Fixed borders idea: uneven spreading of culture

[os79]

Oh, this!?

Going to subscribe to this by posting something here !

Good idea, you two! I had played a game with this included and I have to say my city growth and building improvements are interesting now .

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

Three suggestions based on my first experience with this in AND 1.73beta3.

1. Increase the probability that the expansion will get a plot which has a visible resource in it.
2. When expansion happens at least one plot is gained. I had a city surrounded by hills and forest expand its cultural boundaries to level 2 and it got no new plots.
3. Increase probability of getting a plot which would join to another plot of the same culture. Eg horizontal or vertical connection to another cities culture. Also fill in areas surrounded by your culture.

 

[Killtech]

Three suggestions based on my first experience with this in AND 1.73beta3.

1. Increase the probability that the expansion will get a plot which has a visible resource in it.
2. When expansion happens at least one plot is gained. I had a city surrounded by hills and forest expand its cultural boundaries to level 2 and it got no new plots.
3. Increase probability of getting a plot which would join to another plot of the same culture. Eg horizontal or vertical connection to another cities culture. Also fill in areas surrounded by your culture.

agree on that. furthermore culture spread on ocean plots is way too fast. since the economy radius of cities has increased to 3 in AND culture borders can go quite deep into the oceans (up to 3 water) frequently allowing ocean passages to distant continents for early ships. please fix that and set ocean tiles to have similar culture spread penalty as forests or mountains (except when a ocean resource tiles). coast tiles can stay the same.

 

[phunny_pharmer]

@Killtech, @Dancing Hoskuld

I've been having trouble with the caching mechanism, as it causes errors in release builds. As soon as I get that, I'll update the version I sent to Afforess for inclusion.

I've made it so that ocean squares (non coast) act like peaks and take 2 additional expansions in order to spread. I already had identified that and put it in my current build

I've also adding four new cultural levels (I'm thinking of names, but "notable" between refined and legendary is one of them) so that cities have more cultural expansions for the same amount of culture. While this won't get rid of the problem that Dancing Hoskuld points out, it will mean that there are more expansions in total -- so that you will eventually spread culture to lots more tiles. Thus, while I can't guarantee each expansion will get a new tile, there will be more of them so that more tiles eventually will culture will be generated in more places. As a side positive benefit, this will allow large and very developed cultures to spread influence far beyond their actual fixed borders if rivers, mountains, and oceans aren't in the way.

Given the number of bugs I've hit, I don't think anything is going to come until later in the week. Apologies. Afforess, I highly suggest you make my mod something conditional if you include it in the main build at all.

 

[os79]

@KillTech,

I am guessing you had played strategy games for so long that you intuitively discover weaknesses and exploit them so quickly. If so, please don't assume that other players are at your level yet . For me, the culture is spreading way too slow .

 

[Killtech]

@phunny pharmer

no need to apologize for good work. as for making it optional i'll wait until at least one person complains about it.

DH suggestions are good but there's no hurry in implementing them. it's well playable as it is. so take your time.

as to guarantee borders expansion: it just looks weird when you get the message that your borders expanded when you can clearly see they didn't. except for that it's not relevant.
to implement this you could just memorize the tile that missed the expansion conditions most closely (if you find 2 that were same close you pick randomly) while counting the tiles the borders expanded during the calculation process. if no expansion took place you just expand to that best matching tile.

@KillTech,

I am guessing you had played strategy games for so long that you intuitively discover weaknesses and exploit them so quickly. If so, please don't assume that other players are at your level yet . For me, the culture is spreading way too slow .

lol, you got me. what's worse is that i'm a mathematician. a trained analytic to find every weak point in an idea.

 

[phunny_pharmer]

@Killtech

New plan -- as opposed to saying that the cultural borders have expanded, I'll make it say that "the city's cultural level has increased". If I were really good, I'd make it tell you how many new tiles you've claimed, but perhaps I'll leave it as a homework exercise for the mathematicians in the group ;-)

@os79

The extra cultural expansions should somewhat address this problem. Also, as the AI doesn't expressly know about this feature (it will know that certain tiles aren't workable, but won't necessarily know that it needs to chop a forest / generate more culture in order to work it), adding additional levels may help the AI get resources in its BFC squares more quickly.

 

[Killtech]

@Killtech

New plan -- as opposed to saying that the cultural borders have expanded, I'll make it say that "the city's cultural level has increased". If I were really good, I'd make it tell you how many new tiles you've claimed, but perhaps I'll leave it as a homework exercise for the mathematicians in the group ;-)

works for me too.

lol, i see you have some math backgroud too. 'leaving this proof as an exercise to the interested reader' is among one of my favourite proof argumentations in mathematical books close after the intimidating proof: 'this is trivial!'

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

@os79

The extra cultural expansions should somewhat address this problem. Also, as the AI doesn't expressly know about this feature (it will know that certain tiles aren't workable, but won't necessarily know that it needs to chop a forest / generate more culture in order to work it), adding additional levels may help the AI get resources in its BFC squares more quickly.

But the AI (and me) doesn't work areas outside its cultural boarder, chop forest, so as to spread culture at the next level!

 

[os79]

But the AI (and me) doesn't work areas outside its cultural boarder, chop forest, so as to spread culture at the next level!

I automate my workers after I have two of them in a set. So that will be a nice change when he code AI into having to chop down the area that was originally available anyway. If he can code the AI, then that should help automated workers to go out and chop .

 

[phunny_pharmer]

@Afforess Tracked down the bug and now have a stable release build. However, I want to add the additional culture levels before releasing the code to for inclusion.

@The rest of you: I need some creativity help with naming for culture levels. I want ten of them total, excluding the "none" level. Right now, I have the following. Note new names are in caps.

0. none
1. MINIMAL
2. poor
3. fledgling
4. PROVINCIAL
5. developing
6. refined
7. NOTABLE
8. SOPHISTICATED
9. influential
10. legendary

I'm least happy with the name "sophisticated", and would like to find a culture level name to stick between developing and refined. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

A city at level 4 (current name "provincial") will be guaranteed to be able to work its standard BFC, including any peaks or forested hills. Cities less than this will not be able to work such tiles unless they are one of the eight free squares around the city.

Assuming that a city has an even mix of tiles with cultural distance 1, 2, and 3 in any direction from the city, this means that a legendary city should spread influence on about five squares in any direction. However, due to the fact that the minimum distance is used, I would expect that legendary cities near the equator will have cultural ranges of 5-8 in many directions. This does not seem unreasonable to me based on the civ games that I've played. However, if the crowd is in favor of additional cultural levels, I'll add them.

Someone mentioned disliking "islands" of unclaimed territory after a couple of border expansions, especially jungle and peak tiles which are completely surrounded by a civ's culture but not yet claimed. I actually think this is the coolest thing about the mod. There are many sophisticated civilizations which were able to build fairly large cities and rule the plains, but weren't able to spread their rule into the highlands or jungle for a long time. I really like how this mod mimics that; if I get a chance, I'm going to take the next step and make barbarian uprisings more likely to occur at these isolated islands of cultural resistance ("we want to protect our way of life"). If you want your distant peaks and jungles, you're going to have to fight for them. Otherwise, you're going to have to defend your plainslands from marauders from such areas.

@Killtech I'm actually going for a doctorate in computer science. Proof by code is perfectly acceptable to me for some things ;-)

 

[konradcabral]

@The rest of you: I need some creativity help with naming for culture levels. I want ten of them total, excluding the "none" level. Right now, I have the following. Note new names are in caps.

0. none
1. MINIMAL
2. poor
3. fledgling
4. PROVINCIAL
5. developing
6. refined
7. NOTABLE
8. SOPHISTICATED
9. influential
10. legendary

I'm glad to see cultural levels being modded. If you look threads opened by me, I proposed something like that a very long time ago... Back then, I wrote some names. These were:

1) Uncultured
2) Surviving
3) Incipient
4) Developing
5) Living the Good Life
6) Refined
7) Influential
8) Worldwide Influential
9) Mankind Patrimony
10) Universal

My 2 cc.

 

[Arakhor]

I think that single adjectives are best for the level titles. However, you could switch 8 and 9 around and end on "Notable, Influential, Sophisticated, Legendary". I particularly like 'Provincial'.

 

[Killtech]

some alternative words for culture developement:
1) desolate, minimal
2) primitive, barbaric, uncivilized
3) civilized,
4) provincial,
5) developing, cultivated,
6) established, major, prominent, rafined
7) significant, famous,
8) influential,
9) ascendant, dominant, monumental, marvelous,
A) supreme, legendary, european

@Killtech I'm actually going for a doctorate in computer science. Proof by code is perfectly acceptable to me for some things ;-)

ah yes, the good ol' four color problem. well i accept the proof in the sense that i won't try to find a counterexample... but the proof really isn't helpful for any further theoretical analysis.
but anyway i'm practical in this matter: as long as i don't have to work with colorful maps i just don't bother myself deciding if it's acceptable.

 

[os79]

What about replacing SOPHISTICATED with PRESTIGIOUS?

 

[phunny_pharmer]

Thanks for the suggestions. Ultimately, while I didn't follow any of the patterns that were suggested, they helped me think of other cool adjectives for cultural levels as well as a more appropriate ordering. I've adapted my latest thinking into the following twelve non-zero culture levels.

NONE: 0
MINIMAL: 1-9
POOR: 10-49
FLEDGLING: 50-99
PROVINCIAL: 100-499
DEVELOPING: 500-999
ESTABLISHED: 1,000-4,999
NOTABLE: 5,000-9,999
REFINED: 10,000-24,999
SOPHISTICATED: 25,000-49,999 (still looking for a better name, but don't really love what I've seen so far)
INFLUENTIAL: 50,000-74,999
RENOWNED: 75,000-99,999
LEGENDARY: 100,000+

Note that the maximum expansion (ie, legendary) is now at 100k culture for a normal game. This is greater than 90,000 which Afforess was using, but I think it's probably still reasonable. Also note the discontinuity between the values under 10k (which increment in a 10->50->100->500 pattern) and those over 10k (which increment at multiples of 25k).

I'm going to preserve the same scaling ratios that Afforess used in his mod, so epic speed will require 200k culture to hit legendary, and snail needs a whopping 600k.

Obviously, adding two more levels means that the city will spread culture over a wider territory. Each city will now have a cultural range of 12 in any direction, which should be effectively 7-10 tiles from the city center when terrain and rivers are factored in. While that might be slightly more than I'd like, I think the cultural range math works out much better this way. Also, in the late game, this will mean that culture can really spread far from the city center, which can be highly destabilizing for small empires with little culture.

With this many cultural levels, though, I'm clearly going to have to play with Firaxis's internal formula for spreading culture to tiles. Firaxis's formula it increased the amount of culture spread to a tile by an order of magnitude each time the culture level increased. I can't have a city spewing 10^12 culture onto its own city tile each turn. That's the next thing I'm going to play with...as soon as I verify that the game loads correctly with these levels included.

If you know of any mods that will break when I add these additional culture levels, please let me know. For instance, I highly suspect that revolutions will be hammered by these changes.

 

[Afforess]

If you know of any mods that will break when I add these additional culture levels, please let me know. For instance, I highly suspect that revolutions will be hammered by these changes.

Larger Cities. You might want to peek at the module. It will need to be updated. Also, how much of a defense boost will larger culture's give? Originally Legendary gave 70%, IIRC.

As for Revolutions, I have no idea how they measure culture...

 

[phunny_pharmer]

@Afforess I was just working on that. I'm increasing the defensive bonus at +5% per cultural level, starting at 0% for minimal. This makes cultural levels have much less of an impact in the late game, which I feel is realistic. Paris's culture didn't really stop the Germans in WW2, and even in WW1 one can't really argue that it contributed much to the Battle at the Marne.

In the early game, my cultural level defense bonus should be identical to that of Firaxis, as I've got two cultural levels (at +5% per level) to Firaxis's one (at +10% a level). The extra level that I provide should even add a bit more nuance to some early warfare. Rushing that monument might actually make a difference in an early defensive battle, since it's quicker to gain that +5% boost.

 

[szemek77]

I see this idea is already working in 1.73 beta3. I think I like it, however, is it a fixed feature, or can I turn it off somehow?

I would like it better, if tiles with resources got priority. Anyway, it is just my thought.

 

[os79]

I see this idea is already working in 1.73 beta3. I think I like it, however, is it a fixed feature, or can I turn it off somehow?

I would like it better, if tiles with resources got priority. Anyway, it is just my thought.

For now, if you want to turn it off, go into RoM/Assets/Modules/Afforess/Required and delete Culture Spread folder or move it somewhere else.