Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

Now, none of those have any animations or combat effects. They move, and that's about it. But since that's all the previous placeholders did, I'm okay with that.

It's actually pretty easy to add effects. If you look at the Gunship's FXSXML-file (maybe wrong name, but the one with all animation- and mesh-GR2 files) it've got a set of bones defined in tags. If you made those models or can open them in a 3D program those bones must be the names of markers, helpers or actual bones where the effects should go off.

Then in the FTSXML-file (probably wrong name, the one that usually starts with "fx_") you set a time, bone and effect-name. Usually it's easy to just copy the Gunship-file, change the name of the markers and maybe remove the misslie- and rotor-blads-effects. Then the entries with "action=1" seem to be the time for the hit-effects and the ones with tangent x, y, z is for the projectile-path of some effects.

The biggest problem is just that the viseffects.xml-file can't be loaded in a mod so you'd need to adjust the model and markers after the rotation and scale of the effects unless you want to make changes in the viseffect.xml-file.
 
All of the units in your screenshot are included in the latest version?

No, none of them are in the version you can download. All of those will be in the NEXT version, in a couple weeks. The posted version, 1.04, was done three days ago, and all of those units were completed yesterday afternoon.

I have 33 units I need to make models for. 7 of those have completed the no-animation first pass; I'm hoping to have another eight or nine done before anything gets to the rest of you. I'm trying to get the most commonly encountered units done first (the Digital Era ones: Spore Tower, Mind Worms, Combat Engineer, Skimmer, Laser Infantry, Stealth Ship, Vertol), but at the moment each of those still has problems.

A couple units (the Geosynchronous Survey Pod and the Stealth Ship) I have perfect models for, but they just don't work. For instance, the Stealth Ship was going to use the "Manta" model from the ee2 future unit pack in Civ4... except that the .dds texture covers exactly half the ship. The left half. Presumably it's supposed to be able to mirror the texture, but it's not doing that and I have no idea how to fix it.

I have nothing at all for 6 units: the Bolo, Former, Mobile Shield, Planet Buster, Plasma Artillery, and Quantum Missile. The Planet Buster and Quantum Missile can just be re-scaled reskins of the existing Nuclear Missile and Quantum Missile, and I've got assorted tank-like models that can probably be cannibalized for the Plasma Artillery, but that still leaves a lot of work to get the others.

Skajaquada said:
If you made those models or can open them in a 3D program those bones must be the names of markers, helpers or actual bones where the effects should go off.

That's the problem, I DIDN'T make them; every one was based on a Civ4 model that I just imported into Civ5 through the standard Blender-NexusBuddy process. Once I get SOMETHING distinctive-looking in place for each unit, then I might look into creating some unique models of my own.

While I do have Blender, it's going to take some work to figure out exactly which bones need to do what to add those animations. But when you're talking about things like naval ships (or the gravship) you don't really need moving parts to make it look right; all you really need are combat visual effects.

Unfortunately, the visual effects just don't seem to work right, because there's something internal where they're tied to combat class. If I take the GDR model and use it for a Labor Mech, of type Armor (like the original GDR), its missiles and railgun work just fine. But change it to type Titan or Energy, and suddenly the combat effects stop working. Likewise, if I use the Japanese Zero as a placeholder for the Needlejet, it'll fly to the target hex as normal, and you'll see the ground-based explosion effects just fine, but the actual WEAPON animation won't trigger any more, because the combat class went from Fighter to Multirole. (I tried replacing the Zero's machine gun with the railgun effect.)
Other people have run into this same problem, and until we fix it, half of the units in my mod could NEVER have combat animations.

The biggest headache, though, is that while Civ4 models seemed to use multiple meshes and multiple textures, Civ5 seems to insist on a single mesh with a single texture, which means joining the meshes in Blender and creating a composite texture from the separate .dds files. This is actually what was causing me a problem with the Colony Pod, which had been my original test case for the whole process; two meshes were getting through to the NexusBuddy step, and it'd freak out.
 
On another note, the change to the market etc. has made a HUGE difference, gold is no longer pouring through my empire like candy, and happiness is taking a hit as I try to build sparingly to stay out of debt

Yes, that's basically what I experienced in my own test games; I was repeatedly choosing NOT to build certain expensive buildings in my cities, because I knew that they'd just cost me too much to maintain. While the AI's not capable of that sort of decision-making, his probabilistic approach means that he generally lags a bit behind in improving cities anyway, so this brings human players a lot closer to the AI's playstyle. My problem at the moment was that the buildings I chose to put off were nearly always the culture buildings (Opera House, Museum, Broadcast Tower). I don't want it to be so easy a decision, hence my thought earlier that the Opera House and Museum would be the ideal buildings to gain a boost from the few remaining luxuries that don't provide a bonus through some other building. Either a Culture gain for having local resources (like the Monastery), or a Gold gain to help offset the maintenance costs (like the +10% on the Broadcast Tower, Stadium, and Research Lab).

What I'm aiming for is this: if you have no gold-producing Wonders, don't have any of the high-gold Natural Wonders (like Cerro Potosi) in your empire, and don't take the Commerce or Order branches, then you should never get above about 100 gpt outside of a golden age. You CAN have a few Customs Houses scattered around your empire, though. From what I've seen, it holds that trend pretty well until you reach the Fusion Era. (But if you don't want to worry about gold, take Commerce. I've tried to make it a worthwhile choice now; tell me if it turns out that way.)

What I've found in my testing is that in the early Industrial, you'll have a pretty nice profit margin, but that'll disappear almost entirely when you replace your roads with railroads. Then you hit the expensive early-Nuclear buildings and there's a real chance of going negative (while in that era you'll have a fairly high Happiness) until you reach Energy Banks. Then you have a nice amount of Gold but your Happiness crashes due to population growth (from the Medical Labs and Recycling Centers of the previous era, and the Children's Creche), until you get Hologram Theaters up and start getting Empath-slot buildings. And so on; I wanted each era to FEEL different, by changing which part of the balance goes critical.

I realized, though, what was wrong with the balance in the late Fusion (besides tech research times, which I've adjusted in 1.04 again): Magtubes. Originally they were a super-railroad with infinite movement, and gave some other benefit to cities, but cost 4 gold per hex. Due to lack of artwork and the inability to add a unique benefit I scrapped them, but I think I NEED a late-game money sink, and it has to be something that adds to route expenses since they're basically trivial by that point right now.
This also means I'll need to move the railroad bonus to an earlier tech, probably Doctrine: Flexibility or Doctrine: Initiative. The only question is how they stack; a route that's half-railroad half-magtube should still give the production boost, but I don't think that's possible without the DLL.
 
Hey Spatz!

Great Mod, I've really been enjoying it. I do have one question though, some buildings are supposed to give strategic resources (Wall Street, Stock Exchange and so on). Somehow those resources never arrive for me. Anything I could have done wrong? Or is that not implemented yet?

Thanks!
 
I do have one question though, some buildings are supposed to give strategic resources (Wall Street, Stock Exchange and so on). Somehow those resources never arrive for me. Anything I could have done wrong? Or is that not implemented yet?

It was implemented back in December, so it should work. It won't give you the resources immediately, but at the start of the following turn you should get a notification in your turn's message stack, with the icon of the building, saying that you've gained a unit of a resource. It'll increase your totals at the top of the screen at that point. This slight delay is a consequence of how the save/load logic works in Civ5, but I like it in this case as it prevents some potential abuses.

If you're not getting that notification, then there's likely a conflict with another mod that modifies the notification systems. But this lack of notification wouldn't stop you from getting the resources; those are tied into core game functions, using only Whys' SaveUtils function (which hasn't changed in a long time), and I don't know of any mods that have changed that particular code when they implemented it.
So if you can confirm that you're not getting the extra resources, check which other mods you use.
 
Huh, what do you know. The only other mod i was using is Copasetics UI Tweaks. Turned that off, next turn I get about a million notifications AND the actual resources. So apparently not getting the notifications also kept me from getting the resources. Weird...

Thanks a lot for the help, off to play now! :)
 
I'm in the modern age and here are the bugs I found: Military Engineers (and probably other advanced worker units can't construct terrace farms. In the civilopedia the Colony Pod is described as a digital age unit although it is a nuclear age one. The description and stats of the three gorges dam, hollywood and the red cross don't match. I play version 1.03 so maybe some of these bugs were already fixed in 1.04
 
I'm in the modern age and here are the bugs I found: Military Engineers (and probably other advanced worker units can't construct terrace farms.

Correct. I don't have any DLCs, and have made no attempt to make anything in the mod compatible with DLC civilizations. Due to how these work, it's often impossible to do so. For instance, take the Terrace Farms you refer to; if I give them the same sort of tech yield increases that other improvements get, then the game will break for people without that DLC in TechButtonInclude, when drawing the tech tree, because it'll try to draw an icon and fail since it lacks the correct atlas.

So DLC civs will suffer in this mod. No way around it.

In the civilopedia the Colony Pod is described as a digital age unit although it is a nuclear age one.

Yep, I moved it a while back to an earlier tech. I'll fix that for the next version.

The description and stats of the three gorges dam, hollywood and the red cross don't match. I play version 1.03 so maybe some of these bugs were already fixed in 1.04

How so? I've never seen any disparity. Each gives three effects: a yield boost to the host city, a global improvement to one specialist type, and a special bonus (free promotion, free resources). Which part do you see not working?
 
I just won a game using crazy spatz's balance and alpha centauri mods, plus a "transhumanist" and "simple clock" mod. However, it did not record my score and the hall of fame claims I did not play any games. I'm using version 1.0.1.348 of the game (latest patch) and didn't spot anything in the release notes about changing the criteria for the hall of fame.

I had deleted the hall of fame about 3 months ago but had completed several games (all using mods) in the interim, all of which had been listed.
 
Correct. I don't have any DLCs, and have made no attempt to make anything in the mod compatible with DLC civilizations. Due to how these work, it's often impossible to do so. For instance, take the Terrace Farms you refer to; if I give them the same sort of tech yield increases that other improvements get, then the game will break for people without that DLC in TechButtonInclude, when drawing the tech tree, because it'll try to draw an icon and fail since it lacks the correct atlas.

So DLC civs will suffer in this mod. No way around it.

Hi Spatz. You can actually fix this by providing a small, seperate mod dedicated exclusively to DLC content. It's not a pretty solution, but it does get the job done. :)
 
Hi Spatz. You can actually fix this by providing a small, separate mod dedicated exclusively to DLC content.

It'd have the same basic problem. It's fine to make an <Update> block that looks for something that might not exist for some players, so some DLC material could be managed in the main mods, but <Row> entries can't do that. Since things like <Improvement_TechYields> would require new Row entries, it'd fail if you lacked even one of the DLC civs it attempts to modify. Even if you keep DLC-related things separate from my main mods, you'd still have problems with people who had some DLCs but not others.
You can get around that by shoving all Polynesia-related changes into a single XML file, so that it'll only drop that one file if it failed to work, and so on for all of the others. No real need to have a separate mod for it. But that becomes MUCH harder to manage, since I'd no longer have all buildings in one place, or all units in one place, or whatever.

The bigger problem is, I can't make a mod like that because I don't have the DLCs, and so have no idea what's in them. I mean, I can go on Wikipedia and see which DLC civs have UBs and what the names of the UUs are, but without their stats I have no way to see which UUs and UBs need to be modified or by how much; while the 2kgames Wiki is SUPPOSED to have this info, it's all blank. I'm sure someone could give me the stats for each thing, but I don't want to have to be modding blindly every time a patch changes things.
 
The description and stats of the three gorges dam, hollywood and the red cross don't match

How so? I've never seen any disparity. Each gives three effects: a yield boost to the host city, a global improvement to one specialist type, and a special bonus (free promotion, free resources). Which part do you see not working?

Look again. In the stats part of the description you see +25% to the corresponding stat and in the description it's 50%. the real one is 25%. Hollywood has a similar problem where the stats write nothing, the description 50% and the real amount is 25%.

Here are a couple more flawed things I found:
Jungles can be planted on grassland. This results in an exploit where instead of building a trading post you can build a jungle then a trading post to get 1 more food and with the university, 2 more science. When you have the technology that gives +1 production to trading posts the bonus isn't reduced too. Also the description of plant a jungle shows that it gives 1 more gold than it really does.
Retroviral Engineering lists in it's bonuses the clinical immortality instead of the doppelganger. Ethincal calculus doesn't list clinical immortality and provides a false description of the aesthetic virtues
In water-poor maps such as highlands dilithium is almost unobtainable. You should make it available on land too
Just to remind tou, I'm playing version 1.03
 
Ive never had that happen with jungles ive planted, the jungle overwrites the grassland bonus and provides the exact same amount of food. In the end it is exactly the same as planting a jungle on plains, and the +2 science from the university is kind of the point of planting them
 
Look again. In the stats part of the description you see +25% to the corresponding stat and in the description it's 50%.

Yes, the bonuses were reduced a couple versions ago and the text keys weren't updated at the time. It's fixed now; all four were like that (the three you spotted, plus Wall Street).

Jungles can be planted on grassland. This results in an exploit where instead of building a trading post you can build a jungle then a trading post to get 1 more food and with the university, 2 more science. When you have the technology that gives +1 production to trading posts the bonus isn't reduced too. Also the description of plant a jungle shows that it gives 1 more gold than it really does.

I understand it's a bit confusing, but here's what's actually happening.

When you select the "Plant a Jungle" action, it creates a temporary Improvement called, obviously, "Plant a Jungle". This improvement has a flat yield of +1 food, -1 production, and +1 gold. When you mouse over the action, the yield it gives is NOT what you'll actually get from the Jungle, it's the yield of this improvement.

At the end of each turn, the mod scans the map for any instances of that Improvement, and if it finds one, it removes the Improvement and places a Jungle Feature, with the actual yields (+1 food, -1 production). All Terraforming actions work this way, as does the Monolith. The yield on the temporary improvements are what they are for three reasons:
1> The AI uses a Flavor override based on yields when picking an action. An improvement without a yield won't get picked often regardless of its Flavors. If I didn't put that +Gold on the temporary improvement, the AI wouldn't associate planting a jungle with gaining gold.
2> The User needs an indication that's in the right ballpark.
This is why the "Plant Forest" says +1 production; Forests replace a tile's base yield with a 1/1/0, but there's no way to make the temporary yield say that, so I just need to emphasize that it's something you'll be using to gain Production (through the lumbermills, most likely).
3> It helps keep the AI from trying to overwrite the temporary improvement with a new improvement during the one turn it's on the map. (This is almost impossible, since the unit that planted the forest will still be standing there with no movement, but some worker units are combat units and some aren't so it's theoretically still possible to stack.)

Jungles have +1 food, -1 production, so the +1 gold goes away once the temporary improvement is replaced. This means that Plains Jungles will be 2 food, while Grassland Jungles will be 3. (Forests, on the other hand, overwrite the tile's yield with a 1/1/0 baseline regardless of type.) Then you make a trading post, which bumps up the Gold by 2 (or it will be 2 by the time you can plant jungles), making Grassland 3/0/2 and Plains 2/0/2, and it gains +1 production at Industrial Economics. This was SUPPOSED to cancel with the Jungle penalty, but apparently it's not doing that any more, so you'll be 3/1/2 or 2/1/2. Plus 2 research for universities, of course.
A non-jungle Trading post would be 2/1/2 on a Grassland, or 1/2/2 on a Plains, plus the research, so on Plains it's a tradeoff of 1 food for 1 production, and on grassland it's +1 food (although it's SUPPOSED to be -1 production as well).

So yes, it's often an improvement in yields to plant jungles and forests. That's the point. The idea is that in the early eras you were clear-cutting your terrain, but now you want it all back, generally with jungles on the temperate terrains and forests on the less hospitable ones (Hills and Tundra).
Not completely, though; consider a Farm. If that Grassland is next to a river, a post-Breakout Farm will be 4/0/0 with +1 research. If the player has taken the Rationalism branch and selected my Knowledge super-Finisher, there's another +1 research to all farms. While the Jungle+TP is still generally stronger, maxxing out food in a period when all cities have at least 80% Food Storage has huge payoffs in terms of city growth.
Likewise, the hill-based Forest+Lumbermill seems great until you see that by the end of the Digital, Mines will be 0/2/0 with +1 research, again +2 with Knowledge.

Funny thing, though; in the early eras forests and jungles are good for defense, since with roads the defenders will have a big mobility advantage and they're good to fortify in. But in the later eras, this is reversed; nearly every unit has great mobility, it's suicide to leave single units outside of cities for long, and the defense bonus will more often be used to keep an invader alive. So you might start to wish you hadn't added all of those forests and jungles.

Also, by the time you're in the Fusion Era, you basically won't be working ANY tiles that don't have resources on them, because Specialists will be strong enough to be a better use of your citizens than random non-resource tiles. Again, this was deliberate. So, it really might not be a productive use of your Workers. It gets even more pronounced in the Nanotech era; you'd rather have a Deep Mined resource and a Mine than a forest+lumbermill, and food becomes a non-issue at that point.

Retroviral Engineering lists in it's bonuses the clinical immortality instead of the doppelganger. Ethincal calculus doesn't list clinical immortality and provides a false description of the aesthetic virtues

A lot of those are fixed in 1.05. In 1.01 through 1.03 I did some shuffling around, and I'm only now getting around to fixing the tech help texts, since they're really the least important part of the whole thing. (After all, you can SEE what benefits a tech gives, right there in the icons below it.) It's also basically a way to keep a record of what the benefit used to be, in case I want to revert the change at some point.

There are quite a few other techs with mismatches like this. Magnetic Monopoles, for instance, says that the Theory of Everything boosts science in a single city (which it used to), while its current effect is to boost ALL cities by a small amount. Basically, I make the changes, see how the balance works, and THEN, if I'm happy with it, I change the text.

In water-poor maps such as highlands dilithium is almost unobtainable. You should make it available on land too

I'm assuming you're using the "Spatz's Highlands" map included in the Player Pack, because the default game's Highlands map is not compatible with my mods. Great Plains, Lakes, and Highlands all conflict with my mod, as explained in the first post of this thread. There's a set of disclaimers in that post; the other big one is that you can't use Quick Combat or Strategic View.

This was deliberate. On water-poor maps, you won't have much of that resource through natural deposits. There are three other ways to get it:
1> Wall Street gives 1 unit.
2> Quantum Labs give 1 unit.
3> Deep Mining can generate land-based deposits of it, randomly. Deep Mines randomly pick a resource from a list, but Dilithium is the most common choice, a 25% chance. (Neutronium is 16.667%, and Aluminum, Uranium, Coal, Oil, Gold, Silver, and Gems each have 8.333% to fill out the rest.)

Conversely, water-heavy maps will be short on Neutronium, since it's primarily a Hill-based resource. Again, deliberate, and again, same answers: Quantum Labs and Deep Mining. (Wall Street does NOT give a unit for technical reasons.)
 
Conceptual question for folks, something I've been pondering for the last couple of days:

The Weather Paradigm. It's a Wonder at Centauri Ecology that has two effects:
> Workers work 25% faster.
> All cities gain +10% food.

Note that the second part is not +10% GROWTH, it's +10% FOOD. If your cities are size ~15 at the time you launch a spaceship, you'll probably be getting 3-4 food per city this way. This, obviously, is a powerful effect, something worthy of a World Wonder.

The problem is that Centauri Ecology is the spaceship tech, the one you get for launching a ship and the one you get at Breakout if you never launch. Because of this, the Weather Paradigm will nearly always go to whichever civ builds the first spaceship. Unless you're incredibly lucky and have multiple civs finishing the space race within a turn or two of each other, there'll just be too many turns where you absolutely KNOW you're going to get it.

Part of the problem, which I'm still trying to resolve, is that the AI just isn't prioritizing the spaceship highly enough. I think it's because the AI still sees it as being a "victory", and the AIs generally pick a single path to victory and follow that, so an AI that picks "domination" or "culture" as its preferred victory will never bother trying to build parts.
I'm trying now to see if decoupling the spaceship projects from the victory tables will work, but let's assume for the moment that it won't. If I can't get the AI to prioritize the spaceship highly, then there are basically two options:
1> Change the Weather Paradigm to a National Wonder, so that it's not first-come, first-served. Cut its effects roughly in half.
2> Change the parts' flavor ratings from FLAVOR_SPACESHIP to something like FLAVOR_WONDER, which should encourage the AI to build them regardless of which victory path he's chosen, hopefully. Even if it's not a pure change away from the Spaceship flavor, adding a second type should help.

---------------------------------------
The questions for all y'all (which, as everyone knows, is the proper plural of "y'all") are these:
1> How often is the space race competitive? By "competitive" I mean where you either lose the space race, or win the space race but the AI launches a ship of his own before the Breakout. An AI who's only built a Booster or two and nothing else does not count.
2> What is your typical city size and food surplus when you launch the spaceship?
3> How many techs in the Digital Era do you have when the spaceship launches?

and one that has little to do with the above questions but which is important to know:
4> Do you use the Content mod without the Balance mod? And if so, what other balance-related mods, if any, do you use?
I ask this because I'm trying to make these mods be more compatible with some of the other major mods out there, like Thalassicus' balance mods. Ideally, the Content mod would be compatible with ones like Thal's mods, while the Balance mod would be compatible with things like NiGHTS or CtP.
 
I'm one era ahead of the spaceship but i'll try to answer your questions from my memory.
1) I played on prince and apears to be far below my level, especially with using the incas on an highlands map which they are very effective on. Currently I could conquer the world single-handedly if I wanted(I could have won a diplomatic victory too). So with all this I completed the spaceship before the other civilizations even got their first spaceship tech.
2) 15-25 size for the large, old ones. +10 food with specialists. (I don't remember this part well)
3) 6 +-1
4) No
PS: There's a small bug that when you destroy a spore tower instead of moving into it's tile your unit will move into one of the surrounding tiles randomly
 
Hello. I have been playing a marathon game. I had completed the tech tree and had about 200+ happiness. My cities all have just about every building and are set to build research. My happiness is slowly declining every turn. I am now at 68 happiness because my cities keep growing but I don't seem to be gaining any happiness from the final repeatable tech.

(The only win condition in my game is time)
 
PS: There's a small bug that when you destroy a spore tower instead of moving into it's tile your unit will move into one of the surrounding tiles randomly

I've noticed this. It's only started recently, which implies that it's part of the fix I made to the Barbarian healing. What's probably happening is this: you kill the unit, you move into its hex, the spore tower tries to move back to its original position (part of the healing thing) despite being dead, and it displaces you randomly.
The fix is pretty obvious, but I'll hold off until later tonight after I finish my current game.

DragonGreen said:
With CIVUP you would have no such problems

CIVUP doesn't do anything more on this particular issue than the core game does. The tooltips are already designed to display the actual yield modifiers, for anything other than a Food modifier (which I added). It's just that in certain cases I prefer to have those effects listed in the lower text as well, and that part hadn't been updated. So if you looked at those particular buildings, the numbers up above would say +25%, while the lower part would say +50%. Whenever there's a conflict like that, always trust the numbers up top.

mo123567 said:
My happiness is slowly declining every turn. I am now at 68 happiness because my cities keep growing but I don't seem to be gaining any happiness from the final repeatable tech.

Go into your capital. Look at the list of completed buildings; see if there's one labeled "Happiness Bonus". Only three things can create that building:
> Empath specialists slotted in this city. (Does not update until the end of the turn, so you won't see it immediately vanish if you unslot any Empaths.)
> The Head Start bonus for your first few techs when you start in a later era (doesn't apply to you)
> The Repeatable tech at the end of the tech tree. (As with the Empaths, it only updates at the end of the turn.)

So go into your capital. Manually adjust specialists to remove any Empath specialists from any buildings you have. (They're the green ones.) End the turn. If, at the start of the next turn your capital still has the building named "Happiness Bonus", then you ARE getting the bonus for repeating the tech. It might just be getting drowned out by the unhappiness from all that population growth.

(The only win condition in my game is time)

Also Transcendence. I don't give you the option of disabling the Transcendence victory or the space race any more.

With the way I've structured Happiness, you can't hold off the unhappiness indefinitely; you WILL run out eventually if you keep playing long after the end of the tree.
 
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