One issue with AI suicide attacks is how it will attack with it's cavalry, one turn before the bulk of it's army, even if the defenders have a lot of anti-cavalry units. Sometimes instead of attacking, the AI will use a unit to pillage an improvement, whilst rest of army attacks. At other times, it was bombard with artillery when it should clearly attack. At other times, it attacks with artilery, after already sending in other attack units prior.
Hello, I'd like to ask if you guys think it's possible to win a domination victory on a huge, non-pangea map, on higher difficulties with this mod, or does the changes to city maintenance costs make domination victories not viable? Does city maintenance cost now increase exponentially and if so, what does city maintenance costs tend to rack up to when trying to achieve a domination win over multiple continents on a huge map?
Just a note to anyone who has already skimmed through the draft of the v0.99 release notes: The only additions in the final release notes are
• the aforementioned bugfix for AI city attacks,
• a problem with miscounted city religions (probably affecting mostly the AI – and only in v0.99-pre I think; not in earlier versions) and
• some smaller bugfixes in my AI code (Git commits 123).
I'm sorry I should have added more information regarding my request. The original BUG mod is great and it includes the civic UI display. Another missing feature of BUG mod that I think is quite terrible is not revealing after how many turns it'll take for a queued production item will take until it will start to lose hammers. I've included screen shots of both of these missing crucial features: [...]
Oh, there it is: "HUD Civics" on the "Map" tab of the BAT mod (not in BUG/BULL). Seen it before, just forgot about it. Seems easy enough to adopt; mainly just two chunks of code in CvMainInterface.py. Being a Python-only feature also means, however, that there is no hover text. Maybe I'll add hover text, but I think I'll leave the layout as it is in BAT (i.e. taking up an inordinate amount of space).
The production decay warning is shortlisted for the next update:
[...] when incomplete objects in the build queue are within 5 turns of decay unless they are resumed, a warning message is shown after the object name in the build queue [...]
Disabling production decay could, in theory, motivate a player to pause a bunch of military units 1 turn before completion in order to avoid gold costs. That said, the current 10-turn decay timer already allows this optimization to a small extent, and I don't think anyone delays their units like that. Still, maybe better not to mess with that rule.
I think I've spent a few hundred hours trying to beat Diety on Marathon, and I'm starting to think it might be impossible for me to beat it. [...] I have been exploiting the AIs mistakes of suicide attacks. The AI did the same in Better BAT AI, but I would say to a much significantly less extent.
I can see how the blunderous AI city attacks could prolong the inevitable. Sorry about that bug. Most of the specific problems you describe could've been caused by that:
One issue with AI suicide attacks is how it will attack with it's cavalry, one turn before the bulk of it's army, even if the defenders have a lot of anti-cavalry units. Sometimes instead of attacking, the AI will use a unit to pillage an improvement, whilst rest of army attacks. At other times, it was bombard with artillery when it should clearly attack. At other times, it attacks with artilery, after already sending in other attack units prior.
With the bug fixed, the AI should (mainly through K-Mod changes) be a bit smarter about city attacks than in BBAI. I'm pretty sure it's still possible to provoke unwise attacks by withdrawing just the right number of defenders, but, hopefully, that tactic will come with a risk of losing at least a few defenders if not the whole city.
Regarding traits, I still have to catch up on the discussion in your S&T thread (I've been away from the forum for a couple of days).
Hello, I'd like to ask if you guys think it's possible to win a domination victory on a huge, non-pangea map, on higher difficulties with this mod, or does the changes to city maintenance costs make domination victories not viable? Does city maintenance cost now increase exponentially and if so, what does city maintenance costs tend to rack up to when trying to achieve a domination win over multiple continents on a huge map?
Iirc @Elkad has been winning Domination victories on Huge watery maps on Emperor difficulty – though maintenance was a struggle. In response to this (quoted) post of his, I capped the city count in the city maintenance formula and reduced the number-of-cities maintenance multiplier for Huge maps a little. It's a pretty high cap though, namely at 42 cities on Huge maps. I've laid out some formulas toward the end of this post (same page as the previous link).
In a Deity game on a Huge map, the constant multiplier c in those formulas is 1*0.22/18=0.01222...
The cost (for number-of-cities maintenance) per city should be
c * (17 + m) * min{42,n}
where n is the number of cities and m the city population. For a population of m=15 (that seems high, on average, for a human player aiming at Domination), that's min{42,n}*0.39111..., i.e. at most ca. 16.5 gold – without a Courthouse and without inflation. The costs that I've seen in a quick test through AI Auto Play and WorldBuilder are also in that ballpark. In BtS, c should be 0.0111.. and the cap on Deity is 8, so the maximal cost per city in BtS is only ca. 2.8.
Distance maintenance should actually be a bit lower in the mod than in BtS, but colony maintenance is (through a K-Mod change) no longer affected by State Property. That might be a serious problem.
On Pangaea, building Wealth should easily offset all expenses in a (conquered) late-game city. That said, expenses when approaching Domination are, no doubt, much higher than in BtS, and there are a lot of numbers in between 42 and 8 that the num-cities cap could be lowered to.
I've been absent from the forums but have been playing. Here are a couple of saves right after the barb-spawning events. Smaller stacks than vanilla, but still too big a swing imo. The rest of the random events are generally small inconveniences or small to solid bonuses, not potentially gamelosing like these. They just seem a bit out of line.
And just skimming the last bunch of posts in this thread, can confirm that the AI does launch some pretty suicidal attacks sometimes, so if that's fixed it will be a bit harder to deal with.
Thanks. I actually ran out of RAM loading those on a single PC – but I did manage to inspect the Barbarian stacks (screenshots attached).
Smaller stacks than vanilla, but still too big a swing imo. The rest of the random events are generally small inconveniences or small to solid bonuses, not potentially gamelosing like these. They just seem a bit out of line.
I agree, but I don't want to turn them from this sort of scourge of god into just another annoying event. Maybe there should be only 4 units in the Medieval era instead of 5. You seem to have easily enough military to handle 5, but it's already AD 800; could've happened earlier. And maybe if the stack were to appear two tiles away from the border instead of adjacent ...
And just skimming the last bunch of posts in this thread, can confirm that the AI does launch some pretty suicidal attacks sometimes, so if that's fixed it will be a bit harder to deal with.
Just noticed that in gameinfo.xml, the AI gets a lot more free techs than previously. At Emperor, it gets hunting and archery for free (which is what it had before), but now also maths, machinery, printing press and steam power. Intentional? didn't see it in the patch notes.
@Lanstro: There's a DLL change I made that causes free techs from eras later than the start era to be disregarded. So those additional free techs only apply when starting in a later era. It's been this way since the initial release of AdvCiv. I'll see if I can squeeze some mention of this change into the main portion of the manual.
seems like the team redistribution again leaves the humans almost always on the snakey islands part of the bigs & smalls map rather than the mainland. any workaround we can use?
secondly, another pretty unfair spawn of the verdic archers attached.
seems like the team redistribution again leaves the humans almost always on the snakey islands part of the bigs & smalls map rather than the mainland. any workaround we can use?
Can't seem to reproduce such an extreme bias. With the attached settings, I've landed on the largest continent 5 times out of 10. I should've mentioned in the release notes that this change
"... tries to avoid letting one team outnumber another on any continent, and it tries to balance that goal with the goal of minimal starting distances between teammates"
doesn't apply to games as large as yours – because the results of my algorithm looked rather worse than in BtS; outnumbering doesn't seem to be a major issue when continents are large. This change, however,
"StartingLocPercent now also applies to team games"
could explain a bias for maritime human starts. The remedy should then be to set iStartingLocPercent (Civ4HandicapInfos.xml) for the difficulty level you use to 49, i.e. to the same value that the AI players get through Noble difficulty.
You could adopt those by replacing Assets\Python\EntryPoints\CvRandomEventInterface.py (on all installations, obv.). To test the changes, I've looked at perhaps half a dozen occurrences of uprising events (using AI Auto Play and increased frequencies in Civ4EventTriggerInfos.xml).
@omnimirage: Having read your latest posts in S&T --
-- have you tried Immortal? Perhaps tough Immortal starts would (currently) be a more interesting challenge than cherry-picked Deity starts.
On a side note, I've been wondering if translating AI discounts into human penalties has made the game significantly harder on the highest difficulty levels. Generally, I still don't think so, but the worker speed penalty seems like a special case: I doubt that the AI gets much benefit even out of the +100% worker speed on Deity in BtS (AdvCiv: only +25%), whereas the 20% (Immortal) and 25% (Deity) slower workers in AdvCiv are a serious impediment for humans.
On the side note, I agree re the worker speed penalty. It was quite confusing for me playing emperor in SP and immortal on MP to have workers work at different speeds. So now when we play the modded halfway between emperor and immortal difficulty I just go with emperor speed workers.
On a strategy note, does anyone have any thoughts on whether finding an early religion on a huge map (where religions struggle to spread more so in this mod compared to vanilla) can be worthwhile, or is the opportunity cost too high to not grab things like early bronze working instead? I've been wondering about finding religions when playing with Gandhi since he already starts with Mysticsm.
Is Aesthetics still best to beeline to for trade bait, like it is on vanilla deity? The AI seems to prioritise aesthetics more so in this mod than vanilla but maybe I'm just wondering that.
I also tried to beeline to Theology using a bulb to get me there but I always seem to come many turns behind other civs to getting it first. Also tried Machinery but again AI gets there way first even with bulbing.
Is there a valuable trade tech the AIs don't go for as much that can be bulbed with this mod?
I'd also like to ask whether religions can be lost like they can in Kmod, and whether in order for religion to spread from one city to another, do we now need to know the location of that city? I gather trade route is required for religion so spread and I believe a city needs its location discovered for trade to occur? Is this why religion is so slow to spread in this mod?
Do you guys build your own missionaries to spread religion? I rarely used to in vanilla but wonder if its more required now in this mod, or maybe its not worthwhile if a religion can be lost later on after its been spread?
Is Aesthetics still best to beeline to for trade bait, like it is on vanilla deity? The AI seems to prioritise aesthetics more so in this mod than vanilla but maybe I'm just wondering that.
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). Note: the effects of this new religion system are actually very minor in the current version. It's a somewhat experimental feature.
+ Adjusted the missionary spread probability. Bigger cities are now less likely to have religions fail to spread (and less likely to lose religions).
[...]
Changed the mechanics of the natural spread of religions. With the new system, only the religion with the highest 'grip' gets a chance to spread to a city - but religions may still spread even if the city already has religion. Also, if an existing religion in the city has a lower grip than the new religion, there is a chance that the existing religion will be removed. "grip" is a measure of how strong the religion is in a particular city. It is calculated based on several factors, including proximity to the holy city, the number of religious buildings in the city, the year the religion was founded, and so on. The new system is a fairly significant change, but it isn't one you should have to worry about if you don't want to.
And this comment in the source code might be noteworthy: "In my view, [the original formula] produced too much spread at short distance and too little at long."
I don't think the chance of eliminating a religion makes a big difference. Maybe somewhat relevant for culture victory.
and whether in order for religion to spread from one city to another, do we now need to know the location of that city? I gather trade route is required for religion so spread and I believe a city needs its location discovered for trade to occur? Is this why religion is so slow to spread in this mod?
Yes, but either direction works (if I read the code correctly): The holy city being able to trade with the spread target city (meaning also: the target being revealed to the holy city owner), or the target city being able to trade with the holy city (i.e. the holy city being revealed to the target owner). There doesn't have to be an actual trade route generating commerce. Do you mean that religion spread is slow compared with K-Mod? Otherwise, I would assume that differences from BtS religion spread are mainly due to K-Mod changes. In particular, K-Mod adjusts the spread probability to the game speed setting, and, as far as I can tell, BtS doesn't do that at all, so, on Marathon, religion spread would be far slower in K-Mod (and AdvCiv) than in BtS.
I find the religion mechanics in this mod are really bad compared to vanilla. In vanilla, most people have religions because they spread. On this mod, most people are atheists due religion simply not spreading enough. I'm sure a part of why I find this is due to playing on huge maps, but it's sucky because I do prefer games where religion is present rather than atheists fighting it out.
have you considered maybe adding / using the city screen from History rewritten? the great people, resources and more, are nicely presented.
just a though.
I was going to go through the HR user interface changes at some point. Kind of forgot about it. Regarding GP on the city screen, I think HR has different rules for GP birth that necessitate a separate bar for each GP type. That could also be a nice way to visualize the probabilities under the BtS rules, but, even if there's enough space, it looks too busy to me. To make better use of the available space on high resolutions, I could imagine simply increasing the size of the specialist icons. And the probabilities shown by BUG could be moved above the GP bar to make them easier to read. I think those (more or less exact) numbers are what players are really interested in, more so than in a bar chart.
I'm attaching a screenshot of the right column of the city screen in HR vs. AdvCiv/BUG.
One column for each category of resource (strategic, luxuries, food) seems more useful to me than HR's sortable table. That said, in the late game, the BtS columns become a mess (another screenshot attached). Still, I'd sooner try to clean the BtS layout up a bit. For a start, there is no need for all those plus signs.
The HR Dawn-of-Man screen is pretty much what I had been meaning to do as well (but I'm not sure if this particular layout will accommodate my enlarged fonts). The Espionage screen has some lootable elements. The fully redesigned screens seem tailored too much toward gameplay changes in HR.
Already in the bag for v1.00 is improved city bar hover text – from BULL, plus some polishing. (screenshot attached - edit: replaced by a slightly nicer one)
[...] In vanilla, most people have religions because they spread. On this mod, most people are atheists due religion simply not spreading enough. I'm sure a part of why I find this is due to playing on huge maps, but it's sucky because I do prefer games where religion is present rather than atheists fighting it out.
Having done some tests on Huge maps, I still think that this difference is mostly (if not entirely) due to Marathon speed. I've thought about tying the speed adjustment to the unit production modifier (i.e. only factor 2 instead of factor 3) in order to match religion spread by Missionaries, but units having a bigger role on Marathon is by design, so I don't think I should do this.
I'm thinking of making this my main mod to play. That is due to the immersive AI, simplicity and informative and practical UI. I have only played a little but what I have read and experienced about the AI I believe it's the best.
I would greatly appreciate the HR style resource tab. Another thing that I'm thinking that could be changed is a music glitch. Maybe I saw some discussion about it somewhere but I'm not sure. Anyway the in-game music can be heard properly only if I zoom quite far and the map civilization music can be heard without much zoom-in. Then when I want to exit the city screen I can only do it by pressing esc. I can't exit by the usual mouse click. I would be happy if that would be fixed too. So that's my wishlist but those are not deal breakers for me. My current version is 0.98c if I remember correctly.
Another thing that I'm thinking that could be changed is a music glitch. Maybe I saw some discussion about it somewhere but I'm not sure. Anyway the in-game music can be heard properly only if I zoom quite far and the map civilization music can be heard without much zoom-in.
The music issue is caused by the default camera distance. The mod sets that based on the field-of-view value and the assumption that players who use a high field-of-view value will zoom in farther than players who use a low field-of-view value. When this assumption doesn't hold, then the default camera distance needs to be adjusted manually. An option for that was added to the Map tab of the BUG menu in v0.98.
Then when I want to exit the city screen I can only do it by pressing esc. I can't exit by the usual mouse click. I would be happy if that would be fixed too. So that's my wishlist but those are not deal breakers for me. My current version is 0.98c if I remember correctly.
I've added an option for that in v0.99: "Click Map to Exit" on the CIty Screen tab.
(In both of these cases, I should've added a BUG option from the beginning and made the BtS behavior the default setting. Now that the default behavior has been different from BtS for a couple of years, I don't think I should change it back. Although changes to the default settings would only affect new installations of the mod ...)
Your vote has been counted. Maybe I'll have to try playing with the HR display. Just looking at that screenshot, I find it harder to get info from the HR display at a glance.
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– but I did manage to inspect the Barbarian stacks (screenshots attached).
Although changes to the default settings would only affect new installations of the mod ...)
