Can you expand on this comment?
Sure. I think I've explained this before, but here's the version I've got in there now.
For both the old and new systems, you'd get bonuses to food, production, and research for the first 2*Era techs. That is, an Industrial start would boost you for the first 8 techs of the game. If N is the number of discounted techs remaining, the benefits would steadily decrease as N did.
The old Head Start boost was a Lua-based end-of-turn modification. At the end of the turn you'd get (N+2)/3 food, rounded down (so 3,3,2,2,2,1,1,1); this'd be added directly to your stored food, so it's possible you'd grow a size at the end of the turn this way. Likewise, you'd gain (N+2)/3 production to your current build order. But these wouldn't show up in the UI (you'd just see yourself that much closer to completing a project the next turn). Research worked similarly, but was MUCH larger; it was a multiplier to your current research output, that'd start at 1+(0.6*Era) and count down in a binomial way (for Industrial, that's 3.4, 3.03, 2.68, 2.35, 2.04, 1.75, 1.48, 1.23). This "multiplication" happened after the fact; if you generated 10 beakers on the first turn, then the head start might add another +24 beakers at the end of the turn. So you might see the number of turns remaining drop by 3 or 4 per turn, and you could gain new techs before the AI had taken his turn, which did strange things to the UI popups.
One other thing is that these bonuses would not be multiplied by any other multipliers. The +1 production wouldn't be affected by a Factory, or railroads, or your policies.
So what I've now done, instead, was create a "Head Start" building, with the NoLimit flag set in its class definition. Every city you have gains the same (N+2)/3 of these as above.
This building gives +2 food, +1 production, +2 research, and +1 gold per 4 population. So in an Industrial start, every city will get +6 food, +3 production, etc. for the first few turns (until you've gained 2 techs), and then will drop to +4 food, etc., for the next three techs, and so on.
> The food is obviously a significant gain, going from +1 to +2; the only real multiplier before the future eras is a +10% for a Water Mill, so it's basically just a doubling. Your cities will grow more quickly than they would before, getting them up to a reasonable size before the Head Start ends.
> The production is about the same, although it's now affected by multipliers like railroads and factories, so you'll see a slight increase.
> The gold is entirely new. It basically substitutes for trade route income until you get everything hooked up; the AI, in later-era starts, was just taking too long to do so and suffering economically. Since you'll be making infrastructure buildings very quickly, you'll still need to prioritize making +money buildings.
> The research is significantly LESS than before. In an Industrial start, each city will start with a population of 4, so adding 6 research to each city's base isn't as large as just multiplying by x3.4 for the first tech. On the plus side, the multiplier buildings (University, Public School, Observatory, National College) WILL multiply the +6, but it's still less research than you had before, because those buildings would also have helped under the old multiplier system.
Additionally, your capital gains (N+1)/2 (rounded down) copies of the +1 Happiness building that I use for Empaths. So for an Industrial start, you'll get an extra +4 Happiness for the first two techs, then +3 for the next two, and so on. I did this because in some eras, you don't have enough starting Happiness to support the extra cities you begin with Settlers for, especially if you take the Liberty branch and get that extra Settler.
So the upshot is that I'm trying to bootstrap your cities onto the vanilla game's growth curve, so that once the Head Start period ends, your cities are almost the same size they would be if you'd started in the Ancient Era and grown them naturally. And while you're getting to that point, you should still have reasonable research and build times from your smaller-than-expected cities.
The old method gave good research times, but the cities wouldn't grow quickly enough, so once the head start ended they'd still be much smaller than they needed to be. The new method helps with that, and is much more UI-friendly. It was also more AI-friendly; before improvements were hooked up you'd get "city is starving" messages for cities with -1 or -2 food, despite the fact that they'd get +3 at the end of the turn and would therefore grow. This'd cause the AI to panic about food production and work his tiles differently.
Also, what era would you like focused on here, and which aspects of the era (i.e. game set-up parameters) would you like focused on? I’ve always started in the Industrial era, but can start in another era if there is one in particular you’d like some feedback on.
I've said before that this mod is primarily intended for an Ancient-era start. With the Head Start system above, I've tried to balance things around three starts: Ancient, Industrial, and Digital. (While I also do Transcendence starts for testing, I'm not trying to keep that balanced.) Ancient is the basic Civ5 experience but with new content, Digital is a SMAC-like game, and Industrial is sort of a mix of the two where you still have most of the old Wonders to build and a space race to participate in, before getting to the new stuff. I've also occasionally played a Renaissance start, which feels very different since most of the free buildings kick in at the Industrial, so I might eventually try to adjust things to make that era a decent start.
Quick question regarding C-S supplying uranium to other civs: if a civ is in the process of building a nuke using uranium from a C-S and the C-S loses the uranium mine to pillaging/ other reasons, then if the civ building the nuke has no other sources of uranium it immediately loses the ability to continue building the nuke – correct?
I THINK so, although I've never tried that explicitly. Once it's built it'd get the -50% penalty, which as far as I know does nothing to nukes, but I'm not sure how loss of resources interrupts construction. It'd be easy to test; start production of a resource-consuming unit, and then replace the improvement on the resource tile with a trading post or something.
) , however if one civ starts with an abundance of uranium, then it becomes quite lopsided very quickly, and if nukes were cheapened then this imbalance would be exascerbated.
