Beta 11

[3Miro]

It seems I will not be able to finish the next version this week. I went out of town yesterday and that put my schedule significantly behind. RL SUX.

Hopefully this will contribute to a more polished version for next week.

 

[AbsintheRed]

It seems I will not be able to finish the next version this week. I went out of town yesterday and that put my schedule significantly behind. RL SUX.

Hopefully this will contribute to a more polished version for next week.

Actually this is good news, at least for me
I wanted to check all the recent changes, and update a few things before the next release

 

[AbsintheRed]

3Miro, I just tested your python arrays, and they work great!

 

[3Miro]

3Miro, I just tested your python arrays, and they work great!

You mean the conversion scripts in the modding tools folder? I guess I can leave those to you then, for all the changes on the map from now on. You were doing pretty good job on the map before and it will give me time to do other things. There are still some bugs in the C++ and I think we need a new UHV to Lithuania.

Things that I plan on doing:
- I don't know if I will be able to do it or not, but I will try to make so that you don't get culture bonus from non-state religious buildings.
- Update the Lithuania UHV, I am thinking like Pagan points that would be won for having large population and culture without state religion.
- Bugs and balance

 

[Opera]

- I don't know if I will be able to do it or not, but I will try to make so that you don't get culture bonus from non-state religious buildings.

A good way would be make it so religious buildings don't give out culture and make them give culture if their prereqReligion == current state religion. May be doable through just adding one tag <iCultureFromStateReligion> and just not putting any culture in the usual tags. Sounds less cumbersome than hacking into the regular culture thing to block it out.

- Update the Lithuania UHV, I am thinking like Pagan points that would be won for having large population and culture without state religion.

That sounds good, kind of like the Vikings. You may also grant points through Pagan Temples.

Speaking of the Vikings, their #3 uhv (the points) might be a big easy. 15 points come quickly enough during expansion, what with all the conquering going on.

I was surprised the Crimea goal had been changed to Novgorod. Why? I liked having to go all the way there.

Conquering Sicily is a pain BTW. Already getting there is one but then Palermo has 10 or so units Made me fail the UHV! But I'll try again

 

[AbsintheRed]

You mean the conversion scripts in the modding tools folder? I guess I can leave those to you then, for all the changes on the map from now on. You were doing pretty good job on the map before and it will give me time to do other things. There are still some bugs in the C++ and I think we need a new UHV to Lithuania.

Thanks, I will try to continue in the same manner, and hopefully with the same enthusiasm
All the conversion scripts are great, I only did a minor cosmetic change in the Array2WB.py - removed the extra lines when converting from the WB file to a txt file
Anyway, you can devote your time to the C++, I can handle all of these. I have time till September, exams are finally over

Things that I plan on doing:
- I don't know if I will be able to do it or not, but I will try to make so that you don't get culture bonus from non-state religious buildings.
- Update the Lithuania UHV, I am thinking like Pagan points that would be won for having large population and culture without state religion.
- Bugs and balance

Pagan points sounds great!

 

[3Miro]

Speaking of the Vikings, their #3 uhv (the points) might be a big easy. 15 points come quickly enough during expansion, what with all the conquering going on.

I was surprised the Crimea goal had been changed to Novgorod. Why? I liked having to go all the way there.

What is the highest number of Viking points that you can do comfortably? I put 15 as it seemed doable, but we can increase it if it is too easy.

Novgorod is more historically accurate UHV than Crimea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangians

 

[AbsintheRed]

Personally I would increase the Viking points to at least 25

 

[Opera]

15 is doable without trying, as long as you go for the conquest UHV. To push towards action outside this UHV, I'd try 25 too, like AbsintheRed said.

 

[3Miro]

Try doing 25 to make sure it is doable. The counter should keep on counting even after 15.

 

[AbsintheRed]

I found a few bugs when playtesting Beta 11:
There are no sounds when completing a tech (no quotes)
The unit order sounds doesn't work either, but strangely the select sounds work fine
Also, in some cases the diplo greeting was missing when I met a new civ...


EDIT: after a few more testing rounds in multiple builds of the mod:
We never had sounds for techs, right?
Ohh, I guess I actually played with the mod too long ago :/

Anyway, the unit order-select sounds is an interesting question
It is this way at least since beta 5

 

[merijn_v1]

I found a few bugs when playtesting Beta 11:
There are no sounds when completing a tech (no quotes)
The unit order sounds doesn't work either, but strangely the select sounds work fine
Also, in some cases the diplo greeting was missing when I met a new civ...


EDIT: after a few more testing rounds in multiple builds of the mod:
We never had sounds for techs, right?
Ohh, I guess I actually played with the mod too long ago :/

Anyway, the unit order-select sounds is an interesting question
It is this way at least since beta 5

The quotes are removed, because many techs have a "custom" quote. If we still had the quotes, you would hear quotes with only a few techs. To solve this we removed it completely.

Of which civ don't the order sounds work? Same question for the greetings.

 

[Caliom]

Some loose thoughts about balancing.

Starting Units
I think starting units should generally be increased to speed things up. Especially late spawners should get more units to defend themselfs. Increase the number of additionally units a civ gets when they are at war upon spawn. It would be cool if some of the starting units would get the city defender promotion. Also i think declarations of war should be forbidden during the first turns of a spawn. This would give the new civ time to move their units after all cities have fliped. Automatic declarations should be postponed until then.

-Portugal should start with some fishing boats and war galleys to protect their sea resources. And if you give them a settler in a boat and reveal a tip of north africas coast they will immediately settle there.
-Austria starts with archers. That should be arbalests or even longbowmen. Maybe even give them a small army to immediately start a war against hungary. Austria is very crapy at the moment.
-Add some city defenders to Bulgaria, they sometimes get conquerd by Byzantium at the start.
-Burgundy starts very strong now, with two cities already improved. I consider to give Germany an additional settler at start to counter Burgundy, and also France.

Resources
I think that most resources are placed for historic reasons. This leads to areas that have a lot of resources and also a huge diversity of resources and areas that have only a few. Huge diversity leads to huge health and happines bonuses and that leads to huge cities.
I don't want to prevent huge cities in general but i think nations shouldn't get them for free. They shall trade, conquer, settle distant locatons or build colonies.
I would therefor suggest to move, delete or replace some resources for the sake of balance.

Anatolia: There are too many health and happines resources. Both Byzantium and Turkey are too strong. I would remove most food resources from the north east coast, as this appears to be the less important part of anatolia to me. I would also delete the silver and gold, and put one gold on Cyprus instead.

Mediteranean Islands: those islands offer no new resources to the civs that are supposed to settle there. The only good locations that offer new resources and i therefor consider worth settling are Sicily and Neapolis, but they are never conquered by the AI. Split the resources a bit. Maybe slightly improve Corsica and Sardinia. Genoa could need a buff.

Spain: Spain starts out with only a few resources. If they fail to conquer cordoba seem to lack resources. If they conquer cordoba they have so many that there is no need to build colonies.

i think there are more locations that need rebalancing.

Provinces
As Salzburg is now part of Bavaria, this province should be added to austrias normal provinces to make them able to compete with germanies culture there. Also the province Austria could be a bit bigger. Austria is unable to get cultural control over the territory around Wien because it belongs to hungarian solid provinces.

Civilizations
I would suggest to lower Genoas production modifier for units to make them more competative and aggressive. Maybe 70%

 

[Hameigh]

I just tried to start a game as the Ottomans, however my units were strangely teleported right at the start. The pic is of the immediate start before I did anything, and the start didn't show the -1 turns bug. Anyone else had this bug?

 

[merijn_v1]

I just tried to start a game as the Ottomans, however my units were strangely teleported right at the start. The pic is of the immediate start before I did anything, and the start didn't show the -1 turns bug. Anyone else had this bug?

IIRC, you can easily "fix" this by clicking on one of the units to select on the bottom of the screen. If this doesn't work, you can try opening the civilopedia and closing it again. If this also doesn't work, you can save the game and reload.

 

[AbsintheRed]

Resources
I think that most resources are placed for historic reasons. This leads to areas that have a lot of resources and also a huge diversity of resources and areas that have only a few. Huge diversity leads to huge health and happines bonuses and that leads to huge cities.
I don't want to prevent huge cities in general but i think nations shouldn't get them for free. They shall trade, conquer, settle distant locatons or build colonies.
I would therefor suggest to move, delete or replace some resources for the sake of balance.

We have to be very careful with this
The human player can easily gain huge advantage over the AI, if the AI civs can't get enough resources in their core area

I agree with you on Anatolia and Spain though...

Will consider your other suggestions as well. Keep them coming

 

[AbsintheRed]

Map updates:
Revised rivers in Kiev, Poland, Lithuania

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Rearranged resources and small map changes in the Salzburg area and in Anatolia

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I also moved Madeira a few tiles southeast based on an earlier suggestion

These changes of course mean that we have to move some of the indy cities, and even a few civs starting points.
Especially Kiev and Minsk were in a totally ahistoric place

 

[Opera]

Yay, finally Riga has its river!

 

[AbsintheRed]

Yay, finally Riga has its river!

I didn't move the cities yet. Riga, Minsk, Kiev, and a couple others are yet to be placed to their correct spot.

Also note, that a few provinces are still not perfect, especially in the Minsk-Kiev area
Btw I put Madeira to be part of the Canaries, only because I was too lazy to make a new province for it
Probably it should be a separate island-province though, along with the Isle of Man (which would solve the english UHV problems)

 

[Morholt]

Don't forget Smolensk, it should be on the Dnepr (1N if I remember correctly)