[Y];14386873 said:
For what it's worth, I also think the implementation could be better.
It makes sense to me that scientific GW become obsolete with time; they are only an advantage until the rest of the world catches up and/or they become commonplace.
What I would consider a good compromise is switching go the large-but-short-term strategy, but once a GW goes obsolete, it contributes +1 point to Great Scientist production. In this way, flavor-wise, they only provide a short term benefit, but even after that's gone the legacy of the work inspires others to continue the tradition. This also means more great scientists, which means better chance at getting Great Works in the future. Which makes sense to me: Being a scientific leader means always chasing the next discovery, not dwelling on past accomplishments.
It's an interesting take on it. We may handle it that way.
What is the justification for this? I wouldn't compromise on realism just to make sure that people play the game in a way you desire, i.e. in this case distributing specialists among your cities.
For the same reason, I am not a fan of increased unit cost per unit on field thing. It feels like an artificial way to encourage people to use combined arms, although using combined arms itself should be rewarding enough. (But it is a fine feature nonetheless)
Well, the "realism" part when dealing with such an abstract thing as Great Scientific Works is dubious anyway. They are more of a game mechanic than anything else.
It's due to trade with other nations (something that can't be represented well enough) and due to a highly educated population. That's why I'm suggesting instead to be based on population. But I don't think that increasing tech cost for each new city is the way to go. That's what happens in Civ V: it destroys balance by hurting research too much once you have more than 4-5 cities.
It's actually represented well enough in RI, I think. A bigger civ that generates lots of trade income can quite effectively out-research a smaller one in my tests. Another important aspect is that more cities usually means more (luxury) resources and thus bigger cities and thus again more research. The question of "hurting too much" really boils down to finding adequate balanced figures.
You said all civilizations have their time and their place...what about the mesoamerican civilizations?
They all seem to be fairly weak compared to the primary European and Asian civilizations, even in their supposed 'era of choice' which is Ancient / Classical.
Each of Meso civs has their own strengths and weaknesses. Incas (whom I guess you're referring to mostly, judging by what you wrote below) are one of the builder civs, who aren't supposed to shine so much at wars. Their military is not very exciting, but they are balanced well for economic benefits.
Both Aztecs and Mayans are among the best military civs in Ancient/Classical, Mayans probably slightly OP even. I love playing Aztecs even as a builder, since they mean I win defensive wars and against barbarians rather easily.
I keep getting error messages like blah blah error with cityAcquired event handler. BugEventmanager.BugEventmanager instance at 0x049D4C88, whenever I hear of a city changing ownership.
Care to share your python logs?
Also, the button for mechanical mining is a purple square.
Bah, forgot to upload the actual button.
And something completely unrelated: How about making silver boost the production of solar plants?
Hm... I believe photovoltaic cells are made chiefly from silicon. Why would silver boost them?
I'm currently using Inca. Their distinctive units barely seem to have any advantages and even some major negatives. I am fairly certain 'Hornet Throwers' are an ancient or classical unit, though...which is where I'm coming from. Those eras tend to end fairly fast with little bloodshed due to an inability to handle too many cities.
Little bloodshed? Do you play with barbarians off?
I think classical NUs are the most useful, because barbarians are rather inevitable and one has to deal with them in an efficient manner.
I've also noticed some weird stuff going on with the barbarians lately. At my last game I conquered two barb cities, and they had -3 or -2 happiness for "we yearn to join our motherland" for hundreds of turns. Barbarians were the only ones that had culture in those cities when I got them. My culture% was going up really slowly regardless of what I tried and strangely enough the unhappiness penalty was changing every turn between 2 and 3, and sometimes when it seemed that the city had extra happiness, it actually went unhappy when I let it grow. Am I missing something?
Interesting. I will keep an eye on that.
There seemed to be also a bug with tile yield icons, they sometimes showed numbers different from the tooltip.
Need more feedback on that! Screenshots, saves etc.
One other thing, that I've actually seen happen for quite a long time, is that the AI seems to really like sacrificing their population while running slavery. While I was testing those other bugs with AIAutoPlay, I noticed that the AI quickly dropped my city populations by a third, which isn't really a good strategy at all.
That is a scary one. See, here we have to deal with either removing a fundamental game mechanic or fundamental AI decision-making. Frankly daunting.
I read a bit about the world population, and it changed throughout the ages. I wanted to see, whether the development of the population in Civ IV is realistic, or there is room for improvement.
At 1000 BC, the world population is estimated to be between 50M and 115M. At 0 AD, it is between 150M and 300M. So, the world population is almost tripled in 1000 years.
However, between 0 AD and 800 AD the population stagnates. It is estimated between 220M to 330M. Even at 1000 AD, many estimates indicates a population of only about 250M. Until 1500 AD, estimates lies around 400-500M.
Ok, how should this be interpreted? In the game, the most significant increase in population comes with peasant servitude, which is on of the earliest middle age technologies. So, it would be researched at 5th or 6th century. However in reality, peasant servitude and feudalism didn't seem to have contributed much to the world population. In fact, the invention of iron tools and irrigation systems and so on seems to have a much greater effect (I am not a historian btw, an opinion from a historian would be much better here.).
From 1500 AD on, the population starts growing rapidly. Some scholars mention that the crops that were brought from Americas have contributed to the population growth in Europe and Asia. This is actually great, since Civilization can simulate this fact very well: New crops, and fruits, and luxury resources from an other continent increases health and happiness and boosts the population in the game.
The population reaches 1000M in 1800 and 1650M in 1900. Today, it is about 7400M, which shows that we should slowly stop breeding as mankind
But the joke aside, it seems the population benefited most from farming mechanization and the advancing medicine in the 20th century. This is also modeled well in the game.
In conclusion, I think the peasant servitude and serfdom should be slightly nerfed, the increase of
between the classical and medieval ages should be somewhat milder.
One interesting note: In 1800 only 3% of world population lived in cities. This proportion has risen to 47% in 2000.
A very thought-out post. I agree with your estimates, and I have to say that +1 with PS was made initially when we were implementing agriculture to make Serfdom better than Slavery at onset. I
think we may eliminate that experimentally, because Serfdom already has other different advantages.
Some feedback on my latest game.
This time I wanted to see how well you can do when expanding, instead of being isolated. Monarch diff, large map. A very varied map. James K. Polk of the Americans (exp, prog)
I coinhabited a medium sized snaky continent with Francisco Franco. Used scouts with +1 sight to effectively bust the darkness and used a city strategically placed next to a mountain range to block Franco's access to half the continent. No barb cities thanks to my darkness busting. Made short work of the Spanish during late classical. Although Madrid was on top of a hill and the gazillion heavily promoted str 4 archers meant I had to bring a huge suicide squad to finish him off. The upkeep costs for the stack before I was ready to make my attack were murder, so that may have been part of what tipped the balance. I should have let Franco brew in his corner, and take only 2 cities of his (instead of 3).
The increased research cost per city got me. I made contact with every civ except one. They were all on adjacent continents, waging wars among themselves. I was able to surpass them in tech very easily. But beyond an ocean the Arabs were inhabiting a cosy continent all to themselves with room only for 7 cities and nowhere else to expand to until they were able to cross oceans. I wisely stopped at 11 cities, securing the more important resources and leaving some of my continent unsettled, for fear of the slowed-down tech advancement. I should have held back more.
Upkeep costs were manageable. 75-80% tech rate. But the Arabs were clearly beating me to everything medieval era had to offer as the 'wonder constructed' reports let me understand. I micromanaged the hell out of my empire, left a token defense knowing (and being right) that all the other civs I'd met were too busy in hating each other to bother me. Bee-lined to universities which were quick to build since I was progressive. I had the Academy and 6 scientific works + 1 settled Great Scientist.
But the Arabs had 4 fewer cities. And that made all the difference.
I met them after they discovered ocean travel and saw their area by trading maps via proxy (the Arabs hated me from the start). I think I was beginning to research a little quicker than them by the time I advanced on Renaissance, but researching techs took 7-8 turns and they had a head start of galleons and soon fusiliers. 40 guys landed on my coast. Decided to give up and research via worldbuilder what their cities showed me. Their main science city had no scientists settled, 2 scientific works, and 7 settled great prophets. By all rights I should have beaten them in research, but the gap from 7 vs 11 cities was enough to doom me. (That and being the first guy they saw, thus becoming their worst enemy due to differing religions.)
If they'd left me in peace I think I could've gotten tech parity around the onset of Industrial era. Quicker if they'd chosen to attack someone else, thus taking on their research-slowing cities.
The lesson here is that the isolated small continent strategy has become slightly too efficient. Originally the lack of open border techs severely limited it, but tech diffusion rate was nerfed a year or two back. Right now, AIs that have contact with each other and room to expand present no danger, and naturally I could've stopped expanding at 9 cities had I known. But I'm not sure if AI would understand to stop. Ironically, it was their limited territory which made the Arabs get ahead in this game. (Also, the map was the product of the terrain generator pw3 something (I forget the name) which produces a really variable world.)
I also checked the 'no city number increase in tech cost' option in worldbuilder to see how drastic the change was. It more than halved the time to research techs.
I'd maybe tone the penalty slightly down, and perhaps consider upping the tech diffusion rate for at least the first one or two civs.
EDIT: Oh and one last thing: I definitely like this change overall. Previously there'd been no question of whether I should expand to fill my entire continent or not, as long as I'd do it in a pace that my economy could keep up. But now there's a serious strategic element to it, and once I get a better feel to it, it should be easier to figure out where the limit is. It's just that if there's a civ somewhere out there where you can't tell how quickly they're researching and how many cities they got, you might easily cripple yourself in relation to them.
One take-away from your excellent writeup for me is that tech transfer bonuses could stand to be increased a bit once again.
Also, in my testing I saw the part that usually comes
after what you wrote: the civ that used to lead gets ocean-faring and first dibs on colonial territories, starts expanding like crazy and falls behind in techs and score. Which I find pretty exciting, since it's a welcome change from "when you're ahead, you're ahead forever".
Are buildable trenches as a tile improvement included in this mod?
If not, what would you think about adding it? I havent found a single mod for Civ 3, Civ 4 or Civ 5 yet that has trenches -______-
Why would that need to be a separate improvement? If anything, trench systems are a part of a modern fortified region, that is, a "fort" in Civ 4 terms. What else should it represent in XX century, if not a heavily entrenched area?
I just want to say, I played recently as Armenia, and when I built walls, I was thrilled to see a new set of really great looking middle eastern walls.
Thank you for that. I really love seeing new city walls according to culture, and these ones look especially great. I hope that other cultures can also have new walls one day, but I just wanted to say that I really appreciated that.
Thank you, I feel very glad reading that. Making various buildings look culturally-appropriate is a pet project of mine, and nobody ever mentions that.
Hi, I was playing with the SVN 4997, and my game kept crashing, when America (Franklin Roosevelt) reaches the industrial age.
After some testing, I figured out that the American Fusiliers in the Industrial age causes the problem.
Yeah, caught that problem a couple of weeks ago. If you want to continue playing that particular game, you can just update the Art/Units/Unique/America folder instead of full Realism folder update.
