Have you noticed that the AI likes to take cannibalism,slavery, etc.? In the end, the city AI is constantly sacrificing population to build small buildings, and eventually my cities getting 30-50 of the population and its cities and remains on level 5 of the population, even in the middle ages and it adds to its backlog in all areas. Is it possible at all to remove the victim population to speed up production or make it so that the AI won't sacrifice it? Start in prehistoric times interesting, but to overtake the AI boring. Yes,it is possible to supply a large level of complexity and if it is not prohibitive then the player can outrun the AI,it just takes more time.
Caveman 2 Cosmos (ideas/discussions thread)
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Dancing Hoskuld
Deity
The "Flavors" are probably too high for the main buildings.
What you need to do is manually disable it or something else? I don't quite understand what you mean.
Thunderbrd
C2C War Dog
Some work was done to limit the AI willingness to slave off population for buildings during the early v38 cycle here. If you're playing on stock v37, you would not have this update yet. Hopefully, it has been enough to make them much more reluctant to do so.
Dancing Hoskuld
Deity
The Flavor tags in the XML probably have too high a value. They are used as a multiplier, I think, when the AI chooses to build the building or not. The numbers are supposed to help the AI choose based on the Flavor of the Leader chosen. Thus a Leader that favors Production is 5 times more inclined to choose to build Cannibalism. A leader that favors Gold will be 2 times more inclined to choose it and one that has both 10 times more inclined.
edit you can disable it if you like. In the folder Assets/Modules/Custom_World_Views there is an MLF file (MLF_CIV4ModularLoadingControls.XML. Just change the 1 to a 0 for those you don't want. We never got round to the Religion dependencies eg must have Human Sacrifice and Cannibalism if you want Christianity.
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I have a svn version that is constantly updated. Strange,perhaps I played with old saves,so the AI sacrificed the population.
Thunderbrd
C2C War Dog
hm... maybe I need to review other reasons they may slave off pop still.
Noriad2
Emperor
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Unlike BTS, the amount of hammers you get from sacrificing population is pathetic (at least on deity/nightmare.Not sure about other difficulty levels).
The only reason you'd want to do that if you really want to lower your pop to keep crime etc. in check (a useful necessity on nightmare, with -6 crime and -6 edu/pop).
The fact that there is a blatantly obvious bug in whipping (if you press the whip button, the number of population units in the city screen doesn't change) and I'm the only one who ever reported it (AFAIK), shows that probably nobody ever uses the whip button.
The only reason you'd want to do that if you really want to lower your pop to keep crime etc. in check (a useful necessity on nightmare, with -6 crime and -6 edu/pop).
The fact that there is a blatantly obvious bug in whipping (if you press the whip button, the number of population units in the city screen doesn't change) and I'm the only one who ever reported it (AFAIK), shows that probably nobody ever uses the whip button.
Thunderbrd
C2C War Dog
Yeah gotta remember to fix that...
The difference in value of whipping from Vanilla to C2C is that in vanilla you pretty much do it because you're wasting food if you don't because the pop grows into unhappy uselessness otherwise, whereas in C2C you can always do something to respond an enable greater growth fairly quickly and the pop is not worth wasting.
I'll also have to look into how many hammers you get. A while back you could spam about 10 units on one sacked pop... guess it's not as valuable these days. Haven't looked at how the amount you get is derived.
Noriad2
Emperor
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If I remember correctly, you get a pathetic 25 hammers per pop (snail speed). Basic prehistoric buildings cost 50-150 hammers. So you need 2-6 pop for 1 basic prehistoric building. Like I said, whipping is only useful for population control now.
Thunderbrd
C2C War Dog
I'll have to figure out how this is established.
@JosEPh_II or @Toffer90 :
Do either of you know if there's any gamespeed or handicap or global or whatever tags that control how much production you get out of a slaved off population?
Gamespeed:
iHurryPercent = Amount of gold or population needed to hurry building production. Normal is 100
Set to 100 for all gamespeeds except for "eternity▬upscaled unit and building cost" where it is set to 16 (obviously a mistake)
Hurry cost (gold) is already increased by gamespeed due to everything costing more hammers, so this tag is useless, it's like double taxation.
The amount of hammers given by whipping should be scaled by either iConstructPercent, or iTrainPercent, or by ↓
<Percents>
<Percent>
</Percents><ID>ADAPT_DEFAULT</ID>
<iValue>X</iValue>
</Percent><iValue>X</iValue>
Alternative would be to make the iHurryPercent not affect gold cost for hurrying, but only affect the hammer gain from whipping.
Thunderbrd
C2C War Dog
I guess I was looking more for what integer establishes the base amount of hammers you get out of slaving off one population.
Thunderbrd
C2C War Dog
wow... easy. Cool!
What should we set it at? Say... 250?
What should we set it at? Say... 250?
A good start, though it won't scale with gamespeed the way C2C is right now.
Maybe adjust gold cost per hammer to 4 as well while you're at it.
Thunderbrd
C2C War Dog
Yeah and I suppose it should but that's taking more steps into this than I want to at the moment.
Is it possible to make so that on the map appeared pirate bases(like the neutrals in fashion master of mana or 5 civilization barbarians),they are invisible to ordinary soldiers,for their detection need to be dogs or hunters. These will create pirate ships,the ships will all the loot,also will serve as transport vehicles delivering all sorts of robbers on land. Yes,there is a barbarian city which spam ground units,but the sea is not too many problems from them. And so will have to invest in the Navy to get profit from trading and not to be robbed at home. However you can just teach the barbarians to do so.
JosEPh_II
TBS WarLord
Why would we want to even keep this in C2C. Whipping has/does cause Multiple problems for the AI and Is a player in game exploit. Terrible decision to even have this in the Mod Imhpo. The whole slavery component is a OP component and should be Nerfed to Death. Absolutely abhor this in the game!
JosEPh
Thunderbrd
C2C War Dog
The AI does need to improve with it obviously. I'm finding it very strange that they do this so readily but generally speaking they SHOULD only, and I mean ONLY, be whipping IF they have a major army able to attack their city in the next turn. There's probably some other times when it would be beneficial but I was hoping to whittle it down to just that. I'm wondering if there are some python factors or if they are still considering small criminal incursions to be cause. I promise I'll get this fixed up as quickly as possible.Why would we want to even keep this in C2C. Whipping has/does cause Multiple problems for the AI and Is a player in game exploit. Terrible decision to even have this in the Mod Imhpo. The whole slavery component is a OP component and should be Nerfed to Death. Absolutely abhor this in the game!
JosEPh
There are a LOT of good reasons to keep this in the game. It was a Vanilla standard, first of all, therefore it violates the goal of maintaining C2C as a game that clearly maintains and exposes it's original game roots.
Even without that, whipping anger manipulation effects are woven into many wonders and traits and so on as balance factors to give and retract value from those objects, as well as helping to add flavor to those objects. I know that if we removed it entirely, my upcoming trait structure would need a lot of rethinking in parts.
Additionally, whipping is the invitation to use a food based production strategy where you do all you can to work with a city that has a huge food income - go ahead and let it grow to the point of problems, unhappiness, unhealth, crime, disease, poor education (which might even be a benefit to this strategy actually since low education should speed growh rates so you can get even more to whip) and once it reaches a point of intolerance and you have some key buildings you really want to get completed quickly (a WW you're in a race for, for example) you can actually do the city and your economy a benefit by whipping.
In C2C this is harder to really benefit from as it was in Vanilla, where it was a critical strategy for not wasting huge amounts of time when you could be using that population refusing to work due to unhappiness you couldn't avoid by whipping it off then letting the city regrow (would be growing further because as the pop hit unhappiness it would stagnate in growth, wasting the food on unhappy citizens who weren't working to make up for it.) With C2C a population point has a much easier time making far more than it needs to support itself, whereas in Vanilla a pop at that stage of the game was pressed to support itself and bring in much of a net benefit over that in food terms. Slaving grew less and less desireable for use through the game in Vanilla because farms and such became more and more productive. Here, a good farm can support 4 population with one pop working it.
However, with the crime and disease angle, the more we tighten the screws there a bit, the more it becomes a valid way to escape those effects when the costs of the units to support a high population get prohibitive. So deity players may start finding reasons to whip pop, thus why it was brought up by Noriad who plays with these kinds of legitimate challenges that this becomes a solution to resolving and yet still utilizing a high population birth rate. Clever players can also use food merchants to overgrow their cities like a duck's liver and harvest that overgrowth with whipping as well.
Having this depth of strategy some call an exploit. Others call it the stuff that makes the highest levels of play fun, that you can display that human intelligence can make the most use of all tools available to them to overcome a simpler AI player that is simply given a lot of handicaps instead, to the point that if you AREN'T capable of figuring out every human exploit possible - and this one is particularly juicy because it's highly complex to use without it backfiring - then you will probably be quickly defeated.
It's also a great way to give players a defensive boost capacity that enables the defending militaries to stand a chance against invaders, or at least help to wear them down further. A way to get some more troops into beleagured cities in a real hurry. This is really good for the game in terms of helping to give it some longevity by making cities a little harder to take down, but it still exacts a price.
When using it for troops, it's almost more of a draft system than imagining that you're simply pushing your people so hard that they are dying under the labor. Even when using it on a building, one can imagine that the loss of population is simply citizens fleeing the city out of fear and refusal to deal with the harsh overworked conditions, moving on to become barbarians elsewhere, or being guided out of the land by a benevolent diety or something
It's a blend of various concepts and does it in a way that doesn't get too graphic for some of them. In general, it's depicting the many ways that early civs would control their citizens to greater productivity through fear, intimidation, and worse.I think the game would be missing a lot if we took it out.
