Mega Mod

[Slowpoke]

Yeah there are going to be some A.I. quirks for the moment, but A.I. is what this week's (or probably two weeks considering how much I need to change) focus is on. I want to try and make warmongering a bit easier, but there's a very thin balance between making it easy enough to conquer the whole world, and making it hard enough so that most immortal+ games need to get to the modern era. Lack of war weariness really makes that difficult.

Edit: I think I'm going to end up making it easier, since there is always DeityPlus and Nightmare for those wanting some more challenge. Again, I'm really dissapointed that there's no way to change healing based on difficulty, as I only want healing eliminated on deity and maybe immortal.

 

[Furyform]

Humm...I just picked up the "Trade Unions" policy and my Tile Maintenance costs went UP from 78 to 132.

 

[Slowpoke]

Hah.. oh dear. I wonder if vanilla is bugged, as I changed it from -20 to -70. Maybe I forgot the minus sign lol.

Edit: yeah forgot the minus sign. I better add a note to the front page that it's messed up.

 

[Furyform]

Nevermind this post, I had forgetten I had to get the next skill after the one that opens Manhattan Project when I posted original. Woops

 

[Slowpoke]

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRG. Spent the better part of today trying to fix the A.I.'s diplomacy, only to find half the values don't even work. *sigh* It kinda pisses me off that the part of the game that is most broken has hardcoded junk preventing people from doing anything.

 

[Clement]

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRG. Spent the better part of today trying to fix the A.I.'s diplomacy, only to find half the values don't even work. *sigh* It kinda pisses me off that the part of the game that is most broken has hardcoded junk preventing people from doing anything.

It sounds like very hard work indeed, from what i have read these past few weeks it seems modding is really quite difficult, especially as a lot of it seems to be done "blind" as it were without the "sdk" or whatever it is called.

Don't despair though you need to give yourself a break now and then like in all stressful work, it helps to come back fresher to it later on, besides with the diplo patch coming soon maybe it's better to find out what they will change before comitting more of your hard work, but heck what do i know, i cannot mod hehe.

Don't burn yourself out i guess is what i'm saying, the mod is already pretty good and offers something different, it's good stuff

 

[Slowpoke]

Oh I'm fine, I need to do piled up homework today anyways. It's just A.I. is particularly frustrating since it's so hard to tell when your code even works. Since most of modding is very educated guesswork at the moment, dealing with something involving hundreds of factors that can only be thuroughly tested with debug panel revealing the map (and causing massive lag even on duel) is frustrating. You find after an hour of testing that your code doesn't work and it makes you sad Diplomacy is the (oddly enough) most complicated part of the A.I. as well.

 

[Slowpoke]

Version 7 is out! It's a bit small, but considering how so many things are wrong with the A.I., I'm just going to have to wait until the DLL to fix it.

Version 7 marks the last of the first batch of balances. Version 8 will be focused on integrating other mods, and fine tuning. After that, I will be adding new content (give me all your whacky ideas )

Please give feedback, and don't be afraid to point out errors or things you think aren't good.

Edit: hah, version 8's going to be easy, I've looked through all the mods and honestly can't find one I want in the pack Kinda dissapointing, a lot of the mods that looked good don't seem to be very balanced or engaging at all. I might add some UI mods, and probably tech overflow. And I can still use at least some fine tuning before adding content.

Edit: Hmm and forgot harder free tech mod, that's probably going in.

 

[brettguy]

I love the mod but.. can you remove the stupid healing? removing instant heal i understand, but no heal is just killing the game!!!!

 

[Slowpoke]

Alright alright, I'll put normal healing back in next version. Since so few people want it, I'll put it as a separate mod component, that you can add in if you like. Until version 8 comes out, just go to your MODS folder in the user folder, open the folder and delete the RemHeal.xml file.

 

[Slowpoke]

Okay so there were actually quite a few good ideas in the mods section I just wasn't looking hard enough. Before I actually implement these, I'd like to hear your thoughts.

Personal tweaks:

- Extra hammer per production on happy buildings was overkill when combined with "All India". It's gone, and replaced with it is colosseums just provide only +2 happiness. Monuments add +1 happiness now too.

-The double gold cost per upgrade was overkill as well, and it's reduced to only +50%

-No healing except in cities will be made a mod component that you have to add if you want it, as enough people dislike it. However, insta_heal promotion is dead in the core pack.

Mods being added:

-4 buildings from Economy mod. Bakery, brewery, fishmonger, and Hunting lodge. Brewery is nerfed to +2 happiness, and bakery now requires sugar. Thanks for the good stuff valkyrionn!

-Info Addict will be added

-Diplomacy mod will be added, although I need to talk to the creator, Gazebo, about some stuff first

-Changed my mind concerning tech diffusion, it will not be added, as it promoted beelining way too much. I may eventually add it in a highly nerfed form, but it uses InGame.xml, so it'll be a while

-Tech carryover or whatever it's called by smellymummy

 

[Clement]

Great stuff as usual, especially these :

- Extra hammer per production on happy buildings was overkill when combined with "All India". It's gone, and replaced with it is colosseums just provide only +2 happiness. Monuments add +1 happiness now too

-No healing except in cities will be made a mod component that you have to add if you want it, as enough people dislike it. However, insta_heal promotion is dead in the core pack.

I have to admit i was finding the healing a little tough too before,

Thank you Slowpoke

 

[a barbarian]

Here is something else you might want to add to your mod:
Better Tech Tree
The tree might need some more tweaking but I already like it much better than the original tech tree.

 

[alpaca]

To quote from a strategy thread about great merchants

750 gold pretty much is that bad.

Consider this. A low 8 turn golden age produces maybe 400 gold and 400 production (worth 1200+ gold). So that's 1600 gold. By the time godlen ages go down to 3, they'll be worth more than that. And that even means the +12 gold customs house is pretty low now that I think about it. Merchants are worthless except for golden ages for every possible use.

Yeah +15 culture ie probably pretty high, but cosnder this. Culture CSs cost about 10 per turn, and by the time you get an artist, Culture CS allies provide 12 culture per turn. So culture is about the worth of gold. (And in my mod utopia is 6 policy branches and you can't save policies, so it's worth a little lower.) But yeah, probably lowering to +12 to be safe.

8 turns is quite long, only the first golden age is this long. It's more realistic to calculate with 5 turns. 400 gold during 8 turns means you work 50 tiles, which isn't unreasonable I guess, so this would put you at 250 gold + 250 production (although I'm not sure the assumption that you get as much hammers as gold is correct). I don't value production much higher than gold, maybe at 2:1 or so, because gold buys things instantly while with production you have to wait. So this puts you at what? 750 gold. Assuming you work 50 tiles with hammers and 50 tiles with gold, which can be shared of course.

At any rate, the customs house has to be evaluated by checking the time it needs to run. At +10 gold over a trade post, you would need 75 turns just to get even with the mission. If the game runs 150 turns still, it's probably a good build, however. I agree that the GP improvements need to be very strong to make up for a lost golden age or bulb.

But the landmark may be a partial exception to this because you can normally only get culture from buildings, and the amount of buildings is limited. So the landmark grants you something you cannot normally get: More culture in a city. This means it's in the realm of wonders more than of improvements. Giving it +10 culture or so is as much as a monument plus temple plus museum unless you run a couple of artists from them. In my opinion, this is strong enough to allow for the occasional use of artists for land-grabbing or if you want to boost SP speed in a smaller empire. In a large empire you will still want to use it for golden ages but that's the way things go.

 

[Slowpoke]

Thanks for the comments For better tech tree mod, I'm going to put that off for a later version. At the moment it seems pretty unbalanced due to really easy beelining in the mod. I agree overall it'd good, I just don't want to have to do much rebalancing for version 8.

And as for landmark, alright I'm lowering it to +10 culture down from +15. I will probably be buffing artist specialists, though.

 

[alpaca]

Thanks for the comments For better tech tree mod, I'm going to put that off for a later version. At the moment it seems pretty unbalanced due to really easy beelining in the mod. I agree overall it'd good, I just don't want to have to do much rebalancing for version 8.

And as for landmark, alright I'm lowering it to +10 culture down from +15. I will probably be buffing artist specialists, though.

With artists, I'd really like specialists to be able to produce fractional points. At the moment, 1 culture is too low but 2 culture seems too high in my opinion. The sweet spot is probably somewhere in between but it could only be reached by upscaling the whole economy.

 

[Slowpoke]

2 culture isn't too bad, and that's what I'm doing. It'd be bad if you got artists early, but thankfully you don't

Also: Version 8 is about to be uploaded, yay! I've only integrated the 4 economy mod builds, the rest of the mods I'm holding out until I hear from jooyo about how to eaily integrate them. I have tried all the mods I wanted to add with my mod, and they are compatible, so I will simply highly recommend them to be used with mega mod on the front page for now. Most of the changes in version 8 are little tweeks, and I have added the newly created caravan unit.

 

[Slowpoke]

Version 8 is now uploaded! Front page is now fixed up. Unfortunately you'll have to look through it all to find the changes as of today, but from now on I will simply add new things to the front page in the right categories with NEW! next to them.

From now on, while I will continue to fix things like mod integration and in game texts, the focus will be on adding content. So please, all your ideas, even bad ones, are appreciated!

Edit: bluh, mod browser description for version 8 is incorrect. Oh well.

 

[Slowpoke]

Whoa, big big error. Download version 9, not version 8. A.l. built Caravans but didn't use them. That's what I get for assuming no A.I. flavors means not building them. Error fixed by setting their A.I. to ICBMs so they don't build them

 

[Rcon]

I still get no healing with v. 9 and I don't like it at all. Also can't find the research overflow mod (Still can't believe they dont have this in the game allready).

Other then that I must say congrats on the great work, this mod and the diplo mod has given me my best civ 5 game so far!