Hi I finished a multiplayer game with one other player and had a good time and want advice about what settings to use for another playthrough. Mostly I'm interested in
- good map generator script and settings?
I'd generally recommend all the ones that have "RI" in front of the names, as those were specifically tailored for playing RI. Most of them are highly configurable as well, so if you want fewer and bigger continents for instance, this can easily be arranged.
- tweaks for separatism so it doesn't break the AI? (or generally having longer games)
If there were any that really worked, it would be on by default.
- is teaming with your friend a fine thing to do? It seems fairly balanced? Like research is split and espionage is shared?
Should be. This is purely vanilla, though; nothing was specifically done in RI to balance or alter this anyhow.
Assuming a normal amount of production for a city at that point in the game is about 80, the immediate bonus constitutes hardly more than the equivalent of a single craftsman. Honestly, it just seems fairly underwhelming for what it is supposed to represent, and how expensive it actually is in the game. Having an ironworks in a city doesn't make it "feel" like it is an industrialized hub of production to me, merely slightly better; but coupled with the liabilities and the opportunity cost, it tends to feel like a reluctant choice to me (with the overall industrial building cost nerf a couple of revisions ago, especially so). I would even go so far as to suggest increasing the additional bonus over the blast furnace to 20%.
On another note, were they even prevalent enough at the time of their introduction to be "buildings" in Civ 4 terms? They were national wonders in the base game. It seems like that is actually more appropriate. Was your reason for changing this merely to complete the metallurgy production modifier line for gameplay reasons, or was it on a historical basis? Off the top of my head, while there might have been more than literally just one, it seems that these facilities would still be quite rare, even for great industrial powers. I might have that wrong, however.
I guess you're right, the name "Ironworks" is usually reserved for bigger operations. I'll rename the building to "Foundry".
The revolutions of 1848 were however one that I thought of, and probably still a good one, though that is a once-off occurrence. Other major European uprisings of that time are probably much better represented by separatism, as they all had much more to do with nationalism than anything else.
Not really, no. The 1848 ones were driven more by bourgeoisie / middle classes and were more grounded in demands for political representation, to my understanding.
Do you think anything relatively simple could be done to make anarchy a little more of a con on its own? Switching civics feels "free" as it is.
You're underestimating how much of a con it already is. A full turn of production and research wasted is a rather serious opportunity cost.
EDIT: Speaking of that, a thought just occurred to me: I don't know if this is something you even like theoretically, but one game concept that tends to come up from time to time in discussion here is alcohol. I like how distilled spirits were added to the game as a manufacturable alcohol resource, but its single bonus of happiness doesn't seem quite in line with its actual role in history. Since alcoholism was and still is widespread to the point of being a longstanding public health issue, what about increasing its happiness bonus to +2, and then also increasing unhealthiness by +1, additionally?
AI absolutely loathes resources with drawbacks. Used to be almost exactly this way; AI ended up not producing or trading any.
So why then do power plants provide power on their own as it is? It seems more sensible that either the substation should be a prerequisite for any powerplant, or that it should be scrapped with each powerplant providing its bonus, individually. Otherwise, you are left with a building which models something that already functionally exists in that city.
It cannot be integrated into power plants as there are ways to provide power to cities without a power plant in them, and that would be a huge nerf for those. As for making it a prerequisite for power plants - this can probably be done, but I see no meaningful gameplay impact it would have compared to how it is right now.
But there is still something that bothers me. Not that the electric railroad has been taken out - I didn't use them much anyway. It's more something with the graphic of the paved roads. They road-design sometime looks too "modern" for me, considering this kind of roads comes into the game already in the classical era.
They are modelled on the Roman roads, and that is how Romans really used to build them. It is specifically mentioned in many sources that, even where local roads existed before (in Gaul, for instance) that would usually follow terrain features, Romans would instead build theirs straight from A to B. Also, from more pragmatic perspective, I only have two layouts to work with, and I'd rather have them use the second one for better visual distinction.
So I've played around with that save some more and I realize it almost always crashes when a menu tries to open, particularly the diplomacy menu. It'll also seize up sometimes when you check advisor panels, or when I've triggered a wonder/religion founding movie. Pretty odd that's where the engine is running into trouble now.
That's likely when the game tries to load/unload stuff in bulk from memory.
I noticed that ai doesn't choose the option to reduce rebellion: the player has the choice to bribe rebel leaders, reduce production , give autonomy for 30 turns and I haven't noticed ai doing the same thing
Interesting observation, thanks. I'll look into this - if true, fixing this alone might ensure much better AI separatism handling.
yeah, this is most annyoying
our nation is top1 in ranking and our leader declare war? lets 3/4 of our cities turn undo barbarian rule, why not.
And this, kids, is why we have lots of non-playable civs despite people constantly asking to make them playable.
I am in the process of trying to turn Austria into a full civ. Does anyone know how to add unique improvements? I've managed to find the improvement folder with unique improvements but I can only assign them a binary value and cannot seem to find where you can assign them to a specific Civ. Thanks.
Unique improvements per se don't exist from the game perspective. You need to create a unique worker and assign it (and only it) the ability to build the improvement in question. The binary value is mostly for showing it as unique in pedia.
Recently I'm editing the world map. I changed one coast plot near Cape Town(South Africa) into ocean one to make it impossible circumnavigate the world before using caravel. But I find that the ocean plot access to the land looks really unnatural and fuzzy. Is it possible to do someting to make the ocean plot looks clearer and nicer?
Not really, no. This is simply something the terrain engine isn't designed to do.
There seems to be no voice acting for the agricultural machinery tech (unless something went wrong on my side or I somehow missed it).
Thanks for pointing out! Turns out we forgot to record a voice quote for this one
Fortunately, there was an unused but fitting voiced vanilla quote that can be used instead.
What about making great people capturable instead of them disbanding on encounter? This has real world precedent (think "captured Nazi scientist" in the aftermath of WW2), especially in the late game now that nuclear expertise requires a great scientist or engineer, and the incentive to hold onto them for later use is greater, for golden ages or otherwise. It seems that if someone was known to be a great person, the enemy would want to capture them and make them work for the new civ, not just kill them on the spot (Pythagoras at the siege of Syracuse comes to mind as an exception, however). Would add a little spice to warfare in general, too, since this could become a deliberate strategic factor in conquest.
They are already capturable when settled in a city. I think that's quite enough to represent that.
With the strategic bomber, I was unable to bomb enemy improvements, which should be something they can do since the base game.
Couldn't reproduce - was able to bomb improvements in a quick test.
My domestic advisor seems unable to display triple-digit numbers. This becomes particularly clunky from renaissance onwards, when many cities yield output at this threshold in several categories. The actual "screen" itself with the info is compressed in a smaller window in the top left, rather than logically filling the entire available space. Unsure if this is how it is for others or if there is a problem on my end.
Domestic advisor is fully customizable in-game, including column width.
In my most recent game, I had the "passenger airliner crashes" event every few turns for almost the entire industrial era. (I've got the save if you need it.)
Nothing RI-specific was done to modify any event frequencies.
The ICBM description in pedia has a hyperlink which says "can NUKE enemy lands" but clicking on this doesn't bring you to another page. While an experienced player obviously knows how that works, it would be cool if there was a page in "Game Concepts" detailing exactly what it entails, damage thresholds, etc., Otherwise, removing the hyperlink might be something you want to do as it is just visual clutter otherwise.
I'll see what I can do about this.
How about making the biological warfare missile cause an instant epidemic on impact (or at least a chance of one)? I think I might have mentioned this one before, but it seems to make sense both in gameplay and real world terms within the purview of the existing mechanics as they are.
OK, firstly, when creating a bioweapon, an epidemic is the
last thing you want. Most of the attempts historically specifically tried to create something that would only work on the people immediately affected and would have very little transmission afterwards. Secondly, thanks for drawing my attention to this one - I think I'll simply get rid of this not-very-realistic unit. I already have a replacement class in mind.
This is purely aesthetic, but all longbowmen have a conspicuously thick, chord-like bowstring which other ranged units do not seem to have. It doesn't particularly bother me, but I know that you like things to look better when possible, so just bringing it up in case it was something you'd not thought about in a while.
Not much I can do with that one that doesn't involve
lots of effort on my side individually tweaking the dozen or so model varieties flavour longbowmen use. I'll try improving the texture a bit though, that should look better.
How about adding a very high maintenance cost to nuclear weapons? Maintaining a warhead missile and silo at instant readiness is very expensive in real life, and nukes are extremely powerful in this mod, so what about something like +5 gold per nuke, to make stockpiling them prohibitively expensive? I don't know if this will have a meaningful gameplay effect, however. Each nuke contributes massively to a civ's power score, so their current ability to be useful deterrents is something to consider in this regard.
Maybe. TBH I'm not sure if it's more expensive than, say, an armoured division or an aircraft carrier.
For several turns, I was unable to select any units in a city which had a garrisoned fort two tiles to its south. (Save included which I can post if this isn't already something known about.)
I'll need a save for that one. I likely know the issue and will be able to fix it, but I need to look at the actual unit causing it.
For some reason, I had the option to nuke my own cities and lands (but, ironically, not those of non-belligerents). You'd only do this by mistake if playing seriously, so I'm not sure if it's worth doing anything about this or not, but thought I'd mention it just in case it's undesirable and/or easily fixed. Perhaps this is actually intentionally enabled so that a player has the option of nuking an invading army at the expense of ruining their own land?
Never did anything to that, purely vanilla. Logically, you shouldn't be able to nuke non-belligerents without declaring war, while being able to nuke your own territory is consistent with being able to pillage your own territory.
Pedia description for Kulothunga Chola is very brief. Is there more meaningful historical information available for this figure? I actually like reading the backgrounds of leaders, units, buildings, etc., when I play.
Expanded his description.
In my current game, the ancestor shrine in my capital is outputting a raw 4 culture, while it is only supposed to be 2, as it is in the other cities which have it.
Vanilla behaviour. Buildings double their cultural output every 1000 years, which is likely the case in your game.
The spy unit model as South China is invisible to the player and in the pedia window.
Thanks, fixed.
The hyperlink for the courthouse says "Can turn 1 citizen into spy" but clicking this takes you to the page for the unit, not the specialist.
That's generally the issue with same-named stuff. Part of the reason why every flavour unit has a unique name. This one can probably be fixed by renaming the specialist.
The work boat in the ancient era shows a pulley reel mechanism on the stern, which realistically shouldn't exist until much later, AFAIK. Unsure if there are any feasible models for this, but mentioning in case you would prefer to use a more ancient looking watercraft until, say, mechanics (which would warrant the artwork as it currently is).
Well, this is probably the earliest mechanism ever created, along with the wheel. Since the ancient era includes the bronze age, it is actually quite technologically appropriate, as pulleys are definitely documented in bronze-age Egypt and Mesopotamia and were likely used even before that.
Is it possible to merge a newer version of the BUG mod which details when civs are plotting war, and the reasons for "we have enough on our hands"? I'm thinking probably not, since everything is already so tethered to the existing UI, that attempting this might uproot a lot of previous fixes, but if it's something that can be done, it would make following AI behavior a lot less arbitrary.
No. No, no, no. The mere idea of that makes my skin crawl.
Suggestion: The build option for the Armenian cavalry NU gets disabled when mounted knights are available to be constructed in a city. I'd like to be able to continue building the NUs (7
) alongside my knights, as they have useful traits. Currently I can build them in cities where I specifically don't build a Stable so knights don't become available there, but that is a bit of an awkward workaround.
Well, they were kinda supposed to be obsolete by that time, but since knights aren't always buildable, I can see how this causes an issue. I will think of something.
per turn so AI economy is weakened
(it's my own personal changes 
) partly because ships (and airplanes) still disapper without any trace - even in our modern and totally controlled world.
)).
City bombardment from my capital ships made short work of the city defenses, and my strategic bombers (only intercepted slightly by one fighter from a minor vassal of the enemy) reduced the strength of the garrison handsomely with collateral damage. The marines made short work of the city! The defending machine gun was the tough nut to crack, and I got a lucky battle at 10%, after which all of my odds were good. I razed that city (one of his which was already legendary), but, it turns out that he just had another which was approaching it as well. So, I literally just went marauding and razing several of his cities, in the hopes that I could force secession from his high-culture cities and wipe it out by causing it to flip to the new state, but, one of his major cities was one tile inland, and I blundered my whole stack landing it ashore, thinking I could take just one more city with it. This caused him to go from willing to make gold concessions to refusing to talk, and Russia began prowling through my own empire at this point. So the game is most likely a loss, but quite close, and a lot of fun. All this to say, it seems that alliances are working well, and for whatever good reason, so are revolutions.
