That's quite an undertaking. I mean it's probably not at the War and Peace level yet, but over 400 pages...
Well, I really appreciate all of your team's work on this mod and want to get the most out of it. In lieu of a master changelog which details everything, that's the best way to go about it and I'm happy to do so.
In fact, many of the suggestions for features and discussions about mechanics have actually been quite interesting, and seeing what used to be problematic and was subsequently improved or fixed additionally provides a more nuanced sense of the balance and intended design before actually using these features myself.
That's the Influence Driven War component at work. Now that you're asking I feel it's woefully underdocumented. The core of the component revolves around the culture on the tile changing based on combat victories/losses, but an additional part is that an undefended city with lots of culture can draft its citizens to defend it (while losing population and culture). The formula for chance is 100% - (Culture level-1)*100%/(Culture level*Defender culture%). In practice it reliably fires for cities with ~100% defender culture, but as the defender losses mount and culture falls, the probability drops significantly (being 25%-40% depending on city level with 50% defender culture). It ensures that by the time attackers take cities, they already have a portion of their culture.
Interesting, thanks. Is there a pop minimum or any kind of technological prerequisite?
It does, though it doesn't prevent them spawning inside it.
I see, thanks. That makes good sense.
What you're likely seeing is the work of toggleable "Protect Valuable Units" component. If other defenders have a high enough (>80% IIRC) chance to defend, they will go instead of the best defender if said best defender is led by a general, is a medic or simply has lots of XP, to save it from being frustratingly lost to some desparate 1% attacker.
Ah, I was curious about what that meant in practical terms. When you say "chance to defend," are you referring to the combat odds of the would-be defender winning, or rather a separate chance that that unit would end up substituting for the medic/general-led one?
... Another quick question on combat which is most likely unchanged from vanilla: in the combat log, are odds displayed relative to you or the attacker, when you're checking on defenses of the previous turn and can't see the odds prior to combat as you do when attacking? For instance, it just says "Combat odds: XYZ%" and I'm assuming that's relative to you per its intended use as a reference, but it lacks the detailed breakdown of the UI when you're attacking and am not sure.
Separatism has its own pedia section in the buildings part, where you can inspect all the buildings and civic effects. I will probably tweak the descriptions of the effects so they reflect their source civics better.
It's possible I've missed something, but I saw that category and it seemed only to detail the "conciliation options" when separatism gets high enough to warrant that menu of options to quell it, not how much units or buildings reduce it IIRC. I'm sure it will be amply discussed when I get to the portion of the thread announcing that addition.
I
generally know what helps and harms it, but, for instance, I thought having a spy in the city would reduce separatism but when placing one in or taking one out, it seemed to have no effect. Furthermore, I would think jails or courthouses explicitly reduce it, but it does not show this in their pedia entries, but there nevertheless
is a modifier for "from buildings" on the bar in the city screen.
The era popups should trigger when a new era of sovereignty definitions starts - that does NOT directly correspond to the game era the player is in, but to the average game era of all players. It should trigger when that shift happens.
Ah, right, I remember this from the manual now.
You are correct in that the culture wipeout on total conquest no longer happening is intentional - it was connected to Revolution component (as the completely conquered civs are able to return with its help) but I found it made sense when Revolutions are off too, as conquered people shouldn't automatically be easier to govern if they lost their own national representation. I actually don't recall if the doubling is intentional though or if it's a bug.
Is it possible that it scales with the
ratio of culture applied as a modifier to the amount of population?
In my example, I shared a medium sized continent with a peaceful and weak Indian neighbor playing as Armenia, with my awesome classical era units, so the circumstances called for attacking early and then filling out the continent myself. When I took the city it was still fairly small, but being a capitol site had lots of food and grew faster than my own culture could displace his.
Diplomacy is mostly hardcoded and almost impossible to meaningfully mod. Permanant alliances are enable by Proletarian Dictatorship tech.
Is there any kind of way to do an edit to make "permanent alliances" function as NAPs, or somehow to re-enable this feature?
I highly highly doubt it but thought it was worth an ask.
That's also kind of funny historically speaking, since most of the alliances associated with actual proletarian dictatorships were notoriously short-lived and fragile: Molotov-Ribbentrop, Pact of Steel, Sino-Soviet, etc. Ironically, the only modern example of a "permanent" alliance which comes to mind would be NATO, which was of course primarily made up of nations defending democratic institutions and explicitly formed against one such proletarian dictatorship.
I'll take a look, though no promises here. That is a vanilla asset though, not currently modified in any way in RI.
Oh, I remember this now... By the way, I love how you included and appropriately scaled sprites and icons from the Paradox games and other sources, but it never feels like a hotch podge or out of place at all. (In fact, the National Idea icons from EU3 are remarkably close in style to Civ4 icons, that kind of "vaguely-cartooned realism" style, even matching the same color palette.)
OK, this one is actually a much debated question, the answer to which (or rather lack thereof) lies not in the game design, but more in the game philosophy.
There is one crucial difference between a Civ 4 game as played by players (or almost any historical game, really), and real history. The course of the game is incremental, and is expected to be such by players. Players expect to get more as they progress, to be rewarded for their efforts. The key feature of all historical empires is that after their greatest extent, they all fell - either to be destroyed completely, or at least to become a fraction of their former selves. Can you imagine any player that would accept this as a natural course of their game? I cannot. But if we take away the ability of player's empire declining, the only other option is endless progress (=snowballing) - and that would render all further gameplay of an early "Roman empire" or "Han China" rather meaningless, as there is already nothing left to challenge them. I have yet to see a game that would handle this issue to any satisfactory extent (some that came closest were focused on particular regions and periods and handled that by introducing external threats, but since Civ 4 is meant to be global, no extrinsic threat is possible by design). So the only other option is limit the early ability to snowball, thus preserving at least some measure of challenge for the further parts of the game.
Yes, and in my experience with strategy games, probably Paradox Interactive's period-specific games like Victoria 2 and Crusader Kings came the closest to this (which I'm guessing are the ones you had in mind already). Civilization is quite a bit more player-interactive than them and ambitious in that it aims to model the full scope of history.
And echoing the poster I quoted, I think what this system achieves is fantastic and is certainly worthwhile as a tradeoff. "Tall" does not feel dominant over "wide" and both do feel like viable options, under the right circumstances, without being predicated by arbitrary and ridiculous mechanics like Civ 5's "global happiness" but rather, to my mind very thoughtful and pleasing models of real historical forces at each era. In fact, in my previous game, there were conspicuous "arcs" of power for leading nations, where they
did actually decline into some kind of relative obscurity or mere secondary-power status, much like a European great power of yesteryear in today's world. Being accustomed to said "snowballing" I had concluding the nations at the top would stay there for the rest of the game and was shocked to see the ebbing and flowing!
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As I was playing yesterday, a couple of questions came to mind about the industrial system. I love the "tiers of goods" approach and how that models the sorts of markets made available by industrialization, as well as "barriers to modernity" for backward countries which aren't strictly technological (even for early forms of industry, such as how masonry materials can be available for stone-poor countries with early coal mining, and gradual boons to local production with the upward-scaling utility of craftsmen), but am unsure on a couple of things which browsing through the 'pedia didn't answer.
First of all, the first rendition of the factory seems somewhat weak. In an already squalor-stricken renaissance world where population growth exceeds health by quite a bit, adding even more epidemic chance for merely one additional hammer per craftsman (on par with "clean" medieval alternatives) seems like a small incentive.
But also... what if anything replaced vanilla's "power" mechanic? I don't see in the 'pedia any equivalent to vanilla's plain factory which received the power bonus to production. Then again, I had been soaking up so much info playing for several hours that I might simply have missed something obvious right before my eyes.
By the way, aside from this question it just occurred to me this week how cool of a mechanic it is that craftsmen start out as weak alternatives to mines as production alternatives for poor production geography, and then labor increasingly becomes more viable, eventually to become the bedrock of industrial production, contingent upon population, food and the appropriate infrastructure, just like a real industrial economy! Very cool!
