Welcome to Rhye's and Fall of the Greek World (Revived again)

bluepotato · Jan 18, 2020

Welcome to the latest version of Rhye's and Fall of the Greek World, a mod covering the rise and fall of civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean.

The current version features 28 playable civilizations and spans from 4400BC to 600AD. A 900BC scenario is included as well.

Spoiler Civilization list :

The mod retains most of Rhye's and Fall of Civilization's mechanics: dynamic rise of civilizations, a stability system, leader swapping, unique powers, city name maps, mercenaries and historical victories (only for those civilizations marked with a star in the above spoiler; other UHVs are still a work in progress).

Download the latest release here:
https://github.com/bptato/RFC-Greek-World/releases/download/v2.1/RFC-Greek-World.zip
The latest stable version of the mod.
Installation: download the zip file and extract it in your Mods folder. Make sure the extracted folder is called RFC-Greek-World, and that the mod files are directly in it (i.e. there's no RFC-Greek-World folder inside the RFC-Greek-World folder).

Download the latest development version here:
https://github.com/bptato/RFC-Greek-World
The latest development version, for those who'd like to try new features, changes, fixes, etc. as soon as they are committed.
Installation: clone the repository into your mod folder using git. The repository is at https://github.com/bptato/RFC-Greek-World.git

Spoiler For those who don't know how this is done :

Alternatively, if you really want to avoid using git, you can download the zip file directly from here, extract it in your Mods folder, and rename it to RFC-Greek-World (i.e. delete the -master from the end). I wouldn't recommend doing this though, since you'll be re-downloading hundreds of megabytes every time you want to update, even if the update itself would only be a few kilobytes.

Release history:

Spoiler :

Known issues:

Spoiler :

Credits:

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Screenshots:

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Edmund Ironside · Jan 19, 2020

Great work, I'm really liking what you are doing with this mod.
By the way this may not matter any more as you have deactivated the mercenary function, but there was a problem with it in the 900 BC scenario. There was a python error which I could not fix. So instead I gave Israel Nationalism, which as designed by Rhye's stopped the ability of Civs to hire mercenaries, and therefore 'fixed' the python error.

bluepotato · Jan 19, 2020

EdmundIronside said:
Great work, I'm really liking what you are doing with this mod.

Thanks!

EdmundIronside said:
By the way this may not matter any more as you have deactivated the mercenary function, but there was a problem with it in the 900 BC scenario. There was a python error which I could not fix. So instead I gave Israel Nationalism, which as designed by Rhye's stopped the ability of Civs to hire mercenaries, and therefore 'fixed' the python error.

Well mercenaries were inherently buggy as they could originally be hired based on a civ's location. That was never changed in this mod, so after removing all vanilla constants I could've either added new civ groups (which doesn't really make sense on this map, they were based on continents in vanilla) or just always return false when canHireUnit is called.
If I ever re-enable them, I will probably make it so it's based on distance or SoI styled provinces, but I don't think they're needed right now.

bluepotato · Jan 25, 2020

After a lot of failed attempts to kill Mycenae in the bronze age collapse, I finally found a solution. Turns out I forgot to add a settler map to Elam, so every AI starting after them was stuck in its own place and kept building units instead of expanding. Whoops.
I've fixed some of the bugs listed in the opening post (and some I didn't even notice at first) in the development version, so I'll release a new version this weekend. The game still has balance issues but I'm quite happy with my progress.

bluepotato · Jan 25, 2020

RFGW 1.7 released! Includes a few changes, a few bugfixes and a few new UHVs.
You can download it here. Installation: download the zip file, remove the previous version in case it's installed, extract the zip file into your Mods folder and rename the extracted folder to RFC-Greek-World.
Alternatively, you can always clone/pull the latest release (or development version) using git.

Changelog:

Spoiler :

PiR · Jan 25, 2020

Thanks! Anything you want us to check specifically?

bluepotato · Jan 25, 2020

PiR said:
Thanks! Anything you want us to check specifically?

Thanks for asking. I think the mod is quite stable as it is: I tested most UHVs (except Minoa, which I simply couldn't do and Phoenicia, which I just didn't feel like trying - I find colonizing stuff boring) and I regularly do Hunnic autoplays during development. That being said, some feedback on the UHVs would be nice, and by that I mean new ideas. I tried to make them interesting but I feel like some are a bit too easy or depend on the starting situation way too much.
The "sack city" option is currently the only thing that needs more testing, but I'll probably change how it works anyways and still haven't decided how. Upon reflection, I think it would've made more sense to exclude that feature from this release.

Edmund Ironside · Jan 25, 2020

Just in case you find it useful I have attached some reference sheets I used while modding RFC GW. They include things such as unit and building values, the tech tree, game turn to year ratios, etc.

Minoa's and Phoenicia's UHVs do both work, I tested them. However I tested them by cheating, such as giving Minoa a load of free techs, so I don't know if they are truly achievable. I feel like Phoenicia's probably is about right, but Minoa's though I deliberately made theirs hard, I feel they may be borderline impossible!

bluepotato · Jan 29, 2020

Great news! I finally managed to compile the DLL without codeblocks (which is not a very straightforward thing to do on Linux). I usually had to wait about half an hour every time I made changes to more than one file; using nmake and a simple shell script I made reduces this waiting time to 1-2 minutes. Another benefit of this is that I can build debug DLLs (codeblocks couldn't do that) and find bugs faster.
Simply put: I can finally spend more time coding and less time waiting.

bluepotato · Feb 3, 2020

The next release will mostly be focused on religions and balancing. So far I've done this on the development version:
Replaced the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Hellenic and Phoenician religions' building/unit art and sounds with stuff mostly taken from History Rewritten and JARM and added holy city relocations. Holy city relocations simply make it so that sometimes the holy city is moved to the most cultured city with the appropriate religion in it.
Fixed a few bugs and tried to make Mesopotamia a bit more balanced.
Persia's starting date was moved back to around the Median Empire's foundation and they are generally a lot more successful.
Athens's and Sparta's core area was nerfed

Spoiler they don't seem to care about Egypt though :

I'm currently thinking of changing religions so that they work more like culture (x% of population follows y religion) than the current binary implementation (city either has y religion or not). My ideas so far:
- If over a certain percentage (10 or 25?) of a city's population follows a non-state religion, they cause unhappiness.
- Missionary/Priest units boost state religion follower rate, and only work in cities owned by you (or a vassal of yours). As far as I know, religion wasn't really spread by missionaries to foreign cities in the time period covered by this mod.
- Different religious civics change state and non-state religion spread rates.
- Stability is affected by believer percentage in your empire.
- Somewhat related: re-add Hinduism and maybe Druidism, plus revamp religious civics. Unsure about Druidism since only one civ would be running it, and then I might as well add five other religions... but maybe that wouldn't be such a bad idea after all. :think:

Any suggestions regarding these?

Edmund Ironside · Feb 3, 2020

Regarding your plans:
Revamp wonders - Definitely
More cleaning up the code and bugfixing - Yep!
League of Corinth, similar to RFCE crusades. The idea might not be exactly historical, but if done correctly, it could: - Sounds cool
- create a Greek Persia
- remove the excessive amount of units in Greece, making it easier for Rome to conquer
UHVs for all civs - Absolutely
Re-enable resurrections for some civs - Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Macedonia, and Persia? (thinking of Civs that rose and fell a few times)
Move Persia spawn date back to 678BC to represent the Medians and give them more time to develop? - Looks like it works
Epic/Marathon speeds? - Would be nice, but I wouldn't make it a high priority. It can make getting UHVs balanced really hard, even DOC struggles with this.
Remove Byzantium? - Preferably get Romans to work. The Romans actually need to expand east, and then Byzantine should be a conditional spawn based on their stability. Easier said then done I know! However Bactria has the same issue, as Macedonia never expands east either. A third civ that could be removed if needed is India (Mauryans) as India is barely on the map.
Revamp Independents? How so?
Elamites in 900BC scenario? Yes, but they should be weak, as the Elamites were very much on the decline by this time.
Religion - Adding more religions would definitely be good. Hinduism for Indus Valley & India, Druidism for Gauls, and Shamanism for Scythian and Huns.
I also agree with the change in function of missionaries, and the stability from religion you mentioned. Also maybe add Persecutors like they have in SOI, as there definitely was suppression of religion at this time (for example Jews under Seleucid's, Christians under the Romans initially).

You obviously have your own goals, but I thought I would mention a few of the things I wanted to (but either was unable to implement, or just ran out of the energy to do), just in case any are of interest to you:
More culturally diverse units - For example the heavy axeman only looks appropriate for the Goths, and maybe the Gauls.
More stuff to be discovered with techs, particularly later techs
More Civs - In order of priority (Armenia, Ptolomids, Dacians, Thebes, Vandals, Seleucid, Trojans, Parthians, Medes)
2nd unique unit for Civs
Fix diplomacy text - A lot of Civs have blanks txt messages or simply nothing at all for the personalized diplomacy messages portion
Add conditional spawns - This might be appropriate for Byzantium, Sassanids, Athens, Sparta, India, and Bactria
Add a 3rd scenario (rise of Rome) - About 270 BC
Expand the map east to include more of India
Add siege engine to Civ extra spawns - Once people have walls, the RFCGW spawns become fairly ineffective. They need to be more like in DOC, for example when the Turks spawn units in the middle east around 1000 AD they get horse archers and catapults
Leader swapping - For example Carthage should start with Dido, but change to Hannibal at the appropriate time.

bluepotato · Feb 4, 2020

EdmundIronside said:
Epic/Marathon speeds? - Would be nice, but I wouldn't make it a high priority. It can make getting UHVs balanced really hard, even DOC struggles with this.

Yeah I've thought of this as well. Might be wiser to just add 100 more turns to the game, but more content is needed for that.

EdmundIronside said:
Remove Byzantium? - Preferably get Romans to work. The Romans actually need to expand east, and then Byzantine should be a conditional spawn based on their stability. Easier said then done I know! However Bactria has the same issue, as Macedonia never expands east either. A third civ that could be removed if needed is India (Mauryans) as India is barely on the map.

True, my problem with Byzantium is mostly that they don't really have time for interesting gameplay. We'll see how conditional spawns work out, anyways.

EdmundIronside said:
Revamp Independents? How so?

Not sure if this is really possible but I thought of some interaction with them, so that they would work more like city-states than weird barbarians.

EdmundIronside said:
Elamites in 900BC scenario? Yes, but they should be weak, as the Elamites were very much on the decline by this time.

I just don't think I could get them to collapse by the time of the Persian spawn.

EdmundIronside said:
Also maybe add Persecutors like they have in SOI, as there definitely was suppression of religion at this time (for example Jews under Seleucid's, Christians under the Romans initially).

Problem with persecutors is that the AI is too dumb to use them. A passive effect of the persecution civic would be just fine IMO.

EdmundIronside said:
More culturally diverse units - For example the heavy axeman only looks appropriate for the Goths, and maybe the Gauls.

Agreed, I've also noticed that Hunnic heavy swordsmen still have maceman art. There's definitely place for improvement.

EdmundIronside said:
More stuff to be discovered with techs, particularly later techs

Yes, the late-game is very much unbalanced and the tech tree is no exception. I'll borrow some buildings from other mods, that should help.

EdmundIronside said:
More Civs - In order of priority (Armenia, Ptolomids, Dacians, Thebes, Vandals, Seleucid, Trojans, Parthians, Medes)

Armenia, Dacia, Thebes are a priority for me. Maybe Trojans as well. Ptolemaids and Parthians barely make sense without Alexander. The Vandals wouldn't have too much time to do anything, but maybe they could work? Media probably wouldn't conquer anything except maybe Mesopotamia in 100 years; minor civ like pre-1.16 DoC Seljuks could work but I'm happy with how pre-Alexandrian Persia is ATM.

EdmundIronside said:
2nd unique unit for Civs

Would need more research and balancing but could work.

EdmundIronside said:
Fix diplomacy text - A lot of Civs have blanks txt messages or simply nothing at all for the personalized diplomacy messages portion

I'll look into that.

EdmundIronside said:
Add conditional spawns - This might be appropriate for Byzantium, Sassanids, Athens, Sparta, India, and Bactria

Byzantium, Bactria and Sassanids definitely need conditional spawns. India maybe, but the IVC usually collapses by their spawn. Likewise, Mycenae is gone by the Athenian/Spartan spawn. I also think they are a good challenge for a player trying to survive ahistorically.

EdmundIronside said:
Add a 3rd scenario (rise of Rome) - About 270 BC

Would take a lot of work so low priority, but I'd like to see more scenarios as well.

EdmundIronside said:
Expand the map east to include more of India

I'm kinda bad at map-making but I'll consider this.

EdmundIronside said:
Add siege engine to Civ extra spawns - Once people have walls, the RFCGW spawns become fairly ineffective. They need to be more like in DOC, for example when the Turks spawn units in the middle east around 1000 AD they get horse archers and catapults

I halved the culture/wall city defense modifiers in 1.7 and I'd say that did the job much better than trying to make the AI actually use their siege engines.

EdmundIronside said:
Leader swapping - For example Carthage should start with Dido, but change to Hannibal at the appropriate time.

Agreed, hopefully this won't be too difficult to implement.

PiR · Feb 4, 2020

I'm sorry, I'm not currently able to catch up with all your work. I'll come back when I can be useful.

Edmund Ironside · Feb 9, 2020

bluepotato said:
I just don't think I could get them to collapse by the time of the Persian spawn.

I think in DOC Leoreth has scripted collapse, but I am not sure how easy that would be to implement.

bluepotato said:
I'll borrow some buildings from other mods, that should help.

On the subject of buildings, one of the last things I did with the mod was to transfer a lot of building sound effects into the mod from SOI. The only one I used was the archery range one. So there should be several sound files available for you to use on different buildings being constructed for greater variety if desired.

bluepotato said:
The Vandals wouldn't have too much time to do anything, but maybe they could work?

They could make for an interesting human only player, as their UHV would likely involving conquering North Africa. So you would have to fight your way through the Roman Empire, reach the coast, construct some ships, and then transport your army to North Africa.

bluepotato said:
I'll look into that.

There is a guide for doing this on Civ Fanatics. I tried to follow it, but for whatever reason I couldn't get it to work.

bluepotato said:
I'm kinda bad at map-making but I'll consider this.

If you do decide to do it, I would check out the SOI expanded thread, where map extension was successfully implement. On the plus side, I believe due to how the numbering on maps works, adding to the eastern side of the map is easier than the west.

bluepotato · Feb 14, 2020

The new religion system is about halfway done. Problem is, this increased the amount of CtD possibilities (the first of these was probably introduced by me) to 2. I haven't managed to produce any when not in autoplay, so if anyone does, a save of the turn right before the CtD would be much appreciated. EDIT: fixed one of these, still looking for the second one (also forgot to mention that it only exists on the development version)
EDIT2: found the second one as well after realizing that I have a save lying around for it, so I believe the development version is CtD-free again.
Also, an update of my plans: the more RFC code I read, the more I am convinced that the whole thing needs a rewrite. It's old and has tons of weird code that could be done much better IMO (including the autoplay). So instead of cleaning it up one by one and effectively rewriting most of it while hoping not to break anything (my debugging capabilities are still limited), here's what I'm going to do:

First I want to finish 1.8 (which is the current development version). This means fixing those two CtDs and changing the effects of religions as described in my previous religion plans post. No more content is planned.

Then I'll continue working on a rewrite of the whole RFC DLL (+ most of the python things). I've already started this as a side-project, starting with the BtS unofficial patch (+ platyping's worldbuilder, it took zero effort to include). Current features of the rewrite are:
- Uses a custom map script, which reads my customized WB save. Modifying pyWB could've worked as well, but this might make some future ideas of mine (more civs, respawns, etc) easier to implement. Players are still tied to slots because of my unit/city scheduling system, they're just random slots.
- Civs' starting date is specified in the WB save.
- Units and cities can be "scheduled" for spawning in the WB save. So for example if you type

Code:

   BeginUnit
       UnitType=UNIT_SWORDSMAN, UnitOwner=CIVILIZATION_INDEPENDENT
       Year=-82
       Amount=3
   EndUnit

three swordsmen are given at 82BC in the unit's plot to the Independent civ.
- A simplified city name system. You just have to add e.g. CityName=Ambrakía (non-ascii characters are automatically converted to xml code) to a plot in the WB save, and every city founded there will be called Ambrakía.
- I ported the independent city spawning to this system.
- Starting techs are specified in the WB save as well. This is nothing new, but I took the liberty to copy-paste them from python and modify their name in the mapscript so that I wouldn't have to format them. (call this a hack if you wish, it'll be fixed)
- Most of my new code that runs after loading the game is in the DLL for increased speed.
- All art and XML files are included. Almost nothing was modified in these, except some info xml files to make this mapscript thing work.
As you can see, my goal is hardcoding as few variables in python or in the DLL as possible. Obviously lots of features are still missing, which are, in no particular order:
- Scripted barbarians.
- Stability system and collapses.
- Unique powers and historical victories (the latter of which I'm still going to have to hardcode).
- Settler maps.
- Dynamic civilization names.
- City names based on language. I'll also have to convert existing city name maps to this new format.
- Adding these stuff using the WorldBuilder. Ideally you could view and modify scheduled cities, city names, barbarian spawning areas, settler maps, etc. Like in DoC, except they will be written to the WB save.
- Multiple scenario support.
- My new religion system. If I manage to fix it, that is.
Once I'm done with these, I'll publish this rewrite as version 2.0 and continue with my plans listed before. I might also merge AdvCiv later, but that'll take a while because of how tedious merging XML is.

bluepotato · Feb 15, 2020

RFGW 1.8 released! Includes a few bugfixes, a few balance changes, a religion overhaul and a Mycenaean UHV (not tested yet).
You can download it here. Installation: download the zip file, remove the previous version in case it's installed, extract the zip file into your Mods folder and rename the extracted folder to RFC-Greek-World.
Alternatively, you can always clone/pull the latest release (or development version) using git.
Changelog:

Spoiler :

srpt · Feb 16, 2020

wow I had no idea you could do stuff like that with the WBS. where did you learn that?

bluepotato · Feb 16, 2020

srpt said:
wow I had no idea you could do stuff like that with the WBS. where did you learn that?

Well this is a simple mapscript I wrote some months ago, and knowing how everything is parsed it wasn't too difficult to make the python part work. The real challenge was making the DLL spawn units at the right time after the mapscript read them, which I solved using vectors of vectors of integers. Not the cleanest solution but it does the job.
I can upload my current progress if you want to check out how the whole thing works, but the game is nowhere close to being playable and the code is a bit ugly at the moment (especially the communication between python and the DLL).

Also, just an update to this:

bluepotato said:
Players are still tied to slots because of my unit/city scheduling system, they're just random slots.

I decided that the sooner I change this, the better. So I went ahead and made slots completely independent from civilization types. This means that MAX_CIV_PLAYERS only limits the amount of civilizations on the map at the same time, and as soon as one civ collapses, another one can be spawned in its place. The player's slot is always left alone (otherwise autoplay breaks), and I didn't want complications with the independent civs so they always occupy the last two slots (since they appear and disappear randomly).

Autumn Leaf · Feb 16, 2020

Roman legions can no longer build roads

Awww shucks. I liked that feature in DoC when playing Byzantium (which gave me 4 left-over Legions). I'd use 'em to repair and extend the Roman road system.

In RFC Original & Marathon I would sometimes play as "Mycenae" (with my capital renamed from Corinth) but I'm looking forward to playing a proper Mycenaean civ and UHV here.

Edited to add: I really like your Harappan population target. 1st in population is more appropriate to the Indus Valley civs than some arbitary integer (currentlly 30 in DoC).

Additional: Well, dang. Maybe I'll just go play Egypt first. :rolleyes:

Autumn Leaf · Feb 16, 2020

# broader areas coordinates (top left and bottom right) (for RiseAndFall)
#TODO: what dis
tBroaderAreasTL = (
(60, 26), #Egypt

Dis de bloo line off to de top right dere. It's a bit of an appendix, but is used, for example, in birthInForeignBorders if the game is having trouble finding a good spot to place a spawning civ. Fortunately having this area run off the edge of the map doesn't seem to upset the game, or perhaps it is a bug still waiting to happen.

You should probably dial back the 700-value Settler Value sites in Egypt. No way are all those spots right next to Peaks backed by Deserts going to be good (let alone historically accurate) city spots. A value of 150-200 is enough to make a spot stable; IMAO you should only use higher values for locations where you want the AI to place its cities, or for purposes such as where (400+) you don't want other civs owning cities in your Normal area. The starting spot could be 700 (I think yours is 500, with several 700 squares adjacent, but I'm still adjusting my mapping utility for RFC GW so I could be one square wrong) and the surrounding spots should be lower to discourage the AI Settler from wandering off instead of founding its capital. For example you probably don't want the AI going one square south and founding outside its Core, although that's still within the Normal areas (I believe the Core is mainly used to define the Flipzone) so it probaby won't cause an issue except for cramping other far southern cities.

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