Getting Started

[skodkim]

Hi Thallassicus

I just updated to the neweset version of Balance - Civilizations (v 6), Balance - Terrain Improvements (v 12) and Unofficial Patch III (v 25) and now I can't seem to load my game any more. The screen just goes black when I press Load and then Civ crashes.

It's the only thing I've done since I last played, but I'm not sure if its related to the updates...

Edit: Unfortunately I deleted the previous versions of the mods. If you could provide these I could test if I could load the game...

\Skodkim

 

[Thalassicus]

Sure, here you go. You might also try disabling mods to see if you can narrow down which one is causing the problem. (Disable half, test... then if it works disable the other half, then split the half which fails in half, etc... if that makes sense.)

 

[Mentos]

Man, you update your mods faster than I can install and play them!
Just right after updating to Units v12, I do notice v13 in the mod browser...

Thanks a lot for your tireless ambition to improve this game!

 

[Thalassicus]

Here's some things on my todo list. This is basically stuff that will be coming in updates in the near to distant future, or I want to do but haven't tackled yet. Plus's + are things I've implemented in my current build versions.

Current
- Siege with Cover
+ -1 on mined gold/silver (same as vanilla post-Engineering)
- City-state influence bonus factors in time, change ratio from 2/3 to 2/4
+ shift GP improvement bonuses to techs in Renaissance
+ credit GP improvements with techs idea to Ahriman
+ Moved 1 scientist from Libraries to Universities
+ Moved 1 from Colosseums to Stadiums
+ Great Wall cost back to normal, obsoletes at Dynamite
+ buff National Wonders
+ credit Aqueduct idea to Ahriman
+ add Baths of Trajan, Medici Bank, Agra Fort national wonders

Wishlist
- check tile purchase rate scales with map size?
- food caravans
- Shipyard
- epic/marathon unit build speeds
- Mod idea: units cost less prod/maintenance, but more strategic resources
- upgrades vs rush buy
- remove insta-heal, change to faster healing over time
- "Alexander has a very high priority for attacking city-states, ruining his fantastic leader trait."
- restrict upgrades to experienced units
- oasis gold = # of deserts around it
- Songhai cavalry -> tanks problematic
- display specialists in primary building information

C++
- auto-generation of tooltip data from xml
- Change Maritime to % bonus
- Great Scientist lightbulbs give random tech
- Less units per strategic resource node, more abundant nodes

 

[marekb]

- check tile purchase rate scales with map size?

General observation is that it is much easier to claim land with a lot of small citeis with hardly any infrastructure then with a few big, well develop cities. Then reading some threads about ICS I came to an idea that cultured building should generate more Culture for more populated cities. On the other hand, the current ratio culture/social policied is, IMHO, quite well balances. But rate of acquiring new land is too low IMHO, especially late in the game. Thus, I came to the idea to reduce the cost of acquiring new hex. For example:
city 1-5 - normal cost
city 6-10 - reduction 25%
city 11-15 - reduction 50%
city 16+ - reduction 75%
or little different reduction: (population-5)*5%, maximum 75%
However, this could be could be difficult to do without c++ code.

Alternatively, certainly it is possible to create a set of buildings that reduce the Culture cost for buying City tiles. Like:
Building I (classical or medieval era): -25% Culture cost for buying City tiles.
Building II (industrial or modern era): -25% Culture cost for buying City tiles, require Building I
National wonder (Building II in all cities): -25% Culture cost for buying City tiles in all cities.

 

[Tomice]

Thal, I'm your mods in connection with CCMAT and have 2 questions:

1)
Is there any place where the strategic implementations of your mods are discussed? I know that you always document your rationale well, but I'm unsure if there is any thread/post where I can find ideas on new possibilities in your version of the game (which is already close to a total conversion). I'm talking about big basic strategies like ICS, civil service slingshot or the CE/SE of BtS. Is it possible that you've changed the game so much that beelining engineering is a better path than civil service? Have you weakened ICS severely?

I hope you understand what I'm thinking of.

Your version of the game is much better than vanilla, especially together with all the other good mods in CCMAT (emigration!!! custom top bar!!! ressource info!!! ).
The only drawback is that I don't know how to use the new possibilities well, I haven't seen anybody postings tipps and tricks.

BTW, I believe the modded game got way harder since unmodded vanilla 1.0!


2)

I see that you have a percentual food boost from maritime CS on your to-do-list (which would need better modding tools). I also see food caravans.

Have you considered an absolute number of food from mCS, that can be distributed as the player wishes? I posted an idea for this some time ago, but there was little response. Maybe you find the idea noteworthy:


[MOD CONCEPT] Food trade, more interesting food resources and balanced maritime CS



Introduction:

We all know how powerful maritime CS are, and one of their major problems is how they help making ICS (Infinite City Sprawl) a viable strategy. This is due to their per-city bonus.
Also there are many wishes for some kind of "global" food calculation and food transport between cities.
Third, food ressources are boring and hardly useful in vanilla civ5.

This mod concept aims at all of the three issues.


Prerequisites:

We would most likely need access to the missing modding tools. Also, this mod would largely benefit from the "sell building" option introduced with the upcoming patch.


Core concept:

A civ-wide food pool and a new screen where the food can be distributed.

Several factors would add an absolute number of food to a nationwide pool, which the player may redistribute. Instead of adding two food per city, maritime CS could give 10, 15 or 20 food which may be distrubuted as needed. Other sources are thinkable, like food ressourcesor wonders.
Exporting food from a city to the pool could be possible, but limited, to keep local production important. This may happen through (very cheap, maybe only 1prod) buildings.



Details:

- Each CS ally would add a fixed number of food to the pool, e.g. 20.
- Each food resource we have would add 1 or 2 food to the pool, in addition to it's local bonus.
- Buildings with a cost of only 1 production could be built/bought in cities to export surplus food.
- There could be several versions of buildings, earlier ones would export little food, lose some on the way and cost rel. high upkeep, while advanced versions (refrigeration tech!) would come closer to an 1:1 transport.
- Selling those buildings would stop the transport.
- Rebuying them would cost almost nothing, creating an on/off switch.
- Only cities connected to the trade network may receive food.


Rationale:

- Maritime CS would help large empires just as much as they help smaller ones, maybe they would even help small civs survive.
- Food resources would have an interesting function.
- Local food would still matter a lot, especially in the early game, making the concept very realistic.
- ICS would be weakened.
- Micromanagement would not be overly complicated.



What do you guys think?

 

[Thalassicus]

Alternatively, certainly it is possible to create a set of buildings that reduce the Culture cost for buying City tiles. Like:
Building I (classical or medieval era): -25% Culture cost for buying City tiles.
Building II (industrial or modern era): -25% Culture cost for buying City tiles, require Building I
National wonder (Building II in all cities): -25% Culture cost for buying City tiles in all cities.

That's a really interesting idea! I know it's possible, since that's what Kreposts do (-50% cost). Speaking of which, I've never tested to see what happens if you build Angkor Wat (-75%) in a city with a Krepost. Maybe it gets capped at -90% like combat penalties. Would probably have to rework Kreposts and Angkor Wat if this was made into a basic thing for all civs. Alternatively, I could just alter the global modifiers for tile aquisition.


@Tomice
I haven't seen anything discussing strategies, you could start a thread on the Strategy forum.

I thought of having a fixed amount of food from Maritime, but I'm not sure that would solve the ICS problem. Consider how you could give all the food to your newly-built cities until they reach 2-3 pop, then shift the food away to newer cities... if you see what I mean? By allowing the food to be focused just on the cities you want to get up to the "average", I think you could actually accelerate ICS.

 

[skodkim]

Sure, here you go. You might also try disabling mods to see if you can narrow down which one is causing the problem. (Disable half, test... then if it works disable the other half, then split the half which fails in half, etc... if that makes sense.)

Thalassicus, just to let you know that I tried downgrading to the oler versions you attached and it still does not load. I did a lot of reading on the forums in te last days and apparantly I'm not the only one:

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=97025

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=91932

This game is really bringing me down...

\Skodkim

 

[Perkus]

We absolutely need some threads on strategy in modded games! I read all the vanilla strategy threads and I'm constantly stopping myself from jumping in with "just use <some mod> and that problem goes away!" It gets old to keep reading how horsemen and maritime food are OP, etc., when that's been "solved' for many weeks now.

Re: Increasing rate of tile acquisition - For what it's worth, I have not found this to be a problem at all in my games, and so far I've only run large cities 4-5 tiles apart (on Emperor). I rarely even buy tiles any more except sometimes when founding a new city. But I run a mod that keeps AI from settling closer than range 4 from another city, which keeps the riff-raff much further away from my borders than in vanilla. That might account for the difference.

Re: Capping maritime food: I like the idea of limiting the max amount of food each maritime city can generate, because it's ridiculous that one such city could somehow feed several dozen in larger games, especially in low-tech eras where long distance food transport would be very difficult. But coding a new interface to let the player pick which cities to feed seems very labor intensive. My idea was to simply feed up to N closest cities automagically. This is more realistic and balanced, and hopefully relatively easy to code (with C++ access). It's not perfect, as some cities could still be really far if there are few.

 

[marekb]

I've never tested to see what happens if you build Angkor Wat (-75%) in a city with a Krepost.

Once I had this combination and certainly the cost of new tiles was positive. Although I didn't calculated I think, that the bonus is 1-(1-0.75)*(1-0.5)=92.5%. Similarly like having Professional Army SP and Pentagon = you get 75% reduction in upgrade cost.

 

[Thalassicus]

@skodkim
If you start a new game, save, then reload the new save, does it work? Your savegames might be getting corrupted. It's something that happens to many people in vanilla civ or with mods, doesn't matter -- bug in the core game. My savegames get corrupted around the early Renaissance, and as a result I only can load them 1 time per instance of civ (then it crashes and I gotta restart + load).


@Perkus
I agree! I've been having so much fun in my current game I decided to start a new thread on the strategy forum.

Tile aquisition hasn't ever been a problem for me, I usually gain new tiles faster than I can grow population to work those tiles.


@marekb
Thanks for that info! So it seems the game does cap negative modifiers at a certain minimum value... I figured out it does that for combat penalties, and must do a similar thing with other penalties as well.

 

[skodkim]

@skodkim
If you start a new game, save, then reload the new save, does it work? Your savegames might be getting corrupted. It's something that happens to many people in vanilla civ or with mods, doesn't matter -- bug in the core game. My savegames get corrupted around the early Renaissance, and as a result I only can load them 1 time per instance of civ (then it crashes and I gotta restart + load).

Hi Thalasicus. It works if I start a new game so I'm happy to say its not mod related - sorry for "implying" it!

My problem vauses a DirectX error when I try to load the game - I'm not the only one who has the problem as I found out.

Really hoping they will fix the game!

\Skodkim

 

[Seek]

Thal - Just got caught up on your strategy thread (where you and others were discussing the "space victory in 200 turns" thread) and was wondering: Would it be possible to change the way people steer research agreements so that instead of avoiding techs you have put >0% into, it would be less likely to bulb a tech you have researched a certain percentage of (say >66%)? In other words, you would have to hard research 2/3 of a tech to steer the RA to bulb another tech. (Hope I'm being clear in what I mean!) This might fix the min/maxer's super fast tech rates.
I wouldn't be surprised if you needed the c++ to do this, but I thought I'd throw that out there.

 

[Thalassicus]

To be honest, I think research pacts should use a curve instead of any hard cutoff point at all. Not sure this will make sense but here it is....

Weight = log (% completed + 0.01)
Total = Sum of all weights
Divide each Weight by Total (a process called normalization)

This gets you a % chance to be randomly selected. For example, if you have 6 techs with 0% research, one 1%, one 50%, and one 90% completed, the odds would be:

14% = Each of the 6 empty techs
12% = 1 turn of research
2% = Half complete
0.3% = Almost complete

If you have 3 techs at 90%, all three would have a 33% chance of being selected because of the normalization process. Same thing if all your techs are at 0%, chance of each would be equal.

This gets exactly the mechanism we want with a very simple formula, and no way to exploit it through micro. I did something similar to this for selecting which city emigration should occur in for the emigration mod.

 

[Tomice]

Thal, I thought a bit more about absolute numbers of food from mCS.

Your objection about this system was very valid. You could indeed abuse it to rocketboost your newest cities and make ICS even stronger.

But what would be, if one would only allow a city to receive one food per population or so? new cities could only get 1 additional food this way.

Might be too micro-intensive, though.

 

[Seek]

To be honest, I think research pacts should use a curve instead of any hard cutoff point at all. Not sure this will make sense but here it is....

Weight = log (% completed + 0.01)
Sum up all weights, divide each weight by this sum (a process called normalization).

This gets you a % chance to be randomly selected. For example, if you have 6 techs with 0% research, one 1%, one 50%, and one 90% completed, the odds would be:

14% = Each of the 6 empty techs
12% = 1 turn of research
2% = Half complete
0.3% = Almost complete

This gets exactly the mechanism we want with a very simple formula, and no way to exploit it through micro. I did something similar to this for selecting which city emigration should occur in for the emigration mod.

Well done, that sounds ideal. Is it possible at this point? Of course I shouldn't be surprised that you have thought this through, but I hadn't seen mention of it in any of the balance threads, so...

 

[Thalassicus]

@Tomice
Yeah, though if you think about it capping it at a max of X food per population is similar to doing a %-based system anyway. More deterministic, but would require more additions to the UI.

@Seek
Not yet possible, but it's on my todo list for the distant future.

 

[Tomice]

@Tomice
Yeah, though if you think about it capping it at a max of X food per population is similar to doing a %-based system anyway. More deterministic, but would require more additions to the UI.

Well, it depends on how strict the limit is. If we have 24 food to distribute, a limit of one per citizen and 76 citizens, there's a lot of choice. But I see your concerns, it would also be a huge load of work, complicated, mm-intensive and the AI would need to handle it decently - so probably not gonna happen. Sadly!

But wouldn't most of your concerns also apply to any form of manual food distribution (e.g. food caravans)?

 

[Thalassicus]

One idea I had for your distribution idea or food caravan mods and the like is requiring some building to create an active caravan... perhaps the city needs a Market.

 

[Tomice]

Yes, a building as prerequisite would only allow it for developed cities, which would weaken ICS. But I think a certain, limited ability to boost growth, especially on terra maps during lategame, could be fun.

I adapted my suggestion:

"Food as strategic ressource"

I don't mean to replace the normal food system, but I think introducing a food-related strategic ressource (FSR) could be an interesting concept.

Each maritime ally could provide a few FSR, which would allow to create a building that boosts growth, similar to how a factory boosts production.

One could create more than one version of the building. The first has no prerequisites and provides a rather small boost, while another could have an advanced building as prerequisite (as you suggested: e.g. market), providing a larger boost in developed cities (for 2 of the FSR).

The buildings should be (very) cheap, to allow short-term food shifting (and selling the building afterwards). Although a certain price could further discourage from using it in newly founded cities with very low production (to weaken ICS). Then again, if the building requiring FSR provides a percentage-based boost, we don't run into a risk of making ICS better. I would prefer absolute numbers, however, it just feels better.

Food ressources on the map (banana, cattle, fish,...) could also provide FSR, although a 1:1 conversion would probably be to much here. Maybe one FSR for every three food ressources on the map?


Advantages over my previous suggestion:

- No new interface, no new concept
- the AI knows how to handle strategic ressources
- you could even trade food for iron or oil
- Possible with current modding tools!

ToDo: Find a sexy name for food as SR Maybe "food caravan" or "packed food"?