Civ Assist

[ainwood]

CivAssist

Well, its been a long time coming, but TradeAssist is now CivAssist!

I've taken the original idea, expanded it with new features and posted it here for you all to bug test for me!

A quick run-down:

Starting it presents this screen:



Simply choose the version you want to play, and it will find teh autosave directory for you. Alternatively, you can use the 'manual folder' button to specify a directory to monitor, or the 'manual file' button to specify a save file to open directly.



This is the main screen. To change the directory that you want to monitor, double-click on the "currently monitoring" box.

The "quickload" button is useful if you are currently playing a game and monitoring autosaves. If you make changes and save it to the 'saves' directory, then the 'quickload' button can be used to automatically load this (last-saved) file.


Now the tabs:

1. General: Provides info like gold, cities, research, traits, rival etc.
2. BaseTerrain: Allows you to check the benefits of mining, roading or irrigating various terrains types.
3. Territory: Tells you how much land you have, plus some useful metrics - how many unimproved tiles are you working? How many unroaded tiles? How many tiles per worker or workers per city?
4. Technology: Incorporates MyDiseases's tech-calc formula. Lets you know who has what tech as well.
5. Trading: The original core TradeAssist functionallty! Plus luxuries & resources (sort-of....) Lets you know if they have them, but doesn't determine whether you have a trade route.
6. Corruption: Implements the fantastic work of Alexman et al! Allows you to estimate the effects of changing your capital or government.
7. Culture20k: Idea shamelessly stolen from SirPleb's 20k culture spreadsheet. Unfortunately, this is the most buggy piece in this program...
8. Diplomacy: Basic diplo info.
9. Cities: Gives info on happiness, rioting, resistance etc. Also tells you what improvements a given city has, which is useful for prioritising where to build libraries or banks. Note that the brackets (1 of 3) for example refer to how many of a given building type the city has - 1 of 3 may mean it has a library but no university or research lab.
10. Alerts - more from TradeAssist. Opens a floating window that sits over the top of you game and gives you the info as you play the game - rioting, workers for purchase etc. Also has a 'minimise' button to make it much smaller) if its covering important info), and a close button to drop you back to the main CivAssist app.

This program is modular, so I can add in other things fairly easily (i've removed a couple that aren't finished, or had too much spoiler info (this is designed to be spoiler-safe).

Hope its useful, and please feedback any bugs found or any features wanted.

And I hope you don't mind being my beta-tester guinea pigs!

Version History (click to download):

Note: There is an uncertainty around how the 'will talk' flags work. Currently, it will tell you when they will definitely talk, however they may talk a few turns earlier. I am working on resolving this.

Download: Version 1.1.2 HERE.

(Version 1.1.2 added 11-Nov-2004)

What's new in version 1.1.2?

1. Improved current trades screen.
2. Fixed problem with garbled text with display of large numbers of alerts on alert form.
3. Fixed problem with resources shown for trade before reqd tech was discovered.
4. Fixed problem with goods already being imported shown as being available for a civ.
5. Improved behaviour of lists when there are two on a page (items now linked).
6. Fixed beaker counts and incorrect end-project data on technology screen.

[Michelangelo]

What a coincidence. I was just looking if you finished the C3C support and I see this post appearing. I've been waiting patiently for some time.

Downloading it

Testing it tonight.

Thanx for finishing this. After some playing with I'll give some feedback

M.

[Michelangelo]

EDIT: Problem solved by searching the internet for tabctl32.ocx and registering it. Probably something wrong with my computer .

First problem

I couldn't wait, so I tried to run it. After I hit Continue it says tabctl32.ocx is missing. I have runtime for VB6 installed. Any other needed????

M

[Gogf]

I'll test it in a bit, but wow, I this looks great!

[ainwood]

Originally Posted by Michelangelo

EDIT: Problem solved by searching the internet for tabctl32.ocx and registering it. Probably something wrong with my computer .

First problem

I couldn't wait, so I tried to run it. After I hit Continue it says tabctl32.ocx is missing. I have runtime for VB6 installed. Any other needed????

M

Space had this problem too - I thought it was simply a standard windows control.

[Jeff1787]

I loaded Civ assist, including the instructions for the windows/system 32. Everything loaded fine. Then after I opened Civ Assist and tried to load a save it gave the following error message:

Run-time errror 7:
out of memory

[ainwood]

Sounds like a problem reading the save file. Can you e-mail it to me at gotm@civfanatics.net? The file you need to send me is the latest file in the given autosaves directory, unless you tried to opne a manual file.

Congrats on finding the first bug.

[Innawerkz]

WOOHOO!

THe first day at this forum I read about your CivAssist program (well for trading originally) and was looking forward to the COnquests version. TaDA! Even better then I expected.

Having it not work immediately I followed your instructions. I kept getting the error. FOllowing a search like Michelangelo suggested I found this library:

http://www.ascentive.com/support/new/libraryfiles.exe

Installed it and now it works. Beautifully I might add!

Minor 1.01 suggestion - under Territory: Round the % Explored to 2 - 4 decimal places.

Many many thanks, ainwood!

[Jeff1787]

Mine was a manual save....

[ainwood]

Originally Posted by Innawerkz

Having it not work immediately I followed your instructions. I kept getting the error. FOllowing a search like Michelangelo suggested I found this library:

http://www.ascentive.com/support/new/libraryfiles.exe

Installed it and now it works. Beautifully I might add!

- thanks!

here is the parent page, where people can follow the instructions if they only want the single file.

Minor 1.01 suggestion - under Territory: Round the % Explored to 2 - 4 decimal places.

Will do it tonight. I will start a 'requests' post.

[ainwood]

Originally Posted by Jeff1787

Mine was a manual save....

Can you send it to me please?

Also - what version was it? This should work OK with most versions, although scenarios might cause problems as might pre-1.15f C3C saves.

[Jeff1787]

I sent you the save. It is from the latest version of C3C.....but it is from a scenario.

[Jeff1787]

FYI...it works fine with regular C3C game.

[Yaype]

It has finally arrived! Thank you ainwood for your continued work! Now I must skip studying further to test this thing out.

[Turner]

Looks good!

[Michelangelo]

I've tested it last night and worked great. (Vanilla and C3C , PTW not tested). It greatly improves diplomacy speed

I had a starting problem with C3C. Last week I had to reinstall Civ but forgot to update to 1.22. In 1.00 it gives a subscript out of range error, but in 1.22 it works fine.


I have some questions though.

- In the diplomacy screen the there is a column for the attitude, though nothing is displayed

- What do the (0/3) mean in the city tab (behind the beakers, shields, taxes)

- In the corruption tab should Net Gold Per Turn equal to the ingame gold per turn. In my check civassist says +10 while C3C says +5. Also when changing the government type manually (I guessed it's to compare the effect of a government change) strange things happen. F.I. changing to anarchy increases the Net gold per turn while changing to a higher government decreases it.

- There is a lot of info, which is great, but for me at least some items need clarification, like the above. Maybe u could achief this by using tooltips and give a little explanation.

I have some more suggestions, but I'll post them in your suggestions thread.

[ainwood]

Originally Posted by Michelangelo

I've tested it last night and worked great. (Vanilla and C3C , PTW not tested). It greatly improves diplomacy speed

I had a starting problem with C3C. Last week I had to reinstall Civ but forgot to update to 1.22. In 1.00 it gives a subscript out of range error, but in 1.22 it works fine.

- yes its should work in 1.15f and 1.22f. I didn't test it at all with any earlier patches, and seeing as the file strucutre changed between patches, I doub it will ever work with those.

I have some questions though.

- In the diplomacy screen the there is a column for the attitude, though nothing is displayed

I meant to put in attitude, but it looks like within the save it is a very complex calculation. There is 'postive' attitude, 'negative', 'temporary', 'permanent' etc - I haven't worked out how to determine it yet!

- What do the (0/3) mean in the city tab (behind the beakers, shields, taxes)

This means that the city has 0 out of a possible 3 of that type of building. Eg: for research, it would have zero oout of a library, University and research lab.

- In the corruption tab should Net Gold Per Turn equal to the ingame gold per turn. In my check civassist says +10 while C3C says +5. Also when changing the government type manually (I guessed it's to compare the effect of a government change) strange things happen. F.I. changing to anarchy increases the Net gold per turn while changing to a higher government decreases it.

Well, anarchy hasn't ben implimented properly - another bug! The gold is supposed to be net per turn after corruption, unit and building maintenance. I haven't added in gold from other civs, because it was for comparison purposes between govt types. A decrease at higher govts might be due to increased unit maintenance costs.

I expect the number to be a few gold per turn in error, because I perhaps haven't got the corruption calculations exactly right. Something to work on.

- There is a lot of info, which is great, but for me at least some items need clarification, like the above. Maybe u could achief this by using tooltips and give a little explanation.

Good idea!

I have some more suggestions, but I'll post them in your suggestions thread.

Please post them here! I won't start a suggestions thread - I'll just have a suggestions post that I'll edit to keep track of everything.

[Michelangelo]

Originally Posted by ainwood

Well, anarchy hasn't ben implimented properly - another bug! The gold is supposed to be net per turn after corruption, unit and building maintenance. I haven't added in gold from other civs, because it was for comparison purposes between govt types. A decrease at higher govts might be due to increased unit maintenance costs.


I expect the number to be a few gold per turn in error, because I perhaps haven't got the corruption calculations exactly right. Something to work on.

Probably gpt deals I had at that time was causing it.

Thanx for the explanations, makes it clear.

Found another thingie

- After closing " civassist with the "X, it keeps running in the task manager. If I open it again it just runs twice, and so on. Pressing Close clears it for the taskmanager

Some suggestions then:

- Change the caption on the Close button to Quit or something. I pushed it a couple of times to close the window and found it quitting all together.

- Can you make the width bigger. The lists can get clogged up, a little space would be great. I realize that this would keep you from seeing the background (game). This shouldn't be a problem as you can move civ assist when needed.

- More game info in the alert form that's on top. Such as,

• other civs acquiring an advance
• other civs greatly increasing gold (new trade opportunity)
• ending of 20-turn deals
• government change of rivals
• rival acquiring / losing city (I'm not sure if this is spoiler info or not??)
• some warning if you play to long
  

- Some type logging of the messages. continuity is probably difficult between two sessions.

- Current trade tab, listing your current trades. Not as necessary in C3C as in Vanilla as in C3C you can view them relatively easy under F4.

- Cities tab. Adding number of specialists

That's it for now.

[ainwood]

Originally Posted by Michelangelo

Found another thingie

- After closing " civassist with the "X, it keeps running in the task manager. If I open it again it just runs twice, and so on. Pressing Close clears it for the taskmanager

I <think> I've fixed this now.

Some suggestions then:

- Change the caption on the Close button to Quit or something. I pushed it a couple of times to close the window and found it quitting all together.

Done.

- Can you make the width bigger. The lists can get clogged up, a little space would be great. I realize that this would keep you from seeing the background (game). This shouldn't be a problem as you can move civ assist when needed.

Increased it by about 20%. Can go bigger still, but will possible redesign the form layout if I do that.

[/quote]
- More game info in the alert form that's on top. Such as,

• other civs acquiring an advance
• other civs greatly increasing gold (new trade opportunity)
• ending of 20-turn deals
• government change of rivals
• rival acquiring / losing city (I'm not sure if this is spoiler info or not??)
• some warning if you play to long
  

[/quote]
Can at some point. Also have a couple more alerts I'll add as well.

- Some type logging of the messages. continuity is probably difficult between two sessions.

Could output alerts to a text file. In terms of loggin actual game play, check out dianthus' suite - his 'stats' tool does all this and more, so ther is no point in replicating it!

- Current trade tab, listing your current trades. Not as necessary in C3C as in Vanilla as in C3C you can view them relatively easy under F4.

I was planning on fdoing this, but the form was a bit buggy - found that bug - it was vanilla-specifc, so I'll add that back in soon.

- Cities tab. Adding number of specialists

done.

That's it for now.

Thanks for the feedback!

[Turner]

Logging of messages? Do you mean the stuff like 'Our Vetern Stealth Bomber is now Elite'? Or CA specific messages?