Modding the aspects of "Game Speed"

[Max_x_fire]

I Have tried that too - succesfully added a new gamespeed with it's own name - only problem, suddenly all cities become legandary with only 1 culture point the first who manged it to found 3 cities won the culture victory

anyone knows what have to be canged/added here ?

Yeah, its been mentioned but here it is again

Look for this file:

\assets\XML\GameInfo\CIV4CultureLevelInfo.xml

Open this up and you will see:

<CultureLevelInfo>
<Type>CULTURELEVEL_NONE</Type>
<Description>TXT_KEY_CULTURELEVEL_NONE</Description>
<iCityDefenseModifier>0</iCityDefenseModifier>
<SpeedThresholds>
<SpeedThreshold>
<GameSpeedType>GAMESPEED_EPIC</GameSpeedType>
<iThreshold>0</iThreshold>
</SpeedThreshold>
<SpeedThreshold>
<GameSpeedType>GAMESPEED_NORMAL</GameSpeedType>
<iThreshold>0</iThreshold>
</SpeedThreshold>
<SpeedThreshold>
<GameSpeedType>GAMESPEED_QUICK</GameSpeedType>
<iThreshold>0</iThreshold>
</SpeedThreshold>
</SpeedThresholds>
</CultureLevelInfo>
...

You'll see the 3 standard speeds (Epic, Normal and Quick)
Just copy and paste a new section like:

<SpeedThreshold>
<GameSpeedType>GAMESPEED_EPIC</GameSpeedType>
<iThreshold>0</iThreshold>
</SpeedThreshold>

and change the text in BOLD to whatever name your new gamespeed is.
You then rinse/repeat this for all the culturelevel's, making sure to increment the "<iThreshold>0</iThreshold>" accordingly and your sorted!

Heres my "Testspeed" that I did when doing all this, you can simply change the name to suit or just use it for a reference.

PS. I also changed some of the values in the CIV4GameSpeedInfo.xml, so use with caution!

View attachment testspeed.zip

** Unzip to Mods folder in your Civ4 install dir, if in doubt make a backup!! **

 

[suspendinlight]

Just wanted to report in on my progress with "modding game speed". Based on Doseki's posts I modded my techinfos so that the costs are increased by an additional percentage which increases exponentially over the eras. Right now this factor ranges from ~100% (no change) for ancient era to ~400% for the modern era. I played one game fully through and found that the modern and industrial eras were much more fun to play. The pace felt the same over each era unlike in the vanilla version of the game. For example, I was able to fight a war with cavalry first, then another with tanks and marines, then one with modern armor and stealth bombers. This would have been impossible in the original version because by the time I created about 6 tanks, I would have discovered composites and have modern armor.

I also adjusted the turn increments to fit the new tech model and my first attempt was unsuccessful as I finished the game in about 1200 AD. Further adjustments have made this closer to the actual pace of history. I also set the initial start date back to 8000 BC to more accurately reflect when humans first began moving out of hunter-gatherer mode and towards real civilization.

Finally, I edited the rate of religion spread slightly to allow the very early religions (Budh, Hind) to spread more slowly than Judaism and Confucianism which in turn are slower to spread than Christianity and Taosim, and finally Islam spreads the fastest. I haven't been able to tell if this affects the game much, but it seemed fair since I added considerable cost to discovering later techs like Divine Right.

 

[spa]

Just wanted to report in on my progress with "modding game speed". Based on Doseki's posts I modded my techinfos so that the costs are increased by an additional percentage which increases exponentially over the eras. Right now this factor ranges from ~100% (no change) for ancient era to ~400% for the modern era. I played one game fully through and found that the modern and industrial eras were much more fun to play. The pace felt the same over each era unlike in the vanilla version of the game. For example, I was able to fight a war with cavalry first, then another with tanks and marines, then one with modern armor and stealth bombers. This would have been impossible in the original version because by the time I created about 6 tanks, I would have discovered composites and have modern armor.

I also adjusted the turn increments to fit the new tech model and my first attempt was unsuccessful as I finished the game in about 1200 AD. Further adjustments have made this closer to the actual pace of history. I also set the initial start date back to 8000 BC to more accurately reflect when humans first began moving out of hunter-gatherer mode and towards real civilization.

Finally, I edited the rate of religion spread slightly to allow the very early religions (Budh, Hind) to spread more slowly than Judaism and Confucianism which in turn are slower to spread than Christianity and Taosim, and finally Islam spreads the fastest. I haven't been able to tell if this affects the game much, but it seemed fair since I added considerable cost to discovering later techs like Divine Right.

This sounds promising. Are you planning on sharing the files when you're done? I for one would be interested in giving it a whirl because I too find it annoying how quickly units are outdated. I feel like I never get to use anything except calvalry and modern tanks.

-Sam

 

[snepp]

This sounds promising. Are you planning on sharing the files when you're done?

Or even before you're done?

 

[MRM]

Yeah, its been mentioned but here it is again

Look for this file:
Open this up and you will see:
You'll see the 3 standard speeds (Epic, Normal and Quick)
Just copy and paste a new section like:
and change the text in BOLD to whatever name your new gamespeed is.
You then rinse/repeat this for all the culturelevel's, making sure to increment the "<iThreshold>0</iThreshold>" accordingly and your sorted!

Heres my "Testspeed" that I did when doing all this, you can simply change the name to suit or just use it for a reference.

PS. I also changed some of the values in the CIV4GameSpeedInfo.xml, so use with caution!

View attachment 103427

** Unzip to Mods folder in your Civ4 install dir, if in doubt make a backup!! **

Thanks. I made a fast read acrose the thread but must have missed the part with culturelevelinfo . But now it works - well not perfect so far, I run out of money so my army starts do disband and research was canceled - ( I guess my version needs some finetuning with the inflation )

I try out yours tomorrow , but it's somehow fun to try it out for yourself to find the right balance ...

 

[Gufnork]

I've been getting worried about the power of early warfare with these mods. I'm about to get my second win on Immortal out of two attempts and I'm starting to think my mod is either imbalancing the game or screwing with the AI. Anyone else noticing similar things?

 

[suspendinlight]

I've been getting worried about the power of early warfare with these mods. I'm about to get my second win on Immortal out of two attempts and I'm starting to think my mod is either imbalancing the game or screwing with the AI. Anyone else noticing similar things?

What have you changed and why are you winning so much more easily? I haven't noticed any real difference in difficulty with my modifications. The first one I tried, I lost a space race on Prince which is what often happens to me. My second game looks to be turning out a little better and I will probably win, but it's not been overwhelming.

 

[Gufnork]

I think I know the problem. I tested a few vanilla games and while I produce troops much slower, the AI seems to have the same amount of troops as ever. I think they get quite a few free troops to begin with that is irrelevant to training speed. My reduction of training costs made that much less of an advantage.

 

[Drakken]

I am back on the Forum after over a week of playtesting several different speed mods. Thank God I am self-employed! It took me an hour to catch up reading the forum!! Good work everyone.

My results; sorry ahead of time for this will be long... (remember these are my experiences and not an insult to any style of play)

All of my games are based upon 300% research speeds and 3 times the number of turns in the game. All were played on prince settings to give the AI's a little edge. (other settings were variable)

My first several games had slow research but normal to medium build speeds. Several posts asked the question does increased numbers of units alter the game in any way? My conclusion is a definate yes! In 7 games where production was left between normal rates up to 150%... (in 3 of these games I upped the settler and worker cost to come in line with my 300% speed) I played 2 games as a peaceful civ, expanding quick but only defending myself with a few units in each city. I quit these games relatively early as I lost a few early wars and ended up with a very small civilization. I played 5 as a warmonger type. With settler production at a fast pace I expanded quickly in the early game and just overwhelmed the computer players militarily. With the slower settler and worker build time it was a lot slower to expand but I came up with the same result. In all of these games I got pretty easy domination victories (except for one I started in a bad location).

During the warmonger games I had money problems like many others who may have expanded rapidly in their games. I often had to raze captured cities because I couldn't afford to keep them. My pillaging of improvements and money offered for ceasefires and peace treaties kept me out of the red during these prolonged wars. Granted my research and economy were totally messed up but I still won the games pretty handily. I think this is due to the fact that you have 3x as many turns to use your units before they become outdated (early units like archers are useful for a very long timespan) and you can destroy enemy civs before they can outclass your units. In these games I was able to make a lot of early units and just threw them at the AI's over and over. In my opinion a dominating military is the most effective way to play with these settings. I do note the computer players do make more military units with faster production speeds but they do not make as many as I did. My units did have a lot of promotions (as someone mentioned earlier) but my sheer numbers seemed to be the bigger factor in victory.

In conclusion: Fast production and slow research is a great way to play if you like a lot of early combat with a lot of early units. Beware trying to win this way in a peaceful manner. It may be tons of fun to play against a lot of AI's with the constant war setting on in these types of mods. It may be more balanced in multiplayer as everyone has the same options. However, I don't think the different styles of play (i.e. research, cultural, warfare, etc.) are balanced with production set at the faster rates.

Next I played 4 games where all settings (research, culture and production) were set proprtionately to 300% of normal speeds. These played out very much like vanilla civ so there is not as much to report as I'm sure you have all had similar experiences. All of these games took a long time to finish!

I played two as a warmonger. With these proportionately slower production speeds I had mixed results... one game I won early in the industrial age the other I failed at slowly losing in a space race game. I was just barely into the modern era

I played 2 games as a peaceful civ. Also with mixed results I won a space race victory in one game and "can you believe it" a cultural loss in the other. Damn wonder building persians...

My conclusion about the game this way is that it does crawl through time... The number of units in the game was very much like vanilla civ but with more turns to use them. You do get to have really cool wars with many types of units up through the medieval era... and then the game does accelerate. Even with the extra turns to do research you still cannot use your late armies to much effect because it takes too long to produce the army with the proportionate production settings.

Like others have noted already... I have come to the conclusion that the individual techs do need to be adjusted if you want a game that flows seemlessly. This adjustment needs to be made so that in all eras one has equal opportunity to use the units at their disposal before they become outdated.

I definately enjoy the game much better at this slow pace. I will now try to tweak individual tech costs to get a slower paced lategame. I will post my findings for any that care.

 

[Drakken]

I am wondering if the speeding up of the late game has something to do with the fact that we are usually doing well in games where we reach the lategame. For example we are one of the larger civs with many cities and improvements. has anyone played the lategame while doing badly compared to the AI players? I am almost always one of the top civs when playing that far into the game.

I am wondering that if we make late techs cost too much that it will make moving up the tech tree almost impossible for the lesser players in each game. What do you guys think?

I know I read about the effects of a short anarchy in the forum. That was a great catch. But where do you change the number of turns in anarchy? It definately has to be increased with epic games or religious trait is almost useless.

 

[MRM]

I am wondering if the speeding up of the late game has something to do with the fact that we are usually doing well in games where we reach the lategame. For example we are one of the larger civs with many cities and improvements. has anyone played the lategame while doing badly compared to the AI players? I am almost always one of the top civs when playing that far into the game.

I guess youare somehow right. Yesterday I had a game where war raged nearly all the time. It was a two front war ( one from east, one from west ) , and my enemies where stronger in the beginning. Well somehow I survived , get srronger and pushed them back, recaptured lost cities and capured some of their, but all this took centuries. Result ( for the tech development ) Flight was discovered in the year 2000
But the problem is not wheter development goes faster or slower than in real history ( I guess it could have been slower or faster too in the real world )

But the problem is still ( for gameplay ) that you are often not able to sent your troops without risking that their are outdated before they arrive somewhere,and that building units often takes longer than discover new techs. Often I don't build units, because better are just a few turns away, so it's not worth building them. But not only units, city improvents too. I never benfit from a castle so far, gunpowder was often researched, before my first castle was finished. That why Civ 4 is IMO out of balance.

 

[Grunthex]

I find the only way to fix that, MRM, is to do your modding the hard way. There is *no* research one-setting-change that is ever going to give you ages past 3 that last. Once you hit the renaissance, it's like a runaway bobsled.

It's more work, but it's worth it.

 

[Vilu]

FYI, I just made a tool to edit research costs (multipliers) for each era. I thought you might be interested.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=140264

 

[Drakken]

Thank you Vilu that should help alot!

I am still trying to change the timeline to allow the late game to be played by season instead of by year. I don't mind playing the entire game by seasons as long as I can skip years worth of seasons during the early eras.

I can't seem to find any xml files that have actual values in the month_season format so I can try to alter them. Does anyone know where to find them?

 

[Stormbringer]

Ok, so I have a problem. I love long games that take many hours to play, and I love having lots of time to fight wars in the ancient, then medieval, then reinasance time, etc. So I changed my research modifier to 250 and adjusted some others accordingly and was pretty happy except for one thing. In the early games there is nothing to build after I finish all the buildings in cities except units, and units cost money, so soon after I am running a defecit because of so many units. Fighting wars became a way to reduce the deficit because my units die when I fight. So, is there any way to change the cost of units or how many units each city can support, or something like that? Thanks in advance for the responce.

 

[69king]

I've been playing a mod I made with everything at 200% (# of turns included) except unit production at 150%. I changed all tech costs individually like this:

Ancient: -25%
Classical: no change
Medieval: +25%
Renaissance: +50%
Industrial: +75%
Modern (and Future): +100%

I haven't tested a full game yet but I can tell you that I have been having a hell of war with the nearby barbarian civilization. I have had about 6-7 hours of war with them starting with warriors/archers, then swordsmen/axeman and only recently using horse archers. It is about 1000AD and I am just beginning the Medieval Period. So everything is good right now but I have yet to see how it will work in the later ages. (And when I finally get rid of those bastards I can get down to some serious civ'ing)

 

[Mosasaur]

I am wondering if the speeding up of the late game has something to do with the fact that we are usually doing well in games where we reach the lategame. For example we are one of the larger civs with many cities and improvements. has anyone played the lategame while doing badly compared to the AI players? I am almost always one of the top civs when playing that far into the game.

That's a good point Drakken, and I was wondering that myself. The one game I controlled about 50% of the land area when I started pumping out the tech at 1 every 2-3 turns. Lots of cities in this civ = lots of tech. I then played a couple games the peaceful way to test this theory making sure that I was about equal in power to the other top civs I was playing against. I still found that the techs came rolling in at an accellerated pace in the modern age: 3-6 turns each.

While I was playing my test games, I was keeping a close eye on my research levels as the game progressed. I found that, overall, my research spending went up exponentially (not linearly) through the course of the game. This makes sense because in the early game you're expanding and increasing your population thereby increasing your tech, and through the rest of the game you get buildings and civics that consistently boost your tech (libraries, universities, labs, etc.). Now if it's true that your research rate will increase at an exponential rate, it means that the tech costs should also increase at an exponential rate if you want it to take the same amount of time to research a tech at the beginning of the game as at the end. So I decided to put this to the test by putting all the techs in the game on a graph, comparing the order of which they appear in the game with the logarithm of their cost. I used a logarithm of the cost instead of just the cost because I want to test to see if their costs increase exponentially. If they do, then all the techs should fall on a straight line. See the attached excel file to have a look at the graph.

You'll notice a few interesting things looking at this graph. First you'll see that the techs increase at an exponential rate until you hit a jump between Writing (120) and Iron Working (200). This observation matches with my experiences with the game. You start off researching techs at about 1 every 10 turns (in a standard game) and then it starts getting faster until you get to Iron Working which is kind of a speedbump. Anyway looking at the graph again you'll see that tech costs go up at a very steady exponential rate from Iron Working all the way up to the Astronomy/Guilds area. From here on, you'll notice that the techs take a very significant drop in costs. Doesn't look significant at first, but take a straight edge and put it on your computer screen on the straight line between Iron Working and Astronomy, and you can see the tech costs drop right off at this point. This agrees with my experience in the game where techs just start to accelerate. At around the Flight tech, the tech rate seems to go back to the same progression rate that it was before. According to the graph, it's between Astronomy and Flight that the rate of technology cost increase is lower than all the rest of the time in the game, and this agrees with what I've experienced.

By using this graph you can kind of tell what the cost of a specific tech "should" be (based on the assumption that they tech cost increase rate of the rest of the game is the ideal pace). Combustion/Physics/Steel should be around 3400 (from 2400), Flight/Industrialism/Radio should be at 8000, and Fusion/Future Tech at 20000. I do think these values are a little excessive because from my experience, your research points do not increase at the same rate in the end game. But I just included this to give people an idea (if I'm right) of how much to increase tech costs in the end game if you want to mod it. I have yet to try this myself to see how it works out.

View attachment TechCosts.zip

 

[valrond]

I have been testing, as you have, a way to improve the gameplay and make longer games balanced. My last test was 1050 turns, 300% research, 200% growth rate, rest is 100% (I like to build units and buildings at normal speed, and besides, it's more correct historically, I have 5 year turns for the classical period. A good city like Rome might produce Legions at 2 turns, maybe one, and Legions took 5 years to traing, so it's not like taking 15-20 years as usual).

When I first played the modified game, I had the problem that we all had, nothing to build, lots of upkeep, low income. Then I changed the growth rate from 100 to 200%, and I don't have this problem anymore. However, I'm still hitting renaissance at AD, which is way too soon. Maybe changing the growth rate even higher (The biggest cities at this point have 18 size, quite big), and increase the research costs for the more advanced technologies with the tech cost editor.

On the other hand, I'm having great games, I can start and finish a war with the same units, maybe I'm able to get a new one, but that's all.

BTW, I've made a very simple excel sheet to input the years per turn and turns per historical period, and see were that period begins and ends.

 

[MSTK]

I found a way to get a "slower" tech rate and find the corresponding year and turn increments.

Just copy it from the Epic one.

What I did was I copied the Quick settings, and then changed Tech Rate to 150%. And because Epic's rate is the same thing (and yet the developers found a way to balance it out), you just use the Epic turnsettings.

 

[Dikaioma]

I found a way to get a "slower" tech rate and find the corresponding year and turn increments.

Just copy it from the Epic one.

What I did was I copied the Quick settings, and then changed Tech Rate to 150%. And because Epic's rate is the same thing (and yet the developers found a way to balance it out), you just use the Epic turnsettings.

I don't understand what you are trying to say here. Copy what from where? I am thinking you are saying to copy the tech rate from the epic one to the one you are making? But then, when I read your bottom paragraph, you are talking about copying the quick settings. What?