I'm somewhat surprised that those wood golems spawned right next to a capital ... was it due to being late-game perhaps?
A gargoyle and some wood golems? Spawned from Exploration, not just from lair or randomly? Then it's intended if barbs had construction.
Edit: As far as having some text description about how dungeon exploration goes ... I think it should be in the Civilopedia (instead you risk over-complicating the help text popup)
Having Exploration Odds, Exploration Skill, and Dungeon Level is a good thing
and I think keeping to those three values in the helptext would be nice.
However for more in depth descriptions, it should be in the civilopedia ... perhaps under the 'New Concepts' section. There you could have a brief description of Dungeon Exploration and roughly how it works ... and you could mention a bit more explicitly that Unit Spawns are not determined by explo odds or explo skill, but instead on Lair (level/ difficulty rating), alone.
Yeah, probably a good idea.
Maybe instead of "Lair level" on the help text of a dungeon's difficulty, you could put 'Challenge rating'?
Things like Weak, Moderate, Strong, Extreme ... and perhaps Legendary as well. (with green, yellow, orange, and red/purple/gold lettering)
In this way, the relative danger of the lair is still understood, even if it says "good" exploration odds. its still a dangerous lair. That plus having a descriptive section in the Civilopedia would likely go a long way.
I'm still sort of missing the indication of higher reward. This is why I favored "Lair Level" over something with "Challenge" (although the latter sounds better). I think with "Exploration Odds: Very Good, Challenge rating: Low" and "Exploration Odds: Good, Challenge rating: High" you don't get that the second gives you better things (if you actually get a good outcome).
((I briefly thought of having a unit's exploration skill determine the number of 'minions' that are spawned (while having no effect on the boss itself) ... but I'm not sure. The argument would be that a high level unit is more subtle, thereby disrupting less enemies, but this is not always the case))
Hm, I consider the bosses and minion part of a "guard" of the lair. You get in, but the way is blocked by a boss (who will of course call
all its minions). This is why the spawns all have zero percent chance to destroy the lair. You can explore the lair another time after defeating the boss.
You could say an experienced unit would have the choice not to disrupt the boss and make a popup like "The entrance of the lair is blocked by a big ogre. Do you want to leave or attack it?", but this would make the whole mechanic more complex, and, more important, it would be illogical if the next time someone explores the lair the boss is not there anymore.
Also, you could say an experienced unit could have at least a better chance to sneak past the guard. Well, I think making high-experienced units able to do this would make high-wilderness lairs too easy to farm. But this (X% chance to avoid enemies from lair exploration) could maybe added as a special thing for certain units or promotion (thinking of sidar, svartalfar, panther trophy).
As you said, I don't consider higher experienced unit to be more "subtle", but just more experienced and smart to f.e. find a treasure/prisoner if it's there, to avoid poisoning themselves etc. (non-spawn outcomes). The ability to kill the enemies is measured automatically
.
Exploration Skill (Unit lair level) -> Novice, Moderate, Advanced (lv6-ish?), Expert
(no color assignment)
These all sound really good, thanks!
I think I'll only display even "Novice" only for units with a certain minimum lair level (firstly, because these words sound a bit RPG, which shouldn't be for
every unit, secondly just to make the displayed text smaller in average).
Exploration odds (chance to get a good option for non-spawn options) -> Very Bad, Bad, Neutral, Good, Very Good (dark red, pale red, white, pale green, bright/dark green)
Hm, maybe yellow is better than white, since the rest of the text is white.
"chance to get a good option for non-spawn options" -> Your formulation lead me to the idea to really give the percentual odds of getting a good result. If not, at least they should be used to determine the worded level. For example, it makes no sense to distinguish between "Good" and "Very Good", if "Good" already has a 100% chance for a good outcome (It is possible in the current implementation to get such a "threshold" lair level).
Challenge Rating (strength of potential spawns) -> Weak, Moderate, Strong, Extreme, Legendary, Godlike (green -> yellow -> orange -> red -> purple -> Gold)
We'll see if it even makes sense to have that many levels up to godlike (I'll group the SpawnInfos accordingly).
I'd like to incorporate .5 into my mod I believe ... although I have changed CivEventsManager, so not sure I could just fully merge into it. Perhaps I'll need to just copy and paste the bits of code you've added ... although I haven't changed the DLL so I could merge your new DLL at least (assuming that has been changed). What do you think about incorporation potential?
Try
WinMerge for the CvEventManager.
The DLL has changed quite a lot. You can just use it (if you merge all of BarbsPlus).
If you based your work on Extramodmod, the only files I can think of, that are maybe tough to merge, are CIV4UnitInfos.xml and I think another XML file I can't recall at the moment. In these files, I removed all XML tags with default values to make the files smaller and easier to edit (like in RifE), so WinMerge will mark nearly the whole document and be useless. However, I have a tool (which I was to lazy to release yet) to do this with any XML file, so if you want you can send me the file and I'll run that for you; then you can easily merge it with the BarbsPlus file and work with that from then on.
Other XML changes should be easy to merge, I think I mostly worked in my own XML files (like CIV4BarbarianCultures.xml).
I'd really appreciate if you based your mod on mine, but still be warned this is probably pretty unbalanced (you should play at least a game or two with few players on a large map. I think the barb pressure with this settings is much higher than normally).
