Rhye's Catapult

the problem is: will there be a fall of Roman empire? Not always. And it could happen earlier or later, depending on casuality.
France, Spain and England are quite close together, but not in the same turn.
I've considered for all of them the earliest possible date (that isn't related to another people, like Gauls or Iberians)

In general, the rules I've followed are the latter one (earliest date of the specific people, always followed but a couple of times), and to try to make a regular flow of births, without booms or bottlenecks, when possible.
 
Just thinking about how civs will be created and stuff, I think the human player should definitely be susceptible to losing cities to a new civ. So a player playing as the Romans would lose at least some of his cities in France when France is created.
 
while assigning starting units, i found that cannon placement is completely wrong. They come far too late, next to railroads and ironclads, while they were used since 1300. And they're very close to artillery too.
So, though I wouldn't have wanted to touch the tech tree (at least in the basic game), I am thinking to move cannons back to Gunpowder, and decreasing their power. The problem seems caused by the lack of Trebuchet...
 
In my regular Civ4 game I've moved cannons to Chemistry. I think that's a much better place for them. Gunpowder seems too ealry to me. I agree that adding a trebuchet unit would make things better though. I think Sharick is almost done making a trebuchet unit, so we could put it in. And besides, how could you call the mod Project Trebuchet and not even add that unit in? ;)
 
Cannons came before muskets!

There is a very simple reason for it too: its easier to make a big thing capable of channeling an explosion than it is to figure out how to make a long thin one do it.

Cannons before muskets please! It is historically accurate for Pikes to escort Cannons, but absolutely absurd for Riflemen to escort Catapults.

I'm not really sure we even need a trebuchet. The gravity based version was not really prevalent, mostly because of the need for experienced engineers to build and operate them, and a torsion based trebuchet is essentially a catapult. Besides, it would make it more likely that we would see rifles and pults! ARGH! Gives me a hernia just thinking about how stupid that is!

I'll just think about how much I enjoyed that scene in Star Wars 3, where that horrible actor got his face and legs burned off. Ahh, sweet relief!
 
Yes, the cannon issue bothered me from day one. They should be available at least together with gunpowder/musketmen, maybe even earlier.

Of course, you can research chemistry->steel directly after gunpowder, but in most games it makes no sense. Why bother with cannons if you can get cavalry earlier?

The availability of cavalry vs. knights is another thing I really hate about the vanilla tech tree: It's easier to get cavalry than knights! Often the best research path is CS slingshot -> Literature -> Music (and not only in culture games). Then you are very close to cavarly (Nationalism with the help of a GArtist or Liberalism, Paper->Edu->Gunpowder), while Guilds are relatively expensive to research and iirc equally far away (e.g you need naval techs).
I've played many games where I researched Guilds after Cavalry & Liberalism, or even not at all. You really only need them for banking if your economy is lacking and victory is far away.
 
@All the followers of the thread : Is it possible to make air units and sea units work liike in Civ 2 or Alpha Centauri ...

Because in Civ 3 and 4 i don'nt use them or so few...
 
I agree that having two types of cannons would probably be best. There really is a huge difference between early cannons and Napolonic ones.

That would be really sweet if you could get it to work with more than 18 civs, Rhye. It would also help me with a little project I've been working on.
 
Its hard to disagree there were major changes in cannon usage and power, but there were also some pretty major differences between early catapults and full gravitational trebuchets in terms of power. Adding in a second cannon upgrade before artillery just seems excessive. Besides, it would make more sense to add a faster late game artillery (2 moves instead of 1) than to add another marginal improvement mid game.
 
Lachlan said:
@All the followers of the thread : Is it possible to make air units and sea units work liike in Civ 2 or Alpha Centauri ...Because in Civ 3 and 4 i don'nt use them or so few...
Huh? Privateers & Destroyers are essential for dominating the sea, securing your coastal tiles, and very powerful at wearing down city defenses because of their high speed.
Can't comment about air units as I hardly ever use or need them, but I recall bombers are by far the best way to deal with city defenses.

I agree though that sea units should be able to hurt land units, cause massive collateral damge, but on the other hand cannons & artillery should be able to destroy sea units. Both scenarios are historically important; many a riot or revolution was decided by mass slaughtering a city's population with naval bombardement.
 
Yeah, its kind of annoying that the first time sea units are able to affect land units is when you build an Air Craft carrier.

In fact, I saw a piece of code a while back that allowed bombardment. I'll hunt it up, since I think I posted on it.
 
Aeon221 said:
Question for Blas: When you talk about pop up policies, would there be a popup dealing with each colony individually, or all of them together as a whole?

IE: I make a colony in NA very close to an enemy city so as to have a base in which to heal and unload troops that I want to dismantle at the end of the conflict, so I want to have the population as low as possible.

I also have another colony in the Carribbean, with lots of sugar resources nearby that can produce a good bit of money, and I want to overtax it (or allow slavery to give me a citizen who does not need food *hint hint* :p).

Needless to say, I would want to have seperate policies in these colonies, which would work perfectly with your 'pop up policies' (so long as they are for individual colonies instead of all of them).
I knew I forgot something! I was going to mention that the popup policies would affect that colony alone by default, but the popup would have a checkbox for making it the policy in all colonies. It should also have the option to select colonies one by one to apply the new policy to.
I think if we implement popup policies we should consider the idea of limiting control of these policies to the points at which a popup is triggered alone. This would be an effective way to curb the flexibility that a leader has about colonial policy. Instead of allowing a full screen of mini-civics for every colony, which would mean the leader can just come on in and start reordering things whenever he wants, we might want to let the leader intervene only when things start to change in the colonies, causing the issue to be brought up.

Gunner said:
Edit: Ok so I thought a little bit more about that idea and here it is with more specifics:
A newly founded city (I'll call it the "colony" class) will get one free great person point per turn. It also gets a bonus of 3 gold (not commerce, colonies should help with money rather than science) per citizen living there. The drawback is that each citizen would eat 3 food per turn. A colony's population would also be capped at a max of 4. A colony could also have a set chance to rebel per turn based on its population size. Larger colonies would be more likely.

The player will have the option of upgrading a "colony" class to the "city" class by building a some building which will transform it. The "city" class is just like a regular city now. So it will have much more production potential and the extra food needed to make city specialists. In the long run it would also be able to make more commerce than a colony.
This implementation sounds too crude imho. I'm no expert, like I said, but I think the transformation should be much more organic and not completely within the player's control. The player should have slightly indirect ways of keeping the colony as it is, like disallowing immigration, but colonies should always naturally aspire to become cities. It's not realistic that a ruler builds some improvement to turn the colony into a city.
As to the gold bonus, that also sounds too crude. We need to make more use of cIV's realistic game mechanics. We can give a gold bonus per X trade routes, per resources, per citizen, etc. Like I said, we can give +1:gold:/resource for every two trade routes (so a colony with 4 trade routes would have +2:gold:/resource). We can give an option for a burst of overtaxation to net a pretty penny but get the colonists angry, or a subtler overtaxation that gets a bit of extra gpt/pop with a little anger and increased chance of revolt.
Rhye said:
the problem is: will there be a fall of Roman empire? Not always. And it could happen earlier or later, depending on casuality.
France, Spain and England are quite close together, but not in the same turn.
I've considered for all of them the earliest possible date (that isn't related to another people, like Gauls or Iberians)

In general, the rules I've followed are the latter one (earliest date of the specific people, always followed but a couple of times), and to try to make a regular flow of births, without booms or bottlenecks, when possible.
One good way to make a Fall of Rome more likely is to make parts of the potential empire flip to new civs almost all at once. In other words, if you create a boom of post-roman civs, that can help make a realistic Fall of Rome.
 
Man, if that happened to me and I was playing Rome, I would literally **** myself :p

Talk about an unwelcome surprise.

Perhaps there could be a slower transition? Something a bit less likely to cause heart attacks?

I definitely think that there should be a tech check and region check before a civ is spawned. The tech check would assure appropriate spawns (If X has been reseached by at least 2 civs, spawn Y), and the region check would change the types and numbers spawned.

If there are lots of enemy cities and a strong army in place, the region check would spawn a large number of military units and flip a few cities, but would not generate a settler. If, on the other hand, the area is empty except for a barb here or there, a goodly number of settlers with some mixed units should spawn.
 
Just to make sure this does not disappear so easily :p

Aeon221 said:
Suggestion: Replace "Greece" with "Macedonia" and have it spawn around the same time that Persia does. It makes better sense with the Phalanx unit (Greeks would have a hoplite or a trireme uu) and the Alexander leaderhead.

Justification:Greece had a fairly long Dark Age, and there were settlements in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers long before there were cities in Greece. In fact, it is fairly certain that Sumer developed writing before Egypt (although I remember reading about a Zero Dynasty in Egypt that would have put them ahead... but nothing came of that as far as I know).

Granted, the Sumerians were city state people, and granted the 'barbarians' model city states just fine... but if the earliest civ in existence, the one that basically figured out writing, grain farming, and the wheel, as well as laid the foundations of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Gilgamesh epic, and Sumerian religion in general, was co-opted by the Peoples of the Book quite nicely, and the flood myth may have been spread as far north as the Nordic peoples by Greek and Celtic traders. Regardless of the existence of a God, the writing and the stories are too similar to deny the syncretism by any academic means) is going to be a string of barbarian city states, then Greece, as another city state civ with some extremely major contributions to history and science, is probably okay as a barbarian civ too.

You could also model both Greece and Middle Eastern Development far more accurately in that way. For example, cities like Knossos and Troy and the various Mycenaean cities could spawn, then be replaced by Mycenaean cities (Athens, Sparta, Corinth...), and finally the Macedonian civ could pop and take them either by war or by flip.
 
Last yap

Zuul said:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=142086

#Too many units in same tile will made it crowded. Over 15 will add the crowded effect.

*Crowded: +1 movement cost, -25% strength, -20% withdrawal chance, -3 first strike chance, -2 first strike.


# Effects gained in Forts (and Fort I can be gained in cities that has both defenders and attackers).

Fort I: No penatly attacking over river, +15% withdrawal chance, +10% attack (Mathematics).

Fort II: Immune to first strike, +1 visibility range, +10% friendly heal rate (Optics).

Fort III: +1 first strike chance, +10% withdrawal chance (Steel).

Fort IV: +1 visibility range, +1 first strike chance, +10% withdrawal chance, +10% combat (Mass Media).

I really REALLY like the Crowded effect, but I think the fort one is a good idea too. I can count on one finger the number of games I bothered to build a fort. Give it a lot of bonuses and strength and... well... then it becomes fairly useful.

But the crowded thing is just brilliant!
 
Aeon221 said:
Its hard to disagree there were major changes in cannon usage and power, but there were also some pretty major differences between early catapults and full gravitational trebuchets in terms of power. Adding in a second cannon upgrade before artillery just seems excessive. Besides, it would make more sense to add a faster late game artillery (2 moves instead of 1) than to add another marginal improvement mid game.
I don't think it would be too excessive to add an early cannon between the catapult and cannon. We could keep the cannon at steel and put the early cannon on gunpowder. If only just to keep me from being annoyed at using catapults with rifleman (which happens to me many times).

The crowded effect seems pretty good to me. I wonder if the AI knows how to use it though?

I would be in favor of keeping Greece as Greece. I know its technically more correct to have Macedonia but I think the game would play better as it is.

@Blasphemous
Civ is not a realistic game at all. You can press a button in regular Civ4 and prevent a city from growing. Essentially everything that the player does makes no sense if you take it in a litteral sense as the leader ordering that thing to be done. For example, since when did your country's leader order all of his citizens exactly where to work? And determine when and where to build a factory, university, or bank? The fact is that essentially everything in Civ4 is abstracted so that its fun to play. I honestly think that adding in little modifier popups for every single colony you have would end up being a pain to manage. I think my system would be much simpler and be more in keeping with the level of abstraction found in most of the rest of the game.

Actually I don't think what either of us thinks is really that important, because I doubt that the AI would be able to handle either model very well (or even at all).

Keep up the good work everybody :goodjob:
 
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