General A New Dawn discussion

Afforess said:

Flexible difficulty is only rechecked every 50 turns or so (configurable in the BUG panel). You may have set min/max difficulties that prevented rebalancing too.

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They've always been at -1 for the ranking part (Difficulty won't change if...) since I never understood what those meant, and the difficulty themselves was set to Warlord for minimum, and Monarch for maximum with a 50 turn inc, but even after 50 turns it never went past Noble. After a while I just changed it myself then disabled FB for the rest of the game so it wouldn't lower it, but by the time I did it hardly mattered anymore - none of the AIs ever recovered from the beatings they took.

Future games FB seemed to work much better, not really sure what went wrong with that one.



Mercy Rule is also a way to end the game if you had 'Mastery' victory enabled and ended up wiping out the world and don't have Barb Civs or Revolutions enabled

Rezca said:

Why didn't it boost the difficulty when I was pulling a 3,000+ score with the second AI barely above 1,000 and the rest 900 or lower then?
I was at the top of the scoreboard since the Medieval and it never once left that, not even when I got to the late Industrial. Never once rose above Noble, but it did rise during the Classic.

I had it set to Warlord ~ Monarch, and it stayed at Noble until the game ended via Mercy Rule.



I think that's a good idea

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Latest revision has changes to Flexible difficulty that use my previously mentioned score & stddeviation changes.

Afforess said:

Latest revision has changes to Flexible difficulty that use my previously mentioned score & stddeviation changes.

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Were those changes in rev695? I see the "AI uses Flex.Difficulty" - (which I still don't full understand? Player F.Difficulty affects your production, revolutions, unhealth, etc but not the AI's, so the AI Flexible difficulty does... What? What does it do that Player F.Difficulty doesn't? Does it affect their cities positively/negatively when they're doing well but not yours?) - but in the current revision I'm on the Player Flexible Difficulty is still stuck on Prince difficulty though the max is Monarch and I've pretty much got the game won - score, techs, power, all of it. Won't move past Prince and when I forced it, the game lowered the difficulty shortly after. To make up for that, I've been toying in the World Builder and giving the AI more units and cities - which I actually find kinda fun ^^


Speaking of which, I find it very hard to stay out of the World Builder when playing a game. Sooner or later I open it up for one reason or another, sometimes several turns in a row!
Crafting new islands and terrain... Having the AI build new cities all over, making and breaking wars... Giving warmonger AI extra resources
Or "fixing" a map that never spawned with a certain resource, like the 'Orion' scenario not having a single Horse on the whole map >_>

And one of my favorite things to do once I'm bored with a game is to radically alter the terrain at the AI's expense or gift the Barbarians a few tactical nukes

Rezca said:

Were those changes in rev695? I see the "AI uses Flex.Difficulty" - (which I still don't full understand? Player F.Difficulty affects your production, revolutions, unhealth, etc but not the AI's, so the AI Flexible difficulty does... What? What does it do that Player F.Difficulty doesn't? Does it affect their cities positively/negatively when they're doing well but not yours?) - but in the current revision I'm on the Player Flexible Difficulty is still stuck on Prince difficulty though the max is Monarch and I've pretty much got the game won - score, techs, power, all of it. Won't move past Prince and when I forced it, the game lowered the difficulty shortly after. To make up for that, I've been toying in the World Builder and giving the AI more units and cities - which I actually find kinda fun ^^

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All players, including the AI's have a difficulty setting. AI's are stuck at noble by default (although this can be judged in the XML). Changing AI difficulty increases or decreases the handicaps given to the player (free happy, free health, a little bit extra production, a little less maintenance, etc).

Previously Flexible Difficulty only changed player difficulty. If you turn on AI flexible difficulty it will also change AI difficulty.

If you want me to tell you why your difficulty didn't change, upload your ANewDawn.log in My Games/Beyond the Sword/Logs

Afforess said:

All players, including the AI's have a difficulty setting. AI's are stuck at noble by default (although this can be judged in the XML). Changing AI difficulty increases or decreases the handicaps given to the player (free happy, free health, a little bit extra production, a little less maintenance, etc).

Previously Flexible Difficulty only changed player difficulty. If you turn on AI flexible difficulty it will also change AI difficulty.

If you want me to tell you why your difficulty didn't change, upload your ANewDawn.log in My Games/Beyond the Sword/Logs

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Aaah I see. So even if Player Difficulty got bumped up to say Deity when starting on Warlord the AI would still be getting the same bonuses as before - it only affects your cities, not theirs?


I checked my folders and there's no file with that name in there. =/

Rezca said:

Aaah I see. So even if Player Difficulty got bumped up to say Deity when starting on Warlord the AI would still be getting the same bonuses as before - it only affects your cities, not theirs?


I checked my folders and there's no file with that name in there. =/

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You may need to turn on logging in your config.ini in the BTS config folder.

So today I got a resolution to pass that I don't think I've ever gotten to pass before, and that was the 'Sign Defensive Pact' AP option. Genghis Khan refused to sign one with me even at Friendly, and I already had one with Boudica, so I thought why not try it? I didn't expect it to pass (I fully expected at least one person to defy it) but it did.

That resulted in the three AIs who were still relevant (All the others were vassals) having a defensive pact forced onto them. Myself, Genghis, Boudica... And the current hated-by-all Atotoztli. Which led to this Diplomacy Screen here with a pretty little blue triangle


Amusing how the Aztecs were forced into it as well, despite only having one city with Hinduism in it



Only a few turns after the Aztecs and I had made peace from our earlier war, I was moving some submarines with spies around and dropped one off in Aztec lands again and had more than enough points to Bribe A city... So I decided to have a little experiment, at the expense of world peace - of which the world had only a few months of after literally centuries of conflict




The result was more or less as one would expect.


Success!



Best part of it all was that not only did I get Atoto... tztl.. At... The Aztec Leacer to declare on me while we still had a Peace Treaty (She declared on me some time ago, we traded some naval units and we each razed a city on our homelands, then made peace)... But since *she* technically declared war on *me* due to the "Bribe City" mechanics, that caused Genghis Khan and Boudica to declare war on her as well because of the Defensive Pacts we had - despite Khan and Boudica also having a Peace Treaty with her.

This was literally the turn after the resolution had passed and the pacts were made too!

View attachment 374756

The most amusing thing about this is that each of the leaders who defied the resolution only had one city each

Oh and just for good measure, the penalty for defying an otherwise successful resolution crippled two of their cities, one of them started starving because it wasn't able to work the fishing boats nearby as a result. Nice work there guys

It's been a while since I used the United Nations, but the penalty for defying a resolution that would otherwise have passed stacks right? So you can keep spamming a resolution that some AI defies until they finally can't take the massing unrest in their cities?


Also, shouldn't the repeat use of nukes on other lands eventually cause or civil unrest in your cities? Especially if you're running a civic that would otherwise frown upon such things (Pacifism, Paradise, etc)

I hope Afforess is reading this. Does anybody know how to remove the primary node from the C++ or wherever else it is coded into so there is only one line for trading an embassy?

stolenrays said:

I hope Afforess is reading this. Does anybody know how to remove the primary node from the C++ or wherever else it is coded into so there is only one line for trading an embassy?

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I can't help this week, but I can offer a line of advice, look for places where TRADE_EMBASSY differs from TRADE_RITE_OF_PASSAGE, since RoP is a single item, but Embassy is not.

The first place I would look is CvDeal. Specifically, bool CvDeal::hasData(TradeableItems eItem). It is not used anywhere in the DLL, but called by the EXE, and has special embassy code. What happens if you remove the embassy line?

Thanks, I'll check it out. One of the things I was going to do was rewrite the fxn because I couldn't figure it out. If I take out the heading string it just has a blank node. I'll look more carefully now.

It looks like this is extra in CvDeal.cpp:


It is only called on once in the doDiplo() function in the AI of CvPlayerAI.cpp though:

I bet if I delete it, that should fix it.

Synopsis of testgame 4 of my AND test.

game;
started atv684 non svn, converted mid game to svn705
conquest - domination
Start era Ancient
Speed Eternity
World Rom_ Archipelago
Size Giant World Sea level high
Handicap Settler first 100 turns then remainder of game at Deity

no vassals
no revs
no nukes
all civs enabled

ending year FEB. 1931 3358 TURNS
Turn times less than 2 minutes at end
NO I repeat NO ctd's or MAF's!

counted over 40 civs in game. killed off all but three by Modern age. Ended up isolating the last civ in order to finish the game at Future era.
Conquest Win score 194458 (11356)

Some Thoughts;

It is obvious that the Transhumen Era needs a Ton of work but I believe that the rest of the Eras must be finished first because from what I read in these forums, most players win or get bored and quit long before they ever get very far into the last Era.
I believe the player needs to have more incentive to continue on after the Modern Age. Speaking of Conquest/Domination players like me. I do not play Diplomacy as the AI is to undeveloped to allow reasonable negotiations. Science victory is all about the top civ beelining, as is Space Race.
This Mod is by far the most playable and enjoyable way to experience ANY of the Civ4 versions and mods. Lots of options, improved AI and a top notch group of dedicated modders make this Mod the BEST!

I am now going to start my "real" game. I have determined that my computer will support the giant map and lots of civs. I just have to try to figure out how to add the music mod and the new handicaps mod on top of svn705 so that svn does not overwrite these and a few minor xml changes that I make, and I will be good to go.

@OldNooob, IF you update through the SVN, just putting a comment in modificationed files will stop them being overwritten via SVN.

a <--- I think was it, this and some text to say what you've done, who remembers what they were doing 1 month ago??, IN DETAIL, and why?? The text along with the dashes and arrows will turn blue in python, Now you have a modified file.

The other update method, which I incorrectly applied this methodology to, I don't know if that'll work or not.

Eternity speed is the least balanced gamespeed of the bunch from what I've heard. Blitz and Quick being the most balanced. C2C's focusing more on the painfully slow speeds while AND's got the faster ones nailed down and are working their way up from there.

@ IPEX, Thanks for the info, so you refer to python and I only modify xmls , so do I use the comment in xml?

Here's something I haven't seen in a while - an AI providing free promotions to barbarian units by trying to kill them with catapults

So I was plagued by not having Horses anywhere near my capitol and the only ones nearby had already been long since taken by Justinian, the only unclaimed piece being across a large stretch of tundra - now bordering Washington's empire. I got a settler over there and hooked it up, and shortly after getting my first mounted unit out some barbarians marched over there and parked themselves in the forest tile within Washington's borders.

I'm his worst enemy so he refused to sign Open Borders, so I couldn't get at the barbs. Well, they just sat there for several turns not really doing anything, when I see Washington send some Catapults down to the edge of his border. He was already really angry at me so I thought he was preparing to remove the city I planted on his border, but as it turns out he only sent two unescorted Catapults for the sole purpose of attacking the barbarians sitting in his territory!

Over the next few turns they kept attacking the barbarian stack, not killing anything and only promoting the Siege Ram that they brought with them

View attachment 375081


The last time I saw this was many revisions ago when a barbarian Lion got stuck in a single tile unclaimed by culture in the middle of AI territory and they sent a single Catapult to attack it, resulting in a Lion with dozens of promotions and the Catapult unable to kill it

@ OldNooob ----> They were XML files that I was talking about not python.

It seems it works for both types of files

Python ## will comment

XML <!--- Will comment --->

I've used both, and they don't get over written by SVN updating.

@oldnoob,

Why not just make a copy of your "modified" svn and place it in a folder outside of Civ IV BtS directory? Then when you update the SVN working file you are not overwriting your "mod". You do have a SVN working copy right?

JosEPh

No , I cannot get svn to work in my machine . I downloaded Dbkblk's svn mod and that ended up corrupting(overwriting) the modified non svn I was playing. So then I tried to add Sogroon' two new little mods and ended up corrupting Bts and RoM-AND. So I had to uninstall the whole works and reinstalled bts, upgraded to 3.19, and downloading the non svn V705 release and started a new vanilla game.
SVN has always been death to me. I was involved with JA2 1.13 for about 8 years and 4 or 5 times a year svn would find a way to overwrite all my progress. I ended up placing copys on other computers just to keep them safe. I HATE svn.