RFC Europe: Small bugs/fixes

[sedna17]

Can I bring up something else? Just started a game as Arabia and Islam was founded in Tyre. And Jerusalem and Damascus didn't convert to Islam. So neither can build anything Islamic until they get Gothic Architecture and Organized Religion. Obviously when you shifted civics it changed everything, esp. for Arabia. It even messed up their UP as well. Was this intentional?

I don't think this is entirely my fault -- it shouldn't have messed up their UP. What happens is that sometimes a civ will "rise" one turn late (counter will read -1 if you're playing them). I consider this a bug in the original RFC code. When this happens to the Arabs, they don't get a chance to switch to Islam before Jerusalem/Damascus flip, so those cities don't get Islam automatically and Arabia sometimes ends up Orthodox.

In general though, I'm not happy with the religious civics as they stand. There should be a good early religious civic (ala Organized Religion), but I'd really like to encourage the building of monasteries and so perhaps defer the "no monastery bonus" to a later religious civic (or even a couple of them, perhaps one of them the Arabs can start with).

 

[jessiecat]

I don't think this is entirely my fault -- it shouldn't have messed up their UP. What happens is that sometimes a civ will "rise" one turn late (counter will read -1 if you're playing them). I consider this a bug in the original RFC code. When this happens to the Arabs, they don't get a chance to switch to Islam before Jerusalem/Damascus flip, so those cities don't get Islam automatically and Arabia sometimes ends up Orthodox.

In general though, I'm not happy with the religious civics as they stand. There should be a good early religious civic (ala Organized Religion), but I'd really like to encourage the building of monasteries and so perhaps defer the "no monastery bonus" to a later religious civic (or even a couple of them, perhaps one of them the Arabs can start with).

I don't think that's the answer. Before the changes, Islam was founded in the first city, Damascus, which got a mosque and the Majid. This time I founded it in Damascus before the flip but Tyre got the mosque and the Majid while Damascus and Jerusalem got nothing and stayed Orthodox. All this stems from shifting Organized Religion to later. Frankly, I don't understand why you had to do that. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Organized Religion as it is. Monasteries shouldn't come before temples. How can you have a monastery without an established religion and a church? That's just silly. If you really want to encourage monasteries then add another research point or other bonus. Don't just turn everything on its head for the sake of it. You've upset far too many other things.
The same goes for some of the other changes. It really bugs me that a worker can build a plantation from the start but not a farm. How backwards is that? And a disastrous growth inhibitor for the early civs. I know you tried to tweak a few things to achieve a result but all you've achieved is upsetting the balance and stability without getting any meaningful improvement. Everything worked much better in the old version. Please, please change everything back to the way it was.

 

[AnotherPacifist]

I think manorialism should enable plantations rather than farms. Not historical but it would restore the ability to build farms early on.

Speaking of manorialism, it reminds me of corvee which in ROTK allowed military units to be built by food. Since there's no slavery, this would give civs like Byzantine (with their inherent disadvantage of hammers) and smaller civs (like Hungary) to build units. Of course, the city stops growing while it's building a military unit, but you have a much better chance of repelling barbarians and overexpanding human players.

I would give this food-for-hammer advantage to serfdom (since it lost the 50% improvement rate) but not manorialism.

 

[sedna17]

The behavior you report for Islam is not the consequence of moving Organized Religion later, I promise you that. It is possibly an accidental result of some OTHER change. I will have to investigate.

I am not going to unilaterally revert all the changes I spent the last two weeks working on. However, I do hear and appreciate your concerns. I would also like to hear opinions from other people.

Several people had complained about the lack of interesting strategic options for the starting civs with too many things available. After playing many such starts, I agreed with them and made some changes which I think make for more interesting choices -- they certainly make the game more enjoyable for me. I disagree that this is "...a disastrous growth inhibitor for the early civs." The early civs seem to be doing fine in test games, and the worker techs just aren't that far into the tree. Plantations coming before farms does seem a little funny.

@AP: A food-for-military units civic would be an interesting strategic choice. I (or someone else, the Civics XML file is easy to edit) would have to run some test games to see how it plays in practice.

 

[jessiecat]

Nobody expects that you reverse all the changes you made unilaterally any more than they would have expected you to make those changes unilaterally. But the fact is that some of the tech shifts have adversely affected the conditions in which civs operate. Shifting Organized Religion is only one example.
1. Making farm-building dependent on Manorialism and moving chopping to Plate Armour has further limited the no. of tiles the player can farm, as you can see in the first example below. Previously, as Cordoba, I could farm every plains tile even if it had a forest on it and achieve a population of 14-15 by 1000AD. Now, after 3 attempts the best I could achieve is 10 because 3 wooded tiles in the BFC can't be farmed. Obviously the first UHV condition is no longer possible as Constantinople or Ephesus will always grow to 12 or more. (screenshots below)

2. As AP has already reported to you, Arabia experiences early instability for no apparent reason now. After several attempts I have got to 1000AD without losing a city due to instability but look how the negative no. has increased. If I hadn't captured Alexandria and gained another star for expansion I'd have lost a city again. Look at the 2 stars for cities and economy. And that's after building 3 Wonders and the Heroic Epic. Something is wrong here. I've always been stable or solid at this stage before. (screenshots below).
I have included saved games as well.

 

[AnotherPacifist]

Actually my Arab stability was even better (since I didn't change civics so it was only -2) and I had 3 stars for happiness. In fact, I had 3 stars for all of them (economy was -10), but the numbers don't add up (I got -25 by 850 AD) and with each successive declaration of independence it went down by 3. I took a chance to switch to OR and serfdom and that just made me collapse(-50).

I think building wonders should help. By 1100 I had built 11 of them: Marco Polo, Uppsala, Round Church, Cluny, Notre Dame, Crak, Mezquita, Tomb of Khalid (this one cost me quite a bit because I kept losing monuments!), the 3 Knight corporations (Templar, Hospitaller and St John--all founded with priests from Constantinople which was another reason to kill the Byzantines early), besides the ones I captured or founded in the religious cities providing plenty of cash. I was building Dome of the Rock, Golden Bull and Magna Carta after I got Divine Right when I just gave up after another faux collapse. They should definitely give at least 2-3 permanent stability points per wonder in future versions.

 

[sedna17]

I hear you on Wonders giving stability. That makes sense, and is planned to happen in the next version. It looks like there are also some bugs in the rest of the stability code. I need a bit longer to debug it though.

The 1st Cordoba UHV is still quite possible. I researched Manorialism first (for farms), then Vaulted Arches (for smokehouse), and then some techs which allowed happiness. I had to focus a bit on the goal, but reached size 14 before 1000 AD, and the next largest cities in the world were only size 10 (though I admit that you will sometimes see cities up to size 11 or 12). I would definitely avoid the Civic Manorialism (-1 food from farms kills you) -- probably not historically accurate for Cordoba anyway.

 

[jessiecat]

I hear you on Wonders giving stability. That makes sense, and is planned to happen in the next version. It looks like there are also some bugs in the rest of the stability code. I need a bit longer to debug it though.

The 1st Cordoba UHV is still quite possible. I researched Manorialism first (for farms), then Vaulted Arches (for smokehouse), and then some techs which allowed happiness. I had to focus a bit on the goal, but reached size 14 before 1000 AD, and the next largest cities in the world were only size 10 (though I admit that you will sometimes see cities up to size 11 or 12). I would definitely avoid the Civic Manorialism (-1 food from farms kills you) -- probably not historically accurate for Cordoba anyway.

I'm glad you were able to do it. I had forgotten about the food penalty for Manorialism. That makes a big difference. I'll try that again. But you do see what we're saying about Arabian instability. I've never had a problem with that before.

 

[Michael Vick]

Cultured is spelled wrong in France's second UHV on the starting screen. "cultued"

I HATE the art for the Enrico Dandolo guy in charge of Venice. I'd actually rather have Abraham Lincoln as Pietro II Orsolo

If not that, we could have like a still portrait (like in Charlemagne, or Greekworld, Desert War in the older civ games).

I think a picture of me would be better than this scary, possessed looking grandpa guy. ANYTHING but this.

 

[Verily]

The behavior you report for Islam is not the consequence of moving Organized Religion later, I promise you that. It is possibly an accidental result of some OTHER change. I will have to investigate.

I am not going to unilaterally revert all the changes I spent the last two weeks working on. However, I do hear and appreciate your concerns. I would also like to hear opinions from other people.

Several people had complained about the lack of interesting strategic options for the starting civs with too many things available. After playing many such starts, I agreed with them and made some changes which I think make for more interesting choices -- they certainly make the game more enjoyable for me. I disagree that this is "...a disastrous growth inhibitor for the early civs." The early civs seem to be doing fine in test games, and the worker techs just aren't that far into the tree. Plantations coming before farms does seem a little funny.

@AP: A food-for-military units civic would be an interesting strategic choice. I (or someone else, the Civics XML file is easy to edit) would have to run some test games to see how it plays in practice.

Sorry to disagree with you, but the French and Burgundians are frankly extremely crippled by the inavailability of Farms, specifically, from the beginning. (This probably hurts other civs, too, but it's been most notable with France.)

In eight loads of Ottoman starts on the new version, in all eight France had collapsed (and sometimes respawned), and in none did they even come close to controlling all of their historical territory, or even all of their historical territory except Burgundy. Burgundy was previously crippled by the old stability bug, so it's hard to tell how it's been impacted, but France should be one of the strongest competitors in the game. Instead, it's a total non-factor in every game I've loaded under the new patch.

 

[sedna17]

Sorry to disagree with you, but the French and Burgundians are frankly extremely crippled by the inavailability of Farms, specifically, from the beginning. (This probably hurts other civs, too, but it's been most notable with France.)

In eight loads of Ottoman starts on the new version, in all eight France had collapsed (and sometimes respawned), and in none did they even come close to controlling all of their historical territory, or even all of their historical territory except Burgundy. Burgundy was previously crippled by the old stability bug, so it's hard to tell how it's been impacted, but France should be one of the strongest competitors in the game. Instead, it's a total non-factor in every game I've loaded under the new patch.

I stand corrected. But France collapsing is more to do with Burgundy remaining strong then anything else. France researches manorialism and builds farms just about as quick as before.

I've found one bug in the interaction of the Arab UP with stability that was causing them to rack up bad instability. It remains to be seen if fixing this will restore them to viability.

 

[BurnEmDown]

When I try to start RFCE with the newest patch (alpha 3) I get an error message saying CIV4 isn't responding. I got the same message when I tried to start it before updating to 3.19 so I thought it would solve it, but I still get the message.

 

[3Miro]

- Does regular civ work.
- You must have 3.19 installed, otherwise RFCEurope will not work.
- Completely remove the Beyond the Sword\Mods\RFCEurope folder and then redownload the mod and reinstall it.
- Le me know if there are still problems.

 

[BurnEmDown]

Done all that before posting, still problems.

 

[3Miro]

Done all that before posting, still problems.

zip and post the folder My Documents\My Games\Beyond the Sword\Logs (right after the crash I mean)

 

[BurnEmDown]

Here ya go.

 

[Samsa]

got a weird bug:
if u zoom out to the satellite view normally theres a small panel wich allows u to select some options for the chosen layer. (e.g. draw lines, or just show strategic resources(
but i got no panel to switch through the options O.o someone else has this issue, if so it might comes along with 3.19

 

[BurnEmDown]

I just tried playing RFC with the new patch and it gives the same problem. The weird thing is that I was playing a game as Germany in RFC and in the middle of it I patched the game to 3.19 (but not the new RFC patch) and it kept on working, I'll try deleting and then redownloading RFC and RFCE completely and let you know if it's working.

 

[3Miro]

RFCE alpha requires BtS 3.19, it will not work otherwise.

I am not sure about RFC, those are separate mods (i.e. it makes no difference which RFC and RFCE combination you have). I don't know abut RFC working or not.

I am not sure about the global view. I would try to see if it works for regular civ and RFC as well (RFC and RFCE share some code and sometimes have common bugs).

 

[BurnEmDown]

Yes as I said I updated to 3.19 in the middle of the RFC Germany game, and noticed the "bug" happening in RFCE before updating to 3.19, so I did update and the bug is still there.
Now I ran BTS and clicked on "about this build" and it says 3.17! Seems it had a problem or something updating last time I did it, I'll update again and see if it says 3.19 as it should.