Probably Improved Gameplay Mod

[AveiMil]

If you had read my post you would have already known KK was very near getting 3 Legendary cities...

Yah, but I got into the game and noticed it my self right after posting the save game before you replied. Felt like "yesterday" when it was 100+ turns until (L) for Fred, suddenly KK's closing in. WTH.

I guess you're right, it does not belong here. Thanks though

 

[TheWilltoAct]

I'm surprised at your dismissal of my arguments Silu. As I understand it if you are playing this game "properly" you will be applying a lot of pressure on your opponents, and probably invading their lands. You cannot help but stumble upon more resources. Perhaps you also play maps with poor resource distributions??
And there should be no excuse to not trade for resources, unless you are truly in a world war. Do you never find yourself with duplicate resources to trade?? And surely you can spare a few gpt to make your whole empire happier (by trading for happiness resources).

 

[Silu]

I'm surprised at your dismissal of my arguments Silu. As I understand it if you are playing this game "properly" you will be applying a lot of pressure on your opponents, and probably invading their lands. You cannot help but stumble upon more resources. Perhaps you also play maps with poor resource distributions??
And there should be no excuse to not trade for resources, unless you are truly in a world war. Do you never find yourself with duplicate resources to trade??

Well, basically what you said was "who cares about happiness, when there's other ways to get it". That's what I understood anyway, if you get red faces you can "just trade for resources or raise the culture slider". Sounds like you never get happy problems. Well, good for you; I'm not as lucky Sometimes you have traded for all the available resources and still get red faces. Sometimes you start in isolation. Or rolled a fractal with a wide, but thin landmass. Or are forced to wage early-mid war against the SoZ. Or need to deny an early AP resolution. Or a thousand other situations where early extra happy at the cost of losing some chops can come in handy.

The biggest strike against that here is that it's enabled by Monarchy, a tech that already is an abundant source of happiness in these situations. Of course military police costs hammers and gpt (doubly so in Pacifism, a situation where you usually work less tiles anyway so you can leave more forests), whereas Preserves only cost worker turns, which may or may not be a more available resource. I haven't played enough PIG yet to get a feel of how they affect gameplay as a whole. Some scenarios where I think they might be of the most use are happy-resource-scarce 'Mids Repr starts, or health-deprived starts where you have to keep forests around for the health bonus.

An interesting thing to note is that Preserves are the only way to get a positive outcome of a jungle tile, without teching IW. This could be handy in isolation with some, but not overwhelming jungle, if shooting for the Oracle for example (so you go for Monarchy prereqs anyway).

BTW, by your definition I don't think I'm playing the game properly, I often find myself in a situation where I feel waging war is impractical for the whole game.

And surely you can spare a few gpt to make your whole empire happier (by trading for happiness resources).

As with everything, it's a tradeoff. If the happiness resource gets so many citizens to work that they outproduce its gpt cost, it's a good tradeoff. Otherwise it's just throwing cash in the bin. Same with using the culture slider.

 

[TheWilltoAct]

I don't want to take away from your good points, so just to clarify, my concern is the tradeoff between happiness and tile output. Forest preserves (+ 1 ) are somewhat lackluster in that regard.

I don't know how critical it was to your argument, but it just so happens I am playing out a long skinny fractal map and resources are abundant. ^.^

 

[Silu]

Yeah no one is ever actually gonna work preserve tiles... I think they shouldn't be good enough to warrant working, the happiness is good enough. Adding food or hammers would be way overpowered and adding commerce won't really do much and steal's Enviromentalism's thunder a bit. I don't know, I think PoM has thought this through pretty much already

To clarify about the fractal part, I meant a landmass that only spans a small number of latitudes. This often leaves out either the tropical resources (Dye, Gems, Spices etc) or the other kind (Fur, Silver, Gold etc), leaving you with just a couple of happy resources pre-Astro even if you can trade for everything that exists on your landmass.

Sorry about the OT'ish spam in this thread

 

[PieceOfMind]

What difficulty are you playing on when testing this (new HR)?

Emperor.

Also, why do you think LM at guilds is much better?

Because it gives a window where workshops can actually be useful. When LMs came with machinery, it seemed almost pointless to ever build a workshop unless there were absolutely no forests anywhere nearby. Now, a workshop with CS and Guilds can at least be useful, and with a rush to Chemistry, workshops could be more attractive than LMs.

I still have some concerns with how the AIs are handling forest preserves and LMs. FPs are still at Monarchy in my game at the moment, and I've seen some dumb decisions made by the AI like putting a FP on a plains hill forest right next to his city near a frontline. When that AI was a vassal of mine later, and an enemy stack came to attack that city, it was impractical for me to try and take it out while it was sitting on such a high defense tile.

I asked about the valuation of FPs in the Better AI forum but haven't received any real response about it other than to make sure to disable the "workers leave forests" option when using ai autoplay.

Can I gather any suggestions on where FPs should be placed? Silu seems to be arguing for SM plus giving the FP some other sort of bonus like being built faster by workers. That's not a simple XML change obviously so would take some work so it would have to be worth it.

Are there any other techs that would be appropriate for FPs to be introduced?

 

[PieceOfMind]

By the way, a slight problem with making Sentry available after W2...
Sentry is already a promotion that has 3 prerequisites. IIRC it's C3, D3 and F1. A fourth is possibly getting a bit over the top.

A downside to giving sentry free to scouts etc. is that Sentry is now pretty pointless on any mounted unit. Why waste that promotion on a strong unit when a cheapo unit can fill that role?

Another comment: Sentry on scout doesn't at all seem ridiculous on the larger mapsizes (which I am probably biased towards) but I could imagine it looking a bit silly on smaller maps. As Silu said, the scout doesn't have to move far before the entire starting area is already scouted.

How about this method for addressing scouts, explorers:

Scouts: Same as vanilla but get Ignore Terrain movement cost
Explorers: On top of the vanilla explorer, Cost 30 (instead of 40), get free sentry promo and 3 strength instead of 4.

This way, scouts will rarely need to die to animals, except possibly sneak attacks from wolves when you're not careful. It also means scouts will have a unique early ability making them worth building.

 

[EmperorFool]

The problem with giving Scouts Ignore Terrain Movement is that it heavily biases the AIs, vastly speeding up their exploration and decreasing the chances you'll get any huts to slim.

Side note: I love MMing my exploration. I always lose a little interest once I've explored the entire map, so much so I'll often avoid trading maps with AIs until I've explored all the fun bits. Yes, I'm goofy, but simple pleasures make for a happy life. ​

In any case, there's a little joy that I get when I can get a Scout up to W2 so he can cruise through the forest and jungle terrain. This change would nullify that.

Sorry, I don't have any suggestions here. I guess I'm wearing my naysayer hat again.

 

[Silu]

I honestly can't think of ANY situation where anyone would want to go C3/D3->Sentry. I didn't even know that path is there, and I don't know why it's there Sentry does nothing for combat efficiency, and certainly there are 10 better choices than it for an unit that already had reason to go C3/D3. Unless the point is just to enable it somehow to non-mounted units. Changing C3/D3 to WM2/G2 would accomplish that, right? And make more sense in the meantime, IMO...

To me, Keshik-Scouts sounds fine, or at least much better than Sentry-ones I don't think that speeds up AI exploration any more than Sentry-Scouts.

About FPs, I'm still a bit in the dark with them. Should test out things a bit. I changed my mind about them being "OP" giving happiness at Monarchy, but I'm not sure yet what I think of them I can imagine that AI behavior is a big problem with enabling them early.

 

[klaidonis]

I don't think that speeds up AI exploration any more than Sentry-Scouts.

I'm sure it would make a difference, because when image recognition algorithms cannot compete with a human (that's why there are "captchas" on sites) path-finding algorithms are pretty well developed. So the Sentry promotion is good for human players but I'm not sure it could be properly utilized by AI whereas ignoring movement penalty would be good for AI path-finding but might be not such a bonus for players.

It's another question which promotion is better: the one good for AI or the one good for players. I'd prefer the Sentry.

 

[Silu]

What on earth do pathfinding algorithms have to do with this? If you want to explore like the AI, just press the Auto-Explore button... I assure you you're better off moving manually. And sure the AI gets the same benefit as the human in both cases. It's just amplified since they start with a couple of scouts regardless of if they have Hunting or not. Ignoring terrain moves benefits the human a lot more than the AI - they're too stupid to use it to avoid getting hit by barbs, whereas it would up the survivability of human scouts a lot.

P.S. Not exactly sure why you brought up computer vision, but most captchas are a joke, basic run-of-the-mill stuff like gocr can "crack" half of them with no problems... But this is another topic that certainly doesn't have a place in this thread

 

[TheWilltoAct]

I don't think PoM minds a bit of OT discussion, who are we kidding, this thread is already forty pages anyway.

 

[PieceOfMind]

I honestly can't think of ANY situation where anyone would want to go C3/D3->Sentry.

I've noticed that path many times before in the case of naval units. If I removed Sentry there, I would have people complaining about why it was removed.

For example, the extra visibility for privateers in their era of use can definitely be invaluable.

 

[Silu]

Oh right, naval units. Good point. Though they can certainly get it with Flanking as well without much troubles, and as you pointed out Privateers (and upgraded Privateers) already have Sentry by default. I need to start thinking with a wider angle with this stuff Frex, I seldom have extensive navies.

 

[EmperorFool]

I don't think that speeds up AI exploration any more than Sentry-Scouts.

I wasn't comparing it to Sentry, but I think klaidonis brings up some good points. What I think klaidonis meant about computer vision is the fact that the human can take into account what tiles the Scout will expose if it moves here versus there whereas the AI just moves it to places it hasn't been before. If it could move everywhere equally fast, it would just "paint" the exposed terrain easily.

We humans can use our reasoning and spacial faculties to pick better routes, especially when dealing with varying speeds of movement, so ignoring terrain movement cost would benefit the AI more. And that the AI has more Scouts to begin with magnifies this effect.

How about we go with Sentry Scouts that ignore terrain movement cost for 10?

Maybe a free W1 promotion would be enough of a boost without being too much. You kill two animals and bam, you've got a W2 Scout.

 

[Graceheart the Leopard]

I'm having difficulty trying to merge Next War and PIG: every time a new turn loads, I get the following message:

How can I fix this?

 

[Fimbulvetr]

What about you just start with a sentry settler? Seriously, all you wanted in the beginning was a bit more releaved tiles on turn 0, maybe that could take care of this without changing gameplay too much

 

[EmperorFool]

@Farsight - See the thread How to Play Next War with BUG for instructions on merging Next War into PIG.

 

[klaidonis]

@EmperorFool: Thank you very much for your explanation. It seems I have to do a lot to improve my English writing.

Speaking about W1, I have just one argument against it: it's a WOODsman promotion. What if there are almost no woods and jungles in the immediate vicinity of a starting position? Or even on the whole map? Warm arid maps could provide such a start.

 

[Graceheart the Leopard]

So do I copy the files over or do I merge them? Also, I noticed that there are Unit, Tech and BuildingInfo files in both Next War and PIG. Copying them over would mean not having the main Next War features.