[MOD] Snoopy/Dale PatchMod

First of all thanks for the great effort. I haven't tried the mod yet because I just recently started playing and want to see how the original game behaves, but I have one suggestion: the automated trades could use the threshold value ("minimum goods stored") when importing goods as well, in order to not overstock a city and make it lose the goods due to lack of warehouse storage room.

 

No worries, my wife hates me too.

 

Hi all. First of all, Dale & Snoopy, thanks for making a great game better! I have had one problem with 1.07 patch. I tried to use clear specialty in Europe and it wouldn't clear the specialty. I'm going to d/l the patch again and see if that clears up the problem. If it doesn't, could you guys look into it?

 

Dale/Snoopy

Have you given any thought into modifying to how the Ref Navy is calculated? Once the kings ground forces get large enough, additional boats are needed to get them to shore in a timely fashion, however it does not appear that the king builds much for ships unless you build a navy of your own. A small royal navy prevents the player from being inundated with units, but In two seperate games, I have been so concerned with the king not being able to move his large army in time that I built a small navy just to escalate the kings and ensure all units make it to the new world in time to kill them. The forum also has several instances of the royal ships getting stuck, or not delivering the final units. Fixing the AI is a much taller order, but ensuring the king has enough ships to transfer all units in the time remaining while still allowing for bombardment of settlements may help to reduce the problem.

Admittedly, I have not played thru that many games and do not pretend to fully understand the kings REF. Below are just a few thing that pop to mind.

1. Make sure the kings MOW can sail back and forth in one turn. This could be an acquired skill that kicks in with a certain amount of turns left. If a colony can do this early on with a FF, why can't a european super power do it 2/3rds of the way thru? (This may be a moot point if the king can already do this)

2. Use a formula to determine min number of ships. The formula should involve total ground units, total number of ships, ship cargo capacity, ocean travel time, average travel time to the coast and some sort of "efficiency" variable to account for time spent bombarding settlements. The formula should be evaluated to ensure there are enough ships to get all troops to the new world with an arbitrary amount of turns remaining in which to do battle. A possible extension of this would be to ensure there are enough ships to get all units to the new world within a pre-defined time period in stead of just by the end of the game. This would allow starting the WoI early without having to play out all remaining turns just to slowly kill ground units in small waves. To prevent swamping the player in case of a large navy, it may be a little more realistic to stagger the release of a certain percentage of ships over a turn or two. After all, no country can mobilize their entire army instantly.

3. Look at increasing the movement range of a MOW after a certain year for the same reasons listed above.

4. Give the king large faster troop transport ships in addition to MOW. This is a big change, but would be much more period accurate. If this was done, the cargo holds of a MOW could probably be reduced to 2 or 3. This would add another dimension to naval victory by trying to attack the soft merchant vessels while avoiding the heavily armed warships. It would allow a small colonial navy to influence the war in stead of being wiped out while only killing an insignificant number of MOW.

Again, thanks for all you have done for the community.

 

Hi sigma, welcome to CFC and PatchMod.

Snoopy and I have been discussing the REF for a month now, we can't make a decisive plan of where to head with it yet. We have similar ideas, but they do differ slightly.

One method is to have the number of MoW's statically assigned based on size of REF. This gives the benefit of knowing the King will always have enough ships to transport the entire REF in a couple of waves. But it means ensuring the MoW's return to Europe from the New World.

The other method is to have MoW's classed as combat ships only, and give the King free galleons to transport troops. This'll give the King the ability to keep his MoW's in the New World, but still transport troops over. But need to ensure the number of MoW's is not too high to make it useless for player's to build a navy of SoL's.

I think what'll happen is to give everyone the biggest options, one method will be implemented in PatchMod and the other method will go into AoD2. That'll give the best coverage I believe.

 

Dale & Snoopy, you need to set the transport and berth size of a wagon train to 0 as it is currently falsely reporting in the Pedia that it can be loaded onto various ships.

 

Actually, a wagon train CAN be loaded onto ships.

 

A decided improvement on the original game, I think.

 

A loaded wagon cannot though. I'm tempted to make wagon trains take 2 berths, 1 for the wagons and 1 for the horses.

 

In my personal mod I have Cannons and Wagon Trains with a Berth of 2 and it works out well in my opinion.

 

Would be nice if the other berth would be filled so you easy see how they fill up.

 

Dale/Snoopy, thanks very much for the patch, and for continuing to work on this.

I'm wondering if you're considering changing the accumulation rate of the REF; I really like the idea of having it accumulate at a steady rate rather than in response to the colonial buildup. Having it respond creates perverse counterincentives for the player to stay small and weak while hoarding money, then to break out in sudden revolution as quickly as possible in hopes of fighting a small REF. Having the expeditionary force accumulate at a steady rate puts pressure on the player to keep up, which strikes me as a more appropriate approach that rewards, rather than punishes, the logical approach of trying to build up the colonies as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

 

Amen. I completely agree with that.

 

Me too

(with added characters to make it long enough to post)

 

Theres' already a mod out by uppi that does just that, plus it incorporates PatchMod.

PatchMod with rebalanced REF

 

Don't know if these two already are reported but:

* When adding same resourse to a transport with no berth left but resourses not full they wont add togehter (only if there is a free berth). You first have to free one spot and move back.

* When fighting you just see a questionmark on the amount of health you will have (like in civ4patch), but it still shows how the bar will become so you will know the result anyway.

Edit: Another bug:

Sometimes the selected mod is removed in the ini file. You have to edit it in again. Happened 2 times with AoD2.

 

Hadn't played the game in a bit due to exams but 1.07 looks fantastic. One of my main gripes with the game (length after DoI) is finally addressed. Thanks again Snoopy / Dale. I don't think even Firaxis could have done a better job of taking care of all the issues.

 

Is some/all of the work here going to be included in an official patch? (BTW, when will there be an official patch?)

Dale/Snoopy, Could you please the following boolean variables to include with bRiver and bWater for buildings?

bNoRiver - No river is present in settlement radius
bNoWater - No water is present in settlement radius

And also if possible (though not a high priority):
bMountain - At least one mountain is present in settlement radius
bNoMountain - No mountain is present in settlement radius

This way we can be far more specific in limiting where buildings are built, particularly inland.

 

Ints are easier to understand:

iNumRiverPlots
iNumPeakPlots

 

Wow - makes it even more flexible. But don't forget:

iNumWaterPlots

Would the integers override the boolean settings though?

Would the set value mean at least that number or exactly that number? If it is set to 0, the intention would probably be that there must be none of that plot present but if you set it higher, say 1, then you might mean at least 1.

You might have to have min and max values, with -1 to mean "ignore".

So far then, we have the following:

iNumRiverPlotsMin
iNumRiverPlotsMax
iNumWaterPlotsMin
iNumWaterPlotsMax
iNumPeakPlotsMin
iNumPeakPlotsMax

Wow! Here's a thought for a mod. Docks require one water plot, drydocks require two and shipyards require three!