[Mod] Alternate Epic

[Sessil3]

I got the idea for this mod from Peter Shafer, who also has a mod in this forum addressing the Epic balance problems. I also worked in my idea of how fast units should move.

Playtested so far through conquest, domination, diplomatic and cultural victory in Small and Standard custom maps, using the Island and Pangaea templates. I've typically played Prince and Monarch difficulty, and am going to be moving up soon. In other words, you can play using your favorite settings without fear of game-fubar.


v0.3 feature list:
Techs cost 300% of normal. This doesnt slow the game down as much as you might think!

Add a lot more turns, # currently in flux.

Great People now discover 200% more tech points due to tech price increase.. to keep that in range.

No more inflation. It's a stupid concept in a simple economy that doesn't include wage and price growth, which are the prime movers of inflation. If the game isn't "balanced" without the concept, it needs to be fixed on its own terms.

Unit training 75% of NORMAL (not epic).. more units, as many as you can afford!
Golden ages last twice as long as vanilla--otherwise they're useless in the context of what you give up to sacrifice the GPs.

Bugfix: strategic resources now give the bonuses you expect regarding food/hammers.. if they say +1 in the window, the city gets +1 food or hammers (ie any city connected to wheat gets 1 bonus food). This is NOT fixed for commerce, as I just couldn't be bothered.. it's a lot of interface work!

FISSION reveals URANIUM (was physics)
WINERIES possible with POTTERY
COTTAGES NOT possible until Monarchy (was Pottery)
SPY & SCOTLAND YARD available with NATIONALISM
SCOTLAND YARD substantially cheaper, as are spies.
GREAT LIBRARY with ALPHABET not LITERATURE
JUNGLE and FOREST allowed roads with BRONZE and IRON WORKING respectively.
SAILING now allows WHALING BOATS.
CANNONS require GUNPOWDER + ENGINEERING (was steel+gunpowder), came 2late b4.
CARAVEL carries TWO special units. Not like I ever load anything..
DRY DOCKS with ENGINEERING (was steel)
AMBUSH PROMOTION not available until you develop STEEL
BOMB SHELTER effectiveness reduced to 50%.
FALLOUT is now 10x harder to clean up.
CASTLE now available with CONSTRUCTION so they are actually useful,made cheaper.
DESERT now is irrigable.. costs 5x more to develop, this also affects incense, oil etc. The game doesn't allow per-terrain per-improvement cost adjustment. This should neuter the retarded "global warming" that happens when you throw nukes around.. nukes destroy the world and put it into nuclear winter at most, they certainly never cause it to overheat.
DESERT now allows cottages.
OASIS now improvable.


MAJOR UNIT CHANGE:
All sea units get an large movement increase (generally around 4x). Bonuses are not yet increased. Exploration is much easier and also sea transport is less painful, while requiring a whole new level of strategic thought in terms of defensive arrangements. Ships have traditionally been OFFENSIVE weapons.

All land units get a semi-large movement increase (2x early, more like 3-4x for late game units like mech inf). Movement bonuses are not increased. This allows armies to assemble more quickly and realistically.. if a turn is a year, or FIVE years.. it's ridiculous to think they can't cross a continent of friendly roads in that time. Consider the fact that in the 1940s, the US moved MILLIONS of human beings across the entire world, to SE Asia and Europe simultaneously. Also consider the conquering march of the Roman empire, two thousand years prior, to Scotland and Hadrian's Wall over a relatively short period. War is a fluid thing, and it should not be hemmed in by stupid game designers :] It's really cool to have to fence in a huge perimeter if you don't locate your borders on chokepoints.. penalizes greediness.

Air units get a default doubling of their range to reflect realistic tricks used by intelligent air forces.. midflight refueling, zeppelins in WWI, small covert airstrips.. etc.

ICBMs made far more powerful (40 strength->1000 str).
I am unsure of the effect, but if it has any at all.. it stays in.

[Sessil3]

File:

I am retarded, therefore the file is here.
0.31 is here now. It fixes a divide by zero issue over 0.3.. what a rookie mistake! ;]

[Sessil3]

changes posted above as per forum guideline (sig heil!)

[Gramphos]

Please read and follow http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...hreadid=141733 when posting mods. When you concider this mod stable, please submit it to the directory.

[Sessil3]

As far as I could tell I needed only to make the thread title prefixed with [Mod], right?

[Gramphos]

Originally posted by Sessil3
As far as I could tell I needed only to make the thread title prefixed with [Mod], right?

Well, you should submit the mod to directory as well, once you concider it tested ennough. But until then the onkly thing is to have the thread prefixed with [Mod] and to remember to update the first post when something chanes.

[Stromko]

The mod sounded good until I got to the part about increasing sea movement by 8x, land movement by 4x.

Such an increase in sea movement makes warships useless, unless you're able to completely blockade and block off every port of your enemy. All one has to do to send an invasion fleet is to Load everyone in a city, End Turn, move transport to enemy coast, Unload, then return to town; unless the enemy has =hundreds= of warship they'd never be able to stop you. The only way this could possibly work is if warships (& subs especially!) had some automatic interdiction chance, like fighters vs bombers, and that any enemy ship within 4+ spaces within that time would get attacked automatically.

The land movement also seems unnecessary. Wars do take a long time in Civ 4, I'll give you that, but fast movement doesn't really change that it just makes it silly. Instead of seeing enemy armies approaching and being able to =do= anything about it, they'll just be on your cities instantly. It does away with field warfare almost entirely.

If you want to change the pace of the game, you shouldn't be so concerned about each turn being a year, etc, the concern should be game balance and fun. Yes, of course a transport can cross an ocean in a year IRL, it'd realistically just take a month or even a week, BUT, in Civ 4 that breaks the gameplay.

[dearmad]

The date conception screws up more reasoning about this game- they should take the date OUT! Then you can concentrate on game flow which is more important.

[Klayvin]

I agree with Stromko

I love the mod except for the movement changes, I would take maybe a 1.5-2x increase for water units though.

Land unit speed shouldn't be touched.

[Sessil3]

Originally posted by Stromko
The mod sounded good until I got to the part about increasing sea movement by 8x, land movement by 4x.

While feedback is cool, theoretical feedback from people who aren't actually going to play the mod is not interesting to me. If this isn't your cup of tea.. go post somewhere else.

As for the relationship between tech, movement points and turns, here is my take:
I don't like the slow pace of wars in the civ games.
I want to fix it by making more wars possible:
a) during the duration of the game (within the # of turns the game allows)
b) within the "ages" of the game.. ie I want knight combat, warrior combat, rifleman combat, etc. I don't want one single war over three cities on an island somewhere to take up the scope of human history like in vanilla civ4.

SO. What I did about it was add a lot more turns to the game, slow tech down a lot, and make the units able to move more in a turn, so they could engage in useful combat. If you don't like the idea of being forced to locate your cities and borders on chokepoints, of having to garrison the sea resources and think differently about sea combat, and don't like the idea of combat in the countryside instead of always city-on-city.. then go play another mod. It's silly to try and make every mod fit this or that player's conception of what is good gameplay. What I was after instead, and got really, was getting the tech advances, gameclock and combat all on the same page. If the result is a little weird sometimes.. well so is the original game.


That said, I'm thinking about graduated unit movement increased (ie warriors getting 2 moves, riflemen 4) to model the increasing ability of people to move about as tech developed. I'm also gonna scale back the movement points once the SDK comes out and I can hack the movement stuff to use enemy roads/rails at 1/2 bonus (instead of no bonus at all which is absurd).


A guy on the irc channel made an interesting point about tech-- you could have a graduated scale instead of just scaling all tech costs, by increasing techs more by age (ie+100% ancient, +125 classical etc).. making the renaissance-modern rush less fast. I'm thinking some of the research techs need to be quite a bit more expensive to discourage research whoring.

Keep the constructive critcism coming. No theoretical "If I was going to play ur crappy mod even tho im not" type kibbitzing plz.

[Sessil3]

To make the early game less of a blitzkrieg fest in continent and pangaea, I pulled back the early game movement bonuses (except for settlers and other noncombat units) to 2x. The ship movement points also got rolled back proportionally. As a result the mod may have more turns added sometime in the future, along with some more tech slowdown. I need to play a few more games to know. Enjoy :]

[Gelondil]

Which part of Civ's slowness do you not like - the number of turns a war takes, or the number of years? I think I can offer some hints to help either, but I'll save that until I understand which PoV you're coming from.

Your mod does have one effect on wars that I don't know if you accounted for...

Units cost 75% of NORMAL length amount. More units, faster.

I have been giving it some thought, and I'm pretty this actually SLOWS warfare. It makes warfare bloodier and more entertaining, that much is clear, but it doesn't make it any faster.

Depending on numerous factors, it normally (for me) takes about 2x as many units to take a city than the city has defenders. Even in an epic game, a player can build a single unit in the time it takes for an army to get to a city. I'm guessing this is one of the bigger reasons you increased the movement rates. Unfortunately, movement rates, city sizes, and map sizes are scaled with eachother in mind.

what you did was to increase production rates. Now, granted, that makes building armies faster across the board, but it makes attacking armies less effective overall. Once an attacker launches an army, they lose the advantage of fast unit production for that attack, but the defender hasn't, meaning that the attacker must put even MORE units into an army to overwhelm a defender, meaning that it takes more effort to build a competitive army. To (over)simplify:
Fast production ... allows rush-built defense ... requiring bigger attack forces ... which take more effort to build ... which may reduce the number wars overall.

My suggestion would be to increase the unit cost significantly, like +25% of epic levels, just to see how the AI takes it. Since I've seen an AI civ launch an army of 3 units before, I think they'd handle it ok.

About deserts -
BTW, perhaps desert can be lived in or irrigated, but rarely without serious costs, and rarely without ulterior motives (such as harvesting recources). Personally, if I were to implement desert farming at all, I wouldn't do it without a -2 trade penalty or something similar. Then again, working a tile for 1 or 2 food is not as profitable in Civ4 as it was in Civ3, so we won't be seeing desert metropolises.
Remember, too, that Civ4 already does have some examples where desert tiles can be worked that you could equate to the rare times it happens IRL.

[Sessil3]

You didn't play the mod, and are not terribly interested in it, right? If so, see the post above about kibbitzing.

[Standup]

While feedback is cool, theoretical feedback from people who aren't actually going to play the mod is not interesting to me. If this isn't your cup of tea.. go post somewhere else.

I think you need to be more receptive to feedback. I like some features and not others but i'm not going to bother playing if you're going to be hostile to general comments. I agree that deserts should have more options but the increased land movement changes the whole nature of the game.

[Sessil3]

Originally posted by Standup
I think you need to be more receptive to feedback. I like some features and not others but i'm not going to bother playing if you're going to be hostile to general comments. I agree that deserts should have more options but the increased land movement changes the whole nature of the game.

Well.. you should realize that there are already tons of mods on this site. Go find one you like.. is it really that hard to understand? I WANT to change the nature of the game, because -in- -my- -opinion- the movement slowness in vanilla c4 sucks. You're totally free to disagree.. and I won't even call you wrong. You just want to play a different game. Go have fun.

To reiterate, for what seems like the 3rd time.. if you are actively playing this mod and think the movement changes need tweaking.. speak up, I won't be hostile! scout's honor.