Unless this was corrected in the SVN following version 3.25, I just remember why I pointed this bug out long ago. I'm surprised this was missed. I recall why I loved Solar Cult so much; it wasn't just for the maintenance bonus...something much bigger was enticing me. The Apostolic Palace.
Yes, I believe it is already corrected in current SVNs.
I would like to know, if is not much issue, why the autolabor workers build cottages all over the place?
Basically, autoworkers use the same logic AI workers would use in that situation. I guess from AI viewpoint, your civ produces too little commerce.
I'm on a good SVN game with the Romans right now. I think I have some interesting feedback once I'm done but meanwhile something is really bothering me: Castrum going obsolete.
Presumably it's too limit the benefits it gives in combination with Walls/Granary/Forge? (I'm not sure what those benefits represent in real history). I kind of get that but it brings along other problems.
1. It removes the happiness from the Imperialistic trait
2. It removes the +xp bonus for melee units at a tech when melee units are still relevant
3. It could prevent you from building the Aeneid/Heroic Epic (not likely in most games)
4. I personally don't think it's a good idea to change such a basic building like that, but that might just be me.
Anyway if the current situation remains, Arsenale should become a unique building since it's functionally different.
All valid points. Several adjustments were made:
1. Castrum is now discontinued rather than obsoleted with Black Powder. You will no longer lose existing castra and their benefits just because you researched a tech. It is still replaced by Arsenal though, so...
2. Roman arsenal now also gives imperialistic happiness. Doesn't provide the same building benefits, so it is still somewhat more limited for Romans. BTW, the benefits there represent the fact that in Roman society, legion barracks were very often the driving force for urban development. Many modern cities in Western Europe started out as Roman castra.
I'm currently playing South China in 3.25, and I'm into the industrial era and cannot build workshops. I'm guessing that South China's unique improvement, canal, is accidentally replacing workshop instead of watermill, since the canals seem strictly superior to watermills once metallurgy is researched.
Yeah, in 3.25 canal replaces workshop for South China. Of course, it is completely different in current SVN already...
Hi, Thanks for the great work. I'm playing on the svn version 4813 and I've noticed that the Viking Hof building isn't scaled correctly. They are bigger than all other building's I've seen.
Thanks, fixed.
Also, something I've been meaning to question for a while is how overpowered the Polish Folwark is. Especially when combined with Casimir III. A single Folwark can produce in combination with Casimir III (Financial Trait), a Manor and Peasant Servitude the following stats;
Grassland, River - 8
, 5
Grassland - 8
, 4
Wheat, Plains, River - 12
, 6
Rice, Grassland, River - 13
, 6
This seems like a disproportionately poweful unique improvement.
You may be right. Since unique improvements are a fairly new addition to RI, we're still adjusting them now and then to find a better balance. It seems that Folwark can use a nerf.
Spain does not have longbowmen? SVN 4813
Yep, along with a whole bunch of other civs. Longbowman is now a special unit that only about half of civs get.
I'd like to discuss about battles:
8. City defence: Lets assume a city has just been built on a hill square. A standart, untrained 3 strength archer gets 50% hills bonus, 50% city bonus. Assuming it is also fortified, so that it gets a %25 bonus. So its defending strength is 6,75. And it has a first strike. So this cheap, primitive, untrained unit is already a solid defender. A swordsman, which is a formidable unit will lose against such a unit most of the time. The iron age bowman is even more stronger when defending, it is an incredible 9.
First of all, I think the archer shouldn't get a 50% bonus automatically. A newly found settlement with some huts and tents shouldn't be giving such defensive advantages. I think the archer should get its bonus, first when the city builds fortifications, i.e. palisades or walls. I hope this is not very complicated to implement, because we have already attacking malus for mounted units, when walls are present.
Ok, you can argue that archer is a ranged unit and the heavy melee units are struggling running up to the hill and they die out before they can reach the enemy, hiding behind huts and tents, shooting from windows whatever. But then, the best units to attack archers should be the archers. But this is also not the case. They don't come into consideration in Civ 4 if you are planning to attack a city.
Unfortunately, it is quite complicated to implement, and moreover would surely confuse many players. Also, from my first-hand experience of siege mode in Mount & Blade multiplayer, which I feel manages to approximate a real assault on a fortification quite well: defending archers are deadly; attacking archers are just moving targets - while they sometimes manage a good shot or two, you have a much better chance of survival if you are instead well-armored and carrying a shield. Then there are much more chances that, as an attacker, you actually live long enough to cause some serious harm to enemy.
9. Ok, in reality it was very very difficult to attack and invade a fortified city. Instead we see long lasting sieges, hoping that the city surrenders because of starvation, diseases etc. Of course, we don't have such mechanism in civilization, we should rely on direct attack to capture cities. And the odds of surviving when attacking a city is currently quite poor. Therefore I'd propose to tilt the balance slightly in attackers' favour. I'd really prefer a more dynamic capturing and recapturing and re-recapturing of cities. Why? I have two reasons:
a) Every time a city is captured, many improvements has to be rebuilt. So it will not be so easy to end up with many perfect cities so early in the game.
b) The AI really likes to assemble large armies. He invests a lot in them, but at the end, he can't see the benefit of them, he can't invade any cities, and eventually gets overplayed by a smart human player, who possesses a modest military for defense and invests in libraries etc. instead.
Tipping the balance in attackers' favor is very dangerous from balance point of view. It creates a positive feedback loop - the stronger you are, the stronger you will inevitably become in future. Also, you are forgetting one thing - while defenders indeed lose less units, they suffer from the very fact that the war is conducted on their territory - pillaged countryside can hurt your civ quite a bit, and AI is actually good at it.
10. You have been working hard on the AI of siege engines recently, with all these bombardment etc. It is a complicated task. Why not getting rid of this ranged attack altogether and doing the following: For example, a bombard gets a rather high strength of 8 or even 10 and attacks normally, but can cause a rather low maximum damage (for example 20%). This way it will survive most of the battles, doing the same effect as the ranged attack. In some cases it will get wounded, but this represents such effects like the machinery gets older and needed to be repaired and the ammunition gets lower. The more modern artillery gets a slightly higher maximum damage, and also some collateral damage. That way, it will be quite robust and AI will understand and manage the siege weapons more easily.
So basically you advocate us going back to vanilla BtS system?
11. The experience: I don't like it, that an attacker with 98% survival chance gets 2 XP, but a defender with 60% survival chance only gets 1 XP. I understand that attack gives more XP, it encourages the player to attack, but the difference shouldn't be that big. The defender should be rewarded with much more experience points, if the odds are close and the battle can go to either sides.
Can't be easily tweaked AFAIK.
And now, I want to discuss about
cost of city improvements:
13. The cost of the buildings are mostly proportional with their benefits. But I don't like that approach. I think the buildings cost should be proportional with their benefits, but as well as their actual construction costs and how sophisticated a building is.
For my recommendation of the new costs, I use the following terminology:
slightly higher: around 25%
somewhat higher: around 50%
much higher: around 100%
slightly lower: around 20%
somewhat lower: around 33%
much lower: around 50%
a) Carpenter, Sawmill: somewhat higher, especially the carpenter. The cost of the carpenter should be similar to the weaver's or potter's workshop.
b) Monastery: slightly higher - but it is not very important
c) Tavern: somewhat lower - it's a very simple building
d) Theater, Opera: much higher - cultural buildings are luxurious buildings and should only be built, if you already have the more beneficial commercial and industrial buildings, or you are a cultural leader, or you really really have to. But theater being so cheap, I even consider to build one as the very first building in a newly captured city.
e) Arena: somewhat higher - because of the construction costs
f) Library, School: slightly higher - these are sophisticated buildings
g) Market, Grocer: slightly lower - these are simple buildings
h) Forge: slightly lower. Or alternatively, I would slightly increase its benefits - for example +1
to craftsmen already
i) Aquaduct: much higher - once again, such buildings should be built, only if you really have to, and it should come with a price. The baths, clinics and hospitals too should all be slighly more expensive.
j) Caravan House, Toll House, Harbor: slightly higher, it is too easy to boost trade routes in this game.
k) Castle: much higher - because of the construction cost. But I understand that it is so cheap, because its benefits are very unclear.
l) Lighthouse: somewhat higher. It is a situational building which might be very useful from time to time,
m) Clock Tower: much higher - it is a very sophisticated building you would build in your best cities in order to get the maximum out of them.
Hm, while I somewhat agree with you in that, we have to be very careful with AI, since it can decide the building is useless and skip it if it's too expensive. Theaters being the prime example here - anymore expensive, and AI will likely cease building them altogether. Still, this resonates well with my thoughts in many cases, and I would also like to tweak various building costs in future.
14. On the left hand side, we see a list for the composition of the enemy army. The units, their strengths, promotions etc. right? In Realism Invictus, we have deal with very large armies, and the left side information becomes very inefficient. I just need the information, that the enemy army has 4 yari ashigarus, 3 asian skirmishers, 3 bushis etc. But even this information is not clear at all! I can never figure it out, how many units does the enemy army have or what kind of a unit I'll be facing, when I attack this stack with my pezhetarioi. Is it in your hands to make it a bit clearer?
Not a lot we can do. Most interface tweaks we have are third-party components anyway.
How about the idea Fishing Boats cannot leave cultural borders?
I dont like other civs boats cruising around the coast and from a realistic point of view who should fishermen leave their territory?
As explained by others, you already can't explore with them, and it would be very inconvenient for players if they can't leave borders altogether.
Great idea.
Current/old system of XP distribution annoys me a little bit. Units gain XP imo too fast especially if there are barbarian/revolt enemies around which are easy to hunt down.
I will agree with other posters here - "if it isn't broke, don't fix it". I think current XP system is not perfect, but still works quite well and doesn't warrant a large amount of effort that would be spent tweaking it.
When a civ demands you war ally with them, really they should be committed to remaining at war for at least 10 turns. There is nothing more annoying than a "join the fight against so-and-so" demand, followed by that civ peace-ing out the very next turn after you join the war.
Those sneaky bastards.
But seriously, wouldn't you gladly do the same if you were in that situation?
Two things I have encountered recently:
a. Turkish early horse archer wouldn't upgrade to improved horsemen.
b. Turkish national unit Timariot doesn't provide happiness in the city it is garrisoned. I mean, if it is the only unit in the city, the citizens start fearing and become unhappy.
Both are bugs, both fixed. Thank you.
I seem to be in a world where sulphur does not exist.
Is this a feature or a bug?
Once again, this likely stems from the fact that there is too little land for too many civs. Map resource placement scripts are not perfect, and in some cases they get overwhelmed.
I agree with this. Numbers could indeed be a little bit smaller. Right now you can pretty much neglect your own research if you happen to get enough open borders with powerful civs. In my opinion when others can keep up with your tech rate so easily, it takes some fun away from scientific-type of game.
However, this isn't anything gamebreaking, just a minor problem and there are lots of things I would like to see done in this mod before this.
As an experiment, we'll try lowering the tech transfer bonus in SVN and see where it gets us.
RI team, have you ever considered making tech transfer only happen when there is a connection or traderoute between two civs? That would make spamming open borders with everybody not so viable strategy, encourage building traderoutes and would fit the realistic idea of passively spreading technologies.
Yes, we're very much considering that. Some day it will get implemented.
svn xx13:
The automated city advisor prefers 1
2
over 2
1
and 2
. I am agrarian so +50% from shields when I build a worker, so it kind of makes sense. But the problem is, I doesn't matter in this case whether if I get 4 or 5
, I still get +2 extra
while I am building the worker. So the AI effectively wastes 2
per turn, which is quite significant very early in the game.
As Josh mentioned earlier, we have swapped the resource evaluation algorithm recently, and we will look and see if it needs further tweaks. Looks like it does.
This is why I'm writing here though, having a great campaign, just reached 1900 and I'm getting a softlock during the end turn. It says "waiting for other players", hearth spinning and it stays like that indefinitely (note that I can move the camera around, which is unusual).
Tried loading previous saves, doing constructions and things differently but nothing, still get the bug and can't continue.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, as like I said, I'm having a great game and wanted to see how it ends
Savegame's here, if needed
Code:
http://speedy.sh/tgxG3/Augustus-Caesar-AD-1919-January.CivBeyondSwordSave
Thanks!
Are you using 3.25 or some SVN?
I've found that once range-1 siege weapons become available (bombards or cannons), you can park a few outside a barbarian city and just farm experience and great-general points forever. You have to rotate the cannons out occasionally as they reach their experience caps (100 if you choose to get the anti-barb promotions), and the city has to be isolated from the other major civs (otherwise they come along and conquer it), but the whole thing seems like a cheat to me, especially the ability to get great generals when you aren't at war with any major civs. Unfortunately, I don't have many suggestions for fixing this beyond "disallow experience and great general points from bombardment of barbarians". One other possibility would be to remove damage caps for bombardment against barbarians, which would cause the cannons to kill the barbarian units.
Thanks, this is an interesting issue you've pointed out. We'll consider how to handle this best.
Why is there an unresearchable tech in the main tech-tree? I've never been able to get Orthodox Christianity in a regular game. I'm guessing it's specific to a scenario I've never played. Shouldn't all that be in a mod-mod or something?
That's for scenario stuff for now. This may change in future.
Some balance notes for r4817:
The Dharani is listed as a "distinctive unit" for the Dravidians in the civlopedia. I think this is a bit of an understatement to its power level, as it gets +2 first strikes and no drawbacks as far as I can tell, making it the most powerful thing on the seas, requiring often 2 War Galleys for each of theirs, god forbid their ruler isn't a a Seafarer and they get ANOTHER 2 first strikes...
Yeah, these things are tough, probably a bit too tough. Will nerf them a bit.
Tanks do not appear to give each other any aid. This may be working as intended, to simulate the need for a cohesive force of different types of units in the modern world?
Yep.
Weird interaction with Mass Produced + Progressive. It actually provides free upgrades for a bit, and then starts increasing (10 gold... 27 gold, etc). I think this due to the each new additional unit increases costs coming into play. However, as it stands this can be absurdly powerful: Upgrading all of my Infantry to Semi Mechanized Infantry and then finally Mechanized Infantry cost a decent amount of gold, around 107 each, and then 200+.
However, I was able to upgrade most of my fairly large (30+) tank force for a piddling 400 gold TOTAL.
Seems a wee bit overpowered. I don't know know if it is codeable, but perhaps a better bonus from the Industrial Know Hows would be a reduction in the scalable cost for units built in this city, and reduce the upgrade bonus to 25%. Maybe just reduce the Doctrine bonus to 40%, so they are not initially free.
Upgrade costs depend on the difference in cost between the old and new unit. It might well be that in your particular case you were covering a very narrow production cost gap.
As an addendum, the naval AI in the game still is terrible, the Dravidians started by themselves on an island (large enough for a decent early civ size, connected to everyone else by coast, so they got to get friends and research... very much an ADVANTAGE, not a disadvantage) and actually got their culture bubble to make a bridge across the ocean to the wide open "new world" that the generator made... and they never went and colonized it. All that room, all that free space, all those precious resources... they just sat their until I conquered them and took MY ships over and started grabbing good city spots and farming the barbarians. It wasn't even that they didn't found cities, they never even EXPLORED the coastline! I checked by grabbing their world map, you could see the stretch of coast their culture border stretched to, and nothing else. I was hoping K-mod would have helped the AI with this stuff, but it seems they still have large gaps in their code.
Yep, and believe me, that makes me very, very sad.
I have just downloaded version 3.25 of RI and I noticed the warning about MAFs with 32-bit OS. My latop has 64-bit Windows but I noticed when I was trying to find the Mod folder that Steam operates in a folder call 'Program Files (x86) which is where the 32-bit applications live.
Does anyone know if this will be a problem?
Much appreciated
Nope. That just means that Steam is a 32-bit app. You should be fine.
Yeah, i would love to see that too.
Plus, it would be a realistic aspect if traderoutes are possible only when there in fact is a connection by route or coastal (without any other non open border civs not blocking it).
I really dislike in starting game, that after a while i could establish traderoutes to far far away civs i have contact to.
(Not sure whether it is possible to code in dll or whether is brakes gameplay performance wise)
I think that traderoutes already work like this - there only are traderoutes when a viable route can be traced between cities (or, to be more precise, between the city and your capital, between your capital and their capital, and between their capital and their city, as all trade goes through capitals).
Guys, I will go str8 to the point. This mod is awsome, but right now it has some problems. And the biggest problem is that in the newer svn versions, houses became obsolete. Building farms is much better than building houses at any stage of the game, on any difficulty level. The specialist-economy is very flexible, very little influenced by pilaging, and way more profitable even in the earliest eras. The cities end up growing to 30 or 35 or even higher pretty quick and you can sustain a large population of specialists. My suggestion would be to re-purpose the houses by making them a requirement for population increase, and later in the game you should be able to build already upgraded towns, for example.
Great point. We'll be discussing internally how to make cottages more viable. Though I have to admit that late-game specialist economy is very intentional, but that doesn't mean that it can't be overpowered (and it likely currently is).
1. I have noticed that in the renaissance era, when declaring peace while enemy units are in my territory, some enemy units remain in my territory after peace is made. Not sure if this is just due to the strain on the system which a Huge World Map game causes or if it is some issue with the Mod. This includes both ships and land units.
What units were they? Caravel-class units, for example, ignore closed borders, so they could logically stay within yours.
2. Is it the intention that emplaced artillery do not add to the stack malus? You can have a seemingly infinite emplaced artillery in a city and while it gains combined arms aid from garrisoned units, their numbers to not count towards the logistics count of units in the city. For example, in my game, my border cities that see lots of combat have over a dozen of these fortified in the city. Their defensive bonuses combined with my garrison units combined arms aid and first strikes makes these cities near invincible. In one city I have 22 of these units emplaced plus the max number of garrisoned units possible without more than a -5% strength malus.
Nope, it's a bug, and thanks for noticing it. It happened because technically emplaced artillery is not considered a land unit. Anyway, it's fixed now.
3. I feel that diplomacy could use a little love besides just AI tweaks and leader attributes. Perhaps some buildings that impart a diplomatic bonus? Maybe certain cultures could be grouped together in "overcultures" (Hellenic, North American/Western European, South American, Eastern European/Russia, Asian, etc) that impart a small (+1 max) boost to diplotmatic relations with countries within an overculture group and maybe also a small malus (-1) to nations with a different culture group. In addition, one could build a "Hellenic Mission/Embassy" or "Eastern European Mission/Embassy" which might produce culture for a city as well as maybe +1 relationship bonus and/or +1 spy. Make it a national wonder.
Diplomacy could indeed use a lot of love. For now, we haven't touched it almost at all.
Though I must note that your culture group idea would probably look out of place on random maps, where civs get random neighbors.
Walter, are you guys still keeping up with this thing? Will there be a 2015 update?
I got tired of Civ 5 so I reinstalled Civ 4. I REMEMBER THIS MOD!
Yup, we're still here, quite alive and planning a new release somewhere in 2015.
There are WB and mapmaking forums here in CivFan, and I'll consult those threads to find more answers about WBing. The Spanish/Arabia thing was easily corrected, and now I can continue with that project. It's a huge map of Europe, middle ages period roughly, and was my primary project.
That's great! We could definitely use more maps and scenarios.
And why the aggressive tone?
. The Mouseover view is complemented by a more complete view in the centre of the screen when you press a combination of keys (Ctrl+F1 in this case).
