K-Mod: Far Beyond the Sword

[karadoc]

Some good feedback. Thanks everyone.

I'm just about to upload 1.09b, to fix an AI deadlock bug (ie. a bug which can prevent the AI from ending its turn.) I've got some other changes in the works, but they aren't quite ready yet. - so 1.09b will just be the bug fix.

Regarding the Power Ratio option. The true / false thing in the xml is just the default setting; and I'd prefer to leave that as 'false'. I'm not really sure why it wasn't working for you before you changed the default. For the power to be displayed, it needs two things set in the BUG options screen: firstly, the ; secondly, the column order list has to have "P" somewhere in it. "WSZV?C6EPTUNBDRAHQ*LO".

.. that reminds me.. I forgot to put P back into the default column order. I guess I'll put that in 1.09b as well.

Spoiler :

Actually, on closer examination, I didn't "forget" to put the P in. I just failed to do it properly. There is a second S where the P is meant to be.

The defaults are only used if the settings aren't already in the "Settings" folder. The settings folding in the K-Mod download is almost empty, so all the defaults are used the first time you play, and then the Settings are automatically saved.

[edit]
ok. v1.09b is uploaded now. (It took longer than expected because it was a bit fiddly to separate the changes I wanted to include from the changes I didn't want to include.)

The next version will include some more aggressive drafting strategy and better use of healing promotions - it also might include another big speed boost.

Spoiler :

I spent basically all of yesterday trying to get the built-in Civ4 path-finder to do a particular optimisation which I know will make everything much faster - but in the end I decided that I couldn't do it, because it kept caching results which were only meant to be temporary. So... I'm going to see if I can quickly write a complete drop-in replacement for the path-finder, and then I'll just be able to tell it "this is a temporary answer. Don't cache it!" - and my speed boost will work. .. It's just a matter of writing a path-finder that works at least as well as the current one. I don't want to spend too much time on it, but I'll give it a shot.

 

[Charles555nc]

I accidently mashed a couple keys and disabled auto saves....can someone tell me which buttons I accidently mashed to fix it?

 

[Axios]

Hi Karadoc,

now on 109b Military power ratio on scoreboard works!

In my game with Darius and Charlemagne, Darius now has only a city. Charlamgne has a stack out of this city and is waiting that his 4 cities build 4 catapults to join attack stack to finish Darius! Good behaviour!

I'll wait for 1.10!

jokes aside, now I start a game from scratch with the 109 to see how works the new AI of the settlers.

 

[JosEPh_II]

karadoc,

I have a small request. Would you be so kind as to look at this file and tell me if it can be added to your great mod.

Jungle Camp was an early Vincentz Modmod for RoM and I've fallen in love with it. I have very little modding skills and would like to know if;
1. it's possible to integrate into your mod for my personal use. (You can use it too if you like what it does, Just give Vincentz credit)
2. Some pointers on how I can go about adding it in.

Thank you

JosEPh

Edit: I do have the .dds file for it too. I need to post it don't I. But I don't know if it required a .nif or not?

 

[Charles555nc]

Continung my game 1.09....notice the AI is still very careless about moving seige units around, when a city is under seige.

For example I invaded the celts, put a 50 unit stack next to one of their cities, next turn, 4 cannons came from other cities to reinforce that city, but didnt get into the city . They stopped very close to my stack... so I just used 4 cavalry and easily killed them...

Noticed some weak grouping, like 4 knights and 7 trebs moving close to a stack of mine with like 20 redcoats...which I think, is a matter of ai grouping behavior.

Also noticed a werid war thing where the Japs and Zulus were at war for like 200 turns, they were seperated by at least 25 squares of territory by me, they would not make peace even though the Japanse were about an age behind in warfare technology, and even though I dominated the Japans (but didnt declare war on them) they refused to vassal to me.

Also, Japanse started sending invading units to the Zulu, even when the Zulus had a dangerous 25+ unit stack seiging the Jap's cities. They sent knights to invade the Zulu's territory, who had riflemen...

Other than that, the ai is really looking spectacular! Pillaging and seiging and huge numbers of upgrades...

edit: O just wanted to say one last thing, I wouldnt be against the Ai getting more great generals than the human gets, because they tend to just throw away the first 2 or 3 great generals from what Ive seen in the 4000 bc- 1 ad time line.

Id definitely love if they got more great general experience givers for their highest production cities or +50% military production from the miltary academy bulding in the later eras. But you said you were working on the "healing" ai and that could be sweet too, if the ai tries to keep its stacks alive a little better.

 

[sgeo374]

Great mod!!!!! i have really enjoyed playing this its nice to see someone making the base game better plus its great that there are frequent updates the ai is defiantly getting smarter can't wait to play 0.9. just wondered if you could put the buildings actual effects part of bull back in so when you hover over a building whilst picking what to build you can see the actual effect it will have on the city.keep up the good work!!

 

[Charles555nc]

Further update...

I declared war on the Japs because I was tired of them saying no to my vassalage attempts. I had given them resources for 100+ turns and the only reason the Zulus couldnt steam roll them.

4 Jap Knights went into gilgameshs land (at peace) and moved into my land, then back out- repeating that process for about 15 turns, not pillaging or attacking. Seems the ai glitched out there for some reason.

*very important*

Ok so me and the Celts are the only two mega powers left- gilgamesh vassaled to the celts, and I brought the Zulus to their knees and vassaled them.

I took my main army and looked for the celtic army and I actually ran into them the turn before they declared war.

Basically our armies were almost completely identical, he had 45 rifles, about 10 grenadiers, and 35 cannons. I had about 20 red coats, 10 infantry, 20 cavalry, and 35 cannons. Similar upgrades.

POSSIBLE FIX? Clearly whoever used their 35 cannons first shouldve won the battle and maybe the game. I was scouting through the Zulus, my vassals lands, I knew a big army had obliterated Gilgamesh, and I ended my turn with my main army right next to his, accidently and almost half hoped the ai was smart enough to hit me first.

Instead of hitting my stack and killing my main army, he walks into my land from gilgamesh's (they ended their turn on a hill, so not that bad), but ofc 25% defense isnt going to help when I used 17 of my 35 cannons and destroyed his army handily. Seems like the ai needs an upgrade in threat assessment...and possibley seige equipment's colleraterol damage needs to be slightly reduced at the cannon and afterwards level...

Also the Ai is continuing to be reckless with their seige equipment, I killed about 30 unprotected trebs, cannons, and catapults when I pushed into the Zulus land. They are ending their turns either next to my stack or a space away (and I had plenty of cavalry)

Side note: The ai likes to use alot of calvary with the chance to flee upgrade on defense, it seems like its almost always better for calvary type units to get the strength upgrade rather than the increased flee chance- especially if they are gonna just defend with them. Just a thought.

Funny Side Note: A civilization was discovered in the 1900s.....yep apparently George Washington got screwed hard core and was living on a tiny island (4 cities) off from the main pangea...

 

[Lenowill]

Regarding Washington, recalling my own similar experiences, I suspect it's more likely that he was spawned as a Colony by some other civilization that had settled a new landmass. Was he already someone's vassal when he first showed up? If so, then that's probably what happened.

If he really was a full-fledged AI player from the game's beginning and really did roll such a terrible start ... well ... I feel sorry for him. xD

 

[karadoc]

It's just a matter of writing a path-finder that works at least as well as the current one. I don't want to spend too much time on it, but I'll give it a shot.[/spoiler]

Ok.. well I did spend too much time on it. For a few days it seemed to be in a perpetual state of being almost finished if I can just find this one last bug (which turned out to be many many bugs...). Anyway, I now have a new pathfinder that works at least as well as the built-in one. As far as I can tell, both my pathfinder and the original give 'optimal' results, and my one is slightly faster. I had to kind of reverse-engineer it so that it worked the same as the original. The speed boost is not actually as big as I'd hoped, but at now it will be a whole lot easier to look for more ways to improve the speed. .. I'd also hoped that by writing it myself I'd be able to fix the bug where your units sometimes don't take the path that they say they are going to take. (ie. the game highlights the path before you give the move order, but then when you actually give the move order they take some other path instead.) -- but unfortunately, it turns out the dll doesn't control how the pathfinder is used for the user interface. So I can't tell it to use my new pathfinder for that; and I haven't thought of another way to fix the bug yet.

...

anyway. That's the status at the moment. I don't think I've made enough changes for it to be worth uploading a new version yet.

I accidently mashed a couple keys and disabled auto saves....can someone tell me which buttons I accidently mashed to fix it?

The hotkey to toggle autosave is ctrl+shift+a. Also, it returns to its default settings when you restart the program - (which you've probably already noticed.)

Jungle Camp was an early Vincentz Modmod for RoM and I've fallen in love with it. I have very little modding skills and would like to know if;
1. it's possible to integrate into your mod for my personal use. (You can use it too if you like what it does, Just give Vincentz credit)
2. Some pointers on how I can go about adding it in.

I haven't tried actually adding this, but by the looks of the files you sent - they aren't actually a complete mod. I mean, I don't think it would work if you just put them in a mod folder and tried to run it (would it?).

Anyway... I as I said, I haven't actually tried this, but if you wanted to merge that mod with K-Mod, my suggestion would be to use winmerge to merge the changes from each of the xml files. Just go through the list of differences that winmerge brings up, and copy everything across. I think that will probably make it work.

A couple of the xml files that you uploaded seem to be the same as the default ones anyway, so I'm not sure what the point of those is. The .dds and .nif files are the graphics.

Continung my game 1.09....notice the AI is still very careless about moving seige units around, when a city is under seige.

[...]

Noticed some weak grouping, like 4 knights and 7 trebs moving close to a stack of mine with like 20 redcoats...which I think, is a matter of ai grouping behavior.

[...]

Basically our armies were almost completely identical, he had 45 rifles, about 10 grenadiers, and 35 cannons. I had about 20 red coats, 10 infantry, 20 cavalry, and 35 cannons. Similar upgrades.

Clearly whoever used their 35 cannons first shouldve won the battle and maybe the game.

Currently there are very few places where the AI actually thinks at all about whether or not its units are likely to get wiped out. So in these cases, it not that they think the units will be safe - but rather that it's completely oblivious to the risk. Maybe they'll learn to deal with this kind of stuff in the future.. Who knows?

Anyway, that final example is probably one of the AIs biggest tactical flaws at the moment. I'm been slowly restructuring parts of the AI in a way that will allow it to check for that kind of situation... But yeah; currently the AI is pretty poor at defense in general, and particularly poor at /active-defence/.

4 Jap Knights went into gilgameshs land (at peace) and moved into my land, then back out- repeating that process for about 15 turns, not pillaging or attacking. Seems the ai glitched out there for some reason.

It does sound there's some kind of glitch going on; but I'm not sure what. I saw something a bit like this in the game that I just played (but it was a multiplayer game, so I couldn't switch to debug mode find out what the AI was trying to do). I like to imagine that the AI was just trying to keep the pressure on... forcing you to have defenders in that area or something - but the real reason is probably that they just keep forgetting why they moved the units into the land in the first place.

 

[Cruel]

Congratulations on your initiative. Actually you explored a side that few mods were. And really the times of the turns are incredibly fast!

 

[Axios]

Maybe another unsolved AI cheat:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=447190

 

[karadoc]

v1.10 is up.
The main thing I've been working on is the new pathfinding system. But I've also made a few small but significant changes to the AI. The new pathfinding system allows slightly more flexible usage, so that its easier to keep the data I want to keep - and skip the stuff that's not important. Here are the result of a one-turn speed test that I did using Lenowill's save game:

v1.09b
Total time: 10575ms (8720ms active)
CvSelectionGroup::generatePath() 2970ms (used 7368 times)

--
v1.10
Total time: 8424ms (5966ms active)
CvSelectionGroup::generatePath(): 851ms (used 6377 times)

I reckon I could make the new pathfinder a bit faster still - but not really the bottleneck anymore, so it wouldn't make a lot of difference to the total time. (and I'd probably end up breaking something...)

Regarding the new stack vs stack AI - it's untested. I've tested that it doesn't crash the game, but that's about all; but like most of my AI changes I think that even if it's bad it will still be better than the original.

By the way, if anyone sees any out-of-sync errors while playing K-Mod in multiplayer, please post it here. I haven't seen any OOS errors at all for several versions now, and so I'm hopefully optimistic that I might have finally fixed all of them. For me, multiplayer games are about a million times more fun without OOS errors. (and I hope that I haven't introduced any new OOS bugs with the v1.10 changes!)

Congratulations on your initiative. Actually you explored a side that few mods were. And really the times of the turns are incredibly fast!

Thanks. I'm expecting the new version will be even faster.

Maybe another unsolved AI cheat:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=447190

I don't really think of that as a cheat, but rather just an "asymmetry". The AI doesn't ask (or receive) favours from other AIs - but that's just their choice. ... it probably should be changed though - one day.

[edit]
I've just noticed a problem in left over from the original AI. The problem is that the AI deletes units for bad reasons - and I suspect this problem is going to be a lot worse in v1.10, because the AI will draft units using the new drafting strategy - and then it will just delete them right away. (By the look of things, the AI has always had a strong tendency to delete units that have been recently drafted; but I haven't noticed it until now.)

I've developed a fix for this, but it involves changing a heap of other things - so I want to test it a bit more before uploading. -- I haven't decided if this will be v1.10b, or if it will just wait for v1.11.

 

[Mattygerst]

Quick question with regard to BUG in KMod. What settings am I missing to get to the BUG interface that shows the yields of the buildings before you build them? IE, upon choosing a building, it shows your benefit will be xGold, xBeakers, xCulture, etc..

 

[En_Dotter]

Ummm... I havent got a reply on one of my questions for quite some time. I asked if you would be interested in implementing "realistic culture spread" feature. It is already in Rise of mankind - a new dawn mod. Basically borders become more "natural". Culture spreads harder over harder terrains like mountains, rivers, forests... hardest over river/hill/jungle for example. It could be in additional options when starting a custom game. It doesnt need to be a default thing in the mod.
What do u think?

 

[wotan321]

I did not read anything so far about this, what am I missing?

I have two mines on Uranium. I have discovered Physics long ago, I can build Airships just fine. But the game tells me I have no Uranium.

I have the Mining Corporation. I have no oil. Other people have Uranium and no oil and are building Destroyers.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks.

 

[Radio Noer]

I'd just check and make sure they have roads, that could solve it, if not it seems like an issue.

 

[JujuLautre]

I did not read anything so far about this, what am I missing?

I have two mines on Uranium. I have discovered Physics long ago, I can build Airships just fine. But the game tells me I have no Uranium.

I have the Mining Corporation. I have no oil. Other people have Uranium and no oil and are building Destroyers.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks.

Do you have fission ?

Physics is necessary to reveal uranium, but fission is to use it. It's like you need a tech to discover oil and an other (combustion) to use it.

 

[karadoc]

I've uploaded v1.10b. The main thing is that it (hopefully) fixes the AI problem I mentioned, where it would basically just delete anything that it drafted - but I also found and fixed a few other bugs. I think v1.10b fixes the rare problem where sometimes units didn't follow the same path that the interface said they were going to follow. (This was a really old problem. It has nothing to do with the new v1.10 pathfinding system.) - The problem was pretty rare anyway, so it's hard to know for sure if it is completely fixed.

Quick question with regard to BUG in KMod. What settings am I missing to get to the BUG interface that shows the yields of the buildings before you build them? IE, upon choosing a building, it shows your benefit will be xGold, xBeakers, xCulture, etc..

That option currently isn't in K-Mod, because it's a BULL option. (All of the BULL options were removed when I first started the mod.) I may add it a future version though.

Ummm... I havent got a reply on one of my questions for quite some time. I asked if you would be interested in implementing "realistic culture spread" feature. It is already in Rise of mankind - a new dawn mod. Basically borders become more "natural". Culture spreads harder over harder terrains like mountains, rivers, forests... hardest over river/hill/jungle for example. It could be in additional options when starting a custom game. It doesnt need to be a default thing in the mod.
What do u think?

It sounds like an alright idea; I just haven't looked into it yet. If I did add it, I don't think I'd do it quite the same way as in RoM though. (For example, I don't think forests should slow down culture spread. I don't think we need another reason to chop down forests...)

I did not read anything so far about this, what am I missing?

I have two mines on Uranium. I have discovered Physics long ago, I can build Airships just fine. But the game tells me I have no Uranium.

JujuLautre is right. Mining the uranium doesn't actually give you the uranium resource unless you have Fission. (It works the same way in unmodded BtS as well.)

 

[JosEPh_II]

Please don't add Realistic Culture or Fixed Borders or City Limits to your mod karadoc. Those 3 combined totally whack out Culture, especially if you or that AI chooses the Civic Pacifism. C2C is struggling to rebuild Culture after all the damage those 3 "options" have done.

JosEPh

 

[En_Dotter]

Please don't add Realistic Culture or Fixed Borders or City Limits to your mod karadoc. Those 3 combined totally whack out Culture, especially if you or that AI chooses the Civic Pacifism. C2C is struggling to rebuild Culture after all the damage those 3 "options" have done.

JosEPh

It sounds like an alright idea; I just haven't looked into it yet. If I did add it, I don't think I'd do it quite the same way as in RoM though. (For example, I don't think forests should slow down culture spread. I don't think we need another reason to chop down forests...)

I guess he will "fix" it, the way he fixed 98.45% things in his mod already