Advanced Civ

[f1rpo]

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.

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.

I don't want to display information prominently that is rarely relevant. Because (a) I do find it distracting and (b) because it communicates wrong priorities. I think we're both attentive to details and appreciate a functional UI, so, if we differ on (a), then it's probably due to some other mental or physical (eye sight, screen resolution) difference. Well, you've probably made the right call by sticking to the BUG defaults.

I don't think total culture is a useful heuristic for Free Speech; the utility of additional culture varies too much from city to city. Speaking of heuristics, the AI (through code by karadoc) actually computes a culture pressure value for each of its cities and evaluates Free Speech based on that (and the prospects for culture victory).

I can see how it's strange when, upon increasing the culture slider, commerce gets subtracted from the total gold or research output and seems to just disappear. Not that far from the truth though and still better than to suggest that there is some sort of national culture pool.

No UI feature is unused.

In that spirit, and seeing that there is apparently room on the BUG menu for three drop-down boxes that set the color of the gold rate display, – there ought to be room too for another checkbox that re-enables the total culture rate. For now, it can be restored by deleting two lines marked with "advc.004p" from Assets\Python\Screens\CvMainInterface.py.

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.

Oh, it could be that sounds for completed production orders get played again when a choose-production popup gets relaunched. The mod relaunches popups sometimes in order to kill popups that are no longer relevant. I'll try to check.

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 [...].

I doubt that this is happening on my end, but, as the (closed-source) EXE is involved with this, – who knows, there might be some race condition causing problems only on certain hardware. Actually, I've had to disable the relaunching/ updating of popups for multiplayer games because popups were triggering multiple times.

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 thought there was at least a link into the appendix, but - nope. I'll add a note. I don't think an .fpk can be disabled or removed while the mod is running, so an option could only be part of an installer. Don't want to go there.

I'll get to your other comments and questions, but will have to call it a day for today.

 

[f1rpo]

The subforum has been created, thanks to Leoreth and some unnamed admin:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/forums/civ-4-advanced-civ.603/​

It's possible that only I am able to post there at this point, – but my guess is that it's open to all (edit: confirmed), and, in that case, please feel free to create threads there. Also feel free to continue posting here, whichever seems more practical for the subject at hand.

 

[keldath]

Mazal Tov !

this is a land mark for AdvCiv.
im very glad for you.

you should leave a big red message on your first post that directs to there.


****
maybe have a sticky now, with advciv modmods

 

[Leoreth]

State Property looks pretty attractive here – although it doesn't remove colony maintenance (a K-Mod change).

Any thoughts on bringing back reduced/removed colony maintenance through another civic? I know it's your philosophy to be cautious about introducing new effects or XML tags but considering it's technically a vanilla feature removed by K-Mod... thematically speaking, reduced colony maintenance would fit well with Mercantilism and give a boost to an otherwise rather situational civic.

 

[f1rpo]

Instead of "State Property doesn't remove colony maintenance" it could be "No Colony Maintenance moved from State Property to Mercantilism" in the manual. Nice.

Mercantilism already has three effects:

The record is held by State Property at 4. It's understandable as those civics have rather severe drawbacks that a single positive effect can't easily make up for.
Vassalage also already has 3 effects, one of them -25% number-of-cities maintenance added by K-Mod. Wouldn't want to add another maintenance effect to that.

Maybe a civ spread out across multiple landmasses would be loath to lose foreign trade, i.e. the effects might be antisynergistic. But then, the intercontinental trade modifier does apply to domestic trade routes, so I don't suppose a maritime empire is especially badly suited for Mercantilism.

So, could do I guess. What I'd like to do sooner though, at least if it weren't more effort, is this (from the DoC forum):

Lastly, I would also like to change colony maintenance at some point. Overseas city below a certain amount of population and/or development (like buildings) could be treated as "colonies", which do not cost distance maintenance but instead colony maintenance. Colony maintenance exists as a mechanic in BtS, where it is incurred by having overseas vassals (this is already disabled by RFC), but it could be easily retooled to a city based maintenance that does not scale with distance, making far flung colonial empires more sustainable.

I've also been thinking of giving Jail -25% colony maintenance – to help civs that are split evenly among two continents. Creating a vassal is clearly not viable then. Having to run Mercantilism could still be quite a handicap – though it's at least a lifeline.
Well, none of these ideas are mutually exclusive.

Edit: sp.

 

[crullerdonut]

I like the idea to have "no colony payments" for Mercantilism. Not only would it make Mercantilism pretty powerful in certain late-game empires (especially when there are large trade deficits... which is no longer visible ), but it would also make sense, in terms of flavor. Mercantilism is already pretty nice if you have a bunch of vassals, since you can still get trade routes from them.

The -25% colony maintenance from Jails is also a neat idea. Why not have both?

 

[crullerdonut]

I noticed a very minor thing:
It appears that extraneous commas ( , ) have appeared in front of lists for Buildings in the Civilopedia.

Vanilla (with BUG but no BULL):


AdvCiv:


There are now commas after the bullet point for some entries for many Buildings. Maybe this was associated with additionally listing some effects like into the Special Effects area.

 

[f1rpo]

Why not have both?

To quote Leo once again:

programming machine broke

Nah, I know it's a rhetorical question ... I see no harm in implementing both, but they'll be new XML tags.

There are now commas after the bullet point for some entries for many Buildings. Maybe this was associated with additionally listing some effects like into the Special Effects area.

Thanks, I found the issue. Only yield rate and commerce rate changes were affected. One more refactoring change gone wrong.

EDIT: I just checked, and the wide city bars are there in vanilla BtS + BUG, without BULL.

OK, interesting. I'll try to resurrect that option when I get around to adding the other UI options on my (short) list. I've also put the icons on that list. Come to think of it, a icon for the city with the next projected GP birth could be helpful when playing without the main screen GP bar (as I usually do). I'd add a separate option for that though.

[...] 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. [...]

Spoiler :

The river graphic can look misleading all right. (And at the mouth of a river, a diagonally adjacent land tile does have river access.)

I still don't think I want to mention the river or lake in help text. Brevity aside, it could be a little puzzling for players who never had doubts about the range of rivers (or don't recall those doubts) or don't think of Levee when founding their capital. Not to say that getting a Levee can't be important, but not getting that Levee still seems like a gentle way to learn about river sources. Inspecting any tile at a river source that does not happen to have fresh water from a lake will also impart that knowledge. Being surprised by the lack of Levee when it really hurts seems quite unlucky.

In my game, it did not allow any boat units either. [...] 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.

No ships being allowed is a bug in my code. Well, "bug," it's not working as intended at all. Will be fixed (is already on my end). The lack of trade routes is a BtS issue; also fixed. BtS only lets trade pass through a tile if that tile could hypothetically connect a resource i.e. if there's a route or river or (with Sailing/ Astronomy) if it's a water tile. So adding a route will allow trade to pass through the fort (once trade routes are updated at end of turn), but that's not very logical as ships don't travel on land routes.

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.

Showing a projection for the "bottom line" of a civics change is troublesome, but showing something simpler, like the number of worked and unworked Farms for Serfdom wouldn't be too difficult. Probably still not a high enough priority to actually happen (by my hand).

Balance of trade:

Spoiler :

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. [...] 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.

I removed that one for lack of space. Didn't want there to be a vertical scrollbar. As for plausibility, I think the notion that trade route commerce represents (only) exports has existed only in that one row of the Demographics screen. Regardless of this detail, one can probably argue that, at some point of the game, a civ should have a clear understanding of how much another civ benefits commercially from bilateral trade. If one wants to argue for secret trade route yield, one could assume that trade route commerce also covers tech diffusion through trade, which could be difficult to quantify.

The space problem on the Demographics tab doesn't seem easy to solve. Also seems unnecessary to have players guess what is meant by imports and exports and worry about their terrible trade deficit. However, foreign trade route commerce (FTRC) could easily be shown per-civ on the Info tab of the Foreign Advisor (maybe only in hover text). If aggregate data is more desirable, then perhaps there's a place for that on the Info tab too or maybe in the Mercantilism hover on the Civics screen. That said, FTRC is relevant for all decisions about Open Borders.

I don't think FTRC information (aggregate or broken down) is all that useful because it says little about the alternative trade routes with third parties that the second civ may fall back on. What an enterprising player would like to know is how much the total trade route commerce of the foreign civ will go down when OB are canceled, or how much it will increase through signing OB. I'll have to think about how a player gauges that difference.

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

Those screens can't be modified, or at least not directly. The Custom Game and World Size screens use the same text key TXT_KEY_SEALEVEL_LOW (and ..._HIGH). Maybe a hack will work that temporarily replaces the text loaded for TXT_KEY_SEALEVEL_LOW (with just the word "Low") when on the World Size screen.

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.

Point taken

Ashoka:

Spoiler :

The spelling change would be consistent with Gilgamesh and Hatshepsut, but I don't know ... Seeing it typed out

Ashoka​

instead of

Asoka​

looks so unfamiliar to the Civ player's eye. Also, the Asoka spelling with omitted diacritic seems to be neither uncommon nor outright incorrect: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Asoka
Also brings to mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assur
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susa
Fwiw, the former appears as "Ashur" in the Babylonian city list (the German translator used Assur), the latter as Shushan in the Babylonian and as Susa in the Persian city list.
Perhaps this should be changed along with "Montezuma" -> "Montezuma II" at some later time, i.e. after version 1.0 (if that time ever comes).

Misdirected links in Civilopedia: I think I know how to fix that. At least I'll make a note about doing so.

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.

Broken links or misinformation about game rules is arguably worth correcting. Most of the strategy advice should really be thrown out eventually because it just verbalizes or rephrases the effects – which isn't worthless, but not worth having this kind of redundancy for. I'm pretty sure I don't want to edit the historical background. That said, some of it might just be too wrong to be left alone. The paragraph about the Indian physique in the Fast Worker article comes to mind. (The unit should also be renamed, but there doesn't seem to be a good name.)

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.

I don't think you're actually using the expanding scoreboard – the BUG scoreboard string will disable all the fly-out columns. So hopefully you can just disable "Expand on Hover" on the BUG menu to resolve this issue. The problem was reported before and I thought I had fixed it. I suspect that one or several columns that I normally keep disabled are causing the delay. I'll see if I can reproduce the issue by enabling them.

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. [...]

That's a good point. At least I never thought of it.

[...] after a game is won or lost [...] 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. [...]

If the same logic as in Debug mode is used after victory, then a recent change of mine should cover this. (If not, then victory should probably have the same effect as Debug mode.)

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?

Can currently be done by reducing the time value of MISSION_NUKE in Assets\XML\Units\Civ4UnitInfos.xml. The time value gets divided by 4, so the current value corresponds to 10 seconds. I've just tested 1 second, 0 probably also works. Also forgot to check what happens with the animation and sound (had both disabled). I guess this should be another BUG option. Tying it to the fast-attack option would make sense, but I think most players have that enabled, and I'm not sure if quite as many players want to get rid of the nuke delay. Depending on what the animation looks like, perhaps a reasonably short mission time could be used when fast-attack is enabled. Some other mission times could also use a haircut: recon, airbomb and (religion) spread. Too bad that the regular combat animations can't be sped up (I've tried); can only disable them entirely.

I think this covers the UI stuff (for now). AI and gameplay yet to be gotten to. Not to mention implementing some of it. Well, I know it also takes you a lot of time to describe and explain these issues, and I do appreciate it.

 

[Leoreth]

On the matter of As(h)oka, I favour Ashoka. Never seen Asoka outside of Civ4.

 

[crullerdonut]

Come to think of it, a icon for the city with the next projected GP birth could be helpful when playing without the main screen GP bar (as I usually do). I'd add a separate option for that though.

Ooo, that's a nice idea.

Spoiler :

I guess another thing you could theoretically add is an icon for the city with the most Espionage Point production (only showing it if the slider is being used). It might be more trouble than it's worth, though. It would basically show, at a glance, where the Scotland Yard is located while running an Espionage Economy, but unlike with , , and , there is no National Wonder which permanently makes that city specialize in . So, it probably would always be less useful information. It also risks confusing the player. ("What's this? Is my city being spied upon? What does this mean?")

gentle way to learn about river sources

I added the information on the Civilopedia on Fandom, for both Levee and Terrain. So, at least the information is out there for the modern player.

So adding a route will allow trade to pass through the fort (once trade routes are updated at end of turn), but that's not very logical as ships don't travel on land routes.

I'd classify it as an oversight on the part of the original devs. They updated forts in BtS, but they somehow forgot about . In my screenshot, I sailed a Caravel through the Fort to highlight the ridiculous situation that ships could visit, but could not.

foreign trade route commerce (FTRC) could easily be shown per-civ on the Info tab of the Foreign Advisor (maybe only in hover text).

How about this:

Spoiler :

On the Foreign Advisor (F4) Info Tab, what if the yield numbers were color-coded, based on the ratio of ( the that the player is earning from the Open Borders : the that the opponent earning from Open Borders) ? The color scheme could be the same as with the BUG scoreboard for military power, or maybe just the same scheme as in the AdvCiv Glance tab. Then, upon hovering the cursor over the number, a hover hint could show the ratio and how much the target civilization is earning on the Open Borders.

Thus, at a glance, the player could see which trade relationships are helping the other civilizations more than they are helping the player. With a lot of red numbers, then the player would have a good reason to switch to Mercantilism, if s/he wants to stop being a sugar momma/daddy to their neighbors. A lot of green numbers, and then the player will know that they're being an effective parasite off their wealthy neighbors.

I'm not sure if an aggregate figure would be all that useful, compared to the above. Seeing a bunch of red numbers (with an explanation by hovering over them) should provide better insight than the old Demographics -> Import/Export ratio ever could.

You're right: with this information, the player still wouldn't know exactly how much of a punishment to the target civ closing borders / running Mercantilism would be, considering that the target civ will always re-adjust its to the next best solution. I can't think of a good way that this problem could be solved. But, I don't think that the player should necessarily be granted such detailed information anyway.

Maybe a hack will work that temporarily replaces the text loaded for TXT_KEY_SEALEVEL_LOW (with just the word "Low") when on the World Size screen.

More hard-coded stuff, eh? Reminds me of how the background logo always seems to be cropped incorrectly. Also "hack" makes it sound a bit undignified. Maybe it'd be better characterized as a "therapeutic prosthesis".

Point taken

...that took me a second. Good one

The paragraph about the Indian physique in the Fast Worker article comes to mind.

Another one which comes to mind for me, is with the Public Transportation, which reads: "At the turn of the twentieth century, most modern cities were cesspools of filth. In the United States, the affluent often moved to the suburbs, using automobiles to return to their jobs in the cities." I'd argue that the quote is very white-centric as far as the United States goes, as it dismisses the (largely non-white) inner cities as literal "cesspools of filth" and totally ignores the contributions and achievements made by those (largely non-white) people despite the adversity. Dismissing modern cities as "cesspools of filth" (and crime) is something which is now very obviously associated with one particular political party in the US.

I don't think you're actually using the expanding scoreboard – the BUG scoreboard string will disable all the fly-out columns.

I'll have to bug-test this later and report back.

I'm not sure if quite as many players want to get rid of the nuke delay

I'll be so bold as to suggest that no one wants to be forced to wait 10 seconds per nuke when animations aren't even shown due to Low graphics settings. But for those with higher graphical settings: maybe there could be an option on the Graphics Options screen: "Show Nuclear Blasts".
Glad to know that there's an option to disable it already, by editing the xml file.

Well, I know it also takes you a lot of time to describe and explain these issues, and I do appreciate it.

My pleasure. It's easy for me, after all. You're the one who actually has to do the hard work of figuring out if my commentary is worth any salt/fits into your vision/is worth the effort, and then figuring out how to implement changes, and then actually doing it, and then bug-testing... and so on.

 

[Leoreth]

Having to sit through multiple 10 second nukesplosions is actually a much more effective deterrent for getting into nuclear wars than the fallout or diplo penalties.

 

[crullerdonut]

I'll have to bug-test this later and report back.

I poked around and found that the cause of the lag while hovering over the scoreboard is due to the "Expand on Hover" option. This occurs even when all the underscored options in "Column Order" are deleted. So, the game lags while hovering the cursor over the text in the scoreboard, regardless of whether or not the scoreboard actually expands out.


I was foolish and didn't copy-paste my usual columns into a text editor while messing around with this, and now I've forgotten which columns I've deleted. (My clipboard was overwritten while moving around the screenshot ) What are the default columns now? I believe that's what I was using.

 

[crullerdonut]

What do you think about the idea I broached here on
Ranking Leader Characteristics
about balancing the Japanese unique building, the Shale Plant, by letting it be built with +100% with access to Stone? Here's my rationale:

1. Unique Buildings which come late in the game need to have extra-high bonuses in order to be impactful, because most games will already be mostly decided at that point. This is why the Mall is so powerful, for example, with an additional +20% compared to the Mint's +10% or the Stock Exchange's +15%, and the Mall also gets a whole bunch of +1 Happiness from the "Hit" resources
2. I don't think that the Shale Plant's +10% and ability to provide power without Coal pulls enough weight to counteract its late appearance
   
3. The other Assembly-Line-unlocked Unique Building, Germany's Assembly Plant, gets built with +50% with access to Coal (and Frederick additionally gets +100% from being Organized)
   
4. In terms of flavor, giving Japan a (slight) boost to the ability to industrialize would be a nod to the Meiji period of rapid transformation and industrialization
   
5. Also in terms of flavor, shale is a kind of rock. So, it would stand to reason that if a civilization has special access to Stone, that it could also have special access to Shale

 

[f1rpo]

I poked around and found that the cause of the lag while hovering over the scoreboard is due to the "Expand on Hover" option. This occurs even when all the underscored options in "Column Order" are deleted.

I'll see if I can get the scoreboard to ignore "Expand on Hover" when no fly-out columns are configured.

[...] What are the default columns now? I believe that's what I was using.

The default string in BUG is !WSZVC?EPTUNBDRAHMQ*LO. The AdvCiv default is _J_P_D_B_N!?2WSZCTURAHQ*LO, i.e. it misses only V (master civs), E (positive espionage weight) and M (fist icon). I can add those and check all the boxes under "Extra Columns"/ "Relations", and my frame rate (Ctrl+Shift+F) still doesn't drop, or only for a split second. So my conjecture that some BUG column is causing the delay seems to be false.

On the Foreign Advisor (F4) Info Tab, what if the yield numbers were color-coded, based on the ratio of ( the that the player is earning from the Open Borders : the that the opponent earning from Open Borders) ? [...] Then, upon hovering the cursor over the number, a hover hint could show the ratio and how much the target civilization is earning on the Open Borders. [...]

Any such information will give away rivals' trade partners that the human player hasn't yet met. Maybe that's OK if the "view demographics" espionage threshold is met. Coloring the yield numbers could be a good approach. I'd tend to let the player set a (single) color and a ratio threshold on the BUG menu. I don't know if I'll get around to implementing this. Still seems like fairly vague info for a minor aspect of the OB/ Mercantilism decision. I mean, the player's own trade route profit tends to be much more important. (As a German, I might be a little biased about the whole matter. )

More hard-coded stuff, eh?

I expect that the game setup screens are implemented in Python just like the rest of the UI, but that all screens dealing with application launch and game start were run through a Python compiler and then included in the EXE in order to make them inaccessible to modders. (Not sure why.)

Reminds me of how the background logo always seems to be cropped incorrectly.

The one with/ above the dome? Looks OK here.

Another one which comes to mind for me, is with the Public Transportation, which reads: "At the turn of the twentieth century, most modern cities were cesspools of filth. In the United States, the affluent often moved to the suburbs, using automobiles to return to their jobs in the cities." [...]

I'll just replace the first sentence with "Unprecedented growth in urban population took place over the course of the 19th century." from the Wikipedia article on urbanization.

I'll be so bold as to suggest that no one wants to be forced to wait 10 seconds per nuke when animations aren't even shown due to Low graphics settings.

I'll do some tests to see which setting(s) specifically hide the animation (other long animations too perhaps). Should be easy enough to use 0 mission time in those cases. Will also have to see what a shortened mission time looks like when animations and sound are enabled.

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.

I wasn't aware that "Play Now" always uses the defaults; but I guess it does. Maybe that can be changed so that the values from the last game (stored in CivilizationIV.ini) are used. I don't know if that would be more convenient in general. By toggling the default, I just wanted to make players aware that this mod doesn't attempt to fix all the obvious issues with random events. Not an important reason, so maybe I'll just toggle it back.

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.

Doubtful if such a game option could be implemented. I've already adjusted the grid sizes of some unusual map scripts, but I don't think Continents needs special treatment. Hopefully will be less of an issue with the new starting position finder. Anyway, the original default player counts can be restored in Assets\XML\GameInfo\Civ4WorldSizeInfos.xml.

@Elkad; following up on my post about the distribution of seafood: There was indeed a bug that had allowed seafood resources of the same type to appear adjacent to each other. That explains, to an extent, why Fish would appear both more frequently, namely in clusters, and more scarcely than in BtS – because the clusters leave larger parts of the map without any Fish. Also, for v0.98, I've increased the range of Crab while making Fish a little less frequent, and, more importantly, increased the overall density of resources a little. That older change I mentioned that is supposed to make resources a bit sparser on larger maps made them slightly sparser on Standard-size maps too, which hadn't been my intention. Actually, I had wanted resources to be a bit denser than in BtS at sizes below Standard, and that appears to be the case now.

 

[f1rpo]

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.

AI city placement has already been overhauled, and the trade-off between coast with Lighthouse and additional workable inland tiles is being evaluated. This doesn't mean that it's always evaluated correctly and rationally. I'd have to see the city, and ideally also a savegame shortly before the AI founds the city. Once a city has been founded, it becomes difficult to find out why the AI placed it there. But, to be clear, I don't think cities one off the coast should be a highly unusual occurrence. I see it like "a knight on the rim" in chess (i.e. only a rule of thumb).

(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?

AI unit roles are quite inflexible. An Infantry trained for the purpose of guarding a city will pretty much only ever do that. Eventually, the AI will randomly train some units for offensive purposes; those may then form a city attack stack. That stack doesn't have to be huge, but a few units are needed before the AI looks for a target city. It would be nice if someone could address this, along with naval assaults on Barbarians (recent post by me related to that subject), but it's not an entirely low-hanging fruit. Some dedicated code would have to be added, I think, that causes the AI to train (or repurpose) units specifically for attacking a Barbarian city (or Minor Civ city in a scenario) – if the city is worth conquering and if there isn't some more important target to to focus on.

 

[f1rpo]

Responding to, at long last, the balance changes proposed by @crullerdonut ...

Shale Plant:

Spoiler :

What do you think about [...] balancing the Japanese unique building, the Shale Plant, by letting it be built with +100% with access to Stone? Here's my rationale: [...]

I'm not enthusiastic about buffing weak uniques, especially not buildings as most civs don't get very much out of their UB. That's why I've e.g. reverted the K-Mod buff to Dunn. The UB are also often so obscure or contrived that I wouldn't want to make the ones that appear late powerful enough to compensate for the delay. (A minor consideration is also the effect on game balance when starting in a later era.) I do agree, broadly, that the late uniques should have greater upsides than the early ones, and there are still a couple of early UU that should arguably be nerfed.

I've read a bit about shale plants a while ago. A shale plant normally produces shale oil from oil shale, and the Civilopedia also states that "such plants kept the Japanese navy afloat.” Power plants that burn oil shale exist too, e.g. in Estonia, but I doubt that they existed in Japan. Even the "navy afloat" plan didn't really work out: The “US Strategic Bombing Survey” (1945) states that “[p]lans to develop a synthetic oil industry failed to yield significant results.” This building could work nicely as a German lignite plant providing Oil through hydrogenation, but, as it is, I don't think I'd want to put lipstick on it.

[...] in terms of flavor, shale is a kind of rock. So, it would stand to reason that if a civilization has special access to Stone, that it could also have special access to Shale

Pretty different from the rocks that get quarried for dimension stone, but, yeah, it's all rock and I wouldn't mind if Shale Plant already had that ability.

Wrt. game balance, while Coal isn't usually difficult to get, at least the Japanese can cut it off from most of their cities to avoid 2 bad health from Factory.

Lumbermill:

Spoiler :

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.

I still say that K-mod-style Lumbermills (only +1 ) should be available at Machinery like the rest of their Mill brethren, with their +1 coming with Guilds alongside the Workshop +1, in order to make Lumbermills more useful. And if you want to talk about real-life/game correspondence, reciprocating saw-mills were in use as early as the 3rd century AD, with the Hierapolis sawmill.

The production ability was moved from RP to Guilds in K-Mod 1.46, i.e. only fairly recently. (The improvement itself had moved in K-Mod 1.45.) I didn't adopt the 1.46 change because I had already buffed Lumbermill beyond the 1.45 change by giving it +1 commerce regardless of river access and by shortening the build time. The +1 commerce only buffs non-river tiles, but that's fine with me: I think fighting players' incentive to clear river tiles is a losing battle, and it makes sense historically insofar that riparian forests are the easiest to exploit. Just +1 commerce is also simpler. So I want to keep those changes, and the K-Mod change on top of that would be too much in my book at this point. karadoc was hesitant about the Guilds change to begin with:

As for lumbermills... if lumbermills came with Guilds, they'd be a very powerful improvement. They'd outclass workshops and watermills; which are the only non-hills productivity improvements available. Having lumbermills come sooner wouldn't just make people think about keeping forests, it would become one of the most used improvements of that era. A few people have said that all their forests are usually gone by the time they get lumbermills. Maybe I'm a bit unusual, but I tend to have a few forests still around when I get replaceable parts. I like to keep forests when they are in the overlap of fat-crosses, so that two cities can have the health bonus. Maybe that's just me though.

Beyond making Lumbermill useful – it already is in my estimation –, it would be nice to reduce deforestation in the first half of the game. I don't want to take further measures to that end currently, but I agree that, in a mod with a slightly wider scope, Machinery would be a good place for Lumbermill. Sustainable forestry is an early modern thing, but, focusing on the name "lumbermill," – the Romans did have those.

Misc.:

Spoiler :

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.

If this is mainly about mopping up, then perhaps some tweak could make revolts less of an issue once the game is decided.

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.

That's another change kept from K-Mod 1.45 (fyi/ fwiw).

(Snow: the new Ice! )

"Ice" would be fine with me if that wasn't also the name of the shelf ice feature.

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.

Slavery is too early I'm afraid. Maybe if Slavery moves to IW (as discussed elsewhere). Otherwise the Monarchy tech would be my best bet for enabling worker stealing. (Doesn't make a great deal of sense, but ...)

Colossus:

Spoiler :

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.

It's because I'm having the Great Lighthouse go obsolete at Astronomy. Apart from Lanstro not having remembered that change, I felt that it worked well in his game. It's true that the intercontinental trade cushions the loss of Colossus in BtS, but losing both Great Lighthouse and Colossus at Astronomy would be tough. Colossus isn't widely considered a powerful wonder in BtS, and K-Mod has already increased its production cost. Obsoletion at Chemistry isn't even necessarily a buff; if one bee-lines to Cannon, obsoletion at Astronomy is preferable. Sure, Colossus with Financial trait is quite a combo. And it may well be that the AI isn't interested enough in the Colossus. Someday, I should gather some statistics about wonder construction dates on AI Auto Play and tweak the evaluation of wonders that go way too late or early. So far, I haven't been paying much attention to that (and haven't changed the AI code for evaluating buildings much either).

Great Spy points:

Spoiler :

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.

I don't think an espionage economy needs to be viable that early. Unlocking stuff gradually is what the tech tree is for. That said, there is the 1 spy from Courthouse and, apart from being another specialist for a GP farm, it's not much use on its own. So I agree that a 2nd spy slot around that time would be a good thing. Castle would be another candidate. Already has rather too many abilities, but the specialist slot could replace the espionage bonus. I guess that bonus is not nearly sufficient for an espionage economy anyway. Great Spy points for Versailles won't be much help, but I'll probably change it anyway (Merchant points currently) – if only to symbolically even out the change to Great Wall.

Forest Preserve, Environmentalism:

Spoiler :

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.

I've given FP +1 commerce regardless of rivers (see Lumbermill above). I don't agree that preserved Jungles aren't worthwhile with National Park. Another specialist in a GP farm should always be worth having. I find it unfortunate that all tropical vegetation gets cleared, but mainly for reasons of immersion or aesthetics. I don't see the proposed change make a significant difference here. I also don't like to suggest that food is grown in a jungle (wildlife?) preserve.

I would like certain improvements to coexist with jungle, but such changes aren't realistic for the time being. Chichen Itza could be given some "Maya agriculture" ability. I don't think anyone would mind a completely new ability for that wretched wonder. But probably would be quite a bit of effort to implement.

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

State Property is at Low upkeep, ever since patch 1.61 I think.
I see Environmentalism mainly as a remedy for civs that badly need extra health. Small civs probably, with too few resources; so the extra happiness is also welcome. Or I guess if Global Warming unhappiness gets really bad. I haven't messed with Environmentalism; I'm wary of making it really competitive because it seems rather utopian at the time when it becomes available. Also, I'd prefer to nerf Free Market and State Property, even though that would be a more high-profile change than buffing Environmentalism (and Mercantilism).
I feel that the notion that protecting the environment is expensive should be captured somehow and not just through the absence of +1 trade route.

Meltdowns:

Spoiler :

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.

Thanks for testing this. In reality, I'm not sure if Fukushima should fully count. Between 1950 and 2000, about 35 turns on Normal speed, there has been one meltdown globally. I agree that your test suggests that it's much more likely to see none in K-Mod/AdvCiv. I'll look into increasing the probability.

Divine Right/ Versailles:

Spoiler :

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

Kek-Mod has that, at Communism. Can be done just through XML: Git commit 1 2
But, considering that special commerce modifiers don't apply to production processes, would anyone really prefer 1 over 1, even when running an espionage economy?

[...] I'd say that Divine Right needs to be made at least slightly attractive. As it is, once the Divine Right wonders have been built, it's a totally worthless tech. It's pretty annoying to have civs keep trying to pawn it off on you, well into the modern era.
Besides the "build " idea, maybe it could give +1 to specialists, or maybe +25% . (Rationale in terms of flavor: Divine Right of Kings, which allows the building of Versailles, enhances the centralization of power as exemplified by the Sun King Louis XIV. This central court was attended by ambassadors/courtiers from across Europe; this centralization would allow for greater ease of spying on those ambassadors.)

I get the Versailles connection with spies, but Divine Right is also (perhaps more so) the Islam tech, so an espionage ability could be taken to refer to Islam. That's really an unhappy marriage, but, unless I move Versailles elsewhere and rename Divine Right, it is what it is. I agree that the tech should have some lasting effect (and maybe espionage is the least bad option).

To the extent that the espionage economy just needs to be buffed (I don't know that to be the case), the government center ability of Versailles is pretty simple, so that wonder could do something in addition, e.g. provide an espionage bonus to specialists. K-Mod-Z – which I had been meaning to bring to your attention for some time – makes Versailles a kind of mirror image of Palace: +1,+6 ,+4 . But 4 isn't much at all of course.
I've been thinking of giving the Protective trait +25% espionage. Can't have too many unpopular abilities.

edit: sp.

 

[crullerdonut]

at least the Japanese can cut it off from most of their cities to avoid 2 bad health from Factory.

Has anyone actually pursued that strategy? I just don't understand how someone could selectively connect Coal only to the Ironworks city, but to no others.

Otherwise the Monarchy tech would be my best bet for enabling worker stealing. (Doesn't make a great deal of sense, but ...)

I'd say just go with Monarchy for now, and we'll see how it goes.

I don't think an espionage economy needs to be viable that early. Unlocking stuff gradually is what the tech tree is for.

The Espionage Economy is already viable in the early game, but only with either 1.) never building a single Wonder and letting the 1 Spy Specialist from Courthouse slowly get out a Great Spy, or 2.) building the Great Wall. But, if you didn't plan for those from turn 0, then it's not viable.
Having EE be viable in the Classical/Medieval era is important, IMO, because it means that, in games where you're stuck with horrible terrain near someone who's running away with the game, you don't have to quit the game for lack of hope.
My vote is still for +2 Spy on Courthouse because Library gets +2 Scientist. If a second Spy slot has to wait until (the expensive) Engineering, then by the same logic, the second Scientist slot should be moved away from Library elsewhere, the second Artist slot from Theatre should be moved elsewhere; same with Markets; with Grocers, etc.

I don't agree that preserved Jungles aren't worthwhile with National Park.

That's if you can build the 300 National Park in a Jungle-dominated city. With Grassland Forest, one can at least survive on those tiles (2/1) and, by building Lumbermills on top of them, it's straightforward to build the NP (as well as specialist-enabling infrastructure like the Factory and Industrial Park for Engineers, a Library, etc.) and then convert the Lumbermills to Forest Preserves. Jungles do not have that option. Instead, there are really only two options: 1.) make sure there's plenty of food, and then chop down several Jungles to build Workshops; or 2.) switch into Universal Suffrage and just buy the NP and infrastructure for . Option 1.) means that a Jungle National Park city will only get about half as many free specialists compared to a Forest (or even Tundra Forest) NP city. I've done Option 1.), and it was simply a disappointment. I've also tried Option 2.) while playing as Spiritual Brennus: I was able to switch into Universal Suffrage for a short time, but this was extremely expensive--so expensive that I think that the almost certainly would have been better spent elsewhere.

Maybe an alternative would be to make Forest Preserves spread Jungles 10x as fast as they do now (but not Forests), and letting them spread diagonally. Then, Option 1.) would be viable: chop down half the Jungles, make Workshops, build your NP and other needed infrastructure, Pillage the Workshops, and then let the Jungles grow back in. A more comprehensive (and realistic?) alternative would be to enable building Forest Preserves on non-Jungle/non-Forest tiles and then give those tiles the additional 10x Jungle spread rate coming from adjacent Jungles. This way, you could build Forest Preserves over the old Workshops and have a decent Jungle National Park city.

an espionage ability could be taken to refer to Islam

On the other hand, there's an association of Theocracy with Christianity, with Theocracy being the warmonger's religious Civic of choice.

Maybe an alternative would be to have Divine Right permanently give +2 with State Religion? (so, +3 altogether) [If that's OP, then maybe just an additional +1 with State Religion instead (so +2 altogether)]. Seems like this would work very nicely, in terms of flavor. It'd give players an incentive to get Divine Right from trades from the AI, instead of the situation now where AIs are basically used-car salesmen trying to pawn off a junker. It would also fit very nicely in with the advent of Nationalism and Drafting (which, let's not forget, Divine Right is actually a lesser-used route to Nationalism)
On second thought, I like this idea better than the Espionage one. Maybe the ability to build could still go to Constitution or somewhere, though.

Spoiler :

This would make Free Religion slightly less attractive, since it effectively gives a slight increase in Happiness so long as multiple religions are present. However, Free Religion is still nice for its Low upkeep, and for Diplomatic reasons.

 

[crullerdonut]

Oh yeah I forgot to mention Revolts:
In the other game that I recently played with AdvCiv, I won by a Domination victory. So, I definitely had to deal with the revolt system.

Actually, it was not too bad to deal with. But, this experience may have been significantly affected by the fact that I built the Sistine Chapel. After conquering a city, I kept moving my stack, only keeping 3-4 defenders on the city, but not enough to actually reduce the Occupation Timer in a reliable way. This way, the conquered cities stayed in resistance and didn't cause crippling Maintenance costs. (This is an interesting mechanic: you can selectively bring cities out of revolt in a way which eases the (possibly massive) increase in Maintenance costs.)
After completing the conquest, I redistributed my troops to bring the cities online. Crucially, I also sent along Jewish Missionaries (my State Religion). Converting the conquered cities has a dramatic effect on revolt chances, so it was critical to convert them. Then, since I had the Sistine Chapel, I got free from settled specialists, and I could build a cheap Jewish Monastery for 5/turn. Before Jewish conversion, I also variously built Theatres and Odeons. I also ran the Culture Slider at 30% for awhile due to an AP vote I had to defy, so this probably helped too.
Since Cannons don't do much to suppress revolts, I could send them away early, and my Cavalry could follow after the revolt chances became lower. This was nice, because Cannons are so slow to move around. Anyway, it wasn't too long before I could send the great bulk of my army over to my next target.
So in this case at least, the AdvCiv revolt system didn't really slow things down too much, if at all. It's important to pause after conquest and consolidate your new holdings, so I'd have to wait a little while before attacking a new target regardless. However, I'm not sure how much this rosy experience was tinted by having the Sistine Chapel.
I've included a couple save files. The first is the period of consolidation after conquering Rome (well, he didn't want to capitulate, so Julius Caesar still lived on an island), and the second is where things are quite ready for another ready for a war with Ragnar, 20 turns later.

By the way, on the topic of the sounds playing for completed builds after a screen is exited, I noticed that there are two screens which cause the pop-ups to re-play: the Civics Screen (F3) and the Religion Advisor (F7). The other screens do not cause this re-playing effect. You can see this in action with the final save, Dingdingdingding.

Before I forget, on the topic of clusters of Fish, I'm not actually sure that this was a bug. I've watched some games of vanilla BtS on YouTube, where multiple Fish can appear right next to each other. I'll have to find an example of clustered fish in some YouTube video or something; I'll let you know.

For another small thing I noticed, which is shared in vanilla BtS: When Monasteries are obsoleted by Scientific Method, you can hover over them in the City Screen and see that their output has changed (and any // from the Apostolic Palace, University of Sankore, and Spiral Minaret are no longer shown). But, Monasteries' hover-hints still show +10% after Scientific Method, even if this is actually not true anymore. Even though this is a behavior that is also exhibited in vanilla BtS, maybe that +10% label should be removed after Scientific Method.

 

[f1rpo]

I'm attaching a pre-release version of AdvCiv 0.98. Not sufficiently tested, and I'd like to fix a few of the issues that @crullerdonut has raised before a proper release. That said, I'll probably release it as soon as I'm confident that there aren't too many egregious bugs. The updated manual is here. (edit: link dead)

Edit (15 Aug): Updated the attachment. Added two items under "Fixed UI bugs" to the changelog. For the record, the original attachment (v0.98-pre1) had 6 downloads.
Edit (18 Aug): Fixed some more issues. v0.98-pre2 had 3 downloads.
Edit (29 Sep): No longer the latest version. I've posted a release candidate here.
Edit (15 Nov): The proper v0.98 release (with the full release notes) has been added to the resource database.

Draft of the release notes (sure to be edited a few times):

Spoiler :

Link to 48-civ DLL yet to be added; and will need to point out the new forum.

This update is mainly concerned with starting positions and the map generator. I've implemented a new algorithm for assigning starting locations that is supposed to partition the available land more evenly than the BtS algorithm. The new algorithm gets used for all scenarios with random starting locations and for the following map scripts:

Fractal, Pangaea (except team games), Continents, PerfectMongoose (except Old World Starts option), Mixed Continents, not too Big or Small, Big and Small, Medium and Small, Hemispheres, Balanced, Tilted Axis, Great Plains, Lakes, Ice Age, Fantasy Realm.​

Whether it is used for third-party map scripts depends on whether those scripts override one of the StartingPlot functions; see the manual (change id 027 in the appendix) for details. The new algorithm can be disabled for all map scripts by setting ENABLE_STARTING_POSITION_ITERATION to 0 in AdvCiv\Assets\XML\GlobalDefines_advc.xml.
I've posted some screenshots comparing AdvCiv 0.97 with 0.98 starting positions in this thread.

Tweaks to the "normalization" of starting sites, i.e. the conversion of terrain and placement of additional resources [change id advc.108]:

Spoiler :

• In addition to the found-city value, the available space for expansion is taken into account when deciding whether a starting site needs to be buffed.
• Far fewer extra forests are placed. (BtS basically places forests everywhere when a site is too weak.) To compensate, slightly more forests are placed during map generation (on average; the forest frequency varies a lot).
• When placing additional resources, resource types that already exist in the city radius are probabilistically avoided, especially in tiles adjacent to the existing resource, and especially for resources that don't normally form groups.
• Gold can no longer be placed as an extra resource.
• Tiles for additional resources are now selected with a (probabilistic) preference for the inner city ring. This should give players more leeway to move their starting settler.
• The location for extra food is now properly randomized. (BtS places food east of the starting site when possible.)
• To avoid adding too much food:
- Food resources are avoided when a site already has enough food and just needs to be buffed.
- Coastal seafood resources are counted as "high-food" resources (i.e. as equivalent to most land food resources) when deciding whether a starting site has enough food.
- Some care is taken not to place too many Flood Plains.

Other tweaks to the map generator: [advc.129]

Spoiler :

• Slightly increased map grid sizes: Back to the BtS dimensions for Small and Standard world size, still a little smaller than in BtS for the other world size settings. [advc.137] Related posts: 1 2
These changes apply mostly just to map scripts modified by the mod (PrivateMaps folder) because most of the original map scripts have their own mappings of world size to grid dimensions.
• Increased the density of resources a bit overall. A change early in the development of AdvCiv made resources somewhat scarcer on larger maps – this is still the case –, but also made them a little bit scarcer on Standard-size and smaller maps. Now the density should be pretty much as in BtS on Standard world size and a little denser on smaller sizes. (Which had been my intention all along I think.)
• Fixed a bug introduced in v0.97 that had caused the "unique range" of resources to be ignored. The most easily observable effect was that Fish resources had appeared next to each other. Bug report (sort of)
• River placement accounts for terrain on both banks equally. (BtS gives the tile at whose southeastern corner a river segment will arrive much higher weight than other surrounding tiles when generating rivers.)
• Slightly increased the attraction of rivers to water tiles; this should result in somewhat shorter rivers overall.
• Reduced the probability of clusters of Silver, Gems and Ivory. (Had already done the same for Gold at an earlier point.)
• Relaxed the latitude requirement of Crab; reduced the frequency of Fish a bit to offset the higher number of Crabs. Related post
• Water resources are no longer placed on tiles that are made unreachable by a Peak. [advc.129d]
• When selecting a continent for a resource that is supposed to occur exclusively on one continent, continents with a high number of suitable tiles are preferred (e.g. tiles with a lot of flat Jungle in the case of Banana).
• World-size adjustment for the minimal distance between Tribal Villages. [advc.314]

Barbarians:
• Decreased the proportion of owned tiles that causes Barbarian activity to reach its peak; i.e. Barbarian activity should pick up and peak earlier than in previous versions (but still a good deal later than in BtS). [advc.300]
• Decreased the attraction of Barbarian cities to strategic resources. [advc.304] Screenshot of a badly placed Barbarian city

Fixed a late-game crash that occurred sometimes when a capitulated vassal broke free. Probably introduced in AdvCiv 0.96. [advc.064d] Bug report

Academy, Military Academy and Scotland Yard are immune to nukes (just as settled Great People are immune). [advc.650] Idea from the "Dawn of Civilization" mod.

Minor changes concerning ice-locked coastal cities:

Spoiler :

• Can produce Work Boats only when there is a reachable water resource; other than that, all ships and Dry Dock can be produced in ice-locked cities, and no ships and no buildings in (freshwater) lakeside cities. As in previous versions, ice-locked cities need to have access to at least 10 passable water tiles to construct coastal buildings other than Dry Dock. [advc.041] Hover text for water tiles now shows "ice-locked" when this threshold isn't reached. [advc.030] Screenshot
• A friendly Fort no longer requires a route in order to connect two adjacent water tiles. (But, for any land connections, a route is still required.) [advc.124] Screenshot showing a city that will receive a trade route through this rule change

Tweaks to AI diplomacy:

Spoiler :

• Made the Open Borders relations boost a bit easier to get by increasing the impact of trade profit by 30%. [advc.130i]
• Made colonial vassals less willing to break free. They had been breaking free far too readily. (In BtS, they never break free.) [advc.112].
• Made the AI more reluctant to liberate cities to small civs (because goodwill from a much smaller civ isn't worth much). [advc.ctr]
• Made Gandhi less willing to declare war at Cautious and lower attitude. [advc.005a]
• Adjusted AI-to-human contact delays to game speed based on the Golden Age modifier (e.g. 200% delay on Marathon). [advc.130r] Related post
• Civic trade value: Spiritual AI leaders should no longer be willing to change civics for just 5 gold. [advc.132]

Minor bugfixes in AdvCiv AI code for razing cities (maintenance calculation, mixup of current and previous owner). These fixes might lead to a bit more razing. [advc.116, advc.ctr, advc.300]

Adopted some more tweaks by @Tholal from the "More Naval AI" (MNAI) mod; mostly in the AI code for units and city management. [advc.mnai]
Fully merged or mostly (Git commits at NotABug.org): 1 2 3 4 5 6
Partly merged: 1 2 3 4

Renamed "Pacal II" to "Pacal". [advc.005] Rationale (Wikipedia)

Fixed UI bugs:

Spoiler :

The first three were probably introduced in v0.97.
• Restored the proper color of the place-sign cursor (Alt+S). Now green again; was gray. Bug report (under "Interface")
• Report random events only to players who have met all civs involved in the event. Related post (last paragraph)
• Occasional Python crash while hovering in Go-To mode. (Was only noticeable with Python exception popups enabled in CivilizationIV.ini.) Bug report
• Updating minimized popups [advc.004x] had caused them to re-play their interface sounds. Bug report
• Music should no longer be inaudible when playing at a flat angle and a high field-of-view value. If it's still not quite right, it could help to set the CAMERA_START_DISTANCE manually in GlobalDefines_advc.xml. [advc.004m] This issue was reported here (2nd quote box) and -maybe- here.

Nuke animation:

Spoiler :

Shortened to a brief camera rumble when playing without Particle Effects and on enemy turns. In those cases, the full animation hadn't been shown correctly anyway. I might implement a separate option for shortening the animation (i.e. without having to disable Particle Effects) at a later time. Related discussion (starting at the end of the post)

Some improvements for the "Aggressive AI (Legacy)" option:

Spoiler :

• Fixed a crash to desktop.
• Brought back the "fist" scoreboard indicator that shows which AI civs have "enough on their hands" despite not being at war with anyone. To enable the indicator, the letter 'M' needs to be added to the Column Order string on the Scores tab of the BUG menu. This has no effect when playing with the UWAI component (i.e. without the Aggressive AI option). [advc.104]
• When Aggressive AI is enabled, the War Trades alert reports status changes of the first indicator. [advc.210a]

Changes only relevant for mod-mods:

Spoiler :

• Made a few more AdvCiv, K-Mod XML tags optional. This should make it easier to merge other mods into AdvCiv.
• Added an XML tag for disabling the dynamic abilities of the Great Wall – so that mod-mods can stop the DLL from disabling some of the abilities depending on the Barbarian game options. [advc.310]
• Fixed a times-100 error that had rendered the DEMAND_BETTER_PROTECTION option (GlobalDefines_advc.xml) useless. Bug report
• Tweaked the DEMAND_BETTER_PROTECTION option as outlined here. That thread also reports a crash that may or may not be fixed now; I haven't been able to reproduce it. [advc.500b]

Misc. code refactoring: Some, but not nearly as much as in v0.97. So, hopefully, not as many new bugs either. Also no major performance optimizations; just a couple of tweaks.

As usually, these release notes omit a bunch of very minor changes. The Git commit history since 23 May covers everything. Note, however, that, apart from changes to starting positions, most of the significant changes up to 9 July were already included in AdvCiv 0.97c.

Thanks to @crullerdonut (although many of his suggestions are yet to be implemented), @Lanstro, @xyx, @Leoreth, @Cruiser76, @keldath and @Elkad for bug reports, recommendations and other feedback.

 

[xyx]

hi f1rpo, in my mod-mod, I am occasionally getting a bug on .97 when ordering to move a unit (point and click), not sure what's going on there:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "CvScreensInterface", line 974, in forceScreenRedraw
  File "CvMainInterface", line 1335, in redraw
  File "CvMainInterface", line 5497, in updateHelpStrings
RuntimeError: unidentifiable C++ exception
ERR: Python function forceScreenRedraw failed, module CvScreensInterface
[\code]