C3X: EXE Mod including Bug Fixes, Stack Bombard, and Much More Release 20

[WildWeazel]

I never put in my two cents regarding the UX of the Christmas light feature, so here goes:

A more informative UI is good, but let's remember that the inspiration for the whole thing was that it's hard to see which units are ready to attack. Since you're looking for something that can attack, this would be best visually represented by the unique presence of something on only those units. I don't know that having several different states combining colors and icons really helps in that regard, because then you have to parse what they mean instead of just being drawn to the one that stands out. Interpreting a symbol is a higher mental load than seeing whether there is one or not.

IMO it would be more effective to simplify this down to one icon which indicates that a unit can still perform its action (whether that's attack, intercept, or start a job). I do like Erlend's idea of making the text more specific, as that could provide more information without visually cluttering the space for the attack symbol. In other words: if you want to know what a specific unit is doing, reading the text or even interpreting multiple symbols is fine. But if you just want to see if anything in this stack can attack, spotting the unit with a symbol is much faster.

 

[Spoonwood]

The "Right of Passage" treaties are usually a Human Player cheat, allowing their stacks to move adjacent to Cities, then declaring war.

The AI declaring war on the human player works out better than the human player declaring on the AI in such a situation. I do not think that the AIs are deceived, deprived, or mislead by such RoP tactics. It also works as consistent with the game's rules to do such things.

 

[Chalito]

I wonder if it's possible to make Conscript the default experience and Regular with barracks? It could add more nuance to veterancy, and make great leaders a little more work to get.



I am using these settings (borders closed, 3-tile min distance, limited terrain settlers, no military alliances) and like it so far. You're right about fewer wars, but they are bloody when they start.

Oh yeah, great idea!!! Barracks creating Veterans never made sense. Veterans should be earned in the field of Battle!

 

[Ozymandias]

Oh yeah, great idea!!! Barracks creating Veterans never made sense. Veterans should be earned in the field of Battle!

I can't help but wonder what a map full of 1HP Units battling away would be like

 

[SayHayKid]

I can't help but wonder what a map full of 1HP Units battling away would be like

Don't Conscripts have 2HPs?

 

[Spoonwood]

Oh yeah, great idea!!! Barracks creating Veterans never made sense. Veterans should be earned in the field of Battle!

Is it just a poor choice of a name? Or does the extra hitpoint not make sense to you?

If barracks didn't give units an extra hitpoint, what would be their function otherwise? Just faster healing?

 

[Chalito]

Is it just a poor choice of a name? Or does the extra hitpoint not make sense to you?

If barracks didn't give units an extra hitpoint, what would be their function otherwise? Just faster healing?

I don’t like that a fresh unit out of a Barracked city gets the second highest Hit Points. I like AnthonyBoscia proposal to have them come out with the 3rd Highest and non-barracked cities come out like Conscripts, the 4th highest. Thus the second and most highest Hit Point units are made through Combat Victories.

The Barracks currently have 3 functions, Healing, Veterans and Upgrading. An extremely powerful City Improvement! It would be nice to break these apart to different improvements.

 

[Flintlock]

Can't we have both? The indicators and the text are related, yet separate. I don't mind waiting if you release the indicators now, and the text part later. It's only been five days since we got Release 17, after all.

Sure, we could have both. I don't have a convenient way to edit the text for units at the moment, but I'm sure I could find some way to swap out those labels. I'm hoping to post R18 Preview 1 with the indicators tomorrow. Part of the idea behind the preview versions was getting quick feedback from this thread. In the past, we'd discuss something, I'd implement it, then it would sit for months before it got released, and at that point no one cared to talk about it anymore. No longer.

I wonder if it's possible to make Conscript the default experience and Regular with barracks? It could add more nuance to veterancy, and make great leaders a little more work to get.

And then perhaps having a second improvement or wonder in the city with the barracks effect could allow them to build Veterans?

Altering experience levels should be easy. The game has one function that determines the exp level for new units spawned in any given city. It should be a simple matter of modifying that function. This reminds me: I think it would be an interesting addition to the militaristic trait if it allowed drafting units at regular instead of conscript level. That might allow drafting to be an alternative way of raising an army like in Civ 4. As it is in Civ 3, drafting is rarely worth bothering with since conscript units are so weak.

It would be cool if the 'disallow trespassing' could be enabled by a tech. In the ancient era people could march through each other's territory in total disrespect, but once the concept of borders is formalized then it becomes impossible without a DOW.

This would be easy, except maybe that it would be necessary to kick trespassers out of a player's territory after they've discovered the tech to solidify their borders. Of course the game already has some logic to eject foreign units but I'm not sure whether it's something I could reuse.

Would it be possible to allow resource generating buildings to generate a resource similar to auto-production, so that they can stack? Example Power Plant generates 1 power (resource) every 5 turns.
Would it be possible to cap the resource at a specified number so that no more can be generated after such number? Example Power Plant generated x20 power during 100 turns and production stops.
Would it be possible for produced resources to be consumed by a building? Example building a Power Plant consumes 1 power and there is x19 power left. Power production resumes in 5 turns to cap at x20.
Would it be possible for produced resources to be consumed by a unit? Example building a Tank consumes 1 power and there is x19 power left. Power production resumes in 5 turns to cap at x20.

There are two challenges I can see right of the bat. First, to make this work it would be necessary to pack extra data into save files. That's probably doable but is not something I've worked out how to do yet. Second, cities off the capital's trade network don't track available resource counts. They only track whether or not each resource is available. So any mechanics that depend on the number of resources available can potentially be exploited using cities not connected to the capital. (In the base game this isn't an issue as there are no mechanics like that except for resource trading, which only applies to the capital's network. That's why the devs programmed it that way in the first place.) Otherwise, what you describe should be possible. It's already possible to have buildings generate multiple resources and multiple copies of the same resource should work as well, although I haven't tested that.

IMO it would be more effective to simplify this down to one icon which indicates that a unit can still perform its action (whether that's attack, intercept, or start a job). I do like Erlend's idea of making the text more specific, as that could provide more information without visually cluttering the space for the attack symbol. In other words: if you want to know what a specific unit is doing, reading the text or even interpreting multiple symbols is fine. But if you just want to see if anything in this stack can attack, spotting the unit with a symbol is much faster.

I'm hoping the colors will make it clear enough at a glance which units can attack. Generally, red will mean they can attack and white will mean they can't. The only catch will be blue, which will indicate that the unit is busy and not specify whether it can attack or not. There shouldn't be any ambiguity, at least under the standard rules. Workers will be blue if they're doing some worker action but they could never attack anyway so there's no ambiguity there. Fighters will be blue if they're set to intercept and bombers will be blue if they're set to auto-bomb, but because they only have one move, they can only be in that state if they started their turn that way, hence if they're blue then they can also attack so there's no ambiguity there either. I'm not sure about radar artillery. I don't think it's possible to set auto-bombard mode on a unit that can't attack. Anyway, I can see how this would not be obvious to players. It probably is better to drop the blue LED and indicate busyness using text instead.

 

[Erlend Philip Wood]

I wonder if it's possible to make Conscript the default experience and Regular with barracks? It could add more nuance to veterancy, and make great leaders a little more work to get.

I like your idea. This would make actual combat experience (and by that, the Militaristic trait) more valuable. I mean, how can you be a Veteran if you have never experienced combat?

Conscripts would represent a ragtag army quickly assembled with little to no training, while Regulars have received basic training. So you need a Barracks (or Harbor, or Airport) to give them that training. Veteran and Elite = experienced troops.

 

[Spoonwood]

I don’t like that a fresh unit out of a Barracked city gets the second highest Hit Points. I like AnthonyBoscia proposal to have them come out with the 3rd Highest and non-barracked cities come out like Conscripts, the 4th highest. Thus the second and most highest Hit Point units are made through Combat Victories.

The Barracks currently have 3 functions, Healing, Veterans and Upgrading. An extremely powerful City Improvement! It would be nice to break these apart to different improvements.

This does sound more interesting in one way.

But, on the other hand, I think if they would have released the game that way it might have had problems. I means, I think some new players just don't build barracks.

 

[Myceanean_Searaider]

@Flintlock What is the current technical unit limit? I've been keeping tabs on amount of units in the world in my ongoing marathon monstrosity map game, via c3mt editor since it shows numbered list of them, and I've just found out few turns ago I got past the magic 15bit number of 32767, on turn 202. Should I be afraid of some kind of value size overflow or am I good to keep on playing? If I don't do anything the AIs will just keep producing units ad infinite and they don't seem very kin on starting wars against each other.

 

[Civinator]

@Flintlock I got past the magic 15bit number of 32767, on turn 202.

 

[vmxa]

If they do get into war, the turn times will be painful.

 

[Myceanean_Searaider]

Surprisingly AI army movement doesn't seem to be adding any significant length to the turns, at least I am not noticing any different between period of relative peace and my recent invasion against AI that had about 1500-1800 military units garrisoned in its cities, having to kill multiple of deathstacks of this size below is sure annoying, but at least AI moves them as 10 stack-groups of 100-200 units instead of filling up whole screen with small teams.

Even when I landed few scouts in Africa, while at war with Carthage and Zulu, making cheating AI send all units randomly trying to chase it down it didn't seem to affect the turns length - not anymore than having 24 remaining alive AI opponents does.

 

[ZergMazter]

I was walking past a German city in a new game as I was testing out the expanded zone of control and defensive bombardment options, and they started firing at my unit with a catapult without being at war or triggering it. It wasnt defensive bombarding or zone of control. It was during their turn when they decided to bombard me and no war. I'm gonna try to recreate it in a new game. There is a chance my custom map just got corrupted.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

I don’t like that a fresh unit out of a Barracked city gets the second highest Hit Points. I like AnthonyBoscia proposal to have them come out with the 3rd Highest and non-barracked cities come out like Conscripts, the 4th highest. Thus the second and most highest Hit Point units are made through Combat Victories.

I like your idea. This would make actual combat experience (and by that, the Militaristic trait) more valuable. I mean, how can you be a Veteran if you have never experienced combat?

Now that I think on it, Civ3 veterancy tracks rather oddly given Firaxis introduced gradient experience in Alpha Centauri, and pegged a "trained" start to middle-tier.

There shouldn't be any ambiguity, at least under the standard rules. Workers will be blue if they're doing some worker action but they could never attack anyway so there's no ambiguity there.

With an eye to nonstandard rules, it's probably worth figuring out marker priority for multi-classers like combat engineers. I figure Working > Intercept/Auto > Attacks Remaining.

 

[Ozymandias]

I don’t like that a fresh unit out of a Barracked city gets the second highest Hit Points. I like AnthonyBoscia proposal to have them come out with the 3rd Highest and non-barracked cities come out like Conscripts, the 4th highest. Thus the second and most highest Hit Point units are made through Combat Victories.

The Barracks currently have 3 functions, Healing, Veterans and Upgrading. An extremely powerful City Improvement! It would be nice to break these apart to different improvements.

OK, you convinced me

 

[SayHayKid]

Splitting the functionality of the barracks has been requested a few times. I'd like to have all cities be able to upgrade units. This does two things, one it helps the AI to upgrade their units as they do not move them to a city with barracks on purpose like a human player does, and two, removes the tedium of moving stacks of units just to upgrade. It would be toggleable true or false. I also think having the option to start units one level down on experience would be great. Have more levels for units to gain experience through battle. Napolean's Old Guard, for example, were with him from the beginning and had survived several battles earning their high esteem on the battlefield.

 

[Flintlock]

R18 Preview 1 is done! It's up on GitHub here: https://github.com/maxpetul/C3X/releases/tag/Release_18_Preview_1. And here are the changes:

• Unit limits
• Add icons to units on the right-click menu showing movement and status
• Gray out units on right-click menu if they have no remaining moves
• Apply GridOn setting from conquests.ini after loading a save

Unit limits means you can cap unit production at a certain number for each type. For example, you can do like Civ 4 with a simple cap per player:
unit_limits = [Missionary: 3, Spy: 3, "Corporate Executive": 4]
You can also set caps that depend on city count, ex:
unit_limits = ["Heavy Infantry": 2 per-city, "Heavy Tank": 3 cities-per]
This limits the number of Heavy Infantry to twice the number of cities. cities-per is the reciprocal of per-city. Heavy Tanks are limited to 1/3rd the city count, or one unit for every three cities.
It's also possible to combine the flat and city-dependent limits with a plus sign like so:
unit_limits = ["Heavy Tank": 5 + 3 cities-per]

I've been working on unit limits quietly since posting version 17 Preview 3. I thought it would be a small-ish job then discovered a bunch of complications along the way. (So, like usual.) In particular I had to work around the issue of unit type duplication, which is by now a familiar problem. I also had to make sure the game switches production away from limited units if completing them would exceed the limit. There's a little popup for this like when you can't continue production on a wonder b/c another player built it. Lastly it took some effort to make the upgrade-all function work well around the limits.

Someone, I believe it was @Predator145 , asked for an option to stop auto-production of armies once a civ has all it's supposed to be able to support based on city count. That's possible now using the unit limit feature since it stops auto-production once the limit is reached. It also prevents city production and upgrading but not any other methods of unit creation. So players can still exceed the limits if they can capture or enslave the units in question. Unit limits also won't stop barbarian spawns, won't block the free units the AIs get based on difficulty, or anything like that.

@Flintlock What is the current technical unit limit? I've been keeping tabs on amount of units in the world in my ongoing marathon monstrosity map game, via c3mt editor since it shows numbered list of them, and I've just found out few turns ago I got past the magic 15bit number of 32767, on turn 202. Should I be afraid of some kind of value size overflow or am I good to keep on playing? If I don't do anything the AIs will just keep producing units ad infinite and they don't seem very kin on starting wars against each other.

As far as I know there is no technical unit limit other than the obvious one, that each unit requires some memory and eventually you'll run out. The unmodded game's limit of 8192 units is arbitrary. BTW, each unit object occupies 1028 bytes so 32767 units only requires about 33 MB. You might run into the 32 MB save file limit that I've heard of but have never actually seen. If you do, please send me the save so I can look into removing that limit too.

I was walking past a German city in a new game as I was testing out the expanded zone of control and defensive bombardment options, and they started firing at my unit with a catapult without being at war or triggering it. It wasnt defensive bombarding or zone of control. It was during their turn when they decided to bombard me and no war. I'm gonna try to recreate it in a new game. There is a chance my custom map just got corrupted.

That's concerning, I hope it's not a bug in the mod. I've seen the game do weird things before that I could never replicate, like walking a unit onto a transport causing it to disappear from the game entirely.

 

[Myceanean_Searaider]

Compressed manual saves are at about 1.60 MB right now but the uncompressed autosaves are at 34.3 MB (36,039,450 bytes). I haven't noticed any issues with them strangely enough.
Was worried about the units since they get enumerated and C3MT save editor cannot read any newer units past the 15bit, so I suspected the game would start either breaking right now, or after hitting 16bit (65536) value in total amount of units in the world. I find it more curious that "disband units if you can't maintain their upkeep" doesn't seem to be applying to the AIs but who knows what's up with that.