Domination of Barbarians [Diplo Game] [Setup Thread]

[Toni]

Please sign me on! @ Ozzy will make sure i do not skip anymore turns

[Donovan Zoi]

I don't know if I'll have much to say during the preliminaries here, but I'll throw my 2 cents in on double move ships. If we are going to let history unfold at Marathon speed (which sounds fun, actually), I think it may be a bit unrealistic to have naval movement doubled against that. Against the calendar, they will already be covering more ground than they would at Normal speed.

[Sommerswerd]

@ Toni - Sorry I forgot to add you to the list before. You're on there now... Only 4 spots left this is going much faster than I anticipated.

@ Donovan - Whoa! Heavy hitter! Thanks for getting onboard Donovan... yea you really picked up a rotten apple in AMAZON Pitboss III... But you're still in it! A testament to your diplomacy skills... so you will do great in a diplogame if you can survive with a start like that

That's an interesting point about the Ship movement that I had not thought of. I think in DoE we were playing Epic speed not Marathon. So if we are playing Marathon I will have to test this out a little. In my tests so far I was mostly been testing the other parts of the Mod, trying to make sure they work, and trying to make double sure all the starts are survivable, playable, and have the right Tier balance.

[DNK]

Yeah, that "getting razed right after being the war instigator" thing was a bit... I guess funny.

Another idea, perhaps easier to implement than ZoC: water tiles within someone's cultural borders work like land tiles in that it takes 2MP to traverse each if you don't have OB.

[I have tested this in SP and can accomplish this with a very simple mod to routeinfos.xml and a little map editing]

note that I'm more worried about oil units: they could have hit Brazil from Morocco in 1T, maybe just outside of 1T.

[DNK]

To expound: You can edit "routeinfos.xml" to add another route called "coast" or whatever you like. Make it the same as roads, editing out the engineering boost, of course. Then, in the map editor, you just add this improvement to every water tile (it does not preclude fishing boats or whatever). It will be easier to simply use the "replace all" function in wordpad opening up the save file and replacing:

TerrainType=TERRAIN_COAST

With

RouteType=ROUTE_COAST
TerrainType=TERRAIN_COAST

And the same for ocean tiles. This is much faster

This makes it such that all water tiles have 2x movement effectively, but if you are war and cross into enemy territory it's only 1x. This way, ships can sail through friendly waters and open seas at 2x the rate, but if they want to enter into enemy territory, they lose the mobility edge (much as in land combat, they can be outmaneuvered easily and invasions slow considerably, plus it gives coastal civs a reason to build up culture for defensive purposes).

It may still be wise to reduce coastal travel. Regardless, then you just keep the ship stats as in the stock game, and they all have 2x movement in all water tiles.

This should work in MP as it alters very little. There are two issues, though:
1. currently, ships can pillage these routes.
2. currently, the game defaults to a road texture over each tile.

Issue 1 can be overcome with adding an option to workboats to rebuild them, and considering the route "unmined sea" whereas pillaging is in effect "mining the waters". Workboats would then perform an "unmine water" mission to rebuild the waterway. The problem here is that the AI won't really do this right, and appears to always build the route before building fishing boats... If it was a pure MP game, this wouldn't be an issue, but it isn't.

Issue 2 should be easy to overcome, but I suck at artwork editing in this game.

[Calanthian]

Well I think I must not play in this game, although I am very tempted indeed.
The only way would be if someone else would take over one of my other game positions.

[Sommerswerd]

Well I think I must not play in this game, although I am very tempted indeed.
The only way would be if someone else would take over one of my other game positions.

How many games are you playing? Meh... What's one more game? The others will end eventually right?

Another idea, perhaps easier to implement than ZoC: water tiles within someone's cultural borders work like land tiles in that it takes 2MP to traverse each if you don't have OB

Given your description of what is involved (workboats 'mining' water tiles and ships pillaging invisible roads over water), I am thinking that might actually be more complicated than integrating a ZOC.

There are two issues, though:
1. currently, ships can pillage these routes.
2. currently, the game defaults to a road texture over each tile.

. I will see if I can figure out some kind of a workaround, but I wouldn't implement that system in its current state... roads on water tiles?. Using workboats to 'mine' the water? That's not going to work IMO. It's too sloppy. I mean its fine for SP when its just yourself playing, but for MP? We need a better system then that.

note that I'm more worried about oil units: they could have hit Brazil from Morocco in 1T, maybe just outside of 1T.

OK, now we're getting somewhere . That's what I was really trying to get at here... the pinpoint focus of your worries, rather than some overbroad solution for a very specific problem. (Using bazookas as flyswatters and all that)

Fix idea #1:
Why don't we add a second row of coast on the East coast of Brazil or West coast of North Africa? That would address your specific concern without a change to the rest of the game, and without an additional Mod. Note- I already had to do this in Alaska/Bering Straits to resolve a bug where Barb pirate ships were appearing, stranded in the Ocean tiles in the Arctic circle. I also added some coast (and fish) already to North Africa to make the canary islands viable. So adding a little more coast to shield South America from a lightning invasion launched from Western Sahara is no biggie.

Fix Idea #2:
Or we could go with your original idea of reducing the movement of the post Modern Era ships. Now IMO, we dont need to reduce the movement of anything except Transports, becuase your main concern seems to be that an Invasion force could land and raze/capture a coastal city too quickly, right? So we could reduce the Transports movement speed to an amount that would make them too slow to get from West Africa to Brazil in 1 turn. I will have to test to see what that speed is exactly, but whatever it is, we can just set them to that. Maybe increase their cargo capacity to make up for the difference (ie a 50% reduction in speed= 50% increase in cargo capacity).

So that raises 2 questions:
1. Are either of these acceptable fixes to you?
2. If I make those edits, are you going to play? (Cause if not then I'm not doing it)

[Calanthian]

Well, since Sommerswerd will be taking over my position in Chi, I am in..

[Sommerswerd]

Notes to everyone:

1. 3 slots left:whoohoo: Almost there!
2. Based on the comments of Calanthian, Donovan, and others, I am inclined to take out the double ship movement from the Mod (which should also address DNK's issue). I like it, but I will go with the majority on this one, if it means DNK will play. So If anyone objects, please say so now, so we can discuss, or forever hold your peace
3. I have added the Proposed Ruleset to the OP, which makes some important changes to the DoE rules, so check it out and comment when you have time
4. My testing has led me to add another tier based on the relative difficulty of the Western European starts. So there is a new Tier 1 description. I feel there is enough of a difference in the challenge faced to make a distinction between them.

Question for everyone-
Are folks ready to look at the Map so they can start thinking about which Civ they want, or is that unfair to the few players who have not signed up yet? I am thinking that the best way to go about this would be for people to just pick, first come, first served, so that the identity of the players is unknown, even to me. Since Robert has to assign the anonymous accounts anyway, we could then all get them at once so nobody knows who is who... Then we start

Thoughts?

[Black Knight 427]

I think to be fair we should just wait untill all spots have been filled.

[Sommerswerd]

Here is an update on the Mod:

I tested the different scenarios with the modified (hidden nationality) Explorer unit and modified (2 cargo) Privateer.

Privateer- Because the Privateer is a hidden nationality unit it can only carry other hidden nationality units, ie, Explorers, which is perfect, actually. I was worried that this wasn't going to work properly.

Explorer -Couple of things to report here
1. Obviously, as hidden nationality units, they can enter rival borders without OB and without declaring War
2. If they capture a Worker, the Worker assumes the true nationality of the Explorer
3. Even If you dont have OB with the nation you steal a Worker from, the worker still loses all his movement when he is captured, so the captured Worker stays inside your borders the turn after capture. At the beginning of the next turn, the worker is warped out of territory like normal.
4. Explorers can not capture rival cities unless you declare war. Explorers can enter unoccupied cities.
5. If war is declared while an Explorer is inside an unoccupied rival city the Explorer does not automatically capture the city. To capture the city, the Explorer must move outside of the city, and then move to capture it.
6. Explorers attack units, barbs and barb cities normally

I will post if I find anything new or out of the ordinary in testing.

[OzzyKP]

I didn't realize Explorers even could capture workers, or attack units. Wouldn't it be wise to give it a non-combat flag?

[Sommerswerd]

It's intentional, and part of the Mod. The point is to mave Privateers more interesting and useful. Again the idea is to make Navy more interesting. It also is to make the colonization efforts more fun and complex with slaver/pirates running around stealing workers. It will add a great layer to our diplomacy and storytelling too.

[DNK]

Given your description of what is involved (workboats 'mining' water tiles and ships pillaging invisible roads over water), I am thinking that might actually be more complicated than integrating a ZOC. . I will see if I can figure out some kind of a workaround, but I wouldn't implement that system in its current state... roads on water tiles?. Using workboats to 'mine' the water? That's not going to work IMO. It's too sloppy. I mean its fine for SP when its just yourself playing, but for MP? We need a better system then that.

Given that ZoC is a massive additional mod that would require tons of python scripting, I think this is simpler but I agree it's not worth the hassle if we can do something simpler.

OK, now we're getting somewhere . That's what I was really trying to get at here... the pinpoint focus of your worries, rather than some overbroad solution for a very specific problem. (Using bazookas as flyswatters and all that)

Believe I've mentioned that previously, but it might have only been in DoE2 (I've had this convo a lot over the past year).

Fix idea #1:
Why don't we add a second row of coast on the East coast of Brazil or West coast of North Africa? That would address your specific concern without a change to the rest of the game, and without an additional Mod.

As I suggested earlier, this would alleviate some of the issues, though it doesn't fix transports with 12MP... I see no reason to up the speed of modern units.



In the end, though, I've decided to hold off on a 3rd game, final. 2 is enough for me to worry about daily, and I don't need a third now. I will be available to sub whenever G&H ends. I assume you will need a solid sub when that time comes. So, sorry to bother you all with this ship movement stuff when I'm not even playing

[Sommerswerd]

no probs... Still, it was fun talking about it