MisterBoomBoom
King
- Joined
- Nov 10, 2010
- Messages
- 700
I'm looking forward to loading this up over the weekend! Looks like an intricate deepdive, involved, and a refreshing challenge to play!
Civilization Epochs
- Thread starter Drawmeus
- Start date
Short answer: Currently, no. I am happy to help resolve conflicts so that you can mix and match, though.
Longer answer: I don't want to bloat this mod with unnecessary features - for features that Epochs doesn't NEED but which are cool, I'd rather just make sure there's a compatible modmod available and leave that up to you guys to choose what you want. For Cultural Diffusion and especially Revolutions, I am looking at whether those mods (possibly with some tweaks) could be part of the solution to the problems Epochs suffers later in the game. If I think they're important to Epochs living up to its potential, and the author doesn't mind my incorporating them, I'll be putting them in. I assume I will need to make some changes to them to fit my particular needs if I do incorporate them, but, well, we'll see.
Nothing happening in the near future, but I've been looking at it.
Longer answer: I don't want to bloat this mod with unnecessary features - for features that Epochs doesn't NEED but which are cool, I'd rather just make sure there's a compatible modmod available and leave that up to you guys to choose what you want. For Cultural Diffusion and especially Revolutions, I am looking at whether those mods (possibly with some tweaks) could be part of the solution to the problems Epochs suffers later in the game. If I think they're important to Epochs living up to its potential, and the author doesn't mind my incorporating them, I'll be putting them in. I assume I will need to make some changes to them to fit my particular needs if I do incorporate them, but, well, we'll see.
Nothing happening in the near future, but I've been looking at it.
Building Creep
The Problem: Epochs presents many more buildings than the base Civ 5 game - overwhelmingly so. Many of these buildings have related functions - there are often multiple gold options, many happiness options, etc.
Spoiler :
Proposed Solution: I will treat building prerequisites as a Build Tree, similar to a Skill/Talent Tree (or the Tech Tree), organizing nearly all of the existing buildings into a small number of categories. For example, the Market, Bank, Caravaneers, Jeweler's Guild, Stock Exchange, Financial Building, Mint, and Tax Collector will be organized into a Financial tree.
Later items in most trees will have population requirements - you will need 6 Population before you can build a Bank, for example. Because later buildings in a Build Tree typically increase the yields of each Citizen, this requirement is a bonus for going Tall over going Wide.
Building Costs and Gold Maintenance in most trees will be arranged to reward heavy investment in trees. Most of the Gold Maintenance will be on the earlier buildings, so taking the early portion of several different Build Trees will result in very heavy Gold Maintenance in that City.
Most National Wonders will no longer require a building to be constructed in every City, but will instead require the City in which they are built to be very highly developed - requiring high populations and deep investment in build trees. Because of the Happiness mechanics of Civ 5, building up a powerful City comes at the expense of having more Cities, so National Wonders will still be much easier to get in smaller empires, but in an empire with enough Happiness, you will no longer need to wait to build new Cities just to get a National Wonder. I reserve the right to require X of a building or require a building in every City for some NWs.
Buildings will be labeled in their Help text with the Tree to which they belong as well as the buildings which they lead to.
There will be N trees:
- Financial: Focused on increasing the Gold output of this City.
- Construction: Focused on increasing this City's ability to construct Buildings and Wonders. Limited bonuses to military production.
- Government: Focused primarily on Empire Stability (Happiness), and secondarily on Gold. Also provides protection from Espionage.
- Infrastructure: Food and general bonuses.
- Entertainment: Focused on Culture and Happiness bonuses.
- Science: Improve the City's Science output.
- Military: Improves the speed with which this City builds military units and the quality of military units produced in this City.
- Defense: Improves this City's defenses, including providing bonuses to nearby military units.
- Naval: Provides substantial food, gold and production bonuses to Coastal cities, as well as bonuses to Naval unit production and to the quality of Naval units built in this City.
- Core: Not a tree per se, Core buildings are cheap, easily constructed buildings that nearly every city should have. Examples include the Monument and Town Hall buildings.
This is still a lot, but much reduced from the dozens that you can currently reach, and the game has conceptually sorted them for you, simplifying the decision-making process.
An example Build Tree might be as follows:
Spoiler :
Two further thoughts:
I had been limiting the number of buildings I assigned because of the Building Creep problem that I noted above. In switching to this kind of model, there may be opportunities to add in new buildings that would provide better gameplay without complicating cities too much.
The UI could potentially be updated to reflect this approach - displaying the Buildings selection screen as a series of Build Trees rather than in the unsorted approach currently taken. I have not explored this too far, either from a prototyping or a conceptual stance, but it would be possible.
Thoughts? I have not committed to this design, but I am committed to solving the initial problem presented.
Oh, way too cool.
Marc
Socratatus
Emperor
- Joined
- Jul 26, 2007
- Messages
- 1,636
Looks good. Civ 5 does seem lacking, especially in the early eras. I will give it a run.
No update this week. I'm perhaps 30 hours into a very engaging playthrough, fighting a WWI-era world war all around the globe, and I simply don't have the free time left over to do an update this week.
Development continues! I'm game design, engineering and QA on this project right now, though, and for this week I'm wearing my QA hat rather than design/engineering hats.
EDIT: WWII has arrived (actually, still WWI technology, but I just suffered the mother of all backstabs - top civs are Russia #1, me #2, Germany #3 - coordinated with Germany to attack Russia, who hated me, in 10 turns... on the appointed turn, Russia and Germany jointly declared war on me).
This may take a while.
Development continues! I'm game design, engineering and QA on this project right now, though, and for this week I'm wearing my QA hat rather than design/engineering hats.
EDIT: WWII has arrived (actually, still WWI technology, but I just suffered the mother of all backstabs - top civs are Russia #1, me #2, Germany #3 - coordinated with Germany to attack Russia, who hated me, in 10 turns... on the appointed turn, Russia and Germany jointly declared war on me).
This may take a while.
Socratatus
Emperor
- Joined
- Jul 26, 2007
- Messages
- 1,636
Wow. That`s a double whammy backstab alright! Ribbentrop must`ve done some fast secret negotiations!
Marc,
I haven't had any luck getting ANY mods to work multiplayer. Still investigating, but do mods work MP in general?
I had 10 battleships upgraded to the point of being able to double attack when the war started... I lost a couple cities but this has turned out to be a bit of an anticlimax, they can't fight me.
Promotions have been on my list of things that will need a major nerfing since before Alpha started, and looks like I'll have to prioritize it - I auto won this war because I had won some earlier wars. Works fine in the base game because by the time you have super upgraded units, the game's ending; in this mod, you can have super upgraded units less than halfway through, and then steamroll everyone who doesn't. The goals for that rework will be to make it still feel like an upgraded military is an asset while cleaning up certain bad consequences of the current promotion trees (e.g. melee upgrading to ranged and vice versa are brain-breaking, and the open terrain/rough terrain distinction is basically pointless), eliminating the few promotions (especially +range and double attack for ranged units) that result in doublings of power and that sort of thing, and bringing in more situational promotions like cover, amphibious, anti-unitclass, etc. (though this runs the risk of making it harder for the AI to play, so I may rethink it - in general, the more situational units are, the worse the AI will play).
Hello Drawmeus,
Perhaps still not yet. I hope they do get enabled for MP use; that's all I play.
Regards,
Marc
Perhaps still not yet. I hope they do get enabled for MP use; that's all I play.
Regards,
Marc
Development plan for the next 3 weeks:
Next Wednesday I will aim to deliver a balance and polish update similar to the previous updates I've done, clearing out part of my bug and feedback queue.
Tonight I will be writing a blog post describing a new system I will be building. It will be an expansion on City-State gameplay, aimed at providing a partial fix to problems (1) and (4) (see the blog post: http://strabogaming.com/?p=174 ).
The following two weeks will be spent building this system as a new mod - Expanded City-States (working title, I'll pick something catchier later). I'm building it as a separate mod for development reasons, it will be integrated into Epochs once it's ready. We'll see how far I can get in 2 weeks; if it's far enough along to be a net positive on gameplay, I'll integrate it and release an Epochs update.
After that will be some combination of Expanded City States development and Epochs development, we'll see where things stand.
Next Wednesday I will aim to deliver a balance and polish update similar to the previous updates I've done, clearing out part of my bug and feedback queue.
Tonight I will be writing a blog post describing a new system I will be building. It will be an expansion on City-State gameplay, aimed at providing a partial fix to problems (1) and (4) (see the blog post: http://strabogaming.com/?p=174 ).
The following two weeks will be spent building this system as a new mod - Expanded City-States (working title, I'll pick something catchier later). I'm building it as a separate mod for development reasons, it will be integrated into Epochs once it's ready. We'll see how far I can get in 2 weeks; if it's far enough along to be a net positive on gameplay, I'll integrate it and release an Epochs update.
After that will be some combination of Expanded City States development and Epochs development, we'll see where things stand.
Hello Drawmeus,
Are you referring to these two issues?
1. The remaining Civilizations are so powerful that each is essentially a superpower. Meaningfully opposing the other Civilizations generally means apocalyptic war on a continent-versus-continent scale. There are not enough ways to gain advantage over your rivals short of large-scale total war.
4. Most Civilizations have been eliminated by the Modern Era, and most City-States have either been eliminated or are so firmly under the grasp of one or another player that dedicating further attention to them is rather pointless. There aren’t enough players left in the game to have enough interesting opportunities for trade, diplomacy, or war
Nicely stated! We consistently run into this problem in our MP games. Yes, I know it is not MP-able yet, but I will guess the game developers will open this up later...
Thank you for working on this.
Marc
Are you referring to these two issues?
1. The remaining Civilizations are so powerful that each is essentially a superpower. Meaningfully opposing the other Civilizations generally means apocalyptic war on a continent-versus-continent scale. There are not enough ways to gain advantage over your rivals short of large-scale total war.
4. Most Civilizations have been eliminated by the Modern Era, and most City-States have either been eliminated or are so firmly under the grasp of one or another player that dedicating further attention to them is rather pointless. There aren’t enough players left in the game to have enough interesting opportunities for trade, diplomacy, or war
Nicely stated! We consistently run into this problem in our MP games. Yes, I know it is not MP-able yet, but I will guess the game developers will open this up later...
Thank you for working on this.
Marc
Took a day longer than expected, but the Minor Civilizations feature design spec (renamed from Expanded City-States) is available, if for some crazy reason you folks are interested in some really tedious reading: http://strabogaming.com/?p=184
The overview is quite simply that you will be able to create new CSes, grant them cities, build them up through gold investment, back them in wars, cause them to attack other CSes and other players, tax them when you need gold (they won't like it, though!), and some of the more annoying problems with them (cough coup spam) will be cleaned up.
I'll be starting on this as a standalone mod in a week or so, but I have no idea how long it will take. Could be 2 weeks, could be months, it's pretty ambitious and it's my first foray into the DLL (though decidedly not my first foray into C++).
The overview is quite simply that you will be able to create new CSes, grant them cities, build them up through gold investment, back them in wars, cause them to attack other CSes and other players, tax them when you need gold (they won't like it, though!), and some of the more annoying problems with them (cough coup spam) will be cleaned up.
I'll be starting on this as a standalone mod in a week or so, but I have no idea how long it will take. Could be 2 weeks, could be months, it's pretty ambitious and it's my first foray into the DLL (though decidedly not my first foray into C++).
I would suggest a new option for major civs: Push to Construct Building. This is a soft way of encouraging a minor civ to construct a building, and should be the only option where gifts of Gold should be available. Also, Grant Food Aid should be an option to minor civs, where some food is removed from the city of the player's choice and given to a Minor Civ city of their choice by dummy buildings.
FramedArchitect
Reluctant Modder
Looks like you have your work cut out for you! If implemented the way you describe this will completely change strategy.
