Created a wiki

[Thalassicus]

I created a wiki to keep track of what the mods do.

communitas.wikia.com/wiki/Communitas_Wiki

I added pages for civup, gem, and vem. This will be the "civilopedia" for the Communitas expansion pack. Anyone with a few minutes' spare time can drop by the wiki and update the information there. This should be much easier than keeping all documentation on the website, where one person (Seek) had to do everything alone. The wordpress website will remain for me to post news and updates.

 

[mystikx21]

Awesome. Thanks.

I'll try to run (minor) changes I find by on here as you post newer versions to make sure those were intended as it goes along and to make sure we're not missing simple things.

 

[Thalassicus]

By the way, there's information about the mod in many places (workshop, website, forums, civfanatics downloads, etc etc) and if anyone notices out of date links please mention it here. Each source of information about the mod should contain these links:

• News (website)
• Features (wiki)
• Discuss (forum)
• Bugs (bug report thread on forum)
• Credits (website)

 

[Tery Buster]

Could you update the GEM part of the wiki, so we can get some more detailed info about the future changes in the next stages and plan ahead of it, discussing pressing matters before it is being coded?

 

[mystikx21]

Could you update the GEM part of the wiki, so we can get some more detailed info about the future changes in the next stages and plan ahead of it, discussing pressing matters before it is being coded?

I suspect the best place for that is here on these forums such that we can discuss it before it goes live.

I'd rather the wiki be for the actual changes, just my 2 cents.

 

[Tery Buster]

I suspect the best place for that is here on these forums such that we can discuss it before it goes live.

Sure is, but, as far as the stage 2, I've only got my eyes on the changes when they are being made already.

 

[mystikx21]

Sure is, but, as far as the stage 2, I've only got my eyes on the changes when they are being made already.

What Thal seems to be doing is posting up a mod stage with proposed changes, and then they get tested, discussed, or modified further from there. It might be helpful to people wanting to help with lua or xml changes to post what he intends to do in the next stage sooner, say at github or the website (or just PM him?)

As far as stage 2:
Most of the important changes to "research" as a stage 2 change will come from changes in city buildings and I think any changes to re-balancing/slowing research costs will come at that time. They haven't been implemented in the released version that I can see.

I did list off what I found on tech prerequisite changes in xml here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AeudKJcGF01VGD_OcY9PjRw6OxB0QYcRnsKR4fL5Cnk/edit?pli=1
(scroll to bottom, anything in red was in the stage two modifications).

 

[Tery Buster]

Well, I just lack a detailed to-do list on the upcoming features.
It's not a must, but would come in handy.

I see the sticky post on "how to improve expansion pack", but the list seems outdated and shows less than 5% of the presented and discussed changes.

Isn't wiki a good format for such publications?

 

[mystikx21]

My thoughts on that.

Thal could definitely update the "how to improve" post. There's stuff listed like "defence buildings add HP to cities", which is already in GK for example.

I'm not sure that would help with updating all the specific changes that are needed. A lot of the little changes were already in VEM and just need updated to GK additions and changes. Those don't need to be duplicated in efforts, just documented and tested. (Which is what I've been tracking).

What we could use are some open threads on existing unit or building or wonders changes to be made rather than explicitly new ones. Especially those that weren't already done in VEM, or ones that GK has rendered necessary by radically changing wonders (Stonehenge, Hagia) or units (muskets, spear/pike). Some formal consensus on these changes would be nice. If we can hash out more or less what we'd like to see done there, then it shouldn't be too difficult for you (or whoever) to go and do it in the appropriate file, edit, and upload or email it. Editing those values is fairly simple.

Units in particular should require a lot of debate because GK changed so many combat values and added a number of units. There's been a lot of focus on the early units (spears/swords/siege/horse) and not much on later units as yet (knights, infantry, tanks), any units that need to be added and updated (vanguards), renaming of those lame "Great War" units, cost and upkeep balance, promotions, etc.

Balancing policies, espionage, religions, and leader UAs is a longer term goal in my opinion. From observing VEM's origin to development to now, all of these will likely go through several iterations for newer changes versus building or unit changes which are much easier to balance and test.

 

[Tery Buster]

Lemme brighten it a bit.
The next steps are:

Cities (Buildings, Wonders)
Armies
Leaders
Diplomacy

I know of a lot of things that could be balanced in all these steps, but in my opinion only.
Obviously, would be better to take experience of various points of view and playtroughs to know what and how much to change.

I'd like to see listed what might be changed in each step and be able to discuss it before or even go on and help Thal doing it forehand while he handles things only he can do (main reason, meanwhile).

For example, I can go on now and balance the "Diplomatic Marriage" to take city size into account to calculate the cost and increase a lot the cost for recurring marriages, since I find it very game-breaking now.
But what if a lot of people don't agree?

I'd rather work with the granted upcoming changes than with proposed changes.

 

[mystikx21]

I know of a lot of things that could be balanced in all these steps, but in my opinion only.
Obviously, would be better to take experience of various points of view and playtroughs to know what and how much to change.

I'd like to see listed what might be changed in each step and be able to discuss it before or even go on and help Thal doing it forehand while he handles things only he can do (main reason, meanwhile).

For example, I can go on now and balance the "Diplomatic Marriage" to take city size into account to calculate the cost and increase a lot the cost for recurring marriages, since I find it very game-breaking now.
But what if a lot of people don't agree?

I'd rather work with the granted upcoming changes than with proposed changes.

If you have a proposed change, propose it in a thread here and see what kind of response you get.

There was a debate over the Austrian UA a while back. I'm not sure that anything was resolved for it based on looking it over. I for one share your impression it's most in need of some scaling modifications. In that case you could do the code/XML changes needed for that and test it and always scale back the formula or scale it up for balancing. That way if it's something we want to do, the bones are there and at worst it just needs tweaked one way or the other.

Many XML changes for things that were already in game are (more or less) already done. Thal just hasn't uploaded those changes to the new mod based on looking through the github page. So some changes that are "granted" are often already done and don't need done again. I can't speak for every single change of course and we'll likely have to revisit some changes in UAs and policies as those come up especially.

What does need doing is updating some of those VEM changes to the newer GK base. For example units now have different values and hit points, buildings or wonders now have production, etc. Again for that, I would suggest going through what changes you think are needed there and see what the community roughly settled on. I'm pretty sure one thing that could go on is adding some free buildings to a few existing wonders (eg cathedrals or pagodas?) and we could rebalance cost later.

I could go through and update the VEM changes in the wikia to give a base line of what was already in the game. But as far as I can see, a good chunk of that is really already done and what isn't done is (mostly) the things that need argued over. Plus I'm lazy and it will take a while to do that on my own.

I do have a roughly complete list of what that looked like at pre-GK release if you want a reference sooner but changes to units and policies and such are going to have to go through some revisions still.

 

[Tery Buster]

I'm pretty sure one thing that could go on is adding some free buildings to a few existing wonders (eg cathedrals or pagodas?) and we could rebalance cost later.

I'll take this suggestion as a lead. I didn't know that much was already done at the moment. Perhaps anxiety is speaking louder...

Thanks for clarifying.
(We might have strayed a bit from main topic)

 

[mystikx21]

I'll take this suggestion as a lead. I didn't know that much was already done at the moment. Perhaps anxiety is speaking louder...

Thanks for clarifying.
(We might have strayed a bit from main topic)

No worries. If we as a community want this "done" sooner, then I think Thal could use some lifting of things here and there as you said. It's more a question from my angle of trying to get people lifting things that need lifted and not things that were already picked up. I seriously doubt he's going to reject the help if it helps.

Whether or not it's "done" is more my impression from looking over what's available in the gem folder at github and what's already out in the release version. Thal could disagree (and probably should.)

I wouldn't say a lot is "done" so much as what remains isn't something that we could just take for granted would stay the same. Units alone is going to be a bloody mess of stuff needing change because of GK changes, and thus discussion. Before it gets nailed into xml and lua and any possible changes to AI behavior, whereas terrain or buildings look(ed) much more straightforward copy-paste style with a few changes here or there and a few new twists. That's before it gets to much more intricate issues like policies and UAs and AI diplomacy.

Open up what you think can or should be changed from your end on the forums would be my advice. I'd especially focus on anything that changed or was added from vanilla to GK (that's why I brought up cathedrals or pagodas on wonders) because that's the stuff that's going to need editing the most as far as I can tell.

 

[Thalassicus]

It might help if I explain how I'm releasing the gem stages.

My first priority is just to get everything out there, even if it's not balanced for G&K. I want to let everyone play it as soon as possible so we can talk about what needs balancing. So for stage 1 (terrain) I did this:

1. I copied the vem project folder.
2. Renamed to gem.
3. Deactivated everything but the terrain part.
4. Fixed a few G&K compatibility bugs.
5. Released vem-terrain feature list as gem-terrain.

As I reach each new stage, I activate the disabled Vem files stored in the Gem folder, then repeat steps #4 and #5. For step #4 I go through files line-by-line making changes, so posting future plans wouldn't be possible without actually doing everything. I'm focusing on one small part of the project at a time to make it easier to find bugs.

 

[Thalassicus]

I added an "archived pages" list to the bottom-right of civmodding.wordpress.com so that information is available to copy over to the new wiki.

 

[Seek]

This is a great idea, Thal! The thought crossed my mind to suggest creating a wiki recently, and the next day this thread was posted.

 

[mystikx21]

I added an "archived pages" list to the bottom-right of civmodding.wordpress.com so that information is available to copy over to the new wiki.

This is helpful, yes, thanks. In a few cases, it was outdated or incomplete on detail but that's a trivial problem compared to the large-scale formatting and summaries that you and Seek had already done. I should have some time over the next week to plug some of that in.

 

[Thalassicus]

The nice thing with "visual" text editors online is it's easy to copy formatting - can just copy-paste and it duplicates all the html styles.