K-Mod: Far Beyond the Sword

[Charles555nc]

I play on epic game speed, so the anarchy # of the turns is different.

I am having alot of fun with the new version. Ty Karadoc I was so bored.

I do think using a great general as an actually attacking military unit is the weakest/most risky use of a great general currently. Perhaps add a free +1 power or something to the unit the general merges with?

Thanks also for the tip about the deal canceling.

 

[rbj2001]

Hi, am loving K-mod. Thanks for making it!

I have a question regarding the attached save file. I am in the process of kicking Kmher butt as Montezuma, but 3 archers seem to magically appear in his cities, and I don't understand how. Case in point: observe there are 5 damaged archers in Angkor Thom. Click the next turn button, and the population has reduced from 8 to 7 and 3 undamaged, unpromoted archers have appeared. There are no galleys in the area that could have brought them, and no hidden archers off to the right. Presumably he's whipping given he has slavery, but how come he's getting 3?

Is it a bug?

I would be really grateful if someone could look at this and let me know what the deal is. Thanks!

 

[PieceOfMind]

A few reasons:

1. The fact that K-Mod introduces a feature where any overflow that would normally be turned into cash is instead put into producing more of the same unit, so more than one unit can be produced in one turn.
2. It's his capital with Bureaucracy so there's +50%.
3. He has 20 sitting in overflow, and with 10 base, that's already 45. Then there's already 15 put into the current archer he's building.
4. He obviously whips his city to produce another 45 base hammers (67 after going through the 50% bonus) from 1 pop point.

In the end he gets about 127 that turn which is enough to build 3 archers (3x31*), plus 20overflow (for whatever he builds next turn) plus 3 into an unbuilt archer.

I wonder if the fact this can happen is desirable for the gameplay or not? His city is obviously powerful in production so one could argue he deserves to get that much utility out of it each turn, but one could also argue getting 3+ archers per turn where in the unmodded game it would have been one changes the balance a bit in favour of the defender.

* I assume the reason an archer is 31 instead of 37 for him is a handicap due to Monarch difficulty.

 

[karadoc]

I'm not 100% sure that the overflow changes are good for gameplay. But I can say that the reason I changed it was so that cities wouldn't reach a maximum useable productivity.

On normal and on quick speed, it was very common for cities to have so much productivity that they could build anything in 1 turn with maximum overflow. I felt this was a bit un-fun, and that it upset the balance of units - since it essentially made production cost a non-issue. One particular example is that guided missiles were completely useless, because their only advantage (being cheap to build) simply did not come into play.

Even on epic speed it wasn't rare to max out productivity like this. If you build HE and IW in the same city, it will almost certainly happen.

I still think that the overflow system now is better than how it was originally, and I don't intend to change it back - but like I said, I'm not 100% sure it's the best way. I wouldn't even go as far as to say it's definitely better. (I'd only say that I like it better.)

 

[Charles555nc]

I personally love Karadoc's overflow changes. It seems more like a discussion of whether bureaucracy should boost slaving hammers (which I think it should as well).

 

[PieceOfMind]

I like it too. Much better than vanilla.

The only way I'd change it now is to let overflowed production get put into the next units in the queue rather than necessarily more copies of the same unit.

However the current system has already achieved the goal of preventing cities hitting "maximum useable productivity", so it's a matter of whether it's worth going further or not, or whether that's even feasible (as I can't say I know what the modding limitations are in this respect, with OOS etc.).

The fact those units of the same type get removed from the queue now definitely helps.

 

[rbj2001]

Thanks for looking at the file. It definitely felt a bit weird because this city was producing 2-3 archers every turn (not just this one). I just sat there basically farming XP for about 10 turns with my attacking units because by the time I'd rested my units for a turn, he'd have 6 more archers ready, and as my units were powerful but few in number it was really hard to finish them off.

As my army approached each of his cities, they would suddenly jump from 3 archers to 9 archers within a couple of turns, then they kept getting tons of reinforcements every turn as I was attacking. It felt a bit unfair and made for very different gameplay from vanilla.

The problem is, each attacking unit can only kill 1 unit per turn. It seems like for balance, if the defender can produce multiple cheap units, expensive attackers should be able to kill multiple units. Otherwise it's advantageous for the defender to spam hundreds of cheap units, which can make taking cities take much longer... say the defender has 4 cities each churning out 3 warriors per turn and sending them to defend the city in their front line: it's literally impossible for an attacking force of 10 infantry with 10 artillery to take the city, even though there's only warriors in it. (The problem - multiple cities sending cheap units to the front - still exists without multiple units per turn, but multiple units introduces an asymmetry between defending and attacking that makes it much worse.)

To be fair, I haven't noticed this problem in any other games I've played with K-mod, but it just seem to crop up here because my opponent had good production but lacked iron/copper/Feudalism to make anything better than archers.

 

[Charles555nc]

If the ai beats its neighbor or if you conquer your neighbor too early then that is a HUGE advantage for the rest of the game.

Unluckily for the ai they can only make archers but are fighting you intelligently. I think this sounds like a best case scenario to me. Im sure getting a couple great generals off the masses of archers, wont hurt you either.

You could also pillage their food/production, so they cant produce or slave, if the archers annoy you...

 

[Charles555nc]

Montezuma is having a tough time because I invaded him, as I am way ahead of him in tech. But he actually could have fought my taking his capital with the 20+ units he had, but instead he invades my near worthless island city (saved game shows the details).

On another note, Karadoc has mentitioned that games often end before the year 1990/2000 mark (I hope Im understanding that correctly). Could there be some sort of discouragement of the ai trading techs, say the top 3 or top 5 technology leaders refusing to trade tech with each other? Technology still seems to blow by around and after rifling and I think the ais refusing to trade tech with their competitors (or the human if the human is a technology leader) would help slow down the pace of the rifling/post rifling eras.

Of course other focuses could be added to this, like refusing to trade tech with the largest ai/human empire, instead of just technology leaders. Or increasing tech trading amongst "technology left behinds".

I remember Karadoc adding some costs to later tech and I liked that. But when people can trade 7500 tech points of technology in a single turn, it really speeds things up imo.

I think it could also be an issue (again for me imo) of rewarding active play vs passive play- as often times (99%+) ais that have never declared war are hugely ahead in tech of ais that have had to fight for land etc etc. Perhaps just expanding the "we arent quite ready to trade this tech away" mechanism could just be expanded...

Of course this is just my opinion of the ai behavior and Karadoc knows way better than I do how often the ai tech leaders actually trade tech amongst themselves. However, I know that trading or giving away a tech like "rifling" can change the course of a foreign war.

(Karadoc has already made a huge improvement over vanilla for this by improving solo continent land a bit so a single civ on a continent is no longer is punished as harshly by being denied tech trading, unable to build Heroic Epic, less chance of religion spreading to your lands, and the denial of potential expanding room for example).

Just realized:
Omg I just remembered something I wanted to ask about. How about making Heroic Epic always buildable but double the hammer cost and having a level 4+ unit decreases the cost 50%? Perhaps decrease the % production bonus of marble to 25% from 50%. (Again designed around not punishing a civ stuck on an island alone).

 

[sjodster]

FYI: The last line of CvPlayerAI::AI_getPlotCanalValue incorrectly calls std::min when it should call std::max.

return 10 * std::min(0, pSecondWaterArea->getNumTiles() - 2);

I think this bug effectively prevents the AI from building forts as canals.

-Josh

 

[Lenneth]

Thank you for the new patch.
I wonder why more people don't play the mod. Why do you guys think this is so?

Btw, Nobles Club didn't quite work out, but does anybody here care for a succession game?

 

[damerell]

I wonder why more people don't play the mod. Why do you guys think this is so?

At a guess:

K-mod improves performance, but many people's gaming hardware is so powerful now that that is less relevant.

The omission of some BUG features is vexing.

 

[AbsintheRed]

At a guess:

K-mod improves performance, but many people's gaming hardware is so powerful now that that is less relevant.

I don't think that's true at all
Every bit of those performance improvements matter a lot
Especially since K-mod is beginning to be used as many bigger mods' base
In all bigger mods performance is still a serious issue

This also answers the question of why not used that much
It is used very widely, but not necessarily in vanilla BtS
Simply because vanilla BtS isn't used that widely anymore

 

[King Pluto]

I've read many people's rave reviews of K-Mod, so I'm thinking of giving it a try. However, as an obsessive micro-manager, I've fallen deeply in love with BULL.

From this thread, I think I've seen that the following BULL features are not in K-Mod:
-Pre-chopping
-WHEOOHRN fist on the Civ list
-Some hover texts

Is there anything else? Are these features generally easy to add back (for example, I never play MP, so I'd have no issue adding pre-chopping, but is it difficult)? I have no Civ modding experience, but I'm not a coding newb and I'm not afraid to make the changes myself if I can have these sorely missed micro tools and the other improvements of K-Mod.

 

[damerell]

I don't think that's true at all

You don't think it's true that gaming hardware is more powerful now than when BtS was released?

Especially since K-mod is beginning to be used as many bigger mods' base. In all bigger mods performance is still a serious issue

Which tells you nothing about why people do or don't play vanilla K-Mod; what is relevant there is whether the performance of vanilla K-Mod is noticeably better than BtS (or BtS+BUG).

Simply because vanilla BtS isn't used that widely anymore

Could have fooled me; the General Discussion board is absolutely full of people talking about BtS.

 

[AbsintheRed]

You don't think it's true that gaming hardware is more powerful now than when BtS was released?

Pfff
No, I don't think that it's less relevant

 

[robbyextreme]

I've read many people's rave reviews of K-Mod, so I'm thinking of giving it a try. However, as an obsessive micro-manager, I've fallen deeply in love with BULL.

From this thread, I think I've seen that the following BULL features are not in K-Mod:
-Pre-chopping
-WHEOOHRN fist on the Civ list
-Some hover texts

Is there anything else? Are these features generally easy to add back (for example, I never play MP, so I'd have no issue adding pre-chopping, but is it difficult)? I have no Civ modding experience, but I'm not a coding newb and I'm not afraid to make the changes myself if I can have these sorely missed micro tools and the other improvements of K-Mod.

No pre-chop and and hover texts were the first things I noticed when switching to k-mod.

But the mod has 1000's of other useful features that I simply stopped caring eventually lol. Now to prechop I just chop then cancel action and chop and cancel again. Just in case I forget about to do it on second turn of chopping.

No hover text is really suck sometimes though. Since you gotta use the combat log to check how much overflow you get. And not all the time does it show up when whipping is available in your cities... so usually end up saving and whipping, then reloading and seeing if it's wort hit.

I did make a post about it when I started playing, wish I knew how to change it myself.

 

[karadoc]

K-mod improves performance, but many people's gaming hardware is so powerful now that that is less relevant.

Actually, the biggest speed gains in K-Mod are from the removal of some artificial delays in the game.

Originally the AI spent most of its turn waiting for stuff that it didn't actually need to wait for. Reducing those waiting times is the main change that makes K-Mod faster; and those waiting times are independent of how powerful the computer hardware is.

 

[Charles555nc]

Well I finally got around to losing my first 1.40 version game, got bombed to pieces on my final desperate charge into the tech leaders land...probably shouldve waited for rocketry and had a healer .

On to try 2: Solo start again with decent land. Cannot say how pleased I am with those changes to solo land...

Any thoughts on what you want to work on for the next version, Karadoc?

 

[Charles555nc]

Idk if this is a change or a bug, but I cannot get a single ai to gift me any gold, (even while on friendly terms).