RFC Europe map development thread

[micbic]

I hope the extra LH list will make it to Alpha 10.

 

[BurnEmDown]

Perhaps these cottages/villages/towns that are on key city locations should be weakened to cottages instead of the better village or town, so people would prefer a better city location over a 1-commerce improvement.
(Or, but I don't know if it's possible to code, if someone settles on a tile with a town on it then the new city will get a population bonus?)

 

[Wessel V1]

That's a quite cool idea, maybe +1 population for every development level?

 

[st.lucifer]

Hey St. Lucifer,

Thanks for the new map update. It's easy to enable city founding on dense forest. I will do so.

What about a general project of reducing resources? I've been playing Poland for instance, and with the number of resources directly available there's basically no limit to city growth. This is true for a lot of civs, and is unrealistic. Now we can increase health/happy penalties, but it seems like removing some resources is the natural way to go. I think we've had this discussion broadly before.

For instance, here's Poland as it currently stands.

I wanted to limit the number of resources available right off the bat. I removed the pigs, two honeys, and a cow that were easily settled. I replaced a barely with another wheat. The net result is a decrease of 3 (6 once you factor in early building multipliers) and 1 . Wheat is not typically a good trade good (most people have it), so increasing wheat doesn't just automatically allow you to trade for another resource.

There are also some of these pre-built towns/villages that I have a problem with. I know you had nothing to do with adding them originally, but... The one on London's square, for instance, strongly discourages you from settling on the proper London spot since then you can't work the town.

I could take a stab at either of these projects if you're busy, but I don't want to step on your toes as main map-guy.

Argh, my post got eaten. Second attempt:

I actually have some spare time this week, so I'll be happy to work on it - but I won't feel stepped on if you'd like to do it.

First, the town/village issue:
I like the idea of having pre-existing villages around the map, but there are two major problems with the execution.
-The issue of discouraging intended city placement is a big one, albeit easily fixed. We should certainly get rid of the town under London, and others in similar positions.
-The bigger issue, for me, is one of game balance - in that a smart human player who's familiar with the mod and the map can finance a 100% tech rate for hundreds of years simply by building two skirmishers and sending them out to pillage towns. Playing as Burgundy, France, or the Byzantine empire, I've frequently been able to sustain this rate until ~900-1000 AD simply by sending one skirmisher to Iberia and Italy and another through Germany, Austria, the Balkans, and Anatolia. If you don't plan on settling the regions with established villages, they're like small piles of cash sitting around the map waiting to be picked up. A lucky turn of pillaging can net a single skirmisher ~100 gold.

Second, the resource issue:
I did some preliminary work on this by eliminating barley from the western half of the map (with the exception of the UK), but it can and should probably be taken further. I wonder if the best way to handle this might be establishing areas where each resource should be concentrated: i.e. pigs should be in Iberia and eastern Europe; cows should be in northern and western Europe; sheep in the Mediterranean and UK, deer in densely forested areas, etc.

I think the problem has less to do with the proliferation of resources than with the stacking health bonuses from early buildings. Having one of each grain resource, with appropriate buildings, can get a city to population 10 or so without any health penalties, which is a real departure from standard RFC. I'm not necessarily in favor of changing or eliminating the buildings, but I think that adopting one or both of these approaches might help:
-Eliminate the health bonus from forests. This hits northern Europe especially hard, and goes a long way towards duplicating the historical split between small northern cities and large Mediterranean cities.
-Make the health penalty from population increase on a non-linear scale. 3Miro already proposed a good method for doing this, and I think that's probably the best solution if we want to keep the buildings as they are and have a relatively resource-rich map (probably necessary given the large size and research penalties for large civs). This does increase the mod's learning curve slightly, but I don't think it will be difficult for people to understand or adjust to.

 

[sedna17]

St Lucifer,

I completely agree that the best model for resources is to broadly segregate them by region, at least for the "common" ones such a grains and livestock. If this can be coupled with a modest reduction in total number, even better.

I, personally, feel that the early buildings are in part to blame (since I designed the system I am free to criticize). The smokehouse/weaver/brewery buildings just keep piling up the health/happy. My plan is to swap things around so that health/happy buildings come later. Thus, smokehouse will give +% money with salt,meat,etc. and the extra health boosts from these resources will come later. This will constrain growth early.

Removing the forest health bonus is a good idea. I'm not a fan of a non-linear health penalty, and I'm not sure that such a thing is necessary.

As for villages/towns: I agree that the pillaging thing is a bigger problem (I hadn't really thought about that). I'm not attached to the towns at all, but perhaps someone who is can chime in with a solution?

If you have time to work on the map, please continue to do so. I have limited time in the near future and other areas I can work on. Also, for eliminating extra resources, you may remember which ones are present for good historical/geographic reasons.

 

[blizzrd]

I have an issue with the pre-built town on Crete which is directly on top of an Olive resource. What is the point exactly? If you improve the square with a Plantation you get exactly the same commerce output as the Town anyway? Confused about this one.

 

[BurnEmDown]

The towns aren't there for gameplay reason, but for historical.
You see there was actually a town there but it was too small to be considered a city, and too big to just forget about, so it's been decided to put towns, villages and cottages in some specific areas around Europe, along with roads where there were main roads often used, or forts where there were still forts in use from the Roman Empire.

I think if there's no other solution all these towns (or at least some of them) could be changed to forts. This will be also very useful gameplay-wise, If you have a Skirmisher travelling around the map and he got damaged from a fight, he can find one of these forts and heal there.

 

[sedna17]

Re: Towns

We can fairly easily apply Python to these problems (assuming we want to keep these pre-built towns).

1) We could have barbarians spawn when/if you pillage a cottage-town outside of cultural borders. That should be easy and efficient to code. The type of barb unit could vary as a function of time, but I'd imagine that at the beginning of the game it would be randomly 1-2 spearmen/skirmishers. This is enough that (after your free barb wins) you'll want a decent force to attack these towns. It makes them a bit more like mini-independent cities.

The drawbacks are that (a) it would surprise first-time players and (b) it would also apply to towns around newly captured/razed cities. I don't think point (b) is actually much of a problem, but it does slightly change the calculus of war (and it becomes more profitable to pillage enemy towns before taking the main city rather than after).

2) I think we could arrange to have a city founded in a cottage-town start with extra population. Maybe +1 for cottage/hamlet and +2 for village/town? Would this provide enough incentive to settle in place?

 

[merijn_v1]

Re: Towns

2) I think we could arrange to have a city founded in a cottage-town start with extra population. Maybe +1 for cottage/hamlet and +2 for village/town? Would this provide enough incentive to settle in place?

I like this one the most.

 

[micbic]

2) I think we could arrange to have a city founded in a cottage-town start with extra population. Maybe +1 for cottage/hamlet and +2 for village/town? Would this provide enough incentive to settle in place?

I would easily go with 2. Currently, empty squares are far preferable from cottaged ones, with unhistorical consequences (ie the best tile in Sardinia is by far Alghero)

BTW: I was wondering what happens to one city's Jews, if it is razed...

 

[sedna17]

Re: Resources

I've started an experimental line of development to reduce health/happy and penalize northern Europe for having lots of forests early.

I removed the health bonus from forests and disabled mines/watermills. I removed all the forests from iron/copper on the map, so players will still have access to that stuff early on.

Then, I reworked the resource buildings (including merging in a mod component to allow +,,,%) so that early buildings generally don't provide +/. Here's a little schematic of how that all works:

These things slowed down development a lot, so I cut back tech costs across the board.

I started a Hungary game last night with the new system (partly to debug the UHV problems people have been experiencing). It was still really easy to get size 9/10 cities which were /. This seems a bit out of place for the middle ages. The problem is that Hungary has (easily settled without fighting) wine/sheep/gold/silver/honey for luxuries and wheat/barley/apples/cow/pig/salt/deer for health. That's just a lot of resources.

 

[sedna17]

BTW: I was wondering what happens to one city's Jews, if it is razed...

Currently nothing happens -- i.e. the Jews get wiped out. I could easily activate the same function as for an inquisition so that if a city with Jews gets razed the Jews will randomly pop up in some other city.

 

[st.lucifer]

Re: Resources

I've started an experimental line of development to reduce health/happy and penalize northern Europe for having lots of forests early.

I removed the health bonus from forests and disabled mines/watermills. I removed all the forests from iron/copper on the map, so players will still have access to that stuff early on.

Then, I reworked the resource buildings (including merging in a mod component to allow +,,,%) so that early buildings generally don't provide +/. Here's a little schematic of how that all works:


These things slowed down development a lot, so I cut back tech costs across the board.

I started a Hungary game last night with the new system (partly to debug the UHV problems people have been experiencing). It was still really easy to get size 9/10 cities which were /. This seems a bit out of place for the middle ages. The problem is that Hungary has (easily settled without fighting) wine/sheep/gold/silver/honey for luxuries and wheat/barley/apples/cow/pig/salt/deer for health. That's just a lot of resources.

Let's keep that schematic and play around with the resource placement. I'll see if I can come up with a less friendly resource distribution.

 

[BurnEmDown]

Well if we want a fixed number of cities with Judaism then auto-spread is the way to go, however that is a bit unfair towards any other religion that is present in the city.
I remember some time ago someone said it wasn't realistic for a city to be razed in this mod's timeframe, and then it was proposed that if a city is razed the population points from that city will join other cities in the area.
I think if this is implemented then maybe the religions which were present in the razed city can move to nearby cities as well.

 

[embryodead]

Reg. resources: how about using that Resources.py script from RFC - e.g. in case of Hungary, the gold & silver in Slovakia/Romania should be there but it should appear around 1210s and 1320s (for Slovakian gold at least, not sure about the rest). Saxon silver/copper should appear gradually in 938, 1168 and 1460., Bohemian silver: 13th, then 1460-80. Swedish (Sala) silver: late 15th. Sardinian silver: 1250. Also German salt: 12th c., Polish salt: 1350,

 

[Disenfrancised]

Reg. resources: how about using that Resources.py script from RFC - e.g. in case of Hungary, the gold & silver in Slovakia/Romania should be there but it should appear around 1210s and 1320s (for Slovakian gold at least, not sure about the rest). Saxon silver/copper should appear gradually in 938, 1168 and 1460., Bohemian silver: 13th, then 1460-80. Swedish (Sala) silver: late 15th. Sardinian silver: 1250. Also German salt: 12th c., Polish salt: 1350,

Well those discoveries weren't deterministic but rather dependent on advancing technology and economics - is it possible to tie Resources.py to technological discoveries (by any player to simply things)?

For Example
Some gold resources are available at the start
Shallow mine metals like the Silver in Saxony turns up with Vaulted Arches
Deep mines like the Sala silver mine turn up with Replacable Parts (see De Re Metallica)
Mines that used explosives like the Slovakian ones turn up with Gunpowder.
Potatos arrive with Trading Companies
Wheat resources on the eastern Steppes start with Scientific Method (these areas weren't very productive till the advent of dryland farming techniques)
Dyes appear in Northern Europe with Alchemy

If it is possible we can make a more comprehensive list...

I've also got to say North Africa is possibly to fertile now - sure it was the Breadbasket of the Roman Empire, but its fertility crashed immensely after the end of the medieval warm period and unless we're doing dynamic terrain we should probably try to strike a balance between the two states...

Its also IMO not correct in the distribution of fertility:
1) In Western Morocco its the inland rain catching highlands that are liveable, not the barren coasts.
2) There is a significant drop in fertility between Morocco and Algeria-Tunisa, this difficult area is one of the main reasons Morocco and Algeria exist as seperate entities.
3) Libya is serious desert, especially and tripolitania (if you want to make it a good city give it seafood and sheep on the desert), the middle and west is more fertile, but shouldn't be more than one tile thick plains anywhere.
4) The Cyrenica fertile seciton wraps further round the bulge catching the moisture off the Khalij Surt
5) The almost liveable area actually extends further south than you've got shown on your map.

Heres the current map with the above overlaid:
Blue: The high pine forest, composed of forested plains hills (timber resources)
Green: Fertile areas consisting of forest/grass/hills, forest/plains, and some grassland (wheat and seafood)
Yellow: Inner plains: forest/hills/deserts, plains (the sheep resources should mainly go here)
The rest should be desert of some type:

 

[embryodead]

Well those discoveries weren't deterministic but rather dependent on advancing technology and economics - is it possible to tie Resources.py to technological discoveries (by any player to simply things)?

Good idea and very simple, the event trigger just has to be moved from checkTurn to onTechAcquired. They'd appear with the 1st discovery.

Making too many resources dynamic will be confusing (e.g. city founding) but a few won't hurt. Another idea: Whales (early in Bay of Biscay, but serious whaling esp. in the North started in 17th; some nautical tech).

 

[sedna17]

Good idea Disenfranchised. If you people who know this stuff can make a more comprehensive list, I will implement it.

 

[jessiecat]

Good idea and very simple, the event trigger just has to be moved from checkTurn to onTechAcquired. They'd appear with the 1st discovery.

Making too many resources dynamic will be confusing (e.g. city founding) but a few won't hurt. Another idea: Whales (early in Bay of Biscay, but serious whaling esp. in the North started in 17th; some nautical tech).

I agree that making too many resources dynamic would be confusing and probably not necessary. Most should be available from the start but a few like potatoes and rice should depend on the date they were introduced. Others like coal and whales could be tech related. But the idea of timing the appearance of a mineral like gold not only to its historical location but also to when it was first mined in that location is unnecessarily complicated and too tedious to code for every resource in every single location IMO.

 

[Disenfrancised]

I agree that making too many resources dynamic would be confusing and probably not necessary. Most should be available from the start but a few like potatoes and rice should depend on the date they were introduced. Others like coal and whales could be tech related. But the idea of timing the appearance of a mineral like gold not only to its historical location but also to when it was first mined in that location is unnecessarily complicated and too tedious to code for every resource in every single location IMO.

Exactly, which is why you'd split the metals into 4 catagories (Available at start, shallow mines::Vaulted Arches, deeper mines::Replacable Mines, blasting mines::Gunpowder (or Chemistry), rather than assigning each one a unique date.

Another thing that'd be useful would be delaying possible Siberian resources at the edge of the map till Trading Companies.