K-Mod: Far Beyond the Sword

To be fair, I never remember anyone using environmentalism in the unmodded game.

I liked your representation idea Karadoc of boosting the rep back to +3 beakers, +4 happiness in (however many) largest cities, and -1 happiness in all cities. That way, in all but the lowest difficulties, you will probably have to put some money into happiness, cutting into some of the profits. I remember you said it would be harder to code.

We are all your fans, Karadoc, dont get bummed out :D
 
I still use rep some of the time, so either I'm an idiot, or it is still a viable civic. --- ... ~~~

It's not idiotic to run it when you don't have towns and aren't in war prep. The problem is that it lacks the PULL of a civic that might drag you out of HR, PS, or US. If rep is adding ~100 beakers/turn to a 1000 beaker/turn empire that is also putting up 100's and 100's of :food:, :hammers:, and infrastructure investment, it might not even be worth anarchy due to the production hit...not to mention the new incentive to skip that civic path in favor of sci meth, steel, or rifling. It just depends.

To be fair, I never remember anyone using environmentalism in the unmodded game.

It was very niche. Its primary draw was that it damaged some setups far less than others and could be forced by the UN (say you're not workshop reliant but a rival is, force him out of SP). I wouldn't mind seeing it made stronger, even if indirectly by pushing up the electricity :commerce: boost on windmills. when you compare an environmentalism + electricity + replaceable parts (likely to have it by the time you'd be in the civic) windmill to a town, you start to notice something...;). Alongside the massive health boost it's no joke.

I wasn't sure what to say about the changes from raw :health: to a reduction in :yuck:, though since there are ties with GW there it makes sense. You'll notice that I didn't complain about the changes to vassalage, serfdom, OR environmentalism...all 3 of these were definitely rarely used.

Vassalage now has real potential late-game over FS or bur if you have a large empire that isn't town-reliant...hell, it might boost some empires more than pre-nerf rep...but the presence of towns or a super capitol + smaller empire or draft spam makes that choice a strategically important one.

Serfdom's tradeoffs are truly trolololol. I like it a lot. Again, this is something that won't materialize in AI hands but might in the hands of a human (slapping that :commerce: on farms is no joke, especially for FIN riverside farms!). When arguing the merits of +1 :science: from a spec or +1 :commerce: from a farm, keep in mind that in a lot of empire setups the latter is more common! Eventually there is emancipation pressure, and caste workshops and slavery (production) are real competitors, but again you can pull a lot of raw :science: out of serfdom all game if you set it up the right way.

Environmentalism I haven't had much opportunity to work with. As most games I play go military it's not a practical civic choice because it's either too late or out of the way of key techs to go killing stuff.

I liked your representation idea Karadoc of boosting the rep back to +3 beakers, +4 happiness in (however many) largest cities, and -1 happiness in all cities.

This is a TREMENDOUS nerf. :) is very important in this game. That rep gets that :) without much maintenance or :hammers: investment is one of its bigger draws early game. Currently, it takes 15 cities with a single garrison in monarchy to provide comparable :) to representation. However, if you put a global -1 on it (which doesn't make sense with the theory of representation anyway) then suddenly monarchy starts to win in :) 10 city range (likely much sooner, as rarely do players wind up with 0 extra military units past 1/city), even if you don't spend any extra resources on military police. Any halfway-decent set up empire with a bur cottage cap and maybe a 2nd commerce city, most post-rush economies, and any FIN or GLH/colossus setups suddenly start to look hard at ignoring rep even if they DIDN'T need mids to use it X_X. It also turns into a TREMENDOUS drain for larger empires, actually weaker in raw :) practicality than US in some cases. Ouch.

I don't mean to get you down karadoc. I like a lot of what you're doing in the mod very much. The look at the governor is just another thing that makes me smile, and you've hit a lot more than missed with the civic changing.
 
Another point to rep.
I tried a one city challenge. And that was a BIG change. I think the nerf is similar to play one diffculty level higher in this mode.

Anyway did you saw my bug message regarding the city list in MP? I was not sure if it was overflooded by the representation topics ;)
 
but I remember thinking for several games after the nerf "yes, that nerf was the right decision. It is better now." But now I've got TMIT and Lenowill saying "WTH", and so apparently I have to revisit the whole thing.

I'm only an emperor / immortal player, so my opinion shouldn't count that much
But I'm also with Lenowill and TMIT on this (apart for TMIT's arguing style in a few cases :P)
Also, the happiness nerf instead of the beaker nerf sound quite nice
 
@TheOnlyDJCat, I did see your comment about the bug thing. Were you and the other player on the same team? I looked briefly at the source-code for changing the commerce percentages, and from what I can tell I'd expect it to redraw your list of cities and so on if you are on the same team; but not if you are on different teams.

So, if you were on the same team, then that's probably what the cause was. I can change it to only update for the player who is actually using the controls. That's a simple enough change. The only downside is that there may be some cases where you actually want to information to be updated... or something. .. I can't think of any problems at the moment... Maybe I'll just go ahead and change it. In any case, it's only a graphical thing, so the worst possible thing that can happen is that some piece of on-screen information might not be up-to-date.

If you were on different teams... then I haven't worked it out yet.


On the topic of the rep happiness nerf. The good thing about the happiness nerf is that it doesn't always hurt. I mean, in some games happiness just isn't a problem. On the hand hand, there are other games when every point of happiness is important, and so the happiness nerf might actually be harsher than the beakers nerf... I'd be satisfied with that kind of dynamic. I like it when civics are powerful but situational. The main thing I don't like about the happiness thing is that it looks a bit messy with all the +:) and +:mad:.
 
So I won a cultural victory the other day on emperor. I built 100% culture for like 35 turns. I was getting behind on tech, as you can imagine. I was number 1 in military, 35 turns ago. I was a little disappointed I didnt get declared war on, in that time. You know to try and stop me? Or does the Ai not think about preventing victories? like space race, culture etc etc.

@Karadoc you could do something like, the (enter amount) largest cities have their happiness reduced by a third, might be less messy? Might be less of a nerf in that department as well (better happiness scaling for those larger cities later on)
 
Hi Karadoc,

yes I completely forgot to mention we were on the same team. I play team games for the last 3 three years, so I might have forgotten that it is possible to play PvP with civ ;)

In this screen there should not be any update problem, because changing settings of one player should not change anything in the cities of the other.
By the way, in former versions the city list also reordered after changing the production from within the list. I don't know if this is still the case and have currently no civ installed to test on this computer.
 
Ok.

Version 1.26 is up, with lots of good changes.

TheOnlyDJCat, I changed something which may fix the problem you were describing, but I'm not certain it is fixed so I didn't mention it in the changelog. (There are actually a lot of things like that which don't get mentioned in the changelogs.)

By the way I don't think the changes to the barbarian's tech will make a noticeable difference... I was intending to add a small delay before the barbs even start teching at all; but then I found that my changes already had a big effect... unfortunately the big effect turned out to be because of a bug and so I didn't get the chance to test the delay that I was originally going to add. Anyway, maybe it'll be ok how it is now. Let me know how it goes. (My goal is just to give the players a few more turns to get their metal hooked up before the first barbarian axemen start appearing.)

[edit]
:( I just noticed that one of my last-minute changes has an annoying side-effect: it causes units to stay awake when they are loaded into transports. --- Sorry about that.
 
I always get excited about a new update!

Tell me how the ai will take inflation into account type update will effect gameplay? Was the computer immune to inflation before?
 
The inflation thing isn't really a big deal. The AI has always been affected by inflation. The game-mechanics for inflation have not been changed. The only difference is that the AI will now include inflation effects in their decision making.

For example, when the AI is trying to work out which are the best civics, it will calculate how much money will be spent on civic upkeep. In previous versions, when it calculated the upkeep for this decision making it would ignore inflation. Now it doesn't ignore inflation, and so its calculations will be more accurate and that should help it to make better decisions. There are only a few thing it will affect. Civic upkeep, unit support costs, city maintenance... that's about all. And again, only the AI's decision making is affected by that change. Inflation itself is still as it always was.

[edit]
ack! This new food value stuff usually works pretty well, but I've just found a case where decides the city doesn't need to grow any more, and I disagree. I'm going to make some adjustments. ... when will this governor ever learn? :rolleyes:
[edit2]
Apparently the unwanted no-growth behaviour is because of a cap on food value that I didn't know about. My new scaling for food value is prevented from working properly when it reaches this cap. So I'm just going to remove the cap, and hopefully that will fix the problem. (Actually, it if I understand this correctly, this cap problem would have happened without my latest food changes anyway. I guess it must be pretty rare.)
 
I've uploaded version 1.26b, which fixes the problems I mentioned in my previous two posts, and a couple of other minor things.

(It's hard for me to catch all these little problems with the limited amount of testing that I do...)
 
Dont you think the AI should "go after" another ai or player, who is close to winning? Whether its space race, culture, points etc etc
 
Oh, Right. Yes. I do think they should -- and they kind of do, but only to a limited extent.

They are more likely to declare war on someone who is close to victory, and they spend fewer turns preparing for such wars (because its usually urgent); and if they are at war with someone who has launched the spaceship, they will try to target the capital; and if they are at war with someone who is close to a cultural victory, they will try to target the culture cities...

But it isn't hard-line. They still won't go to war if they don't think they stand a chance, and they still won't do it if they are friendly with you (unless they are aiming for a conquest victory), and so on. It's just a mixture of role-play and play-to-win.
 
Have you thought about uping the aggressive factor, not all the way to "hard line" but more than it is now?

Does the ai more aggressively seek its own way of winning in response to another player getting closer to winning, for example: do they more aggressively seek a space race when someone is within 10,000 culture of a culture win?
 
hey,

currently playing version 1.25 on mp,

i noticed the ai sometimes will just roam around and pillage near an enemy city, and wont attack, but come to think of it - the defending city, had lots of troops in it, maybe the attacking/pillaging ai didnt attack cause he knew it would loose?

just sharing impressions karadoc :)
 
Just played a bit with k-mod. Very much liked the improved AI - monarch was almost challenging, in the normal game I can win on emperor most of the time. And that was on a rather easy map (Lincoln, Mansa, Charly on my continent. Bismarck had one for himself, but that did not matter^^). The balance changes were not particularly crass, an felt right most of the time - I even used vassalage for a X-bow rush.

Nevertheless, I am sorely missing many UI changes from ... err, Buffy, probably? Things like "turns to next great person", "what will this building actually generate for me in this city", "how much overflow is that whip", etc.

Is there a way to get these things back? Because... well, they are very convenient... especially if the game itself is harder...
 
Nevertheless, I am sorely missing many UI changes from ... err, Buffy, probably? Things like "turns to next great person", "what will this building actually generate for me in this city", "how much overflow is that whip", etc.
Its all there mate. Just turn it on in options.
 
Just wondering why shandong is so small in population, and why they have a fort on their rice instead of irrigation.

If youve got any feedback on my playstyle too, I wouldnt mind that :D

Ive started marking my cities either production or tech so I better remind myself to specialize cities (and hopefully get better). Also started upgrading grens to machine guns this game (I love the pikemen city attack-> rifles strat).
 

Attachments

Shondong is small because it was only recently founded. It doesn't have any buildings yet - at all. Also, the AI says that it intends to farm that rice very soon. I suppose it had a fort because it wasn't workable before the city was founded (and the AI typically prefers to use forts to connect resources that are not workable).

Have you thought about uping the aggressive factor, not all the way to "hard line" but more than it is now?

Does the ai more aggressively seek its own way of winning in response to another player getting closer to winning, for example: do they more aggressively seek a space race when someone is within 10,000 culture of a culture win?
Maybe I'll make it a bit more aggressive when using the "aggressive AI" option. I'm a bit reluctant to up the aggression in all games...

The AI does not currently try to speed up their space tech or anything like that if they see someone else close to victory. They just try to keep trying to do do the best they can, regardless of what others are doing.

@keldath, most of the time the AI will only attack a city if they think they are going to be able to capture it. So it's isn't surprising that they are wandering around pillaging stuff outside well defended cities. Basically, they'll just keep doing that until they change their mind about which city to target, or until some reinforcements arrive to help them capture the city. They're pretty good at working out whether or not they are able to capture the city; but they aren't great at switching targets. (They do switch targets, but they just aren't very smart about it.)


I've got some good features in the works for the next version. I've already implemented a couple of new controls: It is now possible to rearrange items on the city build queue in-place. Ctrl + click moves the item up one place, shift + click moves it down, and alt + click toggles whether or not the item should repeat.
Also, double-click on a plot will now wake all units on the plot without grouping them. (Awhile back, I said I couldn't do this because it was handled outside of the dll. I wasn't wrong about it being outside of the dll, but I've come up with a bit of trickery to get around that problem.)
 
Back
Top Bottom