Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

[Spatzimaus]

Okay, status update: I was originally hoping to have v.0.23 done by Friday, but things are a bit hectic at work so it's probably getting pushed to Saturday at the earliest. I've already updated the various Lua scripts to account for the new patch, and I didn't see much in the XML that would impact anything I've done, but I'm still testing to see if there's some conflict I missed.

On the bright side, the negative-happiness buildings are VERY close to functional. The UI will be really flaky on them, but it should work. Effectively, the way it works is that I created a new policy branch, containing two new policies. One of those two policies is given immediately, the other is NEVER given. (That way, you can't complete the branch to get closer to a cultural victory.) I'm in the middle of rewriting the policy tab to explicitly not show that branch.

The policy that you start with gives you -2 happiness per Genejack Factory. Actually, it gives you -1, but the bug that makes you get policy happiness twice doubles that to -2, although only -1 of that applies on the first turn after the building is completed.
Likewise, it also gives -1 happiness per Children's Creche, Gravity Shield, and Robotic Assembly Plant. Yes, the bug doubles that to -2, but I also added +1 happiness to these buildings, so the net is -1 (-0 on the first turn).
And finally, I created a custom building that adds -10 (two -5s, actually). When someone completes the Dream Twister, one of these is created in every other civ's capital. Right now, the Dream Twister doesn't do what it's supposed to.

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There's one major problem with this method: giving a player a free policy screws up the cost progression, since it counts you as having taken a policy. (For whatever reason, the <CultureCost> field in the policies table just isn't used.) So I'm having to change the progression. Currently, it's 25 + 6*(N^1.7), rounded to the nearest 5. By changing that to 15 + 5*((N+1)^1.7), the progression is nearly identical up until you have ~15 policies, at which point they're slightly cheaper than before.

I'm in the process of tweaking the numbers on this in a spreadsheet to find something that works better. Which brings us to a question: What do people think about the pace of policy gain in the future eras? Personally I feel it's a bit fast, since the stacked +culture buildings really add up, but I don't usually try for a culture win.

There's also one small abuse: the free policy is awarded at the start of the SECOND turn, since the "start game" event isn't triggering correctly. So if you start in a later era and buy all of your policies on the first turn, before it's awarded, you'd get a huge cost discount. The AI won't abuse this; it never buys more than 1 policy per turn, no matter how much culture it has. But players can break it if they're not careful.

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Also, I'm still testing that SDI bit. It's looking like the nuke interception just doesn't work at all, meaning those other mods that have made their own SDI variants can't be working either. But I'm going to implement some anti-nuke stuff as-is, under the assumption that it WILL get fixed, so don't be surprised to see that stuff in the patch notes. (I haven't tested it since the patch, though, so SDI might work...)

 

[Darsnan]

It's a national wonder. Everyone can have one. (That's also why it's cheaper than a "normal" wonder of that era.) The Planetary Datalinks and Nethack Terminus, the other two main espionage buildings, are also national wonders.

Well, I was batting a 1.000 that day, huh?

Unfortunately, the game's interface doesn't separate world wonders from national wonders, outside of the civilopedia. I might try fixing that myself, because it really annoys me. At the very least I'll put something into the help text to explicitly denote this.

It is confusing, but once you pointed it out, why it made perfect sense. Now that I understand it better, why I do like the concept of the KGB (i.e. stealing techs in order to catch up). Question: can this ceoncept be gamed in that a human player can deliberately fall behind tech-wise while concentrating on other infrastructure, knowing that they won't fall too far behind tech-wise?

Are those 4-5 techs happening when you're the tech leader, or are you consistently behind in technologies when you're getting them?

I am typically behind until the Spaceship - then I seem to catapult forward and into the #1 position.

Playtesting with your mod against the new patch, and it has been very stable so far!

Concerning the two pics below: I've looked thru the bug reports against the new patches and haven't seen a reference to either situation, so I was wondering whether they had something to do with your mod or not? The dead AC were there when I conquered the C-S, and the display remained there afterwards, however when I clicked on them (i.e. tried to activate them) nothing happened, so its only a visual thing.
The nuke range issue is relatively irksome, but of course can be worked around. Probably also explains why I haven't been nuked in this game yet, as the AIs can't reach out and touch me with their nukes, either.

D

 

[McOwn]

Heya Spatzimaus,

This seems like an incredible piece of work you have accomplished here, and I would absolutely love to try it out. I'm having issues though, perhaps you (or anyone else reading this?) have had or heard of similar problems, and might offer some advice?

When I download and unpack your mod files into my MOD directory, and enable them in the games mod menu, I experience a game crash when attempting to start it. It loads the map selection screen, but when I start the game, irregardless of combination, it crashes my game.

This both happens if I select the Spatz Mod of Alpha Centauri alone, or together with the Balance Mod. It does not happen if I only select the balance mod, and the game starts as a vanilla game would.

I do hope some light can be shed on this, I'm a massive fan of the Civilization series since the very first one, and it seems like a terrific ammendment you have made to this game.

Thank you in advance.

 

[randomcivguy]

Just starting a game with your mod,hope its good!

I always start in the ancient era,so i can only help with the long mod for now.

 

[Chaotic Law]

When I download and unpack your mod files into my MOD directory, and enable them in the games mod menu, I experience a game crash when attempting to start it. It loads the map selection screen, but when I start the game, irregardless of combination, it crashes my game.

Do you have any other mods loading with the game? If so try just loading his 2 mods and no others.

Chaotic Law

 

[Spatzimaus]

When I download and unpack your mod files into my MOD directory, and enable them in the games mod menu, I experience a game crash when attempting to start it. It loads the map selection screen, but when I start the game, irregardless of combination, it crashes my game.

Sounds like a conflict in AssignStartingPlots. The game is trying to build a map, and something is going wrong. For instance, I've got it placing a number of large neutronium deposits on hills, but the map you generate just might not HAVE enough hills for this (or at least enough hills that aren't already covered in other resources). I can try to add a check for this in the future, but I'm not quite sure how to code it so it'll take some trial and error.

I've tested the current code primarily on Continents, Small Continents, and Pangaea with default settings for the other map options. So which map type are you trying to use? And are you trying to use any custom maps or scenarios?

 

[randomcivguy]

Just found a bug.

my scout started with rookie, which give it a -15% penalty the first time it attacks
or defends. it didn't attack yet,but when it went in the ancient ruins and got upgraded to a bowman(I'm playing as Babylon) it went away.I think this is beacause when a unit upgrades,it loses all negative promotions and keeps all good ones.

 

[McOwn]

Do you have any other mods loading with the game? If so try just loading his 2 mods and no others.

Nay, I also cleared the cache beforehand, which to my understanding means that there are no other factors that have any effect?

Sounds like a conflict in AssignStartingPlots. The game is trying to build a map, and something is going wrong. For instance, I've got it placing a number of large neutronium deposits on hills, but the map you generate just might not HAVE enough hills for this (or at least enough hills that aren't already covered in other resources). I can try to add a check for this in the future, but I'm not quite sure how to code it so it'll take some trial and error.


I've tested the current code primarily on Continents, Small Continents, and Pangaea with default settings for the other map options. So which map type are you trying to use? And are you trying to use any custom maps or scenarios?

First time I tried to start it on the Earth map, but following the subsequent crash there, I attempted with everyone left on it's default settings. Following your post, I re-attempted to start a game with Continents, Pangaea and Small Continents as the map type, and on multiple different map sizes, taking what you mentioned about amount of terrain types into account. I also tried Disabling Start Bias, thinking that perhaps it may have been settler placing that could have been the error.

I'm not attempting any custom maps or scenarios, just a regular game. Thank you both for the replies, I'm very, very eager to play your creation

 

[Spatzimaus]

Question: can this ceoncept be gamed in that a human player can deliberately fall behind tech-wise while concentrating on other infrastructure, knowing that they won't fall too far behind tech-wise?

That's been a concern in the back of my mind. After some analysis, I'm generally not worried about it for mathematical reasons.

There's no change of getting a tech unless some other civ has already done it, which means you'll get almost no Wonders if you follow this path. With the KGB, you have at best a 4% chance of receiving a tech each turn, and that'd only be if EVERY other civ had the tech. Since city-states lag behind, you're lucky to have a chance above 1% most of the time.

That means that if you depend only on this for research, then you'd be dozens of turns behind the tech leaders. Forget about getting any Wonders that way, and militarily you'll be much weaker. By the end of the digital era, even with all three tech-stealing national wonders, you're looking at a 10% rate if every other civ has the tech.

I'm not saying that you can't underemphasize research and get more benefit from the KGB than you would otherwise. But with the numbers I've picked, from what I can tell the only way to get a significant benefit is to lag behind in terms of empire size as a whole, and that means you've got bigger problems. These are designed to help civs that, through early wars or unlucky starting locations, have no real empire to speak of; in the vanilla game, they get so hopelessly far behind that they have no chance to even defend themselves, civs that have no chance of WINNING but should at least be able to put up a fight.

I am typically behind until the Spaceship - then I seem to catapult forward and into the #1 position.

I get that a lot when I play on King in an Industrial start. Part of it is just the inevitable superiority of a player's management, but I've been thinking that there might be some other reasons. For instance, one worry I'm having is that if gold is too hard to come by, the AI might be switching his cities into Gold Focus and suffering such huge production penalties as a result that he builds no infrastructure.

Also, I'm assuming you win the space race? One thing I've found is that the double-length golden age is just too much, you'll have a MASSIVE gold and production surplus. So in the next version (due out later tonight unless I find something critical), I've cut these in half; being first gives a normal-length GA (10 turns on normal speeds), and later ships give a half-length age.

The dead AC were there when I conquered the C-S, and the display remained there afterwards, however when I clicked on them (i.e. tried to activate them) nothing happened, so its only a visual thing.

That's been in the vanilla game for a long time. You can get it with artillery in a city, too. They claim to have improved it back in the March patch, but I still see it happening.
I'm not saying that it can't have anything to do with my mod, but I don't see how, and it's too similar to a reported bug to seem like a coincidence.

The nuke range issue is relatively irksome, but of course can be worked around.

That's not a bug. As of the last patch, you can no longer nuke a civ you haven't met yet and/or have a peace treaty with; the game draws a 2-hex border around all these civs' territory so that you can't catch their territory on the edge of a blast radius. So in your case, the fact that you're at peace with the civs to the sides (Persia?) is hedging in the available hexes. You can't nuke that city because two hexes to the east is a hex controlled by another civ.

This is yet another reason why I wish they'd allowed us to tune missile blast radius by type, so that Atomic Bombs could be a 0-radius (target hex only) attack, Nuclear Missiles a 1-radius, and Planet Busters a 2. But at the moment, it's 2 for all.

 

[Spatzimaus]

I think this is beacause when a unit upgrades,it loses all negative promotions and keeps all good ones.

Sort of. The only reason a unit loses negative promotions is because those promotions have the "LostWithUpgrade" flag explicitly set. So that flag doesn't HAVE to be set if I didn't want it to; many of the penalty promotions in the vanilla game don't have that, and it's one of the things I changed in my mod.

But I'm also using LostWithUpgrade as a criteria for the Doppelganger; it'll never steal a promotion with that flag. Since I didn't want doppels stealing the Rookie penalty, it gets that LostWithUpgrade. I could make an additional explicit check not to steal that particular promotion, but I'd rather not.

So yes, a ruins upgrade will remove it. I'm okay with that; it happens very rarely, and Rookie is actually not a negative promotion in the usual sense. While you get -25% to a single combat, you also get double XP from your first fight (which in the case of ground units might get you right to your first promotion). So while the upgrade removed the penalty, it also prevented you from getting that extra XP. And we're only talking about the effects on a single combat.

 

[randomcivguy]

So it's only he first time you engage in combat,then it dissapears.

 

[Spatzimaus]

So it's only he first time you engage in combat,then it dissapears.

Correct. As long as you're not using Quick Combat or playing in Strategic View, the Rookie promotion is automatically removed at the end of your first fight (because you're not a rookie any more!). I'm mainly using it as a way to make sure newly-created units don't trigger OnUnitCreated multiple times, so it technically doesn't need to have any effect, but I liked the idea of this sort of thing. One thing I'm looking into is automatically removing it after a given amount of time has passed.

If you ARE using Quick Combat or Strategic View, a LOT of things will break: psi combat, nuke interception, the Ranger, Troll, and Doppelganger units, and so on. So you need to not be using those. (I really need to put a big disclaimer in the first post about known conflicts like this.)

 

[McOwn]

Spatzimaus, you wouldn't happen to have any further insight into what the problem I am experiencing may be, taking into account the new information i posted? Thank you

 

[Spatzimaus]

Spatzimaus, you wouldn't happen to have any further insight into what the problem I am experiencing may be, taking into account the new information i posted? Thank you

Not really. If you're using everything on the default settings, are only using my mods, and have flushed your cache, then there's no reason it shouldn't work. The other things I can think of:
1> You've hacked the core game files when you tried modding something in the past. (I'm not accusing, just saying that quite a few people have done this.)
2> You've got a corrupted file somewhere, either in my mod or in the core game; redownloading my mod (or waiting until the next version) would help with the former, and verifying game files through Steam helps with the other.
3> You've got a permission issue. Common in Windows 7, and something that's been reported in the main forum as of the last patch.

The fact that you're the only one reporting this implies it's something in your particular installation. Try loading FireTuner while you run it, and see if it says anything before the crash. It's not likely that it will, but you never know.

 

[McOwn]

Ahh, I had no idea the original files had anything to do with being able to use mods, i figured they just overrode them. That just may be it, I have altered some of the original game XML files in order to adjust maintenance and construction costs on alot of buildings. I'll give re-installing the game a try, and see if it works.

Thanks

 

[Spatzimaus]

That just may be it, I have altered some of the original game XML files in order to adjust maintenance and construction costs on alot of buildings.

Yeah, don't do that. Make a mod for your changes, using the Update syntax. XML mods do NOT replace the original files, they only modify them, so if you've changed the base code then that'll cause lots of problems. If you want to tweak values of things, then it takes very little work to make a mod to do this and you don't run into these sorts of conflicts as often.

Also, many of your changes will have been overwritten in last week's patch; if the game made ANY update to CIV5Buildings.xml, then it would have replaced whatever you'd don with the new official version. But since files that weren't changed in the patch wouldn't have been overwritten, you could easily have some of your changes still there while others are now gone, so I'm not surprised it broke.

And even if there wasn't a direct conflict that way, you're changing things that may or may not be changed by my mod, so you'd have no way of knowing which parts were being overridden by me. Granted, you'd still have the same problem if you tried to use both mods at once, but it'd at least be easy to debug by disabling your own mod.

I'll give re-installing the game a try, and see if it works.

No need for that. Just delete the files you've changed and tell Steam to verify your installation. It'll replace all the ones that are missing with clean versions. If you changed a lot of XML, you can just delete the entire XML tree and it'll remake it; XML is just text so it doesn't take up a lot of room and can be restored quickly.

 

[randomcivguy]

Oh, Ok.

So I just entered the renaissance era on turn 234,
was in a golden age,was making +23 gold and +74 science,
and had 3 unhappiness.

 

[Spatzimaus]

So I just entered the renaissance era on turn 234,
was in a golden age,was making +23 gold and +74 science,
and had 3 unhappiness.

Sounds about right, although the science sounds a bit low (but maybe it's your map size). That unhappiness will disappear as soon as you put Theaters in your key cities, and the gold will shoot way up once Banks are built. The Renaissance works like that, and I'm trying to make the Digital do the same once you get to it (although there it's Hologram Theaters and Energy Banks, respectively). It was actually deliberate, that the Digital was supposed to mimic the Renaissance, the Fusion mimic the Industrial, and the Nanotech mimic the Nuclear.

On a related note, did you go Piety or Rationalism? (Or neither?) The Piety branch makes a huge difference in happiness, so it's hard to gauge.

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On the bright side, I got a few new things working today:
1> Empath specialists now add +1 happiness. The only catch is that it won't adjust as you slot and de-slot the specialists; it only updates at the end of each turn. But they work, and the AI seems to understand the Flavor settings well enough to use them.
They'll continue to generate +2 food as well. There's a reason for this, which I'll get to below.
2> Likewise, the Dream Twister (wonder that makes other civs get -10 happiness) and the repeatable Transcendent Thought tech (+1 happy per time) now work correctly.
2a> When you build the Dream Twister, a custom building appears in everyone else's capitals that gives the -10 happiness; it's visible to the city's owner, so that they can tell what's going on, but you can't sacrifice it. The +1s for Empaths and Transcendent Thought researches involve a custom building in your own capital, but it's hidden so that you don't have to see it.
3> The negative-happiness buildings now work... sort of. I mean, they do exactly what they're supposed to, and subtract happiness, but the problem is that the custom policy used to enable them seems to be causing the AI empires to not pick any policies, like has been mentioned previously. I'm working on ways around that. (It also does some screwy things to the cost progression of policies.) But if I can't get it working, there are a couple alternate things I can try.
I also fixed a few UI issues in the process, although there's one notable one remaining: the tooltip for each building in the city screen shows the correct happiness, but the ones in the tech tree don't.

The upshot of this whole deal is that there are four buildings with negative happiness: Children's Creche (massive food bonus but -1 happy), Genejack Factory (massive production boost but -2 happy), Gravity Shield (massive defense boost and nuke immunity but -1 happy), and the Robotic Assembly Plant (another massive production boost but -1 happy). So in the future eras you should start running out of happiness again, and that's where the Empaths come in. You'll start using them to supplement the few happiness buildings in those eras, and that'll significantly reduce your cities' gold, production, and science. But since the empaths also provide food, it'll speed up the growth enough to help offset that difference. (But that adds even more unhappiness...)

I'm going to boost a couple buildings' happiness up a bit (Hologram Theater, for one, and the new Temple of Gaia I've just added), but you won't have those +100 happiness surpluses any more. This was part of my original design (based on the SMAC idea of the Genejack Factory adding unhappiness), and I'm finally going to have it work...

 

[randomcivguy]

I've just Had One of my cites demand neutronium.

since it dosent reaveal until MUCH later on, maybe you could stop making it a luxury?

 

[randomcivguy]

Sounds about right, although the science sounds a bit low (but maybe it's your map size). That unhappiness will disappear as soon as you put Theaters in your key cities, and the gold will shoot way up once Banks are built. The Renaissance works like that, and I'm trying to make the Digital do the same once you get to it (although there it's Hologram Theaters and Energy Banks, respectively). It was actually deliberate, that the Digital was supposed to mimic the Renaissance, the Fusion mimic the Industrial, and the Nanotech mimic the Nuclear.

On a related note, did you go Piety or Rationalism? (Or neither?) The Piety branch makes a huge difference in happiness, so it's hard to gauge.

Well I took liberty and rationalism. i have all policies unlocked in liberty,and two in rationalism.

And as for the science,yes,i'm playing on a huge small continents with 8 civs and 16 CS. I only met askia a few turns ago.(He's the only civ I know)