The Ancient Mediterranean MOD

[ambrox62]

(go back button in lower left corner)

Thanks

 

[Ankenaton]

You're so cruel, Ankenaton. You shouldn't hit someone that's already down. Why don't you give those techs to Viriato instead, and help him against his antagonists.

I have done it the past. But then when I need him, usually against Dido he will just twiddle his thumbs and leave me hanging. After all of the coddling, safeguarding and literal buying off of the Gauls or Romans every 10 or so moves when they are ready to roll in on him. Hey if he can't hang with the big boys, well it sure speeds up the game to have one less civ, . I guess he never heard of realpolitik; too bad for him.

 

[Seven05]

Hey if he can't hang with the big boys, well it sure speeds up the game to have one less civ, . I guess he never heard of realpolitik; too bad for him.

Hmm, should I warn him about what I just uploaded for the next version?

 

[Waterloo]

After playing hours this mod, finally came up with two ideas for two new wonders, which you might like, just want to introduce the ideas. I am no good at this balancing stuff, so no details:

1. Military harbour of Carthago
I noticed that there seems to be no wonder or modernization which gives an advantage to naval units, so may be once built this wonder could give either experience points or a free promotion to naval units or reduce building or maintenance costs (I am not sure if this is possible).
The military harbor was an impressive construction, with shipsheds for a hundred military ships, which where build round a circular canal.

The following site gives more information:
www1.rgzm.de/Navis2/Home/HarbourFullTextOutput.cfm?HarbourNR=Carthage

2. Olympic Games
For at least a thousand years this was a cultural fixum for the greek world, well in later years there where lots of participants, who were not a exactly greek, but that is politics.
There could be a cultural and a financial bonus (lots of people made money from the games, even then). And may be a GP Bonus for Artist (where to put an athlete, but there were poetry contests as well).

Hope this fits your concept.

Waterloo

 

[AndreasS]

Hi again!

Been playing the new version as Chartago and the Hellenes now, and still there is those 2 small things that bothers me, that is also easy to fix.

1) The Great People are still using the modern graphics

2) The Sid tips for polytheism says it founds hinduism.....

Will you fix this for the next version you think?

Must say this mod is developing very fast, and is improving rapidly. I also like how you implemented the heroes. Was afraid they would be too powerfull and unbalanced, but hey, you made it right!

NB! Will be cool to attach a Great General to the hero unit after the new Warlord expansion, and see how that affects gameplay, hope that wont be too heavy......

 

[HÄI]

I like Waterloo's suggestion for new wonders, and would also like to add a suggestion: The Royal Road. It was the 2 700km road that Darius of Persia had built throughout the empire. It would be an interesting addition for warlike players/countries, increasing travel speed perhaps to 3 or 4 times the normal?

 

[Pvblivs]

I like Waterloo's suggestion for new wonders, and would also like to add a suggestion: The Royal Road. It was the 2 700km road that Darius of Persia had built throughout the empire. It would be an interesting addition for warlike players/countries, increasing travel speed perhaps to 3 or 4 times the normal?

3 or 4 times for all roads are way too much an advantage.

I would rather suggest that, very much like with the Great Wall in Warlords, the 2 most distant cities in the empire are connected with each other (and cities that can be easily connected on the way) by a special road that can be used as fast as the roads after road building.

But that's difficult to implement as you have to implement a path finding

 

[Stellan_87]

Very nice i especialy liked the "fertile Cresent map", but shouldn't there be gold in nubia... gold was more common than silver in ancient egypt, and egypt got their gold from nubia.

 

[davbenbak]

Been playing the huge med map and the Nubians take out the Eygptians everytime, usually by 1000bc.

 

[Ankenaton]

Hmm, should I warn him about what I just uploaded for the next version?

So Virato got his thumb out now? That would be great; love those multi-front wars. "Upon hearing the lamentations of the conquered, Pharoah most beloved follower of the Aten was pleased".

 

[Ankenaton]

Been playing the huge med map and the Nubians take out the Eygptians everytime, usually by 1000bc.

I will rain swarms of chariots down upon the Cuhorsehockyes until they yield unto Pharoah their status as vassals

 

[Seidrik_The_Gray]

It is always better to leave behind a couple of defanged vassal states rather than wiping them out completely.

This I have finally learned in TAM! TAM is more than a close depiction of this early time, it is also a great teaching tool!

I have learned and refined so much of my strategies.

I really appreciate what the Romans had to overcome to grow their empire. The Germanic people really piss me off! Vercingetorix had the nerve to tell me that this world isn't big enough for the two of us! It took two major wars to wipe out the Illyrians.

The ebb and flow of empire building was awesome! Now that I've developed my skills in empire building (RESTRAINT and PATIENCE) I'm doing much better and having more fun, and developing a much deeper understanding of the depth of the strategies in this game!

I should add that I am approaching total domination with the Romans on the Normal map on Prince/Epic

 

[Shqype]

This I have finally learned in TAM! TAM is more than a close depiction of this early time, it is also a great teaching tool!

I have learned and refined so much of my strategies.

I really appreciate what the Romans had to overcome to grow their empire. The Germanic people really piss me off! Vercingetorix had the nerve to tell me that this world isn't big enough for the two of us! It took two major wars to wipe out the Illyrians.

The ebb and flow of empire building was awesome! Now that I've developed my skills in empire building (RESTRAINT and PATIENCE) I'm doing much better and having more fun, and developing a much deeper understanding of the depth of the strategies in this game!

I should add that I am approaching total domination with the Romans on the Normal map on Prince/Epic

hehe, that's great to hear! The Romans historically did fight 2 Illyrian Wars before they eventually conquered the whole of Illyria. Isn't it cool when the game follows history?

 

[Seven05]

So Virato got his thumb out now? That would be great; love those multi-front wars. "Upon hearing the lamentations of the conquered, Pharoah most beloved follower of the Aten was pleased".

Well, sort of. Shqype and I are currently looking into a number of AI "enhancements" possible with the SDK. I wouldn't expect anything too amazing right away but you never know.

 

[Jet]

To follow up about dense forests, on marathon / Huge Med, they grew so much that they took over the whole North and crippled France and Germany. I never saw a problem like that on the normal map, I think because the normal map starts with less dense forest and blocks more of it with regular forest. You might want to reduce the dense forest spread rate to very low or even zero, so that the map design can control how things work out. I also noticed that dense forest spawns panthers.

Sometimes the best defender for a city wasn't chosen. For example, I had a stack of unpromoted javelineers attacking a city containing unpromoted javelineers and an unpromoted warror. The first combat was with the warrior, at better odds for me than the subsequent combats.

I'd like to expand on my criticism of Plato's Academy "rant style". Two things that make it even crazier are: 1. Education is expensive, yet it is easy for someone to Philosophy slingshot to it, because Philosophy is a tech that enables it! So you don't even have to do parallel research to maximize the effectiveness of the slingshot. It's a total no brainer if you win Philosophy: the most expensive tech by far is likely to be Education, which enables Plato's, and since you got that expensive tech with a slingshot, you then have a window of time in which to build it. 2. You can combine it with Aristocracy for quadruple beakers in the capital. My last 3 games (Boudicca/Huge Med, Hatshepsut/Fertile, Minos/Magna), after I got Plato's and Aristocracy going, the game was in the bag and I didn't want to play much beyond that. It's like my personal victory condition now.

The unit upkeep costs are cool... it got me thinking. It changes the tradeoff between hammers and commerces: averaged over your empire, it definitely tilts the commerce/hammer tradeoff towards commerce. The ways I did OK in my last 3 games were respectively: Colossus + Great Lighthouse + coastal towns (+ some cottages), cottage spam in a protected grasslands/river area,, and financial + Colossus + coastal towns (+ a few cottages). Indeed if I've survived long enough to get Heroic Epic, I've probably amassed a big enough army that most of my military expansion can and should come just from The Heroic Epic city. I don't think the balance change is necessarily a problem. It is interesting, though, and suggests a couple possible tweaks. If you haven't already, you might consider tweaking the city AI to favor commerce improvements and working commerce tiles a little more. Also the merchant wonders (especially the Colossus) are now relatively more powerful, so... I don't know. Make them more expensive? Change them? But I can't think how the Colossus could be merely tuned down.

You might want to reduce the boat bonus to timber to 50%. Mainly, it's for merchant vessels. Now, I love them, especially with the variable-distance thing to make it interesting. For example on I could get merchant vessels from Britain to Morocco for 216 wealth, but I had to struggle to keep, at best, on-and-off-again open borders with Dido. ("No, you can't have Alphabet. Oh, crap. Here, have Urbanization. Here, have Construction. Oh, come on.") With +100% from timber, that's 70 hammers for 216 wealth. That's 3:1 commerce to hammers, compared to 1:2 for building wealth directly, 1:1 for building a wonder that you don't get, 1:1 for building a Caravan House if you play the game for another 180 turns (not counting the trade route bonus). Put another way, you're producing merchant ships twice as fast, so you're bringing in the wealth twice as fast. I think the time it takes to get your merchant ships to the destination dampens this effect, but I suspect not by much. So that's why I suggest +50%, which in my case would have gotten me 2.25 wealth from each hammer, compared to 1.5 for no timber.

Speaking of trade route bonuses, Harbor + Caravan House + Seafaring trait gives you a rounded-down +95%. The torture of it all! Was that intentional?

Round-down is "horribly painful" with Industrious too (33% rather than 34%), but maybe that was your intention.

Unit upkeep seems to be such a big deal that a world wonder that enabled a few free units or reduced unit upkeep cost in some other way (eliminating the military cost from Nature Cult?) might be cool.

For random maps, it might be helpful if a technology enabled trading on ocean. Maybe you could include it in your Silk Road design.

Now I'm going to indulge in a commentary on all the civics. I'd love to hear from other people what they use in their own games and if they have strategies that I'm missing.

Hereditary Rule: never needed because of tavern + either (holy site + path of mystics) or (ampitheater + free religion) + multiple free religions in each city.
Republic: likewise
City States: awesome, and much easier to get than Republic
Empire: seems good, but I don't usually play that far through the end game.

Council of Elders: pretty necessary because of unit upkeep. By the way, is it possible to document the number of free units it gives you? The civics screen says how many you get currently, but the number increases over time. I tried drafting, but felt the 3 unhappy was too expensive to be worth it except in case of emergency.
Bureaucracy: never been remotely tempted
Forum: it's cool, but it's very expensive to give up the free units from Council of Elders. I was spread all over the Aegean in my Minos/Magna game, but even so, when I tried running it it was prohibitively expensive, and I had to switch back. (Of course, I was already Organized.)
Ius Civile: used it for cultural victory in earlier versions. Especially now, I don't think I'd ever use it except in that case. Council of Elders is valuable, happiness is pretty easy to get, and culture from buildings or Patronage is fairly easy to get.

Slavery: cool
Public Works: never been tempted, although perhaps I should be. Would you consider beefing it up? +100%? +100% has drool factor. And Despotism is still a dead-end tech.
Patronage: cool, especially with City States, of course
Migration: it makes military build like settlers, correct? It's a cool concept and it seems like a cool mechanic, but I've never figured out a good way to use it. And also, now the game seems to be as much about having a strong economy to support your units, as it is about building them fast. Could it also give Exp to mounted units? A bonus from pastures? Edit: ooh, ooh - isn't there a movement promotion for mounted units? Migration could give that for free. Because it's migraton. Then you could build a lot of fast pillagers, send them out, pillage for wealth, and then delete them to save on maintenance costs when the good pillaging ran out.

Nature Cult: I remember thinking it was cool and using it a little when I started playing TAM around version 1.5 or so. I don't remember if it had the +1 military cost then. Currently my feeling is, +1 military cost, forget it! I guess people pull off running Pacifism in vanilla somehow, but I just can't imagine how it could work in the current version of TAM. It would have to be with a very special strategy (I'd actually like to try grasslands + Crop Rotation + Nature Cult + Agricultural + either specialist economy or cultural victory or Migration. With Circus Maximus that'd be nasty. And of course, I'd have to add Plato's Academy. )
Plutocracy: seems cool, but I've never thought of a good way to use it. I don't usually prioritize the Commerce tech. By the way, this is one of the places where using the distinct wealth/commerce icons would clarify things. If it had the commerce icon I would assume it multiplied base commerce, otherwise that it multiplied output wealth.
Vice Royalty: seems great, but I rarely get there
Aristocracy: killer

I usually become dependent on Path of the Mystics. (Less so in the latest version, with more religions). Even so, in older games I sometimes ran Organized Religion and Theocracy, but now with less control over state religion, I'm less tempted. After Theocracy I might switch to Free Religion, depending.

 

[Broken Hawk]

At what game settings can I expect some AI on AI war? I am still playing my first game to familiarize myself with TAM. Germanic Tribes, Huge Random Map w/ Continents, Epic Speed, Warlord Difficulty. The other civs either love me or hate me. I am currently at war with the Nubians, Medians and Mycenaens. Everyone else is sitting around doing nothing.

 

[Seven05]

The AI to AI relationships are currently being worked on, hopefully Thamis will have a treat for you guys in the next version

 

[Impaler[WrG]]

Have you considered changing the name of the Egyption religion ot "Maat", this is an egyptian word meaning Peace, Balance, Harmony, Good, Order ect ect.. Their whole belif system revolves around maintaining Maat. Also White Rabbit has produced a Sphinx wonder which sits ontop of a Building very much like the Temple of Carnak, I recomend you use it as such for the Egyption Shrine.

 

[H.GrenadeFrenzy]

I'm trapped in the Mediterranean again!

 

[Shqype]

If he made a Sphinx, TAM actually has a Sphinx wonder that could use some new graphics...