Tentative Project - Part Three

[WesW]

Daniel, IIRC you said onetime that the game took the surplus food a city had, multiplied it by 75, and used that answer to calculate the city growth in people?
I think the 75 setting is in the diffdb (I don't have my notes with me). If so, reducing this number is how I want to slow down city growth, along with reducing the tiles worked from 1.25 to 1 for the first radius.
This way, terrain types would keep their values relative to one another, as would tile improvements. There would be no need to try and juggle the settings of dozens of things when you could simply adjust the base factor of the one thing that they all are used to calculate; the pop growth rate. (This refers to terrain changes beyond those I have already proposed.)
Cities would still grow on the same places they do now, except at a much slower pace without TI's.
Once everyone tries this approach out, I think they will like it. Specific terrain settings will be given in the terrain sheet of the Med charts spreadsheet.
And, if things still seem out of whack, we can easily reduce the food from certain terrains.

Btw, at this point, I think I am going to post two separate portions of the Med mod II. One portion will simply have all the proposed new units for people to look at, ala Harlan's WWII pack. The second will be the first beta, and will contain all the changes to terrains, TIs, improvements, growth, etc. There will be more than enough in these areas to evaluate without adding the units as well.

For the time being, I want to restrict discussion to these "non-military" aspects of the game, since this thread is going almost too fast for its own good (Martock, if you can find an earlier post of mine listing the new units, you will see that I plan to implement some of the same things you thought of).

[Pintello]

Hi Wes,

Check out the "Add Lakes and Beaches" Thread. Someone over there has figured out how to add or remove beach Terrain tiles as a Terraforming option. This might be a good thing to add to your MedMod2. Especially if you can teach the AI how to use it correctly.

This seems to resolve the problem of not being able to build canals or to reclaim land from the sea a la the Netherlands. The only catch with this fix is that it does not work with rivers correctly. But if you don't try to add land at the end of a river or a beach where a river already is, you shouldn't see any problems. Even if you do, apparently the problem is merely estetic in nature anyway.

Regards,

Timothy Pintello

[Harlan]

Wes, about this discussion moving too fast. I think your mod needs its own forum section, so people could keep things straight. All one would need is to look at the "units" thread to see what's been said before. Much better than these huge 100+ threads that take forever to load.

About terrain, I agree that changing one value is best, but I also think there needs to be some relative changes on top of that. I'd like to see what should be the really poor terrain less attractive in relation to the good stuff. So both you and the AI don't feel inclined to build to cover every single tile to beat the other civs to it. And if someone does build a city in a totally stupid spot, it should starve to death. For instance, have glacier actually have negative 5 food, so if you build a city on a large field of glacier it should die in short order. Historically, there has never been even a village built on glacier- it would soon be ground into bits since glaciers are rivers of ice. Duh. Nor should one build any kind of tile improvement on that terrain- its a slowly moving river of ice crushing all in its path! Other places like Desert should have food growth of 0. Its a friggin' Desert for crying out loud!

Also, if I'm not mistaken, I vaguely recall that at least according to CTP1's text files the AI uses different criterion to determine where to build cities. Some weight for terrain attractiveness, some for strategic location. I think it should be tweaked more towards terrain attractiveness.

[Alpha Wolf]

I think its in the strategies.txt that determines whether the AI will build a city. Unfortunately I dont have the files with me right now but I think it was setsettle or something like that for each type. But I couldnt figure out exactly how that number was calculated altho I suspect it has something to do with terrain values in terrain.txt. I fiddled around some and have noticed a big improvement on where the AI settles but I havent tested it enough to know whether its coincedent or if my changes actually worked. I think the AI looks at a 2 tile radius then adds up all the terrain values. If its greater than the setsettle, it builds a city, otherwise moves on.

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History is written by the victor.

[Depp]

Wes and Harlan:
if you change the standard growth multiplier then everything is scaled down, which will have farm still being useless. Not a good way, maybe to combine with land changes like harland said. Building a city isn´t just "place it anywhere and it will grow", but should take some planning etc. Now most terrain is just the same.

[WesW]

I have reduced the city growth rate from 75 to 60 in the citysize text files, a 20% reduction. I will start a couple of games shortly to see how this affects the game.
As far as cities dying, I think there are precedents for settlements that exist on almost any terrain, at least small ones. Greenland and the Sahara Desert come to mind.
Settlers cost 740 currently. I will go into the terrain text, and reduce the city bonus from 10/15/15 for food/prod/gold to 10/5/5. This approximately equals the amount of PW it would take to give those bonuses to a terrain square. I am leaving the food bonus the same so that you can found a city on Desert or other terrain with no inherent food value, and have it survive at size one if the surrounding terrain has an average of 2 food per square (say a city founded on Desert along a sea shore to get access to a good).
I think Depp mis-interpreted the effect of reducing the food multiplier. The effect of food TIs in Ctp2 is doubled from what it was in Ctp1, and my change will not affect their increases in production compared to un-improved terrain. Cities will simply grow at a 20% slower rate.
I think perhaps the biggest change you will see on these "glacier" cities will come from eliminating the production from beach tiles. If you want anything much built in these cities, you will have to rush-buy it.

I have also reduced the env score (the sum of which has to be at least 600 for the 21 squares around the city) of beach and other terrains to match their reduced production. For Beach, the reduction is from 90 to 50, which means the AIs will be much less likely to choose terrain with nothing else going for it other than coastline.

Lastly, I have increased the max number of citizens by 2 for each radius size, and I will look at changing any other numbers so that a pop only gathers an average of one tile's resources.

On another topic which hasn't been covered in a while; building costs and effects.
I have set Food, Commerce, Science, Production, Crime, and Pollution improvements to cost 1 gold per pop for maintenance, and set the upkeep cost to zero. The effects of these improvement types I have set to a uniform 20%, except for Pollution, which I set to 40%. The construction costs I have generally left alone.
This means that the maintenance cost and commerce effects of a Bazaar and a Bank are going to be the same, but the Bank will cost more to build. Ideally this increased cost will parallel the growth in produciton capacity of cities as the game progresses. This is going to have a huge effect on gameplay and choices, and we will have to do a lot of studying to balance this new approach, an approach which I feel is much closer to the real world than the old system.

I want to get the militia triggers into the mod for the initial release, since not having to build that initial garrison unit will have significant effects on game flow. The other triggers can wait for now until we get these domestic issues adjusted.

Finally, I will adjust the goals in the strategies.txt to bring about some improved AI behavior in exploration and military conduct, among other areas.

There will be no new units nor changes to unit settings in this initial release.

Once I get these areas taken care of, I will start another thread for military aspects of the game. In it I will try and detail my theories and setup for standard units, and note some interesting things that I have found while going through the units.txt (Did you know Pikemen now have a bonus against mounted units?) Yesterday I modified the Med charts to list all the proposed standard units, and added a new age strictly for wonder units.
Once I get a new website, I will begin posting these charts so that people can see things laid out at one time, rather than having to get bits and pieces from the posts here.

[lordmoore]

While you are making all of these changes, can you fix the farming TI's? In CTP 1 you couldn't place a farming on a tile that wasn't adjacent to water...this limit has been removed.
[This message has been edited by lordmoore (edited December 14, 2000).]

[Alpha Wolf]

I say let farms be built anywhere. i know many farmers that are very far from major rivers. This also allows major cities in mid continent.

Best case scenario would be for farms close to water to produce more than those not near water.

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History is written by the victor.

[WesW]

Well, actually I like this change, since most irrigation water comes from wells rather than open streams or rivers. Also, with the old way you usually irrigated from oceans, and that's ridiculous when you think about it. This new method should also help the AI, who often couldn't tell how to wind a path from a river or ocean inland several squares to an inland city (think Denver).

I am posting so soon becauseI have been working all night on some things. Did I mention that my exams are finally over, and I am going on a trip Saturday morning which will probably last at least a week, during which time I will not be able to play Ctp2 or upload graphics files to my new, soon-to-be-announced website? (No, I don't really expect you to answer.)

I have been working on the citysize files, which were really screwed up. If some of you have been keeping track of city production beyond 18 workers, you may have noticed some readings which didn't seem to make sense. Well, that's because they in fact didn't make sense. The number of tiles in the city's vision, which should have matched the number of tiles being worked, did not in fact match each other.
Basically, the programmers forgot to include the size 3 settings, and you went from working 21 tiles with 18 workers, which was how it should be, to working 45 tiles with 32 workers. The max worker settings were messed up from size 3 on as well. I find it very hard to believe that the settings were intentional, even though there was something of a pattern to it.
I remembered from the beta-testing that there used to be no size 0 that flashed when a city was founded. I think that the screw-up might stem from that late addition.
Anyway, here are the new pop ranges for the various city radiuses:
1-8, 9-20, 21-36, 37-44, 45-56, 57-68

The max number of tiles worked for each radius is one more than the max pop, so that each pop collects an average of one tile's rsources, plus the city tile.
Ideally, it would go 20-32-44, but there is a hitch in the geometry that can't be avoided at that point. You can go 20-28-44 if you want. Any opinions on this?

To compare, the old system of max workers and max tiles actually worked for each radius was:
6:9, 18:21, ____ ,32:45, 46:57, 60:69

[Alpha Wolf]

If I might make one more suggestion, cut down the output from specialists. In CtP1, it was 10, but in CtP2, its 20 and 30s. Thats makes specialists far, far more productive than the combined output of any unimproved tiles and that seems to be contributing to the massive growth of AI cities. When I captured them, I always notice that it has many farmers.

I wonder about your city bonuses. In my playing, I've done just the opposite. I've lowered the food while leaving prod and gold higher. The reasoning being that if land has a building on it, its hard to grow food there. However, cities by default will create a certain amount of production and commerce just from daily activities. Plus I found that when I lowered prod even the slightest, it took forever to build anything unless the city was in a great location. And lowering the gold caused huge delays in discovering new advances.

BTW, are you going to include the terraforming to/from beaches? I havent had any bugs yet, except that when first completed, if under fog, it'll look funny, but looks perfect as soon as a unit removes the fog.

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History is written by the victor.

[Alpha Wolf]

Before I forget again, have you found a way to get some gold directly for the city that has a good within it immediate parameter? I was thinking that if a city is directly next to say cotton, it should get some increase in gold from it. But after various testing, it seems that goods only generate gold if traded. In CtP1, I modified some goods to also give prod or food depending on the good. Is this possible in CtP2?

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History is written by the victor.

[Colonel Kraken]

It seems there are no triggers in the goods.txt to account for increases in production and food. I was disappointed about this too.

Perhaps someone knows of some triggers we can use that Activision decided not to use, but are still available.

[Pintello]

Hi Colonel Kraken,

I haven't looked at adding Gold, Production, and Food to goods in CTP2 yet, but in CTP1, you make these changes in the Terrain.txt. Under the Good setting in the Terrain.txt file you go to the Good for the Terrain Type and add the EVN Gold = whatever. This is the way it worked in CTP1. You could also do the same thing with Production and Food. Again, like I have said, I have not checked this in CTP2 yet. If may not work this way there.

Regards,
Timothy Pintello

[MrFun]

Has anyone kicked ass in the North America map so far?

[MrFun]

Has anyone kicked ass in the North America map so far?