Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

[Spatzimaus]

isn't true that happiness per city is capped at its size? It cannot create more happiness than it's own size, right?

Not exactly. There are two types of happiness: <Happiness>, and <UnmoddedHappiness>. <Happiness>, on buildings, is capped by population. <UnmoddedHappiness> isn't capped, and neither are non-Building happiness sources (like Policies).

In the vanilla game, every building that provides happiness uses <Happiness>, with only three exceptions: Circus Maximus, Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower. Those use Unmodded because they add so much. (Macchu Picchu adds 4 and uses the normal <Happiness>). However, happiness from Policies (including the policies that give you happiness for having a certain building) is not capped.

Since a city in the vanilla game generates 3+1/pop unhappiness, the population unhappiness basically offsets the happiness buildings, while the 3/city balances the 9 free Happiness you start with, your policies, etc. The math gets stranger when you start adding things like the Forbidden Palace that reduce population unhappiness by a percentage, where you can actually have a net gain from the capped buildings.

In this Balance mod, though, the base unhappiness is 4 + 1.2/pop. That extra 0.2 causes real problems if buildings are capped at 1/pop, so my extra growth buildings (Aqueduct, Sewer System, Recycling Center, Habitation Domes) are all +1 UnmoddedHappiness. The idea is that if you build one every ~5 population, you'll cancel out that extra 0.2 from population.

In the Content Mod:
Happiness: Hologram Theater (+2), Brood Pit (+1), Temple of Gaia (+2), Hybrid Forest (+1), Nanoreplicator (+1)
UnmoddedHappiness: Centauri Preserve (+2) and any Wonders or National Wonders that add Happiness.

Last night I tried something: playing a game without going out of my way to pick Happiness policies. I went Liberty-Rationalism-Freedom, each of which has a few Happiness boosters but doesn't really focus on it.
As I got into the Digital, I was having real problems with Happiness. By the late Digital I was negative, even BEFORE I got to the Genejacks. I had every luxury (and had bribed every city-state, all of my cities had built everything that boosted happiness, and I just couldn't stay above zero because my large (size 30+) cities were growing so fast from all the surplus food I had. Even with an Omnicyte-heavy empire (which meant plenty of Centauri Preserves), I just couldn't get back above zero. Thankfully I pulled off a diplomatic win right about then, but it means I'm going to look into slowing the growth rates down a bit; food storage is a bit too high at the moment, I think. (80% once you get to Medical Labs, which aren't long after Hospitals.) So I might knock Medical Labs from 20% down to 10% and give them a better research boost or something to compensate.

 

[Sjru]

I believe there is an option to forbid growth via the gobernor. That doesn't work?

 

[Spatzimaus]

I believe there is an option to forbid growth via the gobernor. That doesn't work?

It works just fine. It just shouldn't be an absolute NECESSITY to use; hence the test game where I was going out of my way to NOT pick the Happiness-heavy civs or policies. After all, the AI doesn't strategize on that level, and I'm trying to ensure that there aren't any traps the AI can fall into if its randomization goes badly. In some early versions of the mod, this'd happen fairly often; the player would be the only one above zero on Happiness, so you KNEW the AI was being crippled by the unhappiness penalties. I'm trying to avoid repeating that cycle.

So basically, I can fix it one of five ways:
1> Increase the Happiness produced by buildings. In the vanilla game you get +4 from a Stadium, in this mod it's 2 for a Stadium, 2 for a Hologram Theater, 2 for a Temple of Gaia. I could bump some (or all) of those up to +3. I was also looking at adding +1 to the Nanohospital, if I were to lower growth.
2> Slow the city growth rates further, so that less population unhappiness builds up.
3> Add more Empath slots, possibly by allowing them to unlock earlier in the game.
4> Add more Happiness-producing Policies, probably to the branches that don't have many of these right now (Patronage and Commerce, for instance)
5> Add more Happiness-producing Wonders, or modify the ones that currently do to add more. For instance, the Virtual World gives one free policy and +3 happiness, and I could bump that back to its original +5. Likewise, the Information and Ambrosia resources generated by wonders could be boosted back up to their old values (+3/+5) or higher, instead of the weaker +2 and +4 they are now)

Each of these has pluses and minuses, and each is something I've seriously considered recently. One thing I've noticed recently is that tech progression is a bit too fast in the later eras, and since tech rates are tied to population, doing #2 would allow me to kill two mindworms with one stone. It'd also slow down some of the build rates a bit, as well as the birth rates of Great People. (Fewer citizens means fewer specialist slots filled.) So I'll try that first.

 

[Shumpitostick]

I'm just curious; isn't true that happiness per city is capped at it's size? It cannot create more happiness than it's own size, right? Couldn't be that?

Happiness from some buildings (colosseum, theatre, stadium and hologram theatre) is capped by the city size but happiness from other buildings isn't

I didn't refresh then page so this question is already answered. Don't mind this post

 

[Spatzimaus]

Something I'm trying out for the next version of the Balance mod:

One nice side effect of buildings like the Stone Works, Monastery, Mint, Stables, Forge, Granary, etc. are that by adding to the yield of a tile containing a certain resource, you effectively increase the strength of an improvement without boosting all versions of that improvement at once. This was always a problem for the Mine, especially; if you boost a Mine's yields, even with the freshwater/non split, you're boosting it for gold, silver, gems, coal, uranium, iron, aluminum, and the random hill-based mines that don't have any resource.

Now, a few versions back I changed the Market and Bank to work this way, adding +1 gold for each of a few resources. It's worked well; you'll still build those buildings regardless of your local resources, but it'll effectively boost those resources' yields enough that you'd rather work the tile than slot another specialist. Empire-wide, it's also less raw yield than adding a flat amount to a building, and creates a bit more variation between cities.
So I'm trying out something similar, where EVERY luxury now boosts at least one building. This has allowed me to make some of my multi-function buildings more interesting, by replacing a flat +1 with a couple "+1 per local X" bonuses; you lose a bit of strength, overall, but the buildings are more elaborate now.

Specifically:
Theater
Vanilla: 3 happiness for 2gpt
1.04: 3 happiness and 2 culture for 4gpt
1.05: 3 happiness and 1 culture for 4gpt, but also +1 culture per Dyes or Silk

Opera House
Vanilla: 4 culture for 2gpt
1.04: 3 culture and +10% great people for 4gpt
1.05: 2 culture and +10% great people for 4gpt, but also +1 culture per Cotton or Furs

Museum
Vanilla: 5 culture for 3gpt
1.04: 4 culture and 2 research for 5gpt
1.05: 4 culture and 1 research for 5gpt, but also +1 research per Gems or Ivory

Market
Vanilla: +2 gold, +25% gold
1.04: +20% gold, +1 gold per Cow, Fish, or Wheat
1.05: +20% gold, +1 gold per Cow, Fish, Sugar, or Spices
(Wheat is already getting boosted through the Granary. Sugar and Spices are also two of the least common luxuries, given the default spawn tables.)

I've played through a couple games with these changes, and I like what it does to the balance, but when 1.05 comes out I'll need others to tell me how the balance works for them. I'm aiming for Thursday or Friday for 1.05, but I wanted to mention this one now.

 

[dinobot386]

I like that idea with the building boosts to resources, however, does the AI know how to capitalize on that?

I bring this up because ive been having an issue with polynesia in my earth map, the AI never wanted to expand beyond hawaii, I had come to the conclusion that it was never exploring the viable islands and its scouts and ships were just going in strait lines through the pacific

So I reasoned that I needed to reveal part of the map so that the AI would see the islands all the way down to north austrailia, and I decided to bribe the AIs expansion to the islands with alot of pearls and whales and to eventually colonize austrailia

My idea worked too well and the AI seemed to be beelining strait to austrailia and ignoring the islands along the way, it only had 3 cities by the modern era and was very poor, I assume that barbarians were just picking off anything that was going from the capital to the other islands

 

[Spatzimaus]

I like that idea with the building boosts to resources, however, does the AI know how to capitalize on that?

There's not a simple answer. The AI does value resources when picking a spot to settle on, and you can adjust the weighting it gives to that factor, so it's possible to make the AI believe that resources in general are a bit more valuable than before. But it doesn't differentiate between a resource that will give its bonuses immediately, versus one that gets a bonus from a building down the road. All it'll affect in the short term is the decision process on which local tiles to work.

If anything, then, my proposed change would improve the AI. Think about it; right now, we all know that Gold, Silver, Wine, and Incense are the most valuable luxury goods, because their yields will be significantly improved by the Mint and Monastery, both of which unlock fairly early in the game. (Ivory also unlocks the Circus, and Marble gets the Stone Works, but these are clearly inferior. I'm ignoring sea resources for the moment.) These four luxury resources will be purely superior to Cotton, Spices, Dyes, etc., then, and the human player will know it, but the AI player won't. He'll see settling on a Cotton-heavy location as being the same value as settling on a Wine-heavy location, while a human player will know that the Wine region is far superior due to the culture of a Monastery.

By boosting the yields of the other resources, then, it reduces the disparity; even if the building using those resources doesn't unlock until the Renaissance (Bank or Museum), it's better than never getting the boost at all. So the AI won't be penalized as badly for picking the "wrong" resources to settle near. I do this a lot in my balance mod; a lot of the changes are things that'll reduce the "penalty" the AI suffers from its lack of metagame knowledge, since the AI doesn't actually know what's going on, but it no longer lags quite as far behind the human.

Now, I deliberately doubled up on the bonuses for Gold, Silver, and Gems. The Mint boosts Gold and Silver, the Bank boosts all three, and the Museum boosts Gems. So of the land-based luxuries, these will be the best, because seriously, they're money; things like spices and dyes become commonplace in the long term, but precious metals have stayed valuable.
More specifically in game terms, these are the three luxuries that are harvested with a Mine. Since Mines are one of the three general-use land Improvements (and are used for most strategics), they don't get as many tech yield increases as the Plantation, Pasture, Camp, and Quarry do, so it's not as lopsided as it'd first appear. Plus, since they're exclusively hill-based, to get the bonus you have to be willing to work hill tiles, which is a bit more of a sacrifice than working a plantation on grasslands. So it balances out.

I bring this up because ive been having an issue with polynesia in my earth map, the AI never wanted to expand beyond hawaii

That's most likely a different problem. The AI, when picking a spot to settle on, won't normally consider any hex more than 20 hexes away from the unit's current location, although there's a specific late-era "colonization" override to that. And the logic I mentioned earlier for picking settler locations is heavily yield-based; the AI won't settle small islands just to link two areas, and while it values resources, they don't count for THAT much, so it might easily decide to just bypass the islands altogether. Make the islands slightly bigger and it'll be much more likely to settle them. Also, luxuries don't seem to add nearly as much to a site's desirability as strategics do.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Status update, for the few of you who comment in here out of the ~200 who download the mod:

I've completed the first pass of unit models for some of the units. By "first pass" I mean no animations, no damage states, et cetera; the units will move just fine, but beyond that they don't do anything. This is only really a problem for the Needlejet, which needs a movement animation to do its attack runs; for the rest, they're about as responsive as the placeholders were already. Eventually I'm going to add animations to as many units as possible, but my priority is to just get something in place and scaled correctly; for the vehicles, you don't actually lose much by not having animations.

I'm not going to wait to get them all done before giving the next version, but I'm very close to getting the models for the Spore Tower and Mind Worms working; given how common these units are supposed to be, I'd really like to finish them before releasing the mod again. Last night I tried converting the Spore Tower five times, and each ended up looking wrong in a different way, but I'm close...

Either way, I'll have a new version out by the end of Saturday. (Some RL stuff is interfering with my valuable game-playing time.) At the moment, I have the first-pass models in place for the Gravtank, Gravship, Stealth Ship, Isle of the Deep, Needlejet, Colony Pod, Orbital Ion Cannon, Orbital Death Ray, and Subspace Generator. My hope is to add the Skimmer, Vertol, Mind Worms, and Spore Tower tonight, but those'll depend on how much time I have. I'm basically leaving the infantry-type units for last, so those won't be in this next version, and a few units still don't have models yet. But within the next few versions, the unit graphics should be more or less completed.

 

[Mayjori]

do i understand correctly that using small continents is not compatible with this mod?

 

[Spatzimaus]

No, Small Continents is fine. The only ones that don't work well with it are Great Plains, Highlands, and Lakes. The "Player Pack" file in the first post contains altered versions of those three that ARE compatible with it, somewhat, although I'd still steer clear of them until I finish rebalancing them.

 

[Mayjori]

No, Small Continents is fine. The only ones that don't work well with it are Great Plains, Highlands, and Lakes. The "Player Pack" file in the first post contains altered versions of those three that ARE compatible with it, somewhat, although I'd still steer clear of them until I finish rebalancing them.

good to hear, i have yet to enjoy a game without using small conts lol

edit: and thanks for the quick response.

 

[dezuman]

Is it normal for Diety AIs to get shittons of gold no matter what? Cos I just played a game where Persia with 3 cities but no gold-giving tiles had like 150 GPT with a fairly sizable army...

Not that I had any problems, just more RAs for me!
Seriously, I thought the highest difficulty would be much harder


However, in the Nuclear era I could almost match their gold gain with my single city and minimal army. Cos, it's not like you need much to stonewall a few not-top-notch civs with a fetish for "backstabbing"

Still, there's China and Arabia on the other end of the Pangaea that are my equals tech-wise...



I have to say that this is my most intriguing Civ game ever, being quite constantly at war from turn 100 at marathon

 

[Mayjori]

the map im playing (small continents) has a plain (i think) and a desert that are showing as mountains they are right next to eachother, even if i reload, havent gotten close to terraform yet. Should I send you the save?

 

[Spatzimaus]

Is it normal for Diety AIs to get shittons of gold no matter what? Cos I just played a game where Persia with 3 cities but no gold-giving tiles had like 150 GPT with a fairly sizable army...

That's Persia. Simply put, the Satrap's Court is insanely overpowered, and their UA is the best in the game.

The Satrap's Court is a Bank replacement that, in the vanilla game, also gives an additional +2 Happiness and +2 Gold. The high Happiness means that Persia enters a Golden Age much more often than normal, especially since in my mod Happiness is harder to come by, and the extra Gold really adds up quickly. The problem is that in a normal game, the fact that it replaces a late-game building like the Bank is a major drawback, since most of the important parts of your game will happen before you get that building, but in a mod where many people will start in the Industrial or Nuclear, with Banks pre-placed in their cities, it's a major imbalance.

So, in the next version, I'm going to drastically nerf the Satrap's Court. The Happiness boost will be halved, and the +2 Gold will be replaced with a boost to the Bank's other ability (instead of +1 gold per Gold, Silver, or Gems, it'll be +3 per).

The UA is a different problem. 50% longer Golden Ages, and the combat boost that goes with it, are EXTREMELY strong in a mod that makes GAs very important. Yet another reason I have no problem nerfing the heck out of the Satrap's Court. Regardless, though, Persia is basically the "easy mode" civ.

Still, there's China and Arabia on the other end of the Pangaea that are my equals tech-wise...

Yeah, that could be a problem. China does extremely well on the higher difficulties, and if an AI like that can conquer a neighbor or two then they can end up with an extremely strong empire for the late-game play. There'll still be a massive imbalance in combat results when a war happens, due to the AI's poor military strategy, but if they're far enough from you to not fight you directly, the AI can get powerful quickly.

 

[Spatzimaus]

the map im playing (small continents) has a plain (i think) and a desert that are showing as mountains they are right next to eachother, even if i reload, havent gotten close to terraform yet. Should I send you the save?

That's not from my mod. The game does that naturally; certain terrains next to mountains might look like they're passable but are really just mountains. This is especially common if the mountains are near a coastline, since there's apparently no mountain-on-coast model in the database. You see this most often with Gibraltar; whatever land hex is next to it will look like plains or grassland but will actually be a Mountain hex.

 

[Mayjori]

That's not from my mod. The game does that naturally; certain terrains next to mountains might look like they're passable but are really just mountains. This is especially common if the mountains are near a coastline, since there's apparently no mountain-on-coast model in the database. You see this most often with Gibraltar; whatever land hex is next to it will look like plains or grassland but will actually be a Mountain hex.

they are next to gibraltar, but its the other way around, there gibraltar -then a real mountain-then a desert with incense that shows as a mountain- then a plain with horses also showing as a mountain.

 

[Spatzimaus]

they are next to gibraltar, but its the other way around, there gibraltar -then a real mountain-then a desert with incense that shows as a mountain- then a plain with horses also showing as a mountain.

Again, not my mod. Gibraltar uses a funny override; the hex it's on is technically changed to Plains, while any ocean hexes adjacent to it become Coast, and any land hexes become Mountains, regardless of what terrain types or resources they'd had originally. This might also screw up the graphics of the hexes 2 away from it, depending on the geometry.

But my mod doesn't change any of that.

 

[dezuman]

Yeah, that could be a problem. China does extremely well on the higher difficulties, and if an AI like that can conquer a neighbor or two then they can end up with an extremely strong empire for the late-game play. There'll still be a massive imbalance in combat results when a war happens, due to the AI's poor military strategy, but if they're far enough from you to not fight you directly, the AI can get powerful quickly.

Too late, they conquered Rome ages ago (Does that count as a pun?) and is currently chewing up the Asstechs. Their only threat is the occasional pokes from Arabia, but they are quite a lot weaker


I like the change for more resource-improving buildings. While it is an overall nerf to some of the buildings, it just feels rewarding to watch the yields go up

Spoiler :

I know it's spelled Aztecs

 

[Spatzimaus]

Too late, they conquered Rome ages ago ... and is currently chewing up the Asstechs. Their only threat is the occasional pokes from Arabia, but they are quite a lot weaker

That's the general trend you'll see. In the vanilla game you'd see China roll over Rome and the Aztecs and then be basically unstoppable, while one of the points of the Balance mod is to make that quite a bit harder. So China chews up the Aztecs and grabs a few cities, then makes peace at a hefty price, leaving a remnant empire behind, and if they DO finish off the Aztecs they'll be that much stronger. The defensive bonuses also help with the other thing you described; in the vanilla game Arabia could do some real damage by attacking a distracted China, but with the changes favoring the defender, China can hold off an Arabian raid with a smaller group of units than normal.

Regardless, it means that a China with that many cities is going to be a real problem for you; as long as they can stay above zero on Gold and Happiness, they'll have a huge research rate. A lot of my balance calculations are based around this sort of thing, to where a game that starts with 6 civs in the Industrial Era is expected to be down to 5 by the start of the Nuclear, 4 by the start of the Digital and so on. (The remainder might not be entirely eliminated, but they'll be no threat to win.) The idea is that by the time you're racing for a spaceship, there should really only be 2 or 3 civs left with any real chance of dominating the world.

I like the change for more resource-improving buildings. While it is an overall nerf to some of the buildings, it just feels rewarding to watch the yields go up

It's strange, because there are two separate and almost-contradictory effects:
1> Overall yields are reduced a bit, on average, which slows down the game a bit. +1 in every city is stronger than +1 per (X), even if X is a fairly common resource. I use two specialized +1s to balance a single universal +1, but overall it's still generally a lower yield across your empire.
2> The yields of individual resources are increased, which makes working them more desirable than using specialists, which reduces the number of Great People, which reduces the number of Great Improvements and the yields that come with them.

Both of these are generally a good thing, although each can be taken too far. It's similar to the tech yield increases for Improvements. Technically I could do something similar with tech yields for buildings, where a certain building gets a bonus at a specific tech, but that's something to worry about later.

My balance goal is that in most eras, the citizen priority should be Great Improvements > Resource tiles > Specialists > non-Resource tiles. I switch those middle two back and forth at a couple points, and quite a bit will depend on your choice of policies, but this is the basic idea. Adding these sorts of building-based yield increases effectively increases the gap between resource tiles and non-resource tiles, which gives me a little more room to work in when balancing specialists vs. resource tiles.

 

[dinobot386]

Will you're change to the naming of units allow the naming of great people? Always annoyed me having a persain leonitus or an aztec cortez.

Also, will the UI change make this mod incompatible with infoaddict?