Suggestions and Requests

[Zaddy]

Could the negative impact of foreign relations be capped? For me, it's pretty much a given that I'm sitting at something like -15 from that catagory alone, which is often the ONLY thing making me unstable (and often is the sole thing that makes me collapse)

Spoiler :

This diplomatic situation makes me sit at -14 foreign stability. I've reviewed what influences foreign stability in the civilopedia and to be honest I have no earthly clue why I'm so negative (it's about to make me collapse when it's the only category I'm negative in). Isolationism tanks your economy to a hilarious degree and is usually a non-viable civic so that isn't a good option either.

Spoiler :

 

[Leoreth]

Can you share this save? I'd like to compare.

 

[Zaddy]

I don't have that particular moment saved, but I do have another save where I believe I'm in a decent diplomatic situation but I'm sitting at -10 from bad relations. Save attached.

 

[Mr-Goriyaki]

I think you should replace 1700 AD Map with 1600 AD Map. Just say in.

 

[Saint Max]

I think a good add on would be the possibility to pillage a city when you eliminate the last défender without taking it (destabilizing thé owner but not you)
It would be easier to manage one s stability by not taking a non historical settlement, while earning money and destabilizing the opponent (and you earn nothing of course if you try to pillage it again next turn etc)
Actually I collapsed as the vikings trying to achieve the last UHV because of that (and the -15 bad relations...)
Furthemore why can’t you pillage (and take, so) aztecs in médiéval area ?
Thanks

 

[Temujin8k]

I would be happy to see a Colonist unit in the game. It should only be able to defend (maybe a little weaker than the Arquebusier) and can gain XP, and can found cities. Cities on found should spawn a free defender with its XP based on that of the Colonist unit, as well as a free worker. It should cost more than just a Settler, but maybe less than a Settler, Worker, and Arquebusier combined. This would simplify the colonization process a bit in the game. I think Galleons should still be trained separately, though, as including it with the Colonist unit "group" would be basically getting free Galleons.

 

[1SDANi]

I would be happy to see a Colonist unit in the game. It should only be able to defend (maybe a little weaker than the Arquebusier) and can gain XP, and can found cities. Cities on found should spawn a free defender with its XP based on that of the Colonist unit, as well as a free worker. It should cost more than just a Settler, but maybe less than a Settler, Worker, and Arquebusier combined. This would simplify the colonization process a bit in the game. I think Galleons should still be trained separately, though, as including it with the Colonist unit "group" would be basically getting free Galleons.

So basically the American Pioneer UU with some XP bonuses?

 

[TJDowling]

Some mechanism by which you could turn captured slaves into soldiers.

 

[Temujin8k]

So basically the American Pioneer UU with some XP bonuses?

Well, yes. I forgot about that, though I also wasn't sure if the Pioneer also grants a free worker. Maybe that Colonist should require having explored around 10-20 tiles of another continent. American Pioneer would be basically Settler that acts like Colonist, plus some other bonus like extra starting production or an additional worker.

Alternatively, the Colonist can be represented as a Project that can be built any number of times, which on completion grants Galleon + Settler + Worker + Defender. But it would be a bit more expensive if the Galleon is included.

 

[catacau]

In the 600 AD scenario AI China start with Militia in their 2 Southeastern coastal cities, that's make super easy to rush them with Ballista Elephants as Khmer. Give them some crossbowman

 

[merijn_v1]

I don't really like the Colonist unit idea. It makes settling new areas too straightforward. Just build a colonist and you're done. I think it is more fun if you also need to put focus on building defenders and workers in order to succesfully settle a new area.

I like the American Pioneer being an exception to this, because that gives America a more unique playing style.

 

[McMickeroo1]

SOME POINTS ABOUT STABILITY/CIVIL WAR

So I just played the best game ever as Mexico. I controlled from Vancouver, to Chicago, to Savannah. However... the game just collapsed into civil war, which I found disappointing, so a few points:

1. If nothing else, make it so that the game doesn't just automatically end when you have bad stability. I don't see how anybody could disagree with this point. If in my war with the US, stability got bad, and the west coast broke away... fine... that's a road bump, but I might actually enjoy trying to reclaim that land. Having cities break free and even entire empires split in half is a good way to moderate the rapid expansion of empires. Having the game just end... automatically... just feels sort of annoying. Every other problem I have could be unaddressed, as long as you make it so when the empire descends into civil war, there is a chance to actually continue the game.

2. Do this for AI civs too. I bring this up as it's own point because I'm sure at least at one point it was the case that civil war didn't result in auto-death for the player, but it did for the AI. TBH... I don't really like this. Sure, make France lose their colonies. Make Russia split in two. But don't just have it so the whole country just collapses easily.

3. Just... scale back the whole civil war thing, in general. I play a lot of games in this mod... and in pretty much every game I've played at least one, usually two, of the major European powers is just... absent. In the last game I played it was France, Spain, and Germany, all absent from nigh on the entirety of the game. Thing is... in reality... these European countries were very powerful, and they were present. Yet every game I play Europe seems to be 50% independent city-states where actual empires should be. Empires collapsing into civil war should be incredibly rare... just as it was in real life. You have all these great civilizations you went to the effort of programming. I'd like to play a game once where more than half of them are present.

4. More civil wars early on, fewer civil wars later on. It seems to me like a huge decider in whether there will be a civil war is the whole core area vs overextension thing. This creates a huge historical issue, best exemplified by China. China never has civil wars during the early game... you know... during the period it was actually having a huge amount of civil wars. And yet by the 1980s when power was pretty consolidated in real life, what was China is now just a big grey blob. I don't think I've ever reached 2000 AD with china still around. Again, in this case I would actually say crank up the civil wars in the early game. China should be experiencing civil wars and rebellions fairly often in the run up to the 17th century. And then just like in real life these civil wars should teeter off. I'm speaking specifically about china, but in general I'm saying that the civil war mechanic should be weighted to ensure civil wars take place in more historically accurate time periods. Right now, because the main determiner seems to be over-extension, there really are very few civil wars early on when there should have been loads.

4b. Just... no civil wars in modernity at all... really... not in the west. A neat little hack for civ is that if you complete all your historical victories, and then die, the game will automatically keep playing. And you still get the prompts to take over as other civs. So one of my favourite things to do in earlier versions of the game was to do that, then leave my laptop for basically the whole day, to return, take over a civ, and see what the new world was looking like. I've tried that several times with this game, and I can't see what the new world is looking like... because every single civilization has collapsed into civil war. Every last one.

So yeah... these comments are kind of in order of preference, but I would genuinely like to hear from anybody who thinks that something I've said would not (1) improve the overall gameplay and make things more enjoyable, and (2) better reflect the actual history of the world.

Thank you. Love the game.

 

[Zaddy]

Back again with more foreign relations silliness.

Spoiler :

This diplomatic situation gives me -17 stability from bad relations. It's been negative for more or less the whole game.

My point by saying this is that when the foreign relations stability mechanic is producing extremely penalizing and unintuitive results for the player, it should probably be reviewed. For all I know the actual penalty might be working perfectly as designed. I think the design has some issues.

Thanks a ton for all your work by the way, I've dumped probably 2000 hours into the mod over the years. Keep chugging! Cheers

 

[McMickeroo1]

Back again with more foreign relations silliness.

Spoiler :

View attachment 538584

This diplomatic situation gives me -17 stability from bad relations. It's been negative for more or less the whole game.

My point by saying this is that when the foreign relations stability mechanic is producing extremely penalizing and unintuitive results for the player, it should probably be reviewed. For all I know the actual penalty might be working perfectly as designed. I think the design has some issues.

Thanks a ton for all your work by the way, I've dumped probably 2000 hours into the mod over the years. Keep chugging! Cheers

I think "unintuitive results" is the best way of summarising the issue with the stability. Collapse always seems to occur when it feels like your civilization is doing its best.

 

[Leoreth]

I already have collected a few saves but please continue attaching saves when you show examples like this. Looking into the actual games helps me to review the contributing factors in detail.

 

[McMickeroo1]

Here's a file from my game. But the thing is... I could pretty much pick any game... It's the same thing almost every time. I don't really think looking at the fine details is necessary. The solutions, in my mind, seem pretty broad:

1. Make it so the game doesn't just end when collapsing into civil war.
2. Scale back the "sensitivity" of the stability mechanic (i.e. the frequency of collapse occurring)
3. Weight the mechanic so it has more effect in the early game, and less in the later game.

I'm not going to say there aren't finer things that I could see being changed to make things better. But the game play would be improved significantly if you kept all the finer details the same, and just changed the much broader aspects of the game outlined above.

 

[Zaddy]

I already have collected a few saves but please continue attaching saves when you show examples like this. Looking into the actual games helps me to review the contributing factors in detail.

Of course, my apologies, I meant to attach the save but apparently I did not. Here you go!

 

[ThreeBlackSevens]

I see the exact thing I made an account for has just been talked about, lol. I'll explain and share the save anyway, in case it's helpful at all. c: Awesome mod by the way!!

So basically for a good chunk of this Russian game I've been at extremely bad stability for Bad Relations, and I assumed it mostly had to do with being the only Orthodox civ. However, after the glorious revolution (Including secularism) I was still at -18 for that, which I find rather strange since I have more good relations than bad ones, whether you count total civs that like or dislike me or weight it for annoyed/furious and pleased/friendly. Also I've had worse relations in Byzantine games and had only -3 or -5ish Bad Relations stability.

Even worldbuilder couldn't save this, which is kind of sad because the best part of a Russian game is obviously being the Soviet Union.

Alternatively, if the foreign stability is supposed to work like it is in Zaddy's game and mine, then it'd be nice to have a bit more of a detailed explanation in the Civilopedia for it, because it doesn't really give any reasons why I should be at such a huge penalty in this situation. Given what the Civilopedia says it looks like I should be at +1 or +3 depending on whether there's a difference between the levels of friendliness or if it's just a +1/0/-1 sort of thing.

Anyway, here are the saves. I backup a lot lol, the order of the saves (from earliest to most recent, in case they don't post in the right order) is all the backups from 1-5, Revolution When, and then DoC (Russia). No worldbuilder has been used in them, that was something I tried later and didn't bother to save, and is also a bit irrelevant. As far as I can tell there is no way to avoid collapse in July 1900 (2 turns after the last save).

 

[1SDANi]

I see the exact thing I made an account for has just been talked about, lol. I'll explain and share the save anyway, in case it's helpful at all. c: Awesome mod by the way!!

So basically for a good chunk of this Russian game I've been at extremely bad stability for Bad Relations, and I assumed it mostly had to do with being the only Orthodox civ. However, after the glorious revolution (Including secularism) I was still at -18 for that, which I find rather strange since I have more good relations than bad ones, whether you count total civs that like or dislike me or weight it for annoyed/furious and pleased/friendly. Also I've had worse relations in Byzantine games and had only -3 or -5ish Bad Relations stability.

Even worldbuilder couldn't save this, which is kind of sad because the best part of a Russian game is obviously being the Soviet Union.

Alternatively, if the foreign stability is supposed to work like it is in Zaddy's game and mine, then it'd be nice to have a bit more of a detailed explanation in the Civilopedia for it, because it doesn't really give any reasons why I should be at such a huge penalty in this situation. Given what the Civilopedia says it looks like I should be at +1 or +3 depending on whether there's a difference between the levels of friendliness or if it's just a +1/0/-1 sort of thing.

Anyway, here are the saves. I backup a lot lol, the order of the saves (from earliest to most recent, in case they don't post in the right order) is all the backups from 1-5, Revolution When, and then DoC (Russia). No worldbuilder has been used in them, that was something I tried later and didn't bother to save, and is also a bit irrelevant. As far as I can tell there is no way to avoid collapse in July 1900 (2 turns after the last save).

Relations Stability in DoC is based on temporary relations to prevent religion from playing too large a factor. This means that "First Impressions", "Same Civics", "Same Religions", etc don't count. As a result it's very common for nations to be heavily unstable foreign-wise despite maintaining very good relations.

 

[McMickeroo1]

I think the stability mechanic has got worse since last time. Mostly because of the bad relations mechanic. Here's a summary of my game as England:

* Control all of England pretty quickly.
* Switch to citizenship and republic quick to get markets built and great merchants produced.
* Have lots of food in my core area, plus a huge gold surplus.
* Send troops out to America, slowly start to take control of the entire East coast.
* Meet the Incas, get lots of free soldiers, decide to transport them to India.
* Slowly conquer India by playing the Tamils and the Mughals against each other.
* Start to send settlers to South America, South Africa, and Australasia.
* Collapse.

Now there are a few areas where stability was taking some hits. But the -10 that broke the camels back is the bad relations penalty. When -12 is enough for my empire to collapse, -10 is a huge hit. And yet it seems like that -10 comes from having a few civs annoyed at me... why does that even affect my stability? I mean all I was doing was fighting the Indian civs. I had no other wars going on.

I was probably just playing the best game I've ever played in civ. I had a big empire, it was growing at a nice rate. I had a lot of population in my core. It doesn't make sense that my empire would collapse when the game is going so well. It's not fun playing a game when how well you're actually doing is completely undercut by a stability mechanic that will just end your game for no real reason at all.

Again, I will say, because I want to stress this heavily. If nothing else make it so when it collapses into civil war, you just lose a few cities. You have to deal with rebellions. That would be fine. It just sort of sucks that I was really enjoying that game and now... I can't really keep playing it. Unless I go back and fiddle with some stuff in world builder... which is probably what I will do now.