[RaRE] RaR Extended: a combined modmod for the RaR modification

[Nightinggale]

How do you think we should import our modmods. Every modmod in its entirety, or feature by feature?

I would greatly prefer the first option, as the second would, at least in my case, be very time-consuming.

While I prefer adding feature by feature, I can accept both options. I really prefer a nice log, but the question is how many hours of extra work it is worth? Also reimplementing your work isn't the most fun part of modding and forcing people to do tasks they really don't want to is wrong on so many levels. On the other hand we have to review each change anyway to see how they all work together.... it's tricky and there is no clear answer. I think the answer is: it depends on what feature combo you want to implement in one go.

Personally I will aim at implementing feature by feature, but then again I have my modmod in a git branch, which allows me to just cherry-pick each one.

Also, Schmiddie recently said that he expected to release RaR 2.2 within a week or three. If we do not plan to release RaRE before that, then it would not be a problem to just add all features of the current SVN to git, would it?

I set the goal for this weekend just before Schmiddie made that statement. I don't have a problem waiting and my work so far can be reused in the sense that the svn import is still linked to svn meaning I can just pull any svn updates. In fact the not cutting the link to svn is part of the idea of the svn import.

 

[Commander Bello]

I would propose adding feature per feature, too.

 

[vetiarvind]

Additional benefits could help, but I agree with Nightingale. The increase of the immigration threshold becomes way too big after the early game. If we find a way to balance that out, then perhaps we wouldn't need to give crosses extra effects.

How about we just cap the threshold at say 500 crosses? (for normal speed) It shouldn't be too low, since it will then be OP with upgraded religious building. It shouldn't be too high, otherwise farmers are a better way to get population inc.

 

[Nightinggale]

How about we just cap the threshold at say 500 crosses?

Sounds like the easy way out and not an ideal solution, but the artistic design of the code isn't what's important. If it works just fine from a game balance point of view, then I'm OK with it.

I'm not sure 500 is the right number though. It's easier to get farmers, both from schools and native training and with improved plots (cheap to improve) you can get quite a lot of food from each farmer. At the same time you only need 170 food if you have the right buildings. Sure immigrants can be experts, but they can also be servants. 500 crosses for a servant and 170 for a free colonist still sound somewhat unbalanced.

The question is what the number should be and how it should scale. I would propose using the default growth threshold with a multiplier. That would likely be the easiest way to get a balanced food/cross radio at all gamespeeds.

 

[Commander Bello]

How about we just cap the threshold at say 500 crosses? (for normal speed) It shouldn't be too low, since it will then be OP with upgraded religious building. It shouldn't be too high, otherwise farmers are a better way to get population inc.

In RaR, there already is a cap at 800 crosses - doesn't solve the problem at all.

Point is you need just 200 food for a new colonist, but between 10 and 800 crosses for a new immigrant. As Nightingale correctly pointed out, this immigrant can be anything between servant and expert.

Now, grassland gives you 3 food and additional 3 (+1 for the "large farm") if you've got a farm. The expert farmer gives you +3 (+1 on a respective bonus). So, in the best case the farmer will provide you with 11 food per turn gross, which results in +9 food net.
After 23 turns you'll get a new colonist anyway.

The priest will give you +6 crosses if working in a church, meaning you'll get a new immigrant each 2 (best case - early game) to 34 (worst case - late game) turns.

This leads to the following fact:
In the early game it is under all conditions the best solution to build a chapel and then a church first, as there isn't any other game concept providing you with new units in a quicker way.
Chapels and churches are not an option, they are just a must have.

But with each new immigrant, they are losing their importance more and more and as soon as the immigration threshold reaches the number of ~150 crosses, they don't make much sense anymore (except maybe for some Founding Fathers).

In total this means the "religion" component of the game is quite immature and imbalanced.

The most easy solution might be to have a fixed value of say 100 crosses needed (numbers are just examples) for new immigrants.
That way, the investment into chapels and churches will always pay off but will lose its overwhelming importance in the early turns - something which I would regard as being historically correct as the immigrations was low in the early centuries and increased over the course of time.

 

[vetiarvind]

Sounds like the easy way out and not an ideal solution, but the artistic design of the code isn't what's important. If it works just fine from a game balance point of view, then I'm OK with it.

The question is what the number should be and how it should scale. I would propose using the default growth threshold with a multiplier. That would likely be the easiest way to get a balanced food/cross radio at all gamespeeds.

Maybe I didn't get this but do you mean having a growth multiplier for food as well, so it's correlated to crosses? This needs a lot of testing and is a huge change. Also keep in mind you'd have to deal with storing huge quantities of food as the game goes on. I'm not opposed to the idea per se however.

But with each new immigrant, they are losing their importance more and more and as soon as the immigration threshold reaches the number of ~150 crosses, they don't make much sense anymore (except maybe for some Founding Fathers).

In total this means the "religion" component of the game is quite immature and imbalanced.

The most easy solution might be to have a fixed value of say 100 crosses needed (numbers are just examples) for new immigrants.
That way, the investment into chapels and churches will always pay off but will lose its overwhelming importance in the early turns - something which I would regard as being historically correct as the immigrations was low in the early centuries and increased over the course of time.

Fine analysis! However, fixing crosses initially at 100 is a gameplay breaker imho. There is simply nothing interesting to do in the initial 100 turns or so. Perhaps the max cap has just to be lowered as your analysis suggests, perhaps to a value of 250-300 or so. A devout priest in a cathedral produces 15 crosses per turn, (more than a farmer in any case) so this seems like a good number considering an expert farmer is capped at 11. Another option i was wondering weeks back was to give crosses some other bonus, say a production multiplier or a unit defense multiplier (say by having a running-window of crosses generated in the past x turns - that would give a 0-20% boost in defense..something of that sort )

 

[Nightinggale]

Maybe I didn't get this but do you mean having a growth multiplier for food as well, so it's correlated to crosses?

No. We get a new unit for 200 food on normal game speed and 300 on marathon (I think). I was thinking that the cross cap could be food requirements multiplied with a constant (whatever that constant should be). That way the cap is higher in marathon games than normal gamespeed. and presumably we don't have to work on balancing cross cap for game speed.

 

[agnat86]

Is it also possible to make new immigrants not use up all crosses you've collected once they appear on the docks? For example, what if every one of them requires only a specific amount of crosses (a percentage of the immigration threshold) to immigrate?

Those amounts should then be different per colonist, lower for servants and higher for statesmen.
For example, if, once the cap for the crosses is reached, it takes 250 Crosses for a Free Colonist to immigrate, it will not replace Food production as the best way to produce Free Colonists. But if it at the same time takes 400 Crosses to get an Elder Statesman, then that could be worth the effort.

Of course, this would mean that different colonists would reach their specific immigration thresholds at different times, which would result in the cheapest one of them automatically immigrating every time. So automatic immigration probably should not happen before every available colonist has reached its threshold. Before that point, the player can always hurry the cheaper ones for free.

Can such a system be easily implemented?

 

[Nightinggale]

I think it would be fairly easy to implement different cross cost for units. When you get a unit, your crosses will drop by either immigrant cost or unit cost and the price will be the lowest of those two. Immigrant cost would be the current system.

I think it only needs a minor change in a single location to get this working, but then you need to add the cost to unitinfo and edit all the XML files. Depending on code design rushing immigrants might also need some work.

I don't think it will be hard to implement something like this, but the XML modding and balancing might take a while to get right.

 

[Commander Bello]

Is it also possible to make new immigrants not use up all crosses you've collected once they appear on the docks? For example, what if every one of them requires only a specific amount of crosses (a percentage of the immigration threshold) to immigrate?

Those amounts should then be different per colonist, lower for servants and higher for statesmen.
For example, if, once the cap for the crosses is reached, it takes 250 Crosses for a Free Colonist to immigrate, it will not replace Food production as the best way to produce Free Colonists. But if it at the same time takes 400 Crosses to get an Elder Statesman, then that could be worth the effort.

Of course, this would mean that different colonists would reach their specific immigration thresholds at different times, which would result in the cheapest one of them automatically immigrating every time. So automatic immigration probably should not happen before every available colonist has reached its threshold. Before that point, the player can always hurry the cheaper ones for free.

Can such a system be easily implemented?

I see quite some problems with this proposal.

First, it doesn't adress the problem of early immigration at all.
Second, the function pickBestImmigrant() (or how it ever may be called) picks new immigrants randomly. As this may cause all kind of possible combinations of units waiting at the docks, you need a requester to chose whether you accept the new immigrant or not, you need a reminder that there may be some units waiting at the docks and so on (think of continuing a saved game). Furthermore you need the logic to decide which of the waiting units can be hurried for which costs (another requester) and most probably even more things of which I am currently even not thinking.
Third, this would again be a concept solely for the human player.

The problem is not how to get units if a cap is reached. The problem is that the threshold is starting low and then increasing.
Play with Penn and the English, have some of the unique goodies introduced in RaR 2.0 and within the first 50 turns you can easily have up to 12 or 15 immigrants waiting at the docks - something which you will never reach again within the game.

The current concept of immigration is broken and unfortunately, RaR has even made it worse by introducing the early chapels.

On the other hand, if immigration would require a fixed amount of crosses, it is completely up to you when to invest into churches (and all other kind of "religious" buildings).
Furthermore, I still think that adding other effects to crosses would make them more meaningful (like adding some points to education and maybe upgrading of units - after all, churches were the place in which education took place before the concept of civil education was introduced).

 

[agnat86]

I was wondering if Nightingale had already succeeded in setting up git for our project.

I saw that Schmiddie released RaR2.2, so that means we won't have to worry anymore about including unreleased stuff from the core mod.

I have been occupied the last few weeks, but I did make some minor improvements:

Spoiler :

- When moving a military unit on a plot occupied by a unit of another civ, you won't get the "do you want to declare war" popup anymore. That has always been annoying me greatly. Of course, the popup still appears when attempting to move into another player's territory.

- When a native brave survives a raid, he will now return to a nearby village. This prevents severely damaged braves from making pointless attacks the turn after their previous attack. It also means that braves cannot simply occupy an undefended city and raid it every turn.

- I wanted natives to be a little more expansive. To do this, I have made slight modifications to the AI to make them found settlements when they lose settlements by giving them up to colonial powers, and also when their population grows beyond a certain point.

 

[Nightinggale]

I was wondering if Nightingale had already succeeded in setting up git for our project.

I imported svn into git, screwed up file permissions and started over. Now I managed to make a new import. Next step is to clean it up a bit and place it on sourceforge.

 

[vetiarvind]

I have been occupied the last few weeks, but I did make some minor improvements:

Spoiler :

- When moving a military unit on a plot occupied by a unit of another civ, you won't get the "do you want to declare war" popup anymore. That has always been annoying me greatly. Of course, the popup still appears when attempting to move into another player's territory.

- When a native brave survives a raid, he will now return to a nearby village. This prevents severely damaged braves from making pointless attacks the turn after their previous attack. It also means that braves cannot simply occupy an undefended city and raid it every turn.

- I wanted natives to be a little more expansive. To do this, I have made slight modifications to the AI to make them found settlements when they lose settlements by giving them up to colonial powers, and also when their population grows beyond a certain point.

Nice! That popup was annoying

 

[vetiarvind]

I imported svn into git, screwed up file permissions and started over. Now I managed to make a new import. Next step is to clean it up a bit and place it on sourceforge.

Please let us know the credentials once it is online. I am sure mod-modders would be eager to get cranking

 

[ZorkZ]

Let me share some of my ideas:

Idea: river boats
Great rivers like Amazonas and Mississippi had major importance in exploration and colonial transportation, but now in the game the rivers have only industrial effect (increasing production).
We have three kind of water tiles now: ocean cost and lake. Adding two other water tiles could increase the fun: deep river and shallow river.
Adding river boats (some from civ4 BTS ROM) would be also necessary. For example:
1. Canoe: exploration, can access coast, cargo space 0, move 3, strength 1;
2. Raft: early transport, can access coast, transport troops only, cargo space 2, move 2, strength 1;
3. Raft ferry: transport wagon train, cargo space 3, move 1, strength 1;
4. Keelboat: explore, cargo space 1, move 4, strength 3; http://steamboattimes.com/keelboats.html
5. Bassist boat (barge): river transport, cargo space 3, move 3, strength 2; http://www.shipmodell.com/index_file...LL_BURCHIO.htm
6. Paddle steamer: multipurpose, cargo space 3, move 3, strength 3;
7. Steam ferry: transport train and wagon train, cargo space 3, move 1, strength 1 http://www.uvm.edu/landscape/dating/boats/ferries.php
Additional rules: All river boats could access shallow and deep river, fishing boats could access shallow river, other existing ships could access only deep river, but galleons and man-o-wars could not access even deep river. River boats should not survive storms on coast tiles. Specific Indian tribes should have raft and/or canoes. Inuit special unit: kayak.

Idea: work camp
Sometimes I would like to exploit a material in the middle of nowhere and I do not need a hole city, but I have only slaves. In this time the work camp could help very well.
Work camp is a “city” that can use only the tile where you build it. You cannot build buildings in work camps. Only Prisoner Indian and African slaves could build work camp.

Idea: mule transport
We need an effective way of transport if we have work camps in the middle of nowhere, or if we want to trade with natives or want to transport something.
Mule: can transport treasure, troops and cargo, ignore terrain movement cost, can access mountains, transport cargo space 1, move 2, strength 1.

I hope you find it interesting.

 

[Kailric]

Idea: work camp
Sometimes I would like to exploit a material in the middle of nowhere and I do not need a hole city, but I have only slaves. In this time the work camp could help very well.
Work camp is a “city” that can use only the tile where you build it. You cannot build buildings in work camps. Only Prisoner Indian and African slaves could build work camp.
I hope you find it interesting.

I have often complicated the idea of "work camps". The issue that arises is that unlike Civ4 settlements are relatively free to establish. In Civ4 you had to build the settler unit and it cost two population so you didn't want to waist it on a work camp. In Col you just send a guy over and found an entire settlement, that has multiple buildings and holds tons of goods right from the start.

So, my latest ideas on this are(this is something I'd like to do for M:C as well); instead of Colonists founding a whole settlement they are limited to only found work camps, then you have to develop your work camps into settlements if that is what you want to do. Work Camps would have a different looking screen, the city plot radius will be shown but there will be a limited amount of buildings and Resource storage.

Perhaps you only start with two buildings. A Work Bench for constructing new Buildings and an initial free industry, depending on surrounding resources, like if Sugar Cane is dominate there will be a Rum Trading Post. The Resource bar will be limited to only a low percent of max resources, say only 6 available slots to store goods, with Food and the Initial industry being the first two shown. Then as you dump goods more will appear.

In order to build up to a Settlement you must construct the necessary buildings. Some buildings could require a Population Requirement. Anyway, you could require a Work Shop in order to build a Storehouse, which then allows you to build a Town Hall. Once the town hall is built the Work Camp will upgrade to a Settlement. Work Camps also do not require a unit present so you can leave the work camp completely unmanned. Work Camps are also destroyed when captured. Likes Settlements they will Provide a base for military units to heal and also any units attacked will auto equip any weapons available in storage to defend themselves. Ships can enter (dock) at a Work Camp if you build a Dock.

There is some initial ideas on this. This would greatly add to the Players feel of their Empire expanding as well as solve the dilemma of having resources out of reach of your Settlement.

 

[ZorkZ]

Your work camp concept is more sophisticated. I think it would be great. Last time I was playing I had the same filing: it is too easy to build a new city. In reality the first settlers suffered a lot, and colonization’s are usually turned into chaos. (They consumed more food than they produced.)

Following your concept in Medieval Conquest it would be great to add Fort Camp and Monastery Camp too.

I would also add a new specialist: Graduated Engineer. And I would add a new unit Field Engineer. The Field Engineer would need a Graduated Engineer and twice as much tool as pioneers need. (We could not make Field Engineer with other colonists.) Only Field Engineer could build Fort Camp, plastered country road. If we add shallow river tile, the Field Engineer could access it and build bridge on it. Building a Fort Camp should consume the tools of the Field Engineer. Finely Field Engineer could decrees enemy city defense (5% per round). I suggest Graduated Engineer should cost as much as statement cost and they could produce hammers, tools and weapons with double efficiency.

I suggest the Fort Camp should focus on iron, tools and weapon production with an addition of medical facilities (for example military units could heal faster). Fort Camp should start with blacksmith shop and weapon smith shop, and base tile should produce 3 blades.

To build a Monastery Camp we should need a skilled missionary (maybe equipped with tools). The Monastery Camp should have a special building: Monastery school where you can convert natives into free colonist in a short period of time etc.

I have tried the river concept idea with a gigantic map. I have added many great rivers (I used cost tiles), and it was fine to play with it. I could trade with the natives in the middle of the continent from the very beginning of the game. I could build cities in the middle of the continent to mine gold, silver, games etc. It takes a lot of time transporting the resources but its worth. It was very easy to support those inland cities with food. The only problem was to cross the river with scouts, treasures and military units. The natives have also problems when they wanted to protect themselves. They could not transport troops throw the river. Seasoned Scout would need the ability of building rafts. Natives are needs the raft unit too. Other additions I had written before are not so important to enjoy the benefit of great rivers.

 

[Schmiddie]

ZorkZ, have you built the rivers manually or have you programmed it also for random maps?

Could you show some screenshots?

 

[Dunpeal]

Thank you Bello for this! Unfortunately I know nothing of coding and programming but I kick ass bug busting and paying attention to detail! If I can help, let me know

I also agree on a feature by feature "upgrade". However, I respectfully disagree with Bello re: crosses. Towards the end of the game you are meant to have a solid position and not rely so much on immigration - focus ought to be learning! If you're in a sticky position then buy. But you can't really compare 200 food with x crosses because 200 food gives you a colonist whereas crosses may give you master-level colonists which are worth a lot of money and time (via study). If you want a cross-based strategy then focus on religion FF. Just my two cents

Nice! That popup was annoying

Great Agnata!!!

 

[ZorkZ]

I uploaded some pictures, about the map with great rivers. ( I have made it in word builder manually)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/zorkz/15619521527/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/zorkz/15619521327/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/zorkz/15619521127/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/zorkz/15619521527/