The new combat model definitely sounds interesting and a lot more tactical. I’m currently playing civ 4 through again and I’m getting sick to the back teeth of the stack of death (both that the AI uses it and that I’m pretty much forced to as well). Using terrain strategically, placement of units in specific locations to utilise their abilities and also having a system that actually gives you a reason to have units doing anything other than be holed up in your cities - this sounds really interesting and a big move from what we’ve known before.
Also there was the reference to religion being gone but there being something to replace it, details to follow. I’m trés excited.
:smack: Of course I should do that. I should be able to make them unbuildable by changing a single line.
My other latest modding goal is to remove those annoying diplomatic penalties for refusing to join a war or stop trading. It looks like modifying the CIV4LeaderHeadInfos file will do the trick, but I’ll have to alter every leader individually. In fact, it looks like I can just get them to stop annoying me in the first place.
I’m diggin’ the custom game speed I’ve put together, but even at twice the marathon tech cost, advancements become really fast around the start of the renaissance. I’m thinking I should decrease the cost of ancient techs, keep classical and medieval the same, and increase the cost of renaissance onwards. I’m gonna have to see if I can change this era by era rather than tech by tech.
When you get this working, can you post it or PM me? I’ve tried to do exactly that, but when I start up the game with the modded file I get around 25 click-through error messages, and then no change in the tech values. I fail at modding
I’ve found that Googling a specific XML tag usually takes me to a relevant Civfanatics thread. It didn’t help for my latest task, though. Fun fact: If you Google <iResearchPercent>, this very thread will be at the bottom of the first page of results.
Fortunately, it looks like someone on Civfanatics made a tool to change technology costs by era. Without it, I think it’s only possible to alter research speed for single techs or all techs at once. DISCLAIMER: I have not tried it yet. I rushed here to share my find first.
Update: It looks like it runs fine. The values in the XML file and the in-game civilopedia are what I told the tool to change them to.
I backed up my custom CIV4TechInfos file to be safe (and for comparison), and set my research rate back to the Marathon default of 300. I had had it at 600, and it felt like research took too long in the ancient era and not long enough from the renaissance onward. My original plan was to just multiply all renaissance+ tech costs by five manually, but I wasn’t sure if that would be too much of an increase. With this tool I’m going for a gradual ramp-up: Ancient 1.0, Classical 2.0, Medieval 3.0, Renaissance 4.0, Industrial 5.0, Modern 6.0, Future 7.0 . I just finished up with a Monarch level game where I was getting modern-era techs every two to four turns; that would mean six to twelve turns with these new settings. I’ll try to remember to report my results.
I’m having about as much fun figuring out new things to mod as I am playing with my tweaked rules. For instance, I hate it when city radii overlap. While I can found my own cities far apart, the AI founds all of its cities close together. As a result, I tend to raze most or all enemy cities I conquer and found new cities in the vacant land. This makes me feel bad, especially so in my last game as I was playing as the Germans (and happen to be re-reading The Man in the High Castle at the moment). I just increased the MIN_CITY_RANGE value from 2 to 4 in my next game, so it’ll be impossible for the AI to found overlapping cities. Sure, I won’t be able to found cities quite as close together as I normally do, but hopefully it should be worth it.
If when you approach the modern era in the game you no longer needed huge armies to win battles. If things took a turn to focus on guerrilla warfare, etc.
Ooooh, I like this idea. I’ll be interested to hear what you think.
I hate overlap too, but I’d worry that the AIs will run out of land too quickly, and wind up being less powerful = game too easy.
I used to do the same thing, raising cities to avoid overlap. I found that it got to be too much of a hassle to raise/resettle huge swaths of land, though. Now I settle without overlap during the land-grab phase, and consider that my civ’s core; once I start going after the AIs, I’ll raise any cities that are too close to my core, and keep the rest. My reasoning is that most of my production is going to come from my core anyway, and the conquered cities are just there to help with population, commerce, science, etc. So it doesn’t really matter if there’s overlap with those.
Why do you associate that particular kind of tactics with the modern era? It’s been in place since forever. And the modern era’s actual wars do suffer from a certain stack-of-doom-itis…
I had an idea for a new game feature which may or may not work well with the new one unit per tile system. In the same way that cities can convert production to research, culture, and wealth, have them convert production to “reinforcements”. The production is converted to extra healing for your damaged military units in the field, divided among your damaged units. It would be less efficient or impossible when reinforcing units in enemy territory. Distance from your territory could also be a factor, and a “reorganized military procurement” type technology could lessen the penalties. That way you can throw the might of your nation’s industry behind your military without tedious deployment of new units or stacks of doom. Smart tactics will still defeat a force before it can be reinforced, but in many situations a more dedicated home front can turn the tide of a campaign.
You mean something like a return of the autospawning Partisan units from Civ II? They tended to be annoying to deal with, especially when combined with the zones of control mechanic, but that would be where I would start in making changes in the modern era.
They could take a page from the Total War series: Recently captured territories have a large penalty to public order (i.e. city happiness) that gradually decreases. Disorder is often inevitable in newly-captured territories. Prolonged disorder causes rebel armies to spawn; if they recapture the territory, it either reverts to its former owner or becomes a new independent nation.
This could be adapted to a Civ game easily. Various technologies could affect the degree of resistance to foreign occupation, as could civics. Cities captured from civs with the Nationalism technology would have a much greater and prolonged penalty. The Guerilla Warfare technology would cause rebels to spawn immediately and/or more often. A civ with Emancipation would get a lower penalty when capturing cities from a civ with Vassalage, while the other way around would result in a greater penalty.
I like the idea of gradual culture growth and gaining a new city means that that cities culture must start from scratch. While it works in larger maps where everything is spread out it doesn’t work so well on small crowded maps…which happen to be my favorite. Once I take a city over I’m forced to bring down the entire opposing civilization just so that first city doesn’t starve.
I still think Civ II is the standard. Civ IV is still buggy for me. I’ll play for an hour and it will crash. Never had that problem with Civ II or III. I had the opposite experience in tech in Civ IV. I was always behind everyone. I tried having a lot of cities to only a few. Yet, the other civs would be not only be more advanced, but have a ton of troops to defend their cities and attack me. It made it start up my old W95 computer to play Civ II.
I always play Noble, that seems to be the tipping point where your boyz equal their boyz. As much as I like a challenge one of my archers equaling 3 of theirs is unacceptable. If I want it harder I’ll just add more civs.
