Procylon's Call to Power Project

[FredMB]

Ok so I finally ran a complete game on Normal speed (500 turns) on a duel size map to prevent any crashes. Here are some observations:

In the nanotech era there's a bug in the tech tree where all techs show as one turn for research. The tree correctly displays the number of beakers needed but not the turns. When a tech is selected then the correct number of turns is shown. In this case that was usually two, but still.

I managed to complete the tech tree in the year 2042. I think it's supposed to last until the year 3000 or so but with large cities it comes way faster. I finished the game in the year 2045 with a Domination victory. By that time I had built everything and had upgraded to the latest units. The AI was nothing but a speed bump.

By end game my largest city was my capital with pop 172. All my cities spent most of the game on Food production so most of them were above 100. Most of them were gaining one pop every turn. The largest city the AI had was also his capital but with size 24. Not so good location near deserts and such but still, pretty small. It doesn't matter what kind of balancing is done if the AI won't grow larger cities it'll never pose any kind of threat, well in the late game at least. The AI is still plenty dangerous early on. Interestingly enough with that much population not having The Freedom tree selected resulted in -400 happiness. So that said Autocracy wasn't possible, might have been because there were so many specialists.

The machine gunner upgrade path is still broken. The combat controller won't upgrade. The Micro UAV upgrades to the Cybernetic Marauder just fine though.

Oh yeah and the usual was still there, 6 million total gold and 400,000.00 GPT. Happiness was a bit lower than usual because of the very large cities but it was still 1170. The Golden Age counter topped at 258 turns left.

The production cost may be a bit low in that case. Would you say that happened around industrial?

Yes it was. Production costs should definitely be higher. By late game everything builds in one turn, except wonders which build in 2 or 3. City specialization is also nonexistent in the late game because you'll just about build everything in every city. In the early game it's still necessary though, to some extent.

Not a native function in the xml's, but I do like the concept so I may try fitting it in down the line.

By using MaxPlayerInstances in UnitClasses you can determine how many units of a class a player can have, it's used for spaceship parts. There's also MaxGlobalInstances but I never tried that one.

 

[Yanikin_Tinkard]

Getting CTD now. Did they patch the game and I didn't notice?

 

[Decimatus]

This would be hard to implement, and might take a bit (or a lot) of .lua coding, but maybe you could have a system where small towns or suburbs spring up in spaces that the player can designate for it. These towns would be like puppet cities where you don't choose what it produces, but it still gives culture, production, etc. These town would start at a population of 1, and you could implement a chance system where it has a chance of going up to 2,3,4 and maybe even become a certain population where you can start controlling it. You would designate spaces for it, so it won't take up your wheat that you were going to farm. Also, you could make it so based on the population it gets certain buildings.

If I could add a system like that I would probably just add cottages back into the game. It sounds like having mini cities covering the map would create a giant wall of confusion.

I will have to see on my next game. What is average science a turn for you? I was in the 3k range before last game crashed. I will see with my curent Marathon, 22 civs, 28 css, huge map turmoil.

I don't remember the number of beakers really, just that I general tech up at a decent pace. Going to run a test game myself after I tweak a couple things.

What about a diffrent approach? Maybe add the negative effects not with the positive ones; but with a gold producing tech? Am at work so am not going to look up the techs. But what say if you get banking, you have cost increase on trading posts? You know that you are going to be makeing more money; but the trading posts now have to "go to the bank" which costs them more money?

This might seam a little gamey in places; but might be an option. While I love realism and being able to be "part of the world" some things need to give. It is a game. This way you get refrigeration (as I said) you increase your yields. You get (insert money makeing tech in same era) it now costs you more. Now I know people will avoid those techs; but if they are tied to the make money tech it will be give and take.

I think a give and take is a good thing.

It still gives you the cluttered tech tree with all the extra icons.

Many of the negatives wouldn't make sense to me either. For instance, you learn refrigeration and now farms cost more to maintain. While this may be true on a basic level, on the whole your farms are going to be bringing in more food and saving more money from not loosing their produce to rot. Not to mention making more money from selling all that food(which you tax).

This is kind of how I see many things. The cost comes from the initial investment, and after that it is pretty much all gain. Unless I could simulate some boom and bust which would take quite a lot of work.

And anyway, the player represents the government. The government doesn't really have anything to loose from farmers and warehouses implementing refrigeration. It's all tax revenue in the bank(from increased commerce), and food to the people.

Another way to simulate government costs in this arena would be subsidies. For that though it would help to have some kind of marketplace for goods, food, etc.

You could look at the initial government investment of building the farm as the subsidies though.

You might say that certain new technologies would hit the tax base, but government revenue generally rises with the GDP.

For me, negatives can only be so useful. Look at governments today. They don't pay maintenance on buildings other than government buildings. They subsidize industries, but only so those industries can compete globally and so that the economy has stable supplies. Even those subsidies are generally low compared to the rest of the budget. ~23% of the US budget is defense spending, another 39-50% is entitlement programs. The remaining all falls in the cracks somewhere. Things like that are better left to social policies.

I kind of see advancement and building in general to be a system where there are few negatives beyond the initial cost of construction. Everything else is net gain.

If we could implement some more complicated forms of economic theory revolving around inflation/deflation, boom/bust, etc, then I think we could represent certain risks much better. But I don't think many want that kind of economic simulator.

Well, some people don't relize when a city is captured. All buildings go poof. I ran into that. Maybe if you set that option to keep all buildings. Set up a scenerio were you are on level you want to test. Mod just your civ to have an uber powerfull unit. Set your cities to be pre built with said uber unit defending. Run for n turns. Save, capture ai cities see what is built. Repeat.

Well, from the look of the building tables, they shouldn't go poof. Not all of them. A certain percentage of them for sure, but not every last one.

If they are all disappearing then I could just delete the line that causes them to disappear since it doesn't seem to be working correctly.

But I am not sure that is the case. It could be that the AI simply doesn't build buildings. Which is more likely given their tiny city populations in the endgame.

I wasn't sure. If a SP can affect the golden age; seamed like a tech, building, etc could too. It is just a database afterall.

A database that calls on the DLL for it's functions. If the DLL doesn't have the ability then you are limited in your approach. This is all lined out in the schema's found at the top of each xml. Basically tells you what you can do in those tables.

I hardly buy units. Of course you say my gold is low anyway. I think I am going to set up a quick, duel for test. First run all trading posts. Second run all farms. I will place cities in same spot for growth. AI is random; but can see what I get. Maybe if I do an early warrior rush (low difficulty) I can keep playing past win and test with everything equal.

I am probably going to try and raise unit maintenance to the point where no one keeps a giant standing army unless they are at war. Once war starts, players would be inclined to buy many units to fight the war since they are somewhat lacking.

Just have to get the AI to go along with that plan... -_-

Long story is our posts. If I ever get to long winded for you just tell me.

That was generally aimed at Sneaks.

And after I start my marathon game. For shame. I asked for it. So remember my thoughts are a version old. I think that would put me on version 15? I will make sure to mention in future what version I'm on.

You are on ~11 I believe.

BTW, Decimatus are you thinking about adding any units to the Ancient Era?

Some will likely be added with optional techs eventually. And later on there will be things like slavers, clerics, etc for subversives.

Probably not much to add in the main line. Any differentiation in the form of say Axemen, Macemen, etc would fall under optional techs. So far I believe the main unit categories are covered.

So I guess I'm playing v7 now with the patch notes 15, and I have noticed that you haven't updated the harbor to improve gold on water tiles. Just wanted to bring it to your attention.

Thanks, fixed.

Ideally, i would like things like suburbs or exurbs to be implemented as Improvements. Perhaps recycling city models on adjacent tiles. These improvements would obviously need to be worker built, thanks to placement. There would be a new/upgraded version of this improvement every era.

Now here is where I diverge a bit. This would take the full SDK, so this is not a near term project:

Ex. I build a suburb on a tile next to my city. This suburb improvement would produce lets say 5 production (workforce), 2 science (innovation in the populace), and 2 unhappiness (think of unhappiness not as the opposite of happiness in this case, but the requirement for), and 5% growth to the city that works it (population boom). Obviously maybe gold goes in here somewhere as well.

What would make this tile unique is that 2 citizens can work it, instead of one. If two citizens are working it, you will get the base yield twice. Further improvements down the tech tree would have more slots per improvement (think major metropolitan areas).

I like this idea in general. Given that we are limited to 36 tiles around the city, being able to double/triple them up could work pretty well. Industrial parks and other similar improvements are things I would like to see come with this.

The biggest problem I see would be limiting it so that the player doesn't just build an endless swath of city area all over the countryside. I think if possible I would want more of a limit to suburbs/etc beyond happiness(though that could be a good start). Perhaps have it tied to population. Each suburb, metropolitan area, upgrade/etc would require X population in the local area. So a suburb might require 5 population. So a size 20 could have 4 suburbs. The next level up might require 10-15 population and so on.

These would use population in a similar manner to strategic resources, and it would all be based locally.

I have no ability to do this myself, but I will keep an eye out for someone who does.

thank you for the hard work you done your mod is going more and more good
here i like a lot CTP2 and especially the future eraS (too short) the best for me was not really really the "space" (too easy to win after on vanilla CTP2) but it was the underwater cities and the road (magnet tubes but i don't have the english name i play french version sorry) from sea to water it was a good part of the game.
with your mod i found back some parts and i can only say than you again.

what about religions now? possible to have them like doctrine? or bad idea?

Thanks.

Yeah I loved the underwater tunnels. CtP 2 was a little more limited on the future end than CtP 1 was, but it was a decent game too. My biggest gripe with CtP 2 was how they watered down the trade system, so I generally stuck to CtP.

I will definitely be implementing religion.

My first idea was to implement religion using roughly 2-4 pages of social policy.

My second idea comes from watching the progress of Lemmy101's and CaptainBinky's D.U.C.K.S mod they are working on. They have religions that spread, a piety mechanic, the ability to name your religion, splinter off from another's religion, and many other cool things. And they have all this before the SDK has even been released. These guys are real programmers(unlike me), and they are creating what looks to be an awesome system. I believe they are adding a corporation system after they finish with religions.

Some of the mechanics I don't feel would be great with this project, but in general it is a good system. I would also want to change around their religion trees to suit this project.

I am not sure which direction I will be headed, but it will likely involve some of both. It may be months before they release their mod and I can reverse engineer it for my purposes. But the future is bright.

In the nanotech era there's a bug in the tech tree where all techs show as one turn for research. The tree correctly displays the number of beakers needed but not the turns. When a tech is selected then the correct number of turns is shown. In this case that was usually two, but still.

Does this bug persist even after you have reached the nanotech era?

I knew the bug existed, but I narrowed it down to the fact that when you are looking at it from the ancient era, it seems to take so many turns to research those techs that it just bugs out on the calculation.

When I started a game or two in the nanotech era, those techs showed their actual time to completion, so it led me to believe that it just couldn't handle the huge turn calculation.

I managed to complete the tech tree in the year 2042. I think it's supposed to last until the year 3000 or so but with large cities it comes way faster. I finished the game in the year 2045 with a Domination victory. By that time I had built everything and had upgraded to the latest units. The AI was nothing but a speed bump.

Something between 2200 and 2600. The Diamond age and all the space related items will get to 3000.

I haven't really done anything to balance the later calendar years. The game still ends in 2050 by time. I may try and find that function while I am thinking about it.

Hopefully though the latest balance adjustments will cause you to finish the tech tree sometime after 2050.

By end game my largest city was my capital with pop 172. All my cities spent most of the game on Food production so most of them were above 100. Most of them were gaining one pop every turn. The largest city the AI had was also his capital but with size 24. Not so good location near deserts and such but still, pretty small. It doesn't matter what kind of balancing is done if the AI won't grow larger cities it'll never pose any kind of threat, well in the late game at least. The AI is still plenty dangerous early on. Interestingly enough with that much population not having The Freedom tree selected resulted in -400 happiness. So that said Autocracy wasn't possible, might have been because there were so many specialists.

The AI had a population of 24 with the newest version or was that an older V7? If he had 24 on the versions after I modified the city sizes, then that failed horribly.

I could increase minimum city distance to 3, but that would probably increase AI pop by a few points at most.

I may have to make a serious AI adjustment regarding growth flavors.


Also do you mean that when you took freedom off your happiness went to -400, or that was the AI?

The machine gunner upgrade path is still broken. The combat controller won't upgrade. The Micro UAV upgrades to the Cybernetic Marauder just fine though.

Mmm, and looking at it doesn't show anything obviously wrong with the upgrade rows. I am going to have to dig more into this.

Oh yeah and the usual was still there, 6 million total gold and 400,000.00 GPT. Happiness was a bit lower than usual because of the very large cities but it was still 1170. The Golden Age counter topped at 258 turns left.

258 turns of GA left? Were you turning excess GP into GA? I reduced GP generation by 33% on the specialists, so maybe this will have a noticeable impact on the overall game.

Also with the production increases, hopefully that slows down some of the rest of your economy.


You know sometimes I feel like a Federal Reserve Chairman raising interest rates to stave off inflation. lol

Yes it was. Production costs should definitely be higher. By late game everything builds in one turn, except wonders which build in 2 or 3. City specialization is also nonexistent in the late game because you'll just about build everything in every city. In the early game it's still necessary though, to some extent.

Should be noticeably better in the newest version, though not necessarily fixed.

I am going to work more on city specialization as time goes by.

By using MaxPlayerInstances in UnitClasses you can determine how many units of a class a player can have, it's used for spaceship parts. There's also MaxGlobalInstances but I never tried that one.

Nice. I think I never noticed that because the unit classes schema list was so small I didn't bother looking at it.

I will see if I can implement some things based on that in the future.

Getting CTD now. Did they patch the game and I didn't notice?

Don't think so, mine works fine. Of course, it wouldn't be the first time that I am the only one who doesn't CtD so who knows...

 

[Decimatus]

Can anyone else confirm that the Machine Gunner/Missile Squad/Combat Controller upgrade line is still broken?

I can't see any reason why it should be by looking at the files.


Playing a huge great plains map. You know this is something I really miss about CtP, the ability to have randomly generated maps with vast areas that are uniform, IE great plains, giant mountain ranges, vast swamps, hills for days, etc.

And with the way the rivers are spread all over this great plains, it is very much like CtP. Rivers in standard Civ 5 maps are too few and too short, cut off by various things, not allowed to snake all over the continent.

Really need a map scripter who can make this happen on your average continent or pangea map.

 

[JSnider]

Can't help on upgrade as have gotten to the point of continual CTD and haven't got 2nd tech yet. Was getting around for a tad but must have hit the save to large mem bloat issue at last.
As to cities, some of the more established I have conquered still have some buildings left in them. So AI is building but slowly (it seems) improvements for the cities.
In Industrial and AI is still (well was since will have to start again) keeping pace, if didn't zoom to certain techs they would be harder to fight. Oh and in the war with the French nice thing happened, they made peace went for a tech to give a combat edge (they thought) and then attacked again ... a small bit of thin'n there.

 

[Decimatus]

I was thinking, when I add governments in, it may be best to remove all % modifiers from buildings. Perhaps change them all to Gold/Production/Food per pop as well as general tile enhancements.

That way I could implement what would be practically linear control of the economy depending on your government type. IE 130% Production on communism and 70% production on ecotopia. When you choose a government, it would apply these modifiers to each part of your economy. Gold, production, food, science, and perhaps even happiness, culture, and other things.

It would pretty much require a complete overhaul of the building system, and a general balancing of the other policies around the government system, which may work out better anyway.

 

[Decimatus]

I was thinking, when I add governments in, it may be best to remove all % modifiers from buildings. Perhaps change them all to Gold/Production/Food per pop as well as general tile enhancements.

That way I could implement what would be practically linear control of the economy depending on your government type. IE 130% Production on communism and 70% production on ecotopia. When you choose a government, it would apply these modifiers to each part of your economy. Gold, production, food, science, and perhaps even happiness, culture, and other things.

It would pretty much require a complete overhaul of the building system, and a general balancing of the other policies around the government system, which may work out better anyway.

Can't help on upgrade as have gotten to the point of continual CTD and haven't got 2nd tech yet. Was getting around for a tad but must have hit the save to large mem bloat issue at last.
As to cities, some of the more established I have conquered still have some buildings left in them. So AI is building but slowly (it seems) improvements for the cities.
In Industrial and AI is still (well was since will have to start again) keeping pace, if didn't zoom to certain techs they would be harder to fight. Oh and in the war with the French nice thing happened, they made peace went for a tech to give a combat edge (they thought) and then attacked again ... a small bit of thin'n there.

I have noticed this as well, but many times the count is so low it makes me think that either the AI doesn't build them, or that there could possibly be a bug with the number of buildings that are kept after conquest.

Though given the low AI populations, I tend to think it is the former. Perhaps an across the board building flavor increase is in order.

Yeah the AI can pull some tricky stuff every so often. One thing I have noticed they are good at is blitzing cavalry and other horse units out from the darkness into vulnerable artillery units.


In my current game I noticed that Russia had pushed a catapult, a swordsman, and 2 archers to the outskirts of one of my cities. This is classic "AI is about to declare war on your defenseless city" tactics. So, I build 4 horsemen and blitz them to my city's defense, and bring down some archers that had been scouting nearby(my entire army was scouting... probably why Russia was getting frisky).

As if Russia knew what I was doing, the units went home after hanging around for a good dozen turns.

I guess they realized my army wasn't as weak as they thought.

 

[FredMB]

Does this bug persist even after you have reached the nanotech era?

Yes it does. At that point all other research was taking about 3 turns. The nanotech era was still showing as 1 turn. I started in the ancient era.

When I started a game or two in the nanotech era, those techs showed their actual time to completion, so it led me to believe that it just couldn't handle the huge turn calculation.

You're probably right. The game probably can't handle techs that are that expensive, for now anyways.

The AI had a population of 24 with the newest version or was that an older V7? If he had 24 on the versions after I modified the city sizes, then that failed horribly.

It was a V7 where the XML defined a large city as 40. Not sure if that was the old or new one. I think the AI's problem is that it was about 60 tech behind me. And that's with using Tech Diffusion. If not for that they would still have had knights out there. Well they had cavalry, not much better.

I may have to make a serious AI adjustment regarding growth flavors.

I don't think that's the problem. I believe the problem lies around the number of specialists available and their power. When I had a city on default it would only generate about 40-60 extra food per turn. All the citizens were assigned as specialists except for a small number working the tiles. When on Food all the tiles would be worked and food would jump to about 600 but the specialists wouldn't assign themselves, they all became unemployed citizens. So while on Food production I had to manually assign my specialists, something I don't think the AI would do. I believe the AI spent most of the game on "Default", therefore assigning all his citizens as specialists, and only leaving a couple to work the field. Also the AI was spamming trading posts everywhere despite having very large amounts of gold. If there were less specialist slots the AI would work unemployed citizens on the field instead, resulting in more food gathering.

Also do you mean that when you took freedom off your happiness went to -400, or that was the AI?

No that was me. With Freedom you get half unhappiness from specialists. I had 25 cities, about 80 specialists each. Without Freedom happiness took a major hit from all the specialists.

Mmm, and looking at it doesn't show anything obviously wrong with the upgrade rows. I am going to have to dig more into this.

Checked your CIV5Units.xml, there's no row for it in Unit_ClassUpgrades.

258 turns of GA left? Were you turning excess GP into GA? I reduced GP generation by 33% on the specialists, so maybe this will have a noticeable impact on the overall game.

Yes I was. I didn't have any other use for them at that point. With 100+ pop cities and so many specialists it's bound to happen.

Gonna try a new game and tweak the AI city sizes myself and see what happens.

 

[Sneaks]

Fred is exactly right. If you want this mod to work well, you more or less have to tell the AI not to run any specialists whatsoever for a while. The problem is as follows: Specialists are much much much much much much worse than just having a citizen work an improved tile. 9 times out of 10, choosing Default Focus for cities will result in much less gold, production, food. When I play, I usually set at least half my cities to food focus, as it is the only way for the game to properly use the tiles without direct micromanagement.

The AI still believes it should run specialists the first opportunity it gets. CtP penalizes such behavior. Given building bonuses, it is almost always in the AI's best interest to simply work plots, which in turn will vastly increase AI city size, which in turn will increase AI production, gold, science, and everything else.

 

[Yanikin_Tinkard]

I hate micro managing. I don't suppose there is a way without the dll to change the behavior of those default, food, science, etc?

 

[Sneaks]

I am guessing there is probably a way to fix it with the current SDK, but it will require a LOT of math to properly understand the various AI valuations and how to properly adjust food in such a way that it also will not entirely ignore production tiles early. I have not looked into the Lua just yet, but I cannot exactly find where to fix Default Focus. Only the specialized ones.

 

[TanisX]

I think you are missing the upgrade of Combat Controller to Micro UAV Team.

 

[Yanikin_Tinkard]

I am guessing there is probably a way to fix it with the current SDK, but it will require a LOT of math to properly understand the various AI valuations and how to properly adjust food in such a way that it also will not entirely ignore production tiles early. I have not looked into the Lua just yet, but I cannot exactly find where to fix Default Focus. Only the specialized ones.

If you can get the AI to focus on specialized ones, and fix them that might be a partial solution. I want food focus to put unworked citizens in use somewhere.

 

[chrome-rome]

A temporary solution would be to remove most of the specialist slots, limiting them to only one per building (and not every building). It's pretty severe, but it might make the ai more competent, at least until industrial/modern.

BTW, I have a post from a few days ago where I highlighted some of my experiences and suggestions about the game. I'm not looking for you to respond to it, but I just want to make sure you are aware of it, incase you are looking for possible solutions to balance issues.

 

[Decimatus]

It was a V7 where the XML defined a large city as 40. Not sure if that was the old or new one. I think the AI's problem is that it was about 60 tech behind me. And that's with using Tech Diffusion. If not for that they would still have had knights out there. Well they had cavalry, not much better.

Well that is unfortunate.

But I do think this is all generally tied to AI population.

I don't think that's the problem. I believe the problem lies around the number of specialists available and their power. When I had a city on default it would only generate about 40-60 extra food per turn. All the citizens were assigned as specialists except for a small number working the tiles. When on Food all the tiles would be worked and food would jump to about 600 but the specialists wouldn't assign themselves, they all became unemployed citizens. So while on Food production I had to manually assign my specialists, something I don't think the AI would do. I believe the AI spent most of the game on "Default", therefore assigning all his citizens as specialists, and only leaving a couple to work the field. Also the AI was spamming trading posts everywhere despite having very large amounts of gold. If there were less specialist slots the AI would work unemployed citizens on the field instead, resulting in more food gathering.

I have known that the AI has preferred the specialists for awhile, but I had hoped that I could get around it by giving them greater incentive to grow in general. Apparently that isn't enough.

No that was me. With Freedom you get half unhappiness from specialists. I had 25 cities, about 80 specialists each. Without Freedom happiness took a major hit from all the specialists.

Freedom has always been a powerful policy branch. Double culture, half unhappiness, 50% more GP production, etc.

When I revamp social policies I will probably have a few policies that have things like 10% less specialist unhappiness instead of 1 that has 50%.

Checked your CIV5Units.xml, there's no row for it in Unit_ClassUpgrades.

You guys were right about the Combat Controller to Micro UAV Team. It is now in there.

However, people are saying that the others such as Machine Gunner and Missile Squad aren't upgrading?

This is what I now have in my Unit_ClassUpgrades:

<Row>
<UnitType>UNIT_MACHINE_GUNNER</UnitType>
<UnitClassType>UNITCLASS_MISSILE_SQUAD</UnitClassType>
</Row>

<Row>
<UnitType>UNIT_MISSILE_SQUAD</UnitType>
<UnitClassType>UNITCLASS_COMBAT_CONTROLLER</UnitClassType>
</Row>

<Row>
<UnitType>UNIT_COMBAT_CONTROLLER</UnitType>
<UnitClassType>UNITCLASS_MICRO_UAV_TEAM</UnitClassType>
</Row>

<Row>
<UnitType>UNIT_MICRO_UAV_TEAM</UnitType>
<UnitClassType>UNITCLASS_CYBERNETIC_MARAUDER</UnitClassType>
</Row>

If you guys are having upgrade problems with these, aside from the controller to UAV team, then I am not sure why. Maybe something is misspelled that I am blind to?

Yes I was. I didn't have any other use for them at that point. With 100+ pop cities and so many specialists it's bound to happen.

Gonna try a new game and tweak the AI city sizes myself and see what happens.

I lowered the GP per specialist, so that might help a bit.

Fred is exactly right. If you want this mod to work well, you more or less have to tell the AI not to run any specialists whatsoever for a while. The problem is as follows: Specialists are much much much much much much worse than just having a citizen work an improved tile. 9 times out of 10, choosing Default Focus for cities will result in much less gold, production, food. When I play, I usually set at least half my cities to food focus, as it is the only way for the game to properly use the tiles without direct micromanagement.

The AI still believes it should run specialists the first opportunity it gets. CtP penalizes such behavior. Given building bonuses, it is almost always in the AI's best interest to simply work plots, which in turn will vastly increase AI city size, which in turn will increase AI production, gold, science, and everything else.

I knew it was a problem, I was just hoping I could fix it with a little stick instead of a big stick...

I am going to look into some things and see if I can deal with it.

I hate micro managing. I don't suppose there is a way without the dll to change the behavior of those default, food, science, etc?

I am right there with you on the specialists. In CtP, I would let my cities grow 50-100 population each, multiplied by 80-100 cities, before I ever even touched their focus. And then you had to manually set where each of those 5000-10000 specialists were going.... Lots of rapid clicking.

The only reason it wasn't a huge problem was that you only had the problem after building the beef vats and your cities started growing out of control. Pretty much endgame when you have already won anyway.

I may try something so the AI simply goes for specialists after having used up all it's tiles first. If I can find where to set this. I doubt it will be easy.

I am guessing there is probably a way to fix it with the current SDK, but it will require a LOT of math to properly understand the various AI valuations and how to properly adjust food in such a way that it also will not entirely ignore production tiles early. I have not looked into the Lua just yet, but I cannot exactly find where to fix Default Focus. Only the specialized ones.

Hopefully the math is already there, and I can just modify a variable to shunt the AI focus back to the tiles.

A temporary solution would be to remove most of the specialist slots, limiting them to only one per building (and not every building). It's pretty severe, but it might make the ai more competent, at least until industrial/modern.

BTW, I have a post from a few days ago where I highlighted some of my experiences and suggestions about the game. I'm not looking for you to respond to it, but I just want to make sure you are aware of it, incase you are looking for possible solutions to balance issues.

That is a possible solution, but one I really don't want to have to use.

BTW, I have a post from a few days ago where I highlighted some of my experiences and suggestions about the game. I'm not looking for you to respond to it, but I just want to make sure you are aware of it, incase you are looking for possible solutions to balance issues.

Ah sorry I didn't respond, I think I was in the air then. I will hit them in another post.

 

[Decimatus]

One that note, Decimatus do you have any graphic designers? Unfortunately, I don't design, but I asked because seeing the agriculture pic for very military-oriented techs is just a little off. More pressing are the units and thier portraits; it would be cool for each unit to have its own design (perhaps long term).

Dr Balthar made the Wonder Splash images for me, but that is it so far. I wish I did have a graphic designer(or that I was one). I also want to see the agriculture icon replaced. I could do similar to the buildings and just reuse other tech icons, but I was kind of hoping to find some extra icons before then.

I have found a few mods that do have some unique icons that I would like to use, but in general I am giving some time so that even more icons can be made and I don't have to keep checking back for them.

In general I will just be grabbing random art here and there unless someone steps up for the job.

And it would help if you guys see any mods that have good amounts of art that could be used in this project, be it icons, animations, etc.

I don't think you should focus on this now, though, as there are more important things to work out (looking forward to that multi-page social/government setup). In that regard, have you seen the D.U.C.K.S. mod by lemmy and Captain Blinky? There are some seriously impressive ideas in that mod which could give you some ideas about this great mod. Or, in a perfect world, you could impliment the mod into CTP

Yeah I have been following the D.U.C.K.S mod, and they have said they don't mind other people using their system(though they did mention letting them have some time after they publish in which they have the monopoly on their system )

If/when I do implement their system, it will probably take me at least a month to tailor it to the CtP project anyway.

1) I think the fact that the ai fails to keep up with the player in later eras is due to two problems. First, I don't think the ai prioritizes infastructure : they are completely focused on war. If the human can hold on, he/she will come out ahead. Note this is not tested (the part about them ignoring infastructure), but merely a theory. Secondly, the human makes use of great people more effectively than the ai. More specifically, the human will prioritize that Great Scientist over the Artist (or any other great person to be honest) and when it arrives, the human uses it pop a tech.

If by infrastructure you mean buildings, then yeah I agree. I think to fix some of this I am going to have to go to the AI directly and alter their guiding flavors.

While I think your mod does a good job limiting the "beelining" potetial that was present in vanilla, it is still too easy for a human player to gain a substantial lead on the ai by bulbing techs. I think it would be better to revert to some kind of Civ 4 formula, where scientist finish techs up to a specific point, and then they lose effectivenenss. Or perhaps (and I like this method better but it could be hard to impliment), make great people improvements more worthwhile than their "speciallity." Right now, I think only the engineer does this. I'm thinking that, upon reaching certain science techs, give bonuses to the academy (not necessarily all researched based either; maybe add some gold/food). This way they scale with eras. However, they should be slightly more powerful than the bulbing option, so the player has to choose between immidiate rewards or stronger long-term benifits. In this same fashion, currently the Great Artist is hugely underpowered. Their improvement only gives four(!) culture, throughout the entire game (or at least through the modern era). This has to be compared with the manufactury, which was making a riverside plain generate somewhere around twenty production. I think it needs a boost (as do all the great people improvements, except maybe the manufactury, as you do a great job keeping it current).

I had increased the academy but removed it due to a stubborn text problem. It also kind of cluttered up the tree with extra icons.

With the artist improvement, there is no non-yield tech increasing function for culture. You can do production, gold, science, and food as they are yields. So to compensate I made culture bombs a 2 hex radius and reduced the cooldown to 5 turns. I also lowered the relations hit. For me personally, this makes the artist my second favorite specialist after the scientist(well engineer is 2nd in the early game).

For scientists I am contemplating making it so that they only bulb the techs in the optional pages. This would make beelining quite a bit less powerful, while still keeping the scientists ability to give you something useful immediately.

Once I have a good portion of the optional pages implemented I will look into changing this.

2) This ties a little in with the first observation, but in my game, the top of the tech tree (the so-called peaceful branch) was completely untouched until well into the midgame. (This might be because of the battle ai mod that I am using with this one; I don't know for sure though, so I will put it here). This allowed me to shoot past the ai by signing research pacts with all of the other ai (two dropped bc of DOW but I still netted 5 techs, while each ai only received one). Perhaps you could balance the agreement by making it so that both players must have philosophy unlocked before an agreement can be locked. This perhaps is the single greatest reason why I shot past the ai. Another problem with this is that the wonders that improve culture, and more importantly, great people were passed over. I went back and got all of them, with the result that I could get a scientist about every five turns (with only two cities working on producing them). This, in turn, fed the tech explosion.

I have been looking at that top row for awhile, pondering where I want to throw in a prerequisite. You can almost get to somewhere around fundamentalism in that top row before you ever need to get pottery. And it doesn't feed the other direction until something like the digital age.

On the other hand, when I implement religions, much of that row may be moved to a religious tech tree. Not sure what I am going to do in that area yet.

3) Once I shot past the ai, there was little they could do to keep up. Specifically, upon entering the renaissance - early industrial, techs that increase specifics yields become highly common. It would be really hard to keep pace with someone who gains three more gold for every trading post and 2 more production for every mine or lumbermill (just examples, I don't remember the specifics, but it wasn't pretty for the ai). I think it would be benifitial to balancing if each tech only increase on specific yield, say mines, at a time. When I had my scientist, I would bulb the tech that either had the best building or the one that gave me the best improvement bonuses. If one tech only improved mines production and another only improved lumbermill production, I think it would be easier for ai to keep up. This way it forces the player to decide what is most important and it spread those all-important improvements throughout many different techs. The same can be said for many of the late industrial-early modern buildings. I remember hitting some kind of tipping point where I knew I would have to screw up hugely for the ai to have a shot. I have yet to do that . I don't think it would have been a problem if the ai was keeping constant pressure on me, to the point that I had to get military techs, but by that time I was already slightly advanced. These bonuses helped to feed my growth, which leads to the next problem...

I am going to try and address the AI population first, and then see about balancing some of the other stuff after I see how the AI keeps up then.

4) Happiness is waay to easy to come by. It's fine in the early game when the main thing is expansion, but come mid-late game, it really gets out of hand. I have about 300 surplus right now, but half less than half of the luxury resourses. I think the problem is that most buildings that you added happiness to also gave some other benifit that would make them worthwhile regarless (like the sewer system). Perhaps consider making buildings that only give happiness, and then charge them an equal (or more) amount in maintainence (not like I can't afford it; +12K a turn). I think more buildings like the theater should be added. I don't mean for you to take out the new buildings, just put their happiness providing effects in a specified building. Or perhaps work out a way so that each extra city added (whether by settling, conquest, or trade) gives more unhappy citizens than those before. This way, you have to make sure your empire is already relatively stable before taking a new city.

As Fred alluded to, Freedom is a big problem in the current game. Another problem may be the fact that each city has more happiness buildings than it has people, which is going to be patched here in the next day or so.

We will see how the patch works out and then I will also be doing quite a lot of work in the social policies in the future.

As for some of the buildings like the sewer system, adding happiness was one method I had to use to balance them. The ~25% food kept was simply too great, yet 10% is kind of low for anyone to care about, so I added in some happiness to sweeten the deal. I think it fits well anyway, as not having poo run in your streets makes people happy.

I did a lot to increase maintenance costs on many post industrial buildings, so we will see how that affects your gold balance. Also, I have to do some work to catch up unit maintenance with the rest of the gold generation. I will likely be adding a specific maintenance cost to each unit depending on the era that unit exists in. So a warrior might have 1gpt, while a tank would be closer to 30-50 or something. The way it currently works, a warrior in the industrial era costs the same as a tank to maintain.

5) Culture wins can potentially come too early. As I mentioned above, a lot of the culture techs were left alone, allowing me to grab the benifits. I could have completed the five branches by the 1400's if I had really tried to do so. Right now I am getting a new policy every 4-5 turns (my many puppets helping in this respect). My main problem with it is that I like to have long games. I think the culture win can potentially shorten them. I still want it to be a viable condition (which is why I didn't disable it). Could you make it so that six trees or more must be completed? Also, while we are on the subject of culture, as others have mentioned, some ploicies are just laughable compared to the benifits already received. Plus one food in capitol? Who needs it when I'm making 150+ a turn? I know that you said you plan to rework the system, so I'll just patiently wait until that time comes...

I agree. When I revamp social policies I will also balance the Utopia project to fit.

6) It is implied, by watching the city allowcation of workers, that the ai highly favor specialist. This is probably a large part of their delayed progression. As the tiles are so lucrative, each turn that they are not working them is a turn where the human gains (of course if they decide to speciallize a city to great people production than that is fine, but I highly doubt that that is what is happening).

Yeah this is my top balance priority at the moment. If I can find all the levers I need to pull...

Now that that's finished, let me say again that I really do enjoy this mod; it makes many improvements to the vanilla version but still retains the feel of a civ game. I particullary love the early game, as so much of it is tactics. As others have said here, the ai is tough. One wrong move early on and your city is lost. I just wish that the entire game would be like that... I think there was more that I wanted to say, but I have forgotten (knew I should have taken notes). If I remember, I'll be sure to let you know.

I agree, the game up to medieval is a good, tough fight. We will get there, just lots to do.

PS: Is there a way to make cities add speciallist if all workable tiles are full? I don't want to just run all speciallist since the yields are sooo good, but I hate having to cycle through my cities every turn to make my unemployed citizens useful. Doesn't really matter what specialist they run, so long as it is not a regular citizen.

I am hoping to find the Default city function and give it higher priority to the tiles. Hopefully enough that it fills all the workable tiles first, and then start shuffling citizens into the specialist slots.

 

[FredMB]

Ok so my current game is in progress. This time I went on Immortal difficulty and tiny map (manually reduced to 2 civs and 4 city states to have more room). I ended up with China against America.

So Washington totally dominated the beginning of the game, outscoring me 3 to 1 and grabbing all the wonders. Around 1000 AD he declared war on me. I turned it around and grabbed two of his cities before setting up camp in a nice mountain pass. He kept throwing units my way and they kept dying. At around 1300 AD his units started appearing out of nowhere near my cities, but always in tiles I didn't own yet, like some sort of teleportation. I went with it for a while and since I was out teched I wasn't able to keep advancing.

His units kept appearing out of nowhere. I had a hunch as to what was going on so I fired up the FireTuner and revealed the map. Sure enough. He had filled every single one of hit tiles with a unit. The new ones were being teleported to the nearest unoccupied tile.

I attached a screen shot. Is this what you had in mind in regards to combat for this mod? Later in the game when I get my tech advantage back I'll be able to steamroll all his units but for now all I can do is hold the mountain passes.

 

[Sneaks]

Oh.... My..... God...

 

[Decimatus]

Ok so my current game is in progress. This time I went on Immortal difficulty and tiny map (manually reduced to 2 civs and 4 city states to have more room). I ended up with China against America.

So Washington totally dominated the beginning of the game, outscoring me 3 to 1 and grabbing all the wonders. Around 1000 AD he declared war on me. I turned it around and grabbed two of his cities before setting up camp in a nice mountain pass. He kept throwing units my way and they kept dying. At around 1300 AD his units started appearing out of nowhere near my cities, but always in tiles I didn't own yet, like some sort of teleportation. I went with it for a while and since I was out teched I wasn't able to keep advancing.

His units kept appearing out of nowhere. I had a hunch as to what was going on so I fired up the FireTuner and revealed the map. Sure enough. He had filled every single one of hit tiles with a unit. The new ones were being teleported to the nearest unoccupied tile.

I attached a screen shot. Is this what you had in mind in regards to combat for this mod? Later in the game when I get my tech advantage back I'll be able to steamroll all his units but for now all I can do is hold the mountain passes.

Increasing unit maintenance is on the agenda. How much gold is America making a turn in that screenshot?

I don't know why, but seeing that screenshot reminded me of this joke:

 

[FredMB]

Increasing unit maintenance is on the agenda. How much gold is America making a turn in that screenshot?

Can't tell. Been at war for 700 years now. He won't make peace. He makes more units than I can kill for now. Hopefully this changes when I take a couple of his cities.