Vel Contemplates Mod-Making.....

[Mokael]

how about Timber for resource? Sure, you can built any boat out of any piece of wood, but you'll need "Timber Resource" for a real good one. An extra bonus for movement, or defense, could be a result for using timber when building frigates (and other sail ships)

I was wondering, is it possible to create a Camel Rider unit? Available in any deser city with discovery of ... hmmm, Trade, or somethin?

[Thresh1642]

how about Timber for resource? Sure, you can built any boat out of any piece of wood, but you'll need "Timber Resource" for a real good one. An extra bonus for movement, or defense, could be a result for using timber when building frigates (and other sail ships)

Maybe this should be tied in to the forest you have available within your country? When a city builds a wooden ship, the closest forest square dissappears (with no production bonus?) If your low on wood, you can plant it, but the ship won't be completed until the forest has been planted. ANd i think it would have to be forest squares only, I am not sure tht the types of wood found in jungles are that good for hullmaking.

Which leads me to another thing: Should hullmaking be a technology? As it stands right now the jump from Galley to Caravel to Galleon is a bit quick IMO. I think hullmaking should be added to the tech tree after Navigation (and it should count as a prerequisite to Magnetism.

[Velociryx]

Good plan on the Hull-making tech....not sure what the proper term is for those....ummm....something-keeled ships (?? help me out here naval enthusiasts!) but we could officially title the tech that.

More on terrain stuff:

Thanks for the information that we can indeed, mod terrain tiles, and in that case, the first thing that's gonna happen is that plains and grasslands will NOT be so damned perfect.

Food/mineral production needs serious trimming in this department.

You should be able to irrigate hills (+0 food with road, +1 with rail?) EDIT: Alt plan: reserve this for crop rotation, and make it a flat +1 food with irrigation (road/rail provide no additional bonus)

special tundra resource....lead mine or something +1 min (so that a mineral special on a forest tile in tundra would give you 1/3, just as a game special in that same terrain gives you 2/2)

bannannas are back!

what was that...bog something?? that should come back too!

desert gem deposits (like gold mines? or make 'em lux items?)

Plains: -1 food

New Tech: Animal Husbandry: Allows for tiles with horses/cows/game to be irrigated for an additional +1 food bonus--which restores plains to what they are now).

Middle Ages tech: Crop rotation: allows wheat tiles and any plains/grassland tile with nothing on it to gain +1 food (also restoring them to what they are now, but the important point is, NOT during the early game!)

Keep 'em coming....my brain hasn't stopped turning on the subject since we started this....

-=Vel=-

[AnotherSteve]

I was thinking about the distributed democracy government a little, too. Automatically a scientific civ, boosted commerce (high-tech productivity, strong crypto), more expensive units (people would rather make money than join army), lower corruption for outlying cities (with the network, everyone is your neighbor), but have a maximum city size, since as long as you have a good uplink, you don't want to live in the same place as 20 million other people.

And I also agree with the previous poster who mentioned Hollywood as a late game culture powerhouse. That'd be cool.

[Thresh1642]

I did some minor tweaking last night after I posted. I have a (post patch) game I played as the Americans saved at different stages (circa 1500BC, 1200AD, 1850AD) that correspond to each age, and used those as my testing gorund if you will. Most of the changes I made have been discussed in other threads, but I wanted to post them here becuase I have seen them mentioned:

Hit Points
I Increased these to 3/4/5/7. Nothing to unusual to report here (although I did get a Great Leader from a Warrior vs. Warrior Battle around 1000 BC, thats the earliest I've ever seen a leader).

Naval Changes
I increased the naval movements:
Galley to 4
Caravel/Galleon to 5
Privateer and regular submarine to 5. Also changed Privateer to A3, D2, and gave it a 1/1/1 Bombard
Destroyer to 7 Changed A to 10, instead of 12. Made it able to see submarines.
Battleship to 6 The Majority of Capital ships have historically been slower than escorts
Carrier to 6
Nuclear Sub to 6
Changed Friagate A/D to 4/3
Changed Man O War A/D to 5/4
Changed Iron Clad A/D to 6/6

The movement sped up the game somewhat, and ships farther away from home were able to survive longer. The AI did start using Privateers more, but did not use them to bombard that often (I figured the bombard would be more of a terror style attack than anything). Making the subs stealthy made it more interesting in the modern ages, I lost more than a few unescorted ships to enemy subs. I think what's needed is a "Fleet Counter" that lets you stack 3 (or more) ships together. Ideally you would include a destroyer in the group so the fleet could conduct ASW operations).

As for land forces, I used Vengers (I think it was Vengers) fix for upgrading units to UU's, and likewise upgrading UU's. That work famously! I ecspecially liked in in my Russian Game where I had a ton of Knights that were now able to be upgraded to Cav (although my Babylonian neighbors most likely didn't).

I have yet to make any other changes, but the ones I made above did have a noticable effect in my games, and it was for the better IMO.

[Thresh1642]

I meant Cossack, honestly I did. Seriously though, when playing the Russians, did anyone else find it frustrating to build a ton of horsemen early, upgrade them to knights, and when you got Military Tradition, realized you couldn't upgrade those knights?

[Sevorak]

Vel,

Currently, you can't do any of that with the editor. Write down the ideas, for sure, but you can't, among other things, change the effect of rails, cause a tech's discovery to do anything that a current tech's discovery doesn't do, i.e. animal husbandry and crop rotation won't work until the editor grows to support something like that (which could be a long time).

As for the food, I think your SMAC roots are showing through Civ food has always been like this, and isn't really a problem IMO.

My personal opinion is that the land-grab phase is somewhat boring, and tedious, and my preference is to mod the game to get that over with right away.

Seriously, what does reducing food get you other than long turns waiting for cities to grow so you can pop out a settler? Reduction of food doesn't change anything strategically, you still need to power out a bunch of cities as fast as you can...all this does is lengthen the Ancient age to five thousand years of sheer END TURN agony. Reducing food just slows down the entire game, and especially the Ancient Age...and I don't recall anyone complaining about how fast-paced Civ 3 was.

-Sev

[gachnar]

Originally posted by Mokael
how about Timber for resource? Sure, you can built any boat out of any piece of wood, but you'll need "Timber Resource" for a real good one. An extra bonus for movement, or defense, could be a result for using timber when building frigates (and other sail ships)

Not to shoot you down or anything, but I thought about this and decided that it would be a bit silly, since you could cut down the trees, mine the square and still get "lumber" from it.

wait.... CTP2 had lumber...

oh.. I think if you cut the trees in CTP2 the goods changed...

I was wondering, is it possible to create a Camel Rider unit? Available in any deser city with discovery of ... hmmm, Trade, or somethin?

Sorta. You can make a new resource: Camels. Then make a new unit: Camelry 3.3.2/ignore terrain which requires Camels, and requires that its resources be in the city radius.

Is anyone else thinking I'm having too much fun with this?

[Spatzimaus]

1> Give all Armies the "Blitz" option which allows as many attacks as you have movement points. An army is supposed to be three units, so why is it limited to one attack? It shouldn't even matter what unit type it is; three cavalry should be able to attack three targets at once, given the right layout

2> Double hit points of all units (4/6/8/10). Maybe make it 3/6/9/12 just to make Elite that much more desirable. Not enough to lag down the game, but enough to reduce the statistical flukes. Or 2/4/6/8?

3> Add new techs; here's the problem. The Ancient era is just setup for the Medieval, it seems. The Medieval Era is where all the important stuff seems to happen in my games; by the time we hit the Industrial era it's all been pretty much decided. Part of this is that there's no attack unit between Cavalry (6/3/3) and Tank (12/8/2); the only one that comes close is Marine, and they're just as difficult to reach as Tanks are, and don't have fast movement. So first of all, move Amphibious War up; the U.S. had Marines since the start, but Tanks came over a century later. This helps bridge the gap.
The Industrial Era needs a LOT more. Wonders (Statue of Liberty, Taj Mahal), Small Wonders (Hollywood, Skunkworks, Space Station, Internet), intermediate units, and so on. A couple new Governments (Fundamentalism and Capitalism) could go at the end of the Industrial era; the Modern is too late for new govs to be useful.
Add a few good units: Heavy Cavalry (8/4/3) would go nicely in the early Industrial. A defensive unit between Rifleman (4/6/1) and Infantry (6/10/1) would be good, maybe a 5/8/1. A defensive cavalry unit (a skirmisher, basically) would be nice, to help reduce the power of attack cavalry. Sort of an upgrade to the Impi; 1/3/2 in Medieval, 2/6/2 in Industrial, and upgrades to the Mechanized Infantry in Modern.

3a> By the time anyone reaches the Modern era it's all over, in most cases. So I wouldn't waste most of the effort adding things there. Maybe an upgraded Bomber.

4> Partisan/Militia: units not requiring any strategic resource. 1/1/1 (Warrior) in Ancient; 2/2/1 (Peasant) in Medieval, 3/3/1 (Farmer) in Industrial, and 3/5/1 (Redneck) in Modern.
These represent what you get when Farmer Bob pulls out his shotgun to defend his home from the commie invaders. Easy to build, but not really suited for any real military use.

4a> Impossible to mod ourselves, but when a city tries to depose your army, I'd like to see it do this:
Step 1> Spawn Partisans (see above); for each three(?) sizes the city has, spawn two Partisans and reduce the city size by 1.
Step 2> These immediately fight your occupying force, to the death. Fast units cannot retreat.

5> fix it so that if A upgrades to B, A also upgrades to any unique unit replacing B. Persians can't upgrade Warriors since they don't have Swordsmen, and so on.

6> Pollution: I'd like to see a building that reduces this before Recycling and Mass Transit. For example, after Sanitation (which leads to Hospitals) add Waste Disposal, which lets you build a City Dump (reduces all pollution by half). Maybe have one of the new techs be Environmentalism, which just reduces pollution across the board by 25%.

7> Upgraded Privateers. Now that we have a 2/1 version, keep going; a 4/2, then an 8/4 later. Might not be that realistic, but it'd be fun. Add a Submarine Privateer also.

8> Synthesized resources. Many of the existing resources can either be synthesized (Rubber), designed around (Saltpeter and Oil, or Uranium for the spaceship), or simply use an inferior material (Iron).

[Velociryx]

Hey Sev...and I guess you're right 'bout the SMAC-roots! My main problem/desire where the food is concerned is two-fold:

1) To balance plains starts against tundra, desert, and jungle starts. Perhaps not perfectly balanced, but closer than now.

2) To limit the power of pop-rushing in the early game via slowing the growth of cities.

Will be fretting until I can figure out a way/hack/something to do this then....heh....

-=Vel=-

[David Weldon]

Here's the next installment of "Mysterious stranger David tries to help..."

1)Is there any way to separate coruption vs. waste? In other words, it makes sense to me that far-away cities might not contribute gold and/or science to my empire, but they should probably still be able to build their own improvements or units. I'm not sure if this can be done, but if not then perhaps we should lobby Firaxis to give us this ability.

2)Also, you need to pay particular attention to increasing the AI ability in the later ages. I've started another thread here which has generated some ideas, the best of which are probably:

- Add extremely cheap bonus production city improvements that become available as time goes by (once or twice per age after Medieval, maybe). These improvements are essentially free to build and increase production/ reduce corruption/ who knows what else. Don't build them as a human player. This will help the AI to be more competitive in the later stages of the game where a human can be much more effective than the AI can. It also helps to offset the momentum advantage that a human often enjoys by the late Industrial Age.

- Increase the power of a palace. Let it have increased production, extra happiness, etc. This will reduce the relative advantage of larger civs because these bonuses only happen in one city.

[Zurai001]

I'll weigh into this again: Changing unit hitpoints breaks bombardment. Where once you needed X artillery units to wear down an Y-hp unit, now you need 3X or so to wear down a 2Y-hp unit. Changing the hitpoints in any way wreaks serious havoc on the number of artillery/airforce units needed to have a noticeable effect. As things stand now, it takes effort to wear down a garrison, but it's possible. If hitpoints are doubled, because of the way combat works, it will take more than twice as many artillery units to do the same job.

I recommend that if you plan on altering combat, work with the attack/defense/bombardment values ONLY. Hitpoints have an extreme impact on the combat system, and some elements of that are unchangeable through the editor. In my opinion, it was a mistake for them to even let us change the number of HP; the impact is of too large a scope for it to be done as lightly as most people seem to take it.

[flbknight]

one of the best ways to make a mod is to actually start modifying in 1 area (for instance HP of the units) and start playtesting, tweak, and go on to another area. I really don't see a point in waiting for Firaxis to fix stuff as i believe that with tweaking one can for instance make the combat a lot more realistic.
just my 2 cents

[flbknight]

also, you might want to check this mod:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=34508&perpage=30&pagenumber=1

it seems the maker has already changed a lot. maybe it can provide other ideas.

[Thresh1642]

I'll weigh into this again: Changing unit hitpoints breaks bombardment. Where once you needed X artillery units to wear down an Y-hp unit, now you need 3X or so to wear down a 2Y-hp unit. Changing the hitpoints in any way wreaks serious havoc on the number of artillery/airforce units needed to have a noticeable effect. As things stand now, it takes effort to wear down a garrison, but it's possible. If hitpoints are doubled, because of the way combat works, it will take more than twice as many artillery units to do the same job.

The best way to remedy this is to increase the strength of bombardment IMO. Adjusting that at the same time you increase HP's for units should balance out things. I havent had a chance to Mod this part yet, but I'll try it out later tonight and let everyone know the results. Tweaking those numbers should give everyone the desired balnce. Although, I have to say, catapault units aren't going to improve drastically, but i do think each succesiuve unit will be more substantial than it's predecessor.