C3X: EXE Mod including Bug Fixes, Stack Bombard, and Much More Release 16

[Predator145]

I played an always war monarch game (except I can trade with a civ and then declare on the same turn). I would see a defender and an artillery unit. I got a stack of 3-5 one time with defenders. I've also seen them drop off artillery type units via boats in 20k games on emperor. Sometimes, they would only drop off say a trebuchet with no defender or attacker. It was quite silly, and could have happened since the defender in the boat might have gotten disbanded due to a unit support issue.

I played some on deity, BUT, I was using a modified version of the Quick Civ mod, so that might have thrown things off.

What I can say is how their stacks perform on high levels against the human player. At mid and lower levels they seem to be cheap captures, I agree. I thought I remember seeing earlier in this thread a mega stack of AI units with artillery type units that wouldn't be a cheap capture.

Also, I've had a few trebuchets bombard my armies before (the AIs won't attack a 7 hp fortified 3 unit, 3 defense army before tanks and maybe not a 6 hp fortified 3 unit, 3 defense army), which if they had enough trebuchets, could mean that they would attack it that turn. And I have a habit of using armies to cover workers who have made rails, so that could be bad. Though, likely the AIs probably need artillery proper and rails before they could pose a serious threat to my armies, and then they would have to use them in the right way, which they probably wouldn't.

I've seen enough debug to know that the AI doesn't now how to organize its artillery in response to armies. The trebs may bombard your armies if they happen to be near by. Otherwise they'd be heading off in a stack towards your city where they will hang out there for a while bombarding because they don't know how to follow up with a proper attack while your armies are free to ravage their interiors.

Speaking of armies, IMO they don't feel like they belong in the game. They just feel shoehorned into it. I'll start with nerfing them down to 2 transport capacity but then you still end up with 3 cavalry armies that the AI can't deal with until bombers. 1 transport+5 HP bonus without a "larger armies" SW seems to be the most balanced based on my last year's test. It would still allow you to use them as highly mobile battering rams and rapid defensive response force. But they'd be far more mortal on deep pillaging missions.

 

[tjs282]

So I'm finally playing through a real game with C3X and the AI is besieging my outlying cities with catapults and AHHH THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING

It's a bit different. But, on the other hand when you take out such a stack, you get their artillery type units.

Yup...

I just finished a playthrough on the "Napoleonic Europe" Conquest at Emperor, using C3X R9. The pRNGods had deemed that this time I should lead France, so it was a relatively easy win: didn't even need to cash-rush much, despite the hideous shield-cost of the Imperial Guard and -Cavalry units.

And by the end of it, every one of my ~60 Grand Batteries was foreign, including several which had clearly changed hands more than once: among my collection were also Danish, Prussian, and Spanish GBs, despite my having been allied with all 3 of those nations pretty much from beginning to end.

(Prussia survived only on sufferance; although I mustered more than enough firepower to crush her, the Ottomans and Russians were simply more insistent that they should have my attention — and lose their towns)

Getting stuck as e.g. Spain or Austria-Hungary would have made the game a lot more difficult, though...

 

[Spoonwood]

I've been watching a huge 60% pangea game with the maximum default number of civs. I don't mean the following as suggestions, but more like observations.

The first army was a medieval infantry army by Babylon, during a war with the Chinese. But, they got behind in tech later. During that war also, trebuchet bombardments ran into just bombardment without any attackers in the stack to attack. It wasn't until later and someone else had knights or cavalry sweep in to attack. The AI doesn't seem to have a logic to manage to pair a medieval infantry, longbow, or other infantry type attacker with it's stack of defenders and artillery type units.

The next army came as a knight army by the Inca, who were pretty decent in tech and built the Military Academy. I saw one of their 3 cavalry armies attack some city by its lonesome, I think attacking an infantry by it's lonesome, go down to 1 hitpoint (that is a potentially winning battle, I might chance the army in such a situation, BUT certainly not by itself), and then get killed. It figures, the AI is still the same old AI.

The AI also does not appear to cash rush anything. Not entirely sure, but I still see this enormous stack of gold in the tech leader. I didn't see any evidence of The Inca doing a single cash rush, though they weren't the tech leader. England who has had the majority of the gold before.

Also, I don't think the AI starts new infrastructure builds during a war. They aren't going to build The Heroic Epic or the Military Academy until they make peace. Recently the Zulu attacked Russia, who now has infantry, while the Zulu still lack Nationalism and Steam Power. The Zulu have a knight army, and I think had a cavalry army, but haven't had any builds for The Heroic Epic or The Military Academy. I could be wrong, but I also don't think they'll use an MGL to rush a building like the Military Academy. If they could, they could do so with 2 turns left on the Military Academy also, I suppose.

Edit: Saw the Ottomans have a Military Academy during a war. They might have started on it during it.

Saw builds of hospitals during a war with Sanitation learned during the war. They will build infrastructure during a war.

 

[Predator145]

I've been watching a huge 60% pangea game with the maximum default number of civs. I don't mean the following as suggestions, but more like observations.

The first army was a medieval infantry army by Babylon, during a war with the Chinese. But, they got behind in tech later. During that war also, trebuchet bombardments ran into just bombardment without any attackers in the stack to attack. It wasn't until later and someone else had knights or cavalry sweep in to attack. The AI doesn't seem to have a logic to manage to pair a medieval infantry, longbow, or other infantry type attacker with it's stack of defenders and artillery type units.

The next army came as a knight army by the Inca, who were pretty decent in tech and built the Military Academy. I saw one of their 3 cavalry armies attack some city by its lonesome, I think attacking an infantry by it's lonesome, go down to 1 hitpoint (that is a potentially winning battle, I might chance the army in such a situation, BUT certainly not by itself), and then get killed. It figures, the AI is still the same old AI.

The AI also does not appear to cash rush anything. Not entirely sure, but I still see this enormous stack of gold in the tech leader. I didn't see any evidence of The Inca doing a single cash rush, though they weren't the tech leader. England who has had the majority of the gold before.

Also, I don't think the AI starts new infrastructure builds during a war. They aren't going to build The Heroic Epic or the Military Academy until they make peace. Recently the Zulu attacked Russia, who now has infantry, while the Zulu still lack Nationalism and Steam Power. The Zulu have a knight army, and I think had a cavalry army, but haven't had any builds for The Heroic Epic or The Military Academy. I could be wrong, but I also don't think they'll use an MGL to rush a building like the Military Academy. If they could, they could do so with 2 turns left on the Military Academy also, I suppose.

Edit: Saw the Ottomans have a Military Academy during a war. They might have started on it during it.

Saw builds of hospitals during a war with Sanitation learned during the war. They will build infrastructure during a war.

During war time, military units get much higher build preference than peace time. But you can get the AI to start infrastructure by perfuming them with the notepad. Otherwise, the human player can prevent the AIs from ever building factories, powerplants and hospitals by starting lazy wars and keeping everyone at each others' throats.

 

[vmxa]

Spoonwood where were you watching that game? Is it a live stream or a podcast/yt?

 

[vmxa]

Flintlock, been meaning to post this:

Was wishing I had a way to pull a stack of xyw with a control key. IOW all at once. Currently I have to click on each one to wake them (fortified).

It seems the AI is not that bad at using artillery. They use more less a one for one in case of a single bombardment unit. So at low numbers, they are giving away those units.
I have seen better stacks, when it is 5 or so units. I had one where they covered 5 artie with 10 infantry. I was impressed as they had about 20 towns and a total of 55 infantry.
They beat down my army, but did not follow up. There was no road, between the inf and the army.

Edit: I forgot to add that they only had the 5 artillery units.

The results were they, I gained more artie. Still not sure, which is better. I guess the new way as you have to worry that a stack will show up on bombard an army. Then they can
kill the army.

 

[Spoonwood]

Spoonwood where were you watching that game? Is it a live stream or a podcast/yt?

I have the AIs in debug mode.

 

[vmxa]

Ah, I had hope it was on Twitch or YT.

 

[Predator145]

The AI seems to know to avoid building new powerplants even if they're perfumed if they already have one. In the WW2 Pacific scenario I had Coal Plants perfumed at 200, and the Americans, having Hoover Dam, didn't touch them while others did. I guess you'd need to perfume a cleaner plant very heavily (perhaps at 10 000) to make the AI consider replacing coal with.

 

[Chalito]

Hello Flintlock, have you looked into Unit trading or gifting units to the AI, like Civ II? Maybe limiting it only to human players giving the AI some help to fight bigger AI enemies.

 

[Flintlock]

Was wishing I had a way to pull a stack of xyw with a control key. IOW all at once. Currently I have to click on each one to wake them (fortified).

Way back when I added stack fortify I also thought about adding a stack wake command for cases like this. Adding a new command would require adding a new button to the screen, which is unfortunately laborious. I did it once for stack bombard and am not looking forward to doing it again. It's probably easier to add a stack wake-and-move command accessed through ctrl+shift+X or something, but I'm wary about adding obscure hotkey functions since I think most players won't know about them. Anyway it's added to the list, something to think about.

Hello Flintlock, have you looked into Unit trading or gifting units to the AI, like Civ II? Maybe limiting it only to human players giving the AI some help to fight bigger AI enemies.

I have not looked into this sort of thing. Transferring units between players shouldn't be too hard. What I'd actually do is delete the original then create a matching unit under the control of the other player. I'm pretty sure that's how enslaving works already. The game also already has very limited unit trading of only workers in the capital, so I could maybe build on that, but it depends on the details of how it works. This looks like one of those cases where the gameplay logic changes are easy but the hard part is integrating those with the interface, AI, etc.

 

[Civinator]

Way back when I added stack fortify I also thought about adding a stack wake command for cases like this. Adding a new command would require adding a new button to the screen, which is unfortunately laborious. I did it once for stack bombard and am not looking forward to doing it again. It's probably easier to add a stack wake-and-move command accessed through ctrl+shift+X or something, but I'm wary about adding obscure hotkey functions since I think most players won't know about them. Anyway it's added to the list, something to think about.

What is about a using the stack fortify command as stack sentry command for units, that don´t have the fortify option enabled. Many years ago I thought about giving tanks only the sentry, but not the fortify option, to give foot infantry here a better edge of defense compared to tanks without raising the defense values too high for those units, but at the end I didn´t use this setting as it was not very comfortable to treat each tank in big stacks individually with the sentry command.

II'm pretty sure that's how enslaving works already.... This looks like one of those cases where the gameplay logic changes are easy but the hard part is integrating those with the interface, AI, etc.

When having a look at enslaving, could you have a look at the barbarians so that they are able to enslave, too. Here the gameplay logic and interface would be existing - but the problem is, that barbarian units in general are not able to enslave, even if the barbarian units are set in the editor for enslavement and the new enslaved units can be set in the editor, too. May be here the limit in the general settings of the C3C editor for only 2 barbarian land units and one barbarian sea unit blocks the normal enslavement settings for units. Allowing the enslavement option for Barbarian units would allow an unlimited number of Barbarian unit types instead of only 2 for land and only 1 for sea.

 

[Shmelkin]

Isn't the AI also able to fortify all units even not having this option?

 

[Virote_Considon]

Way back when I added stack fortify I also thought about adding a stack wake command for cases like this. Adding a new command would require adding a new button to the screen, which is unfortunately laborious. I did it once for stack bombard and am not looking forward to doing it again. It's probably easier to add a stack wake-and-move command accessed through ctrl+shift+X or something, but I'm wary about adding obscure hotkey functions since I think most players won't know about them. Anyway it's added to the list, something to think about.

Perhaps an easy way of doing it would just be to have it as an option in the right-click menu. For example, hold SHIFT and the text can change to "7x Wake ALL Regular Rifleman" and it'll wake all of them whereas if you don't hold shift it'll just stay as it is.

 

[haluu]

Hi Flintlock,
Are there any plans to add a "perfume" option to technologies as well? This way, we can better nudge the AI to research civ-specific techs (in mods).

 

[Flintlock]

What is about a using the stack fortify command as stack sentry command for units, that don´t have the fortify option enabled.

You mean to avoid the hassle of adding a new command that I mentioned? In this case it wouldn't make much of a difference. The hassle is only with adding a new command button where there wasn't one previously, like the stack bombard button. The other stack unit commands aren't a problem because there I don't create new buttons, I just replace the images on the existing command buttons. It wouldn't be difficult to make the sentry button stackable.

As an aside, if I were redoing this all now, I would make stack bombard work like the other stack unit commands. In other words it would appear in place of the regular bombard button while the control key is down. The reason it doesn't work that way is that I implemented it early on when I wasn't familiar enough with the internals of the EXE to replace the button images. But in retrospect that's easier to do than adding another button.

When having a look at enslaving, could you have a look at the barbarians so that they are able to enslave, too.

Sure, this is probably implemented with a check somewhere that I could easily edit out. The only problem I can think of is that the barbarian AI might not know how to deal with the enslaved units. Even then, I could inject some simple logic to handle that, for example to walk enslaved workers to the nearest barb camp & fortify there.

Perhaps an easy way of doing it would just be to have it as an option in the right-click menu. For example, hold SHIFT and the text can change to "7x Wake ALL Regular Rifleman" and it'll wake all of them whereas if you don't hold shift it'll just stay as it is.

That's a good idea, though I'd use control instead of shift since shift is already used to keep the menu open while waking units. Also I've been using control as the standard stack button, following how the original game uses CTRL+X to stack move units of the same type.

Are there any plans to add a "perfume" option to technologies as well? This way, we can better nudge the AI to research civ-specific techs (in mods).

No plans, I actually hadn't thought of this, but I'll add it to the list now. I don't know how the AI chooses technologies, I've never even bumped into that part of the code while poking around. It probably just assigns point values to each possibility so adding perfume should be possible, though it might be pretty hard. Perfume for city production was one of the more difficult features to implement, as it required some relatively complicated machine code edits to insert the perfume at the proper point in the AI logic.

 

[haluu]

No plans, I actually hadn't thought of this, but I'll add it to the list now. I don't know how the AI chooses technologies, I've never even bumped into that part of the code while poking around. It probably just assigns point values to each possibility so adding perfume should be possible, though it might be pretty hard. Perfume for city production was one of the more difficult features to implement, as it required some relatively complicated machine code edits to insert the perfume at the proper point in the AI logic.

Ok, thanks for considering it! Didn't realize the difficulty regarding the city production perfuming.

There are several links to how the AI decides which techs to research (I don't remember the threads) but it is indeed predicated upon what that tech gives. I.e. offensive/defensive units that don't require resources greatly increase desire to research a tech, which makes it more difficult to get AI to research a tech that only gives a building, for instance.

 

[vmxa]

Isn't the AI also able to fortify all units even not having this option?

The does not use the UI, that was how it could use an MGL to build great wonders. The check was only in the UI, oops.

 

[vmxa]

Anyone notice planes not being shot down by ToW, Mobile Sam's, Sam Battery or DD units? In some cases I had 4 ToW, 4 Mobile Sam's as well as the Sam Battery and nothing was ever shot down or even got a hit. I am fairly sure tow and mobile sam were getting kills in R6, but can't be sure.

 

[tjs282]

Anyone notice planes not being shot down by ToW, Mobile Sam's, Sam Battery or DD units?

According to my cheat-sheet, unmodded TOW-Infs don't have an AA-value?

I have seen Flaks, MobSAMs and Destroyers (="DD"?) shooting down enemy planes at least up to CX3_R9 (which is what I last used to play a solo epic-game) — but generally with only very sporadic success (as is also true in unpatched C3C).

Regarding the SAM Battery... In my limited experience (with or without the patch), once a town has one of those, the AI tends to stop sending its air units against that town.

That is, the SAM Battery acts as a deterrent, rather than a defence, against Air-attack — similar to how the AI will often send its naval units out to Sea to bypass a hostile town which has a Coastal Fortress*.

*

Spoiler Footnote! :

Not that I build those very often/at all in the epic-game — but I did do so in the above-mentioned Napoleonic Europe Conquest run, along the west and north coasts of France, pour descouragée les bêtes Anglais...