[mod] TOTAL REALISM 2.0

[Serga]

First, central and south america. Just looking at Nicaragua in the 1980's. The contras which were financed and trained by the CIA, functioned exactly like the assassins in this mod. Leaders were assassinated, innocent people were killed and this led to unrest and chaos throughout the country. It greatly impeded the social reforms of Sandanistas. The contras avoided attacking the military and focused upon civilian targets, just like the assassins in the mod.

in you example contras more like barbarians spawned by slave revolts, and their "civilian targets" just workers and other non military units. Their attacks never drop civs borders, alowing neighbors to occupy it territory.

And if you see an assassin in your borders, declare war. That would be a realistic reaction. He wont be able to defeat a single archer and attack your cities.

yeah.. just like declare war on USA in answer on contras attacks

I m not against assassins, but its current implementation is huge disbalance.
i like to see them as civ-neutral units expensive to support. And it will be allowed to destroy them.

 

[Houman]

oK guys, some fixes have been applied. From now Organized and Expansionist are swapped. So when we are talking about Epansionist we are talking about a real expansionsit trait (+1 move for scouts and settlers, -50% Maintaince cost) and Organized Trait is a real organized trait (+3 health and hopefully the +1 happiness will workout)

1) Shall Expansionst give these bonuses to the buildings? What wuld make more sense:

Expansionist Trait:
50% Granary
50% Harbor

Organized Trait:
50% production for Lighthouse
50% production for Courthouse

I suppose these have to be swapped as well, since Couthouse is for maintenance reduction and Lighthouse is helping the expansion over sea. While Granary is helping bigger city growth (organized) and Harbor is good for fishing.

Now to the leaders:
Bismark has been changed in Realism to Ind/Agg. There were suggestioned changing him to Agg/Org. But shouldn't Germans stay Industerous? Or Ind/Org? But this would weaken the German Military, any comments?

Napoleon has been changed to Exp/Ind. Since he started to expand and unify Europe obviously.

Roosevelt and Washinton shall not remain Organized anymore. None of these guys were isolatist in that sense. Capturing West America and going to War with Mexico is showing that Washington was more of a Expansionist. Exp/Fin is a good one I suppose.

Its funny that some people still believe Roosevelt was surprised buy "Pearl Harbor" and was only dragged into the war. There are enough offical facts out there that implies Roosevelt knew the Japanese are coming but he needed a 9/11 to have the population behind him going into the war. I suggest Agg/Exp or Ind/Exp

Houman

 

[bovinespy]

I think a lot of folks have felt that they misnamed the Expansionist and Organized traits when Civ 4 came out. To a lot of us, it makes no sense to call it 'expansionist' when they get more health in cities as that has no effect on how far the nation can expand. The only thing slowing down an expansionist nation in Civ 4 is maintaining the corruption and cost for the cities, which is where the Organized trait comes in. I suppose one could say that the Organized name is okay or at least would work but the word 'Expansionist' simply fits it better.

Basically, I'm just agreeing with the cow here and pointing out that its not a fault of this mod in any way...it's with Civ 4. However, if you're going realistic with this mod, perhaps changing the names around would be more realistic and then perhaps taking another look at which nations have which trait.

Hi there! The cow appreciates your support But seriously, I agree that the current state of confusion over the traits should not reflect badly at all upon the fine work done by Houman et al. However, it does reflect a little poorly on Firaxis, who apparently didn't think all the way through the consequences of simply grafting a bonus for a new concept (health) onto a pre-existing Civ 3 trait (Expansionistic), when they had already overhauled the ICS tendencies (by not requiring food for settlers and by introducing city maintenance) that made having cheap granaries so integral a part of REX in Civ 3 (settler factory, anyone?). Then they compounded the error (IMHO) by not transferring over the Exp label to one of the two new traits (Organized) they fashioned out of splitting the old Civ 3 Commercial trait (Financial being the other one).

In other words, put simply as possible, whereas in Civ 3 cheap granaries were key for early REX, in Civ 4 the crucial factor for REX is low city/civics upkeep. The labels should have been switched to reflect this underlying change in game dynamics. Thank God we have the modding community....

 

[KnowNothing]

I was wondering if you could make it so when a settler is created it takes the religons from the city that created it to the city it founds.

"If an idiot say something genius to other idiots he is a genius,but if a genius says something idiotic to other geniuses he is an idiot."

 

[AvianAvenger]

I was wondering if you could make it so when a settler is created it takes the religons from the city that created it to the city it founds.

starting settlers are also needed, like in that other mod(fall from heaven) where the settlers you initially start off with get 4 movements points + ignor terrain movement cost.
Its nice to be able to actually choose your starting spot.

 

[Spartan117]

i like the idea of assasins but if my city could pump out assasins every two turns then i could catch up on tech quickly and mess up another civilization

and then the ai doesnt really know how to use it prooperly i think there should be a limit on them say like 2 or 3 and then that would fix it..or if they didnt steal technology that would be even better...and could only kill the leader of a city or caused unrest in the city...

is the holy cities always will be changing say if i conquered every other but one civ ....will the holy cities always be changing or they willl be set?..it will get annoying that the holy ciites will bounce around within in your own country...all the time every few turns..

 

[Los Tirano]

"in you example contras more like barbarians spawned by slave revolts, and their "civilian targets" just workers and other non military units. Their attacks never drop civs borders, alowing neighbors to occupy it territory."

No Serga, the contras were not like barbarians from slave revolts at all, they are like the assassins of the mod. The amount of destabalisation they caused is certainly the equivalent of a decline in culture and the shrinking of borders. The government lost control of sections of their country to a foe that wasnt like conventional military units, i.e. their borders shrunk.

As for dealing with assassins, i told you how to save yourself from them. If you cant take the civ who sent the assassins thats your problem. Nevertheless their acts of aggression warrant a war.

And how do you justify assassins being extremely expensive to support hmm? Given that assassination tools range from knives, the equipment of peasants, to poisons from plants, to armaments that any modern day military unit has? No they do not warrant high upkeep. They already have a very high training cost for one person. Far too high in my opinion.

 

[Nightmare01]

I think i found two bugs. Dunno if they are already known.

1. I get Slave Revolt messages for Thebes and other egypt cities but not for my own towns. Happended when i played the germans and the americans.

2. I had a single 'elite' unit with 30 XP points. I moved it into a stack of 5 new units with each about 3-5 XP. At the next turn i noticed that all units had about 8-9 XP and got promotions now. The elite unit lost its XP down to 9 aswell but it kept all its promotions. Bug or feature that stacked units share XP ?

I played on the world map delivered with the mod.

 

[bovinespy]

oK guys, some fixes have been applied. From now Organized and Expansionist are swapped. So when we are talking about Epansionist we are talking about a real expansionsit trait (+1 move for scouts and settlers, -50% Maintaince cost) and Organized Trait is a real organized trait (+3 health and hopefully the +1 happiness will workout)

1) Shall Expansionst give these bonuses to the buildings? What wuld make more sense:

Expansionist Trait:
50% Granary
50% Harbor

Organized Trait:
50% production for Lighthouse
50% production for Courthouse

I suppose these have to be swapped as well, since Couthouse is for maintenance reduction and Lighthouse is helping the expansion over sea. While Granary is helping bigger city growth (organized) and Harbor is good for fishing.

Now to the leaders:
Bismark has been changed in Realism to Ind/Agg. There were suggestioned changing him to Agg/Org. But shouldn't Germans stay Industerous? Or Ind/Org? But this would weaken the German Military, any comments?

Napoleon has been changed to Exp/Ind. Since he started to expand and unify Europe obviously.

Roosevelt and Washinton shall not remain Organized anymore. None of these guys were isolatist in that sense. Capturing West America and going to War with Mexico is showing that Washington was more of a Expansionist. Exp/Fin is a good one I suppose.

Its funny that some people still believe Roosevelt was surprised buy "Pearl Harbor" and was only dragged into the war. There are enough offical facts out there that implies Roosevelt knew the Japanese are coming but he needed a 9/11 to have the population behind him going into the war. I suggest Agg/Exp or Ind/Exp

Houman

Hi Houman. I'm certainly no expert at coding, but if you guys are having trouble coding in the +1 happy face for the New Organized trait, maybe it would be simpler to just enable a cheap building (~20 hammers?) that provides one happy (call it a "shrine" or "sacred site" or something) that only New Org civs could build? But then, I don't know how you'd auto-destroy it when another non-NewOrg civ captures a city containing that building, since it wouldn't be generating culture. Just an idea...

As far as discount buildings, personally I would recommend cheap Courthouses and Harbors for the New Expansionist trait, since the Harbor is emblematic of increased commercial linkage between cities, and also provides a trade boost, which can help out with maintaining a large empire. I suppose you could say the same of Marketplaces, but I think that 1/2-price Marketplaces would be too unbalancing.

Conversely, for the New Organized trait, I would recommend cheap Granaries and Aqueducts. I figure that Lighthouses are pretty cheap anyway, and having 1/2-price Aqueducts would further accentuate the +3 health bonus of the trait. Plus, it might make the difference in giving a NewOrg civ a head start on building the Hanging Gardens, which I feel is appropriate.

As far as Bismarck goes, I don't have a problem with Ind/Agg. It seems appropriate (even though Otto didn't embark on any major campaigns of conquest, he certainly did use Prussian militarism to further his diplomatic goals). Plus, I think there should be a scary Germany in the middle of Europe Somebody needs to push back against the French and Russians.

For Napoleon, Ind/NewExp also seems appropriate, especially if you look at the bigger picture. The English, Spanish, and French were the major world empire-builders of the early modern period, so even if Nappy's achievements were rather ephemeral, those of France as a whole during this time period were certainly not.

As far as the two American leaders are concerned, I agree that making Washington (representative of the Founding Fathers and that whole "Manifest Destiny" crowd of the early 19th century) Fin/NewExp seems right. However, if you make Roosevelt Ind/NewExp, then he would share Napoleon's traits. I would instead suggest Ind/Phi. I think that this would help represent the USA's 20th century burst into global prominence quite nicely. I understand that Firaxis thought (probably with good reason) that this might be an overpowered combo, but maybe we could see how it works out in practice? I don't think Ind/Agg would be really appropriate (and besides, that would overlap with Bismarck's trait combo).

 

[Spartan117]

"

As for dealing with assassins, i told you how to save yourself from them. If you cant take the civ who sent the assassins thats your problem. Nevertheless their acts of aggression warrant a war.

And how do you justify assassins being extremely expensive to support hmm? Given that assassination tools range from knives, the equipment of peasants, to poisons from plants, to armaments that any modern day military unit has? No they do not warrant high upkeep. They already have a very high training cost for one person. Far too high in my opinion.

its not dealing with them the problem...they are already better then spys for the most part and then there can be unlimited amounts of them that gives the human player an unfair advantage, i think they should not be allowed to steal tech just kill a city's leader or casue unrest in the city. and there should be a limit say 5 or so...maybe smaller if they are allowed to continue to steal tech..

if they ai used as wide spread as a human would then it would be okay but since the ai uses them sparingly, from my experience on noble and prince, and i since i realize how powerful they are.. then i obliterate the ai with them

that means an unfair advantage for human, and human player can easily exploit this...

i could simply decide assassin spam...

 

[Nightravn]

@Nightmare - I too have experienced this bug with the unit XP and we are working on the whole concept of XP sharing now. If you could please post the specifics of the bug in to the bug tracker on sourceforge.

Assassin Issue - I too believe that the Assassin have been to powerful and agree that they should be limited and that the technology stealing should be removed. We are already discussing the Limitation on them and I will bring up the tech stealing, which should be left to the spy unit. I would also like for defending assassins to be able to attack other assassins without actually having to go to war or that if your assassin reveals another assassin that your units will defend the city as it tries to enter it but I don't know if those are possible . I have found that if you do have defending assassins that the AI usually does not enter into your cities and tends to go somewhere else.

@AvianAvenger - We left the settler religion out on purpose as it tends to nullify the need for missionaries and the natural limitation of the spread rates we have Incorporated in the mod. As for the extra movement well we have given certain traits a bonuses in this area and therefore wouldn't want to impede on that advantage for that particular trait.

@kflorian - Thanks for your comments and as for your request it would be almost impossible for us to remove those components you ask about but the good news is that there is already a couple of Mods out there that basically does what you ask for and they are called Alerum's Unaltered Game Play and Yet Another Unaltered Gameplay Mod.

As for the Trait switch and the building that the trait reduce the cost for......

Well I say leave them as is as I find it redundant that the trait that gives you reduced maintenance cost also gives you a cheap building that does the same thing. And if the organized trait helps with providing bigger cities having cheaper court houses will help in that respect and ties into the trait as more organization provided healthier, happier and better run cities. Where the Expansionist trait provides bigger empires and quicker access to buildings that help you produce those much needed settlers who move quicker to help expand that empire.

I say Roosevelt should be Ind and the new Organized as he basically built up the US after the great depression. I don't think the aggressive trait fits as that is usually giving to those leaders that were just that very aggressive in nature and expanded their empires by force. Washington is good with Fin/ New Exp while Napoleon I would say should be Agg/Exp not really being industrious and Bismark should be Ind/Org.

edit comment after reading the Cows.... maybe Roosevelt being Ind/Phi would be better this way his and Bismark's traits aren't the same. As for that combo being to powerful we must keep in mind that we have changed that trait from being the Wonderbuilder to just a production bonuses like the financial trait so I think it wouldn't be that over powered.

 

[Aragorn7]

Hi Houman.

I was wondering if you could implement Roger Bacons and Strands "Three Square Radius Cities Mod" into Total Realism?

 

[Serga]

I would also like for defending assassins to be able to attack other assassins without actually having to go to war or that if your assassin reveals another assassin

it will be great. But i dont know how it possible.

 

[Mexico]

Hi Houman. I'm certainly no expert at coding, but if you guys are having trouble coding in the +1 happy face for the New Organized trait, maybe it would be simpler to just enable a cheap building (~20 hammers?) that provides one happy (call it a "shrine" or "sacred site" or something) that only New Org civs could build? But then, I don't know how you'd auto-destroy it when another non-NewOrg civ captures a city containing that building, since it wouldn't be generating culture. Just an idea...

yest, it is one option ... but don't worry, we are able to code this happy face directly (no from building) (and destroying building when city is acquired is no problem too)

 

[bovinespy]

As for the Trait switch and the building that the trait reduce the cost for......

Well I say leave them as is as I find it redundant that the trait that gives you reduced maintenance cost also gives you a cheap building that does the same thing. And if the organized trait helps with providing bigger cities having cheaper court houses will help in that respect and ties into the trait as more organization provided healthier, happier and better run cities. Where the Expansionist trait provides bigger empires and quicker access to buildings that help you produce those much needed settlers who move quicker to help expand that empire.

I say Roosevelt should be Ind and the new Organized as he basically built up the US after the great depression. I don't think the aggressive trait fits as that is usually giving to those leaders that were just that very aggressive in nature and expanded their empires by force. Washington is good with Fin/ New Exp while Napoleon I would say should be Agg/Exp not really being industrious and Bismark should be Ind/Org.

edit comment after reading the Cows.... maybe Roosevelt being Ind/Phi would be better this way his and Bismark's traits aren't the same. As for that combo being to powerful we must keep in mind that we have changed that trait from being the Wonderbuilder to just a production bonuses like the financial trait so I think it wouldn't be that over powered.

Hi Nightravn. With all due respect, I must strongly disagree with you regarding keeping new traits and old building discounts together. I guess you could call it redundant that cheap Courthouses go with lower city/civics costs, but by the same reasoning, I could argue that it's redundant to give Financial civs cheap banks or Aggressive civs cheap barracks. The way I see it, the discount buildings for a trait should complement and accentuate the trait, thus making pronounced differences in playstyle between civs likely.

With regards to NewExp civs, I think that cheap courthouses are a key to relatively early expansion, much more so than cheap granaries (especially when played on a huge map, like TR Earth). Likewise, I fail to see how cheap courthouses go well with the NewOrg trait. Not only is there no direct link between city maintenance costs (affected by courthouses) and city size (unlike civics upkeep, which AFAIK, is affected by city size, but not by courthouses), but by providing cheap courthouses, you are actually diluting the intent of having a NewOrg trait in the first place, ie. encouraging vertical, rather than horizontal, empire growth.

As for the leaders, if Napoleon was Agg/NewExp, then his traits would overlap with Genghis Khan's. Plus, I think Ind is actually kind of right for Napoleon, when you consider that during his reign (and, you could argue, even back to Louis XIV), France was basically taking on all of Europe by itself. Plus, as long as Bismarck is going to keep Ind (and I've seen nobody argue that he shouldn't), then France should be able to keep pace in production with Germany.

For Bismarck, I guess I could accept Ind/NewOrg, as Germany did surge ahead in population (relative to the UK and France) towards the end of the 19th century. However, I still think that Agg would be more appropriate - after all, I don't think it's really proper that the only other Agg civ (on the TR Earth map) between the Atlantic and the Mongol steppes would be Greece

 

[gunnergoz]

Houman - You were doing great until your dumb Roosevelt/Pearl Harbor/9-11 comment. Let's keep the political fantasies for an appropriate medium, thank you. Apart from that, great mod and good work!

 

[Nightravn]

I will concede the point about the cheaper building for their respective traits as it does make since and its balanced to the reset of the vanilla traits. beside it makes switching the trait as simple as renaming them.

Now as far as Individual leaders like Nappy and Bismark well I really don't see where Bismark would be aggressive, maybe we could give him the Ind/Phi instead of Roosevelt and see how it goes as he was much into the political aspects of creating the German state than being very militaristic. I still Nappy would be more true to form as Aggressive and Expansionist. The point that it would be similar to Genghis while it is valid it is also incidental as there has to be some overlap in traits due to then amount of Civs/Leaders vs number of traits to choose from. And it will give you another Agg trait in the Area while limiting to many Ind. Of course we could always make Nappy Agg/Ind instead making him a force to contend with which in history he was and as I think about it probably the best fit for him then we could give the expansionist trait to Louie which would be a better fit IMO.

We need to come up with a matrix that shows the traits they have vs what we think they should have and have the ones of the Realism Map be dissimilar to provided the best diversity and balance.

 

[Nightmare01]

I finished building the Museum of Mausollos but i didnt got any video. The wonder popup was empty and only the close button on the bottom was there.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Some small tweak suggestions (mostly hellenistic this time):

1) Thermopylae? Come on! That's like having fort Alamo the third city in US city name list. The place isn't even a city, but a mountain pass (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermopylae). I always wonder what Firaxis coders have been smoking at the moment. Either axe the name, or move it to the end of the list.

2) Imagine a formed phalanx attacking horse archers. Just that. Horse archers should be given 50-100% defence (not strength) against phalanx, or any spearmen, or maybe even any melee unit, while not in city (technically, it can go 100% defence vs. melee units, -50% city defence). Those guys just stay away - that was always, since scythians and parthians, their main strength, and it could bring a new twist to using light cavalry - having spearmen doesn't ensure your victory (remember all those failed invasions to scythia).

3) A balance issue. Game is slower. Religions spread as if it wasn't. This results in ancient religions (Zoro, Hindu, to less extent Buddism) to cover 90% of the world by the time later religions (Christ, Tao and Islam) kick in, leaving them no chances, except in determined player's hands. Something (and I don't know what - curbing passive spread still leaves missionaries) must be done. Maybe for building all missionaries one should research some later tech (missionaries as a whole available only around theology or at least alphabet), and at the same time curbing spread rates would help? Oh, and that observation is based on 3-4 games on a huge random terra map.

4) Shouldn't Islam and Christianity be "dominant" religions, like Judaism, in ReligionMod? Under appropriate rulers, they pretty much rooted out all the other religions wherever they went. This just seems more realistic to me.

 

[Nightravn]

Ok got a little bored at work so here is a list of the Leader traits and some of the changes that has been Discussed.... come to find out that Nappy is already Agg/Ind so there is no need to change him...

What is everyone feedback on this?


Oh and I keep forgetting to mention this but not only do we have bug tracking on the sourceforge site we also have Feature Request tracking as well. SO please post your requests there so we don't have allot of duplicate posts asking for the same things.

@Aragorn7 - The 3 square city radius is already being looked at to be implemented and I am the one who requested it but If it is included then it will most likely just be an optional add in for those who like to play huge maps.