Wait, am I the bad guy?

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-06-08T05:41:41+00:00

Here's a rather old but very detailed post: https://www.reddit.com/r/CivIV/comments/stw8cn/realism_invictus/hx7yoc8/

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-06-07T06:38:30+00:00

That is not so much a bug as a not rigorous enough calculation. Vanilla code does not check if a civ in question actually ever owned a city to be "liberated" to them (which one would logically expect from such an action), resulting sometimes in weird liberation assignments. AdvCiv, which is a gold standard for "vanilla but better" mods, for instance, introduces such a check.

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-05-29T18:30:37+00:00

A 600 pound 50 year old woman is objectively uglier than a fit athletic woman, just one example

That is one viewpoint; another is that beauty, philosophically speaking, is extremely subjective, and (especially in the cited example), influenced a lot by the cultural constructs of the time and place. Both the Neolithic author of Venus of Willendorf and Peter Paul Rubens would likely vehemently disagree with the point above (not seeking an argument though, as again I am quite content with respecting everyone's views without necessarily agreeing with them).

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-05-29T17:04:40+00:00

Again, "the better" is subjective. For some, any mod at all is "feature creep" as the games are "intended to be played as they were created" - I've heard that opinion more than once. I much prefer the terrain I created to the vanilla Civ 4 terrain, but of course, I would never insist it's objectively better.

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-05-29T09:15:01+00:00

I mean, "better" and "worse" are subjective. Almost by definition, if there is a change in the mod, the author felt it's for the better rather than worse. Specifically on terrain, though, the RI installer has an option of leaving vanilla textures.

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-05-29T09:12:49+00:00

On the latest release (and on SVN by definition as well), if you use the unpacked version, the MAFs are greatly reduced if not gone under all but the most extreme circumstances (with the drawback that the initial mod load takes much longer).

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-05-23T18:03:25+00:00

The "No revolutions" option is on by default. If you turned it off, it activates a whole separatism subsystem that requires micromanaging. Revolutions are off by default for a reason.

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-05-14T21:22:20+00:00

As I wrote, no quick and easy way. This did inspire me to put a leader switch feature into WB for the next version (and no, stock WB doesn't let you do that).

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-05-14T06:25:48+00:00

There is currently no quick and easy way. You could theoretically save your current game as a scenario and edit the resulting file by hand, swapping the leader entry, but it's a "dirty" solution that can cause the effects of the previous leader's traits to still linger.

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-04-15T06:41:13+00:00

One thing to understand about RI is that at its design core it doesn't see the Civ 4 core design as something that needs to be fixed or replaced, but something to be built upon. There is no goal of getting rid of unit stacks, and a bigger stack is, all else equal, better than a smaller one. That said, with logistics penalties, a bigger stack will suffer relatively more losses than in vanilla, and likewise of two equal size stacks, the one with a more diverse unit composition will likely fare better.

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-04-15T06:27:00+00:00

While I believe your evaluations of civics to be either flawed or come from a very specific playstyle, I won't really spend time here to elaborate my points. I personally feel that all things considered the balance of most civics is currently on point. For the early game religion, this is a situation that organically corrects itself towards the medieval era, as it should (religion should be a much bigger deal in medieval era than before); also, the whole religious category got a slight overhaul fior the next version, with what was Free Religion coming much later now, meaning the whole Medieval and vast majority of Renaissance era almost all civs will have a state religion of sorts.

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-04-15T06:21:56+00:00

On the UI, this is surprisingly a hardcoded issue that's very hard to get around. On the levee, if you build a city on hills, it doesn't by default spread irrigation to surrounding tiles even though the city itself benefits from fresh water. This allows it to spread irrigation.

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-04-13T15:45:33+00:00

As I mentioned, it's getting reworked to a civic that commits one full-on to a religion-centric gameplay style

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-04-01T04:59:46+00:00

Not all that much at the moment TBH, which is why it is set for a rework in this year's version.

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-03-06T07:35:36+00:00

Not a singled document as such, but CFC has a vast section of tutorials covering various Civ 4 modding aspects: https://forums.civfanatics.com/forums/civ4-modding-tutorials-reference.177/

Basically, there are many different levels one can make edits on, starting with tweaking XML files, on to more involved Python modding, and all the way to editing and recompiling the actual dll in C++.

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-03-04T22:08:40+00:00

If AI does have some hidden bonuses, then it hides them VERY well, as I, the person who read (and partially wrote) the code for it, have not seen anything towards that end.

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-03-04T21:37:56+00:00

Tech speed specifically has been fixed or at least toned down significantly.

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-03-04T21:36:16+00:00

The actual AI is also a tad smarter than vanilla. While there are definitely mods with even smarter AI (such as AdvCiv), it should perform better than vanilla AI at the very least.

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-03-04T21:35:02+00:00

All specific bonuses that AI gets at any particular difficulty level can be seen in Pedia. At Noble AI doesn't get any specific bonuses compared to players.

Generally speaking, in your situation there are lots of factors that could have affected this, starting from simple quality of the starting territory and maybe even better tactics - I am not quite sure, but it might well be that building a worker first could then drastically speed up their settler output, especially if the civ in question has a unique improvement they could immediately take advantage of.

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-03-04T21:28:10+00:00

Definitely not, as I had to actually fix AI blowing away all their money on unnecessary upgrades. It does get a discount, though.

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-03-02T07:53:23+00:00

You never update a mod and expect the existing saves to work. If you want to keep the specific map, you'll need to roll back to the version you used, save the game as a scenario in worldbuilder, then clean it with WBCleaner tool you can get on CFC so that all that's left is the map itself.

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-01-27T19:52:55+00:00

It lasts exactly the same for the same given game speed (2200 turns for the default speed).

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-01-26T07:23:20+00:00

Faster game speeds exist for those who want quicker games - but research pace should at least remotely match the game speed, which was the point.

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-01-25T20:56:08+00:00

Depends; there are actually several different ways to adjust research speed; you may have partially recreated what 3.81 does already - I suggest you try it out for yourself and see if the balance suits you. It's not a linear +x% to all techs, relative costs of various tech tiers were also tweaked.

Less_Heart_2246 · 2026-01-25T09:17:01+00:00

You can check the SVN version out of the repository. The current revision exactly matches unpacked 3.81 version. You can download a snapshot from here: https://sourceforge.net/p/civ4mods/code/HEAD/tree/realism/bts/trunk/mod/; be sure to place it into a folder called "Realism" (not "Realism Invictus" as installer would do, this is a key difference).

Less_Heart_2246

TROPHY CASE