Warlords patch

[alexman]

[Edit by Solver: as of October 31, the 2.08 patch has been released, and is available here on Apolyton.]

We are almost ready to release the patch.
It's a bit later than we initially thought, so in the meantime, here's the list of changes that will be in it:

Vassal States
No longer possible to receive a request from an AI to declare war on one of his vassals (!)
Vassals can no longer accept one-sided defensive pacts (!)
Fixed happiness from vassal issue
You can now airlift into cities of your vassal
You don't pay supply costs for units inside your vassal's borders
Can no longer ask someone to make peace with a vassal. Talk to the master directly.
Vassal AI improvement
When you declare war on a vassal, you also declare war on the master (instead of the master declaring war on you)
Vassal AI no longer makes *all* their gold available for trade.
Vassal AI never refuse to talk to their master
AI better considers war consequences of accepting a vassal
Vassals no longer freed when master forms a permanent alliance
- Fixes the vassal/defensive pact exploit
Master/Vassal AI attitude reflects the implicit defensive pact of a vassal agreement.
Master/Vassal AI no longer give each other negative attitude modifiers for close borders.
Vassal AI does not get upset because of Master's defensive pacts with third parties.
Vassal cannot own plots within the city radius of his master's cities unless those plots are closer to his own cities.
If you have a peace treaty in effect with someone, you can no longer declare war on their vassals either.
Adjusted negative AI attitude for having vassals
AI no longer refuses to become a vassal because of "your lands too far" when you are actually neighbors

Great Generals
When a generic Great General is attached to a unit, the unit is no longer given a TXT_KEY name
Great Generals experience threshold scales with the ratio of Great People threshold to unit production rate
(so the threshold is the same at all speeds except Marathon where they require 1.5 time more experience)

Multiplayer
Anonymous play: real player names revealed on game end
Fix for anonymous mode not being always anonymous
Fixed some more anonymous play issues
- You can no longer see other player's names in the staging screen for loading a save
- You no longer see the player ID for "waiting to hear from..."
Fixed selection issue in simultaneous MP for recently-moved units
Now possible to join a Pitboss game where only AI are left
Fixed Pitboss not-ready-to-launch bug
Pitboss no longer crashes when launching as players are joining
Pitboss no longer crashes when large amounts of text are spammed into the chat box
Don't allow launching the game with players still in the civ selection screen
Fixed MP crash when player is eliminated with the trade screen up and performs a trade
Switched to new GameSpy SDK
No autosaves generated for PBEM
Innocent units are no longer penalized when another unit moves near the end of the turn timer and stays selected
Added "logging enabled" warning for MP
LAN: No longer possible to spam the network with game refresh requests

Graphics
Fixed non-shader version of Mehmed
if too many individual plots need globe rendering, redraw entire globe texture for performance
Hooked up modern harbor graphic
Fixed issue where combat zoom did not happen after you just clicked "yes" on the popup to declare war.
Possible fix for grid crash. Test by playing at medium or low graphics level.
Kublai / Qin swap
High resolution terrain option has no effect when graphics settings are not at the highest level

Interface
Combat odds greater than 99.9% are displayed as such (not rounded to 100%)
Combat odds less than 0.1% are displayed as such (not rounded to 0%)
Active resource deals (1 of X) display the correct number for X
Diplomacy screen: leader attitude once again shown at the top
Regenerating the map resets the statistics in the Info screen
Plot indicator rotation no longer gives away your location on the map (north-south hemisphere)
Fixed Python exception in plotlist mouseover help
Fixed watermill and workshop tooltip
Mission queue is no longer cleared after the selection group has used up all its movement from a previous mission
Fixed cursor location for windowed maximized mode.
Rally points now work with autopromote
Canceling a deal in the diplomacy advisor no longer affects the state of any existing diplomacy screen
Fixed erroneous score display in city screen for games with over 20 number of players
Foreign advisor: leaderheads no longer cut off when tech or resource trading not possible
Great Person city bar mouseover shows turns left
Your cities can now have the same name as an existing city of another civ (to prevent renaming to expose your AI opponents)
Civ name appears after city names when captured and when Great People are born
(to avoid confusion now that duplicate names are allowed)
City selection: Shift-clicking on a selected city de-selects it, just as it works for unit selection
Fixed sorting bug in Domestic advisor
Improved performance for large selection groups
Fixed F6 screen update issue for PBEM
Fixed civilopedia display for buidings that give raw food/production/commerce/gold/science
No more warnings for animals at your borders
No more '&' allowed in player and city names (special character)
Globeview unit indicator and help text show up correctly for plots with more than one unit
Correct unit mouseover for collateral damage protection
Correctly updating yield symbols after plot ownership change
Workers given orders after they have moved wake up when in danger

Sound
Fixed SAM noise issue
Fixed a sound bug
Added audio to enemy unit warnings
Stalin gets Peter's diplo music, not Catherine's
Fixed audio crash on reload
Diplomacy music was slightly too loud for new leaders

AI
AI no longer chooses state religion civics if it has no religion
City governor no longer overly starves a city when there is not enough food
Fixed a couple more issues with the city governor
AI no longer dumps their entire nuclear arsenal on the barbarians
Fixed bug where AI would sometimes accept trades for your worthless maps
AI builds bunkers more urgently
AI city placement improvement as per Blake
Improved AI use of 'emphasize' buttons as per Blake
Pop-rush and draft AI improvement as per Blake
Worker AI improvement as per Blake
Improved civics AI as per Blake
Tweaked AI building priorities as per Blake
Fixed AI accidental war declaration (crash into submarine)
AI no longer offers non-peace deals when at war

Balance
Increased trebuchet cost to 80
Quarries give +1 shield with railroads
Expansive gets +50% production for workers, and just +2 health
Navigation II requires Flanking
Leadership gives double experience points
Stables obsolete with Rocketry (when mounted units upgrade to Gunships)
Siege units no longer defend after other less powerful units in a stack
When gifting a unit to a charismatic leader, an experience adjustment occurs.
(Prevents exploits of gifting units to a charismatic teammate just for them to promote and return them)
Removed balanced resource option from Mirror mapscript
Creative gets cheap Libraries
Organized gets cheap Factories
Jaguar gets Woodsman promotion instead of 25% jungle defense
Bureaucracy: High upkeep
Representation: +3 Happy in largest cities
Civil Service requires Mathematics
Pyramids cost 500
Colosseum and Odeon cost 80
Masonry has higher religious weight
Mall: +20% gold
Guerilla3 gives +30% withdrawal in addition to hills attack bonus
Walls give 25% protection to bombardment (so they are relevant even in high-culture cities)
Castle gives 25% protection to bombardment
Spanish Citadel gives +5XP to siege
Heroic Epic available with a level 4 unit
Shrines immune to nukes
Gallic Warrior can also be built with Copper
Military Academy: +50% production for military units
Military Academy requires Education
Military Academy gives 3 culture
Oracle, Stonehenge, Great Wall no longer available in Classical starts
Great Wall gives just 1 Great Person point per turn
Temple of Artemis: reduced cost to 350
Barbarians can have Spearmen

Misc bug fixes
Fixed first strike chance bug
Enemy spies no longer visible from GlobeView!
Barbarians can no longer build any of the Wonders
Fixed potential crash
Old .Civ4WorldBuilderSave files are recognized and loaded
Can't gift a unit if the recipient is over the limit (missionaries, spies)
Units cannot jump into enemy territory when expelled
When you lose a Wonder race and you have a Settler/Worker queued up next in that city, you no longer get food counted both in the food and production boxes.
Fixed crash with flip of city that contained troops loaded into a transport.
Fixed several other potential crashed of the same type.
Fixed crash bug
Fixed bug with research overflow
Fixed load unit into transport crash
Fixed selection group cycling crash
Can't capture Greek Odeon (gives culture)
Raised Worldbuilder culture limit from 1000 to 100000000
No longer possible to bombard a city with zero defensive modifier
Fixed back to main menu crash
Great People type no longer changes during anarchy
Game no longer freezes when you try to retire after ending your turn in PBEM/Hotseat

Text
Fixed Stonehenge strategy text
Updated credits
Fixed typo in Hannibal civilopedia entry
Fixed inaccuracy in Great General civilopedia entry
Fixed Pavilion spelling
Updated Celtic city list
Fixed Louis diplomacy text bug
Egypt civilopedia text fix
French Tank: Char -> Char d'assaut

Modding
Updated PythonHelp feature
exposed getCurrentEra to Python
Added some missing python auto-doc information
Added Python override to prevent razing of a city
Leaders with no favorite civic appear in civilopedia
Projects defined in WorldBuilder saves now work properly

Genghis Khan Scenario
Removed Pinch promotion

Chinese Unification Scenario
Can now build Galleys in all 'river' coastal cities
Imperialist Trait now grants 50% Settler production bonus as expected

Alexander the Great Scenario
Reset Variables at the beginning of the game; fixes the 2 Alexander if the scenerio is restarted.
Scenerio->Scenario
Only available for single-player games

Peloponnesian War Scenario
Non-english text fix for Peloponnesian War

Vikings Scenario
fixed bug where Red marking circles did not show up after loading a save

Omens Scenario
Player can no longer gift Missionaries to the AI to convert them to their religion and win easily

[Tattila the Hun]

That's all?






Say, I read trough the vassal fixes, but I'm still not sure, whether the exploit of getting Civ C to declare war on your vassal, and then making peace with Civ C immediately, without closing the diplo-screen, is fixed?

[Diadem]

Good work! Major improvements! Those vassal changes will really make them more attractive!

And all those AI improvements from Blake... That's really gonna make the game a lot harder on all difficulties. I wonder, is the difficulty scale going to be adjusted? Or perhaps the AI bonusses tweaked? Or will the game just be harder from now on?

All the gameplay changes seem to make the game more balanced. Some of the lesser leader traits got improvements, nice.

The major changes, gameplay wise, are these:
- Civil Service requires Mathematics
- Masonry has higher religious weight

Most of the starting strategies are now instantly worthless. No more CS slingshot, no more lightbulbing CS or Philosophy. It's gonna take a while for players to find new starting strategies!

[Solver]

I can certainly confirm that the game is now harder. If you were mostly comfortable at some difficulty level, that level will now become challenging.

[Diadem]

Yeah, I fear I'm never, ever, gonna win a deity occ game now ;(

[Tattila the Hun]

Oh, bugger. What's below settler?

[rah]

I am really pleased that Blake's effort has been included.
A touch of class.
Well done. (not diminishing all the other fixes of course)

[lockstep]

No more CS slingshot, and (hopefully) no more AI cities one tile away from the coast ...

[Solver]

Originally posted by Tattila the Hun
Oh, bugger. What's below settler?

Markos

[JackRudd]

Originally posted by Tattila the Hun
Oh, bugger. What's below settler?

StarLightDeath

[Blake]

I have to say that my favorite change is:

Quarries give +1 shield with railroads

Come on, that's just awesome. And I'm actually not being sarcastic, I've always thought "wow, quarries should benefit from railroads" .
And it's called a shield, that's so quant!


The Balance changes are IMHO most interesting:

Expansive gets +50% production for workers, and just +2 health
Now this is an interesting upgrade to Expansive. It plays a slightly more active role in a civ now. Kind of a free 30 hammers with every worker you train/whip, but bearing in mind it doesn't work with food (ie you need whip or mines).

Siege units no longer defend after other less powerful units in a stack
This is another interesting change especially for things like Elepult - Elepult is now less vulnerable to spears even without axes, because the pults will defend against spears. And Korea? deadly... just bring spears.


Creative gets cheap Libraries
This is a pretty cool change. It means even earlier academies and even stronger border pushes.

Civil Service requires Mathematics
Alas poor CS slingshot we hardly knew thee. Hey funny story, first time I tried the patch with this change, I popped Mathematics from a hut right before the Oracle finished and performed a flawless CS Slingshot. The funny thing is I didn't even notice what I'd done and picked CS without any thought. I think that's the only time I've ever popped Maths from a hut
It's a great change though, look forward to more Feudalism and Philo slingshots (I often prefer Philo anyway).

Masonry has higher religious weight
This is a significant change and quite the blow to the usefulness of the Prophet since he can no longer slingshot to Code of Laws or Civil Service. The Great Prophet is now restricted to religion type things, as he probably should be. Look forward to more Theology and Philo pops (ie generate library GS rather than prophet). Monarchy is still poppable too, after Theo has been popped.

Walls give 25% protection to bombardment (so they are relevant even in high-culture cities)
Castle gives 25% protection to bombardment
This is also kind of interesting, especially Spanish citadels... those things take forever to bombard down.

Shrines immune to nukes
Well yeah, God > Nukes, everyone knows that.


Military Academy: +50% production for military units
Military Academy requires Education
Military Academy gives 3 culture
I think this makes MA's kind of a no-brainer, but only once you have that Education.


Barbarians can have Spearmen
Barbarians can get Horsemen too. But how often do you see them? But still this meanas chariots are less of a one-stop solution to barbs.

[Karol]

Blake, did they just take AI improvements from your mod or enhanced them further?

[Tau Ceti]

Lots and lots of good changes here. The only thing that worries me is cheap factories for Organized. Org is already one of the most powerful traits on higher difficulties, it already has one of the most useful cheap buildings in the Courthouse, and now it gets another super-building for cheap (and it is the most expensive bonus building too).

Augustus will get just ridiculous. Cheap Libraries, Theatres, Colosseums, Lighthouses, Courthouses and Factories, plus Praetorians? I say it is broken.

[Thedrin]

I'm more curious about the change to Mehmed. Cheap courthouses, granaries, lighthouses, harbours, factories and workers.

[JackRudd]

Frederick will be pretty nice as well; he joins Shaka in the class of "leaders with a cheap UB".

EDIT: And Franklin Roosevelt becomes a production god. Cheap forges and cheap factories.

[DirtyMartini]

Interesting that the CS slingshot has been (nearly) eliminated. I'm wondering how popular that is going to be.

For a while it was my preferred strat, but it became a crutch and started to feel a little gimmicky, so I moved away from it. Seems that in order to safely and reliably pull it off, you needed a pretty decent start anyway, so it was mostly a good strat for making a good start into a great start.

Agree with Blake on the military academy issue -- I rarely built them before, but will now. I also like the move of reducing the requirement for the HE, now you don't necessarily need to spend that first GG on a lvl5 promotion. These changes add some depth to the use of GGs.

Good point regarding Augustus by Tau Ceti.

[Thedrin]

Frederick will be pretty nice as well; he joins Shaka in the class of "leaders with a cheap UB".

Frederick's UB is already cheap with coal.

[MasterDave]

I can confirm that the AI improvements have made the AI a lot tougher. The beta games I played on Monarch were struggles and I will only win one of four of them!

I played a lot with the new Expansive trait. The production bonus to workers only applies to hammers, so in order to benefit from the discount, you need to micromanage your cities to emphasize hammers. You do not get a whole lot of benefit from this for your first worker most of the time (the first worker came one or two turns sooner most tries, but when you have some mines built, you can pump out additional workers very quickly.

While the worker discount is not quite the game-breaker I originally thought it was, it does make expansive a legitimate trait now, more comparable with the favorites such as financial and organized.

[Solver]

Yeah, an important thing to understand is that +50% production doesn't mean building Workers in half the time.

[Diadem]

Hmm, I hadn't tried the new organized yet, but if the 50% bonus only works on hammers it's pretty useless. Workers are already cheap enough that their build-time is irrelevant late-game. It's early game that it takes long. A discount is significant for your first 3 workers, after that it's pretty much irrelevant. And your first three workers ... Are built mostely with food. In fact I think I'd prefer the +1 health over this broken worker build-speed improvement.


And why are some people calling organized a strong trait? It might be playable now that they get cheaper factories, but before that it was most definitely the most useless trait around. A 50% reduction on civic upkeep is simply not a lot. Even for a truly massive empire this is but a small amount of their total balance. The financial trait surely gives much more extra commerce than that 50% reductions saves you cash. And the turns saved as spiritual leader surely are worht more than that 50% reduction. The bonus from the organized trait is really only significant when your empire is so big that you've already won anyway.

[MasterDave]

Organized is very powerful for warmongers for one reason: The trait, and the cheap courthouses both significantly reduce maintainence fees to the point where you can conquer a largish empire early in the game without going broke. If your plan is to try to win Culturally or with a Spaceship with a small empire of five or six cities, then organized is the wrong choice. If you plan to grow beyond this, it becomes hugely powerful (especially with the cheaper factories now, nice).

[Thedrin]

Hmm, I hadn't tried the new organized yet, but if the 50% bonus only works on hammers it's pretty useless. Workers are already cheap enough that their build-time is irrelevant late-game. It's early game that it takes long. A discount is significant for your first 3 workers, after that it's pretty much irrelevant. And your first three workers ... Are built mostely with food. In fact I think I'd prefer the +1 health over this broken worker build-speed improvement.

I build my first worker with unimproved tiles. That worker will usually generate at least one square with a large hammer output. A 50% bonus to such a tile will build a worker faster than the vast majority of early game food tiles. The worker production bonus can give a much bigger boost to your game than the 1 health that was removed.

Having said all that I'd probably still choose the 1 health. Point is, I don't think the worker bonus is a bad one.

[Adagio]

Originally posted by alexman
AI city placement improvement as per Blake
Improved AI use of 'emphasize' buttons as per Blake
Pop-rush and draft AI improvement as per Blake
Worker AI improvement as per Blake
Improved civics AI as per Blake
Tweaked AI building priorities as per Blake

I'm looking forward to this

[JackRudd]

The difference between the worker bonus and the +1 health is that the +1 health is much more situational - it's better with some sorts of prevalent terrain, and worse with others, and you don't get much say about which you end up with.

[kiky]

Any changes to vassal refuse (red option) to trade tech to the master?

Organize is broken, I think.
Mehmed

This patch gonna be

[Blake]

Hmm, I hadn't tried the new organized yet, but if the 50% bonus only works on hammers it's pretty useless. Workers are already cheap enough that their build-time is irrelevant late-game. It's early game that it takes long. A discount is significant for your first 3 workers, after that it's pretty much irrelevant. And your first three workers ... Are built mostely with food. In fact I think I'd prefer the +1 health over this broken worker build-speed improvement.

The food thing does suck but there are ways to leverage the bonus, for example the whip always works properly and if you have for example a forested plains hill you can get 4hpt boosted to 6hpt which is the full bonus at size 1, or you can go for 4hpt at size 2 (ie grassland forest + plains forest) which is still a 40% bonus. The governor is quite good about figuring this out (not perfect... but he tries pretty hard).

And why are some people calling organized a strong trait? It might be playable now that they get cheaper factories, but before that it was most definitely the most useless trait around. A 50% reduction on civic upkeep is simply not a lot. Even for a truly massive empire this is but a small amount of their total balance. The financial trait surely gives much more extra commerce than that 50% reductions saves you cash. And the turns saved as spiritual leader surely are worht more than that 50% reduction. The bonus from the organized trait is really only significant when your empire is so big that you've already won anyway.

The power of Organized is first and foremost in that it has the best cheap buildings. The courthouse is a good cost to be cheap - buildings like the granary, barracks and theatre are cheap enough normally that being cheap isn't a huge saving - like they can be whipped from a size 4 city (a typical happy cap at higher difficulties). An organized courthouse, can be whipped form a size 4 city, versus a size 8 city for non-org - that's huge! Absoutely huge!

The lighthouse is also a cheap building, but that's a more useful effect as lighthouses are often needed in cities with abysmal production, cities which may struggle to grow to size 2.

The civics savings are nice too, usually equal to between 10% and 20% slider (20% would be when your economy is near-death), there ARE times when I look at my civic bill and wish I was organized. Organized cost savings have an interesting synergy with gold income from great merchant cash bombs, shrines and such - Organized can allow you to get away with not building gold multiplier buildings (or only in shrine cities).
The factory isn't really significant, this is true. Relatively speaking factories are not that expensive.

But I've never thought of Organized as being weak... it's just not that obvious how to leverage it and caters more to certain playstyles (many cities, high cost civics, concentrated gold etc).

[JackRudd]

Originally posted by Blake
it's just not that obvious how to leverage it and caters more to certain playstyles (many cities, high cost civics, concentrated gold etc).

Which is why vanilla Tokugawa was so powerful in the right hands (i.e. not the AI's). Organized is a lovely trait to have if you're continually running Police State-Vassalage-Theocracy and gobbling up everybody's cities with your cheap, souped-up units. Obviously this works rather well in conjunction with Aggressive. (It's probably pretty good in conjuction with Charismatic too - people are probably actually playing Napoleon now he's Cha/Org and not Agg/Ind. )

[Dis]

audio enemy warnings? sounds intersting. What I'd like to see is warnings after all the city maintenance popups (so I don't forget while I'm assigning production)

[kiky]

Audible or visual reminder on newly captured city become online would be great.
Needed this because almost always forgot to whip!

[Virdrago]

This patch Thanks, Alexman.

Also, thank you Blake, for your inputs in this.

Looking forward to this.