Beta 13

[3Miro]

a reasonably expected AU where Vinland didn't collapse and failed to gain a permanent 'beachhead', it would be likely that the Vikings (primary Norweigians, secondary Danes) would have colonized down the eastcoast and in through the big rivers, ending up in a semipermanent war with assorted Natives, or establishing petty kingdoms not unalike Kievan Rus, with a Norse elite and a Native Commoner class, which through time is going to be intermixed ... but at some point lose comonication with them (at latest doing Black Death, prehaps even transferring the plauge overthere, deciminating the Natives), but the memory of the 'land beyond the sea' presisting, triggering a earlier 'second disovery', spearheaded by The Kalmar Union in the early 1400s (with Swedish Nobles prehaps being somewhat less interested in disbanding the Union again since that would mean losing all oversea assets, 'cept Finland)

The impact of establishing a Norman style of government in North America that early on would be huge. Only South and Central Americas has Empire like governments, the north was almost entirely decentralized. The exact effects of Vinland over the history of Scandinavia may be unclear, but they would certainly be profound. Imagine also the impact on the other European powers, they would have reached out much sooner and imagine if the British and Spanish had faced a Norman/Kiev type of a North American Empire or even the natives in the south, but without the advantages of Gunpowder.

I thought Vinland makes for great ahistroic UHV for the Norse.

 

[amrod]

1 tile off for the capitals isn't a big deal.

But just for clarity, is it really off?

You absolutely have to show the CoreAreas.

Okay, will work on that. So the normal areas have exceptions, but the core areas are totally rectangular?

 

[Tigranes]

I will have to test this. When was this feature introduced in BtS? RFCE originally started with patch 3.17 and was later ported to 3.19 (at the cost of 20 hours of my life). If 3.19 introduced this feature, then it is possible that it was lost in the port, which means it is not disabled, but rather buggy.

AFAIK this was in always, vanila RFC has it, I never seen a mod without it, but then again I mostly played RFC type mods...

As for the Vinland I only commented on Tobacco -- can we replace it with ... well, Wine ! The name says it...

 

[3Miro]

But just for clarity, is it really off?

Okay, will work on that. So the normal areas have exceptions, but the core areas are totally rectangular?

In RFC the cores have exception too, but in RFCE we managed to get away with rectangles only.

Remember that the exceptions are additional squares, not squares subtracted from the original. The naming is a bit misleading.

 

[3Miro]

AFAIK this was in always, vanila RFC has it, I never seen a mod without it, but then again I mostly played RFC type mods...

As for the Vinland I only commented on Tobacco -- can we replace it with ... well, Wine ! The name says it...

The F11 option works, except for the religions that are causing some bug. I will see to it.

I will look into the Vinland thing.

 

[AbsintheRed]

Isn't Buda a bit too close to Vienna?
I know in reality it is, but in the game could be cumbersome (to don't mention that Buda loses the protection from the river).

Ask AbsintheRed when he comes back, he is the Hungarian in the mod.

the problem that Buda/Vienna are to close aren't there since previously the Hungarian AI loved settling a city somewhere between them

They are not that close, and it's more accurate this way. Buda was the more important city during the mod (Buda and Pest unified in 1871)
Also, Sian is right. The other main reason was to force the AI not to settle Sopron/Szombathely/Steinamanger 2 tiles south of Wien. It flipped, and completely ruined the Austrian capital's production

 

[AbsintheRed]

Guided crusades sounds like a great mechanic!

Considering the Dawn of Man texts: I made suggestions for Ottomans, Muscovites and Austrians that weren't incorporated, but not rejected, perhaps they were missed? I see that you've added another one for Ottomans, but Muscovites and Austria still have the default text. My suggestions were:

Austria:
"It is the year 1282. The Holy Roman Empire have had enough of the excesses of the Hohenstaufen. Called Stupor Mundi -astonishment of the world - Fredrick II has made the people long for stability and moderation. Your Habsburg dynasty will provide that. Navigate carefully through the intricate diplomacy of central Europe, and your dynasty will still stand proudly many hundreds of years from now!"

The Ottomans:
"It is the year 1359. Allah has truly shown his favour towards you. Firstly, the Black Death affected the Byzantines in the cities, but largely spared the countryside of the Turks. Secondly, the earthquake in Gallipoli 1354 levelled all the walls. The way to Europe is open, you need only to reach out and grasp it!"

The Muscovites:
"It is the year 1380. The shadow of the Mongol Golden has loomed over the land for more than a hundred years. With the people chafing under their oppression, fear has prevented effective resistance. All has changed now on the fields of Kulikovo, where you led your coalition to victory. The road ahead is long and arduous, but in the end, Mother Russia will prevail!"

Yeah, not all of the dawn of man texts were uploaded to the svn
I don't consider any of them final yet, some polishing is still needed IMO
Will get back on this on the DoM thread

One annoying bug remained though: the flashing amber (at least with intel 945 chipset graphics and regardless of frozen animations). Reported it looong time ago.

I remember this bug, and it's on my todo list
But I never experienced it myself, and it's kinda hard to solve it this way
You experience this both with and without frozen animations?

Also, in the mod Reference directory, the png files are still outdated, were so even in beta12 and probably before that.

The png files are absolutely outdated, they were made before the province system
With provinces they are not really useful, I don't think we will ever update them

EDIT: It seems 3Miro plans to update them after all

Three small things as the Byzantines:

- Barbarians now consist of double stacks of lancers, right in the beginning, spawning near your cities. Kinda hard!
- Should hippodromes give +1 happy for every 5% culture?
- No mercenaries available the first hundred years

Hmm, I will test the Sassanid lancers. They should be hard of course, but I may have gone overboard with them. Will see after a few test runs.
Also, much more mercenaries will be added to the mod, both unique and general mercenaries

 

[AbsintheRed]

with the new Merc system in place, how about a revisit to an idea i aired while it was in the workings?, basicly reworking Norse

Bezerker is changed to a cheap Merc recruitable in Scandinavia

Norse UU is reworked into the Longboat replacing Galley, able to sail the oceans and to carry a extra unit (so it carries 3 units instead of two)

Norse UP could then be reworked into a 'pillage gives x5 times money' promoting Pillaging wars for them (which is quite historical)

That is interesting. I wonder what other people think about it.

Berserkers can be units available only in the Scandinavian provinces, thus the Norse would need to expand throughout Scandinavia to get more Berserkers. The ship wit extra cargo works fine too. The Pillage UP would tie with the Viking points.

Great idea, I absolutely like all of these suggestions
The Viking UP was rather underpowered after all

 

[AbsintheRed]

I haven't tried out beta 13 yet, and won't really have the time in the near future, but..

Moving the Hungarian Capitol sounds like a great idea to me, especially the renaming and moving it to the other river side.
And I assume that things will get better for Vienna since the AI really liked to build Steinamanger which even though it flipped to Austria was always a very annoying city for me.(Vienna, Steinamanger, Budapest all in a space about 5-6 tiles wide)

The current situation actually looks better as you get only Buda and Vienna on those few tiles (i.e. one city less).

Steinamanger is really brutal on Vienna

Exactly. As I said, that was the goal I hoped to achieve with my change
Also I hated to see the Hungarian capital on the wrong side of the Danube

 

[AbsintheRed]

I understand that at this stage all the colonial projects are more or less fixed and new F9 feature makes it very easy to see them. So I could not help but to compare it with the actual map of colonization:

Spoiler :

As you can see this mod captures most areas of colonization. However there are 4 notable omissions:

1. Angola -- just like East Africa this area was very important for slave trade. It was also one of the longest lasting European colonies.

2. Taiwan. "The time of Dutch rule saw economic development in Taiwan, including both large-scale hunting of deer and the cultivation of rice and sugar by imported labour from Fujian in China." -- This colony is not falling under a Far East trading port -- because it was (short lived) colony and can provide Rice, sugar and deer -- rice is very important comodity due to the health issues in RFCE.

3. Florida -- All the Spanish colonies require South American Access, Florida was an important exception -- oldest place in US settled by Europeans was Florida and this deserves to be depicted somehow.

4. Greenland -- Together with Vinland Greenland can be an early colony. Vinland was short lived colony but settlements in Greenland lasted for a long time and were badly devasted by the Black Death. AI never build Vinland -- it takes too much intelligence to sail to the Iceland and settle there. Would be cool to see early colonial project available for Norse after they discover some tech and unlike Vinland also available for later years

These are good ideas, but I'm not sure we should add more colonies to the game
Wouldn't really add anything to the gameplay, as we already have more than enough colonies.
So I'm not really sure it would worth the efforts

Yeah, and by the way -- there is absolutely no evidence of Norse in Vinland using tobacco. Vinland providing tobacco in c. 1000 AD looks very silly We better replace it with Ivory.

You do make a good point there with Tobacco is not the right bonus
But I don't want Ivory either: for Vinland you need a city in Iceland, which already means 2 Ivory resources

 

[AbsintheRed]

Made a map of the mod from screenshots. Could be better (top of screen darknesses and some distortions still there, though tried to minimize it), but usable. For something.
Original is 4500x3300 png, this one smaller and jpg to fit here.
Will try to draw in provinces. Can someone tell me how to enable the line drawing feature of globe view in RFCE? Or why it wasn't working for me?

Here's a first try at starting locations map. (There's still some work to do with the large map, but in the medium size the errors are not obvious luckily).

Great map, Amrod!
Thanks for doing this
It will be great if you can do all civs spawn/flip (core) areas!

 

[3Miro]

You do make a good point there with Tobacco is not the right bonus
But I don't want Ivory either: for Vinland you need a city in Iceland, which already means 2 Ivory resources

I think the Ivory idea comes from Greenland (mixing Vinland and Greenland). The tobacco probably a mix up from the founding of tobacco in the Egyptian mummies suggesting that they had expeditions to America (there is no tobacco in Europe). However, those are Egyptian Pharaohs, not Vikings.

It is hard to pick the right resources for Vinland since it was never really founded. Wine would be good (although there is some speculation whether the name does indeed come from wine). We may give an extra Ivory (to connect Vinland and Greenland, it is an abstraction in the name of gameplay). This would give the Norse huge monopoly over Ivory. Alternatively we can give Vinland the most abundant resource in North America: Corn.

 

[AbsintheRed]

But just for clarity, is it really off?

Okay, will work on that. So the normal areas have exceptions, but the core areas are totally rectangular?

Buda is really in (66, 37), so it's not off
I think Ezzlar meant, that on your map it seems that it's too close to the plot north of it (66, 38), where the Danube turns

Core areas can also have expections
I recently added a few extra tiles to Portugal and Sweden for example (so they flip Porto and Abo)

AFAIK this was in always, vanila RFC has it, I never seen a mod without it, but then again I mostly played RFC type mods...

As for the Vinland I only commented on Tobacco -- can we replace it with ... well, Wine ! The name says it...

Hmm, Vine may work pretty well if it's more or less historic

 

[AbsintheRed]

I think the Ivory idea comes from Greenland (mixing Vinland and Greenland). The tobacco probably a mix up from the founding of tobacco in the Egyptian mummies suggesting that they had expeditions to America (there is no tobacco in Europe). However, those are Egyptian Pharaohs, not Vikings.

It is hard to pick the right resources for Vinland since it was never really founded. Wine would be good (although there is some speculation whether the name does indeed come from wine). We may give an extra Ivory (to connect Vinland and Greenland, it is an abstraction in the name of gameplay). This would give the Norse huge monopoly over Ivory. Alternatively we can give Vinland the most abundant resource in North America: Corn.

Crosspost
Anyway, I agree with you, I would also remove Tobacco from Vinland
But I don't like Corn either, it would make the early colony absolutely overpowered
Vikings have an easy access to a health-giving resource? Which is not availeable to anyone else, no matter how they play? I don't really like the idea
I would probably go with Wines
So we can have 1 Ivory and 1 Wine

EDIT: I more or less changed my mind about this
It would really worth to complete Vinland for extra health, and the Norse could absolutely use it
But we should only add it, if we spawn a couple more Corn resources throughout Europe around 1600, the same way we do it with Potatoes
This would be quite historical AFAIK, also wouldn't leave the Norse with absolute monopoly over a resource for all of the game

 

[3Miro]

Crosspost
EDIT: I more or less changed my mind about this
It would really worth to complete Vinland for extra health, and the Norse could absolutely use it
But we should only add it, if we spawn a couple more Corn resources throughout Europe around 1600, the same way we do it with Potatoes
This would be quite historical AFAIK, also wouldn't leave the Norse with absolute monopoly over a resource for all of the game

I put corn out as half of a joke, although this is definitely something that the Vikings would find useful to trade back to Europe (stable Vinland colony is fictional anyway). Do we even have Corn currently? If not, then don't bother.

We should put wine as one resource. We can give the second as Potatoes. It will not spawn in Europe until the right time, but it will be only accessible via the colony. We should also remember that the AI cannot build Vinland (it is too dumb) and the Human would probably finish the UHV a few turns after Vinland.

 

[Tigranes]

I see Vinland as a UHV and flavor colony -- not something that can benefit Human player. Lets make something that alludes to the historical reality. 1 Wine -- for most probable source for the name Vinland, 1 Thimber -- since settlers in Greenland sailed Westward in the search of wood, 1 Ivory -- since you get to the Vinland via Greenland and Greenland settlers traded Ivory. Potato is Mesoamerican/ SouthAmerican food.

P.S. We could help AI and flip Iceland to Norse if their ship sight Iceland -- kinda like Rhye helped Spain with Conquistador events.

 

[Tigranes]

Finished today my Swedish game on Monarch. All the UHVs work properly but were not very exciting (see bellow more on this).

Spoiler :

Employed unorthodox approach and conquered Barbarian Riga for the capital. AI built 3 cities around future Stockholm -- would be 4 weak cites instead of 3 strong ones (AI Sweden would get just that). Even with 4(!) plagues new rule about cottages made it profitable to invest in Towns. (my favorite improvement under Limited Monarchy).

Had a decisive war with Norse on land and a tie on sea, lost a lot of initial population to the sea blockade, but Norse lost too many cities upon the flip and stood little chance. They collapsed and I peacefully settled all the required land to complete 1st UHV. Russia declared on me after I captured barbarian Vilnius -- but I never saw any organized army and soon made a peace. Vilnius became my production city 1.5 times better than anything you could beef up in Sweden . Most of my colonial empire was built here. The F9 Colony tub is absolutely rocks -- thanks sedna! You guyas should add SS to the front page for this mod -- describes a lot about this mod and has very professional touch! While we are on this: is there any way to add colony's founding date to the mouse over info ?

Spoiler :

.

Nobody else ever declared on me for the rest of the game (and this was aggressive AI!), so I was just waiting until my 2nd UHV kicks in and was trading with everybody and being a nice guy trying to complete tech tree, build all the available wonders and projects and engaging in non-stop piracy -- nice way to gain GGs during the peacetime. This SS probably belongs to: "Look what happened" thread: my GG promoted precious Captain Jack Sparrow lost to a pathetic Combat 1 Dutch Caravel with 99% winning odds I can almost swear that BTS has a thing against the GG units -- they get killed more often then regular units under the same odds:

Spoiler :

Poland was dead, Russia lost a war to Bulgaria and collapsed, and Germany was afraid of me. So I was focusing on my economy. AI built a useless city away from coast on the north of Sweden, it would never grow past population 5, but AI settled 2 GP there! So I decided to use it as my Wall Street city creating Medici Bank there and later building Amsterdam Beurs. It's a very nice touch not to make it a National Wonder! Btw, who can tell whats up with the difference in gold between mouse over info and regular city's gold info?

Spoiler :

I really feel that National Epic should not be a National Wonder -- just like Amsterdam Beurs this would represent a certain "Europe's wonder" city (Florence) that historically offered the most Great People. Here is what a National Wonder can do to a unremarkable city of Kalmar:

Spoiler :

After my 2nd UHV kicked in I was so strong that nobody dared to declare, so I just took over all the independent Russian cities and sailed towards my 3rd UHV. Russia respawned, but me being Very Solid meant that she was limited to 3 cities in Siberia.

Overall the games runs very smooth, often Plagues really help with speed, had just one graphic memory crash even though I use minimal settings (must be some LH). Here are humble requests to improve few things about the balance and make the late games more exciting:

1. Please nerf Barbarians on Emperor. AI always frustrates me with stupidities, so I try to compensate with Emperor, but in RFCE this means double barbarian stacks -- not only against human player but also against AI. So effectively AI becomes weaker on Emperor! Barbarians and Plague should somehow affect AI in lesser degree than human player -- we know how to minimize the impact of both -- AI does not! Also, Sassanid Persian Barbarians should not harass Arabia in 823 and would be nice for every Barbarian to have a tribe name and also have a named Barbarian Leader (GG)-- like in SoI...

2. Please nerf the "bad Bs" of this mod: Bulgaria and Burgundy. Bulgaria under Aggressive AI caused a collapse of 3 major civs: Byzantium, Ottomans and Muscovy, eventually expanding into Ukraine! Burgundy flipped French Lion and conquered Paris during the time of the 100 years war -- France collapsed and never respawned! As a matter of fact I never seen Burgundy collapsed and never seen Second Bulgarian Empire. Turkey respawned and vassalized to UK.

3. Too much happiness in this mod. Way too much. Life was not a piece of cake in Middle Ages. There is never a need to use culture slider. Too many happiness resources and too many buildings. Who came up with the idea of Jewelers I wonder -- like all we need in late game is more happiness ! Health is much more balanced and nice, by the way -- I was always shopping for more health. Lets make it that every 2 unhealthy faces create 1 unhappy face: "This city stinks " (Wise man forgot about Sanitation in Europe more that in any other known civilized place on the planet Earth during that time!)

4. No passive 2nd UHV for Sweden please, especially when AI is not very smart and often dead! Never loose city should be replaced back to raze 7 Catholic only cities. Most of the German cities have both Protestant and Catholic faiths -- trying to find a city with Catholic faith only could prove to be challenging and fun. Otherwise even Spain OB and got pleased with me! This would represent 30 Year War much much better -- I was trading with Germany instead of pillaging her!
Karl XII goal should be changed to have 4 vassals in 1750 (Denmark, Poland, Saxony and Russia). Alexander of the North was not interested in annexing all those cities and provinces -- he wanted humiliation and capitulation of his enemies.

5. If it is codable -- please allow for Colonies to change hands -- to recreate things like Seven Years war.

 

[Nolan08]

Hate to be "that" guy but Beta 13 isn't working for me and I downloaded it and zipped it into RFC Europe.

Any suggestions on why it isn't working?

 

[amrod]

In RFC the cores have exception too, but in RFCE we managed to get away with rectangles only.

Remember that the exceptions are additional squares, not squares subtracted from the original. The naming is a bit misleading.

Actually I see a

tExceptions = ( #for RiseAndFall. These are (badly named) extra squares used in spawn.

line after core areas and before normal areas, and some civs have coords in this. so that would add to their core areas?

update: I see Absinthered already said they are

 

[amrod]

IThis would give the Norse huge monopoly over Ivory.

I think that luxury resources are currently only good so far as you can trade them (though you mentioned that happiness will be made harder). Luckily the AI will trade for all the happiness resources
But unluckily, they are fully aware of the uselessness of coal and will never trade for it