Realism Invictus

[Ahnarras]

Swamps actively giving nearby cities unhealth and encouraging epidemics, being unworkable, and requiring medieval tech and many worker turns just to be removed is an objective problem. It acts as a check on civs that have no reason to be checked.

Valid point, but I'm gonna give a counterview : The 4 swamps tiles in the Nile delta (on Huge World Map) have acted like the primary balancing thing in my game, at least so far.
When settling my second city, I had the choice to put it out of range of thoses marshes, but by doing so, I would have missed a Wheat (on which I counted to feed my miners, that would gives the production needed for this first boat-making costal city).
The huge +12% epidemics, due to 4 marshes tiles, had forced me carefully manages the growth of that city, keeping it small (in contrast to my capital, which always had double to triple the number of inhabitants).

It also added a sense of emergency in how I researched Tech in Ancient/Classical Eras, making me prioritize subpar Tech and not going for the usual ones.
It drives the way I settled my others cities, looking for ressources that would reduces epidemics (and even made me open the Trade panel each turn, looking for someone that would have a sea ressource to trade against my wheat).
And finally, it is now making me rushing the Middle Age at a point where most of the Civ are still Mid-Classical (and even the Age counter is only barely into the -50% Middle Age Tech, and far from the -100%).

Is it a bother ? Yes, clearly.
Could I have easily avoided it ? Yup, settling a tile away would have made that a no-problem.
Is it what makes my game interesting ? Absolutly ! And I'm loving it ^_^

TL ; DR : Having a true negative tile can be it's own kind of fun, I wouldn't advocate for nerfing them or making them removable earlier.

Now, back on my way to discover Mill Machinery before Armor Crafting. On a map full of war-happy leaders

 

[[Y]]

Valid point, but I'm gonna give a counterview : The 4 swamps tiles in the Nile delta (on Huge World Map) have acted like the primary balancing thing in my game, at least so far.
When settling my second city, I had the choice to put it out of range of thoses marshes, but by doing so, I would have missed a Wheat (on which I counted to feed my miners, that would gives the production needed for this first boat-making costal city).
The huge +12% epidemics, due to 4 marshes tiles, had forced me carefully manages the growth of that city, keeping it small (in contrast to my capital, which always had double to triple the number of inhabitants).

It also added a sense of emergency in how I researched Tech in Ancient/Classical Eras, making me prioritize subpar Tech and not going for the usual ones.
It drives the way I settled my others cities, looking for ressources that would reduces epidemics (and even made me open the Trade panel each turn, looking for someone that would have a sea ressource to trade against my wheat).
And finally, it is now making me rushing the Middle Age at a point where most of the Civ are still Mid-Classical (and even the Age counter is only barely into the -50% Middle Age Tech, and far from the -100%).

Is it a bother ? Yes, clearly.
Could I have easily avoided it ? Yup, settling a tile away would have made that a no-problem.
Is it what makes my game interesting ? Absolutly ! And I'm loving it ^_^

TL ; DR : Having a true negative tile can be it's own kind of fun, I wouldn't advocate for nerfing them or making them removable earlier.

Now, back on my way to discover Mill Machinery before Armor Crafting. On a map full of war-happy leaders

Totally valid! I should have been clearer that my stance is about random maps and not premade maps. When the map is designed by hand to balance the terrain features, I'm fully on board.

 

[Tango Delta 72]

From a purely historical perspective, swamps and marshes provided all sorts of interesting things to look at. Consider the communications between Joseph Priestly and Allesandro Volta when they were discovering new "airs". Perhaps a new tech on the tree, "Early Chemistry", which might require a swamp or marsh tile in your civ's zone and act as another prereq for arquebus or something? Just thinking out loud...

P.S. - How much of James Burke's original Connections was used as supporting groundwork for the original RI idea?
P.P.S. - Still loving the heck out of this mod. Thanks!

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Nah. Tundra is fine. It's sub-par compared to other land types, but that's a relative problem. Swamps actively giving nearby cities unhealth and encouraging epidemics, being unworkable, and requiring medieval tech and many worker turns just to be removed is an objective problem. It acts as a check on civs that have no reason to be checked.

Still not sure I'm quite following you - how is starting in/near tundra not exactly the same then, a "check" on "civs that have no reason to be checked" if compared to the ones that start in grasslands/plains, and not even ever addressable through technology? Or, say, a mountain - a tile that admittedly doesn't cause epidemics, but unlike swamps isn't workable ever, whereas a swamp can later be converted to farmland?

From a purely historical perspective, swamps and marshes provided all sorts of interesting things to look at. Consider the communications between Joseph Priestly and Allesandro Volta when they were discovering new "airs". Perhaps a new tech on the tree, "Early Chemistry", which might require a swamp or marsh tile in your civ's zone and act as another prereq for arquebus or something? Just thinking out loud...

That would be a terrible idea from gameplay perspective.

P.S. - How much of James Burke's original Connections was used as supporting groundwork for the original RI idea?

Never saw it, which, judging from the descriptions, seems to be a real pity. And yes (again, from descriptions at least), this is highly congruent with my own views on the historical process, but that shouldn't be too surprising, as these days they are relatively mainstream, groundbreaking as they were back in 1979. Moreover, I'd venture a guess that the series might have actually influenced the very concept of the "Civilization" games. The "tech tree" that is a staple of the Civ series and currently seems a no-brainer, but in truth, this is just our hindsight and familiarity, whereas this could have been approached very differently, and this seems to be a direct practical application of the idea of "interconnectedness" of human progress.

 

[Ahnarras]

Totally valid! I should have been clearer that my stance is about random maps and not premade maps. When the map is designed by hand to balance the terrain features, I'm fully on board.

I'm afraid I don't have enough XP with randoms map to have an opinion on that, but I kinda I'm with Walter : It's a crappy tiles, but in the same way a tundra or mountain would be a crappy tile and we all would rather sette somewhere with a lot of grasslands / hills.
Preferably with a good ressource, copper and gold, too

Perhaps tweaking the map generator to reduces / disperse the swamps ?
Or giving them a counterbuff, like "if you have a swamp there, it increase the chance of spawning another tile with a good ressource nearby" ?

Or perhaps just the fact that having a garantee grassland tile in Middle Age is enough...

 

[TheBirdMan]

They are already allowed by certain map scripts. As this is a non-stock feature, what a map script does with them is mostly that script's business.

My suggestion should be seen in the light of that I think many players mostly use only 1 or 2 of the most "recommended" map scripts either RI_Totestra.py, RI_Planet_Generator.py or RI_perfectMongoose_v332.py (maybe also RI_EarthEvolution3.py). Furthermore, I also have a "feeling" that only a smaller number of players open WorldBuilder to check/edit_in their current map before they start a game.

If all those "standard"-mapscrips disregards this line <bNoAdjacent>1</bNoAdjacent> in the CIV4FeatureInfos.xlm file, then all is fine. But if not - then I still say that little change <bNoAdjacent>0</bNoAdjacent> would be needed.

 

[[Y]]

Still not sure I'm quite following you - how is starting in/near tundra not exactly the same then, a "check" on "civs that have no reason to be checked" if compared to the ones that start in grasslands/plains, and not even ever addressable through technology? Or, say, a mountain - a tile that admittedly doesn't cause epidemics, but unlike swamps isn't workable ever, whereas a swamp can later be converted to farmland?

Tundras are a disadvantage compared plains/grasslands, yeah. But the critical thing for me is the unhealth and epidemic chance factor from swamps. They aren't just dead tiles until removed, they are actively harmful to the nearby cities. Tundras don't have any such effects, nor do mountains. But tundras can have deer and fur which adds a fair bit of value, and mountains, when lucky, can be used for defensive bottlenecking and the volcano event that adds food to nearby tiles. Even if they are not worth working, they aren't adding any problems to your city.

I think a better comparison than tundras and mountains are jungles and flood plains. They both contribute unhealth and epidemic chance to the city, much like swamps do, albeit less. Flood plains offer a bounty of food, which makes for an interesting trade off. And jungles can be given a decent yield with slash and burn farms, and can have resources on those tiles. These tiles offering both good and bad experiences, while swamps only offer bad, means I'm still happy to have them in the game.

So all in all, tundras, mountains, jungles, and flood plains all put an additional handicap on nearby cities, but have some form of redeeming factor, while imposing less of a handicap than swamps, which have no redeeming factors whatsoever.

Another factor here might be what we want out of games. In the past we talked about how we each have a different take on difficulty: You liked difficulty arising from map conditions more than game settings, and I liked difficulty coming from game settings more than map conditions. I think we're seeing that here, where people that like map-based difficulty see the swamp as an added game feature to play around, and people that don't like difficulty from map conditions see it as an unnecessary obstacle creating imbalances.

 

[Fantasieprodukt]

I want to remove the "your land is too far away" refusal for AI making vassals. In which file would I find the setting?

Background: I enjoy a lot playing the huge world map - but here this condition doesn't make any sense ... AI would make vassals anywhere in Europe/Asia/Africa no matter how far away, because AI considers this as the same land mass ... at the same time AI would not make vassals on a neighboring island, even if they share (sea-)borders, because it's not the same land mass, and thus considering it "too far away" which I find unlogic and contradicting ...

 

[AspiringScholar]

An interesting conversation above about swamps (and terrain features in general)!

In general, I agree with Y, but as to their being utterly devoid of any utility, I would add the small caveat that (very situationally) they, like mountains, can function as powerful chokepoints due to their significant -25% defensive malus and high movement cost, which can trap enemies for slaughter, and even when that is a liability rather than a benefit for the player, generally makes for an interesting feature enhancing the combat experience, just as the impassability of mountains does.

This also touches on a related topic that I think also has bearing on the "fun" element conferred by terrain features, and might offer a suggestion for improving the one in question: the incompatibility between most terrain features and improvements coexisting on the same tile. As with the lengthy discussion about forests some handful of months back, it feels like a strange overgeneralization to me that these need be completely removed in the presence of almost all improvements, with the notable exception of farms. I believe this stems from the vanilla gameplay design philosophy, where forests offer an interesting strategic dilemma as a great source of immediate production through chopping at the cost of reducing the long-term quality of the tile; and even when chopping is still often preferable, there is the further interesting dilemma of *when* to do it and for what, which has all of the other bearings of the timing and availability of whatever one wants to use that for. The meaningful difference here is that the pace, scale and tone of the vanilla game is markedly different from RI, being much faster and less concerned with providing an immersive experience of history than with being a pure, optimizable strategy game whose concern with the former is mostly just aesthetic and not as serious, even when we still have major abstractions of realism in both. In this regard, this feels like a leftover of a vanilla mechanic and something which would make for a better gameplay experience along the lines of how RI modifies other vanilla mechanics elsewhere without fundamentally changing its nature as an abstraction (such as with logistics penalties and stack aid bonuses, which loosely give the player a sense of supply and combined arms being modeled, without changing the fact that these still operate within a context of functionally immortal units whose campaigns often exceed the fighting age or even the lifetimes of the soldiers conducting them, and yet there is still a different tone which is more serious and unattuned with needlessly undercooked historicity).

Why does building a cottage, for instance, necessarily remove a forest surrounding it, when to this day, several large urban towns are still in great measure meaningfully surrounded by forests (which for that matter are certainly very often the full surrounding of what cottages, hamlets and villages represent)? From an immersion standpoint, it feels vestigially gimmicky from vanilla, and damages the sense of immersion I get when playing among forests - especially when there is no visual representation of trees at all with towns otherwise.

From a gameplay standpoint, that leaves you with a strictly better tile overall, in retaining the forest's yields on top of the town's, yes, but hasn't the general consensus been that towns (which have their own malus in the form of epidemics, and are early in the game often unspammable because of it) eventually are eclipsed by farms due to the waxing value of food and feeding specialists, and compete with them as a source of demand for food? Early game, you have very lengthy improvement construction time in forests (coupled with the lengthy investment of time and allocated labor to develop the town), to dissuade you from building your first town on that nice riverside tile (where you end up with an extra commerce anyway due to forests nullifying this), and midgame, you forfeit your best source of continuous production (often outcompeting mines, if they don't have a resource) by investing in lumbermills. Late game, as said, they lose utillity in general and become a worse bargain for the food which abundant specialists compete with them for. So, I don't see much of a balance or gameplay concern allowing this for at least cottages.

Farms, on the other hand, of course I do think should obviously be mutually exclusive, since "assarting" forests was often expressly for the purpose of farming the cleared land, and with mines, you would have an obviously unbalanced production tile in retaining both. Forts would be a weird simultaneous buff and malus since woodsmen assailants might eventually be on equal footing but nothing else would be. Though it's mostly aesthetic, I do think there's a case to be made for cottages to be mutually inclusive, and even gameplay enhancing.

Going back to swamps, however, my thought was what if they somehow marginally aided farms? After all, Nile Delta being comprises of swamps in the Huge World Map is a bit silly considering its historical fertility, and there is a somewhat fine difference between them and flood plains anyway. (No one would argue that the Louisianna basin isn't a swamp, but it's also heavily farmed and productive to this day; in fact, New Orleans is basically a "town" in a swamp tile). It seems right that they should still retain a negative aspect, but what if they provided a source of fresh water and uniquely lacked the "cannot build improvements" tag across the board, with the Aztec chinampa buffed consequently? That would leave you with the incentive to get rid of them eventually since they still confer unhealthiness and epidemic chance, but prevent them from being economically worthless and also enable farming in surrounding land? The Aztec's UI does also seem underwhelming in it's current form as being barely a net bonus of food, when the real thing had multiple harvests per year and fed one of the largest cities of its day.

 

[Ahnarras]

From what I've understood frome some of Walter's commentary a few months (years ? God.) back, concerning your forest/town point, it's mostly a matter of size and perspective.
A single tile of forest IG simulate a huge, deep, ancient forest. Not the few trees that you can see here and there near nowadays towns, and are few enough that they wouldn't appear on a map the size of Civ.

Also, "forest" around towns aren't really use for wood anymore, at least not around where I live. The sawmill and stuff like that does work, I'm near one of the biggest in whole Europe, but you have drive a good half-hour and then trek for another hour or two from the nearest city before managing to go where they really cut the trees.

And finally, as it was said a bit earlier here, at the end of the day, R:I is still a game, and you have to find some kind of balance. It's bad enough that a Civilization spawning in a grassland/forest settings already has a good advantage compares to another Civ spawning in a savannah/desert settings, but if you can double down on forest bonus, wouldn't that be just too good ?

Small point on the Nile's marshes : The whole river still represents the "roleplay" of Ancient Egypt, as I was very, very far ahead of everyone else in term of city size thanks to all the flood plains and the special egyptian improvement. The 4 marshes at the end of the delta don't really affect that. Also, nice detail I noticed : the map makes a good representation of the "decline" of Egypt, as, venturing deeper into the Middle Age, the few desert tile in the big cross of my capital are now stopping my growth and I'm starting to see other civ's cities growing as big as I am. It's quite nice !

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Thanks @Ahnarras, that saved me quite a lot of typing for most of my own answer, as those are exactly my takes. One small addition on the Nile delta specifically: unlike most of the Nile, its outer delta (the region closest to the coast) is a vast stretch of marshland virtually unsuitable for agriculture to this day, and a lot of the agriculture in the inner delta in modern era is possible only due to modern intensive techniques, drainage and vast amounts of fertilizer. It should be heavily caveated that Nile delta is one of the more changeable ecosystems, and throughout the last 6000 years its makeup (and even actual location, due to silting) have changed dramatically, and more than once. This nice map shows well that even when the arable lands were at their greatest extent, there was a vast strip of marshland closer to the coast:

(basically, blue "meandering" is the only terrain really suitable for large-scale agriculture and is roughly what Nile's flood plain is elsewhere). I've been to the outer delta around Alexandria, and it's a stark contrast with the rest of the Nile's highly agricultural stretch even in the modern day. This is how vast stretches of the delta look (I know I'm not a good photographer, but it should give you an impression of what's out there; the second one is just a photo I found on Google):


The wetlands of Nile delta are very green, and indeed quite bioproductive, but in a way that absolutely doesn't translate to agricultural output. The fact that they are still unclaimed to this day in a country that was, for millennia, historically overpopulated and starved for enough habitable land, should give you an idea of how hard it is to make these lands suitable for anything permanent and man-made.

 

[Ahnarras]

Always fascinating how much stuff I learn by playing with your mods and reading this forum.

Thanks you

Ps : Slowly (veryyyy slowly... thanks war >_<) going up in turn and noticed another misshappen while transitionning from the 0-400 era to the 400+ era (name missing for both, at least on my save :/ )
As last time, the icon transition happened at the correct turn, but the science % reduction only hit a turn later than it should have.

 

[TheBirdMan]

about keeping the forest (and a savanna for that matter I guess) on tiles, where you at the same time also want a Cottage/Hamlet/Village/Town..... think I got an idea - at least I'm going to try it out when my current test-game is over.

How to do it (in theory)
1: Changes in the CIV4BuildInfos.xml file for the "Build Cottage" entry, tag <bRemove>1</bRemove> for both the Forest and Savanna to <bRemove>0</bRemove>. Now the forest or savanna would "stay" when you build your cottage.
2: Changes in the CIV4ImprovementInfos.xml file for the "Improvement Cottage" entry, tag <YieldChanges> 2nd line <iYieldChange>0</iYieldChange> to be changed to <iYieldChange>-1</iYieldChange>. This should nullify the production a forest normally would add because just as Ahnarras wrote:

"forest" around towns aren't really use for wood anymore, at least not around where I live.

Above would now only give a better visual look (I think - I have not tried it, so I really don't know if it would look nice or ugly).

 

[AspiringScholar]

about keeping the forest (and a savanna for that matter I guess) on tiles, where you at the same time also want a Cottage/Hamlet/Village/Town..... think I got an idea - at least I'm going to try it out when my current test-game is over.

How to do it (in theory)
1: Changes in the CIV4BuildInfos.xml file for the "Build Cottage" entry, tag <bRemove>1</bRemove> for both the Forest and Savanna to <bRemove>0</bRemove>. Now the forest or savanna would "stay" when you build your cottage.
2: Changes in the CIV4ImprovementInfos.xml file for the "Improvement Cottage" entry, tag <YieldChanges> 2nd line <iYieldChange>0</iYieldChange> to be changed to <iYieldChange>-1</iYieldChange>. This should nullify the production a forest normally would add because just as Ahnarras wrote:

Above would now only give a better visual look (I think - I have not tried it, so I really don't know if it would look nice or ugly).

Please post back what the results of that are. It is mostly a visual irritation for me that terrain becomes barren and devoid of all semblance of trees, scrub, savannah, jungle, etc., if they're supposed to be only mitigated in that locale and not actually completely absent.

 

[TheBirdMan]

Please post back what the results of that are. It is mostly a visual irritation for me that terrain becomes barren and devoid of all semblance of trees, scrub, savannah, jungle, etc., if they're supposed to be only mitigated in that locale and not actually completely absent.

I'll post some screenshots no matter if it works or if it fails.

 

[Ahnarras]

Hmm, having some kind of trees staying around the cottage-town (kinda like a decoration ?) with no real gameplay impact, but only for the eye candy, DOES sounds quite like something I would support.
I'm interested in seeing how it will goes.

- says the guy always playing in Egypt with not a single forest tile for centuries

 

[[Y]]

Hmm, having some kind of trees staying around the cottage-town (kinda like a decoration ?) with no real gameplay impact, but only for the eye candy, DOES sounds quite like something I would support.
I'm interested in seeing how it will goes.

- says the guy always playing in Egypt with not a single forest tile for centuries

hah, yeah. I had a post typed up suggesting that maybe trees could be added to the cottage/village/town models but then scrapped it when I realized that it wouldn't be applicable to many/most tiles.

 

[AspiringScholar]

hah, yeah. I had a post typed up suggesting that maybe trees could be added to the cottage/village/town models but then scrapped it when I realized that it wouldn't be applicable to many/most tiles.

However, BirdMan's idea might be a perfect approach, since the game engine already allows the features and improvements to coexist (at least via the World Builder), so that if terrain features are already present, building the improvements on them will keep the visual if the yield is subtracted, but wouldn't require adding anything where they aren't present to begin with.

 

[Crusnik83]

Can you change in save file some game options, for example i don't have random seed generator turned on and i would like to change that?

 

[[Y]]

However, BirdMan's idea might be a perfect approach, since the game engine already allows the features and improvements to coexist (at least via the World Builder), so that if terrain features are already present, building the improvements on them will keep the visual if the yield is subtracted, but wouldn't require adding anything where they aren't present to begin with.

Wont it still provide a defense bonus, though? Combined with the town bonus for +75%? 100% on a hill... Or can that be removed too?