Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

[Spatzimaus]

Because I could see this as ether a very useful unit, or too fragile to do anything, especially since it has -50% hp

Note I said XP, not HP. As in, it gets ~2 XP per fight, like an artillery unit, instead of the ~5 that melee units get. It still has the same 10HP as every other unit in existence. The reduction in XP was because it'd be getting promotions through this other mechanism most of the time, and so wouldn't need to gain nearly as many through the normal mechanisms.

As for the rest, I was looking at ~50 strength and probably 3 MP, although 4 is a possibility. 50 is a bit low, compared to contemporaneous units, but the thought is that it'd quickly make up the difference after a few fights by having a variety of promotions that normal units can't acquire easily.

My biggest concern, though, is that it'd come too late in the game to really help; by the time you get it, everyone'd be rolling out the heavy armor and Titan units. One thought was to put it significantly earlier; in my original design there'd been a "Hellhound" unit in the Digital Era (where the Golem is now), an era full of units with weak strength but interesting special abilities.
But I rolled a lot of the Hellhound concept into the Mind Worms, or at least I will if the "Hidden Nationality" ability ever works. So I could put this there, at Retroviral Engineering, and set its strength to 40ish, although I'd have to shuffle a few more things around to make it fit. (Moving Soporific Pods down to Gene Splicing or something.)

 

[dinobot386]

Actually, I have no idea how to know if firetuner is working, I just found it in my files

 

[Spatzimaus]

Now that the attachment feature on this board is fixed, I'll be uploading a new version soon (probably tonight); I'd have done it last night, but I was busy trying to remove some of the debugging changes I'd made recently and couldn't finish it in time.

Unfortunately, the negative Happiness (which is what I was trying to debug) is still an issue; buildings that are supposed to subtract Happiness just aren't doing so. I tried getting around this by creating a custom Policy that gives the appropriate negatives (-4 per Courthouse, -2 per Genejack, etc.) but this has three problems:

1> The effect counts twice; on the turn you get the policy you get the effect added to the "Happiness from Buildings", and on the next turn you'll also get the effect added again to "Happiness from Difficulty Level" (which is the generic +happiness category), and the building's tooltip will show the effect twice as well. This isn't just a UI issue, though, it's really counting twice, and it doesn't matter whether the Happiness involved is positive or negative.

In other words, the Rationalism policy in the vanilla game that adds +1 Happiness per University? Yeah, it's actually adding 2. (So is my altered Fundamentalism policy, which is now +1 happy per Broadcast Tower and +3 culture per Wonder.) So there's a massive balance issue in the core game, and the devs never noticed. (And yes, I've confirmed that it's not my mod doing it.)

For the Courthouse and Genejack I can get around this by making them -2 and -1, respectively, knowing that it'll count twice, even if it looks really sloppy in the UI. But this doesn't help for the buildings that only subtract 1 happiness (like the Children's Creche), since the field won't accept a decimal value.

2> This "free" policy counts towards the increasing costs of future policies. I can change the baseline culture requirement, but the increase isn't linear.
This also rules out the other solution I had: Binary. Make a policy that subtracts 1 happiness, one that subtracts 2, one that subtracts 4, and so on; figure out how much Happiness each civ needs to lose (from these buildings and the Dream Twister) or gain (from Empaths) each turn, and give the appropriate policies at the start or end of each turn, removing the ones given on the previous turn.
But if adding half a dozen policies screws up the policy costs this badly, then it won't work. I'm trying to see now if there's a way I can override/rewrite the number of policies selected so far, or recalculate the baseline so that the cost of the next policy is unchanged; if there is, then this method would at least work.

3> It's not so easy to prevent a policy from being selected by the AI. (You can stop the player just by leaving its position as 0,0; the game won't draw it.) You can have the policy require the final tech, or create a new tech that's disabled so that no one can get it and hide it somewhere. But it'll still show up in the Civilopedia (both the new tech and the temporary policies), and there might still be a way for an AI to get these; I KNOW that city-states can get disabled techs if the player civs have them, so clearly there's some extra logic involved, and I don't know the extent of it.

So for now, none of this will be activated, and you'll have significantly more Happiness in the later eras than you're supposed to. The Genejack, especially, is supposed to be something you can't just plop down in every city without any concerns.

(This'd be so much easier if the devs would actually just fix the problem in the first place.)

 

[dinobot386]

Hey, Spatz, when should we expect to see the new version up?

 

[markusbeutel]

1> The effect counts twice; on the turn you get the policy you get the effect added to the "Happiness from Buildings", and on the next turn you'll also get the effect added again to "Happiness from Difficulty Level" (which is the generic +happiness category), and the building's tooltip will show the effect twice as well. This isn't just a UI issue, though, it's really counting twice, and it doesn't matter whether the Happiness involved is positive or negative.

Have you tried to one-shot it? I haven't had this happen to me when I tried this in previous versions of my mods. Could you just update the Happiness from Difficulty Level right after the Policy?

 

[Spatzimaus]

Have you tried to one-shot it? I haven't had this happen to me when I tried this in previous versions of my mods.

To verify this bug, I made a mod whose SOLE change was that it added "+5 happiness per Palace" to the Liberty policy (which you can obviously get very quickly.) Other than that, it was a vanilla game. And yet you'd see two +5s pop up on the building. Ditto for -5, -3, +3, and so on, and I confirmed it wasn't just a graphical bug, since it was incrementing the Golden Age counter by the doubled amount.

Hey, Spatz, when should we expect to see the new version up?

Like I said, tonight. I'm in L.A., and so my "tonight" is a bit later than most other people's. Also, I'm an astronomer, so I tend to stay up late anyway.

If I can't track down an issue I've been having with the Plant Forest action, I'll just revert that part to the previous version. So figure another hour or so.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Okay, it's that time again. Two weeks since the last version, and 88 people downloaded it. I was REALLY tempted to go for 100, but that would be a bad idea.

This update isn't huge, despite the two-week gap. The balance of the previous version was significantly better than I'd originally thought, and most of the remaining game mechanisms are the very time-intensive ones that most players won't really notice. (Oh, and unit graphics, but I'm not touching that one until I have a few weeks to kill.)

v.0.18, dated 3/17.
BALANCE:
> The Hospital’s help text (stores 20% of food, heal x2) was being done as an Update, but there was no original field to update so it wasn’t doing anything. It’s now a Row definition.
> Secularism (Rationalism Policy) previously added 2 science per specialist. This is now reduced to 1. In the future eras you run far more specialists, so it was getting overpowered, but it was a bit much even in the normal game. I'm open to suggestions if people feel it's now too weak.
> Republic (Liberty Policy) previously added +1 production per city. This was extremely weak, since Communism (a later policy) added +5 production, and I dislike that sort of duplication in general. Also note that the AI's flavor values are the same for both, so an AI civ that can pick either of those two wouldn't prefer the +5 over the +1, which is stupid. So it now adds +1 production AND makes trade routes generate 10% more gold. In the early game the production will be the dominant effect, but in the late game the gold will probably end up being more important. This is also tied to how the Liberty policies were improved in general in the big patch.
> Move quite a few Civilopedia entries from the Content mod to the Balance one, to reflect the things that were migrated in the past few versions (like the Improvement tech yield increases in the Industrial/Nuclear Eras). This is the only change that'd force you to update both mods at the same time. There'll be a few of these sorts of things in almost every version, but we're nearing the end on the migration.
> The tooltips for the Sewer System and Recycling Center now say that they require the Aqueduct and Sewer System, respectively, to be in that city.
> The AA Gun and Mobile SAM units now get the “Melee Penalty” promotion, which gives –25% versus most “melee” attacks, meaning mounted, melee, gunpowder, and armor attacks. It also gives –25% when attacking cities. With the reduction in the Mechanized Infantry’s power from 50 to 42, they’d become a better unit all around, being a 40-strength unit with other uses. This won't interfere with their primary purpose, but you won't see SAMs capturing cities and such any more.

CONTENT:
> The Plant Forest and Plant Jungle actions were changed slightly in how they activate. They still work the same way to the player, but I’m hoping this change might improve the crash issues. Happy St. Patrick's Day... in honor, make your planets green for me.
> If a city demands a resource that is revealed at a technology, then at the start of the next turn it’ll reset the demand to nothing (and then eventually pick a new demand). Eventually this’ll check to see if you have the tech needed for that resource, but for now I’ll leave it this way. In my mod, this only applies to Neutronium. I'm currently debugging a simple change that'll have it immediately pick a new resource instead of restarting the timer.
> The Stock Exchange has been reduced from +33% gold to +25% gold, but now also provides one unit of Horses and one of Iron. I couldn’t code in Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice, or it'd provide that too. Basically, there are now six +gold buildings, all of which add +25% but which give progressively better secondary benefits.
> Adjusted AssignStartingPlots.lua to make Oil less common (since it now has much larger deposits) and Uranium and Aluminum more common. Also, the vanilla game had almost no chance of ever placing a small (3-unit) Aluminum deposit; all you’d ever see were the large 8-unit deposits. I’ve tweaked the tables to make the small deposits a bit more common (at the expense of neutronium, mostly, so it won’t affect much else). This one could use some testing. Oil has a very narrow window in which it's useful, before the units requiring it are upgraded to Aluminum-using modern counterparts, but in that window it's extremely valuable. One way I was thinking of fixing this was to have Modern Armor and Stealth Bombers require BOTH Oil and Aluminum, analogous to how the Gravtank requires Dilithium and Neutronium, but if I do this, I'll re-evaluate the rarities.
> City-States can no longer build the Combat Engineer, Colony Pod, or Labor Mech. (The latter two were already effectively prohibited since they require a resource, but no Combat Engineers means no planting forests or jungles.) This might help with the crash bug I’ve been trying to track down for a long time, but it’ll also keep city-states from bankrupting themselves replacing lost workers, and they have no need for the extra movement.
> All new buildings that have other buildings as prerequisites now say so in the tooltip, instead of forcing you to go into the Civilopedia pages.
> The three buildings that require local resources (Centauri Preserve, Pholus Mutagen, Living Refinery) now say so in their tooltips.
> The tooltip for the Maritime Control Center now says that it must be built in a coastal city. It already had to be there, it just never said so explicitly, even if it was pretty obvious.
> Added “Soporific Bombs”, an alternate version of the Soporific promotion for Air and Naval units. Instead of requiring Shock, Drill, Accuracy, or Barrage, it requires Targeting, Bombardment, Interception, or Dogfighting. There was no need to do the same for EMP, as no naval or air units can select it anyway. I'm tempted to change that so that Needlejets, at least, can drop EMP bombs. Fighters and Naval units (which didn’t get Soporific before) can now select this promotion; Bombers and Multirole were changed from the normal Soporific to this.
> The Fundamentalist policy was changed from “+5 culture per Wonder” to “+3 culture per Wonder, and +1 Happiness per Broadcast Tower”. Note that due to a bug in the game, this actually gives +2 Happiness per building. There was just a little too much Culture in the Piety tree and not enough Happiness; the Rationalism tree was almost as good for Happiness.
> The “Melee Penalty” promotion mentioned above also gives a penalty when fighting Energy, Psi, and Titan units. Note that the Isle of the Deep (Psi) and most Titan units have ranged attacks as well as melee. But if you're still using Mobile SAMs in the Fusion Era, well, sucks to be you; upgrade them to Plasma Artillery already, which does NOT have this drawback.
> The “Special Forces” promotion was internally known as PROMOTION_RANGER. It’s been changed to a more appropriate name. The renaming was mainly for the Civilopedia, which tended to freak out when a unit and promotion shared the same name.
> Through a simple Lua hack, all newly-built Ranger and Troll units begin with +30XP, in addition to what they get from the usual military buildings. You won’t get to use this XP to choose a promotion until the following turn, though, but the XP through the Barracks and such will still apply on the first turn. These are supposed to represent elite infantry, and unlike the Powersuits aren't upgrades of earlier units, so they were starting off at a big disadvantage before.
> Psi and Titan units begin with +10XP in addition to the usual military buildings, to reflect that these units can’t be upgraded from previous ones and must be built new each time. A bit less pronounced than the Ranger/Troll fix, because these aren't supposed to represent elite infantry. The Psi units gain XP at twice the normal rate, while you'll only build Titans in fully-developed cities anyway, so it's not so bad.
> At the start of each combat, a Psi unit’s base strength adjusts by +/-25% based on the base (pre-promotions) strength of the opposing unit. That is, if the opposing unit’s strength is more than 25% higher the Psi unit gets +25%, if it’s more than 25% less the Psi unit gets –25%, and if it’s in between the two match. This only applies if the other unit is NOT also a Psi unit, and does not apply if attacking or being attacked by a city. (If a unit has a ranged attack as well, it’ll compare the higher value for each unit, even if that’s not the value it’s actually using at the moment.) Note that this checks for the Psi unit combat class type, NOT the Psi promotion. It's very SMACesque. What this does, in practice, is make Psi units the ideal unit for a civ that's a bit behind, technologically; only needing the Omnicytes resource, cheap to produce, builds up XP quickly, and now this; the window in which these units are still useful is now much larger, and it makes the Nessus Worm downright scary. Note that this +/-25% adjusts the BASE value, which means it's stronger than a +25% promotion.
> Added three new Promotions: Critical Strike, Spontaneous Healing, and Synthesis. (At the moment these don’t have custom icons, but those WILL be coming.) They don't generally have XML effects, but DO trigger custom Lua logic:
- Critical Strike is only given to the Ranger unit. At the start of each combat involving a Ranger, there is a 10% chance that the opposing unit will immediately take 5 damage, whether attacking or defending. This will NOT trigger when fighting a city. Note that this'll trigger even when the Ranger is being bombarded by an artillery, naval, air, or even orbital unit. I could check to see if the attacking unit has a ranged combat rating, but the question is, should I? Despite not making a lot of sense, I like the idea that the unit can't be safely picked off at range.
- Spontaneous Healing is only given to the Troll unit. At the start of each combat involving a Troll, there is a 10% chance that the Troll will immediately heal 5 damage, whether attacking or defending. Unlike Critical Strike, this can trigger when a Troll fights a city.
- Synthesis is not currently being used, but is a placeholder. Its Lua is not yet implemented, but it does have a –50% XP penalty in the XML. This is for the upcoming Doppelganger unit. Details are in a previous post.

---------------------------------------
As you can probably guess, I have a text file that I keep the latest patch notes in, adding as I go and then clearing it when I release a version. The file also contains a wish list, all the little things I'm thinking of putting in or tweaking. Right now, that list is getting huge; I've got things like "give the Repair Improvement action to all Secondhand units", "Kelp Farms", "get the All Terrain promotion to work", and "change the Vertol and Skimmer to require both Uranium and Aluminum", that I might do but not until I can get more playtesting done. So the mod's not "done" by any stretch. But it does mean that nearly all changes from here on out will be relatively minor, or at least isolated to a single unit/building/whatever (except the Kelp Farm thing), so don't feel obligated to update to the next version as soon as it comes out if you're in the middle of a game.
The move to v.1.0 will happen whenever I get unit graphics in; I was hoping that there'd be far more of a unit graphic database for me to borrow from, but it looks like I'm going to have to do it myself as no one seems to be doing this sort of thing right now. This'll take some time, so I wouldn't expect too much progress on that any time soon.

And by popular request, I'm attaching v.0.16 to this post. It's two versions behind the v.0.18 I just posted to the first post in the thread, but it's the last version compatible with the v.167 (December) patch and its hotfixes that came before the v.217 (March) patch went live. Because I'd prefer not to have obsolete versions floating around, this is going to be a limited-time offer; I'll remove the attachments in a few days (probably whenever I release the NEXT version, v.0.19), so only download them if you're one of those people who disabled the v.217 patch. This is NOT the version that you new folks want to get; go to the first post in the thread for the newest version. This is only for people who didn't update the vanilla game two weeks ago.

EDIT: Removed v.0.16, because we're now FAR beyond that point.

 

[dinobot386]

Theres an issue with Mediocrady policy under Liberty

It just says "choose free great person" yet you cannot click it, thus getting you stuck in the turn. I tried reloading it and trying again but ran into the same issue. (im using the new version you just released)

And the plant forest/jungle is still refusing to work properly, if its an issue with the lua script or firetuner, how do I fix it?

 

[Spatzimaus]

Strange, because I played last night right before pushing the new version, and that policy (Meritocracy) worked just fine. Well, except for the fact that you can select a Great Empath in the Ancient Era, but I've mentioned that one before. A Monolith in the first few turns can make a BIG difference...

Are you using any mods other than mine? I hate to keep asking this, but it really sounds like something is screwing up the notification UI system. While I do have a CustomNotification element to my mod, it requires a slight alteration to two existing notification Lua files, which would conflict with any other mods that add or change notifications. Removing the ability to click on that notification is a big indicator, since I know for a fact that adding that particular notification required a handful of additional lines in the game's notification UI, and those lines govern the left-click and right-click events. So if any other mod you're using also edited the the notification Lua, and that other mod wasn't updated to the March patch, it'd break there.
When I get home I'll try to confirm that the version I posted included that change, just to be sure.

 

[dinobot386]

Ok, I got it working, turns out there was a mod I had forgotten to turn off hiding on the second page

Edit: So ive been trying to get the economy mod to be compatible with yours, ive gutted the whole thing exept for what im trying to keep in :/, still to no avail. The reason is simply that I want my ages to last longer and have a decent economy in earlyer eras, but it seems the problem lies in the unit, building, and tech files

Any idea how to get it to work?

 

[Spatzimaus]

Any idea how to get it to work?

I'd have to look at that mod's files to see what it changes. Just looking at the summary on the first page of its thread, I can guess a few conflicts:
> Many of the things in Thalassicus' Unofficial Patch were duplicated or done slightly differently in mine.
> Anything that adds new notifications will conflict, as does anything that adjusts the Top Panel. (There's mention of the top panel in that summary.) I'm not sure if it'd conflict with Info Addict, but I wouldn't bet against it.
> The economy mod changes the resource allocation, to have food resources provide more than one unit. I'm sure this involves editing AssignStartingPlots.lua, which would definitely conflict with my mod. (And merging two variants of that script would be painful.)

The simple fact is, my Content mod is extensive enough that it'll conflict with pretty much everything. The Balance mod isn't so bad for that.

 

[dinobot386]

I pretty much gutted the files so that the only things left are BuldingCosts, TechCosts, and UnitCosts, all sqls

The only issue this seems to generate is the plant forest/jungle, which is odd because I wouldent think simple cost reajustments would conflict with the lua script for those actions

 

[Spatzimaus]

The only issue this seems to generate is the plant forest/jungle, which is odd because I wouldn't think simple cost readjustments would conflict with the lua script for those actions

If all that remains are SQL changes to costs, then no, there should be no conflict. So either you're missing something and an XML or Lua change IS still being included, or the SQL is modifying something other than just costs. I suppose it's possible that there's some secondary failure, like the SQL trying to divide by a value that for normal actions won't be zero.

For reference, the plant/forest jungle actions include the following components:
> Build actions in CIV5Builds.xml, several tables
> Assign said actions to various workers in CIV5Units.xml
> New temporary Improvements in CIV5Improvements.xml, several tables
> Terraform.lua, which does the replacement action
That's it. Not a lot of room for the conflicts you're describing, but not having your mod in front of me I can't be sure.

 

[Darsnan]

Will give a more comprehensive report later on, but one thing I ran into this morning was that I couldn't build the spaceship parts (specifically the thrusters) after researching the correct tech. I built the first part (cockpit?) OK, but after that I researched the prerequisite tech, but the parts then did not show as available to build in any of my cities. Can anyone else confirm this?

Oh, and where is the description/ details in this thread regarding "Hacked" units? Ran into that for the first time this morning as well - nice!

D

 

[dinobot386]

Trying to share the files, but for some reason they wont upload.

Thought you might like to take a look at them, since they are rather good for extending the earlyer eras, by increasing the tech costs by 50% while decreasing building and unit costs by 20%
Thus making it possible to have larger, more realistic empires for the ancient and classical eras.

If you want to try and cannibalize the files, its the Economy mod v5

 

[Spatzimaus]

Will give a more comprehensive report later on, but one thing I ran into this morning was that I couldn't build the spaceship parts (specifically the thrusters) after researching the correct tech. I built the first part (cockpit?) OK, but after that I researched the prerequisite tech, but the parts then did not show as available to build in any of my cities.

Had anyone else completed a spaceship already? More specifically, check your tech tree: did you have Centauri Ecology already? (Having CE makes the spaceship parts go obsolete, which'd prevent you from building.)

The reason I ask is that since you were last here I added the "Breakout" logic: once one civ has launched a spaceship, there's a random chance each turn (2% per civ that's launched a ship) that the Breakout occurs. It's purely random, no minimum (yet), so it could happen the next turn, or it could be a hundred turns down the road. Typically, it happens ~20 turns later. I'm going to try to make it less random, with some kind of minimum, but that's a lower priority.

When it happens, everyone's automatically given Centauri Ecology for free, and Barbarian Spore Towers begin spawning around the world. There'll be a popup when this happens, but it's easy to miss. Depending on map type, there's a ~50% chance a Spore Tower spawns each turn in any land hex, and they favor coastal areas; it's an immobile unit with a ranged attack that starts spawning Psi units each turn (30% chance of a Mind Worm, and as you reach higher areas it can spawn bigger stuff too.) So even if you miss the popup, you'll start seeing these units in your territory a few turns later.

This was the best way to give the Barbarians the spaceship tech without them building anything, and it helps civs that are far behind the tech leader (or that have been reduced to 1-2 cities by an earlier war); you get the tech to keep progressing, although you don't get any of the other benefits of launching, and it gives civs a reason to rush their own spaceships even if they think they're not going to be first. So the first ship gets tons of extras, the next couple get less, and then if you're behind that you'll get only the minium but won't have to waste too many turns building.

In the next version, I'm going to try creating a "Concepts" entry in the Civilopedia that explains this whole thing. It all goes back to the way I've programmed this: I'm trying to make the AI does things the optimal one. It keeps a few units scattered around its empire instead of rushing everything to one front, so I wanted a mechanism that'd encourage the player to do the same. Spore Towers aren't that hard to kill, as long as you keep a Tank or two around your rear areas, and they make Trance promotions more valuable. But it heavily favors small empires and especially hurts those that have spread across multiple continents.

Oh, and where is the description/ details in this thread regarding "Hacked" units? Ran into that for the first time this morning as well - nice!

"Hacked" is the name of the negative promotion given by the Hunter-Seeker Algorithm (a National Wonder in the late Digital). That's why the promotion uses that wonder's icon. Most promotions just use the name of the Wonder, but I wanted to go away from that in a few cases.

 

[bobslay]

good news: vanilla Civ V stopped crashing for me since last patch !



i just finished my 1st game with both of crazy spatz mods, and i outrageously dominated every ai civ.... before reaching the content mod.
on prince difficulty, i tend to always win, but there are usually 1 or 2 ai civ challenging me.
i think the vanilla game's balance on "tall" empire made a big difference for my style of play.

i was planning to conquer everyone with psy units, since you wanted feedback on them. But with the lack of opposition, i opted to end this game with bribes [diplo win], in order to try out psy units on king difficulty.
Also, next game i'll try without any citystates, to see if the crash frequency will be less.



i finished with a diplomacy victory at turn 539.
i was about to launch spaceship, so i reloaded a turn before to make sure i could launch it, after i've read there might be trouble with it.
Spaceship launched properly for me.

i'm pretty sure hospitals didn't have any effect for me
[ except maintenance cost? ]
despite the release note saying they were fixed ?


Below are the info i've kept while playing:
[since you wanted feedback on balance]
if there is any more info you'd want, just mention it.
at around turns 220-250, i've taken the lead and never looked back.
i'll try to pinpoint the exact cause of it if it happens again.




civ: russian
speed: standard
ancient era start
map size: standard [8 civ 16 city states]
map type: small continent
difficulty: prince
allow policy saving
allow promotion saving
raging barbarians
quick combat

other civ [random]:
germany
england
india
babylon
iroquois
songhai


turn 64 = classical era [ iron working ]
213 gold [+0]
-1 happiness [2 cities, capital 4 pop, total 6]
+9 science
2 policies, culture [+12]


turn 110 = ancient era finish [ archery ]
181 gold [-2]
3 happiness [3 cities, capital 5 pop, total 12]
+16 science
5 policies, culture [+12]


turn 129 = medieval era [currency]
103 gold [-6]
1 happiness [ 3 cities, capital 6 pop, total 14]
+21 science
5 policies, culture [+12]


turn 141 = classical era finish [ optics ]
350 gold [+7]
-1 happiness [ 3 cities, capital 6 pop, total 16]
+37 science
5 policies, culture [+14]


turn 205 = renaissance era [astronomy, via scientist, while researching acoustics...]
1394 gold [+34]
-2 happiness [ 4 cities, capital 8 pop, total 28]
+55 science
7 policies, culture [+38]


turn 252 = medieval era finish [steel]
2883 gold [+55]
14 hapiness [4 cities, capital 10 pop, total 39 + 1 ally citystate]
+76 science
9 policies, culture [+118]


turn 268 crash [no crash on the autosave reload]


turn 329 = industrial era [biology]
6400 gold [+61]
35 happiness [5 cities, capital 14 pop, total 45 + 2 ally citystates]
+144 science
14 policies, culture [+273]
scores:
me, russia [895]
germany [405]
england [188]
babylon [359]
india [275]
rome [417]
iroquois [293]


turn 346 crash
turn 355 crash


turn 377 = renaissance era finish [fertilizer]
4007 gold [+76]
21 happiness [6 cities, capital 17 pop, total 80 + 3 ally citystates]
+253 science
18 policies, culture + [365]
scores:
me, russia [1097]
india [309]
rome [393]
iroqois [357]
songhai [485]
germany [421]
england [212]
babylon [433]


turn 421 = nuclear era [electronics]
6950 gold [+172]
17 happiness [6 cities, capital 19 pop, total 104 + 4 ally city states]
+323 science
21 policies culture [+506]
scores,russia [1303]
india [367]
rome [349]
iroquois [404]
songhai [540]
germany [448]
england [226]
babylon [477]


turn 440 crash


turn 474 = industrial era finish
7675 gold [+223]
29 happiness [7 cities, capital 22 pop, total 132 + 4 ally citystates]
+671 science
26 policies culture [+590]
me, russia [1469]
india [430]
rome [414]
iroquois [479]
songhai [551]
germany [542]
england [240]
babylon [515]


turn 493 = digital era [gene splicing]
11598 gold [+190]
30 happiness [6 cities, capital 24 pop, total 152 + 4 ally states]
+869 science
28 policies culture [+597]
me, russia [1562]
india [450]
rome [460]
iroquois [427]
songhai [579]
germany [557]
england [249]
babylon [525]


turn 539 = diplomatic victory bribed enough city states to get 15 votes and win
spaceship was 5 turns away to launch.

 

[Spatzimaus]

i just finished my 1st game with both of crazy spatz mods, and i outrageously dominated every ai civ.... before reaching the content mod.
on prince difficulty, i tend to always win, but there are usually 1 or 2 ai civ challenging me.

A lot will depend on who the other empires are and where they're located. I've noticed that the Small Continent map is more prone to this than most, since of all the common maps it seems to have the least checks in place to ensure that each civ has a comparable area. On a Pangaea or even Continents map, you'll have enough civs on each continent that each expands to fill any open areas, but on Small Continents, if you start on a larger-than-average one then you can get an insurmountable advantage.

But what'd help here is an evaluation of just what happened to the other civs. Did you start getting every Wonder? Did they beat each other up in early wars while you sat back? According to your numbers, you really pulled away from the pack in the Renaissance, but the key events might have happened earlier.

One key question: did YOU get involved in any early wars? I've found that a critical part of pulling away like that is to annex at least part of one neighbor's empire early on, for the increased production/science/gold/etc.

i'm pretty sure hospitals didn't have any effect for me
[ except maintenance cost? ]
despite the release note saying they were fixed ?

Hospitals add 20% food storage and allow units in their cities to heal more (+2 per turn when resting). The food storage, especially, isn't easily noticeable, because you'll only see it when your city grows a size. I'll try testing this in my own game to make sure it's stacking correctly.
And all I fixed in the last release was the help text for them, the effect hasn't been touched in a long time.

The turn breakdown will help a lot. I notice, though, that the point at which you said the game had basically been decided also coincided with going from ~0 Happiness to +14, which also coincided with the Theater (and Bank). So frankly, I'm not surprised; the game really does seem to get a lot easier once you're not scraping for Happiness. I'm still trying to decide if there's a way around this.

 

[bobslay]

But what'd help here is an evaluation of just what happened to the other civs.

my goal was to avoid wars to try and make sure everyone was alive when i'd go on the offensive with late-game psy-units.

and i never got into any war.
i didn't even attack any city-state.
the only "offensive" action i took was to rob luxury ressources from a city state with culture bombing.

it seems every AI took that peaceful path....
the only aggressive AI was iroquois, who grabbed a lot of Rome's cities.

As for the space we each had:

i have started on a decently sized continent with germany and england.
i had the north, germany the middle and england the south.
at first i tought germany would be the one competing with me, as he got twice as much cities than me in the early game.
i was getting my 3rd city and he was at 5 already.
i lacked space to get more, and i was lucky to slip between germany's border and england's border to get a 4th city at the south of the continent.

the wonders, at first, were evenly splitted between me, germany and " unknown nation"
[probably the dominant one on the other main continent, probably songhai]

in the rest of the world, babylon had a whole continent for himself...
the rest of the civs were on a S shaped continent.
when i discovered them everyone had at least 4-5 cities

and luck [ the randomness built into leaders personalities] would have made all the AI civ [except iroquois] totally ignoring the smaller islands.
but i didn't want to pull too much ahead and waited a bit to colonize those.
[and stayed at 4 cities for a long time]



the only theory i have is:

Ai struggled to make his city productive,
under the happiness and cash constraints,
and i didn't.
[ it was a challenge, a fun one, but a managed through]
so i had 4 solidly developped cities, and they had 4 weak cities...
king difficulty instead of prince should correct that.

also, maybe when i got a lot of cash, my rival neighbor the german became paranoid and invested a lot into his army while i was still building infrastructure.
[since the patch that made the AI take into account the cash on hand to evaluate the strength of my army, Ai tend to not attack me anymore]

i got machu pichu, the harbor to link my 4th city, and mints in 2 cities with 3 silver mine each at around the roughly same time. [just before the renaissance period where i pulled ahead]

that amount of money can explain why i pulled ahead, but i don't think it explains how come no other AI didn't reach decent scores even when i was about to launch spaceship...



i'll try on the more "standard" continent map for the next game.
also a smaller map, might be easier to track things
[and meet other civ to see their scores]




for the hospital, there was no description of the effect while ingame
[ didn't check civilopedia...]
i though it added some food, but with a % to be kept, and city HP regen,
it's totally possible i simply didn't noticed it.

 

[Charybdis]

I just had a city state gift me a Nessus Worm.

Possibly OP?