HephMod: a mod combo-pack emphasizing balance, realism, and historical flavor

[Jaybe]

Yes David, adjusting to a non-state religion's appearance in your cities can lead to 'interesting times.' That's a factor of Hephmod being closer to a simulation (i.e., is more realistic) than the regular game. There ARE ways to minimize such unrest, such as putting a priority on happiness issues in such cities.

With Free Religion, each religion's unhappiness is balanced with it's temple's happiness. Also, each religion (even without buildings) gives gold, science and/or culture.

If you have a civil war, know that you can still prevail (and it can be quite EXCITING to boot)! With a little luck, that neighboring civ that is such a threat will have its own turmoil in its own good time.

There are NO issues! Only features* we have to take time to adjust to.

* As I will have to do to adjust to the 3.19 rendition.

n.b., I'm still with the pre-3.19 version, and play at Noble/Prince difficulty (huge/marathon).

 

[Hephaistion]

I played the earlier version of this mod, the one before you updated to 3.19. So far I do like it, but you ruin the religions by making it ridiculously hard to balance happiness. It's almost impossible to research anything without coming across something that causes unhappiness.

It needs more balance. Don't ruin religion just to punish people who want to play with it. Really, it's very broken at the moment, and free religion doesn't do anything.

Any other issues I should know about?

The difficulties with religion are intentional: I don't think that it's "ridiculously hard" to balance religions with happiness (difficult, yes, but not ridiculously so), you just have to be more careful about when you get religions and what you do with them. Free religion also has an "invisible" benny (besides the +10% science bonus, a substantial bonus by the time you get Liberalism!), in that it lets every city benefit from the global commerce bonus tied to EACH RELIGION (so a city with Confucianism and Taoism would get +1 GOLD, +2 CULTURE from Conf. AND +2 SCIENCE, +1 CULTURE from Tao), so imagine the benefits cities with three different religions are receiving! Later in the game there are inquisitors to purge unwanted religions and in 1.0 there are other ways to get more happiness through civics (including Religious Law, which gives extra happiness for state religion in a city and extra happiness for temples). Also, if you want religion to be a key part of your strategy, you should play a Spiritual civilization: they get an additional happy face from temples AND monasteries, which balances out the -2 happiness state religion penalty!

I don't believe that my mod punishes people who want to play with religions; I'm usually Organized Religion well into the 19th century, and have played games where I've never switched to Free Religion. It's not so easy to play the non-state religion civics, either! Just try playing with state atheism when your cities have several religions each! Is the science bonus worth it? That's a decision you have to make!

HephMod is designed to give you a richer experience by forcing you to make strategic decisions and judgments about what disadvantages you can accept in exchange for what advantages. Far more things in the game, not just religion, are cost/benefit decisions rather than free bonuses. Imposing central authority on a civilization is HARD, and there's a price, so you have to play around with it and get a sense of when it's worth it and not. Despite the difficulties, religions are still extremely potent in the game, especially with the new shrine wonders and global state religion commerce bonuses (which exist in vanilla only as one measly culture point).

So, I'd really suggest you give the new 1.0 version a try and see if it addresses your problem with the game's balance; if you don't like it, perhaps HephMod is not for you. Or, if you like everything BUT the non-state religion happiness penalty, you can go into the GlobalDefines.xml file and change the value!

 

[DavidB1111]

Hmm, if it wasn't for the fact I'm waiting for more mods to be updated to 3.19, I might try it.

I dare say though,

forcing you to make strategic decisions and judgments about what disadvantages you can accept in exchange for what advantages.

isn't the way to go.

I'll keep trying this mod though. What do you mean about other things? So far, the religion thing is the only "broken part"
OH, and why are almost all religious wonders gone from your mod?

Like I said, I do like the mod, but however you can balance the penalty, it literally escapes me.

I play on Random, so spiritual is rather random too.
At least I don't play with Broken Revolutions.

 

[Hephaistion]

@David:

If you don't like the idea of being forced to make the kinds of decisions I discussed above, then I'm afraid HephMod really isn't the mod for you. This core idea of balancing the good and bad that come with centralization/decentralization, militarization/demilitarization, repression and freedom, etc., within your civ is one of the foundations of this mod concept.

You asked what other areas were like this, in your words, "broken" . All the civics are based on this core idea that there is a trade-off. Slavery increases productive improvements and gives you the hurry production ability, but the trade-off is general unhappiness; similarly, free speech gives you a huge cultural boost but the trade-off is that people will be vocal about dissent, increasing war weariness and giving unhappiness for jails. If you look at all the civics, you'll see the whole system is based on this idea.

What religious wonders do you think are missing? I have not removed ANY wonders from the game, only added. Shrine wonders, however, can now only be built if the shrine's religion is your state religion.

Here are some things you can do to help with the religious penalties: burial mounds under paganism give +1 happiness (use them in the early game before adopting a state religion); don't let your cities overgrow if you expect to found a religion soon; hurrying production to build a happiness building in a city experiencing religious unhappiness (not only do you remove a population point or two, but then you get the happiness from whatever you build); don't make open borders treaties with civs of a different religion if your cities are close to their happiness limits; under a Monarchy in the 3.17 version you can compensate for any unhappiness just by keeping a military garrison in the city (and since in HephMod you get many more free units than vanilla, this really shouldn't strain your resources); the Jurisprudence civic gives you a +2 happiness for having a courthouse; be careful about founding more than one religion (only do it if you can handle it); raise your culture rate (with theaters this can massively increase happiness). Plus all the regular vanilla strategies for making people happy.

The old vanilla strategy of "found every religion, then make more money than g-d from their shrines" is highly unworkable in HephMod. This is working as designed. Benefiting from a pluralistic society, on the other hand, is not so unworkable: Free Religion reduces the religion penalty to -1 for each religion in the city, and each religion's temple gives a +1 happy, resulting in no penalty at all! Then you can build cathedrals once you have the required number of temples and you get the global commerce benefits of each religion. In vanilla you'd get a bonus happy face for each religion. In each case we're talking about a handful of happy faces. I don't see how this is "ridiculously" unbalanced or how it "ruins religion." It can be difficult early in the game when you have fewer options, so care is required concerning when you found your religion, but by the middle ages you have many options at your disposal to deal with heterodoxy. In the end it's obviously a matter of taste, so I don't want to go round and round about it unless we can move the discussion to something more constructive than, "I think it's broken," "well, I don't."

I hope these suggestions help, if you want to bother trying them out. I don't know if it's worth it to you when you seem to have a basic problem with the mod's concept, but since you asked, there it is.

 

[DavidB1111]

Personally, I only have a problem with the religion aspects. But I can get used to it.

So, I'll no longer complain about it. I'll just spam Great Engineers and build tons of temples. And I'm almost never played with my culture at above zero. Because until this mod I've never had a happiness issue that I couldn't solve.

So, since that's the only part of this mod I don't like, I think I can get used to it.
I may try your 3.19 version, but it won't be for awhile.

So far the civics are balanced. At least you don't force people to play with Revolutions. Which is kinda even more broken then what I complained about.
Also, I hate slavery.
I'm sorry if I came off as an arrogant socialist.

 

[Jaybe]

Shrine wonders, however, can now only be built if the shrine's religion is your state religion.

This is very important to know, and while it may have been stated before, I have only suspected it to be so in recent games

... as in getting a GProphet and not being able to build the shrine in the founding city when not having it as the state religion.

 

[Hephaistion]

Personally, I only have a problem with the religion aspects. But I can get used to it.

I'm glad that you like the rest of the changes, but remember that you can change the amount of unhappiness non-state religions give in GlobalDefines.xml: just search for "religion" and you should be able to find it. I don't remember exactly what the tag line is. Right now it's set at "-2" (two unhappy faces per non-state religion); in vanilla it is set to "0."

I have considered putting out a version of the mod with all the unique religion aspects removed. I considered it anticipating that people could be put off or offended by the choices I made in characterizing the different religions, choices that were admittedly biased not only inevitably by my own views, but also by game-related balance issues and particular historical contexts for the developments of religions (Christianity and Islam both come off as militant because I wanted to simulate a militant period of religiosity mirroring our own Middle Ages/Early Modern period, not because I think those religions are somehow intrinsically aggressive). This could also serve those who simply don't like the way religion plays out in the game as well.

And I'm almost never played with my culture at above zero. Because until this mod I've never had a happiness issue that I couldn't solve.

Good! This tells me that my mod is doing exactly what I want it to do! You also might be interested to know that the new Revolutions build punishes city unhappiness more mercifully than the one HephMod .9x uses. You can have a city with one or two unhappy people for a long time before the Revolution points really start piling up.

I'm sorry if I came off as an arrogant socialist.

You didn't ... plus, I have no problem with socialism, though arrogant -isms of any sort are usually annoying. In fact, one of the things the mod tries to do is move away from the triumphalist Western master narrative of progress through capitalism. Free market societies now have to deal with additional unhealthiness from letting companies pollute and overlong working hours for laborers. The labor unions civic, for example, is a simple trade-off: do you want your workers to be healthier and happier, or more productive? If you want to be a real despot, people will resist you, and if you are "too" liberal, you will have to deal with the fact that what makes people happy isn't always what's good for YOU.

I'm sorry if I came off a bit irritably, but saying a core feature of a mod is broken rather than simply that you don't like it is naturally off-putting for the mod's designer!

 

[DavidB1111]

My wording is kind of bad. I must admit.
As for Revolutions, I always turn that off. I have had some major issues with the revolutions, plus, insane spawns when a city is conquered. TOO Darn Hard.

Seriously, it's like playing Contra on Hard, it's just insanely difficult. Anyway you slice it, Revolutions is over 9000! times more buggy and "broken" then the problem I had with this mod.

 

[Ninja2]

I have considered putting out a version of the mod with all the unique religion aspects removed. I considered it anticipating that people could be put off or offended by the choices I made in characterizing the different religions, choices that were admittedly biased not only inevitably by my own views, but also by game-related balance issues and particular historical contexts for the developments of religions (Christianity and Islam both come off as militant because I wanted to simulate a militant period of religiosity mirroring our own Middle Ages/Early Modern period, not because I think those religions are somehow intrinsically aggressive). This could also serve those who simply don't like the way religion plays out in the game as well.

Hephaistion, I think you should do the opposite: Release a modcomp with all the unique religion aspects! You've obviously done some balancing on these things, and I think it would be interesting to these changes in other people's mods too. Wouldn't it be a strictly XML mod?

 

[Hephaistion]

Hephaistion, I think you should do the opposite: Release a modcomp with all the unique religion aspects! You've obviously done some balancing on these things, and I think it would be interesting to these changes in other people's mods too. Wouldn't it be a strictly XML mod?

You're correct: all the religion aspects of the mod are just xml changes. HephMod's religion component is basically a merger, rebalancing and tweaking of several mods that have been lost in the onward march of official patches: Abbamouse's Realistic Religions (unique temples), Eusebius' World Religions (unique global commerce bonuses) and Sevo's Faces of God (unique shrines abilities), and, in 1.0, Gods of Old (unique religious promotions, though tweaked so that only Spiritual civs have access to them). While the shrine powers balance out somewhat because each shrine also has penalties, the global commerce bonuses may unbalance a game that doesn't have some of the other checks against overdevelopment that HephMod has (the non-state religion penalty, the science penalty for Organized Religion and Theocracy). The best way to find out, of course, would be to release it and see what people think!

Thanks for the suggestion!

 

[Hephaistion]

My wording is kind of bad. I must admit.
As for Revolutions, I always turn that off. I have had some major issues with the revolutions, plus, insane spawns when a city is conquered. TOO Darn Hard.

Seriously, it's like playing Contra on Hard, it's just insanely difficult. Anyway you slice it, Revolutions is over 9000! times more buggy and "broken" then the problem I had with this mod.

You can also change the way Revolutions works in its .ini file in the /Assets folder. You can make revolutions happen more or less often, or give weight to different factors, like religion, distance from capital, civics, etc. HephMod .9x, for example, gives a significant break to the AI on revolution point buildup because it didn't handle revolutions particularly well. The new RevDCM build doesn't have this problem, so 1.0 doesn't artificially favor the AI. Also, the Partisan event is now gone, so a whole pack of enemy units no longer appears every time you conquer a city!

 

[Puer]

Hi Hephaistion, great mod!
I started new game with this new version: HEPHMOD BEYOND v 1.0 BETA for BtS 3.19
I noticed a bug: glance screen will lock all others F4 sub-screens - it's not possible to select other options. Work round is restart the game.

Best regards!

 

[DavidB1111]

I wish the partisen thing was the problem. Unfortunately, and this was many years ago,
Revolutions though it would be funny for 14 units to spawn from a city that had maybe 6 poplulation, and I barely had anything approaching that. Knights and Longbowmen..ouch. So, yeah, I'd rather die in a fire than play Revoultions. Iin fact, I would like Revolutions to die in a fire.

 

[Lachlan]

To Hephaistion : when do you plan a definitive 1.00 version ?

I suggest include BUG Mod since i want see attitudes of others leaders before contacting them...

One thing i find bad : other civs tends to be great empires quickly and dont go to revolution easily, i was used to see my score near the top because frequent revolution in others empires...

I suggest that you add a cap of number of cities based on current era, and beyond the cap the stability cost should be hardened...

Certain eras could permit great empires, other only small empires, stone age could permit only three cities empires, but in modern era couldd have smaller empire than industrial era because decolonization

What do you think of this new parameter ?

What do you plan after 1.00 ?

 

[Hephaistion]

To Hephaistion : when do you plan a definitive 1.00 version ?

I suggest include BUG Mod since i want see attitudes of others leaders before contacting them...

One thing i find bad : other civs tends to be great empires quickly and dont go to revolution easily, i was used to see my score near the top because frequent revolution in others empires...

I suggest that you add a cap of number of cities based on current era, and beyond the cap the stability cost should be hardened...

Certain eras could permit great empires, other only small empires, stone age could permit only three cities empires, but in modern era couldd have smaller empire than industrial era because decolonization

What do you think of this new parameter ?

What do you plan after 1.00 ?

BUG mod is included in HephMod: in 1.0, press CTRL+SHIFT+O for a menu of options. Under "Scoreboard" you'll find a box you can check (or something like) for the attitude icons. I turned them off in my version because I don't like my scoreboard to eat up a quarter of the screen and because I can easily see their attitudes by mousing over their names.

I don't like the idea of artificial caps on empire size and I think that the AI having fewer revolutions is an improvement over the old Rev mod because it crippled the AI, making a less challenging game. There's no denying that 1.0 is much, much harder than previous versions of the mod. Time to adapt and change your strategy! Or try a lower difficulty level until you get the hang of the new feel and pace of the game or go into Revolution.ini in the Assets folder and increase the Index Modifier (try going from 1 to 1.25 or 1.5 and see how that works out).

One way to reduce early AI empire size would be to increase some of the maintenance penalties for distance/number of cities, which I actually have done in my current working version. While this does NOT actually cause the AI to build fewer cities, it does decrease the effectiveness and benefits of having those new cities.

The Beta release is more or less what you're going to get in the final version, but I wanted to send it out to all you kind folks for some playtesting so I can stomp what bugs I am able to fix before claiming a finished version. Civics are still up in the air: I'm still mulling over what to keep and what to throw out and trying to a) keep them balanced, b) make sure they make conceptual sense, and c) make sure the AI uses them (the AI still doesn't like some of the new civics, like Republic, Monasticism and Standing Army). The beta version is also notably lacking in textual support; for the final release I will (finally) write up pedia/strategy/hint text and hopefully also a brief strategy guide covering the new features and concepts of the mod.

For the future? Who knows? But I do have a few ideas : Elite national units (a version of regular units that starts with at least the Hero1 promotion ["exceptional"] and has a chance of one of the better Hero promos) instead of the completely random hero system; increased unit-specific military production for different military civics (Vassalage would give a bonus to Knight production, for instance), making strategic resources give a bonus to producing units that require the resource and increasing production cost of those units, some more new units (Mounted Infantry>Dragoons>Motorized Infantry; Ranger>Sharpshooter>Special Forces), and Civ trait penalties associated with existing civ traits. And, of course, whatever ideas I get from all of you! Some of these ideas may make it into the 1.0 final release, but don't count on it.

 

[Lachlan]

One word : your mod is very nice quand même...

 

[os79]

BUG mod is included in HephMod: in 1.0, press CTRL+SHIFT+O for a menu of options. Under "Scoreboard" you'll find a box you can check (or something like) for the attitude icons. I turned them off in my version because I don't like my scoreboard to eat up a quarter of the screen and because I can easily see their attitudes by mousing over their names.

I don't like the idea of artificial caps on empire size and I think that the AI having fewer revolutions is an improvement over the old Rev mod because it crippled the AI, making a less challenging game. There's no denying that 1.0 is much, much harder than previous versions of the mod. Time to adapt and change your strategy! Or try a lower difficulty level until you get the hang of the new feel and pace of the game or go into Revolution.ini in the Assets folder and increase the Index Modifier (try going from 1 to 1.25 or 1.5 and see how that works out).

One way to reduce early AI empire size would be to increase some of the maintenance penalties for distance/number of cities, which I actually have done in my current working version. While this does NOT actually cause the AI to build fewer cities, it does increase the effectiveness and benefits of having those new cities.

The Beta release is more or less what you're going to get in the final version, but I wanted to send it out to all you kind folks for some playtesting so I can stomp what bugs I am able to fix before claiming a finished version. Civics are still up in the air: I'm still mulling over what to keep and what to throw out and trying to a) keep them balanced, b) make sure they make conceptual sense, and c) make sure the AI uses them (the AI still doesn't like some of the new civics, like Republic, Monasticism and Standing Army). The beta version is also notably lacking in textual support; for the final release I will (finally) write up pedia/strategy/hint text and hopefully also a brief strategy guide covering the new features and concepts of the mod.

For the future? Who knows? But I do have a few ideas : Elite national units (a version of regular units that starts with at least the Hero1 promotion ["exceptional"] and has a chance of one of the better Hero promos) instead of the completely random hero system; increased unit-specific military production for different military civics (Vassalage would give a bonus to Knight production, for instance), making strategic resources give a bonus to producing units that require the resource and increasing production cost of those units, some more new units (Mounted Infantry>Dragoons>Motorized Infantry; Ranger>Sharpshooter>Special Forces), and Civ trait penalties associated with existing civ traits. And, of course, whatever ideas I get from all of you! Some of these ideas may make it into the 1.0 final release, but don't count on it.

Y'know, since you are using RevDCM 2.50, ithas WoC modular system right?
You can easily just update using modules, after you are satisfied with main mod's system. Then you can add in new units, buildings, civs, civics, few gameplays, projects and so on. Look at RoM's forum, there is modmod subforum there. The modmodders there are awesome in applying Johnny Smith's WoC system. Zappara is even going fine-tune it in 2.71. You can do the same for your mod. No need ot change the system if you are completely satisfied with mod because your mod is smaller than RoM. Personally, RoM is my "mod to play" but your mod do provide variety when I feel like it .

 

[John Woods]

Hi,

After researching Theology and choosing Judaism I get a CTD straight to desktop. If I chose any other available religion there is no problem. Of course I have the choose a religion option on.. No other mods or changes made - straight BTS 3.19. What could cause this?

JW

 

[Hephaistion]

Hi,

After researching Theology and choosing Judaism I get a CTD straight to desktop. If I chose any other available religion there is no problem. Of course I have the choose a religion option on.. No other mods or changes made - straight BTS 3.19. What could cause this?

JW

Thanks for the report. I don't know what causes this problem -- someone had a similar problem with an older version of the mod related to the choose religion option. It wasn't specifically Judaism, but there was a persistent crash at a certain point in the game when the AI founded a religion and wanted to choose Hinduism. When I founded Hinduism artificially, the AI just chose a different religion and there was no crash. I never got at this problem 'cause it looked like it was something in the Revolutions code that was responsible. I'm sorry to see it resurface and even sorrier that I don't know how to fix it!

 

[Lachlan]

Re Hephaistion, i found a little problem with religion system...

1) If a ai civ has several different religions, ai civ switch to "no state religion"...

I would be not a problem by itself, but there the fact that most civs have switched to "no state religion" so religious wars are gone...

Even Civs with holy cities, have switched to "no state religion"

I propose an idea, you should make that no state religion should be very risky...

Or make that "no state religion" possible if NONE of cities of civ has religion...

Have already seen a religion heterogenous civ surviving a long time ?

2) A new idea : convertion to a new religion or changing religion should be automatic, based on number of citizen under religion A or B or C...

Example :

A city 3 pop with religion A only has 3 pop "A"
A city 3 pop with religion A and B has 2 pop "A" and 1 pop "B"
A city 3 pop with religion A, B and C has 1.5 pop "A", 0.75 pop "B" and 0.75 pop "C"

So here give priority to first religion entered in my civ, then the second, then the third...

3) What is the system of realistic religions ? It seems you have said that was a mix between different systems...

4) I'm attempting to finish the current game...