Beta 12

[Krschtschn]

Good morning, here are my two cents on svn revision 788:

I really like the new mercenary system, it works a lot better than before and adds a lot of flavour through unique units. Also i would love to see some kind of naming on the generics, but that is just a minor issue.

The new city placement in Arabia is working well for the AI, maybe we should add some penalty for the human player?
Sadly the crusades are to easy. Arabia doesn't really defend it's core area. On the other hand i really dont see any incentive to actually keep Jerusalem. The independence mechanic makes it incredibly hard to keep and there is next to no benefit to it. I just use it to get crusaders into arabia and conquer damascus, eqypt and the lebanon. Those areas are easier to keep and contain useful resources like silk, coffee, dye, rice or the shrine bonus, while jerusalem just has wheat and honey, which every west european already has.
Now to the iberian peninsula:
Porto currently has no province. Aside of that it looks pretty good. Portugal is stronger and settles islands, Spain does the same, but cordoba might need a small buff to survive the spanish spawn and turn the reconquista from a rush into a prolonged war effort.

The West Europeans:
Is there any way to stop burgundy from building the stupid little city on the salt tile next to marseille? It's a waste of resources and an incredible annoyance whenever i want to conquer them. Speaking of conquest: Why is noone interested in italy? Florenzia rarely gets taken and Neapolis virtually never.
Is there any consenus concerning scripted wars for germany/burgundy/france? I saw maybe one or two wars per game and they mostly kept sitting in their citys after that.

Other stuff: I like the new ottoman UP, but the lithuanian UHV is damn hard. Haven't got it yet. I think Austria doesn't need 3 starting settlers, 2 are enough. And the barbarians in anatolia are a bit much. Weren't they supposed to represent the sassanids in the 500s? Those horse archers ruin my settlement till the 900s, which isn't exactly what i expected.

I think that wraps it up for now, i hope it was somewhat helpful.
Greez, Krschtschn

 

[AbsintheRed]

Hey, thanks for the great feedback!

I really like the new mercenary system, it works a lot better than before and adds a lot of flavour through unique units. Also i would love to see some kind of naming on the generics, but that is just a minor issue

Eventually many more generic mercs will get unique names, but first I would like to perfect the new mercenary system and add more unique mercenaries

The new city placement in Arabia is working well for the AI, maybe we should add some penalty for the human player?

Thanks! The Arabian AI really needed a buff there, this way they have somewhat better city sites.
Will have to look it for the human player though, you are right

Sadly the crusades are to easy. Arabia doesn't really defend it's core area. On the other hand i really dont see any incentive to actually keep Jerusalem. The independence mechanic makes it incredibly hard to keep and there is next to no benefit to it. I just use it to get crusaders into arabia and conquer damascus, eqypt and the lebanon. Those areas are easier to keep and contain useful resources like silk, coffee, dye, rice or the shrine bonus, while jerusalem just has wheat and honey, which every west european already has.

Jerusalem adds a Goldan Age, conquering it should definitely be a goal
I suggested to add a gold bonus to the jewish shrine too (like all the other ones) to add another reason that players would like to keep it, but the vote went down 2 against 1 on this
Another solution may be to rearrange resources so Jerusalem also gets an important one, and to also add minor nation mechanics to all the other cities in the Levant (especially to Damascus)

Porto currently has no province. Aside of that it looks pretty good. Portugal is stronger and settles islands, Spain does the same, but cordoba might need a small buff to survive the spanish spawn and turn the reconquista from a rush into a prolonged war effort.

Ohh, thanks, I forgot to expand the province Lusitania with the extra tile
Cordoba might need a buff, 3Miro is working on the balance for the next release

Is there any way to stop burgundy from building the stupid little city on the salt tile next to marseille? It's a waste of resources and an incredible annoyance whenever i want to conquer them. Speaking of conquest: Why is noone interested in italy? Florenzia rarely gets taken and Neapolis virtually never.
Is there any consenus concerning scripted wars for germany/burgundy/france? I saw maybe one or two wars per game and they mostly kept sitting in their citys after that.

The next version will also have better settler and war maps for most of the civs
This isn't uploaded to the svn yet, as I keep improving my WIP version continuously.
Hopefully it will solve all these issues

Other stuff: I like the new ottoman UP, but the lithuanian UHV is damn hard. Haven't got it yet. I think Austria doesn't need 3 starting settlers, 2 are enough. And the barbarians in anatolia are a bit much. Weren't they supposed to represent the sassanids in the 500s? Those horse archers ruin my settlement till the 900s, which isn't exactly what i expected.

The Lithuanian UHV is reduced to 2000 culture recently, is it still too hard this way?
Maybe you are right and we can remove an austrian settler, will check it
I may have gone overboard with the Sassanid barbarians
Btw I want to change them to be more unique, they should rather be lancer replacement barbarians than horse archers.

 

[ezzlar]

How about the relic resource as bonus for a Jerusalem jewish temple mount, holy shrine?

 

[Sian]

a relic resource on the tile of Jerusalem would be logical ... currently, the only way (as far as i can see) to get relics is via one of the religuous coops, while it was one of the reasons to capture Jerusalem

 

[3Miro]

Jerusalem relic resource is a good idea. Currently a Catholic player holding Jerusalem gets lots of buildings from the Pope, with the Relic, Jerusalem would be worth holding.

 

[yogiebere]

Hey guys! I haven't been on in a really long time, but Beta 12 looks sweet so I've got to try it. I have a new computer since the last one, and I'm having issues getting the mod to start. I downloaded the mod off of filefront, extracted it with winrar into MODS of BTS. Then started BTS up, loaded the mod and it just ends the program...

The loading screen pops up briefly, but then exits as if I had told the program to close. Any ideas?

 

[3Miro]

Hey guys! I haven't been on in a really long time, but Beta 12 looks sweet so I've got to try it. I have a new computer since the last one, and I'm having issues getting the mod to start. I downloaded the mod off of filefront, extracted it with winrar into MODS of BTS. Then started BTS up, loaded the mod and it just ends the program...

The loading screen pops up briefly, but then exits as if I had told the program to close. Any ideas?

Filefront? We haven't released anything on filefront in quite some time. We are using sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/rfceurope/

Download the mod from here and then completely remove anything RFCE that you may currently have. Then install Beta 12.

 

[Morholt]

Are you sure you downloaded RFCE? It is hosted on sourceforge, not filefront. Or did you download RFCE++, which does crash unless you extract it into a renamed RFCE folder? In either case, both are getting a major upgrade within a few days, so check back in soon!

 

[yogiebere]

sorry I mean sourceforge. I downloaded it from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/rfceurope/files/

I can extract right into MODS right?

 

[3Miro]

sorry I mean sourceforge. I downloaded it from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/rfceurope/files/

I can extract right into MODS right?

Remove any previous version of RFCE, then you should be able to just extract it in MODS.

 

[yogiebere]

Ok looks like I needed to get the latest patch, but it still doesn't work... Hmm. And that was the latest version of RFCE, I didn't have any older one.

In general, does it matter if I put it in program files MODS or the my games MODS?

 

[3Miro]

Ok looks like I needed to get the latest patch, but it still doesn't work... Hmm. And that was the latest version of RFCE, I didn't have any older one.

In general, does it matter if I put it in program files MODS or the my games MODS?

I have only ever tried it with "Program Files/..../Beyond the Sword/Mods", I don't know how "My Games/Beyond the Sword/Mods" works.

 

[yogiebere]

Oh I figured out the problem - turns out the patch didn't install properly. It works now, I can't wait to try it!

 

[amrod]

The new city placement in Arabia

This reminds me of North Africa. Currently (i'm in beta12) there's not much activity there. Portugal uhv goes for Morocco (but I've not seen Portugal AI do it), Spain AI sometimes catches a city there too, and Cordoba might (or always??) respawn, but large parts of it remain independent for all the game. All those indep cities, they do nothing. Unless there are barb cities spawning the barb pirates (though probably that doesn't need cities right?). Of course, there probably wasn't much activity there irl...

update: I see RFCE++ (hah found a thread in Morholt's post has some civs in North Africa...

Speaking of conquest: Why is noone interested in italy? Florenzia rarely gets taken and Neapolis virtually never.

Hm, yes, there was supposed to be a holy roman empire or what and a lot of fighting. Though as I see there's already some discussion going on about having the empire in the game (but I don't really know what the wise guys want - last time I couldn't even find the rfce+ thread, the search engine skips the + sign).
Oh and there was that the when the Pope went to Avignon, yes?

Is there any consenus concerning scripted wars for germany/burgundy/france? I saw maybe one or two wars per game and they mostly kept sitting in their citys after that.

Another interesting idea. Though it seems the original AI has several problems with wars, sending off units in strange ways - so probably AI needs fixing as well, not only scripting wars to happen. But I don't know about the AI Still, some more wars would be interesting

 

[Morholt]

(but I don't really know what the wise guys want - last time I couldn't even find the rfce+ thread, the search engine skips the + sign)

The RFCE++ thread is here (also in my sig). The thread is not actually called RFCE++ since it was renamed to that after it was posted, I'll make a new thread once it goes into beta, which will be quite soon.

 

[merijn_v1]

@ Absinthered, 3Miro

Some time ago, I suggested a new bonus for the Leaning Tower. IIRC, it isn't hard to merge it into the mod. (Almost all of the coding is already done) I tried to add it to the mod, but my python coding skills are to low to manage the job. Can you do it before the release of the next version? (IIRC, it won't take much time to do it, but it still has to be done)
http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=10092

 

[AbsintheRed]

@ Absinthered, 3Miro

Some time ago, I suggested a new bonus for the Leaning Tower. IIRC, it isn't hard to merge it into the mod. (Almost all of the coding is already done) I tried to add it to the mod, but my python coding skills are to low to manage the job. Can you do it before the release of the next version? (IIRC, it won't take much time to do it, but it still has to be done)
http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=10092

Oh, somehow I missed this/forget about this
It's a really good idea, would be a great bonus for the Leaning Tower!

 

[AbsintheRed]

Alright, it seems that I modified and added it without any problems. It's up on the svn
On my only test run everything looked fine, but I don't have time for more tests ATM
Merijn (and everyone else who is willing to help): Could you guys test it out?

 

[merijn_v1]

It works. I also see what I did wrong. (I forgot the 2nd part of code)

 

[AbsintheRed]

I move my post here, maybe I will get a little feedback on it in the Beta 12 thread:

I'm thinking about adding this as a general rule in RFCE
Whenever there is a city in any civs starting position's fat cross, that city is reduced to a town. Without expections, so it wouldn't matter if it's an Indy city or the player's city
Note that respawns doesn't count, they are tied to existing cities. Only all civs initial spawns need space for them to settle.
This would solve a couple issues on spawn. No more squatting or any similar cheats.
Also this is a much better solution then what the latest RFC uses, AFAIK they just simply pre-raze every city in a 3*3 radius.

My only concerns is what happens when the to-be-reduced city is a very important one in the game, maybe even with wonders in it?
For the AI it's not an issue at all, as they follow their settler and war maps in most cases.
On the other hand, this can be a serious punishment for the human player in a few games, and means we are reducing from the freedom to achieve alternative history
I really want to hear some opinions on this, what should we follow?
Should we strictly keep all civs start clear?