1.23 Released!

[Simon_Jester]

Two issues with just starting the game on Windows 7.

One is, does anyone know how to set things up so HR will load automatically so that I don't have to boot the game up twice every time?

Two is, I keep having to re-set the game to "play in windowed mode," and it FORGETS every time I restart my computer. This is exasperating because I usually play Civ IV in windowed mode. It also interferes with my Civiliopedia entry work.
________________

I know this isn't a new mechanic but I'm only just now getting back into the game and... uggh, dissent can be a killer. I don't know what I would have done in the past ten turns or so if I weren't in a position to start a well-timed Golden Age.

It's not that my cities actually started rebelling, but it would have happened twenty turns down the line if I hadn't been able to stop it.

A couple of observations on the dissent mechanic:

One, it is clearly "working as intended" to punish civilizations that grow too large. The AI has only limited ability to cope with it, I suspect, and you get a lot of AI civilizations 'calving' and fragmenting as a result. I think that's actually probably for the best.

Two is, I'm still a little vague on what you can do when there's dissent in specific cities. The only thing I've come up with is to deliberately induce a famine so that the population shrinks until health and happiness bonuses kick in, which is ghastly, but... how else do you stop the city from rebelling?

Sure, on a civilization-wide level you can avoid dissent by not conquering anyone ever, and to a lesser extent by selecting only the lowest-dissent civics, and by limiting your population below the caps imposed by health and happiness.

But if you're making policy decisions most of your cities are fine with, how do you keep control of a few specific places that are starting to get rebellious? Maybe we should create a few more means to lower dissent... they should cost, but they should at least be available, so that you can in theory choose NOT to have splinters breaking off your civilization whenever you turn around, if you're willing to pay the price.

 

[cel10]

Hmm, I don't know if it's me being dumb (I only got this PC about three weeks ago and am still figuring out a lot of technical stuff), but I can't find any logs or crash reports with the kind of information you need -- I have the settings enabled in the .ini file but nothing is showing up in the /Documents/.../Logs folder, which is where I assume I should be looking?

What I posted before was from the Windows event viewer.

 

[ales_]

One is, does anyone know how to set things up so HR will load automatically so that I don't have to boot the game up twice every time?

I can say that there is a way, in the .ini file, but I don't remember how exactly.

 

[cel10]

Something went wrong here as well, apparently with the Celts trying to have a civil war. (Hopefully the DLL doesn't matter if I don't have 18+ civs in the game?)

 

[Xyth]

Something went wrong here as well, apparently with the Celts trying to have a civil war. (Hopefully the DLL doesn't matter if I don't have 18+ civs in the game?)

I cannot load it. The problem is that the Barbarian civ is always 1 after the last available slot, no matter how many civs in are in a game. So with the standard BTS DLL, Barbarians are player 18, but with the custom DLL they're player 51 or something. BTS without the custom DLL doesn't know to handle that and crashes when a game is loaded.

From the error message it seems my civ-selection code during a civil war isn't coping with the custom DLL either. I'll have to set up a test environment with the custom DLL to try solve it, but I don't have time to do that for 1.23.1. Added to the todo list for 1.24. I'm afraid you'll have to stick with just 18 civs for the time being.

 

[Xyth]

Two issues with just starting the game on Windows 7.

One is, does anyone know how to set things up so HR will load automatically so that I don't have to boot the game up twice every time?

It's in /Documents/Civilization IV Beyond the Sword/CivilizationIV.ini. Change this section:

; Specify a Mod folder (Mods\Mesopotamia), '0' for none
Mod = 0

To this:

; Specify a Mod folder (Mods\Mesopotamia), '0' for none
Mod = Mods\History Rewritten

Two is, I keep having to re-set the game to "play in windowed mode," and it FORGETS every time I restart my computer. This is exasperating because I usually play Civ IV in windowed mode. It also interferes with my Civiliopedia entry work.

Not sure about this, but be sure that you've set BTS to run as administrator. Without this BTS (and HR) can't save some settings and this might be why the window settings are not being retained.

Hmm, I don't know if it's me being dumb (I only got this PC about three weeks ago and am still figuring out a lot of technical stuff), but I can't find any logs or crash reports with the kind of information you need -- I have the settings enabled in the .ini file but nothing is showing up in the /Documents/.../Logs folder, which is where I assume I should be looking?

What I posted before was from the Windows event viewer.

I'm not sure how crash dumps work on Windows. On Mac the crash report just appears when the crash happens, and can be looked up later via the Console app. Can any Windows users advise?

 

[Xyth]

A couple of observations on the dissent mechanic:

One, it is clearly "working as intended" to punish civilizations that grow too large. The AI has only limited ability to cope with it, I suspect, and you get a lot of AI civilizations 'calving' and fragmenting as a result. I think that's actually probably for the best.

Two is, I'm still a little vague on what you can do when there's dissent in specific cities. The only thing I've come up with is to deliberately induce a famine so that the population shrinks until health and happiness bonuses kick in, which is ghastly, but... how else do you stop the city from rebelling?

Golden Ages are a crucial tool, as you've mentioned, but's there's a couple of others too. Firstly, the Authoritarianism civic. It has a low dissent rating now, so you can switch to it and stack military units in your unsettled cities. Each garrisoned unit = 1 happiness = -5 dissent per turn.

Secondly, and though this might sounds contradictory, one of the best ways to avoid civil wars is to let them happen. If you have an unsettled or rebellious city, especially one that on the fringes of your empire, it's often best to let it go Barbarian and reconquer it. It's a setback for sure, but doing so will remove all its dissent - and reset the dissent of every other city in your empire to Stable. It's much better to lose a single city temporarily than have dissent build everywhere and lose a whole bunch at once. Furthermore, if some cities become Barbarians, you don't suffer the cultural or diplomatic effects that you would if they formed a new civilization. Just be careful that another civilization doesn't conquer your Barbarian city before you do. They're sneaky like that!

Sure, on a civilization-wide level you can avoid dissent by not conquering anyone ever, and to a lesser extent by selecting only the lowest-dissent civics, and by limiting your population below the caps imposed by health and happiness.

The idea is that you can conquer and expand but you cannot neglect developing your acquisitions as you do, or it will destabilise your empire. Note that how fast civic dissent ramps up per city is modified by difficulty level, so if you're struggling to expand it might be worth trying a lower difficulty level till you've got the hang of it.

But if you're making policy decisions most of your cities are fine with, how do you keep control of a few specific places that are starting to get rebellious? Maybe we should create a few more means to lower dissent... they should cost, but they should at least be available, so that you can in theory choose NOT to have splinters breaking off your civilization whenever you turn around, if you're willing to pay the price.

I've been intending to add a dissent reduction ability to the Great Doctor, which currently doesn't have a special ability like the other Great People*. It would be a 'Humanitarian Mission' and it would reduce level in a targeted city back to Loyal or Stable. Something like that. Easy to implement for human players, but coding the AI for it will take a fair bit of effort. Ran out of time in 1.23, so it'll be one of the first things I work on for 1.24.

* Great Scientists also need a special ability but I don't have anything particular in mind yet.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Hm. I don't think the 'remove dissent' mechanic would be enough to balance the Great Doctor with, say, the huge pile of cash you can get from sending a Great Merchant on a trade mission. Maybe the doctor's special ability could also do something else, like create a special mini-building that gives some small bonus or some such?
___________________

Another observation about religion and Tenets: In my first play of a recent-iteration HR game, it seems like all the civilizations I met early on wound up with several points of "we hate you" racked up against me for events diplomatically. "Past events have drawn our people apart" or some such.

Did you introduce any new mechanics to make that happen?

Because I had a purely hypothetical thought. There are several tenet choices per option available, so if civilizations tend to dislike other civs with different tenets, they wind up disliking, well... almost everybody. It is highly unlikely that you will encounter another civ that shares most of your tenets, unless you or they have deliberately altered their tenet lineup in order to conform.

So IF this is the case, then the effect of tenets will tend to bias the game in favor of lower relations between different nation-states. Combine that with the constant effect of civil wars popping up and AI civilizations fragmenting into warring factions that ask you for help against each other and get mad if you stay neutral...

HR is becoming a setting where it is, perhaps, a bit easier to make the AI angry with you.

Perhaps you might want to just doublecheck that. Maybe you could introduce a new source of positive relationship modifiers, or set the threshold for "they share enough of our tenets to be likeable" at a low level, or some such.

This may just be my opinion- check with others who've done more extensive playtesting.
___________________

Also, I'm getting this weird bug where the game hangs up indefinitely on the "waiting for other civilizations" phase with the spinning globe. I can tell the game hasn't crashed, parts of the interface are responding, but whatever action the computer is waiting for doesn't resolve, so my turn just... never comes.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Here are the save files. The 1150 save is from near the beginning of my turn. The 'z' and 'zz' saves were done while the game was locked in its endless "waiting for other civilizations" cycle (as I said, the interface was working fine, I just never got control of my civ back and the 1160 turn never began). They're from different playthroughs of the turn, in which I captured the French city of Tours in slightly different ways.

 

[Xyth]

Hm. I don't think the 'remove dissent' mechanic would be enough to balance the Great Doctor with, say, the huge pile of cash you can get from sending a Great Merchant on a trade mission. Maybe the doctor's special ability could also do something else, like create a special mini-building that gives some small bonus or some such?

I'm thinking there should be an additional effect if you send a Great Doctor to do a humanitarian mission in another civilization's city. An attitude bonus would be an obvious candidate for this.

Another observation about religion and Tenets: In my first play of a recent-iteration HR game, it seems like all the civilizations I met early on wound up with several points of "we hate you" racked up against me for events diplomatically. "Past events have drawn our people apart" or some such.

Did you introduce any new mechanics to make that happen?

"Past events have drawn our people together/apart" is the generic attitude description, used for all modded attitude bonuses/penalties. So that's the net effect of attitude effects from Tenets, Civil Wars, Diplomatic Trait, etc. I haven't figured out a way to add new diplomacy descriptions yet.

Because I had a purely hypothetical thought. There are several tenet choices per option available, so if civilizations tend to dislike other civs with different tenets, they wind up disliking, well... almost everybody. It is highly unlikely that you will encounter another civ that shares most of your tenets, unless you or they have deliberately altered their tenet lineup in order to conform.

So IF this is the case, then the effect of tenets will tend to bias the game in favor of lower relations between different nation-states. Combine that with the constant effect of civil wars popping up and AI civilizations fragmenting into warring factions that ask you for help against each other and get mad if you stay neutral...

HR is becoming a setting where it is, perhaps, a bit easier to make the AI angry with you.

Perhaps you might want to just doublecheck that. Maybe you could introduce a new source of positive relationship modifiers, or set the threshold for "they share enough of our tenets to be likeable" at a low level, or some such.

This may just be my opinion- check with others who've done more extensive playtesting.

Tenet similarities and tenet differences cancel each other out. So if you have 3 tenets in common with another civilization, the net attitude adjustment is 0. You have to have 4 tenets different before you start seeing any attitude penalties (or 4 the same before you get any bonuses). Forbearance and Syncretism mute negative attitudes further, and the foreign reformation mechanic causes civs with the same religion to drift towards similar tenets. So overall negative attitudes aren't excessive except where it makes good sense for them to be.

Also, I'm getting this weird bug where the game hangs up indefinitely on the "waiting for other civilizations" phase with the spinning globe. I can tell the game hasn't crashed, parts of the interface are responding, but whatever action the computer is waiting for doesn't resolve, so my turn just... never comes.

Endless 'Waiting for Other Civilizations..." is an unfixable BTS bug that occurs more often in big mods like HR. I implemented a hotkey (Ctrl-C on Windows, CMD-C on OS X) you can use to break out of it, but unfortunately I broke it in 1.23. Will be fixed in 1.23.1.

 

[Simon_Jester]

I'm thinking there should be an additional effect if you send a Great Doctor to do a humanitarian mission in another civilization's city. An attitude bonus would be an obvious candidate for this.

"Past events have drawn our people together/apart" is the generic attitude description, used for all modded attitude bonuses/penalties. So that's the net effect of attitude effects from Tenets, Civil Wars, Diplomatic Trait, etc. I haven't figured out a way to add new diplomacy descriptions yet.

Okay, so yes, it is a tenets thing...

Tenet similarities and tenet differences cancel each other out. So if you have 3 tenets in common with another civilization, the net attitude adjustment is 0. You have to have 4 tenets different before you start seeing any attitude penalties (or 4 the same before you get any bonuses).

Aaah, but think about the impact of statistics on this. There are six tenets.

Two of them gives you six available choices from game start (divinity, tolerance). For the others, you have to discover techs to enable most of the choices, but by the time the midgame rolls around, three or four of them are available. Let's say three.

Thus, treat tenets as being randomly determined, with two tenets having six choices and four with three choices. Imagine meeting a new civilization and finding out what their tenets happen to be.

The odds that someone would randomly share all six of your tenets by the midgame is therefore around, oh... One chance in six, times one in six, times four more one-in-three chances... 1 in 2916. Or about 0.03%.

The chances that someone would randomly share five of your tenets would be, hm... about 0.75%

The chances that someone will randomly share four of your tenets is 4.4%

The chances that someone will randomly share three of your tenets is 16.2%

The chances that someone will randomly share two of your tenets is 32.1%

The chances that someone will randomly share one of your tenets is 32.9%

The chances that someone will randomly share none of your tenets is 13.7%

So when we assume only three possible tenet choices except in areas where all six are available from game start, eighty percent of civilizations end up disliking each other more because of the tenet mechanic. About fifty percent of them dislike each other strongly more (zero or one tenet shared). Only about five percent of randomly chosen civilizations will actively like each other more because of the mechanic.

And as the number of tenet choices available for Aspiration, Morality, Revelation, and Worship increase in the mid- to late game to more than 'three per option,' these probabilities all get rapidly worse.

So if you pick two civilizations and determine their tenets at random, the typical number of Tenets for them to share isn't three. It's one. Maybe two in the early game.

And as implemented, the tenet mechanic has the indirect result of noticeably worsening diplomatic relations among the nations.

This is compounded by the generally worse relations that result from lots of civil wars among the AI, which introduce extra ways to incur the "You traded with our worst enemies!" and "You refused to go to war against our enemies!" and "You refused to stop trading with our worst enemies!" penalties.
___________________

I can think of a few ways to solve this.

I'm assuming the 'different tenet' penalty is -2. I can recalculate if it's -1: basically I'd just chop all the bonuses and penalties in half.

One would be to make the "we share tenets!" bonus about twice as large as the "we have different tenets!" malus: a +4 instead of a +2. Then, civilizations that share two tenets (not uncommon, at least in the mid-game) would still have normal relations. That, though, breaks down when dealing with your coreligionists. Because nations that share your religion will usually share several tenets and therefore would be on super-duper good terms with you.

Another option is simply to add a universal bonus to relations between all players, of about a +3 or +4. This would 'normalize' diplomatic relations by canceling out the 'different tenets' effect, without getting quite so crazy between civilizations that share a religion.

A third option would be to remove the bonus for shared tenets, but add a +8 or so bonus to relations between all players (again, assuming a -2 penalty to relations per 'different' tenet). That way, having unusually different sets of tenet choices (only one or zero tenets shared) would still cause noticeably worse diplomatic relations than would be normal without the tenet mechanic. But most people would be on roughly the same kind of terms they were before tenets, give or take a little. Civilizations that share identical tenets would have a big bonus to relations... but this is comparatively rare, for reasons I discuss below.

Forbearance and Syncretism mute negative attitudes further, and the foreign reformation mechanic causes civs with the same religion to drift towards similar tenets. So overall negative attitudes aren't excessive except where it makes good sense for them to be.

Trouble is, Great Prophets become available relatively early, and thanks to the 18 religions mod, everyone and their cousin Fred can start their own religions (even to the extent of founding a random religion if their 'favorite' religion is not available).

So the de facto result is that nearly every civilization has its own religion, tenets do not normally drift closer together except among neighbors who just happen to have the same religion because Civ A was unusually successful at spreading its religion in the Bronze Age. By the time the Iron Age rolls around, almost everyone has different religions and the tendency to converge on similar tenets stop mattering so much.

As a result you have a 'tower of Babel' scenario. All the major civilizations (and most minor ones) have their own religion, with rare exceptions, and nobody is getting much traction out of the "shared religion leads to shared tenets" mechanic.

Now, because my game crashed in medieval times I can't tell if this trend usually starts to reverse and if certain religions are likely to gain a global advantage and spread rapidly as we move into the Renaissance and later.

But at the moment, the odds are high that no more than two civilizations out of a dozen will ever share the same religion. And almost all the others will be angry with each other over tenet differences.
________________________

I just thought of another fix- you might soften the effect of tenet differences on civilizations that do not share a religion.

NOTE: I AM NOT TRYING TO SLANDER ANY RELIGION IN MY EXAMPLE, JUST TRYING TO ILLUSTRATE THE CONCEPT.

Suppose that the Byzantine civilization which practices Christianity in the game has chosen the "Salvation" tenet for Aspirations.

Meanwhile, two Buddhist civilizations exist. The Burmese have chosen "Salvation" (achieving nirvana through the mercy of the Buddha and the bodhisattvas), while the Tibetans have chosen "Enlightenment" (achieving nirvana through personal enlightenment and spiritual discipline).

Now, arguably the Burmese version of Buddhism is closer to the Byzantine version of Christianity, so there's some logic behind giving the Burmese better relations with the Spanish , and/or giving the Tibetans worse relations with the Byzantines.

The thing is, there's a good chance that the Byzantine would (realistically) either deride both the Burmese and the Tibetans as a bunch of heretics and not bother to sort out the detailed differences between Tibetan and Burmese Buddhism.

Or, even if they are tolerant of the Tibetan and Burmese religion, they will probably not have a clear grasp of the differences, any more than most people outside the Muslim world are clear on the differences between Sunni and Shi'ite versions of Islam in real life.

Now, by contrast, suppose the Byzantines still adhere to the Salvation tenet, but the neighboring Americans under Lincoln also switch to Enlightenment as their Aspiration tenet. I'm sure we can all imagine the cry going up from the Byzantines:

"HERESY!"

The resulting diplomatic malus for the Americans may be far more significant than the diplomatic malus the Tibetans would experience for adopting the same tenet.

So we could imagine setting things up so that if you have the same religion as someone else, you need to have like four or five shared tenets just to break even on the "tenet similarity" front.

A version of Christianity that shares only three tenets with Byzantine Christianity is likely to seem like a mutant funhouse mirror version of Christianity to the Byzantines, and thus draw their wrath (as indeed happened historically with things like Nestorianism and Monophysitism).

Whereas a version of Buddhism that shares three tenets with Byzantine Christianity gets viewed as essentially harmless, or at least no more harmful than any other non-Christian religion... so that the Buddhist civilizations can 'break even' with only two shared tenets or so.

Endless 'Waiting for Other Civilizations..." is an unfixable BTS bug that occurs more often in big mods like HR. I implemented a hotkey (Ctrl-C on Windows, CMD-C on OS X) you can use to break out of it, but unfortunately I broke it in 1.23. Will be fixed in 1.23.1.

Do you know the causal mechanism behind it? What's happening to make this happen? If I back up five turns and play them over, is there a chance that it won't happen, or at least won't happen on this particular turn?

 

[Xyth]

Do you know the causal mechanism behind it? What's happening to make this happen? If I back up five turns and play them over, is there a chance that it won't happen, or at least won't happen on this particular turn?

It's caused by an AI unit getting stuck in a permanent loop of joining/leaving a selection group, or switching between missions. Naval units are particularly susceptible to it. In your game it's one of the Barbarian units, but I haven't figured out which yet.

I haven't got time to comment on the Tenets stuff at the moment, but a few relevent things to consider/clarify:

• The same tenet bonus is +1
• The different tenet penalty is -1
• Tolerance tenets don't cause any bonuses or penalties, just the other 5 categories
• Different religion penalties have been reduced (by at least half) for every leader. I need to do a review of this.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Hm. My analysis changes a bit if there are five relevant tenets rather than six, especially since Tolerance is the category where nations are most likely to diverge and not share a tenet.

But basically, because of the diversity of the available Tenets, the odds are that you're only going to share one or two tenets, tops, with a civilization that you haven't specifically influenced to share your Tenets.

It's actually more or less the same way with Civics- but generally the AI won't hate you specifically because of your different civics.

 

[Joij]

Hi Xyth. This is a great mod! Finally something that works with Mac.I like the new 1.23 update, good so far. As for tenets causing other civs to hate more, a solution to this could simply alter the way religions are founded. Instead of civs founding all of the religions at once and going to war because everyone has a different religion with different tenets, prophets could work similar to golden ages. So for the first three religions that are created in a game only one great prophet would be necessary to found them. After that the next three would require two prophets and so on until all 18 religions are founded. This would also give the player an extra incentive to found a religion first so they can have more time to spread it and get it on the cheap. Also more time would pass to allow other civs to convert to the same religions and not each create their own only to shut themselves out from the rest of the world. And it would give leaders with the spiritual trait a tactical advantage if they want to go for a religious victory. Eventually though all of the religions will be founded and everyone will start hating each other, however doing it this way delays the diplomatic conflicts much later to about the mid game which would then simulate the middle ages better. At this point religious victories become substantially harder and will cause (frustrated)players to reform to more secular tenets to simulate the enlightenment and modern times. Once most of the worlds civs develop secular tenets diplomatically things should calm down again but make a religious victory improbable(but not impossible). So great prophets with similar mechanics to golden ages would make a more balanced and strategic game.

 

[Xyth]

Download

http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=14855​

Changes

Civil War
• Fixed crash when seceding civs capture siege units

Tenets
• Humanism: fixed bug making it unselectable

Art
• Numerous improvements to cultural city art

Units
• Gunship: can now flank Mobile SAMs
• Mobile SAM: redesigned, no longer an upgrade to the SAM Infantry

Promotions
• Nomad: can now be chosen by Melee units

Buildings
• Museum: +50% culture bonus was missing

Interface
• BUG Settings screen tidied up, many superfluous options removed or made standard
• New 'Auto Avoid Growth' and 'Auto Resume Growth' settings added
• 'Break Endless AI Turn' keybinding fixed
• Strategy Overlay: fixed broken keybindings
• World Builder: updated to PlatyBuilder 4.13b

Misc
• Further tweaks to OOS Logging
• Numerous updates and additions to the Civilopedia
• Various other tweaks and fixes​

 

[cel10]

Game crashed upon opening the military advisor screen, I think it had something to do with unit categories - the pull down menus had very strange names.

 

[ales_]

Have you fixed the starting locations on the Earth (Huge) map?

 

[Simon_Jester]

Mm... I seem to recall recommending Gunships as tools for breaking into a fortified air defense network; is that why you gave them the flanking ability?

 

[Xyth]

Game crashed upon opening the military advisor screen, I think it had something to do with unit categories - the pull down menus had very strange names.

Hmm, I seem to have broken something there. It's not crashing for me, but it is throwing a bunch of errors. Investigating.

Have you fixed the starting locations on the Earth (Huge) map?

I adjusted a few, but disagreed with others.

Mm... I seem to recall recommending Gunships as tools for breaking into a fortified air defense network; is that why you gave them the flanking ability?

In part. The Mobile SAM is also classified as a Siege Unit now, rather than Gun Unit like it was before, so I figured it should be flank-able like other such units.

 

[ales_]

I adjusted a few, but disagreed with others.

What did you disagree with?