Civilization Epochs

[Drawmeus]

I'm principally an Emperor-Immortal player, so I admit I haven't done extensive testing in the middle difficulties - so this is a great opportunity for insight into how the mod plays for that difficulty level!

I'll take a look at evening out the economy at the middle difficulties for the next patch. This may include decreased unhappiness per city below King difficulty. If I can't get the balance right with my existing terms, I may add an economy difficulty slider as well, but I'd like to avoid that if possible.

I may also slow growth past population 4 or 5, which, while it won't make the economy particularly easier, will at least give you more time to react. Right now you grow into your happiness VERY quickly, which makes it difficult to settle cities once you have 2 or 3.

I'm starting a new job (Game Systems Design Consultant) Monday, and I've got a pair of for-pay indie projects in the works (no announcements), so my modding is going to be very slow over the next few months. No promises when I'll have another patch. But I'll take a crack at it for the next patch, whenever that is.

 

[gr5a]

but normally i don't have fun until medieval times, with lots of knights and siege fun. the mod makes ancient times just as fun, with lots of new things to do and a production level above that of a snail.

 

[Ambassador]

Hi Drawmeus,

I don't know if you are acquainted with Realism Invictus Mod from Civ4? It seems to me that your mod has a similar design philosophy as RI. Maybe you can get there some inspiration for problems troubling you.

 

[chumchu]

Great work!

I've played my first game as France doing a cultural/military strategy. (Immortal, Continents, standard size, standard resources). It's around turn 230, I've completed liberty and piety and I have discovered 2 renaissance techs. I built 3 cities very early and a fourth one late medieval. Puppeted Romes 2 best cities for extra culture and gold. Happiness were a problem until I got my religion going for ~40 happiness. Gold is really tight even when I sell most my lux and strat resources and produce wealth in 2 cities and I only have a 8 unit army. Im only earning money during golden ages.

General observations
There is often little that you want to build because gold is so scarce, so build order decisions are not as interesting as they used to be. I could build military units to grind down my neighbors in wars or spam levy/militia all over the place. Slightly increased build costs would help alleviate this.

Tech is working beautifully. The tech diffusionrate might be a bit high, not sure. The new tech tree is interesting. If possible you might want to reduce the amounts of required techs for each tech so that civilisations become more different techwise.

There could definatively be more social policies, to go with the expanded tech tree. As it stands now you earn them very slowly, even with a dedicated culture strat. I think cultural victories might be at a disadvantage vs. domination and science.

Minor crticisms
There could be a building giving a fixed amount of gold with no maintenance, this would alleviate the gold problems of peaceful civilisations. My suggestion would be the tax collector since it is almost worthless as it is now. If it gave 2 gold it would actually be built for other reasons than getting access to a market

Hunters are too good in comparison to warriors, even for fighting. They are significantly cheaper, ignores terrain and have access to survivalism I, II and III which makes them incredibly hard to kill. They counter both archers and warriors.

 

[Drawmeus]

Thanks for the feedback!

I like the idea of expanding the policies tree, but it's a ton of work (I'd also have to rebuild the UI for it). We'll see; it'll certainly have to wait a lot longer.

Survivalism I, II and III are on my hit list of things to either eliminate or totally rework. They are frankly toxic - you can plop a hunter next to enemies and just sit him there healing over and over with them, while being virtually impossible to attack, and they make Hunters ridiculously overpowered when stationed in a city as well.

EDIT: I kept a relatively high number of tech dependencies because I followed the Civ V approach to beelining, which is - keep it very limited. It's possible that I could change that, particularly if it's a feature that people really like. I'd have to consider teaching the AI to beeline, though.

And by the way, the praise is useful since it lets me know what you like, but the criticisms are even more useful because anything that stands out enough that it makes you feel the need to comment on it is a definite problem that I need to be aware of. For anyone reading this: if you play my mod and run into problems, please tell me. It's helpful.

 

[chumchu]

Regarding the tech tree. Don't see beelining as a problem but rather as an interesting choice for the player, do I beeline for this expensive line of tech to take advantage of horses/ naval start/ my civilisations bonus etc. or do I go for a lot of cheaper ones instead of those giving me luxuries. The important thing in this type of design is balance it so that it is not obvious what to do. If going deep is a bit more expansive than going broad so that you lose tech by beelining it can probably counteract the benefits you get from accessing a powerful technology. It's is unsatisfying to have to plow through a lot of tech you do not really need because the tech you need require 3/4 of the tech tree. Further, if you decrease the requirements you greatly increase the number of ways you can start the game, increasing replayability. With tech diffusion, everyones tech is still very much alike.

 

[Drawmeus]

Schedule time!

I've started a new job and am getting a handle on the hours, plus I have a pen and paper RPG project in the works, first playtest tomorrow.

I'm going to be working on the RPG through tomorrow and probably for a decent chunk of my free time next week. After that I will transition into the next version of Epochs. I'm not sure when I'll be releasing, but it may be 2 or 3 more weeks. The playtesting is the biggest problem for me - I can verify that my changes function, but playthroughs right now take 1-2 weeks of my total free time.

 

[primordial stew]

Epic!

In my first game I played as Montezuma on King with huge continents. It lasted till turn 439 (july 1547AD) before CTDing, and it is repeatable. Do you want a savegame?

Shortly after getting 4 cities, Germany attacked. I held them off pretty well, until a trireme took over my port city (no navy of my own, or even a garrison). Around then Sweden attacked, and took 1 city. Germany took another, so now I was left with only the capital. Sweden accepted peace, after which I slowly took back the cities from the Germans, then invaded them and took their 2nd city, and finally Berlin. With a big enough and experienced enough army the Swedes could be tamed. Progress has to be slow due to the very limited happiness producers during this time! Getting a size 7 city during peace negotiations is a bitter pill.

Roads are very limited early due to the small city size. They just don't generate enough commerce while small. This is fine, but like many of the other changes it takes some adjustment!

Later on Japan attacked, which was another epic war. Eventually 2/3 of their cities were conquered. Happiness was finally reasonable, so new cities could be absorbed at the rate the army could take them. Over the course of this was there was finally sufficient cash to allow building workshops, and other maintenance 2 or 4 buildings, and even the 6/8 ones in the capital.

Faith was of limited value. The Swedes founded Christianity, and spread it all over, though never enhanced it (perhaps because they were reduced to just the capitol). No buildings or units could be purchased with faith, so it accumulated unit GPs could be bought. I do really like the regular upgrades in the great improvements, and it's interesting that the great merchant is so much more desirable in this mod. Everywhere else they seem almost pointless, but here with gold so limited they are a big help.

From the captured cities it looks like the AI is building too many expensive buildings, and as usual they are building too many military units. Most seem to be running -100gpt or so whereas I managed +50gpt while most of the army was garrisoned.

When the CTD occurred I have ~3000 gold saved, and was running +50 gpt with +20 happy.

Probably for more turns than not I was -gpt (due to being at war much of the time), and it was only pillaging, conquest, and some raider gold that the system stayed afloat.

Very nice overall I'm looking forward to the next version

--------------

Ok, the savegame is 3.4M, but the max attachment size is 2M, so it's split into 2 parts (.001 and .002), and finally renamed with .7z added to the end so it's a legal filename.

I also use "R.E.D. Modpack" (unit graphics only) v23, and my own creation "Cities are not Fortresses", which is an xml only mod that changes some of the global parameters related to city bombard ability and strength modifiers. I've used each of these in plenty of games without any problems.

 

[Drawmeus]

Yes please! I would love a savegame with the repeatable CTD.

Also, AI aggression is turned WAY down compared to the base game - I see that you fought a ton of wars. Were they distributed fairly well over the course of the game? Over 439 turns, that sounds reasonable, if it was all clustered up, less reasonable, though of course extraordinary circumstances could account for it (including a weird roll resulting in lots of aggressive civs for that particular game).

 

[primordial stew]

updated my 1st post with the .savegame

 

[Drawmeus]

Thanks!

I'll be starting in on the next update tonight.

My plan is to release a lightly tested (mostly just unit tested - does this piece work? does this piece work? etc.) version when I've got the update together. I'll release that as a separate file from the most recent stable build, so the previous stable build will remain available.

 

[Drawmeus]

Started the update.

I'm going to try something new - I'm going to share the list of changes that I'm considering for this update ahead of time. I am happy to discuss any/all of them. Some are based on feedback, some are new feature development that I had already planned, some are the results of my own observations from my own playtests.

Disclaimer: Some of these are fairly large. It's very likely that not all will make it in, and probable that some will be cut from this patch simply because there's too much work to do.

So far the changes I've got planned for v10 are:

Spoiler :

• +2 Gold on Tax Collector
• Rework the Scout promotion line to be +strength in rough terrain instead of +defense and +healing. This is step one in a general Promotions rework; some of the other goals of the rework will be to eliminate double attack promotions (at least for ranged units), tone down promotion bonuses, unite the ranged/melee promotion trees and the rough/clear promotions. The overall goal will be that promotions will remain a powerful and interesting element of gameplay while being balanced around the much longer game; winning an early war will no longer leave you with an incredibly powerful military for effectively the remainder of the game.
• Implement a new Handicaps tuning that controls unhappiness per city for the player. This will be used to ease up Happiness problems on Prince and lower difficulty.
• Slow population growth above population 5 to account for the longer game. Cities will still relatively quickly grow to a size where they can be an interesting and important part of the empire, but growth beyond that point will take much longer. Buildings such as the Aqueduct may be tuned to allow the player to grow cities beyond that point faster if necessary.
• City-State Investments - Bug fix - Ensure that Investments cancel appropriately when a City-State is completely conquered.
• Restrict the "New Military Unit For City-State" notification to only fire for City-States which you have a Military investment in.
• Debug the CTD provided by primordial stew.
• Add City-State Influence Decay to Game Speeds info, so that faster game types will have faster Influence decay and slower game types will have slower decay.
• Slightly open up the tech tree to allow more beelining, based on feedback.
• City-State Investments notifications - add handling to pull the UI to the relevant City-State on clicking the notification.
• New Civilization: Egypt
• Increase Tech Diffusion rate with Civilizations with which you have a Declaration of Friendship, decrease Tech Diffusion rate with Civilizations which you have denounced.
• Incrementally reduce some maintenance costs of buildings.
• Incrementally increase maintenance costs of military units, possibly escalating per military unit, such that a small, defensive army will be cheap and a large, aggressive one is more expensive.
• Update Minor Civilization names to national or cultural names, instead of City-State names. E.g. La Venta will have a civilization name of The Olmecs, and a city name of La Venta.
• Disable Privateer boarding functionality if acquiring the new unit would result in you having negative resources.

Just guilt-tripping you all throwing this out there, but my life got incredibly busy rather suddenly, and focusing on the mod is hard right now. The more engaged people are, the easier it will be for me to stay focused on it and actually get stuff done. When I'm publishing to an empty room, it's easy to let it slide. When folks are actively engaged, that makes it fun for me. Honestly, if it hadn't been for those last 3 or 4 pieces of feedback from you guys talking about your experiences with the mod, there's a really good chance I wouldn't be working on this update for a while longer. Building games that people will actually enjoy is one of my favorite hobbies.

 

[Drawmeus]

primordial stew - where can I find the "Cities are not Fortresses" mod? I've been hunting around and can't find it either here or on the workshop, and your CTD save requires it.

 

[primordial stew]

primordial stew - where can I find the "Cities are not Fortresses" mod? I've been hunting around and can't find it either here or on the workshop, and your CTD save requires it.

It's not much of a mod. What it does is turn off city bombardment, reduce the city defense scaling factors, and increase the defense bonus from having a garrison.

It use it with everything.

 

[Drawmeus]

Thanks. I just need it to load your save.

It does introduce the possibility that the CTD might not be purely related to Epochs, unfortunately, but we'll see where I can get debugging it.

Epochs does change City Defense scaling factors, by the way, and completely changes how garrisons apply to City Strength, so you may see some inconsistency in City Strength depending on the order in which the mods load. Basically, Epochs reduces them a lot and increases the defense bonus from a garrison, but also 'floors' the City Strength of a city with a garrison to the unit's combat strength. So, e.g. if the City Strength including Garrison would be 12, but the unit's Defense in that tile would be 18, the City uses 18 for its Strength value.

EDIT: It's going berserk in this code:

void CvCity::changeBonusProductionFromInvestments(int iChange)
{
	m_iBonusProductionFromInvestments += iChange;
}

This should be fun.

 

[Drawmeus]

primordial stew -

I tracked down the crash bug and resolved it. There are some underlying problems that I'm tracking to fix, but you should be able to continue your game (if you still want to) with an update to Epochs. I'm including it here - it's v10, the only change from v9 is resolution of the crash bug.

 

[primordial stew]

Epochs does change City Defense scaling factors, by the way, and completely changes how garrisons apply to City Strength, so you may see some inconsistency in City Strength depending on the order in which the mods load. Basically, Epochs reduces them a lot and increases the defense bonus from a garrison, but also 'floors' the City Strength of a city with a garrison to the unit's combat strength. So, e.g. if the City Strength including Garrison would be 12, but the unit's Defense in that tile would be 18, the City uses 18 for its Strength value.

The disappointing bit with what I have is that the city is vulnerable to immediate counter-attack if the unit which just took the city didn't have any MPs left. I doesn't sound like you have that, which is much better

I take that is done in the DLL?

 

[Drawmeus]

The immediate counterattack issue is the exact reason why I also floored city combat strength at the defense value of the unit. You CAN have a city which is weaker than the unit in it, still, if it has the same combat value and fewer hit points, but in practice that only happens if the city has been subjected to repeated attacks after being captured, so your unit would have been destroyed anyway.

It is done in the DLL, yes. The code is relatively simple. It has weird consequences which I'm accepting responsibility for designing around - for example, if you leave a unit parked on Alert or Fortify in the city, you'll see the city's defense raise by a bit each turn for the next two turns. Defensive promotions are nightmarish in power level, parking a really elite soldier in a city can make it nearly unassailable. But I figure all these things are acceptable to solve the other problem.

 

[doag]

Great mod so far! Loving the slower tech paths, although I'm yet to see past middle of classic Done 2 different V9 (also happens V10) games so far with repeatable CTD, I've got one save:

 

[Drawmeus]

Thanks for the save and the feedback. I'll take a look asap.

v9 introduces a DLL, and as you may have noticed, it's a bit unstable. The saves go a VERY long way towards letting me stabilize it.

I'll get you an update as soon as I can figure out the problem. With any luck you'll be able to continue the games, but no promises.