Realism Invictus

[Crusnik83]

How many units can you stack together before starting to suffer from logistics penalty?

 

[gladguy]

Sadly, I was only able to upgrade 4 out of my 16 composite bowmen to longbowmen.

I had similar problems with egyptian units. Sometimes it helps to place them in a city and wait one turn. E. g. I gifted some Galatikoi Kleruchoi to my human ally (America) and he was not able to upgrade them. He had to gift them back to me to upgrade them.

 

[gladguy]

How many units can you stack together before starting to suffer from logistics penalty?

Hoover your mouse over this bar in the bottom left corner of your screen and you will see additional information:

It depends on your rural or urban logistics, which are influenced by tech and sometimes civics. Idk if there are also wonders which influence it.
There are different stages of penalties. You can see the influence of all of them.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

One more question to increased unit costs. Later tech units cost gold in maintenance. Is this independent from the increase unit cost or is it an alternative mechanism so that when opting out of increased unit cost the monetary cost per unit is active?

Independent.

1. I think there is a problem (or a mechanic I don't understand) with cultural expansion.
Last time I reported the problem there were several city razed in the area, but this time no.
Borders should have expanded also in these coast areas:

From what I understand, this is a vanilla thing. Borders cannot exceed the BFC of the city on a landmass different from where the city itself is located. Basically, the coastal tiles in the first example "belong" to a different island, whereas in the second example they count as still "belonging" to mainland Europe. I don't know the precise internal logic behind that (for instance, I can't see why in the first example, the borders do extend all the way south), but that's the gist of it. See a vanilla example here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/cities-1-tile-apart.647369/#post-15486685

2. What is the mechanic behind sea ice shifting? I see that sea ice plots change over time, seems they can both appear and disappear.

A simple probability each turn to both contract and expand.

Resource convo:

I thought about necrobumping any old thread where chernozem and andosol were mentioned, but I didn't see anything with those terms used with the thought that's in my head. We know that those tiles can be improved based on your civ type or the techs you've discovered - all food resources. In my latest game (3.72c), I didn't have cotton or hemp so I couldn't build shipyards and get that nice +1 food on water tiles. C'est la vie. I don't know the historical or practical notions of growing cotton or hemp, but it seems like chernozem would be a good candidate for a cotton or hemp resource in the game. Not sure which tech would apply to make something like that available... I remember (many RI versions ago) that some UUs couldn't be built without cotton (sorry, cba'd to look up which civ it was, but I think it was a middle-eastern or north African one). As you expand, you could strategically plan to settle near those tiles after you know where cotton or hemp exist yet realize you can't get to them.

OK, I'll answer this from three different perspectives.

1) Realism: growing cotton in chernozems would be a very bad idea IRL - basically it would be considered a "waste" of those valuable lands. Historically, cotton was grown in soils and climates poorly suited for high-yield agriculture, and prime fertile soils would generally be the last to be considered for growing fibre crops (cotton/flax/hemp/etc). Related fact: ocra features prominently in the cuisine of the Southern States in the US and of certain regions of India and the Middle East because it's closely related to cotton, and grows well in the same regions as cotton does - and where most food crops don't (or at least don't thrive).

2) Gameplay. Cotton and hemp are the resources with probably the longest period from being revealed to being useful in RI. You have almost two full eras to locate and secure those before they actually start being used. I don't feel there needs to be any alternative way of getting them - not any more than, say, prime timber (another "nice to have" but not critical resource).

3) Coding. Currently, the fertile soils are set up in such a way as to require almost no decision-making from the AI. They either go for their civ-specific resource if they can or for one of the two almost equal food resources if they can't. Introducing another option to consider would require far more actual decision-making from the AI, which translates to me spending time coding it (with an uncertain end result; as practice shows not all my code works well).

On a related thought, how about the idea of a Great Merchant or Artist being able to "create" a cotton or hemp resource with its consumption, kinda like how a Great Merchant or Artist does the same thing with movies, glassware, hits, or motor vehicles. Not that using a GP in this way would make the resource for a city's consumption, but just make it available to your civ. In the same way how someone figures out how to use something in a way no one else has: i.e. - the resource had been there all along but it took a bit of cleverness to make it beneficial. I guess it would make that person "great".

While I would probably like more early-to-mid game uses for Great Merchants, this wouldn't be one of them.

Currently, I am playing as Egypt in the Triassic scenario (which I enjoy very much, since I like playing on Pangaea worlds). Anyways, I am now in the medieval period and I have researched the tech that grants me longbowmen. Sadly, I was only able to upgrade 4 out of my 16 composite bowmen to longbowmen. The other 12 have NO option to upgrade to longbowmen (I have enough money btw). Is this normal? Are they on the crossbow line?

Longbowmen require archery ranges (unlike earlier units that only get bonuses from them) - make sure they're in a city with one to upgrade them.

I want to add some knowledge but a solution is needed here: Some coastal waters are actually ocean. I ran into this problem when i tried to explore australia with a sailboat. it does not work. you need an ocean faring vessel. I think these "borders" are intentional in order to limit early exploration, but in some cases like yours these may be remnants from the map creator and should be corrected.

Fully intentional for the world map scenarios.

 

[gladguy]

I love the soundtrack of the mod. It was the renaissance era when I realized what a great soundtrack there is.

 

[Crusnik83]

Man, i have like 3 doomstacks rolling towards me, tech inferior units but too many even for my mostly MBT high experience doomstack, i can handle one at a time, but not like this when the entire world declares war on you lol. I'll try to fight, knock out one at a time, and have to move fast.

 

[JDCP]

Man, i have like 3 doomstacks rolling towards me, tech inferior units but too many even for my mostly MBT high experience doomstack, i can handle one at a time, but not like this when the entire world declares war on you lol. I'll try to fight, knock out one at a time, and have to move fast.

Soviets vs Germans draft some people or buy units if you have to, use collateral damage to delay enemy troops from reaching your main cities. It's okay to lose one or two cities, what is not okay is giving up just because you were caught off guard. Also keep your eyes on strategical positions, don't let the enemy reach the ground above you, good luck!

If everything goes well you might have the chance to perform a counterattack, and if you've got MBTs while your enemies don't... then I don't see what could go wrong! Let me know how it goes, that sounds fun as hell.

P.S: Hi everyone

 

[Crusnik83]

Soviets vs Germans draft some people or buy units if you have to, use collateral damage to delay enemy troops from reaching your main cities. It's okay to lose one or two cities, what is not okay is giving up just because you were caught off guard. Also keep your eyes on strategical positions, don't let the enemy reach the ground above you, good luck!

If everything goes well you might have the chance to perform a counterattack, and if you've got MBTs while your enemies don't... then I don't see what could go wrong! Let me know how it goes, that sounds fun as hell.

P.S: Hi everyone

Steamrolled them but my air strength wasn't sufficient to protect my mines and pastures so they cripled my resources needed for war effort. I can disregard that and just move to counter strike and punish them but i have agreed to cease fire to get my economy back online and to amass fighters in every city on intercept patrol so that i can effectively crush anyone that starts getting too cocky.

 

[Luís Felipe Silva Pinto]

I was playing on a map with two continents, one of them was left as a new world or something like that, so in the industrial era I tried to colonize since all the cities were from the barbarians, I realized that it wasn't economically viable when I was on the fourth city (2 built and 2 taken), so I decided to liberate the colonies as a vassal. So is it kind of unfeasible to colonize throughout the campaign? And maybe expanding to another continent through war isn't a good idea either because of the maintenance? Should I leave the other continent out of my conquests?

 

[AspiringScholar]

I was playing on a map with two continents, one of them was left as a new world or something like that, so in the industrial era I tried to colonize since all the cities were from the barbarians, I realized that it wasn't economically viable when I was on the fourth city (2 built and 2 taken), so I decided to liberate the colonies as a vassal. So is it kind of unfeasible to colonize throughout the campaign? And maybe expanding to another continent through war isn't a good idea either because of the maintenance? Should I leave the other continent out of my conquests?

Timing is quite important and it is also rather situationally dependent. Map painting on another continent for the sake of it is often untenable and a poor idea, but with the right commercial foundation, thoughtful, limited colonization can indeed be quite profitable. Typically it's a bad idea to colonize en masse before you have banks, and if the aim is for acquiring specific strategic or luxury resources, the option to release colonies as a vassal who then provide these to you remains fully viable.

 

[Ahnarras]

Yup maintenance is real in this mod and you need to carefully plan when to settle a new city, specially if it's on another continent. So far I've had a little success with the Confederation Doctrine and it's huge maintenance cost reduction (but that means loosing the bonus hapiness from others government doctrines and a hefty penalty on units production...). Plutocratie is also quite good for gold generation if you, like me, have a "centralized" empire with one huge city and the other lagging a bit behind.

 

[Luís Felipe Silva Pinto]

Yup maintenance is real in this mod and you need to carefully plan when to settle a new city, specially if it's on another continent. So far I've had a little success with the Confederation Doctrine and it's huge maintenance cost reduction (but that means loosing the bonus hapiness from others government doctrines and a hefty penalty on units production...). Plutocratie is also quite good for gold generation if you, like me, have a "centralized" empire with one huge city and the other lagging a bit behind.

what do you mean by some cities lagging a bit behind? More or less in the industrial Age i got a lot of cities that have nothing to construct anymore and put almost every city to get gold, and just build something when the tech is done, its something related to this?

 

[tebriz]

What exactly <iVassalTechTransferCommerceRateModifier> value in Civ4CommerceInfo file does?

I though it is the tech transfer rate a vassal civ gets from its master. But it seems that it is (also?) the case for master civ to get tech transfer from its vassal. And this number adds up with default tech transfer rate. In my case I have +25% tech transfer rate, and +50% tech rate from vassaltechtransfer - I end up with total tech transfer rate of 75%. So, is it intentional that the master civ gets such a big boost from its vassal in case if it as ahead in technology?

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

I was playing on a map with two continents, one of them was left as a new world or something like that, so in the industrial era I tried to colonize since all the cities were from the barbarians, I realized that it wasn't economically viable when I was on the fourth city (2 built and 2 taken), so I decided to liberate the colonies as a vassal. So is it kind of unfeasible to colonize throughout the campaign? And maybe expanding to another continent through war isn't a good idea either because of the maintenance? Should I leave the other continent out of my conquests?

Funny you should mention it now, as it was in my immediate plans to address that. It's a vanilla thing, but it's high time something was done about it - and it will be.

What exactly <iVassalTechTransferCommerceRateModifier> value in Civ4CommerceInfo file does?

I though it is the tech transfer rate a vassal civ gets from its master. But it seems that it is (also?) the case for master civ to get tech transfer from its vassal. And this number adds up with default tech transfer rate. In my case I have +25% tech transfer rate, and +50% tech rate from vassaltechtransfer - I end up with total tech transfer rate of 75%. So, is it intentional that the master civ gets such a big boost from its vassal in case if it as ahead in technology?

Great catch. I checked the relevant code and the master-vassal relations were specified in reverse. Fixed now.

 

[Noyyau]

Great catch. I checked the relevant code and the master-vassal relations were specified in reverse. Fixed now.

Wait, why shouldn't the master also get extra tech transfer from a vassal?
Conquering and subjugating an advanced, yet militarily weak(er) civ seems like the sensible thing to do for a conquest/expansion oriented civ.

 

[Ahnarras]

what do you mean by some cities lagging a bit behind? More or less in the industrial Age i got a lot of cities that have nothing to construct anymore and put almost every city to get gold, and just build something when the tech is done, its something related to this?

Oh no, not at all. In my current game I had a long time where my capital was at 10-15+ population and had a lot of production/gold generation, while the rest of my empire were dealing with low food / epidemics trouble and were stuck under 5 or so population. So the capitale was the only one really contributing to the empire.


But if you are in Industrial you should have the tools to avoid that situation by then. Going for Commerce Generation is good if you have nothing to build/train, but remember that it's only a 50% conversion rate (half your hammer into raw gold, except if something later in the tech tree improves it perhaps?) and it's sometime better to build more cottage / put more people into Merchant. But I've not enough XP of the late game to know if those tips still work at your point of the game, sorry ^^

On another note, a weird thing happened in my game : Tigranes was leading Armenia since the start of the game, as it should be.
A few turns earlier, he declared himself to be a Vassal from Israel. So far, so good.

Then the weird twist : a city revolted somewhere (perhaps even in Armenia ?) and the new civilization that was created was called "Armenia" too by the Alert at the beginning of the turn.
I haven't encounter them yet, but seems like I've got two Armenia running in my game : one being a vassal of israel and the other one being the "real" Civ.

There are real world situation where that happened so I'm not too disturbed by it, but I was more wondering if it's intended behaviour or not ?

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Wait, why shouldn't the master also get extra tech transfer from a vassal?
Conquering and subjugating an advanced, yet militarily weak(er) civ seems like the sensible thing to do for a conquest/expansion oriented civ.

You're getting the regular tech transfer from them anyway. The bigger additional bonus is in place for a smaller vassal to at least somewhat keep up in tech with the overlord.

 

[tebriz]

Oh no, not at all. In my current game I had a long time where my capital was at 10-15+ population and had a lot of production/gold generation, while the rest of my empire were dealing with low food / epidemics trouble and were stuck under 5 or so population. So the capitale was the only one really contributing to the empire.


But if you are in Industrial you should have the tools to avoid that situation by then. Going for Commerce Generation is good if you have nothing to build/train, but remember that it's only a 50% conversion rate (half your hammer into raw gold, except if something later in the tech tree improves it perhaps?) and it's sometime better to build more cottage / put more people into Merchant. But I've not enough XP of the late game to know if those tips still work at your point of the game, sorry ^^

On another note, a weird thing happened in my game : Tigranes was leading Armenia since the start of the game, as it should be.
A few turns earlier, he declared himself to be a Vassal from Israel. So far, so good.

Then the weird twist : a city revolted somewhere (perhaps even in Armenia ?) and the new civilization that was created was called "Armenia" too by the Alert at the beginning of the turn.
I haven't encounter them yet, but seems like I've got two Armenia running in my game : one being a vassal of israel and the other one being the "real" Civ.

There are real world situation where that happened so I'm not too disturbed by it, but I was more wondering if it's intended behaviour or not ?

Yeah, this is a common thing in game (and in history too). This situation happens exactly in such situations. Let’s say half of Armenia is conquered, and the rest is vassalized by Israel. Now, if a conquered armenian city revolts and wants to join motherland, Armenia has a choice to accept that city (and be in war situation with Israel) or to refuse. If Armenia wasn’t vassalized, it would probably accept that city. But since it can not declare war on its master, that revolting city establishes its own Armenian civilization, which is totally cool. Theoretically that rebel Armenia can defeat Israel, conquer vassilized Armenia and thus create a new independent Armenia.
Think about Ataturk in real history - he revolted against practically surrounded/vassalized Ottomans and their masters, and created new Turkey. There are a lot of other such historic examples as well.

 

[Ahnarras]

Neat ! I'm curious to see how that will goes in my game

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Then the weird twist : a city revolted somewhere (perhaps even in Armenia ?) and the new civilization that was created was called "Armenia" too by the Alert at the beginning of the turn.
I haven't encounter them yet, but seems like I've got two Armenia running in my game : one being a vassal of israel and the other one being the "real" Civ.

There are real world situation where that happened so I'm not too disturbed by it, but I was more wondering if it's intended behaviour or not ?

It's an intended, if relatively recent, mechanic. Usually if there is a civ alive, a city with its majority culture will simply defect to it - but if said civ is a vassal, it'll instead proclaim itself a "free" version of the same civ (especially since there's a high probability that the civ in question is a vassal of whoever the city was revolting from anyway). Glad to hear it works, as I never saw it happen in-game yet besides some specifically crafted testing scenarios.