Modding the aspects of "Game Speed"

[mark24]

As a rule of thumb, if we are doubling the number of turns, does it make sense to half the inflation?

What is "inflation offset"?

Mark

 

[Adam7Eight]

According to your formula kevchod, it would look something like this:

<GameTurnInfos>
				<GameTurnInfo>
					<iYearIncrement>31</iYearIncrement>
					<iTurnsPerIncrement>65</iTurnsPerIncrement>
				</GameTurnInfo>
				<GameTurnInfo>
					<iYearIncrement>20</iYearIncrement>
					<iTurnsPerIncrement>52</iTurnsPerIncrement>
				</GameTurnInfo>
				<GameTurnInfo>
					<iYearIncrement>16</iYearIncrement>
					<iTurnsPerIncrement>91</iTurnsPerIncrement>
				</GameTurnInfo>
				<GameTurnInfo>
					<iYearIncrement>8</iYearIncrement>
					<iTurnsPerIncrement>78</iTurnsPerIncrement>
				</GameTurnInfo>
				<GameTurnInfo>
					<iYearIncrement>4</iYearIncrement>
					<iTurnsPerIncrement>169</iTurnsPerIncrement>
				</GameTurnInfo>
				<GameTurnInfo>
					<iYearIncrement>2</iYearIncrement>
					<iTurnsPerIncrement>130</iTurnsPerIncrement>
				</GameTurnInfo>
				<GameTurnInfo>
					<iYearIncrement>1</iYearIncrement>
					<iTurnsPerIncrement>260</iTurnsPerIncrement>
				</GameTurnInfo>
			</GameTurnInfos>

I'm going to test it out.

 

[byrdie]

Someone please let me know when they nail the time and production adjustments to correspond to a longer research rate. I've been playing with it for days.


We need to account for infrastructure in thinking about making a longer game. If we leave unit production and efficency the same and only adjust time and research in proportion to eachother, it will not work, becuase our workers and buildings will accumulate, which will speed up research.

I followed someone's suggestion about this and trippled my research rate while doubling time, the difference hopefully offsetting additional production/bulidings etc. I have not had time to play with it yet.

And how should we accout for inflation if we change our time/research values?

I really want to play a truely epic game, one in which I can play with musketmen for a few nights before moving on, for example. One that lasts a few weeks at least.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

To my knowlede after looking at the files, most values have to be increased, and unit production decreased.

We want a longer game, but faster production of units to wage war with lots of not outdated units.

All infrastructure should take longer to build, as should both settlers, workers and workboats.

 

[Tarkhan]

so to maintain game balance, as Firaxis has it now, could we not increase production cost/time and infrastructure build time by the same percentage as we increase research times?

 

[Adam7Eight]

I just want to point out that I've been playing a while with the turns/years adjusted to what I posted a few spots above (using kevchod's formula). Instead of getting mathematics around 1350 AD like mentioned earlier in the thread I had discovered it around 700 AD. So the turns/years are more on track for what we're going for here.

I also agree with Jorgen... I think we're going to have to increase everything accept for the creation of units. My only question is, which tag(s) exactly do we edit, or not edit? I'm guessing the "iTrainPercent =" tag. But what about the "iCreatePercent =" or the other 4 unit tags? I wish Isak would tell us what they all mean.

 

[mayonaise]

are increments less than 1 possible?

 

[mark24]

Low,

So by increasing infrastucture build time as well as research, we avoid the effect that byrdie mentions in post #43? That is, by increasing research & the time increments by +200, the effect doesn't actually equal just a doubling of the research (operationally more like +150) , by dint of the fact the built buildings contribute to science in such a way as to unbalance the +200 setting. The result being research occurring faster than the anticipated.

Mark

 

[Adam7Eight]

It's real early in the morning, so forgive me if I'm misunderstanding the question or not making any sense...

Since the basic goal in all of this is to make games (research) longer, but make units quicker... if we raised everything by a certain percentage the game is going to be longer no matter what. So I think the rate at which improvements and other factors speed up research is irrelevant since it's still going to be a longer epic game anyway you look at it. I don't think it's going make much difference if it's all at 100%, 150%, 200%, etc. We just want to play around with era-specific units a little longer before they become obsolete.

But, if there is going to be an imbalance, especially later in the game, then those infrastructure settings are going to have to be changed, probably to a higher value than research itself... unless, we were to change the values and specifics of the improvements and buildings themselves (which would probably be the better route to take, unfortunately). For example, say a library offers a 50% research increase, then we would have to lower it to like 25%, and so on for the other research-related buildings.

I don't know though. And we're not going to be sure until a few of us sit down and start playing some longer games with these higher percentages to find out.

 

[Rabbit_Alex]

Somebody should package all this into something people can download. Alot of people aren't comfortable editing files by themselves.

 

[Adam7Eight]

We'll probably do that... once we know what the hell we're doing.

 

[Wlauzon]

I still am not clear on what the "Inflation" tag does. What, exactly, gets "inflated"?

 

[byrdie]

I agree that we should probably simply increase some of these percentages in proportion to our research increase, but some of them are confusing and I do not know what they mean. But the logic sounds good; just double research, for example, while halfing year increment and doubling years per increment. Then, just double those values associated with all improvements and so forth, but obviously keep unit production the same to play with them, as the previous poster said. Again, I'm not 100 percent sure on some of these. A few to think about; any thoughs?

iUnitDiscoverPercent>150</iUnitDiscoverPercent>
<iCreatePercent>150</iCreatePercent>
iGrowthPercent>150</iGrowthPercent>
iBuildPercent>150</iBuildPercent>
iFeatureProductionPercent>150</iFeatureProductionPercent>
iInflationPercent>18</iInflationPercent>
iInflationOffset>-150</iInflationOffset>

Again, I am playing with tripple research (450%) and double time. I'll let you know how it works out. Please let me know any developments you find.

 

[Adam7Eight]

I don't have a clue on what most of those mean. I'd rather know before I go on any further tinkering around especially if it's gonna save time once I do know.

 

[Madrone]

Is there an actual hardcoded requirement that the game ends at 2050?

The logical way for it to be is that the game ends when all the allotted turns are completed, whatever year that would turn be.

So aside from trying to keep the ingame year as a point of reference to how you should be doing in technology, its not as important as first balancing the other values to your liking or intent.

 

[Rabbit_Alex]

I don't have a clue on what most of those mean. I'd rather know before I go on any further tinkering around especially if it's gonna save time once I do know.

I feel the same way. I want my technology and units to be on par for the year it is. So I should start building knights in the middle ages (year 1000 roughly). In all the games I've played I've always been way behind in technology and units for what year it was.

 

[Lord Shadow]

I agree that we should probably simply increase some of these percentages in proportion to our research increase, but some of them are confusing and I do not know what they mean. But the logic sounds good; just double research, for example, while halfing year increment and doubling years per increment. Then, just double those values associated with all improvements and so forth, but obviously keep unit production the same to play with them, as the previous poster said. Again, I'm not 100 percent sure on some of these. A few to think about; any thoughs?

iUnitDiscoverPercent>150</iUnitDiscoverPercent>
<iCreatePercent>150</iCreatePercent>
iGrowthPercent>150</iGrowthPercent>
iBuildPercent>150</iBuildPercent>
iFeatureProductionPercent>150</iFeatureProductionPercent>
iInflationPercent>18</iInflationPercent>
iInflationOffset>-150</iInflationOffset>

Again, I am playing with tripple research (450%) and double time. I'll let you know how it works out. Please let me know any developments you find.

Here are some speculations:

iUnitDiscoverPercent: How often you get new units out of Goody Huts (tm)
iCreatePercent:
iGrowthPercent: The time it takes for cities to grow in population (almost sure)
iBuildPercent: The time it takes for cities to build buildings
iFeatureProductionPercent: The time it takes for workers to build improvements (not sure)

I'm just guessing here, since the string names are not always particularly self-explanatory.

 

[Adam7Eight]

Since I had nothing better to do tonight I decided to go ahead and raise all the tags to 200% matching research, and then decreased the "iTrainPercent =" tag down to 100% for quicker creation of units and gave the game a quick whirl. Well... let me just say that no matter which way you (we) decide to go with this, it's also going to require the additional work of modifying specific units and possibly buildings to get the desired results. Trust me...

Out of all my cities, my estimated average speed for building a barracks was around 60 turns, and on the flip side of that, I was able to pump out settlers in 5-8 turns. IMO, that is not a good thing. Raising the infastructure to match the research is probably going to cause more imbalance than it would if we raised the research and left everything else at default. But, that's just a prediction.

My solution regarding research and infastructure: Keep the research around 200-250%, raise the building and creation tags around maybe 10-20% more than default.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I personally like the slower growth and decelerated rate for producing settlers with a default Civ4 than Civ3...

So, my solution regarding units: Decrease trainpercent maybe 25%, and altering settlers (and maybe workers) invidually to keep them at a default epic production rate.

That's about the best I can come up with if we want to keep a somewhat happy medium without doing a crapload of extra unit editing. I am going to try some new settings, and I should be able to tell fairly quickly if production rates for both units and buildings are too high or too low. If I can come up with something fairly reasonable I'll post it. Also, I'm going to keep the year/turn increments where they are from the last post I listed them in. They seemed to produce fairly decent results with the other game I was playing.

Anyways, I'm off to test...

 

[Adam7Eight]

If anyone else wants to try it out, here is what I got so far:

 <GameSpeedInfo>
  <Type>GAMESPEED_EPIC</Type> 
  <Description>TXT_KEY_GAMESPEED_EPIC</Description> 
  <Help>TXT_KEY_GAMESPEED_EPIC_HELP</Help> 
  <iGrowthPercent>170</iGrowthPercent> 
  <iTrainPercent>120</iTrainPercent> 
  <iConstructPercent>160</iConstructPercent> 
  <iCreatePercent>170</iCreatePercent> 
  <iResearchPercent>250</iResearchPercent> 
  <iBuildPercent>160</iBuildPercent> 
  <iImprovementPercent>160</iImprovementPercent> 
  <iGreatPeoplePercent>170</iGreatPeoplePercent> 
  <iCulturePercent>170</iCulturePercent> 
  <iAnarchyPercent>170</iAnarchyPercent> 
  <iBarbPercent>150</iBarbPercent> 
  <iFeatureProductionPercent>170</iFeatureProductionPercent> 
  <iUnitDiscoverPercent>170</iUnitDiscoverPercent> 
  <iUnitHurryPercent>170</iUnitHurryPercent> 
  <iUnitTradePercent>170</iUnitTradePercent> 
  <iUnitGreatWorkPercent>170</iUnitGreatWorkPercent> 
  <iGoldenAgePercent>170</iGoldenAgePercent> 
  <iHurryPercent>50</iHurryPercent> 
  <iHurryConscriptAngerPercent>170</iHurryConscriptAngerPercent> 
  <iInflationPercent>10</iInflationPercent> 
  <iInflationOffset>-160</iInflationOffset> 
- <GameTurnInfos>
- <GameTurnInfo>
  <iYearIncrement>31</iYearIncrement> 
  <iTurnsPerIncrement>65</iTurnsPerIncrement> 
  </GameTurnInfo>
- <GameTurnInfo>
  <iYearIncrement>20</iYearIncrement> 
  <iTurnsPerIncrement>52</iTurnsPerIncrement> 
  </GameTurnInfo>
- <GameTurnInfo>
  <iYearIncrement>16</iYearIncrement> 
  <iTurnsPerIncrement>91</iTurnsPerIncrement> 
  </GameTurnInfo>
- <GameTurnInfo>
  <iYearIncrement>8</iYearIncrement> 
  <iTurnsPerIncrement>78</iTurnsPerIncrement> 
  </GameTurnInfo>
- <GameTurnInfo>
  <iYearIncrement>4</iYearIncrement> 
  <iTurnsPerIncrement>169</iTurnsPerIncrement> 
  </GameTurnInfo>
- <GameTurnInfo>
  <iYearIncrement>2</iYearIncrement> 
  <iTurnsPerIncrement>130</iTurnsPerIncrement> 
  </GameTurnInfo>
- <GameTurnInfo>
  <iYearIncrement>1</iYearIncrement> 
  <iTurnsPerIncrement>260</iTurnsPerIncrement> 
  </GameTurnInfo>
  </GameTurnInfos>
  </GameSpeedInfo>

Keep in mind that Settlers will probably have to be changed seperately (if possible).

 

[69king]

Does the game always end at 2050 no matter what you set in the interval variables?