Version 2.7 discussion

I've made icons for the tea resource:


I attach archive with DDS icon and TGA small icon for gamefont.

As long as it's just a bush, we can just retexture the wine resource (I'd say, remove grapes and make texture darker). and we could use more bushes per tile to make it more distinct.

If I manage to find the texture I will retexture it easily.

 

And IMF (International Monetary Fund), IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), WHO (World Health Organization) and dozen other world wonder/project ideas that I got on notes list...

Horse Archer is already in Mounted Archery (new) tech which can be found after Horse Breeding.. so this tech comes available around the same time when you get Longbowman.

Only one resource per tile is allowed. Civ 4: Colonization has multiple resources but those are really yields ie. same as food, hammer, commerce from plots. Doing anything like that requires heavy sdk changes to BtS.

Flax I got and was going to add it. Few others that could be added are Amber, Cocoa.. and some other, as for those I got graphics already. But I'll consider what to add - Lead is currently used to speed up Bath House and Sewer System construction (lead pipes) and on modern era it's requirement for Nuclear Plant. Since that resource adds unhealthiness (-2) I was also thinking to +1 health from it in Hospital (protection from X-rays) as modern day scientists are more aware of Lead's bad effects and thus the use of Lead has been limited in many ways (removed from gasoline as well).

Cool icons, now just missing the terrain graphics for it

 

This is a retexture for "spices" graphics to tea resource, just replace the spices.dds and spices_l.dds with it. It changes "spice fruit" texture to dark leaves and red juice on the masher stone to green. Also changes the "hanging spices" graphics for plantation to hanging leaves.




P.S. An idea for desert/plain: a temporary modern resource "safari" which gives happiness and requires just route on a free desert/plains tile without an improvement. We could use recolored horses->zebras for it.

 

Nice. You're on a roll with the Civ4 art assets these days Deon.

If we're worried about natural resources crowding the map, just reduce their individual impact a bit. Make them provide less of an improvement to yields and happy and health bonuses through various buildings. I'm pretty sure you can alter things to make them appear more densely with a few changes, if I remember discussions in FfH a fair while back about their reagents resource never showing up.

It does seem to be getting difficult to find some particular resources. On non-huge maps. The last game I played, I was disappointed to find there wasn't any Wheat on the whole planet. So the +25% bonus in my sprawling capital from that Egyptian religious building I had went to waste. And I had to go to war a few times to secure a lot of resources that only had a single instance in the world. Lemons, silver, spices, silk, pigs and probably a few others. But then, all of those were probably wiped out by the millions-strong swarms of elephants ruling that version of Earth. Might not have had cavalry until well into the availability of Knights, but I was drowning in elephant riders.

Anyway, one of the natural resources that I would definately like to see is some kind of better wood, found in forests and jungles. Could give a bonus to the construction time of wood ships and siege weapons. Or let you construct a building that gives those units a promotion when built. Lumbermills come a bit late for that though. So perhaps you could also use a Camp, (To stand in for a logging camp) with a lesser yeild, and later upgade to a lumbermill. Wasn't there some kind of model for a wood resource around? Barring that, there's always the option to recolour and enlarge one of the existing tree models to make some kind of small grove to place in an existing forest.

And save some of those resource slots for the Future Era, Zappara. Deuterium pulled from ocean water or He3 harvested offworld. For fusion plants and fusion-powered units. Nanotubes to build the space elevator and some of the more outlandish units.

On generalstaff's ones for which he has no ideas:
-Nanobots are one of the easier ones. Required for building the Nanobot Cloud. And give a lot of the manufacturing buildings '+XX% with Nanobots.' like they get with power.
-Pharmaceuticals (Or just call them medicines if they're introduced earlier) are a natural add for additional in hospitals and the like. Or as a pre-req if it's available earlier. Spices are a good resource to base it off of, if it's an earlier thing. To simulate herbalistic origins. Though at that point you might want to make Spices just building it much faster, since they're sort of rare. If it's later then building a Pharmaceutical Company, or whatever, would likely require a chemical plant.

 

Actually, I think its nerfed enough already (as whipping is a far worse deal given the productivity of RoM tiles), it just needs to be moved to labor civics with something else opening up foreign trade.

As for hopping to atheism early, good luck with that at higher levels, as the happiness, productivity, and diplomatic benefits provided by a religion would be very difficult to pass up in that era.

Side note: pls consider taking steps to reduce the overseas vassal spawning spam. It forces all the AI into secular and really hurts the AI in the long run, as they need to RoM-powered overseas tiles to compete in the late tech race.

 

I'm missing rice in my current game - first time I've seen that one. Very excited about the manufactured resources. The longer the chain (and thus powerful the effect) the better. Builder's paradise.

 

I always thought that would be a great addition also, just not sure how to implement it. Like maybe different forest types than say just forest. For example a dense forest would provide more hammers when chopped or less for a less dense one. Or even go further where certain types of forests would give the city in its radius a bonus toward certain wooden ships ( like HP's or maybe speed ) while others would give a bonus to the early siege units ( HP's or attack )...

Haven't had a chance to playtest the new Megapack, anyone get it to load a map & get it to work& mess around with it? The 2.62 non mega game I'm currently in is consuming what little free time I have of late, best Civ game I've played....ever. One thing I have noticed tho & maybe its just in this game but when Civ's declare war on each other, they stay at war lol. I am playing on Snail & currently have 6-8 hours into this game & I'm only at 1000BC but it seems like Gilgamesh & Shaka have been beating away relentlessly on Isabella forever & even with no cities left they won't end it ( I have complete kills on ).

And this again has to deal with the lack of positive reactions thing but I felt so bad for Spain I donated 2 cities I had conquested from Ethopia & a few units as I was losing money bad & was going to disband it all anyway & I barely get a thanks from Isabella, I think plus 3 for donating 2 very minor cities, 8 average units & giving some resources. & the very next turn I get negative from Isabella because I was paying tribute deer to Gilgamesh as I couldnt afford another war. Also I didn't get to "see" it all unfold but either a Revolution occured or Barbarian civ started the Gilgamesh/Sumerians in my game cus I didnt choose them & after 15 maybe 75 years turns or so I finally get to that part of my continent & Gilgamesh all of a sudden has the most powerful army by far on my continent & he just got started....seemed kinda unbalanced. Could of just been a Rev on Spain because they were neck & neck with me & Shaka & just dropped completely off the map in a matter of 3-4 turns but as cool as it was to see all this as its is my 1st RoM/Rev game, he was rediculously powerful out of nowhere....back to my game...

 

I'd say, make resources convertable. I.e. if there're cows it means that there's a good pasture so horses could live there. So with a suitable technology (like horsebreeding, which would add some small promotion to all mounted units and probably upgrade stable) you could convert cow resource to horses etc. (banana to spices,...). This would be a good alternative to "resource planting" which looks overpowered, so this variation wouldn't give you a huge imbalance issue because the resources are at their original case, you just would get the variant you need (you know, it's common for some countries to bring oversea goods and start to grow them; in Rusiia Hrushev brought a lot of corn and started to grow it everywhere, and we all know the potato which was brought from America).

There should be exceptions defined by a common sense.

I.e. it makes sense to turn cow<->horse<->sheep<->pig(maybe) and most "plantation"-type resources (banana, rubber, spice etc.); however I don't see a possibility to turn gold to silver etc., so it basically touches "growable" resources only. Also there should be exceptions of "rare" goods, like for silk. But there should definitely be an ability to transform crops from one type to another etc.

 

There have certainly been (many) times when I've wished you could do this..
Unfortunately, there's a 'but' involved.

..But one of the big draws of continent and Terra maps is that not all resources are available on all landmasses. So you have to do some overseas conquest or trade heavily.

It's still a better solution than resource planting, mind.
Maybe once you get up in the tech tree? Biology, or Agricultural Engineering. Where you can justify being able to easily get seeds and information on the open market, and know enough to mimic the proper soil conditions to do large scale planting.

 

I to would like this feature. I am reminded of two times in history when England has "liberated" plants and grown them in its colonies, mostly to break a monopoly. Rubber and Tea are the ones I am thinking of.

So I reckon the "but" should just be that you have access to the resource, maybe via trade. For the grains and livestock that should be enough. With the other foodstuffs requiring a tech apples and lemons early, tea and rubber in the industrial era and so on.

Of course how will the AI handle it?

 

You can pretty much guess the answer if you ask yourself a certain question. Is there anything identical to this in Vanilla? If no, then the AI probably won't handle it.

Either they won't change the crops, or you'd get like fifteen workers piled up on each resource tile trying to change it to four different things.

It might not be hard to write a snippet, since the logic itself is pretty simple. Check to see if I have multiples of this resource the worker is on. If yes, check to see if you're missing one of the other available options. If yes, change it to that. But since I have no idea about AI coding, it might not be so obvious in practice.

I had thought of that too. But it really wouldn't solve the problem of very rare resources, since the AI wouldn't trade it if they just had one. Unless they were your vassals, of course. But if so, you could have conquered them and taken their land, with the resources on it, so it's a bit of a moot point.

 

I like it too. I always think about solutions / improvements for the resource system, but always stop at the modable or not modable question. This seem easy to do. If a map generates tons of cows and few pigs, you may choose to convert it. But it should have another restriction: your contact with the resource. Medieval europeans didn't know potatos, but from the moment they had contact with it, they planted it, am I right?

 

If [( has required tech = true) and ( has more than 1 type of this resource ) and ( resource has improvement )] then (allow transformation)

Pretty easy, just convert this code to python and it works.

 

Going totally in a different direction from the current topic. A thought that popped into my head while browsing some other thread:
The whole Colonist/Pioneer thing is definately one of my favorite parts of RoM. It always felt kind of ridiculous to me in vanilla that I had to spend ages building up a practically stone-age infrastructure in the modern age.
Wouldn't mind seeing it expanded a bit further.

Ever consider a few national wonders that provide a few more of the basic buildings to all cities? I'm not advocating The Great NanoFoundry(tm) that gives free Nanofactories or something. But a Clean Water Act or something that provides aquaducts in the industrial eras. Transit Infrastructure that gives paved roads. Jewelers, bakeries, butcheries, bazaars, even brothels if you can possible think of a wonder to provide them . Just those small priced, older buildings that are almost a given in more advanced times.

Personally I wouldn't mind fronting production time in one of my more developed cities to have to worry less about babysitting the basic development of new ones in the later eras. Or not wanting to keep captured enemy cities because of woeful development.

 

In one of the Civ III mods the author had come up with a solution. You could build a minister of graineries (or temples, or whatever) which gave you a free granery in each city. Its maintenance cost was larger than five or ten times the maintenance cost of one grainery so it was only useful for larger empires. I think it could only be built in an administrative centre such as palace of forbidden palace etc.

OrionVetran has built such a national wonder, see http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=316270. That thread suggests that there are others somewhere for the other basic buildings. It is a python wonder so someone needs to merge the code.

 

"Red Lights District" (+1 and +10% ) in all cities, grants free brothels. Hehe.
I will be able to provide graphics.

 

I use slavery in my games for the production bonuses, and because Barter is weaker in comparison. I use whippiing only occasionally for wonders only. I disagree with your argument about whipping being sufficient counter balance for slavery as whipping is purely an optional choice. I'd still use slavery for the production bonuses, and because it's better than barter, up until I can access free market, even if whipping was not allowed. Plus the Slave Market for a +10% commerce, +15% production is very useful. I rarely have problem with unhappiness since so many resources and buildings are available to give me plenty of happiness bonuses. Moving Slavery to another civic is anxdhaving something else to open foreign trade is something to consider though but I'm not sure what. At present there does need to be a early alternative to slavery economic civic which isnt barter. Maybe a coin economy or something with the advent of currency.

Higher difficulty levels? I play on deity..... If you mean later eras, well you need not keep it set Aethist the whole time, but the commerce and science boost is just super powerful that early on. If you dont have a relgion yet its a no brainer, and if you do, but dont have it's founding city, (since you wont be getting the holy city income anyway) again might as well switch to it if you have the wonder.


On an unrelated note, the Scientific trait is still too powerful, in fact its more powerful than it was before even though you tried to reduce it. First it was +2 beaker per city, +10% science per city. Now it is +1 beaker per city, +15% science per city. The +5% science per city is cumulative and it by mid or late game probably is providing a lot more beakers than the +1 beaker per city difference as compared to before. For any city that is bringing in more than 21 beakers, +1 beaker per city and +15% nets you more in total than the prior, +2, +10% settings. I'd suggest making it +1, +10%.

 

That thread is the one that brought my thought to mind.

There isn't any building maintenance in Civ4, of course. But the build cost can easily be some arbitrary multiple of the base building. And it could indeed have a +maintenance or - aspect. Though obviously you wouldn't want either of those things to be so bad that you'd be better off just constructing those aging buildings individually.

It might be a helpful thing to add for the AI, who often seem to neglect base building in favor of having their little towns spent 15 turns building a unit that a bigger city would create in 2. But they seem to love building national wonders.

Not sure why OrionVeteran's Strategic Grain Reserve would a python wonder? It doesn't seem to do anything that a normal pure-XML wonder can't.

On the topic of Slavery, I like where it is now. I used to always use it in my RoM games, and stay with it until modern times. The last game I used something else, finally. Maybe it's more attractive if you use whipping more than I do.

 

Yea, I agree, I can't see why it has python code. Perhaps we should ask . I tried making it a modular wonder but screwed up the XML somewhere. I slept on it and still can't see the problem.

 

Awesome! Could you do one for Honey (and maybe Wax)? And possibly a bee hive building icon? Cause i really think it would be a good resource to get from an "Apiary" aka bee hive. It would work similar to Hit Singles where there is no resource on the map but a building that makes the resource. Oh and i suppose the new tech of "Apiculture" would need an icon too.

Many many thanks in advance if you do this.