Realism Invictus

[RezerCuid]

Y, What is the point of such monasteries if they can soon be replaced by windmills?

 

[[Y]]

Y, What is the point of such monasteries if they can soon be replaced by windmills?

The point is to provide an improvement that has decent yields with religious backing but that gradually loses relative value as non-religious options become available. And Meditation is still a fair bit away from Mill Machinery. Personally I'd like it to become available with Writing or Alphabet, but I figured Meditation would be a better starting point for discussion since that's where the current Monastery becomes available.

 

[pecheneg]

Why are monasteries in cities anyway?

Because very often that's exactly what happened. The most famous example is Westminster Abbey, right next to Big Ben. At the same time, we are now talking about the remnants of former greatness. The fact that European capitals are not studded with monasteries is simply the result of revolutions or/and local analogues of Henry the 8th.
If we take Russia, then the term "monastery" itself was generally used in relation to urban monasteries. Monasteries outside the city were called "pustin" (from the word "desert", then it simply meant desolation). At the same time, "pustins" prevailed, but not radically – the ratio is ½ - 1/1.5.
Let's say Monasteries appeared in the city in three ways at once. The easiest way to look at the same example of Russia is simply because I know it in detail.
1. The monastery was originally founded in the city. Because it was almost a necessary part of the city's infrastructure. For
a) social institutions were attached to it: hospitals, orphanages, conditional nursing homes, "hotels" for pilgrims and not only, schools (i.e. cadres of officials), etc.
b) some religious needs were fulfilled only by the monastery, and some it fulfilled better. For example, it was the custom to take monastic vows before death, and believers preferred monastic worship to simply temple worship.
2. Monasteries were built near the city, most often as part of a system of advanced forts. And gradually they found themselves within the boundaries of a growing city.
3. The city arose around the monastery. There is a saying, "a holy place is never empty," and that was indeed the case. In general, monasteries, especially in the north and east, served as centers of colonization. A successful monastery = the rapid emergence of a settlement system around. etc.
If you go back to the game, it is logical to have both urban monasteries AND improvements. And ideally, a specific mechanism for founding a sity by a special "religious" unit (not necessarily a "pure" settler). Giving bonuses in the form of a ready-made monastery, temple, etc. immediately after the foundation.

Missionaries require temples instead

No, the game variant - it's just a reality. For Catholics, missionary work is mainly the function of specialized monastic orders. The reason is trivial – celibacy among Catholic priests became the norm only in the 11th century. At the same time, going into the wilderness to pagans, etc. with a wife and children is a dubious idea. Meanwhile, the same Benedictine order existed at that time for half a thousand years and the tradition of mostly monastic missionary work had already developed.
There are no Orthodox orders, but... not only is there no celibacy for priests. According to the canons, before being ordained (to receive the priesthood), they must either become monks or marry.
As for the Protestants, they took up classical missionary work very late (the beginning of the 18th century). At the same time, they quickly caught up with Catholics quantitatively, but the quality remained low for a long time. One of the main reasons (well understood by the Protestants themselves) is precisely the lack of monastic–order structures with 1000+ years of experience.
Buddhists have an almost Christian scheme.
Another thing is that it has a very "perpendicular" attitude towards non-Christians and non-Buddhists.

Adding a Monastary improvement (which is replaced by the Fortified Monastery for the celts, though the fortified version retains hill requirement)

• Unlocked with Meditation, or maybe Alphabet. I originally had Writing, but that feels too early
• Same placement rules as cottage
• +1
  
• +1 with Calendar

Well, in fact, conditionally suburban monasteries were just an "alternative" branch of settlements – from a "hermit's hut" to a full-fledged suburb. And it would be interesting to reflect this. At the same time, the demographic penalty from mass celibacy should also be taken into account for the monastic system as a whole.
In general, the differences from the standard line may be as follows.
1. Less commerce. The hermit's "starting" hut/house is generally zero. At the same time, as an option, there is some chance to find a specific bonus "relic". After that, commerce grows dramatically. Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages and later was a huge business and... an excuse to organize a fair.
2. Growth is slower.
3. At the same time, there is less epidemic penalty and there is a bonus to happiness starting from the second or third level.
4. Higher defense indicators. At the same time, the maximum figure should be even higher than that of a standard fort.
At the same time, in order to increase the demographic penalty, it is possible to build monasteries only by a specific one-time worker (monk/hermit), who consumes an impressive amount of food during construction. And the same unit can build monasteries in cities.
Unfortunately, there are no corporations in RI. However, theoretically, the construction of "hermits" can be linked to specific corporations. For example, the Benedictine Order. It is founded, of course, by the prophets. At the same time, it is clear that a more intricate scheme requires more significant bonuses for monasteries.

 

[PKSRoman]

How would I go about changing a leader's traits? Is there an editor? I want to have a British seafaring and political leader. I know I can just click unrestricted leaders to get a leader with those two traits, but then all civilizations cities are named after the leaders original civilization instead of the one they are heading. I don't care if Spain is led by Thomas Jefferson, but I want to see Spanish city names....not Washington, New York, etc. So, i would just prefer to change an existing British leaders traits to what i prefer.

in fall from heaven mod one nation had perk who roll random traits after a certain number of turns. i wonder if it would be possible as an additional option to choose in the game to implement a trait roll every era....

mass celibacy

I have never heard of a nation where most of the people are monks living in monasteries. Civilization building monasteries instead of houses for people, mmm....

 

[giorgio1234]

Hi @Walter Hawkwood ,

from the log of 5439 SVN revision:
"- Fractional commerce from trade routes is now always factored into the total commerce output of the city"

Sorry to bother you again on this topic, but I wanted to do a deep check and it seems to me that there is something wrong.

In the following screenshoots, the values in the tooltip for both cities are different from the reported ones. It seems that a 25% is not considered.

Then, if I select the breakdown detail, I see the 8 value for trade, that is not the sum neither of (4,8+4,2) nor of (4,4+3,85).

Finally, looking at the detail tooltip, I see Base Commerce = 31 (as if the trade was 8), but the calculated value for is 18,37, that doesn't come out starting from 31 (trade 8), nor 31,25 (trade 4,4+3,85=8,25), nor 32 (trade 4,8+4,2=9), but it comes out starting from a Base Commerce of 31,74 (that is trade 8,74).

I can attach the savegame, if it can be useful.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

*Is there any chance resource pandemic values can be added to the panel in the top right of the city screen, along with the happiness and health from resources?

I'll note that, but the space there is pretty tight as it is, so no promises.

* The pandemic chance tooltip in the city screen doesn't have a "+" in front of positive values, which is standard across all other positive values in the city screen tooltips.

Noted.

In addition to absolute value of culture, could there be a way to see culture values on tiles outside of cultural borders? There have been times I founded a city only to discover that it's immediately 99% foreign culture, which led to problems. I've seen this happen with AI, too. In one game, it settled a city, and 5 or so turns later it revolted and joined my empire. Cheapest Settler I never had to build.

Noted.

Tangentially related, in the pedia, civ specific archers are listed as replacing composite bowman instead of the base archer.

That's not an Archer thing, but an elusive bug that sometimes crops up in pedia in general, where many units are "offset" to be considered as replacing a unit of one tier higher. I ran into it a couple of times for other units too, but was never able to predictable reproduce it.

The fact is that, quite independently of Griboval, in Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, the caliber of guns was a multiple of a pound, while there were not so many values. As a result, the "caliber lines" at least partially overlapped in almost any pair of countries. At the same time, in the second half of the 18th century, the number of calibers decreased everywhere and the "sects" of "twos" (French, 2/4/8 pounds) and "threes" (3/6 British, Prussians, Russians) finally took shape in light artillery. Everyone had 12 and 24 pounds.
Another thing is that the weight of an artillery pound varied greatly depending on the country. However, it was possible to identify groups where he was extremely close. For example, the Russian artillery pound differed very little from the Dutch one – which is quite logical - and even less from the French one.
And this theory had little to do with practice before Griboval and Co. Because the gaps between the walls of the barrel and the core were still huge. As a result, the incompatibility was at the edges of the distribution – so, the Prussian core (the largest) no longer fit into the Saxon 12-pounder (it is the smallest).
However, at the same time, more "large-caliber" Prussians, of course, could use ammunition with a smaller caliber, just the efficiency of the gun and accuracy decreased. Moreover, as a last resort, it was possible to use projectiles with a difference of pounds – say, 8-pounders could, in principle, shoot 6-pound cores.
After Liechtenstein/Griboval, standards tightened, but not extremely. The Russians and the French did not interfere with using each other's ammunition when the calibers matched, for example.

Thanks, interesting info! The French having "named" systems replacing one another whereas other countries didn't, to my knowledge, gave the impression that they were more systematic - but I guess they were simply more creative with branding!

British have
1. large calibers up to 42 pounds have been preserved
2. an atypical number of varieties of guns of the same caliber for the continent.

Does this have something to do with Britain being far more navy-focused?

Once again, lots I'd like to participate in the conversation about here but I've been caught up with real life somewhat recently, though still have enjoyed reading along. A quick question in the meantime as it pertains to the discussion surrounding TheBirdMan's asking about the autoplay testing: can that be a reliable way to test for MAF errors, or would those have to be encountered in real play? I would think, on paper, that they would be viable for this, but truthfully I didn't even know that this existed until somewhat recently and always thought that Walter was resorting to his cryptic magic when referencing autoplay testing, not that it was a built-in feature of WorldBuilder accessible to the lowly laymen like me...

Packed and unpacked assets behave differently when it comes to memory usage, so even if I were to run the SVN version into the ground using autoplay, the data would be irrelevant for the release versions, and the release versions have autoplay disabled, so I'd have to produce a hybrid version to test them directly if I wanted to. But since there is nothing really to do about MAFs, and since they depend heavily on individual system's hardware, I'm not sure if there'd be any valuable data in that. At most I'd get a set of statistics of when I'd expect to get MAFs on my PC with a given release version.

By the way, the monstrous Austrian bombard lying above under the cut has a rather direct relationship to the RI units. It is not difficult to notice that the "bombard" from EU4 is actually an ordinary mortar. If we fall into conspiracy theory and try to think well about the developers, you can assume that they have heard about "bombards-mortars" out of the corner of their ear. The nuance is that all kinds of "tsar cannons" / long bombards are actually not extreme archaic, but the third generation of European artillery. There was a "mortar-shaped" intermediate link between them and the "iron pots". The reasons for this are funny, but it won't be a very long, but rather boring explanation.

That's a dangerous conspiracy, considering me competent! And yes, while I was limited to what models were out there, I deliberately chose the default one to be as archaic as I could without regressing to a pot-de-fer. Though there are also many flavour tubular bombards in RI, as it seems to have coexisted with long bombards at least partially; here's a picture from the HYW for instance, showing a long bombard at a time when there were definitely even pots-de-fer still going around:

Hence, in the current SVN, there are some civs that use the long bombard design for their flavour units, to name some, the Ottomans (Orban seems to have made long bombards for Mehmet) and Eastern Europeans. Also, Far Eastern designs obviously follow their own evolutionary paths - but there I will freely admit I was even more limited by the available models. Early artillery there is generally modelled on Maritime Southeast Asian cetbangs (which are said to have closely followed contemporary Chinese designs) and lantakas (which are a bit anachronistic in presentation, as from what I understand, the carriage type shown in RI is a direct copy of European designs, and earlier lantakas would be mounted differently).

- I've noticed something very strange. Technologies that have the same nominal cost (same column in the tech tree) and both no displayed tech research bonus are displaying as needing a different number of turns to complete. For example, I have division of work shown as needing 9 turns and explosives shown as needing 11 turns. I think it's related to prerequisite techs in some way, because it's techs that don't have their immediate prerequisite tech researched that are displayed as needing more time: I have mercantilism (direct prerequisite linked with an arrow for division of work) but I don't have metallurgy (direct prerequisite for explosives, although it's also a prerequisite for division of work it's in the top-right corner of the tech box rather than linked with an arrow).

Indeed, techs for which more than one "or" prerequisite is known get a discount. That's a vanilla mechanic. Vanilla has some obscure research-related mechanics that are not generally known to most players. See here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/technology-research-explained.146163/

- What if the Creative trait gave a bonus to the tech research of some art-related techs? I think this could be an interesting way to boost some weak traits.

It is generally a productive idea, as techs are always clearly tagged with one or more flavours, but it would feel weird to use just cultural flavour for that if implemented. I'll ruminate.

- I don't like the current balance of religious civics.
-- Paganism is in a fine spot, and I suppose freedom of religion is fairly good (although the incentives to spread a lot of religions to get benefits from them all is completely illogical).
-- I'm not sure about the cult of personality, the unlimited spies and the happiness bonuses are good, but losing benefits of state religion is harsh and the civic doesn't even have a way to remove religions while taking penalty hits from them.
-- But I really don't like the balance of the remaining 4 civics. Militancy gives a huge scientific and cultural penalty. What I do is I switch into militancy after starting a golden age, purge all wrong religions with inquisitors, and switch back out of it afterwards. Spiritual leaders can make good use of it too. But I would never stay in it longer than required to purge wrong religions that create separatism issues. It's also illogical that militancy, which is themed around aggressively spreading the religion, can be prevented from training missionaries in cities that got built or captured too late to be able to get a monastery.
-- Monasticism allows to spread your religion without having a monastery, which is only ever useful because you can't build monasteries past a certain point of the game. Still, usually you can afford to build missionaries in your old cities and send them to the newer cities, so the civic is mostly carried by the +1 food bonus you can get from (standard) farms after getting a special building (and to a lesser degree, its culture boost). However this also causes a penalty to city maintenance... I think it needs some small nudge to be better.
-- Civil religion is terrible in my opinion. High upkeep costs. Unhappiness from wrong religions, without any tool to remove wrong religions. All that to get a 25% building construction bonus (which is usually less good than it sounds like because of resource bonuses) and a 25% spy points bonus? And a small boost to the productivity of priests, but that's really minor. Yes, buildings usually take the bulk of hammers, so boosting them is the most important production boost that one can get, but since a lot of cities reach naturally a point where they spend a lot of time transforming hammers into wealth, the benefit seem a lot more dubious.
-- Pacifism is my go-to. I don't think it's poorly balanced, the low upkeep cost and the great people bonus is balanced out by severe military handicaps, so there are leaders and situations with which it should be avoided and where monasticism should be preferred. But its drawbacks, mostly punishing the waging of prolonged (especially offensive) wars, are manageable in a way the drawbacks of Civil Religion and Militancy are not. Unironically, Pacifism shines with Imperialistic leaders, because the Great General penalty is more than compensated by the bonus Imperialistic leaders get.

Thanks for sparking this discussion; it's unlikely I'll action anything pre-3.7 at this tempo, but I'm following.

I mean the scientific work that gives +1 food to banana, citrus and sugar plantations.

Yeah, I guess it is quite niche and underpowered as it is now.

I guess I wish first attacks could be exhausted or limited in some way. All combat is sequential, but we can understand multiple attacking the same turn as representing not multiple units queuing like Brits, to attack one after the other, but multiple units assaulting at once.

If units that defends could get a temporary debuff on first attacks after defending several times in the same turns (say -1 first attack after defending twice and -2 first attacks after defending four times), that could help a lot of the issues around cities that, despite their defensive bonus being reduced to 0%, are outrageously difficult to attack. The debuff would be gone the next turn.

That's a rather radical departure from the Civ 4 design philosophy where each combat is treated as an independent event. Not necessarily a taboo, but something that needs a lot of thought and theorycrafting so as not to have a slew of unintended balance consequences.

I looked, and did notice that he is missing his left trapezius, though. Might be hard to hunt heads if his own isn't braced in place stably...

I guess I'll need to re-animate his skeleton!

Don't forget that these all have the unstated benefit of giving you +1 happiness from state religion, which is not available to paganism, free religion, or cult of personality. Walter, is it possible for the civic descriptions to be phrased as a bonus to those civics, rather than as a malus on paganism?

Yeah, that's in the plans.

Looking at them again now, weighing them realistically against my various needs, I do think that some need to be reworked, and a few rebalancing acts might be in order. The problems are primarily that Civil Religion and Monasticism lack any real purpose. They aren't solving any problems or supporting a playstyle, whereas just about every other civic serves a specific purpose. Militancy and Pacifism are great in this regard, but suffer from having their drawbacks be universal while their benefits are mostly for cities that have your state religion, but religion spread in RI is a dice roll. There's no guarantee that you'll have enough cities with your state religion to justify applying the drawbacks across your entire empire.

My own take on it was more or less what you pointed out. Militancy and Pacifism are special-purpose civics, with strong advantages and drawbacks, whereas Civil Religion and Monsticism are the two "default" civics - one cheap with marginal usefulness unless you invest into a later building (Monasticism) and one expensive with a generally useful bonus (Civil Religion).

My 2 cents at this point is to rework civil religion and monasticism. I'm not really sure what Civic Religion is as a gameplay concept, since it's essentially the essence of having a state religion in the first place. There's also no flavor reason why a civ has to choose between civil religion, monasticism, and militancy. The Civic Religion wikipedia entry is pretty sparse on anything before Rousseau coined the term in the 18th century, too.

From flavour standpoint, I basically positioned the four civics as a two-axis diagram (like the "lib-auth, econ left-right" one that's so beloved by teens on certain Internet boards) - the "Militancy" axis and the "State-Church separation" axis. Civil religion is the civic for State-Church integration, denoting high participation of clergy in running the state; Monasticism is the "Church left to its own devices and exists as a parallel structure" civic.

If I'm allowed to spitball ideas, I'd suggest the changes below. I'm terrible at naming things so don't take the names seriously.

• Removing the Monastery building
  • Why are monasteries in cities anyway?
  • Missionaries require temples instead
• Adding a Monastary improvement (which is replaced by the Fortified Monastery for the celts, though the fortified version retains hill requirement)

Apart from the flavour reasons already stated by others, there is a gameplay/flavour reason I dislike the monastery as a potential improvement - as a building, it selectively impacts research and culture - whereas as a yield-generating improvement, you'll basically derive taxation and even manpower (even if the improvement generates no production, the food from it can be used to build levies), which makes monasteries - historically very economically segregated - too integrated into the general economy.

I come from a Jewish background and while monastaries proper were never really a thing in Judaism

Yeah, Judaism as one of the major religions in Civ 4 was a somewhat weird design decision in vanilla, given no civ in game ever ran it as a majority religion (with a probable very minor exception of early Ethiopia, but even then, I am not sure if it was adopted much past the elites and a minority of population), and a lot of mechanics (missionaries, monasteries - even the concept of building a temple in every city!) don't make a lot of sense for it. Aside from Judaism, all major religions have/had a monastic element to them - even Judaism might actually have, as the Qumran finds look a lot like a de facto monastic community.

in fall from heaven mod one nation had perk who roll random traits after a certain number of turns. i wonder if it would be possible as an additional option to choose in the game to implement a trait roll every era....

Unlikely on my part.

from the log of 5439 SVN revision:
"- Fractional commerce from trade routes is now always factored into the total commerce output of the city"

Have you quoted it further, there'd be a part where I say I haven't updated the tooltips. I'm pretty sure at least some tooltips currently lie, maybe even all of them - updating those will be a chore for the next revision. Currently the only numbers I'm reasonably sure are reflecting the reality are the final ones for all commerce types in the upper left (not the tooltips for them though, these lie too).

 

[pecheneg]

I have never heard of a nation where most of the people are monks living in monasteries.

That is, in your opinion, the mass is exclusively the MAJORITY of the population? By the way, about 40+% of the adult male population is very little, or not at all?

Civilization building monasteries instead of houses for people, mmm....

You have just described Mongolia of the 19th century.

 

[RezerCuid]

I have a super idea, 1 first hit takes down exactly 10% of the opponent's HP. If the defensive archer has 3 first strikes, and the attacking unit has 1 first strike, then the attacker loses 20% hp even before the battle.
The percentages may be different at Walter's discretion

 

[RezerCuid]

Maybe then the battles will be a little less like a casino

 

[pecheneg]

as it seems to have coexisted with long bombards at least partially; here's a picture from the HYW for instance, showing a long bombard at a time when there were definitely even pots-de-fer still going around:

Well, it's the siege of Orleans (at the same time, the drawing itself is another 60+ years later, 1490.). More than a hundred years after the earliest known pot

Spoiler :

And 90 years after the official appearance of the term pot-de-fer. This bright era ends somewhere in the 1360s. Then there are cannons made of iron bands with hoops with a pronounced charging chamber. They are still very short, but sometimes they are very large-caliber. At the same time, the small pot is also... usually no longer a pot. However, this thing is already closer to the end of the 14th century.

And finally, at the beginning of the 15th century, large bronze bombards appeared and at about the same time the trunks were lengthened (for the "irons" too).

1410-1411, Lazy Matilda . He is already trying to grow in length, but so far... She's too lazy.

The "Orlean" picture shows just a super-modern cannon for that moment. - long and bronze.

the Ottomans (Orban seems to have made long bombards for Mehmet) and Eastern Europeans.

Yeah, this is just the golden era of long bombards.

Also, Far Eastern designs obviously follow their own evolutionary paths - but there I will freely admit I was even more limited by the available models. Early artillery there is generally modelled on Maritime Southeast Asian cetbangs (which are said to have closely followed contemporary Chinese designs) and lantakas (which are a bit anachronistic in presentation, as from what I understand, the carriage type shown in RI is a direct copy of European designs, and earlier lantakas would be mounted differently).

To be honest, I haven't even started to really understand East Asian affairs, while I'm firmly stuck in India. And having found practically orders of ascetic warriors there, to his own considerable surprise .

 

[pecheneg]

which makes monasteries - historically very economically segregated - too integrated into the general economy.

Mmm... As far as I understand, this is some kind of (and quite strong) exaggeration of the already Renaissance situation. When monasteries were noticeably slower to integrate into the market than secular landowners and Co. Partly because of the initial tendency to climb into the wilds and inconvenient lands when founding new monasteries. But every decent monastery is shops in the city (and the crying of burghers about unfair competition), a network of sales agents, etc.

Spoiler :

For the early Middle Ages, however, everything will be exactly the opposite - monasteries at that time were almost the only bankers, for example. The same practice will be continued by the Templars in the High Middle Ages - and this is only the most famous brand. There are also the earliest fairs starting from Saint-Denis. In the High Middle Ages, the share of monastic fairs was less, but, say, one of the fairs in Champagne was right in the monastery, and the monastic business also revolved around the rest.
Eastern Europe is even more archaic in this sense. For example, Gdansk is a Dominican fair, by the way, since 1260.
Actually, in order to assess the degree of integration of monasteries into the market, it is enough to look at the fortifications and cathedrals. It was built with the help of external finances and labor resources.
It can take a long time to describe more specific details. But... In general, it seems obvious that in the High Middle Ages the average monastery was much more integrated into the market. than the average secular feudal lord.
And finally, the Russian Renaissance/powder Empire is generally a classic. The church is the main and most sane banker (Lombards, obviously, have already frozen out in Poland)), monastery fairs as the norm of life, etc.

 

[RezerCuid]

I have a super idea, 1 first hit takes down exactly 10% of the opponent's HP. If the defensive archer has 3 first strikes, and the attacking unit has 1 first strike, then the attacker loses 20% hp even before the battle.
The percentages may be different at Walter's discretion

I think 8% is better

 

[JDCP]

Is there an actual reason for the mod to not have a North Korean leader despite having a Southern one (Syngman Rhee)? I wanted to beat some DPRK ass.
I also find it curious, and admitedly a very good implementation, that both Greece and Rome have Byzantine leaders. although I indeed would have preferred them to be together on a separated CIV, the work already done is not bad

 

[AspiringScholar]

Is there an actual reason for the mod to not have a North Korean leader despite having a Southern one (Syngman Rhee)? I wanted to beat some DPRK ass.
I also find it curious, and admitedly a very good implementation, that both Greece and Rome have Byzantine leaders. although I indeed would have preferred them to be together on a separated CIV, the work already done is not bad

If you play as Korea and adopt the cult of personality and (or?) planned economy civics, you'll become the DPRK. I am not sure though if it's possible for a second Korea to secede from a democratic one and become communist, to create a situation similar to the real world's.

 

[JDCP]

If you play as Korea and adopt the cult of personality and (or?) planned economy civics, you'll become the DPRK. I am not sure though if it's possible for a second Korea to secede from a democratic one and become communist, to create a situation similar to the real world's.

yeah one of the best things about this mod is how names/flags change with civics lol, I love that. But still no Korean leader seems to have predilections to the well known cult of personality that characterizes the Kim's Having 2 players as North and South Korea is indeed possible although I have never done it, I have very rarely played with repeated civs, only when doing random stuff in the WB.

I guess I'll just learn how to make my own leaders must be fun

Also look at this, an aqueduct bridge between two islands!

 

[AspiringScholar]

yeah one of the best things about this mod is how names/flags change with civics lol, I love that. But still no Korean leader seems to have predilections to the well known cult of personality that characterizes the Kim's Having 2 players as North and South Korea is indeed possible although I have never done it, I have very rarely played with repeated civs, only when doing random horsehocky in the WB.

I guess I'll just learn how to make my own leaders must be fun

Also look at this, an aqueduct bridge between two islands!
View attachment 708238

Kim Il Sung would be an interesting leader, I agree. As a matter of fact, I believe the "rule" for a leader's proximity to the present is that their political career has to have ended 20 years before the conventional end date of the game (2015), which would make Kim fit by literally just one year. I might have that slightly wrong, however. By the way, I had mentioned a while back adding Ronald Reagan as a leader for America, since there is currently no Cold War leadership representation for it, but there is, for instance, Konrad Adenauer for Germany and De Gaulle for France. Could I check back on this and see if this is likely to make it into 3.7?

EDIT: Yes, I think the aqueducts actually trailing from a source of rainwater is very cool! Also, what are you using for that water? It is much bluer than the teal color that RI's water currently has.

 

[JDCP]

Kim Il Sung would be an interesting leader, I agree. As a matter of fact, I believe the "rule" for a leader's proximity to the present is that their political career has to have ended 20 years before the conventional end date of the game (2015), which would make Kim fit by literally just one year. I might have that slightly wrong, however. By the way, I had mentioned a while back adding Ronald Reagan as a leader for America, since there is currently no Cold War leadership representation for it, but there is, for instance, Konrad Adenauer for Germany and De Gaulle for France. Could I check back on this and see if this is likely to make it into 3.7?

Yes he is the right option for a DPRK leader, actually I never stopped to think about the others, for the entire time I have been thinking about playing as him lol.

About the later yeah, more Cold War leaders should be added such as Gorbachev, Eisenhower, long etc. I'd actually benefit a lot right now from having someone like Mátyás Rákosi, as I'm going for a communist Hungary yet no leaders represent that.

Funny thing is, we have the Khmer rouge in the game as a unit, but we don't have Pol Pot! I do must admit I didn't expect to see that unit in the game and even if it's just a replacement for the conscript, that's pretty fudging cool.

Just think of it: You're near the end of the industrial age, Paratroopers fall into the dense jungle and your transports land on Cambodian's beaches, ready to take all the marines and tanks into their cities and suddenly... a swarm of conscripts are drafted to defend the land and sucessfully repelling the invasion, all because this MF already got Motherland's Call, I can see that happening.

 

[AllTheLand]

- The civilopedia pages about cannons don't indicate the maximum percentage of damage they can inflict in distance fighting mode, or how much they inflict per hit, as far as I can tell.
- The civilopedia pages for tile improvements don't indicate how much worker time they require, and that can be annoying when you are going to get a new tile improvement and would like to know if you need more workers.
- New cities really, really need a separatism starting bonus. Destroying a barbarian city, and founding a new city, and getting 30% separatism from the start because the area is culturally dominated by barbarians is really terrible. The settlers in the new city are supposed to be your own people coming from one of your own cities...

Indeed, techs for which more than one "or" prerequisite is known get a discount. That's a vanilla mechanic. Vanilla has some obscure research-related mechanics that are not generally known to most players. See here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/technology-research-explained.146163/

I know that vanilla mechanic, but, apart for animal husbandry, all RI requirements work as "AND" requirements (i. e. there are no optional requirements), and having the future tech costs all wrong when going more than one tech ahead in the tech tree is a significant issue, as it misleads the player when evaluating tech paths (and perhaps the AI too, I'm not sure).

If it's not intended for a tech to be accessible through two different paths, then getting the discount when going through the only path is bizarre.

From flavour standpoint, I basically positioned the four civics as a two-axis diagram (like the "lib-auth, econ left-right" one that's so beloved by teens on certain Internet boards) - the "Militancy" axis and the "State-Church separation" axis. Civil religion is the civic for State-Church integration, denoting high participation of clergy in running the state; Monasticism is the "Church left to its own devices and exists as a parallel structure" civic.

I think that's not obvious from the bonuses given by civil religion.

I'll have to think over concepts. I don't object to the concept of choosing between a higher upkeep civic with slightly stronger bonuses and a lower upkeep civic with weaker bonuses for the more "neutral" civics, but I rather agree with this assessment:

Three unrelated and niche bonuses that don't build towards any unified end

I wouldn't call the building bonus niche, I'd rate it as similar to the +10% hammers from civil service, but in the end you'd pick up the civic much less because you like it and more because you can't effectively deal with the drawbacks from the other civics.

Except if you want to avoid drawbacks, Monasticism usually does that better (mostly because of the unhappiness penalty from wrong religions without any tool to deal with it that plagues Civil Religion). But without its special building

Militancy: I think this is the best designed of all the state religion civics, and I've seen some AI civs use it to great effect. But it also strongly relies on you having your state religion actually spread throughout the empire, since the drawbacks apply universally. Though it becomes available around the time most religions have access to missionaries, so that helps, and the inquisitor helps control the unhappiness drawback, so it's probably fine. It just requires a lot of spreadwork beforehand or else it causes more harm than good.

Militancy is well designed overall, and I don't think that having to spread the religion to get the benefits is that much of an issue.

My typical religious experience is having way too little spread before unlocking my missionaries, but as soon as I get the missionaries, I spread the religion easily in all my cities within two or three dozen of turns. So early religious civics that are not paganism tend to be unattractive for that time period, but militancy as you point out comes at a time where missionaries are already unlocked or soon to be unlocked.
But I think 10% tech penalty is really harsh, it will usually be much worse than high upkeep. When thinking about real life, it may seem appropriate, but for balance I think it's not quite right.

Unironically, the tech penalty becomes less relevant as you go later into the game, because -10% when you just have +20% bonus in your cities loses you 1/12th of your science, but -10% when you have +65% bonus (after observatories) loses you below 1/16th.

Rather than a penalty on general science output, I think it would be better to go towards a penalty such as -1 science output to engineers, scientists, schools and observatories. The values and affected things would likely need to be changed, this is just a crude basis for discussion. Since scientists specialists get more and more bonuses as te game goes on, I think that compensating some of their later game output boost would be needed.

This, and not being able to build missionaries in new cities in the late game after monasteries go obsolete, are my main complaints with it. 20% culture is harsh too. 15% would be enough.

Pacifism: Looks fine to me, but can't really say. I'm usually at war more often than not (and not always by my choice), so the war unhappiness and the military unit production malus make this civic a no-go for me in just about every circumstance.

If you really need the unit production, yeah it's not appropriate. But for defensive wars, I find the need to go into total war mode rather situational (it usually happens after having been too greedy having a too small standing army... I got punished for it once), and the overall amount of hammers spent on units is not that high usually. If you get +25% from resources (blast furnace + prime timber), the penalty is really only 20% (multiplicative). If you prioritize getting units out from your Heroic epic city with its +50% production on military units, the penalty is also less of a factor.

War fatigue is usually not much of a concern for defensive wars either.

For offensive wars, you have time to build troops up, and try to seize your key objectives relatively quickly.The AIs are very reluctant to give on their offensive wars, but when they lose a few cities, they are usually ready to settle things. Increasing happiness for some time with the culture slider costs gold, but it's workable.

The great general penalty can be very dangerous, because you need to get several traditions at least (to get better units but also to keep AIs at bay), but you can generate some in early game wars under paganism, use, and take advantage of different bonuses that give more great general (some traits, some buildings, fighting slaves or peasant rebels). Great generals leading units are not that critical. That's why Imperialistic leaders are such a wonderful combo with Pacifism, you get +2 happiness with Barracks and Arsenals and +100% great general production.

Obviously, I wouldn't recommend using the civic in every situation, far from it (and only after paganism has run its course entering the Middle Ages, I would never adopt this civic at Philosophy), but it at least has many situations where you want to run it for a long duration.

 

[JDCP]

EDIT: Yes, I think the aqueducts actually trailing from a source of rainwater is very cool! Also, what are you using for that water? It is much bluer than the teal color that RI's water currently has.

https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/deliverators-water-mod.16366/ enjoy much thanks to this modder Deliverator for his work.

I didn't like much some terrain that came with RI, I wasn't a big fan of the original ones either, so I mixed the ones I liked the most. It might look a bit weird at first, but I got used to it and the world looks a lot more lively. I couldn't find a high definition texture for the rivers that had the same color as the coast/ocean (since the one in that mod is low quality, rivers look very out of place when placed in the field) so it kinda looks weird but ah, I don't mind. I was thinking about using an AI to enhance it, but I don't mind anymore so whatever.

 

[AspiringScholar]

https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/deliverators-water-mod.16366/ enjoy much thanks to this modder Deliverator for his work.

I didn't like much some terrain that came with RI, I wasn't a big fan of the original ones either, so I mixed the ones I liked the most. It might look a bit weird at first, but I got used to it and the world looks a lot more lively. I couldn't find a high definition texture for the rivers that had the same color as the coast/ocean (since the one in that mod is low quality, rivers look very out of place when placed in the field) so it kinda looks weird but ah, I don't mind. I was thinking about using an AI to enhance it, but I don't mind anymore so whatever.

Thanks! I prefer the water here, but the new terrain in RI looks very good in my opinion. Unfortunately they're probably incompatible, but I appreciate the reference.