All right everybody, I've given releasing a new version of RI at Christmas time, as per our tradition. I decided that the new version
will be coming out, but I am really not satisfied yet with the state of the new features, especially Revolutions. They will be left in the release, but turned
off by default, suggesting they are not yet at the desired quality level. I am also fully conscious that my coding skills, though quite improved during the last year (as basically any improvement is quite a big one when compared to zero it was previouisly
), may not be enough to ever give it enough polish by myself - so unless I get substantial help from a really competent coder, it may stay this way for good.
5202 Huge World map: I'm in mid-Medieval and the global revolution level is still at the starting tribal level, I suspect that all of the minor American civs that are trapped in the Ancient era are holding the world average down.
Update: Updated to 5203 mid-game and re-loaded, I'm now in "Client State" so this may be "fixed" (or not really a problem), though I didn't get any pop-ups about the change.
Thanks! I never even considered this as a potential issue when I set the average era to be the trigger. It may not be easy to fix, as average era is calculated by the dll, but I will definitely give thought to fixing it.
When a barbarian city develops to a new civilization it should be in war with all other civilizations at the moment it occurs. It's completely uncomprehensible that a barbarian city which is attacked by me or I wanted to attack automatically is in peace with all other civs and I have to declare war "again" to attack it. Also the development from a barbarian city to a new civ itself should have more complex requirements in my opinion, for example depending on population, city culture, maybe even having a specific building in the barbarian city and a minimum of laps the city is barbarian until it can develop to a new civ. The technological progress from the new civ should just depend on the progress of the surrounding or adjoining civs.
Also it's really curious that all barbarian units attacking my city dissappear each time a barbarian civ is generated, it would be nice if there's always a variable number of units the new civ gets from the barbars, depending on barbarian units in the surrounding area and a little random factor and that the attacking barbarian units stay barbarian.
Thanks! Those are excellent suggestions! I will keep those in mind when improving the barbarian civ component. While I don't think they should start at war with
all civs, as that might be harmful for those civs themselves (as AI might take these new wars seriously and abandon the actual productive stuff it was doing in favor of a new war across the whole world), they should probably start at war with their immediate neighbors.
I'm still 100% sure about the fact that the national improvement is the cause for overperforming civs like zulu, armenia, turkey, inka compared to all other civs. The difference of their NI carries no weight per tile but when a timar or a cattle trek in addition with pastoral nomadism produces so much food on almost each tile which leads to the fact that each city has 2 or 3 additional specialists over almost all eras (until modern era, because the mechanized farm obsoletes each other improvement) - on the contrary civs like germany, england, japan, aztecs... whose NI is really rare to build and if I have the luck to find one of these rare tiles it has just too low boni to even activate the tile in the concerned city.
But the alternative on those tiles would be farms that produce even more food and allow for even more specialists! In fact, the most constantly overpeforming civ in my experience is Korea - a civ whose NI is a farm with NO food bonus over regular ones; but since they are more enthusiastic in building those farms, they get more population and more specialists. So basically I tend to agree with you that these civs may overperform, this is IMO not due to their NI being overpowered per se, but rather because they are willing to build more of those earlier - resulting in net more food.
If I'm allowed to make a proposal, my recommendation for solving these problems:
- cattle treks: either no food bonus at all, but doesn't cut down savanna - or just allowed to build on tiles with savanna, this would secondly require to generate savanna on grassland too.
- timar: either more like a farm, but with more commerce instead of food - or as an alternative for cottages and hamlets, with one or two food, also developing to a town after turns
- highland pasture: either just allowed on tiles with hill AND resource - or with much less food but instead a small chance of discovering horse, cow or sheep (one of them), in case of horse, this would secondly require to generate horse on hills, which I find is realistic anyway.
- anden: new name -> terrace farm: just allowed on tiles with hill and get additional food bonus from food ressources (rice, corn) on hills, this would secondly require to generate these food ressources on hills too
- thermalbad: small boost of healthiness in the next city and much more commerce through techs or buildings, which are enabled in era modern (tourism, ...)
- shipwreck: small boost of happiness in the next city and much more commerce through techs or buildings, which are enabled in era modern...
- chinampa: small boost of healthiness (to cancel the illness out, produced by a swamp) and a small chance of discovering potatoes to make it more likeable to use and more similar to a farm as it really was, now it has the same yields as desert with flood plain has and it does not really get better with time.
- fortified monastasery: why is this improvement enabled with technology meditation and fort bonus I is enabled with technology fortification? This improvement is unlocked really early, which is basically fine, but it has nearly no useful combat or other benefits until reaching some later technologies...
I will consider those, but as I wrote above, I don't consider their stats to be a problem themselves.
I think resources should be placed more randomly over the map, why is iron, coal, copper, all other metal ore resources always on a tile without wood or jungle, I never found a resource on savanna or flood plain until now, whale is placed only in polar regions, reefs are too rare to be relevant at all... I play on RI_Planet_Generator, is the map generator the problem, would you recommend a different map generator?
I think the resources mostly spawn in the same was as in vanilla Civ 4; as for savannas and other custom terrain features, not adding resources to them was a deliberate decision for compatibility with custom map scripts - if they don't add new features, nothing will be fundamentally broken.
Maybe stop the problem with too much multi-religious cities by decreasing the chance of spreading the religion in cities with a religion? For example, a missionary's chance to spread a second religion in a city is 50%, the third religion 25%, and so on. In my view, religion should have even more impact on revolution and diplomacy. And changing religion to any other should not be as easy as changing a civic. I think the state religion has to be at least in the capital city before being able to convert to it. Also missionaries should have less chance to spread religion but instead increase the chance of spreading the religion after a random number of turns. It should be possible that religion spreads also in cities where an other religion exists already to randomize spreading a bit more.
I think the missionaries already work that way. They have escalating chance of failing the more religions are already present in a city.
In history, when did ever spread a religion in a city in a few years just because of a missionary?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_the_Illuminator or tons of other similar stories from basically any missionary religion. When there's no direct opposition from those in power (not to mention when there's a direct political will towards it), mass conversions can happen very quickly.
The fact that the boni religious wonders aren't affected by the number of cities with the religion in it makes spreading religion to other civs quite uninteresting. It really would be great if there was a bigger difference between the advantage a religion gives which is spread over the half continent and a religion which exists only in 2 or 3 cities...
Yeah, I plan on revisiting that. It will definitely be dynamic again.
What would be if civics (like Theocracy, Social Justice, Free Religion) do not enable infinite specialists, but instead 3-5 or even more specialists (and maybe a free specialist) in each city? Each building which allow specialists would not obsolete when the particular civic is introduced...
I don't think there are any buildings the main purpose of which would be specialist slots (except for craftsmen, but you don't get a civic for that).
In modern era, a craftsman obsoletes mines and lumber mills (in short version). I really don't like the idea that there is no need for mines or lumber mills, because how could a craftsman work without gaining raw materials or ressources? Maybe give him just production boni with some strategic ressources (prime timber, copper, iron, ...) or even give him a small percentage bonus on production for each strategic ressource. You could adopt this to all other specialists, f. e. merchants and having luxury ressources. I know this is a really sensitive issue, this would have a big effect on balancing...
That was more or less the deliberate concept - gradual movement of productive forces from countryside to cities, as represented by craftsmen gradually becoming better than (or at least on par with) mines and other terrain improvements, in terms of raw production output.
Is the increasing of unit costs for each unit depending to the world map size? I think it should, units just get unattainable when controlling 30 or more cities at the moment... By the way I don't understand why this was introduced at all. I know the reason was to benefit from training different units, but in my opinion I also get a malus for the lack of aids I would get otherwise. Another negative effect for having much units are the maintenance costs. Attacks with just one unit category are much more difficult to defend and brings a variety of strategies in offence and defence. (Yeah, I know there is a button to deactivate it...)
Yes, they are dependent on map size, with larger sizes getting much less increase. I feel people complaining about units being unattainable think in vanilla logic. Most cities by that time should really be garrisoned by irregulars, a unit which has the least cost increase.
Increasing costs of settlers during the game is a very important thing in my opinion! I'm a little bit annoyed that I must explain this in detail and I don't believe that this is much effort for low effect. My Problem: At the beginning of each game a settler needs 30 to 50 turns (Speed: Legendary) to build. During the mediaval this number shrinks to 10 laps and so on until reaching industrial where one settler needs just 2 or 3 laps! The impact of this fact can be explained fast in the following example:
America was discovered in 1492. It took centuries until the whole continent was populated by many different nations all over the world. It was not because there were some Native American in North America, nor because there were some Incas in South America. In my estimation, in Realism Invictus r5203 this continent would be completely razed and easily repopulated by one civ within a few decades (the civ which first discovers navigation and naval engineering). (I ignore the fact that this would be the financial melt down for each civ, because that's not the point for me at the moment.)
The question for me is not why, but how should the cost for settlers be risen. Here the increasing of unit costs in each era in combination with increasing unit costs per unit and city (to prevent early spamming of settlers or cities) would function quite well, but this is just my idea. An other possibility would be to introduce new units like colonists, which give a new city 3 or 4 population from the beginning istead of 1...
I really don't understand why this is being an issue. Yes, building settlers becomes easier when time goes on. I don't see why it shouldn't be. And as for the example you give, in RI World Maps I usually see the very opposite - Americas staying populated by native tribes up to modern age.
In my opinion, in ancient gameplay, peltasts (recon unit) are a little bit outperforming compared to chariots (charge mounted unit), which has horse as a requirement, a peltast doesn't have any resource requirements, they also have same strength against melee units...
A good remark, highlighting the issue I was looking to address for a long time already - I will definitely do something about chariots so that they are more useful.
Stealth corvettes are pretty useless, maybe it would be more interesting if they are invisible for most units. I also think submarines are visible for too much units, their invisibility is nearly useless and and because of this fact destroyer ships are underperforming too...
As they are in real life
Submarines and their invisibility are a more pressing issue though, something I may look into in future.
I would lower the strength of all Artilleries that can range bombard, I can't find any reason, why these units have nearly the same strength as other gunpowder units in their era, I think in real they always needed some protection units like infantry in war, in game they don't really need them, they fight by themselves...
Well, infantry charging an artillery position head on is a recipe for disaster IRL. Artillery has a hard counter in form of cavalry though.
I can't see any combat chances when i attack a ship with a helicopter...
Interesting. Will look into that.
I really like the concept of emplaced artilleries and heavy batteries, it just would be nice if they get much more importance until the end, such as a last upgrade, they have much more strength and boni against air units and a nice bonus for city defence, it would be thrilling if the maximum per city is one unit, but instead it can be built in each city (it needs the building fortification and each fortification requires 2 Arsenals)
Again, that was a deliberate decision, forcing players to designate strategic strong points.
Yields on neutral territorium seem not to be updated when ressources are revealed through technologies until I reload the game...
Hm... I guess that one is a Civ 4 engine issue, beyond my expertise.
I once played japan and had a small inland sea with islands on one tile. I was not able to build an improvement on it because there was no resource in this sea, so i wasn't able to build a working boat to improve it...
Was it a sea or a fresh water lake? As in, were the water tiles "Coast" or "Fresh water"?
I don't like the fact that crystal palace provides 2 steel, it's anyway too easy to get this resource, because iron and coal aren't rare at all.
Well, neither do I, but that and Synthetic Oil Plant are an opportunity for high-tech players who are left without appropriate resource at that point to get it. Steel and fuel are so fundamental to the gameplay that I felt alternative means of getting them was needed just in case.
I would find it great if wonders require some resources (in the city plot) instead of just giving the city a production boost
I didn't understand that one.
I also would find it great if a great prophet is required to found a religion (and get a free spot for a priest by a pagan temple to be able to get early prophets)
I am thinking about it. Not sure if AI would be able to adequately deal with this, deliberately generating GPs to found a religion.
Wouldn't it be nice if units get their promotion a little bit randomly, depending on the fights it had? F. e. a scout winning a few fights on tundra or ice could give him the arctic combat I promotion when getting enough experience or when attacking animals he gets combat I or land tactic...
An interesting idea. I will think about it.
). I have been playing the last version, but I would love to try the SVN version. I changed PC and I couldn't find how to get it though. Help
