1.9.6 Feedback

Even on normal speed, Defense Tactics is a priority (no later than 4th tech researched unless gambling on getting Fanaticism in time). For some reason, I normally see waterstealers first (before soldiers and infantry). I can imagine on marathon this would be a huge problem.
 
Maybe the tech requirement for waterstealers should be tweaked; so they don't show up until X factions have defense tactics?

I've also suggested the possibility of making some other, later unit available to barbarians; maybe a strength ~5 or 6 melee unit with the Raider promotion (pillages improvements), 2 moves, and stillsuits, that starts showing up a bit later on (maybe once X factions have Master Guardsmen, or similar).
 
Multiplay problem: Might also effect single play but can't think how it might.

Anyway, We have been getting a problem with OOS since 1.9.6 with air units. Seems when we use them they make out of sinc errors pop-up that are not fixable with a reload. Was wondering if the AI tweeks might have something to do with this as this was reduced in a previous patch that was done before. Enjoy the rest of 1.9.6 but with this happening it is impossible to multiplay as we are effectively playing different games effectively as AI's take over OOS players. Just to note this is on are 2 player games and have had this on more then one game now.
 
I'm not planning on continuing work on DuneWars until maybe in a few months. I'm working with Tholal on his FfH AI mod and just started a new job, so, getting a little change of pace in. As for the polar cap, what I settled on is indeed that it's all terra-formable, but improvements aren't build-able on sink (unless it has resources on it), while ice is now a very profitable resource to harvest. I felt that the emphasis there should be on a few high yield tiles, emphasizing placement near resources (which the AI does better than it did before too), and fairly small population (though with enough ice it's got potential to reach fairly high numbers) rather than covering the whole ice cap with cottages.

As for barbarians and the AI... I'm not sure why they might be more of an issue on marathon, I know that I haven't seen a problem with them being wiped out on epic. The code that causes barbs to start looking to attack cities isn't linked to speed directly, instead it's linked to the number of non-barb-cities / number of players. Once you have 3 cities to each player who's alive, they will start attacking and pillaging cities. If those third cities are getting built at an early technological stage on average on marathon, that could be the causation.

Getting infantry is a pretty high priority to the AIs in the early game, but that's not where they are weak really. The AI doesn't understand two things. No. 1, that certain areas are more likely to recieve an adundance of barbarian attacks due to lots of nearby open space. And No. 2, that sometimes it's best to position a unit in attack range of a barb on good ground, and let the barb kill himself attacking your unit at a disadvantage. Neither is easy to write code to deal with. The easier solution is to encourage them to build an extra defender per city in the early game to account for the issue, especially if raging barbarians is on.

But I do think when I come back to it, some code to try to give AI cities a sense of how much barb trouble they might have is something that's on my list. But I'm not certain how feasible that is, especially in a way that's efficient.
 
what I settled on is indeed that it's all terra-formable, but improvements aren't build-able on sink (unless it has resources on it), while ice is now a very profitable resource to harvest
I think that this is a poor design that will frustrate the player. There is no logical reason as to why the sink tiles can't be built on, and no reason that will show up for the player. It fails on logic (it makes no logical sense that you can improve a rock tile expose to the wind, but can't improve a nice cool polar tile with water that is protected), and I think fails on balance too, because it means polar cities are always pretty weak and that the polar zone is not really worth contesting - which is what I have observed in my own play, in Jester's Dune University games, and in feedback from others. There is just no point in having 1 water 1 hammer tiles that can't have improvements. These are never worth working.

I think the compromise solution, which I thought we had agreed on, was to change the polar tile yield down to just 1 water (ie remove the hammer) and disable the polar water shipper from these buildings, and then allow improvements.

I can probably do this manually this weekend.

As it was, by removing the water shipper but not implementing the other changes, the effect is just to weaken the polar zone further.
 
They're actually pretty dang good, the commerce you can get from them alone makes them very worthwhile.
?
What commerce?
Not sure what you're talking about sorry.

Polar tiles give no more commerce than rock tiles, and if you can't build improvements on polar sink, then they give much less.
 
As for barbarians and the AI... I'm not sure why they might be more of an issue on marathon, I know that I haven't seen a problem with them being wiped out on epic. The code that causes barbs to start looking to attack cities isn't linked to speed directly, instead it's linked to the number of non-barb-cities / number of players. Once you have 3 cities to each player who's alive, they will start attacking and pillaging cities. If those third cities are getting built at an early technological stage on average on marathon, that could be the causation.


Huh, strange. At the time the 3,5 civs were wiped out, the factions i knew had 1 or at best 2 cities. I ALWAYS encountered barbs long before ANY faction had its third city.

Maybe there is something wrong with the code that causes attacks to start much earlier at marathon speed?
 
Not pod barbi's attacking them and killing them is it. These "released" barbi's might attack cities as they are play/AI made instead of spawned the normal way. Just a idea.

Ahriman. You played 1.9.6 yet? The commerce if from a polar mine thingy making something like 6 gold each with water and hammers on top. Got one city in a game with 5 ice in my zone and it was my highest gold maker in that game.
 
Yes, the ice-cap tiles themselves are good, but if the polar zone is covered with cities at normal spacing, most cities will only have 2 of those tiles. That doesn't make up for the lack of being able to get solar farms or cottages on the other tiles.

I just don't see any reason why the polar zone should not be able to work most tiles. It doesn't add anything to gameplay for me, and it just "feels" wrong.

Polar zone cities don't get any spice tiles either, and they have high distance maintenance costs, so if you want commerce, polar cities aren't the ones to go for.
 
Not pod barbi's attacking them and killing them is it. These "released" barbi's might attack cities as they are play/AI made instead of spawned the normal way. Just a idea.

I'm not entirely clear what you mean, but... I'm definitely not talking about barbs out of botanic test stations. I talk about the regular spawning barbarians. Just to sure.
 
@ KHM, are you playing with raging barbarians on? That bypasses the code that keeps the barbs somewhat civil till more cities are built, which is... bad.. for the AI, no doubt about it.

@ Rathazel, it doesn't matter if the barbs are spawned from test stations, normally, or built in a city, they all follow the same Unit AI code.

@ Ahriman, I tried several games with improvements on polar sink enabled. It added nothing to the game and just created a cluttered polar cap, and most certainly didn't make those cities more worthwhile. The commerce for ice (which is and should be the big attraction there) on the other hand makes polar cities one of the biggest money makers you can get. Period. Two ice resources alone make the city quite worthwhile, but when you can pull in a four or five ice city... it's cool. That's a lot more interesting way to set up the polar region, matches the lore better (small settlements built for the purpose of collecting ice -- and in our case a few other precious resources found there), and makes them distinctly different from cities on the rest of the map. Given the typical size of a polar city furthermore, there are enough tiles to work outside of the resource tiles without covering the whole landmass in cottages (which really just looks stupid to put it bluntly) plus there is always the ability to use specialists. I don't see the pressing issue.

By the way, how was the honeymoon ;)
 
Ahriman, I tried several games with improvements on polar sink enabled. It added nothing to the game and just created a cluttered polar cap, and most certainly didn't make those cities more worthwhile.
I played many games with improvements in the polar zone enabled, because every game was like this until just recently.
Being able to build improvements there would make polar cities massively more worthwhile. I can't understand the argument that says "it wouldn't make them much better, so lets not do it". If it wouldn't make much difference, then what is the harm in enabling it?
It wouldn't create clutter, anymore than enabling improvements in sink tiles on non-polar zones makes clutter. This is Civ; yields come from improvements on tiles.

The commerce for ice (which is and should be the big attraction there) on the other hand makes polar cities one of the biggest money makers you can get. Period.
Nonsesnse. They give barely more commerce than a cottage, and they give less than you'd get from a non-polar city that let you access a handful of spice tiles.
We are observing in many people's experience that the polar cities aren't worth getting because they don't provide enough of a boost to make it worth the hassle.
Enabling improvements so that those cities can actually get the hammers to build stuff or the commerce to contribute seems like a no-brainer to me on both gameplay and realism terms. I genuinely can't understand why anyone could oppose this, particularly when the failure to have them was a bug introduced by mistake.

I don't see the pressing issue.
It is a huge pressing issue because the polar zone is not worth prioritizing to settle or seriously contesting, given its downsides (hard to reinforce, high distance maintenance costs, no health/happy resources, no mesa, no spice, etc.). Enabling improvements would be a significant boost. I strongly disagree that there is a significant graphical downside (which seems to be your only argument here?) anymore than there is a downside of enabling improvements to be built elsewhere on the map.

This is a big deal for me. I thought we had a compromise worked out, but you implemented the penalties for polar cities there (removing ice shipper availability, reducing terraform speed) without implementing the benefits.
 
If polar cities (I haven't played far enough into any game yet to know) do not have any hammers, polar cities will be worthless no matter how much commerce they can generate (except to the Harkonnens who can adopt oppression to whip infrastructure). I never saw a problem with building improvements on polar tiles - I actually thought the polar zone (with improvements) looked pleasing graphically.

Would it make sense for polar water improvements (ml and ie) to give a passive +1 water to adjacent polar sink tiles (or possibly just the ml)?
 
Would it make sense for polar water improvements (ml and ie) to give a passive +1 water to adjacent polar sink tiles (or possibly just the ml)?
I don't think the polar area needs more water; its high water yield is already present from the water yield on each tile.
 
Just a few questions:

- Would it be possible for Kwisatz units to give their bonus the turn that they enter the square? Currently the Inspiration promotions aren't added until the Kwisatz has been sitting on the square for 1 turn. ie Make it an onMove trigger.

- Is it possible for automated workers to auto-upgrade tiles that have upgrades (ie Mine -> Deep mine, Shallow -> Deep wells etc) while the "Automated workers leave existing improvements" is on.

Basically, the idea is you don't want workers to turn your Wells into Solar farms or Windtraps into Turbines, but you do want them to upgrade to the best improvement in the chain you have chosen for that square.

This would really help the late game tedium of upgrading all your improvements :)
 
Hi, Ive got a BIG problem with 1.9.6, Ive bought a civ 4 all in one collection just for this mod, honestly I think its the best mod Ive seen for civ, and am amazed at all the work done, but when I try to load a saved game it crashes saying send\dont send report, funny thing is that the save files are in C:\Documents and Settings\Genrich\ almost like desktop=) Ive tried copying them to
C:\Documents and Settings\Genrich\My documents\My Games\Beyond the Sword\Saves\single
still no luck, any advice? where are they supposed to be located, what can be the problem? ive got windows XP.

Other mods work fine, load and save, after redirecting the saves for dune wars the errormessage now turns up for half a second and sais something like "cannot find game data" other mods work fne, ive tried, maybe you forgot to ad something crucial to the 1.9.6 full download that is included in the previous versions? total size was 119mb, the music pack was bigger, please Help.
 
Although the version numbering is slightly unusual, you must install 1.9.1 first, then 1.9.6. If you upgrade from 1.9 directly to 1.9.6 then it will not work. Could this be the problem?
 
OK ive downloaded 1.9, then as 1.91.exe instructed uninstaled 1.9, replaced with 1.9.1, then patched to 1.9.6 and IT WORKS!!!! Davidlallen you are VERY HELPFUL THANKS=)
 
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