Full Patch Notes for December Patch

[Zyxpsilon]

I would still like to see a "Map regeneration option" when starting a new game so I didn't have to go back and reenter all settings every time I wanted to restart a game because of a crappy starting position. I'm no programmer, but I would think this would be relatively simple to implement.

Also...
It's a must have.

 

[bryanw1995]

Without limiting happiness, the rebellion due to -20 happiness would never happen. When they introduced the risk for a rebellion/civil war (which is a good thing IMO) they also had to make it more than a theoretical concept. Anyway, the previous version where buildings in a city could create more happy faces than there were people in the city was ridiculous. Note that Wonders are excepted from this new rule, for obvious reasons.

yes, we'll have wonders, natural wonders, luxuries and sp's to get excess happiness. a few of those have been slightly nerfed, but huge amounts of excess happiness are still readily available.

 

[bryanw1995]

I do, in fact, play Civ IV, right as we're speaking actually. But I would like hex tiles and the Civ V resource system. So I would like to see Civ V fixed and improved, and removing 1UpT would go a very long way to improve Civ V - to make it less deadly tedious than it is now. We don't need to go back to infinite unit per tile, but rather a balanced system. Each unit would have a value called "footprint" or some such, and so you could have a number of units per tile until the total footprint is 1.

The longer Firaxis insists on 1UpT, the higher the likelyhood for a startup to offer what Civ V should have really been, siphon all the dissatisfied people away, and then, buh-bye Firaxiño.

yeah...except that the day the game was released, so was the legions mod. you could very easily play without 1 upt from day 1.

I'm much more frustrated with the unbelievably easy conquest of even well-developed cities. After having played mods with better city defenses it's hard to go back to playing the vanilla game.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

I'd like to hear from our talented group of modders as to how the changes are going to affect your future modding ability? Is it going to be much better with these changes & will you be able to change things that you didn't have access to before?

I always find modders end up doing more for these types of games than the developers themselves, so it would be interesting to hear your feedback.

# Support for mods that perform major restructuring of the tech tree including adding, deleting, and updating techs, buildings, and units.
# Added GameEvents system for overriding Gameplay DLL specific functionality.
# Fixed "Reload Landmark System" mod flag to now refresh landmarks defined in "ArtDefine_Landmarks".
# Multiple SDK updates (new version to go live shortly).

Everything above these four lines is mostly just for BrowseMod "fine-tuning".

So let's take them quatro group for a quicky ride;

1) Gameplay balancing issues are somehow hard to grasp (intuitively) without extensive testing... thus a critical feature for proper monitoring of Techs +++ Buildings +++ Units can only catch bad reasoning right where they show -- much faster than it would otherwise be.

2) As i said in earlier threads... this alone constitutes the brick & mortar thickness of a huge process. It allows Modders to have much greater control over the active components - as a juicy bonus - at low(est)-level routine. It opens up the DLL *without* having to re-compile critical calls. It has the ability to fuze Events with specifically added functions *of* anything in a MOD.

3) It was bugged. Now we can all use it for a clear purpose.

4) Might yet be even more important in both scope & capacity. They possibly didn't want to spoil the big surprise.

Superb patch. The best Modders will create truly amazing stuff with this.

 

[anandus]

Hi, you must be new

Even if you do that, the game will patch itself. Read 2K Greg statement or try it yourself if you don't believe me: turn your auto-patching off and sit back and watch as Steam happily downloads and install the next patch on December 16th.

Ah, okay, didn't know that

 

[Matjillam]

Everything above these four lines is mostly just for BrowseMod "fine-tuning".

So let's take them quatro group for a quicky ride;

1) Gameplay balancing issues are somehow hard to grasp (intuitively) without extensive testing... thus a critical feature for proper monitoring of Techs +++ Buildings +++ Units can only catch bad reasoning right where they show -- much faster than it would otherwise be.

2) As i said in earlier threads... this alone constitutes the brick & mortar thickness of a huge process. It allows Modders to have much greater control over the active components - as a juicy bonus - at low(est)-level routine. It opens up the DLL *without* having to re-compile critical calls. It has the ability to fuze Events with specifically added functions *of* anything in a MOD.

3) It was bugged. Now we can all use it for a clear purpose.

4) Might yet be even more important in both scope & capacity. They possibly didn't want to spoil the big surprise.

Superb patch. The best Modders will create truly amazing stuff with this.

That's good to hear Better moddability is the way forward! Can't wait for the new exciting mods to come

 

[Öjevind Lång]

yes, we'll have wonders, natural wonders, luxuries and sp's to get excess happiness. a few of those have been slightly nerfed, but huge amounts of excess happiness are still readily available.

And now there are three new natural wonders, and we won't know for certain which ones we'll encounter. That will add a little more spice to the game as well. At that's another thing that was suggested in these forums. They do listen to us.

My guess is that one of the new natural wonders will be Lake Titicaca. It is mentioned as one of the naural wonders in the Civilopaedia. Now they have the time to add it. Boy, I hope everyone at Firaxis gives the bozo who insisted on rushing out the game a really hard time.

 

[bryanw1995]

yes, I'm interested to see what these new natural wonders are too. and with the added benefits from those tiles they'll become much more useful imho. hopefully they'll beef up some other tiles going forward as well.

 

[Öjevind Lång]

yes, I'm interested to see what these new natural wonders are too. and with the added benefits from those tiles they'll become much more useful imho. hopefully they'll beef up some other tiles going forward as well.

Mind you, I get the impression that not all the natural wonders will turn up in every game. Note the reference to "frequency quotient", or whatever the term was.

 

[Seek]

Everything above these four lines is mostly just for BrowseMod "fine-tuning".

So let's take them quatro group for a quicky ride;

1) Gameplay balancing issues are somehow hard to grasp (intuitively) without extensive testing... thus a critical feature for proper monitoring of Techs +++ Buildings +++ Units can only catch bad reasoning right where they show -- much faster than it would otherwise be.

2) As i said in earlier threads... this alone constitutes the brick & mortar thickness of a huge process. It allows Modders to have much greater control over the active components - as a juicy bonus - at low(est)-level routine. It opens up the DLL *without* having to re-compile critical calls. It has the ability to fuze Events with specifically added functions *of* anything in a MOD.

3) It was bugged. Now we can all use it for a clear purpose.

4) Might yet be even more important in both scope & capacity. They possibly didn't want to spoil the big surprise.

Superb patch. The best Modders will create truly amazing stuff with this.

Thanks, I was wondering about that stuff too.
Do you think culture will be an actual yield now that Natural Wonders give culture? It would be nice to be able to make dynamic cultural buildings (ie, 1 per 2) or to add culture to resources, etc. Cheers!

 

[PawelS]

You can add culture to improvements.

 

[bryanw1995]

ok, cities are more powerful now. I just re-read the notes, missed that cities heal faster (+2 per round instead of +1 I assume) AND defensive buildings increase healing rate. so +3 with walls, +4 with castle, +5 with mb? and horse units are -50% vs cities, archers weaker as well? plus city power ramps up more with technology? this is very nebulous, but if it ramps up enough then it will definitely be usefull. Universal suffrage could actually be useful if your core cities are already 120 defense, though I think a bigger buff than 33% would make it more useful still. the increased city heal rates are like increasing city hp in all but the most lopsided situations. definitely much better overall city defense,

 

[Horizons]

Yeah, now it will be next to impossible to capture cities - a great way to make up for an incompetent AI that will never be able to compete in the field of battle.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Thanks, I was wondering about that stuff too.
Do you think culture will be an actual yield now that Natural Wonders give culture? It would be nice to be able to make dynamic cultural buildings (ie, 1 per 2) or to add culture to resources, etc. Cheers!

Yet again, this is more of a gameplay balancing concern. Anyone could (or would!) alter every aspect via modding to include whatever they please.
The trick is to make a smooth integration worth most player's intellectual challenge.

But when it comes to purely natural Yields; Food, Production & Gold are fair enough - for me. Culture is more of a Feature driven asset rather than a worker's multi-tasking activity. GA can create Landmarks on tiles for +4C to any cities at the expense of losing some regular Yields. You wanna carpet your territory with Landmarks, you can still do it -- but, i wouldn't recommend it. I found desert tiles to be the perfect spots for a potential Landmark site anyway, while some key buildings & SP choices can enhance cultural points gathering in fair enough levels (depending on game conditions though).

I guess we'll get to experience whatever new gameplay they opted to design... i'm on the trust'hem camp side in this manner.

Although, i'd love Natural Wonders to be much more diversified in what they Yield by default and -maybe- the ability to work them out for reasonable boosted values. Like, i dunno, dump a platform on The Great Barrier (double tiles) Reef for +3P each... farm The Old Faithful for +5F, and so on.

 

[Morningcalm]

You can add culture to improvements.

Can Great Artist Landmarks add culture to an improvement without overriding the production, etc that the improvement provides (i.e. Landmark + Mine = additional culture and production)? Out of curiosity. I thought it couldn't be done. =|

But giving Natural Wonders culture is long overdue, they're in the board game as it is already, hehe. And we all know Natural Wonders in real life are identifiable with the host culture (Uluru--Australia, Everest--Nepal, etc), so their adding culture is apt. Wonder how much culture they will add, hopefully at least 2. Would be nice if wonders received more culture too. Might make cultural victory more competitive with the other victory types, and perhaps then we might see the AI win some cultural victories for once.

 

[Buccaneer]

I'm worried that our expectations are getting a little low here. So much joy over fixing something that simply should not have been broken in the first place.

It wasn't broken, it was a reducer of some sort. As it stood, without overflow and micromanagement, the tech rate was far, far too fast. without overflow and no micromanagement, the tech rate was far too fast. Now with the specialist changes, we'll see if it ends up just being too fast overall.

 

[Panda_Power]

Superb patch. The best Modders will create truly amazing stuff with this.

Yeah, that's what I was hoping!

 

[Seek]

Yet again, this is more of a gameplay balancing concern. Anyone could (or would!) alter every aspect via modding to include whatever they please.
The trick is to make a smooth integration worth most player's intellectual challenge.

But when it comes to purely natural Yields; Food, Production & Gold are fair enough - for me. ...

It's my understanding that "natural yields" are Food, Production, Gold *and Science*. For no apparent reason Culture was left out; this is unfortunate as it prevents some modding possibilities.

Although, i'd love Natural Wonders to be much more diversified in what they Yield by default and -maybe- the ability to work them out for reasonable boosted values. Like, i dunno, dump a platform on The Great Barrier (double tiles) Reef for +3P each... farm The Old Faithful for +5F, and so on.

Indeed, I have no idea why there weren't hundreds of natural wonders (and with varied yields) upon game release - to me, it doesn't seem like all that much work for Firaxis, and it would make them more interesting. Hopefully with the new modding tools someone will release a big batch of them. Not sure about improvements for them, however, they are impassable terrain, after all...

 

[PawelS]

Can Great Artist Landmarks add culture to an improvement without overriding the production, etc that the improvement provides (i.e. Landmark + Mine = additional culture and production)? Out of curiosity. I thought it couldn't be done. =|

You can't have two improvements in the same tile, so no landmark+mine. But as far as I know one improvement can provide both normal yields and culture. I never tried to do it though.

 

[Txurce]

ok, cities are more powerful now. I just re-read the notes, missed that cities heal faster (+2 per round instead of +1 I assume) AND defensive buildings increase healing rate. so +3 with walls, +4 with castle, +5 with mb? and horse units are -50% vs cities, archers weaker as well? plus city power ramps up more with technology? this is very nebulous, but if it ramps up enough then it will definitely be usefull. Universal suffrage could actually be useful if your core cities are already 120 defense, though I think a bigger buff than 33% would make it more useful still. the increased city heal rates are like increasing city hp in all but the most lopsided situations. definitely much better overall city defense,

I think this delivers not just what we've had in the mods but what the modders wish they could have done, had they had the tools.