PlayWithMe

[alpaca]

I doubt removing the RR bonus and replacing it with a tile yield bonus is much more work. Also, multiple Set tags don't work in one update, you can, however, write all the updates in the same Set tag.

 

[alpaca]

After a couple of hours of tinkering and coding I'm happy to announce that Great Scientists will be nerfed in the next version. They are going to work similar to the Great Merchant in that their ability only creates a maximum amount of beakers (if the amount of beakers is higher than the tech cost they simply finish the tech). I will also implement a cooldown period of 10 turns for them so you can't save up a couple to quickly research a tech. The number of beakers is open for negotiation

Both will be probably player-only, though. I can't add new unit actions to the AI without SDK access. Luckily, they don't exploit GS much.

The new patch notes also sound encouraging about the AI.

 

[bobbyboy29]

Good job fixing the GS ability! This was definately needed but most people said it wasn't possible. I guess nothing is impossible (except stapling jelly to a tree). Might I suggest that the amount of beakers given by bulbing work similar to how it worked in Civ 4. Namely that you can instantly discover any pre-renaissance era tech, but post renaissance you only get partial bulbs.

Also, is it going to be a set mount of beakers the whole game or will it at least vary slightly with total pop or era?

 

[Wolfprint]

It sounds like a lot of the mechanics from CIV could have been applied in CiV. Makes me wonder why they didn't just do that. Would have solved a lot of problems.

I would like to see GSes bulb to give a set amount of beakers, and with a slight modifier depending on the era. And I second bobbyboy29's suggestion, to make it similar to how it worked in CIV.

 

[iop]

A few comments from my playthrough:
- Damage done by citadels, as well as damage done to civilian units has not scaled to the new hitpoints: In other words, citadels still deal 3 damage to adjacent units, while civilians (including embarked units) take 4 damage. You may want to scale at least the citadel (and fort) damage.
- speaking of citadels: one thing I really like in the balance mod is that the citadel connects the underlying resource. This makes building one somewhat more interesting
- I have been concerned about game pace on quick with higher HP, which means much more drawn-out combat. I was wrong. The tech pace is almost perfect, at least in the early game.
- I find that aggressive settling (i.e. popping a city close to enemy territory) can be interesting in a war, especially if you can afford to buy a wall: the higher city strength makes them quite powerful stationary units now.

Re roads: I like your tile yield idea, alpaca. Also, I look forward to reworked GS (and it might be nice if beakers scaled with age, so that you can, for example, always fully buy a tech from the past and present era, but not quite finish techs from the next era.

 

[Wolfprint]

For road maintenance, why not have each road cost a fixed, one-off amount of gold? Instead of a continuing maintenance cost? Each new road could cost about three or four gold. It might discourage road spamming while still allowing for more spacious city placements.

 

[alpaca]

Good job fixing the GS ability! This was definately needed but most people said it wasn't possible. I guess nothing is impossible (except stapling jelly to a tree). Might I suggest that the amount of beakers given by bulbing work similar to how it worked in Civ 4. Namely that you can instantly discover any pre-renaissance era tech, but post renaissance you only get partial bulbs.

Also, is it going to be a set mount of beakers the whole game or will it at least vary slightly with total pop or era?

Impossible is such a harsh word. So final. But most of the time it just means that nobody has seen it done yet. My solution isn't perfect because it doesn't work for the AI but that doesn't stop me from doing something if I think it's badly needed in the design of the game.

Scaling beakers with era is simple, and I will certainly do it because it preserves symmetry with the Great Merchant. I'm not sure how to scale it yet. 1500 tech sounds about right for the Renaissance but it's a bit lackluster in the Industrial and Modern eras, so I'll probably set it to 3000 for Industrial and 6000 for modern (about half the cost of the most modern tech in each era and enough to directly get the first tier)

I'll also upscale the Great Merchant to similar, or maybe somewhat higher numbers, and the Great Artist will get a similar mission that allows you to get culture, which will provide a number that depends on your city number and number of policies chosen in some way. Then, all Great People except for the GG have a similar ability and all will be useful in my mind.

A few comments from my playthrough:
- Damage done by citadels, as well as damage done to civilian units has not scaled to the new hitpoints: In other words, citadels still deal 3 damage to adjacent units, while civilians (including embarked units) take 4 damage. You may want to scale at least the citadel (and fort) damage.
- speaking of citadels: one thing I really like in the balance mod is that the citadel connects the underlying resource. This makes building one somewhat more interesting
- I have been concerned about game pace on quick with higher HP, which means much more drawn-out combat. I was wrong. The tech pace is almost perfect, at least in the early game.
- I find that aggressive settling (i.e. popping a city close to enemy territory) can be interesting in a war, especially if you can afford to buy a wall: the higher city strength makes them quite powerful stationary units now.

Re roads: I like your tile yield idea, alpaca. Also, I look forward to reworked GS (and it might be nice if beakers scaled with age, so that you can, for example, always fully buy a tech from the past and present era, but not quite finish techs from the next era.

Good catch about Citadels. I did see the Embarkation damage myself but didn't get around to changing it yet. I will probably just double the damage output of civilian damage but will have to test the Citadel. 5 damage might be acceptable but more will be too strong I think.

Aggressive settling is, unfortunately, somewhat too strong with the AI not able to mount a proper attack. You can expand aggressively outward to the best city sites and turtle, which is quite a strong strategy. I'm not sure it's something I don't want in in some capacity, though, so I'll wait for the patch to see if things change a bit with the AI supposedly bringing siege.

For road maintenance, why not have each road cost a fixed, one-off amount of gold? Instead of a continuing maintenance cost? Each new road could cost about three or four gold. It might discourage road spamming while still allowing for more spacious city placements.

To be honest I like road maintenance because it at least somewhat incentivizes you to settle your cities close together. Especially if you can grab every tile of the road in a workable city tile. I don't think a flat cost would have the same effect because flat costs are much easier to see as part of the investment cost for the city.

 

[alpaca]

On second thought I will make the GS beakers depend on the number of techs you have researched rather than era. The game already gives you enough benefits for deep beelines so I think giving some for broad research is only fair.

So, <30 techs: 1000
30-39 techs: 1500
40-49 techs: 2000
50-59 techs: 3000
60-64 techs: 4000
65-69 techs: 5000
>= 70 techs: 6000

 

[iop]

Two more quick comments:

- Others have said it before, but I'll say it again. The new tile yields are nice - you get some city spots that you just have to settle, even though it may make your cultural victory harder.
- With the higher food yields, more gold on the water and the faster city growth, you can get some very impressive cities. Delhi in my game had 3 fish and 2 clams, and produced enough gold that the horrible production didn't hurt (early on, one might want to buy settlers, anyway).
- A detail about HP scaling: The animations for dying units don't seem all to scale properly. For example, the first of two war elephants dies after taking 5 damage only.

Also, I like your ideas for GP changes.

 

[Sneaks]

I played a quick game with this and the Diplomacy Mod, and the two work extremely well together. It made for a game where gold felt really well balanced.

 

[Sonereal]

I like this mod. Playing it on Marathon, build and tech times are reasonable. Improvement building is sinfully long and City-States, at least on duel maps, are able to pump out a LOT of warriors. I'm playing Prince and the CS's are using Carpet-of-Doom Deity-sized armies. Using strategic view, it looks like the CSs have more units than me or Gandhi.

 

[alpaca]

Two more quick comments:

- Others have said it before, but I'll say it again. The new tile yields are nice - you get some city spots that you just have to settle, even though it may make your cultural victory harder.
- With the higher food yields, more gold on the water and the faster city growth, you can get some very impressive cities. Delhi in my game had 3 fish and 2 clams, and produced enough gold that the horrible production didn't hurt (early on, one might want to buy settlers, anyway).
- A detail about HP scaling: The animations for dying units don't seem all to scale properly. For example, the first of two war elephants dies after taking 5 damage only.

Also, I like your ideas for GP changes.

Animations aren't something I looked into yet, and probably won't for a while. Units at the moment also go into fortify animations even though there's no fortification bonus.

Yields will become even more interesting in the next version because I discovered you can add improvement-specific bonuses for roads and railroads. So I'm toying with the thought of providing some extra gold if you build roads on luxury tiles, for example. So if you have the worker turns, you can boost your tiles even more.

I played a quick game with this and the Diplomacy Mod, and the two work extremely well together. It made for a game where gold felt really well balanced.

Which one? City state diplomacy? I haven't looked at it for a while. The problem I had with it when I tried it some time ago was that it basically only shifted the focus from money to production where city states are concerned. Ok, there is a distance component because of the units, but the primary effect of this is just an increase in micromanagement because you can still grab far-away city states, you just have to send a ship or so to escort them. It also doesn't really fit my vision of how city states should work, but it might be a good idea to add it to the recommended mods list

I like this mod. Playing it on Marathon, build and tech times are reasonable. Improvement building is sinfully long and City-States, at least on duel maps, are able to pump out a LOT of warriors. I'm playing Prince and the CS's are using Carpet-of-Doom Deity-sized armies. Using strategic view, it looks like the CSs have more units than me or Gandhi.

Hmm was this only military city states or others, too? I buffed military city states quite a lot so you can now use them to provide for your army instead of building one yourself, but they're a bit hit and miss because they often give you crap units. I didn't touch improvement speeds, and I don't normally play Marathon because it really throws the game out of balance quite significantly in my opinion so I can't really comment.

Edit: Just noticed that the Scientist would be better served by a smooth function. Something like 500+n^2 will be my first try

 

[Sneaks]

Yeah, the CS one. While you can still just use gold in the mod in the lategame, I enjoy the concept of ambassador/diplomat units able to go into enemy territory for scouting, knowing the AI might up and nab them in a second.

I like the yield change idea for routes quite a bit.

Speaking of improvements, do you know if it is possible to create an improvement that yields unhappiness?

 

[alpaca]

Speaking of improvements, do you know if it is possible to create an improvement that yields unhappiness?

Without Lua? I doubt it.

 

[Sonereal]

Hmm was this only military city states or others, too? I buffed military city states quite a lot so you can now use them to provide for your army instead of building one yourself, but they're a bit hit and miss because they often give you crap units. I didn't touch improvement speeds, and I don't normally play Marathon because it really throws the game out of balance quite significantly in my opinion so I can't really comment.

Others. Made it impossible to use with the CS Diplomacy mod because there was a sea of units.

 

[alpaca]

Others. Made it impossible to use with the CS Diplomacy mod because there was a sea of units.

Are you sure this isn't a vanilla issue? On normal speed I'm seeing the CS even disband units and replace them with more modern versions but they don't have huge amounts of units.

 

[Slowpoke]

On second thought I will make the GS beakers depend on the number of techs you have researched rather than era. The game already gives you enough benefits for deep beelines so I think giving some for broad research is only fair.

So, <30 techs: 1000
30-39 techs: 1500
40-49 techs: 2000
50-59 techs: 3000
60-64 techs: 4000
65-69 techs: 5000
>= 70 techs: 6000

This looks like a prefect solution really. Now I'm gonna have to steal some more code

 

[alpaca]

This looks like a prefect solution really. Now I'm gonna have to steal some more code

I actually replaced it with a smooth function to avoid racing to threshold effects that warp gameplay (it would have been best to race to 30 techs, then go for a phase of deep beeline, then fill back until you have 40 techs as quickly as possible to hit the next level). The current solution is a quadratic function so it makes sense to keep your scientists around, but at an opportunity cost.

As usual, you're welcome to take out bits and pieces if you can find them (which is becoming increasingly hard I have to admit)

The next version seems to focus on Great People as its main theme, although I will do some changes in other parts of the game.

 

[Slowpoke]

Btw, you've worked with saveutils, so I gotta ask you, how would you save variables specific to a city? It sounds like saveutils saves a variable for a given player, if I (probably don't) understand it.

 

[alpaca]

Btw, you've worked with saveutils, so I gotta ask you, how would you save variables specific to a city? It sounds like saveutils saves a variable for a given player, if I (probably don't) understand it.

Well, what I do is to append the city ID and player ID to the key for SaveUtils. SaveUtils does not store player-specific data as it only keeps one table of things to save for each mod. Me misunderstanding this is what introduced the city maintenance saving bug.