VP Community Roadmap/Vision Brainstorming

Recursive · Apr 27, 2024

balparmak said:
Is there any intention or demand to keep VP on feature parity with new generation of historical 4Xs? I played some Old World, Humankind and Millennia (demo) in my time away from VP, honestly the only one I properly played was Humankind. VP is still better (by far) in most regards, but I can name two areas where Civ5-VP formula feels underdeveloped. One is barbarians, both Civ6 (iirc) and Humankind have interactions with barbs, allowing you to recruit them either directly or indirectly. This would be a serious undertaking, but I think it is within our capabilities with what we can mod, so that probably would be my candidate for a new mechanic/feature.
The other issue with VP is the infinite city sprawl. Civ6 added a half-baked loyalty (iirc) system to discourage settling close to other civs, the newer games seem to move towards an area/region system. In VP this is discouraged by the AI aggression and yield scaling, but I still feel overwhelmed with how crowded the map gets, the AI is relentless. I don't have any suggestions here though. Oh and a wargoal/casus belli feature would be welcome, as mentioned earlier.

'Feature parity' is vague. Ideas from other games can be suggested but need to be more specific, and if it's balance related, that's what the VP Congress is for.

CppMaster said:
I like that in Civ6 you could bribe barbarians to attack someone and after some time, a camp is transformed into a city state. It add some dynamics to the game.

The DLL is limited to a maximum of 63 players (excluding Barbarians) and I believe there's an engine limitation of 80 players. The free city mechanic from revolts already adds new players to the game.

Tekamthi · Apr 27, 2024

Recursive said:
The free city mechanic from revolts already adds new players to the game.

does this use the 80 limit or 63? I often play 43/20 players/CS, I don't think I've ever see this happen

Recursive · Apr 27, 2024

Tekamthi said:
does this use the 80 limit or 63? I often play 43/20 players/CS, I don't think I've ever see this happen

63. So you wouldn't get free cities.

CppMaster · Apr 27, 2024

balparmak said:
So in Humankind (and other Amplitude games afaik) the map automatically gets divided into regions which are distinct geographical areas, and each region can only have one city, where you place the city is up to you. It's possible to found a city closer than 3 tiles to the enemy, but regions in general are much larger than the 3-tile radius we get in Civ5/VP. There's also a neat mechanic where you can claim a region with an outpost, but link it to a near city instead of founding one. It has its drawbacks, this essentially means there's a hard cap on total cities on the map (due to number of regions generated), there's also a hard-ish city cap per player instead of a proper wide/tall mechanic.

Then I prefer the standard civ way, where regions are not forced, but decided by players.

balparmak said:
I really like the mechanic but I'll admit it isn't really suitable for VP. Something like Civ4/Civ6 would be better, such that if you're going to found a distant city very near to your rival's heartlands, you either need to have policies or traits to back it up, else it gets flipped/converted.

That would be cool, although loyalty mechanic would need to be implemented. Probably a modmod territory at first.

Recursive said:
The DLL is limited to a maximum of 63 players (excluding Barbarians) and I believe there's an engine limitation of 80 players. The free city mechanic from revolts already adds new players to the game.

That's fine. A new city state would be created if it'd fit to the limit, which is plenty for Standard settings.

ASAP_CARAMEL · Apr 28, 2024

Hi just a humble VP player here, not sure if this is the right place to share this, but i'll give it a go anyway, sorry in advance if it isn't.
I would be more than happy to donate to the development of VP, i've been really enjoying the mod so far, supporting the devs is a no-brainer
At the risk of uttering blasphemy, perhaps it could be interesting to look at gaia's core and sapiens mod to seek useful new features to add to VP?
I've heard the sapiens diplomacy and the congress meetings in-game have been punched up a little
thank you for the mod

N.Core · Apr 28, 2024

balparmak said:
One is barbarians, both Civ6 (iirc) and Humankind have interactions with barbs, allowing you to recruit them either directly or indirectly. This would be a serious undertaking, but I think it is within our capabilities with what we can mod, so that probably would be my candidate for a new mechanic/feature.

JFD made that Mercenaries mod, I think? Where you can recruit units, but not from barbarians, though. We should take inspiration from it. The mechanic is also based on a feature that CP added.

balparmak said:
The other issue with VP is the infinite city sprawl. Civ6 added a half-baked loyalty (iirc) system to discourage settling close to other civs, the newer games seem to move towards an area/region system. In VP this is discouraged by the AI aggression and yield scaling, but I still feel overwhelmed with how crowded the map gets, the AI is relentless. I don't have any suggestions here though.

I made a rough suggestion a long time ago on the Discord server. It's called the Control system.

Spoiler Rough idea :

Code:

I'm thinking about a gamified Loyalty mechanic that could turn into something that makes expanding more interesting.

Instead of similar to Loyalty pressure that could turn your city into a free city or other civ's city, make it a gradual step.

I would probably call it Control instead of Loyalty, it means how much the empire controls that city.

Control goes from 0% - 150%.

The raw percent is acting like a yield percentage.
So 100% Control means that you get a 100% yield outcome from that city, and with 50% Control you only get half as much yield from that city.

At 76% - 100% Control, you get a normal city.
At 51% - 75% Control, you can't purchase units or invest in buildings.
At 26% - 50% Control, you can't train units from that city, and the city's production rate becomes slower.
At 1% - 25% Control, that city turns into a puppet.
At 0% Control, that city will rebel or flip as a free city or another civ's city.

Passively, it's capped at 100%, but you can go higher by doing it actively.

Above 100% Control, unhappiness from the population is rising, as the citizens start to feel the empire is controlling them.
Population * (additional percentage * 2) = extra unhappiness.
150% Control, you get 100% unhappiness from the population.

But, for any additional Control percentage, you also get production modifiers for training units or constructing buildings.

A Control percentage can be passively influenced by having a city connection to the capital.
Having a >100% Controlled city nearby, city distance from the capital (depending on map size), etc.

But you can also do it actively by placing a counter-spy in the city, garrisoning a unit in the city, training units in the city, and having an internal trade route to the city.

This could be an interesting city expansion mechanic, I'm not sure a modmod has done a similar thing to this.

So far, I can imagine that both Tall and Wide will suffer from this.
Tall can't build a military so easily, as it can tank their Control to more than 100% if they keep building a military.
But they can maintain their Control value quite easily across cities.

Wide won't be as easy as it is now. They can't just settle wherever they like.
But they still can do it if they want the hassle of sending garrison units, having an internal trade route, sending a counter-spy, etc.

What I mean by Garrison units is kinda like how you put the military to pressure CS, but instead, you place them near your own city to keep the Control value intact.

But I don't want this tedious micro work, so it needs to be not a complicated thing to do.

N.Core · Apr 28, 2024

ASAP_CARAMEL said:
I would be more than happy to donate to the development of VP, i've been really enjoying the mod so far, supporting the devs is a no-brainer

The Community Patch project doesn't accept any kind of donations, and the author of the mod is also against it. You can donate to someone else who needs it more, thank you.

ASAP_CARAMEL said:
At the risk of uttering blasphemy, perhaps it could be interesting to look at gaia's core and sapiens mod to seek useful new features to add to VP?
I've heard the sapiens diplomacy and the congress meetings in-game have been punched up a little

FYI, Gaia's core and Sapiens is actually based on a fork of an old version of VP (along with modmods that are designed for VP). The codebase should be similar excluding Gaia's own addition. So the development team is very well aware of the existence of that mod and also other mods that are forked from this project. Sapiens and VP have their own game design and balance choices. Sometimes this project took inspiration from other mods, but that doesn't mean we should implement them directly as is. It must go through balance discussions and changes voting through Vox Populi Congress.

balparmak · Apr 28, 2024

Control looks great, it'd also play nice with the espionage rework. The counterespionage line of buildings always felt a bit useless, they could act like control-boosters and be pretty essential in border cities. Of course adding a new core mechanic would be a huge undertaking, but since we're talking about long-term here, this would probably be the best addition we can make to VP.

N.Core said:

JFD made that Mercenaries mod, I think? Where you can recruit units, but not from barbarians, though. We should take inspiration from it. The mechanic is also based on a feature that CP added.

I made a rough suggestion a long time ago on the Discord server. It's called the Control system.

Spoiler Rough idea :

Code:

I'm thinking about a gamified Loyalty mechanic that could turn into something that makes expanding more interesting.

Instead of similar to Loyalty pressure that could turn your city into a free city or other civ's city, make it a gradual step.

I would probably call it Control instead of Loyalty, it means how much the empire controls that city.

Control goes from 0% - 150%.

The raw percent is acting like a yield percentage.
So 100% Control means that you get a 100% yield outcome from that city, and with 50% Control you only get half as much yield from that city.

At 76% - 100% Control, you get a normal city.
At 51% - 75% Control, you can't purchase units or invest in buildings.
At 26% - 50% Control, you can't train units from that city, and the city's production rate becomes slower.
At 1% - 25% Control, that city turns into a puppet.
At 0% Control, that city will rebel or flip as a free city or another civ's city.

Passively, it's capped at 100%, but you can go higher by doing it actively.

Above 100% Control, unhappiness from the population is rising, as the citizens start to feel the empire is controlling them.
Population * (additional percentage * 2) = extra unhappiness.
150% Control, you get 100% unhappiness from the population.

But, for any additional Control percentage, you also get production modifiers for training units or constructing buildings.

A Control percentage can be passively influenced by having a city connection to the capital.
Having a >100% Controlled city nearby, city distance from the capital (depending on map size), etc.

But you can also do it actively by placing a counter-spy in the city, garrisoning a unit in the city, training units in the city, and having an internal trade route to the city.

This could be an interesting city expansion mechanic, I'm not sure a modmod has done a similar thing to this.

So far, I can imagine that both Tall and Wide will suffer from this.
Tall can't build a military so easily, as it can tank their Control to more than 100% if they keep building a military.
But they can maintain their Control value quite easily across cities.

Wide won't be as easy as it is now. They can't just settle wherever they like.
But they still can do it if they want the hassle of sending garrison units, having an internal trade route, sending a counter-spy, etc.

What I mean by Garrison units is kinda like how you put the military to pressure CS, but instead, you place them near your own city to keep the Control value intact.

But I don't want this tedious micro work, so it needs to be not a complicated thing to do.

This could be little controversial but judging from the earlier community enthusiasm for providing data to train AI models, and multiple "improve selection AI" goals in Recursive's goalmap, I think we should discuss adding a telemetry function to VP.
The community is great when it comes to providing feedback and insights on balance, but sometimes you just need lots of hard data -especially when it comes to testing AI behavior, and collecting logs is a hassle. An optional, open-source telemetry function that would automatically upload selected logs would help a lot. I was going over my earlier projects, one of which was an attempt to improve AI unit production, it was promising and I'm still behind the concept, but ultimately decided against integrating it simply because I lacked the data to justify it. If we had an experimental branch with telemetry, it'd be much easier to collect the data, and more energy-efficient than running dozens of AI games too.

Recursive · Apr 28, 2024

balparmak said:
This could be little controversial but judging from the earlier community enthusiasm for providing data to train AI models, and multiple "improve selection AI" goals in Recursive's goalmap, I think we should discuss adding a telemetry function to VP.
The community is great when it comes to providing feedback and insights on balance, but sometimes you just need lots of hard data -especially when it comes to testing AI behavior, and collecting logs is a hassle. An optional, open-source telemetry function that would automatically upload selected logs would help a lot. I was going over my earlier projects, one of which was an attempt to improve AI unit production, it was promising and I'm still behind the concept, but ultimately decided against integrating it simply because I lacked the data to justify it. If we had an experimental branch with telemetry, it'd be much easier to collect the data, and more energy-efficient than running dozens of AI games too.

I'll add it to the list.

N.Core · Apr 28, 2024

Adding a telemetry toggle as a modmod (so you have to enable it to opt-in) is probably a good idea. I agree. So each game that people play can be a good hard data to gather so we can have a gigantic collection of raw data to analyze, instead of relying on Vern's effort for doing automated games on his PCs.

azum4roll · Apr 29, 2024

Do a sweep on building/unit text keys, adding plural forms for all, to be referred to by their own strategy text and policy/belief/etc. text.

Doing it this way is not desirable.

N.Core · Apr 29, 2024

azum4roll said:
Do a sweep on building/unit text keys, adding plural forms for all, to be referred to by their own strategy text and policy/belief/etc. text.

Doing it this way is not desirable.
View attachment 689908

Can the engine do it if we use a text key reference?

Martiquin · Apr 29, 2024

Is there any way to implement an interface to turn off and on integrated mod mods for vox populi which doesnt require you to change values in the mod files?

azum4roll · Apr 29, 2024

N.Core said:
Can the engine do it if we use a text key reference?

We can define things like this:

XML:

<Row Tag="TXT_KEY_BUILDING_GALLERY">
    <Text>Gallery|Galleries</Text>
    <Plurality>1|2</Plurality>
</Row>

How they can be used needs to be further researched though.

Edit: The CvLocalization API makes doing it in C++ (and by extension Lua, if not already programmed so) easy, but how the game parses static text keys (from the database) with hardcoded {} tags is still a mystery.

From the modiki,

XML:

<Text>+2 [ICON_PRODUCTION] Production to {1_Building * 2_Num}</Text>

should fetch the correct text form when inserted from Lua/C++, but you can't do it with

XML:

<Text>+2 [ICON_PRODUCTION] Production to {TXT_KEY_BUILDING_GALLERY * 2}.</Text>

according to this post.

Recursive · Jul 7, 2024

Categorized Ideas (Updated)

For sorting soon (TM).

AI Improvements

Spoiler :

Compatibility with Modmods

Spoiler :

Discord Server

Spoiler :

Documentation

Spoiler :

Memory, Logging & Bugfixing

Spoiler :

Multiplayer

Spoiler :

Organization & Consolidation

Spoiler :

VP Congress

Spoiler :

Other

Spoiler :

Balance Reworks (not part of the roadmap, just here for personal reference)

Spoiler :

azum4roll · Oct 2, 2024

azum4roll said:
We can define things like this:

XML:

<Row Tag="TXT_KEY_BUILDING_GALLERY"> <Text>Gallery|Galleries</Text> <Plurality>1|2</Plurality> </Row>

How they can be used needs to be further researched though.

Edit: The CvLocalization API makes doing it in C++ (and by extension Lua, if not already programmed so) easy, but how the game parses static text keys (from the database) with hardcoded {} tags is still a mystery.

From the modiki,

XML:

<Text>+2 [ICON_PRODUCTION] Production to {1_Building * 2_Num}</Text>

should fetch the correct text form when inserted from Lua/C++, but you can't do it with

XML:

<Text>+2 [ICON_PRODUCTION] Production to {TXT_KEY_BUILDING_GALLERY * 2}.</Text>

according to this post.

I found something that might work.

TXT_KEY_GRAMMAR_A_AN is a vanilla text key that's made for substitution.

XML:

<Text>{1: gender *:an?an {1}; *:the?the {1}; *:no_article?{1}; other?a {1};}</Text>

Example usage:

XML:

<Text>{@2_CivName} longs for {TXT_KEY_GRAMMAR_A_AN &lt;&lt; {1_UnitName}}</Text>

The game is able to parse {TXT_KEY_* << {1}} as code, and in this case grab the gender of the unit text key that's passed in.
We can make a similar substitution text key for plurality.

XML:

<Row Tag="TXT_KEY_PLURALITY">
    <Text>{{1} * {2}}</Text>
</Row>

Code:

{TXT_KEY_BUILDING_GALLERY * 2}

wouldn't work, but

Code:

{TXT_KEY_PLURALITY << {TXT_KEY_BUILDING_GALLERY} << 2}

should!

greenfieldpark · Oct 2, 2024

You guys are ridiculously talented. You are constantly adding new feautures and refining over and over again while being constrained by civ 5 engine.

Have you all ever thought of creating your own game with current tech and without the restrictions of civ 5?

azum4roll · Oct 3, 2024

Code:

[1666452.296] ERR: Injected numbers are not supported in this release. {TXT_KEY_PLURALITY << {TXT_KEY_SPECIALIST_CITIZEN} << 2}

Welp, Firaxis sucks, there goes the idea.

Tekamthi · Oct 3, 2024

Recursive said:
- Decide whether 43 Civ and non-EUI versions should continue to be developed

I'm aware I'm in the minority here but I almost exclusively play VP 43 civ non-eui -- would not be happy to see these disappear

Recursive said:
Attempt to combine 43 civ and standard versions into one

Idk what's involved here, but I've used 43-civ version to play 22 civ and less games in the past... Maybe there are some subtleties I didn't notice but it seemed to play normally

azum4roll · Oct 4, 2024

We can have EUI as the only option with most features toggleable (like those lists on both sides of the screen). Same with Improved City View (guaranteed to be broken in 5.0) so we don't have to maintain multiple versions of CityView.lua...

Ideally we should only have ONE set of UI for both CP and VP with lots of optional features.

VP Community Roadmap/Vision Brainstorming

Already Looping

Emperor

Already Looping

Deity

Chieftain

1st Class of Neoa

1st Class of Neoa

Prince

Already Looping

1st Class of Neoa

Lost the game

1st Class of Neoa

Chieftain

Lost the game

Already Looping

Lost the game

Warlord

Lost the game

Emperor

Lost the game

Similar threads