Probably Improved Gameplay Mod

PieceOfMind · Jul 26, 2010

A note to anyone playing the current version...
I'm pretty sure the Governor Builds Workers modcomp will not be working. Turning on those options is not harmful but will just have no effect. To put it simply, city governors will not build workers or workboats just like they always didn't.

Fuyu said:
Was there an update that I missed?

Not sure how to answer that. I think there was an update, but it looks like you didn't miss it.
It might have been done through BULL or BUG though. The SHAM spoiler stuff is new, and I'm pretty sure there were some new translations relating to the SHAM mod - I think it was Spanish.

But no, I'm working off of your merge so you haven't missed anything.

Mojoqmeyvam · Aug 26, 2010

Great idea. I'm enjoying the little balance tweaks. Highly curious to see how a Serfdom-heavy game would work; I think it unbalances Pacal a little more, though: Fin Farms, Expansive for countering the Slavery unhappiness, and you've got a whipping machine.

Divine Right:
What about making it a little less bulb-able? Namely, changing the base cost from 1200 beakers to 1440, BUT also making Theology an "OR" pre-requisite. That won't change the need to have both Monarchy and Theology. Also, this means that when teching it by hand, you get the 20% Pre-req bonus, balancing out the cost increase. But a Prophet (or Artist) bulb gets you significantly less progress towards finishing it. I've always felt that the "Bulb Music and replace" plan was a little silly, and this would limit the DR version of the same play, without otherwise changing the game.

National Wonders:
What about Mount Rushmore and the Red Cross? Both highly under-used wonders, and could probably use a cost reduction.

The settling-on-flood-plains doesn't seem to work.

Airports: How much of a boost does a mere +10% to foreign trade routes help? Because that's 10% of a very low base (typically something like 2 commerce or so late game), not 10% of the final, I'm not sure that really justifies a 50h increase with the ability to add 1 more air unit. But I've never really used airports in a standard game for military purposes, so I may be wrong on the military aspects. Still, the economic benefits are very slight. Even 20 or 25% would make the foreign boost somewhat valuable: That's about 1-2 commerce for a 4ish trade route civ.

EmperorFool · Aug 27, 2010

Mount Rushmore is key when warmongering, and having a highish cost is important to make you plan ahead on your build location. Plus I tend to use it as a good :culture:

push in a border city with decent production.

karadoc · Sep 1, 2010

I've just found your mod and read through the list of changes. It sounds really good. Many of the changes are things that I intended to put in my own mod, and others are things that I hadn't thought of but agree with. I particularly like all of the changes to civics and traits. Those are excellent choices of buffs, in my opinion.

But there are a few changes which don't sound good to me at first glance. Here's what I think are questionable changes:
(note: I'd tend to err on the side of leaving stuff alone unless I think there are really obvious improvements to make)

Marine given +1 first strike.
I think marines were very powerful already.

Tecnologies: ...
The tech tree changes seem like just fiddling with stuff with the sake of it. I don't know what the goal of these changes is. Do you think not enough people get construction before education? Why does that matter? Do you think there should be bigger race to discover Divine Right? — I'd prefer these changes to be left out. The just change the game without improving it.

Nuclear Plants, if connected to uranium, now give 1 and +25% production.NEW v0.925 Nuclear meltdown event reduced in severity (see above for more detail).
Hydro Plant gives 1 engineer specialist slot.NEW v0.925I don't see why nuclear plants should give more productivity, even if they do produce more electricity; and I don't see why a hydro plant should give an engineer slot when the other plants don't. Maybe it's good to have a bit more variety... but I just these changes just make the game a bit more complicated without adding depth of strategy or 'fun'. If it was up to me, the only change I'd make to power plants would be to reduce the impact of meltdowns (even further than this mod already does).

Farms, when worked, have a small chance of discovering a grain resource (wheat, corn or rice), similar to how worked mines can discover a resource.
I don't like the sound of that. Unlike new mining resources, a new farm resource can greatly change how a city operates...

(test featues)
Theocracy: Unlimited priest specialists.
Hereditary Rule now has +25% maintenance for distance to palace.
I think Theocracy is strong enough as it is, and Hereditary Rule is weak enough. I can see why you might want to make these changes for flavour, but I think they are anti-balance.

-- There are also a couple of things that I find questionable in the included mods, but maybe I'll just post my thought about those mods in their own threads.

One more thing:
Floodplains are not removed when a city is settled on them. If the city is destroyed, the floodplain remains.
Does this mean that cities founded on floodplains give +3 food on the city tile?

I hope my feedback doesn't come across as sounding too harsh. I really do think you're onto a good thing here.

(by the way, I really don't think Mount Rushmore is too weak; and the red cross isn't really too weak either, it's just somewhat hard to build.)

PieceOfMind · Sep 1, 2010

Thanks for the feedback. I've put development of this mod on hold for the moment, and depending on what civ5 is like I'm not sure whether I'll make many more changes in this mod.

Regarding the floodplains, they are gone when the city is built, but they return when the city is destroyed. At least that is what is supposed to happen - it might not be working correctly.

Re nuclear plants, I wanted to give them a more interesting benefit. Since they cost quite a lot more than coal plants and come later, there needs to be at least some incentive to build them when a city already has a coal plant, IMO. I agree the engineer slot for hydro plant is a bit fiddly, but again I wanted to provide unique reasons to build for each building. The main problem with the hydro plant is the 3GD may be overpowered now.

As for the changes in tech prereqs, it's mostly to reduce the dominance of the Liberalism beeline strategy. That's both of Paper requiring Machinery and Education requiring Construction.

karadoc · Sep 1, 2010

I don't know much about the dominance of the Liberalism beeline. I often win the race the Liberalism, but I almost always have construction and machinery when I get there anyway, so for me it wouldn't weaken the power of getting Liberalism. Maybe the change is good for balance reasons that I'm not familiar with — but like I said, it's not a change that I'm a fan of.

As for nuclear plants, I guess I see them as just an alternative power source for cities that either don't have coal, or want to avoid the unhealthiness, rather than a building that every city should have as long as it has a bit of spare happiness.

It sounds like you have good reasons for your changes, and it's your mod, so... that's that I guess. I'll probably make a more minimalist mod for my own use and just steal your best ideas.

PieceOfMind · Sep 1, 2010

karadoc said:
It sounds like you have good reasons for your changes, and it's your mod, so... that's that I guess. I'll probably make a more minimalist mod for my own use and just steal your best ideas.

You know what? That's one of my goals for the mod - to simply supply ideas for others to use in their mods.

The thing is all changes are going to be liked and disliked. The only way to make sure a mod is all the changes you like, is to make your own personal mod. I look at mods as existing somewhere in the minimalist<--->extensive spectrum, and while this one is probably closest to the minimalist side (by design) it is by no means as minimalist as it could be.

Regarding Lib beeline, it's a very popular strategy for high-level players... Pretty much to the point where it's a standard strategy. Players even benchmark their progress based on what year they reach Liberalism. Machinery in particular is a tech many Lib-beeliners would be without. Part of the purpose of having Construction and Machinery as prereqs for Liberalism is that the "bulbing" path of great scientists is not as overpowered. I'm sure the discussion was somewhere earlier in this thread, but you could refer to Great Scientist bulb order reference page (sorry I have no link right now) to see the consequences of these changes.

As for plants, well, avoiding the unhealthiness is hardly ever considered for nuclear plants. Many would consider the danger of meltdown to be more serious than the health cost of coal plants anyway. Getting the 50% multiplier from Power is so strong that it's almost always in the player's best interest to build any plant at earliest opportunity. More than 9 times out of 10 that first opportunity is with coal plants. After that, building a 250 :hammers:

(IIRC) nuclear plant to save only 2 :yuck:

faces and also introduce the risk of meltdown is such a bad investment it's rarely even considered by players. Other buildings like the hospital or recycling centre are better alternatives.

karadoc · Sep 4, 2010

I've been thinking about the liberalism beeline thing. I think I agree that it would be good to reduce the power of beelining towards liberalism, but I suspect it isn't the techpath that's the problem.

Here's my thinking on the matter, please correct me if you disagree:
I don't think the free beakers from liberalism is the really important thing there. On high difficulty levels the AI will typically be teching faster than the player, and the actual beaker cost of the free tech isn't really a big advantage. The advantage is that you get a head start on some particularly important techs. In particular, rifling, and the synergy between rifling and nationhood.

Here's a little anecdote from a recent game, it isn't very important, I've just written it to illustrate what I think the power of rifling is:

Spoiler :

There are a few techs which grant a big step up in attack power, but it occurs to me that rifling is the only example in which there is no defensive tech that comes before it. For example, macemen struggle to beat crossbows, and crossbows come first. Archers come before axemen, and archers typically win if they are defending a city. Knights are a less well countered, because pikemen don't really come first, but longbows do come first. ... then there are riflemen. Riflemen beat everything that come before them. They are typcially fighting against knights, musketmen, and longbows and riflemen stomp them all. Even grenadiers struggle against riflemen when under attack. After riflemen the old pattern resumes. Machine guns beat infantry, fighter planes beat bombers, anti-tanks beat tanks, etc. So defence usually comes before offense except in the case of riflemen which are both the offensive and defence of their time. And this means that to get a strong military edge using riflemen, you only need to be 1 tech ahead of your enemies (only "Rifling") as opposed to most other cases where you need to get the offensive tech before they get the earlier defensive tech.

Meanwhile, at the same time as this anomaly, drafting becomes available. Suddenly instead of taking a few turns to build each unit you can get them instantly, and a flood of riflemen can appear from nowhere.

...

My point is that I think that the relationship between riflemen and the other units around that time might be a bit problematic, and that the problem is strongly amplified by drafting. I don't think liberalism is the problem. I think rifling is... but I don't really have any good ideas to improve it yet.

I do have some other thoughts on the matter, but I've already ranted enough for now... I'd better give you a chance to say "No. You've missed the point entirely. Rifling has very little to do with the liberalism beeline strategy."

[edit machine guns don't really come before infantry... they are about at the same time. But I think you can still see my point.]

PieceOfMind · Sep 4, 2010

You are correct in noting that the main advantage of Liberalism is not the free beakers for another tech, though it certainly is a nice bonus. High level players, from what I've heard, argue the advantage of the Lib beeline comes first from the tech path that leads to it and to a lesser extent the civics it opens up. Some very expensive techs on the path to Liberalism, including Education and Philosophy, are bulbable by Great Scientists. Because the techs are expensive, it makes them strong trading techs. Also Liberalism itself is another of the expensive yet bulbable techs so it too is good tradestuff. Civil Service is a hugely important tech at high levels and it too is on the Lib path.

By forcing players to learn first techs like Machinery, you end up with Great scientists bulbing things like Compass or Optics or something else less powerful. In short, the best way to nerf the Liberalism beeline is to nerf the bulbing strategy, and the easiest way to do that is to make some adjustments to prereqs. Messing with the rifling balance will likely annoy more players.

If you are getting Machinery before Liberalism then most likely you are not pushing the Lib beeline to the extreme. I would be tempted to ask in what year you are getting Liberalism if you are getting Machinery first.

EDIT: Note in the following list that Optics, Compass and Engineering are all above Liberalism. Other important techs for that part of the game are bolded.

Spoiler :

karadoc · Sep 4, 2010

I agree that it's probably a bad idea to mess with rifling. I thought about buffing grenadiers in some way so that the non-rifling path would be more viable, but since I never actually use that strategy myself I wouldn't know if it needs buffing! (Just because the AI uses it and fails doesn't mean it isn't good...) You're right that all of the techs on the way to liberalism are pretty important.

I loaded an old save from the game I was talking about to see when I got liberalism. It was a normal size "big and small" map with low sea level, emperor difficulty, normal speed. I got Liberalism in 1140 AD. I have no idea if that's early or late. I wasn't really trying to get it as soon as possible. I just wanted to get it before the other civs. I got compass, optics, machinery, etc in trades. I didn't have another scientist ready to bulb liberalism itself anyway. Actually, I was getting more great prophets than scientists, because of the temple of artemis.

I think for my own mod I'll just leave all of that stuff alone for the time being. Thanks for your input on this.

ChuckNorris135 · Sep 6, 2010

Any idea when you'll (re)upload the latest source code? Or is it available somewhere other than here?

EmperorFool · Sep 6, 2010

I don't consider myself an expert player, and I used to rely on riflemen as well, but I learned a while back that the true power of Liberalism is when you can nab Steel for free. Engineering and Chemistry are expensive techs, and you will usually need to self-research them, but the payoff is extreme.

Cannons will remove city defenses and chew apart the defenders with minimal casualties, and the unpromoted ones are nearly as effective which means you don't worry too much about them surviving. Macemen can easily finish off the half-strength longbowmen--even on hills--and will accrue promotions. Not only that, cannons will defend at 12 on the battlefield, protecting the other units nicely.

Manign · Sep 6, 2010

I've got a problem with using the PIG mod. I install it and when it's done, it asks if you want to launch the mod, and everything is fine. But after I close out, and open it up again, when I get into a game, this very annoying error spams itself in the top middle about some autolog failure. I really don't care about autolog errors, doesn't seem to effect the mod or game, but the fact that it does not go away really annoys me, to the point where I just close out immediately after seeing it.

What can I do about this? I've got literally no knowledge on the inner workings of a mod, and it's the only one I've got.

karadoc · Sep 6, 2010

My guess is that the error message is a result of the new security rules in Windows 7 and Windows Vista. If the mod is installed somewhere in "Program Files (x86)", which is would be by default, then the game would need administrator rights to right a log in the mod's directory. To get around this, you can either run the game as an admin (right click the shortcut and select "run as administrator") or you can reinstall the mod in a different directory. For example, all my games are installed in the 'C:\games' folder.

(really though, this isn't something that you should have to work around. If this is what's going on, then it's a problem with either civ4 or with the mod. It should write the log to one of the userdata folders or something.)

Silu · Sep 7, 2010

On Normal speed, Rifling isn't a particularly dominating choice for a Lib target chosen for military gains. Steel is arguably better (on average), and Military Tradition is better in many circumstances - neither of these choices get boosted very much at all by Nationalism. The problem of Grens is that 1) the path is a dead end 2) they (+ Cannons they get paired up with) get absolutely roflstomped by Cavalry. This can't really be easily changed without changing the whole unit dynamics.

On slower speeds (especially Marathon) Rifling gets relatively better. If you play those, then I can understand the reasoning behind claiming it's the main power of Liberalism, but that doesn't hold in general.

On high difficulty levels the AI will typically be teching faster than the player, and the actual beaker cost of the free tech isn't really a big advantage.

That's precisely the reason why the beakers from the free tech are a huge advantage. The main power of Liberalism is the immediate boost in trading power, similarly to the Philosophy bulb. That single free tech can easily turn into half a dozen. If you just aim for military prowess then even skipping Paper-Edu-Lib is often the way to go (albeit most people teching on auto-pilot don't even consider it) as barring extensive bulbing you get the tech(s) faster this way. So it makes sense to make it harder to "just get" it and then backfill with that recently acquired trading power.

PieceOfMind · Sep 7, 2010

Manign said:
I've got a problem with using the PIG mod. I install it and when it's done, it asks if you want to launch the mod, and everything is fine. But after I close out, and open it up again, when I get into a game, this very annoying error spams itself in the top middle about some autolog failure. I really don't care about autolog errors, doesn't seem to effect the mod or game, but the fact that it does not go away really annoys me, to the point where I just close out immediately after seeing it.

What can I do about this? I've got literally no knowledge on the inner workings of a mod, and it's the only one I've got.

Can you please take a screenshot or write down the exact error details? Is it an error you see with any other mods like Better AI or BUG?

karadoc · Sep 7, 2010

I guess the consensus is that I was off the mark with my riflemen rant.

Cannons are great, but never bulb steel because I never have chemistry at the time. In fact, I rarely have gunpower at the time that I get liberalism and I only sometimes have engineering. So aside from some special situations, my choice of tech from liberalism is always between printing press, nationalism, and sometimes astronomy. If I could get steal, I probably would.

Also, maybe it's worth pointing out that in the anecdote I described earlier in which a short lead on rifling + nationalism won the game for me, I didn't use siege weapons at all. I figured that by the time trebuchets could bring down castle defences, my rifling lead would be spent. Similarly for the time to tech steal... so instead, I built heaps of spies and used city revolts to bring down defences. That was the first time I've used that tactic exclusively and I must say that I worked better than I expected. The only downside I can see is that you really have to plan in advance... choose your target civ so that you can direct all espionage towards them in advance, and then choose the target cities well in advance of the attack so that the spies can get stand there long enough to get their 50% discount before the attack-stack arrives... But yeah; it worked really well and I didn't need siege weapons at all.

(collateral damage from cannons is obviously a massive advantage over the spies method, but it isn't really important until the enemy gets rifling...)

[edit]
By the way, PieceOfMind, do you intend to make the source code available again? I'm interested to know how you made March have three different optional prerequisites. I tried just putting a PromotionPrereqOr3 line into the xml, but that results in many many errors when the mod is loaded. I suppose I need to change the source code somewhere to give meaning to the new field or something.

Chiyochan · Sep 10, 2010

I want to see an option that eliminates clear cutting entirely, by the end of the game, every forest is gone,

Manign · Sep 16, 2010

Found I just needed admin rights, usual vista. Now I'm trying to merge the ranged bombardment mod with this one, but I'm kind of lost. I would just open up both XML files from each, copy whats not in the PIG one to it from the RB mod, right?

EmperorFool · Sep 16, 2010

No, I'm pretty sure Ranged Bombardment requires C++ changes to the SDK which will require merging the C++ code and compiling your own DLL using PIG's makefile.

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