Alternative Map during 1.18
- Thread starter Leoreth
- Start date
FraggleJock
Warlord
- Joined
- Jun 25, 2017
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would you consider shortening time/turn for periods of intense historical conflict like the Napoleonic wars/ww2 etc.
Temujin8k
Fluyts, Grand Vizier of Your Mind
What if we give the 20 more turns to the cusp between the Ancient and Classical Eras? This gives a few more turns between the 8th and 6th centuries BC, during which period various civilizations historically flourished, such as the Phoenicians (and Carthaginians), Greeks, and Romans. This also gives more turns at least to Assyria, which during this period the Neo-Assyrian Empire was established, expanded, and reached its peak.
With that said, here are two proposals on the game calendar:
Proposal 1:
Proposal 2:
Both proposals extend the Ancient Era by 20 turns (18%) but do not add any more turns to later eras. With respect to the v1.17 game calendar, the Ancient Era now gains 30 turns (from 10) and the Classical Era gains 29 turns (from 49).
I guess it remains to be seen whether we need to add more turns to later eras. Perhaps once all civs have had their pass at the UHV testing and rebalancing?
With that said, here are two proposals on the game calendar:
Proposal 1:
Proposal 2:
Both proposals extend the Ancient Era by 20 turns (18%) but do not add any more turns to later eras. With respect to the v1.17 game calendar, the Ancient Era now gains 30 turns (from 10) and the Classical Era gains 29 turns (from 49).
I guess it remains to be seen whether we need to add more turns to later eras. Perhaps once all civs have had their pass at the UHV testing and rebalancing?
Last edited:
No because there is no way of knowing whether or not there would actually be a war going on in those turns.
Hickman888
Prince
Check the bottom third of the first post. (He’s considering 3000 BC, 1200 BC, 250 BC, 600 AD, 1500 AD, 1700 AD.)
HNation
Éireannach
I'd suggest adding them from 1200-1400, in order to give the Mongols a little more time to conquer China on the bigger map without pushing the date for that goal ahistorically late. It would also help the Byzantines, and some other civs with their UHVs. I also think the medieval era goes by too fast in this game currently (I also really like the medieval music)
freethink
King
If new start dates are made does that mean new dialogues for the civs start dates will be made?
If so I volunteer to write all the entry texts- I want to contribute, but I am still not good with python I am even good at java after the classes I took haha.
The good news though, I am writing much more, so I can do any writing that is needed.
Probably yeah, I am also looking to replace many of the existing dawn of man texts. I think we can do better. It will be some time until immersion aspects like these are going to be on top of the priority list though.
Temujin8k
Fluyts, Grand Vizier of Your Mind
Methinks we can make the DOM texts generally a bit longer and more detailed. For those who've played EUIV, I imagine something akin to the "The NationX Situation in 1444" there.
We can also add some civ-specific stationary BIK art on the DOM box, perhaps? Maybe to put above the DOM text at the topmost, if we can fit even a small one.
We can also add some civ-specific stationary BIK art on the DOM box, perhaps? Maybe to put above the DOM text at the topmost, if we can fit even a small one.
freethink
King
I love the writing aspects (I am afraid that is all I am good at), so should I start with a rewrite of the existing ones?
On the game rules front, I spent some time recently to rebalance the various kinds of city maintenance: number of cities, distance, and colonies.
For number of cities, I only made sure that it scales better with the map size, but nothing fundamentally changed.
I made some more extensive changes for distance and colony maintenance. Before going into the actual changes I think I should describe in more detail how colony maintenance used to work because I rarely see it discuss and I don't think everyone knows. In the vanilla game rules (unchanged in RFC and DoC) all cities that are not on the same continent as the capital pay colony maintenance. The definition of continent here is what I usually express as "landmass", i.e. a contiguous area of land. Meaning that e.g. Britain and Ireland are separate continents from mainland Europe and consequently England pays colony maintenance for European cities. Colony maintenance increases quadratically with the number of cities on the same continent after the first city, e.g. if you have one city on another continent you pay 0 colony maintenance, if you have two you 1x, if you have three you pay 4x etc. This may look like a steep curve but there are (map and difficulty based) scaling modifiers that make it not as punishing as it sounds.
Actually, with base rules, even with multiple cities on the same continent it is very rare to see more than 1 gold in colony maintenance. Note that colony maintenance is entirely independent of distance, but it does increase with city size.
From these base rules, I have made the following changes:
With these changes, colony maintenance now should not be negligible and instead becomes a significant concern. The benefit of colony maintenance is that it is independent of distance, making colonies regardless of their location more valuable, without having to give those civs distance maintenance modifiers that make them too powerful at the same time. At the same time, the fact that colony maintenance scales quadratically means that it will better limit huge colonial empires like England controlling all of India. Nevertheless, in more common configurations distance maintenance is still the dominant factor - for example a 1700 Portugal is paying around 7g for distance, 2g for number of cities, and 3g for colony maintenance in its Brazilian cities. The new English UP is to stop letting them ignore distance altogether while still helping them maintain a larger colonial empire than others. Of course, England (along with France) also has a strong colony maintenance modifier.
The era-scaling distance maintenance is half related to this. Part of its purpose is to give the greatest benefit of colonial empires to the Renaissance and Industrial eras, and give them diminishing returns afterwards. But another motivation was the early game. Compared to 1.17 DoC, the scale of the map and the available number of turns means that it is now more common to control a lot of cities even in the ancient and classical eras (imagine the typical Assyria, Persia, or Rome game, but it applies to a lot of civs). This made number of cities maintenance the dominant kind of maintenance, which I thought was unsatisfying because it made city location matter almost not at all (e.g. you pay 3g in number of cities maintenance regardless of location - then it rarely matters whether the distance maintenance comes out to 0.4 or 1.4). For this reason the impact of city distance is much higher in the ancient and classical eras. I think this also helps with immersion because it reflects the contemporary perception of distances and the knowledge about the world.
Entirely unrelatedly, I also decided to balance inflation. As a reminder, inflation is not a game mechanic intended to model economic inflation but rather just the name of the mechanic intended to reflect rising costs that come with the economic growth happening during the course of the game. I realised that the game code does not automatically adjust inflation to the game length, it simply scales with the number of turns elapsed no matter how long the game is. This caused inflation to be overall too high throughout the game, and to be impactful too early during its course. I addressed this by adding additional turns before inflation "kicks in", so the total number of turns that inflation scales should be the same as in 1.17. I will keep monitoring this aspect of the game as it is quite important for mid and late game tech speed, but for now it looks alright.
As with all balance changes like this, they are not meant to be perfect from this first pass onwards - I do not have enough capacity to observe all of that just on my own, so I expect to get back to it once I can get more player feedback. For now it was only important to me that the system works in broad strokes so that I have a solid foundation for further tech speed and civilization balancing, and for now it looks quite good.
For number of cities, I only made sure that it scales better with the map size, but nothing fundamentally changed.
I made some more extensive changes for distance and colony maintenance. Before going into the actual changes I think I should describe in more detail how colony maintenance used to work because I rarely see it discuss and I don't think everyone knows. In the vanilla game rules (unchanged in RFC and DoC) all cities that are not on the same continent as the capital pay colony maintenance. The definition of continent here is what I usually express as "landmass", i.e. a contiguous area of land. Meaning that e.g. Britain and Ireland are separate continents from mainland Europe and consequently England pays colony maintenance for European cities. Colony maintenance increases quadratically with the number of cities on the same continent after the first city, e.g. if you have one city on another continent you pay 0 colony maintenance, if you have two you 1x, if you have three you pay 4x etc. This may look like a steep curve but there are (map and difficulty based) scaling modifiers that make it not as punishing as it sounds.
Actually, with base rules, even with multiple cities on the same continent it is very rare to see more than 1 gold in colony maintenance. Note that colony maintenance is entirely independent of distance, but it does increase with city size.
From these base rules, I have made the following changes:
- You now only have to pay colony maintenance if the city is genuinely on a different continent, i.e. islands are counted as part of the biggest neighbouring continent (e.g. Britain is counted as Europe, Japan as Asia etc)
- However for the scaling factor of colony maintenance, still the proper landmass is considered
- Scaling of colony maintenance begins with the first city, not the second city
- However if there is only one city on the entire landmass, the colony maintenance is still 0
- I overall increased the modifier to colony maintenance to make it more impactful
- I introduced a civ based modifier to colony maintenance similar to the existing number of cities and distance modifiers and balanced it accordingly. Some colonial civs that received a strong (i.e. low) colony maintenance modifier had their distance modifier weakened (i.e. increased) to compensate.
- City distance maintenance is halved when the city is considered a colony (i.e. on another continent as the capital)
- City distance maintenance now scales with player era: the impact of distance is highest in the ancient era, reaches its lowest point in the industrial era, and increases with the global and digital eras to be slightly above the Renaissance again
- The English UP has been changed: it no longer limits city distance maintenance, instead it reduces the number of cities counted for colony maintenance by 1, effectively reducing their colony maintenance costs
With these changes, colony maintenance now should not be negligible and instead becomes a significant concern. The benefit of colony maintenance is that it is independent of distance, making colonies regardless of their location more valuable, without having to give those civs distance maintenance modifiers that make them too powerful at the same time. At the same time, the fact that colony maintenance scales quadratically means that it will better limit huge colonial empires like England controlling all of India. Nevertheless, in more common configurations distance maintenance is still the dominant factor - for example a 1700 Portugal is paying around 7g for distance, 2g for number of cities, and 3g for colony maintenance in its Brazilian cities. The new English UP is to stop letting them ignore distance altogether while still helping them maintain a larger colonial empire than others. Of course, England (along with France) also has a strong colony maintenance modifier.
The era-scaling distance maintenance is half related to this. Part of its purpose is to give the greatest benefit of colonial empires to the Renaissance and Industrial eras, and give them diminishing returns afterwards. But another motivation was the early game. Compared to 1.17 DoC, the scale of the map and the available number of turns means that it is now more common to control a lot of cities even in the ancient and classical eras (imagine the typical Assyria, Persia, or Rome game, but it applies to a lot of civs). This made number of cities maintenance the dominant kind of maintenance, which I thought was unsatisfying because it made city location matter almost not at all (e.g. you pay 3g in number of cities maintenance regardless of location - then it rarely matters whether the distance maintenance comes out to 0.4 or 1.4). For this reason the impact of city distance is much higher in the ancient and classical eras. I think this also helps with immersion because it reflects the contemporary perception of distances and the knowledge about the world.
Entirely unrelatedly, I also decided to balance inflation. As a reminder, inflation is not a game mechanic intended to model economic inflation but rather just the name of the mechanic intended to reflect rising costs that come with the economic growth happening during the course of the game. I realised that the game code does not automatically adjust inflation to the game length, it simply scales with the number of turns elapsed no matter how long the game is. This caused inflation to be overall too high throughout the game, and to be impactful too early during its course. I addressed this by adding additional turns before inflation "kicks in", so the total number of turns that inflation scales should be the same as in 1.17. I will keep monitoring this aspect of the game as it is quite important for mid and late game tech speed, but for now it looks alright.
As with all balance changes like this, they are not meant to be perfect from this first pass onwards - I do not have enough capacity to observe all of that just on my own, so I expect to get back to it once I can get more player feedback. For now it was only important to me that the system works in broad strokes so that I have a solid foundation for further tech speed and civilization balancing, and for now it looks quite good.
freethink
King
Thank you for this post
Do you expect or more like foresee as a result of these changes, that Civilizations colonial especially may start giving up cities voluntarily after 1950? If suddenly cities become more expensive to maintain, will they keep these places even if it causes other problems for them?
Do you expect or more like foresee as a result of these changes, that Civilizations colonial especially may start giving up cities voluntarily after 1950? If suddenly cities become more expensive to maintain, will they keep these places even if it causes other problems for them?
The nature of the game is that as the game progresses, cities are more profitable relative to their maintenance rather than less, so I don't think that's going to be an issue. But there is no AI logic that I am aware of that is ever going to make them voluntarily give up a city.
I considered it, but so far the increased size (i.e. more cities) and the increased number of resources seem to be mostly in balance, so I did not change anything. That decision is not set in stone though.
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