v97 and happy holidays

Rhye

's and Fall creator
Joined
May 23, 2001
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Japan / Italy / Germany
Thank you for your patience.
I could not cope with all your requests, but here is the new release, at least I could complete it by the end of the year.
A special thanks to PiR, whom I met in person the other day, and helped me to finalise this release.


- reduced some useless printed logs
- fixed a Lua exception
- removed wrong help text about the Pyramids
- fixed 2 bugs in Austrian victory
- fixed bug in Dutch victory
- fixed China and Rome wrong victory points (bug introduced in 96)
- 4 policy branches replaced by a new hybrid government system. Each of them allows only 3 out of 5 branches of policies.
- 2nd row governments need a tech to be unlocked
- 2nd row governments cause a -25 stability hit when adopted
- citadels cannot be build adjacent
- fixed bug in which settlers were deleted by mistake by cleanup routine
- settlers cap set to 4; bazooka cap set to 4; machine gun to 5; worker to 6; workboat to 5; privateer to 3, destroyer to 4; marine to 2
- increased the cost of some modern units
- cleanup routine made stricter but limited to civs that are not in their first 50 turns, in order not to hamper their start
- forced upgrade of AI units limited to when the previous unit is obsolete, as it may happen that weaker units get produced again (and later possibly upgraded), ending up beyond the cap
- AI founding distance made progressively greater in the last 2 eras
- added riflemen as possible bonus unit for colonising civs (AI-only)
- added routine to “merge” AI cities that are too close to each other, by moving the assets of one into another and deleting the older one.
- techs not counted anymore as victory points for England
- Barbarian of Barbarians not contactable anymore
- reduced spawn of native pathfinders, more Mohawk warriors instead
- added iron near Oslo
- small update of city renamings
- holy cow cannot spawn on Lhasa
- new line wrap bug in Victory screen finally fixed
- revised territory stability formula to punish XXL empires
- victory text updated
 
I started up a game and looked at the social policies. I disliked the social policies changes a lot, from what I saw. It removes toys: many early social policies, and culture advancement in the early game. The vision of developing a distinctive style of government for your civ seems like it could be OK, but only if it was much more developed. As it is now, it looks like it would be no fun for playtest games.

v96 looks good, though; I'd like to try that version some time.
 
Just spitballing some new ideas for each; equally influenced by Fall From Heaven 2 mods and board game tableau mechanics.

ALSO: should some policy options give a production boost for certain wonders under construction that are on theme with the policies?

Monarchy:
King's retainers: Receive a free Horseman in your capital. Loyal - Receives Disaffected whenever Civ isn't in monarchy (10% chance to turn barbarian each turn, 10% chance to wear off each turn) (borrowing mechanic from Civ 4 FFH2 mods)
Tax Collector: Receive a modified Great Merchant with # charges to receive (x) gold from each city, where x is a function of (city population)*n. Subtract y stability for each use
Muster Vassals: Receive a free Swordsman? in each of your non-capital cities
Carnival: Remove all food storage in your capital city to remove n discontent

Republic
Citizen defense: Receive a free archer in your capital. Loyal - Receives Disaffected whenever Civ isn't in Republic.
Marathon: All cities receive We Love the King Day/Golden Age following # enemy (Civ) units killed in n turns (Should barbarians trigger this? not sure)
Constitution: Receive a Great Artist in your capital
Frontier provisions: Each new city you found receives a free barracks

Dictatorship
Slave Recruit: Receive one warrior in your capital with the Disaffected promotion
Triumphs: Each time you conquer a city for the first time, add +1 culture to your monument in your capital
Olympiad: Each of your troops on tiles worked by your (capital)? gains +n experience

Theonomy
Liturgical music: Cultural buildings give +1 faith
Indulgences: Receive n gold per city and +1 happiness to each city, - y Stability; may be chosen multiple times (an end node on the tree)
Inquisition: Remove non-state religions from your cities, -n happiness and -y Stability, - % Culture
Jihad: Gain 3 warriors and 1 great general by your capital. Loyal - They receive Disaffected if you switch out of Theonomy
 
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Jet, is there any way to integrate the fun part you're missing into the new type?

1. Revert the mechanics to how they were originally, but rename the social policies so that interpreting them as mutually-incompatible forms of government doesn't bother you any more. :D

2. Take a modding vacation until February and then put all your modding time into Civ 7 instead. :mischief:

3. The change removes options and toys, so I'm not sure how to restore that particular fun without replacing it with different toys.
Maybe:
3.1. Keep the first-row civic trees as they were originally, but also add instability the more you mix them, similarly to how you get instability when there are mixed religions present in your civ. Personally, I don't feel that makes a lot of sense "historically" in the first place, though; the only trees that really feel incompatible to me are the monarchy and liberty ones, and even then I can imagine them being mixed.
3.2 At the same time, develop the 5-year-plans mechanics, which is a project you "need" to do anyway in the context of the Civ 5 mod. Some of the social groups represented in your 5-year-plan scheme are more closely associated with certain social policy trees, so possibly you could re-conceive the 5-year-plan social groups so that each one corresponds to a social policy tree. Maybe have a satisfaction score for each social group. I'm not sure; I'm not sure what the design would be. But I know you wanted to tie the social policies in to stability somehow.

4. No matter what, to make it fun for playtesting you have to rebalance the cultural costs so that it doesn't disrupt, too much, the pace of social policy development and the value of culture.
 
I feel the need to chime in and give a contrarian take. I don't actually dislike the current changes to policy. It's one of the most boring points of vanilla Civ 5.

Here is what I would suggest to improve on the current RFC system:

1. Make the different government types a bit more impactful, to make the choice of each more meaningful. Maybe each government types, instead of three policies, could have two or three variables that you can decide on? Like, Monarchy could have:
-An "absolutism" branch, with absolute, enlightened, and constitutional
-An "inheritance" branch, with partition, elective, and primogeniture
-An "administration" branch, with nobility, clergy, and administrators
Therefore you could make your kingdom be an absolute monarchy, with an elective king (elected by the nobility), with an administration handled by the nobles or so. Of course these are just ideas, but having three branches of that sort could help make government feel more alive.

2. As for the actual policies (Patronage, Commerce, Aesthetics...), I would change two things only. First, I would make all policy groups available starting ancient (or classical) era. Second, I would change the Rationalism policies into Honor (and possibly re-adjust Honor's bonuses if need be).
This would allow for a lot more flexibility (if you start with an ancient era or classical era civ, you're forced to go for either patronage or aesthetics, which doesn't really feel good if you wanna play Greece and want to conquer the world, for instance).
The reason for Rationalism's removal is that picking it first could really snowball out of control I fear, but it doesn't feel right to lock one behind anything.

With those adjustments, you got a whole lot of possible combinations when it comes to policies (Which groups you go first, second, and third becomes really open, and by the time you get the third group you should be able to unlock ideology), but also with government. If the government modifiers are balanced right, it won't necessarily become as simple as "Take the newest one that's unlocked by newer technologies."
 
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