Mega Mod

[Valkrionn]

10 turns of anarchy sounds really harsh. This just means you should never, ever go into a dark age and, therefore, doesn't add much to gameplay imho.

....Is that not the entire point? As it stands now, there is no effective penalty for long periods of unhappiness. Dark Ages represent that penalty.

The entire point is that you should not want to enter a Dark Age, meaning you actively avoid unhappiness.... Even if it's just 1 or 2 points of unhappy.

It was never intended to be a 'fun' mechanic.

 

[Slowpoke]

Yeah I like the idea of dark ages, cause it allows you to dip in and out of unhappiness without severe problems unless you heavily abuse it. Personally, though, I think it'd need to be lowered to 250 or less for the first Dark age or it won't be severe enough a threat. Consider it would take an entire 100 turns of 5 unhappiness to even trigger it, and in a nromal game you'd dip above 0 every now and then through colosseums.

Also, don't worry about hijacking, I do it too often myself. I only care that the thread stays on topic for about 2 or 3 days after every update, so I can know what bugs or major problems are in that version. I'm open to opinions and suggestions anyways, so it'd be pretty hard to get off topic. Might use this dark ages mechanic myself

 

[Valkrionn]

Yeah I like the idea of dark ages, cause it allows you to dip in and out of unhappiness without severe problems unless you heavily abuse it. Personally, though, I think it'd need to be lowered to 250 or less for the first Dark age or it won't be severe enough a threat. Consider it would take an entire 100 turns of 5 unhappiness to even trigger it, and in a nromal game you'd dip above 0 every now and then through colosseums.

Also, don't worry about hijacking, I do it too often myself. I only care that the thread stays on topic for about 2 or 3 days after every update, so I can know what bugs or major problems are in that version. I'm open to opinions and suggestions anyways, so it'd be pretty hard to get off topic. Might use this dark ages mechanic myself

If you want the code I'll be releasing a version soon enough.

And I agree about the initial threshold; Like I said, it hasn't been playtested much yet. I tend to shoot high and then adjust after playing; My ExcessLuxury mod started at 1 per excess luxury, it's now at 0.5.

 

[Slowpoke]

Version 10 is out! Time to start this competition Should be up in strategy forums in a bit.

Edit: Or it WOULD be if the mod wasn't denied. Hmmm... Now I gotta figure out why that is o.o

Edit: Edit: Okay apparently other people are getting random denies. Well darnit, guess I'll just have to wait a day or two.

 

[alpaca]

....Is that not the entire point? As it stands now, there is no effective penalty for long periods of unhappiness. Dark Ages represent that penalty.

The entire point is that you should not want to enter a Dark Age, meaning you actively avoid unhappiness.... Even if it's just 1 or 2 points of unhappy.

It was never intended to be a 'fun' mechanic.

The problem with designs like this is that you only ever get into the situation by oversight or bad luck. When that happens, you get frustrated and switch off the game rather than sitting it out. Setting it to something like 2 turns anarchy is really sufficient to avoid spending long stretches at high unhappy

 

[Slowpoke]

I think ideally you'd have dark ages be a random event that can occur if you've accumulated 50 unhappy, only it'd be very infrequent. So you could take a risk if you really need a boost by staying unhappy and expanding.

 

[Valkrionn]

The problem with designs like this is that you only ever get into the situation by oversight or bad luck. When that happens, you get frustrated and switch off the game rather than sitting it out. Setting it to something like 2 turns anarchy is really sufficient to avoid spending long stretches at high unhappy

I disagree completely. Right now, there is no effective penalty for long periods of unhappiness. That is what Dark Ages are meant to be.

It is also not, in ANY way, meant to be used stand-alone. It is very much meant to be used with Dale's ICS limiting mod, as is my Luxury Happiness mod (luxuries dropped to 3 , +0.5 for each instance of the luxury past the first; 1 gold = 3 , 3 gold = 4 ).

Taken together, you have buildings that will never generate excess happiness (meaning they cannot fuel further expansion in the same way they can now; More powerful for Tall empires, less so for Wide ones), luxuries that are better the more you have (meaning those excess luxuries that you just can't trade now have a use, as does getting luxuries you already have from city states; Helps both types of empire due to the monopoly most starts have, but helps wide empires more), and Dark Ages if you overexpand and run into unhappiness.

It's one entire system; There are just multiple people working on it.

I think ideally you'd have dark ages be a random event that can occur if you've accumulated 50 unhappy, only it'd be very infrequent. So you could take a risk if you really need a boost by staying unhappy and expanding.

I really dislike randomness for things like this; If it's incremental, and you KNOW you're getting close, you can plan for it and adjust, lessen the impact of it. If it's random, there's no real planning, and people are more likely (in my experience with RifE, at least) to get pissed off and stop playing.

 

[bryanw1995]

this mod looks great. however, I cannot download anything using the mod browser, I always get a computer freeze for some reason. can you put a file in the OP so that it is possible to download directly?

 

[Clement]

I don't know anything about modding so forgive me if the answer to this question is obvious, but if you make a penalty for unhappiness that was'nt in the vanilla game, does the Ai take any notice of it?

Will the Ai "see" that particular downfall or is it only the player that knows it's there?

Like for example at the moment i often see AI go into huge deficit on it's gold per turn, if a penalty was added by a modder to make everyone's units fall apart faster on entering deficit, would the AI recognise that new game rule or what it carry on playing as normal and really hamper itself without knowing?

 

[alpaca]

I disagree completely. Right now, there is no effective penalty for long periods of unhappiness. That is what Dark Ages are meant to be.

It is also not, in ANY way, meant to be used stand-alone. It is very much meant to be used with Dale's ICS limiting mod, as is my Luxury Happiness mod (luxuries dropped to 3 , +0.5 for each instance of the luxury past the first; 1 gold = 3 , 3 gold = 4 ).

Taken together, you have buildings that will never generate excess happiness (meaning they cannot fuel further expansion in the same way they can now; More powerful for Tall empires, less so for Wide ones), luxuries that are better the more you have (meaning those excess luxuries that you just can't trade now have a use, as does getting luxuries you already have from city states; Helps both types of empire due to the monopoly most starts have, but helps wide empires more), and Dark Ages if you overexpand and run into unhappiness.

It's one entire system; There are just multiple people working on it.



I really dislike randomness for things like this; If it's incremental, and you KNOW you're getting close, you can plan for it and adjust, lessen the impact of it. If it's random, there's no real planning, and people are more likely (in my experience with RifE, at least) to get pissed off and stop playing.

That's fine, we don't have to agree on it, I'm just pointing out my viewpoint. Fun is sujective, after all. I didn't find Dale's ICS killer mod much fun, either, probably for the same reason. It will just mean we won't play each other's stuff much but that's not a biggie, anyways

 

[Slowpoke]

this mod looks great. however, I cannot download anything using the mod browser, I always get a computer freeze for some reason. can you put a file in the OP so that it is possible to download directly?

Yeah I will get a zipped version of v11 out in a second. Mod Browser just broke for uploading for me, so unfortunately for a few days everyone who wants an updated version will need to download it this way.

I don't know anything about modding so forgive me if the answer to this question is obvious, but if you make a penalty for unhappiness that was'nt in the vanilla game, does the Ai take any notice of it?

Will the Ai "see" that particular downfall or is it only the player that knows it's there?

Like for example at the moment i often see AI go into huge deficit on it's gold per turn, if a penalty was added by a modder to make everyone's units fall apart faster on entering deficit, would the AI recognise that new game rule or what it carry on playing as normal and really hamper itself without knowing?

The A.I. does see happiness, although I'm not sure it does much about it until colosseums. On PrincePlus and above, it doesn't make much difference at all since the A.I. has enough of a happy discount that it isn't too affected.

As for maintenance, yes this is a problem with my mod at around prince-king level I think. The A.I. can't really handle the extra defense much. Admittedly, I'm not incredibly concerned about prince difficulty, since if it's too easy as a result, then PrincePlus should replace it. I'd love to get DLL access so I can make A.I. army size dependent on gold maintenance if it's too low, but I'll have to wait. Note: Large and late game armies are now much less maintenance, though, so perhaps that's a step up.

 

[Valkrionn]

I don't know anything about modding so forgive me if the answer to this question is obvious, but if you make a penalty for unhappiness that was'nt in the vanilla game, does the Ai take any notice of it?

Will the Ai "see" that particular downfall or is it only the player that knows it's there?

Like for example at the moment i often see AI go into huge deficit on it's gold per turn, if a penalty was added by a modder to make everyone's units fall apart faster on entering deficit, would the AI recognise that new game rule or what it carry on playing as normal and really hamper itself without knowing?

Short answer: Maybe.

Long answer: It depends on if the mechanic is implemented in Lua or C++. AI is handled in the C++, which is the prime advantage to adding mechanics in the base code; You can teach it to the AI. Lua mechanics tend to be easier to implement and tweak, but cannot really be taught to the ai.

However, at least in the case of my two (soon to be three) modcomps, the goal is more to play with the idea and see how it works for the human player, as they are test mods. Ideas that the testers have more or less come to a consensus on, modded in so we can examine their effects on the game.

For a more specific answer... In this case, the AI doesn't particularly need to understand Dark Ages, as the AI already knows to avoid unhappiness and actively does so.

 

[Slowpoke]

Okay. Mega Mod v11 (skipped 10, it's the same thing), is now available as a zipped file here. Hopefully this mod browser problem will get figured out. Just plop this folder in your MODS folder in your user games/civ5 folder. Remember to delete previous versions of this mod or you will get rediculous bugs.

 

[Clement]

Nice one, thank you Slowpoke

 

[Slowpoke]

That's probably going to be the last update for a while due to technical issues, though

 

[Clement]

I'm sorry to hear that Slowpoke, still on the plus side you'l have more time for other stuff i guess, modding is quite a talent but it must be very time consuming

 

[Slowpoke]

Actually modding is easy, it's the playtesting that takes up all the time lol. Which is kinda ironic, since half the reason for the competition would've been free playtesting for thalassicus and I

 

[alpaca]

Why do you need the mod hub to post a competition? Installing a mod isn't THAT difficult without it, really.

 

[Slowpoke]

Eh... I'd get about half the people, though. If this modbrowser issue doesn't resolve itself in about a day or two I will, but this seems to be affecting a lot of people than just myself so I wouldn't be surprised if they fixed it soon.

 

[Seek]

Competition?