v8 feedback

Pfeffersack

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Since no one has done it yet, I will open the feedback thread for v8 :)

I played 240 turns on Emperor difficulty, standard size map, high sea level and tropic climate. FC reached 51; native life was troublesome, but managable so far. I think the change regarding fungal blooms on sea is a good thing. Also the combo of Unity Hydroponics Bay and Terraformed allowed some Farms to grow big (3x Eden and some settlements as well). Most AIs perfromed mediocre (3 of them 6 cities, 2 with 5, Zak only 2 - I have 12 bases in comparison); some oversea colonization (Morgan has colonized a big sized island with three bases!), but no sea-bases (except one I lost to native life, which Deidre took then)

I like the new Spore Launcher graphic, it adds a lot of atmosphere :goodjob:

Currently there is only one thing which really annoys me...fresh water lakes getting fungal-bloomed...you cannot fight there, because you are not allowed to build ships, so you cannot work the tiles and the spawning points count towards the FC. Not to speak of the interturn delay the animations of native life movement inside two- or more-tile-lakes cause.
Not sure how to solve this issue, though. Allowing to build ships would be the most logical thing to do, but that might hurt the AI badly. Not allowing fungus/spawns on fresh water would be probably the clearest fix.
 
Downloaded, ran the installer. It didn't install anything! What am I missing?

Did the installation routine load up and an installation seem to have taken place, but after that there was nothing in the place you installed? Or did you double-click the installer and nothing more happened? If it is the former and you run Vista as OS, it might help to run the file as administrator and/or to allow modifying files in the destination place, here for the BTS/Mods direction.
In the latter case or if my tip doesn't help, good luck and hopefully someone else can help you :)
 
Bug: The holy city for Voice of Planet gets one point of Planetvalue for every city with VOP even before you build White Pines. I didn't notice any effect of White Pines when I did build it.
 
I love how you don't get fungus pops if there is no fungus!

Morgan+ that early wonder that makes all terraforming civics available+ terraforming civic = super fast fungus removal. Muahaha, take that you semi sentient planet!

However, border cities have issues. I can't terraform my neighbor's land , so I have to live with the pops. I would like the game changed so that your neighbor's fungus doesn't make your own tiles eligible for fungal pops.


Is there a reason why I can't build farms in the highlands?

Also, do cities with the hydro plant building(the one that gives fresh water health and 1 energy on rivers) also give fresh water for farms? That would be a nice thing to add since often its hard to chain farms to all of your cities due to all the rocky or highlands squares that can't carry farms. Maybe have the terraforming civic give this ability to the hydro plant so that it doesn't come so early?
 
i found it annoying that while i was meticulously keeping my planet rating up, and meanwhile my neighbors were aggressively not. for whatever reason the planetlife that was spawned during blooms made a beeline for my territory. possibly because of the punch and pie.
 
However, border cities have issues. I can't terraform my neighbor's land , so I have to live with the pops. I would like the game changed so that your neighbor's fungus doesn't make your own tiles eligible for fungal pops.

I like the idea that a Terraformer would have problems because his neighbour is a Hybrid planting fungus all over the place. So I prefer to keep the current rule.
The problem is that currently not even AI Terraformers remove all fungus inside their territory.

Is there a reason why I can't build farms in the highlands?

I am able to. Send me a save where you can't.

Also, do cities with the hydro plant building(the one that gives fresh water health and 1 energy on rivers) also give fresh water for farms?

No. You can build Condensers. They provide fresh water.

i found it annoying that while i was meticulously keeping my planet rating up, and meanwhile my neighbors were aggressively not. for whatever reason the planetlife that was spawned during blooms made a beeline for my territory. possibly because of the punch and pie.

Hopefully this will eventually be solved by AI improvements. If you have a positive Planet Attitude though, you can take advantage of this situation by placing units with Empath Song near the borders, and capturing the native life.
 
Space victory isn't working. Two Subspace generators were completed on the same turn for the win (three had been completed already), and instead, only one was built. The one in Gaia's Landing was completely reset, even though the game acknowledged it as having been built.

The save is attached if you'd like to check. Just hit "Enter" to end the turn.
View attachment Deirdre MY-2420.CivBeyondSwordSave

The Great Doctor must have wrong animations, since she's splayed and not animated at all.

Solar Power Transmitter is scaled wrong: it orbits far too high above the city it is in, and is huge as well. (See the screenshot: the sat is in Far Jericho, but it is next to UN Humanity Base.)
Civ4ScreenShot0004.JPG

A suggestion: you can use the Leviathan (and button) from Next War for the Planetfall Leviathan.

There are a few other units I will suggest, but let me see if I can get them to work. If they do work, I'll submit them with the XML. (It's just a matter of doing the XML, since I've pulled them from the Downloads database.)

Edit 1: Oh, I forgot to ask. How does one build a Gravity Lens on a LaGrange point? I tried deploying Gravity Lenses to the LaGrange points, but a Gravity Lens is a Air unit and so can only be deployed to a base.
 
Okay, I managed to get four units to work. They are possible replacements for the Acolyte, Creator, Helion, and Mobile Infantry.

The Acolyte and Creator were made by Refar (Generic Male and Female Missionaries)
http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=9697

The female missionary is a close match for the Acolyte button art, and if one could make her hair blond, it would be even more appropriate. (Perhaps use the head of the female pirate settler?)

The Creator is found both in the Warlords Rise of Rome scenario and the BtS Gods of Old mod, and I just like the look of it. (He should carry a sickle though, to symbolize how the religion of Homo Superior will cull the species until the chaff is separated from the grain.)

The Helion is GarretSidzaka's Space Soldier.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=4230

This is not my first choice for the Helion. That was Zerver's Spetznaz Plasma Bolter http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=11971 Couldn't get it to work right, so I'm abandoning it for now. (I think I now know what I did wrong, and will try again later.)

By the way, could the Helion's name be changed to Hellbore or Inferno Gunner?

Mobile Infantry by Zerver, and is team-colored. It does not have air drop animations: if Maniac does choose to use this model, perhaps some one could add the air drop animations?
http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=9436

The zip includes the units and the XML. However, since I haven't updated to v8a, it is not "drop and play". Interested parties can cut and paste the XML and unit art into their version of Planetfall.
 

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The female missionary is a close match for the Acolyte button art, and if one could make her hair blond, it would be even more appropriate. (Perhaps use the head of the female pirate settler?)
It's easier just to retexture the dds. Keep em coming :). With you supplying new units and me retexturing/remodelling existent we will "fix" the graphical part of this mod very quickly :).

P.S. I retextured Acolyte, it was like this:
s5a9z5.png


I've made her blonde, worked a bit on face texture and added the religion "logo":
xlyu6p.png


Look in the attachment.

[EDIT] PS I like to think that she carries fungus with mind worms in her pot :D.
 

Attachments

Hi :) I've started my first Planetfall game yesterday and thought I'd give some feedback. So here are some random thoughts that crossed my mind while playing:

- Height-based movement rules. It's a bit hard now to see the quickest path simply by looking at the map, but I like the new strategical options that these movement rules provide. There are more bottlenecks on the map now, and more safe spots for lookouts.

- No roads. I know that this is by design, but it comes across as an odd choice. I don't see how leaving roads out improves the strategical aspect of the game, and in terms of realism it's extremely odd that the colonists can build mag-tubes, but no roads (which would be far simpler).

- Faction placement: all factions start in roughly the same area of the map. Again I know it's by design, but at least in my game it isn't working very well. Miriam and Lal were so boxed in that they never had any chance (Lal has been destroyed already, and Miriam is stuck at three cities). I started on a peninsula of a huge continent with no one else to bother me, and the four remaining factions settled a crescent at the eastern shore of a second large continent. Having only seven factions is already quite a small number for my games, and placing those in a way that two of them don't stand a chance exacerbates that shortcoming. It's not realistic either, seeing as how the escape pods of the unity were blasted off the Unity at a fair distance from the planet, and with very different trajectories (see SMAC opening movie).

- Crippling worker AI. I had my formers on "improve nearest base", and as soon as I researched High Energy Chemistry, my entire workforce suicided itself into building bunkers at useless spots. If I build new formers and try to automate them, they again insist on building bunkers instead of hooking up resources (for example).

- My automated aquaformers first filled entire shorelines with seamills, only to replace every single one of them with a mining platform as those became available. This also crashed my economy since I relied on the seamills for energy (I have some energy problems throughout the game, but that may be due to my inexperience with the mod's economy).

- No naval invasions. Although my continent is weakly defended, and three other factions with lots of units declared war on me, not a single invasion force ever landed on my continent. The only send submarines, which usually sink themselves by trying to attack my own submarines. After a while, I realized that sea combat with submarines heavily favors the defender, so I placed a shield of submarines in the straits that my enemies use to get to me. This is working well so far, but it makes the AI very easy to handle.

- The AI also entraps itself in major fungal blooms.

- Many technologies are described as requiring previous technologies, but I can select them for research without actually fulfilling the requirements.

- Blockade problems. A city on a lake got a fungal bloom. Now there are two IoDs and a sealurk occupying the only water tile that the city has access to, and blockading the entire lake. I cannot build any ships in the city under these conditions. I cannot bring ships in from elsewhere. I cannot attack the blockaders with land-based units. How do I drive them out?

So far the game has been a mixed experience. I like the idea of a SMAC mod for Civ4 (a lot), but the suicidal formers were pretty frustrating, and the AI doesn't seem competitive yet.

Edit: I should add that this is a v0.8a game.

Edit2: Something else I forgot to mention. Rovers that I pop from pods have four combat promotions ("hardened" to "commando"), but not the first one ("disciplined"). Is this working as designed?
 
Many technologies are described as requiring previous technologies
Are you sure there're no "or" rules?

Faction placement:
There's a checkbox in the bottom of the list of map settings to use a "normal" faction placement.
 
Okay, I managed to get four units to work. They are possible replacements for the Acolyte, Creator, Helion, and Mobile Infantry.

The Acolyte and Creator were made by Refar (Generic Male and Female Missionaries)
http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=9697

The female missionary is a close match for the Acolyte button art, and if one could make her hair blond, it would be even more appropriate. (Perhaps use the head of the female pirate settler?)

The Creator is found both in the Warlords Rise of Rome scenario and the BtS Gods of Old mod, and I just like the look of it. (He should carry a sickle though, to symbolize how the religion of Homo Superior will cull the species until the chaff is separated from the grain.)

The Helion is GarretSidzaka's Space Soldier.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=4230

This is not my first choice for the Helion. That was Zerver's Spetznaz Plasma Bolter http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=11971 Couldn't get it to work right, so I'm abandoning it for now. (I think I now know what I did wrong, and will try again later.)

By the way, could the Helion's name be changed to Hellbore or Inferno Gunner?

Mobile Infantry by Zerver, and is team-colored. It does not have air drop animations: if Maniac does choose to use this model, perhaps some one could add the air drop animations?
http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=9436

The zip includes the units and the XML. However, since I haven't updated to v8a, it is not "drop and play". Interested parties can cut and paste the XML and unit art into their version of Planetfall.

I re-textured the woman with fungus and worms in the pot, look above.
About mobile infantry: it has too funky colors IMO. I can reskin it, I just need suggestions.
 
- Faction placement: all factions start in roughly the same area of the map. Again I know it's by design, but at least in my game it isn't working very well. Miriam and Lal were so boxed in that they never had any chance (Lal has been destroyed already, and Miriam is stuck at three cities). I started on a peninsula of a huge continent with no one else to bother me, and the four remaining factions settled a crescent at the eastern shore of a second large continent. Having only seven factions is already quite a small number for my games, and placing those in a way that two of them don't stand a chance exacerbates that shortcoming. It's not realistic either, seeing as how the escape pods of the unity were blasted off the Unity at a fair distance from the planet, and with very different trajectories (see SMAC opening movie).

There's an option you can enable to fix that. If you start a custom game this option disperses the factions all over the map. Check the last of the options in the custom game screen.
 
Are you sure there're no "or" rules?
I checked again, and you're correct - they are "or" rules, I just didn't expect them to be and constantly overlooked the words "requires the knowledge of ONE OF" in the description. My mistake.

There's a checkbox in the bottom of the list of map settings to use a "normal" faction placement.
Ah, that's the "scattered pods" option. I saw it, but I thought that this option was for the placement of *supply* pods (like the similarly worded option "No Unity Scattering: Supply Pods Only at Landing Sites." in SMAC). Perhaps reword the option into "scattered starting positions" to avoid the confusion?
 
Space victory isn't working. Two Subspace generators were completed on the same turn for the win (three had been completed already), and instead, only one was built. The one in Gaia's Landing was completely reset, even though the game acknowledged it as having been built.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

The Great Doctor must have wrong animations, since she's splayed and not animated at all.

The Great Doctor doesn't have any animations at all at the moment. IIRC it was supposed to use female settler animations, but IIRC the unit then showed up as a female settler instead of the doctor/nurse. Something must be wrong or missing with the Great Doctor model.

Solar Power Transmitter is scaled wrong: it orbits far too high above the city it is in, and is huge as well. (See the screenshot: the sat is in Far Jericho, but it is next to UN Humanity Base.)

Noted, though nothing I can do about that. IIRC the model has a too high poly count, and should be replaced eventually too.

A suggestion: you can use the Leviathan (and button) from Next War for the Planetfall Leviathan.

The Next War mod doesn't have a Leviathan unit. :confused:

Edit 1: Oh, I forgot to ask. How does one build a Gravity Lens on a LaGrange point? I tried deploying Gravity Lenses to the LaGrange points, but a Gravity Lens is a Air unit and so can only be deployed to a base.

That's a remnant for an old idea for a victory condition. I'll remove the Lagrange Points.

The Acolyte and Creator were made by Refar (Generic Male and Female Missionaries)

I like the Acolyte. :goodjob: I've put it in the game with Deon's new texture.

The Creator is found both in the Warlords Rise of Rome scenario and the BtS Gods of Old mod, and I just like the look of it. (He should carry a sickle though, to symbolize how the religion of Homo Superior will cull the species until the chaff is separated from the grain.)

I'm not particularly fond of the Creator, but it's certainly better than the Hindu missionary currently used.

The Helion is a flame/plasma/whatever thrower. As a consequence its weapon should have an animation like the flamethrower, and neither GarretSidzaka's Space Soldier or Zerver's Plasma Bolter fits.

Generally speaking (that is, without thinking in terms of a specific unit use), I like the helmet of GarretSidzaka's space soldier, but its weapons are rather silly. I mean... some sort of sword??

I like the look of the Plasma Bolter, the weapon and the colour scheme of the texture, but I can't get it to work either. Scene Viewer crashes when I try to open the file. I suspect one of the problem is that Zerver only made a shadernif model. The second problem is, as pointed out by many in that unit's thread, that the texture is MUCH too large. The third (minor) problem is the Russian flag on the uniform.

By the way, could the Helion's name be changed to Hellbore or Inferno Gunner?

No? :confused: (I don't get the reference)

Mobile Infantry by Zerver, and is team-colored.

Ah, I had already looked at that unit, but dismissed it because I didn't really liked how it looked up close. At the usual zoom level as indicated on your screenshot it looks acceptable though. I might use the unit.

A question though. Are all those texture really used by the unit?? There are no less than 18 included in the download. Added up that's just as bad as the huge texture used by the Plasma Bolter.

It does not have air drop animations: if Maniac does choose to use this model, perhaps some one could add the air drop animations?

An a sidenote, I'd love to have another drop animation than the parachute. I'm thinking more along the lines of

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf157ILqJQQ

SMDropPod2.jpg


Anyone know if this is possible?

For the record, this
http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=1824
is what I have in mind for Drop Trooper graphics, if it's possible to make it use a drop animation.


Most issues you raise are AI-related. Those should gradually improve.

Some thoughts regarding the following though:

- My automated aquaformers first filled entire shorelines with seamills, only to replace every single one of them with a mining platform as those became available. This also crashed my economy since I relied on the seamills for energy (I have some energy problems throughout the game, but that may be due to my inexperience with the mod's economy).

Is this not standard Civ4 worker behaviour though? AFAIK people often say the same thing about vanilla Civ4. (Important to know if the problem is caused by me, or just a shortcoming of Firaxian code) I never use automated workers, but IIRC isn't there an option to prevent workers from replacing improvements? You could use that.

No naval invasions. Although my continent is weakly defended, and three other factions with lots of units declared war on me, not a single invasion force ever landed on my continent. The only send submarines, which usually sink themselves by trying to attack my own submarines. After a while, I realized that sea combat with submarines heavily favors the defender, so I placed a shield of submarines in the straits that my enemies use to get to me. This is working well so far, but it makes the AI very easy to handle.

How do submarines favour the defender?

Anyway, here too I'm wondering if this is specific Planetfall behaviour, or usual Civ4 behaviour? Regardless of the origin, it still is a problem of course. Hopefully naval invasions will improve after I add BetterAI in some undefined future.

- Many technologies are described as requiring previous technologies, but I can select them for research without actually fulfilling the requirements.

There's an interface change in the F6 screen: AND-prerequisities (the few there are) have a yellow box around them. If there isn't a box around the tech icon, it's an OR-prerequisite.

Blockade problems. A city on a lake got a fungal bloom. Now there are two IoDs and a sealurk occupying the only water tile that the city has access to, and blockading the entire lake. I cannot build any ships in the city under these conditions. I cannot bring ships in from elsewhere. I cannot attack the blockaders with land-based units. How do I drive them out?

I can't really envision the situation you're describing. Do you have a screenie?
Are you really sure you're playing with patch a though? Fungal blooms shouldn't occur on lakes with the latest patch.
 
Thanks for the quick reply. :)

Workers replacing improvements:
Is this not standard Civ4 worker behaviour though? AFAIK people often say the same thing about vanilla Civ4. (Important to know if the problem is caused by me, or just a shortcoming of Firaxian code) I never use automated workers, but IIRC isn't there an option to prevent workers from replacing improvements? You could use that.
It is standard Civ4 behavior, so if you're using standard Civ4 worker AI, you inherited the problem from there. Using the "never build over existing improvements" option isn't that good a solution because *some* improvements *should* be replaced. BetterAI improves worker behavior a lot, IIRC when you set the governor of a city to emphasize a certain resource, then the workers will build impriovements accordingly. So in a city that is set to emphasize minerals, the aquaformers should build mining platforms, whereas in a city that emphasizes energy, they should leave the seamills in place. Theoretically.

How do submarines favour the defender?
I think I misunderstood the "Trench" bonus. I'll have to take a second look at that. As you said, BetterAI also improves naval invasions, so if the plan is to eventually include BetterAI anyway, then this aspect should improve as well. :)

There's an interface change in the F6 screen: AND-prerequisities (the few there are) have a yellow box around them. If there isn't a box around the tech icon, it's an OR-prerequisite.
Thanks, I missed that.

I can't really envision the situation you're describing. Do you have a screenie?
Are you really sure you're playing with patch a though? Fungal blooms shouldn't occur on lakes with the latest patch.
I'm pretty sure I installed the v0.8a patch (although I didn't find a way to display the version number in-game). But I think the problem is that the patch only prevents fungal blooms in fresh water, and the lake in my game isn't a fresh water lake (it's either too large for that or it was generated as a part of the southern ocean and then closed off by the continent, I don't know how the map script works). Here's the screenshot you asked for:
 

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About mobile infantry: it has too funky colors IMO. I can reskin it, I just need suggestions.

Perhaps a texture more similar to White Rabbit's unit I linked to? Though in another colour than kaki-ish green. Kaki doesn't make sense in an (initially) forestless environment. Black or greyish colours look more futuristic I'd say.
 
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