C3X: EXE Mod including Bug Fixes, Stack Bombard, and Much More Release 24

[Flintlock]

I've managed to replace the wake/activate labels on the right-click menu. Here's what it looks like so far:

I still have to figure out how sentry and worker automation are tracked. General automation is not tracked by a unit's usual state field since that will get occupied by whatever job the automation logic assigns it. I.e., an automated worker building a road will be in the "build road" state. The more specific automation modes like auto-clear pollution do have their own states. Sentry mode might be one of the states. There are three I haven't decoded yet, although I believe they're used by the unit AI and sentry status is tracked separately.

Here's the full table of unit states if anyone's interested:

NUM | STATE                |  LABEL
0     (No state)              Idle
1     Fortifying              Fortifying
2     Build Mines             Working
3     Irrigate                Working
4     Build Fortress          Working
5     Build Road              Working
6     Build Railroad          Working
7     Plant Forest            Working
8     Clear Forest            Working
9     Clear Wetlands          Working
10    Clear Damage            Working
11    Build Airfield          Working
12    Build Radar Tower       Working
13    Build Outpost           Working
14    Build Barricade         Working
15    Intercept               Intercepting
16    Go To                   Moving
17    Road To Tile            Working
18    Railroad To Tile        Working
19    Build Colony            Working
20    Auto Irrigate           Automated
21    Build Trade Routes      Automated
22    Auto Clear Forest       Automated
23    Auto Clear Swamp        Automated
24    Auto Clear Pollution    Automated
25    Auto Save City Tiles    Automated
26    Explore                 Exploring
27    ?                       (None)
28    Fleeing                 (None)
29    ?                       (None)
30    ?                       (None)
31    Auto Bombard            Bombarding
32    Auto Air Bombard        Bombarding

I've been thinking about putting the full states on the menu, e.g. "Building road", "Irrigating", etc. instead of "Working". Not sure that would be helpful though.

The big problem since the release of Civ 3 is, that in Civ 3 there is a special programming, that destroys every mobile air unit when a land unit of another civ is drawing on the tile with the mobile air unit without any regard to the defense values of the mobile air unit

I'll look into removing this behavior, at some point. Honestly there are so many things I want to do that I doubt I'll get around to this for a few months.

It is true that the game provides 5 different shades for movement LEDs, but in practice it only uses the green, yellow and red ones.

That is convenient.

 

[ndobb]

This is such amazing work! Thank you, Flinklock! As an aside, I've always wanted a way to run Civ 3 in a marathon-like speed, similar to Civ 6 for example. (ie, less years pass per turn, and more turns can be run in total, but technology discovery speeds are still roughly completed around the same years as vanilla game).

Would that be possible using the current C injection strategy? If yes could it possibly be prioritized?

Thanks for considering!

 

[tjs282]

Would that be possible using the current C injection strategy? If yes could it possibly be prioritized?

Number of turns per game can be adjusted in the "Game Limits" in the "Choose-Your-Civ" screen. If you want a longer game than 540 turns, you can simply increase the total number of turns-in-game (up to a maximum of 1000, I think?), without modding anything else.

However, in order to preserve your accustomed tech-pace (i.e. relative to game-date), you would likely also need to go into the Editor and create a modified .biq file. There are at least 2 possible options that I can think of, which could probably also be combined to some extent.

The 'simpler' version would be to make some/ most/ all the techs untradeable, meaning that every player would have to spend longer to research everything themselves (or steal techs from rivals). This should substantially slow down the tech-pace, unless you also reduce some/all of the tech base-costs, making them cheaper/quicker to research (or steal? Not sure if that's related to tech-cost or not).

Another possibility would be to shorten the "years per turn" in the .biq's General Settings, but increase the total turns per duration proportionally to cover the same number of in-game years. If you want to have discoveries coming in at roughly the same tech-pace as in the base-game, you would then also need to increase all the base-costs for the techs (especially the Ancient–Medieval era techs), proportionally to the number of turns you're expecting to spend in those eras. This would likely take a lot more fine-tuning.

Bear in mind also that the "Wonder+Improvement-Culture-doubling" mechanic is hardcoded to trigger 1000 years after completion, according to the in-game date — so if you want to continue to have the 100K and 20K Culture victory conditions potentially happening at roughly the same end-dates, the Cultural values of buildings and Wonders may also need tweaking.

 

[Ozymandias]

Bear in mind also that the "Wonder+Improvement-Culture-doubling" mechanic is hardcoded to trigger 1000 years after completion, according to the in-game date — so if you want to continue to have the 100K and 20K Culture victory conditions potentially happening at roughly the same end-dates, the Cultural values of buildings and Wonders may also need tweaking.

Also note that it's 1,000 years, not 1,000 turns.

 

[LKendter]

Also note that it's 1,000 years, not 1,000 turns.

That is why 20K and 100K culture victories really want stuff in the BC time frame. You get nice early doubling

 

[tjs282]

Also note that it's 1,000 years, not 1,000 turns.

Yes, as I wrote, and as you quoted

 

[Civinator]

The RARR mod holds a RARR extended biq, where the number of turns for the same techtree is increased from 540 turns in the standard RARR biq to 915 turns.

 

[Erlend Philip Wood]

The RARR mod holds a RARR extended biq, where the number of turns for the same techtree is increased from 540 turns in the standard RARR biq to 915 turns.

Thanks for the link, Civinator. Why not post it at the Downloads section? I was looking for RARR a couple of years ago, but couldn't find it and thought it was one of the lost mods.

 

[Civinator]

Thanks for the link, Civinator. Why not post it at the Downloads section? I was looking for RARR a couple of years ago, but couldn't find it and thought it was one of the lost mods.

In my eyes the completed mods forum is more important, as there is much more place to communicate with other forum members about that mod (or scenario). In the special case of RARR the download size of that mod from about 1,2 GB was reduced to about 13 MB by connecting it to the files in the mod CCM. With the upcoming CCM 3 not only additionally RARR can be played with that small additional download, but in the nearer future also the "lost" scenarios SOE, WW2 Global Gold and may be AOI (this needs a bigger additional download) can be played again and a new additional mod that I named Civ 3 Plus.

Questions of civers who are angry, because their 13 MB download in the download section alone don´t let them play a mega-mod like RARR, that normaly needs much more than one GB of download, can be answered much better in the completed mods forums and here the base of other civers with a good knowledge of Civ 3 to answer questions is very helpful, too.

 

[Flintlock]

This is such amazing work! Thank you, Flinklock! As an aside, I've always wanted a way to run Civ 3 in a marathon-like speed, similar to Civ 6 for example. (ie, less years pass per turn, and more turns can be run in total, but technology discovery speeds are still roughly completed around the same years as vanilla game).

Would that be possible using the current C injection strategy? If yes could it possibly be prioritized?

It's my pleasure! Glad you're enjoying it. It would be possible to edit the EXE to add some sort of marathon mode but it would be more natural to do that using the scenario editor. With the editor you can increase tech costs and reduce how many years pass per turn. If there's some specific change you'd like that's not possible in the editor, please share.

If you want a longer game than 540 turns, you can simply increase the total number of turns-in-game (up to a maximum of 1000, I think?), without modding anything else.

With C3X, the turn limit can be increased up to 1,000,000. IIRC I added that for R16. I remember that being a surprisingly difficult change. You'd think there would be one or two points in the code where the game caps the turn limit at 1000 but in fact there are seven different places, many of them redundant, for no good reason.

 

[vmxa]

Flintlock, I hate to put another request on a plate that is overflowing already, but I hate volcanoes. Any chance that an option could be added to not have them spawn on a map?

 

[Flintlock]

Flintlock, I hate to put another request on a plate that is overflowing already, but I hate volcanoes. Any chance that an option could be added to not have them spawn on a map?

Done! This is very easy since there's one function call in the map generator that sets tiles to hills, mountains, or volcanos. I can intercept that call and replace any volcano spawn with a mountain instead. I've been slowly decoding the map generator for a while now so I already knew where to look. BTW, the way the game places volcanos is by randomly switching some would-be mountain tiles. The chance to place a volcano instead of a mountain is 2, 4, or 6% depending on the world age.

 

[SayHayKid]

I know this was requested a while back, but what about HN units capturing cities? In the config file can we have it so neither AI or human capture, both AI and human can capture, or keep as is?

 

[Flintlock]

I know this was requested a while back, but what about HN units capturing cities? In the config file can we have it so neither AI or human capture, both AI and human can capture, or keep as is?

This is not so easy because I'm not familiar with the movement code. Also there's a lot of movement code and it's kind of a mess, as you could probably guess by the various bugs related to movement: the submarine bug, the disembark immobile bug, that issue with wheeled units escorting settlers, this thing you just mentioned, and probably more I'm forgetting. I'll add this to the list but no promises about when I'll get around to it. I mean I'll add it to the current list, I'm sure it's already on one of the previous lists of things I wanted to do but never got around to.

 

[WildWeazel]

Did someone say marathon games?

 

[Civinator]

Did someone say marathon games?

I thought this is an April Fool's Day joke.

 

[Sakharov]

Number of turns per game can be adjusted in the "Game Limits" in the "Choose-Your-Civ" screen. If you want a longer game than 540 turns, you can simply increase the total number of turns-in-game (up to a maximum of 1000, I think?), without modding anything else.

However, in order to preserve your accustomed tech-pace (i.e. relative to game-date), you would likely also need to go into the Editor and create a modified .biq file. There are at least 2 possible options that I can think of, which could probably also be combined to some extent.

The 'simpler' version would be to make some/ most/ all the techs untradeable, meaning that every player would have to spend longer to research everything themselves (or steal techs from rivals). This should substantially slow down the tech-pace, unless you also reduce some/all of the tech base-costs, making them cheaper/quicker to research (or steal? Not sure if that's related to tech-cost or not).

Another possibility would be to shorten the "years per turn" in the .biq's General Settings, but increase the total turns per duration proportionally to cover the same number of in-game years. If you want to have discoveries coming in at roughly the same tech-pace as in the base-game, you would then also need to increase all the base-costs for the techs (especially the Ancient–Medieval era techs), proportionally to the number of turns you're expecting to spend in those eras. This would likely take a lot more fine-tuning.

Bear in mind also that the "Wonder+Improvement-Culture-doubling" mechanic is hardcoded to trigger 1000 years after completion, according to the in-game date — so if you want to continue to have the 100K and 20K Culture victory conditions potentially happening at roughly the same end-dates, the Cultural values of buildings and Wonders may also need tweaking.

Why not just double research rate in "World Size" tab in editor and minimal turns for tech? BTW, I should try something similar.

 

[Ozymandias]

I've been thinking about putting the full states on the menu, e.g. "Building road", "Irrigating", etc. instead of "Working". Not sure that would be helpful though.

 

[Flintlock]

Done!

Here's what the right-click menu looks like right now:

The colors on the LEDs match the ones in the base game and the little swords indicate which units can attack. Since the text now states what units are doing, I got rid of the blue LEDs on "busy" units. Overall it works like @Erlend Philip Wood suggested on the previous page. His post got 5 likes so I'm assuming most of you are okay with it. Personally I like it like this, except for the swords which are IMO a bit ugly. I'm going to keep them for now as I can't think of any other simple, clear way to indicate which units can attack.

I'm going to try to finish off R18 very soon, like hopefully tomorrow. I don't think there's any point to having a second preview version. I wanted to post it today but there's still one issue I need to address, which is that disabling units on the right click menu prevents you from clicking them at all. That's bad for units that are occupied with some multi-turn action because it means it's hard to interrupt them. For example, take that mining worker above. If you'd accidentally set it to mine instead of irrigate, you couldn't simply click it on the menu to cancel that command. You'd have to wait until next turn or use wake all or something.

 

[LKendter]

I wanted to post it today but there's still one issue I need to address, which is that disabling units on the right click menu prevents you from clicking them at all.

Will 18 address the issue with boot order that Civinator found?