Ok is is just easy to edit somehow so Seafarers get trader route on rivers
No easy way, unfortunately.
What I've read about the start position algorithm seemed to imply that it does take the value of ressources into account, so if you get crummy clams the value of your other tiles should average out somehow. Maybe Walter can chime in? Maybe it depends on the map script?
It depends on a lot of things, but first and foremost on difficulty level - as it determines the order in which AI and human players are assigned starting spots. Out of all starting spots, the map generator will try to assign you worse ones if you're playing higher difficulty, and vice versa.
I thought there wan't terrain bias in CIV IV.
There is none.
Regarding starting positions I would like to fix so our multiplayer games don't consider SPices as a food rersource. Really 20% of starts are starts with 3 spices !
While it is possible to edit, I don't recall exactly how it's done. You can do this specifically for Totestra by changing the line 5731 from "if (bonusEnum == 23) or (bonusEnum == 27):" to "if (bonusEnum == 23) or (bonusEnum == 24) or (bonusEnum == 27):"
A minor aesthetic thing: many food resources (potatoes and wheat especially) are very difficult to see against the darker terrain of RI. Maybe make them a little brighter or taller to make them more visually distinct?
TBH, I almost always play with resource indicators on, but I can see how that can be an issue for someone who doesn't. I'll give it some thought.
- I am not able to see any triple-digit numbers in the domestic advisor, and the whole display panel appears shrunken relative to the available size. (For instance, the information appears only in quadrant 2 of a Cartesian plane, while the rest of the menu is opaque/blank. Is this normal? It's still no big deal but it appeared somewhat out of place that way so I thought I'd report as a potential bug. I am playing on the highest available resolution (1080p) if that matters.
A screenshot would be useful to illustrate what you're talking about here.
- How exactly does "siege assistance" work relative to the vanilla mechanics of collateral damage? I couldn't figure this out exactly, and tried to loosely test this with small battles in my game to see if I could. So, does latently having the siege weapon in the stack provide some bonus to an assaulting unit, which is still doing all of the direct fighting, or are you supposed to attack the city directly with the siege weapon? How does this mechanic computationally work? The maximum possible damage from ranged attacks also was not displayed in 'pedia and would be good to know. (I thought my bombards would blow the enemy to shreds but pleasingly found that something like that wouldn't be possible and I'd have to be more thoughtful about warfare.) Siege was obviously an unrealistically crucial aspect of warfare in BtS so this seems to be a major important difference. Nevertheless I'm happy to find that unit composition with 60% siege no longer reliably annihilates everything such that virtually any primitive assisting unit can be depended upon to mop up everything else. Of all the things in civ which felt gimmicky, that was probably the worst offender.
Pre-gunpowder siege engines are mainly useful for bringing city defences down. From bombards onwards, siege units get the ranged bombardment ability, but as you already found out, it can never be lethal, so it should always be followed through by other unit classes (also remember that siege, and later armoured units are unable to take cities on their own, even with no defenders). Siege aid can also be a non-trivial addition to your besieging stack's strength, just as is the case for all other aid bonuses. But no, attacking directly with siege units is almost never a good idea.
I actually never paid attention that bombardment limits were not displayed in the pedia - I will probably look at changing that at some point.
- What governs the specific mechanics of the likelihood of slave and serf rebellions? Is happiness or any other variable a material factor? I like their inclusion as a game mechanic but it would be helpful to know what actual circumstances have bearing on their likelihood/severity, if any, besides simply running slavery or serfdom as civics at all. For instance, does an unhappy city have a greater likelihood of spawning a revolt within its BFC than a happy one? Does this scale based upon how unhappy it is? Does a more populous city have a likelihood of spawning larger stacks near it, etc. That would make intuitive sense, but it's just a question as I couldn't find anything explaining the breakdown of how they actually function.
The revolt mechanics are intentionally very straightforward. The chance is a simple 1% per turn per city for slave and 0.5% per turn per city for serf revolts. The actual unit count is determined by city size only, being a random number between one and the size of said city. I felt there was no need to introduce any additional complexity in any of those calculations. And logically I don't feel city happiness should impact that as well, as the happiness/health stuff pertains to citizens, and is simply not reflective of slaves' conditions in any way; basically, slaves should be considered "always unhappy" and the revolt chance as something unavoidable when running relevant civics.
- Why are settlers immune to capture? Losing settlers constitutes a valid and important risk in the early game and eliminating it doesn't make either historical or strategic sense to me. (I think it was 3.4 you said this was done away with - curious what the reasoning is.)
Early on, a settler/worker is a major investment of city resources, and even simply killing off a rival civ's settler is a major blow - being rewarded a worker of your own for that felt like a majorly overpowered strategy that simultaneously made your neighbour weaker and you stronger, and one that favoured predominantly human players, as opening by stealing a neighbour's settler/worker was a classical gambit that would be recommended. Settlers and workers are simply killed instead of being captured.
- Minor issue - on the civics menu, I am unable to scroll and read the entire listing for a civic which I am not able actually to select. Happened to me with labor union. This ultimately doesn't matter because I can simply look it up in the game encyclopedia, but if it's a UI thing you want to fix, just letting you know.
Yep, annoys me too. I am rather bad at python interface stuff though, so I'm not sure if I'm able to do anything about it.
- Does the unhappiness penalty mechanics for lacking labor union exactly match that of lacking emancipation in the base game, or were there any changes to how that system works (IIRC, +1 unhappiness for every civ that has it while you still do not)?
The mechanics are exactly the same; IIRC the numbers are too. Basically, consider it the counterpart of said vanilla civic.
- The mod seems to have done away with the 2 national wonder limit per city Is it true that you can theoretically build every national wonder in one super city? Might this not present balance issues
I don't feel there are any significant balance issues here. I don't think most of them directly stack with each other anyway.
- How does the tech pace tend to differ between games which have trading disabled with default settings vs those that have it turned on, with the handicap/bonus system from open borders turned off? In this game, my own tech pace was about on par with real history relative to the calendar date, but I was severely behind Korea, who was well into the cold war era in the late 19th century by the time that they won. My own research was heavily boosted because I was so far behind, but this system did not stop an AI from launching way ahead in tech just like they do in the base game. This was Monarch difficulty, by the way. Furthermore, it might have been a unique scenario because that strange event turned the entire game into a love fest. Korea eventually did DoW and capitulate the runner up in score, but between about 300AD and about 1850 there was zero wars between the AI, so they likely maintained open borders consistently and received the boost in a way that wouldn't have happened if there wasn't an anomaly keeping everyone pleased/friendly with each other.
TBH, I didn't run any major testing with tech trading on in any of the recent versions. I don't feel there should be a major difference, especially due to rubberbanding from technological eras.
Is it intentional that the Japanese pagan temples aren't restricted to Paganism? I thought it was a bug, but then it occurred to me that (a) their temples are pretty weak and (b) they still have shinto temples today, so I thought it might be intended behaviour.
If not, then please consider this a bug report
You know what, I don't really remember if that's intentional or not.
Due to the age of the mod, it might have been someone's intentional idea from ages ago or someone's mistake from ages ago. But I'm inclined to let it stay as a feature at this point, since indeed Japan is one of the few developed countries where folk pagan traditions still officially coexist with major religions.
With this installer RI is working for me.
Yay! I hope the nasty black terrain issue is gone for good.
Also, another question: are the revolution/separatism mechanics not included in the Earth scenario? I was playing a terra map from a custom game and quickly lost, however, there was an active revolution mechanic with an entire menu devoted to this. I found that to be an incredibly rich feature which livened the game considerably; however, in the huge earth map as Spain, that menu is gone altogether, albeit still rather early in the game. Was it because this feature was added later on in the mod, while the Earth scenario was already there from release, and so the mechanic simply wasn't grandfathered in? That's an excellent feature, IMO, and I'll probably quit and start another game if it's altogether missing in this scenario.
Yes, it's off by default in all the scenarios, as it's off by default in RI in general. Upon reflection, after implementing it, I found it both too micromanagement-heavy and unfairly favouring human players over AI (as well as being frustrating for new players). You can turn it on by selecting "Custom Scenario" option in the main menu that lets you adjust the options for the selected scenario.
Also, reporting that after about 15 more reloads or so, no more black tiles for me.
Yay again!
- Balance/gameplay question: when early growth is already so restricted by prohibitively low ancient era happiness, why is the additional food from slavery supposed to be lucrative? I suppose faster production of settlers, workers and militia, but I think that's offset by the revolts that will happen; the slave market itself has drawbacks of its own which to my mind don't cause the civic to be more attractive overall, either.
One citizen producing more food means another citizen being able to do something else - whether it's a no-food production tile, or being a specialist. As others mentioned, properly managed, revolts aren't necessarily a bad thing too. But generally speaking, one can thrive equally well without running slavery (unless one is Rome) - though you will find the opinions of actual players very divided on that count.
Wow, this is freaking hard and I'm getting frustrated.
The general piece of advice for new players is choosing a difficulty level one or two lower than what they're used to in vanilla Civ 4. I literally know the mod inside out and my own comfortable playing level is Monarch (though there are definitely players here who play and win on difficulties higher than that).
I am fairly comfortable at Monarch in the base game, but the same difficulty in this mod is extremely tough. Didn't build enough units in one run and got overrun by the AI despite a comfortable tech lead. Focused on building units in this game, can't keep up in tech because most of my hammers are going to units... and besides the double-digit number of battles with barbarians eating plenty of my units despite fogbusting, my neighbor DoWs me literally right after every truce expiration and chews up most of what I'm able to produce meantime, despite strategic resource units and near number parity. It's playing very opportunistically like a human would, which makes for a rewarding challenge, but I just can't seem prevent losing out mightily somehow or another no matter what I do in trying to correct the previous game's error. I know I need to just go down in difficulty and try different approaches, but I might be too proud for that.
Well, losing can be fun too, especially if it comes with a lesson learned
Most of the AI leaders will back off if you're stronger than them, but I suspect the guy who fought Germany and the USSR at once doesn't take that into account
Just a nitpick here, but Pilsudski died before WW2 began, in 1935. He did win the Polish-Soviet war in 1920 though and reputedly advocated for a preemptive strike on Germany.
I'm curious how the "feel" of expansion differs in the late game once the weight of economies and development of cities reaches a mature level. My only other play through to the end (which admittedly didn't see me to the end of the tech tree, only the 19th century) was a semi-isolated peaceful game with minimal war once I came into contact with the rest of the world. Just seems like the checks on early expansion have everything to do with technological and infrastructure limitations which won't be in effect midgame onward; once cities are profitable, the more the better. That was actually one thing I really found interesting and exciting about the modern era in Civilization, how volatile the world becomes and how much you can do in such a short time.
Well, from my own impressions when industrialization kicks in, another major factor is the vast difference in productivity between your industrialized core and periphery, which, again in my experience, tends to naturally produce a plausible simulation of XIX century imperialism, where you mainly acquire new cities to feed the metropolis with resources.
But this is a lot of fun! I have basically constantly been at war with Poland and share most of my entire border with them. Our ceasefires are like mutually-understood regroup phases. There are cities that have changed hands multiple times between us and it feels like it's a real eastern European longstanding battleground (and amusingly enough, I am Germany), where swathes of territory change their color on the map near-generationally. I can only imagine the beleaguered population lamenting their perpetual changing of masters as each hoisting of a new flag is incipient.
Those 30YW-vibes...
Hmm. I don't know if handing over cities in a peace treaty is supposed to wipe out your culture. Culture is generally quite persistent now. That may be a bug that Walter missed when he altered all of that for the separatism release.
Yes, exactly from gameplay considerations in conjunction with separatism. Otherwise, the new masters would get a city that would instantly revolt against them, which is very much not the intended result.
