Feedback and Suggestions

[Kailric]

Native Diplomacy:

Could it be something like the fixing of vassals, you siad at one point they were acting as the same faction, or different factions, something like that, which was why things like taxing were not working properly.. could it be some kind of knock on effect from that?

As noted in the bug thread this has something to do with the delayed responses, refer to that for more info.

Stone Roads:
Could this be some kind of glitch with the fact that stone is now removed until discovered? Like it has broken the 'stone prereq' for stone paved roads and now they are just there?

It is possible I discovered the tech needed without realising, as you don't get a tech splash screen like bts, but I don't think I have.. like I said I thought it came after you get stone..

Look at your Tech Screen, stone roads will be marked as Cataloged. If they are not and you can build them then there is another kind of bug happening there.

Noble food:
It seemed to be so, I looked in one city and it went from +4 to +1 when I added a 'Recruit' to the city, something else may have been at work, but I don't think so. I haven't tried it with more units in more cities yet though.

I looked and they are set to 2 food, so something else was a foot. When you add a unit to a city the AI will shift around units if they are not locked so this may have happened. However, Nobles costing more food would be a good idea, especially under Feudalism Civic, and other Units could be looked at as well for this.

Civic Scaling:
I definately think the prices are good for the early game, I have just gotten to the point of activating all 5 civic types, I am at 1050ad-ish. (Normal Speed)

I don't know how it will effect me going forward, I have about 7-8 cities I think. I only really have plans to build one more which is my Nothern Trade Harbour(Unless South is closer/better) Any other city would just be for the sake of building the most massive empire I can(Oh and I need an Outpost for war engines). (I am still really bad at making Garrison Troops.. That is what I am trying to focus towards now.)

Well do keep this in mind. You can tinker with all the settings yourself in the CivicInfos if you feel it needs rebalanced and give us feedback on any changes you think works best.

 

[Nightinggale]

I looked and they are set to 2 food, so something else was a foot.

Disable the cache and see if that helps.

When you add a unit to a city the AI will shift around units if they are not locked so this may have happened. However, Nobles costing more food would be a good idea, especially under Feudalism Civic, and other Units could be looked at as well for this.

That would be piece of cake to add using CivEffects. However it would be stupid to add in another branch right now as it will only cause problems when merging with CivEffects.

 

[Kailric]

That would be piece of cake to add using CivEffects. However it would be stupid to add in another branch right now as it will only cause problems when merging with CivEffects.

We are not suppose to be making changes to the CivicInfos.xml right, is that what you mean.

The ability to do this is already in the mod as you can assign each individual unit a Food Cost, it is in UnitInfos however and wouldn't effect CivicInfos. Perhaps this could be added to UnitClassInfos, so that the whole class can be effected.

But, game balancing changes can be done after the merge of course.

 

[Trade Winds]

Some comments:

- Scouts only gain experience when surviving attack, I don't know if this is intended.

- I also like the civics maintenance. It makes you use you citizens to work in areas you'd rather not choose.

We could use this maintenance to penalize Tribalism, we could set up a food penalty to this civic so that we are in need to change as soon as possible, because to be sincere, I never change so that my population growth is due with regular citizens.

I imagine this is an xml change, so I could set it up in my game for testing purposes.

 

[Nightinggale]

We could use this maintenance to penalize Tribalism, we could set up a food penalty to this civic so that we are in need to change as soon as possible, because to be sincere, I never change so that my population growth is due with regular citizens.

CivEffects (including civics) can affect food in the following ways:

• food required for each unit each turn
• food required to grow a new unit
• food production modifier

It shouldn't be difficult to assign food penalties to tribalism.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

I think rather than a food penalty, it should produce something other than a Free Citizen, perhaps a Cottar or a Tribesman.

Just because it seems odd that tribalism gives you something akin to a Roman Citizen (At a time when citizenship has just collapsed and imploded on itself).

That being said, I think that I actually prefer serfs to citizens, as the food reduction (from serfdom) and the +1 field work are actually really strong for building up your cities, especially if you get some good high end immigrants early on (which can be a bit pot luck sometimes) who can manage the internal jobs list.

But I think a starting setup of something like a cottar, with wage labour giving Citizens makes more sense to me, as by this point you will be looking to train up specialists in schools, etc.

(As well as Wage labour just sounds like you have a more 'Rights' oriented society, as you are actually paying people to do their jobs instead of just whipping them if they don't!)

 

[Nightinggale]

This discussion is more related to game balance than technical issues. This is good because there has been too much focus in implementing new features and not really any focus on ensuring that gameplay and game balance still works.

Having said that, I would prefer to figure out how to handle civic upkeep and scale it and once we have a proper scaling upkeep, we can start to balance out the effects of each civic.

However we should do this work with CivEffecrts as that branch has rewritten some critical parts of the civic handling code.

 

[Kailric]

This discussion is more related to game balance than technical issues. This is good because there has been too much focus in implementing new features and not really any focus on ensuring that gameplay and game balance still works.

You never cease to amaze me I've been the only one adding new features and also the only one testing them. Mostly testing them for if they work. Now with this test release we can finally get some feedback on balance. So, yeah, its good.

I think rather than a food penalty, it should produce something other than a Free Citizen, perhaps a Cottar or a Tribesman.

Just because it seems odd that tribalism gives you something akin to a Roman Citizen (At a time when citizenship has just collapsed and imploded on itself).

Hmm, yeah a decent idea. Perhaps tribesmen could have penalties to certain industry labor, but bonuses to Combat. Or some other balancing effects.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

They could suffer from lack of fealty and law and religion probably, being all uncivilised and fiercely independent and generally prefering to stab things rather than 'bend the knee' to things, so they would be most unhelpful for getting your administration and fledgling empire in good order, which is where the wellborn come in. Then serfs come in to give you a specialised field labourer, so they become even worse in town (bad industy as well) but better in the fields as well as eating less than those gluttonous nobles and heathen tribesman.

 

[Kailric]

They could suffer from lack of fealty and law and religion probably, being all uncivilised and fiercely independent and generally prefering to stab things rather than 'bend the knee' to things, so they would be most unhelpful for getting your administration and fledgling empire in good order, which is where the wellborn come in. Then serfs come in to give you a specialised field labourer, so they become even worse in town (bad industy as well) but better in the fields as well as eating less than those gluttonous nobles and heathen tribesman.

Yeah, good suggestions. Here is a thought, we have 2 types of Citizens, the Industry Workers and the Laborers. But, we can have conflicts for each Citizen type depending on the current set up in the XML. Like for M:C at the moment, there are basically 4 types of Labor" civic citizens produced from food. And then we have Burgers being produced when you take on Guilds. This changes the Food born citizen, and so would seem to have a conflict as under Serfdom you produce Serfs. How to handle such conflicts is the question?

Night has it programmed I think so that the XML order determines which citizen gets to be chosen. But, this isn't really game environment friendly as players want know to look in the XML to see what citizen will be produced depending on their choices, not to mention it distracts from play. It could be made into an option selectable by the player. Or, we could rely on setting up "Prohibits Civics" options to prevent such discrepancies.

Another idea, we could have 3 citizen types. The Labor force, the City Dwellers, and then the Aristocrats. But, how would we obtain such units since there is only two Food sources. We could add a third food source, but perhaps, there could be other means to obtain Noble classes (or the other two). Something to think on...

 

[Nightinggale]

Night has it programmed I think so that the XML order determines which citizen gets to be chosen. But, this isn't really game environment friendly as players want know to look in the XML to see what citizen will be produced depending on their choices, not to mention it distracts from play.

I tried to make it XML modder friendly as if more than one growth unit is enabled, the unit with the highest ID will be selected. This mean the one written lowest in the unit info XML. The player has no control and if the XML modder isn't aware of this issue, cottars could gain the highest priority. However it was the best I could think of at the time.

Another idea, we could have 3 citizen types. The Labor force, the City Dwellers, and then the Aristocrats. But, how would we obtain such units since there is only two Food sources. We could add a third food source, but perhaps, there could be other means to obtain Noble classes (or the other two). Something to think on...

I have been thinking of removing the code related to luxury food. Instead the growth code could be made more dynamic to handle any number of growth yields.

I'm thinking something like making CivEffects contain an array to provide "allow points" for each unitclass and a player caches the combined points for each unitclass.

On unit growth, a list of valid units is created. If more than one, a popup is created where the player can select.

A valid unit is a unit, which is allowed by the player (obviously) and has a positive score of allow points.

Taking this one step further, unit info can contain growth yield. The player then has a bool array to cache which yields are growth yields for at least one valid unit.

The growth code can then loop the bool array and run the same code on all growth yields.

This approach use the allow feature from techs to enable and disable growth units (in case one is better than the other), it can be made into a nice GUI and is fully controllable from XML. Growth yields is whatever modders set in unit info and we can have any number of growth yields.

If we take this one step further, not all units may require eating food. They could require something else instead though, but that is a different issue.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

yeah in WHM I thought about a third food type for industrial age. I think actually I had 4 one for the classical and 1 for the medieval..

I kind of like the idea of a popup that lets you choose from a list of your active types, or we change some of those settings (maybe the cheese burgers) to be like the 33% chance setting like with benedictine monks on the (I think) theocracy civic, so then guilds gives you a more or less 1/3 growth for city labour, perhaps also unlocking them in the immigration screen as well.

So that way, the main 'labour' birth decision is made by the fifth column (Resist the Occupiers!!) and then any that are found in the other 4 are chances to get something more specialised. (Currently Monks and Bacon Burgers)

 

[Nightinggale]

I kind of like the idea of a popup that lets you choose from a list of your active types, or we change some of those settings (maybe the cheese burgers) to be like the 33% chance setting like with benedictine monks on the (I think) theocracy civic, so then guilds gives you a more or less 1/3 growth for city labour, perhaps also unlocking them in the immigration screen as well.

I didn't think of that

What to do about the chance of a better unit.... How about the allow score is also used for this. Each time a new unit is grown, all units growing with that food adds their score to an array. The unit, which is actually grown cost 100 points and the rest of the scores stays in the array, possibly capped at 120 or something. This way if we give a unit a score of 34, it will take 3 unit growths to gain the needed 100. Not 33% chance, but still one out of three can be that type of unit.

I'm not sure I like this approach though. Somehow it can easily feel overly complicated, both for coding and for playing.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

I can't speak for the coding side of it, but I do quite like the idea of the 1 out of X system, to replace the %chance.

It allows us to create civics(or whatevers) that allow for a partial transformation of society, rather than a complete change.
(Of course this could bring us back to the previous issue of what if you have 2 or more at the same time).

But I quite like the mix and match idea, so you could end up with 1 in 3 monks, 1 in 3 Chilli Burgers or a serf. This would allow for some quite cool population design, especially if we did things like limiting professions(or unit types!?!? I am thinking education upgrades) for certain types, so like a serf could not become a town specialist(right now a serf has to become a free citizen first right?), and a Quarter Pounder Burger cannot become a field specialist, then that 1 in 2,3,4,5 whatever system, could be quite interesting.

 

[Trade Winds]

I also like the idea of “eating” anything else to change class. A poor craftsman ceased to be a craftsman and began to be a rich merchant once they have money and commodities.

Could it be an open door to the system of using luxury goods for our own population rather than been only used to make money in the market screens?

 

[Lib.Spi't]

That was where my thinking was beginning to lurk too TW

 

[Nightinggale]

Could it be an open door to the system of using luxury goods for our own population rather than been only used to make money in the market screens?

That's one option, but I just thought of something else. What if unit info has an array of required yields? When the unit has a profession where it gains a bonus, it consumes the yields listed in that array. If you fail to supply those yields, the bonus goes away.

We have a number of options to consume multiple yields and somehow I wonder if the best would be to more or less implement DLL support for all of them and then by trial and error see what works best. This would have the added bonus that not all modmods would have to work the same way.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

You know me, the more xml toys the better!

I also like any idea that can expand the 'role' of all the trade yields, that by combinations of consuming these you get all kindss of different benefits, making each one important and not just 12 yields that all give varying amounts of gold. (although this will be more important if prices are more fluctuating) I really like the idea of yields taking on actually uses for both you and native/opponent civs.

That way natives 'eating' wine actually makes sense, as suddenly they are creating more...drunkenish? In their Civilization!

 

[Trade Winds]

@Nightinggale Oh, yes. I like your idea more.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

I quite like the combination of both systems