Trying to teach my son Civ and getting very tired of OOS errors...every time there's an attack, every time we land a unit on another land mass....etc. So, I've seen multiple mentions of this mod to maybe alleviate these problems. So, here I am.
Questions....so the 2011 file is the most recent? Also, if installed on both computers....will our current save files work, or would we only be able to start anew? Is there a command line listed somewhere to auto start this mod, like I do with Buffy? I assume this works on top of Buffy....I hope.
The download page says "Date Added: Jan 08, 2011"; but that' just the date that the first version was uploaded. I've been using the same page to update the mod rather than creating a new page for every new version. If you look a the description, it says "Current version: 1.44b; Last Updated: 10/Dec/2014". That's the most recent "official" version. There is also a more recent 'beta' version a couple of pages back in this thread.
Here. That version is generally better than 1.44b, but it also has some potentially controversial changes that are in there for testing purposes. That's the version I've been playing recently, and I'm still hoping to get some more feedback on how people are finding it. (* some more thoughts about that at the end of this post.)
The shortcut I use to launch K-Mod has this command:
"C:\games\Civilization 4 Complete\Beyond the Sword\Civ4BeyondSword.exe" -mod="K-Mod"
Without looking through the code of Buffy, I don't expect that K-Mod work at the same time as Buffy. (I'm sure you could have both installed; but you could only run one at a time, I'd assume.)
A question from a guy who mainly works with XML and very occasionally dabbles in Python. As you probably know, a version of K-Mod is included in Realism Invictus. Lately I have seen, for instance, that all leaders raze cities, regardless of appropriate XML variable being set to 0 for them - so I guess that variable is no longer exposed to any meaningful code, or at least not in the way it was.
So, my question is: could you provide a list of vanilla XML variables that no longer have any meaning in K-Mod? I have a suspicion that at least various WarRands might not be working anymore as well.
The raze probability in the xml is still used; but it is no longer the only thing taken into account. Some AI leaders will raze cities just because they feel like it (base on that xml value), but the others will generally just do it for strategic reasons - such as to prevent a cultural victory, or because they can't afford the maintenance costs. ... It's an AI decision which could probably use a bit more flavour and variation, but that's roughly how it works.
As for unused xml; the only one that comes to mind is the number-of-cities maintenance cap in the handicaps file (and even that one probably should have been changed rather than completely disabled - just for moddability reasons). Some xml values have changed their meaning, such as unit upkeep in the civics file; and great work culture; but I can't think of any that are disabled right now. (I haven't maintained a list of those kinds of changes, sorry.)
Hey, Karadoc, I was wondering if you have played any Civ 5 and thought of doing any work on the AI there. I had only dabbled in Civ 5 and I just played a game the other day on emperor difficulty and it was a complete joke... I was just toying with the AI by the end, hitting them with giant death robots, nukes, and Xcom squads while they had WW1 units.
I don't want to turn up the difficulty because, as in Civ 4, that makes certain strategies impossible, like building any of the early game wonders. I have fond memories of Kmod for Civ4... wow was it difficult, you did such an excellent job. If you've done any work on the Civ5 AI I'd love to try it. Otherwise, how's it going? What are you up to these days? Designing AI for those new military robots?
The short answers is that I won't be working on Civ5. I was one of the beta-testers for Civ5. There were some things that I didn't like about the beta process; and I'm not a great fan of the core game. Although I haven't looked at the current state of Civ5, I'm currently of the opinion that Civ4 is a better base game to build on. (For various reasons.)
--
* Re: experimental balance changes. I've played around 6 games on the the test version. From my point of view, although the Scientific Method change sounds huge, it hasn't hasn't made a huge impact on how the game plays out. Rough calculations show that even with the +1
to all specialists, you will typically
still lower your science output by researching Scientific Method; especially if you have University of Sankor. (And working towns still gives more total yield than using specialists with Representation.)
The reason I'm testing +1
to specialists rather than +10% to all cities is that I was hoping to give it a boost that transforms how science is done, rather than just increasing it. I wanted it to be a somewhat complex choice, which transformed the economy... Also, I wanted to give a bit of an indirect boost to the +
corporations. In any case, adding the back-end stuff to allow that bonus in the xml was actually more work than I expected; and I'd have to do it again to get +10% in all cities. So that's one strong reason why might not even test that other change. (Neither of those boost were possible in the original xml.)
Anyway, if that +1
to specialists is too powerful for Scientific Method, I might give it to Computers instead, just so that I don't feel like the new feature is going to waste.
As for lumbermils... Maybe it's just the way I play, but I've found that with the lumber-mill change, I'm using a lot more lumber-mills... a lot more to the point that I'm wondering if the change is a bad idea. Lumber-mills with just the +1
are decent - especially in cities which lack hill. And the health and pollution offsets later in the game make them quite a good improvement. ... But it's still pretty powerful to chop early for a surge in production; so I guess that's the trade-off.
In any case, I'm still interested in thoughts about those things.