MOD: korn's Blitz Mod

[francoImpaler]

Re: lots of good points where to start first?

Originally posted by korn469

when the game crahed what exactly happened? was it a hang up without the game closing down or was it an illegal operation or was it something else?

did rename the infantry.ini to partisan.ini in the partisan unit folder you created right?
did u download v1.04b with the fascist name update?

if you all of that, then a short description of what caused the crashed along with a savegame would be great!

additionally as long as you have your units in a city with a barracks the units DO upgrade,
all infantry units eventually goto riflemen, and all horse units eventually goto tanks, i know for a fact that warriors will upgrade to riflemen for a cost of 100 gold (that might be too low but i can't change the upgrade cost modifier)

Harlan

It was an illegal operation with civ3.exe.

I did not d/l v1.04b. That may be the problem.

For what ever reason my ancient units would not upgrade.

Sorry, I deleted the save game. I will try again and will send you the save if I get the same result.

[lockstep]

I didn´t test your mod until now because I still need to learn the details of the original game version. Therefore I don´t want to comment extensively on the 'tweaking' of unit stats; however, I have some general thoughts regarding your changes to the game.

Ideas I strongly agree with (read: that should be part of a future 'standard Apolyton modpack' if there will be one):

• Moderate increase of the movement rates of naval units (as in version 1.0 of your mod);
• Ability to upgrade for units like swordsman, longbowman, cavalry etc.;
• Addition of a Fascist government (trade bonus, no war weariness, nuisance corruption);
• Possibility to build armies (not to rush wonders) without a leader.

Ideas I find interesting, but that may be unbalancing or otherwise problematic:

• More productive specialists. Even if tax collectors and scientists are next to useless now, I don´t want the return of Civ2´s specialist cities (where specialists are more productive than working the city radius) as a viable strategy. We´ll have to see how the first patch deals with corruption.
• Raised unit support cost for certain governments. IMO, this has to be playtested extensively (but you already seem to have started to do so ).
• Additional buildings (newspaper, museum, mill etc.). While there may be good reasons for each suggestion, there is a small line between interesting variation (a la Civ2 with about 30 buildings) and annoying repletion (a la CtP2 with about 50 buildings). Yes, re-introducing the stock market as a third tax-increasing building could be nice, but then what would be the point of the 'Wall Street' small wonder?

Ideas I disagree with:

• The Obelisk (culture-only building, gives +2 culture, requires the Pyramids, Pyramids put an Obelisk in every city). IMO, one of Civ3´s design principles is that you can hurt a rival´s culture through waging war and conquering/razing his cities, but you can´t improve your own culture (because culture buildings are destroyed when a city 'changes sides'). With your mod, conquering the city that has built the Pyramides will vastly improve your culture rating in the long run.
• Negative culture for certain buildings/wonders. Factories, Coal Plants etc. already have pollution as a major downside, and a decrease in culture is a needless double penalty IMO. Moreover, I don´t like the (theoretical) possibility that a city may have a negative culture rating. Would that cause its influence border to shrink? Would a negative rating even be displayed in the cultural advisor screen?
• Government-specific buildings (as opposed to wonders). While it may be interesting to split the colosseum into a 'Movie Theater' (for Democracy), a 'Propagandy Ministry' (for Fascism) and a 'Classless Society' (for Communism), I don´t see a game-mechanism yet that would prevent me from building all these buildings in each city (using tactical government-switching) and therefore gaining a +9 happiness increase. (The editor has only one flag called 'replaces all improvements with this flag checked', and it is used for the different power plants.) IMO, this is very unbalancing.
• Universities making citizens unhappy. Where´s the gameplay reason for this? If you feel universities are too powerfull, I suggest to increase their costs.

Regarding air combat and corruption, I´m quite sure the first patch will adress these issues, so you can change your mod accordingly.

BTW, please don´t overrate my lengthy criticism. I´m glad that mods like this one are being developed, and Civ3 will surely become an even better game in the long run also because of your work.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

a look at the governments

After a little effort I came up with 5 governmetal traits so to say.

I will list them here and perhaps we can use them to give us some perspective on that in the gameplay terms

Age------ancient--------medieval----------industrial--------modern
Type---(to 500AD)-----(500-800)--------1800- 1920's----1920's on

1.---Despotism----------Tyranny----------Dictatorship------Fascism

2.---Monarchy------Feudal Monarchy **--Proleterian---Communism
------------------------------------------Commune***

3.---Theocracy--------Theocracy----------Theocracy--Fundamentalism

4.---Republic---------Constitutional**----Democracy-----Democracy
------------------------Monarchy

5.---City State*------Unitarian **---------Democracy-------Socialist
---------------------Monarchy----------------------------Democracy


I hope this alligns OK, but basically I have put forward 5 types of governments that have dinstinct traits. Three of these traits would go under monarchy style and two of them in the democratic style.

I have not read this anywhere so the table is quite subjective, but it could serve a purpose.

The swing in the table would go from 1 .Totalitarian control by one individual to 5 with people controlled governments, and moving trough the ages. (Ie what was the peoples response to the government style in certain age).

.
Neverheless how to use this in Civ III.
I would propose a system were certain gov. attributes are getting changed in regards to the age the gov. is from and in which part of gov. spectrum they are from.

Well if we are looking to fill in the gap, I think that in style 1 goverments people were generally unhappy, corruption high, low food, without war these governments would generally collapse, or they would cause quite a lot of unhappiness but good production for the age. Style 3 gov, is the most happy one, good at war , with lower production medium corruption, food. Style 5 are more unhappy again, especially at the time of war. But style 5 gov is most economically/ scientifically advanced, lowest corruption for the age they are from, and high production, food.

The goverments that we got with Civ III are Despotism, Monarchy, Republic, Democracy, Communism. (I hope I didn't miss any)

So basically we get 3 from monarchy traits, and 2 with democratic traits.

You have already added Fascism, that would be for me at least modern equivalent of despotism.

What we miss (as I don't think we need more here yet) as you pointed out is some form of Medieval Monarchy. From here I would give it the stats of bettered monarchy, the problem is where would we fit it in the civ III tech tree, which seems to me gives all the govs in fairly short period, (monarchy and republic are 5th advances both, and democracy comes 6th in medieval times.

I think that some government differentiation would be very welcome, but tech tree should be changed to make an early medieval monarchy useful and different. Civ III tech tree does not seem to be very good anyway.

Just for a proposal if you want to get into this

1. move monarchy to tech # 4. kick out polytheism. maybe give a bit more despotism feel to it, (lower some stats, but not the food penalty, since it is quite strong with present attributes.

2. make literature requirement for the republic, to make a time span between the two a bit bigger.

3. give feudalism the government - Feudal monarchy, and provide it with fairly good stats, a good choice to republic, maybe republic could be a bit stronger in trade/ corruption, and feudal monarchy a bit stronger in war/happiness(like 4 units make people happy) since most of the world was a monarchy still in 1800's.

I think that would be quite fair. I would prefer moving democracy a bit furher down the list to a first advance in the industrial ages, like a prerequisite to nationalism, therefore you could get free artistry straight from printing press wich is OK too. And make banking lead straight to economics. That move would give a further boost to scientific civs (get democracy straight at the beginning of the age without waiting), which I'd say is desireable too. That would make fascism (it comes after nationalism too I hope) and communism kind of a response to democracy on the tech tree.

Anyway this is my take on governments. (actually I would like to add socialist democracy, to get some democratic choice in the game, in modern age but I am not sure that you (Korn) are interested to go in that direction). Pleas feel free to add to/ use the table above, but that could be a basis for a mod on its own, where government attributes would be the key to make significant differences between the ages, contrary to the way civ III plays now. But that might just wait for another time.

just some explanations below
*city state (Harlans CTP idea) represents ancient Greek style gov.
** three different monarchy types would represent the kinds of rule that developed in medieval times...
constitutional -UK type, with a parliament,
unitarian - Habsburg monarchy type where the king was the king of all the kingdoms under him and they are united trough him (needed good diplomacy and making sure that subdued kingdoms are kept happy),
feudal - french, russian and most common type, king does almost all that he wants
*** that would represent all the brief 'commoner' contolled governments like the French Paris Commune, and basically states which either collapsed, or were turned after a few years into communism.

the rest are familiar I guess, some names are here just to differentiate between the ages.

[Glostakarov]

Feudalism government could fill the niche I'm thinking of.

It occurs to me that with more improvements increasing shield production a third improvement reducing pollution might be in order. What I'd really like is a small wonder, but the editor won't work with me on that one. I thought about making a great wonder which puts a building in every city, call it the Environmental Protection Agency or something. The downside to this is only one civ could build it, which doesn't make sense, but I suppose the EPA Offices would be buildable separately, so the affect could be achieved if you failed to get the wonder.

Stock Market sounds good. Some options for an industrial era research improvement:
Research Hospital (1900) A hospital with research as a priority rather than a sideline.
Scientific Journal (1869) A way of spreading knowledge quickly and efficiently through the scientific community, with the result of less duplicated effort among scientists.
The Theory of Special Relativity (1905) Not a building but influential all the same.
Electron Microscope (1932) A bit late but not bad.

Looking forward to 1.05!

[monkspider]

Your mod keeps looking better and better korn!
One real quick thing, there has been some clamoring for an increase in walls defense, from my experience with the balancer, I would suggest that you stay away from that. As I have found that it makes the game, particularly the first half, a slow defensive affair.

[korn469]

Monkspider thanks for both the praise and the advice! i really appreciate it

anyways here is v1.05 enjoy!

[Slartibartfast]

Originally posted by korn469
Monkspider thanks for both the praise and the advice! i really appreciate it

anyways here is v1.05 enjoy!

Thanks, Korn, looking forward to it - but one question about the General unit. The readme tells to copy files from the Leader unit under ../art/units, and rename Leader.INI to General.INI, but I've got 4 different Leaders, one from each age in my folder. Which one to use - or all of them?

[korn469]

sorry i should have been more specific...it is the ancient leader file that you need to copy, and make sure to rename the ancientleader.ini to general.ini otherwise the game will crash, but if you do that correctly then i haven't experienced any problems yet, except that communal corruption seems to work exactly like regular corruption, which is frustrating to say the least!

[TechWins]

May I ask why you have 4 Police Stations and 3 United Nations? You probably had a miscue somewhere along the line of creating v1..05. Now this wouldn't really be that big of a problem if I could remove them, but I can't, so could you please hurry and release v1.05b that doesn't include 4 Police Stations and 3 United Nations?

Also, I think you should take away the trade bonus for tundra, as I mentioned before. Confederation doesn't seem like that appealing of a gov. Other than that your mod is looking pretty good.

[Glostakarov]

Downloaded and Installing

A couple thoughts from my last unmodified game:

Trying for a conquest victory I found myself unable to win because the Russians were somehow alive with no cities and no units that I could find. Doubt there is anything we can do about this, but maybe some Firaxis people will see it.

If I tinker with the 'optimal number of cities for corruption' setting, how exactly does it affect my corruption? My last game I ended with nearly 200 cities in a large (not huge) map, where the 'optimal' number is 24. With decent placement of my capital and forbidden palace I had about half those cities producing at acceptable levels of corruption under Democracy.

Blitz on armies will be so welcome. I tinkered around with armies just to see what could be done, and found them to be almost worthless because they could only attack once. I did make good use of a few armies of defensive units (infantry, etc.) since frequency of attack makes no difference there.

I'm almost going to miss being unable to upgrade cavalry. I discovered that having 50odd spare cavalry around is a great way to rush production in newly conquered cities. You can't buy a production rush in a resisting city, but you can disband a cavalry for 20 shields, and before you know it you have a temple and courthouse in every new city.

Manufacturing Plants are worthless, they come way too far down the tech tree to be useful. I have yet to build one, because if I can't produce well enough by the time I have access to them, I'm in trouble. I haven't bothered with nuclear power plants either; with careful planning I had 6 cities that could produce one-turn modern armour. What more do I need? I don't think I really need to produce Longevity in 5 turns (I did it in 8).

Mechanized Infantry are of dubious usefulness at the default stats. At 12/18/3 (the manual incorrectly says 12/20/3) their defense is only 2 better than modern armour's 24/16/3, a difference of about 12%. When modern armour became available I started rush building with my mech inf (37 shields each) and replacing them with modern armour. I didn't feel the lack, so I think Mech Inf need a boost, combined arms kind of falls apart in the modern age. That or maybe a mid/late modern age unit to replace it.

War weariness under democracy wasn't half as bad as I'd been led to believe. In fact, it only seems to cause problems in cities filled with citizens ethnically of the civ you are attacking. All that means is I have to be thorough about wiping out the enemy. That and a blitz offensive, taking several cities in rapid succession, then obtaining peace, is the only way to go. Also, letting the new cities starve for a few turns then grow rapidly loads them up with citizens of my nationality and solves the problem for when I continue blitzing. I felt so good about finding a use for grainaries.

[korn469]

TechWins

save games don't like when you add new buildings, you can mod them once they are in the game adding them causes savegames to short circuit, little did i realize that it would allow so many stuctures in the game

but i fixed it

anyways why are you against roads providing a +1 to commerce in tundra? why not tundra, desert, mountains, hills, jungle, and forest? why only tundra?

but i worked around the problem of too many police stations and United nations

(they now come with intergrated defense, require 25 obelisks, and the government anarchy)

Confederation is an alternative to despotism (ie weaker than monarchy/republic), but communal corruption is supposed to be a flat rate of corruption across your empire, it doesn't seem to work like that at all

Glostakarov

the one thing i took most from your thread was the effectiveness of modern armor and in 1.05b i decreased their defense to 12

so here is 1.05b
hope that works better

[lockstep]

Originally posted by korn469
Confederation is an alternative to despotism (ie weaker than monarchy/republic), but communal corruption is supposed to be a flat rate of corruption across your empire, it doesn't seem to work like that at all

If communal corruption really is broken at the moment and needs to be patched, there´s no point in adding governments that use this feature (or tweaking existing ones like Communism). I suggest to deal with the whole government issue only after the first patch - leave Fascism as it is now, but don´t tweak anything any further.

I generally like the additional city buildings, but have some comments:

• The idea that the mill is replaced with any of the later power plants (i.e. becomes obsolete) is interesting but doesn´t really fit in the Civ3 scheme. Marketplaces may as well be replaced with more powerfull banks, temples with cathedrals etc.. I suggest to keep mills in the later game and to give factories only a production bonus of 25% instead.
• If you add the forum as the 'culture-only' building of the ancient age, let the Pyramides provide a forum in every city on the same continent (and drop the Obelisk). Looking at the stats, forums do exactly what Obelisks do, and this would allow a player who didn´t manage to build the Pyramides to 'catch up' cultur-wise, but at higher costs. (Another Civ3 design principle IMO.)
• About the laboratory ... I´d say four research buildings are overkill. Even the name 'laboratory' reminds me of 'research lab'.

Generally, you should verify if there is a limit to the number of improvements and wonders that the city view will display and if exceeding that limit would cause the game to crash. (Gramphos seems to be an expert regarding these issues, so maybe he knows.) If you hit a crucial limit with your mod, I suggest to generalize the power plants in the game (how, I have no idea at the moment) and thus gain two or three improvement slots.

P.S.: I have to agree with Glostakarov that manufacturing plants are available too late to be of any use.

[TechWins]

but i fixed it

Ok well that's good.

anyways why are you against roads providing a +1 to commerce in tundra? why not tundra, desert, mountains, hills, jungle, and forest? why only tundra?

The reason for that is because in real life tundra is virtually useless, whereas those other terrains you mentioned people have been able to excell/prosper in their respective terrain. Also, taking away the trade bonus for tundra will hopefully scare the AI away more from building in tundra. I know when I play my games with tundra lacking the trade bonus it seems as if less AI cities are in tundra, or it might just be a coincidence.

Confederation is an alternative to despotism (ie weaker than monarchy/republic), but communal corruption is supposed to be a flat rate of corruption across your empire, it doesn't seem to work like that at all

Yes, I know that it is an alternative to Despotims, but I still feel that it is too weak. Mainly because I thought 'communal' was the worst corruption level to have. Although, since 'communal' doesn't function properly (as you say). I think I agree with Lockstep, if 'communal' doesn't work, then you might as well disband any of thought of adding a gov. that has a 'communal' corruption level. What have you noticed in terms of Communism with the 'communal' rating, though?

Regarding Lockstep's three bullet points:

1) ASFAIK, the Factory can't give off a 25% production bonus, so the mill will have to be upgraded to the Factory. Regardless of their being a 25% production bonus I would still rather have the mill upgrade to the Factory.

2) I completely agree with everything.

3) I really don't have an opinion on the issue.

I think you should change the town limit from 6 to 8 and the city from 12 to 14, as somebody else stated before, as well.

The added hitpoints seems to really help combat out a lot, so please don't change the hitpoints for the units.

I really like the way the General fits into the game.

The added culture buildings along with the decrease in already culturally producing buildings (that also have another function) seems to very nicely.

Updating the Civilopedia more efficiently (if the editor will allow it) would be a plus. It seems as if you added cons/pictures for a improvements, or is this just me?

[TechWins]

One more thing I forgot to say, where did the blitz ability go? It doesn't work in the game for me. Along with the fact that it doesn't show up in the editor, either. You might want to check into this.

[lockstep]

Originally posted by TechWins
1) ASFAIK, the Factory can't give off a 25% production bonus, so the mill will have to be upgraded to the Factory. Regardless of their being a 25% production bonus I would still rather have the mill upgrade to the Factory.

I re-checked the editor, and there is no simple flag called '+50% production output' (different from research, luxuries and tax). Instead, you can adjust it 'whole-numbered', and the factory (for which the manual states a 50% output increase) features the figure '2'. So '1' (the figure that Korn choose for the mill, BTW) should be a 25% increase.

Anyhow, it´s somewhat strange that the mill not only gets obsolete, but does so with the next-but-one production-boosting buildings (the power plants). Ít´s like the marketplace would get obsolete with the (added) stock exchange.

2) I completely agree with everything.

Thanks for the 'anti-Obelisk' support.

3) I really don't have an opinion on the issue.

About the 'four-buildings-of-the-same-type'-issue ... It´s just a personal preference, but I liked the way how the original civ mostly got by with two buildings of the same type (e.g. marketplace/bank, library/university etc.) Civ2 added more 'level three' buildings (stock exchange, research lab), and Civ3 took away again some of them (stock exchange) and replaced their function with small wonders (Wall Street). I´d say, at least don´t add 'level four' buildings.

A small inconsistency I didn´t note until now: There are three 'culture-only' buildings (forum, theater, museum), and the 'happiness' and 'research' buildings also yield a (reduced) amount of culture. The courthouse and the police station, which now both reduce corruption, don´t yield culture (IMO correctly), but the newspaper does. I´d suggest to drop this feature and instead add the flag 'resistant to propaganda' to the newspaper (this seems more consequential than for the courthouse, which features this flag now).