I am wondering what would K-mod do with Washington (third picture)? Would the Minimal food resources feature add at least one food resource for the capital like that? Notice it is already size 2 with all the flood plains and Oasis. Does Oasis count as a food resource?
That's an interesting example, because that particular case fails to meet food rules for both K-Mod and BtS. There are no food resources there at all. The floodplains and oasis are counted as extra food, but special features like that only lower the food bonus requirements. In order to meet the requirements there must be at least one actual food resource. -- So, it fails both versions of the food requirements.
However, by the look of things there's nowhere available to add any more bonuses. So the game would have
tried to add more food, but failed due to there being no available plots because food bonuses can't be placed on a forest or no a floodplain.
Apparently, the game will only attempt to remove features (such as forests) to place bonuses when certain conditions are met. I haven't looked into it in great detail, but apparently those conditions aren't met in this example, and so the food requirements simply cannot be met.
--
So, unless there's some kind of bizarre bug which is causing more resources to be placed, then the amount of resources should be very similar in K-Mod and the unmodded game.
I've been looking to see if I can improve the starting position choosing algorithm so that it is less likely to place players on islands with very limited resources; and while I was doing that I discovered that there actually
is a bizarre bug which is causing more resources to be placed. Or rather, there are a bunch of different bugs in the starting position evaluation which basically cause the starting position evaluation to be wrong. ... Extremely wrong. And when this happens, the game may try to add a bunch of additional resources to starting positions which are evaluated to be weak.
I've added some logging to the part of the normalization process which adds these bonuses, and I've found that it's very common for several starting positions in each game to have this problem.
This is somewhat related to the Washington starting position which didn't have a food resource. Apparently, in almost every game there are a few starting positions which are deemed to be extremely low value no matter how many bonuses are added. The rules which sometimes prevent bonuses from being placed are the only reason why we don't end up with cities completely surrounded by bonuses.
These bugs that I'm talking about are actually not from K-Mod. They're in the original BtS rules; so I still think that the current version of K-Mod will probably have similar starts to the original rules... but it is possible that the changes I've made in K-Mod could cause these bugs to manifest in different ways. And so it is possible that K-Mod starting positions could have these erroneous bonuses added to them more (or less) often than in the unmodded game. It's hard to know for sure without testing it thoroughly.
This whole thing is pretty shocking really. I had previously assumed that the reason the game sometimes chose some poor positions was that it wanted to make sure players weren't too close, or something like that. I had assumed it was doing the best it could in a difficult situation... -- and it was trying to do that. I mean, it did have some factors in it to discourage the game from placing players too close, and so on - but they didn't work. Pretty much nothing in the evaluation worked, because there were some things right at the end which completely messed everything up. (sometimes, but not always.)
...
Anyway, I'll try to fix this stuff. I just hope that fixing it doesn't make starting positions become
boring or something.
.
This needs to be toned down somehow!
