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

[Alekseyev_]

Don't think there is a better catch-all term than either upgrades to/obsolete with, but being able to have two different texts would be perfect to make this a non-issue.

 

[tjs282]

Superseded by?

I suggested that phrase as well but @Civinator decided to stick with "Obsolete with"

 

[Alekseyev_]

One more super minor "bug" I came across once again: Specialists with multiple types of yield stack them visually. I.e. to have a specialist that "shows" 1 happy face and 1 tax, it would have to have 1 tax and 2 happy faces, as the first happy face would be obscured behind the tax icon. If it could be changed to show them all successively, that would be a nice minor QOL feature for mods with more diverse specialists.

 

[Civinator]

Question about build-rates for units with AI double-strategies in the Flintlock mod:

In the Flintlock mod there can be set build ratios concerning the new AI routine for land artillery and for bombers:

How are units with AI double strategies treated in these calculations ?

 

[Civinator]

Superseded by?

Don't think there is a better catch-all term than either upgrades to/obsolete with, but being able to have two different texts would be perfect to make this a non-issue.

I suggested that phrase as well but @Civinator decided to stick with "Obsolete with"

Thank you all very much for your suggestions and the requested help for these difficult to use "small English little words".
As I am a non-native English-speaker, I am more convinced with the conventional solutions. For the suggested combination "upgrades to/obsolete with" I feared that this labels text would be too long for the following link, but a test shows, that in nearly most cases there is enough place for the following linked text.

Spoiler :

So in my eyes the problem of obsolescence can be fixed without the help of the Flintlock mod and a fix of the hyperlink bug would much more needed for all mods and scenarios that are in work by using the Flintlock mod, as it makes a big difference, if a unit can have up to 3 prerequisite resources than only two without running into that bug and two instead of one for buildings.

 

[Predator145]

It seems like the devs had the idea of stealth bombard in mind and tried to unsuccessfully implement it. You can still see in the editor how some late game air units and the kamikaze have "Stealth Attack" as a command and the a unit targeted list. But of course that would only work if they actually attack and not bombard/bomb.

How could they be so half baked about it? Is there anything they've left in place that could salvage the stealth bombard concept?

 

[Flintlock]

This effect is achieved (as far as I know since El Justo´s great scenario AoI) by setting a unit into the upgrade box, but not tickling the upgrade function of that unit.

Thanks for the info. I got the text replacement working, now the Civilopedia page will say "Obsoleted By" instead of "Upgrades To" for unit types that do not have the upgrade ability. "Obsoleted By" sounds a bit better to me than "Obsolete With", but the replacement label is stored in C3X's own labels.txt file for easy customization or translation. This change ended up being more difficult than I anticipated. I thought it would be a quick 15 minute job but it ended up taking a couple of hours, so I hope you guys appreciate it. It was one of those cases where the job seemed simple but then a little problem appeared, and I resolved it, then another appeared, and got resolved, then another, and so on. I was able to replace the label by intercepting a function call just not the one I was expecting. I intercepted a weird little function "check_ptr" that checks that some label text comes from a text buffer created to store some labels. I have no idea what the point of that function is but I'm glad it's there since it makes it easy to swap out label text.

One more super minor "bug" I came across once again: Specialists with multiple types of yield stack them visually. I.e. to have a specialist that "shows" 1 happy face and 1 tax, it would have to have 1 tax and 2 happy faces, as the first happy face would be obscured behind the tax icon. If it could be changed to show them all successively, that would be a nice minor QOL feature for mods with more diverse specialists.

Alright, I'll add it to the list. This reminds me I haven't updated the list in quite a while.

Question about build-rates for units with AI double-strategies in the Flintlock mod:
In the Flintlock mod there can be set build ratios concerning the new AI routine for land artillery and for bombers:
How are units with AI double strategies treated in these calculations ?

Good question, I hadn't thought about that when I wrote that code. In general the strategies are considered independently, so production can be switched off of a unit as long as it has either the offense or defense strategies regardless of any others, and a unit type will be considered artillery as long as it has the artillery strategy regardless of any others it has in addition. There is one point of conflict, when comparing the strongest available artillery and strongest available direct attack unit, if a unit type has both strategies assigned it will be considered to be artillery and not an attacker. The numbers of units the players have for each strategy are provided by the base game so I don't know how it accounts for units with multiple strategies. I'd expect them to be counted multiple times.

It seems like the devs had the idea of stealth bombard in mind and tried to unsuccessfully implement it. You can still see in the editor how some late game air units and the kamikaze have "Stealth Attack" as a command and the a unit targeted list. But of course that would only work if they actually attack and not bombard/bomb.

Interesting you mention this now, this is something @Vaughn has asked me to look into so it's already a priority for R15. (I'll post R14 as soon as I get around to it, it's been in "just one last thing" mode for a couple of weeks now.) So far I haven't seen any sign that the original developers tried to implement stealth bombard in the game's engine, but I am going to try to patch it in.

 

[Alekseyev_]

Thanks for the info. I got the text replacement working, now the Civilopedia page will say "Obsoleted By" instead of "Upgrades To" for unit types that do not have the upgrade ability. "Obsoleted By" sounds a bit better to me than "Obsolete With", but the replacement label is stored in C3X's own labels.txt file for easy customization or translation. This change ended up being more difficult than I anticipated. I thought it would be a quick 15 minute job but it ended up taking a couple of hours, so I hope you guys appreciate it. It was one of those cases where the job seemed simple but then a little problem appeared, and I resolved it, then another appeared, and got resolved, then another, and so on. I was able to replace the label by intercepting a function call just not the one I was expecting. I intercepted a weird little function "check_ptr" that checks that some label text comes from a text buffer created to store some labels. I have no idea what the point of that function is but I'm glad it's there since it makes it easy to swap out label text.

Alright, I'll add it to the list. This reminds me I haven't updated the list in quite a while.

Good question, I hadn't thought about that when I wrote that code. In general the strategies are considered independently, so production can be switched off of a unit as long as it has either the offense or defense strategies regardless of any others, and a unit type will be considered artillery as long as it has the artillery strategy regardless of any others it has in addition. There is one point of conflict, when comparing the strongest available artillery and strongest available direct attack unit, if a unit type has both strategies assigned it will be considered to be artillery and not an attacker. The numbers of units the players have for each strategy are provided by the base game so I don't know how it accounts for units with multiple strategies. I'd expect them to be counted multiple times.

Interesting you mention this now, this is something @Vaughn has asked me to look into so it's already a priority for R15. (I'll post R14 as soon as I get around to it, it's been in "just one last thing" mode for a couple of weeks now.) So far I haven't seen any sign that the original developers tried to implement stealth bombard in the game's engine, but I am going to try to patch it in.

Thank you so much! And sorry that it took so long in the end.
A great part about this feature that I just noticed is that it will work automatically even for older mods without additional work by user or mod author required, as the information comes just from the scenario file.

 

[Flintlock]

Flintlock updated C3X with a new update entry:

Release 14

New in this version:
- Automatically cut research spending to avoid bankruptcy
- Option to aggressively penalize bankrupt players
--- Sells non-gold-generating buildings, non-free units, and switches city production to Wealth
- Remove pause for "we love the king" messages
- Holding shift while a stack bombard is going will temporarily turn off combat animations
- Fix units could trespass by attacking an enemy unit across a restricted border
- Widen C3X error, info, and warning popups
- Warn...

Read the rest of this update entry...



Edit with some more details about the new stuff:

• Automatically cut research spending to avoid bankruptcy: Kind of like in Civ 4, when you're about to go bankrupt, your spending on the research slider will be automatically reduced as much as necessary to avoid that. There is a popup informing you when this happens. I categorized this as a convenience feature and so left it enabled by default like the others, although in rare cases it might be inconvenient as it prevents you from bankrupting yourself to complete a tech faster.
• Option to aggressively penalize bankrupt players: This modifies how maintenance works and makes bankruptcy harsher overall. If a player goes bankrupt and so can't afford to pay their maintenance costs, the game will forcibly lower their expenses and raise money by: (1) selling buildings, excluding those that are maintenance-free or contribute to gold production even indirectly, (2) disbanding units, excluding free ones, and (3) switching cities to building Wealth.
• Fix units could trespass by attacking an enemy unit across a restricted border: This fixes a bug someone reported a while back, where you could attack an enemy unit standing in another civ's land even when you weren't allowed to enter that other civ's territory. If you won combat, the attacking unit would be prevented from entering the tile across the border and would be left stuck halfway between tiles. This is now fixed so the attack is not allowed in the first place.
• Warn if two-city start contains adjacent cities or missing FP cities: After setting up the AI two-city start, the mod double checks if the player starting locations were generated properly. The two failure cases it checks for are: (1) AI capital locations being placed adjacent to one another. This is an error in the base game's map generator and occurs when too many maps are generated without restarting the game. And (2) FP cities not created. This happens because no suitable locations could be found for them, likely because the "distance between civs" BIC variable is set too large.
• Gold amount autofill activates when editing an amount on the table: Now you don't have to remove a gold offer from the trade table and re-add it in order to get the autofill to trigger again, instead it will also trigger when you right-click a gold amount to modify it.
• Suppress "maximum hypertext links exceeded" popup: This does only what it says, it stops the "maximum hypertext links exceeded" popups from appearing. It does not fix any sort of crash related to the link limit. I don't know if there even is such a crash, I've read about one on the forums but did not see one in my limited testing. If anyone can reproduce a crash in that case, please send me a save so I can look into it. This change also does not remove the link limit, so any links beyond the limit will not work.
• NoRaze restriction applies to the human player as well as AIs: This is something I've wanted to do for a while. It's not very important since the human player(s) can be expected to obey the house rules of a scenario, but still it's nice that the rules are consistent for all players. This was awkward to implement since the option to raze cities is mostly provided by popups that are specified by a text file (script.txt) outside the executable. For the advisor popups, I took the lazy approach of not modifying the popups themselves but instead intercepting the player's choice and, if they choose to raze a city, overriding it and showing a popup telling them razing is not allowed. By comparison, it was easy to remove the "Abandon City" option from the right-click menu so that's what I did there.

 

[Ozymandias]

WOW! (And it does seem - for the very good indeed - that you've taken a page viz. Aircraft Carrier / Armor presence from the "traditional" war game Cataclysm, which, for the record, is my favorite, for well over a half-century of playing such games.)

 

[Predator145]

Another breakthrough! Agri has been such an overpowered trait waiting to be nerfed. But it wasn't the cheap improvements but the fast growing lake and river cities during despot that the human player knows to take advantage of so well in early game. Still, would removing that warrant giving them cheap granaries? Heck, the cheap granaries themselves felt like a trait on their own.

Another suggestion if I may. The king unit ability is often used by modders to create units that can't be built but still upgraded into. This is useful in utilizing all the AI strategies in the editor like Flag Unit, Explore, Cruise Missile, Leader in conjunction with heavy perfuming. With enough perfuming, the AI will build them and then with perfumed barracks upgrade these into king ability units with AI strats that are useable. But the king unit ability makes the unit unable to defend a stack thus only bombard units can be used. The option to turn off the auto hiding in a stack function would be great.

 

[Fergei]

Blimey, this looks to have been a lot of hard work. I've not yet downloaded any mods but this one stands out. Before taking the plunge I have a few queries, with apologies if any of these turn out to be non-specific to this particular mod.

1) is it safer for me to create a duplicate directory prior to downloading or is the way C3X creates a backup .exe pretty much safe enough?

2) does the AI use of bombard and armies increase the difficulty of the game (e.g. do they use these options pretty intelligently?)

3) does the AI use of bombard increase their building and use of basic archers in the early game as an offensive alternative, even after discovering horsemen and swordsmen?

4) I've not played the game for a while so apologies if they do this in vanilla Civ3, does the AI in C3X use bombard on naval units?

5) does the AI bombard land tiles to destroy improvements (I'm thinking mainly naval here)

6) does the AI use great leaders to make wonders?

Thanks in advance. I'm a particular fan of the listed changes in terms of rail movement limits, zero corruption government option and a more powerful forbidden palace.

 

[tjs282]

1) No other backup is really needed. Only the .exe file itself is modified and the mod-installation backs it up first

2) the AIs use their new bombard and army units as intelligently as they use any of their other units -- but at least they do now build and use them! (And they fill their Armies more competently than before) It does make the early game a bit more difficult/dangerous -- until I start capturing their Cats/Trebs...

3) Archers and LBMs are set as "offensive"-strategy units in the base-game .biq, so no, the AI's 'extra' bombard unit-builds do not generally include extra Archers/LBMs, beyond what they would usually build

4) The unmodded AI already used Air units to bombard ships, but I have not (yet) seen an AI use its additional bombard-capable Land-units to systematically attack (my) shipping

5) Similarly, the unmodded AI already used its ships to bombard land-tiles

6) The unmodded AI could already use MGLs to rush builds (GWs, generic improvements, or units) -- and in the rare event they got one, that was about all they ever did with them. I don't think that ability has been lost as such, but the patch is supposed to make the AI's decision more nuanced, e.g. not rushing a Worker, if an Army would be a better choice.

 

[Predator145]

Blimey, this looks to have been a lot of hard work. I've not yet downloaded any mods but this one stands out. Before taking the plunge I have a few queries, with apologies if any of these turn out to be non-specific to this particular mod.

1) is it safer for me to create a duplicate directory prior to downloading or is the way C3X creates a backup .exe pretty much safe enough?

2) does the AI use of bombard and armies increase the difficulty of the game (e.g. do they use these options pretty intelligently?)

3) does the AI use of bombard increase their building and use of basic archers in the early game as an offensive alternative, even after discovering horsemen and swordsmen?

4) I've not played the game for a while so apologies if they do this in vanilla Civ3, does the AI in C3X use bombard on naval units?

5) does the AI bombard land tiles to destroy improvements (I'm thinking mainly naval here)

6) does the AI use great leaders to make wonders?

Thanks in advance. I'm a particular fan of the listed changes in terms of rail movement limits, zero corruption government option and a more powerful forbidden palace.

1) No need for back ups. Just create a "C3X" folder in Conquest to extract to. You can always run the unpatched version of the game after having installed the patch.

2) The AI will be much tougher using stock game armies. These things will help a lucky AI become a run away one easily. They simply do not die in AI vs AI wars. As for artillery, it's a mixed bag. The AI break down passive static defenses better. But it fails to coordinate offensive units to take advantage of bombardments. Also, stock game artillery units are capturable and thus the AI will simply end up donating them to the human player. Soon the player will be swimming in captured artillery. This is cured by modding artillery to having -4hp and some token defense stats. This coupled with nerfed armies IMO makes the game a lot more balanced. Armies in my mod only contain 1 unit and have a 5hp bonus, costing only 200shields. This combined with heavy perfuming of the military academy and armies themselves means the AI will be fielding lots of them (something they can do very well). Since armies are very mobile and can blitz the AI is much better at taking advantage of their bombardment. Expect your redlined defenders to be cleaned up by AI armies.

3) The AI will not build stock game archers after it has access to stronger offensive units. In stock game, it overwhelmingly builds swordsmen and neglects horsemen because extra attack and defense are valued much more than speed. By giving horsemen inconsequential "buffs" like "stealth attack" order without any targets and lethal land and sea bombard, you can elevate the horseman's value in the eyes of the AI, causing it to build a more balanced mix of both swords and horses. As for the archer, I've given it amphibious. This also gives the AI a reason to build a few of them after having access to horses and swords. If you don't have too many flavor units, you can also easily use the perfume option on the patch.

4) Unfortunately, the dumb C3C naval behavior hasn't been fixed so far. The AI rarely uses ships to bombard ships unless you added "sea power" AI strat units with very low or 0 attack and a bombard strength+function. The AI will weigh the odds and sees that attacking is futile and thus will bombard instead.

5) Since the dumb C3C naval behavior remains and can't be easily reverted back to the PTW one, naval units prefer to bombard cities most of the time. I have give my harbors, commercial docks and offshore platforms Sea Bombard value to make AI naval bombardment on cities threatening, giving meaning to building coastal fortresses.

6) The AI prioritizes making armies with leaders now. It can't rush great wonders.

Of course all the changes above are OPTIONAL and can be turned off even if you've dloaded the patch. Even if you're a stock game purist it's worth using the patch for you can play it with 100% stock game mechanics and enjoy many quality of life improvements.

 

[Chalito]

I tend to disband captured AI artillery to keep the game fun! The AI will sit 2 tiles back on a hill and pound your city with a few Arty, every once in a while it will send offensive units to attack the city, if it has a surplus of units. The best improvement of the Flintlock Mod in my opinion.

 

[Ozymandias]

I tend to disband captured AI artillery to keep the game fun! The AI will sit 2 tiles back on a hill and pound your city with a few Arty, every once in a while it will send offensive units to attack the city, if it has a surplus of units. The best improvement of the Flintlock Mod in my opinion.

I don't think you're alone in that opinion

Also (just in case no one has beat me to it) -

WELCOME TO CFC!

 

[Sutsuj]

Hi there Flintlock,
Thanks for the update! I have a question about the new bankruptcy penalization feature: In what order does it choose units to disband? Based on some preliminary testing on my part, it seems like it deletes units in order from first in the scenario's unit list to last, but I'm not sure if that's correct. Anyways, it's a great feature and will work well with a new scenario idea I've had; thanks!

 

[timerover51]

Does this patch/change work with the standard CD Civilization programs, or does it only work with the Steam Download?

 

[justanick]

The only supported versions of Civ 3 are the Steam and GOG versions of Complete, although other versions might work if they use the same executable as GOG.

This should still be current.

 

[timerover51]

This should still be current.

Thank you. I will not touch it then.