No quests!

I got the Build heaps of Musketmen quest yesterday, couln't have happened at a better time it gave me the quest 7 turns before I'd complete the Taj Mahal (which was an optional requirement) I had to build 12 Muskets which i managed to do half-way through my golden age from the Taj, the choices were:
1.All Musketman units gain the Pinch promotion
2.IF Vassalage civic gain 400 gold
3.IF you control the Taj Mahal wonder trigger a golden age

of course I chose 3.

Double golden age from the Taj? If only you had the Mausoleum, that would be a total of 3 golden ages worth of super production/commerce turns without a single great person!

Let's see....

- got the Swordsman quest....ok, but I had to take the raider promos, as the other alternatives weren't appealing. AND a free golden age...

- got the harbormaster quest, and it really helped my bottom line (took the harbor +1 gold)...

- got the master blacksmith, and that was expensive, and took up alot of production time in alot of cities, and I had to have the right civics no less. AND WOUND UP WITH ONE MEASLY SPECIALIST!!!

What a waste of time!!

Oh well, just my views.....

I read upthread that one could ensure that events (and specifically "quests") are applied to any given game by modifying the <iPercentGamesActive> value.

Some deeper questions...

Was this implemented strictly for aesthetics purposes (i.e., so the player doesn't get peppered with quests) or for more utilitarian reasons? Since events require triggers - I assume the engine does a condition check every turn... If I change all quests to <iPercentGamesActive>100 -- am I dooming myself to a slow-running game?

Based on what I've read - it would seem by changing iPercentGamesActive - then ALSO jacking up iWeight, I can increase the probability and frequency of events... but I don't want to turn the game into a crawl. I do understand that unless I likewise modify the conditions and AI vs. Human settings - the chance still exists I'll either blow by the quest before it can fire, or, it might go to the AI. I have no problem with that -- but I play more as a builder - I beeline for wonders and while I certainly like to mix it up via war, I've never had a problem with the AI starting them for me ;-). The quests add some nice flavor towards my infrastructure style play -- some of them are also nice for "forcing" me into building a military, which is actually a blessing in disguise.

However - I'm concerned that the active game limitations were implemented to reduce the "turn footprint".

Anyone have any insight?

Hey, just kinda curious what does the Noble Knights quest involve? Obviously enough I suppose but I never got it... Got the damned blessed sea one though a bundle of times, and occasionally the trireme one.

Veneke said:

Hey, just kinda curious what does the Noble Knights quest involve? Obviously enough I suppose but I never got it... Got the damned blessed sea one though a bundle of times, and occasionally the trireme one.

Click to expand...

I've never gotten the Noble Knights -- nor the Blessed Sea (what's that one? Since I normally miss Budhism to earlier founders, I generally find myself playing as an excluded religion... I was, in fact, going to change this event to apply to all religions.... but if you're calling it 'damned' - perhaps I shouldn't ;-)

No, sorry I mean damned cause I get it so often. Can't shake it at all.

Rumor is that events (and thus likely quests?) are influenced quite a bit by the in-game situation.

I remember when I pursued my culture victory, I got completely different events than my other games in BtS; most often I go for space race, and I tend to get similar events when I go for space race. I don't know if quests are the same, but I suspect it.

Remember that a 75% chance doesn't mean it will appear in 3/4 of the total number of games. It probably means there is a 3/4 chance each turn of eligibility, and a 0% chance if ineligible. So maybe you were unlucky and the roll of the dice was always not high enough when you were eligible? This would be balanced out by a roll of the dice that was balanced.

Another possibility is that your research style favors researching an enabling quest tech, then beelining toward an obsoleting tech soon afterward, so the window in which the quest could appear is small.

For example, War Chariots quest will be less likely to appear if you research the tech to provide Chariots late, and Monarchy soon after, since Monarchy obsoletes it.

That said, I wouldn't mind more quests. Some of them would be ignored, depending upon game situation, but it would be neat!

Sam

I think I get the Horse Whisperer quest in every one of my games; it's ridiuculous. I haven't even completed it once.

I usually get about 2 a game, with one of them always being the Holy Mountain quest.

This is just my observation and may be way off what the coding says, but it seems to me that I get more quests when I'm the score leader. I've also noted that when I play multi-player my girlfriend always has a higher score earlier in the game, and gets significantly more quests than I do, but when my score passes hers, at approximately the middle ages, I start having more quests than she does.

Again, this is just passive observation and by no means have I been trying to prove or disprove it.

weimingshi said:

It seems that quests are offered to multiple civs at same time, but not ALL civs. It could very well be that all the quests in your game were given to other civs but not you.

Click to expand...

What an awesome way to help poor lil civs stuck at he bottom of the deck .LIke a realistic wildcard, random luck has gone to push crappy civ up the ladder IM sure. Truly a good way to make things a tad less predictable. Now modders makin even cooler quests? Yes this does seem like a major selling point for me.

Number of quests per game range from 1-5 for me.

zonk said:

I've never gotten the Noble Knights -- nor the Blessed Sea (what's that one? Since I normally miss Budhism to earlier founders, I generally find myself playing as an excluded religion... I was, in fact, going to change this event to apply to all religions.... but if you're calling it 'damned' - perhaps I shouldn't ;-)

Click to expand...

The Blessed Sea requires you to found cities on a certain number of new landmasses. On a Huge map it's 16. I don't know if the landmasses can have other people's cities on it, or if taking a barbarian city counts. I've never completed the quest, which seems like it would kill you in maintenance.

I average about a quest a game. Currently I have the triremes quest (build 11 triremes) and the Master Blacksmith (build 11 forges) both active. I've never seen the Noble Knights quest.

Some of the quests (triremes; build libraries; build stables, build forges) are things I do anyway, but the last two require 11 cities.

zonk said:

I read upthread that one could ensure that events (and specifically "quests") are applied to any given game by modifying the <iPercentGamesActive> value.

Some deeper questions...

Was this implemented strictly for aesthetics purposes (i.e., so the player doesn't get peppered with quests) or for more utilitarian reasons? Since events require triggers - I assume the engine does a condition check every turn... If I change all quests to <iPercentGamesActive>100 -- am I dooming myself to a slow-running game?

Based on what I've read - it would seem by changing iPercentGamesActive - then ALSO jacking up iWeight, I can increase the probability and frequency of events... but I don't want to turn the game into a crawl. I do understand that unless I likewise modify the conditions and AI vs. Human settings - the chance still exists I'll either blow by the quest before it can fire, or, it might go to the AI. I have no problem with that -- but I play more as a builder - I beeline for wonders and while I certainly like to mix it up via war, I've never had a problem with the AI starting them for me ;-). The quests add some nice flavor towards my infrastructure style play -- some of them are also nice for "forcing" me into building a military, which is actually a blessing in disguise.

However - I'm concerned that the active game limitations were implemented to reduce the "turn footprint".

Anyone have any insight?

Click to expand...

Hello, I was curious about this too, I searched the dll source code and found the part that generates events is around line 18454 in CvPlayer.cpp, it looks like it creates a list of possible events every turn, then rolls a die to see if and an event will happen and then constructs and paired list of all the the events and their weights. It then chooses one of these from list with probability equal to its weight / total weights.

This codes seems really inefficient, (as in it goes through all of the event data every turn even the inactive ones partially, even if there are no differences from the previous turn), but it is very flexible and easy to add on to (and less prone to bugs).


Anyways to answer your question:
Anyways it looks like including more events in the checking would add to some CPU time but it is pretty much checking almost all the data every turn anyways so I doubt it would make a big difference unless you added something like a thousand new quests.


Important points I discovered:

The formula for determining whether any event will occur (after the first 20 turns) is the iEventChancePerTurn (from the erainfo xml) divided by EVENT_PROBABILITY_ROLL_SIDES (from gamedefine xml). Defaults are
ancient: 1/100
classical: 1/50
medieval: 1/25
renaissance: 1/25
industrial: ~1/17
modern: ~1/12
future: 1/10

from Solvers Guide: if you set iWeight to -1 the event will always occur as soon as its criteria are met

Also from solvers guide: If you set the building or unit weight multiplier (none of the normal events have this) the weight for the event is multiplied by the number of relevant units/buildings. I think I will mod my quest to have this, so if I already have three libraries I am three times as likely to get the build x libraries quest.

@ original poster - if you play until the modern ages you almost always get one the corporation quests (there are two - 80% chance of being in your game, and events occurs roughly every 12 turns in the modern era)

@ButSam - Are you sure the an whether an event is active or not is checked every turn?? It seems like in the source code is only at the beginning of the game (and also according to Kael's guide). Please don't spread lies and misinformation.