Jeez, you guys are fast!
I was agonizing over how to modify my Civ's bonuses and penalties last night, eventually giving up and heading to bed. I get up and you guys have solved this already!
The C++ (DLL) code is spaghetti. Just because X works one way does not mean Y works the same; just because Yield A under X works one way doesn't mean Yield B under X works the same way. You pretty much have to track them through the C++ code on a case by case basis.
This inconsistency seems like it would be extremely annoying, to say the least. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to check the DLL, and that C++ code confuses me. If it needs to be handled on a case-by-case basis, I hope no one minds if I have to impose myself a little bit more on your knowledge as I continue to run into these sort of limitations.
And I just whomped up a unique palace and tested it all with a little help from our friend IGE. Works!
Darkscythe,
Let me clean do some clean-up on the file I used to test concept for a replacement palace that will subtract the specialist food yields. I'll post it here as a link to a mediafire file sharing address.
If you haven't actually tried to build a mod in ModBuddy yet my advice would be to follow either ceej12's guide or whichever other tutorial you may have found, and actually build yourself a small mod so that when you go to build your civilization you are at least confident that you are doing everything correctly so far as operating ModBuddy is concerned. There are bunches of mods on the Steam Workshop that don't actually do anything because the Mod Author never learned how to use ModBuddy correctly.
And I've been having nothing but troubles with my internet connection this morning. If you see this and respond back, any delay in my responding back again to you is to do with my internet connection.
You certainly went out of your way to be helpful; I appreciate it!
No worries about your internet connectivity -- you've posted multiple times and even tested before I had a chance to get on today, lol.
For what it's worth, I have not created any mods before, but I figure the best way to learn is to just dive right in, so my very first mod is this Civ, and all it entails. I've already started work on it within ModBuddy, and have the basic skeleton XML files ready, I'm just at the stage where I need to build the Uniques, and as such, is where I ran into these roadblocks.
For guides, I saw you link to that Steam Workshop one on your Building XML thread, and I've also got Kael's Modder's Guide and LuvToBuild's (incomplete) Newbie reference guide open. They were certainly helpful for getting the skeleton files built quickly, but at this point I need to make the UA, UB, UU, and all the diplomatic responses (and the artwork. Oh god, the artwork. I am so bad at it.)
In any case, I should have been a bit clearer -- sorry.
What I meant to say was that I wasn't sure how I would go about modifying a stock Civilization, like America, just to test a building without having the entire Civ turned into a mod. But, come to think of it, I suppose that's where the <Update> tag comes in handy. I will check out your Special palace file and see how it goes. I also assume that if I wanted those unemployed citizens to also consume more food that I'd add SPECIALIST_CITIZEN to the list as well (if I'm interpreting the XML correctly, I think this is how they are defined.)
You know, when I told you to look at the policies to change Specialist food consumption, it never occurred to me that it could just be a boolean value for half consumption -- didn't actually look at the Policies table for it. I still give Firaxis too much credit...my bad!
Haha, no worries at all!
It was a good starting point for me to look, and I found a few other things digging through the Policies. It also gave me what I needed to start poking through the Building, Trait, Unit, and Promotion schemas as well.
With all that said, I have a few more 'issues' that I need to resolve, and I will be searching for solutions as time, and my Google-fu, permits. However, I'll put some of them here in case you guys already know the answer, or if you can confidently say that it is impossible with only XML (and maybe LUA) editing.
(In that vein, is there any sort of LUA reference or guide?)
1) I'll probably need to make invisible dummy buildings to distribute to every city, in order to have Specialists in every city consume 3 food, unless Building_SpecialistYieldChanges is global. I'll have to look up in more detail how to go about this, though I think LeeS' Building guide already touches on this.
With that, I'll probably also stick a bunch of other things onto that building; I'll ask separately on those properties later, once I've decided on which ones, but it seems like this would be less effort than trying to make a hidden Social policy.
2) I still might need to make a hidden Social policy, but I haven't figured out how to do this yet. Brief searching on the subject seems to indicate that policies must be assigned to branches or something?
3) I have been unable to figure out how to (if even possible) modify faith costs Civ-wide. There is the social policy FaithCostModifier, but I don't believe that affects the amount of Faith required for the next GP to pop, etc. It should only affect regular buildings and units?
4) Along those lines, is it possible to completely disable a Civ from getting Missionaries by setting Trait_NoTrain to UNIT_MISSIONARY? (Sounds like it would prevent them from getting Missionaries, but I don't know about the Borobudur which grants 3 free ones.)
5) I have been unable to find a way to grant extra Happiness to a specific resource(s). None of the parameters in any of the XML files I've looked at so far seem to be that specific. I'm not sure if I can simply do this in LUA, or something.
6) This game makes it easy to require a building in every city before you can build a National Wonder. But from reading LeeS' guide, it seems impossible to do it the other way -- require a National Wonder before being able to build another building. Is there no way to do this? My current workaround is to simply make the NW appear earlier than normal, and hope you build it before finishing research on the next tech which unlocks the normal building.
Phew, that was a lot longer than I expected..
Thanks again for all of your assistance and support!