Getting Started

[doktorstick]

I think I found a critical bug with the latest beta release.

I started a new game as Babylon and as I was obtaining more and more techs, after obtaining Writing, I was given a Great Scientist, which is the unique ability of the civ. Apparently, pressing the beaker icon is supposed to give you a certain amount of science towards the next tech you're researching, but all it does is absolutely nothing.

At first, I thought it may have been due to a conflict with Tech Diffuser. So, I started up another game with the mod not enabled and the same thing happened. I haven't checked to see if it will happen again if I get another Great Scientist the old-fashioned way, but figured I bring this to your attention.

EDIT: After getting my next Great Scientist, I can confirm that the unit doesn't have the option to give any addition science. I think the issue may be in the DiscoverMission.lua file, though I'm having somewhat of a hard time pinpointing the issue at hand.

Also check to see if the tooltip still reads NaN science contributed.

 

[bobbyboy29]

Hey thal, my idea for the national wonder requirements is to have different requirements for large and small empires. i.e: If you have only 4 cities, all of them need a library to complete NC, if you have more than that then you need libraries in 75% of cities rounded up (those numbers are subject to change, I'd probably put the percentage lower for NW's related to buildings which have maintenance costs like barracks).

If this is possible to mod in this fashion, I think it will mean that it will still be harder yet possible to build NW's for large empires (without having to stall settling or annexing cities to build them) yet the change doesn't make it any easier for small empires to build the NC.

 

[alpaca]

My interpretation of what national wonders should be is basically along the lines of Sneaks'. They should be super-buildings that promote city specialization. If city specialization is powerful enough that a small empire with well-specialized cities has decent chances of fighting a larger empire without, that's a good thing. The large empire can have the specialized cities, too, but they will be smaller because of happiness reasons and more resources flowing into expansion than infrastructure.

In fact, I would argue that especially for small empires, it's not at all feasible to build most of the NWs because it's not feasible to get a university in all of 3 cities if one of them has to build military and the second is money-focused and has few hammers. Large empires usually have hammers to spare and can rotate their building plan so they can keep churning out units even though they get markets, libraries and universities up everywhere. They also have more money to rush-buy them in cities with little production. The NW city requirements don't promote small empires, it just promotes periods of stagnation.

My own plan is to add some more NWs and remove the building requirement except for the city you build the wonder in, and instead increase cost per city to make the investment steeper for large empires. Flavor-wise I'm also deliberating styling some NWs as super-versions of their respective buildings, as kind of upgrade.

I don't know if you should use city maintenance in balance. It once again depends on what you think "balancing" means, but city maintenance feels quite a bit different from happiness capped expansion. The most effective way to curb ICS is to make settlers expensive, by the way. You do think twice about when you want to shell out the 200 hammers for the settler if he's only going to grab vanilla terrain in PWM, so maybe that's a more appropriate way to go for BC

 

[Txurce]

Making the AI favor guided missiles is a fiendishly simple way to improve AI military IQ (especially on higher levels). I laughed out loud thinking about it.

I finished a game last night with v12 (I think). I've already posted a couple of bug comments, so won't repeat those. I did have a notable culture boost from the National Epic, which I built almost by chance. Everything else felt right, including the FR mod, now that gold has been reduced - the AI often didn't have enough gold to sign RA's.

I joined in my continent's universal DoF fest, and as expected, noticed zero benefits from my usual abstention. Specifically, I had no better trade relations, and the DoF's didn't prevent the AI from denouncing each other eventually. Experimenting, I went with only a warrior and and an archer (my promoted scout) until about 1000 AD. At that point I built four chu-ko-nus, and let that ride until a break building SS parts, when I cranked out some MI and Rocket Artillery. I avoided war by bribing my neighbors to attack each other several times. This was the case even though I culture-bombed one of my Friends. (I'll repeat these comments in the WWGD thread.)

 

[gandalf51]

@gandalf51
That's an interesting idea, though probably beyond the scope of these mods... more like something for a full-fledged gameplay mod.

Maybe, but removing iron for siege units also change gameplay, and more than my idea I think. Not only you can build any numbers of siege units, and earlier in some case; you can also build more units that need iron (even with the -25%).

I agree entirely that the AI ignoring unhappiness is annoying, but there's some things about that we can't overcome. For example, all AIs play on the Settler difficulty setting and get a decent, fixed happiness bonus on top of that... to my knowledge this is something we can't change.

It's more than annoying. In one my latest game one of my neighbor had at least 15 towns, and it was early in the game.
Have you looked the mod I was talking about (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=408513) ? Because he "corrected" that.

 

[alpaca]

Well you can change the post defines but that requires you to start a game twice after enabling the mod. The AI then plays on the difficulty you set it to. It normally plays on Chieftain, by the way, not settler.

 

[Txurce]

Maybe, but removing iron for siege units also change gameplay, and more than my idea I think. Not only you can build any numbers of siege units, and earlier in some case; you can also build more units that need iron (even with the -25%).

It's more than annoying. In one my latest game one of my neighbor had at least 15 towns, and it was early in the game.
Have you looked the mod I was talking about (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=408513) ? Because he "corrected" that.

The point that there are now more combined siege and sword units than ever is an interesting one, but the change still "balanced" the use of all units.

With regard to fixing happiness despite the dev "settler" code, I keep noting that Sneaks also addressed it to some degree with his WWGD mod.

 

[Txurce]

I would argue that especially for small empires, it's not at all feasible to build most of the NWs because it's not feasible to get a university in all of 3 cities if one of them has to build military and the second is money-focused and has few hammers.

Slightly off topic, I've never understood this approach, unless my three cities just happened to be geographically really different. I've occasionally had one of three cities low on hammers, but for me a university in every city of a small empire is a given, because all three cities being super-cities if at all possible is my foremost goal. What's the rationale for the more specialized approach?

 

[jacyp]

I agree entirely that the AI ignoring unhappiness is annoying, but there's some things about that we can't overcome. For example, all AIs play on the Settler difficulty setting and get a decent, fixed happiness bonus on top of that... to my knowledge this is something we can't change.

But you can change what the Settler difficulty gives to the player, can't you?

You can dumb down the Settler to make at least a bit of impact on the AI initial status to balance the cheating happiness a little.

No one that plays on Settler will even know that the game has MODs anyway.

 

[doktorstick]

Slightly off topic, I've never understood this approach, unless my three cities just happened to be geographically really different. I've occasionally had one of three cities low on hammers, but for me a university in every city of a small empire is a given, because all three cities being super-cities if at all possible is my foremost goal. What's the rationale for the more specialized approach?

Nor have I. I beat the game regularly on Emperor, less frequently on Immortal. Reading these posts was making me think that I was "missing" something when managing a few cities. Maybe that's what's keeping me from consistent Immortal wins...?

In large empires, I definitely have focused cities. The cities though are focused through specialists and tiles, not because I did or didn't build buildings in them.

 

[basta]

The most effective way to curb ICS is to make settlers expensive, by the way. You do think twice about when you want to shell out the 200 hammers for the settler if he's only going to grab vanilla terrain in PWM, so maybe that's a more appropriate way to go for BC

I'm midway through a first test game at emperor with this latest dev version of BC and find the city spacing set at 3 tiles is an enormous improvement and goes a huge way to check ICS. AI cities are more rationally placed and you don't have those ridiculous parasite cities spawning in coastal crannies, or on desert and tundra. Refreshing.

IMO settlers should be cheap for a mature empire which has enormous resources at its disposal; scaling up the cost as you propose is to my eye too similar to the official-patch penalistic philosophy of "Oh look, it works too well; let's nerf it."

I read all of Thal's mod in notepad to see the nuts and bolts and do a few personal tweaks for pet peeves and liked very much his way of resetting the settlement flavors for the AI--what kind of terrain they will favor. With the 3 tile spacing it really works wonders and avoids being a blunt-instrument nerf.

It's almost killed ICS but if you want to drive a stake through its heart there's one more placement variable that would kill it off for good--settlers must settle at least 1 tile away from another major civ's borders. IDK if this can be modded, but it would get rid of those later-game parasite cities & would put an end to ICS without nerfs at all.

As for NWs, building 100% is too much IMO, except for monuments and libraries, which I consider necessary for every city. Why not a simple percentage of prerequisite buildings built? 75% to me seems fair. Takes that many states to ratify a constitutional amendment.

 

[Seek]

My interpretation of what national wonders should be is basically along the lines of Sneaks'. They should be super-buildings that promote city specialization. If city specialization is powerful enough that a small empire with well-specialized cities has decent chances of fighting a larger empire without, that's a good thing. The large empire can have the specialized cities, too, but they will be smaller because of happiness reasons and more resources flowing into expansion than infrastructure.

In fact, I would argue that especially for small empires, it's not at all feasible to build most of the NWs because it's not feasible to get a university in all of 3 cities if one of them has to build military and the second is money-focused and has few hammers. Large empires usually have hammers to spare and can rotate their building plan so they can keep churning out units even though they get markets, libraries and universities up everywhere. They also have more money to rush-buy them in cities with little production. The NW city requirements don't promote small empires, it just promotes periods of stagnation.

My own plan is to add some more NWs and remove the building requirement except for the city you build the wonder in, and instead increase cost per city to make the investment steeper for large empires. Flavor-wise I'm also deliberating styling some NWs as super-versions of their respective buildings, as kind of upgrade.

That sounds like a good way to go about it; I'm not sure that the larger empire would necessarily have smaller cities in the core than the small empire however. I often play in a builder style similar to Txurce and make 3-6 super-cities with decent hammers (if possible), science, gold and culture. There might be slight specialization, but usually they're all pretty well rounded. I'll build pretty much all the NWs in my super-capital which carries most of the heavy lifting.

The most effective way to curb ICS is to make settlers expensive, by the way. You do think twice about when you want to shell out the 200 hammers for the settler if he's only going to grab vanilla terrain in PWM, so maybe that's a more appropriate way to go for BC

Out of curiosity, can one adjust unit costs by number of cities like the NWs? (I took a cursory glance through the xml, but didn't see anything.) It might be an interesting way to go with settlers.

 

[zambies]

Slightly off topic, I've never understood this approach, unless my three cities just happened to be geographically really different. I've occasionally had one of three cities low on hammers, but for me a university in every city of a small empire is a given, because all three cities being super-cities if at all possible is my foremost goal. What's the rationale for the more specialized approach?

In large empires, I definitely have focused cities. The cities though are focused through specialists and tiles, not because I did or didn't build buildings in them.

Completely agree. I'm very much a builder so I generally don't have any use for more than the bare minimum military (just to keep people off my back) until I'm ready to sweep the world away or I decide to go for a rare domination victory.

I don't even bother specializing until I have more than, say, 5 - 7 cities. Even then I see a use for at least gold or science enhancing buildings in all but the most completely deficient cities.

 

[Sneaks]

I think the basic point is that National Wonders should not only be appealing to all playstyles (not just builders), but also available to them. I also considered the non-requirement for multiple copies like alpaca, but ended up sticking with the 3 concept much like Civ IV did.

A note about the new tile expansion choices: In playing a test game, the AI prioritized grabbing river plains and some hills before grabbing a luxury resource in the second ring. There were 2 rivers between the resource and my city, but still the game should have weighed it heavily enough to overcome any physical barriers.

 

[doktorstick]

A note about the new tile expansion choices: In playing a test game, the AI prioritized grabbing river plains and some hills before grabbing a luxury resource in the second ring. There were 2 rivers between the resource and my city, but still the game should have weighed it heavily enough to overcome any physical barriers.

I observed the same thing in .14 last night. It prioritized a hill over marble in the second ring. The marble was across the river from the city; the hill was on the same side (if that matters).

 

[Seek]

I think the basic point is that National Wonders should not only be appealing to all playstyles (not just builders), but also available to them. I also considered the non-requirement for multiple copies like alpaca, but ended up sticking with the 3 concept much like Civ IV did.

I think it just comes down to what we decide NWs should be for: To me (and the devs and Thal I think) their purpose is to allow the small empire to keep up with large ones. Alpaca's view is to create/encourage city specialization. This is equally valid, but I think Thal has taken steps toward this using other methods (like building tweaks and additional resource bonuses), using the NWs as a temptation to stay small.

It's a shame that it cannot be based on a percentage of cities; I think this would be ideal once the dll is released. Until then I think we should leave them as is: essentially forcing the builder types to have 3+ cities is not really a desirable option I think, and for the expansionist the three city reqs seems insignificant.

 

[VimesUK]

Just downloading the latest dev version (rev 15 at the time of this post) and I have now seen "Balance DLC - Inca Spain" amongst the ones within the balanced combined folder but can't read anything about it from the readme mod list. What does this one do..?

 

[SuicideMW]

Also check to see if the tooltip still reads NaN science contributed.

Actually, it didn't show anything other than a copy of the tooltip from whatever button you hovered over on the lower left-hand portion of the interface.

Speaking of that area, with v.15 and the Liberation Boost mod activated, that whole lower left-hand corner of the interface is gone. Disabling the Liberation Boost mod brings it back.

 

[Sneaks]

Just downloading the latest dev version (rev 15 at the time of this post) and I have now seen "Balance DLC - Inca Spain" amongst the ones within the balanced combined folder but can't read anything about it from the readme mod list. What does this one do..?

Gives Terrace farms the same bonuses as farms.

 

[Sneaks]

Actually, it didn't show anything other than a copy of the tooltip from whatever button you hovered over on the lower left-hand portion of the interface.

Speaking of that area, with v.15 and the Liberation Boost mod activated, that whole lower left-hand corner of the interface is gone. Disabling the Liberation Boost mod brings it back.

Liberation Boost does NOT work with Free Research.