ExtraModMod

[Terkhen]

1) "Culture" in civ4 makes me think more about "high culture" than culture itself, what with stuff like theatres providing a lot of culture and cities becoming "refined" when they have a lot of culture. I'd prefer to have an evil hippus leader with barbarian and other militaristic traits, and a neutral one with economic traits ( creative and something else I guess )

Civilization IV mechanics are skewed in favour of what have been the most advanced civilizations in each period of history (comes with the name of the game, I guess ), and assigns cultures that did not follow that path the same role those civilizations assigned them; warmongering brutes with whom diplomacy is impossible at worst, or insignificant up to the point of ignoring them completely (barbarians appear from nowhere, for example). That is why playing the mongols never fits their real history; the game does not really account for their way of life. I don't think that Fall from Heaven should follow Civilization IV definition of culture, and I already argued why I think that barbarians can have a strong culture in my previous post.

I also don't believe that the Barbarian trait is only suited to evil leaders. An evil leader always seeks to dominate in one way or another, and for non-clan leaders that would probably include those orc savages always surrounding their frontiers. A neutral leader is a better fit in my opinion, as it could mean that they don't strictly need to dominate those barbarians and that they aren't compelled to purgue them for being evil.

Another reason for neutrality is the direction that barbarians are taking in ExtraModMod. In my opinion, in Fall from Heaven the Barbarian trait does not only mean that a certain leader made peace with these barbaric people, but it also seems to imply being a bit like them (hence the research penalty). Barbarian in vanilla FFH seems to imply "at peace with some evil orcs that are not in the clan of embers" but I have always thought that having mostly orcs as barbarians came from coding limitations and not from an actual design decision in this direction (let me know if I'm wrong ). This is part of why lfgr's idea of Barbarian Cultures appealed so much to me. When this feature is finished, the game will have barbarian cultures that will not necessarily be evil; it does make sense to have some non-evil leaders with Barbarian too.

ExtraModMod also has a big share of evil Barbarian leaders already. Averax, Braeden (now proposed to be changed), Charadon, Hyborem, Weevil and the three clan leaders. The only neutral barbarian leader right now is Kane, so I believe that a Hippus one is a nice addition to the list.

I also don't want a second Hippus leader with purely militaristic traits; that is Tasunke's role. I wouldn't mind changing Charismatic in Uldanor to something even more oriented to military affairs, but IMO Charismatic fits the role better.

2) I think you are vastly underestimating the usefulness of "heal after combat" , it's essentially like having free March on all units which is extremely powerful ( and tons of fun for warmongering leaders ) .

March is superior for less powerful units. March can be used to heal faster after a big battle (for example after suffering collateral) without having to stop your war efforts for some turns. Heal after combat only triggers right after a single combat, and in most cases 10% will not recover all of the damage you suffered; therefore it is mostly useful to give your units a bit more durability in stack vs stack combats. Heal after combat is awesome for very powerful units, I agree... specially on the defensive. But normal units are more significant for winning big stack vs stack combats in my experience. Since Savage does not help those units at all, and its other effects are not very significant either, what we have is a trait that helps in only a few corner cases which is therefore underpowered.

3) imho "stealing" unique features from civilizations is just wrong, one of the main design goals of FFH2 is providing each civilization with a distinct gameplay. If we want to spice up a couple new leaders we can come up with a new mechanic, there's no need to borrow mechanics that are supposed to define a civ.

It is the same case than giving Barbarian to non-Clan leaders, Ingenuity to non-Khazad leaders or (more recently) Tolerant to Decius. The first two cases happened during vanilla Fall from Heaven times (Charadon got Barbarian, Mahala got Ingenuity). I already mentioned a lot of other features of the Doviello that would remain unique in my previous post. I also don't believe that the Doviello are defined by just this mechanic. Having said this, a specific proposal for a new mechanic for Savage could change my mind if it is better than what I came up with

Hi, I've been using this mod and enjoying it the past couple of days. Thank you all for the work you continue to do on this, it's great to see modders still dedicated to trying to perfect such a big project.

Welcome to the forums! I hope that you enjoy ExtraModMod and keep telling us what you think

There was a bug in MNAI which prevented dungeons from spawning, I'm not sure if it made it's way into EMM already.

ExtraModMod 0.5.0-beta1 should have that bugfix: https://bitbucket.org/Terkhen/extramodmod/commits/8e91eb9c3841f1b0f4f6d7c50bd013dbd22d42fa

I do have some weird error with EMM and Blue Marble - it works fine if I install EitB but doesn't work in MNAI or EMM. I'm so accustomed to it by now that without it map looks really ugly to me. I reinstalled Civ and all the mods to make sure the error I posted earlier isn't related to a faulty install, so I went with a clean install. Everything worked fine prior to that. Anyone has any ideas?

I have never used Blue Marble so I don't know if it is supposed to work or not. Are you using the Fall from Heaven version of Blue Marble or the regular one?

Because of that reason, I've been playing EitB instead of EMM and I want to ask about two major issues, balance-wise:
1) Pyre Zombies
2) Loki
Those two issues are something EitB didn't change much, and understandably. EitB is balanced around their own multiplayer pitboss/pbem games. For humans, Pyre Zombies are annoying and dangerous, but manageable. It requires some effort, but it is doable. For single player, it's a catastrophe. AI can't deal with Pyre Zombies and simply throws stack after stack at them until it losses horribly. In my last EitB game as Malakim, I've watched Sheaim take over every single civ on a large Pangea map with Pyre Zombies. I've beaten them down with several Life II mages later, but every AI fell without exception, including Doviello (casting Wild Hunt in late game and getting cca. 300 wolves didn't help), Clan, Khazad, Sidar, Lanun, Amurites.

Loki, of course is even worse. In multi, he's a 100% useless. You basically build him and delete him for Shrine of the Champion. A player can deal with him, simply DOW Balseraph as soon as you see Loki in early game if you're not a cultural leader. BUT, Like with Pyre Zombies, AI can't deal with him and if Balseraph start close to non creative civ, it's a joke. AI doesn't understand, so it just keeps pumping out cities for Loki to take over.

Has this been addressed in EMM or are there plans to address it?

Qgqqqqq already mentioned the biggest change to Pyre Zombies included in ExtraModMod. I remember that Tholal added improvements to how the AI uses and deals with suicidal units (fireballs, pyre zombies...) but I can't find the log. I have seen the AI using Pyre Zombies with some success, but I have never seen or had any reports about anything as extreme as you mention. What leader was leading the Sheaim in that game?

I disagree with Loki being remotely useless in multiplayer; my friends whine whenever I play Balseraphs. For starters, if you believe that humans are going to be a problematic target you can always target AIs. Killing Loki is not as easy as you say for a human player; for starters you need to declare a war and that may trigger other attacks while he's distracted, dealing with war weariness and so on. Actually killing Loki (specially if it is using puppets as a decoy or as extra defense) requires an investment of units and time that may cripple their early game expansion a lot.

Tholal has improved how the AI uses Loki in More Naval AI (and I include those changes) but I don't think that the AI has been taught to deal with Loki. In fact, it seems like something extremely difficult to do. A small improvement could be making the AI delay settling as long as a non-team Loki is nearby, but human players would just move away and then back once that the city is founded. Since human players are also relatively undefended against this strategy, I believe that the most useful measure would be to just increase the AI diplomacy penalties after a city is stolen, and forcing it to start preparing a warplan when the second one is taken.

Concerning Unicorn event, I do understand that the point of the story is to showcase just how much of a dark, not-your-typical fantasy FFH really is, but I only got that AFTER reading the story. It's very hard to connect the two just from the in game event. I think that it would be best to remove the event in its entirety, because, even after thinking about it, I can't find the format in which it would convey the point of the story on wiki.

I did not know about the lore story behind the event until this discussion started and [to_xp]Gekko mentioned it, but I never missed having different options. A free +1 health for the people of one of your cities is too good (with good meant from an alignment point of view) to let it pass. As I mentioned I would be willing to add a "do nothing" option that teaches the point of the event to players that select it, but I don't want to make any other changes to this event or to remove it.

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Sarmatian: Did you experience that game freeze on single player or in multiplayer? I loaded that game on single player and wasn't able to reproduce the game freeze after 5 or 6 tries. While hunting for OOS errors by making AIs automatically play on multiplayer I have found a game freeze bug which at first I believed to be related to your report. After 20 350 turn games on single player I did not manage to reproduce it, but on multiplayer it happens on nearly every game. It's driving me crazy :S

lfgr: It's not a priority right now, but do you think that proposing and discussing a schema of barbarian cultures along with their UUs could help on reducing the amount of work required for Barbarian Cultures?

Also, the only big feature remaining that I have planned for ExtraModMod is Victory Sharing. The team separation and diplomacy changes are already in place; I just need to tweak victories and other minor stuff and it'll be done for 0.5.0-beta2. After 0.5.0 I just plan to tackle some of the features tagged as FUTURE in the issue tracker for each major release, and to polish existing stuff by adding stuff like new art, events and so on. This leaves me with enough time for helping actively with BarbsPlus development, if you want. I wanted to ask you if there is something in the BarbsPlus tracker you want me to do, or if I could just help by picking up some of the minor tickets such as this one and providing patches for them.

 

[A Moon]

As I mentioned I would be willing to add a "do nothing" option that teaches the point of the event to players that select it, but I don't want to make any other changes to this event or to remove it.

Ooh, ooh, how about if you let it live, you get a result like this:

"A few days later, a scouting party encounters the unicorn again. Or at least, the parts of it that haven't been picked clean by scavengers already. Judging by the amount of bite- and claw-marks on the corpse, it would appear that this innocent creature was ill-suited for the wildlands of Erebus."

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

good points Terkhen, I did not understand the difference between March and "heal after combat" until you explained it. here's my proposal for Savage: change it to give free March promotion ( only for unitcombats that can get March naturally ) and -10% culture.

regarding Loki, I think you already pointed out the issue: the AI got thaught how to use him effectively, but NOT how to deal against him. I get that it's easier said than done, but it IS a big issue, using him against the AI is cheesy. imho AIs should declare war right before they lose a city, which is pretty much what a player would do.

 

[Sarmatian]

I have never used Blue Marble so I don't know if it is supposed to work or not. Are you using the Fall from Heaven version of Blue Marble or the regular one?

Version for FFH. Ironically, it worked with previous installation. It refuses to work now. Another weird thing happened when I loaded the game up for the first time after a new install - game displayed a message how my computer is below minimum specs and how graphics setting have been put to lowest to accommodate. Maybe that has something to do with it? I changed the setting manually later, of course, but I'm struggling to understand what might be the issue...

Qgqqqqq already mentioned the biggest change to Pyre Zombies included in ExtraModMod. I remember that Tholal added improvements to how the AI uses and deals with suicidal units (fireballs, pyre zombies...) but I can't find the log. I have seen the AI using Pyre Zombies with some success, but I have never seen or had any reports about anything as extreme as you mention. What leader was leading the Sheaim in that game?

Averax. He's the worst. Expansive allows him to REX effectively and set up an effective power base for Pyre Zombie domination.

To Qqqqqqqq... I meant no disrespect but the fact is AI can't deal with Pyre Zombies. All those changes you mention affect multi. I CAN deal with them, AI can't.

Capping collateral damage to something way less than 95% may give other AI a chance.

I disagree with Loki being remotely useless in multiplayer; my friends whine whenever I play Balseraphs. For starters, if you believe that humans are going to be a problematic target you can always target AIs. Killing Loki is not as easy as you say for a human player; for starters you need to declare a war and that may trigger other attacks while he's distracted, dealing with war weariness and so on. Actually killing Loki (specially if it is using puppets as a decoy or as extra defense) requires an investment of units and time that may cripple their early game expansion a lot.

If it is human player only multi (no AI) he's almost useless. You'll get DOW as soon as another player spots him.

If there are AI's in the game, he can be used effectively to mess with them, to the detriment of other players.

Tholal has improved how the AI uses Loki in More Naval AI (and I include those changes) but I don't think that the AI has been taught to deal with Loki. In fact, it seems like something extremely difficult to do. A small improvement could be making the AI delay settling as long as a non-team Loki is nearby, but human players would just move away and then back once that the city is founded. Since human players are also relatively undefended against this strategy, I believe that the most useful measure would be to just increase the AI diplomacy penalties after a city is stolen, and forcing it to start preparing a warplan when the second one is taken.

We need to keep in mind the entire picture. A lot of map scripts place civs rather close to each other. It's not uncommon (in fact, it's rather common) for Loki to steal first (non capital) city of another civ. Losing a city so early is HUGE, even more so in FFH with increased cost of settlers. The AI that losses a city is out of the game in most cases. If it losses the second city to Loki, it's over 100%. There's no chance to get back into it.

Now, to take a city that early by conventional means, it takes a huge effort and investment, which may or may not pay off. With Loki, you can conquer MULTIPLE cities with ONE unit WITHOUT declaring war. On monarch and up, you need 8 warriors to have a remote chance of taking an AI city, and you'll lose most of them.

The only games Loki isn't a problem is if Balseraph are boxed in by Creative civs or if first neighbours are really far away.

I'm afraid Loki needs drastic measures.

In short, either Sheiam or Balseraphs are present in the game, the will usually dominate, by a big margin. Depends on a lot of factors, map size, starting land, neighbours etc... but in most cases it is unavoidable.


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Sarmatian: Did you experience that game freeze on single player or in multiplayer? I loaded that game on single player and wasn't able to reproduce the game freeze after 5 or 6 tries. While hunting for OOS errors by making AIs automatically play on multiplayer I have found a game freeze bug which at first I believed to be related to your report. After 20 350 turn games on single player I did not manage to reproduce it, but on multiplayer it happens on nearly every game. It's driving me crazy :S

Single player. Did some map editing in WB at the beginning but that's it. I thought it might be an issue on mine side, as no one else reported anything, so I did a clean install but now I can't get Blue Marble to work.

 

[Qgqqqqq]

To Qqqqqqqq... I meant no disrespect but the fact is AI can't deal with Pyre Zombies. All those changes you mention affect multi. I CAN deal with them, AI can't.

Capping collateral damage to something way less than 95% may give other AI a chance.

Sure, point taken

I don't know Terkhens view, but I know that I'm not going to cap their damage any lower. I've been considering moving it to 99, tbh.

 

[Terkhen]

Ooh, ooh, how about if you let it live, you get a result like this:

"A few days later, a scouting party encounters the unicorn again. Or at least, the parts of it that haven't been picked clean by scavengers already. Judging by the amount of bite- and claw-marks on the corpse, it would appear that this innocent creature was ill-suited for the wildlands of Erebus."

I like it! I think that it explains the point of the event perfectly

good points Terkhen, I did not understand the difference between March and "heal after combat" until you explained it. here's my proposal for Savage: change it to give free March promotion ( only for unitcombats that can get March naturally ) and -10% culture.

I like the March idea. Currently Savage is granted to Archery, Melee, Mounted, Recon and Beast units, while March can be accessed by Beast, Disciple and Melee units. Savage does not fit much with Disciples or Archers, but I'd like to keep it on at least Recon units too. I would like to keep the immunity to fear and the access to Cause fear. The -10% culture fits the trait a lot. It would hurt the Doviello but it also fits them, and I was torn between keeping Savage as a civilization trait or removing it, so it may be a good idea. Therefore, the trait could work as follows:

Savage: Grants the Savage promotion to Melee, Recon and Beast units (and maybe Mounted units?). The Savage promotion grants immunity to fear, the ability to heal on enemy and neutral lands and increased healing (exactly like March does) and allows to select Cause Fear along with Combat V.

regarding Loki, I think you already pointed out the issue: the AI got thaught how to use him effectively, but NOT how to deal against him. I get that it's easier said than done, but it IS a big issue, using him against the AI is cheesy. imho AIs should declare war right before they lose a city, which is pretty much what a player would do.

Maybe that would be the best idea, yes.

Version for FFH. Ironically, it worked with previous installation. It refuses to work now. Another weird thing happened when I loaded the game up for the first time after a new install - game displayed a message how my computer is below minimum specs and how graphics setting have been put to lowest to accommodate. Maybe that has something to do with it? I changed the setting manually later, of course, but I'm struggling to understand what might be the issue...

I get that "below minimum specs" message whenever I reinstall Civilization IV or delete my ini file. It seems that CivIV's ancient engine cannot understand today's computers and think that they are old. I've always ignored it.

Averax. He's the worst. Expansive allows him to REX effectively and set up an effective power base for Pyre Zombie domination.

To Qqqqqqqq... I meant no disrespect but the fact is AI can't deal with Pyre Zombies. All those changes you mention affect multi. I CAN deal with them, AI can't.

Capping collateral damage to something way less than 95% may give other AI a chance.

In my experience the AI suffers when dealing with Pyre Zombies (so do I, honestly), but it can deal with them. I've never seen what you mention happen in ExtraModMod, even when we are the ones in control of the Pyre Zombies. It's relatively simple to conquer the AI with them, but it also is quite simple with nearly any valid strategy. At which difficulty do you play?

I would also like to mention that Averax is Imperialistic in EMM, and the pyre zombie cap is 90%, not 95%. The scenario you are mentioning seems to fit with Erebus in the Balance; is it possible that your problematic games against the Sheaim have been played with that mod? More Naval AI has added a lot of incremental improvements to AI since EitB separated from it and in these years the AI has become better at handling wars. Besides the general improvements, I believe that some of the AI changes were specific improvements to this kind of units (via the bExplodeInCombat XML tag).

If it is human player only multi (no AI) he's almost useless. You'll get DOW as soon as another player spots him.

That's not my experience, as I mentioned in my previous post. If the people I play with declared war to me as soon as they see Loki, that would serve my purposes too. I would just use Loki to annoy them and move it around their lands while ignoring their declaration of war and focusing on my economy. Early game economy is vital and if they don't focus on it they will be defeated.

If there are AI's in the game, he can be used effectively to mess with them, to the detriment of other players.

Well, that's the whole point of Loki, messing with other players for your benefit.

I'm afraid Loki needs drastic measures.

I see your points, although in my opinion they are not as severe as you say. Nevertheless, I'm interested in which drastic measures you believe he needs. As it is happening with the Savage case, I'm always open to changing features if a good proposal that solves all problems and is more fun comes through.

I don't know Terkhens view, but I know that I'm not going to cap their damage any lower. I've been considering moving it to 99, tbh.

My original problem with Pyre Zombies was that they were able to kill with just collateral damage. The EitB changes fixed that and, as I mentioned earlier, in my experience they are powerful but not game breaking (against both human players and the AI). I'm not sure if the cap should be increased from 95, though... In ExtraModMod the cap is actually 90%. Pyre Zombie explosion was heavily nerfed by my nuclear banhammer approach to balance in the first version (from which I hope to have moved away and learned from in these years). When the first feedback posts made me see the error of that change (among others), between the cap values they suggested I chose the lowest one. After that change the Pyre Zombies have always felt right for us, although we probably wouldn't even notice the difference if it went up by 5%.

Reading those first posts made me feel nostalgic, and thankful to everyone who has posted in this thread for all the feedback and help I have been getting in these years

 

[A Moon]

I like it! I think that it explains the point of the event perfectly

Death! Death to the pointy horse!

 

[Terkhen]

Death! Death to the pointy horse!

Maybe this is a conspiration and the Princess Rule does not apply to unicorns as much as we think...

 

[lfgr]

To throw in my interpretation of barbarians (as in barbarian player, not the trait):
Barbarians represent all those states/nations/groups etc. which are not important enough in terms of diplomacy (especially war/peace), trade (trade routes) and culture (real-life culture, which is really difficult to define, as well as "influence", which is strongly connected to culture in civ) to be real civs, but important enough in terms of warfare to have units and cities.
This strict definition is violated in FfH/MNAI in certain aspects (which is not necessarily bad): Acheron's city, which produces culture, and barbarian workers, which build roads (I think that is specific to MNAI).
It is obvious that there are certain holes in this model; what about groups that are important in another aspect than warfare, but not in others? In RFC, some are represented by the Independents (in a rather clunky implementation), with which you can implicitly sign peace treaties and have trade routes (AFAIK) and which you can fight.

In my impression, FfH has a lot less nations and states than the real world has (RFC is supposed to simulate the history from 3000 BC to today), and the members of one "nation" are more likely to belong to the same state (a state ruled by a semi-god is not very likely to break up).
Still, firstly, there are certain civs that are explicitly excepted from that (Lanun, Doviello, Clan, Hippus); and secondly there are definitely also non-orcish bandits in Erebus. To me it's pretty clear that there are also independent cities (I just can't imagine the whole world is distributed among the civs, but I can't think of any evidence of this in the lore).
These are the reasons why I think non-orcish barbarian units and cities are appropriate.
I would like to tie the emergence of certain units and cities to the location of the civs mentioned above (especially Doviello and Hippus; I think pirate-style Lanun cities and orcish cities would fit everywhere), but this is not of high priority.

I think the barbarian trait should be interpreted as a general shift to the direction of the barbarians. Barbarians don't fight each other in game (though they obviously do so in reality), so the peace with barbarians is appropriate. The -10% beakers indicates that they are especially barbarian in terms of technology (more scavenging than researching), but I really have no strong opinion on the Barbarian/Creative combo. If it's fun...

ExtraModMod 0.5.0-beta1 should have that bugfix: https://bitbucket.org/Terkhen/extramodmod/commits/8e91eb9c3841f1b0f4f6d7c50bd013dbd22d42fa

Hm, so I have to test that.

lfgr: It's not a priority right now, but do you think that proposing and discussing a schema of barbarian cultures along with their UUs could help on reducing the amount of work required for Barbarian Cultures?

Yes, definitely. I already some things I want to do with it above.

This leaves me with enough time for helping actively with BarbsPlus development, if you want. I wanted to ask you if there is something in the BarbsPlus tracker you want me to do, or if I could just help by picking up some of the minor tickets such as this one and providing patches for them.

Yes, of course! I went through the issue tracker and opened all issues which I consider ready for implementation. Apart from that, there are some creative things to do, like adding new animals and exploration outcomes, if you like that. I have no preferences at the moment; I mentioned in the issue tracker what is already partly coded by me.

 

[DarkLunaPhantom]

Infernal can't build Mercurian Gate, right? But whoever is in a team with Infernal can. It doesn't seem right.
And civilization descriptions aren't properly updated when someone with a team size 2 builds Mercurian Gate.
Also it would be nice if the effect of the Gate is listed in mouse-over description and not only in civilopedia.

 

[Terkhen]

To throw in my interpretation of barbarians (as in barbarian player, not the trait)

That's nicely explained, I agree with your interpretation. I would add that there are three groups of barbarian units that should be deemed as exceptions to the general rule and which do not fit quite rightly into the barbarian cultures definition. Neither of these factions would care much about the similarities with other barbarians that the Barbarian trait implies.

• Acheron city (already mentioned)
• Demons
• Winter (Frostlings and friends)

None of these groups should be at peace with leaders with the Barbarian trait, but Multibarb is something for the far future. I prefer to help in finishing BarbsPlus and tackle Multibarb once that is stable.

Yes, definitely. I already some things I want to do with it above.

Lately I find myself with free time while being far away from my development environment, so I can also help with non-coding tasks like this one. I will come up with a proposal and present it for discussion.

Yes, of course! I went through the issue tracker and opened all issues which I consider ready for implementation. Apart from that, there are some creative things to do, like adding new animals and exploration outcomes, if you like that. I have no preferences at the moment; I mentioned in the issue tracker what is already partly coded by me.

Okay, once I finish catching freezes and OOS errors I will start. I will try to focus on simple coding stuff and adding new content for starters, and I will also answer to some of the issue comments you made.

In order to make things easier for both of us I could create and work upon a fork and once I have stuff ready we could give pull requests a try. It seems cleaner and simpler than discussing development topics here or via PM. What do you think?

Infernal can't build Mercurian Gate, right? But whoever is in a team with Infernal can. It doesn't seem right.

Infernals should be able to build the Mercurian Gate. If they can't, it is a bug. See: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=5216329&postcount=23

And civilization descriptions aren't properly updated when someone with a team size 2 builds Mercurian Gate.

I'm sorry, what do you mean?

Also it would be nice if the effect of the Gate is listed in mouse-over description and not only in civilopedia.

You are right. I have added it, the text will appear in mouse over description of future versions.

 

[Qgqqqqq]

Reading those first posts made me feel nostalgic

Me too...and more than a bit annoyed at how horrible my posting used to be. Apologies, everyone who's still here.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

Terkhen, if you want to bring more variety to minor leaders I can think of a couple warmongering traits that could be added: Conqueror for free City Raider and Skirmisher for free Flanking ( also some cheap buildings, based on affected unitcombats ). Defensive could gain free city defender, similar to vanilla Protective, to make it a bit more competitive.

regarding Loki, he is immediately available and costs 200 hammers which is a ton early on... I think it might be a good idea to have him require Festivals, so that the AI doesn't build him early on instead of settlers/workers/warriors.

 

[DarkLunaPhantom]

I'm sorry, what do you mean?

Two civilizations X and Y formed permanent alliance and their names changed to X-Y Alliance. Then one of the built The Mercurian Gate and when Mercurians spawned they were called X-Y-Mercurian Alliance but both X and Y were still named X-Y Alliance.

 

[lfgr]

In order to make things easier for both of us I could create and work upon a fork and once I have stuff ready we could give pull requests a try. It seems cleaner and simpler than discussing development topics here or via PM. What do you think?

Looks interesting, I think we should give it a try.

 

[Terkhen]

Terkhen, if you want to bring more variety to minor leaders I can think of a couple warmongering traits that could be added: Conqueror for free City Raider and Skirmisher for free Flanking. Defensive could gain free city defender, similar to vanilla Protective, to make it a bit more competitive.

With the number of leaders we have right now, I don't think that more traits should be added. I would consider adding more traits if more "Extra" (also known as non-canon) leaders needed to be added; adding a new trait requires a lot of trait juggling and most of the leaders already feel settled to me. I agree with Defensive requiring something, though. I wouldn't mind buffing it a bit, including it in some leaders and changing the ones who have it. Having said that, vanilla Protective has always felt boring to me. I'm thinking that Defender could instead get a better CombatPercentInBorders, which is its defining feature (only the Homeland promotion has it), and withdrawal chance could be removed.

regarding Loki, he is immediately available and costs 200 hammers which is a ton early on... I think it might be a good idea to have him require Festivals, so that the AI doesn't build him early on instead of settlers/workers/warriors.

Early shenanigans are a big part of what makes Loki fun. I would prefer another way to let the AI know what it should do.

Two civilizations X and Y formed permanent alliance and their names changed to X-Y Alliance. Then one of the built The Mercurian Gate and when Mercurians spawned they were called X-Y-Mercurian Alliance but both X and Y were still named X-Y Alliance.

Where do those names appear?

Looks interesting, I think we should give it a try.

Okay, will do

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In other news, I found why the game options were not being stored. In its ini file, vanilla FFH2 sets ForceGameOptions to 1, and therefore game options are always loaded from the XML files. I'm pondering including my own Fall from Heaven 2.ini file with this value set to 0. Would this cause problems to anyone? I don't know if someone likes to modify this file for some reason. I have also found that the game freeze I thought I had found was created by how I test multiplayer games (and making me lose a week ). As a result of this, I won't be able to test for OOS errors until I find and setup a free VM that is not as buggy as VirtualBox. I'll commit a fix for the Puppet States one (tested in SP so I don't break anything) and ask for testing in MP once that beta2 is released.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

I would not remove the withdrawal from Defensive, it synergizes well with some strategies like sidar waning and hippus/kuriotates mounted line

 

[Jayuk]

Thanks for your work on this, I am looking forward to trying it out!

Just one question, which of the included mapscripts would you recommend for the use with your mod?

Thanks.

 

[Terkhen]

I would not remove the withdrawal from Defensive, it synergizes well with some strategies like sidar waning and hippus/kuriotates mounted line

In ExtraModMod, no Sidar leaders have Defensive. Neither do the Hippus. In fact, the only leader who actually has Defensive is Cheron, meant to be a buff that Cardith could not imitate.

Thanks for your work on this, I am looking forward to trying it out!

Welcome to the CivFanatics forums! Thank you, I hope you like ExtraModMod.

Just one question, which of the included mapscripts would you recommend for the use with your mod?

My favourite is Erebus_mst, although many people around here disagree. MapScripts with names that finish with _mst come from MapScriptTools, and they include many nice features. You can check their descriptions in the mapscripttools_readme.txt file included in the ExtraModMod download, or in its website. Erebus Continents and World of Erebus are also used a lot, although I don't like them that much. I recommend that you start a game with the mapscript that seems more fun for you, and that you try new ones in following games.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

I disagree with the idea of replacing tech trading with tech diffusion.

Tech trading is a transparent system that requires player involvement and gives immediate feedback. Tech diffusion is much more passive and obscure, and I think it should be a minor aspect of gameplay instead of replacing tech trading.

In my opinion tech diffusion should just be a rubberband mechanic that allow less fortunate civs to not be completely left behind in the tech race.

Tech trading also allows the option of focusing on military and then getting techs from peace treaties with rivals, which is a very viable option in ffh2.

With "no tech brokering" enabled tech trading is a balanced and well functioning feature of the game, there really is no need to remove it.