Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

[Roflpotamus]

Thank you for creating this mod.

I have recently installed Civ V and am while I can do everything else without any problems, I cannot run the game when I have any mods installed.

I know this isn't the right place to post this question, but since you've been so helpful, and the only mod I really want to play is this one, do you all have any suggestions as to how to fix my situation?

I am fine with mods up until I click the start game button. I can load them, have them change the stats on civies and whatnot but simply cannot actually start a game after I have chosen any mods.

Thank you.

 

[dinobot386]

Ive had this issue before, there was like a month where I couldent play this mod, still happens to me sometimes. From what ive figured it's an error with the save files, try deleting all your autosaves and other savefiles, also delete the mod and reinstall it, might not have loaded into the game properly, sorry if i can't be of more help

 

[dinobot386]

I was thinking about how the AI would react as well. One idea is to not make any new myth units, but instead make the ones you have get promotions to improve combat, etc. It really comes down to making it work with the AI's play style, where it would be doing baiscly the same thing as it would if it had triggered the event, peity would be a good haven for polcies that improve the civ enough so that the AI can function, assuming it takes these polcies which im sure theres a way to encourage it to. Rationalism should of course cancel this, for logical and practical reasons, since a society that takes rationalism would no longer have access to all the goodies a god has to offer, and because it means that the AI wont be getting the benefit from peity, so it forces away the AoM policy so that the AI doesnt cripple itself

Also i like the racial thing, I think the best idea is to have alot of gods tied to the apropriate civ type, (Western, Mediterainian, Middleastern, Native American, and Asian) so say the Asian civs will have access to all the asian deities regardless of what civ they orginated from, but will never get to take Zeus or Quetzelcoatl

 

[Roflpotamus]

Ah no, this problem applies to all mods for me :X

 

[Spatzimaus]

Also i like the racial thing, I think the best idea is to have alot of gods tied to the apropriate civ type, (Western, Mediterainian, Middleastern, Native American, and Asian) so say the Asian civs will have access to all the asian deities regardless of what civ they orginated from, but will never get to take Zeus or Quetzelcoatl

I was thinking about that, and I think I'll take a page from the original AoM and have the Pantheon you choose inherently tied to the method by which you generate Favor. So the Norse gods reward you for fighting battles, the Egyptian gods reward you for building religious buildings, the Greek gods reward you for using Priest specialists (basically like Empaths), and so on. This'd basically limit me to a relatively small number of pantheons. But I was looking to also add a "Custom" pantheon where you could pick any method you wanted, as long as it didn't conflict with your choice of prime deity.

After a few days of plotting it out on paper, it's looking like there'll be 17 deity "domains", sorted along two axes (Law-Chaos, Material-Ephemeral). To translate those to, say, the four elements, LM is Stone, LE is Fire, CE is Air, CM is Water. I wanted to avoid the usual Good-Evil split, and this seemed to work pretty well.

The idea is that you'd start at (0,0), your choice of starting god would move you 2 (either 2 points along one axis or a 1,1 diagonal), your choice of Favor method would move another 1 (but you can't pick one opposed to your deity), and then as time goes on you'll make "event" choices that move you around the grid. Still working on the specifics, but it'll be the usual choice of 2-3 actions, each with its own benefits and drawbacks and each of which moves you by 1 spot.
Your position on the grid determines which minor deities are available the next time a choice is offered to you; using AoM as a template, I'd probably limit you to 3-4 deities between the start of the game and the Enlightenment. The further you get from 0,0 the fewer choices you'll likely have, but the more powerful they'll be, so it'll generally pay to make the choices that correspond to your god's initial "personality".

Basically, I wanted to avoid the current Policy/Tech "tree" styles, and go to something a bit more freeform. So there'll be a screen with all 17 domains shown graphically, and an icon showing where each civ's deity falls at the moment; I was planning to have Inquisitor-style units whose strength depends on how far away from your deity your enemy's one falls. Similarly, some abilities or events could depend on how far along one axis you are. The specifics of this are very flexible; for now, I'm just going to try to add the basic UI and the religious techs I'll need.

 

[Spatzimaus]

I am fine with mods up until I click the start game button. I can load them, have them change the stats on civies and whatnot but simply cannot actually start a game after I have chosen any mods.

If it's doing this with any mod, then it really just sounds like something isn't installed correctly. You shouldn't need to fully re-install; just go into Steam and ask it to re-verify your files' integrity. Chances are, one file got corrupted and it's causing these problems. If that doesn't fix it, then it's possible that there's an error in what directory Civ5 is attempting to find the files in.

 

[dinobot386]

I think fire should be with chaos, since its considered the most chaotic element.

Anywho, is there a way to have what gods you choose still effect your civ even after the enlightenment? Maybe some promotions or watered down versions of the god policies? Since religion does effect a civilization's cultural identity, weather or not they beleive in it any more

 

[Spatzimaus]

I think fire should be with chaos, since its considered the most chaotic element.

The problem is that if you try to line it up that way (which I had, initially), then many of the other domains just don't make sense. After all, Air is just as chaotic as fire (if not more so). Also, I needed a few "diagonal" entries; this'll make more sense once you see it.

Anywho, is there a way to have what gods you choose still effect your civ even after the enlightenment? Maybe some promotions or watered down versions of the god policies? Since religion does effect a civilization's cultural identity, weather or not they beleive in it any more

That's basically what the Piety tree is for; it's the bonuses that a civ gets after they stop being controlled by a deity, the sort of generic stuff that ties to the political organization that supports the religion (the Church) instead of drawing power from the gods directly.

Now, I'm still trying to figure out the mechanism I'd use to add and subtract new abilities, and generally speaking there'll be 3-4 "tiers" of effects per policy. So it shouldn't be too hard to tweak the system such that there are still a few remaining bonuses right up to the end; it's just going to depend on what mechanisms I use, and I haven't decided yet.

 

[dinobot386]

ALSO, crazy idea I just thought of about 2 minutes ago

Weather, a status that effects certain attributes of tiles and their improvments, semi randomly generated

on farm tiles where its raining it adds +1 food, drought -1 for the turn, and effects things like combat

 

[dinobot386]

Now, I'm still trying to figure out the mechanism I'd use to add and subtract new abilities, and generally speaking there'll be 3-4 "tiers" of effects per policy. So it shouldn't be too hard to tweak the system such that there are still a few remaining bonuses right up to the end; it's just going to depend on what mechanisms I use, and I haven't decided yet.

Thats sort of what I was thinking, adds a bit more variety to the game instead of just what policies are chosen, and it would effect them more than just "we have religion"

For example, lets say your civ chooses Hephaestus and he does some kind of thing to your forges, your blacksmiths learn from this, your civ is now known for your naturally skilled engineers as a result, it passes on, you retain some kind of production bonus

 

[Spatzimaus]

For example, lets say your civ chooses Hephaestus and he does some kind of thing to your forges, your blacksmiths learn from this, your civ is now known for your naturally skilled engineers as a result, it passes on, you retain some kind of production bonus

Actually, I was going to go less event-based for that one and more status-based. That is, each "domain" might have multiple tiers of bonuses. Let's call them Level 1-4, where 4 is the strongest, and each level is tied to a specific building type. So for a God of Machinery/Metalworking/etc., like Hephaestus, it might go something like:
Shrine (1): +10% production in all cities, but -10% food and -10% gold.
Church (2): Above, plus all units in this city gain a custom promotion that adds 10% to their combat, and also adds a UU.
Cathedral (3): Above, plus increase the +10% production to +20, and reduce the penalties to -5% each.
Basilica (4): Above, plus +1 production per Mine, and adds a much stronger UU.

Your Primary god would start at L2 in all cities, and could never go below that line (AND adds a separate unique ability to your empire as a whole). Secondary gods would start at L1 in all cities (meaning they're not usually worth the cost), and could never go above L3. These buildings can't be upgraded through production; instead, as you gain Favor in a city they'll upgrade themselves.

As you gain Favor empire-wide, you'd periodically add a new minor god to your pantheon. In the long term, generating Favor just wouldn't be as cost-effective as it used to be, and you'd start having to consider dropping this whole "religion" thing altogether. Basically, certain technologies would affect these levels:
> Mysticism unlocks level 2 structures for the minor gods.
> Deism unlocks level 3 structures for your primary god.
> Spiritualism would unlock Missionary units, and unlocks the Priest specialists, both of which generate Favor.
> Polytheism boosts all minor gods by one level and unlocks level 3 structures for them. This'd be a big boost, since it'd pull all those minor gods you've added up to a level where they're clearly worth the cost.
> Monotheism would increase your primary god by 1 in all cities and unlock level 4 structures, while reducing all others by 1 and capping minor gods at level 2.
> Inquisition would reduce all minor gods to 1 and cap them at level 1, and unlock the Inquisitor unit.
and so on. I might co-opt a few existing techs (like Theology) for some of this, but the majority would be new techs inserted into the Ancient and Classical eras.

But here's the thing: I wasn't planning to let you pick Hephaestus as a primary deity. To save on work, I was going to limit the primary within each pantheon to the big 3, like in AoM: for the Greeks, that's Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. The "Custom" option would just allow 4 generic choices (Sun, Moon, Sky, Earth). That way, I wouldn't have to come up with level 4 UUs for every domain/pantheon combo.

 

[mo123567]

Gods??? What the heck are you people talking about in here?

I was having issues with air units attacking psi units. I just updated to the new version and my air units are still broken. I do not have the option to put them to sleep so I have to take an action or move them every turn in order to end the turn.

Do I need to start a new game? Will they work when I get back to that point?

 

[Spatzimaus]

Gods??? What the heck are you people talking about in here?

If you go back a page or so, I mentioned that the Alpha Centauri mod is going to be the first (or last, really) of three content mods. There'd be a mythological early-era mod and a diplomacy/espionage/world wars middle mod. We're discussing the intricacies of the early content. And the three are going to be designed to be mix-and-match, so if you don't like the idea of mythological content, you can feel free to play without it and everything else will still work.

I was having issues with air units attacking psi units. I just updated to the new version and my air units are still broken.

Hmm, sounds like it didn't update correctly. No one else has said anything about still seeing the problem, although most people don't comment in here. It might just be that you need to do a clean install of the mod, that it's somehow keeping the old version around, or that you had a cache problem when you started that game.

Do I need to start a new game? Will they work when I get back to that point?

It'll depend on what exactly is wrong. If it's just a problem with your installation on that one Lua file (SpatzUnit.lua), then it's likely that your savegames will still work, but there's really no way to be sure without knowing exactly what version your files are.

 

[Sjru]

I do liek the AoM Idea, (It slightly resembles the epic FFH).

However, can you do that without the .dll? How far can you go without it?

I think you may need some help for that, isn't it?

 

[Spatzimaus]

I do liek the AoM Idea, (It slightly resembles the epic FFH).

That's kind of the intent. Cross DUCKS with FfH, add some AoM content, and add a few new twists of my own, and you'd get the early-era mod I'm planning. Likewise, cross RFC with the city-state diplomacy mod, add some Age of Empires content, add a bit more of my own design, and you'd get what I have planned for the middle section. After all, I'm not pretending that my Alpha Centauri mod is unique content; obviously, a lot of it is drawn from SMAC, sometimes by way of the Planetfall mod, but I've added quite a few new elements to it along the way. So expect something along those lines, albeit with fewer new technologies, units, etc. The Mythology mod will include some new techs and a large number of new units and buildings, but the Empire mod will only add a handful of units, very few buildings, and no techs as it'll mostly focus on events and new Lua mechanics.

However, can you do that without the .dll? How far can you go without it?

A lot further than you'd think. Look at the Content mod, for instance; I've managed to get around a lack of DLL access by using a number of randomized effects (like the tech-stealing and breakout), and I've generally designed it in such a way that the AI actually does better with it than in the vanilla game. Combining overly specialized units (anti-air, submarines, carriers, fighters) with their more useful support brethren (artillery, destroyers, battleships, bombers) really helps the AI avoid having too many of a useless unit. No need for the DLL when the mod is optimized for the strategy that the AI already follows.

So consider the mythology mod. Most of the myth units will have abilities that are already present in the vanilla game, or that I've added in the AC mod. Most of the deity bonuses will be things already possible through current policies and buildings, or that I've already added in the AC mod. In fact, I'm going to get around the save/load bookkeeping issues by using the buildings in cities as the benchmark; if a city has a Fire Shrine and the owner is Greek, then I'll know that he's got Hephaestus as a level 1 minor god in that city. "Upgrading" a god, then, is done by replacing that Shrine with a Church (which'd give larger bonuses); no need to save the values somewhere else.
Adding a new Yield type (Favor) allows me to use the existing tables to link to buildings, units, etc., so there's no bottleneck there. Creating a custom interface doesn't require the DLL, and I can get around the AI's inability to handle new concepts by simply removing the Flavor system from the equation. The key is that all spending of Favor will happen at the start of the turn, similar to the notification you get when you unlock a new policy. So where you, the player, would open up a screen to make your decisions, the AI will just randomize it with weightings based on "direction".

To illustrate the "direction" idea, let's say an AI has chosen the Greek Pantheon, and chosen Hades as his central deity (primary focus Death, secondary focus Wealth), with the Pious favor trait (gains extra favor from Priest specialists; this is the default for the Greek pantheon.) Note the primary/secondary split; I spent last night trying to match gods to foci for five pantheons (Greek, Egyptian, Norse, Hindu, and Aztec), and it worked best with each pantheon having four "central" gods you could select from, each with a primary and secondary focus, and then ten minor gods with one focus apiece. In fact, it worked so well that I'm looking to drop the "custom" pantheon idea altogether, and just allow you to rename your gods as you go; I'd really prefer to only use four pantheons for two reasons: 56 icons instead of 70, and I've only got four favor-generation methods (extra from Priest specialists, extra from religious buildings, extra from Missionary units, gain when fighting).

Death is 0 on the Law/Chaos axis and negative on the Material/Ephemeral axis, as is Pious, while Wealth is 0 on the M/E and negative on the L/C. So Hades is in the (-,-) quadrant at the start of the game, probably at -1,-3 with the numbering scheme I've got currently. If he's offered a choice of a minor god at that position, he'd be able to choose between the gods of Arts (Apollo), Healing (Asclepius), Justice, and the Seasons (I think I had Demeter here). Since Justice is Zeus' secondary, it's off-limits to the other major gods, but that'd still leave him with 4 choices. A bit further in the -,- direction is Air, which is Zeus' primary domain (and therefore CAN be added), and depending on which direction you go next you'll probably unlock War (Ares), Travel (Hermes), Knowledge (Athena), and/or Beauty (Aphrodite) as well, so you won't run out of choices; generally speaking, you'll have 3-4 at any given time. You COULD go in the other direction a bit (the Lawful and/or Material axes), but it's pretty much impossible for Hades to go far enough to get things like Fertility, Stone, Crafts, or Water. (Since two of those are the secondaries for Poseidon and Hephaestus, you wouldn't be able to take them anyway. This was deliberate.)
I'll try to whip up a basic diagram to illustrate how these are laid out. It sounds a lot more complex than it really is.

A Human might pick carefully, but the AI would probably just pick randomly, or maybe with a bit of weighting involved. Point is, instead of setting flavors and letting the AI pick internally, I'd do the randomization myself; no need for DLL access when the decisions can be made to always occur at the start of a turn, and when the randomization is so simple. Likewise, if an event comes up that asks you to make a choice between two effects, each of which is tied to a direction on this map, I'd have the AI weight the options by what it's done so far. So, if Hades is currently at -1,-3 and is offered four choices, one per direction, then it'd probably weight 40E/30C/20L/10M (basically, -5 to +5 is the normal range for each axis, so each point shifts the probability by 5%.)

The Empire mod, on the other hand, will absolutely need the DLL. There's just no way around it; adding diplomacy and espionage in a manner that involves units will almost definitely require adjusting the AI, because he has to be taught how to handle a non-combat unit that WANTS to be in enemy territory.

I think you may need some help for that, isn't it?

Depends. Most of the basic mechanics I can do myself, since I'll be scavenging code from my other mods as often as possible. If I decide to add more Pantheons beyond the five I have now, then that could use some outside help, but I don't want to bloat this up to the point where there are separate pantheons for every civ. Beyond a certain point it's just window-dressing; the differences between the Pantheons basically come down to which 8 out of the 18 foci are tied to the four primary gods. The Greek, Norse, and Aztec pantheons generally tie the elemental foci to their primary gods, while the Egyptian and Hindu don't. The rest vary widely; I think Beauty and Knowledge are the only foci that NEVER tie to a primary god.

 

[dinobot386]

Balence mod still isnt loading, its probably a cache issue, but i deleted my cache and its still not loading (i turned the mods back on)

 

[Spatzimaus]

Balence mod still isnt loading, its probably a cache issue, but i deleted my cache and its still not loading (i turned the mods back on)

I'll check it again when I get home, but it was working for me before I left on vacation. I didn't change anything in it since 1.06, so I don't see why it'd stop working now. It could be that something didn't transfer over on my own machine, but if that had happened then I'd expect tons of complaints from the 200 people who've downloaded.

I'm going to see what needs tweaking over the weekend; I'm hoping to decouple the space race from its victory condition entirely, so that the AI doesn't avoid taking it any more. But where I'd normally already have a long list of other tweaks in the pipeline, right now I've got almost nothing. So, it might be a while until the next version.

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

I've attached, below, the Mandala that'll form the basis of the Mythology mod's deity system. This is the grid showing where on the 2-axis grid you'd have to be to take a specific Focus. Currently, there are 8 major foci, 8 moderate foci, and 5 minor foci. The majors reward you from going far from (0,0), while the minors reward you for staying close to (0,0), with the moderates somewhere in between. On the plot, the X+Y+Z means that there are X major foci, Y moderate foci, and Z minor ones that are available at that point. In a typical game you'll start near the middle, generally 4 points away from the origin, and over the course of a game you'll move a bit outward into the area dominated by the more powerful Foci.

Basically, there are six Focus groups, for a total of 21 Foci:
(Water, Air, Stone, Fire): Major group, designated by the thick red lines. This is the only group that orients along the diagonals; the first-quadrant equation is 3*(x+y) - ABS(x-y) > 9. So if you look at the intersection at (1.5,1.5), and follow the two orangish-red lines moving away from there, you need to be OUTSIDE that area. If you're wondering why I used "Stone" instead of "Earth", it's because I intend to use Sun/Moon/Earth/Sky as the four central-god choices of the Custom pantheon, where the primary for each is one of the four elements (with Moon=Water, so I might just call it "Ocean" or something instead).
(Fertility, Beauty, Crafts, Wealth): Major group, designated by the thick blue lines. Equation for the +y one is 2Y + ABS(x) > 9. Basically, go to (0,4.5) and look at the two blue lines that go down from that point; valid spots are OUTSIDE that area. The reason these are "major" is that they basically translate to Growth, Happiness, Production, and Gold in Civ5 terms. It shouldn't take too many guesses to figure out what their benefit is going to be.
(Death, Healing, Knowledge, War): Moderate group, designated by the orange lines. The +y point's equation is -y+2*ABS(x) < 4.5. It forms a V-shape with vertex at (0,-4.5) going upward, basically covering the area inside from the first group. These basically translate to unit promotions with only minor empire-wide benefits. If you stay near 0,0 then it's possible to get all four, but realistically you'll only have access to maybe two in the whole game.
(Animals, Plants, Travel, Art): Moderate group, designated by the green lines. Simple quadrant system, (y-ABS(x) >0), meaning the diagonals have none and everywhere else has one.
(Justice, Seasons, Darkness, Honor): Minor group, designated by the area inside the purple diamond. ABS(x)+ABS(y) < 9, but each also has a second limit to only include half the area (y >=0).
(Balance): final Minor element, designated by the grey square (ABS(x)<4.5, ABS(y)<4.5). Exactly what this one is will be up for debate, but the general idea is a catch-all for "All-Father" or creator-type deities.

Like I said, I've mapped out five pantheons (although the Hindu set didn't fit as well as I'd have liked, mainly because of the avatar and aspect concepts), but only for my previous 18-focus idea (which didn't have Honor, Darkness, or Balance). Honor will be added because most early pantheons tend to be heavy on War gods and I felt I needed another in that vein. Similarly, Darkness is basically a weaker Death-type domain, since most pantheons have more than one. In most of these pantheons, Gods of arts, crafting, beauty, and healing were pretty few and far between.

 

[dinobot386]

Ok, I got the balance mod working again, it's doing something really weird though, when I started I looked at the policies, Planned Economy was -25% unhappiness, Theocracy was 10% gold in cities with temples and Free Speech was the 8 free units, whenI looked at it after a few turns it had changed to the balance mods effects

 

[Spatzimaus]

Ok, I got the balance mod working again, it's doing something really weird though, when I started I looked at the policies, Planned Economy was -25% unhappiness, Theocracy was 10% gold in cities with temples and Free Speech was the 8 free units, whenI looked at it after a few turns it had changed to the balance mods effects

Strange. That first set is the vanilla game's effects, except that Planned Economy hasn't been -25% unhappiness since the last patch IIRC (it's now a research-if-you-have-factories thing). That makes me think that somehow it's mixing an old vanilla directory somehow.
Thing is, I've seen that before; when modding it's useful to keep a backup copy of the vanilla game's Assets directory, but if you keep the backup inside the Assets directory (say, by creating an assets/backup/ directory) then it'll still occasionally link to it. I had to move my backup somewhere else before it'd start working again. So if you've done anything like that, it could explain the problem.

And just so everyone knows, I've now decoupled the space race from the victory condition, so the AIs are now building spaceships ASAP. The only downside is the loss of the launch animation, and I'm still checking to see if there's any way to trigger that by hand. I'll clean that up and probably release 1.08 early next week; I'm just trying to test out an idea I'd had to slow down combat a bit more. (Basically, I'm going to reduce the jump between Riflemen and Infantry, etc., so that the industrial-era conquering spree isn't so easy.)

 

[CivOasis]

.. Now I'm waiting for a Spatz-made colonization mod, too? Awesome.