RFC Classical World

Thanks for the suggestions Crossphazer. Will try Antigonids, they seem challeging.

@ srpt: iirc i actually had 11 luxuries.
From my cities i had 6 luxuries: pearls from sardinia, wine from sicily, gold and silver from iberia, dyes from massilia, rhodes and syria, incense from syria. I got from my vassal Gaul honey and furs. After I got Open Borders with Judea, Ptolomy and Saba i got from trade cinnamon from phandyan (spelling?), silk from Han and Pepper from an Indian civ I forgot it's name, Satavahana perhaps, but i'm not sure.
 
It was more bad play of the AI honestly. Gaul declared war on me and attacked Massilia, which fell quickly. With some 5 numidians with combatI and shock promotionI, I reconquered massilia and went northwards to the heartland of Gaul. Only when I was at Lutetia I discovered that they had 2 luxuries nearby, so I decided to continue the war until they accepted capitulation. I gave back the gallic cities I had conquered previously, and then imported honey first, and when lutetia borders expanded, furs. In the end, I was pretty lucky that the Gauls attacked me.

The war was fairly simple, because Gaul don't produce heavy spearmen. Spearmen only have 25% bonus against cav, so with shock numidians with +50% against spearmen and gallic warrior the war would always be easy. Spearmen could, perhaps, have +50% bonus against cav instead of 25%.

Just noticed in the civilopedia that there are Slingers, but I cannot recruit them in my new Antigonids campaign. The starting situation is pretty challeging.
 
I'm getting very good results from the autoplay right up to the Kushan spawn so I've gone ahead and got the 80BC and 220AD starts together. I think everything is working at least for the setup of the 2 new maps. The 3 kingdoms feature is working, allowing you to play the 3 kingdoms war as any of 3 civs and go for the same UHVs.

I'm not going to worry about about autoplay results beyond 400 years or so. its not intended that you would play a civ later than the Dacians or maybe the next couple from the 320BC start. I'm not going to block such things because I know people sometimes like to try weirder scenarios.

edit:

things look good up to the Byzantine spawn now. settler maps are done up to them and the Romans are surviving at least from the 220AD start to the Byzantines.

more needs to be done to make China more coherent. its been a bit messy
 
What I notice a lot when watching the AI perform during replays is that Alexandria (in Egypt), and, to a lesser degree, Diospolis, are cities constantly being taken by barbs, whether the ruler be Ptolemid, Seleucid, Roman or otherwise. It's a real drain on the stability on whichever empire controls Egypt, and seems to be ~90% of the reason for Roman rebellions when Rome controls Egypt.

Edit:
Playing a very nice 220 AD Sassanid game. However, probably due to Roman Rebellion existing in 330 AD, the Byzantines never spawned. Maybe stop all Roman Rebellions at 320 AD?
 
yes good point about egypt. I will lower the barb pressure there.

btw barb spawns are now slightly tougher any time the human player controls the nearby relevant province

there is code to stop the Roman Rebels when the Byzantine spawn gets close. I'll look at it again.

actually now that I think of it there was a bunch of highly conditional bits of code for the Byzantines to make for lots of different outcomes

I feel like we have just now got back to the point we were at when I decided to make the bigger map. that was 2 months ago. I think we can now say that the idea worked. the old map had its charm, but this one seems more real. thanks everyone for having the patience to see it through. I think it was worth it.

Stability as well seems to be working overall. I'd still like to improve it though. ideally I'd like to try to find ways of penalizing the AI with revolts or something that allows them to recover rather than starting them on a slippery slope to inevitable collapse. all ideas welcome.

feature-wise, this thing must be just about complete now. we have expanded slavery, hiring and bribing barbarians and pirates, pilgrims and religious resources, stealing silkworms and secret diplomacy.

also, this thread is getting close to 2,000 posts. thanks everyone for all the interest and support!

and you won't believe it but yesterday I loaded a Kushan start and the Satavahanas had been destroyed!?!
 
@srpt I also loaded a Kushan game where Sungas and Kalingans ate up the Satavahanas ;)
Maybe the extra city you gave the Mauryans really made a difference...

Also yep, things are more or less back to where they were before the switch. Glad we have the new map. More breathing room and room for some important cities like Tarsus and such.

Btw if you're done with the 220 AD map, I'd like to go through it and fix some names (Pelusion (which is Pelousion, and already in the dictionary) -> Pelusium).
 
yes go ahead with the city names.

I will probably post a new non-svn regular download today but with the civs after Byzantium temporarily turned off, just until the late game balance is happening.

I will remove the javelinmen from the egypt barbs. their fast movement and +50% vs spearmen make them very dangerous to ai cities.

there's a quite rare "unidentifiable C++ exception" that occurs during stability checks but I've only ever seen it in autoplay so I haven't been able to isolate it. if you get it during normal play please post a save.
 
those city names are in

another one of those weird little changes I get obsessed with: it took forever to get it to work but now cottages cannot be built on adjacent tiles.

I'd also like to make them grow faster with fresh water
 
I'm guessing the trick to fresh water would be checking for irrigation like farms, perhaps. I'd advise slowing down growth speed in general when you make that change, because cottages already grow pretty fast. So "irrigated cottages" would grow at current speed, and non-irrigated ones would grow slower.

As for ideas on stability:
Most of the time, the civ is too small to suffer from instability, or, if it is a large empire, it is generally doomed to failure, and the current "slow decline" system works very well for the Successors, dying Chinese and Indian dynasties, etc. The two main exceptions are the Sassanids, who have a very generous stability area which has the added bonus of being landlocked, and thus generally don't have stability issues, and the Romans, who, due to the naval AI and the exceptional circumstances of Rome's rise, are helped by copious amounts of cheating. So for the moment I can't really think of anything I'd add on to it.

If I see an oddity or a lack of stability features as I'm playing, I'll comment on it though.

Now I shall go see if Alexandria on the Oxus is correctly placed on the city name map (I think it might be a tile off). Nope it's in the right place. Settler map for it is too. All is well!

Python exception in the city name map...looks like a non-ASCII character made it in there. I'll go find it.

Found it! It's in "Arbela" : "Arbairā", . The last "a" is non-ASCII. I love regex in times like these.
 
The mercenary slinger seems a nice addition!
Still haven't seen any slinger in the mercenary recruitment. Do I need to own a certain province, say, Balearic Islands or Rhodos ?
Also I can still recruit Archer as mercenaries, is it intended?
 
Yes, archer mercs are very much intended, according to what srpt previous said. The Cretan archers, etc.

@srpt iHorseman_Arab does not exist or is not recognized, line 143 in barbs if I remember correctly.

edit: Sassanid AI needs many more troops, no matter the start. In 220 AD start, Rome conquers Seleucia before I spawn! (Also, I don't inherit Roman cities in Mesopotamia.)
 
And would cretan archers be unique on it's own, like having different base strenght and/or modifiers? Or just having the same attributes, only changing it's name ?

sorry for so many questions :)
 
I don't think they do...but I'm sure srpt has the answer.

@srpt: Here's a comment on stability: civs should NOT abandon everything but their core at the first sign of instability. For example, in my Byzantine game, Rome suddenly collapsed to core when they lost one city. They should lose one city at a time to instability, have turns of anarchy, etc. instead of just semi-complete collapse.

Also, becoming a Saint is ridiculously easy. It took me 20 years of game time from spawn. (Byzantine)

Edit: 220 AD map: Sundapura is in the ocean below Arachosia.
 
the mercs are already quite differentiated by promotions. I'd like to customize the whole thing more but every time I've tried to make an adjustment the mercs disappeared altogether and I couldn't really afford the time to dig through it so I just reverted.

the provinces for Slingers are: Numidia, Mauretania, Baetica, Iberia, Africa, Sicily, Sardinia and Mallorca. yes you can hire archers when you don't have archery and horse archers when you don't have horse archery. again I will eventually get around to customizing it a bit more.

I think I fixed Sundapura. its supposed to appear on Java in 150AD. it was supposed to be an additional target for the Satavahanas' missionaries, which is why it spawns at the earliest believable date possible.

here's a crazy idea: spawn tribal villages in SE Asia and allow the Indian missionaries to spread their religion to them. the plot would then acquire the religious resource. as soon as that village had a city founded on it or came within someone's cultural borders, the city gets the religion and the resource disappears...

I could see similar ways to simulate the transit of Buddhism and Islam to the steppe people.

but I promise to stop getting sidetracked by new features. I want the AI balance and the UHVs done.

about stability: yes gradual collapse. Rome is so damn hard to model. it was gradually ripped to a threadbare, bleeding wreck and the still many of the barbarians, from Theodoric to Stilicho, Odoacer etc for the most part just wanted to acknowledge the emperor, at least in name, and achieve the legitimacy of an imperial viceroy.

thinking of it that way, it seems like some kind of title/special power sort of thing would work best. I was never crazy about the idea of a Roman Emperor title because I was thinking of titles being something contested among a bunch of civs and this would be basically just Rome. I'll think about it.

the Romans took Ctesiphon in 3 turns? wow. I can put more indy defenders there and in Edessa and Damascus. you should flip their cities though, I'll look into that.

Horseman_Arab has been dealt with

slowing cottage growth is a good idea

I balanced piety for the Mauryans UHV so its ok for the early game but I will have to look at it again for the later ones.
 
Oh, sorry, I meant Byzantines. The Romans conquered Seleucia before I spawned as Byzantium. Sassanids DO flip Mesopotamia, but as the Byzantines, I do not flip Roman Mesopotamian cities. The point still holds: Sassanids are underpowered.

Roman Emperor can be a title contested by the barbarian civs when you make them playable ;)
 
I'm guessing you fixed the Arbela typo that was causing an error?

I just had an idea relating to huge stacks of advanced units civs tend to create: instead of being purely technological, more advanced units (swordsmen, heavy infantry, lancers, heavy spearmen) should probably require more hammers, and maybe have a greater upkeep cost. This could help create the conditions of the decline and fall of Rome and other empires, at least militarily. Currently the game essentially doesn't have a "dark age".

Also, the food bonuses given by later techs and civics become hugely overpowered, up to +3 or 4 food per farm improvement. This is one of the reasons late game civs (most of which should be on the decline), because huge unit and tech powerhouses.

Also, look at the Roman spearman: its lack of armor might make a good Western/Greek spearmen (essentially a levy, as you intend).
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=335967

Not that I have a problem with the current spearmen, but I thought I'd share what I found on the forums.
Currently looking for a good heavy spearman for the Byzantines. The "tagmata" unit art as the heavy spearman is somewhat anachronistic.

Byzantine horseman uses the "barbarian/arabic" horseman art instead of the Greeco-Roman art.
 
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