Version 4.0 Discussion Thread

OKAY. Sorry for being silent the last 8 days; if the forum hadn't been having problems we'd probably have had all this conversation on here to begin with. But that's why I posted it, so you guys would know I didn't die, or go on vacation, or something. :p

Next, I offer you this battle cry, which echoes through the subforum:

Release the hounds!!! ... I mean, the mod! ... Wait, the mod has hounds in it, doesn't it?

The change log sticky has been updated for the last time, with the final set of patch notes from the last 8 days. Feel free to look it over, or ignore it; up to you. :)

...

One additional note I meant to make but never got a chance to: I was actually wrong one final time (if you can believe it) two weeks ago about the power plant situation. The AIs were evaluating the magnitude of the XML power unhealth globals, and they definitely would've been more reluctant to build them at -10 health than at -2, contrary to what I said before.

The vanilla code probably didn't do this, but there was BetterAI code that did, which is why I missed it the first time through. My changes were still necessary to add happiness penalties to power, but they weren't as badly needed as I thought at the time. Just lettin' ya know. :)

...

Version 4.0 is finished, but I still need a certain number of hours (please don't ask me how many b/c I have no clue at this point) to update the Credits section, convert the patch notes into release notes, take out the custom soundtrack files, zip it, and upload it. In the past this has taken 4-8 hours, but these patch notes are longer than my last several major updates combined. Sigh.

Anyway, figure tomorrow afternoon, give or take. I swear I mean it this time.

I honestly thought I was a few days, and even a few hours, away from this point a hundred times over the last 2-4 weeks, but I kept thinking of stuff to do, finding stuff to do, having stuff to do suggested to me, and having everything take twice as long to do as I expected. I can't really apologize any more, so some of the email conversation I posted above was to further make fun of myself on this point. :)

...

I said it once before, but this version will, without exaggeration, be the biggest accomplishment of my life so far. It has so many improvements in it I've lost count. I've done almost everything I had on my radar screen to do in the future, ever. I've done a bunch more stuff I wouldn't have thought of on my own, thanks primarily to Rakete. I've stumbled into a ton of additional things simply from working so thoroughly on everything else.

This update is designed to be completely, 100% bug-free. It is designed to be perfectly balanced. Obviously I can't know for sure, but unlike my past releases, it should not need a 4.0.1 patch to fix problems that emerge after release. I have tested and double-checked everything I can. I have given everything close scrutiny with my now-very-exhausted brain.

If this update does not make the best Civ4 mod of its type for the rest of human history, I will come apologize to each and every human who reads this, in person.

Now then... release notes. *gulp*
 
added Mongoose PercentCommerceRoundingFix to round, rather than truncate, the higher-precision internal empire-level percent commerce income values, to help prevent alternating zero and 100% research funding levels from being slightly superior to stable intermediate values (thanks AIAndy!)

Very well!
 
Very well!

What I did last night before going to sleep helped, but it wasn't a perfect solution; it could still get messed up if you used 3 or 4 non-zero percents (once the Culture and Espionage spending controls are unlocked), or if you used the "Build Gold"-type processes in any of your cities. Don't worry though; I only spent 20 minutes on this last night hehe.

Fortunately, I realized the right way to solve the problem while I was asleep. (Which is not the first time that's happened in the last 2 months...) So after another 10 minutes implementing that just now, I believe I've fully solved the problem. Toldja it'd be quick. ;)
 
higher-precision internal empire-level percent commerce income value remainders

That's a nice term for it. :goodjob:

Actually I just asked you to fix that, because I am too lazy to alternate my tax rate every couple of turns, but I don't want other players in our group to benefit from that trick. ;)
Though at the moment we play against the AI most of the time.

And are you sure that it does not cause any problems/bugs to replace the truncate operations by rounding operations? I mean maybe Firaxis truncated these values intentionally.
 
Actually I just asked you to fix that, because I am too lazy to alternate my tax rate every couple of turns, but I don't want other players in our group to benefit from that trick. ;)

Bugfixes tend to apply to all players... sorry. :p

And are you sure that it does not cause any problems/bugs to replace the truncate operations by rounding operations? I mean maybe Firaxis truncated these values intentionally.

They truncated them b/c they truncate everything in their code, and that's usually fine as long as they're consistent about it. This is a special case b/c you have one value that can optionally be broken up into 4 seperate pieces.

Changing to rounding was what I did last night. It would've worked for just gold and research spending, with no build processes going on in your cities, but otherwise it was still broken.

What I'm doing now is collecting the 4 remainder values, adding them up, and dropping the result onto the gold value. It's functionally equivalent to setting gold to 100% funding and having no remainders. So yes, I'm sure. :)
 
A few hours ago I realized something was still bothering me about special kill gold rewards, so I figured out what it was and made one more quick update as a result. It's in the Change Log sticky if you want to read the details.

Don't worry; I'm pretty sure that's the only last-second thing I'll stop to do, and it didn't take very long anyway. :p Whelp, back to work... These patch notes go on forever.
 
extended Mongoose UnitGoldValueMod to also scale special kill gold rewards from 100-50% depending on world size (they are worth more on smaller maps b/c there are fewer fogged tiles for animals to spawn in so Mammoths and Rhinos are more rare; b/c there are lower quantity limits on Turtles and Serpents so THEY are more rare; and b/c, while there is always only one Kraken and it will always have room to spawn, a player has less room for, and higher maintenance costs with, a large number of cities to build and support a large naval fleet, which is needed to actually kill a Kraken)
doubled gold reward values on Sandworm, Turtle, Serpent, and Kraken to compensate
increased gold reward value on Mammoth from 25 to 120, and on Rhinoceros from 15 to 80

120 gold for a Mammoth is far too much. It's not that difficult to kill them. Rhinoceros probably, too. Gold rewards should be based on how difficult it is to kill an animal, not on how rare the animal is on the map. Otherwise they will be like mobile super goody huts.
And don't forget that without rageing barbarians it is easier to kill those animals.
 
120 gold for a Mammoth is far too much. It's not that difficult to kill them. Rhinoceros probably, too. Gold rewards should be based on how difficult it is to kill an animal, not on how rare the animal is on the map. Otherwise they will be like mobile super goody huts.
And don't forget that without rageing barbarians it is easier to kill those animals.

Dood... I said "100-50%" for a very specific reason. :p You only get that much for killing them on Duel-Eternal games (b/c there won't be much fogged land area for them to spawn in the first place on a map that small). On Huge-Eternal and Duel-Quick a Mammoth is worth 60, and on Huge-Quick they're worth 30. (Technically that's only true for the Planetary size, but Huge will be pretty close.)

They got a balance buff from 25 up to 60, and then got doubled along with the monsters to cancel out the new worldsize scaling.

Also, they're a bit stronger in v4.0, and Rhinos are still going to be worth less than Mammoths. :)

p.s. - I'm getting there. Still at least several hours away, but I'm getting there. Oh, and I think I'm going to set the LFB (Lead from Behind) system to be off by default from now on, since we always turn it off for our games... It's a simple XML control global if people want to turn it back on.
 
What's that actually?

It's a very popular mod component that I added into my code a while back. Basically it tries to make sure your highest-value units (ones with a lot of promotions, ones with a Great General, and probably also elite units and dragons and such) stay alive, by making units with somewhat-lower combat odds for it, still take defense combats instead of the good units.

Obviously if the valuable units are better than the best non-valuable unit by a sufficient margin it will still let them be the defender, but it adjusts the chance of that happening by how much more valuable they are.

Personally I prefer to always let the units with the highest combat odds be the ones that actually fight, so I have the best chance of winning each combat, but I can see the point; that way your best units are more likely to be available for offensive combats. (The type of game we play puts us on the defensive a lot though, so I'm probably biased, hehe.)

So yeah, up to you on whether I turn this off by default or not. Like I said, to toggle it you just change a "0" to a "1" at the top of one of the XML globals files, so it's easily adjustable, but most people don't like to touch even the high-level control switches like this.

As for the update, I probably would've been done by now, but the friend I used to play Civ4 with called, and we wound up playing Starcraft 2 for the last 8 hours, heh. Sorry for the extra delay, but it was fun, and I hadn't had any real fun in over 3 months now, so I kinda had to.

I'm currently 75% done with the release notes conversion. After that it's pretty fast and straight-forward, but I'm going to need to sleep again pretty soon here, too. I'll do the best I can.
 
I have never paid much attention ot those combat orders. There is always few time in the games we play. So I don't care at all if you turn "Lead from behind" on or off. I am also not skilled at all in using promotions. Usually what happens it that either
A) I have chosen a promotion but then I decide to use the unit for a different purpose so the promotion is worthless.
B) I am waiting too long to choose from the promotions and my units get killed already. :eek:

So now I sometimes just turn-on auto-promote or I just choose the combat-promotions.

What I am skilled in is to build many cities without running into economic problems, and to choose the best locations for my cities.
 
Today I made a few more AI code improvements related to tile damage (which all started b/c I was wondering what was really going on with that AI_PATH_DAMAGE_WEIGHT global I found and changed earlier), and also made a bugfix to the BetterAI code in one place as a result.

Next, b/c I wasn't really happy with LeadFromBehind being on OR off by default, I came up with a brilliant alternative solution that's now been implemented as well. A few other people may have thought of the chronological leader cycling thing independently from me, but I seriously doubt anyone else would ever think of this on their own: LFB is now used selectively, depending on the leader. The ones with more military skill, success, and boldness historically use the old system (taking higher risks with their valuable units), and the rest use the new system.

Oh, and I screwed up going from memory yet again in my previous post: LFB was incorporated into BBAI at some point, so it wasn't something I specifically added to the mod myself. Now then, back to work on the release notes, hehe.
 
Gotta note a few non-civic icon choices, sorry: Atlatl (two flying stone daggers on red background), Condor ("Thieves' Guild" with mask sitting on table), Witch Doctor (bone hand on black background), Shaman (lightning sphere on red background), Storm Drake (blue lightning bolt on purple background), Intercept mission (front view of green WW2 fighter shooting bullets on yellow sky background), Recon mission (large white UAV on dark blue water background), Bomb mission (overhead view of two B52's sitting on on runway), Strike mission (large neon green targeting reticle on black background), Rebase mission (purple and red suitcases), Explore mission (old white map with gold arc from bottom-left to top-right), Sentinel mission (dark gray Harrier with blue water background), Arcology Infrastructure (dark teal generator columns with purple lightning around them), Arcology Shield (light blue energy beam in concentric square slices coming out of scifi projector on black background), Labyrinth (teal room with giant pillars, yellow lights, and white sun beams that I used to have on the Gutenberg or Leonardo I think), and Buckingham Palace (long stretch of rectangular green garden segments with gray between them).

...

Today I fixed a bug with the Nuclear Plant effect that would've had you all up in arms if it had made it through to the release version; made one final, extremely-minor change; fixed the game crashing that resulted from that change, which I almost didn't discover; and put the finishing touches on the included documentation files.

Now then, one additional note to make: You won't get the gold reward if you kill a Rhino or Mammoth with a nuke (you wouldn't with the monster units either, except they're all nuke-immune so it doesn't matter ;)). This is intended, however: the horn or tusks would be obliterated, and if not, who would want to buy radioactive ivory? :p

Okay, the file has been uploaded... gimme a minute and it should be available. Version 1.2 of the Africa map is included, so until he updates it again you don't need to make a seperate download for that. (This version has the ocean tiles set to be Ocean instead of Coast, and has the one minor change needed to make it work in MM 4.0.)

People other than Rakete: I've worked harder on this than most people work at their jobs, and I'm not getting paid a cent for it, so please at least let me know what you think. :)
 
:thumbsup:

Great to see version 4.0 online!

I have already played a couple of turns to test the woodland cottages and they work great. I have got some real-life work to do for the next 2-3 days, but after that I will definitely start a single player game. And our first multiplayer game will likely start on 26th March.
And I have seen some minor things in version 4.0 that could be flaws, but I will spare that to you for the moment. You really deserve playing Starcraft 2.

The only thing I want to mention at this point is that my Africa map loads up, but crashes after ending the first turn. But lets talk about that later as well. I will try to find the cause by myself. Your ostrichs are not permitted to stop me from searching for the cause on my own, hehe. :D
 
MAY 15!!! They finally announced the Diablo 3 release date... Ahem.

And I have seen some minor things in version 4.0 that could be flaws, but I will spare that to you for the moment. You really deserve playing Starcraft 2.

It's also a bunch of PS3 games, and some more RL stuff I've fallen behind on again... But no, go ahead and tell me. I want to know what the flaws are in my flawless creation. :p

The only thing I want to mention at this point is that my Africa map loads up, but crashes after ending the first turn. But lets talk about that later as well. I will try to find the cause by myself. Your ostrichs are not permitted to stop me from searching for the cause on my own, hehe. :D

Ack, sorry, I only tested that it loaded. I just can't catch a break on this update, sigh. It sounds like an SDK problem, in which case you won't be able to figure it out on your own, but I'll let you take a look first anyway. :)
 
downloading...

thank you Mongoose! I can't say that I 100% understand all those excellent status updates... only to say that certainly appreciate the detail and effort you've put in!
 
thank you Mongoose!

Enjoy. :)

There's a minor problem where the wonders I added "Requires Coastal" to are displaying in the water b/c I forgot it triggers that, even for ones that're supposed to be physically drawn on land, but it's only graphical, and I'm waiting to see if Rakete finds any other issues with the update before I patch that, hehe.
 
Ok the day of reckoning has come! :D

Time to tell you the truth. This new version of Mongoose Mod is not as perfect as you thought it was. It's just toooooo full of bugs. :p

Ok to be serious, I have so far only discovered one major bug, but I am sure that you will be able to fix it. All other things are just minor. :)

This is the MEGA BUG:
Load the savegame that I have sent you and you will see that there is only one turn left in which the AI calculations take the usual span of time. From the second turn that you finish, you will have to wait a very long time until the AI calculations are finished. On my desktop it increased from approx. 5 minutes to approx. 25 minutes. I have got an Intel Atom, that's why I have got such a high 5 minutes normal duration. On my laptop it increased from approx. 3 minutes to approx. 15 minutes. If you have got a very fast computer, it will maybe increase from 5 seconds to half a minute or so. But I'm sure that in relative terms the increase will be as high as on my two computers.

I suspect that an AI has researched a certain tech in the start of the renaissance age which makes it use a new routine that lasts so long, taking about 3 times as much time as all other calculations accumulatively.

Since my computer is slow anyway, I have to stop that game until you have cleared that bug.
Our first multiplayer match is postponed anyway, because the laptop of one in our group is out of order. So for the moment we are a group of three only and are finishing a game on my African map with version 3.6.1.

Some minor bugs:

- why can I build 3 national wonders in the same city? I thought it was restricted to 2. Just load the savegame that I have sent you, go to the city that is located second to the top on my semi-archipel. I have built the Maoi-statues and the National epic there, but I can still build the Royal tomb.

-Why does the Heroic epic not require a unit with 4 experience? I thought that we had agreed on that. It does not have any such requirement now.

-why can I only build 2 missionaries of the same type? I thought this was increased from 3 to 4? Ok, probably my remembrance is wrong and it was decreased from 3 to 2.

-Why is Alumunium enabled long before it is revealed? Does that make sense? Even if I trade for Aluminum with a technically advanced player, what can I build with Aluminium then? Aren't I lacking the techs for those units then?

-the effect of the Labyrinth is strange. Why does it cost so much population? What does the Labyrinth refer to in Human history?

-the warrior is too strong, a real Falcon killer! The Stone axeman is quite worthless now, because the Warrior serves nearly all of its purposes and is much cheaper.

Ok that's it for the moment.
There are some other small bugs and things that I dislike but they were just carried over from version 3.6.1, because I had never told you about them. I will post them a bit later.

Sorry if I have ruined your day now.......
 
I suspect that an AI has researched a certain tech in the start of the industrial age which makes it use a new routine that lasts so long, taking about 3 times as much time as all other calculations accumulative.

Off the top of my head I have no idea what could be causing this, so I'll have to re-read all my AI-related code changes and do a bunch of testing. Doh.

- why can I build 3 national wonders in the same city? I thought it was restricted to 2. Just load the savegame that I have sent you, go to the city that is located second to the top on my semi-archipel. I have built the Maoi-statues and the National epic there, but I can still build the Royal tomb.

The limit was changed from 2 to 3 waaaaay back in the earliest days of the mod, years ago... This is not something I changed in 3.6, or 4.0, or even 3.0, heh. No one ever complained about it so I left it at 3, and with the recent National Wonder nerfs I figured it'd be even more okay.

-Why does the Heroic epic not require a unit with 4 experience? I thought that we had agreed on that. It does not have any such requirement now.

Yes, it does have that requirement... The code doesn't display the red text for the restriction when you currently have a unit somewhere that meets the requirement. Try looking at it on an early turn, or from the main menu. (The "not displaying the red text when the condition is met" thing is not new either; that's vanilla code, and it has always behaved that way.)

And it does add +1 to the level needed when Raging Barbs is on, as intended. I definitely tested this, with it both on and off.

-why can I only build 2 missionaries of the same type? I thought this was increased from 3 to 4? Ok, but probably my remembrance is wrong and it was decreased from 3 to 2.

Because there's also worldsize-based scaling of the maximum number of allowed restricted units in 4.0 (check Turtles, Flying Machines, Mantas, Dragons, etc). The base limit was indeed increased from 3 to 4, but the base value is only the final value on the larger map sizes now.

-Why is Alumunium enabled long before it is revealed? Does that make sense? Even if I trade for Aluminum with a technically advanced player, what can I build with Aluminium then? Aren't I lacking the techs for those units then?

Eh, this was a random minor thing I decided to do early on in the update. It doesn't really make any difference either way, but it was going on the same kind of logic that was used to set the enabling techs on the earlier resources: Metallurgy gives you the physical ability to manipulate, work with, and use Aluminum, regardless of whether you have anything to use it for, yet. Metallurgy is a more advanced form of the Ancient and Classical metalworking techs, and is needed for this particular type of metal, for realistic physical reasons.

It is revealed in Flight b/c that is where there is the first major use and need for it, so an empire suddenly starts looking for sources of it, b/c they find they need it all of a sudden now.

As a practical gameplay matter, no, it doesn't matter much, but it's consistent with how the Ancient / Classical enabling techs were chosen, so eh, whatever. :)

-the effect of the Labyrinth is strange. Why does it cost so much population? What does the Labyrinth refer to in Human history?

It's mythological. (There might have been an actual physical labyrinth built, but if there was it would've been for different reasons... myths are usually based on some element of truth).

I don't remember if a Pedia entry made it in for that wonder or not... Anyway, in the myth, it was the prison for the Minotaur. It was a giant maze, and people would be thrown inside, to eventually die to the creature if they couldn't find their way back out again. These being either criminals and such, or just human sacrifices that were thought to be necessary (I don't remember, but Wikipedia has a full article on it, as usual :)).

Anyway, the idea is the population goes down b/c of the sacrifices, and war weariness goes down and production goes up a little b/c of the extra fear-based motivation the people have.

-the warrior is too strong, a real Falcon killer! The Stone axeman is quite worthless now, because the Warrior serves nearly all of its purposes and is much cheaper.

Really? Falcons are completely optional. I was expecting players to skip that tech entirely half the time... Stone Axes are still significantly better city raiders, and still own every type of melee unit in the field...

I may have gone a little overboard with the Warrior vs Falcon counter modifier, but I used it b/c I felt Warriors still sucked... badly. The low base price on them is probably sufficient though I guess. :)

Fine, I'll re-balance them a little... I can't agree with you about Stone Axes though; they're STILL the best Prehistoric unit if you ask me. :p
 
So, do you get those prolonged AI calculations, too, in those savegames that I sent you? How long does it take on your computer?
If the problem is not related to the abilities of a certain tech, it could also be a consequence of city raising. In the turn prior to the prolonged AI calculations I razed a city for the first time in the game (AI city, not Barbarian). But the prolonged AI calculations seem to be enduring, I tested it for three more turns. But I razed the city only once.

Falcons vs. Warrior: The Barbarians build a lot of Falcons!!!! It doesn't matter if the AI and Human players hardly build any.

National wonders: It is displayed incorrectly in the mousover, saying "National wonders left: 0", when I have built two. But there is still one left to build then..


And yes, I have heard about the fairy tale of the Minotaur. I just didn't think about that.
 
Top Bottom