PlayWithMe

[alpaca]

Is there some way to edit the thread name? I know that this is possible in other forums but I tried renaming it and it didn't display the change in the thread list.

 

[SevenSpirits]

Looks interesting! This might actually get me to play a game of Civ5 again.

I have a couple recommendations - things I was quite happy with in my personal tweaking mod earlier, yet I haven't seen anywhere else.

1) Increase the AI's value of gold in trades.

		<!--Make AI value gold higher in trades. This makes it not overpay for resources as much,
		though also makes it easier to bribe to war. Previous values were 100 and 75 respectively.-->
		<Update>
			<Set Value="140"/>
			<Where Name="EACH_GOLD_VALUE_PERCENT"/>
		</Update>
		<Update>
			<Set Value="100"/>
			<Where Name="EACH_GOLD_PER_TURN_VALUE_PERCENT"/>
		</Update>

Oddly enough, this seems to be the only way to adjust its trade valuation of anything. The more intuitive route of changing its resource valuation is unavailable.

2) Completely remove ally bonuses for city states, keeping only friend bonuses. The bonus for allying is free resources, free vision, and a war ally!

 

[alpaca]

I more or less agree about city states. I changed it to something much like that for maritimes already, but they do still provide an additional capital bonus. I will definitely look at the other CS, too, though. With nerfed maritimes and nerfed cultures, even the military CS might become worthwhile (and for them, the allied bonus is small already, going from 20 turns to 17 in one example game I played)

Gold value might be a good quick fix, going to give it a try.

Otherwise, I'm currently working on a more interesting tech tree in my pursuit of a more captivating early game. I significantly expanded on the "ancient" and "classical" eras, which probably also need a new name. Don't worry about the buildings and units, I haven't changed them yet, and the techs aren't yet hooked up to the rest, either. There are a number of OR requirements in there which seem to work with the correct logic from just clicking on them but I'm unsure if they're used by the AI, and they are of course not displayed in the interface yet (a tech needs all requirements shown plus at least one OR requirement). Hunting, Fishing, Religion and probably Archery will actually be available from the start like Agriculture is now. So you will start a little bit earlier than in vanilla, about 10000 B.C. in the fertile crescent timeline. Hierarchy could also be called Division of Labor.

<Row>
<TechType>TECH_THE_WHEEL</TechType>
<PrereqTech>TECH_AGRICULTURE</PrereqTech>
</Row>
<Row>
<TechType>TECH_HIERARCHY</TechType>
<PrereqTech>TECH_AGRICULTURE</PrereqTech>
</Row>
<Row>
<TechType>TECH_MASONRY</TechType>
<PrereqTech>TECH_POTTERY</PrereqTech>
</Row>
<Row>
<TechType>TECH_MASONRY</TechType>
<PrereqTech>TECH_MINING</PrereqTech>
</Row>
<Row>
<TechType>TECH_TRADING</TechType>
<PrereqTech>TECH_POTTERY</PrereqTech>
</Row>
<Row>
<TechType>TECH_TRADING</TechType>
<PrereqTech>TECH_WHEEL</PrereqTech>
</Row>
<Row>
<TechType>TECH_TRADING</TechType>
<PrereqTech>TECH_HIERARCHY</PrereqTech>
</Row>
<Row>
<TechType>TECH_TRADING</TechType>
<PrereqTech>TECH_SAILING</PrereqTech>
</Row>
<Row>
<TechType>TECH_MATHEMATICS</TechType>
<PrereqTech>TECH_CURRENCY</PrereqTech>
</Row>
<Row>
<TechType>TECH_MATHEMATICS</TechType>
<PrereqTech>TECH_MASONRY</PrereqTech>
</Row>
<Row>
<TechType>TECH_MATHEMATICS</TechType>
<PrereqTech>TECH_ENGINEERING</PrereqTech>
</Row>

 

[Slowpoke]

Heya, I'm still a newbie modder To include your city maintenance, all I would need to do is include the 3 files in the Lua folder, the library lua file, do OnModActivated>UpdatDatabase, and then I'm good? Or is there anything else I have to do, like include InGame.xml or something?

 

[alpaca]

Heya, I'm still a newbie modder To include your city maintenance, all I would need to do is include the 3 files in the Lua folder, the library lua file, do OnModActivated>UpdatDatabase, and then I'm good? Or is there anything else I have to do, like include InGame.xml or something?

You need CityMaintenance.lua, SaveUtils.lua, the TopPanel.lua from the UI/InGame folder and texts/WorldViewTexts.xml. Then add the xml with UpdateDatabase and CityMaintenance.lua as an InGameUIAddin under Contents (see Kael's modder's guide). That should be it.

 

[civcivv]

Hi alpaca,

I have not yet played with your mod yet but from reading the description, I would say that the culture requirement per tile seems a tad low. Might I suggest adding a small exponential (along the lines of 1.12) with each increase so as to not grow 3+ tiles a turn when you get opera houses and museums? At present, the majority of my cities by turn ~250 tend to have 40 or more culture per turn generation, especially if I also have the double output due to Wonder policy.

Similarly, for city growth, maybe a factor of 1.07 or so. I'm a big fan of building farms all around fresh water instead of spamming more trade posts, so even without maritimes, I get 20+ net food per turn, which would translate into +1 pop per 2 turns with your mod, or per turn with hospital. Even faster when you add med lab.

We Love The King Day will likely be a bit too powerful, especially when you have access to every luxury resource. Note there is no cooldown with it, and if you have all luxury resources you are permanently in WLTKD. There is also no option of stopping it, so you may actually end up better off WITHOUT all resources if the boost is 100%. Also, it would be great if you could remove all the notifications dropping down which says City XYZ needs resource to enter WLTKD or acquired resource and now is in WLTKD and instead make it a floating notification instead. Its just really tedious clicking 10+ notifications away every few turns.

I would also welcome if you could split your other notification mod so that you can choose whether to display pop growth past 5 and culture growth individually. Personally I'm not interested in pop growth notifications at all even before 5, but I do want to know about culture expansion at all times. Though with the PWM mod that expansion might end up a tad spammy I suppose, unless you implement my suggestion above .

In regards to improvement yields, would it not be better to tie culture yield for incense and wine completely to monastery as opposed to the resource itself? And modify the monastery that it does give you +n culture per instance as opposed to per resource?

Lastly, reducing base hammer per city by 1 might make a city completely unproductive at the start since you need 20 food to grow and food usually is not on the same tile as hammers. This means that you end up relying quite heavily on gold to buy say a granary to start with. I feel that no gold but 2H by default would be fair already, but your mileage may vary.

Other than that I really like the changes and look forward to eventually playing with your mod.

 

[alpaca]

Please get back to me when you do. While I like to theoretize, too, it's not entirely useful. I don't mind cities grabbing their available culture quickly if you invest heavily in culture. In fact, they are supposed to. At the moment I'm more interested in getting the early game to be fun but I might revisit an exponential contribution when I tackle the later eras. I will probably change things quite a lot when I add new buildings, at any rate.

I might look at adding a message settings box at some point so you can disable some of the notifications. Meanwhile, just don't click them away and end your turn instead.

Having all resources isn't very common for me. But a cool-down might be a good idea for the WLTKD. This may be the reason why the bonus is so small in the first place but in vanilla it's just not very interesting.

I like tile culture yields where they are, the Monastery is quite strong enough as it is. Base yield is fine, high base yield is one of the reasons why ICS is so profitable. I like that you have to grow and improve your city a bit before it's profitable. If you feel like buying early infrastructure is a good idea, that sounds quite well-balanced to me because the gold/hammer ratio for that is horrible (I tend to only buy a Monument)

 

[EscapedGoat]

So I played some warrior / horse rush games, and the extra culture gets you a great general from the honor tree in time. That's quite handy!

I also have to take back what I said about AI expansion, it seems to be a little situational (so a lot like vanilla). Suleiman had 10+ cities at turn 100 in one of those games - that's pretty strong considering the cost of the new settler.

Also, liberty is really nice now - the discount is a free monument i suppose

Still don't have any late game experiences with the mod, guess i need to finish a game too.

 

[bryanw1995]

Well in any case +100 is really low and will make a piety persia dominate once it he gets theatres (actually colosseums even). I'd argue that immortal is pretty important too, because lower levels are still pretty easy due to lux trades being messed up at 300 gold. It'll be a great day when mods have the tools to fix that.

Edit: Not saying +500 is better, but I've done the testing to show that +100 won't work out as intended.

huh? balance-combined sets lux trades at 240.

 

[Slowpoke]

Really? I've noticed they tended to be lower in that mod, but I swear I could've gotten some above 270 even. Thought it was because everyone hated me in that game lol.

 

[Martin Alvito]

A ton of good ideas, but at the moment you're just inviting Police State/Communism abuse on Deity by making Settlers so expensive. The problem is that as Settlers become more expensive, it makes sense to stop settling, push Dynamite, build up SPs and annex everything (with +5HPT!) once you hit Industrial. Linear food boxes just make the problem worse; the AI can grow monster cities that you have no hope of attaining in the near term because the AI's food boxes are microscopic, and half of infinity is still infinity...

Once the SP restriction is implemented, this should be better than vanilla. While pricy Settlers still disproportionately reward warmongers and indirect puppet micromanagement through tech tree manipulation, you have so many positive changes that directly address game mechanic problems that the flaw is miniscule by comparison.

 

[Slowpoke]

If anything I would suggest taking out the settlers being more expensive, and making a stronger maintenance. You don't want to make the first 80 turns boring, you want to slow mid-end game steamrolling. When I get around to adding your maintenance in my own mod, I'm probably going to double it and take out most of my happiness restrictions, perhaps even lower settler costs.

 

[LordTC]

Is it possible to make the settler cost affected by number of cities in your empire?

That might be the best solution as if you make it cost some base amount for the first one, and then have it ramp up (probably linearly) based on the number of cities you have then things work out much better.

So for example if the base settler costs 60 and you choose to increase it by say ceiling(n^2/10) + 5 *n where n is the number of cities then
your 2nd settler would cost: 66
the 10th would cost: 120
the 20th would cost: 200
the 50th would cost: 560

So it gets to the point where settlers are costing much the same as a very big building once you have a large empire, but doesn't bias people towards conquering over building unless they already have some territory.

 

[Slowpoke]

You can have buildings do that, but apparently not units. I personally set colosseums to cost more production at one point, essentially taking the place of settler increases when you think about it, but it was just too large an ICS deterrent.

What I'm doing right now is taking alpaca's maintenance and making it so unit disbanding doesn't occur except with extremely severe gold deficits (-100 gold per turn). Thus, for the expanding empire, you can expand at the loss of extra science and CSs. This allows me to do all sorta of things, like lower CS bribe costs, RA costs, return back from this temporary "All india" happiness I have going, increase city maintenance to 1.5 to 2.5 per city, lower of even eliminate city unhappiness, etc. Essentially, like civ 4, expanding will cause science to slow rather than increase

 

[alpaca]

So I played some warrior / horse rush games, and the extra culture gets you a great general from the honor tree in time. That's quite handy!

I also have to take back what I said about AI expansion, it seems to be a little situational (so a lot like vanilla). Suleiman had 10+ cities at turn 100 in one of those games - that's pretty strong considering the cost of the new settler.

Also, liberty is really nice now - the discount is a free monument i suppose

Still don't have any late game experiences with the mod, guess i need to finish a game too.

Don't worry too much about the late game in PWM at this point. As I wrote in the OP I'm currently trying to get the early game right first of all and when that suits me, I'll tackle the later stages of the game. Out of curiosity I played a low-difficulty game for a while longer and I think I'll follow civcivv's suggestion and re-introduce a slight non-linearity in the food bucket and culture bucket increase. I will probably also change the happiness golden ages back to taking longer to get but also lasting longer and do something about the WLTKD

A ton of good ideas, but at the moment you're just inviting Police State/Communism abuse on Deity by making Settlers so expensive. The problem is that as Settlers become more expensive, it makes sense to stop settling, push Dynamite, build up SPs and annex everything (with +5HPT!) once you hit Industrial. Linear food boxes just make the problem worse; the AI can grow monster cities that you have no hope of attaining in the near term because the AI's food boxes are microscopic, and half of infinity is still infinity...

Once the SP restriction is implemented, this should be better than vanilla. While pricy Settlers still disproportionately reward warmongers and indirect puppet micromanagement through tech tree manipulation, you have so many positive changes that directly address game mechanic problems that the flaw is miniscule by comparison.

Hey Martin, I didn't think you played mods (took you down to be one of the people to whom community discussions are more important, like Sullla). I always value your input highly.

You are correct about the warmongering being disproportionately favoured. I have some ideas about re-balancing the strategic war mechanics, too (nevermind the tactical mechanics, which definitely need an overhaul).

Puppets should have a higher cost. What I would like to do is to make them follow the "puppet state" flavour better, and nerf them while doing this. My current ideas are to decrease their science and gold output to 50% (after modifiers are applied, so if you have +100% you only get 100% not 150%) and their culture contribution to the SP bucket to 0. However, they will also only contribute 50% of the normal value to your city maintenance

Strategically, I'm also leaning towards implementing something like Slowpoke and remove healing from the game altogether or replace it with a different system that requires you to build reinforcements of some kind. This would mean that you actually lose more than a couple of units in a war, making them a lot more costly. City strengths will also be buffed somewhat, especially if defensive buildings are present, which should help making aggressive wars a lot more painful than defensive ones.

I will also remove most upgrades and cut the upgrade paths down to length 1 or 2 at most. I had a discussion with luddite about this at an earlier point, this is the list I came up with

Warriors -> Spears -> Pikes
Archers -> Crossbows
Swords -> Longswords
Muskets -> Rifles
Knights -> Cav
Horsemen -> None
Inf -> Mech Inf
Tanks -> Modern Armor
Chariot Archers -> Lancers
AT -> Gunships
Catapult -> Treb
Cannon -> Artillery

Mid-term I'm also planning to look at the tech tree, already started for the early game, to make beelining more difficult or impossible. I will see if I can implement a cooldown for GS so you can only use them every 10 turns or so for tech bulbing, further reducing your beeline capabilities.

If you stay in observer mode about the mod, I'd appreciate your input, you're a person who I think very well predict how something will affect the game.

Is it possible to make the settler cost affected by number of cities in your empire?

That might be the best solution as if you make it cost some base amount for the first one, and then have it ramp up (probably linearly) based on the number of cities you have then things work out much better.

So for example if the base settler costs 60 and you choose to increase it by say ceiling(n^2/10) + 5 *n where n is the number of cities then
your 2nd settler would cost: 66
the 10th would cost: 120
the 20th would cost: 200
the 50th would cost: 560

So it gets to the point where settlers are costing much the same as a very big building once you have a large empire, but doesn't bias people towards conquering over building unless they already have some territory.

I'm not sure, to be honest. Would have to look into it. I'm not sure it's necessary, though, I actually think expanding is fine as it is but warmongering should be more costly.

You can have buildings do that, but apparently not units. I personally set colosseums to cost more production at one point, essentially taking the place of settler increases when you think about it, but it was just too large an ICS deterrent.

What I'm doing right now is taking alpaca's maintenance and making it so unit disbanding doesn't occur except with extremely severe gold deficits (-100 gold per turn). Thus, for the expanding empire, you can expand at the loss of extra science and CSs. This allows me to do all sorta of things, like lower CS bribe costs, RA costs, return back from this temporary "All india" happiness I have going, increase city maintenance to 1.5 to 2.5 per city, lower of even eliminate city unhappiness, etc. Essentially, like civ 4, expanding will cause science to slow rather than increase

How does a cost increase work with buildings? I'll probably check out your take on city maintenance balance when you release it to see which version I like better

 

[Slowpoke]

Check national wonders, they have the code. It's numcitiesproduction or something like that. But basically, buildings cost "base + cities*thatnumber", defaulted at 0. So if you have 5 cities, all colosseums cost their base + 5*the changed number. As you can see, it gets pretty rediculous with numbers higher than 5 even. But yeah, I would honestly not recommend it, unless you had caravans or something, as eventually gold buying colosseums or whatever you change becomes optimal. City maintenance is the way to go, I just didn't know how to do it.

 

[alpaca]

Check national wonders, they have the code. It's numcitiesproduction or something like that. But basically, buildings cost "base + cities*thatnumber", defaulted at 0. So if you have 5 cities, all colosseums cost their base + 5*the changed number. As you can see, it gets pretty rediculous with numbers higher than 5 even. But yeah, I would honestly not recommend it, unless you had caravans or something, as eventually gold buying colosseums or whatever you change becomes optimal. City maintenance is the way to go, I just didn't know how to do it.

I see. Actually this is quite interesting for national wonders, I didn't even know they got more expensive with number of cities because they are so hard to build at any rate. However it's not exactly what LordTC proposed because #settlers != #cities

This might fit right into an idea I had, which is why I asked: I want to add some "national wonders" that you can build multiple copies of, but without the requirement of having a building in all cities, for example to increase trade route income by 10%. The cost increase for number of cities for such buildings makes a lot of sense. I'm probably also going to add a "cost increase per number of copies built" once we have SDK access

 

[orangecape]

I have been doing some thinking and early play testing of the scaling up city maintenance and I have some thoughts.

First, I really like the way it plays for a small number of cities. After a couple expands you really need to start thinking about your economy and how quickly you can afford to keep planting new ones.

Second, it starts to get really out of hand at large civ sizes. If I am on a big map and I conquer an enemy and get up to 20 cities I really cannot afford to conquer or found more cities - I just raze everything I find mostly since the newly conquered or founded cities cause me to bleed so much red ink.

Perhaps it might be good to go with a nonlinear formula, two ideas below:

Cost of City N=MIN(10, N)

or
(for cities 1 to 10) Cost of City N=N
(for cities > 10) and up City N=10*logN

The second way means your costs do continue to rise but they rise slowly and until your empire get stupidly large it should be profitable to keep any reasonable city you conquer. I assume what you are trying to accomplish here is to prevent spamming tiny cities in every possible spot, and not so much trying to establish a real cap on empire size. Both of these formulas make ICS impossible economically and really make a good case for placing cities carefully in the best spots but do not make enormous empires impossible.

If you are trying to put a serious limit on empire size though your current formula works fine.

 

[alpaca]

Is it really so bad? I mean, if you have conquer city #20, it will have to generate 20 gpt to make you not run a money loss. This sounds like a lot but if you think about it it isn't so much. Let's say city #20 has 5 inhabitants, and you roll a lucky die and keep the library. Each of the 5 inhabitants will generate 1.5 science, putting you at 7.5. Also, the 5 inhabitants set to work tiles, let's say you keep things at pop 5 and are in grassland. Then each pop can work a trade post and you get 10 gpt for it. You also barely break even in road maintenance because you get 4, and let's say you have 4 roads

Your three maritime CS friends also mean the city still has 5 food surplus and will grow to size 6 in 9 turns. All in all, this really bad city without any resources nearby will run a minimal loss. If you add two resources, which you usually should aim for in a city, you will either have something like 2 or 3 additional gpt, enough food to run a specialist, increasing your science by 2 points, or some more production you can put to use.

20 cities is also a huge empire. If you grow normally and conquer an AI you usually won't have much more than 10 good city locations

The behaviour I am aiming for is that you keep any good city that has already improved tiles and maybe one or two nearby resources. If these requirements are fulfilled, the city will still run a profit even if you have a lot of cities (which is unlikely as I stated above). Alternatively, you might want to keep a city for strategic reasons, even if it runs a loss.

I will also add some building that works like the courthouse in Civ4 and reduces the city maintenance contribution of the city in question (for math connoisseurs, the highest unhalved k in sum(k) will be halved for each courthouse you build), which should help alleviate the effects.

Edit: Oh, I just realized you're playing a large map: I will also add a reduction for larger maps and an increase for smaller ones but I haven't decided on a method yet. Right now you probably have to play on Normal map size for maintenance to be properly balanced

 

[orangecape]

Yeah, I normally play on small maps because the game length on enormous ones is just too much, but on a huge map the current formula would make really powerful empires unmanageable. I figure it is important to note that though as it is a design constraint.

I have another thought about your upgrade paths: Why have upgrades at all if you are going to only have so few? Having upgrades means that everyone will want to build Muskets/Swordsmen/Warriors/Knights but never Cavalry/Rifles/Pikes/Longswords. I tried a build just today where all upgrades were turned off and it felt really good. It was a *huge* buff to the AI since I have to continually churn out more modern dudes but even on lower difficulty settings the AI put up a stiff fight a lot of the time because I did not have high level units. It also drastically improved the buildings that give +production for unit creation and the XP buildings, which is nice. Of course you would have to do something with the SP that interact with upgrades and change the Pentagon (which is terrible anyway).