New Beta Version - 1-11 (1/11)

[saamohod]

I declared war on Siam, he had 1% warmonger bonus. I've now captured two cities with an archer rush, and its up to 4%. He and Ethiopia dislike my aggression, but Rome does not. Currently the values seem reasonable.

I wish the AI was taught to expect human archer rushes.

 

[usadefcon1]

However, the events system as is isn't very good. It does help somewhat with runaways, but it just doesn't feel good to play with. I disable it every time because of the incredibly obnoxious negative events lategame, and my impression is that that's a common sentiment. If it is, I strongly believe the "Enable Events system" option should be unchecked by default, so new players don't run face first into it and get a sour first impression of the mod.

I agree. I play events off, research agreements on, no tech brokering.

 

[Gazebo]

I'll chip in again since I've seen a few topics I want to chip in on, although not strictly relevant to 1-11.

First, re: the animations/voicelines for Civs thing. I'm going to assume by animations we mean leaderscreens, not unit animations. Myself, and almost everyone I've seen play VP (rather limited number, but still) play with animations off and skip through voicelines. It's just flavor, and although Civilization's strongest selling point is flavor, it's nowhere near VP's. I'd be perfectly happy with a static image and no voiceacting. I also assume that most people (but my experience may be skewed) even plays with unit animations disabled. But I fully agree that it should be an option in the installer.

Next, events. I like events. Although I just said I don't think VP's strong point is flavor, and it shouldn't be either (as there are so many mods that focus purely on flavor and do it so well), events are still a good way to bring it. However, the events system as is isn't very good. It does help somewhat with runaways, but it just doesn't feel good to play with. I disable it every time because of the incredibly obnoxious negative events lategame, and my impression is that that's a common sentiment. If it is, I strongly believe the "Enable Events system" option should be unchecked by default, so new players don't run face first into it and get a sour first impression of the mod.

Finally, any multiplayer bugfixes and improvements would be incredibly welcome. But didn't the guy who was working on those disappear?

re:events, if you aren’t using an expanded events mod, you’re only seeing the template events.

g

 

[randomnub]

re:events, if you aren’t using an expanded events mod, you’re only seeing the template events.

g

Many players, new and not, might not know about this, or simply aren't interested in using even more mods until they digest the transition from vanilla to vp. Because the template events alone aren't a great feature of cbp, could you make so they are turned off by default?

 

[ridjack]

To be fair, even with the expanded events mods they end up being pretty crap, IMHO.

Unrelated, but I just met a civ a couple turns ago ( @pineappledan 's Inuits, if it matters), and I have a bright red diplo modifier for " capturing or killing their civilians." I haven't even seen anything but one of their Pathfinders, much less captured or killed anything. Local barbarians didn't have any of their units either, at least as far as I saw. They're decently far away, too, with Indonesia right between us. No shared borders to speak of.

I'm currently without internet on my desktop, so unable to post a proper bug report. Can give any additional info that helps, though.

Edit: Also, I'm really sorry to see that we're sticking with the skirmisher doctrine. I was under the impression that we had reached a general consensus that it was pretty crap. I've been playing with Dan's unit tweaks for the past few games, and I have to say it feels much, much better than the current terrain modifiers. I don't see a numbers tweak making much of a difference, but we'll see.

 

[JamesNinelives]

But in the next second you give the Zoo the power to easily overwhelm any GW by simply working forests/jungles? Working only 10 forest tiles gives as much tourism as 4 GW in the mid game.

In theory, yes. In practise, show me your cities with lots of jungle that remains unchopped mid to late game. I'll concede that the Iroquois (and to a lesser extent the Maya and Brazil) should be pretty happy with this change. I don't see it being a huge issue though. It agree it has probably overshot the mark, but I trust G to bring it back to something more moderate once we have some playtesting feedback.

To be fair, even with the expanded events mods they end up being pretty crap, IMHO.

That doesn't really seem fair to me. Community Events for VP has it's flaws, I will be the first to admit. It's still miles better than vanilla events though. It's improved over time too. I would recommend it to anyone who is tired of having their farms pillaged all the time for example. It may not for everyone, but it has made my experience playing this mod significantly more fun .

 

[Gazebo]

To be fair, even with the expanded events mods they end up being pretty crap, IMHO.

Unrelated, but I just met a civ a couple turns ago ( @pineappledan 's Inuits, if it matters), and I have a bright red diplo modifier for " capturing or killing their civilians." I haven't even seen anything but one of their Pathfinders, much less captured or killed anything. Local barbarians didn't have any of their units either, at least as far as I saw. They're decently far away, too, with Indonesia right between us. No shared borders to speak of.

I'm currently without internet on my desktop, so unable to post a proper bug report. Can give any additional info that helps, though.

Edit: Also, I'm really sorry to see that we're sticking with the skirmisher doctrine. I was under the impression that we had reached a general consensus that it was pretty crap. I've been playing with Dan's unit tweaks for the past few games, and I have to say it feels much, much better than the current terrain modifiers. I don't see a numbers tweak making much of a difference, but we'll see.

I'm not particularly sure what you're expecting events to do.

G

 

[TranceBlossom]

Is open borders acting weird for anyone else? I have open borders but can’t move my units through other civs’ borders.

EDIT: Looks like it's been posted on Github and Iteroi added the "Already Fixed" label...does that mean a hotfix will be posted soon?

 

[Stalker0]

This is pretty well-addressed by your changes to Museum and Broadcast tower. If I understand, your aim was to overcorrect and get player feedback anyways, but it does seem like it was nudged a bit too far.

@Stalker0 did the math in a previous thread trying to convert the approximate value of 1influence via diplomatic action and he came to a squishy 5-7 in value. That's 5-7hammers worth of influence growing arithmetically. 1/4/9/16/25, every turn. There's no other option for your TRs that could possibly hold a candle to that.

That's a bit higher than what I quoted, its more like 4 hammers per influence under normal conditions. Here is the my original post.

I've made this statement a few times, so let me take a stab at quantifying this by converting influence into production, to give us some understanding of what bonus we are actually getting here. Ultimately we want to look at a bad influence to production ratio....as that means an extra +1 influence is giving us the most hammer benefit.

So lets assume I am building an emissary (haven't gotten to envoy's yet), and I am building it outside of my diplomatic buildings. I think we can all agree this is a very non-optimal scenario for building diplomatic units, so this will be our upper bound for how valuable the +1 influence per TR is.

It costs 250 hammers (in medieval era) for 40 influence...or 6.25 hammers per influence.

Now if we go with a more middle ground scenario, lets assume Envoys with chanceries but not the schriver's. That's 225 hammers (10% discount) for 55 influence, or 4.09 hammers per influence. Considering that anyone going statecraft is planning at least some type of decent CS play, I think using this middle ground scenario is reasonable...but not optimal, so I am still giving the policy the benefit of the doubt.

Just taking a look at my current medieval France game (just took a spitball of my production on Turn 199...not optimizing or anything just said what is my current civs overall hammer output at the moment), I have 257 hammers overall. So my new bonus is effectively increasing my civ's hammers by 1.6% in this example.

Now taking it a step further, right now in my France game I have the option of getting a CS TR or an ETR. (Note: I do not have the statecraft policy this game, but I have confirmed the TR is to a civ with more science and culture than I have, so I am adding in the +3 science and culture into the math). I have an allied CS that would get me +7 gold, +2 science, and +2 culture. Or I could choose an ETR for 9 gold, 9 science, and 5 culture. The extra 2 GPT is worth 2.6% more gold, the +7 science is worth 4.8% more science, and +3 culture is worth 1% more culture.

A lot of text, so let me summarize. In my particular example:



A CS ETR is worth 4.09 HPT (1.6% increase)
A ETR is worth 2 GPT (2.6% increase), 7 SPT (4.8%), 3 CPT (1%)

Now my France game is a single example, and these values may not hold true to your game. Yet I feel I gave the influence per turn policy a lot of benefit of the doubt. I am also not taking into account many other factors that make the policy weaker, such as:

1) Making a TR to a CS that goes into a sphere or open policy
2) Making a TR to a CS that has so much influence that the only way to take it is with a sphere (which is pretty common in my Immortal games).

And yet with all of these factors, based on the math above the CS TR is just terrible compared to the ETR. While the Influence is nice, I can make up for it very quickly with just a little more diplomatic unit use...and I give up a lot in not going regular ETRs.

 

[gwennog]

Is open borders acting weird for anyone else? I have open borders but can’t move my units through other civs’ borders.

EDIT: Looks like it's been posted on Github and Iteroi added the "Already Fixed" label...does that mean a hotfix will be posted soon?

I have the same problem, Portugal is my vassal and I can't enter its territory.

 

[Gazebo]

Is open borders acting weird for anyone else? I have open borders but can’t move my units through other civs’ borders.

EDIT: Looks like it's been posted on Github and Iteroi added the "Already Fixed" label...does that mean a hotfix will be posted soon?

Later today - @ilteroi found a bug in some of his code.

 

[Tarzan737]

What has happen? Cities can attack a unit (healthy) and kill it with just ranged attack!!

Made it stronger? But really, kill units?

I dislike a lot!

 

[SuperNoobCamper]

After two unfinished games roughly 200 turns each on standard speed/standard size emperor i have got to say that the Anti warmonger fervor seems to be finally reasonable but city ranged attacks are devastating now, for reference a 5 population authority Songhai capital with walls, no garrison and god of war pantheon dealt NINETY NINE damage to an archer .... that's a bit overkill buff to ranged attacks to be honest.
Is there by any chance a plan to modify Naval/Land unit production logic ? it seems the AI even on immortal does not seems to be getting a grasp of balance between them in favor of naval units which makes any ground assault pretty easy even if i don't end up taking the city.

 

[LifeOfBrian]

Can someone with a GitHub account make a report on the potentially wonky religious pressure? Here are some screenshots, all standard settings, no other mods. Edit: Please and thank you!

 

[Zuizgond]

I like the tourism reduction from TR but why compensate by buffing zoos, GW and museums? It wasn't necessary.

 

[BiteInTheMark]

In theory, yes. In practise, show me your cities with lots of jungle that remains unchopped mid to late game. I'll concede that the Iroquois (and to a lesser extent the Maya and Brazil) should be pretty happy with this change. I don't see it being a huge issue though. It agree it has probably overshot the mark, but I trust G to bring it back to something more moderate once we have some playtesting feedback.

I play at the moment an England game and have around 60-70 workable forest tiles with 7 cities and I will definitly work them cause I will go for Industry/Order with +5+1 for lumbermills (I love lumbermills). Those forest tiles will give me additionally around 120-140 tourism, which is in mid-late game equal to around 25 GW. Do you think its balanced/fair if (for atleast some time) constructing 7 building is worth as much as creating 25 GW?

I totally agree, that jungles are crap. It may be historically correct, that logging camps comes that late, but its so imbalanced in comparison with lumermills.
Also the yields from logging camps are only worth half the amount as lumber mills (cause gold is only half the value as hammers and logging camp and lumber mill give the same amount).
The one point in science never compensate the extreme late improvement and the difference in yield worth versus lumber mills.

the cost of sending all routes to CSs has consequences as well. It’s not a cut and dry decision.

It is for Germany. Or for Morocco. They are literally forced to use as many trade units to CS.
And if I send trade units to CS which directly borders my empire or lying in my empire, they are nearly as save as an internal trade route.
What was the "reward" for sending trade units to CS before this patch, if trade routes to CS are so dangerous? One patch ago you completly crippled CS trade route yields. Were trade routes to CS in the late patch not as much in danger as now?

 

[BiteInTheMark]

I like the tourism reduction from TR but why compensate by buffing zoos, GW and museums? It wasn't necessary.

The buff of Zoos was unnecessary, but the other were made to increase the reward for activly follwing the path of a CV by accumulating GW/Wonders/etc and didnt win accidentially a CV cause you simply send external trade routes to other civs.

 

[Kim Dong Un]

Edit: I will reserve judgement on the new city mechanics and let it play out a bit, but city ranged attack seems overpowered initially.

I like the tourism reduction from TR but why compensate by buffing zoos, GW and museums? It wasn't necessary.

I had all 6 TR going through a CS while playing Arabia for CV - it flipped allies as I was declared on, losing all 6 routes within a few turns because my army was fighting on another front. Tourism from ETR's is much easier to shut down, so now you can rely on tourism coming from more direct means. Zoos and museums were underwhelming and needed a buff; numbers might need further adjustment, but I personally like the change.

 

[ridjack]

I'm not particularly sure what you're expecting events to do.

G

Just be fun, honestly. It's been quite a long while since I used them, but IIRC they got extremely repetitive and annoying, particularly everything related to barbarians. Playing wide became almost masochistic, with multiple events in multiple cities every single turn.

I think the biggest thing was the complete lack of variety or even the perception of randomness. Even with extra events mods, I saw the same events every single game, aside from a few of the more rare ones.

 

[telelavoro]

Just be fun, honestly. It's been quite a long while since I used them, but IIRC they got extremely repetitive and annoying, particularly everything related to barbarians. Playing wide became almost masochistic, with multiple events in multiple cities every single turn.

I think the biggest thing was the complete lack of variety or even the perception of randomness. Even with extra events mods, I saw the same events every single game, aside from a few of the more rare ones.

I think the worst of the wide punishment is gone. You still sometimes get multiple pillaging events on the same turn but it's a lot rarer than it was a number of versions ago.