[BTS] The History of Three Kingdoms

[Dknight99]

I think what is also important now is to find out how to make each civilization unique. There are already features in place such as civilization traits, but the way each civ plays is still pretty much the same.

What made Fall from Heaven so interesting was that each civilization was so different with a distinct theme from pirates to ghosts. So it would be interesting to just compile a list of each civ avaiable and just name their theme with one strength and one weakness so that it can be easier to balance.

 

[Agent327]

It is not the realistic aspect of the component that I don't like it is simply the graphical impact of it. I imagine on the huge map with all the battles fought, the game will become almost unplayable.

I disagree. I'm now well past turn 100 in my current game as Yuan Shao and battle effects have little or no effect on visibility of the map; they dissipate quite soon.

Another matter: the "Commanderies Government" building should probably be named "Commandery (Local) Headquarters". Government is about administration and it's an abstract term and the commanderies of ancient medieval China referred to certain military regional administrations (Otherwise I'm not sure what the term stands for as a city building.) It might be simplest just to use the term "Commandery" (singular) though.

 

[Kalimakhus]

Finally, Cao Cao got his well deserved Conquest Victory. Late November 218AD is the date. I needed 29+ hours to finish this game.
I am not sure if domination is possible but even if it is it would be essentially more difficult than conquest as AP has mentioned before. Civs will capitulate after taking 1 or 2 cities provided that you have defeated their main army. Sun Ce has given me the greatest battle before taking the only city I took from him. In addition to this city I needed to kill his only vassal before he capitulated. Liu Zhang was the 2nd in giving me some sort of a challenge.

I've finished the tech tree a long time ago (at 47% of game time playing on epic). (was researching future tech 6 when I finished the game at 55% of game time). This means that I spent about 8% of game turns doing essentially nothing but moving my troops around and killing things. I was making tons of gold with more than 500K in treasury. I didn't even need to set any percentage of this to culture (none of my cities was unhappy except for newly conquered one). I see this as the real problem to address for the time being.

 

[Calcobrena]

Found a slight bug I think.

Whenever u take a civ's last city and it has heroes that are in the city attached to ships, those heroes will not turn over to u, they will dissapear from the game and the hero screen will show them still loyal to a DEAD civ.

Also the promotion Sea Lord is not granting hidden nationality.

 

[Ricemon]

I discovered a problem when I click on the promotion for Vigorous II for Xiahou Dun and the game crashes to desktop. I then discovered there was a new patch and dl'ed that. It still crashed anyways.

 

[xxhe]

I discovered a problem when I click on the promotion for Vigorous II for Xiahou Dun and the game crashes to desktop. I then discovered there was a new patch and dl'ed that. It still crashed anyways.

Try to load an earlier autosave could probably solve the problem. Because the crash can be attributed to some errors happened several turns ago.

 

[AnotherPacifist]

Well, I got tired of my huge Cao Cao game so I'm not going to finish it. (In 210 Sun Ce only has Wuwei swordsmen and advanced Danyangs and not even Chen Xiaos, and I have knights and the new type of 8 strength trebuchets). BTW the Elite Crossbowmen (15 strength) are very useful, because you can promote them against archers and have collateral damage.

The small map is actually interesting in that Cao Cao is strong but not super strong because he doesn't have as many cities to start with, and Wang Lang has 3 cities while Sun Ce only has 2 to start with. Gongsun Zan is just plain unlucky though because he's got nowhere to run and Yuan Shao has the same overwhelming strength. 2 of the religions haven't been founded yet. A succession game for conquest with this map would be fun.

 

[stmartin]

I think what is also important now is to find out how to make each civilization unique. There are already features in place such as civilization traits, but the way each civ plays is still pretty much the same.

What made Fall from Heaven so interesting was that each civilization was so different with a distinct theme from pirates to ghosts. So it would be interesting to just compile a list of each civ avaiable and just name their theme with one strength and one weakness so that it can be easier to balance.

FFH's civ plays differently, that's correct. But the real deal is that all those civs ARE different, emotionally, naturally. Our civs don't enjoy this: they are human, Chinese, warlords, all the same. So even we give each of them a set of unique features, I really doubt we could achieve similar effect, because you'll feel awkward, because those features are not likely to have a solid base in history, or even romance, which is all this mod is about.

 

[stmartin]

Finally, Cao Cao got his well deserved Conquest Victory. Late November 218AD is the date. I needed 29+ hours to finish this game.

I've finished the tech tree a long time ago (at 47% of game time playing on epic). (was researching future tech 6 when I finished the game at 55% of game time). This means that I spent about 8% of game turns doing essentially nothing but moving my troops around and killing things. I was making tons of gold with more than 500K in treasury. I didn't even need to set any percentage of this to culture (none of my cities was unhappy except for newly conquered one). I see this as the real problem to address for the time being.

Yes, the tech rate is really a problem in scenarios. Here is what we think might be helpful:

1. increase city maintenance and civic maintenance
2. implement tech diffusion
3. turn on no tech brokering

So what do you think? Any ideas how we could solve this problem?

 

[stmartin]

Found a slight bug I think.

Whenever u take a civ's last city and it has heroes that are in the city attached to ships, those heroes will not turn over to u, they will dissapear from the game and the hero screen will show them still loyal to a DEAD civ.

Also the promotion Sea Lord is not granting hidden nationality.

Thanks, the first bug is right on. However, I remembered testing Sea Lord and it worked for me. Please make sure it didn't work for you, and if it didn't, please attach a save.

 

[xxhe]

Another matter: the "Commanderies Government" building should probably be named "Commandery (Local) Headquarters". Government is about administration and it's an abstract term and the commanderies of ancient medieval China referred to certain military regional administrations (Otherwise I'm not sure what the term stands for as a city building.) It might be simplest just to use the term "Commandery" (singular) though.

Thanks for your opinion. The "Commanderies Government" is indeed too long to be shown properly in the city bar and function just the same as "Commandery". We'll fix it at next release.

 

[AnotherPacifist]

Yes, the tech rate is really a problem in scenarios. Here is what we think might be helpful:

1. increase city maintenance and civic maintenance
2. implement tech diffusion
3. turn on no tech brokering

By all means, DO NOT TURN ON NO TECH BROKERING!!! This gives the human a necessary edge when playing at higher levels.

Rhye's original solution is bang on: just make larger empires' research more costly. The more cities you have, the more expensive the tech. This will deter early leaders like Cao Cao and Yuan Shao from going all out on conquest and give the smaller civs a chance to win. Right now, once large empires get their essential techs (Jianan literature, household tax among them), you can never catch up, because economically they can't lose.

 

[Dknight99]

FFH's civ plays differently, that's correct. But the real deal is that all those civs ARE different, emotionally, naturally. Our civs don't enjoy this: they are human, Chinese, warlords, all the same. So even we give each of them a set of unique features, I really doubt we could achieve similar effect, because you'll feel awkward, because those features are not likely to have a solid base in history, or even romance, which is all this mod is about.

I understand, but perhaps FFH isn't the right analogy. Perhaps more to Medieval Total War. Even though they are all warlords and Europeans they have very different motivations and backgrounds.

I remember reading Zhang Yan's background and how he was basically a bandit and I thought it would be cool to play as a civ that's a bandit. Already in place is the rogue ability where he gets 300% more gold when pillaging, but I guess I'm thinking maybe there could be more to make it feel as if I'm playing a bandit civ.

Like making a unique barrack for them so that it gives a promotion so that when their units win a battle then they get gold, or perhaps give them cheaper but weaker units to show that these bandits are based more on numbers than strength. Or give their UU hidden nationality so that they can truly raid without having to declare war.

 

[stmartin]

@AP

OK, we won't turn on no tech brokering. I'm now implementing hero's maintenance cost. It will be equal to the hero's level.

@Dknight99

You've got a point! I believe we still have quite a lot of room for improvement here. And you ideas about Zhang Yan is good too. If you have some more, tell us!

 

[bonedog]

Being a fan of the Koei historical simulation games, I just had to try this out. Been loving it so far. Re-learning the tech tree is always the hardest thing to get used to, but I really like how combat heroes work.

I do have a question, though. Is there any way to use post-196AD leaders with the scenario maps? As far as I can tell, you can't use folks like Sima Yi and Zhuge Liang when playing a scenario, but I'd like to try and have them rampage the Middle Kingdom as opposed to random earth maps.

 

[Ricemon]

Try to load an earlier autosave could probably solve the problem. Because the crash can be attributed to some errors happened several turns ago.

Thanks, that solved it. FYI, I also figured out the cause. The unit I attached Xiahou Dun to did not have the 'dismiss' or 'reform' legion option in the bugged saved file. Hence why I think that's the cause of the crash.

 

[Shiggs713]

I've found some kind of bug. If you load up the save game, and try to attach two melee units to the already existing legions, it'll crash to desktop every time. Its hard to tell exactly whats doing what (other than joining legion with the button, not the legion interface causes CtD) cause there are a ton of legions units all in the same area, and I just killed most of Yuan Shao's giant stack of doom. The game was already acting glitchy (i.e. kinda freezing the gfx if I selected certain units, and then going away when I selected a different one). Quite positive its nothing to do with my system. I forget the city's name but its the one up near Yuan Shao.... just have two melee units "join legion" with the button on the main interface and it'll crash.

ps. I did a clean re-install once you made an installer, so it shouldn't have anything to do with the patch business

 

[Dknight99]

I was thinking an interesting idea would be to add promotions to different factions units. For example, Cao Cao units would be given the Northerner's promotion giving them certain bonuses and weaknesses.

This from thinking about the prelude to Chi Bi and how Zhuge Liang convince Wu that even though Cao Cao's army is large, they are northerners' who are unfamiliar with fighting in naval battle.

Same can be given to Nanman or the Xiang with bonuses and weaknesses so that not all the fighters are the same.

 

[stmartin]

Hey guys, thunderfall has just created a forum for us, the location is:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=346

currently it's empty, so add something to it

@Shiggs713

I checked the save. You could open that save and check the info panel of hero advisor, you will see that Gao Shun's legion members are not shown properly. There is a blank spot on the third position, which means the game thinks he has 3 members but the 3rd member is not a valid unit. So please check some previous saves and see if we could find the exact time and action you did to create this situation

@bonedog

The safe way to pick the leader you actually want to play is to modify the scenario WBS file with a text editor, and replace all traces of the previous leader's name with the new leader's name. Remember, leave the civ's name alone.

For example, you want to replace Cao Cao with Sima Yi. Then go ahead and open the map file in notepad or something else. Find every instance of Cao Cao that refers to the leader (not the one refer to civ), and replace all of them with Sima Yi

 

[Kalimakhus]

@stmartin

First congratulations on the new sub-forum HoTK really deserves a place of its own

Now about tech tree, let's state the exact problems we have here:
1 - A large empire is able to finish the tech tree around half the way through game time.
2 - A small empire has no chance of catching up in tech race and at some stage its troops are so ******** to constitute any real defense in face of the larger empires.

One more issue I see is that you can't really play according to your adopted belief unless you are a Unification leader. Division believers have limited options to win a victory condition that is compatible with their belief. Only cultural victory seems appropriate here.

For solutions:

AP has suggested some interesting solutions based on RFC.
- UHVs while can't be implemented in the same way as in RFC can be a base for adding more Victory conditions that allow smaller civs (especially Division believers) a chance for winning the game and gives larger civs a challenge. For instance if Nan Man has a UHV and they are about to obtain it Cao Cao can no longer ignore them and he has to divert his military effort to destroy them in time. Now some considerations for implementing UHVs is that they should be implemented in a way that doesn't depend on the map. Holding a specific territory for instance can't work. The reason is that we don't want to lose the variety of Random Maps and the different options for historical china map.
-If implementing a UHVs system is not a good idea for you then adding more general victory types would be nice. Some space race replacement can be nice. Religious (belief) victory can also be nice.
- Modifying research rate by empire size is another good idea. In RFC it is hard coded for each civ. This is ok there because Civs have a core empire territory and they lose stability when they extend beyond it. A more general approach can be utilized in HoTK. Let's say it is based on land area percentage so if you have 10% of land area you get -50% research modifier, i.e. you get -5X research modifier where X is your land area percentage.

- For smaller civs especially those who start already behind in tech race, tech diffusion can be a good boost. In Total Realism a civ that researches a tech known by all other civs gets 100% research modifier. This can be good in HoTK as civs have contact with all rivals quite early.

- I think belief system can be put into action to give civs some unique features as long as it is actually the main difference from a civ to another. Again Division civs don't really want to conquer all of China. They want to be left alone. They can then have unique (prerequired state religion=Division) more powerful units for defense. Their belief related buildings may give extra defense, etc.

- I know allowing settlers in the historical scenario is not a good idea but adding barbs or minor civs cities in empty areas can be a good idea. On one side they will allow smaller civs in remote corners of the map a chance to expand. On the other side it will make domination victory a possibility.