I posted a preview version of R16 to my GitHub (
https://github.com/maxpetul/C3X/releases/tag/Release_16_Preview_1). It's still missing a couple of things I want to add for the final release. It also hasn't been extensively tested for bugs, but it should work well enough. Going forward, I'm going to try to put out more of these preview releases to compensate for the fact that the full versions take so long. They'll let me go faster back and forth with suggestions from this thread.
What's new in Release 16 Preview 1:
- Barbarian city capture & production (experimental) -- If activated, when a barb unit enters a city, it will capture it instead of ransacking it. Barb cities can grow and produce units. Because of how barb city production works under the hood, it's necessary to have barbs turned on for their city production to work. The mod handles this automatically, if there's at least one barb city on the map and barb activity is at level 0 (no barbs), it will be increased to level 1 (sedentary) just for city production. I've labeled this feature as experimental since I don't know if it will work in all circumstances, for example I don't know what would happen if the barbs were to win the game.
- Can use charm flag to control PTW-like artillery targeting -- If activated, the mod will add all units with the charm bombard flag to the list of artillery that uses PTW-style targeting. This cancels out the charm effect since you can't have both.
- Option to ignore king flag on defense -- Can make it so king units aren't always the last to defend in a stack. Useful for mods that use the king flag.
- Harbor/airport city icons indicate unit effects not trade abilities -- Those little harbor and airport icons that appear on the map will appear for cities that have the harbor and airport unit effects (one turn healing, veterancy for new units) instead of sea or air trade routes. This has no effect under the standard game rules since the unit and trade effects are tied to the same buildings, but it's useful for mods that separate the two.
- Fix incorrect ETAs in go-to mode when railroad movement is limited -- This bug has been in the mod since limited railroad movement was first added, back in R6 or so. I finally fixed it. It was caused by the fact that the game's pathfinder stores the number of remaining movement points at each point along the path in a single byte. The number of movement "points" a unit has equals its max moves times the road movement rate (typically 3) times the railroad movement limit. For units with many moves, like destroyers, and high railroad limits, like 15, it's easily possible to overflow that single byte of MP remaining causing incorrect path lengths to be computed. The fix is to recompute the path length after the pathfinder has finished without the one byte limitation.
- Can limit the number of escorts the AI assigns to its naval transports -- Normally the AI will assign between 1 and 3 escorts for each of its naval transports depending on the shield cost of the transport and the number of units it's carrying. Now you can reduce the upper limit from 3 to 2, 1, or even 0. This has the effect of freeing up the AI's naval power units to battle for control of the seas and bombard enemy shores. The catch is AI naval transports will not be as well defended. If you reduce the limit to zero, the AI will send out undefended transports which will be easy targets.
- Fix barbarian diagonal bug -- Barb units will search for targets on all tiles within six steps of their location, as intended, instead of 12 tiles only along the NW/SE diagonal. In case anyone missed it, I wrote about this bug here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...rd-and-much-more.666881/page-70#post-16434678.
- Optimize improvement loops -- This rewrites a few short bits of game code to improve efficiency. Those bits are inefficient because they loop over all possible improvements to check if a city has some effect when it's only necessary to check a few buildings. In particular, the game checks if each city is capable of establishing trade routes over water or air by considering every possible improvement. The mod replaces that code so it instead considers only the small number of improvements that enable water or air trade. In some circumstances, this can significantly reduce turn times, however it is very hit or miss. In one game I tested, a huge industrial era CCM save Civinator had sent me a couple of years ago, this optimization reduced turn times by over half. In another game I tested, an industrial era game on the "Monstrosity" map, the optimization was not effective. I still intend to post a thread all about game performance and optimization at some point, for now this is a small start.
- Option to show untradable techs on trade screen -- They will appear grayed out
- Option to remove Elvis Easter egg -- Stops all king-flagged units from appearing as Elvis on his birthday. Useful for mods with many king-flagged units.
- Fix cached building maintenance amounts not being updated when buildings are obsoleted -- Firaxis intended for obsolete buildings to be maintenance-free, except the game doesn't update building maintenance when techs are unlocked so maintenance persists for obsoleted buildings. It will be removed when the player triggers a recomputation of maintenance, for example by changing governments, but then you can exploit the game by selling the obsolete buildings to have their maintenance removed twice. Both of these issues are fixed, and so is the display of maintenance costs on the city screen.
- Load mod button images from scenario folder if present -- You can now override the mod's images for stacked unit buttons and trade screen scroll arrows with scenario-specific versions by placing the replacement PCX files in the scenario's Art directory.
- Match only complete names from config -- I noticed my string matching code for names in the config file can pass by only matching the first letters. For example, if you specify the name "Horse", it can match "Horseman". The problem with this is if you have a unit named "Horse" it might incorrectly match "Horseman" instead. This is changed now so it only matches the entire name.
- Improve config read error messages -- See: https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...rd-and-much-more.666881/page-65#post-16404684
You can use the preview version to experiment with the barb city capturing. And, of course, if you find any bugs in the preview version, please report them to me so I can fix them.
Sure, I'll try to slip these into future releases. The pollution stuff should be easy enough. Unfortunately the game's interface code is a pain to work with, there's a lot of it and it's very stateful. Moving the golden age timer to that banner is probably more trouble than it's worth. A much easier solution there to replace the "Golden Age" label with an abbreviation. Fighters always being on air superiority is an interesting idea, although it would make the air sup. mission and fortify states redundant. That is unless fortify doesn't count as air sup., which would make sense since it could be used for healing instead, but then you'd never have air units end their turns with unspent moves unless the turn was force-ended without all units moved. Skipping a unit's turn removes all its remaining moves. It shouldn't be too difficult to modify the right-click menu to show which fighters are set to air superiority, since I've already decoded how it works to allow for the grouping of duplicate units.
