Improvements

[Thalassicus]

Ah, had reworded it as you were writing your post in fact, to somewhat solve that issue. This is revising the tooltip displayed in the Tech Tree. There's no size limit, but most of the other tooltips are a single line, so I'm trying to keep it as concise as possible.

 

[Kanin]

Started a new game today and found something odd with a cow. I hope you can explain this.

The cow was on grass by the river, so had 3 food, 1 gold.
I built Grocer, which added 1 food, now 4 food, 1 gold.
I built Pasture, which oddly added 1 production, now 4 food, 1 prod, 1 gold.

I expected to get 5 food, 1 gold. What switched 1 food for 1 prod?

I prefer it this way since 1 prod lets me get 1 more prod during golden age. I am not saying there is a bug in the mod, but I like to understand what happened.

 

[Lazy Knight]

the pasture on cattle has always been +1

What I don't know though is if it is intended to have the food bonus applied before improving the tile? I guess it does not really matter. May even be hard to implement otherwise.

 

[Kanin]

Aha thats good to know. I wish the civilopedia was more complete.

 

[Thalassicus]

Yes, there's no option for buildings to boost improved tiles only. For example, the Mint states it only works for mined gold and silver, but actually uses the same ResourceYieldChanges option I use here, and boosts gold and silver regardless of whether or not they're mined.

 

[nemini]

Could you maybe add wheat to the granary/grocer as well?

Also, why not keep the vanilla settings but add "farms spread irrigation" on civil service as in Civ4?

 

[Thalassicus]

Spreading irrigation with farms would require access to the c++ part of the sdk. Civ V seems to be transitioned away from that sort of requirement, too... don't need a road to resources, for example. I think it represents the "non-federal" irrigation canals or country roads that would connect up those improvements.

I originally had wheat boosted too, but some people pointed out it already is a very strong improvement, and the bonus to the Fertilizer tech indirectly benefits wheat. An improved river wheat on plains is 5 1 1 with all the techs, and a similar one on flood plains is a whopping 6, capable of supporting 3 population points.

 

[Matte979]

Has any thoughts been put into making trading post only be buildable on flat land? The AI somehow seem to get confused and build them on hills in the early game. That was without the latest AI changes so you might have fixed that, but I dont see any issue with restricting trading posts to flat land.

I added this to the mod for myself.

<Improvements>
<Update>
<Set RequiresFlatlands="true" />
<Where Type="IMPROVEMENT_TRADING_POST" />
</Update>
</Improvements>

 

[Thalassicus]

Well, trading posts on hills are valuable since both yields hammers:) are boosted by golden ages. The goal of this mod is to increase the choices players have and provide for more decision-making, so I'm hesitant to restrict existing strategies.

From the games I've played the AI seems to build a relatively healthy mix of improvements in logical locations, haven't seen as much trading post spam as in vanilla.

 

[PieceOfMind]

No problem Thal. I'm not sure how you're going to amend the Harbor description but it might be a tad tricky. Due to poor documentation the way Harbor trade works is confusing for a lot of people.

e.g. The documentation does not clearly explain that for a functioning Harbor Trade Connection:

1a. There must also be a Harbor in the Capital; or
1b. There must exist a Harbor City on the same continent as the Capital and that also has a road or railroad connection to the Capital.
and
2. The game engine must be able to trace an unbroken (explored) line of water tiles (coast/ocean/lake) from the originating Harbor to the destination Harbor.
What this usually means is that both Harbors must be on the same body of water.

The corollary here is that a Harbor will only provide a railroad connection to the Capital if:

a. The Capital also has a Harbor, and is on the same body of water as your city.
or
b. The Capital has a railroad connection to a Harbor city on the same continent which is on the same body of water as your city.

So a simple sentence like "Harbors also provide railroad connections to the Capital if there is an existing trade connection" will break in scenario 1b. where there is only a road (but no railroad) connection.

I'm not sure how you're going to get all the nuances above into the description. Might be more trouble than it's worth

Did you discover this yourself? This is very useful information, and before I read this I was really confused about how all these aspects interacted.

I mean, the documentation doesn't even make it clear that for a harbor city to make a connection with your capital the capital or a city connected to the capital needs to have a harbor too. And considering how streamlined the game is now, and how arbitrary the rules are in other parts of the game, it really was impossible to make an intelligent guess.

One thing that I still wonder, along similar lines as above, and which if you know it'd be great if you could explain, is how road maintenance is worked out. In particular when roads are conquered from the enemy (in enemy territory) yet they connect no cities, or enemy roads that are outside a captured city's borders, or even roads of an eliminated civ that are on the other side of the world. :s Pretty confusing stuff.

 

[Thalassicus]

I worked on the Harbor clarification a bit more, it should all make sense in the version currently in the unofficial patch.

As for roads... I haven't ever tested it so I'm honestly not sure. I know this much:

1. You always pay for roads within your borders.
2. You pay for roads you built that are in no borders.

Therefore if you conquer someone, you now pay for any roads inside their borders, but I believe they still pay for ones outside the borders. I've often wondered if that could basically kill off a civ with only 1-2 cities left but dozens of borderless roads.

As for roads built by eliminated civs, I'm assuming no one pays for them anymore, though again I haven't tested it. Just seems logical from points #1 and #2, which I saw a Firaxis dev explain.

 

[bobbyboy29]

No problem Thal. I'm not sure how you're going to amend the Harbor description but it might be a tad tricky. Due to poor documentation the way Harbor trade works is confusing for a lot of people.

e.g. The documentation does not clearly explain that for a functioning Harbor Trade Connection:

1a. There must also be a Harbor in the Capital; or
1b. There must exist a Harbor City on the same continent as the Capital and that also has a road or railroad connection to the Capital.
and
2. The game engine must be able to trace an unbroken (explored) line of water tiles (coast/ocean/lake) from the originating Harbor to the destination Harbor.
What this usually means is that both Harbors must be on the same body of water.

The corollary here is that a Harbor will only provide a railroad connection to the Capital if:

a. The Capital also has a Harbor, and is on the same body of water as your city.
or
b. The Capital has a railroad connection to a Harbor city on the same continent which is on the same body of water as your city.

So a simple sentence like "Harbors also provide railroad connections to the Capital if there is an existing trade connection" will break in scenario 1b. where there is only a road (but no railroad) connection.

I'm not sure how you're going to get all the nuances above into the description. Might be more trouble than it's worth

Yeah this happened to me in my last game. Just to add another element of confusion I had this scenario:
1. My capital was inland
2. I had only one coastal city with a harbor, it was not connected by road to the capital and thus did not have a trade route as per what Lukeloh has told us.
3. I built a road between the harbor city and a coastal friendly city state which also wasn't connected by road to the capital (but may or may not have had a harbor) and THAT connected my coastal city to my capital somehow.

I am beyond confused now!

 

[Thalassicus]

Well, the civlopedia for the Harbor should now explain it clearly. Basically, your capital had a path of road and water tiles to the coastal city, transitioned at a city-state with a harbor.

 

[Kanin]

While I like the Grocer building, I keep feeling the name is out of place. Archaeologists have found granaries as old as 11000 years, while grocers appeared during the industrial era, possibly the renaissance. Maybe we could come up with a more fitting historical name to replace Grocer? For example Food Storage, Food Pit or something along those lines.

 

[Thalassicus]

Sounds reasonable. The problem is we know people bartering or selling food in cities have existed since cities themselves, but I don't know of any words for it in ancient times.

What about Provisioner?

Another idea that popped into my mind is move wheat's +1 bonus to the building. This would increase resource balance (since Wheat is the only resource that can be improved immediately) and consistency for the building: boosts yield of all land food sources. Thoughts?

 

[Lazy Knight]

Is it possible that the harbor tooltip does not reflect the change? I.e. there is no word mentioning the increased tile yield.


EDIT: I see now - the unofficial Patch fixing the harbor tooltip and this mod altering the harbor don't go together.

Is there some thing as a "load order" for mods? Meaning one mod will overwrite another one?

 

[SerialK]

Thanks a lot for your mods, they make the game so much more enjoyable. I played around 5 full games in King difficulty so far with your mods (and probably move to emperor next), and even if i'm no civilization expert, i noticed that even the AI seems to benefit from the production bonus given by mines and other improvements as the field much larger armies than in a vanilla game, which is good.

On the other hand i very rarely see lumberyards in AI territory, i've not been looking for those actively, but usually, when i invade another empire the forest are either gone or covered in trading posts. That's probably because the forests get destroyed before the lumberyards get their production bonus from tech. Not a big deal anyway and i guess you can't do much about it anyway without dll access.

One thing that worries me a bit more, is that in the late game with all the various production bonus granted by the buildings, well placed cities can popup wonders and large buildings in a matter of turns as long as they have a hill or two and a river.

Of course, i understand that balancing beginning vs endgame is quite hard, especially with all those production boost buildings and changing the hammer cost of buildings leads to a whole lot of side effects that are hard to balance. But, maybe reducing the railroad bonus to 25% would help a bit on that matter.

Anyway, that's just my opinion, keep up the good work

edit: i was wrong on the lumberyard part, the AI definitively build some.

 

[Thalassicus]

@Lazy_Knight
A priority system would be fantastic but is unfortunately not provided. Oblivion had a great and simple priority system: mods were loaded in order of last modified date, so mod manager programs could be used to alter this order. I don't believe Civ has anything... yet. Mods might be loaded in alphabetical order, but that's not very effective since the names are tied with their entries in the online Mod Browser.

The Harbor tooltip is indeed altered in both mods, there's not really any good way around that. I point this out in the readme for Terrain Improvements; if you use both just delete the Unofficial Patch - Harbors.xml file. The unofficial patch version is a "fixed" harbor tooltip that shows better information on what they do in regards to trade routes, while the Terrain Improvements version adds info about the +1 bonus.

I'll experiment and see if it's possible to concatenate the commerce bonus notification to the existing tooltip instead...


@SerialK
Glad you're having fun! I've seen the AI build lumbermills a lot in both the vanilla and modded games, I think it just depends on their priorities and map positioning, possibly factors such as map size and difficulty too. I had one game where China built a dozen of them.

One thing that can affect this is I weighted the AI to favor food slightly more, to try and combat this issue:

[...] the AI tends to lag behind the human with regards to total population. It's not able to micromanage the numbers in the same way a person can, and also can't build up the REALLY large food surpluses humans like to. The lack of population tends to catch up to the AI in the later part of the game, where it tends to lacks technology and cities with really high production.

In regards to production, it depends a lot on a city's circumstances. Increasing mines from 3 to 4 is a 25% increase, or the same as a 20% decrease in costs, about what several other balance mods do that tweak production - just approaching it in a different way. Even after modifiers this is still only a maximum of 25% increase, as modifiers multiply by base value. In an optimal city, if a wonder could be built in 10 turns before, now it can be built in 8, so if it can build it in a few turns now it probably could in vanilla too. If you're seeing more of a drastic change, make sure you only have one production mod enabled (Economy Mod, Seven's tweaks, Terrain Improvements, etc)? Doing more than one at a time would have a multiplicative effect.

 

[SerialK]

Point taken. And nope, i don't mix several 'economic' mods with each other, i understand how the engine works Still it's not uncommon to get a 90/turn (or way more) city in the late game which is kinda overpowered imho. Not that it's a big deal anyway as the AI get the same production power.

And yeah about the lumberyards i was wrong, i assumed there was forest in my enemy territory, but using a map reveal script i noticed they only had jungles instead. I came across China in another continent, and yes they built a large amount of those.

 

[JeBuS27]

And yeah about the lumberyards i was wrong, i assumed there was forest in my enemy territory, but using a map reveal script i noticed they only had jungles instead. I came across China in another continent, and yes they built a large amount of those.

Which is good enough reason to add Jungle to the Lumbermill's capabilities. I mean, seriously... They're trees! The amazon is getting cut down, whether we like it or not!