FlavourMod 2

[[to_xp]Gekko]

awesome

 

[Jean Elcard]

Version 2.3.3 changelog:

• Change: Compatibility to Fall from Heaven 0.40q.

Download link in the first post.

 

[JDexter]

Great, thanks!

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

could I ask you to consider re-enabling some of the starting positions normalizing functions you disabled in flavourmod?

normalizeRemoveBadFeatures
normalizeRemoveBadTerrain
normalizeAddGoodTerrain

I tried generating a couple maps on MountainCoast with and without flavourmod, and WITHOUT flavourmod the starting positions were balanced. less flavourful, sure, but gameplay overrides flavour imho. keep in mind that the terrain surrounding the starting positions doesn't get changed, so it's STILL flavourful. the doviello are a prime example: without flavourmod, they still start in a tundra region, but at least their BFC isn't tundra, which gives them a fair start compared to other civs, and makes for a more fun game imho.

of course, disregard all this if FF gives some terrain based bonus to the civs that "like" crappy terrain

 

[Jean Elcard]

@Gekko: To some degree I understand, that you would want to have the normalization functions reactivated, but I really don't like their current implementation. Not a single plot with desert for the Malakim, no snow for the illians, no tundra for the doviello, that's simply not what FlavourMod is all about.

I think the main problem with the so called "bad" starts is the lack of food, isn't it? So my alternative proposal to simply reactivating the old methods is:

1. Change normalizeAddFood to add more food resources to the starting locations (especially to bad ones).
2. Make extreme jungle starts (if not chosen by the lizards) less painful by transforming some jungle to forest and chop the rest.

What do you think?

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

something that's halfway between the current system and the vanilla one would be best of course, flavour without losing balance

desert is not a big problem imho, since all it needs to spawn some nice floodplains is a river. but tundra is awful, and jungle is even worse, not to mention the unimprovable marshes

your 2 suggestions indeed sound like they would solve the issue whilst keeping the flavour. about 1) , do you mean add more food resources to ALL starting locations, or just the ones that happen to have bad terrain? I think the latter would be better, to make 'em balanced. It should be entirely possible to detect starts with bad terrain and add more food resources there, I guess. point 2) sounds perfect.

 

[Jean Elcard]

Point 1 is done. I've disabled the vanilla normalizedAddFoodBonus method and wrote my own. The new one counts how many food is available naturally in the fat cross of each starting location and calculates the mean. After this it adds random but valid food bonuses to all locations below the mean until all locations are above the mean. First tests seem to work nicely.

There is one drawback, though. The work of some map scripts, like Perfect World for example, which try to assign only a certain subset of all available food resource to a particular continent is somehow nullified.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

awesome! the drawback is outweighed by the benefits imho, so it's fine. hope everyone agrees

 

[JeffSteel]

New world mechanics have little place in FFH anyway, to me at least. I always set Perfectworld to allow pangeas when playing FFH, but to each their own.

 

[Jean Elcard]

Version 2.4.0 changelog:

• Add: Food Balancing (should make dull starts really rare and help the AI get started)
• Add: Jungle Softening (not for civs, that like jungle)
• Change: Sidar lose dislike for Jungle

Download link in the first post

The first two points are quite severe changes. I would really like to get some feedback about them. Here is some more specific information for those, who are interested what's happening below the surface:

Food Balancing: Counts the food available in each starting fat cross (civ dependent) and then puts some more food resources in starting fat crosses, which are below the world food mean until they reach this mean. Can lead to heavy food clusters if surrounding area isn't producing very much food. I think it's still balanced, though.

Jungle Softening: Removes some Jungle in the first three rings around each starting plot (guaranteed if on Marsh <- bad enough on its own) and transforms some more jungle in those three ring into deciduous forest (guaranteed for jungles the first ring).

Both mechanics can be easily disabled in CvFlavourInterface.py, if you don't like them.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

awesome! I'll try this right now and let you know how it behaves

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

great job, all the starts now are viable. the only ones that still seem below average are heavy ice/tundra: a couple more deer help, but hunting is pretty expensive in the beginning so it takes a while till you can exploit those deer tiles... will work better in FF where arctic deer gives +2 food unimproved

 

[Jean Elcard]

great job, all the starts now are viable. the only ones that still seem below average are heavy ice/tundra: a couple more deer help, but hunting is pretty expensive in the beginning so it takes a while till you can exploit those deer tiles... will work better in FF where arctic deer gives +2 food unimproved

The +2 food for deer sound like good solution. Will add it to FlavourMod too.

 

[Jean Elcard]

Version 2.4.1 changelog:

• Add: lonkero173's MountainCoast map script (version 1.0.0 rc1)
• Change: Deer unimproved food yield increased by 1 to 2
• Change: Compatibility to Fall from Heaven 0.40r

Download link in the first post

Be sure to take a look at lonkero173's MountainCoast map script, if you haven't done so by downloading and installing it separately yourself in the past already. It's a really nice one.

 

[Swodhawk]

Great, new update.

On a minor note, would you consider adding bigger-than-huge map generation capacity?

 

[Jean Elcard]

On a minor note, would you consider adding bigger-than-huge map generation capacity?

An elegant solution for this was easier than I thought it would be. Giant maps working for every map script will be in the next version, but be aware that you might easily run into MAFs (memory allocation failures) with them. Civ4 was never thought for this kind of maps.

For now I recommend using the "Huge" setting of Cephalo's PerfectWorld map script coming with FlavourMod. It produces bigger than the default huge maps without my interference. Actually all map sizes there are up a notch.

 

[Swodhawk]

Thank you, I am eagerly waiting for the new release, and will have a try at the solution you pointed out.

 

[Jean Elcard]

It turned out it isn't that easy to add a "properly" working Giant map option after all. A crude version worked nice, but a lot of map scripts overwrite the standard values and that causes problems with the aspect ratios of some maps and leads sometimes to giant maps, which are actually smaller than the huge version of the corresponding map script.

In short: The next release will take some more time. Exactly till I'm happy enough with the new dll code I have in mind, which will hopefully fix the problems.

 

[Elm]

How much work is it to make a version for patch "s"? from the "t" description, it looks like it may be a while until the next patch.

 

[Jean Elcard]

Sorry, guys, I decided to cut the Giant maps feature. It works, but there is no "nice" way of implementing the mechanism and giant maps are very likely to cause MAFs sooner or later anyway. If I implement something, I want to do it right and that's simply not possible here.

Update to "s" maybe today, if nothing steals my time.

EDIT: Maybe I found a solution for giving you a giant maps option in the furture.