K-Mod: Far Beyond the Sword

This guy doesnt disappoint :D

Soon the ai will out smart us! I love it...

I check this page twice a day for new releases!
 
Wow wrote another long post and then page needed refreshing and I copied my post and then it wouldnt paste. HATE THAT.

Monarchy, Turks, 1.07, epic game speed.

Stole nearest neighbors worker, pillaged his land, and then camped his forests with warriors. Ofc his 3 archers kiled my 3 warriors in forests, no losses >:l

Maybe ai shouldnt trust u within one square of their workers for like the first 100 turns.

There was a single forested square that was the top border and choke point to the mongols and Pacal's lands. I put 2 axemen with forest upgrade and one spearman with forest upgrade.

For 200 turns the Mongols (who i stole their worker) and Pacal declared war on me and didnt try taking that one square with the dug in units. Only way by land to get to my cities was through that single forested land plot.

In fact the turn that Pacal declared war, his stack next to that forest square ran back wards away from that square, the turn he declared war.

He had several of his troops sitting on his coastline opposite my coastline, like he wished he could walk on the ocean square inbetween to get to my land.

Side notes: first time I got great lighthouse in a long long time, but every single city I had was on a coastline, that plus religion money=$$$ Also made alot more almost purely ocean cities that I almost could never use slavery in because it was half tundra, half water, but still made alot of money off them.

Back on point:
Also wanted to state that it seemed like every 4 turns or so some ai comes calling asking me to screw over another ai. Maybe increase the time between requests for a greater diplomatic penalty? I dont think you should be able to "sit on the fence" forever, but it would be nice for more trade deals and less times of them asking you to cancel deals with someone.

O I almost forgot, Mongols had no iron, and I had iron in my cap and iron in the very farthest west of my land (mostly a desert wasteland). I didnt cover that square with culture obviously since it wasnt worth making a city there. Anyway, Mongols kept sending a galley over, planting a city on the iron, while we were at war (brought a horse archer every time as a defender with each settler until he got longbows) and I kept killing that city until fairly recently when they finally made peace after 200 turns of unproductive war. I kept killing the city with one axeman with city attack bonuses, and they actually sent their horse archer after that one unit and killed it....ofc that newly planted city had no defender after I mopped up the horse archer...But I was pleased that they took out the axeman but i just built a spearman to replace him and to kill the horse archers easier.

Edit, last thing lol. I also see the ai building forts on silk and resources like that if its close to borders...but its not connected...so its not even worth defending with a fort, right?

Ill post when I get further into this game.
 
I noticed a few things that weren't quite working as intended, so I've fixed a few things and uploaded v1.07b. I'll update this post and changelog tomorrow. (no time at the moment-- and sorry about the version spam.)

-- edit --

Ok. as promised, I'm in the process of updating the changelog.

I think I've made a mistake though.. or at least, done something unwise. The reason I uploaded v1.07b was that I found a bug which I think would significantly weaken the AI. I wanted to fix that asap so that Charles555nc et al. would be able to have to bug fix before their game got to a point where the bug actually mattered. (By the way, it's fine to change K-Mod versions mid-game.)

Anyway... I wanted to upload that bug fix; so what I did was just upload all of my latest changes - which include the bug fix, but also include a bunch of new changes which are completely untested. I think that was unwise of me, and I kind of wish I'd only uploaded the bugfix. Anyway... no point trying to spill crying milk, or whatever. I'll just stick with the latest version and hope there are no serious problems.

The new version (v1.07b) contains one significant gameplay change: The victory vote for the Apostolic Palace now requires that there are at least 3 "full members". This change is meant to block the so-call "AP cheese" strategy. In the original rules, the condition was that there need to be at least 3 voting members, but only one full member. This led people to engineer somewhat silly situations where they are the only option for people to vote for in the victory vote. That will not be possible anymore. A full member of the Apocalyptic palace is someone who either has the apostolic religion as their state religion, or owns the city with the apostolic palace.
(I can still think of a way to get around this new rule, but I'm not going to tell you what it is; because I don't want to tempt anyone to try it. :p) (also.. "apocalyptic palace wasn't a typo. That's what I call it sometimes.)

So.. there's the AP change, and some more AI changes.

Let me know if you have any opinions about that AP change. It was meant to be a kind of work-in-progress; but as I said, I've already made the unwise decision to upload it... so now it's there.

.. that reminds me.
One thing that always bothered me about the Civ4 AI is their city placement: 4 times out of 5 they place new cities only 3 squares away from the previous city (at the beginning that's the capital) which leads to an inevitable overlapping city fat crosses when the city borders expand.
...
I'm wondering if you have any plans to improve the AI in this respect?
I revisited that part of the AI since we last talked about this; and I think you were right. The AI were settling too close together because of a flaw in the original BtS code. v1.07b fixes that flaw. I think it'll probably help a lot. Also, some AI personalities will space their cities further apart than the other AIs. In particular, any leader who has "flavor_growth". eg. Cyrus, De Gaulle, Lincoln, Zara, ... and many others. Maybe too many. We'll see.

Wow wrote another long post and then page needed refreshing and I copied my post and then it wouldnt paste. HATE THAT.
That's happened to me a stack of times. It's pretty frustrating :mad:. Because of that, I've gotten into the habit of copying my entire post to the clipboard before pressing send. I do that habitually on all forums, and on email.

Maybe ai shouldnt trust u within one square of their workers for like the first 100 turns.
Maybe... but on the other hand; I trust the AI when I play - because I don't really have a choice. I don't have any spare troops to defend my workers with. Maybe the AI is in a similar situation. At least the AI will hate you forever for declaring war on them. (Some mods change the "you declared war on us" penalty so that it can wear off, like the other attitude penalties - but I'm reluctant to do that, because I see the permanence as a way to discourage early wars like you're talking about.)

For 200 turns the Mongols (who i stole their worker) and Pacal declared war on me and didnt try taking that one square with the dug in units. Only way by land to get to my cities was through that single forested land plot.
So they just never got to your cities at all? Or did they try to send boats or something? I would expect them to try to send boats to get around your guys.

In fact the turn that Pacal declared war, his stack next to that forest square ran back wards away from that square, the turn he declared war.
I know why they would do that. It's a flaw in the AI that I've known about for some time, but I can't think of an easy way to fix it. What I think happened is that the AI was heading towards one of your cities, intending to attack it.. but it had chosen the best peace-time path to get there... so when it finally arrived at the border and declared war - it suddenly found that the path it intended to take is now impossible because of your guys... ... yeah. It sucks, but like I said, it is not easy to fix.

Re: The Great Lighthouse. Yes, it can be an extremely powerful wonder. That's why I increased its cost from 200 to 300 some versions ago. Now it's still one of the best, but at least you have to work harder to get it!

Also wanted to state that it seemed like every 4 turns or so some ai comes calling asking me to screw over another ai.
I haven't changed that stuff so far, but I agree that it can get a bit annoying sometimes - especially on big maps where there are lots of AIs. Each AI has some probability of making a demand like that each turn, so more AI players means more demands.

From a strategy point of view, I often deliberately choose not to have open borders with people who are the worse enemy of someone that I care about. If you cancel your deals before you are asked you, then you don't get any attitude penalties.

Anyway, Mongols kept sending a galley over, planting a city on the iron, while we were at war (brought a horse archer every time as a defender with each settler until he got longbows) and I kept killing that city...
Sounds like a pretty rough situation for the Mongols. They probably really really wanted that iron, and didn't properly understand that the area was under your control. Poor guys.
 
Yeah the mongols never got to my cities or Pacal either for that matter, by navy or ground forces, the Mongols just kept replanting that city on the iron with that one galley and never ferried over more than a single horse archer at a time.

Maybe they didnt focus on an ocean route because they did technically have a fairly short land route...

I dont understand because most of the time it was only 3-4 units with a forest upgrade...and I saw the enemy had catapults/larger numbers at certain times...

It was also strange that the Mongols refused to make peace, cause i stole their worker, but then planted a city 4 or 5 tiles away from one of my cities during war time, with a horse archer defender lol.

Keep up the awesome changes and Ill keep testing :D
 
I've just spotted another bug.. but I think I'm successfully holding back the temptation to upload a fix for it right away. The bug has been there for several versions now - so I think it's something we can live with. (The main effect of this bug is that it will sometimes cause the AI to be slow to get its second city.)

I'm not surprised about the iron city. They don't really consider how much defense a city needs until after it is founded - so I expect that if you let them keep the city for awhile they'd eventually ship in some decent defenders; but they currently aren't smart enough to just bring the defenders in the first place. :(

But about that choke point - I am surprised by that. Unless there is a bug somewhere, they should recognize that unless they are willing to fight through your chokepoint, then it doesn't count as a short ground route. So they should either just try to bust through it by force, or go around it with boats. All I can think of is that maybe they didn't have a proper attack force ready to go through - but you say that it looks like they had the troop and just didn't know what to do with them... Anyway I'll keep it in mind and see if I can spot any related problems.
 
Ya 200 turns, 2 nations against mine, and I was expecting the 300 battle all over again for that forest and they never attacked it once, and then I was scared theyd pillage my fish or clams etc and they never sent any boats either.

They had tons of units cycling around the forest square at different times.

It isnt part of the bug you mentitioned: that "since they cant get good odds on the best defender, then the ai doesnt try at all" type scenario?

My vote if I get a vote, is upload as much as you want, I dont mind downloading this mod you put so much work into :D
 
Aha! I think I just realised what was causing the chokepoint problem (I don't think it is related to the old odds problem with collateral untis). Unfortunately, it might be somewhat tricky to fix...

Here's what I think the AI was doing:
  1. The AI wants to attack your city, and it thinks it can walk there. So it starts walking.
  2. It gets to the choke point, and decides that it might be easier to go by boat, so it start walking back to its city...
  3. but when it gets just a couple of steps away, it no longer has sight of the choke point - it doesn't remember that it is defended, so it changes its mind about the boats and starts walking back to the choke point.
  4. this indecisive back-and-forth continues indefinitely, because the only knows about the defenders at the choke point when it is able to see them.
Does that sound like it would match what you saw?

So... that might be kind of tricky to fix. The obvious solution is to just allow the AI to cheat - let it know the defenders are there even if it can't see them. But I don't really want to do that.

The AI doesn't currently have any way to remember any tactical information about its enemies. It doesn't remember where any units are ever - that's the justification for allowing the AI to cheat in the first place. -- I'd rather not have to implement tactical memory just to solve this particular problem.

I'll have to give it some more thought.
 
Sounds exactly right Karadoc, maybe in that scenario you could give them vision of that square/ surrounding land for 15-25 turns after scouting it, kinda of like a delayed fog of war?

A little bit cheating, a little bit honest :D

They still have to scout to get the information, but not completely forget it the second they walk away.

Idk if you really push this mod for even more absolute brillance/challenge, it sounds like the ai will need some tactical memory at some point. Ofc I say that not knowing how crazy hard that would be to implement.
 
So I continue playing my last game, Pacal has a monstrous economy #1 in the world, which I think is from religious gold...

A little disappointing that they are destroying me in technology when I was #1 gnp for like 150 turns. Even worse considering I decided to play on Monarchy this game.

I think you are to blame lol. You made them so much smarter about their economy and tech choices that they dont need cheats anymore lol.

Think about a -15% to -20% lower research cheat for the ai and +4 to +6 production bonus per city (towards non wonder use ofc and only once it reaches a certain size like 10)

But anyway I was first to gunpowder and once I got nationalism I drafted like 15-20 units of Janisaries along with my knights, macemen, and catapults and pushed into Mongolia.

I took two cities over 15 turns, and THEN this gigantic stack comes from somewhere inside of Mongolia....which I couldnt help feel couldve arrived much earlier (they werent at war with anyone else).

Defeated the gigantic stack on open ground with maybe 2-3 losses over 2 turns.

After I took the 3rd citiy, Mongolia vassaled to Pacal and Pacal was at war with me. For some reason, maybe personality, they had number 1 economy but only equal to me in "power" rating. I looked at their land, and yep, not a single mined hill, just 100% econ focus.

I took a fourth Mongol city and really feeling the pain, war weariness, my sea resources pillaged, Pacal massively out teching me now, no one will enter the war with me when i have +12 rating with them. Kinda funny, so many people asked me to declare war on the distant Native Americans, I agreed and occassionally made peace for some extra cash from them.

The rest of the world has been spending about 175 turns slowly destroying the crap out of the native americans. Now that war ended (with another vassalage), the others (some with massive power rating) still wont enter this war or any other war, even when I out power Pacal, and Mongolia barely hanging on.

The other ais seem content to tech their way through the 1700s.

Wish they would try and win more. Ive yet to see anyone try for a culture victory or really try to win militarily. It seems like they declare war to someone nearby is extremely rare, and declaring war on some distant guy is the overwhelmingly high choice (>90%).

Anyway I am slowly sending over replacement cats as I take cities and Ive only got 2 cats and a large army slowly battering away on the 5th Mongol City.

Feels good to gain ground, but the ais are destroying their way their technology at a unpleasant rate but not having much personality otherwise.

I also get the feeling that when this Mongol-Pacal war finally breaks and I start taking cities faster...that Pacal will just vassal to the number 2 guy- who has been teching the whole time, massive power rating and I'll really be in a bad spot then.

Side notes: Organized still seems like one of the weakest civ traits (napolean always gets his butt kicked in whatever game hes in with me - its what made me think of this). Maybe also give the organized trait a 10-20% discount of corruption penality due to number of cities or distance from cap or make it double the production speed of universities etc etc.

I still never consider vassalage and rush straight to bureaucracy...perhaps vasslage should be medium upkeep instead of high?
 
Im sorry i didnt have patience to read through 9 pages, but i have a suggestion.
After playing this mod i noticed a very interesting option inside of it. Its called realistic culture spread or realistic borders (im not sure). Basically culture spreads at different rates depending on the terrain. So its harder to spread over the rivers, peaks and forested hills, less hard on hills, deserts, ice... and easiest on the plains and grasslands. Im sure at least some of u played that mod and know what im talking about. Would it be hard to implement that option as and advanced option in custom games? Since this mod is about fixing the culture among other things, i think this could add a lot of flavor, but will change some things and needs to be tweaked for this mod.
Take it into the consideration, at least as an optional trait of the mod so it doesnt need to be default game play feature.

Tnx for your time, and i apologize if it has been suggested before.
 
Just a quick update (ie. post, not upload yet):

I think I've solved the AI choke-point confusion – by giving it some basic memory capability. It doesn't really remember where units are, but it does remember if certain plots were well defended when it last considered moving onto them. It's quite ad hoc. It solves this particular problem without resorting to cheating, but that's about all it helps with.

By the way, I should point out that originally the AI did cheat with their pathfinding. ie. When they were choosing which way to walk to a city, they would know which plots were blocked by enemy units even if it couldn't see them. I removed that element of cheating a few version ago - I guess this problem is why it was in there in the first place. Anyway, hopefully the AI will be ok now.

While I was testing that stuff, I also found some problems in the assault transport code - including one someone tragic bug in the original BtS code. ... lets just say that I think the AI's overseas warfare tactics will be slightly less incompetent in the next version.

Unfortunately, even with these new improvements there are still some rare situations where the AI can get locked into a loop of confusion. - For the particular problem I have in mind, not even allowing the AI to cheat will fix it; and the only way I can think of to fix it could potentially make the AI significantly slow because of some technical limitations in the pathfinding system. Maybe I should test it anyway to see if it actually does make it noticeably slower...


Anyway... That's the update for now. Thanks for the feedback you two.
 
Here is some feedback:

Terra, Huge, 15 Civs, Epic, Emperor, No tech Brokering, Played as Vikings.

1) The AI city site selection is vastly improved with AI snarfing up sites that I intended to build on. That's good since when I conquer them I won't need to raze a few of them to make the conquered cities more economically viable.
2) Everyone Teching bloody hard. Carthage researching Nationalism and I've just got my Macemen out. An they are mid table. I'm bottom.
3) Nobody seems to want to invade little old me. Perhaps due to my openhanded diplomacy. Declare war on Koreans. I'm feeling self conscious and neglected.
4) The friendly Ethiopians gift me Theology even though the Wonders are not yet built.
5) Quit game since everyone is so far ahead tech and I can't compete.


Terra, Huge, 15 Civs, Epic, Monarch, No tech Brokering, Played as Zulus

1) Planted a city right next to the Portuguese capital and they soon realized what was up and declared war on me using a mass archer choke strategy. Although initially a wise move they perhaps should have switched to a more offensive stance when they had enough axe men but they never did. I had no iron, no copper or no horses no nothing despite having 6 cities. Got everyone else to declare war on them.
2)Notice some shrewd tech deals from the AI.

Going to start a new game now.
 
Hi Karadoc,

first of all, congratulation for 1.07b expecially for "The AI will now be willing to defend high-value bonuses with put multiple units rather than just one. (This still needs some work.)" :goodjob:

Some question: when you included and modded BUG and BBAI do you used respectively version 4.5 for BUG mod and 1.02a for BBAI?

Some units of attack city stacks with multiple moves like cavalry should pillage roads around sieged city to prevent owner's city reinforcements.

Helicopters should have Amphiouos promotion by default. Why helicopters should be penalized by crossing rivers when attacking?

Why in changelog of version 1.00 "The AI will now send spies to destroy improvments only when at war"? If I target an enemy, I send spies to destroy improvment over happiness or strategic bonuses or to interrupt irrigation chain.

When I have more time I hope to test in more depth your exceptional mod.
 
I have a strange question to ask. I cant seem to play this mod in multiplayer (except hostseat). Game isnt visible on LAN or Interent. I have 3 mates willing to play this mod in multi but we cant seem to see anyone's games. Game works perfectly without mod though, so its not the network settings problem. Also i checked out mod .cfg file, and SinglePlayerOnly is set to 0.
Any help? We really wanted to give u feedback on the new version in multiplayer but srry :p
Also i never tried to play it in multi b4 1.07b.
 
The only thing I know of which causes multiplayer games to not be visible is when the assets files on each computer do not exactly match.

So try uninstalling and re-installing the mod on all of the computers to make absolutely sure all the files are identical. (and use the same zip-file to install, to make sure it is the same version of the mod!)

[edit]
By the way, even if the assets do not match, you can still join Direct IP Connection. I sometimes use that to join multiplayer games when I have the debug version on my computer and the release version on my friend's computer. (I only recommend trying that as a last resort though, because if the mod assets are different in some meaningful way then it will cause the game to go out of sync whenever the differences arise.)


(I'll respond to some of the other feedback a bit later.)
 
Well, one of the mates had just installed civ 4 and did a clean k-mod install. My other mate and me just updated the previous K-mod installations. I doubt it would make any difference but better i ask u if that could be the case :D
Tnx for quick reply btw! <3
 
I just did a clean copy of K-mod and my mate and i will test it shortly. Feedback coming in soon ;)

EDIT: Forget it... Something came up at his place. We will do it tomorrow for sure. Sorry for the false alarm :(
 
Don't forget to get the latest BtS patch if it's a fresh civ install. (v3.19)

(by the way, it's usually fine to just copy the new version of K-Mod on top of the old version. The only time that would not work correctly is if the new version removes one of the files - in which case the file would need to be removed manually. The only time I've removed a file from K-Mod was ages ago - when I noticed that I'd accidentally left in a useless piece of python test code that didn't do anything. I think that was before v1.00)
 
Hi Karadoc...

I have a question, which I'm sure you've thought of but would like your input in terms of what your thoughts are. I saw that you had posted this, and saw a few of these types of posts in the changelog:

By the way, I should point out that originally the AI did cheat with their pathfinding. ie. When they were choosing which way to walk to a city, they would know which plots were blocked by enemy units even if it couldn't see them. I removed that element of cheating a few version ago - I guess this problem is why it was in there in the first place. Anyway, hopefully the AI will be ok now.

The AI cheating, obviously is unfair...however...since the AI is so much worse at playing the game with less ability to think "outside the box" like a human can - do you think removing "cheats" that the AI can use is for the better? Sometimes i feel the AI needs all the help it can get. Bugfixes are a MAJOR plus that you are contributing :goodjob: What are your thoughts, though, in terms of removing these cheats and making the AI weaker because of it?

Regardless - a most amazing and excellent job you are doing. The amount of time spent moving forward with CivIV will be increased by levels of magnitude by many, many people because of this work that you're doing. If you ever set up a pay-pal account, I'd bet you'd find some donations from some of us for all the time you're putting into this (and all the hours of fun and addiction that many, many of us players will benefit because of it) :lol:
 
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