AND2 and SVN Bug Reports - A New Dawn 2 ONLY

[sadris]

So with Tech Diffusion, did you lower the cost of Steal Technology as an Espionage mission because it is now less useful given the effective reduced costs to research?

 

[Rezca]

So with Tech Diffusion, did you lower the cost of Steal Technology as an Espionage mission because it is now less useful given the effective reduced costs to research?

I think he lowered it a bit, but it's usefulness plummets once you get to the Medieval and onward. I was looking at 5,000 ~ 9,000 EsPoints in a good city for some techs, and then I checked again around the end of the Medieval and it was suddenly 20,000 ~ 30,000 in the same city and 40,000+ in the rest
Easy enough to reach those numbers in the Modern Era, with many civics and buildings allowing for increased espionage production, but this early??

It just went up and up from there as the tech tree progressed
Focusing ALL of my espionage against a single person while having numerous cities focusing on Espionage production for ages on end I could probably steal a tech every 30 or 40 turns. Not sure if that's how things were intended, but once you get to the mid-to-late Medival, Tech Stealing is almost not worth it. Unless you're so far behind that you're desperate and have TechDiffusion disabled.


Not really sure what to do about that though, or if anything can be done. I think the problem started with the relative scarceness of Medieval Era techs, and so the costs skyrocketed to compensate =/

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

Tech stealing cost depends on how many beakers you need to discover that tech. If you're closer discovering it, it will cost you less than stealing a tech you've not yet started researching.

 

[sadris]

Yeah it does seem broken in the late game, I was needing 40k espionage to steal anything in the modern era (on Prince difficulty)

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

Yeah it does seem broken in the late game, I was needing 40k espionage to steal anything in the modern era (on Prince difficulty)

It's not broken. You're not supposed to steal techs every turn. On blitz speed and in modern era I'm doing almost 1000 esp/turn without much effort in my current game. Build more appropriate buildings and use more appropriate civics. And remember that Prince hasn't been balanced yet, so things are going to improve in some future revision for different handicap levels.

 

[Rezca]

It's not broken. You're not supposed to steal techs every turn. On blitz speed and in modern era I'm doing almost 1000 esp/turn without much effort in my current game. Build more appropriate buildings and use more appropriate civics. And remember that Prince hasn't been balanced yet, so things are going to improve in some future revision for different handicap levels.

Up until the Medieval it's fairly easy to nab a tech if you are patient, but then once someone gets something like Civil Service it's pretty much one tech every 100 or so turns, and that's even when every city of yours has the appropriate buildings - and there aren't many before the Modern Era! You'd have to sacrifice research rate to push additional espionage funding, and you'd only fall further behind in doing so.

I have nearly 70 cities in the map I'm playing on. Most have Courthouses and Brothels already (Nationalism just came in and obsoleted the Town Watches sadly), and with the espionage slider at 0% I'm getting around 900 ~ 1,100 per turn. If I was playing a Normal or Large sized map? I'd have a fraction of those cities, but still need that 50k espionage to get the same techs. Maybe I'm still in my BTS mindset where I could easily focus my empire on being an espionage-centered one even before the Modern Era rolled in, but *shrugs*

If there was more ways to get Espionage before the Industrial and Modern, then it might not be such a problem (Having a shot at a tech every 15 ~ 25 turns instead of every 50+ turns) Maybe Divine Cult can do something? Divine Cult in its current state is almost useless, maybe providing a small Espionage boost to it... Like 5% empire wide and 15% or so in the capitol, or just 25% in the capitol...
Something for the pre-Industrial so that it's not such a sharp and massive skyrocket in required cost.

Though with Tech Diffusion on, you could safely ignore Tech Stealing all together. There just doesn't seem to be much else for my spies to do except poison water (Which is useless post-Modern era) and spread anarchy and.... Hey do the AIs ever actually use those advanced espionage missions against you? You know, the Plant Nuclear Device, Spread Anarchy, Bribe City, etc?

*edit* All the above was on a Normal/Huge/Noble game.

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

@Rezca, research is scaled for mapsize too. Hence on a smaller map, less research should be required. I say "should" for the usual balancing issue. I could lower bit esp costs but I'll have to test first.
And AI certainly uses "poison water" but I've never had a nuke planted in my cities. But I've used it myself just once and only to test it.

 

[Rezca]

@Rezca, research is scaled for mapsize too. Hence on a smaller map, less research should be required. I say "should" for the usual balancing issue. I could lower bit esp costs but I'll have to test first.
And AI certainly uses "poison water" but I've never had a nuke planted in my cities. But I've used it myself just once and only to test it.

I've never played on a Huge map before, since long and slow games just aren't my thing xD
I did it mostly out of curiosity ^^ Anything slower than Epic, and anything larger than Large... I tend to avoid. Epic/Large is really my favorite combo, usually Warlord/Noble (Starting to move on to being comfortable with Noble and might move to Prince as my default eventually.)

But yeah. I don't think globally reducing the espionage costs would work, since that would just make the pre-medieval techs far too easy to steal. I think providing more opportunities to gain espionage points prior to the advent of Jails and the District Courthouses and Fascism (If you land the wonder that enables it early) might be a better option instead of tinkering with the costs further.
Also, aren't Town Watches only available if you enable Early Buildings in the pre-game options? Some people don't play with this option so that further limits how much esp they can gather, if the Town Watch is attached to Early Buildings (I always play with it on so I don't know)



I've seen the AI amass huge amounts of espionage against me - usually only if they're a power rival, the "lesser" leaders tend to stop once they have enough to see my cities - but I've only ever seen:
*Poison Water
*War Rallies
*Sabotage Improvement
*Sabotage Production
*Sabotage Building
*Anti-Espionage Missions
*Steal Technology (Only in BTS and old versions of AND. I haven't seen it happen in AND for ages)

The others like Spread Anarchy, Plant Nuclear Device, and Bribe City seem to be Player-only. If they are capable of utilizing the Advanced Espionage missions, they aren't doing it or aren't doing it often.

 

[nionios]

I play on rev 686, noble,large and quick which is the most balanced combination according to what i've read in the forum.I am on medieval era and i can build (even in my less productive cities) almost any building or unit in 1 or 2 (in the worst case) turns.Is this a balancing or a gamespeed issue?
Also i think that the +1 in diplomatic relations, when you liberate a city of another civ, is toooooooo low.

 

[Rezca]

I play on rev 686, noble,large and quick which is the most balanced combination according to what i've read in the forum.I am on medieval era and i can build (even in my less productive cities) almost any building or unit in 1 or 2 (in the worst case) turns.Is this a balancing or a gamespeed issue?
Also i think that the +1 in diplomatic relations, when you liberate a city of another civ, is toooooooo low.

That's Quick in a nutshell yes. That's actually kinda the point of the Quick gamespeed


As for the +1 diplo for ONE liberated city? That's fine by me since it can be easily abused, and it stacks pretty quickly. It's the "You razed a Holy City!" penalty I think is too low - even if it *is* shared by every civilization that has that religion adopted.

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

That's Quick in a nutshell yes. That's actually kinda the point of the Quick gamespeed

Exactly.

 

[Rezca]

Aaaah the "Voting" event again. Never have selected that second option before, since it's always empty - never says what civic I'm going to be changing to =/
View attachment 373357

1st option - No Change
2nd option - ?????
3rd option - Change to Monarchy

Come to think of it, the "Angry inlaws" event (That religious one that sometimes pops up when you and your neighbor have different state religions, the one that sometimes causes war?) has an empty text field when it's Naghualism. Instead of "A [___ist] wedding blahblah" it will just say "A wedding"


There's a few quests that still make reference to Environmentalism (Now Green I assume?) and I could have sworn I saw one make mention of Theocracy, but I could be mistaken.

 

[nionios]

As for the +1 diplo for ONE liberated city? That's fine by me since it can be easily abused, and it stacks pretty quickly. It's the "You razed a Holy City!" penalty I think is too low - even if it *is* shared by every civilization that has that religion adopted.

But you give him back a WHOLE city.It's very important.I refer to the case where you capture a city from a X civilization and give it to a Y civilization.Also it's the case where the liberated city was not founded by the Y civ or the Y civ has no influence in that city.

 

[Rezca]

But you give him back a WHOLE city.It's very important.I refer to the case where you capture a city from a X civilization and give it to a Y civilization.Also it's the case where the liberated city was not founded by the Y civ or the Y civ has no influence in that city.

Couldn't you could just move all your units out of it in that case and then let Civ X take it back, then take it again and re-gift it, over and over?

You can also found a junk city in the tundra on a civ's borders then gift it to them for a free bonus. The bonus stacks very quickly after a few gifts, which is why I don't think it's too big of a deal. Just like repeated war declarations stack up real quickly.


Point is, +1 hardly is a problem since it accumulates just like razing cities and unlike trade relations, there isn't any limit to how high it can go - that I am aware of.

 

[<Nexus>]

Couldn't you could just move all your units out of it in that case and then let Civ X take it back, then take it again and re-gift it, over and over?

How do you take it back without war? Which means a penalty greater then the previous bonus iirc.

You can also found a junk city in the tundra on a civ's borders then gift it to them for a free bonus. The bonus stacks very quickly after a few gifts, which is why I don't think it's too big of a deal. Just like repeated war declarations stack up real quickly.

IIRC the AI does not accept every city even as a gift if "They have nothing to gain" with it.
This sort of strategy has many limitations IMHO. In the later game you just run out of space.

I think it would be nice if the bonus would scale with the city's value, altough it's not a great priority IMHO.

 

[Rezca]

How do you take it back without war? Which means a penalty greater then the previous bonus iirc.

You're already at war with Civ X. You take a border city, gift it to Y whom you're buddies with. Move your troops out and let that horse archer from X capture it again. Move the units back in, re-gift it to Y, and now that bonus for gifting a city is at 3 (Not sure if it only goes up by 1 each time or if it rises by 2 after every gifting).
I wasn't talking about being at war with the guy you're gifting it to

IIRC the AI does not accept every city even as a gift if "They have nothing to gain" with it.
This sort of strategy has many limitations IMHO. In the later game you just run out of space.

I think it would be nice if the bonus would scale with the city's value, altough it's not a great priority IMHO.

I almost never see that when gifting a city, and it's usually only when it is one of my core cities or one on the other edge of the world when they're in financial trouble. I gift them a large sum of cash and some GPT and suddenly they're willing to change their minds from time to time. Makes it hard when I'm trying to challenge myself to not allow an AI to die, since they'll be getting mowed down by Alex or Monty and refuse to accept a city from me when they're losing all of theirs

To be honest, I still see this as a "Don't fix it if it's not broken" sort of situation. It's already very easy to buddy up with the AIs unless you're waring with each and every of them for two thirds of the game, and I've even managed to pull a Furious AI after six war declarations on him (And a razed Holy City) back to Pleased over the course of just one era. Making it even easier was part of the reason we got AIs that insisted on such unbelievably absurd trading demands - because it was too easy to get the AIs to love you, and when the AI loves you they'll fork over half their empire when you ask.

 

[Rezca]

I've seen the 'An Unknown Civilization' thing be brought up elsewhere a few times, but this is my first time seeing it.

However, it's not in the Scoreboard, but on the 'World Announcements'. When mousing over the new civilization's tab or calling them up, it will state their civilization and their title just fine - it's just in their initial announcement that they get referred to as 'unknown'

View attachment 373408

View attachment 373409

Also -20 from razing cities? I feel so proud about that
I think my current record is just over -47 from razed cities alone

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

Rezca, I know about that problem, it will be fixed in next release. Thank you.

 

[Rezca]

rev686

I was playing a new game since my Giant Earth Map started to become unstable, and was having lots of fun. Well, I deleted the cache files and the civ ini file in the MyGames folder when switching to AND from playing C2C and Pie's Europe mod for a while, and everything was playing fine - then I saw this island that was literally SWARMING with barbarians, more than I've seen since 1.75 days, and wanted to get a screenshot but couldn't fit them all into one picture, so I saved the game so I could edit the ini file to allow for Camera Flying. Well I saved the game and then went to Menu -> Exit Game, and shortly after I did so I get the message that "Civ 4 has stopped working etc etc".

Big deal, I already saved the game. So I click okay and start navigating to the My Games folder and the message comes up a second time. Okay fine whatever. So I finally get to the ini file and change the entry from 0 to 1, and then re-launch AND.

I load my save file and the game crashes to the desktop almost immediately after it starts loading the game - no sounds, no message... Just poof.

So this time I load an autosave and it does the same thing D:


I packed up the save file and [hopefully the right] mini-dump file, which was created just now so I'm assuming it's the proper one. I suppose I'll have to start a new game unfortunately, since the main save is crashing when I load it and the auto-save from several turns *before* the crash is also dying on me

Really not sure what happened here, since everything was working up until now and I was saving/loading many times since then...

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

rev686

I was playing a new game since my Giant Earth Map started to become unstable, and was having lots of fun. Well, I deleted the cache files and the civ ini file in the MyGames folder when switching to AND from playing C2C and Pie's Europe mod for a while, and everything was playing fine - then I saw this island that was literally SWARMING with barbarians, more than I've seen since 1.75 days, and wanted to get a screenshot but couldn't fit them all into one picture, so I saved the game so I could edit the ini file to allow for Camera Flying. Well I saved the game and then went to Menu -> Exit Game, and shortly after I did so I get the message that "Civ 4 has stopped working etc etc".

Big deal, I already saved the game. So I click okay and start navigating to the My Games folder and the message comes up a second time. Okay fine whatever. So I finally get to the ini file and change the entry from 0 to 1, and then re-launch AND.

I load my save file and the game crashes to the desktop almost immediately after it starts loading the game - no sounds, no message... Just poof.

So this time I load an autosave and it does the same thing D:


I packed up the save file and [hopefully the right] mini-dump file, which was created just now so I'm assuming it's the proper one. I suppose I'll have to start a new game unfortunately, since the main save is crashing when I load it and the auto-save from several turns *before* the crash is also dying on me

Really not sure what happened here, since everything was working up until now and I was saving/loading many times since then...

I've tried your save and it crashes for me too; and minidump I get is the same you've attached here. Looks like a problem of incompatibility in the savegame, but I don't know what's causing it. Was this game played from the start with rev686? Or have you changed revision during the game? If you haven't, then my guess would be that using another mod probably messed up someway with some configuration file, or maybe something with the cache. Are you sure you have always deleted your cache and ini file while switching from one mod to another?