Development plans

Also, if it is within my abilities, I'll see what I can do about adding the logical Revolutions effects to Next War's mind control center, and mod the assault mechs to reduce revolution in garrisoned cities their civilopedia entry hints at.
This will require some python modding, and would be non trivial. But it's certainly doable. I can help get you started on it if you really want to add in these effects. As a first step I suggest you browse through Revolution.py in the Python/Revolution/Gameready folder, and see if you can make sense of some of the functions, it should give you an idea of how python works if you are unfamiliar with it. This is actually how I first got into seriously modding civ4 (after adding in units), I felt I needed to fix the city distance code. I was surprised because I had no previous knowledge of computer languages, but was able to understand alot of the python functions just by using common sense.

Ah... I've noticed that you already have the hydroponics and aquaculture techs from Next War in LoR, but don't have the sound quotes for them in your sounds folder. Do they still work? The Next War mod's sound folder as of BtS 3.17 has files for them.
I never noticed this. I'll update the SVN with the quotes then, if I can find them.
 
I presented this idea in the Rev forum, but that was perhaps not the right forum for such an idea. Is this a good idea for LoR?

I play LoR a lot and I have always felt for the anonymous generals. While we have Legendary Units roaming in glory the generals, each the same as the other, settles all quietly in cities or becomes attached as boosts to the legendary units.

I would like a Great Mounted General leading my Mongol hordes in battle or a Great City Defender expertly leading the city defense.

My idea is to specialize the generals in the same way as the great people are specialized?


For example, you could have categories like:

Great City Defender - when settled in a city the city would get +50% city defence and would never go below +20% in defence. Each unit built in the city would recieve that promo that gives you a first strike and less collateral damage. As a warlord the unit would give every unit in the same stack +25% city defence. Plus the usual 20 xp of course.

Great Mounted General - when settled in a city new mounted units would recieve +3 xp. Can be a warlord only with a mounted unit and would make every mounted unit in the stack to ignore terrain.

Great Archer General - when settled in a city new archer units would recieve +3 xp. Can be a warlord only with an archery unit and would give every archer unit in the stack one extra first strike plus increased accuracy or damage in ranged bombardment.

Great Admiral - when settled in a city new water units would recieve +3 xp. Can be a a warlord only with a water unit and every water unit in the stack would get +1 movements and +20% retreat chance.

Great Explosion General - when settled in a city new gunpowder units would recieve +3 xp. Can be a warlord only with a gunpowder unit and every gunpowder unit in the stack would get +20% attack strengh.

Great City Razer - when settled in a city new siege units would recieve +3xp. Can be a warlord only with a siege unit and every siege unit in the stack would get +25% city attack and incresed accuracy or damage in ranged bombardment.

And so forth with other unit categories like Melee and what the names.

Just as with Great People, every Great General Point produced would be categorised in line with wich unit produced the point. When a mounted unit wins a battle and produces a great general point it would at the same time count towards producing a Great Mounted General. Unless the mounted unit won a battle while defending a city, then the point would be divided between a mounted general and a city defender general. When you have reached the level for a new great general it would be randomized according to size of the categories.

An extension of this idea would of course be to sort the existing generals into the suitable category. No longer would great general Montgomery pop up in ancient times.
 
I presented this idea in the Rev forum, but that was perhaps not the right forum for such an idea. Is this a good idea for LoR?

I play LoR a lot and I have always felt for the anonymous generals. While we have Legendary Units roaming in glory the generals, each the same as the other, settles all quietly in cities or becomes attached as boosts to the legendary units.

I would like a Great Mounted General leading my Mongol hordes in battle or a Great City Defender expertly leading the city defense.

My idea is to specialize the generals in the same way as the great people are specialized?


For example, you could have categories like:

Great City Defender - when settled in a city the city would get +50% city defence and would never go below +20% in defence. Each unit built in the city would recieve that promo that gives you a first strike and less collateral damage. As a warlord the unit would give every unit in the same stack +25% city defence. Plus the usual 20 xp of course.

Great Mounted General - when settled in a city new mounted units would recieve +3 xp. Can be a warlord only with a mounted unit and would make every mounted unit in the stack to ignore terrain.

Great Archer General - when settled in a city new archer units would recieve +3 xp. Can be a warlord only with an archery unit and would give every archer unit in the stack one extra first strike plus increased accuracy or damage in ranged bombardment.

Great Admiral - when settled in a city new water units would recieve +3 xp. Can be a a warlord only with a water unit and every water unit in the stack would get +1 movements and +20% retreat chance.

Great Explosion General - when settled in a city new gunpowder units would recieve +3 xp. Can be a warlord only with a gunpowder unit and every gunpowder unit in the stack would get +20% attack strengh.

Great City Razer - when settled in a city new siege units would recieve +3xp. Can be a warlord only with a siege unit and every siege unit in the stack would get +25% city attack and incresed accuracy or damage in ranged bombardment.

And so forth with other unit categories like Melee and what the names.

Just as with Great People, every Great General Point produced would be categorised in line with wich unit produced the point. When a mounted unit wins a battle and produces a great general point it would at the same time count towards producing a Great Mounted General. Unless the mounted unit won a battle while defending a city, then the point would be divided between a mounted general and a city defender general. When you have reached the level for a new great general it would be randomized according to size of the categories.

An extension of this idea would of course be to sort the existing generals into the suitable category. No longer would great general Montgomery pop up in ancient times.

Personally, I think this is too broad. There's also another saying... KISS. By KISS, I mean to add (natively or as module) to LoR the HoTK mod (http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=346) and plug-in the Heros functionality, which I think is really cool.

In fact, perhaps the Legend units could be reworked (ducks rotten tomatoes from phungus420 :p) so that Legend units are created when a Hero is attached to a standard unit... so Spearman + Hero (namely Leonidas I) = 300 Spartans, etc...

Have a go with HoTK and see what you think... :D
 
Can anyone recommend a decent free python editor? For the Wolf + Next War I used WinMerge, which displays the files as text files but lets you identify differences, as well as Serna XML. I toyed around with XML settings some in Serna but don't have anything to work with Python with in a similar manner.
 
I know you're putting out 0.98c, though currently I'm working with 0.98b + the hotfix. I hope that's ok as I'm not sure what changes you've made exactly.

edit: Also, I know you changed the gamespeed so that the game ends at 2100 instead of 2050. Next War also extends the game to 2100 to make room for its new era. I'm not sure exactly what effects editing these will have, but I can use either the Next War settings or yours. If you needed to extend the game to 2100 to make room for your extra techs, also, we might need to extend a Next War add on further to 2150. This is something we can probably save for later though as I'm not exactly sure how to edit it... I guess for now I can use your settings.
 
The main reason for the 0.9.8c update was due to the broken victory bug, which the hotfix fixes anyway. The rest of the changes in 0.9.8c are under the hood, most users wol't notice; the 0.9.8c build has some pretty significant changes in the python (the manner that the Revolutons.ini file is loaded was standardized with the BUG mod). If you start modding the python in LoR you really would need to update, if not, it doesn't really matter. As far as the end date goes, your best bet would be to just use Next War's gamespeedinfos file. It probably ends in 2100, but I'd assume it has a different number of turns (LoR only increases the number of turns in a game by 10%).
 
I think I'll use yours since I just saw the file had a note in it saying that the Next War gamespeedinfos only increases turns for all speeds by 5%. Since yours extends it by 10% I'll stick with yours. We can make additional adjustments later perhaps.

... or everyone can just play with time victories turned off. :p

edit: Hmm... you seem to have increased the research cost for the late game techs, including your introductions of hydroponics and aquaculture. that raises some thoughts about whether I should do something similar with the Next War techs or not.

edit 2: Right now I'm torn between boosting the research costs of the Next War techs by at least 25% or bringing the costs of the late game techs back to normal and adding the Next War techs to that. It depends on what you had in mind when you were increasing the tech costs. Were you trying to stretch the game out further towards 2100? If so the answer is either to add more turns to the game and boost the cost of the Next War techs, or to return the techs to their old costs and add the Next War techs on top of it.
 
I always felt the late game techs went by too fast. It's typical in default BtS to have 4 turn or so research times for late game techs, on epic gamespeed. That's just too fast, and it makes the late game feel awkward. Part of the goal of LoR was to make the late game feel like the medieval era in terms of progression and desirability in techs. By this I mean in default BtS when you're going through the medieval techs there are always multiple techs you want, and they take a while to research, so it makes for more interesting strategy, I tried to make the tech race keep this same feeling all the way through till the end. Part of accomplishing that was to slow down the tech speed in the late game, and bring it on par with the mid game where techs take 8-12 turns to research (assuming epic speed here).

Some strategies you may consider would be:
  • Make your add on increase # of turns by 25% (instead of the 10% in LoR), and end the game in 2200. Of course this would require significant modification to the gamespeedinfos file, a serious PITA.
  • Significantly cut LoR's tech costs, especially in the Late game. This will speed up the tech rate which may then make sense to move a unitclass significantly forward, such as taking the UNITCLASS_GUNSHIP and moving it into the future era and make it more sci fi.

I think in the long run you'd be more satisfied with the former option, but the latter may be easier in the short term. I don't know though, that's kind of the joy of modding is the design phase and planning how to build it. So I figured I'd just throw out some methods to consider, I'm sure there are others you may come up with.
 
For now I'll simply bring over the Next War techs and boost them by 25 or 30% or more. I'll leave Hydroponics and Aquaculture the way you had them. I'll worry about the game speed when I'm finished with everything else and have a working "test" version.

What I was planning to do when I finished this was make it a contribution to LoR so that you could adapt it or use it in future versions if you wanted, so I wasn't planning any big changes to what has already been done, except in the short term to move the Assault Mech to its Next War pre reqs and stats.
 
Yeah. For right now, just make it as an add on for LoR, completely following whatever vision you have. Feel free to ask questions, and the project interests me so I'll definatly throw out my 2cents if it seems apropriat. In the long run I plan on incorporating an End Era modcomp into RevDCM (and thus LoR), and I'll set it up so that LoR will automatically end in the Information Era (going to rename the current future era information era), but that the user can set it to later if they want the game to go into a sci-fi thing. That's really far down the road, and there are too many issues to deal with now planning wise for that (such as what to do with the spaceship victory). But just something to keep in the back of your mind while you go through the design process.
 
I always felt the late game techs went by too fast. It's typical in default BtS to have 4 turn or so research times for late game techs, on epic game speed.

One of the reason I always like the Civ III Rise & Rule and then Civ IV's Rise of Mankind mods was that it broke up the tech from about the Civil War through Modern times. I mean I know it's hard and it may not seem like it is worth it to have some distinct phases of modern war. To me, it seems vanilla Civ sort of mashes the Napoleonic time period into the American Civil War period and then mashes WW I and II together and then sort of jumps to today. I like that in R&R or RoM that you'd get more distinct periods where the machine gun makes attacking very tough and your PRAYING you get to tanks first. That and I've always felt the first nuke should be a modeled on a bomber that had to be launched from a base and not some immediate globe spanning ICBM. In fact, I've noticed that in certain games you get ICBMs before some other more basic weapons. Anyway, it always seemed to me that Civ is long on hand weapons and then suddenly you get muskets and the next thing you know you've got modern weapons...and the AI is often still stuck using bows. :rolleyes:

It is too bad there isn't (that I know of) way to simulate guerrilla war to reflect what we see going on in warfare today. The plain truth is that modern armies have always had problems with insurgencies. I would think if one had the Rebellion mod on that if an area got to a certain rebellion rate, your 'garrison' units would constantly take damage and the higher the rebellion rate, it would start to cost more and more gold. I mean back in the American Revolution, it was always felt that the Colonies knew they couldn't defeat Great Britain in a stand up fight; we had to make it more profitable for them to let us go then to pay the cost of 'keeping' us. Historically speaking taking over other people's territory by rolling your armies through it never worked to well due to the locals rebelling later. I think Civ rarely reflects this; you take a city and they just seem to take it.
 
One of the reason I always like the Civ III Rise & Rule and then Civ IV's Rise of Mankind mods was that it broke up the tech from about the Civil War through Modern times. I mean I know it's hard and it may not seem like it is worth it to have some distinct phases of modern war. To me, it seems vanilla Civ sort of mashes the Napoleonic time period into the American Civil War period and then mashes WW I and II together and then sort of jumps to today. I like that in R&R or RoM that you'd get more distinct periods where the machine gun makes attacking very tough and your PRAYING you get to tanks first. That and I've always felt the first nuke should be a modeled on a bomber that had to be launched from a base and not some immediate globe spanning ICBM. In fact, I've noticed that in certain games you get ICBMs before some other more basic weapons. Anyway, it always seemed to me that Civ is long on hand weapons and then suddenly you get muskets and the next thing you know you've got modern weapons...and the AI is often still stuck using bows. :rolleyes:

It is too bad there isn't (that I know of) way to simulate guerrilla war to reflect what we see going on in warfare today. The plain truth is that modern armies have always had problems with insurgencies. I would think if one had the Rebellion mod on that if an area got to a certain rebellion rate, your 'garrison' units would constantly take damage and the higher the rebellion rate, it would start to cost more and more gold. I mean back in the American Revolution, it was always felt that the Colonies knew they couldn't defeat Great Britain in a stand up fight; we had to make it more profitable for them to let us go then to pay the cost of 'keeping' us. Historically speaking taking over other people's territory by rolling your armies through it never worked to well due to the locals rebelling later. I think Civ rarely reflects this; you take a city and they just seem to take it.

Sounds like what you're looking for is Partisan Mod.
 
Something I'd like to see with nukes maybe is the Manhattan Project changed to a National Wonder so that each nation has to develop its own nuclear capability, as well as 3 kinds of nukes: bomber, tactical nuke, and ICBM.

Bomber requires fission and air superiority and is destroyed after one use. A B-29 model would be nice, though this doesn't take into effect the strategic nuclear jet bombers.

Tactical nuke requires fission, rocketry, and radio and can be based from submarines, resist SDI and should be cheaper to make with maybe a greater range.

ICBM requires fission and satellites but may be intercepted by SDI.

Also it would be cool if each level of nuke technology deals a different level of damage. Like the nuke bomber does the default Civ IV damage, tac nuke is a little better, and ICBM is absolutely devastating, guaranteed to kill anything directly under it, have twice the damage zone and may even raze small cities.

edit: I still remember once, back in Civ II, I defeated the Sioux superpower in one turn after getting a foothold on their continent connected to their rail system. I nuked every city and did a little tour with one mech infantry until I had taken them all XD. A little too exploitable that was.
 
Happy New Year folks.

Well, after much work I finally have a working copy of "Legends of Next War," though with a few nagging issues.

For one, I still need to fix the gamespeedinfos to take into account the longer future era and rebalanced tech costs.

I'm also getting an error message on the first turn related to a couple of the python files, which I didn't alter.

Error in GameStart event handler <bound method AIAutoPlay. on Gamestart of <AIAutoPlay AIAutoPlay instance at 0x36B0068>>

Error in GameStart event handler <bound method RevolutionInit. on Gamestart of <RevolutionInit RevolutionInit instance at 0x1ECCB73B>>

Also I have no Che Guevara button and it looks like Revolutions isn't loading. I know the errors are with python files in the Revolution folder I didn't mess with them to begin with and I recopied them to my new mod to make sure. The error messages don't come up when I play normal LoR, and the RevDCM window that should pop up at the start of the game doesn't in my new mod.

Edit: Fixed it. It was being caused by the Next War eventmanager.py that I had brought over. It looks like it counts the nukes before initiating the Next War "cracked earth" event (something I don't want here and have removed elsewhere), and also logs razed cities for some reason.

So, anyway. I think Legends of Next War is now playable. :)
 
OK, so some major changes.

I've just spent a bunch of time mucking around with the SDK and python for other mods that use the RevDCM core so that things aren't hardcoded. Doing this exposed more under the hood issues, none of which directly effect LoR, but where necessary coding changes in the RevDCM core, especially the SDK. So updating will pretty much break save game compatibility. This means that 0.9.8d will not exist, and instead the next update will be a 0.9.9 release.

Since we'll be bumping up the version number there are some unit balancing changes I've been thinking of implementing for quite some time. They are:

Change Tech Hunting: Name Change Only - Warrior Code (This is because human ancestors have been hunting with stone tools for at least 2 Million years, the tech makes no sense in the Neolithic)
Change Tech Archer: Name Change Only - Formations (allows better prerequisites, also again humans have been using bows Since well before the Neolithic, the tech is not ere aproprate)

The above tech changes wol't have any other effects then changes in names, and possibly some minor pre req changes for later techs to take the new names into account (formations could be used as a required prereq in a couple later techs pretty easily). Also the Formations tech will definitely be used a bit as unit prereques.

Add Composite Archer: Str 5, +25% City/Hills, 1FS, "Formations" & Construction
Change Axeman: Str 4, +50% Melee (removes bonus against Swords)
Change Spearman: Str 5, +50% Mounted, "Formations Pre reque tech" (adjust some UUs to compensate)
Change Swordsman: Add "Formations Pre reque tech"
Change Knight: Str 9, Feudalism & Machinery & Horseback Riding
Change Longbowman: Str 9, Guilds & Formation, increase cost to 90 hammers

Obviously the above changes will require some adjustments to UUs, but only the Spearman change will cause noteworthy changes.

Anyway I'm not set on the above, but I think these adjustments are the most logical, and historically accurate. Feel free to leave any feedback.

Finally the above changes wol't look so pretty. As I simply don't have enough models to add all the ethnic unit art needed for the inclusion of a new unitclass (Composite Archer). I'm still holding out hope achilleszero will return, but it looks less and less likely every day, and such finalizations simply can't be done as well aesthetically without a graphics artist.
 
OK, so some major changes.

I've just spent a bunch of time mucking around with the SDK and python for other mods that use the RevDCM core so that things aren't hardcoded. Doing this exposed more under the hood issues, none of which directly effect LoR, but where necessary coding changes in the RevDCM core, especially the SDK. So updating will pretty much break save game compatibility. This means that 0.9.8d will not exist, and instead the next update will be a 0.9.9 release.

Since we'll be bumping up the version number there are some unit balancing changes I've been thinking of implementing for quite some time. They are:

Change Tech Hunting: Name Change Only - Warrior Code (This is because human ancestors have been hunting with stone tools for at least 2 Million years, the tech makes no sense in the Neolithic)
Change Tech Archer: Name Change Only - Formations (allows better prerequisites, also again humans have been using bows Since well before the Neolithic, the tech is not ere aproprate)

The above tech changes wol't have any other effects then changes in names, and possibly some minor pre req changes for later techs to take the new names into account (formations could be used as a required prereq in a couple later techs pretty easily). Also the Formations tech will definitely be used a bit as unit prereques.

Add Composite Archer: Str 5, +25% City/Hills, 1FS, "Formations" & Construction
Change Axeman: Str 4, +50% Melee (removes bonus against Swords)
Change Spearman: Str 5, +50% Mounted, "Formations Pre reque tech" (adjust some UUs to compensate)
Change Swordsman: Add "Formations Pre reque tech"
Change Knight: Str 9, Feudalism & Machinery & Horseback Riding
Change Longbowman: Str 9, Guilds & Formation, increase cost to 90 hammers

Obviously the above changes will require some adjustments to UUs, but only the Spearman change will cause noteworthy changes.

Anyway I'm not set on the above, but I think these adjustments are the most logical, and historically accurate. Feel free to leave any feedback.

Finally the above changes wol't look so pretty. As I simply don't have enough models to add all the ethnic unit art needed for the inclusion of a new unitclass (Composite Archer). I'm still holding out hope achilleszero will return, but it looks less and less likely every day, and such finalizations simply can't be done as well aesthetically without a graphics artist.

What's the compelling reason for swapping Longbows and Knights in the tech tree? :confused:
 
Well, it was brought up before, and I think it makes sense. It also allows for Longbows and Muskets to be of equal strength, but Muskets are just cheaper, and thus obsolete them, as was historically accurate. I think the proposed changes would be more historical, and more fun in terms of gameplay.
 
I feel like "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". This would be the second major reworking of the early units (that I remember) and because that is the era I am most often playing in, it means that I am basically playing a new game.

The LoR mod is excellent right now. And as you yourself say these changes are potentially stopping you from getting the thing complete any time soon.
 
Well, it was brought up before, and I think it makes sense. It also allows for Longbows and Muskets to be of equal strength, but Muskets are just cheaper, and thus obsolete them, as was historically accurate. I think the proposed changes would be more historical, and more fun in terms of gameplay.

Seems like unnecessary tinkering to me. Historical accuracy aside, let's consider gameplay; this seem like something that could be game-altering. The AI loves Feudalism, and it's primary benefit is the Longbow, a resourceless defender that becomes available just as advanced siege equipment (ie Engineering), and Heavy Footmen (ie Civil Service?), become available. Further down the tech tree, and on a differenct path, is Guilds which gives access to the best attacking unit of the era, The Knight, but this requires horses.

By switching this around, we're increasing the period of time before the AI gains access to a superior resourceless city defender during a very dangerous era. I think this will play out as a game breaking advantage for the human.
 
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