Modding the aspects of "Game Speed"

jaynus said:
But in the ancient eras, we have no way to compensate in gold on how to upkeep these cities.

You could just make an ancient building generate some small amount of gold. Or, if possible, have the Palace put out a certain amount. Might make the difference in the Ancient Era, and be negligible later on.

Ma
 
I've been having the same money problems in the early game. I don't think the solution is free money from any buildings, but I think you should start out with the "can build wealth" aspect of the Currency tech. This would let you spend your production on money instead of making a bunch more military units that you can't afford. I've looked all through the XML files, and I can't figure out how to enable this, though. I didn't find anything about it in Assets\XML\Technologies\CIV4TechInfos.xml, or even in Assets\XML\GameInfo\CIV4CommerceInfo.xml.

Maybe someone can figure out where this asset is stored, and add "can build wealth" to an early tech like The Wheel.
 
I believe it's in CIV4ProcessInfo.xml, in the GameInfo directory, the relevant line being:

<iProductionToCommerceModifier>50</iProductionToCommerceModifier>

Max
 
maxpublic said:
I believe it's in CIV4ProcessInfo.xml, in the GameInfo directory, the relevant line being:

<iProductionToCommerceModifier>50</iProductionToCommerceModifier>

Max

I was trying to figure out how to enable production to commerce sooner, not alter the amount. This is the right file for that though. Thanks for the quick response.

I went to PROCESS_WEALTH and entered <TechPrereq>TECH_THE_WHEEL</TechPrereq> and I now am able to spend my city's production on money after researching the wheel. This should help balance out early game economics.
 
A Question thrown in.
I´d like to create a new game speed called "real epic", with 5 years per turn and make research corresponding to that. How do I do that?
And how do I have to change the research-value to fit for that?
 
Tanelor said:
I was trying to figure out how to enable production to commerce sooner, not alter the amount. This is the right file for that though. Thanks for the quick response.

I went to PROCESS_WEALTH and entered <TechPrereq>TECH_THE_WHEEL</TechPrereq> and I now am able to spend my city's production on money after researching the wheel. This should help balance out early game economics.

I wasn't as clear as I should've been. You can replace the line with:

<TechPrereq>NONE</TechPrereq>

And shield-to-gold production will be enabled for every civilization, regardless of starting techs. You can't leave the field empty or it'll throw an error. Actually you can and it'll still work just fine, but the above line avoids the error message and possible confusion on the part of folks who don't realize that the error is meaningless in this context.

Max
 
Umm, you guys do realize you don't have to build units or anything else if you don't want to, right?

When you get the pop-up, just click on a unit to start production, then enter the city view and click on the unit in the build queue to stop building it. Exit the city screen and boom-bam. No problem.
 
Tanelor said:
I've been having the same money problems in the early game. I don't think the solution is free money from any buildings, but I think you should start out with the "can build wealth" aspect of the Currency tech. This would let you spend your production on money instead of making a bunch more military units that you can't afford. I've looked all through the XML files, and I can't figure out how to enable this, though. I didn't find anything about it in Assets\XML\Technologies\CIV4TechInfos.xml, or even in Assets\XML\GameInfo\CIV4CommerceInfo.xml.
low said:
Umm, you guys do realize you don't have to build units or anything else if you don't want to, right?

When you get the pop-up, just click on a unit to start production, then enter the city view and click on the unit in the build queue to stop building it. Exit the city screen and boom-bam. No problem.
My guess is he knew, and was just trying to solve the problem at hand simultaneously - wasting city production earlygame isn't exactly a "dream solution."

I've got a mod that's working very well for what I/we want to do here, but have run into exactly the same problem. In my game I was trying to solve it by rushing for The Alphabet so that I could build research. I consider it a success of my mod that I was unable to do so - without The Alphabet, The Alphabet was all but out of reach ;). Allowing players to build gold in order to maintain their research levels is a much more elegant solution, and I'm going to implement some form of this as well.

Richosh said:
A Question thrown in.
I&#180;d like to create a new game speed called "real epic", with 5 years per turn and make research corresponding to that. How do I do that?
And how do I have to change the research-value to fit for that?
Start by reading through the entire thread. Once you do that, you should have a better basic understanding, and you can then ask specific questions if you are unable to work through a problem on your own.

- Doskei
 
I'm not entirely sure the economic difficulties you're experiencing are actually a problem. I mean, just don't build more cities. Expand at a reasonable, sustainable pace, the way the game intended. The cost in research is a balanced effect of your city rush. The game was designed that way.

I fiddled with all of this all day today on my own, and came to many of the same conclusions you've all discussed here. I also went ahead and reduced the bonus for production that stone, marble, etc gives you, because doubling production is just too much in a slow setting. I reduced it to 25%. I think some of you should consider doing the same.
 
I also considered placing wealth building earlier, then I realized that it would favor early aggressiveness way too much, almost to the point where no other strat is possible. I've tried a Praetorian rush and it lead me to completly dominate the game. If I hadn't been set back by huge financial problems I would have completly overrun them all.
 
Exactly, Gufnork. If you can't sustain your cities and your armies, you shouldn't have them. You can change the game rules if you want, but this isn't a game of who can build the most cities fastest.
 
Well, my last game was with 175% research, 100% unit and barbs and the rest on epic levels. I also halved the tech cost for starting techs and increased the cost by 25%-units each era. So modern techs cost 125% normal, Industrial 100% etc. I got some nice results from it, even if my large scale wars made things a bit off. I lagged behind a lot early, then raced past everyone. I think this might be the way to go for me. Let me know if anyone is interested in my CIV4TechInfos.xml, changing all those tech costs were a *****.

Edit: Oh, and the game took almost eight hours to complete.
 
JeBuS27 said:
Expand at a reasonable, sustainable pace, the way the game intended.
Reasonable advice, JeBuS27, but the whole reason this thread exists is because most of us don't want to play the game the way the designers intended. I for one think it would be more fun if we could rebalance the game so that you could expand, explore, and mobilize even before the classical age. I think most of the people here working on this, feel the same way. You said it yourself:
JeBuS27 said:
You can change the game rules if you want
We know, and we will. :)
 
Oh, believe me, I understand the drive to change the game to allow a longer, more drawn out battle between civs, but after having several players test out what I've done, without ever changing the economic balancing, I can tell you that it makes the game even better to have to restrain yourself. The drive for expansion can be deadly for you civ, just as it should be. It should be weighed against the ability to defend yourself. I've had 6 people play with it, and they all loved that it was such a delicate balance for them. Try it modding it without economic benefits and see.
 
JeBuS27 said:
Try it modding it without economic benefits and see.
I have, JeBuS27. I, too, like having to restrain myself, but I'd like to see more cities before I start having to do so. I just want a more epic scope. Epic scope = more cities (among other things). That doesn't mean I think you should be able to expand forever with no ill effects. I just want to be able to expand MORE without ill effects.

Still working on a decent way to allow for limited but still greater expansion.
 
Hey guys, just some quick input. Modifying the inflation rates seemed to get rid of finances being a HUGE issue, but still it limited my expansion enough to keep it realistic. Here were the settings I used:
- Lowered Inflation to 10% and offset to -220 to compensate for no money in ancient era and expansion

It got rid of the 30gold inflation cost with extended turns you get at around 1000bc, but by midevil/renisance it seemed balanced out.

Anyways, just my 2cents :)
 
Actually, with respect to inflation you can leave the time to increment alone and adjust the inflation percentage by dividing it by the increase in game length. That is, if your game is twice is long, divide the inflation percentage by 2; if five times as long, divide it by 5.

Also, changing gold production as I pointed out works exactly as advertised. And if you're turning production into gold to pay for your maintenance, you very well can't be spending that production on establishing new cities or building new units, which has the desired result of slowing you down - you HAVE to turn production into gold, or collapse.

It makes more sense to do it this way than attaching it to a specific tech, especially if the AI doesn't start with that tech or isn't likely to research it any time soon. AI players that don't do that are likely to fail in an extended early game, or at least suffer serious problems. The AI doesn't seem to be aware that it needs to change tactics in the ancient era, at least so far as I've seen in my tests.

Max
 
Whew, just got done reading this thread over the past few hours. Lots of great things going on. Here are my two pennies on some issues:

-As JeBuS27 got at, adjusting anything economically (as some have brought up maintenance costs/expansions speeds) will throw a LOT of things out of whack. First, it can really unbalance civics, so getting to a certain civic may be the only viable path to victory. Secondly, since gold and research are the same base commodity, adjusting the former impacts the latter. Lastly, enabling expansion at a faster-than-relative rate means that you're increasing research rates as more of a power function than linearly. That is, 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. So expanding three turns earlier than linearly balanced may result in huge tech discovery differences by the modern age. All of the above applies also to allowing production of wealth, research, or culture at earlier junctures of the game. So I would oppose doing much if any wealth tweaking in this mod, especially in the early game.

-Civics. This is going to require the most playtesting. The idea is that, as the mods are shaping up right now, civics that adjust military unit experience will be unbalanced, as those military promotions were meant to be enough to give a civ a legit advantage when they had, say, 15 units in a given era. But now they will put out perhaps 150. What will end up happening is that units which begin with higher experience as a result of a trait or civic will be more likely to fight more battles under these settings, and therefore be more likely to create a disparity in game balance compared to a civic that gives a civ a non-military advantage, especially when the effects of promotions are added in (that is, units that start with a promotion or two are more likely to win, therefore more likely to get promoted more, therefore more likely to win at even a HIGHER rate...). The counter-argument is that "well, 150 upgraded units against 150 non-upgraded units isn't more of an advantage than 15 upgraded units over 15 non-upgraded units, right?" Well, we don't know that. Civics were balanced based on the default civ speed, so perhaps some of the military experience civs had to be given disproportionate advantages to compensate for the small windows of opportunities for combat. Basically, if the benefit of a military civic for any one unit is equal to (benefit per battle) * (battles), then adjusting the second half of that formula can throw the whole thing out of whack, and we can't be guaranteed that the non-military civics scale proportionately. So, to maintain the balance of different types of strategies and victories, civics/buildings that give military advantages will have to be monitored and possibly adjusted later.

-Anarcy. Under these mods, anarchy becomes not much of an issue, since one turn becomes less valuable. Anarchy needs to be scaled along with everything else. Then, the spiritual trait has to be balanced if it creates a problem. Keeping anarchy at just one turn but increasing the total number of turns reduces the value of the spiritual trait. Perhaps anarchy could be scaled as a function of total turns.

-Pillaging improvements. Doubling worker time doesn't account for what will inevitably be increased pillaging due to more military units with many higher total movement points per era. Perhaps worker improvement time shouldn't quite be doubled but instead a little quicker than double. This probably won't be prevalent against the AI, but will have to be monitored in MP. Simply doubling worker times while vastly more than doubling the total number of military unit turns available per game may result in very undeveloped city terrain due to pillaging.

-Food/hammer/commerce balance. The very heart of the game balance system will get screwed up if GPP's aren't treated with care. They need to be properly scaled along with everything else, otherwise high food/high specialist cities become less valuable, and the entire civ terrain engine that balances around that becomes no longer balanced. Hilly and forested areas would become necessary for victory, and flatlands and coastal squares would be far less valuable. You may not like GP's much, but that's fodder for a different mod. Adjusting them in this mod opens up a can of worms that is far outside the scope of research and turn balance.

I think it is important that people realize the shortcomings of the game WRT this mod and accept them instead of trying to fix them to only create more and numerous and perhaps fatal errors and imbalances. Those "shortcomings" are:

-possibility that your cities will spend large periods of time producing military units or producing nothing at all

-possibility that expansion will be very slow

-possibility that most of your turns will simply be pressing the enter button

Those are all natural extensions of the mod. Trying to mod them out of it is trying to have your cake and eat it too, and could create more problems.
 
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.
 
ritterpa said:
-possibility that your cities will spend large periods of time producing military units or producing nothing at all

I rather hope so. That's kinda the point of playing a slow, extended, period-based game. You get to spend considerable time in each era without the worry of constant upgrades and tech advances. If your cities are doing anything BUT spending lots of time building military units or converting production to gold, you've screwed something up.

ritterpa said:
-possibility that expansion will be very slow

Again, that's something to hope for. A grand, epic, glacial sort of expansion where the placement and development of each city is a Really Big Deal(TM).

ritterpa said:
-possibility that most of your turns will simply be pressing the enter button

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
 
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