Imperialism 3 - Now with 100% more Lua!

[civ2units]

The graphics looking real great.

 

[CurtSibling]

Thanks, @civ2units !

Here are the final city GFX, with new Latin and Oriental city sets...

 

[CurtSibling]

Update - Some edits to naval power, and the tanks -

Battleships and Dreadnoughts can now carry one ground unit - Good for marines and agents.
Tanks are now more balanced. Powerful, but certainly not unkillable against entrenched troops.

I found in my 1900s world war test, the tank and light tank will win about half of the time.
Using artillery and then tanks is the go-to tactic late-game...Maybe some assualt troops too!

New rules below:

 

[JPetroski]

Curt at some point convenient (perhaps after you reach a milestone in development or something) would you mind updating the first page with a fresh zip of current files? There's a lot going on in this thread and it's 10 pages long which is tough to go through and ensure you're current. Thanks!

 

[CurtSibling]

@JPetroski
The first thread page does indeed have the current zip. The rules edit I posted today is entirely optional.

 

[CurtSibling]

Just for ease of use, here is the absolute current version as of today:
ToTPP 16 and a completely new scenario folder are recommended.

 

[tootall_2012]

Hi Curt,

Here is my final update. I’ve reached May 1896 (turn 317) and achieved all the objectives which I had set out in the game which are as follows:

• Researched all the available in game advances (researched, traded or purchase 59 of the available technologies plus 9 future techs as well)
• Control more than 50% of the current number of world cities (290 out of 495 for a percentage of 58.59%)
• Control the most population (1st in ranking)
• Control the largest amount of land (1st in ranking)
• Control the majority of Wonders (19 of 23)
• Control the largest active military (I have 1998 active units compared to a total of 2506 for all other powers combined)

As such, I accumulated a score of 10844 points which upon retiring provides me a rating of 1084% and the highest permissible title of “Napoleon III the Magnificent”.

In terms of the two issues we discussed earlier, i.e. Agents and the Palais de Versailles wonder:

• Agents: as I indicated, personally, I continued to use them only for their ‘Investigate City’ ability. By the end of the scenario I had 12 of them that supported my multiple offensives in Africa, South America, the Caribbean, Middle East, India, and China.

I certainly don’t have any issue if you prefer to keep all their abilities as I will continue to use my own house rules in this case.​

• Palais de Versailles: though it is indeed a powerful wonder, in actuality, I almost never used its government switching ability except maybe near the beginning of the game, when I switched to Democracy to keep up with the British in the technological race. But as my Senate kept imposing peace treaties on me, hindering my campaigns of conquests, I soon switched to Imperialism and remained under it for the rest of the game.

As promised, I prepared a Casualties Tracking list excel file. Feel free to review it at your own leisure and extract whatever data you feel may be of use to you (if any at all). Each power has its own tab as to what it produced. There are two tabs in the file which may be of particular interest, i.e. BUILDS and SCIENCE:

• The BUILDS tab outlines all the units produced by each power by category (ex: settler, artillery, infantry, naval, etc). As you will notice, and not a big surprise, out of the over 18,000 total units produced by all powers more than 30% were naval units (which given their much higher build cost probably represents at least 50% of the total production costs spent by the nations during the game).

As I outlined in an earlier post, this caused an over abundance of naval units in the early game which tended to clutter the seas. That was no longer an issue in the later part of the game, as the cost and ability to produce naval units was more prohibitive.​

As such, perhaps consider increasing the build cost of early naval units to reduce this clutter?​

• The SCIENCE tab indicates the number of techs researched during the game by each power and the average number of turns to research an advance. As you can see, France, England and America had a respectable 8 and less turns per advance which allows them to remain competitive in the arms race.

On the other hand, the Independents, Japan and Russia were on average in the 20 turns per advance rate, which meant they failed to discover more than 15 or so of the 60 or more researchable game techs. As they all start the scenario with less than 30 techs each, that placed each of them at a definitive disadvantage overall in the science race.

As such, perhaps consider giving these powers a few more at start techs?​

I’m truly impressed by the quality assurance done for the scenario as the lua events appear to have worked flawlessly (I certainly found no bugs).

As I’ve mentioned previously, the quality of the graphics are first rate and make the playing experience that much more enjoyable.

I would quality this as a monster scenario in the same league as Second Front or Red Front and in that its take a fair amount of time to play. But it’s an investment that is well worth the effort.

Overall, I played both as France and Russia and in both instances this remained an extremely fun and challenging game to play!

Very well done.

 

[CurtSibling]

@tootall_2012

Thanks so much for the very professional and detailed feedback - Your playthrough and compliments to the scenario are hugely appreciated.
I will check out the Xls file, and am highly honoured to have this mod be compared to Alex and Nemo's classics. I will for sure continue to make
updates, and take your advice about navies and the other factors for the future. Once again, you have my thanks, good sir.

 

[tootall_2012]

Hi Curt,

Just a quick follow up. I noticed during the later part of the game, as I was spying on American and British cities that most of their production was geared towards "Capitalization". If you check the Casualties list tab for each power you will notice that they both had around 800 active units, which probably indicates that the AI considered they both exceeded the default limit of 512 after which it switches to Capitalization. As per the ToTPP reference guide:

"AICapitalizationLimit": Number of units after which the AI switches to Capitalization. Default is 512."

I don't know if this was intentional on your part to limit the numbers but if you wanted to increase that limit you could consider adding the following line in the @COSMIC2 section (you can insert the amount you believe appropriate).

AICapitalizationLimit, 1000

Increasing the build limit would undoubtedly make conquering British cities even more difficult as they often had at least 4 or more Maxim Guns, along with an equal or so number of Armoured Car to defend each.

Just on a foot note there were 4500 active units in play on turn 317. As we had previously discussed, I had increase the ToTPP default maximum unit limit of 4096 to 7500 and encountered no issues during the game.

In case you were interested to have a peak, I attached the last save game file of my France play through.

 

[CurtSibling]

@tootall_2012

Yep - If you check your rules file, the cap limit is indeed at 1000.

@COSMIC2
NoStackKills,1
AICapitalizationLimit,1000
CityPopulationLossAttack,0
CityPopulationLossCapture,1
NumberOfTerrainTypes,13
NumberOfUnitTypes,116
RiverMultiplier,1,3
RoadMultiplier,1,3
RailroadMultiplier,1,6
TradeGoldMultiplier,200
TradeScienceMultiplier,100
NoIncrementalRushBuy,1
ProductionCarryOver,0
BarbResearch,1

My ToTPP unit settings are also at 7000 - I would recommend all players use that too.

 

[tootall_2012]

Hi Curt,

Sorry for the confusion. I obviously didn't properly check your rules file though I believe I must have still been using an older version where the cap had initially been set at 750 (does that sound correct?). In any case this would help explain the Capitalization issue I reported.

With the newer cap of 1000 I probably wouldn't have encountered this issue as frequently.

 

[civ2units]

Maximum units could be set up to 7000 without crashing the game? I've to check my ToTPP settings

 

[tootall_2012]

Hi civ2units,

After I had received a message that I could not build anymore units because the scenario had reached its maximum default unit limit, Curt advised I could increase the limit in the ToTPP launcher. At that time, I made it 7500 and as soon as I did I was able to continue producing new units.

I didn't encounter any crashing issues after I made the change. I can't confirm if I ever came near the 7500 limit during game play but I suspect I reached at least 5000 or more. All the same, Curt seems confident that the game should be able to support this higher limit.

 

[civ2units]

Hi civ2units,

After I had received a message that I could not build anymore units because the scenario had reached its maximum default unit limit, Curt advised I could increase the limit in the ToTPP launcher. At that time, I made it 7500 and as soon as I did I was able to continue producing new units.

I didn't encounter any crashing issues after I made the change. I can't confirm if I ever came near the 7500 limit during game play but I suspect I reached at least 5000 or more. All the same, Curt seems confident that the game should be able to support this higher limit.

Good to know, thanks for the informations @tootall_2012

 

[CurtSibling]

I always have the limit at 7000, and can report no troubles at all.

PS
Forgot to set the obsolesence of Versailles to "Dem", so please add this new rules file to your folders, if you wish.

 

[amadeus]

With Curt's blessing, I've made a couple of tweaks to the icons graphics (the bricks were light) and the people graphics so it's a little easier for me to see everything.

I'll share them here:

This is a very fun scenario and I'm liking all of the TOTPP stuff that has been added to it. As much as I've also been enjoying the Cold War scenario, the old Imperialism scenarios have been just as much fun for me.

 

[CurtSibling]

Just a micro-thing - In the last row, and last icon of people, the "very unhappy" rifle guy's colour square is off set.

 

[Civinator]

Curt, after all the changes in this scenario I have abandoned my current testgame and start a new testgame with the new settings and a higher difficulty level when I have the time for it. It is still a great scenario. It can be a good idea to set the ships more expensive in the game.

Spoiler :

p.s.: When looking at the title of this thread, I´m always reminded to the advertisement of fruit juices.

 

[CurtSibling]

@tootall_2012

Fruit juice with 100% more refined death sugar!

Please enter your own suggested costs for the ships, maybe 25% or even 50% more expensive, and let me know how it goes.

If things work out, I will adopt the settings.

 

[amadeus]

Just a micro-thing - In the last row, and last icon of people, the "very unhappy" rifle guy's colour square is off set.

Good catch! It has been fixed.