Completely agree about the biological reality statement. But the 2nd about breaking immersion has never bothered me. As this is a "What if Mod" and not a Historical Simulator".
Immersion does matter a lot imo. That's the whole point of C2C is to improve immersion.
We don't Need to have animals fighting animals, that is just plain taking it too far. We don't Need for animals to fight barbarians either. That too maybe going too far. Now if someone wanted to make this aspect a Modmod. That would be Okay/Cool. If popular demand grew then it could be considered for inclusion. But Not before Imhpo.
Perhaps it should be a game option? That could be easily done.
One thing though that I'm concerned about is this; for all these years all the Mod makers/coders have said that the Barb AI Must be the Last Player (#50). By adding these NPC's Is the Barb being kept at #50? I saw that #40 was being used. How is this not confusing the exe. of the game engine, Where we can not go?
This is why this has been a difficult project. But not impossible. There are probably some lurking python issues in this that I may yet be able to resolve.
I'm forcing initialization of NPC players and teams (wherever they don't have the default barbarian civilization definitions in the globals) - barbs are already initialized by the main game engine.
Player and team data, however, cannot write and read in the sequence they normally do. Players past 40 won't initialize as they normally do. If I reverse the NPCs and place them BEFORE barbs, then they will be assumed to be normal players under normal rules in too many assumed spots. Yes, it's a challenge.
Furthermore, while I can catch the read/write sequence at player #40 and create a loop that read/writes players 41-50, trying to do this for teams creates an infinite loop and I think it has to do with the read/write sequence being written with the old methods before Koshling changed how read/write works. Since I'm not entirely 100% sure HOW his magic is properly initiated, and I'm not 100% sure that he didn't initiate it THERE because of a separate exe interaction issue he discovered as well which may be the root issue I had there, teams got really really tricky.
So... what I'm doing is actually re-initializing the team infos for 41-50 on each load. Which is again a little tricky because one step in the war declaration all npc players make on all other players (which I can change in specific cases) calls for unit data and a plot validation before units are initialized. So skipping that section for NPCs during load is a little concerning and could be causing some funny stuff but I THINK it's safe... could possibly account for something to do with SO's auto-end-game issue. Since we're not seeing it taking place again though I cannot be sure it's a consistent issue at any point and that it has anything to do with this project.
Your particular loading issues need some code in action analysis to get a clue what the problem boils down to. I suspect some possible python stuff as there are some interesting references to the barbarian player making the assumption it's the last player in the sequence that can be changed I think. Having a test case that can show where victory or failure takes place after an adjustment will be critical to sort it out.
And we definitely do not need to be burning out our main Coder over this either, again imhpo. We've lost great Coders in the past from too much pressure and too big of projects coupled with fan and team "demands". It's really too bad that T-brd is having to carry most of the "Problem/Bug fixing" alone And developing New concepts at the same time. Just wish alberts2 was in a position to help more, but RL is what it is.
Trust me I'd love the help! But I'm trying to take some pride and where I'm finding issues I'm feeling its important to try to resolve them myself if I can. This is me trying to put on some 'bigger boy pants' as a modder and my biggest frustration is really that I must hold down a complex job at the same time. But it certainly doesn't have me considering falling out. I set my own pace here and take enormous pride in the quality of this mod.
I believe TB was the one who initiated this current project, I'm just following his queue here in an attempt to lighten his workload as much as possible.
And its truly inspiring to have such great teamwork! Y'all have been the wind beneath my wings here and to you I'm eternally grateful!
I agree that barbs shouldn't fight animals though. there is simply no real reason for this game-function. However, I think animals fighting each other can bring a lot to the early game (through animals reaching high levels, increasing hunting difficulty/predictability, flavour); and it would help reduce the number of animals filling certain areas of the map.
Again, I'm thinking that some options may be in order to sort that out since there are so many dissenting opinions on this. I like the immersion factor and with many animals moving away from potential threats I think it's going to create some interesting 'story' style map movements that could help to fascinate players. It doesn't seem to be creating much delay since we're not talking about large stacks (when they get to evaluating it's a major delay BECAUSE in large stacks finding the best attackers and defenders mean evaluations of every possible unit against every possible unit and you can see how that can become exponentially delaying.) And it can also help to keep the numbers from getting out of control on all NPC sides of the fence.
That wouldn't make any sense or be consistent at all IMO.
Neanderthals are no less allied with human barbarians than chimpanzees are.
If we had much more Neanderthal content they could be an unique unplayable civ filling one of the other reserved NPC slots I guess; but this doesn't seem like a plausible direction for the mod to take in the foreseeable future.
Making them animals doesn't make sense even moreso than making them barbarians wouldn't. My concern was primarily:
If we had a Neanderthal NPC civ and the Neanderthal civ in the game, what would their stance towards each other be?
And the other concern being that anti-barbarian combat modifiers should apply to neanderthals, being humanoid.
However, I'm growing fond of the idea of having Neanderthals be their own NPC. We do have some space for more but Chimps are animals... neanderthals are really too sentient and civilized to be called that. It would make sense to make them a 4th NPC. I like it. It wouldn't take too many adjustments throughout the code to address that I think. We'll need art for them of course. They would be NPC8.
Animals fighting animals Could bring something to the table early game. And I stress the "could". But right now is that a good design decision?
The bigger question... what would make it a bad one? But maybe setting it up as an option might be able to help us easily test either way. The code would control this directly so a modmod would not be an appropriate way to address it because modmoding doesn't work well with dll stuff. But options sure do.
We still can't seem to get as players to the Modern Era with any semblance of consistency. As Arakhor now calls the Mod Caveman to Castle (with good reason) because we can't seem to leave the early game alone long enough to further help the mod get past the castle age.
True... but then again there was a time you'll remember not that long ago where even medieval was a bit unstable and out of whack. We're getting better and as we do we get the game more functional later into the game. Nevertheless if an idea applies to the beginning of the game it should still take precedence since at a point we'll feel that the beginning of the game is actually 'finished' and we can really get to focusing on each era moving forward.
About 80% of the animals will be able to spawn within borders soon. That is, all the animals that cannot attack unless they go feral later.
I think this should be made an option too and aside from trying to sort out Joe's load issues, has become the object I'm most focused on trying to implement. There are those who will NOT want this at all and will be very angry if they don't have a choice in this matter. Equally so the call for it has been loud and clear for a long long time.
Current SVN (and I know this area is far from finished so take that into account for my observation, I am) animal subduing is down and the strategy of placing "A well-promoted hunter fortified on a tile with a good defense bonus can survive a massive number of animal units." is not getting any real results now. You Have to move your hunter/hunter teams around the map. I also Know this is because the Aggressive Tagged set of animals is not in the SVN yet. And this will undoubtedly change.
Once again, I must ask you, in your opinion, is it a good thing or bad thing that you aren't as able to plant your units in the field and let the soak up the animal attacks? I personally think it's good you need to actively hunt. IMO it makes it more interesting. But I don't know everyone would feel this way in general so I'm not sure what your opinion or the opinions of others is on this and would love some feedback.
A single game turn is several decades. Especially in the beginning. And animals die of old age. So every turn you face a new generation of the same group of animals.
A game turn is decades in relation to tech advancement and social growth but not in terms of unit movement. In terms of unit movement, what's happening in the field turn by turn is reflective more of days or weeks per turn at most. This has always been the case for Civ.
If we tried to reflect unit activities more 'time accurate' to a game turn then we'd have to make each game turn take a day or week and make it thousands of turns between techs which would really drag on. So the events units go through are reflective of blinks of moments within the era rather more than anything. Once we hit WWII era we see the game trying to somewhat reflect a more accurate to time progress for units but even that isn't quite at a high enough turn resolution to truly represent the activities in the World Wars, which is a little unfortunate given what a great time it was for warfare simulation.
Whether a game turn for unit movements represents a week or a day depends more on the size of the map. Smaller size maps would mean more like weeks whereas the larger the map goes from there the LESS time unit movement in a turn really means.
Equally stated for human units, by the time a unit was trained and moved to the edges of the national territory every troop would've died of old age and would be tremendously difficult to replace with new soldiers, particularly if they were out in the field. Sieges lasted a long time, sure, but a month was a long time and a turn lasting 50 years would have been enough to represent the old age deaths of the troops both defending and there to attack. And that's just ONE turn. To give a strategic FEEL of replication in the game, the unit behaviors cannot be compared to taking the amount of time a turn takes but rather a MUCH smaller slice of time.
The older teach the younger hunting tactics that is specific to a family/pack... Usually.
Most brown bears are lousy hunters/predators and mainly herbivores/scavengers due to cultural differences between bear families. While others may be strong hunters as it is inherited from generation to generation, these may not even consider plants as food.
And that new generation should consist of statistically more or less the same ratio of seasoned to unseasoned animals as the last generation had. It's regional trends of animal ferocity.
Such as we see with the Magpies in Australia having such differing behavior to the ones here in the US!
Such as we see in Tigers that have become Maneaters.
Such as we see in some monkeys and the unique tricks their tribes have developed.
Etc...
The same as any human civ have toward the regular human Barbarian would make sense.
Actually it would, yes, now that you mention it. And I COULD make it so that the Neanderthal embassy could make it so that the player achieving this wonder would cause the 'eternal war' with this Neanderthal NPC player to end.
Not many animals left now, may finish it today:
Will start a new thread that list all animals in the OP that should be easier to read than these post are; after I've done them all.
Great work! A cursory review, understanding your perspectives on these assignments from earlier discussions shows a list I believe I can get behind entirely.
You never commented on whether you want a bTerritorial tag so we can make animals not always react to having a low aggression level by trying to get away from any visible potential threat. Would you like a tag like this for those confident animals like badgers and such that really don't care what you do until you intrude upon them?
And your post adds good details to the subject, making some of mine redundant.
