New Beta Version - February 1st (2/1)

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Gazebo

Lord of the Community Patch
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Hey all,

New version inbound, primarily to see if we actually fixed the turn freeze bug. Some other fixes and whatnot here too. If all goes well I'm pushing a full version Friday.

  • General
    • Bugfixes and performance improvements
    • Improved AI religion, policy, and building selection criteria
    • Fixed the 'hanging on barb turn' bug
  • Balance
    • City Flipping:
      • Fixed a bunch of Firaxis weirdness related to city revolts - should actually occur now, be delivered to the right parties, etc.
      • I also made it so that the revolts can occur earleir (if you are ever below -20 happiness), and can be used to revive dead civs/city-states.
      • Civs with cultural influence over the city revolting will get first dibs unless the city is being restored to a dead player.
      • In testing this has had the fun effect of buffing vassals when a warmonger goes crazy (as vassals get cities back this way), and also bringing dead city-states back to life. Fun!
        • Bugfix? Balance? You decide!
    • Eras scaling for Wonder cost revised a bit
  • Anything beyond previous two eras back is 0% added
    • So a wonder from the Ancient period (Era 0) is...
      • 25% if new wonder being built is Ancient
      • 15% if new wonder is Classical
      • 10% is new wonder is Medieval
      • 0% if new wonder if Renaissance
  • Small number adjustments
    • Beliefs:
      • Way of Transcendence - now scales with Era
      • Evangelism - increased Science gain from successful conversion (was a factor of 6, now a factor of 10)
      • Stupa - increased Tourism to +5 (was +4), GAP to +3 (was +2)
    • Tenets:
      • Iron Fist - now 25% (was 50%) (to note, I have seen gross vassal yields once or twice. Best to nip this even if it weakens the tenet a bit.)
    • Wonders:
      • Oracle - now +500 Culture/Science (was Culture/GAP)

Online as of 1:00am EST. Not savegame compatible.

Link: https://mega.nz/#!SU1HnTQD!TuycFGMGO9pPNro6KwZRcEJcJGVl_qJtZ3z6jvfRB1w

Cheers,
Gazebo
 
Beliefs:
  • Way of Transcendence - now scales with Era
Sweet!
  • Evangelism - increased Science gain from successful conversion (was a factor of 6, now a factor of 10)
So in my last game I generally got 18 science a hit. So with your new math I will get 30. Eh...not sure if that is enough, that science just doesn't scale very well.
  • Stupa - increased Tourism to +5 (was +4), GAP to +3 (was +2)
Eh....still pretty meh, I don't think this is enough to make me really want stupas. Could they trigger a historical event....that would actually perk a CV player up!
 
Thanks for the patch, the change to Oracle looks interesting along with the Wonder era cost changes. Personally I think Stupa are good at what they do, but a bit too niche for my taste, but I might try my hand at a tourism game with them and seee how it goes.
City flipping looks like a good way to make people focus on hapiness and I'm raring to see it in action.
 
Love the wonder change ideas. In practicality only really effects Renaissance on of course and those wonders are already difficult to beeline/build due to midgame tech/production advantages on the AI side.
 
I'm curious about the Revolts mechanic now that it's been re-added. G, you said it can occur earlier now, which I'm assuming now means it can happen prior to getting an ideology? How does this work, exactly? Does it mean that when you're happiness is at -20 or worse any of your annexed/puppet cities have a chance to randomly revolt? Do you get any warning of this before it happens, like rebels spawning near the city that's about to leave?

I've never seen this mechanic happen (I guess, because it was bugged?), so I'm just curious, really. I don't think I've ever allowed myself to get to -20 happiness before, but I've definitely seen the AI get there due to ideology pressure.
 
The city flipping will be interested, but it also means I’m going to be even more assertive about the happiness system and ensuring it’s manageable. This could easily turn into a rage quit scenario is an unhappiness spiral I can’t control causes me to lose cities
 
I'm curious about the Revolts mechanic now that it's been re-added. G, you said it can occur earlier now, which I'm assuming now means it can happen prior to getting an ideology? How does this work, exactly? Does it mean that when you're happiness is at -20 or worse any of your annexed/puppet cities have a chance to randomly revolt? Do you get any warning of this before it happens, like rebels spawning near the city that's about to leave?

I've never seen this mechanic happen (I guess, because it was bugged?), so I'm just curious, really. I don't think I've ever allowed myself to get to -20 happiness before, but I've definitely seen the AI get there due to ideology pressure.

It can occur any time you are -20 happiness. There will be a notification that will tell you the likely city to revolt (it isn't defined until the moment the revolt happens, though) and the likely recipient. There is a 10-turn window in which you get a chance to recover things.

Priority order for cities is based on local negative happiness - this means more recently-captured cities are more likely to flip. The one exception is major civ capitals - they'll never flip back (encourages players to grab capitals). The game also tries to flip captured/conquered cities before cities you've settled.

Priority order for recipient is former owner first (especially if dead), then most influential civ over you compared to distance proximity between the civ and the revolting city.

The city flipping will be interested, but it also means I’m going to be even more assertive about the happiness system and ensuring it’s manageable. This could easily turn into a rage quit scenario is an unhappiness spiral I can’t control causes me to lose cities

Not to be mean, but if 10 King AIs can all manage to play an entire game in positive happiness on 2-1, I'm sure you can too. :)

G
 
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Not to be mean, but if 10 King AIs can all manage to play an entire game in positive happiness on 2-1, I'm sure you can too. :)

G

Sorry G, AIs are a good baseline, but there’s no assurance without playing that says a human can keep up compared to the production bonuses from the AI. We shall see!

This is my cautionary note, it just means the stakes are even higher to ensure the happiness system is stable.

From a curiously, if we wanted too, could the revolts trigger on -30? Not saying we should, was interested if it was an option to allow for another tier of bad happiness.
 
Sorry G, AIs are a good baseline, but there’s no assurance without playing that says a human can keep up compared to the production bonuses from the AI. We shall see!

This is my cautionary note, it just means the stakes are even higher to ensure the happiness system is stable.

From a curiously, if we wanted too, could the revolts trigger on -30? Not saying we should, was interested if it was an option to allow for another tier of bad happiness.

Sorry, not King, Warlord. I forget the order sometimes. The first 'no bonus' one (technically Chieftain gives bonuses to the human). :)

Another tier is possible, sure, but we only have graphics for :c5unhappy: and :c5angry:. Need a :aargh: in-game.

I feel attacked.

I believe in you, Medieval State Man.

G
 
Can we make a change where you only have population loss and building damage the first time you take over a city? So if I take a city, it flips back, and I retake it again I don't need to burn it.

I also don't like the city getting wrecked when taking it back and fourth.

I understand that it's kind of thematic, but it's really frustrating for gameplay imo. I think if a city revolts needing to recapture it would be enough of a punishment.
 
Can we make a change where you only have population loss and building damage the first time you take over a city? So if I take a city, it flips back, and I retake it again I don't need to burn it.

I also don't like the city getting wrecked when taking it back and fourth.

I understand that it's kind of thematic, but it's really frustrating for gameplay imo. I think if a city revolts needing to recapture it would be enough of a punishment.

Revolting cities count as a gift to the recipient, so they're not hit with the building destruction. Retaking it, though, does. There's a malus (or bonus? depending on how you see it) for building destruction/population loss every time you take the same city (same for warmonger).

G
 
Were revolting cities disabled entirely, or did they just not work? I definitely had a Polynesian city flip on me a long time ago. I guess you shouldn't expect to hold onto all your cities when you're trying to conquer the world. Can't wait to try it out!
 
Were revolting cities disabled entirely, or did they just not work? I definitely had a Polynesian city flip on me a long time ago. I guess you shouldn't expect to hold onto all your cities when you're trying to conquer the world. Can't wait to try it out!

There were a lot of exceptions and points-of-failure in the code.

G
 
Heya, long time lurker here. Been playing VP for about 1,5-2k hours now (for a total of about 3k civ time), so thank you alot for this great mod. More detailed review and concerns to be hopefully following in a separate post, but i felt inclined to post right now due to the topic beeing my most pressing issue with the mod. Bare with me, i don't have much time in the moment to give proper reasoning, but i hope i will soon.

Happiness in the mid- to lategame right now is a benefit of the few, it's basically a way to measure the infrastructure of your empire and a way to punish the ones that have weak per capita yields. I believe it's the source of runaways and the reason of ragequits or boring "i won already" quits. The main sources of unhappiness are in order: Lacking need-fulfilling or -reducing buildings, which is basically a race between players, which will be won by any scince oriented, production-strong empire. Secondly specialists should step in to fulfill the role of soothing of unhappy people. But meanwhile they themselves produce alot of unhappiness, which then concludes to micromanagement, because city mayors cannot be put to maximise happiness. And I understand that's alot to ask. So in order to combat an unhappiness spiral, the player must go through tedious micro management in each city. I had this in several games now, when i manually had to assign my specialists every turn in every city to gain about 20-30 happiness in an empire of ~15 cities. This affects mostly warmongering civilizations, which do have to put more hammers into military and then (with the exception of rome) mostly capture completely building-empty cities. Razing and rebuilding with advanced settlers is mostly not an option, since those are (and maybe they should be? maybe not?) very underdevolped compared to your core cities. That means ginormous unhappiness for ever eternity from them. The tradeoffs too seem lackluster, so it comes down to "can you go without war" and for countries as denmark or france that just seems to be meh.

TL;DR: Unhappiness is the punishment for expansion through war. Domination is very hard especially on high landmass pangeas.

There's a couple of ways i could see something be done here.
- Keeping more buildings upon capture (i'm not sure if the AI is selling buildings when it's attacked) - nerf to rome.
- Scaling unhappiness maluses with number of cities, maybe at a variable, scalable ratio. say you have 20 cities, its much more probable that your specialists (and enemies) go ham dumping your happiness by 30 in one turn. And then you'll have to deal with barbs in your lands and other nasty stuff, and the spiral begins. If you only have 5 cities, that's unlikely to happen. Might be alot of balancing work to do though.
- Add "happiness focus" in cities. I hardly think this is doable though.
- Add need reduction modifiers to courthouses. That's inelegant and we might get issues with persia. But it's easy to implement.
- Remove or heavily reduce specialist unhappiness (and rebalance total aquired happiness accordingly ofc). they are already limited by food consumption and therefore are a tradeoff to city growth. That fixes the high differences in happiness that can occur between turns.
- Add more steps of advanced settlers (like pioneers) to promote resettling razed positions. That might not do anything though.

Also, i didn't put too much thought into possible solutions, so there are probably many more possibilities.


Btw, didn't play 2-1 yet but, in last version i'm not entirely sure if the new warmonger CS bonus was working as intended. I couldn't figure out when i had it or not, nor if it affected a battle. I'll keep an eye on it.
 
Well, now that Revolts are back in the game it's definitely reinforcing my decisions to raze bad, wartorn cities when I play as a warmonger rather than keeping them around as puppets. I'm really getting more and more used to razing weak cities and replacing them with Pioneers and Colonists in late-game wars in order to stay on top of happiness (unless I'm Rome). This retroactively is a rather nice buff for Rome, actually.

Also, is it too late to suggest that Liberated cities should be treated as gifts back to their original owner rather than taking the wartorn building destruction debuff? When I Liberate CSs it sucks knowing that the poor things have lost most of their infrastructure. I promise I'll be gentle when routing out the last of the previous defender's army! :hug:
 
Looking forward to seeing how the city flipping turns out, I think it'll be a great new dynamic, and it counting as a gift makes it great.

Just a question -> if they count as a gift, which of the UAs dealing with city acquisition will it trigger and which ones it won't?
 
If I had to guess, China and Spain say "conquer or gain" while France and Assyria specifically say "conquer", so I'd guess only China and Spain would have their UA triggered for receiving cities back due to Revolt.
 
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