Realism Invictus

[tebriz]

I have encountered a strange bug after updating to the latest SVN and starting a new game today. I was playing Rome, neighbouring Persia declared war on me and their flag have immediately changed to Roman flag.

 

[TheBirdMan]

Random question for those that wanders often into the late game : does swamps have any good sides ? Any building, improvements or something that use them and could makes keeping them interesting ?
Or are they just a pure negatif tile and should be drain as soon as it's possible ?

I know I could keep them for the -25% defense that could be useful when trying to lure the IA in combat, but except for that, anything else to makes me reconsider draining them ?

In a default game I say: Normally they are (close to be) worthless even as a defense - so drain them - specially if you want to build a road there - or if you have nothing better to do. Reason is this tag in the CIV4FeatureInfos.xlm: <bNoAdjacent>1</bNoAdjacent> - meaning if the feature is allowed on a tile next to a tile with the same feature or not. In this case it's "not".

However larger areas of swamps should be allowed in the game considering this is not that uncommon IRL - and never have been so. I have change this value to <bNoAdjacent>0</bNoAdjacent> for years - even before I decided to make my own Spinn-Off. And this change gives the swamps an important function as a passive defense - specially in the "early" days where nations are expanding. I can't count how many times I have used an area of swamps to keep a much larger
enemy back - and even occasionally defeat them - having fortified archers combined with militia/spearmen and/or warbands ready when the enemy tries to pass the swamps.

Spoiler Former dead-zone (before I founded Hofuf). Those swamps will - sooner or later - be drained. Unless I loose Hofuf to an enemy :

Spoiler A few more screenshots of area with swamps :

 

[pi4t]

Random question. How does the land tactics promotion differ from strength? 99% of land units will only ever fight other land units anyway, so it seems to be almost identical to strength other than having a different promotion tree. Am I missing something? Is it just there to stop you getting the later strength promotions and a specialist promotion on the same unit quite so easily?

 

[Ahnarras]

In a default game I say: Normally they are (close to be) worthless even as a defense - so drain them - specially if you want to build a road there - or if you have nothing better to do.

Thanks !

Random question. How does the land tactics promotion differ from strength? 99% of land units will only ever fight other land units anyway, so it seems to be almost identical to strength other than having a different promotion tree. Am I missing something? Is it just there to stop you getting the later strength promotions and a specialist promotion on the same unit quite so easily?

Combat I and the Land unit promotion works the same but they don't "unlock" the same kind of promotions afterward. They each have different promotions down their own path. So, as you said, it's depends a lot of what other promotion you wants for that specific unit.

Also : a follow-up about my epidemic % bug. I build the Gondashepur in my capital, and it corrected the tooltip, it knows show the correct value. But the other cities are still buggy, and I guess will stay so until I can change their epidemic % too.

And on another topic : Something seems fishy about the date where you unlock the new sub-era. The message speaking about the collapse of the bronze age spawn a few dozen turns into the iron age, seemingly from nowhere. And I didn't hit the following age (the one just after the iron age) at 0AD. The icon only changed at 4 AD, so one turn later, and the penalty on medieval tech research only went from 100% to 50% at turn 3 or 4.

 

[[Y]]

Random question for those that wanders often into the late game : does swamps have any good sides ? Any building, improvements or something that use them and could makes keeping them interesting ?
Or are they just a pure negatif tile and should be drain as soon as it's possible ?

I know I could keep them for the -25% defense that could be useful when trying to lure the IA in combat, but except for that, anything else to makes me reconsider draining them ?

Nope, they're just a negative play experience. I modified my local totestra file to just not place any swamps since it's a better play experience.

 

[tebriz]

Random question for those that wanders often into the late game : does swamps have any good sides ? Any building, improvements or something that use them and could makes keeping them interesting ?
Or are they just a pure negatif tile and should be drain as soon as it's possible ?

I know I could keep them for the -25% defense that could be useful when trying to lure the IA in combat, but except for that, anything else to makes me reconsider draining them ?

I think Aztecs have a unique terrain ability related to swamps.

 

[Ahnarras]

Nope, they're just a negative play experience. I modified my local totestra file to just not place any swamps since it's a better play experience.

They are indeed nothing but a nuisance so far, but it added a bit of challenge, as the epidemics madness forced me to stop growth in one of my city because of them. And now I'm double excited to finally rearing the Middle Age and the Mill technology, allowing me to drain them and transform that little backward town into a gold powerhouse. But that's on a scenario map where the swamps where placed by humans... I can see how they could become even worse on a random map.

I think Aztecs have a unique terrain ability related to swamps.

Make sense, but as I'm playing Egyptian, it doesn't concern much then.

Thanks for the replies, everyone !

 

[TheBirdMan]

I would hate to play without them (the swamps) in this game (as you may have understood from my last post). Mostly because swamps are naturally occurring in large parts of the world and since the game is called "Realism Invictus" then the map should also be realistic - or at least close to .

But if I hadn't made that change myself enabling me to have contiguous areas of swamps - then I think I would prefer to be without them.

So herewith I have a suggestion for our Chief-Architect: Allow contiguous areas of swamps. Please.

 

[[Y]]

I think Aztecs have a unique terrain ability related to swamps.

Eh, not really. I mean, technically yes, but the tile is pretty much always better being replaced with a farm. Until you can clear the swamp, building the improvement on it turns it into a 11 tile that still gives 1, though the pandemic chance is essentially removed, at least. That's not a yield worth working, and the other benefits it gets are from after Water Pump, at which point you can just remove the swamp for an even better yield. So the aztecs have a swamp related NI, but they're still better off not being near the swamp to begin with. If I'm doing my math wrong let me know, but that's my current take on it.

I can see how they could become even worse on a random map.

Exactly that. There's enough variance in handicaps placed on civs already, and swamps are a randomly assigned handicap on civs that happen to spawn near them that has no balancing factor or interesting gameplay impacts. It exists only to give those civs a worse experience, and I'd rather give civs a more equal opportunity do well.

I would hate to play without them (the swamps) in this game (as you may have understood from my last post). Mostly because swamps are naturally occurring in large parts of the world and since the game is called "Realism Invictus" then the map should also be realistic - or at least close to

Eh. I see what you mean, but there already a lot of realism aspects can be acknowledged as absent from the game. Swamps have of the benefit of being readily available for use, but come at a cost to gameplay. And even when removed we can still say they're in the game, just not needing any representation on the map, like many other biomes that are assumed present.

I would consider the realism aspect better if initial civ placement better mirrored actual early civilizations (fertile crescent, etc) and not in the middle of swamp infested territory that happens to have a single jungle-covered Rice in its BFC. In that case then few to no civs would start near swamps, and swamps would fill the role of territory that you wouldn't want to settle until you can remove it. Though then you run into the issue where AI settles every corner of land it can, even if it's just a single grassland tile surrounded by 18 tiles of swamp, which kind of spoils that approach.

 

[TheBirdMan]

Eh. I see what you mean

I'm not sure you do. But let us agree on the fact that we disagree on the subject.

 

[Crusnik83]

Is legendary game speed (0.5) the slowest one?

 

[globosud]

Eh, not really. I mean, technically yes, but the tile is pretty much always better being replaced with a farm. Until you can clear the swamp, building the improvement on it turns it into a 11


Exactly that. There's enough variance in handicaps placed on civs already, and swamps are a randomly assigned handicap on civs that happen to spawn near them that has no balancing factor or interesting gameplay impacts. It exists only to give those civs a worse experience, and I'd rather give civs a more equal opportunity do well.


Eh. I see what you mean, but there already a lot of realism aspects can be acknowledged as absent from the game. Swamps have of the benefit of being readily available for use, but come at a cost to gameplay. And even when removed we can still say they're in the game, just not needing any representation on the map, like many other biomes that are assumed present.

I would consider the realism aspect better if initial civ placement better mirrored actual early civilizations (fertile crescent, etc) and not in the middle of swamp infested territory that happens to have a single jungle-covered Rice in its BFC. In that case then few to no civs would start near swamps, and swamps would fill the role of territory that you wouldn't want to settle until you can remove it. Though then you run into the issue where AI settles every corner of land it can, even if it's just a single grassland tile surrounded by 18 tiles of swamp, which kind of spoils that approach.

I believe that the problem of the marshes arises from the fact that you can reclaim them around the year 1000 or few centuries earlier in game , but as I have learned from various historical sources, the reclamation began to be carried out many centuries before. Of course it was not common and not easy at that time, but many things were not common at that time

Drainage of Swamps in Ancient Times
Swamps have always been a problem for ancient civilizations, as they represented an obstacle to colonization and agricultural development. However, many ancient civilizations found ways to drain swamps and make them habitable.

Examples of Drainage in Ancient Times
1. Drainage of the Pontine Marshes: The Romans, in the 2nd century BC, drained the Pontine Marshes, a vast swampy area located between Rome and the Tyrrhenian Sea. They built canals, dikes, and embankments to drain the water and make the area habitable.
2. Drainage of the Po Valley: The Etruscans and Romans drained the Po Valley, one of the largest river valleys in Europe. They built canals, dikes, and embankments to control flooding and make the area habitable.
3. Drainage of the Mesopotamian Marshes: The Sumerians, in the 3rd millennium BC, drained the Mesopotamian Marshes, a vast swampy area located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They built canals, dikes, and embankments to drain the water and make the area habitable.

Drainage Methods
Ancient civilizations used various methods to drain swamps, including:

1. Construction of Canals: Canals were used to drain water from swamps and transfer it to lower areas.
2. Construction of Dikes: Dikes were used to block water and create artificial water basins.
3. Construction of Embankments: Embankments were used to protect inhabited areas from flooding.
4. Drainage: Drainage was used to remove water from swamps and make them habitable.

Conclusions
Drainage of swamps in ancient times was an important undertaking for ancient civilizations, as it allowed them to colonize and develop previously uninhabitable areas. The methods used to drain swamps were varied and required a great deal of work and resources. However, the results were significant and allowed ancient civilizations to prosper.

 

[trashmunster]

Guys, is there a way of generating less continents with totestra script? I put "few" on standard map and ended up with 5. WTH really... I want something earthlike. 2-3 big landmasses and 2 greenlands/australias

 

[AspiringScholar]

Earlier today, I had been thinking about the Battle of Liège and in particular, how the Germans were able to use their M-Geräts to effectively demolish forts Loncin and Pontisse unto uselessness, and then it occurred to me: wouldn't this be a cool unique ability of the Heavy-Siege Howitzer in RI? While I don't particularly like the idea of siege weapons normatively being able to destroy forts, as a unique wonder unit and in the context of this actually happening in real life, I think it would add some interesting flavor for the nature of the era's warfare. In practical terms, this is already possible for strategic bombers, so giving the unit the same ability seems easily feasible, unless the "bomb tile improvement" mission is somehow restricted to air units exclusively.

​

 

[RezerCuid]

How do you like the idea of a city with defenses, some part of which no siege weapon can destroy?
For example, a wooden fence with 0%, walls with 10%, + a Castle with 20%, with a fortress of 30%
Even in the ruins, You can hide from the attacks of bows and crossbows and arrange an ambush.

 

[Ahnarras]

How do you like the idea of a city with defenses, some part of which no siege weapon can destroy?
For example, a wooden fence with 0%, walls with 10%, + a Castle with 20%, with a fortress of 30%
Even in the ruins, You can hide from the attacks of bows and crossbows and arrange an ambush.

That would create a problem with all cavalry units, which have a hefty penalty as long as the city as some kind of defense (and is the reason why you want to take the ennemy's defense to 0% and not, say, to 10%).
Also, the units that are supposed to defend in a city already got a base bonus on those tiles, without regards for additionnal defense being present or not (which, I think, covers pretty well the "I'm good at hiding in building and fighting in narrow streets" fantasy).

So, even if your idea is neat, I think this mod already manages it well.

 

[Noyyau]

Had a blast playing the Crusades scenario way past it's end date. Armenian Cilicia, Noble Difficulty, default settings, only my minor tweaks on the latest stable RI 3.72.
First priority was to conquer the Rum as soon as possible, to obtain some needed lebensraum. The crusader states had way too strong units to tangle with, at the beginning.
Culture is a major problem with the cities so tight , and no possibility to raze and resettle.
I usually play with "Unit cost scaling" OFF. By default in the scenario it's ON, and it makes thing really difficult! Just replacing combat losses is terribly long (or expensive to rush with gold).

Best friends the whole game with the Bizantines, even when I conquered Trebizond and Cyprus the moment they left vassalage. Also best friends with the Georgians, religion is a major help in diplomacy. Everybody else pretty much hates me. I guess constant bullying for money does that.
So anyway, barely managed to bring myself to highest score some 10 or so turns before the end, by gradually conquering Mesopotamia and Persia, in a long series of gruelling wars with pauses to consolidate and pump culture in the conquered territories. Up until the elimination of the Seljuks, all conquered cities were starving and constrained , most tiles remained in Seljuk cultural control.
Meanwhile, the Mongols slowly but surely went on to conquer all of China, Khmer, Korea...
AND THEN I KEPT PLAYING
Wow, this scenario gets even better after the end date!
Pleny of wars, vassals change masters (voluntarily and not so much), I conquer and subjugate the hostile neighbours to create some buffer states, many smaller polities are eliminated.
Even tangled with the Mongols on their border cities, to give some room to my buffer vassal Ghazni, tried to set up some garrisons.
AND THEN
I accidentally declared war on the Mongols when I did not want to (it was late, misclicked on the "you don't have open borders" popup), just by moving an Explorer onto one of their vassal's land...
And it was brutal! Ghazni was decimated, lost half his cities, and held on only because I rushed all I could from the other side of the world (was busy getting myself the Scandinavians subjugated).

Screenshots: right after the terrible Mongol war. And one of the battles.

 

[Ahnarras]

That sounds like a crazy game !

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Random question for those that wanders often into the late game : does swamps have any good sides ? Any building, improvements or something that use them and could makes keeping them interesting ?
Or are they just a pure negatif tile and should be drain as soon as it's possible ?

I know I could keep them for the -25% defense that could be useful when trying to lure the IA in combat, but except for that, anything else to makes me reconsider draining them ?

Generally conceived and currently implemented as mostly/exclusively negative terrain feature. It can also be, like forest and jungles, used with late-game nature preserves (currently still called "forest preserves" - note to self, rename and probably severely buff). I also have an idea of an improvement that might actually make swamps at least somewhat tenable to keep around that long (and even a civ-specific one that might be fun)... We'll see. They are quite underloved currently, and could stand to have more interesting content related to them, in line with me revisiting older RI features.

I have encountered a strange bug after updating to the latest SVN and starting a new game today. I was playing Rome, neighbouring Persia declared war on me and their flag have immediately changed to Roman flag.

You are a naughty naughty person, as you've committed the sin of updating SVN mid-game.

Is it just there to stop you getting the later strength promotions and a specialist promotion on the same unit quite so easily?

Basically yes. As many promotion lines get incrementally better, it's to separate the "strength" line that is useful on any unit from many of the more specialized ones that generally don't synergise that much with each other.

And on another topic : Something seems fishy about the date where you unlock the new sub-era. The message speaking about the collapse of the bronze age spawn a few dozen turns into the iron age, seemingly from nowhere. And I didn't hit the following age (the one just after the iron age) at 0AD. The icon only changed at 4 AD, so one turn later, and the penalty on medieval tech research only went from 100% to 50% at turn 3 or 4.

Thanks, I'll investigate.

Also : a follow-up about my epidemic % bug. I build the Gondashepur in my capital, and it corrected the tooltip, it knows show the correct value. But the other cities are still buggy, and I guess will stay so until I can change their epidemic % too.

This too.

Nope, they're just a negative play experience. I modified my local totestra file to just not place any swamps since it's a better play experience.

That's... an interesting take. I won't even argue, to each their own and all that, but I'm interested - do you feel the same way about tundra, for instance? Should it be removed as well?

So herewith I have a suggestion for our Chief-Architect: Allow contiguous areas of swamps. Please.

They are already allowed by certain map scripts. As this is a non-stock feature, what a map script does with them is mostly that script's business.

Eh, not really. I mean, technically yes, but the tile is pretty much always better being replaced with a farm.

Note to self: buff.

Is legendary game speed (0.5) the slowest one?

Yes. If you need to go slower still, you can edit the XML (CIV4GameSpeedInfo.xml) yourself.

I believe that the problem of the marshes arises from the fact that you can reclaim them around the year 1000 or few centuries earlier in game , but as I have learned from various historical sources, the reclamation began to be carried out many centuries before. Of course it was not common and not easy at that time, but many things were not common at that time

The problem with all such takes is we can generally find examples of everything everywhere. Greeks had mechanical computers (antikythera mechanism) around 150 BC, Romans had sophisticated hydraulic engines for automating production (but wouldn't generally use them as cheap slave labour was more economically viable), Chinese were using natural gas as a fuel in 500 BC. Does that mean that all these things should be available at these respective times? Not to mention you're bending the realities there quite a bit, as for instance the Pontine Marshes existed as a prominent area of marshland and a major source of malaria well into the Middle Ages, despite Roman reclamation efforts (and to some extent still exist). Likewise the early Mesopotamian efforts were largely ineffective in reducing the extent of the marshland and the early civilizations were confined to its borders - which did recede after 3000 BC, but mostly due to natural causes (changing climate). These early efforts were by no means insignificant, but they mostly centered around major urban dwellings for sanitation purposes and didn't reclaim arable land en masse.

Guys, is there a way of generating less continents with totestra script? I put "few" on standard map and ended up with 5. WTH really... I want something earthlike. 2-3 big landmasses and 2 greenlands/australias

Totestra is generally very customizable but rather opaque in what the actual settings do in the script. I recommend playing around with variables there. I got interesting results by reducing the number used in line 861, for instance (not exactly viable by itself, but it did produce fewer continents).

Earlier today, I had been thinking about the Battle of Liège and in particular, how the Germans were able to use their M-Geräts to effectively demolish forts Loncin and Pontisse unto uselessness, and then it occurred to me: wouldn't this be a cool unique ability of the Heavy-Siege Howitzer in RI? While I don't particularly like the idea of siege weapons normatively being able to destroy forts, as a unique wonder unit and in the context of this actually happening in real life, I think it would add some interesting flavor for the nature of the era's warfare. In practical terms, this is already possible for strategic bombers, so giving the unit the same ability seems easily feasible, unless the "bomb tile improvement" mission is somehow restricted to air units exclusively.

That is an interesting idea. I am not sure specifically about forts either, but currently some World Units do feel bland to me (some intentionally so, as superheavy tank is supposed to be relatively useless for practical purposes, as it was IRL ).

Had a blast playing the Crusades scenario way past it's end date. Armenian Cilicia, Noble Difficulty, default settings, only my minor tweaks on the latest stable RI 3.72.

Glad you had fun! I spent quite a lot of time rebalancing and improving this scenario for 3.7; now I need to find inner strength to give Deluge that treatment too...

 

[[Y]]

That's... an interesting take. I won't even argue, to each their own and all that, but I'm interested - do you feel the same way about tundra, for instance? Should it be removed as well?

Nah. Tundra is fine. It's sub-par compared to other land types, but that's a relative problem. Swamps actively giving nearby cities unhealth and encouraging epidemics, being unworkable, and requiring medieval tech and many worker turns just to be removed is an objective problem. It acts as a check on civs that have no reason to be checked.

For what it's worth, though, I did have en error in my last post. I said that by the time Chinampa gets benefits from Water Pump you could just remove the swamp, but swamps actually can't be removed until Mill Machinery. So there are a few hundred turns or so where the Chinampa gets a food from the swamp, though probably still not a tile you're eager to work.