Alternative Map during 1.18

[Temujin8k]

Regardin

For the problem that some civilization’s tech develop too fast, I have a suggestion. We can adjust the points required for technology beyond the current era. For example, researching medieval technology in the classical era requires higher points, and researching technology in the renaissance era requires far more points. The penalty for this technology beyound the era can grow exponentially.

That is already implemented in DoC. It starts not until you leave your starting era, and it applies to techs not yet discovered by anyone or discovered by only a few civs.

e.g., England and France get increased tech costs after leaving Medieval. Netherlands and Iran get those after leaving Renaissance. The tech cost penalty is iirc max 30% for those that have not been discovered yet. The penalty decreases for each percentage bracket of civs discovering the tech, until it zeros out, allowing other civs to catch up easily.

I think the main problem with this is that the tech cost penalty seems to apply only to the human player, and not to the AI.

 

[KdNseer]

That is already implemented in DoC. It starts not until you leave your starting era, and it applies to techs not yet discovered by anyone or discovered by only a few civs.

e.g., England and France get increased tech costs after leaving Medieval. Netherlands and Iran get those after leaving Renaissance. The tech cost penalty is iirc max 30% for those that have not been discovered yet. The penalty decreases for each percentage bracket of civs discovering the tech, until it zeros out, allowing other civs to catch up easily.

I think the main problem with this is that the tech cost penalty seems to apply only to the human player, and not to the AI.

Well，I’m not sure if you understand what I said.Indeed we already had some settings in 1.17,but Leo said some civs as China and Egypt have an overspeed tech development in the new vesion’s earlier turns.So maybe we can add some new measures to limit them.

 

[Temujin8k]

Well，I’m not sure if you understand what I said.Indeed we already had some settings in 1.17,but Leo said some civs as China and Egypt have an overspeed tech development in the new vesion’s earlier turns.So maybe we can add some new measures to limit them.

Then what new measures are you proposing?

 

[Genghis Khaiser]

Are core areas going to change like they do in current versions? Are they going to be the same civs or more civs will do it?

 

[Leoreth]

I don't know yet.

 

[Genghis Khaiser]

There are certain sea passages that are key to the world's commerce, making empires and countries located there richer in real life (Malacca strait, Bosphorus, Panama canal, etc).

Should this be reflected in-game? Like, having straits and canals provide extra commerce or additional trade routes for example. Closest thing so far is Indonesia's UP where they get extra gold whenever a foreign ship is in their territory.

 

[TwoF]

There are certain sea passages that are key to the world's commerce, making empires and countries located there richer in real life (Malacca strait, Bosphorus, Panama canal, etc).

Should this be reflected in-game? Like, having straits and canals provide extra commerce or additional trade routes for example. Closest thing so far is Indonesia's UP where they get extra gold whenever a foreign ship is in their territory.

It seems to me, although it may be due to the fact that I am not an expert in this game, but it seems that trade is poorly represented in the game, as well as its influence is weak. It's not obvious to me the bonuses from adding an additional trade route from some building in the game, for example. In Civ 5 and Civ 6 they are presented more clearly. If we could introduce a caravan system here, it would be good. I could send caravans to other civilizations and get as much gold as the number of cities the caravan has to go through, and all the owners of these cities would also benefit from this caravan.

 

[1SDANi]

It seems to me, although it may be due to the fact that I am not an expert in this game, but it seems that trade is poorly represented in the game, as well as its influence is weak. It's not obvious to me the bonuses from adding an additional trade route from some building in the game, for example. In Civ 5 and Civ 6 they are presented more clearly. If we could introduce a caravan system here, it would be good. I could send caravans to other civilizations and get as much gold as the number of cities the caravan has to go through, and all the owners of these cities would also benefit from this caravan.

Hard pass on caravans. The Civ 4 trade route system is way simpler and way less tedious, every city already has 1 trade route, so just mentally count 1 trade route as being worth as much commerce as other trade routes in that city are worth. It's rare for two trade routes in the same city to vary too greatly, assuming you have enough non-hostile neighbors.

 

[TwoF]

Hard pass on caravans. The Civ 4 trade route system is way simpler and way less tedious, every city already has 1 trade route, so just mentally count 1 trade route as being worth as much commerce as other trade routes in that city are worth. It's rare for two trade routes in the same city to vary too greatly, assuming you have enough non-hostile neighbors.

But where do trade routes bring wealth? How to control this?

 

[1SDANi]

But where do trade routes bring wealth? How to control this?

Trade routes produce commerce for both cities they connect and they always choose the cities with the highest commerce yield, they update literally every turn so there's no need for micromanagement, and if you don't want your trade routes to benefit a rival, don't have an open borders agreement with them. It's simple, it's elegant, and it lets you focus on more fun elements of the game. I would like it if the yield formula took more variables into account and it would be nice if food, production, science, culture, espionage, etc could also spread via trade routes, but I don't think the system needs to be made any more complex on the player end.

 

[TwoF]

Trade routes produce commerce for both cities they connect and they always choose the cities with the highest commerce yield, they update literally every turn so there's no need for micromanagement, and if you don't want your trade routes to benefit a rival, don't have an open borders agreement with them. It's simple, it's elegant, and it lets you focus on more fun elements of the game. I would like it if the yield formula took more variables into account and it would be nice if food, production, science, culture, espionage, etc could also spread via trade routes, but I don't think the system needs to be made any more complex on the player end.

Then there is not enough modifier that would give a bonus to all cities through which this trade route passes. This is a more complex system that would check the path between cities, the openness of the borders of states on the way, and so on.
But your version also works.
You can come up with such a strange option to implement the "canal" as a resource that gives additional gold and it will be used when building a city on it or through an improvement in the form of a fort. Visually, the canal resource before improvement could look like a dried up and overgrown river (not historical, but indicative), but after upgrading with a fort, it would look like a fort with a canal.

 

[1SDANi]

Then there is not enough modifier that would give a bonus to all cities through which this trade route passes. This is a more complex system that would check the path between cities, the openness of the borders of states on the way, and so on.
But your version also works.
You can come up with such a strange option to implement the "canal" as a resource that gives additional gold and it will be used when building a city on it or through an improvement in the form of a fort. Visually, the canal resource before improvement could look like a dried up and overgrown river (not historical, but indicative), but after upgrading with a fort, it would look like a fort with a canal.

Yeah, that's the abstraction of the system, trade routes only really have a source and a destination and the distance between them, the specific route doesn't really matter. It'd be nice in theory to add that as a variable, but I'm not sure how it'd work out in practice. The current trade route system is balanced around the idea that your income from trade routes is limited by what buildings you have in your city. That said, it might be possible to do something like give 1 commerce to the city that works the strait of malacca for each trade route between a city in india, persia, the swahili coast, ethiopia, egypt, south africa, etc and a city in indonesia, japan, china, korea, manchuria, australia, micronesia, etc.

 

[Genghis Khaiser]

Although I disagree and think the Civ5 BNW trade route system is very interesting, I don't think we should change the way it works here.

Maybe it should be more impactful gameplay-wise as for gold or commerce at most but I think we're over-complicating things here.

 

[Derdan]

If natural wonders are added to the game, cities like Malacca or Istanbul can get extra trade routes or trade route yield simply for having it within their BFC. It would be cool too if the Panama and Suez canals were added as wonders.

 

[Glorfindel of Gondolin]

Hi, I have two funny but accurate suggestions that might add variety to the maps: The first being adding Carribbean islands to the Byzantine map, to represent the crusader colonies in the Americas, which seem to be a thing.
I would also Petition to put Israel and Sinai in New Zealand's historical area, similarly to what has been done with Italy, that earned its Israel stability tiles after ww2 bombings.
I would say that the New Zealandic army marching through Israel while fighting for a few years is a good enough reason, also when taking into account the many Australian troops that were employed there, while there being no Australian civilization in the game.

Also it has already been done with Polish America

Note:
In the picture of the Israel map, I would recommend reading the writing under the pictures at the bottom, as they show the New Zealandic battalions.

 

[Glorfindel of Gondolin]

I kind of explained the New Zealandic situation bad, but the knowledge is in the pictures if you're interested

 

[Leoreth]

There hasn't been an update in a while, but I have been very active behind the scenes. So let's share what has happened since the last update, and give an update on what the next steps are.

As for changes that have already happened, I have in fact added all planned new civilizations into the mod, and also implemented a lot of changes to the existing civilizations. Some of these changes were immediate consequences/requirements for the newly introduced civilizations, others were changes I wanted to make for some time, in part as a consequences of the "Civilization Attributes open discussion" thread.

Looking into the future, what is most important to me is getting the map branch to a state where it is ready to be shared with everyone by incorporating it into the develop branch. It has been a while since I came up with the original development roadmap for 1.18, and now that I am in the middle of it I can be more specific. Right now the mod is in a surprisingly good state on the new map, but nevertheless there is still a lot to do before playtesting has any value, but we are a lot closer by this point.

You can now read the thread on New and Changed Civiliations in 1.18. And an additional thread on Updated Plans for DoC 1.18.

 

[Leoreth]

I made a lot of progress regarding the settler AI in recent days. Like I said before, my two main problems with the previous state were:

1. The AI only poorly followed the settler maps, often preferring tiles with settler value 1 over easily available 10+ sites
2. The AI often got "stuck" not founding any cities even though there was easy room for expansion, e.g. Carthage not settling North Africa and Rome not settling Iberia

I addressed both problems without "forcing" these outcomes and by mostly fixing bugs and adjusting the logic in the existing game logic. There include:

• Regardless of any other AI considerations tiles with settler value 10+ get preferred over any adjacent tile with lower settler value and tiles with settler value 1 never get preferred over adjacent tiles with higher settler value
• Removed or limited a lot of conditions on building settlers, usually related to being at war. The AI was often worried about building settlers because it was at war - I lessened the impact of that and especially excluded wars with minors from these considerations. That was already done in some places but not everywhere - random wars with independents should not halt expansion elsewhere. I plan to come back to this later - it's still not ideal that e.g. England cannot have a war on one end of the globe and continue building settlers on the other. Maybe basing it on the presence of enemies on the same continent is a better approach.
• Fixed a bug (I think?) resulting from inconsistencies between settler AI and naval transport AI. Naval transports seem to opportunistically pick up settlers on the same tile (not bad) but once full and ready to move they again evaluate if shipping the settler is a good idea in the first place (which seems backwards to me). The only criteria here is whether the desired city site is on another continent and therefore impossible to reach by walking the settler. Unless that is the case, the settler is unloaded again. Because there is no precondition on picking up the settler on the next turn again it gets stuck in this cycle. I changed this condition to actually compare the number of turns required to walk to the destination with the number of turns required to ferry the settler, even if it is on the same continent - the latter is now often clearly faster because even Galleys have four moves. This also helps the AI circumvent blocked paths, e.g. Rome using ships to get settlers to Iberia while Celts are there blocking the land route via Gaul.
• Relatedly the AI was very inclined to not ferry settlers until they can be accompanied by a defender or a worker (or both, depending on cargo capacity). I relaxed these conditions to not require workers because imo it's preferable to settle asap then have a worker there from the start - it's better to build the worker or send it later. I also think these rules were set up with the assumption in mind that it would be a different continent with no easy way to get a worker there otherwise. I did not want to remove the defender requirement (too risky to lose the settler or city to barbarians) but I improved the AI in actually instructing it to look for a defender to pick up, which it did not focus on before (another reason why things got stuck).
• I also helped out the AI with ferrying settlers by spawning a free transport with UNITAI_SETTLER_SEA for them whenever they build a settler as long as both the city and one target city site are coastal, the coastal target site has a 10+ settler value, and the player does not already have more than 2 transports with UNITAI_SETTLER_SEA. This rule is intended to help out Mediterranean (Greece, Phoenicia, Rome) and European colonial civs. Ships can switch out of UNITAI_SETTLER_SEA when currently needed for other roles but might not switch back immediately, so it is important to ensure that these civs depending on maritime expansion have some help.
• I also disabled all civ specific settler AI parameters. A lot of these dealt with rules of how close cities are allowed to be built to each other and how much tiles under foreign control are allowed. This was done on the old map to get these civs to use their surrounding environment better e.g. Korea had to be configured to allow close cities so they would found Hanseong and Pyongyang. I want to get rid of these settings because they are difficult to understand and maintain, I do not want to adjust them to the new map or define them for new civs, and in general because it does make not a lot of sense to base these rules on the civilization when they are actually related to the AI. My idea was to revert to the base BtS settings for all civs and then introduce some extra rules based on settler values - but even without doing the latter part the AI seems to be doing just as well as before. So these parameters are definitely no longer needed.

There are some other small adjustments I want to make. For example, I am considering further discouraging the AI to found on settler value 1 tiles if there are still possible settler value 10+ sites available. Another thing that I want to try is to grant free workers to the AI when founding/acquiring cities on another continent with unimproved nearby tiles. Like I mentioned above, the AI struggles with ferrying workers and I rather make it stop bothering and give them the workers for free than having settlers wait forever for the right worker to be on the same ship.

I might share a few screenshots of the ~1810 AD world soon to show the settlement development and the world state at the time in general.

 

[BigSchwartzzz]

Would it be a bad idea/impossible to have the American pioneer unit concept be extended to colonial civs by having a maritime unit that once moving on a coastal tile it unloads a settler and a defensive unit. Could that minimize the variables that is making the situation difficult/complicated to code?

 

[Leoreth]

Since no such unit exists there is no AI for it either.