Realism Invictus

[trashmunster]

The advanced horsearchers are supposed to be mutually exclusive with pistoleers, but I'll definitely fix the unupgradeable bit. As for the hussar, I probably meant it to be shared with India and forgot. I'll fix.

Also African Sailboat(reed) has a very weird attack animation, projectile is basic red, like there is a problem with transparency effect. Maybe it can be fixed.

 

[AllTheLand]

- The message about unhappiness from state religion being removed from a city incorrectly says "your" rather than "our", at least in the translation.
- Anesthesy is more of an industrial era invention than a renaissance invention. There were things in the time of Renaissance, but it was much less effective and widespread than modern methods. As a contender for the title of most influential medical advancement of all times, it would be more appropriate as its own tech available in the middle industrial era, rather than as something enabled by the Renaissance era medicine tech. If we have a Bessemer tech to reflect the massive progress in steel production it allowed, a tech for the massive jump in medical possibilities enabled by anesthesy is not a stretch.

Do you guys ever play with any leader that has the poor commander trait? I don't, honestly that thing is a deal breaker for me... It's a fun challenge thought

[/URL]

I haven't yet, but -5% strength on some type of units (not all - melee, archery and gunpowder units are unaffected) is not that bad. I find the foreigner handicap on worker or the megalomaniac 20% wonder penalty much worse.

I'm curious to hear your feedback, if you manage a full playthrough! The circumstances are obviously quite a bit different from a normal game on a random map, and I would expect some conventional strategies to be made irrelevant for that.

Since the Kingdom of Jerusalem is tiny, turns go by quickly. I played in monarch, figuring that the starting spot was difficult enough.

The start is extremely slow, but after twenty or so turns I figured out the trick: completely abandon tech research, and go all-in on gold. Accelerating construction of buildings using gold isn't that expensive in this scenario, so the entire gold production should go towards it. My priorities were getting workers out to improve terrain, fixing the health and happiness issues, and increasing the production and gold revenue of cities. The military order house is very good because it offers both city defense and gold. Very peaceful gameplay, with only one or two crusaders built to bolster my troops.

At some point, the Emirate of Damascus decided it would be a good idea to attack me. I bribed the Principalty of Antiochus to join me in the fight, defended against the attack on Beirut, and prepped more troops. I then counter-attacked. It took a long time for my catapult to bring defenses down, but I took Damascus in 1207 and Aleppo in 1245. Damascus showed good potential (I used a lot of gold to accelerate the construction of buildings), but Aleppo soon got culturally trapped and couldn't do much. Having it instead of the Emirate allowed Damascus to have more tiles, but it was trapped between Seljuk and Antioch tiles, not doing much besides running an artist to try and get tiles back.

Since boosting buildings was getting less interesting, I started looking at techs and got some, but I would still often revert back to 100% gold. At one point, I decided to go build the Kreml which has a good synergy with the civics of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Jerusalem spent 20 turns building it and I accelerated the rest with a few thousand gold.

One thing I did not notice was the tech need to build Templars and Hospitalier knights. @Walter Hawkwood It doesn't show up on the tech tree overview.

So I spent most of the scenario thinking I could not build other Templars and Hosptialier knights and being quite unhappy about it, reloading a few times when my templar lost a 90+% win fight...

I did of course spread christianity to the newly conquered cities, and also made some inquistors to start removing non-catholic religions (diplomatically not very wise and not that necessary for happiness, but I figured it should be done sooner or later). I also started to increase my troops, in prevision of future wars.

@Walter Hawkwood What if it was made possible to select which religion is targeted for removal when there is more than one religion an inquisitor could remove? For diplomacy, that can be quite important.

In 1331 I got attacked by the Hejaz (the open borders treaty being broken a few turns before was a sign). Ayla felt on the first turn despite its 85% defense rating and two defensive units including a fortified crossbow with 2 city defense upgrades, as the AI simply sent waves after waves of cavalry. Frustratred, and feeling this was both bad gameplay (the entire point of fortification is to create a delay that allows to react and send reinforcements) and ahistorical, I reloaded a few turns earlier and did a few things differently. The AI attacked anyway, but this time it couldn't do the suicide cavalry storming of a fortress. The fight was difficult because it had a lot of strong units, but after some time and some losses I repelled the attacking troops.

@Walter Hawkwood I already had this thought from random map games, but playing the scenario only made me more convinced: I'd be in favour of increasing the effectiveness of city defenses but also increasing how much siege weapon damage them - the end goal being that suicide attacks without siege support are less effective, without making siege-supported assaults more difficult. Perhaps also high city defense ratings could offer first attacks...

I then counter-attacked, took Tabuk in 1355 and Mecca in 1370, while Saladin and Malik Shah were busy listening to poetry or something similar, because they didn't attack me to defend their holy city. I capitulated Hejaz and I now had a vassal! Hejaz even offered me Muscat in the peace deal, but I gifted the city back because its location was impractical for me to deal with. This also opened trade with India, which allowed me to get a good resource exchange going. At the same time, I finally started to get back tiles around Aleppo thanks to cultural production there. For a long time I considered attacking the Seljuks or even Antioch to free up a road to Aleppo but it became a lower priority.

In 1377, I noticed that Saladin was massing a lot of troops on my border. Saladin had also declared war on Makuria on the same turn, but that's on the other side of Egypt, so I decided to preempt and attack the massing troops with my host.

In 1381, I got a random event that allowed me to get land tactics on all my melee units for 500 gold and two turns of anarchy in Jerusalem, I jumped on it.

Saladin started a naval blockade which I had no way to fight, but I wasn't concerned because on the land my crusaders were overpowered. In 1384, Ascalon fell. In 1389, Damietta fell. I first wanted to stop there, but the city was completely surrounded by egyptian culture so I decided to push further. Alexandria fell in 1395, Crusaders with enough upgrades can assault cities with impunity even if there are walls, the only way to get them is to attack them on the field but the AI is bad at attacking offensive armies. Cairo fell in 1399, Benghazi in 1403.

In 1410, Hejaz lost tiles around Muscat due to cultural pressure and decided to declare independence. I declared war. In 1420, I took the egyptian city in the Sinaï and finished off Saladin. In 1430, I took Aden and made peace with Hejaz, their last city being uninteresting.

@Walter Hawkwood I encountered a visual bug, see the picture.

Spoiler Bug :

In 1436, the Seljuk attacked me, sending an army towards Mecca. Some of my forces repelled it while my crusaders were on the way to attack the Seljuk heartlands.

In 1449, the Mongols asked a tribute and I refused. They declared war on me.

In 1450, I captured Bagdad. I made peace and fast-forwarded the last 9 turns as there was no time for anything meaningful to be done. I got the win in 1459. At the very end, my production per turn was higher than the mongols according to the graph in the victory screen. Military power was of course behind.

 

[AspiringScholar]

Do you guys ever play with any leader that has the poor commander trait? I don't, honestly that thing is a deal breaker for me... It's a fun challenge thought

That one isn't so bad in my opinion (sometimes it even feels flavorful if you're playing a civ with a reputation for poor military performance), but what is much worse in my view is Temperamental. -2 first strikes is so punishing that I might even rank it equivalently to an increased difficulty level just on its own.

Here's a screencap of what I mean. Absolutely 0 potential for any food resources or industrial resources other than Prime Timber in my locality. The crabs don't count, non-fish seafood is terrible before late classical. If the expectation is that I just have to idle with minimum food until farms actually have a decent yield, we have different wants from the level of engagement in our games.

Spoiler :

View attachment 705658

Oh, I would love a start like that!

I guess here is another example of disagreement over what is good or desirable being testament to the quality of the mod in affording various playstyles. All I am seeing is beautiful 2 riverside serfdom farms everywhere in the midgame, lots of fresh water and potential otherwise, and high quality underlying grassland for whatever you want later on. Sure, I would probably run slavery here and prioritize iron working if not, either way, but I see that as a premium start. Chopping and farming in the ancient era still nets you the same as your suggested hunter's cabin buff, and while admittedly there is more of a worker investment involved, the standing improvement quickly appreciates in the very early classical. I respectfully disagree with the disapproval, but to each their own when it comes to preferences!

Though now that I had to stop and think about it, it might be a product of me making grasslands go further into continents (at the expense of less desert). I should adjust my local values to make forests and jungles both less frequent.

Yeah, that is part of what is surprising to me about this! Grassland is generally somewhat rare on Totestra IME when it doesn't start with a jungle on top of it.

Revolutionary isn't a negative trait... It allows you to go on wars of conquest without getting "You declared war on our friend" malusses...

Wait, what? This isn't documented in the Pedia. Does it actually do this, or are you just saying you can write off negative relations since they'll start off on a bad footing anyway?

--

@AllTheLand, thanks for that writeup! Clever idea to forego research and weigh into -> conversion with the undeveloped and slow start. I am curious, though, if you started to feel the lack of technology towards the end of the scenario, even though you still won. You don't start with City Boroughs, for instance, and lacking pikemen in this scenario could be quite significant. (Annoyingly, I invested in Stirrup for the stable, not realizing that I already had this building in Jerusalem without needing the tech!) The Knights units and crusaders are extremely powerful offensive units, but without longbows or pikes, I think the Kingdom of Jerusalem is defensively weak, and is of course surrounded by avowed enemies.

 

[JDCP]

That one isn't so bad in my opinion (sometimes it even feels flavorful if you're playing a civ with a reputation for poor military performance), but what is much worse in my view is Temperamental. -2 first strikes is so punishing that I might even rank it equivalently to an increased difficulty level just on its own.

Now that you mention it I didn't thought of the immersion level of this mod had more layers beyond what can be seen (graphics). New game mechanics play a big role in the immersion, cool as hell. Now I wan't to play with the worst traits

 

[AllTheLand]

- The AI can be stockpiling renowned gladiators instead of using them. I think the problem is that it doesn't build the prerequisite arena because it doesn't see the value it can provide through the enabling of the gladiator school. This may be a more general problem with AI not properly evaluating how much a building is valuable not for itself but as a requirement for another building, or maybe it's because this specific building is created by a unit so the AI misses the fact that it unlocks something else.
- The AI seems very reluctant to build health/epidemic-improving buildings. I think it has trouble valuating the epidemic part.

That one isn't so bad in my opinion (sometimes it even feels flavorful if you're playing a civ with a reputation for poor military performance), but what is much worse in my view is Temperamental. -2 first strikes is so punishing that I might even rank it equivalently to an increased difficulty level just on its own.

Perhaps Temperamental should be tweaked to be made less punishing?

I am curious, though, if you started to feel the lack of technology towards the end of the scenario, even though you still won. You don't start with City Boroughs, for instance, and lacking pikemen in this scenario could be quite significant. (Annoyingly, I invested in Stirrup for the stable, not realizing that I already had this building in Jerusalem without needing the tech!) The Knights units and crusaders are extremely powerful offensive units, but without longbows or pikes, I think the Kingdom of Jerusalem is defensively weak, and is of course surrounded by avowed enemies.

Stirrup is required to make Templars and Hospitalier knights (it doesn't show up in the tech tree overview but it shows up if you check the tech itself), so it's not a bad investment at all, just not worth doing early on.

I was some amount of technology behind, but it really wasn't a problem. Tech didn't advance far enough for the enemy to get brand new tiers of military units, and the cities start so undeveloped that you'll be busy enough building things you can build with techs available from the start. I did build some buildings unlocked by additional techs, such as the bath houses or some schools, but they came at a point of the game where it didn't really matter, they probably didn't pay off. I got some techs from conquering cities, and some others were fairly quick to research later on when I had a +300% open border tech bonus (I highly recommend signing as many open border treaties as possible early on, although they won't pay off until later).

I got City Borough for the pikemen (somewhere around 1350 I think?), as well as the glass and porcelain tech to build a glassworks with a great merchant, and a couple other techs.

If the game had continued past the end date, I would have been in an excellent position to catch up technologically with open border bonuses and a very strong economic and industrial base.

Now, if I had been attacked early by Saladin, things might have gone differently. Some amount of greed minimizing army to maximize economic development pays off massively if you can pull it off, but it creates some risks. My general defending technique is to have a few units that are meant to be pure defenders with city defense promotions, such as european recruits and crossbows in this scenario, and then you have offensive troops who will attack the enemy stack in front of the city, heal back, attack again. Crusaders with the holy war promotions and Templars are very good at this job. If well executed, the enemy stack will be worn down too much to assault the city by the time it has managed to reduce the city defenses.

You should not just wait for the enemy to assault you, you should assault him at every turn while he's outside vulnerable on the field and you have your cities as safe bases for your glasscannon units to attack from or retreat to. As the old saying goes: the best defense is offense.

 

[JDCP]

Hello friends, I was wondering if there was a way to edit the unit models in the game or to make new ones (for those that don't have any unique ones). Is it possible? if that's so, how? Id like to know

 

[Noyyau]

I've been reading the recent pages with interest, though without the time to actually play, I don't have anything constructive to say.
I would like to express great gratitude to Walter, for your continued dedication and excellent work!
I know what my present will be for the new year holidays!

 

[arizzi]

4 quick suggestions:

1. Centralist constitution is a bit overpowered at 3 happiness. Maybe should be 2.

2. Maybe great people generation should be slowed as the number of cities increases?

3. I think republic needs a serious buff. Happiness is about same as with autocracy when all building built (which is easy to do) but costs of running it are extremely high. I suggest an extra happiness and more free units.

4. I think the limits on national stock exchange and national university should be removed. You had mentioned that civs should already be big enough to meet those requirements at that point in the game. However I don't see why that should preclude removing that limit. Why make smaller civs even less competitive than they currently are?


Edit: This is my list of personal changes I've made to my game:
UpdateGlobalHappinessForCentralistConstitution(2);
UpdateNumBuildingNeededForOxfordAndStockExchange(1);
UpdateExtraCostForWorkerUnits(1);
BuffRepublic(2, 6); // 2 happiness, 6 free units
ScaleUnitCosts(1.2);
ScaleBuildingCosts(1.1);
ChangeResearchRate(20, 10);

 

[AllTheLand]

- Why are fortifications requiring multiple arsenals to be built? Historically they weren't everywhere mostly because of how expensive they were and because countries had more strategic depth than we have in a civ game, but I see no good gameplay reason from preventing every single city from having one, especially as Civ-style city represent major strategic points. Perhaps fortifications could receive a small gold upkeep cost and in exchange they should only require an arsenal, not multiple ones? A large empire can leave inner cities undefended, but otherwise most civs will have a high proportion of cities as border cities that could benefit from further defenses.
- The manufactory is arguably worse than the workshop when it becomes available. The tiny boost in production and the additional potential specialists it enables are, when it becomes available, not worth the additional epidemic risk it brings (the health points are easier to deal with than the epidemic points). The workshop shows as +0 (+0.5?) while the manufactory is +2. Putting the workshop at +1 would make the switch to the manufactory more interesting, but the workshop itself is currently not particularly compelling over the building it replaces, as getting multiple craftsmen in cities is quite rare at that stage of the game.
- The Veuglaire (6 Str. cannon for France) looks very strange when zooming in/out, the men next to the cannons seem to slide.
- When playing with Totestra's "Keep the new world empty" option (is that the default option of the map script or am I imagining things?), it is very jarring to have the settling barbarians jump to your own technological level. Imagine the Iroquois starting to build cannons and cathedrals in 1550 because the Spanish conquered Mexico. Worse, right now the civ that settled on the new continent where I got a city is more technologically advanced than every single civ on my own continent except myself. Looking at the techs currently owned by other civs on the continent makes sense when old-world barbarians settle, but for new world barbarians, they should have a bigger gap. Usually, the territory they own when settling is prime real estate and they have a viable territory in size since there was no normal civs competing, which is a significant advantage compared to standard barbarian civs settling, which often struggle from lack of space and quality terrain. And if they really need a buff in viability after reducing their techs to a more believable level, I'd rather consider tweaks to how easy it currently is to transport massive armies overseas without this costing very much (and without having to deal with disease, but I don't see how that could be easily modelled in Civ - perhaps adding sickness promotions to units staying too long on ships on ocean tiles).

2. Maybe great people generation should be slowed as the number of cities increases?

Having multiple cities that get great people point is a definite advantage, but I would argue that it should stay as is. Getting more great people out means that subsequent great people are requiring higher amounts of GPP, so the gap in number of great people generated ends up much smaller than the gap in great people points generated. And in the end, there is a reason why you have much more English inventors than Scottish inventors, for example, despite Scotland producing a lot of them. And 19th century England didn't stop producing inventors because the United Kingdom had control of Canada, Australia or India. When you control for other variables, a bigger population will generate more great people, and for gameplay reasons the GPP system already helps smaller civs much more than reality. I think the current compromise is good.

One thing I could see as meaningful would be a per-city GPP production penalty for cities whose share of the civ's culture is below some thresholds.

3. I think republic needs a serious buff. Happiness is about same as with autocracy when all building built (which is easy to do) but costs of running it are extremely high. I suggest an extra happiness and more free units.

Agreed that Republic is weak currently. The only real advantage is the boost to GPP generation offered by the Senate, but overall it's not competitive. Maintenance costs are a big issue making Autocracy much better in most situations. Once constitutional Monarchy appears, Republic is hopelessly inferior to it in every single way, by large margins.

In my modmod, Republic is at -25% numcities maintenance instead of +25% (Autocracy is at -50% instead of -25%), and despite this being a big cut that makes the economics much more viable, Republic still doesn't seem particularly tempting in the situations I've seen.

4. I think the limits on national stock exchange and national university should be removed. You had mentioned that civs should already be big enough to meet those requirements at that point in the game. However I don't see why that should preclude removing that limit. Why make smaller civs even less competitive than they currently are?

I think the point of the limit is to force civs to invest in building several banks or universities before they can unlock the advantage of the powerful national wonder, instead of it being an almost automatic and immediate bonus. These buildings are good for themselves, but they are competing with other useful buildings and with military production, so rushing them to get the national university as soon as possible has more drawbacks than just having it comfortably in one city.

UpdateExtraCostForWorkerUnits(1);

You think workers should be more expensive than military units to maintain?

 

[arizzi]

I think the point of the limit is to force civs to invest in building several banks or universities before they can unlock the advantage of the powerful national wonder, instead of it being an almost automatic and immediate bonus. These buildings are good for themselves, but they are competing with other useful buildings and with military production, so rushing them to get the national university as soon as possible has more drawbacks than just having it comfortably in one city.

What about requiring every city to have those buildings in order to build the limited building? Seems that would address both concerns. Actually I like this idea it could be applied to other things too.

Regarding workers the extra gold was meant to represent the continued investment in infrastructure. But yeah this is kind of a stop gap. Ideally I would have workers die off like slaves, or have improvements gradually degrade over time without maintenance. Or some other idea. I will try to think of a solution that doesn't require such drastic changes.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Though now that I had to stop and think about it, it might be a product of me making grasslands go further into continents (at the expense of less desert). I should adjust my local values to make forests and jungles both less frequent.

Definitely never saw anything like that in random maps in stock RI. Though I must applaud you as you basically created a realistic starting Europe - at 4000 BC, the tree cover in Europe was so dense that they say a squirrel could run from Finland to Spain never once touching the ground.

- In the CvSelectionGroup.cpp (module to execute the attack) at line 3563 there are the following lines of code, which are instead missing in CvGameTextMgr.cpp (module for the odds tooltip):

That's a vanilla code piece, and generally quite reasonable at what it does, preferring not to risk valuable units at poor attack odds, if possible. Its poor visualisation of what unit is going to attack is also vanilla behaviour. While I agree that displaying the real attacker would be nice, I'll see how easy it is to fix (all the code around combat odds is quite complicated).

Also African Sailboat(reed) has a very weird attack animation, projectile is basic red, like there is a problem with transparency effect. Maybe it can be fixed.

Thanks, fixed.

- The message about unhappiness from state religion being removed from a city incorrectly says "your" rather than "our", at least in the translation.

It is "from a city" in English, without specifying whos - corrected the translation.

- Anesthesy is more of an industrial era invention than a renaissance invention. There were things in the time of Renaissance, but it was much less effective and widespread than modern methods. As a contender for the title of most influential medical advancement of all times, it would be more appropriate as its own tech available in the middle industrial era, rather than as something enabled by the Renaissance era medicine tech. If we have a Bessemer tech to reflect the massive progress in steel production it allowed, a tech for the massive jump in medical possibilities enabled by anesthesy is not a stretch.

I wouldn't like to add new techs, as I have no way to get new voiceovers consistent with the existing ones. While the current tech it comes with is technically in the Renaissance era, it's basically the last Renaissance tech, which loosely corresponds to the very beginning of the XIX century. The first use of general anaesthesia in medicine dates to 1804, and the more widespread adoption in the West began in the 1840s. Therefore, the tech seems to be in the right place if you consider that you need to build the project after researching the tech, so the actual use of anaesthesia chronologically arrives later than the tech itself (the theoretical potential for anaesthesia, as in the description of properties for both aether and nitrous oxide, both date from late XVIII century, when the "tech" was researched). Also, for the avoidance of doubt, I think most/all of the medical advances in RI had a profound effect on contemporary medicine and would deserve separate techs, but Industrial is already the most tech-heavy era in the tree, and by far (that said, if I were able to procure more voiceovers of the same quality as the current RI ones, I would probably add another dozen or two techs to "offload" some of the currently more crowded ones).

Wait, what? This isn't documented in the Pedia. Does it actually do this, or are you just saying you can write off negative relations since they'll start off on a bad footing anyway?

I think this was supposed to be a joke.

- The AI can be stockpiling renowned gladiators instead of using them. I think the problem is that it doesn't build the prerequisite arena because it doesn't see the value it can provide through the enabling of the gladiator school. This may be a more general problem with AI not properly evaluating how much a building is valuable not for itself but as a requirement for another building, or maybe it's because this specific building is created by a unit so the AI misses the fact that it unlocks something else.

Are you playing in a revision where I already added an alternative use for them? Should be less of an issue after that; a warmongering civ will likely have more gladiators than cities anyway, so they also have a consumable function.

- The AI seems very reluctant to build health/epidemic-improving buildings. I think it has trouble valuating the epidemic part.

Yeah, I don't think epidemic reduction is currently being factored anyhow into the building value calculation. While it works decently ok as it is usually accompanied by a similar health bonus, this should really be added as a factor of its own. Shouldn't be too hard to do either, I think I'll handle that.

Stirrup is required to make Templars and Hospitalier knights (it doesn't show up in the tech tree overview but it shows up if you check the tech itself), so it's not a bad investment at all, just not worth doing early on.

They are indicated on their "main" tech, which logically should have come much later than Stirrup. I double-checked, and there were some techs that most civs were obviously supposed to have at the start, and Stirrup is definitely one of them. Seems like the actual starting tech rosters in the Crusades were created before that tech was even added. So I overhauled the starting tech setup in that scenario.

Hello friends, I was wondering if there was a way to edit the unit models in the game or to make new ones (for those that don't have any unique ones). Is it possible? if that's so, how? Id like to know

I was really hard pressed to say that no, there is absolutely no way. The tutorial subsection here on CFC has a lot of tutorials on that of varying complexity.

1. Centralist constitution is a bit overpowered at 3 happiness. Maybe should be 2.

It comes at a time when happiness is already much less of a constraint unless you're resource-starved.

2. Maybe great people generation should be slowed as the number of cities increases?

The GP points are not pooled in any way so I see no reason why. A single highly specialised city might be outputting all the GPs at the same pace whether you're a 1-city civ or a 50-city civ.

3. I think republic needs a serious buff. Happiness is about same as with autocracy when all building built (which is easy to do) but costs of running it are extremely high. I suggest an extra happiness and more free units.

It's supposed to be a) situational, b) obsolete by late Renaissance, c) more suited for smaller civs that need to defend themselves, which is usually not the case with human players. It has its niche, it's just outside of most human players' playstyle.

4. I think the limits on national stock exchange and national university should be removed. You had mentioned that civs should already be big enough to meet those requirements at that point in the game. However I don't see why that should preclude removing that limit. Why make smaller civs even less competitive than they currently are?

If your civ is not big enough by the time they arrive, it's a signal to you that it's not big enough, period. While smaller civs should be viable, that doesn't mean civs of all sizes should be. You still can and should be too small to be competitive beyond a certain point.

- Why are fortifications requiring multiple arsenals to be built? Historically they weren't everywhere mostly because of how expensive they were and because countries had more strategic depth than we have in a civ game, but I see no good gameplay reason from preventing every single city from having one, especially as Civ-style city represent major strategic points. Perhaps fortifications could receive a small gold upkeep cost and in exchange they should only require an arsenal, not multiple ones? A large empire can leave inner cities undefended, but otherwise most civs will have a high proportion of cities as border cities that could benefit from further defenses.

Because historically they weren't everywhere? And no, the "gold upkeep" idea that you already shopped around for all buildings previously is bad, since it would lead to a total overhaul of AI building evaluation.

- The manufactory is arguably worse than the workshop when it becomes available. The tiny boost in production and the additional potential specialists it enables are, when it becomes available, not worth the additional epidemic risk it brings (the health points are easier to deal with than the epidemic points). The workshop shows as +0 (+0.5?) while the manufactory is +2. Putting the workshop at +1 would make the switch to the manufactory more interesting, but the workshop itself is currently not particularly compelling over the building it replaces, as getting multiple craftsmen in cities is quite rare at that stage of the game.

I can't believe that there are still 0.5 epidemic modifiers I missed. Fixed that one, it's a full +1 now. And I feel that the building line is currently fine, especially with a guaranteed free craftsman per city (blast furnace) that arrives around the same time as workshops.

- The Veuglaire (6 Str. cannon for France) looks very strange when zooming in/out, the men next to the cannons seem to slide.

A quick look doesn't reveal anything untoward in the nif, but I'll check further.

- When playing with Totestra's "Keep the new world empty" option (is that the default option of the map script or am I imagining things?), it is very jarring to have the settling barbarians jump to your own technological level. Imagine the Iroquois starting to build cannons and cathedrals in 1550 because the Spanish conquered Mexico. Worse, right now the civ that settled on the new continent where I got a city is more technologically advanced than every single civ on my own continent except myself. Looking at the techs currently owned by other civs on the continent makes sense when old-world barbarians settle, but for new world barbarians, they should have a bigger gap. Usually, the territory they own when settling is prime real estate and they have a viable territory in size since there was no normal civs competing, which is a significant advantage compared to standard barbarian civs settling, which often struggle from lack of space and quality terrain. And if they really need a buff in viability after reducing their techs to a more believable level, I'd rather consider tweaks to how easy it currently is to transport massive armies overseas without this costing very much (and without having to deal with disease, but I don't see how that could be easily modelled in Civ - perhaps adding sickness promotions to units staying too long on ships on ocean tiles).

That's because they're not Iroquois, they're the USA. That's the only meaningful way to have powerful post-colonial civilizations appear organically in RI. With current mechanics, they do it a bit too early, but generally it feels they're in a roughly right spot to become real challengers on the world arena by late game.

What about requiring every city to have those buildings in order to build the limited building? Seems that would address both concerns. Actually I like this idea it could be applied to other things too.

That is, on the face of it, not a bad idea, but I'll have to digest it further.

 

[AllTheLand]

Are you playing in a revision where I already added an alternative use for them? Should be less of an issue after that; a warmongering civ will likely have more gladiators than cities anyway, so they also have a consumable function.

My game is in R5427, but I specifically checked that the AI still had multiple cities without the gladiator school that would have benefited from the +10% gold associated with the building.

And I feel that the building line is currently fine, especially with a guaranteed free craftsman per city (blast furnace) that arrives around the same time as workshops.

I have civil service and so I even have two free craftsmen per city, and the building is still not tempting. When mostly health and disease capped, exchanging 2 hammers for a full citizen that would produce 4-5 hammers as a craftsman, or gold, or science, is not a good deal when needing to invest a lot of hammers in the first place to get the building done.

EDIT: I'm particularly talking about the manufactory here, since the +1 bonus to craftsmen is the same as with the workshop, so the only advantage are +1 base hammer, +1 hammer from the clock tower, and additional specialists enabled. 2 hammers, one potential craftsman specialist and 1 potential engineer specialist are not really worth 1 disease point, 1 epidemic point and spending over 600 hammers, not until much later when new techs lift the health limit and mechanized farms increase excess population that needs specialist roles to fill.

That is, on the face of it, not a bad idea, but I'll have to digest it further.

It means that the 3-pop island colony meant to gather some resource suddenly need a bank or a university for the mainland big city to be able to build its national university, so there needs to be an upper limit on the number of buildings needed.

Because historically they weren't everywhere? And no, the "gold upkeep" idea that you already shopped around for all buildings previously is bad, since it would lead to a total overhaul of AI building evaluation.

I think a big nuance to add is that Civ-style cities only represent a small portion of a civ's actual cities, and are strategically much more important than most cities ever where. A massive civ can have a hinterland that doesn't get fortifications, but a normal-sized civ will easily have half of its cities as border cities, so when the limit of arsenals to fortifications is at a 1 to 3 ratio as it is on large maps (I think the ratio can depend on map size?), it's too restrictive.

Another route to disincentivize building those everywhere is to simply increase the hammer cost of the building. With a higher cost, sure, you can build it everywhere, but why would you? A competent player will leave a good share of his cities without archery ranges or stables because the cities won't ever need to produce the associated units, the same should be true of fortifications.

To me, a serious issue with the current approach is what happens when you get a new city. If you already expended your fortifications-quota in existing cities, and at the end of a war you conquer a new city, you may simply be in the impossibility to build the fortifications building there and to add fixed cannons, so although it would potentially be very desirable from a strategic perspective to fortify the new conquest, and although the fortifications of the former border city have lost a lot of their usefulness, the latter can prevent the former from being done.

There is a big conceptual difference between the cathedral/opera and the fortifications in this regard. The former bring a clear benefit to any city, and if you didn't have the cap, you'd build them in almost all cities (especially cathedrals). While even without a cap, there is still a good reason to not build the fortifications building everywhere, as it's only useful if the city ever get attacked. If you're confident some city won't be attacked, or at least that you would have time to build the fortifications before it was, then saving the hammers and using them for something else is advantageous. There is a built-in incentive to not get fortifications everywhere. It would also be historically strange if every tile that can support it was built up with a town, never using farms or other terrain improvements, but you don't need a "max 50% town tiles" rule to prevent it, it happens organically.

Also, I should mention +25% is really pathetic for a gunpowder-era defensive bonus. It disappears extremely quickly. So you really need to add defensive cannons that cannot move to increase the city's defense further, but 20% at the time it gets expensive quickly. I suppose in a way that it accomplishes the goal of creating an upkeep and increasing the hammer cost, as you'd need multiple cannons to really get a fully effective fortress - but if we view it under the lense that the fortress is not really complete unless defensive cannons are added, and that they represent abstractly not just cannons, but additional fortified buildings, then the argument to not allow the base "fortifications" buildings everywhere gets even weaker - because cities with heavy fortifications are represented by the fortifications building + cannons, while the fortifications building itself represent only light fortifications.

That's because they're not Iroquois, they're the USA. That's the only meaningful way to have powerful post-colonial civilizations appear organically in RI. With current mechanics, they do it a bit too early, but generally it feels they're in a roughly right spot to become real challengers on the world arena by late game.

I don't think "post-colonial" is an appropriate representation when colonization has barely begun at all, and saying they are the USA when a core defining characteristic of the USA is their nature as breakaway colonies and we are dealing here not with a breakaway colony but with setling barbarians is not convincing.

My core argument here would be that reducing the viability of new world settling barbarian civs to compete for the win is an acceptable trade-off if that's what required for them to provide an experience that feels somehow believable. The newly discovered savages, that you could see as backwards barbarians during exploration, suddenly beating 9 out of 10 old world civs in tech feels extremely wrong and always will.

Of course, I could simply turn off barbarians settling into new civs, but in other situations it's a nice option to play with adding more dynamism to the game.

(that said, if I were able to procure more voiceovers of the same quality as the current RI ones, I would probably add another dozen or two techs to "offload" some of the currently more crowded ones).

Is there any native english speaker with a correct mic and a nice voice in this thread?

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

My game is in R5427, but I specifically checked that the AI still had multiple cities without the gladiator school that would have benefited from the +10% gold associated with the building.

Yeah, it was added in 5428. From a coding perspective, coding an AI value for a building that may be a prerequisite for a unit-constructed building sounds nasty. I'll try to think of a simpler way of facilitating this.

EDIT: I'm particularly talking about the manufactory here, since the +1 bonus to craftsmen is the same as with the workshop, so the only advantage are +1 base hammer, +1 hammer from the clock tower, and additional specialists enabled. 2 hammers, one potential craftsman specialist and 1 potential engineer specialist are not really worth 1 disease point, 1 epidemic point and spending over 600 hammers, not until much later when new techs lift the health limit and mechanized farms increase excess population that needs specialist roles to fill.

They're both 1, so the only negative difference is the 1 epidemic point, which only really matters if your epidemic level is already high. I agree that comparative advantages might be higher, but another +1 to craftsmen would be an overkill I feel, so I'm not quite sure what other compelling but not OP bonus could there be.

I think a big nuance to add is that Civ-style cities only represent a small portion of a civ's actual cities, and are strategically much more important than most cities ever where. A massive civ can have a hinterland that doesn't get fortifications, but a normal-sized civ will easily have half of its cities as border cities, so when the limit of arsenals to fortifications is at a 1 to 3 ratio as it is on large maps (I think the ratio can depend on map size?), it's too restrictive.

Indeed, and if we take Europe for instance, certain places were renowned for their defensive citadels whereas other weren't. It's an element of choice for the player on where to concentrate their defenses. I feel buildings you can't spam everywhere enrich the game, not the other way round.

To me, a serious issue with the current approach is what happens when you get a new city. If you already expended your fortifications-quota in existing cities, and at the end of a war you conquer a new city, you may simply be in the impossibility to build the fortifications building there and to add fixed cannons, so although it would potentially be very desirable from a strategic perspective to fortify the new conquest, and although the fortifications of the former border city have lost a lot of their usefulness, the latter can prevent the former from being done.

Come on, you're a human, and a smart one at that! You're really selling yourself short here - if you know you'll be taking a city you want to fortify, don't build to your fortification limit. You're under no obligation to immediately build all the fortifications you can.

Also, I should mention +25% is really pathetic for a gunpowder-era defensive bonus. It disappears extremely quickly. So you really need to add defensive cannons that cannot move to increase the city's defense further, but 20% at the time it gets expensive quickly. I suppose in a way that it accomplishes the goal of creating an upkeep and increasing the hammer cost, as you'd need multiple cannons to really get a fully effective fortress - but if we view it under the lense that the fortress is not really complete unless defensive cannons are added, and that they represent abstractly not just cannons, but additional fortified buildings, then the argument to not allow the base "fortifications" buildings everywhere gets even weaker - because cities with heavy fortifications are represented by the fortifications building + cannons, while the fortifications building itself represent only light fortifications.

Heh, I'll agree with you there, the defensive bonus should probably be increased. The cannons though are quite nice, as they are mostly better than the normal available options. The original design decision behind fortifications mainly saw them as enablers for defensive artillery.

I don't think "post-colonial" is an appropriate representation when colonization has barely begun at all, and saying they are the USA when a core defining characteristic of the USA is their nature as breakaway colonies and we are dealing here not with a breakaway colony but with setling barbarians is not convincing.

My core argument here would be that reducing the viability of new world settling barbarian civs to compete for the win is an acceptable trade-off if that's what required for them to provide an experience that feels somehow believable. The newly discovered savages, that you could see as backwards barbarians during exploration, suddenly beating 9 out of 10 old world civs in tech feels extremely wrong and always will.

I'd probably rather delay their spawn time from the moment of the first contact. And as I mentioned elsewhere, there is no gameplay point in spawning weak new civs - they should either spawn strong or not at all.

Is there any native english speaker with a correct mic and a nice voice in this thread?

As experience shows, those are rare beasts indeed. I think the guy who did the current ones was an actual voice actor. We've had some ad hoc ones from several different people before, and they all sounded awful. Turns out sounding good isn't easy at all.

 

[[Y]]

Oh, I would love a start like that!

I guess here is another example of disagreement over what is good or desirable being testament to the quality of the mod in affording various playstyles. All I am seeing is beautiful 2 riverside serfdom farms everywhere in the midgame, lots of fresh water and potential otherwise, and high quality underlying grassland for whatever you want later on. Sure, I would probably run slavery here and prioritize iron working if not, either way, but I see that as a premium start. Chopping and farming in the ancient era still nets you the same as your suggested hunter's cabin buff, and while admittedly there is more of a worker investment involved, the standing improvement quickly appreciates in the very early classical. I respectfully disagree with the disapproval, but to each their own when it comes to preferences!

I fully agree that this is a wonderful place for serfdom, but that's 4-5 hours into the game or more. I want to be enjoying the experience from turn 1. And my usual experience of this kind of start is complete lack of food. Even with ironworking, that's just 4 1, which is essentially just a self-sustaining tile and hardly contributing to a city's bottom line. You need to be working 3 4 tiles in order to work 1 no-food tile without the city starving. These tiles aren't bad when working in conjunction with big food yields, like a 6 tile, since you can use that big tile to sustain several population and use the 4 as necessary when you want to grow the city/build food-based units. But when the 4 is the only food you have, the city basically lacks versatility, and the you get from riverside hardly covers the costs you get for maintenances. A city needs a high yield food tile in order to thrive.

The other thing I see in these starts is the barbarians rampaging through, destroying what farms you do have, and being a challenge to control since there's very little opportunity to catch them without defenses. There's little opportunity for any long range visibility to prevent their spawn or get more warning about them showing up, and building enough units to guard important tiles and cities isn't practical (especially when the barbs show up in stacks 4 strong). Maybe you can look at this as being part of the game, but for me, especially on higher difficulties, it's typically an experience that makes me think "I should go play something else".

Yeah, that is part of what is surprising to me about this! Grassland is generally somewhat rare on Totestra IME when it doesn't start with a jungle on top of it.

Yep, I changed more values to combat that a bit. Every grassland being jungle is neither fun nor realistic, especially when playing seafarers and coasts are oddly dominated by jungle at almost any latitude. I don't understand the temperature generation enough to modify on a deep level, but I'd much rather the jungle generation was in narrow bands that penetrated deep into the continent rather than shallow bands across all coastlines. As it is, Totestra would generate North America as a jungle heavy land.

Wait, what? This isn't documented in the Pedia. Does it actually do this, or are you just saying you can write off negative relations since they'll start off on a bad footing anyway?

As Walter noted, it's a joke. Sort of. Of all the drawback traits, it's probably the only one that can actually work out in your favor. If that -1 to relations causes a neighbor to declare war on you, and you wanted to declare war on them anyway, it's now balanced out by the "You declared war on our friend" malus that you avoided. And if it happens a second time, you come out ahead on relations. Though this is all in nit-picky land in terms of how much has to line up for it to be a positive effect (and without counting any trade/open borders losses), but I do feel it's the softest of all the negative traits. I'll take a trait that makes people declare war on me over a trait that makes me lose wars any day.

What about requiring every city to have those buildings in order to build the limited building? Seems that would address both concerns. Actually I like this idea it could be applied to other things too.

That is, on the face of it, not a bad idea, but I'll have to digest it further.

I'd be heavily concerned about this approach. Now conquering or founding a city suddenly disrupts your ability to built a national library/bank, which doesn't make sense to me. It also goes against the game's ethos of specializing your cities as it demands the exact opposite approach. Taking a step back, what is the intended role these buildings are supposed to have in a game?

Are they supposed to soften the drawbacks of running larger empires? Then the current implementation is probably fine, though it calls into question why larger empires are being punished for size (eg tech cost increase) if they're also being rewarded for size.
Are they supposed to provide smaller empires a more significant advantage in facing against bigger empires? Then maybe it makes sense to require it in every city and make it impractical for larger empires.
Are they supposed to be symbolic of the wider empire investing sufficiently in the field? Maybe the construction cost should go up with every city, though I don't know if Civ4 has mechanics for that.
Are they supposed to represent an accomplishment of a civ? Maybe they should be great person buildings.

Lots of ways to approach it, but figuring out the intention is a prerequisite.

 

[arizzi]

Ooh building cost scaling is a very good idea! I would apply that to everything! In my games I've simply scaled the cost by 10 percent, but I like that idea more! It addresses a lot of the issues I have with the current balance. The scaling doesn't have to be that extreme either for it to have a meaningful impact.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Taking a step back, what is the intended role these buildings are supposed to have in a game?

Are they supposed to soften the drawbacks of running larger empires? Then the current implementation is probably fine, though it calls into question why larger empires are being punished for size (eg tech cost increase) if they're also being rewarded for size.
Are they supposed to provide smaller empires a more significant advantage in facing against bigger empires? Then maybe it makes sense to require it in every city and make it impractical for larger empires.
Are they supposed to be symbolic of the wider empire investing sufficiently in the field? Maybe the construction cost should go up with every city, though I don't know if Civ4 has mechanics for that.
Are they supposed to represent an accomplishment of a civ? Maybe they should be great person buildings.

I feel (and therefore design around) that they represent increased centralisation in a larger empire - given the time when they appear, there is supposed to be a growing contrast between the "heartland" and the "periphery" - these buildings allow you to further specialise some of your best cities, whereas your newer, further flung cities are treated at this point more as resource extractors - which is an excellent gameplay representation of colonialism. If you view them this way, a minimum number of buildings requirement makes a lot of sense - you have to be both sufficiently advanced and sufficiently large, and you may want to get some new territory if you're not quite there yet.

 

[[Y]]

I feel (and therefore design around) that they represent increased centralisation in a larger empire - given the time when they appear, there is supposed to be a growing contrast between the "heartland" and the "periphery" - these buildings allow you to further specialise some of your best cities, whereas your newer, further flung cities are treated at this point more as resource extractors - which is an excellent gameplay representation of colonialism. If you view them this way, a minimum number of buildings requirement makes a lot of sense - you have to be both sufficiently advanced and sufficiently large, and you may want to get some new territory if you're not quite there yet.

Oh, I like that. It never occurred to me that that's the flavor but it makes sense, and the current implementation captures that effectively.

 

[AllTheLand]

- Upgrade costs can get really insane. In my eyes the core problem is that the scaling hammer cost of the units apply directly to the upgrade cost of every single unit. Let's say you have 10 spearmen. You pay upgrade costs based not on what the average cost would be to build say 10 pikemen from zero, but on what the 11th pikeman would cost. Right now, the game tells me I should pay 900 gold to get a 5-3 horsmean into a 9-3 musketier... Sure, it's a big upgrade and I have many cavalry units, but that's still outrageous.

From a coding perspective, coding an AI value for a building that may be a prerequisite for a unit-constructed building sounds nasty. I'll try to think of a simpler way of facilitating this.

Preemptively building in the hopes of getting a renowned gladiator is not what we'd want, but when already having the renowned gladiator available at least, we'd want the AI to build it... Although coding it cleanly doesn't seem so simple. EDIT: Perhaps simply having the gladiator school not have the arena as a prerequisite, but only give its bonuses once an arena is built, sort of like the clock tower, building boosting another building? Then the only thing needed AI-wise is to teach the AI to build gladiator schools if it can, although I suppose the disadvantage of this approach is the AI may not pick the highest commerce cities to build them.

Come on, you're a human, and a smart one at that! You're really selling yourself short here - if you know you'll be taking a city you want to fortify, don't build to your fortification limit. You're under no obligation to immediately build all the fortifications you can.

I'm not too worried about my own games. In single-player, it's the early game where needing to survive a big assault on a key city is critical, by the time fortifications are available, I'm yet to be in a situation where the AI can mount a really dangerous offensive.

But the AI can't understand such nuances, and in multiplayer, that limitation is probably going to be quite unwelcome in player-vs-player wars.

Regarding the general concept of not building to the limit, I often do that with all limited buildings if I think they will be better used in new cities (the opera is a lot more valuable to culturally convert a new land than in the core empire, perhaps too much so), but I've been quite annoyed by the fact that if you already have more than the cap, you have no information displayed on what's the current situation. You basically need to look in some advisor screen or worse manually how much of the limited buildings you've already built and how much more you could build with your current cap.

It's an element of choice for the player on where to concentrate their defenses. I feel buildings you can't spam everywhere enrich the game, not the other way round.

In my eyes, for many things the best design is when you could spam everything everywhere, but when you shouldn't because it will be a waste of resources, when there are good reasons to keep things not built.

Although you don't like it very much, and I agree it would be troublesome with the AI and create additional questions (what if you don't want the building anymore?), an upkeep system can achieve that... I'll admit that this create more difficulty in balancing things too, so I'm going to drop the idea for now.

If you don't want to remove the cap, would you consider making the fortifications cap 1 in every 2 cities instead of 1 in every 3 cities? If the cap formula is somewhere in the DLL code, we could also perhaps have something fancier, so that a 3-city civ is allowed to fortify everything, but a 30-city civ can't...

The cannons though are quite nice, as they are mostly better than the normal available options. The original design decision behind fortifications mainly saw them as enablers for defensive artillery.

I'm not sure what to think of theses cannons. They are fairly strong stat-wise and give bonus fortification to the city, but since you need to wait for your enemy to move to attack the specific city where you have built them, they are drastically less versatile, so although I really like the concept behind them, I'm not sure how good they really are. Apart from cities that are one or two tiles from the border vulnerable to surprise attacks, a mobile defensive force is likely going to be cheaper and more effective.

They're both 1, so the only negative difference is the 1 epidemic point, which only really matters if your epidemic level is already high. I agree that comparative advantages might be higher, but another +1 to craftsmen would be an overkill I feel, so I'm not quite sure what other compelling but not OP bonus could there be.

Yeah my mistake, I thought it was 2 for the manufactory for a moment, I'm not sure why. I edited my message probably while you were writing yours to strike the mention of a disease point from it. Another +1 to craftsmen would likely be overkill, I agree with you. Perhaps simply giving them +3 base hammer instead of +2 base hammer would be enough? It would fit between the +1 of the previous building and the +5 of the next one. And perhaps also giving +1 to engineers? Although I assume engineers will get +1 base as we discussed, it would give an additional incentive to both use engineers and build manufactories if it made engineers slightly better.

Yeah, I don't think epidemic reduction is currently being factored anyhow into the building value calculation. While it works decently ok as it is usually accompanied by a similar health bonus, this should really be added as a factor of its own. Shouldn't be too hard to do either, I think I'll handle that.

If you've not already started on it, I'd like to have a look myself. This way, I can pool it with other AI changes and do my strength-testing. I would like to pile up a lot of changes and see just how far I could get a new AI to beat the current one.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

- Upgrade costs can get really insane. In my eyes the core problem is that the scaling hammer cost of the units apply directly to the upgrade cost of every single unit. Let's say you have 10 spearmen. You pay upgrade costs based not on what the average cost would be to build say 10 pikemen from zero, but on what the 11th pikeman would cost. Right now, the game tells me I should pay 900 gold to get a 5-3 horsmean into a 9-3 musketier... Sure, it's a big upgrade and I have many cavalry units, but that's still outrageous.

Hmmm...

Preemptively building in the hopes of getting a renowned gladiator is not what we'd want, but when already having the renowned gladiator available at least, we'd want the AI to build it... Although coding it cleanly doesn't seem so simple. EDIT: Perhaps simply having the gladiator school not have the arena as a prerequisite, but only give its bonuses once an arena is built, sort of like the clock tower, building boosting another building? Then the only thing needed AI-wise is to teach the AI to build gladiator schools if it can, although I suppose the disadvantage of this approach is the AI may not pick the highest commerce cities to build them.

The current bonuses, unfortunately, don't support that functionality, buildings can only modify yields (not even yield percentages, but more importantly not commerce percentages or free XP) of other buildings.

But the AI can't understand such nuances, and in multiplayer, that limitation is probably going to be quite unwelcome in player-vs-player wars.

AI is actually surprisingly good at placing fortifications from my experience - probably because its decision-making is threshold-based - it is actually rather good at selecting best locations for limited buildings, as those locations are the first to outweigh other building options.

If you don't want to remove the cap, would you consider making the fortifications cap 1 in every 2 cities instead of 1 in every 3 cities? If the cap formula is somewhere in the DLL code, we could also perhaps have something fancier, so that a 3-city civ is allowed to fortify everything, but a 30-city civ can't...

I don't want to remove the cap, but maybe something like one per each 3 plus one extra would make life nicer for smaller civs.

Yeah my mistake, I thought it was 2 for the manufactory for a moment, I'm not sure why. I edited my message probably while you were writing yours to strike the mention of a disease point from it. Another +1 to craftsmen would likely be overkill, I agree with you. Perhaps simply giving them +3 base hammer instead of +2 base hammer would be enough? It would fit between the +1 of the previous building and the +5 of the next one. And perhaps also giving +1 to engineers? Although I assume engineers will get +1 base as we discussed, it would give an additional incentive to both use engineers and build manufactories if it made engineers slightly better.

If we're giving another to engineers, it might be a good idea to take one from them and give it back with manufactures. It is around that time when Great Engineers stop being super-useful, so we might buff engineer specialists.

If you've not already started on it, I'd like to have a look myself. This way, I can pool it with other AI changes and do my strength-testing. I would like to pile up a lot of changes and see just how far I could get a new AI to beat the current one.

Sure, knock yourself out; I'm happy not touching AI code for a while.

 

[AspiringScholar]

As experience shows, those are rare beasts indeed. I think the guy who did the current ones was an actual voice actor. We've had some ad hoc ones from several different people before, and they all sounded awful. Turns out sounding good isn't easy at all.

For what it might be worth, I am no voice actor but am a native English speaker and would be happy to pitch some voiceovers if you would like. You've seen some of the commentary footage I've put up on YouTube, so you know what I sound like already too. If that's not up to the standard, my feelings will not be hurt, however...

I fully agree that this is a wonderful place for serfdom, but that's 4-5 hours into the game or more. I want to be enjoying the experience from turn 1. And my usual experience of this kind of start is complete lack of food. Even with ironworking, that's just 4 1, which is essentially just a self-sustaining tile and hardly contributing to a city's bottom line. You need to be working 3 4 tiles in order to work 1 no-food tile without the city starving. These tiles aren't bad when working in conjunction with big food yields, like a 6 tile, since you can use that big tile to sustain several population and use the 4 as necessary when you want to grow the city/build food-based units. But when the 4 is the only food you have, the city basically lacks versatility, and the you get from riverside hardly covers the costs you get for maintenances. A city needs a high yield food tile in order to thrive.

If you still have that save, I would be interested in testing some starts to see just how punishing that really would be in the early game. Tentatively, I don't think it would be particularly handicapping, and it would be well above-average midgame onward. (Don't forget too, that even though you might only be netting a single additional from a grass farm pre-serfdom, the cost of working another grassland tile is 50% cheaper than a plains, meaning that only one of those farms could support an entire town yielding 5 within the same timeframe, and meaningful passive from forests will make building a granary, smokehouse and hunter's cabin relatively easier, which combined would result in a perhaps somewhat slower but still rather healthy pace of ancient era city growth in my opinion.)

Once again though, to each their own with these sorts of preferences! In a game that usually takes 40-60 hours to complete, the first 5 being relatively slow isn't something significant to my mind. I also actually like the other dilemmas you mentioned, and feel that it makes forest starts more interesting and unique, as they offer you drawbacks as well as advantages.

Yep, I changed more values to combat that a bit. Every grassland being jungle is neither fun nor realistic, especially when playing seafarers and coasts are oddly dominated by jungle at almost any latitude. I don't understand the temperature generation enough to modify on a deep level, but I'd much rather the jungle generation was in narrow bands that penetrated deep into the continent rather than shallow bands across all coastlines. As it is, Totestra would generate North America as a jungle heavy land.

Yes, there is something amiss with the placement of jungles, and grassland on its own should be seen a bit more I think, though, it does seem to be generally more rare than in vanilla (which I like, since RI's "Base 3" food mechanics but much better mature farms result in plains being more normative and usable, but still typically less desirable than grassland). My current game seems to have actually managed a very lovely map with some nice swathes of grass and only a few jungle tiles dotting it here and there, but that did come as a surprise to me.

As Walter noted, it's a joke. Sort of. Of all the drawback traits, it's probably the only one that can actually work out in your favor. If that -1 to relations causes a neighbor to declare war on you, and you wanted to declare war on them anyway, it's now balanced out by the "You declared war on our friend" malus that you avoided. And if it happens a second time, you come out ahead on relations. Though this is all in nit-picky land in terms of how much has to line up for it to be a positive effect (and without counting any trade/open borders losses), but I do feel it's the softest of all the negative traits. I'll take a trait that makes people declare war on me over a trait that makes me lose wars any day.

Ah, I see now! I don't hate Revolutionary, but I actually love Politician. -1 can be worked against relatively easily I feel, but +2 when paired with an individual first impression +1 or a single request fulfilled can put you at pleased instantly and unlock free money lump sums or war solicitations of your own, and oftentimes more open borders. That's saying nothing of the insane bonus too, which is strong enough to be a standalone trait on its own probably!