Modding the aspects of "Game Speed"

[ritterpa]

Well, that's why we playtest our mods. I can tell you right now that none of the problems you predicted happened in my game. They do unbalance traits a little, but it's not like they were anywhere near balanced anyway. Some are better at low difficulties, others at high and Organized just sucks any way you look at it.

Of course, a lot of the potential problems I brought up won't be noticeable in SP. The AI isn't dynamic enough to recognize that you're pulling a time mod and what exactly that means. Sure, they may figure out to produce more units because they can, but they won't figure to plunder more improvements or to seek an imbalance in particular civic research or to settle a few turns earlier at all costs or to switch civics every 5 turns. So you can play 100 SP games and think the mod is perfect, then play 10 MP games with it and find 17 problems.

 

[ritterpa]

Don't really see the problem with that. There are probably going to be times when you're just mucking about and waiting for thing X to happen, so pushing the 'End Turn' button in rapid succession is going to happen occasionally. I'm not sure why this is a bad thing in a game that's supposed to be paced slowly.

Max

That was my point, Max. It was in response to people trying to fix these "problems" which is basically acting reflexively on the very changes made to achieve the original goal.

 

[The Fjonis]

This seems very interesting! Like many others, I feel that tech research goes too fast. I want a game speed with as many turns as Epic, and Epic research rate, but everything else on normal (building production etc). Which lines of code from Epic should I copy into the Normal code in order to achieve this? The way I see it, it shouldn't be too many. (TurnIncrement, Research rate etc). Do you think this would work?


Cheers!

 

[maxpublic]

That was my point, Max. It was in response to people trying to fix these "problems" which is basically acting reflexively on the very changes made to achieve the original goal.

I don't see any of the folks actually trying to make a slow mod claiming these as "shortcomings" or problems. So far as I can tell, you're the only one that's done that.

As far as multiplayer goes, I don't think most of the people working on super-epic games really give a rip about it. It's not as if you're going to find a hundred spare hours to play with your dozen best friends, where all your schedules coincide perfectly. Well, unless you're all unemployed or still in high school, I suppose. And if you and your buddies are either of these things then you're in a much better position to make and playtest your own MP mod than anyone of us with jobs and families are, so hey - have at it!

Max

 

[King Jason]

Tone down the attitudes in this thread.

 

[Doskei]

@ritterpa ~
Just a quick question, so that I make sure that I understand you clearly. Are you saying that we should consider not making this mod because it's going to cause more problems than it solves?

you can play 100 SP games and think the mod is perfect, then play 10 MP games with it and find 17 problems.

I am building my mod specifically for multiplayer, to play with my roomate. Yeah, we've got time. We're in the classical age in our first test game, and aside from a plague of CTDs, I feel it's going very well. The slower expansion has helped to make the Barbarians more of a threat early game, because it's next to impossible to get LOS on your entire continent/area/etc before they start swarming. In my game it has led to a 30+ turn war at my frontier city (built to give my civ access to Iron).

modding percentages linearly (as is all we've looked at) is no longer adequate if you enable expansion to occur in a non-linearly balanced manner. Basically, from the moment you allow expansion to occur 1% faster, you have to pinpoint the exact percentage that that increases research due to the added commerce, and that elusively-quantified impact IS DYNAMIC for each turn that occurs after the deviation from the linearly balanced model of the original settings.

On this point I agree with you completely, and had actually brought that up earlier. I found it hard to guage the response to it but I think most of the modders here are still trying to find a perfect iResearchPercent rather than adjusting the relative cost of the techs. What I've done, and I think it's working very well, is to incrementally increase the cost of each tech tier level. Very early techs are virtually unaffected (tech tree's first column of techs is cost-increased by only 2%), but by the end of the game you're paying 12x normal costs. So far I'm very happy with the changes.

 

[woodelf]

Agreed. I keep checking back to see if anyone is posting improvements, but was getting turned off by this little tiff.

 

[suspendinlight]

What I've done, and I think it's working very well, is to incrementally increase the cost of each tech tier level. Very early techs are virtually unaffected (tech tree's first column of techs is cost-increased by only 2%), but by the end of the game you're paying 12x normal costs. So far I'm very happy with the changes.

Could you explain how you did this? This is exactly what I want because Industrial era and beyond techs go way too fast IMO. However, I haven't been able to find anything relevant in this thread. The ErasInfo file looked promising but then people discovered that it only affected games based on the starting era. Is there one (or a few) values that you modified, or did you have to go through and change each tech individually?

 

[Doskei]

Could you explain how you did this? .... Is there one (or a few) values that you modified, or did you have to go through and change each tech individually?

No, suspendinlight, I did it the hard way - tedious editing of the CIV4TechInfos.xml file. I decided I wanted about normal-cost techs to start, and about 12x techs by the end. Made that decision based on the fact that I wanted a game that was 3-4 times slower than normal, and the fact that the game is sped up 3-4 times in the lategame, and 3-4 times 3-4 is about twelve, so I made that my final goal. Then I took the number of "tiers" in the tech tree (19) and tried to gradually scale up my cost increases. I multiplied all the techs in tier 1 (Fishing, The Wheel, Agriculture, Hunting, Mysticism, and Mining) by 1.02. Tier 2 by 1.63. Tier 3 by 2.24. Increments of +61% all the way up to Fusion and Future tech, which were cost-increased to 12.00x of their original values.
I did make a new CIV4GameSpeed.xml file, mostly to give me infinite turns available. I also changed the iResearchPercent file in all game speeds to 100%. I've only played my mod in my own gamespeed (realtime), and may eventually remove the other gamespeeds from my mod entirely (if you load my mod, you're doing so to play on "realtime" so why have any other options?) Anyway my point is that the costs I gave to all the techs don't stack on anything in my mod. I've taken the research scalar out of the map sizes, the game speeds, and the difficulty levels. It's only at testing stages right now so I may put some of those scalars back in, but for now the costs are the costs, in any game.
I've included a ZIP file that should extract to TechCalculator.xls (Excel File). Excel was not one of the supported attachment filetypes, but Word is, and if you have Word, you probably have Excel. Anyway this is the file I created when I was working out the costs I was going to use. Let me know if you find it useful or have any questions about it.

 

[suspendinlight]

I guess I will be modding each tech value then. The excel sheet will be a helpful tool, thanks.

 

[ritterpa]

Max, yes there were others who were concerned about those effects and discussed modifying expansion/economic speeds to compensate, which caused me to express my concern with that idea. I don't think people would want to change it if they didn't see it in some way as a shortcoming. On the last page only: Posts 162, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175 all addressed the expansion speed and/or wealth creation in the early game (the two are entirely correlated, as the latter controls the former). I don't understand the aggression towards me; I was merely adding my opinion to that discussion--that changing anything economically opens up a whole new can of worms that may or may not be in this mod's best interests right now, that instead we should just accept some long and perhaps boring at times play as an effect of this mod, not necessarily a problem with it. From earlier responses, I believe the vast majority of folks agree with me there, but there were a few considering increased expansion and wealth early on.

Doskei,

I am certainly not saying this mod shouldn't happen. I'm looking forward to it way too much! I would just rather point out potential pitfalls before they occur, that way they can be monitored and perhaps dealt with a little more efficiently/productively and proactively concurrent with the research time tweaking. For pillaging in MP games, for example--it's more efficient to fix if you monitor it while you're playtesting everything else. That way you don't get done with a mod, then realize it's a problem and have to go back and playtest just to tweak that one seemingly peripheral but important aspect. I'd rather point out 10 issues ahead of time and have only 3 become real issues than to not point out any and have those 3 issues arise later, unexpectedly.

I think the mod is great. I never thought my post would come across as attacking. I was trying to help in the process, but I fear the euphoria surrounding the project made that sort of help unwanted. I think the misinterpretation is like when someone tells you they have a car picked out to buy, then gets mad, dejected, or disappointed when you tell them that that particular model has certain problems that they didn't know about or think to look for earlier. They may want to argue or deny those truths, and be angry at you on a personal level, even though you are, in fact, trying to help them find the best car.

 

[jpinard]

I'm disappointed to see some of the "jabs" posted here. You can make any of these files load-only mods so there is no conflict with multiplay. You cuild make a hundred different variants without touching the original game, and if you distribute the same mod folder set to your friends you can use it with multiplay for a better game experience.

Instead of looking at the problems - look at the fact we have a wealth of options to play with. No matter how Firaxis made Epic mode play out - there will be people who want to change it or tweak it. We should count ourselves fortunate that we can mod it so easily. So lets get back to sharing data.

Doskei - thanks for providing the chart. I have some charts and files I hope to have completed later tonight (depending on how I feel). It will make it slightly easier to consolidate some data changes between mods.

Jason, I sent you a pm - can you check it? Thanks.

 

[Doskei]

ritterpa ~
My apologies if my post came across as agressive. That's why I asked first if I was understanding you correctly, because I wasn't sure that I was. And as mentioned, I do agree that it would be unfortunately if you had to compromise the limits on expansion in order to achieve the goal of slowing down the game's pace. I'm all for those limits, I would just like to see them eased.

So speaking of, has anyone come up with another solution to the early-game upkeep problem? Here are my thoughts:
Some form of monetary alleviation is going to be necessary. Whether you only want more units, more and better cities, or both, you are going to incur more costs per turn than the game is going to let you have nicely. somehow it's going to be necessary to provide players with more money/turn or less costs/turn, or the mod is going to be worse than useless. I think everyone so far has assumed that this is only a problem until you research currency, because at that point you can solve all your problems with building wealth. Is this the case, though? Even lategame, I want to be able to have more cities and more units. Obviously the vanilla game is balanced to allow for one level of units ... is it reasonable to assume that it will play well with more units and cities, just because you can build wealth? Or are you going to get into a situation where a much higher ratio of your cities are required to constantly produce wealth just to offset the costs of your military and your buildings?
I think the next thing I'm going to try is increasing the coin-value of rivers, roads, gold mines, and silver mines. That should allow me to compensate for greater costs by expansion, but said expansion will still be limited by inflation costs and distance from my capitol (if I'm understanding the game mechanics properly). I'm hoping that I can make it beneficial for a player in my mod to expand to the number of Target Cities specified in the WorldInfos file, and detrimental to expand beyond that.

 

[ritterpa]

Doskei, wasn't primarily referring to you, but thanks for the reassurance nonetheless...anyway, on to the subject of wealth/maintenance:

Would it just be possible to reduce research costs so that they are somewhat lesser than proportional to total turns? That way, in the early years you'd be able to use something that already exists in the game (the less changed, the better) by reducing research percentage to cover the maintenance. I know that you, Doskei, are working on stratified tech values, so maybe the earlier techs could just be a little cheaper, then a lower research percentage allocation would cover both empire maintenance and the desired tech advancement pace?

 

[Doskei]

@ritterpa
Yes, that is certainly possible, it would just be a matter of changing a few things in that excel file of mine, and then editing the iCost values of the techs. Here's what I'm worried about though:
A) Will this have the desired effect? It would have to be a fairly substantial change. In my one test game so far, the finances hit me hard, but not until early classical - throughout ancient I was at 100% and still making money (playing on Noble). Inflation hadn't kicked in (I gave it a wide berth in my GameSpeed file), so I was really just operating on the coins in my cities, to pay for my buildings, units, and research. I also felt that the pace was EXCELLENT, much improved even in the ancient ages.

TANGENT ALERT: A lot of what I'm going for with my mod is to have better tech-cost BALANCING. I hate that you can travel five or six techs down your timeline before having to make a serious decision about whether it's wise to research another advanced tech on the same path, or catch one of the other disciplines up. What I mean is, you often research a 4th- or 5th tier tech for only slightly more time investment than a 1st- or 2nd-tier tech, which in my mind doesn't do enough to promte a well-rounded Civ. Making tech more expensive but also making cost [increases] from tier to tier more severe is a large part of my goal, so that you can research four or five lower-level techs in the time it would take to get the ONE at the frontier of your technology level.

B) So I'd like to preserve that, which means incrementally increasing the increase (as it were) in the original costs. Which means I'd have to drastically reduce the cost in the very early techs, which would break the mod for that time period.

C) Would that actually work? If you reduce the cost, you'd basically be saying - now you can choose between spending your money at a more reasonable pace (smaller percentage research for same amount of progress), or losing money at the same pace as before in order to get more tech faster. And maybe that would turn out to be equally (if not more) viable - you might find that your earlygame stockpile from goody huts was enough to get you through the tech quick enough that you could get to commerce or banking or something without sacrificing research. I'd be especially worried about this with the AI - are they really going to take their research down just because I've reduced the costs? I think it's unlikely, but couldn't say for sure without testing.

What about the opposite approach? What about increasing the cost of early-game tech, so that players HAVE to budget their research percentage or go bankrupt? I'd love to see a design in which a player was rewarded for intelligently managing their research. i.e. if you could balance the game in such a way that a player who cranked research was quickly stifled financially, preventing them from expanding efficiently, and thus set back technologically in the long term, I think that would be the best solution. But would increasing costs really have that effect? I think as a player I am always trying to be on the leading edge of technology, and will scramble to get ahead if I see a leaderboard that doesn't have me in the top 3 for "most advanced," so I may not be the best person to test that. Intellectually it should work that way - fall behind early to build a stronger infrastructure and leap forward to trounce everyone later on - but I'm just not convinced, so I always play the rat race with all the other Civs.

I think I've written enough for one post. ritterpa, I like your suggestion and think it bears testing, but I do obviously have concerns.

And I still don't have any better plans for long-term income/cost improvements, to make an epic gamespeed that can truly accomodate more units and cities. Such a solution would have to span all ages. I can try my idea of giving some tiles more commerce, but I'm sure there've got to be better solutions out there.

 

[JeBuS27]

Doskei, on the issue of expansion and units beyond the 'normal' means, I'd still like to point out that a player can reduce his research spending to balance his budget. Essentially, that's what every civilization has had to do. Balance your budget, or screw your economy.

By removing the penalty of a large military (high cost of upkeep) or the penalty of a large civilisation (high cost of maintenance), you are handing the game to the agressive civs. If the military civs of the game don't have a limiter, what good are the other styles of play?

 

[Roma Victa]

Good stuff, ritterpa. I've had the same concerns after doing some play testing (single player) with my own modifications. You've expressed them in a much better manner than I could have though. You are dead on about a tiny imbalance early in the game getting more and more out of control as the game progresses.

Some thoughts from my own experimenting so far...

Pillaging has been more prevalent with the increase in military units for me. One approach I'm experimenting with at the moment is to leave improvement build rates at the vanilla epic settings, but limiting the number of workers that a Civ can have at any given time. This lets me repair pillaging damage without being crippled while preventing improvements from being built too fast in the first place. I have upped the cost of creating a worker as well, so protecting them has become extemely crucial. I'm also toying with making unit upgrades for workers so that creating one mid game or late game is just as expensive as it is in ancient times.

To slow expansion down, I have made settlers a one unit maximum per Civ. When a city starts to build a settler, no other city in that Civ can even start to build one until the original settler is used up. I'm also tinkering with making each settler built more expensive that the last. Still trying to find a happy place where it is possible to build enough cities early to be fun and still limit rapid expansion later on.

Keeping your empire economically viable early on is a challenge, but messing with economics just opens up way too many cans of worms for me to find effective countermeasures for. Any economic adjustments I've tried so far have been thrown out. I'm hoping someone smarter than me finds a solution. For now, I've just decided that I have to make a tough choice between adequate defensive military and moderate research, or an offensive military and low research. This was always the case to some extent, of course, but it is more pronounced with more game turns, more troops, etc.. When I go the offensive route, it becomes imperative to attack the Civs who are pouring most of their resources into research. If not, they bury me later. One thing I've found is that any Civ who starts all alone with their own continent has a distinct advantage for that very reason. I make sure now that all Civs have to worry about potentially agressive neighbors from the get go.

Anarchy balance does need to be given some consideration. Leaving it at one turn makes Spiritual a useless trait.

Doskei's approach with the incremental research cost adjustments at each tier is definitely the way to go, judging by my experience so far. If you don't go that route, research rates just snowball exponentially at some point during a game. None of my experiments with simply adjusting the reseach rate percentage have found any way around it.

 

[JeBuS27]

Roma Victa, that's an ingenious way to limit growth. How are you doing that? Did you throw a iMaxPlayerInstances tag into the unit? That's the idea I had at work today. Or is there something I'm missing?

 

[Roma Victa]

Thanks. I just used CIV4UnitClassInfos.xml.

<UnitClassInfo>
<Type>UNITCLASS_SETTLER</Type>
<Description>TXT_KEY_UNIT_SETTLER</Description>
<iMaxGlobalInstances>-1</iMaxGlobalInstances>
<iMaxTeamInstances>-1</iMaxTeamInstances>
<iMaxPlayerInstances>1</iMaxPlayerInstances>
<DefaultUnit>UNIT_SETTLER</DefaultUnit>
</UnitClassInfo>

 

[Adam7Eight]

Nice Roma Victa. I like that idea. Going to do it myself.