playtest feedback

[KillerClowns]

That is the *total* number of cities, across all the players. If each AI has two cities, and you have three, that is enough to satisfy the limit. With 6 players total, if you had 5 and each of the other players only had one each, that would be 10 against 13 needed. If there were 13 cities total, then I am still confused about why you had not won.

So what happens if I start crushing my neighbors? Does the city minimum go down when other civs are disposed of?
EDIT: While I'm here, might I suggest a ferry unit to access any accidental islands? Make it come early, salvaging or something along there.

 

[davidlallen]

Just to be clear on the formula, it is correct to say that any player can win a vision victory if:
a) they own the holy city of a vision
b) that vision has spread to 67%+ of the world
c) the total number of cities is greater than two times the number of players?

Yes, that is my understanding. Note it is two times the number of *living* players. So in a game which originally had 11 players, but only you and one other guy are still alive, the requirement is 5 or more total cities (not 23).

EDIT: I should point out in the released version, 0.8, there is also a requirement that you must hold this for 10 turns. I was hoping that the game would give you a popup to notify you that you (or somebody else) had started the ten turn countdown, but no such luck. I have added the 25% popup as an early warning to watch out for it. So in the development version, 0.9, I have removed the ten turn requirement.

 

[davidlallen]

EDIT: While I'm here, might I suggest a ferry unit to access any accidental islands? Make it come early, salvaging or something along there.

I would rather get rid of accidental islands in the mapscript, but I have not quite figured out how to do it correctly. There is an obvious approach, but it occasionally wipes out 90% of the main continent too, so I must be missing something.

Several people have requested ferries or some ocean transport. But these people have obviously confused "Mad Max" with "Waterworld".

I have a reason for keeping people on one continent, which I hope I will be able to implement someday. But, small motorboats or jetski's are still reasonable, along with some way to raise the food output of water plots. That is on my list to put in.

 

[countjackula]

Not having a save to go double check I cooked up* (cheated for testing) a game. The AI built as normal. I got open border agreements with all civs and manually spread my religion to each and every city. I did however use the world builder to create all the necessary missionaries and place them.

7 players, 22 cities, 96% my vision on the F7 display (Open Road Society), 3% Stevie's vision (Technocrats). Open Road society is in every city on the map. Technocracy is only in one as Stevie just founded it :

Myself 3 cities
Peter 5 cities
Stevie 3 cities
Brian 4 cities
Max 3 cities
Keith 2 cities
Ironhead 2 cities

This should meet the vision victory requirements. I founded ORS and the holy city is my capital city. ORS has spread to more than 67%+ of the world (96%). Total amount of cities is > 2* number of living players (22 cities).

Skip ahead 10+ turns and still no victory. Technocrats has dropped to 0%. Brotherhood of Steel has been founded and sits at 2%. ORS is at 97%. We are up to 28 cities, with BoS only in one city and ORS in all 28.

Skip ahead 5 more turns. ORS is down to 92%, but still fits the criteria for holy city, total % of followers, and the total amount of cities in play. No victory.

If no one else runs into this then perhaps it's a bug on my end.

 

[davidlallen]

Please put up the save games if you have them, from before you expect a victory as well as after. You can zip them together to save space. If you cannot upload to here successfully, let me know and I will give you my external email address and you can email them there.

 

[countjackula]

Here is a saved game from a world builder test where I would expect to win.

Second file is the same test game more than 10 turns later still without a win.

 

[Refar]

This must not necessarily be a FuryRoad bug - there were rare reports in the unmodded game forums, where - due some glitch, or maybe due to player mistake (Retired maybe) the game went into the "non-scoring game" state - like if you continue to play after victory/defeat.

 

[MrFred]

Hi there, had a great time playing this mod last night.
Though I havnt got to the tanks or missiles stage yet ive got a few thoughts about the early stage of the game. This was 0.8.

It started all good, the terrain looks great and am loving the survivers model and the fact most of the buildings in the city are ruined apart from the palace. I cunningly sent my surivers out to scout the land and they quickly ran up against some giant spiders and a massive mutated beast which i cant remember the name of. The barbarians are great as I expereince them. They really slowed expansion as I usually dont build that many defensive units at the begining but you really need to protect your workers and settlers in this which I think is great and fits the setting.

However I found the mod through your sig about crossbows in the desert which sounded great, however crossbowmen and survivers seem to be obsolete to gaurdians pretty much straight away. I was quite looking forward to trying to survive in the wasteland with old technology before finally getting some guns, however I'd only built one crossbowman before I was getting gaurdians. Maybe you could move gaurdians a bit further back in technology or make crossbowmen a bit cheaper/gaurdians more expensive or something to make crossbows more useful early on, though you probably wanted gaurdians early so just ignore that if you want.

Reading through this food seems to be quite an issue, I was imagining before playing really small cities at first, 2-4 sort of size, but i think i must have got quite lucky with my placement, lots of river and grassland and a bonus food so got to 8 quite quickly. I quite liked the idea mentioned earlier in the thread about having upgraded farms later on in the tech tree, so your cities stay quite small early on then allowing them to get bigger later, but somehow keeping the cities small to begin with, as i cant see vast cities forming 20years after nuclear war. I also found that theres quite few buildings and soon I was just pumping units out and it seemed I had half a small country living in my band of surivers, and troops were quite indispensible. To slow growth and to make your soilders more important, so you dont risk them so much, I thought having to spend food, like you do with settlers and workers, at least for the earlier units might work quite well, to add to the surval element of the early game. Though it does sound like I got quite a nice start so probably not nessacery.

One other minor gripe is having lots of cottages early on didnt add the the atmosphere, I felt that people would be trying to stick together in the early years in the face of all the monsters, not splitting up. Making cottages available later on is the obvious solution but then I guess that would just add the money problem people have. Maybe farms could produce a little gold to balance it out, and pursuade the AI to build them more? As im sure food would be one of the most important commodities after a nuclear war.

Sounds quite critical I think but really I thought Fury Road was great! Having alot of fun and im probably just rambling.

 

[arkham4269]

However I found the mod through your sig about crossbows in the desert which sounded great, however crossbowmen and survivers seem to be obsolete to gaurdians pretty much straight away.[/QUOTE}

I agree totally with this.

I quite liked the idea mentioned earlier in the thread about having upgraded farms later on in the tech tree, so your cities stay quite small early on then allowing them to get bigger later, but somehow keeping the cities small to begin with, as i cant see vast cities forming 20years after nuclear war.

Again, I agree, although regardless of nuke war or lots of nuke plants failing, the problem is that there aren't a lot of farmers anymore. It takes time to reconstitute lost agrarian lore and machines as 'simple' as the mechanic threshers and the like. As I've posted many times, the book "Island in the Sea of Time" by S.M. Stirling shows this when the island of Nantucket gets thrown back to 1240 B.C. Not to mention but low tech agriculture tends to be very labor intensive and with low populations, it's going to take awhile before there is enough stability to have the people to make the tools as well as guard the farmers while they're doing their thing.

This is another reason why I think that raiding for slaves would be so important early on, so much so that I think raiding towns should give you a chance to get money or a slave, which might later on upgrade to a refugee or perhaps revolt into a barbarian.

One other minor gripe is having lots of cottages early on didnt add the the atmosphere, I felt that people would be trying to stick together in the early years in the face of all the monsters, not splitting up. Making cottages available later on is the obvious solution but then I guess that would just add the money problem people have. Maybe farms could produce a little gold to balance it out, and pursuade the AI to build them more? As im sure food would be one of the most important commodities after a nuclear war.

I agree again due to the same issues of safety.

 

[davidlallen]

Here is a saved game from a world builder test where I would expect to win.

Thanks for uploading. I investigated a little. I agree your earlier save game should lead to a win. When I remove the "10 turn delay" requirement, and load that game, I do immediately get a vision victory. Well, at the end of the first turn I play. So something is wrong with the "10 turn delay" part. I looked a little bit through the C code for the "10 turn delay", and I don't quite understand it. However, there is a "launch success rate" in there. I am wondering if the Firaxis folks assumed the only use for the delay field was in a space race victory, and it checks some launch success rate, and in my mod that's always zero because there are no spaceship components.

I have already set the "10 turn delay" to zero in 0.9 because of my own warning popups. If you want to make the same change locally, edit Fury Road/Assets/XML/GameInfo/CIV4VictoryInfo.xml in a plain text editor. Search for "<iVictoryDelayTurns>10" which only appears once in the file, and change the 10 to 0. Not sure how launch success factors in, but this change causes your game to result in the expected vision victory.

 

[davidlallen]

@ MrFred: welcome to civfanatics! I am honored that your first post is about my mod.

Regarding guardians, moving them later in the tech tree is a good suggestion. I have been looking for ways to spread out the tech tree. One factor in the "Road Warrior" movie is highly limited ammunition. I haven't put that into the mod, because I wanted to get highly limited fuel working first. Maybe something like "small arms ammunition" is needed, with a tech and then a building to enable it. We have a "jeep crossbow" unit art already done, but I removed it because the "jeep rifle" came up so soon. Maybe removing it was the wrong solution.

Regarding the difficulty of a starting location, I am a little worried that there may be too much difference between the qualities of the starting locations. In some games I think that my start location is reasonable, but by 100 turns in, my score is only 800 points while of the AI players is up to like 1300. It is possible that these AI players, and also maybe MrFred, got a really good start position. I recommend to try a few more games and see if it is always that easy to get up to population 8.

Regarding difficulty of farming, one key point of this mod is that there is technology around, it's just broken, and you have to dig it out of the ruins. So it is a little different from being thrown back to 1200 BC where there are no ruins to get stuff out of.

Regarding safety of villages and slavery, this may need more tuning or a different mechanic. In previous versions, animals could capture cities. This caused a number of AI civs to get destroyed in the first 10 turns, and sometimes players too. In the current version animals cannot capture. I agree with the idea that early cottages and farms should "feel" risky. I think exploration "feels" risky because your survivors will get clobbered by deathclaws, but maybe cottages and farms don't feel risky now.

What is the best way to put actual risk into farms and cottages? Punks probably don't cause too much trouble early in the game. I don't want animals to destroy cities, but maybe they should be allowed to pillage ... "Oh no, a giant spider just ate all our farmers!"

 

[countjackula]

I have already set the "10 turn delay" to zero in 0.9 because of my own warning popups. If you want to make the same change locally, edit Fury Road/Assets/XML/GameInfo/CIV4VictoryInfo.xml in a plain text editor. Search for "<iVictoryDelayTurns>10" which only appears once in the file, and change the 10 to 0. Not sure how launch success factors in, but this change causes your game to result in the expected vision victory.

Thank you for tracking down this bit of code, and for supplying a solution.

Regarding guardians, moving them later in the tech tree is a good suggestion.

I agree with this. Guardians are available very soon. While they make protecting my workers much easier, they obsolete survivors and crossbow units very quickly. Before, it was tanks and helis that obsoleted so many of the cool vehicles. That isn't the case anymore, but this still holds true for the guardian. They are something I always aim for very soon. I still may if their tech requirements get pushed farther back, but it would be nice to see those early units be useful enough to make an appearance for awhile. If Guardians are harder to make/come later, then all of a sudden crossbow units have a use. (Guardians new graphic is very cool btw. I love the cigar).

What is the best way to put actual risk into farms and cottages? Punks probably don't cause too much trouble early in the game. I don't want animals to destroy cities, but maybe they should be allowed to pillage ... "Oh no, a giant spider just ate all our farmers!"

Those wasteland creatures are very formidable. From an RP sensibility I don't think they should be able to pillage roads. Simply being on the road is hindrance enough to slow down exploration and expansion. Scrapyards, mines, and pump jacks fit into this category too imo. I wouldn't be adverse to you allowing them to pillage farms (food) and perhaps cottages (outskirt dwellers... people equal food too).

If they could enter your borders to feed, their appearance in your lands would certainly slow down the earlier stages of the game and reinforce a feeling of barely surviving. With more units, or preferably stronger units, they pose less of a threat. It definitely would cause many to re-evaluate their opening strategies.

Can you code creatures to be only able to pillage certain improvements while keeping cities and perhaps other improvements safe? If so, I'm sure a balance could be found that added extra challenge and atmosphere without being so harsh as to remove the fun factor.

 

[MrFred]

Just played a couple of games, first was with rageing barbarians which turned out quite interesting. The barbarians where everywhere and really made the world seem dangerous and limited expansion. Unfortunatly it limited to the point where I was killed just before turn 200 but was one of the most fun games ive played. The barbarians come in a constant stream instead of massive stacks, and dont pillage so held out for quite a while. Several of the AIs were killed by them though so was probably a little much.

The next game was without rageing barbarians so actually managed to survive, was alot of fun and delibratly left light arms to give my crossbows a chance to be used. It seemed to work quite nicely and kept barbarians that little more dangerous at the begining. Getting refugees were great from bunkers, but are you sure you want to give away techs from them? I managed to get 4 techs from bunkers in a previous game, and with a quite small tech tree it gave me quite an edge.

On bunkers maybe you could get specialist citizens from them, like great people to represent knowledge they have? Also adding a great farmer might be good, extra food for the city they join!

On your crossbow jeep it could be enabled with the tech that gives you utes then could be upgraded to rifle jeeps with small arms, if you move small arms further back in the tree.

One last suggestion though its probably a rubbish idea, forts that spread saftey, like the space stations in final frontier. Then you could build forts near ruins instead of having to build a full city and suffer maintanence costs, and you might get more desolate areas on the map, as city borders expand quite quickly to the first expansion on normal speed (I personally prefered the 15 points required on epic speed but I just like longer games so thats just me). The AI managed to do this on final frontier so it should be possible to implement...

 

[Avahz Darkwood]

Or you could give a city a 3 plot radius to allow for more food options at start up and spread the required tile distance between cities to 4 or 5... It would add to the importance of the central cities without spaming the wastelands with them. Safety would still be a requirement to reach this extra plot.

 

[Jabie]

Quite like the idea of forts spreading safety. It makes building them to grab a particular rsource a viable tactic. Perhaps they should require a garrison to do so though.

Also, any way for the safety bonus of the monument to be linked to your highest level troop?

 

[davidlallen]

I have thought a little bit about more use of forts to spread safety and allow building of improvements. I could make forts do all that. But, in the final analysis, what is the difference between that and a real city? The startup cost of a real city is a little higher, actual food/hammers instead of just worker time. I don't see a strong reason to have a second way to get the effect of a city.

 

[MrFred]

The only reason I thought of it was with the cities borders expanding you get to see lots of the map and you soon are rubbing borders with other civs. So theres not very much fog of war for barbarians to spawn by mid gameish. A fort would only have a small border leaving more fog of war.

I guess there would have to be more incentives to build it over a city though as people would want to try and stop the barbarians!

 

[arkham4269]

I have thought a little bit about more use of forts to spread safety and allow building of improvements. I could make forts do all that. But, in the final analysis, what is the difference between that and a real city? The startup cost of a real city is a little higher, actual food/hammers instead of just worker time. I don't see a strong reason to have a second way to get the effect of a city.

I think forts would really only work in a Necro Christi zombie type future since zombies are relatively easy to flummox. To make a fort that would be defensible against Road Warriors would require a lot of effort and that kind of goes against the grain of the mod. If you are going to take the time to fort up something, it's going to be your city since by it's size, that take most of the time.

That being said, is there anyway to program it to where villiages grow slower if they are farther away from the city? It would be one thing to have your farms farther away; your average neo-barb doesn't want grain, but a town will have lots of stuff to loot, rape and burn. Going by a feudal historical model, you'd want you outlying villages to be close to the castle (in this case the city) so during an attack, they could retreat to the town. Obviously, the farther away, the less safe they are.

Plus, keeping your town folk closer also allows the leader to exert more control. Most Max Max type stories (and zombie ones for that matter) tend to have lots of nasty Warlords.

Oh, just saw a clip for the new movie version of Deathrace...maybe instead of the 'Olympic Games' event many mods have, you could replace it with this one. >=)

 

[davidlallen]

Regarding "lack of safety" for outlying villages and farms, countjackula has recently suggested that maybe animals should be allowed to pillage these improvements, only. I think that would add a lot to the feel of the game. You would want to keep more units nearby to patrol. It was also suggested a while back that maybe the actual safety level of your city could be set back if there is a pillage event. Each city could have a sign: "Number of days since last villager eaten: NN", and when somebody gets eaten they reset the count to zero.

I am not sure exactly how to code that. Animals move randomly now. I could add an "override", maybe, which says if the animal is next to a pillageable improvement, it pillages, otherwise let the regular AI do it. That might work.

 

[Jabie]

Re: Forts. Given that there had been a military crisis pre-scourge, it's not unreasonable that there might be a few still left around. Perhaps the ability to build forts could be lost, but there could be a couple of unmanned forts sprinkled into the map creation script.