Age of Mythology

[Scrambles]

At about turn 150 on a game with v0.02.

Going great so far, the management of priests etc. to balance growth and happiness makes for much more engaging gameplay than vanilla early eras. I haven't been to war yet in any meaningful way so I can't comment on unit balance just yet.

At the moment I'm starting to stumble a little bit though as none of my shrines are upgrading, do I have to do anything to force the upgrade or is automatic once enough Favor is generated? Is there any way to view the progress for each shrine?

Only bug I've seen is that the Ephemeral option on the generic event can't be selected, button does nothing.

Just found one more, when I researched Mythology a whole bunch of units from other Pantheons appeared in my production list (not ALL of them as in the previous version).

Update: I'm at turn 199, about 3200 Favor total, still only shrines (4 now) in the capital and nothing in my other two cities.

Conclusion: I played through to the end of the Myth content, so I'll add in my overall feedback here. Like I said above it plays really well in the early stages probably up to the point where you should be getting shrines in other cities and upgrading your capital shrines. Things started to fall apart a little later on, say just before the medieval era, as I was managing things with the expectation that I'd have lots of shrines and upgrades to work with. Other than that, my main feedback is on the economy; it might be a result of the shrine problem but both myself and the computer civs were having a hard time financially. Most AI civs had a pretty badly negative income (by most I mean all that I encountered). This was all on normal difficulty if that makes any difference. I was able to manage it, just about, but would not have been able to support a decent army. My suggestion would be to move some of the gold related tile upgrades (extra gold from camp/fishing boat etc.) to an earlier point in the tech tree. Being able to convert production to gold might have been enough but that ability is way down the line now. I was building units just to scrap them, not sure if the AI could figure that out. They had huge armies but were bankrupt. If *I'm* doing something wrong with the shrines let me know!

On another note, is there a maximum number of gods you can have selected? If I just never built the wonder to end Myth would I be able to eventually have all of the gods in my pantheon? I think I had 1 major and 4 minor or so.

If it's helpful at all, a couple of Favor values from my game are:
Turn - Favor
50 - 240
105 - 712
127 - 1156
150 - 1738

Finally, just from that one game I can tell that this part of the mod is going to be at least as much fun as the Ascension content, once it's at the same stage in terms of functionality of course! Great work so far.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Going great so far, the management of priests etc. to balance growth and happiness makes for much more engaging gameplay than vanilla early eras.

Good. The intention is that you should have to use Priests occasionally, but not every possible slot all of the time. The balance on those are pretty tough to get right.

At the moment I'm starting to stumble a little bit though as none of my shrines are upgrading, do I have to do anything to force the upgrade or is automatic once enough Favor is generated? Is there any way to view the progress for each shrine?

I'm working on a more detailed Favor window that shows exact progress numbers for every building; at the moment you can get the info from the FireTuner output (although I didn't format it in a very readable way, since it was meant for me). Similarly, I'm also working on a window that'll show the other players' pantheons, Favor totals, and so on. I'm not sure exactly how much I want to make visible to you, but for now I'll set it up like this. Basically, the part where Focus info comes up when you click on one in the mandala? That'll be changed to a general data readout area, so I'll add a couple extra buttons that'll place the different kinds of data in that area.

But you absolutely should have seen the two starting Shrines upgrade by now. Even if you picked a Building x1 pantheon, then even if you never generated any Favor at all or researched any religious techs, you'd still be getting 1.5 favor per turn for each of the two starting shrines (1 for the Palace, split 0.5/0.5, plus a base growth rate of 1 for each). Each started at 100 Favor and upgrades to a Church at 300, so they should have upgraded no later than turn 134 no matter what else you did. And probably much, much sooner due to Mysticism, a Monument, Priests, etc. adding to your totals.

Okay, found the problem. It's a combination of about a half-dozen small, stupid mistakes on my part. I hadn't sanitized the inputs on the Level database read, I hadn't initialized the Level variable for your capital, I had an unset structure due to commenting out a block of code (the Teams variable), and I had an error in the part where it decides which city to put the free Shrine in when you add a minor god. So, when your cities were ready to upgrade, it was pulling a null value and trying to do math on it, failing, and not doing the upgrade. If you had FireTuner, you'd see an arithmetic error on line 612 of MythStartTurn. I've fixed it, and tested it by hacking the growth rates; it definitely works now. I might try uploading a fixed version tonight, if I have time; I'm spending most of today at work because of a deadline, so it might have to wait a day or two.

And yes, I'd tested this way back when I first put the code in. The above errors were due to some restructuring I had to do right before v.0.01, when I switched from Whys' save/load functions to a direct MapModData structure access.

Only bug I've seen is that the Ephemeral option on the generic event can't be selected, button does nothing.

Found it. I'd used Teams.GetTeamTechs() instead of Teams:GetTeamTechs(). Lua is very finicky with these sorts of references.

The bigger problem I'm having with those events is ensuring that the AIs get them as well; the UserEvents mod I embedded to handle these wasn't really built for that, so at the moment it's a human-only thing (which obviously is a major problem for the AIs' balance).

Just found one more, when I researched Mythology a whole bunch of units from other Pantheons appeared in my production list (not ALL of them as in the previous version).

Fixed. Stupid mistake on my part; in the production popup, I was having it decide whether something was a pantheon or focus myth unit based on two bits of the red-text warning string that normally pops up when you don't have a building or project needed for a unit. If the tooltip ended with "in this City" then it must be a Focus myth unit (or some other unit that can only be built if you have a certain building), and if the tooltip starts with the string "entry into the" then it'd be a Pantheon unit. What I forgot is that this tooltip now starts with a "[NEWLINE]", meaning the Pantheon units need to check the 14 characters starting at position #10, not #1.

Update: I'm at turn 199, about 3200 Favor total, still only shrines (4 now) in the capital and nothing in my other two cities.

Definitely a bug, but with the fix I've mentioned above, it should work in 0.03. You get your third minor god at 3300, and I was intending that to occur on about turn 200, so it looks like the pacing's working better than I'd hoped. With the upgrade fix you might have grown a little faster (since your cities would have had better yields and such), but it's pretty close to what I'd wanted.

Most AI civs had a pretty badly negative income (by most I mean all that I encountered).

If you weren't getting any upgrades, then yes, I can see how the economy could quickly get out of control. Not that it's not possible to still be messed up either way, but a lot of Foci have some sort of small gold-boosting effects at various levels, besides just Wealth. That's actually one of the things I've worried about; lots of Foci boost Food, Production, and Gold, but only a couple boost Culture (mainly Art, but there are a couple minor bits in other areas) and only one boosts Happiness at all (Beauty). So I've been trying to figure out ways to justify adding small amounts of Happiness to other Foci, like Justice or Balance.

My suggestion would be to move some of the gold related tile upgrades (extra gold from camp/fishing boat etc.) to an earlier point in the tech tree.

Interesting idea. Normally you don't get your first yield increase until Civil Service, with the others coming a bit after that throughout the Medieval and early Renaissance. Normally it might only take you ~100 turns to reach this point, but I'm now aiming for 200 or more. So maybe some of the others SHOULD get moved earlier. The issue is going to be that those changes are being done in the Empires mod, so if I want to move them earlier to account for Mythology content, then there might be balance problems going the other way.

The other option I've got on my wishlist is this: add a few custom "religious" tile improvements that disappear once you have your Enlightenment. These could be more powerful than normal; for instance, a +2 Culture tile improvement that can only be placed by the level 4 Art creature, Xelhua, or some other specific high-end creatures. So I could do something similar for gold, but it wouldn't kick in until much later than the period you're talking about.

On another note, is there a maximum number of gods you can have selected? If I just never built the wonder to end Myth would I be able to eventually have all of the gods in my pantheon? I think I had 1 major and 4 minor or so.

There's no hard limit (beyond the obvious limit of 12 possible gods to add), but there are two soft limits that would make it very difficult to collect more than a half-dozen or so:
1> The Favor costs go up as a second-order polynomial. (5N + 1)*(N+1)*100 is the equation, so it's 100 for your first minor god (N=0), 1200 for the second, 3300 for the third, 6400 for the fourth, 10500 for the fifth... your Favor doesn't reset to 0 when you pick a god, so it's actually only the differential that matters (1100 after your first god to get the second, 2100 after your second god to get your third, 3100, 4100, etc. on up). This equation is subject to change, and was just my crude estimate for the curve, but that's the general idea.
Since Favor generation will plateau at a certain point (there are only a certain number of buildings that add Favor, and battle favor scales only with damage, not strength), it'd be very, very hard to keep adding more at any reasonable rate once you get past the first few.
2> Your Alignment on the mandala. You'll eventually hit a point where you've cleared out all of the gods available in one area, so unless you're deliberately picking every Event choice to shift you towards an area full of gods you haven't taken yet, then you won't be able to keep adding more.
This heavily depends on your god and pantheon. The Greeks have a big hole in the middle of the Mandala, for instance, where many of the banned foci are the ones near (0,0). This means that if you follow Zeus or Hades, for instance, then you have a LONG way to go to pick up things like Water (Poseidon), and not a lot of gods to pick up in between; it generally forces players to move around the edges. Conversely, the Sumerians mostly lack the ones around the edges, which encourages staying near the center; more choices, but many of the obviously powerful foci are off-limits.

If it's helpful at all, a couple of Favor values from my game are:
Turn - Favor
50 - 240
105 - 712
127 - 1156
150 - 1738

This is exactly the sort of thing I need, although a smaller interval would be even better. Say, every 10 turns or so. It looks like you're pretty much right on the curves I'd intended; I was aiming for you to have 1200 Favor on turn 125, so it matches almost perfectly. (The other benchmarks: 3300 by turn 200, which you also hit almost exactly, and 6400 by turn 300.) I'm assuming this was with a Greek god? (All pantheons should be roughly similar in the progression, but I'd expect the battle-heavy pantheons like the Norse or Aztec to be more erratic.)

Finally, just from that one game I can tell that this part of the mod is going to be at least as much fun as the Ascension content, once it's at the same stage in terms of functionality of course! Great work so far.

I'm trying hard to make it quite a bit less straightforward than the future content. The Ascension mod had the Breakout, the altered Space Race, and the Transcendence victory, but beyond that it was really just more of the same sort of content you'd already been playing. (Okay, there were also some new unit and building abilities, especially the ones that create strategics.) Generally speaking, you'd play that future content the same way each time, or at least as much so as in the vanilla content.

I was originally worried that the Myth content would be too similar to that, with the new units, techs, and such just being more of the same. My hope is that through the combination of Focus effects, the balancing act between Myth units, Heroes, and mundane units, the Events, and the whole Priest thing, it'd be enough to keep things different each time. In the long term I'd like to take it further, biasing diplomacy based on pantheon choices, but that'll have to wait until the DLL. The worry, now, is that it's too much "railroading", where you're hosed if you don't grab a Wealth god or a Beauty god or something; the game shouldn't be unplayable no matter who you pick.

This is really why I need playtesting feedback. You've seen the kinds of penalties you have to overcome (with the Gold issue you mentioned); the idea is that depending on which central god you picked and which minors you add, some of those penalties will become non-issues, while others will stay problems. What I need the feedback for is to know whether any of the 28 starting gods is unplayable due to the combination of all of these factors (since I can't possibly play enough test games to see this for myself), to where you're absolutely forced to do something you don't want to do (like shift to Gold Focus in cities). I want the game to FEEL different depending on your choices, to where you won't get a more-of-the-same feeling every time, but not to the point where you feel there's only one possible way to play a certain god.

 

[Kemystul]

Still early in my game, but I've stumbled across a small error I think.

I've been choosing the chaotic option whenever the event shows up but it's been boosting my ephemeral stat instead.

That and my current favor on top UI bar says I have 81/300 favor but in the Mandala screen it says I have 46/300 favor til my next minor deity.

That's all so far, gonna keep playing and see if I stumble across anything else.

Aztecs, Marathon speed, Norse Pantheon, Odin.

EDIT:

I've also noticed that I'm not generating battle favor when I fight barbarians, either when they attack or when I attack.

 

[Spatzimaus]

I've been choosing the chaotic option whenever the event shows up but it's been boosting my ephemeral stat instead.

I double-checked the effect functions and they look correct, but this might be related to the below issue. As in, it's not ACTUALLY boosting your E, but that you're not seeing the C boost until several turns later. Or, it could be related to the half-dozen errors I found this morning, who knows.

That and my current favor on top UI bar says I have 81/300 favor but in the Mandala screen it says I have 46/300 favor til my next minor deity.

The one on the top panel is correct. I'm pretty sure what's happening is this: the top panel updates continuously, because it's one of a small set of UI elements that the game automatically refreshes. The Mandala, however, only updates when I tell it to. And unfortunately, "when I tell it to" isn't working very well at the moment. In the version you have, I had it to where it updates whenever you found a new city (or possibly whenever ANYONE founds a new city), or when you add a new minor god, but my attempts to get it to refresh every turn didn't work.

And even that wouldn't really be enough; ideally, I'd need it to refresh whenever anyone tries to open the Mandala window at all, but I can't find the trap for that. So when you pick a choice on an event, it'll move you to a new position on the grid internally, but the Mandala window will still list your old position.

I'm trying to add more triggers for this, but it's complicated. I THINK I've now got it updating every turn by using the serial event (active player start turn) instead of the GameEvent one, so it should be a lot better in the next version. But I'm still trying to see if I can force an update from outside the routines handling the mandala; it's not easy.

If worst comes to worst I'll just throw the update into every Lua event I can find. Start of combat, end of combat, improvement created, unit created, you name it. It'd be so much easier if I could just refresh by opening the Mandala, but I just haven't found a way.

I've also noticed that I'm not generating battle favor when I fight barbarians, either when they attack or when I attack.

The only barbarian check in the battle favor algorithm is one that makes sure they don't gain favor themselves; it SHOULD be triggering for you otherwise. I'll look into that later; if anything in the combat events is crashing then it'd stop the favor accumulation, because that's pretty much the last thing to trigger.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Okay, my original plan was to post a new version tonight, but I didn't get any sleep last night so I'm probably not going to be too coherent by tonight. Not really the best sort of environment to be making last-minute changes. So plan for tomorrow (Tuesday); tonight I'll double-check the battle favor, and test out the update triggers I added yesterday, which means that v0.03 should be stable enough to really test all the way through. I've already confirmed that the shrine upgrading is now being handled correctly, and yes, there'll be a popup message when your buildings upgrade themselves, so you can't miss it. (I'd screwed it up to where it had previously give a separate message for each building, but I've fixed it to have one single popup for all building changes.)

But I'd like people to keep a close eye on exactly when the buildings upgrade, because there's one big elephant in the room, balance-wise, that I haven't addressed: Overflow. That is, should shrines and such keep accumulating local Favor behind-the-scenes, even if they can't upgrade yet because you haven't reached a tech that unlocks the upgrade? This is a concept that I could really use some feedback on. (Note that this wouldn't affect global Favor, which determines minor god unlocks. Only the local values used to determine shrine upgrades are involved here.)
For instance, at the start of the game, every focus caps its level at Shrine (1), worth 100 Favor. (I'm assuming standard speeds here.) To upgrade to a Church, that focus needs to reach 300 Favor in that city, meaning 200 beyond Shrine. If the shrine can keep accumulating Favor to where it might be way up at 500 or 600 when you unlock the Church, then it'd instantly upgrade as soon as you reached that tech and in fact could immediately upgrade again were you to get a couple free techs at the right time. (I'm not sure whether that's a good thing.)

So the question to you, dear readers is this: What should the focus-specific Favor within each city cap at? I'll give examples using the level 1->2 (shrine -> church) upgrade, but similar logic applies to all levels.
A> Cap at the amount needed for the previous building
As soon as you get that Shrine at 100, no more Favor can be acquired until you unlock Churches, at which point it'll progress as normal but with no actual upgrades for the dozen or more turns it takes to acquire 200 Favor.
B> The amount needed for the NEXT building
Once you get the Shrine, it can continue to accumulate until 300, at which point it'll freeze until you unlock Churches; when you do so, cities at the cap will instantly upgrade and then start accumulating up to 600.
C> Some amount in between A and B
Say, halfway? That'd act a lot like A, but you'd only need to get 100 to see the effects of the Church unlock in a capped city instead of 200, so it wouldn't take as long to see an effect.
D> No cap at all.
The current setup. A lot like B, but it'd practically be GUARANTEED that you'd upgrade everything as soon as you unlock the next level.

This issue also applies to the downward slide at the end. The way the Enlightenment works is that once you finish the Project, every focus in every city loses 100 Favor per turn; if that's enough to fall below the amount needed to gain that level on the way up, then the building downgrades (and you get a small amount of culture and golden age progress as compensation). A lot of other things are different about the turns needed to fall to zero, like how no more mythological events will trigger for you.
If you pick A above, then it'll probably take no more than 10 turns before the enlightenment finishes and the Mythology policy goes away (although that's a drop of 100 AFTER gains for Favor generation are added, so if you have enough priests or monuments then you can really slow that down); the turn after finishing the project, your capital's basilicae would downgrade. For a few turns, things'd be kind of tight as you no longer would have all the bonuses of religious buildings, but you'd still be suffering the penalties. (Sort of a "dark" age.)
If you pick B, it could take 5 extra turns beyond A, as your capital would have gone up to 1500 in the primary and secondary foci, but it could be 5 turns before the key buildings even start to downgrade (although fringe cities would likely drop sooner). But if I leave things uncapped (D), then who knows how many turns it'd take. You might have a dozen or more turns where nothing happens, before the actual 10-turn downward trend starts. Take that too far, and you might already be in the Industrial by the time the mythology stuff goes away, and that'd be bad.

Now, I know it'll be hard to answer this until you actually play through with upgrades, and that'll also depend on me giving you a more comprehensive UI that lets you actually see the Favor levels in each city. (Working on that tonight.) But any thoughts?

 

[Scrambles]

I'd suggest going with B for now. I've played another few quick games and I think that if I was getting the upgrades pretty much immediately as I researched the appropriate tech it would have been nicely balanced. There's also the fact that since the Myth content 'ends' eventually it's best to get it unlocked reasonably quickly, I think.

 

[Spatzimaus]

I think that if I was getting the upgrades pretty much immediately as I researched the appropriate tech it would have been nicely balanced.

The main problem comes down to the usual AI-vs-human stuff. If there's always an immediate payoff to taking those focus-boosting techs, then the human player will time it such that he'll take that tech right when it's accumulated enough to move up. I'm not sure that's avoidable, but it's one of the reasons I wanted to not allow unrestricted overflow.

So for now, I think I'll try going with B. Assuming I can get it to work right before I fall asleep at the keyboard, that is.

 

[Memlink]

King Difficulty, contents map, Persia, Sumerian Pantheon (beauty/war)
Ages of myth V0.02, Ages of Man base, Ages of Empires

I had major happiness problems at the beginning of the game. This was due to my starting resources both requiring calander (sugar and dye) and mining/masonry to clear forest and marsh. Also my initial warrior was able to pop 2 goodie huts for additional population within the first 20-30 turns. Once i was able to devolpe the resources i was usually able to maintain positive happiness for the rest of the game.

I like the way the economy works in this mod. I was able to stay in the green for most of the game, but you really have to watch what you build. I kept my army small (one unit per city combined with oligarcy for free maintaince) and a couple of Immortals for barbarian controll. I limited buildings to things that were maintaince free (walls/circus) or that provided favor or happiness.

The AI does not seem to handle the changes in this mod very well. All AI civs that i met were operating at negitive income for most of the game. They initally made quite abit of money but around turn 50 or so they all seemed to drop into negative income. I think i found two explanations for this:
1) The AI builds lots of units. At one point the french had 20 units going to war with rome who had an equally lagre army of its own.
2) None of the AI connected trade routs to their capitals. They devoleped all the tiles around their cities but no one ever built a road.

Around turn 150 a message poped up displaying everones happienss. I was second with 4 happiness. Spain was first with 7 but they quickly built 2 cities. The other AI were between -4 and -15.

I also noticed that the AI science was not devolping at the same rate as mine. I was just finishing elighnment when my closest competitor was just entering the medievil era.

Because you asked for it Favor ratings at 10 turn intervals:

Turn Favor Turn Favor Turn Favor
20 40 100 1455 180 4578
30 71 110 1785 190 4992
40 201 120 2115 200 5448
50 331 130 2445 210 5937
60 459 140 2791 220 6507
70 609 150 3181 230 7077
80 849 160 3571 240 7647
90 1125 170 4042 250 8437

Enlightment was completed on turn 256

I used every one of the priest specialists available to me (and because of the extra population for goody huts started using them right away). I also used the legalism polocy to build monuments in my first four cities and manually built coloseums and temples in all four as well.

I dont know how many events you want the player to recieve in a game but i got 23 in total, 7 of which came within 15 turnes of each other. Because there wasn't alot of spare money i usually had my capitol building wonders (it seemed better than building a troop only to disband it right away or a building to sell right away). Consequently i only ever used the lawful (50 production in the capitol) event to rapidly build wonders.

One thing that i did notice was the temple adds -1 gold and has a maintaince of 1. Is this sposed to work this way?

Also what exactly is supposed to happen when you complete the enlightnment wonder. I built it expecting the myth content to end but i was still able to build myth units and collect favor after it was built.

Anyways I hope this feedback is helpful

 

[Spatzimaus]

I had major happiness problems at the beginning of the game. This was due to my starting resources both requiring calander (sugar and dye) and mining/masonry to clear forest and marsh.

If you're having happiness issues as Inanna, then I definitely need to fix some things. Beauty is supposed to be the Focus that makes Happiness problems go away. Of course, since you weren't getting Shrines of Beauty (or higher) in any other cities, you wouldn't be getting the full effect.

I kept my army small (one unit per city combined with oligarcy for free maintaince) and a couple of Immortals for barbarian controll. I limited buildings to things that were maintaince free (walls/circus) or that provided favor or happiness.

It's not supposed to be THAT harsh. I know the unit maintenance equation is getting thrown off, since it keys off turn number instead of era and so will inflate much faster than before. (Similarly, I haven't fixed the turn number-year correlations yet.) But you should be able to maintain a more powerful standing army than that.

The AI does not seem to handle the changes in this mod very well. All AI civs that i met were operating at negitive income for most of the game.

Yes, there's an obvious problem there. If I can't get the AI to adjust its behavior, and if the maintenance equations can't be adjusted to allow for more units in this era, then there's a very simple solution, one I've already done somewhat: right now, Hero units are maintenance-free... and I could just do the same to Myth units. (Or at least the level 1-2 Myth units, the more powerful stuff could still cost you.)

Another possible solution is to add gold to the Mythology policy itself. So if, during the Mythology Age, you saw Palaces give an extra 2 gold, Harbors and Markets give an extra 1 gold, and so on... that'd offset it. But if I was going to do that, then I might as well just toss the inherent gold penalty (-20%) in the first place.

Around turn 150 a message poped up displaying everones happienss. I was second with 4 happiness. Spain was first with 7 but they quickly built 2 cities. The other AI were between -4 and -15.

Worrisome, but if the AIs weren't using any Priests then that could explain some of it (although -15 isn't acceptable even with that).

I also noticed that the AI science was not devolping at the same rate as mine. I was just finishing elighnment when my closest competitor was just entering the medievil era.

If you go negative on gold, then it subtracts from your research. So if the AIs were all having money issues, then it'd be understandable that they'd fall far behind.

Given that in 0.02 none of your religious buildings were upgrading themselves, gold production was probably quite a bit lower than intended. But even so, I'll look into the costs of things, because it's never supposed to be THAT bad.

Because you asked for it Favor ratings at 10 turn intervals:
Turn Favor Turn Favor Turn Favor
20 40 100 1455 180 4578
30 71 110 1785 190 4992
40 201 120 2115 200 5448
50 331 130 2445 210 5937
60 459 140 2791 220 6507
70 609 150 3181 230 7077
80 849 160 3571 240 7647
90 1125 170 4042 250 8437

Okay, I'm assuming this is on Standard speed. That'd put your first minor god on turn 33ish, your second on turn ~92, third on turn 154, fourth in turn 218, and you'd have reached a fifth on turn 275ish if you had stayed religious. That's quite a bit faster than I'd intended, although if you were slotting every Priest possible, as a Sumerian, then it'd make sense. But using that many Priests should have seriously impeded your production and such.

Enlightment was completed on turn 256

That's quite a bit faster than I'd intended. Were you evenly researching techs across the whole tree, or did you specifically go for Apostasy?

I used every one of the priest specialists available to me (and because of the extra population for goody huts started using them right away).

I don't want that to be necessary. The goal I'm aiming for is that you (and the AI) should be filling about half of your Priest slots; priest-heavy pantheons, like the Sumerians, might want more just for the Favor, but that should be a choice that costs you in other areas.

Granted, you probably only had one Shrine per Focus, because the upgrade logic for buildings was broken. So you should have had far more slots available, which'd balance this out a bit. (If you had three minor gods, for instance, then you should have had up to 5 religious buildings in EACH CITY, each with a slot.) So you'll want to try this again once 0.03 is out, since it fixes the upgrade path.

I dont know how many events you want the player to recieve in a game but i got 23 in total, 7 of which came within 15 turnes of each other.

Right now the probability was just set to 10%, purely random, for the generic debug event. The eventual timing will go like this:
> No events for the first 10 turns of a game.
> Once you have an event, you won't be able to have any others at all for 5 turns. (Might increase this to 10.) This lockout currently doesn't work.
> Most events are one-time-only; once you have one, you can never have that same one again. (The generic events will be the exception to that.)
> Major Events are the 8 hero-generating ones will each have a 0.5% chance of triggering, and won't begin until you reach Polytheism. So you'll get a few of them at random times in the game, but because of the 5-turn lockout from other events you won't get all 8. The non-hero options will have powerful bonuses, but the strongest will have a cost. (Lose 100 food in your capital to gain 300 Favor, Lose 100 Favor to gain a Hydra, that sort of thing.)
> Moderate Events will have a 1% chance and won't start until you reach Mythology. I intend to have 6 of these, and you should expect to see all of them in a typical game. The benefits of these will be about what the current generic event gives, although it won't just be yields. One option, for instance, might just add a permanent +1 Happiness (well, "permanent" in that it won't go away until the Mythology Age ends).
> Then there'll be Minor Events, like the current generic one, which'll be available from the start and won't be limited to occuring only one time per game. I'm going to add three more of these, just for some variation, and they'll each have a 2% chance. The effects will be about half what the current generic gives (25 food, production, etc.).

The goal is that, putting all 18 of these together, you should see an event every ~10 turns, although mostly minor ones; the more powerful events might only come every 30-40 turns, with some of them not appearing at all in a typical game. (The total of all 18 will be an 18% chance, meaning one event every 5.5 turns, but the 5-turn lockout will mean you'll average one per 10.5 turns.)

Consequently i only ever used the lawful (50 production in the capitol) event to rapidly build wonders.

As I add more Events, that'll go away. Production won't always be an option; on the Minor events, you'll tend to care more about the alignment shift than the tangible bonuses.

One thing that i did notice was the temple adds -1 gold and has a maintaince of 1. Is this sposed to work this way?

Yes, although it's definitely awkward in the UI. What happened was that the base Temple is +1 Happiness, +1 Culture, 1gpt maintenance. (At least in the Empires mod it is.) The Mythology Policy then adds a second set of modifiers to it: -1 culture, -1 gold, +2 Favor. (With the Favor then getting multiplied by 1/2/3, as usual.) Now, I might toss the gold penalty, if everyone's having such big problems with economy, but the point is that it's an intentional balance thing; the change required in making things generate Favor is supposed to be balance-neutral, with 1 point of Favor coming at the expense of something else.

Given how central Temples are supposed to be, it's probably okay to have them be stronger than normal in this era, though.

Also what exactly is supposed to happen when you complete the enlightnment wonder. I built it expecting the myth content to end but i was still able to build myth units and collect favor after it was built.

It's fixed in 0.03, but was broken in 0.02. The same bug that was preventing your Shrines from upgrading were also preventing this process.

What happens is that every turn, each focus in each city will lose 100 points (although it'll still gain whatever Favor you're generating, so the drop won't be the full 100). If this drops a city below the threshold needed for the Shrine, Church, Cathedral, or Basilica it has, then the building will downgrade itself (but will award you some stuff to compensate). Once all religious buildings have disappeared in your empire, which'll generally take ~15 turns, the Mythology policy (the one with all of the penalties) will be removed and you'll play as if you'd never had the Myth content in the first place.

There are a few other bits; during the downgrade process, your Myth and Hero units will have a chance of despawning each turn, awarding you some gold and research in the process. At the end of the downgrade, any remaining ones despawn in the same way. Events won't happen during the downgrade (or after), and there are a couple miscellaneous other bits that get changed during this period, but you get the general idea.

 

[Spatzimaus]

One other thing: when I said your favor was accumulating faster than I'd expected, I hadn't mentioned that you weren't generating Battle Favor. It should have been accumulating even faster yet, although as a Sumerian deity you'd only get the low x1 multiplier for that one.

What I'm going to do, once I get a good amount of data on those 10-turn intervals, is readjust the equation needed for minor gods to match the curves. My original idea was that you'd get new gods on turns 50, 125, 200, and 300, although I'm really liking the idea of picking your first minor god much sooner than that. So maybe I should assume something more like 25, 100, 175, 250, 350.
Right now, the equation is
(5N+1)*(N+1)*100. That's 100, 1200, 3300, 6400, 10500 for your first five minor gods.
But I can easily change that. For instance, if you wanted to slow down the later ones:
(5N+0.5)*(N+2)*100. That's 100, 1650, 4200, 7750, 12300. Looking at your Favor curve, that'd mean you would get new gods on turns 33, 107, 174, and 242, which fits pretty close to the revised progression I gave above. (Although, again, Battle Favor wasn't included and you didn't have as many Priest slots as you were supposed to.)

It's very adjustable. Dropping the first term to (4N+0.5) but keeping the (N+2) would be 100, 1350, 3800, 7250, 11700, while raising it to (5N+1)(N+2) would be 200, 1800, 4400, 8000, 12600. (Subtracting a flat 100 off of that to keep it starting at 100 could also work.)
So as I get more data on favor generation, for a variety of god combinations, I'll be able to feed it into a polynomial fit routine to give me the best three parameters.

So the questions to ponder:
1> When should players get their first god? I'd like it to be late enough that it doesn't feel like just another part of the "pick your central god" process, but early enough that you don't get bored waiting for the first really adjustable part of the process.
2> How many minor gods is a good number? (Related question: was there ever a point where you were prompted to pick a minor god, but an unclaimed one just wasn't available at the alignment position you had at that moment?) I keep asking this one, but now that people are having a chance to see the actual mod, I'm hoping for some more detailed answers.
3> Right now, your first god is mainly acquired through building Favor from your palace (1/2/3 points) and your initial Priest slots. 100 points won't take long to get, and that first minor god is actually a pretty important thing to have early on.
Should that 100 be changed in either direction?
4> One idea I had was to eliminate the variance in Palace favor yields. As in, have it give 2 points a turn regardless of which Pantheon you pick. I already do this with the Favor generated by the Academy, Manufactory, etc.; those give 2 per turn, period. That'd make it far more consistent in which turn each player got their first minor god, but I'm not sure if that's a good thing.
(Despite the fact that Favor is handled as a new Yield in the XML tables, none of the Lua functions can evaluate it, so all Favor accumulation is being handled directly by me. I can tweak whatever I want, as a result.)
5> Right now, you're limited solely to Shrines until you reach the Classical Era. I don't want to move up the "all Primary max levels increase by 1" effect, but I CAN move up the "+1 in your capital" bit so that you can see the Shrine->Church upgrade happen much more quickly. Those level 2 effects would make things quite a bit easier; the problem is that level 2 Myth units are Swordsman-equivalent, and those guys don't unlock until the early Classical. The level 1.5 pantheon units are at Mythology (late Ancient), so I wouldn't want to make them worthless by putting the level 2s before that, but I COULD move one of the Classical religious techs down to the Ancient for this. Thoughts?

 

[Spatzimaus]

I'm almost definitely going to post a new version tonight, but I came across something last night that I thought was interesting.

Within the RunCombatSim and EndCombatSim events, it includes as arguments the amount of damage each unit took during that combat, the amount of damage each unit was left with at the end of the combat, and the unit's max HP. Given these, it's pretty easy to check to see if the unit was killed during the combat. (One quirk: the two "damage taken" arguments are flipped in the EndCombatSim event, presumably because it then becomes "damage dealt" in effect.)

What's interesting, though is that the arguments aren't capped. If I send a Dragon against a Warrior, the event will claim that the Dragon dealt 72 damage to the Warrior (although the first 10 would obviously be enough to kill it, or even less if the Warrior had already been wounded). I found this out because Battle Favor scales with damage and I was getting some huge amounts in a test fight. Now, I've fixed it since then to cap at (10 minus how many points of damage the unit had going into the fight), but there MUST be some use for this sort of thing, knowing how much overkill the unit had.

So, I'm going to go back and look at some abilities to see if they can be improved by this. Give an increased chance of a Zombie or Vampire spawning new creatures the further beyond "dead" you go, give the "Trample" promotion this effect, to where it'll deal any damage beyond the necessary 10-X to adjacent enemies, that sort of thing. Maybe give Spontaneous Healing and Critical Strike some extra bonus when you kill a foe, with the size of the bonus depending on how far you went beyond 10HP.

But this wouldn't be in tonight's version. Tonight's v0.03 will fix the shrine upgrade logic, the Battle Favor logic, and add some useful UI bits to the Mandala so that you can keep track of Favor levels in your cities. So once that's done, the mod should be fully playable (although still not very balanced).

 

[Spatzimaus]

Slight delay due to RL issues; I'll try to post 0.03 tomorrow morning. 0.04 will probably be on Saturday or Sunday, then.

EDIT:
Okay, big problem. What I'd thought was just a minor computer issue now appears to be the complete death of my machine, possibly requiring an entirely new motherboard. If I'd uploaded the files last night (like I'd intended) I'd have been able to sit on a stable version while I assembled a new machine, but I just can't get to the files any more. So this might have to be on hold for the few days it'll take to get new parts.

(Why didn't I upload last night? Sleeping pill kicked in at an awkward time. Long story.)

As a result, it might be a little bit before I can upload v.0.03; if I'm lucky, then I'll be able to recover the many, many changes I'd made since v0.02. But either way, I won't be uploading today.

 

[Kemystul]

So sorry to hear about the computer problems, I hope you'll be able to recover most of the changes.

The excess damage from the damage count sounds interesting, so much can be done with that, like maybe: devourer nano-swarm, excess damage = +production in nearest city? sorta like eating your enemies armies for parts.

 

[Spatzimaus]

So sorry to hear about the computer problems, I hope you'll be able to recover most of the changes.

From what I can tell, the problem is motherboard-related. Here, I'll explain so that others can check my logic:

Last night, while doing my usual twenty things at once (three ModBuddy instances, FireTuner, Word, Civ5, internet radio, Steam, Skype, etc.), my machine's video started screwing up. It added some random red pixels to the screen, blanked out, and then popped back in again with a message that my video card had recovered from a malfunction, and mentioned the kernel driver version number. A couple hours later, it did it again, but this time the red pixels were in a pattern covering the whole screen. At first I figured that the video card was having problems, so first I updated its drivers and then checked to see if its cooling fan had broken or something, causing it to overheat. Nothing obvious was wrong. Scanned for viruses, nothing found. An hour later, it did it again, but this time I got the Blue Screen of Death and had to reboot. So I called it a night.

This morning I woke up early (4am) and turned on my machine. It lasted maybe five minutes before doing this again, and again it Blue Screened me and forced a reboot. During the bootup cycle (BEFORE the Windows 7 start), I started seeing those same red pixels. That started to make me think it wasn't the video card, but I wasn't sure. A couple minutes later, it crashed again. This time, during the BIOS startup, many of the text characters were corrupted (using the wrong characters altogether), which wouldn't have anything to do with the video card, and now it can't even get through the Windows 7 start message before crashing, regardless of whether I try safe mode or not.

Now, it could be some sort of virus that somehow got through all of my protection, but I'm thinking that it's just the hardware failing. This machine's four years old, it was one I assembled myself (so no guarantees on quality), and I've run it pretty heavily for these past few years. It's made some questionable high-pitched noises recently (which I normally don't hear myself, as I wear headphones, but when I was the guest on the most recent ModCast the hosts could hear it through the microphone), so I was expecting something like this to happen eventually.

I've been scouring Newegg to check prices on parts, and it pretty much seems to be an all-or-nothing thing; keeping my old processor limits the motherboards I can use (since it's a Core 2 Duo, meaning an LGA 775 slot), and RAM's so cheap that there's no point in trying to find a motherboard that can use my old 4x1GB DDR2s when I can just spend $40 to get 2x4GB of DDR3. So if it's not some simple fix, I'm going to have to basically assemble a new computer, buying a new processor, motherboard, and RAM. (Possibly a new video card as well, depending on the problem.) Even my keyboard will have to get tossed, since it's a PS/2 plug; I'm looking at ~$600 in parts.
If it IS hardware-related, then it'll be at least a week or so before I can work on the mod again. On the bright side, as long as it didn't screw up the hard drives I'll be able to recover my previous work, which was ALMOST ready to be posted; besides a ton of bug fixes, I'd added deity graphics for four out of the seven pantheons, and was trying to add the last three (Aztec, Sumerian, and Shinto) when the problems started, so while I could remake those files if I needed to, it's a lot of random work to repeat if I need to rebuild the mod from scratch.

The excess damage from the damage count sounds interesting, so much can be done with that, like maybe: devourer nano-swarm, excess damage = +production in nearest city? sorta like eating your enemies armies for parts.

That'd definitely be more suitable for the Ascension mod than the Mythology one, and would be a nice effect to add to the Nano Factory. One thing I thought of for the Myth content would be to have some sort of extra factor for "cinematic" fights, like Hero-vs-Myth, Hero-vs-Hero, or Myth-vs-Myth. There's already something in there for that; a fight gets +50% Battle Favor (for BOTH players) if the attacker is a Hero or a Myth, and ANOTHER +50% if the defender is Hero or Myth. So those sorts of fights would already generate twice as much favor as a comparable Swordsman-on-Swordsman sort of battle.
But I could change it. For instance, a Hero killing a Myth unit (possibly only a level 3 or higher one) could get bonus XP for "overkill", while a Myth unit killing a Hero could heal itself with the excess.

The first thing that came to mind was Trample, because I used to play Magic: the Gathering. The Trample I've created for this mod is simple: deal 1 damage to every enemy unit adjacent to the target, but reduce your attack strength by 10% per enemy damaged this way. It seems fairly balanced; you'll do more damage overall, but your designated target takes less damage and you'll take more. Overall still probably a gain, but it's one the AI won't use ineffectively.
But what I thought of was, using MtG's example, a more direct approach; a fraction of the damage beyond what's needed to kill a unit is dealt to enemies adjacent to that unit. It's a pure increase in effectiveness, but it's something the AI probably wouldn't understand at all. And it's probably abuseable, like attacking the Scout so that you can damage the Longswordsman standing next to him without a counterattack.

One of the nice things about this discovery is how it applies to cities. When a unit attacks a city, or a city attacks a unit, the city's player ID, damage taken, max HP, etc. are all correct; the only thing missing is the city ID, and that can be found from the Last Mission functions. So I could modify the system to where "overkill" damage against a city results in more damage dealt to the buildings within the city; a human player tends to bombard a city down to 1 HP before sending in an attacker to capture it (minimizing the damage the unit takes), while an AI will attack as soon as it thinks the invading unit can capture the city and survive. To compensate for this, I could add a Thalassicus-style change to the conquering process (in his mod, a conquered city only loses one or two sizes, instead of the default of losing half).

 

[Memlink]

That's quite a bit faster than I'd intended. Were you evenly researching techs across the whole tree, or did you specifically go for Apostasy?

In the ancient and classical eras i spread my research around. Once i reached the medievil i went straight for currency then for Apostasy. There was no iron in my empire and my military was already more advanced then my opponents so i didn't research to much of the bottom tree (but i believe that i had researched physics)

I don't want that to be necessary. The goal I'm aiming for is that you (and the AI) should be filling about half of your Priest slots; priest-heavy pantheons, like the Sumerians, might want more just for the Favor, but that should be a choice that costs you in other areas.

Granted, you probably only had one Shrine per Focus, because the upgrade logic for buildings was broken. So you should have had far more slots available, which'd balance this out a bit. (If you had three minor gods, for instance, then you should have had up to 5 religious buildings in EACH CITY, each with a slot.) So you'll want to try this again once 0.03 is out, since it fixes the upgrade path.

It wasn't necessary but i wanted as much happiness as possible to trigger a golden age to take advantage of persias UA.

I used my capitol as a religous centre. Built the hanging gardens, granery, watermill for food and switched all the people to preists for the favor and your right the capitol didn't produce very much but i used the myth events to boost that with production.

The shrines didn't appear in any other cities. If they did i would have probably would have spread my priests around a bit more.

Yes, although it's definitely awkward in the UI. What happened was that the base Temple is +1 Happiness, +1 Culture, 1gpt maintenance. (At least in the Empires mod it is.) The Mythology Policy then adds a second set of modifiers to it: -1 culture, -1 gold, +2 Favor. (With the Favor then getting multiplied by 1/2/3, as usual.) Now, I might toss the gold penalty, if everyone's having such big problems with economy, but the point is that it's an intentional balance thing; the change required in making things generate Favor is supposed to be balance-neutral, with 1 point of Favor coming at the expense of something else.

Given how central Temples are supposed to be, it's probably okay to have them be stronger than normal in this era, though.

OK just wanted to make sure that was entended. I wouldn't say i was having a problem with the economy it just forces you to think a little more about what you are building (I.E. should i build a barraks in city A or a library in city B, or do i want to field a large army or a small experiened one). Personally i like the changes in this mod, usually I get to the point in the vanillia game where your economy is so strong that it dosn't matter what you build or how may units you have .

So the questions to ponder:
1> When should players get their first god? I'd like it to be late enough that it doesn't feel like just another part of the "pick your central god" process, but early enough that you don't get bored waiting for the first really adjustable part of the process.
2> How many minor gods is a good number? (Related question: was there ever a point where you were prompted to pick a minor god, but an unclaimed one just wasn't available at the alignment position you had at that moment?) I keep asking this one, but now that people are having a chance to see the actual mod, I'm hoping for some more detailed answers.
3> Right now, your first god is mainly acquired through building Favor from your palace (1/2/3 points) and your initial Priest slots. 100 points won't take long to get, and that first minor god is actually a pretty important thing to have early on.
Should that 100 be changed in either direction?
4> One idea I had was to eliminate the variance in Palace favor yields. As in, have it give 2 points a turn regardless of which Pantheon you pick. I already do this with the Favor generated by the Academy, Manufactory, etc.; those give 2 per turn, period. That'd make it far more consistent in which turn each player got their first minor god, but I'm not sure if that's a good thing.
(Despite the fact that Favor is handled as a new Yield in the XML tables, none of the Lua functions can evaluate it, so all Favor accumulation is being handled directly by me. I can tweak whatever I want, as a result.)
5> Right now, you're limited solely to Shrines until you reach the Classical Era. I don't want to move up the "all Primary max levels increase by 1" effect, but I CAN move up the "+1 in your capital" bit so that you can see the Shrine->Church upgrade happen much more quickly. Those level 2 effects would make things quite a bit easier; the problem is that level 2 Myth units are Swordsman-equivalent, and those guys don't unlock until the early Classical. The level 1.5 pantheon units are at Mythology (late Ancient), so I wouldn't want to make them worthless by putting the level 2s before that, but I COULD move one of the Classical religious techs down to the Ancient for this. Thoughts?

1) I was happy with the rate at which i recieved new gods but i would wait to see what it feels like when the shrines expand and their abilities grow before i would make any hard choices here.
2) Again hard to say untill i see what the gods feel like when they upgrade. There was never a time when i was prompted to pick a god and none were available
3) The amount for the first god seems fiine to me.
4) I don't know about this one. I think it would hurt any pantheon that gets a large favor bonus from buildings. They could still slot priests and go to war but i think that other civs with promary bonuses to priests or battle favor would pull a head of the builders quickly in the god department. On the other hand those pantheons with building bonuses could pull ahead quickly if the others don't use specialists properly or if they is no early wars fought (or if no barbarians are chosen).
5) I like the idea of your capitols shrines upgradding sooner than the rest. Moving some of the myth units down to the ancient era sounds good to.

 

[Spatzimaus]

In the ancient and classical eras i spread my research around. Once i reached the medievil i went straight for currency then for Apostasy.

Okay, so if you'd researched evenly then you'd have reached it on what, turn 300ish? The goal is that you'd finish construction of the Enlightenment project on turn ~330-340, with the mythological effects ending on turn 350 or so.

It wasn't necessary but i wanted as much happiness as possible to trigger a golden age to take advantage of persias UA.

Fair enough. Persia's not really the best test case for this sort of mod, since you REALLY wanted to get to Banking. (Satrap's Courts are awesome, which is why I toned them down in the Empires mod.) Egypt is similarly skewed thanks to the Burial Tomb, so when I'm testing I nearly always take America.

I used my capitol as a religious centre. Built the hanging gardens, granary, watermill for food and switched all the people to priests for the favor and your right the capitol didn't produce very much but i used the myth events to boost that with production.

Understand that you won't be able to do that in the full version of the mod. There'll be 18 Myth events, at the current design, only a couple will offer production boosts, and they won't generally be capital-specific effects. The generic event that's there now is just a placeholder, intended to come up about as often as the 18 would when combined, and I'm going to base one of the Minor events on it, but you won't be able to depend on it for production/food/etc. like you did there. So when testing, you should try not to depend on it too heavily.

The shrines didn't appear in any other cities. If they did i would have probably would have spread my priests around a bit more.

The logic is supposed to be that when a new minor god appears, the game places the free Shrine in the city with the least number of religious buildings (with ties going to the older city). Your capital wouldn't take long to gain a Shrine of its own, but this helps expanding empires generate Favor in the outer cities.

This bit of logic, like all of the upgrade stuff, was broken in 0.02 and was fixed for 0.03.

OK just wanted to make sure that was entended. I wouldn't say i was having a problem with the economy it just forces you to think a little more about what you are building

The problem is that even if YOU could deal with it, it's untenable if the AI can't do the same. And if your only options for dealing with it were to stop military production, not build certain buildings, etc. then the AI has no hope of dealing with this correctly.

Personally i like the changes in this mod, usually I get to the point in the vanillia game where your economy is so strong that it dosn't matter what you build or how may units you have.

The Empires mod has quite a few balance changes in it, especially in regards to gold and science; you'd no longer have tons of excess gold, but it wouldn't be so crippling that the AI would stay negative and cripple itself. These were the balance changes in the previous Alpha Centauri 2-mod set, and so have been well-tested by now.

I'm trying to make the Mythology mod adhere to the same sort of balance, but it's not easy; the process of extending ~200 turns of content into 350ish has all sorts of implications for balance. If I can tie all of the balance changes to the Mythology policy itself, instead of directly altering the buildings and such, then it becomes easy to make the penalties go away and have players drop to the Empires balance curves.

1) I was happy with the rate at which i recieved new gods but i would wait to see what it feels like when the shrines expand and their abilities grow before i would make any hard choices here.

Yeah, that IS the problem with testing, and why I was hoping to get 0.03 out today. With the upgrading functional, there's so much more you could see in terms of the balance. The goal is to balance lacks against overflows, to where a Wealth god's followers would not only not have horrible money problems, he'd have a large excess which he could then use to offset his other issues (buy units or buildings to make up for low production, buy strategic resources to make up for low Happiness). Without the ability to reach those upper tiers, you're never seeing the sorts of excesses needed for that type of play.
(The only major Wealth gods are Inari's primary, in the Shinto set, and Hades' secondary. But it's a common minor god option.)

2) Again hard to say until i see what the gods feel like when they upgrade. There was never a time when i was prompted to pick a god and none were available

This one will heavily depend on your choice of starting god. Greeks and Sumerians, for instance, are VERY different on this one. I need to make sure that all 28 major gods are still viable; each god will have seven banned Foci, and start at a different position on the grid, so I'm trying to ensure that every god has two or three available Foci at or near their starting spot. (Since the two foci your god starts with are almost guaranteed to be near the starting point, you can very quickly run out of options.)

3) The amount for the first god seems fine to me.
4) I don't know about this one. I think it would hurt any pantheon that gets a large favor bonus from buildings.

Just to be clear, these two directly oppose each other.

The favor from the Palace is only a tiny part of the Building Favor you'll generate in the long term. Besides the Palace, Building Favor comes from Monuments, Temples, Monasteries, and Colosseums, and I was considering expanding that to include Libraries, Markets, Barracks, and Harbors if it proved insufficient. But, it's pretty much the ONLY Favor you'll see in the first twenty or thirty turns (except maybe the random Barbarian fight), since you won't have the spare population for a Priest, won't have enough of an army to fight a war, and won't have unlocked anything beyond a Monument yet.

So Building-heavy pantheons would get +3 per turn for those first 20-30 turns, and unlock their first minor god well ahead of the pantheons that only get +2 or +1 from the Palace. Your strategy of using Priests early and often, and using the Event for production, just won't work once I fix the events, so you can see the balance problem.
This is why I proposed the flat +2 for Palaces; it'd make all civs get their first minor god at about the same time, but in the long term it's not going to skew the balance that badly. (Building-heavy folks could still make a Monument, Priest-heavy folks could use a Priest once they reach size 2, and Battle-heavy folks can fight barbarians, but the baseline would be comparable.)

5) I like the idea of your capitols shrines upgradding sooner than the rest. Moving some of the myth units down to the ancient era sounds good to.

To be clear, there ARE myth units down in the ancient era already. The Pegasus, Zombie, Gargoyle, Nemean Lion, and Fenris Wolf are all level 1 Myth units, meaning they're available at the very start of the game if you have their Shrines. (Air, Death, Earth, Animals, and Animals respectively.) Power-wise, these are all comparable to Scouts or Warriors. (There's one more Level 1 unit, the Skeleton, which can be spawned through the promotion you get at Death 1 but which can't be built. It's weaker than the Zombie.) It's a trade-off; a Zombie, for instance, costs 50 hammers (instead of the 40 for a Warrior) and has the same strength (6) and movement (2) as the Warrior. Given that the Zombie starts with two special abilities (Spawn and Teamwork) you'd think it a no-brainer to build just those. But Myth units won't start with Barracks XP, have that major weakness to Hero units, and won't get things like the Death promotion that your mundane units benefit from, so balance is maintained, more or less.

The level 1.5 myth units (the first Pantheon-specific units, generally strength 8-9) are also at Mythology, which is in the last column of the Ancient Era as well. Mythology also unlocks the Heroic Epic, which makes sure you have at least one Hero in your empire. (All Heroes are Swordsman-level combat units, with a 12-14 strength and some promotions beyond the anti-myth one. Since they're severely number-limited, having them before you unlock Iron Working isn't a huge balance issue, because you can't make an army out of them.)

The question is whether level 2 Myth units, which also are in that 11-14 strength range and require no resources (like the Medusa, Thunderbird, Shade, Mummy, Scarab, and Manticore) should be possible to make in the Ancient Era, before you get to Iron Working. Do that, and no one would want to make swordsmen, which'd mean I'd have to lower their strengths down to a level where they wouldn't be unbalanced, like the same 8-9 range that the 1.5s use (which'd mean I'd want to move the 1.5s to an earlier tech, like Mysticism, and lower their stats a bit further as well). And that'll throw off the level 3 and 4 units' balance...

Also, your capital is already likely to upgrade sooner than the rest; the Palace's favor means that your capital will have a higher baseline favor, the capital will have earned all of the earliest Battle Favor in the first turns instead of splitting it with other cities, and your capital should have the highest population, at least early on, which means the most ability to run Priests (as you noted). If I want to make it such that the capital CAN upgrade before any other city gains that ability, then it'll require some major balance reworking. (Not that I'm unwilling, but it'd have a significant impact on a lot of areas.)

And obviously, this is all academic until I get a working computer again.

 

[mindlar]

I played a short partial game this evening.

Aside from your known issues, the biggest visible thing that needs to be fixed is the gifting of units from the military minor civs. I think my first gifted unit was a water elemental, which occurred shortly after destroying a neighboring barbarian camp (~turn 50-75), which was extremely overpowered for this early in the game. Subsequent gifts from other minor civs were a host of myth units, which seemed out of place.

 

[Scrambles]

Sorry to hear about your computer troubles Spatz, that really sucks. It does sound from your description like it probably is hardware related. If you could at least get it to boot up I'd suggest a couple of utilities to run but that doesn't sound like it's the case. If you just want to get access to the files you could try sticking the harddrive from your machine into an enclosure. It's the kind of thing an IT department might have lying around, not sure if that's helpful for you specifically but it's one option.

On a game related note, one potential issue from my last game, zombies seem quite powerful, they seem weak on paper so it's probably a combination of promotions, they seem to self heal a lot and can take down cities with relative ease. I'm not sure if they have a maintenance cost as the AI player seemed to have tons of them (though, they also had ruined economies). I kind of like the idea of fighting an undead horde but if they're going to be present in huge numbers maybe they should be weak attacking cities or be unable to capture them?

 

[Spatzimaus]

Aside from your known issues, the biggest visible thing that needs to be fixed is the gifting of units from the military minor civs. I think my first gifted unit was a water elemental, which occurred shortly after destroying a neighboring barbarian camp (~turn 50-75), which was extremely overpowered for this early in the game. Subsequent gifts from other minor civs were a host of myth units, which seemed out of place.

It's definitely not supposed to work like that, but I'm not sure how I can fix it; the banned unit lists for each civ don't apply to gift units. I may have to override it the hard way, where when a unit is gifted by a C-S I check it, and if it's a Myth unit I kill it and replace it with a normal one.

If you just want to get access to the files you could try sticking the harddrive from your machine into an enclosure. It's the kind of thing an IT department might have lying around, not sure if that's helpful for you specifically but it's one option.

It's definitely one of the things I've considered, although recovering my mod is not high enough in priority to go to that sort of trouble when I can just replace the hardware within a couple weeks. Assuming the hard drives weren't damaged in the process, I should be able to just pick up right where I left off.

One of the things a guy at work thought is that it could just be the internal power supply failing, and so he's going to loan me a spare. If that doesn't work, then I'm just going to buy a bunch of replacement parts from Newegg (MB, CPU, RAM, maybe video card), since I'm about due for a machine upgrade anyway.

The thing that kills me was that if it had waited even one more day before crashing, I'd have 0.03 out to you. It was STABLE, pretty much everything that mattered worked, and people would be able to give real feedback. But instead, you're stuck with a mostly broken version.

On a game related note, one potential issue from my last game, zombies seem quite powerful, they seem weak on paper so it's probably a combination of promotions, they seem to self heal a lot and can take down cities with relative ease.

Zombies shouldn't be self-healing at ALL. That's not one of their abilities; they don't heal any faster than normal units. (In fact, they should heal more slowly, if you have a Healing god.) But I might know what's wrong; go into the game, and build a Zombie. (Unit plopper works fine for this, even if you aren't a Death god.) See which promotions it starts with. It should have only two: Spawn and Teamwork. It shouldn't even get the Home Field Advantage promotion that every other unit starts with; the ONLY way it'd ever have any other promotion at its creation would be if you'd reached level 2 in the Darkness focus in that city (which adds a Myth-boosting promotion) or reached level 4 in a few specific Foci. Well, okay, there are a couple other ways: a Shrine of Travel in the city it starts in would give it a temporary promotion, and there are a couple others like that. But realistically, you should only see two promotions.

If you see them have more than that, then it means you've exceeded the promotion cap and the game is awarding every unit a number of extra promotions (the last N promotions in the table, where N is the number you exceeded the cap by). Since the mods load last, it'll be a bunch of wonder promotions or myth unit special abilities depending on load order.
So they might be getting a number of powerful promotions they shouldn't have, things like Regeneration 2 or Fire III, which'd explain what you saw. The myth mod actually doesn't add many promotions, but my AC mod added a ton, so if you'd been playing that recently it could be interfering. Thing is, it should be doing this to EVERY unit, including your starting Settler and Warrior, so it should be easy enough to check. If every unit is getting extra promotions, then this is the problem; if it's only Myth units getting extras, then that's a different issue, and if it's only Zombies, that's something else entirely.

This mod, by itself, doesn't even come close to exceeding the limit; the limit's 50ish, and my Base+Mythology together only add ~20, but the Alpha Centauri mod added about 40, and if it's still in memory then you'd overrun the limit. Clear the cache and try again, it should go away if this is the problem.

I'm not sure if they have a maintenance cost as the AI player seemed to have tons of them (though, they also had ruined economies).

They do have a cost, although that's one of the things I was considering changing. The only units in the game that don't require maintenance, currently, are the Worker, the Skeleton, and the Hero units, but I was looking at having all level 1-2 myth units be maintenance-free to encourage more early armies of weak units (so that the strong units have something to kill). I'd raise their production times a bit to compensate.

I kind of like the idea of fighting an undead horde but if they're going to be present in huge numbers maybe they should be weak attacking cities or be unable to capture them?

Combat-wise, a Zombie should be nearly identical to a Warrior. Both are combat 6 and movement 2; the only two abilities a Zombie will have are:
Spawn: Whenever the Zombie kills a non-Myth unit, there's a chance that you will gain a new Zombie. The chance depends on the units' relative strengths. (Against another combat-6 unit, it's 50% I think, so if the unit killed is strength 12 or more, it'd be a 100% chance.)
Teamwork: +20% combat when adjacent to a friendly unit.

That's it. So if you're seeing Zombies capture cities with ease, then something is seriously wrong, because they're just not supposed to be like that. They're really just supposed to be an alternate Warrior, with a couple extra abilities. To balance those two promotions, the Warrior has no vulnerability to Heroes, can upgrade to a better unit (assuming you have iron), gains the XP from a barracks, and gains any free promotions from wonders, policies, or religious buildings (like the Death promotion given by the Shrine of Death that unlocked the Zombies), so you shouldn't even WANT an all-zombie force.

Now, if the cache issues mentioned above don't fix it, go into the CIV5Units.xml file in my mod's directory. Find the <Units_FreePromotions> table and scan for "Zombie". It's possible that my cut-and-pasting screwed up and the Zombie got an extra ability intended for some other unit.
If that's not broken, then go into the CIV5UnitPromotions.xml file and scroll down to the bottom. See which promotions are available for UNITCOMBAT_MYTH; there shouldn't be very many at all, but it's possible that I screwed up and left one for them that I shouldn't have. But this'd apply to all Myth units.

 

[Spatzimaus]

While my home machine is down, I've been looking at tweaking the technology benefits a bit. The idea is to make the progression a bit smoother, and here's what I've got so far.
> The first level 2 buildings (primary focus, capital only) will appear before the end of the Ancient Era. Level 3s will be in the mid-Classical, level 4s in the early Medieval.

> All Myth units will basically be moved up by one tech. Pantheon units explicitly unlock one technology earlier, and the Focus buildings will generally upgrade a little sooner, which'll move those myth units up as well.
This'll necessitate a full rebalancing of Myth units. Previously, tier 1 units were designed to be Warrior-equivalent (6), T2 were Swordsmen (11), T3 were Longswords (16), and T4 were Rifleman-equivalent (24) in terms of raw strength. These'll be lowered a little; T1 will be ~5, 1.5 will be ~7, 2 will be ~9, 2.5 will be ~11, 3 will be ~13, 3.5 ~16, 4 ~19.
Note: that's for melee units. Ranged units, scouts, or fast units are on a different progression.
What this'll mean is that even the strongest Dragons and Elementals will be weaker than rifles and cannons, especially since those units will have two free anti-Myth promotions, so you won't really want to put off the Enlightenment just to keep your flashy high-end Myth units around. You'll get your Primary level 4 at the start of the Medieval, and your Secondary 4 in the mid-Medieval, which gives you a 1.5-era window in which they'll dominate warfare.

> Previously, there were four types of bonuses a tech could give: Level +1, Growth +1, Minimum +1, or Capital +1 (which'd add +1 to level and growth, but only in the capital), with that set of four being duplicated for Primary, Secondary, and Minor. By far the most valuable of these was Level +1, even without the growth boost that capitals would get, since it'd apply to all cities. So, I'm changing it to where you have Growth +1, Minimum +1, Capital +1 (with no growth boost) and Non-capital +1 in each category. It's sort of like how Farms get +1 at fresh water, then +1 for non-freshwater instead of getting the +1 all at once, except replace "fresh water" with "capital".
Yes, this'd mean that an OCC-style strategy would make the non-capital bonus worthless, but it allows a smoother progression of bonuses for normal players, since I can have, say, Primary Capital +1 on one tech, and Primary Non-capital +1 on the next tech in line.

> The Enlightenment will be pushed back a tier, to Iconoclasm, so that you can't start it quite so early. The Apostasy tech won't have any negatives, though, so you won't be as rushed to end the myth period; the negatives start at Iconoclasm.