[Modmod]Sunset of Civilization

[Leoreth]

No I do read all threads, but I can't remote debug crashes from other modmods.

 

[black213]

Knoedel, now that Merjin's AllCivs was updated for 1.16, could we see a merge of that and Sunset?

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

Knoedel, now that Merjin's AllCivs was updated for 1.16, could we see a merge of that and Sunset?

Sorry, but I'm more interested in getting the already existing civs working and somewhat balanced, adding even more civs would make that even more complicated.

 

[black213]

Argh! I understand. Still anticipating for your official release (owo)

 

[Enyavar]

Some more feedback.

The additional troops on golden age are not helpful with all civs. The colonial civs appreciate all the settlers, I'm sure; but for example Greece can do nothing with settlers, because they don't provide meaningful building upgrades until renaissance; and Greece has too many cities in their Macedonian empire anyway. The Polynesians can't use the surprise golden age troops. Settlers, sure, and more boats, I guess. But for the Polynesians, an even stronger culture boost might be more important than a catapult etc. So, my request is that different civs get different golden age presents?
On another note, I have found a bug there: If you start a new golden age during a golden age, you still receive only one set of units. Also, that Amber Room wonder that lets you share golden ages of your defensive pact partners? That also grants you the same units, each time a GA is started. With that wonder, you get inundated in military.
So sometimes, the soldiers pile on and on. Another example, I'm just playing Italy and the additional troops forced an earlier-than planned civic change because I was not at war and with the third golden age, I could not pay all the troops anymore. Though I couldn't just fire them, because I knew that Italy gets invaded 200 years later. So I saved them up, never had to pay a single gold/hammer to produce soldiers and yet could easily kill Spain in the Big Reformation War. (Spain-Portugal vs. England-Germany-France-Italy).

Did you raise the cultural thresholds for cities? Or only decreased the culture bonus from Library/Weaver? Because I had severe problems with managing Italy's second UHV, and this time I did a straightforward Easy/Italy 600 AD start, not my usual precursor starts. I think I had a lucky start, but my culture triangle of Rome+Geneva+Venice couldn't get the required culture level by 1560. My strategy was: 100% research until I had the prereq techs for the three wonders (UHV 1), then 100% culture spending for nearly the entire time between 1300 to 1560. I had 1 great engineer (Sixtine Chapel just before HRE builds it) and six great artists, all delivering 2400 culture to my cities. I built exclusively culture buildings in my cities, too (exceptions for Harbors and Jails), and even joined the Reformation to get St. Thomas and the additional protestant cathedrals. And even with all that, I only ever got close to the goal. Even my best city narrowly missed the threshold.
I'm going to take another run where I research Cartography before going 100% culture (I guess that the great artists are better in reformation) and where I switch to Monasticism to get more of them; missing out on cheaper culture buildings.
Um, still about city thresholds. If you DID raise the thresholds, please don't consider lowering them again. The cultural victory is often easier than UHVs for late-game civs.

Idea for Golden Ages: Maybe do a popup choice here: {"Our outstanding cultural achievements have lead us into a golden age and our people is filled with energy. Which way should they be directed?"} - {Build a fighting force like no other - get lots of soldiers} - {Lead our people to settle new lands - get settlers, workers and garrison units} - {Select the most excellent people and use their ideas - get one great person depending on the civ.} That last point would mean: Great Artists for Italy or Polynesia. Great Engineers for Egypt or Rome. Great Statesmen for Britain or Greece. Great Prophets for Tibet or Spain.

The additional independent cities of Uruk, Knossos and Carales are a nice touch; Leoreth's DoC has these spots usually not settled. But Uruk (only available in 3000 BC starts) should be targetted for a raze by computer opponents: Barbarians and Persians should consider it as a bad place; by the Islamic conquest it should be gone. If not, then let the Arabs raze it, please. Now, Knossos and Carales are nice spots, but they tend to be independent. And stay that way. In my 3000 BC start Greece/England game, Carales was the Holy City for Catholicism, and do you think anyone wanted it? Nope. Only a human Italy player would ever bother to conquer Carales. (Don't know if it's included in the 1870 late-Italian resurrection zone).
So, um, my takeaway point here is that those cities maybe shouldn't appear guaranteed. A guaranteed Cnossos for Greece is fine; a guaranteed Carales for Italy to conquer is fine; but if the player isn't those civs, these cities could maybe have a 50/50 chance to appear?

Railways: Are no longer the big speed-up. Infantry units gain a speed of 10 instead of 6 - that is substantial, but not as much as from 3 to 10. And horses are slowed down from 12 to 10. In my games I haven't had tanks so far; but I expect them to also slow down on railways. So, make it 16 speed, please. When researching Infrastructure, increase to 20 (railroads; highways still 16). Aerodynamics then boosts both highways and railroads by another 4. Just an idea.

River movement: I stated it before, that is a great thing. I wish Leo had it in his mod, along with the military/civil unit movement reversal. In Leo's mod, I never used the slow infantry units except for defense and garrison. While your mod made pikemen worth the investment, again. Once you are used to single-move worthless workers, you stop to miss them as two-move units.

Spoiler But, back to river movement: I think I discovered a bug. :

In this picture, you can see how a worker unit moved from one river origin to a different river origin, and only used a half move. I think I had a similar situation elsewhere on the map before, but this one stood out for me. I tried to find other places, but this one is confirmed: Crossing from one hill to another hill, both riverside but on different rivers, and not connected by roads, should result in using up the entire move.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

So, my request is that different civs get different golden age presents?

To a certain extent that already happens, as some civs get less land units but instead a few ships, and for anything other than granting free units I would have to look into writing additional code.

On another note, I have found a bug there: If you start a new golden age during a golden age, you still receive only one set of units.

Yeah I know about that, but I'm unsure how to fix it.

Maybe the best solution would be to only grant the bonus units for your first ever Golden Age as a sort of of delayed starting bonus for newly born civs? That was after all the original intention behind this idea.

Did you raise the cultural thresholds for cities? Or only decreased the culture bonus from Library/Weaver? Because I had severe problems with managing Italy's second UHV, and this time I did a straightforward Easy/Italy 600 AD start, not my usual precursor starts. I think I had a lucky start, but my culture triangle of Rome+Geneva+Venice couldn't get the required culture level by 1560. My strategy was: 100% research until I had the prereq techs for the three wonders (UHV 1), then 100% culture spending for nearly the entire time between 1300 to 1560. I had 1 great engineer (Sixtine Chapel just before HRE builds it) and six great artists, all delivering 2400 culture to my cities. I built exclusively culture buildings in my cities, too (exceptions for Harbors and Jails), and even joined the Reformation to get St. Thomas and the additional protestant cathedrals. And even with all that, I only ever got close to the goal. Even my best city narrowly missed the threshold.
I'm going to take another run where I research Cartography before going 100% culture (I guess that the great artists are better in reformation) and where I switch to Monasticism to get more of them; missing out on cheaper culture buildings.
Um, still about city thresholds. If you DID raise the thresholds, please don't consider lowering them again. The cultural victory is often easier than UHVs for late-game civs.

I doubled the threshold for Influential culture from 5k to 10k and lowered the threshold for Legendary culture to 40k instead of 50k. The first I did because I wanted to be more consistent between the thresholds so each one is exactly ten times as high as the last one instead of switching between 10x and 50x thresholds. In that vein I might increase the Legendary threshold to 100k if you think that's reasonable. I lowered it because I figured a cultural victory was unachievable for most players and civs.

I forgot about Italy's UHV when I doubled the threshold for Influential. I also moved the deadline back to 1560 from 1600, so that's two important factors making that goal significantly harder.

I like 1560 as a deadline because it's the historical end of the Italian Wars and the Council of Trent which kicked off the Counter-Reformation, but maybe 1650 (Peace of Westphalia) would work better? Then again that might be too late and therefore easy. The only other notable event in Italy between those was the Ottoman-Venetian War 1570-73. The only justification for the old deadline of 1600 I could find was the first Italian translation of the Bible.

What do you think?

Idea for Golden Ages: Maybe do a popup choice here: {"Our outstanding cultural achievements have lead us into a golden age and our people is filled with energy. Which way should they be directed?"} - {Build a fighting force like no other - get lots of soldiers} - {Lead our people to settle new lands - get settlers, workers and garrison units} - {Select the most excellent people and use their ideas - get one great person depending on the civ.} That last point would mean: Great Artists for Italy or Polynesia. Great Engineers for Egypt or Rome. Great Statesmen for Britain or Greece. Great Prophets for Tibet or Spain.

Good idea in general, but a bit complex for my taste. I really think I'm going with limiting the free units event to the beginning of a civ's first ever Golden Age.

The additional independent cities of Uruk, Knossos and Carales are a nice touch; Leoreth's DoC has these spots usually not settled. But Uruk (only available in 3000 BC starts) should be targetted for a raze by computer opponents: Barbarians and Persians should consider it as a bad place; by the Islamic conquest it should be gone. If not, then let the Arabs raze it, please. Now, Knossos and Carales are nice spots, but they tend to be independent. And stay that way. In my 3000 BC start Greece/England game, Carales was the Holy City for Catholicism, and do you think anyone wanted it? Nope. Only a human Italy player would ever bother to conquer Carales. (Don't know if it's included in the 1870 late-Italian resurrection zone).
So, um, my takeaway point here is that those cities maybe shouldn't appear guaranteed. A guaranteed Cnossos for Greece is fine; a guaranteed Carales for Italy to conquer is fine; but if the player isn't those civs, these cities could maybe have a 50/50 chance to appear?

I never added Uruk as an Independent city, the Babylonian AI just really loves settling there.

Carales flips to Italy I believe, I even remember it being their capital from time to time.

I'll think about making Carales and Knossos random if the human isn't playing a nearby civ. There seems to be some precedent of this already, with there being a chance of Lübeck spawning instead of Hamburg if the human isn't Holy Rome.

Railways: Are no longer the big speed-up. Infantry units gain a speed of 10 instead of 6 - that is substantial, but not as much as from 3 to 10. And horses are slowed down from 12 to 10. In my games I haven't had tanks so far; but I expect them to also slow down on railways. So, make it 16 speed, please. When researching Infrastructure, increase to 20 (railroads; highways still 16). Aerodynamics then boosts both highways and railroads by another 4. Just an idea.

Good catch, I really should have put some time into testing this instead of just hoping for the best.

I'll have to play around with the XML a bit because the way it works seems a bit complicated. According to CIV4RouteInfos.xml, Roads, Railroads, Roman Roads and Highways have these respective values:

<iMovement>30</iMovement>
<iFlatMovement>30</iFlatMovement>

<iMovement>20</iMovement>
<iFlatMovement>6</iFlatMovement>

<iMovement>20</iMovement>
<iFlatMovement>30</iFlatMovement>

<iMovement>20</iMovement>
<iFlatMovement>6</iFlatMovement>

River movement: I stated it before, that is a great thing. I wish Leo had it in his mod, along with the military/civil unit movement reversal. In Leo's mod, I never used the slow infantry units except for defense and garrison. While your mod made pikemen worth the investment, again. Once you are used to single-move worthless workers, you stop to miss them as two-move units.

Don't let your dreams be dreams, just go bother Leoreth until he does your bidding for you!

Spoiler JUST DO IT. :

Spoiler But, back to river movement: I think I discovered a bug. :

In this picture, you can see how a worker unit moved from one river origin to a different river origin, and only used a half move. I think I had a similar situation elsewhere on the map before, but this one stood out for me. I tried to find other places, but this one is confirmed: Crossing from one hill to another hill, both riverside but on different rivers, and not connected by roads, should result in using up the entire move.View attachment 531235

[/QUOTE]

I know of this, but unfortunately the code is really simple in this regard and only checks if the relevant tiles are next to a river, not if they are connected by the same river. I don't think there's an easy solution to this problem.

At any rate, thank you ever so much for your time and effort, your feedback is invaluable and part of the reason I'm delaying the official next release is precisely because I first want to fix a few things that I overlooked but others noticed.

 

[Enyavar]

I like 1560 as a deadline because it's the historical end of the Italian Wars and the Council of Trent which kicked off the Counter-Reformation, but maybe 1650 (Peace of Westphalia) would work better? Then again that might be too late and therefore easy. The only other notable event in Italy between those was the Ottoman-Venetian War 1570-73. The only justification for the old deadline of 1600 I could find was the first Italian translation of the Bible.

What do you think?

I continued playing Italy. With my first strategy I just managed to hit the deadline in 1585 with all three cities. With the second strategy, I pulled my Venezia over the finishing line first, right in 1560, and produced two great artists in short succession 1555 and 1565.

In my opinion, 1580 would be okay. Yes it's only those four turns difference, but it's okay and possible if the player sacrifices anything for the extra culture. 1600 to make it a bit easier. 1650 is probably easy enough so that you can even do it with a cold start on Monarch levels.
However, after having pushed that far, I got a steady culture output between 150 and 400 in those three cities. I dialed back the culture immediately after hitting influential, but even then I have a culture surplus of 100+ in all three cities. I will continue playing, but I fear that I'll be hitting Legendary before year 1945.


About the river movement, I thought I looked it up previously, and I couldn't find instances where "river adjacent forest hill to river adjacent forest hill" resulted in a second move for the worker. Odd, but if the movement rules are really that simple and straightforward, the current situation is better than fixing the issue with thousand lines of code.

 

[black213]

Managed to get the download to complete with Tortoise!
Attached is a save of a looping turn, pressing next turn should be enough to cause it (tried three times).

 

[Enyavar]

Today I continued my voyage into the 20th century with Italy. Something strange happened with Vienna.

Austria collapsed when I had 70% culture in Wien from Venezia. Afterwards, the Independent state had ~750 culture in Wien; my Venezia had over 28000 culture. The hill plot directly south of Vienna and directly northeast of Venezia was, of course, dominated by me. The independents however gained control of this plot one turn after their independence! And in every turn afterwards their influence rose by 12% points. I checked these values in world builder; Vienna and Venezia still had the same low/high culture values, but the effect on the surrounding areas was that the independents gained +1000 culture per round in the offending plot. Such a thing only occurs with Independents, as far as I observed (also in DoC before, but never that obvious).

I am asking this in this thread, but I don't think it's a specific SoC problem, more probably rooted in DoC. I just wanted to alert someone to the problem; Prussia has by now conquered Wien and my Italy controls 7/8 surrounding plots.

Edit: After a dozen more turns, Prussia has completely eliminated my culture in the city of Wien/Vienna itself: The culture bar in the city screen shows 55/45 Germany/Independent control; even in world view the Italian culture is at 4%. Still, all the neighboring plots are heavily dominated by Italy. I'm just curious if the mechanics are supposed to be that way.

Edit in October: I still have all savegames of that Italy game, if you'd like to debug with them.

 

[black213]

It seems that whenever I end the turn prior to winning the UHV, the game crashes! Quite the anticlimax.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

It seems that whenever I end the turn prior to winning the UHV, the game crashes! Quite the anticlimax.

Yeah I know, but isn't it that way in Vanilla DoC too for many civs?

 

[Enyavar]

Not really a crash in my case, I am simply trying to advance one turn and the game freezes while processing other civilizations. That's a problem I encountered often before; but never five times in a row at the same turn. I am getting quite proficient with the taskkill-command.

I am thinking the problem is with my PC, not the mod. Knödel, could I ask you to post a savegame of my next turn? I am still hopeful to finish my current game next month ;-P


Edit: since compatibility could be an issue: I'm on the version of your mod of this June 30.

 

[1SDANi]

Yeah I know, but isn't it that way in Vanilla DoC too for many civs?

Not AFAIK

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

Not AFAIK

Wait, really? Huh. Guess I've got some debugging to do then.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

I think Christmas will make a nice deadline for the next official release, exactly a year after the initial one.

Here's my To Do List:

• Merge my Scaling Garrison Unhappiness Modcomp
• Debug "recently" posted saves:
  • PinkPallin
  • black213
  • Enyavar
• Make Knossos and Carales spawn semi-randomly
• Make only the first ever Golden Age a civ experiences spawn a bunch of units instead of all of them
• Fix Railroad (and Highway) movement
• Increase the Legendary culture threshold to 100k?
• Move the deadline for Italy's culture goal forward
• Fix the game crashing on winning by UHV for many civs

That should be achievable.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

New commit:

Merge my Scaling Garrison Unhappiness Modcomp

CHECK

( This took longer than expected because I'm an idiot who took way too long to figure out that all the code in the world multiplying a given variable won't accomplish anything if I just plum forget to ever assign that variable a value that is not zero. )

To quote my commit message:

As cities grow in size, they require more than just a single Warrior to not become afraid from the lack of military protection; as a rule of thumb the sum of all stationed units' garrison values should not fall below the population size to keep the peace; a unit's garrison value is now displayed in its tooltip; some buildings such as Barracks and Walls reduce a city's need for military protection to free up units.

Playing the excellent Planetfall mod gave me some more inspiration for other mechanics:

How would people like it if in addition to just cultural pressure, unhappiness and starvation would also contribute to a city's likelihood to revolt? I propose that if there is no cultural pressure but a city still revolts two times from unhappiness and/or starvation it would just become independent, barbarian or native depending on the situation. Totalitarianism should make a civ immune to losing cities from revolts.

A neat little feature I also found in Planetfall is that you can use one unit per turn to "pillage" a revolting city, which gives you a bunch of gold in exchange for increasing the revolt timer and decreasing the city's population. Maybe I'll steal this at some point once I understand the current new city sacking mechanic a bit better and find it could use a little extra something.

Finally, for once an idea I came up with myself, espionage should provide some benefit even if you're completely isolated, just so all that free commerce doesn't go to complete waste. One idea I had was reducing a city's unhappiness, but I'm still mulling over the exact numbers. Something like -10% unhappiness for every X espionage a city produces, with X being the population? (Totalitarianism would invert this effect to +10% happiness or something instead) Alternatively, if you have no target to direct espionage against, espionage could just automatically be converted into culture?

Ah well, maybe I should focus on actually implementing the ideas I already had instead of coming up with new ones all the time.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

New commit(s):

• Make only the first ever Golden Age a civ experiences spawn a bunch of units instead of all of them
• Fix Railroad (and Highway) movement

CHECK

Also, cities in civs that don't run Totalitarianism can now revolt from starvation and unhappiness and flip to Independent control when they do the second time.

To clarify: A city needs to revolt two times over the same issue (culture, hunger, or unhappiness) to flip, the first revolt of any cause is just a "warning" revolt so to speak. A city could revolt three times without flipping if all revolts were for a different reason, or flip with the second revolt already if the revolt occurred for the same reason as the first one. The City Garrison promotion line helps lower a city's revolt chance. Resolving a crisis with a Statesman resets the revolt counters for hunger and unhappiness back to zero in all cities that already suffered from a warning revolt.

Russia in the 1700AD scenario starts with some settlers in her easternmost cities so players can still make the Siberian colonization deadline in 1720AD if they are quick about it. To compensate, I removed the universities in Moscow and Kiev, which incidentally makes more historic sense anyway as Russia founded her first university only in 1755. I also placed some forts in the Siberian wilderness to simulate already existing colonization efforts. Remember, founding a city on top of a Fort grants extra population and money!

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

Civics yadda yadda

So I did done some more thoughts:

In the early game you will get extra happiness either from Imperial Cult (when running Despotism or Monarchy) or Republic. Monarchy will grant extra happiness from State Religion (after all, there hasn't been a single example of a secular monarchy in human history so far with the possible exception of North Korea which is its own special brand of... special) so once you have your state religion spread around you are less reliant on Imperial Cult and have more of an incentive to switch to Aristocracy. Conservatism should also provide some bonus for your state religion.

However, what I really want to talk about are some of the ideas I had for civic effects that incentivize you to behave in certain ways in regards to other civilizations. Something like:

Conservatism:
For every living civ you know running no Industrial or later civics (i.e. civics that are unlocked by a tech in the Industrial or later eras) this turn you receive:

• +25% Gold, Espionage, and Culture in Capital

Liberalism:
For every living civ you know and have open borders with you receive:

• +25% Trade Route Commerce

For every 1k Commerce globally produced this turn you receive:

• +10% Great People Birth Rate

Socialism:
For every living civ you know with more Gold than you in their treasury this turn you receive:

• +10% Production, Research and Espionage

For every 1k Production globally produced this turn you receive:

• -1% Inflation

Fascism/Purity:
For every living civ you are at war with this turn you receive:

• +1 Experience Point for newly created units
• +1% Military Unit Production

For every 1% of your culture in a city that city receives:

• +1% Food

For every 1% of foreign culture in a city that city receives:

• -1% Commerce
• +0.1 Unhappy

In a nutshell, conservatives want to suppress newer forms of government spreading for as long as they can, liberals want free trade and money all over the world, socialists want to industrialize the entire world and hoard as little money as possible, and fascists just want to see the world burn, starting with foreigners.

Edit: Oh wait, how about instead of a boring happiness bonus directly from your state religion, Monarchy would grant extra happiness from all State Religion Buildings, including the Pagan Temple if you don't have one.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

Managed to get the download to complete with Tortoise!
Attached is a save of a looping turn, pressing next turn should be enough to cause it (tried three times).

So I finally took a look at this save.

It really did take a long loooooong time, but eventually the next turn did arrive. I uploaded the save if you're still interested.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

It seems that whenever I end the turn prior to winning the UHV, the game crashes! Quite the anticlimax.

Aha! So it turns out this is a problem with DoC after all, and not my mod! This means I'll just kick back, relax, and let Leoreth deal with it, only to claim the fruits of his labor for myself later on.