K-Mod: Far Beyond the Sword

[TheOnlyDJCat]

I just spent 4 hours yesterday for a new team game on a fresh installed civ4-bts with K-mod. And it runs smooth without any crashes or OOS.

So everything ok!! (despite of having a really hard time on impossible compared to our previous easy wins )

Btw. could you compile a 48civ-version of the dll, to enable playing the big earth maps? Would be interesting to see, if your AI-Speedup changes make them actual playable.

 

[OnmyojiOmn]

He should try, sure, but he should know when he's failing. I'm talking about wars with no successes/benefits for a hundred turns or more, with every indication beforehand (power ratio etc.) showing that this will be the case. Literally the only thing that happened in this war with Huayna was me chasing his archers with my archers. I had just hit swordsmen but hadn't made any yet. It's like a war of micromanagement; the AI inflicts micromanagement on you.

If the AI is trying to pillage and choke me, shouldn't it have some understanding that it hasn't pillaged a tile or had a decent chance to kill a unit for dozens and dozens of turns? Shouldn't it at least try a larger city with more important improvements?

 

[Mattygerst]

Btw. could you compile a 48civ-version of the dll, to enable playing the big earth maps? Would be interesting to see, if your AI-Speedup changes make them actual playable.

This is also something I'd LOVE to see.

This mod truly makes Civ playable and, with the 48 Civ DLL, the Earth-Size maps would be mega-fun.

 

[Charles555nc]

Onmyoji,

The strategy you described is called "choking" and it usually isnt dangerous unless they are camping next to a city or a valuable resource.

Usually an ai will give up a war in 15 to 20 turns if u havent attacked them early, early wars against the ai make them lifelong enemies.

If you didnt attack them early, then usually killing their initial invading force and having a proper defense set up will cause them to accept peace.

You could also send a couple archers onto their hills/forests and give them something to worry about

 

[karadoc]

v1.12 is up.
There are a couple of minor game mechanics changes; and there are heaps of AI changes, both for their tactics and their economics. Once again, I'm expecting this version to be faster and smarter than the previous versions. Let me know how it goes.

I'm particularly interested in whether the AI is now more successful at getting good corporations. I think it would be nice to see some strong Free Market AIs rather than having them all go to State Property in the end-game.

Also, I'm a little bit worried that I may have overcorrected the natural spread of religion. So please tell me if you think religions are spreading too easily or not.

--
One more thing..

I've attached a 48 civ version of the v1.12 dll to this post. It is untested, and it will not be compatible with save games from the normal (18 civ) dll.

By the way, the only reason I've stuck with the 18 civ limit so far is that there are heaps of places in the code which loop through all of the civs, whether the civs are alive or not. So with a 48 civ limit, the game will run slower and take more memory, and make large save files; even if there are still only 7 civs actually in the game. --- Maybe one day I'll see if I can find a way to remove the 18 civ limit without suffering a performance hit.

 

[Mattygerst]

Hi karadoc,

I have a "spinning world" crash to report. I actually saw this roughly 3 versions ago but I had only saved the game after the crash, and when I loaded the auto-save I couldn't remember all the moves made, and it didn't replicate. The saves I'm posting here, I hope do, though. I'm posting the pre-"spinning world" crash, and then the post, and also 2 turns prior to the spinning world crash for reference purposes (not sure which one you use).

Keep in mind that although I am using the 48-civ DLL in this game - a "spinning world crash" DID happen in a previous version that was NOT-modified whatsoever.

As a side note - the 48-civ DLL certainly is AGES slower. I expected it to be slower, however, it seems to crawl along like I remember the previous mods using the 48-civ DLL. I'm assuming the code for the 48-civ DLL was likely poorly written.

Anyway, hope these help identify any issues that you'd like to know about. Keep up the great work...the game is MEGA-Addicting right now

-The Saves are:
AD-580 (hit end turn to duplicate "spinning world crash")
AfterSpinningWorld (this is after I had hit end-turn in the game and it had crashed)
AD-560 (Hit 2x end turn to create crash - for verification in case moving/selecting/etc. created different scenarios)

 

[karadoc]

Thanks for the saves, Mattygerst. I've found and fixed the problem, and uploaded v1.12b; both 18 civ and 48 civ.

The problem was that the game had conflicting rules about when units are allowed to attack. In the AI's decision making process it was thinking it was ok to give a particular order to attack something, but the actual game rules didn't allow it; and so the AI just kept trying to give the same order over and over again, and the game just kept saying "nope. Try again." -- In this case, the AI was right. It should have been allowed to attack! -- (By the way, this particular bug was my fault. It was not a problem in the original BtS code.)

Spoiler :

In the next turn of your game, Monty demands calendar - damn him!

 

[Mattygerst]

Not that my opinion should matter too, too much...and not that I think its an entirely bad thing - but religions certainly did spread very quickly in this game. There has been ZERO need to even consider building missionaries for my immediate area and am at +23 gld/turn during the pre-medieval era at 100% science because of the holy city shrine.

That fact, alone, may make the very-quick religion spread a bit overpowered.

 

[karadoc]

Alright.. Thanks for that bit of feedback.

By the way, you may be interested to know, the probability of religion spread when there are no religions in the city is essentially unchanged. The stuff I've been tweaking so far is just the probability of spread when there are already religions in the city. (In standard bts, there is no spread at all to cities that already have a religion.)

In any case, I'm starting to think that no amount of tinkering with the original formula is going to get the kind of results that I'm looking for - so I've just written a completely new probability formula for natural religion spread (including for cities with no religions), and I'll be testing that throughout the development of the next version. The end result will be something that has less spread to close cities, and more spread to far cities (compared to the current system).

In the current system, the probability of spreading to a far away city is very small. It's as much as 100 times smaller than the probability of spreading to a close city -- which basically means it never happens. I suppose the purpose of this was to localize the religions. But I think the religion "grip" system that I introduced several versions ago, will be able to do a better job of localizing the religions anyway; so I think if I flatten out the spread probability formula like I described I think it will work a bit better.

(I'm still interested in more feedback about the current system. Even though I intend to completely replace the system, the feedback will help me choose the parameters for the new system.)

 

[En_Dotter]

Have u thought about certain religion civics as variables for natural spread? For example, organized religion should have lower rates than the paganism, pacifism neutral, free religion should improve the chances.
If not take it into account and make it more realistic

 

[Charles555nc]

I dont if this is a bug or a blunder from 1.11...but I had carthage, navy dominated and was slowly taking cities with superior ground forces,

Well they moved 6 cruisers and 4 transports into a city that only had 2 massively wounded cavalry in it (i was just about to take it, after seiging and attacking it for 2-3 turns). Needless to say, they lost the rest of their navy when I took the city the next turn.

Their transports were gonna die (I had cruisers and battleships surrounding the area, but those 6 cruisers couldve set me back alot.

Perhaps the cruisers were trying to "protect" the transports inside their city?

 

[karadoc]

@Charles555nc, I just look a quick look at the code that handles that kind of thing.. and it does look a bit problematic. The AI does know to move ships out of cities that are in danger, but apparently it does not know to not move the ships back into the cities. It looks like I'll have to rewrite another one of the original functions to fix this.

@En_Dotter, I think that's probably a good idea, but I don't really want to make Free Religion any stronger than it already is; and so I'm not sure if adding new xml values and so on would be worth it. (From a balance point of view, I think pacifism is the only one that's a bit on the weak side; and Free Religion is the main one that would benefit from having higher spread of other religions...) Anyway, so far I'm pretty happy with how the new formula I've been testing with. So I'll just leave it at that for the time being, and then consider adding new variables later on.

The new version is coming along nicely. Once again, I've found a bunch of problems in the way corporations are handled by the AI. Corporations are fairly complex things for the AI - they need the right tech and the right great people, and the right resources, and then they need to build the execs at the right times to spread to the right cities, with the right civics, and so on...; and the original code was quite bad. So anyway, I've fixed a few corporation related problems -- and some other AI stuff; and the religion thing is going well.

 

[Cybah]

Could you please provide the gamecore files? Nevermind, just found your https://github.com/karadoc/Civ4-K-Mod

 

[Cybah]

Well, I'm not able to open any big file in my browser. How can I download those files?

Nevermind, just found the ".zip" button.

 

[Charles555nc]

I won my 11.1 game at 1984, with being at 57.4% land percentage for forever. Every turn I was like, "cmon .6 land percentage!".

Onto to 1.12b!!

I stole a german worker (and started a war), they had no 3 food plot, but were aggressively slaving archers or focusing on production (Im guessing) because they stayed at a size 1 city for most of the war but always seemed to have plenty of archers.

I sent 3 warriors and choked them at 3 different hills/forests and killed 6 invading archers (2 were sent at a time), I had them pretty beat. Ofc I couldnt do much to their 6 archer capital until construction and iron working. About 30 turns turns of peace and when I invaded their cap was size 2 and they had a single expo. About 7 units in each city.

I got two religions early again, both in my cap. Christainity was my official religion and I also got Islam. Christainity actually spread decently (I wait a long time to build the religious wonder). Islam didnt spread to any of my citys besides the cap, although someone half the map away coverted to islam for about 20 turns before turning buddist.

 

[karadoc]

I've just made something a bit different which some (or none) of you might be interested in: a map script.

I've mentioned a few times that I really like the "Big and Small" script -- but the truth is that I only like Big and Small on standard size maps. On larger maps, Big and Small tends to produce one massive continent with almost all the civs. I don't like that.

So this afternoon I decided to modify the Big and Small script so that it scales better on big maps. My basic goal was to make it so that bigger maps have more continents rather than bigger continents.

Anyway, this is my first attempt at a map script; so don't laugh.

 

[En_Dotter]

I might be rly late but i just remembered something. It was happening on version 1.09 or was it 1.10 (maybe both). In multiplayer games OOS happened in 80% of times when random events happened on one pc only. This was the setup: One of my mates and I were on the same ip (lan), other mate wasnt. We were using tungle for easier game creation (virtual lan server). When the mate, that wasnt the same ip as i was, got a random event he gets OOS almost always. While two of us on the same ip didnt get any OOS problems. OOS happened in some other cases which didnt have any obvious pattern, but were rare in comparison to the 1st one mentioned.
I havent played a multiplayer since 1.10 so i dont know if u fixed that OOS problem or not.
<3

 

[The_Reckoning]

This mod is great. Is there any way to merge it with other mods? Is the AI code for units and techs totally dependent on weightings assigned by humans or does it figure it out itself?

I'm really enjoying the extra flavour History in the Making adds to the game, but I can't play a big game with more than 8 civs without it taking 30s+ in the later turns.

 

[Charles555nc]

Where do we extract that map script zip? Never tried big and small, but if u like it I want to try it

Public maps folder?

 

[Radio Noer]

This mod is great. Is there any way to merge it with other mods? Is the AI code for units and techs totally dependent on weightings assigned by humans or does it figure it out itself?

I'm really enjoying the extra flavour History in the Making adds to the game, but I can't play a big game with more than 8 civs without it taking 30s+ in the later turns.

I integrated it into my own mod, it takes a bit of changing in the Leaderheadinfos and BuildingInfos (as well as a couple in civics), but it's very doable.