Modding civ1 to be harder

[hannurabi]

I know you can set up difficulty level for example emperor +1, but that's not what I'm after, since emperor + x levels aren't really fun to play because of unhappiness IMO.
(Well maybe darkpanda could find a way to hack the diff level parameters...)

Therefore it would be interesting to change the game parameters so that it makes it harder for human but not AI. Something I've been thinking, but not tested really:

• Edit tech tree, so that republic and democracy becomes available much later in game
• Make wonders cost more, so they are harder for human to get (AI gets them randomly)
• Give units more defence strength. This makes the conquest harder.
• Edit save file to make human tech slower by changing flag that keeps count of techs researched.(This is possible with JCived for example)
• Of course you could give AI extra settlers at start

 

[Renergy]

For me, #1 change would be

• make inciting the revolt in a city MUCH more expensive (if not completely disable it)

As far as I like "taking over with diplomats", it never made much sense to me to be able to buy a whole big city, in some cases for a price well under the price of bribing the units in it. (see here for bribe calculation).

Some possible options:

• make the revolt possible only for city up to certain size - say, 8 (fixed number)
• make the revolt posssible to incite revolt up to 1/2 mean size of your own cities (rounded down).
• factor the price of units in incite revolt cost (e.g., add normal "bribing fee" for each unit - perhaps "x2" - to the currently calculated cost)

Regarding the technology tree - quite agree with moving Republic (and Democracy) in the technology tree. Republic should be possible earlier, naturally, but - say - only after researching Monarchy.

I would add Railroads to the changes in technology list

• make Railroad dependent on Steel - as in history, Railroads began developing en masse only after discovering Bessemer process
• (now that I've written it) perhaps before Steel, building a Railroad should take 4x the turns to build road it takes now; after discovering Steel it would it go to normal (twice the time for roads)

 

[hannurabi]

What I had in mind are the changes that are actually possible to make within the current knowledge of exe and save files.

One obvious thing would be to set up yourself a house rules, like not allowed to bribe cities.

It would be fun to create a mod for CivDOS,since the recent research has made it possible (can edit images,tech tree etc).
But I already have too many projects on my hands.

At least it would be fun to design new tech tree.

 

[Bert Pajou]

Hi,
These are very interesting thoughts, but why fix something that is not broken. I have found that if you don't cheat at all CIV is a very nicely balanced game giving both you and the computer a chance to win.

When I say 'No cheating', I mean 'No cheating'. Not even by restarting or reloading. No fast settlers or anything else. On the other hand, if you do cheat then it does matter how difficult you make it, you will always beat the computer. IMHO.

I like TerraForm and JCIVed. Simply because I like playing scenarios, but once the scenario is created, no cheating. Nothing can spoil a game more than cheating. And that is my not so humble opinion.

 

[hannurabi]

Well, I never use any cheats and I win king level games 100%. And I would say that for experienced players who play carefully, the emperor level winning chances are more than 50% for sure.

Anything else I agree with you. I love scenarios too.I'm currently designing Eastern Front 1941 scenario, which I will try to make very hard to win.

And if you have any scenarios on your vault, I think you should upload them for others to enjoy too.

 

[Whelkman]

I think most people interested in the military aspect of this game already avoid strategies like reloading and settler manipulation. That still leaves Chariot rushing. I wouldn't blame players for thinking holding back on unit production because of top-level design issues goes one step too far.

Also, Civilization's AI isn't very advanced and the CPU plays by different rules (cheats) to mask its lack of sophistication. A true challenge mod would enable the CPU to compete on a level playing field, but that would involve writing a new AI.

 

[darkpanda]

Also, Civilization's AI isn't very advanced and the CPU plays by different rules (cheats) to mask its lack of sophistication. A true challenge mod would enable the CPU to compete on a level playing field, but that would involve writing a new AI.

Indeed it would be a true challenge... One of my ambitions is to get into CIV AI's code to map it out and try to understand the logic that Sid & al. have put behind it.

We know it's not sophisticated because, for instance:

• Wonders a randomly built by AI without any accumulation of shields
• Diplomats spawn out of nowhere
• AI cities cannot build ships on inner seas/lakes (although I'm not sure this is really an advantage)
• ...

But at the same time, we also know it is kind of complex because:

• We keep playing CIV, against AI players, and find it interesting to discover how developped -or not- AI oppenents can become
• CIV.EXE exploration shows tons of AI-helping data (path-finding, strategic locations, map and Civ statistics, various attitudes, etc.), even though their usage/impact is unclear

Besides understanding how it works out of the box, the other ambition, as Whelkman states, would be to design an AI for Civ... This is definitely an open territory where all roads could be explored.

Implementing it back into CIV.EXE would be near impossible though... I'm rather thinking about a full, faithfull-yet-moddable port of CIV to the 21st century's technologies...

 

[Bert Pajou]

I have never tried those hidden levels. I always play Emperor level, but if those plus levels have bigger unhappiness I can foresee a difficult start. And a good start on a good continent is vital. If there are a few sedate neighbours within reach, so much the better.

 

[Whelkman]

Implementing it back into CIV.EXE would be near impossible though...

Just for curiosity's sake, what would be the top challenge? The act of writing raw 8086 assembler? Fitting everything into 16-bit segments? Extending the game to EMS, XMS, or 286-style DPMI to provide more RAM for the AI?

I'm rather thinking about a full, faithfull-yet-moddable port of CIV to the 21st century's technologies...

The near term result of your research seems to be to produce a fully specified ruleset, bugs included, at the top level. This is really step 1 in writing a clone but it's never been done.

 

[hannurabi]

Implementing it back into CIV.EXE would be near impossible though... I'm rather thinking about a full, faithfull-yet-moddable port of CIV to the 21st century's technologies...

If you up to it, you should contact with humbe. He has a good civ1clone project on git repository. He ended up reprogramming my project totally. I think his work is quite promising although game is nowhere near completed.

 

[darkpanda]

Just for curiosity's sake, what would be the top challenge? The act of writing raw 8086 assembler? Fitting everything into 16-bit segments? Extending the game to EMS, XMS, or 286-style DPMI to provide more RAM for the AI?

Definitely all of them are challenging!

But given my current knowledge, the less challenging of all would be to write the raw 8086 assembly, although it might be really challenging to find a way to allocate more data...

Fitting everything into 16-bit segments is obviously not straightforward, but CIV natively has an overlay mechanism that could be leveraged to arbitrarily add code as necessary.

Definitely, the most complex part for me, at this stage, would be to extend the code to use EMS/XMS or DPMI... A year ago I basically had zero knowledge of ASM, except that it existed, and although I made quick progress, the MS-DOS system part of the code remains the most tricky one for me, especially because it would be a hell to test and debug.

The near term result of your research seems to be to produce a fully specified ruleset, bugs included, at the top level. This is really step 1 in writing a clone but it's never been done.

Yes, that's what I want to do: keep the original CIV experience as I knew it, but make it extensible in some conservative ways: bigger/smaller maps, more than 6 opponents, more task automation (auto-settlers, city production lists), more advanced or better reporting, etc.

Then making the AI "better", or at least experiment with AI tweaking would be interesting too... Sometimes I'm imagining massively running AI-only games with some kinds of reinforcement learning, and see if interesting heuristics can emerge, but that's still in the "dream" part of the to-do list

Anyhow, any of this requires to know the original rules first.

 

[darkpanda]

If you up to it, you should contact with humbe. He has a good civ1clone project on git repository. He ended up reprogramming my project totally. I think his work is quite promising although game is nowhere near completed.

I did see your post fly across, but never took the time to try it out... Eventually, I think I will get into coding a clone, but right now I'm analyzing CIV in its guts, and publishing everything I deem of interest, so if humbe or other contributors find it worthwhile to re-code, it's all for the best.

As a matter of fact, most of the CIV.EXE code that I am browsing at, I am re-coding in Java as a sub-tree of JCivED, so the next release of JCivED will contain a random bunch of ported code, even though not used in JCivED itself.