Getting Started

[Seek]

Off the cuff, I would say it is worse. It prevents an earlier era cultural victory since without the bonus SPs, you have more SPs to get. It also makes it take longer even with the free SPs, because with each SP, you increase the cost of the next SP. Then you have to throw up a wonder.

Free policies don't add to the cost, so in fact it's only two policies longer, assuming you win before future era.

I'm no expert on cultural victories so someone please tell me if I'm being an idiot, but this is something that strikes me every time I get a bit cultural....

One thing I would suggest as an option would be to switch one of the culture buildings from a +n culture building to a +n% culture building (and I'm thinking Opera House as the obvious candidate, for perhaps +50% culture).

The reasoning for this is that there's very little reason to focus culture in a given city at the moment (prior to Hermitage/broadcast tower/freedom). Generally, you're better off going horizontal with culture before going vertical - simply because it's both better value and gives more return on investment with regard to giving (and evenly spreading) new city tiles. There's not much incentive to go vertical and build specific "cultural meccas" before the late game. And there's not much reason to favour artists in one city over another either, except which one needs more border pops. Sort of seems like production cities become the de facto cultural cities by virtue of being able to build more of the buildings faster. Contrast this to science cities, where vertical investment pays off in spades.

Sorry, but this argument doesn't fly. Expanding is a big no-no for culture victories: Like the tooltip says, each city you found adds to all policies from then on an additional 30%. Two to three cities is usually optimal. Horizontal growth is *much* more friendly to science than culture because of the tie between science and population and the ease of gaining population at small numbers, which is why ICS is so powerful in this game. This is not to say that a % or per-pop cultural building wouldn't be a good idea. (Though the Opera House does not seem like a good fit to me, the Museum would make much more sense I think.)

I don't want to see GAs become uber-bombs as the mechanism to increase culture. Use them for border bombs and landmarks (maybe grossly increase the landmark bonus so you create a mecca in lieu of growth/production tiles).

Even with the boosts to the GA in this mod, it's still the weakest of the bunch in my (and many other's I think) opinion - and if you're going for a culture win you end up with a lot of them, with not much choice but to settle (unless there's a resource you need risking a possibly dangerous war because of your small empire). I really think the GA should operate like every other great person and give a decent bonus to their field with their special ability. I miss the culture wars from civ4 too!

So like I said, it's not too different with the mod as without - but it is more fun because of the extra policies, though! However, I think if we were to go with GAs giving culture, perhaps the free policies from eras should be removed.
______________

For anyone interested, an excellent thread regarding culture wins can be found here. It's long, but well worth the read.

 

[Polycrates]

Sorry, but this argument doesn't fly. Expanding is a big no-no for culture victories: Like the tooltip says, each city you found adds to all policies from then on an additional 30%. You do not want more than 3 cities max, otherwise it will take forever! Horizontal growth is *much* more friendly to science than culture because of the tie between science and population and the ease of gaining population at small numbers, which is why ICS is so powerful in this game. This is not to say that a % or per-pop cultural building wouldn't be a good idea. (Though the Opera House does not seem like a good fit to me...)

Indeed! I think I misphrased my argument a bit. The horizontal vs vertical thing is more something that strikes me as odd for cultural development in mid-sized empires who aren't just using culture entirely for border pops. The cultural victory argument simply being the extension that favouring verticality more favours the small cultural civ more anyway.

I suggested Opera House because it's roughly contemporaneous with the University, which acts similarly (museum just seems a tad too late), and with +50% would be weaker in a city just using monument and temple but stronger in a city with e.g. monastery, landmark, museum, stonehenge or running artists. So favouring someone going for a cultural victory or someone applying themselves to culture, more than someone just building cultural buildings around the place to help their borders.

And @ doktorstick I totally agree that GAs are plenty powerful enough already, it just seems strange to me that a period that is supposed to be the high point of an empire's culture doesn't actually help its culture at all (unless you're a warmonger type mass-building temples, I guess). Dunno if there's any realistic way to balance it though

 

[Common Sensei]

Even with the boosts to the GA in this mod, it's still the weakest of the bunch in my (and many other's I think) opinion - and if you're going for a culture win you end up with a lot of them, with not much choice but to settle (unless there's a resource you need risking a possibly dangerous war because of your small empire).

Although probably not possible without the SDK, but I think it would be interesting if the type of Great Person gave some kind of flavor to the Golden Age.

For example maybe something like
Great Merchant: +x per Merchant specialist during Golden Age
Great Engineer: +x per Engineer specialist during Golden Age
Great Artist: +x per Artist specialist during Golden Age
Great General: special promotion or +x XP to military units created during Golden Age
Great Scientist: +x per Scientist specialist during Golden Age

Great Artists could be buffed by their flavor factor.

 

[SSgtDuke]

I think 2.0.05 should be compatible with *.02, I believe I've primarily made just UI changes. It wouldn't hurt to back up your old mod folder though.

Actually it crashed hard on load game. Fortunately I took your advice and could recover with 2.0.02. Will update after finishing this game.

 

[Thalassicus]

I discovered and fixed an error in the policies file invalidating it in recent versions. If anyone noticed policies lacking their modded effects, it should be fixed in v*.06.


@doktorstick
One thing to consider is I intended to buff Artists to 2 a while ago but mistakenly left out or deleted the change somehow. This was intended to counterbalance the overall delay in cultural victory timeframe due to the change to free per era / 1 extra tree. Artists should properly have this value in current beta versions and the next public release.


I like the idea of a / building. As you point out, I don't think any culture effect in the game right now that benefits from having larger cities. Food/prod/gold all inherently get stronger with population because more tiles can be worked with those yields, and science comes from population. Landmarks don't really come anywhere close, and all the culture buildings are flat or % modifiers.

I feel the Opera House would be too low-tier to have as a good place for the modifier. Temples are rather common even for a non-culture player, and with just one more step up we'd have access to a very powerful cultural building. In addition, I like the happiness bonus someone suggested a long while back I added to the Opera House, it makes sense when compared to the Theater.

Considering these two factors, I think it'd be reasonable to change the Museum to 1 per , and will do so right away.


Edit: argh there's no easy way to do this because of their bizzare decision to not consider culture a yield!
I think I can manually add the effect, though it'll take a lot of work... hrm...

 

[Seek]

Edit: argh there's no easy way to do this because of their bizzare decision to not consider culture a yield!
I think I can manually add the effect, though it'll take a lot of work... hrm...

On another thread, Valkrionn outlined how to do it if this helps:

There is no need for it to be a true yield for that; It would be extremely easy to do via lua.

Add a new tag to buildings (easily done with sql) called "CulturePerPop" or something similar.

Then in lua, do the following:

1. Hook into ActivePlayerTurnStart
2. Loop all players, so it applies to AI as well as human.
3. Loop all cities of the player.
4. Check all buildings in the city for a non-zero value in the new tag.
5. If found, add to a counter, and keep checking buildings.
6. Once all buildings are checked, counter should hold the total amount from all buildings in the city. At this point, multiply the counter by the city's population, add to player culture.

I've done similar things in some unreleased mods.

Also just curious, are you still thinking of adding actual culture to the Culture Bomb?

 

[doktorstick]

I finally stepped up to the .05 beta. I've noticed two text problems.

1) In the production queue, hovering over Market gives the description of TXT_KEY_BUILDING_MARKET_HELP.

2) When completing Chichen Itza, there is no text that describes the wonder's benefit.

 

[doktorstick]

Regarding (2) above, that may be normal. A lot of wonders have no benefit text in their wonder graphic.

I encountered a problem with GS. The first one I earned I turned into an academy. Before I did that, however, I noticed that the "generate science" tooltip said that it contributed NaN science to a technology. The second GS I earned, I used it to add science and it made no change (I was 19 turns until Scientific Theory and the next turn I was at 18 turns).

 

[zambies]

Sorry, but this argument doesn't fly. Expanding is a big no-no for culture victories:

But what I've found is that this is no longer true with the Balance mods. As I posted a page or so earlier in this thread, I easily finished a culture victory (on Prince) by the mid 1900's even though I had founded 15+ cities of my own. I also did zero micromanaging of specialists or workers. It just sort of sneaked up on me as I was going for a science victory.

Edit: Also, Thal, I noticed in my last game that a lot (all) of the wonders had either blank descriptions or the descriptions were offset 4 - 5 lined down in the window so that they either overflowed or were cut off by the bottom border. Guessing this has to do with your tooltip re-write.

 

[Torvald]

Am currently playing version 2.0.05 beta, and noticed that I did not receive the expected benefits from acquiring Collective Rule, Citizenship and Republic.

Are these the only ones goofed up, or are they all goofed up?

In other words, will I need to restart my game using version 2.0.06 beta in order to get the correct benefits from most of the social policies?

 

[Mentos]

I know such question is maybe out of place here but I mainly play with Thal's mods so I shoot away:

I've created a bunch of new units using the standard unit classes.

Do I always have to reactivate the Thal Combo Mod at last to make any of its unit-gameplay changes affect my units too?
How does the game handle mods? Is there a list stored somewhere with the load order or doesn't it matter at all in which order I activate mods?

 

[Thalassicus]

@Seek
Thank you for providing that information, it's about what what I was thinking when I talked about manually adding it.

That thinking led me on a whole long side path all day today trying to figure out if I can make automatic tooltips modular too... mostly stumped on that one so I'll just add things manually. (I have a table in InfoTooltipData.lua listing every building stat and what to do if it's on a building... so right now the only way to add new stats is modify that one file, shared across all mods.)

I do intend to add culture to great artists at some point, my time the past few day's been taken up working on the tooltip system.


@doktorstick
The Market issue should be fixed in *.06

The issue with the wonder splash screen is something that's next on my todo list, it's a result of redoing the tooltip system. That screen calls the same code as normal "mouse-hover" tooltips, and I haven't looked at the code yet but I suspect it has something to do with these three flags passed to the tooltip function:

bExcludeName, bExcludeHeader, bNoMaintenance

Once I figure out how to properly use those, the wonder splash screens should be fixed.

Yep, the policy error in *.05 I found and fixed in *.06. Beta versions tend to be buggy, it's why I do the testing versions.


@Mentos
Load order is something which could be handled very easily with the "Associations" tab in ModBuddy. Unfortunately they haven't finished that feature yet, which makes it really hard to do any dependencies between mods.

I asked the same question you're asking a few months ago, and I think the response was mod load order is determined by the order the mods are installed in. However, I tried changing the "created on" dates for all the files in a mod, and that didn't work. My only conclusion is this load order is hidden away in some CiV database somewhere, and I have no clue where that might be. This is very different from most other games like Oblivion/Fallout, which have a load order we can easily control ("date created" of files).

Due to this combination of unfinished modding tools and lack of visible load order mechanics, the only solution I know of is to delete mod folders, then re-install them ingame with the "install mods" button in the order you wish them to load. I think this might work, but I haven't tried it.

 

[orangecape]

I have some anecdotal evidence that might help you Thal. I used a bunch of mods that conflicted in various ways and it always worked out that they were loaded in alphabetical order. If I had multiple mods changing the same value the one last alphabetically always took precedence. I have no hard data to prove it but I have never seen an exception and have seen many supporting data points. If you want your mod to have lots of dependencies and always work, trying naming it zzzBalance or something...

 

[Txurce]

I finished two games with version 2.0 today, and had a consistently engaging and balanced experience. It definitely seems ready for release from a gameplay perspective. Of interest in a miscellaneous way:

A city can be nuked into oblivion.

1090g for the courthouse almost made me choke when I saw it, but it was late enough in the game that building it was easy. Should puppets mostly be an interim step leading to annexation? It happens to perfectly fit the way I play, but it's worth considering that the devs effectively replaced vassals with puppets, and made them OP to boot. Should the choice between puppeting and annexing be more situational?

A civ can build the UN but not compete for it.

Competition for CS - particularly maritime - has existed for a while now, but in this game there was a decades-long modern-era bidding war that was absolutely brutal fiscally involving 3 AI civs and my own.

Arguably nothing is more out of whack in Civ 5 than AI happiness and gold at higher levels. We're all aware of the disproportionate happiness buffs - the AI is seemingly always above 100% with minimal effort. In my Immortal games some civ (often Spain) gets above 60,000g. If all this is due to the Immortal/Deity distortion, then never mind. Otherwise, it's a constant reminder that the game isn't working properly. This leads me back to wondering whether it's worth exploring eliminating the AI happiness bonus, and whether it would also put pressure on those gigantic piles of gold.

FR puts pressure on RA's, but not enough - mainly due to the AI's huge gold amounts at the highest levels. The only civs who don't have enough for a RA within a five-turn window are those on the way out.

WWGD has addressed happiness to some degree, but I don't know how much. I can say after having played one game without it that I was very happy reinstalling it! My last game had an unusual amount of war, but it was relatively predictable.

 

[Mentos]

I did a test about the mod loading order. You can read about it here.

In short: Last installed mod wins!

 

[Torvald]

Good News.

I simply replaced the v2.0.05 files with the v2.0.06 files in mid-game, and was able to successfully continue from my last game save.

Still have a bad cold, but at least I'm having fun with Civ-V this weekend.

 

[Thalassicus]

On the topic of the courthouse, that's a decision I made because I feel simply making it purchasable resulted in too easy access to annexation (done in patch *.135 I think). A high purchase cost is probably a decent middleground to try out between cheap vs. not purchasable at all. It currently costs as much to build as 1 colosseum with a purchase cost of 2 colosseums, but has no upkeep anymore.

One thing is any increase in #cities increases social policy costs, so that'll always be a downside to annexation. There's also the cost of the courthouse itself. I do want all three choices between razing-puppeting-annexation to be valuable options, so if it turns out puppeting got nerfed too hard I can reduce some effects here and there.

 

[Txurce]

On the topic of the courthouse, that's a decision I made because I feel simply making it purchasable resulted in too easy access to annexation (done in patch *.135 I think). I think a high purchase cost is a decent middleground to try out between cheap vs. not purchasable at all. It currently costs as much to build as 1 colosseum with a purchase cost of 2 colosseums, but has no upkeep anymore.

One thing is any increase in #cities increases social policy costs, so that'll always be a downside to annexation. There's also the cost of the courthouse itself. I do want all three options between razing-puppeting-annexation to be valuable options, so if it turns out puppeting got nerfed too hard I can reduce the effect of the nerf.

Just because I swallowed hard doesn't mean I had a problem with the courthouse costs! I agree with all your reasoning.

With regard to your second paragraph, doesn't an increase in the number of cities already increase SP costs?

 

[Thalassicus]

Yeah, just thinking out loud mostly.

Whether through conquest-annexation or simply expanding, there's the inherent policy cost downside to large empires (also much harder to get national wonders). Puppet states were a sort of way to cheat these limitations, allowing large, high-income, fast-teching, fast-policies, all-national-wonders empires all from conquest... no downside really. This is why I targeted the fast-teching and fast-policies parts, and improved national wonders... so a big empire will still have more production (through hammers and purchasing), but ideally not too much more of a tech/policy pace than small empires.

I decided on this route because of precedent from Civ 4, where rapid expansion increases production at the cost of tech pace.

This is another reason I've kept the National College very powerful. I moved it back to Philosophy recently to make it a little harder to beeline to and still rapid expand, which lets me maintain its power level. I've also been thinking about buffing other national wonders some more. By increasing cost-per-city modifier of national wonders it makes them harder to get for large conquest-empires, and allows me to improve effects... overall keeping the value about the same for a big empire while buffing smaller ones. In particular I gave the National Treasury a 50% modifier like the National College, and I'm thinking about targeting the Oxford University for something else.


------------------------

Main updates from .06 beta to .07:

• Wonder popups should display properly now. I checked Stonehenge and the Great Wall in particular. In general, all building tooltips should be working now in .07, so if you notice any problems please point it out.
• Oxford University additionally has 1 per . Base cost reduced, cost per city increased to 30%. For an empire of 6 cities the cost is unchanged... less than before with <6 cities, more expensive with >6.
• Museums are now 1 per , replacing the previous 6 flat value. This should display properly on all UI screens, if you spot an error anywhere, please describe it. To add the 1per1 culture possibility to the game I believe I've updated (so please check):
  • City banner (on-map display of city food/culture/prod bars)
  • City view screen
  • City view tooltip
  • Top bar
  • Top bar tooltip
  • Social policies window
  • Building tooltips
  • The actual gameplay effect

Incidentally, this means all culture buildings have their own distinct flavor of balance now, with fun perks as we advance in tier.

• Monument - static culture
• Temple - boosts some luxuries
• Opera House - gives a little happiness
• Museum - rewards high populations
• Broadcast Tower - doubles culture

 

[SSgtDuke]

City capture
I finished my game in 2.0.02. Overall I think the city attack/puppet/annex system is working nicely. The only weird thing was when I captured a large capital. It was in resistance for 20+ turns, which might be a bit excessive. It went from having several +4 food maritime allies down to +1 food as my new non-capital city. It also lost food buildings during the attack. This caused massive starvation and I was reminded about it over and over again as the citizens died, even though there was nothing I could do about it. Maybe instead of a conquered city only losing one population it can be dropped down to whatever size the post-capture amount of food can support? I think that would solve both of the above problems (resistance time and mass starvation).

Unit names
You know how the unit name(s) are now displayed in the bottom right when you mouse over a tile? I noticed that they're also showing up behind FoW. So I can mouse around land that my units don't have vision into and see all the unit locations and types. It's a bit of a cheat. Possible to sync up the unit name display with FoW? If not then maybe disable it altogether. I personally don't find it all that useful.

Oil requirements
I ran into a couple single unit land oil deposits. Is this intended? I was under the impression that all SRs would be minimum two now, with the occasional three or maybe even four in extremely hostile environments. Related to this scarcity, rocket artillery requiring oil didn't feel right. I was using my limited oil resources to fuel these "basic" units and I didn't have much remaining for "special" units (tanks, battleships, early aircraft). For similar reasons that cats and trebs have become resourceless, I think rocket artillery should as well.

Helicopter gunships
Helicopter gunships requiring oil also doesn't feel quite right to me. Because they are the balance to armor, I think maybe their resource requirement should be as well by reverting it back to aluminum. If I don't have adequate oil to defend against enemy tanks, but I do have aluminum, then I still have a chance. On a slightly different note, I also feel like helicopter gunships should be more like lancers, having a 50% defense penalty and being able to move after attacking. Though given their huge movement distance (and easy access to increasing it via promotions), this might overpower them and be difficult to balance. Just something to consider.

Looking forward to starting again with the latest version.