Imperialism 3 - Now with 100% more Lua!

[CurtSibling]

State of affairs in my current playthrough as the German Empire: The never-ending war with Napoleon III! My policy was to hold the frontier, but recently we decided to extend the borders, which led to Paris being destroyed...!

In this world of WAR, giant stacks of German, Finn and Boer troops, backed by the Kaiser's brave artillery, zeppelin and dreadnought forces keep the rampaging French legions at bay, but only just!

I have strong alliances with the USA and Tsarist Russia, who are at war with The British Empire and Independants. The world is a chaos of conflicts...And slowly, the modern weapons are making their power known.
The Brits are definitely my nemesis in this playthrough, as they are almost indentical in tech to me. With a daunting fleet of ships...Which is perfectly accurate for the era. They are semi-friendly for now, but there are
matters of world domination that will be settled between our nations before the end...But for the moment, my tank production has begun, and I am considering the final sweep into Western France...C'est excitant!

 

[voltar]

You mentioned no population explosion? So what does WLTK day now for Republics?

 

[CurtSibling]

You mentioned no population explosion? So what does WLTK day now for Republics?

Whatever it did before, minus the unrealistic pop growth. Not sure it gives an extra trade point point, or not.
I consider WLTK as a pretty silly mechanic that does not really impact the scenario much.
I always play with the notification off.

 

[voltar]

Well for Republics and Democracy it grew the pop by 1 per turn in effect,
The trade bonus was provided to the other governments to by making cities act like they had Republic Democracy (provide 1 extra arrow per tile producing at least 1 arrow).
So if no pop growth anymore, it does nothing for Republic/Democracy?

 

[CurtSibling]

I made pop growth purposively slow in this mod. Having WLTK in rep/dem would mess up the balance.

As I said, Voltar - The WLTK day is not important in this scenario, or in CIV2, in my opinion.

 

[CurtSibling]

With the new ToTPP 16 release, you can now have as many cities on the goto menu dialog! The crash hopefully is solved.
DL the new ToTPP ASAP, it has a TON of new features.

One new addition is that you can have custom CIV2 menus in the scen folder. Meaning you can drop your own UI files into any scenario.

I am using the City/Dialog/CivWinBack files from Boco's El-Aurens, you can use whatever one you want. But changing the menu is now really easy.

Just upgrade into ToTPP 16, and then drop these files into the Imperialism III v5 folder for that classy look.

 

[Prof. Garfield]

You mentioned no population explosion? So what does WLTK day now for Republics?

Whatever it did before, minus the unrealistic pop growth. Not sure it gives an extra trade point point, or not.
I consider WLTK as a pretty silly mechanic that does not really impact the scenario much.
I always play with the notification off.

The functionality I provided in the template disables WLTKD for certain government types selected by the designer. This is done by checking every city every turn, and clearing the bit that says the city is celebrating. The city will 'start' to celebrate each turn, but it only gets the bonus if it has been celebrating since the previous turn, hence the effect is cancelled.

I think @Knighttime 's Medieval Millennium actually removes the population growth and gives some other bonus instead.

 

[CurtSibling]

@voltar
I know some people like to use the WLTK feature in their playstyle, but the flow of this scenario was never intended to take advantage of it.
Cities are long term projects, and take many, many turns and investment of massive infrastructure to get them to grow into a metropolis.

This is the main reason I used Lua to stop vast populations magically appearing in Rep/Dem governments.

 

[Knighttime]

I think @Knighttime 's Medieval Millennium actually removes the population growth and gives some other bonus instead.

@voltar: That's correct (thanks @Prof. Garfield ) -- although this was pretty challenging to implement, and it would probably need to be rewritten (refactored) in order for the functionality to really be portable to a different scenario. Essentially I allow the city to celebrate normally, detect whether or not its population actually did grow due to the WLTKD celebration, and if so decrease its population back to the prior value. Then I add my own effect, which is to provide free unit support in that city: each happy citizen causes the city to be reimbursed for the support cost of one unit, capped at a max of 6 in Republic and 3 in Democracy. (Those governments have different names in my scenario of course.) The free unit support doesn't currently appear on the city screen, but is handled by adding shields directly into the production box, although the new TOTPP 0.16 should allow this to be improved.

Sorry if I'm hijacking the thread, definitely not my intention. Short story is that I completely agree with @CurtSibling that the vast population growth achievable with these governments is unrealistic for the eras or time periods covered by many scenarios, and furthermore gives the human player an unfair advantage. I wasn't aware that Prof. Garfield had provided an easy way for scenarios to block this, glad to see that implemented here.

 

[voltar]

I'm not criticizing the decision just wanted to understand what the mechanics are like. The pop growth is certainly overpowered, but this does change considerations for which government to choose is all. Love me some Imperialism, thanks for the updated scenario, looking forward to playing.

Also noted that capital cities can build Engineers without Explosives tech.

 

[CurtSibling]

If you are into the long game, and willing to put the time in, your cities will be massive by the time you need them for mass-building all those heavy artillery and zepplins later on.

And yes, your capital is even more important now. Also many strong units cannot be trained outside of your empire's homeland. Another reason I adopted Lua for the update.

 

[miccal2000]

View attachment 592013
Editing the special rules is among the first tasks I do when making a scenario, as no-one on Earth wants to see the vanilla ToT GFX.

Myself and TooTall have not got this problem, as you can see from the above screenshot...And all the other screenshots.

So I am not sure what is going on with Miccal's ToT.

Can he provide a screenshot of his Imperialism folder contents, please?

Hello!

Editing the special rules has everything working properly.

Thanks!

 

[CurtSibling]

I took advantage of the new ToTPP 16 feature of extra difficulty levels...

What stout fellow is up for the challenge?

You'll need to update ToTPP to the new version, available here:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-test-of-time-patch-project.517282/page-54#post-16064118

 

[Civinator]

Curt, with all these mfg good units at the start for many civs, wouldn´t it be a good idea, to set the tech, that enables the trade manager´s demand and supply screen at the start of the game, as this would reduce a lot of micromanagement for the player, who otherwise has to look to each single town where to deliver the goods for good prices ? At present the 'tra'-tech in your scenario is International Trade.

 

[CurtSibling]

The big trade empires of the USA, Great Britain and France have the tech you seek.

You could tech-trade with any of them to get it.

 

[Civinator]

The big trade empires of the USA, Great Britain and France have the tech you seek.

You could tech-trade with any of them to get it.

Yes, this was what I did. If I remember well, I traded it from Japan. Nevertheless, letting start the civ of a player with deficits in micromanagement compared to other civs, is an 'unfun' element in gameplay and I have learnt that such situations should be avoided when possible (Soren Johnson in the Civ 4 manual about Civ 3). I would change the tech that allows mfg goods to the 'tra'-tech, that opens that screen.

 

[CurtSibling]

Or you could trade the tech, as you did. All the civs start with upsides and downsides.
For instance, Russia isn't a trade powerhouse like the USA at the start, but a player can change that situation.

If others consider this a huge problem, I will add the tech to all civs for the next update.
Not entirely sure if all civs should start out with it, however.

 

[voltar]

I feel like the dmg on tiles to units is messing up the AI, many of their units just become stuck as they fortify damaged units.

 

[CurtSibling]

I feel like the dmg on tiles to units is messing up the AI, many of their units just become stuck as they fortify damaged units.

It isn't stopping the majority of the units in my game.

 

[Civinator]

All the civs start with upsides and downsides. For instance, Russia isn't a trade powerhouse like the USA at the start, but a player can change that situation.

Yes, and this is very good as it is.

May be I was not precisely enough in pointing out what I mean:

The upsides for the "trade powerhouse" civs are not coming from having ToT-tech 84 Trade, they are coming from having the building International Port, that in this scenario is connected to tech 84. The problem is, that ToT tech 84 hardcoded opens the trade manager´s demand and supply screen. As far as I know, this is the only hardcoded advantage of tech 84, especially this tech is not giving any additional trading benefits to the players.

http://sleague.civfanatics.com/COC/guides/tot_advances.shtml

I think the idea behind that hardcoded setting in ToT was to create a service to avoid "spying out" every city of other civs about their demanded trade goods when caravans are appearing in the game and therefore is a "fun" gaming-element. To disrupt the connection between the trade manager´s demand and supply screen and the first caravan units appearing in the game without any need, therefore creates an unnecessairy "unfun" gaming-element.

My suggestion to fix this "unfun" disruption between the tech, when the first caravan units are appearing in the game and the opening of the trade manager´s demand and supply screen, is to rename tech 84 to Railroads and adding the unit Mfg Goods and the building Grand Rail Station (=Superhighways) to that tech and to rename tech 68 to International Trade and adding the building International Port to that tech. Of course these changes need to fix the prerequisite techs for other techs in the techtree and the techs that civs receive at the start (to become the economic powerhouses), too.