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Exept that one tortoise. He seems chill about the whole roving pack of barbarians
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Feb 10, 2019 18:47
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Seems like a good place to ask if anyone has ever tried out the Dune mod for Civ IV and if so is it worth a look? Arrakis Dune Desert Planet I have heard C2C and Fall from Heaven bandied about as the mods for Civ IV to check out, but never Dune.
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Feb 10, 2019 18:55
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It works and it has a kicking rad remix of the whole map/terrain system. I won't speak to how balanced it is but if you want to run through a Dune story it will probably deliver. Do you want to terraform Dune into a forested paradise over the course of dozens of turns: check. Exploit the planets spice for an insane amount of money and wipe out sandworms with bombers: check. Haderach it up with insane stack bonuses: technically but it is a bit underwhelming.
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Feb 10, 2019 21:57
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mitochondritom posted:Seems like a good place to ask if anyone has ever tried out the Dune mod for Civ IV and if so is it worth a look? i have and it's very good. i easily prefer it to ffh2; dune wars is up there with planetfall
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Feb 10, 2019 22:26
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There's also Planetfall, a mod that aims essentially to be a remake of SMAC with Civ 4 mechanics, and it does a pretty dang fine job of it as it is. Shame the mod maker disappeared and it's been abandoned for years now, but the current version is worth a couple playthroughs.
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Feb 10, 2019 22:29
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C2C Gameplay Chapter 2: Lions, Tigers, Bears, Pigeons, Snakes, Crocodiles, Eagles, Jaguars, And Three-Toed Sloths, Oh My Something I really should have done with my initial three Stone Throwers that I completely forgot about until now is taking advantage of Statuses. Statuses are special promotions that you can apply to certain units at-will. This status, Quick March, allows my units an additional movement point and an easier time moving along the terrain, all at a cost of -50% strength, which means they make for great exploring units but much more easily die to stray barbarians or hostile animals. The other promotion is mostly the same, just that the terrain cost and strength lowering effect is slightly less. You can only have one status in effect at a time.  Among other things, Gathering unlocks the Stick Gatherer a building that provides an additional +1 hammer. More importantly though, it's a prerequisite to a bunch of other future buildings. Get used to this, there are a lot of buildings in this mod and a great deal of them just build off each other in various complex ways, to say nothing of when we get to stuff requiring manufactured resources.  Language is our next tech. Not terribly useful on its own except for being able to switch from one of our terrible starting civics to something not quite as terrible.  We encounter our first animal, who unfortunately is a carnivorous animal that will eat our face off if we try to engage it ourselves. We also get a glimpse at the next major system in play in Prehistoric Era, the Hunting system. Attacking animals is not just an annoyance or a way to get early experience, it's a crucial part of developing our economy. Killing animals provides immediate food and/or hammer yields to our nearest city that are applied to the city's food box and build queue. But killing an animal also provides a chance to subdue it, which has... additional effects depending on the animal in question. 10% seems like a meager chance for subduing, and it is, but there are ways to raise it as we'll see later on. Fortunately, despite technically being able to attack us the Lynx (excuse me, "Prowl of Lynx", more on that later) leaves us alone to explore more of the map.  A demonstration of how significant the boost in maneuverability is with the Quick March status in effect. Also some additional resource tiles shown like Prime Timber, Tea, Corn, Coconuts, and other stuff that I forgot what they're supposed to be cause there are too many drat map resources in this mod.  Mt Sinai discovered, and more of the southeast portion of our map being explored.   Speaking of natural wonders, turns out Barringer Crater was right below us the whole time. Not in the most lush location but hey, 200 free gold is welcome any time.  This is pretty bad, Sloth Bears definitely can attack and if they do my Stone Thrower is certainly in trouble despite the defensive terrain.  Except I survived? Talk about some good combat luck.  Probably meant to counteract the bad event luck    Not only did we survive but we didn't even take a hit, which makes killing the redlined Bear easy-peasy. 2 free hammers and 2 free food to Hattusas, our first generated food of the game! I mean, we immediately lose it the next turn because, again, starvation, but it's a milestone to make note of!  Naturally, after surviving the ferocious bear attack our battle-hardened thrower of stones is dispatched by a measly snake bite.  Another Stone Thrower dies to monkeys the following turn, and I don't even know how to feel about that.  Oh cool, our first human barbarian. Yeah, he's at 1 strength (100HP) to our 0.66 strength (66HP) and the Quick March malus almost nullifies our terrain advantage, but if we can survive a grisly bear attack then some guy with a sling should be no problem. (Spoilers: He dies.  )  On turn 25, our first contact with fellow tribesmen! Our first AI opponent happens to be Joan of Arc of France, not that that really means anything outside of flavor since, as I said, leader/civ choice barely matters under these settings. And no, I wouldn't even know where to start trying to figure out each AI's personality traits.  On the same turn, we finish Language. And I lied before. Community Discussions is actually useful as an early source of education and culture. I'll get to building one soon enough.  Native Language gives us a small but nice boost to our science and culture. Notably, the science boost counteracts the -5% from our terrible Education which puts us back at a break-even modifier, eliminating the truncation problem for the time being. Also no anarchy this early in the game for single Civics changes, that will only come into play later.  Scavenging is our second shot at getting a useful resource in our capital. Whereas Gathering revealed a bunch of plant-life for food, Scavenging will show us where all the soon-to-be-domesticated animals reside.  Neanderthals are like regular barbarians. Except stronger. I do not survive.  Meeting Joan of Arc introduces another concept which I believe came from the Rise of Mankind mod: Tech Diffusion! This is more or less the replacement for tech trading, and simply means that you get a fairly large science boost towards a particular tech if opponents you know already have that tech. I'm not a huge fan of rubber-band mechanics like this but, to be honest, if I don't leave it on then AIs will find it very difficult to keep up in tech in the long run. I'd like the AI to present at least some sort of challenge beyond the early eras.  Hey, remember when I said there was at least one bad village result?  At least I survive the attack here.  Scavenging comes in. Those units you see enabled are the first example of unique units that require players to have specific Cultures built for them, but they mean nothing to us. What will mean something eventually are those Pests (Flies), an example of how techs make the property system progressively more challenging to control. In this case, if the conditions for the building are met there's no getting rid of it, which means when the time comes it's just going to be an extra +5 disease per turn to worry about. But that's in the future, in the present we've uncovered a bevy of new resources, let's hope this time we strike pay-dirt.  Success! A horse and a deer in our cap is a welcome sight. The food is still useless to us but the two extra hammers is a huge boon to our ability to build stuff. We do lose a commerce in the process though, so teching will be a bit slower for a time. Not a huge deal to be honest as there's going to be a lot to build in the near future.  Case in point. And these were enabled by one two techs mind you. We'll likely need all of them eventually to get our city growing. Fortunately, the mod goes to great lengths to make the chore of setting your building queue slightly less tedious by providing a bevy of filtering options, represented by the icons and drop-down boxes above the building and unit list. This filter will be absolutely indispensable, make no mistake. By the way, Herbalism is a tech we have access to right now, so a close reading of some of these buildings show that, for example Tidepools is absolutely worthless to us until we get Herbalism to counteract the additional unhealthiness. Getting access to buildings that only provide their intended effects when a later tech is researched will also become a trend.   With Scavenging I can finally put my Gatherer to work. Unfortunately, Gatherers kind of suck hard, as to be expected from a unit that's meant to be a precursor to the most basic civilian unit in the base game. They only have one movement and when they complete a non-road improvement they don't have the luxury of just going to another tile and doing it again, they just kinda sit there and die. Fortunately, this early on tile improvements aren't terribly vital and Gatherers are a cheap unit, so it's all good. They also have a lot of potential build options depending on the tile and resource in question. Gather Grain is a generic Prehistoric improvement not unlike a farm that provides +1 food. For animal resources specifically, we can also build a Scavenging Camp that also provides 1 food, but also provides the resource itself when connected. The distinction may not matter too much right now, but I'll spoil in advance that most improvements in this game will grow over time to better versions of that improvement, just like how the Cottage->Hamlet->Village->Town chain works in BTS. So long as you have the required tech of course.  Our next tech is Deception, in which our civilization learns that hey, being a bad guy can get you stuff!  Joan of Arc's land lies to the southwest, pretty far from us. She's also coastal, which is not seen in this picture, so trade with her is a possibility in the far future.  About time to get a Wanderer, since I've lost a bunch of my scouting units and I need to start being able to kill animals more easily.  Barbarians starting to show up near my borders, which is kind of annoying. Clubman is the next melee unit in line after the Brute and a bit stronger, so I queue up some Brutes as I'll need something of my own to protect my Gatherer from interference. This should be a nice opportunity to show off the power of the merging mechanic.    Our three completed Brute units are merged into a stronger single unit! This unit is considered a Squad(7-20) rather than a Party(2-6) and thus has 50% more HP to work with in combat. However, we also see one of the drawbacks of combining units this way as it earns XP at a much slower rate than it usually would. Still, this will end up being enough to deter any aggression from that Clubman and play zone defense around our borders in general. And yes, if we happened to build 9 Brutes, we could make 3 of these stronger Brutes and then merge those 3 Brutes to raise our Group attribute again, giving us 225 HP. But more on that later.   Meanwhile, we finish Deception which brings about some pretty big changes for this part of the game. It brings us our first crime-related building, Crime (False Accusations), which brings an immediate reduction in hammers and commerce, among other things. Note the line about Criminal units, that is actually a thing in this game we potentially have to worry about, or make use of ourselves if we choose to... The Lookout Post is our immediate desire though. We've enabled a crippling crime building, but we've also enabled our first form of basic law enforcement. Building a Lookout Post requires paying gold for maintenance but provides a flat -5 crime per turn in the city, which will go a long way to bringing our crime down to below 0. It also enables us to build Law Enforcement Units, which is an example of the other primary way to control properties in this game.  Our merged Brute has pretty good odds here, and the Clubman certainly won't be able to attack us back as long as stay on defensive terrain. I don't kill it though, as I'm simply content defending my land and letting the barb piss off to who-knows-where, and 95% battles are still a 1/20 chance of everything going horribly wrong. If there's one thing every seasoned Civ 4 player knows, it's that you don't test the RNG if you don't need to. Forgot to screencap the fact that we're teching Herbalism next. It will do more or less the same thing Deception did, except providing a way to control Disease rather than Crime.    We meet two more AI neighbors on the same turn, Sennacherib of Assyria and Qin Shi Huang of China. They're both pretty far from us so hopefully we won't have to worry about any surprise aggression from any of our opponents this early on.  Our Lookout Post finishes, and we already see combined with the Alpha Male that we're going to see a steady decrease in our city's crime. But we can do better.  Watchers also cost additional unit maintenance when that starts to become a thing, and provide a constant -2 crime per turn inside a city. Building several of these units will become a good way to deal with crime down the line, though it isn't foolproof for reasons that aren't important right now. We definitely want at least one of them right now though.   We find Auyantepui far south from our borders, a natural wonder which was discovered by an opponent civilization near the beginning of the game. We get nothing out of this discovery, but it's a nice sight nonetheless.   Herbalism comes in, and besides some decent promotions and buildings we now have the ability to build Wild Herbs, which doesn't provide an immediate Disease reduction but allows us to build a Wise Woman, which provides -2 disease in a city. Why yes, the Law Enforcement unit is a burly bearded man with a club and the Medical unit is a young demure fair-skinned woman, why do you ask?  Hey, sometimes we get good events too.  We also find the borders to China's capital, though the terrain doesn't allow us to explore much around it. It appears to be coastal though like Joan of Arc's capital.  Oh yeah, our tech. Cave Dwelling gives us access to additional Housing buildings, which itself is another useful-to-know mechanic of this mod. We also get a couple other things I may get to in time.  Yeah, Neanderthal barbs don't mess around. Our Stone Thrower doesn't survive.    So with Cave Dwelling comes some new Housing! Housing is a mechanic which describes the general conditions that the citizens in our city live under, and is important because Housing buildings are automatic and provide an immediate bonus (or malus, in this case) to any settled city. Think of it as something of an extension of the basic city tile that every city always starts with. The key thing though is that the Housing available to a given city is not just based on your techs, but also on the terrain surrounding the city! I didn't call attention to it at the start, but our capital started with the Housing (Homeless) building, which sucks. It provided 2 unhealthiness and 1 unhappiness. Getting to this tech automatically allows that building to be replaced by Housing (Animal Burrow), which is slightly better as it removes the +1 unhappy and only provides a mere 2 unhealthiness. Any random city we place would get at least a Housing (Animal Burrow), but because our capital also has a forest tile already, our housing is further upgraded to Housing (Tree Hollow), which now only provides 1 unhealthiness! Our housing will steadily improve over the course of the game and there are some pretty interesting and unique housing options available if our future cities have the right terrain around them. Whether it's living in caves or living in igloos or whatnot. Manufactured resources will also be needed to gain access to the more elaborate types of housing further down the Eras. I quite like this mechanic, and I like how this first instance of it in action easily teaches you how terrain can affect your housing options.  Cooperation is our next tech which required Deception as a prerequisite. It provides access to a couple useful buildings but is the way to Oral Tradition, which we're going to need right about now.  Annnd Cooperation finishes, as the only real noteworthy things that happened are building Wild Herbs and a Wise Woman. This is about the point where turns start to settle into a routine of moving units, hunting animals, building stuff to control properties, and rinsing and repeating until you get the techs and buildings you need to actually do things further. It's a lot of clicking next turn and keeping track of Crime and Disease and stuff, which is why I hope you appreciate not having to see the 15 turns between this screenshot and the last one  Incidentally, I wanted to build a Childcare Hut since I desperately need some Education and culture rolling in, but I forgot I'm missing one of its tech prerequisites. Whoops!  Oh hey, it turns out something is happening! We've reached 160 culture in our entire empire (well, our one city) and that's the first threshold for choosing our First Leader Trait. Traits are significantly more complex in this mod and even the positive traits have several drawbacks we need to be aware of, so choosing a trait tailor-made to our situation is a pretty tough strategic choice to deal with. There's a lot of choices but most of them aren't terribly useful, so instead of letting you choose from the two dozen or so options, I'm allowing you to choose from three of them! Also one more note: We will have the option to remove any of these traits in lieu of taking a negative trait when we're forced to do that, so don't assume that the choice we make now will necessarily stay with us for the entire game. Audience Participation: First Leader Trait I'll leave this poll up for at least 24 hours and no more than 48, give or take when I'm actually on the PC to call it.  A. Creative Pros - Negative effects are minor or don't really matter much at all in the long run. - Extra culture allows new cities to increase their borders faster, compete for contested land much more easily, and gets us to our next Developing Trait quicker - Unlike BTS Creative, we have some more increased culture sources so the bonus actually scales pretty decently as the game progresses. - Cheap libraries are always a plus Cons - Outside of culture, almost nothing to help our economy besides the happiness bonus and I guess a couple of the cheap buildings - War weariness is minor, but still can become a thorn in our side if we end up tilting ourselves into a more war-focused style of play  B. Expansive Pros - +3 health for free is a huge deal in Prehistoric Era, and will allow us to get some positive food income going much sooner, which means faster growth. - Maintenance reduction is always a welcome economic bonus and is especially powerful in this mod with how many superhuge cities we'll likely end up with. - Faster worker builds is just as nice here as it is in any other Civ game. - Negative effects literally don't matter at all. Cons - Besides the health and worker speed, not much else exciting. - Very, very few cheap buildings, and the buildings we do get are pretty meh until Arcologies.  C. Nomad Pros - A powerful trait tailor-suited to Prehistoric/Ancient Eras, especially if there are a lot of animal resources around to exploit - Camps provide food, which is a crucial bonus in the early game - One of the traits that lets you upgrade units outside of national borders, an ability we definitely want at some point. - Lots of goodies for our hunting-related units, dog units in particular when that becomes a thing. - Useful cheap buildings and improved worker speed to Camp improvements, synergizing well with the food bonus. Cons - Becomes entirely useless past the Ancient Era when camps fall out of favor and hunting is not nearly as useful - Other traits allow the upgrading outside of borders thing, so it isn't crucial we pick this specific one - All cities gain 1/3 crime per population in the city without exception. Not important now, hugely important when our cities start growing. Spoiler alert: We're going way, way past the 20-25 pop megacities you're probably used to from normal Civ 4. ---------------------- NEXT TIME: Maybe our citizens stop being stupid, maybe we'll start capturing animals for a change, and maybe our science won't be a tire fire. Who knows, I haven't played past this point yet! One thing we WILL be getting is an SVN update though which fixes some things and also has some other... effects I'll get into. Vote for the next trait, but don't leave quite yet cause I'm not quite finished with all of you yet. Now it's time for some math 
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Feb 11, 2019 07:03
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C2C Systems Overview: Basic Combat Mechanics So you might have noticed I haven't said much of anything about fighting in this game yet outside of "this or that thing died, how sad". Well that's gonna chance, cause now we're getting into the nitty gritty on how this mod handles combat scenarios and the type of conditions you need to be mindful of when training and using your units.  If you'd rather not go through this giant wall of  just skip to the bottom of the post to get the super-compressed cliffnotes version Section 1: A Civ 4 Combat Primer So I said I was assuming everyone reading this knows how Civ 4 works and all, but in order to understand what C2C changed I will need to summarize how combat is supposed to go. Don't worry, I'll try to condense it as best I can. Units in Civ 4 have three primary attributes governing their combat prowess: Their Combat Strength, their HP, and their Unit Type. Combat Strength is a function of many things. Base Combat Strength is just the number assigned to that particular unit, for example Warriors have 2 base strength, Archers have 3, Axemen have 5, etc. etc. This base value is modified by the units current HP. All units have 100 maximum HP and their current combat strength is proportional to their current health. An Archer with 60 HP will have a combat strength of 1.8 (3*0.6) for example. All units also have a particular Unit Type, which primarily governs how they interact with specific other unit types. When combat with an opposing unit is initiated, Combat Strength is further changed by modifiers of different sorts, coming from unit type interactions (e.g. Axemen have a 50% bonus when fighting Melee units), promotions, fortification, and defensive terrain. All of these modifiers are additive, and the final modifier amount for each respective unit is applied to their combat strength, and these values are used in the actual combat. Also important is that the combat strength for both units is constant for the entire battle from start until resolution. Combat occurs in rounds. In each round of combat, the proportion of one unit's combat strength to the other unit's combat strength determines both which unit is damaged during that round and how much damage is done to the unit that was damaged. (There are also additional complications related to stuff like withdrawal and first strikes, but for simplicity's sake I'll ignore all of that.) Combat rounds continue indefinitely until one of the units reaches 0 HP, in which it is killed. With completely equal combat strength there is a 50-50 chance of each unit being attacked, and 20 damage is applied (in these equal fights, 5 hits will kill a full HP unit). Odds to hit changes proportionally to the difference in combat strength, so a unit with twice as much combat strength will have 2-1 odds, or 66.6%, of hitting the opposing unit in each round. Damage inflicted is also proportional to the difference in combat strength to an extent, but the exact calculation involving damaged units is a bit more complicated but not super important for this discussion, so don't worry too much about it. All this has a compounding effect that has some pretty important but nonobvious implications for how the actual combat odds are calculated, and is the reason why a simple linear comparison of combat strength doesn't tell the whole story for how a combat will resolve. (NOTE: I'll be using a combat calculator I downloaded from Realms Beyond for these calculations, but they can easily be simulated in any bog standard BTS game using WorldBuilder manipulation) For example, a combat between two full strength warriors with no additional modifiers will have 50-50 odds as expected. 50% chance to hit each round, and an equal 20 damage for either unit per hit. Tilt those numbers one way or the other, however, and you find a surprising result. Resolve the same combat except the defending unit has one turn of fortification, or in other words a mere 5% defensive bonus, and the chance for the attacker to win that combat (CS 2.00 vs 2.10) is... 34.73%??? Just that tiny bit of extra defense turns a 50-50 battle into 1-in-3 odds??? How does that make sense? Well, all you have to do is consider just how combat is resolved. Because combat is resolved in rounds, that means you not only consider the odds of an attack hitting once, but the odds of an attack hitting in all rounds of combat until completion. So in this case the odds of the defender hitting in a given round is only 51.22%, but over the course of several rounds the odds tilt more and more in his favor. But even so, that adjustment is only slight, not nearly enough to account for such a massive swing as 1-in-3 odds. That's where damage comes in. Recall that damage inflicted is proportional to the difference in combat strength, and that slight difference makes a huge difference in this particular case. Because while the defender with 2.10 combat strength still does 20 damage per hit, killing the attacker in five hits, the attacking unit only does 19 damage to him. Five hits of 19 damage is not enough to deplete a full HP unit, he would need to win an additional combat roll to complete the kill. So the attacker require one MORE hit than the defender to win the combat, and this is where the huge swing comes. I won't go go much more into the exact calculation of the numbers, just know that this recontextualizes how you need to think about combat in Civ 4. Don't think so much about how much stronger your unit is proportionally to the other, think about how many more or how fewer hits your unit would need to kill the opponent than he would need to kill you. To put out another example, a Spearman is fighting a Warrior with no additional combat modifiers, but the Spearman is at 50HP while the Warrior is full strength. Despite having completely equal combat strength, the warrior has a 63.67% chance of winning the combat simply because he only requires 4 hits (16 damage per hit on 50HP) to kill while the Spearman requires 5(24 damage per hit on 100HP). Raising the Spearman's HP to 58, just high enough to raise its damage inflicted to 25, would immediately swing the odds to 58-42 in its favor since the Spearman has slightly higher odds to hit and now requires only 4 hits to kill. Conversely, lowering the Spearman's health by a mere 2 HP, to 48, swings the warrior's advantage to almost 80% simply because he now requires one less hit to complete the kill (16 damage * 3 hits = 48 damage). These important "thresholds" where the number of hits to kill changes are the most vital components to keep track of when planning unit composition in an attacking or defending scenario and greatly informs the promotions you take, what terrain you choose to defend at, and other key components. MP games in particular can be decided almost entirely by knowing which combat situations will swing damage calculations just enough to turn your odds of victory from only slightly in your favor to overwhelmingly in your favor. But this isn't BTS, and this certainly isn't multiplayer, so what does all this number nonsense mean in the grand scheme of C2C? Section 2: C2C changes things; A gentle nudge can go a looong way So what can we glean from all this talk about Civ 4's combat? Well to summarize the main important part that will be useful in seeing how C2C changes things, A) The most important component of combat is how many hits it takes to kill an opposing unit. With that in mind let's take a look at the two main ways C2C changes combat. First off is that units don't necessarily start with the same maximum HP. This change is compounded by the fact that the base damage of each hit in any combat is reduced from 20 to 10, which means there can be significantly more rounds in a given combat. Animals are the most obvious example of this as I'll show here.  Pigeons actually have a base combat strength of 1. And yet this unit only has 0.02. That's because pigeons are adjusted to only have 2 HP, which means they die to literally any hit by any unit. It's pretty much impossible to die to a stock pigeon, and the only way it doesn't die outright is if it withdraws early (another mechanic I won't get into today, just know that many units have special withdrawal abilities that bypass even the most terrible of combat odds). HP adjustments like this are one of the primary ways C2C tries to differentiate the combat ability of units. After all, as we established, changing the number of hits it takes for a unit to die is hugely important, just as important as each unit's combat strength even. A prime example is here:  I should point out that C2C integrates the Advanced Combat Odds mod, which is a pretty sweet mod that shows all sorts of detailed information about the different outcomes of a fight. For now though, the only line I'm concerned with is the one above the Press SHIFT for more detail sentence. That's the key line that tells you the important information of 1) how much damage the attacker and defender do per hit, 2) how many hits it takes for the attacker to kill the defender and vice versa, 3) the odds to hit for the attacker or defender (check the color), and 4) the strength ratio between attacker and defender. The survival odds are misleading because the viper has a pretty high withdrawal chance, just know that it's very unlikely to kill me (but NOT impossible despite the 0.00% defeat chance it shows, I'm getting to that) despite the fact that it actually has a higher modified combat strength. That's cause my Stone Thrower has 66HP, having been split from a 100HP unit at the beginning of the game whereas the Viper only has roughly 30 HP. So while it does almost as much damage per hit as I do, it requires more than twice the number of hits to kill, and that's just incredibly unlikely considering I still have a higher chance to hit per round than they do due to other modifiers I won't get into right now. Or so it seems... But again, it's not impossible. After all, in the main update you saw my 0.66 strength 66HP stone thrower not just win, but come out unscathed against an attacking Sloth Bear at 2.00 combat strength with 66 HP itself. Let's take a closer look at that combat round-by-round  So I had a bunch of positive modifiers from defensive terrain and whatnot, which is good, but I also had -50% strength from Quick March and, you know, it has three times as much base strength, so it still had almost twice as much strength while I had no advantage or disadvantage in HP. So what happened here? Anyone who carefully read the preceding section would find this combat off. I start off doing 7 damage to the bear, but after two hits I start doing 8 damage, and then by the time the Sloth Bear withdraws I'm doing 9 damage per hit. This demonstrates the other small but still massive change to the combat engine: Unit combat strength and all combat values derived from it are recalculated after every round of combat. This has some useful implications. First off, every time a unit takes a hit they get weaker, which makes the subsequent round of combat easier for the opponent to win. So getting hit even just once or twice at the start can snowball into an outright mauling if the odds are swung enough. Secondly, it means that having high HP becomes even more important, because the lower your HP, the greater hit you're going to take to your combat strength proportionally after each hit. Thirdly, first strikes (a concept I glossed over, it's pretty much exactly what you think it is: a combat roll at the start wherein you have a chance to damage your opponent but your opponent can't damage you) become MUCH more important, since having multiples of them essentially gives you a chance to cripple the opposing unit before they even get a chance to do anything to you. Oh and by the way, did I neglect to mention that Stone Throwers randomly get 0-2 first strikes in any combat? So in this combat it seems like I got 2 first strikes (can't really tell with this combat log) and managed to hit both rolls at relatively low odds, already knocking a fourth of the bear's HP off before the combat truly even begins, and the odds swung enough in my favor that I won a few more combats until it gets to the point where I actually just outright rout it. That's not to say that this wasn't still an insanely lucky combat overall, cause it was, but it wasn't as much in the Bear's favor as one might have originally thought. These few changes manage to have a pretty large impact on how units should be specialized, in what situations they can be deployed in, and the relative effect of promotions. Battles with overwhelming odds might not be overwhelming if you're attacking with a frail, low HP unit, and having a high HP, tanky unit that can survive multiple battles without losing too much strength could be a huge boon in defensive standoffs. Oh yeah, I mentioned that splitting and merging units drastically lowers/raises your HP, maybe we can take a look at some practical examples of how that affects combat, and while we're at it take a quick look at Sub Combat Types Section 3: Strength in Numbers, and Sub Combat Types I already talked about the splitting/merging mechanic, so I won't really get into that again, but I will show another quick example of how the massive HP increase affects potential combat. And it's an example you already saw, as this is the Clubman hanging around my borders during this update! Nothing complicated here, A strength 1.5 unit vs a strength 1.33 unit means that there's roughly 50-50 odds for each of us to hit per round, but because my merged Brute has 150HP while the Clubman only has 100 (and does only 9 damage to me as opposed to 10), he would need to hit me 17 times to kill me whereas I'd only need to hit him 10 times... though I suppose that's not strictly true, as if the Clubman managed to get a few lucky shots in at the start, it might end up doing more damage, being able to kill me in less rounds. I still have a pretty strong advantage, but the fact that progressively damaged units become progressively weaker throughout the combat means that, unlike Civ 4, it's never quite as simple as just overwhelming the enemy with more numbers. It's important to always be wary of any advantage in HP or Combat Strength or any other modifiers that may be in play when deciding whether attacking, defending, or just high-tailing it out of there is the right move. Oh yeah, speaking of those other modifiers, let's look at one more combat example. This time it's a combat that I lose super badly in my test game. I'll also take the opportunity to introduce Sub Combat Types properly. Oh, and minor spoilers I guess.   So despite the fact that I'm attacking into defensive terrain across a river, my ridiculous hunting promotions are such that I actually only have a slight deficit in combat strength to this Jaguar unit, and yet if I were to execute the attack I would get absolutely rolled with no mercy. What's going on? Well, as it turns out, I'm not fighting a Jaguar. I'm attacking into a Prowl of Jaguar. Jaguars start out as a Solo(1) unit, but this one spawned as a combined Jaguar unit at Squad(7-20), two ranks higher. That shot its base strength and its HP up by 225%, giving it the 6.75 strength you see here and 225HP. I have 66 HP. But hey, this is an attack into it. Surely if I just stand my ground and take advantage of the defensive terrain and river crossing, I'll become strong enough to at least put up a close fight.  Oh. No, actually I just kinda die despite having roughly 50% more combat strength. Yeah, that's what happens when 66 damage kills me while 92 damage doesn't even knock the Prowl of Jaguar to half health. Even still, the overwhelming combat strength should have given me more successful combat rolls even with the HP reduction, whereas in this combat it seems our success rate was roughly 50-50. Well, I could have just gotten unlucky. Or I could have just failed to take a couple other things into account. So let's take a look.  I believe this is our first good look at the Civlopedia for C2C, or at least Toffer90's rework at it. It's actually quite functional and organized, and you get a ton of information on pretty much everything you could ever ask for if you know where to look. The important part though are the icons on top. If you'll remember earlier in these updates, I pressed SHIFT on top of my Stone Throwers to show, among other things, their Group setting as I explained the merge/split mechanic. Well, these are the "other things". It's a pretty interesting system as they functionally serve the same purpose as Unit Types in base Civ 4 but are designed to be used in large groups like this in creative, interchangeable ways. Thus, the basic "template" of any given unit can be defined to the finest detail, and these Sub Combat Types can then be used as reference values for the myriads of other systems C2C puts in play, most notably in the many, many promotion lines it employs. A quick example is that almost every combat unit has a Heals As setting, which can be stuff like People, Animal, some variant of machine, etc. A Wise Woman, besides her Disease reduction ability, has the power to provide additional healing to units that have the Heals As(People) and/or Heals As(Animal) Sub Combat Type when on the same tile, but only those types. A unit that only has, say, Heals As(Mechanical) would gain no benefit from the healing unit. The Jaguar has the Feline Type first of all, which provides a bunch of cool bonuses that make it much harder to defend against than it might appear. Of particular note is the Dodge and Precision values.  These show up again.  And again. The Dodge and Precision values in combat modify a unit's "chance to hit" odds by comparing one unit's Precision with the other unit's Dodge, and multiplying the base hit odds by that modifier for that unit. This likely explains how the Jaguar was able to get so many hits in despite supposedly having a much lower hit rate, as combined with my own 5% Dodge/Precision it gets a net 15% multiplier to its hit rate while I get a net -15% multiplier. It doesn't sound like much, but that alone would be enough to turn a 50-50 fight into a 57.5-42.5 fight in its favor.  Fortunately, holding Control when looking at combat odds tells you all this and other information on these type of advanced modifiers (Side note: You might have realized that because the Dodge/Precision calculations are independent, it's possible to get a situation where the "chance to hit" for both units doesn't actually add up to 100% like it always would in a normal Civ 4 game. This is evidently intentional, and in fact it is quite possible for both units to score a hit in a combat round or even both miss. I haven't seen any instances of that happening yet though, so we'll see what happens down the line)   And finally to wrap things up, here's an example of subtypes related to the Size Matters option of the mod. If that option is turned off, these Types (and the size Type for that matter) are ignored, but since I like the split/merge mechanic we can take a quick look. Groups with less people gain experience quicker, cost less to maintain, and heal faster, units with higher combat quality gain XP slower and cost more to maintain, big or small units gain bonuses or maluses to stuff like Dodge and Precision or damage dealt, stuff like that. The details aren't important, it's just important to know they exist and be mindful of them when deciding how you won't to go about merging and splitting your armies. Incidentally, there are special promotions that raise your combat quality which also raises your HP in the same way merging does, but they carry a pretty significant drawback in that they reset your experience (but not your level) to 0. ---------------------- Oh god that was way too much, can you give me a poor man's summary? Sure, glad to help. Civ 4 utilizes a round system where units have a chance of being damaged each round proportional to their opponent's strength, and rounds continue until a unit dies. This means that the most important part of Civ 4 combat is determining how many rounds you need to kill an opponent or be killed yourself. C2C shakes things up a bit by adding variable HP values to units that you can manipulate to an extent via Splitting and Merging, and also by changing the rules so that units that lose HP during combat also become weaker during that combat, unlike in Civ 4 where unit strength is determined solely at the start. This makes determining combat odds more tricky but also gives a surprising amount of variability to your unit composition strategies. Also adding an addition layer of strategy are Sub Combat Types, unique descriptors for a given class of unit that provide a host of different effects and modifiers and are used for determining specific interactions between different units and between units and other game systems. It's not just about having strong units, it's about having the right units. ---------------------- On one hand, I enjoy writing these as it helps me quite a bit to understand some of the more esoteric stuff going on. On the other hand, I'm looking at my clock and I just want to 
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Feb 11, 2019 07:04
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Alpha males? Omega children gangs? Good grief, this is already going hard into weird territory, combined with the sheer  of mechanical complexity, it's really... insular nerd culture, to put it in the most delicate of fashions.
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Feb 11, 2019 08:45
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Hopefully, that kind of stuff gets toned down as we get past prehistory... but I won't hold my breath. Vote B - Expansive - early healthiness and worker speed are always useful.
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Feb 11, 2019 08:49
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Oh, yes, forgot to vote. B - Expansive as well, because it seems like the most useful.
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Feb 11, 2019 08:51
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B) Expand or Die! I remember a few years ago I was thinking of trying this mod. One look at the feature list however and I was like no thank you.
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Feb 11, 2019 09:24
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B. A strong economy is the foundation of Crushing Your Enemy Before You.
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Feb 11, 2019 09:35
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B Expansive for now, but I think we really need to get Creative soon after. And yeah, the  seem to be getting stronger in this update, hoo boy.
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Feb 11, 2019 09:47
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A. Creative. it's supposed to be a big fat cross not a tiny sad box!
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Feb 11, 2019 10:45
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A
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Feb 11, 2019 10:50
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A: More culture means bigger cities which means more resources which means more civics which means.... getting closer to a Culture victory?
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Feb 11, 2019 14:13
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A. Creative sounds good to me.
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Feb 11, 2019 14:31
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B: cheaper Workers and improving the lands faster is always worthwhile.
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Feb 11, 2019 14:41
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B Culture and Border expansion don't seem like huge priorities at this point and could probably be picked up 2nd.
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Feb 11, 2019 14:54
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A
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Feb 11, 2019 15:19
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Expansionism up in the ancient world to!
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Feb 11, 2019 15:27
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A, culture is the highest calling. I tried to play this mod once and managed to reach all the way to ships that could transport a unit. Hopefully it's possible to research insane asylums before it's too late. 
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Feb 11, 2019 15:31
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I downloaded and started playing this mod because I figured if I it ended up being terrible it was a good excuse to get back into Fall From Heaven and its modmods. This mod is seriously difficult for someone who doesn't know it in and out. It takes a ton of very specific (and not necessarily obvious) techs to get the ability to found new cities. I was beaten to that tech by 20,000+ years. I'm not out of the game yet by any means but I'm in a real hole compared to the top civs.
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Feb 11, 2019 15:36
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A Culture because we're going to be stuck as one city for a while, it seems, need more resources, and this gets us our next unlock quicker.
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Feb 11, 2019 15:44
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Nomads because dog units
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Feb 11, 2019 15:52
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B Home is where the heart is, and I love the world.
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Feb 11, 2019 16:18
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A, I say. Let us be the cradle of civilisation.
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Feb 11, 2019 16:33
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Slaan posted:Nomads because dog units I'm seconding this motion. C, Nomads for doggos and early economic boost. So what if it falls off 150,000 years down the line?
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Feb 11, 2019 17:13
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Zurai posted:I'm seconding this motion. C, Nomads for doggos and early economic boost. So what if it falls off 150,000 years down the line? Then we haven't gotten the trait's worth, since it'll still be the prehistoric era. 
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Feb 11, 2019 17:46
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Jossar posted:Then we haven't gotten the trait's worth, since it'll still be the prehistoric era. The Prehistoric era lasts a long-rear end time, but not that long, thankfully.
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Feb 11, 2019 18:53
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This is a 4X game, so let's pick the one that matches a core goal B. Expand.
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Feb 11, 2019 21:03
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Gonna go with C. Nomads.
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Feb 11, 2019 23:41
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Current vote count so far seems to be A) 8 B) 10 C) 3 A and B seem close enough that I can wait until at least 12 CST (18:00 GMT) tomorrow. If there are still people voting and the vote is still close enough I'll let it run a little longer, but certainly not past tomorrow night.
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Feb 12, 2019 05:33
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And I thought trying to do an FFH2 derivative was madness. Dammit, now I have to go finish that Illians game. C, because growth now is worth more than growth later.
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Feb 12, 2019 06:10
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Another vote for C - nomads. A bonus now is better than a bonus later and if I'm understanding this madshow of a mod correctly we'll be able to give up the trait as an offering instead of picking a negative when the usefulness has run out. Incidentally, Creative was low-key one of the best economic traits in the base game for a simple reason: double speed libraries. In the lategame it doesn't hold a candle to what actual economic traits bring, but quickly jumpstarting libraries as soon as you unlock them is just that good.
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Feb 12, 2019 06:22
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A! Though normally i'd pick nomads if i was trying to win, a bonus that falls off doesn't matter if it puts us ahead now.
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Feb 12, 2019 06:25
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C Man is a dog’s best friend.
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Feb 12, 2019 07:12
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This is simultaneously amazing and terrifying. Do keep it up.
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Feb 12, 2019 07:42
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a
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Feb 12, 2019 15:37
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Once you get actual hunting units, name one after me so I can die ignominiously
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Feb 12, 2019 16:59
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