Beta 13

[3Miro]

@AbsintheRed: its me again. i think we should make the number of Barbarians vary depending on who is the Human player. If Bulgaria is in the hands of a human, then a large Mongolian horde should be fine (more fun while waiting for the Ottomans). If Bulgaria is controlled by the AI, then we can spawn smaller horde so that there is some 40/60 chance of collapse/survival. Same for the Seljuks and Mongols going after the Byz, same for Kiev and so on.

 

[AbsintheRed]

@AbsintheRed: I just noticed that Norrland is on the two sides of the Baltic sea. The AI messed up if there is a Region that falls on both sides of a sea without land connection. I moved Finland and Estonia to Eastern Europe so the Barbarians don't mess up, but Norrland should be restricted to Scandinavia only and Finland should be expanded. Could you change the provinces there?

This was a request from our Scandinavians here
Swedish province of Norrland did historically expand into NW parts of Finland
Anyway, if it causes some problems, I will make those tiles part of Österland

The Venetian unit stack bug was also related to the regions. I moved Croatia and Bosnia to Central Europe and the Venice AI works much better.

Yeah, I was sure these new AI issues are related to the new AI regions :/
The same for barbarian and worker behaviour in some parts of the map - like I reported it with screenshots in this thread a few pages earlier
Here is yet another worker issue:

This is the beginning of my turn with Bulgaria
The AI clearly had a chance to move it's worker into safety, yet did nothing
Probably didn't realized there was a threat, which is most likely connected to the new AI regions somehow.
I never saw such unprotected workers in vanilla BtS or in previous versions of the mod

 

[AbsintheRed]

@AbsintheRed: Morholt had found a bug in the Prosecutor code that was supposed to crash the game, however, the game wasn't crashing. I fixed the bug, but started examing the code and specially the part about Poland UP. I found more bugs and I was confused how come we haven't seen them earlier, the answer was that the AI wasn't building Prosecutors. This is due to the fact that the AI isn't building neither Missionaries nor Units with Special City AI (not sure what that is). I noticed that you tweaked the AI for all the leaders, could this have caused the problem.

I have a temporary hack on the AI now, but this only leads to building Prosecutors in a rather random fashion, this doesn't fix the Missionary problem

Are you talking about the <UnitAIWeightModifiers> in the personalities?
I don't see anything else in the leaderheadinfos which could be related to unit production
Actually I never touched that part of the AI personalities
IIRC Caliom suggested some changes there which I uploaded, but it was about 5-6 months ago
Will check it

PS: you are already aware of this, but the Barbs in the Balkans and Anatolia are way too powerful, Bulgaria does to Barbarians almost always and often times half of Anatolia is conquered.

Yep, already started to work on this

 

[AbsintheRed]

@AbsintheRed: its me again. i think we should make the number of Barbarians vary depending on who is the Human player. If Bulgaria is in the hands of a human, then a large Mongolian horde should be fine (more fun while waiting for the Ottomans). If Bulgaria is controlled by the AI, then we can spawn smaller horde so that there is some 40/60 chance of collapse/survival. Same for the Seljuks and Mongols going after the Byz, same for Kiev and so on.

Yes, this is exactly what I'm doing
Rrosen suggested something like this a few weeks ago
I toyed a little around with the idea, then started to implement it a few days ago
Most appearing barb stack will be much lighter on the AI than they are on the human player

 

[AbsintheRed]

3Miro, running through your last commits

I see you changed and persecutors now availeable from Code of Laws. Isn't this a little too early for them? Or was it needed because of your latest changes?

Also, from the changelog: "Moved Estonia to Estern Europe Region, otherwise Barbarians from Estonia were trying to attack the Norse in Scandinavia and they had no way to get there"
This raises a few interesting questions
First of all, with the new regions, the AI will only check it's own region in ALL aspects of the game?
Worker actions, all the barbs, war maps, etc?
If that's true, no wonder some new issues appeared in Beta 13
What if a player holds territory from multiple regions? Even better, what's with civs with UHVs requiring cities in other regions? Workers will never properly automate, never realizes threats, etc?
What if we want a barb spawn zone to be a threat to multiple regions? I mean adding barbarians for two neighboring civs, in different AI regions.
Automated missionaries (spread religion) or scout actions (epxlore) will never work properly?
I'm pretty sure this will result in quite a few other unexpected AI issues, if somehow an AI has a city in another region besides it's own default region

This doesn't look too well ATM :/
Don't get me wrong, AI regions is a good idea, and improves a few key aspects of AI play
But I don't think it's wise that the AIs focus on one region only, no matter what's the case
Maybe it could be (partly) solved with neighbouring regions and AI weights?
I mean something like this: AI values everything in it's own region with 100 weight, neighboring regions with 40 weight and in all other regions 10 wieght...

Ehh, maybe that's not enough either, I have no idea how would automated units react to this
I'm also not sure how hard would this be to implement...

 

[ezzlar]

Which civ are you playing? IIRC, you'll get colonial expenses if a city is on a different landmass or when it's has a certain distance to you capital.

Playing as Arabia. It is the cities in North Africa so I guess its distance to capital like you say!

 

[3Miro]

@AbsintheRed: the AI puts more weight on its own regions first, and less weight on others. There are a few notable exceptions with the Barbs. I have seen this in RFC also, but Barbs will tend to stay in their region and not attack other regions (i.e. Chariots from Anatolia will not attack my workers on the Balkans in RFC). The regular AI does expand into other regions (like Spain into N Africa), but this is happening only after the AI runs out of space to expand. The same holds for the Missionaries and such.

I will look at the worker thing, it may be related to the regions, but it may be something completely different. What you have on the screenshot is workers and attackers that are in the same province and same region.

 

[Sian]

in length of region problems ... spot the oddity on this event list

yeah ... it's reporting that the barb is coming near another city than it actually is

 

[ezzlar]

Yes, this is exactly what I'm doing
Rrosen suggested something like this a few weeks ago
I toyed a little around with the idea, then started to implement it a few days ago
Most appearing barb stack will be much lighter on the AI than they are on the human player

Cool, then I suggest amp up barb pressure on human. But only Seljuks and Keshiks. Not those free roaming irritating ones.

Seljuks should be both human Byzantium and Arabia.

 

[AbsintheRed]

in length of region problems ... spot the oddity on this event list

yeah ... it's reporting that the barb is coming near another city than it actually is

Are you sure there wasn't anouther barb unit (or ship) coming near your other city, Skhodra (Skadar)?

 

[AbsintheRed]

Cool, then I suggest amp up barb pressure on human. But only Seljuks and Keshiks. Not those free roaming irritating ones.

Seljuks should be both human Byzantium and Arabia.

Indeed, the major barb invasion should be really hard on the human
This needs a lot of balancing of course, but I will upload the first version in a few days

 

[Sian]

Are you sure there wasn't anouther barb unit (or ship) coming near your other city, Skhodra (Skadar)?

positive ... in fact when i pressed the line in the event tab, it moved to that barb, and every barb unit

my best guess would be region code calling the closest city in the same region subset that the units are in.

 

[Sian]

got an issue in my current Bulgaria game ...

Built a City 4w2s of Constantinople, and when Ottoman spawns they kick out my army there, spawns their own on the same tile, losing me the city, with no chance for me to deny them, hence losing the city

 

[3Miro]

got an issue in my current Bulgaria game ...

Built a City 4w2s of Constantinople, and when Ottoman spawns they kick out my army there, spawns their own on the same tile, losing me the city, with no chance for me to deny them, hence losing the city

The problem is that you build a city right on the spot where the Ottoman first capital should be. Denying them the city would allow you to just not let them spawn. This is a consequence of the pre-declared war, without the forced war, the Ottomans would simply be bumped to a nearby empty spot, but with the war, they just conquered the city. I am not sure what the proper resolution should be.

 

[rrosen]

How about disabling the check for Bulgarian UHV on the turn Ottomans spawn, is that possible? (This happened in my Bulgarian game as well).

 

[Sian]

miro ... aren't they spawning just south of Bosphorus?

its the place where their secondary Balkan Army spawns i'm talking about ... which spawns in 1365, wheras their first army in Western Anatolia spawns in 1359 together with a few settlers

... how about spawning their second army on a fleet of Hulks (and a few (Combat1?) War Galleys to stop people from deciminating them with their own boats) so they can land whereever they prefer to?

 

[Tigranes]

Ottomans used to do very poorly in Europe, I don't think this effect is bad. Think about it that for whatever internal reason some of your European lords invited Ottomans to fight their opponents, but they took over your city instead and established a beachhead in Europe. Just fight them back

 

[Sian]

hardly taking my point in mind Tigranes, which is that its somewhat fake difficulity that if you place a city there (and its a reasonably good city since its the only logical place that Bulgaria can get Clams) you can't win Historical victory, because it autoflips without even a 'by-your-leave' since it tosses out your defenders before spawning a enemy army there capturing the city ... only way to get out of it would be to somehow force them into accepting a peace ... but i don't really see that happening since that would mean killing most if not all of their initial stack without lossing anything

 

[3Miro]

hardly taking my point in mind Tigranes, which is that its somewhat fake difficulity that if you place a city there (and its a reasonably good city since its the only logical place that Bulgaria can get Clams) you can't win Historical victory, because it autoflips without even a 'by-your-leave' since it tosses out your defenders before spawning a enemy army there capturing the city ... only way to get out of it would be to somehow force them into accepting a peace ... but i don't really see that happening since that would mean killing most if not all of their initial stack without lossing anything

The city doesn't auto-flip, it is auto-conquered. You get enemy units of a player with whom you are at war into your city, this is conquest. But I got your point now, I missed it earlier.

What we need to do is to spawn the Ottoman army so that if there is a city on the spot, then they will go one tile to the side. To fix your current game, load an earlier save, go to the World Builder and delete the city. You can also gift it to someone else so long as they are not the Byz, Barbs or Turks and so long as you can find someone who wants it.

 

[ezzlar]

In my game as France, Philip the Bold was the worst enemy of the pope and he even asked me to stop trading with the pope. Bug?

Edit: He was catholic.