Where to start?

[ihuc19]

Since I'm a new guy I'm kind of finding it hard to understand which mods are the most up to date because they don't seem to follow any natural order on this website.

Could someone help me out with this?

I'd like to know what was (is) the most recent (all-round decent) mod released. I have 1.17 is that recent?

Is their some chronological order here that could help me figure out what's going on?

I too am looking for an overall more balanced game play but I don't know where to look. I own C3Cv1.22 if that helps.

When reading the readme for 1.17, I found this kind of interesting for example "I've added +1 attack to Riflemen". I kind wish it was explained a little better for instance "I've added +1 attack to Riflemen from 5 to 6." so people know where you are coming from (especially in the improvements section).

Only a couple times does the readme ever say this, and if I'm not mistaken 1.17 says to reduce optimal cities by one third and then increase it 50%? Just wondering what that was all about.

[nbarclay]

If you're playing C3C, you want the version of the AU Mod from the "Apolyton University Mod: C3C version" thread, the latest variant of which is 1.06. Note that as with patches from Firaxis, version numbers for the AU Mod for Conquests are separate from version numbers for the PtW version of the Mod. That is, when we moved from PtW to C3C, we started back at 1.00 or 1.01 or something like that in our version numbers. But since we stopped doing anything with the AU Mod for earlier versions of Civ 3 once C3C came out, the C3C versions of the Mod are the latest.

[nbarclay]

In regard to the tricks Alexman played with the "optimal number of cities," in version 1.17 of the PtW version of the Mod, if you look at the editor, the "optimal number of cities" itself is found under the "World Sizes" tab while "percentage of optimal cities" is a separate setting found under the "Difficulty Levels" tab. The idea was to make changes to those two settings that would cancel out in their impact on human players, but that would encourage AIs to capture more territory. Unfortunately, at casual glance, it's not necessarily obvious that "percentage of optimal cities" is itself a second, separate editor setting. By the way, that particular change hasn't been carried over to the C3C version of the AU Mod, nor is it needed in C3C because AIs are naturally more inclined to conquer massive empires.

[ihuc19]

Thanks for the help and thanks for pointing out that optimal cities thing being in two different tabs.

What does that exactly mean anyway if you reduce or increase those numbers of optimal cities or percentages?

[nbarclay]

Corruption in Civ 3 is affected by two things: the distance a city is from your capital and how many cities you have. (If you want to go into the full complexities of the issue, including exactly how the Forbidden Palace affects things, you'll have to look elsewhere; Alexman has a good thread on it, and there's almost certainly a link to it in the must-read threads topped thread in the strategy forum.)

With corruption due to number of cities, each city is given a "rank" such that cities farther away from the capital (and those founded at later dates when distance is the same) have worse corruption above and beyond the impact of distance in and of itself. The optimal number of cities (OCN) setting determines how bad the "number of cities" aspect of corruption is, such that the higher the OCN is, the less bad that aspect of corruption is. That's one of the reasons corruption is less serious on larger maps. Also, the number of cities you have to have before you can build a Forbidden Palace is defined relative to the OCN. (I'm thinking it's half, but I'm not sure.) So increasing the OCN means you can't build the Forbidden Palace as soon.

If I understand and recall correctly, the percentage control causes corruption to be worse on higher difficulty levels. In essense, the game is set up so that for corruption purposes, you play as if the OCN were lower than the base level for the map size you're playing. Thus, the number of cities aspect of corruption gets worse on higher difficulty levels, although the distance aspect does not. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Nathan