Getting Started

[Zyxpsilon]

...Similarly, I consider the Unofficial Patch, Attila's mod, and Copasetic UI Tweaks part of one unified mod with another three co-authors primarily focused on fixing UI bugs/issues.

Fine, i needed to read it from the "source(s)" and it actually makes a whole bunch of rational sense.
Where there are some advantages to exploit, any fair modder worth the name *must* do everything in their power to solve tasks at hand with optimal solutions.

Btw, alpaca... it's another good reason why i've been hesitating to dig deeper into the current LUA codes, once the stable release (incl. the famous DLL) gains a much more Final status - we'll have a lot less guesswork to do and many superfluous routines & functions won't have to be integrated in *our* components.
Patience!

(PS; In fact, you are both formally invited to think over about designing your own LPR(s) (at least, one from the original authors) for your mods. Generally speaking, the trick is to make a pseudo Steam/Achievement process *BUT* extremely hard to complete!)

Once players click on the rrrrroooaarring LPR button, they'll know they're in for a hell'of'a'ride...

 

[guczy]

Thal - quick and simple question.

In your latest dev build 25 I see that the unofficial patch is now at Unofficial Patch III (v 31) but on your previous dev builds it was Unofficial Patch III (v 32). I can't imagine that it has regressed but has the numbering changed for a reason..?

Also the Balance - Combat mod i have from the beta from a week or so ago is v20 and the one in the current beta build is v19, same with reasearch (v6 - v5)

 

[VimesUK]

Where does it say v31? It's a typo wherever it is...

Within the latest dev build mod folder ....Unofficial Patch III (v 31)

in the readme for build 21 of the dev build it shows...

v. 32

Clarified Pyramids tooltip.

The Woodsman promotion was listed in the Civilopedia under the nonexistent Terrain promotion category, and has been moved to the Melee category.

in the readme for build 25 there is no such entry as it stops at v. 31


See also guczy's post

 

[Swang]

Dear Thalassicus,

I have used this balanced modpack v1.08
Download the 1.09.25 beta version, Did not find any change form v1.08
Is the attachment is really 1.09.25 beta?

 

[jonezis]

In 1.09.25 beta version America, Japan and England are missing their new UU's and UB's.

 

[Tomice]

Confirmed, England and America have their vanilla UUs again. Also Iron and Horse deposits are size 1 or 2 again - AFAIK the latest conclusion was to have them all provide 2 units?

I fear 1.09.25 is broken somehow!

 

[alpaca]

Looks like we had some different ideas about puppets after all

Mine get only -50% science but also -50% gold and the culture contribution is locally unchanged but globally zeroed

 

[Thalassicus]

Oh I see what I did... I accidentally took the file DarthCycle attached, and renamed that to "Balance - Combined (v1.09.25 beta)"
I think a correct archive should be uploaded now... sorry for the confusion!

@alpaca
Yep, the key problem I feel is there's no quality vs quantity tradeoff for conquest as there was in Civ 4. Any sort of science rate for puppets means a conquest empire can easily both out-tech a builder empire and have a larger army, plus faster policy generation since the puppets contribute to policies but don't have a downside. This is why I targeted research and culture. I detailed a bit about the new city capture mechanics in the Combat thread here.

 

[Torvald]

Played most of the way through version v1.09.20beta this weekend, so here's my feedback after completing turn 423.

Game settings were: playing England, Archipelago map type, standard map size, King difficulty level, standard game length, and start era of Ancient.

Additional mods were: Beyond the Future (v1), Blue Mosque (v2), Globe Theatre (v1), Hukkak's Wonders Pack (v2), Improved Notifications (v6), Moai Statues National Wonder (v1), No XP Cap from Barbarians (v1), Red Cross National Wonder (v1), Resource Discovery (v1), Scientific Buildings (v4) and Wall Street National Wonder (v1).

The game was very stable and only crashed once, around turn 200, when I left it running overnight instead of shutting down my computer. Was able to easily resume from the last autosave, though, so this was not a problem. Did not notice any interference from the extra mods I'd installed (sorry - I'm an admitted mod junky).

The game's AI seemed to be working much better, as the other civs were actively conmpeting with me to bribe city states, rather than mostly ignoring them like in the Vanilla version of Civ-V. This made the game much more competitive. The other civs also were more likely to gang up on the game's point leader, which was me after about turn 175.

Except for the first 50 turns, it was not too hard to keep earning a decent money income and have a decent happiness surplus. I call this a big improvement!

Noticed that it became harder and harder to bribe city states as the game progressed, with gold progressivley buying less and less influence. This was an interesting change, as it had actually been too easy to bribe them before. However, bribing eventually became too tough, as it finally told me my influence would go down if I sent any more bribes. I can understand getting zero additional influence at some point, but negative influence changes hint at a mod formula quirk somewhere.

Had originally wanted to go for a Culture victory, but mistakenly annexed a city state when capturing it. Didn't think this was a serious problem at first, as I planned to raze that city later. However, after playing for another hour, the game would not let me raze the captured city state, saying I could not raze captured capitals. Had not known that captured city states count as capitals. Is this a feature of the Balance mods, or part of the Vanilla game?

Oh well, will try to finish the game later this week by going for a space victory or a highest score victory instead.

Thanks again for creating the Balance mods. I wplan to test your latest beta version next weekend.

 

[Thalassicus]

@Torvald
Glad you're enjoying the game!

Yeah, in the beta test versions things can be a little unpredictable. I was testing out various settings for citystate influence for a while there and things got out of whack, it should be back to normal in more recent beta versions.

Citystates are considered capitals by the game and cannot be razed, this is part of the vanilla game.

 

[doktorstick]

Official balance mods + unofficial patch:

I've completed a few games with the officially released balanced mods, and for whatever reason (likely it's *me*), I'm unable to win a cultural victory unless I purposefully ignore other victory paths. Usually by time I get my last policy to start building the victory wonder, I'm ready to launch the space victory.

This last game I won (standards as French on King) with six cities and had about as many units. I was lowest on land area, money, and military. Since I have to push science to stay competitive versus the AIs (both in bullying and opportunity to build wonders), the science victory path became the way to win. (I also built the pieces over years but assembled entire launch vehicle in one turn so the AIs wouldn't see that victory path as a challenge). I didn't have oil nor aluminum. Siam ended the game with almost 50,000 gold.

I've also observed that when I build a road to a CS capital (as requested), the quest does not complete.

I had one lockup in the same place (a lot rival civs attacking each other). Eventually I had to quicksave each turn and was able to get through it by loading, hitting next turn, and then waiting about 3 minutes. (It felt like a computer resource problem.)

I'm unclear what happens to buildings that require resources that are built through trade/CS resources. Since I had no units which used aluminum, I wasn't penalized for being at -2 aluminum from spaceship factories. (A CS gave me aluminum that I later lost.)

I didn't build stables until late game and it was a quick build or I didn't have anything more interesting to build. The same with the smokehouse. And aqueducts. It feels like there are too many things to build and that's after you make a focused choice of which way to build. I have read complaints about gold, but maybe vanilla purposefully gave more gold since it was intended that you spend spend spend (historically accurate?).

That's it for my notes. There were some other oddities but I didn't jot those down. Doh.

Cheers.

 

[Txurce]

I've also observed that when I build a road to a CS capital (as requested), the quest does not complete.

This is a vanilla bug post-patch.

 

[Thalassicus]

Two bugs should be fixed in v.28 beta compared to <26:

• Gifting cities no longer triggers the partisan/refugee mechanic.
• Cities with more culture than what's required for border expansion no longer show negative turns until the expansion. (This typically happens after a Krepost or the Angkor Wat is built.)

@doktorstick
Thanks for the detailed feedback!

In the beta versions over the past few weeks I've been focusing on quite a few buffs for the small-empire "builder" type game. Like in Civ 4, the goal is a small empire focused on peaceful research will be able to out-tech an empire focused on production and conquest, so the small army's higher-tech units will face off against more numerous, but lower-tech foes. This quality vs quantity tradeoff will hopefully make both a cultural or conquest victory equally enjoyable, since the cultural path won't feel penalized from every aspect of the game.

One thing to ask... how much culture do artist specialists give in your current game? I intended to buff them to 2 a while ago, but discovered I'd somehow forgotten that (or accidentally deleted it) at some point. More powerful artists should hopefully make culture victories easier to attain, and lessen the need to choose this victory path from turn 1.

Alpaca and I have also been discussing ways to add a new feature the Great Artist's culture bomb ability: it will give the empire culture in addition to its normal effect.

On the topic of buildings, I tend to agree there's tons of stuff to build and not enough time to do it. I added some upgrades for trading posts around the Medieval/Renaissance boundary. In addition to solving some balance issues of yields and individual improvement types, this also helps the economy of peaceful builders. (For warmongers the better trading posts are balanced with slightly higher costs to purchase, maintain and upgrade large armies.)

 

[doktorstick]

One thing to ask... how much culture do artist specialists give in your current game? I intended to buff them to 2 a while ago, but discovered I'd somehow forgotten that (or accidentally deleted it) at some point. More powerful artists should hopefully make culture victories easier to attain, and lessen the need to choose this victory path from turn 1.

IIRC, it was 1 and 2.

 

[scide]

hey I have a prob my great scientists dont have the command interface so i cant bulb techs. Everything else seems to be fine. Only other mod im running is RED modpack v.7. Tried clearing cache too.

 

[alpaca]

@alpaca
Yep, the key problem I feel is there's no quality vs quantity tradeoff for conquest as there was in Civ 4. Any sort of science rate for puppets means a conquest empire can easily both out-tech a builder empire and have a larger army, plus faster policy generation since the puppets contribute to policies but don't have a downside. This is why I targeted research and culture. I detailed a bit about the new city capture mechanics in the Combat thread here.

I feel like a 100% science loss makes puppeting only a temporary solution until you have enough happiness to build a courthouse or enough money to buy one (which might be what you're after, of course). I would prefer it to be a viable alternative to annexing, so I'm not balancing against peacefully built empires but against other warmonger empires.

The problem with balancing against a peaceful player is in my opinion that the diplomatic penalty for conquering cities is quite severe. If you take a couple of cities while you're the strongest player it's very likely you will see a number of denounces which means you lose a lot of money from AI sales and a lot of research agreements. This, in addition to higher army needs (well in PWM at least) means conquest becomes very unattractive unless you desperately need land.

 

[Thalassicus]

@scide
Hmm... this is the hardest sort of problem to figure out, since the unit interface is working properly on my system, but disappears on your system and Madfox's.

You're using the beta version with Free-Research Balance Mod (v 2.1), right?

I'll put on my todo list to try and go through that file item by item to see if I can identify what the problem might be.


@alpaca
Ahh that makes sense! Yeah, basically my thought is to have puppets as a temporary transitional state if an empire can't afford to build or buy a courthouse, due to low happiness or funds (respectively). I made the courthouse quite expensive up-front with no maintenance: same as a Colosseum with a purchase modifier of 100. Very desirable to annex but expensive.

Also, there's a subtle difference between 0/ and a -100% science loss: any libraries in puppets still work at full effect. I did this so if a library is captured, or the puppet runs out of stuff to build and starts on a library, it's not a waste of time & maintenance.

You're right that diplomatic penalties can be rather stiff for conquest at a high point rating. I don't focus on that much because I feel the whole diplomacy system is a little out of whack. Sneaks has been trying to work on that some so I use his WWGD mod, though all we can really do without the full SDK is band-aid solutions.

 

[Thalassicus]

EDIT #2: The Germans have a Naresuan's Elephant in an isolated city next to a military CS that is not allied with them.

Thinking about this some more, I suspect they were allied with the CS at some point. In a recent patch Firaxis made it possible for militaristic CSs to grant UUs of civs other than one's own... probably to try and buff them.

 

[guczy]

Could you guys pls recommend a good TSL earth map which could be played with the Balance modpack? I've tried the "yet not other earth map", which seems to be the best, but it crashes super often (which only happens on random maps when i play for like 5 hours). I also tried the legendary earth map, but that has the leaders confused (for example when i told Suleiman to attack Ramses he attacked Augustus, when i tried again, it didnt even let me select Ramses).

 

[doktorstick]

I like puppets in that I don't have to micro-manage a sprawling empire. Am I grokking that that micro-management is essentially going to be forced?