Orbis - the original thread

Nice mod Ahwaric
a few things i noticed so far
1.) there is a bug with the lairs you can pillage where you get insane amounts
of money (17000000+ i think i read somewhere in the marnok thread about it)
got this with the bannor only so far
2.)many events like the mushroom spawning and vulcanoes eruption trigger
often but in player territory there is only the first time any effect
3.)i really like the guilds (i play preferably on huge earth maps and conquest
win option) but i think the alchemist guild should be a bit rebalanced
i got more than 600 research in every city i spread it to(with 30 citys on the huge map not beeing much) thats a lot of beakers and even on marathon speed you got nearly every tech in only one turn
4.)about the fireship mentioned above
i think it shouldn´t be a unit itself but maybe a spelllike promotion available
with millitary strategy or warfare, which makes any ship you activate it on a fireship
maybe a new tech: naval tactics, new building: marine academy which adds the promotion to ships build in this city

5.)don´t know if you did anything to the Ai and it´s naval tactics but at least if the Ai found a guild by itself it build up huge fleets and you´ll see a constant traffic of all availlable ships on your coasts
spreading the guild, also they try to use it in war
last game as the bannor, Amelanchier was a naval power rivalling my best Lanun Games and often transported stacks of up to 12 units into my not so well defended backcountry, not mentioned how annoying it was finding all his little citys he settled anywhere on far away small islands
all in all i like how the ai use the navy now

6.)about the Amurite Frigate: i really like the idea (one of my favorite civs),do you think it´s possible
in the future to use the techunits replacements for them as well? (Warwizard, Siege-Mage)
 
@ Rawn
1.) that is a known Marnok Mod(Explorable Lairs) bug. I'm not sure if Marnok has fixed it in more recent versions of his modmod, but I do know that Ahwaric didn't create that bug.
2.)That is a well known FfH bug, not specific to any modmod

4.) I think that it would probably be better to work though a promotion too, but the schema doesn't really permit that. Ahwaric would have to use a custom DLL to allow this. (He could just borrow the Fall Further DLL.)
 
@ Magister
1.) i didn´t follow the marnok thread recently, so i don´t know if he has fixed it was just a thing i noticed

2.)didn´t know that, was just the first time i noticed it

4.)i don´t know what is possible to do or not to do in creating such abbilities
i thought it maybe could be done like the pirate-raid promotion he already use
 
A comment about Battering Ram; they really need to expire somehow, perhaps be destroyed when their host unit is destroyed. I've gotten to the point of using Soviet conscript-style Mercenary-Battering Ram swarm with over 30 Battering Rams, despite having not built a single one.

Also, melee units that simply have +x% collateral damage don't actually seem to do collateral damage. (This also happens with Mimics who defeat catapults in normal FFH.) I think they might be missing some flag or promotion that allows them to do collateral damage in the first place. This means the +10% collateral damage from the battering ram has no noticeable effect.

You can also "pass around the Ram". Bombard, split the Ram. Have another unit take the Ram, Bombard again. It essentially allows you to use a Battering Ram twice a turn. I might've seen the AI do this once.


By the way, this is a great mod. If only there were a way to combine this with FF. =)
 
Just about to try this out. The changes look awesome from the documentation I've read...

Also... you've included magocracy... I love you :D

Al
 
I was just looking through the main text file and found there are already a few references to the Stewards of Inequity


Bazaar of Mammon said:
Commerce is the lifeblood of an empire. A farmer sells his prize horse to buy seed for next season, and the tax collector takes enough off the top to equip a footman. A noble buys a tapestry imported from across the continent, and the King's campaign can continue for another month. As such, it is not discontent that is the greatest threat to a ruler's ambition. Bread and carnivals can asuage unhappiness, or garrison troops should those measures fail. Rather a people's satisfaction has the potential to deplete the treasury and starve an empire. If the farmer is content with a smaller gain, from where does the soldier's arms come? If the noble is pleased with his bare halls, shall the war end sooner? Indeed, if the soldiers themselves do not yearn for a better life than their fathers, why will they quite the farm for a mercenary life?

In light of this, the Stewards of Inequity make an offer which even rulers devout of Junil have a hard time declining. Let the royal market be seeded with a relic of the King of Avarice here, or one of his praying acoyltes there. Let his temples be unmolested in your capital. The people's hearts shall take up a little-- just a little--greed. So will their labors be intensified with avarice, and the nation profit.

Alas, such hubris has brought down empires. There is no such thing as a little greed, for Mammon is not a master content to share his subjects, and a people enslaved by their own base appetites are rare to rouse to the nobler callings of man.

Corrupt Merchant Event said:
Your financial advisor reports that the economy of %s2_city is suffering. It could be the work of a few corrupt merchants, or the actions of the Stewards of Inequity. How should we respond?


1.) There is little we can do.

2.) For a slight bribe the Ratcatchers Guild can handle this for us.

3.) The priests of Kilmorph will not be happy to learn that their tithes are being stolen, allow them to deal with the situation as they please.

Currency Quote said:
Consider this: The value of the coins I hold just now is completely illusory. They only have value because the majority of citizens in our society recognize them as effective bargaining material, but the moment a disaster strikes--drought, war, revolution, flood or famine--our money will be worthless, as it has no practical value in the following struggle for survival.--Dengrahl Lern, Stewards of Inequity


Taxation Quote said:
If there is a finite amount of a resource, then it cannot be equally allocated. As with water where there are oceans there will also be deserts. What better method do we have to see that gold is distributed unevenly than the hand of government and the concept of taxation?--Dengrahl Lern, Stewards of Inequity


I think that an actual Stewards of Inequity guild should be relevant in all of these places. Currency and Taxation should of course be important techs for the religion, probably meaning you need Currency to found it and Taxation for its unique building.

I'm leaning towards making The Bazaar of Mammon once again be a world wonder instead of being a national wonder, and having it also found the Stewards. You leave it buildable, or require a great merchant to found it. I was thinking ti would be appropriate for it to boost the commerce you get from Merchants/Great Merchants (and Bards/Great Bards?) (similar to the Guild of Hammers, Great Library, and Theatre of Dreams), but also decrease the yields/commeces of Priests/Great Prophets (and Sages/Great Sages?). Then, just to make sure it is overpowered, why not go ahead and make it provide Mind mana? If it is buildable and not made by a Great Merchant then requiring Mind mana to build it would make sense too.

I was thinking it would make sense for the Stewards UB to grant something like +4 happiness in that city and +1 unhappiness in all cities. Their whole philosophy is that life is a zero-sum game, in which they must work to make themselves better off at the expense of others. Whatever this Guild does to make some happy makes more unhappy. Those hurt by their greed are forced to compete by acting exactly the same way, which makes things worse for others and and means they need to be more ruthlessly greedy too.

Naturally, it should cost money in the cities and generate in in the Headquarters, like all the BtS guilds.


I'm thinking there should be multiple versions of that corrupt merchant event, with some of them tied to the Stewards and others not. If you own the headquarters of the guild, then you would get some very favorable options (like taking a cut of the merchants profits) from the merchant's illicit profits. If the merchants aren't already in the guild, perhaps you would have the option of inviting them to join, spreading the guild there and maybe giving you the building for free.










Completely unrelated, but since you got the mushrooms to look like mushrooms in the city screen I assume that you are better with tga files that I am. I really think that the Religions should be rearranged in line with their alignments, instead of Fol -Order-OO-RoK-AV-Empyrean-CoEsus is a really odd order. It is very easy to rearrange the order that these religions appear in in the religion screen by rearranging them in CIV4ReligionInfos.xml, but when you do that they don;t use the right Icons. You have to also rearrange them in the tga file. I tried doing this once, but messed up. (Using my tga, the Order's symbol was a banana.)
 
Patch b is linked in the first post. It does not break save games.

I fixed (hopefully) battering ram problems. Also, circle of transmuters will not grant instant techs any more.
Prospectors (renamed from miners) can now actually discover new resources. I could not (do not know how) prevent doing it on already existing resources, so be carefull.

This patch is bigger, as I have included editor in it. I will post it separately from time to time from now on. Package includes documentation, but documentation link was updated too

Thanks guys for all your support and bug reporting :)

@ Vehem
Good to know there is such a way and thanks for letting me know. But as my python skills are bad, I will keep it as it is. I quite like it anyway.
By the way, thanks for letting me to use Maztal in this modmod. It will probably take some time, but I will try to get lizzies here :)

@Raize
I have nothing against using this mod or it's parts in other mods. But it will take some time before I will merge it with FF, if I ever do. It should not be so hard though, as I do not use SDK, and if I do, it will probably be Vehem's.
As for the collateral damage, battering ram promotion does not give it. It only gives some bombarding ability, which is only used against walls.

@Rawn
As Magister said, most of it is not my fault and I tried to fix what is mine in patch b. But I will check Marnok's thread and fix it here if he found what is causing it.

@Magister
Thanks for the info. I really like the idea of Stewards. I am trying to find a way for it to interact with other guilds, but for now I can't find an easy way of doing that. I will keep on trying ;) But I do not think I will change bazaar to a world wonder, I like to have national wonders to specialize cities.
As for the rearranging religions icons, editing res files is a real pain. I think even the original ones from FfH are not perfect. I may try do it, but it takes time and I am a bit short on it now. Just in case, do we agree on the order: order/empyrean/RoK/FoL/CoE/Overlords/Veil?

Edit: regarding the Ai, I did not really do anything. I just tried to choose the right unitAIs for my new ships. Maybe the increase in usefulness changed this? Or is it the new Ai that Kael written for FfH. Anyway, I am glad it works better.
 
You got it backwards. AV/OO/Esus/FoL/RoK/Empy/Order :p

Not sure why, but I always list them in order by alignment myself, and always start with Evil (maybe alphabetical influence? :dunno:)

Actual reason you have it backwards though: The further Esus is from the front of the list, the worse your chances of a Unit adopting them as a religion upon building. Thus your way you have to keep 4 mostly beneficial religions out of the city, my way you only have to keep 2 out of the city, and 1 you don't want there to begin with (AV, due to Hyborem's Whisper)
 
I was just looking through the main text file and found there are already a few references to the Stewards of Inequity

I actually had a lot of Stewards of Inequity implemented as a religion before the release of Fall Further 030 (Mammon linked), but some of the DLL code added for them was causing trouble so I pulled it out and tabled them to work on later.

That implementation basically revolved around extra gold for certain "dubious" buildings (Public Baths, Gambling House etc) though in hindsight I suspect the Stewards would have their fingers in quite a few more legal pies as well.

Dengrahl was to be the "religious hero", though his role was very much as a "city booster/exploiter" rather than a front line warrior. Tax-collector units also featured heavily and allowed a Stewards player to raise a lot of gold at the expense of city happiness (with a chance of temporary revolt if exploited too often).

The main reason I haven't gone back to working on them so far though is that I felt they still lacked some "key feature" that made them interesting and unique enough to deserve a place.
 
OK I must say... I LOVE THIS MOD :worship:

There is so much more flavour and so much more to do. Haven't tested the guilds yet but I know what they do... and they seem awesome! :)

OK gonna go attend to my Amurite tea plantations now :D

Al
 
Looks like a lot of cool stuff in there. Good show!
 
My friend and I have been playing a few MP games with no real technical issues. We always play with events off (even vanilla FFH as OOS are just too risky with them on) but other than that the rest of the mod seems to be working fine.
 
I'm not sure if I'm seeing a bug, but the sidar seem completely unable to adopt the AV. It has spread to all of their cities and they still haven't converted :s

Also, I assume that you've allowed all civs to build mines in forests?



Another issue is that I'm not seeing any kelp or swamp (or reagents for that matter). I'm using the PerfectWorld map script. Any advice on how I can get these features into my game?

Al
 
I have set Sandalphon to -99 weight for Ashen Veil. This way, while human can adopt it, Ai will never do. I just thought that if they want to extend their lives as much as they can, they would not want to bring hell to Erebus.
They are heavily weighted towards CoE and to lesser extent to RoK and FoL.
If you guys think it is excessive, I will lower his animosity towards AV in the next patch.

I changed the religion weigths for all the leaders. So, you should not see many of them converting from good to evil or vice versa. But there are variations between the leaders of the same civ, i.e. Falamar is for CoE and Hannah for OO, while Amelanchier is the only Ljosalfar leader that can adopt AV. As the AV goes, only Calabim, Sheaim and Balseraph really like it.
If you do not like this, it can easily be changed in CIV4LeaderHeadInfos.xml

As for the mines in forests, it never made much sense for me to remove forest to dig under it. Most mines I know (and I know a few ;) are under the ground... I also made them provide just one hammer, not two.
Also, this is part of making FoL usefull for non-elves, too. You can build mines on hills and foresters on flatlands (or if you need more food and do not want to go RoK or cut forests down).

Swamps and kelp do not appear on most of the custom map scrips :( They do on all the standard scripts I tested. I think I have read that reagents not appearing is a common PerfectWorld mapscript problem (Circle of transmuters was thought partially as a solution for this).
Unfortunatelly, I never really edited mapscripts, so I can't help you. If any of you know what have to be changed, I would gladly add edited mapscripts for Orbi mod.

Glad to hear MP is working good. It has been some time since I did it and I have added some stuff since then. Unfortunatelly, I think there will be the same amount of OOS as in the main mod. If only I could find a way do remove it...
There should not be more of them, though. I tried to make it as code light as possible (which is good judging on my code abilities ;) and also use the build-in BtS and Warlords features whenever possible.
 
I have set Sandalphon to -99 weight for Ashen Veil. This way, while human can adopt it, Ai will never do. I just thought that if they want to extend their lives as much as they can, they would not want to bring hell to Erebus.
They are heavily weighted towards CoE and to lesser extent to RoK and FoL.
If you guys think it is excessive, I will lower his animosity towards AV in the next patch.

I changed the religion weigths for all the leaders. So, you should not see many of them converting from good to evil or vice versa. But there are variations between the leaders of the same civ, i.e. Falamar is for CoE and Hannah for OO, while Amelanchier is the only Ljosalfar leader that can adopt AV. As the AV goes, only Calabim, Sheaim and Balseraph really like it.
If you do not like this, it can easily be changed in CIV4LeaderHeadInfos.xml

As for the mines in forests, it never made much sense for me to remove forest to dig under it. Most mines I know (and I know a few ;) are under the ground... I also made them provide just one hammer, not two.
Also, this is part of making FoL usefull for non-elves, too. You can build mines on hills and foresters on flatlands (or if you need more food and do not want to go RoK or cut forests down).

Swamps and kelp do not appear on most of the custom map scrips :( They do on all the standard scripts I tested. I think I have read that reagents not appearing is a common PerfectWorld mapscript problem (Circle of transmuters was thought partially as a solution for this).
Unfortunatelly, I never really edited mapscripts, so I can't help you. If any of you know what have to be changed, I would gladly add edited mapscripts for Orbi mod.

Glad to hear MP is working good. It has been some time since I did it and I have added some stuff since then. Unfortunatelly, I think there will be the same amount of OOS as in the main mod. If only I could find a way do remove it...
There should not be more of them, though. I tried to make it as code light as possible (which is good judging on my code abilities ;) and also use the build-in BtS and Warlords features whenever possible.

I like your reasoning about Sandalphon and the AV. It would make sense also that a lot of leaders would not adopt AV. Hmm... I'm CoE and a neighbour of Sandalphon... looks like I'll be sending a few Nightwatch over :D

Wish I had known about the mines earlier. I would have built all of mine (pun intended :p) IN the forest... rather than on open hills :blush:

I'll try and figure out what is stopping the kelp and swamp appearing in the game. I don't have much time atm (am moving house and jobs), but will get round to it as soon as I can :)

Keep up the good work! I love this mod. It's so much harder to wonder-rape also ;)

Just managed to get the arches guild... mmm I have so much copper and marble :D

Al
 
Hello, i have a bug to report even if it doesn't affect a lot of people. When i install your mod, i got no text at all on either the menus or in game screens. I'm playing with a local version of CIV4 (french one actually). The name of the file which is causing the issue is CIV4GameText_FForb as i can play after i delete it =)

I think all you have to do is to add French, German, Italian and Spanish sections in the latest parts of the file where only an English section appears.
At least i think it's the problem as every other text file which is working always has all these sections.

Thanks for reading me and keep the work going :)
 
Playing a Balseraph SP game on perfect world and I found a bug when I switched to Hyborem. I spawned near Amelanchier so I declared war and conquered a nearby city. However I have no city interface! http://screenshot.xfire.com/screenshot/natural/04624e54e792cd103f3b338aff815e20bd1e5417.png

I tried quitting and reloading and that just gave me this: http://screenshot.xfire.com/screenshot/natural/f17afd7c37b0f0798d648abc38b8fc7b8e4492ed.png Wierd... so I exit that screen but the city interface problem persists :(
 
The file CIV4GameText_FForb in text folder, as well as GameText_orbi.xml in the main xml folder (not the one in the Text folder) should not get in the zip file of the modmod at all. That are old, experimental ones. Please delete them, as I can't do it via patch.
I think I may release a new mod zip, i.e. with the next patch, to fix this. This mod is not so big after all, so I hope it will not be a major problem.

As for the missing city and tech screens, I found the problem. One s too many in the art define of infernal chariot... :(
Use the file in the attached zip and it should fix the problem. The file goes to Fall from Heaven 2 032\Assets\XML\Art. Let me know if it did not help.

Anyway, thanks for reporting both issues. And sorry for inconvinience :(
 

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is it just me or does this mod mess up map generation? i have swamps all over the world including in tundra!? and im getting dyes and suger in snowy forests, and mushrooms in desert hills... seems all a bit too chaotic really...

other than that the changes made here are brilliant, i really like the tech and unit changes. i have yet to found a guild... but they look like fun :)
 
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