Air Units can now explore -- 01/25

jkp1187

Unindicted Co-Conspirator
Joined
Aug 29, 2004
Messages
2,496
Location
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Just wanted a clarification on what this new feature accomplishes. Does this mean that you can have an aircraft randomly scouting nearby territory? Would this also work in a situation where an air unit was stationed on an island and the player needed to scout for approaching enemy ships?
 
Just wanted a clarification on what this new feature accomplishes. Does this mean that you can have an aircraft randomly scouting nearby territory? Would this also work in a situation where an air unit was stationed on an island and the player needed to scout for approaching enemy ships?

Yes. I added 'fogbusting' functionality for the AI.

In order to test it with aircraft, I enabled exploration with aircraft, and then it just seemed to make sense leave it in. All this does is cause an aircraft to automatically do a recon mission, it does not give you an ability you did not have before, it just does it automatically rather than you having to manually tell each play to recon.

If there is a good choice of totally unexplored territory, that will be chosen first. (Give yourself 2 carriers with 3 planes each at turn 0 and put them both on explore, watch them map the whole world real fast). If a carrier is put on explore, all the planes on it are automatically put on explore.

In a more normal situtation, if there is nothing to explore, then units will fogbust. This works for land, sea and air units. You can put your ships on explore, and as long as you have explored the world, they will stand in the ocean off your cities watching for invasions. They should wake up if an enemy unit is sighted. (Only the unit that sees it, not all units, you may need to use the wake all key if you want to stop all recon missions). Neutral units that are a threat will not cause automation to be canceled.

Put a carrier on explore once you have explored the world and you will see its planes keep a large area of fog busted.

AIs should be doing the same thing, their ships should be much less likely to just be sitting in port doing nothing.

Note, there is no memory from turn to turn here. In the case of aircraft, it should be slightly random which of a few good choices it picks, but if you want to get full coverage, you will need more than one plane. Do not expect it to check each direction in sequence. Each turn, it looks at a few choices and picks the best one, with a random factor, ignoring what it did the previous turn.

-Iustus
 
Cool... no, this is frikkin' awesome! Aircraft (particularly fighters) need some oomph. Before the enemy has bombers, you can now put your fighters on explore, rather than auto-intercept. They'll watch for incoming fleets!

Wodan
 
So, are you using this feature?

I was of mixed mind about leaving it in game, but so far I have hear no negative feedback about it.

-Iustus
 
General question, I just played a game and saw some cpu planes flying around scouting. Now later in a normal map when all the cpus get flight will it slow down the game at all with all the cpus sending the planes scouting? I wasn't really looking for it in my last game cause i was in turtle mode getting culture victory but curious if anyone else may have seen a slowdown. Although i do like the feature cause it let me see an incomming invasion fleet before they could land.
side note i did a multi game and got a couple oos but with reloading it got past it, i enable logging but i didn't notice the lines kept going in the .ini file for more logging options so i think all my logs are worthless. there wasn't an mplog.txt file which blake mentioned just the ones below in the image. I have 2 sets of them each with 5 turns of autosaves so if they are still good lemme know ill put em up in the bug reports area
 

Attachments

  • log.bmp
    193.6 KB · Views: 106
So, are you using this feature?

I was of mixed mind about leaving it in game, but so far I have hear no negative feedback about it.

-Iustus

Believe it or not, I haven't tried it yet. I just played a game from start to completion tonight using 1/30 -- ended up with a space race win, but because time was tight and my position relatively secure, I didn't bother building any aircraft....
 
Just wanted a clarification on what this new feature accomplishes. Does this mean that you can have an aircraft randomly scouting nearby territory? Would this also work in a situation where an air unit was stationed on an island and the player needed to scout for approaching enemy ships?

I missed where this came from. How do you get this new aircraft functionality??
 
Ambreville: It is automatically available if you use the latest Better AI mod.

So far, I have only had one occasion to use it. I did not find it to be incredibly useful; since I always play on ancient starts, most of the map had been explored by the time carriers are available, and the acrft randomly explore, meaning they don't always focus on the area where you think the threats are likely to be. I found myself deactivating the feature after a few turns and doing recon manually.
 
Ambreville: It is automatically available if you use the latest Better AI mod.

So far, I have only had one occasion to use it. I did not find it to be incredibly useful; since I always play on ancient starts, most of the map had been explored by the time carriers are available, and the acrft randomly explore, meaning they don't always focus on the area where you think the threats are likely to be. I found myself deactivating the feature after a few turns and doing recon manually.

I didn't get at this far late in the game yet(studying), but I figure out that ,depending of the constitution of my civilization, I would leave like 3-5 airplanes(old ones probably) in this function always..That should cover most of my territory most of the times.

Of course, I didn't test it yet hehe.
 
Ambreville: It is automatically available if you use the latest Better AI mod.

So far, I have only had one occasion to use it. I did not find it to be incredibly useful; since I always play on ancient starts, most of the map had been explored by the time carriers are available, and the acrft randomly explore, meaning they don't always focus on the area where you think the threats are likely to be. I found myself deactivating the feature after a few turns and doing recon manually.

Thanks for that info -- although now I do have a problem to resolve. I've installed the BetterAI subfolder(s) in the two following folders:

C:\Program Files\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Warlords\Mods

and

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\My Games\Warlords\CustomAssets

After loading a scenario that I am working on (that does have aircraft in various cities), my aircraft do not seem to have the option of "exploring". The scenario uses seaplanes from the Modern Warfare mod.

The questions is: how do I verify that BetterAI is actually running?
 
I didn't get at this far late in the game yet(studying), but I figure out that ,depending of the constitution of my civilization, I would leave like 3-5 airplanes(old ones probably) in this function always..That should cover most of my territory most of the times.

Of course, I didn't test it yet hehe.

Problem was that I was using them on carriers, and they just never seemed to want to 'fogbust' the areas I was concerned with.

It might work better if you use "explore" while based in coastal cities. I will try to check that.
 
Thanks for that info -- although now I do have a problem to resolve. I've installed the BetterAI subfolder(s) in the two following folders:

C:\Program Files\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Warlords\Mods

and

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\My Games\Warlords\CustomAssets

After loading a scenario that I am working on (that does have aircraft in various cities), my aircraft do not seem to have the option of "exploring". The scenario uses seaplanes from the Modern Warfare mod.

The questions is: how do I verify that BetterAI is actually running?

Wrong thread for technical issues, but in my uneducated opinion, I would say that if you're mixing mods, all bets are off.
 
Thanks for that info -- although now I do have a problem to resolve. I've installed the BetterAI subfolder(s) in the two following folders:

C:\Program Files\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Warlords\Mods

and

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\My Games\Warlords\CustomAssets

After loading a scenario that I am working on (that does have aircraft in various cities), my aircraft do not seem to have the option of "exploring". The scenario uses seaplanes from the Modern Warfare mod.

The questions is: how do I verify that BetterAI is actually running?

Look in the FAQ for pictures and more detail, but I suspect the Modern Warfare mod includes its own dll, in which case, you cannot use both it and betterAI. It is easy to confirm whether BetterAI is running, take a look in the installation thread.

-Iustus
 
Look in the FAQ for pictures and more detail, but I suspect the Modern Warfare mod includes its own dll, in which case, you cannot use both it and betterAI. It is easy to confirm whether BetterAI is running, take a look in the installation thread.

Thanks for all that info. The Modern Warfare mod does not seem to have any dll file. I also determined that BetterAI is definitely not running with that mod for whatever reason. I did install the BetterAI dll file in the two appropriate folders, without much luck I'm afraid. No clue what to do next.
 
Thanks for all that info. The Modern Warfare mod does not seem to have any dll file. I also determined that BetterAI is definitely not running with that mod for whatever reason. I did install the BetterAI dll file in the two appropriate folders, without much luck I'm afraid. No clue what to do next.

If you are trying to run it with another mod, the two places to put it are either in your custom assets folder or in the mod folder of the mod you want to combine it with. Rename your 'Modern Warfare' mod to something like Modern Warfare + BetterAI, and then put the dll file from BetterAI into the Modern Warfare assets folder.

If you are still having trouble, please start a separate thread.

-Iustus
 
Top Bottom