Wish list for the patch that will never come

[Archbob]

An AI that actually has a game plan according to game settings rather than relying on massive bonuses. In other words, one that is actually intelligent.

 

[Archon_Wing]

See: The Great Wall.

Qin was quite the noob. He didn't know that there was a whipping penalty for wonders and his wonder became one of the world's largest graveyards.

 

[Um the Muse]

I rationalize the player's ability to hurry production as granting emancipation to your slaves. Of course, that kind of goes against the icon, but it more like traditional slavery (kind of).

I still can't wrap my head around the free food that the Goddess provides your city if you build the Gran Shrine, though. Especially when it has nothing to do with starvation. Why can't it either work just like the other bonuses (+25% food) or just give you a buffer if you're experiencing starvation?

 

[Tempesta13]

After reading through this my new top 5 "easy" fixes would be:

1. Unit selection improvement - Improve selection in cities; select all healed units button or have units in order of % health, double-clicking units when one is on auto-move selects all units and does not give any orders.

2. Vassal Mechanics - Option to stop war when peace vassal happens unless less than cautious (or at least pleased). Also what TMIT said: Having a vassal is never a detriment to getting capitulation compared to having nothing, "islandtarget" is not a HUGE factor in cap with civs that aren't even doing damage, war success factored more heavily.

3. Apostolic Palace - Never can be only one Civ eligible for Diplo Victory; Basically need to figure out in what scenarios this should result in victory and change it so it works correctly.

4. Rally Point - Applied to drafted units; don't have to unselect a city to rally all cities there.

5. City Revolt - Less units required to prevent revolts.

The others:

- Nerf fail gold some.
- Lower spawn rate or eliminate barb galleys.
- I also like the idea of an automated recon mode for aircraft.
- Alt left click on a civ declares war after an "are you sure" message.

That and a new map generator that can make either 1, 2 or 3 land masses that may or may not have pre-astro contact, and somewhat equal land distribution - at least make it so there's no way an AI can only get only 3 or 4 cities while another can get 17.

Edit: Another other: - Governor always will work improved tiles over non-improved tiles. Such as working a grassland hill mine over grassland when building wealth. Exception would be if emphasize food is checked.

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

@VoU: I hope you didn't feel offended, reading what i wrote again led me to the impression that it might have been a little bit rough. Please accept my apologies.

Accepted but unnecessary.

Starcraft, Warcraft3 and Diablo2 were patched for like ages, and the games keep getting played - not only because of the constant patching, but something like that still has a huge impact.

I don't know any of those games very well (I played a bit of Diablo, a little WCIII), and so I know nothing of the patch history.

(Wow - did they really just release a patch for Frozen Throne?)

But I would ask - have they released any Starcraft patches since SCII went live? Are they still patching Warcraft II? Or the original Diablo?

If i knew that my patch would be broadly accepted to be the new "official" patch, then maybe i'd even think about putting work into something like that. But as it is now, it'd really be a waste of time. I rarely use mods, what i want is a patch for the "basis game", a "mod" that is used by the whole community, just like 3.19 etc.

Which whole community? Everybody in the world that plays civ? or is the couple hundred of us that lurk in Strategy and Tips enough?

I'm with you though - the message "welcome to the community, let the automatic updater grab the latest version of the game" is a lot easier than "welcome to the community, manually install the mod we all use in twelve easy steps".

 

[Tempesta13]

I agree with VoU on this. (which is why I titled the thread how I did). Even for a handful of "easy" changes to make a patch that takes a few programmers a couple weeks of work it makes no sense for them to do it at this point. No more expansions will come out for civ4. Also it's not like they can charge $20 for the patch - how many people would buy it? They can't profit off it so it makes no sense.

SC and WCIII were supported for so long because it's a different community. Very competitive which means tournaments/events which means revenue from advertising, sponsors, entry fees etc...

 

[Archbob]

Thats why we need a competitive Civ IV multi-player stage.

 

[Um the Muse]

You could probably make any unofficial patch a part of BULL. It's already widely used and comes with an unofficial patch.

Tempesta13, I didn't see city governor on your summary. Somebody mentioned that the Guv should always prefer developed tiles over undeveloped. That sounds reasonable and shouldn't be too hard, I would think (not that I know the first thing about what goes on under the hoood).

Other changes to the governor: shift-click to de-emphasize food, production, or commerce; ability to choose which specialist to emphasize, instead of only having emphasize science; and include a button that would remove the Guv's aversion to starvation.

 

[vranasm]

I already looked into the code of governor to make him a bit better when building wealth/research and honestly... after 2 hours of watching I didn't found anything where i would catch up :-D.

Then I gave up... if it was in java i could use netbeans which is fantastic IDE for orienting in code... notepad doesn't cut this ;-)

If I would make the patch...I would really only concentrate on bugs, stability and performance. Balance changes is something that isn't exactly accepted in good will if it's not official enough.

 

[Kid R]

If I would make the patch...I would really only concentrate on bugs, stability and performance.

Same here. The speed from renaissance onwards is the biggest problem I have with the game.

We just got a new C++ profiler at work - I'm dying to sneak Civ 4 through it some time. Bet a lot of the trouble's in the Python user interface code though.

 

[ahcos]

But I would ask - have they released any Starcraft patches since SCII went live? Are they still patching Warcraft II? Or the original Diablo?

The sheer fact that they released patches for the old games even though they had new titles in the pipeline is more than enough I wouldn't expect Firaxis to still patch Civ4 now IF they had done that before. As i see it, it's their duty to catch up to things they should have done years ago.

Blizzard are no saints, that's for sure. Still, they released a patch for Diablo II, which was kind of gamechanging in alot of aspects, in 2010 (correct me if i'm right), by a time when Diablo III was in Alpha status, almost Beta. They even released a patch for Warcraft III that was almost solely adapted for the WC3 mod Defense of the Ancients (DotA), a patch that changed the underlying code structure to allow mods to be bigger than just 3,5 mb IIRC (went up to ~9 mb if i'm not mistaken). Now that's what i call interest in the community...

Ofc it's hard to compare the games and the developers, but still ... The difference is: Blizzard takes care for their titles for a very long time, which keeps their titles fresh and interesting for a very long time. I don't expect any groundbraking updates to come for Diablo2 as soon as Diablo3 is out, but by then they've been patching D2 for over 10 years.

Not to mention that no "modern" Blizzard title ever, even in it's release version, had such horrible bugs and design flaws as Civ4 still has in it's "final version". Maybe that's the reason the patching was more constant: they didn't have to overhaul the whole package, but just more or less tweak certain aspects...

Holy mother of satan, you just got me turning into a Blizzard fanboy But otoh, i have no problem to admit that. They're the most reliable and caring developer out there with the best franchises, period.

 

[Rusten]

Thats why we need a competitive Civ IV multi-player stage.

I don't see that happening for civ4 or for any later edition in the series. People that want to compete don't play TBS online -- they play RTS.
As much as I love civ4 and for all the hours I've put into it I never play online MP games as it's simply inferior to a proper RTS title. I load up a Blizzard RTS instead.

I've played some pitboss, but it's pretty casual.

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

We just got a new C++ profiler at work - I'm dying to sneak Civ 4 through it some time. Bet a lot of the trouble's in the Python user interface code though.

Which profiler?

Back when I was writing destructors uphill through the snow both ways, profiling meant (a) slowing things down a lot, and (b) that you needed to run profiling during the entire execution.

The java project I'm working on now is instead instrumented - you can send signals to the program to turn it on and off, get it to dump to files, and so on. I was considering adopting that approach to the Civ4 DLL.

Edit: I do recall hearing that the code had been profiled during the release process, and that it turned out that the graphics/drawing logic was taking up all of the time, which might explain the "slow" algorithms that they use in the intelligence (like the way trade routes are re-evaluated each time).

 

[ecuwins]

Still, they released a patch for Diablo II, which was kind of gamechanging in alot of aspects...

That was patch 1.10 circa 2003. It introduced synergies, high level runes, ladder only runewords, Diablo clone, et al. This broke many previous character builds, but also made way for many new character builds. In many ways, this made it a completely different game.

Anyway, it's tough to compare civ to a BNet game. They are different animals. Ten years of D2 patching shows that Blizz is always testing/experimenting for the sake of all their titles.

 

[civvver]

I wouldn't change any of the units/buildings/traits (only slight changes)/civs etc. Just fix UI bugs and some mechanics. Like AP victory, vassals, war success. Fix some speed bugs like stuff to do with trade routes. There's a fairly good spread of units and buildings and you can always mod in more. The speed things, UI bugs, that's stuff we can't fix ourselves.

The only balance changes I would make are change protective, remove the drill promo (it's too strong for AI, too weak for players) and instead give protective civs +1 happiness from walls and castles and bunkers (for when the castles go obsolete). I'd also bring bank half price banks for financial. Banks are hardly worth building anyway, can't see how making them less painful to build breaks the game.

 

[dalamb]

It seems to me lots of people want incompatible things -- perfectly fine for a wish list, but a bear to implement. You'd need lots of on/off or choose-1-of-N options. Doable, I suppose, but awkward to use.

 

[kossin]

Everything that got broken by 3.19. Balance is fine for the most part, but perhaps find a boost to the traits considered less favorable...?

 

[dalamb]

I seem to recall TMIT talking about (ranting against?) several trait nerfs (even indirect nerfs like the PRO/stone/wall overflow trick; seems widely to be rated as a very weak trait). Reversing those makes sense.

 

[ben-jammin]

Reminds me of the Calabim in FfH. Farm everything and have your Vampires eat your population for promotions. Pretty fun.

It's realistic to whip units, since you're basically rushing people into the army. But it's less realistic to whip things like Forges and Libraries. I mean, are you making buildings out of human flesh?

You are working slaves to death. What do you think supported the Nazi war machine? It's actually not ridiculous at all.

As for making the weaker traits better...that can be seen as a (minor) balance issue, but it can also be seen as a way for players to challenge themselves. If the best players are able to win on Deity with a protective leader...

Also look at the Deity Always War games. Those were made winnable within the current leader framework with protective being extremely important.

 

[Kid R]

Which profiler?

Back when I was writing destructors uphill through the snow both ways, profiling meant (a) slowing things down a lot, and (b) that you needed to run profiling during the entire execution.

The java project I'm working on now is instead instrumented - you can send signals to the program to turn it on and off, get it to dump to files, and so on. I was considering adopting that approach to the Civ4 DLL.[/i]

It's AQTime from SmartBear. It seems pretty good so far (free plug in case using it on Civ 4 would be a licence grey area )

The pro version is probably a bit pricey for home use but it does look like there is a free one (standard edition) which has somewhat fewer options. E.g. free one doesn't support turning on and off dynamically so you have to profile a whole run.

Haven't done any serious performance profiling at work yet because our apps are OK performance wise - so can't say for sure if it adds significant runtime overhead, but I haven't noticed any during other usages.

No source code code instrumentation, it just hooks into the runtime somehow and uses the debug symbols to track each different code path taken. Gets stats for every line of code - it's pretty impressive.