[Mod] Mylon Mod - New Culture Model, Terraforming, and more!

[Notarzt]

Your MOD sounds really great, Mylon.
But while testing it, I encountered a few problems:

Either:
- The "traveling perfomer" doesn't give +10 culture
- Not every citizen gives 2 culutre (that's what i understood)
Or:
- The culture-display isn't correct

My cities (e.g. a peripheral city about 20 in size) has about +5 culure/turn
with a "performer" in it (resulting from 2 culture base and x150% from buildings)
Should be:
(2 base + 40 size + 10 perfomer) x150% = 131 culture
Shouldn't it?

What seems to function is the cultural spreading via religion. I had the
jewish holy city and all foreign jewish cities were about 3-10% my civilization.

The foreign cities i moved a "performer" in didn't seem to convert.


If all would work well, it would be a wounderful mod,
because i love the "unbloody" way of conquest.
Thanks for devellopment.

 

[dh_epic]

Mind telling me what you disagree with and why? If you can make a convincing argument, I might change my ways.

I have very little convincing to say, actually. I just thought the buildings were closer to being balanced than initially thought, and I disagree with your approach to just throw numbers down. If I were to do a mod, I would focus more on adding a few new mechanisms, but leaving the buildings largely in place (only rebalancing them to accomodate the mechanisms I added).

But then again, this might very well be how Firaxis did it: put together realistic buildings first, and then tweak and changed them based on the need for game balance. So who am I to say that you're going about it the wrong way?

I maintain that balance will be your biggest challenge and will take a lot of discipline, hard work, and testing to overcome. But it's not impossible. There's a lot of challenges there to balance the overall thrusts between war and peace, the many ways you can war, the many ways you can be peaceful, and the various technology choices that come about throughout the game.

Keep up the good work.

 

[Mylon]

Either:
- The "traveling perfomer" doesn't give +10 culture
- Not every citizen gives 2 culutre (that's what i understood)
Or:
- The culture-display isn't correct

The culture-display is not correct. The current formula is very complex ((Advertised culture rate + 2 per population, split based on nationality), (+1 per religion and religious building, assigned to holy city owner), (+tradevalue * 0.02 * culturerate(including population) of trade city split according to nationality of trade city, which means each and every city in the world would have to be queried to get this value due to asymetrical trades), all modified by culture rate modifier appropriately.) I could update the city detail screen to display the culture rate of the two greatest influences, but previous attemps at modding that screen means one small error and the whole screen becomes useless, displaying nothing.

Also, the effect of the travelling performer isn't quite that great: The major bonus of the travelling performer is that all 10 points of culture it's generating in for your civilization and is not split according to nationality, unlike other methods.

As for balance... Why waste a lot of time making fine tuning balancing changes when I later throw in a big gameplay change that throws everything out of whack? I'd rather wait until I run out of features to impliment before I really focus on balance.

 

[Roetghoer]

I see Mylon has combined several concepts in a single mod at once,
I would like to get you acquainted with the 'Modswitcher' by TDB ( http://forums.civfanatics.com/showth...8&page=1&pp=20 ) This little prog, currently still in an immature form, will allow a large audience to combine different mods together without the hassle of modding the scripts by hand!

I think TDB could use either a little help or at least some encouragement for his activities, because this prog feels like the missing link in the current game to me.

Eventually, I hope we can come to some kind of standardized modding using a program like TDB's which would greatly enhance playability of mods on the game.
A single script-alteration might be the only thing needed, after that everybody can choose their own modifications to the game and combine them into a modfile and play it.

Doesn't that seem more logical than everybody creating their own combo's for all others to swallow, don't get me wrong i greatly admire the work that some people put into mods people but sometimes i don't DL a good mod because of one little thing i definitely wouldn't have put in it.

Whats your stance?

 

[Mylon]

Turns out v0.28 released with a bug that prevented Travelling Performers from working their magic, even though it worked in v0.27. This was a side effect of changing how culture from trade worked. On further testing, it turns out when a city was undergoing a revoltion, it produced errors with the way bonus food was calculated. Also, breweries made it through with a +20% commerce bonus, which was unintended. I thought about such a bonus, but decided against it.

I'll work on getting v0.29 out soon.

 

[Mylon]

Mod updated to v0.29. This version should fix a lot of problems with previous versions, including a problem with breweries updating whenever _anyone_ researched medicine (allowing 2 of them to exist for a short while), fixing an error that occured when separating the FoodBonus so it wouldn't have to exist twice, and, of course, adding some new stuff.

As for future changes... I really want to change how city maitenance works. The -upkeep buildings are not terribly attractive. In general, each is worth about +2-5 gold, while a market can be easily worth 8 gold or more. If I boost maitenance costs any further, the early game is going to revolve around waiting until the capital can generate some big money before building any cities at all. In short, maitenance costs hurt the early game too much and barely affect the late game at all. If civic costs were part of the maitenance costs (and reduced by courthouse type buildings) I'd easily raise the cost of civics (especially the later civics) and solve this problem, but I'm still holding off python-editing of gold as a taboo.

 

[Lachlan]

What do you think of a standard world map for the mod and disable normal scenarios of Civ 4 ?

 

[Impaler[WrG]]

I am wondering is culture from buildings also split based on nationality? I see the logic in making the bonus "Popculture" of 2 per population being split by Nationality but things like Theathers, Specialist, Libraries and Wonders are state controled and should I think be producing only "MY" culture. This would alow you to do some good "cultural imperialism" by using culture buildings to pile on extra culture every turn, the accumulated culture % would start to slowly shift in my favor as the nationality ratios change. A positive feedback would be established as forign culture becomes a smaller and smaller % of the total. The more bonus culture that can be added the faster the feedback, this is much like your traveling entertainer concept, I just think it should be possible to convert cities through building projects as well as Units.

 

[Mylon]

With the standard world map, I don't adequately understand the question. If you're referring to a pre-made map, I say go for it. You may want to add the new resources, though.

As for buildings... All culture generated by a city is split by nationality. The exceptions to this rule are Travelling Performers, Religions and religious buildings (they have a hidden culture value of "3", given to the religion holy city owner), and trade imports which are not listed and that culture is split according to the nationality of the trade city. Cities favor their own nationality at a rate of 40%: the foruma is (0.4 + 0.6 * nationality%) * Culture Rate. This means that no matter what the current % is, a city generates more culture for its owner than anyone else and thus a city not recieving more foriegn culture will slowly gain nationality towards its owner.

From testing with my most recent game, either this 40% favoritism is too high, or I'm doing very strong culturally, as very few of my cities are below 85% nationality.

The goal of the cutural change is to be able to win through cultural conquest: A player dominates another so much through culture that the cities convert to his civilization at a rapid pace, rather than merely flipping 2-3 border cities. Also, culture will matter more at a global scale such that it will matter in an island map, even causing cities to flip from a distance.

 

[Lachlan]

Here a premade map

Good work !

It's not me who made it but it's my favourite world map because it is not huge map of Rhye who knew problems when it was too cities

If you set "undestructible cities" i'm would glad ...

 

[Imperator666]

i have encountered a nasty bug with your mod, that so fas has only occured when having cities on different islands. when cultural radii start to intersect they seem to "cancel each other out" and the land is neutral again, though it should be within my borders for sure! also sometimes it says something is > 100 % of a nationality, i had 1200 % french once. might be an error easily fixed - just wanted to tell you

 

[dh_epic]

As for future changes... I really want to change how city maitenance works. The -upkeep buildings are not terribly attractive. In general, each is worth about +2-5 gold, while a market can be easily worth 8 gold or more. If I boost maitenance costs any further, the early game is going to revolve around waiting until the capital can generate some big money before building any cities at all.

You could make maintainance costs scale a bit more... so they're basically as cheap as they are at the beginning of the game, but they scale a lot more as your population increases, or as you take on bigger civics. This would be manageable if the right buildings came along at the right time.

Although that IS just increasing the magnitude of a problem so a solution actually becomes more meaningful.

 

[Melkus]

Some random observations made during a Prince test game with Mao yesterday. I know that you want to balance later, but there may be flaws in some of your concepts.

- Strangely, I find the game is more fun when the numbers on city screen are inaccurate/unreliable/wrong. This is unintended of course, but makes gameplay less robotic and predictable.

- The AI seems to have a very hard time with some of the changes. Some of them fall behind pitifully techwise. Hatty and Catherine did reasonably well, but the warmongers just couldn't get anything going.
I strongly suspect it's the maintenance cost. They expand early as usual, but when they run into financial trouble, they don't quite know how to deal with it.

- Four Chinese 15 cities in 450AD, due to food bonuses and easy health and happiness management. Beijing produces a ridiculously high 217 research/turn. I didn't even found a religion and still dominated in culture and science. (Which is why I can't comment on your culture system, which I like in principle.) Higher research costs don't work, I'm currently researching Paper in two turns.
Novgorod will reach size 20 next turn, by the way.

(Beijing has Pyramids + Great Library + Academy. Mao is also philosophical, so I just produce stacks of Great scientists, each of which produces more than 20 science per turn. Add normal scientists, which is easy with the food from resources, and you can get an enormous amount of beakers.)

- The importance of religion in the early game is lowered by the many alternate ways to get extra happiness (esp. the Brewery).

EDIT: I should add that I didn't do any warmongering or other special advanced strategies, pretty much just cruised along on autopilot and looked for the changes you made.

 

[Lachlan]

Here a premade map

Good work !

It's not me who made it but it's my favourite world map because it is not huge map of Rhye who knew problems when it was too cities

If you set "undestructible cities" i'm would glad ...

CAUTION : added ressources not placed !

 

[TheFourGuardian]

I combined this mod with random events if anyone wants it...

Easy combination. Three small files. Almost lost it to a space in the bonusartinfos file though, it threw off the declaration of the xml type.

 

[TheFourGuardian]

My opinions as of now:

Well, to get it out of the way, it edits so many files. It's good, but it makes combination hard enough. I tried to edit in my combination superciv/great people/lost wonder/slower pace and other tweaks mod into it, and stopped before I began. (I got random events in though.)

Most of the mod is very good though. I think that the workshop needs a boost(it never seems useful enough. Get rid of the -1 food perhaps, or improve the number of shields.) That's actually a problem I have with the main game though.

Anyway, mod wise:

Pace: It should be good, but it falls into a problem. That is specifically because of the few cities you can build. It becomes problematic to build a large army when one can only build 4-8 cities. That may be my playing style, but early expanision is impossible, and by late game when one can expand, it's all taken.

I do like the culture model though, and it is very nice. I actually took over two boardering cities and my culture seemed to be important.

However, I think I might want to check this against the "bloody hell" mod to see if a different style of pace is needed to make wars work better. That is because I cannot build an army without falling behind tech wise or building wise in my few cities based on maintence.

Perhaps you should lower that a bit.

Otherwise, I like this mod.

 

[hanskamp]

This mod is the most interesting mod that I saw...

My biggest city has a size of 65. What is your biggest city with this mod?

 

[Mylon]

Attached a screenshot to give a better idea of what the mod does.

 

[LittleRedPoint]

Hi Mylon,

I report a bug. If you develop Guilds you can build tree nursery but if you build it and if it get ready, the game crashes. Does everione have same problem? Or the problem is between the chair and monitor?

 

[Mylon]

Turns out there was an custom art define tagged called for tree nurseries and this tag wasn't defined in another file. Tree nurseries have since been changed to look like plantations as per the original Forestry Mod.

Many thanks for the crash report!

I have another saved game which crashes at the beginning of a turn, right after a revolt is reported. I'll look into that bug, too.