Editor Documentation Errors

R8XFT said:

When testing the Anno Domini mod, I had the "build often" flag checked for offensive land units for militaristic civs. The map was overrun with units until I later unchecked it, when a more sensible number of units were built by the AI.

Click to expand...

Interesting. Normally the AI builds land units in an approximately 60:40 ratio of units flagged Defensive to units flagged Offensive. Any guestimate as to what percentage, with the flag checked for "Build Often" for "Offensive", were actually offensive? - If nothing else, I'd be amazed if the AI didn't have a defensive unit (or, if it lacked one, was in the process of building one) for each city.

Thanks ,

Oz

To be honest, most of that came from feedback from the beta testers. I hardly played the mod myself when I was creating it; though I did sometimes play the early stages of it. There was an A1D1M1 unit available from the start, with A2D1M1 and A1D2M1 units being available shortly after. IIRC, we were overrun with the A1D1M1 units more than anything else. It wasn't for lack of other things to build either.

If you uncheck fortify for a unit
a) It cannot sentry anymore
b) The fortify button is not there... But you can still fortify it using a right click and the contextual menu
--> Removing the fortify is useless

@ Steph - nice one

@R8XFT - I can't speak to that experience as I'd need to know more details (i.e., the AI will take into account hit points per unit for its calculations). I can only refer you to this ancient and lengthy thread within which many modders came to generally unsettling conclusions after much serious investigation.

Best To All,

Oz

ozymandias said:

@ Steph - nice one
Oz

Click to expand...

Well, not really. I wanted to have infantry as the only fortifiable unit, and cavalry cannot fortify, but it doesn't work

From what I've heard, the same is true for upgrades. You can still use the keyboard shortcut. I don't know if the AI can still Fortify or Upgrade, though.

Steph said:

Well, not really. I wanted to have infantry as the only fortifiable unit, and cavalry cannot fortify, but it doesn't work

Click to expand...

Ouch! I was hoping you'd found some happy use for this.

-Oz

Weasel Op said:

From what I've heard, the same is true for upgrades. You can still use the keyboard shortcut. I don't know if the AI can still Fortify or Upgrade, though.

Click to expand...

Wasn't that changed in one of the later patches?

I don't know, PCH told me about it when he was adding the light infantry to version 1.11

mrtn said:

Wasn't that changed in one of the later patches?

Click to expand...

Even then, if you have units A,B, and C, where A upgrades to B, B upgrades to C, but B is not flagged as upgradable (so B cannot be built when C is available).
This still allows A to upgrade to C as a standard upgrade.

This thread has been "stickied" a little ahead of schedule (well, my schedule anyway ). I've kept fairly detailed notes about the editor literally for years; I'll update the first post, etc., with the goal that we'll collectively know everything worth knowing about that tricky beast.

Stay tuned and keep posting!

All The Best,

Oz

Kindly check out Post #1 and let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Oz

Good job

I always forget to bookmark the important threads, it's nice to have them all in one place.

I'd like to submit this link as my contribution
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=69502

The post there gives the correct formulas for resource distribution in PTW and C3C. The Helpless gives incorrect information, of course: "a ratio of 160 should give 16 resources in 8 player game", while it gives 12 in PTW and 9 in C3C.

I don't quite agree on the governments issue, but at the moment all I can say is that while making MEM governments, I observed that Favored settings actually work (as in, have some impact), at least if I avoid "hot" features like the trade bonus and make the governments AI-balanced. I'll try to make some clean tests though to be sure.

Also, maybe it's a good place to inform about the undocumented bugs that are associated with modding? The things that come to my mind are the resource overflow bug, the world size / barbarian activity bug and NoAIPatrol=1 effect on barbarians?

One more thing:

The mechanics of Flavors can be discovered here.

Click to expand...

You've linked to my post here, which is for the most part right, but one sentence isn't, which may be confusing: "But in practice it just doesn't work..." - as Plotinus later explains, it in fact does work, that is, the flavors do affect the AI's decision on what to research next (or rather, what techs will it avoid / put off until later).

Oz, thanks a lot for the work you have done.

It is nice to have a comprehensive list in one place, thanks for putting this together.

Oz, the first post looks great. Your notes are all accurate as far as I know. But I didn't actually discover the hidden nationality bug- that was ocedius. I just tested it extensively

Ok, here is the deal with Favorite governments. They do affect diplomacy of course. But they also work as the manual says - the AI is more likely to use its Favorite government (I don't know if it's less likely to choose it's Shunned govt though; EDIT2: re-tested, Shunned works!). The reason it is not very visible is that the governments in unmodded game, as well as most mods, have drastically different values for the AI engine.

Initial observation:
In MEM the first government is Feudalism, with Empire coming a bit later in the same era. What I noticed is that at the end of the 1st era, with pretty much all civs having researched both, everyone (give or take 2-3 civs out of 30) is still in feudalism, but the four civs that have Empire as Favorite are already in Empire. Similar things happen later with other governments. It's by no means fixed but the bias is visible. This is largely because I tried to make the governments balanced in the AI, not human terms, by trial and error, e.g. by adjusting unit support 1 by 1 or not using the "Standard Trade Bonus", which almost assures that 90% of civs will love it regardless of their Favorite settings.

Direct proof:
Take a fresh BIQ and make all governments identical, and not requiring any techs. Make anarchy as default type so as to force all civs to choose a new govt after 1 turn. Play in debug mode, wait 1 turn, then go to Military Advisor and see what happens!

Here are some results I got after further testing, with cleared favorite/shunned settings, and governments differing only in 1 feature.

These settings have effect on the AI government choice:

- Favorite government
- Shunned government
- Military Police Limit
- Unit Support (cost per unit, free units and support per city *combined* - the AI makes a calculation based on the number of units and settlements owned to determine the best option)
- Corruption (Minimal > Nuisance > Communal > Problematic > Rampant > Catastrophic; it doesn't seem that the AI makes any calculations here, it won't choose Communal over Nuisance even with 50 cities on a standard map)
- War Weariness (if at war)
- Standard Tile Penalty (avoided)
- Standard Trade Bonus (highly valued)

These settings have NO effect on the AI government choice:

- Rate Cap
- Worker Rate
- Assimilation Chance
- Draft Limit
- Hurry Method
- War Weariness (if at peace)
- Xenophobic and Forced Resettlement
- Resistance Modifiers
- Espionage (Diplomats, Spies, Immune to... etc.)
- Government-specific improvements and wonders

All of this is in no particular order. It's rather impossible to determine the exact value of each of the elements without hax0ring. But the list should help balancing the governments, at least.

embryodead said:

Here are some results I got after further testing, with cleared favorite/shunned settings, and governments differing only in 1 feature.

These settings have effect on the AI government choice:

- Favorite government
- Shunned government
- Military Police Limit
- Unit Support (cost per unit, free units and support per city *combined* - the AI makes a calculation based on the number of units and settlements owned to determine the best option)
- Corruption (Minimal > Nuisance > Communal > Problematic > Rampant > Catastrophic; it doesn't seem that the AI makes any calculations here, it won't choose Communal over Nuisance even with 50 cities on a standard map)
- War Weariness (if at war)
- Standard Tile Penalty (avoided)
- Standard Trade Bonus (highly valued)

These settings have NO effect on the AI government choice:

- Rate Cap
- Worker Rate
- Assimilation Chance
- Draft Limit
- Hurry Method
- War Weariness (if at peace)
- Xenophobic and Forced Resettlement
- Resistance Modifiers
- Espionage (Diplomats, Spies, Immune to... etc.)
- Government-specific improvements and wonders

All of this is in no particular order. It's rather impossible to determine the exact value of each of the elements without hax0ring. But the list should help balancing the governments, at least.

Click to expand...

Genuinely amazing I won't even ask how you structured your tests, but I'm certainly very grateful for this information.

Thank You,

Oz