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I'm feeling in the mood to make another map, and have two ideas I'd like to gauge interest in.

A Tale of Two Continents
The core concept is to have two more-or-less natural continents with about 4 players on each. The lurkers will try to split the players in two groups based on perceived skill, and have the best players on the same continent. Will one player manage to consolidate the resources of their continent under one rule?
Proposed start acceleration: Start with a worker and one additional first-tier tech.

My initial thoughts had them as mirrors of each others, but the more I think about it the less I like that idea. Current plan is to roll two different pangea maps and merge them into the same map as different continents, and add islands as necessary. Starts and resources will be balanced within their continent.

Love Island: Always Peace Archipelago
As Krill is fond of saying, Always Peace is the most aggressive game mode in Civ4. I'm not sure how many madmen are interested in trying this, but I have a mindmap layout of an archipelago style map for five players that I think can be interesting. As this type of game is mostly decided in the landgrab phase, I believe an archipelago will make for an interesting challenge of how much land you can possibly grab.


This variant probably needs some trait banning, but I'd like to hear the player's input before proposing any.

If you have or find a gaming meme you like a lot throw it in here to share it around.

Note does not have to be civ based, but found example below.



I may have shown a picture of airlifting an elephant in PB66 after I did such a thing, so I feel this one.

I'm considering adjusting the following.

1. Building destruction rate when conquering.
This was originally added to balance out the resource advantage the AI gains though difficulty modifiers, so the player can't take advantage of the AI building significantly faster, and as a secondary effect also to make conquest slightly less rewarding compared to other ways to invest your resources (lair hunting and building up city economy).
While the latter is still valid, the AI resource advantage is much lower nowadays so I wonder if maybe these percentages could use some adjustment. (In particular the rate on Normal, Fair, Advanced and Expert seems somewhat questionable and exceeds the AI's production and population growth bonus by a significant quantity)
As a potential side effect, AI players conquering each other also comes with less destruction, which might in theory lead to stronger endgame AI if they had wars and conquered many cities. So this might not actually improve the player's chance at winning as much as it sounds like but might make the game more enjoyable by conquering more relevant high value buildings in wars.

Should I lower the destruction rates or not?
Additionally, the Smithy has double the normal chance of getting destroyed, maybe this should not be a multiplier but a flat addition instead (30% higher chance seems right, if we lowered the base values)

2. Chance of hiring heroes.
I think this is fine for hero 1, 2, 5 and 6 but maybe the third and fourth hero could have a slightly higher chance than 1 in 3 and 4 years respectively?

3. Power Link
Is the AI's reaction good as is, or would it be better if I added a percentage chance for the AI to skip casting spells for a turn if it rolled a low cost spell and has no rare or better summons available?
Or is the wizard elimination mechanic and the power cap on the spell already good enough to balance it? (assuming the player didn't disable the "no early very rare spell treasure" feature)

4. Spells found too early in treasure
I do believe the 1 book or retort pick given when a Very Rare spell is replaced is fair but I'm somewhat uncertain whether the 1600 value item is really good enough compensation for the player for missing out on a rare spell?
I thought it was the item plus an uncommon spell but apparently not.

Does anyone want to play a relatively low pressure, bit more buildery than stabby Civ 6 PBEM? Using all the DLC (excluding Julius Caesar, screw 2K).

Looking for a turn per day pace after the opening (PBEM23 managed to average 42 turns over 2 weeks, for three truns per day average).

I'm open to discuss settings but thinking keeping disaster settings around normal (if we want to go totally random and max everything for a more PvE style game then that could be fun with the game having a bit more space).

Tentative Sign ups:

• Krill
  
• greenline
  
• TheArchduke
  

Assuming I don't change the Fire Giants, do you think Sorcery/Chaos needs further additional synergy, or we have done enough by adding Breakthrough and making Aura of Majesty prevent diplomatic effects from tile destruction spells?

I feel this is a highly subjectve matter, as my initial evaluation was this before and after the changes (ignore the Fire Giant row)

Please keep in mind this is specifically about the early game (common and uncommon spells), as late game has good synergies and is very powerful in general for this realm pair.

   
     

but if I try harder to find synergies then I end up with this instead

   

If we do want to make changes, the pool of ideas (feel free to add your own)
-Resist Elements on Fire Giant
-AEther Sparks adds vulnerability to Fire, Ice, Lightning damage
-Blur raises the minimal armor of a unit to a certain amount (Hell Hounds have 2 armor, this is a major buff for them if the minimal is 4 or 5), might have the unintended consequence of making Zombies and Werewolves too good
-Flame Blade and Focus Magic can stack for a +5 ranged attack total on bow units
-Immolation and Guardian Wind combined grants Resist Elements
-Fire giant has Caster 15 instead of Fireball Spell (might be too powerful buff for Chaos?)

Been thinking about this lately. I've been putting together a combat calculator/simulator for CoM 2 and like all good calculators it shows what most already knew: most ranks provide incremental bonuses except for Elite and Champion, which are major breakpoints. Nothing wrong there, business as usual.

The issue comes with the spell Crusade. Because Ultra-Elite is only a small improvement over Elite, Crusade becomes pretty anemic for a Very Rare spell if you don't have Warlord, to the point that I generally don't want to see it.

For reference, Ultra-Elite gives an additional +1 Attack, ranged attack, and defense over Elite. Conferring +1 ATT and +1 DEF on all normal units would be pretty bad even for a Rare enchant (I know Crusade is more complicated than that - there's also the free hero levels and free starting levels for units built in cities without Altars of Battle, but still).

But this is more of a discussion prompt than a suggestion, because I have no idea what the solution would be. Buff Ultra-Elite to make Crusade more interesting, and you've just made Warlord too powerful. Keep Ultra-Elite as is and make Crusade rare instead, but again, that's making Warlord too powerful. It could do something like also have all units start at max XP, but that's obsoleting Altar of Battle, which feels bad.

Maybe something like Crusade also buffs the Ultra-Elite rank, making it more useful for non-Warlords without making Warlords too strong? But the buffs would have to be careful - they'd need to be big enough to feel worth it, but not so big that they make the Crusade-Warlord combo feel bad or irrelevant.

Anyone have any thoughts?

See the Chaos/Sorcery discussion for more details.
I want to make Fire Giants a desirable summon for a Sorcery player by making it resist magical ranged attacks, the only attack type sorcery cannot counter effectively until much later in the game. (they have Guardian Wind for missiles and Flight against melee units)

By adding Resist Elements only, the giant goes from 5 to 9 defense against magic ranged attacks. A decent increase but far from omipotent, can probably beat 2-3 magicians effortlessly but any more and 1 such Fire Giant would be to few.
However if Large Shield is also added, the total defense become 12, which is high enough where even 1-2 Giants can effectively fight a large stack of 7-9 magicians.
As a side effect, the shield adds 3 defense against normal missile attacks too, which feels unneccesary - Using Guardian Wind and Animate Ammo should be the primary solutions to missile attacks, not Fire Giant's abilities.

SO...which do you think would be better, please vote

Fire Giant with Resist Elements only
Fire Giant with Resist Elements and Large Shield
Fire Giant with Elemental Armor (overkill for magic but nothing vs missiles)

The spells which make it overpowered IMO:

1. Spell binding = you can get 5 other very rare spells from other realms and can trade them.
2. Power link = 2500 Mana per turn in a many players game - will be much more than life force, for example.
3. Time Stop = give you free game turns.
4. Spell ward = makes your cities practically unconquerable
5. Mass invisibility = undispelable invisibility.

Hi, I am making a personal civ-mod for single-player gaming. It is based on K-Mod but I want to add some changes from Close to Home and also some stuff of my own making.
Unfortunately, my modding abilities are limited to messing with XML files and some of the things I want from CtH require Python expertise. Can anyone give me a hand? What I want is simply to transfer the respective code from CtH to my mod so that the respective XML tags are enabled. The functionality I want is very limited, almost exclusively related to leader traits: things like the Protective bonus for internal trade and extra barrage for the aggressive trait. Those cannot be implemented through XML alone.