Nikas Kunitz
Warlord
I made this mod some months ago as basis for a proper mod. However, as I still hadn't really started this "proper mod" (some things I want still remain beyond my modding capabilities, while I'm also not sure what additions I should start with, starting and aborting the mod several times), I occasionally played and improved this NK Tweaks mod when I wanted to play more simple vanilla-like game. Finally, after describing limited unit stacks in comments on YouTube, I was requested several times to share it, so here it is. There's still some things to improve, but as I played couple of games well into modern age, the mod is fairly playable. Anyway, testing by more players (particularly the ones who manage to finish their playthroughs) is very welcome! Please share your experience with this mod in this thread! For intended (as I play it) gameplay I suggest using Totestra map-script packed in with the mod, large or huge map with 18 civs, Monarch difficulty, "resources evenly spread" (resources are more sparse and strategic) or "full of resources" map setting, "choose religions", "no technology brokering", "city flipping after conquest" and "aggressive AI" game settings.
Download: https://forums.civfanatics.com/reso...d-unit-stacks-faster-movement-and-more.32525/
Now, to the "tweaks" of this mod.
This is vanilla BtS with a lot of various changes I find necessary to play it, without addition of new content (civs, units etc).
Mainly, unit stacks are limited to 8 units per tile, and movement speed is doubled for most units (infantry now has movement 2 and cavalry has movement 4 as default. Also doubled speed of naval units). Cavalry now has 50% malus to attacking and defending cities, making infantry more relevant but keeping cavalry as best field combat units. Advanced machine units, like tanks, airplanes and modern ships now require specific building (industrial park or drydock) to be built along with additional logical strategic resource (mostly iron in addition to the fuel), to make them strategic asset in addition to infantry&artillery basis of army. This all makes war more realistic and interesting both on strategic and tactical level. You now need to mindfully combine various unit types in a stack to counter enemy units, with artillery remaining the best way to soften enemy stacks and cities, but it cannot defend itself well. Faster movement makes "frontline" deeper, particularly with cavalry, as it can swiftly penetrate deeply into enemy territory (but with cavalry having 50% malus to city combat, cities are safer from such raids), and the game in general feels more dynamic. Most importantly, AI handles these changes well, instead of one stack of doom it will send several armies to attack you (or other AIs). And faster naval units allow you to build effectively sea-connected empire with galleys, global colonial empire with galleons, and quickly project your power on the world stage in late game with battleships, aircraft carriers and missile ships. Also all ships now have varying withdraw chance and most modern ships have varying anti-air protection, allowing even battleships a small chance of shooting down planes.
Some changes were made to the tech tree, mostly by adding more prerequisite techs for later techs, thus making "over-specialisation" on particular tech line less possible, especially regarding unit availability timing (still, there's plenty of freedom in research). Also, copper is now revealed with Mining (that is better both realistically and gameplay-wise), allowing you to build spearmen earlier if you are lucky to get copper nearby on non-forested tile. Cannons were moved from Steel to Chemistry, for earlier transition from Trebuchets. Ironclads now can enter oceans with Electricity.
Resource generation is almost fully overhauled, along with few changes to yields (like rice and cow got their lacking +1 food to be on level with other food resources, while copper got +1 commerce to represent its use as coinage and "cultural/luxury goods" unlike iron). Most resources now can spawn in more locations more freely (like alongside rivers, or mineral resources spawning in most terrain types both with forest or jungle and without). Cow now spawns on flatlands as well on hills, while pigs spawn only in forested/jungle tiles. Percent appearance of some resources also was tweaked, for example copper being realistically rarer than iron. For some reason, gold generates around twice as commonly as silver in vanilla Civ4, despite silver giving less commerce. I fixed that, now gold is rarer and feels more special, while silver is now the common metal "for your coin". Some resources no longer are used for balancing starting locations, so you won't get pigs everytime you want to "roleplay" Arabia or other Islamic country. Deserts are better now with some resources (wheat, horse, cow and sugar) spawning on flood plains, and oases made improvable (honestly, I don't know why Firaxis made them unimprovable. Improvements, particularly farms, looks really well on oases). Finally, resources have different chance of spawning on islands. Smaller islands will get only food like sheep or cow, while grain can be found mostly on large continents. In general, luxury resources tend to be generated closer to equator. The mod includes the best realistic map script packed in - Totestra, the only one that I consider worth playing with as a geography fan.
Finally, traits of many leaders were changed to make them more "historical" or better gameplay-wise, atleast in my opinion. Some traits also were changed (major commerce bonus of the Financial trait now cannot be exploited from the start, as coastal tiles give only one commerce. Build lighthouse (effectively swapped with harbor) to get the second sea-coin). AI focus of some leaders also was changed, particularly removed religion-focus, along with starting Mysticism, of Maya, Aztec and Inca, as they have no religion of their own and seeing Buddhist Montezuma again and again is annoyingly unrealistic in my opinion. As religions still are all the same, it is recommended to play with "Choose religions" game option, so you would likely see Christianity, Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism as first (and thus dominant) religions instead of usual Buddhism and Hinduism.
There are few other changes as well, including graphical ones: Middle Eastern and African city artstyles, that are greatly lacking in vanilla BtS, were added from Rhye's and Fall. Infantry now has 5 models per unit instead of 3, greatly improving immersive feeling of battles (no performance issues encountered). And colours of several civs were changed to more historically/culturally relevant ones (India and Carthage swapped colours, becoming fittingly orange and purple; Russia got dark red colour from RFC, with its vanilla red-gold given to Rome, that in turn gave its purple-gold to Byzantium replacing dull grey; Spain took yellow-red from Inca, who took light blue from Persia, which took peach-pink from Spain). I also wanted to swap red-white and white-red between England and Japan, but that requires replacing flag decals so I'll do it later.
Also, city lists of some civs (like Russia) were altered to prioritise more historically important cities, without adding new names to the lists.
Plans for potential improvement include:
Fixing minor issues (like civ buttons still have old colors)
Applying feedback
Assembling unit graphics for each artstyle. Not unique for each civ, but common graphics for whole unit tree in Middle Eastern, Asian, African and Native American artstyles.
Download: https://forums.civfanatics.com/reso...d-unit-stacks-faster-movement-and-more.32525/
Now, to the "tweaks" of this mod.
This is vanilla BtS with a lot of various changes I find necessary to play it, without addition of new content (civs, units etc).
Mainly, unit stacks are limited to 8 units per tile, and movement speed is doubled for most units (infantry now has movement 2 and cavalry has movement 4 as default. Also doubled speed of naval units). Cavalry now has 50% malus to attacking and defending cities, making infantry more relevant but keeping cavalry as best field combat units. Advanced machine units, like tanks, airplanes and modern ships now require specific building (industrial park or drydock) to be built along with additional logical strategic resource (mostly iron in addition to the fuel), to make them strategic asset in addition to infantry&artillery basis of army. This all makes war more realistic and interesting both on strategic and tactical level. You now need to mindfully combine various unit types in a stack to counter enemy units, with artillery remaining the best way to soften enemy stacks and cities, but it cannot defend itself well. Faster movement makes "frontline" deeper, particularly with cavalry, as it can swiftly penetrate deeply into enemy territory (but with cavalry having 50% malus to city combat, cities are safer from such raids), and the game in general feels more dynamic. Most importantly, AI handles these changes well, instead of one stack of doom it will send several armies to attack you (or other AIs). And faster naval units allow you to build effectively sea-connected empire with galleys, global colonial empire with galleons, and quickly project your power on the world stage in late game with battleships, aircraft carriers and missile ships. Also all ships now have varying withdraw chance and most modern ships have varying anti-air protection, allowing even battleships a small chance of shooting down planes.
Spoiler Issues/bugs with limited unit stacks :
Some changes were made to the tech tree, mostly by adding more prerequisite techs for later techs, thus making "over-specialisation" on particular tech line less possible, especially regarding unit availability timing (still, there's plenty of freedom in research). Also, copper is now revealed with Mining (that is better both realistically and gameplay-wise), allowing you to build spearmen earlier if you are lucky to get copper nearby on non-forested tile. Cannons were moved from Steel to Chemistry, for earlier transition from Trebuchets. Ironclads now can enter oceans with Electricity.
Resource generation is almost fully overhauled, along with few changes to yields (like rice and cow got their lacking +1 food to be on level with other food resources, while copper got +1 commerce to represent its use as coinage and "cultural/luxury goods" unlike iron). Most resources now can spawn in more locations more freely (like alongside rivers, or mineral resources spawning in most terrain types both with forest or jungle and without). Cow now spawns on flatlands as well on hills, while pigs spawn only in forested/jungle tiles. Percent appearance of some resources also was tweaked, for example copper being realistically rarer than iron. For some reason, gold generates around twice as commonly as silver in vanilla Civ4, despite silver giving less commerce. I fixed that, now gold is rarer and feels more special, while silver is now the common metal "for your coin". Some resources no longer are used for balancing starting locations, so you won't get pigs everytime you want to "roleplay" Arabia or other Islamic country. Deserts are better now with some resources (wheat, horse, cow and sugar) spawning on flood plains, and oases made improvable (honestly, I don't know why Firaxis made them unimprovable. Improvements, particularly farms, looks really well on oases). Finally, resources have different chance of spawning on islands. Smaller islands will get only food like sheep or cow, while grain can be found mostly on large continents. In general, luxury resources tend to be generated closer to equator. The mod includes the best realistic map script packed in - Totestra, the only one that I consider worth playing with as a geography fan.
Finally, traits of many leaders were changed to make them more "historical" or better gameplay-wise, atleast in my opinion. Some traits also were changed (major commerce bonus of the Financial trait now cannot be exploited from the start, as coastal tiles give only one commerce. Build lighthouse (effectively swapped with harbor) to get the second sea-coin). AI focus of some leaders also was changed, particularly removed religion-focus, along with starting Mysticism, of Maya, Aztec and Inca, as they have no religion of their own and seeing Buddhist Montezuma again and again is annoyingly unrealistic in my opinion. As religions still are all the same, it is recommended to play with "Choose religions" game option, so you would likely see Christianity, Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism as first (and thus dominant) religions instead of usual Buddhism and Hinduism.
There are few other changes as well, including graphical ones: Middle Eastern and African city artstyles, that are greatly lacking in vanilla BtS, were added from Rhye's and Fall. Infantry now has 5 models per unit instead of 3, greatly improving immersive feeling of battles (no performance issues encountered). And colours of several civs were changed to more historically/culturally relevant ones (India and Carthage swapped colours, becoming fittingly orange and purple; Russia got dark red colour from RFC, with its vanilla red-gold given to Rome, that in turn gave its purple-gold to Byzantium replacing dull grey; Spain took yellow-red from Inca, who took light blue from Persia, which took peach-pink from Spain). I also wanted to swap red-white and white-red between England and Japan, but that requires replacing flag decals so I'll do it later.
Also, city lists of some civs (like Russia) were altered to prioritise more historically important cities, without adding new names to the lists.
Plans for potential improvement include:
Fixing minor issues (like civ buttons still have old colors)
Applying feedback
Assembling unit graphics for each artstyle. Not unique for each civ, but common graphics for whole unit tree in Middle Eastern, Asian, African and Native American artstyles.
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