Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

[nathanglevy]

Hi spatz, started a new game with version 1.08, playing Alexander again. Difficulty on deity. Standard map size, standard resources, 8 civs, 14 CSs. I've played about 120 turns, and so far ONLY ONE civ has been building wonders (haven't met 'em yet). So far they've built about 5, they've also beat me to great library... Grr...

Is it normal that only one civ is building wonders? I thought I might bring it up because maybe something broke with the AI flavor.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Is it normal that only one civ is building wonders? I thought I might bring it up because maybe something broke with the AI flavor.

Depends on who they are. As long as you didn't select "Randomize Personalities", the AIs will vary by +/-2 on their Flavor baselines. For instance, Alexander starts at a 6, so an AI Alexander could vary between 4 and 8 on a 10-point scale. But Askia starts at a 3, so an AI Askia could be as low as a 1, which'd mean he'd almost never prioritize wonders. If you had the right combination of enemies, and most of them randomized downwards, then it's easily possible that they'd decide that building infrastructure or units is a more important use of their time. Now, personally I think that Wonders are important enough that no civ should ever neglect them like that, but the devs coded it this way.

It's also possible that they ARE building wonders, but are simply being beaten to every one by you or the one civ that's winning them all. The easy way to tell when that's happening is by gold; if those civs suddenly got an influx of gold on the turns the wonders completed, then you'd know what happened. This'd especially be common if that one foe that's getting wonders is an Egypt that went Tradition for the double wonder production bonus.

 

[Spatzimaus]

So, I'm going through the Mythology design today, and a few things occurred to me.

1> I can understand making it easy to tell what god (if any) another civ worships at a glance. Ideally, when you contact them you'd see a title like "Catherine the Pious, High Priest of Tlaloc" or "Elizabeth the Wise, Chosen of Anu", with a different "X of Y" for each pantheon. And once the DLL is out, I intend to have your choice of pantheon act sort of like the religions in Civ4, with diplomatic bonuses for picking the same pantheon and penalties for different ones (with Enlightened civs being in between). Since no more than 4 civs can pick a single pantheon, and there's no way to change once the game's started, it wouldn't be quite as abuseable.

The question is this: while it should be possible to see what gods the other civs follow, should it also be possible to see their position on the Mandala grid (Law/Chaos vs. Material/Ephemeral)?
The reason I ask is that I've been going back and forth on Inquisitor units: should their combat bonus/penalty depend on the distance on the grid between the two civs, or should it solely be a bonus based on what pantheon the other guy follows? That is, if player A follows a chaotic Norse god like Loki, and player B follows a chaotic Egyptian god, and player C follows a more lawful Norse god like Frigg, should A get a bigger bonus versus B, or versus C? Or should I just remove the randomness outright, and say that they give bonuses against any unenlightened civ (since everyone else is automatically heathens)?

The problem is that if I have too much be Pantheon-based, then it becomes too easy for players to metagame the situation and deliberately target AIs that they'll get these bonuses against. And if I make it depend on position on the grid, then it adds a lot of overhead.

2> Is it okay to just make you pick a god at the start of the game (by far the easiest solution), or should it wait until you've researched your first religious tech?

3> If you start a game in a later era, what happens? The balance I've come up with really only works well for Ancient starts, so should I just explicitly code it to only trigger the Mythology content for Ancient starts? Or should it be like culture, where late-era starts just hand you a chunk of Culture to spend on the first turn?

 

[dezuman]

1. Unless you introduce some diplomatic modifiers for distance on the grid, it would be kinda meh. I mean, if not then it will just be a random dice roll if a "close" or "distant" AI decides to BACKSTAB DURR HURR!!! you...

2. Whatever

3. I've got the impression people mostly either play from Ancient or from Renaissance/Industrial, so it shouldn't matter a whole lot...
Suppose it might change if you make the early ages pass a bit slower though

 

[Spatzimaus]

1. Unless you introduce some diplomatic modifiers for distance on the grid, it would be kinda meh.

That IS one of the things I'm considering. If a lawful AI decides that you're too chaotic, he might hold it against you. That sort of thing.

2. Whatever

Let me expand on this one, then. Right now I've got it where you pick your main deity, sight unseen, from the full list of 28. The AIs then randomly pick from the remainder. There's no strategy involved, it's purely random, and the player always gets first pick.

The question is whether this should be changed to let you play a few turns before picking, where you wouldn't pick until you reached the tech that actually gave religious bonuses. This'd let you know what other civs are in the game, and whether an early war is likely (which makes a huge difference in the appeal of battle-heavy pantheons like the Aztecs or Norse). Also, you'd know which gods are absolute necessities; if your starting area is short on luxuries, then maybe you pick Inanna as a Beauty/War goddess for the extra Happiness, or if you're on the coast maybe a water god like Poseidon would be best. But, now the player would often pick LAST because on higher difficulties he'd be the last to reach that tech.

That's the question.

3. I've got the impression people mostly either play from Ancient or from Renaissance/Industrial

Right, but that's the issue. If someone starts in the Renaissance or later, should I just say "forget it, you're already post-Enlightenment, the mod will have no effects at all"? And what happens if, for some reason, someone DOES pick a Medieval or Classic Era start? It'd be easiest to just say "If you want to use any Mythology content, start in the Ancient", but what happens if you don't? These are the sorts of things I have to worry about.

 

[mo123567]

I believe mythology content should require an ancient start.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Mythology update:

Right now it's looking like 15 techs will be added. The real concern is whether a few of the terms involved are too... specialized. Most people would have a rough idea of what "Mythology", "Polytheism", and "Shamanism" mean, especially since I'll be filling out the Civilopedia with all the explanation you'd ever need, but when you start getting into Proselytism (a.k.a. Conversion), Apostasy (a.k.a. Enlightenmnent), Deism, Iconoclasm and Heresy, etc. it starts to get a bit tough. And there are a few, like Henotheism/Monolatrism, where I'm going to use a more generic term like "Hierarchy" instead. (Those are the beliefs that while there are multiple gods, your god is the only one that really matters. Very common back in the age when each city had a patron god of some kind, and sort of the key intermediate step between pantheons and monotheism.) I might cut out a few of the more esoteric ones, but I don't want to have to lump too many bonuses and penalties onto each tech.

I'll try to post a screenshot of the tech tree later tonight, to illustrate the first-attempt layout, but I've got to go get an MRI of my brain done first. It seems to be a bit defective lately.

 

[Sneaks]

Sounds like you are indeed making it a might bit more complex than necessary with the naming conventions.

 

[Sneaks]

So, I was recently working on developing my own religion mod, and figured it would be better to combine forces considering how much better your Lua practices seem to be comparatively.

Anyhow, as for implementation, I wanted to throw a few ideas off in general as a sounding board.

First, as for exactly how these gods get worshipped:

Step 1: Teching the Faith
Just like IV, the first person to research a tech has first dibs on that religion (probably via popup choice, AI always just says yessir).

Adopting a religion allows for building its Holy Wonder, which makes its city the Holy City for said religion. Religious buildings all produce a Piety Yield (what you have listed as Favor which will both be the means of spread and possibly other fun things)

It also allows the building of Shrines, dinky little buildings that have the capacity to worship 1 god. Once a city reaches some undecided Piety cap, a larger Shrine becomes available, offering the worship of 2 secondary gods. Rare big cities might be able to finally build some massive building allowing for the worship of 5 gods total (1 primary patron, 4 secondary deities).

Ideally all of these shrine pieces will be buildings (check out my building addition system in the EEM modmod of Thals VEM).

Part 2: Big trouble in little shrine-a

Religion isn't fun if it doesn't spread and cause all sorts of grief. So, the systems I was looking at to make it work are a combination of Gangler's Religious City States and Gedemon's Cultural Diffusion. Gangler places a false religion resource per city that worships said religion, which would be a relatively simple way to know what religions are in what cities. Next up, Gedemon's culture spread is based on percentages and totals: If a plot has 75% French culture and 25% Incan, when France earns say 300 Culture on the plot, it will flip to French control. While I am not interested in plot flipping, similar numbers could be used for calculating percentages of faithful in a city with multiple religions.

So, if we found a new city on a plot that is currently 65% Buddhist and 35% Shinto, and we are Shinto, only 35% of the Piety generated by the city will actually go to us. The rest will be stolen away by those evil pacifists. Of course, if we pop down several shrines, the city would eventually become heavily Shinto instead. It would be relatively simple to add extra modifiers that increase spread or decrease foreign influence based on certain policies. Ideally, once we have better DLL access, we could make Priest improvements directly radiate their own influence, as well as crusader/myth units on the march.

 

[dinobot386]

I actually really like sneaks idea, I was actually going to ask if you were going to try and make a system like religion was in civ IV that has to do with your mythology mod

And, um, all your buildings from digital to trancendence are gone, or did not load

 

[Spatzimaus]

Step 1: Teching the Faith
Just like IV, the first person to research a tech has first dibs on that religion (probably via popup choice, AI always just says yessir).

See, I deliberately DON'T want this in my mod. Besides the fact that the AI just won't understand how to deal with this sort of thing without the DLL, it's just an inherently flawed concept IMO; on lower difficulties the player gets whatever religions he wants, but on a higher difficulty the player never founds any religion. There was really not much of an in-between in Civ4.

That's why I'm having the player pick a pantheon at the start of the game, and why none of the balance points will depend on the choices the opponents make; it's nearly all internal, just like Policies, so there's no question of whether the difficulty level you've chosen will ruin your experience. The technologies will affect the various level caps and growth rates for religions, but there's no first-come-first-served effects.

Religion isn't fun if it doesn't spread and cause all sorts of grief.

I fundamentally disagree. The thing is, Civ already bases the entire experience around a single abstraction, the idea that a single civilization will persist from 4000 BC to the modern era, when in reality the vast majority of civs rose and fell. And while religions spread in Civ4, they were all interchangeable; you could have called them "corporations" and it would have still made as much sense. They were very non-interactive, and only had any effect through the secondary interactions between nations. That's not what I want for this mod at all.

One of the motivations for my mod in the first place is that I wanted something more interesting, where exactly WHICH god you picked matters. I wanted something based on mythology, where you weren't just worshipping Generic God A, I wanted something where the gods are real and actually, directly involved in your civ's development. A Mythology mod, NOT a Religion mod.

And that precludes the ability to simply change to the god your opponent follows; you're not just some random priest, you're the Chosen of Zeus, the guy he's personally blessed to lead his followers, and you won't just give that up to follow Isis because your neighbor sends a couple missionaries over. Your goal is to be the best disciple of Zeus you can be, right up until the point where he stops caring about you and you stop believing in gods.

You can probably cobble something like what you want together from the cultural diffusion mod and city-state diplomacy, but it sounds like what you want is absolutely nothing like what I'm trying to make here.

 

[dinobot386]

Just tested it again, and NONE of the buildings from your content mod are loading, units and effects are still there, but the buildings are all missing

 

[Sneaks]

The issue I have with picking from the start is it removes the "organic" element to the process. I think there is a way to reconcile your concerns without requiring everything to be pre-chosen.

The fundamental worry I have with the myth system as you just described is it basically entails each civilization simply getting more unique units/buildings by which religion they choose much as they would choose a leader. I fully get the mod you wish to make, but I have a personal preference where Religion/Mythology is something that the player encounters during the course of the mod as opposed to a preset value at turn 1. The exact solution to that still currently evades me.

As per the issue of religion spreading: They did act like corporations in a sense in IV, but the inherent differences in powers given automatically removes this stigma. I just like the concept of Religions/Pantheons giving a new means of gameplay as opposed to simply buffs to warring/teching/policies.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Just tested it again, and NONE of the buildings from your content mod are loading, units and effects are still there, but the buildings are all missing

I haven't changed the mod in the past week or anything, so if it suddenly stopped loading, then it's got to be something on your end. Unless you hadn't been using 1.08 yet. I just double-checked and it's working fine on my end (and I haven't changed anything at all since 1.08, which is kinda unusual for me).

Check the Database.log and xml.log files; it'll tell you if there's something conflicting. It could just be the usual cache conflicts, where it's trying to load part of the content of some other mod and the two just aren't working together.

 

[Spatzimaus]

The issue I have with picking from the start is it removes the "organic" element to the process. I think there is a way to reconcile your concerns without requiring everything to be pre-chosen.

It's not all pre-chosen; you choose your primary god at the start, but as the game progresses you'll add minor gods to your pantheon, each of which brings in an additional set of bonuses. Once you get to the point where you have four or five minor gods, their cumulative bonuses will easily outweigh your primary god's effects (at least until you reach Monotheism, at which point the minor gods start tapering off).

If you've ever played the original Age of Mythology game, it followed a very simple design. If you played as the Greeks, then you followed Zeus, Poseidon, or Hades. If you played as the Egyptians, then it was Ra, Isis, or Set. And for Norse, you followed Odin, Thor, or Loki. Each of these had a significant effect on your empire, unlocked a couple unique units, and so on; all of your normal units and buildings were determined by the race you were playing (which meant the Pantheon you followed). So Zeus followers would begin the game with more Favor and generate it faster, his infantry would be a bit stronger, and he could throw lightning bolts; these wouldn't change over the course of a game. Poseidon, instead, would get some naval bonuses, cavalry bonuses, and would have Militia units appear when a building was destroyed. And so on.

But as you played, every time your civ advanced to the next era (three times, assuming you didn't lose quickly), you'd pick one of two minor gods to follow. Each civ actually had three minor gods at each level, but which two you picked from would depend on your primary god. So if you followed Zeus, then at the Classical Age you picked between Athena and Hermes, and Ares was unavailable, but Poseidon followers would pick between Ares and Hermes, with Athena unavailable, and so on. Since these minor gods unlocked very significant abilities (custom units, custom promotions, custom god powers), they'd have just as much impact on your gameplay as your first choice.

That's the dynamic I'm aiming for here, although shifted from the RTS design over to a more intricate mechanism than just picking from a few preset lists. I do NOT want to recreate Civ4's religion system, I want to recreate AoM's god system.
Your choice of Pantheon controls your Favor generation methods, your major god controls the first set of bonuses you get (and the ONLY set of level 4 bonuses you get, since minor gods can't ever get that high), and these are set from the start and won't change. But the minor gods you add along the way, through the Mandala screen, will have a big impact on how your civ plays and you'll have quite a few of them by the end; while your choice of main god will have a significant impact on which minor gods are available, the dominant factor will be your decisions at certain Events that'll pop up from time to time.

I'm hoping to have the basic framework in place within the next week or so; I'm rearranging the techs now, and over the weekend I'm going to try putting in the first pass on the buildings (it's a LOT of XML). Most of the Lua is in place now, I just need to make sure it works. So hopefully by next weekend you'll be able to see for yourself what I'm trying to do.

 

[dinobot386]

Ok, it was definatly an issue with the cache, after i deleted it the content mod is loading properly now, but the balance mod is not loading properly, im getting the weird thing I did before where the game is doing the -25% unhappiness at planned economy theocracy is +10% gold in cities with temples, etc.

After deleting the cache is there any order I should install or download your mods to avoid this?

 

[Spatzimaus]

After deleting the cache is there any order I should install or download your mods to avoid this?

It used to be (pre-1.0) that you needed to be loading the Balance mod before the Content mod, but I've since changed it such that the order doesn't matter at all. All modification to existing policies is being done in the Balance mod. So if it's not adjusting the policies correctly, then the Balance mod just isn't fully loading. Quick check: are you seeing the other aspects of the Balance mod, like the Sewer System and Recycling Center, or the Happiness changes? It'd be useful to know if any part of the Balance mod is loading, or if the whole thing is failing at once.

Beyond that, assuming there's nothing showing up in your logfiles, there's really not much I can say. It works just fine for me, and I only play with my own two mods (except when I'm testing something out in the Mythology mod), which is why "clear the cache" is the usual answer. I don't use any other mods, so if you're having problems that I'm not, then it's got a pretty limited pool of possibilities: interference from other mods, an unpatched client on your end, or a corrupt file (either in my mod's download or your base game).

Now, in the near future (either the next version or the one after), I'll be migrating to a 4-mod design: one Base mod, and three Content mods. Most of the current Content mod will become the Ascension content mod, while the remainder of its content and much of the Balance mod will be moved to the Empire content mod. (The third content mod, obviously, is the Mythology mod.) The only limitation will be that all three Content mods will depend on the Base mod, so load order will matter there. The Base mod will have all of the essential Lua code and new XML table definitions used by the other mods; it won't have any content, it's just mechanical stuff.

It was originally going to be 5 mods, with the Balance and Empire mods split up, but that seemed like overkill.

 

[dinobot386]

Im not exactly sure how to get log files

 

[dinobot386]

Ok, the sewer system and recycling center are there, but neither of them have graphics, just have the granery placeholder one

 

[Spatzimaus]

Ok, the sewer system and recycling center are there, but neither of them have graphics, just have the granery placeholder one

The graphics are set by the Content mod (long story, that'll change soon), so it looks like the Content loading before the Balance is causing problems; I'd tried this before and hadn't seen any issues. So try making sure the game loads Balance first; try starting a game with Balance on and Content off, and then exit and start a game with both turned on; that should put them in the right order.

It's still strange, though; loading them in the wrong order shouldn't have affected the policies at all.

Im not exactly sure how to get log files

Go into your config.ini file. About two-thirds of the way down will be "LoggingEnabled = 0" or something similar; change that to a 1. There are a half-dozen or so other logging flags in that file; turn on whatever sounds interesting.

Then, when you start a game, a bunch of log files will be created in the /Logs/ directory (right next to the /MODS/ directory you put my files in). The ones that generally matter are xml.log, Database.log, and Lua.log. Each of these will have a few errors from the base game, so don't be shocked to see error messages inside them, but if something's breaking in my mod during the load process, these will tell you.