Version 2.4 feedback

[Domino369]

I'm not sure how you can tie road movement into a building (a minor one at that) :S Main reason being that road movement is civ wide while the paved roads is city wide.

Still a lil iffy on more resources...

 

[sjami7]

I've played a few games with this mod and for the most part I love it. A couple things I would change is battle fields and the bombardment features. Battle fielfds should be taken out all together... Atleast allow my workers to clear them before the future era. Bombardment is cool if you are being attacked, but a little unrealistic. I think bombardment should be reserved for city attack. Think about it, if I had enough catapults to bombard a rifleman, I could kill that rifleman with an axeman without even losing a single catapult... a little unrealistic if you ask me. I had some other issues with the tech tree... Like I went straight from cannons to mobile artillery? That could use a little work. One last thing is I would like to play the earth map (huge) with any leadr of any civilization... That is all, very nice work with this mod. Lots of fun to play!

 

[sjami7]

btw, I also remember losing units by bombardment... I thought there was a 80% max on that? maybe a glitch.

 

[konradcabral]

Oh, nothing, just the driveway, the foundation, the road outside, the sidewalks... what do you think concrete is, other than processed stone? Aggregates are most commonly made from gravel, while cement itself is made from a variety of things, all of which are stone-derived. Aside from which, what do you have in your house that's made of uranium? Got anything made from horses?

Oh yeah, you're totally right. I completely forgot about these things. Stone and its bonus stays then.

And what about my other ideas? What do you guys think?

 

[le_harv]

I've played a few games with this mod and for the most part I love it. A couple things I would change is battle fields and the bombardment features. Battle fielfds should be taken out all together... Atleast allow my workers to clear them before the future era. Bombardment is cool if you are being attacked, but a little unrealistic. I think bombardment should be reserved for city attack. Think about it, if I had enough catapults to bombard a rifleman, I could kill that rifleman with an axeman without even losing a single catapult... a little unrealistic if you ask me. I had some other issues with the tech tree... Like I went straight from cannons to mobile artillery? That could use a little work. One last thing is I would like to play the earth map (huge) with any leadr of any civilization... That is all, very nice work with this mod. Lots of fun to play!

I can see what you are getting at with a catapult being out of reach of attacking forces. The ranged attack does become important later on in the modern era when you are trying to simulate a combined arms approach, for example artillery bombardment is an important part of modern warfare and without it, its not overly realistic. It shouldn't be restricted to just city attack because ROM is set up using the 'influence war' idea where you have frontlines and battlefronts. Killing enemy units in their territory gives you a cultural bonus for that tile driving the frontline deeper into enemy territory. Ranged bombardment aids this effort.

 

[c0d5579]

Oh yeah, you're totally right. I completely forgot about these things. Stone and its bonus stays then.

And what about my other ideas? What do you guys think?

I haven't reviewed most of them in close enough detail to give proper critique, but the idea of charging money for building roads... sucks. In the ancient world, "roads" as defined in Civilization were built by slave or conscript labor using readily-available materials (in other words, by Worker units, using whatever was at hand, not something you'd have to pay for and import). The Roman roads, for instance, were built largely by military laborers; indeed, part of the Roman equivalent of basic training was road construction, as physical conditioning. Rail lines were built similarly, though steel rails obviously can't be made on-site due to the difficulty of portable steel mills. Still, railroads already require the "Steel" resource in RoM.

Now, bridges - that's a horse of a different color. Problem is there's no separate "bridge" structure in Civ4.

 

[konradcabral]

I haven't reviewed most of them in close enough detail to give proper critique, but the idea of charging money for building roads... sucks. In the ancient world, "roads" as defined in Civilization were built by slave or conscript labor using readily-available materials (in other words, by Worker units, using whatever was at hand, not something you'd have to pay for and import). The Roman roads, for instance, were built largely by military laborers; indeed, part of the Roman equivalent of basic training was road construction, as physical conditioning. Rail lines were built similarly, though steel rails obviously can't be made on-site due to the difficulty of portable steel mills. Still, railroads already require the "Steel" resource in RoM.

Now, bridges - that's a horse of a different color. Problem is there's no separate "bridge" structure in Civ4.

OK, i'm waiting for your other opinions on the other subjects.

 

[c0d5579]

More ideas:

-Roads and RailRoads should cost money, like done with Shaft Mines and other improvements. It would avoid the inverossimile spam of it around our lands and AI's.

Discussed this already. Since pre-superhighway roads were as often as not built not by order from the capital, but by locals using local materials (leading to very widespread differences in road quality outside cities, I might add) I don't see why the central government (you, the player) is being charged money for an improvement that is done on a local-purchase basis.

- The civics should be changed DESPITE the player and AI's will, using the Revolutions mod or maybe the new events. This would reflect situations where societies' intellects know what would be the best type of state, but can't change how the things are.
- Following this idea, a new Great Person could be created: the Great Revolutionary, like Lenin. These guys can give the players the possibility of change civics accordingly their will.

I don't know - it might work in, say, Thomas' War, which is already Python-heavy and has a couple extra GP categories, but in RoM, which on most machines is already unplayably huge at its upper end in the modern era, I really think that you're running into the problem of realism vs. system resources.

- Open Borders Division:
- Civil Open Borders (Scouts, Workers, Merchants)
- Commercial Open Borders - Trade Routes
- Military Open Borders
The differents levels of these would change the caused by spies getting caught.

Absolutely, though I'd simplify "civil open borders" and "commercial open borders" into one category. Diplomatic hierarchy would be something like this:

Cross-Border Trade (your civil/commercial) -> Open Borders (your military) -> Defensive Pact -> Permanent Alliance

Each stage would require the others to be complete. This allows something like the real-world Holy Roman Empire, where imperial troops can march pretty much where they want within the borders of the empire, and trade occurs inside the same zone, without creating a "Holy Roman Empire" state where no such thing really existed.

- Military maintenance should much more expensive, and armies size food-production limited. This would increase even more the battle experience importance, as well the military strategies. It also would cause a much more frequent change of cities' ownership, like real history.

Civ4 already has problems in the medieval era not linking population base and food production to military size. Honestly, I think what you're asking here would require a serious re-tooling of the way it handles things, similar to Civ2's home-city system. It's probably doable, but is it doable within the framework of RoM, or would it need a ground-up mod?

- The trade routes could be explicitely player-designed, I mean, manually. This would stimulate even more the exploration beyond borders, and the discovering of new routes, more cheap or not. When I say this, i'm thinking at the portuguese efforts at the Middle Age to discover new paths to India, in order to get the valuable resources there, without depend on Venezian or Genovian merchants.

This seems reasonable to me, though I'd want a button that just says "optimize" to let the computer do my thinking for me. Frankly, RoM takes long enough to play through without me going "if I switch this route from X to Y, what will change?" for five trade routes per city.

A lot of your proposals add to realism, but not to playability. RoM is already borderline unplayable on a lot of machines because of size and scope - making it more bulky is not the answer.

Regarding resources becoming obsolete - I vote against it. Stone, I've explained elsewhere. Obsidian is borderline, but then, I consider it borderline as a resource. It has exactly the same applications it did 500 years ago, and is widely used for surgical implements (not as widely as steel, but widely enough that I know about it and I'm not a surgeon). Horses aren't as widely used in, for instance, agriculture or daily life (and are outdated by trucks, not commuter trains, which means Mechanized Transport, BTW), but they're still both agriculturally and economically significant in large portions of the world - Kentucky and the Arabian Peninsula, to name two places. Basically, while they're not used in cities near as much as they used to be, they still have uses. If hemp and tobacco are included, horses fall in the same category of "luxury resources" in modern times.

 

[konradcabral]

Yes! This kind of discussion i wanted to see.
I like to imagine how it'll be the perfect Civ game, so i know i tend to fly so high. I'm starting a 2.5 game now.

 

[le_harv]

Alas starting the game in the industrial era failed to allow me to progress very far. Please see the attached save game file, press enter and shortly thereafter a crash occurs. Reproducible no matter what I do up until this point...

I can't make heads or tails of the logs but if you need me to post them then I can.

EDIT

Also tried to start a game in the modern era with the revmod and barbciv mods turned off. I only managed to get a couple of turns before I got a crash. This happens everytime I try to start a game in the modern era. I have tried different combinations of game settings in the modern era and it will never progress beyond a few turns. I have attached the save game file for reference.

 

[coreybowman]

ive down loaded 4 times now over the last week but i still dont have interface. i tried installing the bud path fix but still now ui. i can figure out the problem. i had 2.4 installed and it ran fine with no problems but i had to reinstll bts and after that no interface. anyone else having this problem. the same thing happen to me with the road to war and it ended up been and faulty download

 

[bramage]

i've been playing rom 2.41 for the past few weeks and have been loving the mod. however, when i reach close to the modern age, the game just crashes to the desktop. didn't have any problems before. i have windows vista 64, 512mb video card and 4gb of ram. have no idea what is going on. this is what it looks like on the problem report:

Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: Civ4BeyondSword.exe
Application Version: 3.1.3.1
Application Timestamp: 48317e8a
Fault Module Name: CvGameCoreDLL.dll
Fault Module Version: 0.0.0.0
Fault Module Timestamp: 48ba29f5
Exception Code: c0000094
Exception Offset: 0002df05
OS Version: 6.0.6001.2.1.0.768.3
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: 3164
Additional Information 2: f31c530d3d12785f4cca5eb2cbce0d8e
Additional Information 3: 5f87
Additional Information 4: 01bff28ec018e5af7a10ed0e25a03bbf

 

[spoo]

when i ckick to start a new game i get ctd but i installed the 3.17 patch, any advice?

 

[zappara]

I think most of the crash problems are solved with v2.5 patch - at the moment even the 2.5beta is more stable than v2.4 or v2.41.

 

[bramage]

are u telling me, i can't use this patch on a previous saved game??? this means i have to start all over and i don't want to. isn't there any way to fix my crashing problem without having to resort to this patch??? i really want to finish my game.

 

[le_harv]

I think most of the crash problems are solved with v2.5 patch - at the moment even the 2.5beta is more stable than v2.4 or v2.41.

Excellent work, I look forward to its release with anticipation.

are u telling me, i can't use this patch on a previous saved game??? this means i have to start all over and i don't want to. isn't there any way to fix my crashing problem without having to resort to this patch??? i really want to finish my game.

I would imagine this would take a lot of work, seeing as mod creators do this for the love of the game and not for cold hard cash, having to start a new game seems like a small price to pay for having a more stable shot at increasing ones enjoyment.

 

[JosEPh_II]

i've been playing rom 2.41 for the past few weeks and have been loving the mod. however, when i reach close to the modern age, the game just crashes to the desktop. didn't have any problems before. i have windows vista 64, 512mb video card and 4gb of ram. have no idea what is going on. this is what it looks like on the problem report:

Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: Civ4BeyondSword.exe
Application Version: 3.1.3.1
Application Timestamp: 48317e8a
Fault Module Name: CvGameCoreDLL.dll
Fault Module Version: 0.0.0.0
Fault Module Timestamp: 48ba29f5
Exception Code: c0000094
Exception Offset: 0002df05
OS Version: 6.0.6001.2.1.0.768.3
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: 3164
Additional Information 2: f31c530d3d12785f4cca5eb2cbce0d8e
Additional Information 3: 5f87
Additional Information 4: 01bff28ec018e5af7a10ed0e25a03bbf

Are you still using the 3.13 Official patch for BtS and Not the 3.17?

I ask because I highlighted in red the Application Version. This could be the source of your problem. As 2.4 and above is based off the Official3.17 patch.

JosEPh

 

[yuizaki]

I think cavalry has a stack attack bug

I selected a stack of cavalry and attacked against en enemy's stack. After the battle, all units in my stack (which have won) are located at where the enemy used to be, instead of only the "last unit in combat" (chosen by CPU on stack attack). Is this a normal function of cavalry or a bug?

 

[DRJ]

its no bug. all units who have a moving point left (yellow sign) after a fight move after the last enemy unit is killed. its annoying, but it will happen in vanilla civ as well.

 

[Stormwind]

Are you still using the 3.13 Official patch for BtS and Not the 3.17?

I ask because I highlighted in red the Application Version. This could be the source of your problem. As 2.4 and above is based off the Official3.17 patch.

JosEPh

Well, the Version of the BtS.exe is still 3.13 here too even after applying the 3.17 Patch.
To check this right click on the .exe - properties - version tab.