HOF Mod Support/Suggestions

[Ozbenno]

The main reason why map finder might regen a map and then stop is when you and an AI are in contact (or 2 AI's) as Civ4 doesn't clear out contacts with regen. The mod doesn't allow regen in that case.

I thought of this, but you get the message "cannot regenerate" if this is the case. I had to press alt-x and them alt-m but as I said once I quit and restarted it worked fine.

 

[Misotu]

I've loaded the latest Warlords MOD. There's a major problem (for me at least) - when you pull up the cities screen on F1, and click on the city icon, it just dumps you in the map. No zoom to city Major problem for management of larger civs ...

 

[WastinTime]

MapFinder suggestion:

The map finder is loaded with so many choices--very flexible. Sadly I usually just tell it to find 2 Gems or something equally simple. One thing it can't do (which I would like) is to filter on Max Population or Max Land. Ya know, those values that are used to calculate score.

 

[Thrallia]

doesn't the map finder base everything on what you can see from the starting position?

Max land or Max pop sounds like it would require it to peek at the entire map

 

[Denniz]

I've loaded the latest Warlords MOD. There's a major problem (for me at least) - when you pull up the cities screen on F1, and click on the city icon, it just dumps you in the map. No zoom to city Major problem for management of larger civs ...

I fixed a sort problem in that module. There must be a python error of some kind. You can turn on logging to find out what it is but I can do anything until we release a new version. I will put it on my bug list but I can't say when that will be. Sorry.

; Set to 1 for no python exception popups
HidePythonExceptions = 0

; Enable the logging system
LoggingEnabled = 1

; Overwrite old network and message logs
OverwriteLogs = 1

; Enable message logging
MessageLog = 1

Be sure to turn them off after as they can slow things down under certain circumstances.

MapFinder suggestion:

The map finder is loaded with so many choices--very flexible. Sadly I usually just tell it to find 2 Gems or something equally simple. One thing it can't do (which I would like) is to filter on Max Population or Max Land. Ya know, those values that are used to calculate score.

doesn't the map finder base everything on what you can see from the starting position?

Max land or Max pop sounds like it would require it to peek at the entire map

Yeah, Max Pop or Max land would be spoilerish. MF only uses visible tiles or the Test Range whichever is smaller. (Test range is size of the "Fat Cross" from the settler's position. i.e. range of 2 would be the normal "Fat Cross" if you settled in place.)

 

[WastinTime]

Yeah, Max Pop or Max land would be spoilerish.

Not true.

This information is available on turn 1 to the player. Just hover the mouse over the player to see the score details. I've used this information to choose maps on many occasions....so it would be nice if the map finder handled it.

Edit: I guess I gave away one of my secrets there. I wasn't aware it was a secret.

 

[Misotu]

@Denniz Thanks for the reply. I'm not quite sure what the logging thing is for - is this so that I can give you data to enable you to fix the problem in the next release? No problem if so, but where do I put this code - in the .ini file somewhere? Where do the results appear and what do I do with them? (Sorry if this is all really basic, but I'm clueless on stuff like this).

 

[Methos]

Where do the results appear?

I can answer this question. I'll leave the rest to Denniz.

Your logs will appear in either:

Vanilla: C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Logs
Warlords: C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\My Documents\My Games\Warlords\Logs

 

[AlanH]

Specifically, the Python error log is the file called PythonErr.log. When I test this problem here there's no Python error raised, however.

 

[Denniz]

Not true.

This information is available on turn 1 to the player. Just hover the mouse over the player to see the score details. I've used this information to choose maps on many occasions....so it would be nice if the map finder handled it.

Edit: I guess I gave away one of my secrets there. I wasn't aware it was a secret.

I am not sure how much value it has since score is based on a ratio but I will take a look at adding it.

@Denniz Thanks for the reply. I'm not quite sure what the logging thing is for - is this so that I can give you data to enable you to fix the problem in the next release? No problem if so, but where do I put this code - in the .ini file somewhere? Where do the results appear and what do I do with them? (Sorry if this is all really basic, but I'm clueless on stuff like this).

sorry, my brain isn't functioning properly. those setting were for the CivilizationIV.ini that appears in the Civ4 and warlords folders in your My Documents\My Games folder. But no need to bother, AlanH alreay checked it. Without an error, this one is going to take some research.

Specifically, the Python error log is the file called PythonErr.log. When I test this problem here there's no Python error raised, however.

Thanks, Alan.

 

[Miraculix]

I am not sure how much value it has since score is based on a ratio but I will take a look at adding it.

Max population at turn 1 is very crucial for Dual/Conquest games with a target win date of 3835BC. In these games, the score is mainly determined by the max population value. Small value gives a high score and vice versa.

 

[Misotu]

Thanks for this!

Not that I'm relieved not to have to try it myself or anything ...

 

[Methos]

Max population at turn 1 is very crucial for Dual/Conquest games with a target win date of 3835BC.

Unless your going for QScore.

 

[KMadCandy]

i decided to spoiler this one since once i started i didn't stop. it's really not a mod suggestion or even a request for support that i think is slightly possible. it's just a rambling whine about an issue my computer has with the mod, and apparently i'm the only one. i don't see any feasible way to work around it and i doubt that even Denniz will be able to help. not for lack of wanting to help, or not being smart enough, you'll see why if you read it but you really don't have to, it got long and the whole thing is soooooo pointless. i'm just in a mood today and can't bring myself to not post it at all. i shall regret this in the morning when the heavy-duty cough medicine wears off, i'm sure.

anyway, this is my moaning and groaning and whining and crying post, and it got really long cuz i always type too much.

Spoiler :

note that i'm not bitter about the mod, or its makers, or the HoF staff. i completely agree with the motivation behind the mod and it works like a charm for most people and that's spiffy.

my computer has a lot of memory and can handle civ4 as a game quite well. the game starts up quickly and runs quickly and i have no complaints there. it seems like sometimes it takes like 30 seconds, which feels like a long time, to load the save of a game in the modern era, but that's kind of understandable if a lot of people are still alive with a lot of units. i can even alt-tab in and out of it all day long and still get no lag, which i know some people can't do. however, i was sometimes getting errors which made the game crash. it says something about memory allocation or bad memory or i forget what. these crashes only happen when the game attempts to autosave. a save file is created, but it's much much smaller than it ought to be and the game doesn't recognize it. from my recollection, i can save the game manually myself without this happening. i can't swear that it never happened on a manual save, but if it did, the crash:success ratio wasn't nearly as high as it was for autosaves, even taking into account that i don't manually save every turn. i do manually save often just from habit. i'm old school, "save early save often" just in case. just in case of what? i dunno, it's just what i do.

i'm such a permanewb that i didn't even realize 3 crashes was lot in a single game. having a game i was proud of, since i hadn't thought i could win it at one point, excluded because of those crashes really frustrated me. i am NOT complaining about the decision itself or the staff, in fact they were quite kind in explaining it to me, and thoughtful enough to reassure me that it was simply a matter of the crashes making it too hard to verify as a game, not that something about the game labelled me as "a cheater". that made me feel a lot better, and they were really sweet to take the time to do that. quite frankly they better not make an exception for me for any reason, they don't know me and maybe i really am a cheater (i know i'm not but they don't). i'd exclude that game too knowing what i know now, it was just the fact that i didn't know it was a high and unacceptable number, so it came as a surprise and knocked the wind out of my sails.

so anyway, i needed a break from HoF for a while. i have a lot of fun here in this forum and i'm not all uber-obsessed about "i must get QM and i must get it now". but it is something that i want someday, no matter how bad my score is (the worse the better actually), and to find out that might not happen due to technical reasons and not just because i'm a poor player, wasn't a good thing for my mood. during my break i played civ4 but i didn't even load the HoF mod, since i just did not want to start any games that might even remotely be eligible and get my hopes up, and then start crashing. so i just played goofy games. and sometimes even didn't lock modified assets . once i worldbuildered in a spy in a barbarian city to watch their tech progress. in another game i built the barbs their own island, with lots of resources, to be able to study them more closely, since the real land masses had no space for them any more. it was really amusing, and you sure can't do that in an HoF game *giggle*. did you know that barbarians suffer from emancipation unhappiness? i had no idea! they were running their culture slider at 20%! at a time earlier than that, they were researching alphabet, which i considered quite . guys, you can't even trade techs through pointy-stick research, hello? well, it turned out that they wanted their next tech (horseback riding) as quick as possible, so they researched alphabet so that they could set their city to produce research from the hammers. all 5 of the hammers. i really had fun with that one, but i was supposed to be whining here wasn't i ...

well, it's been almost a month now, and for the past two weeks i've been ill so i've played even more than my normal amount, to get my mind off my incredible pain, agony, and suffering caused by "Attack of the Pollen" [please insert your sympathy here]. it dawned on me last weekend that i haven't had that type of memory allocation whatever crash on autosave in all these weeks. not even once. not even in games that had play times over 30 hours (i did some really weird games, the cough medicine makes my brain kinda wonky). i never did change my config file, except to not load the mod. i'm still autosaving every turn. and it's working like a charm.

so those crashes on autosaving must somehow be linked to using the mod itself . something about the mod doesn't get along with my machine. i never did enable the autologger so that's not it. i'm sure there's nothing i can do about it. if the mod doesn't change anything about how autosaves happen, then it's my machine specifically and that's not fixable within my current budget *giggle*. and if the mod does tweak autosaving on purpose, it must be by design to make the files easier to check for cheating, so of course you ought not give me information about how you did that, or how i should work around it, that would be a ridiculously bad idea! i could try to minimize the possibility of the autosave crashes by not autosaving every turn, but that would of course automatically exclude my games . as far as i can see i'm stuck between a rock and a hard place and insert-some-other-cliche-here.

if anybody does have any ideas that don't involve me spending money on a new system, i'd love to hear them. i've done all i can think of, including stuff like uninstalling/reinstalling both the game and the mods, updating drivers since every tech support person in the universe is trained to give that as suggestion #2 (#1 is reboot your pc). i even updated the firmware on my disk drive since it sometimes misbehaves and doesn't see the disk in there. i was even nice to monty in a game!!! this isn't directly a map size issue, i've played some large maps this month with no trouble at all until the very late-game wars, when you have all those units to move around. it feels slightly laggy when i'm in an area full of troops (like 50 or more on the screen when i'm zoomed in close) but then again i'm kind of mentally laggy at that point too since moving them around is not the most exciting thing ever. that slight lag was the only trouble tho. even there, i didn't get crashes, even on the game i "one more turned" after a win. it wasn't all the way to 2050 but it was past 2000 AD and i had approximately 50 bazillion troops. i'd set a goal for myself to see how many of mehmed's cities i could take in one turn after leaving him alone the entire game. i razed his entire continent the same turn i declared, surprised myself. went from Friendly to a -27 modifier in the "you razed one of our cities" category alone in a single turn. he didn't live until the next turn to complain. hubby thinks i was a little teensy bit overprepared. anyway...

my guess is that i've never submitted a game to HoF with a played time longer than 4 hours without at least one crash. literally, for me i just knew i was going to get hit with at least one at some point and i didn't know i was getting more than an acceptable amount, i just thought it happened to everybody, how dumb am i? for HoF it indirectly becomes a map size-related issue, in that a crash is guaranteed, the crashes are always during autosaves, large maps lead to longer playing times of course, and more turns means more autosaves means that i'm giving the game more opportunities to crash during one of the autosaves. the last excluded game was on a standard map and i was playing OCC. once i knew the lay of the land, i took their world map out of all their offers, just because i didn't want to wait the 1.3 seconds or whatever for it to update. but seriously, if i can play large maps without a problem not using the mod, but can't even play an OCC game on a standard size map without 3 crashes if i am using the mod, what would you do? OCCs take way less time than normal games, and the majority of the time my camera is looking at the same spot on the map. i just have to believe OCC games are the least taxing on the pc and on the game. i don't know the actual played time on that one, but it cannot possibly be enough to justify 3 crashes now that i know most people don't even have a single crash in a game. wouldn't you just give up on trying to submit HoF games in this case, at least for a while? maybe when it's time to upgrade my pc again i stumble across something new that doesn't dislike whatever it is that whichever current thing doesn't like. i sure hope so.

i'll still follow the forum of course since you guys rock and i learn a lot here, and you make me laugh . you can't get rid of me that easily! but i better stay away from the majors because if i did finish one, well, you don't even want to know the fit i'd throw. i really wanted to get QM and a major was gonna be the only stumbling block. so i better not ever ever find out that i coulda woulda shoulda gotten that taken care of in some alternate world where my computer behaved. it's a game and the purpose is to have fun, and i do have fun and playing HoF games was adding to that fun. but the crashes were frustrating to me already. very much so. now that i figured out that they only happen when the HoF mod is running, well, the conflict between my pc and the mod is causing me frustration past my limit.

anyway, i'll stop typing now. i had to whine, please don't hate me!

sincerely,
kmad the permanewb, who really honestly isn't mad at the mod makers or any of the staff and completely understands (and agrees with) all the reasons why you do what you do. my whole feeling of pride at "yay i got a spot on such-and-such esoteric table with settings so odd almost nobody ever plays them!" wouldn't mean anything if i didn't trust the process. i do want you to keep us honest . i'm just pissed as all get out at my stupid computer.

 

[Denniz]

i decided to spoiler this one since once i started i didn't stop. it's really not a mod suggestion or even a request for support that i think is slightly possible. it's just a rambling whine about an issue my computer has with the mod, and apparently i'm the only one. i don't see any feasible way to work around it and i doubt that even Denniz will be able to help. not for lack of wanting to help, or not being smart enough, you'll see why if you read it but you really don't have to, it got long and the whole thing is soooooo pointless. i'm just in a mood today and can't bring myself to not post it at all. i shall regret this in the morning when the heavy-duty cough medicine wears off, i'm sure.

anyway, this is my moaning and groaning and whining and crying post, and it got really long cuz i always type too much.

Spoiler :

note that i'm not bitter about the mod, or its makers, or the HoF staff. i completely agree with the motivation behind the mod and it works like a charm for most people and that's spiffy.

my computer has a lot of memory and can handle civ4 as a game quite well. the game starts up quickly and runs quickly and i have no complaints there. it seems like sometimes it takes like 30 seconds, which feels like a long time, to load the save of a game in the modern era, but that's kind of understandable if a lot of people are still alive with a lot of units. i can even alt-tab in and out of it all day long and still get no lag, which i know some people can't do. however, i was sometimes getting errors which made the game crash. it says something about memory allocation or bad memory or i forget what. these crashes only happen when the game attempts to autosave. a save file is created, but it's much much smaller than it ought to be and the game doesn't recognize it. from my recollection, i can save the game manually myself without this happening. i can't swear that it never happened on a manual save, but if it did, the crash:success ratio wasn't nearly as high as it was for autosaves, even taking into account that i don't manually save every turn. i do manually save often just from habit. i'm old school, "save early save often" just in case. just in case of what? i dunno, it's just what i do.

i'm such a permanewb that i didn't even realize 3 crashes was lot in a single game. having a game i was proud of, since i hadn't thought i could win it at one point, excluded because of those crashes really frustrated me. i am NOT complaining about the decision itself or the staff, in fact they were quite kind in explaining it to me, and thoughtful enough to reassure me that it was simply a matter of the crashes making it too hard to verify as a game, not that something about the game labelled me as "a cheater". that made me feel a lot better, and they were really sweet to take the time to do that. quite frankly they better not make an exception for me for any reason, they don't know me and maybe i really am a cheater (i know i'm not but they don't). i'd exclude that game too knowing what i know now, it was just the fact that i didn't know it was a high and unacceptable number, so it came as a surprise and knocked the wind out of my sails.

so anyway, i needed a break from HoF for a while. i have a lot of fun here in this forum and i'm not all uber-obsessed about "i must get QM and i must get it now". but it is something that i want someday, no matter how bad my score is (the worse the better actually), and to find out that might not happen due to technical reasons and not just because i'm a poor player, wasn't a good thing for my mood. during my break i played civ4 but i didn't even load the HoF mod, since i just did not want to start any games that might even remotely be eligible and get my hopes up, and then start crashing. so i just played goofy games. and sometimes even didn't lock modified assets . once i worldbuildered in a spy in a barbarian city to watch their tech progress. in another game i built the barbs their own island, with lots of resources, to be able to study them more closely, since the real land masses had no space for them any more. it was really amusing, and you sure can't do that in an HoF game *giggle*. did you know that barbarians suffer from emancipation unhappiness? i had no idea! they were running their culture slider at 20%! at a time earlier than that, they were researching alphabet, which i considered quite . guys, you can't even trade techs through pointy-stick research, hello? well, it turned out that they wanted their next tech (horseback riding) as quick as possible, so they researched alphabet so that they could set their city to produce research from the hammers. all 5 of the hammers. i really had fun with that one, but i was supposed to be whining here wasn't i ...

well, it's been almost a month now, and for the past two weeks i've been ill so i've played even more than my normal amount, to get my mind off my incredible pain, agony, and suffering caused by "Attack of the Pollen" [please insert your sympathy here]. it dawned on me last weekend that i haven't had that type of memory allocation whatever crash on autosave in all these weeks. not even once. not even in games that had play times over 30 hours (i did some really weird games, the cough medicine makes my brain kinda wonky). i never did change my config file, except to not load the mod. i'm still autosaving every turn. and it's working like a charm.

so those crashes on autosaving must somehow be linked to using the mod itself . something about the mod doesn't get along with my machine. i never did enable the autologger so that's not it. i'm sure there's nothing i can do about it. if the mod doesn't change anything about how autosaves happen, then it's my machine specifically and that's not fixable within my current budget *giggle*. and if the mod does tweak autosaving on purpose, it must be by design to make the files easier to check for cheating, so of course you ought not give me information about how you did that, or how i should work around it, that would be a ridiculously bad idea! i could try to minimize the possibility of the autosave crashes by not autosaving every turn, but that would of course automatically exclude my games . as far as i can see i'm stuck between a rock and a hard place and insert-some-other-cliche-here.

if anybody does have any ideas that don't involve me spending money on a new system, i'd love to hear them. i've done all i can think of, including stuff like uninstalling/reinstalling both the game and the mods, updating drivers since every tech support person in the universe is trained to give that as suggestion #2 (#1 is reboot your pc). i even updated the firmware on my disk drive since it sometimes misbehaves and doesn't see the disk in there. i was even nice to monty in a game!!! this isn't directly a map size issue, i've played some large maps this month with no trouble at all until the very late-game wars, when you have all those units to move around. it feels slightly laggy when i'm in an area full of troops (like 50 or more on the screen when i'm zoomed in close) but then again i'm kind of mentally laggy at that point too since moving them around is not the most exciting thing ever. that slight lag was the only trouble tho. even there, i didn't get crashes, even on the game i "one more turned" after a win. it wasn't all the way to 2050 but it was past 2000 AD and i had approximately 50 bazillion troops. i'd set a goal for myself to see how many of mehmed's cities i could take in one turn after leaving him alone the entire game. i razed his entire continent the same turn i declared, surprised myself. went from Friendly to a -27 modifier in the "you razed one of our cities" category alone in a single turn. he didn't live until the next turn to complain. hubby thinks i was a little teensy bit overprepared. anyway...

my guess is that i've never submitted a game to HoF with a played time longer than 4 hours without at least one crash. literally, for me i just knew i was going to get hit with at least one at some point and i didn't know i was getting more than an acceptable amount, i just thought it happened to everybody, how dumb am i? for HoF it indirectly becomes a map size-related issue, in that a crash is guaranteed, the crashes are always during autosaves, large maps lead to longer playing times of course, and more turns means more autosaves means that i'm giving the game more opportunities to crash during one of the autosaves. the last excluded game was on a standard map and i was playing OCC. once i knew the lay of the land, i took their world map out of all their offers, just because i didn't want to wait the 1.3 seconds or whatever for it to update. but seriously, if i can play large maps without a problem not using the mod, but can't even play an OCC game on a standard size map without 3 crashes if i am using the mod, what would you do? OCCs take way less time than normal games, and the majority of the time my camera is looking at the same spot on the map. i just have to believe OCC games are the least taxing on the pc and on the game. i don't know the actual played time on that one, but it cannot possibly be enough to justify 3 crashes now that i know most people don't even have a single crash in a game. wouldn't you just give up on trying to submit HoF games in this case, at least for a while? maybe when it's time to upgrade my pc again i stumble across something new that doesn't dislike whatever it is that whichever current thing doesn't like. i sure hope so.

i'll still follow the forum of course since you guys rock and i learn a lot here, and you make me laugh . you can't get rid of me that easily! but i better stay away from the majors because if i did finish one, well, you don't even want to know the fit i'd throw. i really wanted to get QM and a major was gonna be the only stumbling block. so i better not ever ever find out that i coulda woulda shoulda gotten that taken care of in some alternate world where my computer behaved. it's a game and the purpose is to have fun, and i do have fun and playing HoF games was adding to that fun. but the crashes were frustrating to me already. very much so. now that i figured out that they only happen when the HoF mod is running, well, the conflict between my pc and the mod is causing me frustration past my limit.

anyway, i'll stop typing now. i had to whine, please don't hate me!

sincerely,
kmad the permanewb, who really honestly isn't mad at the mod makers or any of the staff and completely understands (and agrees with) all the reasons why you do what you do. my whole feeling of pride at "yay i got a spot on such-and-such esoteric table with settings so odd almost nobody ever plays them!" wouldn't mean anything if i didn't trust the process. i do want you to keep us honest . i'm just pissed as all get out at my stupid computer.

I am sorry to hear that you are having issues with crashes. I don't really know what the solution is either. If you look over in the Tech Support Forum you will see that you are not alone. The common theme seems to be with video memory not regular RAM. You may also find that it is related to certain video cards. I would imagine that the Domestic and Foreign advisers require more memory as they have more tabs/screens.

One thing you might try is to lower some of your graphics settings to see if that helps.

You also might want to make sure that you have adequate ventilation for computer. I have heard stories about problems from overheating.

Sorry I can't be more help. Good luck.

 

[KMadCandy]

If you look over in the Tech Support Forum you will see that you are not alone. The common theme seems to be with video memory not regular RAM. You may also find that it is related to certain video cards. I would imagine that the Domestic and Foreign advisers require more memory as they have more tabs/screens.

the common theme i've noticed when looking into this problem (i started searching for clues a few months back, which i never related until last weekend was the time i started playing HoF), is that people experiencing the crashes get really really mad at Firaxis's standard response of "that only happens if you use mods, and we don't support mods." they say they aren't using mods and are still getting crashes, and i'm sure that's true. but in my case, that standard cut-and-paste answer turned out to be true .

it could be worse. at least the game itself works, so i don't have to go cold turkey. can you even imagine how long my posts would be then, and how very many there would be?

 

[Hindi]

Denniz
I have permanent problem when I play huge map size (oasis, inland sea, highlands, lakes) with raging barbarians. In the middle of the game (warlords: v.2.08 with the version 2.08.003 or 2.08.004) I always have crash to desktop (run time error).

 

[Thrallia]

if you only crash because of autosaves, perhaps you could try not autosaving every turn.

I've never changed my autosave frequency away from 4 turns because I've never had stability issues(except under v1.09) so I never need autosaves. I've almost turned them off completely a couple times because I never had stability issues, but decided not to because if I WERE to have a crash when playing in the SGOTM, it'd get my entire team removed from the competition.

 

[Denniz]

Denniz
I have permanent problem when I play huge map size (oasis, inland sea, highlands, lakes) with raging barbarians. In the middle of the game (warlords: v.2.08 with the version 2.08.003 or 2.08.004) I always have crash to desktop (run time error).

It is notable that you have problems with the map types with the most tiles and that with raging barbarians you would have a lot more units in the game. Both are liable to push your video card to the limit. If it always crashes after a certain amount of continuous play you might want to check your ventilation. If when autosaving, then you might want to play without autosave. Otherwise, I can only suggest saving and exiting Civ4 more often to minimize and memory leak's effect.

 

[Hindi]

Thrallia
Denniz

Okey, I try play without autosave. Now I play 1 turn - 1 autosave.