Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

[Spatzimaus]

Okay, I think I might have found what was causing the AI to stop building the spaceships; back in 0.23 I tried decoupling the Apollo program from the Science victory, and it seems that this is somehow screwing it up. So I'll try undoing that for my next test game, and if it works I'll have that in v.1.01.

 

[Spatzimaus]

After a test game that started in the Industrial and ended with a diplomatic win in the late Fusion (or I could have waited ~10 turns and done a Cultural win, it was that close), I've confirmed that I now have the space race working correctly again. There are a couple minor other bugs that I want to fix first, but it means that I'll release v.1.01 within the next couple days to fix the various bugs in 1.0.

And I just have to say, man that game was tough. I won a diplo win, as I said, but I never expanded much beyond my starting area; I was the lowest-tech civ in the game for most of it, BARELY won the space race, and at the end there were still 5 civs with full-sized empires (out of 8 initial civs), all with comparable tech levels and military strengths. Surprisingly, I think only two nukes were launched all game...

 

[Aflred_JFK]

Hey Spatz!

Thank you for a great and detail-oriented Mod! After some attempts to play the Mod, I've got little remarks or questions:

I've every DLC downloaded and installed, and I've got your Alpha Centauri Mod activated together with your Balance Mod. Firstofall, is it necessary to have them both activated at the same time?
And secondofall, I'm experiencing some glitches, where barbarian units keep getting "invisible" for some time after I've attacked them with one of my cities. They are reappearing at the latest at the beginning of the next round. This makes it hard to tell, in case they are not reappearing, if I killed them or if they just wandered out of sight. Is this glitch something you know of, or experienced yourself, or is it something which is my fault, or something else. At the Moment I can't tell and wanted to pass this on to you.

Anyways, thanks for the great Mod!

 

[Sjru]

Hey Spatz!

Thank you for a great and detail-oriented Mod! After some attempts to play the Mod, I've got little remarks or questions:

I've every DLC downloaded and installed, and I've got your Alpha Centauri Mod activated together with your Balance Mod. Firstofall, is it necessary to have them both activated at the same time?

They're both compatible and non-exclusive, you may have one of them activated and the other not, that's why they're separated, as they're both optional.

And secondofall, I'm experiencing some glitches, where barbarian units keep getting "invisible" for some time after I've attacked them with one of my cities. They are reappearing at the latest at the beginning of the next round. This makes it hard to tell, in case they are not reappearing, if I killed them or if they just wandered out of sight. Is this glitch something you know of, or experienced yourself, or is it something which is my fault, or something else. At the Moment I can't tell and wanted to pass this on to you.

Anyways, thanks for the great Mod!

I have that glitch too, fortunately is just from the early game and it's just graphical. It seem that some change he made confuses the game from when to start the animation or something like that. You gotta wait a while, they reappear later.

 

[Spatzimaus]

I've got your Alpha Centauri Mod activated together with your Balance Mod. Firstofall, is it necessary to have them both activated at the same time?

It's not absolutely necessary; I designed the two to be usable independently. So you can use the Content mod with some other balance mods, or you could use the Balance mod by itself if you want a game that still ends with the spaceship launching. But they're intended to be used together, and that's all I ever play.

I'm experiencing some glitches, where barbarian units keep getting "invisible" for some time after I've attacked them with one of my cities.

Yes, this is something that's come up recently. What's happening, apparently, is this: at the end of each turn the barbarian units are regenerating 1 HP of health (which is something I added), but the unit model isn't being updated correctly to reflect the new number of units that should be drawn; or, more specifically, the number of models IS being updated, but the formation isn't. So when the fight starts, the animation tries to move your units towards the barbarian's, but one or more of the models in the Barbarian unit is off on the other side of the world at some unset location, so part of your unit goes off to engage them.

I'm trying to find out if there's some way I can force a recalculation of the unit model graphic; for instance, after healing if I force the unit to snap to the location it's already at, that might reset the unit model's formation. Still testing that.

But in the meantime you get this problem with any regenerating units. Since the psionic units (which regenerate) are all going to be single-unit models, I'm not too worried about those, which just leaves the early Barbarian units and maybe the Doppelganger, Ranger, and Troll. (The Titan units also sort of regenerate, but they'll all be single-unit models as well.)

---------------

On the bright side, I went through an Industrial-to-Fusion game last night with a grand total of three crashes, all near the beginning. So some of my recent changes might have helped the stability a bit; I'm going to try to make 1.01 tonight (Friday) so that people can test it over the weekend, but it might have to get pushed back a day.

 

[Sjru]

I'm trying to find out if there's some way I can force a recalculation of the unit model graphic; for instance, after healing if I force the unit to snap to the location it's already at, that might reset the unit model's formation. Still testing that.

Why don't delete the unit and rebuild it? Ain't that what the game does under some circunstances?

But in the meantime you get this problem with any regenerating units. Since the psionic units (which regenerate) are all going to be single-unit models, I'm not too worried about those, which just leaves the early Barbarian units and maybe the Doppelganger, Ranger, and Troll. (The Titan units also sort of regenerate, but they'll all be single-unit models as well.)

One thing I've noticed with some of your units (Mindworms for instance) is that they don't have combat animation, the combat is over as soon as it started. Is that normal?

On the bright side, I went through an Industrial-to-Fusion game last night with a grand total of three crashes, all near the beginning. So some of my recent changes might have helped the stability a bit; I'm going to try to make 1.01 tonight (Friday) so that people can test it over the weekend, but it might have to get pushed back a day.

That's something I've noticed too, late game seems to be very stable.. On the other hand most of my crashes were on the early to mid game, before Industrial, dunno why.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Why don't delete the unit and rebuild it? Ain't that what the game does under some circunstances?

That has some horrendous problems associated with it. (I tried to do that for the All-Terrain promotion at one point.) Transferring the promotions the unit has is hard enough, but making sure the new unit has the right number of movement points, fortification bonus, etc. is just a pain. Granted, the fact that the barbarian regeneration is a purely end-of-combat event helps quite a bit, but it's still problematic.

One thing I've noticed with some of your units (Mindworms for instance) is that they don't have combat animation, the combat is over as soon as it started. Is that normal?

Yes, because those are placeholder unit models. The real models have animations, but the way these things are indexed a placeholder will never have a correct animation, since the file name it looks for is a combination of the unit name and the art definition. Since I intend to replace those placeholders with real graphics as soon as I can, I don't feel like fixing it.

On the other hand most of my crashes were on the early to mid game, before Industrial, dunno why.

My latest guess? A lot of it has to do with the graphical transition that happens when a civ moves from the Renaissance to the Industrial. The game switches from "early" graphics for improvements (and certain units, like the Settler) to "late" graphics. I think the game is just incapable of updating dozens of hexes of graphics simultaneously. So if you start a game in the Industrial Era you won't have this problem because everyone will already be using the "late" set, but an Ancient Era start will hit a point around that time where each turn there's a heavy load on the graphics, because the game has to check each civ to see if they've crossed the threshold.

 

[joeruskey]

spaztimaus when i load up your alpha centauri mod with the long mod added on all of my top bar is just text...except for my gold count is this a bug or no?

 

[Spatzimaus]

is this a bug or no?

Sounds like you're trying to combine it with some other mod, because there's nothing in my mod itself that should cause anything like that. So:
1> Are you running any other mods at the same time? And I mean ANY. There are some mods that will be compatible, but not many.
2> Attach a screenshot of what you're talking about. It makes it a lot easier to figure out what you're talking about.
3> Have you ever tried modifying the basic game's asset files yourself?

 

[joeruskey]

wasnt running any other modders mods at the time. just your balance mod and alpha centauri mods. perhaps i did something wrong but ive never edited the files don't know the first thing about XML files
EDIT give me a min for a screenie...need to upgrade my ram something fierce...
EDIT2 Screenie is attached btw i get these errors on loading
unable to load texture
assets\ui\art\notification\Notificationiconsfreesocialpolicy.dds
assets\ui\art\notification\Notificationiconsfreesocialpolicyglow2.dds
assets\ui\art\notification\Notificationiconsfreegreatperson.dds
assets\ui\art\notification\Notificationiconsfreegreatpersonglow2.dds

 

[Sjru]

wasnt running any other modders mods at the time. just your balance mod and alpha centauri mods. perhaps i did something wrong but ive never edited the files don't know the first thing about XML files
EDIT give me a min for a screenie...need to upgrade my ram something fierce...

Try clearing your cache, it might have gone corrupted.

 

[joeruskey]

Try clearing your cache, it might have gone corrupted.

so i just clear out my C:\users\username\mydocuments\mygames\civ5\cache?

 

[Spatzimaus]

Yeah, that's definitely a mod conflict issue. My mod doesn't even HAVE files by those names. So whether you'd turned off those other mods or not, the game THINKS it's still trying to load them. Clearing the cache should fix it, although exiting the program entirely and then re-entering often clears it pretty well.

Since I only ever play with my own mods, I never have to deal with those sorts of issues, but they're fairly common because of how Civ5 is structured.

 

[joeruskey]

ok so all i have to do is delete all the data in my cache folder?
EDIT: uninstalled civ 5, reinstalled all of my stuff all DLCs and all updates...nothing still get those same errors
EDIT: managed to get it to work with out the odd text error but now i cant choose a policy...

 

[Spatzimaus]

By the way, they just posted the patch notes for the next patch, which should be out in a couple weeks. Read it here.

Among other things:
> They're raising the base Unhappiness per city from 2 to 3.
> All of the Great Person-made improvements now have tech yield increases in the middle eras
> The Theater and Stadium now give a bit less Happiness, and the Broadcast Tower gives less Culture, and the Research Lab gives a bit less research.

All of the above are remarkably similar to what I've already done. But unfortunately, they went MUCH further, and a lot of the changes they made aren't ones I'm particularly happy with.
For one thing, they added "Finishers" to the policy branches. These are an extra benefit you get as soon as you complete a branch. The problem, of course, is that in my mod you won't be finishing ANY branches until the future eras, so the balance is now totally off.
They also repriced the techs AGAIN, so I'm going to have to reprice my future eras again. And not only did they reprice them, they MOVED THEM.

The point is, whenever they get around to releasing this patch, it's going to take quite a few days to get this mod working again, from the looks of it, and it won't work WELL until I rebalance quite a few things again.

 

[markusbeutel]

By the way, they just posted the patch notes for the next patch, which should be out in a couple weeks. Read it here.

Among other things:
> They're raising the base Unhappiness per city from 2 to 3.
> All of the Great Person-made improvements now have tech yield increases in the middle eras
> The Theater and Stadium now give a bit less Happiness, and the Broadcast Tower gives less Culture, and the Research Lab gives a bit less research.

All of the above are remarkably similar to what I've already done. But unfortunately, they went MUCH further, and a lot of the changes they made aren't ones I'm particularly happy with.
For one thing, they added "Finishers" to the policy branches. These are an extra benefit you get as soon as you complete a branch. The problem, of course, is that in my mod you won't be finishing ANY branches until the future eras, so the balance is now totally off.
They also repriced the techs AGAIN, so I'm going to have to reprice my future eras again. And not only did they reprice them, they MOVED THEM.

The point is, whenever they get around to releasing this patch, it's going to take quite a few days to get this mod working again, from the looks of it, and it won't work WELL until I rebalance quite a few things again.

It gets frustrating, doesn't it? I expected them to tinker with the Tech Tree and actually made custom versions of all the Tech's and Policies so this wouldn't end up be a continuing issue. Switching up ActionIcons is also going to be a pain...

 

[Spatzimaus]

No, what's really frustrating? They're adding a new Resource. Stone. A Bonus resource that acts like Marble, and has a custom building just to use it. That means HEAVY modification to AssignStartingPlots.

They're also just swapping Policies' effects around all over the place. I mean seriously, it's one thing to tweak numbers, but to suddenly decide that a policy needs to have a completely different effect? I only did that once in my own changes, and that was the Planned Economy/Planned Society thing; beyond that, it was just modification to the existing policies. And that means I'm going to have to rework a bunch of my own Policies, because several of them now won't be as unique as they were before.

The one that kills me, though, is that they're basically turning a lot of Wonders into neutered versions of themselves. The Sydney Opera House, for instance, is going from "1 free Policy" to a more generic "+50% Culture in this city" effect. That part's annoying enough, but they're also moving it from Globalization down to Mass Media, which means now I need to figure out what to do about that; it makes Mass Media very crowded.

Or those Great Person tech yield increases? They're only doing them to the "pure" ones (Manufactory, Academy, Customs House) and not the Landmark or Citadel. That's pretty bad. But also, I had one round of increases in the early Renaissance and one in the early Nuclear, and they're instead putting a single round of increases about halfway in between those two. So do I stick with my own version, or go with theirs, which'd require rebalancing a whole bunch of other things?

--------------

New version will probably be done late tonight or early tomorrow. I'm testing out a few minor things, but from what I can tell the game is less crash-prone than before, and I've been fixing all sorts of little things. (Things like: the Vertol is now technically a Sea unit, because that's the only way the All-Terrain promotion could work, but that meant that it would only heal in friendly territory. I've fixed that.) The only game-breaking bug fixed in this version is that the AIs will now build the spaceship correctly.

ONE QUESTION:
Before I release the next version, there's one slight thing I want people's opinions on.
In the setup screen you can pick "No Barbarians" and "Raging Barbarians". Previously I ignored these when handling the Breakout and Psi unit spawn rates, but it now adjusts them.
Here's the question: should "No Barbarians" really mean NO random Psi units, or just a reduced number (half as many at breakout, half as much chance of spawning per turn)? It'd be nice if there were a few more possible settings in between, but this is what we have.

 

[dinobot386]

I like the Psi barbarian thing the way it is now, personally

Also, my god, this patch almost completley guts your mod, what im worried about the most is the policies, the finishers are really just an extra policy that was part of the branch already, I like how your new ones unlock at future techs, so I think you should start tweaking the policies so that finishing a branch is really just a bonus as opposed to needed

And while im at it, order and autocracy mutually exclusive? Autocracy is now almost worthless because you cant maintain the large amount of land you're obviously aiming to conquer

 

[Spatzimaus]

I like the Psi barbarian thing the way it is now, personally

Me too, but there were complaints earlier that turning on "No Barbarians" didn't stop the Breakout. On one hand, I have to ask why you'd be playing a themed content mod if you didn't want to experience the whole thing, but on the other hand, No Means No. And on the gripping hand, the psi mindworms serve a useful purpose for game balance, so I'd rather not totally toss them out entirely.

Right now I've got it to where "No Barbarians" cuts the Psi spawn rates in half, but it won't prevent them from spawning entirely. The question is whether anyone actually USES that No Barbarian flag, and if so, whether that's a problem. (Given that in v.1.00 and earlier there's NO mitigation of spawn rates, I'm not too concerned.)

Also, my god, this patch almost completley guts your mod,

It's pretty rough to both mods. The Balance mod gets some serious headaches involving improvements, tech dependencies, and Wonder effects. Or little things like how they're making the Mud Pyramid Mosque require a Monument, when I did the reverse and made the Temple NOT require a Monument.

The Content mod has some rebalancing of tech costs, changing a few Policy effects, and some resource stuff. The real problem is the less obvious balance issues, involving how much Happiness and Gold is in the game; you'll notice that they're reducing the maintenance costs of many Industrial/Modern buildings AND several civs' traits now involve reducing unit maintenance?

The devil's in the details. For instance, they said that the Barracks, Armory, and Military Academy now give XP to all units (meaning air and sea as well). This is a HUGE change, because it means that Air units would be able to start with 2-3 free promotions, and that means getting to Logistics and its 2 attacks per turn VERY quickly. This is a huge advantage to the player, since the AI won't look forward like that.
I generally don't want to just flat-out say "I like my version better", because I'd really prefer things to adhere as closely as possible to the vanilla game because of how much easier things would be the NEXT time, but they really seem to be crippling mods like mine.

My real complaint is that these sorts of balance things should have been completed back in, oh, DECEMBER. If we don't have a stable baseline to work off of, how can anyone expect any modding to get done?

And while im at it, order and autocracy mutually exclusive? Autocracy is now almost worthless because you cant maintain the large amount of land you're obviously aiming to conquer

Autocracy was already basically worthless, this just makes it even worse. Although the effects are very strong; note that their Total War effect is nearly identical to my own Power policy? (+XP in all cities, +production for military units)

Worse: Freedom and Order are now exclusive. That, to me, is just insane; I loved pairing those two in large empires, and really, what else are you going to take? I mean, I basically go Liberty, Piety, Freedom, Order, and then maybe Patronage for a fifth.

------

On the bright side, several of the effects they've described are ones we didn't have XML stubs for before, so presumably they're adding more of these. Unfortunately, they explicitly listed the GameEvents they're adding, and none of them are the ones we'd asked for. Seriously, we just need a StartCombat and an EndCombat...

 

[Spatzimaus]

It's that time again, same Bat-Time, same Bat-Channel!

In case you hadn't figured it out from the previous few posts, I won't be making a new version until the patch comes out, at which point this mod WILL break in horrible ways. From the looks of the patch notes they've revealed already, it'll be pretty spectacularly incompatible.
Do not attempt to use this mod post-patch until I release 1.02 (figure 2-3 days later, at best).

v.1.01, dated 6/18
BALANCE:
> The Robotics technology now requires Rocketry, in addition to the Computers tech it required previously.
> The Globalization technology now requires Computers, in addition to the Ecology tech it required previously. Note: the devs are doing this exact change in the next patch. At that time, I'll remove my own change.
> The Ecology technology now requires Electronics, in addition to the Plastics and Penicillin it required previously.
> Changed the three buildings added in this mod to use placeholder art defines, instead of an unset value.
> I've disabled the "kill city-state" mission altogether. Conquering city-states almost never happens, and this'd cause city-states to get locked into a mission that would never be completed.
> The help texts for the Bank and Satrap's Court were supposed to say "+1 gold per Gold, Silver, or Gems worked by this city." I'd misspelled the text key in the Update commands, so it wasn't changing the text, although it was giving the correct effect.
> Previously, I'd lowered the Planned Economy policy's Happiness boost from -50% to -25%, with the Content mod changing it to a trade route income policy. To avoid some conflicts, I've now moved this to the Balance mod entirely.
> The policy changes that had previously been moved to this mod hadn't had their Flavors updated. So while Piety and Theocracy now add to both Happiness and Culture, their flavors didn't reflect the culture part. This has been fixed.

CONTENT:
> Added improvement art defines for the new resources; it won't draw an improvement on the hex, yet, but it at least won't blank out the resource either.
> The Vertol, Former, Nessus Worm, and Gravship all had their tooltips updated to reflect the fact that they must be built in coastal cities because of the All-Terrain promotion.
> The "No Barbarians" and "Raging Barbarians" settings now affect psionic unit spawn rates. Setting No Barbarians divides Psi spawn chances by half, both in the Breakout and in later spawns from spore towers, and reduces the chance of towers spawning by half. Raging Barbarians, conversely, doubles the breakout size, doubles spawn chances, and effectively removes the Spore Tower cap calculation.
> Changed the buildings added in this mod to use placeholder art defines, instead of the unset values before.
> In the Advanced Setup screen, the game no longer asks you if you want to enable a Transcendence victory; it's always on.
> The Wild variants of Mind Worms and Chiron Locusts begin with the Defensive Embarkation promotion.
> I'd previously lowered the AI's Flavor rating for the Apollo Program from 250 down to 100, so that it wouldn't drop everything to build it. But now the AI just almost never builds it, so I'm returning it to the original value.
> In v.0.23 I tried decoupling the Apollo Program from the Space Race victory, so that it would still be buildable. It appeared to work at the time, but it was somehow preventing the AIs from wanting to build the project any more.
> The Happiness bonus in the Head Start logic for later eras was using Happiness, when it should have been using UnmoddedHappiness. As a result, you were rarely getting any actual bonus, as the free Temples, Colosseums, Aqueducts, etc. would provide more happiness than your population could support at first.
> After Barbarian units heal at the start of each turn, the game resets their graphic (by moving them onto the same hex they're already on), which prevents the graphical bug where units would run halfway around the world for no reason.
> Similar logic was added to the self-heals of the Troll and Titan-class units, and the critical strike of the Ranger.
> Because the four All-Terrain units were technically classified as Sea units, the game was preventing them from healing outside of friendly territory. The promotion now includes this ability.
> Plasma Artillery previously required both Uranium and Aluminum. I've removed the Aluminum requirement for now. The problem was that upgrading from a Mobile SAM to a Plasma Artillery means going from 0 to 2 resources, which I normally don't allow. While this makes the unit noticeably stronger, the devs were already planning on boosting the earlier artillery units to have higher base Combat ratings, which is one of the big selling points for Plasma Artillery already, so by comparison it's going to get a bit weaker in the near future.
> The animation movement rates for the Bomber, B17, and Stealth Bomber were sped up by 50%. The animation movement rates for the Fighter, Zero, and Jet Fighter were sped up by 25%. It was just taking too long to do the animations before.
> The Embarked Movement speed increase at Advanced Ballistics was changed from +2 (meaning a speed of 6) to +1. (I didn't want embarked units outrunning battleships so easily.)
> At Matter Transmission, embarked movement speed increases by 1. I might move this later on to a slightly earlier tech.

Player Pack
No change iin this version. (I'm working on a couple things for the next version. But until then, it's staying at 1.00.)

----------------------------------------
Now, I'm going to continue seeing about adding unit models, and if I find any major bugs in this version I won't wait for the patch, but barring that this'll be fairly stable for the next couple of weeks.