ExtraModMod

BobCW · Oct 30, 2014

So, I finally tried out this Modmodmod for the first time.

There are parts of it I really liked, particularly the massively expanded leader selection and the new traits. Overall though I don't think it's my cup of tea. There are just too many new features crammed in, and they don't always seem to work well together.

The barbarians are completely nuts. Perhaps it's my fault for playing on Deity, but having wolf packs, lion prides and wolf riders spawning around turn 10 is absurd. Combined with the insane AI aggression from the Naval AI mod, far too many turns are spent cowering in cities and building Warriors. In my most recent game, I spawned on a large island, and by turn 100 my coasts were unworkable, with barbarian galleys, caravels, triremes and privateers all swarming around them, blockading every city. Every single island spawned at least one barb defender, including one-tile islands. I wasn't playing with Raging Barbs.

I also just can't stand BUG. Really wish there was some way to turn it off. Particularly aggravating as the Calabim, since I wanted to grow my cities into deep unhappiness and had to fight BUG constantly to let me do so.

The new map scripts are great though. Does anyone know how to get the Planetfall map working for EitB? It makes some really neat landforms.

Edit: NM, I figured it out

omegaflames · Oct 31, 2014

IIRC you can turn off the avoid unhappiness option in the BUG options, it's just a check box you uncheck.

Terkhen · Oct 31, 2014

ArkhanTheBlack said:
It's possible that the player density was too high because I was almost surrounded by opponents. I still had the impression that barbarians could spawn closer to cities before barbs plus. On the other hand, there were nice new barbarian creatures like ogres later in the game. I think I'll try another game soon, maybe it was just a one time incident.

Thank you, BarbsPlus still needs testing and rebalancing, and feedback will be appreciated

BobCW said:
There are parts of it I really liked, particularly the massively expanded leader selection and the new traits. Overall though I don't think it's my cup of tea. There are just too many new features crammed in, and they don't always seem to work well together.

One of the main goals of ExtraModMod is precisely to integrate all features with each other (not only the new features included in ExtraModMod, but also features from vanilla FFH2 or MNAI such as magic spheres or Great Generals) so I'm very interested in knowing more about this. What features do you feel are not integrated with the rest or feel out of place? Do you have any ideas on how to improve them?

BobCW said:
The barbarians are completely nuts. Perhaps it's my fault for playing on Deity, but having wolf packs, lion prides and wolf riders spawning around turn 10 is absurd. Combined with the insane AI aggression from the Naval AI mod, far too many turns are spent cowering in cities and building Warriors. In my most recent game, I spawned on a large island, and by turn 100 my coasts were unworkable, with barbarian galleys, caravels, triremes and privateers all swarming around them, blockading every city. Every single island spawned at least one barb defender, including one-tile islands. I wasn't playing with Raging Barbs.

As I mentioned, we are very interested in balancing BarbsPlus correctly, as it is a relatively new feature. Since lfgr took the effort to design it in a way in which tweaks to how and when barbarians spawn are relatively simple to do, it should be possible (and desirable) to improve barbarian spawning for ExtraModMod's next version (0.5.0).

In my opinion, the biggest problem with rebalancing barbarians is that in this thread we are seeing mixed feedback. Some people mention that they get no barbarians at all, while others such as you are getting too many. In my games I find that I like both the changes in barbarian strength (weaker near each player's starting points, stronger when you get far away from civilization) and spawning rate, but the feedback obviously indicates that there is some kind of problem (I suspect that it has something to do with game settings, such as the MapScript used or the chosen difficulty). I'll write more about this later in this post.

Having said that, I also have noticed that barbarian maritime aggression is more intense than without BarbsPlus, requiring a greater fleet to protect my coasts. I also wonder if barbarians should be prevented from spawning in islands that are too small. Another idea could be to prevent barbarians from spawning if there are too many in a certain zone, for example, no more than X barbarian units in a landmass of Y tiles, or no more than X barbarian sea units in a map with Y sea tiles.

BobCW said:
I also just can't stand BUG. Really wish there was some way to turn it off. Particularly aggravating as the Calabim, since I wanted to grow my cities into deep unhappiness and had to fight BUG constantly to let me do so.

You should be able to turn off most BUG options via the BUG options window (I think you can disable all of them, but I'm not sure). If anyone wants to take the time to create BUG configuration files for EMM with all options disabled, I'll add them to the ExtraModMod downloads to allow anyone to quickly disable BUG if they want to. As omegaflames mentioned, that particular option can be turned off easily. Given FFH mechanics for some civilizations, I wonder if it should be disabled by default in EMM's next version in order to avoid situations like this one.

BobCW said:
The new map scripts are great though. Does anyone know how to get the Planetfall map working for EitB? It makes some really neat landforms.

Edit: NM, I figured it out

I found Temudjin's work in MapScriptTools while browsing for other stuff and I was impressed with how much it improved map script support for FFH and its mods. The advanced features it randomly includes are also great, such as the himalaya-like mountain ranges or the lost islands. I have been working on fixing some bugs and adding minor improvements to the supported map scripts, but I still have not released an stable version or added information about my version here at CivFanatics. You can find its project page here (still a work in progress): https://bitbucket.org/Terkhen/mapscripttools-for-civilization-iv

I have taken care of not breaking Temudjin's code to keep compatibility with other mods, so it should work fine with EitB, any other FFH2 based mod or even other mods such as Planetfall or Mars Now!. If you find any bug while using my updated version with other mod, feel free to PM me. I'm going to start working in making a proper release now, to make it simple for anyone to add MapScriptTools to other mods instead of having to download EMM and extract the required files from it. That would also get more feedback and testing, and maybe I'll find someone interested in helping at adding support for more map scripts such as Archipelago or Pangaea

lfgr: In order to get feedback about barbarian spawning in BarbsPlus in a more systematic way, IMO it would be a good idea to create a small survey that any interested player can fill for each game they play, and contains all required information in order to allow to figure out what is happening. This would allow us to identify the reasons of problematic corner cases more easily. I was thinking on something like this. What do you think?

Code:

Difficulty:
Civilization:
Number of players:
MapScript:
Map size:
Raging barbarians: (Y/N)
Wildlands: (Y/N)
Spawning rate: (Perfect, too frequent, too low and so on)
Barbarian unit strength: (Challenging but good, weak, too stong...)
Other comments:

[to_xp]Gekko · Oct 31, 2014

Terkhen said:
Given FFH mechanics for some civilizations, I wonder if it should be disabled by default in EMM's next version in order to avoid situations like this one.

No, it shouldn't. Situations were you want to disable "avoid unhappy citizens" are all exceptions, not the norm. There is an issue to be fixed, and it's that the button is not enabled automatically when you conquer a city.

BobCW · Oct 31, 2014

As I indicated, I think the main issue is that Barb + and MNAI are not playing well together. Again, it may just be my fault for jumping right into Deity and assuming I could steamroll it the way I can in EitB / Vanilla, but I found myself in situations where barbarian strength 4/5 animals, wolfriders, assassins and rangers would curb my expansion, and then contact with an AI would bring a pile of axes rushing across the map to kill me. The expanded barb selection is more flavorful, but I don't think it adds anything from a gameplay perspective. As for MNAI, it's wonderful how it has improved AI expansion and economic development, but the computer is far too rush-happy at the moment, even without "aggressive AI" checked. Thankfully it sounds like Tholal is going to make some adjustments in the next version.

From my last attempt:

Difficulty: Immortal w/ "Increasing Difficulty" set
Civilization: Calabim
Number of players: 7
MapScript: Planetfall
Map size: Standard
Raging barbarians: (Y/N) N
Wildlands: (Y/N) N
Spawning rate: (Perfect, too frequent, too low and so on) Too frequent
Barbarian unit strength: (Challenging but good, weak, too strong...) Too strong

Other comments: The toughest barb to spawn on land was an assassin, who while unexpected was manageable. They actually didn't trouble my borders much; whether this was due to being on an island or some new AI logic that makes them act like Pristin Pass gargoyles I'm not sure. The real issue was at sea, where the barbs were always a generation ahead in military tech and spawned in vast, endless swarms. Having to invest half my production in a war of naval attrition against a foe who gets free units was awful and led to me abandoning my game (and, for the time being, the mod).

lfgr · Oct 31, 2014

BobCW said:
The barbarians are completely nuts. Perhaps it's my fault for playing on Deity, but having wolf packs, lion prides and wolf riders spawning around turn 10 is absurd. Combined with the insane AI aggression from the Naval AI mod, far too many turns are spent cowering in cities and building Warriors. In my most recent game, I spawned on a large island, and by turn 100 my coasts were unworkable, with barbarian galleys, caravels, triremes and privateers all swarming around them, blockading every city. Every single island spawned at least one barb defender, including one-tile islands. I wasn't playing with Raging Barbs.

Where you settling near your starting location and at ancient era? The farther you go from your starting point, the harder the barbs get. Difficulty only affects the number of barbs that spawn.
Is there a gameplay reason why you wouldn't want tiny islands to spawn defender? I don't see a problem with it myself at the moment (except useless units to slow down the game).

Terkhen: I also think my and your gameplay testing is maybe to narrow, your survey is a great idea. Furthermore I'd encourage everybody to make suggestions how they would like barbarians to behave ideally.
The system is indeed easy to tweak, as most constants are in the XML. Below an explanation for anybody who is interested in helping fleshing the thing out:

GlobalDefinesAlt.xml:

Several defines on wilderness calculation. I won't go into that further; it shouldn't be necessary to change those for balance changes.
UNIT_MOVE_MIN_WILDERNESS_RANGE (default: 5) - When a unit spawns, it recognizes the wilderness value of the tile it's standing on. This is it's minimum wilderness; it can't enter tiles below that wilderness minus the range, i.e. this constant. Lower this to keep barbs and animals farther from the starting points.
- UNIT_MOVE_MIN_WILDERNESS_RANGE_NO_ANIMAL_EXTRA (default: 5) - Increases the range of all non-animal barbarians by this (so standard barbs actually have a range of 10)
- UNIT_MOVE_MIN_WILDERNESS_RANGE_RAGING_BARBARIANS_EXTRA (default: 5) - Increases the range of all barbarians by this if raging barbarians is activated
BARBARIAN_SPAWNING_SPEED (default:0.20) - The base chance at which a barbarian spawns.
ANIMAL_SPAWNING_SPEED (default:0.23) - The base animal at which a barbarian spawns.
VISIBLE_TILE_SPAWNING_SPEED_MOD (default:0.75) - On visible tiles, the base chance is multiplied with this. 0 for no spawning on visible tiles, 1 for no penalty on visible tiles.
TERRAIN_SPAWNING_SPEED_MOD_BASE (default:0.7) - The basic terrain factor (which is lastly multiplied with the spawning chance), for a tile without yields.
- TSSM_COMMERCE_MAX (default:2) - The commerce taken into consideration for the terrain factor is capped at this value.
- TSSM_COMMERCE_EXTRA_SPEED (default:0.15) - The tiles' commerce multiplied with this is added to the terrain factor
- TSSM_FOOD_MAX (default:2) - The food taken into consideration for the terrain factor is capped at this value.
- TSSM_FOOD_EXTRA_SPEED (default:0.15) - The tiles' food multiplied with this is added to the terrain factor
- TSSM_PRODUCTION_MAX (default:1) - The production taken into consideration for the terrain factor is capped at this value.
- TSSM_PRODUCTION_EXTRA_SPEED (default:0.10) - The tiles' production multiplied with this is added to the terrain factor
BARBARIAN_FREE_TECH_PERCENT (default:7) - I overrode the default value for bts (3). Barbarians get (that much percent * playersResearched / totalAlivePlayers) of each tech each turn. Since in FfH there are several military tech paths, players will have different military technologies.
MAX_BARB_BLOCK_RADIUS] (default:6) - Maybe the most interesting. In bts, barbs are counted per area. This means a couple of polar bears in the inhabited north could prevent animal spawning on a whole continent. In BarbsPlus, each barbarian normally invalidates a given number of tiles for spawning (see below), groups are "spread out". This causes barbarians to tend to spawn further away from others if enough space is available. With MAX_BARB_BLOCK_RADIUS set at -1, barbarians are capped the same as they were in bts (except maybe rounding). However, with MAX_BARB_BLOCK_RADIUS not at -1, barbarians can only affect tiles at a maximum distance of this value. This is good as it prevents large areas void of barbarians due to them gathering in a small area, but can also cause infinite spawning if they all barbs wander towards a particular point.

Civ4HandicapInfo.xml:

<iUnownedTilesPerGameAnimal> - The spawning chance for land animals on any tile is divided by this after being capped at 1.0. Furthermore, each land animal invalidates at most that much tiles for spawning (see MAX_BARB_BLOCK_RADIUS).
<iUnownedTilesPerBarbarianUnit> - Same for land barbs.
<iUnownedWaterTilesPerBarbarianUnit> - Same for water barbs. The constant for water animals is calculated as iUnownedTilesPerGameAnimal * iUnownedWaterTilesPerBarbarianUnit / iUnownedTilesPerBarbarianUnit.

Having said that, I also have noticed that barbarian maritime aggression is more intense than without BarbsPlus, requiring a greater fleet to protect my coasts.

As you maybe noticed, the functionality behind the MAX_BARB_BLOCK_RADIUS constant probably wasn't really a good idea.. Ships are quite prone to gathering at your coasts.

I also wonder if barbarians should be prevented from spawning in islands that are too small.

I also noticed that 1-tile islands seem to almost always spawn barbs. I think this is due to BarbsPlus effectively "rounding up" (it's entirely based on chances if no barbs are present), unlike the old system. I actually don't really see a problem apart from maybe unnecessarily much units.
On the other hand, multiple barbarian or multiple animals on a relatively small island would most likely be a bug.

Another idea could be to prevent barbarians from spawning if there are too many in a certain zone, for example, no more than X barbarian units in a landmass of Y tiles, or no more than X barbarian sea units in a map with Y sea tiles.

This hard cap would (almost) be enforced with MAX_BARB_BLOCK_RADIUS at -1 (You could still get really bad luck and have multiple units spawning at the same time and hitting the cap).

There's another problem with the wilderness system. While most of barbsplus is acting behind the curtain (as long as it doesn't annoy players

), the wilderness feature actually changes the gameplay, as you have to be careful not to start too far from your starting position (at least in higher difficulties). I think players might not know this.
The first obvious solution would be to advertise it; maybe a short "quickstart" or something which mentions this along with other mayor EMM features?
Another in my opinion really cool thing would be to change map graphics based on wilderness, such as darker forests etc. That wouldn't be hard to implement, but require additional graphics.
And, the probably best solution: Dynamic Wilderness. But I don't think I'll have the time to get into that soon.

scutarii · Oct 31, 2014

IMO only annoying part from barb "feature" are barb galleys and triremes - too early for the player. Practically kills sea busines for loong time

[to_xp]Gekko · Oct 31, 2014

scutarii said:
IMO only annoying part from barb "feature" are barb galleys and triremes - too early for the player. Practically kills sea busines for loong time

agreed, on Noble the barbs are fine but the ships are annoying.

BobCW · Oct 31, 2014

There's nothing inherently wrong about barbarians on one-tile islands, although it does slightly slow down naval expansion and seeing a wolf pack on every island becomes silly quickly. It struck me more as a symptom of something being wrong with the implementation of barbarians in EMM.

Part of the problem with Barb+ from my perspective is that, as a player, I'm not familiar with all of the new rules governing barbarian spawning and behavior. Thus finding lizardman rangers wandering the woods when I was still using warriors and axemen threw me into a panic, even though they might have been running some sort of script that kept them from razing cities. There's also the issue that the FFH early game is awfully slow as it is, even on quick speed- having to expand even more deliberately because the wilderness is now full of barbarians who can easily kill warrior escorts leads to dreadful pacing.

[to_xp]Gekko · Oct 31, 2014

afaik the way it works is that the further you get from civilized areas, the more high level creatures you'll see, but I think they won't leave those areas. I agree with you about the slow start issue, imo raising the commerce from the palace like in Fall Further would help. I think they went from 8 to 12 for that.

Qgqqqqq · Oct 31, 2014

[to_xp]Gekko;13535269 said:
No, it shouldn't. Situations were you want to disable "avoid unhappy citizens" are all exceptions, not the norm. There is an issue to be fixed, and it's that the button is not enabled automatically when you conquer a city.

I haven't played this mod in ages (since before the barbs+, actually), but I disagree strongly with this. I turn this off in almost all of my games, in almost every city, no matter if I am Calabim, Khazad or Lanun.

Unhappy citizens don't do any harm. The AI is good enough to de-emphasize food if you are at or past your happy cap, and if you build foodhammer units then it ignores any unhappy citizens, so you are not being harmed there. Maintenance is a little more complicated, so maybe this would be a plus in BTS, but the difference is in FFH armies are almost always far beyond the maintenance cap so the extra unit support gained from population is always useful. So maintenance is probably a wash.

Where having this on loses out bigtime to leaving it off is in the meta stage. Pre a certain number of cities it has all-but no effect, because I am paying enough attention to every city. When it moves past that into the meta stage, where things lose the critical mass so that I can no longer be bothered doing that, is where it gets really, really annoying.

Why? Because being able to look at a city and know if it is happy or not without zooming in is useful. That means that when the city comes up in the queue I won't look at it and think "okay, one more turn to growth, better not assign a foodhammer unit," instead, I'll notice the unhappiness and move to stagnate it, or build a happiness building, or start thinking about a shift into conquest or out of agrarianism, or if it needs religion and so on. The last few, on the meta level when I'm scrolling around the map seeing a half-dozen cities in unhappiness compared to seeing them still growing - it interferes in my knowledge of what is going on.

And that is to say nothing of all the times when growing into unhappiness is actively a good thing - buildings completing, conversion upcoming, preparing to whip, recovering from whipping/drafting or any other temporary period of unhappiness.

In short, the situation where I'd want to *ever* use the "avoid unhappy citizens" is very much an exception to the rule, and its automatic application to all of my cities is actively harmful to my play.

[to_xp]Gekko · Oct 31, 2014

that is pretty much the opposite of my experience. I started playing FFH2 again because that feature was added in by lfgr.

Terkhen · Nov 1, 2014

ABOUT BARBARIAN SPAWNING

We would like to request all 0.4.1 players to answer a few questions about barbarian spawning in their games, in order to gather the information required to improve barbarian spawning in future versions. The data and questions we need are detailed below; just copy the template and post your answers here. If anyone is playing with different settings and getting different impressions about barbarian spawnings, feel free to post the answers as many times as you need.

Code:

[B]Difficulty:[/B]
[B]Civilization:[/B]
[B]Number of players:[/B]
[B]MapScript:[/B]
[B]Map size:[/B]
[B]Raging barbarians:[/B]
[B]Wildlands:[/B]
[B]How was the frequency of barbarian spawning in this game?[/B]
[B]Did you find the spawned barbarian too strong or too weak?[/B]
[B]Did you notice any weird barbarian behavior?[/B]
[B]Do you have any suggestions on how should barbarians act?[/B]

-------

[to_xp]Gekko;13535269 said:
No, it shouldn't. Situations were you want to disable "avoid unhappy citizens" are all exceptions, not the norm. There is an issue to be fixed, and it's that the button is not enabled automatically when you conquer a city.

Thank you, I have created a task for this issue.

BobCW said:
...

Thanks for the feedback, with this post we'll start compiling data in order to balance and improve barbarian spawns.

The expanded selection of spawns is something that is just an extra that came along with the inclusion of the new spawning function. The BarbsPlus component with the most impact for players is probably Wilderness:

BarbsPlus Wiki said:
Inspired by the Wilderness mechanic in Master of Mana, Wilderness introduces more variety among spawned barbarians and makes barbarians spawning far away from civilized lands or on uninhabited islands more stronger.

In short: each tile has a wilderness value, which is 0 or nearly 0 nearby player starting positions, and increases the further into wilderness you go. That value determines how powerful barbarian spawns are, but it also prevents barbarians from entering tiles with wilderness values too far away from the one in which they spawned.

From your feedback (and the posts from others confirming it) I think we can conclude that there is a problem with both the tech rate of naval units and their tendency to accumulate nearby a coast. I also noticed quite a lot naval barbarian spawns in my games; I could handle them but usually I play Erebus or other map scripts with less sea and coasts, while Planetfall has a lot of sea and coasts.

lfgr said:
I also think my and your gameplay testing is maybe to narrow, your survey is a great idea. Furthermore I'd encourage everybody to make suggestions how they would like barbarians to behave ideally.

Okay; I expanded upon the questions at the end and put a request at the beginning of this post in order to give it more visibility. I have created an issue to compile the answers.

lfgr said:
BARBARIAN_FREE_TECH_PERCENT (default:7)

Some months ago, my friends complained about having to face barbarians that sometimes had better units than them, even when they were nearly on top of technology. I reduced the value to 5 and we seemed to get better results.

lfgr said:
MAX_BARB_BLOCK_RADIUS] (default:6)

Oh, I see... maybe this problem is more noticeable with naval units, as they will naturally tend to concentrate at coasts while land units will just wander aimlessly around their part of the continent. Are barbarian naval units able to spawn at every land tile, or are they limited to spawning on coasts?

lfgr said:
I also noticed that 1-tile islands seem to almost always spawn barbs. I think this is due to BarbsPlus effectively "rounding up" (it's entirely based on chances if no barbs are present), unlike the old system. I actually don't really see a problem apart from maybe unnecessarily much units. On the other hand, multiple barbarian or multiple animals on a relatively small island would most likely be a bug.

I agree, as long as it is just one unit, this shouldn't be considered a problem. I remember seeing two or three lizarmen in a three tile island, though.

This hard cap would (almost) be enforced with MAX_BARB_BLOCK_RADIUS at -1 (You could still get really bad luck and have multiple units spawning at the same time and hitting the cap).

lfgr said:
the wilderness feature actually changes the gameplay, as you have to be careful not to start too far from your starting position (at least in higher difficulties). I think players might not know this.

Indeed, that is a problem which needs to be addressed.

lfgr said:
The first obvious solution would be to advertise it; maybe a short "quickstart" or something which mentions this along with other mayor EMM features?

I agree. I think I have mentioned before that I would like to include one (or more) entries about BarbsPlus in EMM's "Advanced concepts" page.

lfgr said:
Another in my opinion really cool thing would be to change map graphics based on wilderness, such as darker forests etc. That wouldn't be hard to implement, but require additional graphics.

That would be awesome. Does anyone know of graphics that could work?

lfgr said:
And, the probably best solution: Dynamic Wilderness. But I don't think I'll have the time to get into that soon.

Increasing slightly the range around the starting tile at which the wilderness values are low would also help a lot. I doubt that most players will settle more than 6 tiles away from their settler's starter position.

About the "avoid unhappy citizens" issue: I agree with Qgqqqqq, so I'm also inclined to disable it by default.

ArkhanTheBlack · Nov 2, 2014

I've now made several test starts on Erebus Continent with both extra 0.31 and 0.40 and I think the reason for the missing barbarians is pretty clear now. While 0.31 places barbarian lairs at the start on the map, 0.40 does not. I haven't seen a single barbarian lair in 0.40 that was placed at the start. They only seem to spawn later. Meanwhile, I saw different barbarian lairs at the start with every test game in 0.31.

I'm not sure if this is caused by the BarbsPlus script, but the lair placement at the start is clearly broken in 0.40.

Terkhen · Nov 3, 2014

ArkhanTheBlack said:
I've now made several test starts on Erebus Continent with both extra 0.31 and 0.40 and I think the reason for the missing barbarians is pretty clear now. While 0.31 places barbarian lairs at the start on the map, 0.40 does not. I haven't seen a single barbarian lair in 0.40 that was placed at the start. They only seem to spawn later. Meanwhile, I saw different barbarian lairs at the start with every test game in 0.31.

I'm not sure if this is caused by the BarbsPlus script, but the lair placement at the start is clearly broken in 0.40.

I could also reproduce this issue with 0.4.1. The game does not seem to place lairs after some turns either. Lair placement was modified by BarbsPlus and I don't see anything obviously wrong in the modified code (CvMapGenerator::addImprovements(), I believe) so I'll wait until lfgr can provide us with more information.

This bug could require a 0.4.2 version in order to allow us to have a more stable version in order to compile the BarbsPlus feedback needed to tackle bigger changes in 0.5.0.

lfgr · Nov 4, 2014

I'm sorry for the lack of replies, I currently don't have the time to give detailed answers, possibly until the weekend.

Terkhen · Nov 4, 2014

lfgr said:
I'm sorry for the lack of replies, I currently don't have the time to give detailed answers, possibly until the weekend.

Thank you and don't worry; this can wait. If you can think of some possible lead to start looking into problem, tell me and I'll look into it.

Terkhen · Nov 11, 2014

I have decided to start the development of ExtraModMod 0.5.0, and to fix the lair placement issue for its first beta instead of releasing a 0.4.2. Therefore, I will delay the feedbacks about barbarian spawning until that beta, and hopefully we will be able to improve it for the release.

The features and changes that will be included in ExtraModMod 0.5.0 have already been decided. As usual, they can be checked at the ExtraModMod's issue tracker by sorting by version. This link takes you directly to the sorted list. All entries tagged with version "0.5.0" will be included in ExtraModMod 0.5.0, unless they are taken out because of time reasons or unforeseen problems. All entries tagged with version "FUTURE" have already been decided as something that should be included in ExtraModMod, but since they are either big or not a priority (or both), I won't be tackling them for 0.5.0. If you want to check and discuss the 0.5.0 changes before they are actually included, now is your chance.

Help is welcome, so if anyone is interested in hastening the release of 0.5.0 by doing any of the entries tagged as 0.5.0, feel free to drop me a line either at this forum thread or directly at the specific task in the issue tracker. If you are interested in working to get one of the tasks tagged with version "FUTURE" in 0.5.0, you can contact me in the same ways and we'll discuss the best way to handle that specific task. In both cases, I have assigned to myself the tasks that I prefer to do myself.

I'm also missing artwork for two units. One of them is the Magic Missile (Force II), which could be just a bluish fireball. Another one is the Grigori Museum curator, a new unit suggested by Tasunke that will be included in 0.5.0.

Tholal originally intended to release More Naval AI 2.6 at the end of October, so we can expect it to be released soon. I don't think that I will be able to release ExtraModMod 0.5.0 right after a 2.6 release, but the first beta shouldn't take more than a month after the release of 2.6.

lfgr · Nov 11, 2014

Terkhen said:
Oh, I see... maybe this problem is more noticeable with naval units, as they will naturally tend to concentrate at coasts while land units will just wander aimlessly around their part of the continent. Are barbarian naval units able to spawn at every land tile, or are they limited to spawning on coasts?

They only spawn on water plots adjacent to land.

I agree, as long as it is just one unit, this shouldn't be considered a problem. I remember seeing two or three lizarmen in a three tile island, though.

If anyone encounters something like that I'd be happy about a savegame.

I agree. I think I have mentioned before that I would like to include one (or more) entries about BarbsPlus in EMM's "Advanced concepts" page.

I forgot that, I actually already wrote parts of it. I'll hand it to you as soon as it's ready.

From your feedback (and the posts from others confirming it) I think we can conclude that there is a problem with both the tech rate of naval units and their tendency to accumulate nearby a coast. I also noticed quite a lot naval barbarian spawns in my games; I could handle them but usually I play Erebus or other map scripts with less sea and coasts, while Planetfall has a lot of sea and coasts.

Some months ago, my friends complained about having to face barbarians that sometimes had better units than them, even when they were nearly on top of technology. I reduced the value to 5 and we seemed to get better results.

Increasing slightly the range around the starting tile at which the wilderness values are low would also help a lot. I doubt that most players will settle more than 6 tiles away from their settler's starter position.

Instead of changing the tech rate of barbs or the wilderness values it would be maybe better to make changes to the tech and wilderness requirements for spawns. I added a description how to do that below.

I'd like to add that barbs having "better units" is/was actually intended (at least in higher wilderness), as they normally don't have promotions rather than the player's units. This design might have been a bit shortsighted, as the higher base strength means they could get out of hands after winning a few battles and gaining too much experience. I also think that the advantage of the player regarding promotions is more a middle- to lategame thing. This could be solved by giving promotions rather than advanced units respectively moving the whole bonus to appear later.

About the "avoid unhappy citizens" issue: I agree with Qgqqqqq, so I'm also inclined to disable it by default.

I just read something accomplished to change the city bar color to blue as long as it's not growing due to "stop grow".

Terkhen said:
I could also reproduce this issue with 0.4.1. The game does not seem to place lairs after some turns either. Lair placement was modified by BarbsPlus and I don't see anything obviously wrong in the modified code (CvMapGenerator::addImprovements(), I believe) so I'll wait until lfgr can provide us with more information.

This bug could require a 0.4.2 version in order to allow us to have a more stable version in order to compile the BarbsPlus feedback needed to tackle bigger changes in 0.5.0.

Lairs don't spawn after start (except animal lairs).
I ran three test games, one with ErebusContinent and latest wilderness revision, one with ErebusContinent and EMM 0.4.1 and one with Erebus and EMM 0.4.1, all standard size. In all three I got lairs.
The mayor change I made regarding frequency of lairs is that I multiplied the probability with ( 1 + wilderness * 2 / 100.0 ). This means wilderness 0 has 100% of the original chance, 50 has 200% and 100 has 300%. So there should be actually more lairs now. However it seems to me that there are at least less lairs than before now, so I guess there is a bug somewhere in it.

Spawn Prereqs
Rather than having minimum wilderness and technology requirements for each SpawnInfo, they are assigned a SpawnPrereq and a number of possible "tiers" (from <iMinSpawnTier> to <iMaxSpawnTier> in CIV4SpawnInfos.xml). The SpawnPrereq decides how wilderness level and which technologies are considered. Higher tiers mean higher requirements.

In detail, each SpawnPrereqInfo (Gameinfo/CIV4SpawnPrereqInfos.xml) has a list of "WildernessTiers" and "TechnologyTiers". Those each have min and max wilderness respectively required and obsolete tech requirements. Given a plot and the technologies the barbarians have, the minimum tier for a SpawnPrereqInfo is the indices (starting at 0) of the first valid wilderness tier and the first valid tech tier added up. If there is either no wilderness or tech tier, 0 is added instead. The maximum tier is calculated the same way with the maximum wilderness and tech tiers.

So, for example, SPAWN_PREREQ_ARCANE looks like that:

Spoiler :

A plot with wilderness 40 satisfies the wilderness tiers 0 and 1; the barbarians having Mysticism and Knowledge of the Ether satisfies the tech tiers 1 and 2. So, the min tier is 0+1=1 and the max tier is 1+2=3. Consequently, the SpawnInfo SPAWN_EXPLO_SKELETON_2 with iMinSpawnTier=1 and iMaxSpawnTier=2 can spawn here, while SPAWN_EXPLO_SKELETON_1 (min 0, max 0) and SPAWN_EXPLO_BOSS_WRAITH (min 4, max 8) cannot.

(I'll compile all this information at bitbucket).

Edit: Terkhen, there's a link screwed up in your last post.

Terkhen · Nov 12, 2014

lfgr said:
They only spawn on water plots adjacent to land.

lfgr said:
If anyone encounters something like that I'd be happy about a savegame.

I see... I'm not sure about what could be causing the problem then. The feedback will help us with this

lfgr said:
I forgot that, I actually already wrote parts of it. I'll hand it to you as soon as it's ready.

Thank you!

lfgr said:
Instead of changing the tech rate of barbs or the wilderness values it would be maybe better to make changes to the tech and wilderness requirements for spawns. I added a description how to do that below.

That sounds better too me too. If I understood correctly, if we have a problem with a specific group of units being too far ahead in tech (ships), we could just increase the requirements for their spawns without messing up the others.

lfgr said:
I'd like to add that barbs having "better units" is/was actually intended (at least in higher wilderness), as they normally don't have promotions rather than the player's units. This design might have been a bit shortsighted, as the higher base strength means they could get out of hands after winning a few battles and gaining too much experience. I also think that the advantage of the player regarding promotions is more a middle- to lategame thing. This could be solved by giving promotions rather than advanced units respectively moving the whole bonus to appear later.

I agree about them having better units; the increased challenge is one of the things I liked about BarbsPlus. Our main problem was that a very strong unit appeared and was always marauding the terrain near one of the player's territory. It wasn't possible to face it without a huge stack, because otherwise it could get a lot of promotions. Switching to promotions instead of higher strength as you suggest would indeed help with this problem.

lfgr said:
I just read something accomplished to change the city bar color to blue as long as it's not growing due to "stop grow".

I'm sorry, what do you mean?

lfgr said:
Lairs don't spawn after start (except animal lairs).
I ran three test games, one with ErebusContinent and latest wilderness revision, one with ErebusContinent and EMM 0.4.1 and one with Erebus and EMM 0.4.1, all standard size. In all three I got lairs.

I'm sorry, I explained myself poorly. I get ancient ruins and goblin forts, but I don't get any dungeons. I was wondering if they are meant to appear later in the game.

lfgr said:
The mayor change I made regarding frequency of lairs is that I multiplied the probability with ( 1 + wilderness * 2 / 100.0 ). This means wilderness 0 has 100% of the original chance, 50 has 200% and 100 has 300%. So there should be actually more lairs now. However it seems to me that there are at least less lairs than before now, so I guess there is a bug somewhere in it.

It seemed that there are fewer ancient ruins and goblin forts than before, yes.

lfgr said:
Spawn Prereqs

That tier system is quite customizable and should allow to do nearly anything with regard to tweaking and balance; I like it a lot. Thank you for explaining this to me; I hope to be able to help with spawn tweaking once that 0.5.0-beta1 is released

lfgr said:
Edit: Terkhen, there's a link screwed up in your last post.

Thank you! I fixed it.

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