incremental patch discussion

koma13 · Jul 12, 2009

I know, I know, this needed a ridiculous long time to finish but here it is:

The 'Early Units' patch (1.32)
Patch 1.31a is required.

This patch is only a suggestion. It's not intended as a monolithic change, I don't mind if we add, remove or change units.

My main goals were:

- more unit diversity in early unit tree
- stopping the hover spam
- balancing the early tech tree

I am lazy right now, haven't make any presentable overview for new unit setup yet :blush:

but you can look inside Civ4UnitInfos for changes. I still plan to make a nice excel chart giving a better overview of changes.

TODO:

- unit names (only placeholders)
- unit art (only placeholders)
- updating the civilopedia to make sure all unit changes are listed
- unique units (i disabled early uu because they didn't fit very well in the new unit tree)
- more unit tweaking, it's an never ending task...

I replaced the scout with a thopter unit. It doesn't have any offensive power but you can use it for exploring. In addition it has 2 cargo spaces mainly intended for loading a settler. This allowed me to forbid settlers and soldiers to enter the desert (as we had in earlier versions of dune wars). I would have prefered giving the scout thopter only 1 cargo space, but then the ai won't use it for settling (ai will only send settler if accompanied by a infantry unit). I also lowered minimum foundvalue to 350 to encourage expansion.

About hover spam:
Well, that wasn't easy. As far as I understand there isn't one reason for that. The main problem left (after excluding sandworms/storms from danger count) was that hover units were the only domain_sea units we had. To me it looks like the ai always tries to gather a certain amount of offensive sea units (especially on a archipelago maps). This together with the regular loss of hovers against sandworms make the ai constantly building them.
What I did is introducing a wider range of early sea units (thopters are now domain_sea too). We have now six domain sea units in early unit tree. In addition I limited hover escort unit's ai to unitai_escort_sea. This should make sure ai leaves hovers inside cities until needed for assault. Last but not least hover escort needs now crystal and soostone to be build.

Tech tree balancing:

I didn't liked there were techs that give 4-5 advantages, other techs only one. I tried to balance that. I'm not sure I got the requirements for techs always right, this needs some more work.

Spoiler :

Link: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?xmmdmnznfcz

I am little tired of doing xml changes, I want to redo the city screen next, giving it a more dunish flavour.

keldath · Jul 12, 2009

hi guys,

deliverator,
sure - ill fix he sound link.

koma13,
good work, units balancing is one of the most important thing in gameplay.

i agree that there has to be some more unit diversity,

basically...
im not that happy with disabling uus...i think we need to make each civ different...but...
i trust you that you know better and have somewhat of a plan for next eras .

i totally agree that the tech balance want good - i dont like either that one tech gives 1, and another 4, great work on re balancing this one.

very good job koma13, looks like you spent a lot of time on it huh?....

davidlallen · Jul 12, 2009

Excellent. I have locally merged this with 1.3.1a and my own changes for Terraforming Victory.

To avoid contradictory changes, I would like to reserve the next patch, 1.3.3, for delivery in the next five hours. It will include all of 1.3.1a plus 1.3.2. It will also include the terraforming victory although that may need some balancing, and the fix for avoiding the new polar ice terrain everywhere.

Now that koma's changes are in, I would like to do part of the Great Renaming. I think the most benefit comes from bonuses. I will try that renaming only, although it will affect many files. This should improve the readability when we go to tweak the bonus/improvement distribution. But it will break anybody else's local changes pretty badly.

Any objection to renaming bonuses?

keldath · Jul 12, 2009

already patch 1.3.3? wowow....

koma13,

i think youve done some imbalance,
you disabled uus for some nations, now some have 3 uu and some 1 or 2.....

would you like me to just create new uus according to your new early unit classes?

other then that - really good job

koma13 · Jul 12, 2009

koma13,

i think youve done some imbalance,
you disabled uus for some nations, now some have 3 uu and some 1 or 2.....

Of course we need uu back in game, but first we have to get the normal units right. I hoped you guys would help me with that. Can't do all at once.

keldath · Jul 12, 2009

sure koma14,
i will help ,

but only on the weekend, after my dreadfull exam...

*****

sound file fixed with newlink - check out the main download thread.

koma13 · Jul 12, 2009

would you like me to just create new uus according to your new early unit classes?

Thank you, that would be great.

Good luck with your exam!

davidlallen · Jul 12, 2009

davidlallen said:
To avoid contradictory changes, I would like to reserve the next patch, 1.3.3, for delivery in the next five hours. It will include all of 1.3.1a plus 1.3.2. It will also include the terraforming victory although that may need some balancing, and the fix for avoiding the new polar ice terrain everywhere.

Well, that did not happen. I am stuck at the interaction between civics, buildings and techs. I need to prevent the Reservoir from being built unless you have the right civic, and that is not quite working yet. I will probably be offline most of the rest of the day.

Some people seem to be stuck on the new ice terrain showing up a lot; there are two workarounds for it -- editing terraininfos.xml or archipelago.py. My third workaround is to remove it in GameStart in python. It would be some work to unwind just that change. I can do it if there is popular demand.

So renaming bonuses and the civic restriction on reservoirs are the two things I plan for 1.3.3 which are not done yet. I would still like to reserve the next patch if there is no strong objection, but it may be until Tuesday night.

koma13 · Jul 12, 2009

I would still like to reserve the next patch if there is no strong objection, but it may be until Tuesday night.

No problem. In the next week I will only work on CvMainInterface.py.

Deliverator · Jul 12, 2009

Mmmmm, maybe I should have held back with the polar terrain. Can we release a new version of the mapscript in 1.3.3? - that seems like the best place for now.

I'll be doing nothing but art, and posting wild unimplementable ideas for the next week. That's the plan anyway...

davidlallen · Jul 12, 2009

Deliverator said:
Mmmmm, maybe I should have held back with the polar terrain. Can we release a new version of the mapscript in 1.3.3? - that seems like the best place for now.

I think we need a deeper understanding of why your polar, and my terraforming, terrain is getting onto the maps. Cephalo suggested that removing normalizeAddFoodBonus in the mapscript is a bad idea, and I agree, although I have not really studied it. I think my onGameStart hack is slightly better, but I cannot really guarantee that either. If normalizeAddFoodBonus is choosing to add all of its bonus as terrains, and then my onGameStart removes all the terrains, that may be just as bad.

The best workaround for now is probably for people to remove the polar ice from terraininfos. But we should work to understand the reason a little better.

I'll be doing nothing but art, and posting wild unimplementable ideas for the next week. That's the plan anyway...

Sounds great. A wild idea can often be changed slightly to make it implementable after some discussion.

Deliverator · Jul 13, 2009

The best workaround for now is probably for people to remove the polar ice from terraininfos. But we should work to understand the reason a little better.

OK. I need to probably add a few more terrain types so that Cephalo has everything needed to perfect the Arrakis mapscript. Given the disruption caused by polar it would make sense to put them in a work in progress patch for him and then we can figure out the best solution for the other mapscripts.

Koma, what are your thoughts about a regicide victory? Is it doable? David outlines the main potential problems in this thread:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=327360

davidlallen · Jul 13, 2009

Deliverator said:
OK. I need to probably add a few more terrain types so that Cephalo has everything needed to perfect the Arrakis mapscript.

While you are making terrain types, could you think about a slightly greener vanilla plains, and a slightly greener vanilla grass? These are used by the Terraform Counter and the Reservoir of Liet. But, the vanilla plains color is too close to our desert, and the vanilla grass looks kind of like "lime" instead of "lush" when mixed with our brownish terrains.

I dug a little more into why the good terrains show up. There are two functions involved in the mapscript, normalizeRemoveBadTerrain and normalizeAddGoodTerrain. You have to get rid of both of them to prevent the terrains. There is no hook that we can use to define these terrains as un-add-able, which is really too bad. I thought I was onto something because for bonuses, you could set the latitudes to illegal values and they would be skipped. But not for terrain.

So the best answer is to define normalizeRemoveBadTerrain and normalizeAddGoodTerrain, but to leave normalizeAddFoodBonuses undefined. This needs to happen in any mapscript which calls these functions. I am not sure why Cephalo's mapscript does not call them. Postprocessing in onGameStart is not as good, since I can't tell what terrain type was there originally to put it back.

An even better answer would be to put xml hooks into the terrain which indicate they are not normally placeable, and then modify the sdk normalize* routines to check for terrain like they check for legal bonus latitude. But that is a lot more work.

Deliverator · Jul 13, 2009

davidlallen said:
While you are making terrain types, could you think about a slightly greener vanilla plains, and a slightly greener vanilla grass?

No problem, I'll look into it. Are the camera controls going to be included in 1.3.3?

Edit: Also, if it's not too late, can you hold off with the bonus tag renaming for 1.3.3. I've decided to do some renaming and reworking of bonuses and improvements and I wouldn't want you to go through the exercise twice. I'll probably book 1.3.4 on the patch merry-go-round for the bonus reworking if that's OK.

davidlallen · Jul 13, 2009

Deliverator said:
Are the camera controls going to be included in 1.3.3?

Yes, this turned out to be easy once the BUG team told me the syntax. Sorry it is all tangled up in the terraforming changes, so I cannot put it separately.

Also, if it's not too late, can you hold off with the bonus tag renaming for 1.3.3. I've decided to do some renaming and reworking of bonuses and improvements and I wouldn't want you to go through the exercise twice.

I have done it and tested it, but the script makes backups, so it is easy to rip it back out. No problem. (That is the benefit of doing it via a program.)

davidlallen · Jul 14, 2009

Here is unofficial patch 1.3.3. Includes changes from 1.3.1a and 1.3.2; you may install on top of either 1.3, or 1.3.1a (release note), or 1.3.2 (release note). The main purpose of this patch is to introduce a Terraforming Victory, by building 7 Reservoirs of Liet to convert Arrakis into a water paradise.

Terraforming victory
* Added terra_grass and terra_plains terrain from vanilla grass, plains
* Added civic category, "Future of Arrakis", with values neutral, spice, or paradise. Spacer Guild and Bene Gesserit prefer spice, Fremen prefer paradise, others are neutral. Soon we will add a "hated civic" so that each faction hates the other.
* Added technology, Spice Industry, which enables the spice civic, which gives +1 hammer on all spice harvesters.
* Added technology, Way of Liet, which enables the paradise civic
* Added Reservoir of Liet and Catchbasin buildings. You must have Way of Liet technology to build. Also you must adopt the paradise civic.
* Each turn:
+ Check if any cities not following the paradise civic have catchbasins or reservoirs of Liet, and destroy them
+ Add some green terraform terrain around catchbasins and Reservoirs of Liet
+ If there is any terraform terrain which is not around a catchbasin or Reservoir, remove it
* Added terraforming victory, build 7 Reservoir of Liet buildings. If you find this too easy, please let me know, but you can individually disable this victory type in the custom game menu.
* Renamed previous Catchbasin (granary) to Water Tower
* Fixed bug (from vanilla) when displaying victory by building count

Minor changes
* Remove any terra_grass, terra_plains, polar ice from the starting map. It would be better to change all the mapscripts to stub out normalizeRemoveBadTerrain and normalizeAddGoodTerrain.
* Added camera control keys requested by Deliverator: shift and ctrl arrows move the camera without zooming, ctrl home resets the view.
* Well and qanat improvements, catchbasin and Reservoir of Liet buildings all generate fresh water in adjacent plots
* Worms will no longer travel near fresh water
* Fixed some bugs regarding removal of spice when fresh water appears
* Changed name of cultural victory back to cultural
* Removed projects related to space race

File removal and cleanup
* Removed a small number of unused artdefines
* Removed the previous terraforming mod special unit (former) and related improvements; some of the improvements and build orders are still there because removing them causes an xml parsing error. This is weird, but I did not take the time to figure it out. The builds are unreferenced and the improvements are unbuildable, so it does not make any real difference.
* Found about 20 unused art directories and 20 individual files which are not used, can be removed from pakfile (see spoiler)

Spoiler :

You can get it from this link (6 MB).

davidlallen · Jul 14, 2009

My plans for the next week or so:

1. Documentation. I think the hints aren't enough anymore. I will mod the "BTS Concepts" section of the Sevopedia by renaming it, removing all its contents, and adding documentation of the DW concepts. See post in the 1.3 feedback thread.

2. Retry my concept for Fremen to get double movement in desert with a worm rider graphic. I can't put down this idea.

3. Reverend Mother unique unit. See separate thread.

4. Actually *play* some games using 1.3.2 to give feedback on the units.

5. Start thinking about Spacer Guild and Bene Tlielax unique abilities.

keldath · Jul 14, 2009

great work david!

i cant wait to be after my exam!!!!

Deliverator · Jul 14, 2009

Yeah, good luck with that Keldath.

keldath · Jul 14, 2009

thanks deliverator,

theres some small art errors with patch 1.3.3, but ill get them on my patch that ill do on Friday:

i plan on re inserting the missing uu's according to koma's new unit set for early era.

ill go on with the unit tree,

also gonna add some more hero units - im thinking of inserting the leader units somehow as power units.

fix some bugs.

****

david,
why did you take out all of the projects regarding spiritual victory?
i kinda liked its idea.

further more - you guys cut down some buildings, isnt it to thin with buildings now?

incremental patch discussion

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