The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Games > Let's Play! > My God, It's Full Of Techs: Let's Play Caveman2Cosmos (Civ IV overhaul mod)
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Super Jay Mann
Caveman2Cosmos is a full conversion mod for Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Beyond The Sword. I could start by saying that the mod's primary gimmick is vastly extending the time period of your illustrious world(s)-spanning empire, having you start from the very beginnings of prehistory all the way to full exploration of the Great Beyond, and that would in fact be accurate. Simply leaving it at that though wouldn't even scratch the coat of paint covering this towering behemoth of a megastructure that is Caveman2Cosmos. You can look at the main CivFanatics thread here for a slightly larger taste of the insanity.
I'm just gonna say it up front: We're in for a long, long ride and I'd be lying through my teeth if I told you I could guarantee this LP will ever be close to finishing. But I suppose chaos, uncertainty, and a paralyzing fear of what could possibly be next is appropriate for this particular mod, so let's cut to the chase and get the introductory fake Q&A out of the way.
Yeah, exactly. So to be more serious for a chance, C2C is a frankenstein's monster of a mod that's been in continuing development more or less for over a decade at least, being touched and handed off to countless individuals I couldn't even begin to credit if I tried. It began as an offshoot of the original Rise of Mankind mod and from there integrated features from a decade's worth of mods from all sorts of sources into its own designed systems to create what can only be described as a beautiful mess. I wish I could be more thorough on just what C2C truly is or what kind of design philosophy governs it or in what specific ways it differs from good old BTS but honestly I'm not even sure the current devs can answer that question with any certainty.
Not that I think it's bad. It's ambitious if nothing else and the extent to which the devs, past and present, have squeezed blood out of the foundation stone of Civ 4 is impressive, if not a bit disconcerting. It's oddly addictive once you get into it and the sheer amount of stuff that's going on throughout the course of the game is downright awe-inspiring if you back up and take a look at the big picture. I wouldn't call it good or bad really, it's just a thing to be experienced, and what you get out of it is all that matters.
Or I could just be grandstanding subconsciously and just want to see this glorious trainwreck in motion once again.
Okay uh, I think I get it. Wait, this isn't gonna be some narrative mumbo jumbo, is it?
Nah, this is not a Paradox LP, don't worry. I love those things but this LP is gonna be focused strictly on the game because I value my sanity and find comfort in numbers and algorithms without trying to make narrative sense out of them. Of course you readers are free to spin those creative wheels all you like if you wish.
So you're an expert on this game right? You know exactly what you're doing?
Hahaha oh goodness no.
This won't be a blind LP but my last playthrough of this game was a while ago and a lot of things have changed since then. I don't even know where to start trying to figure out what's different or how some of the retooled systems work, so I'm content to just stumble through what I know and hopefully figure out what I don't know along the way. And also hope I don't die in the process. I will be doing a concurrent "test game" on another map to make sure I at least kind of have a plan that isn't just clicking buildings and techs at random but that's about it.
This will be a screenshot LP and I'm hoping to update at least once a week. Updates will be a mix between progression in the current game and detailed posts about the inner workings of individual gameplay systems, as trying to do both at once in the same post will get messy very very fast. I know I'm making it sound overwhelming, and in many ways it is, but in the end it's still Civ 4 and its core gameplay loop remains as familiar as always, so it shouldn't be too hard to pick things up. Aurora 4X this is not, don't worry.
Speaking of, I'm not going to waste time explaining how Civ 4 works, I have enough to deal with as it is. So if you're unfamiliar with the game this mod is built on, check out Chucat's (abandoned?) LP of the game here. With that out of the way, let's begin.
# ? Feb 5, 2019 18:37
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# ? Jan 29, 2022 05:44
Super Jay Mann's Playthrough (Currently Defunct)
Gameplay Updates
Prehistoric Era
Chapter 0: 200,000 Years Will Give You Such a Crick In The Neck
Chapter 1: Let's Split Up And Look For Clues. I'll Be With Daphne.
Chapter 2: Lions, Tigers, Bears, Pigeons, Snakes, Crocodiles, Eagles, Jaguars, And Three-Toed Sloths, Oh My
Chapter 3: There's Something Out There Hunting Us And It Ain't No Jaguar
Chapter 4: A Hunter From The Darkest Wild, Makes You Feel Just Like A Child
Chapter 5: We're Not The Only People On This Island, And We All Know It
Chapter 6: Let The Revels Begin, Let The Fire Be Started, We're Dancing For The Restless And The Broken-Hearted
Chapter 7: Here Lies Boksi. He Never Scored
Chapter 8: What if he doesn't survive? He's worth a lot to me
Chapter 9: Oh Yeah, Well I'll Make My Own City! With Blackjack and Hookers! In Fact, Forget The City!
Chapter 10: Who Let The Dogs Out WOOF WOOF WOOF WOOF WOOF
Chapter 11: I'M ON A BOATcanoe, I'M ON A BOATcanoe
Chapter 12: ~Celebrate Good Times Come On!~
Ancient Era
State of the Empire: Ancient Era
Chapter 13: This Land Ain't Big Enough For the Two of Us
Chapter 14: It's Not Right For a Civ Player To Read! Soon He Starts Getting Ideas and Thinking...
Chapter 15: No Funny Title This Time, Have Some Nietzsche Instead
Chapter 16: I Think It Was 'Blessed Are The Cheesemakers'
Chapter 17: YOU SHALL NOT PASS!
Chapter 18: ~This is the tale~ ~of Captain Super Jay Mann~
Chapter 19: I Need a Hero! I'm Holding Out For a Hero 'til The End Of The Night
Chapter 20: While You Were Learning How To SPELL YOUR NAME, I Was Being Trained To Conquer Galaxies!
Chapter 21: I AM THE LAW!!!
Chapter 22: "Where's the X? It's supposed to be right here, 10,000 paces East." "Oooooh, East? I thought you said Weast."
Systems Updates
Overview: Basic Combat Mechanics
Overview: Unit Promotions I - Basic Promotions
Overview: Religions of the Prehistoric And Ancient Eras
Unfortunately, due to personal issues and COVID-19 anxiety this playthrough will probably stay at this point for the foreseeable future. Good news though, fellow C2C player Jossar agreed to do his own playthrough, done in a much less detailed but much more streamlined fashion, and has been blowing through the major highlights of the game in lightspeed, doing a much better job summarizing the ridiculous scope of the mod in a timely manner. I encourage you all to read his part of this LP all the way through.
Jossar's (Hopefully) Complete Playthrough
First Trait Vote
Second Trait Vote
Bash The Fash Vote
Ancient 1
Pick a Continent
Ancient 2 (and Third Trait Vote)
Ancient 6/Classical 1
Fourth Trait Vote
Classical 2
Fifth Trait Vote
Medieval 1
Clockpunk/Medieval 3
Clockpunk/Renaissance 1
Renaissance 3(and Sixth Trait Vote)
Renaissance 4/Industrial 1
Jossar's Steampunk Rant
Bonus Update: Industrial Era Civic Status
Industrial 3(and Seventh Trait Vote)
Gimme That New Time Religion, Religions of the Renaissance through Atomic Era
Atomic 1/Dieselpunk
Eighth Trait Vote
Atomic 2/Atompunk
Atomic 3
Nanotech 1
Nanotech 3/Biopunk
Transhuman 1/The Rest Of The Punks
Transhuman 2
Galactic 1
Super Jay Mann fucked around with this message at 02:18 on May 7, 2020
C2C Gameplay Chapter 0: 200,000 Years Will Give You Such a Crick In The Neck
Fortunately, game setup is mostly the same as it always was in Civ 4, though I'll need to explain the plethora of new options as they become relevant.
First and foremost, we will be playing on a pre-built map that I downloaded from the C2C forum rather than generating one ourselves. This is because the current version of the game (I'm playing on SVN version 10411 which is the most recent build as of this writing) does not have any map scripts that generate space terrain, and this will be a Big Deal down the line when we start finally getting to the "Cosmos" portion of the game. The map we're using has (I think) a continents map as its Earth landmass, and I will be playing it blind.
This game will be played on Immortal difficulty on Marathon speed, as that's evidently the speed this is balanced for, and there will be 7 AI opponents to contend with. Don't worry too much about the other options for now, just know that tech trading isn't a thing in this mod and neither are vassals. The important part is the victory condition. Since the intent of this LP is to try and get through an entire game from beginning to Future Tech, I'm going to enable Mastery Victory, which is a scoring victory comprising a bunch of different criteria that each civ is judged on when all turns have been played. The important part is that Mastery overrides all other victory conditions whether they're selected or not. I doubt I'll get as far as running out the turn limit, so we'll just use the Mastery Victory score as a benchmark to see how well the game is going.
As for civ and leader? Well, the truth is that it doesn't really matter that much, especially with my settings. I'm using an option called Developing Traits, which is a feature that allows players to select a Trait at certain intervals during the game based on how much total culture you generate. Combined with Start Without Positive Traits, which I also turned on, it means that all players start the game completely Traitless and build their leader's unique abilities as they play. I quite like this system, unbalanced though it may be, and it simplifies the leader selection process, which is welcome, so I'm going with that.
As for civs? Well, this one is just a bit more complicated and ties into a new system that I'll probably use a seperate update post for. The short version is that civs have absolutely no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever except for one specific building that will serve as the foundation for diversifying our entire empire. Stuff like unique buildings and unique units will be entirely dependant on what type of land we get, so there's no way to know in advance what the best options will be. For simplicity's sake, I'm just going to go with a random leader/civ combo and see what happens.
We get Suppiluliuma of the Hittite Empire who is, uh, a guy I guess.
And here's our start. Coastal starts are good in C2C if I remember correctly but, as you might notice, there are no resources around us. At all. Well, it turns out we don't actually know of any resources at all! Everything is just a big old pile of dirt to us primitive folk. We'll discover exactly what we have in our land as we research the appropriate techs. Oh and it's not shown in this specific screenshot but the max turn count for this game is 8000 turns. Yeah, this is not a short game.
Also note that the game looks a bit different than usual. That's due to two things. First off, the BUG mod, a mod that adds several quality-of-life features and improvements to the base game, is fully integrated into C2C much as it is with almost every other mod out there, and that includes a bevy of customizable options, cosmetic or otherwise. I'm not gonna mess too much with it both cause there's a lot of options and because I want to spare you all the headache of looking at them. If you happen to notice minor variations in the UI as this LP progresses for whatever reason, it's probably because I messed with a BUG setting to make life easier on me.
The second thing is a Python and UI enhancement mod made by a user named Toffer90 on the CivFanatics forum that improves many annoying aspects of the original mod's interface and also makes the font a bit bigger and bolder, which I appreciate. It also speeds up certain operations that slowed the down game immensely normally, most notably the Civlopedia. Exploring the Civlopedia without this mod can cause tremendous amounts of downtime as the game attempts to load the many, many available entries. This is fixed now. There are other substantial UI changes from this mod that I'll get into as the game rolls along.
When we settle we're given a free Tribal Guardian, a 2 strength garrison unit that cannot move but will provide sufficient protection against any wandering barbarians that may come our way. Settling also immediately gives us a couple automatic buildings in our capital with various effects. Get used to this, as these "Special" buildings, as they're called, will be the bane of our existence for the entire game.
Here's the new city screen, courtesy of C2C proper and Toffer90's UI mod. Among other changes, buildings units and wonders are sectioned off into their own menus and take up more space in the selection screen, which is great because that tiny banner on the bottom is not sufficient for displaying the sheer volume of options we'll be working with. Aside from that and a couple other changes that aren't relevant in this first update it's more or less what you're used to in regular Civ 4.
I mentioned Special buildings before, the important one highlighted here is Native Culture (Middle Eastern), an automatic building corresponding to the region our chosen civ originated from and to my knowledge the only thing in the entire game that our initial Civ choice affects. The idea is that depending on the terrain of our cities we can build various "cultures" throughout our empire corresponding to nations and empires in history that, when built, give us access to various unique goodies specific to that culture. It's essentially a more organic form of unique units/buildings/etc. The wrinkles are that all the culture buildings have prerequisites beyond terrain (in this case for the time being we can only develop cultures that in real life developed in the Middle East) and that cultures count as World Wonders, so only one player in the game ever has access to each one at a time. I'll explore the Culture building mechanic in more detail when it becomes relevant.
You may have also noticed that we, uh, kind of can't grow. Our city starts with a ton of unhealthiness and not even fresh waters and forests can overcome this enough to gain any food to grow. Where is this crazy amount of unhealthiness coming from?
Here is the new Civics screen. Yes, this is just as stupidly complex and needlessly fiddly as it appears. Far from the simple 5x5 configuration of BTS, there are a total of fifteen Civic categories, each of which allows us to select one of 10-15 options throughout the game. Civics here aren't just small but impactful bonuses that steer the course of our empire, they are one of the primary gateways we need to be able to actually do anything at all. They even provide access to powerful unique buildings that only function when their corresponding civic(s) are active. To start, we have several civics that provide unhealthiness, a malus to science, hammers and gold, a huge malus to growth in general, and a bunch of other unsavory albatrosses that make our feeble primitive minds incapable of little more than standing around and picking our noses. A huge part, nay, the primary goal of the early game is digging ourselves out of this hole in the ground so that we can grow and expand like any proper Civ empire should.
For posterity, here's a listing of all of our current civics and their effects. You can also have some fun speculating what some of the late-game Civics could possibly be like if you dare.
Of note is a couple of odd icons in the Garbage and Immigration civics that you won't have seen before. I'll get to those. Oh will I get to those, don't you worry.
(The starting gold seems to be a quirk of the map scenario, I'm just gonna roll with it)
Fortunately the other info screens are about what you'd expect, some with enhancements to suit the needs of the mod while being further cleaned up by the UI mod.
We have two units and two buildings accesible to use. I'll get into units in the next update because that's a can of worms in and of itself. Alpha Male and Alpha Female are the initial buildings we start with, and give +1 hammer and +1 food respectively. Growing is impossible right now so I'll take the 1 hammer first before anything else.
That's all for now. There's a lot to take in and the game hasn't even started yet, but we've got our city down and our production set, so we can finally begin playing the game for real and getting to the nitty-gritty of what makes C2C's Prehistoric era tick. Look forward to it.
...Oh right, our tech selection. Can't ignore that now, can we. We have two possible selections right now so figuring out what we want to do shouldn't be too much of an issu--
Huh, that's a lot of icons. Some units, a lot of promotions, hard to tell what is what.
Oh, um, well. That's a pretty significant list of stuff.
What am I even looking at here?
Wait where is the end of the tech tree anyway--
Manic_Misanthrope
Why do you do this to yourself?
Roobanguy
hahaha good loving luck.
VictualSquid
Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.
I never played C2C, but I watched an LP once. His computer died of old age before the game was finished and he couln't find a version compatible with his savegame afterwards.
Also, build those
When I looked at those civics and saw "time drafting" I really hope that means your civ is abducting people from alternate realities to fight their wars.
tonberrytoby posted:
Looks like you weren't far off
Omobono
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!
Roobanguy posted:
Godspeed you poor crazy bastard.
Terrifying Effigies
Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.
"Clockpunk"
100 HOGS AGREE
by Nyc_Tattoo
Grimey Drawer
lol is the final tech upgrade the civilization realizing they're a civilization in the game civilization
Telsa Cola
No... this is all wrong... this whole operation has just gone completely sidewaysface
God speed, I played on the solar system maps till about the space stage then gave up once I realized the space travel systems are not that great.
That was about a week of gameplay.
mitochondritom
If thats the case, then it's brilliant. I'm optimistic OP, looking forward to your civ achieving transcendence in a decade or so. Godspeed.
100 HOGS AGREE posted:
Huh, I never managed to make that connection when skimming over the tech tree, good call there.
Oh wait that's the tech before the last one, my bad. Here's the last one.
NewMars
Is it just me, or does this mod seem to have a lot of really weird stuff in general going on?
Cythereal
NewMars posted:
This looks like it will be a trainwreck and a half. Looking forward to it.
Pvt.Scott
What God wants, God gets, God help us all
Somebody needs to mod this so that all the civs start as lone lobsters.
I GAIN POWER FROM EATING PEOPLE, JUST ASSUME I'M ALWAYS VOTING TO EAT PEOPLE
As a plus, lobsters know how to keep their rooms clean
General Revil
"Congratulations! You're all smarter than some of the most brilliant minds on Tendao that worked on this revolutionary project."
This looks like a wild ride.
C2C Gameplay Chapter 1: Let's Split Up And Look For Clues. I'll Be With Daphne.
One thing I didn't mention is that settling popped a nearby tribal village (why are there tribal villages in what's supposed to be a Prehistoric start? ) which revealed a bunch of the map in our immediate area. I typically don't like playing with villages on, but they can be quite useful in this game for the extra gold they bring and, more importantly, I can't actually turn them off
And here we have our first combat unit, the Stone Thrower. It has a meager 1 strength and 1 movement point but is otherwise a solid defensive unit that is cheap to build. It exists alongside the Brute, an equally cheap unit that's meant for aggression against other non-animal units. Units have a lot more relevant information to worry about that can be accessed by pressing Control, Shift, or Alt while hovering over them.
The Control info box is stuff you'd be use to seeing in any regular Civ 4 game, combat bonuses, first strikes, other similar attributes. The Alt info box shows Civilian info, which isn't too helpful on a combat unit but still has information that will prove useful in later parts of the game. And the Shift box... we'll get to that when we talk about combat, which is getting its own dedicated post alongside the next update when fighting actually starts happening. Just take note of the Group setting there, as it is about to become relevant about right now.
What utter nonsense is this? We turned our starting Stone Thrower into three weaker Stone Throwers?
And now its Group setting has went from Party(2-6) to Solo(1).
And apparently we can also combine our units together again???
So yeah, aside from the usual Civ 4 attributes units now have special settings that define properties of specific units that are otherwise abstracted out or ignored in Civ 4 proper. There will be more information in the aforementioned combat update, but the Group setting is one example of this. This Group setting describes how many of this particular combat class that this specific unit represents, and this has potentially pretty big implications in combat. Though there are limitations imposed on certain unit types, as a general rule you can split any unit into three units of the next smallest Group size or merge three healthy units of the same size into one unit of the next largest Group size. Splitting or merging units will divide or multiply that units current strength by 1.5, thus why the three units pictured here have a strength of 0.66 (to be more accurate, their HP is increased/reduced by this amount. This is an important distinction, but for now don't worry about it.) As you might assume, Solo(1) is the smallest possible group and thus these units cannot be split any further than this.
All that being said, the practical effect right now is that we have three starting scouting units instead of one, which is really quite nice and super useful in the early game for grabbing important tribal village bonuses.
Oh right, the tech, almost forgot again. Nomadic Lifestyle isn't immediately useful, but is the prerequisite tech for one that absolutely is.
Incidentally, I'll be covering promotions in detail in a later update post because hoo boy is that a doozy and a half.
An example of a good tribal village result, shaving a turn off Nomadic Lifestyle. I won't be showing all the village results, it'll mostly be a lot of free beakers, free gold, and at least one bad result.
One thing I unequivocally like about this mod is the sheer variety of terrain features and types present on a given map. It can be overwhelming at times but the thing I like is how these terrain features are actually given some real relevancy in cities, as tons of resource-generating buildings and other similar goodies only become available if the given terrain is somewhere in the city's workable radius.
Uh, what?
So we just randomly lost 3 science beakers in the turn transition.
And now we have a production malus as well??
Yes, it is now time to talk about what I previously called the bane of our existence.
Behold the Properties System, arguably the most omnipresent and high-impact distinguishing feature that makes C2C what it is. The mechanics of the system are actually relatively simple but the effects of them are incredibly far reaching and incredibly annoying in a way that's so hard to describe to people who haven't played it. Sorry, let my irritation slip out just a bit there, I'm fine, really.
So there are a number of properties. Not all of them are listed here currently but these are the important ones that'll be around the whole game. The two most that immediately impact us the most are Disease, Crime, and Education which describe exactly what you think they do. Every turn these properties are raised or lowered by an amount that's dependent on a couple factors, some of which we control and some of which are just obtuse mathematical jiggering that's used to maintain an equilibrium.
To demonstrate, here we have the Crime property. The number in the parentheses on the left shows how much this property changed the previous turn, and because of aforementioned math manipulation isn't necessarily constant. The important part is the tooltip which describes how much raw crime is actually being generated in the city per turn. Population and civics are the most immediate forms of crime increase (note the +3 we get with the Borderless Immigration civic) while buildings and, later, units can increase or decrease this rate. Rather than concern yourself with the exact formulas governing the turn-by-turn property changes, all you really need to do is keep the rate of change based on controllable factors as high or low as possible depending on which direction you want the property to go (for instance, you want to raise education rather than lower it). This, of course, is easier said than done, and a huge part of city management throughout the game is controlling these properties and being aware of when you need to invest more resources into doing so, as well as deciding what kind of tradeoffs you want to make. Do you want to make that cool building that let's you build powerful units or give a nice flat boost to important yields but that gives a +5 to disease every turn?
Anyhow, I've described how Properties function, but that doesn't tell any of you what they actually do. And now finally we get to the Special buildings. Oh boy.
Special property-based buildings are automatically built in a city at specific property thresholds, sometimes also requiring more specific conditions, and provide effects to the city that are meant to represent the effect your properties are having on your citizenry. We have Disease (Common Cold) which shows up at any Disease value over +1, and Education (Blissful Ignorance I)/Education (Unaware) are built at less than -10 Education. That unaware building is what's responsible for our sudden decrease in science, as it reduces war commerce and raw science. -5% doesn't sound like much, but because of how Civilization 4 does fractional yields (opting for truncation as opposed to actual rounding) any modifier below 0% can be really really bad, especially early in the game. That -6% hammer malus results in an actual 25% loss of hammers because it truncates 3.76 to 3. So one major priority in the short term is getting our education back to acceptable levels to remove this building.
And one more fun fact, many, many more of these special buildings unlock as we move through the tech tree, and the ones with negative effects will become more difficult to reach the conditions for but also provide far, far worse effects. Note that there's no Crime-related building in this list, that's definitely not because my crime isn't high enough yet. Fail to pay attention to properties and let your crime or disease or water pollution/etc. skyrocket out of control in a particular city can result in Very Bad Things, even in the mid-to-late game.
I should also point out that individual tiles also gain and lose property values over time, though the effects of that are a lot less clear and I don't think much of what it's suppose to do is implemented anyway, so if it becomes important I'll get back to that.
Man that was a lot to cover. For reference, in addition to the +1 food and +1 hammer effects respectively for Alpha Female and Alpha Male, they also provide -2 disease and -2 crime respectively, so they're certainly worth building early as every little bit of property control counts.
We finish Nomadic Lifestyle and aside from the ridiculous number of promotions shown we also get access to the Wanderer, the first exploration unit. It has 2 moves and a large combat bonus against animals. Useful, though not immediately so as animals aren't spawning yet and it's a bit steep in cost. Also they start as Solo(1) units and can't be combined so no making Super Scouts early to murder all vermin.
There's also a Neanderthal version of the unit we can't build? And it's twice as strong? Curious.
Anyhow, next up is Gathering, which is a crucial early tech. It reveals a ton of basic resources that will improve the yields of tiles around our capital and can later have basic improvements to act as prerequisites for supply chain buildings. Having certain resources in your workable radius also gives access to some buildings without needing to be improved. It also let's us build the Gatherer, the first worker unit of the game.
Some terrain types damage units that stay on them, and I accidentally ended up on one. It's not a huge deal right now but you have to be mindful of it as it makes crossing large swatchs of desert, tundra, and other similar hostile climates quite difficult.
Let's get more going as planned. And yeah, that's certainly not the last or the worst of it. And just you wait, we still haven't even gotten close to religion yet
Oh yeah, this mod takes a page from Civ 5 and also has Natural Wonders. They don't have totally broken tile yields like in that game, but they do allow any city in its range to build a very powerful exclusive wonder in Prehistoric Era and it also has potential additional effects later on in the game. If nothing else, being the first to find a wonder gives you 200 free gold.
After Alpha Female finishes, I queue up a Stone Thrower which I can then split into three weaker units for further exploration. Also shown is the combat attributes of the Brute, so you can see how they differ in what role they take.
Gathering finishes, and we now a reveal a ton of resources on the map. Get used to this, as because of the sheer number of map resources pretty much all of a generated map's tiles will end up with some kind of resource on them eventually, whether that be now or long into the Modern and Space Eras.
Also getting to Gathering before anyone else gives us a free Gatherer, which is a nice bonus. Now let's see what we've got in our capital. Hammers are a bit much to ask for right now but commerce would help quite a bit to get to some key techs early on before hunting starts to become a thing.
Well this is kind of annoying.
Not to worry though, we do have some resources just outside our current borders, so once our borders expand to their second ring we'll have some wheat and apples to look forward to.
How long until our borders expand anyway?
NEXT TIME: Lots of map exploration! Are we alone on this continent or will we have some nice neighbors that definitely don't want to kill us? Will the harsh wildlife of the land turn our Stone Throwers into doggy chow? Will our citizens ever stop eating their own feces and learn to read a book? Will that Gatherer in our city ever improve anything?
Also next time: Some audience participation!
So yeah, I've played a lot more but I figured I'd keep this update short so I can get some of these early C2C-only concepts out of the way, the Properties system especially as it's important from the very start to understand how it works to not completely screw yourself early on. The next update should move more briskly as stuff starts to, you know, happen.
Iamgoofball
Pfft. 150 turns is nothing, I started playing this two days ago and just now after over 800 turns realized that Eternity ISN'T the default gamespeed for this mod, because when I opened the turnspeed selector the first time it must of bugged out because it only showed Eternity, Snail, Eon, and Marathon.
WhitemageofDOOM
... It's magic. I ain't gotta explain shit.
Why would you want to hit a setting that just "Makes game take longer with no other effects."
If the mod's treatment of is any indication, then you're right, religion is going to be amazing.
Luckily it's only ten thousand turns or so until we discover abstract thinking.
ChaseSP
Getting in ground floor of this. Either you'll abandon it early or we're gonna be here for a very long time. I can't wait for whichever ends up.
Eeepies
No, that's Magic!
How long does a C2C game normally last in terms of hours? It looks like an exercise in tedium.
Eeepies posted:
It is said that in the time a single game is played, that a child may be born, grow to their full manhood, live a full life and then pass on and you still won't have discovered how to boat.
ssmagus
Assmagus, LPer ass-traordinaire
On a sane speed like marathon? It takes about 24 hours with kinda optimal play to get to WW1 levels of tech. that's about 1/3 in the tech tree, so a full game to then end is 72 hours. At the slowest speed, a tech that takes 3ish turns on marathon is now 30 turns, so lets say a month of hours? maybe a bit faster because of just the end turn clicking with nothing else going on.
Boksi
It is my honest opinion that Caveman2Cosmos has a lot of bad game design in it, but I still like it because I'm a sucker for this kind of 'more of everything' mod. There's so many subsystems you've yet to cover, like hunting and stories and stealth and fixed borders and instability and housing and the various buildings that need and/or produce resources, it's gonna be so fun
ssmagus posted:
yeah, on eternity i got up to 800 turns absolutely maximizing my research and my neanderthals had just discovered what a tattoo was or whatever the gently caress that technology was
i have since restarted on normal because thats a much better decision and i'm already well past where I was before and into the ancient era at 250 turns or so
In my experience with Civ V and VI if you adjust the speed settings and make the game longer, really all that happens for me is that the game ends in the Medieval or Renaissance eras as I sweep the world with my army. Essentially, I end up going domination because you have much more time to move an army about between technologies and civics. Is this the case with this mod, and I guess vanilla Civ IV?
mitochondritom posted:
Is this the case with this mod, and I guess vanilla Civ IV?
yeah but at the same time the people who want to play a slower game are also the people least likely to leverage an advantage into victory decisively so they usually just go to space anyway
Jossar
Current status: Angry about subs
Well this looks interesting.
If nothing else, it's encouraged me to try a game in the mod to try and join you in the trainwreck.
(EDIT: Just downloading the thing is already causing my computer to eat posts, that's not a good sign.)
Jossar fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Feb 8, 2019
Seraphic Neoman
This feels more like the philosophy people take with NV's hardcore mode; more gauges more better so I can't really see what it adds to the experience. I hope there are some techs to relieve the early game tedium because clawing through the early parts of 4X games is usually the least fun thing about them.
Maybe it's partially my fault for being unclear but I should say in no uncertain terms that my comments on the game are most certainly not an invitation to play through it yourself. I mean, feel free to if you feel you'd get something out of it but it takes a certain uh... mindset to power your way through this experience and I wouldn't wish that kind of thought process on anyone
My only goal is being able to convey the experience properly through this LP. I may or may not succeed but I sure as heck am going to try.
Super Jay Mann posted:
Having tried it out for a few hours my result is that i'm not a person of that mindset...
But mainly because I forgot that I like watching Civ LPs more than I like playing the game itself. So that would probably have been the case even if I was playing Vanilla Civ.
There are some interesting things that will be popping up soon-ish from a viewer perspective, so at least for us it won't be quite as tedious. But as has been stated numerous times before: for the player this is a long haul.
Siegkrow
Arguing about Lore for 5 years and counting
O had always been very curious about this mod because of some of the stuff I've heard you can do (which I won't mention unless Super Jay Mann gives the go ahead, since he didn't set a spoilers policy on the OP)
Xenoborg
I love this mod despite never getting more than any farther than about the iron age.
Siegkrow posted:
I'm not in favor of enforcing any type of hard spoiler policy, partly because I'm sure some people can do better than I can in describing certain things than I can and partly because I don't really care that much, especially if you're talking about stuff that's so far down the line that it won't become relevant in my playthrough for weeks/months and people will just forget about it by then anyway.
Just use your own judgment if you think something would be better off described now or if you think it'd be better to see it in action in the context of a full playthrough.
oystertoadfish
I remember trying to play this years ago. I guess it's continued to metastasize since? I really hope this goes all the way, good loving luck though. thanks for trying!
# ? Feb 10, 2019 00:03
Captainicus
I've definitely tried to play a LAN game of this before, but we only started getting some basic prehistory techs in the first few hundred turns before finding that Civ 4 LAN doesn't work and constantly throws OOS errors. I tried it myself after that but never could get into it as much as my other favourite mods, Fall from Heaven / Fall Further / Rise from Erebus.
No context needed for MAD MAX FURY ROAD!
I have no idea when, if ever, this lets up. To be fair, I also had a lot of military units die because I wasn't paying attention, but still it's kind of horrifying to see that the entirety of the map is out for your blood the instant you leave your hidey-hole.
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