[Mod] Mylon Mod - Bigger Cities and more in depth gameplay

[1shmae1]

Here's the big change that's needed.

Trade NEGATIVELY impacts culture.

It is no coincidence that the age of mercantalism is coincident with the rise of the nation state. Opening borders to trade results in a less integral and cohesive culture. It produces more intenral conflict and opens the nation up to external influences. If you want to build a sense of nationhood, its often a good idea to put up trade barriers around your borders. Makes people pissed but they feel a real sense of brotherhood in their common misery.

Thus I advocate that all higher-level trade buildings (beyond a simple marketplace) ought to negatively impact culture. If you want to trade, be certain to compensate for the negative cultural impact by investing in cultural artifacts (like libraries, museums, etc.). Otherwise, your borders will begin to SHRINK!

Of course, switching to Mercantalism, and ending all foriegn trade, reduces negative trade impact on culture of trade improvements.

That's the Mod that's needed.

[Mylon]

I was thinking of incorporating several methods of culture contamination. That is, if your city is 10% nationality, that means 10% of the culture generated is assigned to that nationality instead of your own. This means the border cities only continue to spread their current nationality mix: It's the cities one layer inside that keeps them to your nationality, unless those border cities have gained enough culture that they're influencing those cities, in which case your cities one further layer inside guards against those and...

Well, you get the idea.

Instead of trade giving negative culture, trade could give culture according to the civilization the trade is occuring with. Thus, big trade cities will notice their nationalities getting rather mixed.

I think this model would create a very interesting way to play out culture. Unfortunately, cities would become much easier to turn, because if a city looses it's owner's majority in terms of nationality, it would only landslide into a faster turning. So, there'd have to be some rate at which foreign culture is "assimilated", or culture can enter your nation with a minor affect to nationality. I could model this manually, but I need to know how it occurs already if I want to impliment this. I'm thinking of doing an exponetial decay. That is, say, each turn 1% of the culture is assimilated. The next turn it's 1% of the remaining 99%, the next turn 1% of the remaining 98.1%, ect...

However, if I don't know how culture assimilation occurs already, this would be difficult to set up in an easily predictable manner.

[1shmae1]

[SIZE=1]
Instead of trade giving negative culture, trade could give culture according to the civilization the trade is occuring with. Thus, big trade cities will notice their nationalities getting rather mixed.

Very interesting design idea!

My question: are their any disadvantages, in Civ4, to choosing to close your borders to neighbors and open them to far-off civilizations? If not, the model you propose above may encourage game-play that is very unrepresentative of the real world.

If I have a choice of cultural contamination, I will choose to expose myself to a distant culture, rather than a nearby culture.

I think your model is more realistic than the simple one I proposed, but make certain that it's effects are not easily circumnavigable. Trade should always be easiest and most-cost efficient (profitable) when it occurs between the nearest of neighbors.

I think this model would create a very interesting way to play out culture. Unfortunately, cities would become much easier to turn, because if a city looses it's owner's majority in terms of nationality, it would only landslide into a faster turning. So, there'd have to be some rate at which foreign culture is "assimilated", or culture can enter your nation with a minor affect to nationality. I could model this manually, but I need to know how it occurs already if I want to impliment this. I'm thinking of doing an exponetial decay. That is, say, each turn 1% of the culture is assimilated. The next turn it's 1% of the remaining 99%, the next turn 1% of the remaining 98.1%, ect...

I really appreciate your attention to detail in this matter! These types of mods truly demonstrate the power of Civ to act as a legitimate model of real-world problems -- such that one can actually experiment with the game to understand how various game elements might actually work in the real world.

You're thinking on this subject is just excellent.

[Mylon]

Okay, I'm going to develop the next version of my mod under the assumption that cultural assimilation does not occur. From my dealings with conquered cities, I'm fairly certain that nationality is a function:

Your culture / Total culture (Where Total culture includes the cultural value of different players within the city and the cultural value of neighbors.)

My form of assimilation would only reduce the cultural value of different players within the city, but they would also generate culture according to that of neighbors, and that culture would be stunted slightly by this assimilation. The 1% will have to be tweaked in game until a good value is found.

I'm not sure how to encourage players to have open borders with their neighbors. Perhaps the diplomacy benefits of open borders alone could be worth it.

[Mylon]

Mod updated to v0.20. I added in a new cultural model, a new bonus food model, some new buildings, and boosted specialists some.

With the cultural model, I tried using the assimilation, but a rate of 1% put a fairly low cap on how much a foreign civilization could influence another one, so I removed it and tweaked how nationality applies to culture. The city's owner gets a couple of small priority bonuses instead. Expect to see some fairly mixed cities in this mod.

Also, the current bonus food model means cities are finite in size. It is possible, in theory, to get a +100% bonus from food resources and use merchants to sustain growth, but merchants are finite and I'm not too fond of this arbitrary critical mass. I'm looking for a way to provide an ever increasing food bonus for cities. Perhaps, say, changing future tech to +5 health per and give cities a +1% bonus per health (unhealithiness does not matter). Not the best of ways of accomplishing this goal, but one possibility.

[Mylon]

Also, some changes I'll be working on to add in 0.21:

+Trade routes yield culture for the civilizations you're trading with. Trade routes will be a key to spreading your influence far and wide!

+Religions in a city will generate culture for the owner of the holy city. Additionally, spreading a religion will generate additional culture for the holy city.

[senormoll]

I really like this idea. I was thinking while reading this: would there be a way to alter religions to accomplish some of what you are talking about? It seems to me throughout history a lot of the culture exchange came from two things: trade and religion. Since no one likes cultural flips occuring too easily, I was thinking just the ability to lift the fog of war over that city may be beneficial enough without it becoming your city. So the idea I got was that each civ gets its own religion to learn, and that way the religion competition around the world is more intense and more realistic IMO. As much as I love founding every religion I can, I'd sacrifice it for the ability to have MY religion and compete with it across the globe, especially if my religion was tied to my culture.


I don't know much about modding this new Civ so my suggestion may be useless, but hopefully this triggers a new idea for you.

[Mylon]

That's an interesting idea. Probably outside of my current knowledge of Python programming, but I doubt it would be impossible. How would you propose religions are measured?

Maybe cities build up a religion by way of religious buildings, great prophets, ect, and missionaries are consumed to boost your religion's influence in a city, like great artists do for culture, but their value might be dependant on your civilization's "religious" value. Of course, if your cities fall to a foreign religion the value of your missionaries would be diluted...

Eh. I'm not seeing enough good gameplay mechanics here.

[senormoll]

well, thats a little ambitious lol. i don't expect you to completely alter the game's premise. but what I was suggesting was just assigning each civ its own religion, even if it takes some creative license on your part. have only that religion be able to discover that religion.

For instance, England starts with a tech called "England", which does nothing but serve as a prerequisite for "Anglican Church". This way every civ is able to discover its own religion.

Then, tie religion to culture by having religion generate foreign culture. So if a neighboring civ contains my religion then it begins to generate my culture (not in my cities, although you could do that if you wanted, but I was thinking more along the lines of the 55% English 45% French type of battles). So having my religion in bordering cities helps a) increase my culture (if you use the same Holy City rule you do now) and b) make cultural takeovers more strategic. By doing this we essentially tie religion to culture (like the real world) and make missionaries also a tool of culture. So cities that share my religion are easier to convert/flip. It also seems religion is easy to spread right now, so also if there was a way to make it more difficult. I would think there would be since the game already makes it more difficult if the city already has a religion. (or more impossibly, have religions replace each other)

Anyway, I definitely don't see this as essential to your mod, but I think it would make a cultural pursuit more lively and gives a better clash of cultures, if that's what you're looking for. And of course, all of these rules could be time/technology/civic sensitive, so I'm just throwing them out there in case you see some way to incorporate it.

[Mylon]

I consider two means of handling culture from trade: One is to generate culture according to the trade money generation (model A). The other is to generate culture as a proportion of culture generated by the trading city (model B), or use some combination of the two.

Model A would result with trades for a lot of money with a culturally poor city will result in a fairly large amount of culture in your city. This could be seen as the other civilization bringing their national culture to your cities, as opposed to city-specific culture.

Model B will result with trades for not too much money but culturally rich cities causing a rather large influx of foreign culture into your cities.

Models A + B would mean the trade value would probably relate to the percentage of culture of the incoming city with the commerce generated by the trade. That is, a trade for 7 gold would mean the city also gains culture at 7% of the rate of the city. This brings further questions of how to apply this: Is it 7% of that city's total culture rate, or is it 7% of that city's base culture rate * the incoming city's culture modifier?

[Mylon]

Mod updated to v0.21. This version is compatable with Civ 4 v1.09.

[Zuul]

Nice :-). I want to try out this mod. Maybe you should incoporate some of the mods others have made, like my promotion mod, extra units and resources, and the fort.

[Mylon]

I'm not too sure about the fort, but I definitely will be incorporating the extra resources (at the very least salt). I might add an extra unit in, too. A sapper, or advanced helicopter to take out tanks.

[Mylon]

Mod updated to v0.25. Note that v0.22 wasn't actually released, so don't think you missed it.

[Mylon]

I'm thinking of adding a new specialist: Bureaucrat. The trick is that I need to decide what they would do. Maybe a cross between an engineer and a merchant. They would inspire great leaders which would give a further -20% to city maitenance. Or maybe +1 beaker, +1 hammer, +3 culture, +1 gold if used as a specialist.