Current v1.13 Development Discussion

[Leoreth]

I haven't played this mod in a few weeks and just came back to play a France game at SVN 887. Although the game itself is still in progress, here's some feedback:

- The new espionage system is awesome. It actually gives me a reason to use spies and pay more attention to that part of the game. I got one great statesman that I haven't used yet. Will the reform government option allow you to change all civics at once with no anarchy or just one?

Good to know that the spy changes are working. I'm eager to try it myself actually, because I also used to neglect espionage. But I decided to continue modding for now. Feedback on the promotions and their balance is still welcome by the way.

And yes, the Reform Government option allows you to change as many civics as you want without anarchy, and it will reset the "x turns until the next revolution" timer to zero. You also don't have to make use of the "you might want to revisit your civics" dialog that pops up when triggering the effect. Civic changes remain free for the entire turn.

- I think the AI stability is too unstable. My game is currently at 1608 and here's a list of all the civs that are still alive:

France (me)
Portugal
Netherlands
Congo
Turkey
Iran
Mughals
Thailand
China (reborn after Mongol collapse)
Japan

Granted I wiped out the Aztecs/Inca with conquerors and invaded and collapsed Spain but everyone else went down without my direct influence. Several of the Euros like England, HRE, Poland, and Vikings went down in quick succession soon after Protestantism was founded. Russia also collapsed but I didn't see that until I took a peek in WB to see who else was even alive. It just feels strange playing on a map with so few civs and so many indies.

I've heard a couple of reports about that recently. Has it gotten worse or is that problem older? Iirc your revision already contains the AI civic instability buff, so that apparently didn't help.

It seems that Europe in particular has this problem? Since you mentioned Protestantism, maybe it's related to religious instability?

 

[Novicenoble]

Yes there were somewhat unrealistic amount of religion instability in my recent games, e.g. when I was playing korea and got Taoism in some of my cities. Cannot sure which part of the mechanism is the problem.

 

[Leoreth]

I think part of the problem is that the modifiers are percentage based, which means a small civ suffers more from one foreign religion than a large one. This is partially by design, but I haven't really considers that this increases the impact of single religion spreads for smaller civs to a degree that might be hard to handle sometimes.

 

[youtien]

SVN 887. SVN 888 should have some special benefit for China.

 

[Leoreth]

Oh, good point.

 

[CaterpillarKing]

What about a compulsory respawn at some point after the Mongols?

 

[Novicenoble]

Not for AI, I felt playing Chinese civ was hard game experience.

 

[CaterpillarKing]

Twas just a thought

 

[Hightower]

I think I posted about this before, but I'm still getting a very long string of XML errors whenever trying to load the SVN. The first error that crops up is "Failed Loading AML file xml\GameInfo/Civ4HandicapInfo.xml" with "Reason: Element content is invalid according to the DTD/Schema." Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this?


I've also had trouble with base 1.12 but found it works okay if I change:

; Modular XML Loading​

ModularLoading = 1​

to

; Modular XML Loading​

ModularLoading = 0​

in the RFC Dawn of Civilization.ini file.

I would rather have Modular Loading on, but I'm not sure what I should do to fix the problem. Turning off Modular Loading doesn't fix the SVN problem.

 

[Leoreth]

No idea. Your mod is in the Beyond the Sword\Mods folder, not in your Custom Assets folder, right?

 

[ezzlar]

The peace option for the Great statesman seems nice. But how about a "Total War" option instead? Could be spawning a conqueror event for the AI or an increase in military production for 10 or 20 turns?

 

[Leoreth]

Seems more like a great general thing, doesn't it?

I don't really want to associate offensive capabilities with Great Statesmen.

 

[ezzlar]

Actually I was thinking of Hitler. But a Great general would do as well!

Or we could change the "Make peace" option to "Total War" if you are running Autocracy or Police State.

 

[Novicenoble]

*No offense and not related with any political topics*

Hitler is rather closer to a leaderhead (in fact, already in game), not a statesman.
Totalitarianism civic is enough to represent total war state IMAO.

 

[ezzlar]

Maybe I should have written "Hitler-like" persona. Sometimes Civ becomes a bit predictable when it comes to military campaigns. A long build up of SoDs can cause the AI to wage war effectively. Sometimes in history countries could quick "draft" a large army for aggression. I dont find the draft mechanic or Totalitarianism to capture this effect. Hitler was one example how a country quick could amass an army and start war.

The conquerer events represent large scale invasions but are very specific in occurence. So I was thinking about creating something that could mimic the conquerer events but with more randomness.

 

[Leoreth]

Goebbels is who you are thinking of.

 

[2015]

Hey everyone,

Does anyone else think that India/China are too strong when playing from 3000 BC? A good percentage of the time I see Indian and Chinese conquerors in the New World. This isn't a bad thing because it gives a nice bit of alternate history (also China did have the technology to get to the Americas but didn't) but sometimes these conquerors are riflemen which is pretty ridiculous for the Aztecs/Incas to compete with.

Maybe India and China especially could get some kind of nerf/be discouraged to explore the New World?

 

[Shadow Warlord]

So I've had a brief experience with some of the new espionage elements and had a few questions:

1. What exactly does the Bribe Worker mission do? does it keep a tile from being worked for a few turns/make a random citizen unhappy?

2. Now that Great spies are generated via experience rather than as a Great Person, could we give normal spies the infiltration mission with a much smaller reward of espionage points?

I haven't played too much with it yet, but my reasoning is this:
-Great Spies are generated via experience. This experiences comes through two ways:
a. spies starting with experience
b. successful espionage missions.

Now, you can't build spies with experience until you research Communism and get intelligence agencies, or you do enough espionage missions to get a great spy and create interpol. So prior to communism, the only way to accumulate experience and generate great spies is to attempt multiple espionage missions against other civilizations.

The only problem is that these missions will all cost EP, which means the player will also need to focus on generating a good number of espionage points, which you have limited sources of prior to the industrial era. The player can just focus on generating espionage points the whole time and ignore research/culture, but for small civs (i.e, Japan), where strategies of using espionage to advance are common, they often need to keep their tech research as high as possible to keep up while doing espionage at the same time, and if they can't generate EP's fast enough to steal techs, then they risk being even more stagnant.

If the spy got it's own infiltrate missions (the reward could be something like 5-10% of what a great spy would generate), it would help civs that can't generate EP at the same rate of larger civs, and it would allow for more use of espionage in the early game prior to Communism. I think this would also help encourage the use of espionage because the player won't have to wait to generate a great spy to actually have a source of EP to conduct missions, and it also doesn't force the player to conduct a bunch of random missions just to get a great spy for the infiltrate mission.

 

[billyleeback16]

1. What exactly does the Bribe Worker mission do? does it keep a tile from being worked for a few turns/make a random citizen unhappy?

You steal the worker. Their worker gets teleported to your capital and you can use him starting the next turn. I didn't know what it did either until I tried it myself.

I noticed another issue worth looking into in my France game. The barbs in North America now have a tendency to just gather into big stacks and just sit there instead of attacking your improvements and cities. Some of these were particularly annoying just because some Mohawks were just fortifying themselves on forested hills. I didn't kill them until I got infantry.

 

[Shadow Warlord]

I noticed another issue worth looking into in my France game. The barbs in North America now have a tendency to just gather into big stacks and just sit there instead of attacking your improvements and cities. Some of these were particularly annoying just because some Mohawks were just fortifying themselves on forested hills. I didn't kill them until I got infantry.

This is still current as of SVN 887, in my Prussian game when i was spying on the americas i noticed the barbs were still stacking a little in Canada around the time of the American spawn and after.