Really looking forward to 4.1!
So am I! Will be great to finally play again.
I like this. After certain points in the tech tree, both of these resources were useless. This makes them worth something again. Also makes me wonder what the AI generally thinks about trading these two after their most useful period is over?
I'm not sure, I'd have to look. I tend to make assumptions about these sorts of things being handled well enough at this point though, given all the AI improvements BBAI made. Plus there are apparently a lot more AI improvements in my big upcoming code merge...
Very interesting idea. The 25% cap makes it a not-so-big but still useful bonus.
Much as I hate to admit it, that particular idea came from the friend I always play with. He's contributed a handful of great ideas in the past too, but MOST of what he brainstorms up, while sounding amazing at first, tends to prove
completely impractical once you stop and think about it, lol.
For example, his OTHER big idea for version 4.1, was to have your cities automatically move one tile every few turns in semi-random directions until you get Sedentary Lifestyle, to simulate nomadic lifestyle. While I LOVE the concept, the problems this would end up causing are pretty much insurmountable, unfortunately.
This makes me wonder - what are the conditions for an AI to switch their current religion to a new one? Thinking about situations where I spread my early religion to a neighbor or two with a missionary - what would it take for them to switch to another religion later on? What about situations where the AI is the founder of their religion?
Again, I'd have to check. Going from memory however, I believe this particular block of AI code - like most of them - is very complicated. They take a large number of factors into consideration for most of the decisions they make, and re-evaluate them pretty frequently.
If you're REALLY interested, you can grab the Better BTS AI (BBAI), K-Mod, and Caveman 2 Cosmos SDKs and look at their AI files (Unit, City, Player, Team, Game). I myself have the unenviable task of merging EXACTLY those 3 versions of those 5 files with my own codebase pretty soon, heh.
Are you sure the additional wonder production bonus is not too much? In my experience, building wonders after the 2nd era is generally not too difficult anyway as the AI is usually somewhat behind with tech. Philosophical already gets a +50% great person birth rate..
Maybe it's just my playstyle though, i.e. not expanding enough.
No, I am not AT ALL sure that it's not too much, lol.
I just know that +25% production on ANYTHING never seems to really feel very significant in practice.
The systemic structural problem is that all such bonuses simply get added in with the Forge/Factory/etc ones. So when you're at 200% production (100 base + 25 forge + 75 powered factory), a +25% bonus is REALLY only worth +12.5%.
The ideal solution would be to have building, trait, and civic yield bonuses all added up separately and then the totals multiplied, but that's beyond the scope of this particular update, heh.
What does that mean? Is it possible to look up from somewhere what these values do?
Don't worry about it, I'm just tweaking PM's control settings a little. (Though since you asked, I maintained Cephalo's original format, which has them all at the top of the PM file. Just open it in any text editor and go down past the version history. The values are commented and everything, so end users can tweak them. I've chosen my values pretty carefully and with lots of testing though, so I don't generally recommend people mess with them.
)
When I hooked up the vanilla SDK river generator (the one most "normal" maps use) to PM (b/c I didn't like PM's custom river generator at all), I felt that, due to the jagged, non-uniform landmass shapes PM has (with less contiguous blob-shaped land on average), I needed to increase the density of the vanilla river generator. Well, after more testing I changed my mind.
It also turns out that lake placement in PM is HIGHLY dependent on how many rivers were placed (and how long they are). The vanilla rivers are significantly different from the custom ones, and this ended up causing vastly different quantities of lakes to be created. I had previously balanced the lake control values for the original environment, so the note was about me making a separate lake value for when vanilla rivers are used.
Lake MinElevation, on the other hand, is just a personal preference thing. Cephalo installed it with an extremely-high value originally, and while I toned it down a long time ago, I never really tried zeroing it until now.
This is very powerful. I can see the other Religion civics still having their purposes, but Free Religion now seems too weak compared to this.
I was mostly going off your comment about Very High Upkeep being prohibitively expensive early on.
And keep in mind that, even just with Forges in your cities, +50% is only REALLY a 1.75 / 1.25 =
40% increase.
This made me wonder what's your reason behind not giving a health boost to NanoMedicine?
If you go through the entire list of normal buildings, you'll find that, by the end of the techtree, a city will end up with
8 unhealth from buildings, and 9 if it's coastal. (And that's not even counting certain National Wonders and Great Wonders that have local unhealth effects.)
The exact list (since I just re-checked it myself the other day and still remember it, lol) is:
Forge, Factory, Industrial Park, Market, Laboratory, Airport, Virtual Reality Center, Cloning Facility, Drydock.
This gives NanoMedicine the EXQUISITE ability, without me having to add any custom functionality to the game at all, to be useless early on (pretty much worth 2 health for Forge and Market), strong by Industrial (everything except Laboratory, VR, and Cloning), very strong by Modern (Lab checks in), and amazing by Future (worth 8-9 health at that point).
This balances out Free Care, at the same upkeep cost, perfectly imo; the Unhappiness Inflictor™ keeps it relevant against NM's rising health potency. (I considered a lot of other options too btw, like Very High Upkeep on one of them, or an Inflictor on BOTH of them, but I'm pretty sure it's best the way it is.)
So basically this means Prolific gets +1 food per farm, fishing boats on fish/clam/crab and some natural resources like mushroom/grassland - correct?
The way I see it, this means
- a lot faster growth/couple more specialists in big cities after Agriculture
- possibility to happily expand in tundra if fresh water is present
- possibility to happily expand almost everywhere after Civil Service
Sounds ok to me.
Yep, I'm thrilled with the new system.
The flat 3-yield trigger works fine for Industrial and Financial, but as you rightly reminded me, it caused major headaches here, and it's ALSO a lot better off balance-wise without the extra effects I put in in the past SOLELY to have Prolific do SOMETHING in Plains and Tundra regions.
Again though, you're forgetting Outposts! There's nothing Farms can do that those can't do as well, right from the beginning... They just expire and have to be rebuilt as Farms, hehe.
One more thing I noticed is that Serfdom is pretty much useless right now. Tribalism is, in my opinion, better in almost every situation where you don't want to use Slavery / Caste system.
I had to delete the earlier entries in the Change Log sticky in my last update, b/c it went over the character limit for what one post can hold. That being said, here's an entry from Oct 26:
"added +1 Commerce on Farm and -1 Commerce on Town to Serfdom (thanks Karadoc!)"
That was one of the things I did early in 4.1 development. It was a no-brainer to steal that from K-Mod as soon as I read about it in his description, b/c it's
SHEER BRILLIANCE.
Also, Low Upkeep is great, and you might have a different opinion after you've played on Huge maps a few times... I always make a point of building at least 12 Workers in Ancient/Classical, and expanding it to 24 as soon as I can possibly afford to. And it STILL takes me forever to build all my tile improvements!
I mentioned some AI behavior problems earlier. I figured out what I don't like about AI research paths. They don't really take into account the relatively big additional research costs which come from rushing into the next era.
For example, I notice the AI researching Boating before a lot of other stuff quite often. Imo this is sub-optimal because:
1) If there's a decent chance of being the first to discover Sedentary, it makes sense to go for it - it's a great bonus for two next-era techs you NEED anyway.
2) Rushing Boating before researching various important techs like Herbalism, Stone Building, etc doesn't really give you any big advantages. Going straight for the lighthouses is too expensive, both in terms of research and production. It makes sense to get the other stuff first.
There are probably more examples like these. While it can make sense to rush some techs (Sedentary, Masonry, Bronze Working + more later), I've found that the most optimal way to go through the research tree is get 60-90% of the current era techs before going to the next. The AI doesn't really seem to do that.
Well, you ARE correct about that. My Era-based Tech cost doubling system was only added in version 4.0, which was quite recently. I didn't opt to write any custom AI code for it at the time (b/c 4.0 was my biggest update EVER and I was completely exhausted), hoping-slash-assuming the AIs would be okay with the new system on their own.
While I probably SHOULD work on that, I would also point out that there are a growing number of OTHER effects from changing eras in the mod as well: your free empire-level research bonus also doubles, Settlers found bigger cities, new cities can start with certain free buildings, Creative civs now get larger starting borders (though it doesn't actually add any culture, so a rival civ can kill those expanded borders in one turn with an already-established city nearby), and there's the possibility of your leader changing (which ALSO got no custom AI support, btw, when it was added back in version 3.4, heh).
Also, some of the AIs really build too many boats.
There's no such thing as too many boats!!!
They actually build a ton of LAND units too on higher difficulties, you just don't seem them as much (unless you're at war with them). So I would sorta guess that's why you're thinking that...
An interesting idea Tauri came up with - theoretically, is it possible to have the AIs play a large number of games without human intervention and see which AIs are more successful than others?
Yes, BBAI has an AutoPlay feature that does exactly that. I've never used it though, and if I remember correctly I never merged in the code for it, b/c it was a lot of code and I never saw a need for the feature, heh.
The massive trait changes made me think about balance issues again. Ideally, I'd really like if we could play with Random civilizations and not be disappointed with certain traits or trait combos.
Well yes, that's always been my goal as well.
Improving Seafaring removes most of the issues so far
but after the updates there are certain traits which, to me, seem quite a bit more powerful than others. I'm going to have to think about this more, though.
I'm actually
pretty darn happy with them at this point, balance-wise...
Also, a request: could you please add the civic and leader trait descriptions to Feature List? It's somewhat difficult to get a good picture from the changelog
Not easily, heh. Plus the civics really haven't changed much. They were in massive turmoil for years though, until I FINALLY came up with my current system in version 4.0. (The 3 small bonus categories were the key to everything.
) Think of all the fun you missed out on, with the civics being repeatedly overhauled like the traits are now?!
And the traits just GOT a massive overhaul in 4.0, too;
I honestly thought I was done with them at that point. ... Silly me.
Anyway, I would say "trust me on this for now." You'll see the final results pretty soon, and if any significant balance changes need to be made, I'll release a 4.1a update (which would've formerly been known as 4.1.1, hehe).
)
