Shilling for RFC: Dawn of Civilization mod for Civ 4

[greenline]

RFC: Dawn of Civilization is a mod of a mod that dramatically extends the originally RFC mod for Civ 4. The RFC mod attempted to simulate all of known history on a large earth map. I'm posting here because a big update for Dawn of Civilization just came out, a complete overhaul of the map that's produced the biggest and most detailed earth map ever used by a Civ game, hosting a bunch of unique historical civs with unique abilities and victory conditions. Check it out! https://github.com/dguenms/Dawn-of-Civil...ee/develop .

Note that the installer provided on the github page doesn't work for the new version. To get it working, just download the develop branch as a zip file, and extract it in your mod folder for Civ 4.

If anyone wants a rundown of what playing the mod is like, I'd be willing to do a runthrough of a sample single player game once I have a chance to get a feel for the new map, myself.

[Amicalola]

I'd love to see a sample game!

[thestick]

The new map is public and finished, but the civs and conditions still need to be rebalanced, right?

[greenline]

The new map is public and finished, but the civs and conditions still need to be rebalanced, right?

That's correct. I'm seeing a number of bugs crop up when doing test runs for a sample game. So if you jump in now, be wary that things will be a little janky.

[greenline]

China Sample Game: Part 1

For this runthrough, after testing a number of civs, I figure I would pick China as an introduction to the mod, as I found the gameplay for China to be on the easier side when going for the historical victory or other desired victory conditions, and the gameplay itself is like a more typical game of civ with a focus on economic development and expanding. So, starting off:




Every civilization in RFC: Dawn of Civilization has a Unique Power in addition to one or two unique units and a unique building. There are no traits or leader benefits, so the leaders you can select are primarily for aesthetic preferences. China's unique power is that its cities store 25% extra food on growth, which is a modest boost for any particular victory you might be pursuing. China doesn't have the vanilla unique building, instead having a unique library that gives a bit of extra culture and lets you hire another scientist. It has two unique units - one being a modified form of the classic Cho-ko-nu, another being a weaker musketman that comes earlier on the tech tree and does collateral damage. Curiously, the best use for both units is for handling barbarians, although they are also good offensively. 




Each Civ in RFC also has a Unique Historical Victory that can be won by completing 3 separate goals. Completing 2 out of 3 gives a golden age, which is of particular note to China. China's historical victory requires experiences four golden ages by the year 1800 AD, owning four Confucian cathedrals and three Taoist cathedrals by the year 1000 AD, and being the first civ to discover the techs: Printing, Compass, Gunpowder, and Paper. The tech goal is generally the hardest, with the golden age goal being the easiest, as you only need to burn great people for three golden ages if you complete the other two goals. I'll be going for the unique historical victory this game.




And here's what you see once you start the game. How RFC works is that, when you pick a civ that has a start date any later than 3000 BC (only Egypt, Babylon, and Harappa / Indus Valley start here), you wait for some time while the AI autoplays until that date. The wait time for China is really short, but for some late game civs like Canada you will have to twiddle your thumbs for a bit. I hear later updates to the mod will expand the available scenarios to include more starting time periods to avoid these waiting periods (current starting scenarios are either 3000 BC, 600 AD, or 1700 AD).




And here's where we start. Nothing too crazy so far. There are a couple of new resources immediately visible: Jade to the south, which is just a luxury resource unlocked at masonry, and salt to the northeast, a health resource unlocked at masonry. There isn't a good reason I've found to not settle in place, especially given that there's iron in the capital BFC yet to be revealed.

The starting units may seem overly generous, but as events in this very game will show later, you will need every single unit provided.




Here is the current civics screen. RFC has an entirely new set of civics, some of which have similar effects to vanilla. You get a free revolt for the first couple of turns your civ is in the game, and any further ones will cost anarchy unless you burn a new kind of great person. Golden ages don't give free revolts anymore, so it's generally better to immediately revolt to new, beneficial civics, rather than trying to wait and swap into multiple ones at once.

For China, the only unlocked civics at the start are Monarchy and Despotism. Monarchy is about the same as Hereditary Rule from the base game, giving +1 happy face per garrisoned unit. Despotism is a minorly nerfed version of Slavery from vanilla, letting you whip (3 and 4 pop whips now give +2 unhappy faces instead of +1). For most civs, unless you have a severe happy crunch or are playing with a specific historical goal in mind, you should always pick Despotism over Monarchy. So we will leave this be for now.

In addition to the up front benefits and downsides of each civic, there are also benefits and maluses to stability that can occur from how you combine civics, which I will go over in a later update.




The starting technology screen, which will probably throw you for a loop as a first timer. Yes, they also redid the tech tree from scratch for this mod. The main thing to understand is that we start with the technology to: pasture livestock, camp deer and furs, build cottages and mines, see copper, build roads, farms, monuments, early temples, and early wonders. The first tech goal for China is Bloomery - this mod's equivalent of Iron Working. The #1 threat to China early is barbs, and these barbs primarily take the form of melee units that walk through hills. The best way to deal with these is strong melee units rather than horse units, and the best melee units you can build early are swords. Sadly, there are no axes in this mod - they are a unit exclusive to barbs. Weird, right?

Getting to Bloomery means researching a couple of cheap techs first - alloys, which lets you chop forests, and masonry, which lets you build quarries. I go for alloys first - the Jade is forested, so I'd need to be able to chop it before building the quarry.




The starting list of things your capital can build. In a normal game of Civ 4, you'd build a worker first. In this latest version of RFC, you always start with at least one worker, so it's better here to grow and slowbuild something else while letting workers improve the tiles. Most of the options aren't that great to build at size one - the best options for China are either an archer or a granary. I decided to go for the granary, but I'd probably have been better off building the archer. 

Note that granaries have also been nerfed, only giving 25% food stored instead of 50%, and only giving a maximum of +1 health from salt instead of 1 per grain resource.




Shown here are the two workers China starts with. I had them start by farming the wheat, then pasturing the pigs. After that, I had them road to the next city. I also have some of my military units do a short scout around the capital, making sure to pull them back after a little while.




This barb city always spawns near China's spawn after a few turns. It doesn't tend to build many offensive units, so it can be ignored until you have built up enough forces to comfortably take it. I prefer to raze it in my dotmap, to move it one tile east to grab the deer. 




Toggling the 'show stability parameters' on the map will show you this blue boundary. The blue region is your civilization's core territory, which relates to stability. In RFC, stability is a mechanic that ensures if your civilization will keep functioning or disintegrate. If you let your stability get too low, your civilization will collapse and you lose the game. AI civs also have to be wary of this mechanic, and throughout a typical RFC game you will see most AI empires die to stability, usually around the time the equivalent civlizations collapsed in real life.

Core territory is territory where settling grants your civ positive stability. There are five categories that factor into stability, and expansion is one of them. You get positive expansion stability for having cities and towns within your core territory, and negative stability for cities outside of your core territory. Essentially, all this means is that you want to maximize the amount of cities and towns within your core territory, as the more core population you have, the more cities outside your core you can support. 




Next, here is my dotmap for how I like to settle China's core territory. The four cities will be very productive and can grow to large sizes, which lets you rather trivially support a large Chinese empire that can win the game however you see fit. Your dotmap may vary, of course. I plan to settle the southeastern dot first, which will be my primary commerce city with a cottage on every possible tile.

more to come...

[greenline]

continuing on:




The first sign of future barb troubles to come. These warriors aren't random spawns, but are scripted to pop up in pairs at set intervals. They will get nastier with time. They ignore the spear for now, but will be back with a vengeance.

While this is going on, I grow the capital to size 4, start a settler, than 2 pop whip it to completion. Typical civ 4 opening stuff.




Newly founded cities are automatically named according to which civ you are playing and where it is settled or conquered. As a new city with no innate cultural bonuses, the list of what to build is more interesting. We have two good options for culture early on - the monument and the pagan shrine (which has a different name for each civ, for China it is an ancestor shrine). Both provide +2 culture a turn. The pagan shrine is cheaper, but can't be built if you have a state religion, and will disappear if a non-state religion spreads to that city (if you spread your state religion to the city, the pagan shrine is instead auto-converted to a temple for that religion). The monument is more expensive, but never disappears. So, generally speaking, you want to build lots of pagan shrines before you convert to a religion and if you are not near a holy city, and stick to monuments once you convert, or if you are getting a lot of naturally spread religion in your borders.

As China, the only foreign religion spread you will get is Buddhism, and that comes in very slowly. So it is best to spam pagan shrines as much as possible until you found Confucianism, to get as many free temples later on. So I start building a pagan shrine in the new city, and will whip it at size 2.

Another note about culture - in RFC, city borders don't expand instantly in all directions. Instead, culture works more like in Civ 5 and Civ 6, where it grabs plains and grassland tiles first, and is slower to grab deserts, jungles, mountains, and water tiles. So a rule of thumb is, +2 culture a turn is plenty for an average podunk grassland cottage city, but if you need to expand through a lot of mountains or jungles, you will want more. RFC does make it easy for new cities to pump out culture though, especially as the game goes on. (Also keep in mind that the cities can still only work the fat cross of tiles they could in vanilla, even if culture expands differently).

The workers improve the deer for the new city and build some cottages on the bare river tiles. In vanilla civ 4, the early cottages would be inferior to pure growth, but here, I need the commerce more to push for iron working and other key early techs.




After researching alloys, the next tech is masonry, and then bloomery is the next stop. Masonry unlocks RFC slavery, which is very different from BtS slavery. Here, slavery gives a minor boost to quarries and mines, and lets you capture workers in war. The AI tends to keep its workers squirreled away in its most far away cities until it collapses, so I have rarely gotten much use out of worker capturing. I only tend to use this civic for boosting early commerce and production for specific civs. It's not worth using on China.

After building a couple of cottages, I had the workers then return to the capital to road and mine the hill where iron spawns. The capital built another settler at size four for a new city, and then whips a worker.




Our first costal city. The tech for work boats will be the next priority after Bloomery, and since the fish are second ring anyway, there's no loss in waiting to tech it until later. Two workers go to hook up the wheat, while this city works on its own pagan shrine for culture.




The whipped worker from the capital comes out just in time to overflow into a swordsman.




After bloomery, the next tech I went for is the most crucial economic tech in the ancient / classical age: Calendar. Not only does this enable plantations in a map smothered in plantation resources, but it also has access to the best early game economic civic (yes, better than whipping): Manoralism. Manoralism gives 50% production to workers, and +1 production to pastures and +1 commerce to farms to boot. But the main benefit is being able to spam out workers at a rapid pace. One thing I forgot to mention in the earlier post is that RFC nerfs worker speed significantly - roads take 4 worker turns, for instance. This works out so that each city tends to want 4 workers each to improve tiles. This makes it so that the best strategy for many civs is to do nothing but spam workers until you have a surplus. So, that is our next tech goal, and we will pick up the tech for fishing on the way.

Shortly afterwards, the barb troubles began in earnest:




I lost my starting spearman getting double teamed by barb warriors. Just my luck. Here's where building the archer earlier would have saved me a world of trouble.




This lets the barbs invade and pillage in earnest, before I can get a sword out.




Not only that, my bad luck continues, and my sword is taken out by warriors. I have to whip an extra archer in the other city. After having all my improvements to the south pillaged, I eventually clear out the barbs with two more swords.




Seen here is one of the nastier barb pairs that spawn in, and the reason you have to go for swords first as China. Everything else you can build loses to the 5 str light swordsman. The 4 strength skirmisher is also no joke, getting a bonus vs archers and doing a little collateral damage too.




I end the playing session by getting to Calendar, ready to revolt into manoralism and crank out a bunch of workers in each city. Time to kick this civ's development into high gear.

[El Grillo]

Best of luck, I played a fair bit of DoC a few years ago on the older map, curious to see what has changed. Last time I played with China it was with a specialist economy fueled by the civic that gave them +1f each, did that get nerfed or reworked?

[greenline]

Best of luck, I played a fair bit of DoC a few years ago on the older map, curious to see what has changed. Last time I played with China it was with a specialist economy fueled by the civic that gave them +1f each, did that get nerfed or reworked?

The civic you are referring to, Republic, was nerfed so that it doesn't give free specialist slots anymore. Some people like it for Greece or Rome or when playing a One City Challenge - I'm content to stick with Despotism (whipping) in most cases. I will try to do a comparison shot in the next update to show how big the new map is and how much less claustrophobic it feels for a lot of civs - China, for example, can fit 10-12 cities in where on the old map you could only do half of that number.

[Amicalola]

comparison shot would be super interesting! ENjoying the read. I remember finding barbarians extremely frustrating in the brief period i played this mod a few years ago, but no idea if its changed.

[greenline]

comparison shot would be super interesting! ENjoying the read. I remember finding barbarians extremely frustrating in the brief period i played this mod a few years ago, but no idea if its changed.

Glad you are enjoying it! My general impression is that the barbs were turned down overall from where they used to be, but they are absolutely something you have to keep in mind for each civ - the first time you play each civ it can be worth just testing out where and which barbs spawn so you can respond adequately next time.