Suggestions and Requests

[ozqar]

Leoreth, any thoughts or possibilities on moving towards that idea of a terrain feature overhaul? We had talked about having steppes, savannas/shrublands, and possibly water terrains such as kelp beds and coral reefs, long ago. Ideas also included getting rid of jungles and having a different form of feature (I suggested mosquitoes) making tiles unhealthy (also for swamps). At the time you liked the ideas, but they weren't a top priority because I think we were in the middle of the tech changes and the new tree.

Calad (I think) also brought up the notion of cold periods, which we could at least start having with changes between terrain types if we nuance them further. For example, we had discussed a cold equivalent of the grasslands (a "steppe", although there were some doubts about using that word in particular) with less food production value, for northern areas in the map. Shifting grasslands and steppes (cold/temperate), as well as prairies and grasslands (humid/dry), could be a way to model this.

Then, of course, I'm also very interesting in discussing changes in the conception of what "production" means, and where you get hammers from. We had talked about how it doesn't make sense to have prairies give a hammer by virtue of being a drier form of the grasslands. This would be a later step, of course. Right now I'm only wondering about expanding/changing the terrain types! Anyway, I'm happy to bring up the old comments again, and perhaps further think about them, if this is interesting in the short term.

 

[Leoreth]

I think I wrote a detailed comment about me being happy with rainforests/jungles the way they are.

Introducing intermediate terrains for desert/plains/grassland/tundra is interesting, but in that case we need some reason to have them, i.e. there should be an actual difference that represent their geographical regions better. You already give a good reason for an intermediate cold terrain (moorland?) for e.g. the northern parts of Europe that are not quite tundra. Steppes could be interesting for regions like central Eurasia, it could disallow improvements like desert but have some base yield. It might also be a nice idea to give units like Horse Archers extra movement on steppes which would really help with a more realistic and feasible Mongol game. The long planned introduction of a Turkic civ might be the right time to do this, it's always nice to have a new civ that synergises with other new features (remember how pearls and islands were introduced together with Polynesia?). No idea about savannah though.

If you want to help me do this: make a thread (to keep things in a central place) and help me look for art, and come up with suggestion for terrain attributes and map locations. Look at the camel resource thread for what is most useful to me there.

Not sure why we do need to model cold periods, like what effect would they have on the game and why is this effect desirable?

I'm open to remove production from plains, but in general I do not want to change production in a more general way.

 

[hnrysml]

I wrote this and then decided it was a pretty bad idea, but I thought I'd share it anyway, in case it spurs better discussion:

Is it possible to write a code for different terrains to offer different yields for different civs, like the Incas get food and production from mountain tiles? Even though it's called the Power of Terraces (I think), it kinda represents the very habitable Altiplano, and fertile valleys, which there isn't room for on the map?

I feel like this would be a potential way to represent certain unique terrain. And perhaps by the modern era or certain techs any differences in terrain yield between civs would disappear

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

Hm, Realism Invictus has something like that, every civ can build different improvements, e.g. there's "South-East Asian Farm", "Latifundium" etc., and their yields boosts from techs and civics sometimes differ from the general improvement they replace.

 

[Tigranes]

Is there any way to design Ctrl+Mouse over type of tooltip help in predicting the name of the city for chosen tile for given civilization? Some of us prefer historical city placement over "the most productive" spots. For example I would like to found Huston but not sure where do I find the spot for it? Is it on that Jungle tile in Texas (why do we even have Jungle tile in Texas ) ?

 

[Leoreth]

I could have sworn that I had implemented something like that already. How about making it part of the tile tooltip when having a settler selected?

 

[Tigranes]

Yes, that would be a very cool feature!

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

Wait, I'm too lazy to actually check, but doesn't the city name appear as tooltip over the Build City action of settlers? Obviously this is a bit awkward because you actively have to move a settler somewhere to find out what the city is going to be called, similar to how Great Merchants can only see how much gold they get from conducting a trade mission in a city when they are already in it.

 

[Leoreth]

That's what I thought I had added, but maybe I only helped someone else add it to their mod? It's not in the game.

 

[Leoreth]

Okay nevermind, I just looked it up and found that this part of the interface is implemented in the DLL. It's unfortunately not possible to easily make strings defined in Python available to the DLL, so that won't work.

 

[merijn_v1]

The worldbuilder does show the CNM when you hover your mouse over a tile. I'm fairly sure this should also be possible in the main screen. It will not appear in the tooltip for the reasons Leoreth said, but it can appear somewhere else on the screen.

 

[AbsintheRed]

Is there any way to design Ctrl+Mouse over type of tooltip help in predicting the name of the city for chosen tile for given civilization? Some of us prefer historical city placement over "the most productive" spots. For example I would like to found Huston but not sure where do I find the spot for it? Is it on that Jungle tile in Texas (why do we even have Jungle tile in Texas ) ?

Surely this comment wasn't meant for RFCE, but this is something which should be added to all RFC-type mods IMO.
Sounds very useful!

 

[Leoreth]

Yeah, you run into technical difficulties though. Other than storing all city name maps in C++ I wouldn't know how.

 

[AbsintheRed]

Well, I recently added the DataLoader module from SoI, which loads the data from Maps.py into appropriate objects within CvGameCoreDLL.
So far I only use it for provinces (I did have different functions for getting province IDs before, but this seems more straightforward and probably faster too), but in RFCE I also store the city name maps in python for each civ separately. So I'm in the lucky situation that loading and storing those maps into c++ is more or less given.
Is it that much different for DoC? I presume you don't have full name maps (as in map form) for each civ?

 

[Leoreth]

DoC has language maps, because civs can share a language or can have multiple (fallback) languages. I also already have an mechanism in place to init DLL objects from Python (e.g. stability values), I just think it's excessive to do that for display purposes only.

 

[AbsintheRed]

I thought adding the preset maps to the .dll on startup, and accessing those stored values ingame (preferably only when a settler is selected) wouldn't take a heavy toll on computers.
Am I mistaken here?

 

[Leoreth]

Performance probably not, but I'm wary of increasing the memory footprint without good reason.

 

[Ecthy]

Scenario design question. The German (Prussian) national territory works in kind of fishy ways. I understand that upon entering the Modern Era, East Prussia is supposed to change away from Core status. This means that Königsberg moves from the denominator to the numerator, providing a huge change in territory-based stability. Intended? Maybe change to historical area? Or are we such big fans of Generalplan Ost after all, to make up for this? Not that it would make too much sense historically, since the latter was part of a war policy while Königsberg was still considered core.

Another detail in change of national territory is that upon entering Modern Era, core territory is added in the south east. Did Germany magically aquire Salzburg after WWII?

Thank you for your attention to users' requests, and to historical detail

 

[Leoreth]

Is Königsberg not historical after the change? It is supposed to be, the intention is only to remove it from the core. The whole idea behind this effect is to reflect the loss of Germany's eastern territory after the world wars and their transition to being reclaimed/settled by other cultural groups. In game the smaller core also makes expansionism harder, so you are encouraged to win the second goal as early as possible, and possibly liberate some territory afterwards while focusing on the research goal.

The south eastern extension is not intentional though.

 

[merijn_v1]

I got to play around with the CNM tooltip and it seems to work.