Sneak Peek - The Total Overhaul I'm working on..

[Ryika]

Ah, that's what you mean. Yeah, there's three types of Old Earth Relic:

Two of them are:
- +2 Yield in the Capital
- +1 Other yield in all Cities (It's possible that in your version they still add bonuses towards the specific buildings, I later changed it to just add bonuses to the Infrastructure)

They sound somewhat weak, but add up during the game, given that they also scale with %-modifiers.
I find that for the most part I directly solve Old Earth Relics of good quality (and sometimes production/culture with lower quality), while keeping and combining low-quality artifacts.

The third type adds +10% of one yield to all cities, but those bonuses will only start appearing once all of category 1+2 are used up, so in mass-artifact strategies (aka large focus on Early Exploration, mostly) it makes sense to combine as much as possible. Obviously I haven't done any theorycrafting, but from playing I feel that it makes sense to combine both methods, instead of just solving every single Old Earth Artifact.

And overall Old Earth Artifacts are mostly meant to reward investment in early exploration, Alien Artifacts are mostly gathered over the course of the game if hostile towards aliens (and reward +Health and some other Bonuses) and Progenitor Artifacts still reward the same wonders they do in the base game, with some number changes. They're, aside from the few that you may pick up from Progenitor ruins early on, mostly gained by investing in certain virtues (not sure if they were already in the test version) and the moonbase.

 

[Ari Rahikkala]

With that said... I'm lagging behind schedule. I originally planned to release the mod next weekend, but I will probably require a few days more than that.

I've been checking this thread fairly regularly recently to see if a release is coming, good to know that it's not far off anymore even if it didn't quite hit the original schedule!

Also, as a complete aside:

Finally, Supremacy. I think from a gameplay perspective, they should be based on science, energy, and specialists

I find it interesting how specialists and Supremacy match up in terms of game mechanics, versus how it *feels* to a lot of people how they should match up. In terms of game mechanics, it's pretty straightforward: Supremacy doesn't tend to grow much food, so they don't tend to have a lot of population, so they will just be working good tiles instead of having to spill over into the less powerful specialists. And that matches Ryika's reasoning upthread - Supremacy just doesn't have a lot of people, so they're not going to have the market sizes that support lots of specialization.

... yet on the other hand, you don't really look at Supremacy and think "oh, these people are going to be a bunch of undistinguished laborers", no? Supremacy society, it seems to me, should be really advanced with automation everywhere, with humans - a fairly small amount of humans, even - only involved far up the chain, in those tasks that really require ingenuity or other human attributes. The boring work still happens, it just doesn't get done by people. So how do you design their mechanics to make it feel like that's what's happening, and makes Supremacy feel distinct from the other affinities? I hope this mod has a good answer to that, I guess I'll get to see once it's released

 

[Ryika]

My motherboard chose a really, really bad time to stop working. 2 additional days lost. Although, now that I've invested the money I wanted to spend on Civ 6 on new Hardware I actually have an extra week of time for post-release maintenance before I get addicted of Civ 6 - which means that in total I've gained 5 days to work on the mod. Hooray for positivity! Anyway.

... yet on the other hand, you don't really look at Supremacy and think "oh, these people are going to be a bunch of undistinguished laborers", no? Supremacy society, it seems to me, should be really advanced with automation everywhere, with humans - a fairly small amount of humans, even - only involved far up the chain, in those tasks that really require ingenuity or other human attributes. The boring work still happens, it just doesn't get done by people. So how do you design their mechanics to make it feel like that's what's happening, and makes Supremacy feel distinct from the other affinities? I hope this mod has a good answer to that, I guess I'll get to see once it's released

Well, not sure if I have a _good_ solution, but I have _a_ solution. Supremacy gets a "Super-Specialist", the "OBSERVR", which basically stands for the whole automated infrastructure. That specialist gains a lot of extra yields as the game goes on, and you unlock more slots over time, so most of Supremacy's power comes from these specialists.

Supremacy as a whole gets a hefty growth penalty in cities bigger than a certain size, so the total number of Citizens is much lower than those of other other affinities (they make up for it by having lots of cities), which "symbolizes" the lack of a human working class.

But to be honest... I'm not quite happy with the way "Affinity Identity" works in the mod. Reworking the system however would mean removing many of the basic buildings and replacing them with Affinity-Specific content - large changes to the core of the mod that I just don't have the time for now. If _some_ interest is maintained even after Civ 6's release I'll probably do a large upgrade once my initial hunger for Civ 6 is gone.

 

[Rhavanna]

Ahhh I saw Supremacy more with cyber-augmentation, or straight up transferring consciousness to machines. Hence specialists could just be a bunch of digital people's minds or something.

Anyway, super excited for this! Are you still hopin' to release this week?

 

[Ryika]

Yeah, I'm currently doing some final manual testruns, then I'll need to fill the event-system with more content, then I'll need to add some stuff to get the AI to work with some of the changes I did in the last month or two. After that it's just some more automated AI-only runs while writing Mod descriptions, texts for the release threads and finishing the feature-guide.

So assuming nothing goes seriously wrong I should be able to finally release it early this weekend.

Then I'll take a day or two off, and then I'll start filling in some of the other stuff that I didn't really have the time to add until now.

 

[Rhavanna]

Awesome, lookin' forward to it!

 

[Ryika]

Phew, even those last changes took much longer than planned. It's finally released:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/codex-gameplay-overhaul.599632/

 

[MasterEcabob]

Wow, Ryika, you have really outdone yourself! Been playing the early game and really enjoying the total revamp you did to the aliens, buildings, virtues and techs so far. Still pretty early into the game-is it normal not to have any stations spawn in the first hundred turns? Also, so far everyone is super friendly to one another-but I haven't unlocked the diplo or empire manager, and I remember you said some hate would come from that system. Just kinda funny that I'm busy forward settling Brazilia and they are giving me a big thumbs up. Thanks for all the work you put into this mod-it is cool seeing all the individual elements from your previous mods coming together like this.

 

[Ryika]

Yes, Stations start appearing turn 75+. That's intentional, as that's around the time when the Standardization-Technology can reasonably expected to be unlocked if targeted as one of the earlier technologies, which gives access to the Commonwealth and triggers their introduction quest.

About people being friendly: That depends mostly on how your diplomatic positions (which you cannot see at that point) match their own; if you get some positive reactions people will be friendly (and Sponsors that you're at least cooperating with will no longer flame you for forward-settling them - which doesn't mean they won't attack you if they're a military civ or pushed into the corner, you just don't get a diplo-penalty) - or if they don't match you may get some negative reactions that you cannot yet do anything about. In my personal testings and the AI-only games I've seen it go both ways - or just stay neutral if the diplo modifiers somewhat equalize out.

 

[MasterEcabob]

Alright, just getting out of the midgame and finally playing around with empire manager, tier II Virtues, moonbase and everything. Wow, I am beyond impressed! So far, I have eight cities, two metropolises, three industrial, and three power grids set up. I thought I could be clever and just ignore power cities, but the way you set it up is really interesting. Trying to build those more expensive infustructures and fund the moon base (missed Luna Wonder so I'm already behind) is almost impossible without setting up a bunch of +21 energy external trade routes. And, at the same time, you can't build any of those energy trade boosters if you don't have the building mats from industrial cities. Then I have my two uber cities cranking out culture and spawning affinity resources from the Holosuite to also fund the moonbase. It is really, really intricut!

Only issue I've notice so far is with the Commonwealth. When I go to cash in my credits, the game actually gives me MORE credits rather than subtracting them! Don't worry-I haven't exploited it...too much.

Thanks for this amazing mod, I can't wait to see what else it has in store.

 

[Ryika]

Woops, will make sure to fix that haha. ^^

And I'm glad to hear the city-system works as it's supposed to. There are ways around having to have all three city types, but those require investments of their own.

 

[MasterEcabob]

Alright, so quick question. Is the AI actually capable of 'solving' the moonbase? Because, like I said, I started way behind on it but even in the late game, I'm the only one who has finished the first stage of the quest with the three starter buildings. Do the AI just not prioritize building the Progenitor Resources? Also, loving the bonuses from the moon excavations-you weren't kidding about those huge boosts!

 

[Ryika]

No, the AI can currently not win Contact victory. In fact, it doesn't use the Moonbase at all and instead gets generic bonuses. It also doesn't construct any Contact-related buildings other than Project Luna (which is an exception only because it's a world wonder).

That's mainly due to the way Contact Victory works - it requires investment in very specific buildings, at a very specific time ("as early as possible, but without hurting your development too much") to start rolling, and for the AI falling behind or focusing too much on Moonbase Buildings are both huge pitfalls. So I couldn't really think of a way to make the AI work with the system, and I wasn't willing to change the system because I find that it plays out pretty well and very different from the other victories where you don't have that "Do I Invest in my Empire, or my Moonbase?"-decision.

So I made sure AIs focus on Affinity Victories or Domination, which are a lot easier for them to understand, and which they can actually achieve in a pretty reasonable time-frame (although even there I had to make them cheat a bit because they were missing out on a lot of Affinity from Quests).

 

[MasterEcabob]

I have absolutely zero problem with that. I know there are modders who say you should never implement a system the AI cannot understand, but the moonbase is by far my favorite new feature-from both a lore and a gameplay perspective. Even if I focus on it less in later playthroughs, there are some excavations that I will want to make every game. Top notch design.

Although you may want to tone down the AI affinity gain just a bit. Even doing all the quests, the AI leaders have more levels in their non-dominant affinities than I have in my main one! Is this bonus based on difficulty? Playing on Soyez, so it could just be they have enough other bonuses to tech and build all the affinity buildings.

 

[Ryika]

Yep. To expand a little on my thoughts: The way I see it it's great when an AI can understand a feature, and if it's a feature that is vital to the gameplay it must either be understood, or able to be simulated with scripts well enough that it feels like they do, but when it comes to something like Victory Conditions I don't see it as that much of a deal. It has some negative impact on immersion that AIs will never try to compete for Contact Victory, but I think the Moonbase itself adds more immersion than is taken away by that. The AIs do compete for Victory by following other paths and any Victory will mean a loss for the player, so I think in terms of gameplay nothing is really lost.

The additional Affinity is only granted for the main Affinity, and only after they reach Affinity 5 is reached (which is when Quests start triggering), the rest just comes from the same sources that players also use; Free Affinity levels, Buildings, and Technologies. Higher level AIs will almost always go semi-hybrid, simply because they unlock the Technologies and construct the Affinity Buildings for all Affinities.