Questions, ideas, etc.

This is a cross post, of a post I made on the We The People github which can be found here: https://github.com/We-the-People-civ4col-mod/Mod/issues/283

Economy / Balance

At the moment large buildings require more resources, however it’s only the resources from vanilla (Silver, tools and stone). It would be good to see other resources required, seeing as the mod has such diversity of resources which are underutilized, for example it would be good to see Cathedrals and grand state buildings that require rare wood / furniture / leather / gold / gems. Bastions would require cannons. Almost all industry required horses in some role, until the 20th century, hence why we still use “horsepower”. Train oil was also exceptionally valuable in early industry. It would be good to see this represented in game.

I also think the larger military buildings (Arsenal, Great tool factory, Bastion) should increase REF size as they are obvious threats to the King’s power and assets to the player.

Would you consider rebalancing prices? It’s just very easy as soon as you are established, to make more money than you can spend, because there are so many valuable yields.

I think Industrial goods (tools etc) should always be more expensive in Africa, unless there is a specific event

Make coastal boats require tools, just as fishing boats do. I think this will also stop the AI spamming them so much.

Carriages should require the Wheelwrights Workshop and require horses etc just as with normal wagons

As per this thread https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/suggestion-ability-to-get-professional-missionaries.649738/ I agree with the OP, that we should be able to request missionaries from the church. It would also be interesting to see immigration shaped by the civilisation and leaders’ traits i.e more aggressive Civs and leaders have a greater likelihood to see Soldiers, agricultural leaders get Farmers and Fishermen etc

Is it possible to have Shipwrecks spawn randomly and drift, rather than have them pre-spawned at the beginning of the game, it’s strange to arrive at the continent full of more European wrecks, than there are ships constructed in the average game. Also, the real benefit is the initial boost to your early ships, which counter intuitively end up faster than your later ships.

Diplomacy / Management

Whilst the mod has some of the notions towards the health and happiness mechanics of Civ 4, it would benefit to be fleshed out, adding another dynamic to the game other than just trying to produce as much as possible, as quickly as possible. For example, colonists could request that you build educational, religious and entertainment buildings and supply certain goods (Tobacco and Alcohol for example). These would rise in complexity and price as the game goes on and happiness would be also shaped by Native Raids, lengthy wars, Pirates etc. At the very least a notification, when your city becomes unhealthy would be nice

As per this thread https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/native-ai.645834/page-2#post-15457248 I think it would be better that European culture does not automatically “dominate” the natives. The natives have the possibility to construct culture producing buildings, and during the Constitution the player is asked if they want the possibility to override or respect native boundaries. This suggests that it was not intended to be this way in the game, but it was just poorly implemented, as with so many other features in vanilla. Instead whilst I think the European culture should be more powerful (and with greater potential due to the range of buildings) it should compete with Natives as it does with other powers in the game.

I think John Jay and other Founding Fathers should give you a choice about peace rather than automatically establishing peace, as often it is not in your interest to do so.

Unlike in the Civilisation games where understandably all Civilisations start with a neutral opinion of each other, it would be good to see the other players holding a range of opinions on each other, from friendly to hostile. For example, in reality much of colonisation was driven by competition between the powers, however as of now this is not represented, if you are the British and start next to the French and Spanish it’s of no real consequence. Also, all of the large Native states (Aztec triple alliance, Incan Empire, Iroquois) fell because the Europeans were able to utilise the grievances, of all the peoples they had previously attacked or conquered. However, in the game the natives start with a neutral opinion and this tension does not exist. Obviously, the Aztec do not need to feel threatened by the Inuit, but it would be good to see them have an opinion of their neighbours.

 

I definitely agree here.

I really like this. I'd love to see a chronically unhappy colony secede, or rebel. It happened plenty both before and after the revolution. Or see colonists flee from unhealthy or unhappy colonies.

 

This might be the wrong place to ask, but can anyone tell me which file I should delete to make Quemuenchatocha music to disappear?Every time it explodes like a jump scare.

 

It was Muisca .mp3. Copied another nations music and renamed as Muisca.mp3(I thought an error might occur if I delete it.)

 

Small question on CIV4ImprovementInfos.xml and its entry "IMPROVEMENT_PASTURE"

If I delete

Code:

           <YieldIncreases>
               <YieldIntegerPair>
                   <YieldType>YIELD_FOOD</YieldType>
                   <iValue>1</iValue>
               </YieldIntegerPair>
           </YieldIncreases>

and

           <TerrainMakesValids>
               <TerrainMakesValid>
                   <TerrainType>TERRAIN_GRASS</TerrainType>
                   <bMakesValid>1</bMakesValid>
               </TerrainMakesValid>
               <TerrainMakesValid>
                   <TerrainType>TERRAIN_SAVANNAH</TerrainType>
                   <bMakesValid>1</bMakesValid>
               </TerrainMakesValid>
               <TerrainMakesValid>
                   <TerrainType>TERRAIN_PLAINS</TerrainType>
                   <bMakesValid>1</bMakesValid>
               </TerrainMakesValid>
           </TerrainMakesValids>

but still maintain

Code:

                <BonusTypeStruct>
                    <BonusType>BONUS_HORSES</BonusType>
                    <bBonusMakesValid>1</bBonusMakesValid>
                    <iDiscoverRand>0</iDiscoverRand>
                    <YieldChanges>
                        <YieldIntegerPair>
                            <YieldType>YIELD_HORSES</YieldType>
                            <iValue>1</iValue>
                        </YieldIntegerPair>
                    </YieldChanges>
                </BonusTypeStruct>
                <BonusTypeStruct>
                    <BonusType>BONUS_SHEEP</BonusType>
                    <bBonusMakesValid>1</bBonusMakesValid>
                    <iDiscoverRand>0</iDiscoverRand>
                    <YieldChanges>
                        <YieldIntegerPair>
                            <YieldType>YIELD_SHEEP</YieldType>
                            <iValue>1</iValue>
                        </YieldIntegerPair>
                    </YieldChanges>
                </BonusTypeStruct>
            </BonusTypeStructs>

will pastures only be able to be build on a bonus resource?

Regards
XSamatan

 

That would seem easy to test.

 

When King asks you to declare war on another colony, you can request troops. Is there any downside to do that?

Also, is there a benefit for buying the goods natives offer? They are not cheap.

Finally, when you upgrade country roads to plastered country roads, it costs same amount of time and money as upgrading from basic roads to plastered. I think either country roads should be removed from game or they should be a mid-step between basic and plastered roads.

 

I think it increases the counter towards the next tax increase, but I would have to dig into the code to be certain. It is however an interesting question precisely what happens and how to tweak it for balance purposes.

Trading with natives gives a positive relationship, which makes them less likely to make a surprise attack. However this too might be something to look into for balance purposes.

In RAR, apparently the AI was taught to use country roads because plastered are too expensive compared to the benefits (their statement). In WTP nothing happened due to people being busy with other parts. We got 3 types of roads and we should make use of them, but the question is how to do it in a balanced way. Also I wouldn't want to make it annoying like having to upgrade a zillion times.

Ideas here are welcome. Ideally it should be some sort of tech tree, but we don't have that (we could make it if we want to). We could however make the era unlock plastered roads, but I fear that would be confusing, particularly because changes in era isn't that obvious other than when declaring independence.

 

From my experience, not trading with natives results in a relations penalty, which seems strange. I suppose the justification is that they want to sell goods and they expect you to be the convenient market for those goods.

I jumped into this mod very recently, and when I first read the Colopedia entry for expert prospectors, which says "+1 silver on land tiles", I misunderstood that to mean they can be assigned onto any peak and be able to produce 1 silver, deposit or not. Likewise with the expert pearl diver. I was wrong, but would this be an appealing solution? Is it possible to implement? (Although, at the end of the day, I don't really miss silver in peaks too much. You don't need to have a colonist working there if you don't need ore/stone, and they're nice to have around when you need stone.)

 

Yeah, I miss the silver in all peaks myself.

 

The code right now allows improvements to boost production of yields already produced on the plot in question. Adding something, which isn't produced would require new C++ code. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's not as trivial as it sounds. One issue is that the code shouldn't be slow as that would slow down the AI. Another issue is that it shouldn't be buggy. What if the mine adds +1 silver and you add a mine to a plot where it shouldn't add silver? Something like that happened to RaR at some point where rivers added +1 to production of various yields meaning suddenly plots became able to produce 1/turn of something, which should be impossible to produce on the plot in question.

Adding the ability to allow improvements to add a new yield to a plot would likely require a review of the entire implementation on how improvements apply production bonuses in general. If we rewrite the system to be focused on a cache or something like that, then speed would increase and it would make more complex checks like this have much less of an impact. It is however not a 5 minute job to implement.

Having said all that, the concept of 1 silver on peaks if there is a mine sounds good to me. It just have to be implemented properly, generic (like reusable for other terrains/yields/improvements) and without bugs or other sideeffects.

 

I guess I should comment on this since I was the one who petitioned @Schmiddie (the lead modder of RaR 2.6) to remove silver from all peaks (RaR 2.7). In my opinion the *optimal* gameplay back then was (besides the obvious "scout rush") to get as many slaves in Africa as possible and then set them to mine silver wherever they could. In my opinion this was just too cheesy and one-dimensional At least now you have to produce a multitude of yields and seeks out the few peeks that do have precious metals!

Keep in mind that some plot yields are already a bit to too good if you consider the opportunity cost of producing "refined" good like cigars, rum etc.

What would you rather do, have a slave produce silver from a mined peak (about 20*4=80 gold per turn) or have one expert sugar planter produce 12 (4 gold) sugar and then have a distiller produce 6 (10 gold) rum.
The export value would be: 6*4 + 6*10 = 84 but then you'd have to deduct the cost of the extra food (2*5) consumed by the distiller compared to just having the silver miner and the cost of having to build a distillery which would yield a profit of 74. You'd also have to use two cargo slot to get the goods to Europe (excess sugar plus the rum) which is additional transportation costs. Slavers are also cheaper than colonists and easier to get compared to experts (which would have to be either educated, trained by natives or you'd have to depend on "immigration luck")

 

I don't think it was too cheesy at all. You still need food to work those mines and considering the usual terrain in mountain areas required farmers or fisherman.
And when flooding the market with silver the price dropped pretty quickly so you are still encouraged to diversify.

 

I think the entire export economy needs to be rebalanced. The difference between a good and a bad start is too great. This is particularly true if you try to start a few times in coop multiplayer. You can see it's not uncommon that one player gets lot of food and say cotton while the other player struggle with both cash crops and food. I'm excluding the time when my starting colony had both silver and gold because it was likely a once in a lifetime event but it wouldn't be wrong to call that game severely unbalanced.

On top of that I find slaves to be unbalanced and unintuitive as well. Why do they get +1 production compared to free people? You can get say 5 slaves for the price of one free colonist. The free colonist produce one silver while the slaves produce 10. Sure the slaves can run away, but you can catch them and if you don't, you can buy a new slave almost each turn from the profits. It would be better to say they don't get a production bonus as that will make the price more balanced.

Another issue is the units, which run away. The implementation is horrible because you can't really do anything to prevent it and when it happens, the unit will appear on the nearest unclaimed plot, even if that's not on the same island. If the whole continent is claimed, then they can appear on a far away location. I once had a bug report where a whole lot of slaves ended up on a 4 plot island.

We should consider something for countering fleeing units. Maybe a guard profession, which produces guard points and each freeable unit will consume a unit each turn. Say a colony has 3 slaves and 2 guard points, only one of the slaves can flee. Another approach would be to introduce civ style civics. We can make slaves get a (possibly negative) production bonus in exchange for a changed risk of fleeing. The civic approach can be integrated into CivEffects as generic coding, which automatically unlocks other features in the xml setup, like making a leader/trait affect the risk of fleeing units.

 

I'll admit that I don't use slaves because I consider them a tad cheesy.
In one game I left one open space in my territory for them to escape to and just rotated a few units there to experience point harvest and had roads there to facilitate a quick return to the mines.
I agree that there is no rational reason for them to be +1 anything. If anything they should be like .75. Slaves only worked as hard as it took so they wouldn't get beaten.

I think silver in all mountains helped balance some of those starts.
Silver and Gold on the opening. Yeah, don't see that much.

 

I've thought about this too. Dragoons or scouts with Exploration I become nearly necessary, although I've noticed that stationing a few units in the frontier a couple tiles outside of your borders really helps. Sometimes, though, I get a message alerting of a fled pop, but in the same turn I can't find the unit anywhere on the map. One idea I had would be to (if possible) reduce the chance of escape the greater the distance from your borders. Water tiles can count for double or quadruple (they need to find a boat to smuggle them).

That would be really cool, and opens the door to other civics too.

This is true, but I think it's part of the colonization experience. Sometimes challenge maps are fun (for example, a hilly savanna start forces me to start with cocoa leaves, then transition to sheep pastures for more food), but also you have a lot of freedom to explore before settling. After all, historically there was a long period of exploring and trading before permanent settlements were established. Maybe some rule changes making early exploration less penalizing would help. Or you can always set up a one- or two-population settlement at the start but choose a better spot to invest in later. Pops are mobile in this game.

 

I don't think silver should be added back to peaks, its already very easy to become wealthy, easily in this mod. I think its for the best to keep peaks as they are, unproductive barriers.

I agree that the economy needs to be rebalanced.

I have made a post on the mods github regarding slaves and their role in the mod : https://github.com/We-the-People-civ4col-mod/Mod/issues/335