Fairy Tale

[Le Sage]

Fairy Tale Reviews

An artist isn't supposed to read reviews of his work. His mind will become dumbed and shaded with the opinions of the critics, but you really can't help reading them anyways, can you? I've found two recent reviews of my mod online and they're both very positive, actually, so I did read them. The first one is rather odd, I'd say, though, since the "reviewer" hasn't even tried the mod.

The second one, by Ross Lincoln, is better. It is rather descriptive, it is fun and it is certainly professional and supplies a good opinion. Both reviews are positive. "...it’s a Mother Goose mashup that positively wallows in its derivative brilliance. Players choose between a number of fictional kingdoms based loosely on RPGs, fairy tales and folklore, without even a pretense of originality. And that’s a good thing."

Nice reviews indeed, it was a fun read, and didn't go hard at Fairy Tale at all. But as always, let us remember that "Noone has ever built a statue in the honour of a critic"

 

[Le Sage]

An issue

I found something in the game that wasn't quite intended. The King is born over and over again, sometimes instead of Great Generals. This issue did not exist before Better AI, but if this slight problem is the price I've got to pay for Better AI, then it's OK.

The solution will be implemented ASAP. I will make a totally new King unit, just making the new one into a proper fighting unit and not a leader, while retaining the King as it is now, but only renaming him The Field Marshal, or something flashy like that. I've noticed that these units are born instead of Great Generals on a random basis, so it really is no problem to have these kinds of Great General variations.

In my ongoing game I have resorted to rename the second king that was born into "The Heir" to distinguish him from the old one I have. This is easily done using BUG's unit naming.

 

[The_J]

That units are born as GPs has something to do with one of the XML entries, i think it is iLeaderExperience, or so (not sure, i'm not at my gaming pc).
If this entry is not 0, the unit will be treated as general.
Had this problem myself in my mod, where DNA had been born as general o_O.

 

[Le Sage]

Thanks, The_J. The fact is that I now remember I had this problem myself before. In my old Hundred Years' War mod I actually finally got Jeanne d'Arc to only be born once to France. She initially kept popping up all over the place. I dunno what I did, but I will have to look it up in the Hundred Years' War files.

Edit: I know how it hangs together now. The LeaderExperience you're talking about is tied to the War Experience points gained when fighting. The cap increases for every Great General born, and since I put my King at 30, I get him instead of the usual General because the cap has been raised and the usual ones have lower points. I'll put them at zero for the King then.

 

[Jennvare]

Le Sage,

Just got into the late stages of a custome game where I am playing the Federation. It's gotten to a point where half the civs are destroyed and nations have control of thier continents. I got 32 cites on mine. For victory, I'm going for cultural with three legendary cities. As a result, I've got my ships spread out around my continent to keep anyone else from landing should they declare war.

At any rate, the pirate ships float by every so often. One came into my territory and I sent one of my battleships to sink it. When I attacked, it said my Battleship withdrew from combat!! I check the strength and my battleship still had plenty of fight left in it. I sent in another one on the same turn it wouldnt attack it. When I hovered over the battleship, I realized that it will only cause 25% damage to an enemy unit / stack!! You've got your battleships set up like floating artillery pieces that cannot kill anything, only damage them.

Is this intended or is this a bug? Just let me know.

Side note: I also think its strange that the "War Ships" look like Galleons with 3 cargo spaces. With the battleships relegated to artillery, this make the cargo ships the "masters" of the sea. Please check your naval units and verify if this is what you wanted.

For now, I gotta pump out alot of these warships now to defend my coastline!!

 

[Le Sage]

The Battleship is obviously wrong. I had problems with it before, and I thought I had corrected it. I will make it better in the next update, as for now, they can only be treated as floating artillery, as you say.

The Warship is really meant to be the ruler of the sea, though, with transport capability and naval power too. The battleship was added later in the mod's development to give variation and more roles at sea, but I intended the Warship to be the seaunit of choice.

Thanks for your reporting. This will be a better mod because of it!

 

[Le Sage]

Another Small Issue

The enemy often becomes bogged down when happening upon a fort in the landscape. He never dares storm it either, but rather sits there and gets involved in an artillery duel that could last forever.

I am a bit ambivalent over this. It's quite realistic for medieval warfare, really, but also not too exciting, innit? I have the forts set to 75% defense bonus, and that's probably why he never dares the attack either; small, insignificant garrisons can hold up entire armies. As said, realistic, but not exciting. He doesn't just pass it by either for some reason.

I shall weaken the forts by the next update and see if he wants to storm it finally. I'd rather have the enemy army storm a fort experiencing hard casualties against a small garrison, than have them sit there doing artillery duel for the entire duration of a war.

 

[Jennvare]

Le Sage,

This bogged down issue also happens outside of cities as well in certain situations. I played the Updated Elven Civil War (thanks again for this). Early in the game when I was trying to build up my economy, the enemy came with a small stack of units. It has his Queen, a couple of horse archers, one goblin avenger, and a magician. My city has six defenders in it (four light archers and 2 catapults). The AI just sat outside letting his magician range attack, but they never came in to attack.

I can understand the reluctance for he did not have a sufficient force to take the city. It took a while for him to send reinforcements (I couldnt expel him from my land yet either). The reinforcements were a few more horse archers and magicians. By that time, I built my dragon and a couple more archers to help bolster defense. Yet, he still just ranged attacked. Eventually, I drove him out.

This issue happens ALOT with FfH2. The enemy will come with a massive stack of units, but they wont attack. They will sit there. I think has to do with the % chance of victory. If no units in the stack have this minimum percent of victory, they will wait for use artillery fire to weaken the defenders. For most human players, we understand the need to sacrifice a good number of weak units just to weaken the strong defenders. The AI doesnt really grasp this.

Now, in vanilla Civ4, I dont really experience this problem and I think it has to do with the progression of the strength of military units. In FT as well as FfH2, the units strengths are very similar ranging from 1 to 18. In vanilla civ, its 2 to 40 and very spread out. Theres also more artillery in the modern age as well. Im wondering if the hardcoding for AI behavior from Civ 4 is what is affecting what your accomplishing.

Just a guess, but letting you know your not alone in this regard. You may wish to bounce ideas of the guys who made FfH2 (and its modmods) and see what you can learn.

 

[Le Sage]

Actually, thank you very much for this. I haven't played FfH2 too much to realize this is an issue there as well. I am going to add a post on the Better BtS AI thread about this and see what they come up with over there. It's indeed nice to know I'm not alone

And yes. I've seen it outside a city once or twice too, but then smaller, and weak stacks have been attacking and I could understand that they didn't attack. But at the fort I saw yesterday it was just meaningless in so many ways. He had power to drive me out; he could have wiped the floor with me, actually, but just sat there. That Fort issue is easily corrected by giving them 30% def bonus, instead of the huge 75% they have today.

There's also a naval issue I need to adress on the Better AI thread, which is similar. I can have a pirate blockading an enemy port for ages. The enemy just builds his Caravels and fills the waters around my single Pirate with those Caravels but never goes in to kill me off. I think the Dead Nation had - surely - ten or fifteen Caravels around me in my ongoing game!

 

[Highwayhoss]

Hey LeSage I just wanted to let you know I have posted my ModMod for Fairy Tale in the download section. You can find the Mod Mod here .

Feedback welcome...I plan to add to this Modmod where possible.

 

[Le Sage]

Wow, man! From the looks of it, it's really quite something! Good job!

I have a game going in FT7 right now and can't test HEFT really as yet, since I am also writing a story about that game and don't want to invalidate the save yet. I will check it out later today; I just need to make the save game into a scenario first and then upload it so that the story readers can continue the story if they want to.

Actually, I will make a complete new install of Fairy Tale to go with HEFT, so I can test it without touching the original FT gamefiles...

I will upload your modmod on Fairy Tale's ModDB page too ASAP for everyone there to enjoy as well. I even made it a cool frontpage image. I hope V8 doesn't invalidate the modmod; but I gather you will be wanting to continue update it as the development of Fairy Tale continues.

Nice job!

EDIT: Actually I can't get my copy to work at all. I get all sorts of error messages and I don't even get to the Main Menu. I wonder if the problem might be that I put it in a completely new copy of Fairy Tale, named Fairy Tale HEFT. Can anyone else get HEFT to work or is it just me? I can't see that just renaming the mod should have any impact though. The error messages I get seems to me mre like you've forgotten to include a file or such. The first one reads something about "Error Parsing File... UnitSchema.xml... Line 7838,21".

 

[Highwayhoss]

EDIT: Actually I can't get my copy to work at all. I get all sorts of error messages and I don't even get to the Main Menu. I wonder if the problem might be that I put it in a completely new copy of Fairy Tale, named Fairy Tale HEFT. Can anyone else get HEFT to work or is it just me? I can't see that just renaming the mod should have any impact though. The error messages I get seems to me mre like you've forgotten to include a file or such. The first one reads something about "Error Parsing File... UnitSchema.xml... Line 7838,21".

No its not you; I made some stupid errors when creating the files. I'm going over it now, fixing and modifying files, plus adding some new content; then I will resubmit the ModMod.

And BTW its meant to be dropped into an existing copy of the mod, its not standalone.

Sorry about that, LeSage; back to the Text editor....

P.S. BTW LeSage; I was able to to merge FT with Fuyu's Better BUG AI mod (Version 1.01b revision 87). I'm merging HEFT into this merge....if you're interested, I'll upload the whole thing...

 

[Le Sage]

Ah. OK! Welcome to the modding world! Try, fail and try again

I'll be waiting for the update. Hope you get it done before I go to bed so I can upload it to ModDB. The guys on ModDB are Australian and always authenticate things when I'm asleep, so when I wake, they always have my stuff ready for download.

Yeah. I have it in a completely new FT folder. It's all the same as my vanilla, but with HEFT included. It's in a backup-folder, if you will.

Fuyu's BUG AI? Doesn't that do the same as Better AI by Jdog5000? What does the merge do and does it have some new features? Does it work well together with Jdog's?

 

[Highwayhoss]

Ah. OK! Welcome to the modding world! Try, fail and try again

I'll be waiting for the update. Hope you get it done before I go to bed so I can upload it to ModDB. The guys on ModDB are Australian and always authenticate things when I'm asleep, so when I wake, they always have my stuff ready for download.

Yeah. I have it in a completely new FT folder. It's all the same as my vanilla, but with HEFT included. It's in a backup-folder, if you will.
Fuyu's BUG AI? Doesn't that do the same as Better AI by Jdog5000? What does the merge do and does it have some new features? Does it work well together with Jdog's?

Fuyu added some extras to Jdog5000's Better AI, (like Sentry Actions) plus BUG 4.4 and BULL 1.2.

I'm just about finished with the File, it seems to work OK, just want to add a couple of things then I'll zip it and send it to you.

 

[Le Sage]

Excellent. I'll give it a look!

 

[Jennvare]

I'll keep an eye on Heft. When it goes standalone, I will download it and give it a whirl or if the two simply become merged, whatever the outcome. I really dont have alot of extra space to keep two folders of fairy tale.

Keep up the good work, both of you!

 

[Le Sage]

Thank you, veBear. Constructive Criticism is always welcome around here actually! Some of the best additions to the mod have come through the players' advice and wishes. This project would be nowhere without it, so you're welcome anytime to take part in the choir of criticism!

There will be several more civs. There's lots more to do with the Middle Eastern theme, but right now I have a very specific civ haunting my mind that I will be adding as soon as possible, because I think it's a really great idea. More to come.

Jennvare: I asked HighwayHoss to try and make a standalone, but I doubt it's doable, since he's made so many changes. In the case it's possible, you will have it in a patch (really a sneak preview of V8), and if it's not, his HEFT-project will be included in Version 8 sometime in the future.

I've seen it now, and it looks very good. I just need to get into the details and see how it all works, and tweak the bits that don't. But it's real good, I can tell you that, and it will be in V8 when we're done!

 

[Highwayhoss]

Ok folks I just finished HEFT Version 1.1. Details of what's in the mod are in the README enclosed in the folder.

I made two versions:

For those who want to play the standalone version with Fuyu's Better BUG AI merged in: Download Here.

For those who want the addon to merge with Fairy Tale V7: Download Here.


Feedback would be appreciated.

 

[Le Sage]

OK. We posted at the exact same time, HighwayHoss. Great stuff! I'll upload the patch to ModDB tonight!

Geez. I should be in bed by now...

EDIT: I'm uploading the patch to be applied to V7 to ModDB right now. It should be authenticated by tomorrow morning! Ater this, I need to go to bed, people. I have a job to go to tomorrow and she's already 01.12 here! G'night!

 

[Highwayhoss]

I just posted an errata file for HEFT 1.1 to make some python fixes and correct a trait typo; you can download it here.