C2C - Civics Discussion Thread

[EldrinFal]

Bringing discussion of buildings and changes to Buildings Thread.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=437557&page=4

 

[JosEPh_II]

Well I can see Pacifism is still OP and imho breaking the games play. It's 100% Culture is over the top and causes the AIs to adopt it Universally. It's just like Slavery was when it was 1st introduced back in RoM days. Every AI used it and wouldn't change from it. It unbalanced the whole game. And Pacifism is doing the same thing.

I'm seriously considering trying to figure out how to eliminate it as a Civic. So the AI acts normal again. The Only good thing it does is give the AI a Cultural win. But in doing so it destroys the Leader Traits, basically rendering them useless/ignored.

I could probably live with a 10% Culture boost from it but Not 100%.

JosEPh

 

[EldrinFal]

Well I can see Pacifism is still OP and imho breaking the games play. It's 100% Culture is over the top and causes the AIs to adopt it Universally. It's just like Slavery was when it was 1st introduced back in RoM days. Every AI used it and wouldn't change from it. It unbalanced the whole game. And Pacifism is doing the same thing.

I'm seriously considering trying to figure out how to eliminate it as a Civic. So the AI acts normal again. The Only good thing it does is give the AI a Cultural win. But in doing so it destroys the Leader Traits, basically rendering them useless/ignored.

I could probably live with a 10% Culture boost from it but Not 100%.

JosEPh

Joseph, can you test out a tweak to Pacifism then? Edit the XML file and reduce
<iCommerce>100</iCommerce> to 10, as you suggested above, and see how that plays out. Interestingly enough, in the XML file I am looking at, the AI Weight shows -50 for that Civic By the definition of that tag, I thought that would have made the AI favor it less. Maybe tweak that one too and see what kind of results you get.

 

[JosEPh_II]

That would be in the Civ4CivicsInfo xml file right? If I can find it I'll try it.

JosEPh

 

[climat]

Joseph, can you test out a tweak to Pacifism then? Edit the XML file and reduce
<iCommerce>100</iCommerce> to 10, as you suggested above, and see how that plays out. Interestingly enough, in the XML file I am looking at, the AI Weight shows -50 for that Civic By the definition of that tag, I thought that would have made the AI favor it less. Maybe tweak that one too and see what kind of results you get.

I thought so. If AIs behave as Joseph said, that's weird.
Pacifism should be a fill-in players use when they don't have any war plan at that time.

 

[EldrinFal]

That would be in the Civ4CivicsInfo xml file right? If I can find it I'll try it.

JosEPh

Correct. It will under Assets -> XML -> GameInfo.

I thought so. If AIs behave as Joseph said, that's weird.
Pacifism should be a fill-in players use when they don't have any war plan at that time.

I don't think it should always be the defacto Civic though between wars, which seems to be Joseph's experience. I've been wondering if Pacifism should actually be a Trait, but I guess it's possible for a leader to be pacifistic even when the people are not.

 

[Praetyre]

For the purposes of testing a big, loooooong scenario I'm developing, is there any way to reactivate the hard city limits? Like, is it one of those DLL things or some setting in the XML?

 

[Koshling]

For the purposes of testing a big, loooooong scenario I'm developing, is there any way to reactivate the hard city limits? Like, is it one of those DLL things or some setting in the XML?

It's a DLL thing. I can promote it back to a full game option with a small amount of work though if you need me to (so that there would be 2 game options, the new one being 'city limits are absolute' or some such wording)

 

[Praetyre]

If it's not too big a change, I'd be very happy. Partly, I'm asking because I can see a number of potential applications in, say, a Rome Total War esque-setting where you don't want the players or AI expanding out beyond the already-settled areas until the Age of Discovery.

 

[Koshling]

@Thoric (et al),

I have just pushed the food wastage system to SVN. Please let me know how that plays out in your game (if you don't have SVN access let me know). I checked it against your massive food save that you posted a while ago, and also against my own games, and it seems to give much more reasonable results in both your extreme case and in more normal case (and has almost no effect in normal development).

 

[Koshling]

I've been trying to figure out why my new civic evaluator seems to like changing from Irreligious to Folklore even when tribalism is close (rather than holding off and doing both as I expected it to). Turns out its because Irreligious has an AIWeight of -100 attached to it - why is that there? Anyone know?

In fact on checking I see several of the newer civcs have AIWeights attached. In general these tend to screw up the AI assessment routines unless they are individually tuned, so anyone iobject if I remove them all for now until we see what tuning is actually needed?

 

[EldrinFal]

I've been trying to figure out why my new civic evaluator seems to like changing from Irreligious to Folklore even when tribalism is close (rather than holding off and doing both as I expected it to). Turns out its because Irreligious has an AIWeight of -100 attached to it - why is that there? Anyone know?

In fact on checking I see several of the newer civcs have AIWeights attached. In general these tend to screw up the AI assessment routines unless they are individually tuned, so anyone iobject if I remove them all for now until we see what tuning is actually needed?

If the AI can evaluate the bonuses/negatives of Civics on its own, is the weight needed at all?

 

[Koshling]

If the AI can evaluate the bonuses/negatives of Civics on its own, is the weight needed at all?

Usually no. It should only be used when the AI is making specific errors we can't easily and generically correct in the civic evaluation code.

 

[Koshling]

Just pushed to SVN:

Improved algorithm that chooses when to change civics
Improved civic evaluation
Removed AI weights form civic defs
Fixed bug in city extra happiness calculation
Improved evaluation of buildings with growth threshold modifiers
Inhibited founding of cities that would cause additional unhappiness when we already have happiness issues

Should address both the inappropriate civic switching, and the issue where the AI spams cities until it's so unhappy it's utterly crippled

 

[JosEPh_II]

Joseph, can you test out a tweak to Pacifism then? Edit the XML file and reduce
<iCommerce>100</iCommerce> to 10, as you suggested above, and see how that plays out. Interestingly enough, in the XML file I am looking at, the AI Weight shows -50 for that Civic By the definition of that tag, I thought that would have made the AI favor it less. Maybe tweak that one too and see what kind of results you get.

The AI Weight even at -50 is doing Nothing to stop ALL but 1 AI in my game from using Pacifist. So I've reset it to 0. I've also reduced Culture by 2/3 to 33 from 100. And even that maybe too strong. With the unaltered settings (not these) Shaka is still a Pacifist but Annoyed with everyone and at war with the only AI not using Pacifist (Siam) but he won't go to war against me.

I had let this slip my mind.

I'll have to look to see if I changed the iCommerce value. And I'm not sure if I need to start a new game or just plug these new values in and see what shakes. Any suggestions on that?

Is this the block for the iCommerce change:

<CommerceModifiers>
				<iCommerce>0</iCommerce>  
				<iCommerce>0</iCommerce> 
				<iCommerce>10</iCommerce>
				<iCommerce>0</iCommerce>
			</CommerceModifiers>

JosEPh

 

[Koshling]

The AI Weight even at -50 is doing Nothing to stop ALL but 1 AI in my game from using Pacifist. So I've reset it to 0. I've also reduced Culture by 2/3 to 33 from 100. And even that maybe too strong. With the unaltered settings (not these) Shaka is still a Pacifist but Annoyed with everyone and at war with the only AI not using Pacifist (Siam) but he won't go to war against me.

I had let this slip my mind.

I'll have to look to see if I changed the iCommerce value. And I'm not sure if I need to start a new game or just plug these new values in and see what shakes. Any suggestions on that?

Is this the block for the iCommerce change:

<CommerceModifiers>
				<iCommerce>0</iCommerce>  
				<iCommerce>0</iCommerce> 
				<iCommerce>10</iCommerce>
				<iCommerce>0</iCommerce>
			</CommerceModifiers>

JosEPh

Just plug in the changes. However in the v17 DLL the ai will normally only consider civic switches about every 25 turns, so you may see no effect in terms of ai behavior for about this long. If you have the version I pushed today then the ai will react to changes in the definitions faster in most cases (they now make a check a least every time they get a new tech)

 

[EldrinFal]

The AI Weight even at -50 is doing Nothing to stop ALL but 1 AI in my game from using Pacifist. So I've reset it to 0. I've also reduced Culture by 2/3 to 33 from 100. And even that maybe too strong. With the unaltered settings (not these) Shaka is still a Pacifist but Annoyed with everyone and at war with the only AI not using Pacifist (Siam) but he won't go to war against me.

I had let this slip my mind.

I'll have to look to see if I changed the iCommerce value. And I'm not sure if I need to start a new game or just plug these new values in and see what shakes. Any suggestions on that?

Is this the block for the iCommerce change:

<CommerceModifiers>
				<iCommerce>0</iCommerce>  
				<iCommerce>0</iCommerce> 
				<iCommerce>10</iCommerce>
				<iCommerce>0</iCommerce>
			</CommerceModifiers>

JosEPh

The Modiki on this forum has all the definitions for the XML files. I have to refer to it myself. Looks like this is the reference:

CommerceModifiers Modifies the commerce output in all your cities (+n%) (respectively, for gold, research, culture, espionage)

So that looks like the Culture tag.

Regarding the Civic changes, Koshling implemented some new code today to help with that, including setting the weight to 0. It is in the SVN though, which I know you don't use.

But take heart that these issues ARE being looked it. Sometimes it just takes a little time to implement, test, discuss, adjust, test more, and so on.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Flavor>
					<FlavorType>FLAVOR_CULTURE</FlavorType>
					<iFlavor>10</iFlavor>
				</Flavor>

What does this do to Culture for Pacifist? Make the AI "want" it more?

I've D/l'd tortiose but just not sure what to do with it yet. What programming skills I had from College was back when Cobol, Fortran, and Basic were all New and Shiney! Cobol destroyed my 4.0 grade avg..

JosEPh

 

[Koshling]

Flavor>
					<FlavorType>FLAVOR_CULTURE</FlavorType>
					<iFlavor>10</iFlavor>
				</Flavor>

What does this do to Culture for Pacifist? Make the AI "want" it more?

I've D/l'd tortiose but just not sure what to do with it yet. What programming skills I had from College was back when Cobol, Fortran, and Basic were all New and Shiney! Cobol destroyed my 4.0 grade avg..

JosEPh

No, just makes the cultural advisor like it more when suggesting things. Doesn't have any effect on the AI

 

[Hydromancerx]

I've D/l'd tortiose but just not sure what to do with it yet. What programming skills I had from College was back when Cobol, Fortran, and Basic were all New and Shiney! Cobol destroyed my 4.0 grade avg..

I would follow the instructions here. Basically you will be wanting to make a folder to put all the stuff inside. I personally made a new folder in "My Documents" called "C2C SVN". That way I knew exactly where it was. Once made you will want to use that as the destination and the stuff you are downloading. Which means right click on the new folder and selecting "SVN Checkout". Once selected you will have the "URL of Repository", which is 'https://caveman2cosmos.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/caveman2cosmos/trunk' and "Checkout Directory" should be the folder you just made. Then you click ok and wait for the very LONG download. This is the longest download you will ever need to do for the SVN. But once its done you should be set. Let us know if you have any problems. This should at least get you started.