Has there been a new patch?

I started a new game today and things are different. For one, the game loads faster now. The price of a monument has dropped. There seems to be a bug where the button in the bottom right corner says "please wait" now instead of End Turn or Change Production or whatever now. When I started Civ 5 it automatically installed something. Also, I had to re-configure the mods too. Some graphics look a bit different too. I noticed that the icon for barbarians looks different. It's almost unplayable with that bug on the end turn button. You never know if it's the end of your turn yet or not. I do like it loading faster though. Don't know what to make of the cheaper monument

Did some research into it and it turns out that a new patch came out today (July 2). The game with GEM is quite buggy. Not sure if it's just the patch itself or it's interactions with GEM. I tried the Honor Policy and selected the one for 2 free units plus 20% production for units. The free units didn't show up but the 20% production is okay.

The worst is with the user interface though. The button also says "Please Wait" no matter what's going on. I never tried playing without GEM as there's no way that it can be as good.

Yep new patch is breaking stuff. Also experiencing "Please wait". Meritocracy lump sum don't work either. I think I'll play normal games until late July well after new expansion is out and Thal has returned.

When I go to click on mods info multiplayer says yes for all of them. OMG is it finally happening?

Also units do not heal when receiving a new promotion.

Couple of these were long-standing fixes in GEM/civup. But the city plot fix was a long-standing vanilla bug (as with the walls HP bug from the last patch). At least they're finally polishing some stuff.

"Fixed an issue that caused workers building improvements to constantly "wake up" when hostile units were not close by.
Hun Battering Ram promotions which allows only city attacks are now lost upon upgrade.
Fix an issue where the plot under a city would not be worked after trading/gifting it.
Crabs should no longer spawn in lakes.
Many additional subtle updates to tool-tips, and information exposed to players."

"Cheaper" monument is probably from GEM using percentages rather than fixed values for changing building costs.

The AI does seem a bit more intelligent so far in one respect. When their unit is in trouble they are attempting to flee instead of just standing there and getting killed.

Something else just happened that I've never seen before. I defeated an enemy unit (archer) and received a worker.

Yes there is a new patch.

It's called the "Pitboss" patch.

http://forums.2kgames.com/showthread.php?247316-New-patch-en-route

The game is basically unplayable now with GEM due to the patch.

I've never even tried plain old G&K without GEM. I used to play plain old vanilla without VEM and really didn't like it. It wasn't "Civilization." It was a war game. I just remember everyone denouncing everyone all the time. Absurd.

I guess I could give plain old G&K a try until this issue is fixed. Many of the features of GEM don't work now.

This is definitely a mod breaker!

Terracotta Army no longer gives a 3 radius increase.
The 'Liberty' policy no longer gives a free Palace in 3 oldest cities. I assume this means any other free building policy is broken too.

At least the UI elements aren't stuffed up.

Anyone else see the barbarians moving at the start of each turn rather than at the end of the previous?

Just had Dido ask me for an acceptance of embassies.

I said yes and the dialogue boxes disappeared but the 'cutscene' won't go away until the ESC button is pressed.

Damn "Upgrades"!

Just completed 'Stonehenge' and entered the Classical Era only to have the whole game crash!

Frustration rules Supreme.

I'm depressed. My game has been ruined

I went and tried to play the game without GEM and after 45 minutes I just gave up. It's so lame. Right off the bat the capital city is worth so much that it's ridiculous. Just a glance at the tech tree has iron revealed in the late classical era.

I'm a programmer myself but I'm new to all this modding. I'm willing to help fix this if someone can point me in the right direction. Unfortunately, I'm going to be on vacation for the next few weeks though.

What really sucks is that they made Civilization 5 to be a war game. It's supposed to be a game of simulating building and managing an empire. You should be able to go through the whole game without a single war if you have the right neighbors and really maintain good diplomacy.

Chin up EricB.

I too tried to start a 'vanilla' game and have just this moment scrapped it. Its rubbish without the addons from CivUp/GEM.

Now I wouldn't class myself as a programmer, but I can figure out the format for modding this game. I've even made some changes to GEM (just for my own use, they're too rough). So if I can do it I bet you could!

I'm thinking it will need to be all hands on deck when the expansion arrives and Thal gets back to it.

I'd like to be a part of the team for when the expansion arrives. I'm just a late arrival to this compared to you guys. I just got the game last December. I played vanilla for about a month, then gave up with it because of the psychotic AI. Then, I searched for an AI mod to fix it. I found WWGD, which lead me to VEM. I played that for a few months and loved it.

Then, I found it frustrating that no one was working on VEM or played it anymore so I downloaded G&K when I saw it available for only $20. Never even tried plain old G&K but downloaded GEM immediately. I had big issues with how the AI gets huge bonus happiness plus there being too many great prophets and missionaries, so I was making my own tweaks to GEM.

Another issue I was having was that every time I could just run away from the AI in science and I was pinpointing it to those extremely over-powered Mentors Halls, so I was about to nerf those then the game pretty much fell apart and won't work now.

Some of the changes in the patch are very good. I like how it runs faster and the AI is supposed to be more intelligent in tactile combat. It's just so lame with the way that the social policies are done and the tech tree is a mess. I'd like to fix it but GEM is just so huge and complicated that I don't know where to get started. Anyone know where to start?

Eric, I helped out a lot checking out and debugging xml and editing it and sql files, in some cases setting up some basic features while Thal did the heavier lifting when GK came out.. and like Reign, I then modded GEM to my own taste, especially on the naval combat and major economic changes in 1.13. Building costs/upkeep/income value, science value, as with the mentor's halls..., culture value, and a few other shifts. That part is easier to do by building a mod-mod and updating it as needed, if updates will be coming fast and furious from BNW updating the mod. GEM it's easier now to just overhaul the actual mod files because updates haven't come out in a while.

Changing basic rules within xml and sql is easy, even as there are vast amounts of such changes in GEM that would need to be ported to make for a separate mod that would work currently. The biggest issue is that many of the lua changes are likely broken by some of the patch changes. Some may now be unnecessary or redundant changes that Firaxis borrowed as ideas or fixes from Thal (for example, the beta version includes a fix for saving city HP bonuses from walls, which was in the last patch). I can sort of debug lua changes when they don't work, but I'm not as adept at writing new ones as needed or determining if one can be axed completely.

Thal does has a github setup for making alterations in place if you can work that, but I imagine the forum will have different segments of the mod to change and balance up and running soon enough. I would hope at least that GEM could be made stable for people who aren't upgrading immediately (I pre-ordered but not everyone does). As I recall, when GK first came out, there was a patch prior or alongside that updated the vanilla game, and that broke a lot of modding that needed addressed there too.

mystikx21,

I spent the morning learning the basics of how to create a mod. I've used Visual Studio a lot for programming so the environment is familiar. It seems really easy to create and modify xml files to make changes in the civ database.

I tried solving one particular bug just as a way of getting started. When you select the Honor policy (I believe it's Military Tradition) that gives you 20% production + 2 free defensive units you don't receive the free units. I found the xml file handling this and how it creates a row in a table for this. I couldn't find that table in the civ core files, but eventually found it in the civup files. There must be some event that is triggered when this policy is selected. I see lots of .lua code handling different types of events but can't find the code handling this event. It must exist somewhere though. The problem must be in there.


Overall, the GEM code base is just so large. If you weren't the one that created it, it can be hard to fix bugs like that. I was thinking of trying out the unmodded G&K. See what I like and don't like about that and then I can make my own mod from there. I'd like to help with the new expansion mod when it comes out. I'll be on vacation starting tomorrow for the next few weeks though. I get back July 22.

The lua files don't overwhelm me because I'm a programmer. It's just difficult to find the right code segment in such a large code base that I'm unfamiliar with. So, I wouldn't mind taking a stab at it, but just don't have the time right now.

As for the new expansion, I think we should try to get as close to the core game as possible. Try that game out for a while unmodded. See what works and what doesn't. Start with BNW as the core and not GEM. Keep it as simple as possible. Especially when new patches come out like this one did it'll be easier to fix the bugs. Just my 2 cents on it.

Converting BNW will take longer than a couple weeks I'm sure. I expect you could be quite helpful even with a couple week break. Those playthrough reports on AI happiness alone were quite valuable.

Play testing what they changed will probably take about that long even before making simple modifications. I agree with Mitsho, and in previous debates with others, that things like the VEM/GEM policy trees, the value and effects of many buildings, the unit combat balance toward strategic "elites" and the vanguard tree, or the diversity of added/changed wonders, many leaders changes, and so on will be easy things that we will want to see modified again regardless. Those are the bread and butter of the VEM/GEM project is enhancing things within the vanilla game in not just a "MOAR!" way but to make them interesting decisions rather than brain dead or boring as vanilla often has. What should be built here should be an interesting question, that sometimes has an obvious local answer, and sometimes depends on overall strategy or capabilities. That kind of thing. If we can ignore things from our decisions because they're very rarely useful, that's less interesting.

The trick here is the balance of the AI's general performance and the economic balance (units versus infrastructure versus income), along with other things like the value of coastal cities and naval units generally. That will take time to balance and re-balance, and may be seasoned to taste. As it were. And BNW looks to be making a number of dramatic to modest changes on this front already that we will need to look into.

I'm not sure, but it almost seems like a lot of the lua may as well be written from scratch at this point. Some functions, like the Machu Picchu mountain event, could be copied back in and made to work again but a lot is UI functions that seem to have hit some bugs either from patch changes or just have become generally unstable from version to version (the gold income bug, or the AI's faith accumulation). I don't know if it would be better to reinvent the wheel here or to gut it where it no longer works or is unnecessary. Github might be the best way to approach that so that Thal and other programmers can collaborate on removing extraneous bits and documenting code somewhat while creating a unified project.

FYI, for modding, this might be a good place to start with the current patch.

With this current patch, upon activating Liberty Policy the Palace bonus doesn't work