Advanced Civ

[f1rpo]

I haven't learned a lot about Civ 7 yet. (I did read a little.) Maybe I'll take another look at the thread with the known features in the Civ 7 forum tomorrow – now that the initial presentations are through.

To follow up on the balance issues with Barbarians in the New World: Come to think of it, the 18th century (in the screenshots @arcvoodal and I had posted) is a pretty late date for early conquests in the New World. 16th is more typical, I think; 14th should be doable at least for humans, even when playing at a moderately challenging difficulty level. So (slightly) earlier Logbowmen can't solve this problem in general. On the other hand, when colonization does start somewhat late, even if the Barbarians don't have Feudalism yet, there's a good chance they'll get it soon once they lose a city to a civ because of accelerated tech diffusion. They don't get to upgrade their units, so it'll take a while for Longbows to actually appear. Still, I'm not sure if just a Galleon load of 3-4 Musketmen can really hope take and hold more than 2 cities. They'll also have to contend with revolts and sporadic raids. A more credible invasion force (which really would have to be mostly gunpowder units because of city walls) would probably manage to capture most of the Barbarian cities, but I wonder how well those scattered colonies would fare against other civs placing (credibly defended) newly founded cities around them. Could be an awkward strategic position by the Industrial era. (Assuming a fairly challenging difficulty level; otherwise I wouldn't expect the AI to seriously contest the New World.)

Some minor changes I've implemented:

Spoiler :

• Increased the number of defenders per Barbarian city by one if they're two eras behind in tech (that often seems to be the case when the majority of the civs have entered Renaissance) and by another one specifically on continents with multiple Barbarian cities that clearly outnumber the civ cities, i.e. in the early stages of the Colonial Age.
• Tweaked a little where Barbarian attack stacks get parked, aiming to distribute those units more evenly, leaving fewer cities exposed to easy capture. This is not terribly effective because I haven't taken the time to implement it properly. it's OK, perhaps desirable, if there's a chance of stumbling across a lightly defended Barbarian city. It's only a problem if too many are easy pickings.
• Shifted Barbarian worker priorities a little away from commerce when they're alone on a continent – as an easily implemented measure to discourage Cottage building.
• Don't let Barbarians improve unworked tiles. I've noticed that they actually have 5 happiness because the Barbarian handicap is Chieftain, meaning that there will still often be 5 improvements around a Barbarian city. Still better than 8; also looks more barbaric that way. I've tried changing the handicap to Warlord because I also felt that the "pre-Columbian" (many of these terms really deserve scare quotes) New World produces rather too many aggressive units, but this seems to vary a lot from game to game, and, in my few test, the Warlord handicap seemed to hamper the Barbarians too much overall.

This could use a good deal more balancing. The number, attractiveness and defense of the Barbarian cities is fairly important. The grace period for concerted attacks probably makes the offensive potential of the Barbarians less crucial – although I have seen AI colonies captured by the Barbarians too, and the aggressive behavior is at least important for reasons of immersion.

 

[f1rpo]

@Garabaldi: Oh, thanks, I'll change the install instruction then to let Steam users know that the re-install isn't a necessity. Probably really just the runtime code changes (resource bubbles) that don't take effect.

Edit (so that I can link to this post from the install instructions): Running the default Steam version probably causes the mod's size changes to the balloon indicators ("resource bubbles") to have no effect. I also read that other mods that have trouble with Steam specifically have issues with their GameFont file (i.e. with icons in tooltips) and (unspecified) issues with multiplayer games. It could well be that such problems also exist in AdvCiv.

 

[Conqueror Worm]

f1rpo - Sorry, but another question. I did enable the USE_KMOD_AI_NONAGGRESSIVE by changing the 0 to 1 in the GlobalDefinesAdvCiv file. I liked it for my Deity level game. However, I started a new game at Emperor level, and for this game I would prefer to use your vanilla AdvCiv war & peace AI. However, I forgot to change the 0 back to 1 in the GlobalDefinesAdvCiv file until about 1or so turns into my new game. Am I correct that even mid-game the vanilla AdvCiv war & peace AI will still take effect? Thank you.

 

[arcvoodal]

Thanks. I'm not sure that a city like this is such a prize. You're stuck with its position that was chosen only with the inner ring in mind. It'll only be size 5, which is something like 130 food, and new cities can grow pretty quickly at this point of the game – which is also desirable because there is not necessarily much time left for them to amortize, not much time, that is, until the game is essentially decided. It is true that growing a new city fast takes a settler and a worker, perhaps better 2 workers, plus a defensive unit. Barbarians won't swarm toward civ cities until the latter outnumber the Barbarian cities, but I suppose stray attackers still need to be expected. And the matured cottages (Village? Town?) in the screenshot can't easily be attained by a new city. If a couple of Musketmen can capture and hold two Barbarian cities, that sure seems like a problem. Because it'll allow a human player to establish a dominating position in the New World by just getting there a little earlier than the AI civs. And a Musketman is not a Conquistador, so this isn't great from a historical angle either. But I don't think it's so far out of balance that a drastic change needs to be considered.

Stronger defenses would seem like the obvious main remedy. Seems rather unusual that the Barbarians don't have Longbows at this point. Could be an outlier, perhaps more likely comes down to the game settings. Either way, still a problem of course. I've just run a single Auto Play game on a Normal-size Terra on Monarch difficulty; attaching a couple of screenshots. Here 2 out of 3 Barbarian cities are defended by Longbows and they're even able to produce Musketmen. They probably wouldn't have Gunpowder though if it weren't for the AI city founded on the southern subcontinent. Tech diffusion speeds up when Barbarians share a continent with civs. That's part of the "lot" going into the mod's handling of Barbarians. Which might be a bit overambitious given that AdvCiv doesn't make Barbarian tech acquisition any more transparent than BtS did. Could also be that I've been relying on AI Auto Play too much for balancing. A civ landing a couple of ragtag units a.s.a.p. to hunt for cities is not going to happen in those games.

The Barbarians have Walls everywhere, but that's no good against gunpowder units (and I wouldn't want to nerf Musketman by somehow excepting them from this rule), They could easily produce a little bit of culture for some more tile defense, but I think that will make their borders too bulky – one ring per 20% defense is not a good deal in this light.

In my game, I noticed that they did actually spread the borders of one city by founding Christianity. This potential issue was already brought up two months ago:I've decided to block the Barbarians from researching toward any tech that no civ has yet discovered. That's easy to implement if nothing else. Should also help them a little to get military tech faster because they'll no longer waste their research on religion techs. But I don't think it'll make a big difference. Maybe their backwardness is related to the map size or difficulty level; if so, that shouldn't be difficult to tweak. Getting them to station an extra defender could also help a little.

As for making the Barbarian cities less attractive, maybe they could just be founded a little later. They could be placed in slightly weaker spots, but it'll look strange if there is clearly much better land available. I don't think I want to block Barbarian cottages entirely; they at least give the civs something to pillage when a Barbarian city is too strongly defended to capture it. They could be restricted to improving only worked tiles; that should normally be just 4 tiles (rather than all 8 in the inner ring) because of the happiness cap; they're programmed not to construct happiness buildings. That should also be quite easy to implement.

Awesome!

For real, you're one of the best things to happen to civ4 ever.

 

[Garabaldi]

What are the differences in the difficulty levels in this mod? I know vanilla has the player on even footing with the AI on noble. Does the AI get more aggressive at higher difficulty levels?

 

[f1rpo]

[...] Am I correct that even mid-game the vanilla AdvCiv war & peace AI will still take effect? Thank you.

I'm afraid this won't work. Initialization for the data used by the UWAI component is only implemented for the (very) beginning of a game. There's the possibility of having UWAI run in the background through an XML setting in GlobalDefines_devel.xml, and that setting can be toggled on and off in a running game – but the non-aggressive K-Mod setting turns UWAI off entirely. Upon loading your savegame, the status of UWAI will be obtained from the savegame, meaning that UWAI will remain disabled if initially disabled. This is another problem that wouldn't exist if I had just implement a NON_AGGRESSIVE_AI setting instead of tying that to disabling UWAI. I'm hesitant to touch that mess now; at least it's working as the comments say.

If you feel attached to the map and opening moves, you could perhaps salvage that with some effort: The mod saves the seed value of the RNG. In Debug mode (requires the chipotle cheat code in CivilizationIV.ini), holding Ctrl while hovering over the big flag on the bottom of the main screen will show the seed. Entering that value as the MapRandSeed and SyncRandSeed in CivilizationIV.ini, restarting BtS and starting a new game with the exact same settings as before (but this time without USE_KMOD_AI_NONAGGRESSIVE in XML) should produce the same map and starting position as before. And the same early human moves should also result in the same AI moves as before. Won't work for PerfectMongoose because that script generates its own seed (which isn't getting saved). And the seeds in the ini should be set back to 0 later on – so that the game doesn't keep generating the same maps henceforth. The whole procedure is pretty fragile and convoluted; you may not want to bother with this. But I don't mind having spelled it out, maybe someone else will find this useful at some point. Oh, just restarting from a turn-0 WorldBuilder save would be a simpler alternative. Won't have the same RNG sequence going forward, but the mod should properly set the AI freebies (which normally have to be dispensed manually through WorldBuilder when restarting a game via WorldBuilder save).

 

[f1rpo]

What are the differences in the difficulty levels in this mod? I know vanilla has the player on even footing with the AI on noble. Does the AI get more aggressive at higher difficulty levels?

I've updated the tooltips shown on the Game Snapshot screen a bit – the final screen when setting up a game via Play Now. I would generally recommend using Custom Game instead, but one small advantage of Play Now is that there are tooltips. The specific changes are covered in detail under change ids 250d, 250e and 251 in the appendix of the manual (I dump my personal documentation there).

In short, the AI logic is still unaffected by the difficulty level (with only some minor exeptions). Although the initial freebies and ongoing (and progressively increasing) discounts will let the AI produce more units on the higher levels, which will indirectly lead to (some) more aggression. This is, in my experience, also the case in BtS, perhaps more so – I remember the BtS AI as being very passive on Noble. Should be a bit livelier already on Noble and perhaps especially on Prince and Monarch in AdvCiv. (Emperor I recall as being already a pretty aggressive affair in BtS.) Noble is still an even footing (as before, with a few qualifications).

I've turned a portion of the AI discounts into penalties for the human player (mostly) starting on Emperor difficulty, in order to reduce the number of units on the map on the highest levels and to keep the tech pace somewhat constant. I haven't gotten much feedback on Immortal and Deity and haven't finished games on those difficulty levels myself either. I've been meaning to tackle Immortal. The number of initial AI exploration and defensive units have been reduced on the higher levels, mostly so that the Tribal Villages option doesn't work against the human player too much. Deity is really only what CFC players sometimes call Demigod – because I've removed the 2nd AI starting settler. @Conqueror Worm has been trying their hand at Deity and has found the AI to be especially bellicose toward the human player. It remains to be investigated why that is. edit: clarity

 

[keldath]

Awesome!

For real, you're one of the best things to happen to civ4 ever.

ill second and third that.

 

[Conqueror Worm]

f1rpo - thanks for the info. I understand. I'll probably just start a new game then. Thanks!

 

[keldath]

Hi,
If f1 wont beat ne to it,
Ill take a look on the above.

Wgich advc version you used?

 

[arcvoodal]

Hi. I have seen things when playing the game. AI workers are doing something weird. Here the workers will replace a hamlet with a workshop, only to immediately replace it with a hamlet again. They just kept doing that over and over. It was also very late in the game so building a hamlet at all is weird, especially since they are at war.

The other thing is this espionage mission to change the target's civics seems bugged unless there's something I am missing. The religious civic can be changed to anything, the economic civic can be changed to mercantilism, despite me running state property. (I have a ton of espionage points against the target so it isn't lack of points).

As for the mention of nukes in the manual and its link to the discussion

Doto [AdvCiv ModMod]

Okay Update time! I finally figured it out. The file you gave me had the CvGameCoreDLL in the wrong place haha. Originally I dragged and dropped the entire folder in the Doto directory. However, the CvGameCoreDLL is supposed to be in the /assets/ folder, along with the XML file included it's...

forums.civfanatics.com

about civs nuking their own cities, I understand why it is simply disallowed for practical purposes. I still just want to point out a situation where nuking one's own city is not too insane realistically. Although I don't have any good ideas about how to do nukes differently:

 

[f1rpo]

I have seen things when playing the game.

That sounds spooky.

The Spy situation seems to be working as intended. All religion and economy civics are supposed to be available. Saladin probably can't adopt State Property for lack of the required tech. My intention had been to allow some extra options but not an overwhelming/ screen-cluttering number. And specifically to make it easier to switch a civ out of the isolationist civics Theocracy, Mercantislism, State Property. The restriction to one's own civics (and religion) doesn't seem all that realistic either. Good intentions, I guess, but arguably not worth the potential confusion. The change used to be mentioned in the front section of the mod's manual, but, at some point, I removed it from there to avoid overwhelming new players. Quite obscure now. I'll try to add a line to the mission cost breakdown. Not running the target civic/ religion actually causes a 100% increase to the "Base Cost," so I can insert something like "+100%: for not practising [civic/religion name]." Normally, no mission-specific cost modifiers are displayed, but I don't think making an exception to that rule will cause confusion or even notice. (Now that's it's been in the mod for years, I don't want to just revert the change.)

Improvement oscillation problems haven't really been reported for AdvCiv. I assume that K-Mod has mostly dealt with them and that they're rare now. It's a bad look (enabled here through espionage visibility, I guess), but, especially this late in the game, not really concerning. And my hunch is that it's not all that easy to fix/ figure out. If you have a savegame, I'll happily stash it away in case that the problem turns out to be more widespread than I realize.

Nukes imo shouldn't affect more than a single tile – for realism, simplicity, balance, maybe even aesthetics – Civ 4 generally seems to glorify nuclear war a bit. Setting iNukeRange to 0 in Civ4UnitInfos.xml would probably do the trick, but I think it's a bit of a spoilsport change and would only seem justified if the whole late game became more serious and competitive through balance changes somehow.

As for the long announced 1.11 update, I have been away from my PC for a few days, haven't been feeling very motivated before, although there isn't much to do. Sooner or later, I'll get myself together.

 

[arcvoodal]

That sounds spooky.

The Spy situation seems to be working as intended. All religion and economy civics are supposed to be available. Saladin probably can't adopt State Property for lack of the required tech. My intention had been to allow some extra options but not an overwhelming/ screen-cluttering number. And specifically to make it easier to switch a civ out of the isolationist civics Theocracy, Mercantislism, State Property. The restriction to one's own civics (and religion) doesn't seem all that realistic either. Good intentions, I guess, but arguably not worth the potential confusion. The change used to be mentioned in the front section of the mod's manual, but, at some point, I removed it from there to avoid overwhelming new players. Quite obscure now. I'll try to add a line to the mission cost breakdown. Not running the target civic/ religion actually causes a 100% increase to the "Base Cost," so I can insert something like "+100%: for not practising [civic/religion name]." Normally, no mission-specific cost modifiers are displayed, but I don't think making an exception to that rule will cause confusion or even notice. (Now that's it's been in the mod for years, I don't want to just revert the change.)

Improvement oscillation problems haven't really been reported for AdvCiv. I assume that K-Mod has mostly dealt with them and that they're rare now. It's a bad look (enabled here through espionage visibility, I guess), but, especially this late in the game, not really concerning. And my hunch is that it's not all that easy to fix/ figure out. If you have a savegame, I'll happily stash it away in case that the problem turns out to be more widespread than I realize.

Nukes imo shouldn't affect more than a single tile – for realism, simplicity, balance, maybe even aesthetics – Civ 4 generally seems to glorify nuclear war a bit. Setting iNukeRange to 0 in Civ4UnitInfos.xml would probably do the trick, but I think it's a bit of a spoilsport change and would only seem justified if the whole late game became more serious and competitive through balance changes somehow.

As for the long announced 1.11 update, I have been away from my PC for a few days, haven't been feeling very motivated before, although there isn't much to do. Sooner or later, I'll get myself together.

Hectic I didn't notice any problems with espionage (I'm not a number cruncher) so if there's anything wrong there surely it must be minor unless I really suck. I didn't feel like any of the missions were too expensive or too cheap. I can imagine the mission to change civics away from emancipation would be ridiculously crippling to the target civ.

Yeah working on a mod when not feeling like it sucks, only to have to go back and do it all over again because mistakes and bad judgment was made due to draining mood.

 

[f1rpo]

I don't have a particularly informed opinion on the mission costs either, I just wanted forcing a non-practised civic/ religion to be costlier. I see now that it's not quite twice as expensive – as just part of the Base Cost gets doubled. I've added an unspecific hint about the cost increase (which, to be clear, had already been in place, only the hint is new):

Spoiler :

Emancipation – right, also strange to revert a civ back to Serfdom when no one has used that civic in a thousand years. So only Religion and Economy civics. This is, on a side-note, configurable through a per-civic XML tag bCanAlwaysForce in Civ4CivicInfos.xml (which excludes the first-row civics Paganism and Decentralization).

 

[arcvoodal]

Ah that is a great addition.

Yeah, forcing someone out of emancipation for an instant +10 in every single city, while still running emancipation oneself, would be broken af.

 

[keldath]

Kodus 1.11

Congratulations and god bless you my friend.

 

[Rawwwrr]

New option on the BUG menu for lowering the screen update rate in between turns. This will reduce turn times a bit further while making the game more difficult to follow. Not usually a worthwhile tradeoff, but perhaps for slogging through the end game of a super-Huge map or for testing purposes on AI Auto Play. [advc.256] Inspired by Caveman2Cosmos

Can you tell me where exactly this item is turned on? I couldn't find it
And thanks for the new version of the mod!

 

[f1rpo]

Should be on the General tab, lower left corner: "Screen Update Rate"
I'll edit that into the release notes too. Thanks for sticking around.

 

[black_rider]

Hey, I bought new monitor, which is 1440p, and now everything in my beloved Civ 4 and your wonderful mod is so small, text, and font, makes it unplayable. Maybe you can provide some kind of patch for people with bigger screens/resolution? I'm not very good at modding Civ 4...

 

[f1rpo]

I'm still only at 1920x1200, akin to what you had earlier (according to your post from 2 years ago). So I'm in no position to test which settings work well on a 60% bigger display area. The font sizes can be changed here if you'd like to experiment. The ones with a // in front are apparently commented out and thus unused. Not sure if Size1_Bold is used. Probably relevant are Size1_Normal, Size2_Normal/Bold, Size3Normal/Bold, maybe also the Italic/BoldItalic versions for those sizes. Size4 probably also is used, but I left that one alone so far. Maybe 15 or 16 for Size1, 17 for Size2, 19 for Size3, 23 for Size4 would work for you. Unfortunately, such changes will lead to a lot of awkward line-wrapping especially in the help text area, whose width can't be modified. So perhaps better only 15 as Size1. Edit: This won't affect the city names on the main map; their size can't really be changed.

The panels and buttons of the main screen HUD should already scale dynamically with the screen dimensions. If this scaling isn't aggressive enough, you could try increasing the two exponents here, perhaps to 0.5 or 0.6.