general-jcl
King
Can you explain a little more?
What do you mean by 'logging unit actions'?
What do you mean by 'logging unit actions'?
Useful Patches for Civ 3 Conquests v1.22
- Thread starter Antal1987
- Start date
crazyanswer
Warlord
- Joined
- Apr 29, 2008
- Messages
- 133
Maybe a little more explanation will help us understand how magical your work is. 
Antal1987
Warlord
I prefered to write an explanation in separate thread.
ZergMazter
Prince
Wow so what ur saying is this is the fix for the submarine's bug? Heck!!! Could i download the patch 7 without having to get benefits from patch 5 which increases the city radius your civilians can work?
Patch 5 sounds nice but if the AI is too dumb to take advantage of it i would be cheating :/ Can you confirm if the AI uses the extra tiles or not? If they do, then i'll download the whole thing
Patch 5 sounds nice but if the AI is too dumb to take advantage of it i would be cheating :/ Can you confirm if the AI uses the extra tiles or not? If they do, then i'll download the whole thing
Antal1987
Warlord
Wow so what ur saying is this is the fix for the submarine's bug? Heck!!! Could i download the patch 7 without having to get benefits from patch 5 which increases the city radius your civilians can work?
Patch 5 sounds nice but if the AI is too dumb to take advantage of it i would be cheating :/ Can you confirm if the AI uses the extra tiles or not? If they do, then i'll download the whole thing
It's not the fix yet. I've just created a way to understand how to fix it.
I designed INI-settings subsystem so I can turn on/off any thing in the game by adding corresponding parameter to INI-file. Soon I'm gonna make all of my changes optional.
crazyanswer
Warlord
- Joined
- Apr 29, 2008
- Messages
- 133
Good to hear.
Is it possible to modify unit movement on railway by hacking "unit actions"
or it need changing the property of "railway" ?
clamel
Prince
- Joined
- May 26, 2011
- Messages
- 528
Light in the tunnel perhaps.
BUT
How is the status on getting the AI to handle Land Artillery..
That might be one of the most important fixes to the game. I´m sure most folks agree, whatever other thoughts and wishes one might have.
After all city squares are nice, if optional, and many other things, BUT the game just don´t function as ment when such important issues as having an entirely action already setup in the game doesn´t work.
I have great hopes, so I hope you could find the code they put in that messed this up.
What I heard is that land artillery functioned correctly in the so called Vanilla version at first but got messe up in PTW or Conquest.
A blatent mistake by Firaxis, and I hope you can set it back to work.
Additional is the strange unlimited movement on railroads. Could it be restricted, hard-coded or better still with a parameter like the Road movement.
Somehow I don´t think that would be very hard for a pro like you mate
My respects on you work
BUT
How is the status on getting the AI to handle Land Artillery..
That might be one of the most important fixes to the game. I´m sure most folks agree, whatever other thoughts and wishes one might have.
After all city squares are nice, if optional, and many other things, BUT the game just don´t function as ment when such important issues as having an entirely action already setup in the game doesn´t work.
I have great hopes, so I hope you could find the code they put in that messed this up.
What I heard is that land artillery functioned correctly in the so called Vanilla version at first but got messe up in PTW or Conquest.
A blatent mistake by Firaxis, and I hope you can set it back to work.
Additional is the strange unlimited movement on railroads. Could it be restricted, hard-coded or better still with a parameter like the Road movement.
Somehow I don´t think that would be very hard for a pro like you mate
My respects on you work
Antal1987
Warlord
Please explain, how does AI "use" Land Artillery in the game? And how should it work?
Bengal Tiger
Emperor
Very briefly, the AI tends to only build a couple of artillery units and keep them fortified in cities where they will occasionally bombard at nearby units but are for the most part, useless.
The much more effective way of using artillery would be to mass produce them and move them along with their usual stack of units in order to weaken any enemy position or more importantly, city, before sending in their troops to attack.
How this all translates into code, though, I'm afraid I'm not sure.
Lionic
King
All as Bengal Tiger said. There were a couple of threads about ways to make AI use artillery, but they are no longer available. However someone discovered that AI does actually use artillery offensive, if it is captured from the other player.
Jorsalfare
Prince
As others have pointed out. AI almost never moves its artillery out of cities to use them in offensive operations. I have a very few times experienced that AI did, and in one of those occasions, it was the Koreans (who in many other respects is the most adventurous civ in my mod) who escorted two trebuchets into bombardment range (range of two tiles) of my units in the field. I suspect these artillery units could be captured ones, like Kumquat suggests in this thread:
Unfortunately I wasn't in debug mode when this happened, and don't know wheather the artillery was korean-built or captured. It could however be interesting to know if AI treats its own artillery different than captured ones.
Also see Civinators thread regarding artillery here
The AI will only march up to your borders and hit you with an arty if its one they captured it...I think xD Only been attacked like that once or twice and I remember it wasn't there arty they were using...and it was like only 1 arty and a defenderIf they build the arty themselves they keep it in there cities for def for some reason. Using arty in a combined arms tactic is something the AI doesn't 'get' like armies and naval invasions
Unfortunately I wasn't in debug mode when this happened, and don't know wheather the artillery was korean-built or captured. It could however be interesting to know if AI treats its own artillery different than captured ones.
Also see Civinators thread regarding artillery here
Lionic
King
It also works if AI enslaves artillery units. However I wanted to point out that technically the right behaviour of AI artillery is already coded in the game, but for some reason is not applied for the most artillery units.
clamel
Prince
- Joined
- May 26, 2011
- Messages
- 528
Well as the above mentioned I can only add this thread for the moment regarding the issue that the AI uses captured guns (especially barbarians) in a "correct" way.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=407459
To sum up one could say that the AI is very cautious using the artillery units. One would think that since normally the defense is set to zero the unit is easily lost. The AI handles it more like it handles workers and if it´s out in the open when enemy arrives it will be sent back to closest city like the workers.
Artillery is very seldom used in offensive style and brought along in packs like defensive units are with offensive units when the AI goes on the offensive.
Hundreds of ideas and settings have been used, as I understand, but getting the AI to use artillery as us humans seams impossible.
The great effect on having several artillery coming along the attacking stack and bombarding the city the AI is aiming to take would be the final happy result.
Since the AI do think on not sending only offensive units in an invasion land units must have some sort of programming for this.
In naval terms one has Unit Abilities set to Requires Escort to handle this for transport and carriers, which would have been something for land units too.
The bombard programming are working for naval units, since very often ships are bombarding, at least coastal cities.
Questioning rise that if the AI handles units ticked with the Artillery strategy similar to the worker with terraform. Why? Or if you could find out HOW the Artillery strategy are handled by the AI ?
That would shed some light on why the AI is not using artillery and taking benefits of bombardment.
Artillery is as I see it used only in defense of cities by the AI, and I can´t think that this was the intention for the game. We all know how important artillery is in RL and a major part of both offense and defense.
All the selections in form of picking out the unit as an artillery, ranges, bombard strength are present, so somewhere in the programming it has gone horrible wrong.
Solving this one could even start up the debate on archers and bowmen that might be even more correctly handled as a sort of artillery units of ancient past.
Since some mods/scenarios have tried to beef up artillery with a defense it still has not changed the AI handling of the unit. Lots of tests have been done over the years by the think-tanks of this forum. All the great modders have touch the issue and surely have much more knowledge than me, so hopefully they are in better position to point you in a more correct way.
This might be a hard nut to crack, but without doubt one the top battle honors you could get Antal.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=407459
To sum up one could say that the AI is very cautious using the artillery units. One would think that since normally the defense is set to zero the unit is easily lost. The AI handles it more like it handles workers and if it´s out in the open when enemy arrives it will be sent back to closest city like the workers.
Artillery is very seldom used in offensive style and brought along in packs like defensive units are with offensive units when the AI goes on the offensive.
Hundreds of ideas and settings have been used, as I understand, but getting the AI to use artillery as us humans seams impossible.
The great effect on having several artillery coming along the attacking stack and bombarding the city the AI is aiming to take would be the final happy result.
Since the AI do think on not sending only offensive units in an invasion land units must have some sort of programming for this.
In naval terms one has Unit Abilities set to Requires Escort to handle this for transport and carriers, which would have been something for land units too.
The bombard programming are working for naval units, since very often ships are bombarding, at least coastal cities.
Questioning rise that if the AI handles units ticked with the Artillery strategy similar to the worker with terraform. Why? Or if you could find out HOW the Artillery strategy are handled by the AI ?
That would shed some light on why the AI is not using artillery and taking benefits of bombardment.
Artillery is as I see it used only in defense of cities by the AI, and I can´t think that this was the intention for the game. We all know how important artillery is in RL and a major part of both offense and defense.
All the selections in form of picking out the unit as an artillery, ranges, bombard strength are present, so somewhere in the programming it has gone horrible wrong.
Solving this one could even start up the debate on archers and bowmen that might be even more correctly handled as a sort of artillery units of ancient past.
Since some mods/scenarios have tried to beef up artillery with a defense it still has not changed the AI handling of the unit. Lots of tests have been done over the years by the think-tanks of this forum. All the great modders have touch the issue and surely have much more knowledge than me, so hopefully they are in better position to point you in a more correct way.
This might be a hard nut to crack, but without doubt one the top battle honors you could get Antal.
First of all: great work, Antal!!
Regarding the "submarine bug", I have a suggestion. Firaxis had fixed that bug for Civ3 Vanilla patch v1.16f, and that fix is also part of the last PtW patch 1.27f. (Apparently, when coding of C3C was started, the C3C codebase was "branched" off a PtW version that did not yet have the submarine fix...?! And so the submarine bug was "re-introduced" when C3C came out. And Firaxis never fixed it in C3C.
)Anyway, perhaps you can get an idea of how the sub bug was fixed, by investigating the PtP executable?
By the way: where did you get the code samples from? Are you "reconstructing" it from the assembler code?
Two more bugs come to my mind, which might be worth fixing:
a) The "Great Wall bug". (I think, it only affects PtW, perhaps someone can confirm this?) Basically, when you own the Great Wall, and a barbarian unit enters an undefended town of yours, the game crashes. Also, when your enemy owns the Great Wall and you bombard one of his towns with an artillery unit, the game crashes. (Probably in both cases the game "tries to destroy" the city walls in that town, but it can't, because the city walls are provided by the Great Wall and are therefore "undestroyable".)
b) In PBEM games, the players' passwords are stored in plain text. Would it be possible to send the passwords through a hash function and only store the hash value in the save file? (This will probably be some major piece of work, as one would also need to pass the user input through the same hash function during the login process.)
Antal1987
Warlord
It's pretty hard to decompile new executable starting nothing. Probably, developers used to add some common internal debug instructions, so I could locate appropriate functions.
I'm using IDA tool with hex-rays decompiler plugin. It creates some kind of source using C language.
Antal1987... Do you believe there is any way to work out settings to have the AI use Land Transports?
I have tried the "trick" that was posted to have the AI use Land Transports by flagging Air Transport with Land Unit in the Editor by Steph but it does not work well enough to use at all IMO. In fact, the AI never used the land Transports in my tests.
I have tried the "trick" that was posted to have the AI use Land Transports by flagging Air Transport with Land Unit in the Editor by Steph but it does not work well enough to use at all IMO. In fact, the AI never used the land Transports in my tests.
Hmm, the code does not "look nice", but it's good enough to understand (with some effort) what's going on. If this is possible for the entire executable, would we be able to compile that source back into a new executable - this time in debug format - and then run the game in the debugger? That would certainly help to understand, how the game works internally...
Antal1987
Warlord
That requires adding new flag in the editor into AI Strategies Group a rewriting class_Unit:
rocess_AI function, making it take into account new flag
Balthasar
Wise Man
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2005
- Messages
- 3,293
That requires adding new flag in the editor into AI Strategies Group a rewriting class_Unit:
Can that be done? The sooner the better.
Vuldacon & I were trying recently to brainstorm a way to make a railroad work on a Civ map. We think that we might have figured a work-around, but it's still in the early testing stage, and very awkward. What would be truly useful would be the ability to make railroad tracks exclusive to trains - a unit flagged for that ability, I imagine. The ability to limit the number of tiles that a unit on a railroad track moves would also be very valuable - even for the regular game rails.
But all that would depend on the AI's willingness to use land transports, so I'll cast a vote for the most immediate fix for that problem as possible!
Hmm, I get the impression that most of the stuff people want here, are "modifications" of the game/the rules or "new features", but not really "patches".
Perhaps there should be two different releases: one which only fixes known bugs and nothing else (this also limits the risk of unwanted side-effects like the ones we have seen with the "big city" feature). And another one, where people can have all their modifications and new features they have been dreaming about...
The "patch release" version could then also be used in official competitions, like the GOTM competition or the HoF competition. I don't think the arbiters of these competitions would allow people to participate, if their game used modified rules.
Perhaps there should be two different releases: one which only fixes known bugs and nothing else (this also limits the risk of unwanted side-effects like the ones we have seen with the "big city" feature). And another one, where people can have all their modifications and new features they have been dreaming about...
The "patch release" version could then also be used in official competitions, like the GOTM competition or the HoF competition. I don't think the arbiters of these competitions would allow people to participate, if their game used modified rules.
