K-Mod: Far Beyond the Sword

[Windsor]

Even if Phi is weaker than Ind, both traits are on the stronger side. And the only thing that makes IND really good is the semi-cheesy failgold.

And to be fair, I don't even think traits have to be equally strong. Its perfectly fine that some traits are stronger than others.

 

[plastiqe]

Even if Phi is weaker than Ind, both traits are on the stronger side. And the only thing that makes IND really good is the semi-cheesy failgold.

And to be fair, I don't even think traits have to be equally strong. Its perfectly fine that some traits are stronger than others.

I agree with you because of the fact that some starting techs/unique units/buildings are better than others. What K-Mod has done reasonably well is buffing the weakest combinations, such as the recent Duns or Musketeer improvements.

Spoiler the Civs I that still need a buff are... :

• America
• Arabia
• France
• Japan
• Khmer
• Native Americans

• America and Native Americans I'd give anything other than Fishing to start. Opens up Machinery/Engineering bulb possibility with G.S. so America has at least a tiny advantage before modern age and so that Native Americans can compete with China for best Archers. True they didn't ever have Crossbows but it's not like N.A. can't use mounted because horses aren't native to North America.
  
  N.A. could exchange Fishing for Hunting because they were prolific hunters and in game they'd get faster Archery. America could have something like The Wheel or Mining which both fit thematically when I think about the States. Removing Fishing nerfs Roosevelt's GLighthouse opening but leaves the rest of the team in a stronger position overall.
  
  
• Arabia either UU or UB or both deserve a significant buff; compared to Byzantines they lose in every category and they're rated as one of the weakest teams overall. Historically this is the 5th largest empire of all time with many advancements over Europe or Asia at the time. A Resourceless unit is great for an opener like Mayans but by the time you get Guilds you have enough time to find where the Iron is... at least on the Hemisphere maps I play on there is enough Iron to go around even if you have to trade for it. Buffs could be anti-mounted like War Elephants (Camels scare horses) or rather than iron-free a discounted hammer cost unit (Camels less expensive to field that European Knights). Madrassa would be great with someone like Pericles but doesn't do much for PRO/SPI. Instead of priests they could have a third scientist slot or maybe priest + spy slot. (PRO has buffed espionage).
  
  
• I know Karadoc has said before he only wants to change things once but I've played a lot of France recently and it has lowered my opinion the new withdraw chance for Musketeer and France overall. Compared to Oromo or Janissary which both those units are great for Gunpowder beeline and/or drafting. The problem for Musketmen in general is that they're weaker than Knights so Musketeer needs to stay in a stack with 1 move Pikeman negating a lot of 2 move advantage early on.
  
  Musketeers could trade 2 moves and flanking (without the promo) for march (without the promo). Historically they were the only unit for poorer nobles to join so they were known as boisterous and advanced on merit. Sometimes they were mounted and sometimes not but the game depicts a foot unit. Heal while moving units would be better attackers in a big stack with siege as opposed to two move utility units you can use to counter enemy pike attacks on your MTradition mounted.
  
  After all that though they're paired with Salon which also comes late and is sometimes bad to build because it pollutes the GP pool with artists. I guess I'd rather have a powerful unit with France because I think of them as a strong military power with Napoleon in that age as opposed to playing for culture with Louis XIV.
  
  
• Japan is weak really just in the isolationist way the A.I. plays. They tend to never do very well in my games because Samurais never get a chance when they're out teched (let alone getting to Shale Plants). I'd buff the A.I. to maximum psycho Shaka-style (unit build and declare war) and let the A.I. try to conquer someone early. Japan A.I. could then utilize the double worst trait combo and fight all the time in the game like they would have in Feudal Japan or WWII.
  
  
• Khmer was already bad and then nerfed their UU when War Elephant increased in cost. But if you buff Ballista then they are good when they have Ivory and terrible when they don't.
  
  In general, most cities won't need Aqueducts until Assembly Line. An Aqueduct that gives half a specialist on an already Expansive team is a bad combo; access to way more health than is usually necessary until late game. Ideally Khmer would steal the stronger +2 happy from the Ottomans and the Ottomans UB would get something else. Khmer Baray's according to Wikipedia were maybe use for irrigation or maybe decoration since Angkor Wat was probably a tomb/city; I think the Civilopedia is probably biased just because they're a replacement for aqueducts. A generic happy bonus makes it a solid building for a team that sometimes doesn't get a UU.
  
  But again on the Ottomans you have an Aqueduct UB and half the team is Expansive so they don't need to build Aqueducts. If they traded +2 happy to Khmer, Ottomans could get something related to great person generation like a specialist slot or reduced city maintenance. Historically Hammams were continuations of Roman/Hellenistic baths that the Ottomans built everywhere, and were sometimes very impressive structures. I dunno, the point is that Khmer UB should be better than plus one food.

 

[Charles555nc]

I switched from financial/philosophic to financial/industrious and the game is so much easier. I just cannot believe it, I lost like 20 games on emperor with fin/philosophic and won my first game after switching.

And I get way more great people in the early/mid game, with the easier wonders, especially with an easier parthenon.

Now I can even consider getting the pyramid without crippling my early game, the pyramid allows me representation for an even larger early game boost on my great people specialists.

I dont know how exactly to balance things but I wish Karadoc would take a look at things....heres my thoughts...

1. Aggressive+Financial+Industrious seem strong choices at all times.

2. Organized seems good mid to late game. Maybe give it a turn or two off the time it takes to build roads? (give it some help early game).

3. Creative/Philosophical/Protective seems noticeably below average.

a. Creative
-Give creative a discount on music tech or +100% building production on Cathedral
-Make Creative give +2 culture per city or +4 or 5% culture bonus in each city (whichever is highest, so that creative scales better mid to late game).

b. Philosophical
- Give +100% research rate bonus on Philosophy Tech or and/or Aesthetics

(aesthetics-
"Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of art, beauty, and taste, with the creation and appreciation of beauty")

-Boost bonus Gp points from +100% to 125% (industrious should not be getting more Great people points than Philosophical and getting the benefits of wonders, just makes philosophical a bad choice)

c. Protective-
- 25-50% time discount off Fort building.
- Maybe give a 25-30% production bonus towards national wonders. (Dont want protective to be worthless if you dont get attacked early).

4. Expansive could use some mid-late game building discounts like towards aqueducts, customs houses or public transportation. Maybe a +25% discount on work boats production as well?

5. Not sure about Spiritual/Imperialistic

-Maybe give spiritual civs the ability to build a religious wonder without needing a great person, at a hammer cost of 100-200 hammers? Half cost monasteries?

-Give imperialistic a building discount on stables/levees?

 

[plastiqe]

Spoiler :

I switched from financial/philosophic to financial/industrious and the game is so much easier. I just cannot believe it, I lost like 20 games on emperor with fin/philosophic and won my first game after switching.

And I get way more great people in the early/mid game, with the easier wonders, especially with an easier parthenon.

Now I can even consider getting the pyramid without crippling my early game, the pyramid allows me representation for an even larger early game boost on my great people specialists.

I dont know how exactly to balance things but I wish Karadoc would take a look at things....heres my thoughts...

1. Aggressive+Financial+Industrious seem strong choices at all times.

2. Organized seems good mid to late game. Maybe give it a turn or two off the time it takes to build roads? (give it some help early game).

3. Creative/Philosophical/Protective seems noticeably below average.

a. Creative
-Give creative a discount on music tech or +100% building production on Cathedral
-Make Creative give +2 culture per city or +4 or 5% culture bonus in each city (whichever is highest, so that creative scales better mid to late game).

b. Philosophical
- Give +100% research rate bonus on Philosophy Tech or and/or Aesthetics

(aesthetics-
"Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of art, beauty, and taste, with the creation and appreciation of beauty")

-Boost bonus Gp points from +100% to 125% (industrious should not be getting more Great people points than Philosophical and getting the benefits of wonders, just makes philosophical a bad choice)

c. Protective-
- 25-50% time discount off Fort building.
- Maybe give a 25-30% production bonus towards national wonders. (Dont want protective to be worthless if you dont get attacked early).

4. Expansive could use some mid-late game building discounts like towards aqueducts, customs houses or public transportation. Maybe a +25% discount on work boats production as well?

5. Not sure about Spiritual/Imperialistic

-Maybe give spiritual civs the ability to build a religious wonder without needing a great person, at a hammer cost of 100-200 hammers? Half cost monasteries?

-Give imperialistic a building discount on stables/levees?

Charles555nc we need you in the fan club! Check your notificiations/profile. : )

Hrrmm so I'm more of the mind that ORG, PHI, CRE & EXP are ok. Sometimes they won't be the best trait but other times they can be awesome.

You have a point about late game CRE. I don't think it needs any more help in the mid game Culture department because it's already one of the best Culture-Win traits. Maybe some bonus to the Broadway/Rock & Roll/Hollywood wonders would be good for CRE.

My thoughts on PRO would be to give it natural Civ wide passive defense against Espionage, so they're harder to spy on even before the Security Bureau (then they're really hard to spy on).

Changing traits is tricky because they affect so many Civs. You also have to think about using them on different difficulty levels or in unrestricted leaders or multiplayer. I've heard people say PRO is great in multiplayer because you can really leverage the defensive abilities when fighting a human opponent.

 

[TheOnlyDJCat]

Philosophic is also independent from the number of AIs on a map, whereas the value of industrious decreases when 18+ civs are building wonders. (on immortal)
On huge highland maps with 17 AIs I always prefer philosophic, because you won't get a sufficient number of wonders even with industrious, but you need the tech leed after middle age via planned light bulbing.

 

[drewisfat]

What K-Mod has done reasonably well is buffing the weakest combinations, such as the recent Duns or Musketeer improvements.

Lol, I just see that. Mousies get +15% withdrawal now? I'll never complain with a buff to my France -- but Musketeers are already one of the best UUs -- I'd rank them #9 in BTS.

And then in KMOD where most of the early game UUs are much less valuable (because you can't simply rush AIs on high levels) they were probably already 3rd or 4th best UU. And now you've buffed them

Fortunately +15% withdrawal is a relatively small buff, but definitely not needed

 

[LunarMongoose]

I'm a bit frustrated that a heap of work I did recently on the AI is undermined by bad caching design. After writing heaps of new stuff, I realised that if I reference any part of the current game state in a particular part of the AI then it could potentially cause OOS due to this cache problem. -- It's frustrating not just because it means that work will probably go to waste, but also because it's another reminder that I need to really concentrate on how syncing works whenever I change pretty much anything in the code. It's a damn mine-field.

Dang, now I'm concerned it's not safe to merge K-Mod AI code into my DLL. My mod is highly multiplayer-focused, so OOS's are red flags for me. I assume people are still running into these with the current 1.41 version? Oh well, hopefully I can still find and use the latest AI bugfixes from it...

My "grand plan" was always to merge the K-Mod and C2C codebases since they seem to be completely separate and both have important AI stuff in them, but that's going to be dreadfully difficult since I'm only moderately-proficient at working with this damn AI code. (I already procrastinated for the last 8 months b/c of it, lol.)

 

[Charles555nc]

Here we go, kmod, here we go!

Ra ra ra! lol

Im still playing kmod games, is anyone else? Anyone got expert advice on keeping up a beast economy?....massing cottages and some wonders just isnt doing it on emperor it seems.

Early wars are so disgusting to favor the ai...I mean I had a warrior in a forested hill and the one defending unupgraded archer attacked out of the city and killed him...ai never loses those type of fights.

I pillaged my neighbor's every resource and he was ahead of me on tech for awhile...not sure how thats possible when I was spamming cottages everywhere and had all my resources.

As I finally (and with another ai) take the enemy capital. Two "random" events burn down the forge in my main production city and a hurricane destroys my monument in another city. Kinda over the top obvious the "random" events are punishing me for doing well.

 

[noto2]

well... when you up the difficulty level you have to play in a very set playstyle in order to win. I think it sucks big time and it's the reason I started playing Kmod in the first place. Civ is supposed to be a game about options - you can do a million different things, you shouldn't have to be pigeon-holed into using maybe 3 possibly strategies. There should be dozens. In the base game, on high difficulty, most things you could do are just simply not worth it and you have to play the same way every time if you want to win. Kmod helped alleviate that by making the AI play much better at lower difficulty levels. To be honest, at emperor, in Kmod, you pretty much have to start using the same cookie-cutter tricks that the pros use to beat the base game on immortal/deity, so take 90% of the strategies in teh game and eliminate them from your mind.

 

[ohjames]

Have you seen a Police State in USA? When? Where? If Saudies even generate Espionage points they direct it all against Israel and Iran, not USA. Bahrain has a Suni-Shia problem, and in terms of BTS -- Bahrain is a vassal state of Saudi Arabia.

Please tell me any historical example of one state changing religion of another state via spies! Or even any significant civic change.

Operation Ajax, 1953, which forced Persia to switch out of Universal Suffrage and State Property? It seems like it didn't even cost that many EPs...

 

[ohjames]

I wish I knew.
I agree that Slavery is very powerful. I'm just not really sure if it should be changed.

A flavor-correct nerf you might consider is a great person generation penalty - say, 25%. Maybe even 50%. The early game is when both Slavery and Great People are at their best, so I think an effective way to reduce the power of Slavery a bit would be to make it harder to synergize with Great Person strategies.

 

[plastiqe]

A flavor-correct nerf you might consider is a great person generation penalty - say, 25%. Maybe even 50%. The early game is when both Slavery and Great People are at their best, so I think an effective way to reduce the power of Slavery a bit would be to make it harder to synergize with Great Person strategies.

Pretty good idea. Early on it makes Caste even more attractive for GP by penalizing Slavery. Buff for Spiritual Civs who can cycle their civics tho, which is unnecessary. Thematically my thought is that Slavery should be very powerful early on (like it is) because that is how it was in history. I did a If you were in charge of a new CIV IV patch... thread where I proposed:

• Slavery unhappiness that builds in the same way as Emancipation unhappiness which starts as soon as a Civ you know is in a higher Labor civic.

I like that better because it indirectly buffs all the other Labor civics and you can play around it. Eg. kill anyone that tries to run another Labor civic to keep your Slavery unhappiness down.

At least for me, most of the buff/nerfs I suggest are the basic type of thing that could've been done in the CivIII editor. The true gift of having a programmer like Karadoc is that with his AI changes he's able to fix things that I didn't even know were wrong. We miss you Karadoc, hope all is well.

 

[robbyextreme]

Lol, I just see that. Mousies get +15% withdrawal now? I'll never complain with a buff to my France -- but Musketeers are already one of the best UUs -- I'd rank them #9 in BTS.

And then in KMOD where most of the early game UUs are much less valuable (because you can't simply rush AIs on high levels) they were probably already 3rd or 4th best UU. And now you've buffed them

Fortunately +15% withdrawal is a relatively small buff, but definitely not needed

Gunpowder units are always weak and always will be. You can trade for it, and by the time you actually have enough the AI will have riflemen and cavalry...

 

[Charles555nc]

Can anyone make a mod of kmod which creates a difficulty half way between monarchy difficulty and emperor. Like 50% of the cheats increases/penalties for the human from Monarchy to Emperor difficulty.

On emperor, some ai always has double my gnp (except for early game) and tech flies by way too fast. O and I never win lol.

On Monarchy I can sometimes have double the ai's gnp and can relatively easily beat the ai.

Mid ground plz lol. Ill thank you for it!

 

[plastiqe]

Can anyone make a mod of kmod which creates a difficulty half way between monarchy difficulty and emperor. Like 50% of the cheats increases/penalties for the human from Monarchy to Emperor difficulty.

On emperor, some ai always has double my gnp (except for early game) and tech flies by way too fast. O and I never win lol.

On Monarchy I can sometimes have double the ai's gnp and can relatively easily beat the ai.

Mid ground plz lol. Ill thank you for it!

Hey Charles, my suggestion would be to post an Emperor K-Mod game thread in the Civ4 Strategy and Tips section. Start by showing the start and giving some thoughts on what you might do next and then play in small sessions to give people time to provide advice.

K-Mod is relatively similar to BTS so even non-K-Mod players will be able to help you, but there are a few of us fan club members that post there too. : )

 

[Lib.Spi't]

you could just tweak the handicapinfo.xml file yourself, to be how you would like it.

 

[Charles555nc]

Thanks I just did. The biggest jump from monarchy to emperor seems to be ai work rate modifier that goes from 20 to 50, interesting.

I HAPPILY increased the ai cost to upgrade units as well (30% i think)

And no wonder the ai is tech destorying with barely any inflation.

What exactly does aiworkratemodifier apply to?

 

[Horatius]

What exactly does aiworkratemodifier apply to?

It's related, as expected, to their workers work rate. Poor bastards that waste worker turns need at least some speed (heh).

 

[Charles555nc]

iAIGrowthPercent>90</iAIGrowthPercent>
<iAITrainPercent>85</iAITrainPercent>
<iAIWorldTrainPercent>100</iAIWorldTrainPercent>
<iAIConstructPercent>85</iAIConstructPercent>
<iAIWorldConstructPercent>100</iAIWorldConstructPercent>
<iAICreatePercent>85</iAICreatePercent>
<iAIWorldCreatePercent>100</iAIWorldCreatePercen


So can you explain these other values preeze?

growth probably applies to city growth...
whats the difference between world train percent and regular train percent?
whats the difference between world construct percent and regular construct percent?
create percent?
world create percent?

EDIT: uh i just went to edit the handicap info...and it reset all my changes...WTH?? Will playing an old saved game with the previous values, reset the changes?

 

[Lib.Spi't]

Go to the modiki, it should have explanations for most of those