5 Leaders Poll

I’ve started a new poll on the mod’s Strategy forum. Vote for the 5 leaders you find most fun and addictive in TBC!

May 29, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Update: v7.2

May’s beta cycle is complete, with the public release of v7.2 out now. Click the blue download button at right to get the release. As always, clear cache/moduserdata and start a new game when updating mods. For details and other vanilla-game bugs please see the Reporting Bugs thread. The patch notes are below.

For June’s beta cycle I’ll be making a new post about once every week, which means you can sign up for notifications of each beta update by email (using the signup button at right). Previously I only made a new post for non-beta releases.

May 29, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

v7.2 Patch Notes

v7.2 Updated May 29 2011 @ 9:48pm.

Overview

• Shifted the location of a few resource yield bonuses on buildings.
• Overhauled the strategic resource placement system. Strategic resource distribution is much more balanced now, and these resources are more important.
• Improved the balance of units AI players start with on higher difficulties.
• Adjusted barbarian strength and spawn rate.
• Spearmen and Pikemen now have a 50% defensive bonus.
• Introduced a new unique building for Gandhi, the Sanitation System.
• Adjusted Darius’s unique characteristics.
• Increased early and late policy costs (click here for details).
• Rebalanced the Honor tree.
• 2 Villages (was 1).
• Rivers now yield 1 only when improved.
• Culture from cultural citystates is now a city yield, working identically to the food yield from maritime citystates. This means cultural citystates now improve border expansion in cities!

City Development

• Reduced production modifiers for Workshop and Windmill back to vanilla settings.
• Returned the name and art of the happiness national wonder to vanilla settings. (The Baths art is now used for India’s new unique building.)
• Added 1 to the Garden.
• +1 with a Granary for Wheat, Sugar, Spices, and Bananas (was deer, bananas, wheat).
• +1 with a Stable for Horses, Elephants, Cows, Sheep, and Deer (was horses, cows, sheep).
• +1 on Deer with a Camp (was 1 production).
• +2 Watermills (was Spice/Sugar bonuses).
• Added 1 artist to the Burial Tomb, so it has one like the Temple it replaces.
• +1 on Iron and +2 on Coal with a Forge (was only iron).
• Stables no longer have a nearby resource requirement (the resources it improves are so common it was basically the same as no requirement).
• 4 per occupied city (was 5).
• Removed the sea tile bonus from the Research Lab.
• Spread out the jungle tile bonus between the tier 2-4 science buildings.

Combat

• Overhauled the strategic resource placement system.
  .
  In vanilla Civ, a player with a large land area to themselves typically has an oversupply of strategic resources, while a player in a crowded area does not have enough. This is because vanilla Civ randomly places strategics on terrain types without considering player locations or map crowding. It’s fundamentally impossible to balance strategics with this method.
  .
  The new version places a specific number of strategics in each player’s start region. Each “start region” is a large area of the map (~200 tiles) Civ dedicates to a player’s start location, similar to congressional districts. Deposit size scales to the number of valid terrain plots for the resource in each region. Smaller regions have larger deposits, varying from 1-3 with normal map settings. The difference between this and “strategic balance” is that option places all resources in a small ring around the capital and does not analyze terrain.

  Resource	#/region	Favors
  Horses	4	flat, open, arable, fresh water
  Iron	4	opposite of horses
  Coal	3	hills
  Aluminum	4	hills
  Oil	3	Desert, tundra, snow. Also appears in water offshore from grassland, plains.
  Uranium	2	random (uranium’s created by supernovae, not earth processes)

• Improved the balance of units AI players start with on higher difficulties (was only warriors).
• Slightly buffed AI starting experience on King through Immortal difficulties.
• Delayed the tech level of most Barbarian units by approximately 1 tech (e.g. barbarian swordsmen appear when someone has Metal Casting).
• Removed the human combat bonus vs barbarians (was 10%) (the AI bonus remains at 25%).
• Increased the spawn rate of Barbarian camps by 33%.
• Barbarians spawning near lots of water can now embark.
• Improved the accuracy of barbarian promotions relative to terrain around their camp.
• Added a Barbarian Chariot Archer (“Skirmisher”).
• 12 Swordsmen and Horsemen (was 11).
• Increased melee strength of siege units. (Primarily helps AI, since human siege units rarely come under melee attack.)
• +50% defense for Spearmen, Immortals, Pikemen, and Landsknecht.
• 7 Spearmen and Immortals (was 8 and 9).
• 45 Paratroopers (was 40).
• Reduced the cost of Anti-Air Guns, and gave them access to Survivalism and Scouting promotions.
• 3 sight range Frigates (was 2).
• 15 Caravels (was 20).
• 20 Frigates (was 25).
• 5 Ironclads (was 4).
• 3 Anti-Tank Guns (was 2).
• Lancers obsolete at Replaceable Parts (was Combustion).
• Rocket Artillery no longer require Oil.
• Adjusted AI ally/conquer priorities for citystates. Several militaristic leaders (such as Alexander) should be more likely to ally with citystates. It’s difficult to really get this working, however.
• Limited Blitz to 1 extra attack (consolidating Blitz and Logistics). Three or more attacks only helped when we already were much more powerful than the enemy, which simply made an easy situation even more trivial.
• Desert Power and Arctic Power are now available after Drill/Shock III (for maps with large amounts of desert/snow).

Leaders

• Gandhi: -25% from population.
• Gandhi: Sanitation System – new unique building from ancient India, replacing the Aqueduct and designed to synergize with Gandhi’s trait. Clean drinking water from a Sanitation System improves food from rivers +1, in addition to 40%food kept after growth.
  .
  The Harappan civilization of the Indus River Valley designed the world’s first known urban sanitation systems around 2600 BCE. Individual homes or groups of homes obtained water from wells. Waste water was directed from rooms set aside for bathing to covered drains lining the major streets. The massive walls of Harappan cities were speculated to protect from flooding. These Harappan hydraulic engineering systems were even more efficient than those of many areas of India and Pakistan today, achieving large urban cities with relatively little agriculture development.
• .
• Adjusted a few start location priorities so each leader will spawn in a region complimenting their unique trait/units/buildings. For example, Japan now favors “hybrid” regions with mixed terrain. I did this because Samurai have an open terrain promotion but require Iron, which appears in rough terrain. A mix of the two is therefore desirable for Japan.
• Immortals start with March.
• +25% for military units with a Satrap’s Court.
• Darius Trait: Golden Ages are 25% longer and increase unit movement +1.

Policies

• Increased early and late policy costs (click here for details).
• 2 Palace, and the first policy costs 50 (was 1, 25). This reduces the magnitude of ancient ruins, purchasing a monument, and other early effects on policy generation.
• Rearranged several policies in the Honor tree.
• Spoils of War now gives (10 * strength) gold from killed units (was 5 * strength).
• Spoils of War now gives (50 * era ^ 2) culture from city capture (was population * 5 * era ^2).
• The culture from Spoils is now distributed to cities in the same way as capturing a cultural citystate. In other words, it’s affected by multipliers (like the Opera House) and expands borders.
• Details of loot from Spoils now displays at the top of the screen when units or cities are defeated.
  
• Increased the policy cost reduction of Representation.
• 12 for all cities with Republic (was 2f/1p).
• 2 in the Capital with Tradition (was 3c).
• Merchant Navy: 3 in coastal cities (was 2).
• Patent Law: 1 on Villages, 2 on Fishing Boats and Customs Houses (was 2, 4).
• Commerce: Gives a free Great Merchant (was a Golden Age).
• Free Thought: 1 on Villages and 2 on Academies (was only villages).
• United Front: Reverted back to vanilla settings.

Terrain Improvements

• 2 Villages (was 1).
• 1 city tiles (was 0).
• Rivers now yield 1 only when improved.
• Reduced border expansion cost to resources and natural wonders by 20%.

CiVUP

• Culture from cultural citystates is now a city yield, working identically to the food yield from maritime citystates. This means cultural citystates now improve border expansion in cities.
• The top bar no longer color-codes imported resources. Lots of green highlighting lessened the value of actually highlighting anything.
• Completed Phase II of standardizing the yield functions.
  • Phase I – Merged food, production, gold, and science.
  • Phase II – Added culture as a yield.
  • Phase III – Add happiness, great person points, and experience as yields.

  Basically I’ve reverse-engineered this part of the core game (we can’t see or modify the c++) and recreated it in code we do have access to. A single function chain works for all yields, replacing the old, separate, inconsistently-named functions for each yield. It is much simpler with this new library to add effects that were not previously feasible. It also makes coding easier, reduces likelihood of errors, and made it possible to fix several bugs in the core game. I might have missed a few things so if you notice any oddities with yields, please check out the Report Bug link at right.

• For modders, the power of the lua logger has been enhanced. In addition to its previous functionality, it can now accept multiple arguments in the same way as string.format. Each argument is also checked for nil status, and prints “nil” instead of resulting in an error. Example usage:
  .
  logger:Debug( “itemTable=” ..tostring(itemTable).. “itemID=” ..tostring(itemID) )
  logger:Debug( “itemTable=%s itemID=%s”, itemTable, itemID )

Miscellaneous

• Fixed several bugs with the upgrade status of unit promotions.
• Fixed a bug with displayed surplus luxury quantity on the top bar, when we have both self-produced and imported resources.
• Fixed a bug with the icon artwork of the Sanitation System.
• Fixed a bug with building production.
• Fixed the Professional Army production modifier.
• Fixed a bug causing city production to be unavailable when allied with a citystate and the city is on Avoid Growth.
• Fixed a bug where Great Person improvements were not granting 1 next to rivers.
• Fixed the Charge promotio tooltip.
• Fixed a bug causing the production panel to fail when “Basic Help” is enabled.
• Democracy now correctly awards a Great Person of choice.
• Fixed a bug with capturing Maritime or Cultural citystates.
• Fixed national wonder requirements.
• Fixed horseman strength.
• Promotions should now appropriately upgrade/not upgrade with units, based on the unique unit criteria.
• Military Tradition and Spoils of War no longer erroneously give their vanilla effects.
• Corrected the culture income displayed on the social policies popup.
• AI’s start with triremes only when their capital is surrounded by lots of water, such as on Archipelago maps. (Previously it checked only if the capital was adjacent to one coast tile.)
• Fixed a bug blocking Forges from construction.
• Newly-created units should now show the correct promotions over their flag.
• Golden Ages now correctly increase production in cities.
• The population meter in the city view no longer displays as always full.
• Sea oil is now restricted to tiles next to land (previously could appear on any “coast” terrain 1 or more tiles from land).
• Altered the distribution of sea oil to favor coastlines near grassland and plains. Previously sea oil simply favored coasts in general, which clustered it in island areas. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the goal has been for desert/tundra regions to have land oil and grass/plains regions to have sea oil.
• Clarified several explanations of the difference between normal cities, puppeted cities, and occupied cities.

May 6, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Update: v7.0

I’ve released v7.0, which you can download either on the Mod Browser or by clicking the blue download button at right. The patch notes are 2 posts down.

• This is a public release and I feel relatively confident I’ve eliminated major bugs. If you run into any problems, please click the Reporting Bugs at right.
• Since the last beta build, I also included some further AI tweaks I’ve been working on.
• As always, ensure you clear Civ’s cache and start a new game whenever changing mods or mod versions. Also make sure there’s only one version of the mod installed. Civ has a bug that reads mods from all installed versions.
• Also check out the new “Important Tips” section at right (or from the menus above).

May 1, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment