Yeah, no way I'm living up to the thread title.

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Events and huts on. Random map. Those crazies.

Figured I'd post about a possible naming scheme while awaiting screenshot and combo:
I was thinking about either my favorite books, which I could do a short spiel about why I love it whenever founding a new city, but that seems a little vain and blase.

OTOH one sort of less conventional idea was to make it a list of my favorite cards across different board games I play. I have a couple ready from games like Dune, Darkstar, TI4, AGoT, and of course some from MtG. 

Any thoughts, preferences, or variations on the themes?

As for the game, I expect much  and  . The settings and the player roster truly allow for nothing else.
It will be good war practice against humans.

Dragged back into the vortex we go.

Should be a fun game.

[this space reserved for later]

So What's Going On Here?

For the next, well, while, I'm going to be playing a long-term PBEM with some friends using the City Lights mod for Civ VI. I think and plan best when I write down my thoughts, and there may be some interest in the mod for those now finding vanilla VI stale. So, I thought I'd write down my thoughts and plans for the better edification of all interested. 

City Lights mod overview

The biggest question, of course, is what exactly IS the City Lights mod? The design doc may be found here, but I'll give you the highlights. 

In essence, City Lights is an effort to enable "tall" gameplay for Civ VI, via a complicated system of specializing cities as either urban-focused or rural focused. Urban cities rely on dense neighborhoods and plentiful fresh water for housing, and must be supported via extensive use of internal trade routes to continue to grow and produce into the late game. In return, they can maintain very high populations and can achieve monstrous adjacencies and bonuses in gold, science, and culture production. Rural cities, in contrast, sprawl out onto the map via small farming and mining town districts, drawing great tile yields from the map and serving as the supporters of the urban cities, at the cost of weaker science and culture. 


Urban boroughs, the fuel of the high pop and adjacencies in the late game. They do harm tile yields, however, and have restrictive placements.

The urban boroughs gain +1 of the relevant yield when next to any district, and return +1 adjacency to the same district. Think of them like a government plaza in terms of adjacencies, except they also profit. The goal obviously is to use them to fill out dense, built up urban areas. They also gain +1 production for each adjacent district, with further specialists and district improvements available (yielding in their turn further enhancing projects and improvements). The stacking possibilities are obvious and there's a lot of potential to exploit here. 


On the downside, each borough is -3 amenities and -10 gold in upkeep, meaning gold generation and entertainment districts will be very important. In turn, that suggests a need for high populations to support the ED district slot. Each borough also is a -1 to basic tile yields in the city, so all 3 is -3 farms, -3 mines, etc, so the city will gain little from the map (but that means you can freely pave over just about everything, I think!). 


Rural towns, which enhance the on-map tile yields around them at the expense of district adjacencies. 

The key to the mod is the rural towns and their districts. Internal trade routes have been altered so that only the rural improvements provide food and production in yields - every other district generates science/culture/gold/faith. With urban cities unable to generate their own food, you NEED to run internal routes to rural cities to feed your urban science monster. Every rural district can be built multiple times per city (unless it has a borough district), and enhances the nearby improvements: farms and plantations for farming towns, fishing boats and camps for fishing villages, and mines/lumberyards for mining colonies. They are a vital source of gold, food, production, and amenities. They don't like being adjacent to other districts, giving -1 adjacency, and only benefiting from holy sites and encampments. 


A mature rural city - note the repeated districts.

As a bonus, the districts ALSO grant farmers/fishers/miners, who can build 2 of their respective improvements. Thus, you can substitute these guys instead of builders, for the most part. Part of my planning will be detailed attention to the amount of builder charges needed. 

So, the basic loop of the game: Build 'rural' cities first and spam the cheap rural districts, focusing on generating gold, food, and amenities. Once established, you can then begin to create the specialized urban cities, which will need the rural resources as support while supercharging science and culture (and strong production from districts). Empire-wide planning is accordingly rewarded - each city must be considered as to how it fits into the whole, rather than as an isolated unit. 


Rules of the Game

So the game is with my friends, thus 'carebear' rules are followed. This isn't a cutthroat win-at-all-costs Realms Beyond game, instead meant to be a sandbox exploration of the mod. 

Accordingly, I can't win by rapidly building out a military and murdering my neighbors (sorry, PBEM 19 thrawn). Instead, I will need to outplan them and build a vastly better internal empire that just outproduces and outresearches them (advice welcomed, PBEM 21 thrawn). Limited wars are possible for specific islands or other strategic points, but beyond that, domination is mostly out. Instead we're going to have to maintain enough army for our own security (I told them I was fair game) while focusing on a peaceful win.  

The map is Island Plates with low sea levels, no balancing has been done - we might get lucky or we might get screwed, it's up to RNG! Turns will hopefully come a few times a week - I'm hoping for 3-4, but I don't think I can expect 5-7 turns a week. 

General Intentions

After a lot of thought, I think I'm going to take the Cree for this game. Obviously, lots of interesting and strong choices with the enhanced setup - Japan's urban density makes it to my mind obviously the strongest choice available in the mod, and Persia's trade routes with gold and culture sync well with the mod, as well. Other civs have been tinkered with to make them better fits, but it wound up not mattering since most people took vanilla civs anyway. 

The Cree have a bonus to internal trade routes that I think will really help me with food and growth early in the game. I can identify sites with lots of bonus resources, where the mekwekap will sync well with the rural districts, and let me run urban cities on almost a one to one basis (since 2 urban cities will run 2 routes each to 2 rural cities, getting more food and more gold than normal). I think I can thus run a somewhat higher proportion of urban cities later in the game than others, and use smart city planning to outtech and outproduce the others to space. 

Religion is on the table, and Work Ethic is obviously a potentially very strong choice if I can swing it. No other civ can strenuously contest religion if I prioritize it, which I am considering. 

Culture might be a weakness in this setup, and I will need to keep an eye on cultural victories (I've never defended against one against the AI, don't know how hard it is). Backup plan here is if a civ is dramatically outpacing me in culture, then sending a task force to burn a city is possible. 

Overall setup is:

Civ 1: Germany
Civ 2: Periclean Greece
Civ 3: The Netherlands
Civ 4: Rome
Civ 5: Victorian England
Civ 6: Cree (me)

Comments on the other civ choices and my opponents later. Should get the first turn late tonight or tomorrow. 

With 2.4 out and Low Rent Legion finished, I set out to have a look at how a hell difficulty Iron Wolf looks like. I am not disappointed. He might not be a big monster processor, but for my lowly barb this is more than adequate a companion. Note that Firebolt and Fireball seems to be synergizing with their "normal" base levels, so 27x16% for firebolt, and 29x14% for fireball.

A very expensive upgrade would be a Flickering Flame + dual spirit + chains of honor setup. That needs level 85 or 86, below that you'll need more than Chains' +20 strength for the spirit shield. Good news is that Jarulf has plenty of resists even in hell, so there is no need to worry about that. The big deal would be faster cast rate obviously, but +6 to skills wouldn't hurt either. +7 if you ditch the sword for a hexfire. I imagine that would be a lot of damage. There is also Enlightenment, but getting a strength boosting armor for a Spirit monarch is a better investment. Then there's Enigma, which doesn't even need Jarulf to be that high a level as it has even more strength boost, but it's enigma so not very useful for people like us.

If you enjoy DnD/turn-based/rogue like/rpg like games... and dont mind having "okay" graphics.. THIS GAME IS AMAZING. Its even COOP. !!!

Would anyone be interested in a little rrrrandom game of CtH Whateverrev? Random map (totestra with Full of Resources), random events, huts, rolled combos?

Commodore
Amicalola
Nowfrogger
Ginger
Superdeath
Gavagai

(April 25th, 2022, 13:54)Ramkhamhaeng Wrote: Game is running! Good luck all players. Lets see if everything was setup correctly…

Url: pb.zulan.net:3064
PBSpy: https://civ.zulan.net/pbspy/game/119/

Introductions

Hi everyone. I'm posting this thread to start a discussion, more than anything, following a throwaway comment in the mackoti/Mr. Cairo PB59 thread. The comment was based off a straightforward observation: This forum is populatated by people who have busy and complicated lives (in the main), and Civ 4, even with all the mods, do not take that into account. I have delayed posting this because, surprise, surprise, I haven't had time to write it despite PB59 ending a month ago.

Thus the suggestion, made public: Civ should have a mod designed that keeps the strategic decision making properties which make it interesting to players, and turn by turn tactical puzzles, but each turn should never take more than a one hour to play (not including documenting the turn).

Seems like a challenge to design and make such a mod, no?

First of all, I present the rest of this post purely as a thought experiment and suggestions. I hope this is interesting to players and people will post their thoughts, but it is unimportant if not. It does not matter if this thread has a hundred thousand views and no replies. I have no intention of making this mod, but I would support anyone who chose to.

Secondly, I acknowledge that the suggested aim is arbitrary, and many people would likely look at it and reject it out of hand. But I'm not asking anyone to play such a mod, more consider what they would want from it, and how it would impact the rest of their lives holistically, eg "My GF might actually let me  play a game because she knows I will not be engrossed in it every night".

Thirdly, my thoughts only lead to a design, and do not bear much thought to implementation. I am not competent to state what is or is not achievable, but I will try to justify why such changes are likely necessary.

Anyway, let me move on.


General constraints

Couple of points here, which I think are uncontentious in this community, and some which might be.

Assertion 1: 1 Turn per day is the ideal play rate for the majority of the game. It fits in with almost every players schedule and other life responsibilities, and should be the aim. It should be noted then, that the first 50 turns of the game usually have too few decisions to make as the turn pace is normally far faster than this, and the time per turn is far below one hour. The converse is true for the late game, as ably demonstrated by the end game for PB59: the end game has too many tactical decision.

Assertion 2: RB, and the German forum, like playing games with over 6 players. Games with more than 6 players struggle to maintain a one turn per day play rate. The only game mode which enables this is Pitboss, therefore this mod could only be implemented in Civ 4, even if other factors make different versions of civ a potential better starting position to design such a mod.

Assertion 3: Civ 4 is a turn based game and when a turn is played (ie start or end of a turn) matters, but if this mod is designed to slot into a players life with the minimum of overspill, this matter needs to be either eliminated, or reduced to a minimum.

Assertion 4: Victory conditions define good gameplay (ie decisions are made to reach a VC), however once it becomes clear that a player cannot achieve a VC, the players decisions can become far harder to make/justify (as their is little meaning beyond surviving, kingmaking, and ending the game with the highest score possible). Therefore a new victory condition system needs to be implemented, and the current Victory conditions are just a way to end the game.

Assertion 5: A rebuilt VC system should promote engagement at all time periods of the game and can be used to modify in game decision making above and beyond that created either by game balance or other player decisions.


General discussion

Looking at the above assertions, I think Assertion 2 is taken for granted and Assertion 1 is second nature but has an obvious solution: the game should start with more tools immediately available but there should be a far harder limit on the amount of decisions that need making late game. This can only be achieved in the following ways: limit the number of cities, limit the number of units, limit the area of a map that a player can easily interact in.

But dealing with assertion 2 first: It makes more sense to keep as much as possible and rebalance, rather than build completely new. ie keep the tech tree generally the same yet move stuff around freely, keep the units but accept that costs and strength might change, but don't design new units, keep resources as they are but possibly change yields etc. Essentially nothing is sacred, but don't change anything if there is not a good reason (given what I would suggest there will be a good reason to change most things on some level though).

The problem with assertion 1 is that Civ 4 warfare is abuilt around disparate windows of attacking due to tech speed, then building units, then moving units (including attacking, healing and reusing the same units), it is very, very difficult to build a mod without first nailing down map size. I think it is accepted that tight maps lead to very quick bloodshed and games ending before the modern era, and I would propose that it actually makes sense to plan around using large maps, with plenty of space, and then building the rest of the mod ontop of that premise. Consider the alternative: with limited space, a mod would need to have really quick tech speeds to play out from ancient, warriors with clubs through to a spaceship and this would have a knock on effect with balancing warfare. My personal view is that it would probably push warfare to being brutal and very difficult to design a way that would not lead to quick knock outs of slower players and a snowball problem.

My thoughts lead to the following ideas: Increase the minimum distance between cities, gradually increase the size of a cities BFC, and tie all military units to population (eg warrior takes 1 pop point, knights might take 3, tanks might take 5), and put a hard limit on the number of combat rounds that occur (to stop units from dying from only being attacked by one unit and move closer to the civ 6 combat model.

Assertion 4 and 5 are two halves of the same coin: If a new VC points system is designed, (which could include eg out of game point scoring such as public reports voted on by lurkers, or after game votes by players) it can be tailored to include negative points ie -5 VC points for taking more than 1 city from a player, or -10 points razing a city that was settled for more than 30 turns just as easily as it could include positive points for stuff like +25 points for "worlds largest ever city" or +5 points per player that you have not declared war on who survived until the end game. The possibilities when we start thinking of VC with the UN and the diplomatic victory are almost endless (yes this rips off/builds on civ 6, refer back to assertion 2).

This leads to an interesting point: is it even worth thinking about about promoting keeping players alive, not necessarily in a true rump state but even in diminished capacity? After all, it should be possible to balance a VC point system to give points for losing one city, never mind more complex balancing.


Without further ado, here is the start of a change log


Outline of change log