Realism Invictus

[AspiringScholar]

It jumped off the screen at me that the English knight has a lion on its head, and this being a new change, surely that was intentional. I'm curious, was this something the Plantagenets (or perhaps a later dynasty) did? I do think the knight being emblematic of late medieval XV Century-ish plate armor clad cavalry makes the direct allusion to the Normans at this point seem somewhat anachronistic, however.

 

[balanceofpower]

It's interesting how the scale has decreased over the civ games. Civ 3 has a much more zoomed out map, a city cap of 512 cities, 31 max civs (+barbs) by default without DLL work required... map sizes far larger too. Civ4 is still a middle ground compared to the later games with their 3-5 city civs, but it's still a little sad sometimes to see the lesser scale compared to 3, as someone who bounces between the two games every now and then.

I doubt anyone here will give you objective feedback about why this is the case and simply hand wave it away as "casualifcation" or "dumbing down" because strategy gamers seem to think they are game-design and marketing geniuses that rival the intellects of actual game designers.

But the fact of the matter is that, when it comes to strategy games, scale and balance are inversely proportional. You simply cannot properly balance a game where each player owns and manages dozens (upon dozens) of cities. The early games (Civs 1-4) tried to address ICS and snowballing with corruption and maintenance, which were ultimately easy to ignore because having more cities = more production = more production = more units, more of everything. This is an unsustainable trend that would have made future game design difficult if not impossible especially as multiplayer became a bigger component of Civ's design. No multiplayer strategy game would be sustainable where a campaign would take 40+ hours to compete or it being over once a person eventually snowballed out of control.

Realism Invictus is all well and good... for a mod; it is ambitious and detailed, but it is very niche and it has the virtue of not having to compete commercially. Don't mistake its virtues for commercial viability because those are two different things. Commercial strategy games are already very niche as it is, and for a product to be successful it needs to appeal to as broad of an audience as possible. Most commercial strategy games simply don't have the luxury of being niche.

If it were easy to sell a game like Realism Invictus then chances are someone would have done it by now in Unity which is capable of doing strategy games. Complex games like Dwarf Fortress are still very niche and its success is more of a gleaming exception than a rule; it benefited from over a decade of glacial development until the developer was forced by health issues to go commercial at which point most people just bought the game out of a desire to support him. Any commercial game developer that operated at the speed of Bay13 games would be out of business already years before it went retail.

These are the economic realities of modern game design.

TL;DR:

• Scale and Balance are inversely proportional to each other both in terms game design and player appeal.
• The scale of old Civ games were more of an accident that was borne out of traditional 4x game design but the developers had measures to curtail infinite growth and snowballing to no avail which required stricter measures.
• These game designs were unsustainable and would have ensured the death of the genre if developers didn't try new things to keep things balanced, especially as player-versus-player multiplayer became a bigger focus on Civ's game design.
• RI is very cool, but don't mistake its coolness for commercial viability because mods that take years to make cannot be compared to multimillion dollar commercial strategy games that need to sell units to be successful.

PS It occurred to me while writing this there's another wrinkle to this question. it was Civ 4 iirc that popularized the whole notion of a One-City Challenge, which is when the whole notion of the Tall vs Wide dichotomy emerged. Previous Civs literally required you to go as wide as possible if you were to succeed otherwise the AI would swallow you up. Civ 4 and later Civ 5 tried to take more deliberate changes to ensure that both play styles, tall / wide, were viable. So while you see a loss of scale, what we gained was an increase in gameplay variety.

PPS: Also the only Civ after 4 that really hammered the whole 3-4 cities thing was V; Civ VI actually was pretty successful in better allowing for tall / wide play and not punishing wide-style too egregiously unlike V did. VII has continued this trend. You can have 20-30 cities or more in Civ VI and VII depending on map size and still do well for yourself. When it comes to Civ's design there is always a tug-of-war between player freedom and balance. While I prefer the fomer, the latter makes for a better game.

 

[globosud]

hi I'm trying the latest svn version, I was wondering if the cultural system had been modified, I remembered that you couldn't go beyond the maximum tiles allowed in the city, while as you can see in the photo even if you have a city with a population of 1, but you also have only 1 culture on a Tile, it becomes yours, is it a bug or a new mode. I hope I was clear, with my bad English

 

[Ahnarras]

Spotted a small typo, probably some fonts size trouble on the Civlopedia page of the leader Mindaugas, near the bottom of his background description

Spoiler :

 

[TheBirdMan]

Hmmm - swamps isn't a "beautiful" feature anymore.......

Spoiler Swamps :

 

[Maximus_Prince]

So, I've been experimenting with settings but alas no luck. I'm trying to get AI players to declare war on each other earlier in the game, I've tried crowding the map with more players, I've tried increasing the difficulty level.

I don't know if its Civ 4 per say or if its Realism Invictus. Would it somehow be possible to have certain AI playesr have easier advantages and others harder?

 

[tebriz]

So, I've been experimenting with settings but alas no luck. I'm trying to get AI players to declare war on each other earlier in the game, I've tried crowding the map with more players, I've tried increasing the difficulty level.

I don't know if its Civ 4 per say or if its Realism Invictus. Would it somehow be possible to have certain AI playesr have easier advantages and others harder?

Have you tried playing with Aggressive AI game option on?

 

[Maximus_Prince]

Have you tried playing with Aggressive AI game option on?

I have, I even experimented with AI play to win while only Conquest and Domination were on. Not much seems to be happening they're really just focusing on building.

Specifically I'm wondering if I could get Realism Invictus to have situations where the AI players aren't directly or indirectly focused on me instead it feel more immersive if more conflict broke out earlier in the game like the first 100 turns.

Its kind of annoying when you have Civilizations with special units for the Ancient and Classical eras not flexing their muscles

But I realize this is civ 4, and most of conflict start in the Middle Ages and after. So I don't know if I can modify some things in the XML to possibly get close to what I'm envisioning.

 

[Lantarh]

It takes a few minutes max in my case (on SSD obviously + decent CPU), and sometimes I have to run Civ multiple times while recompiling and testing something, so on modern hardware it isn't really an issue.

If you move all the assets to the BtS folder you can get around 1 minute for a 8MB save.
You lose the ability to easily switch mods, but for me is not an issue as I only play RI.

 

[tebriz]

I have, I even experimented with AI play to win while only Conquest and Domination were on. Not much seems to be happening they're really just focusing on building.

Specifically I'm wondering if I could get Realism Invictus to have situations where the AI players aren't directly or indirectly focused on me instead it feel more immersive if more conflict broke out earlier in the game like the first 100 turns.

Its kind of annoying when you have Civilizations with special units for the Ancient and Classical eras not flexing their muscles

But I realize this is civ 4, and most of conflict start in the Middle Ages and after. So I don't know if I can modify some things in the XML to possibly get close to what I'm envisioning.

From this perspective, the “AI Plays to Win” option begins to significantly impact gameplay only starting from the late game.
How crowded are your maps? If the world is sparsely populated and starting civilizations are far apart, it’s natural that early wars will be rare. Personally, I like to play with about 200 land tiles per civilization (assuming the New World isn’t empty), and I find that this setup results in a reasonable number of early conflicts.
P.S. I just noticed you’re referring to the first 100 turns—within that short timeframe, it’s quite difficult to see wars break out, and honestly, there’s no real need for them so early on.

 

[PaperPaulo99]

Found a way to not punish player too much regarding truncation problems in Fanatical and Schemer traits

Instead of reducing GPP generated per turn for Fanatical and GGP generated per combat for Schemer, i advise to increase GPP cost for next Great People for Fanatical and to increase GGP cost for next Great General for Schemer

And maybe similar workaround can be done for other traits aswell

Other suggestions
Imperialistic: replace +100% GGP generated per combat to reduced GGP cost for next Great General, which is mutual nullified with Schemer
Philosophical: replace +50% GPP generated per turn to reduced GPP cost for next Great People, which is mutual nullified with Fanatical
Protective: replace +100% GGP generated per combat within borders to free City Garrison 1 for Melee Units, promotion which counters City Raider 1 that Conqueror grants for their Melee Units
Protective: replace free Drill 1 promotion for Archery and Gunpowder units to +3XP for Archery Units, which weakenens Archery and Gunpowder units but also grants extra XP for Archery Units for player choosing their promotion when built instead

 

[Noyyau]

+1 to that; on an SSD it's definitely under 5 minutes.

Took me more time to unpack all those .fpks than to load the game! About 4 minutes, quite acceptable!
Savegame is currently 4,4 MB.
We'll see in the coming days how it goes.

 

[Maximus_Prince]

From this perspective, the “AI Plays to Win” option begins to significantly impact gameplay only starting from the late game.
How crowded are your maps? If the world is sparsely populated and starting civilizations are far apart, it’s natural that early wars will be rare. Personally, I like to play with about 200 land tiles per civilization (assuming the New World isn’t empty), and I find that this setup results in a reasonable number of early conflicts.
P.S. I just noticed you’re referring to the first 100 turns—within that short timeframe, it’s quite difficult to see wars break out, and honestly, there’s no real need for them so early on.

Then another variable I should consider is possibly slowing down the game? Before I typically had games on the fastest setting.

Is it possible that the auto play feature is not giving true results? And the only way to get the results I want is to play it?

 

[tebriz]

Then another variable I should consider is possibly slowing down the game? Before I typically had games on the fastest setting.

Is it possible that the auto play feature is not giving true results? And the only way to get the results I want is to play it?

Oh, of course. You haven’t mentioned playing fast gamespeed. I was talking about default game speed.
Yes, of course default game speed is much better and recommended to play than fast.
What do you mean by Autoplay not giving true results?

 

[Maximus_Prince]

Oh, of course. You haven’t mentioned playing fast gamespeed. I was talking about default game speed.
Yes, of course default game speed is much better and recommended to play than fast.
What do you mean by Autoplay not giving true results?

Civ 4 makes its decisions for each faction based on a set of algorithms focusing mainly on the human player's decisions
I think by having the game essentially play for me that my Civ just becomes another AI and then what your seeing is less risk NPCs just mimic each other.
At least that's what I was hypothesizing.If true it would make sense why after repeated auto plays nothing really interesting seemed to be happening.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

It jumped off the screen at me that the English knight has a lion on its head, and this being a new change, surely that was intentional. I'm curious, was this something the Plantagenets (or perhaps a later dynasty) did? I do think the knight being emblematic of late medieval XV Century-ish plate armor clad cavalry makes the direct allusion to the Normans at this point seem somewhat anachronistic, however.

That particular guy is based off the Black Prince specifically:

He's a bit anachronistic, as he's XIV rather than XV century, but beside the great helm, his kit was very progressive for the time and could as well have been seen in the late Hundred Years War. The other two figures in the English knight unit are also based on specific people, both roughly contemporary to him, and neither has a cat on their head. I semi-deliberately made English knights somewhat outdated compared to French ones, basing them on early HYW rather than late.

but don't mistake its coolness for commercial viability because mods that take years to make cannot be compared to multimillion dollar commercial strategy games that need to sell units to be successful

Speaking of commercial viability, I went to check if they fixed Civ 7 yet...

From what I understand, its sales are abysmal for a Civ title ("for a Civ title" is a big qualifier, obviously, as the brand name ensures a baseline many indie titles can only dream of). The current player numbers trail behind not only VI (massively) but even V.

I agree with you that the direction I took RI is more niche, and probably appeals more to what's Paradox GSG crowd rather than the core Civilization demographic these days, which have their own viable market niches. EU4, which is out of its lifecycle from what I know, having had its last DLCs and patches, and released roughly between Civ 5 and 6, still has very respectable online player numbers - lower than Civ 6, but higher than Civ 5 (and thus Civ 7).

hi I'm trying the latest svn version, I was wondering if the cultural system had been modified, I remembered that you couldn't go beyond the maximum tiles allowed in the city, while as you can see in the photo even if you have a city with a population of 1, but you also have only 1 culture on a Tile, it becomes yours, is it a bug or a new mode. I hope I was clear, with my bad English

Nothing was changed. You weren't quite clear when explaining the situation, so I can offer no additional comment.

Spotted a small typo, probably some fonts size trouble on the Civlopedia page of the leader Mindaugas, near the bottom of his background description

Interestingly looks differently on my side, but as there's a bad symbol there anyway, I'll fix:

Civ 4 seems to kind of support unicode - it's pretty selective which symbols it accepts and which it doesn't.

Would it somehow be possible to have certain AI playesr have easier advantages and others harder?

If you save your game as a WorldBuilder save and edit that file manually, you can set individual difficulty levels for players, including AI players.

If you move all the assets to the BtS folder you can get around 1 minute for a 8MB save.
You lose the ability to easily switch mods, but for me is not an issue as I only play RI.

I wouldn't recommend that unless you want to be stuck with the same version forever (or until you wipe clean and reinstall BtS).

Then another variable I should consider is possibly slowing down the game? Before I typically had games on the fastest setting.

The fastest (x10) speed was never meant for actual playing TBH, it was more for people who wanted to have a quick glance at what the mod offered. The mod is balanced for its standard speed and the further you go from it, the weirder the stuff likely gets.

 

[balanceofpower]

That particular guy is based off the Black Prince specifically:
View attachment 736278View attachment 736279
He's a bit anachronistic, as he's XIV rather than XV century, but beside the great helm, his kit was very progressive for the time and could as well have been seen in the late Hundred Years War. The other two figures in the English knight unit are also based on specific people, both roughly contemporary to him, and neither has a cat on their head. I semi-deliberately made English knights somewhat outdated compared to French ones, basing them on early HYW rather than late.

Speaking of commercial viability, I went to check if they fixed Civ 7 yet...
View attachment 736282
From what I understand, its sales are abysmal for a Civ title ("for a Civ title" is a big qualifier, obviously, as the brand name ensures a baseline many indie titles can only dream of). The current player numbers trail behind not only VI (massively) but even V.

I agree with you that the direction I took RI is more niche, and probably appeals more to what's Paradox GSG crowd rather than the core Civilization demographic these days, which have their own viable market niches. EU4, which is out of its lifecycle from what I know, having had its last DLCs and patches, and released roughly between Civ 5 and 6, still has very respectable online player numbers - lower than Civ 6, but higher than Civ 5 (and thus Civ 7).

Nothing was changed. You weren't quite clear when explaining the situation, so I can offer no additional comment.

Interestingly looks differently on my side, but as there's a bad symbol there anyway, I'll fix:
View attachment 736283
Civ 4 seems to kind of support unicode - it's pretty selective which symbols it accepts and which it doesn't.

If you save your game as a WorldBuilder save and edit that file manually, you can set individual difficulty levels for players, including AI players.

I wouldn't recommend that unless you want to be stuck with the same version forever (or until you wipe clean and reinstall BtS).

The fastest (x10) speed was never meant for actual playing TBH, it was more for people who wanted to have a quick glance at what the mod offered. The mod is balanced for its standard speed and the further you go from it, the weirder the stuff likely gets.

First of all, Steam isn't the only platform Civ VII is played on; Steam is no longer the default metric by which games succeed. Civ VII is multi-platform and Steam is only one platform. Secondly steam reviews or concurrent steam players is not an accurate metric for assessing sales numbers. No one knows those numbers except Firaxis and 2K.The only thing that Steam reviews proves is that Valve is incompetent to keep people who have less than an hour of playtime from abusing the review system.

The funny thing all the whining and crying over "this isn't Civ" because of changes to the gameplay in Civ 7 -- gameplay changes that have become de rigueur since Civ 3 -- apply as much to Realism Invictus as it does to Civ VII.

The petulant strategy game community is never happy and is content to backseat game develop and theorycraft perfect games in their heads without ever having to write a single line of code. And they'll turn on you / the RI team if you dare to change anything that goes against their idea of what the game should be.

These strategy gamers are not your friends.

But if you think RI is so commercially viable I invite you to seek funding, get yourself a team and prove me wrong. Unity is free and a game dev college graduate should be able to whip up a 4x grid or hex-based game.

 

[AspiringScholar]

That particular guy is based off the Black Prince specifically:
View attachment 736278View attachment 736279
He's a bit anachronistic, as he's XIV rather than XV century, but beside the great helm, his kit was very progressive for the time and could as well have been seen in the late Hundred Years War. The other two figures in the English knight unit are also based on specific people, both roughly contemporary to him, and neither has a cat on their head. I semi-deliberately made English knights somewhat outdated compared to French ones, basing them on early HYW rather than late.

Beautiful, I love the reference.

"Witness our too much memorable shame, when Crécy Battle fatefully was struck; and all our princes, haunted, by the likes of that black name: Edward Black Prince of Wales. This is a stem, of that victorious stalk, and let us fear the native mightiness, and fate of him."

Speaking of commercial viability, I went to check if they fixed Civ 7 yet...
View attachment 736282
From what I understand, its sales are abysmal for a Civ title ("for a Civ title" is a big qualifier, obviously, as the brand name ensures a baseline many indie titles can only dream of). The current player numbers trail behind not only VI (massively) but even V.

This is truly bad, possibly bad enough that Civ VIII won't even happen, at least on Firaxis's dime. I halfway understand the impetus to reinvent a game whose essential premise of being well over 30 years old at this point is well-trodden, but it seems they took the undesirable things from competing titles of late and copied them, while sacrificing a lot of what was still enjoyable and fun on the basic model of the game. At the same time, I don't feel shortchanged at all from RI (which I think offers a sublime "Civ" experience) and with the graceful way that Civ IV as an engine and platform has aged, this is more of an amusement than a disappointment, for me at least. I get a sense that they don't know who to market to (the longstanding player base or new entrants who are probably teenagers accustomed to the unfortunate modern trend of pay to play endless development cycles, who never knew of a reality where expectations of quality were commercially mandatory out of the box), and if they opted towards flirting with newcomer, casual gamers who haven't played this series previously, its abysmal debut reputation itself forbids that being commercially successful, either.

 

[Ahnarras]

Frustrating evening for my Sultanate... If I may vent a little : I was going for a war with Carthage a few centuries ago.

Spoiler :

I took Elissa's first city, razed it, and build Buhen just south of it. Then I took Carthage. Then, to be prudent, I razed Atiq to create a buffer zone.
Big success, generals were happy, and I've had secured a source of Iron for the Middle-Age. *Kitty dance*

Now, fast fowards ~200 turns.
Despite my best efforts, I never managed to make a cultural difference. I've constructed every cultural building available, even the religious one, but the tiles % barely changes. I'm only "owning" the land because I razed the closest carthaginian city.
Now, you may have guess it, Elissa came while we were in peace and settled a new colony on the ruins of her old city. As the tiles are still "her's", each time the city's cultural limits grow, I'm loosing ground.

I closed my game when New-Atiq finally reached another cultural threeshold, taking my iron mine and voiding the training of every knight I was building. I'm a sad sultan.
Double-frustrating is that I was supposed to have another Iron Mine, in the Alps, but the exact same thing happened with Cesar : resettle a city, took back the tiles, nothing I could do except going back to war.

Well, venting over. Now, real question : is it normal for the cultural influence to move so slowly ? Shouldn't two hundreds turns with every cultural building up and running be enough to at least secure the closest tiles to the city ?
Is it mandatory to go Artist / Culture Slider to have any hopes ?

Or am I too peaceful ? Is the game not intended to do partial war, taking a few cities but letting your opponent survives ? Should I destroy them everytime to make their culture vanish for good ?
Seems barbaric to me, but wasting dozens of turn in a war just to see it voided without any chance to keep your lands isn't a great feeling either.

Note that I will probably take back the area forcefully : I've got 12 cities, she has 2, I have bombard and arquebusers, she's still building levy. It won't be hard, it's just a slog at that point.

 

[Maximus_Prince]

So I figured out my problem. I turned off Aggressive AI which was making all players focus too much on military build up and equally aggressive expansion.

Then the time to legendary and had the computer run it for about 200 turns. And sure I got the results I wanted NPCs were fighting against each other and willing to war much earlier.