1.6 feedback

davidlallen said:

One workaround is to go to your My Games\Beyond The Sword folder and create a folder called "BUG Mod". Inside that folder create a folder called "UserSettings". Then try running the game without "run as administrator".

Click to expand...

negyvenketto said:

For me it doesn't work.

Click to expand...

That is bad news, but thank you for reporting. This is the #1 reported problem for Dune Wars, and I am actively discussing with the BUG component team how to avoid the problem. Please see this thread for details. For now, all we can do is to list this as a known problem on the installation page (done), and as soon as any newcomer reports a crash during xml loading, we should suggest this.

(redirected from succession game thread)

Where should religions be documented? In vanilla, the religion pedia entry shows the prerequisite tech and the effect; the only written text is background; it does not list the related buildings. Vanilla does not have any weird founding / spread effects.

Today in DW, in the religion pedia, I have listed some bullets of the game effects. Several players have asked questions indicating they did not find this information, so we need to make this information easier to find.

Should the buildings be listed in the religion pedia page?

Should we rename some of the buildings? In DW, we have chosen thematic names for the buildings, and therefore it is hard to remember which buildings go to which religion. In vanilla, some of the buildings have random names, especially the shrines, so the same problem exists.

Instead of the religion pedia entries, should we instead have a section in the Dune Wars Concepts tab? More players might find it there.

Is there some other more obvious place we can put religion information?

Instead of the religion pedia entries, should we instead have a section in the Dune Wars Concepts tab? More players might find it there.

Click to expand...

Why not both?

Should the buildings be listed in the religion pedia page?

Click to expand...

This would be nice, particularly if they link off to the relevant building pages. We could even add a link to the missionary/special units, Mahdi Zealot, etc.

Should we rename some of the buildings? In DW, we have chosen thematic names for the buildings, and therefore it is hard to remember which buildings go to which religion. In vanilla, some of the buildings have random names, especially the shrines, so the same problem exists.

Click to expand...

As you say, vanilla has the same issue with the Shrines. I would rather keep the flavourful names, but have the list of buildings associated with each religion well documented.

Ahriman said:

Why not both?

Click to expand...

In general, documentation should never be repeated. This guarantees that somewhere along the line, somebody will update it in one place but not the other place, causing a contradiction. Now that I have added the civilization hover help, I am tempted to remove the Unique Abilities section of the pedia for just this reason. I have to update two documentation places for each change.

Of course you can link to the same documentation in multiple places; I could write a DW Concepts entry for religion which only says, Please see the religion pedia entries for more details on religions.

Deliverator said:

This would be nice, particularly if they link off to the relevant building pages. We could even add a link to the missionary/special units, Mahdi Zealot, etc.

Click to expand...

I can easily add the unit and building names in plain text. I tried some experiments and there is no way to have the plain text fields *link* to other pedia entries unsing standard blue underlining. When the pedia entries want links, what they do is build a scrolling box which shows the icons instead. For example, in the pedia for a civ, the list of UUs is a scrolling box of icons. It would be a good enhancement to change the religion sevopedia to put a scrolling box of the buildings and units enabled. But for now, we will have to make do with a plain text list.

Still, I would like to find an additional way to guide players to read the religion pedia text. I can add a hint to guide them there. I don't want to put duplicate information into the DW Concepts tab. It seems silly to put a one line section into the concepts tab which guides them to another pedia section, but maybe it is worthwhile. What do you think?

guarantees that somewhere along the line, somebody will update it in one place but not the other place, causing a contradiction.

Click to expand...

Good point.

I could write a DW Concepts entry for religion which only says, Please see the religion pedia entries for more details on religions.

Click to expand...

With links, this should be fine.

seems silly to put a one line section into the concepts tab which guides them to another pedia section, but maybe it is worthwhile.

Click to expand...

I think its utility outweights any silliness. It makes sense to me; the Dunewars concept is a central repository that *should* link elsewhere. You can just have a one liner that says somethnig like "many of the religions of Dune have unique characteristics that are not immediately apparent; make sure to read their unique descriptiosn here <link>"

Ahriman said:

It makes sense to me; the Dunewars concept is a central repository that *should* link elsewhere. You can just have a one liner that says somethnig like "many of the religions of Dune have unique characteristics that are not immediately apparent; make sure to read their unique descriptiosn here <link>"

Click to expand...

There is no way to put a link in plain pedia text, but I will add the section and the one liner. Also a hint with basically the same text.

I agree with all said, and i think no need to rename buildings. In DW religions are different. Difference in names make a good serve. Its not tetris, not FPA. People need to know to think alittle before starting their game of Civ or any its sequels/mods.

I redirected my reply to Ahriman from our sucession game here:

Ahriman said:

?
How is the presence of scout thopters (transports) an indication of weak AI?
We blitzed them in two turns, they didn't have time to bring in any more defenders.

Three defensive units in a city is not normally unreasonable, its just that we beelined for very powerful assault troops, and these troops are perhaps a little too cheap/strong.

Click to expand...

If you find str 1 transport/scout units stationed in capital is good thing. then nvm

really, if we make in-depth look, there should go a change.

Str 1 units. Movement 2. Why the hells those should be in numbers in capital?
Why there should be too much of them?

AI need tweaking. It need some balance between condsidering it a transport unit and considering it a scout unit. I know its hardest SDK change, but it should be done at some point. Few 1 Str scout thopters in capital. Isnt that stupid? How much it needs to move it's settlers? To scout rivals? Less. I have no doubt there much more in other place. Why stalling early growth by building such amounts of them, and hten just stationing them in capital, till caryalls? Isnt that stupid? I am sure it is.
And at some point it should be mastered. Its SDK/Python level change, but if AI will build less scout thopters and still will spread settlers at same rate, and will try to get to suspensors earlier using its production on better things, and better defence - it will be much better.
There shoul dbe balance. 3 Units (i dont count those thopters) in capital which is border city as well - is too few.
It is capital. Full of Wonders, if you didnt noticed. BTl have 4 cities. That is stupid they have few thopters with str 1 stationed in capital. This is VERY stupid.
We dont need to look at AI from perspective of its current limitations.
If there is a target, it could be achieved. To say its good for him, where you understand that he was able to build less of those thopters in favor of 2-3 more protective-trait defence units? To say its good that AI not defending Wonderspammed capital? 3 defence units? 1 of those is Quad. Thats bad, in my opinnion.

There is no moaning without proposition. 1st Scout Thopter should be not Defence-ability unit. Just no military str at all. It should be not a unit which AI will consider as "able to defend a thing". (like worker). If it possible to change AI vision of Scout thopter without changing its strength - that will be better, but if not - removing str from scout thopter unit will improve quality of AIs defence. AI is good at offense now. But at defense it fails miserably. And as i see, i see stupid behavior. Please dont call me stupid, denying my saying. I just make a notification of important matter to the mod's quality.

Slvynn said:

To say its good for him, where you understand that he was able to build less of those thopters in favor of 2-3 more protective-trait defence units? To say its good that AI not defending Wonderspammed capital? 3 defence units? 1 of those is Quad. Thats bad, in my opinnion.

Click to expand...

I completely agree with you.

The AI code is practically impossible to understand. There are 2-3 modders such as jdog5000 who understand it. Everybody who plays civ complains the AI is not very smart. Visit the BBAI forum and read all the flames from people complaining about this. It is not possible to just make one change, such as, "Build less thopters", without spending weeks to understand the code and deal with possible side effects. I do not have the focused time or energy to do that. We will keep it on the list of common complaints, and hopefully someday "we" can do "something" about it.

I just edited my post and added few important strings with solution. Solution is simple - Deny to AI to view a Scout Thopter as military-potent unit. Or even to just remove any Strenght from him, and make him vulnerable unit same as worker.. I think that not denying any sense and make this part much better.

Also as far as i know - AI bases on UnitBuildProb.
And any military capable unit count against that modifier which is also influenced by amount of units AI already built.
So those thopters are denying to AI to defend cities well. Just because they are military unit. AI sees ist as defence capable unit. And, by default defence-potent.

As balance i propose to give to scout thopter withdraw chance. If it possible to make it domestic unit, but add 75% withdraw chance? It is (Loki in FFH) Its laso possible to tie withdrawal to certain units type. Lets say all units except Air ones will have this retreat, but Air would be immune to it.

Slvynn said:

I just edited my post and added few important strings with solution. Solution is simple - Deny to AI to view a Scout Thopter as military-potent unit. Or even to just remove any Strenght from him, and make him vulnerable unit same as worker. Captureable as well. I think that not denying any sense and make this part much better.

Click to expand...

Would you be willing to locally edit your xml file for the units and try this out? What you have described is a simple change but I bet it will have either no effect, or some unexpected bad side effects. If you do make the change, be sure to keep a copy of the original file and change it back afterwards, so that your succession game will still work.

In file assets/xml/units/civ4unitinfos.xml, find the section for "UNIT_SCOUT". Under that you will see "<Description>Scout Thopter" so you know you are in the right place. The unit is already defensive only because of "<bDefensiveOnly>1". Find the line "<iCombat>1" and change to 0, so it will have zero strength just like a worker. Save this and try a new game. I bet you will find this does not make any difference to the number of thopters built.

This should demonstrate my point that AI changes are not as easy as you seem to think. For each city, the AI is deciding how to spend its hammers. There are many choices, among all the possible buildings or units. The AI has thousands of lines of code to assign a weight to each choice, and then it picks the choice with the highest weight. For some reason, it is assigning a high weight to thopters, and we do not know why. Or possibly it is assigning a low weight to other defensive units, but again we do not know why.

I understand that this is painful for you, and I am sorry I cannot immediately fix it for you.

Slvynn said:

As balance i propose to give to scout thopter withdraw chance.

Click to expand...

This is a common misunderstanding. In vanilla, withdraw chance only has an effect when the unit is attacking. Since the unit already cannot attack, this does not have any effect. In FFH, they have added a separate ability which I would call "escape", but they have re-used the same name. This "escape" ability allows a defending unit to avoid destruction by moving away. DW does not have this code, and pulling out just this bit of code would be difficult.

I know and i not demaning it , i just dont like postion of "its quite well and nice".

Good things never come immediately, to my own belief.

I think i know where we might looking, and i read some tutorials of xmls. There is other parameter that related to unit's tactics.

I sure the will be change. Because AI will know then that he have only 3 defensive units for its capital. And not 6. And thus will prioritize build more of them.

If you find str 1 transport/scout units stationed in capital is good thing. then nvm

Click to expand...

They are 2-capacity transports, and the AI player at that point in time didn't need them for transporting anythnig. They're very cheap. So why is this a problem? The 2 thopters together probably cost less than a single infantry, and the AI I think tends to store unused transports in its capital. How is this bad?

Why there should be too much of them?

Click to expand...

How do you know this is too many? An economy wide transport force of 2?
The AI needed those transports, it managed to use them to claim a large part of the polar region. So, who says that was a bad decision? Arguably there is a problem in that polar cities are over-valued in the AI relative to other sites, because of the high value on water, whereas in the early game the polar cities aren't actually useful.

But this is just an argument that says polar tiles are too weak in the early game, or are valued too highly. Maybe add +1 hammer to polar desert waste?

Few 1 Str scout thopters in capital. Isnt that stupid?

Click to expand...

It had 2. No, that isn't stupid. The total hammer cost of these was like 40 hammers. How much of a delay do you think this caused in their expansion? It probably hastened their expansion.

and still will spread settlers at same rate

Click to expand...

How is it giong to spread settlers at the same rate, including to the pole and to surroundnig islands, without any transport units?

Full of Wonders, if you didnt noticed.

Click to expand...

I haven't looked at it, but if this is true, this is a MUCH more serious issue. 2 thopters is like nothing compared to multiple wonders.
At some point I'll check the save, but what wonders were present here?
Maybe removing so many early wonders will help here.

I think you're massively misdiagnosing the problem. 2 thopters is not a problem. Building tons of Wonders is.
Partly the wonders are probably concentrated in too few techs, so when the Tleilaxu (who have religious weighing) go for Faith, there are lots of Wonders there and so they start building them, and can get through multiple wonders before other factions bother to research faith. A Wonder redesign (spreading them to more techs) will help here.

Maybe we need to increase the military unit proportion for some of the AI leaderheads, or decrease their tendency to build Wonders.

Scout Thopter should be not Defence-ability unit. Just no military str at all

Click to expand...

As long as it still uses them for transport, this is relatively harmless. But I *like* that the AI builds scout thopters early and uses them to transport settlers. This is good behavior! We don't want to lose this.
Note how much worse the Fremen AI performs because they don't have a scout thopter to carry their settlers around.

I found alot of other parameters there. And i am sure that one of them is sure we looking for.

<bNoDefensiveBonus>1</bNoDefensiveBonus>
<bMilitaryProduction>1</bMilitaryProduction

Changing its defencive ability will no way harm spreading settlers. Settler spread tied to AI tactic SETTLER_SEA, and removing one of those parametres that identify Scout thopter as defence-viable unit will in no way harm it.

Worker s and settler have those 0. I think it should be 0 as well. Ai threatening Thopter similar to vanilla galley. All things that military should be removed, while leaving its scouting/spread Intelligence.

Potential problem; does this mean that AI scout thopters, like workers, would start to flee into cities if enemy units were spotted - even if the AI had vulture thopter defenders for the scouts?

But the other issue is more important.

Either:
a) This change will make the AI build fewer thopters, which I think could be a bad thing
or
b) This change will not make the AI build fewer thopters, in which case, what's the point?

Ahriman said:

Potential problem; does this mean that AI scout thopters, like workers, would start to flee into cities if enemy units were spotted - even if the AI had vulture thopter defenders for the scouts?

But the other issue is more important.

Either:
a) This change will make the AI build fewer thopters, which I think could be a bad thing
or
b) This change will not make the AI build fewer thopters, in which case, what's the point?

Click to expand...

Huh. I am not arguing with you, because you are arguing.
I not telling it should be white or black. I wont bad or bad choice. There is a balance. Ai will prioritize Thopter as domestic unit. As a settler. It have already this ai. The problem is ver yclear. It have also military potence. If we remove it it will make things much better, closer to balance.
If there is optimal amount of thopters of 3, why you build 1 or 6? Player never build less than he needs and never more than he needs. Thats called efficiency.
Also i found tendency in your approach - to deny and argue, denying separate points of one wis whom you are battling. Its a right approach but not in all cases. I am not battling. I saying things, that can be fast salvation. Why to deny things before you looked into them? Before you tried? I find this way waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to uneffective. There is things that clear even to noob as i am - in that XML, that AI consider Scout Thopter as Military unit. Not Domestic/Support. Military. Is that good?

Slvynn said:

I found alot of other parameters there. And i am sure that one of them is sure we looking for.

Click to expand...

I think the only way for you to believe me is for you to try it. Please modify whatever parameters you like and play a game. If you see an improvement with no side effects, I will put it into the release.