I have been playing with the latest svn and have some remarks:
A. the additional tech cost per city should maybe start after a couple of cities instead, forbidden city threshold for example. As it works today, it has to problems: 1. it removes the fun of building new cities right from the start and 2. it makes some tiny civs too advanced but too easy to conquer as well and that gives too much free wonders and techs to the conqueror which seem too easy to me.
Well, the solution you're suggesting doesn't actually solve the problems you outline. Even smaller civs very rarely are confined to a single city. If it's the World Map one-city "City States" you have in mind when outlining this, then the reason they're ahead in tech is that they get a straight bonus to their research instead.
B. i like the way stone works now though I do not see it more frequent now (unless the change is not included in Mongoose map scripts because that is what i used lately). I however still find stone to be too big of a bonus. AI is still however not willing to trade for a resource you already have which makes the new system difficult to use through trading :-(
Yeah, AI trading logic is almost impossible to change. As for stone, I generated some maps to check for it, and it seems to be quite enough being spawned. Also, limestone is no longer exclusively used for roads and most buildings, as there are alternative ways to get masonry materials.
C. i like playing with no city razing option on so AI do not come from the other side of a continent, capture someone's capital and raze it making it impossible for said attacked civ to recapture its capital and maybe recover later. it gave nice results. i however would like to make it possible to raze barb cities (because they spawn in crappy places). is there a way to permit razing barb cities only?
keep the good work
Not that I know of. Though I'd actually say razing someone's capital instead of keeping it across the continent would be the smart thing to do for AI, and generally currently AI is pretty smart when it comes to deciding whether to keep or raze cities.
Diplomacy music volume for many of the Native American civilizations (tribes) is very high, especially compared to the usual background music in game. On a volume scale of 10 I'd say the background music is 2 and tribe diplo music is 10 (that's how it feels/sounds like to me). It's the music track with the native american flute. I have to turn down my volume considerably before contacting them, then turn it back up when done. Don't know if anyone else has this occurring for them? it's very high to me, my ears almost hurt.
I used the amplify effect with value -15 in Audacity to reduce the volume to a level that matches the other music in game. The attached file is a mp3 export of the modified mp3 from the assets - sounds - diplomacy folder (for some reason the file is twice the size of the original though).
Thanks! It is more easily fixed in XML without modifying the actual sound files. If you come across any other music-related stuff, please notify me, as I usually play with music off and can't notice those.
Is there a way to have the civilopedia list EVERYTHING in one big list? I find the current civilopedia somewhat confusing to use (but that's just because I am a newbie, but that's also the reason that I am reading the civilopedia in the first place: im a newbie that want to learn
). Say I want to read about Famous Warriors I have to know a forehand that I have to choose Military - Traditions. But I didn't know that it was a tradition, so I felt I clicked around the civilopedia too long before I found it. I really like a long list where I can simply find everything alphabetically (or use the nice filter feature on it). A search feature . Sure the initial load time of the list may be considerably longer, but it would be very convenient not having to first click around/through a lot of different categories which can be quite confusing for a newbie.
That's definitely not a thing I could do easily, sorry.
The leaderheads are working again, Walter. Whatever you did to fix them worked.
If it helps with correlating possible sources, my system was win10x64 running on a dell inspiron 15 using the intel intergrated graphics chipset and a 1.7-2.3ghz i5 processor. Directx etc is up to date I believe.
Meh, I just reverted them to the way they were before. There's no reason for them to not work. I liked them better the new way, but since I couldn't reproduce the problem myself, it would take too long to solve it, so I took the easier way out.
The AIs generally field massive armies and seems to be engaged in a perpetual military arms race. This could contribute to their war mongering behavior. Once they have an enormous army, they will likely be inclined to use it. It also generally tanks their economy and research. I have never played a game in which I was not the tech leader by a large margin (on Monarch).
The fact is that remaining small is rarely feasible, and the large civs will invariably dominate the smaller ones. I see the increased research cost per city and per unit as good measures against this I would suggest boosting those. I would also suggest 2 more things.
Small is also relative. Like, a 1-city civ and a 10-city civ are both "small" compared to a 40-city monster. Should they be equally viable? I don't think so. We already have two systems in place to mitigate the difference in size between civs - escalating unit costs and research costs per city, but make no mistake, bigger is almost always still better in the long run, and I'm not sure we can/should punish it more without crippling people's actual ability to expand and win military victories.
1. Remove the requirements for certain limited buildings such as the requirements for the national university and the art eras. Small civs will not be able to build these and will be hugely disadvantaged. (more than they already are.)
That is a good observation, and I will probably lower them, but again, they often serve as a suggestion of a minimum size you should be to be a viable contender at that appropriate age.
2. Decrease the rate that great people are produced the more cities you have.
In my games at least, one of the reasons I dominate science wise no matter how large I am is because I take advantage of all the great scientists and money producing prophets, merchants etc. and stack them with stuff like national university and stock exchange.
The rate at which you generate great people is currently in no way, direct or even indirect, tied to your number of cities, as GP points aren't pooled across the civ, but rather tracked individually on a per city basis. I see no reason to have it otherwise. Smaller civs, at least early on, have an indirect advantage when it comes to GP, as they can more easily run Republic with its GP bonus.
On a completely separate note, I would just throw out there the idea of limiting the speed of boats in waters an enemy controls (same as on land). The way it is now it feels like navies are useless and can be ignored for the most part. An invading fleet transporting an army can declare war and have all their units on your soil the same turn right next to your coastal city.
That's a good idea that I was also considering. It will probably happen in some way.
There are three problems that make this happen:
1) With the technological advancement the economy of a civ is growing much faster that the cost of a growing army. In the early game a huge army can indeed cripple research. But since renaissance the cost of military units becomes less and less significant.
2) In the civ game big empires (especially the ones that were created by conquest) never fall into pieces unlike real life. Revolution mod - I believe!
3) Armies in the civ game do not suffer from being far away from homes, supply routes etc. Gigantic armies can move through devastated enemy lands for centuries and suffer no consequences.
1) Yeah, that is a clear balance issue that I will be looking into. Later in game money should be harder to come by.
2 and 3) Not very realistic to expect at this point, especially 3, since it would require an almost complete re-write of all the AI logic when it comes to warfare.
I can't expend population to rush production under Slavery; is this intended? EDIT: oh seems I was wrong, I can, but the pop costs are just too high for me. Like 6 population to rush a building that costs 160 hammers. So that would make for example Egypt with all it's excess food from floodplains suitable to expend some population if say 2/3 of the hammers had been produced?
Pop-rushing under Slavery was removed as AI was way overzealous in using it, depopulating its cities (and usually just rushing more units it would expend in pointless wars anyway).
I do think it's a serious problem - though it doesn't happen every game - that the new logic makes civs on remote islands vastly ahead in terms of science. Literally centuries ahead in many cases. In current RI terms, the indigenous Australians would have had spaceships when the Europeans first arrived there.
I like the idea of constraining large civs' tech, but perhaps trade/neighbors need to be a bigger part of it to compensate.
Yes, there is a problem, and yes, I'm looking at ways of containing it. But the main problem here is that it doesn't really come from the actual game balance, but rather from the fact that AI behaves differently in isolated starts, smarter, better at managing resources. Punishing AI for smart behavior is not a thing I'm glad to do.
Right... I just started a standard sized pangaea game with 14 (I like my maps crowded) civs. Before starting though, I scanned everything with worldbuilder. Lots of marble, not a single limestone. Regenerate map. Same. Regenerate map. Same. After doing this about 8 times, a single limestone appeared. Just to be sure, I went back to main menu, selected the same kind of map again, and checked if things were different. They weren't. Most of the maps didn't have a single stone.
I don't get this behaviour. I checked and atm marble and stone have the exact same stats regarding their spawning, except marble can go on tundra. Well, it makes sense that this makes a difference since there's lots of it in pangaea maps and tundra isn't crowded for other resources. But despite this, marble was often found on plains and deserts.
Is it their mutual ordering? They are put on the map in the same priority category (third, I think), but perhaps marble gets put first and that makes all the difference.
Likely because you're overcrowding the map. Remember, lots of resources have their numbers tied to the number of players. By the time the map script reaches limestone (not just after marble, but after lots of things like copper and iron and stuff), it might be out of map space to place those.
The National Sports League event now bizarrely requires a christian cathedral for the golden age "in honor of Zeus" option.
EDIT: The Aztec special building Sacrificial Altar still reduces anger from sacrificing population -- which no longer can be done under slavery. It does have other benefits compared to courthouse though, it's cheaper and helps prevent espionage so it doesn't necessarily need a buff.
Thanks, I'll look into those.
Looks like it's been around a year and half since version 3.3 came out. Are we looking at a version 3.4 soon?
You should hope you're not, as the only way it could happen with so much unfinished stuff is that I decide I no longer want to work on RI and release it as it is.