Bronenosets (Russian Pre-Dreadnought Warship)

[Wolfshanze]

Basically though Wolfe, I'm a firm believer that more is not necessarily better. And trying the naval mod out, it felt too crowded for MY tastes, not to say your setup isn't good, it just was overloaded for me.

By far I don't add the most units in my mod... there's TONS of mods out there that add everything under the sun and the kitchen sink for good measure.

I still find it hard to believe that the jumps in combat value I make (none less then a 3-point jump, and most 4-points or more) are "crowded", when almost every single land unit jump is usually 2-4 points.

Heck, several naval units in the early game don't even have a jump of two points or more... most only get bonuses.

I've played though my own mod several times... I never felt the naval units were any more crowded then the constant upgrades of land-units. If you feel my naval adds are too crowded, then you must think all of Civilization 4's land units are too crowded as well. You have to get at least two tech upgrades in specific categories for each advance in my naval jumps... that's assuming your only goal is to get a naval jump, and not some other tech for some other reason/purpose.

You guys might as well start arguing why Knights and Cavaliers feel "too crowded" or that Marines and Paratroopers are "irrelevant"... those units are very close in abilities and techs compared to my own naval upgrades.

I suppose to make everyone happy, I'll ditch half the naval upgrades and also start hacking through the superflous land units too... so we can jump from knights to tanks, since everything inbetween is "too crowded".

Why do land units get a pass, but adding naval units with the same spacing is "too crowded"?

Let's be real here... I only really added TWO classes of units between Ironclads and WWII Battleships...

Pre-Dreadnought era ships and Dreadnought era ships... each consisting of a heavy/slow unit and a light/fast unit.

In my mod I have the Ironclad age... which consists of three ships available (basically) at the same time:
Ironclad Gunboat (coastal only, mostly useless... who wants it)
Ironclad Cruiser (the ocean-going light/fast unit)
Ironclad Battleship (the ocean-going heavy/slow unit)

The Pre-dreadnought age...
Protected Cruiser (the ocean-going light/fast unit)
Pre-Dreadnought (the ocean-going heavy/slow unit)

The Dreadnought age (aka: WWI)...
Destroyer Escort (the ocean-going light/fast unit)
Dreadnought (the ocean-going heavy/slow unit)

They are all nicely spaced on the tech tree... how that's too many units, I don't know.

 

[Refar]

You guys might as well start arguing why Knights and Cavaliers feel "too crowded"

They are I feel that the addition of the Curasier in BTS was unecessary. It causes the Knight being skiped in many games. I played a Game as Byzantines shortly, and was very disappointed, about not having the time to field a single Cataphract. But arguing that the land tech tree is a bit full as well is not exactly a good justification, for adding even more units.

This might be different in scenarios expanding a certain Age. Perhaps also on slower game speeds. Also depending on the time i go to war, in different games different units will be skiped.

Over all the standard naval unit progression is far from being good and does need a overhaul. Some peoples personal taste that "more is not allways better" does not make your mod bad or useless.

In fact i keep wondering, why you take the rather generic comments made in a unrelated thread as a attack against your mod.

 

[phungus420]

Well for the record I think the Naval mod is vastly superior to the default. I just basically combined the pre-dreadnought & dreadnought-WW2 era. I'd take the naval mod and it's extra 3 or so units over the insane 17th century wooden frigate --> WW2 destroyer jump in the default game.

 

[mamba]

In fact i keep wondering, why you take the rather generic comments made in a unrelated thread as a attack against your mod.

The posts were replies to his post in this thread, so they are not unrelated.

@Phungus: which Naval mod are you talking about (link please) ?

I agree the jump from Frigate / Ship of the Line to Destroyer / Battleship is big, but by squeezing in that many units, there is no clear distinction any more. Basically about half of them are superfluous at least.

The Ironclad Battleship and Cruiser make the regular Ironclad obsolete (the I.Battleship and the I.Cruiser are made available by the same techs, the Ironclad was moved a bit down the line but generally is available at the same time as well).

Protected Cruiser and Pre-Dreadnought als are very similar to each others, slight power and movement differences only. Either one makes all Ironclad variants obsolete.

The Pre-Dreadnought is made obsolete by the Destroyer Escort (the P.Cruiser obviously is as well, but that is its logical precursor anyway).

If you wanted to have less ships and not miss much, I guess you could lump together the Protected Cruiser, the Pre-Dreadnought and the Destroyer Escort (I'd go with the Pre-Dreadnought as that sits squarely in the middle of the three). In addition, you could also merge the Ironclad Battleship and Cruiser (or pick one over the other).

I am not saying having all these ships is a bad thing, just that there are ships introduced which either are alternatives to each other or made obsolete by superior ships very soon (nothing wrong with that however).

 

[bmarnz]

Easy solution: more Techs

 

[Wolfshanze]

I agree the jump from Frigate / Ship of the Line to Destroyer / Battleship is big, but by squeezing in that many units, there is no clear distinction any more. Basically about half of them are superfluous at least.

The Ironclad Battleship and Cruiser make the regular Ironclad obsolete (the I.Battleship and the I.Cruiser are made available by the same techs, the Ironclad was moved a bit down the line but generally is available at the same time as well).

Protected Cruiser and Pre-Dreadnought als are very similar to each others, slight power and movement differences only. Either one makes all Ironclad variants obsolete.

The Pre-Dreadnought is made obsolete by the Destroyer Escort (the P.Cruiser obviously is as well, but that is its logical precursor anyway).

If you wanted to have less ships and not miss much, I guess you could lump together the Protected Cruiser, the Pre-Dreadnought and the Destroyer Escort (I'd go with the Pre-Dreadnought as that sits squarely in the middle of the three). In addition, you could also merge the Ironclad Battleship and Cruiser (or pick one over the other).

I am not saying having all these ships is a bad thing, just that there are ships introduced which either are alternatives to each other or made obsolete by superior ships very soon (nothing wrong with that however).

That's well-thought Mamba... and while I certainly see your point, it's all a matter of needs/opinions.

There's already superflous units in the default game... Frigate/SotL is superflous... both coming basically on top of each other and only varying a bit in speed/firepower... one is faster and smaller, while the other is slower/bigger. The same can be said of the Destroyer/Battleship... both basically coming at the same time... one is faster and smaller, while the other is slower/bigger.

Keeping the same theme is what I did here... A light/fast version of each tech vs a slow/heavy version of each tech. What I did is no differant then what the Firaxis team did with Civ4's Age of Sail (Frigate/SotL) and Civ4's modern naval age (DD/BB). What I did do is offer two new naval eras... the Pre-Dreadnought era (PC/PrDread) and the Dreadnought age (DE/Dread).

I also filled-out the Ironclad age with a similar pair... quite frankly, Firaxis added the useless unit, not me... the movement-2, coastal-only Ironclad Gunboat doesn't really have much use in the modern age, as it's too slow and too limited, so I merely added the ocean-going Ironclads... if you want to blame someone for superflous units, blame Firaxis for the Ironclad Riverboat... I didn't do that, I just left it in and added two useful units.

Now, having said that... I mirrored what Firaxis did and added two naval progressions, there's plenty of times I don't bother building fleets if I'm not at war or expecting one... and even if I do build a fleet, it's usually just one class of ships (like I often build Friagates but don't bother with SotL). It really depends on your needs (if you want speed vs firepower)... the OPTION is there to do what you want. Build both... build one or the other... or build none at all and wait till the next age. The choice is yours to make, but I'm not forcing anyone to build every ship of every age... even before when I played the vanilla Civ4, I would often skip building classes of ships if I didn't need to.

However, if you NEED to go to war and build a fleet, and you're somewhere inbetween the tech-line between age-of-sail and modern age, you don't have to regress to age of sail or wait till modern ships... there'll be something there for you to build that isn't "ancient" technology.

Nobody has put a gun to anybody's head here... if you need it, build it... and build what you need/want (fast/small or slow/big).

IMHO, I've only added four units in two age groups. The Ironclads I consider now "fixed", because I never bothered with the Ironclad Gunboat in vanilla Civ, it was mostly worthless.

In short, I made the mod to what I wanted in the game (the beauty of the game's ease of changing to personal likes). I just so-happen to make it available to the public my vision of Civ4. I'll release a newer/snazzier version soon, but it's still just what I thought was missing. I'm happy with the outcome, and there will be times where I'll build ships I've added, and times where I won't... but the OPTION is there for me to use it or not.

 

[mamba]

I agree, having the option is not a bad thing, not making use of the option most of the time is not a bad thing either, CIV also has redundant units and the regular Ironclad is something I never ever built, so you are right on all counts.

I didn't intend to imply that you should be changing anything about your mod, my post was in response to the other people saying these were too many ships. If they wanted to, they could reduce the number significantly without loosing much by going the route I suggested.

This incidently also is the route I went in my mod, with 3 new units, Ironclad Warship, Pre-Dreadnought and Dreadnought. The direction I came from was different however. I took a look at Frigate /SotL / Ironclad and Destroyer / Battleship and mapped out the space in between them both in combat strength and tech progression, as the jump of 8/4/90 (Frigate) or 12/2/100 (Ironclad) to 30/8/200 (Destroyer) or 40/6/225 (Battleship) seemed too steep to not have any units in between.

From the tech tree progression I decided to make the Ironclad Warship available at the same time as the regular Ironclad, thereby making the Ironclad obsolete as well (if it weren't for its lower cost - it still very much is anyway). I put the Pre-Dreadnought between Ironclad and Destroyer (there is just one tech in between, Railroad) and picked a tech I considered sensible for the Dreadnought (Artillery, Assembly Line would have been the alternative, but that was right before the Battleship and I didn't want these two right after another).

So I arrived there by design, rather than by going with actual units and merging them into sufficiently distinct entities as I did in my post here, the result obviously is similar

Again, this is not to imply that there is anything wrong with your design, you have a different emphasis and your progressions suits that better. I just posted this as a response to those people who wanted to cut down on the number of ship types and I provided a way or getting that number down without missing any significant step in that progression (in CIV terms, not naval progression terms).

 

[Roamty]

Pet camel kills Australian woman
Camels were brought to Australia in the 1840s for transportation
A woman in Australia has been killed by her pet camel after the animal may have tried to have sex with her.
The woman was found dead at the family's sheep and cattle ranch near the town of Mitchell in Queensland.
The woman had been given the camel as a 60th birthday present earlier this year because of her love of exotic pets.
The camel was just 10 months old but already weighed 152kg (336lbs) and had come close to suffocating the family's pet goat on a number of occasions.
On Saturday, the woman apparently became the object of the male camel's desire.
It knocked her to the ground, lay on top of her and displayed what the police delicately described as possible mating behaviour.
"I'd say it's probably been playing, or it may be even a sexual sort of thing," the Associated Press news agency quoted Queensland police Detective Senior Constable Craig Gregory as saying.
Young camels are not normally aggressive but can become more threatening if treated and raised as pets.



Can you make a plain Camel and a Giraffe units with no riders or saddles for me I do not know how to work with or edit a nif file

 

[Wolfshanze]

I'm cool with that Mamba... certainly you can go with just one ship from each era... I mostly took a two-step process in my own mod...

1) I tried to mimic what Firaxis did (most naval "ages" had two similar units... a fast/weak unit and a slow/strong unit)... so I did the same keeping similar to the Firaxis style.

2) I created naval "ages" according to true history... basically Ironclads to Pre-Dreadnoughts to Dreadnoughts to Modern warships, and fit them in spaced-out and as logically as I could.

On a side note, I didn't really care whether or not every ship from each age or class would be built... to me it was mostly a "if I just happen to be in a certain naval age and need to build a fleet, it's there for me if I need it". I didn't care if I bypassed an entire age without building a unit... I did it all the time in Vanilla Civ4 (I can't even remember the last time I ever built a Trireme).

If you look at true history, a lot of money was spent on a lot of warships that were both never used and became obsolete quite-fast. The Ironclad age saw a rapid progression of naval technology as ships were launched already obsolete. In-fact, there were very few fleet actions during the Ironclad age, and most ships were built, served and retired without firing a shot.

At least in Civ4, I usually don't build standing fleets unless I expect (or plan to inflict) trouble!

 

[Refar]

Reuploaded after hacker strike...

 

[Wolfshanze]

I would like some opinions at the smoke. Personally i play with effects disabled, so i do not have much experience with it. I used Ironclad smoke effect and i think it definitely adds to the mood of the unit, but it looks like very much, so i had seriously concidered removing it.

Upon further review, I'd like to see a smokeless (or smoke-reduced) version of the NIF... and also a "no ropes/wires" version in-addition if possible.

The smoke, while kinda cool, is so heavy it clouds view of an excellent model. The smoke should either be greatly reduced or removed all-together (and like I said, I'd like to see a no ropes/wires version as well).

With the release of the Aurora, it makes a nice combo of units for Russia.

 

[Refar]

I removed both smoke and ropes. Only the Nifs in the archive - the rest is unchanged.

I see the problem with the smoke it's too much - unfortunately i did not find anything else that would look good/appropriate. But what's wrong with the ropes

 

[Wolfshanze]

I removed both smoke and ropes. Only the Nifs in the archive - the rest is unchanged.

I see the problem with the smoke it's too much - unfortunately i did not find anything else that would look good/appropriate. But what's wrong with the ropes

Thanks Refar... what a guy.

The smoke was too much... as for the ropes... in-and-of-themselves, it wasn't a problem... thing-is, your Bronenosets is one of many pre-dreadnoughts I have in my own mod... none of which have ropes (or smoke). So yours kind-of sticks out like a sore thumb in my mod. Not that it looked bad... it just didn't fit-in with the many other pre-dreadnoughts I had.

Thanks again.