Codex - Gameplay Overhaul

Yep, needs RT. ^^
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A new update has been released: v4 aka "Rise of the Commonwealth".

The main Feature is a completely overhauled Commonwealth that has now, instead of just being a random tab in the Empire Manager, been turned into its own thing. It comes with an all-new Victory Condition, a basic Reputation system, new Quests, Traits, little Contests, and a "Foreign Aid"-system that helps players that fall behind too much with light Growth/Production bonuses.

It also brings a set of new Sponsor Traits that now consist of 2 positive bonuses (one of which is increased when the trait is leveled), and a penalty or restriction. This makes Sponsors play much different from each other than they did before.

A ton of other changes are also included in this update, making it the biggest one so far. The full patch log can be found here.

A Codex Version of the Sha'Yuri Clan has also been released a while ago.
 
Loving the update so far! That KP nerf was well deserved, and all the other sponsor changes seem very interesting as well. I like the way the Commonwealth is move involved, and look forward to gaining their approval through legitimate (and nefarious) ways! Perhaps reputation should take a hit for excessive conquest? That way, it's almost an anti-domination victory instead of an energy one. On turn 80 so far as Barre with three cities, and just off the bat the diplo policy per city changes already give a lot more weight to my choices other than just being an "oh neat" flavor thing.
 
Thanks. :)

Yes, there are certainly a few things that I want to have influence on your reputation. Conquest - and obviously hostility towards Stations - are two examples of that.

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I've also released a new Sponsor for this Mod, the Genesis Corporation.






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Registered on this forum purely to say that I really appreciate your efforts, Ryika.

I've recently moved over from Civ V, and was initially sceptical about BERT based on described game mechanics and reviews (although the whole "Civ-in-space" part still weighted quite heavily in the game's favor), but after reading up on Codex, I decided that the game was still worth a shot. Now, I haven't played a single playthrough of the unmodded game but jumped straight into Codex, so I can't tell exaclty how much of a difference the mod does, but I severly doubt that I would enjoy the vanilla game even half as much as I enjoy Codex.

Keep up the good work!
 
Looks like a very impressive and well designed mod, definitely worth a try.

I may have stumbled upon a bug on my first turn though, it seems aquatic cities don't give bonus culture despite the culture breakdown in the city view being unchanged . Is it an undocumented feature or a real bug ?
Personally I would have preferred if Firaxis gave them no culture bonus and a 50% reduction in border-growth instead, do you have any idea if this is doable ?

One last thing the loadout "Colony Module" looks really punishing for wide play maybe you could add a +1 Food per city.
 
@Flixflix: Thanks! Glad you enjoy it. =)

@Zarrk: No, it's just a tooltip error, I'll fix it with the next update. Aquatic Cities don't have a Culture bonus.

Border growth for Aquatic Cities is not possible at all unfortunately as far as I can tell. You may however enjoy the Sonar Net in this Mod - it immediately claims all unowned plots in working range when finished.

Colonization Module isn't really meant for wide empires (in fact, I'd say it's terrible for wide Empires because of the harsh penalty), it's mostly meant for midgame strategies with 3-4 cities and then a heavy focus on Wonders or the Moonbase.

For wide Strategies that want to expand early on, I personally use the combination of Pioneers and Supply Module. Then I use my units to explore and try to get the "Bonus Production in the Capital/all Cities"-combinations to boost out a number of Colonists.
 
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Thanks for the confirmation about aquatic cities and for my complain iit was just because I used a fully random setup and ended with Chungsu, two exploitable hammer and Colonization, not really a good start, now I know it's much wiser to choose carefully your loadout.

Really impressive work, it feels like the game got his second extension (except this one looks balanced).
 
Thank you so much, your mods are the only reason I somehow still playing BE. Also, are you planning to make something similar to Civ6, that game is currently quite underwhelming somehow.
 
I have an idea that I want to work on for Civ VI, but it will not be an Overhaul Mod.
Not sure if I will actually do it though, changing seasons were a big part of my idea, but once again terrain cannot be changed "on the fly", so that idea is already impossible to implement visually.
 
Hey Ryika, I was sick this week and just wanted to say your mod was the perfect remedy and I couldn't put it down sometimes even feeling as bad as I was. Just won a turn 361 Commonwealth Victory, followed by Contact a few turns later. Was about to stick it out ten turns for Emancipation, but my close neighbor backstabbed me and I didn't want to deal with that.

The real strength of your mod is how complicated and interconnected the various new systems are. Your supremacy is ridiculously fun to play-I founded 12 of my own cities, and conquered two capitals. By endgame, my OBSRVRs were banking 25p 45s 30e from buildings and moonbase and Africa specialist bonus. If you've ever played mass effect, this is literally a Geth civ, interconnected robots that learn from and boost each other. When I built that first puny 5e 5s guy, I was hesitant to even work him since my normal human specialists totally outclassed him-next thing I know, they're literally putting the human specialists out of a job, are running my entire empire yield wise and are even calling the shots with that Supremacy victory flavor text. The humans in my society slowly lost the reins to automation by conscious AI, and in the end I gladly gave those robots rights, which is something the base game didn't even bother to address. And when I started work on the Emancipation Gate, the purity sponsors showed their disgust at my society's transformation over the communique, which may have always been a thing but certainly had more weight with all your gameplay and flavor additions.

That said, I did run into some issues. Exiting and loading the game reset my Golden Age points, and since I left a session in the middle of a Golden Age, upon loading it never ended, giving me a permanent 200% growth boost (gee, I wonder why my capital ended up with 50 pop) which was at least amusing. This also locked me out of diplomatic positions for the rest of the game (whatever) and reset my status with the Commonwealth, but oddly enough did not reset my traits. By the way? Those traits are awesome-a good chunk of my resources came from station trade, and I actually prioritized diplomatic capital for once-that stuff was more valuable than science most the time.

I also ran into issues with the late Supremacy quests, particularly the Harmony one about stealing science and then killing aliens. This quest looped on me-each time I completed the steps, it made me start again with the steal science and never completed. There was also a base Rising Tide quest that required me to build a CEL Cradle, and then build 2 manufactures, which I obviously couldn't do. All the Commonwealth quests worked fine, although I stopped running into them around the midgame.

Pacing was great, early game was challenging, and unlocking the various new systems (including the Commonwealth) was very rewarding. Midgame gives you a lot to do, and is the first time when I was encouraged NOT to rush the next tier of techs, as most would take 30+ turns and by shopping around the leaf techs I could cut that down by a lot. There were several times I teched too far ahead and ran out of things to build, which meant I had to spend more time lower in the tree. Really well balanced.

At the end of the midgame, some of the really good wonders started to pop up. Man, I don't think I've been as satisfied with a wonder as I have with the Quantum Computer. I unlocked something like 20 techs with that thing, and it felt like from that moment on I had won the game it was that powerful. Ironically, I think Civ VI tried something similar with their Great Library unlocking all classical techs, only by time you it, you were well into medieval, so it mostly fell flat. Not so here. Same thing with city specialization, you do a lot of the district stuff with the balance between Metro/Power/Industry. Of my 14 cities, I had three of each specialization, and left the others unspecialized. The power grids were on my coasts for trade access, and once neoplanatariums went up and Comm Sats came online, I had orbital coverage over nearly the whole map, which was insane in a good way. Brazilia on the other continent got antsy at one point and declared war for the sole purpose of shutting down my Comm Sats, which I'm sure he found hilarious until he realized I just redirected all that petroleum for covering all my cities with Deep Space Satellites instead.

That brings me to the endgame. This played out a lot like the midgame-even though I had enough diplo capital and production by turn 275 or so to start on the four Commonwealth victory token buildings, I was barely managing 800 science per turn. Given that even with the discount from traits, the Teleporter tech was sitting at something like 400,000 science, I had to redirect my efforts towards unlocking every minor leaf tech I could find. And wow, whichever tech it was that gave +6 diplomatic capital per city is easily one of the best ones on there, that did wonders. In the end, it was heavy optimization of Supremacy and Harmony buildings, plus serious manipulation of Commonwealth resource market that allowed me to pull out 2000 science from each of my 14 cities, and at that point it was just a waiting game. Although, even in that there were a lot of decisions to be made even as I mostly hit next turn. This is where I filled out the moonbase and waited around for my 1500 building materials to show up. (And of course I got the +400 materials event ten turns after I built the darn Mountain Observatory!) This was on one of the lower difficutlies, but in the post game stats the AI was no where close in science or production. The endgame requires such optimization and almost exponential growth, that I wonder if the AI is capable of getting those endgame techs even with the ridiculous deity bonuses. But I'm sure it's happened-and they certainly know how to beat the player militarily.

On that note, I have to point out another exploit I noticed. Around the time I unlocked tier III virtues, I picked the bonus quantity from strategics policy in military. Now not only did it give me extra resources, but it also gave me +2 trade capacity, which is fine. However, it calculated building materials and progenator alloys based on the TOTAL amount I had throughout the game, rather than what I had on hand. As a result, I netted something like 800 of both out of thin air. Given the way you coded them, I don't see a way around this, but that is one heck of a powerful virtue as is. And over in science we have winners like +2 health >_> Hard to go wrong with Industry and Society, though.

Okay, that about wraps up my comments. I'll let you know if I think of anything else. As said, this was an amazing overhaul and you've really fleshed out all the systems. There are still a few kinks, and I still kind of miss the old colossal aliens and diplomacy modifiers from regular Rising Tide, but for the most part it is really solid. Thanks for all your hard work, on this, and on your previous mods.

One last thing-I had no issues with the faction "shortcomings" and didn't even notice not having mines or generators. I planned around it with my colony picks, focusing on aristocrats for energy and taking the super flexible +2 trade capacity. For other civs, I would probably tailor my colony choices to fit their weaknesses the same way-that's a GOOD thing, makes the choices more dynamic. By the end of the game, I was mostly using Supremacy improvements, and in fact I had this really neat triangle node wall set up around a bunch of sexy nanoscapes enveloped by mountains. It was like a parade ground out of freaking TRON, it was awesome.
 
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Thanks for the in-depth feedback. Have read and noted it all, will now respond to parts of it. :)

xiting and loading the game reset my Golden Age points, and since I left a session in the middle of a Golden Age, upon loading it never ended, giving me a permanent 200% growth boost (gee, I wonder why my capital ended up with 50 pop) which was at least amusing. This also locked me out of diplomatic positions for the rest of the game (whatever) and reset my status with the Commonwealth, but oddly enough did not reset my traits. By the way? Those traits are awesome-a good chunk of my resources came from station trade, and I actually prioritized diplomatic capital for once-that stuff was more valuable than science most the time.
Yes, this is a bug in the previous version of the mod. I've rolled back to an earlier version because after spending 3 days of trying to fix it while the game ran into bugs and more bugs (as it always does, unfortunately) I decided to take a break. So the most recent version should not have this problem, but it's currently lacking most of the new features from Version 4.

I also ran into issues with the late Supremacy quests, particularly the Harmony one about stealing science and then killing aliens. This quest looped on me-each time I completed the steps, it made me start again with the steal science and never completed. There was also a base Rising Tide quest that required me to build a CEL Cradle, and then build 2 manufactures, which I obviously couldn't do.
I thought I fixed this one. ^^ Will have another look at it.

All the Commonwealth quests worked fine, although I stopped running into them around the midgame.
Yes, Commonwealth-Quests are currently mostly earlygame-focused. I'll add more later down the line.

On that note, I have to point out another exploit I noticed. Around the time I unlocked tier III virtues, I picked the bonus quantity from strategics policy in military. Now not only did it give me extra resources, but it also gave me +2 trade capacity, which is fine. However, it calculated building materials and progenator alloys based on the TOTAL amount I had throughout the game, rather than what I had on hand. As a result, I netted something like 800 of both out of thin air.
Thanks, didn't notice that although I've played around with it a lot to make it feel impactful but not super-strong. Well, the final reason to just get rid of that bonus and replace it with something else.

This was on one of the lower difficutlies, but in the post game stats the AI was no where close in science or production. The endgame requires such optimization and almost exponential growth, that I wonder if the AI is capable of getting those endgame techs even with the ridiculous deity bonuses. But I'm sure it's happened-and they certainly know how to beat the player militarily.
The AI cheats a bit to help them over the final hurdle - instead of adding Science to the Victory Technologies they unlock it completely (the reason for this is that I couldn't get them to focus on those technologies at a reasonable point in time - they'd either beeline it or ignore it for ages...). Other than that the AI does a semi-good job at keeping up on higher difficulties (imho of course), mostly because having a strong Empire does not depend on obscure trait-virtue-combos, but in large parts on cities + infrastructure, which they can handle somewhat okay-ish by focusing only on what's important.

One last thing-I had no issues with the faction "shortcomings" and didn't even notice not having mines or generators. I planned around it with my colony picks, focusing on aristocrats for energy and taking the super flexible +2 trade capacity. For other civs, I would probably tailor my colony choices to fit their weaknesses the same way-that's a GOOD thing, makes the choices more dynamic
Well, I'm glad to here this, because that's exactly how I want it to work. :) Thinking about reasonable loadout instead of just always taking the same combo because it's the most efficient one is something that I wanted to tackle with the new traits.

On that note, I have to point out another exploit I noticed. Around the time I unlocked tier III virtues, I picked the bonus quantity from strategics policy in military. Now not only did it give me extra resources, but it also gave me +2 trade capacity, which is fine. However, it calculated building materials and progenator alloys based on the TOTAL amount I had throughout the game, rather than what I had on hand. As a result, I netted something like 800 of both out of thin air.
Thanks, didn't notice that. Well, the final reason to just get rid of that bonus and replace it with something else.

/edit: Btw, and the "waiting period" towards the end of the victory conditions should go down significantly after a few attempts. They're all designed in a way that you can prepare your empire for the tasks that lie ahead.
 
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A few colonist types: Pioneers and Instructors don't have their intended bonus applied.
Spoiler Fix, not savegame compatible it seems. :
\XML\Civilizations\Colonists.xml
Line 174 <ColonistType>COLONIST_RYIKA_AL_PIONEERS</ColonistType>
Line 180 <ColonistType>COLONIST_RYIKA_AL_INSTRUCTORS</ColonistType>

Also is it normal for the type 'Labourers' to not appear at selection ?
 
Thanks, will fix them later.

Yes, I've hidden Laborers (aka COLONIST_PIONEERS) by using a fake FiraxisLiveUnlockKey.
I had decided that Hybrid-Yields aren't really that useful during earlier development, but trying to delete default loadout leads to problems with the pregame-screen because it messes with the IDs, so I figures just hiding them is the easiest solution. Loadout files are a mess though, there's all sorts of leftover-code from when I simply copy-pasted my 'Awesome Loadout' mod and then started modifying stuff from there.
 
No.
 
Quick one for you, @Ryika.

I was playing around with Codex recently and was abusing an Energy-focused strategy by grabbing the Faraday Gyre on route to spamming Generators. I got pretty late into the game and didn't notice any alien skeletons washing up in my territory so I'm not convinced the Gyre is working as intended.

The reason I thought this btw was because I had the similar bonus from Society (the one that spawns Progenitor Ruins) and that one popped up quite a few times on my way towards the late game.

Any thoughts?
 
Sorry, I saw your post and actually tested the wonder, but forgot to reply. ~_~ It seems to be working just fine though, so I assume you were just unlucky in that particular game.
That's a bit of a problem with those low %-chances, the variance is just really high. I might turn these effects into "spawn one every X turns"-effects.

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I've uploaded the Mod to the Civfanatics database.

Some people had asked for alternative download links in the past, and v4 is stable and seems to be free of major, game-breaking bugs, so from now on I'll keep all versions archived there, in case somebody wants to play with older version of the mod.

I've started working on v5, for which I don't actually have many ideas. Funny how that works when you're mostly happy with what you have created, heh. (;

I do however want to replace the Event System that is currently in place with a new system. A sneak peak (and the tragic backstory of how it was created) can be found here, but of course the details of the Beyond Earth Version will work differently.
 
For no real reason other than me wanting to find out if there are still people out there, here are a few preview screenshots of stuff that will be included in v6, which is about to release in a few weeks:

Spoiler :

screen1.jpg
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screen5.jpg


 
I'll play! I quite enjoyed my last game of this, though I never finished it because Codex takes a heck of a long time to finish.

What are your chief goals in v6? Affinity seems to have been expanded again from what we can see. Any Wonder tweaks planned? I like that Codex gives you strong early game Wonders that you can develop a strategy around. Master Control is pretty fun in that sense.
 
P.S. @Valessa You uploaded a new version of The Genesis Corporation recently and I was wondering- do you still have the standard version of the Sponsor on file anywhere?

This is the version that you made for the base game with just the farms bonus and relic malus. You de-listed it because of the artwork conflict, but never re-uploaded it. I'm gutted I missed it as I'd like to give it a spin in Rising Tide without any other mods, assuming you still have it.

Best.
 
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