Caveman2Cosmos v41.2 Player Guide

Caveman2Cosmos v41.2 Player Guide

Released: 3/14/2021

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SVN updateable version here: https://github.com/caveman2cosmos/Caveman2Cosmos/wiki/Using-SVN

v41.2

v41 with half a year of more fixes and a new game option for Advanced Routes. This will be detailed further in the v42 full explanation. We are likely to soon break game compatibility from here so we released the 'latest' before going forward into dark territory where we can no longer debug many games running.

Forward for v41

Well... we've just released! Some information is being compiled about this release and over the course of the next day or two we'll update this text extensively.

Version 41 is a huge set of simple game improvements with massive amounts of underlying code upgrades that speed up the game and expand how far a player can get without experiencing memory errors. FAR more stable, and hundreds of balance tweaks, including a major civics review. This modernized version should make for a great game experience and we are proud to present it to you as the latest installment in this ongoing work to manifest a grand vision of what Civ IV could have been if expansions had continued rather than entirely new versions being introduced.

Oh, by the way, be sure to stop in and check out the new tech tree page display if you're looking to have your mind absolutely blown! (Thanks Bill and Toffer!)

For this version, I'd like to thank @Toffer90 in particular for taking the reigns on numerous projects - ok seriously on the whole mod! You've been an incredible contributor and v41 is more your efforts than any given other. Your PPIO contribution just gets better all the time and you've certainly gone far beyond that as well.

@MattCA and @Blazenclaw have also stepped up and helped a lot with various coding projects. Matt is such a silent contributor I sometimes get lost in all the many things he has done to help here. And Blaze is... growing more and more indispensable by the day.

You guys have kept things nice and cleanly debugged and that's incredibly appreciated!

@JosEPh_II has completed a major review of civics with the goal of improved game balance in numerous ways.

@DrD_AVEL has continued to make the mod look better all the time... such new sparkle all over the place here!

@raxo2222, as always, has been a major help handling a lot of the miscellaneous fixes and issues here and there, and being a knowledge resource for all of us on hand whenever we need it most.

And a special thanks to PhilosoShy on streaming the game non-stop every week to help promote the game and contributing his vocal talents to our tech quotes. Thanks also to IdioticUlt1mara for regularly streaming and promoting our mod!


Personally, my efforts have been fairly minimal through this year in terms of direct modifications to the mod. However, I've been hard at work in the unit design lab and hoping that within another year I should be able to suddenly start making HUGE changes, leaps and bounds in strides forward in unit AI function and strategic balance points, completing numerous new and existing combat mod projects in process and perhaps even taking part in getting Multimaps finally up and running. Yeah, it's THAT big what I'm working on here and once it starts going into actual application it should be pretty interesting.

But in the meantime so many improvements have taken place that it's really finally time to make this release happen! @billw2015 Thank you again for getting us setup on a fast track to massive improvements and overcoming huge obstacles in our path. You will ALWAYS be welcome to come back and continue working with us at any time and the mark you've left on our ability to make progress here is going to be a matter of legend forever.



v40.1

We have been working on a lot of bugfixes, graphics, and general improvements in all sorts of areas. v40.1 does not introduce new rules or any significant new content. It's just a better game. Thanks, in largest part to @billw2015 , @Toffer90 , @raxo2222 , and @DrD_AVEL for their hard work on improving the greatest of the CivIV mods!

Meanwhile, I've been laying low and in planning mode.

v40

Welcome to the team BillW and Anq! With our newest team members bringing some cutting edge game industry professional level coding skills, we have overhauled a lot regarding the underlying game engine. Processing speed, memory management and balance improvements are the hallmarks of this version release. Players are reaching farther and farther into the later eras without encountering critical bugs than ever before, and the time it takes to get there has been dramatically streamlined.

We also include a major rework in the Prehistoric and Information age Tech Trees and some civic improvements that should all help create better staging of unit access points and economic balance factors. You will find that the first part of the game will play out very differently if you were highly familiar with the best practices in the Prehistoric era. There are numerous new strategies and interesting decisions to make as you seek to advance to a Sedentary Lifestyle.

Oh, also, and I can't believe I forgot to mention this on the download notes... Toffer's PPIO is now stock with the mod. This thing is truly awesome UI design and you'll find that the pedia is lightning fast now as well as a tremendous number of various improvements in the UI have been made.

One more thing... you may notice a number of sprite graphics have been vastly improved. That would be thanks to our newest art team member, DrD_AVEL (affectionately known as Daredevil) who connects to us through our Discord server and has just today made his first Git commit just after this version update. He's been helping us with lots of 2d art and does a great job beautifying things all over the place. Thanks DrD_AVEL!


Also, keep in mind that if you are new to the mod from pre-v39, the Complex Traits would be a very interesting thing for you to explore, particularly if you use Developing Leaders and Start with No Positive Traits.

And again, if you want to experience a precursor to the multi-maps space exploration system, the mod is capable of working with some great space maps that are included in the Maps and Scenarios sub-forum. Our core map-scripts don't generate off-world locations but with these scenarios and maps you can explore out into space and beyond now. As noted, we've had a lot of new development work on these this cycle as well.

We're quite proud of this version release. I hope you enjoy playing it as much as we enjoyed getting it to this point of development!


The Player's Guide

My intention here is to explain not only just what is new in the version 41 release, but also to help to summarize some important things for anyone new to Caveman2Cosmos in general. I will NOT try to explain the basics of Civilization here. But it may come through anyhow.

This is also not a marketing document, but an aide to players. There are more strategic notes in the Strategy and Tips sub-forum, and it's also a great place to leave your insights for others. But this is to help give an initial overview of the elements of C2C that makes this a truly unique Civ experience.

Not everyone will find this to be the ideal mod for Civ IV. We've been called over-engineered, kitchen sink, the largest mod for Civ IV that exists, a fine balance of madness and genius, built on top of some 4 mods before it with equally large ambitions. As one of our founders, @Hydromancerx stated repeatedly in the early days of the mod, some decade ago, MORE IS MORE is the founding philosophy here.

However, although it IS huge and complex, with a bewildering array of options for the player, and probably intimidating to many, we've taken a lot of steps to ensure that the game can be configured to be nearly as basic as Vanilla BtS with just some additional content, or can be set up to include an incredible degree of additional depth for those craving deeper immersion. Thus it is important for a guide such as this to help players understand how to get out of C2C what they are seeking.

While the name of the mod may encapsulate our long-term design intentions, we have sought to do far more than just expand the scope of the game's timeline. We've also intended to further flesh out every era, add meaningful new content in every game sector and deepen and develop new and core game mechanics so as to make this a more powerful model of Human development and an experience of true strategic mastery.

For that is what our mod is REALLY about, the story of the span of the human experience. C2C is about all of us, no matter what nation we hail from in this one life that will span a blink of time in the big picture of the experience of mice and men. This is an exploration of where we've been, what our ancestors experienced. What we learned from those experiences and what we've passed on. It's about where we're headed. Where we could have gone and did not. And most of all WHY these experiences have taken place, how they sprouted from those that preceded them.

It is from the past that we can learn about our future. The whole of human consciousness from Caveman to Cosmos is our legacy, and it's far bigger than any of us can imagine. But perhaps our mod can expand that imagination for us all, just a little bit.

 

Downloading and Installing C2C​

First of all, get the mod. While you're waiting for it to download, that's a good time to be reading up on things here.

Download Here!
You can also get a consistently updatable version of the mod through the SVN:
https://github.com/caveman2cosmos/Caveman2Cosmos/wiki/Using-SVN

Immediately, those who have downloaded CivIV through Steam should take note of this thread: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/for-those-who-use-steam-to-play-c2c.639734/#post-15305321

To install the mod, simply place the Caveman2Cosmos folder within the Mods folder for BtS. Your file path is likely similar to mine: C:\Program Files (x86)\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Beyond the Sword\Mods\Caveman2Cosmos Then to run the mod, start Beyond the Sword (or Civ IV Complete or whatever) and select Advanced->Load a Mod and then select Caveman2Cosmos. And wait Here's what you should know when you get started:

1. You should go ahead and use Play Now to start but don't really play that game. Just let it load with all defaults, save that game, then exit.
2. Whenever you exit, it is wise to exit to desktop and restart the game entirely. You may be able to get away with going to main menu but there have been known bugs this can introduce. Regenerating a map is also not advised.
3. Always setup the game you intend to play through Custom Game. There are some scenarios and maps and such you can find here that do work but if you're not using one of them, CUSTOM GAME is your destination.
4. The graphic options should always be Medium or Higher or at least, if you're on Low, make sure that animations and effects are enabled.
5. That said, there have been some unresolvable crash clusters we've discovered that can be caused by some unit combat animation events. If you are getting sudden non-repeatable crashes, consider going into the main game option panel and setting the options Quick Combat (Offense) and Quick Combat (Defense) to ON and see if that helps. I MAY have corrected this in v38 but I cannot say that for sure.
   
6. NEVER rename the mod folder to anything BUT Caveman2Cosmos unless you have damned good reason to. We've found that some bugs may exist simply due to renaming the mod folder. Furthermore, it adds a half hour minimum to the debugging process when I look into a save made on a mod named something other than Caveman2Cosmos, and that makes me want to pull my hair out when I encounter this problem.
7. Be prepared to follow the instructions given in the Bugs and Crashes primary thread(s). This mostly means if you have a bug, please don't hesitate to report it but report it according to the rules intended to make it as possible for us to debug it as can be. I'll not cover those rules here. Look at the first post on the current bug threads (and use the right thread!) Please don't post new topic threads there... I use the main threads as a way of tracking what has and has not been addressed and will probably overlook bugs reported in new threads unless I'm really on top of things.
8. "Just have fun!" Don't let the mod overwhelm you. Civ IV itself is a pretty big game and we take it about 50 levels past that. Just explore things as they come. You should probably read, or at least scan, through this thread, but if anything doesn't make immediate sense, that's perfectly OK. Let it be. Come back to it down the road. It'll make sense later. Use this thread as a reference when you encounter something you don't understand.
9. Steam users who just installed often complain the mod doesn't seem to load correctly and they don't get a different main menu screen than the Civ BtS. This happens when Steam installed an unnecessary Caveman2Cosmos folder inside the mods folder and then placed the real Caveman2Cosmos folder inside that. Get rid of one of the layers of Caveman2Cosmos folders and you'll be good to go.
10. You MUST be using the 3.19 patch that can be found on THIS FORUM, installed by hand before you load Caveman2Cosmos. There are other 3.19 patches out there. They don't work. NEW: It seems most of the ways one might get the original CivIV BtS these days have this included and it may no longer be commonly necessary - further, I'm not sure that this 3.19 patch link works anymore... I'll research soon.
11. We're doing pretty good with multiplayer stability but you should use the direct IP connection over the LAN option. If you play a simultaneous MP game, make sure to turn off events or you'll get swamped with OOS errors. Might want to keep Revolutions off for good measure as well. Try to avoid a lot of automating units and sending them farther than they can go in one turn - and avoid setting wonders other players may have set to be built in their cities so some communication there can help.
    
12. On older systems using XP and 32 bit, I advise searching the forums here for the 3GB Switch and using it.
13. You need to run this program as the Administrator on most Windows platforms or you'll get major python errors.
14. A long time back we were getting some conflicts if you had other mods in your mod folder that this one was built from. Other copies of Caveman2Cosmos, named other things, A New Dawn, Rise of Mankind, Better BtS AI, etc... COULD cause conflicts but it's unlikely.
15. You do NOT need (nor will it work) to install BUG, BAT, BULL, Baskervilles, any other addons etc...
16. ONLY modmods in the forum here may work and the team and I do not vouch for anything outside the core download. If you have a modmod loaded, it's probably not going to be something I can debug. Sorry for that.
17. Those playing with Windows 7 should be aware we sometimes have some rare crashes that are a result of Windows 7 itself. You can get through those by playing in windows compatibility mode with Win XP, or better yet: Windows Vista SP2 (this seems to run better overall). Please try this before registering a bug report on a crash.

That should cover most of the basics of getting started for new players and should help you to navigate 99% of the reported struggles with downloading. The mod should be available here on the forum.

StrategyOnly will post how to get the latest version on the main Caveman2Cosmos entitled thread here.

Maps
The only ones I will personally vouch for being tested and functioning well are C2C_PerfectWorld2F, C2C_PlanetGenerator_0_68, and C2C_World. I'm sure the others are valid too but I've not tested much past these three lately. World, in particular, has gotten a number of improvements this version.

Each may have its 'flaws' according to your preferences but the last one is a project from @Toffer90 so if you have feedback on it, he'd appreciate that so he can find ways to improve on it. Its intent is to eventually answer to all of the frustrations we've had for a long time with slightly insufficient maps for the mod.

I'll not address most map options here except to discuss a little about the More Resources and More Rivers options below.

The game will default now to starting in the PREHISTORIC ERA and you should ALWAYS use this start as there are some known bugs we have not attempted to address with starting later!

It should be noted that the best game experiences seem to be coming from Long and Epic game speeds at the moment, with a lot of players also appreciating Normal if you like to get further into the game faster and longer speeds for those players that enjoy a more gradual game experience.

Difficulty-wise, I would STILL expect you to be able to play pretty effectively at one or two levels harder than what you would normally play at with Vanilla BtS (if you know.) Though this has intensified a little bit with this version and I'm hearing feedback suggesting you might need to back down a setting or more if you know where you stand on previous versions of C2C.

There are still a number of known bugs and deficiencies yet to be solved in the AI so don't expect them to be geniuses here.

v41 New Features​

Removed Game Options

• • No Espionage (Was problematic and rarely preferred)
  • Size Matters Uncut (Not the way it was really meant to be played to begin with)
  • Usable Mountains (assumed now)
  • Barbarian Generals (also assumed now)
  • Nightmare Mode (replaced by an actual new difficulty level)

Bug Option adjustments

• • Reactivated Dynamic Civ Names: Please look out for potential bugs in this system and let us know if you encounter them.

• Removed Battle Effects Bug Option due to honestly buggy behavior.

SM Adjustments

• Splitting a unit as far as you can before disbanding it no longer gives you more gold - a merged unit gives 3x more gold when disbanding than each of the three it splits to does.

Economic

• New Unit Upkeep mechanism that gives better user insight into what each unit is costing in upkeep (and works better with SM too.)
• A rewrite of the improvement upgrade mechanic.
• AI willing to spend more than 2% of their gold on buying techs in diplomacy. Now they, based on personality, are willing to spend between 20-50% of their gold on buying techs.
• Major new feature for Treasury upkeep - don't hold onto it if you aren't willing to lose some of it, the more you hold the deeper it digs.

Food/Growth

• Food consumption changes gradually between city population sizes rather than increasing abruptly with each population point.

• Exponential factor of increase as population goes up has been increased.

Tools and User Interface

• Major improvements with a foundational overhaul and upgrade to the World Builder.

Resources

• Revamped the bonus discovery and depletion code - its no longer necessary to work a tile to have the improvement on that tile potentially discover a new resource there.
  
• New Early game improvement that is useful for finding random resources on the plot it's placed - Seasonal Camps.
  
• New Early Fishing Boat improvement.

Misc

• The Armed Guard promotion can also be used to protect animal units from hostile hunter units - along with a bit of debugging to the entire thing.
  
• Master Chaser unit has been added.
  
• Major improvements with a foundational overhaul and upgrade to the World Builder.

There may yet be more to be mentioned.

Archived Commentary on v37 New Features​

Building Prerequisites for Technologies

There is now the potential for us to add a building as a prerequisite to researching a technology. You will notice this has been implemented for the Concrete tech.


Group Wonders

We've always had World Wonders, National Wonders and Team Projects. We now also have Group Wonders.

Currently, this has been implemented for a special set of educational buildings, Elite Universities.

The rule for Group Wonders is that not only may each wonder in the set be built only once in a game, a given player may only build one of the wonders among the set.

This leaves other players to select the wonder they prefer to build among that set of wonders and keeps one player from hogging all the wonders, while also making them unique so that not all players end up with the same thing as they do with a national wonder.

They are meant to be designed on similar base principles of modifiers with unique specializations that can guide which one you may favor based on your play style preferences.

Thus, if you build the Oxford University, which is specialized in enhancing commerce for your city, you may not also build the Montpellier University, which is specialized in medicine. The color of the background on the icon for these buildings helps to indicate their specializations.

More Group Wonder collections are planned.

In the pedia, they fall under the category of Great Wonders.


City Founding

You may find, upon founding your first city, that we now allow some features to coexist on the same plot with your city. This can be extremely meaningful to your city site selection as well because the yields from that feature continue to compile into the city plot, which is the one plot you are ALWAYS working.

As cities grow, some features they may have been allowed to coexist with on the plot may be destroyed at a defined population level. A forest, for example, will only remain on the city plot until the city has grown to a size 3 or more.

Caves are a huge benefit for cities, both defensively and for what they provide by being in the city vicinity. And they are never destroyed by the city no matter how large the city may get. Founding on caves can be a major boon now, whereas before the caves would have been destroyed.

With the City Starts with 1 Tile option, this can be a very powerful feature to consider when planting your cities!



Seas

Seas are deep water terrains that add a layer between coast and ocean. They help us to craft smoother transitions in trade rules and some movement rule adjustments. They are further out than coastal waters, beyond sight of land, but not so far out that earlier navigators so easily get lost at sea. Not all older maps have been adapted to including Seas properly yet. MOST of our current mapscripts seem to be working well with them.

This development is a major step in the direction of new rules regarding where you can and cannot build tunnels, when and where you'll be able to settle ocean floor cities and many other lategame plot development rules, as well as working in to some plans for deeper unit movement and interaction rules regarding depth.



Invisibility Types

If you are playing with Hide and Seek, these are ultra-critical to understand. But even if you are not, it is important to know that it requires being able to see both types of invisibility on a plot to see a unit that has two invisibility types there. On Hide and Seek, it requires that the plot is also observed by units with strong enough visibility ratings to meet or beat the invisibility ratings of the unit hiding there.

But what's also important to note is that each invisibility type is now denoted by a particular icon.

For more information on what types exist and their representative icons, check out THIS POST!



Statuses

There are new kinds of promotions in C2C that we call Statuses. Unlike promotions that are taken as a result of gaining enough XP to have earned a new experience level, these are unit ability adjusters that indicate a unit 'status' or a current but easily changed focus.

Statuses can, and have been, used to allow the player to adjust the rules under which the unit operates.

A status promotion is uniquely displayed as a diamond shaped promotion icon. Every status is part of a group of status promotions, grouped by Promotionline (see Promotionlines). You may only have one status in a group on a unit at a given time but you may also have no statuses assigned to the unit from that group.

In fact, there is almost always one status promotion in the set that can be taken so as to remove all statuses, including itself, from the unit so as to clear the unit of any applied statuses from that group. It usually only becomes available when you have a status from that group assigned to the unit and it stands out for what it is by its primary icon symbol being covered over by an X graphic.

You can usually only take a status promotion selection if you have not yet moved the unit at all and by default, a status promotion will use up all the moves available for that unit in the turn it is selected. However, some statuses are 'quick' and may be taken without concern for using up movement and may be taken even if you have moved, as long as you still have some actions available to the unit this turn. Otherwise, statuses may be taken at any time and there is no limit to the amount of times a unit can change statuses aside from these stated movement costs. You'll get familiar with the status promotions being an available option on your unit command lists as unlike other promos, they do not show up only when selecting a promotion because you gained enough XP to make it possible to do so.

Many statuses are good for some situations but very bad for others. For example, there are a few statuses, Forced and Quick March, both part of the same set but different selectable intensities, that offer improved movement at the cost of military preparedness and thus will make the unit faster but apply combat penalties.

You'll want to watch out for the hand icon status (Stay the Hand) which shows up as a default status on a number of units, most notably Recon units, that makes it so that the unit cannot attack but can thus share the plot with other enemy units that cannot attack. This status allows you to peacefully move through enemy positions, which is very useful for criminals trying to avoid trouble as they sneak into a city or a scout who wants to explore rather than hunt. IF you want your unit to be able to attack, then you'll need to remove the 'Stay the Hand' status (which is a quick status removal to select the status that removes it.)

Also stay conscious of the Standout status, particularly when playing Hide and Seek where many more unit types, such as Hunters and Scouts, can have varying degrees of invisibility. If you want a unit to be fully reliable at protecting other units, you should set the Standout Status to ON so that all potential invisibility on that unit is negated. However, when you're not escorting other units, you may want your unit to be as stealthy as it can be so at that point, remove the Standout status.

If you are playing the Without Warning Combat Mod option, you'll want to also stay conscious of the Surprise status, which sets the unit to attack enemy units that enter the tile by suddenly revealing itself and defending rather than allowing the opponent unit to simply walk onto the territory. This launches a surprise defense which is a stealth combat situation for the defender - all first strikes on both sides are negated and Stealth Strikes and Stealth Combat modifiers apply for the defender only in this case, giving the defender a huge bonus. However, after the ambush is staged, for the rest of the round the defender is revealed and will not get those bonuses if attacked again until that unit's owner get's another turn. If you don't want your unit to give up his position if he's invisible and an enemy happens to stumble onto the same plot, keep this status OFF! Not considering this can lead to the unintended death of a stealth unit that's dangerously close to an enemy's army.

There are more statuses to come still.



Route Upgrades

Routes, unlike other improvements, may not upgrade over time when a tech has been researched that offers a newly available improvement to that route. Now, when you do go to improve a route with a worker, the worker isn't building the route from the ground up in terms of invested effort. The previous route's build cost is deducted from the new route's build cost so updating your routes won't require as many workers as it once did.



Armed Guards

A new Promotionline warrants some individual discussion, warning and advice. This promotionline set is called 'Armed Guard'. It is indicated by a tall shield icon.

Once you take this promotion, your unit may never be able to attack again. Thus the reason for going out of the way to explain this here. The intention of this promotion is to focus your unit's role as an escort for other units. Units that cannot attack can pass through territory that you have a Rite of Passage with (one of the diplomatic offers that can be made under the Advanced Diplomacy option) thereby allowing your combat capable unit to accompany units like merchants, missionaries, workers, and settlers through such neutral held lands while protecting them against the scourges of strike teams and criminals looking to prey on these unwary peaceful travelers.

The promotionline is given further strong defensive benefits, particularly against those unit types that attack the lesser defended, making it good for many types of escorts. It was designed so that a whole new unit line was unnecessary. You can give this to mounted units for fast escorts or small sets of strong cross-defending stacks for maximum defense for your settlers through the wild, and so on.

Thus Armed Guards are very useful, but the promotions that create them can be very attractive and you can easily overlook the fact that it will negate the ability of the units that select these promotions to ever attack again, which can ruin an entire city attack stack if you don't take some care with your selections.



Criminals, Strike Teams, Ruffians and Law Enforcement units

A lot of work in v37 AND v38 has been dedicated to balance and feature development for these unit types. In previous versions, Criminals, Strike Teams and Ruffians have all been almost identical in abilities and purpose. They have now taken on very distinctive roles and abilities to help define those roles in the game.

To understand the differences between these three and what they now 'do', please refer to THIS THREAD!


Criminal Spawns, Investigation and Arrest

I've placed this discussion in it's own thread: HERE!

This feature has been dramatically improved in balance since its inception and was potentially cause for v37 to be almost unplayable. Its been zeroed in on for major adjustments and should now be an enjoyable facet to the game rather than an overwhelming pain in the hind-section.

New in v38​

Expansions on Criminal Missions

​

Criminals have a few more mission capabilities in their arsenal. The infiltration mission is much more effective and they can perform trade missions as they deal on the black market. When they perform missions like these, they must make investigation checks to avoid getting caught and made 'wanted'. If that happens, their movement stops and this exposes them to potential arrest. So it's not without risk. But it can also be a good way to attempt to get back to their home city in a hurry as successful checks will send them back to where they were trained.


Merchants

You'll also find that Merchant units are no longer destroyed when they perform trade missions but are instead sent back to their city of origin so they can be reused. This makes them a bit more valuable for this use than they once were. Use your criminals to sack opponent merchants if they leave themselves open for attack!

Land merchants that can provide either production or food to cities now cannot be affected by any production modifiers that aren't specifically FOR those units. This ensures that they cannot be manipulated to help generate more food or production than the producing city can for itself without them.

Trade missions now ARE, as they've always stated but weren't actually setup this way, influenced by the distance and population of the target city. Go as far away to as populated a center as possible for maximum results, though sometimes closer targets can be more beneficial.

Some special trade units still have a multiplier if they trade with a capital, among other possible unique benefits. There are a lot of cultural special units that can be collected for use in C2C. However, most CORE trading units no longer are modified by using trade missions in an opponent capital.

Spawn Mechanism Adjustments​

While animal spawns are based on dates to reflect classical points of extinction and ecological changes over the Prehistoric timespan, Barbarian and Neanderthal spawns are now based on the technologies possessed by the tech leader in the game. This can make them very challenging if you're lagging behind but should hold them back from dramatic out-teching you. We had a bit of an issue with that in v37.


Torture

I realize this may not be the most popular modification of all time but it certainly was a major factor in the Middle Ages. Since we filled out the medieval era, I just wanted to give the strategy decisions some lip service here regarding this new expansion. These buildings, accessible via a castle, a dungeon from there, and then a torture chamber, are all quite cheap and very powerful at crime control and espionage. However, they can also create a lot of problems. The idea here is - how much pain can you suffer for an otherwise difficult to generate game edge in espionage? Or will you bear to even indulge in the practice? It IS called the Dark Ages for a reason.


Free Traits from Buildings and Civilization Traits

Civilization traits are NOT the standard leader traits that represent the game modifying effects resulting from the personality factors of your leader. Rather, they are the general personality of your unique culture. They cannot be selected when your Leader gains a level in the Developing Leader game option.

However, in our introductory design implementation for them, which comes in at the Ancient Era, you can get a Civilization trait for free from the Group Wonder you choose to build from the Ancient Ways Group Wonder set. (See above about Group Wonders.) When the building obsoletes, you'll lose the trait it gives as well.

Much more work with Civilization Traits and buildings giving free traits are coming in the future.


Recosts

​

We're in the process of recosting the production requirements for buildings and units and research to earn technologies. At the moment, they are all established based on new progression charts. During the next cycle we may introduce more causes for recosting. AKA, we know that some buildings probably should cost more or less than other buildings by comparison but at the moment, the baseline cause of the tech stage it opens up at is the platform for its established pricing. You'll find that, strategically, this means you may be better served at times by not beelining for certain techs because the production costs for the power buildings they have may not be quite worth it until you get some of the earlier techs.


Gateway Techs

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Be warned that these techs, which form the only passages into the next era, will exact some penalties. Education per population usually gets more expensive. You can reach stronger education levels at these stages, which can be good OR bad depending on how on top of education you are in your cities. There is a cumulative 10% increase in all production costs for units and buildings when you hit a new era, and if you are playing with the Beeline Stings option, techs left behind become 20% more expensive to research.

But hey, if you're the first to reach a gateway tech, you'll get a jumpstart with a free technology. Use it wisely!


Space and the Far Future

My words cannot do this developing side of the mod justice. So IMMEDIATELY check out this brilliantly written guide to the concepts and designs infused into this planet-hopping new development to C2C, written by our futurist @pepper2000 : A Guide to Space and the Future in C2C

New in v39​

• Hundreds of bugfixes and adjustments all over the code and assets in every area.
• Global Techs: Some technologies, including religions, may now only be researched by a single team. Once it is, no other team may research that technology. This adjusts Divine Prophets a bit in that for the first 2 turns after a religion has been researched, the team that researched it is the only one that may use a Prophet to found that religion. After that, the religion becomes available for any owned Great Prophet by any player to found that religion with their own Prophet.
• Each individual player on a team is now accountable only to themselves where the earning of Great People and Great Military people is concerned so you don't have to get set back on earning one if your partner gets one first.
• A new option for Upscaled Research Costs makes it possible to set a game that has higher research costs. If you don't set the Upscaled Building and Unit cost option, this will have the effect of changing the ratio of production costs vs technology costs to make it easier to stay more on top of your buildings and units as you go. Not checking this option but checking the Uscaled Building and Unit costs makes it more challenging to keep up with the buildings and units you want while you get through the tech tree.
• Barbarians can merge units under Size Matters now - watch out!
• A huge amount of deep changes to food consumption settings and rules. Each citizen in a population now causes each citizen to consume a little more food since each citizen in a population represents an increasing amount of population per citizen anyhow. This, coupled with more stringent growth threshholds for population growth and some very insightful adjustments by sorcdk to our food waste mechanic now means that super oversized cities are no longer a prevalent experience in this mod and FOOD NOW MATTERS again!
• Huge new content for space maps and that whole segment of game development - still no multi-maps but hope is building on that front with some of the new master programmers joining us! A lot of new space maps have been designed this cycle as well so check them out if you want to go that deep into the late game stuff!
• New Dance Mechanics by Dancing Hoskuld that add beneficial new combat promotions.
• 3 years in the making: Complex Traits - an alternative trait set, designed primarily for use with Developing Leaders (particularly with Starts without Positive Traits ON as well. The Complex Traits option offers TONS of new traits, new effects never before seen on traits, and trait tiers (3 levels of each trait) which allow you to develop even more specialized leaders throughout the game. They were designed based on a method of point buying each modifier and ability and should be much more closely balanced between options than ever before. May be played without Developing Leaders, but with the limitation that leaders do not have default set trait selections on about half of the potential traits in this set and there will be a few odd duck leaders with strange settings as a result.
• Significant corrections on plot ownership and cultural decay and barbarian culture expansion.
• Expanded applications of the Group Wonders concept.
• Some huge improvements to turn processing and AI city expansion.
• Major changes to civics - don't underestimate how important it is to get those first civic improvements as fast as you can!

 

Game Setup Options​

These options CAN be changed mid-game by using the Worldbuilder (only on single player games) BUT many of them are NOT safe to change and may introduce all sorts of weird bugs, usually crashes. Best to consider these picks unchangeable.

I'm thinking of setting up individual threads for discussion on each option, with a poll on each that you can change at any time which allows us all to weigh in on our preferences whether to use them or not. I'll try to be brief here about what each means and how it applies perhaps uniquely to C2C:

• Advanced Start: No different from the Vanilla option except that I must admit we have not attempted to balance Advanced start costs for buildings and units very well. However, I recently came to understand that the code takes basic values and converts them into something reasonable here so this might not be as 'out of whack' as I have stated previously. Might be worth trying if you are doing a non-prehistoric start.
  
  
• No City Razing: Makes it impossible to raze cities for both player and AI. I don't use it because I like to raze - I often hate where the AI places its cities. But if you fear this being done to cities in your sandbox, feel free to turn this option on.
  
  
• No City Flipping From Culture: Cities can't be won by overwhelming them with your culture. But you should know that it also makes cities incapable of going into culturally inspired revolt. I keep it off because cultural warfare is fun.
  
  
• City Flipping After Conquest: Allows players to liberate cities for other players and for a city to try to reject the new leadership and attempt to rejoin whatever nation it most identifies with. Doesn't usually take that choice away from the player but does this through popups. I turn this on usually.
  
  
• No Barbarians: No Barbarians and Neanderthals. There will still be animals. We've split the Barbarian team into many factions of Non-Player Character teams that do not operate according to the normal rules for players. These teams include Barbarians, Neanderthals, 3 animal teams and a team for Insectoids (yes, Earth Insects, but also for an eventual future alien faction in development.) More of these NPC teams are reserved for the future.
  
  
• Raging Barbarians: Doubles the spawn rate for Barbarians and Neanderthals. Has no effect on Animal Spawn rates. Beware though, there's already a lot of barbarians out there without this setting.
  
  
• Aggressive AI: Makes the AI a little more stupid and aggressive. Not all that advised because it is not necessarily a better AI just because it is a more aggressive one. Successful wars and nation management takes patience and requires a balanced approach.
  
  
• Unrestricted Leaders: Allows nations to have leaders that are not normally allowed to that civilization. This may have meant more on a Vanilla BtS game than it would here depending on what trait options you select below.
  
  Previously, this was THE way to select a wider array of traits. However, not only are there other ways to go about that in C2C, the Unique Units and Unique Buildings of Vanilla are not affixed to civilization selection here as they were in Vanilla. Thus, the civilization and leader selection is primarily cosmetic in most arrangements. Civilization selections can matter by determining what your cultural basis is and that can shape what cultures you can gain access to. More on that much later.
  
  
• Random Personalities: Shuffles all leader personality profiles and randomizes which personalities each AI leader in the game will have so you never really can know 'who' you're up against if you've gotten good enough at guessing what certain leader AIs will act like. I don't generally feel I need to do that in C2C because there are SO many leaders here to begin with and most of them really are in need of further diversification in their personality settings in the future anyhow.
  
  
• Choose Religions: Whenever you found a religion you get to pick from the religions that haven't been founded yet. This was a cosmetic decision in Vanilla. Not so in C2C. Here, all religions are different by a lot of factors. In fact, we leave this option here purely for players who REALLY like it but the mod team would encourage you NOT to use this option as the abilities of various religions are balanced to the eras in which they come into play. In single player games, I don't play with it myself, but it can be strategically fun to have full choice with all the religions being so different. My wife and I enjoy playing with it on in our team games though.
  
  
• No Technology Trading: Keeps civs from being able to trade technologies at all. I prefer this option being on because I feel it too strongly accelerates the game progress to have it on.
  
  
• No Technology Brokering: If the last option is off, this allows you to only trade away those techs you've researched yourself. Techs you get from other nations are not techs you can then trade to other nations. Some players feel this mitigates the game progress problems in the last option but I don't feel its enough.
  
  
• Permanent Alliances: Sometime around mid-game the option to merge your team with another civ emerges. This decision links your nations permanently and cannot be undone. I don't bother with this myself.
  
  
• Require Complete Kills: Makes you have to take out every single unit a player may have out there on the map if you want to completely remove them (and their lingering culture in their old cities) from the game entirely. Given that some units in C2C can be very difficult to find (particularly spies!) this option is not a personal favorite because I like to get the reward of wiping out the lingering culture from captured cities when I vanquish a foe's last city.
  
  
• No Vassal States: Removes vassals (a BtS concept that has not been modded much in C2C) from the game. I turn this on because I find it annoying that a nation I'm about to defeat can simply capitulate to another nation and I'm suddenly in a war with the nation that took them on as a vassal, leading to a domino effect that can make one war end up swallowing up the whole world into it. Ugh. Needs improvements and it was discussed a while back to eventually adopt some modifications here from other mods but it hasn't been a central project yet. Some players on the team really like this option though and I can't blame them.
  
  
• No Random Events: Keeps Random Events (A Beyond the Sword concept) out of the game. This is important to C2C's proper functioning of the Flammability property. There are also quite a few unique and interesting events. But it can also be a source of infrequent Out of Synch errors on multiplayer games so if you want to minimize those you may want to consider playing with this option on for those games.
  
  
• No Espionage: Very heavily advised to play with this OFF for C2C. However, if you are finding some of the criminal and spy stuff to be annoying or unmanageable, you can probably turn a lot of that off with this option. But I warn that a LOT of the work we've done, particularly in this version, will be eliminated with this option.
  
  
• Barbarian World: Spawns a Barbarian city for each player that exists in the game at setup. Beyond that no further effects. I don't use this because I prefer to let the spawns deliver the barbs and because I prefer to have a little more open hunting territory to begin with. Once barb cities start emerging, they're pretty aggressive about getting in wherever there's a good opportunity on the map to do so anyhow.
  
  
• No Revolutions: The Revolutions mod from this forum is a part of C2C but while we have taken regular action to keep it balanced, it's still not a mod we created nor one we are all that great at balancing. I don't think I'm alone on the team to say: Play only if it's a must have for you.
  
  
• Limited Religions: In a nutshell, makes it so a player may only found a religion (when the conditions to do so are met) IF and only IF they do NOT have a current Holy City and they haven't founded one previously. The intention is to enforce that access to founding a religion is spread over all players and can't be so easily hoarded, particularly into one super holy city of many religions. Personally, I find it irritating. But some players like it so I've done a lot to debug it.
  
  
• No Inquisitions: Keeps the inquisitor unit out of the game. They can be trained under some civics and they are used to remove all religions but your state religion in cities. I like the idea of having them be part of the game personally.
  
  
• No Barbarian Civs: This is on by default for those systems that struggle with data. It's probably wise, even for larger systems, to not allow Barbarian cities to unite with neighboring barb cities to become new emerging civilizations, but I love the feature so much I play with it, even though it may cause memory failure errors later by introducing so many new players on larger maps. It can't introduce more players than the total limit though (40 + NPCs.)
  
  
• No Tech Diffusion: Tech diffusion gives a research bonus to a player researching a technology that other civs it knows have already discovered. This is intended to help civs that are behind catch up a bit so that there isn't QUITE such a huge steamroll that can take place in most games. I play with it if I expect, by the difficulty level I selected, to be ahead of most other civs. Helps them stay somewhat competitive (hopefully). But if I expect to play a very very challenging game and be behind most of the time, I'm turning it off to make it harder on myself. Of course, NO tech diffusion means that if this option is ON then Tech Diffusion is OFF. Watch out for double negatives getting confusing when considering this option.
  
  
• Start as Minor Civs: Basically, this puts all civs in an eternal state of war until they reach the Writing tech. I'm not personally happy with how this makes the AI behave less optimally up to that point. But some swear by this option.
  
  
• Usable Mountains: Allows peaks to be worked and moved through under special conditions. At first, special units can do it or earn the ability to use peaks. Later, a tech opens them all up for your units and for your cities to work for yields. I've advocated removing this option and making it mandatory for C2C. That's how favorable I believe it to be.
  
  
• Surround and Destroy: Units can get advantages in combat by having other friendly units taking positions in OTHER plots adjacent to the units they are attacking. C2C has extended some of the concepts of the original design of this option some, with defensive buildings providing protection from this bonus and some units being able to enhance this bonus when it exists. However, the AI's use of this option is still almost entirely coincidental rather than planned, so some feel it's not a fully graduated option for use yet. I cannot conceive of playing without it myself. See what you think.
  
  
• Advanced Diplomacy: Opens up some additional diplomacy options such as embassies and Rites of Passage. I don't remember what it's like to not play with this, to be honest.
  
  
• Unlimited Wonders: Removes the wonder limit per city, both for world wonders and national wonders. This means you can build an unlimited number of them in one city. When off, you are challenged to spread out your wonders and specialize your cities further. In C2C, if wonders ARE limited, then it is limited to a count based on the amount of culture you've obtained so the limits CAN expand, unlike in Vanilla. I still don't play with limits on wonders so I turn this right on for my games. This means I can play a super-city strategy BUT I'm finding new balance factors are making that a bad idea to overfocus your accomplishments into one city lately, with or without this option. Which is good. Means it's now a balanced game either way really.
  
  
• Barbarian Generals: Has 2 effects: 1) Barbarians can get Great Generals and turn them into Great Commanders if that option is on later. And 2) Combat with NPC teams gives your nation points towards Great Military People, such as Great Generals (they aren't the only Great Military People anymore in C2C - more on that later.) I believe this option is critical to a few things we've done in C2C that are pretty cool and I have no problem letting barbs use Great Commanders either.
  
  
• No Zones of Control: Zones of Control can be created by forts and cities (some buildings generate these zones) when this option is off. Enemy units cannot move from one plot adjacent to a source of a Zone of Control to another plot adjacent to a source of a Zone of Control. The point of this is to model that the unit would come under heavy fire and be destroyed if it were to try such a move. Thus usually the city and/or fort must be manned for it to generate the Zone of Control.
  
  Having Zones of Control on can cause some undue slowdown in tun processing and I personally feel that I'd often like to have the choice to let my unit come under fire instead of assuming it would be destroyed if it did so. Thus the option for turning off Zones of Control was introduced. I use it myself but I have to admit that ZoCs do add something to the strategy layer of the game that I do want to eventually replicate with a solution that answers to my complaint regarding the premise.
  
  
• Final Five: Every 50 turns, the bottom player is destroyed until only 5 remain. I don't play with this as I find it gamey and I like a more historical immersive feel to the game. Could be fun for a game or two to try it though.
  
  
• High to Low: Carefull... this one has caused a bug report or two from players who set it not reading very carefully what it does in the help hover tip. It changes which player you are playing periodically so that you are having to play catch up from the bottom with each shift. I don't use it myself.
  
  
• Increasing Difficulty: Every so often your difficulty level goes up one until it maxes out at Deity. There's another option in the BUG options (we'll discuss those later) that can cover this AND give you some more definitive controls to how it operates.
  
  
• Ruthless AI: This is the more aggressive cousin to Aggressive AI. It will turn Aggressive AI on as well if you use it. Again, I advise against it for all the same reasons as Aggressive AI.
  
  
• Great Commanders: Some Great Military People, such as Great Generals, can be turned into Field Commanders, which although they have no strength of their own, can add bonuses to nearby or same plot units you control when they enter combat. They can get promotions that make the bonuses they give even more powerful and they can expand to influence more and more units (the amount of units they influence in combat each round is limited.) I'll talk more about them later on. I think these guys are pretty cool BUT they CAN cause a significant end of turn slowdown so if you're being driven nuts by long turn times, consider turning this off.
  
  
• Culturally Linked Starts: This rearranges player starting positions so that they more closely resemble real world starting positions for the civilizations included at the beginning of the game. At least in a relative fashion. This can be a good thing if you want the map to reflect the base cultures coming from similar evolutionary roots geographically. I don't usually play it out of some apathy towards the concept rather than disagreement. Mostly because I play a lot of Team games and I would not advise it for a team game where placement close to your team partner can be disrupted by the option.
  
  
• Personalized Map: An interesting option where tiles get named at game setup. My only issue with it is that we have not been able to fully fix a problem with map labels not saving and reloading properly.
  
  
• Advanced Economy: Allows for inflation and some decimalized values in the economy, as well as some deeper stuff with trade. I like it.
  
  
• Realistic Culture Spread: (RCS for short) Culture spread was pretty basic in Vanilla BtS. This makes it grow a bit more organically. Jungles, hills, rivers, forests, all can resist the entry of your culture as your culture levels grow. It also adds new culture levels. We've adjusted it in v37 so that resources on the map make it easier for the culture to grow into a plot. I really like how this option works now that it's been a little recalibrated.
  
  
• Larger Cities without Metropolitan Administration: C2C allows the third rung of city radius to be worked by the city once you have achieved the right to do so. This option determines what grants that access. With this option ON, the right to work the third tile out is given purely by reaching Influential culture level. With it off, you need to reach the tech that gives you access to the Metropolitan Administration and build it in the city. I find it takes longer to get there and makes culture less valuable VS research without this option so I play with this option ON. But the designer of this option (Koshling) had intended it to be a temporary patch to a disagreement and strongly urges it not be used.
  
  
• Realistic Corporations: More to come Changes the manner in which corporations are founded. Originally, corps are founded by using the proper Great Person in the city when the corporation has yet to be founded. But with this option, they randomly found themselves. Since the key to profiting from corporations is to found them in cities you focus all your +gold/commerce% national wonders in, and I greatly enjoy the challenge of birthing and saving up just the right collection of GPs to found the corporations you want in your nation, I don't use this option. Might be a little better balanced for the AI, though, who were never prepared to handle corporations all that well, even in BtS.
  
  
• Religion Decay: Religions that aren't your state religion will fall from use in your cities now and then. This is intended to represent the evolving religious adherence among the people Personally I find it makes the game a little bit more like playing 'whack-a-mole' so it's not a favorite for me, but it's certainly been improved as a system since it's first iterations.
  
  
• Barbarians Always Raze: This option forces all cities captured by barbarians to be razed as soon as they are taken. I've never been sure why anyone wants this but I suppose it could be a great way to freak yourself out a bit.
  
  
• United Nations: Turns on the UN world wonder and its voting system for games that are not using the Diplomatic victory setting, which was originally the only way to have the wonder and votes show up. However, if the Diplomacy victory setting is not active, then the vote to unify the world and win the game won't show up even with the UN built. I really like this option because I hate having the Diplomatic victory potential in the game but love having the UN still.
  
  
• Advanced Espionage: Adds some further espionage mission options and gives spies the opportunity to gain experience and level up. Also opens up some additional spy units. This is just flat out cool in my opinion. Very satisfying to suitcase nuke a city later in the game.
  
  
• Advanced Nukes: Adds new Nuclear units. We accidentally disrupted some of the function of this option a while back, since it was hardcoded to a particular civic, which we removed, and I haven't had the opportunity to fix it yet. This factor added a new defcon screen when using that civic. Furthermore, not all the Nukes are well designed to really show the additional power they were meant to and some of the effects were found buggy and disconnected. The option isn't fully what it should be right now but I still play with it and intend to fix it and flesh it out down the road.
  
  
• Divine Prophets: C2C's first unique option (and my first modding effort ever!) Religions are founded by Great Prophets. Furthermore, Great Prophets may spread any tech qualified religion to any city he chooses to go to and spread it and if you are the first to spread a given religion, you are founding that religion (so you may want to check the Religious advisor to see which religions have and have not yet been founded.) When you are first to reach a religious tech, rather than getting a religion, you get a Great Prophet. If Choose Religions is OFF then your Prophets may only found those religions you have the tech for. With Choose Religions ON, earning a Prophet can allow you to found any religion that hasn't been founded yet. The option is compatible with Limited Religions as well.
  
  Some feel this option is great because it allows you to place the Holy City wherever you want it. Others feel it's too exploitable. Even as the designer of the option I can see both sides and eventually plan to provide another option that may help to balance it out more, but I still heavily prefer it to having the city the religion goes into being random, particularly in C2C where not all religions are the same. It helps to enable better city specialization but also does urge a super-city approach, particularly for the AI.
  
  Also, if you use Divine Prophets, don't take it as a bug if the AI doesn't always immediately use a Prophet for founding a religion if possible. It may be trying to hold the Free Prophet so it can use it for the shrine as soon as it gets the religion it really wants (which must be close on the tech tree for this to happen.)
  
  
• No City Limits from Civics: The limits this is talking about are not hard limits to the amount of cities you can build, but if this option is off and you found cities past a certain number based on the civics you've selected then you'll start to incur happiness penalties in every city for each city past that limit. There used to be an option for scaling this by map size but we made it an automatic factor included in this option rather than an option of its own.
  
  
• No Fixed Borders: Turns off the feature that allows some civics to enable players to have fixed borders that no longer adjust due to culture alone and allows for units to 'claim' tiles for the nation if enemy or neutral. IIRC, units need to stay on the tile claiming it to keep it if it's not held by culture. Some players don't like fixed borders. I like them for the sake of realism with more advanced societies mapping out hard borders like they do in the real world, so I keep this off.
  
  
• Infinite XP: Without this option, when you upgrade a unit that has a high amount of XP, it will lose XP down to a particular point (25 or 40 or something like that.) Doesn't lose LEVELS or promotions but it does set back well developed units when they upgrade. Additionally, without this option on, there is a limit of 10 XP that may be earned by a unit fighting barbarians and animals, but there are promotions that may be selected that can enable the unit to continue to earn XP from either animal combats or barbarian combats. In this case, Neanderthals count as barbarians. I play with this option on because I've never liked this design element of vanilla Civ IV where there is a penalty to the unit's progress if you upgrade it.
  
  
• Unlimited National Units: Many units in the game have a unit limit, meaning that a given player can only train and/or control a defined amount of them. This option turns that limit off for most of those units. A few still retain limits when they have been proven to truly require it. I personally play with this on. Not a fan of hard limits when they can be avoided.
  
  
• No Negative Traits: In C2C, there are positive and negative traits. These negative traits are overall a set of penalties (mostly). By default, leaders are assigned 2 positive traits and 1 negative trait. If you would prefer to play without leaders having negative traits at all in your game, then play with this option on. I keep it off.
  
  
• Pure Traits: If you look closely at the traits in C2C, you'll see that they have been designed to include both positive and negative qualities within them, whether or not they are generally positive traits or generally negative traits, as a whole. This option purifies the traits so that they are ALL positive or ALL negative. Thus, if you would prefer to have Positive traits ONLY have positive effects on your nation, and to have Negative traits ONLY have negative effects on your nation, then play with Pure Traits ON. This also means IF you would prefer to have ONLY positive effects being given to leaders from their traits at all, play with both No Negative Traits AND Pure Traits. I do not use Pure Traits because I feel that even valuable leader personalities have some downsides and even horrible leader personalities do have their upsides.
  
  
• Developing Leaders: The game default is to have leaders get their traits from their pre-set definitions, just as it is in Vanilla BtS. However, with Developing Leaders ON, you can earn more trait selections by amassing culture nationwide. This adds new value to producing culture even in cities that aren't on a border anywhere. Unless you are playing with No Negative Traits, you'll have to select a negative trait with every second positive trait you receive, though you can select to remove a positive trait rather than selecting a negative trait when you must make that decision. And whenever you select a positive trait, it can be used to instead remove a negative one as well. I HIGHLY recommend this option! It's fun AND it tends to lead to a more balanced game if you also use Start Without Positive Traits.
  
  
• Start Without Positive Traits: This option makes it so that when you begin the game, your leader has no positive traits. With Developing Leaders ON, you also start with no Negative traits. With No Negative Traits and with Developing Leaders OFF, you are choosing to play with No Traits at all throughout the entire game. The point of starting without any traits on Developing Leaders is to allow the selection of leader traits to be entirely organic and not based on preset defines at all. Going about it this way, you do get your first two trait selections much earlier and the third and beyond at the same time they would've been without this option. If you oddly want only one negative trait on all leaders through the game, play with this option On, Developing Leaders Off, and No Negative Traits Off. Could be interesting, right? Anyhow, I play with this option On, along with Developing Leaders, because I feel it creates the best-balanced game since traits can be rather imbalanced between different leaders at the game's opening.
  
  
• No Nukes: Keeps all Nuclear units out of the game. Ever feel frustrated that such a long and well-developed game can fall apart in the span of one or two rounds due to the enemy whipping out a bunch of nukes on your cities and troops? This option is for you. This option is not for me because I feel the tension of trying to keep a nuclear war from taking place, at least before you can minimize one's impact, is one of the most brilliant and intricate sides of achieving a game played into the later eras. And how fun is it to blast your major super-powered rival back to the stone-age in one round yourself?
  
  
• Religious Disabling: There are lots of buildings and wonders that are accessed by having religions. It has been observed that hoarding religions, particularly with so many in the game, can be a little imbalanced. This option makes it so that any buildings dedicated to religions that aren't your state religions are generally not going to function unless you have a civic that enables them all, regardless of state religion. It's a LITTLE deeper than that but this description pretty much covers it. Thus temples and cathedrals and monasteries of religions that aren't your state religion's are disabled until you either change state religion or select the civic(s) that allow all to operate at once. I like the option and usually play with it on in my single player games.

 

Game Setup Options and Victory Conditions
Part II​

• Upscaled Building and Unit Costs: Some feel that it is important to make the game more strategic that a city can never keep up with all the buildings it can build while also keeping itself and the nation well staffed with military. This is so that the decisions on what to invest production and build time into requires more careful consideration. This option has been recently re-balanced and should again provide the challenge that it was intended to provide. I like to get on top of all possible buildings as fast as I can in my cities and like there to be more units in the game so I don't usually use this option. In fact, I don't advise it at all if you have Size Matters on because that option is already
  going to challenge you to build a lot more units than you normally would.
  
  
• C2C Combat Mod - Fight or Flight: Any time you see the C2C Combat Mod label on an option, you are being informed that the option falls within a group of options that are intended for use all together for the deepest possible strategic game experience. Call it my own personal 'brand' if you will but it's more than that - it's an overall project. One which will lead, I hope, to the most fascinating ultimate expression of both the Caveman side and Cosmos sides of the mod, as well as everything in between. The goal of the C2C Combat Mod is to transform the Civ IV base stack combat system into something that will make you wonder why Civ V and VI EVER thought it would be a good idea to introduce 1 Unit Per Tile when there was still so much we could do with Stack Combat.
  
  Each Combat Mod introduces new game dynamics. Fight or Flight deepens the Withdrawal system from Vanilla Civ IV. It adds two new unit abilities: Early Withdrawal and Pursuit.
  
  In the original system, withdrawal is checked once when the unit that may withdrawal has just taken the last bit of damage that would destroy it. If the withdrawal is successful (which is a % check - basically a 100 sided die roll and if it comes up less than the withdrawal probability rating for the unit then the unit successfully withdraws) then that last bit of damage is never applied and the unit flees the battle.
  
  C2C also inherited a Defensive Withdrawal BUG option that makes it possible for units that are defending to also potentially withdraw under the same circumstances, IF there is a plot they can flee to that is not threatened by another enemy unit adjacent to or in that plot. Fight or Flight enforces Defensive Withdrawal to be always ON in this game.
  
  Early Withdrawal makes it so that the unit with this ability starts making withdrawal checks much earlier than the last possible minute before being otherwise destroyed. If my unit has, for example, 25 on Early Withdrawal, my unit will begin to attempt Withdrawal once it reaches 25% of its overall Hit Points total (has lost 75% or more.) It will continue to attempt withdrawal every round it remains in combat thereafter so it can lead to a lot of attempts to withdraw before it comes down to that last all or nothing ditch bid to escape the battle. On the downside, such units may not be given much time to do damage before they're trying to escape. A unit with 90 Early Withdrawal, for example, is trying to escape battle as soon as it's taken just 10% of its Hit Points in damage. If it succeeds on the first check, then it hasn't had much time to deal damage to its enemy before it has left the fight.
  
  Pursuit is a value that directly counters the Withdrawal value of the opponent the unit is fighting. Thus if the attacker has 50 Pursuit and the defender has 60 Withdrawal in total, then when the defender goes to make a withdrawal check, it does so at just a 10% total withdrawal likelihood. Pursuit is usually applied to faster, often weaker units, very few of which have the capacity to utilize defensive tile benefits but are very good at cleaning up strong withdrawal units that have just hit and run in a previous fight. Those that CAN combine the two abilities are highly valuable for defending against the strong withdraw attackers that are sent in to wear down tough to attack positions.
  
  With Fight or Flight ON, Withdrawal values are allowed to exceed 100% because pursuit values can counter them. Without Fight or Flight, Withdraw values in the core mod are diminished more and more the higher the total goes and thus reaching 100% withdrawal is actually impossible.
  
  Fight or Flight also adds a new world of promotions that accompany the pursuit and early withdrawal capabilities.
  
  Suffice it to say, I always play with all Combat Mod options, except for one, which is meant to adjust the way one of the Combat Mod options works. I advise players to add one into their game at a time and get familiar and comfortable with the option before adding the next one to the next game or you may get overwhelmed. But if you love that noobish feeling of having lots new to learn and explore, go for all of them of course.
  
  
• C2C Combat Mod - Size Matters: See many of my notes on the C2C Combat Mod as a whole in Fight or Flight above. The Vanilla Civ IV Combat Engine asks the player to envision for himself how many people make up an Axeman unit and to assume that the Combat Strength of a War Elephant has been adjusted for the massive size of beasts by having less Elephants in the unit to compensate. Size Matters attempts to allow players to no longer have to wonder if a Hunter means just ONE hunter or a small group of them. It actually defines these things. And it then further adds ways to manipulate and find strengths to take advantage of and weaknesses to exploit based on these size and volume factors units possess.
  
  In Size Matters, almost all units have ratings for three Size Factors, Size (of the individuals that make up the units), Group Volume (the number of entities that make up the unit) and Combat Quality (the natural combat readiness and fighting ferocity of the unit). They are all factors that are considered to balance against one another. For example, Elephants are Huge by size but also have a reduced Group Volume to compensate. Heroes have a very high Combat Quality but the lowest Group Volume (solo) to compensate.
  
  There are numerous ways to improve a unit by improving one of its three factor ranks. You can merge three of the same type of unit to get a higher group volume unit (example: take three Clubman units and merge them so that you have a singular Clubman unit with a higher group volume.) You can earn promotions that increase your base Combat quality, but they do reduce your XP to 0 if you take them, Infinite XP option on or not. And higher Quality units earn XP at a slower rate as well so it's doubly painful.
  
  Increasing any of your Size Factor ranks will increase your base combat strength by 150%. Thus a Spiked Clubman (str 3 when trained) that is merged with 2 other Spiked Clubman units will have a total BASE strength of 4.5. If merged with two other merged Spiked Clubman units (making a group of 9 total Spiked Clubman units) that base of 4.5 gains ANOTHER 150% and becomes 6.75 as a base. Much more impressive when you get higher base strengths than those from Spiked Clubman units of course.
  
  Units can also split, which is often a method to distract and harass, or perhaps to utilize more of a Surround and Destroy strategy. Or to split up to go exploring faster. Of course, they weaken to split.
  
  Size Matters adds a lot of new promotions as well. Generally, the purpose of this option is to introduce whole new layers of the rock-paper-scissors method of strategic design layers in the mod. Size Matters (often referred to in the forum as SM) is likely to present you with challenging unit foes that may seem at first indominable and over powered until you realize that for every way to obtain strength through manipulation of the fact that Size does Matter, there is also a way to undermine that method. Small group volume units can take promotions that make them lethal to high group units. High quality, low group volume units can be undone by massive numbers with Swarm promotions. There's always a way to get under your foe here.
  
  However, I warn that cities are very difficult to defend on this option! And your hunters may not be safe to automate in a world where huge herds of animals can band together to protect themselves. (That last point is new to v37!) But if you're looking for a Civ game that can give you a sense of first person adventure or just much deeper strategy, this option is definitely for you. The AI is still a little weak once you've truly mastered SM but it does have some tricks up its sleeve special to this option.
  
  For much deeper, though in some spots slightly outdated, information and discussion, here's a Link to the Size Matters Player's Guide
  
  
• Minimum City Border: Makes it so that all cities automatically and always culturally claim the tiles adjacent to them. Is another way to turn off cultural takeovers and revolts in cities as well. Not advised unless you really hate it when cities you capture can't feed themselves and often get recaptured by the strength of the original opponent's culture alone in and surrounding the city. I don't use it myself because I feel that's just part of the challenge of invasion warfare.
  
  
• More Rivers: Some maps use a default river generation from the core DLL rather than a specially defined method in the mapscript itself. This option only works to enhance rivers on those maps. This is for players that feel there should be a lot more rivers on their maps given how many real world cities are actually positioned on rivers. I use it myself.
  
  
• More Resources: Much the same as More Rivers. If the mapscript doesn't use a unique overriding method of its own to assign resources, this will add a lot more resources to the map. I use it but I'll also warn that it can often feel like there is nowhere to just have a normal farm or mine or lumbermill. It also can diminish a nation's requirement for trading for the really important resources. There are many ways in C2C to add a resource to a plot, events, Great Farmers, and more, and all of these become diminished in value and frequency if the map is already mostly filled with resources. I'm not saying that this option will place resources in every space, but it may constrict these game elements a bit. I believe the C2C_World map may use this option even within it's unique mapscript assignment method.
  
  
• Assigned Specialists XP: This option adds a new dimension to specialists where nearly all of them will add experience points to units of particular combat class definitions that are trained in the city. Thus, Doctor specialists will add +1 XP each to Health Care units like healers for example. Some feedback has expressed the feeling that this option is not yet well balanced but I think it depends on how many promotions a player feels units should be capable of starting off with that determines this opinion. We also have another option that can make this seem more balanced, More XP to Level. I play with this on. I just think it's cool and gives new things to consider when choosing your specialist assignments in your cities.
  
  
• More XP to Level: Doubles the amount of XP units need to gain a level (which is the point at which they can select a new promotion.) C2C has really proliferated with methods to enhance XP gain and assignment to units when they are trained. For some, this disrupts the feel of the original Civ IV experience too much or makes the game unbalanced. This option can help to make skill based promotions a lot harder to obtain and can make each selection mean more. It makes for an interesting alternative experience in my opinion, but I like hoarding promotions on my units so I play with it off.
  
  
• Nightmare Mode: Makes the game more difficult. In general, a Nightmare Mode game can be comparable to a game two difficulty settings harder, but there are other factors that are even more severe than that. What it's doing is replacing the difficulty settings with definitions that are just a lot more tough. Don't bother playing with this option if you're going to play on Noble level or below anyhow. It's for those of you out there who are REALLY advanced players.
  
  
• Size Matters Uncut: This is NOT a director's cut of Size Matters, but rather, it removes some of the rebalancing efforts I introduced with Size Matters and enforces that ALL units start with the same combat strengths they start with in the core mod without Size Matters. This option is for those who want to play with some Size Matters game dynamics, but have been playing the core mod for a while and don't like how SM changes some starting values on some unit types in an effort to further refine the roles of those units. It requires Size Matters also be set or you'll get some severe errors in the game. I don't use it but I was happy to provide it for those who disagree with some of my adjustments in SM.

~NEW TO v37~​

• Teleport Hunting Awards: Much of the Prehistoric experience in C2C is a matter of getting hunters out to slowly overcome the dangerous wilderness that early man had to contend with. As they do, on occasion they'll subdue animals in the process. These animals can be extremely useful for the civilization by adding unique buildings and being consumable for research and culture and other benefits. By default, once a player has the Sedentary Lifestyle tech, the age of collecting these animals for such benefits is passing and the benefits aren't as profound, therefore when an animal is subdued, it is teleported back to the nearest city. This option makes this teleportation of subdued animals always take place, right from the beginning of the game, so that players don't have to escort the animals they capture back. Sounds like a cheat perhaps, and does diminish some immersion factor, but it makes the collection of animals less laborious (and costly) and can be very helpful for the AI players that are really never going to be as skilled as players at handing off units to other escorts to take back to the proper cities while continuing the hunt. I play with this option on but I can empathize with the players that prefer it off.
  
  
• Amnesty for Units using Rite of Passage: Some complain that our stealth units are fouling up diplomatic agreements such as Rite of Passage (from the Advanced Diplomacy option) because you can just use such an agreement to invite merchants and missionaries from a neighbor to enter under friendly premises, then have your Criminals take them out as they come into your lands. This option makes it impossible for YOUR stealth units to attack any units that are in YOUR lands as a result of being allowed there by Rite of Passage. You can always send such units into a neighbor's lands (at risk of course) to attack those that have entered HIS lands by means of a rite of passage. I like to keep things devious so I don't use this option myself. The way I see it, if you are going to send units in by Rite of Passage, you should protect them with one or more powerful escorts, because it's dangerous to travel no matter where you are.
  
  
• C2C Combat Mod - Hide and Seek: See the general notes on the C2C Combat Mod in the Fight or Flight description above. Hide and Seek is intended to make unit invisibility and the ability to see units a much deeper strategic structure as a whole. The original Vanilla Civ IV rules on unit invisibility are incredibly basic and are plagued with an 'all or nothing' element.
  
  Hide and Seek makes stealth a contestable skill. It opens up new means (and promotions) by which units can become more or less invisible and new rules as to how they can be detected.
  
  It's an effort to make the play experience based on fixed numbers but so complex to compute all factors that it can lead to the tactical uncertainty you get with random variables. I believe it achieves this feel. Some, understandably, just find it frustrating.
  
  If you play with this option, you should at least scan through the thread dedicated to this option: The Hide and Seek Guide and Discussion Thread
  
  I personally feel this is a major breakthrough for the mod and encapsulates the central theme of the v37 effort. Many new core rule dynamics in v37 operate somewhat differently if Hide and Seek is active or not.
  
  
• Peace Among NPCs: As stated earlier, another major accomplishment for v37 has been to split up the one Barbarian team into numerous factions, animal groups, neanderthals, and paving the way for other types such as aliens and other hominid groups. When all of these factions were considered one Barbarian team, all players were assumed at war with the Barbarian and all Barbarian units were friendly with each other. Now that they are split, they all tend to be in an eternal state of conflict with each other.
  
  Thus, by v37 game default, Barbs and Neanderthals now stalk and hunt animals (and each other) as well as player units. And sometimes a tiger may take down a barbarian brute or a gorilla prove that even a Neanderthal may not be the STRONGEST primate. But much of this happens when you cannot see it taking place.
  
  So if this degree of organic world depth doesn't suit you or you feel that it's slowing down your turn times too much for what it adds to the game experience (as it does introduce some cost there) then the Peace Among NPCs option is for you. We have striven to make spawns adjust appropriately so that whether this option is on or not will be equally balanced to provide a wide variety of wilderness encounters. I do not engage this option in my games.
  
  
• Animals Stay Out!: Since the benefits of capturing animals does extend far into the later stages of the game and in the real world, many animals do find it possible to share the planet with human presence, while others may get feisty and start hunting Mankind, even in more developed territories, many of us have long wanted to see a more organic approach to how animals interact with national borders than to simply say they should all not be allowed to enter civilized lands.
  
  Thus, many animals may now spawn within borders and although they are uncomfortable in human lands and will exit them quickly if there is the option to do so, as land is eventually overwhelmed by nations laying claim to all of it, animals do continue to be a part of the fabric of the game, particularly where land is less 'improved'.
  
  This disturbs some players who want a more simple game experience where animals are concerned, and don't want to have to worry about the pissed off man-eating tigers who can sometimes come down from the wild-lands to stalk your workers when you least expect it. This option is intended to return the basic game rule that wild animals will never enter your borders. I do not use this option myself.
  
  
• Reckless Animals: A lot of thought has gone into the animal AI settings in v37 and many old complaints about marauding pigeons that plagued the mod in the past should no longer be an issue. Now, many animals cannot attack at all. But even animals that CAN attack, often rarely do, be it out of fear or respect or not feeling a need to prove themselves more often than not. Thus, by game default, animals are given an aggression rating that makes them more or less likely to attack (you can't be too careful though... you often never know if they'll attack or not if they can.)
  
  However, some players missed the game experience of being able to hunt by assumption that animals generally attack whenever they can. This option is for them. It generally returns animals to a universally rabid state of mind where they will almost always attack IF they can attack at all. Pigeons still can't be expected to be able to take down stacks of workers so they really can't attack at all now. Personally, I prefer animals to act a bit more like they do in nature so I don't use this option.
  
  
• Neanderthal Cities: Barbarians sprout cities later in the game. Why shouldn't Neanderthals be able to have their own thriving communities for a while before those pesky Homo Sapiens eventually overwhelm them by killing and breeding them out of existence? This option will give the Neanderthal faction its own cities. Recently a lot of work went into debugging and recalibrating some game damaging factors introduced by these cities so that it shouldn't be a detriment to any games now.
  
  Neanderthal cities is quite interesting because they will never grow up into proper civs but can produce units much more powerful at a base to the Homo Sapien unit comparison and can become quite a potent threat. I admit to some needed AI (and hopefully some eventual art) improvements for these brutes though. Still, should be fun, which is why I play with it on.
  
  
• City Starts with 1 Tile: The game default is to have cities, when founded, claim the tiles immediately adjacent to them with the starting culture level. This option makes it so that cities must earn the right to claim more tiles than the city itself. What this means is that, at first, the city can only work its own tile and the population it starts with is immediately limited to being a specialist only until the first culture level is achieved. At that point, the immediately adjacent tiles are claimed.
  
  This has a profound impact on the experience at the beginning of the game and introduces very interesting strategic elements as the game progresses. I would advise anyone to try it to see if they like how it works for them. It's quite innovative, which is what we do here as a team! We'd like to thank JosEPh_II for his contribution of this option and welcome him as a valued new official modding team member!
  
  
• Realistic Siege: Adds a Minimum Defense level factor to many defensive buildings, which establishes that the city defenses cannot be reduced past a certain point without destroying those buildings entirely, which is often not possible with siege weapons alone.
  
  Also brings a Minimum Defense to Enter the city game dynamic, which many defensive buildings add to the city, which force you to reduce the city to at least this defined level or lower (or to the minimum defense completely) to be able to attack the city with conventional units like swordsmen or riflemen, etc...
  
  Players from previous versions may recognize that these effects were, for a long time here, core mod elements that were not options at all. But not all players preferred having these effects in their games so the option to keep them from being on has been introduced. I absolutely play with this option ON, but if you're really used to Vanilla BtS combat or really prefer it, you may want this option OFF for your games.
  
  
• Vanilla Combat Engine: When I began working on the Combat Mod, I made some interesting core changes to the Civ IV combat engine here. These changes are not so obvious on the surface but would be profoundly interesting to those who understand classic RPG combat systems, such as that of Dungeons and Dragons for example.
  
  The combat engine of Civ has always utilized a round by round contest between units where one or the other would win based on the ratio between them and the 100 sided die roll (actually it's a 1000 sided die roll but let's not get too technical here.) Thus if the ratio of power between unit A and unit B presented a 60% odds for unit A, it would automatically have a 40% odds for unit B. This check would happen once per round and the winner would get to do their damage to the loser (damage is also defined in part by that initial ratio.) Every round these odds would stay fixed as they were and eventually one unit would come out victorious as the other ran out of HP.
  
  This option returns the combat engine to this original basis. This means you will see combat results more like you can assume from the original Civ IV BtS game experiences.
  
  However, if you leave it off, the following was changed:
  
  1) Both units make independent checks so both units can damage each other in a given round or both units can miss and deal no damage to the other in a round. This means on rare occasion both units can die in the end round of the battle.
  
  2) The odds are recalculated every round of combat, so as a unit is damaged and it weakens throughout the conflict, it gets harder and harder for it to expect to succeed in the fight overall. This means that first strikes are FAR more powerful than they were in Vanilla. If you're half dead by the time you can really engage your enemy, you're probably not going to do all that well once you do. It also makes a higher odds carry more weight, so units with less power don't usually make as large a dent or any dent at all in a much more powerful foe. Thus large numbers of lesser quality units aren't as strong against lesser numbers of higher quality foes.
  
  For a long time now, this has been the non-optional method of resolving combat in C2C. Now, the Vanilla Combat Engine is provided for original Civ IV combat purists who prefer the original design. Can't blame 'em. Civ IV is a popular game for a reason, right? I don't use this option myself, of course.
  
  
• C2C Combat Mod - Without Warning: For much of v37's design cycle this was in place as a core part of the mod, but I feel that it's distinct enough that it really warranted it's own option, particularly once I started seeing how frustrated some folks were getting over some of the dynamics here. (See the generic notes on the C2C Combat Mod in Fight or Flight.)
  
  The Without Warning option gives players the ability to Ambush and Assassinate, as well as Surprise Defend. It currently assumes you'll want to play with Hide and Seek and thus automatically turns that option on, but I may eventually disconnect this prerequisite.
  
  It also turns on Stealth Strikes and Stealth Combat Modifiers and lots of promos that give units the opportunity to develop these abilities.
  
  An Ambush is an attack against a unit that is on the same tile as your unit, usually because he didn't see you unit there when he moved in or because you moved onto that tile without attacking (more on this in a discussion of Statuses to come.) With this option on, any enemy sharing your tile can be ambushed by any unit type. However, some units make better use of this element of surprise than others. Ambush cannot be performed inside a city.
  
  An Assassination is also an attack against a unit on the same tile but it can only be made against units that your unit considers among its special target types. As an example, Hunters consider Animals to be their special targets. Unlike Ambush, Assassinations can be made against units within a city plot and can only be performed by units that HAVE special targets defined.
  
  The core C2C has had this special targets feature for a while now - its what allows some units to target special unit types inside stacks when they attack stacks, rather than having to deal with the best defender first - thus how Assassins can take out Healers in military stacks first.
  
  It should also be noted that with this option on, Arrests count as Stealth Combat where BOTH the arresting unit and unit to be arrested gets the benefits of Stealth Strikes and Stealth Combat Modifiers. This means that the Criminal stealth benefits can be countered, or even overwhelmed, by those of the arresting Law Enforcement unit.
  
  Stealth Strikes completely act as First Strikes in effect, and replace all First Strikes for attacker and defender in a Stealth Combat. This is because First Strikes are now officially to be taken as a result of range and rate of fire and the ability to strike at foes as they approach to engage in close combat, while in a Stealth Combat, the combat begins at close range immediately.
  
  Stealth Combat modifiers are cumulative with all other combat modifiers but only apply during Stealth Combat.
  
  Stealth Combats take place when:
  
  1) A unit attacks a unit in the same tile by using Ambush OR Assassinate OR Arrest (Arrest is available to the core mod now regardless of this option.) ONLY if the defender also sees the attacker in these cases will the defender also get his Stealth Strikes and Stealth Combat Modifiers to battle (representing an attempt to counter ambush an expected ambush attempt.)
  
  2) A unit attacks another unit that cannot see it by moving in to attack as it normally would.
  
  3) A unit 'Stealth Defends' its position. Units can be set by Statuses or Buildups to be ready to defend their position against units that cannot see them rather than allowing those units to just walk onto the same tile. When they do, they're technically defending but they've taken the 'attacker' by surprise so only the defender gets the benefits of any stealth combat modifiers and both lose any normal First Strikes.
  
  When Stealth Combat factors apply, they will show in the combat help hover.

~NEW TO v38~​

• Win for Losing: This option makes it easier for smaller nations to research. Keeping up with technology counts for a lot, if not everything, in staying competitive.
  
  The Civ franchise has always struggled with the game giving all the benefits to those nations that capture as much territory and population as it can and converting that to as much research as possible. We've coined this term, 'the Steamroller effect'. The more successful a nation has been, the more likely it is to succeed and pull further ahead, and therefore, the harder it is to resist.
  
  So some balance factors for smaller and less populated nations helps to keep the game competitive after a player begins to pull away from the pack. The more a nation gets ahead, the more his competitors are given a handicap benefit. The more a nation is defeated and pushed back and hedged into smaller territory, the more this option kicks in to give them a benefit that counters this degree of defeat.
  
  Mathematically, with this option, smaller nations, by population count and by city count, gain a percentage bonus towards their research equal to how far they are beneath the city count and population leaders in the game. This now only kicks in after the Prehistoric era because the small variations in population before Ancient were too influencing.
  
  When you play with this option (and not the 'No Tech Handicaps for Humans' option below) you will see the additional research combined with any benefit you're getting from tech diffusion combined in the main display window research string. It is denoted there as 'WFL' - Win for Losing, and TD - Tech Diffusion.
  
  What is the difference between Tech Diffusion and WFL? The benefits derived from Tech Diffusion come from knowing other nations that have technologies you don't, thus Tech Diffusion cannot help you get AHEAD, only help you keep up. WFL actually recognizes that you are at a disadvantage for being a smaller nation and gives you an opportunity to take advantage of that disadvantage - to Win for Losing. You can actually be the tech leader and still get a great bonus to your research, simply for being a smaller nation.
  
  
• Beeline Stings: We have new gateway technologies that are the only ways to enter a new era now. Most of them are called the 'Lifestyle' tech for the new era and represent the overall cultural advancement in the way people live, and the accumulation of the previous era's worth of knowledge. That doesn't mean that you must research ALL technologies in the preceding era before you can enter the next, only that these gateway techs are the only way to enter the next era, thus you cannot delay taking them if you want techs in the era to come.\
  
  Gateway technologies will give a free technology to the first player to achieve this point, so you may be tempted to race ahead for one. They also open up more intense Education levels and if you're doing well in Education amounts in your cities, it might be very lucrative to take better advantage of that. And of course, techs in the next era may be VERY beneficial to obtain.
  
  But beware! As soon as you enter a new era through these gateway technologies, all buildings and units get 10% more expensive in production costs. Most eras add more education demand per citizen. AND:
  
  If the Beeline Stings option is on, the techs left behind in the previous era, yet to be researched, become much more expensive than they were (more severe in the earliest eras). So it can actually slow you down considerably to race forward to the gateway tech.
  
  This can make for a very interesting and difficult decision as to when to head for the next era!
  
  
• No Tech Handicaps for Humans: Tech Diffusion and Win For Losing can be powerful handicap factors for researching technologies. If you find you like to select these options just so that the AI players have a better chance at keeping up with you and continue to present a challenge no matter how powerful you become, but you DON'T want to personally benefit from these handicaps because it feels like you're cheating, this option is for you!
  
  The option allows only AI players to benefit from the research bonuses provided by TD and WFL, if they are in the position to benefit according to normal game rules. This can make for a very difficult game. Good luck intrepid players!
  
  
• Downsizing is Profitable: The original game rule on disbanding units was that they were simply disbanded and you get no benefit for doing so aside from minimizing your upkeep expenses. Some time back in the development of C2C, I believe during Afforess's work on A New Dawn, before we branched off from that project, disbanding units were made to give some gold back to the player, which in essence made it possible to use unit production to convert production to gold, sometimes at a better rate than the gold process option. There were often some interesting loopholes some players were able to exploit with this.
  
  Knowing some players would really enjoy still having this option, but recognizing the original wisdom of not having gold be given for disbanding units, and not seeing a lot of justification for such gold being returned, this option has been added to allow players to continue getting the benefit of getting gold from disbanding, while the normal default core game lost the gold benefit for disbanding units.
  
  To make it clear, because negatives and positives in wording can sometimes be hard to follow: Option ON - you GET gold for disbanding. Option OFF - you do NOT get gold out of disbanding units

~NEW TO v39~​

• Upscaled Research Time: Technology costs have been increased by 40%. Use it when you want a more relaxed game where you can keep your building construction and unit training up with your technology without any strain. Can make for a more combat-intensive game as civs get bored waiting on technological achievements and train more units in the interim as a result.
  
  
• Dangerous Wildlife: Makes all animals liable to cross into your borders. Not having Animals Stay Out on will mean that safer animals tend to enter your lands and spawn within but with this, they are truly menacing to your unguarded workers and trade units.
  
  
• Complex Traits: Is found a bit up the list because it's been in development for a long time. Tons of new traits, a system of tiered traits, such as Aggressive I-III, like promotions can often be, NEW trait abilities - some rather impressive, such as getting a golden age every time a particular type of specialist is born, fascinating trait synergies and interactions, all designed with a point-buy system intended to make for a highly balanced, albeit very powerful, trait structure.
  
  This is BEST to be played in combination with Developing Leaders and Start with No Positive Traits because our leader lists have not had any defaults set for these new traits and it can lead to a few leaders not having the normal starting 2 or 3 traits.
  
  This is my personal crowning achievement for this version and I'm excited to invite you all to give it a try. The thread for in-depth analysis and discussion on this option is: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/players-guide-to-complex-traits.643570/ Here is listed all the abilities of each trait and I also introduce the idea of issuing trait challenges and ask for engagement in identifying traits that work particularly well together.

 

Victory Settings

I may stand corrected on a few of these. If I'm wrong here, let me know so I can correct the record. Much of this is from Vanilla and all of them have been in previous versions of the mod and have not recently been manipulated. I list them here for players new to the mod and perhaps for those who are skipping learning Vanilla gameplay.

• Time: Each gamespeed is set to 'end' at a particular turn count/date. At which point, the point tally is taken and the winner awarded based on having the most points.
  
  
• Conquest: The game ends when all other nations are vanquished. Simple and straightforward. My personal preference is to play this with no other options though I DO like Mastery as well, even if I never really finish those games.
  
  
• Domination: The game ends when you have established a domination that would be incredibly unlikely to allow any other players to truly present a real challenge in the long run. You've captured most of the land and have a huge majority of the world's population within your borders. I can't offhand recall exactly what the %s for victory are but it's measured by land owned and comparable population levels.
  
  
• Cultural: The game ends when a player reaches Legendary culture status in 3 cities. This is a good one for a faster game as in C2C this happens pretty early on compared to Vanilla BtS.
  
  
• Religious: The game ends when the nation that has declared the dominant world religion as its state religion, which is also the religion attached to the Vatican world wonder, has obtained the votes of all participating nations in the Vatican in a vote to declare the world religious leader.
  
  
• Space Race: In Vanilla, the space ship was compiled and then launched to the nearest star system and had to reach that system to win the game. In C2C, it's a dimension traveling ship rather than a starship, but it's pretty much the same challenge.
  
  
• Diplomatic: The leader that gets enough votes for Global President by means of the UN Wonder vote procedures wins the game. If the United Nations option is on, but this victory is off, the UN wonder and its votes can apply without ever bringing up a vote to win the game for a player. Otherwise, the UN wonder won't be in games without this victory setting.
  
  
• Scientific: Reach the end of the tech tree and build the Ascension Gate wonder first to win the game.
  
  
• Mastery: All of the above is on and the game will end only at the time limit, upon which time, not just the points are going to determine the winner, but all the victory achievements will be taken into account. Thus if you conquer the world but another civ reached a Domination Victory and a Cultural victory first, you may yet be the loser even though you had everything to yourself for quite an age until the game ended.
  
  I have yet to see anyone complete a Mastery game in C2C and it may not be the best game for the AI who tries to achieve all goals and probably makes some poor choices in the meantime. But it also means the game can continue in a meaningful way after someone gets a cheap shot and pulls off a quick and unexpected Religious or Diplomatic victory, for example.

 

C2C Gameplay
​

I've already explained a lot of the basics of unique C2C gameplay dynamics by explaining the game setup options in previous posts. But there are still a great many features this mod adds to play above and beyond the standard Vanilla BtS. Some of these explenations may end up becoming entries in the pedia but since YOU are clever and paying attention to the forum material, you can get your answers here!

Unique City Growth Rules

Food Per Population

In Vanilla BtS, each population in the city consumes 2 . C2C citizens eat much more, mostly because farms and resources provide a lot more food here and there are many buildings to enhance the food output of a city. Thus, each citizen consumes 4 food.

NEW in v39: Each citizen past the first also causes each citizen to consume .1 more food each. Thus, at 11 population, each citizen in the city is also consuming +1 food more than usual (+11 food required in total). The larger the city, the more the food consumption per population, which is a reflection of the larger actual population count per pop point as cities grow.


Food Waste

We still have cities that produce a far greater amount of food than consumed. What happens when a city produces a lot more food than is needed is much of that food gets wasted. The more overflow food you produce, the more of a percentage of that overflow becomes waste. Only so much will be allowed to go towards growth buildup. In the Food Help Hover information in the city screen, you should be able to get a breakdown of how much food is going to waste.


Hunting for Food, Production and Subdued Animals.

During the Prehistoric era, and to a much lesser extent thereafter, you'll find that one of the most effective ways to propel your city and civilization's growth and development is to hunt animals. Whenever you win a combat against an animal, you will have food and/or production delivered to the closest city. The amount varies by what sort of animal it is you've defeated.

Sometimes you can Subdue an animal and a subdued animal can give you quite a variety of potential benefits depending on the type of animal. You still get the benefits of the hunt when you subdue, because it is generally considered that the subdued animal is young you've captured from your prey and have been given the opportunity to raise in captivity.

Successful hunting can make all the difference in how well you succeed in the beginning and that can have a dramatic impact on your long term game success as well. You will also find that C2C has a tremendous variety of animal life in the game and where you find those animals depends on terrains, features, resources, and location on the planet. Use them all to your best benefit!


Unhealth and the Beginning Unhealth Deficit

Generally speaking, unhealth, in C2C, is to be considered mortality rates. As it is in Vanilla BtS, each Unhealth not countered by Health in the city becomes a Food lost. (Food waste is calculated after this step.) With enough unhealth, a city CAN begin to starve when all stored food is used up. At this point, if the city remains running at a total food deficit each round, it will lose 1 population per round. But a city of population 1 cannot starve any further.

The Prehistoric opening of the game is a time when humanity is an animalistic species struggling for survival in a violent wilderness, plagued by diseases, a lack of shelter, exposure to elements and predation, and unchecked foodborne illnesses. Thus, you'll find that you start the game in a highly unhealthy state.

Therefore, you are technically in starvation right away. This is by design and is intended to give you a serious challenge to overcome so that you can begin to actually put your round by round food income into the black and save up every round towards city growth.

Until you reach that point, many of your Hunting food awards will go to waste and working plots for food is often a waste as well, so focus your efforts on production until working food plots can bring in more food than is being lost to unhealth.


Growth Influencing Effects

You will find that there are buildings, civics, and traits that can dramatically influence your growth. Effects that state, "Cities require x% more or less to grow" influence the amount of food that is required for a population expansion, while "Stores x% of food after growth" effects keep your city from backing down to zero stored food after a population growth takes place, protecting your population from a potential sudden starvation after growing and thus consuming more food and giving you a head start on the next population growth as well. These are powerful effects to leverage to your benefit.

However, beware that cities CAN get so large they produce more problems than benefits for their size. In addition to the basic Vanilla Rule that still applies here that each population adds an additional base unhappiness and unhealth to the city and consumes more food, they also bring more education demand, crime, and disease. See Properties below. These factors can easily become a runaway problem that can cause an economic, political (on Revolutions) and even population collapse.

Commerce VS Gold​

This is a Vanilla BtS concept BUT it becomes more important to understand in C2C because we've approached things a little differently than you may assume if you're used to Vanilla.

Let's clarify things here. Commerce is a yield. It is what you get from working a plot with a town, for example, and is the most common overall benefit from trade. There are three yields that cities collect, Production , Food , and Commerce . Commerce is represented by a single, Roman-esque coin icon. Commerce represents variable economic income and taxation. In Vanilla BtS, most buildings, such as Banks, produce or enhance the generation of commerce.

Commerce is split into 4 commerces (little 'c'). These are Gold , Research , Culture , and Espionage . Gold is represented by a stack of coins icon. When you adjust the sliders (which in C2C may be adjusted in increments of 5% rather than the 10% standard increments in Vanilla BtS) you are determining how much of your overall commerce income is being converted to Gold, Research, Culture or Espionage. Only Research, Culture and Espionage have sliders but what is not assigned to one of those three is automatically converted to gold income instead. Commerce is never stored as commerce but is always converted by the slider during the end turn processing.

Gold is what can build up in your treasury and is used to support existing units, pay upkeep costs for your buildings in each city, distance to city, number of cities, and civic selections. It is also used for upgrading units and for paying sudden fees that may be presented by certain events. It can be plundered by enemies destroying your units or razing your improvements. When gold runs out and you are operating at a deficit, the slider will automatically adjust to keep you from debt, UNLESS you have so much loss of gold that you end up at 0% research, Culture AND Espionage and you STILL are losing gold and have none in your treasury. At this point, you go into STRIKE and every round spent in strike eliminates numerous units from you forces (because they abandon you since you aren't paying them.)

This is all pretty much understood by Vanilla Civ IV players. What differs here in C2C is that most buildings that would usually give COMMERCE benefits in vanilla, are giving gold benefits now instead. This means that the slider has about half the impact that it once did and many buildings are sources of and modifiers to the types of commerces specifically. Very few effects modify your commerce income directly. Therefore, for example, you cannot build a Bank so as to increase your research. Although it's a building that gives +% Commerce in Vanilla, in C2C it gives +% Gold .

You'll find that this can dramatically change your priorities so watch for how this difference in design approach can lead to cause to change your assumable play strategies.

City Management​

The Three Plot City Radius

This was once an option but it was found to be so popular that it has been fully integrated into C2C. Vanilla BtS players will recall that cities can grow out to work plots as far as two spaces away from the city plot itself (with the exception of the exact diagonal directions, which allow 1 plot out to be worked.) C2C allows larger cities that can work up to three plots out (with the exception fo the exact diagonal directions, which allow 2 plots out to be worked.)

As noted in the options above, the manner in which the third plot becomes accessed is based on a setup choice by the player. It can be, as it is to access the 2nd rung of plots (and possibly even the first) a matter of achieving enough culture to do so or a matter of achieving the Metropolitan Administration building being constructed in the city. Either way, unlike the second rung of plots, just because the city may have culturally claimed them for the empire does NOT mean that the city can automatically work them. You MUST further qualify by having a VERY high culture level or the Metro Admin building.

In fact, with Realistic Culture Spread, you'll find that there can be plots within the city workable radius that aren't even yet captured by the city's culture and thus cannot be worked for that reason yet. I'm sure all of this will make more sense in-game, but it can be helpful to have it stated here so that you don't feel that the system is automatically bugged.

Since C2C has a LOT of buildings that can add direct base food, production, and commerces, and yet plots can produce a tremendous amount of yields due to far more powerful improvements and frequent plot resources, there is a healthy debate among its fans (and even the modding team) as to whether it is better to spread your cities out so that they can almost all take full advantage of the full three rungs of workable radius eventually, or to crowd them in and get as many cities close together as possible. We'll leave you to make your own determination as to how you want to develop your nation's city placements. Our Player VS Player games we've been playing have not been conclusive at showing anything but to confirm both approaches have their own powerful and differing strengths and weaknesses.


City Radius and Resources

Many buildings have a prerequisite of having one or more particular resource(s) within city radius. This means that the resource must be within the 2 or 3 rung radius depending on what the city qualifies for, connected by a route, and improved in a way that gives access to that resource. However, it does not require that the city WORKS the resource plot specifically. If two cities radii overlap a given improved resource, BOTH of those cities are considered to have access to that resource in their city radius.


Goods

Many resources, called Goods, are manufactured in the city by a building. Even what are commonly plot based resources can be made by buildings in the city. When buildings exist in the city that provide a resource, that resource is also considered to be granting access within the city radius for the purpose of fulfilling any 'resource within city radius' prerequisite. Goods are just one kind of category for resources but for all intents and purposes they are much the same as any other. They aren't found on the map but they CAN be traded with other nations, and in some cases they are more valuable to trade than the core map resources that usually require refinement or manufacturing processes to become end Goods.


Complex Refinement Chains

For players new to C2C, it can be a little frustrating to try to understand some of the C2C refininement processes and its necessity. There can be some very complicated prerequisite chains to get to end results that can provide the buildings and units you seek access to.

For example, units that require access to horses are not generally qualified to be trained simply because you have placed a stable improvement on a plot with the Horse resource and a route connected to it somewhere in the empire. Now that you HAVE access to horses, a city that has those horses within its city radius must now build a Horse Trainer building to provide itself with the means to produce Horse Riding Mounted Units. Once you have the horse resource alone, any ONE city can build the National Horse Breeder national wonder to qualify to train Horse Riding Mounted Units, and you can usually breed horses from any city that has City Radius access to horses or the National Horse Breeder. Such bred horse units can be moved to other cities to plant horse herd buildngs, which give local access to horses in those cities as well.

Metal buildings are similar in that the ORE, such as Copper Ore, is obtained from having a mine on the copper resource. But since ore is itself very heavy and hard to meaningfully transport long distances, it must at first be within a city radius to grant access to that city to build a smelter, which can convert that Copper Ore into Copper Ingots. Copper Ingots are quite useful and can be traded to other nations or kept for your nation so that any city can then build a Copper Forge, which gives you Copper Wares. Copper Wares are then used as the prerequisite for units that require copper weaponry to be trained, such as standard Spearmen and Axemen.

It is by design that it can be very frustrating that you HAVE copper in the nation, but it's too far away from a city or it's on a peak and you cannot yet have it qualify for being in the city radius so you then have to wait for improvements in transportation technologies (road building or seafaring techs) to be able to construct a National Copper Smelter that can take Copper Ore from anywhere, even trade from foreign nations, and convert it to Copper Ingots so as to open up the Copper Forges to derive Copper Wares so that you can get those incredibly necessary improved units to keep an invader at bay.

But you're ahead of the game challenge already because you took the time to read and absorb this! But I warn you, these are examples and do not cover every situation that exists due to similar design concepts.

You're on your own to track through the pedia to figure out how to train a unit or construct a building that it seems you should have technological access to. You can start your search by turning off the build filters that keeps buildings and units that you cannot build from showing up in the build and construct options. When they show but cannot be made by the city, they show up darkened out. This has the benefit of allowing you to find the object and get hover information on the object that displays what your city is missing in its prerequisites. Usually if technology is what you are failing to have to qualify for a building or unit, it won't even show up when these filters are off. But if its a resource or other prerequisite, it should show up in the hover info in red to explain why you cannot build it yet. Sometimes this is only a first step and you'll need to go into the pedia to research how you're supposed to provide for yourself a missing element.


City Build Filters

As you discover how to turn off and on the ability to hide buildings and units you cannot yet build, but do qualify for by technology, you'll notice there are many more filter buttons lining the top of the build selection list and three icons down the right side as well.

These are filter options. On the right, you have an icon for units, one for buildings, and one for wonders. If one of these is selected, it gets a highlight glow. When none are selected, all three categories still stay separate from each other and you can scroll through the build selections with units showing first, buildings showing second, and wonders showing third. You also get Processes at the bottom. These are the options to convert production directly to various commerces. If you select one of the right hand icons, only that type of category will show up in the build option list. Additionally, you'll have a unique line of filter buttons show up for just that category. For the most part, this is differing by buildings and units.

The first filter button is a red circle with a slash through it and it turns on or off the setting to display only trainable units or only constructable buildings.

For units only:

The second filter button looks like a globe and it turns on or off to show only units that are unlimited.
The third filter looks like a tank and it toggles the 'show land units only' filter.
The fourth looks like an airplane from the top down and toggles on or off the 'show air units only' filter.
The fifth is an anchor and turns on or off the 'show water units only' filter.
The sixth looks like a pick axe and it turns on the 'show work units only' filter.
The seventh looks like a 60's peace symbol. It toggles the 'show civilian units only' filter.
The eighth is two blue squares and it toggles the 'siege only' filter.
The ninth is a track or a stable and it toggles the 'mounted only' filter.
The tenth is crossed swords and it toggles the 'heroes only' filter.
The eleventh is a red fist symbol which toggles the 'military units only' filter.
The twelfth is a shield and sword symbol and toggles the 'defensive only units' filter.
The thirteenth and last is a red clothed man and toggles the 'missionaries only' filter.

Then on the unit bar you have an 'arrange by' drop selection which allows you to arrange units by No method, by Primary Combat Class, by Hero (not sure what the last one does.)

You then have a second 'arrange by' drop box which allows you to sort your units by: Cost (production cost, which is the default), Strength, Move, Collateral, Range, Bombard, Cargo, Withdrawal, and Power.

For Buildings:

From Left to Right:
Research icon - Show only research providing buildings
Espionage icon - Show only espionage providing buildings
Culture icon - Show only culture providing buildings
Coin icon - Show only gold providing buildings (this is displaying a commerce icon technically which goes to show how deep the commerce vs gold confusion can be, even for modders!)
Food icon - show only food providing buildings
Hammer icon - show only production providing buildings
A smiley face - show only buildings that provide happiness
A red cross - show only buildings that provide health
A red fist - show military benefiting buildings, including both those that enhance military unit production and experience point gains
The Shield and Sword - show only defensive buildings
Red man - hide buildings that add unhappiness
Green sad face - hide buildings that add unhealth
Globe - hide world wonders
Flag - hide national wonders

THEN YOU HAVE UP AND DOWN ARROWS TO GET TO A SECOND PAGE OF FILTERS (and back)!

Pickaxe - hide non-wonders (normal buildings)
Handcuffs - show only buildings that manipulate crime (See Properties discussion)
Biohazard - show only buildings that manipulate disease (See Properties discussion)
Book - show only buildings that manipulate education (See Properties discussion)
Fire silhouette on a yellow triangle sign - show only buildings that manipulate flammability (See Properties discussion)
Water drop - show only buildings that manipulate water pollution (See Properties discussion)
Cloud with eyes - show only buildings that manipulate air pollution (See Properties discussion)
Gold helmet - show only buildings that manipulate tourism (See Properties discussion)

Used properly, these filters can make your life as a player far easier and can help you to make strategic determinations as to what order to construct buildings and train units in. This system has been a priceless addition to C2C ever since we began to proliferate the amount of buildings and units over vanilla a hundredfold.


Working With Build Queues

Since we're on the subject of making your city management easier, we should discuss a subject that is really no different between Vanilla BtS, but unlike the original game, this is no longer optional information to have and regularly use. Due to the HUGE amount of buildings and units, and the fact that C2C allows more than one item in the build queue to be processed and completed within a given round, which is critical to take full advantage of, you absolutely MUST have some understanding of how to work with build queues.

First of all, the build queue is listed in the bottom left of the city screen. It shows what has been selected for training and construction and the order in which they have been arranged to be undertaken by the city. Many players from vanilla may never have realized you could set more than one thing to build, and it wouldn't have mattered much if they did because when an object was built, the next item(s) could not also be completed in the same round. The city would save as much overflow for the next round as it could but would then reach a limit and convert the rest to gold. In C2C, this can only happen when you complete or begin working on a wonder, which doesn't allow the unchecked continuation of the build stream through the queue.

The following keys, when pressed when a selection is made, will adjust how the selection is added to the build queue.

No Key: the selection replaces whatever is first in the build queue.

Shift: Adds the selection to the end of the queue. Thus if you hold down shift and select a Brute to train, but you've already selected a Stone Thrower, it adds the Brute to the end of the queue and he'll immediately be what the city works on after completing the Stone Thrower. There is NO KNOWN LIMIT to the number of objects you can add to the queue and you can add multiple units of the same type as well. This is a good way to build a pre-selected batch of units or a stream of particular buildings in a preset order so that you don't continue to be driven nuts by constant popups for selecting the city's next build selection every round.

Ctrl: Adds the selection to the front of the queue but doesn't remove the front selection. Just pushes the whole queue down. Sometimes you'll find you suddenly need a unit but you don't want to restructure your whole queue, or you just qualified to build a building you really want to build immediately before continuing with the previous plans. CTRL-Select gives you this power.

Alt: Use with units to select a unit for repeated build. An asterisk shows up on the selection to let you know you've selected it for repeat build. When the city trains the unit, the unit goes immediately to the end of the queue. (You can use Shift-Alt-Select and Ctrl-Alt-Select to determine where this repeat will begin in the current queue plan too!) So let's say you have selected a Hunting Instruction to be built, then you have selected, with Shift-Alt-Select, a Clubman unit for repeat build and then a Chaser for repeat build. Your city would complete the Hunting Instruction, then build a Clubman, then a Chaser, then a Clubman then a Chaser until either a unit limit was reached on one of the units, at which point ONLY the other unit would continue to be repeated or you interrupt the constant swapping off between the two unit types. Alt can be very useful for those situations when you know you need a lot of some units or you need to build defined batches of unit types in a specific ratio but who knows how many you actually want at this point (like city defense stacks for example.)


Batch City Selections

You can also select multiple cities by selecting a city build bar but not entering the whole city, then holding shift as you select other city bars to add to the batch. Then, whatever selections you are making will apply to all the cities in the batch, if possible. The lead selected city determines what can and cannot be selected. This can be very useful if you want to take a group of cities and interrupt their current queues with a newly opened up power building, like a forge when you reach Metal Casting for example. Select the batch of cities that will be able to build the forge and then hold down CTRL and select the forge to put it ahead of the queue in all of the selected cities.

If you hold down CTRL and select the city you select all cities you own on that continent. Alt and select and you select all cities you own everywhere. You can then hold shift and select to DE-select cities from the batch selection. Pretty cool stuff. VERY useful for C2C as you'll soon find out. Thus why it all deserved its own lip service.


Multiple Research

We've just talked about C2C's multiple build modification (another one that used to be an option but was so critical to the game it became a standard element) so we should probably mention its cousin, the Multiple Research mod, which has also graduated to full stock inclusion in the mod core.

When you go to the research screen to select what tech you are going to research, you can and should select more than one tech because the research will continue to apply to the next tech you are headed for and it keeps you from potential waste of research.

You can select a tech further down the tech tree and it will select everything that leads up to that tech (this is called spamming for that tech.)

You can also hold down shift to select additional techs to research and the order in which to research them.

As a general rule, it's best not to leave yourself set to research only one tech and waiting to let the research selection popup to hit you at the beginning of the turn after you research a tech. When this and city build research popups come up, in C2C this should be taken as being a reminder that you overlooked your planning and got caught not being fully prepared.

You can't select a research path until you have your first city though.


Reading the Building Help Hoverover Information

In C2C there can be a LOT of modifiers and values buildings bring to the table.

Buildings will give you both the static honest modifiers and values display and will also deliver a projected total impact. This 'Actual:' line is showing you what the building will currently be bringing to the city because those statics don't always tell the whole story.

For example, a Basketweaver's hut may tell you that it gives you +1 but then on the next line state - Actual: +0.42 This is because it does give you +1 BASE gold but when you consider all the total local and national percentage modifiers for gold that your city is under the effect of, it's actually going to give you +0.42 when it is completed. However, if and when those modifiers change, the actual would have changed as well, so it's only a snapshot of what it would 'actually' bring your city NOW.

Buildings that influence trade can give some of the most interesting Actual lines showing exactly how their modifications to trade will add value to the city. These are extremely complex calculations I don't expect any player to be able to do the math in their head on, so it's VERY nice to have this showing you the current value of these trade influencing buildings.


Building Upgrades/Replacements

Sometimes the Actual line can show +unhealth and +health at the same time. This is often quite accurate. To understand this, you may need to also know that many buildings may be upgrades, meaning they automatically replace another building of a more crude nature but similar type, and when they do, they remove all the factors from that building and replace it entirely with it's own. It is not unusual as many buildings follow such upgrade chains.

You do not have to build the simpler buildings to be able to build their upgrades. In fact, this can be a red herring to cause waste in production, therefore, in the BUG options (see the final section here) you can select to never show buildings that can be replaced already. USUALLY it is good to skip the buildings you can already build the upgrade for. (But if you need whatever small benefit you can get as quickly as you can get it there can still be cause to build lesser forms of a building upgrade chain you can already qualify to replace since you can get them completed faster.)

These building upgrade chains are a great innovation for C2C and the mods it was derived from because they give us a smoother means by which to represent the gradual fading out of an obsoletion rather than a sudden full stop disconnection of a building functioning as you often get in Vanilla, making a particular tech something you really don't WANT for as long as you can avoid it. Not to say that doesn't happen in our tech tree in spots, but it a lot of cases, it is a smoothed over effect by building upgrades instead.

For an example, a Public Stoning building is replaced by a Crucifixion Crosses building. Once you can build the Crosses, you can still build the Public Stoning, but if you then build the Crosses later, you'll remove the Public Stoning when you do and the two buildings do not operate concurrently with each other. Later, Stocks will replace Crucifixion Crosses as an improved form of punishment building as well.


Civic Special Units

Some units need civics to be buildable.
If such civics aren't chosen, then unit won't appear at all - not even when hiding unit is disabled.

Civics that have some special units under them are: Despotism, Feudal, Monarchy, Inquisitorial, Mercantilism and Nationalist.

 

City Management Part II​

Preset Saved Build Queues

In the upper left hand portion of the main game screen, there is a button with the Hammer icon on it that you don't have in Vanilla Civ, or any other mod for that matter. This leads to a screen in which you can setup and save pre-constructed build queues that you can then select as if they were buildings in your cities. Once you have established a batch and saved its details it is useful for this game alone, so maybe don't go too overboard. Just use it when it can help you to speed up play in the current era, for example for establishing batches that represent the order in which new founded cities should build their buildings.

Using this feature is tricky and if I can find a link to this information, I'll come back and provide it so that you have further details. I have not used it extensively enough to try to explain how to use it myself. My wife did and she found it pretty cool but it also has some buggy little quirks you have to know how to work around or it can lead to more frustration than value. Once you know how to use it and what those quirks are, however, it can be an extremely helpful tool.


Reading the Unit Help Hoverover Information

There's also a tremendous amount of information on almost all given units. Our of absolute necessity, we have developed some tricks to enable us to deliver you all this information without the limited dimensions of the help hover panel simply allowing it to all overflow into uselessness. There are many BUG options (in game options we'll talk about last in this guide) that can toggle certain portions of information display on or off as well. But primarily, what you'll really need to know for C2C is how to navigate the 4 'hotkey pages' of unit information. This is seriously one of the most important things you NEED to know that many players often never figure out.

When you hover over the unit without holding down any of the hotkeys (Shift, Ctrl, Alt) you get the primary default information page for that unit. This covers Strength, Movement, Production Cost, how many units you can build if it is limited, and some other optional BUG delivered info like, by default, how many XP the unit will get being built in this city, what sources are adding up to provide that XP and what buildings may yet be built that could add more. Like with buildings, the production cost will also express how many rounds it will take to build this unit. Keep in mind that many units can be built multiple times in one round from a given city in C2C.

However, when you hold down one of the hotkeys THEN hover over the unit (you cannot switch the view while continuing to hover over the unit then depressing the hotkey. Move the mouse off the unit, hold down the proper hotkey THEN move the mouse back over the unit and the display info will have changed!) you will see the new unit information page.

If you cannot remember which pages to use to get the information you need on a unit, hover over the unit and look at the bottom three lines. They instruct:

Press CTRL to view Combat Modifiers
Press ALT to view Civil Information
Press SHIFT to view Combat Classes

So if you want to see that an axeman, as it does in Vanilla, has a +25% Combat Modifier vs Melee Type (Combat Class) units, then you must hover over the unit holding down CTRL to see it! ALL the combat modifiers the unit receives by nature of its BASE UNIT TYPE definition will be delivered when you hold down CTRL and hover. This works the same on your units in the game but you won't get full information like this on opponent units so you may need to use the pedia now and then where you wouldn't have had to in Vanilla BtS.

Civil Information is going to show you displays such as what types of improvements a worker type unit can build.

Combat Classes in C2C is interesting, a huge driving breakthrough for the mod, and deserves its own section. For now, just understand that Shift-hover will show you all categories that apply to this unit, known as Combat Classes or Unit Types. In Vanilla BtS, units only ever had one category type. In C2C units are heavily categorized and have many categories at once.

You can get modifiers specifically from these Combat Classes that add into the totals for the unit and are not always visible under the other hover pages that only show modifiers that come from the BASE unit definitions. But if being a Mounted unit is going to add another combat modifier to the unit against Throwing units (which it does) then you'll only get to see that here in the Shift hover info.

But there are a lot of combat classes assigned to each unit, and again, if all the modifiers from every combat class were to be displayed at once, you'd overload the help hover panel. So what we've done is make it so that with each time you hold shift and move the mouse off then back onto the unit icon, you'll open up the modifiers displayed from the NEXT combat class on the list. This can take some practice to get it to cycle through the different combat classes the unit possesses.

Tip: It can be faster to review the unit in full depth by going into the pedia, where the list of all unit details is given on one scrolling panel and works through each combat class, displaying the modifiers obtained by each one. Or simply reviewing one such unit IN the game when all values ARE totalled up for you under similar hotkey pages.

For the sake of awareness here, All XP and build modifiers the city gains towards a particular combat class will affect the trained unit that has that combat class. So if your city is giving +2 XP to Melee units and +2 XP to Mounted units, a unit that is both Mounted and Melee will come out of training with +4 XP total.

I'll go into more detail about how these combat class categories were established (there were layers and sub-categories and so on) later when discussing units in more strategic detail.


Autobuildings

Constructing a building is only one way buildings can end up in your city in C2C. There are numerous other means and methods. Of course, as has been discussed before, units such as subdued animals can sacrifice themselves to add a particular building to the city. But there are also buildings that cities get automatically when certain conditions are met.

These include (and this is not likely to be an exhaustive list):
- Pests, like rats and cockroaches, that come from the terrains in city radius in combination with the size of the city and tech levels of the civ.
- Housing buildings that represent the forms of housing being used by the people. Some study and awareness of these buildings and what unlocks them can certainly give a player an edge, particularly the first ones you can unlock so as to quickly replace the heavily penalizing immediate 'homelessness' building that the initial capital cities all initially start with.
- Automatic builds when founding the city based on the degree of technology and possibly what type of unit is used to found the city.
- Civic buildings that are basically an attachment to some civics. Always wise to research the deeper impact of a civic choice by looking at the pedia to see what, if any, autobuildings the civic adds to your cities.
- Property generated buildings that emerge as a result of the city being at, above, below, or within a particular range of property values (see properties below.) These can be the most influential of all autobuildings.
- Tech delivered autobuilds - buildings that the people just immediately build as quickly as they can with or without the player (representing the decisions of the state) goes to build them or not. There are a few trade post buildings that act in this manner.

The good part of all this is that most autobuildings and specially added buildings by unit activities show up under the 'specials' tab for the building list in the city on the middle left of the full city screen panel.


Specialists

One of the neatest things about C2C is that there are more specialists to work with. This is actually one of our major MAJOR long awaited breakthroughs for v37 to be able to go past a limit we'd been stuck at previously. Specialists don't currently operate under truly unique rules from Vanilla. But many do have new abilities and a wider array of things they add to the city. Buildings open up Specialist slots for assignment. Many units can dedicate themselves to the city as a 'settled' specialist. And some civics can make certain specialist types unlimited for assignment.

Additionally, C2C has numerous ways to add 'free specialists' to the city. These act just like a population that can be assigned except they cannot work tiles, only be specialists. They represent additional efficiency in the labors of the people, second jobs, etc, rather than actual additional population.

It is worth noting that Education levels can influence how many free specialists you have. This can also mean that low Education levels can counter other sources of free specialists by giving you 'negative' free specialists. This has led to some previous bug reports and misunderstandings since you can't have an overall negative amount but these negative free specialists can diminish those you get from elsewhere. (See the Education Property description in Properties for more info.)

Some buildings also 'employ' population, meaning they reduce the number of specialist assignments and if those run out from the pool of 'free specialists', they reduce the amount of assignable population (not the overall population but the amount of population that can be assigned to work a plot or be a specialist.) I don't believe this is currently used much if at all in v37 but if you encounter it I wanted to have mentioned it was possible.

I'm not going to cover all the possible specialists. Some of your learning how to play C2C should be experienced rather than explicitly explained in every detail. Use what benefits you most to use! Simple, right? Sure. More importantly, this document is about the game mechanics and rule dynamics, not the specifics of each game object.


Defensive Help Hover

I've been finding that many players are not familiar with this hover. I'm not even sure if it was or wasn't available in Vanilla BtS. But if it was, it certainly didn't have nearly as much information in it as it does now in C2C, which is why it strongly deserves coverage here.

Inside the city screen, on the top center panel where the name of the city and the population is centered, to the right of the name and population is the rook symbol and then it shows you how much overall city defense % exists right now for this city. If you hover on that rook (or the words saying Defense: x%) if gives you the Defensive Help Hover.

This is a literal treasure trove of information in C2C, showing you things you can't find anywhere else. It can provide you with the following information:

• Defense % by source: It starts by breaking down each source of City Defense % and showing how it adds up to a base City Defense %. It then gives the current amount, which is potentially lower than the base if you've been under attack.
  
  
• Minimum Defense: It then shows Minimum Defense (if you are using the Realistic Siege option) which is as low as an enemy may reduce the defense value without actually destroying the buildings that are providing Minimum Defense levels.
  
  
• Minimum Defense to Enter: It then shows Minimum Defense to Enter (if you are using the Realistic Siege option) which is the defense amount that the city must be currently below for most units to be able to attack it directly. It reads: "Enemy units may not attack city until Defense is reduced below x%" (If this amount is lower than Minimum Defense then at Minimum Defense, the city may still come under direct attack.)
  
  
• Recovery Modifiers: If the city has any cause to have adjustments to the rate of recovery of defensive value after those amounts have been reduced, it will display this next.
  
  
• Bombard Resistance: This is an incredibly potent value that comes from some defensive buildings and wonders. It is NOT the same as City Defense. It reduces the damage of bombard attacks that reduce the city defense and acts as a protective modifier against Ranged Assault attacks against units in the city. It is currently capped at a maximum of 70% because we've found that city defenses get too difficult to reduce if allowed to go over this point. Some adjustments to how this works are planned but for now, if you see you can get additional Bombard Resistance in your cities, it's worth a lot of protection to really reach out to get that benefit. (unless all your cities are already at the maximum 70%.)
  
  The way it works is to reduce the amount of Bombard Damage to your city's Defense % by a % amount equal to the resistance. Thus if a Bombard action would normally cause a reduction of 10% to your City Defense level, a 50% Bombard Resistance would reduce that hit down to just 5% of your Defense being damaged.
  
  
• Specific Combat Modifiers and Strength Adjustments: Some buildings can add Combat Modifiers and even base combat strength adjustments to particular unit types protecting the city. I don't think any buildings are currently utilizing these benefits in the mod but if they do show up on buildings built in the city it will be expressed here next.
  
  
• Dynamic Defense: (Only on Surround and Destroy) This is a value that reduces the combat modifier that may be provided to units attacking the city by Surround and Destroy effects. These benefits are derived for the attacker by having potential attacking units in other spaces adjacent to the city aside from the space they are attacking from. It can normally get as high as a 60% bonus but it's final total is modified by the Dynamic Defense of the defender. So if Dynamic Defense offered by the city to defenders in the city is 10% and the attacker has achieved the full 60% possible Surround and Destroy combat modifier by surrounding the city with his attackers, the Dynamic Defense is reducing that 60% modifier by 6% (10% of the 60% S&D bonus.) Some defensive buildings, mostly towers, provide Dynamic Defense values to the city because they can help troops to know where they need to focus their defensive efforts with less uncertainty about where the attacks are coming in.
  
  
• River Modifiers: According to the original rules of Civ IV, crossing a river to attack gives a base combat modifier penalty to the attack, which some units can ignore. Bridge buildings in C2C can reduce that penalty for attackers (the downside of building bridges.) So the total river crossing combat penalty to attackers that are crossing rivers to attack this city is shown next.
  
  
• Espionage Defense: (If Espionage is ON in this game.) This is the modifier that makes it harder (or easier if it totals to a penalty) for enemy spies to perform missions against this city.
  
  
• Insidiousness: Next is shown the total Insidiousness that is given to criminals in the city (See Dealing with Criminals below.)
  
  
• Investigation Total: Then the total Investigation chance that all sources in this city have added up to will show. You'll really want to check this in some cases! (See Dealing with Criminals below.)
  
  
• # of Local Criminals: And to cap off the Crime and Law displays, if there are criminals lurking in the city, a count (including your own) of how many are here now will show up next.
  
  
• Repel: According to the code, next to show are repel values but that's for a combat mod still in development and not yet available.
  
  
• ZoC: But if you are playing with Zones of Control and your city has one, it will denote that next.
  
  
• Damage to Attackers: Then there are quite a few potential buildings that will attempt to cause damage to an attacker before the attacker can actually make the attack against the city. When this damage takes place, it does so silently and does not inform any player that it has taken place. Additionally, it will influence the actual odds during the attack and thus the attack will not be made with as strong odds as it may have originally shown on the combat help hover to the attacking player. This can even fake out the AI a bit. These pre-attack damage steps are particularly nasty because of how little they tell you about themselves as they take place and I do feel that they should be expressed more openly in the game, perhaps in the combat logs. But you can currently see if the city has any of this potential pre-attack damage attempts to offer against invading units here at this next line. If it shows up with some, they exist, otherwise, if unmentioned here, they do not.
  
  
• Defense Building Audit: The last item to be displayed is a breakdown of what buildings do give defense here and what buildings COULD be built that would manipulate defense here.

All this information is incredibly valuable to the city's owner, of course. But you know who REALLY gets to benefit from this hover display if they can get it? Spies! If you can get enough espionage into the city or get spies in to infiltrate the city so you can see what's going in on a city you're thinking of attacking or messing with in any other way, you can seriously find this information beneficial to your strategic planning. So the city can damage mounted units that attack it before those units even engage the enemy can it? Good to know that the odds I will see in this case may not be accurate by the time the battle actually begins...

Units and Combat
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Breakdown

To reduce city defense values, vanilla Siege Weapons were capable of launching a distance bombardment attack on the target city adjacent city. This hasn't changed in C2C for most Siege Weapons. Distance Bombardment is still an aspect of many siege weapons, such as catapults and ballista, cannons and artillery and so on. But for Siege Weapons that get up close and personal like rams, it was no longer acceptable to consider the capabilities of these weapons to reduce city defense levels to be done from afar and outside the zone of great personal risk.

So these units have a new ability called 'Breakdown'.

As has been discussed in the Vanilla Combat option description, combats do take place in multiple rounds, even though it is not visibly shown to the player unless the player references their combat log to see a round by round breakdown of how a recent battle just took place. Combats average between 4 and 12 rounds or so depending on how balanced the fight is between the attacker and the defender.

When a unit with Breakdown attacks a city, not only does it usually get the opportunity to, unlike other units, ignore the Minimum Defense to Enter (on Realistic Siege), each round of battle it gets an added chance to damage the city defenses as well as the opponent it's engaged in combat with.

The chance to damage the City Defense factor is the Breakdown Chance on the unit, which is expressed as a % odds probability. Again, since there can be multiple rounds of combat, each round getting its own check, a ram can have numerous successful checks in a given combat.

The amount of damage done to the City Defenses is the total Breakdown Damage on the unit, adjusted by the Bombard Resistance value in the city. Thus if a city has 25% Bombard Resistance and your attacking Breakdown unit deals 4% Damage to Defenses, in each round your unit successfully damages the City Defenses, the City Defenses will be reduced by 3%. Under the non-Vanilla Combat Engine, this means that every round becomes more and more survivable by the ram as well since the reduced city defenses are taken into account when the odds are recalculated between each combat round.

When a Breakdown unit, such as a Ram, has damaged its foe to its Combat Limit, unlike other units with a Combat Limit, such as Catapults, it does not immediately Withdraw. Instead, it continues to attack but it will deal no further damage to its foe (though it may do a lot of damage to the city defenses round after round.) However, once it then loses its own HP down to its Combat Limit, at that point it will then automatically withdraw (But ONLY if the unit it is in battle with is also at HP equal to the combat limit.) This means that if a Ram gets a severe upper hand on its foe, it can reduce the walls for quite a while, potentially all the way down to the minimum defense level of the city, before the combat ends.


Ranged Assault

For units with extremely long reach ranged weaponry, from Archery onward, the design logic that enables long range weapons to damage city defenses equally applies to weapons dealing damage to units at such a non-engaged combat range. Therefore, a complex gradiated quality system of Ranged Assault has been developed for C2C. It is an evolution of some systems that came before it, Archery Bombard, DCM Ranged Bombard, but it is completely specific to this mod and is the final answer as to how such distance attacks are resolved.

Multiple Unitcombats on every units is discussed in a few other sections in this guide but the Ranged Assault system is heavily based on that. The primary weapons used by a unit is one of the categories assigned to units and differing weapon types impart their base values for Ranged Assault to units that use them. For example, a unit that primarily uses Bow weapons is going to have different base values for Ranged Assault than units that use Crossbows, and much different base values than units that use Flung Boulders or Cannonballs.

For nearly all weapon types that provide access to a Ranged Assault attack, there are also a set of skill based promotions that can help the units that wield them to develop their Ranged Assault values along progression scales that are appropriate for that type of weapon. Thus the promotions that help Bow wielders improve their Ranged Assault values are not as potent as those that are given for units that wield Rifles. Regardless, although most units in the game can actually enact a Ranged Assault, very few are really good at it unless they have specialized in doing so through these skill promotions.

Whereas a committed attack by a unit will result in repeating rounds of combat until one or the other unit (or both) is destroyed or retreated, a Ranged Assault, although not introducing any automatic counterattacks to the attacker, is much like only committing to one round's worth of attack. So it's not going to necessarily be devestating, even if it hits. But since it can wear down the opponent without taking any personal risk or committing to a battle that the attacker would surely lose, it can be a great way to soften up the defenders before charging in with committed attacks, or hindering invaders from trying to attack your defended targets.

In the later game, it is not absolutely necessary to even attack very often, as Ranged Assault can eradicate enemies, much like missiles can at even longer range. But this is all part of the natural evolution of combat mechanics and challenges on the battlefield. The earliest forms of Ranged Assault are often severely limited in how much total damage can be inflicted upon the targeted foes.

Units that can Ranged Assault are given Accuracy (chance to hit), Damage, Maximum Damage %, # of units damaged (similar to collateral) and Range values. for those units that can reach further than one tile away, it's important to note that accuracy dramatically reduces for each range out from the unit. Some tiles (terrains and features) and existing City Defense % values on the defender's plot do influence the chance to hit. Bombard Resistance in the city can reduce the Damage dealt to the defenders.

The system also assumes that the lead defender in the targeted stack is NOT the target of the attack UNLESS the weapon type specifies that. In general, any weapon that lobs or arches overhead to come back down on top of the defenders will avoid going after the lead defender, while weapons like Ballista and Crossbows that direct fire will tend to target the lead defender first.

 

Unit Combat Classes

One of the major innovations in C2C that has enabled a tremendous wealth of other unique and improved models for systems and interactions is that units can have (and are ALL assigned) multiple Combat Classes.

A Combat Class is not an unfamiliar feature to Vanilla Civ IV players. They are used to having to consider that a unit is a Melee type unit or a Mounted type unit or an Archery type unit. These are Combat Classes, means by which to define the units by differing categories that often have VERY meaningful interactive factors. Axeman units, for example, were classicaly very strong against other Melee units (+25% combat modifier against Melee types) while Spearman units were even stronger against Mounted type units while being weaker strength units overall. Swordsman were strong Melee units that could easily trump Spearman units but were likely to die if they went up against an Axeman. But they sure were good at attacking cities, while Archers were incredible at defending them.

Much of these classical interactions continue to be adhered to in C2C. But there are additional layers of consideration since there are multiple categories by which all units are organized and arranged.

A Combat Class can be a weakness against units that have combat bonuses against them. It can be a strength when the city training the unit grants that Combat Class additional experience points or gains a production bonus while building units of a Combat Class the unit undergoing training has. There can even be Withdrawal bonuses or penalties against particular Combat Classes, and many more modifying effects that interact with the unit's combat classes.

Furthermore, although in Vanilla, the Unit Combat Class was only a tag to help define the unit, in C2C, Combat Classes act much like promotions, bringing with them a whole world of potential modifiers to every unit of that particular Combat Class type. For example, Mounted units ALL gain a combat modifier bonus against Throwing units, making Mounted units as a whole a type that naturally counters Throwing units, or at least they have a head start on it. (This is because Throwing units specialize in hit and run tactics and Mounted can out-maneuver even the fleet of foot, additionally a swivel from the saddle can easily evade even an accurate throw.)

Once this ability to define multiple categories on every unit was opened up, a major modding effort was undertaken to define numerous categories of categorization that needed to be defined for all units. What this means is that it is very rare to have a unit be both Melee and Mounted because both of those fall under the same type of classification of Unit Combat TYPE which define how a unit engages in battle. But there are other classifications, such as Racial designators, Professions, how a unit gets around (Mobility types), the Weapon sets the unit relies on (which as we've read earlier defines the entire basis of a unit's Ranged Assault capabilities) and more.

Another major facet of Unit Combats is that it can be a huge way we craft access to particular promotions.

The Classifications of Unit Combat Classes are as follows:

• Size - Only applies to Size Matters games - represents the size of the individual entities in the unit:
  • Fine
  • Diminutive
  • Tiny
  • Small
  • Medium
  • Large
  • Huge
  • Gargantuan
  • Colossal
• Group - Only applies to Size Matters games - represents the volume count of the entities in the unit:
  • Solo (1)
  • Party (2-6)
  • Squad (7-20)
  • Company (21-100)
  • Battalion (101-600)
  • Forces (601-2500)
  • Clan (2600-10000)
  • Horde (10001-100000)
  • Multitudes (100k - 1 million)
  • Millions
  • Billions
  • Trillions
• Combat Quality - Only applies to Size Matters games - represents the natural tenacity, ferocity and combat readiness of the entities in the unit:
  • Pathetic
  • Inferior
  • Poor
  • Mediocre
  • Standard
  • Superior
  • Exceptional
  • Elite
  • Epic
  • Divine
• Speed - a very relative designation that is designed not to indicate how fast a unit is but rather how much that unit relies on speed and maneuverability as a strategy. It's primarily to help craft promotion access.
  • Slow
  • Fast
• Weapon Methods - determines the primary method by which this unit goes to fight
  • Hand to Hand Only
  • Distance Only
  • Distance Primary
  • Distance Secondary
  • Warhead
• Weapon Style - Weapon configurations (Part of a work in progress and in v37 these probably don't show up on units but they are actually defined on them all in the background.) I'm not going to list them here because posts do have character limits.
• Weapons - the actual categories of weapons in use on the unit. This is used NOW for units, particularly for use in determining base Ranged Assault values, but will be an even more important driving factor when the planned equipment mod comes together in full. Again opting for brevity. This is a HUGE list.
• Armors - A preparation for the Equipment implementation and some promotions soon to be developed.
• Shields - Another prep for the Equipment implementation and promotion sets to come soon.
• Nature - Definitions for animals (usually) that define their capabilities. Primarily this is for providing a platform for planned promotion developments for animals, some of which have already been designed and implemented.
• Animal Types
  • Invertebrate
  • Fish
  • Amphibian
  • Reptile
  • Bird
  • Mammal
  • Insect
• Animal Subtype categories - I'm not even going to bother listing off all these sub-categories. Many of these will come into play for advanced hunting promotion sets eventually, or for specific minutae of weapon benefits on equipments.
• Primary Combat Classes - Large sweeping categorizations of units. A unit should only ever have one of these and EVERY unit falls into one of these.
  • Combatant (Meaning Land Based Military)
  • Naval Combatant
  • Civilian
  • Criminal
  • Explorer
  • Commander
  • Swarm
  • Ruffian
  • Wild
  • Subdued
  • Idea
  • Ballistic
  • Attache
  • Captive
• Mobility - how the unit moves (previously named Motility). Effects that can damage units that attack a city before the combat even begins are often tagged to these. Traps are also often tagged to be triggered by units with a particular category here or another. (See Traps.) Nearly all units have one of these and no unit should have more than one.
  • Foot
  • Aerial
  • Riding (Exposed)
  • Animal Drawn (Exposed Behind)
  • Driving (Encased/Ground)
  • Hovering
  • Piloting (Encased/Air)
  • Naval
  • Unmanned
• Base Combat Class - the manner in which the unit engages other units in combat. Units may have multiple types here but it's not common and is a special case. Almost all units have one of these types. These correspond most closely to the original Vanilla categories.
  • Melee
  • Throwing
  • Archer
  • Siege
  • Gun
  • Hi Tech
  • Clones
  • StrikeTeam
  • Rocket Launcher
  • Mounted
  • Wheeled
  • Tracked
  • Dreadnought
  • Hovercraft
  • Antigrav Craft
  • Balloon
  • Helicopter
  • Early Fighter
  • Early Bombers
  • Jet Fighters
  • Bombers
  • Supersonic Planes
  • Stealth
  • Orbital Aircraft
  • Early Spaceship
  • Solar Sail Spaceship
  • Nuclear Spaceship
  • Antimatter Spaceship
  • Wormhole Spaceship
  • Wooden Ships
  • Steam Ships
  • Diesel Ships
  • Jet Ships
  • Nuclear Ships
  • Shockwave Ships
  • Droid Ships
  • Levitation Ships
  • Troid Ships
  • Gravity Drive Ships
  • Cutter
  • Corvette
  • Submarine
  • Destroyer
  • Cruiser
  • Battleship
  • Pirate
  • Swarm Ships
  • Transport
  • Carrier
  • Assault Mech
  • Robot
  • Nanite
  • Missile
  • Doom
  • Law Enforcement
  • Health Care
  • Entertainer
  • Diplomat
  • Spy
  • Worker
  • Sea Worker
  • Settler
  • Trade
  • Missionary
  • Executive
  • Nomad
  • Combat Worker
  • Administrator
  • Prodigy
  • Recon
  • Hunter
  • Captain
  • Sea Animal Tale
  • Hero
• Siege Sub-Categories - very helpful to take a look at these to get an idea as to what a particular siege unit is really intended for. There are common combat interactions and promotion crafting utilizing these.
  • Defensive Siege
  • Gatecrasher Siege
  • Field Siege
  • Urban Siege
  • Wooden Siege
  • Gunpowder Siege
  • Rocketry Siege
  • Energy Siege
• Species - A unit should only ever have one of these defined
  • Human
  • Neanderthal
  • Alien
  • AI
  • Animal
  • Sea Animal
• Era - I'm not sure if this is working properly right now or not but it's supposed to be assigning the era unitcombat to each unit when the unit is trained.
• Mount - the type of mount the unit rides
• Assisted - the unit uses an animal as part of the unit but doesn't ride the animal. This category declares what type of animal that is for future promotion crafting.
• Religion - not often assigned at the moment but will come into play more with the deeper development of the 'ideas' project. Will give us the ability to have bias based promotions and so on.
• Culture - much of the same footnotes as Religion. Not sure they are currently being assigned but will have a huge impact on the 'Ideas' project interactions.
• Heals As - declares what kind of healing abilities apply to assisting this unit in healing. (Healing section)
• Healer Type - declares what types this unit has capabilities in assisting to heal. (See Healing section)

For the entire list and to see how units were originally assigned (the lists haven't been perfectly maintained since this project was undertaken) you can refer to this Google Doc: C2C - Combat mod - UnitCombats

You can also find more information in the pedia on each combat class.

Tip: DON'T let these categorizations overwhelm you. Reference a unit's combat class list when you want to understand how other game rule interactions are going to affect that unit, such as healing, xp assignments, and combat modifiers. Trying to memorize them all will drive you to drink. And most of the categorizations are absolutely assumable and intuitive. I'm not saying that study cannot lead to new strategic insights, such as finding that Thieves are both Throwing and Melee units, as well as Criminals, and thus would be easily countered by units promoted with Anti-Melee, Anti-Throwing and Anti-Criminal Combat Modifier providing promotions. But if you try too hard to study and memorize in depth all combat classes on all units it's going to make your head spin!


Great Military People

While the birthing of Great People follows ALL the original rules of Civ IV, C2C has expanded on the idea of Great Military People. As a platform, this concept was initially introduced in the Civ IV Warlords Expansion, with Great Generals. In general, each experience point earned by your units would compile into a growing pool of points to qualify for the birthing of a Great General. With each Great General earned, the amount of XP you'd need to earn to birth the next would increase exponentially. There were modifiers introduced through traits and wonders and so on that would modify how many points you'd get towards Great Generals per XP gained and in what manner (such as +50% towards Great Generals for XP earned in battles within your borders.)

That really hasn't changed deeply at the core. What HAS changed is that there are more Great Military People types than just Great Generals. Great Generals were capable of being committed to cities to add +2 XP to ALL units trained in that city (along with a couple of gold) or they could be attached to lead a unit or build a military training center building that would grant increased unit production. But now, we have:

• Great Generals: Can be added to the city as a Great Military Instructor, which adds +2 XP to all COMBATANT units (see Unit Combat Classes - this is a Primary Unit Category Combat Class that generally means the unit is a land based militarily trained unit) and +2 . Can be used to create a wide variety of buildings, many of which add unique free promotions called Traditions to units built from the city or in the empire. Can (if the Field Commanders option is on) be turned into a Field Commander which can give aura-like benefits to units under its command in the field and develop its skills in providing those benefits. Can lead a unit, giving an XP blast to all the units on the tile when they are selected to do so, while also granting access to special and powerful 'led unit' promotions to the unit they are leading. In short, quite a few potential uses but primarily focused on giving benefit to Land Based Military units... Combatants.
  
  
• Great Hunters: Can be added to the city as a Great Hunting Instructor, which adds +2 Experience to Explorer type units (Hunters and Scouts of both Naval and Land varieties) and a whopping +5 per round. Can be instead turned into a Master Hunting unit of whatever type hunting unit you can currently qualify for by technology level. These Master hunting units are extremely capable of living up to the title, getting to attack multiple times in a round and not finding many animals in the field to be a challenge to their skills, commonly subduing what animals they take down, and being strong enough to potentially fight off some of the random Barbarian and Neanderthal threats they encounter that would normally be the death of other hunter types brave enough to go out into the wild alone to maximize on their mobility to hunt to the fullest extent. They can also be used for some special buildings and traditions.
  
  
• Great Admirals: Can be added to the city as a Great Naval Instructor, which adds +3 XP to Naval Combatants and does some other more minor things. I won't pretend that in v37 these guys are fully fleshed out yet but that doesn't make them still cool to get so as to enhance your navies.

And more are planned, such as the Great Aviator, Great Animal Trainer, Notorious Criminal, Great Siege Engineer, and more coming soon.

To make it possible to introduce a variety of Great Military People, we had to design a system that introduces them into the game, of course, and once more the multiple combat class feature plays into this in a heavy way. Great Generals are the default type here if there is any ambiguity, but in general, the units that are entering battle and earning XP are earning them towards the type of Great Military person that most closely represents them.

Unlike with the birthing of standard Great People, this means that when points towards Great Military People (GMPs for short) are earned, they are earned into two pools, one for the TYPE and one for the overall achievement towards birthing a GMP. The first determines which type is born while the second determines when one is born. When you have earned enough to birth a GMP, that overall achievement pool resets and you must, just like with the original Great General system, earn yet more points to get the next one than you had to earn to birth this one.

What determines what KIND of GMP is birthed is the Type pools. If you have generated more points towards getting a Great Hunter, than that is what you will birth. However, at that point, ONLY the points you earned towards the Great Hunter get reset back down to 0. This leaves the next GMP to be more likely to become a Great General or Great Admiral, depending on which you currently have more towards because those pools don't get reset until that type has been birthed. This has the effect of making it possible to birth GMPs of types that are earning less experience points than more common earners, just at a less frequent rate.

You can follow the progress towards a GMP as a whole in the Great Military Person bar (the red progress bar) just to the left of the gold Great Person Progress bar, both of which are just under the Research Progress bar in the top-center on the MAIN interface screen. If you hover over the Great Military Person bar, you will get a breakdown of how many points have been earned towards which TYPE of GMP. Once you get a GMP birthed, you'll see the overall count get reset to 0 and ONLY the Type that was birthed (having been the highest among all the types) will be reset down to 0.

Trying to get the types of GMPs you most want can be a matter of strategic decision making. Do you want a badass hunter early in the game? (You probably SHOULD want that!) Make sure to rely more heavily on Wanderers and Scouts and Chasers to earn the majority of your first experience points. (This can be quite challenging in itself!) But if you want to try for a more aggressive early warfare game to wipe out a nearby opponent civ or two, then maybe go hunting with spearmen (very strong against animals) and clubmen, both of which are Combatants and will generate GMP points towards a Great General rather than a Great Hunter. They may also be a bit more survivable in the wild since they can tangle with a wider variety of threats than the Explorer units can.


Cross Defending Stacks and Special Targets

In the standard Vanilla CivIV rule system, when a unit attacks, the best (defined as the most combat capable) defending unit in the stack to take on the attacker that's trying to take the plot will be the one selected to defend first. This is called the 'lead defender' in the stack. To leave no doubt, the lead defender can (and will) change according to the unit that is attacking.

What this means is that defensive stacks have a tremendous advantage IF they are able to cross-defend. Cross defended stacks are stacks where primary vulnerabilities are protected by having specialized defenders of multiple skill sets so that no matter what the enemy brings to face you, your stack will always be incredibly difficult to win a battle against.

As an example, Spears and Axes make a good simple cross defended stack. This is because the two primary attack units in the early stage of the game are either going to be Melee units or Mounted units. Axemen have native bonuses against Melee units while Spears have powerful native bonuses against Mounted. If you promote them to be even stronger against those types then the cross defense is all the more potent. Adding to this, Axeman and Spearman units are fully capable of fortification and receiving defensive bonuses from the plot!

Therefore, if a Melee unit comes to attack the plot with an Axeman and a Spearman, it will have to tangle first with the Axeman and is likely to die, even if it is a strong Axeman itself because the tile defenses make up for the units being equal. And if a Mounted attacks, the Spearman will probably make easy work of it. There are further ways to add to this simple cross-stack to improve on even this potent defense, such as to add an Archer that an attacking Axeman unit would find very difficult to defeat.

This is what makes it so valuable when units have an ability that allows them to target specific Unit Types or Unit Combat Types first. For these units, when they attack a stack that includes any units of their Special Target types, the best to defend among only THESE units will be the ones to come up to defend first.

Hunters are a good example of some of the first untis with such an ability to show up in C2C. They always target animals first. So if there are enemy animal units in a stack of defenders you are trying to attack with a Hunting unit, you're going to have the best defending animal come up first to guard the stack. This is pretty convenient for the Hunter, since animals tend to have no chance against hunting units but hunting units aren't all that good at fighting more standard combatant style units. This means the hunter can basically take out an animal right out from under a unit intended to defend that animal without ever having to contend with that defender!

This is incredibly important in v37 C2C because the C2C Combat Mod - Without Warning option heavily relies on these Special Target unit types and unit combat types to define what kinds of units may become the target of an Assassination attack if your unit happens to share a tile, even a city, with his Special Targets.

You also have units that Defend First against particular Unit Types or Unit Combat Types. This can trump the Attack First targeting units. So, for example, if the unit defending that stack of animals had the ability to Defend First against Hunters, then the animal would have to wait and the Hunter would end up frustrated if that defender was much stronger than he wished to face down to get his kill.

Defend first hasn't been used extensively in v37 but you'll see it now and then. There are plans to expand on promotions to enable many units to earn the ability to Attack and Defend First as well but they have not been developed as of v37 yet.


Healing and Unit Health

The first thing to clarify between Vanilla and C2C regarding unit health is one simple change that can have a huge impact. Originally, all units have 100 Health. This was a simple system intended to enable every measurement damage to just be a % of the total health. In C2C, units may have or obtain slight adjustments to maximum health amounts but where another value that relates to health is relating to the % of health, it will remain accurate to its purpose (such as the Combat Limit some units have.)

A unit with greater maximum health won't be stronger than its maximum strength when fully healthy, but it may be able to last a little longer in a fight. It can also take a little longer to heal up to full health. Some promotions add maximum health to the unit.

Just as in Vanilla, if a unit has 50% of its health left, it also is at 50% of its overall maximum strength. If the Vanilla Combat system option is in effect then when a unit enters battle, the round by round odds during that battle will not change until the fight is completed, but in the core C2C combat mechanism, units will weaken as they are damaged during battle, each round the odds being recalculated to reflect the current amount of damage the unit(s) have received.


Originally, a unit that could help other units to heal would be able to help all other units in the same plot. This has changed in C2C in two ways:

1) Healers usually only assist particular types of units.
and
2) Healers are limited to being able to help a defined count of units in the stack before the rest must be helped by another healer unit or are left to heal on their own until the units under the healer's care have become fully healthy and they are freed to assist other units.

Almost all units have one or more 'Heals As' Unit Combat Class categories assigned to them. Most healing units specify what types they help to Heal and how much they assist in healing those units under their care.

If a unit has multiple types of Heals As categories, then its damage is held in multiple pools, each one capable of being healed at different rates. The pool that is most damaged represents the overall amount of effective damage the unit has in regards to further healing and combat readiness.

What this means is that when a Mounted unit like a Horse Rider, that has both 'Heals As (Animals)' and 'Heals as (People)' categories takes 10 Hit Points of damage, for example, it actually takes 10 points of damage to the Animals Health Pool and 10 points of damage to the People health pool. Left on its own, both recover at the same speed.

However, if there is a Healer on the tile that Heals People +5 Health per Round (and let's assume that the mounted unit in the example is the only unit on the plot) and the base healing rate is 5 Health per round, then in one round, with the Healer's assistance, the damaged Mounted unit has healed all of its damage to the People in the unit BUT still has 5 points of damage to the Animals in the unit. Therefore, the unit is considered to have 5 points of damage remaining overall. The next round, that 5 points will heal due to the base.

If, however, there were a second healer on the plot that Heals Animals +5 health per round, both the People Healer and the Animal Healer would aid the damaged Mounted unit and that would leave the Mounted unit completely healthy after just one round of healing, as both types were assisted enough to complete healing 10 points of damage in both Animal and People damage pools on the unit.

Thus, if you wish to have an effective healing force for all unit types, then you must cover healing needs for all types. Of course, if your stack contains only melee units, then purely people healers would be sufficient. But if your stack has some melee units but also has some chariots, which Heal as People, Animals, AND Mechanical, then you'll need some healers of all three types. If you only have People Healers in the stack, your chariots will heal rather slowly but your Melee will recover very quickly.

As individual healing pools are cleared up in the units that have received assistance, the healers will be freed up to help other units that are damaged in ways they can help. Thus, even though a Mounted unit in the stack may have had all it's people healed and still be waiting for its animals to heal, the people healing units that helped the people in that unit to heal up faster than the animals can then focus their attention on the next unit that needs some help healing people.

Healers respond with the most effective healers available to assist the most injured units in the stack first. And many buildings that can be constructed in cities will offer healing support to all units on the tile but usually for specified 'heals as' types as well. Nevertheless, a well grown city can offer a lot of healing support that can make it much faster to heal there than in the wild.

There are many types of promotions to help healers develop. You can have your healers widen the scope of what they can help to heal and how many units they can heal in one round, and you can instead specialize them in healing particular types. There are numerous different unit types that have different healing specialties. You're probably going to want Siege Mechanics for your Mechanical unit healing needs, and Shepherds for your animals etc...

However, just as it has always been, unless it has a special ability to heal on the go, a unit that has moved this round will not get any ability to heal during the end of turn processing, when healing takes place.

Although it has not been implemented yet in v37, many naval units are soon to be very difficult to heal at sea at all, getting ONLY what assistance they can to heal and not having any ability to get a base amount of healing applying at all unless they are in a port. If you're staying updated on the SVN, this is coming some time soon.

 

Civilian Unit Types

Although this topic could easily be considered the sort of thing that should fall under the general guideline of being specific content and thus something left for the Pedia alone, we've done a few things with civilian units that I wanted to shed some light on for players unfamiliar with C2C because it hasn't been made obvious anywhere.

All of these types of civilians can get their own experience points from a coresponding type of specialist assignment if the Assigned Specialists XP game option is on. Furthermore, the Citizen specialist adds +1 to ALL kinds of specialist. So with this option, there is a huge pool of potentially available XP for these Civilians when trained, but to assign your specialists to assist you in training these can mean sacrificing a lot of other benefits by the normal specialist assignments you'd otherwise be using that could be much more beneficial, especially over the Citizen.

Civilian unit types include, but are not limited to:

• Workers - May now gain experience points and levels, taking advantage of promotions as they do. Just working, they earn experience as they go. At the moment, the promotions are fairly basic, mostly just improvements to construction speeds on various terrains. Many worker types gain differing benefits and there are special promotions and special workers that are accessed by getting cultures. (See Cultures)
  
  
• Missionaries - Operate much as they always have, except that sometimes you will train a Female Missionary at random whenever you train a missionary. There is no game difference, just graphic. Otherwise they are the same as their male counterparts.
  
  
• Merchants - May also gain experience points, usually just at the point they are trained. There are some special promotions for merchants. Food merchants are one of the fastest ways to grow a city if you want to really push growth. Most of their missions are still one shots though.
  
  
• Entertainers - Also gain experience points and levels and thus promotions. Entertainers can be used to end local anarchy by performing for the people, which is also gives a very minor culture blast of a much lesser benefit than that of a Great Artist. Most importantly, they can be used to be sacrificed to build a huge amount of buildings that can be constructed no other way. You should always remind yourself to check what the latest type of entertainer can build for you in your cities! Entertainers are also very useful for improving your education levels wherever they stay put, particularly if they are using buildups and promotions to enhance their abilities here. More on Entertainers in the Properties section.
  
  
• Law Enforcement - Law Enforcement units aren't that great at being military guards for the city but they CAN help as fodder in a pinch. Mostly, however, they are used to help you control crime, simply by being there in the city. They can enhance their abilities to help with that and there are buildups that can strengthen this as well. However, they can also be specialized in Investigation and in arresting (going to battle with) criminals. Some of this is the biggest new development in v37 and deserves a LOT of discussion. Thus, I'll explain it all in detail in the Criminal Spawns, Investigation and Arrests section. Also more on Crime in the Properties section.
  
  
• Healers - We've talked about special healing rules but Healers are also generally very good at helping to control Disease. More on this in the Properties section.

Promotionlines

These are fairly simple from a player perspective but have helped a lot with back end modding work and with display simplification. Promotions have always classically had layers. Combat I led to Combat II which led to Combat III, all of which had similar, if not the same benefits and artwork, usually designated with additional stars to show what number of that promotion type it was (a little more directly so with the Combat promotions.)

In C2C, units were beginning to amass so many promotions that it helped to make it so that if a unit has Combat II, only Combat II would need to be displayed on the unit help details, a hoverover on which would indicate the sum total of modifications that having both Combat I and II were giving the unit. This doesn't mean that the unit lost Combat I when it took Combat II, just that we felt it didn't need to explicitly show it.

To achieve this, promotions have been assigned PromotionLines. Not ALL promos have promotionlines, just those that are part of a progression set. Shock (anti-melee promos), for example, is a Promotionline, as well as the aforementioned Combat. Shock I, II, and III are all part of that promotionline so if a unit has Shock III, only Shock III will show but the unit really does posses all three.

PromotionLines have come to have a lot more effects and interactions since this simple setup. For example, it plays a major role in Buildups and Statuses. (See Buildups. See Statuses.) It has also helped a lot with crafting access to all kinds of promotions for units. Promotionlines are part of the basis of the promotion side of manipulating units within the Size Matters option. It will be a key component in Equipments, Diseases, Poisons and Critical Injuries, all elements of Combat Mod options in development.

Developing Leaders also uses the Promotionlines structure to categorize Traits, making traits much like promotions for leaders. This will become much more apparent how this is important once a tiered trait system is implemented (planned for early inclusion in the v38 design cycle.)


Buildups

While units may still 'Fortify' as they always could, to get a growing +5% Combat Modifier if attacked, capping out at a maximum of 5 rounds of fortification bonus (25% Combat Modifier), in C2C FAR more options have opened up for units to benefit from the time they spend doing 'nothing'... or rather during the time they are not moving.

A unit may now select a buildup to go to sleep. A buildup is a Promotionline selection you make from a popup that comes up when you select the Red Shield buildup button. Once you've selected the buildup from the list of those available for this unit in the popup that ensues, the unit will go to sleep 'building up' promotions on that promotionline each round.

In most cases, each round the unit is building up, it gets assigned the next promotion on that line. There are a few ways that this basic rule can deviate. Some Buildups are programmed to give the next promotion on the line every other round, for example.

When you read the hover text on the Buildup Selections available for the unit, there is clear text to explain what promotions and at what rate you'll get them for the Buildup you are considering. However, some Buildups are limited by tech level so you might only get one or two at most for now, but later, when you've collected more technologies, you may be getting a full five promotions by waiting five rounds or more.

For example, there is a Fortify buildup now! In fact, the AI no longer uses the original Fortify command at all but rather relies entirely on the Fortify Buildup instead. Unsurprisingly, it actually works exactly like the classic Fortify action. Each round spent working on the Fortify Buildup, the unit gets a +5% Defense Modifier from the next Fortify Promotion on the line. Since there are just 5 promotions on the Fortify line, a unit caps out at +25% Defense Modifier when it has obtained them all. Of course, it should be that only units that can benefit from defense values can use the Fortify Buildup (but there are other buildups that they MAY be able to use so that's a big thing that differentiates this system from the Vanilla mechanism!)

One of those buildups that units that don't get Defensive Benefits may be able to take would be Escape Plans, which increases the unit's chance of withdrawal by +5% for each promotion on the line (and there are 5 promotions on the line so it can build up to a total of +25% Withdrawal Probability.)

An IMPORTANT distinction here, is that when a unit moves or attacks while under the effects of Buildup promotions, it maintains those built up benefits for the move or attack, as long as it's all part of the same command.

You can't buildup, move one space then attack another space and still have the buildup. But you can maintain the buildup benefits if you move and attack in the same singular command.

This is why the Fortify Buildups give a Defensive Modifier rather than a general Combat Modifier. But some buildups DO allow you to prepare to get a bonus on attack in special situations, such as Set for Charge, which gives a growing combat modifier against Mounted units.

The wake up command will dissipate all buildup promotions on the unit and allow you to set a different buildup, which you may sometimes want to do, particularly with Law Enforcement units on occasion.

Unfortunately, selecting a batch of units and then having them select the Buildup mission will still enforce that you select a buildup for each unit individually. This is to avoid a crash situation that can take place otherwise. So some complained that the Buildup system could end up a little laborious in how many selections would need to be made.

In an effort to simplify things for players who don't like to have to take too much time considering every detail, the Blue Shield Automated Buildup selection button has been provided, which allows you to set the unit to go to sleep with the buildups that the AI would have chosen for this unit.

One benefit of the AI using these buildups is that you can usually pretty easily see what promotions a unit in the field has, and if you get pretty good at recognizing the buildup promotions, you can get an idea of what buildups they're using and at what level they have obtained those buildups. For example, this makes fortified units a little easier to see that they are.


Capture

You'll notice a number of civics, units, promotions and more often mention that they influence the chance to capture and resist capture.

Although the old rules regarding capture of helpless units, like capturing workers (and settlers though they become workers when you capture them) has not changed, meaning unless units specifically cannot capture units peacefully, attacks against helpless units result in the capture of those units, the chance to capture and resist capture that is often noted for units has nothing to do with this sort of capturing.

We also know from other discussions that animals may be subdued. This also follows its own mechanism where chances of subdual are an ability that many hunters develop. Again, this is not the same kind of capturing being referred to here.

When a unit attacks another unit and defeats the defender, the attacker checks his total % probability to capture subtracted by the defender's resistance to capture. If the check is successful, the defender has become a captive.

There are primarily two kinds of captives, military captives and civilian captives. Civilian captives come from taking cities. Military captives are the ones that can be generated from battle.

Captives of both kinds are exceedingly useful. What they can be used for differs a bit depending on whether it is a military captive or civilian one. Civilian captives can be made to join cities as a new population (refugees so to speak) or represented as food added to the city to take the city closer to another population point. Military Captives can add food to the city as represented portion of population added to the people there but cannot add a full population point immediately as Civilian Captives may.

Captives may often be used to open up access to one of three worldviews, Cannibalism, Human Sacrifice, and Slavery. It takes a Judge or Great Person to dispense with a worldview.

Cannibalism obviously allows you to make captives into even more food but can be pretty penalizing in other ways, particularly as the game progresses and it becomes less and less acceptable to maintain the practice.

Human Sacrifice allows you to get some other benefits from sacrificing captives.

Slavery is perhaps the most powerful of the worldviews, allowing you to absorb your captives into the fabric of your society as slaves to serve you in nearly any function. There are powerful slavery buildings captives can generate if slavery is unlocked and military captives can be added to the city, enhancing the city as 'free specialists'. This can add up to a tremendous source of power for your empire.

There is a huge danger in slavery though, as health and happiness take hits with each benefit you gain, and crime and disease can quickly become a massive problem as slaves enhance these problems in your cities. Furthermore, some much later powerful industrial buildings may not be constructable under slavery. So it benefits the civilization to eventually free the slaves (emancipate) and absorb them as population as much as they can from there.

Even without any worldviews, captives may be freed to add to the speed of growth of your nation, or put to immediate work to rush a building's production like trade units can. Some players prefer to avoid the added management problems introduced by these worldviews and just use captives for these smaller immediate one-time benefits. You'll have to make up your own mind how you want to play it.

Regardless, strategizing to enhance your ability to capture and use these captives to your best advantage can be a major factor in achieving dominance among the civilizations of the world. And while it may not seem too important to enhance your resistance to capture, it can go a long ways towards keeping your opponents from gaining a lot of benefit from your defeats at their hands.


Special Movement Rules

The information in this section is probably going to become pretty obvious pretty quickly when you play, but in case anything strikes you as 'funny' because it doesn't act like it did in Vanilla, I figured you should be able to get at least a quick explanation. A LOT of this is absolutely NEW to v37!

Movement rules have undergone some interesting adjustments in C2C. On the surface, these seem pretty innocent but from an 'under the hood' look at the code, it was a massive retooling of a lot of things where assumptions and shortcuts were made for Civ IV base move rules. In fact, there have been so many little tweaks, I'm not sure I'm even going to manage to remember to mention them ALL. But here goes:

1) Enemies can sometimes share the same tile. This was a NEVER NEVER NEVER kind of situation in Vanilla. Even if your unit was invisible to an enemy unit and the enemy unit moved onto your tile, your unit, assumed to want to remain invisible, would be moved to the next legal plot it could occupy. Therefore, if you had a Stealth Destroyer protecting your fish resource, it would not defend the fish when an enemy submarine would move in to destroy the fishing nets there because the submarine didn't see the Stealth Destroyer. It would just get shunted off to another tile. In C2C, by default the Stealth Destroyer in this situation would neither try to defend nor move away. They can legally share the tile instead.

2) Some units, like criminals, now have a Blend with City ability that allows them to move in and out of even enemy cities without combat, whether seen or not. They cannot, therefore, attack a city... at least not from the outside in. On the Without Warning Combat Mod option, they can often then use an Assassination action against some units there, and criminals have to watch out for being investigated which can make them vulnerable to arrest - see the section Criminal Spawns, Investigation, and Arrests.

3) There are some units, like Ruffians (bandits) that get a special ability to 'blend with barbarians'. This means they don't attack barbarians, but instead barbarians take them to be 'one of them' and accept them into their society at every level, including allowing them to take refuge in their cities (thus they are useless at attacking barbarians as well.)

4) Land units inside tunnels can share the plot with enemy naval and LOADED land units on the high seas overhead.

5) Terrains and features add together their movement costs and defensive values now. Since I would otherwise be at risk of sounding like a lawyer with a stick lost somewhere behind his chair, this is easier to experience. Movement follows some subtle rule adjustments that make it more intuitive and accurate to what you'd imagine you could expect.

6) Since it's possible for enemies to share tiles, another thing to watch for is that a unit that cannot attack can share a tile with a visible enemy IF that enemy unit can ALSO not attack. Thus if you are at war with another nation and your scout encounters their scout in the wild, they can share tiles because scouts can't attack. This will happen with scouts and quite a few animal types as well for the same reason.


Achieving these interaction rules have paved the way for more interesting stuff to come in v38 (with unit elevations for submersible units and ongoing hovering units.)

There's also some new interesting movement rules that can restrict units (and buildings for that matter) to existing only on particular 'map types' such as Earth or Space or the Moon, or Mars for examples. You will see tiles denoting what type of plot they are in this regard and unit details denoting what kinds of maps they can exist on. This is a preliminary for multi-maps and interacts with the cruder (but well designed) scenario style maps that offer a proxy multi-map setup on a single map. This has been a very interesting thrust among a sub-segment of modmodders that v37 has given some support to where we could. You may want to try to give one of these maps a go at some point! But if you do, understand that not every detail of space travel has been sorted out perfectly yet so it might be a little funny with some elements.

 

Miscellaneous Mod Factors​

Improvement Upgrading

Improvements in C2C, you know, those things you put on plots to 'improve' them, like farms and such, can upgrade on their own without worker action. This is not unusual. It's been happening for villages to towns since Vanilla CivIV. But we've taken the feature to new heights here where nearly all types of improvements have upgrades and sometimes multiple potential improvements they can upgrade into.

Furthermore, some improvement upgrades will destroy the feature (such as forests for example) that the previous improvement was allowed to coexist with. For example, a Mine will allow a forest to go on undisturbed on the same plot but a Modern Mine tears the whole hillside apart so the forest is destroyed for the mine to upgrade to a modern mine.

In general, if an improvement can upgrade to its default first available improvement, it will start counting down it's turn timer before the upgrade takes place, a timer that some leader traits and civics and buildings can influence. Once the turn timer has counted down, it will consider whether or not it should just go ahead and upgrade. It will do so if it won't disturb the features on the tile and there are no other current options for upgrade.

HOWEVER, if the improvement has multiple options to upgrade into, or it will destroy the feature on the plot to do so, then it will give you a popup that asks you what you want to do... accept the default upgrade or select an alternative or just leave it alone and keep it from upgrading (which in some cases is not a bad choice considering that removing the feature can remove some of the benefits on the plot.) It will show you any production that will be gained by allowing a feature to be destroyed and where that benefit would be received.

If you tell it not to upgrade at this point or the upgrade is technically something you could build but you cannot yet tech qualify to destroy the feature and it would require doing so, then the upgrade will be frozen. The plot hover information will tell you this but you won't get any popup notification on the subject. To later unfreeze a frozen upgrade, go into the city and remove any population from working that plot, then have the population work the plot again and you'll get the popup again the next round.

This improvement freezing CAN be a useful way to suspend an upgrade that you'd rather go in a different direction but you cannot yet tech qualify to do so, but that, of course, would require a level of study on the improvement structure of the game that even those who built that structure would be hard pressed to recall so much detail in.

Suffice it to say there are a number of interesting ways to work your improvements as they upgrade. See if you can figure out the secrets of mastery here.

For deeper understanding, this document was written for a modder's perspective on this issue: https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...rnative-improvement-upgrade-mechanism.526342/


Cultures, Unique National Units and Heroes

A few years ago now, someone on the general forums for Civ IV here suggested that the civilization that a people becomes is not something that was, historically, based on environmental factors. They observed that customs and the ways in which people interacted with the world were shaped by the terrains and resources the people had access to.

As a mod team, we received this idea and decided to take the ball and run with it. Therefore, if you are expecting your civilization choice to have much meaning any more, we apologize but it doesn't carry the weight it once did in Vanilla BtS. Unique Units and Unique Buildings (UUs and UBs) and yet more uniques like promotions and such, have been relegated to the domain of being provided by Cultures.

This is not to be confused with the term Culture, which is a commerce and defines the strength of the civilization's overall national identity as distinct from the other civilizations in the world. CultureS are the heritages, art, military specialties and more that a people develop as their perspectives evolve and grasp for identity, even within sub-groups within a nation.

To initiate a culture, a city must build the Culture world wonder. It can only ever be built once. Once built, it provides a resource that represents that culture, and it is this resource upon which unique units, buildings and more are dependent upon to be trained or built.

Your original civilization choice DOES determine your Heritage, from a very limited group of heritages. These are the most basic definitions of regional development, such as North American, European, Oceanic, African, Middle Eastern, Asian, South American. When you capture an enemy city, your Civilization adds their Heritage to the list of Heritages your nation has access to, provided you don't have it already.

Most Culture Wonders are buildable as a result of having access to a base Heritage, as listed above, tech access, and just the right combination of plot details within the city vicinity (see City Radius and Resources), terrains, features, and more often than not, stringent resource requirements. Some players have already gotten quite skilled at knowing where to plant cities to ensure they will get access to the cultures they would like to unlock for themselves.

Once the resource for the culture is possessed, and yes it CAN be traded off but it would be rare to do so, all of your cities have access to it and can thus all build the special uniques it provides. These unique units do not replace the core generic unit types they do often mimic, but they usually are limited to how many you can build (unless you are using the Unlimited National Units option) and they usually cost an exceedingly high amount of cumulative extra upkeep for each one you maintain. Many are special because they receive free promotions while others due to basic improvements to one unit ability or another or multiple abilities. They are not all equally more useful. Some are truly game-changing while others have a slight edge.

Commonly, the most impressive benefits of a culture are the heroes it can provide. Most cultures give you one or two heroes that can be built once further qualified for. Heroes are totally unique units that are limited to ever showing up in the game once. They are sometimes much stronger than the normal unit for the age and can often build some very powerful buildings or be committed to cities as specialists. The utility of great people with uniquely awesome military might. They also have access to a whole host of special green promotions that are far more powerful than most common promos. On Size Matters, in particular, Heroes can play a critical role in presenting unique challenges to your foes due to their unusual high quality and low group volume.

Many plans for further development on this subject exist but for now, this is where we are at in v37. It's a stable and tested system but some feel it is too exploitable by allowing too many to be collected by one large nation, particularly if that nation has been a successful conqueror. We're working on that.


Properties

We've introduced a new, and incredibly game changing feature in C2C that we call Properties. Aside from massive new content, this may be the central defining factor of the mod. Properties have given civics, units, buildings, traits and technologies new things to manipulate. They present new challenges to the player to control and internal conflicts that were never modelled in the original Civ IV, or where they were they were blended in to larger features such as general 'happiness' and 'health'.

Property values may be tracked on Players, Cities, Plots and Units (and more) but are usually only tracked on Cities and Plots with the current implementations we have. Property manipulators exist on many other game objects, from units to promotions to buildings and more.

A manipulator pushes changes to property values being tracked on cities and plots but they push these changes in a highly complex mathematical environment. Therefore, even if you were to understand the entire method behind these calculations of gain and loss of properties from one round to the next, you'd probably be hard-pressed to do those calculations offhand.

There are decay factors, resistance factors, bleeding over from plot to city to plot, then manipulators in effect from the units and buildings and civics... it can make the head spin trying to calculate what it should be from one round to the next so my advice is don't. Just know what direction you want to push a property in a location and do what you can to push the property in that direction with the tools you have to use, while minimizing the costs of training, building and using those tools.

Properties are not a one strategy fits all proposal. Some properties you want to keep eliminated (at 0 or under) while others you want as high as you can push them. At the moment, most of them you'll want to keep at 0 or as close to 0 as possible.

There are actually two property systems, a dynamic one and a static property system. Static property systems work more like health or unhealth, where all sources are simply added together into one, otherwise unchanging, total. Dynamic systems have drift and change and while you can get an idea of which direction your city is moving and where it's currently at, predicting further than that is a developed skillset.

At the moment, we only have one static property, Flammability, which when it starts to add up can trigger events that burn down buildings or more in the city. Fairly simple. Static properties cannot be manipulated by units like Dynamic properties can.

Property levels are shown on plot information hovers, city bar hovers, and on the city Properties panel which is in the upper right portion of the city screen on a tab that shares its space with the resources tab, above the specialist details. On the city screen properties tab you will get more information, a breakdown of the city's current level and how it shifted last round to give you an idea of the current trend of growth or retraction of the property (which you can influence with property manipulation sources like buildings and units.)

Note that the city plot maintains a different property total in most cases than the city itself but they do slowly bleed into each other in those cases, slowly seeking to balance out between them.


The Dynamic Properties currently a part of C2C are:

• Crime - Many painful buildings emerge in your city as crime grows there. Crime can spread from city to countryside (plot) and can spread from the plots around the city to the city itself. Most commonly, crime auto-buildings, representing criminal activities, will tend to impact your city by providing unhappiness and economic drains, as well as stability problems if you have Revolutions enabled. Some crimes even impose penalties nationwide. It can be VERY bad to allow crime to go unchecked and uncontrolled.
  
  Some buildings that skirt the moral boundary, such as Pirate's Coves and Bandit''s Hideouts, as well as those that can make for good criminal targets, can be powerful benefits to the city but you must be prepared to manage the crime they create. Population creates crime and the more difficult the handicap game setting, the more crime each point of population brings. Some traits can heavily influence crime so some games will be more difficult in this arena than others.
  
  Law Enforcement units can help you to control crime just by being on the plot, but promotions and build ups can enhance their abilities to help bring crime values down. There is much more to understand here that I'll discuss in the section that details what's new to C2C v37 specifically.
  
  Conversely, criminal units can be very useful to train and send to your neighboring cities to spread crime there and enhance crime values just by being on the plot, using again promotions and buildups to enhance their ability to cause this pain to your rivals.
  
  Crime is perhaps the most powerful of the properties and if you allow it to get out of hand, it can crush your economy. But don't panic... hardly any nation in the history of man has been able to keep crime in check everywhere at all times. And once you start to push crime into the negative amounts, you're probably wasting a lot of added support costs to achieve no further benefits past having reduced it to zero.
  
  Crime levels are represented in plot hovers and in the city 'properties' panel in the upper right section of the city screen as a gray pair of handcuffs icon.
  
  
• Disease - If crime is related closely to happiness and unhappiness, disease is equally related to health and unhealth. But it can have wider effects, like reduced productivity and economic health as well. It operates very similarly to crime in that population enhances it, and there are buildings and healer units to help control it, along with promotions and buildups, while auto building which represent the diseases existing in the city will emerge as disease grows. It's also very difficult to keep completely negative and wasteful if you do. At the moment, diseases mostly just drag on city growth so may not be as important to react to as dramatically as crime, but it's looking like v38 will have a lot of focus on reshaping disease and making diseases much more challenging.
  
  Disease levels are represented with a biohazard icon in hover information and on the city Properties panel (where you get as detailed a breakdown of the city's current level and how it shifted last round.)
  
  
• Education - Education is the one Dynamic Property that you want high, usually. In reality, education levels CAN be manipulated depending on the current needs of the nation. Education is a double-edged sword but probably sharper in serving you beneficially on the high side than the low. Sources of entertainment and public education often enhance education. Entertainers can have a lesser effect on enhancing education in a manner that Law Enforcement units can reduce crime. Each population soaks up some education.
  
  What education really represents is different than research. It represents the applicable understanding of technologies that the civilization has discovered that is applied by the people of the nation. A country with a huge amount of technical expertise but only a small percentage of its people understanding those technologies and how to best use them to improve their society is going to miss out on a lot of the benefit of having those technologies. But if more people do have the full educated world views that the cutting edge information can provide, the nation has a harder time coming to unified agreements on how to plot a course into the future, and they tend to value personal accomplishments over breeding future generations.
  
  A less educated people are more easily manipulated into accepting wars and their consequences. The highly educated are powerful but finicky and this can mean you get a lot more great people and free specialists (representing greater accomplishments from the working populace) but your leader is held to higher standards and the people can be more sensitive and grow weary of war earlier.
  
  Education also spreads awareness of the pitfalls of crime and the dangers that can lead to contracting diseases so a high education level can be very instrumental in controlling crime and disease properties as well.
  
  The influences from Education levels are represented by autobuilds triggered to emerge or disappear when levels reach certain points, both positive and negative. For more information on the structure of Education effect autobuilds, check out this spreadsheet, admittedly designed more for modders than players to read. The Pedia will show you a player format on these levels as they show up in the buildings lists.
  
  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wNPOpUZOOOIiVXB8Vf1tcXm_D-bxBDCg_JB2vChRU-I/edit#gid=0
  
  Education is represented as a little red book icon.
  
  
• Tourism - Although this doesn't kick in right away, later in the game when citizens start to travel for fun and enjoyment, tourism can become a major factor. It is mostly generated by wonders and tourism supporting buildings like hotels. It is usually more beneficial than negative but it's absolutely both good and bad for your city. On the good side it can enhance your gold income a lot. On the bad side it can also bring tremendous levels of crime. If you have a heavy tourist destination for a city, watch your crime levels and maximize on the added gold income in every way you can. No units influence Tourism currently.
  
  Tourism is represented by a gold helmet icon.
  
  
• Air Pollution - Can lead to global warming and other effects if allowed to get out of hand. Becomes a problem in the Industrial and Modern eras. Industry tends to be the primary source. There are a few units that can help, the Park Ranger and the Ecologist, but they aren't very strong at it and you could go broke if you try to use them over restraint to primarily control this property.
  
  Air Pollution is represented by a toxic brown cloud icon.
  
  
• Water Pollution - Can diminish the yields on nearby water tiles when it gets too strong. Watch how you dispose of your garbage!
  
  Water Pollution is represented by a water droplet icon.

At first, you should watch your properties and monitor them closely. After a while you'll get a pretty good idea as to what's taking place with them and what to watch for. But ignore them at your peril. Your enemies are not purely your opponents. They can be your own citizens as well.


Trade Route Rules

Trade can be an awesome and powerful factor in growth of your empire. In C2C there are a number of unique features to trade.

Techs, civics, traits and buildings all influence trade in highly significant ways.

Techs determine when overseas trade can take place. Trade routes can connect via rivers and shores and lake shores at raft building. At Sailing, you can trade across the water as long as you don't have go pass seas or oceans. (See Seas) At Seafaring trade routes may cross Seas. (See Seas) At Navigation, trade routes may cross oceans. Across land, any route connection to another city can enable a trade route with that city.

The amount of trade routes in a city is generally built up by building construction selections. The first building to enable a trade route is trails, but you may wish to wait to construct it until you have a means for a route to be established (as listed in the last paragraph) to another city. There are usually slight drawbacks to those buildings that establish trade routes.

Some buildings will establish only additional trade routes by water.

Furthermore, there is a hard limit maximum amount of trade routes for a city. This CAN be adjusted by traits but I don't think this is in use on any traits in v37. (It's coming in v38.)

Each trade route brings profit to the city that established it. Although this is true, it is often possible for the city you have a route with to also have established a route with your city.

Civics control whether you can establish routes to foreign cities or not and when you do, foreign routes are generally more valuable because what you get from a route is modified by the distance to the city and the size of the city.

Civics and buildings also control what you can get out of a trade route. Originally in Vanilla BtS, only commerce could be derived from trade routes. In C2C we inherrited work from previous mods that enabled the other yield types to also be generated by trade, production and food. Civics usually control the % of your trade yields converted from commerce to food or production.

Each route can become quite lucrative for the nation, if trade factors are given consideration and value when making your civic selection choices. Trade routes can also enable religions to automatically spread between them.

To see what your trade routes are accomplishing for you, there is a panel just over the halfway mark on the lefthand side of the city screen that is defaulted to showing the trade routes, the cities you have those routes with, and what they are generating. There are many options on that panel for breaking down what yield sources there are for the city but trade routes are what you'll commonly want to see there.

Don't underestimate the power of peaceful trade!

 

Wow this is looking great. Thanks a lot for this hard work.

 

Wow, that is great. Would it not be better in the main forum as a sticky?

 

Perhaps, yes. I would like to at least get a link to it from the Player's Info stickied thread.

 

It looks like my goal of having this complete by v37's release date is going to come up tremendously short. Sorry for that guys. BUT, this is still a project that has been a LONG time coming and has been sorely needed. So this is my immediate goal to complete this and if anyone sees more things that need to be addressed, don't be shy to mention it. If there are things you still wonder even after reading a section or matters you want clarified that aren't included in any sections yet and don't appear in the planned for inclusion list, bring those things up please. If you are a modder or are just really knowledgeable about a subject I haven't covered and can explain it (@DH & Toffer especially: I'm looking at you for helping me to flesh out some of this!) then write that section up in a PM to me and I'll fit it into one of these posts. This central repository of a playbook may REALLY help to propel the popularity of our mod in a time when we are in competition for playtime against a core version of the game that is TWO full sequels past the platform we are on. Our biggest detractor is also our biggest benefit, which is how complex and epic the mod is, both in design and play scope, so the more we can break things down for the player, the more we can turn intimidation into excitement to play. And I know there are areas of the mod I dare not try to explain, like trade rules for example, or the thinking behind animal autobuildings, or how the advancing settler types are used. I also recognize that I'm more likely to have my mind on aspects of the mod that I had a hand in developing and I may be overlooking whole mod elements because they weren't my projects. AKA, help is welcome. Also, if I have gotten anything wrong or incomplete, let me know!

 

Impressive work so far. You da !

JosEPh

 

Wonderfully. New version + my ideas were implemented.

 

two minor things

1) If Barbarian Generals if OFF you will never get a Great Hunter.

2) The AI does not use Surround and Destroy, last I heard, so it becomes a human player cheat

also Usable Mountains should be removed from the options as far to much relies on you being able to move through mountains at some stage. In fact I don't think all the promotions that allow you to move through mountains have been properly linked to this option as they should.

 

I'm not 100% sure about that now that the animals have been split from barbarians which is why I was vague about this point. I know it was like that when we introduced Great Hunters.

I've been noticing that the barbarian USES of Great Generals and how they get put into the game only as soon as the first barb city emerges so the first one gets a sudden drop of around 10 generals or so are both fairly problematic for this option but it's not worth breaking the Great Hunter over. Those are just a few things to address at some point as they are current noted design flaws.

They don't INTENTIONALLY use it but they can benefit from it, and often do. If they were to intentionally try to use it to their benefit it would require some very clever AI indeed to keep them from making themselves more vulnerable for trying. I have some plans for that and perhaps I can fit them in this cycle. Maybe next. Either way I strongly suggest playing with the option rather than without.

I thought it was you who kept fighting to keep it an option? I'm MORE than happy to turn it on and invisible.

I think you're right that there are some real inconsistencies with it off right now.

 

This document should replace the one I started in the main thread and is stickied there. I never got it finished mostly because I never understood some of the options.

BtW you don't mention the downside of the More Resources option viz stops some events that spawn resources, reduces the herd planting from combat with animals (this is based on if the plot has resources and what ones are near by), reduces your ability to place herds where you want and so on eg Great Farmer.

 

How do we get that 'done'?

What... because there are already a lot of resources it reduces the chances for having some of the other later resource placement effects in the game being valid? I mean, it doesn't directly have this effect, just indirectly right?

EDIT: Added the mention on this. Thanks for the tip! More info is merrier. I figured you'd be good for bringing a lot more info into this document!