Improvements

[Thalassicus]

Ooops. I got tired and forgot to finish the other GP improvements, just did manufactory and customs house. That xml file is 763 lines of code so it's a hassle to work through, not really any easy way to simplify it with SQL either since every resource and improvement must be individually specified.

I've uploaded v. 12, which should include proper GP improvements.

In all situations, the GP improvement should give a constant yield over the "normal" improvement you would otherwise build on the tile. In other words, pre-economics a Customs House should increase a TP tile from 2 to 8, or a camped Ivory from 3 to 9, always a +6 increase over the "normal improvement" wherever you put it.

If you find a circumstance where the yield does not appear to be constant, please point it out.

 

[Perkus]

@Thalassicus:
I've been tracking down some curious side effects that I *believe* are being caused by this mod component. It concerns how the changes affect the yields of city center tiles. I'm not quite 100% sure it's coming from this mod, because it's hard to test it definitively. Here's what I've found so far:

Something increases the yields of all central city tiles from 2 Food to 3 Food during the game. It doesn't happen in vanilla. I'm pretty sure I've linked this to the change to Fertilizer tech which now gives added food yield to all farms, regardless of freshwater status. This in itself is not a bad or surprising thing - the assumption is that city center tiles are being farmed, I guess. What's curious is that without the mod, river cities do not get a +1 Food bonus post-Fertilizer as you might expect, despite having Freshwater access. Still, no big deal, although perhaps this could be documented in the readme.

Where it gets stranger: With the mod, all central city tiles get the +1 Food, EXCEPT the capital city! That's right, for some weird reason, the capital is treated differently that all the other cities. It isn't being "farmed". This "bug" (?) is what originally led me into this weird rabbit hole in the first place. I was trying to double check the mod's effect on maritime food bonuses, and noticed it wasn't adding up at the capital - it was off by 1 from what the tooltip seemed to imply. That's when I discovered the capital falls behind by 1 food somehow. Usually people wouldn't notice because the larger maritime bonus tends to obscure this small bonus.

I've tried removing the fertilizer code in the .xml, but this doesn't change the city center yields upon loading. I also tried adding the fertilizer food bonus into both "freshwater" and "non-freshwater" yield tables, with no effect. I assume it's because tech-triggered yield changes are only processed when the tech is discovered, as you once mentioned when we were discussing reloads with regards to the Butcher. I don't have a save handy that's just before discovering Fertilizer to test this with properly.

While testing the curious food bonus, I noticed there is also an unexplained +1 Production bonus being added to the center tile of all cities at some point during the game. Again, this doesn't happen in vanilla. In this case there is no difference between the capital and other cities. I'm not at all sure when & why it's happening, but I'm guessing it's from a tech being researched. I do not have the Republic Social Policy researched at any point during my test game (it gives +1 Prod to all cities). There are no wonders or other policies that account for this. The bonus is not there after Engineering, and is there after Steam Power. If I had to guess I'd think it's this mod's added Lumber Mill bonus that's triggering it for some reason. In any case it's something that happens in the Renaissance or early Industrial era. I would have thought it would be Mining tech, but it doesn't happen that early. Both this & the food bonus happen without Railroad having been researched.

I'm just curious if anyone can verify or explain my findings. It's not very big deal balance-wise, obviously. If it is this mod, I don't imagine anything reasonable can/will be done about this, except perhaps some additional documentation to explain the phenomenon.

 

[Thalassicus]

Interesting observation. I looked through the files and couldn't find what precisely might be causing it. You're most likely right that it's the tech advances... that whole thing is actually slightly buggy, like how it doesn't retro-actively take effect if the mod is enabled after you research the tech. Since they don't use yield bonuses from tech in the vanilla game, I wouldn't be surprised if it got less testing and these bugs slipped through. It seems relatively minor though, so it shouldn't be much of a problem until we get c++ and can fix it properly.

 

[CNightwing]

New to the conversation, I haven't tried the mod but terrain and improvements are something that need significant change to balance the game.

I wonder if there's some value in tweaking the behaviour of trade routes overall? Obviously you want to avoid anything that further promotes ICS, so you can't award them on a per-connection basis (unless there's a cap). The way that gold is generated at the moment isn't too bad, though it would be nice to promote a bit more interconnection. The way that production is generated is pretty bland though. It would be nice if each connection to a city increased production a little. Diminishing returns, naturally. Something like 25% if linked to 1 city, 12.5% for 2, etc.. capping naturally at 50%. Or just 10% per connection capping at 50%. This would also reward non-capital connections and multiple harbours rather than 1 on each continent. Anyway, just some thoughts.

Also, is there a terrain flag for 'trade route' status? I wanted to test out the idea of trading posts starting at 1 gold, going to 2 gold on a trade route with currency and 2 everywhere with economics (to work similarly to farms currently).

 

[Thalassicus]

I'm 99% sure I remember seeing an improvements attribute for if the improvement is built on a trade route. This was probably used for trading posts in an early alpha build of Civ V.

Changes to trade route calculations are something I'd like to do, anything complex like what you describe will require more tools than what we currently have though (need c++ access).

 

[Supercheese]

I'm 99% sure I remember seeing an improvements attribute for if the improvement is built on a trade route. This was probably used for trading posts in an early alpha build of Civ V.

I'm pretty sure that tag is just for plain ol' Routes like roads and rails, not actually Trade Routes.

<Table name="Improvement_RouteYieldChanges">
	<Column name="ImprovementType" type="text" reference="Improvements(Type)"/>
	<Column name="RouteType" type="text" reference="Routes(Type)"/>
	<Column name="YieldType" type="text" reference="Yields(Type)"/>
	<Column name="Yield" type="integer"/>
</Table>

 

[Perkus]

There was a suggestion in another thread somewhere (ICS-related) to change the trade route formula to something like a base of -1 but +1.33 / pop. Currently I think it's 1 + 1.25 / pop, which makes it too cheap to spam roads to tiny, tightly packed cities.

 

[Niniux]

I was wondering if Great Scientists Tech Popping ability could be changed to give tiles and specialists an extra beaker or two for X number of turns, basically a Scientific Golden Age, with the current tools?

I think that'd be the best way to nerf them besides making them give a fixed amount of research points per bulb.

 

[Tomice]

Thal, in Valkrionn's economy mod, trading posts are allowed on all ressources. He explains it with the limited choice some city spots offer. And indeed, especially your capital often has some sort of ressource on almost every field, making terrain improvement somewhat automated. Have you thought about this?

On the other hand, trading posts are still ugly (hope Poncratias releases v2 soon...), so making them ebven more spammable is probably not appealing.

 

[Thalassicus]

A scientific golden age would be great, things like that just aren't possible yet though.

I haven't done some things like the trading posts on resources because the AI wouldn't know how to deal with it (if I remember the discussion on that thread correctly). I've been prioritizing things the AI can handle properly. This is the same reason I haven't done anything like Active City Defense, the AI wouldn't "know" to move into the healing effect or avoid the damage effect.

 

[Perkus]

And yet the citadel already does damage to nearby enemies, and medics heal nearby units. I wonder if the AI has any logic to try to handle that? If the AI was written properly (har har), it would automagically notice any new sources of such "radius" effects and react accordingly. Has anyone ever seen an AI medic? Their units rarely live long enough to earn deeper promotions, and if they do they'll usually have to blow it on an insta-heal!

 

[Thalassicus]

It's different: each turn Afforess selects units and increases or decreases their health directly. The AI would have no way of knowing of this. Likewise, it's only coded to build plantations/camps/etc on resources.

I haven't seen a medic, but it's difficult to see enemy promotions... only shows up when you attack, and you can't actually read them. I doubt they coded for a medic since finding an optimal solution for arranging units to utilize the medic benefit would probably be NP-hard (same reason AI doesn't use great generals in the field).

 

[Tomice]

I've been prioritizing things the AI can handle properly.

I just love how you know everything and think about everything .
Sadly, we have no "Most awesome community member of the month" vote.

One day I would really love to make a suggestion you didn't think about before, though

 

[bryanw1995]

so from reading patch notes you just kept all natural wonders at 2h3g, or did you just remove the 3 crazy ones but keep the changes to "normal" natural wonders?

 

[Thalassicus]

I haven't made any alterations to national wonders yet, they're set at vanilla patch 1.0.1.135 values. I'm going to work on those once I have everything working relatively well with patch compatibility and bugfixes.

 

[Ahriman]

I think you could rebalance natural wonders in a way that would improve balance while retaining the flavor of different kinds of bonuses for different wonders.

With a bit more testing, I'll propose some ideas for an alternative.

 

[Thalassicus]

Sounds great! In addition to the obviously overpowered ones, some seem rather weak, such as Old Faithful. It's 2, strictly worse than a scientist (even with the nerf to scientists in these mods).

 

[SlightlyMad]

The Fountain of Youth needs a serious nerf. I have it in my game, and I wasn't even close to the first to find it. Japan and Songhai were both settled nearby but never bothere to take it. When I got a settler nearby, it didn't even show a recommendation icon, so the AI obviously has no idea how good the +10 happy bonus is.

Even worse though, is the free promotion. Every single unit that passes by it gets double healing for the rest of the game. I of course spent the next 100 years after finding it sending all of my troops on a mass pilgrimage to get the promotion, and it's the first thing I do with any newly built unit. Again, the AI has no idea how to do this. Even civs with whom I have open borders won't send any units to the fountain to get the promotion.

Now any battle I fight is just ridiculous. I have my front-line units upgraded to march and medic, which means they can attack and still heal +5 per turn.

I'd suggest either removing the fountain entirely, or at least removing its promotion ability.

 

[Ahriman]

In addition to the obviously overpowered ones, some seem rather weak, such as Old Faithful. It's 2, strictly worse than a scientist (even with the nerf to scientists in these mods).

Well, Old Faithful gives +3 happy if its inside your border. So you never want to work it, but you still definitely want to be near it. I think that's ok. Maybe make it 4 science but only +2 happy when in your borders.

But yeah, all the new ones need a nerf.

As a simple start point, I'd leave the original wonders the same, but just make the Fountain of Youth a happiness booster (maybe +2 happy, 4 food tile yield) and remove the magical healing effect, make El Dorado bonus ~200 gold, and reduce the other one from 10 gold down to 5 gold.

 

[alpaca]

I think the Natural Wonders should mainly provide yields. A bit more than normal tiles but nothing very exagerrated, total of 5 or 6 maybe. Fountain of Youth can provide a happiness bonus of 2 points maybe, which makes it about as good as a free Circus, and get some yield, too. El Dorado might be ok with 100 gold and maybe some generic yield.