The Quest for Deeper Strategy....

[Gen.Dragolen]

Trial Run

Greetings Everyone,

Well the first draft of the mod I've been working on is finished and ready for action. I have yet to play test it since it took a lot longer to document the changes than I estimated. No point to making a mod without recording a baseline for comparison...

The changes I made include most of the ideas posted here, except for making units have a population cost, so this should make for an interesting trial. There are changes to most of the medieval, industrial and modern units, the terrain values for terraforming and defense, and reductions in the espionage costs.

Ancient Age combat will be much tougher and I have made it so that units like the Legionary are the toughest unit of it's age. I suspect that there will be some rather bloody conflicts when CC's start to get their unique units into the field. And many of the units have different upgrades (or none at all) and technology pre-requisites that are more in keeping with what history has recorded. This especially holds true for the naval units, where Navigation marks the start of the Man O'War, and Galleon. Frigates do not appear until Military Tradition to reflect the developement of Britain's Royal Navy and the Admiralty.

Good hunting.


D.

[Blake]

Nice, playing it for a short while I do have a couple of comments.
Specialists:
The production of taxmen/scientists is too high, 3 is MUCH too high, 2 is slighty too high, 1 is too low. I put it to 2, which is just a tad too good, but not terribly unbalancing.
Note that specialists aren't effected by corruption, which means you could create heaps of specialists in distant cities and rake in the cash/science. OTOH they are not boosted by facilities, so are not useful in interior cities if there are available tiles with 2+ commerce.
A specialist also removes one unhappy citizen, which is a further strength.
From playtesting I am fairly happy with a specialist output of 2. Altough this is with standard terrain improvements and corruption effects, very low corruption and boosted improvements would tend to allow conditions where 3 production specialists are balanced.

3 luxuries for enterntainer is obscene. 1 is actually just fine, as it gives the same amount of pacifying power as in SMAC/Civ2. 1.5 would be around right (but impossible, unfortunately). Altough 2 is too high, it probably wouldn't break the game.

I find the boosted irrigation interesting, it would seem to make Despotion a much better goverment choice, as much more rapid population growth is possible on grassland, desert and food bonuses, allowing more pop-rushing, especially with enhanced entertainers to keep the population happier. Under higher goverments you end up with food coming out your ears and assorted orifices. But I'm not sure if the bonus should be reduced or not... prehaps mines should be boosted to +2 to make them competitive. (+3 on hills/mountains)

As the mod stands if you have a source of water, and especially with grassland, you would want to pack in cities ultra close and use heaps of specialists, either rushbuying a lot of stuff, or pop-rushing. No other strategy would compete in terms of sheer resource output.

[Austin]

In an attempt to resurrect the "military units cost one pop" idea, is it possible ala Civ2 to tweak the sizes of the food boxes so that populations grow faster?

Austin

[Gen.Dragolen]

Blake,

I was thinking that 3 would be a little much for the specialists, but that's why I wanted other peoples opinions about the changes. I'll lower them to 1 Happy Face/2 beakers/2 coins for the next version.

And I thought that the standard production penalty for Despotism would limit the amount of food (and shields) a tile could produce ? If that isn't the case, then we may need to lower the effect of irrigation. The thing about it is that a cousin who grew up on a farm in the '30's said that most of the land was giving about 5 bushels of wheat per acre and where there was moisture, they could get over 40 bushels per acre. Irrigation has allowed deserts to bloom: take a look at Isreal, Saudi Arabia, or even California. A little water goes a long way... so I will leave the irrigation effect alone for now until I can verify that it is superceding the production penalty for Despotism.

And as for the strategic use of the speacialists in ICS type setups, well that was in mind when I setup the terrain improvements. I think adding a population cost to units will be needed to balance things out again. I think it should apply only to foot units, and not to mounted, support or Air units. Those units usually relied on a relatively small group of specialists. So we add Bread and Butter to the strategic planning.

So for the next version:
1. Reduced specialist effects: Entertainers 1, Scientist 2, Taxman 2
2. Add population cost to most military units that would need large numbers of bodies.

I will try and post the revised version tonight.


D.

[Austin]

I just had a horrible thought; adding population costs to military units will probably result in the AI cities self destructing.

Austin

[alva]

Originally posted by Austin
I just had a horrible thought; adding population costs to military units will probably result in the AI cities self destructing.

Austin

to difficult fot the AI, he doesn't know how to cope with it, the same happens when a settler costs 3pop points. He will have all the shields, be needs to wait 7-8 more turns for the city to grow to size 4.
I never mod beyond the basics, things like adding an extra hp are no problem, but anything beyond that may have strnge side-affects

[Gen.Dragolen]

Austin,

I don't think a population cost will be a problemfor the AI Civ's if the irrigation tile improvement supercedes the despotism production restriction. Granted, I haven't had a chance to playtest this mod yet. (That's on the to do list for tonight)

Food production will be a little better than it is now, so growth should not be a problem. If they build a granary to boot, then they will be at size 6 in no time and pumping out units like any human player would. The first arms race will be to see who builds the Pyramids first.

Part of the reason for wanting to have the pop cost is to prevent the ridiculous stacks of units that the AI Civ's have by the early Industrial Age: if it is costing them population in addition to increases unit maintenance, it will be harder to have 167 Rifleman units crossing your border. It hopefully will make it a little more reasonable, like 10-15 crossing and you will have the same to meet them in the field.

Having increased food production by irrigation is a two edged sword though: a size 12 city on a river will starve down to size 3-4 if most of the improved tiles are pillaged... just another reason to try and take out the enemy before he gets to your city.


D.

[Gen.Dragolen]

Update

Greetings All,

I managed to find the time after I got home from work to change the settings mentioned in the previous posts:

1. Entertainers are reduced to 1 luxury per, scientists and taxmen changed to 2 beakers/coins per
2. Added population cost to most of the units with a few exceptions: scout and armies.

My rationale for adding a pop cost to almost all of the units is that the logistics tail has never been accounted for in the game design, and there are usually many technicians/specialists who allow that a crew to operate a weapon on the battlefield.

If you do find that one or some of the changes have "broken" the AI, let me know the situation and what happened. Screenshots would be useful.


D.

[Gen.Dragolen]

Sit Rep

Report from the Egyptian Norther Frontier near El-Amarna:

My beloved Pharaoh,

The war goes quite well, after some inital losses, and we have destroyed the last of the Persian invaders. It was a very different feel to the campaign...
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IMO, with adding the population cost to the units, it makes it much harder at the very start as you feel rather naked without some sort of unit guarding you capital while the AI Civ's warriors are wondering about.

The AI does not self-destruct, but still pumps out settlers at an alarming rate. At one point I had 8 different settlers and spearman groups from nearby civs criss-crossing the empire.

And they did not suffer in the least for combat. I was in two small skirmishes with the Iroquois and Persians. Persian Immortals are very powerful now and with the terrain defensive bonuses added in, they can pose a problem. A modified swordsman could not destroy one in a jungle tile, only inflict a hit or two.

However, longbowmen kill them off quite nicely, as do pikemen garrisons. I had serveral longbowmen down to 1 hp by the time they kill the Immortal, but this makes me think the combat balance isn't too bad.

The only downside I noticed is that it was taking forever and a day to build any improvements. I think I will take a look at the relative costs for the improvements over the ages and see if they are linear or exponential. Even with increased production from mines, it still could take 30+ turns to build a library.


D.

[Blake]

I do have to wonder if the pop cost and irrigation strength would make life excessively difficult for civs without a source of fresh water, and as pop is required to build military units, taking the source of water would be much easier said than done.

[Catt]

In watching the replay, my obsession with Killer AIs has increased... why the hell didn't England expand??!! The size and tech leader, good GWs, weak as crap neighbors...

The above quote is from another thread -- a thread about a shared game that many played, and in which many games England (yes, England ) was a powerful AI civ. A lot of great mod makers seem to be posting in this thread, and since we're all looking for a more challenging AI, I throw the question to all of you -- does a radical change (increase) in the OCN stimulate the AI civs to expand more aggressively, even at the cost of war? In our shared game, there was a sense that England didn't press her advantage in a manner at all similar to what a human player would have done, and therefore did not become a supreme empire over which the sun would never set . . . .

Catt

[Theseus]

Not to make trouble...

But can we start with a really minimal mod?

I hope to meld this thread with the AU concept... and that means combining two concepts, 1) better gameplay and 2) training, and getting ready for MP.

The latter, MP, will at least initially probably be played closer to "stock," and I am hesitant to get used to a mod that is too different.

I sorta think we need 2 standard mods:
1) The Apolyton "preferred"
2) Damn close to "stock"

I also wish Firaxis would chime in here, as they have obviously tested a lot of this stuff.

(Threadjackers that they are!)

[Franses]

Originally posted by Theseus
Not to make trouble...

But can we start with a really minimal mod?

I fully agree. By doing that we can much better investigate the influence of the changes we make.

[Gen.Dragolen]

Simpler, Simpler, Simpler

Theseus,

A really minimal mod you say. It would be no trouble at all.

I'm getting better at finding things in the editor, so if you can help prepare the list of changes, I'll do the busy work. You know how it is, part-time military genius, part-time mad scientist... but not enough brain damage yet to go full time in either career choice.

I'll make a zip of all the default settings spreadsheets I have so far and post it. The only tab I haven't documented yet is the Advances tab. That will be several evenings of reading and typing. I wish there was a way to dump the tabs using VBA in or something to flat text file.

(And Soren, I know, I know: no decompiling the executables. EULA's and all...)

Anyways, we could use that as a reference so we change only the settings we want. I noticed during the testing last evening that the ancient age was painfully slow by about 1000 years. So I figure the next step will be to reduce the number of civs from 16 to 8, and try it again. The next step after that would be looking at the costs for improvements and make it easier to produce buildings. (lower building costs, higher maintenance)

And about the AI Civ's building habits: it would be nice to have some indication from Soren about what some of the choices do for the AI Civ's in that Build Often section on the Civilizations tab. I turned on Growth for all of the Civs and I was up to my gorget in settlers from every other civ on the continent. One down, many to go.

I know I may have gone overboard on the changes, but after almost a year of tinkering and playing with CtP2 and many months of CivIII, I hoped some drastic changes would combine the best traits from both into CivIII. I even made graphs of the unit stats in Excel just to see how they compared. Those graphs alone drove most of the changes I made, especially to the naval and air units.

(just put the brain in the jar on the table, Igor. Now please go see if the storm is picking up yet)

So in keeping with the Scientific Method just how simple did we want to start and which area do we address first ?


D.

[Blake]

These are the changes I would like in a minimal mod:
(in no particular order)
+1 unit HP per age.
Scienists/Taxmen produce 2
Improve weak UU's, especially english (bring forward in tech tree). Prehaps other (weak) mid-modern era UU's should get +2 rather than +1, ie France, Russia.
Add upgrade paths.
Make non-useful units useful, Musket, marines, paratroopers. I'm thinking boosts to attack and/or defense.
Prehaps add one attack to the 'infantry' type foot units or reduce cost by 1 row (that is musket, rifle, infantry)
Increase speed of ships. (Tho thats just personal preference, I added 1 to all ship movements and found it thoroughly enjoyable)
hmmm. That's all I can immediately think of.