magna Carta, Red Cross, etc.), and Ascension and Mythology will be pure era-specific content.

Now, for practical reasons there's not much point in using both Ascension and Mythology. The myth mod is designed to make the early game be the most interesting, so by the time it's done (early Renaissance), the game would be mostly over. Whereas, the Ascension mod really needs that NOT to be true. So realistically, I'd say that the two are mutually exclusive in effect, but the game won't stop you from using both (or break if you try). I expect most people to go Base+Empire+Myth or Base+Empire+Ascension for practical reasons, but there's no explicit exclusion.

Also, will there be any new Wonders in the Mythology portion of the mod? (Not expecting them to be in the first release necessarily!).

A couple. I've added a few special Projects or National Wonders in the later part of the Mythological Age (i.e., the Medieval Era). At the moment, for instance, there are two National Wonders: the Crusades (all units get a small bonus for fighting in foreign lands and against Myth units) and the Inquisition (all units get a large anti-Myth boost). These were mainly put in to force an end to the mythological age, not because I wanted to add more content. I may end up shifting the Magna Carta to this mod as well, as it's right on the borderline, but for now that'll stay in the Empires mod.

I know there's a lot of room for early-game Wonders, but the devs have already released an Ancient Wonders DLC that adds exactly that. So the only way I'll add earlier Wonders would be if they were very religion-based (i.e., the Parthenon) or if I repurposed an existing one (like Stonehenge) to be more religion-boosting. I can easily make Stonehenge give less Culture and add a large amount of extra Favor, for instance. And I'd prefer to use National Wonders, maybe modeled on the seven Great Prophet-generated buildings from Civ4, but I need to come up with some significant bonus to tie to them.

Really, the level 4 units and effects ARE your "wonders"; each level 4 building has a National Wonder-level effect and a unique, very powerful unit. The difference is that those buildings are always going to be in your capital, can't be captured by your enemies (like a National Wonder), and stop giving you a bonus once the mythological age ends. The main concern I have is whether the religion system is a bit too non-interactive to be "fun". If you're not building the wonder-level buildings directly, I'm concerned that the gameplay in these early eras might be a bit too monotonous. But the Events should help with that.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Okay. As of this morning, the accounting for Favor seems to be operating correctly, the Events are triggering correctly (although I've jacked up the probability to test it out), and the Hero generation seems to work (although I've only entered one Hero unit into the database at present, out of 57 that I intend to add in the long term). I'm running into two problems, though:

1> I'm trying to add a new XML table in the Base mod and have entries for it located in the three content mods. That way, I can have buildings in multiple mods having the same basic effect (like how the KGB mimics the Planetary Datalinks). It doesn't work; the game'll give an error at the beginning, saying that I'm trying to set a table that doesn't exist. I've tried switching the table definition to an SQL file, and it still doesn't help. I suppose I could try using SQL for the table entries as well, if it's an order-of-operations thing, but that seems like a longshot.
One temporary solution would just be to have very similar tables in all three files, and have everything check for entries in three places before executing (or at least duplicate the code in a separate Lua file for each game). This is horribly inefficient, but playable.

2> You know how people talk about the Promotion limit, where you can only add ~60 custom promotions before the game starts screwing up? Yeah, I just found out the hard way that the limit's actually closer to 50ish. So at the moment, the Mythology mod and Ascension mod are not compatible, because using both (with the Base mod) totals something like 54 new promotions, and causes all of your units to start with a dozen or so free promotions (some of which are negatives and will cause it to die).
I'm going to go back and try to rework bits of the Ascension mod, so that it won't use quite so many custom promotions. For instance, the "Titan" promotion is basically just the Damage Reduction custom promotion (needed for the Myth units) paired with the existing Logistics promotion and an extra nuke immunity (which I need for other units as well); so, all I need to do is give every Titan three abilities instead of one, and it'd allow me to trim one promotion off the list. It clutters up the UI a bit, but I've already increased the number of visible promotions you can have.
NOTE: I haven't yet done the merging of ranged and melee promotions yet. These'd allow me to trim another half-dozen off the list as well, so maybe the problem will go away by itself. But it does mean that if you want to use anyone else's mods with mine, or you use a lot of DLCs, then you'll probably want to disable either the Mythology or Ascension mods.

If anyone knows ways to fix either of those, please speak up.

The plan is still to release v.0.01 of Mythology and Empires tonight, or tomorrow at the latest, along with v.2.00 of the Base and v.2.00 of Ascension. For those of you trying to recreate the experience of the previous versions, Base+Empires+Ascension should be nearly indistinguishable from the old Balance+Content setup, barring a few changes I've made to the interface.
As long as it doesn't crash horribly I'll post the Mythology mod, even if it doesn't do all I want, just so that people can start to get a better idea of the balance. Because even the Ascension mod is not likely to work correctly right away (too much stuff has moved around to be sure of stability, especially in light of issue #1 above), I'm not going to remove the v.1.09 posted in the FILES thread, as I KNOW that version is fully playable. I'll try a quick test game tonight, but it's possible something will slip past me.

Now, I'm looking into ways to automatically log things like Favor generation, so that I can get better feedback on the rates of minor god acquisition without needing the playtesters to take notes. I know what turn numbers I want them to unlock on, it's just a question of how much Favor the average player has gained by those turns. If I can get that working tonight as well, then it'll go into the first version; otherwise, I'll have to ask everyone to write down how much total Favor they had on various turns (10-turn increments would be nice, but I'm specifically looking for turns 50, 125, 200, and 300 on standard speeds).

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And that brings me back to a few ongoing issues. Specifically, I need ideas for Heroes. Each pantheon needs 8 unique heroes, and there'll also be one Generic Hero that I'll put in as a placeholder. The way it'll work is that each Hero will be biased towards one alignment (Lawful, Chaotic, Material, Ephemeral) or one diagonal (LM, LE, CM, CE); your current alignment will determine the likelihood of each event Hero-creating triggering (if you're in the +L, +M quadrant, then no CE events will trigger, and straight C or E events are much less likely). So when suggesting heroes, try not to make them all too similar in theme.
These events will come every ~20 turns, and maybe one third of them will offer Heroes, so you should be able to gain a few naturally (although the Hero events will disable if you already have that Hero). Also, every player will always have 1 Hero once you have the Heroic Epic (which now loses its Barracks requirement), and +1 if you've reached level 4 in Justice, which can only happen for Zeus, Osiris, Shakti, or Sarutahiko. If you drop below the minimum, then a random Hero (random for your Pantheon, that is) will spawn in your capital at the start of the turn.

Now, if you do the math, you'll realize that with 56 Heroes, each needing an Event, and I only want one-third of the events to award Heroes... even if I want the non-Hero events to be shared by all players, it's a huge amount of content I still need to add. So v0.01 will only have a single generic Event for now.

 

[Scrambles]

On the subject of events, other than the Hero events, what kind of thing will we see (in later versions)? Natural disasters, culture/food/science +/-, barbarian spawning, random city state related events etc.?

 

[Spatzimaus]

On the subject of events, other than the Hero events, what kind of thing will we see (in later versions)? Natural disasters, culture/food/science +/-, barbarian spawning, random city state related events etc.?

There are two separate event sets here, depending on which mod.

The Mythology mod's Events will all be things that give short one-time boosts of some kind: a Hero, a free Myth unit or two, a few Gold, a research boost, that sort of thing. For all of these, you'll have four choices of action to take; in addition to the "mundane" effects, one choice moves you +1 in the Lawful direction (this'll usually be the Hero one for events that award Heroes), one moves you +1 in the Material direction, one moves +1 Chaotic, and the last is +1 Ephemeral. These events will never be negative (although some options might have a cost, like "spend 100 Favor to get a really awesome Myth unit" or "spend 100 Gold to get +10 Influence with every city-state", where the effect's just too strong not to have some kind of cost). These events are a key part of the Mythology progress, and are intended to help make up for the weakened production, research, etc. you'll have, so I won't make them negative events.
For these, I wanted each player to get their own events separately, but that might not be feasible. So I might have to simplify, and just have every player in the game get each event at the same time; they're randomly timed, but the idea would be that when it triggers for you, a similar event is triggering for all the AI players as well. I'm still working on that part.

The Empire mod's Events will be more of the persistent types, where you have no say in the matter. Some of those will have bigger negatives, although usually in the "+25% to Gold but -25% to Research" manner where it's balanced out by something else, and it'll apply to all players equally.

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I'm VERY close to getting the Mythology mod ready for release. There's one minor crash bug to deal with first.

 

[CivOasis]

Well, its probably not the pantheon you need them for, but may I suggest Perseus (lawful), Hercules (chaotic), Bellerophon (ephemeral), and Daedalus (material) as Greek heroes?