Development thread for 1.5

It's probably good to have a thread dedicated to the overall development of the next version of RFCE 1.5.
Bigger plans:
New SoI-style company system, changing everything connected to the current one
Couple new terrain and feature types, updating various parts of the map
New provinces and various province updates, revising all UHVs connected to them
Finetuning gameplay for some civs, improving UPs and UHVs where necessary
Improvements on the 1200AD scenario

Other than that there will be lots of smaller things every now and then.
I will post here so we can have a brainstorming about them.

 

Hungary's UHV need serious improvement, its still too easy now. I think the 2. and 3. should be changed. 1 alternative was that control or have x (ie 7) horse by 1200 or around that date.
Also Edict of Torda was a big deal, but not in-game it is, Or change westminster to something else (ei: reduce religious tensions in you empire.
Black army is something that you just accomplish accidently, and do nothing to achieve. I think an uhv similar to polands religious uhv would work, also their 2. uhv could fit for hungary later!
btw any ahistorical idea is wellcome too.

 

Some things I'm thinking about ATM:

Plagues don't reduce villages/towns, but reset their development for the next level to 0 (DoC style)
These improvements already require much time investment, no need to punish players that much.

Cities with plague do not generate health instability at all.
This is kinda straightforward IMO, no point in adding further instability on plagues gameplay-wise
EDIT: there is a conversation about it in another thread, maybe it's better to leave the instability?

Some bonus (free granary or free population) for settling cities on villages or towns. Same way you get free walls if you settle on a fort.
Adding a granary already came up before, and I quite like the direction where it is going. Maybe it's better to have +population though.

Civil Engineering adds 1 further movement to all roads.
That tech currently does nothing apart from enabling a couple colonies. I feel this bonus is rather appropriate, representing the bigger investment in road building and also the new techniques in the 17-18th century.

Adding Paved Roads to the mod, or something similar with that name.
This is a somewhat more complex question, but I always felt like it would be very cool and historic to have Roman Roads at 500AD set up on the map in some places where they actually remained important after the fall of the Roman Empire.
These are unbuildable until later on tech tree, they give +1 road movement for everyone.

One of the connected things is road maintenance. Should I add a price for building these if we decide to implement them? Should normal roads also have a price then? We have to be careful here, don't want to make it too hard for the AI.

And if we go in that direction, we can also toy with the idea of adding a cost for all improvements. Apart from cottages maybe, which could potentially consume the worker.
This is a huge change though, not sure about it at all.

 

Paved roads sounds good. I'm not sure about road/improvement maintenance though; what would it add, gameplay-wise?

 

As in the other thread, I think instability from plagues is very historical. I also think plague should reduce villages and towns, to reflect the population dying off and needing to regrow over time.

My view still remains that plagues should not entirely kill units, only reduce their health. Other than that, plagues should be as damaging as possible to civilisation, government and development, as IRL.

Sounds good - would it also be possible to set roads to unpillageable as in Classical World? I can't think of many historical examples of barbarian tribes stopping to pillage some dirt tracks!

I think maintenance would be too much for the AI to handle - it would be too easy to bankrupt the AI by getting OB and building roads all over their territory.

Perhaps a small price of 5 to build a normal road and 10 to build a paved road would be better? Or add additional maintenance costs for every city connected to another city by roads to represent the cost of maintaining the major roads?

Not sure about a cost of improvements - surely that is just something reflected in the relative yield (i.e. the yield each improvement gives is already net of maintenance costs). Cottages consuming a worker would be interesting, but perhaps difficult for the AI to handle. It would also mean waiting to build cottages last of all, thus delaying their growth and reducing their value.

Maybe a better idea would be to allow workers to join existing cottages and contribute the equivalent of 10 turns of growth? That way it becomes voluntary when you decide to settle a worker in a settlement, and this acts to grow the settlement. Would be quite useful after plagues as well - you can build workers to regrow the settlements that have shrunk.

 

Wow, these are very good ideas! One-time cost for building roads is the better alternative imo. I'm all for making roads unpillagable. As for Paved (Roman) Roads: maybe they could downgrade into normal roads after a certain time of not being in a civilisation's territory.
Settling on an improvement resulting in a bonus for the settlement would be an advantage as opposed to just pillaging the improvement and gaining the experience of killing the barbs. My suggestions are village/town -> market, fort -> walls, farm -> granary, workshop -> forge, city ruin -> random smaller building.

 

Nice, i like your thinking, however the workshop-blachsmith are coherent, seems op but it certanly need to be tested out. I think few player builds fort to get wall. At least i do not, but more preplaced forts on the ad500 map wozld be good. Also i like most of Absinthe's ideas too.

 

Ohh, sry didn't mean to write maintenance there.
I was thinking about a price to build them, as for all other improvements.

Yeah, it will remain for now.
Will get back to it if too harsh for gameplay.

Still not sure. While cottages develop fairly fast in RFCE, they still require a huge time investment.
I myself never tried it in DoC. Doesn't that way feel better overally?

Good idea, that's also something we should consider.
Btw, some entirely different opinions also exist about this topic http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=432869

Yeah, as I said above, I have never considered adding road maintenance cost for each turn.
That's not something the AI can handle.
No need for an additional variable in city maintenance either IMO.

Cost for roads and improvements is a different question. AI could handle it fairly well, and makes money more important in both the early and the late game.
I often feel that money is just too easy.
That can also be helped with adjusting research of course.
Or even revising every mod-specific change connected to it, I dislike quite a few aspects of 3Miro's implementation.

Good point. This is also something that exists in one of the modmods for DoC.
Remember it from some other mods too. Did someone test it out? How is it in gameplay?

While it would be a nice feature, it's much harder to implement.
Not sure if it worths the effort, even the basic function is far from trivial.
Also this is something which would cause troubles for the AI.
Writing some functions which determine when is it feasible for it to settle it's workers seems rather difficult.

 

While it sounds fun, I don't plan to go that far.
As it already came up in the other thread, I consider cities on a different scale.
Thus I only want to represent the most signifcant tile improvements in this regard: forts and villages/towns.

I also don't want to encourage a strategy where players send workers to build up a random improvement on the tile just before founding the city there.
Only works fairly well with forts IMO, and villages and towns are a different question as they cannot be built instantly with a couple workers.

Yeah, I want to have more pleplaced forts and villages/towns on the map in the start if this get's implemented.

 

That would probably be necessary imo - otherwise you will rarely ever get any cities founded on towns as they would need to be in a BFC for a long while.

Although this mechanic could work well with a resettle option for conquered cities - you could raze an existing city to get a settler, then refound it on a town or village in the BFC and get a decent starting situation for the new city.

I think there should be a graded scale for the pop and buildings if possible, with the benefits stacking for each level:

Cottage - +1 starting city size
Hamlet - Granary
Village - 1st border pop
Town - Market

That way there is a genuine incentive to found new cities on higher level settlements. Also by placing towns and villages on key city sites, this will give more choice to players around which cities to keep when conquering an area, whilst allowing them to have a good level of development.

 

Oh, a building price. I think it would definitely make sense for paved roads since they actually require a significant amount of investment and material to build, but not for ordinary roads since they're more or less just a well-used trail.

 

Some thoughts

Normal roads give you double movement (or none) in the entire game and connect cities and resources free to build, War road, can give increased movement with techs have a cost to build.
Settling cities on improved tiles can yield an option if we introduce the re-settler unit. I mean u relocate an indy city on a place and move it 1-2 tiles nearby, then you can settle it on an improvement. which is good imo.

@Swarbs I would change your order as cottage give granary and village can add pop. and hamlet maybe smokehouse?

Also mind that English cities starts with granary anyway.

 

For some time now I'm thinking about adding a small initial stability boost.
Something along the lines of an initial enthusiasm, like "We love our new nation, it will most certainly be the most perfect civilization ever!"
This could be applied both to the AI and to the human player, both on spawns and on respawns.
Generally fading away in 20-30 turns.

The idea behind it is to add something specifically for the early period.
Late game stability is way too easy ATM, I certainly don't want to add anything which is too long lasting.

This would benefit both the AI, and a more agressive early playstyle for the human player. There were lots of posts about early expansion being too hard.
Also respawned AIs could use all the help they can get.
Can anyone think of some reasons against this?
I guess it can be misleading to new players, but maybe that's not a real problem if it goes away slowly enough.
Does anyone see any bad aspects of it?

 

I think it's a good idea. I can't really think of a situation where having higher stability at start would be bad, and the Arabs definitely need the buff.

 

I also can't see why this would be a bad idea. On the contrary, I think this will always be helpful.

 

Btw, the cause of the delay with my current update is those ugly plagues
Got a little into making various improvements connected to them in the past few days

 

Many of the penalties would kick in as soon as the boost is over. Maybe get a few turns of non-generating stability penalties? Raze and conquer. Change civics and religion and so on.

 

Only possible problems are that it could make stability planning a bit harder - a drop of more than one point at a time could cause a stable civ to slip into instability with no warning. This could be particularly problematic for a civ like France or England, which is expanding rapidly at first.

 

I'm thinking along the lines of 1 less bonus stability per every 2-3 turns

 

What I proposed represents something like this in effect.
Well, there are some differences in permanent penalty, but you don't get too many of that in the first couple turns anyway.

While I agree that this form would be more ideal, it's much more time-consuming to code.
I would have to set up triggers for each and every stability modifier separately.