Realism Invictus

[PKSRoman]

error in proletariat dictatorship description: you cant make pernament alliances in game

 

[AspiringScholar]

What I mean is that I get +2 at 10%, +3 at 15%, +4 at 20%.

With only a theater?

 

[AllTheLand]

Nevermind, I checked an empty city and the culture slider by itself, with no building at all to boost it, already gives +1 every 10 percent. So the theater makes it +1 every 5 percent instead. But the happiness boost from the culture slider with no supporting building is new to me.

 

[PKSRoman]

What I'm contemplating right now is a mechanism for removing religions from a given game. I feel there are far too many religions in smaller map sizes - often more than one per civ! And there is definitely enough of them for most, if not all, game cases of RI already. I never saw a game where each religion thrived and had a viable role.

Cult of personality should have "Religion Removers" as unique unit

• Research bonus requires a civ to have open borders with you, be in your trading network (or whatever it's called when you can trade resources), and for that civ to have completed research on that tech
• Default bonus +10% per civ
• Once you research Alphabet, additional +5% per civ from other civs with Alphabet
• Once you research Paper, additional +5% per civ
• +5% per civ when running each of Republic, Inclusivity, Merchant Families, and Free Religion civics
• -5% (to min 0) per civ when running each of Tribal Union, Traditional Custom, and Protectionism civics
• Theocracy and Civil Religion only allow the bonus from civs that share your state religion
• Free Religion gives +2% per civ for each religion in any your cities
• Qumran provides +10% per civ (instead of the happiness bonus. I often get it and the volatility of the research rate makes it a double edged sword)
• +100% from Information Networking
• With (tech ???--medieval maybe), a Great Spy can create a Spy Network national wonder, which grants the bonus from all civs within trade network, regardless of open borders
• With (tech ???--something roughly early 20th century), a Great Spy can create a Intelligence Agency national wonder, which grants the bonus from all civs, regardless of trade network or open borders

let's summarize:
from just one civilization with the right odds we get +25% to tech transfer
if you are oudated and 3-4 or more civcs are above you you get +100% to tech transfer since the snap
with silimiar things i and group of people in New Dawn mod tried to solve better disposition of because it affect science and if you know how to play you could invent techs in one turn
my opinion? raw bonus is best suited for this game
like:
tech transfer depends from relations from other civs, max cap from one civ is 30% (when you have +15 to relations with other civ) standard is 10%
+2% to additional for every positive relationship with others civilisations
so if you have lets say 6 other civs with relationship +15 (rather rare in my opinion) and with open borders in theory you had +180% to tech transfer - and you could speed up very quick

That's interesting to hear. I didn't think they could. I'll look into it.

you can build shipyards on lakes when lake have size 8-10 tiles

It would be interesting to have the ability to plant forests at the end of medieval or start of Renaissance. But it should be time consuming to do so, so that it is not an efficient source of production.

it would be a nice addition if we had "global warming mod" merged into RI.
I play now on standard noble level for tests and i achieve rennesaince lvl in 1000 AD so factories and manufactures in 1600 had enough time to wreck earth ecosystem
i also like idea of additional task for workers, not only build autobahns and highways in modern era

 

[PKSRoman]

also "military alliances" (not "pernament alliances") is nice idea for me:
lets say we have (A,B,C) alliance and (D,E,F) another one and G as example

if A declare war on G despite fact a is in alliance they fight A vs G (a declare war solo - he can ask for help B and C but declaring war not start unfair war 3 vs 1)
if G declare war on A they fight G vs ABC

if A declare war on D it escalate, just like pre-WW1 and you have ABC vs DEF
both military alliances are dissolved (dont like idea the ethernal war beetween these two goups also after war all 6 civs can make new military alliances what make game more interesing)

alliance applies only to military activities, civs in the alliance get a small +2 bonus to relations with each other within the alliance, technology between them is not shared

I just don't know how to reduce the chances of when a civilization with a small STR that is in an alliance declares war on the other alliance:
In rhyes fall on civilization (BTS4 vanilia) they have additional messagebox
"A declare war on DEF military alliance - did you want to join war? YES/ NO"
if you click NO they dissolve you from military alliance and you get a penalty to relations with your friends from former alliance
if anyone had a better idea on how to improve this idea of “military alliances” then write in

anyway my idea still sounds like tons of lines to coding.. or stealing codes from actual mods..

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

OK, lots of other stuff happening here, but I'll address the rest tomorrow. For now, the promo issue has been fixed and uploaded. Should be save game compatible in case someone wants to continue a save where units had confused identities.

 

[[Y]]

Gaestatae in my game always seem to target my most experienced melee unit. Is that luck of the draw, bad defending unit AI, or expected behavior? I tried finding the code for the targeting abilities but couldn't tell where to find those (or if it's even RI specific code).

 

[Watermelon]

Hmm, I think Great People Points of a city dont properly reset when a GP is born. It seems like it doesnt remove the accumulated points and only adds the new required points on top. So after a e.g. Great Scientist is born you end up with 80% already for the next GP in the same city.

 

[Roland Johansen]

True, but then again, considering the gameplay perspective, doesn't that argument still hold for later eras as well, maybe even more so? A farm has far more utility than a forest in the modern era, except for the city with the National Park.

Yes. So forest planting in real life and in the game would happen in those areas where you can't have a farm, namely the non-river tundra tiles. That is where a lot of modern day lumber mills are. But I am repeating myself and you said later on that you are not considering it anyway, so why argue about it.

No, that's not the exact argument, as I referred to an actual state leader who had actual documented plans of doing that. But to be honest, what does "razing a city" even mean in a modern context? There were basically no buildings left standing in Dresden post-WW2, and of course, there were nukes dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - yet all those cities are still there. Were they "razed" in Civ 4 terms and refounded on the same spot later? Were they not "razed"? Especially now that culture (= local population) stays behind in all cases when the city itself is razed.

There are cities that have been horribly marred in modern wars. But the most important part of cities are the people, not the buildings. As long as a part of the people survive, the cities will rebound. Buildings are replaced every few decades in cities anyway, so losing a whole bunch of buildings doesn't destroy a city in real life. The cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki lost some 20% of their population, Dresden a few percent and they all immediately rebounded. This kind of damage can also be done in-game by heavily bombing or nuking a city, although the cities in the game don't rebound so quickly. Probably cities in the game should also lose buildings and population just by armies trying to conquer the city but failing.

What can be done in-game and never happens in real life is that a huge modern day city is lost to a surprise attack with barely any fighting and then it is raised to the ground, all the people and buildings lost with the click of a button. It is as if in real life a city would be surrounded and then every single building in the city would be destroyed and every single person in the city would be shot, leaving no stone unturned and all of this with absolutely no cost to the conqueror. That is what we see in the game. But luckily, there is a switch 'no city razing', making the game a lot more realistic.

Don't play huge maps. That's an integer overflow from building too many units that's realistically only reached by the largest civs on huge maps. In an ongoing ongoing game, one could try to specifically poach the dll from the upcoming SVN commit, but no guarantees.

Ah thanks. Good to know what the parameters are that lead to the unfortunate bug. I am playing large maps, so I am probably good.

I mean, didn't most forest clearance historically happen exactly for that, freeing up space for farming? The "production from chopping" is a rather gamey concept that was added in Civ 4 and is a rather high-level abstraction. How exactly does chopping down a forest help me train a swordsman quicker?

I am not arguing for production from chopping. I never really liked the chopping and whipping mechanics of CivIV. I was just replying to a post of AspiringScholar which argued for a new forest-based slash and burn improvement that improved production.

 

[AllTheLand]

Suggestions:
- Currently, Flanking 1 gives +15% retreat, Flanking 2 +20% retreat, Flanking 3 +25% retreat and immunity against first attacks. The retreat percentages are cumulative, so if you start from zero, the 15% bonus is only a 15% multiplicative bonus, but the 20% additive bonus from level 2 is a 24% multiplicative bonus, and the 25% additive bonus from level 3 is a 38% multiplicative bonus. Flanking 3 is interesting (first attacks can get really aggravating), but Flanking 1 is really underwhelming. What about making Flanking 1 +20% retreat and Flanking 3 +20% retreat?
- Make the arena gives its second happiness point at 15% instead of 20%.
- Display the maintenance cost of a unit type in the Civilopedia, since RI already has variable maintenance cost.
- The colors of India and South China are too similar, a tweak would be welcome.
- Disallow units with the commando promotion from capturing cities. While I don't mind this promotion purely for raiding (capturing workers, destroying improvements), I think it is extremely problematic for balance reasons because of the potential it creates to threaten cities. A player can lightly defend inner cities, safe in the knowledge that the AI is not going to be able to take it (the AI is even too dumb to just use normal mobility units properly - a bunch of 5-3 cavalry archers walked slowly with a mangonel to attack a city that, if they had attacked immediately, I could have not reinforced in time). But if the AI saved up resources by not having many defenders in a core city with walls, players would get the ability to completely steamroll the AI by surprise-capturing such cities. Actually, if commando works as I think it does, and with how easily available it can be thanks to the Great Wonder that allows all compatible units to be trained with it, I dread to think what an army of commando units could achieve once a civilization has paved roads or railways. It becomes a very real prospect to declare war by surprise, then immediately throw 15 units on a city located 5, 6, 7 tiles from the border.

Observation:
- The removal of all the additional inflation code from K-mod is very much welcome. Around 500AD, I was at 104% inflation in my Germany game (3.60) - representing 292 out of my 573 spending. I'm at 51% inflation in my South-China game (SVN r4519) - representing 99 out of my 294 spending. That's a very appreciable difference. I'm also playing with a small mod-mod for city-maintenance (saving, in this specific case, 50 pre-inflation or 75 post-inflation per turn), but it's making a smaller difference than the inflation change. I still think that inflation is a poor mechanic, but I'll gladly take changes that make it smaller, and it would probably be easier to balance phasing it out progressively than all at once anyway.

Question:
- Is there a link somewhere about how to compile the DLL? Is Visual Studio required? I'd like to try my hand at AI tweaks.

But luckily, there is a switch 'no city razing', making the game a lot more realistic.

Issues are that in real life, it's possible to build a new city closer than 200km from the next closer city. And the placing of cities has a relatively reduced effect on how well the rest of the land can be exploited. In the game, if you conquer and keep a city, you commit to its location which can completely prevent the proper exploitation of some tiles or cause an excess overlapping in exploitable tiles. The way Civilization cities are placed on the map and work is fundamentally unrealistic by itself so while it makes sense for gameplay, it's always going to have some problematic side effects.

What can be done in-game and never happens in real life is that a huge modern day city is lost to a surprise attack with barely any fighting and then it is raised to the ground

Yeah, the potential in taking a city by surprise, with no ability in holding it long term, but utterly destroying it with the "raze city" option, is problematic.

Ideally, military forces and time should be required to raze a city (the bigger the city, the more troops and time being required), and it should probably also produce units representing population as an output.

In some ways, how Civ3 handled population and settlers had its advantages. You could have settlers and workers made in one city join another to grow its population, with the culture of the new citizen in the city determined by the settler's culture. And razing a city to the ground produced workers, representing the population that survived the city's sacking. And if you created a new city, it had the culture of the settlers, not the culture of the tile, so culture was not so resistant to war crimes. The per-tile culture of Civ4 swung the situation from one extreme to another.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

- I got a case of missing text: AI_DIPLO_REFUSE_TO_TALK_LEADER_HARUN1

I don't know where that is coming from! This isn't referenced anywhere in the XML, and people report random missing lines like this from time to time, but I don't know why this happens as there never is an explicit reference to the line in question.

- I got a tile with a broken production display. The tile produces 15 food and 1 gold, but it has additional hammers overlaid on top of the bread and coin parts. Subsequent tiles that got to 15 food displayed the same issue.

I set it up to work up to 14, but since 15 is apparently reachable, I'll rejig it to work with up to 19 I guess.

Makes sense. Did you miss my mention of ways to export/import the XML strings to make maintaining texts easier?

No, I saw it. Since I have no interest in translating myself though, I felt no need to comment on that. For my own needs, directly editing XML is quite sufficient.

The Theater is advertised as giving +1 happiness for every 10% on the culture slider, but it seems to be giving +1 for every 5%. Is that intended, or related to the theater being supplied with dye? Rounding up to +1 when at 5% is nice, but getting +4 when running at +20% may not be intended ? At least it doesn't match the civilopedia.

Although if the theater is made less effective, the Arena should be made more effective. Having to get the culture slider all the way up to 20% to get an additional happiness is a lot, if it gave its point at 15% it would be something that matters more in games.

See below. There is base happiness from culture, without any buildings.

error in proletariat dictatorship description: you cant make pernament alliances in game

You can.

Nevermind, I checked an empty city and the culture slider by itself, with no building at all to boost it, already gives +1 every 10 percent. So the theater makes it +1 every 5 percent instead. But the happiness boost from the culture slider with no supporting building is new to me.

Yes, I can confirm there is a happiness boost from the culture slider by itself. Later in game a new city with no buildings might be too unhappy from the start to be productive - so this allows the player some flexibility.

Cult of personality should have "Religion Removers" as unique unit

Maybe.

let's summarize:

I suspect these ideas were not supposed to be used altogether, just random collection of things for me to consider as some possible effects.

you can build shipyards on lakes when lake have size 8-10 tiles

Yep, 8 tiles is the cutoff for most maritime-related buildings. I just lowered it to 0 for fishing docks and lighthouses.

it would be a nice addition if we had "global warming mod" merged into RI.
I play now on standard noble level for tests and i achieve rennesaince lvl in 1000 AD so factories and manufactures in 1600 had enough time to wreck earth ecosystem

If you achieve Renaissance by 1000 AD you should have won by 1600. The scope of the mod is up to the end of XX century, whenever that end happens. If someone keeps playing beyond that (as in, researching "Future Tech 55"), this is frankly not my concern anymore - I didn't design RI to have content beyond a certain point.

i also like idea of additional task for workers, not only build autobahns and highways in modern era

That's true, workers are rather idle in modern era. I have some concepts for occupying their time (basically, very expensive late-game improvements), but I'll see if I get to implement them.

also "military alliances" (not "pernament alliances") is nice idea for me:
lets say we have (A,B,C) alliance and (D,E,F) another one and G as example

if A declare war on G despite fact a is in alliance they fight A vs G (a declare war solo - he can ask for help B and C but declaring war not start unfair war 3 vs 1)
if G declare war on A they fight G vs ABC

if A declare war on D it escalate, just like pre-WW1 and you have ABC vs DEF
both military alliances are dissolved (dont like idea the ethernal war beetween these two goups also after war all 6 civs can make new military alliances what make game more interesing)

alliance applies only to military activities, civs in the alliance get a small +2 bonus to relations with each other within the alliance, technology between them is not shared

I just don't know how to reduce the chances of when a civilization with a small STR that is in an alliance declares war on the other alliance:
In rhyes fall on civilization (BTS4 vanilia) they have additional messagebox
"A declare war on DEF military alliance - did you want to join war? YES/ NO"
if you click NO they dissolve you from military alliance and you get a penalty to relations with your friends from former alliance
if anyone had a better idea on how to improve this idea of “military alliances” then write in

anyway my idea still sounds like tons of lines to coding.. or stealing codes from actual mods..

Military alliances are already in. To quote the relevant lines:

<!-- Better BTS AI: Changes behavior of defensive pacts (Def: 0) :
            0 : Default BTS
            1 : Defensive pacts do not cancel when a player has war declared on them
            2 : Turns defensive pacts into alliances, so they are now also offensive pacts.  Plus pacts
                do not cancel when war is declared.  Does not change name/description in game.
         -->

This is currently set to 2, and defensive pacts have been brought back a while ago in SVN (Imperialism tech).

Gaestatae in my game always seem to target my most experienced melee unit. Is that luck of the draw, bad defending unit AI, or expected behavior? I tried finding the code for the targeting abilities but couldn't tell where to find those (or if it's even RI specific code).

That's vanilla code and I don't know its exact workings.

Hmm, I think Great People Points of a city dont properly reset when a GP is born. It seems like it doesnt remove the accumulated points and only adds the new required points on top. So after a e.g. Great Scientist is born you end up with 80% already for the next GP in the same city.

Thanks, fixed!

What can be done in-game and never happens in real life is that a huge modern day city is lost to a surprise attack with barely any fighting and then it is raised to the ground, all the people and buildings lost with the click of a button. It is as if in real life a city would be surrounded and then every single building in the city would be destroyed and every single person in the city would be shot, leaving no stone unturned and all of this with absolutely no cost to the conqueror. That is what we see in the game. But luckily, there is a switch 'no city razing', making the game a lot more realistic.

That's actually an interesting observation. Cities have been "razed" to a similar extent all throughout history, but over the last several centuries it seems that this doesn't cause the site of the city to be abandoned afterwards, whereas earlier it often did.

Currently, Flanking 1 gives +15% retreat, Flanking 2 +20% retreat, Flanking 3 +25% retreat and immunity against first attacks. The retreat percentages are cumulative, so if you start from zero, the 15% bonus is only a 15% multiplicative bonus, but the 20% additive bonus from level 2 is a 24% multiplicative bonus, and the 25% additive bonus from level 3 is a 38% multiplicative bonus. Flanking 3 is interesting (first attacks can get really aggravating), but Flanking 1 is really underwhelming. What about making Flanking 1 +20% retreat and Flanking 3 +20% retreat?

Are you sure it's multiplicative? I think it's additive.

Make the arena gives its second happiness point at 15% instead of 20%

I appreciate you playing on Immortal where happiness is most scarce, but I feel for most other difficulty levels, no additional happiness sources are required.

Display the maintenance cost of a unit type in the Civilopedia, since RI already has variable maintenance cost

There is no variable maintenance cost in RI other than +x gold per turn maintenance which is already displayed. See battleships for an example.

The colors of India and South China are too similar, a tweak would be welcome

Yeah, and so are many other civs' (see Japan and Poland, for instance). The problem is there are many civs in RI and I've mostly run out of colours that are visually distinct.

Disallow units with the commando promotion from capturing cities. While I don't mind this promotion purely for raiding (capturing workers, destroying improvements), I think it is extremely problematic for balance reasons because of the potential it creates to threaten cities. A player can lightly defend inner cities, safe in the knowledge that the AI is not going to be able to take it (the AI is even too dumb to just use normal mobility units properly - a bunch of 5-3 cavalry archers walked slowly with a mangonel to attack a city that, if they had attacked immediately, I could have not reinforced in time). But if the AI saved up resources by not having many defenders in a core city with walls, players would get the ability to completely steamroll the AI by surprise-capturing such cities. Actually, if commando works as I think it does, and with how easily available it can be thanks to the Great Wonder that allows all compatible units to be trained with it, I dread to think what an army of commando units could achieve once a civilization has paved roads or railways. It becomes a very real prospect to declare war by surprise, then immediately throw 15 units on a city located 5, 6, 7 tiles from the border.

I'll think about it.

The removal of all the additional inflation code from K-mod is very much welcome. Around 500AD, I was at 104% inflation in my Germany game (3.60) - representing 292 out of my 573 spending. I'm at 51% inflation in my South-China game (SVN r4519) - representing 99 out of my 294 spending. That's a very appreciable difference. I'm also playing with a small mod-mod for city-maintenance (saving, in this specific case, 50 pre-inflation or 75 post-inflation per turn), but it's making a smaller difference than the inflation change. I still think that inflation is a poor mechanic, but I'll gladly take changes that make it smaller, and it would probably be easier to balance phasing it out progressively than all at once anyway.

You're welcome.

Is there a link somewhere about how to compile the DLL? Is Visual Studio required? I'd like to try my hand at AI tweaks.

Yes and yes: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-easiest-way-to-compile-a-new-dll.608137/ (note that I only got it to work in RI using Visual Studio 2012)

 

[AllTheLand]

Some new thoughts:
- Did you consider having more options to get negative separatism? As far as I can tell, excess health, excess happiness, etc. don't give anything. Having >95% proper culture doesn't give anything. Etc. Throughout the game, there are several factors that can increase the potency of factors causing separatism, such as the special events (bronze age collapse, migration period, etc.) or being ahead in score/military, but the only way to get "negative separatism" are a few civics and stacking military units. Something like -1 separatism per excess health and -2 separatism per excess happiness would feel logical to me. Perhaps with a cap of max +5 from health and max +10 from happiness. (EDIT: I forgot about getting spying points going in the city, that's also quite helpful, of course, but still I would like excess health/happiness to not be completely useless!)
- I have never been a big user of espionage, but the missions to sow discontent or poison the wells are massive separatism bombs. I think generally speaking that it would be nice if there was some smoothing of separatism by averaging values over several turns. Lasting rebellious sentiment would trigger separation, but a short-term issue would be less likely to lead to a civilization imploding.
- I forgot to mention it, but I have been playing my game with modded likelihoods of building destruction (I gave the values in an earlier post). I don't know if anyone was interested in reading my first report on the China game so I haven't yet bother to write another one, but I had some "lose city, gain back city" situations later on, and the mod made it a much better experience. The war caused setbacks and destruction for the city, but it didn't feel like an empty shell either. I would invite other players to try it out, while ideal values are debatable (and there should be some amount of destruction happening), I think the values I picked are at least closer to what it should be.

I set it up to work up to 14, but since 15 is apparently reachable, I'll rejig it to work with up to 19 I guess.

I reached it in the late classical age. I didn't even need mechanized farms.

Grassland (2) + Rice (+1 base, + 6 from the special south chinese farm - +7) + Special south chinese farm (1 from irrigation, 2 from techs if irrigated, 1 from tech independently of irrigation, 1 from government form - +5) + Agrarian state leader (+1). And there is one more tech I could unlock to reach +16, so the agrarian state leader is actually not required to reach +15. I don't know if there are other combinations making 15 food possible.

Yes, I can confirm there is a happiness boost from the culture slider by itself. Later in game a new city with no buildings might be too unhappy from the start to be productive - so this allows the player some flexibility.

Yeah, starting unhealthiness and unhappiness for brand new cities once a few eras into the game can be problematic so it's a good tool to have.

No, I saw it. Since I have no interest in translating myself though, I felt no need to comment on that. For my own needs, directly editing XML is quite sufficient.

Ok. I would have considered contributing some translation, but directly editing the XML is too painful, especially with the character-formatting issues.

Are you sure it's multiplicative? I think it's additive.

I guess I wasn't clear enough.

Let's take a unit with 0 base retreat probability getting the upgrades.

No upgrade : 0% chance retreat, 100% to not retreat
Flanking 1 : 15% chance retreat, 85% to not retreat (85% of previous probability to not retreat)
Flanking 2 : 35% (15 + 20) chance retreat, 65% to not retreat (76,4% of previous probability to not retreat)
Flanking 3 : 60% (35 + 25) chance retreat, 40% to not retreat (61,5% of previous probability to not retreat)

The percentage points are added together, then applied, but how valuable the promotion is for the player is determined by how much the likelihood to lose the unit is reduced. The "multiplicative" values show what would be the equivalent number if, instead of being added together and then applied, each value was applied separately. The higher the current retreat chance, the more powerful adding a fixed percentage point to it is. Going from 0% to 20% for example is rather weak, because while occasionally useful, it has a slim impact on making the decision to attack or not. Either the unit is expandable, or you are going to want a really high outright win chance to risk it. But going from 80% to 100% would mean there is no risk of directly losing the unit by attacking, so even if the outright win chance is a measly 20% or 30%, you could still happily send a very experienced and precious great general unit on the attack.

I appreciate you playing on Immortal where happiness is most scarce, but I feel for most other difficulty levels, no additional happiness sources are required.

I was mostly feeling that 20% is really high so situations where a player would be willing to pay that much to reach the bonus +1 would be rare. I have been running for a while at 15% in my game and had moments at 20% and even 25%, but the civilization gets really addicted to it. Cities grow and any attempt by the player to reduce it is met by instant discontent so the culture spending become the new normal. Realistic I guess.

Although I have also been frustrated by how poorly my religion has been spreading despite instantly building its associated great wonder, so most of my cities have been losing on the +2 happiness from religion and temple.

There is no variable maintenance cost in RI other than +x gold per turn maintenance which is already displayed. See battleships for an example.

The +x gold per turn maintenance what was I was talking about. I had checked a couple of modern units (tanks, etc.) without seeing the modifier, so I assumed it wasn't displayed. It seems it's restricted much more than I thought it would be.

I think I'll try my hand at expanding the + gold per turn maintenance system to many more units. Could that perhaps have a chance to make it to the official RI version after it has gone through some balance testing?

Yeah, and so are many other civs' (see Japan and Poland, for instance). The problem is there are many civs in RI and I've mostly run out of colours that are visually distinct.

Ok, too bad. I wish there was some kind of "fallback color" system, kind of like sports team having a secondary jersey color, but it's probably not possible or too complicated to mode something like that.

I'll think about it.

Other ideas would be:
- Remove the free commando promotion from the wonder that gives it. It's still possible to get several commando units without it, but not as easily. Although if some unit types get commando for free (is there any?), the same concern applies.
- Changes to the "empty city spawn defenders" system (which I think is a great RI innovation) so instead of applying the same % over and over, it memorizes somewhere previous spawns and so can start at much higher percentages (up to 100%) and then decrease. This would generally reduce the effectiveness of surprise-capturing cities, without affecting conventional attacks too much.

Yes and yes: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-easiest-way-to-compile-a-new-dll.608137/ (note that I only got it to work in RI using Visual Studio 2012)

Thanks for the answer. Having to get Visual Studio 2012 for it to work is a bummer, but I guess I'll have to try. I have been running RI on Linux through Wine!

 

[[Y]]

I was also thinking about Flanking. I'll add it to my units on occasion to try and get some use out of it, but it's so unfulfilling. If you win the combat, the promotion does nothing. If you lose a combat with a flanking I unit, then 85% of the time, it does nothing, too. If you lose a combat with a Flanking II unit, then 65% of the time it does nothing (incredible for a tier 2 promotion). Only with Flanking 3 does it do anything other than nothing more than 50% of the time, and even that percent only reflects the occasions on which the unit loses combat in the first place. Well, Flanking 3 does give immunity to first strikes, which is useful, but not "invest into 2 nearly useless promotions first" useful. And this is all for attacking. When defending, it again does nothing at all.

And even when a unit does retreat, it's at minimal health, which at that moment isn't any more useful than a dead unit. A dead unit at least doesn't cost maintenance. Having a unit that's only good at not dying avoid death isn't a big help: it needs to be good at dealing damage for it to be worth keeping alive. So getting retreat odds on your City Raider III unit through stack bonuses is great, but loading a unit with retreat promotions instead of strength promotions most often is on par with not giving it any promotions at all.

In just about every situation, giving the unit Combat promotions will be more effective than giving it flanking.

I'd like to propose these changes:

Flanking I - +15% Withdrawal Chance, +5% Collateral Damage.
Flanking II - +20% Withdrawal Chance, -1 Terrain Movement Cost
Flanking III - +25% Withdrawal Chance, +1 Movement Range

In this way, every Flanking promotion gives the unit some reliable utility. Level 1 is enough for some minor Collateral Damage, which complements Withdrawal Chance, since you don't need a unit to win a fight for it to deal collateral damage, and you can even send the unit in at half health. It's a minor utility on light cavalry, and helps make heavy cavalry even more effective at barreling into a stack. Level 2 allows the unit to move around more easily, allowing it to retreat to safety more easily after withdrawing. Level 3 gives it more movement range, making both surprise hits and retreating to safety more practical. This setup emphasizes the mobility of the units.

I'd remove the first strike immunity. While I like it as an ability, it's kind of at odds with the Withdrawal Chance bonus. While it can help hit units with a lot of first strikes that might effectively be immune to damage, those are usually fortified (eg in a city or fort) archers, and it doesn't make much flavor sense for cavalry to be the ones breaking that line of defense. In non-fortified battles, the first strikers are usually the last to defend against cavalry, after spearmen/pikemen/cavalry have had their chance to defend. And if the immunity helps the unit survive the fight, then the withdrawal never happens. The overlap between hitting a unit with lots of first strikes and needing your unit to survive is pretty narrow.

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I imagine this would be a lot of work, and so probably not worth it, but would it be possible to list in the pedia what units a Civ doesn't have access to? It's always a disappointment when finishing research on Archery Training and realizing the civ you're playing doesn't have longbowmen available. Or in my current case, getting it with Germany and realizing that I neither get longbowmen nor any 8-strength cavalry. Archery Training also tends to be higher priority than Military Engineering for me, so there's an additional pain point of getting there and not even having access to crossbowmen yet. Having a place where I can quickly refernce which common units aren't available to my civ would save a lot of time and wasted research.

 

[AllTheLand]

I was also thinking about Flanking. I'll add it to my units on occasion to try and get some use out of it, but it's so unfulfilling. If you win the combat, the promotion does nothing. If you lose a combat with a flanking I unit, then 85% of the time, it does nothing, too. If you lose a combat with a Flanking II unit, then 65% of the time it does nothing (incredible for a tier 2 promotion). Only with Flanking 3 does it do anything other than nothing more than 50% of the time, and even that percent only reflects the occasions on which the unit loses combat in the first place. Well, Flanking 3 does give immunity to first strikes, which is useful, but not "invest into 2 nearly useless promotions first" useful. And this is all for attacking. When defending, it again does nothing at all.

Having faced an entrenched unit on a hill that had 4-7 first attacks making it nearly impossible to take a city, I would disagree on the usefulness of immunity to first strikes. It can be really nice in some situations. Although cavalry units are generally not particularly good at fighting in cities, so it's far from the unit where it would be the most powerful, and the odds to lose outright a unit painfully upgraded to Flanking 3 would make it particularly unappealing. I agree with your characterization of Flanking 1 and 2 however.

I only see Flanking 3 as really nice if the unit is linked with a great general to get an additional +30% retreat. 90% retreat chances (95% with the tradition) means the great general unit can attack often to get experience.

And even when a unit does retreat, it's at minimal health, which at that moment isn't any more useful than a dead unit. A dead unit at least doesn't cost maintenance. Having a unit that's only good at not dying avoid death isn't a big help: it needs to be good at dealing damage for it to be worth keeping alive.

Very well said.

So getting retreat odds on your City Raider III unit through stack bonuses is great, but loading a unit with retreat promotions instead of strength promotions most often is on par with not giving it any promotions at all.

In just about every situation, giving the unit Combat promotions will be more effective than giving it flanking.

That's also my impression, the basic combat line (especially buffed as in RI) is just better. It is useful in defensive situations, when winning a fight it helps to take less damage doing so, when losing a fight it helps to inflict more damage doing so, and the odds of (win + retreat) with Combat 1 are usually not noticeably worse than with Flanking 1... But with much more win.

I'd like to propose these changes:

Flanking I - +15% Withdrawal Chance, +5% Collateral Damage.
Flanking II - +20% Withdrawal Chance, -1 Terrain Movement Cost
Flanking III - +25% Withdrawal Chance, +1 Movement Range

I think some boost to collateral damage would make sense for flanking promotions, I like the idea.

I still think that Flanking 1 should give +20% withdrawal chance and Flanking 3 another 20% instead of 15%/25%, as retreat % chance are already intrinsically better the higher the previous retreat % chance. I would even go as far as making it 25/20/15 (so 25/45/60 total) - which would make the multiplicative factors for the "probability to die" 0.75, 0.7333 and 0.7272.

Movement range and terrain movement cost is too powerful to give away there, and some units could get way too much movement range if they had this possible additional +1.

I'd remove the first strike immunity. While I like it as an ability, it's kind of at odds with the Withdrawal Chance bonus. While it can help hit units with a lot of first strikes that might effectively be immune to damage, those are usually fortified (eg in a city or fort) archers, and it doesn't make much flavor sense for cavalry to be the ones breaking that line of defense.

I would agree here.

Or in my current case, getting it with Germany and realizing that I neither get longbowmen nor any 8-strength cavalry.

You mean the archer training tech is sometimes useful?

I avoided it in my game with Germany because it didn't give me any useful unit, and in my South China game it's the same thing, it doesn't unlock anything of worth... Better to always check what a tech will give you in the tech tree before researching it!

 

[[Y]]

Having faced an entrenched unit on a hill that had 4-7 first attacks making it nearly impossible to take a city, I would disagree on the usefulness of immunity to first strikes. It can be really nice in some situations. Although cavalry units are generally not particularly good at fighting in cities, so it's far from the unit where it would be the most powerful, and the odds to lose outright a unit painfully upgraded to Flanking 3 would make it particularly unappealing. I agree with your characterization of Flanking 1 and 2 however.

Immunity to first strikes is amazing! I just think it goes to waste on a cavalry unit, from both a tactical position and a flavor position. If archers defended against cavalry in the field more often it would make sense, but the current defense incentives don't usually make that a thing (and even when they are a thing, the cavalry is usually strong enough to not need the immunity).

I still think that Flanking 1 should give +20% withdrawal chance and Flanking 3 another 20% instead of 15%/25%, as retreat % chance are already intrinsically better the higher the previous retreat % chance. I would even go as far as making it 25/20/15 (so 25/45/60 total) - which would make the multiplicative factors for the "probability to die" 0.75, 0.7333 and 0.7272.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. A unit with Flanking I and Flanking II has a 35% chance to retreat, unless the implementation is very unclear.

Movement range and terrain movement cost is too powerful to give away there, and some units could get way too much movement range if they had this possible additional +1.

They already have access to promotions with these benefits, this just puts them in a place where they actually benefit from working towards them.

You mean the archer training tech is sometimes useful?

I avoided it in my game with Germany because it didn't give me any useful unit, and in my South China game it's the same thing, it doesn't unlock anything of worth... Better to always check what a tech will give you in the tech tree before researching it!

Archery Training is incredibly useful for civs with Longbowmen, which are good both on the defense and the offense. It's an archery unit with strength on par to some of the other units of the age (8, just like the medieval cavalry and the man at arms), while other archers are usually behind in strength, such as the 3 strength archer being behind the 4-strength spearmen, skirmishers, and chariots, and the 4 strength archer being behind the 5-strength axemen and light cavalry. Even crossbowmen are only strength 6 to the average 8. Longbowmen are just a solid unit all around.

The problem is when you're used to playing specific civs (I play Carthage more than any other) and run on autopilot. It's hard to juggle the specific unit weaknesses of so many civs in memory.

 

[AllTheLand]

Immunity to first strikes is amazing! I just think it goes to waste on a cavalry unit, from both a tactical position and a flavor position. If archers defended against cavalry in the field more often it would make sense, but the current defense incentives don't usually make that a thing (and even when they are a thing, the cavalry is usually strong enough to not need the immunity).

I can agree with this!

I'm not sure what you mean by this. A unit with Flanking I and Flanking II has a 35% chance to retreat, unless the implementation is very unclear.

I didn't say otherwise. I tried explaining my ideas around flanking in a couple different ways in my previous posts, but it seems I didn't do a good job to get my entire point across. I'm myself not sure what part appears unclear.

So a general overview:
- How things work: Each promotion gives some percentage points of retreat. All the different values are added together, so for example Flanking 1 (15%) and Flanking 2 (20%) give together 15% + 20% = 35%. Then they are applied.
- Adding the values together before applying their effect significantly changes how valuable they are compared to the approach of applying each factor separately (which is not used by Civ4)
- When things have a final effect that's applied in percents, this additive approach makes the bonuses weaker for things that increase (for example, combat strength - applying two 50% bonuses additively gives +100% strength, but multiplicatively (applying one 50%, then the other 50% on the result of the previous operation) it would give +125%), but stronger for things that are reduced (for example, retreating - 50% then 50% would give 100% retreat additively instead of 75%)
- The point of a retreat chance is to reduce the odds of a unit dying. Therefore, the primary measure is how often the unit dies nonetheless. If the unit has retreat chances but still dies, it's a failure.
- Perhaps a good way to represent this is to flip the representation from "odds to die" into "average expected number of fights until death". Let's assume a simple 50% chance to win to make calculations simple. With 0% retreat, the average expected number of fights until death is 2 : 1 + 0,5 + 0,25 (= 0,5*0,5) + 0,125... With 20% retreat chances, so 50% chance to win, 10% to retreat, 40% to die in our example, you instead get : 1 + 0,6 + 0,36... This gives an "average expected number of fights until death" of 2.5. Now let's take 40% retreat chances instead : 1 + 0,7 + 0,49... the "average number of fights until death" is now 3.33. The first "20% retreat chances" is only worth 0.5 additional fights until death (with a base 50% win/lose probability) ; while the second one is worth 0.833 additional fights until death. Notice also that the first 20% retreat increased by 25% the expected number of fights, but the second 20% increased the expected number of fights by 33% (3.33/2.5 = 1.33) Which is why I keep saying that retreat percentage points are worth more and more depending on the previous retreat probability. Computing the multiplicative probabilities that are equivalent to the additive probability we have in game (which works in so far as you must get flanking 1 before flanking 2, etc.) was simply an helpful tool to highlight this difference.

If we again assume 50% chance to win the fight to start with, we have the following:

• No promotion: 2 fights until death on average
• Flanking I: ~2.35 fights until death on average
• Flanking II (total effect including Flanking I that's a requirement): ~3.08 fights until death on average
• Flanking III (total effect again): 5 fights until death on average

Which I think is the best demonstration I have made until now on why Flanking I really, really sucks.

For comparison the suggested 25/20/15 arrangement produces this:

• No promotion: still 2 fights until death on average
• Flanking I: ~2.67 fights until death on average
• Flanking II: ~3.64 fights until death on average
• Flanking III: again 5 fights until death on average

They already have access to promotions with these benefits, this just puts them in a place where they actually benefit from working towards them.

I know, but you have to pay an entire promotion to get these benefits. Getting that benefit, and 20% retreat probability on top is very strong, and I'm also concerned about the possibility of adding these promotions on top of one another. A great general unit could potentially get +3 movement points for 6 movement points total if you add everything up.

The problem is when you're used to playing specific civs (I play Carthage more than any other) and run on autopilot.

I'm too new to RI to play on autopilot.

I'm starting to get some idea for the ancient eras, but I got a grand total of one renaissance era tech in all my games to date.

 

[AllTheLand]

More observations:
- I had started a quick game to check out a tech tree, and then when reloading my normal game, the option to NOT apply the "too early" tech penalty disappeared - the tech I was supposed to research in 17 turns suddenly had a +200% penalty and needed 49 turns. Which I think wasn't even correct for the date I was at, as the Middle Age techs don't have tech penalty in 500+ AD. Restarting the game entirely and reloading the save thankfully made things work as expected again.
- The percent bonus from open border tech trading should probably depend to some degree on map size or civilization number? Does it already? I'm seeing +40% for the first civ and then +20% for each subsequent civ with open borders that know the tech.
- I sometimes get a bug where the unit that I'm previewed to fight in the combat odds simulation is not the unit I actually end up fighting. Is a save needed to check the issue? Actually, I think I know where it comes from: bonuses that are linked to a specific tiles (support bonuses, logistics penalty, but strongest by far fortification-related bonuses).

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

- Did you consider having more options to get negative separatism? As far as I can tell, excess health, excess happiness, etc. don't give anything. Having >95% proper culture doesn't give anything. Etc. Throughout the game, there are several factors that can increase the potency of factors causing separatism, such as the special events (bronze age collapse, migration period, etc.) or being ahead in score/military, but the only way to get "negative separatism" are a few civics and stacking military units. Something like -1 separatism per excess health and -2 separatism per excess happiness would feel logical to me. Perhaps with a cap of max +5 from health and max +10 from happiness. (EDIT: I forgot about getting spying points going in the city, that's also quite helpful, of course, but still I would like excess health/happiness to not be completely useless!)

The short answer is I didn't because I don't actively support the revolution component. I fix bugs in it, but it's not something I want to actively develop further.

- I have never been a big user of espionage, but the missions to sow discontent or poison the wells are massive separatism bombs. I think generally speaking that it would be nice if there was some smoothing of separatism by averaging values over several turns. Lasting rebellious sentiment would trigger separation, but a short-term issue would be less likely to lead to a civilization imploding.

That's more or less a total rewrite of the component.

- I forgot to mention it, but I have been playing my game with modded likelihoods of building destruction (I gave the values in an earlier post). I don't know if anyone was interested in reading my first report on the China game so I haven't yet bother to write another one, but I had some "lose city, gain back city" situations later on, and the mod made it a much better experience. The war caused setbacks and destruction for the city, but it didn't feel like an empty shell either. I would invite other players to try it out, while ideal values are debatable (and there should be some amount of destruction happening), I think the values I picked are at least closer to what it should be.

I am open to implementing those if you share; be sure to merge into the latest SVN version though.

Ok. I would have considered contributing some translation, but directly editing the XML is too painful, especially with the character-formatting issues.

Quite frankly I'd rather not have more translations bundled with the mod, as that means me being responsible for maintaining them going forward, which is what happened to the German translation. I know that a Russian translation exists somewhere without any involvement from me at any point in time, for example (and I think a Chinese and a Korean too), and I'm quite satisfied with this status quo.

The percentage points are added together, then applied, but how valuable the promotion is for the player is determined by how much the likelihood to lose the unit is reduced. The "multiplicative" values show what would be the equivalent number if, instead of being added together and then applied, each value was applied separately. The higher the current retreat chance, the more powerful adding a fixed percentage point to it is. Going from 0% to 20% for example is rather weak, because while occasionally useful, it has a slim impact on making the decision to attack or not. Either the unit is expandable, or you are going to want a really high outright win chance to risk it. But going from 80% to 100% would mean there is no risk of directly losing the unit by attacking, so even if the outright win chance is a measly 20% or 30%, you could still happily send a very experienced and precious great general unit on the attack.

One small note - retreat chance is capped at 80 or 85%. I know these last percentage points would have had the greatest utility, but they're simply not there.

I was mostly feeling that 20% is really high so situations where a player would be willing to pay that much to reach the bonus +1 would be rare. I have been running for a while at 15% in my game and had moments at 20% and even 25%, but the civilization gets really addicted to it. Cities grow and any attempt by the player to reduce it is met by instant discontent so the culture spending become the new normal. Realistic I guess.

Indeed, I always considered the culture from Arenas a "putting out the fires" mode, and it is supposed to hurt. Unless of course you're actually trying to maximise culture and it is just a pleasant side effect.

The +x gold per turn maintenance what was I was talking about. I had checked a couple of modern units (tanks, etc.) without seeing the modifier, so I assumed it wasn't displayed. It seems it's restricted much more than I thought it would be.

Yeah, it isn't used too much, just for capital ships and advanced planes IIRC, maybe tanks too.

I think I'll try my hand at expanding the + gold per turn maintenance system to many more units. Could that perhaps have a chance to make it to the official RI version after it has gone through some balance testing?

I'm not quite sure escalating upkeep costs of particular units is good design. You had a unit cost 1 gold per turn, then you upgrade and suddenly it costs twice as much, without a leap in utility that would warrant the +100% cost increase. The system is simply not granular enough to have the increases in line with increasing utility, unless of course it is accompanied by much steeper power creep (which is not the worst idea if handled carefully and with appropriate production costs increase, but it would be quite a monumental undertaking).

Ok, too bad. I wish there was some kind of "fallback color" system, kind of like sports team having a secondary jersey color, but it's probably not possible or too complicated to mode something like that.

Unfortunately not, or rather not to the extent - if there are two exact colours in play, the second civ will fall back to something else (random I think). Oh what I'd give for two-colour borders instead, that would instantly solve all clashing colour issues...

- Remove the free commando promotion from the wonder that gives it. It's still possible to get several commando units without it, but not as easily. Although if some unit types get commando for free (is there any?), the same concern applies.

Sounds fair, I was considering a different effect for Alamut anyway.

In just about every situation, giving the unit Combat promotions will be more effective than giving it flanking.

Interesting; I actually have a persistent use case for flanking myself. For assaulting tough cities (after bringing down defenses of course) with lots of first strike defenders, I will attack with several cavalry units first, as dealing collateral damage happens regardless of winning the combat (that I wouldn't expect them to win anyway). Slapping retreat chances on those units (that have some free XP for that anyway usually) means I get to rebuild fewer of them after the assault. In short, it's a useful promo if you're not expecting to win the combat anyway.

I imagine this would be a lot of work, and so probably not worth it, but would it be possible to list in the pedia what units a Civ doesn't have access to? It's always a disappointment when finishing research on Archery Training and realizing the civ you're playing doesn't have longbowmen available. Or in my current case, getting it with Germany and realizing that I neither get longbowmen nor any 8-strength cavalry. Archery Training also tends to be higher priority than Military Engineering for me, so there's an additional pain point of getting there and not even having access to crossbowmen yet. Having a place where I can quickly refernce which common units aren't available to my civ would save a lot of time and wasted research.

Might not be all that hard to actually compile such a list, but no promises, as the pedia was coded by a person with far more understanding of python use in interfaces than me, so it depends on my ability to figure it out.

I think some boost to collateral damage would make sense for flanking promotions, I like the idea.

A technical limitation: that would automatically restrict these promotions to units capable of doing the collateral damage, which is not all units we'd like to be able to retreat.

I had started a quick game to check out a tech tree, and then when reloading my normal game, the option to NOT apply the "too early" tech penalty disappeared - the tech I was supposed to research in 17 turns suddenly had a +200% penalty and needed 49 turns. Which I think wasn't even correct for the date I was at, as the Middle Age techs don't have tech penalty in 500+ AD. Restarting the game entirely and reloading the save thankfully made things work as expected again.

Reloading the game between saves from different games (especially with significant differences in options) is generally not recommended; you're lucky you didn't crash outright.

The percent bonus from open border tech trading should probably depend to some degree on map size or civilization number? Does it already? I'm seeing +40% for the first civ and then +20% for each subsequent civ with open borders that know the tech.

It's flat currently; as I said before, I'd like for this mechanic to be more flexible and involved, so it might be a part of the changes.

I sometimes get a bug where the unit that I'm previewed to fight in the combat odds simulation is not the unit I actually end up fighting. Is a save needed to check the issue? Actually, I think I know where it comes from: bonuses that are linked to a specific tiles (support bonuses, logistics penalty, but strongest by far fortification-related bonuses).

Is it when you're checking the chances when not standing on the tile you're going to attack from? If yes, it's more or less a "won't fix", annoying as it might be, as we're not calculating various aid bonuses and such until you actually get to the tile.

 

[JDCP]

Hello Walter I have been playing this mod and its amazing, this is been giving me hours and hours of fun man. I was thinking about asking you what were the best and most varied maps to play (on large sizes)?? I have been playing on mongoose but the new world not having horses kinda of bothers me, as I like to play with 30-something opponents and having half of the map with no damn horses sucks... everyone deserves a cavalry!

Aside of that, this mod has great artistic choices, specially for the units and constructions. Do you mind if you could tell me the name of the track that sounds on the Hanseatic League wonder? its pretty good.

I also had a nice idea, I was wondering if you or anyone else who worked on this mod ever thought about making units that could only move on rails (something like a gustav gun) idk, its a cool idea I came up with and while I know very well nobody is working anymore on updating this mod, I still wonder if anyone came up with the same idea as me. I really love building special siege units like Helepolis and imagining how a gigantic cannon moving trough the rails at great speed would be amazing to have.

 

[RezerCuid]

I think that the percentage bonus to learning technology from open borders should be reduced on large and huge maps of the world, and on the huge world scenario. I had a +280% bonus to learning technology, it's too much. And the Russian horse Archer (5power) looks like a horse archer of the late Middle Ages, and does not look close to the ancient style.