Age of Mythology

[Spatzimaus]

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

Heh, Greek are the one I really DON'T need. The eight I've got for the Greeks are Achilles, the Argos (i.e., Jason, but as a naval unit), Odysseus, Perseus, Theseus, Bellerophon, Ajax, and Hercules. I left out Daedalus since he really wasn't a soldier/hero, the kind of person who'd fight monsters or go to a war over in Troy. Hero units are supposed to be a key element of your early military and the primary counter to Myth units, and I couldn't really justify giving Daedalus a high enough strength rating to do this.

The way I figure it:
the Argos is CM (since that's Water's direction)
Theseus is E (given that after slaying the Minotaur he founded Athens and established a cult of Aphrodite, and Beauty is an E focus)
Odysseus is CE (Travel's direction)
Hercules is CM (the Animals focus direction; really, all he DID was fight Myth units.)
Ajax is M (strength at all costs)
Achilles is C (War's direction)
Perseus is LM (Earth's direction, where the Medusa is...)
Bellerophon is LE (Air's direction; he IS riding Pegasus, after all)
There are a few others, like Cadmus, that I could fit in if I wanted to drop one of those, but I don't really want to. And the reasons for each aren't ONLY because of the various Focus alignments; the way I see it, Chaos units have "unusual" skills (like +25% vs. Wounded, +25% vs. Fortified, etc. or straight attack penalties), Material represents raw strength, Ephemeral units are lighter but more mobile, and Lawful units will have fairly straightforward promotions (+ vs Open, + on defense, etc.)

 

[Spatzimaus]

Small update:

I've fixed the crash bugs, but there's still a couple really minor things I have to fix before releasing the Mythology mod. (The Mandala screen's "close" button doesn't work. Once you open it, you're stuck unless you close Civ5. And something in its execution is breaking, where it's not creating the things it's supposed to on that screen.)

I haven't got a working "pick a god" system yet; right now, you're randomly assigned a Greek god at the start of the game, and when you gain enough Favor to gain a god it picks one for you. No, this is not acceptable to me, but I'm still working out the mechanisms I need.

So what'll happen is this: tonight, barring any catastrophic bugs, I'll release the first version. Chances are, v.0.02 will come out early next week, so it's not a big deal that a lot of stuff haven't been finished yet; this is really an alpha in every sense of the word.

And as for the graphics, it's all placeholders at the moment.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Update, for those few of you who still come into this forum:

It's almost time. I've got the Mandala screen working perfectly; it shows the gods, it shows your current pantheon, everything's color-coded, the "Add Minor God" button works perfectly, and I even got the Pantheon biases working (where most AI civs have a 50% chance of choosing the "historical" pantheon closest to them). The Favor accounting works correctly, the UI top panel is integrated pretty well (although I have some long-term plans for that one)... there's just one remaining problem.

Right now, you can't pick your starting god.

Yep, it's one of the single most important bits, and it doesn't work yet; I've got it giving you a random Greek major god instead. I think I know how to make that work correctly, but it'll take a little time and I'm busy at work this afternoon so it'll be a few hours until I can get back to modding. Since the rest of the mod is working, and the weekend's almost over, I'll just wait until that's done to post the files, instead of giving you something that'll be obsolete within a day.

Now, that isn't to say that it's "done", by any stretch. There's only a single Hero unit (out of 57), all 61 Myth units look like a Swordsman (even if their stats are distinct), the balance on Foci is way off, there's only one Event, and none of the Help text or Civilopedia text are programmed in. (Lots of "XXX" entries.) And those six or seven Myth units I mentioned earlier, that still hadn't been finalized? Yeah, those are still placeholders. ("UNIT_XXX_HEALING", and so on. I didn't have time to run the suggestions through the usual balance checks, so I held off finalizing those.)

There are also a few conceptual bits I'm working on:
1> What happens if you get enough favor to add a Minor god, before reaching the tech that allows level 1 religious buildings for minor gods?
This is a real problem, because adding that Minor god starts splitting the Favor three ways instead of two, but it can't gain a Shrine with that Favor yet, which means no actual benefits yet. (And if you somehow gained enough Favor to reach a Shrine, it wouldn't be able to create one unless I deliberately override this.) This leads to a related issue:

2> When you start the game, your capital gets two Shrines (one for your main god's Primary focus, and one for his Secondary). So a follower of Hades gets a Shrine of Death and a Shrine of Wealth, each of which gives some small bonus. Later on in the game, new cities will get free Primary Shrines, and even later will get free Secondary Shrines.
But right now, when you add a Minor god, you get... nothing. It takes some of the fun out of your decision to add a new god if you know that it'll probably still be a dozen or more turns before you gain enough Favor to add a Shrine in any city, and without that Shrine you can't get any tangible benefits.

This leads to a fun possible solution I thought of this afternoon: treat it like Civ4's religions. That is, you get one free Shrine whenever you add a Minor God, but which city that free Shrine gets placed in will depend on the number of religious buildings in other cities. So if you follow Hades, have two cities, and add Ares, then the free Shrine of War will be placed in your second city instead of your capital. Suddenly, the choice of single-city or expansionist makes a real difference, as an OCC person will have all Shrines appear in his capital, while the expander will have each city getting a different specialty early on. That Shrine of War would make your second city a better choice for cranking out new military units, at least until your capital generates the ~100 Favor needed to gain its own Shrine.

A different possible solution would be to allow the player to build Shrines with normal production, instead of having them only be awarded through Favor generation. But I don't really like this idea that much, as one of the ideas of this mod is that those religion boosts don't interfere with your normal production queues.

Now, to #1, here's the deal. There are three religious techs in the Ancient Era:
Mysticism: sets Primary maximum level to 1 (Shrine), sets Primary Growth to +2.
Spirituality: sets Secondary maximum level to 1, sets Secondary Growth to +1.
Mythology: sets Minor maximum level to 1, sets Minor Growth to +1.
(Mythology and Spirituality both depend on Mysticism, although Mythology also has other requirements.)
What I think I need to do is this: have the three maximum level bits moved to the start of the game, so that level 1 buildings will always be possible with enough Favor even if you haven't taken any religious techs yet, and give other bonuses to those three techs to make up for the difference. (Mythology, for instance, already has the Heroic Epic, and I can boost the Growth numbers to +2 for the two +1s.)
The question, then, is SHOULD it be possible to develop religious infrastructure in all of your cities despite not having taken any religious techs? (Your capital will still start with its two shrines, either way.)

 

[MindXX]

Been a lurker here for a long time playing your AC mod and I have to say I am REALLY looking forward to playing this mod!

Thanks for the hard work!

MXX

 

[Scrambles]

No harm waiting until it's fully functional before releasing, we'll get much better testing out of it this way. Looking forward to it anyway!

 

[Spatzimaus]

I have to say I am REALLY looking forward to playing this mod!

Well, so am I. Seriously, I've been working on this thing pretty much non-stop for the last two months (well, I do stop to go to work, eat, sleep, etc.), and I have yet to play more than 2 turns of any game of it. I'm completely guessing on things like Favor generation rates, and it's going to take a serious number of playthroughs to get all of the religious buildings balanced correctly, but I haven't actually PLAYED any of it yet. Obviously, I enjoy the coding and design bits, so it's not a total waste of time. (I mean, I do play Minecraft for pretty much the same reasons.) But I'd like to actually play one game though; normally I'd do that before posting any mod files, but in this case even a nonfunctional mod would still be useful to get feedback on, since you can look through the XML files and Civilopedia to see what the various Foci, Buildings, and Units do. (Granted, the Foci and Buildings have been posted in this thread for a while now. But there's a big difference between seeing a quick summary and being able to look through the actual stats.)

What's probably going to happen is this:
v0.01 will come out tonight; it'll be very crude, but playable enough to get feedback. Some of you will download it, and in a day or two a few of you might even tell me what you thought, but it's not even close to being ready for general release. While you're doing that, I'll be making even more changes, filling in a lot of the missing bits mentioned above, and so on.

v0.02 will come out in a few days. Even if any of you give feedback before then, it probably won't be integrated into this version, because I'm still kind of on autopilot. This'll be sort of a minimum-level playability pass, fixing a couple of the most obvious problems and then just fleshing out a whole lot of the rest (adding Help text to every unit, adding information to the Mandala screen, adding a few more types of Events to provide some variety, and so on.)

v0.03 will most likely be next weekend, or early in the following week. This'll include fixing any major imbalances people have found or incorporating easy design changes people have suggested, so it'll probably be the first version that can really be called "fun".
Over the next month, I'll probably go through a half-dozen versions or so; I went through 25 official versions of the AC mod (and a couple emergency half-versions) before calling it 1.0, with five of them posting in one 14-day period, but there I was adding content as I went. In this case the content is pretty much all there at the start and just needs tweaking, and I'm not guessing blindly on balance as much as I was back then. (Also, the fact that I'm shamelessly copying quite a bit of the Lua internals from my previous work means that there won't be nearly as many game-breaking "learning experiences" this time around.)
By the end of November, it should be playable and balanced enough that I'll bump it up to v.1.00 and call it a Beta instead of an Alpha. I'm not going to do any custom unit models (unless someone wants to do them for me...) until this point, but aesthetics aren't nearly as important as playability. There might be a few more versions before Christmas, but nothing major.

Once v.1.00 is ready, I'm planning to post all four mods to the in-game browser and hope for the best. I've avoided the browser for various reasons, but there's no question it'd have more people playing. When my thread was over in Modpacks I'd average ~100 downloads per week. Here, in this side forum, I've had less than 100 in over three weeks. That's just not enough to get good feedback, so I don't really have much choice.

In the new year, I'll switch over to unit graphics, trying to add the remaining custom models to the Ascension mod as well as importing as many fantasy unit models as I can for the various Myth units. Now, this doesn't mean I'll be completely ignoring the other content mods for the next two months; in the process of creating the Myth mod I've found quite a few ways to improve the other mods. For instance, take the tech stealing mechanism in my previous mod; one of the things I can easily add is a timer, to where the chance of stealing a tech depends on how many turns it's been since the last one you stole. Likewise, I've created a bunch of unit abilities that could be added to future-era units; the "Trample" ability, for instance, damages any enemy units adjacent to your target for 1 point, but reduces your attack strength by 10% for each unit harmed this way. That sort of thing would be good for the Nessus Worm, so I plan to go back and tweak a lot of the old units.
So don't be surprised to see new versions of the Ascension and Empires mods in the next couple months; nothing major will be changed, but lots of little bits will be altered.

 

[CivOasis]

Is the major god / pantheon selection going to be fixed for v1 or v2?

 

[Spatzimaus]

Is the major god / pantheon selection going to be fixed for v1 or v2?

It's the only real holdup to v0.01. Like I said, if I was willing to ignore it and go with the current randomly-assigned Greek major god, then you could have the mod right now. It runs without crashing (at least within the first couple of turns), you can select your own Minor gods when you gain enough Favor, and so on, but I haven't finished writing/debugging the start-of-game popup that forces you to pick a Pantheon. So assuming I can get that interface working tonight, you'll get 0.01 with full god/pantheon selection in the first version. If I can't get it working tonight, then I might post 0.01 without it and wait until 0.02 to put it in. (Besides, the Greek gods are best for general balance playtesting, as they're the 2/2/2 Favor generators.)

One minor quirk: to make some of the Pantheon stuff work right, I give each player 1 instance of a custom Project (so PROJECT_PANTHEON_GREEK if you pick the Greek pantheon). It has no actual effects, I just use it as a prerequisite for other things. That way, I can give Pantheon-specific units without having to muck about in the Lua controls, and it's also handy in that it's a more permanent way of storing which pantheon you've selected (so it can't be corrupted if I screw up the save/load functionality or you have a cache conflict, and is easily readable across mods). Sounds good, right?

Well, it had one unintended side effect: on turn 1, you'll see one message per civ that says "Elizabeth has completed enty into the Norse Pantheon!", because Project popups are handled automatically and I haven't figured out how to shut those off. (Remember the 10 Orbital Defense Pod messages you'd get in the AC mod?) So you'll know which civs are in the game, and which pantheon each picked, at the end of your first turn. This seems harmless enough that I'm not worried, especially as you can see what other civs are in the game through FireTuner as it is, but it's something to keep in mind.

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

Oh, one other thing: right now, there's no mechanism forcing you to pick a Minor god. The AI, when it gets enough Favor, will attempt to add a Minor god as soon as possible. (If there's no unlockable minor god at its current position on the Mandala, it'll wait until it moves to a spot where there ARE ones it doesn't have.) The player, however, has to go into the Mandala screen and pick one. The top panel will say "137/100", which'll tell you that you have enough Favor stored up to gain a minor god, but you don't HAVE to do it right away.

The problem is that the popup types are fairly hard-coded, so I can't see an easy way to add a new blocking event (like how you can't end a turn until you pick techs or choose production), although it's probably something trivial that I'm missing. The Mandala is current accessed through a DiploCorner addin (meaning that same small menu that has the Tech Tree and Victory Progress UIs will now have "Mandala" at the bottom of the list), so it's easy to get to, but you need to keep an eye on your Favor to know when you need to go into it. (Favor will continue to accrue if you don't select a god, it's just that you'd be missing out on some good effects if you wait.)
Note: the DiploCorner addin required to access the Mandala is designed to be fully compatible with InfoAddict. While both mods alter DiploCorner.lua and DiploCorner.xml, we both do it in the same way, a very open-ended table read that works for both mods' other files, so it won't matter which mod loads first. Yes, I completely copied alpaca's code, although I did tweak a couple bits since I was basing my work on a slightly out-of-date version of IA.
Second note: the AI only checks if it has enough Favor at the start of its turn. So if it generates enough Battle Favor during the turn to reach the threshold, it won't pick a new god until the start of the following turn, while a human could do it immediately. To me, this balances the timing issue above; the AI might have to wait a turn, but it'll never accidentally forget to check for several turns.

The question for people to think about is whether this flexibility is a good thing or not. In the vanilla game, you can use a game option to decide whether you can hold off adding Promotions or picking a Policy, but the default for these is that waiting is not possible. Should there be a similar option for Favor? And if so, how would an AI decide whether to add a minor god or not? If I want to keep this flexibility in, then I can add a popup notification that tells you "You have enough Favor to add a new god...", so that you don't accidentally forget, but if this shouldn't be possible then I won't waste the time.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Update:

I have the Pantheon/Major God selection interface in place. It's ugly, but it almost works. I had to break a few related bits to make it work, which I won't be able to fix until this evening. And I can't quite publish it now, since you can't click on the god buttons correctly, but I can easily get that working tonight. It WILL get published tonight, after work, even if I have to pull another all-nighter.

 

[CivOasis]

I don't think the favor-selection thing's an issue, honestly.

 

[Spatzimaus]

I don't think the favor-selection thing's an issue, honestly.

It's not a game-breaker, it's just that I'm REALLY close to getting it to work. So the question became, should I post the mod knowing that within a day I'd figure out the part that was holding everything up? Or should I hold off a day to get that working, knowing that it'd slow down testers even further? My natural tendency to want things to work right biased me towards that later option.

I obviously wasn't modding during the day today, but now that I'm home for the night (mostly), I'm going to try finishing it up. Right now, the only problem is simple: the beginning pantheon selection UI is a single-stage design. (As in, click one of 28 god icons, conveniently grouped into seven pantheons, instead of having a two-stage setup where you select the pantheon and then select the god you want.) Unfortunately, for whatever reason, it's not actually placing the 28 god icons in the correct spots; it's placing the seven Pantheon boxes, but no icons within them. It says it's doing it, but I don't know WHERE it's placing them; presumably off the edge of the screen somewhere. As soon as I figure out where the buttons went, I'll be able to get it working because all of the other essentials were tested before I overhauled the selection mechanism. I might have to spend an hour or two double-checking mechanical bits and removing some of my debugging statements, but I can't see it NOT being posted tonight.

Now, it's definitely not pretty. Right now, the selection mechanism doesn't look like a normal window; the buttons just kind of hover in space on top of a simple gray background. There are a LOT of things I can do to make it better in the long term, to look more like a Civ-style window and give you better information, but for now I'm just trying to get something workable. (All the tooltips that'll tell you what each Pantheon does, etc. are all "XXX" placeholders at the moment. The only tooltips I've completed are the ones that say what each building does. So make sure the first page of this thread is on hand when you play.)
The bigger problem, though, is that I can't get this pantheon selection to pop up automatically as the game starts. If I tie it to a start-of-game event, then the game freezes on startup (although that might have been because of an infinite loop bug I put in accidentally), so right now on turn 1 the player has to go into the Mandala screen. Entering the screen pulls up the pantheon selector, and you can't get to the normal mandala until you make a selection. After you select your god from the 28, the AI civs all pick their gods, so if you wait a turn before starting the mythology content, the AIs will also wait.
Also, it's a double-confirm setup, which I don't really like. As in, you click a god to highlight it (and provide more info), then click "Select this god", then it pops up the usual yes/no confirmation box. I could ditch the confirmation box, I suppose, but that's something to think about later.

But yes, it's very close.

 

[Scrambles]

Could you tie the selection into the founding of the first city somehow? Just to make it mandatory... or would there be no benefit to this? I'm thinking along the lines of the existing tech/build choices, but iirc you've mentioned that you can't use the same logic as these do?

 

[Spatzimaus]

Could you tie the selection into the founding of the first city somehow?

I actually have. There's a redundancy bit in there, where if it somehow fails to initialize things at startup, then it'll shift it to when you found your first city. The problem, though, remains the inability to actually force a popup. I'm sure there's some way to do it, but I haven't found it yet, so it still falls to the user to click the right menu on turn 1. If I can't figure out how to force a popup then I'll add a notification that says "you should do this now!".

I'd have posted the files last night, but I needed to run back into work for an hour or two, and by the time I got home I was just too exhausted to write more code. So I'm working on it right now, before work; not sure if I'll get it done this morning.
One of the bits I'm trying to get in is a "Random" button. Not totally random god, but random within a pantheon.

 

[Spatzimaus]

I was trying to get it done this morning before work, but I couldn't quite get it. The god picking process now works just fine; for some reason, though, the game is assigning you two already-unlocked minor gods as well. I think I know what's causing it, but I don't have time to fix it before work. So tonight I'll fix that, add in a few important text keys, and post it.

 

[Pazyryk]

The problem, though, remains the inability to actually force a popup.

Surely one of the other mods does this. I have "popups" of a sort in my code. Just a new window with an image and text. I have not taken the time yet to understand the core popup system and integrate it properly (too much else to do) but I didn't think this would be particularly harder than a dozen other things.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Surely one of the other mods does this.

Almost definitely. But I have yet to figure out how to do it, so in the meantime I'm trying to code this up in a way that doesn't really need it. I'll go through other mods for their code fragments, but since I don't PLAY most other mods, I don't really know which ones do something like this.

There's also a general aesthetics question. Should the player be confronted with yet another popup window right after the dawn of man window? Should he have a minute to look around, see what god he wants, and then choose? Or should this be something I have the game do in the process of the Advanced Setup screen, before the game even loads (with players getting a random god if they don't go through that screen)? Since this is still a bit undecided, I'm not going to spend a huge effort on details right yet.

-----------
Tonight I'll post the files, and this time, I mean it. The game WORKS, or at least it appears to, and it's only being held up for one minor bug that I didn't have time to fix this morning, so it's nearly ready for testing. I might spend an hour or so putting in some of the essential help texts for the rest of you, but it will be ready tonight.

Now, I've been thinking about what comes next. One thing I want to do, in the context of the other mods, is add a few more upgrade chains of units to both this mod and the Empires mod. For instance:
Skirmishers: cheap infantry units with a range-1 attack, upgrade through to Muskets (or in the Empire mod, through to Sharpshooters and Snipers). Relatively weak and cheap, but they won't take damage when they attack and you can cheaply rush them in border cities easily (like Laser Infantry). Penalty vs. cities, penalty on defense.
Light Cavalry: mounted skirmishers, all have the "can move after attacking" ability, same basic idea as a cheap unit designed for whittling down an invading force before you commit your Knights; upgrades through to the Lancer.
Explorer: Scout chain, through to Paratroopers.
Macemen: alternate early-era chain; swordsmen and longswords would be better vs. archers and such, and pikes are better against mounted units, but these'd be the anti-infantry unit.

Why bring this up? Heroes. I don't want a pantheon to have eight slightly different Swordsman heroes; I need a mix, and this'd be an easy way to differentiate them.

 

[Pazyryk]

There's also a general aesthetics question. Should the player be confronted with yet another popup window right after the dawn of man window? Should he have a minute to look around, see what god he wants, and then choose? Or should this be something I have the game do in the process of the Advanced Setup screen, before the game even loads (with players getting a random god if they don't go through that screen)? Since this is still a bit undecided, I'm not going to spend a huge effort on details right yet.

Get it working first, of course. But I like the idea of specialization evolving over time (perhaps motivated by surrounding geography or some early condition), rather than a setup menu selection or a turn 0 choice.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Get it working first, of course. But I like the idea of specialization evolving over time (perhaps motivated by surrounding geography or some early condition), rather than a setup menu selection or a turn 0 choice.

That path is definitely more desirable for the player, but it gives them a substantial advantage over the AI. You see you're surrounded by forest, and so pick a Plants god. You're on the coast, so you take a Water god. Lots of stone around might bias you towards Crafts. That sort of thing would be a significant advantage, which is why I changed my original plan (which was to have you pick a god only after your first religious tech).

As it is, I'm already making it so that the player always picks first, but I wouldn't want to let the player figure out things like who their neighbors are before picking.

 

[Pazyryk]

Well, here's your AI logic for you:

You see you're surrounded by forest, and so pick a Plants god. You're on the coast, so you take a Water god. Lots of stone around might bias you towards Crafts.

I'd add a check for AI personality (you don't want hippies worshiping your war gods). This will never be as good as human player, of course. But it doesn't need to be.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Well, here's your AI logic for you:

Yes, that's the long-term plan. I'm going to give each Pantheon and Focus some flavor ratings, and have the choice between gods weight the personalities of the leaders. The historical biases already do this a bit; the Aztecs have a 50% chance of taking the Aztec pantheon (which is obviously skewed towards an aggressive playstyle), while India has a 50% chance of picking Hindu. But I do intend to make it a bit less random.