Real Epic (Longer research times without longer production times, etc)

[Shadowlord]

[Note: This mod should work fine in either vanilla Civ IV or Warlords. However, if you use this mod in vanilla, the Research, Wealth, and Commerce processes will have 100% efficiency (like in warlords). Vanilla had them at 50% instead.]

Quick summary:
The goal of this mod is to:

• Allow wars to take place in each era
• Make technologies have a far greater impact on wars and development, as per real history
• Eliminate or reduce the likelihood of having your military units go obsolete almost immediately after they become available.
• This is mainly intended for singleplayer, although it could probably be used for multiplayer as a means to play mainly in one era.

This is intended for Quick or Normal game speeds (mainly because the current year won't be anywhere near accurate with Marathon or Epic).

These things are accomplished by multiplying research costs (for ALL difficulty levels and speeds) by 10x, extending time, and multiplying city culture requirements by 3 (to prevent cultural victory consistantly ending the game in the medieval or renaissance era). Note that 10x research costs does not necessarily come out to 10x slower research, due to a number of factors.

Download (link goes to the CFC File Database page for this mod)

Suggestions and comments are welcome.

Current version: 1.0.1, released September 8, 2006.
(0.3 was released on August 6, 2006 and 0.4 was released on August 10, 2006)

I've made a second post containing more information from the readme, since it is a little long and I wouldn't want to overflow the post length limits in this post later on.

 

[Shadowlord]

More detail from the readme, for people who want to know more without having to download and extract it first:

List of features

• 10x higher research costs for all techs
• 3x higher city culture thresholds.
• Many more turns in the game. (Years/turn may not be quite accurate yet, although it's probably most accurate in normal speed, and least accurate in epic and marathon)
• Inflation is slower, but perhaps too slow.
• I've added an "Idle" process which turns production into +10% commerce, +10% science, and +10% culture. This is, of course, not very efficient, but it is mainly intended to be a way to avoid having to constantly make and disband units because you have no other build options. This process is available from the start of the game. It uses the 'coins' icon that commerce uses, for now (I don't know how to make new icons or I would think about combining the three existing process icons, or making a 'zzz' icon).
• AIs prioritize researching mining, the wheel, and pottery now, in that order. Also, if they lack fishing and agriculture and the wheel, they'll research agriculture before the wheel (since either fishing or agriculture is needed for pottery). This should help reduce the number of civs which get stuck in the ancient era. These technologies are recommended to the player as well, if researchable.
  

About game speeds

• Normal speed is the intended playing speed, although you can use the other speeds if you like. Only normal and quick have year/turn set up decently - Epic and Marathon both have 6050 turns and 1 year/turn, which will make your year very bizarre.
• For the normal game speed, there are 1350 turns. The first 900 turns will take you to 1600 AD, and then there are 450 1 year/turn turns after that. More specifically, the first 100 turns will take you to 2800 BC (12 years/turn), the next 120 turns will take you to 1600 BC (10 years/turn), the next 140 turns will take you to 400 BC (8 years/turn), the next 160 turns will take you to 480 AD (6 years/turn), the next 180 turns will take you to 1200 AD (4 years/turn), the next 200 turns will take you to 1600 AD (2 years/turn), and then it's 1 year/turn from then on.
• Quick game speed is 903 turns, with the year/turn rates based on the ones for Normal but sized to 2/3.
• All game speeds above normal are 6050 turns at 1 year/turn, which will probably result in crazy incorrect year numbers for the tech level.

Known Bugs and things which I am considering changing/fixing

• Inflation is a little slow.

Advice

1. You have to be careful before you get pottery - it is easy to end up with a weak economy, leading to a slow tech rate, and if you build too many troops or go to war, your income will tank. If you are planning a war before pottery, I'd advise building up a stockpile of 500+ gold before starting the war. In the meantime, coastal cities are useful for producing a bit more gold, even if you can't grow the population much. It IS possible to capture enemy cities with just warriors, but not necessarily easy. Your economy and research rate will suffer badly while you're at war, but you may be able to recover due to gaining new land from the war, if you disband parts of your army until you get unit upkeep sufficiently low again.
2. Religions are very useful early on, as they will grant you +1 happiness per city, letting you get another population in each city. Monasteries help improve your culture and science rates, and temples also allow another population per city.
3. Great prophets are one way to pull out of a crashed economy, since they can discover religions for you, or act as a gold-producing specialist, or found holy buildings which give you +1 gold per city with that religion.
4. Stonehenge is more useful than normal, as it will help you pump out several Great Prophets. The Oracle is also VERY useful due to the large research costs.

To install
There are multiple ways, and each has advantages and disadvantages:

1. Unzip this into the Mods folder, so that there is a Mods\Real Epic\ folder. This won't break existing saved games, but you won't be able to use this with them either. You'll also have to load the mod every time you play, and you can only have one mod loaded at a time...
2. Or, to have this mod always active, unzip this somewhere and then copy the files from the "Real Epic" folder into CustomAssets. If any of the files already exist (from another mod, probably), then you'll have to merge them together (I suggest using WinMerge). This approach may cause weirdness if other mods which modify any of these files are loaded normally.
3. Or, to merge this with another mod, unzip this somewhere, move the files from this mod which aren't in the other mod (move them into the other mod's folder), and then merge the remaining files' contents into the files in the other mod's folder (Using WinMerge).

 

[Prestidigitator]

Looks interesting Shadowlord , I'll wait for the Warlords version when you release it .

 

[Thanatosimii]

Oh I wish this was ready for warloards. this is exactly the solution to my biggest complaint with all civ games since the beginning.

 

[alms66]

I've added an "Idle" process which turns production into +10% commerce, +10% science, and +10% culture. This is, of course, not very efficient, but it is mainly intended to be a way to avoid having to constantly make and disband units because you have no other build options. This process is available from the start of the game. It uses the 'coins' icon that commerce uses, for now (I don't know how to make new icons or I would think about combining the three existing process icons, or making a 'zzz' icon).

You, sir, are awesome!
For this reason alone, you should be nominated the greatest modder ever...

Seriously, I got so sick of doing that build-disband-build routine that I was strongly considering going to Quick speed , wouldn't that have been horrible?! You should post just this part of the mod as a seperate mod component also, for those who play vanilla epic & marathon games... hell, it even comes in quite handy on normal games.

_Edit_
I just played several dozen turns of this in warlords... it seems to work fine.

 

[Dearmad]

6000 turns!? LOL. Wow... people have a lot more free time than me... amazing.

Hope people enjoy it, though.

 

[alms66]

6000 turns!? LOL. Wow... people have a lot more free time than me... amazing.

Hope people enjoy it, though.

Yea, I agree 6000 is too much, but at normal speed he's saying it's 1350 turns, if I understand correctly. Then quick is 3200 turns and others are 6050 turns, which makes no sense to me. If you intended normal to be the way to play, why not remove the others, or at least leave them at their normal percentages so that they work the same way as they do in vanilla - then there's no need for explanations.

Personally, I've always thought that CtP's 600 turns was a good pace (ie, normal), epic should increase that to 900, quick should halve it to 300, and marathon would be for psycho's at 1200 turns. Any more than 1000 though and IMO, Civ's map scale just can't handle that many turns. You get weird effects like having explored the whole continent by 2000 BC and stuff like that. So you'd have to increase the map sizes or you need to have a tile that takes three movement points actually take three turns to cross. In other words, we're talking substantial gameplay changes at those turn scales.

 

[Shadowlord]

Yea, I agree 6000 is too much, but at normal speed he's saying it's 1350 turns, if I understand correctly. Then quick is 3200 turns and others are 6050 turns, which makes no sense to me. If you intended normal to be the way to play, why not remove the others, or at least leave them at their normal percentages so that they work the same way as they do in vanilla - then there's no need for explanations.

Normal has several thousand more turns after 2050 AD, although I don't know if that will work, because I haven't reached the end of a game yet to see when it ends. (The main reason it has more is that I don't know if civs will hit the last tech by then, or not)

Quick is 3200 turns because I haven't even tried to balance the years/turn on quick yet.

Normal was originally 6050 turns as well, but after my first test game with 1 year/turn on normal, I changed the year/turn rates to make the turn when I got gunpowder end up in the 1400s-1600s or somewhere around there. (I don't know exactly when I discovered it, but it was before 800 turns) In order to make that happen around those years, I had to reduce the number of turns (or make it go beyond 2050 AD, if that works).

Quick simply has more turns because I haven't tried it to see what I would need to change the year/turn stuff to yet.

Personally, I've always thought that CtP's 600 turns was a good pace (ie, normal), epic should increase that to 900, quick should halve it to 300, and marathon would be for psycho's at 1200 turns. Any more than 1000 though and IMO, Civ's map scale just can't handle that many turns. You get weird effects like having explored the whole continent by 2000 BC and stuff like that. So you'd have to increase the map sizes or you need to have a tile that takes three movement points actually take three turns to cross. In other words, we're talking substantial gameplay changes at those turn scales.

In my opinion, disabling or reverting to standard the speeds on quick, epic, and marathon would be silly - If someone likes the faster production times on quick, but wants slower tech research still, why force them to use the normal speed instead? (As I said, the only reason the year/turn isn't balanced for quick is because I haven't tried it yet and thus have no idea what to set it to)

As for epic and marathon, there's no way to fit 6050 turns in 6050 years without making it 1 year/turn.

As for "civ's map scale can't handle that many turns," I had the continent explored fairly early in regular games anyhow. You're still not going to be able to find other continents (if they aren't connected by coast or borders) until you find a way to cross ocean tiles.

 

[alms66]

Well, that makes sense now... you simply haven't gotten to it yet.

I didn't mean use the same numbers, use the same percentages, so that if in Vanilla, normal is 100% research rate and quick is 50%, then in your normal with a 200% research rate, set quick to 100%... Do the same process for each adjustable parameter... does that make sense?

Regarding 6050 turns, that's not something I'd like to sit through because of the map/turn scale issue I pointed out. If someone would address that, I'd be all for 1 year per turn games.

Sure, we alll have the continent explored fairly early in most games, but that's something I'd like to see stopped. It's just that I like at least a nod to realism in my games and that speed of exploration is like giving the finger to realism.

 

[Shadowlord]

I've compared (between Warlords and Vanilla) the files that this mod modifies, and it appears that this should indeed work fine with Warlords. The only notable difference is that for some reason Firaxis increased the efficiency of the wealth, research, and commerce processes from 50% to 100% in Warlords, and since Real Epic modifies that file (to add the Idle process), those three processes are all 50% again if you use this mod with Warlords.

The only other difference is that iHurryPercent for the Epic game speed in Warlords is 66, whereas it is 67 in vanilla (And that will be 67 again if you use this mod in Warlords). I don't know why they changed that, and it probably wouldn't affect much. Plus, you'd have to play the Epic speed with this mod, which might be a little crazy.

(I've updated the first post to note that this'll work with Warlords)

 

[Shadowlord]

New version (0.4) released - the link in the first post will take you to the download page.

Changes from 0.3:

• Fixed a bug which was causing the Normal speed games to end at 1600 AD. (Your current games will be fixed if you load them after updating the mod)
• Set speeds for quick, although I haven't tried them.
• Normal has 1350 turns and quick has 903 now. In vanilla Civ IV, normal has 460 and quick 320 turns. (That's almost but not quite 3x as many turns)
• I was unable to set the game to last beyond 2050 AD, as Civ IV considers that invalid (which is why it was ending Normal speed games at 1600 AD). If this isn't enough to reach end-game techs by 2050, I may need to make it hit 1 year/turn sooner, so that I can add more turns.

 

[darkedone02]

HEY! YOU STOLED MY SECONDARY NAME!

anyways... I go check this out

 

[Shadowlord]

Hmm, looks like the turn-ending-at-1600 bug didn't get fixed. (The turns left counter vanished when I reloaded, so I thought it was fixed, so I uploaded it - but it came back the next turn >_<)

Edit: Or the saved game file contains a turns left counter itself as well.

 

[vodkamattvt]

I like this mod, it has always bothered me that I could never use many of the units because they are obsolete completely before I could build even 1, let alone an army. The default longer games simply make everything longer (longer tech, longer production, etc), which didnt really make the game longer, it just made it more boring.

Anyway, there are a few issues.

1. Early techs - As you noted, some of the AI simply refuses to discover techs that are necessary for their economy to progress early. Because techs in the mod take so long to discover early, not choosing economy techs can basically lose it for the AI. My solution was to gift every empire the basic techs (namely the ones to build mines, farms, roads and fishing boats. This way their economies can heat up faster. Instead of 3 AI out of say 11 "getting past the breaking point", I had around 6.

2. However, a bunch still were caught in situations where their research path did not match with their locations they were settled on. Lack of iron working for jungle was the biggest killer for a lot of them.

My solution was to just gift techs that the AI needed to grow to them lol, it made the game more competitive. But it also screwed up the correct times for the years and appropriate technology.

Anyway, thanks for the mod!

 

[Zacar]

This mod sounds excellent. If I will ever mod, I'll use this (or similiar) as base.

Epic speed sounds good, for me the fun in civilization games is not finishing the game but playing it. Would it be easy to make a game speed with no ending turn?

For gameplay, no tech trading sounds like an attracting option to use with this. I think "no tech trading" limits a bit too much though.. AIs should not trade techs as easily as in vanilla. But AI editing needs SDK/more skills, right?

I'm considering decreasing the research costs of certain early techs - Either the ones which other civs can start with, or the ones which unlock mining, irrigation, roads, and cottages. Suggestions on this subject are welcome. Right now, civs' starting techs are VERY important due to the very slow research speed, and you may or may not think that is a good thing.

Either this or remove starting techs totally. It isn't necessarily a bad thing for the gameplay experience if some AIs get a horrible start though, but if too many do.. yeah.

I attempted to slow down inflation, but apparently the result was that inflation no longer happens at all.

I'm not sure.. how would no inflation affect the gameplay? I never liked that aspect too much.

 

[Harrier]

[Note: This mod should work fine in either vanilla Civ IV or Warlords. However, if you use this mod in Warlords, the Research, Wealth, and Commerce processes will have 50% efficiency (like in vanilla civ IV). Warlords increased them to 100% for some reason, but this mod will override them back to 50%.]

For some reason??

In fact a very good reason.

In vanilla Civ4 - if you have a one tile Island City - which only produces 1 hammer. You get nothing from the Research, Wealth, and Commerce processes. 50% of 1 is 0.

The hammer increase bonuses from Forge, Factory etc. are ignored.

Why build the city - well if you have the Financial trait that gives 3 commerce per coastal tile, go for it.

Late game, it is a pain you get no benefit from the per turn output of that city. Who wants to wait over 100 turns for a basic defender unit.

Your mod would be better if you reverted back to the Warlords change.

 

[Shadowlord]

I've uploaded a new version now (See the first post for the download link). The most notable new features/fixes are: AIs prioritize mining, the wheel, and pottery, years are mostly correct with the Quick game speed, inflation works, and the game really shouldn't end at 1600 AD anymore.

The new version is version 1.0 now, as I think this is in a pretty much complete state now. I don't think it's possible to fix the year/turns on marathon or epic speeds due to there being more turns than years with this mod on those speeds*, but I'd recommend playing on Normal or Quick anyways.

* Unless I could somehow convince it to show months in the date.

Full list of changes in 1.0:

• Clear your cache (hold down shift while Civ is restarting after loading the mod) to make sure Civ IV notices that some files in the mod have changed.
• Really fixed the bug or bugs which was causing the Normal speed games to end at 1600 AD. Unfortunately, your current games will NOT be fixed if you load them after updating the mod. Apparently Civ IV got confused when I put a comment tag inside the GameTurnInfos section (It was valid XML, but it looks like Civ IV quits looking for GameTurnInfo elements if it hits any other kind of element, including comment elements).
• Quick has turns/year speeds now.
• jdog's excellent <a href="http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=174812">AIAutoPlay</a> mod component is included with this mod now - it's incredibly useful for testing (it only took several hours to go to 1600 AD* with that going, rather than a week or two if I were playing myself).
• I've fixed inflation, although it seems to be rather slow right now. (So it might get tweaked further)
• AIs should now prioritize researching mining, the wheel, and pottery. If they lack fishing and agriculture and the wheel, they'll research agriculture before the wheel (since either fishing or agriculture is needed for pottery). These are recommended to the player as well, if researchable.
• Research/weath/culture are 100% efficient instead of 50% efficient now. (Firaxis made that change from vanilla to warlords)

* Although I had to do it over and over and over again until I finally got the "ending in 1600 AD" bug fixed.

 

[Portus]

hi
I cant load the mode. Real Epic - version 1.0
Say memory cant be read - Warlords

 

[Shadowlord]

Hmm. Maybe the AIAutoPlay component's CvGameCoreDLL is incompatible with Warlords. I'll remove the AIAutoPlay stuff and reupload.

Edit: Okay, I've removed AIAutoPlay's DLL and code, and re-uploaded. Try redownloading it and see if it works now. On the plus side, the download is only 144 KB now (1.0 was 1,154 KB, as AIAutoPlay was pretty big).

(The current version number is now 1.0.1.)

 

[derflensburger]

Interesting Idea. What about bts?