Col Bug Fixes / Feature Enhancements Patch

[Lord Shadow]

There seems to be a bug with colonist strength, which I think is supposed to be 0 by default, and 1 after choosing the Right to Bear Arms constitutional choice...

Then it seems we've found another bug. Either Right to Bear Arms is overpowered or colonists are mistakenly getting 2 strength, out of nowhere. Coupled with RTBA, colonists would be as effective as normal soldiers without the need of guns (ironically enough). Dammit.

 

[offworld]

And as I have repeatedly mentioned, Trade Goods are not working. Forget all other finished goods for the moment then. Trade Goods are not working as even you have described.

Hmm strange.. I just bought and sold trade goods to the natives, and made a handsome profit. No idea why this isn't working for you. But I'm sure there's somekind of mechanic for what natives are willing to pay so you can't sell trade goods to them indefinitely.

 

[player1 fanatic]

Anyone noticed small bug with native units stats?

Armed Braves gain no defensive bonuses.
While Armed Mounted Braves do gain defensive bonuses (unlike regular Mounted Braves).

 

[Lord Shadow]

That's definitely off. As infantry, Armed Braves should benefit from defensive bonuses, while Mounted Braves (armed or otherwise) shouldn't, given they're cavarly units.

 

[player1 fanatic]

Exactly!


I'm already using tweaked CIV4ProfessionInfos.xml (in Custom Assets) that fixes this.

 

[Turinturambar]

First some general bugs:

1)Dragoons are not listed anywhere. Not in the col paedia or in any stat screens.



Now some things I noticed in a Spain game on the highest difficulty level:

I declared Independence at turn 180 with 11500 pop and 26000 soldiers. Those numbers are a bit wacky, I guess 100 pop is 1 colonist, but the soldier number does not make a lot of sense. In fact the size of the Ref force is 105000, about ten times my population, which does seem a bit excessive.

1) Prices in Europe seem to be completely fixed. I purchased more than 3000 horses and never produced a single tool until the declaration of independence on turn 180 and prices stayed at 3/4.

I also specialized in a tobacco/cigar economy, producing from two factories with 3 masters each and the price is about the same for cigars/rum/cloth/coats
at 11/11/12/12 each.

As a result ore miners/blacksmiths/master ranchers are all pretty much worthlerss, because it is not worthwile to produce the stuff yourself and there is no point in diversifying your goods except for space reasons.

2) Probably more of a balance issue, but founding father balance is completely crazy. Some are almost worthless and Peter Minuit the first trade FF is better than all exploration FFs combined.

3) Speaking of founding fathers, it is annoying that you don't get the chance to get one again when you pass him up once. Often I want a different one first than the one the program offers me, but after saying no once I never get the chance to get him again even after hitting his threshold again.

4) The AI of the other colonial powers is pretty worthless even on the highest difficulty level. I had no problem at all killing the English right from the start. France got massacred by the Aztecs and Holland managed to declare Indepence and is slowly losing the war. The only trouble I got were two privateers, which managed to kill my starting caravel.

I suspect they perform so poorly, because they seem to blow all their cash on colony buildings. You often find a lumbermill in a settlement that you capture in the first ten turns. Rushbuying stuff is a good thing in civ4, but it kills you in col.

5) No sugar resource anywhere on a large map.

 

[Lord Shadow]

I agree the Civilopedia is rather confusing.

Dragoon is listed as a profession, not a unit type.

 

[kayapo]

Thanks for doing this for us snoopy and Dale.

I downloaded the Patch mod posted and found some weird things when starting a map. The human spawns in different places now, granted but i have spawned with my settlers already landed, i have spawned with my ship on the coast in a very strange position and the worse, i have spawned with my ship inland. Yes it was sailing inland =P

I would also ask if it would be possible to make the random maps have more rivers. It might just be me, but the maps look weird with huge continents with only a couple of rivers.

 

[DCMage]

* "School/University Training Time Bug" - School training time increases exponentially, making it effectively useless after only a few settlers.

I don't see a Bug or balance issue here, dunno maybe I am looking at it different to all you otheres. I've been training up peeps from the off, and get a "Trained Colonist" every 8-15 turns.

How I think it Works:-

We have 3 Colonies, we will consider Colony 1 our Home Colony(First City Founded)

Colony 1 - 3 Trainees giving +12 ea, 36 points
Colony 2 - 2 Trainees giving +6ea, 12 points
Colony 3 - 1 Trainee giving +6ea, 6 points

That Gives us a total of 54 Training points + whatever %'s we get from building Types + any additions form Founding fathers.
Now our Home Colony(As long as you are training a person here, havnt tested the theory withotu including the home Colony) will start to produce Trained units at a rate of about 8-15 turns per one. All other Colonies will be on 30-60+ Turns for them to produce a trainee, which they never will as long as you have 1+ training in your Home Colony. Therefor producing trainees at a steady rate.

This leads me to belive that Education points are not spread throughout your colonies but based in your Home Colony. If this is so, then I realy dont see an issue with it.

 

[ddd123]

I don't see a Bug or balance issue here, dunno maybe I am looking at it different to all you otheres. I've been training up peeps from the off, and get a "Trained Colonist" every 8-15 turns.

same here
i dont get bug ppl is talking about
if school could train faster or without DR would be idiot

school as it is now is fine

the cost is VERY low but after a bit is useless
still you can train some top tier specialists... thats good

 

[Dale]

Thanks for doing this for us snoopy and Dale.

I downloaded the Patch mod posted and found some weird things when starting a map. The human spawns in different places now, granted but i have spawned with my settlers already landed, i have spawned with my ship on the coast in a very strange position and the worse, i have spawned with my ship inland. Yes it was sailing inland =P

I would also ask if it would be possible to make the random maps have more rivers. It might just be me, but the maps look weird with huge continents with only a couple of rivers.

Yeah noted. I saw that this morning (but interestingly not last night when I did the change)

 

[Deon]

A suggestion: don't allow treasures to disturb ruins/ancient grounds. It makes them to be highly exploitable as a scout unit which doesn't require you to spend colonists for it and also negative damage effect is neglected since it has 0 str. Or maybe have it destroyed if the "natives attack" event happens.

 

[TFVanguard]

A suggestion: don't allow treasures to disturb ruins/ancient grounds. It makes them to be highly exploitable as a scout unit which doesn't require you to spend colonists for it and also negative damage effect is neglected since it has 0 str. Or maybe have it destroyed if the "natives attack" event happens.

Hmm. What's in the Civ4's settler's code that makes them 'capture' targets? I would think that that mechanic would work best here, and would make it identical to ColWin as well. (It would also SOMEWHAT prevent the 'ship the unguarded treasure across the continent issue.. if there are hostiles along the way.)

 

[r_rolo1]

Well, there is a thing that is not exactly a bug or a feature fix, but it would need some tweaking:

When we capture settlements of other european that overlaps territory of a Indian tribe and we keep them , we get a ( probably deserved ) penalty for stealing land. But we never have the oportunity of negotiating again to "regularize" the land property... IMHO it lacks a nice pop up of overlapping tribe asking us to pay or leave.

Another thing that it sorely needed is a compreensive market screen, with all the tribes requests of goods ( not only one of them ) and maybe what they have in stock. Not mentioning a glance like screen ......

 

[Lord Shadow]

Hmm. What's in the Civ4's settler's code that makes them 'capture' targets? I would think that that mechanic would work best here, and would make it identical to ColWin as well. (It would also SOMEWHAT prevent the 'ship the unguarded treasure across the continent issue.. if there are hostiles along the way.)

As it stands, don't treasure units get destroyed if attacked? It's better that way. Europeans would technically capture them, but what'd hostile natives do with a treasure unit they can't (by game mechanics and cultural principles) cash in? A new layer of coding would be needed to allow treasure units to be captured by some units/factions and destroyed by others.

 

[r_rolo1]

Treasure units can be captured... I've seen indians with some, probably loot from the war they had with Spain

 

[TFVanguard]

As it stands, don't treasure units get destroyed if attacked? It's better that way. Europeans would technically capture them, but what'd hostile natives do with a treasure unit they can't (by game mechanics and cultural principles) cash in? A new layer of coding would be needed to allow treasure units to be captured by some units/factions and destroyed by others.

Code-wise, let the Indians automatically cash in the treasures when they return home at a 0 percent tax rate. While this doesn't do much NOW, it does get 'rid' of the treasure, and could allow an income option for 'play as native empire' mod.

(Okay, these ads are annoying the heck out of me now... stupid UGO)

 

[Deon]

Well, the main point about treasures is to somehow allow the AI to compete with a player. Currently you can drive your treasure across the map revealing all the map tiles and grabbing all the loot. Basically the fact that I've found a single treasure usually means that I have the most connected land revealed and most villages/ruins captured by me (you capture villages/ruins, you get more treasures and your "treasure scout network" grows). The AI can't use it as a scout although it may be easy to change... The problem for this is that then AI treasures would be easily huntable... while AI doesn't capture your treasure even if it nets him almost no consequences...

 

[thelibra]

I noticed a couple of more problems this weekend:

* Colopedia lists Veteran Soldiers as a 0-strength unit.

* Description of Armory, Arsenol, etc... includes "required to build cannons and artillery". Players cannot build Artillery! Of course, I didn't realize this till I kept upgrading and kept upgrading the building to its final mega-gun-producing store before I realized I was never going to get Artillery because they are a unique unit to the X Empire. Please remove any Empire UUs from building descriptions if they are impossible for the player to build.

* Schools/Colleges/Universities - For the love of god, SOME explanation here? There is absolutely nothing to explain how this works in the manual or the Colopedia. To date I've seen "It bumps up the training cost 30% globally" to "it only works right in your first founded colony" to "it requires a certain amount of money available to produce certain occupations" to "it doesn't allow you to train Veteran Soldiers" and apparently you also cannot use it to train specialized planters, like cotton planters. Of course absolutely none of this has been explained in any documentation. Could we please get some full explanation on it?

* Rebel Sentiment appears to go back down if you pull your colonists from the town hall, even though population has not increased. Is this intentional?

 

[player1 fanatic]

* Colopedia lists Veteran Soldiers as a 0-strength unit.

That's because unit strenght is not tied to unit itself, but profession.

When Veteran Solider has Solider proffession it gets +3 unit strenght. If you make Pioneer from him he'll have zero unit strenght.