Advanced Civ

[keldath]

@f1rpo sure ,
always looking


the change in the default theme you made to the art cpp, doesnt like my mod.
keep getting the ui mis match error you added.
can you take a look?

 

[f1rpo]

My Doto installation has
Mods/Doto/Resource/Civ4.thm
as the DEFAULT_THEME_NAME in CIV4ArtDefines_Misc.xml,
and the mod folder is named Doto. So that should not result in a warning, but I can't easily test that. If you set a breakpoint toward the end of
CvArtFileMgr::testThemePath
what are the contents of sThmPathModName and sModNameLC?

 

[keldath]

ill check the debugger in a few days.
i guess you need my dev version.

ill debug and report back.

 

[keldath]

ok, checked quickly,

case lower vs original name, thus the error
if (cstring::tolower(sThmPathModName) == sModNameLC)

i changed to:
if (cstring::tolower(sThmPathModName) == cstring::tolower(sModNameLC))

and it works.

 

[f1rpo]

You're right, I forgot to actually convert the "LC" variable to lower case. Thanks.

 

[keldath]

glad to assist

 

[Jorunkun]

Leftfield question: Why does the AI like to build forts on top of (surplus) resources?

 

[kingrommel]

Hi, sorry if this has cropped up before but has a 'Disable Espionage'feature been covered?
As far as i can see this mod is one of the best for balanced AI but I hate the espionage feature. As most other mods this disabled as an option this would make me use this if available.

 

[f1rpo]

@kingrommel: The "No Espionage" option can be unhidden at the end of AdvCiv\Assets\XML\GameInfo\Civ4GameOptionInfos.xml. I assume that it still works correctly, but I haven't tested it in many years. I've never really played with that option, but it seems pretty clear that converting espionage into culture will lead to balance issues, especially in the mod, which makes culture somewhat more important. I dislike the espionage system too, so I mostly just assign espionage weights for seeing demographics etc. and eventually position a few Spy units to hamper rival Spy missions. I don't think I'm losing much by not conducting active missions.
Edit: I've come across two posts echoing this sentiment – better to ignore espionage than to disable it – in just the last two days:

Spoiler :

The thing is that turning off screws the game up, because all is turned into . It's much better to keep on and mostly ignore it. Only direct the -points towards your future trading partner (Mansa is optimal) to see his research and that's all you need to do in most games, especially on low levels.

Turning off espionage (which I also dislike) raises the culture target limits enormously, so it takes longer to get a city expansion and forever to win a culture victory. For these reasons, I put up with espionage.

Leftfield question: Why does the AI like to build forts on top of (surplus) resources?

They should pretty much only be built on tiles that the AI is unable to work. Since the yield of unworkable tiles doesn't matter – at least for the moment –, a Fort is, ignoring the needed worker turns, the best improvement to connect those resources. And, often, unworkable resources are near a foreign border (though the AI will place a Fort regardless of that iirc).

Because I play with random personalities on, I still get the occasional "favoriteciv" error after the age of astronomy, but the game runs stably.

I've finally tried to look into this. Since favorite civics are no longer based on the secret personalities, the FavoriteCivicDetector module should no longer have any work to do. Some of its functions are still being called, but it's not apparent from looking at the code where an exception might occur. Also, in a quick test, I'm not getting an exception when the AI asks me to adopt its fave civic (AI Auto Play into Renaissance, Random Personalities, AI code modified so that'll immediately ask for civics to be changed). If the problem occurs again, a savegame or Python stack trace (PythonErr.log) would be helpful.

 

[f1rpo]

Also, maybe because I use a 3840 x 2160 screen resolution, the info about active units in the lower left corner is sometimes positioned too low, the lowest line of text gets covered up by the interface UI frame. Happens with workers, specifically; see screenshot.

Hopefully, this edit will (at long last) fix this issue: Git commit

 

[f1rpo]

What I've noticed over the past year is that that certain world wonders - especially trade boosters like the Great Lighthouse - have a huge effect in the early game, to the point where getting GL early may be a dominant strategy and in need of nerfing. Generally, any wonder that scales multiple cities is relatively better on a huge map, whereas single-city wonders, including academies, are usually worth less, relatively, in an empire comprised of many cities. Can anybody think of an elegant way to address this, maybe make wonder effects scale with map size?

Best solution I can think of that isn't "remove effects affecting all cities entirely" is to give all wonders affecting all cities a requirement of X buildings in your empire, like for national wonders. At least these requirements scale with map size and therefore make the wonder as a whole more expensive for large empires.

Seems to me more a matter of space per civ than of map size alone. (And Marathon speed may lead to higher city counts through wars of conquest already before the Medieval era.) In that play-along Marathon game, I recall that early wonders didn't interest me much because there was so much land to be settled. So I think wonders already have a higher opportunity cost on sparse maps. And spamming coastal cities for the GL is a less desirable strategy when there is much good land available. It's still true that e.g. the Temple of Artemis is going to be especially unattractive when there is much room for expansion while the GL will be attractive – if one can get it without slowing down the pace of (snowballing) expansion too early. In the play-along game, I also found that the AI was hardly building any wonders – presumably due to prioritizing settlers, maybe also due to Stone and Marble being less common on sparser maps (which wouldn't affect the GL however). So perhaps the AI is making it too easy for humans to first expand rapidly and then secure the GL.

[...] it seems that some of the stats, like number of cities, don't show on it even though they are in my display string in BUG settings (!?WSZCJEPTUNBDRAHQ - it doesn't matter where I put the Q, the number doesn't show up). Anybody else get these?

City count and some other stats have separate checkboxes in the upper part of the "Scores" options. I guess the idea is that the formatting string should always contain the letters Z (score delta), Q (city count), A (attitude) and H (worst enemy), and that these stats are toggled on and off only through the checkboxes.

[...] the intrerface and map font is very small on very high resolutions - any way to make that scale up in an in-game setting, maybe?

As far as I know, there is no practical way to increase the size of the text on the map; here's a post on this subject. Getting rid of the progress bars on the city billboards can improve readability, as the Civ 4 Remaster mod demonstrates, but isn't worth it, I think. Allowing the UI font sizes to be adjusted from within the game also doesn't seem feasible. The EXE obtains those font sizes from Civ4Theme_Common.thm in the mod's Resource folder, probably only once, upon loading the mod. If a very high resolution causes too many issues overall, perhaps a smaller window would be a less bad option.

Lastly, what do you think of making the "delete unit" and maybe other rarely-needed buttons very small, so you (read: I) don't accidentally click on it dozens of times in every game? It probably looks goofy and is an inelegant solution, but I could live with it.

In your screenshot, it looks like you have the action button size set to "Large" ("General" tab of the BUG menu), which only leaves room for a single row of buttons. At "Medium" size, there should be a separate row for the promotion buttons, and the Delete button should be all the way to the right on the first row - without any frequently used button near it. That said, I think the Delete button should be all the way to the right in any case. That change was made in v1.06. Apparently, your copy was at least that recent when you took the screenshot because v1.06 also introduced scaling of the HUD, which is apparently being applied. Don't know what causes the Delete button to appear on the left. Does choosing "Medium" size move it to the right?

After playing a fair bit of civ over the last few weeks, I've noticed one recurring hard-crash bug.
It happens when you take a city and decide to "liberate" it, reverting it to its original owner. I've had three games where this happened and don't recall an instance where I did liberate and it didn't crash.
I have a save file, if this is of interest / fixable.

Yes, please. I've just tried liberating a city upon conquest; didn't get a crash.

Also, if I may make one wish for a convenience fix, it would be cool if, upon first meeting another civ, you were prompted about assigning espionage points, or they were given one point (or six, as explained elsewhere ) by default.

Have you tried enabling this option...

Optional message upon meeting rivals to remind the player to set espionage weights. Can be enabled on the bottom of the Alerts tab of the BUG menu; disabled by default.

... yet? Or is having to enter the Espionage screen too cumbersome?

The pirate boat changes have worked out really well for the early game; for a huge map, the settings feel just right. You can fogbust them away in the early game but they remain a threat until all the coasts are covered and it still stings to get the occasionally two swordsmen dropped on yor doorstep.

But apparently it doesn't reliably work out this well ...

Re: Barbs, difficulty and randomness: One thing I've noticed over the span of a dozen or so games at huge / marathon / totestra / 18 civs / monarch (no tech trading, etc) is that barbarians are maybe the main driver of who comes out ahead in the mid-game and who doesn't. On these huge worlds, a lot of space is left un-busted, especially along wiggly coastlies, and this causes barb galley to spawn, which can be the bane of any civilization. I've had games where a place of contested coastal space was infested with half a dozen marauding barb galleys dropping off stacks of swordsmen turn after turn.

Many civs struggle with barbs, most lose at least one city, and - reliably - 3 to 5 civs wind up being hobbled for life because they keep losing cities to early barb attacks. In one game, there was a cluster of seven neighboring barb cities, with acces to iron and horses and they stuck it out well into the middle ages. Quite a spectacle in the replay.

Barbs are certainly the biggest randomizer on these settings, and managing them for your own civ is a real challenge, depending on your start. I've grown used to it and quite like the settings as they are, but it does make some games a lot harder than others ... or easier, if your neighbor is one of those crippled by barbs.

I'm not adjusting Barbarian activity to the crowdedness of the map because I don't want to take away this indirect means for configuring Barbarian activity. And also because I don't think players will intuitively expect sparser Barbarians on undercrowded maps; if there's a lot of unclaimed land, players know that this should worry them. Though I guess one could go a little bit in that direction. Would be better to look at specific situations – whether the placement rules/ probabilities can be tweaked or if there's a simple criterion that the AI could use to identify a need for more military units for fending off the Barbarians.
(Thanks also for the praise that came along with the open issues etc.)

 

[Rawwwrr]

Do I understand correctly that because of this, nuclear weapons do not make any difference to global warming? File GlobalDefinesAlt.xml
<!--<Define> <DefineName>GLOBAL_WARMING_NUKE_WEIGHT</DefineName> <iDefineIntVal>50</iDefineIntVal> </Define> <Define> <DefineName>BONUS_OBSOLETE_VALUE_MODIFIER</DefineName> <iDefineIntVal>150</iDefineIntVal> </Define>-->

 

[Rawwwrr]

My impression is that spreading a religion through Missionaries is pretty unattractive in the early game. A Monastery – or teching Monotheism early on – is a big upfront investment, and passive spread will often, in good time, do much of the work for free. From that angle, I can see how a decreased chance of passive spread could improve game balance, but it would make it less rewarding to found an early religion, and I don't agree that this is desirable. Maybe having far more than 18 civs on the map and just 7 religions (assuming that this is how you play) makes a big difference here; passive spread might get a bit out of hand on a single large continent, and, on a map with many continents, several might end up without any religion. Certainly the Shrines become more powerful on bigger maps. You could try increasing RELIGION_SPREAD_RAND in GlobalDefines (e.g. in GlobalDefines_advc.xml); that should decrease the chance of passive spread. BtS sets it to 1000 and AdvCiv, so far, doesn't overwrite that value.Fwiw, I don't think there is much passive spread in the late game anyway (because most cities already have a religion or two by then).

I understand your point of view. As a result, I changed <iSpreadFactor>100</iSpreadFactor> to <iSpreadFactor>0</iSpreadFactor> for each religion in CIV4ReligionInfo.xml And I got what I wanted

 

[f1rpo]

Do I understand correctly that because of this, nuclear weapons do not make any difference to global warming? File GlobalDefinesAlt.xml [...] GLOBAL_WARMING_NUKE_WEIGHT

No, the DLL code that had made use of that variable no longer exists in the mod. So nuclear winter/ warming (whichever it was, I don't even know) can't be re-enabled just through an XML change. (The same goes for BONUS_OBSOLETE_VALUE_MODIFIER.)

 

[Rawwwrr]

Is it normal that after the foundation of a corporation, the possibility of the birth of great people disappears?

UPD: It looks like this is a display bug
UPD2: The problem is repeated in other cities where I distribute the corporation. AdvCiv_v1.08.1 + 48 + FIX (2). There is a noticeable drop in FPS in the city at the same time

By the way, <iSpreadFactor>000</iSpreadFactor> turned out to be not the best idea, AI does VERY few missionaries, perhaps just reducing the value of iSpreadFactor would be a more correct solution

 

[f1rpo]

I can't reproduce this by simply founding Civilized Jewelers in a city. In your video, it seems that the city screen also doesn't show religions and corporations (on the upper right). Could be an unrelated problem ... So does the Great Person bar re-appear (if you save and reload, perhaps)? I guess I'll take a look at the code to see under which conditions the GP bar isn't shown; maybe that'll give me a hint. The drop in frame rate – I suppose the spread-corp animation shouldn't cause this. Some expensive recalculation regarding the availability of resources, perhaps. Anyway, hard to see how this could be related to the missing GP bar.

By the way, <iSpreadFactor>000</iSpreadFactor> turned out to be not the best idea, AI does VERY few missionaries, perhaps just reducing the value of iSpreadFactor would be a more correct solution

I think some leaders, depending on their Religion, Culture and Gold flavor, will spread dilligently (through Missionaries) once they have a Holy City. Others won't bother to spread even if they have the Holy City; only some few will spread if they don't have the Holy City. Well, reduced passive spread sounds good.

 

[Rawwwrr]

Recorded a video on how to repeat the problem. Restarting is useless. The problem with the FPS drop by 100% is related to the GP panel, in a city where there is no corporation, everything is fine, but it's worth spreading a corporation branch there, as the GP panel immediately disappears and FPS drops in the city, this has been checked many times in other cities while spreading the corporation

 

[Rawwwrr]

I recorded another video, in a city where there is a corporation, added religion, and the GP panel, like the panel with religions\corporations, was repaired, and FPS returned to normal, here is such a bug. I probably wouldn't have stumbled upon it if I hadn't decided to play a save without religion on my territory).

UPD: The problem turned out to be this (screenshot) if you uncheck this box, then everything returns to normal under any conditions

 

[f1rpo]

Thanks for investigating further. Founding Civilized Jewelers through WB is what I had already tried, but now I've done so again in a new game and have been able to reproduce the issue - I think. When I enter the city after founding the corporation, I get a ton of Python error popups, and those errors also get written to PythonErr.log, several errors per second. That could explain the drop in frame rate – if you have error popups disabled in CivilizationIV.ini but logging enabled; or maybe those errors cause delays even if logging is disabled. The (uncaught) exception also means that parts of the city screen don't get drawn - the corporation and religion list and GP bar, I suppose. Now I just need to figure out what causes the error exactly. Shouldn't be too difficult now that I have the exception stack trace.

 

[f1rpo]

OK, I've fixed it (Git commit). So I think this occurs whenever a city has a corporation but no religion. I've implemented all the changes I was going to implement for v1.09 (not very many), done some smoke-testing (not as much as I used to do), just need to compile release notes and upload it. "Later this month" doesn't seem like a too ambitious timeline (unless something more crops up).