K-Mod: Far Beyond the Sword

[Habitus]

Thanks for the info karadoc. I wasn't so much thinking of asking you to do it, I think you have enough to handle with what your doing and your skills are of greater use elsewhere. I have a very small amount of knowledge in the merge stuff so I may just look at learning more about it and working with the dll stuff, load it up on a PC and play with it. At this point the only Mod I'm thinking of would be something along the lines of RevDCM or LoR (which is built on RevDCM). I don't think RevDCM itself has alot of content differences, though LoR has some variations.

Can't hurt to give it a run!

If you think you'll have problems with the dll, pm me and i'll set aside afew hours and do it for you python and xml will give you plenty to learn with at start.

 

[karadoc]

I've just uploaded v1.16. In terms of programming, the biggest change is that I've rewritten the system that the AI uses to pick up units that are stranded on other islands. I don't think the new system will make a lot of difference in terms of gameplay, but I suspect that the old system may have been the source of some rare OOS problems in multiplayer. The new system is completely immune to OOS mistakes. So with any luck that'll be the very last of the OOS problems gone.

(If you happen to experience any OOS errors in your multiplayer games, let me know.)

FINALLY a mod which cares a bout the global warming.

FINALLY an author who understood that GW can be an interesting features is well developed.

Karadoc, you made me very happy

Thanks. I hope you enjoy it. GW is still just a minor component of the game, but I do think it's a lot more interesting now. After you've played into the late-game, I'd be interested to hear your opinions on how it's working.

Regarding BUG voting info: please, restore if possible, only the info about how many turns for a new vote/election.

v1.16 now has that information on the 'resolutions' tab of the victory screen.

I get a problem occasionally when trying to select a unit, it selects it for a second then goes off it, only way to wake the unit up is using a hotkey before it deselects again

I think I may have fixed this problem in v1.16 - but I'm not certain. I fixed something that was causing this exact behavior, but I suspect it wasn't caused by the same thing that caused the problem for you. Anyway, let me know if it happens again. If it still happens, I'll keep looking for the source of the problem.

Ive lost like 5 games on emperor now...I need to up my game. lol

It sounds like the AI is working well then. In my most recent game, Fredrick was going for a cultural victory, and he managed to get all three of the cultural corporations. So based on that, I think the new great-person value weighting system is working as intended. That was pleasing to see, even though I lost the game... (and I'd been saving a merchant for sushi-co for ages. )

 

[keldath]

karadoc,

i just love you for making an effort for a stable mp game with no oos.

ur absolutely awesome!

***
hi again,

ive been adding small mod parts for my own amusement

i just tried to merge in super forts, which is a really good mod comp,
but, i had trouble merging one file - unitai.cpp, a part about bombard city, was too difficult for me,
i might be rude to ask of you, but any chance youll assist me?
its ok if not, i know you have enough on your hands.

 

[Mattygerst]

karadoc,

Not sure if you've noticed or not, but please check your PM's if you haven't

 

[Todd Hawks]

Great Mod! The AI sure plays differently and better.

I have a question and a request:

Question: What do you mean when you say that the AI is put to the same difficulty level as the (minimum) human player in mp? Isn't the definition of the difficulty levels mostly the AI bonuses?

Request: I don't know how difficult this would be to implement, but BUG (or BULL?) has a feature where you get told the actual amount gained when hovering the mouse over a building. Example: "Library, +2 Culture, +25% Science. Actual: +2 Culture, +3 Science" (because those 25% correspond to currently 3 science). Make decisions a lot easier.

 

[En_Dotter]

Karadoc, i asked if something could be implemented a while ago and havent got a reply. I assume the answer was no since u didnt reply. If thats the case i would like to know the reasons if possible ofc. I asked if it would be possible to make the sliders have step of 5% instead of 10%. Sometimes it helps having +5% on cluture or on espionage when u dont want to invest more. Even on science having 85% instead of 80 or 90 gives u some better future planning and saves u several clicks later on. I dont know how hard this is for AI to understand and use properly.
What are your thoughts if u got any about this topic?

Also a suggestion about community functionality. Would u be interested in opening a separate forum for this mod where we could have different topics sorted and more easier to track. For example: bugs, suggestions, future plans, bla bla bla. You know what i mean. If you are interested and dont have time for setting up the forum ill gladly find some free forum "dealer" and start one and ofc give u full admin privileges and such.

 

[karadoc]

Question: What do you mean when you say that the AI is put to the same difficulty level as the (minimum) human player in mp? Isn't the definition of the difficulty levels mostly the AI bonuses?

When I said that the AI's difficulty level is set to be such-and-such, what I really meant was that the difficulty level of the game itself is set to that. I think to describe what this means, you need to understand that there is a distinction between player difficulty level and game difficulty level.

When the player's difficulty level is high, they get certain penalties, such as increased maintenance costs and increased tech costs. But when the game's difficulty is high, the AI gets bonuses, such as reduced construction costs. The difficulty level for the AI players is always set to Nobel, regardless of the game settings. In single player mode, the game difficulty level is set equal to the difficulty level chosen by the player. So for example if I choose Monarch in single player mode, my player difficulty will be Monarch, which means research costs are increased by 15% (amongst other things); the AI's difficulty will stay on Nobel; but the game's difficulty level will be on Monarch, which, for example, reduces the production cost of units by 10% for all AI players, and gives them Archery for free at the start of the game.

In multiplayer games, if the human players choose the same difficulty level, then that will also be the game's difficulty level. But if the human players choose different difficulty levels, then without K-Mod the game's difficulty would be automatically set to Nobel, regardless of what the players choose.

So for example, if I play a game with my friend, and I choose Immortal and my friend chooses Emperor; in K-Mod, the game difficulty would be set to Emperor, which gives the AI archery, and a few extra units, and some production bonuses and so on. But without K-Mod the game's difficulty level would be set to Nobel, which means the AI gets essentially no special bonuses. I think it's silly that in the unmodded game, the AI gets fewer bonuses for a Emperor + Immortal game than it does for an Emperor + Emperor game - so that's why I changed it.

The full effects of the different difficulty levels are detailed in Beyond the Sword\Assets\XML\GameInfo\CIV4HandicapInfo.xml.

Request: I don't know how difficult this would be to implement, but BUG (or BULL?) has a feature where you get told the actual amount gained when hovering the mouse over a building. Example: "Library, +2 Culture, +25% Science. Actual: +2 Culture, +3 Science" (because those 25% correspond to currently 3 science). Make decisions a lot easier.

Yes, this has been suggested by someone already. I think it's a fair enough idea, but it's not really a high priory for me, because I don't think I'd use it myself. I expect that I will implement it, but it's hard to say when, sorry.

Karadoc, i asked if something could be implemented a while ago and havent got a reply. I assume the answer was no since u didnt reply. If thats the case i would like to know the reasons if possible ofc. I asked if it would be possible to make the sliders have step of 5% instead of 10%. Sometimes it helps having +5% on cluture or on espionage when u dont want to invest more. Even on science having 85% instead of 80 or 90 gives u some better future planning and saves u several clicks later on. I dont know how hard this is for AI to understand and use properly.
What are your thoughts if u got any about this topic?

I thought I did respond to that suggestion. I suppose I must have forgotten to actually write it. But you're right, for the time being the answer is 'no'. There are two reasons that come to mind. One is that I think there are various parts of the game mechanics which currently expect the steps to be 10%; and so although it is easy to change it to 5%, it would probably introduce a bunch of bugs - most of which would be easy to fix, but not necessary easy to notice. Maybe it wouldn't cause any significant problems...
The other reason is that although it would sometimes be easier to set the sliders in smaller increments, in general you still wouldn't be able to get it exactly the way you wanted it - and so you'd still be adjusting them a little bit up and a little bit down from turn to turn, particularly on large maps, and particularly later in the game. -- The smaller increments would mean you have to adjust it less often, but on the other hand, when you want to make a big change it would take a heap more clicks to make it happen. I'm just not really sure it's worth it. Many people like to drop their research to zero, for a few turns, and then bump it up to 50%, or 80%, or 100%.. and if the increments were half the size, then that would mean twice as much clicking.

So basically, I think it would be exchanging one inconvenience for a different one - with a chance of creating some lingering bugs in the process.

Also a suggestion about community functionality. Would u be interested in opening a separate forum for this mod where we could have different topics sorted and more easier to track. For example: bugs, suggestions, future plans, bla bla bla. You know what i mean. If you are interested and dont have time for setting up the forum ill gladly find some free forum "dealer" and start one and ofc give u full admin privileges and such.

Well, I'm happy enough just having a single thread for the time being - but if a K-mod sub-forum appeared on this site, that would be fine. I don't think it would make much difference for me, but maybe it would give other people more space to talk about the game without it always being technical suggestions and such.

 

[Lenowill]

Played current version for four hours in 4-player multiplayer with not a single OOS error. Yay!

 

[Cybah]

Cool, can you provide the mp difficulty level snippet for all people in the modcomp directory? I would like to implement this in my existing mod.

 

[Todd Hawks]

Thank you for the difficulty level explanations, I didn't even know there are two different kinds of difficulty level being applied!

 

[Roamty]

How do I get the Sevopedia screens working?

 

[keldath]

Lenowill!

awesome!

 

[Danwood]

@karadoc

I played many games so far, and i can confirm the AI is much better than BBAI or vanilla BTS, i simply cannot go back to them or any other mod which does not use karadoc's AI.

But amazingly the feature i've enjoyed the most is global warming: as the description say, it is now very interesting and makes late games really enthrilling!

I have a suggestion though, always about GW:

Turn melted polar caps into water tiles, like the "rising seas" feature from GW mod (which is optional): for every (insert number here) polar cap tile melted, there is a coast (non hill-mountain) tile which turns to water (this would not include cities if possible). Indeed the new ocean tile would lose any improvement-resources on it.

This would make GW more severe, but also more interesting, and most important would be totally optional.

Karadoc, i'm sure you can do that!


Also, i'd like to recommend some little mods (totally not-gameplay wise) which are imho a must-have in any bigger mod (and since K-Mod is my new favorite mod i want to see them in it ):

the mods are:
Dynamic Civs names
Event with images
Culturally Linked Starts
Show Hidden Attitude Mod

Basically some from the PIG mod. I'm sure merging PIG mod with K-mod isn't possible sinc ethe Ai is designed to work with other components, but definitely K-Mod needs some "enge" features to reach perfection, and no, i will not play again another mod which misses K-Mod AI, so i will not see those small mods in my games unless you include them in K-Mod!

 

[Dark Force]

Out of curiosity, what is the probability of being able to build inquisitors to remove religions being added?

 

[Mattygerst]

Edit.

 

[Makaru]

Hi karadoc,

Really interesting looking mod - i'm looking forward to giving it a try after it was suggested in a ROM-AND thread.

However, I have a slight problem when trying to play a game. Once I load K-Mod, and start a game, I have no interface -I can see the game board fine but I have none of the control bars, buttons, sliders, progress bars, etc. I am also greeted with a blank "Technology Advisor" screen when first starting the game.

Please see this screenshot.

Any help would be great!

Thanks,

Makaru

 

[En_Dotter]

Speaking of that screenshot u sent. You might have turned off the interface, i dont know the hotkey but there is one.
Isnt it a bit odd that in lot of fractal maps i see deserts and jungles overlap? Sometimes ice and tundra are a bit strangely positioned. Is it cus of K-Mod or what. Havent see that much of "random" climate areas in original BTS.

 

[entwood]

I tend to move towards mods with the best AI, where you indicate:

"Strongly improved AI. The K-Mod AI uses the BetterAI mod as a starting point, but greatly builds on it. The AI has been taught to understand the new K-Mod game mechanics; but it has also been taught to understand many of the standard BtS game mechanics which were overlooked in the original AI, such as the difference between 'revealing' a resource and 'enabling' a resource. The AI in K-Mod is noticeably stronger than the standard BtS AI, or the BetterAI mod."

but I would hate to give up the graphical improvement and other niceties in Better BAT AI...the mod I was mostly playing with. Are you are interested in adding graphics to K-Mod?

 

[En_Dotter]

You can always use blue marble. I use it and it works fine. Don't know about other graphics mods tbh.

 

[karadoc]

I have a suggestion though, always about GW:

Turn melted polar caps into water tiles, like the "rising seas" feature from GW mod (which is optional): for every (insert number here) polar cap tile melted, there is a coast (non hill-mountain) tile which turns to water (this would not include cities if possible). Indeed the new ocean tile would lose any improvement-resources on it.

This would make GW more severe, but also more interesting, and most important would be totally optional.

In the earlier versions of K-Mod there were rising seas with global warming, but I decided to remove it before it had the potential to completely ruin civilization with just a bit of bad luck. For example, in one game, my oil resource sank (and thus was destroyed). It caused me to lose the game because I was going for a domination victory - and I needed the oil for my navy. Here's an more extreme example (but I can't remember if it actually happened, or if it was just a horrible nightmare): imagine a large civilization which spans a large area of land - like the combined land of North and South America, connected by a 1-plot isthmus. If that isthmus sink due to global warming, the suddenly one half of that civilization would become a "colony", and the maintenance cost would become huge.

I don't think bad-luck should be allowed to have such crippling effects in the game. Also, aside from those balance issues, there were a few graphical glitches which occurred when a land tile got turned into a coast tile. So I decided that although the rising sea levels is kind of a fun idea, it was probably bad for gameplay.

Also, i'd like to recommend some little mods (totally not-gameplay wise) which are imho a must-have in any bigger mod (and since K-Mod is my new favorite mod i want to see them in it ):

the mods are:
Dynamic Civs names
Event with images
Culturally Linked Starts
Show Hidden Attitude Mod

I don't think I'll add the show-hidden attitudes feature, because I kind of like a small element of unpredictability in the AI's attitudes. Culturally linked starts and dynamic names both sound alright. I'll probably look into it at some stage. I probably won't add the event images mod though -- because.. of stuff. (sorry, I just realised that I'm running out of time to write this post.)

Out of curiosity, what is the probability of being able to build inquisitors to remove religions being added?

Pretty low. So far I have haven't intended to add any new units. But maybe you'd be interested to know that K-Mod has different underlying mechanics for how religion is spread...

Hi karadoc,

Really interesting looking mod - i'm looking forward to giving it a try after it was suggested in a ROM-AND thread.

However, I have a slight problem when trying to play a game. Once I load K-Mod, and start a game, I have no interface -I can see the game board fine but I have none of the control bars, buttons, sliders, progress bars, etc. I am also greeted with a blank "Technology Advisor" screen when first starting the game.

Please see this screenshot.

Any help would be great!

Thanks,

Makaru

To me that looks like there has been a python error while the mod was loading. If your original python files from Civ4 and from K-Mod have not been tampered with, then I don't know why that would happen. If you think it's a bug in K-Mod, then I'd like you to do the following:

• After running K-Mod (and seeing the empty interface), close the game and look for the Beyond the Sword python log file (Beyond the Sword\_Civ4Logs\PythonErr.log).
• If that file isn't there; edit the beyond the sword config file to turn on 'logging' (Beyond the Sword\_Civ4Config. "LoggingEnabled = 1"), and then run the game and look for the log again.
• If you get the log file. Post it here as an attachment or something. If you don't get the log file. Weep in despair, because I don't have any other ideas at the moment.

Speaking of that screenshot u sent. You might have turned off the interface, i dont know the hotkey but there is one.
Isnt it a bit odd that in lot of fractal maps i see deserts and jungles overlap? Sometimes ice and tundra are a bit strangely positioned. Is it cus of K-Mod or what. Havent see that much of "random" climate areas in original BTS.

The layout of the land would be from the map generator, which has nothing to do with K-Mod.

I would hate to give up the graphical improvement and other niceties in Better BAT AI...the mod I was mostly playing with. Are you are interested in adding graphics to K-Mod?

Ultimately, what I'd like is for people to use whatever graphics they like in the game, and yet still maintain multiplayer compatibility with all other K-mod players. As a starting point towards that goal, I've made a single-file blue marble tile pack. If you unzip that into your K-Mod assets folder, then you can play with the terrain tileset from Blue Marble; and you can still join multiplayer games made by K-Mod players without the Blue Marble tiles.

I'd like to have something similar for all of the BAT graphics, but I suspect it isn't possible. (To anyone: feel free to try to make such a package! )

Although I personally think the BAT graphics are better than the original BtS graphics, I don't really like to impose that kind of change of people - because it isn't a gameplay change.