Rhye's of Europe Civ Discussion Thread

[BurnEmDown]

Or maybe even play as the revolutionaries! Just like in E:TW.
If you succeed at taking your capital you civics will be switched to different ones depending what the people want.

 

[FuzzyRabbitLord]

I had suggested this once before but ill bring it up again, It would be interesting to change some respawn location as the game progresses, that why civs can in effect represent two different civs (with a name change which should be easy)
some examples of how this would work.

Byzantine respawns somewhere in the 1600's +
they respawn as Greece, and take athons and mistra, maybe even thesolanika if we wil go so far.

Cordoba respawns after 1500 as Morocco (something of fez... cant remember what Morocco was called then) in Tanja

the name change would also be interesting (this would require much less coding) in maybe that when a civ respawns it comes with a more modern name, (maybe the name of whatever soveriegn nation controlled it around that time if there was one.

other candidates could be burgundy, spain (respawning out of toledo instead)

this would ad some more variability to the game and could lead to some interesting situations, some locations are already in the core area so it might be a little easier to code, then again this might just be to much work to implement and or screw with the balance or smething

 

[Tigranes]

Just an idea I would like to discuss: every time I see a message -- a new civilization is being born I ask myself -- where is the visible leader? The birth of a civ is represented by the stack of Settlers and Archers, how about the founding father?

Why don't we give each civ a great person at the birth -- appropriate to that civilization and with his historical name. For example Damascus was conquered by the Rashidun Caliphate during the reign of Umar by forces under Khaled ibn al-Walid. Arabs can start with Great General Khaled ibn al-Walid, or with Great Prophet (Caliph) Umar. While the Great General would be the most appropriate choice for the most civs, some, Venice and Genoa, for example, could start with a Great Merchant. Cordoba with a Great Scientist. Byzantium can start without Hagia Sophia but with Isidore of Miletus or Anthemius of Tralles as a Great Engeneer (the current building was originally constructed as a church between 532 and 537 A.D and we start at 500 AD).

The Great Spy is the other good choice for Byzantium. What separated Byzantium from other nations of the early Middle Ages was its active involvement in manipulating internal events in other countries. Today we take for granted the existence of government agencies which gather and interpret intelligence, cultivate support in foreign circles and perhaps even instigate rebellion. To find such a sophisticated and centralized arrangement as early as the sixth century is truly remarkable.

To aid in dealing with other nations, the Byzantines established an organization called the 'Bureau of Barbarians' (aka Scotland Yard in Civ IV), which gathered information from every source imaginable (even priests) and kept files on who was influential, who was susceptible to bribery, what a nation's historical roots were, what was likely to impress them, etc.

The only concern is that this can disbalance the starting situations. But it would also be very fun to see how AI will use his free Great Person.

So what you think, guys?

 

[sedna17]

FuzzyRabitLord:

What you're proposing is somewhat complicated to implement. I think we'll eventually move to have the original spawn zone and the re-spawn zones be different (they are in RFC, but we merged them back-in-the-day to make things easier). We'll also want to work on dynamic renaming -- which can be made time-specific (albeit with more work). Between these, we could get most of the effect of re-born civs being "different". It's not as easy to automatically give a different capitol, for example, but it could be coded for some specific examples. In general, we still haven't really settled on a re-spawn model yet, but I will keep your good suggestions in mind as we go forward.

Tigranes:

I'm lukewarm this idea. It seems an unnecessary complication. I'm not sure the AI wouldn't disband a GP right away when it sees it doesn't have any cities (this could be tested, or the GP could spawn a few turns later ala the workers). In a sense, the leaderheads/human player are the "fathers" of each Civ.

 

[AnotherPacifist]

Actually, a random GP when workers appear would be a welcome variation; depending on the GP, you might take your civ in a different direction (military vs. scientific vs. financial). The only problem would be that there are more than enough great people names for certain civs (Arabia) but not much for others (Bulgaria).

 

[Tigranes]

I don't see why AI would disband a Great General?

Take Clovis I, for example. He is remembered for three main accomplishments : his unification of the Frankish nation, his conquest of Gaul, and his conversion to the Roman Catholic Faith. Leaderhead is a general representation of the Civ, the best known leader for the perioid of 500 -1800 AD. Saladin was Kurd not even an Arab! The civ specific Great Person at the start only responsible for a jumpstart, he adds flavor. His "uniqeness" would be perfectly in line with the entire RFC phylosophy. Well, think about the "founding" Great Person as a starting technology -- civ's founding Great Person is kinda defining the starting situation for that civ, just like techs, gold, the place, etc.

Is it a complication on the level of coding or unpredictable changes in the game mechanics? But I can certainly see that is it hard enough to balance the existing stuff before introducing something new.

Where in a code do you assign which units each civ gets on the spawn? Just want to see what would AI do...

 

[sedna17]

Sure, feel free to experiment with it and see what the AI does.

Assets/Python/RiseAndFall.py

See the function called "createStartingUnits", it should be reasonably self-explanatory. Note the Byzantium/Burgundy/Frankia have their units on the map instead of being created by this function.

To add a great prophet would just be

utils.makeUnit(con. iProphet, iCiv, tPlot, 2)

Assets/Python/Consts.py lists the units available and their names in the code.

 

[3Miro]

utils.makeUnit(con.iProphet, iCiv, tPlot, 2)

No space between con and iProohet.

If Byzantines start with a spy, who would they use it against? I don't know if they will keep on to it until Bulgaria spawns.

The AI uses GPs in a rather predictable matter, if we give a GP to nation, then it will probably always use it in the exact same way anyway. Since it is easy to add it, you can do that to see what changes.

Different respawn regions would be challenge to implement. We will need to know which civ has respawned and which not to consider in stability. There is still the issue with overlapping core areas. Then how do you count owning cities in someone else's core ares and so on. It is not a bad idea, just hard to implement.

 

[3Miro]

The basic question is: Why do respawns happen?
1) Nationalist reasons (perhaps Nationalism should have been discovered for a respawn, or any other landmark tech?)
2) Instability of the empire leads to smaller factions breaking up
3) Religious reasons
4) Inspired by another revolution, thus creating revolution waves
5) Certain civics may encourage or discourage civs of breaking up
6) Incited by other forces


For example, Greek revolution happened due to reasons 1-4, the American one due to 1, 2, 5 and perhaps 6.

Perhaps for a revolution to happen, there should be a minimum of 4 of the 6 above conditions. No cities should flip, but a military force could show up, immediately in war with you. Instead of war, you could have the option to release civ as vassal, free the civ or pay the revolutionaries to stop the attack. You could also ''incite a revolt'' to a rival civ who occupies another civ's core area.

Any thoughts?

1018 Bulgaria was "conquered" by the Byzantines and in 1186 it "respawned" after the rebellion of Tzar Asen I. Reason 2 was definitely involved and I suppose one could argue one (it was long before the era of Nationalism, but then some define Bulgaria as the first nations state in Europe, so at least some version of medieval nationalistic concept was perhaps involved). Bulgarians and Byzantines were both Orthodox Christians, however, there were issues with the official language of the Church, Byzantines did not allow Bulgarian to be spoken in sermons, so one could argue a religious reason. There were no other revolutions or powers in the region that could have influenced anything and Byzantines surely did not change civics.

That is 2, 3 reasons tops, and the "respawn" did take place. Actually all of the issues stated (one way or another) are already implemented in the stability factor for the empires, so in terms of our mod, stability should be the main factor in respawn (as is in regular RFC). I don't yet know how the revised stability scheme works, but maybe that is part of the issue/solution.

Also, giving an army means that the army should belong to someone. So that is in effect respawn without cities.

 

[Tigranes]

No space between con and iProohet.

If Byzantines start with a spy, who would they use it against? I don't know if they will keep on to it until Bulgaria spawns.

The AI uses GPs in a rather predictable matter, if we give a GP to nation, then it will probably always use it in the exact same way anyway. Since it is easy to add it, you can do that to see what changes.

Byzantines could build a 'Bureau of Barbarians' (Scotland Yard) if we enable that building. Right now they keep Great Spy in the Capital, Rome settles Great Prophet, no tech bulbing, Franks settle Clovis (Great General). I think you are right about AI...

By the way, if Academy is in the game, why GS can't build it?

 

[sedna17]

By the way, if Academy is in the game, why GS can't build it?

Just a bug, but thanks for the reminder.

 

[Tigranes]

I am sure there have been talks about the poor sanitary conditions in Medieval Europe before (new manual talks about it too), but I would like to address this issue one more time. There is little record of sanitation in most of Europe until the High Middle Ages. Unsanitary conditions and overcrowding were widespread throughout Europe. Life for the average person at this time was indeed 'nasty, brutish and short.'

Now look at RFCE Europe somewhere around 1000 AD. We got lots of rivers, resources, buildings and trees, and all this results in big healthy Catholic cities. While Orthodox and Muslim cities used baths, this was not the case with Catholic nations. Bagdad, Cairo and Damascus had a combined population of 2 million, while Paris and London had about 50, 000 residents each. And yes, they did stink. Luckily Civ 4 has nice health system which is not used enough to depict the situation.

Would be nice to see that nasty green stinky smoke over the medium-to-bid European cities. Why don't we make population unit to create +2 unhealthiness? Until the High Middle Ages? It would capture the flavor, I would say the odor of the age

 

[AnotherPacifist]

I always bulb Arabic Medicine (8000 beakers) when I play Arabia and build the Round Church, not that I need it but it saves on beakers. Maybe make it give the same effect as reducing population unhealthiness from 2 to 1 (because otherwise it's a useless tech)?

 

[sedna17]

I agree that historically health should be more of a problem for western europe. Making each person +2 would cause health problems for all of the map (I don't actually know where to make this change, but presumably it exists in the XML). One could balance this by putting more + buildings in the "Islamic" techs as AP sort of suggests.

I'm not totally convinced that this would be more fun though. Perhaps it's just me, but I hate to have unhealthy cities. It bugs me, even if the un-health isn't impeding growth that much (or I don't care about growing right now).

 

[jessiecat]

I agree with Tigranes and AP. Health should never be a problem with Islamic civs in the early game while it should be with the rest until at least 1700, if we want to be historical about it. The same applies to tech research in Islamic civs. They should have big advantages up to 1400AD. After that their research rate can be halved at least, IMO. But then with the recent changes, Arabia has just become ridiculously unstable anyway so so maybe its a moot point, isn't it?

 

[3Miro]

I agree that historically health should be more of a problem for western europe. Making each person +2 would cause health problems for all of the map (I don't actually know where to make this change, but presumably it exists in the XML). One could balance this by putting more + buildings in the "Islamic" techs as AP sort of suggests.

I'm not totally convinced that this would be more fun though. Perhaps it's just me, but I hate to have unhealthy cities. It bugs me, even if the un-health isn't impeding growth that much (or I don't care about growing right now).

There should be a balancing factor in RFCEBalance that deals with the health. I think everyone has pretty much no health bonus, however, we can give Arabs a health bonus and make population give +2 unhealthiness or something along those lines.

(IIRC the balancing knob gave health, but could not remove it. No one gets negative health.)

 

[3Miro]

I read the post with RFCE suggestions. The pedia one is definitely good. It would take some coding, but we can move the stability penalties/bonuses in the XML. This will make our mode different from RFC, in RFC Rhye wanted to make stability "arcane" i.e. you don't know exactly how it works.

The Papal State and the HRE need a lot of improvement. They will require a lot of thought. For one I don't think adding a HRE player makes sense, we have no place to put him on the map. I think we should make it so that any Catholic player can become HRE i some way or another.

Jerusalem is supposed to give stability bonus and start a golden age. I just have not coded that part yet.

If Arabia found themselves at war with every Catholic nation in the world, that would harm their stability a lot. Multinational army before the wall of Jerusalem is good, but we have to be careful. We can make a generic "independent" Crusader player that will lead rouge/independent crusades around the map. The Crusader player will be friendly with all Catholics and at war with everyone else (even Orthodox players).

If the Portugal UP is underpowered, we will update it. I have been away from the mod for some time now and I don't have a good feel for the balance yet.

 

[jessiecat]

About your observations. I'm not sure which "pedia" idea you think is good. If its about giving stability bonuses for wonders, etc. I agree. As for the HRE, I don't think there's any need for a sep. civ. I'd rather see a more active Papacy with decrees, alliances and maybe even congresses of some kind. Not sure about the indy crusader though. As for Arabian instabilty, did you see where AP and I pointed out how this has become a big problem since the changes in the latest version?

 

[sedna17]

I think a big question for stability is how much we can easily reveal. I support as much disclosure as possible, and I think this is the general consensus of the group, but many things are tricky. Obviously we can add XML to the buildings to show their stability boost when built. This works well for a few other aspects of stability (+/- for certain techs), but would be much more work to implement for others. Consider a few of the other elements of stability:

Civics: Most of the "government" civics influence stability. We can add tags for these effects, but how do we show the interactions between civics? How do we display that Serfdom + Manorialism gives you a +X stability bonus?

Foreign: The stability value of vassals, open borders/wars, and unstable neighbors is complicated. There's no set stability hit for going to war, because the formula caps how much negative stability you can have from this. Do we calculate this number for the player and display it somewhere?

Expansion: A critical aspect of stability is the penalty into "foreign" homelands. There's no straightforward way to show the +/- from this -- the value of any given city depends on the others you have (i.e. there is some grace number of cities which you can have in foreign lands with no penalty).

As for Arabian instabilty, did you see where AP and I pointed out how this has become a big problem since the changes in the latest version?

Hey Jessiecat, I guess you missed in another post where I said I've found a bug with how stability and religion spreading interact that was causing a big part of the Arab instability. That fix will help a lot -- and I'm still investigating another part of their stability which is acting funny.

 

[jessiecat]

I guess you missed in another post where I said I've found a bug with how stability and religion spreading interact that was causing a big part of the Arab instability. That fix will help a lot -- and I'm still investigating another part of their stability which is acting funny.

No. I didn't miss it. I just thought you meant you found one factor and were still looking for others. I just wondered if 3Miro had any ideas about it. But if you do find out the full answer, that's great of course.