Final Fixes Reborn

[kaapteeniii]

The Legion of D'tesh hasn't been able to build any melee units for a few revisions now, making Dark Empowerment practically useless (you can still dominate enemy melee units and use it on them I think?). The D'teshi Fort Commanders don't have their spell working, either. Or maybe it has, sometimes it seems to work but most of the time not at all. This makes the D'teshi Fort commanders pretty much useless apart from hogging more land for wastelandification, seeing as they don't have the usual Fort Commander ranged attack.

Appreciate the work you're putting in on this mod. Played since Rife 1.3 or something and am very glad that someone's still fixing up all the stuff left unfixed.

 

[Vorpal+5]

I'm now crashing consistently on a given turn processing (30 secs after Grigori got a new adventurer), is there a way to fix that? I'm 172 turns in, with an average of 4 mn waiting time per turn (I do something else rest assured!), so preferably I would like not to restart

The logs in \My Games\Beyond the Sword don't show anything

 

[Bearmarshal]

Pegasus in my opinion was a unit with strangely disproportionate ability. The only motivation to hunt them(unless you're Austrin) was to get them the airlift building which also double as a somewhat powerful economic booster. But the problem is you need 2 pokemon hunters to catch them due to both having 5str(Even if you wish to strictly kill, only hunter can reliably do it) and 100% retreat. And just like Vorpal+5 saying, that 5str will getting much worse when a Pegasus suddenly be able to attack instead of only harmlessly defend.

In truth i kinda like pegasus gimmick but the absurd str for a mundane animal must go, just scale them back to 3str is enough for a fix. Oh and unlock the ability to ride Pegasus for all Civ would be nice. Maybe restrict them to only high level units or heroes only is fine too. Maybe this could pave way to a new mount system. ^_^

Pegasi, together with rocs, gryffons and hippogrifs, are by far the most worthwhile animals to catch just because of early game airlifting. Requiring two Pokémon hunters sounds fairly reasonable with that in mind, and I wouldn't be against bumping up the withdrawal rate of the other flyers. That said, I can agree that they are a little overpowered with that high starting strength.

________________________________

A question came up in my head while poking around in the spell code. Do you people prefer square or "circular" areas? I personally prefer the circular areas, but most spells with a larger area or range use square areas, and the penalty-less moving across diagonals means you can get "closer" to someone with a circular range before they can reach you if you approach them diagonally...

 

[Jerrian]

After SVN update today I tried to load my old game with Dtesh and game crashed. That ´s not the problem, I started a new game with Legions of Dtesh and I ´m not able to recruit undead slaves in my city.
If you pick the option your population will drop by one, but no undead slave is created. It must be something with the current update, because yesterday it worked.

 

[Jerrian]

Ok, I found more strange things happening, maybe something went wrong with my update progress.

Edit: Updated again, the save game from before said I need to start Ashes of Erebus mod as it was already running and it kept crashing and had weird issues with missing textes and so on. Anyway it seems to work correct right now again

 

[black_imperator]

I'm now crashing consistently on a given turn processing (30 secs after Grigori got a new adventurer), is there a way to fix that? I'm 172 turns in, with an average of 4 mn waiting time per turn (I do something else rest assured!), so preferably I would like not to restart

The logs in \My Games\Beyond the Sword don't show anything

Well, i can't open the save file since the folder name wasn't Ashes of Erebus , i'll see if i have time to set up another folder to diagnose it. You can try with the debug dll, it might work.

Out of curiosity, do the Mechanos still have access to Arcane Barges in the SVN version?

At the moment yes.

Yes, that did it.

A follow-up. When I started the PLAYNOW game, there was no interface at all. Is there any way to reset that so it appears if/when that happens (I've seen it before).

None that i know of.

Any update on what was wrong with the scions in my save? I'm stuck on what to do haha.

What was the issue exactly, i may have lost track of it ^^

To pinpoint precisely the problem, there is 10 seconds between each attack of a blitzing pegasus...

and those slowdowns are exclusive to the svn version ?

Is Fort Commander spamming really an issue, though? If you still hold the fort after the enemy's turn, getting to appoint a new commander isn't way out there, and an unpromoted Fort Commander isn't overly powerful. Although if you don't want unconditional appointing, I suggest keeping the same action but disabling it when there are adjacent enemies, to give it a feeling of siege and disrupted supply lines. This would also prevent you from stealing a fortress right next to an enemy city and use it as a free siege weapon against the latter.

i'll think about it.

Tearing down mana nodes is an AI behaviour I'd gladly get rid of. Just make sure they don't stop building Forts on un-noded non-raw mana, since that's a legit way of getting the mana without the required tech once they grow into Citadels...

i'm pretty sure they're strongly tweaked towards not destroying mana nodes, i'll check.

Would it be possible to get a debug build of the DLL with all the asserts turned off? I want to debug some CtDs at startup, but don't have the patience to sit through multiple failed asserts several times over to track down a crash bug which only happens in a minority of cases.

need to look at the compilation options, i'll see if i can do it

I'll answer to that but take it with a grain of salt : IIRC, in at least one modmod (but maybe not AoE), spirit III (or mind III?) could cure crazy. And If it's not the case in AoE, maybe it should become possible due to the low-interest of being able to cast "peace" by sacrifying a rare tierIII caster ; having a day-to-day use for such caster might be nice.

agreed, will do when i have time.

Another frustration is some of the world spells. While he might be fun if you are the one casting Stasis, it is a pain to go through as a player. I understand the concept, I do, but this is a game, imposing on players not-fun-at-all features is generally not good. At the very least, it should be reduced to 10 turns. And even 10 turns make it much more powerful than many others world spells. ps: I know you are not responsible with it, just taking over. Time for some spring cleaning perhaps?

The Legion of D'tesh hasn't been able to build any melee units for a few revisions now, making Dark Empowerment practically useless (you can still dominate enemy melee units and use it on them I think?). The D'teshi Fort Commanders don't have their spell working, either. Or maybe it has, sometimes it seems to work but most of the time not at all. This makes the D'teshi Fort commanders pretty much useless apart from hogging more land for wastelandification, seeing as they don't have the usual Fort Commander ranged attack.

Dtesh needs a cleanup at some point, for the melee thing. I'll check the spell

Pegasi, together with rocs, gryffons and hippogrifs, are by far the most worthwhile animals to catch just because of early game airlifting. Requiring two Pokémon hunters sounds fairly reasonable with that in mind, and I wouldn't be against bumping up the withdrawal rate of the other flyers. That said, I can agree that they are a little overpowered with that high starting strength.

i tend to agree with that, i'll decrease their strength

A question came up in my head while poking around in the spell code. Do you people prefer square or "circular" areas? I personally prefer the circular areas, but most spells with a larger area or range use square areas, and the penalty-less moving across diagonals means you can get "closer" to someone with a circular range before they can reach you if you approach them diagonally...

with the general setup, square is probably the better choice

After SVN update today I tried to load my old game with Dtesh and game crashed. That ´s not the problem, I started a new game with Legions of Dtesh and I ´m not able to recruit undead slaves in my city.
If you pick the option your population will drop by one, but no undead slave is created. It must be something with the current update, because yesterday it worked.

Yeah, depending on when was the last time you updated, some saves may have been broken.


We still need a tie-breaking vote on the next dev diary between Religions, Units and Alignments,

As usual, you can see the available themes and the former dev diaries here :

https://docs.google.com/document/d/14P90zYvnsodp-PLfRDmAehvX--nuhGV6yhKZMUxy9NI/edit#

 

[Nor'easter]

Regarding World Spells, I'm not particularly upset by Stasis. Yes, it's annoying, but so are such World Spells as Arcane Lacuna, World Break, River of Blood, and Raging Seas, not to mention something like the Blight. You can just wait out the spell and have your workers build improvements in the meantime. The World Spell I really hate is Hyborem's Whisper, but I've commented on that before. I remember Kael saying that his intention was to balance FfH2 at the level of Civilizations, not particular Civ abilities such as World Spells, so some World Spells were, by design, more powerful than others, since he was balancing Civs. I think reducing Stasis to 10 turns would make it incredibly weak, actually, although the Illians have a lot of other things going for them. Depends on whether you think the Illians need a nerf.

I haven't updated the SVN in a couple of weeks, so I assume on not on the latest update, but one thing I noticed in the Mercenaries screen was that many Mercenaries start with the Mana Guardian promotion. Not sure it matters, but just thought I'd mention it.

 

[Haeresiarch]

Playing as Scions I had the same problem as mentioned before - couldn't use any spells. Starting a play now game did help about the spells but neither awakened nor reborn can be added to any cities and no haunting lands ca ne created - not by creepers and by rede...de...the scion's druids.

Any advice?

 

[Jerrian]

Still having issues, game seems to run good until I met another Civ, can ´t do a dialogue. I ll try if that problem occurs too when I play other Civs.

 

[black_imperator]

i'm starting to think that this mod hates me ...

 

[Nor'easter]

@black_imperator , often when I start a new game or reload a saved game I get a bunch of python exceptions resulting in no interface, or no diplomacy interface, or whatever. I'll exit to either the Main Menu or the Desktop, sometimes the game crashes on exiting and I'll select the Debug option. Then when reloading the last Autosave the game works fine. (Sometimes I have to repeat the process two or three times before successfully loading the last Autosave.) Still, my point is that this just seems to be the result of the various python exceptions on startup that you've seen people post about before. Having to exit and reload a few times can be annoying when it happens, but it doesn't always happen, so it's hard to know what to report and what not to.

 

[Jerrian]

Hmm, when start this mod over civ4 itself and not using the launcher and try to load a game, the game tells me I need to run ashes of erebus mod, if I start it then, new games look like this (Display missing).
There are 3 possibilities, first is the svn update is bad, or I somehow destroyed my civilization4 installation or the mod one, or my operating system at all :-(.
I ll do some tests now.
If no other players tells you similar issues, it might be my bad :-/. Any ideas maybe ? Restart did not fix the problems.

 

[black_imperator]

the missing interface is a symptom of a demonic python bug that i know not how to replicate or to fix, since it pops at random for some people, mostly people with the steam version, but it's known to have happened to the non-steam version too.

ok, new plan, any people with the python bug, i want to know your OS, the full path of the install folder, steam or not steam, mod version, options used, and any other particular you may think of

 

[Mknn]

Re: the SeveredSouls issue. My DividedSoulDude died, but loading up a prior save randomly, here is what I see. Red X's indicate tiles the soul cannot move to.

 

[Jerrian]

Ok, tested other games like civ4 beyond the sword - no issues. Yesterday Ashes of Erebus everything was ok, after updating today problems occured.


Notes that might be important: I used to play own games with the lakes.py and Oasis.Py but sadly these maps not working anymore so I switched yesterday to sea_highlands_mst. As it is similar to lakes. I tried to disable Lakes and Oasis in modules in launcher but system says the following (look screen).
Maybe launcher and installation of ashes of Erebus corrupted somehow.
Edit: Deleted Oasis and Lakes in PrivateMaps folder manually.

Data:
- Win10 pro 10.0.15063 Build 15063
- D:\Games\Civ4\Beyond the Sword\Mods\Ashes of Erebus
- No steam Version

 

[Jerrian]

Hmm, I deleted lakes.py and oasis.py in private maps made an SVN update, tried to load my dtesh game and had no interface.
Then I made a new game and it crashed while loading, after that I tried again to start a game, had my interface back and as I met Cassiel from Grigori I also had dialogue Screen.
I´m a bit confused right now, maybe Lakes and oasis in private maps was the issue?
I ´ll continue testing tomorrow. If I still have these python issues, I ll renew my installation of AOE.

 

[Bearmarshal]

The missing interface (symptom of the Python not loading) and CtD at startup bugs are both arbitrary in whether they appear or not. I wouldn't read too much into a single or handful instances of them happening or not happening, because that can all be explained by luck alone. You need a lot of startups to make a true prediction of what worked and what didn't.

That said, I've noticed a few times in one of the logs that the game was in the middle of loading the World of Erebus map script when crashing to desktop, so the idea that a map script could cause some of your bugs isn't way out there. I can't tell whether it was the map script which caused my crashes or if it just happened to be adjacent to the code which does crash, though. I think World of Erebus is the last map in the standard map list, so it could be that it is the last to be loaded and the game crashes when moving on to whatever happens next...

 

[Vorpal+5]

About my crashing saved game:
My mod folder was Ashes of Erebus299 (even if I migred to commit 300 during the course of the game). Done this way because "Ashes of Erebus" is for the last stable version.
About the blitzing pegasus, this is using commit 300 indeed.

I'm really unsure what to do at this point. The last stable game without lag that I had, this was with old stable version. I don't see me restarting a game with the current version because if I'm stuck with a recurring crash, I'll probably not have the courage to continue playing FFH. So I believe I'll revert to the old stable version for the time being, unless the crash in my saved game can be fixed (not putting any pressure on that ). I know you have your hands full Black Imperator, so no obligation, that's life...

 

[black_imperator]

About my crashing saved game:
My mod folder was Ashes of Erebus299 (even if I migred to commit 300 during the course of the game). Done this way because "Ashes of Erebus" is for the last stable version.
About the blitzing pegasus, this is using commit 300 indeed.

I'm really unsure what to do at this point. The last stable game without lag that I had, this was with old stable version. I don't see me restarting a game with the current version because if I'm stuck with a recurring crash, I'll probably not have the courage to continue playing FFH. So I believe I'll revert to the old stable version for the time being, unless the crash in my saved game can be fixed (not putting any pressure on that ). I know you have your hands full Black Imperator, so no obligation, that's life...

Please play with the version that works for you, i'll just ask you from time to time to test a version when i do speed improvement ^^ (for the next time though, it's better that the latest version is given the name Ashes of Erebus, that allows me to diagnose the save files easily ^^)

 

[Vorpal+5]

ok, I'm restarting with the old version and will test speed improvements on the new one

Any idea why the options for a map (I never change script) are saved up to 'cohesion', but the others below are reset to default each time?