K-Mod: Far Beyond the Sword

[Fluffy_Rabbit]

@Karadoc - I think the global warming needs to be changed/nerfed, it just runs out of control from about 1990 (have been playing on Prince level) - is that intended? it is unrealistic imho (whatever one thinks about the politics of climatic change) ... icy tundra at the poles turning into grassland . . . and then into plains! This is without any nuclear warfare.

 

[nsaman]

Do you have any ambitions to support more than 18 players?

Btw, love what you're doing, just got done reading through the change log. When I play, I like to play huge maps with tons of players but can't figure out a way of integrated needed mods. Also on a less than important note, what do you think about auto play features?

 

[Tigranes]

Time and again I witness the same story with aggressive leaders being overrun by Barbarians super early. I don't remember something like this in vanila, not sure if this is good or bad... But notice size 9 Rome so early in game! Do the Barbarians somehow ignore anger while growing the city?

 

[Charles555nc]

I knew I was right.

This game Mehmed declared war on Hammurabi and instantly took a city...after about 15 turns of war, Mehmed takes another city and Hammurabi's Mecca finishes the great lighthouse in his capital! Building wonders while he gets conquered...

Now I know why some of ai s are getting destroyed or vassaled super early.

Can we look into this? (I can provide earlier saves if anyone wants them).

 

[noto2]

@fluffy: Very few games go until 1990. I know it's not realistic compared to real life, but for game mechanics I think the current GW works very well. I think very few games go that late. Even space wins usually happen well before 1990. If Karadoc nerfed it then it just wouldn't be a factor at all most of the time

@Tigranes: I would be willing to bet that is the result of the vedic aryan event where 4 archers spawn outside a city of yours and attack you. Haven't you had this happen to you? There are a few barb spawning events - archers, spears, swords, and horse archers. You'd think horse archers would be the worst but it's not, because it happens well into the game, like around turn 100-150, and you have plenty of defences at that point. The archer spawn event happens stupidly early, like turn 40 or something. At that point in the game you have 2 cities and maybe 2-4 archers if you're lucky. If the event catches you by surprise and you have only 1 archer in the capital because you sent the others out to fog bust, you can easily lose your capital. It's happened to me many times and this forum has been littered with threads talking about hhow the Vedic Aryan event sucks. Thing is, it can also wipe out an AI. I've noticed that too. It's really lame when it happens. I think the event should be removed from the game or delayed at least. I'm not sure the barb spawning events really add anything to the game, though. In any case, I haven't noticed it happen more often in Kmod.

 

[damerell]

@fluffy: Very few games go until 1990. I know it's not realistic compared to real life, but for game mechanics I think the current GW works very well. I think very few games go that late. Even space wins usually happen well before 1990. If Karadoc nerfed it then it just wouldn't be a factor at all most of the time.

On the other hand, turning icy tundra into prime grasslands is perhaps not an ideal effect.

 

[PieceOfMind]

On the other hand, turning icy tundra into prime grasslands is perhaps not an ideal effect.

I think it's ok. It's certainly a lot better than turning everything into desert.

I just finished my first K-Mod game where I got to GW (I'll admit I deliberately delayed winning earlier in order to see the late-game). I had truly massive cities with 4 corporations being spread to most towns. My biggest cities were in the high 30s in population and receiving GW unhappiness on the order of 11. I had to start using the culture slider to compensate though I didn't mind at that point as I had already researched the important techs.

Despite the fact I was playing probably below my level (Prince, but I had a pretty good start and very good circumstances for most of the game, the world warring while I stayed mostly out of it), I found GW had very little real impact on the late-game except for the unhappiness. I was trying to ruin the world with GW but in the end I was going to accidentally get a culture victory and actually a couple turns before that got a Domination victory without war. With Sushi, CivJewellers and CreateCon fueled by a massive resource network, the new culture mechanics meant I was starting to really intrude into the culture of every landmass I managed to settle a city on. I'd found a city, throw the corps and a courthouse in and it'd be pumping 300+ culture within a couple turns.

Still, I'm not going to call it unbalanced yet as I was below my difficulty and it was a maptype that favoured Sushi (karadoc's not too big or small).

But my point is I like GW as it is currently. It'll be more interesting to see it in a game where I'm not winning by such a large margin. I can't imagine the tile-changing effects of it to ever cause enough havoc to tip the balance, but it adds flavour to the late-game. The main thing is the unhappiness it causes and if I'm not mistaken this is what karadoc intended.

I will have to try a larger game with more civs to try it out again.

EDIT...
I also have to say the new way unit cycling works is great. I always used to disable unit cycling and would just press w after every move, but now with this mod I've gone back again and most of the time the next unit chosen is nearby. The fact the unit cycling is faster now is a bonus.

 

[PieceOfMind]

By the way, I have some suggestions/criticisms...

• When I read about the changes to the way production overflow works I thought they sounded ok, but in play I found I had a problem with them. They didn't work IMO intuitively. I had some cities base hammers higher than 40, and some even higher than 50, and then after corps it got ridiculous. With lots of production modifiers (mainly the HE and IW cities) I was starting to get massive amounts of overflow obviously, even on units one wouldn't normally consider cheap.
  The problem is I would sometimes want a particular quantity of one unit and I thought the intuitive way to queue up the things to get that many was to place as many in the queue. For example, I want 3 cruise missiles to put in a sub, so I put three in the queue. Or I want 5 workboats to send over with my galleons colonising islands, so I queue up 5 workboats.
  
  However the observed behaviour was that the city would sometimes produce more than one of each unit while only deducting one from the queue.
  The expected behaviour was that if multiple of that same item are in the queue, it should at least deduct more from the queue if more were produced.
  Those workboats I was building... IIRC I had 5 by the second turn, and there were 3 still queued!
  .
• The other unfortunate consequence of this overflow feature is that sometimes after building a few of one type of unit, when you're finished you have ended up with wasted hammers being invested in more of that unit. For example, build 3 corp executives, and now there's one that has 70/100 hammers on it but I don't need it. There would have been a way to micromanage to avoid getting overflow hammers put into it, by putting a turn of production into a building before doing the last exec, but it's pretty annoying to get to that level of micro.
  
  I guess I'm saying I'm not too big a fan of the current implementation of the overflow feature. I think I remember reading there were some difficulties with getting something closer to the original multiple production mod (OOS issues maybe?), but if it's going to produce excess units you don't need or waste hammers on units you won't build anymore, I'd prefer to have gotten the good old overflow gold.
  .
• This is only a small request, but I think the "barb free wins" for Prince level and below should be removed from the game. I remember discovering these while working on ACO and thinking how much I disliked a feature that was so opaque to the player, could be (slightly) exploited if known about, and the player was even lied to about (concerning the combat odds).
  I'm guessing the reason it was put in was to avoid the situation of a newbie player having their scout eaten by the first animal he came across. However people playing this mod are not likely to be so incompetent they need this strange cheat in the game (and I do consider it a cheat because the AI does not get this handicap). Because of this barb free win, you can use a starting warrior to attack a bear and know you'll be able to get 4XP for free.
  I just think it's a bad feature and no one would miss it. Disabling it is just an xml change so I suppose I can do it myself, but still I'll leave the suggestion here.

 

[damerell]

But my point is I like GW as it is currently.

I don't. It's an improvement, certainly, in that the unhappiness has some kind of effect to deal with. But really it needs to give the player decisions to make.

 

[PieceOfMind]

I don't. It's an improvement, certainly, in that the unhappiness has some kind of effect to deal with. But really it needs to give the player decisions to make.

Oh, I think it can be improved too. I'm not sure how much the game would need to change though in order to give the player some meaningful decisions to make.

For one, I think it needs to be a little bit clearer to the player the correlation between GW and unhappiness in cities. For example, considering the Environmentalism civic, does it have any benefit other than what it lists? Because the +1 and reduced unhealthiness did not sell the civic to me in my game.

The main thing I like about the new system:

• It's at least based on a physical model with parameters and thresholds
• It doesn't just turn everything to desert, and focusing on the polar regions first means it's less annoying. Sometimes a tile may be changed to something more productive (which is possible in RL - it's more the fact it adds more extremes and changes some local climates that makes it costly to adapt to)
• It has an impact on cities mad so ignoring it completely is hard to do.
• It isn't caused by nuclear warfare.
• There are buildings which reduce pollution (recycling centre and public transit system).

I think forest preserves on jungles should be more valuable. Currently there's still not enough incentive to keep jungles for all that time, but if they added maybe 2 and some to the nearby city then keeping them might be worthwhile. Actually I still don't think that's enough but I'm struggling to think of anything that would work.

Or maybe the player could invest part of his/her budget into offsets and this would help reduce the unhappiness (though the way I've described it there makes it pretty one-dimensional and probably boring). For the decision to be interesting it probably needs to be more than, "Should I spend this much gold to reduce unhappiness in key cities?".

Maybe there could be a new building whose main effect is to reduce caused by GW at some sort of cost to the city?

e.g.
Sustainable City Project
Costs:300
Effects: -10% commerce, -50% GW anger, -15% from population
Available: Computers

Or 500 without the commerce penalty could work better.

On another note, I only just noticed this thread is in its own subforum now. Maybe this feedback is meant to go in another thread?

 

[Charles555nc]

I don't. It's an improvement, certainly, in that the unhappiness has some kind of effect to deal with. But really it needs to give the player decisions to make.

I made this same argument in the GW thread for kmod. Give the player more choices to reduce GW, have the ai be slightly more aggressive about reducing pollution BEFORE the terrain starts going to crap, have rainforest offset GW more than regular forests etc etc.

I dont think you'd really need to create a new pollution fighting building, just kinda buff the existing ones pollution reduction like 5% and increase their cost 5% and call it a day.

 

[Jabarto]

While we're on the subject of global warming, there' something I've been meaning to point out for a while now:

In standard BtS, global warming is a bit of a joke. It is triggered by the wrong things, you can't really do much to prevent it, and it hits the world in a harsh and unintuitive way.

This is the most succinct description of a bad game mechanic I've ever seen.

 

[Charles555nc]

Question for the Pros like Karadoc.

Mercantilism?

Seems weak to me, considering how late in the tech tree it is (with the nearby free market almost always being the better choice) particularly if you have neighbors to trade with. Maybe I am misunderstanding the exact meaning of: no "foreign" trade routes...does that mean all trades with other civs or just no trading with civs on other continents..

My view of Mercantilism...
An extra specialist is valued at about 3 or 4 commerce per city imo, but a sizeable loss in extra valuable foreign trade routes, and some additional Great People Points from the specialists..

Maybe have mercantilism also create an extra specialist in the capital (2 total) and/or increase the value of internal trade routes by 25-50%. This might help people stuck on their own continents before Astronomy. I wouldnt mind if it got unlocked at guilds instead of banking either (so you can get it earlier) but that might be too radical a change.

I'd love to see it get your "pacificism" treatment, which I think was a massive success.

(but Im not the best player, only play on emperor setting)

 

[noto2]

GW does give the player choices to make. Before Kmod I would never get mass media or broadcast towers, it didnt matter, and I'd almost always use coal plants instead of anything else. Now the late game happinesss stuff like broadway, broadcast towers, etc, is actually useful a lot of the time, additionally, I have more incentive to use alternatives to coal power now. I like the Kmod GW a lot.
As for tundra turning to grassland...first of all, that's not as unrealistic as you think, and secondly, for gameplay it's fine. there's nothing wrong with tundra turning to grasslands at the end of the game. If some poor shmuck started in the middle of the ice (as happens sometimes) then rewarding him by making his land better for the last 5% of the turns of the game is fine by me, and it happens too late to really make a difference anyway.

 

[noto2]

@Charles: Merc can be better than FM or SP sometimes, it depends on what's going on in the game. First of all, if everyone else is in merc then you get no benefit from being a free trader. Trade routes depend on a lot of things. If you're a small civ with a few really big cities, trade routes benefit you more. If you're a very large civ then trading with the smaller civs benefits them more, you might want to be in merc in that case bc it will hurt them much more than you. Also, if you have vassals you can trade with them in merc, so you might decide to stay in merc and trade only with your vassals, which hurts your rivals because they can't trade with you. Furthermore, if you're running REP those specialists from merc are even better.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Also would the UN-forced open trade routes (I forget the exact name of the resolution) mean that even in Merc you'd still get the benefits of foreign trade?

 

[Charles555nc]

Yeah i just realized my vassals can still trade with me in merc. And for some reason I thought free market was better than it actually was...

I still think boosting internal trade by a % with merc would be cool.

 

[noto2]

actually I think that boosting trade with colonies/vassals would be cool. As it stands right now there is no reason to ever make a colony (except conquering a civ on another continent perhaps). Mercantilism would fit the whole colonial empire economy but as it stands right now its not strong enough

 

[Charles555nc]

Thanks for answering my questions guys. Can you guys look at this save and tell me what you think?

My Capital, Kyoto has 96 base commerce, and 7 great specialists, I am doing 179 research a turn and 108 commerce. Ive got about 7 towns, a couple villages, some farms with serfdom.

My vassal's capital, Mecca (which you can view thanks to epsionage) has 45 base commerce and 3 super specialists (not including great generals). He is doing 140 research and 66.8 commerce. At the same tax and research rates as I have- (80% research, 20% commerce). Hes got only 4 sad cottages only and alot of production. He has 3 citizens as merchants.

Tell me what kind of insane bonuses are going on here. Hes doing 80% of my research with less than half the base commerce I do.

I can only imagine if he had a town or 2 he would be out teching my capital...

No wonder tech flies by with these cheats... I made need to ask Karadoc how I could edit my own files to turn this down a bit (I dont mind the production bonuses at Emperer difficulty, but the money/tech side is too much imo).

Take away thought: i dont actually mind small ai nations getting bonuses like this if they kept them to themselves, but this system runs into problems with tech trading and vassals handing over tech to their master country.

Every game an average sized ai nation who has a couple cottages per city (ais who gets the bonuses/cheats in their capital, must be so overpowered bad with financial/serfdom ais). That average ai then vassals one or two nations early and techs trades with them and thereby multiplying his tech rate by taking advantage of those vassal's capital bonuses, to just slaughter the mess out of the tech tree.

In this game, that ai is Pacal and he just got railroad about 10-12 turns ago, and I dont have cannons yet. So hes gonna have machine guns and Ill just be getting cannons in 10/12 turns or so. I know I should just unlock tech with my great people and the game would be closer...

Edit: two turns later Mecca is doing 176 research with 46 base commerce.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Charles555nc, it all adds up. I think the main thing you're missing is that he's running Bureaucracy.

So for all intents and purposes his base commerce is 67 before multipliers.

To nitpick you're mixing the use of gold and commerce which confuses things further.

EDIT...
By the way, if you weren't aware of this you might find it useful to know:
You can set rally points for cities by clicking their title and then shift + right-clicking any tile. Any units built will head to the rally point. Also you can select multiple by shift clicking on as many as you need. Or you can select all cities on the same landmass by ctrl+clicking a city, or all cities in the world by alt+clicking.