K-Mod: Far Beyond the Sword

karadoc

AI programmer
Joined
Oct 3, 2005
Messages
1,568
Location
Australia
K-Mod aims to build on standard Beyond the Sword game-play without changing the flavour. The focus is on fixing flaws in the game-mechanics for some of the weaker elements of the game, and improving balance and the AI. I'm quite happy with the results. I think this mod is a great improvement to the game and I wouldn't go back to playing unmodded BtS. But these kinds of changes are subjective, so I'd appreciate your feedback. The download page has most of the details.

Latest version: 1.46
Last updated: 6/May/2018

Download, and feature list

Major features of K-Mod
  • Greatly improved AI. The AI has been taught to understand the new K-Mod game mechanics; but it has also been taught to understand many of the standard BtS game mechanics which were overlooked in the original AI, such as the difference between 'revealing' a resource and 'enabling' a resource. It has new military strategies, new victory strategies, and a bunch of changes just for personality. The K-Mod AI originally used the BetterAI mod as a starting point. It is now noticeably stronger than both the standard AI, and the AI from the BetterAI mod. Each new version of K-Mod comes with further AI improvements.
  • Speed improvements. I've gone to some effort to tune how the game runs. Although some of the internal calculations of K-Mod are more complex than in standard BtS, K-Mod actually runs much faster than the unmodded game.
  • User-Interface improvements. K-Mod includes most of the of features from the famous BUG mod, as well as lots of additional UI improvements. For example, units will no longer automatically attack when you move them into the fog of war. And units can paradrop as a group now, rather than only one at a time.
  • Completely new Global Warming system. In standard BtS, global warming is a bit of a joke. It is triggered by the wrong things, you can't really do much to prevent it, and it hits the world in a harsh and unintuitive way. I've completely changed it. The new system is driven by population and pollution-causing buildings, and offset by forests and jungles. The world has a "sustainability threshold", above which global warming will start, and will gradually pick up pace as more pollution is created. ... There is a new Environmental Adviser screen. Global Warming has become a significant and interesting part of the game; but also a less painful one!
  • Under-the-hood rebalancing. I've tweaked many of the numbers in the game. Stats of buildings and things like that; but that's just part of the balancing. The more significant balance changes are 'under-the-hood'. For example, I've changed the way culture spreads from cities. This isn't the kind of change that the average player would notice, but the affect is that culture is a more important, more powerful, and more intuitive.

Any questions / comments / suggestions / bug reports / criticisms, etc. are welcome.

I mostly play on normal or large map size, (Using the Not too big or small map script), and on normal speed. But I have tried to make sure the scaling of the formulas is right for all speeds & sizes. I'd appreciate any feedback about whether or not it works as expected.

Regarding the in-game translations. I think I've put in translations for all of the new game text. But I only speak English, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the translations. If you happen to see some translated text that you think is wrong (or english text that's wrong), please let me know.

For improved graphics, here is a Blue Marble tile pack which can be unzipped directly into the K-Mod assets folder. This graphics pack will not break multiplayer compatibility or change any of the game mechanics. It's what I use.
 
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Change log

v1.46

Game
  • Increased trade culture rate for lower levels. (This doesn't affect city culture. Only plot culture.)
  • Fixed overflow bug when adding large amounts of culture to a city.
  • Several miscellaneous bug fixes.
AI
  • Major changes to the AI's tech evaluations. (Hopefully this will help the AI plan ahead a bit better.)
  • Improvements and bug-fixes for citizen job evaluations for AI and automated cities.
  • Several minor tweaks and changes to the AI.
UI
  • Improved German language text. (by Zholef)
  • Added a couple of (useful) loading hints, and removed a couple of low-value hints.
  • Restored WHEOOHRN scoreboard indicator option.

Previous versions
Spoiler :

--
v1.45

Game
  • Increased carrying capacity of all military boats by 1.
  • Scientific Method now gives +10% science in all cities.
  • Increased the research cost of Scientific Method.
  • Computers now gives +1 science to specialists.
  • Lumber mills are now unlocked with Guilds rather than Replaceable Parts.
  • Lumber mills and forest preserves now +1 commerce on the corner of rivers, just like the other improvements do.
  • Watermills now give 1 commerce (and 1 hammer) by default, but only gain 1 commerce from Electricity. (i.e. more commerce than before in the early game; but same in the late game.)
  • Submarines and Attack Submarines now get +25% attack (for coast and ocean plots).
  • Machine guns now get +10% vs mounted units
  • Adjusted cultural city revolt probability and properties.
  • Increased the base (maximum) chance of city cultural revolt from 10% to 15%
  • Decreased the duration of revolts from 3+2*(# of revolts) to 2+(# of revolts).
  • Cities will now flip on their 3rd cultural revolt rather than their second (if it is possible for them to flip). (The average number of turns to flip a city is the same; and the average number of turns spent in revolt is similar to before - but the chance of each revolt is a bit higher, and so it is less dependent on luck.)
  • Inflation rate now increases with global tech state. Previously inflation only depended on how many turns had past, and so if the global tech rate was very high (due to lots of tech trading), players would reach high end-game yields and still have very little inflation - which would increase the tech rate further. With this change, there will be higher inflation in games which have lots of tech trading. (And the inflation will be slightly higher for players with better tech!)
  • The global warming index now decreases exponentially by 1% each turn. (This will significantly decrease the effect of global warming in games where global warming is already very strong.)
  • Reduced the global warming offset of forests and jungles from 15 to 10.
  • Adjusted the 'severity rating' formula for global warming. 'Save the planet' anger will now be a bit stronger.
  • Increased the probability of natural spread of religions.
  • Reduced chance of spies being caught while exploring friendly land.
  • Tweaked religion "grip" values. (Distance and the shrine now have a relatively higher effect.)
  • Increased the maintenance cost of Civilized Jewelers. Decreased the maintenance cost of Standard Ethanol and Aluminium Co.
  • Fixed a bug which allowed 'no capture' units to captures cities that were only defended by non-combat units. (eg. a gunship could capture a city if the city only had a worker in it.)
  • Capitulation power is now determined after cities are reassigned, rather than before. This means that civs which give up a bunch of cities when they capitulate won't immediately be able to free themselves due to the lost cities they just traded away.
  • Many fixed memory leaks and logic mistakes, with help from alberts2 and DarkLunaPhantom.
  • Fixed potential crash in CvSelectionGroup::groupMove (again, thanks to DarkLunaPhantom for the idea)
  • Fixed air intercepts conflicting with combat in simultaneous turns. (This fixes potentially unpredictable behaviour; and it also allows air combat and interceptions can happen while the interceptor's plot is being attacked by someone else.)
  • Adjusted CvTeam::shareCounters to prevent lose of circumnavigation bonus when forming a permanant alliance.
AI
  • Fixed a bug which prevented the AI from declaring war with transports that ignore borders (such as the East Indiaman).
  • Adjusted worker AI to better prioritise large yield increases rather than working on plots which already have good yields.
  • The AI now counts the defensive bonus of features as negative value if they are next to cities. (This makes the AI a bit more likely to chop forests adjacent to their city.)
  • Fixed a bug which discouraged the AI from chopping forests in most situations.
  • Fixed several problems with slavery evaluation in AI_yieldValue. (The AI should work more food plots when using slavery.)
  • Rewrote AI_counterPropose to get more balanced deals. (This mostly improves the way the AI negotiates with other AI players.)
  • Increased the maximum discount that AI players are willing to offer to human players in trade deals.
  • Tweaked the AI to increase the likelihood that they'll offer a discount deal to human. (Please do consider deals that the AI offers you. They may present a one-time offer with a significant discount.)
  • The AI now uses time-weighted averages when deciding whether to build cottages. The specific time-weighting depends on the AI's situation.
  • Rewrote AI_techValue to establish a common value scale, and hence provide more accurate evaluations.
  • Improved evaluation of free techs from buildings (ie. The Oracle)
  • The AI now takes collateral damage resistance into account when evaluating stack attacks.
  • Fixed a bug which caused the AI to move units needlessly back and forward between cities (usually corporation execs).
  • Fixed AI missing inflation in the AI's colony & building evaluations.
  • Fixed several AI bugs related to the misuse of "CvUnit::getMoves" (which doesn't do what it sounds like it does). This mostly affects naval AI.
  • The AI now ignore automation settings when taking over from human players in multiplayer games.
  • Adjusted the unit priority for group pillage missions. (Slightly better choices when deciding which wounded units should pillage - if any.)
  • AI amphibious attacks will now use the normal (situation specific) city attack threshold calculation rather than a flat threshold.
  • Adjusted pathfinding costs to help exploring units to not avoid unexplored plots.
UI
  • Changed UI text to include inflation whenever displaying costs. (Previously the costs displayed were not the costs that the player will actually have to pay - because inflation was not being included.)
  • Spies in foreign territory now wake automatically when they reach their maximum fortification bonus.
  • Fixed a minor rounding problem in which sometimes made espionage costs inaccurate.
  • Removed duplicate gold commerce text from financial advisor screen.
  • Fixed launch spaceship popup sometimes appearing when it shouldn't.
  • Fixed the graphs screen sometimes showing the wrong thing on the pull-down menu.
Modding
  • Added two new (optional) xml fields for TechInfos.xml.
    • 'CommerceModifiers' allows techs to give a percentage bonus for each type of commerce in all cities.
    • 'SpecialistExtraCommerces' allows techs to give commerce bonuses to all specialists.
      These new effects are displayed in the Tech Chooser, the Civilopedia, the mouse-over text of relevant things in the city screen; and the effects are properly evaluated for AI decision making.
  • 'RiverSideYield' for improvements now applies when touching a river, even on the corner. Previously it only applied on the side of a river, like a watermill.

--
v1.44

Game
  • Fixed OOS bugs in some random events.
UI
  • Modified the space-ship screen and the multi-player launch space-ship popup so that travel time and success probability are always visible.
  • Corrected espionage costs displayed in spy mission popups when in a permanent alliance.
  • Added debug/cheat information for commerce weights and culture cities.
Automation / AI
  • Forced specialist count can no longer exceed total population. (This corrects a problem where the "remove specialist" buttons seems to have no effect when the number of forced specialists was still too high.)
  • Corrected some inconsistencies in the way forced specialists are handled by automated city governors. (The governor will not assign any specialists of non-forced type unless all the forced types are full. For example, if the player forces 1 merchant specialist, then the city will not use any scientists until all the merchant slots are full.)
  • AI_juggleCitizens now directly compares jobs before switching, to ensure the accuracy of evaluations.
  • Reduced the number of executives built by automated cities.
AI
  • Changed the evaluation of executives so that the value of spreading to foreign civs is only counted when more execs are needed.
  • Tightened the conditions on deciding to replace existing corporations.
  • Increased tendency for settler and missionary transports to wait in cities, so that they can be used when needed.
  • Fixed some minor issues with the AI's calculations when loading units into transports.
  • AI missionaries and workers now prefer waiting in cities with air-lift when they have no work to do.
  • Refined the AI's calculations for cultural victory decisions.
  • Pillage units now prioritise pillaging strategic resources they are standing on over attacking nearby enemies.
  • Increased the AI's evaluation of river plots in AI_foundValue.
  • Tweaked the area-based resources modifier for starting positions, to avoid overflow bugs on very large maps.
  • Fixed a minor mistake in the evaluation of buildings which remove resources (eg. National Park).
--
v1.43

Game
  • Forest preserves now give +1 commerce (in addition to their previous effects).
  • German assembly plants now give +2 production (in addition to previous effects).
  • Restored the Representation civic to 'medium' upkeep.
  • Fixed a rare bug which sometimes caused units to get bumped off their plot when simultaneously attacking and defending (in simultaneous turns mode).
  • Fixed bug which allowed cities to momentarily exceed their specialist cap.
  • Fixed a bug which caused original ownership to be ignored when deciding whether a city can be 'liberated'.
  • Added bNoCache argument to AI_localDefenceStrength. This is to protect against potential OOS bugs.
  • AI_commerceWeight for culture and espionage is now cached.
  • Improved the speed of the path-finding system.
AI
  • Completely redesigned the automatic assigning of worked plots and specialists in cities. (This will be an improvement for AI and for automated cities.)
  • Improved the AI's identification of culture cities aiming for a cultural victory.
  • Great artists now use the updated culture evaluation to choose when/where to create a great work (culture bombs).
  • AI espionage spending is now turned off by AI_VICTORY_CULTURE4 rather than by AI_VICTORY_CULTURE3.
  • The AI will now consider using machine guns for city defence.
  • The AI will now build assault units, transports, and attack ships are built at a more even rate, rather than focusing on one type of unit before starting the next.
  • Redesigned some sections of how the AI evaluates which units to build.
    • There is now some basic consideration of potential promotions.
    • Units which can't capture cities are now less likely to be built as attack units (eg. gunships).
    • Evaluation of unit speed has been adjusted.
    • Collateral damage immunity is now taken into account for city defenders.

UI
  • Fixed vassal / master relationship information of humans being hidden.
  • Tweaked the format of vassal/master relationship information.
  • The victory conditions screen now shows culture cities by team rather than by player (to match the actual conditions for victory).
  • Added loading hint about right clicking on +/- commerce buttons.

--
v1.42

Game
  • Human players can now tell their AI allies start war preparations via the diplomacy screen.
  • Byzantine hippodromes now allow two artists to be consistent with other theatre buildings.
  • The 'free city culture' (applied to plots in the area of a city) is now granted even for cities with zero culture rate. (Note, this is a behind-the-scenes effect. It is not the type of culture shown in the city screen.)
  • Reduced 'free city culture' from 6 per turn, to 4 per turn. (These changes to free culture will make it slightly hard to flip cultureless cities, and slightly easier to flip all other cities.)
  • Added some plot culture dependence to CvCity::getLiberationPlayer. (This affects the availability of the option to liberate a city.)
  • Fixed a rare bug in AI_cityTradeVal which could cause a seg-fault.
  • Changed the way AutoPlay disables popups, so that it is less likely to break other mods.

AI
  • The AI will no longer start planning for war in less than 30 turns (scaled by game speed) unless a certain number of cities have been built (based on map size and number of players).
  • Fixed a bug which prevented AI players with few cities from choosing to convert to foreign religions.
  • Taught the AI how to do amphibious attack landings on non-city plots.
  • Changed the AI's evaluation of amphibious attacks to use stack strength estimates rather than just counting the number of units.
  • The AI will now consider amphibious attacks even if some of its cargo cannot attack. (eg. siege units)
  • Fixed a bug which often messed up the AI's evaluation of prerequisite buildings.
  • Made some minor changes the AI's evaluation of resource values. (I intended to change this a lot more, but there were some technical problems.)
  • Made the AI a bit more resistant to human manipulation in limited wars.
  • Fixed a minor bug which prevented the AI from making peace deals with multiple other AI players in the same turn.
  • Fixed a bug which could sometimes cause great spies to get stuck.
UI
  • Fixed a bug which caused the danger checks for interrupting actions use the wrong range in most cases.
  • Blocked city governors from considering 'worker_sea' and 'explore_sea' when choosing to build an arbitrary unit. (They'll still build work-boats when needed.)

v1.42b
  • Fixed a bug in the AI's evaluation of resource value.
  • Reduced visual clutter in the culture overlay of the zoomed-out world map.

--
See changelog.txt for older versions
(The complete changelog does not fit in this post)
Here are some gameplay changes that I think are not obvious, and worth knowing about (in no particular order):

  • Victory votes now require a minimum number of "full members" rather than just "voting members". This means that the Apostolic Palace victory vote is only valid if there are at least 3 full members.
  • Tech trade deals offered to human players can now sometimes include a small discount. (ie. If you try to renegotiate a deal, you might not get as good a deal as was originally offered - so it might now be worth considering the deal the AI offers you rather than going straight to the renegotiate button!)
  • Implemented new controls for the city build queue: ctrl+click moves the item up the list, shift+click moves it down, alt+click toggles 'repeat' for units.
  • Added a new BUG option: Rapid Unit Cycling. This option removes the delay between issuing a command to a unit and the automatic selection of your next unit.
  • Right clicking on the +/- commerce rate buttons will now set the commerce rate to 100% / 0% respectively.
  • If you hold alt when pointing to a potential building or specialist, the mouse-over text will display precisely what would be gained from the building / specialist in that city.
  • In the diplomacy screen, pressing "Lets stop this fighting..." will now bring up the trade screen with the AI's suggested peace terms. (Originally, it just made peace instantly without any trades - it was a horrible button.)
  • Tech trades in which the receiving player is more than 2/3 of the way through researching the tech or when the tech is two eras behind the 'game era' no longer count towards tech trade memory. ie. They don't contribute to causing "we fear you are becoming too advanced".
  • The cost of Pacifism has been changed from +1 gold per military unit to +0.5 gold per military unit. However, the old cost was actually scaled based on difficulty level, whereas the new cost is not. (The old cost was actually between 0.2 $/unit and 1 $/unit depending on difficulty. The new cost of 0.5 gold / unit matches the previous cost on Noble.)
  • For the purpose of building plot improvements, resources available inside a city are now provided to all the workable plots around that city. (The purpose of this change is to let civs use Standard Ethanol corp to build railroads.)
  • In multiplayer games of K-Mod, the game handicap level is set to be the average of the human player's levels rather than defaulting to Noble when human players choose different handicap levels.
  • In multiplayer games, the leader and civilization of unmet players will now be concealed. ie. Unmet human players will appear with grey text in the chat and in the scoreboard, and the mouseover text will not display their leader traits.
  • Combat bonus vs animals and barbarians is now based on player handicap level rather than game handicap level. (This just means that in multiplayer games when players has different difficulty settings they will get different bonuses.)
  • Combat animations are now orchestrated to roughly correspond to the events from the actual combat mechanics. (It still isn't a blow-for-blow representation of the actual battle, but events in the animation will at least occur in the same order as the events in the combat log.)
  • "Lost production" for units is now assigned to another unit of the same type (previously, it was converted into gold). With this change, it is possible to build more than one unit per turn. (Note: this does not affect normal production overflow. It only affects the production beyond the overflow limit.)
  • Rewrote the way the auto-build city governor works. (It should be much more useful now.)
  • Added a new religion mechanic: existing religions may be removed from cities when a new religion is spread to them with a missionary. The following factors reduce the likelihood that a religion will be removed: number of religious buildings in the city, proximity to the holy city, the existence of the holy building (wherever it is), the turn the religion was founded (religions founded later will be less likely to be removed), the population of the city (larger cities are less likely to have religions removed).
  • Adjusted the missionary spread probability. Bigger cities are now less likely to have religions fail to spread (and less likely to lose religions).
  • Automated (human) workers will now try to avoid working near enemy borders when at war.
  • The effects of telling a civ to target a particular city in the diplomacy screen will now affect their strategy for at least 10 turns.
  • The immediate experience boost from Great Generals (when used as a 'warlord') is now increased by 10% for each affected unit, up to a maximum of +100% (ie. 40 xp shared across 11 units).
  • Changed the game initialization to set the game handicap level to be the minimum of the human players' handicap levels. This is so that the AI does not default to "noble" in multiplayer games.
  • Free technology bonuses from goody huts are now allowed without settling a city first.
  • Units will no longer automatically attack if they are ordered to move into an unseen enemy unit in the fog of war.
  • Drafted units are now included in the stats screen's units-built tally.
  • Mining inc now uses aluminium and uranium instead of gold and silver [this should make mining inc slightly weaker, and civ jewelers more viable]
  • Culture from creating a 'great work' with an artist (ie. a 'culture bomb') is now scaled by era.
  • Culture flipping is now blocked for the most recent previous owner of a city instead of for all previous owners (when using the default "no flipping after conquest")
  • Rearranged to order of certain turn-counting game mechanics to fix some balance problems. Most notably, the turn counter for counter-espionage missions now counts down at the start of the team's turn rather than at the end of all players' turns. This means that the duration of counter-espionage missions will now be independent of which team is doing the mission and who the target team is.
  • In particular circumstances, the AI being "friendly" will not prevent them from declaring war.
  • For efficiency reasons, the K-Mod pathfinder currently assumes that there can be no roads on the ocean. If this is used in a mod that does have ocean roads, the pathfinder may sometimes produce non-optimal solutions.
  • Teams are now allowed to capitulate even when it would result in a violation of their peace treaties. (This is similar to how defensive pacts can cause teams to violate peace treaties. Note: this change does not apply to voluntary vassals.)
  • The field-of-view BUG setting will now still apply after the adjustment slider is turned off. (So you can activate the slider, set it how you like it, and then hide the slider without losing your settings.)
  • Food resources which give less than 4 net food are now worth fewer food points to the start-position normalizer. (There is no longer any chance of having plains-cow as the sole food resource for a starting site.)
  • Anarchy duration modifiers and golden age modifiers will now apply their respective adjustments to the existing anarchy / golden age at the time the modifier is applied. (eg. When the Mausoleum of Maussollos is built, it will now increase the remaining length of the current golden age by 50%.)
  • Previously, "automated workers leave old improvements" was implemented with inconsistent rules. It is now enforced so that automated workers will not replace existing improvements for any reason. (City ruins not included.)
  • (for mods) Inflexible gold rate is now allowed; and inflexible research no longer forces all gold to be converted into research.
  • Rewrote some game-text xml loading system. The language names used to tag the xml values are now what determines the text for any given language. The order of the languages is no longer important; and if there is a missing language for any given text entry, the first text defined for that entry will be used instead.
  • Gifts of great people will now always result in +1 for "you gave us help". (This is potentially useful when aiming for a diplomatic victory.)
 
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What are the features? Can we get some screenshots? New Units? What Modcomps if any? DETAILS
 
nice sounds good especially the new gw features will down load and try tonight only question so far:

does the AI know how to use the global warming properly in regards to the unhappiness penalty

defiantly some great ideas look forward to playing :)
 
D/L'ed and set to go.

Finally a mod that makes culture worth something again. Too many current mods have cut out cultural victory or reduced it to irrelevance.

And maybe I'll give Vassalage a try again. The Standard BtS Vassal was a Giant waste of time and resources.

JosEPh :)
 
What are the features? Can we get some screenshots? New Units? What Modcomps if any? DETAILS
The list of features is here.

does the AI know how to use the global warming properly in regards to the unhappiness penalty
No, not yet. It would be nice if the AI understood how it worked, but to be honest, that's a relatively minor problem with the AI. There are actually quite a lot of things about the AI that I think are sub-par. I'm currently toying with the idea of rewriting most of it... but that would be a pretty serious undertaking.

But anyway, although the global warming unhappiness does depend on a civ's relative contribution, it isn't hugely sensitive to it. So most of the time there won't be any single action the AI can do to dramatically decrease GW unhappiness in one shot. It's more of a long term thing. But the AI does understand how to use the new "minus X% pollution from population" effect. So it isn't completely lost. :p
Spoiler :
Originally I intended for the unhappiness to be very strongly dependent on relative contribution, but I've heard back for the time being because I'm worried about people 'gaming the system'; for example, polluting like crazy to get the world's unhappiness up high, then doing some trickery to drop their own relative contribution. I don't want that to be a viable strategy, so I'm kind of taking it slow for the time being.


D/L'ed and set to go.

Finally a mod that makes culture worth something again. Too many current mods have cut out cultural victory or reduced it to irrelevance.

And maybe I'll give Vassalage a try again. The Standard BtS Vassal was a Giant waste of time and resources.

JosEPh :)
I hope you aren't disappointed. :) Culture is certainly more valuable in this mod than in standard BtS, but it isn't hugely different. For me, the main improvement is that cities don't have to be right on the border for their culture to have an effect.
 
I failed to get it to open.

So I guess I need to re D/L and hope I have better luck.

JosEPh :(
 
I just reuploaded the files with a small bug fix. There was a problem that could sometimes cause cultural revolts to last for much much longer than they should. Sorry for the inconvenience. Hopefully there aren't any more silly mistakes like that.

I failed to get it to open.

So I guess I need to re D/L and hope I have better luck.

JosEPh :(
I don't know what the problem is, but please try it again with the version that I just uploaded. If that doesn't work, then maybe we can work through the problem here.

I want the mod to just work without people needing to mess around with it. So if it still doesn't work when you redownload it, then please post more details and I'll try to fix it. eg. Do you mean that the zip file wouldn't open, or that the mod failed to load when you opened it in Civ4? Where did you upzip the files to?
 
Dude, this is the kind of mod I've been looking for. A simple mod without too many additions that make the the game feel overwhelming and too complex.

I have yet to play with this mod, but what is your recommended game speed and map size for it?
 
I usually play normal speed and either normal or large size. My favourite map type is 'Big and Small', which it produces more variety than Continents or Fractal. (Not to be confused with 'Medium and Small', which is actually very predictable.)

I've tried to implement all the new mechanics in a way that scales sensibly with map size and game speed. So if you already have a favourite map type then hopefully this mod will work just as well.
 
I got the new beta to load and made moves for the 1st turn. But as soon as I hit end turn it CTD'd.

I have uploaded the save game.

Is the Planet generator version 38 supposed to come up after you set the game settings? If so, I've had trouble with that program in the past.

I just hit Confirm and Exit button to get to the game's 1st turn. I didn't change anything. Might be the culprit.

JosEPh
 
I got the new beta to load and made moves for the 1st turn. But as soon as I hit end turn it CTD'd.

I have uploaded the save game.

Is the Planet generator version 38 supposed to come up after you set the game settings? If so, I've had trouble with that program in the past.

I just hit Confirm and Exit button to get to the game's 1st turn. I didn't change anything. Might be the culprit.

JosEPh
Planet Generator version 38 is not included in K-Mod. Planet Generator 0_68 is included, but it's only there because it was bundled with the version of BUG that I used. It shouldn't affect your game unless you explicitly choose to use that map type. When you start a new game with K-Mod it should look exactly the same as if you were starting a new game without any mods at all – except that there might be a few extra map types on the list, such as Planet Generator 0_68.

I tried your save game, and it crashes on the first end-turn on my computer as well. After a bit of testing I found that the crash is because 'max turns' is zero on that save, and in the global warming calculations I divide some things by max turns.

It's easy to fix the crash, but currently the mod relies on max turns being a sensible number anyway. I don't know why it is zero in your save. Maybe it's something to do with Planet Generator 38.

Can you try starting a new game using a different map type, such as Continents, or Big and Small? I'm a little bit confused though, because the map type is the first settings screen that comes up for Play Now, but you said Planet Generator came up after you set the game settings.

update:
I've just learnt that 'max turns' is set to zero whenever time victory is disabled; and therefore the mod won't work correctly unless it is enabled. So the problem probably has nothing to do with planet generator 38.

The bug will be fixed in the next version. In the mean time, you'll have to play with time victory enabled.
Thanks for helping me find and fix the bug. :)
 
Your Welcome.

And that save was not using a Planet gen map (I couldn't remember the exact version). It was a standard BtS Archipelago.

I've gotten used to turning the Time Victory off because of RoM and AND Mods.

JosEPh :)
 
This version is working good. Up to 1300BC turn 108 on Epic, Huge, Lakes map, 6AI, and I even turned on Vassals (something I've Not done in ages). :thumbsup:

JosEPh :)
 
I've just updated the mod with a few minor balance changes and bug fixes. I'm still interested to hear feedback from anyone who's actually tried it; particularly regarding the changes to cultural borders and late-game global warming. There are probably some balance issues that I've overlooked with the culture changes. In the previous version, early culture bombs were still ridiculously overpowerful – so I've reduced their culture again. I feel like it's about right now (and still powerful) but I'd be interested to hear what others think.
 
Wow come a long ways since I first posted. . . Love the Global Warming additions and the E advisor, I absolutley hate it when my ruthless exploitation of the planet bites me on the butt, and by hate I mean I really love it in a hateful sorta of way. Keep up the great work, I am greatly interested in what you add next
 
I haven't been playing lots of Civ4, so I haven't made any major changes. But I have made a handful of minor but significant improvements. So.. today I named it v0.94 and uploaded it. Get it here.

I'm quite happy with the mod in its current form. I think it's a great improvement over unmodded BtS. Most of the changes are only small things, but the result is that culture is more dynamic and responsive, civics are more balanced and varied, global warming is actually an interesting game mechanic; and at the end of each game, as industrial revolution kick-starts global warming, and the AI gears up for their attempt at victory... It's often quite a climatic finish.

The main thing I would like to improve in future version is the AI. I think the AI in K-Mod is much stronger than the AI in unmodded BtS (and stronger than "Better AI" too), but it still has some obvious flaws. But when I say I'd like to improve the AI, what I mean is that I'd like the AI to be better... but I don't particularly feel like working on it at the moment.

I've also got some ideas for changing religion, but I'm kind of in two minds about whether or not I should go ahead with the changes. The current religion system isn't great, but there are advantages to its familiarity and simplicity.

Anyway, I hope people play and enjoy the mod!
 
hi,

(and stronger than "Better AI" too)

really??

looks like you put a lot of hours in the mod, you got me interested.

i would really suggest you improve your first post here - add the complete list of features, screen shots, more stuff to made it more attractive to new comers - take a look in the different mods out here for examples.

and another thing - can you please upload the source sdk ? i would be happy to look at the work you did there.

p.s. - a few years ago, there was another "k-mod" :)
 
For the AI in this mod, I just started with BetterAI. But to be honest, I didn't find BetterAI any more challenging than the normal AI. In my opinion, the military tactics of BetterAI were much better, and they were better at aiming for victory; but their economies were weak and their tech paths very predictable (and not sensible). So I changed some stuff. I only made minor changes, but I do think its slightly stronger now — at least it's now stronger against me. Maybe it's just my play-style though. I'd like to set it up so that my AI can play against other kinds of AI. But I haven't gotten around to doing that yet. (and maybe I never will)

About the first thread post; I'm not sure that screen shots would help much. Almost everything looks the same as the unmodded game. I guess I could upload a shot of the environmental adviser screen; that's completely new. But do you think that would make it more attractive? I kind of like the clean and uncluttered look.

As for the source. I recently uploaded the whole thing to my github page. Most but not all of my changes are tagged with comments. I starting doing that less when I released how easy it is to see changes using github.

Now I'm going to go and try to find out what the other k-mod was. I wonder if it was me, and I forgot about it or something...
 
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