Getting Started

[Txurce]

Perhaps a bit more iron sprinkled about would be nice though, and/or deposits that have a bit more in them, since it is very difficult early-on (with scarce workers with lots to do spending all that time to get to and build a mine for 1 iron resource) to build siege units and this can create a drawn-out stalemate where weak units just go to the slaughter turn after turn.

I would prefer there be no "1" resources - just 2's and maybe the rare "4." If siege units no longer require iron - a good idea in my opinion - then I would drop the 4's altogether. I would also hope that even though the resources are more plentiful, that they would be scattered haphazardly, so that there is a random element that makes the human player have to adjust is strategy to the circumstances. In other words, I don't think one should count on starting with two swords and two horsemen every game... sometimes one of those resources should be some distance away.

 

[Dunkah]

I have been playing with this mod for a while as well. In an effort to improve my King Level opening strategies I have had a lot of starts recently to about turn 200. I have not managed to get more than 2 iron in each start.

I tend to build only 3 or 4 cities early on and like to expand through puppets after that for Policies sake.

But Iron does seem to be scarce and I very rarely get to build Catapults until I have befreinded a city state or conquered my first city, due to lack of Iron.

Wondering how this will blend in with the city defenses being increased as those calculations were based on having capabilities of an all Swordsman army right?

 

[rhammer640]

Is it possible to have the high iron deposit nodes only appear in normally unwanted lands, such as desert and tundra and have any that are in more fertile lands be the small ones or is it completely random?

 

[basta]

I would prefer there be no "1" resources - just 2's and maybe the rare "4." If siege units no longer require iron - a good idea in my opinion - then I would drop the 4's altogether.

I agree very much with this. 1 iron in a deposit is basically adding an 8 to 10 turn surcharge to an early unit's build time (get your worker to the deposit with no road guaranteed, then build it) and is far too stingy for the worker build effort put into it. It was the first iron mine to come online for me and boy did it feel like I was gypped.

Most with 2, a few with 3, and a rare one with 4 feels right.

 

[Tomice]

Most with 2, a few with 3, and a rare one with 4 feels right.

To achieve Thal's goal of a 25% overall reduction while increasing the iron deposit count by 50%, we only have the options of 1 and 3 or a constant 2.

I guess I'd prefer always 2, since single-unit deposits are a bit unexciting. But then again, with horses we have no choice (since they are 2 and 4 in vanilla).



The yields per big/small deposit are very easy to mod, though. It's just the distribution that's hard to change. But you have the option to use either vanilla or Thal's (+50%) "assignstartingplots.lua" file as base. Thal has marked the lines with "combat mod". Just search the word "combat" using Strg-F

 

[Thalassicus]

it is very difficult early-on (with scarce workers with lots to do spending all that time to get to and build a mine for 1 iron resource) to build siege units

I'm experimenting with resource-free catapults and trebuchets. I was concerned making catapults/trebuchets spammable might be a problem... but since they're so weak defensively, move slow and require setup, it's not particularly effective to spam them. Cannon don't require resources either and don't seem to be a big issue. I've seen this idea mentioned in vanilla strategy discussions as well.

This provides a small buff to the Mathematics tech too, which is typically one of the last Classical techs to research due to the fact you require Iron Working to get much use out of it. Incidentally this also buffs Archers since their tech is followed by a more-valuable one. I'm considering increasing the cost of Mathematics slightly to mitigate the effects of the buff on early city conquest.

While getting 1 of a resource might not seem like much, keep in mind it's still possible to spam archers and spearmen, both of which have been buffed. The goal is to give a reason to actually build these units. In vanilla you can simply spam strategic-using units since strategic supply is much higher than demand.

In addition, having more frequent but smaller deposits means you have more viable locations to choose from for your cities to get these resources, and more likelihood of a good spot to build a military city with a Forge (which has been buffed).

Is it possible to have the high iron deposits only appear in normally unwanted lands, such as desert and tundra and have any that are in more fertile lands be the small ones or is it completely random?

That's a fantastic idea and would be very easy to do. "Major" deposits are already distributed based on terrain type, so all I'd have to do is increase the quantity of iron in these, and decrease it for the "small" deposits. Thank you for the idea.

Since I can alter the abundance of major/minor deposits separately, it's possible do "common" 2s and "rare" 3s while still achieving an overall 25% reduction. Keep in mind it won't be possible to increase the number of deposits with this approach however (since minor deposits will be the same size as before at 2).

Adding a third type of deposit (2 3 4) would take hours of work due to how the code is structured in a rigid major/minor classification (would require a total rewrite).

I've posted a new dev version with the common 2s / rare 3s approach (v1.09.7dev):

Version 1.09.7Adev had a 25% reduction through +50% resource deposits with -50% resources per deposit.
Version 1.09.7Bdev is 25% reduction through +0% resource deposits with -25% resources per deposit.

Either way I'll be moving the cata/treb iron requirement. I tend to favor the +50/-50 approach since it gives more potential locations to drop a city for at least one resource, but either one should accomplish the goal of a 25% reduction in availability.

 

[Tomice]

Thal, I have 1.09.5 dev installed, what's the difference to 1.09.6 dev? Seems similar?

 

[Thalassicus]

I don't really remember, to be honest. I only document changes between one release version to the next (1.08 to 1.09). I don't think 1.09.5 and 1.09.6 have any significant difference in strategic resources though.

I've been thinking a bit more about these, and here is the concept behind the changes I've been exploring in the latest dev versions.

Basically, in vanilla it's like this:

• Each player has about 10 units' worth of strategic resources within a dozen tiles of the capital, a mix of horse and iron of varying deposit sizes.
• We can field a full army of strategic-users with these first few cities.
• We never really have to worry about seeking out new strategic resources after getting those spots developed. Supply of strategics usually exceeds demand. In my personal experience with vanilla resource placement I rarely have to worry about what strategics citystates have, and I've never needed to trade other leaders for strategics.

What I've been trying is to make this progression more gradual, with strategic resource more valuable:

• Each player has about 5 units' worth of strategic resources within a dozen tiles of the capital, a mix of horse and iron of varying deposit sizes.
• Early armies would field a few of these elite units mixed in with non-strategic cannon fodder like spearmen and archers (which were buffed), in about a 50/50 ratio, instead of the whole army as strategic-users. Unit production slightly increased to replace cannon fodder.
• We gain more strategics through conquest, city-state alliances, or diplomatic trade. Ideally each citystate we ally with or conquer, civ we conquer, or civ we trade with let us operate ~2 more of these elite units in our army.
• Eventually supply exceeds demand again (like in vanilla), but at that point gunpowder units are appearing.
• This would benefit defending AIs since they can quickly replace lost strategic-users, while half the attacking army would be weaker non-strategic cannon fodder.
• Regular replacement of cannon fodder enhances value of long-term unit production buildings like the Armory, Forge, Stable, etc.

Thoughts on this subject would be helpful from anyone who has a comment. Does this sound like a form of gameplay you would enjoy, or do you prefer the method in vanilla, or some third option?

I can work on details of implementation, the code is flexible... the important part is to identify goals.

 

[Tomice]

I don't fully understand. Do you want to remove strategic ressources from the map?

The version in 1.09.5 works already very well, I do think about attacking a civ only to get access to horses. The only horses I have now are imported from an AI civ, traded for GPT. That's hard, but interesting.

While I think some players might enjoy it to have 2 or so units of the most important str. ressources within their surrounding (at least sometimes), the solution you have now is already very good for the "normal" setting.

I'd add a second setting that guarantees at least 2-3 units of horses and iron within 10 tiles from your capital, and maybe a few units of other essential SRs. The vanilla "strategic balance" setting is probably a bit too predictable, though.

I'm not a fan of "gamey" approaches.

 

[Thalassicus]

Clarified it some. By "free" I simply meant we get early resources by just building our first few cities, without much extra effort involved seeking out those resources.

 

[Tomice]

Does this mean you'd like to no longer randomnly spread ressources across the map, but give a few of them in every starting region of a major civ (circle of 12 tiles radius) and a few for every CS?

If that's the case, what about terra maps or other settings where large parts of the map are far from any major civ?

If I understood you wrong again, I'm very sorry.

Again, I'm all for reduced amounts of SR, to make them valuable. I also think that swordmen/knights/tanks/battleships/... should be elite units, not easily fielded in large numbers. But I'm not sure we need a big change from the way 1.09.6 dev (or .7 dev) handles stuff. Only a choice for more or less randomness (Is it possible to start without ANY iron nearby or not?).

 

[Thalassicus]

Naw I simply mean: 1) take vanilla civ 2) fiddle with quantity/abundance of resource deposits until those goals are met. The fundamental placement algorithm would not change. This is basically my thinking for the +50% deposits, -50% per deposit method I tried first.

The thing is, I'm a subconscious/intuitive thinker so I often do something first, then take much longer to consciously figure out the reasons why I wanted to do it.

This is also why many things get added to the mod before writing up the rationale.

 

[Seek]

What I've been trying is to make this progression more gradual, with strategic resource more valuable:

• Each player has about 5 units' worth of strategic resources within a dozen tiles of the capital, a mix of horse and iron of varying deposit sizes.
• Early armies would field a few of these elite units mixed in with non-strategic cannon fodder like spearmen and archers (which were buffed), in about a 50/50 ratio, instead of the whole army as strategic-users. Unit production slightly increased to replace cannon fodder.
• We gain more strategics through conquest, city-state alliances, or diplomatic trade. Ideally each citystate we ally with or conquer, civ we conquer, or civ we trade with let us operate ~2 more of these elite units in our army.
• Eventually supply exceeds demand again (like in vanilla), but at that point gunpowder units are appearing.
• This would benefit defending AIs since they can quickly replace lost strategic-users, while half the attacking army would be weaker non-strategic cannon fodder.
• Regular replacement of cannon fodder enhances value of long-term unit production buildings like the Armory, Forge, Stable, etc.

Thoughts on this subject would be helpful from anyone who has a comment.

This is almost exactly what my current game was like - I found it very enjoyable! Much more interesting with fewer (but still some) strategics nearby.

Look forward to the siege change, it was one of the things in PWM that I really missed coming back to TBM. Another was the road change: +1G for every roaded tile. So roads are free *if a city works the tile*. It made for some interesting decisions and resulted in 1. More realistic roading patterns, ie in the city's starting six; and 2. Never had downtime for workers. Obviously some balancing to prevent a superabundance of gold would be necessary, but it would be neat if this got added at some point.

 

[Thalassicus]

I tried pursuing ideas like road yields with trading posts, the problem is a simple 1:1 ratio results in a surplus after modifiers are taken into effect, so it's beneficial to spam roads as population grows. My main problem with anything that encourages new roads isn't a gameplay issue... but the simple fact of Civ's horrible road linking system graphically. CiV roads really have promise but are wrecked by wrong curves almost everywhere three or more roads meet. I actually try and build my roads to avoid this problem, which for me is eye-wrenching on an otherwise more realistic landscape than previous versions of CiV.

I sorta wonder how long the road linkage issue has been around. It's obvious to anyone who sits down with CiV for half an hour, yet has existed at least 5 months. That combination of obvious bug + lack of fixing typically indicates a difficult-to-find error between interrelated and complex segments of a program (instead of a bug in a single component), which is unfortunate. (No, it's very unlikely to developer laziness if anyone's thinking that.)

Yeah I know, I sorta rambled there.

I wonder what sort of an effect 2/turn maintenance, 1/turn yield would have...

I've updated the development versions. A and B are identical with the exception of deposit abundance and size (version A is +50%/-50%, version B is +0%/-25%). Both include resource-free siege units with increased Mathematics tech cost (delays potential siege rushes). See which one yall prefer.

 

[Sneaks]

If you want to fix the road issue, I suggest you go alpaca's route. PlayWithMe has roads yield 1, so obviously worked road spaces are free of charge/profitable with market+. He added 1 to raildroads as well. In both cases, he changed their existing bonuses, however. He removed the 50% production bonus from RRs and reduced the road trade route gold equation.

As far as removing iron from siege, I can tell you from playing the PWM mod that has had this requirement removed for some time, the AI does not spam these units. I believe that alpaca added extra promotions to them as well, some manner of weak vs. melee.

 

[Ahriman]

In particular, I think I'm going to reduce mech infantry to 3

I think this is very wise.
Realism people might complain that light vehicles should be able to move at least as fast as heavy tanks, but eh, screw 'em.

I feel he's already a decently powerful leader so I don't want to buff him significantly... what if it was a 100% chance, but half the gold and the free warriors had a -1 "untrained" penalty?

I don't think the randomness of the German ability comes from the 50% activation or not, it comes from the fact that you might or might not have a lot of barb camps nearby.

PlayWithMe has roads yield 1, so obviously worked road spaces are free of charge/profitable with market+. He added 1 to raildroads as well.

I really don't see a problem with the vanilla implementation of roads, I think it works just fine.

I'd go flat 2 everywhere rather than 1 and 3 for strategic resources, but its not an important issue.

Both include resource-free siege units with increased Mathematics tech cost

Nice, will test.

 

[Thalassicus]

@Sneaks
The issue I'm specifically referring to is this, not any gameplay concern:

Spoiler :

Anything that makes roads more valuable tends to increase occurrence of the problem. I know it's probably silly but this one surreal aspect stands out for me in otherwise realistic terrain (well, with modded less-luminescent trading posts).


@Ahriman
I agree about all that. I think a fixed number of resources per node is much easier to balance for one thing. I'm trying not to stray too far from vanilla's method though.

In addition to increased Mathematics tech cost I gave it a Bronze Working prereq. This means catapults can still be built at around the same time as vanilla, while simply not requiring resources anymore. It prevents super-early siege rushes.

While doing this I also fiddled with tech tree display of things around around Acoustics a bit. The Banking -> Acoustics link they added (patch 1.0.1.135 I think) has been bugging me a while due to its cumbersome graphic.

My primary annoyance is it's not possible to tell if the vertical crossbar bar next to Acoustics is a link from Chivalry or Education without checking for a corresponding vertical bar next to Education or Chivalry, the opposite tech. Lining everything up at least eliminates these vertical crossbars, and although it's not possible to display four mutually-linked nodes with CiV's system without overlapping lines, only 2 lines overlap instead of 4:

Spoiler :

 

[Txurce]

Thoughts on this subject would be helpful from anyone who has a comment. Does this sound like a form of gameplay you would enjoy, or do you prefer the method in vanilla, or some third option?

What you itemized is what I want.

The difference between dev mods .6 and .7 isn't big enough for me to object regardless of what you ultimately settle on. The ideal for me is to have enough diversity between games - some harder, some easier - while not handicapping a civ unduly (very little iron on your third of the continent. Hitting this sweet spot perfectly is probably unlikely, in which case I would tilt toward .6, which seems closer to Ahriman's preference for a fixed number of resources per tile.

My fear with .6 prior to testing would be that it limits improvisational creativity. But I'll test it, since I have no clue whether this is the case.

 

[Thalassicus]

I added a prereq between Bronze Working and Mathematics, so Catapults still require about the same tech level before they can start rolling out. To do so I shifted the displayed position of a few techs on the tech tree.

I could use feedback on what people think of the new positions. The reason I'm trying this out is the ancient/classical combat units all group together nicely, with horseman and swordsman paths visibly side-by-side with the catapult path.

The reason I avoided any tech tree edits like this in the past is I didn't want to break the norm of no-lines-overlap. Firaxis already did this with the crazy Aesthetics links though, so a little creativity has precedent now. In this arrangement it might make sense to link Construction with Metal Casting. After all, it's logical to know Construction to build Workshops. It would also delay the improvements to workshops from the City Development mod, mitigating the effects of that buff from a possible beeline.

 

[Ahriman]

What I've been trying is to make this progression more gradual, with strategic resource more valuable:
Each player has about 5 units' worth of strategic resources within a dozen tiles of the capital, a mix of horse and iron of varying deposit sizes.
Early armies would field a few of these elite units mixed in with non-strategic cannon fodder like spearmen and archers (which were buffed), in about a 50/50 ratio, instead of the whole army as strategic-users. Unit production slightly increased to replace cannon fodder.
We gain more strategics through conquest, city-state alliances, or diplomatic trade. Ideally each citystate we ally with or conquer, civ we conquer, or civ we trade with let us operate ~2 more of these elite units in our army.
Eventually supply exceeds demand again (like in vanilla), but at that point gunpowder units are appearing.
This would benefit defending AIs since they can quickly replace lost strategic-users, while half the attacking army would be weaker non-strategic cannon fodder.
Regular replacement of cannon fodder enhances value of long-term unit production buildings like the Armory, Forge, Stable, etc.

In case you couldn't guess, I strongly support this kind of design, and if it works well enough might even favor buffs to the strategic resource units.

I'd continue the story though; in the renaissance era, strategic resources generally become much less important, particularly with rifles and cannon, and so civs with fewer resources have a chance to recover, or push offense on equal footing.
After that, the game changes; horses and iron become irrelevant, but then coal and most importantly oil become available.
Coal should be limited but really valuable; if its rare enough, then we might even want to buff factories (reduce cost, or maintenance cost).
I'd consider removing the coal requirement from the Ironclad and making it just an economic resource.
[Also, what happens to factories if you drop into negative coal; do they stop working?]

Oil should be very important militarily. This might require buffing aircraft, and buffing tanks even further, and buffing battleships (maybe strength boost to make them more durable?).

I could use feedback on what people think of the new positions.

Screenshot please? I might not have a chance to test.
I agree that the graphic depiction of AND requirements is really ugly.