[BtS] Destiny Mod

[foxtrotsierra]

I solved the issue of the overwriting of the error message on the screen. I played the game in the "Play Now" mode "Single" player and it did not show up. I then went back to "Single Player" "Custom Game" mode and it no longer was present there.

I no longer have any problems, but will follow the thread for additional issues that other players report and will institute the corrections needed when the issues are resolved. Otherwise, I think this mod is beautiful and certainly reflects a great deal of work. Thank you. I'm 71 years old and retired. Playing this game provides me with a great deal of pleasure. I want you to understand how much I appreciate all the work people such as yourself do to put these mods together. I sure wish I had your ability.

 

[smeagolheart]

I played the mod a bit, here's some "constructive criticism" (aka nitpicks).

1. When playing with Revolutions enabled, maintaining order in new cities is a pain in the back of epic proportions. Most civics that weren't present in the vanilla Civ (Animism, Technocracy etc.) hold a huge instability penalty. Was this intended?
2. There's a lot of mess regarding unit descriptions and skills, particularly with UUs. For example, the Portuguese Blazer Gun still becomes available with Steel, while the Cannon that it replaces has been moved to an earlier tech, Metallurgy.

@ Tevery Best:
The Civics are NOT currently balanced for Revolutions. On the patch notes for 3.19 it says (2nd post this thread)

Recommend not running Revolutions component at this time as Civics have not been balanced for use with this and Revolutions will run somewhat unpredictably.

The main reason they haven't been balanced yet for Revolutions is because it is a large job with a whole lot of entries. I did look in the Revolutions forums for guidance but there wasn't a lot just "find another one and copy it" with no real explanation of what the new tags that control the Revolution mechanics mean. I haven't tackled the mountain yet of attempting to figure out what each field means. If anyone has done this thing before, I'll gladly accept help for it.

That is a good catch on the Blazer Gun, I've done a lot for the UUs but there might have been things missed, thanks for pointing it out, it will be fixed in the next patch. You say " a lot of mess" what other mess are you talking about?

 

[smeagolheart]

I solved the issue of the overwriting of the error message on the screen. I played the game in the "Play Now" mode "Single" player and it did not show up. I then went back to "Single Player" "Custom Game" mode and it no longer was present there.

I no longer have any problems, but will follow the thread for additional issues that other players report and will institute the corrections needed when the issues are resolved. Otherwise, I think this mod is beautiful and certainly reflects a great deal of work. Thank you. I'm 71 years old and retired. Playing this game provides me with a great deal of pleasure. I want you to understand how much I appreciate all the work people such as yourself do to put these mods together. I sure wish I had your ability.

@Foxtrotsierra

Thanks for the kind commentary, it has been a lot of work for one dude for sure! I'm 35 and not retired still got a lot of work left to do *groan* and I got two little girls so I've got my hands full.

 

[smeagolheart]

played a bit further now and crushed a 24 cities civ with elephants and spionage only (city revolt). taking cities gives WAY too much espionage points (like 1-1.5k per captured city, size 10-15) and tech points (like 3k).
there cannot be seen how much gold you pillaged when taking the city, it only displays the amounts of research and espionage points. (all on marathon and giant maps)

also, the nomadic trait prevents from pillaging gold only, you still get research and espionage points when you capture a city of a nomadic leader. this shouldnt be intentional, as it weakens the nomadic trait even more, if you get so much points (too much i think ...).

@Blair
Here's the logic behind the advanced pillaging system.

When you capture a city you get a chance to get a percentage of a tech that they know that you don't. If they don't have any techs you don't you don't get any tech bonus.

City Population Size 1-5
10% bonus per pop + 0-25 random = % of tech to gain

Size 6+
10% bonus per pop + 0-50 random = % of tech to gain

So Size 1-5 you can get at most 75% of a tech's research cost so if they had Guilds which cost 1000 beakers you could gain 750 whole beakers of research towards the Guilds tech at most so when you switched over to research guilds you'd have that bonus.

So size 6-10 you will have increasingly good chances to get the whole tech.

Over size 10+ then you get the whole tech?

The numbers of beakers get adjusted when you go on Marathon as you say and Guilds will cost a lot more than 1k Beakers then and any percent of that tech in that example would be your gain.

These bonuses apply to the AI as well should they take your cities.

I haven't touched the espionage points part of it from the code I implented it from Dom Pedro II's "Extra Conquest" component and you can actually adjust that one from XML field in Globaldefines.xml

iTotalCommerce = (GC.getDefineINT("CONQUEST_ESPIONAGE_PERCENT") * GET_TEAM(getTeam()).getEspionagePointsAgainstTeam(pOldCity->getTeam())) / 100;

That forumla gives the espionage points. If you find the field in Globaldefines.xml "CONQUEST_ESPIONAGE_PERCENT" you can adjust it to a lower number than it is (believe default is 25%)

So that is how the numbers are calculated, I think you will see big numbers especially since you are playing marathon and tech costs, espionage costs have been scaled accordingly.

Now another question could be why? Consider the situation of a conquering army going into a city. In a bigger city, they are bound to learn new things about the conquered people (espionage) and might pick up new ways of doing things (tech). The armies will go through important papers, intimidate and strong arm important local figures, etc that they will learn something.

As I say it's fair both ways, if the AI retakes a city they will get the same bonuses back from you.

 

[Blair-]

alright, thanks for posting the formulas.

i ended up with 35k espionage points against my victim before i thrashed his last city. at a time you only got like 700 GNP and are far away from having jail or the espionage trait, i consider it too much. a 10% yield might be better, i think. that would neither make espionage bombs completely useless, nor give a too high advantage. because right now you can fill up the pointbar til like 2k, then you never ever need to spend any new points during wartime, as long you capture cities. this makes culture bombing with catapults unnecessary.

and what about the nomadic trait i wrote about in my last post regarding tech+esp catching?

 

[smeagolheart]

alright, thanks for posting the formulas.

i ended up with 35k espionage points against my victim before i thrashed his last city. at a time you only got like 700 GNP and are far away from having jail or the espionage trait, i consider it too much. a 10% yield might be better, i think. that would neither make espionage bombs completely useless, nor give a too high advantage. because right now you can fill up the pointbar til like 2k, then you never ever need to spend any new points during wartime, as long you capture cities. this makes culture bombing with catapults unnecessary.

and what about the nomadic trait i wrote about in my last post regarding tech+esp catching?

Definitely lower the value in the xml file as I mentioned.

	<Define>
		<DefineName>CONQUEST_ESPIONAGE_PERCENT</DefineName>
		<iDefineIntVal>10</iDefineIntVal>
	</Define>

Hmm it's set at 10 now. Do you have a savegame before conquering one of the cities? Adjust the number lower and find a good value and I will set it in the mod for the next release. I don't find Nomadic all that weak (look at imperialistic for example). I'm not sure how to program it in the SDK to skip over Nomadic on conquering a city though I'm sure it could be done. I'm not 100% convinced it's necessary. If we can get the espionage and tech numbers where they make sense, I'm not sure they should be exempt from those "losses" on losing cities.

Another thing, as you mentioned the espionage points were only against the losing civ right? It kinda makes sense that a civ that has lost a ton of cities to an invader, the invader would have a lot of intel against the remains of the civ. They would find plans, documents, etc for last bit of the civ if you can imagine a scenario where a civ (country) slowly or even rapidly lost control of major cities to a foreign invader.

Let me know what you think.

 

[Blair-]

i would suggest to make the spypoints dependant on the city size as well. the bigger - the more secrets the city reveals. however, this would make another coding session necessary.
but as most of you wont play that huge maps, the 10% yield as it is now fits.

about the nomadic trait: currently you get 3 things when conquering a city in the best case - espionage (always 10%), research (as you mentioned) and gold (depending on the city size and buildings pillaged). when you attack nomads in the beginning of the game in the original extra mod (no research pillaging there), you might suffer severe lack of gold, as you have to completely finance the army on your own.
now that you CAN get research as well, you dont necessarily get into severe troubles, as you can easily pre-tech around the techs your future victim has, which will give you an advantage even on nomads. this imho weakens the trait a bit, as it doesnt "protect" your civ by giving attackers a no-advantage-case.
for example, protective civs are hard to be attacked, as there are units in all eras that can profit of the 2 promotions, which makes the possible attacker rethink about the victim.

 

[smeagolheart]

It was difficult - for me anyway - to program the tech conquest bonus as it is now. I understand your concern about Nomadic being weakened, some tweaking with that trait may be added to the next patch.

 

[Raven Destroyer]

what i read is just great the latest update is in the first post right?

it took me downright 2 day's to get from page 1 to 15 so i expect a lot and i heard leonardo davinci's workshop that is my favorite wonder i heard more fantastic wonders added here i will download the current link shown in the first post then tomorow i will test it

you will make the it on my pc as the first mod installed for civ (maybe for any game)


oftopic) does some one know if it is possible to automate settlers in 2 or even in the first? i still play sometime's those two and it would be neat to have the settlers to be linked to the ai

 

[smeagolheart]

The mod has "Ai-autoplay" if you want you can have the AI take over the rest of a turn or take over completely for a few turns.

Ctrl-Shift-X to take over for a number of turns
Ctrl-Shift-M to have the AI finish current turn for you

I hope you like it Raven Destroyer! (and get a faster net connection!)

 

[Raven Destroyer]

the internet is fiberpower or so 15mbs or so but still needs over an hour but i meant with the ai auto the old civ's like civ 1 and 2 that is also why i said it whas oftopic but i wanted to go to bed after i installed it but this is going to take until 6 o'clock am at my end of the world


i hope my headache is worthy of the time

58 mins now

 

[Raven Destroyer]

i hope installing it won't take some more then 1 hour cause i'm tired

oh and i play civ 1 to 4 and smac and i have somewhere that something and a half civ game where you said you had some wonders it is starting with installing i hope i get a verdict about it in three day's but school starts tomorrow or so

funny installer pic

oh and thanks about the buttons not to press XD

 

[Raven Destroyer]

ok that started well when i try to open destiny from desktop and ingame it crashes this is the

signature AppName: civ4beyondsword.exe AppVer: 3.0.0.1 ModName: cvgamecoredll.dll
ModVer: 0.0.0.0 Offset: 00073e90

could it get into trouble when you have A) an illegal version of windows B) moved the hole bunch from c to an other harddrive?
i will check on b if someone can say about A if it is both or just a i get sixty curses and then go hunting (i should have a good windows somewhere)

ok i'm almost done reinstalling the hole thing it took the hole evening i will move destiny back without the cvpath file
o this mod costed me 2 days to complete reading two day's of installing what is next?

ok this is unexpected ty to moving it and then reinstalling it without checking comes with a side effect i now have two working copies that both work but confuses me to the bone

 

[Raven Destroyer]

i hate myself currently and i edit now my latest post so much i'm confused what is correct what is stil hot what cold but i will have to run a small test to check the "deleted" civ from the new oh and i should look if i can find the patches to make sure that wasn't the prob

you might think why now that is a good question maybe this is the first time i think that might be the bugger if that is it then i wasted time loads of time

edit 1) ok there we go again i'm deleting the hole game again (including destiny i still have the instal i will run the install of civ in the night when i sleep i need to get out of my bed on 6 o'clock cause i have to go to school so i will be the first awake again when civ is done i check if i now get everything working properly (without destiny) when that is done i will load destiny (after i updated the hole !@#$) when this uninstall work is taking to long it will be tomorrow that i begin installing

 

[smeagolheart]

@Raven Destroyer: I have no idea what you are talking about, I'd like to help but if you don't lay out your problems specifically, I can't. Try to narrow down the problem. Think of it logically. Does Civ4 BTS 3.19 work without the mod? If so try and install the mod, if Civ4 BTS works but not the mod, then try another mod maybe you'll have more luck with another one! And get some sleep bro!

 

[Raven Destroyer]

it did work without it when i installed it wanted to start up nice but i think i was three steps ahead of myself and didn't check if the bts version was the latest and when i face problems i most likely talk to the first wanting to listen even if it is a wall but i have installed now the latest version of bts i should now have better results (i hope) if not i will post again

but the prob i got gone the following i started bts i searched the mod found it then activated wanted to load but between loading and showing windows showed his famous error message from where the error came from can be just me (5 out of 10) a problem out of windows (2.5 out of 10) or a problem of your end (2.5 out of 10) or another possibility the old silly buggers part that is just a mayor bullying problem the pc just not wanting to note some parts from now and then but that where minor problems cd-drive not showing and working now and then sometimes freezing or making shortcuts or so possitive not a hacker toying with me i have avg and another good program filtering badguys

 

[Raven Destroyer]

@Raven Destroyer: I have no idea what you are talking about, I'd like to help but if you don't lay out your problems specifically, I can't. Try to narrow down the problem. Think of it logically. Does Civ4 BTS 3.19 work without the mod? If so try and install the mod, if Civ4 BTS works but not the mod, then try another mod maybe you'll have more luck with another one! And get some sleep bro!

the narrow down option went this far as narrowing down old files costing me a day in total to get rid of it

i have made it to work only not to play a game but i will try it again when i try to play the thing loads maybe one third to half of the things then it shut's down i will move now again the cvpath maybe that will work

oh and i'm missing civilization.ini
it doesn't work it gives a runtime error then says it asked to end something in an weird way

 

[Raven Destroyer]

ok i got it to work now i know that it where two files that i needed
A) the latest version of bts
B) i moved cvpath elsewhere to make that file invisible

but now comes my review i didn't finish my game yet i don't even have cat's yet
i find the new things verry cool also i love your effort to make old wonders back in civ 4 that is a huge plus i dislike the new civics as they still force to make use of specific civic's but that might the xp hunting me being but beside the xp and that civic that forces you to only use that else you get angry people the other civics i could chose have more negative effects then realy helpfull aspects you might look at that once like i read earlier the UU unit's are sometimes missing their link to their civ

but still 4/5 still great huge work you put into this and for the fact you did most on your own (or even everything)

i have only one problem it seems that in my game the barbs are even stronger then i am i need two units to kill one barb or could this be a problem from my end? as they captured my copper just after i secured it and iron is no where near me

 

[smeagolheart]

The mod has been updated to Version 3.41. Check the first post for link to download it. The filesize has shrunk a little bit because wonder movies for the new wonders have been changed to static images, also all Wonders should have "wonderimages" now.

Here's a partial changelist:
Version 3.41
--------------------
*Renamed Medium Tank and Modern Armor to Tank and Heavy Tank respectively
*Added Maria II by Sabitoleth, Henry the Navigator Removed for Portugal
*Ramkam changed to Seasnake's version, background replaced
*Moved Heroic Str to Combat2 instead of Combat3
*Fixed double wonders/captured destroyed messages
*Removed Freight, Caravans didn't seem enough value added and never seen the AI use them
*Changed Airships to National Unit with 2 limit
*Added Static Wondermovies
*Changed Red Cross, Academy to limit of 1 per civ
*Added Darwins Theory of Evolution from Earlier Civs
*Various additional fixes and tweaks

 

[Raven Destroyer]

The mod has been updated to Version 3.41. Check the first post for link to download it. The filesize has shrunk a little bit because wonder movies for the new wonders have been changed to static images, also all Wonders should have "wonderimages" now.

i have made it working now i have to spend another hour updating XD glad i can afford that time now

oh did you also linked the UU to their owners if you want i can make a list of units missing their link

-----Edit------
it's some time i last tried destiny i'm busy with school and all when i get again some free time then i go swap the dust of destiny and going to play it at least twice out

--second edit--
i needed to update civ before destiny could be played but i have at least 10 saves from the un-upgraded version do i need to instal another version or can i just continue playing i can't play road to war (i want to rule europe making hitler a side show (playing as the nazi's XD couldn't resist the temptation)