[BtS] Super Spies

[glider1]

@Capo
Yeah I've had that feeling myself. Why is no one else observing this? It doesn't mean they are not. You may truly be observing something real.

I'll go check it out. I cannot check it on this computer so it will take me some time.
Cheers.

 

[The Capo]

I figured I'd put up a sample pic of what is going on too. I am Japan, that is my spy. The image on the left is at the start of the turn, I did this to show that the python error is certainly linked with the assassin/bribe buttons NOT showing up when the spy enters the same tile as a rival unit. Otherwise, the pop-up should come up at the begining of the turn rather than when I move it into the same square as a lone rival unit. As you can see once I do that, move the unit, the error pop-up shows up and the asassin/bribe buttons do not. So I am quite sure that is the problem. Further this IS the latest version, ie the one in post 174, that you told me to get.

 

[glider1]

@Capo
I do understand your point you are very clear. However it would be a lot easier if you could actually post a save game. That would be a save game from a clean build of Super Spies for BTS317 only. Personally, I tend to turn auto-save on and make it save every turn for this exact reason - catching potential debug situations.

Thank you for persevering. Like I said, you may well be seeing something real. People on this forum have gotton asassin and bribe to work so it is interesting. Stick with it, we will track it down and it could benefit others who knows.
Cheers.

 

[The Capo]

I don't really have one handy, and its really late now. But I'll put up a clean save file. I'm not sure what you are going to get out of it though, but I also don't really know what I am doing either, so its worth a shot. I'll put one up tomorrow.

I can just whip something up in worldbuilder right? I don't need to play an actual game or anything do I? Just for time's sake (plus I'm working on a mod too).

 

[glider1]

@Capo
Just thought you might have had a save. Can work something out. Just have to think of an easy way to hack enough espionage points to get world builder to fire up an assassination/bribe option. There's probably a chipotle cheat way to max out the espionage points quickly, but not sure what it is.

Yes it would be late in Baltimoron. It's moronic here too, but me morons hang out in the daylight over here
Cheers.

 

[The Capo]

Well, without doing it naturally, all I really have to do is go into WB build a bunch of espionage buildings/wonders/great spies and just go to town on one civ and I am sure I can get to the level. But this happens even when I don't have enough points either, so I think the buttons are still supposed to show up just greyscale/darker to indicate you can't do it yet. Just a thought. I'll play a game though and let you know what happens. I'm sick today anyway so I can do it.

 

[The Capo]

Alright, because of the pop-ups I didn't get to save the game myself, so this is going to be an autosave. I hope its the right one, the civ should be Babylon and there is a spy in the east, in Mongolia. I set my espionage points to go to the Byzantines, so if you want to try the unit with as much espionage points as you can try it on them, I got the same error for both the Byzantines and Mongolia though.

Hopefully this helps. Another option would be to ignore this and deal with not having the ability to bribe or assassinate, but that isn't very fun. So good luck.

 

[Xenomorph]

Without having to go through all 10 pages, is this mod MP compatible?

 

[glider1]

@Capo
Thanks for the save and the effort. Excellent observation:

Another option would be to ignore this and deal with not having the ability to bribe or assassinate, but that isn't very fun. So good luck.

This is probably what has actually been happening. Virtually no-one has been playing this mod on it's own. Most have been playing it in context with RevolutionDCM. In that context, the point of Super Spies is to add AI intelligence and experience points to spies without changing the basic game too much. This is why no-one has complained that they cannot assassinate I think. Assassination is a fundamental game changer if it is not implemented correctly. If we find the cause for your crash, that will only be the beginning. We will have to study whether assassination is good or bad. Some have already said that you should only be able to assassinate civilian units. Thanks again, and will proceed to debug and testing.

@Xeno
I wish I could answer that. Honestly I am not sure. I think SS was designed to be multiplayer compatible for sure.

Cheers.

 

[The Capo]

Well, then I guess this was all for naught, especially if nobody else seemed to notice the lack of the assassin/bribe capability. The mod I was working on was to be used specifically for MP games, so certain issues that others may have (ie Assassin missions being too powerful) would not effect us as every player would be human (we usually play with 10 to 18 players). Hopefully you are lucky in discovering this problem, and I will be sad to report to my comrades that the assassin/bribe missions, for now at least, are not going to be possible.

Don't stop trying though, please. If I had done that, this probably may never have come to light.

 

[glider1]

@Capo
Exactly you are correct. Assassin will either die a natural death if it is not already dead, or be a good thing again as Trojan Sheep intended it. Should be fun to discover which it will be.

Cheers.

 

[The Capo]

I wish you luck though, because I would like to have my mod work with no error pop-ups at all, and I don't have the skill/knowlege to remove it.

 

[glider1]

@Capo
I've done a quick test of Super Spies for BTS 3.17 regarding assassination. I could not get your save game to load. It appears to be wanting a different version of Super Spies for some reason.

The bribe and assassin buttons do show up under these conditions:
1) Spy is ready to move
2) Spy has enough points
3) Spy is on top of any rival unit that is on it's own

The spy then has the option to assassinate or bribe. Assassination costs more for higher value targets. Roughly in the future era it seems:
1) Spy assassinates a worker at 90% prob for 100 points roughly
2) Spy assasinates a marine at 75% prob for 200 points roughly

These things are unclear:
1) I'm not sure if the AI uses the assassination option. I could not trigger it during testing. Will have to now look through the code in detail to see whether the AI actually can perform the assassination mission.

2) There is a possibility of a bug where the spy will assassinate a whole stack. However I'm not sure whether I was imagining this during testing.

3) It is unclear whether the assassination costs and probabilities are correct for balanced game play.

4) Is is unclear whether assassinations should only be possible on civilian units.

In order to help you debug your own build Capo, attached is both the super spies mod as I was using, and a save game. If you concentrate on Suleiman's borders, you will see a line of spies. Some have a worker under them, some have a marine, some have nothing. This will show you the relative costs and absense/display/dimming of the buttons.

Thank you for your persistence. If you were not interested in this mod, no-one would be testing it and this mod would not be improved upon what is already very good.

(Super Supies is already a very high quality mod - Trojan Sheep is a great modder with a great ability to capture detail. I hope his arm has healed after he fell off his bike).

Cheers.

EDIT:
Have looked through the code. I'm 90% sure that the AI does not conduct assassinations itself. If super spier's like the idea of assassinations, Trojan Sheep's quality of coding is so high that it would not be hard to add it in as a mission the AI can select in it's queue of priorities. If anything, at a guess I'd say that the human is more vunerable to assassinations than the AI is because the AI rarely has workers working on their own and normally in groups by the time that assassination becomes an option. However this is debateable. The problem is a conceptual one. Assassination is more closely bound to the idea of killing important figures like great people and warlords, not workers and single unit military.

Trojan Sheep mentions that bribing has not yet been implemented. But again, his code quality is so high that bribing would also be not hard to implement. Bribing military units and workers actually gels more conceptually. Thus you could I guess imagine that bribing would be the most popular active spy mission if it were implemented.

Assassination could be implemented like this:
1) AI detects that a Great person is imminent in a rival city because the city internals are sufficiently observable through passive espionage. Another scenario is that a spy happens upon a warlord in a similar fashion.

2) AI sends in spies on the road routes out of the city in order to possibly catch and assassinate a great person exiting the city. The only way to prevent this would be to accompany great people on intercity routes with your own spies which would then be able to twart assassination attempts. That mechanism is already there.

The problem with that is it could end up being quite one dimensional and thus not much fun. Thoughts are welcome. Remember that assassination is only one aspect of this mod. The other aspects that are working very well are spy promotions and a better espionage AI.

 

[faichele]

Hello!

Time to post here once again, as I skimmed over that discussion on assassination and unit bribing missions.

I used Trojan Sheep's Super Spies mod as foundation for my own modding endeavours, which meanwhile have extended the espionage options available in combination with the World of Civilization (WoC) core mod quite a bit.

Unit bribery and assassination (though I call it "sabotage") are among the available options, though not working quite along the same lines as described here (these missions actually were contained in the C++ source code of default BtS, though not activated).

Sabotaging a unit doesn't kill it with my mission, but does a random amount of damage, and sets it immobile for 1 to a few turns; I'll also try to integrate the "sabotage" feature from CivRev, which "un-fortifies" a unit.

Oh, regarding great persons; you can abduct them (either a unit or a settlet Great Person specialist) with my added espionage missions (though this is only available for the Great Spy).

Regarding unit sabotage, there's still another alternative: Inciting a worker revolt, which (will) set a worker unit immobile for a certain number of turns, and (will) lower its work speed rate.

Regarding assassination: I added/plan on two assassination missions: Assassinate an enemy city leader (I added new city leader specialists for that ), which will send a city into revolt for a few turns (and will have additional side effects like spawning immigrant units), and Assassinate an enemy leader (only for the Great Spy); for the effects of the last one, I haven't decided what to do yet (apart from replacing the target leader with a new one if the targeted civ has more than 1 leader in the game).

If you're interested in seeing/using what I turned the original Super Spies into, just drop me a line, OK?

And once again, thanks for your excellent work with Super Spies, Trojan Sheep!

 

[The Capo]

So are you saying you could only use the assassin mission in the modern era?

 

[glider1]

@Capo
That's completely up for grabs and a good question. What is the history of assassination, and in what era does the AI start to double up his civilian workers so that assassination doesn't become a game breaker against the mindless AI?

Many questions, of that there is no question
Cheers.

 

[glider1]

@Faichele
Glad that Super Spies lives on. Your ideas are very interesting. The concept of my merge which is RevolutionDCM below, is to not diverge from standard game play too much but focus more on better AI's and strategies for the single player. Super Spies without assassination fills this bill well. However, your ideas are a lot of fun and may be most excellent in the future.

Is your version of Super Spies intended around competition with an AI for example?
Cheers.

 

[The Capo]

There has got to be something wrong on my end then. Unless it didn't work for you either. I downloaded your files and everything, took out the SS mod I had in, replaced it with yours and went in, clicked on a spy to assassinate a worker and I got the pop-up again.

This blows, any ideas?

 

[glider1]

@Capo
There is a possibility that it sucks not blows. That is one idea.

Another idea is that perhaps everyone is getting this pop up error but not seeing it? If you turn off python errors in the civ ini file, can you still assassinate? In any case you should be able to press the bribe button without drama because that is just vanilla behaviour. I'm not on the test computer I used and won't be back on it for 24 hours. There is a possibility that python error popups were not enabled on that test computer but doubt it. If this were the case then it is possible that the error was logging but not being displayed. Python can continue on if there is an error, in some cases.

Another idea is that your installation is in some way corrupted. Python is so finicky by small things like indentation dramas in the code. However I think that is unlikely and wouldn't get into reinstalling straight away. Cripp7 on this forum was having a drama with one computer and not another at his place. He wrote about it in this forum and on the RevolutionDCM forum a page back. It was something silly but I don't remember.

Cheers.

 

[cripp7]

Another idea is that your installation is in some way corrupted. Python is so finicky by small things like indentation dramas in the code. However I think that is unlikely and wouldn't get into reinstalling straight away. Cripp7 on this forum was having a drama with one computer and not another at his place. He wrote about it in this forum and on the RevolutionDCM forum a page back. It was something silly but I don't remember.

Cheers.

yes I did, I wound up having to completely uninstall civ/bts and re-install, then install the RevDCM mod+addons. After that it worked great.