Better BUG AI

Yes, forts is what I am talking about when I say channels, but it would require insane effort to detect if a city is connected to a big ocean by a chain of forts.
The parts I wrote but never tested, should in theory make the AI notice that a city with a fort in an adjancent tile has not only access to the water areas around the city but also to the water areas around that fort since ships can move through, and more improtantly it should also allow the AI to build them if they aren't already there.

If you think you can write something that makes the same thing work for multiple forts next to each other connecting multiple water areas, be my guest. But I gave up after I realized just how non-trivial it would be to code that, it would need to be done for every player seperately, and it would probably be so expensive to calculate it would need to be stored at least for one turn. I prefer not to add any new functions and instead improve upon what is already there until I have a bit more confidence in my c++ skills.
 
Does your mod folder contain a Python folder with subfolders and files in them?
If it's empty, I :):):):)ed up the installer.
If there are files in that folder, uninstall completely and be sure that there is nothing left of that Python folder; then reinstall or simply extract the files from the installer with 7zip.
And let me know what happens.
 
Thanks so much for this!

But I have one problem: The Plot List Enhancments buttons are missing for me. (the buttons that allow you to sort units and filter out units by injured, healed, your own troops, allied troops, etc.) I have enabled it in the options, but it doesn't show up. Anyone else have this problem?

EDIT: Oh, that's weird... Even though I had selected to enable both PLE and the buttons I had to change a drop down menu from Vanilla to PLE Style. And the BUG option is REALLY weird, it just gives me a large blue box that covers half the screen. But I got the buttons to work on the PLE Style option anyway.
 
Thanks so much for this!

But I have one problem: The Plot List Enhancments buttons are missing for me. (the buttons that allow you to sort units and filter out units by injured, healed, your own troops, allied troops, etc. I have enabled it in the options, but it doesn't show up.

Anyone else have this problem?

Change the Draw Method from Vanilla to PLE in the Plot List tab of the BUG options, and you'll be set! You need to click on a unit before you'll actually see the change. Fuyu mentioned this recently over in the BUG forum.
 
With vanilla drawing method not doing anything and BUG being broken it would probably be best to simply set the default drawing method to PLE (since so many people want these filter buttons and most can't find out how to activate them), and change it to BUG once that is finished.
Will do that for the new version but everyone who keeps usersettings will still need to change it manually, if he hasn't done it already.
 
10 BetterAI revisions later:
  • I'm still not sure if I like Lead From Behind, but I hope I could turn down the effects in the xml (using 1/2/1/2/1/1/1 settings instead of defaut 1/5/1/5/2/1/1). And that's also where it can be turned off completely (by setting LFB_ENABLE to 0).
  • Health/Happy buildings evaluation is improved by jdog, my own version is still more sophisticated imo, will need to finish that one day.
  • Siege units for city attack: all new evaluation code, I'll be using my own variant of what was there and what jdog wrote.
  • Naval units can no longer move diagonally through land, they could do that since BetterAI r483 which dates back to August 31st 2009. I knew about it but thought it was supposed to be that way :p (I blame Civ2)
  • There's a "New AI raze city logic". I didn't look at that one yet, I just hope jdog knows what he's doing :)
  • [no change] MongooseSDK's Barbarian tech fix and Sephi's WE diplo hit fix are now part of UP and thus part of BetterAI (for this mod nothing changes, both were already included)
  • [no change] In BetterAI r529, the workboat unit lost its military upkeep and military production attribute, I did not take over these changes though, workboats remain unchanged here, until I figure out why this change was necessary or a good idea.
  • [no change] Floodplains staying when building cities was removed in BetterAI, but I am keeping my version in (only remove a feature if it either gives defence or disallows improvements).

I'll be committing to svn, creating and uploading the installer shortly.

Better BUG AI (2010-03-05) <- don't use that version

Hopefully coming soonish&#8482;:
* A fix for fast units suciding against heavily fortified cities instead of sticking with the main stack (by jdog)
* Fuyu's building happy/health evalution (noone will notice that difference though, current version should be good enough)
* AI logic for building 1-tile channels (fort) to help iced-in cities gain access to ocean, or to connect a city to another/bigger ocean.
 
Alright, so I installed the version from 2010-03-05 and now I'm crashing like crazy. In fact, I have a savegame right now where if I load it and hit enter to end my turn, the game immediately crashes.
 
Thank god it seemed to be my own code in the siege units evaluation for attack_city. I don't know what I would have done if it hadn't been that simple.

Please try 2010-03-06, and tell me if this doesn't fix the crashes for you.
 
If I may make a suggestion- I told the installer "sure, make a desktop icon", and then spent a while looking for it because it gave me an icon with the BUG icon rather than the CivIV/BtS icon. This makes some sense, but as the game is still Beyond the Sword I would suggest leaving the icon as BtS. Obviously this is exceedingly minor, but what the heck. :) (I suppose ideal would be someone making a BtS icon with the little red bug in the lower right corner or something, but that would be, like, work.)

Going to try the newest version. I'm getting an incredible number of OoS errors in multiplayer with the version from late Feb, but unfortunately I have seen no pattern nor had a saved game that triggers one, so I don't have anything _useful_ to report about it. I'm going to keep trying to make a reproducible case and will do so with the latest version to make sure it wasn't already fixed. The problem with this kind of merged mod is knowing where to report bugs- if I manage to make a reproducible case that points extremely towards BetterAI or BULL as being the problem, I'll jump right there with a report.

("An incredible number" really means I have to reconnect 5 or 6 times in a 3 hour game session, which is by no means unplayable.)
 
Just a minor detail, my desktop shortcut is pure white, no icon for it. Been so since I started using installers.
Win 7 64 bit if that means anything.
It still starts the game no problem though :)

Keep up the good work!
 
Afaik BULL should be pretty much free of OOS errors, as the one from safe move was fixed recently. No idea about Better AI though, but when in doubt that's where I'd point. I'd also assume the newest version will get you even more oos but that's just a guess ;) based simply on the fact that there were a whole lot of betterai changes since then.

The icon problem I simply wasn't aware of, as I am always using a mod chooser utility instead of links. Being without icon extraction (from civ4bts exe) and editing software, I am simply unable to create an icon that is both different from default and still looks like bts, so I'll just use bts icon from now on. There are icon plugins for PS cs4, I wouldn't know which one tough and I still need to extract the one from the exe. Oh right, w7 needs special care. heh
 
Afaik BULL should be pretty much free of OOS errors, as the one from safe move was fixed recently. No idea about Better AI though, but when in doubt that's where I'd point. I'd also assume the newest version will get you even more oos but that's just a guess ;) based simply on the fact that there were a whole lot of betterai changes since then.

Well if it does I'll hope I can find a damn pattern to them so I can help track them down! ;)
 
Alright, so I installed the version from 2010-03-05 and now I'm crashing like crazy. In fact, I have a savegame right now where if I load it and hit enter to end my turn, the game immediately crashes.

I was getting crashes almost consistently after I merged it into PIG as well, usually before 1AD. Weird thing is, I couldn't get it to crash with straight up Better BUG AI mod. Maybe it didn't have the latest SDK changes built in?

Anyway, I'll test out the fix and see if it stops my crashes.
 
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