Identified the following minor typo: when encountering Kobdo Kunctai of the Mongols, she says that she would punish people by making them eat steak without utensils (a reference I'm not really understanding, honestly) and then follows that with "Is not it better to have my friendship that this humiliation?" That should be "than." This may not even matter at all but I thought you might want to know little tiny things like that as I encounter them.
Typo noted. As for the quote, these are the covenants she imposed on defeated Oirats (language unedited):
The codes included:
- Crests of helmets must not exceed two fingers long
- Eat meat without a knife
- Do not call your Ger (Yurt) an Ordon (Palace)
- Do not call airag but tsegee
- Sit upon your knees before khans
Out of them all, the only one that got rejected was the one regarding the knives. I guess that was a big deal for them (more so than kneeling to the khans, for instance), and the quote underscores that. One also should remember though that by some accounts, while a strong leader, Mandukhai was actually quite insane - so that might be another explanation.
Hi there!
After years playing this great mod I've decided to do my own scenarios, like American Civil War, and others.
But I'm completely lost at this point, so i'd like to ask: which tools do I need for editing the map? Since I'd like to use RI scripts, units and so, do I need anything more or specific for RI?. There are some tutorial about vanilla, but Do you know any specific tutorial for RI too?
Thanks on advance
I don't think there's anything specific to RI you should know - the WorldBuilder is there and should have everything you need. If you have any particular questions, ask.
On the topic of the City Square, I'm not particularly happy with that building either - mainly because unlocking it disables your ability to build new Monuments, which are much cheaper (60
iirc instead of 100+) and have the same main effect, that being the +1
to pop your first border in a new city. Making it available to build alongside it's upgrade like the Blast Furnace may be an option, but I can see it being silly to have one of the cheapest buildings in the game available for a long time. Maybe finally disable it with the clock tower.
Yes, this might be reasonable. I agree with the fact that the use cases are currently somewhat different, but I'd also argue that in most cases monument simply becomes redundant when you can build a theatre for a comparable production amount.
The Monument and the City Square just have different use cases. The Monument is primarily an option to pop the second ring for small, newly founded cities. The City Square is something you put in larger, established cities to multiply existing
output and benefit from the
bonus.
So what are the options? Making it a building line Monument -> City Square -> Clock Tower, or making it Monument -> Clock Tower with the City Square separate. Could shuffle around the +
from the City Square to the clock tower, adjust
costs a bit - but then the City Square would look awkward, being a cheap building with small bonuses.
Since the Clock Tower was used for (commercial) coordination, assigning a small
bonus (5-10%?) to it instead may be an option. That would put it in the City Square category of "makes established city a bit better, not good for new city".
Here you bring up another notion that I also agree with - City Squares currently have a weird use case. That should be something that every city wants to have, at least eventually, while in reality, it ends up being useless for most of your cities (most cities never produce enough GP points to merit a bonus, and culture is only really relevant for the frontier ones). This feels frustrating and should probably change. Bonuses to other buildings might work, but I am wary of handing out too many - flat bonuses might be rather unbalancing. I'll give it some thought - probably take away the flat ones that are already there and give to the city square "line" (if clocks are indeed to be treated as their upgrades).
I cannot belive but it works.
I found simple solution to black water
Find how to enable cheats. ( easy tutorials so i do not repeat )
Press lambda, and write: graphics.togglewater
Press enter.
Interesting. Can't test it myself as I can't reproduce the issue on my side, but will suggest trying next time anyone runs into it.
After more careful play of my own and continuing to read through this whole thread (on page 261 now), some new ideas have come to mind; some of my own, and others being the relayed suggestions of others which seemed to be received favorably at the time, but don't seem to have made it in the current rendition of the mod. I wholeheartedly respect the position of Walter not to undertake any kind of overhaul or fundamental mechanical change, so in each case I've tried to temper the suggestion with that in mind, endeavoring to work within the framework already enabled by the game's engine. Some are simply minor tweaks or aesthetic changes, but a few would be a bit more involved if still (by my sincere if still non-programmer assumption) something easily workable within the purview of the existing mechanics. If some of these are excessive, I don't mean to be inconsiderate or blithe towards the desire not to undertake any ambitious changes, but suspect some of these might be interesting and simple enough to be worth suggesting. Once again, many thanks for such a high-quality game experience that I get to enjoy for free.
Thanks for a trip down the memory lane! To preface, most of the stuff there wasn't implemented for some particular reason, not simply forgotten about. In many cases the reason being "requires a lot of coding" - and while I did get better over time (starting at zero any improvement is substantial
), I am nowhere near good enough to implement major stuff on my own. While, as you correctly mentioned, I am on record as liking most of these ideas, this is purely hypothetical as in "I'd love if a wizard came by and did this". I'll go over them one by one below. Also, a suggestion to you - from what I can gather, you're playing a release version. Since you're being so thorough in your feedback, I feel it would actually be great if you set yourself up with an SVN version. I end up implementing lots of balance changes and stuff over there that might take a year to make it into another release. There's already half a year of incremental changes and fixes there compared to the latest release version, and I was rather active during that time...
- Would it be possible to make early oceangoing vessels take damage for each turn they are in ocean and outside of their civ's cultural borders, and eventually sink? In Civ3, there was a risk of sinking for wooden ships, and from both a realism and gameplay standpoint, it's somewhat disappointing and uninteresting that early transoceanic ships in the age of sail are guaranteed safe passage and indefinite tenure out at sea, when these early voyages were in history quite dangerous and seldom completed unscathed; furthermore, I think it would add to the fun of exploration as the player in the game, as you seek to circumnavigate the world, or find other civs, or explore the coastline of the new world: imagine instead of just building one caravel which is guaranteed (outside of war, or privateers from someone much more advanced) to accomplish all of this for you at no additional risk or expense, you have to send out multiple voyages to scout out and get an idea on the resources and good city spots of the new world are in a terra map, and face the risk of losing settlers and other valuable units as you begin colonizing. I think that this would be a relatively simple change to enhance gameplay quite a bit, and make this area of play more historically plausible and exciting. The way I propose this to be done is to inflict variable collateral damage to ships of a certain class (and I'm thinking for simplicity's sake, to restrict this only to the age of sail, perhaps even only the pre High Seas Warfare classes, as later ships are obviously far more reliable), only, to enable a total destruction once strength reaches zero, if possible. (AI pathfinding with planned invasions should be irrelevant as well, if later sailing ships are excluded from this, I would think.) I don't know if that's obtainable via the collateral damage mechanic, but it seemed like a first-blush way to accomplish this simply. I vaguely recall mentioning something about this a while back, so if apologies if I'm repeating myself in any way.
Think of the poor AI. That would require teaching it a major new concept and actually creating a decision mechanism to evaluate the risks and rewards involved. It's not just beyond me, it's
far beyond me.
- Is tech transfer currently tied to active trade routes, or is it still simply a function of having open borders diplomatically? This was discussed a while back, and Walter said that this was the intention for the system and ought to be implemented eventually, but AFAIK it still does not function this way.
If we were designing the tech transfer system from the ground up at this point, that (and actual distance) would probably be an approach we'd take. Note that this is not a royal "we", as I was never directly involved in setting up this system, so even figuring out its workings would take quite some effort for me.
- There was also talk about a more passive espionage system than in BtS. Was there any previous development here that was shelved and could be added back in? Even simply codes for new mission types?
There was some very very long time ago (pre-BtS I'd reckon), so while there might be some legacy code in there, I am not even sure if it would work at all, much less do meaningfully useful stuff.
- Someone had mentioned the nuclear arms race being represented exclusively by ICMBs as somewhat disingenuous to history, since, obviously, their first (and only, in war) use was in being dropped as a bomb from a conventional aircraft, making rocketry and all of the industry, technology, and infrastructure (silos) associated with that superfluous to the actual historical arms race. Walter had actually responded at the time that he concurred with the argument and that it would actually be quite workable within the existing "world wonder unit" system, but that there wouldn't be a unit to represent this effectively. I suggest reskinning the guided missile (one-use, per being a disposable unit and functionally a world wonder) and making it (unlike later tactical nukes or ICBMs, which are naturally supposed to be superior) vulnerable to fighter interception, as this seems to be a workable way to include it in such a way that it is more true to an authentic representation of the weapon while also being an interesting gameplay feature which would affect play meaningfully and isn't just a bell and whistle.
I actually did want to add Enola Gay as a world unit, but ran into a purely technical limitation - I couldn't make a decently animated nuclear bomber (at best it was an epic, but not particularly realistic nuclear kamikaze plane). But this one I might actually revisit, with more practical experience in unit making (the new Gulyay-Gorod recently uploaded to SVN took me an inordinate amount of effort, but is something I'm genuinely proud of, for instance).
- Another idea someone had mentioned was refugees, and Walter had said that he concurred that this is a very important aspect of history which sadly just isn't modeled by Civilization IV's game mechanics. I believe I may have found a way that they could be, at least theoretically! In the same way that captured slaves use the unit functionality of the great engineer in hurrying production, albeit significantly scaled-down, this made me wonder if an analogous unit, "the refugee," could similarly apply a scaled-down function of the great artist's culture bomb, to instantly install foreign nationality in the nearest cities it finds! Their odds of spawning could be something similar to partisans when attacking a city, or a random "revolt" vis a vis slaves/serfs, if razed, perhaps, and they could use the same pathfinding logic as slaves in serfs in seeking the nearest city to "attack" by joining it. This foreign culture would then constitute a problem for the host city in the form of instability from separatism, and unhappiness for "resenting foreign rule," (and also represent social problems like the racism and xenophobia of the native population against the minorities) those latter two already being written into the game in the form of foreign culture within the city. (This would also rudimentarily model cultural diasporas in such a way that the interior of every civ isn't curiously 100% homogenous, and make contentious border regions more naturally diffused than simply a dichotomous distribution of outputs.) In gameplay terms, I think this could add a considerable layer of depth and a lot of fun for something which appears to me to have the building blocks for it already there.
IDW component actually does some of that in a passive way - a contentious region will now naturally have a mix of cultures if enough combat took place there. Anything more major would be too ambitious to me at this point.
- This would just be a matter of flavor, but would you consider verbally titling/labeling the tech eras next to their cool individual icons? For instance, "high medieval" for the crusader shield, and so forth.
Screen real estate. It's usually a pretty long name, and while I play with a rather big resolution, I know most players don't. I was very surprised recently by a complaint from someone who was playing at 1024x768 (and claiming their monitor couldn't do any better). The best I can probably do is put it into the tooltip.
- Epidemics in my games always seem to be local and don't seem to be spreading a long trade routes to other cities. Isn't that how they are supposed to function? Also, I think epidemics as a whole could be buffed a little bit, to be more deadly in some cases. They usually are just a few turns and a few population unit deaths, but something like the Black Death should be capable of, in the span of 5-10 turns, reducing all of your cities by a third of their population or more. Neglecting health infrastructure or overexpanding vertically is punished by them, and they are more than a nuissance, but more like a thorn in the side rather than a truly seismic disaster as they sometimes were. Would implementing any changes to severity within the existing mechanical functionality be difficult, and do you agree with this reasoning?
I do agree that epidemics are currently very local, and could be much more devastating in real history. But I am rather averse to putting something
that punishing into RI. I'd imagine most players wouldn't be thrilled to lose half of their population. And mechanically speaking, the epidemics currently spread through trade routes, which, while realistic in and of itself, in Civ 4 means that instead of spreading to neighboring cities, they usually go to the most remote (and preferably foreign) ones. And putting additional distance-based checks, while not beyond my skill, would likely have a really major performance impact.
- Someone mentioned being disappointed by army sizes not meaningfully corresponding to population sizes, such that small empires can still afford to field considerable armies, etc., but their main gripe was that manpower itself wasn't really represented by any population loss from battlefield deaths, or required to train units. I don't really mind that personally in this game, since "hammers" can be taken to represent fighting age men as a resource, too, and the time to train units could loosely represent this ability to be replenished, notwithstanding that the relative number of men in a military unit is necessarily much smaller than a whole population unit of the city, but where I think a tweak could be made and that this poster had a point, is with force limits. As it is now, we have the base unit support by default, and then thereafter it is an additional free unit for every 0.24*population, but going beyond this is always only one additional gold per turn... The value of a single commerce equating the support of a unit facilitated by, say, an entire 4 population city, is simply not reasonably on par, to my mind, and furthermore, the relative value of one single unit of commerce diminishes substantially as the game progresses. This does mean that low population civs aren't really hindered much by their dearth of manpower in fielding a sizeable army, perhaps even comparable to that of a much larger civ, comfortably. Historically speaking, overall population and fieldable manpower do of course have a high P value, where greater concentrations of fighting-age men being in the professional army at any one time being somewhat rare and usually the result of an especially martial society, not one merely marginally wealthier than it is populous. I think this phenomenon could be more faithfully represented by the game. If I could suggest something simple, how about approximately doubling the free support value WRT population, and also doubling unit cost in excess of this? I mentioned something about simply doubling unit cost and Walter said that then the AI wouldn't know it was overspending, but could we circumvent this by altering the values for free support, so that it knows what it should be aiming for with unit build? I also think this would combine quite nicely with scaling unit costs to prevent snowballing, which I suspect would be the next source of reluctance beyond any potential AI unit-build complications.
This is already in RI. Almost your exact suggestion when compared to vanilla. We toyed with having a more in-depth manpower system, but eventually scrapped it both for the effort it'd require to implement, and because the underlying gameplay would actually encourage snowballing - the bigger you are, the easier it is to get bigger.
- The shortswordsman is a little overpowered, I think. Perhaps (especially given its title) make it require a strategic metal, or increase its hammer cost? It's a quite reliable, cheap, and easily-spammed unit. I think in scenarios where one doesn't have copper or iron, they simply fare too well to be lacking weapons made from these, or are otherwise disingenuous to this lack by wielding "shortswords" anyway. Something just seems kind of wrong about that, when you would otherwise have to rely on archers and militia. Was this a matter of balance so that if you don't have these resources, you're in a virtually unwinnable position if you get attacked by someone who does?
No place in the world completely lacks access to metals. Strategic copper and iron resources are simply ores in large enough quantities to support major centralised smithing operations to outfit big armies with quality weapons and armour. A shortswordsman is armed with whatever their village smith could conjure - it will likely still be metal to an extent (though "shortswordsmen" for some civs don't visually use metal weaponry), just poorer quality and likely not enough for any major body armour elements. Many other units not directly requiring metal resources (such as some militias, horsemen and all of the archery line) visually have metal elements in their gear. And yes, it's very much a matter of balance, both defensively (if you don't have copper/iron you don't get overrun) and offensively (if you can output lots of food early on, poorly equipped human waves are a solid alternative to well-equipped small armies).
have come to the conclusion that the tech tree has a bloat problem. While more engaging in the start and very end of the game, the industrial-era military techs in particular are slog. Thematically, I don't think many of them are important enough to be included, making getting through them boring and confusing.
The tech tree being so tightly connected to itself also paradoxically makes science victories less fun to play, as it reduces tech tree from a series of choices to merely an obstacle to overcome. Because to get all the space parts, you basically need every tech in the game, so deciding which tech to research matters way less. And while some prereqs are good and necessary, the fact that you need almost every military tech before you can start science stuff might on one level be accurate, it doesn't make for as good gameplay, at least in the Civ context.
Related to this, because the techs are so numerous, I don't have much difficult choices in my building queus. I can build faster than I tech for my established cities, so I run research way more than I ever did in unmodded Civ. This also eliminates a vector of player choice.
I can provide a list of techs I consider excessive. I could do the same for connections, but that would take longer.
Thanks for the feedback; this has provoked me to share some of my thoughts on the matter, but tl;dr to that is: I won't be cutting the tech tree down; I certainly won't object to a modmod that does it, but my overall views on what RI is are probably significantly different from yours.
Now to the long part. A necessary preface: the views here are my own, and I don't consider them to be anything more than that - other players and indeed content creators might (and should) have very different views from mine, and I am completely fine with that. But given how this is, in essence, my mod at this point in time (and even before I became a one-man team, I was responsible for most content design decisions), and its design is driven by my views, I thought it would be good for people to understand how certain decisions were taken.
Firstly, all (or at least most) of RI is, strictly speaking, bloat. It adds huge quantities of stuff, and none if it is strictly necessary, as Civ 4 in the vanilla state is perfectly playable. What - in my view - makes it different from a kitchen-sink approach to a mod is that the elements of "bloat" to be introduced were curated with a specific concept in mind. In the manual's preface, I describe this at length, but in condensed form it's: to deliver a distinctive "realistic" feel through a combination of all the elements - gameplay, visual, etc. Realistic not in a sense of underlying mechanics - RI is not a simulator of reality, but rather a game mod - but in a sense of emotional, if you will, attachment to "historic" process you shape when playing. To me, it meant making certain design decisions. Tech tree design is one of those - industrial era was deliberately created with twice more techs in mind, to convey a feeling of technological progress radically speeding up; just as medieval era has fewer but relatively (obviously later techs are more expensive than earlier, but in my experience, it takes much more time to research a medieval tech than an industrial one, given when one is upon reaching those eras) more expensive techs, to convey a more "static" world view (while the concept of "dark ages" is more cultural myth than fact, the post-classical world does appear to have developed at a steadier pace for a while).
Likewise, for me, the interconnectedness of the tech tree is important. I fully understand that it limits the breadth of one's strategic decisions, to my overall "look and feel" outlook it's important that someone isn't able to build, say, planes, while still having sailing ships as the best available navy. Indeed, the tech progress in RI is more "even" than in vanilla and most civ-like games, and that, again, was an intentional design decision. While I understand what you're saying when it comes to pursuing certain victory strategies, that's a perfect illustration of how one's overall vision impacts those things: I don't care about winning the game. I don't think I've ever played more than a couple of Civ 4 games, both vanilla and modded, to a victory. And I know that for a lot of people, this is a very important part of the game. But since it isn't for me, this simply failed to influence my design decisions. I always preferred a more choose-your-own-adventure approach that is central to, say, Paradox grand strategy games.
That said, I do feel a certain responsibility to accommodate other players who might have very different outlooks - to an extent. Hence such a lot of stuff that can be toggled to customize one's experience. But redesigning major parts of the game is somewhat beyond the scope of that - and here I'm encouraged by the fact that Civ 4 is very accessible in terms of modding. If someone happens to like RI but dislikes certain aspects of it, they can always make their own adjustments, either purely for domestic use, or even putting it out for everyone else as a modmod. I feel I've always been fairly helpful to people wanting to make their own adjustments even if they don't suit my own taste.
P.S. That doesn't mean everything is set in stone. I also feel there's not enough building going on in the industrial era, so I might up the costs of most non-production related buildings and wonders quite radically. But the numbers of techs and their interconnectedness are very much to my taste as they are now, thank you very much.
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