Getting Started

[Zeppelin4]

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.

May I ask what mod this is? I really like the idea of not being able to build a city within a range of 4.

 

[Nille]

My thoughts about the food pool,

Food from CS enter the food pool as a fixed number.

To be able to acces food from the pool a city needs:

1. to be connected to the trade route. (maybe the cs also needs to be connected to be able to provide)

2. Have a marketplace building, the building has N amount of specialist slots and every specialist can handle x (maybe 5) amount of food, export or import from pool.

3. For every new era you can upgrade your marketplace to have more specialist slots who each can handle a larger amount of food.


Also I think that the later happiness building should be more cost efficent than the first ones you build. Now its better to build an extra colusseum in a new city than to build a theatre. That would work against ICS.

 

[Tomice]

My thoughts about the food pool,

Food from CS enter the food pool as a fixed number.

To be able to acces food from the pool a city needs:

1. to be connected to the trade route. (maybe the cs also needs to be connected to be able to provide)

2. Have a marketplace building, the building has N amount of specialist slots and every specialist can handle x (maybe 5) amount of food, export or import from pool.

3. For every new era you can upgrade your marketplace to have more specialist slots who each can handle a larger amount of food.

1) Connection to a trade route is a reasonable prerequisite, both for export and import IMO. Trade routes to very small cities cost money (not much though, if the distance is 2 or 3)

2) I'm not sure if we are able to create food-related specialists. Usually they need food, which would also be complicated. And you'd need an extra building for import and export, since we can't have 2 types of specialists in a building. Finally, would your specialist take up a population slot?

It seems that your usage of specialists is totally different from vanilla. Not sure if this is practical.

3) Is "upgrading" buildings possible at all?

 

[Nille]

Maybe my idea isnt possible to implement. Havent been modding myself so dont really know whats possible and whats not.

my idea wasnt to have a new type of specialist, the specialist working the marketplace is a normal merchant specialist. Is it possible to code that if you have a specialist working the marketplace, then you can export/import food from the food pool? In all other ways the specialist functions like a regular one. The food cost for the specialist would be the cost for trading.

The mughal fort changes after flight is researched. maybe all buildings can be programmed to change when set criterias are met?

 

[Perkus]

The Mughal Fort is the only building that does that, via <Building_TechEnhancedYieldChanges>, and all that functionality seems capable of is adding a specific yield modifier with a tech (food/gold/prod/science).

 

[Tomice]

@Nille:

I modded BtS a bit for my own needs, but I'm not even close to being a serious modder myself

I just think that mixing too many unrelated mechanics (specialists, gold, food) might be complicated and hard to balance.

 

[Perkus]

May I ask what mod this is? I really like the idea of not being able to build a city within a range of 4.

Sorry, I didn't see your question until now. The mod just changes the global define MIN_CITY_RANGE to 4 from 2. This is the minimum range at which the AI will settle cities near others. I use my own private modpack, but there is a (poorly named & undocumented) version of this on the public browser. It's called "timet min city range 4." But I just tried downloading it, and it failed to extract properly, I had to unarchive it manually. Not sure if that's my local problem or if the mod is FUBAR. He also has a version of range 3 and 5.

If these don't work, I will try to put up a proper version for people. I was going to do this at some point, but ditched the plan when I saw him put those up, I didn't want to duplicate it.

 

[Tomice]

I used this tweak in civ4 and loved it, but here I don't find it as appealing.

Imagine an Egypt-like situation: If there's a single nice river I might want to found multiple cities on it, claiming the surrounding area later. Or maybe there are two river mouths close to each other, and each would be a perfect spot for a city.

BFC overlap in civ4 was a huge issue, because you had local caps on city size. With the new happiness pool, many small cities or a mixture of big and small are much more practical.

 

[Thalassicus]

Another big round of updates like last week, so if you notice any problems please speak up.

 

[Perkus]

@Tomice
I don't think it restricts your own minimum city range. Although I don't think I've ever tested that. And if the AI suffers for it, so be it. I'd rather not have them settle every tiny little hole they can find near my borders, and then declare war cause we're too close... Plus it makes it a lot less tedious to conquer them with half as many cities as they might otherwise have. As always, YMMV.

 

[learner gamer]

@Thalassicus: Before I roll up a new game to play using your latest update, could you please do me a big favour and answer two quick questions:

(i) At what tech does the aqueduct become available? Apologies for asking, but I can&#8217;t see it mentioned in the &#8220;Details &#8211; Buildings&#8221; spoiler in your OP of the Balance - City Development thread here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=385148
(ii) Are your mods compatible with MasterDinadan&#8217;s Culture Calibration mod that you mention in your signature? (I ask because I don&#8217;t see it mentioned in the recommended mods page of your civmodding.wordpress.com website.) If not, out of curio, have you had any thoughts re: increasing the amount of culture from world wonders as a means of helping larger empires through the social policy tree?

As others have mentioned, thanks for your continued efforts trying to balance Civ 5.

 

[Thalassicus]

Aqueduct is available at Construction.

I put it here for several reasons:

• Gameplay - I feel it's one of the least-useful classical techs currently: you do get colosseums, but civil service slingshot, horses, or iron working are all arguably more useful (or even catapults for that matter). Sailing is already quite strong too, if you have coastal resources in your capital city radius, and it wouldn't make much sense for it to unlock aqueducts.
• Realism - colosseums and aqueducts both available at the same time and tech.

I considered alternatives, such as placing the food bonus on the granary or watermill.

However, I feel granary would be too early, and I'd have to increase the cost of the granary to compensate for the dramatic improvement in usefulness (plus it's already improved as a Smokehouse).

I didn't want to put this benefit on the watermill because that's situationally dependent upon river access. It would both make rivers too important (gameplay), and the whole point of aqueducts is to bring water from distant sources, thus wouldn't make as much sense to require the city to be right on a river already (realism).

Yep, these are compatible with the culture mod.

 

[Centerfinger]

Thalassicus, thank you for your modding efforts. I haven't used the Combined Mod by itself as I have been using 95% of your mods that come in CCMAT. I have read through all of your balancing mod details and really just want to use your mods with a couple of others thrown in.

I read in atilla's mod thread that you use and have included his UI in the combined version, but you also mentioned that you use City and Diplo Willard as well. Any possibility on getting those included into the Combined?

I'm new to using mods and I really just want to use 1 rather than combining a whole mess of them and I think the ideal mod for me is your combined mod + the city/diplo willards and the R.E.D mod. Your balancing + the best of the UI mods and R.E.D sounds like a winner to me.

Keep up the great work!

 

[Tomice]

To save Thal some time, he said in another thread that the "Willards" are fully compatible with his mods and CCMAT. I use them as well, no issues.

Just download and activate, that's it.

 

[Centerfinger]

Thanks, I read that he didn't want to include them in another thread after I posted. I was just looking for a one stop shop other than CCMAT. Just Thal's stuff + the best UI mods available.

 

[Tomice]

At the moment, stuff changes so fast that I change my used mods after every game. I guess this will slow down a bit at a later point. I have the feeling Jooyo has just what you said in mind.

 

[Thalassicus]

The reason I only have mods I make in the combined pack is because if I include others (like the willards) I have to keep the versions in the pack up to date with new releases of other mod makers. It would quickly become unmanageable... already takes me about 2-3 hours a week just to update the mods I make (readme files, download links, version history here and on the website, etc etc). Independent mods that are fully compatible I prefer letting the creators handle themselves.

The only exception to this was Attila's mods, since that and the unofficial patch were not compatible (and required merging). It was a pain to merge them again every single time after I updated, so I just gave the merge-required stuff to Attila (user interface files) and moved it out of the unofficial patch. This also makes it easier for people who might not know how to merge Lua files properly. I've used Attila's mods from his very first version and consider it the best and most comprehensive overhaul of the top panel information.

 

[Zeppelin4]

The only exception to this was Attila's mods, since that and the unofficial patch were not compatible (and required merging). It was a pain to merge them again every single time after I updated, so I just gave the merge-required stuff to Attila (user interface files) and moved it out of the unofficial patch. This also makes it easier for people who might not know how to merge Lua files properly. I've used Attila's mods from his very first version and consider it the best and most comprehensive overhaul of the top panel information.

If I want to use Attila mods do I just download the mod and install it or is there any thing special I need to do to work with your mods?

 

[/solar/]

Thanks for all the amazing mods. Fantastic work.

Just want to point out you have a typo. In the mod list under terrain improvements it says bronze working reveals iron but in the thread for that mod it says mining reveals iron.

 

[Thalassicus]

I've uploaded a new version of the Combined package with some additional user-interface fixes in Attila's mod.

@Zeppelin4
The "Combined" download includes Attila's mod.

@solar
Ah thanks for pointing that out! I'd moved the change to the Combat mod a week ago, but apparently forgot to remove it from the mod details on that thread.