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Super Jay Mann
Nov 6, 2008

Well A and B are now tied at 10, so I guess I can't quite call it yet. C is also at 6 so it's not quite out of it yet!

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Zathril
Nov 12, 2011
C

megane
Jun 20, 2008



B. Expaaaand

Aerdan
Apr 14, 2012

Not Dennis NEDry
B seems like a good bet.

Rockopolis
Dec 21, 2012

I MAKE FUN OF QUEER STORYGAMES BECAUSE I HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO WITH MY LIFE THAN MAKE OTHER PEOPLE CRY

I can't understand these kinds of games, and not getting it bugs me almost as much as me being weird
C Nomads

100 HOGS AGREE
Oct 13, 2007
Grimey Drawer
C I heard there were dogs.

OOrochi
Jan 19, 2017

On my honor as the Dawnspear.
Let's go C because dogs are great

Super Jay Mann
Nov 6, 2008

Voting seems to have settled so I'll call it now, and with 12 votes Expansive will be our first trait. Although Nomad made a late push to tie with Creative in the end.

Don't worry, we'll have plenty of traits to vote on before this game finishes.

Pvt.Scott
Feb 16, 2007

What God wants, God gets, God help us all
Welp, pack it in boys. We’re Homo NoDoggo now, doomed to the ash heap of history like Neanderthal.

Ralepozozaxe
Sep 6, 2010

A Veritable Smorgasbord!
I just missed the vote but would’ve voted expansive so it all works out.

really queer Christmas
Apr 22, 2014

God I haven't played this mod in years. I always had a certain level of...fun with it, despite its clear and many flaws.

Gonna follow this lp to the end, though I'm unsure if this lp will outlive the forums :v:

Pvt.Scott
Feb 16, 2007

What God wants, God gets, God help us all
Omega Child Crew needs to be a gang tag.

Jossar
Apr 2, 2018

Current status: Angry about subs :argh:
Status report on the run this LP inspired me to try:

The giant barbarian doomstacks eventually wind down, but i'm uncertain as to whether there's an actual variable in play decreasing their numbers after a certain time point or I just expanded hard enough to decrease their spawn zones...

And expand I have, as I now basically control the entirety of the world that I can actually reach. This is mostly because I got a capitol snipe on the weakest player back in the Prehistoric, which let me catch up to my opponents' tech advantage in Ancient and then wipe out everyone on my continent by Classical. I'm aware of two other civilizations who comprise the other 25% of the world, but I cannot reach them as they lie across the ocean and I only just reached the Medieval Era. The tech for ocean-faring boats is one of the latest ones on the medieval tech tree, one of the many fun facts about boats that i'm sure Super Jay Mann will describe in "loving" detail as boats become relevant. But for now i'm just going to be spending the next 100 turns (probably more than that) waiting to get the ability to steamroll the last parts of the earth map. It has pretty much become a waiting game at this point, with the occasional poke to my cities to make sure that they aren't doing anything too stupid.

The main thing i'm curious about is if the Caveman2Cosmos AI will be able to actually provide a decent, but not overbearing challenge on Immortal. In my experiences with the game, the AI either walks over you from its bonuses or you leverage human ingenuity to get a slight advantage which then explodes into you owning the entirety of the map. Then again, i'm not a very good player so maybe the dynamics are different at the most challenging difficulty settings.

Super Jay Mann
Nov 6, 2008

C2C Gameplay Chapter 3: There's Something Out There Hunting Us And It Ain't No Jaguar



So in-between this update and last I updated the game to a later SVN version, SVN build 10438. Mostly a lot of tweaks and bug fixes that aren't relevant to us now, but regardless, whenever the mod changes the game gives us the option of recalculating modifiers on the fly. This is pretty convenient and allows us to instantly see any effects that updating the version might have for us.



Oh. We somehow lost a whole 2 science per turn in the version transition. That's pretty inconvenient.





So one of the new SVN commits tweaked a whole bunch of Civics and the starting Civics were among those changed, now making the start even slower than before. Some of the changes are actually minor buffs but these two in particular are pretty nasty, giving us an additional -15% science and culture. Good thing I'm already on my way to Oral Tradition to deal with the bigger problem of the two.



Speaking of, Oral Tradition gives us access to a new civic, and new unit, and ways to raise education which we'll certainly need.



On a more positive note, with Expansive and a couple other unseen Civics changes we've finally eliminated excess unhealthiness and can finally grow! Any food we get from hunting will now no longer be lost and will contribute to the increasing food box. As another plus, as I get a proper food income I'll be able to build units much faster since they're currently built with food in the same way workers and settlers are in Civ 4. Though we don't grow during this time.

We get our next trait choice at 1600 national culture, which is closer than you might think. So don't worry too much if your choice didn't go through this time, we'll have a second trait to vote in before too long.



Forgot to mention last update, but one of the available promotions unlocked at level 3 is Might I, which increases the base strength of any of your combat units by 1. This is a pretty massive upgrade this early in the game and is a must-get when you can manage. Exploring and hunting units get experience very quickly because they're Solo(1) group units and are always killing animals, so they'll gain XP very quickly. More barbarian-centric units like my combined Brute gain experience more slowly and don't kill as many units, so it could be a while before I have the chance to give it to him. Also note that this increases base strength. My Wanderer only goes from 0.66 to 1.33 strength because it only has a maximum of 66 HP, which modifies its base strength value accordingly.



And here's another feature that I didn't really look at too closely until I started this LP. The Build-Up system, represented by the red and blue shield, is essentially customized Fortification. It's quite an interesting system and one I regret not looking more closely at sooner.




When selected, instead of gaining the normal 5-25% fortification bonus, you can select from among a list of promotion lines that the unit in question will progress through over several turns, up to five levels if available. For now, most build-up promotions are limited to only one, maybe two levels because of a lack of tech so are only marginally useful. But as you can see, certain units with certain Sub Combat Types have access to some rather unique Build-Up options. Crime Fighting only has one level right now, but that one level instantly provides an additional -1 crime per turn to the city tile for a total of -3. Higher level versions provide even more crime reduction as the tooltip says.

The blue shield will automatically choose an appropriate build-up promotion for the unit in question in case you don't want to choose one yourself.



Naturally, there's a promotion for healer units too, Disease Control, that does the same thing for Disease reduction.

Build-up promotions last until the unit acts again, same as regular fortification, so they should only be seen as a tool to use on idle units that you want defending or just hanging out at home like the Law Enforcement and Healer units. I'll try to keep up on available Build-up options as they become available and useful as there's quite a few interesting ones out there. That Inspections promotion line seems pretty intriguing for example...



With the Wise Woman and Watcher up Disease and Crime are being reduced to manageable levels. The crime building I had is already gone and the Common Cold will soon be eradicated as well. Now if only my people weren't still blithering morons.




I take opportunities to kill off stray barbarians when I can. For the experience sure, but I'm also seeking something else.



Hunting for food can be quite profitable if we find the right animals. 5 food and 2 hammers is nothing to sneeze at and every little bit counts, especially in a Marathon game.



I find a tribal village! This many turns into the game! Guess none of the AI scouting units managed to get this far before getting killed by something.





:aaaaa: Well this is an amazing get. Persistence Hunting is an absolutely crucial tech and exactly what I was going to research next after Oral Tradition. It gives access to our first proper dedicated hunting unit, the Chaser, and the first of a very important promotion line, Hunter. Not having to use a bunch of turns to get this will speed things up quite a bit.



Oral Tradition comes in soon afterwards. Story Tellers are kind of similar to Watchers and Wise Women in that they raise Education in the city they're stationed in. That's not necessarily their primary use though, as in conjunction with other buildings they can build unique special buildings that can provide interesting bonuses.



For now though, we get the Civic Oral Tradition, which turns the -10% science malus to a 5% bonus and gives +3 education per turn, a really important bonus to get rid of that silly building that's been plaguing our yields since the beginning of the game.



Tracking is a bit expensive even with our better science, but it's also an important tech as it gives us the hunting unit we'll be using for the foreseeable future, the Tracker. It also gives us another level of Hunter among other useful things.



My borders also finally expand! Now the barley and the apples are available for improving whenever I so desire. I also built a Gatherer at one point to finish the deer camp since I'm working it now rather than the horse for the extra food.



Queueing up a Knowledge Inheritance while I wait for Tracking to finish. The science and culture are welcome, but the education is really important and the building itself is a prerequisite to another very important building in the near future.



The AI generates a Great Hunter, which spawns using the same great person pool as a normal Great General. I believe killing more animals increases your odds of getting a hunter as opposed to a general, though I'm not 100% sure on that.



We ourselves are about halfway to getting a military great person ourselves. Also the three AIs we've met get to 160 culture at the same time and pick their first traits. Not worth worrying about for now as we're still a long way from meaningful AI interation.



Hey, a useful event for once.



After 115 turns, our first Chaser finally subdues our first animal. Subduing animals is a very, very important part of the early game, arguably THE most important part. It forms the very backbone of our early game economy, and I'm not talking about the food and hammers here.

So first off, subduing an animal puts it under your control. Subdued animals are weak and have no real use in combat at all and are easy pickings for any other predators who want to snack on it. So when you capture an animal you have to slowly trudge it back towards your capital so it can be useful there, either escorting it with a unit or hoping it survives the trip.



Or you can select the Teleport Hunting Rewards option at the start of the game like I did and all subdued animals will immediately go to your nearest city no matter what. Now, I know you may think this is unbalanced or trivializes an important part of the game or something like that. I'll have you know that I have three very important and logical reasons that form my rationale for turning this option on and not having to manually send all my subdued animals home one by one hoping they don't randomly die to a jaguar.

1) Screw
2) That
3) Noise

I hope I have made a convincing argument in my favor. Let's continue.



In a city, animals have the ability to construct a number of unique special buildings that potentially have very wide-ranging effects, but they all universally can build what are called Myths. Myths are stories and tales based on animals brought back from hunting expeditions that inspire awe and wonder in our ignorant populace, making them more aware and more curious about their surroundings and the way the world works. Or in Civ terms, they each give one base science. There is an associated myth with almost every animal, and each of those myths provides an additional science, so getting a bunch of hunting units out and trying to subdue as many different types of animals as possible is vital to getting any sort of tech pace going, as our cities are not going to be growing very big in the Prehistoric Era. And even though myths eventually become obsolete when Writing is researched, they will at that point provide culture to the city which is always welcome.



Some animals also give the option of building more generalized myth buildings, many of which were unlocked with Oral Tradition. These myths also initially give 1 science but may have other effects down the line. In this case, it will eventually provide education instead of culture.



If you subdue an animal and have already built all the special buildings you want from it, you can always expend them for a tiny burst of culture and science.



On another note, with Oral Tradition we're already almost past the threshold for getting rid of Education(Unaware) and fixing our science further.



An example of one of the other unique buildings we can make with animals. The Master Hunter gives us some additional health from deer and provides 3 experience points to all new Hunter units, aka our Chasers/Trackers.



With the Unaware building gone, our science is finally starting to look up for a change :woop:



Tracking finally comes in. Aside from the aforementioned Trackers, we can also build Scouts, which are actually classified as Explorer units like Wanderers, as opposed to Hunters like Chasers and Trackers. They move through terrain easier and have more HP than Trackers, but can't attack so I honestly don't see the need to build any. They're an option for exploration though if you think you need it.

We also gain the ability to Make a Trail, the precursor to a road, so we can now connect our resources properly with Gatherers. We also get the Trails building, a not-confusingly-named-at-all part of a line of buildings I like to call "trade buildings". More on that in a later update.



Our initial Chaser comes back to our borders and upgrades to a Tracker at minor cost since I believe they both actually cost the same amount of hammers. Or because they're Solo(1) units, not entirely sure yet.

Either way, it is now much stronger and easily able to stand up to most any small animal we'll find out in the wild. Hunting is about to finally kick into high gear.



Tool Making makes our Gatherers slightly faster and unlocks the next unit in the basic Melee line, the Clubman. At a base strength of 2, it'll prove to be a pretty big upgrade for our current combined Brute.



A subdued parrot allows us to build Myth - Sky to go along with Myth - Earth. From here on out I won't be pointing out individual occurrences of myth building because there are a lot of them and I'll be subduing different animals constantly throughout these updates. Just take note of how my science per turn increases as the game progresses.



Not sure if it's Persistence Hunting or Tracking that unlocks this event, but it shows up from time to time just to give us 8 free food in our city for no reason. I ain't complaining.



Along with the Clubman there are a couple buildings not worth talking about and a peculiar building denoted by a purple star. Wonder what that could be.



Hard-Hammer Percussion is quite an important tech. Not only does it give access to one of the most important Prehistoric buildings and the ability to build the precursor to the mine improvement, both named Stone Tools Workshop just to be confusing, but it provides our next wave of map resource reveals. Copper, Marble, Obsidian, and Stone allow for some good unique options later on, but I'm banking on Stone in particular being in my capital.



Unfortunately, even Trackers have trouble standing up to the stronger barbarians lurking about.



Our Education is starting to rise fairly high, and as a result our capital has build the Education (Intuitive) building. It has more or less the opposite effect as Unaware, giving us slight bonuses to all our yields and reducing crime and disease by a minor amount. Our people aren't stupid anymore, yay!

Unfortunately, even good buildings like this won't be without their drawbacks sometimes. Apparently knowing more about the world around you makes you slightly less keen on pumping out babies somehow, so an educated Prehistoric populace requires more food to grow to the next population.



A quick demonstration of our hunting ramping up, to show how much free yields we can get just by killing things in the wilderness.



Techs start coming in quickly as our science increases. Let's see if we've gotten lucky!



Well the good news is we have Copper and Marble nearby. Those will be quite handy down the line. Sadly, nothing in our capital.

I was hoping for stone because having stone in our cap would allow us to build our first Culture wonder, Culture (Neanderthal). I mentioned the Neanderthal Wanderer a while ago and you may have noticed several similar unit icons/names in the tech windows as we've unlocked military units. Building Culture (Neanderthal) would have given us the Neanderthal unique resource, which would have allowed us to build all of those Neanderthal units ourselves in lieu of the regular ones. As Neanderthal units have a base strength 1 higher than their normal counterparts, it would be have very helpful military bonus and an early demonstration of the Culture building system, but c'est la vie I suppose.

We've unlocked a number of other Culture wonders so far but they're either required resources we don't have or initial culture regions besides the Culture (Middle East) we're saddled with right now. Maybe one of our opponents will be able to build one themselves too though, spoiler alert, they haven't so far as of this writing.



Weaving doesn't do a drat thing.



It's quite annoying when your attempts to explore for animals get blocked by strong barbarians. We must tread carefully as our hunters are very valuable units, especially as they promote.



It took a couple turns cause my Brute was out of position, but now I can promote it. Not quite as cheap as the Chaser->Tracker upgrade sadly.



And now for something completely different. I can use this time to backfill some buildings (there are quite a lot of them) but I decided to finally try going for a real wonder for the first time. This one is a bit different though. Having a purple star on it designates the wonder as a Group Wonder. Group Wonders are exactly the same as a normal World Wonder except that they are part of a set (in this case, Legendary Landscapes) and a player is only allowed to build ONE wonder in any given Group Wonder set. This means that if I were to build this wonder, any other wonders that are a part of Legendary Landscapes would no longer be available to me. This ensures that, assuming there aren't too many players, everyone will have access to at least one wonder in each set, though possibly not the one you want. Not to mention that some wonders might not be buildable anyway due to other resource or terrain requirements.

LL Meadowcroft Rockshelter provides a pretty massive boost to food, hammers, and gold, like the other wonders in this group, but also provides +3 Tourism a turn, something that doesn't matter at all until way later in the game so we'll hold off on talking about that for a while yet. Building it is going to take a while though, even for Marathon.



We gain enough experience to acquire our very first great person, Wong How Man the Great Hunter, complete with snazzy photo.



Great Hunters can instantly be promoted to Master Trackers for free, an extremely powerful hunting unit that gets a unique promotion line that makes subduing even easier, 3 movement, and the ability to attack multiple times a turn. It's quite a useful unit to have and would make hunting for bigger game much easier and less risky, along with being able to survive any sort of barbarian incursion.



But that's for a later time. Instead we'll have Mr. How Man stay at home and teach our aspiring populace the best way to turn a deer into delicious venison chops. +5 food is, naturally, a massive boost that will make growing significantly faster.



59 turns is quite fast considering I'm not even working a food tile and I'll be getting plenty of extra food from hunting regardless. Working the horse will get us the wonder slightly faster, as every little bit counts.



Oh right, this was a thing. Yawn.



It is a prerequisite though, for a tech that is useful. Shelter Building provides a ton of new additional Housing options and is an important prerequisite for a number of buildings scattered elsewhere on the tech tree. The Childcare Hut I meantioned near the end of the last update needed this to be built, for example.



A barbarian Tracker creeps up in our lands. It isn't too much of a threat and doesn't really do much besides hang around my borders and annoy me, but as my Clubman is out of position looking for other barbarians to kill it'll take a while to dislodge it unless I quick build some more units, which is not happening in the middle of wonder building.



Bit of a scary moment, as a Legendary Landscapes wonder is built elsewhere, but not the one we're currently working on.



The Bug Catcher is a building I can build normally in my city, but I also have the option of using a subdued bug like this one to get it without having to invest any hammers. Useful enough.



Barb Tracker dies to my Clubman with no fanfare. You might be wondering why my Clubman was even so far down south and why I'm trying to aggressively hunt Barbarians anyway instead of just ignoring them and defending at home. Well dear hypothetical reader, that is indeed a very good question. I'll get back to you on that.



As I said before, Gatherers don't die when constructing road-type improvements, so I've been taking the opportunity to hook up my Deer and Horse before going to improve the Barley. Another thing I didn't mention before is that worker units can actually gain experience now and get special promotions that speed up their ability to improve on certain terrains, among other effects. Not really relevant on a unit that kills itself after improving almost anything anyway, but useful to know now nonetheless.



Incidentally, the Abatis and Fortified Cave improvements are prototype fort tiles. So useless to us right now.



Shelter Building gives us the Housing (Lean-Tos) special building by default, which you notice doesn't actually replace our Tree Hollows. Cities can and will have multiple lines of Housing buildings with unique upgrade paths. Lean-Tos doesn't do anything useful though and in fact hinders us by adding an additional unhealthiness, though we have enough spare healthy by this point that it doesn't matter. Later on one we get certain resources we'll be able to upgrade the Lean-Tos housing into something that's actually useful.




Controlled Fire comes and goes. It has some interesting buildings, including a National Wonder that provides a lot of culture and a free golden age. I'll be keeping this one in my back pocket, though not forever since it obsoletes pretty quickly in relative terms.



After Controlled Fire comes Cooking, which unlocks several useful buildings and resources for later down the line and instantly provides additional healthiness. I really should be building this and other stuff right now but I'm still in the middle of building the wonder. Not to worry though, it's about halfway done and the boost it'll provide to our economy will more than make up the time we spent building it down the line, we just have to hope that--



:suicide:

----------------------

NEXT TIME: 200 hammers down the drain! But maybe it's not all bad. Also: More animals to inspire wonder in our citizens, and we finally get more people! In more than one sense anyway...

Radio Free Kobold
Aug 11, 2012

"Federal regulations mandate that at least 30% of our content must promote Reptilian or Draconic culture. This is DJ Scratch N' Sniff with the latest mermaid screeching on KBLD..."




:rip:

ssmagus
Apr 2, 2010
Assmagus, LPer ass-traordinaire

Super Jay Mann posted:

The AI generates a Great Hunter, which spawns using the same great person pool as a normal Great General. I believe killing more animals increases your odds of getting a hunter as opposed to a general, though I'm not 100% sure on that.

Hover over the great general bar to find out how much you have of each, the highest amount of hunter/general/admiral when the bar is full is what spawns.

General Revil
Sep 30, 2014

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Ah, wondersniping.

oystertoadfish
Jun 17, 2003

lol they really went all out looking for historically great hunters, huh. our guy seems awesome tho

you said there's two different buildings with the same name, right? I'm assuming the mod team lost track of what was even going on in their own mod, which is a great sign for what lies ahead

Super Jay Mann
Nov 6, 2008

oystertoadfish posted:

lol they really went all out looking for historically great hunters, huh. our guy seems awesome tho

you said there's two different buildings with the same name, right? I'm assuming the mod team lost track of what was even going on in their own mod, which is a great sign for what lies ahead

No no, a building and an improvement both with the same name. There's a Stone Tools Workshop building which I'll get into next time and a Stone Tools Workshop improvement that improves any hill for 1 hammer and the current mining resources we can see and upgrades to a mine.

This is definitely not the last time this will happen.

Jossar
Apr 2, 2018

Current status: Angry about subs :argh:
EDIT: Beaten to the explanation by the actual person with game expertise.

Some actually "useful" content though: Part of the reason why they don't change the name is that there's other buildings dealing with stone tool production. So if you called the city one a Flintknapping Site, that would leave people confused with the similarly named building that shows up if you have Flint as a resource.

Jossar fucked around with this message at 06:13 on Feb 16, 2019

oystertoadfish
Jun 17, 2003

yeah I have to admit I can't keep track of all this poo poo. which is great! thanks y'all

Super Jay Mann
Nov 6, 2008

ssmagus posted:

Hover over the great general bar to find out how much you have of each, the highest amount of hunter/general/admiral when the bar is full is what spawns.

Yeah I know that much, it's just me wondering if experience from killing animals and experience from killing barbs is what determines the split, and additionally if it's the highest amount that spawns or if those are just the odds of each great person type spawning. The latter would be consistent with how the civilian great people are done in Civ 4 so that's what I generally assumed.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
Missed opportunity to reference the mighty hunter Nimrod.

Miliardo
Dec 3, 2014

This has been one the most enjoyable rabbit holes to fall into. Keep on keepin' on, it's a great read. In case you weren't considering it, make sure this gets to the lparchive once it's concluded. It already feels like it deserves to be remembered, and we're still in prehistory.

I remember, back when I played Civ4, I went to war with more than just one opponent for sniping a wonder that was about to be finished. If the opportunity arises, I support our uneducated masses taking up arms :black101:

Cerebral Bore
Apr 21, 2010


Fun Shoe

I don't know anything about this mod, but please tell me that Moon Bears are actual bears from space that pop up in the late game.

Prav
Oct 29, 2011

sorry but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Bear

although with this mod it's hard to be sure

Lucky Guy
Jan 24, 2013

TY for no bm

ssmagus posted:

Hover over the great general bar to find out how much you have of each, the highest amount of hunter/general/admiral when the bar is full is what spawns.

I think that it's the unit type that does the fighting it what generates the points, not the target, so a hunter will always generate hunter points if they're fighting a non-animal, and regular combat units will generate great general points even if they're killing animals.

Super Jay Mann
Nov 6, 2008

I have everything ready for the next update I just need to finish writing it. The new Civ 6 expansion is making that somewhat difficult though sadly :sweatdrop:

Lucky Guy posted:

I think that it's the unit type that does the fighting it what generates the points, not the target, so a hunter will always generate hunter points if they're fighting a non-animal, and regular combat units will generate great general points even if they're killing animals.

Aha, that's probably it. I wasn't sure cause in my test game my first military GP was overwhelmingly weighted towards a general even though I had mostly been killing animals, that's probably because I had been using cheap stone throwers to kill a bunch of animals before I got to Chasers/Trackers.

Also I missed this post.

Jossar posted:

Status report on the run this LP inspired me to try:

The giant barbarian doomstacks eventually wind down, but i'm uncertain as to whether there's an actual variable in play decreasing their numbers after a certain time point or I just expanded hard enough to decrease their spawn zones...

And expand I have, as I now basically control the entirety of the world that I can actually reach. This is mostly because I got a capitol snipe on the weakest player back in the Prehistoric, which let me catch up to my opponents' tech advantage in Ancient and then wipe out everyone on my continent by Classical. I'm aware of two other civilizations who comprise the other 25% of the world, but I cannot reach them as they lie across the ocean and I only just reached the Medieval Era. The tech for ocean-faring boats is one of the latest ones on the medieval tech tree, one of the many fun facts about boats that i'm sure Super Jay Mann will describe in "loving" detail as boats become relevant. But for now i'm just going to be spending the next 100 turns (probably more than that) waiting to get the ability to steamroll the last parts of the earth map. It has pretty much become a waiting game at this point, with the occasional poke to my cities to make sure that they aren't doing anything too stupid.

The main thing i'm curious about is if the Caveman2Cosmos AI will be able to actually provide a decent, but not overbearing challenge on Immortal. In my experiences with the game, the AI either walks over you from its bonuses or you leverage human ingenuity to get a slight advantage which then explodes into you owning the entirety of the map. Then again, i'm not a very good player so maybe the dynamics are different at the most challenging difficulty settings.

Yeah I'm quite worried about how the AI will pan out over the course of the game. There will be a point where the AI will inevitably just not matter anymore for a specific reason, but I'd rather they at least pose some sort of challenge before that. I don't mind doing a "solitaire sandbox" LP as there's more than enough content to chew on for that but I'd like to get into the nitty gritty of how :hist101: works in this game.

Banemaster
Mar 31, 2010

Super Jay Mann posted:

I have everything ready for the next update I just need to finish writing it. The new Civ 6 expansion is making that somewhat difficult though sadly :sweatdrop:

I tried to play this mod again lately (earlier attempt was couple years back) but Civ 4 being wonky and this mod being super wonky, I noticed that I was not having fun. So I dropped it for much better Civ 6.

Kinda frustrating as I find the idea of this mod very enticing but it is just so much of layers of bullshit on top of more bullshit that I just can't handle it.

Super Jay Mann
Nov 6, 2008

C2C Gameplay Chapter 4: A Hunter From The Darkest Wild, Makes You Feel Just Like A Child



So to recap, someone built LL Meadowcroft Rockshelter before us, so all 200 or so of those invested hammers become gold. This isn't the worst result in the world honestly, cause we've been running a deficit anyway and at least it happened halfway through the build instead of 99% in or something like that. Additionally, as I explained before, we'll have plenty of other opportunities to get a wonder in this particular set since each player can only have one anyway.



Another bit of bad news though, our initial built Wanderer, a highly promoted pseudo-hunter by this point, finally succumbed to a bad roll against an aggressive predator. Wanderer 1 will be immortalized as a hero in legends passed down generation to generation. :patriot:



And after some searching, I finally find what I've been hunting for this whole time. You see, animals are not the only types of units that can be captured. Killing non-animal units in battles also has a small chance of converting that unit into a Captive - Military, which is a civilian unit that can be used for a number of different things when brought back to your home land. Acquiring captives is a strong way to potentially bolster your economy or military in the future.

Barbarian units like Neanderthals can also capture units this way, so this captive likely came from this wanderer killing an AI unit nearby recently. I haven't created any captives with my kills yet, but seeing captives in the wild like this is a welcome sight too. The AI is also incredibly bad at protecting said captives, so picking it off should be easy-peasy.



Case-in-point.

Sadly, unlike animals, there is no option for teleporting captives, so I'm going to have to escort this lad home the old fashioned way.



The long, long old-fashioned way. :v:

And this is why Teleport Hunting Rewards is on.



Cooking finishes. We also have one of the first examples of a mass of buildings becoming obsolete, something that will become a problem later on if you're not paying attention. Other than that, we get the ability to manufacture Bone, Lard, and Raw Meat with some buildings and is also one of the first examples of a resource supply chain, where you'll need a bunch of successive manufactured resources (usually starting with various map resources) to enable buildings with more advanced effects. For example, Raw Meat is acquired via the Butchery, a building that requires a Slaughterhouse. The Slaughterhouse, in turn, requires either Carcass, Pelts, or Poultry to be built, and each of those resources are acquired from the processing of various animal bonuses like deer, cow, furs, chicken, etc. Raw Meat itself enables a lot of buildings on its own that we'll see later down the line, but importantly is not the only manufactured resource we can use for many of them. This highlights the flexibility of how manufactured resources are designed in this mod. There are a lot of resource requirements for a number of buildings, but there are also tons of options in how you acquire those resources, so in general you're never left completely out of the running in creating certain powerful building chains. It's still something that's tough to keep track of, so I'll do my best to do so.



A quick example of what I'm talking about is the Burger Joint, something way down the line in the tech tree. It requires a source of Raw Meat and Bread in order to be built, and additionally provides up to a 4% bonus multiplier for the city's gold if you also have access to Potatoes, Salt, Cheese, and Seasoning. 4% is not a huge bonus, but there are a ton of buildings of this nature and those percentage bonuses will stack up very quickly if you have a good base of resources, manufactured or otherwise, to work from.



Speaking of bread, Ground Stone is the first step to acquiring some. Given what I just explained, the purpose of all these buildings should be self-evident.



Eventually as you continue hunting, you'll subdue animals with which you've already built all available buildings. The city will soon become cluttered with all sorts of various wildlife with no room to go anywhere. Generally they're worth keeping around, as though myths can only be constructed once, most other special animal buildings can be built in all of your cities. Not to mention there are still some still-to-be-unlocked options we'll see down the line...



Yeah, with so many techs in the game, the developers have to reach just a bit deep to find quotes for all of them.



I need to make a correction, the building I was talking about last update is in fact not called the Stone Tools Workshop, it is called the Stone Tool Maker, so the improvement does manage to be uniquely named.

Nevertheless, my statement about there being more instances of buildings and improvements having the same name still stands.

As for the building itself, as you can see, it's quite a doozy. It does little for us now, but as we progress through the Prehistoric Era tech tree it will gain a lot of additional yields, eventually maxing out at +5 production, science, and gold. It will then slowly obsolete those yields as we research more advanced techs in the Ancient/Classical Eras until the building itself obsoletes at Iron Working. This will not be the last building that operates in this fashion, not by a long shot. Naturally, it's important we build this ASAP.



Baskettry is another manufacturing tech, in this case converting various fauna to baskets which are then used in later processes.



Good news everyone! We've finally grown to our second population! And with that growth in population comes additional Disease, Crime, and (loss of) Education per turn, yippee! Always keep track of when you're growing as it's easy to miss when your available property control buildings/units are no longer sufficient for the population you're handling. Incidentally, if I remember correctly Crime is raised by +4 per population, Disease and loss of Education less so.



We finish the barley in our borders which provides an extra +1 food compared with our unimproved apples. Unfortunately, since there are plentiful sources of food from all sorts of buildings and such, the develepors introduced a food waste system wherein producing too much excess food will turn a percentage of that food into waste, probably to ensure that city growth doesn't get out of control later in the game. It's generally not worth worrying about as you still want to grow as quickly as you're allowed to, but in this particular case it means that working the apples provides the same amount of excess food. I'd rather have the hammer than the commerce for the time being, so we'll continue working the apples.



The fauna we're allowed to collect depends on the terrain features available in our city's workable radius, though straw will likely be available no matter where you settle.




Trapping comes and goes. It's not really useful to use at all right now, but it does give access to our first Camp buildings, which are buildings created in the city that provide bonus yields if we have access to those particular animals as resources. More on that later.

As you might guess, this tech in particular focuses on smaller animals.





Hunting also comes and goes. Don't you love me skipping 15 turns of nothing interesting happening? :v:

This tech is more important though. We get no new units we can use (the ones you do see are part of another mechanic I'll get into later, don't worry about it for now) but we do get the Hunter III promotion, which makes fighting and subduing animals easier than ever. With all three Hunter promotions we on average subdue more animals than we actually kill. It also unlocks a line of new camp buildings for bigger animals.



Significantly, we also get our next new Civic. Subsistence gives us a small food multiplier in the capital, and moving off Communalism also swings the gold multiplier from -5% to 1%. Nothing too big, but with how rounding works just getting a non-negative multiplier always helps this early on.



It's time to try again. LL McCallum doesn't have the culture or tourism yields the other wonder had, but it does provide a source of Hide. This is welcome as it means I won't have to worry about acquiring them the intended way until we leave Prehistoric Era.



You always wanna try for subduing big game like this, as the buildings from the bigger animals tend to provide some really nice stuff. This would eventually become a source of ivory for example. I say "would" because I end up killing it instead. :(



I did subdue a deer though, and this introduces us to another set of important buildings, the Herds. Herd buildings can be constructed by certain animals and provide a source of that animal as if we had improved it on the map. Our first example of animal domestication if you will. Besides the animal bonus it also gives us a source of Carcass, which opens up the Butchery buildings I explained above. And all of that comes with a nice +1 to both food and production, a welcome flat bonus as always.

In this case we already had Deer improved, so we don't get anything new out of it besides the Carcass, but we can easily use Herds to gain animal resources that otherwise we couldn't see or get to on our map.




Prehistoric Music was next after Hunting. Percussion and woodwind instruments provide some happiness with certain buildings and there's some culture to be had here, but otherwise nothing important.



Prehistoric Dance actually opens up a lot of interesting options that I want to explore in the near future. Remember that Storyteller unit I talked about a while ago? This is where he becomes handy. But that's for another time.



My Clubman reaches 10XP, which means I could have given it Might I. It's plenty strong for this part of the game anyway though, so I opt instead for Hillsman, a Combat II-enabled promotion that lets me effortlessly move through hill tiles. There's also an equivalent promotion for forest/jungles that I may get. Incidentally, my now-dead Wanderer ended up with both these promotions by the time he was killed.



Subduing a Mouflon gives us access to Herd (Sheep), which provides our first animal resource that we otherwise don't have. This building also comes with a free commerce because they're sheep I guess? :shrug:



I'm not sure this is quite the meaning Taylor Swift was going for there.



Ritualism provides a number of assorted bonuses, such as a new Civic, some Cultures that we can't build, the first actual vanilla Civ 4 building we've seen in this game in the Monument, and uh, Public Stoning? :stare:



Oh hey that captive I captured is finally back home. And the wonder I'm building is getting close to getting done. Would be a real shame if I managed to lose yet another wonder after building it for so long.



The fact that I pointed out both of these things in the same sentence is surely just a coincidence.



Yep, nothing to see here, just keeping our military captive nice and comfortable while we wait for our glorious World Wonder to finish.



Okay, jokes aside, this is one valuable use of the military captive. Among its other uses, we can use it to Hurry Production in the same way we'd use a Great Engineer, though obviously with far less potency. The fact that we could potentially have multiple captives that can be used for production hurrying is quite powerful though, and even having just the one shaves off 8 crucial turns from our wonder build. And since I'm always player 1 in a single-player game, I'm guaranteed to get the wonder at the end of my turn no matter what the AI is doing.



And get it we shall. :woop:



Incidentally, Ritualism also gives us partial access to what was BTS Egypt's unique building, the Obelisk. I mentioned before how stuff like unique buildings and units are now dependent on acquired Cultures, and most of the previous BTS stuff is no exception, but some of them, like the Obelisk, instead become unique religious buildings. In this case, it requires having Kemetism in the city, the old Egyptian religion.



Folklore does nothing for us in and of itself, but it does eliminate the -20% culture penalty from Irreligion, so it's worth going into.




Soft-Hammer Percussion improves the science output of our Stone Tool Maker and... there's that Public Stoning again. :stare:

Well this is getting slightly uncomfortable.



The Subdued Aurochs has the ability to build a Herd(Cow) and give us access to Cow, it just can't do it yet. We'll greatly enjoy a source of cow in the future so it's well worth keeping him around.



Piercing improves our Stone Tool Maker even further and gives us the next upgrade to the Melee unit line, the Spiked Clubman



With Barley available we can build the Barley Gatherer, which gives us our first source of Grain. We could build a Quern after that to convert the Grain into Flour, except that the Quern requires Stone to be built :argh:



Hey, remember when I said that animals would start spawning in larger "Merged" states, making them tankier and a heck of a lot stronger? Yeah, that's starting to happen and it's going to quickly outpace our Trackers' abilities to kill them. Fortunately aurochs aren't aggressive, but as we saw in the combat update, jaguars most certainly are. I'll need to tread carefully from here on out.



Prehistoric Music gave us the ability to use snake-type animals to create Snake Charmers. They aren't anything special compared to myths right now, but the cool thing about many unique buildings like these is that they obsolete way later into the game and thus provide their small boost for longer. All the myths will be useless for anything other than culture by the time we hit Writing.



Piercing also gives us a new Build-Up promotion, Set For Charge, which is an example of a situational Fortification bonus. Each level provides +10% combat strength vs mounted units, so if you're trying to defend against an attack from that type of unit, you're better off fortifying with this promotion rather than using the default fortification. Other Build-Up promotions of this type will show up as we progress.



Our Clubman gets another upgrade and becomes 4.5 strength as a result. I gotta be mindful of upgrade costs of course as I don't have infinite money, no matter what it may look like down the line.



Cultural Identity improves some of the Natural Wonder buildings and gives us an important building in the Elder Council, which I will be building ASAP.



Hattusas grows to size 3, much quicker than getting to size 2. The settled Master Hunter has really been helping out in getting our growth in order even through all the initial penalties to growth we've had to suffer through. The Storyteller's Hut provides a minor bonus to science and Education, but is also the prerequisite to the Elder Council.



Speaking of Master Hunters, we earn another one the same turn we grow. I have no idea what any of these words mean.



No messing around this time, we're taking this guy and throwing him out to the wild. As I said in the last update, Master Hunters are crazy powerful and will be your key weapon against the hordes of merged animals we're going to start to see as the game progresses further. Just make sure this guy doesn't get killed, that would suck massively.

Rudra is kind of a bleh name though. I believe we can do better.



That's more like it :)

Our mighty hunter Boksi ventures to the great unknown, hopefully to not be eaten by tigers.



Looks like Assyria built their Golden Age national wonder. Have to remember I still have that in my back pocket.



Oh hey, what do we have here?

So what I didn't show is that I sent a newly-built Tracker down here for some hunting but it ended up getting killed by that Brute you see in the corner. Since I'm hunting barbarians for captives, I sent my Spiked Clubman there to cleanup and found a captive here, no doubt created when the barb killed my Tracker. Naturally, instead of commending our fallen comrade on surviving the barbarian onslaught, we're gonna pretend we never knew who they were and put them to work in the fields. A fitting end, wouldn't you say?



Along with the other stuff, we can now use certain animals to create Military Traditions, which are buildings that provide small bonuses like extra experience or minor promotions to certain types of units. Nothing exceptional, but worth pointing out.



Theft, in which our humble citizens wake up one morning and ask themselves, in the immortal words of Rocket Raccoon, "but what if I want it more than the person who has it?"



The Elder Council is our first substantial bonus multiplier to science. As you can see, with all the myths and various buildings we've accumulated 10% is actually quite a lot of science. Definitely building this now.




So Theft is a bit of a loaded tech. It enables a new civic, a new building, a new unit, and some build up promotions, but it's not quite as simple as making use of them. No, this ties in to a system that I haven't yet messed with but will experiment with in the coming updates, as it represents a pretty major and interesting set of game mechanics. Expect a full dedicated update at some point for C2C's mechanical implementation of crime, and I'm not just talking about the city property.



Games are fun, games are cool.



The Hunter's Camp is the base building we need to build many of the animal-specific camp buildings I mentioned earlier. Extra food and gold is always welcome of course.



Boksi shows his stuff by subduing two animals on the same turn. Since he has three movement he could in theory make three combats per turn, though terrain restrictions usually won't allow that.



I manage to see more of China's area, that's quite a mountain range he's got. The tile above the ivory seems to be coast now that I look at it, so it appears China does indeed have a coastal capital like I do.



Much like in real life, playing games does absolutely nothing useful or productive and can be safely ignored!



Natural Pigments reveals some more resources, including Dyes, and has a couple of interesting buildings worth looking at too.



My second military captive comes back and here's some options for it. Besides being able to hurry buildings we can convert it to a military unit, though which military unit is something I'm not sure as to how it is determined. It would upgrade into a Stone Thrower right now which is hilariously useless as I can build 5 of those things instantly. It can also upgrade to a worker unit, in this case a Gatherer, also useless. And then there's one other option that's kind of peculiar, I wonder what this is going to--



Oh. Uhhhhhhhhhhh.

:stare:
:stonk:
:suicide:

----------------------

NEXT TIME: No we will not massacre humans and serve their flesh on a platter. We will start to dabble into our nascent criminal underbelly, for fun and profit of course.

I've been talking a lot about acquiring techs, but I haven't really shown how all these techs relate to one another. So here's our current tech tree up to this point:

Captainicus
Feb 22, 2013



I should have known the mod was going there at some point in prehistory :v:

Jalak
Nov 23, 2013
So how long can you keep Cannibalism around until it gets outdated? Does it have any penalties?

Cogliermo
Feb 23, 2017
The mod creators have some really odd ideas about anthropology to say the least. How can Homo Sapiens "discover" gathering? What were they eating before? And fire and cooking shouldn't be on there either, that dates back to at least Homo Erectus, it's the reason we could afford having such puny teeth and jaws.

CountryMatters
Apr 8, 2009

IT KEEPS HAPPENING
I'm loving this LP. Reading about mechanics and strategies is my favourite part of LPs like this, and this mod has so many weird mechanics that it is like crack for me
I'd never actually play it though, good god it looks hellish

Seraphic Neoman
Jul 19, 2011


Are we at least halfway through the prehistoric era ?

Super Jay Mann
Nov 6, 2008

SSNeoman posted:

Are we at least halfway through the prehistoric era ?

:lol: :lol: :lol:

Cerebral Bore
Apr 21, 2010


Fun Shoe

Cogliermo posted:

The mod creators have some really odd ideas about anthropology to say the least. How can Homo Sapiens "discover" gathering? What were they eating before? And fire and cooking shouldn't be on there either, that dates back to at least Homo Erectus, it's the reason we could afford having such puny teeth and jaws.

Or cave dwelling. That doesn't seem like something you'd need to figure out.

Radio Free Kobold
Aug 11, 2012

"Federal regulations mandate that at least 30% of our content must promote Reptilian or Draconic culture. This is DJ Scratch N' Sniff with the latest mermaid screeching on KBLD..."




SSNeoman posted:

Are we at least halfway through the prehistoric era ?

i dont like the sound of that :smith:

The Narrator
Aug 11, 2011

bernie would have won
Consider that our civ only just invented the concepts of games and theft, taking something that is not yours

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Omobono
Feb 19, 2013

That's it! No more hiding in tomato crates! It's time to show that idiota Germany how a real nation fights!

For pasta~! CHARGE!

Cogliermo posted:

The mod creators have some really odd ideas about anthropology to say the least. How can Homo Sapiens "discover" gathering? What were they eating before? And fire and cooking shouldn't be on there either, that dates back to at least Homo Erectus, it's the reason we could afford having such puny teeth and jaws.

What's the current year? Because I'm not fully sure this is Homo Sapiens yet.
(I fully agree with your broader point)

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