My ideas for Fall Further Modmodmodmodmod

[Mylon]

Broken Loose 0.12 for Fall Further 0.50 Patch N

Get it here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=9015

Source: http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=12396

Copy your FF folder and extract this over the asset folder.

Changes:

*Holistic Cultural Model. Culture spreads according to nationality and via trade.
*More trade routes. Should be no limit now.
*Fluid great people. The GPP required goes down every turn, which should keep the GPP flowing even into late game. Recommended turning off Altar of the Luonnatar.
*Fractional Trade Counting. 2 trades at 1.5 value each now gives 3 commerce.
*A few under the hood changes, moving code from onBeginPlayerTurn to onGameBeginTurn. This eliminates OOS issues due to certain civ's code (like the Scions or Archos). Still need to look at AI bits for OOS issues.

High Priority: (easy stuff to do)
*Higher wonder costs. In general, wonders seem kinda cheap, especially the ones for late game.

Short term:
*More city and unit maintenance. This might require some AI tweaks as not to bankrupt the AI.
*Make spring and vitalize take time to cast.
*Late game building tweaking. I'd rather see the buildings made more powerful, more expensive rather than more buildings overall. Some buildings are a double-whammy: The golden forge provides Mithril _and_ a free weaponsmith in every city? I might get rid of the free resources totally.
*Unique Feature improvement. In general, make the unique features something to really fight over.
*Guild Improvements. At the least, some kind of building each city can build to compliment the guild. - Not sure about this one as all of the guilds are powerful enough already without maintenance.

Mid Term:
*Change Scion haunted lands as something that expands automatically. It'll work very slowly but start at each city.
*New civ! I have some ideas kicking around about a civilization that has global improvements instead of specific buildings.
*Make the fractional trade counting more obvious to the player. The game displays the trade in both the python interface and the widget, and the widget will need the text entry changed to accommodate the change from an integer to a string.
*Diversified trade. Having trade routes from different civs increases total trade revenue. Sounds nice in concept, but then it becomes a traveling salesman type problem trying to determine the most optimum trade routes to have full effect.
*More "generic" features/buildings for evil, good, and different leader traits.

Long term:
*Expand/merge civs. The Grigori's adventurers, the Sidar's settled great warriors, the Dural's extra national wonders and so on don't seem to be enough to build a civilization on. I might give the Kuriotates the Dural's national wonders and expand the Kuriotates so they can build settlers but at an increasing cost each time.
*Expand/merge mana. There's a lot of mana types, many with redundant effects (lots of summons everywhere). Life/body/nature/growth all seems redundant, as an example.
*More late-game oomph. Try and reduce the monotony. Improved roads are a must, as is better cavalry. Vanilla Civ has nukes, tanks, and aircraft. FFH has Phalanxes, but they're only movement 1.
*More early-game oomph. Archers plus the warrior city defense bonus makes taking cities early on difficult. Barbarians overall should be weaker if they are the reason for this.

Issues:
*Aformentioned interface will not show the decimal trades properly.
*The way Fluid Great People works is during the python event onBeginPlayerTurn - This could create some strange results where GPP exceeds the amount of GPP required, and possibly cause an OOS issue.

 

[WarKirby]

the ideas for trade and culture sound interesting.

I've always thought that culture was a rather tacked-on mechanic in Civ IV. Taking cities culturally is near impossible, and once you've got the second ring of city culture, there's almost no tangible benefit to expending any more effort on it at all.

Vitalize already is a ritual, Genesis. The Vitalize spell is just a more localized version of it, and I personally like it that way. Spring, too.


But I'm really not keen on merging either civs or mana types. All of which have their own place in the lore. Each mana type is the precept of one of the gods. It wouldn't be right to just edit them out of history like that.

I do agree that from a gameplay standpoint, some of the civs and mana types are a little redundant, but I believe the solution to this is expanding each one individually, not merging them. You'll find an endless source of spell ideas here if you ask.

 

[Mylon]

I won't agree to the lore bit: The game comes first, the lore second. Unless you want to introduce more interactive fiction elements into the mix (which wouldn't be too hard to do, the event system can handle this), the lore is merely support to the gameplay. Some of the civs feel like taking vanilla Civ like the Americans and making a separate civ for Lincoln and Washington. I mean, we have the lore of the civil war to support having multiple American civs, but I'd rather have a few deep and interesting civilizations than a few shallow ones. The differences in base Civ4, and even FFH were fairly minor, but that's mostly because not all of the civs are present on the map at the same time.

For mana types, there's only so many attack spells, so many summons. Many of the debuffs seem fairly pointless, as by the point you can cast them you can also smash the enemy. I plan on making some changes to give each of the spell spheres their own kind of flavor. Death will be a permant summon line, entropy will be a debuff, shadow will allow adepts to hide and allow other possibilities, like a pseudo-command promotion.

 

[Valkrionn]

This post is mostly a place for me to keep track of my ideas and such for my own modmod. I was originally going to use Orbis as a base, but it looks like it needs a bit more attention to balance. There's good stuff in both, but FF seems like a better overall base I can rely on for constant updates that add more than new features. Which lets me focus, on, well, new features. Anyhow...

High Priority: (easy stuff to do)
*More trade routes. Mostly to accommodate all of the +trade route buildings.
*Fractional Trade counting. No more 5 trade routes generating 1.5 commerce each for 5 commerce total.
*Higher wonder costs. In general, wonders seem kinda cheap, especially the ones for late game.
*Make spring and vitalize take time to cast.

So far I like these, especially the fractional trade routes... Always bugged me too.

Short term:
*Fluid Great people. More GPP required overall and rival GPs increase the GPP required, but the max goes down every turn, ensuring a fairly steady rate of late-game GP.
*Holistic Cultural model. Make culture buildings in the center of the civilization count, as well as ones at the edges. Culture also spreads from trade, so closing borders makes more sense.
*More city and unit maintenance. This might require some AI tweaks as not to bankrupt the AI.
*Late game building tweaking. I'd rather see the buildings made more powerful, more expensive rather than more buildings overall. Some buildings are a double-whammy: The golden forge provides Mithril _and_ a free weaponsmith in every city? I might get rid of the free resources totally.
*Unique Feature improvement. In general, make the unique features something to really fight over.
*Guild Improvements. At the least, some kind of building each city can build to compliment the guild. - Not sure about this one as all of the guilds are powerful enough already without maintenance.

What do you mean by Holistic Cultural Model?
I'd love for the Unique Features to be better... While you're at it, you could add the Blair of Lacuna. Already have a model made for it. http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=11175

Mid Term:
*Change Scion haunted lands as something that expands automatically. It'll work very slowly but start at each city.
*New civ! I have some ideas kicking around about a civilization that has global improvements instead of specific buildings.

I love you. Spreading HL sucks.

Long term:
*Expand/merge civs. The Grigori's adventurers, the Sidar's settled great warriors, the Dural's extra national wonders and so on don't seem to be enough to build a civilization on. I might give the Kuriotates the Dural's national wonders and expand the Kuriotates so they can build settlers but at an increasing cost each time.
*Expand/merge mana. There's a lot of mana types, many with redundant effects (lots of summons everywhere). Life/body/nature/growth all seems redundant, as an example.
*More late-game oomph. Try and reduce the monotony. Improved roads are a must, as is better cavalry. Vanilla Civ has nukes, tanks, and aircraft. FFH has Phalanxes, but they're only movement 1.
*More early-game oomph. Archers plus the warrior city defense bonus makes taking cities early on difficult. Barbarians overall should be weaker if they are the reason for this.

And here is where I disagree with you. Rather than merging civs and disregarding lore, make the civ better. If I wasn't shipping out, I'd get around to all the other civs as well.

Same thing applies to the magic.... There are 5 or 6 giant threads full of ideas for the magic lines.

 

[Vehem]

So far I like these, especially the fractional trade routes... Always bugged me too.

If he gets them done, I'll certainly use them It should actually only be a minor tweak in a couple of places (as with the other fractional values for happiness in civics), but it's one I've never gotten around to doing.

I love you. Spreading HL sucks.

Tarq has done something along these lines for the next version anyway. Haven't look at the specifics yet, but it's passive spread based on the number of units-that-used-to-be-responsible-for-active-spread that you control.

 

[Mylon]

What do you mean by Holistic Cultural Model?
I'd love for the Unique Features to be better... While you're at it, you could add the Blair of Lacuna. Already have a model made for it. http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=11175

Holistic Cultural Model is a complex bit I made for my own mod (see the Mylon Mega Mod link in my sig). The short and skinny: Cities generate culture according to their nationality, with a bit of bias towards their owner. Additionally, cities spread culture via trade. Is what this means is your border cities will spread enemy culture to your inner cities. Since the code for it is already done, I consider this a minor addition. The important part is that culture will matter for more than merely border cities. As a side effect, I did add more cultural levels so cities will in general reach farther (so they can have their affect on other cities.

I'll take a look at the unique feature.

I'll see if I can make a mini-mod for the trade patch and get that pushed out tonight. Shouldn't be too hard.

I guess I'm off the hook for HL spreading.

The civ/mana changes seem unpopular. Lore this, lore that. One could expand the civs to make them as unique and interesting as some of the others, but that requires effort and lots of ideas. Condensing the existing mechanics down to a smaller number of civs is easier and enriches the gameplay, if not the lore. If anything, one thing that helped SMAC was that there were 7 factions. That's it. On a sufficiently large planet, they all existed and played a part and had their own mannerisms towards one another that made the game interesting. Trying to have all of the FFH races on one map would be madness.

 

[zup]

Haunted lands spread nicely in Orbis. Not too quickly but I can wait.

 

[Mylon]

Haunted lands spread nicely in Orbis. Not too quickly but I can wait.

I noticed in Orbis that I got a big chunk of haunted lands every time I built a temple of the gift. It didn't seem related to anything else.

 

[Mylon]

Since this does seem to be drawing some interest... Is there any particular reason the game shows all units available ever? The build list gets very cluttered towards the end of the game showing warriors, axemen, and champions.

 

[WarKirby]

It shows axemen?

Those should be obsolete, and archers too.

When units become obsolete, they're pruned from the list. Most of the units in the game have various special roles to fit, and so making them obsolete is not a good idea.

Warriors, are the base unit. The start of everything.
They're very good for mutating, using as cannon fodder, or building in cities which aren't capable of building much else. So generally they have to not be obsolete.

There's also the matter that most of the highest tiers are "National Units". You can only have a limited amount of them. So to maximise their potential, you usually want to upgrade them from older troops, but the option to build them is needed too.

Champions can't be made obsolete because of their infinte nature. And also from a visual standpoint, more nations have unique champions, than have unique Phalanxes or Immortals, so it's visually desireable to have that level always available.

Then there are faction specific UUs for lesser units. Like the Calabim Moroi, or the Balseraph Freak. Things like these have special functions that are always useful, and so they can't be obsolete.

In general, the only unitclasses that can really be obsoleted, are axemen and archers. Everything else upgrades to a limited national unit, or is a necessity to have for one reason or another.

 

[Mylon]

Okay, I'll give you, axemen aren't shown.

What about soldier of Kilmorph? Could we give the Paramander the ability to obsolete the Soldier? Just give the Paramander the 3-1 hammer transferral ability of the soldier. I noticed the Scions have a unique tier 1 disciple unit that can be used for culture. I could do without that minor ability if any other disciple units (with medic 2) are available.

I might dip into the BUG mod to see if there's a way to hide missionaries and executive units and otherwise improve the list.

 

[Mylon]

So how the heck do you compile this code? I get this error:

Spoiler :

CvDLLPython.obj||error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol "void __cdecl CyMapPythonInterface2(class boost::python::class_<class CyMap,struct boost::python::detail::not_specified,struct boost::python::detail::not_specified,struct boost::python::detail::not_specified> &)" (?CyMapPythonInterface2@@YAXAAV?$class_@VCyMap@@Unot_specified@detail@python@boost@@U2345@U2345@@python@boost@@@Z) referenced in function "void __cdecl DLLPublishToPython(void)" (?DLLPublishToPython@@YAXXZ)|

I can compile the Orbis code just fine, but this one gives me problems, it seems.

Is what I did is changed these lines in CvCity.cpp

9183//	iProfit /= 100; // Mylon - This prevents rounding in trade profit calculations
iProfit = std::max(10000, iProfit); //This number is 100x larger, so increase the capping function.
...
12085         setTradeYield(((YieldTypes)iI), calculateTradeYield(((YieldTypes)iI), int(iTradeProfit/100))); // XXX could take this out if handled when CvPlotGroup changes...

I imagine one would also have to reference all of the python interface calls to divide those values by 100.

I imagine this will also have the side effect of not chopping those trade values all to a flat 1 base commerce. We might see more trades worth 1.02 and 1.03 or some such.

 

[xienwolf]

The error isn't really what I would expect to happen from a change to using larger values. You compiled the source without changes with no issue? (We split CyMap into 2 interface files so that we could create debug DLLs, not sure if Orbis has done so as well, so that could be a source of your issues)

 

[Mylon]

Oh, I realized now. Since I have no real C++ knowledge, I took the project file from one project, copied it over, and expected it to work. Since FFH uses more c++ files, it needs them to be added to the project. D'oh. Now I'm getting an error in CvTextScreens.cpp saying it cannot find CvTextMgr.h . Which confuses me too. Editing it to cvGameTextmgr.h (which does exist) causes all sorts of problems. This line is in the vanilla code, so I'm not sure how it resolves since the file does not appear to exist.

 

[Quetz]

I totally agree with merging mana types. I know nothing about modding but I've always wanted to make a magic system modmod for FFH (including a bunch of new rituals) that would merge the spell spheres into 8 more traditional, but longer ones, instead of a zillion short paths with only 3 spells each.

Body/life/nature, chaos/fire/entropy, etc...

 

[Mylon]

Okay, so it turns out CvTextScreens should not have been part of the code. Strange.

Anyway, I reprogrammed it with 2 new functions for the benefit of the only place the hard numbers matter so the interface or anything else isn't affected. I noticed the code supports trade income in the form of food and hammers too. That seems interesting.

 

[Mylon]

Argh, this change is being stubborn. Okay, the first iteration, as written, works. But as predicted the interface looks weird with 125 trades (despite only giving the proper 5 for four such trades). So I tried making 2 new functions in CvCity.cpp, and then I notice the tooltip for the trade route and the display itself only shows integer values, not the decimal values.

To get this to properly display, I have to edit the tooltip code, then edit the text key to accept a string (where it otherwise takes an integer). At this point I should also probably expose the extra functions to python so the interface can call them instead of showing the rounded integers. And the trade total should be included somewhere for good measure. Making it work requires changing one file. Making it work without a weird graphical glitch requires changing 2 files. Making it work so that all of these decimals are evident to the user requires changing 7 files.

As a sidenote to all of this, I just realized why there's nothing that multiplies commerce in base BTS: Because trade commerce could get multiplied twice! Once from trade income, and again if total commerce gets multiplied, as total trade income is counted as base commerce income.

 

[apotheoser]

I noticed the code supports trade income in the form of food and hammers too. That seems interesting.

Yeah, Lost Lands (the Mazatl civic) uses that. It's a very powerful feature, especially with food - larger cities get more trade routes, which gives them more food, which causes them to grow larger and get more trade routes... et cetera.

 

[Mylon]

Yeah, Lost Lands (the Mazatl civic) uses that. It's a very powerful feature, especially with food - larger cities get more trade routes, which gives them more food, which causes them to grow larger and get more trade routes... et cetera.

Interesting feature. Also keep in mind that these these bonuses can be increased by building +trade% buildings like inns and taverns and harbors. And that the +hammers get multiplied again from the forge.

Now that I realize it's gonna take 7 total file changes to make the interface work properly... Anyone else want to take up this task? Here's the changed CvCity.cpp (tested), CvCity.h (tested), CvGameTextMgr.cpp (untested) files - Stuff that needs to change is the text key and the python interface files (To expose the CvCity changes) and the Python interface file.

This line bugs me:
FAssert(iProfit == pCity->calculateTradeProfit(pOtherCity));
Since the whole function this is in basically imitates the formula for calculating the trade value, and I've modified this by branching it out... Well... It's not going to trigger the FAssert, but it is theoretically possible what the game says the trade value is and what the interface says could be different.

The source code so far, if anyone wants to look at it while I sleep:

 

[Opera]

Interesting feature. Also keep in mind that these these bonuses can be increased by building +trade% buildings like inns and taverns and harbors. And that the +hammers get multiplied again from the forge.

Yeah, very interesting but isn't it only usable by civics? I remember checking if it could be modified by building... and iirc, it wasn't. That's not-so-terrible but I would like not to have to create a civic for my civ. Civ-specific civics irk me, don't know why.

OT: As nearly everyone, I'm not agreeing about your long term changes but why not? Maybe it's just that we don't want the system being too much changed, after all. However, I do like the Holistic Culture, the Fraction Trades Route, the Fluid GP and the Unique Features to fight for.

BTW, what are your ideas to make unique features more interesting?