- Are cottages supposed to be unable to be built on plains hills, only grassland ones? In a new game, I found that I could not build a cottage atop a hill which had a hot spring on it, so I thought that maybe there was something about this feature which prevents that, but did not see that documented in Pedia and also recalled building cottages on hot spring hills before. The local city in question had another hot spring hill within the BFC, so I sent the worker there and was able to build a cottage there, the only difference being that the latter was grassland and the former was plains. If something doesn't sound right here, I can drop the save.
Same as farms, they require at least 1
on a tile.
- This is strictly a flavor/conceptual question, and applies to the base game as well, but it occasionally piques my curiosity: why is metal casting a distinct technology from bronze working when the latter already entails the smelting of an alloy? Even the icon for the technology (which I've chosen for my avatar here) depicts what is technically metal casting. Of course, the way that the bronze would be worked would still be hammered out and would be less brittle than casted metal as the finished product, but isn't the concept which the game represents as an individual technology essentially the same?
It's probably not the specific tech I'd have created from the get-go to fill that spot, but it does have some merit as the development of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment_casting specifically. It seems to have been first developed during late bronze age.
- Because the historical bronze age ended due to a tin shortage and the alloy itself is typically stronger than iron anyway, is it only for gameplay balance reasons that you can't use bronze for swordsmen as you can with cataphracts? That just seems a little inconsistent on paper.
While gameplay is primary, my headcanon is that swordsmen, specifically, are the first units that get a lot of chainmail body armour. I am not sure if it is technically impossible to make chainmail out of bronze, but I never saw any examples thereof. More generally speaking, it is symptomatic of how, while bronze body armour was definitely a thing, due to the costs of the material and its brittleness (meaning fewer chances at proper repair and maintenance after it's been crafted),
widespread use of metal body armour with a significant amount of body coverage was an Iron Age thing. To me, a swordsman represents the advent of relatively cheap and effective metal-based personal protection equipment.
- Why is guilds a prerequisite for paper when they are both tier one medieval techs?
Because they used not to be. Thanks for pointing out, I'll remove the prerequisite for consistency.
Pretty sure it was. I ended up playing off of the autosave before they formed and moving a worker to give vision of what would be the city tile, so I can't confirm it, unfortunately.
After checking the code, I cannot rule a very very unlikely roll on the part of that particular city too. Population affects the settle chance quadratically, but there is some very small probability of a settle to happen at pop 1 (something close to 1 in 1000).
Being cheeky are you? You're well aware that everybody influenced everybody and we don't have anything "pure" in that regard, we'd end up with only Jaguar warrior as a single distinct thing, although Aztecs probably had their fashion choices influenced by Mayans and other Mesoamericans.
My point is that Roman civilization shouldn't end up inevitably as a 20 century Italy. It should be one of a few possible ways that civ could develop. Of course its impossible to implement in a mod and nobody in their right mind wouldn't demand anything form you.
The main reason for my cheekiness is the specific example you chose. I feel no nation has made more effort to actively look like its ancient counterpart than XIX-XX century Italy did with Rome. I won't even be going for specific examples, as it would be pointing out the obvious. Visually, Italy is as close to a modern version of some ancient civ as one could realistically wish for IRL, and if one got that in fiction, it would probably feel like "lazy writing" ("oh come on, 2000 years later and they still use the same symbols and build a colosseum but square instead of round?").
Nevertheless we have some stereotypical feel of what looks "roman" or "russian" or "usa-american" even though it a product of cross-culture exchange anyways.
Good, another great example invoked by you. Does the stereotypical feel of what looks "Russian" really have any continuity in your head? Russia is a great example of a civ that underwent a radical aesthetic shift in its history that's very comparable to Arab-style fashions in Egypt that you complained about. Yet you don't have an inner problem with Russia suddenly starting to look like a generic European country from XVIII century onwards in terms of architecture, dress styles etc (even court language shifting to French). One can't really take an isolated early medieval Russia or France or Scandinavia and "extrapolate" all the later developments from there in a linear fashion. Imagine a Viking being shown pictures of Caroleans and their Russian opponents from the Great Northern War (and maybe some from the belligerents of the contemporary Spanish Succession War while we're at it) and being forced to point out which, in his opinion, are his descendants.
Aesthetic shifts happen with or without external conquest - to me it is absolutely not implausible that Mamluk-style fashion would organically develop in a Egypt that somehow retained its independence. While early Egypt did maintain a remarkable stylistic consistency throughout Bronze age with short exceptions such as the Amarna period (uniquely so in the world it feels to me, I recall no other example where I wouldn't be able to tell apart two artefacts separated by a millennium of time), that identity had undergone seismic changes even before the Arab conquest, and while those changes were also brought about by external conquerors, they weren't simply direct imports of foreign culture. To me, it's the opposite - an Egypt that bases its aesthetic identity on Bronze-Age Egypt in the XVII century would look implausible.
And to add to it, the "theme park" approach feels bland for another reason - while there is unique content in history to draw from, a hypothetical "pure" Egypt not having existed in our history leaves us with two options for, say, Industrial-era content: either do it in the most generic way with only slight aesthetic rethemes of standard factories, ironclads and riflemen, or go off on a complete tangent and make up something that at that point has no basis in real history (because there is nothing in real history to draw from for a "pure Egypt" at that point and hasn't been for millennia). Real-life mamluks, Mohammed Ali and Khedivate of Egypt offer some content to fill a slot that would otherwise remain filled by something generic, or wildly fictional, or most likely both.
In an ideal game that stuff could be treated in a way of mixing cultural characteristics when changes happen in a game. Say alt-history roman empire exists but neighboring Arab civ develops islam, its religion and culture triumphantly spreads onto roman lands in a peaceful manner (Arab civ working toward cultural victory for example) , that should reflect in gradual change of roman architecture being replaced with islamic one. and it eventually becomes Roman Sultanate, if population changes to arabic then not only architecture but people phenotype changes. So in such game its hard to imagine why suddenly in modern Rome from that imaginary game session we end up with Mussolini stuff.
On a mechanics level it could be implemented in a way that units are not set in stone but rather constructed from a pool of equipment based on technology, resources, chosen doctrines and dominating culture aesthetics and CLIMATE (because god I its painful to see naked Zulus jumping around arctic regions). Insignia and banners easily could reflect that also, Islamic Rome has crescents, Christian - crosses and so on.
That does sound nice and would be great to have, but we have to work with what we have.
Theoretically (
very theoretically, don't get your hopes up!), an underlying mechanic for an equipment system already exists even in vanilla Civ 4, as promotions can change the looks of units. Zulus could get a nice fur coat if they got "Arctic Combat I" promo (and it wouldn't be hard to give all their units from a city past a certain latitude such a promo), but it would require a tremendous amount of work as that would have to be done for all unit models.
So I would like to see a giant sandbox where building blocks are actual elements of human history and some hypothetical ones, where cultures changes gradually for objective reasons like conquest or cultural dominance. And where player is not pigeon-holed into starting as Egypt and ending up as Arab or Songhai without any historical logic behind that change.
You're describing Humankind basically - at least, that's what it tries to be. Unfortunately, when done sloppily, you end up with a total loss of the civ's identity.
To sum up what I'm trying to say, I agree that my chosen approach is not ideal, but I haven't seen a better approach that works in practice yet. And if I'm being cheeky it's only because you've been presenting me with easy targets. There are some decisions in RI that would have been much harder to defend.
Iron Pagoda Cavalry well before anyone else even had knights to a pot shot from a skirmisher having 1.2% odds... Can I put in a vote for the change where overwhelming combat odds get rounded into being actually certain? While that will create a new fence line at 95% or whatever number is chosen, the player then still knows that it is there and that beyond it, the spearman will never defeat the tank.
