Visionary Keith of New Republic v0.6 AAR

[Refar]

A new version is there to be tried out, so time for another game
I can say in advance, that the new version has some major improvements over the previous one.
The AAR is itended rather as kind of introduction to players new to the Mod.
Some notes and suggestions on the gameplay are in the second post, if you prefer to skip the details.

In my second game i want to try a different path, to explore the features i missed (or booked as useless ) in the previous game.
- Try and use some different Units - i.e. the UTE but also some Crossbows.
- Be more carefull with the economy.
- The goal is to achieve the new Vision victory of 0.6.
So overall i will pursure a somewhat more peacefull path and prioritize techs accordingly.

The Settings
Played version 0.6 of the mod on BTS 3.17

Standard Map, 10 Random Civilizations (Us and 9 AI)
Prince Difficultie
All Victories Enabled

City Flipping after Conquest
Choose Religions

We drew Keith of the New Republicans and will be playing in Amreican Blue.
We are Creative and Protective.

The Start Location looks not bad. Some Grassland, Brahmin, Copper and Gold. What striles me is the abundance of Gold and Silver. Not that i mind.


Opening:
Research Ariculutre while building a Worker.
I do need Construction for mining and Administration for Buerocracy.
Will move for Machinery->Radio or maybe Combustion->Refining after that, to try and found a Vision. Not a what one would call a beline, but from my expreience in my last game, the AI did not moved for the Vision-Techs too soon.

Enter the Survivor-Village seen in screenshot on turn 0 and pop Agriculture. move on to tech Construction.

See a Spider on Turn 1 and the Aquarian Civiliztion is Destroyed by wild animals at Turn 2.


After the Worker was done, i built a Survivor. Then Barracks, and then Chainbuilt quite a few Survivor Warriors. Did not do a lot of exploring untill those promoted Survivors came out - even with a promotion they die quite easily to animals.
Still used a part of a highway connected to my city, to make a few runs ind take a look at the very close neighbourhood. Met Victor, Brandy, Shiro and Ironhead.

Turn 32:Brandy offers to become my Vassal State. Apparently 3 Survivor Warriors are a power to be reconed with right now. Well why not.
But BTW. HOW ?!? I am looong way from Feudalism/Vassalage. Apparently peaceful/voluntary Vassalization is not bound to Feudalism/Vassalge.


Those Animals seem more scary than before. Next time i might even concider not building a Worker first

Got a group of refugees form a Village around turn 40. Quite interesting twist getting those so far from home. Mademe really think how to get them back safe. Had a few more Survivors in the vicinity. Was able to bring the refugees back home, loosing one of 3 escorting survivors (Two were close by right away, the third i sent from the capital to meet them half-way).


Pick up Machinery on the way to Radio and start fielding Crossbowmen, which are a bit better than Survivors. With the new Crossbowmen on defense duty, send out my last Survivors to scout. Try to keep them in Pairs, as on many accasions there are two or more animal attacks in one turn.

Turn 48: Achieve my first objective by founding Plutocracy with Radio (Choose Religions). Immediately switch to state vision.
Also in Picture: A Deathclaw. Uhhh. Scary.


Midgame. After founding Plutocracy moved for other vision techs, to gain controll over the spreading (or not spreading in this case) of as many other visions as possible. Also started some expnasion trying to cut the AI from expanding past me. Was indeed able to secure a bit of land.

Also observed some AI on refuelling. But they do refuel and use Gasoline based units now.


Got 2 Hospital Trucks and a Refugee from City ruins, having 8 or 9 ruins under my controll.

Also sent out a few small waves of Advocates and converted 2 of my neighbours to Plutocracy.

Civics i went State Property and Buerocracy again - there is no real alternative to it right now.
However adopted Serfdom rather than Slavery this time. While i missed the ability to whip on a few occasions, with the maps beeing very food challenged Serfdom is a real alternative now.

Actually lost a more or less mature city to Barbarians. A real Horde of wild animals and Punks (Those unfortunately do stack...) Attacked in two consecutive turns and owewhelmed the Defenders (2 Crossbos and one Guardian) before reinforcements could arrive.
Was able to retake the city one turn later with the reinforcements however.

Turn 128: With Education done i was able to gain controll of 4 Visions. Lost one on Automatic Weapons and one on Currency (by 2 turns ), showing that some of the AI went a deep path in the techtree as well.
Both "rogue visions" did not pose a threat to our victory however.


Endgame: With the "Race to Visions" done i was less afraid to overtax my economy (Was running with 6 cities at ~80% slider so far), so i planed to settle my backyard to get more Plutocratic population and backfill the tech tree.
Picked up Fertilization from Computers to boost my Farms and my Plutocratic Population.


Turn 132: A glance on the Victory Screen around revealed that i was really close to the Vision Victory so i switched most of my cities to build Advocates and sent those to my neighbours.


Some population growth in my own cities, two more cities founded and converted and a few Advocates sent to my neighbours brought victory at Turn 150.


The Victory felt a bit easy, but i had some luck along the way too.

 

[Refar]

Notes
This version has some very noticeable improvements over the previous one, so i will start with what i liked.
The new slower tech speed certainly feels a lot better, giving some units i previously ignored completely a place in the game (I.e. Crossbowmen).
Also the Animals/Barbs felt more dangerous this time.
Improved Farming with Fetilization, and the somewhat deeper techtree are big + points as well. Also while the economy still feels constrained - which goes along fine with the setting - there are some more options now, to actually run a stable productive economy.
The new victory condition opens a way for a peacefull victory for builders.

Unfortunately due to my goals and research path i had no opportunity to try the new balance on the later game units and depots.
But i noticed the AI using and refueling gas-powered units.

Suggestions / Issues
Again those are my impressions from a game, so they might come form wrong or incomplete observations.
Also they are all minor.

- Protective now is only giving a bonus to Guardians. Perhaps you can concider reintroducing the Bonus on Ranged units (Crossbowmen). This would not only boost PRO a bit but also make those Crossbow units more usefull, making PRO a good and sound Trait for Builder-players.
- Wild animals stack with Punks. Looks odd. I know it's not your fault, and i am not sure if you can do something to change this.
- My impression was, that the map is too "crowded" with shiny metals. Rarely seens o much Gold and Silver. But it was just thi one map for now.
- I felt the requirement of 6 building to allow a wonder (Brodcast Towers -> Voice of the Badlands) too heavy. Even with this beeing a peacefull builder game, i was nowhere even close meeting the requirement. Sure the game ended rather fast too. Still...
I think making the wonder require the building in the city to be built should be enought (like in normal Game for example Lighthouse -> Great Lighthouse).

- I think the new victory condition need some tweaking. The Victory felt quite easy. As you see from the statistic - i used 18 Advocates, only 11 of them on opponents. It's not much.
And while i pushed Plutocracy to the needed 51%, the closest "concurrent vision" had 2% influence. Doen not feel right somehow.
I.e. i don't think the AI's did try to actively spread they State Vision. It might be because they were to pressed otherwise, or perhaps because the Visions dont have shrines - i am not sure on the inner workings of the AI here.

Minor Bugs
- The MG should be enabled with Automatic Weapons. It makes more sense and requires Ammunitions anyway. Right now it has apparently no prereq-tech, as it is displayed in the build list from Turn 1 (Greyed out because "need ammo")
- The notification Message on some of the new ruins events seem to get lost sometimes.
I got a proper message, when i got my fist Hospital truck. The second truch and a refugee apparing in the ruines generated no message (not that i seen it) - noticed them when they were activated for moving during th turn.

- The Vassal Thingy... Brandy became my Vassal before i (or she or somewhere else) had the tech for Vassalage. Also i dont really see, why - i had 3 Survivor Warriors at that point.
I am pretty sure that both are not of your doing.
But maybe you can still check, to be sure. I.e. i don't really know how units are accounted for the power-graph. It might be possible that those survivors giving too much percieved power

Thet is it. I have some other - vague - ideas on Civis and Unit balance, but

 

[davidlallen]

Turn 32:Brandy offers to become my Vassal State. Apparently 3 Survivor Warriors are a power to be reconed with right now. Well why not. But BTW. HOW ?!? I am looong way from Feudalism / Vassalage. Apparently peaceful / voluntary Vassalization is not bound to Feudalism / Vassalge.

The fact that she made the offer means you can accept it. The ability to accept vassals is in "administration" tech, which you already had. There is an icon for it in the tech tree, if you mouse over the items granted by administration. I put it early on purpose.

Turn 48: Achieve my first objective by founding Plutocracy with Radio (Choose Religions). Immediately switch to state vision.

I have never seen "You have founded a new religion! What do you wish to call it?" You mentioned you are using the option "Choose religions", which I have never used. At a minimum I need to change the text to refer to "value". But does this actually allow you to get the effects of, say, democracy, when you achieve the tech for plutocracy? That would make a big difference to vision-specific buildings and civics, I think.

Also observed some AI on refuelling. But they do refuel and use Gasoline based units now.

In your screenshot, it could be that either the gas truck just appeared, or the jeep just ran out of gas, or there was another fuel truck closer (for example in Boston). Did that jeep remain there several turns without being refueled, with the tanker also sitting there? That would be a bug. I have fixed the previous bug where the units were *never* being refueled, which was at least easy to reproduce. I may have trouble to reproduce a bug where units are *sometimes* not refueled. Are there any other clues there?

Some population growth in my own cities, two more cities founded and converted and a few Advocates sent to my neighbours brought victory at Turn 150.

In your screenshot, you drew a question mark over the fact that each initial city shows the "founded" message twice. This is true, and it seems to be a side effect of the trick I used to get the city founded before the first turn. I don't know how to avoid it, but it seems pretty minor.

- Protective now is only giving a bonus to Guardians. Perhaps you can concider reintroducing the Bonus on Ranged units (Crossbowmen). This would not only boost PRO a bit but also make those Crossbow units more usefull, making PRO a good and sound Trait for Builder-players.
- Wild animals stack with Punks. Looks odd. I know it's not your fault, and i am not sure if you can do something to change this.
- My impression was, that the map is too "crowded" with shiny metals. Rarely seens o much Gold and Silver. But it was just thi one map for now.
- I felt the requirement of 6 building to allow a wonder (Brodcast Towers -> Voice of the Badlands) too heavy. Even with this beeing a peacefull builder game, i was nowhere even close meeting the requirement. Sure the game ended rather fast too. Still...

Good point about PRO. I will add it to all related units. Maybe flamethrower too.

I hardly ever see punks stacking with punks, let alone stacking with animals. It is probably because I have set bIsAnimal to 0 for the animals in order to allow them inside cultural borders. I haven't ever looked inside the SDK C++ code itself, but probably there is code to prevent bIsAnimal units both from stacking and from entering cultural borders. So I may not be able to fix it.

For resources, I have left the vanilla settings. Please try a few maps, and compare to vanilla maps with similar settings. If there is more on my maps, it is not intentional and I will find something to change.

I think *one* tower before Voice of the Badlands may be too easy, but maybe 6 is too much. Maybe 3 is a good compromise.

- I think the new victory condition need some tweaking. The Victory felt quite easy. As you see from the statistic - i used 18 Advocates, only 11 of them on opponents. It's not much.

I have only played a few games on "manual". On full autoplay, the AI's never seem to win on their own after 350 turns, or even fight much. They do occasionally win vision victories but I have never seen another kind. It is a few characters change if you want to make it higher and retry. In Assets/XML/GameInfo/CIV4VictoryInfo.xml, find "VICTORY_RELIGIOUS" and then underneath it "iReligionPercent". It is 51 now, you could try 67.

- The MG should be enabled with Automatic Weapons. It makes more sense and requires Ammunitions anyway. Right now it has apparently no prereq-tech, as it is displayed in the build list from Turn 1 (Greyed out because "need ammo")

You need Automatic Weapons to get munitions, I did not see any real point in making the same prerequisite twice. I can add it, but it will not change gameplay.

- The notification Message on some of the new ruins events seem to get lost sometimes.
I got a proper message, when i got my fist Hospital truck. The second truch and a refugee apparing in the ruines generated no message (not that i seen it) - noticed them when they were activated for moving during th turn.

The routine everybody seems to use for printing messages is CyMessage(). This produces a "transient" message, that is, it shows up on the screen for a few seconds and then disappears. So it is likely you were looking at something else when this message appeared, and it disappeared before you noticed it. The same thing could happen in a vanilla game, if you activate a goody hut by a movement path or by your cultural borders expanding.

My other option is to produce a pop-up where the player would have to click "OK" to dismiss. I do not think this is needed, since you will be sure to find the new unit when cycling through your units to move.

 

[Refar]

The fact that she made the offer means you can accept it. The ability to accept vassals is in "administration" tech, which you already had. There is an icon for it in the tech tree, if you mouse over the items granted by administration. I put it early on purpose.

The Vassal state thingy is on my part - out of routine i did not even really check if Feudalism enables it - just assumed it does. The offer was a bit odd, still at that point in the game, but that is most probably unrelated.

I have never seen "You have founded a new religion! What do you wish to call it?" You mentioned you are using the option "Choose religions", which I have never used. At a minimum I need to change the text to refer to "value". But does this actually allow you to get the effects of, say, democracy, when you achieve the tech for plutocracy? That would make a big difference to vision-specific buildings and civics, I think.

I usually prefer playing this way as it adds some flavour. However in the normal game the religions name is just that - flavour. I do assume, that the religion specific buildings will be assigned by religion, not by founding tech.

However i think you could solve this problem adding a Tech Prereq to the building/civic as well.

Say Democracy is allowing "Representation Civic" and normally tied to Constitution. I use "Choose Religions" and found Democracy with Radio. But i still need to wait till Constitution in order to enable the "Representation Civic", since the Civic requires Right Vision + Right Tech.

If it is doable, i would prefer having the Choose Vision option avaiable for flavour. But naturally gameplay comes before flavour.
I do also assume, that there is a way to disable certain custom options in a mod.

In your screenshot, it could be that either the gas truck just appeared, or the jeep just ran out of gas, or there was another fuel truck closer (for example in Boston). Did that jeep remain there several turns without being refueled, with the tanker also sitting there? That would be a bug. I have fixed the previous bug where the units were *never* being refueled, which was at least easy to reproduce. I may have trouble to reproduce a bug where units are *sometimes* not refueled. Are there any other clues there?

Sorry.

The "No Refuelling" bug is - from what i observed - fixed and i seen the AI making a fair use of the Gas Powered units. The Truck in my screenshot was on its way to refuel the jeep. It just looked a bit funny, so i put a screenshot.

In your screenshot, you drew a question mark over the fact that each initial city shows the "founded" message twice. This is true, and it seems to be a side effect of the trick I used to get the city founded before the first turn. I don't know how to avoid it, but it seems pretty minor.

The Double "Capital Founded" note in the game log is negligible. I think i would have missed it, if i hadn't inspected the log because of the killed Aquarina Civ on the second turn.
Just posted it to be sure it is not some strange side effect that you missed as well.

I hardly ever see punks stacking with punks, let alone stacking with animals. It is probably because I have set bIsAnimal to 0 for the animals in order to allow them inside cultural borders. I haven't ever looked inside the SDK C++ code itself, but probably there is code to prevent bIsAnimal units both from stacking and from entering cultural borders. So I may not be able to fix it.

They do not stack in the sense of making a SoD that moves united over longer distance. But they will occupy the same square sometimes, and attack the same target from there.

It's just a cosmetic oddity and it actually does have positive effect on gameplay, making the barbs more dangerous, so i am not really sure it is worth fixing.

Observed while loosing a city to such a mob

For resources, I have left the vanilla settings. Please try a few maps, and compare to vanilla maps with similar settings. If there is more on my maps, it is not intentional and I will find something to change.

Ok, i will try some maps, but i guess it was just a lucky one this time.

I think *one* tower before Voice of the Badlands may be too easy, but maybe 6 is too much. Maybe 3 is a good compromise.

3 does sound doable.
It does scale with map size however iirc. So now needing 6 on Standard map, 5 or 4 on small, etc.

I have only played a few games on "manual". On full autoplay, the AI's never seem to win on their own after 350 turns, or even fight much. They do occasionally win vision victories but I have never seen another kind. It is a few characters change if you want to make it higher and retry. In Assets/XML/GameInfo/CIV4VictoryInfo.xml, find "VICTORY_RELIGIOUS" and then underneath it "iReligionPercent". It is 51 now, you could try 67.

The AI is generally bad at winning. In standard civ you have probably to play Monarch to see the AI actually win before time runs out. And it will be a builder victory - space or culture.
The best thing we can hope for is to put up some fight, making our win feel a bit more challenging. In case of the Vision victory, founding and spreading they own religions would have made my life a bit more difficult.

But AI finetuning is something that naturally has a very-very low priority now, as some basic game mechanics are still subject to development.

You need Automatic Weapons to get munitions, I did not see any real point in making the same prerequisite twice. I can add it, but it will not change gameplay.

You are right it has no impact on gameplay - and it is again very minor - but i think it would match the standard game behaviour (for example Swordsman with IW and Iron).
It will also make the unit appear in the pedia / techtree as granted by Automatic Weapons, adding more clarity (Not that it is hard to understand now).

The routine everybody seems to use for printing messages is CyMessage(). This produces a "transient" message, that is, it shows up on the screen for a few seconds and then disappears. So it is likely you were looking at something else when this message appeared, and it disappeared before you noticed it. The same thing could happen in a vanilla game, if you activate a goody hut by a movement path or by your cultural borders expanding.

My other option is to produce a pop-up where the player would have to click "OK" to dismiss. I do not think this is needed, since you will be sure to find the new unit when cycling through your units to move.

The missing message on special unit generation is very minor as well. I know it can happen in normal game and it is possible i missed it, because naturally i did not expect nothing. A clickable pop-up is definitely not needed.
Would be still a + if it would appear in the game log window - it's usally where i look when i missed a message in the standrad game.
But that is not worth any extra coding or something.

 

[davidlallen]

Say Democracy is allowing "Representation Civic" and normally tied to Constitution. I use "Choose Religions" and found Democracy with Radio. But i still need to wait till Constitution in order to enable the "Representation Civic", since the Civic requires Right Vision + Right Tech.

If it is doable, i would prefer having the Choose Vision option avaiable for flavour. But naturally gameplay comes before flavour.
I do also assume, that there is a way to disable certain custom options in a mod.

Let me flip this one over to the visions thread since it is related.