[Custom Civ] pineappledan's Chola for VP

I can confirm what Hokiefan00 described is happening to me as well, there are available trade routes but cant start any, land or sea.
 
New version
Code:
 - Vassal production bonus for Thirvai now visible on the building
 - Trade UI bug fix (thanks InkAxis)
 - Kallarani now has Infiltrator instead of Quick Study
 
I think it would be interesting to reduce the Kallarani's CS to -3 from Caravel and really bump up the :c5production: reduction from trade routes; such that the average time to push out a ship is ~3-4 turns in the capital.

While most CIVs spent the medieval era building up their infrastructure, the Chola spent it spamming Kallaranis to overwhelm their opponents. Supply in this era is also quite limited, so the gimmick here is that the Chola can push out ships faster than their opponents can kill them.

We have plenty of UU that is stronger than the unit that they replace, I think it would be interesting for a UU that is intentionally weak.
 
We have plenty of UU that is stronger than the unit that they replace, I think it would be interesting for a UU that is intentionally weak.
weaker, spammable uniques don't test well, people enjoy them less, and they run into supply issues.

I'm in late Modern on my full test run game with the Chola. Communitu map, King difficulty, standard size and speed

General impressions
  • The Chola start slow. I was worried about the potential infinite scaling on the UA's :c5gold:in all cities for each unique TR completion, but this hasn't been an issue. I had about 8:c5gold: by medieval, 18 in late Renaissance, and have nearly run out of unique cities that I can reach at 31:c5gold: per city in Modern. I have 21 cities, so that's 651:c5gold:GPT in late game. This seems reasonable to me, given the UA ability is high-risk, and scales fairly slowly in the beginning, when your trade cap is low.
  • The UA incentivizes you to pick new TRs instead of the most profitable TRs, which means I gave up a lot of early :c5gold:/:c5science:/:c5culture: to maximize my UA as fast as I could. This is an interesting tension the makes the civ pretty fresh.
  • The Free TRs is nice. Having played with the Chola, this is the more impactful part of the UA. In modern, I have dominated or vassalized my entire continent: 21 cities and 2 vassals = 7 free :trade:Trade routes!
  • The Thirisadai is too strong. Once you get the Thirvai up, the GAdmirals roll in quickly. I had a massive amphibious invasion with Indonesia and spawned 2 GAdmirals by the time the Thirvai was unlocked, after which I quickly had another 4. The Thirisadai base CS is simply too strong. In Medieval and reinassance, they are functionally a UU that comes 1 tech earlier, upgrades for free, and has +8:c5strength:CS with 2 unique promotions. That would be strong for a normal UU, and these are like 3 UUs because they don't obsolete.
  • Being unable to build Thirisadai was less of a drawback than I had thought it would be. They are very hard to lose, and you get them for free, meaning they don't cost you any production turns diverting cities away from infrastructure, but you still get this incredible unit. I had 10 Thirisadai by Modern, which was half my melee ship force. Functionally, I got almost 1/3 of my entire navy given to me for free.
  • Thirvai only feel like a UB if you have vassals. I have two vassals in my game, giving me about 80:c5gold:GPT in taxes at 10% tax rate. I never paid any attention to vassal taxes before, but they are quite low. I think my intuition of 20% taxes to :c5production:production was on the money. In modern, my Thirvai are converting vassal taxes into 16:c5production: per city. This is a healthy boost, but not game changing at this stage of the game, especially once factories came online.
  • Kovil Kulam is good. They're just good. auto-boosted freshwater farms everywhere is a nice quality of life improvement, and the way the KK encourages a mix of farms and the UI makes it feel like the UI rewards a wider mix of improvements than your normal UI. It also makes imperialism and freedom very tempting with Agribusinesses, since you don't feel like your UI supplants standard farms.
Upcoming changes:
  • Reducing the Thirvai from 25:c5capital:GAdmiral points on TR completion to 20:c5capital:. I feel the GAdmiral rate is just a little too fast right now. This will also make Thirisadai a little 'costlier'
  • Lowering the Thirisadai from 18/33/48/63:c5strength: to 15/30/45/60:c5strength:
 
Some general notes from my current game.

One of the events, think it was the flood, destroyed the dummy guild building (Ainuruvar Guild Dummy or something ...). I assume it just gets replaced with the correct yields etc the following turn otherwise that is a bit of an issue. I'm not sure what it shows but but perhaps it would actually be useful to have it show in the building list instead of being hidden since it could be interesting to see how many extra gold etc you pull in due to the trade route having established that +1 gold in every city for every trade route completed (500 lords ...). I'm not sure if there is an easy way to show that one So it's bit hard to say but eventually it sort of racks up if you play on a huge map with lots of cities about.

The infiltrator promotion on the boat is a bit cumbersome when it comes to movement and combat formations etc as you need to keep a space between units so moving or combat with them is problematic I would say. It's a bit of an issue. Very little sea warfare is done single boat to single boat so you sort of need to move in groups and with this promotion that becomes sort of annoying, the benefit of the promotion is kind of lost really. As if you move out of the group to then strike with the full bonus you are probably dead as your single lonely boat will get crushed on the AI turn. Just not sure if Infiltrators is a good boat/fleet/melee promotion really. I basically never take it on my ranged units either as units that are alone tends to get swarmed and die.

Infiltrators
+25% combat strength outside friendly territory
+25% ranged combat strength when attacking wounded units
-15% combat strength if adjacent to a friendly unit

So the first one is ok, but if you are next o a friendly it's either only +10% or if in your land it's -15% which makes you weaker then the attacker. The ranged combat strength is completely pointless I guess since you are a melee ship upgrading to a melee ship etc that will never have ranged combat strength for attacking wounded units.

Placing the Kovil is very map dependent. It's not a spammable building I would gather on most maps. But even getting one or two up per city have turned into a bit of a hassle due all the rivers and such. It's one of the more rare unique improvements I would say. To then also be able to place one that can be surrounded by a bunch of farms even more so. I get that his aspect is very map dependent and such due to geography and such. But I think in my entire empire I managed to pull one with four farms. Most of the others have 1 or 2 farms at most and then there are cities that can't even get a single Kovil up due to all the tiny little one or two tile rivers and such. It also doesn't connect resources that later appear below it, coal in my case, which then makes the placement even more annoying or more of an issue perhaps.

Taking Glory of God seems to be a bit of a no-brainer if you can get it as you can then just pump out great admirals and get a free super boat.

My game is a in a bit of a weird state and I have not really been able to get my wars going so no vassals and the faith generation have been somewhat abysmal. But it will soon be industrial era and I think the wars will start. I live on the continent of peace and have defensive pacts with Byzan and Marocco that share the continent with me. The other lands appear to be a constant war mess so far.

** Odd unrelated to this mod I learned so far from this game -- votes in congress that end in ties are not broken in the players favor ...

(edit) Apparently there is more then one dummy building that can get destroyed.
civ5-vp-chola-bigdummy.png
 
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v5 posted:
  • Thirvai production from Vassal Tax functions properly
  • Thirvai GAdmiral points on TR completion reduced from 25 to 20, scaling with era
  • Thirisadai CS reduced by 3 in all eras
Taking Glory of God seems to be a bit of a no-brainer if you can get it as you can then just pump out great admirals and get a free super boat.
Or you go Imperialism like me :)
Placing the Kovil is very map dependent. It's not a spammable building I would gather on most maps
I had no trouble placing 3 or more in my cities. One thing to pay attention to with the Chola is that, since you get free fresh water from the Kovil, you might actually want to AVOID rivers.
The infiltrator promotion on the boat is a bit cumbersome when it comes to movement and combat formations etc
I completely disagree with this. Infiltrators on ships is the single least cumbersome place for that promotion. ships have much more open space and movement than land units, and can satisfy the adjacency requirements easily. ship combat is about setting up pincers, with 2 ships covering opposite tiles around an enemy ship in the middle, which covers all that ship's ZOC options, and pins them to 1 move. This pincer formation also satisfies the no adjacency requirement on Infiltrators, since your own ships are 2 tiles apart. I think it's actually a rather nice fit for a naval unit, and rewards good play even more.
 
As I noted I think this is very map and geography dependent, seems to me the current communitas map likes to splosh the entire map with little river all over the place that are. So for me most of my homeland was just dotted with little rivers so it was not really an option. It's hard to avoid something that is everywhere.

Very different games then I suspect. That kind of fancy movement doesn't work on huge marathon maps cause the AI build gigantic death fleets with a ship in more or less every single tile they can put something in. So anything that sticks out gets bombarded to death instantly. You send a lone ship forward by just a tile and out of the AI fog comes the fleet to annihilate it in a turn. It might work fine on smaller maps, normal speeds and such when the AI perhaps have a smaller amount of units (even tho the map is smaller it might be similar as a ratio) but when they have 3-5x as many units and have a unit in every space then fancy movement and such things just doesn't work. Then it's wall vs wall; something holds the line while the back row takes it out with range.
 
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The AI has a death fleet of caravels?
I would say it mostly starts at the Corvette and Frigate level and era and beyond that. It's usually when they have started to bulk up enough so there almost is a unit in more or less every or every other square or so. That is not to say they won't have large armies or fleets before that cause they do. But there is no galley deathfleets as far as I have seen. I'm currently at turn 728 so it's about half game timer wise and I have about a hundred units give or take and that is not enough. I have 28 ironclads now that are upgraded Kallaranis that have survived this far. I figure in a hundred turns or so I will have more then doubled my armed forces. I'll see if I can take some later screenshots etc. But this whole idea of fancy movements and tactical pincers etc are a small map other speed issue I would say and not something I ever or rarely get the luxury of dealing with. Here it's wall vs wall of smashing and bombarding. There is no war without loses.

Infiltrators as a promotion is just wonky and I just never take it, not for ships (if it was an option otherwise) and certainly not for ranged units. It's the deathwish promotion in my book, ship or ranged doesn't matter in that regard. That said it was entertaining when you just got the Kallarani at compass and there was no or fewer ships around. Not so interesting later in the game and that unit is still around. Since the promotion is permanent. The only exception if I had to find one would be to give it to ships that go down the melee city busting route (dreadnought). I suspect at the end of the game this will be the once that have survived while the once that went for boarding will have eventually just died out. But dreadnoughts they are usually alone on the tile hitting the city or can be made safe to be alone and then it's doing fine. But otherwise. No. Not a promotion I want or would have picked. So now I'm somewhat wondering what that other promotion it had before was, since Infiltrators was the replacement?

I guess I just don't like promotions that make you worse, so this one or the medic or heal when move promotions -- you'll heal or you'll heal when you move but you'll be 10%-10%-15% weaker depending on the promotions you get. Thanks but I'll just build some dedicated medic units instead to heal them up with.

If I would send a single ship two-three tiles away from the rest a couple of AI corvettes and frigates would/will appear and annihilate it for certain.
 
Are the Thirvais working? Where do you see that potential yield increase in production from your vassal taxes? 20% of the revenue from vassals should be turned into production according to the tooltip. I'm currently making 196 gpt from my one and only vassal. So that should translate into about 39 extra production in the city.

civ5-vp-chola-thirvais.png

Lets take this small one tile island city. Seriously lacking production. So 39 extra production should really show. It does have the Thrivai constructed. So 21 hammers from the terrain, counted them it's all from the various atolls and sea tiles. 12 from buildings. Check. 12 from specialists (engineers working non stop), 2.7 extra from population for the grand total of 47.7 hammers. So where are my extra 39 hammers? Am I misunderstanding the tooltip? Does that aspect of it not work? Where should that extra production be noted or is it stealth production I can't see? It doesn't show up as an extra yield for the tooltip of the Thirvai either like some buildings do when you get extra or total increases from something such as some of the corporate buildings.

I guess its sort of like the 500 lords thing with the guilds. I'm not quite sure how many extra gold I'm getting in each city. It doesn't really show up under the gold listing per city or of it does I'm not sure if it is under terrain, building or specialists (it's not this one).

civ5-vp-chola-money.png
 
Are the Thirvais working? Where do you see that potential yield increase in production from your vassal taxes? 20% of the revenue from vassals should be turned into production according to the tooltip. I'm currently making 196 gpt from my one and only vassal. So that should translate into about 39 extra production in the city.

View attachment 619708

Lets take this small one tile island city. Seriously lacking production. So 39 extra production should really show. It does have the Thrivai constructed. So 21 hammers from the terrain, counted them it's all from the various atolls and sea tiles. 12 from buildings. Check. 12 from specialists (engineers working non stop), 2.7 extra from population for the grand total of 47.7 hammers. So where are my extra 39 hammers? Am I misunderstanding the tooltip? Does that aspect of it not work? Where should that extra production be noted or is it stealth production I can't see? It doesn't show up as an extra yield for the tooltip of the Thirvai either like some buildings do when you get extra or total increases from something such as some of the corporate buildings.

I guess its sort of like the 500 lords thing with the guilds. I'm not quite sure how many extra gold I'm getting in each city. It doesn't really show up under the gold listing per city or of it does I'm not sure if it is under terrain, building or specialists (it's not this one).
v5 contains a fixed lua so the thirvai tax bonus works. It was not working before. I fixed and tested it and can confirm it works as intended now. The production will appear directly on the Thirvai, so all you need to do to determine how much production you are getting from taxes is to look at a Thirvai’s :c5production:production yield and subtract 2 for the base yields. Eg. If a thirvai in your city is giving 16:c5production: then you are getting 14:c5production: per turn from taxes.

you can download v5 and replace the CholaFunctions.lua from your current game with the one from the new version. lua changes won’t affect your saves or crash your game.
 
you can download v5 and replace the CholaFunctions.lua from your current game with the one from the new version. lua changes won’t affect your saves or crash your game.
Excellent. Tested it and it works fine. You have to process a new turn but after that it all shows up. Tested with the same city as above and the previous 12 from buildings increased to 53 by updating and processing a turn (ok a few turns had passed to, I think the pop grow once and the previous building finished but still it works now).

civ5-vp-chola-thirvais-v5.pngciv5-vp-chola-thirvais-v52.png
 
Been wondering about one thing. Didn't really think about it early in the game as most units doesn't get that much xp on creation. But are the Thirisardai supposed to get XP on creation or spawning? It becomes a lot more obvious later on as the Thirisardai seems to get the "bonus xp" from various buildings but nothing else on creation.

I'm currently at around mid 800 turns. A normal unit that gets created gets 270 points of experience from building and such. But the Thirisardai gets 75 xp on spawn. It's from Orders (15xp), Barracks (15xp), Armory (20xp), Military academy (25xp) that adds it up to the 75 xp, without any of the buildings I guess it gets none. I don't think I was ever in a situation that one spawned early on that I didn't at least already have an Orders or a Barrack so it got something. But now I'm started to wonder as they spawn and they get one promotion but any other unit basically gets three promotions. Sure it has some built in promotions and stuff if you will but still.

Currently I had 14 Thirisdais (most of them have just become Missile cruisers) spawn and I can't claim that I have been really going for it or picking Great Admirals every chance I got or anything. That first upgrade from Thiriardai to Destroyer tho, 3k gold and some change even with Imperialism etc. Auchy.
 
Thirisidai only get the XP from buildings in the city they spawn at. They don't get the XP from policies or globals like Elite Forces or Brandenburg
 
The scaling of the Thirvai might be granting a bit much science on longer games or huge map games where you have a lot of cities and such.

"Incoming trade routes grants additional gold for both city owner and trade route owner. +5% science and culture in this city for each trade route targeting a foreign city with an ainuruvar guild."

I'm currently at turn 891, so currently in about the 2/3 territory of game turns but I guess I'll be spending the last third of the game just running future tech over and over again. I'm crushing the AI on tech. This usually doesn't happen on deity games. I'm making close to 11k science per turn.It wasn't really noticeable at first but then as the trade routes grew and the number of cities it just took of like a rocket.

I'm at 73 techs, 35 cities, 26 traderoutes, 30 culture (progress6, fealty1, statecraft6, industry1, imperialism6, freedom10). I guess I'm crushing it on culture to a bit.I wasn't very aggressive at the start of the game. Sort of just sat on my island took over some minor islands and such and just slowly built up. Now I'm just going around liberating the world (and abusing the freedom mechanics and rewards for doing so when it comes to XP), bringing people back from the dead and liberating city-states. I crushed and resettled Marocco but I have spared Byzantium even tho we three all shared a starting continent. It's not only out of goodness but also cause I want to have a lot of vassals so I can see how silly that production bonus could get.

Some time during the Industrial-Modern era things just exploded. As techs was supposed to become more expensive and such instead things just rocketed a head and there was no slowing down. One would think that the cost of the techs would be enormous due to the difference and I'm doing all the heavy lifting so to speak. No tech that is left in the tree is more then 10-11 turns away to complete.

The issue is that the closest rival is at 60 tech, and most of the others are at 57 or 58. The scaling on that +5% is possibly to much. Most of the rivals are at about 22-23 culture policies. They more or less all went for rationalism and order to so they should have gotten at least a couple of techs for free.

Part of the explanation could be playstyle. But the modifier for science and culture (based on trade routes) is currently set to 7055% (it's 7065% for culture) in cities such as Uraiyur (my main trade city). In my capital it's only 850-860%. That city, Uraiyur, alone makes about 4034 science per turn, or then about 40% of my total science. It makes 3794 culture per turn out of my total 13514 culture per turn. About 10 trade routes out of the 26 operate out of that city.

civ5-vp-chola-uraiyur.png

Two trade routes are not operating at the moment so only 24 are in action. 7 are internal at the moment granting production between cities, stuck since the war mostly. 11 target city-states and 6 target rival AI (mostly vassals or spreading the guild thingy to new cities).

The game is in the bag and have been for some time. Now it's just clicking the turns and trying things out for fun and science.

(included savegame for comparison and analysis)
 

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Thank you for all the detailed writeups, @looorg. It's a shame I wasn't able to complete my game into the later eras; I never got to see these problems first hand.

I hadn't considered that going from a unit with no production cost upgrading into a unit worth 1600:c5production: would be a jaw-dropping sum of gold. I'm going to drop Thirisadai's upgrade unit to Ironclad, and I'm going to make the upgrade free once Ironclad is available. Thirisadai will still have an industrial era CS step, but they are the same base CS as ironclads now, and so the upgrade functionally just gives them +1 moves.

re: the Thirvai, I regret not getting to that point of the game, but considering your feedback and comparing it to the bonuses of Germany's top-tier Hanse UB -- 3%:c5production: production vs the Thirvai's 5%:c5science::c5culture: -- I am astonished that I hadn't come to the same conclusion while still planning the civ. I will change the Thirvai to 4:c5culture::c5science: flat yields instead. Another Customs house with a big yield modifier based on TRs is repetitive anyways.

edit: done
 
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I have not really finished the game yet, but I'm sort of ending it. Mostly due to me just being silly now and the turns are taking a bit long to play. But I'm now at the end of the tech tree and it's turn 933 out of 1500. The random win condition is diplomatic which I could push in a few congresses if I wanted or conquest. I could have conquered the world already, a long time ago, but didn't. Instead of went around to see how this could work and as noted I think it worked a bit to well I guess. I didn't test the new fix or nerf or what it should be called. It sort of can't undo what has already been done so perhaps for another game. In the end tho it was even worse then previously, the science and culture bonus was now over 8000% in my trade route city and researching future tech was taking at most five turns. So it scaled a bit much so to speak.

That said I am not sure if it has to do only when code and mod but also how I play or the settings I play at (deity, marathon speed, huge maps). So part of it could have been building, part game settings and part me. Still it got a bit large and weird for sure. So I have not tested it on any standard speeds or map sizes etc. Perhaps it wasn't as noticeable there. I certainly didn't really notice it until the fourth era or so before that I was actually behind on both science and culture. I guess I had not yet reached critical mass.

While the 3k gold and change upgrade fee for the unit might seem a bit excessive it was not really a problem. It was just the most expensive upgrade I had ever seen, but then it might not be that strange since you upgrading for a very early unit until a fairly late game unit in one go. Perhaps it was just more funny when I saw it the first time. Not that I couldn't afford it, it's at best a couple of turns worth of income and I'm not getting a couple of them each and every turn. I think in the end I had gotten 19 of them. But once again perhaps one should note that the money here isn't standard game speed money and costs but marathon money and cost. That said I would still agree that perhaps that upgrade to Ironclad was a better step then upgrade to Destroyer. At least it softens the blow or smooths the curve for the upgrade cost instead of saving it all up to one giant payment.

Still I had an interesting game I think so good work.
 
update posted. contains Recursive's new victory focus code.

Reduced Thirvai Tax conversion to 15%
 
Had a good time playing this civ on Emperor. Went Progress -> Statecraft -> Imperialism -> Auotcracy. Trying to settle as much as I can early with Progress and only focused war efforts on my neighbour Scotland to get some form of promotions starting to roll in. Tried to remain friendly to everyone else and focused all my TR's towards different cities all the time. I decided to not vassal Scotland, because the extra cities seemed more worth it to me making it probably easier to conquer onwards my continent. Statecraft and an early focus on great diplomats and being able to found the world congress made it easy to pass casus belli. Afterwards, I used the world congress mainly to gain diplomatic favor with any civs that could actually challenge my military in some way. The Ottomans were score leader, hoarded a lot of wonders, were on my continent and had settled a lot of nearby islands plus capital was on the coast, so they were a prime target to go after next. This was also right when my UU came online. They were relatively easy to conquer, because I could just do a full scale navy invasion, while their land troops were kind of useless. After vassalizing them, I could finally make use of the UB bonus as well giving them a maximum tax, but I already had factories online at that point, so it didn't move the needle much for me. Two other great powers on different continents were Poland and Sweden who remained friendly to me throughout. Proposing things like WC projects or Casus Belli is seen as good for them and here and there a tactical denouncement made it easy to keep them on my side, without really needing to lift a finger. The UA also made it really really easy to stay happy despite expanding, because the main unhappiness source is poverty. Austria remained on my continent and with autocracy starting to ramp up, they were ridiculously easy to vassalize and I quit the game there. Poland was ramping up, but like 800 score behind me, so if I had set my sights there afterwards, I would have handily won, but late game war is too much micro for my liking.

The civ felt a bit too strong to me, but I also didn't have aggressive neighbours at the start plus adversaries being on coast maybe skewed my viewpoint. I liked the ship with the infiltrator promo, forcing me to try and think about warfare in a different way than I was used to! The unique improvement was good, but the whole farm placement thing I never had a good spot for it actually doing anything.
 
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