New Version - 2.0.3 (April 1, 2022)

[Recursive]

Hey all,

New version inbound. The Great Merge has arrived, merging the (2) through (5) mods into a single mod, after massive community support for the move. This release will be version 2.0 to recognize this major change.

Also contains some other cool stuff, like major tactical AI improvements, the removal of the infamous disrupt production event for the time being, the return of unique City-State gifts, and of course bugfixes and performance improvements.

Huge thanks to @balparmak, @Rekk and @ilteroi for their great work for this release.

There will be some temporary compatibility issues with modmods that depend on one of the merged mods. Please report mod dependency issues in this thread and we will fix them.

Changelog:

The Great Merge
- (2) Community Balance Overhaul, (3) CSD for VP, (4) Civ IV Diplomatic Features for VP and (5) More Luxuries for VP...
...have all been merged into (2) Vox Populi!

- LUA files have been consolidated, making future UI changes much easier.
- Repository size greatly reduced and is now 70.9% C++ (was less than 50% due to all the LUA clutter).
- The autoinstaller will install the new version and delete the old one automatically as usual.
- Future changes to VP will be easier as a result of all this tidying up. And fewer clicks for players!
- Thanks to balparmak for his awesome work in merging everything!

General
  Savegames
  - Fixed the savegame compatibility issue caused by InfoAddict (thanks, ilteroi!)
  - Now use Github release tags as identifiers

  Modder Functions
  - Added Building_ResourceQuantityFromPOP table: provides 1 of a specified resource for each x% of city population

  Other
  - Removed Visual Studio upgrade prompt from the GameCore project file (might mean building the DLL requires VS 2017+ now?)
  - Performance improvements
  - Improved fake RNG algorithm (now uses PCG hash function)
  - Autoinstaller now deletes any existing UI_bc1 folder no matter what version you're playing, for compatibility

Balance
  Barbarians
  - Can now spawn Cavalry, Mechanized Infantry, Ironclad, Missile Cruiser

  City-States
  - Fixed a bug preventing Militaristic City-States from giving out their unique gifts, which have been rebalanced (see below)
      Odds of getting a unique gift are now roughly 1/4
  - Pledge to Protect threshold now just uses raw military might numbers
      Should be far easier to make a pledge now!

  Happiness
  - Reduced unhappiness divisors for Poverty by 3x, Boredom and Illiteracy by 2x
     Hopefully this should put unhappiness in a reasonable place. Please provide feedback on this!

  Improvements
  - Eki is now buildable on all land tiles

  Order Ideology
  - Nationalization: Immunity from foreign franchises in your cities now excludes masters

  Resources
  - Salt: +1 Production (base)
  - Amber: +1 Production (improved)
  - Furs: +1 Food (base)
  - Sugar: -1 Food, +1 Production (base); +1 Food, -1 Gold (improved)

  Spies
  - Commented out "disrupt production" event for now due to massive complaints about it

  Trade Routes
  - Resource Diversity Modifier fixed (thanks psparky!)
      For years this was only adding 1 Gold or less, instead of a % modifier as intended/displayed
      Carthage UA now actually works!
      Removed legacy text about negative resource diversity modifiers, since this is not possible anymore

  Units
  - Rebalancing of City-State unique gift units by Rek

  - Companion Cavalry: Gains Movement to General, combat bonus while stacked with GG

  - Sipahi: 39 CS (up from 37), loses Formation I and scouting promotions, gains Overrun and +25% flanking bonus

  - Hakkapeliitta: 37 CS (same as Lancer), loses Movement to General, combat bonus while stacked with GG
      Gains +1 Move, +1 Sight, Free Pillage, 50 HP on kill, +20% damage VS wounded units

  - Turtle Ship: 32 CS (up from 30), gains Indomitable

  - Great Galleass: 27 CS (up from 26), 20 RCS (up from 16), +1 Move to match Galleass, gains Bombardment I

  - Pracinha: Gains 10x more Golden Age Points from kills

  - Ballista: 8 RCS (up from 7), loses Sight Penalty and malus VS units, gains Field I

  - Battering Ram: 17 CS (up from 15), loses Defense Penalty, gains City Assault, upgrades into Tercio
      Fear the mighty Battering Ram.

AI
- Adjustments to leader non-diplomacy flavors by balparmak
- Improvements/bugfixes to AI handling of Settlers, Inquisitors and Missionaries
- Major improvements to tactical and operational AI by ilteroi
    AI should be better at coordinating the movement of its units and finishing its military operations correctly
    Target selection by AI units and cities has been improved
    AI now prefers ranged land units as garrisons
    AI garrisons no longer abandon the capital city, and are better at swapping

UI
- "Required" and "Leads To" buildings in the Civilopedia now consider civs' unique buildings (thanks Rek!)
- City banner now displays when a city has an airport
- Added art for land mine indicator and new airport indicator, courtesy of Hinin and balparmak
- Added the ability to hide a promotion icon from the unit promotions list
- Standardization of promotion help text
- Fixed description issues for the American Unique NWs
- Replaced all instances of "Kiev" with "Kyiv" (the Ukrainian-derived spelling)
- Other text fixes

Other Bugfixes
- Swept away most of the religion weirdness, like World Congress delegates not being added and unbuyable Inquisitors
    If any issues remain, please point them out on Github!
- Attempted to fix "End Turn" button not working
- "(NOTE: You are not at war.)" removed from denouncement text keys
- Fixed a crash
- Fixed a bug causing players to always get a full turn of Production overflow when they complete an invested building
- Fixed AI spreading other players' religions to third parties
- Fixed promotion duration (for temporary promotions) functioning incorrectly
- Fixed yield/trigger weirdness with City-State friendship/alliances
- Fixed "non-specialist yield bonus" function not working properly
- Fixed unbuyable spaceship parts in Community Patch only
- Fixed missing global defines
- Fixed Foreign Legion not being purchasable after the Authority finisher
- Fixed LUA runtime errors
- Fixed City-States being able to build Settlers
- Fixed LOCAL_GENERALS_NEAREST_CITY not being listed in CustomModOptions.xml
- Fixed policies which provide free buildings ignoring existing free buildings (will now move to next city)
- Fixed work boats being unable to enter Ocean tiles

Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JwLQ2bKBw00AuEUr0XjpfL-4ZKdMo4Yj/view?usp=sharing

Online as of 7:15 PM CST. Obviously not savegame compatible.

I wish farewell to Asterix Rage, who has decided to leave the VP community. Thank you for your contributions to Vox Populi and associated modmods, especially the excellent promotion icons! Take care, and you're always welcome back.

---

Hotfix 2.0.1
Changelog:

- Fixed the database issues

Online as of 7:35 PM CST on March 30. Savegame compatible with 2.0 versions.

---

Hotfix 2.0.2
Changelog:

- Fixed bug with GAMEEVENT_MinorAlliesChanged LUA hook (restores compatibility with UCS)

Online as of 8:54 PM CST on March 31. Savegame compatible with 2.0 versions.

---

Hotfix 2.0.3
Changelog:

- Fixed city bombardment bug (cities will now bombard units again!)
- Increased unhappiness from needs again, but still lower than before (Boredom/Illiteracy: 100 -> 60, Poverty: 150 -> 120)

Online as of 8:55 PM CST on April 1. Savegame compatible with 2.0 versions.

 

[arievillo]

THANK YOU VP TEAM!

 

[phantomaxl1207]

Happiness - Reduced unhappiness divisors for Poverty by 3x, Boredom and Illiteracy by 2x Hopefully this should put unhappiness in a reasonable place. Please provide feedback on this!

This should hopefully mean Cities don't have 60+% Unhappiness from Poverty.

Rebalancing of City-State unique gift units by Rek

Awesome

 

[danymatrix]

oh my god!

 

[Hinin]

The Great Merge has arrived

My vision of the Great Merge.
mod (2) mods (3) to (5)

How the modmodder within me sees the Great Merge.

Spoiler Video Clip :

Just kidding. I know you did a great job.

 

[ShadedSkies]

BUG: Started a game as Byzantium and Cataphracts now unlock at Trade (Horsemen and War elephants too). The rest of the tree seems fine.

 

[usadefcon1]

Wow I posted a Feature Request on GitHub just 2 days ago to add an icon to the city banner when it has an airport, and it made it into this version with new art. Amazing!

 

[stii]

"
Improvements
- Eki is now buildable on all land tiles"

How literal is this? Because it is currently flat plains/grasslands without fresh water. So if taken literally it is a huge buff, but it probably means a bit less?

 

[azum4roll]

"
Improvements
- Eki is now buildable on all land tiles"

How literal is this? Because it is currently flat plains/grasslands without fresh water. So if taken literally it is a huge buff, but it probably means a bit less?

All dry flatland tiles.

 

[Gidoza]

I'm curious about the motivation for buffing Salt and Furs? I always thought they were quite powerful.

 

[azum4roll]

WITH Stone Works built a Salt mine has better yields than a Silver/Copper mine without the respective buildings, IF both are on hills or both are on flatlands. That's quickly outpowered when Silver gets its monopoly or Copper gets to Forge.

And we haven't factored in Salt preferring to spawn on flat desert/tundra tiles while all others prefer hills.

Pre-buff mined luxury yields table:

Furs is most comparable with Ivory - both must start on a 1f1p tile. Furs starts weaker with 1f compared to 1p, comparable when improved (1f1c vs 2p), weaker with a boosting building, and has a way worse monopoly. The buff should at least give them some early power to compensate.

Pre-buff camp luxury yields table:

 

[Gidoza]

WITH Stone Works built a Salt mine has better yields than a Silver/Copper mine without the respective buildings, IF both are on hills or both are on flatlands. That's quickly outpowered when Silver gets its monopoly or Copper gets to Forge.

And we haven't factored in Salt preferring to spawn on flat desert/tundra tiles while all others prefer hills.

Pre-buff mined luxury yields table:
View attachment 623573

Furs is most comparable with Ivory - both must start on a 1f1p tile. Furs starts weaker with 1f compared to 1p, comparable when improved (1f1c vs 2p), weaker with a boosting building, and has a way worse monopoly. The buff should at least give them some early power to compensate.

Pre-buff camp luxury yields table:
View attachment 623574

Thanks for the reply!

As for the "worse monopoly" - why does that monopoly type even exist as it is then? I have found 6 happiness useful when conducting warmongering. It might be interesting if instead of 6 global happiness, each Furs tile provided 2 happiness when worked. This would give it more breadth and potential while still scaling properly on smaller maps.

 

[frktest]

Thanks a lot, that looks to fix some issue for me to play with last VP versions.

- City banner now displays when a city has an airport

That is a big idea! Thank you.

- Fixed the savegame compatibility issue caused by InfoAddict (thanks, ilteroi!)

I have not understood if InfoAddict put bugs to VP yet.

 

[Slyceth]

Did you read through my suggestions I posted a while back? I don't see any changes from there in here? Are they going to be implemented in the next patch?
Just to reiterate:

More situational World Congress proposals. Something like "Mountain travel" that will help me win against a civ that is surrounded by mountains and vice versa, or "Repair project", where a civ gets all their tiles repaired, "Closed waters" where nobody is allowed to access ocean tiles until the proposal is repealed, interesting stuff like that that make me consider more than just the obvious. No mods do this, and right now Sphere of Influence is usually the only decent proposal in the late game.

More fair AI diplomacy counter I recommend a "AI friend dedication system", where a long-standing relationship with an AI is unbreakable as long as there's a combined stronger AI party to oppose. An exception would be where that AI would definitely want to betray you in the endgame to prevent your victory, because unless you're teamed by being in the same Team from the start, an AI should never let you win.

Joining wars as a proposal even if they are sanctioned, and even if they are hostile towards you. No country would ever reject a foreign player as a Hail Mary in their war. The only way of doing it right now is declaring war on both players.

Recommendations for pantheon and religion beliefs so I don't have to read through all of them.

More land customization productions.

Tech trade availability indicators in main overview, same as the luxuries, so you can see who has which techs for trade.

The final and most critical thing is how the AI is broken on maps with lots of water. Sometimes they declare war for 5 turns, 1-2 units show up and they give up and offer peace.

 

[youngsteve]

Looks really good. I will start a new game after I finish my current campaign with Russia.

I did chuckle about Barbs producing modern units, as in my games they are usually gone by Classical Era, & that is with raging barbs. I do ususally play on land maps, & the AI is so efficent they hunt them all down.

I also didn't know there was a problem with CS handing out Unique units. In my present game I have received 7 Winged Hussairs alone, plus a few others.

 

[CppMaster]

Did you read through my suggestions I posted a while back? I don't see any changes from there in here? Are they going to be implemented in the next patch?
Just to reiterate:

More situational World Congress proposals. Something like "Mountain travel" that will help me win against a civ that is surrounded by mountains and vice versa, or "Repair project", where a civ gets all their tiles repaired, "Closed waters" where nobody is allowed to access ocean tiles until the proposal is repealed, interesting stuff like that that make me consider more than just the obvious. No mods do this, and right now Sphere of Influence is usually the only decent proposal in the late game.

More fair AI diplomacy counter I recommend a "AI friend dedication system", where a long-standing relationship with an AI is unbreakable as long as there's a combined stronger AI party to oppose. An exception would be where that AI would definitely want to betray you in the endgame to prevent your victory, because unless you're teamed by being in the same Team from the start, an AI should never let you win.

Joining wars as a proposal even if they are sanctioned, and even if they are hostile towards you. No country would ever reject a foreign player as a Hail Mary in their war. The only way of doing it right now is declaring war on both players.

Recommendations for pantheon and religion beliefs so I don't have to read through all of them.

More land customization productions.

Tech trade availability indicators in main overview, same as the luxuries, so you can see who has which techs for trade.

The final and most critical thing is how the AI is broken on maps with lots of water. Sometimes they declare war for 5 turns, 1-2 units show up and they give up and offer peace.

It has to be a consensus that we actually want it. It's not enough that one person would propose sth. It would mess up the mod really quick if that was the case.

 

[Solic]

Did you read through my suggestions I posted a while back? I don't see any changes from there in here? Are they going to be implemented in the next patch?
Just to reiterate:

More situational World Congress proposals. Something like "Mountain travel" that will help me win against a civ that is surrounded by mountains and vice versa, or "Repair project", where a civ gets all their tiles repaired, "Closed waters" where nobody is allowed to access ocean tiles until the proposal is repealed, interesting stuff like that that make me consider more than just the obvious. No mods do this, and right now Sphere of Influence is usually the only decent proposal in the late game.

Mountain travel and repair project also seem like no priority over a sphere of influence, nor very interesting. Closed Waters is too strong and not really realistic, but something like halving naval movement I could see being pretty cool to have a tool against naval civs. I agree with more world congress proposals being a nice thing to add (and great modmod territory), but the proposals should be more fleshed out if you'd hope to have this be implemented in my opinion.

More fair AI diplomacy counter I recommend a "AI friend dedication system", where a long-standing relationship with an AI is unbreakable as long as there's a combined stronger AI party to oppose. An exception would be where that AI would definitely want to betray you in the endgame to prevent your victory, because unless you're teamed by being in the same Team from the start, an AI should never let you win.

The diplomacy modifiers we have already do this in a sense?

Joining wars as a proposal even if they are sanctioned, and even if they are hostile towards you. No country would ever reject a foreign player as a Hail Mary in their war. The only way of doing it right now is declaring war on both players.

Not sure if I understand this correctly, but in my opinion sanctions should not have really niche exceptions. Their hostility towards you is there for a reason, so not giving you something additional for you joining their war, seems reasonable to me. You should still get a positive diplomacy modifier with them again if you do declare war on whoever they are warring, so that's a form of a reward with them.

Recommendations for pantheon and religion beliefs so I don't have to read through all of them.

Seems like a waste of time. We might as well add recommenders for every major decision then like cultural policies, spy placements, WC votes. This is the part where you're in control and religious choices are so infrequent and important that taking your time to read through them seems worth your while.

More land customization productions.

Too vague.

Tech trade availability indicators in main overview, same as the luxuries, so you can see who has which techs for trade.

Not a priority to me, but can't hurt.

The final and most critical thing is how the AI is broken on maps with lots of water. Sometimes they declare war for 5 turns, 1-2 units show up and they give up and offer peace.

Couldn't comment on this, because I don't play too much on those maps.

I gave my thoughts on your proposals in italics.

I think it's good you shared your input, but I think a vast majority should agree before there is actual development movement on it. Keep in mind that the devs are doing this in their spare time free of charge and they are not at your beck and call.

I think the best chance for you to succeed into making some of these changes is making a thread honed in on some of these topics separately and get community feedback on it that way. If enough agree, you have a stronger case and if they do not, you could make your own modmod.

 

[Slyceth]

I gave my thoughts on your proposals in italics.

I think it's good you shared your input, but I think a vast majority should agree before there is actual development movement on it. Keep in mind that the devs are doing this in their spare time free of charge and they are not at your beck and call.

I think the best chance for you to succeed into making some of these changes is making a thread honed in on some of these topics separately and get community feedback on it that way. If enough agree, you have a stronger case and if they do not, you could make your own modmod.

I appreciate the reponses and you're right, it's silly of me think they are easy changes and things everyone would agree with. It's more in a "cover all bases" kind of sense, but I appreciate the comments for sure!

 

[adan_eslavo]

For anyone interested, I have just updated all of my mods to the recent VP 2.0. For complete list of my mods look at my signature.

 

[adan_eslavo]

What does it mean:

- Standardization of promotion help text

Anything close to my Promotion Overhaul or sort of quick fixes?

the return of unique City-State gifts

Do you mean gifting for ? I ask because of my City-State Leaders compatibility.

performance improvements.

Just curious, how much improvement can be seen on slow computers. I haven't played a game for a really long time, now waiting for some updates of modmods, and I'm curious. Late game performance lags were really annoying then.

Makes it easier to do UI changes, such as integrate the changes from later versions of EUI (which I hope to do eventually), because there are fewer versions of the files to worry about

If your simplification is out, and you say UI/EUI changes will be much easier, then maybe finally you will take into account incorporating some must have visual mods like:
Improved City-View
Religion Spread
Show XP in Military Overview
Filters in Trade view
Unit Path Viewer
Small Resource Icons (with very important feature for Natural Wonders' icons which stay after discovering!)

Also I can recommend this one we've made some time ago (file).

Also something like Full Top Panel Condensed would be nice feature chooseable in options.

Moderator Action: Merged posts together. - Recursive