Advanced Civ

[f1rpo]

The majority of Space Ship parts are not necessary, [...] you can launch with a single Thruster, a single Engine, and a single Casing, and that's it.

Yep, unfortunately not just a UI issue. Not sure if the AI has still been producing (some of) those SS parts, but it seems likely that the AI has been launching its SS as soon as the rules allowed it. Another issue introduced with 0.97. In this case, the unusual behavior of the VictoryMinThreshold XML tag – namely, attaining the value of VictoryThreshold if no minimal threshold is set – has gotten lost. Enough material for another patch: v0.97c

Thanks for spotting that. I always just click the SS screen away.

I'm impressed that you were able to debug the problem that quickly. Just a missing pair of curly brackets, eh? No wonder it was easy to miss.

I credit the debugger, which points out the line of code causing a crash (so long as it happens within the GameCore DLL); and you for providing a savegame that always crashes if one just hits end-turn.

I don't remember the vanilla BTS map generator ever putting 5 fish in that close of a cluster. Not saying that it's a K-mod- or AdvCiv-only thing, but dang, that's a lot of fish.

If I generate a few more Continents maps with AdvCiv, I don't get any large uh... schools of fish nor too much fish in general. Most Continents maps don't have peninsulas like that either. After a few attempts with BtS, I did get a somewhat similar map (screenshot attached).

WorldBuilder circles: Right; the BBAI mod added those for debugging/ development. City site circles should have the color of a civ that plans to settle there. Both types of circles are actually only supposed to show up in Debug mode (Ctrl+Z with chipotle cheat code). I've made a change that hides them entirely unless the yield display is enabled; since I don't normally use the yield display, I hadn't noticed that the circles still show up in WB. (I didn't fix that in v0.97c; too unimportant to risk introducing some new problem.)

That Napoleonic island isn't exactly a credit to the AI. Even if Napoleon has nowhere else to go, that spot is pretty terrible this early in the game. Probably overestimates the strategic value of the Horse. A known issue is that the AI is bad at attacking Barbarian cities across the sea. It'll only consider such an attack if there is no war on the horizon on the mainland (no war plans, not alert about a possible DoW by a rival), and, when that doesn't prevent an expedition, the AI often doesn't have a sufficient number of ships and invaders (with the proper unit AI types). That said, that Barbarian city is probably also the result of an overestimated strategic resource (Marble). Come to think of it, strategic resources shouldn't be evaluated at all when placing Barbarian cities. I'll change it so that the Barbarians assign some small-ish constant trade value to resources. Barbarian cities blocking strategic resources seems rather unhealthy for game balance. (Those are all shortcomings inherited from BtS.)

 

[Elkad]

I've been feeling the opposite on fish (seafood in general). Seems rather rare.
of course the capitol may get some added to bring it up to par, but the general map feels like it needs more.

 

[crullerdonut]

WorldBuilder circles: Right; the BBAI mod added those for debugging/ development.

I just checked, and these circles are visible in K-mod as well. I don't mind that they're there, I was just confused as to what was going on.

That Napoleonic island isn't exactly a credit to the AI.

"Napoleonic island" you guys crack me up
But yeah, Napoleon was a bit of a dud that game. That Barbarian marble city wasn't conquered until like the 1930s or something, and only then by Tokugawa. Mansa Musa also settled on that island. Napoleon did get pretty unlucky in terms of food resources, so maybe that was part of the reason.

 

[crullerdonut]

Now that I've played through a game of Advanced Civ, I'd like to do a little review on it, similar to what I did with K-mod. This time, I'll group the things I like and don't like within two sections: Interface and Gameplay. This will be followed by a section for miscellaneous suggestions.

Interface
What I didn't like:

• I very much missed the widescreen Technology Advisor (F6) screen.
  
• I wasn't a huge fan of the semi-blue-marble look because Jungles look too similar to other Forests. The default look is that Jungles are radioactive-green which, while not realistic, does make it easy for the player to identify these nasty places.
• The default settings for the custom Domestic Advisor (F1) screen need to be adjusted a little bit because, with the larger font, triple-digit , , and are truncated, and large values of total are also truncated. I've included a screenshot with the new appropriate widths: 40 instead of 38 for , , and , and 56 for total .
• When using Alt-S to place a sign, the highlighted square is now gray instead of green. I enjoy having the green square, because it makes it easy to point things out to someone watching me play.
• Music issue: It appears that the threshold for switching between the zoomed-in music (the music that's particular to each leader/civilization) and between the regular music, has been moved outward. In other words, in order to hear the regular music, one must zoom out further than is usual. I normally like the view to be somewhat zoomed-in, in order to see things better. If one attempts to narrow the field of view in order to solve this issue, then a new issue arises: the view inside the City Screen becomes too zoomed-in, and you can't see all the tiles properly.
• (shared with K-mod) I miss some of the regular features of the BUG mod for the Victory Screen (F8): I miss being able to see the estimated number of turns until Cultural victory for myself and the other leader. I also miss the BUG expected results for diplomatic votes.
• I didn't actually like the shortened City Banners, and I missed seeing the , , and icons for the top-producing cities. Why not add an option to re-enable them?
  
• No option for The Red Fist™? K-mod added this back in, and I don't see the harm in giving players the option to use it. It's a key part of gameplay with the usual BUG mod that people are used to.
• It seemed that the Alerts Pop-up caused some issues. It seemed that there were times when I'd hear the sound for Taoism being spread, for example, but then there wasn't any visible alert icon showing me where Taoism had spread.

What I liked:

• I really liked the larger font. Much easier on the eyes.
• The Resources screen in the Foreign Advisor (F4) has been massively improved. I loved being able to see all my resources right there at the top, instead of just having it be surplus resources. The ability to cancel deals just by clicking on the resource icon in that screen is also very convenient. Another convenience is being able to see for how much each leader is willing to buy/sell resources. These little changes have made this screen amazing to use. I don't see why the word "trade" has been substituted by "share" though , what a strange little change.
  
• I liked the larger Tribal Villages. Much easier to see them, especially in Forests. Were the Yield icons enlargened, too?
  
• The Airport icon. This should've been in the original game; there's just no excuse not to have it.

Gameplay
What I didn't like:

• Compared to K-mod, the +1 from Lumbermills has been moved from Guilds back to Replaceable Parts. This reverts the change that K-mod made, thereby making Lumbermills very niche like the vanilla game. My suggestion is to put the +1 for Lumbermills at Guilds (right next to the Workshop bonus), and to put the ability to build Lumbermills at Machinery, along with Watermill and Windmill. In terms of immersion, well, why can't all the Mills be unlocked at Machinery? In terms of gameplay, this would allow players to start building Lumbermills before they're very useful, just like with Watermills and Workshops. Is the +1 from the AdvCiv Lumbermill so lucrative that it needs to wait until Guilds? I don't think so.
• It was sad having Civilized Jewelers go back to Mass Media. Why can't it stay at Corporation? If Mass Media is not attractive enough once Civilized Jewelers is moved, then why not just add +1 to Specialists from Mass Media?
  
• Random Events being turned off by default. I think that if you press "Play Now", the game should use the standard settings that have always been there, with both Huts and Random Events.

What I liked:

• I was surprised to find that I enjoyed the new exploration requirement for Trade Routes . There's now incentive to actually scout out your surroundings, and there's finally a use for a Scout: to explore your open-borders neighbors.
• No Barbarians spawning on Snow (Snow: the new Ice! ) and Desert. Previously, spawning in Tundra/Ice areas was already pretty harsh, but then you had the added problem of having a White Walker-esque invasion potential from all the wastelands. Thus, the change not only makes the game more realistic, but it also makes it more fair.
• The Granary changes. Someone kept Fomenting Unhappiness in my Floodplain city. It was nice not to have the population suddenly plummet from starvation every turn.
  
• Compared to K-mod, I'm glad that the Eiffel Tower has been moved back to Radio. Who cares about realism: the only reason why the Eiffel Tower was ever useful was that you could get the Broadcast Towers out earlier than usual. In K-mod, this Wonder is worthless.
• Watermills, etc. being built faster. I'd say that this was a flaw in the game: it's as if Firaxis originally had Watermills be really strong and then made it take long to build them to compensate, but then they later made Watermills rather unattractive and then forgot to remove the build-time nerf. I don't know what they were thinking, and I'm glad you fixed it
  
• I was okay with having Flood Plains not spawn on corners of rivers. Floodplain cities are still powerhouses despite this.
• I'm alright with the changes to Scientific Method. Moving Forest Preserves to Biology doesn't really nerf them too much because Biology is so lucrative anyway, and it makes sense in terms of immersion. As you say in the Manual, it doesn't really make too much sense to make all the tech rectangles longer just to accommodate 7 entries in Scientific Method.

What I'm still not sure about:

• I'm not sure how I feel about the new revolt system. On the one hand, being able to see the chances of revolt and the number of troops necessary, made the mechanic not too difficult to manage. It also did add some sense of immersion and realism, and it gave further use for the Leadership general. On the other hand, the mechanic does slow down the domination game considerably. I think that I'd have to play some more Advanced Civ games to see how I really feel about it.
• The AI: I just haven't played enough Advanced Civ to make an informed opinion about it.
• Inability to steal Workers. It didn't come up in this game, so I didn't lament its absence on this occasion. But as discussed elsewhere, maybe it'd be a good idea to just gate Worker-stealing behind Slavery.
  
• With Scientific Method, I'm not sure about what's better for game balance: +1 to specialists or +10% . On the one hand, +1 to specialists pushes the player toward Representation and Specialist Economy at the expense of others; but on the other hand, +10% allows for more flexibility. Either one is better than nothing, though, that's for sure.
• The Colossus becoming obsolete at Chemistry instead of Astronomy. I played as Financial Ragnar, and I ended up building the Colossus (nobody wanted to build Wonders, it seemed). I had a Golden Age after I discovered the other continent (and bought a map from Mansa Musa), so I was getting nice intercontinental Trade Route and +5 on water tiles. Moneybags everywhere! I had so much coming in that, to be honest, it seemed a bit OP. Obsoleting the Colossus at Astronomy means that the extra from water tiles can be replaced by extra from intercontinental trade routes.

Miscellaneous Suggestions/Ideas
Smaller changes:

• My suggestions from the K-mod thread still stand:
  • Allow +2 Spy Specialists with Courthouse instead of +1. I didn't realize that the Great Wall doesn't give Great Spy points in AdvCiv, so even more difficult to switch to a Spy Economy in AdvCiv. So, I think that there's an even greater imperative to make this change, to give players the viable option of getting a Great Spy out and switching to a Spy Economy in the Classical-Medieval eras.
    
  • BUG-mod defaults. I again had to go through the whole 10-minute ritual of taking pictures of my screen and manually applying them to the new AdvCiv BUG screens.
  • Giving Jungle Forest Preserves an additional +1 +1 on top of what they normally do, so that Jungle National Parks are viable, and Jungles are actually useful for once. I don't know why you got rid of the +1 from Rivers; to me, this amounts to nerfing an improvement in desperate need of buffs. Forest Preserves might need an additional +1 with Recycling Center, to make them more useful, on top of the other things.
    
  • Angkor Wat settled Great Prophets +1
• I think that Environmentalism should go back to Medium upkeep. At that stage of the game, the full Corporation payments and lack of +1 Trade route from Free Market is enough of a disincentive to use Environmentalism. The extra ~50 Civic upkeep from High compared to Medium is additional salt in the wound. If State Property could be moved back down to Low, then I think that Environmentalism can be moved back down to Medium. Then, with the Forest Preserve changes, smaller hilly forested Civs could have a real incentive to go Environmentalism for the extra . They'd be like IRL Costa Rica or something
  
• Maybe you did this already, but in the vanilla game, Nuclear Plants could still melt down even if they are not providing power, i.e. if they had no access to Uranium, or if they had been superseded by a Hydro Plant or Three Gorges Dam. I haven't tested this in AdvCiv yet, sorry. I think that Nuclear Plants should be totally shut down and incapable of melting down, if they have no fuel or if they are not being used due to being superseded.
  EDIT: I did a test and, sure enough, superseded Nuclear Plants don't melt down anymore. I also saw that this was mentioned in the manual in change dlph.5, woops! I think that meltdowns have been nerfed a bit too much, though. With 16 Nuclear Plants running in a test, it took me 140 turns on normal speed for a single meltdown to occur. From when I did this in vanilla BtS, meltdowns seem to happen ~10x less commonly now. Maybe that's a bit too rare now; players are unlikely to ever see one, I think.
• When selecting a Settler, the Tooltip Box on the lower-left should show whether a city is Coastal and is adjacent to a River ("Riverside"). I had this situation in the game where I tried settling an Ice city like in the attached picture (before I realized saw the Whale was utterly inaccessible). I thought to myself "oh it won't be too bad, at least I can get some and from the water tiles." Then I realized that all water buildings/units were unavailable: no Lighthouse allowed! I'm not ashamed to say that I re-loaded and moved the city elsewhere, because I didn't consider it fair to expect me to know that Sea Ice blocks the building of Lighthouses. (The new spot was way better, anyway.) Having a little indication in the tooltip box while selecting a Settler (and when just hovering over built Cities) would give an easy indication of whether the City is Coastal or not. As for giving information being Riverside or not: in previous games I've had trouble knowing whether the fresh water was coming from a Lake or a River, only to find out centuries later that I couldn't build a Levee.

Pie-in-the-sky changes:

• What I've always wanted is for there to be a way to see how Civics will affect your per turn, per turn, per turn, per turn, and total per turn. It's literally a math problem for deciding whether Bureaucracy or Free Speech will result in more overall. I've tried getting out a calculator and figuring it out myself, but I've taken to just making a save, noting down the values, and trying out the new Civic; if it's not good, I re-load. Both options are not ideal. The situation is also very difficult to determine when deciding between the Economic Civics. I think that it'd be such a great feature if, when hovering over a new civic, the new values will be computed and compared to the current Civics, and shown in a tool-tip.
  
• Maybe there should be an ability to just build like one can do with , , and . This ability could perhaps be unlocked by Divine Right, to make it more attractive.

Conclusion
All in all, I definitely appreciate the huge amount of effort and thought which has gone into Advanced Civ. Still, I'm not sure whether I'll primarily play with K-mod or Advanced Civ. For me, there are a lot of trade-offs: what do I value more, the nice font and F4 screen in AdvCiv, or the widescreen F6, Red Fist, and wider city banners with top // icons in K-mod? Do I value more the lack of White Walkers, the fixed Eiffel Tower, and other balance changes in AdvCiv, or do I value more having early Lumbermill , early Civilized Jewelers, and other K-mod things which have been reverted? I don't know, and maybe that's alright. At any rate, I have to give hearty appreciation to f1rpo for all the hard work. Looking at the sheer size and thoroughness of the AdvCiv manual and the thoroughly-commented changes in the source code, reveals the sheer magnitude of the effort undertaken. It's both impressive and humbling.

 

[f1rpo]

I very much missed the widescreen Technology Advisor (F6) screen.

What I had meant to do is enable widescreen by default and then remove the option. It seems that I forgot the first part and didn't notice because widescreen was still stored as being enabled in my local BUG .ini files. This would've been fixed in v0.98 anyway because I recently decided to remove the widescreen option more cleanly in case that someone imports (copy-pastes) .ini files where wide-screen is disabled (Git commit). Apologies to all who have been playing with the 4:3 tech tree; I don't think it has any benefit. (Some of the other screens I wouldn't necessarily want to enlarge; cf. this old post of mine.)

For the time being, perhaps you could manually apply the change to CvTechChooser.py from the commit above by replacing the whole file or changing just the highlighted line.

That's an upside of these rather meticulous reviews of yours. Makes me aware of issues that others may not have bothered to bring up and that are really easy to fix. Thanks (also for your other comments of course).

Music issue: It appears that the threshold for switching between the zoomed-in music (the music that's particular to each leader/civilization) and between the regular music, has been moved outward. [...]

Probably due to the changes marked with "advc.004m" in Assets\XML\Misc\CIV4DetailManager.xml. Those changes move the Globe view boundary; apparently, one of them is also responsible for the music volume. I've come to think that this strange bug report was also caused by camera distance affecting the volume.
Regarding the camera angle, the field-of-view slider has the same effect as moving the Globe view boundary, but the latter allows for more fine-grained zooming (higher number of zoom levels). So I'd like to keep that change, but I'd also like to fix the music issue.

If one attempts to narrow the field of view in order to solve this issue, then a new issue arises: the view inside the City Screen becomes too zoomed-in, and you can't see all the tiles properly.

I don't think one can stop the field-of-view value from affecting the city screen.

[...] Were the Yield icons enlargened, too?

I haven't enlarged them, but I guess the field-of-view/ Globe view settings could affect their size.

It seemed that the Alerts Pop-up caused some issues. It seemed that there were times when I'd hear the sound for Taoism being spread, for example, but then there wasn't any visible alert icon showing me where Taoism had spread.

But there was a message in the Event log; i.e. the issue is that, normally, a bubble/ icon thing is shown along with a sound? I play without sound, so I wouldn't know how that works or used to work.

I wasn't a huge fan of the semi-blue-marble look because Jungles look too similar to other Forests. The default look is that Jungles are radioactive-green which, while not realistic, does make it easy for the player to identify these nasty places.

Agreed, especially in the fog of war. (Screenshot attached for illustration. The Forest east of the Dye is easy to miss.) At least they're easier to distinguish than in Blue Marble. But, functionally, the original texture colors are the best. I don't want to make the Jungle any brighter than it is because that looks too unnatural and unpleasant. Perhaps I can make the deciduous Forest variety a bit sparser. Anyway, one can always remove BML.fpk from the Assets folder to restore the original textures.

When using Alt-S to place a sign, the highlighted square is now gray instead of green. I enjoy having the green square, because it makes it easy to point things out to someone watching me play.

I noticed that a while ago; or I wasn't quite sure if the color had changed and didn't bother to look into it. Highlighting stuff, also for a screenshot, is a reasonable argument for restoring the bright green color.

Customizable Domestic Advisor (CDA): I never use that myself; good to know that it's still mostly working despite my neglect. If you're not too attached to the CDA: I've added a column with revolt probabilities to the original Domestic Advisor and polished some small things. But I'll also try changing the CDA defaults according to your screenshot; shouldn't be much effort.

Fist indicator on scoreboard: There's an alert instead (under "Alerts -> Trading -> Wars"; enabled by default). That said, the AI being unwilling to start any wars for payment is the norm, and "too much on our hands" is the default answer and doesn't imply that the AI is already preparing for war. Unless the "legacy" (K-Mod) AI is enabled for war planning; in that case, the alert could actually use some work because it doesn't currently trigger when the AI stops being willing to start a war for payment.

I didn't actually like the shortened City Banners [...].

I didn't exactly shorten the city bars, I just haven't merged the wide city bars from BULL. (Or maybe they are in BUG and karadoc excluded them on purpose? I think BULL.) I wouldn't mind having the option – although I don't think the extra space is actually used for anything by BULL and it can't be clicked to select the city, which is weird.

I missed seeing the , , and icons for the top-producing cities. Why not add an option to re-enable them?

I thought they're pretty obscure, arbitrary (why those two commerce type and that one yield type?) and useless. I don't think I've played with them, so I could be wrong. I would assume that the capital virtually always is the top gold and research city. I guess the top production city could be relevant. Well, apparently you do have a use for those icons. There are a few simple options I want to add to the BUG menu; I'll put the top city icons on that list. (The graphics options menu doesn't have room and I do like having a separate option for the turn numbers on the city bar.)

Victory Screen (F8): I miss being able to see the estimated number of turns until Cultural victory for myself and the other leader. I also miss the BUG expected results for diplomatic votes.

I don't like having to tally the votes either. The Victory Screen is on my list of features to be adopted from BULL (someday).

I really liked the larger font. Much easier on the eyes.

Vincentz himself – who gave me the idea – said it best:

Funny thing is that one of the modifications I've been most happy about, I did more than 10 years after the game came out, and is one of the simplest change. A new font.

The Resources screen in the Foreign Advisor (F4) has been massively improved. [...]

Now that the AI actually evaluates happiness and health resources, those changes were pretty much necessary. (The prices can differ a lot now.)

I don't see why the word "trade" has been substituted by "share" though , what a strange little change.

On the Tech tab? Well, "trade" could mean "trade for/ accept in trade." (Or perhaps this is less ambiguous to native speakers than it is to me.)

[...]in previous games I've had trouble knowing whether the fresh water was coming from a Lake or a River, only to find out centuries later that I couldn't build a Levee.

A river always grants one extra commerce. Doesn't sound like this should be a recurring problem.

I had this situation in the game where I tried settling an Ice city like in the attached picture (before I realized saw the Whale was utterly inaccessible). [...] I didn't consider it fair to expect me to know that Sea Ice blocks the building of Lighthouses. [...] Having a little indication in the tooltip box while selecting a Settler (and when just hovering over built Cities) would give an easy indication of whether the City is Coastal or not.

I'd like to remove that Whale at the end of the map generation process, i.e. if no water tile in the area is adjacent to land. And also any water resources blocked by peaks.
The mod allows ice-locked cities to produce ships – because a Fort can often connect such cities to the open sea. It's a little confusing that Lighthouse isn't also allowed; but if Lighthouse were allowed, I guess Harbor, Customs House, Great Lighthouse, Colossus and Moai Statues would have to be allowed as well. Anyway, those cities are "coastal" to an extent, and I don't think a player would notice the absence of that word. I'll try adding "ice-locked" to the hover text of water tiles; screenshot attached. Might suffice to show it when a settler is selected.

 

[f1rpo]

Addendum (to have all the UI-related comments covered):

BUG-mod defaults. I again had to go through the whole 10-minute ritual of taking pictures of my screen and manually applying them to the new AdvCiv BUG screens.

Copy-pasting the .ini files probably would've given you the same result. Though I would encourage players to bite the bullet and familiarize themselves with the BUG menu instead of copying settings that may or may not be well-suited for the mod. The layout changes and revised hover text should make that task less daunting. Also, the AdvCiv defaults are the settings I use myself except that I have the bulb paths enabled (too difficult to interpret to enable them by default). That doesn't mean that those settings are best for everyone, but I do think they're, in general, a better starting point than the BUG defaults. Apart from bulb paths, I think what many players miss with the AdvCiv defaults is the field-of-view slider and the GP bars. And perhaps a couple of enhanced Advisor screens and Advanced Combat Odds. Not that much effort to customize manually.

What I've always wanted is for there to be a way to see how Civics will affect your per turn, per turn, per turn, per turn, and total per turn.

In the tradition of the "actual effects" help text. But, no, too much work. I shouldn't have bothered implementing the cost preview on the found-city button either. Quick save, quick load. (I did implement a cost preview for Pacifism because it's not so clear how the ability even works.)

 

[f1rpo]

I've been feeling the opposite on fish (seafood in general). Seems rather rare.
of course the capitol may get some added to bring it up to par, but the general map feels like it needs more.

You play on Huge maps iirc. I don't think there's much of a difference from BtS on Standard size. AdvCiv tends to place less seafood at the starting locations; that's probably the only significant difference. On Huge maps, there seems to be something like 20% less seafood on average than in BtS. It varies a lot though. I did make a change that makes resources more sparse on large maps, but the effect is fairly subtle. It could be that seafood is affected more by that change than other resources.

For illustration, some statistics for Standard vs. Huge in AdvCiv (LOG_MAP_STATS in GlobalDefines_devel.xml):

Spoiler :

I've generated a few maps and copied statistics for the one that seemed most representative. (I probably should've generated some more maps and used averages; not very confident in these numbers.)

Huge Fractal, 16 players
Total tile count: 9424 (124x76)
Land: 20.5% (1936)
Continents: 3, large islands: 0, islands: 3
Major landmass sizes: 732, 695, 505
Water breakdown:
Coast: 10.4% (777)
Ocean: 89.6% (6711)
Ice: 18.6% (1394)
Resource total: 382 (23.88 per player)
Non-oil water resources: 42
Clam: 12
Crab: 4
Fish: 20
Whale: 6

Huge BtS maps with 16 players seem to have about 55 seafood resources on average.

Standard Fractal, 8 players
Total tile count: 4160 (80x52)
Land: 20.3% (846)
Continents: 3, large islands: 1, islands: 5
Major landmass sizes: 410, 273, 113, 28
Water breakdown:
Coast: 12.3% (408)
Ocean: 87.7% (2906)
Ice: 19.4% (643)
Resource total: 182 (22.75 per player)
Non-oil water resources: 21
Clam: 5
Crab: 3
Fish: 9
Whale: 4

The tile count ratio between the two map sizes is 2.27, the resource count ratio 2.09 and the seafood ratio 2.00. Coast ratio 1.9; this should be the same in BtS; I guess because the number of landmasses isn't affected much by the map size. Maybe there are just fewer resources in general on Huge maps in AdvCiv than in BtS and it's more noticeable for seafood because it tends to be scarce on Huge maps anyway. At any rate, not sure if I should do something about this. Crab seems to be pretty rare on all map sizes; probably also in BtS.

 

[crullerdonut]

That's an upside of these rather meticulous reviews of yours.

You're welcome, and thanks for your meticulous replies (and your work).

For the time being, perhaps you could manually apply the change to CvTechChooser.py from the commit above

I changed the line in the file, and that worked. Thanks! One thing I should say is that, aesthetically, I think that the regular BUG screen--with the bulb stuff in a nice column on the left--looks nicer than this version, with the bulb stuff very small on the bottom. Just my two cents, though.

It seemed that the Alerts Pop-up caused some issues. It seemed that there were times when I'd hear the sound for Taoism being spread, for example, but then there wasn't any visible alert icon showing me where Taoism had spread.

I've since played another game, and I think that what was happening, was that this was the sound of a Taoist Temple having been built (showing up on the right side of the screen, due to playing with pop-ups suppressed until the end of the turn). This sound would sometimes play after exiting a city or a screen. I haven't done a thorough investigation yet, so I'm not sure what's going on.
There also seems to be a bug where, after selecting a new build item in a city, the pop-up will then ask the same question. And--again, I'm not sure yet--I could've sworn that I encountered some kind of duplication glitch associated with this, where I ended up with three Caravels even though I had built two. (Although it could've just been a lapse in attention, on my part.) If I encounter any of these again, I'll be sure to make a save, and check if it can be replicated after re-loading the save.

Anyway, one can always remove BML.fpk from the Assets folder to restore the original textures.

Thanks for the tip, that worked. Now I have the radioactive-green Jungles again. Maybe it'd be worth adding an option for this, somehow. Or, at the very least, mentioning in the Manual that the BML textures can be disabled by deleting that file.

I didn't exactly shorten the city bars, I just haven't merged the wide city bars from BULL. (Or maybe they are in BUG and karadoc excluded them on purpose? I think BULL.)

EDIT: I just checked, and the wide city bars are there in vanilla BtS + BUG, without BULL. (I never installed BULL because I had heard that it's annoying to install.) It's back to short ones with K-mod. I don't know why karadoc would have excluded the wide city bars, but apparently that happened. But as you mention, maybe the decision came down to the wide city bars being difficult to click.

I thought [the top // icons are] pretty obscure, arbitrary (why those two commerce type and that one yield type?) and useless. I don't think I've played with them, so I could be wrong. I would assume that the capital virtually always is the top gold and research city. I guess the top production city could be relevant. Well, apparently you do have a use for those icons.

For me, those icons are a way to just visually show on the main map where the Oxford, Wall Street, and Iron Works cities are. (I know that some players just re-name the cities as "Iron Works city", etc., but I don't like to do that.) If the Wall Street city has a religious Shrine or any Corporations, then it will very easily produce more than a cottage capital. This can also happen with a specialist city running a lot of Merchants.

On the Tech tab? Well, "trade" could mean "trade for/ accept in trade." (Or perhaps this is less ambiguous to native speakers than it is to me.)

On the F4 Foreign Advisor Resources tab, the word "trade" has been changed to "share". I don't really mind the change either way; I was just mentioning my surprise that you bothered to make such a tiny change.
EDIT: You're right, it's actually the Tech trading tab that has this little change, not the Resources tab.

A river always grants one extra commerce. Doesn't sound like this should be a recurring problem.

Wow, I'm actually a little embarrassed that I never thought to just look at the tile yield, to see if it's a river. It never occurred to me; that's really smart.

Edit: I just thought of an exception, though: Forests. The +1 is obscured by Forests. So, technically, this method is not reliable all the time. There could still be ambiguous cases like a forested tile that's adjacent to the source of a river (and behind it), which looks like it touches the river, and which says "Fresh Water" because it's also adjacent to a freshwater lake. Then, the only way to determine if it's adjacent to the river is to chop down the forest, or to build the city and find out that it can't build a Levee. Or to just remember that tiles behind the river source do not count as riverside.
It's not a terribly uncommon occurrence: I generated one map and saw this situation: the forest on the hill is sandwiched between the source of a river and a freshwater lake. The tile is getting its fresh water from the lake, NOT the river, even though it visually looks like it touches the river. The second image demonstrates that tiles behind the river source are not riverside.

The mod allows ice-locked cities to produce ships – because a Fort can often connect such cities to the open sea.

In my game, it did not allow any boat units either. I've uploaded a screenshot showing that this is the case, even if there is a Fort there ("highlighted" with the gray Alt-S square). The city also gets no trade routes. I've included the save file, too, in case this is some kind of bug that you'd like to investigate.
Removing those inaccessible whales and other sea resources would be great. It's always a little sad to see a Fish that could only be accessed by a City if it were sitting on a mountain Peak.

I'll try adding "ice-locked" to the hover text of water tiles; screenshot attached. Might suffice to show it when a settler is selected.

That's a neat idea; I like it.

(I did implement a cost preview for Pacifism because it's not so clear how the ability even works.

Oh, that's right! In my review, I forgot to mention the change to Pacifism in the Civics screen. It's really very helpful, and I appreciated it a lot.

One thing I didn't mention, though, is that in the Demographics screen, the Import/Export ratio has been removed. I'm not sure why this has been removed. This information is useful, because it helps in making the decision to switch to Mercantilism: when you have a very negative Import/Export ratio, then this means that your trading partners are getting a lot more by having trade routes with you, in comparison to the that you're getting from them. Mercantalism is powerful in those situations because, by shutting down those trade routes , those opponents get hurt more than you do. So, even though you lose by switching to Mercantilism, they get hurt more, which may be desirable.
In the Manual, I believe that you mentioned somewhere that the Demographics screen was overhauled because it leaked information about your opponents, even before you scout them out. So, maybe that was the rationale for getting rid of the Import/Export data. But if that was the rationale to get rid of the Import/Export information, then I have to say that I disagree with the decision: in terms of realism, if a civilization can't determine how much money is coming in and going out, then it had better fire its accountants.

 

[crullerdonut]

So, I played another game with Advanced Civ--twice. In vanilla BtS, I normally play Monarch, but while trying out K-mod and AdvCiv, I had played Prince, so that I could avoid just getting rolled over. This time, I tried playing AdvCiv at Monarch difficulty. Well, it was extremely challenging to me. I lost, so I tried the map again--and lost again. I'm thinking about making a separate thread where I could give screenshots about the situations encountered.

Anyway, I do have more material for you now, f1rpo.

• In the Play Now > World Size dialog, with the bigger font, the text for sea level is truncated.


• One thing I've noticed in both AdvCiv maps I've played, is that the AIs love settling their Great Artists. In my game playing as Isabella, Gandhi settled five Great Artists in Pataliputra by the time I captured it, and never made a Great Work as far as I could tell. I haven't encountered an AI making a Great Work. Maybe the AIs should be encouraged to do so more often. This would've made the situation scarier and more difficult for me.


• The tool-tip for the Financial trait (which you have changed) now has a period (a.k.a. full stop) at the end. This is inconsistent with every other tool-tip in the game, which do not have a period/full-stop at the end.


• Looking at your GitHub project page, I saw that you will be changing Pacal II to Pacal. Rightfully so, I would say. My suggestion is that if you're going to be making that change, then could you also change Asoka to Ashoka? The devs totally dropped the ball with this one. I think that what happened is that the academic transliteration of his name from Sanskrit is "Aśoka"; my guess is that the devs probably tried this, but then they weren't sure if the text would display properly, so they just dropped the diacritic to be safe, producing "Asoka". But, that'd be like having trouble typing the umlaut in Königsberg and, instead of writing Koenigsberg as the rules dictate, just writing Konigsberg. Anyway, this change has resulted in Civ4 players constantly mispronouncing the name Aśoka. There's a very simple solution here: just have it be "Ashoka", so that every reader knows how to pronounce it reasonably accurately. This is the solution that Wikipedia uses, for what it's worth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashoka

• If you're going to be correcting errors in the game that the original devs made, then I have some other ones that come to mind.
In the Civilopedia, any of the buildings that allow the hiring of Spy specialists (Courthouse, the Kremlin, etc.) erroneously link to the Spy unit (the one that moves around on the map), and not the Spy specialist. See, for example, the entry for Courthouse.


When looking at any of the headquarters buildings for the Corporations, the Civilopedia entry for the Special Ability "Incorporates [the corporation]" links to the building, i.e. the same page the reader is currently looking at. So, the link effectively does nothing. Instead, it should link to the page on the particular corporation.


The Firaxis devs made quite a lot of errors and typos with the Civilopedia, so there are a lot more which I forgot about or didn't encounter.

• The // ( ) sliders show how many of each you are producing per turn. However, in AdvCiv, the amount of total per turn is not shown. I think that it's useful to see this, to see how big of an effect switching to Free Speech causes. I don't think that showing the total per turn adds any visual clutter.

• When scrolling the map, if the cursor is hovering over the scoreboard, the game lags very badly, especially late-game. This often happened to me while exiting a City screen: if my cursor happened to be on the bottom-right of the screen, then, while the camera re-adjusts itself, the frame-rate could drop to ~2 frames per second.

• AIs still love settling their cities one tile away from the coast, which forever makes those water tiles unimprovable and limits which units can be produced there. Buffoons, I say! Maybe it would be good to improve the AI's city placement behavior somehow.

• Currently, in the Demographics Graph tab, you only get to see the Score graph for the enemy civilizations for which you have enough points. But, why should this be? The player has access to the Score information for every encountered civilization at all times. The player could, theoretically, just write down those numbers for every turn, and then just make their own graph on paper. So, I think that, by right, the player should be able to see a Score Graph for every encountered civilization, just for convenience. The information is already there; allowing the graph would merely display its history.

• I've never noticed this before, but it happens in vanilla BtS too: after a game is won or lost and the replay is done, it shows the Info Screen. This reveals the demographics and graphs of all civilizations. However, in the top-5 cities/wonders tab, it doesn't reveal the cities which were unrevealed to the player at the time of win/loss.

When the game is over, if we can see everyone's Graphs regardless of exploration, why can't we see the cities? Seems a bit strange to me.

• I think that part of the reason why my Isabella game ended up so difficult came down to having 8 civilizations instead of 7, on a Continents map. This map ended up with 4 main continents, somehow. One AI, Justinian, ended up alone on a huge area of the biggest continent; three AIs were shoved onto a medium-sized island, I and Gandhi ended up on a small food-barren island, and Pericles (!!!) ended up on his own private isle where he could just sit and tech in peace. I think that it would be nice to have an option in Custom Games to have the original number of civilizations, i.e. 7 instead of 8 on Normal size. It might be wise for the player to enable such an option for Normal-sized Continents maps.

• (shared with vanilla BtS) Why do the AIs sometimes just leave Barbarian cities untouched like on this island? C'mon Pericles, it's Infantry vs. Archers! Go get 'em!

This happened to me with vanilla BtS before, when I liberated a colony which became Mansa Musa. There was a nice Barbarian city right next to him, with a Whale. Mansa had Infantry, and the Barbarian city had Archers. And yet, the Barb city remained there for the rest of the game. I kept thinking "Mansa, go get it! Go get the Whale, buddy! I want to buy it from you!" But nope, no Whale that I could buy. Why do they do this? Are AIs just really pacifist sometimes?

• Nuclear war can be a bit of a drag because the explosion animation is so slowwwww. With the graphics settings set to low, the mushroom cloud animation doesn't show, but the game still makes the player wait. Is there any way this waiting period could be removed, if the mushroom cloud animation isn't shown?

Well, that's all I can think of for now. Thanks again for all your hard work, f1rpo, and for your consideration of my suggestions/ideas.

 

[f1rpo]

So, I played another game with Advanced Civ--twice. [...] I'm thinking about making a separate thread where I could give screenshots about the situations encountered.

I guess there isn't really a place for that. If this new thread is more than a remote consideration, then an AdvCiv subforum is a possibility:

[...] It seems like having one main thread lends itself to being focused on bug reports and balance feedback that is mostly a direct conversation with the developer, and people tend to remain quiet on other topics to allow that. Your choice of course, but if you ever need a subforum I can help you get it.

 

[crullerdonut]

I guess there isn't really a place for that. If this new thread is more than a remote consideration, then an AdvCiv subforum is a possibility:

I think that it's about time that a sub-forum is created.

 

[keldath]

hey f1rpo,
hows it hanging,
i had some time so i started a game (Doto - latest merges until 17/07).

some funky AI behaviour:
- every turn, im offered with open borders by the same AI, its quite annoying ?
- one of the AI, which im at peace with, just 150 turns in game, offered me, peace treaty ....in addition to some tech...while im in peace with him :edit : happens with other ai.
- small map size, i think there were too many huts.
- saw a strange city placement, where the ai settled near my border, limited by my capital culture. though it might be ok cause the city is pretty good.
- all screens, when in window mod, are not aligned with screen res, im used to that a long time ago , not sure its rleated to advciv, but, one thing i did see, era splash now is cropped by the top of the window.
- not sure advciv related - but - my money is on 100% and stable, 150 , never had a minus since, maybe doto too much money... edit: looking at the fin advisor - all my expenses are 0 that does not seem right.


ill report more if i see .

 

[Elkad]

• I didn't actually like the shortened City Banners, and I missed seeing the , , and icons for the top-producing cities. Why not add an option to re-enable them?

I thought they're pretty obscure, arbitrary (why those two commerce type and that one yield type?) and useless.

We just had this discussion (my left-arrow wraparound of cities). No UI feature is unused. Including ones that are clearly bugs

 

[f1rpo]

If three people are in favor (@crullerdonut + likes from @Cruiser76, @carp; I'm assuming that Leo's like just means that he's here to help), then, OK, fine , let's get that subforum. Though, for the record, I see it as just a matter of practicality, not a step to expand this project, which, as far I am concerned, is on course to winding down.

@Leoreth: I assume that this thread could remain unchanged here under "Modpacks" (same deal as with Realism Invictus); wouldn't want to break hyperlinks, bookmarks and habits. My impulse would be to name the subforum "Civ 4 - Advanced Civ" (following the convention, redundant as it may be) and place one sticky thread "Download & Info" in there, closed for replies, that'll mostly just link to this thread and the download page. Actually, that sticky thread could "blend in" the database page as it's done e.g. by the Middle Earth. I never found out how this is done; maybe through the "Additional Information URL" or "Alternative Support URL" fields on the "Edit Resource" page? Probably I can create that thread myself and then just, say, report it to you for closing and stickying.
Obviously we can sort out details through private messages – however you prefer. (I hope there won't be very many details to burden you with.) Just thought I'd spell out the basic approach here so that everyone's in the loop.

 

[f1rpo]

[...]- every turn, im offered with open borders by the same AI, its quite annoying ?

Accept already! Can you debug it? Probably goes through the line with getContactRand(CONTACT_OPEN_BORDERS) in CvPlayerAI. Some problem with Civ4LeaderHeadInfos.xml maybe, specifically the ContactRand value for OB.

- one of the AI, which im at peace with, just 150 turns in game, offered me, peace treaty ....in addition to some tech...while im in peace with him :edit : happens with other ai.

Probably not a bug, but it seems that this indeed needs to be made clearer. Maybe I can show a different label for the TRADE_PEACE_TREATY trade item when already at peace.

- small map size, i think there were too many huts.

I'll try to compare with BtS.

saw a strange city placement, where the ai settled near my border, limited by my capital culture. though it might be ok cause the city is pretty good.

Would have to see the city to form an opinion; but noted.

- all screens, when in window mod, are not aligned with screen res, im used to that a long time ago ,

The tech tree at least should take up the entire width of the screen. Most other screens have hardcoded dimensions; but they shouldn't be distorted or cropped. Though if you set window dimensions smaller than your desktop resolution and then maximize the window, then the whole UI may get distorted; that would be unrelated to mods.

not sure its rleated to advciv, but, one thing i did see, era splash now is cropped by the top of the window.

I'm attaching a screenshot. That's in windowed mode, maximized, with dimensions 1920x1120 set in CivilizationIV.ini, a bit smaller than the desktop resolution because of the window decorations.

- not sure advciv related - but - my money is on 100% and stable, 150 , never had a minus since, maybe doto too much money... edit: looking at the fin advisor - all my expenses are 0 that does not seem right.

As soon as you have a 2nd city, there should be expenses, i.e. the city screen should show a maintenance cost greater than 1.

 

[keldath]

Hey buddy,
Answering via phone for quick reply,
Resolution might be due to the defs ive set. Ill play with.
Peaxe treaty, atleast it wasnt just a PT, cause it came with tech request. Maybe some arbitrary, just the word, Agrement.

In doto, i made it to start with 2 settlers... Ive gotten to 3, i also looked at the civic, no matter tge upkeep, it was 0.
I also added eventually a stack of doom of axemam, checked the fin adv, nadda, unit upkeep still on 0, all on 0.

Open borders, never! No one is allowed in, i play Covid quarantine style
I think we once spoke, maybe you should consider added, do not bother us diplo action, as in recdcm mod, i loved that, takes off ai bugging you.

Ill add a save later,
Ill also try to dbug as you requested.
As for maintanance, assuming its not latest advc issue coukd you take a look at my 106 dev branch? Everything is updated there, maybe i screwed something with dpi maintenance, at least that what comes to. Mind, though I didn't see such.

Finnally i play

 

[Leoreth]

@Leoreth: I assume that this thread could remain unchanged here under "Modpacks" (same deal as with Realism Invictus); wouldn't want to break hyperlinks, bookmarks and habits. My impulse would be to name the subforum "Civ 4 - Advanced Civ" (following the convention, redundant as it may be) and place one sticky thread "Download & Info" in there, closed for replies, that'll mostly just link to this thread and the download page. Actually, that sticky thread could "blend in" the database page as it's done e.g. by the Middle Earth. I never found out how this is done; maybe through the "Additional Information URL" or "Alternative Support URL" fields on the "Edit Resource" page? Probably I can create that thread myself and then just, say, report it to you for closing and stickying.
Obviously we can sort out details through private messages – however you prefer. (I hope there won't be very many details to burden you with.) Just thought I'd spell out the basic approach here so that everyone's in the loop.

Yeah. I can ask for the forum to be created right away. Didn't know until just now that you can merge threads and resources like that, but I can ask about that too. Admins will probably know how it works. I think I have everything I need right now, most likely it will begin with some waiting until an admin finds the time. Still, please contact me via DM too so we have a paper trail, if any questions come up I'd rather discuss them there instead of cluttering this thread.

 

[f1rpo]

@Leoreth: Found it: Under "Resource Tools", i.e. when viewing the resource page as the author, there's "Reassign Resource to Different Thread". Haven't actually tested it, but seems obvious enough. OK, then I'll make the official request via DM to you tomorrow. Thanks.

 

[f1rpo]

Peaxe treaty, atleast it wasnt just a PT, cause it came with tech request. Maybe some arbitrary, just the word, Agrement

Yes, it might be enough if it just looks a bit different from the "Peace Treaty" upon ending a war.
"10-Turn Peace Treaty", "Sign Peace Treaty" or something. Since it works exactly like a peace treaty after making peace, I'd like to use the same term.

0 expenses: I've sent you a brief message.

Open borders, never! No one is allowed in, i play Covid quarantine style

Then the OB requests are going to be a nuisance even if they work correctly.

I think we once spoke, maybe you should consider added, do not bother us diplo action, as in recdcm mod, i loved that, takes off ai bugging you.

Yes, here's the previous discussion. But I guess there are AI offers that you are interested in – just not Open Borders. An exponential backoff algorithm for all AI contact delays could work. E.g. a 20-turn delay on the first declined OB offer, 40 turns after the second declined OB offer in a row etc. In the case of offers that can come with a discount, e.g. tech trades, the escalating delays could be another incentive not to renegotiate every time.

 

[keldath]

Hi,
Coukd civ today,
But,
I looked at tge func of player ai infltioncakc.. 100 sometging, that you added, its not used from what i saw.

Also, in no maintenance, i sae with 3 cities,
I got +3 gold from distance abd - 3 from number.
Seems odd,, i ran some tests with advciv, i didnt see the maintenance chabge also, or im wrong,, i cant remember, il check nore tomorrow.