A Babylon 5 Mod for the Final Frontier Mod

[God-Emperor]

t doesn't and never has, that I recall, used fighters from carrier units. A human player will just sit 3 spaces away from the star system core and blow the defences away with fighters before sending in the rest of the fleet and troop transports to capture the system. I wish we could educate the AI to do this sort of thing.

The next version of FFP should have DLL modifications that will get it to use at least some missiles from ships, and it should station squadrons on starbases (they should be created with the aircraft carrier unit AI type, if that is set in the unit XML as the default unit AI type). It might also be able to sometimes use squadrons from ships other than starbases - I haven't really gotten to that part yet so I am not sure if it will be in. I am currently trying to determine if my missile related adjustments are working properly (or, at least, something close to reasonably well). One step at a time...

 

[PsiCorps]

These graphical peculiarities exist all the way back to regular FF.

The planet modifications (city lights, mag-lev, satellites) don't show up unless you can see the star system, based on the star system's plot's visibility (the plot with the star in it). Since the planets orbit pretty far away you can see them without being able to see the star system's actual plot and in that case they won't show the modifications.

I don't know why, but it seems like they occasionally don't show up if you get a look at the star system plot (like via a recon mission) even though they should. The code that controls what shows up is in CvSolarSystem.py, the updateDisplay method of the CvSystem class and visibility of the plot is the only thing checked to see if it should show them.

Thanks God-Emperor, one less task for me to look into.

 

[PsiCorps]

I've now removed the need for the early carriers to have the Q-40 resource before it can be built but for some reason the game will still not allow me to build an early carrier even with the tech and building requirements met.
I'm still investigating why this is before I upload a new version.

 

[Greeneyedzombie]

Finally finished one game with the dilgar.

Bug:
Combat 1 is not needed for combat 2.
Advanced bridge is not available as a promotion.
The AI doesn't upgrade their starbases?

Gameplay:

Needing Q-40 cripples each and every civ without it.
In my game with 5 civs (1 less then standard on the map) there where only 2 sources of Q-40.

Dilgar Warmaster College is very strong, Giving at least 18 xp more then most other civs. Making Dilgar ships the best promoted ships in the game. Due to their promotions they are almost on par with the mimbari in military strength.

Whitestar frigates are to strong.
3 fights with fresh build whitestars:
1: two tinashis where needed to kill one defending whitestar (the best kill ratio the computer ever achieved)
2: one starbase attacked the whitestar, three tigaras attacked after that, all of them died, next turn I destroyed the starbase with the same whitestar.
3: three neshatans, two tigaras, and 8 carriers failed to destroy my whitestar, and most of them got destroyed while attacking me.
4: new whitestars kill almost each and every starbase they attack (at least the first generation starbase) and most of the time they get barely damaged in return.
5: Sharlins like everything weaker then them are only target practice for whitestar frigates.

In the lore whitestars where as strong as destroyers, and able to go up against first gen capitol ships (but they would take heavy damage and victory was still not given easily).
The coming of the next gen of cruisers and destroyers made the whitestar destroyers needed.
As it is now, a few whitestars can and will destroy anything in reach which isn't a whitestar themselves.


Raiders are no match for anything.
Late game raiders are still no match for anything most of the time.
Maybe give them some promotions to help them out?

the AI chooses to often to build the cheapest and weakest unit they can. Crippling their ability to attack starsystems. They do build the best defender possible.
maybe when the next gen of ship of a category is developed the older ones can't be build?

Mimbari love carriers. they build them often, and love to throw them at the enemy. And then to proceed to build even more of them. Making up half their army. (which makes them the only threat to whitestars)

 

[PsiCorps]

Finally finished one game with the dilgar.

Bug:
Combat 1 is not needed for combat 2.
Advanced bridge is not available as a promotion.
The AI doesn't upgrade their starbases?

Gameplay:

Needing Q-40 cripples each and every civ without it.
In my game with 5 civs (1 less then standard on the map) there where only 2 sources of Q-40.

Dilgar Warmaster College is very strong, Giving at least 18 xp more then most other civs. Making Dilgar ships the best promoted ships in the game. Due to their promotions they are almost on par with the mimbari in military strength.

Whitestar frigates are to strong.
3 fights with fresh build whitestars:
1: two tinashis where needed to kill one defending whitestar (the best kill ratio the computer ever achieved)
2: one starbase attacked the whitestar, three tigaras attacked after that, all of them died, next turn I destroyed the starbase with the same whitestar.
3: three neshatans, two tigaras, and 8 carriers failed to destroy my whitestar, and most of them got destroyed while attacking me.
4: new whitestars kill almost each and every starbase they attack (at least the first generation starbase) and most of the time they get barely damaged in return.
5: Sharlins like everything weaker then them are only target practice for whitestar frigates.

In the lore whitestars where as strong as destroyers, and able to go up against first gen capitol ships (but they would take heavy damage and victory was still not given easily).
The coming of the next gen of cruisers and destroyers made the whitestar destroyers needed.
As it is now, a few whitestars can and will destroy anything in reach which isn't a whitestar themselves.


Raiders are no match for anything.
Late game raiders are still no match for anything most of the time.
Maybe give them some promotions to help them out?

the AI chooses to often to build the cheapest and weakest unit they can. Crippling their ability to attack starsystems. They do build the best defender possible.
maybe when the next gen of ship of a category is developed the older ones can't be build?

Mimbari love carriers. they build them often, and love to throw them at the enemy. And then to proceed to build even more of them. Making up half their army. (which makes them the only threat to whitestars)

Duly noted, I'll see what I can do before the next release. I've also experienced combat against the Gallery Cruiser, 7 Fighters, a carrier and 2 Destroyers (all early units) couldn't take one down. I'll be making a change or two to this one as well.

 

[Greeneyedzombie]

I've also experienced combat against the Gallery Cruiser, 7 Fighters, a carrier and 2 Destroyers (all early units) couldn't take one down. I'll be making a change or two to this one as well.

I've never seen the gallery cruiser show up. Or fought against it. (where in the lore does it fit? which race does it belong to?)
I can live with it being almost invincible to low tech ships. It would be problematic if a fleet of high tech ships can't destroy or damage it.
Drakh raiders due to their immunity to first strikes seem to do reasonable against most ships. Still later in the game most ships destroy them easily due to promotions. The cruisers not so much due to lack of promotions.
It might overpower them to much, but maybe to even the odds they could all start with the same promotions the player gets from buildings?

Current game I've convinced the mimbari to build sharlins to attack my whitestar frigate. Each turn they suicide 3 sharlins, a few nashetans and some destroyers on my whitestar parked next to their system. They hardly do any damage.
Is it possible to program the AI to first use the bombard from the sattelites and then attack with ships? Its the other way around now.

 

[PsiCorps]

I've never seen the gallery cruiser show up. Or fought against it. (where in the lore does it fit? which race does it belong to?)
I can live with it being almost invincible to low tech ships. It would be problematic if a fleet of high tech ships can't destroy or damage it.
Drakh raiders due to their immunity to first strikes seem to do reasonable against most ships. Still later in the game most ships destroy them easily due to promotions. The cruisers not so much due to lack of promotions.
It might overpower them to much, but maybe to even the odds they could all start with the same promotions the player gets from buildings?

The Gallery Cruiser comes from an unknown race that appeared in the episode 'A View from the Gallery' which is where the name comes from as there is no mention made of the race in that episode (That we've so far found). As for starting with the same promotions players get from their buildings, this is do-able but may cause problems in the early game. A test game on a huge map with 11 Civ's went to a Huge map with 6 Civ's by turn 100, the AI still doesn't like building many defensive units at the moment I am trying to weight the AI so it will build Planetary Defense Troops and Satellites before it starts building ships. I may move the destroyer and frigate early units one level higher on the tree so they can't be built immeadiately which would force the AI to build the units it has available at game start.

Current game I've convinced the mimbari to build sharlins to attack my whitestar frigate. Each turn they suicide 3 sharlins, a few nashetans and some destroyers on my whitestar parked next to their system. They hardly do any damage.
Is it possible to program the AI to first use the bombard from the sattelites and then attack with ships? Its the other way around now.

I don't know C++ so I can't tell you if this is possible though I suspect it should be. They should also be building lots of fighters to use against attackers. I think I may need to weight the AI and try to get it to build these more often.

 

[PsiCorps]

Hi all
a little update to let you know where I'm up to now.
I've been adjusting things in an effort to get the AI to use the Planetary Defence Troops more often and in the course of doing so came across a few other things that I failed to take into account along with some xml entries added in an earlier version but somehow have been left out of the current version. I'm hopeful that I'll have the new version uploaded by tomorrow night, Christmas Eve at the latest.

 

[God-Emperor]

FYI I have done some testing of a little DLL modification that checks units that are being checked for grouping to block units that can't move off their current plot due to terrain restrictions from being grouped with other units (other units can still group with them, but when forming a colonizing group any escorts get added to the colony ship's group, not the other way around). With this change, the AIs in B5 colonize at a much more normal rate (in my latest test game, one of them has even out expanded me - I wasn't pushing too hard but I probably couldn't have kept up due to my position; most of them did well and that one did very well).

In my testing of some other things I have found "irregularities" in the unit infos. In particular, a lot of ships types that can carry missiles are set to allow the UNITAI_CARRIER_SEA unit AI type, but that is the one for aircraft carriers, not for missiles (which is UNITAI_MISSILE_CARRIER_SEA, although the AI should be loading missiles onto some other unit AI types too in the next version of FFP). I'll attach the current CIV4UnitInfos.xml that I am testing with. I have also changed the default unit AI type for the starbases to UNITAI_CARRIER_SEA (this will allow it to have squadrons based on it with the next FFP DLL) and the sensor station to UNITAI_SPY_SEA (just to make it not count as anything it might need to build). What I have not done is checked all the other units (other than starbases) that can carry squadrons to see if their UnitAI list includes UNITAI_CARRIER_SEA. Also, I did just blindly add UNITAI_MISSILE_CARRIER_SEA to all of the missile carrying unit types, but it is possible that some (like scouts) should not get this. The whole issue with this is that if you specify a unit AI in the UnitAI section then it assumes it is correct and considers the unit valid for that type of unit AI and then the evaluation that determines the value of the ship type for these two unit AI type does not actually check what type of cargo the unit can carry, just how much. Now that my experimental AI branch of FFP allows land units to use these unit AI types it becomes important to not specify incorrect ones as being valid.

Anyhow, you can compare my CIV4UnitInfos.xml to yours to see what I changed. Most of it will have no effect currently, but if you accept my offer below the starabse and sensor station changes will be used in your new version.

EDIT: Turns out I did not assign the UNITAI_MISSILE_CARRIER_SEA as a UnitAI possibility for the first few units that can carry missiles (the Minbari scout and two frigates). APparently I started changing things at one that had the carrier AI and only went to the end of the file.

I'm not sure exactly when the next version of FFP will come out - probably sometime late next week. So you will probably also get to do a minor release of B5 for New Years to add the new DLL (and make any other changes or bug fixes that crop up in that time) which should improve the AI's performance a bit.

If you'd like, tonight I can produce a new DLL for you with a couple of changes, like I did with the other two changes I already did. This should get you some better behavior in this release without having to wait for the next release of FFP to get everything.

1) The "don't let units that can't move due to terrain issues join groups" change.
- This should improve the AI's colonization efforts as the colony ships won't be trying to bring effectively immobile units with them.
- I'm confident it won't mess up any other behavior - the worst thing it might do is to slow down the AI infinitesimally due to both the check it does and it also probably causes the AI to have a few more unit groups to check for things to do every turn.

and

2) The "units build by construction ships will be built with the default unit AI type specified in the XML" change. (For which you need to adjust their DefaultUnitAI type in the XML.)
- This lets the AI base squadrons on starbases, which it does sometimes.
- As far as I can tell, this has no significant side effect other than getting the AI to build a few more useful, and mobile, combat units now that the bases are not counted as UNITAI_ATTACK.

 

[PsiCorps]

I would have responded sooner but I was at my works christmas party last night.

If you'd like, tonight I can produce a new DLL for you with a couple of changes, like I did with the other two changes I already did. This should get you some better behavior in this release without having to wait for the next release of FFP to get everything.

I would very much like to get that, thank you.

 

[God-Emperor]

OK, I have posted a new DLL at Sourceforge.

It includes the two things mentioned above plus a bug fix for a problem I found. The bug fix was one of the reasons this is coming later than I had intended: I (probably) did not find out what caused the crash. I did find a (probably different) bug in the new unit combat attack and defense related combat strength calculation which I have fixed (it could end up looking up the modifier for a unit combat of -1, which is invalid). So one more potential source of mystery crashes is eliminated.

Anyhow, you can get it from Sourceforge here: http://civ4ffplus.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/civ4ffplus/civ4ffplus-dll/release, the new one is CvGameCoreDLL-1.73b.dll (remove the "-1.73b" part after you grab it).

 

[PsiCorps]

OK, I have posted a new DLL at Sourceforge.

It includes the two things mentioned above plus a bug fix for a problem I found. The bug fix was one of the reasons this is coming later than I had intended: I (probably) did not find out what caused the crash. I did find a (probably different) bug in the new unit combat attack and defense related combat strength calculation which I have fixed (it could end up looking up the modifier for a unit combat of -1, which is invalid). So one more potential source of mystery crashes is eliminated.

Anyhow, you can get it from Sourceforge here: http://civ4ffplus.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/civ4ffplus/civ4ffplus-dll/release, the new one is CvGameCoreDLL-1.73b.dll (remove the "-1.73b" part after you grab it).

Many thanks God-Emperor, hust DL'd it and am adding it to the mod.

 

[Premier Valle]

Hello everyone!,

I know its a little bit late for a christmas present but I couldn´t finish it on time , so...

Here is the present:

Spoiler :

One of the resons that drove me to do this is because currently we are using someone else´s images as backgrounds for the main menu, so I wanted to at least offer one background made by ourselves, so this is my proposal. What do you think of it?

As you can see I made a High Detail Omega and Drakh Cruiser, but the rest of the ships (Thunderbolts, Drakh Raiders, Warlock, Small Drakh Cruiser), are the same we use in the mod.

Hope you like it



PS: I used GIMP only for the text

 

[The_J]

Beautiful .

Could you maybe upload it to our image gallery ?


Oh, and should I maybe move this thread to the modpacks section? No need to let it stay in the main forum here.
(I think I already asked that once )

 

[AbsintheRed]

Awesome work Premier Valle, it looks fantastic!

 

[Premier Valle]

Beautiful .

Awesome work Premier Valle, it looks fantastic!

Glad you like it

Could you maybe upload it to our image gallery ?

Which gallery? do we have a gallry for this?

Oh, and should I maybe move this thread to the modpacks section? No need to let it stay in the main forum here.
(I think I already asked that once )

I believe modpacks section is for finished stuff, is't it?, Project & Mod Development sounds more like it.

 

[The_J]

Which gallery? do we have a gallry for this?

If you are on the main forum site, http://forums.civfanatics.com, you can see at the bottom 4 images being displayed.
These are randomly sampled from the whole CFC image gallery here.
Would be nice if we had that image there too .

I believe modpacks section is for finished stuff, is't it?, Project & Mod Development sounds more like it.

Modpacks is for everything which is a) meant to be a mod and b) has something to be downloaded. The majority of the threads there does not have a really "finished" mod, most stuff is work in progress (but all threads wtih a download).
Project & Mod Development is only for projects which ask for their own subforum, and this is only granted if the main thread is long enough and if there's enough activity. And I don't really think that the activity here is enough for a whole subforum (enough for a thread, sure), so I'd not support that idea (means I'd not forward it to the admins, who are the only people who can create subforums).

So, modpacks would be in this case the right place. If you want...

 

[Premier Valle]

Hello everyone,

Just noticed I haven't released the B5 14th ship pack, so... I released it . Here.

If you are on the main forum site, http://forums.civfanatics.com, you can see at the bottom 4 images being displayed.

I almost never get that far down the page, , I haven't noticed it.

Would be nice if we had that image there too .

I just uploaded it to the Civ4 miscelaneous gallery, currently waiting for approval.

So, modpacks would be in this case the right place. If you want...

I'll talk to PsiCorps, we'll let you know, thanks for the offer.

 

[PsiCorps]

Happy Christmas one and all and a prosperous New Year.

Wow, you guys have been busy posting, so busy that I can't respond to them the way I might normally.

So, Instead I'll try and tie it all up here with a few short but concise answers.

@The_J
Yes, I would very much like to move this to the ModPacks section. As soon as I have the next version ready I was going to post it there all ready for the new year, so you have pre-empted my actions with your offer.

@Premier Valle
That image is fantastic, I'd love to see more of them. I'm going to include it in the next release of the Mod which, I am hoping will be very soon.

 

[The_J]

Hello everyone,

Just noticed I haven't released the B5 14th ship pack, so... I released it . Here.

Great work, as usual .

I just uploaded it to the Civ4 miscelaneous gallery, currently waiting for approval.

Approved now .

@The_J
Yes, I would very much like to move this to the ModPacks section. As soon as I have the next version ready I was going to post it there all ready for the new year, so you have pre-empted my actions with your offer.

Moderator Action: Thread moved.