MOD: Long Winded Changes Mod: Improvements increasing Balance, Accuracy, and Fun

[Blackadar1]

WOW! Lots of stuff. If I may make a suggestion, how about toning down pollution in the endgame. It seems absurd to have to play janitor in the later stages of the game until you can build the sewers, solar plant, mass transit and recycling - all of which come after industrialization. Some pollution is ok, but it's out of hand in Civ III.

[NorthSwordsman]

The way the game is coded, it's difficult to modify more than a few things, such as terrain, etc. You have difficulties with the tech tree, etc. Is this game worth the time it takes for the modpack folks like Plutarck to work on? I'm not finding it worth the cash I paid for it. Wish they would come out with a game that is polished for once.

[Plutarck]

Blackadar1: With my increase in effectiveness of the Sewer System (which can come before industrialization) and City Dump (which will no longer require Sewer System be built first), and pollution now requiring only 20 turns to cleanup (4 turns less than before), it should be a lot more managable now. Not to mention my addition of Oil Plant, which pollutes less than Coal Plant (but is more expensive to build and maintain).

Which leads me too...




ANNOUNCEMENT:

Regarding ERP4, I am now in the testing and final polish phase to prepare for the release of it.

I believe I have fixed combat on land and sea at least 95%, which is probably 99% of what's actually possible to do

Further, ERP4 fixes every issue I know to fix (that I'm actually going to invest the time to fix, that is; I don't think I'll do anything to the tech tree except, at most, doing something with the modern era...but I doubt it) save 2: Governments and needing more Great Wonders in the Industrial and Modern eras (and maybe some more improvements too).

Cost is the only "iffy" thing, I believe.

Just one step closer to "completing" this mod, and I think I'm getting quite close with this one.


I hope to have it released by Thursday, which should allow me enough time to test and make sure everything is working satisfactorily.


Let the slobbering, BEGIN!

[NorthSwordsman]

*slobbering*.

*sober thought: I hope that Firaxis will include elements of this modpack into their next patch, assuming they will have one at all *

[hbavatar]

A quick comment on a wonder that occured to me a couple of minutes ago. I think it might have been used in a previous game...

One of the problems with wonders is that some come too late to actually be useful. Since you wish to make colonization and population grow in two phases, I thought one way to do this might be to incorporate a "Statue of Liberty" Great Wonder. This wonder would, instead of Longevity, double the incoming population at each growth period. To me, at least, the Statue of Liberty symbolizes a boom in immigration, which could account for the population growth. As people would flock to a coastal city, a requirement in my opinion, they would then move on to other cities in your empire, expanding. It might make more sense to limit it to the continent you built it on, but if I remember correctly, that would not be possible.

I suppose you could have the Statue of Liberty put a "Immigration Office" in every city of the continent, and have the immigration office double the population, but then you have to create two new things, instead of just the one.

Wasn't the Statue of Liberty in one of the Civ games?

Anyway, hope that helps, and the mod plays and looks great, although you have an extra comma in the Shakespeare Theatre description, plus you need to clarify the Smith's Trading Center description to show the change.

[cyberguide]

mounted scout butchering barbarians

in my last few games i was making use of the mounted scout which - as far as i know - was introduced by this mod. it has no attack but 1 defense point (and 2 for movement which makes it attractive to use).
the curious thing was that my mounted scout was being attacked by barbarians a lot (now swodsmen with some hitpoints and little defense as far as i can remember) ans survived!!! (as long as it was fully healed when the fight was starting.
so my mounted scout kept on butchering the barbarians without any attack point.
i am not complaining that i won these many fights. it just does not seem to be right or logical.
i would fix this by either giving the mounted scout some attack point (maybe just 1) to make it more logically and/or give the barbarians (anyone knows that stats for these?) 1 surplus defense point.

cyber

[Gutz]

I am not sure if this qualifies as a bug or not but thught I would mention it. Sometimes when I go to my tech tree it will have all the information filled in on the actual tech tree. Sometimes the tech tree is totally blank. I can still right click to get all the pertinent info but just wanted to throw it out there.

[JC Woodman]

[QUOTE] Originally posted by Plutarck
Here are my latest entrys in changelog.txt


As usual i'm confused Are these additions to the change log (i.e. Stalin/Hitler, Settlers-Pioneers costing 3 ect.) present on ERP-3 as available now... or are these changes erp-4 stuff?? Do I want to load erp-3 again? I loaded it back on 1-16 or so but no Hitler or Joe S. ect.??

[Plutarck]

hbavatar: That's definately an interesting idea, but from what I've heard only 1 "Granary Effect" works in a city, so I'd have to use the Longevity effect unchanged.

Unfortunately the problem is, "Where to put it?" If it's early Industrial it could be too powerful, but there's no place for it in the late Industrial...that would make sense, anyway.

Egalatarian Act could be a good idea for an early modern wonder like longevity, except for the fact that it's not a real wonder and probably won't really exist for...oh...well, I have no idea. Sometime between 300 years and "After we've been replaced by aliens".


cyberguide:

I've had one other person mention that, but I haven't a clue as to why that would be. What difficulty level were you playing on at the time?

And try it again with ERP4, and see if they're still as tough. Can't think of why they would be, though...


Gutz:

Yeah, I've seen that too, and haven't a freakin' clue as to what causes it. Though if that happens try saving your game, exiting, rebooting, then loading up the saved game. Might fix it, but I dunno...


JC Woodman:

Whenever I release something with changes in it I'll update the version, so I'll never have to ask "Do you have first version of that, or the fixed version?" Bleh.

So all things I mentioned go towards the next release, in this case ERP4.



ERP4 on it's way out, and if I may say so: I've really outdone myself on this one, and in a major way. Shwew!

[Plutarck]

ERP4 is now AVAILABLE!

Yes, ERP4 is now out and available for download.

*wipes brow*

Jeesh, it easily has over 15 hours of non-stop work between ERP3 and ERP4 (probably 20+, though I wasn't really counting), and is definately worth upgrading, or getting it for the first time


Check the first post for details, and check the website at http://lwc.realmofgaming.net for addons and other info.


Enjoy, and I await all your feedback

[NorthSwordsman]

*drooling*... running to download... download complete! :-D. Outta my way!

[Plutarck]

For non-labeled resource.pcx downloaders only:

For those who downloaded the non-labeled resource.pcx file, try redownloading it. I put the wrong one up, which didn't include a graphic for Fruit.

Won't effect any games, will just make it so if the game tries to display it the icon will actually show up.

At least it's not a bug in the mod

[NorthSwordsman]

Plutarck, thanks for your continuing hard work on this mod. It has made what was a boring game into something a bit more interesting. I enjoy playing with your mod.

I sent you a game save, along with an entry about the National Bank small wonder. I'm wondering if anyone else has the same problem?

I've got the requisite tech for building banks and the National Bank small wonder, I've built above the required number (5) of banks, the Domestic Advisor informs me the people want to build it... and no one else is even near that level of tech.. yet... I cannot build it? A bug?

Anyone else with that problem?

Also, since I installed Mod3 (and now 4), everytime I exit the game, it crashes. No biggie, just on exit. Doesn't bother me, as it is Civ3.exe that crashes... and I'm leaving Civ3. Just making you aware of a potential problem. Haven't even had one game crash in all the time since I've been playing it, since Mid-December.

[Plutarck]

NorthSwordsman:

Actually the civilopedia is wrong, but only in that National Bank requires only 4 banks to build. But I think it would be preferable if it required 5, so it'll probably be that in the next version, but that's neither here nor there.

From looking at it I can't imagine why it couldn't be built, but I'll definately take a look at the save and see if I can figure out the problem.

Do any of the new improvements, such as Stock Exchange, show up later on, or have you not gotten that far yet?


Oh, and as for the crash-on-exit thing, it seems many mods have the same oddity. Probably when some item is changed that the game doesn't handle entirely as well as it should, but luckily it doesn't seem to effect any part of gameplay

Not really anything I can do about it, so luckily it's just a minor annoyance


And thanks for your encouragement, and glad you like the mod. Removing the boredom factor that managed to creep into Civ3 was definately one of the main things I set out to accomplish.

[Plutarck]

Well I found the problem, and it applys to all improvements which give a defense bonus.

In short, if a city is Size 2 Civ3 will not allow it to build an improvement that has a defense value, alla "Walls".

So Forbidden Palace and National Bank can only be built in Size 2 citys, which was the same as in erp3 but apparently noone noticed it...go figure.


*sigh* Well, I'll be removing the defense bonus from forbidden palace and national bank, but I think I'm just going to leave it on Palace anyway. The effect is just too good.

Yet another example of why hard-coding such things is pure, unadulterated, idiocy, but nothing much I can do about it.

I'll hold off on releasing ERP5 to fix this problem, as well as trying to fix a minor unit icon problem (I swore I had it fixed...), in case any other such bugs manage to popup their ugly little heads.