Development thread for 1.5

[AbsintheRed]

PS: it seems slower ín lategame then several Update before.

With which revision?
And what was the revision you used before?

 

[Force44]

Personally I don't think the problem with Poland is anything to do with its UP, it's much more to do with the sheer length of time between the spawn and the UHVs and the resultant lack of direction.

Other civs with similar long term UHVs like Germany and Arabia do at least have some interim goals - Germany has to conquer most of Europe but before that it has to conquer part of Europe, so there is something to work towards. Poland on the other hand has a huge gap between its spawn and the first two UHVs, both of which go in virtually opposite directions - one is all about improving territory and building large core cities to produce max food whilst the other is all about taking and holding cities in territory outside the core. So it is hard in the early period to remain focused on both at once and not go all out for one then miss the other.

Although having looked at your save gilgames, I don't think you have really played it as intended - the open ended nature of the religious UHV obviously implies this one should be done last. So the intention is to focus more on the food and military goals at first in order to meet the deadline which you don't seem to have done.

In particular it looks like you have beelined Printing Press in order to found Protestantism. There's no need to do that, and it certainly isn't historical or intended - you can just let Germany or whoever found it and then switch when asked. You've also researched Shipbuilding which is of no value to Poland. Also the time and effort spent getting Divine Right for Westminster Abbey is largely wasted - Poland doesn't get any instability or unhappiness from foreign religions so half the point of Religious Tolerance is gone anyway. And why build the Golden Bull when you have stayed in Apprenticeship? The amount of hammers spent on those wonders could have built your own SOD.

If you'd gone down the bottom of the tree, you'd probably be at Professional Army and Flintlock by now, so you would have a wall of pikes and muskets supported by Pistoliers who would eat up those Hungarian Huzars and Arquebusiers. I appreciate you want to play a richer game and not just focus on the UHV, but in my opinion (and it is just my opinion of course) you have ignored the 2nd UHV for too long and now are in a situation where you don't have a buffer to respond to unexpected setbacks and still win the game.

I dont know but westminster is a must in my every catholic civ game. Its just too powerfull (can u change it?) And alsó like to have protestantism as my own. Maybe just bad habit. I tried poland again and failed hard, germany defeated me. I have to try it again.
PS: it seems slower ín lategame then several Update before.
PS2: sorry my phone is very stupid. Infó just Now noticed that it autocorrect every word

@ Swarbs
I just wanted to say I enjoyed your post on how to enjoy the Polish talents and handicaps as they are right now.
I especially like how you manage to give direction on what to do through the Polish UP.
(in my words: "Don't build Westminster, you only receive half of the benefits other civilizations do, so effort (commerce and shields) allocated to something else has a relative higher yield.)
It gives some solution to the (additional) challenge for the Polish civ you stated.
(again in my words: "It is hard to come up with a good game plan at the start of the Polish game because it takes a long time before the first two UHV conditions can be achieved and meanwhile they continuously vie for attention and resources.")

@ gilgames
Do I understand correctly that you think Poland would be more fun if they had acces to more production?

If so, this is a pretty outrageous idea, but how about giving Poland two plots per population?
(for instance through unique buildings, granary (folwark) and smokehouse come to mind)
That will make the Polish cities smaller and simultaneously occupy more tiles. (to indicate a rural population and give more production per health)

 

[gilgames]

@ Absinthe i talk about rév. 1239 to 45.
@ Poland; it seems that poland is another kiev. And this is dissapointing. I always tried to play as a mire free civ. You are right its easy to lost focus.

 

[2phunkey4u]

Wow, strange.
Which revision do you use?
Do you happen to have a savegame before it happens, and if yes, is it reproducable?

Revisited the autosave and found out what happened. I accidentally double-clicked and switched to Aragon. In the attached game, Aragon gets destroyed on spawn. That's how I got defeated.

 

[Swarbs]

I dont know but westminster is a must in my every catholic civ game. Its just too powerfull (can u change it?) And alsó like to have protestantism as my own. Maybe just bad habit. I tried poland again and failed hard, germany defeated me. I have to try it again.
PS: it seems slower ín lategame then several Update before.
PS2: sorry my phone is very stupid. Infó just Now noticed that it autocorrect every word

I've never really found Westminster important, unless you mean to avoid instability from multiple religions? If so then yes it's important, but not for Poland as that instability is gone.

I've also never found Protestantism to be a large overall benefit tbh. Printing Press is too far down a narrow branch of the tech tree and doesn't lead to else that's vital. There are greater advantages, imo, in pushing Professional Army and Flintlock for military or Astronomy for colonies depending on the civ and UHV. Then just trade for Printing Press.

 

[AbsintheRed]

New commit is up, with some important AI changes.
A couple parts were fairly complex to code (and hard to test), so there might be need for further adjustments.
But the base code is now there
So I would love to hear some feedback, especially about civic changes and AI behaviour connected to missionaries&persecutors and religion spread + inquisition!

 

[gilgames]

I always wanted to ask but forgot, the 3 Palace(summer, papal) says: Reduce nearby cities maintenance. So pls define nearby. Does it have a range? Does it work through water? What amount or percentage does it reduce? These buildings seems so mysterious to me

I have some screen saves again
002: I swear to God I didn't Dow-ed anybody, but Byzance just respawned and it happened to other respawners too.
003-6-7: Recently it also happens to respawners, not always but often, they get archers instead of musketman or any unit that fits to their tech level.
008: is it intentional that a ship can apply blockade this way?
009: My land was soooooo far that we had a common border! ...a long border!
010: This is only 1 thing Yaroslavl has +4 happiness instead of +1 as in all other cities In the city it says: "Our state religion is the best!" So way it isn't in other cities or why it is there?

Also number 010 is my current russia game. and its is in the 17th century. Question: I waged war against ottomans, my stability was 1-10 sometimes 12 or 14. when I made peace it was 1 and it jumped back to 44 on the next turn. Is it really intentional to have that big differences? I know where does it came from! Mostly the "we wont fight-6" and other thing + unhealthiness ect. But imo ending a war is not that much a big deal in a nation's life as it was shown in stability numbers.

 

[merijn_v1]

003-6-7: Recently it also happens to respawners, not always but often, they get archers instead of musketman or any unit that fits to their tech level.

Oops, this is my fault.. I changed the code a bit, but it seems I made a mistake.

 

[gilgames]

Thats good, you can fix it pretty fast then

 

[AbsintheRed]

Reduce nearby cities maintenance. So pls define nearby.

It acts as a palace IIRC. Basically a second capital on maintenance calculations for city distance.

002: I swear to God I didn't Dow-ed anybody, but Byzance just respawned and it happened to other respawners too.

I also noticed this, there are some strange war declarations after respawn in some cases.
It's rare in my experience, and a little hard to investigate what is exactly the trigger for it.
Would need a savegame before the spawn, where it is reproducable. So far didn't encounter one in my games.

003-6-7: Recently it also happens to respawners, not always but often, they get archers instead of musketman or any unit that fits to their tech level.

Merijn did some python code reorganizations recently. He probably made another small mistake when updating theis part of the code.
It must be the code checking for the latest available unit of a given type for the civ.
EDIT: great, he already posted that he will fix the bug with his next commit

008: is it intentional that a ship can apply blockade this way?

Vanilla BtS rules, never changed anything in blockades for RFCE.
If pathing is involved it would take a fairly big effort to update it. Not really worth it. It might even cost a lot of processing power if it's get called often.

009: My land was soooooo far that we had a common border! ...a long border!

Probably just got the wrong text. Firaxis wasn't that consistent with those diplo refusal messages.

010: This is only 1 thing Yaroslavl has +4 happiness instead of +1 as in all other cities In the city it says: "Our state religion is the best!" So way it isn't in other cities or why it is there?

Not only Yaroslavl, but also Kyiv and Bratzlav have +4.
You have a cathedral in those cities.

Also number 010 is my current russia game. and its is in the 17th century. Question: I waged war against ottomans, my stability was 1-10 sometimes 12 or 14. when I made peace it was 1 and it jumped back to 44 on the next turn. Is it really intentional to have that big differences? I know where does it came from! Mostly the "we wont fight-6" and other thing + unhealthiness ect. But imo ending a war is not that much a big deal in a nation's life as it was shown in stability numbers.

Happiness (and healthiness) is an important factor in city stability calculations.
If war weariness was high in your cities, than it should be a big deal IMO.
With 20 cities if you had -1 stability on average from war weariness (which isn't that uncommon, especially if you are the agressor in the war), that's already 20 difference when the war is over.

 

[gilgames]

Happiness (and healthiness) is an important factor in city stability calculations.
If war weariness was high in your cities, than it should be a big deal IMO.
With 20 cities if you had -1 stability on average from war weariness (which isn't that uncommon, especially if you are the agressor in the war), that's already 20 difference when the war is over.

this means if you wage war with a big emipre, than do it fast or don't? So it is really intentional to a single war (even if I started) makes 40 points of stablity difference? seems too much to me, but...i am not against it, just strange and huge.

I dont even know what does it mean in the case of the Palace.

 

[AbsintheRed]

this means if you wage war with a big emipre, than do it fast or don't? So it is really intentional to a single war (even if I started) makes 40 points of stablity difference? seems too much to me, but...i am not against it, just strange and huge.

If you have a huge empire with many cities, don't be surprised if some of them declare independence if you are the agressor in a prolonged war.
War weariness should be an important factor IMO, resulting in destabilizing your empire unless you were very stable before the war.

Also you can't really measure this only on an empire level, number of cities is also very important.
How many cities did you have in that game? 50? Based on the picture it had to be something around that.

 

[AbsintheRed]

009: My land was soooooo far that we had a common border! ...a long border!

Probably just got the wrong text. Firaxis wasn't that consistent with those diplo refusal messages.

Did a quick check. Turns out it wasn't Firaxis, but Rhye.
He simply added the same DENIAL_TOO_FAR text, when added era restrictions to defensive pacts.
Was too lazy to imlement a separate one. I would have done the same though Actually I have never even checked those texts before

Anyway, maybe we don't even need those restrictions in RFCE.
The tech availabilty is enough for defensive pacts in this mod, right?

 

[Swarbs]

Did a quick check. Turns out it wasn't Firaxis, but Rhye.
He simply added the same DENIAL_TOO_FAR text, when added era restrictions to defensive pacts.
Was too lazy to imlement a separate one. I would have done the same though Actually I have never even checked those texts before

Anyway, maybe we don't even need those restrictions in RFCE.
The tech availabilty is enough for defensive pacts in this mod, right?

I agree to some extent, after all the history of Europe at the time was of defensive pacts and alliances between distant countries (England and Austria, Prussia, Portugal etc) to deal with common threats from the likes of France and Spain. So it seems odd that a distance restriction would apply to defensive pacts when they were often used by the great powers to intervene against rivals in other areas of Europe.

That said, for gameplay purposes it could increase diplo spam if you continually get defensive pact requests from far off nations which you have no intention of helping.

 

[Force44]

revision 1247

Free spearmen and missing citizens for Bulgaria.

~

Free spearmen


I tried to pick a fight with the barbs.


But they insisted on being my drinking buddies instead.

~

Angry citizens went missing after byzantine collaps.
(probably a bug)


The lack of booze in Tsarigrad due to previous barbarian drinking made unhappy Byzantine citizens leave after Byzntium collapsed.
(citysize 5, but only 3 citizens)

~​

attached savegames:
1st) the turn it happened
2nd) the turn before it happened (when I replayed the game it happened again a couple of turns later)

 

[AbsintheRed]

Hahh, nice finding!
The citizens are there though, just don't have any role given to them. Not even "citizen".
You can put them down to work on the fields, or assign them as specialists.

So while this is only a display issue, it might even come from vanilla Civ IV.
I don't think I have ever changed anything connected to this.
Even if it's possible in BtS, it's much more rare there. With no collapses, you might only encounter it when you totally conquer another civ.

 

[AbsintheRed]

@gilgames
Do you have a save with the blockade set up that way?
It might be connected to those forts through your territory.
If yes, I might have an idea how to solve it.

 

[merijn_v1]

Did a speed comparison to test the new updates.

Dutch loading time 500 AD scenario:
Revision 1238: 31 minutes
Revision 1248: sub 28, sub 25

The progress of the game (amount of living civs) is a huge factor on the gamespeed, and I don't know how much influence this has on the loading times, but I think the game should run faster now.
(Also, I have to run more Dutch starts to get a more reliable outcome. But I only wanted to get an indication on the speed increase)

 

[gilgames]

Idk the forts might cause the problem.
Again my russian start takes about 50 minutes. But i have an outdated laptop, its about 5 years old now or more.

 

[AbsintheRed]

Things are looking good, managed to improve both the diplo refusal stuff and the blockade rules