Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

[Spatzimaus]

Most of the Foci favor warmongers. Let's face it, those ancient pantheons were a violent bunch.

The War focus obviously helps a lot in fairly direct ways (one of the two promotions is a very simple "+10% to all combat", i.e. the Bioenhancement Center's promotion), but look at the others; Crafts/Beauty/Fertility/Wealth/Art/Knowledge basically free up one part of your empire (you can delay building that Colosseum if you worship Aphrodite and use that production time for other things), but then there are the Myth units. Take the Basilisk/Medusa/Cockatrice (not sure which one I'll use yet, or if I use more than one): it's got an okay attack, but its big benefit is that the unit one of these fights loses its next turn. Depending on circumstances, that could be huge.

So Myth-heavy domains like Animals have some appeal, because Myth units have these powerful abilities and can only be countered by a rare set of Heroes (at least until the Medieval). And then there are things like Healing; one of the promotions it gives is a very simple "heal 1 HP per turn", which in the ancient eras can make a huge difference to early wars. Or consider Air; its L1 promotion is a simple +10% to ranged combat, but its L3 promotion: +1 range. Giving +1 range to archers and catapults, bringing them to range-3, in the ancient/classical era can be HUGE when attacking cities.

And then you get to the wierd ones. Take Travel:
1: Scouts get +1 movement and visibility
2: Your units get +1 movement if they started the turn in your territory
3: Your units get Paradrop if they start the turn in that city
4: All units trained in this city get a flat +1 move, period.
This has some obvious military applications.

One of the things I'm worried about is that it might make early wars a bit TOO easy and that the game would be over by the time you got to the Renaissance. So I'm going to try tweaking a few other balance issues.

 

[MindXX]

Outstanding ideas! Looking forward to it!!!

 

[Spatzimaus]

It's that time again, folks. (No, not mime-clubbing time, that's tomorrow.) It's a relatively small update, compared to the previous ones, mainly because I was on vacation for most of the time. What I really want to know is, have these changes made it noticeably harder to conquer your way to an insurmountable advantage in the Industrial Era. There are a few other small changes I'm going to toy with over the weekend along those lines.

The next version should be considerably larger, in that I'm going to try overhauling the diplomacy math again to make bribery less effective (in early preparation for the Empire mod).

v.1.08 (9/2)
BALANCE:
* The Rifleman's combat strength was reduced slightly, from 25 to 24.
* The Infantry's combat strength was reduced from 36 to 32. This also includes the French Foreign Legion. The progression now would have gone 18/24/32/42/56, if they hadn't decreased the longsword/musket to 16. See the pattern?
* The Iron Works was moved from the Machinery tech to Steel. This is in preparation for the Mythology mod. Trust me.
* The Heroic Epic now adds +10XP to Land units trained in its city.

CONTENT:
* Added the Magna Carta. This is a new National Wonder, available at Civil Service, that has three effects: +3 Unmodded Happiness, all Citizens in your empire (meaning non-slotted specialists) generate +1 Food (the city view UI says +2, but it'll only add 1), and all units gain the Defensive Advantage promotion (+10% on Defense, doubled against ranged attacks). My hope is that this defensive boost will cut down on the artillery-on-rifles slaughter you often see in the Industrial. What I need to find out now is if the change to Citizens causes the AI to ever not use a normal slot, so keep an eye out for that.
* All Barbarian and City-State units also get the Defensive Advantage promotion once their factions enter the Renaissance Era, with no need for a building. City-states SHOULD build the Magna Carta, but I want to make absolutely sure they get the bonus.
* The Three Gorges Dam should be correctly giving the Teamwork promotion to all non-Air units now.
* The Victory Progress screen will now show the space race and transcendence project status, regardless of what victory conditions you've chosen.
* The space race victory condition is now turned OFF by the setup screen, and the spaceship projects are decoupled from the victory condition, so the AIs should try to build them regardless of what victory the AI has chosen to pursue. The only things lost are the launch animation and the "#1 in Science!" popup.
* The Mobile Shield no longer counts as a Great General. Instead, it gives a custom promotion to any of your units within 2 hexes; this promotion gives +100% vs. ranged attacks and makes the unit immune to nuke damage. The check for this is done during the movement action itself, so it doesn't require waiting until the end of the turn to kick in. The unit also still counts as a Medic for adjacent units. This is basically how I'd wanted it to be. The AI probably won't plan things out this way, but the hope is that if he builds even one of these, his field units will no longer be so nukeable.
* The combat penalty from the Rookie promotion was reduced from -25% to -10%. I'm evaluating whether this should have a penalty at all, and in the next version I'll probably add the time cutoff mentioned previously.

------------------------
Over the weekend I'll be working on converting a TSL Earth map to use my custom resources for the Content mod. This'll go in the next version of the Player Pack, along with some of the documentation about the Mythology mod (basically, the last few really long posts I've given on it), because I do NOT expect people to come back to this thread every time they need to look something up, and it's going to take quite a while to integrate it into the in-game Civilopedia.

 

[dinobot386]

Why is Ra animals instead of Set? Surely you remember Set from AoM

 

[Spatzimaus]

Why is Ra animals instead of Set? Surely you remember Set from AoM

Yes, in AoM Set's god power was that bit with animals, but from what I can tell that really had little to do with the actual mythology. (They stretched a LOT of relations in that game for gameplay reasons, especially with the Norse.)

Set was the god of the desert, storms, and foreigners, although he was kind of a Loki-style pure chaos guy. So Storms/Travel fits him just fine; with Storms and Travel both being chaotic foci, he'll be at -5 on that axis at the start.
Ra, on the other hand, was directly responsible for the creation of all living beings despite being mainly a sun god. So, I stuck him with Animals/Plants, although I might invert it to Plants/Animals, depending on the seventh pantheon. While sun gods usually end up with a Fire-type domain, Bast has that one locked down tight.

I've tried a bunch of different pantheons tonight as the seventh; Inuit and Navajo just didn't work, in the end (too few well-defined deities), and I tried Yoruba (Nigeria) as well. It's looking like the best fit?
Shinto.
It works surprisingly well. I've tweaked a few things since then, like inverting Isis and Brahma (meaning Isis changed from Fertility/Healing to Healing/Fertility, and Brahma from Crafts/Balance to Balance/Crafts), and the Kami now fit almost exactly into the niche I needed. Still tweaking, but it looks like it's going to work, and it's not a bad choice for a Buildings/Priests combo.

 

[Erobaka]

I still can't play with this mod :'( I tried with last version 1.8
I can start the game but i get some errors while it is loading, before the button "Begin your journey" appears :

unable to load texture [assets\UI\Art\Notification\NotificationIconsFreeSocialPolicy.dds]
unable to load texture [assets\UI\Art\Notification\NotificationIconsFreeSocialPolicyGlow2.dds]
unable to load texture [assets\UI\Art\Notification\NotificationIconsFreeGreatPerson.dds]
unable to load texture [assets\UI\Art\Notification\NotificationIconsFreeGreatPersonGlow2.dds]
unable to load texture [assets\UI\Art\Icons\SocialPoliciesBrancheBlackMask.dds]

And in fact all those files don't exists.

This doesn't crash the game and i can start, but the tech tree is empty.

Thanks for help

 

[ounceofreason]

Love the sound of the Mythology mod so far - I don't envy you the implementing and balancing, but the design is exciting!

My one concern is that it's too much stuff to deal with this early in the game. The first few eras, I'm busy cranking out settlers, setting up a military, and getting an economy going; am I going to have the capacity to do all that and set up a religion too? Granted, the era times are longer, but I guess I worry that I'll either be able to see the cool stuff, or get a decent-sized empire going, but not both.

To remove some of that conflict of interests, is there a way to limit the number of cities, pre-Enlightenment? Either a hard cap, or just really nasty scaling unhappiness via policy. (Probably way too soon for me to be worrying about this)

 

[LetMyPeopleGo]

Hi,

I have access to all the luxury resources that are available, 1500 AD, researching gunpowder, playing version 1.07

I keep getting each turn ~ Because this resource requires a technology you do not have... the city of XYZ wants Neutronium!

Obviously Neutronium too requires a technology I do not have, I know about the mechanism that replaces the demand for Neutronium with a different resource, but now I have a demand for an extra (unknown) resource that is replaced with a demand for Neutorium and I get these pop ups for each city every turn.

Any solution?

I get from Steam (starting today) an announcement about a hot fix for Civ V regarding a minor bug, I didn't install it yet, is it safe, regarding the current game I'm in?

Thanks

 

[Strozzolo]

The possibility to check the "quick combat" option is unavailable, it's working as intended or what?
I would like to have this option availabe in the future.

 

[Spatzimaus]

The possibility to check the "quick combat" option is unavailable, it's working as intended or what?
I would like to have this option availabe in the future.

Quick Combat is incompatible with this mod. So is Strategic View. (That's why there's a big disclaimer in bold text in the first post mentioning these.) If you were to use either of these, the RunCombatSim and EndCombatSim events wouldn't fire, and that'd destroy the Nuke interception, Psi units, the Doppelganger, Troll, Ranger, and Quantum Missile units.

When the devs get around to adding an actual start-of-combat GameEvent that isn't UI-based, I'll be able to let these turn back on. But until then, no Quick Combat.

I have access to all the luxury resources that are available, 1500 AD, researching gunpowder, playing version 1.07

That's a problem. As I mentioned a few pages back, this process will basically break if you have every single luxury in the game before unlocking Neutronium; since it's incredibly unlikely that you'd do that during normal gameplay (i.e., not in a One More Turn environment after conquering the entire world), I didn't feel the need to make the logic account for that possibility. I can work on that, but for now, it'll do that repick every turn.

I get from Steam (starting today) an announcement about a hot fix for Civ V regarding a minor bug, I didn't install it yet, is it safe, regarding the current game I'm in?

It's really a nothing patch, no conflicts with anything that I can see.

 

[dezuman]

Hi,

I have access to all the luxury resources that are available, 1500 AD, researching gunpowder, playing version 1.07

I keep getting each turn ~ Because this resource requires a technology you do not have... the city of XYZ wants Neutronium!

Obviously Neutronium too requires a technology I do not have, I know about the mechanism that replaces the demand for Neutronium with a different resource, but now I have a demand for an extra (unknown) resource that is replaced with a demand for Neutorium and I get these pop ups for each city every turn.

Any solution?

I get from Steam (starting today) an announcement about a hot fix for Civ V regarding a minor bug, I didn't install it yet, is it safe, regarding the current game I'm in?

Thanks

Now I can tell Spatz "I told you so!"

Jokes aside, it's simply the fix preventing cities from demanding neutronium waaaay before you can get it. Spatz is fully aware of the problem it causes, so I assume it was the only reasonable fix possible.
I mean, how often do you get ALL luxuries?


I'm pretty sure a minor bugfix won't screw anything up, but don't take my word for it

Edit: Why does EVERYONE have to ninja me?

Edit2: Funny how they call it a "hotfix" when the patch was like a month ago

 

[Spatzimaus]

I still can't play with this mod :'( I tried with last version 1.8
I can start the game but i get some errors while it is loading, before the button "Begin your journey" appears :

Those files are what the game tries to load through the Social Policy popup. (And by the way, they DO exist; they're packed inside the game's package files. When you unpack those, it doesn't restore the original directory structure, but the game still knows where to look.)

You'd generally see this if you were trying to run my mods with someone else's UI mod, one that adds its own custom notification logic. So first of all, are you trying to use any other mods?

 

[Spatzimaus]

My one concern is that it's too much stuff to deal with this early in the game. The first few eras, I'm busy cranking out settlers, setting up a military, and getting an economy going; am I going to have the capacity to do all that and set up a religion too?

It's a real concern, but understand that I intend to basically double the amount of time it takes to go through the first two eras, slowing down research, production, and city growth a bit to where there isn't the massive time crunch to get settlers and such out the door in the first place. That's one of the reasons I'm adding that mod; the pacing of the middle eras is fine, but the early stuff is just too fast, too easy for the human player to gain an insurmountable advantage. And the pacing of the late game, obviously, was one of the main reasons for the AC content from the start.

In the normal game ("normal" meaning with my Balance mod), on Standard speed, it takes ~50 turns to go through the Ancient, another ~50 for the Classical, and then ~100 for each era after that (until you get to the Nuclear). My goal is to basically add another ~100 turns, split between Ancient, Classical, and early Medieval (mostly in the Classical), and put the myth content there. That means a total of about 300 turns between when the mythology starts and when it's expected to end, and 300 turns is basically a complete game.

To remove some of that conflict of interests, is there a way to limit the number of cities, pre-Enlightenment? Either a hard cap, or just really nasty scaling unhappiness via policy. (Probably way too soon for me to be worrying about this)

Adjusting the scaling on the fly generally doesn't work. But yes, there IS a way, and it's one I already plan on doing. What'll happen is this: when you start a game right now, my Content mod gives you the "SMAC Start Policy" (which is used solely to give five buildings negative happiness values), and changes the policy cost equation to where having that one extra policy doesn't drastically alter the cost equations from vanilla. So far so good, right?

So all I need to do is change it to add a DIFFERENT start policy instead of the SMAC one (since the SMAC policy's benefits don't mean anything until you reach the future content). That NEW pre-Enlightenment starting policy can have all sorts of negatives; slower city growth, slower research, lowered base Happiness, lowered Happiness per luxury, more expensive Settlers, and so on. And then, at the Enlightenment, manually remove the Mythology starting policy and add the SMAC one back in its place; the player never notices any change in the costs of future policies, but suddenly the player no longer suffers those debilitating penalties.

Note the bolded part of the above. In the normal game, you start with a base of 9 Happiness and Luxuries add 4 apiece. But what if it was 6 base and only 3 per Luxury (because that policy had -3 Happiness and -1 per luxury)? Or what if your empire had +25% Unhappiness from population (1.5 instead of 1.2)? Then you'd NEED to slot Priest specialists, who add 1 Happiness apiece (and generate Favor), or take something like the Beauty focus, which hurts your food, production, and gold output even worse. Using specialists that early, of course, means you're really cutting into the output of your tiles. And even with Priests you wouldn't have enough spare Happiness to really expand at the rate you're used to in vanilla. Then, you hit the Enlightenment and all of those Priest slots magically go away (since the religious buildings are removed from your cities), but you're no longer limited by that hidden Policy.

At least, that's the plan.

 

[Erobaka]

Thank you for your answer Spatz. I don't have installed other mods, only your 2 mods are in MODS directory BUT i have 2 DLC mods that appears in the mods browser, but i don't know where they are installed. could it be due to this ?
I'm frustrated of not being able to play with this mod which seems to be awesome

Thanks

 

[Spatzimaus]

Thank you for your answer Spatz. I don't have installed other mods, only your 2 mods are in MODS directory BUT i have 2 DLC mods that appears in the mods browser, but i don't know where they are installed. could it be due to this ?

DLC shouldn't be the problem, as they're designed to be separate from the normal XML. I don't have any of them and so couldn't guarantee that, but no one else has said they have problems, and I'm sure quite a few people have DLC. Thing is, as we speak I'm playing a game using my two mods, exactly as released last night, and it didn't have any conflicts. So, you can try re-downloading the mod, verifying your existing game files, clearing the cache, et cetera, and maybe it'll fix it, but beyond that I'm not sure what to tell you.

 

[MindXX]

Thanks for the update Spatz!

 

[CivOasis]

I have all DLC, and have played with those civs, so I can confirm that is not an issue in this mod.

 

[LetMyPeopleGo]

That's a problem. As I mentioned a few pages back, this process will basically break if you have every single luxury in the game before unlocking Neutronium; since it's incredibly unlikely that you'd do that during normal gameplay (i.e., not in a One More Turn environment after conquering the entire world), I didn't feel the need to make the logic account for that possibility. I can work on that, but for now, it'll do that repick every turn.

I'm playing Continents, I'm on one of the major continents, eliminated one rival, conquered two or three more cities for silver and marble, settled on one small island to access sugar, that gave me access to all the available luxury resources, furs and wine are unavailable at all on the map, I've explored the other large continent, all the luxury resources are there too besides furs and wine, a very standard game, far from the end, and very far from conquering the entire world.

If I understand you correctly, in order to continue playing without the interference of the pop-ups I need to pillage one of my resources?

No offense, but isn't it kind of a high priority bug?

I admit that usually I never had access to all the luxury resources so early, but because the lack of furs and wine on this map it happened.

I don't use any mods besides your mods. The only change I've made to the vanilla game is to incorporate one line in FeatureGenerator.lua so to avoid continents from reaching the poles and blocking the around the world passage, nothing to do with resources.

 

[Spatzimaus]

furs and wine are unavailable at all on the map,

That generally shouldn't be happening; AssignStartingPlots should be forcing a minimum number of deposits of each luxury (with three luxuries explicitly reserved for city-states). I've long since overriden its logic to force a better distribution of strategics, but I might have to do the same for luxuries.

No offense, but isn't it kind of a high priority bug?

Not even a little bit.

First, you're the first person to have this happen, and that logic has been in place for at least six months. No one else, in all that time, has ever reported having that happen, although there was some speculation a few months ago about how it COULD happen. Granted, most people don't give any feedback at all, but I've never seen it happen myself, and none of the people who do comment in here have claimed to have encountered it.

Second, it's a POPUP. The game isn't breaking, you're not being penalized (since if you DID have all resources you wouldn't be starting any WLTK days anyway). It's one or two extra popups per turn to right-click or ignore, and a temporary message at the top of the screen. No effect on actual gameplay.

Combine those two, and it becomes a very, very low-priority bug. Not only is fixing it not trivial in general, but it'd require a significant amount of overhead to figure out if there are still other luxuries to pick from. So until we get DLL access, it's probably not going to be fixed; there are far, far more important bugs to fix, most involving the AI. (Seriously, it's not even the highest priority bug in that exact resource-picking mechanism. That honor goes to the fact that it's not actually checking to see if you HAVE the tech for Neutronium before telling the game to pick again.)

 

[Spatzimaus]

Unless I change my mind or anyone has major objections, the seventh pantheon:

SHINTO:
Major gods: Amaterasu (Fire/Balance), Sarutahiko (Earth/Justice), Inari (Wealth/Animals), Hachiman (Plants/War)
Minor gods: Ryujin (Water), Raijin (Air), Izanagi (Fertility), Izanami (Death), Omoikane (Knowledge), Uzume (Art), Kotoamatzukami (Seasons), Tsukuyomi (Darkness), Susano'o (Storms)
Missing: Beauty, Crafts, Healing, Travel
Primary Favor method: Buildings generate x3 Favor
Secondary favor method: Priests generate x2 Favor

I made a few changes to the other six, and I'll adjust the earlier post to reflect these.