Final Fixes Reborn

Keansor · Sep 17, 2017

Silly me, and my forgetting that you have to patch just about any modded game with the 4gb patch.
Unfortunately, that hasn't solved it. Played more and it's still been crashing (when I end turns), but I've been powering through. Unfortunately the most recent autosave crashes when I'm trying to load it up; in the past I just loaded a further back autosave and did things differently and it'd work past it, but it occurred to me I can also ask about it/post any potentially relevant logs here.

Spoiler resmgr :

Spoiler init :

EDIT: I think I should also note that I'm using the Keepers of Noggormotha module in addition to all the other ones that are on by default. The fact that Bannor Chain Of Command and Greatest People seem to take issue with each other makes me think that there could be something there, but I just set it back to what it normally was to try and fix stuff since the game screamed at me any time I loaded it up without the Chain of Command one.

Nor'easter · Sep 17, 2017

PPQ_Purple said:
That's the thing though. Right now the role of siege weapons is literally "well if you don't have fire mana".

Maybe one solution might be to remove the ability of fireballs to bombard city defenses, making it a purely collateral damage spell. That would make siege weapons more important.

Bearmarshal · Sep 18, 2017

black_imperator said:
On the alignment stuff, Good/Evil is the position in the Godswar, so the Paladin/Eidolon opposition work for this. Neutral is either pragmatists or people who don't want to take sides. I'm not sure what kind of unit could work there, though i'm tempted with a Arcane/Divine unit to give it the ability to be very versatile.

For Lawful/Chaotic, it's more the societal structure of the civ. Berserk, as units that follow no rules, work well as chaotic, some kind of Rogue could maybe work too. For the lawful, the commanding units with pacifying bonuses to cities that have been mentioned would work well. For ethical neutral, i have more trouble defining it.

For the Good/Evil scale, I suggest Neutral should be themed for survival. Neutral are those who do not surrender to and join the evil, yet refuse to join the good who march against it. They may start out that way for many reasons, but when the Godswar has progressed far enough, I'd say the nations which have remained Neutral should have grown into small bastions of isolationism. Maybe some mobility-centred defender with defenses against magic, ranged attacks and collateral damage to really give the enemy a tough nut to crack.

Neutral on the Law/Chaos axis is much trickier, since it's harder to find some kind of extreme to it. Perhaps something focused around the sense of community, the mentality of "I'm doing this by choice, because we're in this together". I don't have any specific ideas at the moment, though...

Keansor said:
Been trying to play the Makara order, but I've been more and more frequent crashes the further I get into the game. Normally I just try doing something different when I re-load it, but it seems that's not going to work this time. I enabled logging in the Civconfig and from what I can tell, the two files in the spoiler tags seem to be conflict reports.
I don't know what all information is useful, so for now I'm just going to attach the Lsystem and resmgr logs and wait for whatever else you might need instead of just throwing in a metric ton of information at you.

Spoiler Lsystem :

[...]

Spoiler resmgr :

[...]

Both these logs are about graphical resources, and Civ shouldn't crash just because some graphical resource isn't found. A rule of thumb with Civ is that if it crashes to desktop, there won't be anything in the log files telling you why (there are no external tools logging the program, and if someone thought to log an extreme event, they probably thought to make it not crash the whole thing too). For most of the part, the most you can glean from the logs is whether the game hasn't started doing something yet, which can narrow down what it was doing when it crashed, but Black Imperator (who currently has computer issues) tends to prefer save files triggering the crash, since they are much easier to debug.

PPQ_Purple said:
That's the thing though. Right now the role of siege weapons is literally "well if you don't have fire mana".

Three Cannons with the Accuracy promotion and a Great Commander with Siege Warfare I outperform 10 Mages with Fireball. The only advantege of the Mages is that you don't need to haul them all up to the walls of the enemy city, which I do admit is pretty significant, but still.

Nor'easter said:
Maybe one solution might be to remove the ability of fireballs to bombard city defenses, making it a purely collateral damage spell. That would make siege weapons more important.

That would be a pretty raw deal for the elves, since they don't have access to siege weaponry. That said, the fact that a dedicated mage can start bombarding a city from up to 4 tiles away while the siege has to walk all the way up to the walls with their meager 1 movement point per turn (2 with Force I) does give the Mage an unfair advantage. Maybe we could remove the bombard strength from Fireballs and instead give it directly to the Mage? That way, they'd be limited to the same short range as the siege weaponry, and while mages generally do have better mobility than siege weapons do, this would still probably be enough to motivate the use of siege weapons over Mages.

The other option is to make bombardment work over range, but this would require modifications of the DLL, and probably quite extensive such.

PPQ_Purple · Sep 18, 2017

Bearmarshal said:
Three Cannons with the Accuracy promotion and a Great Commander with Siege Warfare I outperform 10 Mages with Fireball. The only advantege of the Mages is that you don't need to haul them all up to the walls of the enemy city, which I do admit is pretty significant, but still.

Cannons are more or less fine. The main thing is that half the civs only get the catapult and therefore basically have a sort of boring siege tree.

As for the fireball I actually like it exactly as it is. My personal rule of thumb is that if something seems overpowered it's because something else is underpowered and skewing the comparison.

Calavente · Sep 18, 2017

black_imperator said:
On the Hippus, at this point, they have no unique units, but a serious discount on mercenaries, and the ability to send their own units as mercenaries. They also get a racial promo and a few unique Master promotions making their mounter units the best in game. I would like to give them some additional unique units, but exactly what is unclear ( some kind of mounted or charioted mage line would be a possibility)

I had a proposition for Hippus : maybe they don't really need a combat UU, but one of the following :
- Mounted Settler ? +1mvt, +20%escape from attack, vision.
- Mounted Worker (with mule) : +1mvt +20% escape
- Mounted Mage / Arcmage (+1 mvt)

Another idea (reading the siege discussion) : Artillery train : Ballista moved by horses (or Ballista Chariot): 2mvt Ballista, with lower performances than catapults to offset the mvt gain.

PPQ_Purple said:
Someone mentioned siege weapons a few pages back and that got me thinking. Right now civs have 1-2 siege weapons depending on if they get cannon. That's a bit... boring isn't it? Maybe it might be a good idea to make some sort of alternative siege weapon to replace the cannon for those civs that don't get it.

Nor'easter said:
Often you don't have Fire Mana, though, and even though Arcane Barges can cast Fireball, you can't use them to attack inland. So I've found that usually I do need Siege Weapons. But it really depends, since there are plenty of spells that do collateral damage, often severe enough that the city's cultural defense doesn't make much difference.

Having said that, I agree with fleshing out the Siege line a bit. Maybe move the Trebuchet away from being a Khazad UU Catapult replacement and have it be an intermediate upgrade between Catapult and Cannon, so we have more than two tiers.

PPQ_Purple said:
Cannons are more or less fine. The main thing is that half the civs only get the catapult and therefore basically have a sort of boring siege tree.

As for the fireball I actually like it exactly as it is. My personal rule of thumb is that if something seems overpowered it's because something else is underpowered and skewing the comparison.

I agree with PPQ_Purple : no need to nerf Fireballs.
However, Siege are lacking when compared to mages : mage are quicker on foot and are more versatile, and you can (almost) spam them.

to solve that, catapults should either become quicker, or become more powerful than mages, or much cheaper.

what Siege lacks is mobility.... that's the main difference versus fireballs : slow (1mvt) instead of hasted mobility 1 mages + 4mvt of fireball, and power.
multiple random possibilities :

Spoiler :

PPQ_Purple · Sep 18, 2017

I am surprised so many people consider mobility to be a big deal with siege weapons when realistically they are something you want to keep in a stack that most of the time won't be moving any faster than 1 movement per turn either. Although admittedly the inability to move and shoot on the same turn can be slightly frustrating.

This said, I like the idea of city defense resisting fireballs. However I think it should just expand to all magic. Like just have the defense bonus apply as magic defense the same way it applies vs a conventional attacking unit.

Calavente · Sep 18, 2017

PPQ_Purple said:
I am surprised so many people consider mobility to be a big deal with siege weapons when realistically they are something you want to keep in a stack that most of the time won't be moving any faster than 1 movement per turn either. Although admittedly the inability to move and shoot on the same turn can be slightly frustrating.

that's where I disagree.
my "real" stacks all move at 2speed....(or even 4 or 6 if I took care to build roads,or if I want my stack to move through my territory) : most of the time haste is learned by a few adepts per stack.
Golems go well with cat's due to their own slow speed ; but mages,and axemen, and champions all go at 2speed! (at least out of forests/hills)
and even if for some turns it's only 1 move, due to terrain, the difference between 1 and 2 move every odd turn for 5-10 turns is enough to make the catapult not relevant for my attack forces.

PPQ_Purple said:
This said, I like the idea of city defense resisting fireballs. However I think it should just expand to all magic. Like just have the defense bonus apply as magic defense the same way it applies vs a conventional attacking unit.

the coding part I have no idea about is how to make it a protection of the "defense" so that the bombardment of the city defens is less efficient when the attack is magical.
I fear that it will "only" make it that fireballs give 50%less damages to defending units.. which wouldn't be the aim as the issue with siege is that fireball are too big of a bombardement competitor, not due to the attacking str of fireballs.

Bearmarshal · Sep 18, 2017

PPQ_Purple said:
Cannons are more or less fine. The main thing is that half the civs only get the catapult and therefore basically have a sort of boring siege tree.

The power difference is notable, but still relatively small when you start stacking promotions. 35% instead of 45% still outperforms ten mages with a group of three.

PPQ_Purple said:
As for the fireball I actually like it exactly as it is. My personal rule of thumb is that if something seems overpowered it's because something else is underpowered and skewing the comparison.

I wouldn't say it's as much a rule of thumb as a philosophy of in which direction changes should be made, since power levels only can be relative. That said, while it's a perfectly valid viewpoint, some changes are harder to do than other, and nerfing fireballs is a lot easier than buffing siege up to their level. Unless we want to have our siege "summon" cannonballs, but I'm not fond of that idea.

PPQ_Purple said:
I am surprised so many people consider mobility to be a big deal with siege weapons when realistically they are something you want to keep in a stack that most of the time won't be moving any faster than 1 movement per turn either. Although admittedly the inability to move and shoot on the same turn can be slightly frustrating.

To me, mobility is a huge deal. I admit most of it comes from being fed up shuffling around troops in the endgame, but Haste + Blitz (and later Mobility I) is great for beating down cities before they have time to reinforce. Also, mobility is pretty much your only option against a technologically more advanced opponent, since winning a war under those circumstances is all about never letting your opponent pick their battles.

PPQ_Purple said:
This said, I like the idea of city defense resisting fireballs. However I think it should just expand to all magic. Like just have the defense bonus apply as magic defense the same way it applies vs a conventional attacking unit.

I like this idea.

Calavente said:
that's where I disagree.
my "real" stacks all move at 2speed....(or even 4 or 6 if I took care to build roads,or if I want my stack to move through my territory) : most of the time haste is learned by a few adepts per stack.
Golems go well with cat's due to their own slow speed ; but mages,and axemen, and champions all go at 2speed! (at least out of forests/hills)
and even if for some turns it's only 1 move, due to terrain, the difference between 1 and 2 move every odd turn for 5-10 turns is enough to make the catapult not relevant for my attack forces.
the coding part I have no idea about is how to make it a protection of the "defense" so that the bombardment of the city defens is less efficient when the attack is magical.
I fear that it will "only" make it that fireballs give 50%less damages to defending units.. which wouldn't be the aim as the issue with siege is that fireball are too big of a bombardement competitor, not due to the attacking str of fireballs.

Walls and their clones already give a reduction to city bombard damage, so the foundation would simply consist of replicating this code. That said, the changes would have to be made in the DLL, which greatly complicates things the actual execution.

PPQ_Purple · Sep 18, 2017

Calavente said:
that's where I disagree.
my "real" stacks all move at 2speed....(or even 4 or 6 if I took care to build roads,or if I want my stack to move through my territory) : most of the time haste is learned by a few adepts per stack.

Good point. I've been making units for so long that I've not actually played the game for months and I just forgot about haste. Stupid of me.

the coding part I have no idea about is how to make it a protection of the "defense" so that the bombardment of the city defens is less efficient when the attack is magical.
I fear that it will "only" make it that fireballs give 50%less damages to defending units.. which wouldn't be the aim as the issue with siege is that fireball are too big of a bombardement competitor, not due to the attacking str of fireballs.

You can set the amount of bombardment damage (defense reduction) a unit does in the XML. The fireball is just a unit.

Bearmarshal said:
I wouldn't say it's as much a rule of thumb as a philosophy of in which direction changes should be made, since power levels only can be relative. That said, while it's a perfectly valid viewpoint, some changes are harder to do than other, and nerfing fireballs is a lot easier than buffing siege up to their level. Unless we want to have our siege "summon" cannonballs, but I'm not fond of that idea.

Call it what you will, but the logic is simple. If you have different units that all fulfill the same role and you nerf the most powerful one you are not solving the problem because you are still left with two units that fill the same role. You are just transforming one non-choice (always pick the better one) into another (pick any at random). What you need to do instead is look at making the other alternatives stronger in ways that make it distinct from the overpowered unit so as to make it into a distinct and valid tradeoff. And that by definition means adding side features to it or otherwise enhancing it to alter its behavior.

To me, mobility is a huge deal. I admit most of it comes from being fed up shuffling around troops in the endgame, but Haste + Blitz (and later Mobility I) is great for beating down cities before they have time to reinforce. Also, mobility is pretty much your only option against a technologically more advanced opponent, since winning a war under those circumstances is all about never letting your opponent pick their battles.

Yea, I completely forgot about haste. My wrong on that one.

Keansor · Sep 18, 2017

Bearmarshal said:
Both these logs are about graphical resources, and Civ shouldn't crash just because some graphical resource isn't found. A rule of thumb with Civ is that if it crashes to desktop, there won't be anything in the log files telling you why (there are no external tools logging the program, and if someone thought to log an extreme event, they probably thought to make it not crash the whole thing too). For most of the part, the most you can glean from the logs is whether the game hasn't started doing something yet, which can narrow down what it was doing when it crashed, but Black Imperator (who currently has computer issues) tends to prefer save files triggering the crash, since they are much easier to debug.

Hmmm, I was worried that might be the case when I didn't see them being used at all in troubleshooting; just thought it'd be worth a shot. At any rate, here's the save.

Bearmarshal · Sep 19, 2017

PPQ_Purple said:
You can set the amount of bombardment damage (defense reduction) a unit does in the XML. The fireball is just a unit.

I think they more wanted something along the lines of:

Code:

<BuildingInfo>
    <Type>BUILDING_RUNED_WALL</Type>
    <iMagicDefense>25</iDefense>
    <iMagicBombardDefense>25</iMagicBombardDefense>
</BuildingInfo>

... which reduces the effect of both magical damage (e.g. Maelstrom) and magical bombardment (e.g. Fireballs).

PPQ_Purple said:
Call it what you will, but the logic is simple. If you have different units that all fulfill the same role and you nerf the most powerful one you are not solving the problem because you are still left with two units that fill the same role. You are just transforming one non-choice (always pick the better one) into another (pick any at random). What you need to do instead is look at making the other alternatives stronger in ways that make it distinct from the overpowered unit so as to make it into a distinct and valid tradeoff. And that by definition means adding side features to it or otherwise enhancing it to alter its behavior.

When done in moderation, that's a great princible, but if you're constantly buffing everything up to the level of the most powerful alternative, you'll run into problems where options start becoming either unusable or totally overpowered depending completely on the situation. Mind you, I don't think giving siege a buff to their bombard power is really going to bring us into that territory, but I am of the mind that you should feel slightly disadvantaged for having to use mages instead of siege weapons to bombard the enemy cities, as mages have way more utility than siege weapons do, what with them being the utility unit and all.

Calavente · Sep 19, 2017

Bearmarshal said:
I think they more wanted something along the lines of:

Code:

<BuildingInfo> <Type>BUILDING_RUNED_WALL</Type> <iMagicDefense>25</iDefense> <iMagicBombardDefense>25</iMagicBombardDefense> </BuildingInfo>

... which reduces the effect of both magical damage (e.g. Maelstrom) and magical bombardment (e.g. Fireballs).

When done in moderation, that's a great princible, but if you're constantly buffing everything up to the level of the most powerful alternative, you'll run into problems where options start becoming either unusable or totally overpowered depending completely on the situation. Mind you, I don't think giving siege a buff to their bombard power is really going to bring us into that territory, but I am of the mind that you should feel slightly disadvantaged for having to use mages instead of siege weapons to bombard the enemy cities, as mages have way more utility than siege weapons do, what with them being the utility unit and all.

I think you got it on the runic wall.
something like stonewall get 25 magicbombardement defense
Earth Ramparts (Engeneering and/or Earth III) : 50% BombardDefense
and magic towers / magic shields / runewall having the same...Etc (increased Defense + slight limitation on bombardment defense or magicbombardment defense)

Re-Firballs and Cat's.
the issue with FB is that Mages are really versatiles creatures... that can summon a firball which is also a very versatile unit (attack, defense, collateral damage on attack, bombardment option, 2mvt, 4 with the right promotion, boosted by Tower of Elements...etc)

TheIO · Sep 19, 2017

RE Hippus uniques - how imbalanced would a civic-unrestricted Royal Guard replacement be?

Bearmarshal · Sep 19, 2017

Calavente said:
I think you got it on the runic wall.
something like stonewall get 25 magicbombardement defense
Earth Ramparts (Engeneering and/or Earth III) : 50% BombardDefense
and magic towers / magic shields / runewall having the same...Etc (increased Defense + slight limitation on bombardment defense or magicbombardment defense)

I think the quick rule of thumb would be that anything which protects against mundane bombard would protect against magical bombard, but protections against magical bombard should do little to nothing against mundane bombard (antimagic runes don't dispell rocks).

As for defense against direct damage spells, I'm cloven on whether they should bypass mundane defenses or not...

TheIanOakley said:
RE Hippus uniques - how imbalanced would a civic-unrestricted Royal Guard replacement be?

Kinda. Very high mid-game defense combined with Guardsman is pretty strong, and the Hippus get to add all their mounted bonuses too...

Keansor · Sep 19, 2017

Sure wish I could finish a single game... I guess this may have been why I stopped the last time. :lol:

Started a new file as the Amurites, on a Tiny map this time to see if that makes the crashing happen less. My autosave is up to turn 505, but the save file itself is a bit beyond that. Initially it would only crash at the end of turns, and sometimes when I'm trying to load it up. The solution to that was to keep trying to load it up until it works, and hope it doesn't just crash again.

Not too many turns ago, it started crashing at different times - twice when I tried to settle a city (but it worked the third time, for whatever reason), and once when casting a spell, dunno which one. On the last crash, I tried to load a few times and when I finally got in, moves some dudes around, then tried to save it said it failed to compress. I quit out, figured I'd shut the computer down and give it time to cool down and stuff, and now that I've gotten back on it says it's unable to decompress the save that I already had. Since that's the save I was trying to overwrite, though, it'd make sense that trying to save it there messed the file up somehow.

Here's the file for both the one that won't decompress and the last auto-save.

TheIO · Sep 20, 2017

Have you applied the 4GB patch? That'd be my first check, but that wouldn't explain the crashing on spells or settling.

Keansor · Sep 20, 2017

I have indeed; both to the Civ4BeyondTheSword.exe and the launcher, just to be sure.

Bahmo · Sep 20, 2017

So, sorry to have gone silent in the realm of troubleshooting, and really sorry if this is answered elsewhere, but how (with what program) do I open and edit ini.bak files? I want to try configuring it to track down the Python errors, if any.

Bearmarshal · Sep 21, 2017

You don't need to edit the .ini.bak file, it's only a backup of the .ini file.

Calavente · Sep 21, 2017

Bugs (I think?)

I started a new game today after updating the svn;
play now, then new game.
in both start, my starting warrior received the following event "Aeron has granted you assassin with new power..." and my starting warrior got "Aeron's chosen". +2unholy + 20%heal after combat makes it a BEAST... especially on turn 1.

second "bug"
wether I have 0, 1 or 2 warriors in defense of my city, every few turns i'm receiving threat from barbarians. I don't know if it is an event (that is recuring due to the small pool of events early game, exacerbated by using "more events",or a situation that is due to my feeble defense)
"barbarian hords are approaching ; what do you want to do
- give them gold (lose gold)
- give them some slaves (lose population)
- taunt the chief in a duel
- entertain them and try to get them to join your civilization"
I always chose the 2 last ones (alternatively)... and they don't seem to do anything.

thanks !

Final Fixes Reborn

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