Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

[LetMyPeopleGo]

Regarding sea food industry or how to add water tiles improvements, if I'm correct in CTP you build fishing nets and they are placed on water tiles, no resource related, they improved food and later on production. If placing elements on water is a problem, you could just build a fish market that in general will boost water tile food/gold/production what ever you think will fit, and later on the tech tree, sea food factories like canning factory to improve yield of water tiles. and later on the tech tree frozen seafood which obviously does the same more or less.

On a completely different note, I'm playing now only on large or normal map size due to very long End Of Turn delays, I've reduced the number of players to 6+me, so on later eras I get new turn delays of about 10-20 seconds but one thing didn't improve with smaller map size, loading a saved game or an auto save game takes about 3 minuets, 2 minuets for the load game screen and the on the map another Please Wait for 1 minuet. If I'm loading a quick save game, it's only two minuets, no need to wait again when the map shows up.

Are these normal delays? or a way to force you to play better when you know that saving and loading is kind of a punishment?

I run windows 7 64 bit version with 8 GB ddrII 800, CPU is Q6600, graphic card is Radeon HD4870, and as I've said before, I can only dream about playing on huge maps.
My game is installed on drive D and so is MY Document folder.

Since I'm playing Crazy Spat's mods (still on v.15) I've decided to go for an advice here, is it a page-file tuning related problem? I've no ideas since besides Civ V I don't have any problems.

 

[Spatzimaus]

If placing elements on water is a problem, you could just build a fish market that in general will boost water tile food/gold/production what ever you think will fit, and later on the tech tree, sea food factories like canning factory to improve yield of water tiles.

I thought of that, and it'd definitely have the upside of not changing the balance of naval units. But it just feels... "sloppy". More than that, there's still the fundamental balance issue of speed. In the core game, all it takes is the Lighthouse to make a coastal city worthwhile, because while the 2/0/1 tiles aren't as good as improved land tiles, they're at least good enough to get an unimproved city up and running. But if you add a Cannery that adds another +1 food per water tile, then all it takes is two rush purchases to make a city get 3/0/1 from dozens of tiles. Imagine that on a Terra map. You're settling the new continent, and you rush a lighthouse, cannery, and harbor in your first coastal city there. Suddenly you have a city that grows incredibly quickly.

Now, for conceptual reasons a Cannery would be more like "+2 food per fish, whales, or pearls". Not oil, not dilithium, and while I could put Omnicytes on the list, there's no way to differentiate between the water and land versions. Basically, instead of boosting all water tiles, just keep boosting the water resource tiles even further. Balancewise that might be the better way to go; the point of this discussion, though, was to see if the SMAC-style Kelp Farm improvement would be viable in the Civ5 context. (This is how a lot of my ideas have gone, and the reason for the many deviations from SMAC; some things just don't balance well in Civ5.)

Are these normal delays? or a way to force you to play better when you know that saving and loading is kind of a punishment?

Sounds a bit on the long side, but yes, there's a long delay loading up a game, especially in the late eras. Your computer's quite a bit more advanced than mine, so I don't think it's a resource issue.

I play in windowed mode to allow me to keep a note file open as I go, so when I want to load a savegame I'll tab over to something else (like this board) until I hear the ambient sound effects start up. I've never actually timed it, but it seemed to be about the same in a vanilla game. I think the problem is just that it has to reload EVERYTHING: set up the database again, apply the mods again, initialize the map, and so on. You can see all of this happening in FireTuner.

From the sound of it, the next patch should improve this a bit, but who knows.

 

[LetMyPeopleGo]

I understand your logic, so a Cannery(new word for me) and a fish market can be applied to river tiles too/only. Anyways, kelp sounds good, so why not implementing it like any sea resource and harvest it by the same means, fishing boats which should be called kelp harvesters.

 

[Spatzimaus]

so why not implementing it like any sea resource and harvest it by the same means, fishing boats which should be called kelp harvesters.

Thematically that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, because kelp can grow pretty much anywhere. It'd be like creating a "desalinization plant" and then saying it only applies to certain coastal tiles and not others; doesn't make much sense, really. (That's the other city building I've been thinking of; it's really the analogue of the Lighthouse, in that it allows modern cities to grow more quickly.)
One thing that could keep the Cannery balanced is that it'd require at least a Harbor. While the AI doesn't do this, I as a player am careful to only make a small number of Harbors. This is part of why I gave them the naval XP bonus, but it's not enough, and this sort of thing would definitely help make them more valuable.
Alternatively, don't even make a new building; I could just have the Harbor give an automatic +1 food for improved fish, whales, and pearls tiles. This might be a little too good in ancient times, but I think it'd be okay in the long run, and it'd definitely make that building more valuable. And it fits the apparent changes they're making to the game, where Stables now give production for horse tiles and so on.

Really, the problem is that I'm trying to imitate SMAC a little more closely than I have in the past. In SMAC you can put kelp in any shallow-water squares, and it spreads on its own (like Civ4 forests). And it's a feature, not an improvement, so you could then put one of two improvements on top of it (one +production, one +energy).
So if I were to put this into Civ5, I'd like to adhere as closely as I can to the SMAC style; the only question is whether it can possibly be balanced in that form. The biggest problem is how pillaging works in general; on land, if you pillage an improvement it becomes nonfunctional but is quick to repair. But on water, if you pillage something it's gone entirely.

But that gives the solution: make it a Feature. If it's a feature, like a forest or jungle, then the only way to clear it is with the appropriate Chop option, and while I'd give that action to the appropriate naval units, it'd take several turns and be a low priority for the AIs in hostile territory. And if I had an actual Sea Former style of worker unit then you wouldn't even need to give that ability to the combat units at all, and kelp would be inherently unpillageable. (Alternately, I COULD make it an actual resource. The problem is that you'd know if a tile already contained a hidden resource. This is why Deep Mining, the only terraform that adds resources, comes after the last resource is revealed.)

Oh, and that reminds me, an idea I had. Chopping a forest gives 20 production. Chopping a jungle gives nothing. So I was thinking of having a jungle chop give 20 food... but if I make Kelp Farms a feature, then maybe give a gold boost for a jungle chop and a food boost for a kelp chop?

 

[LetMyPeopleGo]

Kelp farms, now I get it, I missed something while reading your previous posts, farms which later on gets improvements, that sounds really good.

Just for the interest of it, here in Israel we do have kelp farms in the desert (actually they are called algae growing farms, Kelp are simply large seaweeds belonging to the brown algae), utilizing the all year round sunny weather, the algae grows in vertical plastic columns like strictest, which gives more algae per area than flat surface algae farms, the algae is then used to feed fish, Salmon fish. That algae is the same one that the salmon fish feed on in nature, and it gives them the pinkish color, salmon fish from fish farms not feeding on that special algae don't have that special color, just white like any other fish, thus not having a good demand.

On the other side of the ocean, in the us, chemists are developing the first economical, eco-friendly process to convert algae oil into biodiesel fuel, so you got your second improvement for kelp farms.

Back to the game, why not build Kelp farms in the desert too, kelp feeds on sun (photosyntheses) and gives a good yield and a fast one too, so if we got the tech let's bring it to the poor desert cities too. I know your intentions are SMAC oriented only, these ideas just pooped in my head while reading your post.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

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.
...
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?

Balance & quantity... sounds sooooo familiar; map configuration, Pangea_Archipelago considerations in a sense that if the weakest amount of tiles aren't reasonably exploitable by either random resources or workable extra-pop(instead of specialists) then you still have BlackyHeads all over the place.
Do click on the Terraform'ingly Yours link below to refuel your mind up on some weird (but i believe "sufficient" within it only) coastal boost to/for Vanilla defaults.

The whole Perl/Whale/Oil/Fish by boats is an indirect deterant to spreadout (but linear) supply pools worth tackling... and here lies the culprit; H²O. It's there, flowing, stagnant & full of salt in places and yet Vital. Food or Hydro potential, you decide. If it were just me, sustainable, adaptative but not useless.

PS; So, what do you want for your SMAC 80x80_Icon in LeoPaRd.?.?. i need an answer, asap!

 

[LetMyPeopleGo]

Just waiting for the patch, the situation now is that each time the game gets intresting, get coal and oil is near, the crashes and/or long delays send me back into despair, I hope the patched game will let me play as it should be.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Just waiting for the patch, the situation now is that each time the game gets intresting, get coal and oil is near, the crashes and/or long delays send me back into despair, I hope the patched game will let me play as it should be.

The long delays, at least, are on the list to be addressed by the patch. The scuttlebutt is that the patch will be released tomorrow, so here's hoping.

The crashes, on the other hand, I'm not sure about. If they're the fault of my mod (and since the core game doesn't crash when you enter that era I'm assuming they'd have to be), then I just don't know what could be causing them. They're definitely occurring during the opponent turns, and seem to happen when the AI reaches the late Industrial/early Nuclear. (In games where I had a massive tech advantage, the crashes didn't start until I was nearly into the Fusion Era.) They also don't seem to happen nearly as often in games starting in the later eras.

But I might have found it.

You see, I don't DO a lot until the Nuclear/Digital boundary, so there aren't many things it could be. Combat Engineer, Plant/Forest/Jungle, Aqueduct/SewerSystem/RecyclingCenter, and the disabled Centauri Ecology tech. So I started looking at these in detail, and I found something.

In my Combat Engineer declaration in the XML, I put its UnitArtInfo as ART_DEF_UNIT_WORKER. But if you look in the actual game's XML, it's ART_DEF_UNIT__WORKER. (Note the doubled underline). They did that for the Settler, too. So with that mistake, it was using an invalid variable, and using some other unit's graphics. (Some sort of spearman, from what I could tell.) This wouldn't be so bad, except that Combat Engineers, like the Workers before them, have the "Era Art Variation" flag. My bet is that the crash is occurring when city-states begin to upgrade their few Workers to the CEs. In late-era starts it's not a big deal because their first workers will be CEs, and if the bug is in the graphical representation of upgrading then there's no issue. Alternatively, it might be that the C-Ss simply don't have access to the graphics for whatever unit it was trying to substitute. (Remember, a few units, like settlers, have different art depending on which general style of civ, like European vs. American.)

Once upon a time, I had a lot of crashes in this mod, because I was using some placeholders for units, and the substitutes didn't have the same set of animations. That's why most units now have a placeholder from the same general category of unit. So I KNOW this sort of mistake can lead to crashes.

-----------
Obviously, I've fixed this in my next version. But if you don't want to wait, it's a one-character fix, so you can edit it in your own copies easily.
One other one-character fix that'll be in the next version: the Manufactory's +2 production at Plastics. The game uses TECH_PLASTIC, while I'd typed TECH_PLASTICS, so Manufactories weren't improving as well as the other GP buildings.

In the meantime, I'm going to start a new game to see if this fixes the crashes.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Well, it still crashes, although it might be less often than before. Hard to know for sure. I'll test it some more after the patch.

 

[Charybdis]

One problem I was having.

Was on a huge earth map, about 10 civs and 10 city states.

As the game progressed when 'scrolling' across the map to another city it'd randomly seize and just stop working.

When it was doing this, I'd be seeing map tiles as grey then drawn in, and I figured all this drawing was what was doing it, however turning down the graphics didn't seem to help.

I have a save file if this would be useful, but if you want any details regarding my system specs you'll have to let me know how to retrieve them.

 

[Spatzimaus]

As the game progressed when 'scrolling' across the map to another city it'd randomly seize and just stop working.

Strange. You're sure this only happens on your computer with my mod? I know we had a few cache issues in the past with graphical bugs, but those mostly seemed to pop up when you'd switch back and forth between a modded game and an unmodded one in the same play session. (Since I only ever use my mod, I don't get these headaches.)

I have a save file if this would be useful,

Unfortunately, it wouldn't. I invariably tweak the mod after I post it, in preparation for the next version, so the mod on my computer isn't compatible with the one I gave you. (Fixed a few bugs, added a few new icons, that sort of thing.) This last version lasted a good hour before I found something I wanted to tweak, and what I have now would almost be ready to be posted as a new version, if I didn't think the next big official patch was coming out today (2/28).

 

[Spatzimaus]

Okay, after further testing, it looks like the Lua-handled negative happiness from buildings (Courthouse, Genejack Factory, etc.) and Wonders (Dream Twister) don't actually seem to be working at all. It's displaying them correctly, but if the game updates your happiness at any point (you completed a +happy building, etc.) then it recalculates it without this new negative value.

This is especially a problem because it appears that at the end of each turn, the game automatically recalculates what your Happiness should be and so will undo whatever subtraction I do in my start-of-turn event. So right now, these aren't having any effect; it'll LOOK like you're losing happiness, but it won't actually do it.

So I'm going to try a few things. First, I'm going to move the derivation from the start-of-turn event to the end-of-turn event and see if I can override that recalculation that way. Unfortunately this'll make the UI even more screwy, so I might have to mod the Happiness UI as well. (Or leave the start-of-turn event in and risk doubling it up.)

Second, I'm open to suggestions. What ways can I subtract Happiness that people KNOW will work? Most of the "integer" fields in Civ5 can't actually accept a negative value, so I can't think of too many, and the ChangeHappinessFromBuildings function just doesn't work at all from what I can see.
It's really important that I get this working; the Courthouse is insanely overpowered without this fix, because of how screwed up it is in vanilla, and the Genejack, Creche, etc. in the future eras have strong effects balanced by this negative Happiness. (Although the Genejack might have to change now that they're altering how factories and power plants work.)

 

[markusbeutel]

Okay, after further testing, it looks like the Lua-handled negative happiness from buildings (Courthouse, Genejack Factory, etc.) and Wonders (Dream Twister) don't actually seem to be working at all. It's displaying them correctly, but if the game updates your happiness at any point (you completed a +happy building, etc.) then it recalculates it without this new negative value.

This is especially a problem because it appears that at the end of each turn, the game automatically recalculates what your Happiness should be and so will undo whatever subtraction I do in my start-of-turn event. So right now, these aren't having any effect; it'll LOOK like you're losing happiness, but it won't actually do it.

So I'm going to try a few things. First, I'm going to move the derivation from the start-of-turn event to the end-of-turn event and see if I can override that recalculation that way. Unfortunately this'll make the UI even more screwy, so I might have to mod the Happiness UI as well. (Or leave the start-of-turn event in and risk doubling it up.)

Second, I'm open to suggestions. What ways can I subtract Happiness that people KNOW will work? Most of the "integer" fields in Civ5 can't actually accept a negative value, so I can't think of too many, and the ChangeHappinessFromBuildings function just doesn't work at all from what I can see.
It's really important that I get this working; the Courthouse is insanely overpowered without this fix, because of how screwed up it is in vanilla, and the Genejack, Creche, etc. in the future eras have strong effects balanced by this negative Happiness. (Although the Genejack might have to change now that they're altering how factories and power plants work.)

You can subtract happiness through policies.

 

[LetMyPeopleGo]

The long delays, at least, are on the list to be addressed by the patch. The scuttlebutt is that the patch will be released tomorrow, so here's hoping.

The crashes, on the other hand, I'm not sure about. If they're the fault of my mod (and since the core game doesn't crash when you enter that era I'm assuming they'd have to be), then I just don't know what could be causing them. They're definitely occurring during the opponent turns, and seem to happen when the AI reaches the late Industrial/early Nuclear. (In games where I had a massive tech advantage, the crashes didn't start until I was nearly into the Fusion Era.) They also don't seem to happen nearly as often in games starting in the later eras.

I've the crashes with or without your mod, going from Huge to Large and to Normal map sizes, decreases the rate of crashes, a crash now and then is not a game killer by itself, the loading of saved games hurts a lot, it takes forever, the funny thing though is that loading a quick save takes almost half the time of loading a normal/autosave, so I'm trying to quick save every turn starting around turn 900~ (I always play marathon) so loading after a crash is less painful.

 

[Spatzimaus]

a crash now and then is not a game killer by itself

A single crash, no. But if you're getting into that wall-o-crashes where it eventually becomes completely impossible to reach the next turn, then that's a problem. And that seems to happen when the AI reaches that same late Industrial era. I couldn't tell whether the crash I had yesterday was the first of many or just an isolated incident, though; I'll try to play more tonight when I get home, but if the new patch goes live today it'll invalidate my savegame.

the funny thing though is that loading a quick save takes almost half the time of loading a normal/autosave,

That's how it's designed, from the way I understand it. Loading a "normal" save also reinitializes the mods/DLC that that save uses; in theory, you're supposed to be able to do this to jump from one savegame to another, even if they didn't use the same mods. (The fact that this doesn't actually work right is a different issue.) Quicksaves, on the other hand, are designed to not reload that mod content; as long as you went in through the Mods menu, and don't ever switch to other games until your game is complete, then there's literally no reason not to just use the quicksave for everything. (Autosaves are another story.)
So yes, much faster.

You can subtract happiness through policies.

First, have you confirmed that negative numbers actually work there? After all, it's an integer Happiness field, the same as for buildings, and I know for a fact that those do NOT work. That's the problem that spawned this whole issue in the first place. (I'm not saying I'm unwilling to believe you. I'm just asking if you've tried this directly and/or seen a mod that actually does this, or if it's conjectural. Of course, I can test this myself when I get home, assuming no patch yet.)

Second, it's not very tunable. How would you use policies to make the game subtract 37 happiness for having 7 courthouses, 6 children's creches, and 5 genejack factories from player A while only subtracting 23 from player B? You'd have to do this through adding/removing a combination of policies (in binary! A policy for -1, one for -2, one for -4, and so on!), but how can you prevent a policy from being selected through the normal mechanisms? (I don't want a stupid AI to accidentally pick the "-16 Happiness" policy when it has enough culture, and I don't want these to somehow make normal policies more expensive.)

 

[markusbeutel]

A single crash, no. But if you're getting into that wall-o-crashes where it eventually becomes completely impossible to reach the next turn, then that's a problem. And that seems to happen when the AI reaches that same late Industrial era. I couldn't tell whether the crash I had yesterday was the first of many or just an isolated incident, though; I'll try to play more tonight when I get home, but if the new patch goes live today it'll invalidate my savegame.



That's how it's designed, from the way I understand it. Loading a "normal" save also reinitializes the mods/DLC that that save uses; in theory, you're supposed to be able to do this to jump from one savegame to another, even if they didn't use the same mods. (The fact that this doesn't actually work right is a different issue.) Quicksaves, on the other hand, are designed to not reload that mod content; as long as you went in through the Mods menu, and don't ever switch to other games until your game is complete, then there's literally no reason not to just use the quicksave for everything. (Autosaves are another story.)
So yes, much faster.



First, have you confirmed that negative numbers actually work there? After all, it's an integer Happiness field, the same as for buildings, and I know for a fact that those do NOT work. That's the problem that spawned this whole issue in the first place. (I'm not saying I'm unwilling to believe you. I'm just asking if you've tried this directly and/or seen a mod that actually does this, or if it's conjectural. Of course, I can test this myself when I get home, assuming no patch yet.)

Second, it's not very tunable. How would you use policies to make the game subtract 37 happiness for having 7 courthouses, 6 children's creches, and 5 genejack factories from player A while only subtracting 23 from player B? You'd have to do this through adding/removing a combination of policies (in binary! A policy for -1, one for -2, one for -4, and so on!), but how can you prevent a policy from being selected through the normal mechanisms? (I don't want a stupid AI to accidentally pick the "-16 Happiness" policy when it has enough culture, and I don't want these to somehow make normal policies more expensive.)

I use negative happiness in my NiGHTS mod. Works great - just make sure to tweak ai flavors for bigger unhappiness policies so they dont bite off more than they can chew.

How you implement the policies, well you'd have to get creative there - but it does work perfectly fine.

Sent from my iphone

 

[Spatzimaus]

Okay, the patch is out. I'm at work, so it'll be at least six hours until I can start the actual modding, but it looks like there are going to be a LOT of conflicts, based on what I've seen of the final patch notes.

A few, like the now-duplicated Aqueduct, will cause the mods to be incompatible, but many of the balance tweaks will also cascade through. I've discussed this before, but it's worth repeating again: now that the game engine is starting to take advantage of the Improvement_TechYields table, a lot of the changes I'd made are going to be removed or rearranged.

The only real question, then, is whether I base my mod off the pre-patch or post-patch baselines. For instance, take the Trading Post change; like me, they reduced it to +1 gold and increased it with technology, but unlike in my mod, they did this in a single increase instead of splitting it between freshwater trading posts and non-freshwater ones at different techs. Personally, I think their way is just too strong, so I'd prefer to keep it the way I have it. But the more I deviate from the vanilla game, the harder it'll be to keep the mod balanced against future patches.
So if possible, I'm going to try to use the post-patch version as a baseline. However, a few changes won't work for this; for instance, the increased yields of the Landmark, Manufactory, etc. completely go against the tech-based increases I designed in, so I'll likely revert those to the pre-patch values. Policies are going to be another headache; they're completely rearranging what many of these policies do, and that's going to screw up a lot of the balance on my own policies.

So, I'm going to go back and re-assess each of the changes they made in this patch, to see if my mod should be restructured to use those same changes. This'll take some time, probably a couple days, before I'm ready to post a new version. And even then, it's likely that the first post-patch version will have balance issues (see also: Public School in the December patch), so don't be shocked if I put out a few new versions in rapid succession.

And on a side note, I have to say, I really dislike some of the design decisions they made in this patch. For instance, take money. The Market and such now produce more gold, many buildings now cost less maintenance, and the only negative change to gold was the Trading Post change (which, in my experience, isn't even close to enough to offset this sort of thing). So in the endgame, you'll now be earning even more money.

 

[Spatzimaus]

It's looking like I'll have the next version ready tonight. (My tonight; I live in L.A., so it might be tomorrow for most of you.) It won't be perfect; for one thing, I'm going to have to go back and fix all of the little help text blurbs for the various techs, the ones that say what each tech does, to match the new positions of somethings. I've added a few new tweaks, but none of them are large enough to cause issues.

I believe I've got all the major bugs ironed out, although there are still a few balance issues to deal with. First and foremost: because of the way tech costs scaled in the pre-patch game, I'd drastically reduced the effects of the Library, University, Research Lab, etc., so that by the time you got to the Nuclear Era your cities were generating less than half the research output of the vanilla game.
But then they go and increase tech costs, where the Modern Era techs now cost almost twice what they used to.

So the question now is whether I should at least partially undo the change I'd made. If it takes too long to research later techs now, then it really hurts my mod, because you'll be less likely to make it to the future eras. I'm going to try and evaluate this for myself, but I won't hold the update up long enough for me to play a near-complete game, and so I could really use feedback on this once I post the new version.
One problem is that I LIKE that research isn't all about how many buildings you stack into a city. By making the buildings less important, it helps balance the AI-vs-player research rates, since the AI doesn't prioritize research highly enough (although I've tweaked the flavors upwards to help with this). So I'd prefer not to undo the changes entirely. (And no matter what else I decide, the Research Lab will NOT go back to being +100%.)

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

But there's something I wanted to bring up, an idea I just had that I'm thinking of putting into the NEXT version.

The developers are now taking advantage of Improvement_TechYields, which lets improvements get better over time. I've used that heavily in my mods, of course, with each improvement getting one or two increases. It's a good mechanism, although the devs have only used it to boost each improvement's "primary" purpose instead of using it to diversify. (For instance, they have both Pastures and Plantations gaining +food at Fertilizer. They couldn't have made Plantations be +1 gold instead, to be more interesting?)
One drawback of it, though, is what it does to the balance of Specialists vs. working tiles. When a Merchant gives you 3 gold (plus GP points) and a trading post only gives you 1 plus the tile's yield, it's usually a no-brainer to use the specialists where possible. But fast-forward a few eras, where the improvements have each increased a couple times, and specialists start to be untenable. Sure, you can make policies that boost all specialists (like my Cybernetic policy, or the half-food and half-unhappiness policies), but they generally don't get much better than tiles do.
My long-term goal has been to have specialist be worse than tiles with resources on them but better than tiles without resources. Right now, that gets thrown off once you reach the late Digital Era.

But that's when I realized something. Have you ever looked at the code for the Statue of Liberty? It doesn't actually say "+1 production per specialist". No, it's "+1 production per artist; and +1 production per merchant; and +1 production per scientist" and so on. Five separate increases that just happen to be the same type and amount. I knew this because I'd had to add Empath and Transcend to the list, but I hadn't really thought through the implications.

That's where my thought came in. As you can tell from my mod design, I'm a big fan of the National Wonder mechanism as a way to give unique abilities without making the tech leaders unstoppable. So the thought was, add five National Wonders to the game, in the late Industrial/early Nuclear. Each would boost its host city in one specialty (like the Iron Works, National College, etc.), but would also boost all specialists of a certain type across your empire.

For instance, using a couple examples from earlier Civ games:
Hollywood (Mass Media): +50% culture in this city, all Artists produce +1 gold
Three Rivers Gorge Dam (Plastics): +50% production in this city, all Engineers produce +1 research
Center for Disease Control (Ecology): +50% research in this city, all Scientists produce +1 food (remember, food balanced "unhealthiness" in Civ4, and affects city growth.)
Wall Street (Electronics?): +50% gold in this city, all Merchants produce +1 production
The fifth one could improve the unskilled Citizen specialist by +1 food, which with the half-food policy makes them require zero food (which means a city could ALWAYS grow if it needed to). I was thinking of going with a government-type theme, like a Smithsonian that adds +5 UnmoddedHappiness and boosts Citizens by +1 food. Regardless, it'd be the earliest of the five. (Although the Smithsonian obviously predates the industrial era, so I'm open to suggestions. I was thinking White House or Capitol, but I didn't want to confuse it with the Palace.)

But I also like the newly-improved Mutual Exclusive logic. So the next thought was, make each of these exclusive, and make them even more lopsided in effect. So Hollywood might be +100% culture (or +50% and +5), but -25% production, -25% research, -25% gold (plus the Artist boost), while Three Rivers would boost production by a large amount but subtract from culture, research, and gold. And so on for the others. (Remember that percentages are additive, so -25% to research in a city that's running at +120% from a University, Public School, and Research Lab obviously won't be crippling.) The result would be that your largest cities would specialize even further, while helping your empire as a whole; you'd put your financial center in New York, your cultural center in Los Angeles, your production center in Chicago, your science center in Atlanta, and your government building in Washington.

So, thoughts?

 

[Spatzimaus]

44 downloads of v.0.16 later, and two days of figuring out what the patch did, v.0.17 is ready. I'll update the posts at the start of the thread in a bit.

WARNING: the balance on this version is probably WAY off. It's not going to be nearly as balanced as pre-patch, because so much has changed. I'll need feedback on everything: gold balance, tech rates, you name it.
Also, there'll be a few things that aren't user-friendly. For one thing, the little help blurbs for each tech that say what its benefits are? I haven't adjusted those to the new effects, so go by the tech tree instead of reading those.

That being said, here goes:
v.0.17, dated 3/3
Changes are split into two groups: those that are directly related to the patch's changes, and those that aren't. As usual, "Balance" means the change is in the Crazy Spatz Balance Mod, while "Content" means the Alpha Centauri mod.
PATCH COMPATIBILITY:
BALANCE:
> Because they’ve now added a new Aqueduct building, I removed the now-duplicated building class and text keys. However, since I’m going to keep the Aqueduct effect I had previously, not all text keys changed, but they’re now Updates instead of Rows.
> The Aqueduct they added was remarkably similar to mine, but a few changes were made: my cost was 150 (instead of 120), the building is given for free in Renaissance or later starts, and of course the +1 unmodded happiness and 10% food storage instead of the 40% of the vanilla game.
> I’m keeping the Hospital at its previous effect (+20% storage and double healing rate) instead of the new +5 food.
> The Bank and Satrap’s Court were changed to have one Merchant slot, so I removed my edit.
> The Mud Pyramid Mosque and Burial Tomb were lowered in cost from 120 to 100, close enough to my 90 that I removed my edit.
> Strangely, the Temple was NOT reduced in the patch, and remained 120, so I lowered it to 100 to match the others.
> Both the Mud Pyramid Mosque and Temple were reduced to 1 Artist, which I’d already done, so my change was removed.
> The Observatory’s maintenance cost of 2 had been removed. I put it back in. (Since the Observatory is now a combined research/culture building in my mod, it’s too valuable to be free.)
> The Monastery’s maintenance cost of 2 had been removed. I put it back in.
> In the patch, the Colosseum was changed to 3 happiness for 2gpt, the same as my mod, so I removed my changes. However, the patch also reduced its build cost from 150 to 120, while I’d increased it to 180, so I left my change in; my mod also increases the Hurry cost and adds +1 culture.
> The patch reduced the Theater to 4 happiness for 3 gpt, but I’m keeping it my old way (3 happiness and 2 culture for 4 gpt).
> The Opera House was changed to 4 culture (same as mine) and 250 cost (closer to my 260 than the old 220), so I removed my edits to those. It still gains a new Artist slot, however, and I’m keeping the maintenance at 4 gpt.
> The Factory was given a second Engineer slot in the patch. I put it back down to 1. While that’s less than some other buildings in the same era, there are now quite a few other production buildings that add an Engineer slot.
> In the patch, the Stock Exchange's cost was reduced from 650 to 600, and given a second Merchant slot, while my verson was cost 500 with only one slot. I’m keeping mine.
> The University was given a second Scientist slot. It’s bad enough when you’re doing this in the industrial buildings, but the University is WAY too early for that, so I put it back down to 1, especially since the Public School now has a slot. Given that I've added so many new buildings in the future eras, I don't really want ANY building to have two slots of any kind.
> Because it now has a Scientist slot, I removed the extra Culture point the Public School gets. It still gets 1, just not the 2 I’d changed it to.
> Because they changed the Trading Post to have a base yield of 1, my identical change was removed.
> In the patch, they gave Trading Posts +1 gold at Economics, while I’d split the bonus, with freshwater posts getting +1 at Compass (significantly earlier) and the rest getting +1 at Economics. I prefer my version.
> Because I use tech-based yield improvements for the various Great Person buildings, I undid the increase to the base values of the Landmark, Academy, and Manufactory, with the exception that the Landmark was only reduced from 6 to 5 (instead of back to 4), due to the increased culture of Artist specialists.
> Pre-patch, trade routes gave 1.0 + 1.25*pop + 0*capital. This was changed to –1.0 + 1.1*pop + 0.15*capital. My version was –1.0 + 1.33*pop + 0.07*capital. Given the decrease in the vanilla value, I’m changing mine to –2.0 + 1.25*pop + 0.1*capital, which breaks even at size ~10.
> I’d previously given Pastures +1 production at Ecology and Plantations +1 gold at Penicillin. The patch gave them each +1 food at Fertilizer, so I removed my changes (but this had other effects, below.)
> I’d given Quarries +1 gold at Electronics. The patch gave them +1 production at Chemistry, so I removed my changes.
> Because I give Wells +1 gold at Lasers, I reduced its base production from +3 to +2. (Pre-patch it was only +1.)
> Various Civilopedia entry changes. Still working on this one, but I got quite a few of them done already.

CONTENT:
> Because the Pasture increase was changed to +food at Fertilizer, I changed its Centauri Empathy increase from +food to +gold.
> Because the Plantation and Pasture increases were moved to Fertilizer, I moved the Plant Forest action to Ecology and Plant Jungle to Penicillin.
> Tech costs were drastically increased in the patch, which required repricing the future era techs. The new costs, by tier:
Digital: 6800/7700/8700 (was 3750/4200/4700)
Fusion: 9800/11000/12300 (was 5200/5800/6500)
Nanotech: 13700/15400/17200 (was 7200/8000/9000)
Transcendence: 19000/21000 (was 10000/12000)
The scaling on this one needs a LOT of tweaking. For those of you new to the discussion, my goal is to have techs always take about 8-10 turns to research on Standard speed.
> Because Oligarchy now no longer gives a promotion to units, there was no need to add it to my new unit classes.
> The repricing of units meant that many future-era units needed to be repriced:
Stealth Ship: 600 -> 800 (Secondhand: 500 -> 700)
Leviathan: 900 -> 1000
Skimmer: 600 -> 700 (Secondhand 500 -> 600)
Vertol: 600 -> 750 (Secondhand 500 -> 650)
Scout Powersuit: 500 -> 550
Assault Powersuit: 600 -> 700
> Lots of editing to AssignStartingPlots.lua to integrate my changes with the core game. Most of this was just a straight merging, but a few of the rarity numbers were tweaked to account for the newly increased Oil deposit sizes. This one actually undid some of the changes I'd made in the last couple versions. So expect more tweaking on this one in the next version.

NEW STUFF:
BALANCE:
> Until I get it working, I’ve commented out the negative happiness for the Courthouse. I've had some good suggestions about how to fix the Happiness issue, so we'll see what happens.
> The Growth flavors of the Sewer System and Recycling Center were increased by 10 each, to 30 and 40.
> Moved the late Industrial/early Nuclear tech yield increases from the Content mod to the Balance mod.
> The Manufactory’s +2 production at Plastics wasn’t working because the game spelled it as TECH_PLASTIC instead of the plural. This has been fixed.
> The patch put a +1 production to Mines at Chemistry. I changed this to be a no-fresh-water-only increase at Chemistry (which would cover the majority of mines), and then put the +1 I’d added at Nuclear Fission in the freshwater category.
> The Sewer System is now moved from Scientific Theory to Fertilizer. Think about it.
> The +1 gold for Forts at Computers was moved up to Rifling.
> The Harbor now gives +1 gold to all local Whale and Pearls tiles. This complements the Lighthouse’s increased food for Fish deposits. The only other aquatic resources are Oil, Omnicytes, and Dilithium, and those'll have high enough base yields that they don't need a boost like this.

CONTENT:
> Workers can no longer plant Forests or Jungles. You have to upgrade to Combat Engineers to get that ability, but since the Plant actions are now about two eras later than before, it’s not a problem.
> Skimmer strength is reduced from 70 down to 56 (which is why their cost didn’t increase as much as that of the other units of that era). They do gain Interception III (+50% chance of intercepting), to help protect nearby units, but not the Anti-Air promotion that true AA units have. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, because the base 56 strength (plus the usual multipliers) will be more than those old AA units had; even Plasma Artillery’s Combat (which is what interception uses, instead of ranged strength) is only a 40, although the true AA units have a +100% chance of intercepting instead of +50%..
The Skimmer was never intended to be a primary combat unit. Like the cavalry and gunships, it was intended to be a skirmisher support unit, but that 70 strength made it better than Modern Armor. So now, it's weaker, although it still has a few advantages, like the fact that it doesn't have the city attack penalty of the Vertol or Gravtank. And it now acts as a supplementary anti-air unit, so that everything doesn't hinge on the placement of Plasma Artillery.
> The Skimmer’s Flavor ratings were adjusted to account for this change, with a little less Offense and a little bit of AntiAir. They also gained the “Counter” AI as a valid AI type.
> Added a Secondhand version of the Skimmer (50 strength, 400 cost) for city-states. It made no sense that CSs would have Mechanized Infantry but couldn’t upgrade them, while they COULD get secondhand gravtanks. Even with the reduction it’s still an upgrade of the MechInfantry (42 strength, 4 move, less terrain ability), especially with the interception boost.
> The Anti-Air promotion that AA guns, SAMs, and Plasma Artillery get would give a +100% bonus against Bombers and Fighters (including the Jet / Stealth upgrades) but did NOT give a bonus against the new Multirole type that the Needlejet is in, because it keyed off of CombatType instead of Domain. So, Plasma Artillery were getting utterly destroyed by Needlejets, despite being the intended counter to them. This has been fixed.
> The Combat Mech now uses the icon of the Giant Death Robot. I think it was always supposed to and I’d just mistyped 26 instead of 36.
> All new units now have custom icons (but not unit flag icons yet). Unlike the previous version’s batch, however, these images were NOT taken from the original SMAC game. Many are from related works of science fiction, but a couple were just Google Image Search results.
> The Empath and Transcend specialists now have custom icons taken directly from SMAC's specialists.
> The +1 research for Mines at Superconductor, previously a freshwater yield (to counteract the non-freshwater at Nuclear Fission) was moved to nonfreshwater.
> The Power policy, in addition to giving +10 XP to all new units, adds 2 culture per kill. Which I'd mentioned previously.
> The Xenoempathy Dome, Telepathic Matrix, Universal Translator, and Manifold Harmonics now generate slightly more Great Empath points than they did before.
> Instead of having an Empath slot, the Neural Amplifier generates 3 Great Empath points per turn. Wonders don't usually have specialist slots.
> Previously, if you right-clicked on the Ranger icon in the tech tree it’d take you to the custom promotion of the same name. To fix this, the unit’s custom promotion has been renamed “Special Forces”. I’d call it “Commando”, but I’m already using that term for the Civ4-like “can use enemy roads” promotion that had that name previously... and the Ranger is also the only unit to possess that promotion, at least for now.
> The Scout Powersuit’s movement rate was increased from 3 to 4.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Okay, I normally have a "no triple-posting" rule, to keep the thread from ONLY being me, but I've decided that posting a new version automatically resets the counter. Besides, it's been two days, and 18 people have downloaded the new version. I understand that it takes time to complete a game, but this is one of those times when I REALLY need feedback.

So here are my impressions of the post-patch gameplay so far.
1> Money is a bit more plentiful than before, but thanks to some increased maintenance cost on later-era buildings, it tends to stay pretty manageable until you unlock Stock Exchanges in your core cities. I'm thinking of downgrading Stock Exchanges from +33% to +25%, since both Markets and Banks are +25%. Maybe give them something else to compensate. (Ooh, maybe have them generate units of Iron and Horses. Sort of like an early-era Energy Bank: +25% and two resources.)

2> The tech pace feels pretty comfortable; I was spending ~12 turns for the best available techs, and 5-6 for the mopup stuff I'd bypassed. Unfortunately, it still felt a bit fast in terms of buildings, because of the reduction in the effectiveness of Factories and the increased construction costs for many Wonders. But it's a definite improvement.
2a> Thanks to my Research Agreement repricing, I think I did 3 RAs the whole game, and only saw the AIs do four with each other. This is a good thing.

3> Happiness balanced almost perfectly, in my not-so-humble opinion, at least until I unlocked Stadia. (Yes, that's the plural.) And even then it wasn't too far out of whack; I was hovering between +20 and +30 for most of the game.
(Note: I usually play Persia, whose Banks generate +2 happy, and go Piety branch. This time I deliberately went America and Rationalism, and it made a huge difference in Happiness.)
However, the "almost" in my statement was because of the bug with the Courthouse, and the nonfunctional status of the negative-happiness building logic. So it falls apart once you get rolling on the conquests, or start getting to Genejacks and such. But I think I have a way to fix that.

4> Conquest is still a bit too easy, although even lopsided wars tended to cost me far more units than in the vanilla game. The militaristic City-States were starting to make a lot of Secondhand units, which is good, but the maritimes and culturals didn't seem to make nearly as much of a military. Conversely, the militaristics didn't make enough workers.
I'm thinking of solving this by having secondhand units also be capable of the Repair action. Right now, when a city-state gets raided, the pillaged improvements will sit around smoking for centuries because they won't make a new worker to fix them.

5> I moved the Plant Forest and Plant Jungle actions from Fertilizer (Renaissance) to two Nuclear-Era techs, and removed the build actions from the Worker (so you need a Combat Engineer now). Coincidentally, I wasn't seeing the massive number of crashes any more until much later. So it looks like these actions are the problem, and I'm guessing most likely related to city-states. The solution is simple: I'm going to make City-States be incapable of making the Combat Engineer. They'll stick with normal Workers, who won't be able to do these actions. (The later units that can do these actions, Labor Mechs and Formers, can't be built by city-states because they require a resource, but I'll make those explicit too. Also, I'd forgotten to prohibit Colony Pods from city-states; they couldn't build them, because of the resource cost, but I wanted to be sure.)

So that's my first impressions, based on one and a half games since the patch. I'd really appreciate feedback from other folks, especially on the gold/research/happiness balance side of things, because that sort of thing takes the most work to get right.