Caveman 2 Cosmos (ideas/discussions thread)

[Thunderbrd]

@Thunderbrd his new tags overlap all your military unit's new unit costs you are working thru atm. Is that what you really wanted?

It's understood that the new tag will replace the old and the old will eventually be removed. I get why he wants to do this, so that the initial 1 assigned to all units isn't assumed anymore so as to allow for a base 0 cost unit as we want some of them to be, such as 'idea' units like our fish tales, and subdued animals.

I also understand that this whole scheme does change some of the tags and that they will require some rebalancing. There has been some ongoing discussion and some debates on various items. However, I think you can see this gives us more workability to balance with rather than less overall. I know it's a little different in approach on some of it and I was advocating for the discount value of a free unit to be measured based on the current average cost of units in play for a player but lost out on that argument apparently. Still, I think a lot of this is a vastly improved system overall so I'm OK with losing that battle in favor of just having a free unit upkeep amount tally. It's a slightly different way we have to think of it in that case.

Now finding out that a standard unupgraded 1st level worker costs 2 Gold in upkeep in a Normal GS game is outrageous.

It would've cost 1 before, as all units cost 1. Why it costs 2 now I'm not sure though it might be based on the current xml assignment. I don't know how much the current adheres to the planning I was doing but units were going to get a lot more expensive so that we could have more wiggle room for the player to earn more gold rather than having to restrict how much they earn more. There's a limit to how much we can reduce how much players earn so increasing costs is also another way to improve that balance and as we enable more ways to do this, yeah some things like civics will need to be able to stay fluid to adjust to current conditions, not much usually, but I'm sure it would be nice to be able to scale up some rather than always trying to limit them more.

Now finding that at least 1/4 to 1/3 of early Civics (Preh thru Medieval Eras) have major holes in what they provide or even could have provided is disturbing. And makes many of them now very broken. Especially Government and Military related Civics. Thanks really appreciate that.

I'm sure Toffer will tell you this but he made some initial numeric assignments understanding there will be more to do to get it closer to the right balance points, or something more similar to where we were if we had found balance to begin with.

There you go assuming again.... I have Repeatedly stated that until I get games up to and thru the Ren to Information Eras that there would only be minor changes to the earlier Era Civics. And this past 8 months has had a Lot of changes happen in my life. Just like yours I presume. My Main comp for example was in quarantine for over 4 months because of this Covid crap. At one point I was back to my old self built 2009 Dual core comp. Which had none of the Git or SVN progs on it.

Nobody really officially retires... they just stop doing things. I'm not saying I assumed - just saying that it had been a while since an update. Glad to hear you're still with us. You do understand not everything is going to stay super constant during mod development though right? I mean, civics will constantly have to adjust until the mod is complete. It's just how it is with this realm. It's not an attack on you. Sorry if I made it sound like 'now that we thought you were gone we decided to act' because that's actually not it at all. It was more that Toffer saw a need to improve a broken system and in so doing it disrupts some other systems. As you are well aware, that's what happens during progress here at times. I'm sure he didn't mean for it to be terribly disturbing but it does impact my work on traits as well in a similar way and I realize I will have to cycle back around to rebalance that side of things at some point as a result.

I'll let him comment more here - I'm only speaking from the perspective of the discussions I've been having with him on this stuff. He'll have to explain some of the nittier grittier details of how to convert between systems properly.

 

[Toffer90]

@Toffer90, so C2C becoming more and more like your Modmod "My Take on Stuff" now.

Not really, my modmod is less like C2C with this change to the unit upkeep code... My modmod is an XML/content modmod only, so it has to rely on the dll that is in core. This change is 99% dll code change which enables us to set precise upkeep cost to specific units, and allowing the game to tell you exactly how much gold a specific unit on the map cost you each turn in the unit tooltip. The few xml changes I included are just examples of what kind of numbers makes sense for the new unit upkeep related tags.

@Toffer90, Did you remove all these "old" tags from the schema? I have not checked to see. I have only looked into what you did to the CivicInfos xml.

Spoiler Here's the civic tag changes from the unit upkeep code rewrite :

Spoiler Global define changes: :

 

[Toffer90]

Perhaps I might sound like heretic, but.... Are there anywhere some scenarios that would skip "cave" part of game? Or perhaps cave, bronze age and classical eras and jump stright to middle ages? I played 6 hours today just to get bad memory allocation error. My time went straight through window, coz I have no autosaves ( they don't work for me) and I wasn't expecting game to crash, as I never had such problem... I would also like to see somewhat historical setup instead of totally random civilizations. I could make advanced start, but it... wouldn't be 100% what I want to see... I would like to start in middle ages with historical placements of religions and wonders, and from than on random civs can appear and mess up game.

A scenario is ideal for what you want.
Unfortunately, we don't have any scenario makers on the C2C team, but anyone is welcome to make scenarios like that.

 

[JosEPh_II]

iBaseFreeUnits, iBaseFreeMilitaryUnits, do Not equate to his new tags that only deal with a Civilian unit or Military units costs,
iFreeMilitaryUnitsPopulationPercent and iFreeUnitPopulationPercent again do Not correspond to his 4 new tags as they have Nothing to Do Directly With Costs, but rather with how much of the pop could be used to fill needs of the city in both voluntary protection or voluntary work.

@Toffer90,
So you did remove them from the schema
And neither of you want to explain why free units based on population were removed? You only want to talk about cost.

There's a limit to how much we can reduce how much players earn so increasing costs is also another way to improve that balance and as we enable more ways to do this, yeah some things like civics will need to be able to stay fluid to adjust to current conditions, not much usually, but I'm sure it would be nice to be able to scale up some rather than always trying to limit them more.

This makes no real sense. Toffer just reduced what many Civic could do. Not "scale up". And who was trying to limit them more? SO wanted complexity and I kept it. But not now as it's been reduced. Circle talk.

The few xml changes I included are just examples of what kind of numbers makes sense for the new unit upkeep related tags.

Few??? You know very well how much code you stripped from CivicInfos xml. But I bet you did not start a new game to see if the new tags translated properly. Example, Chiefdom still says you get 5 Free military units. You Do Not get 5 free units now when you get the chance to adopt Chiefdom Civic. Now other Civics that used to give free units based on city pop no longer do. And the Civic it self does not state or relay that anymore, as you changes should naturally relay. But those same civics are now lesser in value and the distinction between them is also lessened in significant measures.

None of this was thought thru or tested for validity and to keep the intent of what each civic would give. If you say you did, then I must say No you really did not.

I'm not going to get into another "war" over this, like what you both did to me last time. But your collective failure to include and discuss this with me is disturbing and in very bad taste and manners.

Will DH ever return? Probably not.

@Thunderbrd,
As the Lead designer and heir apparent to SO's work just say the word. If you want me out say it now and I will bow out.

 

[Toffer90]

Now finding that at least 1/4 to 1/3 of early Civics (Preh thru Medieval Eras) have major holes in what they provide or even could have provided is disturbing. And makes many of them now very broken. Especially Government and Military related Civics.

I didn't remove civic modifiers from civics without replacing them with one of the new tags that had a similar effect on unit upkeep as the old one had.

Few??? You know very well how much code you stripped from CivicInfos xml.

Most of it had zero set as the value, which means it didn't do anything.

Spoiler Changes like this in civicInfo.xml doesn't really change anything :

So you did remove them from the schema.

One could say I renamed them; or one could say I removed them and replaced them with exactly the same amount of new tags.

 

[Buffalo Solider]

A scenario is ideal for what you want.
Unfortunately, we don't have any scenario makers on the C2C team, but anyone is welcome to make scenarios like that.

Oh.... That's sad, but actually also quite motivating for me. I will attempt to make such scenario. I think I will make ~1500AD scenario or ~600AD scenario... Probably I won't finish it, but I will have my fun by trying that.

 

[Toffer90]

Oh.... That's sad, but actually also quite motivating for me. I will attempt to make such scenario. I think I will make ~1500AD scenario or ~600AD scenario... Probably I won't finish it, but I will have my fun by trying that.

If you're having any troubles with the world builder, report them to me at https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/platy-world-builder-beta-testing.657623/

I will try my best to fix bugs and add features to it when requested. ^^

 

[GreatLordofPie]

Oh.... That's sad, but actually also quite motivating for me. I will attempt to make such scenario. I think I will make ~1500AD scenario or ~600AD scenario... Probably I won't finish it, but I will have my fun by trying that.

The upgrades to the worldbuilder make scenario building a breeze. I was able to do up the bulk of C2C Next War in about 2 weeks, working on it pretty intermittently.

 

[Thunderbrd]

This makes no real sense. Toffer just reduced what many Civic could do. Not "scale up". And who was trying to limit them more? SO wanted complexity and I kept it. But not now as it's been reduced. Circle talk.

Sorry... it's hard to explain what I'm trying to say there. What I'm trying to say is that it is hard to reduce how much gold a player brings in because there are so many sources of gold. Therefore it can be helpful if players are getting too much gold income, to not just seek to reduce gold income so much as increase consistent gold expenses. Having a bit more visibility and functionality, including the ability to modify unit upkeep costs both individually for the unit and nationally for the player, gives us more options where overall balance is concerned, and generally speaking, the intent before and after these adjustments for many units is to make them more expensive, which will probably be a little disturbing if you're trying to seek a perfect balance through civic modifiers and upkeep factors where we start to swing the pendulum a bit too far the 'other way' and players start having to spend a lot more to field their armies so will need some more wiggle room for their budget by being a little more giving in civics, which in turn gives us the ability to make certain civic changes almost critical for the player to adopt so they can overcome the limits that the civics they have are giving them. Not that this is abnormal to what is already existing, but because it stands out and is more prominent, it makes the need to update civics more powerful at certain junctures, which can be a very good thing for gameplay because it puts more tension on when to take the anarchy hit and how you might strategize to be able to make those changes without taking that hit etc...

Anyhow, that's where I was going with what I thought was a more simple comment but it was confusing and this statement is probably too rambling to be of much help in sorting it out further. Ignore me if it helps.

And neither of you want to explain why free units based on population were removed? You only want to talk about cost.

This gets very technical into the programming and why this change was necessary. It's kinda hard to explain. Again, I wanted to make free units continue to be the measure we could work with in civics and traits, representing an average overall cost of a unit. A few others preferred it to be a simpler measure of just flat gold that would go towards unit upkeep support only. Certainly from a coding perspective, that was a bit easier to establish.

The main thing this whole project is about is giving us the ability to account for the cost of a unit on the unit itself, whereas it was not previously possible to do this. A promotion, for example, can modify the upkeep cost of that exact unit, which was not possible before, or rather, if it was, it was done through very fuzzy math which corrupted the 'free units' count.

You could give a unit definition an additional cost, but a given unit ingame could not account for its total nor have its total adjusted by modifiers or scaling factors because everything was purely being based on counts of units at the player level, with a secondary addendum count for additional costs and a vague attempt to make 'free units' maybe account for that extra cost, which it was doing poorly at best tbh. This all worked in Vanilla but was not advanced enough for C2C.

The math had become very skewy and hard to account for and report to the player in any meaningful sense, both individually on the unit and even trying to break it down for the player.

Free units had become the only way to account for some units individually being free themselves and this was making it very confusing for the player trying to account for how many free units they had from traits and civics because the free unit count was being added and subtracted to by things the player couldn't track.

In all reality, a free unit only ever meant a gold towards unit upkeep since unit upkeep in vanilla was based on the established cost per unit and a count of units - the cost being 1. The real difference would've been if we'd made each unit cost a base of 2 gold instead, which WAS vaguely possible to do in the globals but I don't know of any mod that ever did that.

Note: I COULD be a little wrong on some of this stuff and invite Toffer to correct me on anything I'm not expressing correctly.

I'm not going to get into another "war" over this, like what you both did to me last time. But your collective failure to include and discuss this with me is disturbing and in very bad taste and manners.

It was being discussed in numerous forum threads. I would expect team members to review all new forum posts in the C2C threads for what might be relevant to them because as we know a conversation on a pertinent subject can happen anywhere here. Yeah SOME discussion took place on discord but not all that much beforehand, mostly after. And a lot of times when you work on a project, you're kinda sorting it out as you go. He also made this in a branch, which although I'm bad at reviewing those things, it is how teams are supposed to be able to review each other's projects before they become part of the core. I'm still trying to get used to that myself and don't expect it of anyone. Still, I think the main discussions that brought this to the fore were in Pit's scenario thread and I thought you often followed conversations there...

 

[Baskedyt]

I think the cultural unit "Bactrian Cataphraet" is too OP for it's time, with a strength of 13. Both the unit and the culture that gives it, becomes available with horseback riding. The other units that becomes available with that tech has a strength of 6-9, not counting the heroes. Must 13-strength mounted units comes around armoured cavalry (knights).
Can the strength be lowered or the unit or the culture moved to another tech, to balance thing out?

 

[Thunderbrd]

As the Lead designer and heir apparent to SO's work just say the word. If you want me out say it now and I will bow out.

As I said, I'm glad we didn't lose ya. But I WOULD ask you try to see the positive in this disturbance does outweigh the negative. We'll have to make later game stuff get higher numbers on the gold support than we would've assigned free units I think.

 

[Thunderbrd]

I think the cultural unit "Bactrian Cataphraet" is too OP for it's time, with a strength of 13. Both the unit and the culture that gives it, becomes available with horseback riding. The other units that becomes available with that tech has a strength of 6-9, not counting the heroes. Must 13-strength mounted units comes around armoured cavalry (knights).
Can the strength be lowered or the unit or the culture moved to another tech, to balance thing out?

Once the current unit planning project is complete, I'll be balancing cultural units into it. Until that's complete, spot fixes aren't going to be a great use of time. Major imbalances like this one you're pointing out will also become very apparent once that part of things starts coming into the evaluation process. I'm trying to keep everyone regularly updated on progress on this project in the units thread as I go along. It's a rather huge project and represents most of my work for months while I'm not doing much directly to the game in the meantime.

 

[rwglaub]

How about a change where if you buid a building like sewer systems in one city. you builkd it in all cities. It will prevent cities founded later from hopelessly falling behind.

 

[Thunderbrd]

How about a change where if you buid a building like sewer systems in one city. you builkd it in all cities. It will prevent cities founded later from hopelessly falling behind.

That's what there are some wonders for though it sounds like we could use a few more national wonders to help cities catch up some. Still, if they all get right up to the cutting edge then they'll quickly all become just gold or research process batteries and that will just speed large nations through the tech tree. They need to take their time to build up generally but there's certainly a limit to that too. We can also get some buildings to come in at founding, which is something we thought maybe we'd do through promos assigned to settler types at some point. There's a few ways to go about that.

 

[raxo2222]

@Thunderbrd its like explaining details of modern science to religious person, who barely has understanding of modern technology and science

By the way you should add New Age religion somewhere after counterculture - it seems like a lot of you would like spirit of it.
For example you dislike limitations, that are known by current science, and could be eventually broken at faster pace by more funding into education, science and technology.
Also patience is virtue lol

 

[Buffalo Solider]

The upgrades to the worldbuilder make scenario building a breeze. I was able to do up the bulk of C2C Next War in about 2 weeks, working on it pretty intermittently.

Yeah, I tried it first first time. I very much like tools avaiable, but whole thing is working too slowly for me. I will download "no-better-terrain version" (if it even have chance to improve my performance). When I use this super cool city edition menu It's 37% chance (based on 8 tries) that game will freeze for ever and 63% that it will just freeze for minute : / whole thing is too slow on my pc. I will try lighter terrain and smaller map before I give up tho.


I have 8gb of ram, 6 free when launching game and game somehow fits into that 6gb, as I don't see massive growth of swap usage, but I think overheating graphical card and using non-native enviroment might be bottleneck... (As you can guess I have pretty old-ish PC) I tried outsiede editors without graphics, but they are not working well with mods, and I don't want de-crypt all "? ? ? ? ?" instead of icons.


My background is some attempts at game making and modifies to xml/python assets in CIV IV, so no scenarios up to yesterday I immidietly started with placing cities of china, than I added techs, improvements, some workers, but I couldn't edit cities, as this GUI was too painful to use (time-wise, not utility-wise ( so I think smaller map won't help me, smaller terrain textures also have slim chances of affecting anything) )

 

[Thunderbrd]

By the way you should add New Age religion somewhere after counterculture - it seems like a lot of you would like spirit of it.

I've advocated adding that for a while. I may at some point make expanding religions, particularly into the future, my war front for further development. Thing about New Age is its an attempt to find what's true in all religious/philosophical ideologies, though I think there could be one underlying foundational truth it could be said to be built on.

What, by the way, is like:

explaining details of modern science to religious person, who barely has understanding of modern technology and science

? Wasn't sure what you were referring to. Was it my previous response going into advanced details of mod balancing considerations?

 

[GreatLordofPie]

Yeah, I tried it first first time. I very much like tools avaiable, but whole thing is working too slowly for me. I will download "no-better-terrain version" (if it even have chance to improve my performance). When I use this super cool city edition menu It's 37% chance (based on 8 tries) that game will freeze for ever and 63% that it will just freeze for minute : / whole thing is too slow on my pc. I will try lighter terrain and smaller map before I give up tho.

That's not really something ive experienced...which SVN version are you using?

 

[raxo2222]

? Wasn't sure what you were referring to. Was it my previous response going into advanced details of mod balancing considerations?

I meant that Joseph has hard time understanding seemingly extensive changes, that don't change anything in game.
That is some concepts are simply too hard for some people.

 

[JosEPh_II]

@Thunderbrd its like explaining details of modern science to religious person, who barely has understanding of modern technology and science

<snip>

You are becoming offensive with your lack of understanding and lack of respect for others. And your erroneous assumptions, especially towards me. I will ask, tell you this just One Time, Do Not do it again. Understand?

With military, junior college, and full time college I have over 200+ hours of completed course work. With a 3.55 grade avg. I do not have a degree though because of finances and switching majors from Computer and Information Sciences to Math Education. While at the same time raising a growing family of 4 children.

You are a bit of an *ss raxxo and you need to realize that. I have warned you so I will say no more.