Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

[Spatzimaus]

cities always do it, to hell with the historic building, we need the land for a new mall)

Or let's move London Bridge to Arizona. Or we're Russia and decide to relocate our heavy industry (Manufactory) past the Urals to protect it from the invading Nazis. Yes, there are plenty of precedents.

I did the check you suggested with FireTuner:

I'd forgotten that I left in that terraform check (which gives two print statements any time someone builds an improvement, and that includes when the game "builds" a Goody Hut) that you saw on lines 1-10. This was to test the theory that the AI planting forests/jungles was screwing things up.

The upshot is that if there's no delay between the Start and End for each of my routines (11/12, 14/15, 16/17), then the slowdown you're experiencing is probably not a consequence of my mods and is something that anyone who plays a vanilla game on huge maps and/or epic speeds should see.
There might still be a weak correlation; for instance, if my mod makes it so that a larger number of players are still around on turn X, or makes each worker now have Y+2 options instead of Y, then I suppose it could still slow things down a bit even outside of my Lua routines.

Well, as you mentioned, around theater, but only if gold is not a problem, because much of the pre theater buildings that contribute to happiness are necessary too.

Right, that seems to be the dividing line; pre-Theater the Happiness buildings (Temple, Colosseum, Aqueduct) are seen as essential parts of a growing city, and if you can get a Circus to add to that, great. This is why I nerfed the Theater and Stadium so much.
But I'm not convinced that these are the only problems. There's also:
> World wonders: Forbidden Palace, Notre Dame, Eiffel Tower. If you're in first place then you'll pick up all of these.
> The Circus and Circus Maximus.
> Finding all of the Natural Wonders, and putting a couple of them within your borders now that I've boosted them.
> The Liberty policy that adds +0.5 happiness per connected city
> The Piety policy that reduces population unhappiness. (And the policy branch's base, which adds a flat +2.)
> The Rationalism policy that adds +1 happy per university.
> In the vanilla game, Planned Economy (Order policy), which reduces city unhappiness a la the FP. (In my mod, I moved that effect to Planned Society, which only unlocks in the Digital Era, so this shouldn't be as much of a problem any more. Likewise I added two other Happiness policies in the future eras.)
> Neutronium and Information in the future eras add another +8. (Plus Ambrosia if you get that wonder.)

And the less direct ways. With a larger empire you're more likely to have duplicate luxuries, which can be traded to get the resources you don't have yet. With higher income you can bribe more city-states to Ally, and that means a few luxuries you can't get from other empires.

Don't get me wrong, I like some parts of the balance here. An expanding empire will often have serious happiness issues, while one that doesn't expand will eventually have so much happiness that they'll spend a lot of time in a golden age, which is a nice way to keep things competitive. But it still feels a bit off; it's just too easy to stay above zero, and once you get Theaters and such it's typical to get huge surpluses.

So the question is, what can be done? I don't want to nerf the happiness on the Theater yet again, and I don't want to jack up the base unhappiness values further since this'd kill the early game.
One thought was to change how luxuries work; one possibility was to reduce the +5 each gives to, say, +4. Possibly have this depend on the specific resource, and use tile yields to compensate. So maybe Marble only gives +3 Happiness, but the tile and improvement each gain an additional +1 production or gold to represent its building purposes. (It'd be less useful as a trade good, which fits given how heavy the stuff is, but would be very valuable to have in your empire. Sort of like how right now it gives a boost to wonder construction in the nearby city.) Spices might only give +4 but also add a little more to food. You could even add Culture to the Plantation or something, for when Incense is harvested.
The other possibility was to add some sort of diminishing returns in Lua, where the more luxuries you have the less each impacts your society, so that an empire with 10 luxuries doesn't get substantially more happiness than one with 5.
Of course, in both cases the AI would be completely incapable of handling this sort of thing well.

 

[LetMyPeopleGo]

Happiness is much like a dog chasing his tail, I need gold to maintain my happiness buildings, I need population to make gold, but most of the game my cities are set to avoid growth due to unhappiness, I avoid late game ruins cause they tend to grant me +1 population which I can't afford.

Since I don't have a real production city, I've lost the race to the Forbidden Palace, so there goes my plane for further expansion.

I don't see how nerfing happiness modifiers even more is possible without turning it into a game which is all about happiness. Happiness controlling should be a game limiter not a game crippler.

Anyways, I'm starting a new game with vanilla Terra map instead of Terra Incognita, maybe the added map causes me the delays, it's impossible to continue the current game with 2 minuets delay for turn, it's like spending an hour for 30 turns without playing, add to it several minuets if I'm engaged in several wars, it's very annoying.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Happiness is much like a dog chasing his tail, I need gold to maintain my happiness buildings, I need population to make gold, but most of the game my cities are set to avoid growth due to unhappiness, I avoid late game ruins cause they tend to grant me +1 population which I can't afford.

That's a problem. Avoid Growth is just a bad idea in most cases, so you're killing your own empire in the long term. Yes, you get a bit of unhappiness from population, but it's worth it in other ways; if you CAN get +Happiness through buildings, it's always in your best interests to do so.

Think about it in the core game; there, the Theater and Stadium are each +5 happy for 3 gpt, and each population gives -1 happy, +1.25 gpt from trade routes, +1 research, and one more tile's yield or specialist slot filled. So obviously, you come out ahead building the things, especially once you add in research and gold multipliers, policies that reduce building maintenance, and so on.
But take the numbers in my mod; the Theater is +3 happy for 4 gpt, and each population gives -1.2 happy and +1.33 gpt, plus the research and the extra tile. You still come out far ahead of the curve; for 4 gpt you can support an additional 2.5 population, which gains you far more than that 4gpt cost. (The trade income alone nearly offsets it.)

Likewise, +production buildings should be THE top priority: Workshop, Windmill, Factory, Nuclear Plant, Solar Plant, Genejack Factory, and so on. For one thing, this allows you to put those theaters in more cities. So doing something like Avoid Growth that prevents you from building up production is just counterproductive.

I don't see how nerfing happiness modifiers even more is possible without turning it into a game which is all about happiness. Happiness controlling should be a game limiter not a game crippler.

The problem is that in the late game it's just not a limiter. In my current game, I was running +20 happy before Theaters (admittedly because I was playing Persia, whose banks add +2 and I'd gone with the Piety tree). With theaters I was suddenly up in the +50 range, despite having annexed India. Then I unlocked Stadiums, went on a military offensive to grab more cities (conquering China and Rome), and I'm now at over +100 happiness. Since I'm Persia, my golden ages last as long as the period between them right now. I'm currently sweeping through the Iriquois (the #2 empire) and puppeting everything as I go, and it's hardly making a dent in my happiness.

This is the issue I'm trying to resolve. For most of the game right now, happiness is balancing nicely; it's HARD to get far above zero, and it seriously slows the expansion of your empire. I don't want to touch the balance of that if I can avoid it. But the late game (Industrial era and beyond) just doesn't work that way. It's trivial to stay above zero, and you quickly get to insanely high happiness levels. That's just bad; I want it to be a limiting factor for more of the game's duration, the same way that I've tweaked the gold balance. (In the old game I'd be making +300gpt per turn in the Industrial, outside of GAs; now, I have a hard time reaching +100 by the same point.)

The one I'm leaning towards now is something I thought of a long time ago, and that shouldn't be too bad to handle through Lua:
> Your first two luxuries get you +6 happiness per
> Your next two give +5 per
> Your next two give +4 per
(so if you've only got 1-5 you're 1 or 2 AHEAD of what you have now, and the break-even is 6. I might even bump the starting value up to 7 for the first one, then go 6 for the next 2 and so on.)
> The next two give +3 per
> All beyond that give +2
It's a trivial Lua change; instead of modifying the luxuries themselves, just give each empire a modifier after the fact. Again, the AI wouldn't know how to deal with this, but the player's already at a larger advantage just because they'll pick their conquest targets and city-state bribes based partially on what resources they can gain.

It's just that once you get to the late game and have conquered a few empires and set up trades with a few others, you'll have 12-13 luxuries, for 60-65 happiness, and that'll put you WAY ahead of the AIs.

I'm also looking at reducing the Stadium to +3 and giving it some +gold or something to compensate. Still working on that one.

Anyways, I'm starting a new game with vanilla Terra map instead of Terra Incognita, maybe the added map causes me the delays

Possible, but I'm not sure how; maps don't have any kind of active component as far as I know, so once it's generated it should run just as fast as any other map. But it should be easy to see whether it's
A> the fault of that map script
B> the fault of my mod
C> inherent to playing on huge maps on epic speed, or
D> something wrong with your computer/installation
just by trying games without each part.

 

[LetMyPeopleGo]

Possible, but I'm not sure how; maps don't have any kind of active component as far as I know, so once it's generated it should run just as fast as any other map. But it should be easy to see whether it's
A> the fault of that map script
B> the fault of my mod
C> inherent to playing on huge maps on epic speed, or
D> something wrong with your computer/installation
just by trying games without each part.

Exactly my next experiment.

Edit: Well, looks like my problem with 'next turn' delay is quite a known one, according to 2Kgames forum, February patch will fix it along with a lot of balancing changes.

http://forums.2kgames.com/showthread.php?104604-February-Patch-Notes

Edit: Another strange rumor on the 2K forum:

Originally Posted by Sneaks
2K Greg,

This patch does not address 2 of the largest game-breaking bugs currently out there. I am referring to:

1: The fact that the AI constantly gets human Chieftain level happiness and other bonuses regardless of settings.

2: Players can sell a luxury to the AI, pillage the tile, rebuild, and resell to the same AI for unlimited cash flow.

Can you give us an update as to whether these are at least being looked into?

 

[Spatzimaus]

Oh great. ANOTHER big patch. Keeping a mod compatible with a patch is hard, but I suppose it'll be worth the effort. This one doesn't look quite as bad as the December patch, but it's going to be painful either way. Thoughts:

> The AI Chieftain happiness thing doesn't surprise me at all, and it would help explain why it's so hard to win on King. So I hope they do fix that, assuming it is in fact a real bug. It won't change the happiness balance issues I discussed above, since those are tied to the player, but it'll definitely change my preferred difficulty.

> I wish they'd had a few of these changes out when I designed the mod. Specifically, the four new stubs for Policy effects; a couple of those would have been nice alternatives to what I ended up using. (Culture from kills, for Fundamentalist?)

> They've now added an Aqueduct, so I'm going to have to tweak mine, but I hate what they've done to it. (Instead of Hospitals having 50% storage, it's now Aqueduct has 40% storage, Hospital adds a flat +5 food, and the Hospital now requires the Aqueduct.) So I think I'll keep my own version, although I'm going to steal their artwork.

> A lot of the other things I really don't like. They've changed the Colosseum just like I did (3 happy for 2 gpt) although I also have a culture component to it. And they reduced the Theater to 4 happy (mine's 3), but they've lowered its maintenance cost while I raised it. And that's true of a lot of their other changes; they've lowered maintenance costs on a lot of things, and I INCREASED the costs because gold was too plentiful.

> They're scaling tech costs differently now. This is going to be a pain to balance, because the changes I made to research buildings were all built around trying to keep the pace constant with the current price structure. Also, I'll have to set new costs for all of my new techs.

> They've also started using that tech yield thing, with Trading Posts starting at 1 gold (like I did) and adding +1 at Economics (instead of the split fresh water/no fresh water setup I added). That one wouldn't be so bad, although I think I still prefer my version. But the rest? Adding +1 Food to Pastures and Plantations isn't a bad idea, but it means that my boosts to those tiles in the early Nuclear will need to be removed. Conversely, with my Plant Forest/Plant Jungle additions, Fertilizer is getting crowded, so maybe I'll just swap them and put Plant Jungle at Penicillin and Plant Forest at Ecology. The ability to plant forests felt a little early before, anyway...
> It's strange, given that they're finally taking advantage of that tech mechanism, that they didn't do the same for the Academy and such and just made a flat boost to the base value. I don't think I'll keep their change.

> And they're tweaking AssignStartingPlots yet again, although some of them (like the small Uranium thing) are duplicating what I did. Editing Lua to match a patch is a LOT more work than the XML.

 

[LetMyPeopleGo]

After doing some testing with other mods, the problem of 120sec and more for new turn delays is caused by huge maps, I'll either wait for the fix from firaxis promised to deal with the problem or start playing with normal size maps which I 'hate' due to less then 10 tiles away players right on start.(maybe playing without CS will give me more room.)

I thing getting rid of RA is a nice solution to the RA frenzy taking place most of the game. If a player decides on the path of science, there in no reason for everyone else who choses not doing so, to close the gap just by clearing out some barbarian camps and signing a RA or mortgaging some resources and doing another RA.

The whole idea of CIV as I see it is to eliminate several weak players on the early or mid game by opening a gap, scientific or militaristic (which in a way derives from good research- scientific).

Because of Research Agreements most of the players keep up most of the game which is nice for a scientific only victory, less attractive for domination victory which defiantly combines most of the elements of the game.

If you could only add to the options screen where I setup a new game the option for 'disable RA' , It would be real nice.

 

[Spatzimaus]

After doing some testing with other mods, the problem of 120sec and more for new turn delays is caused by huge maps, I'll either wait for the fix from firaxis promised to deal with the problem or start playing with normal size maps which I 'hate' due to less then 10 tiles away players right on start.(maybe playing without CS will give me more room.)

Just dial down an existing size's numbers a bit and you'd be fine. For instance, Standard maps are 8 civs, 16 city-states; just remove 2 civs and 4 CSs, to get the 6/12 typical of a Small map, and you'll have a lot more room. I've done that a few times.

It also depends on map type, obviously. A Pangaea map will give each player a bit more real estate to work with; you won't be far from the other players, but you won't have the immediate border pressure either. The map I'm currently playing is an S-shaped Pangaea continent, Standard size (8 players), and my starting area had enough room for 9 cities to fit comfortably. So it really didn't feel cramped. (And it's not just me; there was one area between India and China, open plains with good resources, that didn't get settled until the Renaissance because each was still developing the areas closer to their capitals.)

I thing getting rid of RA is a nice solution to the RA frenzy taking place most of the game.

I'm not going that far. The repricing I did in my current test version seems to work just fine; you still get a few RAs, but not the mad explosion of them you saw in the vanilla game. The key just seems to be making them cost a little more than a typical unit/building rush; the AI no longer has enough money on hand to buy them, and even a player will find it hard to save up 600 gold for a tech 30 turns away, when less could buy you the Colosseum you need right NOW.

The whole idea of CIV as I see it is to eliminate several weak players on the early or mid game by opening a gap, scientific or militaristic (which in a way derives from good research- scientific).

That's actually the whole thing I'm trying to move AWAY from. The Balance mod is designed from the start to make it harder to eliminate the weak players; in the vanilla Civ5, a game with 8 players in the Ancient would usually only be 2-3 in the Industrial with one of them so far ahead as to make victory inevitable. I want that number to be more like ~6 players, with maybe one or two that had been demoted to "minor powers" by having all but one of their cities taken, and have no civ pulling THAT far ahead.

It hasn't quite worked out that way in practice. My current test game (the reason I've delayed a new version) is nearly complete. While it was a lot harder to do so, I've still pulled away; I'm a couple turns away from Fusion Power, entering the Fusion Era, and my army is Skimmers/Vertols/Plasma Artillery and some Modern Armor that are waiting for the Gravtank upgrade. The next closest civ JUST entered the Nuclear Era, meaning ~30 techs behind; I haven't lost a Wonder race since the Forbidden Palace. Militarily I could have just rolled over the remainders whenever I wanted, and I'm now in the middle of a massive Golden Age (for finishing the spaceship first) where my income is over 1400 gpt just from the sheer number of cities I have.
The problem is that there's no Civ4-style "corruption" model to make distant cities less useful. So once you conquer an empire and Courthouse all of its cities, it'll double your empire's science and gold. (Maybe not double, since the cities will be smaller, but a large increase.) Conquer one or two more empires, and you now have an insurmountable tech advantage.

(Side note: the crash bug definitely seems to be tied to the era of the other players and/or city-states.)

Because of Research Agreements most of the players keep up most of the game which is nice for a scientific only victory, less attractive for domination victory which defiantly combines most of the elements of the game.

That's exactly what I wanted. I wanted the domination victory to be less attractive, because in vanilla it's the easiest way to win by far. No one was ever getting to the science or culture victory, and the diplomatic win was just a formality tied to conquest (I own so much of the world that I can bribe every CS to vote for me). So most of my balance changes were aimed at making conquest more difficult; you'll still see plenty of wars, with cities changing hands, but it'll be much more rare that an AI civ conquers another civ's capital; more typically you'll see a couple cities get conquered, peace is declared, and a century later the war starts up again but this time the other civ is the one taking cities. (That happened in my current game; Rome and China traded a couple cities back and forth in four different wars.)

I'm not sure how to add that flag to the options menu, but there might be something in the other mods/components for that. Otherwise, I'd suggest just waiting to try out the new version when I post it (tonight or tomorrow); if you still don't like the RAs, you can always just make your own quick mod that modifies the Eras file to make ResearchAgreementCost equal to 9999 or something. (Don't know if "-1" will work for that one.) There might be compatibility issues, since I'm setting those numbers myself, but you could always hack the XML of my mod. (XML/GameInfo/CIV5Eras.xml; look for ResearchAgreementCost for each era.)

The delay on the new version is that I'm trying to track down a couple bugs; for some reason the "Plant Jungle" action is being given a much higher yield than it should, so it's making the AI want to plant the jungle and then immediately chop it. For instance, if you've got a Grassland tile with a Jungle on it already, then "Plant Jungle"'s yield should read "+1 gold", but instead it's saying "+1 food, +2 gold" which makes it the obvious best choice.
This is leading to empires in the later eras not using their Workers correctly, because they'll get stuck in the plant/chop loop. If I can find the problem tonight then I'll post the new version then, if not I'll put in a kludge and post it tomorrow morning. (After that, the next version will probably wait until after the patch.)

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Oh great. ANOTHER big patch

> They're scaling tech costs differently now. This is going to be a pain to balance, because the changes I made to research buildings were all built around trying to keep the pace constant with the current price structure. Also, I'll have to set new costs for all of my new techs.

> And they're tweaking AssignStartingPlots yet again, although some of them (like the small Uranium thing) are duplicating what I did. Editing Lua to match a patch is a LOT more work than the XML.

So what, instead of a swift release within days of Patch activation... you'll be taking a few days_weeks more.

That big damn LUA_Plotting stuff is such a wreck just waiting to happen, i agree. If only intuitive modular components could be used.

 

[Spatzimaus]

So what, instead of a swift release within days of Patch activation... you'll be taking a few days_weeks more.

It shouldn't be THAT bad, at least in terms of getting a version out the door. After the trainwreck that was the December patch, I've prepared; I've got an entire backup copy of the current vanilla game's XML and Lua file directories, WinMerge is set up and ready to go, and I've made detailed notes of how I've modified each of the existing Lua files so that I can insert my additions to each into the new versions. (Note: I don't mean that the patch itself was a trainwreck. Just that as a modder I was unprepared for the amount of work it would take to get my mod compatible and working again.)
So the only real headache will just be removing duplication of effort. For instance, the whole Improvement_TechYield thing I've got going on in my mod; now that that's going to be used as an integral part of the core game, I'll need to remove some of my own similar changes to make sure it doesn't get too unbalanced. And if they're taking advantage of those, then they're probably going to improve TechButtonInclude.lua to use actual icons for an improvement yield increase instead of that starburst (like I did), which means I could remove that Lua change from my own mod.
My guess for when I'd have something that doesn't crash is a day or two after the patch, although you never know.

The devil, as they say, is in the details. Take the Public School change in the December patch; going from "+50% research" to "+1 research per Citizen" throws a huge wrench into balance calculations. Is it more than the old value, or less? (More, in most cases.) Does it make the Academy and scientist specialists more or less valuable? (Less.) From the patch notes it looks like they'll be overhauling specialist slots again, so would that interact badly with some of my own changes to the slot distribution? (Probably.) There are a lot of things like this that wouldn't break the game, per se, but would really screw up the balance if I'm not careful.
Or the tech costs. Obviously if T14 Modern Era techs now cost 6000 instead of 3350 then I can't start my Digital techs at 3700, so I'll have to reprice all of my new techs as well. That's not a big deal, I can handle that pretty well even if it would take a little work. But part of the reason I lowered the +research percentages for the University, Observatory, etc. in the first place was to make up for the fact that tech costs didn't increase as quickly as research output did through population and buildings. But if they're changing the underlying tech curve, then I might have to undo some of my changes and put the University and such back at +50% just to keep the effective curve flat. (Research Lab will still stay at +50% instead of +100%, though.)

So it might take a couple of versions (figure a week or more) to get it to something that feels balanced again. And that's before thinking about the other conundrum: what do I do with things like the Aqueduct, where I'm clearly not going to change it to do what the vanilla game now has it as? Or the rearrangement they're doing to social policies, where a lot of them will have different effects than before? (That is, would I want to change some of my new policies to use some of the now-vacated effect stubs, or to take advantage of some of the new stubs they're putting in?) Those sorts of design decisions might take longer to sort out.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Considering how "Bi-Monthly" these patches come screwing up our stable lives (with gameplay, that is), it's a Modding rehersal for proper & final DLL access, i guess.
I also have a bunch of specific backups (continuous & synchronized) every time i detect formal release announcements... but my stuff is tremendously more simple than yours and all other complex balancing Mods out there.
A few fine-tuning graphics, not much of any LUA/XML fiddling tasks at all.
But that was a choice i made waaaayyyyy back in November, wait them Devs & Patches out for core encoding of complex features to supplemental assets such as ErasCenter & LeoPaRd.

I fail to see why they wouldn't seal the ruleset asap though. Possibly has to do with Shafer gone and the new guy swooping in with fresh ideas that requires many if not total procedural changes.

It's a ride into the unknown, daily for each of us that's for sure.
I guess caffeine will become handy when the time comes.
Good Luck and stay well.

 

[Spatzimaus]

I fail to see why they wouldn't seal the ruleset asap though.

Well, there's not much they can do about some of this. I mean, take the pacing. They decide that tech costs need to be rebalanced, with later techs now costing more. Seems simple enough, right?

Does research get increased, to compensate somewhat, or is it now assumed that it'll take more turns to clear each era? Probably the latter, but what does that mean for, say, year numbers, which were tuned to the old tech pacing? Would they now change the number of years per turn in the gamespeeds file? If so, then that's yet another thing that I'll have to spend a few days rebalancing, because my new eras totally throw the math off.

There's just a lot of things like this. What seems at first glance like a minor tweak cascades to all sorts of things within the game. For a small mod this isn't a big deal, because you'll only be changing a few parts and leaving the defaults for the rest. But for a mod like this...

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

On the bright side, upon consideration I've realized that a few nice things will come out of this patch. For instance, take the Power policy (future-era policy in the militaristic Honor tree). Right now, it's a fairly simple "all new units start with +10XP". I've felt it was a little on the weak side (its biggest benefit was that cities without Barracks could rush a unit and still get a promotion); I was going to bump it to +15 or possibly even +20. But then I saw the "gain culture from kills" stub they're putting in, so now I think it's going to stay at +10 XP but also give one or two Culture per kill.

The rest of their changes I'm still considering. For instance, the Factory; instead of +50%, it's now going to be +25% and +3 production, whereas the Nuclear Plant and Solar Plant are going to be +35% and +4. So Coal is now going to be FAR less important than Uranium. (Seriously, other than Factories its only other use is Ironclads, and they go obsolete so quickly.) So do I go with their change there? And if so, what does that mean for the Genejack Factory (currently a flat +50% also); would I change it to that sort of split bonus as well?

 

[LetMyPeopleGo]

Just dial down an existing size's numbers a bit and you'd be fine. For instance, Standard maps are 8 civs, 16 city-states; just remove 2 civs and 4 CSs, to get the 6/12 typical of a Small map, and you'll have a lot more room. I've done that a few times.

That's exactly what I did, with even less CS, now I understand you point of view regarding the flowing:

That's actually the whole thing I'm trying to move AWAY from. The Balance mod is designed from the start to make it harder to eliminate the weak players; in the vanilla Civ5, a game with 8 players in the Ancient would usually only be 2-3 in the Industrial with one of them so far ahead as to make victory inevitable. I want that number to be more like ~6 players, with maybe one or two that had been demoted to "minor powers" by having all but one of their cities taken, and have no civ pulling THAT far ahead.

On a huge map it's a completely different game, 12 players are much too much to be dragged all the way to a scientific victory, the AI wages wars constantly and most of the first half of the game (on marathon) I'm busy defending from or eliminating close rivals, that's why I see it fit to have six players run away from the six weak players, that's more or less the number of opponents you begin with on a standard size map.

My feeling is that the playability on Standard size maps is different from that on a Huge size maps so it's less important to maintain balance and avoid early "retirement" of several players because you begin with 12.

Anyways, to counter balance your balance mod a bit I took your advice on:

I'm not sure how to add that flag to the options menu, but there might be something in the other mods/components for that. Otherwise, I'd suggest just waiting to try out the new version when I post it (tonight or tomorrow); if you still don't like the RAs, you can always just make your own quick mod that modifies the Eras file to make ResearchAgreementCost equal to 9999 or something. (Don't know if "-1" will work for that one.) There might be compatibility issues, since I'm setting those numbers myself, but you could always hack the XML of my mod. (XML/GameInfo/CIV5Eras.xml; look for ResearchAgreementCost for each era.)

and I did it, let's see how it plays.

Waiting for your next release.

 

[eraofdiversion]

So let me get this straight, being a total noob.

This mod basicly turns the game into Alpha Centauri after you've passed the modern era? that sounds AMAZING..

 

[Spatzimaus]

My feeling is that the playability on Standard size maps is different from that on a Huge size maps so it's less important to maintain balance and avoid early "retirement" of several players because you begin with 12.

While that's true, the larger maps have a different drawback: you have more opportunities to pull far ahead by conquering a couple empires. Take over two empires and you'll out-tech, out-gold, and out-produce everyone else regardless of whether there are 3 or 9 empires remaining, but in a smaller map, getting that far means the game is basically over. It's also just easier to do on large maps; when everyone has more cities, it's easier to see the sort of military imbalances that lead to lopsided campaigns. If you only have four or five cities in "your" area, then you can't build/support enough of an army to do a true blitzkrieg on an AI at will, and you see a lot more of these "remnants" left. But with 8-9 cities, you can have a few on full military production while the others handle wonders and such.

My last test game was an 8-player Pangaea game, and I conquered one empire very quickly. Only one other empire (the Iroquois) seemed to make any similar progress in conquest, totally wiping out Japan, so they were the only real tech competition. The problem was that once I started expanding, my army could wipe the floor with whatever enemies were near the point of contact on the first turn, and then systematically roll through their empires. Part of this was just the stupidity of the AI when it comes to war (leaving half of his combat units on the far side of the empire until I got close enough for them to hit right away), but part is inherent to the sizes involved.

Also, I realized that the game is horribly bugged in one other way: when you build a Courthouse, it doesn't just drop you from the Conquered happiness (8 + 1.6*pop) to the normal (4+1.2*pop) curve. It reduces the population part from 1.6 to 1.2, but it REMOVES the 8 entirely, it doesn't downgrade it to the 4. So conquered cities will basically be better for happiness than settling a new city by +4.
This, unfortunately, makes the Forbidden Palace and Planned Society (-25% to city count unhappiness) basically worthless in the long term. You're only saving for those few cities you founded yourself. And it means that once you can afford to rush Courthouses in every conquered city (at 450 gold per), you get a massive Happiness surplus. (I was over +200 in my last game.)
So for now, I'm having the Courthouse cost 3 happiness when you build it. This still won't help with the FP's relevance, but it will at least get the Happiness into the right ballpark until they fix the bug. I did 3 instead of 4 under the assumption that most players will, in the long term, have one of the two ways of subtracting 25%. (I'm trying to figure out how to make it more intelligent.)

Waiting for your next release.

I was going to release it last night, staying up until 4am to try fixing a couple things, but I've been trying to figure out the math used for making the gold gifts to city-states give less as you go on. (I want it to drop off faster.) I was close to figuring this out when I decided to call it a night.

Give me a few minutes and you'll have a new version; it's basically ready now. I decided to back out a couple of my test changes; city-state bribes now give less Influence than before (30/65/140 instead of 40/80/170), but they drop off with era the same way as before.
To make up for this, gifting units now gives +4 instead of +2, and city-states offer quests about twice as often as before. I want the diplomatic victory to be less buyable, and to make the Free Market policy (x2 influence from quests) be more valuable.

This mod basicly turns the game into Alpha Centauri after you've passed the modern era?

Not quite.

It uses a lot of SMAC's techs, buildings, and units, albeit with somewhat different effects since there are things we can do in Civ5 that SMAC couldn't do. And the way the techs flow had to be tweaked for various reasons (nanotech stuff now comes later than grav stuff, instead of SMAC's reverse. Terraforming is also much further down the line than before.)

But you're still on Earth; there's no fungus on the map, you're not playing as Zakharov, Dierdre, Lal, and company, you're not planting kelp in the water, and there's definitely not the build-a-unit system SMAC relied on (although Civ5's promotion system has the same basic effect). This isn't really a new version of SMAC; it's not even as close as Civ4's Planetfall mod was.

Think of it more as, a mod that adds a few future eras to Civ5 (by making the spaceship not end the game), and those eras use SMAC for a theme. It's not trying to be a pure conversion, although when it's "done" I've been pondering a scenario that DOES use SMAC's leaders and tries to adhere a bit closer to SMAC's playstyles.

 

[Spatzimaus]

It's that time again!

Yes, I know it's been a week and a half since the last version, and in the meantime 13 people downloaded v.0.15. It's been a busy time at work, so I haven't had the time to get much playtesting time in. But here goes.

There are a couple new things that'll go into the next version, but most likely I'll wait on releasing v.0.17 until the new patch comes out and I can guarantee compatibility. So the next version will come out a couple days after the patch, whenever that is.

NOTE: this is one of those times where you really need to download both mods at the same time. Playing the new Content without the new Balance would basically undo about half of the changes in the past two versions, because a lot of things that had been initially placed in the Content mod are now migrated to Balance.

v.0.16, dated 2/19:
BALANCE:
> The cost of upgrading units for an AI player was increased from 50% of normal to 75%.
> The vanilla game is currently bugged, in that building a Courthouse removes the “number of unhappiness” value for conquered cities entirely, instead of just downgrading from the conquered 5/8 to the settled 2/4. This leads to ridiculously high Happiness values for empires that conquer other sides’ cities. To compensate for this, the Courthouse now adds –3 Happiness (although it’s flaky, like the Genejack does); this is less than the –4 base value, but having the Forbidden Palace or taking the Planned Society or Thought Control policies reduce the –4 but won’t adjust this modifier. This is a TEMPORARY change until the core game is fixed.
> A previous version set the maintenance cost of the Colosseum equal to 2gpt in the Content mod. This has been moved to the Balance mod.
> A previous version set the maintenance cost of the Temple to 1gpt in the Content mod. This has been moved to the Balance mod. (The Temple’s UBs were not affected as their costs were zero.)
> The Colosseum, Temple, and the Temple’s UBs (Mud Pyramid Mosque and Burial Tomb) had a Hurry cost modifier of +25%. This has been increased to +50%, to make it harder to rush the construction of one.
> The Military Academy, in addition to its custom promotion and production boost, gives +10 XP to all Air units (since they don’t have any other way to start with XP until the Aerospace Complex). If I add an Airport building I'll put +15 there, but until then...
> The Arsenal, in addition to its production bonus, gives +5 XP to all Land units. The previous reduction for the Armory meant that new Land units started with 25 instead of 30. This gets them back to starting with two promotions.
> The reductions to Culture and increase to cost for the Opera House and Museum were moved from the Content mod to the Balance mod.
> The reductions in Happiness and increase in cost for the Theater and Stadium were moved from the Content mod to the Balance mod. This also includes the extra culture these buildings provide.
> The Stadium’s Happiness was reduced from 4 down to 3. To compensate, it now provides an additional +2 gold. (If the city has a high enough +gold multiplier, this can almost offset the cost of the building.) Basically, I realized that if the Colosseum, Theater, and Stadium were all +3, then it'd balance nicely. There are now three types of Happiness building: the +1s that add it as an incidental, these +3s that are designed for it, and the Wonders that add +5-+8. Happiness is one of the few "yields" where you don't need to have the numbers ramp up with era to stay viable.
> The change that made the Bank and Satrap’s Court be free for Industrial or later starts, and that gave them only one specialist slot, was moved from the Content to the Balance mod.
> The change that made the Market be given for Renaissance or later starts was moved from Content to Balance. (The Bazaar was already given in that era.)
> The change that made the Temple, Burial Tomb, and Mud Pyramid Mosque be given for Renaissance or later starts was moved from Content to Balance.
> The change that made the Paper Maker and Longhouse be given for Industrial or later starts was moved from Content to Balance.
> The change that made the Barracks, Krepost, and Forge NEVER be given for free was moved from Content to Balance. Giving the Barracks for an Industrial start was only costing 1gpt per city, but this was really hurting late-era starts financially at first. And it's not like you can't build them if you want to.
> The Flavor ratings for the existing defensive buildings (Walls, Castle, Mughal Fort, Military Base) were significantly increased, from 20/25/50/30 to 30/40/60/40. The AI simply wasn’t building these before, which was making his outlying cities too easy to conquer. Now that these cost no maintenance, it’s not as much of a money sink for the AIs, so there's less reason for them not to build them. And in my test games, the AIs would often have strength ~20 cities when I had Infantry, which made for easy conquests.
> The Flavor ratings for the military training buildings (Barracks, Armory, Military Academy) were increased slightly, from 10/15/20 to 20/25/30.

CONTENT:
> The cost of Research Agreements is increased; instead of 150/200/250/250/300… it’s now 200 for the Ancient Era, 300 for Classical, and so on with +100 per era until the Digital (800), then 1000 Fusion, 1200 Nanotech, and 1500 Transcendence. The point is that RAs now cost more than the average rushed building or unit of that era, so it'll be much harder to save up for one. These are basically double the vanilla game's costs.
> Switched the positions (and tech prerequisites) of Ecological Engineering and Ethical Calculus
> Switched the positions (and tech prerequisites) of Environmental Economics and Homo Superior
> Added some icon graphics for several of the units (mostly Psi units). This also includes the Spore Tower icon that pops up during the Breakout.
> Skunkworks now adds +20 XP to all units trained in its city, instead of +10. It’s still useful to make for its upgrade cost component, but this makes it matter more which city you place it in.
> The “Plant Forest” and “Plant Jungle” actions will now chop/clear forests, jungles, and marshes already on the tile. This solves the AI issue where it’d think that planting a Jungle on a tile that already had a Jungle would be an upgrade, because it’ll now consider the loss of resources from the chop before starting the action. However, unlike for a farm/mine/whatever, the chop/clear actions in these cases won’t take any extra turns (the chop is free), although you still get the 20 production from a forest. Technically this is a bit abuseable, in that it'd give you 20 production every X turns, but I wanted to give the AI more chances to reconsider its options if it gets stuck in a loop again.

And now, two sets of changes to the Content mod that need a bit of separate discussion. Feedback on these is HIGHLY welcome.

> Gold gifts to city-states generate about 25-40% less Influence. This makes it harder to use a gold surplus to buy your way to a diplomatic victory. The scaling isn't linear; large gifts now give a bit larger of a margin over the small ones. (That is, there'll be more of a gap between a single 1000 gift and two 500s.) At the start of the game, it'll be 30/65/140, instead of the vanilla 40/80/170.
> City-states will offer quests about twice as often as before.
> Gifting a unit to a city-state now gives 4 Influence instead of 2, to make it a more viable way to gain influence if you can't afford cash. (I'm also hoping this encourages the AI, who tends to build tons of units, to gift units to the CSs that can't produce/support a large army.)
While these last few might seem to be more appropriate to the Balance mod, it addresses a financial imbalance that only really occurs when you get into the future eras so I'm leaving it in the Content mod for now. My ultimate goal here is to make it so that to win a diplomatic victory you can't just shell out a few thousand gold on the turn before the vote, so I'm still working on making the amount decay faster. I basically want to make it where by the time the vote comes up, purchasing influence is almost impossible, and you'll have had to cultivate relationships in other ways as you went.

> Changed the math for the Diplomatic Victory to require significantly more votes to win. This one takes a little more explanation.
The basic math seems to be:
A = DIPLO_VICTORY_DEFAULT_VOTE_PERCENT
B = DIPLO_VICTORY_TEAM_MULTIPLIER
N = number of civs
Where B was 1.1, and I'd previously increased A from 67 to 80.
The math seems to be this (through a bit of testing):
Number of votes needed = (A-(B*N))*Number of total votes
So on a Small map (6 civs, 12 city-states) you'd need (80-1.1*(18))=60.2% of the votes (47.2% in the vanilla game), which'd be ~10.8, so you need 11 votes. On a Huge map (12+24), you'd need 40%, or 14 votes.
I've now decreased B to 0.75, which means that you now, on a Small map, need 66.5% (12 votes). On a Huge map, you'd need 53%, or 20 votes.
66.6% basically means getting EVERY city-state on your side, at least until the conquering starts. Once a few empires are eliminated it's a bit easier.

However, there's an additional threshold, the well-named DIPLO_VICTORY_ALGORITHM_THRESHOLD (28) and DIPLO_VICTORY_BEYOND_THRESHOLD_MULTIPLIER (35), which basically says that if there's over 28 voters (which previously took you down to ~36%), then don't allow the threshold to go lower than 35%. Since I increased the percentages, these simply shouldn't apply any more, so I increased them to 40 and 50. You'll only trigger this if you go on a Huge map and add extra city-states.
If I can get the Influence purchasing to decay faster then I'll tone this change down. But I like the fact that you need at least 50%; it seemed stupid that in the normal game two players could meet the victory threshold (35% on large maps) at the same time.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Now that I've posted the new version, here are the things I'm working on for the next version that I didn't put into this one. Remember that unless they push it back, these changes will wait until after the patch.

> Empaths will actually add +1 Happiness. (This one's VERY close. The only question has been, do I want to try extending this back into the pre-SMAC existing game? Making the Garden have an Empath slot instead of an Artist, that sort of thing?)
> The Skimmer is just way too good. Back when MechInfantry were 50 (and Modern Armor were 80), having them upgrade to a 70 wasn't a big deal, but now that they're 42 and Modern Armor are 70, the Skimmer becomes the main battle unit before you reach Gravtanks. That's not what I wanted.
So I'm going to drop them to 56, give them a SAM-style AA bonus (not as good as Plasma Artillery but still decent AA), make them a bit cheaper, and maybe throw on some other custom promotion or ability.
> City-states will get a resourceless Secondhand version of the Skimmer. Right now they get MechInfantry and then can't upgrade them.
> More "primary combat" units will require multiple strategic resources. Modern Armor and Stealth Bombers will need Aluminum and Oil, Leviathans, Vertols, and Skimmers might need Aluminum and Uranium, that sort of thing. This'd encourage you to use some of the weaker-but-flexible support units instead of just cranking out the heavies all the time. I've already done this with the Gravtank (Dilithium + Neutronium) and I really like what it did to its balance.

So at several points in the past, I've asked questions for what people think about some specific aspect of the balance of the game; Happiness, gold, we've covered a lot of topics. Today's questions deal with Ranged units, especially Air ones.

1> Artillery units get 2XP per kill, but they can start with up to 30XP (45 in vanilla) because they're Land units, which gives them 2 promotions, taking them much closer to the all-powerful Logistics promotion that lets you not only attack twice, but move after firing (a fourth-tier promotion, meaning 100 XP). A Rocket Artillery with Logistics gains XP faster than a tank does (less resting) and isn't nearly so vulnerable since it can fire from a city.
Air units, in vanilla, get 4 XP per kill, and I felt this was too strong, so I lowered it down to the same 2 that artillery get. (Especially since air units don't worry about moving after firing.) But the fact that they start at zero XP made it nearly impossible for them to get to 100 for Logistics in even the most combat-heavy games. In this last version I added +10 XP to Air units through the Military Academy, just to get them started.
So the question is: Should I bump the XP per kill for Air units up? Not back to 4, but maybe 3?

2> Orbital vs. Air. Orbital units are classified as Air units, with all that entails, and they get a large production boost from the Spaceship Factory (+50%). The fact that they never need to rebase away from your core cities makes them more efficient than aircraft. But their XP rate has to be the same as for other Air units, so I can't have them give less XP than a bomber without some serious hacking.
Also, their promotions use the artillery style (Open vs. Rough) instead of the bomber style (Land units vs. Cities vs. Sea), although that doesn't change the number of steps to get to Logistics. The main balance here is that the Ion Cannon's damage stinks, and all orbital weapons are new builds instead of upgrading from previous air units.
So the question is: Are Orbital weapons too good? For instance, I was thinking of giving their type an inherent penalty vs. Gunpowder and Energy units (i.e., Infantry), which'd be harder to target than a big tank or ship.

3> I normally play on Standard or Small maps. The 20 range of the Stealth Bomber is usually overkill there; if it's based in a border city, the entire empire you intend to conquer will be within its range and so you'll have no need to rebase. Even the 10 of the Bomber or Jet Fighter would be enough for most fights, although there I'm at least tempted to add the +2 Range promotion.
Needlejets are 15. (Or is it 16? Somewhere in that range.)
The question: If you play on a Large or Huge map, is the range of Air units more of a problem? If so, then this'd make orbital units even better. On the largest maps, I know rebasing across large oceans is a real problem, necessitating Carriers. I've boosted Carriers recently, giving them Medic to help with onboard fighters and nearby ships, but are they good enough to leave aircraft on?
(Also, you apparently can't put a Stealth Bomber on a carrier. But a normal Bomber can, and so can a Needlejet...)

 

[Zyxpsilon]

There's just a lot of things like this. What seems at first glance like a minor tweak cascades to all sorts of things within the game. For a small mod this isn't a big deal, because you'll only be changing a few parts and leaving the defaults for the rest. But for a mod like this...

Think of it more as, a mod that adds a few future eras to Civ5 (by making the spaceship not end the game), and those eras use SMAC for a theme. It's not trying to be a pure conversion, although when it's "done" I've been pondering a scenario that DOES use SMAC's leaders and tries to adhere a bit closer to SMAC's playstyles.

So true, it boggles the mind.

Take it from me... somehow try waiting for the DLL before you start actual work on the second paragraph concepts.

And, in a "side" tracking tiny biddy thought... have some fun dreaming about what your own 80x80 Mod_Icon_Reference should look like within LeoPaRd -- cuz, the next official patch triggers that "complex" personal & indirect HOF project into formal action(s).

 

[Spatzimaus]

Take it from me... somehow try waiting for the DLL before you start actual work on the second paragraph concepts.

Well, most of the pieces are already in place to do a SMAC-like scenario, as long as you don't insist on the SMAC build-a-unit system. Spreading or destroying fungus really isn't any different than how forests or jungles work with the forest growth mods. And so on.

And this made me think about something else: Water. In SMAC, coastal cities are THE way to go, because kelp farms make them water tiles your best source of food. And this, in turn, makes navies more important, to protect said resources from rampaging Isles of the Deep. But in Civ5, water is almost an afterthought. In my last game, I made a grand total of three ships the entire game. One was lost early on to barbarians, one battleship was sunk on the very first turn of a war (three guided missiles), and I ended the game with a single destroyer. Water tiles just aren't usually worth the effort to "guard"; the units you make are generally offensive.

In the early game, ocean tiles are worthless, and lakes just aren't very good. Get a Lighthouse and the water tiles become okay, and lakes become very nice 3-food tiles. So far so good.
But from that point on, the only increases are resource-based. Fishing Boats and Offshore Platforms on the resources, Seaports giving +2 production per resource tile, and there's the tech yield bonuses I give to Fishing Boats and Offshore Platforms in the future eras. Now, water has three possible new resources (Oil, Omnicytes, Dilithium), so you will still get a decent number of good water hexes, but ONLY if the resouce draw works in your favor.

And therein lies a major balance problem. Non-resource land tiles can still have Improvements (Farms, Trading Posts, Mines). Each of these adds +1 right away, and another +1 or +2 down the road, depending on whether it's adjacent to fresh water. So generally speaking, each land tile ends up 3 better than it started as, and that's not even counting the terraforming options.
But non-resource water tiles get... the Lighthouse. That's it. They start as 1/0/1, they end as 2/0/1, which no one in their right mind would work when your specialists and such do much better than that.

So one thing I was looking at adding was the Kelp Farm. It'd be a water-based Improvement that added +1 food to a coastal, non-resource tile, created by a Work Boat (without sacrificing). I don't think I'd go for the other two from SMAC (Thermocline Transducer for +gold, offshore trunkline for +prod), at least in the sense of them stacking with the Kelp Farm (like they can in SMAC), but done as an alternative improvement they might work.

The biggest balance problem is simply quantity. I can't give these a tech yield increase like I do for farms and such, because your coastal cities could have a dozen or more kelp farms, and there's no fresh water/non-fresh to narrow it down. So boosting coastal tiles to 3/0/1 won't, in the long term, make them worth working unless I also throw in another building or something to boost water outputs.

Thoughts, anyone?

 

[Sneaks]

I've been trying to come to grips with balancing sea resources as well. One issue with sea improvements in general, is the fact that you need to sac the work boat. Unfortunately the AI didn't seem to understand workboat building rather than saccing in some tests I ran.

 

[Spatzimaus]

One issue with sea improvements in general, is the fact that you need to sac the work boat.

You don't HAVE to sac. The Sacrifice toggle is part of the Build action; you can create a new Build action that creates a Fishing Boat but doesn't require sacrificing, for instance; I did this for one of my advanced terraforming units. So if you add a new Build Kelp Farm action, you'd just need to make sure you didn't require sacrificing for that action.
Also, if I was going to do this, then that whole paradigm would change to begin with. Why do Work Boats sacrifice? Because it'd be pointless to have them sitting around doing nothing the rest of the time; you'd be paying upkeep for a unit that can be killed and that does nothing but get in the way. But with the introduction of a non-resource tile improvement for water, you totally change this balance. Now, you need a persistent unit that can build these things, which means a SMAC-style Sea Former unit. And this, in turn, requires an active naval force to protect. (At least, until I get the antigrav promotions working.)

Or, assign the new Build action to one of your other naval units (Leviathan, Stealth Ship) and have them do it. That actually seems like a nice way to handle it, now that I think about it; your futuristic naval units would "seed" the oceans around your empire, which gives them a use after they become obsolescent in combat. And they can defend themselves well enough, so they don't need guards.