I could take a look tomorrow. Odd problem, glad you caught it early.
|
Pitboss 36 Mapmaking and Lurker Thread
|
|
Okay, I tested this a bit, and a mod is indeed needed to make the game work as intended. The game never places the religions in barb cities even if no civs have cities after several turns, and always founds four religions (or as many as are left) in one or more civ's cities on the (fifth, I think?) interturn or the first interturn thereafter when there is a non-barb city in which to found them.
I'd suggest checking with the players to see if they'd rather use a mod (with appropriate ModPath set in the WB text file) or start with seven shrine cities or what.
February 23rd, 2017, 20:39
(This post was last modified: February 23rd, 2017, 20:53 by RefSteel.)
Okay, so there is a non-mod four-shrine alternative:
[EDIT: My original post made it more complicated than it had to be; improved version below.] In place of the barb shrine cities, create four "lurker civ" cities, none of whom have war traits, and remove all their starting techs. Each gets a longbow, a Great Prophet, and a city (without a shrine or religion!) on a "shrine city" starting tile. Tasunke or other lurkers can play all ten civs for the first few turns of the game: Player civs end turn without moving; lurker civs tech Hunting->Archery on max gold, fortify units, and work a citizen specialist, building a Warrior. The game should randomly found the four religions in the lurker cities after a few turns. When it does, the Prophets shrine each one, the "lurker civs" are kicked to AI, and then the game is on for the players. (Barbs should be off though, or at least the players should be warned that barbs may start spawning immediately!) If someone can make a simple mod though, that might be a lot easier....
It actually isn't quite as bad as my first description though; I edited the post above to reflect this, but you can just give the "lurker civs" a great prophet from word go and shrine them as soon as the religions get distributed, then kick to AI and let the players start the game.
February 24th, 2017, 00:38
(This post was last modified: February 24th, 2017, 00:42 by RefSteel.)
That's the option if it's okay to have AIs in charge of the cities instead of barbs. It's also possible to give the barbs the cities though; just a little more complex to set up: Replace the four barb cities with four (shrineless, faithless) lurker civ cities with 2 population each, plus a Great Prophet and 7 Scouts apiece in each of the cities. The civs can be called "Barb Bait 1-4" or something. Then place a CR1+CR2 barb Longbow (Yes, those are City Raider promotions) adjacent to each city. Admin can then set the turn timer to 1 minute, let six turns roll, reset the turn timer to 24 hours or whatever, and let Tasunke know. Then it's just a matter of logging in to the four barb bait civs, shrining the four religions, leaving the scouts in place so that the idiot barb AI actually attacks again, and letting the real players take over the real civs.
By the next turn, all four shrine cities should be in barb hands, and all four barb bait civs eliminated. Problems: If barbs are on, players will have to be warned that the usual six-turn grace period will not exist. Also, the barb cities will contain no walls or castles unless the barbs build them by hand. Note walls and castles should NOT be placed in the barb-bait cities. If you want to give the LBs Drill or something to help make up for the lack of future walls, that's fine, but note they'll probably pick up CG2 on their own just by winning battles against scouts in the city. I should also note that in the starting save Tasunke sent me, the barb cities contained some other buildings, such as Levees, that are unlikely to survive conquest by first the barbs and then a real civ if the barb bait option is used, though they imaginably could. I'd be inclined against including them under any circumstance: The "does the city keep this building?" die roll is too swingy if a city is conquered significantly before steam power, and it kind of favors one civ over the others (the Dutch get a coastal Dike instead of a Levee). Probably not a huge deal though.
Gotcha .... I suppose if we did use a mod we could set Levee and Military Academy to conquest probability 0 (because it was only meant to benefit the barbs, not the player who conquers) .. or else we could set conquet probability to 100 for levee I guess? to go the other way, but either 100 or 0 should be conquest chance for barb placed cities *if* we have control over it .... if not, I wouldn't think the levee itself (or lighthouse/ granary) would be too swingy ... (I'm assuming Military Academies have a default conquest chance of 0)
Since I have a really good 7 holy city solution, I would probably prefer this to the Lurker AI solution, but I'll post in the tech thread and see what the players think. Other than that, anyone wanna make a mod and they (or I) could test it out? I'm worried that if we do the lurker Civ option, we would be forced to have a City Raider 3 longbow with AI setting to City attack, which would mean that we could potentially have 4 killer longbows not only killing the lurker civs ... but also the playeres ...... (unless u tested out City Def AI City RAider 2 to work ... but I don't think it would work 100% of the time unless they have City Attack AI pattern, which would also end up killing the players) Therefore I would be inclined to use either a Mod to prevent Holy City spamming, or to pre-place all Seven Holy Cities ..... (and the remaining 3 holy cities would be in the middle of Oil Island, within one central non-coastal city called 'Eden' or 'Garden of Eden' Going from Dutch to Japan, missionaries would be set as follows .... X, Islam, Tao, X, Islam, Tao .... so Arabia and China would get the Islamic Missionary, Dutch and Russia the Christian one, and Japan/ Maya the Taoist one. As close as possible for both balance and flavor imho. (February 24th, 2017, 20:24)Tasunke Wrote: Other than that, anyone wanna make a mod and they (or I) could test it out? I'm worried that if we do the lurker Civ option, we would be forced to have a City Raider 3 longbow with AI setting to City attack, which would mean that we could potentially have 4 killer longbows not only killing the lurker civs ... but also the playeres ...... (unless u tested out City Def AI City RAider 2 to work ... but I don't think it would work 100% of the time unless they have City Attack AI pattern, which would also end up killing the players) I only tested with one LB set to unitAI City Defense facing one lurker civ, but it always attacked the city next to which it was standing so long as a scout was present in the city. I believe this would be true for all four cities but won't be able to test it further in the next few days. Also note LBs can't promote to CR3 (nor CR1 or CR2) - they only get those promos if you place them by hand in Worldbuilder. Generally speaking, my barb-bait idea is very much a kluge (and unless the LBs are given drill or combat promotions too there's a chance one of them will die at low odds attacking a scout across a river onto a hill) and a mod or 7 cities might be more reliable and satisfactory. I was just spitballing ideas.
Yes RefSteel I was not trying to criticize
 ..... well lets focus on making a mod that the people want .... I'm thinking we could have either Jew/ Islam/ Hindu/ Buddhist (as a more normalized religion set) or possibly Jew/ Islam/ Christian/ Buddhist ..... or even Christian/ Islam/ Hindu/Buddhist tho I think I would prefer Jew/Islam/Christian/Buddhist if we were picking favorites here. and just remove the other three religions from the game .... I do the same for the map, and the two should work swimmingly together.
Or...just scrap all but one remote barb city (ice floes to allow spread?) with spare religion, give one religion per player, and have a fair normal late-start game?
If only you and me and dead people know hex, then only deaf people know hex.
I write RPG adventures, and blog about it, check it out. |
