Advanced Civ

keldath · Dec 3, 2019

In my game,
Muktiplayer,
Advc 096, we lost to ghandi, on space victory... So i hadnt notice that.

Projects data is stored on civ4projectinfo
Under assets/gameinfo/
Check out mod wiki link on this site for more info.

edit:

f1rpo :

is this a proper merge to the pplot.cpp?

Code:

//105 - keldath from advc 097 -Bugfix: Don't verify city production after border expansion
void CvPlot::updatePlotGroup(/* advc.064d: */ bool bVerifyProduction)
{
    PROFILE_FUNC();
   for (int iI = 0; iI < MAX_PLAYERS; ++iI)
    {
        CvPlayer& kPlayer = GET_PLAYER((PlayerTypes)iI);
        updatePlotGroup(kPlayer.getID(), /* <advc.064d> */ false);
        /*  When recalculation of plot groups starts with updatePlotGroup, then
            bVerifyProduction sometimes interrupts city production prematurely;
            not sure why exactly. Will have to verify all cities instead. */
        if (bVerifyProduction && kPlayer.isHuman() && getOwner() == kPlayer.getID())
            kPlayer.verifyCityProduction(); // </advc.064d>
    }
}

f1rpo · Dec 5, 2019

Montezuma12 said:
Is there a way to edit the Apollo Program or other projects in the files? I had a game where none of the AI's ever built it (and thus no competition for space), [...]

I'm not aware of a fundamental AI issue with Space victories. (Of course it wouldn't be the first glaring problem to escape me.) In Debug mode, Alt-hover on the scoreboard shows the current AI victory strategies. Under the Space-3 strategy, the AI should definitely create Space projects once it has the prereq. tech.

[...] and when I looked in the worldbuilder I couldn't find a way to add projects to cities manually, which was my band-aid solution. [...]

I don't think the WorldBuilder can create projects. I've noticed that only recently when I wanted to test if the Internet project still works. I resorted to gifting myself the required tech, queuing the Internet in a city and immediately finishing production through the plus key cheat (Ctrl+Z for Debug mode, select the city bar, press "+"). That should also work for other players by taking control through Alt+Z.

Obviously, there's PlatyBuilder, but that seems like a big liability to maintain. As a testing tool, I've managed to arrange myself with the BtS WB for the most part.

As usual, love the mod overall, best one I've played for Civ 4, blah blah blah (but honestly, I actually mean that. This mod is incredible!)

Thanks. Well, if you still play the mod, I assume that you're getting something out of it, so that says enough as far as I'm concerned.

keldath said:
is this a proper merge to the pplot.cpp?

Before I changed the loop header to

for (PlayerIter<ALIVE> it; it.hasNext(); ++it)

(which v0.96 doesn't support yet), the code was

Code:

for (int iI = 0; iI < MAX_PLAYERS; ++iI)
{
   if (GET_PLAYER((PlayerTypes)iI).isAlive())
   {
      updatePlotGroup((PlayerTypes)iI);
   }
}

So I think you're missing the isAlive check.

f1rpo · Dec 5, 2019

Starting with the small items:

VDNKh said:
The hover over scoreboard causes a huge FPS drop, had to disable it.

Interesting. Indeed, I see the frame rate drop to 14 FPS while the scoreboard is expanded (through Ctrl+Shift+F in Debug mode). That causes animations to stutter slightly. (I normally have animations frozen, so I had never noticed this.) Is it worse than that on your end? Well, anyway, it's not a good sign and I'll look into it.

Sometimes the AI will make demands from me to end a war even though they are about to be annihilated.

There are some pending reports about such problems and I intend to make some changes. I realize that the current behavior is at times irksome.

Something the K-Mod dev said he wanted to fix: persistent city sorting in the domestic adviser, so when you issue a build order it doesn't reset the order.

No can do.

Net effect value doesn't get applied to the add great person to city option. It's been awhile but I'm pretty sure it does this in the BUG mod.

When hovering over the "Join City" button? Works for me when I hold down the Alt key. It seems that there is no option on the AdvCiv BUG menu to show that help text always, also not for the add-specialist buttons on the city screen. I guess I should either add a checkbox for that under "Building Actual Effects" or change the meaning of one of the existing boxes. Maybe I'll check how BUG/BULL/BAT handle that.

Removing culture borders over water on the minimap and strategic maps

There's an option in Assets\XML\GlobalDefines_advc.xml: "MINIMAP_WATER_MODE"
I'll add it to my list of options that should be on the BUG menu.

A bigger minimap, on 1080p and 1440p monitors, it's pretty small,[...]

Vertical space isn't abundant even on HD. Something like a 20% enlargement might work well. The unit pane on the lower left should then also be enlarged. I'm not sure if that's possible; I remember once trying, in vain, to make the box for help text above the unit pane wider. Well, perhaps a larger unit pane would actually have that effect.

[...] and making it higher res would help with the distortion due to the low res. (That being said I love the fullscreen replays, I just wish the map wasn't just stretched but actually high res.)

After poking around a bit, I've found out that there is a GlobalDefine "MINIMAP_RENDER_SIZE" for that. The BtS value is 512. 1080 looks pretty good on my (just recently acquired) 1920x1200 display. The delay upon opening the replay screen gets a bit longer, but I think it's worth it. However, changing MINIMAP_RENDER_SIZE breaks compatibility with older replays. I hope I can work around that.

Global warming can change the face of the planet and the replay only uses the end game map for the entire replay. Is there a way to fix that?

Maybe not – the EXE gets the minimap terrain data from the replay object only once at the start of the replay. So the first problem to solve would be how to get the EXE to reload the data. Neither setMinimapMap, updateMinimapSection nor setMinimapMode seem to do the trick; there might be a few other candidates to try in the Python API. If that can be worked out, it's still a non-trivial task to implement. Using the terrain from the start of the game would be easier, but would still require the (raw) minimap data (obtained from the EXE through CvDLLInterfaceIFaceBase:: getMinimapBaseTexture) to be stored on turn 0 – also in savegames because the replay file doesn't exist yet – and to be loaded into the replay object at the end of the game. I'm also not sure if using the initial terrain would really be an improvement.

A way to disable globe view for watching AI games.

You mean that the game shouldn't go into Globe view when the world map is centered by Calendar/ Stonehenge? Or do you want to zoom out farther without entering Globe view? Does the field-of-view slider help, say, at a value of 75?

An option for automated workers to leave forts and towns and villages.
A "split" button for selected units which evenly divides the selection in half, like what Paradox games have. I find myself doing this manually a lot.

Sounds sensible, but I doubt that I'll get around to something like this in any foreseeable future. The worker option would be a pretty easy task for what it's worth. Splitting stacks would require an algorithm that partitions the stack according to various criteria; a bit of a can of worms maybe.

Cruiser76 · Dec 5, 2019

I haven’t noticed any Apollo Project issues with the AI. In fact, they usually keep building the spaceship even after losing. :lol:

Elkad · Dec 5, 2019

Automated railroad construction could use help as well. It's far more useful to team up on rail builds. And they should prefer railroading tiles that get a bonus (mines) first. Then connect all cities by rail. Only after that should they be putting rails on random tiles. (If I need the city connections first, I'm probably micromanaging my workers anyway)

And while you are adding checkboxes, one to "Replace Forts with resource-specific Improvement when available" would be nice.

Automated Workboats could use a look as well. When I have 3 boat on Auto in 3 separate cities, it should be sending the nearest boat to a new sea resource, not whichever one it gets too first.

VDNKh · Dec 6, 2019

f1rpo said:
Interesting. Indeed, I see the frame rate drop to 14 FPS while the scoreboard is expanded (through Ctrl+Shift+F in Debug mode). That causes animations to stutter slightly. (I normally have animations frozen, so I had never noticed this.) Is it worse than that on your end? Well, anyway, it's not a good sign and I'll look into it.

Depends on how cluttered the map is, but mine will jump down from 144fps to 36fps with almost nothing to look at on the map. Seems to be a spike in CPU usage. Attached a screenshot of task manager.

f1rpo said:
No can do.

That's a damn shame. Maybe Civ VII will be better... Haha.

f1rpo said:
When hovering over the "Join City" button? Works for me when I hold down the Alt key.

Wasn't holding the Atl key, that was it.

f1rpo said:
There's an option in Assets\XML\GlobalDefines_advc.xml: "MINIMAP_WATER_MODE"

Missed that, awesome!

f1rpo said:
You mean that the game shouldn't go into Globe view when the world map is centered by Calendar/ Stonehenge?

Yes, so it's just flat and not curved. On big maps, maxing out the FOV slider doesn't cut it. Speaking of the FOV slider, have you noticed that small BUG bug where it will jump up or down 1 degree after releasing the slider?

Cruiser76 · Dec 6, 2019

f1rpo, have you ever considered implementing an optional mechanism to slow down runaway AIs or players? I’ve noticed that even when playing on a “fair” level for myself (emperor for me), that occasionally I will get far ahead or an AI will get far ahead. Sometimes the snowball becomes insurmountable by as early as the renaissance era. This usually occurs due to land and resource inequities. I use 100% tech diffusion in the BBAI xml file and that helps the issue somewhat but I wish there was a way to “throttle” a player who gets way ahead. This has been a long standing issue with Civ.

f1rpo · Dec 8, 2019

Upon further consideration, terrain changes in replays are probably infeasible. Since the entire texture needs to be replaced, I expect that there would be a noticeable delay. At best, one could do it e.g. once per era (rather than each time a forest is chopped or a road built). And I still haven't figured out how to get the EXE to reload the texture. So I've settled for the following two options in XML (both disabled by default):

Spoiler :

A higher resolution has some unanticipated drawbacks. Currently, AdvCiv replays can be read by BtS (i.e. with just a double-click on the replay file). A higher resolution breaks compatiblity. Also, the minimap <edit> on the main map </edit> uses the same texture resolution as the replay screen, so there could be some small performance penalty throughout the game for no real gain. (I've tried increasing the resolution only when creating the texture for the replay screen, but didn't get it to work.)

VDNKh said:
Yes, so it's just flat and not curved. On big maps, maxing out the FOV slider doesn't cut it. Speaking of the FOV slider, have you noticed that small BUG bug where it will jump up or down 1 degree after releasing the slider?

Yes, the buggy slider is actually pretty annoying. Seems like the error is inside the slider component. PlatyUI uses +/- buttons iirc; I guess that would be the only way to really fix it. For now, I'm only making the slider a bit longer, which somewhat helps, and I'm increasing the impact of the slider position toward the right end, so that the 100% position results in a field-of-view value of 125. That seems to be enough to view Huge maps in their entirety. Until I deploy that change, you could try increasing the four values in the left column of DF_SKY and DF_GLOBE_TERRAIN in Assets\XML\Misc\Civ4DetailManager.xml. It's easy to experiment with that because changes to Civ4DetailManager.xml take effect immediately when the game is running. Those values set the camera height at which the game switches to Globe view. I think that's a bit different from the field-of-view value; seems to increase the number of zoom levels below the Globe view boundary. I'd generally like to increase those values a bit, but they result in a flatter camera angle when playing at a medium distance. In principle, mods can change the camera pitch (example), so, with some effort, this could be amended. Meanwhile, for AI Auto Play, Alt+F (Satellite view) might be helpful.

f1rpo · Dec 8, 2019

Cruiser76 said:
f1rpo, have you ever considered implementing an optional mechanism to slow down runaway AIs or players? I’ve noticed that even when playing on a “fair” level for myself (emperor for me), that occasionally I will get far ahead or an AI will get far ahead. Sometimes the snowball becomes insurmountable by as early as the renaissance era. This usually occurs due to land and resource inequities. I use 100% tech diffusion in the BBAI xml file and that helps the issue somewhat but I wish there was a way to “throttle” a player who gets way ahead. This has been a long standing issue with Civ.

I'd like to implement a tech diffusion mechanism that factors culture in foreign tiles into the diffusion rate, so that geographical distance matters. But I don't expect that this would make tech diffusion any more effective as a catch-up mechanism than in BBAI. I don't have any other major change in mind to prevent snowballing; I see it as an inherent flaw of Civ.

I expect that localized balance changes would alleviate the problem. Any technologies that are too powerful (Liberalism, Civil Service, Rifling, Steel come to mind) will take the civ that gets there first farther ahead. That said, I agree with your analysis that the quality of the land has a lot to do with runaway leaders, and that's also unfair (which snowballing doesn't have to be; it's just anti-climactic). Nerfing resources should help a bit. At the least, I'd like to reduce the food yield from Fishing Boats by 1 until Refrigeration and take away one food from Pig. Gold is also a problem, but, well, gold ought to be valuable. Some changes in that vein are already in place - slightly fewer extra resources at starting locations, bad terrain isn't always removed, no flood plains on river corners, fewer clusters of Gold and Gems. What might help more is a fairer placement of the starting locations. The current algorithm doesn't predict at all in which directions the civs can expand. Shallow-water connections to other continents are also ignored.

The AI already tries to identify civs that might run away with the game and prioritizes war against them. In my experience, this does sometimes lead to the downfall of a civ that was already well ahead. Often, too few civs are able to reach a dangerous rival though. There are also already some disadvantages for strong civs built into AI diplomacy – there's the "you're getting ahead of us" rank hate and advanced civs get overcharged in tech trades. One could dial that up a bit more, e.g. by making the "fear you're getting too advanced" threshold actually care about how advanced the recipient is.

As for options: There's the Rise & Fall option, but that's a pretty different experience than the regular game. I'm aware of mods that adjust player handicaps dynamically. That seems like the bluntest approach and isn't even very effective from what I've heard.

keldath · Dec 9, 2019

thats an interesting discussion .
it was always like this in civ, an ai is at the top, pretty hard to catch up with it. the lack of fluctuation in empire power. this makes victories that are time based, meaning not domination or conquest,
to be a lost battle from the mid game, or a hard to achieve one.
but as said, thats inherited on civ for ever.
tech diffusion and such may help to narrow to gap somewhat.
but, pretty hard to go for an ai with a 500 point gap .
having ai personalities to target leading civs may assist. some ai perhaps can target those civs and hinder tham, even on the cost of the attacker to be weaker and loose its position, due to the power difference. that can help a bit.

My previous version of Doto,
i tried to play with these gaps , by adding "parallel" units, meaning, that other units types with similar powers are available on the other side of the tech tree, so , if one chooses to follow another path of the tech tree, it shouldn't be hurt and get further away from units. in addition, i have added units that have less strength than its "parallel" unit, with the one difference of not having to need a prerequisite resource to be built.

maybe by adding some random factors, to hurt leading civs, can assist.
events with some hard effects, maybe some health disease mechanism, such as in RI/c2c. maybe increase large empires maintenance .
or maybe some cool mechanism that will split empires into small empires

while keeping maybe the score or something ...
(just fired some thoughts).

but all and all, thas civ, and realism,
empires that are in the lead, are hard to pull down or catch up, something needs to happen artificially to catch them.

or,
maybe nukes more powerful, with damage that can really take down empires

Leoreth · Dec 9, 2019

Have you considered some sort of technological rubber banding effect? In DoC, the most advanced quartile receives a tech cost penalty (gradually decreasing from the most advanced to the top 75% advanced) and the least advanced quartile receives cheaper techs. The effect also scales with era so that it's not too punishing early in the game where civs tend to cluster more. I think it's plus/minus 25% in the modern era for the top and bottom civs. It's kind of a crude instrument, and I'm sure some people will regard it as unfair/punishing, but I found it's quite useful to keep the tech race a bit tighter over time.

For early gold, I've seen some mods take away commerce from it and add it later with a tech. I think it was Bronze Working, which makes sense thematically but I'm not sure if that particular tech needs to be even stronger for the early game.

<Nexus> · Dec 9, 2019

keldath said:
thats an interesting discussion .
it was always like this in civ, an ai is at the top, pretty hard to catch up with it. the lack of fluctuation in empire power. this makes victories that are time based, meaning not domination or conquest,
to be a lost battle from the mid game, or a hard to achieve one.
but as said, thats inherited on civ for ever.
tech diffusion and such may help to narrow to gap somewhat.
but, pretty hard to go for an ai with a 500 point gap .
having ai personalities to target leading civs may assist. some ai perhaps can target those civs and hinder tham, even on the cost of the attacker to be weaker and loose its position, due to the power difference. that can help a bit.

My previous version of Doto,
i tried to play with these gaps , by adding "parallel" units, meaning, that other units types with similar powers are available on the other side of the tech tree, so , if one chooses to follow another path of the tech tree, it shouldn't be hurt and get further away from units. in addition, i have added units that have less strength than its "parallel" unit, with the one difference of not having to need a prerequisite resource to be built.

maybe by adding some random factors, to hurt leading civs, can assist.
events with some hard effects, maybe some health disease mechanism, such as in RI/c2c. maybe increase large empires maintenance .
or maybe some cool mechanism that will split empires into small empires while keeping maybe the score or something ...
(just fired some thoughts).

but all and all, thas civ, and realism,
empires that are in the lead, are hard to pull down or catch up, something needs to happen artificially to catch them.

or,
maybe nukes more powerful, with damage that can really take down empires

I think that is what Revolutions should be for. I know it hurts the AI more than the Human player, even with smaller empires but it may be a good area to start at brainstorming.

I think of something like this:
Bigger empires have fewer enemies outside and more inside
You control X% of world population. Every turn there is X% chance that one of your cities will demand for autonomy (become a vassal). You can either grant it or the city will revolt for some turns (scaled by gamespeed, maybe mapsize too). This could work regardless of revolutions mod.

An other attemp seen in Galactic Civilizations 2:
All against the top one
At some later point of the game all factions aligned against the leading one.
Something similar could happen in Civ4 too but not sure how. Maybe diplomatic penalty between the top and all the lower players and bonus among the lower players. This could work if the top player gets isolated (cancelling trade agreements, open borders, e.t.c) and the rest of the world should unite (defensive pacts, increased trade, e.t.c.).

...and I have a 3rd thing in my mind:
More people, more demands
Again, you control X% of world population. Every turn there is X% chance that one of your cities will demand for something:

a building from the list of available list of that city;
a resource that you have no access to;
an improvement on a chosen plot in city's BFC (must be a valid improvement, but may want to replace your only Uranium mine with a Town );

...and you have some turns to fill the request or receive penalty (revolt and/or unhappiness).

I'd like to have penalties on the leading civ(s) but only those kind that don't feel artificial and "You are punished for doing good" rather introducing additional layers of difficulties.

f1rpo · Dec 15, 2019

I had gotten bogged down a bit restructuring the AI code for evaluating city sites. That ties in with @VDNKh's post about AI exclaves

VDNKh said:
[...] it makes some strange settling choices too. [...]

and @keldath's earlier reports about misplaced AI cities. My development version can now write a breakdown of the city site evaluation to a log file. Example (screenshot of the main map attached):

Spoiler :

This will make it a lot easier for me to diagnose bad city placement. Regarding VDNKh's 29-civ Earth scenario, some general considerations:
* When founding or conquering a city that isn't connected to the new owner's main territory, there's the possibility of correcting that at a later time through (further) warfare. When fighting a long-distance war, the first city to be conquered will always be isolated and not worth keeping if no further conquests are assumed.
* The AI doesn't anticipate whether a new city will be cut off by foreign borders. That would be a somewhat difficult thing to compute. The AI does consider the air distance to its own nearest city and to the nearest rival city. (It would be better to take into account multiple cities.)
* The historically accurate behavior for some of the European civs would be to stay at 1-3 cities until Astronomy. But if they play to win, they'll have to expand earlier by some means. When the available city sites are very poor (due to distance and other factors), then the AI should produce military units instead of a Settler. I.e. assuming that there is some target that the AI could realistically take a city from. So the war planning code could be the culprit. Or the chance of producing a Settler despite poor sites might still be too high. And city sites are probably sometimes valued too highly. Another problem on a tight map like this is that several AI civs will start producing Settlers for the same site. I've recently added (not yet deployed) a clause that causes the AI to switch production when there is no longer any site worth settling. However, so long as some site remains available, say, in the Urals, the AI will finish the Settler (and that isn't necessarily wrong).
* From the screenshots, it's difficult to say which rival cities had existed when a questionable city was founded and which strategic resources the city owner was missing.

Egypt is settling behind Zara's cities near Shaka and Mansa Musa.

Rome is settling far behind Russia.

Germany is settling even further back behind Russia and Persia.

Persia and Greece are also making some questionable city placements but they could work.

Mali should've taken the Alexandria spot; perhaps Mali was slow to get Iron Working. I'd agree that Germany and Rome should've rather spent their production on military units than on a Settler. Cumae is in a pretty poor spot (unless you've added resources to the map).

VDNKh said:
An option for automated workers to leave forts and towns and villages.

Elkad said:
And while you are adding checkboxes, one to "Replace Forts with resource-specific Improvement when available" would be nice.

I'd combine that into "Automated workers never replace Towns and Villages and replace Forts only on workable tiles." (hover text) and name the option perhaps "Workers Leave Some Improvements" and rename the "Old Improvements" option to "Workers Leave All Improvements". Anyway, automation isn't a priority for me; just mentioning it on the off chance that someone else wants to implement that.

Automated railroad construction could use help as well. It's far more useful to team up on rail builds. And they should prefer railroading tiles that get a bonus (mines) first. Then connect all cities by rail. Only after that should they be putting rails on random tiles. (If I need the city connections first, I'm probably micromanaging my workers anyway)

Automated Workboats could use a look as well. When I have 3 boat on Auto in 3 separate cities, it should be sending the nearest boat to a new sea resource, not whichever one it gets too first.

These two would also help the AI. Though probably not much, so I'll only make a note about it for now.

keldath · Dec 16, 2019

very nice f1rpo,
you taken up a notch on city placement.
looks like a big project that you had your time on.

im certain youll have some great improvements.

im on a small civ break to play some league of legends, but im here always

Cruiser76 · Dec 16, 2019

Very cool, tinkering with AI city placement is a worthwhile project :thumbsup:

Cruiser76 · Dec 22, 2019

I’d like to report on a fun ending to a game I just finished. I had a pretty good point lead due to population and land size, and was 2 techs behind Ragnar, the tech leader. Ragnar launched a spaceship but there wasn’t enough time for it to reach Alpha. I was simply running culture and letting the clock run out. With 2 turns to go Roosevelt launched a massive ICBM strike on me and captured one of my core cities on the coast. I actually had to sweat the finale a bit, hoping my score wouldn’t drop too much. The interesting thing is that he had no chance to win, so it was a pure spite attack. It made me wonder though whether the AI would do this to another AI player about to win?

Elkad · Dec 22, 2019

AI sea invasions are still.. well, stuck in a rut.

The AI will pick a landing point (city) and throw endless stacks of troops at it, while other MUCH weaker target cities, sometimes closer ones, are ignored.

f1rpo · Dec 25, 2019

I've been separated :sad:

from the Internet for a few days (my desktop PC is still offline).

Cruiser76 said:
[...] With 2 turns to go Roosevelt launched a massive ICBM strike on me and captured one of my core cities on the coast. I actually had to sweat the finale a bit, hoping my score wouldn’t drop too much. The interesting thing is that he had no chance to win, so it was a pure spite attack. It made me wonder though whether the AI would do this to another AI player about to win?

There is code to encourage AI civs to stop a disliked rival from winning. I'm not positive that this was a factor here. The AI doesn't recognize when a time victory is imminent – though that seems like an easy addition to make. So Roosevelt might have assumed that only Ragnar was a likely winner. Or perhaps you were close enough to some proper victory condition as well. So long as no civ is close to any victory condition, likely winners are identified based on score (and predicted conquests in ongoing wars). In that context, the human score is inflated a bit. I think that's the only anti-human bias in the king-making code. Anyway, the AI civs that can't win continue to fight wars for all the usual reasons, and the timing could’ve been a coincidence. If you have a savegame shortly before the declaration of war, you could enable the UWAI log in GlobalDefines_devel.xml to check. The log gets written during AI turns.

Arguably, the AI shouldn’t start a nuclear war when it can’t win anymore. Also, ideally, nukes shouldn’t be launched as a matter of course when at war. Currently, the only levels of escalation while at war are “total” and “limited” war and the latter type of war merely makes the AI more hesitant to fire nukes.

Elkad said:
AI sea invasions are still.. well, stuck in a rut.

The AI will pick a landing point (city) and throw endless stacks of troops at it, while other MUCH weaker target cities, sometimes closer ones, are ignored.

I don't think I've changed anything about that. There's a BtS loading screen hint suggesting that the AI will target lightly defended coastal cities:
"Rival civilizations led by computer opponents now pose a more significant threat from the sea. Stronger fleets, amphibious invasions... Don't be caught unprepared! The more warlike leaders can be very sneaky with their attack plans, as they have learned to think beyond the sword."

I agree that this doesn't really happen. I did make some changes to get the AI to attack by ship sometimes even when there is a land connection. But that'll also only come up once in a blue moon.

I'm not sure if it would be fun to shift units back and forth along the coast to keep every angle covered. So the AI just trying to win through superior numbers seems fair enough, or almost.

A bit of sneakiness would probably be a good thing, if only to make the AI appear more lifelike.

Catching up a bit on other recent topics:
I seem to have fixed the lag while hovering over the fly-out scoreboard.

Cruiser76 said:
Very cool, tinkering with AI city placement is a worthwhile project

Having worked with the logs for some time – there really were some significant miscalculations and, given that every AI civ will consider settling on every legal tile, it seems that such errors tend to materialize pretty frequently. There are still some fundamental issues:
* Penalties for foreign culture and remoteness are based only on a single existing city.
* The distance penalties can lead to cities in sites that are clearly not local optima.
* City specialization isn't encouraged at all.
* The special treatment of resource yields (inherited from BtS) is an obstacle to further improvements to the yield evaluation.
One unexpected issue was that the AI sometimes settled its second and third city without having explored the site’s surroundings (sometimes not even the full city radius). Not sure if it's much better now; I've added a clause that encourages exploration units to target unrevealed tiles near tentative city sites.

keldath said:
[...] but all and all, thas civ, and realism,
empires that are in the lead, are hard to pull down or catch up, something needs to happen artificially to catch them.
or, maybe nukes more powerful, with damage that can really take down empires

When the early game is too decisive, one remedy can be to make the midgame and late game more decisive, i.e. to allow increasingly bigger swings through skill and luck. Since Civ ties new capabilities to technologies, the players in the lead are the first to get access to any game-changers. In that light, keeping players somewhat on par technologically seems especially important. Astronomy, for example, has the potential to upset the game – if a civ that urgently needs more space is among the first to get there.

I'm open to including the DoC tech cost adjustment as an XML option. Sounds like it should be easy to adopt.

Leoreth said:
Have you considered some sort of technological rubber banding effect? In DoC, the most advanced quartile receives a tech cost penalty (gradually decreasing from the most advanced to the top 75% advanced) and the least advanced quartile receives cheaper techs. The effect also scales with era so that it's not too punishing early in the game where civs tend to cluster more. I think it's plus/minus 25% in the modern era for the top and bottom civs. It's kind of a crude instrument, and I'm sure some people will regard it as unfair/punishing, but I found it's quite useful to keep the tech race a bit tighter over time.

For early gold, I've seen some mods take away commerce from it and add it later with a tech. I think it was Bronze Working, which makes sense thematically but I'm not sure if that particular tech needs to be even stronger for the early game.

I've seen Currency suggested a while ago – same problem wrt. game balance of course. Market perhaps; though the only applicable BtS XML tag would be BonusYieldModifier, e.g. "+10% (overall city) commerce with Gold". I think I'll leave this problem to mod-mods for now.

The more I think about it, the more I think that a fairer spacial distribution of the starting locations would be the best individual measure against early runaway civs, with the fewest feathers ruffled. However, selecting nodes in a graph so that their mutual distances are maximized seems like a hard problem computationally (should be at least as hard as computing an independent set).

Leoreth · Dec 25, 2019

I agree on the starting locations. One silver/gold/gems is already very powerful and may only be balanced at the expense of one food resource, more than one should never occur on a starting plot in my opinion.

Is the computational complexity that impactful here though, when it comes to distances? The set of locations should be low enough for the impact to be limited.

f1rpo · Dec 25, 2019

Leoreth said:
I agree on the starting locations. One silver/gold/gems is already very powerful and may only be balanced at the expense of one food resource, more than one should never occur on a starting plot in my opinion.

Unless there is a real catch like Gems under Jungle. (I’ve changed the normalization step so that tiles with powerful resources can’t benefit from feature removal and terrain upgrade.) The found value function should be able to tell whether a starting site is too powerful. I haven’t looked at logs for the evaluation of (potential) starting sites yet; perhaps the commerce multiplier needs to be increased, but hopefully it’s not too far off the mark.

Currently, CvPlayer::findStartingPlot greedily picks the sites with highest found values. Or rather, it’s a mix of that and maximizing the distance to previously picked sites. To rule out double-Gold starts, the algorithm should probably not go for the highest found values; at least skip outliers. That said, it’s also problematic when a civ gets to place its second city at a site deemed too powerful to be a starting site …

Is the computational complexity that impactful here though, when it comes to distances? The set of locations should be low enough for the impact to be limited.

I was thinking of evaluating all possible assignments of n players to m>n potential starting sites. I guess that’s the binomial coefficient since we don’t care which player gets which location. So that’s not going to be feasible for 18 players. To maximize, as I wrote, the mutual distances, a greedy algorithm should actually work pretty well. The PerfectWorld script starts by computing distances between all potential sites (m square complexity – no problem) and picking the site with the highest average distance. The other sites are then selected to maximize the distance to all previously selected sites.

Even if this comes close to an optimal solution, it doesn’t give everyone equal space for expansion. If we imagine a star-shaped continent with one corner for every civ, then each civ will start at one corner, even if the sizes of the star’s triangles are highly assymetrical. Also, PerfectWorld starting locations are almost always coastal.

So I’ll have to move the goal post. I was picturing an algorithm that works on a fairly large set of potential sites, e.g. m=6*n (or n times WorldSize.getTargetNumCities), and tries to give every player access to an equal number of sites, with contested sites (near multiple starting sites) counting only partially.

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