[Religion and Revolution]: Mod Development

[raystuttgart]

New revision available in SVN.

Small Changes:

1. Buffalo now gives +4 Fur
2. Cod now gives +4 Food
3. Planting Forests will now remove Improvements
4. Pioneer now also has 1 Strength

New Feature:

It is now possible to define Land Plot Yield Changes in XML for Buildings.
(This might one day become very handy for modmods or Total Conversions build on RaR.)

e.g. Windmills and Watermills will now increase Food production of all land plots
(They used to only give additional food to the city.)

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It is absolutely necessary to start a new game when switching to this revision.
Cleaning caches might also not be a bad idea.

 

[raystuttgart]

I have been asked what my personal "most wanted" features were, which I would still have liked to see in Religion and Revolution.

So I will give some feedback about the major features that were still on our list but had not been implemented.

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The features I would really still have liked to see:

• More Python Events and Achievements
• Africa Screen (Like Europe Screen)
• Improvements to War of Independence

These features could have created even more atmosphere, without seriously risking to damage the balancing of the rest of the mod.
Also, they could have been created with reasonable amount of code and risk of bugs.

On the other hand, they are not that important to me, that I would say "I must have them because otherwise I can't enjoy playing the mod.".

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

These would have added even more micromanagement:
(About which some people are already now complaining.)

• Religions: Protestants and Catholics
• Health
• Satisfaction

I had even started to create (first) protoypes for those but realized, that most people would not like them.
I was not even sure, if they would make the mod more interesting or if they would be annoying for myself.

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These would have heavily impacted balancing:
(Maybe for the better, maybe for the worse. )

• Native Knowledge and Inventions
• Changing Cannons from Units to Professions
• Swords, Guns, Cannons and Ammunition
• Loyalty to the King

With these features I was simply too "afraid" to invest massive amount of time and energy but in the end have achieved nothing but make the mod unplayable.
(Balancing, AI, CTDs, gameplay ...)

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I am really looking forward to see, what community will do with our mod and which ideas other modders will have.

 

[Willi_Tell]

• Native Knowledge and Inventions
• Changing Cannons from Units to Professions
• Swords, Guns, Cannons and Ammunition
• Loyalty to the King

Holy Makerel!
I may be a dreamer, but I would really love to see these features in a Civ4Col mod...

 

[raystuttgart]

I may be a dreamer, but I would really love to see these features in a Civ4Col mod...

I would love to see these features in a Civ4Col mod if they are well implemented.
(Gameplay, Stability, Performance, Balancing, AI)

But as I said, I am looking forward to see, what other modders will create.
Maybe somebody will pick up these ideas.

 

[orlanth]

I have been asked what my personal "most wanted" features were, which I would still have liked to see in Religion and Revolution.

So I will give some feedback about the major features that were still on our list but had not been implemented.

Holy Makerel!
I may be a dreamer, but I would really love to see these features in a Civ4Col mod...

How about Holy Cod, I hear those give +4 Crosses as well as +4 Food
Yes, those are certainly great planned features .. but I imagine several of those would be difficult to implement/debug except for those with much familiarity with coding C++ and Civ4Col DLL, and if I'm not wrong Ray was the last C++ programmer active on this project (and certainly has by far the most familiarity about the many interacting features of the TAC and RaR DLL), so I don't know whether anyone else remaining active has the skill to implement those.

Of the listed features, I think the ones having the greatest chance to be straightforward to implement are:

New XML tags for Events / Eventtriggers - adding a few XML tags with functions such as checking King attitude or checking yield stored in a city could enable modding more Events without bugs and performance drag from python code.

Enabling a "Europe screen" for other trading ports such as Africa and/or Port Royale - may be possible by merging some existing code from KJ Jannson's modcomp in which this was already implemented.

Nightingale or Androrc or anyone else still around, do you think you might be willing & able to mod features like these?

 

[Nightinggale]

How about Holy Cod, I hear those give +4 Crosses as well as +4 Food

It would be much better to supply priests with holy hand grenades, which can bombard and potentially kill a unit. They would only carry one though and they would have to return to a church to "refuel"

Nightingale or Androrc or anyone else still around, do you think you might be willing & able to mod features like these?

To be honest I haven't thought of coding anything like that. On the other hand I have no set major goal as such and will not rule out anything.

 

[raystuttgart]

@Team:

New revision available in SVN.

A bug had been reported and is fixed now.
(Gameoption "No Wild Animals Sea" did not work.)

 

[raystuttgart]

Release 1.5 of Religion and Revolution is available for download.

Changes:
Polished version of Release 1.4.
Several small bugfixes, balancing improvements and other small corrections.

All further information and downloadlink here:
[Religion and Revolution]: Welcome ! (Read first please.)

 

[Wombats of War]

Woot, new version! I'll try this out when I get home. Thanks, Ray.

 

[Beetlebug]

Played almost all day Sunday. Can't tell that much difference from 1.4, but the extra city radius really changes the way you play. Lovin' it so far

 

[Nightinggale]

Can't tell that much difference from 1.4

Maybe you should read the release text and you would know you aren't supposed to notice much difference from 1.4.

Release 1.5:
A polished version of Release 1.4.
Several small bugifxes, some balancing corrections and a few other improvements.

If you want to know in greater detail, read this thread starting on page 98.
If I recall correctly the only completely new feature is the teacher list. The rest are minor tweaks to existing features and bugfixes.

 

[Nightinggale]

As previously announced I decided to make a modmod. I have done so now and it is available at http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=498014
Any talk about the modmod should take place in that thread and not here.

 

[Stacmon]

I was very pleased to read that there was interest in making the various Cannon units professions, rather than simply units on their own.

One of my favourite concepts within Civ4Col was that every soldier that you wanted to have meant that you needed to reduce your economic/political/religious capacity. This made it necessary to make some tough choices.

At the same time however, it also meant that if you had the arms available, you could "draft" or simply equip farmers, fishermen and elder statesmen to defend your colony without worrying if you had "prebuilt" the right defenders before an attack from an enemy.

I hope that someone seriously considers implementing this feature so that colonies with high levels of industrial capacity can't just crank out cannons for attack and defense and have to rely again on building a high enough settler population (or making necessary trade-offs on their ability to accumulate various point types and their economic potential).

Anyone else see this the same way?

Also, "loyalty to the king" is an interesting concept. Perhaps one day there will be a victory option that allows a colony to preserve their relationship with the Monarch and remain loyal to the mother country (for example, taking the path of Canadian Confederation, rather than the US Declaration of Independence), but that would need to come with some kind of strings or challenge (e.g., building a strong enough economy to be able to convince the Monarch of the value in greater autonomy).

Another alternative might be for a colonial leader to be faced with a choice at the time of rebellion. Either join the secessionist forces (which would be the majority of the colonies) or join the local loyalists, which would have far fewer cities and colonists but be allied with the King. They could take back land for their majesty and ultimately reassert the King's authority.

I really haven't reflected much on the details, regardless of the specific mechanic, it would be great to have some way to preserve one's loyalty to the Crown!

 

[raystuttgart]

@team and RaR-mod-modders:

There is a new revision available in SVN.

1) Bugfix for "Player initalization order breaking bonusses of some Traits for Human Player" (actually a Vanilla bug / oversight)
2) Added some missing sounds

 

[AbsintheRed]

@team and RaR-mod-modders:

There is a new revision available in SVN.

1) Bugfix for "Player initalization order breaking bonusses of some Traits for Human Player" (actually a Vanilla bug / oversight)
2) Added some missing sounds

Sounds great!
Do you (or anyone else) plan to add the new war paints for SabiotLieh's native LH?

 

[raystuttgart]

Do you (or anyone else) plan to add the new war paints for SabiotLieh's native LH?

I have seen it and it really looks great.

But I don't plan anything at the moment.
(I also don't know the detailled plans of other team members and mod-modders although I am still regularly in touch with most of them.)

I was simply taking a look at some of my unfinished prototypes and "accidently" had the solution for the bug in mind.

Thus I implemented it and added some of the sounds I had noticed missing a few weeks ago.
(All together it was 10min of work.)

Then I thought "Well, it is kind of stupid if I don't share these fixes." so I uploaded them to SVN so the team members and mod-modders that have access to my SVN might use it.

That is all.

 

[raystuttgart]

@team and RaR-mod-modders:

There is again a new revision available in SVN.

1) Tiny bugfix (Bug: Plastered Roads replacing Rail Roads when building Town Hall)
2) Code Improvements (Removed unnecessary GlobalDefines, Centralizing Checks, ...)
3) Advisor Screen from Nightinggale
4) Removed Feature "New Rules for Missionaries" (Its was deactivated by default anyways and I realized it is pretty useless. Reason: Save a bit of performance.)

It is probably best to start a new game when you switch to this revision.
(Please also clean caches just to be sure.)

 

[raystuttgart]

@team and RaR-mod-modders:

New revision available again.

1. Speed Boost
(Credits mostly to Nightinggale. I merged parts of RaR Extended and added a few improvements of my own.)

2. Fixed some minor bugs I had noticed and been reported over the last weeks.
(Really minor stuff)

Otherwise no changes.
(So no new features or changes to features.)

Edit:

Tested 3 times 200 rounds in Autoplay with Mapsize "Huge".
(No bugs. The 200 rounds Autoplay took about 1 min on my machine.)

I can't give exact numbers, but it feels faster.
But I can't tell for sure.

The things I did, do improve performance only marginally.
(Basic code improvements to have logic a bit more efficient.)

Several things Nightinggale had done, I can tell by looking at the code, that they increase speed since we did that already before.
(Caching of Globals)

With others it is really hard to predict by simply looking at the code.
(Inlined functions, the "Just-In-Time" arrays, ...)
Here I simply trust Nightinggales tests and examinations.


As I said, most of the Credits for the Speed Boost goes to Nighinggale.

 

[Beetlebug]

Do I detect a Release 1.6 to be coming soon

 

[raystuttgart]

Do I detect a Release 1.6 to be coming soon

All I did was:

A) Eliminated minor issues and bugs I had been reported or found myself
B) General Code Improvements
C) Merged Advisor Screen from Nightinggale
D) Merged Speed and Performance Improvements from Nightinggale

I am not done yet however.
I still want to do:

E) A few more minor Code Improvements
F) Check with other team members and mod-modders, if they have further interesting materials to merge
G) Proper testing

Summary:

This is more or less simply a clean-up, to create a better version for all mod-modders.
But yes, it will most likely be published as Release 1.6.
(Just don't expect any new major features.)