[MOD] Medieval: Conquests

[orlanth]

Edit: Scratch that on the new update tonight. Just not enough time to test everything before I leave in the morning

lol don't worry u deserve a break. enjoy the sun and sand! (or icebergs if you're going to antarctica)

Well after playing for a bit, I have to say Kailric, I'm liking how these new trade mechanics work together quite a lot! I love the combination of being able to use Trading Posts/Markets for domestic sales, sending traders to bargain with nearby natives when the local price is right for certain goods, plus the ability to gain access to the new "special" foreign trade routes and still send a big trade expedition when u want.

Since the local prices become really important both for your own Trading Posts/Markets and when trading with nearby cities; it would be really great to have some way for the cities' local prices to change a bit based on realistic supply/demand. How about if you allow each citizen to have demand for certain goods (by adapting code from the Domestic Economy modcomp), but they don't consume it automatically like in that modcomp and instead continue using your existing system. Then at the end of the turn, whenever sales by Trading Post / Market exceed the demand it pushes local price down slightly, and when demand goes unfulfilled it pushes price up slightly. That would let local prices vary naturally and in an interesting way, and you'd pay attention to fulfilling your citizens needs without it becoming too fiddly exact micromanagement (i.e precisely x units of coats per turn).

 

[Kailric]

lol don't worry u deserve a break. enjoy the sun and sand! (or icebergs if you're going to antarctica)

Well after playing for a bit, I have to say Kailric, I'm liking how these new trade mechanics work together quite a lot! I love the combination of being able to use Trading Posts/Markets for domestic sales, sending traders to bargain with nearby natives when the local price is right for certain goods, plus the ability to gain access to the new "special" foreign trade routes and still send a big trade expedition when u want.

Since the local prices become really important both for your own Trading Posts/Markets and when trading with nearby cities; it would be really great to have some way for the cities' local prices to change a bit based on realistic supply/demand. How about if you allow each citizen to have demand for certain goods (by adapting code from the Domestic Economy modcomp), but they don't consume it automatically like in that modcomp and instead continue using your existing system. Then at the end of the turn, whenever sales by Trading Post / Market exceed the demand it pushes local price down slightly, and when demand goes unfulfilled it pushes price up slightly. That would let local prices vary naturally and in an interesting way, and you'd pay attention to fulfilling your citizens needs without it becoming too fiddly exact micromanagement (i.e precisely x units of coats per turn).

Yes, I'd like to see the economic system expanded on. The mod I have developed so far is just the base of something even cooler. The vanilla system is very simple and each Civ has it's own market that isn't effected by other markets. I'd like to see more of the supply and demand you talk about too. Well, have to head out now, but I'll be in touch.

 

[mastrude]

Well, I do believe, thanks to Nightinggale, we have found and isolated the bug that was causing Deer and other unwanted vermin to wander into your cities.

I may have a point of ignorance about the workings of vanilla Colonization: When an enemy attacks a town, normally people working in the town grab the best weapons available and defend. I can't tell, but it appears that if there wasn't a garrison, if everyone was working at town jobs, they didn't defend against the ferocious animals. Also, if people were working in the fields they didn't defend either--they were still working there if I recaptured the town. Is this correct? I have the feeling that you have to have a military unit garrisoned, actually sticking his head up, to defend.

One thing about the mod that differs from vanilla Civ. Your own wagon, resting in a tile, prevents your cultivating it. See attached game. Is this what you want?

Drydocks and shipyards don't speed up shipbuilding?

I hope you thoroughly enjoy your vacation!

 

[Nightinggale]

I may have a point of ignorance about the workings of vanilla Colonization:

To be honest it has been a while since I played vanilla. However how it is in vanilla might be unrelated to how we want it

When an enemy attacks a town, normally people working in the town grab the best weapons available and defend. I can't tell, but it appears that if there wasn't a garrison, if everyone was working at town jobs, they didn't defend against the ferocious animals. Also, if people were working in the fields they didn't defend either--they were still working there if I recaptured the town. Is this correct?

If that is what happened, then it happened. However the question is what we want. Would the peasants make a makeshift army when attacked? Seems likely. Maybe this should be added to the todo list.

IOne thing about the mod that differs from vanilla Civ. Your own wagon, resting in a tile, prevents your cultivating it. See attached game. Is this what you want?

Sounds like a bug, though I have no idea why it would be like that. I will take a look later.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

If I remember rightly, isn't it one of the founding fathers that lets peasants pick up available weapons in a crisis? (or was this from original original Col...)

One of my settlements just got got by a boar, and when I took it back the game crashed.. stinking boars.

Also i am not sure if mining stronghold patrols are working.. or how do they work if they are working.. I have a few of them scattered around my realm now, but i still get lots of barbs and animals standing around near them.. it is getting annoying, mostly because they keep breaking my auto routes for caravans and I have to figure out what job it was doing...

still having lots of fun though although the animal/barbs situation is getting tedious, I am about to research plate armour! oooh shiny!

An alternate hunting system to the barb animals, could be like in RaR ( ithink this is the one?) where they have fishing boats that can generate food from fish outside your borders, you could maybe do something similar to this with huntsman and a 'game' bonus, if the whole animal issue gets to be too much of a headache or maybe as a research benefit.

 

[Nightinggale]

If I remember rightly, isn't it one of the founding fathers that lets peasants pick up available weapons in a crisis? (or was this from original original Col...)

Peter Minuet did that in the original Col. However I can't rule out that it's possible to gain this feature in M:C by some tech or something.

One of my settlements just got got by a boar, and when I took it back the game crashed.. stinking boars.

I think I fixed that bug. However severe lack of testing means it isn't released yet (we don't even know if it works). It would be very helpful with a savegame where the animals attack when you click end turn. Remember autosaves and that CivilizationIV.ini can set it to autosave each turn.

; The maximum number of autosaves kept in the directory before being deleted.
MaxAutoSaves = 5

; Specify the number of turns between autoSaves.  0 means no autosave.
AutoSaveInterval = 4

0 is absolutely not recommended. 1 and games without random random seeds makes bugfixing a lot easier as the bug is very likely to happen every time the game is loaded.
This goes for all bug reports btw.

Also i am not sure if mining stronghold patrols are working.. or how do they work if they are working.. I have a few of them scattered around my realm now, but i still get lots of barbs and animals standing around near them.. it is getting annoying, mostly because they keep breaking my auto routes for caravans and I have to figure out what job it was doing...

This annoyed me quite a lot with 1.5. Strangely I haven't encountered this issue in 2.0.

An alternate hunting system to the barb animals, could be like in RaR ( ithink this is the one?) where they have fishing boats that can generate food from fish outside your borders, you could maybe do something similar to this with huntsman and a 'game' bonus, if the whole animal issue gets to be too much of a headache or maybe as a research benefit.

Not a bad idea. Implementing the fishing boats themselves are not bad either. Fishing and fish trading were actually a rather big business in medieval times. Many fish in the sea (compared to both earlier and today) made people really interested in eating fish as they became cheap. The start of the little ice age and it's devastating effect on crops didn't make people any less interested in fish.

 

[Nightinggale]

One thing about the mod that differs from vanilla Civ. Your own wagon, resting in a tile, prevents your cultivating it. See attached game. Is this what you want?

I loaded that savegame, but I can't reproduce the problem. You do realize that there already is a farm on the tile your transport is standing on, right? Moving it to any other tile doesn't seem to affect what the workers can do to those tiles and naturally the tile in question can't be farmed, nomatter which units are present. You can't build a farm on a farm.

EDIT: I tried the savegame on top of page 24. It crashes because the barbarians tries to move a unit out of a settlement, which gives it the default profession. However barbarians aren't designed to have settlements, which mean the XML file lacks info about default professions. The bug isn't the crash itself, but the fact that the barbarians conquered the cities. This already happened when the game was saved, which makes the savegame a bit useless for bug hunting.

 

[Kailric]

In vanilla col units should always grab weapons and defend, says so in the pedia. This wasn't changed in M:C. The strongholds and lodges will auto hunt animals only and only if the are within a city radius, at the moment. Thanks Nightinggale for checking into the bugs. Writing this from my iPhone at a rest stop.

But yeah, I added the animals mod like it was and have only adjusted it enough to to get it working. But sounds like that whole system needs to be brought back to the drawing board.

Edit: tools can be added as a weapon when it comes to auto defenders so armed peasants can defend.

 

[mastrude]

I can't reproduce the problem. You do realize that there already is a farm on the tile your transport is standing on, right?

From inside the city, the farm the wagon is standing on is showing grey, as it would if an enemy were standing on. My wagons are not my enemies, though.

 

[Nightinggale]

From inside the city, the farm the wagon is standing on is showing grey, as it would if an enemy were standing on. My wagons are not my enemies, though.

Looks like I misunderstood the bugreport. I will take a look again next time I have the chance to do so.

 

[mastrude]

I just restarted a saved game. A clean restart, i.e. restarting Colonization. Though I was at turn 316, all the tutorial quests played again.

Also, I had been playing with animals and spawned outlaws (not those sent by other civs) turned off. I turned them back on again, but no animals appeared. Well, after the clean restart they turned up in a flood. Like 3 or 4 outlaws in one turn and 8 or 9 dangerous animals. Thing about the animals and bandits is that they show up in insane numbers.

I made money in this game, hand over fist. Didn't do much but build markets and do normal trade. It was like I couldn't spend the money fast enough. Wound up with over $600,000 without ever trying. Something is haywire.

Also, an outlaw I had subdued is standing on a square with a wild boar, with neither attacking the other.

 

[Kailric]

Sometimes when applying patches and start and restart it resets the player options. Did you play through the tutorials at the start of that game? If you didn't then if the option is reset they will start.

The animals are unbalanced for sure. What size map did you play on? The animals need adjusting for all contingencies. I plan to make lodges and strongholds kill animals and outlaws within a one space radius.

It what why was the money pouring in? Do you have any suggestons to balance it?

Boars and deer do not attack or disrupt workers so a none combat unit can dwell with them. They do however wonder into your towns and conquer it, this needs fixed.

 

[Kailric]

From inside the city, the farm the wagon is standing on is showing grey, as it would if an enemy were standing on. My wagons are not my enemies, though.

This may be a result of when I adjusted things so boars and deer do not disrupt workers.

 

[mastrude]

Sometimes when applying patches and start and restart it resets the player options. Did you play through the tutorials at the start of that game? If you didn't then if the option is reset they will start.

I always try to turn them off. That never works. The tutorial messages had played out before and they played again. I don't think I had patched anything.

The animals are unbalanced for sure. What size map did you play on? The animals need adjusting for all contingencies. I plan to make lodges and strongholds kill animals and outlaws within a one space radius.

I play huge.

Why was the money pouring in? Do you have any suggestions to balance it?

I really don't have a handle on it. Something's wrong though.

Boars and deer do not attack or disrupt workers so a none combat unit can dwell with them. They do however wonder into your towns and conquer it, this needs fixed.

OK, that makes sense of why it didn't attack the bandit.

 

[orlanth]

Originally Posted by Kailric View Post
Why was the money pouring in? Do you have any suggestions to balance it?
I really don't have a handle on it. Something's wrong though.

hmm that's not very much info to go on , but if you're not doing anything to make money my guess would be there could be too much gold from Market sales. To get more specific info, try keeping track of your gold at the start & end of a few turns while recording what you're doing (ie record specifically how much money you got from markets, trades, or other sources); and try turning your Market sales off and on during a few turns to record what the impact of them is, also check whether the goods are being subtracted from cities appropriately when sold. (it's nice not having the sales messages constantly appear at the top of the screen, but it could be good to have these recorded in a log or journal so you can monitor when you need to.)

If it looks like domestic economy sales via Markets/Tradingposts are working correctly but income is too much, it might be necessary to add a balancing mechanism that decrease local prices when sales exceed demand as mentioned above. If it seems too easy to generate gold from trade with nearby cities, this could be also used to drive down their price when you're selling too much. A quicker fix could be to decrease the "percentage" given by tradingpost from 100% to a lower amount like 50%, and perhaps 75% for higher tier buildings like markets.

I'm not sure how the "Prosperity" works, is it like Culture in RaR? If there is free gold from Prosperity that could be an issue as well.

I'm not sure how the Animal/Bandit spawns are handled but think it's likely a chance dependent on number of tiles of their native terrains/features. On massive maps where a lot of tiles are unexplored they could easily build up. Perhaps an easy way to balance would be: at the start of each turn check the total number of animal units divided by number of their native tiles without Improvements, then spawn an new animal if this ratio is low. (edit: Maybe the spawn function could also check that there's not another animal in a 1 tile radius to prevent local buildup of huge animal clusters.) I approve of having stronghold improvements kill nearby animals; if you own lots of unimproved Forests could give you some nice yields from hunting if you keep out those poachers!

 

[Nightinggale]

hmm that's not very much info,

One option to correct this is to share the savegame. That way we could all dig into it and figure out where all the money comes from.

 

[mastrude]

Yeah, I know, about the money. I just wasn't focused on it. I frequently don't make bug reports till I know more. This time, though...

 

[orlanth]

If it looks like domestic economy sales via Markets/Tradingposts are working correctly but income is too much, it might be necessary to add a balancing mechanism that decrease local prices when sales exceed demand as mentioned above. If it seems too easy to generate gold from trade with nearby cities, this could be also used to drive down their price when you're selling too much. A quicker fix could be to decrease the "percentage" given by tradingpost from 100% to a lower amount like 50%, and perhaps 75% for higher tier buildings like markets.

I'm not sure how the "Prosperity" works, is it like Culture in RaR? If there is free gold from Prosperity that could be an issue as well.

I'm not sure how the Animal/Bandit spawns are handled but think it's likely a chance dependent on number of tiles of their native terrains/features. On massive maps where a lot of tiles are unexplored they could easily build up. Perhaps an easy way to balance would be: at the start of each turn check the total number of animal units divided by number of their native tiles without Improvements, then spawn an new animal if this ratio is low. (edit: Maybe the spawn function could also check that there's not another animal in a 1 tile radius to prevent local buildup of huge animal clusters.) I approve of having stronghold improvements kill nearby animals; if you own lots of unimproved Forests could give you some nice yields from hunting if you keep out those poachers!

I'm not sure of the details of how prices get set in the vanilla game, Nightingale could you comment on how this works? I believe that when you sell more than <iPriceChangeThreshold> of a Yield there's a chance of decreasing based on <iPriceCorrectionPercent>, while remaining between <iBuyPriceLow> and <iBuyPriceHigh>, but many price changes seem rather random in vanilla. Ideally this could be reworked to enable local prices to drift down when sales exceed demand, acting as natural balancing to prevent too much automatic income without thinking about supply/demand.

Another issue with the vanilla game is that the lack of any decimals in prices mean that the smallest possible price change of 1 becomes enormous in percentage terms for low priced goods (ie 50% higher from a price of 2 to 3). It would probably be too hard to change prices from integers to floating point though; I think Ray and I discussed that and considered effectively multiplying all prices/costs by 10 to enable smoother adjustment, but never ended up doing this. Not sure this is worth doing but its something to consider.

 

[Nightinggale]

I'm not sure of the details of how prices get set in the vanilla game, Nightingale could you comment on how this works?

I refuse to act like some expert witness about something where I don't know the answer. All I have is my game experience, which tells me if I land in an area good for tobacco and not much else for export, I end up exporting a lot and the price of tobacco and cigars drops noteworthy.

Another issue with the vanilla game is that the lack of any decimals in prices mean that the smallest possible price change of 1 becomes enormous in percentage terms for low priced goods (ie 50% higher from a price of 2 to 3). It would probably be too hard to change prices from integers to floating point though; I think Ray and I discussed that and considered effectively multiplying all prices/costs by 10 to enable smoother adjustment, but never ended up doing this. Not sure this is worth doing but its something to consider.

When you drag-n-drop yields, you take 100. Why not store the price of 100 units instead of each unit? Sure it would mean some rounding errors, but the code can predict where they will be. What to do about them is another issue.
I think the reason they put in the price of each unit is to avoid users from exploiting rounding. Say a goods cost 149 for 100, 100*1 unit would then cost 100.

If we really case we could add a remain for each player remembering the first two digits, which mean the first cost 1 and the next will then be 1.98 = 2 with a remain of -0.2. However I think the trading/money system has bigger issues than chasing those rounding errors, at least at the moment.

Alternatively money could start using floating point, but I think that would be a bad idea. Come to think about it, I can't remember savegames using floating point. We may end up with serious issues if we try to introduce them.

 

[Kailric]

Yeah, I know, about the money. I just wasn't focused on it. I frequently don't make bug reports till I know more. This time, though...[/QUOTE

There could be a huge imbalance on how the last trading tech works, Trading League. You get a 3000 gold bonus and another 1000 if you are the first to reach it. And then it turns your trading points into gold each turn.

I didn't have any better idea for the Trading League at the moment so I just went with the gold bonuses. This needs to be tested out though for imbalance issues and bugs, like make sure the 3000/1000 bonus is rewarded only once and not esch turn.