K-Mod: Far Beyond the Sword

How is cultural influence for a tile calculated? In the game of this attached screenshot I had a big capital city Paris with size 17, had two religions and a couple of wonders. But Stalin conquered a crappy barbarian city, far from his homeland, and not long after that a french tile flipped to russia. Even though the mousover showed french influence was still 75%.
 

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The fact that the plot is controlled by Russia rather than by France implies that the plot is not in range of any french city.

If Paris' border's expand, the plot will be controlled by France. If Gote is destroyed, the plot will be unowned.

It's not easy to describe exactly how the culture on the plot is calculated; but the gist is that the culture builds up over time based on how much culture is being produced in nearby cities. The cultural influence of each city extends a few plot further than cultural control, which is why there is a lot of french culture on that plot even though it is out of range.
 
I think it works with either-or.
 
A few questions:

Does taking a one city vassal make other civs harder to capitulate like in regular BtS due to reduced power average? Also, if other civs hate that vassal, is it more likely that I'll get dowed? Related to that, in which cases would the AI consider declaring while it otherwise normally wouldn't on Pleased or Friendly?

Thanks :)
 
The mod is failing to load for me. Did the simple install instructions. Tried both the ingame and shortcut method of opening, both simply failed to load after about a wait of 20 seconds. Any ideas?
 
A few questions:

Does taking a one city vassal make other civs harder to capitulate like in regular BtS due to reduced power average? Also, if other civs hate that vassal, is it more likely that I'll get dowed? Related to that, in which cases would the AI consider declaring while it otherwise normally wouldn't on Pleased or Friendly?

Thanks :)
1) No. The power is no longer averaged. It is summed, but with vassal power counting for less than your own power.
2) If your vassal is hated, you'll get a visible diplomacy penalty saying something like "Our rivals are vassals to your empire" or something like that. But that's all. The behind-the-scenes attitude averaging has been removed.
3) The AI may declare war at Friendly if they are fully focused on a conquest victory. It's not always easy to tell when this is the case, but as a general rule of thumb, if someone has a couple of vassals - watch out!

The mod is failing to load for me. Did the simple install instructions. Tried both the ingame and shortcut method of opening, both simply failed to load after about a wait of 20 seconds. Any ideas?
I don't have any ideas so far. Can you give some more details about what is happening? When you say "simply failed to load", what exactly is happening? Does it crash to desktop with a message from Windows? Does the game just close and not say anything or do anything? Does it load the game but without the mod? Does it display some kind of Civ4 error message saying "this mod has failed to load" or something like that?

A couple of things which are important, but not mentioned in my installation instructions are that the base game has to be fully up to date. ie. Beyond the Sword version 3.19; and that the core game files should not have been tinkered with. ie. It's ok to have stuff in mod folders and in custom assets, but the non-custom assets files should be completely untouched (except by the official 3.19 patch.)
 
1) No. The power is no longer averaged. It is summed, but with vassal power counting for less than your own power.

Since what version of K-Mod has this mechanic been in place? EDIT: I didn't see this information in the changelogs that are available. /edit

I'm still in the middle of my first game with K-Mod which I started quite a while back, so… I'm using version 1.18b. I'm pushing for a conquest victory and wondering whether to take vassals or not.

Can't wait to update to the current version of the mod by the way, I'm really enjoying it. When I do update, I was wondering whether I should uninstall/reinstall BUG first. I believe I installed it using the "Multiplayer (Mods folder)" option, which seems to make BUG "main mod" which may not be ideal. So far I haven't had any conflicts between BUG and K-Mod, but just wondered whether you had a recommendation as to whether to install BUG differently. Thx! :goodjob:
 
Dude! :D
U are missing a lot with 1.18b. Not that its bad version but rather the others are so good. Update as soon as possible and u wont regret it! GL with you game but i cant answer your question :(
 
I think all of that averaging stuff has been in K-Mod since before I started keeping logs. I think the change of willingness to vassalate was a change from BBAI; so that's been in K-Mod since the first version; and the attitude averaging was one of the first things I changed when I started modding.

As for the BUG mod; that's completely independent of K-Mod. So unless BUG does something remarkably silly in its installation, it shouldn't affect K-Mod in any way. K-Mod implements the BUG features itself. It doesn't look for any external BUG installation.

--

Recently I've been tinkering with the AI's evaluation of war targets. I'm trying to add a bit more intelligence and nuance to their decisions of who to attack. It might turn out to be a bit of an annoying update to the mod when I finally upload it, because the AI might behave in a way that we just aren't use to... and I can't even guarantee that it will be 'better'... But it is certainly on the track for becoming better! (Maybe the difference won't even be noticeable. It's hard to really tell without a lot of games played; and I haven't finished writing it yet.)
 
3) The AI may declare war at Friendly if they are fully focused on a conquest victory. It's not always easy to tell when this is the case, but as a general rule of thumb, if someone has a couple of vassals - watch out!

1) DoW while Pleased

Thanks for your answers. Does this logic also apply for Pleased? For example, Joao doesn't normally attack on Pleased. Does he need to have some conquest going strategy to break that rule, or could he do it without much reason?

2) Revolting vassal cities

Here are some pictures from my current game, K-MOD Immortal Pangea :
Spoiler :


89b2528f8ff0f5cd1bc93b00a4eedb3c2d7b58b9e2dd8a1a78f8772e5a618f066g.jpg


10% chances to revolt. The French have Judaism as state religion, I'm running Free Religion.

73e5fdac87975d3b2ccecd2979e964abbbd2661e725deed584e480cbce4719f66g.jpg


I move a big stack of elephants to Paris, revolting chances are down for only 0.05%! This mechanic looks like it needs some fine tuning.

 

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Hi there ... just started my first game with your mod and i have to say its great so far ;)

but im a bit confused i just had an event that one of my town´s lost one religion ... never saw this be4 so i did some google-searching and found out its an ability of the Inquisitor from FFH-Mod ... but i cant find any infos here or in your changelog/readme where u added it or how i could "delete" it ...
I downloaded this mod because he was recommended for the prevention of oos-sync error in mp!
doesn´t want to change the normal civ4 game style with new units =/

i'm hoping for help and thanks in advance ;)

edit: ok nevermind ... just found your post on page 46 about this mechanic in your mod =)
 
Hi.

I'm really wanting to play this with a friend, because it seems like a general improvement over CivBtS.

However, I want to make a few additions to the mod and add a few units. As a noob modder, I want to know if anyone can help me.

I hope to add in Next War and the Inquisitor unit, a number of the resources not included in vanilla BtS (such as coffee, apples and cotton), the Marsh terrain type and the Revolution mechanic from a number of other mods.

As this mod is the first priority of all these thoughts, I guessed I could start by posting here for guidelines. Can anyone help me?
 
joakim

revolution requires a lot of changes within the CvGameCoreDLL.dll (some of which may clash with kmod) so you'd have to merge and recompile. and then troubleshoot a hell of a lot i imagine :) not noob friendly! if you feel like some hard work then you might have an easier time merging glider's "RevolutionMP" which would probably cut down on your work (bear in mind it was really only released for testing purposes). i suggest you save yourself some pain and don't bother with revolutions ;)

better news: next war is pretty simple to merge! just a matter of setting up a working folder somewhere and using fresh copies of both mods (with kmod as the base). compare the assets folders of both mods and then move any unique sub folders and files from next war into kmod asset folder. after that youll be left with a bunch of xml and python files with the same name. it is now a simple case of merging the differences contained within next wars files into the kmod ones.

to do this you really need a decent xml editor.

oh and enable the logging system in civilization.ini for troubleshooting purposes. the logs show up in their own subfolder in your docs folder\my games\bts.
 
I suggest WinMerge for merging purposes.

Depending on the implementation of the Inquisitor unit, it could be more complicated too, because it should have some kind of AI so it knows where to go and when to be built. But I've seen this implemented in Python, too, so maybe you can save the effort of recompiling the DLL here.
 
I've been trying to win an emperor level game for a while now. Its a "Not Too Big and Small" map with two major continents and two smaller ones. English and Romans have a small continent each. I have a major continent. Zulus, Byzantines and Malians (Mansa Musa) share a larger major continent.

No matter what way I play it I just can't catch Mansa. He runs away with the game. The English and Byzantines have strong tech positions too so can't be dog piled easily.

I've uploaded a save where I've just won the Liberalism beeline and chosen Nationalism. Can you see a way to win?

From that save point I can get Rifling first. I generate a GM for upgrade money and draft in Riflemen. I also build the Taj for the golden age for free civic change. Unfortunately the rest seem to be able to tech quickly enough to riflemen to negate the tech advantage by the time I can invade across the sea. Mansa just has too many units too.

Is a domination win possible from here? Is any win possible?

Any feedback would be welcome.
 

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joakim

revolution requires a lot of changes within the CvGameCoreDLL.dll (some of which may clash with kmod) so you'd have to merge and recompile. and then troubleshoot a hell of a lot i imagine :) not noob friendly! if you feel like some hard work then you might have an easier time merging glider's "RevolutionMP" which would probably cut down on your work (bear in mind it was really only released for testing purposes). i suggest you save yourself some pain and don't bother with revolutions ;)

better news: next war is pretty simple to merge! just a matter of setting up a working folder somewhere and using fresh copies of both mods (with kmod as the base). compare the assets folders of both mods and then move any unique sub folders and files from next war into kmod asset folder. after that youll be left with a bunch of xml and python files with the same name. it is now a simple case of merging the differences contained within next wars files into the kmod ones.

to do this you really need a decent xml editor.

oh and enable the logging system in civilization.ini for troubleshooting purposes. the logs show up in their own subfolder in your docs folder\my games\bts.

I suggest WinMerge for merging purposes.

Depending on the implementation of the Inquisitor unit, it could be more complicated too, because it should have some kind of AI so it knows where to go and when to be built. But I've seen this implemented in Python, too, so maybe you can save the effort of recompiling the DLL here.

So the Inquisitor and NextWar is doable? It's pretty nice because that was kind of my first priorities... :P Leoreth, what's WinMerge?
 
(Keep in mind throughout this post that I utilized the Aggressive AI option.)

Kay, I've played a bit with the improved AI of this mod now, and it seems pretty potent. However, the way it's done really turns me off. In fact, it turns me off so much I really don't want to play the mod with my current options. Which we'll get back to at the end of the post.

See, the AI makes great decisions now. I have played a game as Greeks where I was isolated with the Vikings on a continent. I conquered the Vikings as soon as I could and started fast-teching (Because if I didn't, tech trading would get me so far behind I would have no chance to win this game). When I then meet the outer continents of Ethiopia (That also ended up on a lone island) and the Old World which was basically Sumeria's dominion, it took ten turns before Ethiopia whipped up a naval Galleon landing to exploit my bad position.

However, here's my problem with the AI: While it is much better at punishing my weak points and amassing a fast naval landing to hurt me as much as possible, for Zara himself, the whole naval landing was pointless. All he did was to amass his whole army and throw it into one of my very wealthy coastal cities and raze it instantly. Then his army died when I encroached it - I did manage to build a few cuiraseers at that point - but really, the few games I've played, the AI really seems to like doing this; throw his whole army suicidally into a wealthy city of mine and raze it. Which leads absolutely nowhere for the AI. In fact, the whole effect of Zara's war was to piss me off and make me feel bad while the actual lead - Gilgamesh - was free to lead continually. I even had a huge production surplus compared to Zara in addition to the military power. Zara had no chance to win whatsoever.

I feel that warfare should be a tool for a nation to assume control of new resources and expand power. Zara ruined his own military standing to remove a coastal city. I really don't have anything against losing cities, but with this mod everyone's warfare strategy seems to be pointless in the Montezuma degree - just randomly declare war against someone and suicide everything while ruining that someone's economy. Wat. The beginning of the game against Ragnar was spent defending my city when he DoWed me and sent 5 archers into my 5 phalanxes. Again, wat.

The thing is that I could easily spend a few hundred years conquering Zara, but if I know the AI in this mod (...), Gilgamesh & Friends will just DoW me as soon as I make a proper landing into Ethiopia, leading to them conquering me rather than Zara, in the end.

I therefore have some thoughts on the AI design:
1) Tactically, in regards to handling singular battles, this mod does it great.
2) Strategically, well, it doesn't. The AIs seem to randomly DoW only to remove cities. Zara even did it while on pleased, which haven't happened to me before...
3) It feels like the AI doesn't really play to win here. :( Rather, it reminds me of old Civ2 days where all the AI did was to play as a cooperative bumper for your war juggernaut. I personally prefer the newer game design idea where the AI has self-interest and acts as if it was another player with its own interests.
4) I think this whole deal is a consequence of the Aggressive AI thing, though. I usually have it on since it's kind of more true to real world history if nations fight more than they do in regular civ, but I have a jist the option really isn't suitable with K-Mod. Which is my personal explanation of Zara's completely unfun and douchy behavior; aggressive AI. I am not going to have it on when I play it again. The AIs merely seem to gang up on the player which will make any lucky AI win, not one AI in particular because of imperial aspirations, but rather because it's a player and he has a city open to raze.

EDIT: Any kjind of explanation for this behavior would, of course, be very welcome. :confused:
 
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