[SDK MODCOMP] Influence Driven War

[mice]

This mod would be great combined with Sevo's new Mastery mod.(play always to 2050,new scoring system) I wonder if they are compatible. It could make for a really epic game.

 

[DrewBledsoe]

I would love to try this, but everytime I try to run a game with this Mod loaded, I get a CTD with "Insufficient graphics memory Error" which is annoying....any ideas?....Vanilla Warlords (and all the included Mods) run fine...

EDIT:No Problems I've sorted it out

 

[Nekkerbee]

Is this compatible with jdog5000's Revolution mod?

 

[moctezuma]

This sounds really cool. I like how cultural boarders have a more front line quality to it. In regards to that, if you were to place some units on the edge of your cultural boarder and fortify them, say for 10 turns before their attacked, should that factor into cultural switch? Meaning that tile would take longer to switch sides because of the strong military presence for the past 10 turns?

This idea may be quite good, howewer AI will never understand it, so it would be too big advantage for player.

In the next version a following features will be added:

• pillage influence
• unit experience multiplier
• fort capture multiplier

 

[moctezuma]

Is this compatible with jdog5000's Revolution mod?

Only if given mod doesn't contain own DLL (otherwise a merge of sources and recompiling is needed)

 

[Dom Pedro II]

Nekkerbee, this is not compatible with jdog's Revolution mod right out of the box... you'd have to combine the source codes and then compile a new DLL file. Not too difficult if you know what you're doing... And the best place to find out what to do is here.

I would recommend that if you decide to combine these two mods that you copy and paste the new code from Influence Driven War into the Revolution Mod since the Revolution Mod has more changes and it would thus take much longer to do it the other way around... either way, you'll get the same result. Good luck.

 

[DrewBledsoe]

So now having played a few games, its has my stamp of approval, well done

It's become my now default game setting, but just a couple of points, when you defeat say a barb animal, it still says "Influence gained $* (some chars)"..isn't it possible to insert a subroutine so that this is not output to the screen in these cases?

The other point, losing a combat with odds of around 98% in your favour within your borders HURTS..I lost a tile for almost the whole of the middle ages...just an observation.

Good work again, even though it does encourage me to be an even more warmongering b****** than usual

 

[moctezuma]

Thanks for your game play report.

It's become my now default game setting, but just a couple of points, when you defeat say a barb animal, it still says "Influence gained $* (some chars)"..isn't it possible to insert a subroutine so that this is not output to the screen in these cases?

This problem is known, but anyway thank you. It is caused by divide by zero if there is no culture of any player in defended plot. It affects only displayed messages and there is no game play impact.

It will be corrected in the next version; I'm waiting for Warlords patch .

The other point, losing a combat with odds of around 98% in your favour within your borders HURTS..I lost a tile for almost the whole of the middle ages...just an observation.

Yes it HURTS But this makes each victory/loss in combat much more important and therefore much more interesting than in vanilla.

 

[cf_nz]

I've just finished my first game with this mod and must say I'm very impressed. For what (as you say) is a fairly small change it has the potential to add quite a lot of interest to war, particularly border wars. More so if you implement the culture gain/loss from pillaging, you're not just going to lose improvments, you may even lose territory.

I was initially dubious about the resistance part of the mod, but that wasn't at all intrusive. It's actually quite well done, the units are easy to beat, it just delays city capture for a number of turns.

Well done for an inspired idea.

 

[Owain]

I'm curious what happens if two large forces clash within a 3rd-party's borders? Say, for example, I am America and I am at war with England, but Spain lies in-between us. We both have open borders with Spain and our forces meet in the middle. Will we be gaining culture within Spain as our forces fight in Spanish territory?

 

[Zetetic Apparat]

I don't think so. I think the point is that any American culture within that Spanish territory would be partially converted to English culture (which I suppose could actually change it from Spanish to English control under unusual circumstances).

 

[Der Steppenwolf]

I downloaded this and tried it out. I went to war in three different periods: Ancient/Medieval, early Industrial, and WWII modern.

This mod was absolutely fantastic when used in the ancient/Medieval time frame. It was good in the early industrial (but then again, I was invading an empire stuck in the Middle Ages). However, I was terribly disappointed with the modern warfare. I invaded an empire that was equal to me in strength, size, and technology. He used almost all of his military to defend against the initial invasion; thus, his border cities fell with little militia resistance and passed over quite easily (roughly three of them). Since his military was broken, the rest was just a quick invasion to gather up his remaining six cities that were pretty poorly defended. However, since there was little land battle nearby and a well-established culture, I was confronted with a constantly re-spawning militia. While this wasn't a big deal time-wise (it was really only delaying the inevitable, and only one city was taken by an ally instead of me), it was terribly annoying in that I start to attack a level 16 city full of improvements, yet capture a level 1 city with barely anything that served more as a burden than a gain to my empire.

I think a solution to this would either have the multiplier to spawn the militia be reduced greatly, to have the drafted malitia not take population away from the city (if that is possible), or to put a cap on the number of militia that can be spawned per turn.

This was only a problem in the modern warfare as opposed to the others because their empires didn't have as much time to build up culture, and the slower movement rates of ancient empire allowed battle to take place in the field near target cities even near an empire's demise.

 

[Elhoim]

This mod is great!!

 

[moctezuma]

@Der Steppenwolf:

Thanks for your report. There are some very important points that are very valuable for further development of this mod:

I was terribly disappointed with the modern warfare. I invaded an empire that was equal to me in strength, size, and technology. He used almost all of his military to defend against the initial invasion; thus, his border cities fell with little militia resistance and passed over quite easily (roughly three of them). Since his military was broken, the rest was just a quick invasion to gather up his remaining six cities that were pretty poorly defended. However, since there was little land battle nearby and a well-established culture, I was confronted with a constantly re-spawning militia. While this wasn't a big deal time-wise (it was really only delaying the inevitable, and only one city was taken by an ally instead of me), it was terribly annoying in that I start to attack a level 16 city full of improvements, yet capture a level 1 city with barely anything that served more as a burden than a gain to my empire.

The issues you have observed exactly match to my experience in several multiplayer LAN games with this mod. Border cities are quite easy to capture due to attacker culture has been well established in the territory prior to war. However when attacker force moves deep inside enemy territory the problems begin. There is no culture of attacker so raising it from 0% to 50% requires many victorious combats.

I will tell you truth. This was partly intentional because from my experience in vanilla multiplayer games the big military force means everything. Developing of culture and building of wonders is very low priority because with big force you can capture everything you want.

This mod tries to make balance between warmongering and culture building. The rule is: if your culture is high; the conquered cities resist less and thus the captured cities are bigger.
I also don’t like that almost each war in vanilla requires complete annihilation of enemy otherwise you have a culture problems. With this mod a best tactics to take out enemy with big territory is several small wars: capture border cities, make peace (and vassalise enemy if you don’t want to continue), increase culture in captured cities (theatres, great artists), when your culture is raised to level that also next enemy cities are affected, capture the rest. This way captured cities resist much less. This mod also makes vassalisation much more desirable than complete conquest.

Nevertheless your points about war in later areas are very important for me.
I'm now trying to solve them without big impact on Ancient/Medieval wars.
I want to avoid making artificial cap on the number of militia.
There are two possibilities how to increase influence in later eras comparing to earlier eras:

• experience multiplier: units have more experience in the later game than in early game.
• base unit strength multiplier: modern units are stronger i.e. they make more influence

I currently prefer experience based multiplier because I wouldn’t like to make the conquest easier for technologically superior civs: it is already quite easy
I'm currently playing with +3% influence per experience point. This way some veteran units can make double influence than rookies.

 

[moctezuma]

I was initially dubious about the resistance part of the mod, but that wasn't at all intrusive. It's actually quite well done, the units are easy to beat, it just delays city capture for a number of turns.

Yes, the purpose of militia is only to delay. When I'm playing as warmonger I like when some militia appears in conquered cities. Militia is cheap way how to increase experience of my units (1 point from each combat) and also way how to increase your culture in near territory.

 

[moctezuma]

I don't think so. I think the point is that any American culture within that Spanish territory would be partially converted to English culture (which I suppose could actually change it from Spanish to English control under unusual circumstances).

Yes, the culture is transferred only from loser to winner.
There is still very small possibility how to acquire tile from third party:

Situation prior to combat: (tile is Spanish).
America: 32%
England: 32%
Spain: 36%

America wins combat with England: Influence 5%
America: 37%
England: 27%
Spain: 36%

The tile is now American

 

[Owain]

That's very cool... However, I'd almost prefer that even if you have zero culture ina tile previously, you still get some gain from winning in that tile... Even against barbarians.

If you are defeating barbarian threats in a neighboring friendly country, wouldn't you develop some cultural influence in that area? It seems to me that troops friendly to a foreign country often exert a cultural influence... Whether its developing relationships with local people, or whatever... Many nationas have military bases in foreign coutnries and those bases are populated by people who bring some of the culture of their home nation with them. I think this mod could reflect that rather nicely.

 

[Zebra 9]

I agree. Good point.

 

[moctezuma]

That's very cool... However, I'd almost prefer that even if you have zero culture ina tile previously, you still get some gain from winning in that tile... Even against barbarians.

If you are defeating barbarian threats in a neighboring friendly country, wouldn't you develop some cultural influence in that area? It seems to me that troops friendly to a foreign country often exert a cultural influence... Whether its developing relationships with local people, or whatever... Many nationas have military bases in foreign coutnries and those bases are populated by people who bring some of the culture of their home nation with them. I think this mod could reflect that rather nicely.

Your point is good. I have a little problem that this rule will break concept of this mod: military never generates a new culture; units only transfer culture from one civ to second civ.

I will think about your suggestion.

 

[Grave]

Moctezuma,

Ran into a problem...

I'm running Influence Driven War along with Dale's Combat Mod. If I'm fighting in enemy terrritory and kill their unit, I don't receive any influence from the victory. This just started happening after I merged Dale's Mod with yours.

The codes don't seem to over-write eachothers (that I'm aware of), so I'm kinda stumped on this one.



** EDIT **

Disregard the above... I figured out the problem. Turns out Influence Driven War doesn't like Dale's Stack Attack. I disabled the stack attack feature, and it works like a charm again.