[Religion and Revolution]: Mod Development

[raystuttgart]

Llamas and used ships. Great ideas

So ok, I will put them on our list.

Golden years, I'm still on the fence about this one. I guess it would depend what the events are and what the corresponding technological/inventive leaps would be. I would not like to see anything that would be an historical anachronism like railways, ironclads, telegraphs etc., etc., as I think it might spoil the timeline and theme of the game. But I think the concept is certainly worthy of further discussion.

I think there is a misunderstanding.

Chances for triggering Golden Years are influenced by Inventionpoints (and Satisfaciton and Culture).
It will not itself influene Inventions.

It will improve

• Population Growth
• Immigration
• Production bonusses

 

[raystuttgart]

Thank you! I don't believe you've already done it... Actually I was simply thinking of using my version of the correction! But you've done even better.

It took only 15min of coding.

I simply removed a condition in DLL "if isPeak() return False" in "bHills" case...

That would have caused problems with other bonus-ressources that should be available on hills but not on peaks.

 

[raystuttgart]

I have put Golden Years into the list "Archive / Undecided" because it seems that there is still some clarification needed.

 

[Robert Surcouf]

Market for Used Ships in Europe

I'm confused. There's something I don't understand.
The idea is very interesting as usual. But, we agreed to have old units still buyable for a while... So are we really going to have many old and unbuyable ships?

Except for this point, which is more a question by the way, I like your idea!

 

[raystuttgart]

Market for Used Ships in Europe

I'm confused. There's something I don't understand.
The idea is very interesting as usual. But, we agreed to have old units still buyable for a while... So are we really going to have many old and unbuyable ships?

Except for this point, which is more a question by the way, I like your idea!

Actually the "old ships" will still be buyable throughout the whole game.
Inventions would simply unlock new types.

So there will be no unbuyable ships because newer ones have been unlocked.

But Market for Used Ships in Europe itself is actually pretty independent of that.
(Of coures there would be no used ships of a certain type before the ship is unlocked by inventions.)

It is simply:

Some ships are better and more expensive.
Some ships are worse and cheaper.

Through balancing (XML) you will find mostly worse and cheaper ships in the Market for Used Ships in Europe and only a few of the better and more expensive ones.

Since the new unlocked types would always be a little better and a little more expensive,
you will automatically find more "outdated" ships in that Market for Used Ships in Europe.

 

[Robert Surcouf]

Oh yes ! I understand now...

We will probably have to discuss the negative effects then?
1) What are the negative promotions we're going to use?
2) Can we remove them (in Col 94 artillery could be damaged but never repaired! ) ?

 

[raystuttgart]

We will probably have to discuss the negative effects then?
1) What are the negative promotions we're going to use?
2) Can we remove them (in Col 94 artillery could be damaged but never repaired! ) ?

It was just an idea.
Negative Promotions could be created technically quite easily.
(Of course they could only be assigned by the logic of this feature.)

1. There are many possibilities. (Less Health, less Speed, less Strength, less Cargo Slots, ...)

2. They would be assigned randomly.
(The lower the price the higher the chances to have one of these negative promotions.)

3. No, they could never be removed / repaired.
(It is simply a very old ship that has its flaws.)

See it as a game.
You might have luck (getting a decent ship for relatively good price) or bad luck (buying a wrecked old nutshell) when buying one of these used ships.
No risk, no fun.

But again, this is just an idea.

 

[Robert Surcouf]

Well, I may just be an idea... but I like it

 

[raystuttgart]

Hi guys,

I have seen this (Civ4) mod-component about Diplomacy.

I would like to extract some things (and adapt) for Religion and Revolution.

1. Right of Passage

Weaker than "Open Borders", and will allow only non-military units to pass through area of player.
Must be traded before "Open Borders" can be traded.

2. Contact (as Trade Item)

Will allow to trade contacts to other Nations to players that have not yet made contact to these themselves.

3. Trading Criminals and Slaves

Would allow to trade (buy and sell) Criminals and Slaves with other players.

--------------

Feedback ?

 

[KJ Jansson]

Hi guys,

I have seen this (Civ4) mod-component about Diplomacy.

I would like to extract some things (and adapt) for Religion and Revolution.

1. Right of Passage

Weaker than "Open Borders", and will allow only non-military units to pass through area of player.
Must be traded before "Open Borders" can be traded.

2. Contact (as Trade Item)

Will allow to trade contacts to other Nations to players that have not yet made contact to these themselves.

3. Trading Criminals and Slaves

Would allow to trade (buy and sell) Criminals and Slaves with other players.

--------------

Feedback ?

Very interesting!

Especially, 2.
It means that the player can trade items with other European colonies. A very usefull feature especially when the player has a very high tax rate with his King.
P.S. The "native" King should be angry if some trading happens compering to other Kings.

 

[raystuttgart]

Sorry, I am not sure, what you want to say with this.

There might be some misunderstanding ...
I believe that eventually "trade Contacts" was misread as "Trade Contract" (with "r").

 

[KJ Jansson]

Ops, sorry! Misreading. You are really talking about trade contacts.

 

[raystuttgart]

Ops, sorry! Misreading. You are really talking about trade contacts.

Trade Contracts (exchanging goods) as you were thinking about have been discussed, too.

To summarize:

1. It is definitely a very interesting idea !

2. There are 2 "major" problems however:

A) It would be very difficult ot handle for AI.
(Goods and Production in CivCol are much more complex than in Civ4.)

B) Goods would need to be beamed.
(Which would be strange / unfitting because they are usually transported in CivCol.)

My opinion:

If anybody would ever come up with a reasonable technical concept, then I would be happy to implement it.

But I will not ruin AI or atmosphere for a feature like this and I will not spend weeks of effort for finding a solution.
(Our list of features is too long to spend my time like that.)

Sorry.

Edit:

Kailric had said, that he was interested in implementing "Trade Contracts" for CivCol.
Maybe he will come up with a good concept and a good implementation.
(If he does, we can take a look and eventually integrate in our mod.)

 

[Robert Surcouf]

Hi guys,

I have seen this (Civ4) mod-component about Diplomacy.

I would like to extract some things (and adapt) for Religion and Revolution.

1. Right of Passage

Weaker than "Open Borders", and will allow only non-military units to pass through area of player.
Must be traded before "Open Borders" can be traded.

2. Contact (as Trade Item)

Will allow to trade contacts to other Nations to players that have not yet made contact to these themselves.

3. Trading Criminals and Slaves

Would allow to trade (buy and sell) Criminals and Slaves with other players.

--------------

Feedback ?

I don't know what to say,
Please choose your favorite answer:
A) You're damn good Ray.
B) You must stop immediately! Stop READING MY MIND !

So it's a yes!
About point 3, we would have to discuss details though...

 

[raystuttgart]

So it's a yes!

Ok, let us see, what the others think.

About point 3, we would have to discuss details though...

What details are you thinking of at point 3 ?

Oh, yes of course:

1. Only Europeans would buy (or sell) Criminals and Slaves.

2. We will need to do balancing of course (prices and trade value for AI).
But that will be XML-attributes pretty independent of the basic implementation.

 

[Gomer_Pyle]

I have been thinking. Diplomacy has been rather limited in Colonization. Would it be possible to add diplomatic actions like.

"Smoke the war pipe with the Natives = They will start raiding settlements and pillage road/improvements from your enemy".

"Smoke the peace pipe with the Natives = You signed a non aggresion pact."

 

[raystuttgart]

@team:

I am currently uploading a Preview to our SVN.
(...\transfer\Preview\)

DLL Sources are included if you want to take a look.

Again:
It is only my "experimental" version, which I use to create features for later integration, once we have TAC 2.02c.
(This is not how Religion and Revolution will look like.)

@Robert:
Eventually you will want to take a look at "Bonus Ressources on Peaks".

// R&R, ray, Bonus on Peaks - START

@KJ:
I think for you specifically "Geographically Correct Placement ..." might be interesting.
(It is not exactly the feature as it will be in TAC - in the Preview it is always on, no game option.)

// R&R, ray, Correct Geographical Placement of Natives - START

@all:
All leaderheads that I liked are in that Preview.
(To take a look at them simply change commenting in CIV4ArtDefines_Leaderhead.xml)


Native Raids

// R&R, ray, Natives raiding party - START

some explanations about that feature:

1. It is about 90% still the code of Dale.
(I am really full of respect of the great work he did. )

10% are different because of adaption (to another DLL) and 2 minor bugfixes I did.

2. I did not put a DLL-Diplo-Dialog into the feature.

Actually the feature was already done last weekend.
This week I had tried in vain to find a good solution for a DLL-Diplo-Dialog and finally gave up and removed the code I had written for that.
I was simply never satisfied with any "DLL-Diplo-Dialog"-Solution I came up with ...

I will try to explain why:

Spoiler :

Any solution I had considered would either:

A) Allow the player to buy out of raids to cheaply.
(And thus making the feature itself worthless ...)

B) Give the human player an advantage over AI (because he could choose more wisely).
For example when to pay retribution and when to prepare himself for raids.

C) Feel "unauthentic": Some young hotblooded Natives wouldn't be warning a settlement that they were going to raid it and then start bargaining about it.

D) Simply not fit into context: "Native Raid" is something very "local" between a few angry / hotblooded young Natives and a certain settlement.
DLL-Diplo-Events however are between Nations (responsivly between their leaders)

E) Start annoying or confusing the player: Native Raids are very much based on Units.
So you could for example apeace one Native and in the same round you would get another Diplo-Dialoge for another Native.
(Especially on large maps with many Native Units, this could really be very very annoying.)

3. I am really sorry, but I did not find time to do thorough testing.
The feature is really big (considering amount of code changes) and it really needs to be thoroughly tested, once we really integrate it.
(I will of course fix any bug found. )

Summary:

The feature is pretty much still the "Native Raids" from Dale.
Let us try how this feels in game.

I believe that it is very very close to the "Native Raids" from Original Colonization.

Native Raids do not appear out of nothing.

There are 2 important settings (at Leaderheads)

Spoiler :

<NativeRaidAttitudeThreshold>ATTITUDE_CAUTIOUS</NativeRaidAttitudeThreshold>

-> Meaning that any player whose relationship to this leaderhead whose relationship drops below this Attitude-Level might become target of Native Raids from Natives of this (Native) leaderhead.
(Otherwise the player is save.)

<ContactRand>
<ContactType>CONTACT_NATIVE_RAID</ContactType>
<iContactRand>15</iContactRand>
</ContactRand>

-> Meaning that the chances for a "free" Native Unit for going onto a Raid (being assigned the corresponding UnitAI) are 1/15.
(Otherwise it will pick different UnitAI like Scouting/Patroling, bringing Gift, ...)
A "free" Native Unit is one, that is not already assigned to another task (like defending the village or working, or ...)

Native Raids can be considered as a warning, that the player should do something to improve relations because he is pretty close to the borderline of a war breaking out.

What Native Raids can do:

1. Weapons / Horses stolen
2. Other goods stolen
3. Gold stolen from treasury
4. Destroy Building
5. Production (that is currently worked on) destroyed
6. Scalps taken
7. Ship in Harbor damaged

 

[raystuttgart]

Diplomacy has been rather limited in Colonization.

True.

"Smoke the war pipe with the Natives = They will start raiding settlements and pillage road/improvements from your enemy".

"Smoke the peace pipe with the Natives = You signed a non aggresion pact.

Basically "Raids", "War" and "Peace" are controlled by Attitude.
(Attitude is not the only factor of course.)

A) Negatively influencing the Attitude of Natives towards other European players

-> We could do some brainstorming about a concept for that.
(In Original Colonization Missionaries could do something like that by speaking to the Chief of a village. )

A concept that also applies for AI is very difficult to find and implement.
I do not like to have too many features, that only human players use.

B) Positively influencing the Attitude of Natives towards self.

-> I think there are enough possibilities to do that already.

 

[Gomer_Pyle]

-> We could do some brainstorming about a concept for that.
(In Original Colonization Missionaries could do something like that by speaking to the Chief of a village. )

A concept that also applies for AI is very difficult to find and implement.
I do not like to have too many features, that only human players use.

I totally agree with not liking human only features. Where would the problems arise when implementing a feature like this? What would the difficulty be?

 

[raystuttgart]

Where would the problems arise when implementing a feature like this ?

1. Balancing: Every feature needs something like a "price", a "counter effect" or a "limitation".

Example:
Just imagine something like "Smoking pipe of war" was possible unlimited times in a row and
thus being able to negatively influence attitude of a Native leaderhead to one of your enemies without boundaries or any risk.

2. AI needs to be taught everything.
(Programming good AI is by far the most difficult thing in modding CivCol.)

How should AI use a feature like that ?

I am talking about specific rules.
(That can be implemented with reasonable effort.)

Generally there are 2 different types of features when talking about AI:

A) Player simply needs to react on something that happens -> relatively easy to implement AI
B) Player needs to decide and trigger an action himself --> often quite hard to implement AI

What we are talking about here is B).

-------------

I need a basic concept that considers "Balancing" and "AI".
(I am not saying it is impossible to do.)

Give me some time to figure out something.
Eventually rebuilding something similar to the "Missionaries get Natives to Raid other Europeans"-thing from Original CivCol.