I overstated things a bit with "people don't care" etc. I'm glad to hear that people do appreciate that kind of work. And I do know that other people do notice.
I guess I just thought it was interesting, and a bit disheartening to hear this apparently expert player declare that the mod was 'unacceptable', and that they would just endure one game and then never use it again because some UI features were not apparent. They blamed the mod for problems both real and imagined; and said nothing positive at all.
Apparently, AbsoluteZero was of the view that K-Mod's raison d'être was to be 'harder'. They spoke a lot about where the tech was up to, and about archer rushes and things like that.
I'm not sure how it is clear to others, but the AI in K-Mod was not designed to make the game harder. It was to make the game to be more interesting. I want the AI to make interesting choices which keep the player thinking. The AI's goal is not to destroy the human player, and they are not solely focused on war. They make decisions based on their personality and situation, and they role-play to some extent. The AI should have a coherent strategy, and each game should play out a bit differently. It's meant to be interesting and fun; strategically, tactically, and narratively. Increased difficulty was never the point. Difficulty can be adjusted with the game's difficulty settings.
It's worth noting that a few versions ago I made changes to prevent the AI from planning super-early wars (which were only happening due to a bug anyway). The AI could crush a human player easily by declaring war as soon as they see you, while they have archers and you have a scout and a worker. But the AI's goal isn't to crush you. The AI's isn't even trying to 'win' at the start of the game. They role-play. They just want to establish their civilisation. Politics and competitiveness come later. (That reminds me, I should take a look at the "aggressive AI" setting at some point to see if it can be easily improved.)
A lot of what I've talked about is for replay value, and so it's not surprising that AbsoluteZero didn't have positive feedback after one session. But I am a little surprised by how quickly they were to dismiss the whole thing as a waste of their time. That was interesting for me. I reckon Zholef's interpretation sounds pretty accurate though.
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Regarding BUG settings, I've got a fairly long post saved on my computer which explains my choice of default settings, the exclusion of pre-chopping, and stuff like that in the context of general game design. But I think I'll save that for another time. Maybe my reasons are good, maybe not. But I've posted about it before, and currently I'm thinking it's probably not worth posting another wall of text about. The gist is that it's a combination of technical reasons and design decisions.
As for the WHEOOHRN indicator; it's true that it is in fact disabled currently. I disabled it after changing some things which made it not work properly anymore. And I had intentions for changing more stuff which would break it further. I don't really like telegraphing the AI's intentions to the player; and so I'd generally prefer to break it than to fix it!
These days though, it would probably work reasonably well if enabled. Of course, most of the time the AI wouldn't allow you to know if they are planning war against you; but the indicator could be used to at see when your friends were at war, or planning a war.
To enable it, there are three things you need to do:
- Edit Python/Screens/CvMainInterface.py.
- Where it says `if (ScoreOpt.isShowWHEOOH() and False):` delete the "and False" part.
- This will allow the feature to work when it is turned on.
- Edit Python/BUG/Tabs/BugScoreOptionsTab.py.
- Remove the # from the start of the line which says `self.addCheckbox(screen, col3, "Scores__WHEOOH")`
- This will make the option visible in the BUG scoreboard screen.
- Use the in-game BUG scoreboard options screen to turn it on.
- Add the letter M to where you want the indicator to appear (next to the W is a good spot).
- And finally, click the checkbox to turn it on.
I'd consider bringing that stuff back, but it's still not a source of information that I want players to rely on. I'd prefer players to have to use a little bit of brain power and awareness to work out what the AI is thinking. And I want there to be an opportunity for players to be surprised or caught off-guard by things that they weren't anticipating. There's a fine line between info the player _can_ know, and info the player should have put right in front of them.
