RFC Europe playtesting feedback thread

[merijn_v1]

Seda17!

I'm not sure if it's me who you were talking about, but I was the one who put together the music for Ukraine, Venice, and a few other civs without unique music earlier back. I've still been lurking around the forums, and am very pleased with the Beta!

But back on topic, would you like me to hunt down some more music for France, Germany, and other civs who needed it? It would be my pleasure!

I also can give the answer: Yes, please! That would be wonderful.

 

[General Toad]

Great, I'll start it as soon as possible!

Though, one thing poses a problem; For the time being, I'm unable to actually load the game (simply problems with the computer on my end), but I can still edit the code, though I'm unable to test how it sounds and such. One thing I'm curious about before I start: Take for example Charlemagne, who is the French leader that you're forced to pick if I remember correctly. Now, to prevent the player of France from hearing a early middle ages hymn in the 1700's, does the era system of music used in BTS and such still work in this mod? Because the coding is there, I assume so, but as I can't playtest at this time, best to ask. If that's the case, I'll make it so the music updates through the eras for those leaders.

 

[sedna17]

Great, I'll start it as soon as possible!

Though, one thing poses a problem; For the time being, I'm unable to actually load the game (simply problems with the computer on my end), but I can still edit the code, though I'm unable to test how it sounds and such. One thing I'm curious about before I start: Take for example Charlemagne, who is the French leader that you're forced to pick if I remember correctly. Now, to prevent the player of France from hearing a early middle ages hymn in the 1700's, does the era system of music used in BTS and such still work in this mod? Because the coding is there, I assume so, but as I can't playtest at this time, best to ask. If that's the case, I'll make it so the music updates through the eras for those leaders.

Great news.

Yes, the era-specific music still works in our mod. Note that we have four eras called in the code -- ANCIENT, CLASSICAL, MEDIEVAL, RENAISSANCE. Later eras are still defined throughout the code, but you never reach them, so you won't need to worry about defining music for (e.g.) the FUTURE era.

These are the approximate dates of each era in my mind (if it influences your choice of music).

ANCIENT = Early Middle Ages (500-1000)
CLASSICAL = High Middle Ages (1000 - 1300)
MEDIEVAL = Late Middle Ages (1300 - 1500)
RENAISSANCE = Renaissance+Early Modern (1500 -1800)

 

[FakeShady]

Oh thats sad, i was hoping i could be the music dude but nvm haha, you seem much more skilled than me lol.

I'll be testing out these 3 for Venice to test their difficulty. Tell me now if there are any major objections.

1. Conquer Constantinople through crusade by 1210.
2. Control the Dalmatian coast, Rhodes (the non-american one), and have at least one city in Crete, Cyprus and Greece each in 1500.
3. Have 15000 gold by 1700

I still insist on Venice ending not earlier than 1700 Since that means there will one more civ which needs to conquer Constantinople, i suggest the 2 tagmatas (i named them Humpty and Dumpty) to be returned to Constantinople at the start of the game, since i realized they have been removed in the latest version. Tell me wad u guys think thanks

 

[grant2004]

Sometimes it's hard for a human player to be 100% sure about what the objective of their UHV is, because of limited knowlege of geography. There should be some kind of reference so that a player who doesn't know the boundaries of regions discussed in game can look them up and know where they'll need to settle. It can also be difficult to judge if you've gone beyond your homeland region, until you start to notice significant stability drops.

What would be really cool is if there were some way to use the line drawing and sign placing functions to show clearly the outline of your objective regions, your home regions, and maybe the spawn areas of future civs. Maybe there's a way of incoporating this into the strategy layer of the map so that it can be toggled on and off, so as to not be intrusive.

 

[merijn_v1]

Sometimes it's hard for a human player to be 100% sure about what the objective of their UHV is, because of limited knowlege of geography. There should be some kind of reference so that a player who doesn't know the boundaries of regions discussed in game can look them up and know where they'll need to settle. It can also be difficult to judge if you've gone beyond your homeland region, until you start to notice significant stability drops.

What would be really cool is if there were some way to use the line drawing and sign placing functions to show clearly the outline of your objective regions, your home regions, and maybe the spawn areas of future civs. Maybe there's a way of incoporating this into the strategy layer of the map so that it can be toggled on and off, so as to not be intrusive.

In the RFCE folder their IS a folder called reference. Their you'll find all maps of the UHV's, spawns, war maps and settler maps. Just look more careful!

 

[Wessel V1]

The idea of the strategy layer is pretty cool and could be applied to normal RFC too. Unfortunately, it seems that I can't access the strategy layer in RFCE at all. The Reference folder is located in the mod folder, war maps, settler maps, spawn zones and victory zones can ben found here.

 

[Hangly Man]

One more gripe.

I know Burgundy was incredibly overpowered before but isn't this a bit of an overcorrection? I've given it five shots and I can say with confidence that the UHV's are now impossible. Burgundy produces and grows too slowly to ever be able to push its way north through France and Germany to the low countries.

 

[grant2004]

In the RFCE folder their IS a folder called reference. Their you'll find all maps of the UHV's, spawns, war maps and settler maps. Just look more careful!

Oh! Well that's very useful to know, thank you. I think some sort of interactive way of displaying this would be the most beneficial, because players could find it without hunting for something that they aren't sure exists. But it would probably be a big project. It might be better just to make a note somewhere highly visible that these maps exist and can be found in that folder.

Thanks again for the info, that will let me test out a few of the eastern civs whose geography I am horrendously fuzzy on.

 

[kochman]

Dude... just look in the folder... man. They made this huge mod, spent thousands of hours in doing so, and you can't spend two minutes looking in the 200MB folder you downloaded?

 

[Schnoucki]

Speaking about Burgundy and maps...
UHV's on lower difficulty should be possible since I only miss twice the crusade duty (UHV #2). The two other UHV's are ok but #2 looks random (last game I stick to catholicism and the crusade was only called once - Jerusalem saved?) or a LOT of kiss to the Pope is needed? Anyway, Burgundy is fun to play.

As for the maps, what are wars maps ?

Spoiler :

C:\Program Files\2K Games\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4 Complete\Beyond the Sword\Mods\RFCEurope\Reference\WarMaps

It looks like my home land and the Jerusalem region for Burgundy but what is it for?
Is there some stability maps avaible like for RFC ?

 

[merijn_v1]

Speaking about Burgundy and maps...
UHV's on lower difficulty should be possible since I only miss twice the crusade duty (UHV #2). The two other UHV's are ok but #2 looks random (last game I stick to catholicism and the crusade was only called once - Jerusalem saved?) or a LOT of kiss to the Pope is needed? Anyway, Burgundy is fun to play.

As for the maps, what are wars maps ?

Spoiler :

C:\Program Files\2K Games\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4 Complete\Beyond the Sword\Mods\RFCEurope\Reference\WarMaps

It looks like my home land and the Jerusalem region for Burgundy but what is it for?
Is there some stability maps avaible like for RFC ?

The Red areas are the spots that the civs want to conquer. As for Burgundy, they want to conquer the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, Eastern France and the area around Jerusalem. (The red areas.)

 

[BurnEmDown]

If Jerusalem is held by a Catholic civ and I think also an Orthodox civ then crusades will not occur. (Imagine the pope calling for a crusade against English-occupied Jerusalem, loyal to him?)

 

[Schnoucki]

That all make sense, crusade and war's map.
I interpret it, in stability terms, that Burgundy is better off taking over or occupaying the red aeras (middle europa/sacred lands)... hence I understand why my kingdom was a bit falling apart when I try to take over africa.

 

[BurnEmDown]

That's mostly true, but there are stability maps and there are war maps, and they're not always the same. Stability maps determine where you will be most stable or which areas are unstable for your civ, the war maps just mean how the AI will act regarding where to attack, which areas seem most valuable to him and how much will he fight for them.
There are also settler maps, which determine where will the AI send it's settlers.

 

[grant2004]

Dude... just look in the folder... man. They made this huge mod, spent thousands of hours in doing so, and you can't spend two minutes looking in the 200MB folder you downloaded?

I appologize I didn't mean to sound rude, but I had no way of knowing that such a folder existed before asking. I don't make a habit of looking through mod files that I download, as most of the time they are just functional files for the mod. I've never heard of useful information for the player being hidden there. If the makers of those maps want their information to be used by the average player, they should find a way of directing players to it. That's all I'm suggesting.

Back to the main purpose of the thread though. I recently completed a game with Portugal on medium difficulty.

I thought their UHV was actually pretty easy. When I spawned Cordoba was still around, but very unstable. They collapsed a few turns in and I was able to grab a good ammount of land from them, which would historically have been Spanish. Getting cities in North Africa and the Atlantic islands was no problem. Spain didn't seem to want to expand to either of those places, and with Cordoba gone there wasn't anyone else around to stop me.

The colonial projects were also easy, I teched almost straight to the sailing techs, and was able to tech trade a few of the early ones away for other useful techs. By the end, all of the colonial projects which had been completed were completed by me. Two of the extra spanish cities I had were really helpful for this, because they had a ton of production. This goal would have been a lot tougher without those cities.

Not loosing a city before the end date was also very easy. With Cordoba gone, Spain was the only country I had a border with, and because we were both Catholic they were friendly with me. I managed to sign a defensive pact with them, and maintained a decent military so I didn't look like a sitting duck. I almost blew it with Spain by converting to Protestantism, but although our relations droped they never canceled the defensive pact. I didn't need the bonus on project production, so it would have been smarter to keep the Spanish happy. Fortunately it ended out working in the end.

The main reason victory was easy was because I was able to take two strong cities from Cordoba as they collapsed. Without those cities I might have lost a few of the colonies, because other civs were right on my tail on the sailing tech path.

One thing that seemed odd was a few of my cities lost BFC tiles to Spanish culture, even though I had the majority culture on that tile. It seemed like this was intentional, I'm just wondering how the system works. Do tiles flip to their historical owner at a lower cultural percentage than neutral tiles? If so is there a way of predicting at what percentage this will occur, so you know when you're in danger and need to start pumping out culture to keep stolen tiles.

 

[3Miro]

One thing that seemed odd was a few of my cities lost BFC tiles to Spanish culture, even though I had the majority culture on that tile. It seemed like this was intentional, I'm just wondering how the system works. Do tiles flip to their historical owner at a lower cultural percentage than neutral tiles? If so is there a way of predicting at what percentage this will occur, so you know when you're in danger and need to start pumping out culture to keep stolen tiles.

Tiles that have large SettlersMaps values (i.e. tiles in the historical core of the empire) are very hard to flip. This is mainly done to prevent older civs from culture mowing over new civs, but it works for everyone. The tiles that would not flip, were considered historically heavily Spanish (i.e. around Leon), thus it will be next to impossible to get them (you need something of the order of ten times their culture).

 

[Hangly Man]

Argh something needs to be done to make the Dutch playable. Trying to keep up with Spain and England with only one good city is impossible.

And I cheated. A lot.

Also has anyone noticed the general unavailability of mercenaries around the colonial period? Here I sit with enough gold to make Solomon blush and I can't spend it.

 

[Hangly Man]

As for the Dutch. They were a nation that declared independence. They didn't found new cities. I think they should start with a city (or cities) that has been build by the Independents, Germans, Burgundians or Spain. Again, they don't have to start from scratch and need less new civ bonuses. I think the same should be done for Venezia and Genoa.[/IMG]

It's party of Burgundy's UHV to have cities in the Netherlands already. Thing is they almost never manage to do that, especially now that they've been nerfed so much.

If Amsterdam, Groningen and Brussels existed (is there any reason the United Netherlands shouldn't initially include all of Flanders?), they were decent cities and all of them flipped when the Dutch spawn then the Low Countries might have a fighting chance against the English juggernaut.

 

[kochman]

Argh something needs to be done to make the Dutch playable. Trying to keep up with Spain and England with only one good city is impossible.

And I cheated. A lot.

Also has anyone noticed the general unavailability of mercenaries around the colonial period? Here I sit with enough gold to make Solomon blush and I can't spend it.

Agreed... this issue screws up the whole mod from 1580 on at this point...