playtest feedback

[DuckAndCower]

I have never had a problem keeping all my units fueled. It's a cool idea, but if it doesn't introduce any interesting decision-making, it pretty much just adds micromanagement.

The worst part is that one truck fuels every unit on the tile... this forces metagaming behavior, where you just stack up most of your military and fuel them all with a single truck.

What if fuel trucks were buildable, could only fuel a limited number of units, and, instead of being destroyed when fueling, could return to a refinery to fill back up?


Unrelated note, but why do flamethrowers get a bonus against vehicles? It seems to me that, except maybe for ambushes in a city, they would be completely worthless. Any vehicle could easily stay out of a flamethrower's range (most frustrating was when a flamethrower took out my helicopter). If anything, flamethrowers should have a city attack bonus, collateral damage, and/or bombardment capability.

 

[countjackula]

- going to DL the AI fuel tanker fix and check out round 2. Thanks! (I would have played this again tonight either way, heh )

- yes, that basic instruction post you linked is clear on where to install a mod file and get it started. Thanks.

- I like the idea of tanker truck supply being tied to actual an oil resource. That would reduce the tanker spam and make those resources strategically either to defend or as a military target.

- about barbarian xp: I make units in cities with barracks and usually with the vassalage policy. With the amount of barbarians out there most of my units were able to get up to 4 promotions quiet easily. The only advantage the barbarians seem to have is sheer numbers.

- Barbarian UTEs and choppers are soft targets. They'd give me a better run for my money if they had access to an advanced form of UTE or jeeps. Their most powerful unit is the marauder, which is underpowered compared to someone who has access to gunships and tanks. Settling near old city ruins really is a priority. Those units are very powerful in this world.

- Happiness. What would make you happy if you lived in a world like this? Finding a cache of medicine, alcohol, ammo, toilet paper, magazines, preserved food stuffs would boost spirits. Perhaps a couple of buildings like a distillery, casino, or a strip club could be added. A used car lot shrine, or a Stonehenge made out of old autos?

- Health. A couple more ways to boost city health. Holistic medicine, herbs, or vegetable/fruit patch. Everyone is going crazy for Crazy Bob's purple crab apples. Just like the "Sex Panther Cologne" joke in Anchorman, 60% of the time, they're 100% radiation free! How about an BBQ Iguana on a Stick vendor?

Just throwing out ideas. I'm off to enjoy round two of Fury Road!

 

[davidlallen]

I have never had a problem keeping all my units fueled. It's a cool idea, but if it doesn't introduce any interesting decision-making, it pretty much just adds micromanagement.

I do want to make fuel limited to the point where it is painful, but not fatal. I like refar's suggestion to make trucks on the oil well and remove the refinery building, I will try that out in my local version.

I had thought about a more complex refueling system, but I am afraid of more micromanagement. I had thought about giving each fuel truck a "gas gauge" like the other units. Each refuel action would take 1/4 tank of the tanker, and would refuel N number of units. Maybe N=6. So a stack of 6 could be refueled with one click. Then I would make the trucks a lot more rare. What do you think?

Unrelated note, but why do flamethrowers get a bonus against vehicles? It seems to me that, except maybe for ambushes in a city, they would be completely worthless. Any vehicle could easily stay out of a flamethrower's range (most frustrating was when a flamethrower took out my helicopter). If anything, flamethrowers should have a city attack bonus, collateral damage, and/or bombardment capability.

I wanted to add some more units which gave the "rock, paper, scissors" effect of multiple unit types. There is one scene in The Road Warrior where the punks are assaulting the refinery, and there is a flamethrower. It incinerates one car, I think it's a pink Cadillac. That is where the idea came from.

I agree that small arms damaging helicopters hurts believability a little. In another wargame I played, air units could only be damaged by ground units when the air unit was attacking. If the ground unit was attacking, it "could not reach" the air unit. Except for SAM type units obviously.

I do like the idea of collateral damage for these units. I will put them into a separate unitcombat (so different promotions can be applied) and allow them the collateral damage promotions.

 

[davidlallen]

Well, I played almost all the way through my first game of version 0.6. I have set up the depots so that after a few units, the percent of generating a unit goes down and after a few more, it stops producing. That seemed to work well. I had a burst of expansion with my first set of tanks, but then I ran out, instead of accumulating a huge pile of them.

I had exactly one ICBM the whole game. The cruise missile, which I had a lot more of, turns out to not be very useful; cities are much less common, so they are a little further apart, so I can rarely attack one city from the next. It's definitely not worthwhile to make trucks to carry them around; they might be capturable once in a great while but not enough to be worth the extra complexity.

I changed the fuel truck generation to work directly at wells, and removed the refinery building. It makes cities a little healthier. But, it seems to make "fuel truck spam" *worse* rather than better. I have to study why that is a little bit more; I greatly decreased the percent of generation while I was at it, but still each AI city I captured had a stack of like 4-8 fuel trucks. I think part of the problem is that the oil well starts generating the trucks much earlier since it doesn't need to wait for the refinery building.

I have a couple of ideas here, but I want to tune it some more before I release it. Gas truck production could slow down and stop just like depot production does now. I could also require refining technology before the trucks start appearing.

The relic appearance and transportation code is in there, but it's an unlikely event, and it didn't happen to me during the game. In the debug log I see it happened to the AI's. I'll be interested in others' feedback when I release it. The goal was to assist people with a builder strategy. But, because it is a random event, there's nothing you can do to make it happen. So it's not really part of a "strategy" so much.

I'll be away from home, but still in touch with the forum, for the weekend. Sunday night and Monday I'll try some more games. So it may still be possible to release 0.6 on Monday.

 

[Refar]

Here some ideas i get reading your post. But don't take me to serious here - you have better insight from your first hand experience.

I had exactly one ICBM the whole game. The cruise missile, which I had a lot more of, turns out to not be very useful; cities are much less common, so they are a little further apart, so I can rarely attack one city from the next. It's definitely not worthwhile to make trucks to carry them around; they might be capturable once in a great while but not enough to be worth the extra complexity.

Is it possible to create a land transport for cruise missile, that would allow to fire the missile from it ? Think missile cruiser, but land going Would make those missiles useful again. (Could combine with your idea of capture-ability - the carrier unit could be to week to stand for its own.)

Also you could increase the range a bit.

One nuke sounds just about right to me

I changed the fuel truck generation to work directly at wells, and removed the refinery building. It makes cities a little healthier. But, it seems to make "fuel truck spam" *worse* rather than better. I have to study why that is a little bit more; I greatly decreased the percent of generation while I was at it, but still each AI city I captured had a stack of like 4-8 fuel trucks. I think part of the problem is that the oil well starts generating the trucks much earlier since it doesn't need to wait for the refinery building.

A solution here might be making the truck require a later technology.

Or applying a reversed meachnic that you did on depots - line nothing in the first 20 turns, then half probability for the next 20 turns and then normal spawn rate.

Or a Worker-turn intensive upgrade of the Oil well (Would need to be better in yield as well, ot the AI wont build it...).

Making the Oil wells dacay over time does not sound as good idea to me. It would make all fuel power units - these you got in depots and those you build in cities - useless at some point

 

[DuckAndCower]

One more issue I've noticed...

Since you start with a settled city instead of a settler, the start to the game can be extremely random. I've started in the middle of fallout with no nearby resources, or next to two goldmines and some food resources. Without being able to adjust your starting city's location, you can get really, really screwed from the start.

I understand that this is done for a "flavor" reason... some cities still exist. However, I think it can have too much of a negative effect on the gameplay. For justification for using a settler instead of a pre-set city, it's not too hard to imaging some survivors banding together and starting their own, new settlement after the missiles have stopped falling.

 

[davidlallen]

Without being able to adjust your starting city's location, you can get really, really screwed from the start.

Well, there is an easy exploit if you start with a settler instead of a city. You can explore around a little bit and set up your first city next to good ruins. That puts you way ahead in the race to get a depot. So I did not want that. Still, I can gather some statistics about starting positions from the map script and make some changes to normalize it. Thanks for the feedback!

 

[Refar]

You can't know which ruins are good at the start of the game, because you need a tech to revel the treasures.

But i like the fixed starting location, and the heavy variation in quality - beeing screwed from the start is a essntial part of the scenario.

You disabled most of the normalizing routines from your map script, hence the heavy variation in the quality.

Still, to prevent absolutely disastrous starts, perhaps removing fallout in the starting BFC would be a good idea - sounds logical too as the best chances for lots of survivors would be in areas not too heavily affected by direct Nuking / heavy radiation.

 

[The_Coyote]

Is it possible to create a land transport for cruise missile, that would allow to fire the missile from it ? Think missile cruiser, but land going Would make those missiles useful again. (Could combine with your idea of capture-ability - the carrier unit could be to week to stand for its own.)

would be possible (the cruisers in Final Frontier are land [the starfield is land] based missile carriers) but irrc there are problems with the AI not using land carriers.

 

[davidlallen]

You can't know which ruins are good at the start of the game, because you need a tech to revel the treasures.

But i like the fixed starting location, and the heavy variation in quality - beeing screwed from the start is a essntial part of the scenario.

You disabled most of the normalizing routines from your map script, hence the heavy variation in the quality.

Still, to prevent absolutely disastrous starts, perhaps removing fallout in the starting BFC would be a good idea - sounds logical too as the best chances for lots of survivors would be in areas not too heavily affected by direct Nuking / heavy radiation.

It's no fun to have a poor starting position, especially if the other guys don't. I was thinking of counting the total food and production available in the initial BFC and adding a food or mineral resource if needed.

 

[Refar]

would be possible (the cruisers in Final Frontier are land [the starfield is land] based missile carriers) but irrc there are problems with the AI not using land carriers.

Yep, i was thnking there might be - there is not "MISSILE_CARRIER_LAND" unit AI iirc. Then again - i never seen the AI using a cruise missile anyway (In normal game that is)

On start location - if you want to improve it a bit more, you could jusr re-enable normalizeBadFeature (should remove fallout) and normalizeFood.
Don't make it too good tho - if the capitolos stick out in quality too much above the other possible locations, it will make rushing even more rewarding that it is anyway.

 

[Polycrates]

Sir! This is a fantastic mod! Found myself having a lot of fun with it, and the theme is just too cool. I'm amazed how far it's all come along so quickly...
And major congrats to the artists too, this thing is starting to look fricking incredible!

Anyway, a few comments on 0.5:

Having new units start with no fuel...I can see where you're coming from, but it really adds a micromanagement chore that perhaps isn't necessary. Having these units require access to oil in order to build could serve a similar purpose but be a little more friendly.

Also, I can't quite figure out the fuel use system. I've had units happily purr along for several turns on full fuel, but then start going to 3/4 to 1/2 to 1/4 each turn subsequent. How does fuel use work?

Ruins...they're of course amongst the best tiles to have from the start, and they make good candidates for cottages...except then when you get depots etc you have to bash half your beautiful developed cottages down. That's kinda not fun, and I would suggest limiting construction on a ruins site to salvage centre or rebuilt depot/whatever. Maybe switch salvage centre to +1hammer, +1gold to compensate a bit.

Barbarians seemed to me to come a bit late - past the point where they're a real threat and towards the point where they're more of an annoyance. I was only playing on Prince though, so maybe that has something to do with it.

Visions...they're all more things that could also fit easily into civics, and it's kind of a difficult thing to shoehorn into the religion mechanic. It's also particularly difficult when you want to have factions characterised by a specific ideology as well. Final Frontier handled it quite poorly, I thought - but I think it could be done really well.

With the religion mechanic, there is kind of an aspect of fanatical ideological zeal to them (more ala SMAC, I guess), and I think you'd need to exploit this aspect or else have the whole thing come off as slightly odd.
Since the religion mechanic has a kind of evangelical flavour, simply giving them group names as if they're a more unified political movement could go a long way towards making the mechanic fit better (and differentiating them from civics more). Like Black Cactus Society or Neo-Makhnovists for anarchism, Brotherhood of Silicon for technocracy, Guild of Allied Merchants for plutocracy, Children of the Atom Dawn for a religious cult (terrible names off the top of my head, I know, but you get the idea).

My personal feeling is that you maybe want to go more all-or-nothing with something like this - either move them all to civics and use the religion mechanic for some post-apocalyptic cults or something; or really go all-out with them and give them significant society-wide effects (more like FFH), so that an anarchist society and a monarchist society would be quite different. The individual buildings someone suggested would be a good start, but adding wider civic-like positive-and-negative effects as well could really make things interesting (eg more money, less health for plutocracy etc etc). And you might also restrict certain civics, since anarchism and state property (for example) don't really go hand-in-hand...
Anyway, I have no idea how much or little you want to emphasise this aspect, so ignore my rambling if it's way off-base

Ridiculous nitpick: The famous Montezuma was already actually "Montezuma II"

Anyway, awesome stuff, and can't wait to see what 0.6 has in store!

 

[davidlallen]

Sir! This is a fantastic mod! Found myself having a lot of fun with it, and the theme is just too cool. I'm amazed how far it's all come along so quickly...
And major congrats to the artists too, this thing is starting to look fricking incredible!

Thanks! Over 500 downloads, and playtest comments are starting to come in.

Having new units start with no fuel...I can see where you're coming from, but it really adds a micromanagement chore that perhaps isn't necessary. Having these units require access to oil in order to build could serve a similar purpose but be a little more friendly.

I wanted to be sure first time players knew about fuel trucks. I could easily start out the gas-powered units on "full" instead of "empty". But then players might not notice the gas tank promotion and treat the units like normal ones ... till they run out of fuel halfway across the map. Which way do you think would make it easier to learn?

Also, I can't quite figure out the fuel use system. I've had units happily purr along for several turns on full fuel, but then start going to 3/4 to 1/2 to 1/4 each turn subsequent. How does fuel use work?

There is a certain percent chance (30%, modified by "less fuel" promotion) of decreasing gas each time you move. If you don't move you don't use gas. It might be better to make it "exactly three moves" instead of random. Initially I was uncertain how to save "state" from one turn to the next so I made it random. Now I have gained confidence with python "scriptdata" so I could make it non-random. What do you think?

Ruins...they're of course amongst the best tiles to have from the start, and they make good candidates for cottages...except then when you get depots etc you have to bash half your beautiful developed cottages down. That's kinda not fun, and I would suggest limiting construction on a ruins site to salvage centre or rebuilt depot/whatever. Maybe switch salvage centre to +1hammer, +1gold to compensate a bit.

Interesting, I don't usually put cottages on ruins. Usually I look for ruins which don't have anything good under them, and put recycling centers on them. Or sometimes on a silo, which I know I won't be using for a while. I guess it is your choice to build cottages on depots or not ...

Barbarians seemed to me to come a bit late - past the point where they're a real threat and towards the point where they're more of an annoyance. I was only playing on Prince though, so maybe that has something to do with it.

I haven't played on that many difficulty levels. I usually play on Noble, and I don't usually leave enough units back on defence. So I usually see a few barbarians sneaking in to destroy my improvements. Sometimes a nation may be surrounded by other nations with no unowed areas nearby; in that case I guess they may never see barbarians. It's easy to crank up the barbarian percentage, it is already a little higher than what you get with the "raging barbarians" option.

If you like, try a game with raging barbs on, and see if it makes any difference. You can use the "alt-c" key to print a little information about the number of barbs and animals; it also prints some other information so it is kind of a "cheat".

Visions...they're all more things that could also fit easily into civics, and it's kind of a difficult thing to shoehorn into the religion mechanic. It's also particularly difficult when you want to have factions characterised by a specific ideology as well. Final Frontier handled it quite poorly, I thought - but I think it could be done really well.

With the religion mechanic, there is kind of an aspect of fanatical ideological zeal to them (more ala SMAC, I guess), and I think you'd need to exploit this aspect or else have the whole thing come off as slightly odd.
Since the religion mechanic has a kind of evangelical flavour, simply giving them group names as if they're a more unified political movement could go a long way towards making the mechanic fit better (and differentiating them from civics more). Like Black Cactus Society or Neo-Makhnovists for anarchism, Brotherhood of Silicon for technocracy, Guild of Allied Merchants for plutocracy, Children of the Atom Dawn for a religious cult (terrible names off the top of my head, I know, but you get the idea).

My personal feeling is that you maybe want to go more all-or-nothing with something like this - either move them all to civics and use the religion mechanic for some post-apocalyptic cults or something; or really go all-out with them and give them significant society-wide effects (more like FFH), so that an anarchist society and a monarchist society would be quite different. The individual buildings someone suggested would be a good start, but adding wider civic-like positive-and-negative effects as well could really make things interesting (eg more money, less health for plutocracy etc etc). And you might also restrict certain civics, since anarchism and state property (for example) don't really go hand-in-hand...
Anyway, I have no idea how much or little you want to emphasise this aspect, so ignore my rambling if it's way off-base

I added visions mostly so the AI's can get mad at each other. The relation grid was filling with all 0's and no wars were happening. I agree it does not really have enough in-game effect. I kind of wanted to avoid specific cult names, partly because I'm not enough of a writer to come up with six backgrounds that would be different enough and sound "cool" instead of "lame".

I would like to make visions have a strong effect on AI interaction (which civics don't) and also have a strong effect on your economy (which religions don't). But the Civ developers did not anticipate that, there is no way for *religions* to affect much of anything. For 0.7 or future, I will definitely look at vision-specific buildings and units. Also, maybe I can find a way to "link" the vision choice with a specific civic in the government column. Civics can affect a lot more than religions, but I don't want the player to switch government civics separately from vision.

Ridiculous nitpick: The famous Montezuma was already actually "Montezuma II"

Who knew? Is III available or was there a whole string of historical ones?

 

[davidlallen]

Alright, some feedback from the first playtest:

(Moved from the "welcome" thread)

First of all, great idea! I've always wanted a post-apocalyptic mod. I also love the leaderhead graphics!

Thanks for the positive vote on the leaderheads. I have been working on the backgrounds, and I hope to find somebody to work on the heads themselves. They look too "medieval" to me.

Now for a few things I'm not so keen on. First, the city graphics. The ruined city graphics are a nice touch, but they "de-rendered" a few times in the playtest, so that they were just untextured baby-blue.

Yes, this is listed in the known issues. I have created a thread to look for a solution on this, and PM'd the author, but no response yet.

The tech tree is pretty short. I had already discovered everything long before the game ended. Consider adding to it.

Or making things more expensive. Both are included in version 0.6 which I hope to release shortly.

We need a real scorpion graphic, obviously.

Yes, we do. That is listed in the art request section.

The "Vision" concept is a good idea, but I'm not fond of your choice of using it to completely-replace government civics. Instead, what should be done is put in new government civics that require certain state visions to implement, like FFH.

Several people have mentioned this, see just above in the thread. I will have to figure out how it works in FFH, and/or do something similar.

Pedia text is sorely needed.

More details please? I have not tried to fill in the "background", which gives interesting real world trivia like the name of the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. When you say it is "sorely needed", are there things about the game you were not able to figure out? If so what? Or is it just that some "atmospheric" background writing would be enjoyable?

Guardian has an assault-rifle fire animation with a shotgun graphic. That's pretty silly, and should be replaced with one of the other gun animations.

New graphic and animation coming in version 0.6.

 

[countjackula]

There is a certain percent chance (30%, modified by "less fuel" promotion) of decreasing gas each time you move. If you don't move you don't use gas. It might be better to make it "exactly three moves" instead of random. Initially I was uncertain how to save "state" from one turn to the next so I made it random. Now I have gained confidence with python "scriptdata" so I could make it non-random. What do you think?l

I think that would make it easier to manage refueling a roving army. I was getting confused by this too at first wondering why some units were running out of fuel and being unable to move while others in the same stack where still almost full. I had fuel tankers to spare so it wasn't an issue that way, but I had to pay more attention to units gas gauges when sending them a square off the main route to go pillage, etc. ie, Will they have enough fuel to pillage and get back to the main stack?

 

[Polycrates]

I wanted to be sure first time players knew about fuel trucks. I could easily start out the gas-powered units on "full" instead of "empty". But then players might not notice the gas tank promotion and treat the units like normal ones ... till they run out of fuel halfway across the map. Which way do you think would make it easier to learn?

Fair point. On the other hand, I guess there's always going to be a bit of a learning curve with new mods; "vehicles need fuel" is the sort of thing new players will figure out pretty quick - I reckon it'd be outweighed by the very significant decrease in micromanagement that starting with full tanks would provide. You could always write one of those "Congratulations, you have built your first vehicle unit! These need fuel etc etc..." popups that I'm sure nobody actually reads.

There is a certain percent chance (30%, modified by "less fuel" promotion) of decreasing gas each time you move. If you don't move you don't use gas. It might be better to make it "exactly three moves" instead of random. Initially I was uncertain how to save "state" from one turn to the next so I made it random. Now I have gained confidence with python "scriptdata" so I could make it non-random. What do you think?

Hmmm.....I dunno. A little bit of randomness for something like that is cool, but it's also nice to have a vague idea of how long a unit can go without refueling.

Interesting, I don't usually put cottages on ruins. Usually I look for ruins which don't have anything good under them, and put recycling centers on them. Or sometimes on a silo, which I know I won't be using for a while. I guess it is your choice to build cottages on depots or not ...

I found that cottages were especially necessary in this mod since you don't get riverside commerce or luxury resources - and flatlands with free hammers and commerce made perfect candidates. And of course, you don't know which ones are depots or not when you're building them at the start either. So the best cottage sites have a ~50% chance that you'll have to demolish them in the future. Destroying your own cottages is traumatic, you know

I haven't played on that many difficulty levels. I usually play on Noble, and I don't usually leave enough units back on defence. So I usually see a few barbarians sneaking in to destroy my improvements. Sometimes a nation may be surrounded by other nations with no unowed areas nearby; in that case I guess they may never see barbarians. It's easy to crank up the barbarian percentage, it is already a little higher than what you get with the "raging barbarians" option.

The number of barbarians is fine, I reckon. I just thought they started arriving too late, once I already had a few cities and decent defences. If they started appearing earlier, even a few guys coming in dribs and drabs could be more of a real menace to the safety of your cities.

I added visions mostly so the AI's can get mad at each other. The relation grid was filling with all 0's and no wars were happening. I agree it does not really have enough in-game effect. I kind of wanted to avoid specific cult names, partly because I'm not enough of a writer to come up with six backgrounds that would be different enough and sound "cool" instead of "lame".

If you post a thread, I'm sure people will be glad to come along and brainstorm
But I don't think you really even *need* a backstory, beyond "this is a group that likes anarchism" or whatever. Really just a name as surface fluff to indicate that these are specific movements of people who follow a particular ideological value (with a bit of a religious-like intensity) rather than something more ephemeral. And to really make it clear why these are different from regular civics. Even something as basic as "Society of Technocrats", "Anarchist League" etc would go a long way to making it feel better-integrated, I reckon.

I would like to make visions have a strong effect on AI interaction (which civics don't) and also have a strong effect on your economy (which religions don't). But the Civ developers did not anticipate that, there is no way for *religions* to affect much of anything. For 0.7 or future, I will definitely look at vision-specific buildings and units. Also, maybe I can find a way to "link" the vision choice with a specific civic in the government column. Civics can affect a lot more than religions, but I don't want the player to switch government civics separately from vision.

I know that Fall From Heaven (in addition to its religious-specific civics) has a few effects of the religion itself - e.g Fellowship of Leaves gives a chance of forests turning to ancient forest etc. Might be something you can use there.
Is there any way to maybe do it by a "building" (separate from any "temples" you might build) that automatically appears in cities (eg town square or something) and which is replaced by eg "anarchist enclave" if it's your state value (and maybe only if the religion is present in the city)? FFH has something like that with its dwarven vaults.
Also, the religion itself can provide different bonuses other than just +1 culture in cities it's in.
There might be more, I don't really know anything much about the coding side of this game.

Who knew? Is III available or was there a whole string of historical ones?

He was the last proper one, what with the spaniards raining on the parade and all. Heh, I just looked at wikipedia and he was succeeded by a whole bunch of puppet rulers with these incredible names like Diego de San Francisco Tehuetzquititzin. So I think you're safe with III

 

[davidlallen]

I wanted to be sure first time players knew about fuel trucks. I could easily start out the gas-powered units on "full" instead of "empty". But then players might not notice the gas tank promotion and treat the units like normal ones ... till they run out of fuel halfway across the map. Which way do you think would make it easier to learn?

Fair point. On the other hand, I guess there's always going to be a bit of a learning curve with new mods; "vehicles need fuel" is the sort of thing new players will figure out pretty quick - I reckon it'd be outweighed by the very significant decrease in micromanagement that starting with full tanks would provide. You could always write one of those "Congratulations, you have built your first vehicle unit! These need fuel etc etc..." popups that I'm sure nobody actually reads.

I have to think about that some more. When fuel trucks spawned in cities it was highly likely that you would have a fuel truck lying around to fuel up your new jeep / humvee. Now it is an additional move you have to make. So maybe it is worthwhile.

EDIT: I did think down this line before and stopped. In order to give the newly built unit a full tank, I would have to require access to oil in the building city. But then, suppose you lose access to oil resources but you have a few fuel trucks in the city. I don't have any way to code a prerequisite which is "either, fuel trucks present in the city or, access to oil resource". So if I changed it to give new units a full tank, and require access to oil, then you couldn't build the unit even though you had a bunch of fuel trucks right there. The current way, you can always build one as long as you potentially might have gas trucks.

I found that cottages were especially necessary in this mod since you don't get riverside commerce or luxury resources - and flatlands with free hammers and commerce made perfect candidates. And of course, you don't know which ones are depots or not when you're building them at the start either.

I guess that is the result of your decision to get construction and build cottages, before researching salvaging. I have studied a little bit about the evolution of cities, and there are countless times a king has razed the poor section of town in order to run a nice straight royal thoroughfare.

 

[davidlallen]

Please see the main announcement post. Over 550 downloads, only 14,200 more needed to crack the top 20 download list. (Think big.)

 

[GeoModder]

Just came to the end of a small map game (5 civs). Version 0.6 btw.

The German civ won in turn 177 with a Vision victory. Small wonder since it was unopposed qua settling space on its part of the map, and I was involved in a war with the Zulu civ for some time.
2 civs were destroyed by the barbs within 30 turns I think.
I couldn't figure out how things work with those fuel trucks. In the whole game, I popped one from a bunker (goody hut), and another one popped on the oil well shortly after I connected it. After that, zip. So I had only two fuel refuel possibilities.
Although the Zulu AI had at least 4 for those few turns I had visibility in one of its cities.
Also, the AI seems to wait before fueling its vehicles. When I first approached a hostile city, all jeeps in it had an empty tank. Two turns later, its whole stack had moved out to intercept my force.

Some bugs I noticed:
The first you already know of, texture disappears sometimes from a city.
The survivor gunman fire exhaust didn't show. No 'flame' when it was firing its rifle.

 

[Refar]

The German civ won in turn 177 with a Vision victory. Small wonder since it was unopposed qua settling space on its part of the map, and I was involved in a war with the Zulu civ for some time.

Well, that at least does disprove my previous rant about AI not actively spreading visions

2 civs were destroyed by the barbs within 30 turns I think.

This might need some balancing. In my game a civ got eaten by barbs on Turn 2. Maybe within first 15 (Time to build a another Warrior) turns bo barbs should spawn in the immediate vicinity of the cities.

The survivor gunman fire exhaust didn't show. No 'flame' when it was firing its rifle.

Thats odd - if by survivor gunman you mean that "Guardian" Pumpgun-Guy - it shows on my game.
Not sure what could make the difference here... Does he animate properly otherwise ?


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I have a bug (?) for you as well David. Was trying out the Horseman in the game... There is something weird with the experience there...

They come out from barracks wit 0 XP. Barracks usually give +2 XP to all land units including mounted iirc. They can get XP from combat, but they do not get promoted when reaching a next level. I had one with 10 XP still level 1 with no promotions avaiable.

Apparently they are not eligible for any promotions... I am not sure, if it is a oversight or by design to prevent them from beeing too powerfull ? Even if you do not want to give them any combat related promotions by design, they should still be eligible for stuff like Medic, Rad Resi, Sentry (the one with increased line of sight). Because a unit that can not be promoted to nothing at all is less fun