AND SVN Build Thread

[HotFusion]

Well, obviously it doesn't work if your difficulty is nominally on Settler. Like I said, this trick only works if your nameplate difficulty is Noble or higher. With stock settings, set your game to Immortal, cheat in a great spy so you can see the enemies' research times, and then quit and alter the research tag for Noble and take another look. The enemy research time will have gone down.

An AI specific tag would be fine, and I think that you are confusing my suggested interim solution with a declaration that such a feature is unneeded.

 

[Arkatakor]

Well, obviously it doesn't work if your difficulty is nominally on Settler. Like I said, this trick only works if your nameplate difficulty is Noble or higher. With stock settings, set your game to Immortal, cheat in a great spy so you can see the enemies' research times, and then quit and alter the research tag for Noble and take another look. The enemy research time will have gone down.

An AI specific tag would be fine, and I think that you are confusing my suggested interim solution with a declaration that such a feature is unneeded.

I understand that you can modify the AI's research percent with this tweak. The problem is that the human players research also gets affected by the iResearchPercent tag. Thus the variable is intertwined somehow, which would probably be something to look out for when implementing a new tag....

 

[HotFusion]

I just tested this and no, it doesn't affect the player's research at all, if used in the manner and context that I suggested it in. I went into an existing game, added three zeros to the Noble research tag, and sure enough, the AI research times ballooned, whereas my own were left unchanged.

As long as your nominal difficultly setting isn't Noble or doesn't pass through Noble, this works, and is a handy interim solution for those of us who want this functionality now.

 

[Arkatakor]

I just tested this and no, it doesn't affect the player's research at all, if used in the manner and context that I suggested it in. I went into an existing game, added three zeros to the Noble research tag, and sure enough, the AI research times ballooned, whereas my own were left unchanged.

As long as your nominal difficultly setting isn't Noble or doesn't pass through Noble, this works, and is a handy interim solution for those of us who want this functionality now.

Ok I will run some tests on this; I would love to have this interim solution.

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

Well, as a temporary solution it should work; in fact, IIRC it's what I've done with my first rebalancing work almost 8 months ago. But remember that it's very difficult to balance research for every player: just think about the difference for people using tech diffusion and those not using it (and using no tech trading/brokering).

 

[DocBuchanan]

Newly back to the game, extremely happy to see dedicated souls still working on this game in and of itself. I'm looking for the current changelog? List of features... What have you. Maybe a manual? Something to get my feet wet before I fight this monster you've created. Can someone point me in the right direction? Afforess, I don't know how active you still are or if you remember my SN but it's good to be home and to see old hats still kicking around. In my book you and your fluid team should have been picked up by the dev team years ago.

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

Newly back to the game, extremely happy to see dedicated souls still working on this game in and of itself. I'm looking for the current changelog? List of features... What have you. Maybe a manual? Something to get my feet wet before I fight this monster you've created. Can someone point me in the right direction? Afforess, I don't know how active you still are or if you remember my SN but it's good to be home and to see old hats still kicking around. In my book you and your fluid team should have been picked up by the dev team years ago.

Doc, I'm afraid there's no changelog besides the little changelog I've done here in previous posts for the latest revisions. I don't think there's an official changelog from AND 1.75C (last Afforess version) and AND2; when I started modding last autumn I've posted every change I've made in this thread, but I'm not sure of all that has been done before. There's not a manual but Civilopedia is good enough although it contains some errors because there are references to previous versions of AND. Afforess is still lurking around but (for the moment at least) he's not actively developing this mod anymore; sometimes he chimes in with advices.
I agree, people like Zappara, Afforess, Koshling and other members of the C2C development team are really very skilled people and we owe them a lot, it's because of their job that we can still enjoy Civ4 (BTS was released in 2007!!).

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

rev625

- Restored rev623 buildinginfo and buildingclassinfo + glasssmith from rev624 (some changes of rev623 were lost when updating to rev624)
- Major bug fixing by importing code from C2C revisions 1959, 2807, 2908, 3174, 3455, 3484, 3994, 4078, 4301 and 4303 (code mostly by Koshling and AIAndy): maintenance bug fixed as following:
- Added (And turned on) TREAT_NEGATIVE_GOLD_AS_MAINTENANCE global define option to allow negative gold from buildings to be handled better
-Added tabs to the list of constructed buildings on the city screen. Maintenance is now displayed as negative gold in the building list if TREAT_NEGATIVE_GOLD_AS_MAINTENANCE is set. (CVMaininterface.py)
- Fixed some bugs with maintenance and commerce updating and significantly reworked the 'income' display section of the finance advisor (BugFinanceAdvisor.py)
- Fix to commerce caching: Invalidating the city commerce now also invalidates the player commerce (but not the other cities). Updating player commerce due to dirty state only updates dirty cities. This should fix the frequent OOS in multiplayer game.
- Fixed displayed research rates in main screen and finance advisor (BugFinanceAdvisor.py and CVMaininterface.py)
- Fixed display issues with Gamespeed gold modifiers
- Fixed building maintenance error
- Tweaked a bit Civics, gamespeed and world info files to balance the game in terms of gold/expenses now that Maintenance has been fixed (maintenance now is higher, or better, older maintenance was a negative expense making it an income effectively)
- Added a backup folder for source files

 

[Sgtslick]

Well done 45°38'N-13°47'E

This in particular got my juices flowing

- Fix to commerce caching: Invalidating the city commerce now also invalidates the player commerce (but not the other cities). Updating player commerce due to dirty state only updates dirty cities. This should fix the frequent OOS in multiplayer game.

 

[DocBuchanan]

Doc, I'm afraid there's no changelog besides the little changelog I've done here in previous posts for the latest revisions. I don't think there's an official changelog from AND 1.75C (last Afforess version) and AND2; when I started modding last autumn I've posted every change I've made in this thread, but I'm not sure of all that has been done before. There's not a manual but Civilopedia is good enough although it contains some errors because there are references to previous versions of AND. Afforess is still lurking around but (for the moment at least) he's not actively developing this mod anymore; sometimes he chimes in with advices.
I agree, people like Zappara, Afforess, Koshling and other members of the C2C development team are really very skilled people and we owe them a lot, it's because of their job that we can still enjoy Civ4 (BTS was released in 2007!!).

I suppose that, due to the extent of this mod, not having total documentation is understandable. Could anybody provide me the basics? What speed is recommended to play at, what size map, other settings... I know some of this stuff is intensely personal, however if I was looking for a good long deep game on a good machine, what's recommended?
Also what would you consider the most major changes in AND 2 (since the new devs started work)?
playing last night I noticed turns taking a while to process. I know this was probably the single largest hiccup with ROM and AND; has the new team looked at methods to streamline?
Lastly, has anyone looked at porting a version of this mod to Civ V? Or are we decidedly against Civ V down here in this deep dark corner of the civ iv community... I was just thinking with the new implementations in G&K and the upcoming expansion, the tools might finally be there.

 

[JosEPh_II]

@DocBuchanan,

On turn time, are you using the SVN version? 45*38'N has implemented several DLL changes from C2C that helps with EoT times (among other fixes). What OS do you use and do you have at least 4GB of ram? Video card with at least 1 GB of ram?

JosEPh

 

[urtho]

rev625

*snip*

Wow seems like a lot of that was to fix the issues I brought up. Thanks for all the work you've done tracking down these problems and glitches. I'm eager to try a new game with this rev 625 to see how things work out with everything you've changed and added in here, probably start it up soon.

I didn't see it mentioned specifically or perhaps I'm not parsing out what you're saying correctly, but does anything you've fixed or added here in this rev specifically deal with the "employed people" issue I brought up from my save game that started this discussion? I don't care about that save game anymore (which I won, shocking absolutely no one I'm sure considering the AI died <g>) just concerned that it doesn't happen again in a future game.

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

I didn't see it mentioned specifically or perhaps I'm not parsing out what you're saying correctly, but does anything you've fixed or added here in this rev specifically deal with the "employed people" issue I brought up from my save game that started this discussion?

You're right, I forgot to mention it in the changelog, but that fix was included too (that was an easy one, just 1 line of code missing)!

 

[Arkatakor]

I just tested this and no, it doesn't affect the player's research at all, if used in the manner and context that I suggested it in. I went into an existing game, added three zeros to the Noble research tag, and sure enough, the AI research times ballooned, whereas my own were left unchanged.

As long as your nominal difficultly setting isn't Noble or doesn't pass through Noble, this works, and is a handy interim solution for those of us who want this functionality now.

As it turns out, it looks like firaxis decided to blackbox the difficulty settings. The name tags for the difficulty levels alone seem to decide how the AI performs. It would be nice to have all the variables out so they can all be modifyable.

 

[DocBuchanan]

@DocBuchanan,

On turn time, are you using the SVN version? 45*38'N has implemented several DLL changes from C2C that helps with EoT times (among other fixes). What OS do you use and do you have at least 4GB of ram? Video card with at least 1 GB of ram?

JosEPh

Joseph. Hopefully the machine isn't the issue. Run Win 7 Ultimate, 16GB ram and 2 decent SLI video cards. And yes, I've got the newest SVN version. Like that setup, btw. Wish we'd had it "back in the day." So I scaled back my gameplay a bit, playing on a huge map with the recommended number of civs, and now the turn times are bearable. If I go above that the times get long. And when you play on marathon or slower that can have a severe effect on the "fun" factor.

Besides that, this is truly great. Again I'd ask though, are there recommended settings at this point for the best "balance"? Thanks guys.

 

[Sgtslick]

Besides that, this is truly great. Again I'd ask though, are there recommended settings at this point for the best "balance"? Thanks guys.

A lot of it comes down to personal preference, probably not the right thread to go into a full blown discussion about it. Most of the settings are relatively balanced there are a few that I would suggest avoiding though:
Great Commanders (AI doesn't know how to use them)
Surround and destroy (ditto)
Tech Trading (too easy to abuse imo)
Gold per turn trading (I personally turn this off so the AI isn't as abusable)
Revolutions below immortal difficulty (below immortal the AI ends up losing cities to revolutionaries too easily)
Archer Bombard (AI is bad at this option)
Limiting units per tile (probably the worst setting in terms of hindering the AI)
Storms (Apparently they eat up a lot of memory and are just annoying imo)
No friendly pillaging (obvious abuse)
Trading for corporate headquarters (this is clearly not balanced)

Probably some more but these are some that come to mind.

 

[JosEPh_II]

...are there recommended settings at this point for the best "balance"?

I believe 45*38'N has tried to balance all the game speeds. My personal is Epic and then Normal, the flow is better for my playstyle. And playstyle is very much a factor. I like Huge and Giant Maps but only up to 12 AI. Early game I want everyone to have some room to expand. Not a fan of crowded maps, again playstyle. Nor do I use REV or Vassals. Again personal preferences.

Your system is fine. Just remember AND is probably the 2nd biggest Mod in CFC, C2C is #1 in size and complexity.

JosEPh

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

Rev626

• Fixed building tabs in city screen which weren't working with Revolutions off
• Increased National Wonders per city limit from 3 to 4

By the way, the first one is a change I've imported almost by accident in rev625 but looks very useful: inside the city screen (on the left) you don't have anyomre a unique list with every building, wonder or anything else you've built in your city; you can now find 3 tabs (buildings, wonders and special buildings), which makes it easier to check what you've built in your city (that's AIAndy work in C2C).

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

Joseph. Hopefully the machine isn't the issue. Run Win 7 Ultimate, 16GB ram and 2 decent SLI video cards. And yes, I've got the newest SVN version. Like that setup, btw. Wish we'd had it "back in the day." So I scaled back my gameplay a bit, playing on a huge map with the recommended number of civs, and now the turn times are bearable. If I go above that the times get long. And when you play on marathon or slower that can have a severe effect on the "fun" factor.

Besides that, this is truly great. Again I'd ask though, are there recommended settings at this point for the best "balance"? Thanks guys.

My personal suggestion would be Perfect Mongoose maps, difficuly level depends on you, definetly revolutions on, maps large/huge, gamespeed normal should be fine. But it's really up to you and to the kind of gamestyle you prefer. These settings make a game good balanced enough. Try different settings and see what you like the most. Just keep in mind that "extreme" settings (very slow gamespeed and very large maps or very hard difficulty levels) haven't been balanced properly yet (I'm still working on it).

 

[buck beach]

Rev626

• Fixed building tabs in city screen which weren't working with Revolutions off
• Increased National Wonders per city limit from 3 to 4

By the way, the first one is a change I've imported almost by accident in rev625 but looks very useful: inside the city screen (on the left) you don't have anyomre a unique list with every building, wonder or anything else you've built in your city; you can now find 3 tabs (buildings, wonders and special buildings), which makes it easier to check what you've built in your city (that's AIAndy work in C2C).

I know that this probably been asked a dozen times (I never can find anything by searching).

I current have a game running rev 624 @ 1523AD. Can I use the saved game with the current 626 build? Also, is the full download 626? I never can find what build I am using unless I am in the game and check in the BUG. I haven't master being able to download and apply the SVN.

I found a couple of gliches in 624 but I am horrible at documenting them and since there is a newer build I won't bother mentioning them here.

Buck