wheres karadoc disappeared??? im worried!
Yeah. I'm worried too; but not gone.
Well, I can't believe this actually happened, but it did. I have finally grown bored of Civ. I've been playing Civ since Civ 2 when I was about 13 years old. I skipped school to stay home and play it a couple of days back then in grade 9 and Civ 3 and Civ 4 definitely chewed up some time I should have been working on essays in university. The amount of time I've spent playing Civ 4 is truly astounding, and far more time than I've spent on any other game. I was tiring of Civ 4 a little over a year ago and about to give it up, but Kmod got me back into it. I want to thank Karadoc for giving me an entire year extension of life on this game, and during that year I had a good 30 or so games. I won't be playing Civ 5 so I guess this is the end of the Civ franchise for me, for the foreseeable future. I can't tell you how many times I was walking down the street or sitting on a bus and thinking about the current civ game I was playing and what my strategic options were, but alas, all good things must come to an end. Thanks, Karadoc! I don't know what you do for a living and perhaps it's unrelated to gaming, but if I ever find out you are part of the production team for a game I will be inclined to purchase it. See you in Dota!
I've grown bored of Civ several times now, and I've had breaks that last a couple of weeks, or months, or years. I first started K-Mod after returning from such a break. I wouldn't claim that there will never be a time that I'll stop playing it forever, but I can say that it isn't unusual for me to play a game lots and lots, and then stop playing it for a long time before coming back again.
It's true that I've been playing Dota 2 a bit recently, but that doesn't really mean much. I've been playing Dota on and off since before this mod started. Roughly speaking I usually have two game that I play a lot at any one time. Sometimes I might split my time between Dota and Civ, sometimes it might be Civ and Nethack, or maybe Nethack and Pokemon! Some other games I've been playing recently include Populous 3, The Legend of Grimrock, X-Com: Apocalypse, and Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon. (I've got a Nethack balance mod
here, and a Apocalypse balance mod
here. Neither of those are anywhere close to being as advanced as this mod, and not many people have tried them. But nonetheless, they are there.)
My version of Fire Emblem has some added interest / challenge for me because it's in Japanese, and I don't speak Japanese. I've been quite surprised to see that it actually uses heaps of English words written with Japanese characters. eg. アーマーナイト, which reads "a-ma-naito", which sounds like (and means) "armour knight". There are heaps of examples like that.
Anyway, noto2, good luck and have fun!
Weird I took Sparta from Alexander, and there was a grassland with fresh water lake and it has 2F 1H and it's impossible to farm. Because apparently the game says it's already farmed and the farm graphic is there.
The game thinks it's still a forest though and I can't change it.
That sounds very strange. I've never seen anything like that. -- I've glanced at some of the relevant code. As far as I can tell, the most likely way for that to happen is if the plot is not part of any "area" - but I don't know what could possibly cause that. I doubt it is a bug exclusive to K-Mod, because I haven't changed the way areas are updated / calculated. (although, I have some vague intention of doing that in the future because I know it can be done significantly more efficiently...) If the plot is still not part of any area, then you won't be able to change its yield -- but if the problem has corrected itself then I'm pretty sure you could pillage the farm and then rebuild it - or build a different improvement to correct the problem. It might be interesting to know whether or not that works if you still have the save game...
I think I just located a Firaxis bug in CvPlot::canTrain
[...]
I believe isPrereqReligion means "some religion must be present", in which case the correct behavior is to return false when getReligionCount() is 0:
[...]
I don't even know if that tag is used in the standard game but I figured I'd report it because it sure looks broken to me.
I agree. I think it's mistake, and I've changed it for the next version. Also, canConstruct has the same problem. (There are a few mistakes like that in the original code.) Changing it won't have any affect on K-Mod itself, because that flag is not used by anything in the current XML, but it might affect some other mods. Thanks for pointing it out.
@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.
Well, I think it's important not to at games in isolation when talking about this kind of balance. Global warming in K-Mod isn't intended to run out of control in every game after 1990... but it is intended to
occasionally have a large effect on the game. In my experience, usually the game ends before global warming does anything much at all. Usually the threshold is reached, and there might be melting of the icecaps, but then the game ends. When I play, it's very rare see it 'run out of control' but I'm glad that it sometimes can! I think it's good for variety and interest. But, if you find that in your games this is actually happening more often than you like, I encourage you to post some feedback in the global warming feedback thread.
By the way, nukes have no effect on global warming in K-mod. Also, global warming in K-Mod is deliberately biased so that it is more likely to 'strike' on cold areas than it is on warm areas. So icecaps and tundra melting are far more likely than turning grassland to plains, and grassland to plains is more likely than plains to dessert. This bias is there mostly for gameplay reasons. Melting icecaps and melting tundra is something that is happening in the real world right now, so I think it's kind of nice that it happens roughly at the same time (in tech if not in date) when playing Civ... but K-Mod is obviously not meant to be a world simulator. I think it would be boring if the civ world always turned out the same as the real world.
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. [...]
- 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 agree with you about the production overflow thing. It is definitely possible to improve the way it works. I guess the main reason I haven't done it is a combination of laziness (or rather, focusing-on-other-things-ness) and on it being no obvious to me how it _should_ work, because however it is changed there always seem to be some fringe cases which are non-intuitive. ... Maybe it's time I had a look at it again. I've got some idea about what needs to be done. (But I don't want to make it the same as that multiproduction mod.)
As for the barbarian free wins... I agree that it's a pretty clumsy way to 'balance' the game. It certainly isn't something I'd add to the game if I was making it from scratch... But I don't think it's completely terrible, and I currently intend to leave it alone. I'm not certain, but I imagine the AI benefits quite a lot from those free wins. (The AI is certainly a lot more reckless with their scouts than I am. If the free wins were removed, I think the AI would need to be retaught how to explore.)
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?
I don't have any immediate plans to support more than 18 players.
It's actually really easy to make the game support more than 18 (just by changing a single number before compiling the DLL), but doing so will cause the game to run a bit slower, and the higher player limit DLL will not be compatible with the current DLL. So it's a bit of a drag. I personally don't have much interest in playing games with 20+ civs, so I've just chosen to stick with the 18 player limit until I get around to fixing some of the performance issues (which may be never). In the mean time, players who want the higher limit are welcome to change it themselves.
K-Mod does have autoplay, but it's only really there for testing / debug reasons. There are some technical reasons why it isn't easy to implement autoplay without it being 'exploitable'. I think I described some of the problems a few pages back.
Question for the Pros like Karadoc.
Mercantilism?
Mercantilism is usually pretty weak. But I really like how it affects the game. If you have heaps of overseas trade routes, then usually Free Market (or even Decentralisation) will be better than Mercantilism... but if you
don't have overseas trade routes, then Mercantilism is usually better. Also, a key point to understand is that trade routes are
not two-way. ie. It's possible for a rival civ to gain a lot of trade commerce from your cities without you gaining anything from theirs. -- So, if someone on another continent has astronomy before you do, then it's often a good idea to adopt Mercantilsim to deprive them of the oversea trade benefits that you aren't getting anyway. Also, if the rest of the world is using Mercantilism, then obviously you can't get any foreign trade routes anyway and so you might as well adopt Mercantilism yourself to get the specialists! The AI understands these things, and so occasionally what happens is that the whole world ends up adopting Mercantilism; and then everyone is very reluctant to switch to anything else (because they wouldn't get the trade benefits anyway until someone else switches too). I think it's an interesting phase of the game. It's a bit like the adoption of emancipation, except that it's usually only short term.
There are a couple of 'hidden benefits' of Mercantilism. Firstly, it still allows foreign trade with vassals - and so if you have a big vassal, or a couple of small vassals, then you might be able to use Mercantilism without losing much trade commerce. Secondly, if you are only getting trade routes to your own cities, then you can only get trade culture from your own cities. And so it can help push back foreign culture. This can work better than you might expect, because usually the trade from your own cities will be to your biggest cities, which usually produce the most culture...
I like the sound of [the culture changes]. However did you clarify a bit more anywhere? In my game I still don't feel compelled to use the culture slider, though I must admit I no longer have any culture-pressured borders thanks to some successful warring.
Can it increase the amount of culture generated in rival cities via the new trade route culture? Do you mean the culture slider is stronger now because other sources of culture are harder to come by / weaker? Or is it something more involved, like the effect of the larger radius at which culture is dumped onto plots around cities?
It's all of those things. Trade culture generated in rival cities is based on the culture rate in your cities - so that can be increased with the culture slider. Many buildings have had their culture output reduced. But the most important thing is the range of the culture. Culture from cities extends 3 plots beyond border (with strength decreasing with distance), and cities that are not actually on the foreign border can still have a significant effect in culture battles.
Even so, I usually don't feel compelled to use the slider either; but at least now it isn't a complete waste of commerce when I do use it!
I'm enjoying fast unit cycling in my current game, however I've noticed one very minor issue (and it may be that this has nothing to do with the unit cycling option), but when you found a city the camera jumps to the next unit before the name-city prompt comes up. Doesn't affect anything serious obviously but it does seem weird compared to the base game.
I'll see if I can do something to fix that.
and does not affect sources of plain ol' gold
. For now I'm ignoring the hammer bonus as this is not what the question was about.
