(RFC3E) Welcome to RFCEurope Enhanced Edition

[0331]

Any updates on RFC3E?

Seems like every few months someone new takes on the mantle of moving the mod forward but, hey, its a lot of work. I get it and I think everyone still left in this community is incredibly appreciative. Unfortunately, I have zero coding ability myself. I actually posted an ad to hire a coder a couple of years ago on Fiverr to work on the mod, but no-one responded.

At any rate, hoping good people continue to volunteer.

Wasn't sure whether to post this in this forum or the newest thread from Nikas Kunitz about remaking the mod. But since it has more to do with current RFC3E gameplay, I decided to go with this one

Question is this - has anyone noticed the AI playing differently in the last hundred turns or so, in this newer version of the mod (RFC3E) vs the old 1.5? There are always certain civs that left unchecked by the human player tend to become pretty powerful (or so I've found anyway) by the end. Ottomans, Muscovy, Hungary, etc. And the endgame is a little messy, so I love the idea of pushing into the industrial era, even if just to make the 16th/17th centuries more fun.

By messy, I just mean there seems to be a constant succession of plagues, random declarations of war from civs on the other side of the map that add to war weariness without any real engagement, and then usually a declaration of war from one of the "powerful" civs that is close by. What's different, I've noticed, is that in older versions of the game when a powerful civ declared war, yes, they had a big army. But it could be defeated. Since I've started playing this latest version of RFC3E, the death stacks are beyond anything that is beatable. So many units that scrolling over can't show all of them on the screen. And they respawn so quickly that on the off chance you make it through the first death stack, there's another right behind it.

Just last night I had this against the Ottomans. They were launching human wave attacks against fortified cities, with no advance bombardment, so they ground down their armies pretty fast. But there wasn't even any opportunity to counterattack, because they had additional death stacks moving up right behind the initial stacks. So I just sat in my cities as wave after wave came. Then I'd have a turn or two break to bring in a couple of replacement units, and allow existing units to heal but, slowly, they were grinding me down. And it was a pretty boring way to play the last 50 turns.

I even had this happen with a vassalized Germany who only had 5 cities. Somehow they were able to create 3 different death stacks of 30-40 units each. Sure, there's always been some of that in Civ4. Just found it to be more prevalent in this latest version. I recall it being a feature of older Civ games (Civ I - Civ III, don't remember which) that the number of units you could have was correlated in some way to the number of cities. Not sure that I want to go back to that, but a complete disconnect between the size of a civ and its army also seems less than ideal.

Anyways, interested in hearing others' experiences as well.

​

 

[voigt]

Hey @0331 ! ! haven't been active on RFC3E since last september. I've explain here some of my reasons why I couldn't and why it's difficult as a single person project to works on RFC3E.
Long story short: on this post, @Nikas Kunitz was talking about recreating RFCE. I said that it will be better to stratch from a clean codebase rather than continue to works on the legacy (ie RFCE/RFC3E). So, last weekend I started using the RFC Dawn of Civilization codebase (which is tailored for more than 10 years and its very clean and have RFC gameplay rules and lots of optimization). So far, I've been able to load the game with @Nikas Kunitz new Europe map. I'm working on creating the region map. We could have a first draft in some weeks. I'm still interested to work on a project like RFCE. I will keep the community in touch about my achievements

 

[HNation]

Hey @0331 ! ! haven't been active on RFC3E since last september. I've explain here some of my reasons why I couldn't and why it's difficult as a single person project to works on RFC3E.
Long story short: on this post, @Nikas Kunitz was talking about recreating RFCE. I said that it will be better to stratch from a clean codebase rather than continue to works on the legacy (ie RFCE/RFC3E). So, last weekend I started using the RFC Dawn of Civilization codebase (which is tailored for more than 10 years and its very clean and have RFC gameplay rules and lots of optimization). So far, I've been able to load the game with @Nikas Kunitz new Europe map. I'm working on creating the region map. We could have a first draft in some weeks. I'm still interested to work on a project like RFCE. I will keep the community in touch about my achievements

Are you using his extended map that includes the Caucasus?

 

[voigt]

Are you using his extended map that includes the Caucasus?

No, only the @Nikas Kunitz Europe map!

 

[HNation]

No, only the @Nikas Kunitz Europe map!

He's working on a version that adds the Caucasus, and adding more columns to the right is by far the easiest map expansion to do. Do you plan to eventually add the Caucasus? I really think it would improve the experience.

(I also don't think his map has moorland, palm forest, and semidesert like the current map, I'd be happy to suggest their placement)

 

[Nikas Kunitz]

He's working on a version that adds the Caucasus, and adding more columns to the right is by far the easiest map expansion to do. Do you plan to eventually add the Caucasus? I really think it would improve the experience.

(I also don't think his map has moorland, palm forest, and semidesert like the current map, I'd be happy to suggest their placement)

I literally made a post in the thread about my full map of Europe with Caucasus and Iran, and why it is NOT practically feasible to have such map in RFC mod about Europe, due to performance, balance and other issues. Please, before stating that "he's working" on anything, read the posts I write.
In short, the map could either be smaller with greater scale having detailed West, Central and Southern Europe without hinterlands of Eastern Europe and Caucasus (as existing RFCE map and NK Europa map we use for remaking of the mod), or it can have all of Europe, Caucasus and, unavoidably for geographic and historical reasons, Iran, but at lesser scale and detail (including practical number of cities and civs) for Western, Central and Southern Europe, to make it playable. A map that has both detailed Western Europe and encompasses all of Europe with Caucasus (as my full map of Europe does), would be too large to be practically playable, particularly for RFC mod. Moreover, it might seem tempting to have map as big as possible in Civ4, but there's certain threshold when a map becomes way too big to actually be practically playable. This is why I started my post about remaking of RFCE, because I finally made the map, with RFC gameplay in mind, that is not too big (100x92), but also sufficiently detailed to properly represent Western and Central Europe, Mediterranean, and half of Eastern Europe that is included.
Sadly, there will be no Armenia or Georgia, as well as Khazaria, Volga Bulgaria, Iran and some other civs, but instead, if we will successfully remake the mod, you would be able to play with such "Europe-only" civs like Aquitaine, Saxony, Tuscany or various Rus principalities.

 

[HNation]

I literally made a post in the thread about my full map of Europe with Caucasus and Iran, and why it is NOT practically feasible to have such map in RFC mod about Europe, due to performance, balance and other issues. Please, before stating that "he's working" on anything, read the posts I write.
In short, the map could either be smaller with greater scale having detailed West, Central and Southern Europe without hinterlands of Eastern Europe and Caucasus (as existing RFCE map and NK Europa map we use for remaking of the mod), or it can have all of Europe, Caucasus and, unavoidably for geographic and historical reasons, Iran, but at lesser scale and detail (including practical number of cities and civs) for Western, Central and Southern Europe, to make it playable. A map that has both detailed Western Europe and encompasses all of Europe with Caucasus (as my full map of Europe does), would be too large to be practically playable, particularly for RFC mod. Moreover, it might seem tempting to have map as big as possible in Civ4, but there's certain threshold when a map becomes way too big to actually be practically playable. This is why I started my post about remaking of RFCE, because I finally made the map, with RFC gameplay in mind, that is not too big (100x92), but also sufficiently detailed to properly represent Western and Central Europe, Mediterranean, and half of Eastern Europe that is included.
Sadly, there will be no Armenia or Georgia, as well as Khazaria, Volga Bulgaria, Iran and some other civs, but instead, if we will successfully remake the mod, you would be able to play with such "Europe-only" civs like Aquitaine, Saxony, Tuscany or various Rus principalities.

I read your post, but I still think that the RFCE map should extend to the Caucasus. Your concerns about Russia having too many cities could easily be solved by using Tundra/Ice to block off land in Siberia, and the map could be trimmed to only have Western Persia, which could then be an Indie.

 

[Nikas Kunitz]

I read your post, but I still think that the RFCE map should extend to the Caucasus. Your concerns about Russia having too many cities could easily be solved by using Tundra/Ice to block off land in Siberia, and the map could be trimmed to only have Western Persia, which could then be an Indie.

There's no Siberia in the map (except for 1 tile column east of Ural mountains that is not to be settled any way) and 1/3 of the European Russia already is supposed to be unsettled taiga, tundra or steppe. Even if different map projection is used, making northern half of Europe relatively smaller (affecting British islands, Scandinavia, Germany, Poland and Baltic regions as well), Russia still will be way too large being up to 50% of Europe if real proportions are kept. In best way of events, even if Russia civ will settle all intended cities in modern day Russian borders, there will be little incentive to expand beyond that, westwards or southwards, as it already will have more cities than any other civ. And again, if lands in Russia are normal, then it will quickly become overpowered with so many cities (even with 1/3 of European Russia being intended to be unsettled), but if the lands are made worse, then there will be little reason to settle them ("worse" here means having little to no resources, just plain terrain). I can imagine cutting off easternmost part, east of Kazan, to keep atleast whole of Volga river, even without its major eastern tributaries like Kama, but this again would only make expanded map more pointless, leaving early XVIII-XIXth century industrial centres in Urals and bunch of other important cities off the map.
But in the south I have even more objections. Even though I personally would like to play Armenia and Georgia, they and Caucasus region in general aren't so historically crucial to be prioritised so much on their own. History of the whole Middle Eastern region, that is included in expanded map, is pretty much defined by centuries of opposition between empires based around Eastern Mediterranean, starting with Roman/Byzantine Empire and culminating with Ottoman Empire, against empires based on Iranian plateau and/or Mesopotamia, starting with preIslamic Sassanid Empire, Abbasid Caliphate and Seljuk Sultanate later, and culminating in Safavid, Afsharid and Qajar Empires of Iran in XVI-XIX centuries. Periods of major powers domination were periodically interrupted by break ups into smaller states. In this state of things, historically, Armenia and Georgia were just local powers in Caucasus, even if they had periods when they approached position of great powers (Armenia had such in Antiquity, much earlier than timespan of RFCE mod, while Georgia had it in XII-XIII centuries amidst break up of Greater Seljuks, before Mongols kicked in), but still they weren't close to position of great powers to the west and south-east, between which Armenia and Georgia usually served as mere buffer states. What I mean, is that such expanded map must include several civs representing great powers based in Iran (and Mesopotamia), being equal opponents to Byzantine and Ottoman empires in game. Degrading these powers to some independent cities in western Iran, while cutting off eastern half of it (I don't know how much you would trim off, but such cities as Shiraz, Isfahan, Ray/Tehran and even easternmost Nishapur/Mashhad and Kerman are all historically crucial) will only make expanding the map pointless from historical point of view. This is why I wrote a lot about "historical spaces" in my post, trying to show that expanded map should cover Near/Middle East as region from Syria to eastern Iran, not cutting it anywhere in the middle.
Thus, again, I consider complications (including pure performance issues) of expanded map to far outweight obvious bonuses like additional civs. Practically, there can be either a mod with more detailed map centered on Western, Southern (with all of Mediterranean) and Central Europe (and western half of Eastern), or less detailed mod with map including all of Europe and Middle East. The mod we are remaking, just like existing RFCEurope, is the former one of the two.