Realism Invictus

[shkitur1]

Some feedback about last version 3.71b

two options in menu "switch leaders" and "no ahead of time tech cost adjustment" always work. Even when they turned off in menu

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

two options in menu "switch leaders" and "no ahead of time tech cost adjustment" always work. Even when they turned off in menu

Map scenarios will always offer you to switch leaders at start, regardless of that option - but not once per era if it is off.

To display the age tech adjustment icon, you have to start researching something first.

 

[shkitur1]

To display the age tech adjustment icon, you have to start researching something first.

I start researching tech and icon apear, but the cost of tech from other age did not increased

 

[shkitur1]

1. I also want to point out that gulyaj gorod is siege type unit and can be promoted to city attack\defense, guerilla and siege engeniering. And having this promotion you can upgrade it to cuirassier. So you receive cavalry unit with city, hill defense attack promotions that are not available to charge cavalry type. + 1 movement point and +100% experience from battle if you have doctrine for siege

2. I don’t know if it was planned this way, but the time to build a road in the forest is longer than the time to cut down the forest and build a road, which looks strange. 1 worker on epic speed needs 57 turns to build road in forest, while to chop forest on tile needs 38 turn + 15 turn build road = 53 turns. Although it seems that building a road in the forest should be faster than cutting down the entire forest and building the same road

 

[RezerCuid]

It feels like no one cares about my graphic redesign.

 

[PKSRoman]

It feels like no one cares about my graphic redesign.

we appreciate your effort but because we don't do it ourselves we just don't comment on it (at least in my case)

 

[JDCP]

Walter have you ever thought about making unique air units for certain civs? I don't have any ideas regarding that, just a thought because I saw the Fokker Dr.1 and was thinking ''damn, this would look really cool in red''

I would be very surprised if you said ''actually old RI had some''

Also I just had an idea while thinking of planes, but it's kinda useless, to be honest is more of a curiosity... did you ever thought about adding seaplanes to scout coasts? some water units already do this task but I was wondering if we could just send some planes specialized for this kind of ''sea scouting mission'', with a far range and only capable of performing on ocean tiles.

It feels like no one cares about my graphic redesign.

I kind of do because when you post and I'm online I take a look at it, but I just don't like it enough and neither do I feel like criticizing something I barely know about, such is unit modelling. If you really want so much a word about it then I could provide you an opinion, but you won't like it.

If I finally understood well how to kit bash stuff, make my own assets and code unit graphics in the game I would join the conversation with you, but sadly I don't think I'll achieve that for now, I barely got time to play I'm still struggling learning Nifskope and Blender, and it's not really hard in the sense of being almost impossible to get into, But I need more time to develop my skills which are literally non-existent.

I've got many ideas in my head for things I want to model, but I'm still on that phase where you can't even make a baseball... lol.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

1. I also want to point out that gulyaj gorod is siege type unit and can be promoted to city attack\defense, guerilla and siege engeniering. And having this promotion you can upgrade it to cuirassier. So you receive cavalry unit with city, hill defense attack promotions that are not available to charge cavalry type. + 1 movement point and +100% experience from battle if you have doctrine for siege

That can be done much earlier with Persians - their Immortals (melee infantry) upgrade to a cavalry unit as well.

2. I don’t know if it was planned this way, but the time to build a road in the forest is longer than the time to cut down the forest and build a road, which looks strange. 1 worker on epic speed needs 57 turns to build road in forest, while to chop forest on tile needs 38 turn + 15 turn build road = 53 turns. Although it seems that building a road in the forest should be faster than cutting down the entire forest and building the same road

It is intentional, but I agree that it's a bit of an overkill. Should probably be toned down a bit.

Walter have you ever thought about making unique air units for certain civs? I don't have any ideas regarding that, just a thought because I saw the Fokker Dr.1 and was thinking ''damn, this would look really cool in red''

I would be very surprised if you said ''actually old RI had some''

Well, there are a couple of aerial world units, so there's that. Unique air units kind of feel not impactful enough to me - not nearly as impactful as a land unit would be.

Also I just had an idea while thinking of planes, but it's kinda useless, to be honest is more of a curiosity... did you ever thought about adding seaplanes to scout coasts? some water units already do this task but I was wondering if we could just send some planes specialized for this kind of ''sea scouting mission'', with a far range and only capable of performing on ocean tiles.

Theoretically there are even models for that, but I don't see a real gameplay niche for them. I feel that would be adding stuff for the sake of adding stuff.

 

[JDCP]

That can be done much earlier with Persians - their Immortals (melee infantry) upgrade to a cavalry unit as well.

And in the base game, you could get melee units with guerilla if you played as the celts by upgrading their UU, yeah the game is full of this kind of stuff which honestly I think it's cool. Same way you could turn a crossbowman into a machinegun with special promotions the later can't have (and that greatly improve their capabilities)

Well, there are a couple of aerial world units, so there's that. Unique air units kind of feel not impactful enough to me - not nearly as impactful as a land unit would be.

Yeah world units are one of the coolest things about RI, although I would love if more civs could build them, not many, just a bit more like 2 or 3... imagine a war between 2 armies with superheavy tanks... RAD

I've been thinking that a nice first project for modelling would be new flavor units for Zeppelins, can't be so hard to do right? And I'm sure you'll like it. I'm still learning how to do this but it's one of the first things I want to do. Thinking of more complex things than just retextures and involving new meshes or modificatiosn to the already existing model from BTS.

Hopefully one day we will see a Russian flavor for the SR-71... one day

I feel that would be adding stuff for the sake of adding stuff.

Yeah sadly most of my ideas tend to follow this trend, not anything groundbreaking... just cute gimmicks. But I can see them having a spot on a scenario like landing barges.

Another idea I had was changing unit graphics with promotions, like giving different camos and equipment for promotions based on terrain (example: desert combat gives your regular infantry/marine short pants or whatever) I believe this could be very fun to see (like how HOI4 units change graphics with climate), but also very time consuming and at the end of the day it's just like you said, too niche to be worth it... maybe even having a negative impact on performance.

Or unlocking new ''equipment'' for units in the form of promotions, that represent a technological advancement within a specifical timeframe on which a type of unit was present but isn't enough to require a completely new unit to be made (for example, Japanese riflemen using khaki uniforms in the ruso japanese war contrary to their previously stablished blue or white uniforms). But once again, it's either not mechanically attractive enough or fits more a scenario than a fully fledged playtrough (following the previous example, something like the ruso japanese war scenario) or both.

 

[RamsesII]

How does Schizo affect unit strength?
What is it?
Ramsess, why does an elephant have 6 powers instead of 8?

Hi RezerCuid, a war elephaant has a strength of 8. But when the game calculates the relative power ratio between your civilization and each other (the menu which appears if you click on that icon in the bottom-right of the GUI), it apparently uses a different "power level" for each unit. In that power level scale, an elephant has a power of 6; [Y] has indicated power levels of some other units which indeed do not necessarily align with their strength score.

Or at least, that is my understanding.

 

[Ahnarras]

Quick comment on the latest SVN :

Weapon Smithing now requires Trade, as was discussed earlier. That's good !
Also, Shipbuilding requires Navigation, and that's make sense obviously.

But !

Weapon Smithing is before Shipbduiling.
And Trade is after Navigation.

Not a huge problem obviously, just thought I would mention it for the sake of consistency.

 

[RezerCuid]

The archers have a power of 2, why is there a power of 3?
I thought that now these 2 parameters would be the same.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Quick comment on the latest SVN :

Weapon Smithing now requires Trade, as was discussed earlier. That's good !
Also, Shipbuilding requires Navigation, and that's make sense obviously.

But !

Weapon Smithing is before Shipbduiling.
And Trade is after Navigation.

Yeah, I even had this mental note while implementing, but forgot to remove anyway

The archers have a power of 2, why is there a power of 3?
I thought that now these 2 parameters would be the same.

Nah, power represents utility beyond just strength. A str 2 archer is much more useful in most scenarios than a str 2 warrior (who has power 2). A national unit will usually have a power rating at least double its strength now, for instance, to reflect its strong bonuses, its starting promos, its aid/detriment etc. A stack of 4 warbands is not nearly as strong as a stack of 2 spearmen and 2 composite bowmen, and power reflects that.

 

[Ahnarras]

Just noticed that the ressources icons on the map seems to be smaller than before when toggled on.
Perhaps I'm hallucinating, but if it was indeed changed, let me say that I really like it ! Now they don't "block" the tile or the name of nearby cities when you are a bit zoomed in

 

[LanceV]

Just finished my first game with 3.7 and once again I am impressed by the replayabilty value of this mod. And not even just because of the changes that this latest version made, but because of the complexity which allows many different viable strategies for the Player as well as for the AI.
This game was the first time for me that the AI actually get to start a spacecraft. Ususally by the end of the game I was so so far ahead, that the AIs were not even close to build Apollo Project. Also this time I was a bit ahead, so the AI stopped building the space craft and instead declared war, which became nuclear at some point. Great fun.

I did not encounter any major problems in this playthorugh. The game seems to be in an excellent state bug-wise.

*I noticed a small display error: in the "view raw production" tab (upper left of the city screen) the production from "GP/specialists" does not include building bonuses (only civic bonuses). A craftsman for example is displayed as providing only +1 production (+3 with labor union/social guarantees) despite the city having a machinetools factory, sawmill and electric substation (which should give +4 production to craftmen).

*It would be nice if the remaining time on the counter espionage mission would be displayed somewhere.

*Some balance comments, although they are probably very subjective and dependent on playstyle:

**I still think that Protectionism is way to strong. This game I was ahead in tech pretty early, due to playing as russia. This meant that everybody wanted to have open borders. I was in third place pointwise, with the two leading civs having considerably larger empires. One would assume that this is the ideal situation for free market. It turned out, however, that free market generated only about +15% more commerce than protectionism. The reason is of course, that Protectionism multiplies trade route revenue by 2, free market only by 1.5.
This becomes even worse if you dont get open borders with everyone (i.e. if you are not ahead in tech), or when your empire gets larger, so that trade routes have to be filled with domestic ones anyways.
On the other hand the open borders give +40% research to my opponents. Also Protectionism generates more gold from merchants and craftmen. So even in the ideal situation Free Market with open borders is at best equal to Protectionism economywise.
On top of that Protectionism gets +1Prod for craftmen and less war weariness than Free Market.

**The Transoxianian unique improvement stands out, since in the later game it is actually worse than the standard plantation, despite that it takes time to develop fully. It is available earlier and its final form gets more from the resource, but doesnt profit from agronomy station. In the mid game it is strong, due to the additional free specialist, but this is lost once the cavanserei becomes obsolete.
Other unique improvements also become obsolete, but in these cases there is a standard improvement that is superior (like all unique farms, which are superseded by mechanical farms). Why not let the silkroad town keep the free specialist? There are not that many resources that can take this improvement anyways.

**There is a similar situation for the German unique building. It gets an additional free craftman (+slot), but loses 3 base production of the building, and one production per engineer. Especially in late game (when everybody has labor union with unlimited engineers) there are situations where this is worse than the standard machinetools factory. Considering that this is also a very late unqiue building, why not let it keep the full engineer bonus (also seems more accurate historically)?

**The Arabian unique building gives additional food to farms and a fresh water source. When it becomes obsolete the farms lose that bonus, which is ok, since mechanical farms are better anyways. But you also lose the freshwater source, which can cripple your town. Why not let Arabia keep the fresh water?

Of course, all there things are relatively irrelevant, but they seem odd to me.

 

[RezerCuid]

<iAsset>2</iAsset>
What does it mean?
The swordsmen(6) of Armenia and Rome have <iAsset>3</iAsset> , and all the others have <iAsset>2</iAsset>

 

[giorgio1234]

From Pedia, desert adjacent to river gives +1

Scrub gives +1 , adjacent to river +1 +1

So the total of desert with scrub adjacent to river should be: 1, 1, 2
But in the map only 1, 1, 1 are shown:

Furthermore, the construction tooltips seem missing the 1, 1 loss (that will be there) from the removal of the scrub.

Is there something I'm not considering?

 

[AspiringScholar]

The +1 from adjacency to a river is annulled in the case of forests in vanilla, which I am assuming must apply to scrubs and savannahs in RI's case. Maybe the text in the Pedia is an artefact and incorrect? Not sure what's going on with the , however.

 

[[Y]]

<iAsset>2</iAsset>
What does it mean?
The swordsmen(6) of Armenia and Rome have <iAsset>3</iAsset> , and all the others have <iAsset>2</iAsset>

That's a good question. But there are many places to find the answer. Did you try searching the internet first for an answer?

---

The latest SVN updates looks so promising! Thanks for taking the time to make all those changes, Walter. I can't wait to try it out. And while I haven't played it yet, I did take the time to add unit power levels to the pedia, so that I can more easily see how they changed (typical "why spend 15 minutes looking through file when I can spend 2 hours programming something" scenario).

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Always interesting to hear other people's experiences. In my games the AI loves making stacks of skirmishers and light cavalry and sending them to conquer cities. I like them as counter units/scouting/field control, necessary and practical support units, but the AI tends to see them as their primary military body.

This got me thinking, and in a recent SVN upload I explicitly forbade the use of ATTACK_CITY AI to recon units (and will likely do the same for light cavalry). They still can be present in stacks afterwards, but AI will not use them as the bulk of such stacks.

I start researching tech and icon apear, but the cost of tech from other age did not increased

I found and fixed the issue. The starting era failed to apply properly (all eras after the initial ones worked ok, so the gameplay impact was limited to rushing classical techs before 2000 BCE).

Another idea I had was changing unit graphics with promotions, like giving different camos and equipment for promotions based on terrain (example: desert combat gives your regular infantry/marine short pants or whatever) I believe this could be very fun to see (like how HOI4 units change graphics with climate), but also very time consuming and at the end of the day it's just like you said, too niche to be worth it... maybe even having a negative impact on performance.

Or unlocking new ''equipment'' for units in the form of promotions, that represent a technological advancement within a specifical timeframe on which a type of unit was present but isn't enough to require a completely new unit to be made (for example, Japanese riflemen using khaki uniforms in the ruso japanese war contrary to their previously stablished blue or white uniforms). But once again, it's either not mechanically attractive enough or fits more a scenario than a fully fledged playtrough (following the previous example, something like the ruso japanese war scenario) or both.

This can technically be done without any additional coding as this functionality is in core BtS, but there are some practical concerns:

1) Since we can't swap out textures on the fly, each of those would functionally be a copy of the whole unit (unless we're swapping out a gun or doing something similarly local), which would balloon both the mod size and, more importantly, its memory footprint.
2) It would look wrong to only have it on small subset of units, and implementing it throughout would be a massive undertaking, as it does require quite a bit of effort in each individual case.

It's a good idea that, unfortunately, works best on a much smaller scale. If I were making a mod centred on a specific region / war / era, this would definitely make it in - but that would have been something that has to be a part of the initial design plan.

I've been thinking that a nice first project for modelling would be new flavor units for Zeppelins, can't be so hard to do right? And I'm sure you'll like it. I'm still learning how to do this but it's one of the first things I want to do. Thinking of more complex things than just retextures and involving new meshes or modificatiosn to the already existing model from BTS.

Hopefully one day we will see a Russian flavor for the SR-71... one day

Sure, go ahead. Since I'm a long-timer here, I saw (and sometimes advised) many who started from nothing and became quite accomplished unit makers. It takes quite a lot of effort to get there (especially, as experience shows, with texture quality), but it's not impossible at all.

On Russian SR-71 counterpart, there was (or rather mostly wasn't, but at least the project was there) this thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsybin_RSR Might be a cool-looking bird to have, with rather distinctively Soviet aesthetic, almost a direct visual counterpart to SR-71:

Just noticed that the ressources icons on the map seems to be smaller than before when toggled on.
Perhaps I'm hallucinating, but if it was indeed changed, let me say that I really like it ! Now they don't "block" the tile or the name of nearby cities when you are a bit zoomed in

This means they are now working as intended for you, as they did for the lucky ones for a couple of years now. Thanks for confirming the fix is working!

Just finished my first game with 3.7 and once again I am impressed by the replayabilty value of this mod. And not even just because of the changes that this latest version made, but because of the complexity which allows many different viable strategies for the Player as well as for the AI.

Welcome and thank you for sharing your impressions. A fresh look is always valuable.

*I noticed a small display error: in the "view raw production" tab (upper left of the city screen) the production from "GP/specialists" does not include building bonuses (only civic bonuses). A craftsman for example is displayed as providing only +1 production (+3 with labor union/social guarantees) despite the city having a machinetools factory, sawmill and electric substation (which should give +4 production to craftmen).

This should be relatively easy to fix.

*It would be nice if the remaining time on the counter espionage mission would be displayed somewhere.

I'll keep this one in mind too, a reasonable suggestion.

**I still think that Protectionism is way to strong. This game I was ahead in tech pretty early, due to playing as russia. This meant that everybody wanted to have open borders. I was in third place pointwise, with the two leading civs having considerably larger empires. One would assume that this is the ideal situation for free market. It turned out, however, that free market generated only about +15% more commerce than protectionism. The reason is of course, that Protectionism multiplies trade route revenue by 2, free market only by 1.5.
This becomes even worse if you dont get open borders with everyone (i.e. if you are not ahead in tech), or when your empire gets larger, so that trade routes have to be filled with domestic ones anyways.
On the other hand the open borders give +40% research to my opponents. Also Protectionism generates more gold from merchants and craftmen. So even in the ideal situation Free Market with open borders is at best equal to Protectionism economywise.
On top of that Protectionism gets +1Prod for craftmen and less war weariness than Free Market.

That's one way of thinking about it - but you might be actually interested in having open borders with your friends / enemies of your enemies to feed them tech, or to mutually boost one another if you're roughly equal. Tech from open borders is not a zero-sum game. If most of your cities are coastal, foreign trade routes will be more lucrative for you (customs houses), which may further be affected from some civ-specific buildings (f.e. Dravidian Payanam)

**The Transoxianian unique improvement stands out, since in the later game it is actually worse than the standard plantation, despite that it takes time to develop fully. It is available earlier and its final form gets more from the resource, but doesnt profit from agronomy station. In the mid game it is strong, due to the additional free specialist, but this is lost once the cavanserei becomes obsolete.
Other unique improvements also become obsolete, but in these cases there is a standard improvement that is superior (like all unique farms, which are superseded by mechanical farms). Why not let the silkroad town keep the free specialist? There are not that many resources that can take this improvement anyways.

This is thematically intentional as it depicts the decline of the Silk Road. I know that losing a nice bonus is sad, but all in all, there are many cases like this and some much more severe - Mongol civ basically revolves around agonizing on when to switch out of Nomadism and lose the sweet bonuses.

**There is a similar situation for the German unique building. It gets an additional free craftman (+slot), but loses 3 base production of the building, and one production per engineer. Especially in late game (when everybody has labor union with unlimited engineers) there are situations where this is worse than the standard machinetools factory. Considering that this is also a very late unqiue building, why not let it keep the full engineer bonus (also seems more accurate historically)?

This is an oversight; I recently buffed the engineer bonus of the base building but not this one. As for the base production, this is brought up so often I will give it the base production as well - at this point in game, a free craftsman can't be less valuable than 3 production, but since it gets reported so often, I will just readd it.

**The Arabian unique building gives additional food to farms and a fresh water source. When it becomes obsolete the farms lose that bonus, which is ok, since mechanical farms are better anyways. But you also lose the freshwater source, which can cripple your town. Why not let Arabia keep the fresh water?

That's a very powerful bonus, so it makes sense for it to expire both gameplay-wise and history-wise (as in a lot of the places where historically post Arab conquests intensive agriculture was carried out the soils are now in a very poor shape). There is a one-per-civ late game fresh water source that can mitigate it somewhat for the hardest-hit city. But I hear you and having more sources of fresh water later in game is something that I was considering.

<iAsset>2</iAsset>
What does it mean?

From what I understand, it's the score you get for having that unit (or building or tech etc - this tag is universal). There might be some small inconsistencies, but ultimately, it's not very impactful, and I won't be doing a massive review of those unlike iPower anytime soon.