Kalin

Put it this way, a single catapult is usually enough to take out a wandering troll party (sometimes with 300+ rating). They are certainly much much stronger than 4 Observers (heh). Although since they are pretty cheap to maintain (comparing to squads and companies), you might as well put two in a city (once you have the resources) just in case you get unlucky and roll low. The only real problem with catapults is they need a lot of mats (and some iron), so you have to be prepared ahead either

[quote who="cwg009" reply="119" id="2771600"] I think if they implemented the steep gold maintenace costs you suggest (which, don't get me wrong, I think would probably work fine for mid to late game), they probably have to code it so everyone is guaranteed to get a gold mine at their starting location. Or they could do some sort of inflation mechanic for the maintenance costs as I previously mentioned. Perhaps even better, they could implement something like taxes, which

You can use the catapult strategy while building your own cities as well. They make excellent defenders in particular because of their slow map movement (which is why organize is so extra cheesy with that strategy), They are also very easy and quick to get comparing to most of your other units, since you have to research not only the needed weapons, but also party/squads/company and experienced/veteran/elite. The only reason you don't want to expand too early is to get the maximum effect out

Your work is nice, but I wanted to point out 3 problems: 1: Time. There are tons of characters in game, not just sovereigns, but champions, basic units, etc. If you're talking about detail painted info cards that takes 1 hour tops, I will point out that I can generate the card in .05 seconds on unit creation. 2. Resource. This is two fold, First is Stardock's art department own ability to develop many types of textures for skins. Even if you put i

[quote who="eHandel" reply="115" id="2771409"] Quoting Hadberz, reply 111 One more "IF" for the game. Four patches and two hotfixes and still there are tons of "IFs". The problem is the main game designer knows the theory but lacks practical understanding about how this game exactly should be made. The result so far - tedious (and boring)micromanagement and lack of most obvious interface options. So don't hold your breath for "good city management screen". &nb

I think we should try to focus on the basic mechanic before adding tons of stuff to it, so I'll just stick to these: At the moment the biggest problem in my mind is the 1D roll on defense. As it is, you'll never be able to have a melee champion or sovereign. The reason is simple, one bad roll = dead (especially since ATK is many times more than HP in most cases). Defense has to either be 100% straight reduction, or a % of damage mitigation, or both, one value for straig

I'm not sure what you mean Raven, I was talking about the base game, with a royal sovereign and a kingdom faction using pubs and inn, getting to level 4 isn't hard at all (the palace and great theater makes getting at least 2 level 5 cities very easy). It's true that I've been trying various mods to see if it helps, but I wasn't referencing those tests at all. As mentioned earlier, the reason I end up building outposts inside my ZOC is mainly to build a study to beat th

This is a rather well known and acknowledged problem, there are actually a lot of the topics regarding this but they got pushed down a few pages (or are in the subforums). Apparently SD is going to have the AI protect their Sovereign more (only fight if it has a massive advantage) in the next patch, so I guess everyone is just waiting for it to see how much it improves. Not sure if they have settled on a solution to the empire destruction, but last I checked, they are considering using the dy

[quote who="cwg009" reply="79" id="2770596"] Good post overall, but I disagree with you about increasing influence generated by cities. The whole reason I like this idea is precisely because it does allow choice: players who don't want to spam cities no longer need to, players who do want to spam cities still can. Right now I have no choice, I have to spam level 1 cities to fill in the gaps between my big cities that actually have resource nodes. I do not want to be forced to do this. Bu

WARNING: doing this may spoil the game for you, but if you want tips, here ya go: Start with a kingdom faction (easier to start), use a sovereign with organized (for extra cheese), make sure to build your capital near a tech library. Don't try expand like crazy and leave your cities practically undefended, just stick around your main city, build up your city and a few conscript (upgraded peasants with staves) just to get everyone off your back for having no military. Th

Making a city cost 1 food isn't going to stop city spamming. First of all, there's the problem of the capital city, which will starve as soon as you found it. Secondly, the way caravans work right now, making a city and sending a caravan to your highest food city will more than make up the 1 lost food. You'll usually gain 2-3 even, even more as you expand further outwards. Essentially, if you make cities use more food, people will have to build even more cities and use those caravans to make

I've been experimenting with the new resource idea myself. Right now I'm trying it out on Elementium, basically the idea is to have the sovereign generate Elementium at a set rate, making them extra valuable, and Elementium resource units more viable. I'm running some tests to check if their children will end up generating said resources. If everything works out, I'll add Elementium to pioneer cost to see if it will do the trick. Will keep you all posted. Quick update:

There's still code in the game setting for how much essence founding a city would cost. I haven't played with it much though, with the way the AI builds cities, their sovereign will be an empty shell real quick.

I don't think anyone has a problem with a couple of cities "out in the wild" (not next to resources), I certainly don't. The problem is when you're putting up lvl1 cities EVERYWHERE including inside your own influence, because each one gives +1 tech, arcane, mats, gildar and generates a caravan that gives bonus to food. At that point you have a ton of tiny little outpost that does basically nothing except making the empire tree a complete mess. Edit: if you are smart ab

[quote who="Gnilbert" reply="126" id="2770007"] - Create a (non-spell) ability for a (non-sovereign) unit that can be used on the strategic map. An example would be the ability Scout: Until cancelled, target applies movement speed as a bonus to line of sight, but movement speed is set to 0 (or 1, maybe). The best part here would be the GameModifier that actually gives the ability to the unit for overland use. [/quote] Just thr

As mentioned earlier, increasing pop requirement on pioneers hurts the AI pretty badly. Their settlement won't be able to grow fast enough to match, as a result, certain factions (kingdom with royalty sovereign) will just steam roll the others. Edit: As for your suggestion PiersAS, on a typical kingdom capital, if you research the first 2 adventuring tech immediately before expanding, you'll have 12 food. Unless you plan to make caravans completely useless or just remov

The problem with adding food cost to city hubs is that your first city will kill you. In other words, you'll starve as soon as you found your capital. Even if you were to fix this somehow with a capital bonus, you'll only create a situation where it's tough at the start. After the first few cities, you'll still have the city spam situation due to trade caravan producing food. If you make a city, then make a caravan that gives a 30% food bonus to your capital (that might have 12+ base food pro

@ Yellowstone_1872: I haven't played with calculate all that much, but the expression SHOULD look something like this (Note that this hasn't been tested): Unit AdjustUnitStat UnitStat_HitPoints <Calculat

That's pretty creative... personally I just stick (G), (A), and (T) at the end of my city name upon foundation. I found that I had to come up with a list of names that I always use just to remember where which city was as well, random names becomes very hard to keep track of for some reason. Cities that I capture all has their old empire name as well, as in: Magnar (G) and Periden (T). I generally only capture one city and kill the sovereign, so it works well enough.

@ Brainsucker: the AI adapts fairly well, they still play okay with modded values, but there are various problems depending on how you mod the values like I mentioned in my earlier post. Most of the issues arises from bad starting location rather than anything else (IE: if they aren't near a tech library and can't research the goldmine techs). But in most cases, those bad start location AI are pretty much doomed anyways. One thing of note is that if you make the pioneer take a long time to tr

Not sure if this is what you're asking for, but atm I'd like to see: 1) The ability to require certain buildings be present or not in a city to build another. For example, a building that can only be build near a palace, or one that cannot be build if a palace is present. Basically, a Building and a not version of that. 2) A tag that makes certain buildings undemolishable. The most obvious bein

Wow that's some seriously long posts Jingseng, I practically forgot your first after the 2nd one. In anycase, I'll make some comments, which, might or might not respond to either posts: The AI in GalCiv2 didn't start the way everyone remembers of it now. There wasn't all that different "feel" or "strategy" for each race. It was, however, pretty brutal and gave first timers a hard time on normal, and managed to play the game decently. But as time went on, and players fig

I also tried much higher values, and here's my experience so far: If you make materials anymore than 20, the AI won't build pioneers at all, this is apparently due to how the AI decides what units to build, it is based on material and metal cost, and the most "expensive" units will only cost 20 material/metal. This is actually an okay setup if you like to play on tiny maps, as it will end up being a battle of capital cities most of the time. At 20

If you're talking about the basic settings in CoreAIDef.xml I've glanced through those (no major test runs with modded values yet though). It seems to control what the AI research, builds, their relations and some tactical combat priorities. I didn't find anything about monster hunting, or how to influence how they go about doing it to "train" their units, and to be honest I don't expect to. From what I can observe from my game experiences, the AI will just gather the closest available force

I've been playing with this idea with mods to give heroes (and sov) 3 and 5 points to use on level up. Then I use 1 or 2 points in Con for every level. This seems to mimic what you guys are suggesting. I've only done a couple of trial runs so far, however, from my experience, it is rather discouraging. First of all, there's still no reason to make a melee hero, defense is just too random, so if you roll low, you'll still die when hit by a orge (or w/e else endgame beast