Gedemon's Civilization, development thread

[Xefjord]

So I played the latest ver of the mod for a couple hours and really enjoyed it. But I have a love/hate relationship with how tile acquisition was taking place. On one hand, I was completely unable to buy tiles, but I feel like cities grew WAY faster with cultural diffusion than they normally would, so buying tiles didn't feel that important. Secondly, the minimap lover in me absolutely adored the fact that tiles never extended out into the ocean, so on the minimap my control over the Japanese island made it look like it was ACTUALLY the Japanese island (As opposed to a blob). But on the other hand, There was a lot of sea based luxuries and resources that were totally unusable because I couldn't get sea tiles within my borders. There was also a lot of 1 tile islands I would normally be able to get from one of my cities (Like Jeju or Okinawa) that I could not get because it was across an ocean and I couldn't buy/expand out into ocean tiles.

There is some stuff I just assume is incomplete, like the fact that it says 500-1000 turns until city growth, at first I was worried, but then I saw the population was going up in my cities and realized it would grow naturally (I like this way of growing better). Although I have no idea how rations work. It just seemed to randomly jump from heavy to medium to light rationing all over the place. I didn't really get to test out any combat stuff, because I always play Japan and that leaves me on an Island.

Just a quick question that popped up into my head, if you plan on getting rid of CS what will happen to the CS related government cards? Will you exchange that for a different type of card slot (Like make a religious card slot?) or will you just remove it entirely? I can imagine either way you go about it, the whole governments civic layout will need to be revamped. Unless you somehow come up with good card slots regarding diplomacy that affect your vassals/satellite states/etc.

 

[Gedemon]

Thanks for the feedback on the early gameplay, you can check the third post on FP for what's done and what's to do.

While I'll surely add/change some during the early phases for testing the new mechanisms, the tech /civics/policies/buildings/units/abilities will have to be completely redone, but that's something to do when all the base mechanisms are set. Balance will come even after that, but things really out of the ordinary are worth signaling.

Sea resources will be collected automatically, the range and efficiency will depand on building/techs/population in a city. One sea resource may be exploited by multiple civilizations/cities, and enemy units can affect exploitation.

On a side note I'm still debating to use dynamic (moving/depleting/finding/creating) resources.

I also note the difficulty to follow the changes to rationning, I'll have to provide more feedback on the UI, as this is a very important part of city management (but one that you can't affect yet, until I do a first pass on housing to control population size)

The informations available in the UI are very important for a mod changing so many things, but it's also one of the most time-consuming part of the development.

Small islands (less than 4 tiles) are a technical/design problem, one possible solution is to give them to the owner of the first (exploring only?) unit debarking on them.

 

[VDanchuk]

Played with Scythia on Prince (for testing) on a small continents map for a few hours; here is my first feedback:

• Combat is now more rewarding and tactical, and the duration of the battles bring a fresh change to the vanilla pace. Scouts, for example, could take 3x the hits they normally can, giving a bigger incentive to train them aside from exploring.
• Unit upgrades make a HUGE difference in the battles.
• Slow border and city growth for newly settled cities (at first).
• As Xef mentioned, your capital and most likely new cities grow way too big in a short period of turns.
• Buying tiles to piss off close civs is now impossible. 100980 gold to purchase a single tile.
• Not sure why, but neither of my troops healed after placing them on defense. The # of wounded diminished and (most) resources filled up but the units would never heal any HP whatsoever. I tried to understand the new mechanics as best as I could but I still couldn't figure out why they weren't healing. My Slinger, for example, had -28 / 1,500 frontline personnel. I checked to see if my capital had enough reserves, and it did.

Overall an ingenious new system! I realize many features are incomplete, so I tried to give feedback on the things that did and didn't work. On a side note, are AI altering mods compatible? CQUI?

 

[Gedemon]

Negative value in an unit's composition means that something goes wrong either when removing or adding health to the unit and created a mismatch between the number of components in frontline and the expected corrseponding HP.

I'll have to track the origin of those, found one with pillaging giving back health (it's now disabled, it will provide different bonuses in the future)

Is there a special ability or an event that could trigger a loss/gain of HP outside combat itself?

Normal healing is already disabled, the mod handles it with reinforcement, but a mismatch blocks it.

 

[Xefjord]

Only Supply lines for units, I was wondering; do you plan on allowing players to get supply lines from allied Civs? Thinking of a WW2 scenario, it would all play out nice and dandy for the Brits, French, Germans, Russians, etc because all of their cities are nearby the battles. But if the AMERICANS were wanting to get involved, they would have to travel far from any of their own cities which would probably cut off supply lines, I could understand the "Far from home" debuff, because that much is true. But if they are assisting allies, would't it be odd if their allies didn't help supply their troops?

 

[VDanchuk]

That makes more sense. The only things I could think that heal units are goodie huts and Scythia's ability, which I relied upon to heal my mismatched units.

 

[Gedemon]

Only Supply lines for units, I was wondering; do you plan on allowing players to get supply lines from allied Civs? Thinking of a WW2 scenario, it would all play out nice and dandy for the Brits, French, Germans, Russians, etc because all of their cities are nearby the battles. But if the AMERICANS were wanting to get involved, they would have to travel far from any of their own cities which would probably cut off supply lines, I could understand the "Far from home" debuff, because that much is true. But if they are assisting allies, would't it be odd if their allies didn't help supply their troops?

Nothing's coded on that sied yet, but supply lines were shared in my civ5 WW2 mod, I'll surely implement something similar related to diplomatic agreement.

Military Alliance for example should provide supply lines to all unit of the alliance, with maybe a lesser efficiency for foreign units, so that your own units still get a bit more resources.

That makes more sense. The only things I could think that heal units are goodie huts and Scythia's ability, which I relied upon to heal my mismatched units.

yes, that's surely breaking the mod. I think I'll have to remove the uniques abilities during development.

 

[Scamps]

Hi! Really interesting ideas there. Surprisingly even pre-alpha version does not break the game that much! Don't really miss city states, water territories, happines, housing. Too early for feedback, I guess, so posting a couple of potential bugs, if you are interested.
- Atzecs somehow managed to grow their capital to 102 and counting. Unsure where they get all the food.
- Most unith heal alright, but the horsemen heal reeeeeally slowly. Seems they resupply very little horses per turn, though horses are abundant in nearest city.
Also units don't drop prisoners when visiting a friendly city. Probably not implemented yet, but still fun.
Wish you to make it to release!

Edit: double-posted attachments, unsure how to delete

 

[Gedemon]

thanks for the report, either they've used a strange ritual to removed the heart of every citizen in Tenochtilan and now they do not need food anymore, still live (happy), and have a lot of little zombies, or this is, indeed, a bug.

they'll be difficult to stop in that game (my anti-zombies mechanisms are far from ready), so I'll track the bug instead, the "food" resource entry must have been removed from the city somehow, and now the mod does not check or apply the food rationing at all there.

 

[Gedemon]

I'm currently testing this, an addition to the economy of the mod, that I thought mandatory before starting to implement the citizen needs...

Spoiler Introducing wealth and resources unit cost :

Now each city has its own unit cost per resource, which depend of multiple factor : base price, collect/extraction price (simplified ATM, it's just a check on corresponding improvement), wage cost (= city wealth), transport price and production price if a building and other resources are required.

Supply/Demand also affect the cost, wealth is based on the composition of the population, with different ratio for upper (*1.75), middle (*1) , lower (*0.5) and slaves (*0.1) class.

Once the prisoners -> slaves code is done, a city with a lot of slaves will produce/collect resources at a very low cost.

Importing resource is done only if the importing city doesn't have that resource, or if the cost (including transport) of the imported resource is inferior than the local cost.

Food cost is raising on the screen, because, even if the food stock is raising, the demand is more important than the actual consumption under medium rationing, the supply would not be enough without that rationing.

Here is a draft of what could be some needs, sorted by importance, I'm still pondering on how (or if it's necessary) to represent fresh water there or if it should stay in the "health" mechanism, civ4-like.

- Citizen have consumers need for resources depending on their social class and the era
    + food (upper, middle, lower, slaves)
    + medecine for those who have a disease (upper, middle, lower, slaves)
    + basic clothes (middle, lower, slave) = linen (plants from forest/jungle/swamp) or leather or wool
    + clothes (upper, middle) = use leather + (wool or linen)
    + exotic food (upper, middle) = food not available in the city area
    + rare food (upper)
    + luxury clothes (upper) = use leather + (wool or linen) + (dyes or furs or coton) | or simply just clothes + (dyes or furs)
    + luxury products (upper) = jewelry (silver, diamonds), decorations (silver, marble)
   
- when all needs of a class are meet, give a bonus to birth rate
- if a basic need (food, medecine, basic clothes - and more with eras) can't be satisfied (high cost or shortage), lower local stability

 

[VDanchuk]

Very interesting mechanic indeed!

 

[Gedemon]

And GitHub updated

- add resources "unit cost" based on multiple factors including supply/demand
- add wealth value to cities
- add logging of resources variations (stock, costs)
- include parts of Despecialize mod to remove all traits for the time of the development
- various bug fix, including not allowing a city to grow without food

 

[Xefjord]

So @Gedemon do you plan on having buildings in the future to develop some of these resources? For instance, will you make it where you have to make a Leatherworker's Shop in order to get clothes from your cows? Also will you be able to withhold specific resources from other civs? Will you be able to stop/allow the import of clothes, or the import/export of exotic food? Or will you only be able to cut off open trade in its entirety or not at all?

 

[Gedemon]

So @Gedemon do you plan on having buildings in the future to develop some of these resources? For instance, will you make it where you have to make a Leatherworker's Shop in order to get clothes from your cows?

Yes, but the list of buildings/resources is not defined, I'm still working on the foundation.

I'll add some during development for testing, for example there is a Butchery building that use cattle, Deers, Sheep to produce Meat and Leather, then reuse meat to produce food the next turn (the meat is a temporary resource just to test this kind of loop on a building).

In the future we'll have buildings to use leather, plants (from forest/swamp/jungle), furs, ... to produce clothes, and so on.

I don't plan to make it too complex, but the code can handle multiple resources IN or multiple resources OUT if needed.

Possible example :
Deers -> Butchery -> Leather + Food
Sheep -> Butchery -> Wool + Food
Iron + Coal -> Steel Factory -> Steel

Also will you be able to withhold specific resources from other civs? Will you be able to stop/allow the import of clothes, or the import/export of exotic food? Or will you only be able to cut off open trade in its entirety or not at all?

I'd like to allow embargo to control what's going out and to who. But diplomacy is far on the road.

 

[Gedemon]

The work on the UI will take an important place in the mods development, with so many changes, you'll need a quick and clear access to the information, your feeback on that is important.

I've split the city tooltip between the city size (population information) and the city name (resource stock information) for clarity

Spoiler New tooltip :

The green bar now represent the % of food stock available, the turn value is based on the last turn variation, I'd like to find a way to give a better approximation, but I've no idea on how to do it with the way the population rate can change at each turn...

 

[Xefjord]

I would just remove the turn value at this point, it doesn't really do any good towards determining growth or decline, if you CAN and you really want to keep SOMETHING there, I would just put an arrow up or an arrow down to represent if the city net population is growing or declining, but any numbers will pretty much be trivial with the system as it is now

 

[Gedemon]

I would just remove the turn value at this point, it doesn't really do any good towards determining growth or decline, if you CAN and you really want to keep SOMETHING there, I would just put an arrow up or an arrow down to represent if the city net population is growing or declining, but any numbers will pretty much be trivial with the system as it is now

Yes, thanks, that's better.

Spoiler general view :

Spoiler Tooltip :

 

[Gedemon]

updated on gitHub

tweak transport cost value
tweak rationing value and add "starvation" values
a few bug fix to prevent some inconsistency in resources cost allowing to export at higher prices than initially calculated
better tooltips for city banners

 

[VDanchuk]

I'm with Xef, those changes are super. On a different note, I take it all UU abilities have been disabled by now? I noticed the Aztec's Eagle Warriors don't capture builders. Totally fine if they are, just wanna know as much as possible for testing purposes.

 

[Gedemon]

yes, all traits should have been removed with yesterday update, to prevent interference with the development of the new mechanisms.

every unique ability will have to be adapted at some point, but that's for long term development.

edit: about development, something important, at this point nearly every updates will break saved games from the previous updates.