I've been rather disappointed by the effect of the Schwedagon Paya (enables all religion civics). Of the eight religion civics, five (Paganism, Animism, Civil Religion, Monasticism and Pacifism) are already unlocked by the Classical Era, and the sixth (Militancy) is unlocked later in the same era. This means that the only civics that the wonder unlocks significantly early are the last two: free religion and Cult of Personality. But both of those are heavily dependent on modern era buildings. Cult of Personality's whole "thing" is giving happiness from propaganda buildings to compensate for the lack of religion; without those propaganda buildings it's just a worse version of Paganism. And Free Religion doesn't let you actually spread your religions around, because you can't make missionaries without a state religion, and can't make representatives until the industrial era.
Realism Invictus
- Thread starter Walter Hawkwood
- Start date
I do agree, but partially because I don't really care much for the religion part of civ. Though, that isn't to say I don't prioritize it; I try to get it so I can get free religion ASAP. Reason being is the sweet sweet unlimited scientists, having even just one super science city running only scientists keeps me at the top of tech throughout most of the 'earlier' eras, until I get more and developed cities in the industrial+ era.
What do you mean 'hectic'?
AspiringScholar
King
Ideally, something which expands the whole system dynamically in a holistic way by adding more layers of depth. For instance, in a game like Europa Universalis III, you have a casus belli and infamy system, and while Civ does have damaged relations from attacking friends and a DP system, there is no variation in domestic or foreign policy complications beyond that; you can just attack anyone piecemeal and unless they have an alliance (which is removed by default in this mod, anyway), the only thing you have to worry about is relations and any existing trade routes which might lead to complications, whereas in EU, there is a whole system of alliances, guarantees, casus belli ("just causes" for war) and an infamy system which puts a check on one's potential for conquest.
Granted, the separatism feature does actually add plenty of depth in this regard, but the diplomatic options themselves are still quite limited. The existing options are fine as they are but they do feel a little bare-bones, and theoretically could be made a lot more complex and interactive. Even without adding any new diplomatic options, if a casus belli system, infamy and prestige (just like in EU3) could be added in, that would be extremely cool. But, I know this is only rumination because programming something like that into the game would be a massive project.
One thing which might possibly be reasonably doable would be to change the AI's peaceweight for trading cities in conquest, while greatly expanding those for losses/victories on the battlefield, so that peace treaties would be more of a matter of land exchanges for desired territory based upon mutually-agreed victory, rather than everything needing to be outright and directly conquered - that one might be something which wouldn't even require coding in any new systems, but I honestly have no idea. We already have "field" and "urban" logistical categories, so technically the game is already able to distinguish between these two types of combat. Even if not, making the AI highly value unit deaths in battle might make it willing to trade cities in peace deals, which it basically doesn't really do in my experience until it doesn't have any valuable ones left anyway. The one big problem with that I can see is that it would greatly benefit the player, since you're not required to give up cities even if the AI thinks it doesn't need to conquer them in order to take them.
Oh yeah, I remember you talking about that a few months ago. Did that upset you?
I can see your point and I think you're right, but, do you mind clarifying what you mean by "the diplomacy element of the game" - while it make sense that individual cities' separatism on a huge map is less of an issue, how does the scale of the map or number of civs significantly affect balance with respect to certain civs conquering everything and running away with the game? I guess technically you can have more people to call in with defensive wars, but that goes for the aggressor too, and if someone is already powerful, they're going to be feared and respected by people they solicit to help them in their own war, so I don't really see how that prevents snowballing.
--
Also, what the heck is going on here? I think these hornet throwers are cheating! Somehow they kept getting positive odds while attacking me in spite of my garrison's higher combined strength.
Spoiler :
Spoiler :
Last edited:
I imagine it'll be just twice as fast. But keep in mind one need not play for 50 hours to go from ancient to future. One can easily extend or contract that amount of time by micromanaging more or less. I think I micromanage a little too much, but I have also gotten pretty quick about micromanaging as I write down notes for myself while playing a game.
Actually, as long as we're talking about a diplo rework, one thing I realized I would love is for AIs to be better at tracking who likes and dislikes who, and make an effort to engage in triangle/[insert shape] diplomacy. IE, I wish AI's were more keen on trying to form large power blocs where everyone in the bloc likes each other, creating for more epic and divided world wars later. Sometimes a great world war can be forced or can naturally happen, but as it stands, I dislike the fact that there's no point in 'choosing a side' as the chart of who likes and dislikes who is so tangled that its essentially just a free for all. TLDR: I wish my friends shared the same friends and enemies as I.
JohnCarterOfMars
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jun 28, 2021
- Messages
- 90
Upset me? No. I was just concerned that you might have been playing on the fringe (smaller map with fewer civs) and yet insisting on changes that affected all styles of play.
Regarding my comment "the diplomacy element of the game," I was referring to how a huge map with many civs will likely mean that many civs will lack enough resources to lead in early game development (in my game I lacked enough limestone to get masonry materials, and it slowed down building and road development). I was able to find several prime timber tiles to trade for some limestone. Larger civs (as a result of fewer overall civs competing for territory) means that they will have much more resources at their disposal, likely everything they will need when they need it.
This is where the comment about "certain civs conquering everything and running away with the game" comes in. I'm saying that it slows down the likelihood of civs doing this. All civs will be resource-constrained in a game with a very large map and a lot of civs, to the point that creating SoDs becomes prohibitive. What happened in my game is that by the time the leaders enter the industrial age, there are still a lot of civs that were unable to compete and are still building old wood siege weapons. These are the civs that will ask to become your vassal. This is where diplomacy really comes into play.
Once the weaker civs look for masters, you have to pay attention to which civs like or dislike the civs that want to become your vassal. Accepting a civ as a vassal may give you open borders to a section of the map that was closed off to you before, but you now will have civs who say you traded with their worst enemy. You may get civs who decline to become vassals because they are afraid of your enemies or that their rivals are in your empire. When you start attacking other civs, some of your vassals may cancel the vassal deal because you attacked their friend, and then a few turns later they become a vassal to another civ.
Eventually, I find that the civs that vassal to me will start trading amongst themselves. If I find a civ that is trading with a rival of mine, I will ask that civ to stop trading with them. Eventually, a trading bloc will form amongst my vassals to the point where it becomes economically infeasible for them to leave.
I suppose this comes down to how you choose to play the game. If you want a wargame where domination is the goal, then none of this matters. If you're playing for a cultural or diplomatic win, then this becomes important. If you're playing the space race and need to lead in tech, then negotiating some form of "coopertition" with your main rivals (where you are #1 or #2 and have open borders with tech transfer) may keep the top civs from direct conflict. I found in my games that smaller regional skirmish wars flared up every now and then between the #4-6 civs and their vassals. I usually ignore these as being inconsequential to me.
I'm almost finished with my v3.5 game and am looking forward to starting a new game with the newest release. Until then, I can't really comment on how the war weariness/separation adjustments affected the huge map/many civs game. I did see some civs break up in the medieval period because they couldn't afford their expansion (I assume), but none of the leaders in the late game are suffering this. It might be because these civs are not diverting their economies to military unit-building (SoDs) because they are not driven by conquest. It might be that civs are not separating because of war weariness because there are fewer wars.
My one exception in my game was with the Ashoka leader. He and I were battling for #1 and #2 and we each had about six vassals. Eventually, Ashoka sneak attacked me. I was able to sink his invading transports, and then diverted all of my research to construction, built up my own navy, destroyed his defensive forces, and blockaded his coastal cities. Then I had the time to build up my own invading army and destroyed those same coastal cities, driving Ashoka back. He dropped from #1-2 to #5-6, and he was eventually attacked by some of the #3-4 civs while restarted my research, but was upgrading my military units one by one each turn. About 60 turns later, I attacked Ashoka again because he kept starting wars with his neighbors no matter how small he became. I eventually declared war on him so my vassal closest to him would occupy his capital and eliminate him from the game.
But other than that war, it's been a mostly peaceful game. I attribute this to the dynamics of a huge map with 40 civs. I'll play the new version using the same setup and see how it compares. Then I might try a giant map with 40 civs to see if having more space will give the civs access to more resources, and if having more resources tilts the AI to be more warlike.
Of course, one has to have a computer that can handle this. I'm playing on a Dell Alienware m17 R4 with 16Gb of ram and a dedicated GPU NVidia RTX 3070. I still need to run Process Lasso w/Watchdog to keep the MAF errors from happening.
I hope that you get to try a large map/civs game to compare to your own experiences, too.
Last edited:
Sad, but that patch didn't help me.
Yeah that would be fun.
Civ 6 has casus bellis.
But I guess the KI cant handle it.
Last edited:
AspiringScholar
King
Thanks for the extensive reply. I think I'm not alone in the standard map preference (IIRC, Walter said he plays standard maps), but I know I'm definitely in the minority among regular posters here. The thing is, though, that the global modifier as it was literally broke the game on that setting, so I don't think my suggestion was out of place. It's likely that you're a stronger player than me (I'm starting to get comfortable on Monarch with raging barbs) and are better at managing it in general, but in the long post where I mentioned that, I hadn't even conquered so extensively, nor lost more than perhaps a third of the stack I was using in an overseas invasion, and my global modifier skyrocketed to well over 200% if I remember correctly, which is beyond the pale of anything you can realistically do as the player to control it. It was also redundant because excess unhappiness from war weariness is already a significant source of separatism, but that one actually has bearing on your local stability via varying levels of happiness. I am almost positive that this is the reason why the feature was considered broken and removed from the game, for the AI and the player.
The biggest variable here does seem to be the map size though, since the war weariness quotient does scale directly with map size, while I'm not sure that the revolution mechanic recognizes this and adjusts accordingly. Still, though, I get positive separatism issues and see actual revolutions in my games almost every time (and the "you're leading the score" global modifier is also really hard to deal with, since AFAIK it's a direct ratio with your percentage of score lead, so that if you're ahead by 25%, you now have that applied to every city in addition to anything else, which is a lot), so I don't think it was overcorrected. It's just that it doesn't break the feasibility of conquest completely. I'm probably a 6/10 on the warmongering preference scale - I prefer expand aggressively in the early game via peaceful settlement, then build up domestically until relatively late in the game, if I decided to go for domination. Generally, I only wage occasional opportunistic wars unless they are meant to be a home stretch to winning the game, but it's very annoying when even doing that results in unavoidable collapse of your empire. Either way, long and short, I think it's the map size making the enormous difference here between our experiences.
My next game I'll play on gigantic and report back on any differences.
Huh, I didn't realize that it did, cool. I still think it's way too far removed from my preferred Civ experience for me to want to try it, but that is a cool feature. Too bad it couldn't be directly included in Civ IV.
45°38'N-13°47'E
Deity
I think I've been able to fix a CTD that kept happening, especially towards the end of the game. I've run a few test games with autoplay in the last days, and almost all of them were CTD somewhere in modern era. After a few attempts, I've been able to debug the dll and I've discovered a division by zero bug, which was causing CTD.
Specifically, the problem is in CvUnit.cpp which is part of the dll; there are 2 instances of
int iExperience = attackXPValue();
but this sometimes returns 0 and since a few lines below in the code for iExperience and AirBombDefense (which explains why the CTD happens during modern era), the value gets divided for iExperience... bang, that's causing CTD.
So pretty easy solution is to use
int iExperience = std::max(1, attackXPValue());
instead of the line above.
I tested it on a few of my crashing savegames and they don't crash anymore. So I hope @Walter Hawkwood or someone else can add this fix to the next release.
Specifically, the problem is in CvUnit.cpp which is part of the dll; there are 2 instances of
int iExperience = attackXPValue();
but this sometimes returns 0 and since a few lines below in the code for iExperience and AirBombDefense (which explains why the CTD happens during modern era), the value gets divided for iExperience... bang, that's causing CTD.
So pretty easy solution is to use
int iExperience = std::max(1, attackXPValue());
instead of the line above.
I tested it on a few of my crashing savegames and they don't crash anymore. So I hope @Walter Hawkwood or someone else can add this fix to the next release.
Sorry for my ignorance, but what is CTD?
Also, for anyone that's curious and definitely for Walter in the future if he decides to make a patch. On the manual, it says that (evasion chance) = evasion%stat - interception%stat. This is wrong. It's the other way around. I only found out about this because there is a tip in the game that states this correctly, that (interception chance) = interception%stat - evasion%stat.
How does one get a playable map with 40 civs? I play on totestra huge and if I try and fit 40, everyone is only going to have one city only. Lol. Although, I've been fiddling around with the totestra script and also been trying out the 6:4 totestra map (which is freaking huge huge, it's almost 3x the size of the built in RI huge world map
) and in that one if I try 40, everyone it seems can have a comfortable 6-7 cities, not even including the new world.
45°38'N-13°47'E
Deity
Sorry for my ignorance, but what is CTD?
Also, for anyone that's curious and definitely for Walter in the future if he decides to make a patch. On the manual, it says that (evasion chance) = evasion%stat - interception%stat. This is wrong. It's the other way around. I only found out about this because there is a tip in the game that states this correctly, that (interception chance) = interception%stat - evasion%stat.
How does one get a playable map with 40 civs? I play on totestra huge and if I try and fit 40, everyone is only going to have one city only. Lol. Although, I've been fiddling around with the totestra script and also been trying out the 6:4 totestra map (which is freaking huge huge, it's almost 3x the size of the built in RI huge world map
CTD = Crash to Desktop, when the game crashes and you don't have a clue why
As for the 40 civs I've played other mods (Rise of Mankind - A New Dawn) with more than 50 civs on a gigantic map (maybe Totestra, I'm not sure). But RI Huge Earth map also supports more than 40 civs and I've seen civs with 3-4 cities but at the same time larger civs with up to 30 cities.
Thanks for the clarification on CTD.CTD = Crash to Desktop, when the game crashes and you don't have a clue why
As for the 40 civs I've played other mods (Rise of Mankind - A New Dawn) with more than 50 civs on a gigantic map (maybe Totestra, I'm not sure). But RI Huge Earth map also supports more than 40 civs and I've seen civs with 3-4 cities but at the same time larger civs with up to 30 cities.
I should've specified what I meant by my last comment though. I meant how does one get a custom map that is playable with 40+ civs? playable as in everyone is capable of having 5ish cities at a time. The issue with Totestra 6:4 that produces the absolutely gigantic map that I talked about is that there are these ugly 'bands' that stripe across a portion of the world. Plus, it produces a size a little too large. Totestra also seems to not cooperate with any map larger than 'Huge', as the giant map size is bugged (atleast for me) in that it produces just a big ol grassland map. I think I'm going to need to look at the mapscript itself though and I'm going to have another crack at trying to get totestra to generate maps similar to 'RI huge world map'.
JohnCarterOfMars
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jun 28, 2021
- Messages
- 90
How does one get a playable map with 40 civs? I play on totestra huge and if I try and fit 40, everyone is only going to have one city only. Lol. Although, I've been fiddling around with the totestra script and also been trying out the 6:4 totestra map (which is freaking huge huge, it's almost 3x the size of the built in RI huge world map
I used the RI_Planet_Generator and went with whatever it generated.
JohnCarterOfMars
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jun 28, 2021
- Messages
- 90
Arrgghh...
I was 60 turns away from a cultural victory when Inca Rosa achieved it first.
Anyway, I doubt I'm a stronger player. I only started playing this game about a year ago. I still play on the Noble level.
I'm probably a 40/60 on the warmonger scale -- maybe a little bit less. I find that I'm averse to using slavery civics, too, as well as dictatorial leaders or civics. I'll start a war if I really need the territory, either for access to the seas or for a critical resource. Sometimes, I'll attack to remove a cruel or warmongering leader from the world. Otherwise, I prefer to let culture eat away at a neighbor's borders.
One thing I'm not good at is with the use of spies. I only lately learned the value of counter-espionage to keep the others from looting my treasury. I now make a point of establishing a counter-espionage with my closest rivals and then setting a reminder for 75 turns to redo it. However, I haven't been diligent in using spies to destroy another civ's buildings. I have been using them to destroy farms or other improvements to slow down a city's growth, but that's about it. There is so much to keep track of and I can't remember to do everything.
Anyway... on to version 3.6!
45°38'N-13°47'E
Deity
You should always check the victory board and keep a spare army to raze a legendary city. In my current game on the Large Earth map I had Indonesia going for Cultural Victory but before they could reach it, I had the time to conquer and raze their 3rd legendary city which extended the game for 100+ turns; then Greece became the closest to Cultural Victory and I'm about to do the same with their 3rd Legendary City and possibly repeating the same with Egypt, hopefully giving me enough time for a Space Victory. If you have a strong military, preventing a Cultural Victory shouldn't be too hard. On the other hand, if you were aiming for a Cultural Victory, perhaps your army wasn't strong enough for this kind of task.
Yup, especially late game if you're on a huge map, you need to be able to project power (carriers) or have a top notch and proactive espionage game.
JohnCarterOfMars
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jun 28, 2021
- Messages
- 90
I may go back to a prior save and try this.
My largest rival was Chola, who shared my southeastern border. Chola was my worst enemy, but wasn't mobilizing an attack against me because he had no vassals and I had many to his north.
Inca Rosa was friendly to me and we had open borders for most of the game. I know we were each leaching tech off of each other, but I probably should have closed the borders when I move ahead in tech. Still, I don't think it was the tech that pushed Inca Rosa ahead of me in culture.
Also, Inca Rosa was further inland from me and it would be a trek to get my city killing stacks into position. I'll have to try it out and see how that manifests into a world war. This may be a case where sacking the third city ends up being too devastating in the long run.
We'll see.
