Dune Wars

[davidlallen]

AHR46
I started a game as Bene Gesserit, and I was the first to get the Great Houses tech, but I did not found the Landsraad religion. Is this from some of the code determining which factions can found which religions?

Yes, this is according to your design. The details of who cannot found a religion are shown when you view a religion in the civilopedia.

If so, it needs a visual indicator.

What indicator would you suggest? I thought about this a little and I could not find a convenient solution. The hover help for techs needs to be short, and I do not think there is room for a full list of the civs which can or cannot found it.

 

[Ahriman]

What indicator would you suggest? I thought about this a little and I could not find a convenient solution.

Is there a way to remove the "first to research this tech founds religion X" icon from the F6 tech tree if your faction is not able to found that tech? That would be most useful I think.
Or have it read "blocked for BG".

 

[davidlallen]

Is there a way to remove the "first to research this tech founds religion X" icon from the F6 tech tree if your faction is not able to found that tech? That would be most useful I think.
Or have it read "blocked for BG".

Just to make sure we mean the same thing, you said "icon" but you meant the hover help which pops up when you mouseover the icon in the tech tree, right? I can try to add text, "(Forbidden for your civilization)" after the "First to research" text.

 

[Ahriman]

Just to make sure we mean the same thing, you said "icon" but you meant the hover help which pops up when you mouseover the icon in the tech tree, right? I can try to add text, "(Forbidden for your civilization)" after the "First to research" text.

Well, either. One way would be to have the icon only display for some civs. The other would be to have the icon always displayed, but sometimes with (Forbidden for your civilization) in the mouseover.

AHR47
Imperial diplomat should require the Feudal Estate building.
Feudal estate building should require the imperium tech, not the faith tech.

 

[Ahriman]

AHR48
The fiefdom building (Imperial cathedral) gives +1 gold to nobles in all cities.
This was supposed to be a property of the Imperial religion shrine, not the cathedral. With multiple cathedrals, this can be far too powerful.

Fiefdom was intended to be:

Fiefdom. Gives +50% culture, +1 happy, +1 happy if Landsraad is state religion, +1 happy with Sardaukar cooperation resource, requires 3 feudal estates. Allows 2 citizens to be converted to noble. Requires tech: imperium.

Basically, happiness and culture.

The imperial shrine was supposed to be:

Great shrine: Imperial palace. Adds +2 free noble specialist, +1culture per city with this religion, +1 gold to all noble and great noble specialists in all your cities. Spreads religion. Can be built by great priest, great noble.

Until you can get the +1 culture per city working, I suggest you remove the +1 gold per city. Given how fast imperial spreads, this is really too powerful.

 

[Ahriman]

AHR49
Something is still slightly weird with transport loading.
You cannot unload from a transport if the transport has no movement points left. You must wait until the next turn.
This could be contributing to the AI problem where it isn't unloading its units, making the lowstrength transports easy pickings.

 

[davidlallen]

One way would be to have the icon only display for some civs.

I don't understand. The civs can still research the tech, they just don't found a religion with it. Why would I remove the icon? Anyway, I will do it the other way you suggested, by adding to the hover text.

Feudal estate building should require the imperium tech, not the faith tech.

This is not the way vanilla works. Suppose there is a late game religion like Islam. The founder obviously has the tech to build the temple either way. Suppose the religion spreads to another player who has the early tech Faith, but not the late tech (whatever founds Islam), and the second player converts. Should the second player be able to build a temple? In vanilla he can; in my current implementation he can; if I make the change you suggest, then he cannot. I can do it, obviously, but why is the vanilla approach wrong here?

 

[Ahriman]

I don't understand. The civs can still research the tech, they just don't found a religion with it. Why would I remove the icon? Anyway, I will do it the other way you suggested, by adding to the hover text.

What I meant was: you play as civ A, who can found religion B, and so the tech that founds religion B has an icon that displays "first to research this tech founds B". But when you play as Civ C, who cannot found B, then there is no icon on that tech that tells you it founds a religion.
That way players playing civ C would not be confused, thinking that the tech would give a religion to them when it doesn't.
But the mouseover chance is probably just as good.

if I make the change you suggest, then he cannot.

Yes, this is deliberate.

We want to give more incentive for actually researching the techs associated with a religion (eg jihad/theocracy for mahdi, golden path for quizarate, cybernetics for technocracy, imperium and landsraad for those, faith and sayyadinnas for shai hulad).
Otherwise its not really worth beelining the religion, and you can still get nearly all the religion benefits by letting it spread to you and adoptnig it.

And many techs are optional and basically do nothing but provide religious stuff. Why bother researching techs for a religion if you can get the benefits without getting those techs?

If you want to spread religion X or get its buildings, you should have to research the techs for it.

Also, I want to discourage the vanilla prospect where basically what you want is to get as many religions as possible in all your cities, so you can build all their stuff and spout massive benefits from religious buildings.

You should have to pick and choose more (especially when our religions represent support for different power groups, and so are mututally exclusive in some sense); this is one minor way of achieving that.

The other way, which is also tempting, would be to require not just religion X in a city to build its structures, but to require that you are State Religion X in order to build their structures.

On religions, I think we might have to tone down the Imperium spread - it becomes incredibly dominant. I will think about some values and test.

Another idea I had as a lever to tweak religion is to reduce the national limit on missionaries; religions will spread slower if you can only have 1-2 missionaries at a time.

 

[davidlallen]

What I meant was: you play as civ A, who can found religion B, and so the tech that founds religion B has an icon that displays "first to research this tech founds B". But when you play as Civ C, who cannot found B, then there is no icon on that tech that tells you it founds a religion.

OK, I misunderstood what you meant by icon. You are pointing out that in vanilla, each tech which can found a religion, has two variant icons: one has the overlay, or sub-icon or whatever we want to call it, for the religion and the other doesn't. So the pyramid icon in vanilla has one variant with the Jewish star on it and one without. Once somebody founds the religion, the game stops showing the variant with the star.

When I added the forbidden relationship between religions and civs, I took out all those variants. You never see the religion overlay sub-icon.

The difficulty with both the hover help and the variant icon is that the tech picker does not have easy access to the player ID. So it cannot tell whether to put the help or display the variant icon. This makes either change a little challenging. Plus with the variant icons, we need to rebuild the icons whenever the founding tech changes or when we change the art for the religion.

I will try again to add some information to the hover help, but it will be a little challenging.

 

[Ahriman]

AHR53
The Landsraad outpost gives +1 happy. It was not supposed to, it is too good with the happy (especially compared to the other temples).

Landsraad gives trade (route and yield) only.

 

[Ahriman]

AHR54
In 1.6 at least (didnt notice it before) the plantation art seems to be missing?

 

[davidlallen]

In 1.6 at least (didnt notice it before) the plantation art seems to be missing?

Curious. I can reproduce that but I am not sure why.

You are up to AHR52 in the 1.5 feedback thread. I think we are both suffering from "too many thread syndrome" :-(

 

[Deliverator]

I'm not sure everything is correct with the beta 1.6 FPK file. For example, Uranium has reverted from orange to green. It was made orange to distinguish it from crystal.

 

[Ahriman]

AHR55
Possibly mentioned before.

Could we:
a) halve the defense value of cultural defenses, so that level 1/2/3/... culture gives 10/20/30/... rather than 20/40/60/... ?
b) move from the vanilla defense system where Max[cultural defenses, city walls] applies, and instead move to the FFH system where [cultural defenses + city walls] applies?

This way, walls would always be worth building (never superseded by city defenses) and the assault value of melee would be better.
As it stands, melee ignore city walls, but don't ignore cultural defenses, so in practice you still have to knock down the city walls in order to be able to assault with melee.
Reducing the cultural value would make this less important.

 

[Dr_Floyd]

I just wanted to say what a brilliant mod. Fantastic atmosphere, intelligent changes (like water instead of food, great techtree) great music. Loved getting dropships so early in the game, allows for some really tactical games. Can't thank you enough for this mod.

 

[davidlallen]

Welcome to civfanatics and welcome to this mod!

Any feedback you can give about what you liked, and what you found missing, would be really helpful. The mod designers have had our noses in the details for six months, and new user input will help us spot things we have missed.

 

[davidlallen]

I'm not sure everything is correct with the beta 1.6 FPK file. For example, Uranium has reverted from orange to green. It was made orange to distinguish it from crystal.

Thanks. Somehow the reskinned uranium directory got lost. I put it back.

In 1.6 at least (didnt notice it before) the plantation art seems to be missing?

I need help to figure this out. The original directory is called "soilenr", and the plantation displays fine in game. Then I rename the directory to anything, say desert_plant, or xyz and modify the xml to match. Now it shows up correctly in the pedia but in game, placed with WB, it is invisible. I can place it, exit WB, and move the mouse over the plot to see it is there in the hover help. But it is invisible.

When I look at the nif in nifskope, all of the dds files have some long absolute path like c:\documents and settings\snydert\... Could this be causing the problem? There are more than 20 references, I got bored after changing the first 5-10 without knowing if this would solve the problem. I can simply leave the directory called soilenr and it will work, but I am curious *why*.

 

[arkham4269]

Hey davidlallen, long time no see one of your mods.

Have been taking a break from Orbis and The History of the Three Kingdoms since I found this mod. I must say it's really great.

My initial observations.
1. A small bug in that when I create my first settler, I get like 3-5 repeats of the pop-up telling me I've built my first settler. Doesn't crash anything, just a annoyance.

2. The religions seem a bit odd. I almost think you need to 'do away' with them and go with more of what you have in Fury Road or what they have in Planetfall of more of 'themes' of how to progress. Don't get me wrong, it just seems that most of the 'religions' should be in place at the beginning of the game. I mean the Fremen would have Shai-Haluud for example as the Harkonen and Atredies would have Landsraad. These 'religions' would stay constant for most of the game. I mean from my first impressions, Mahdi is really the only "new" religion that should spawn during the game.

So maybe the current religions could be made into civics that are available at the beginning of the game and the religions would have a lesser impact. Having not read the Dune series for awhile (just rewatched the original film and the Sy-Fy series somewhat recently) I can't say for certain what might be a different way to pursue this. Also, I'm not saying the current system is good; it just seems a bit weird that the Harkonen might actually found Shai-Haluud before the Fremen.

3. My only semi-complaint is that it seems too easy (or at least too early) to get a win w/terraforming. I was able (on Noble) to get a win after only 3 hours of play and I hadn't even gotten to Worm Riding! So perhaps the tech to get a terraforming victory might be moved later in the game?

4. I haven't played them yet so maybe I've missed this, but shouldn't the Ixians have a 'problem' like the Fremen or Atredies in that when those factions go for Arrakis terraforming there is a repercussion for certain Ixian units being created?

5. The Dune-O-Pedia didn't seem to have a section where you could look at the different victory conditions.

6. Plus, just a thought, have you considered perhaps doing something like what they did in the The History of the Three Kingdoms mod where the Emperor is a unit that is capable of being captured? In this I'm thinking that at some point in the game (whether by event or some metric being met) the Emperor shows up on Dune and is guarded by some Sardukar units. Maybe they might be 'alone' or maybe with the Corrino faction. Taking this unit means your faction becomes the new Emperor and would get certain benefits and disadvantages. I'm thinking it might be better to have the Emperor separate from the Corrino to show the possibility of in-fighting in the house. (I mean I could see Princess Wensicia possibly wanting to oust old Shaddam to put her son Farad'n on the throne.

7. Any plans to possibly allow a way for units to be bought from the Spacer's Guild? That was always a nice option in the game Dune 2000. Plus implied in the book, if the Fremen can bribe the Guild to keep their skies clear of spy satellites, it seems you should be able to try to 'buy' intel from the Guild, perhaps in the way of maps or a burst of espionage against a certain faction. Maybe even have a pop-up saying, "A Guildsman appears and says a rival is going to spy on you; they are paying X amount; for more we'll refuse"

8. Is there a problem with the Thumper promotion? I've never found a way to activate that function.

Anyway, I'm really enjoying the game. Though I must say the worms act a bit strange in that having workers out on the sand doesn't seem to attract them as much as I would have thought. Plus (and I'm sure this is a AI thing) I've noticed they often get 'attracted' to units in cities right on the border to sand and take forever to leave.

 

[The_J]

I need help to figure this out. The original directory is called "soilenr", and the plantation displays fine in game. Then I rename the directory to anything, say desert_plant, or xyz and modify the xml to match. Now it shows up correctly in the pedia but in game, placed with WB, it is invisible. I can place it, exit WB, and move the mouse over the plot to see it is there in the hover help. But it is invisible.

If it hasn't already been mentioned in the subforum: This improvement is sure somewhere in the PlotLSystem.xml mentioned, and it has to be changed also there (i guess).

 

[davidlallen]

If it hasn't already been mentioned in the subforum: This improvement is sure somewhere in the PlotLSystem.xml mentioned, and it has to be changed also there (i guess).

Ack! To be honest I have been modding for almost two years and never changed plotlsystem. I see it has lots of references to nif filenames in there, and in particular to the "soilenr" directory which I was complaining about. I will definitely update these, but a number of them have been wrong for some time (like since DW release 1.2 at least.)

Is it possible that the problem has to do with heightmaps? I have noticed that sometimes I can see plantations in sink, but not on rock, or sometimes I can see other improvements on rock but not in sink. I have not experimented with this much yet. Perhaps there is something in the nif which is sensitive to altitude, but not set up correctly? We are doing something unusual with our heightmaps that other mods have never tried.

I will try search/replace/fixup the plotlsystem file, and if I have a chance I will also try an actual experiment with different altitudes and the improvements.