K-mod vs BAT?

[Imperator Knoedel]

Okay, so.

K-mod is a mod that is relatively minor in scope, more or less just polishing BTS as it is, rather than adding fancy extra content for its own sake.

BAT is a mod that is relatively minor in scope, more or less just polishing BTS as it is, rather than adding fancy extra content for its own sake.

One would think that those two mods go together like chocolate and peanuts, but apparently there is to this day not a real ultimate version of BTS that combines both. How come? I heard rumors that a while ago some guy was trying to do just that, but he never finished it and he also didn't give credit and ever since there has been bad blood between karadoc and the BAT team. Is that true?

At any rate, if I have to choose just one, I guess I might as well get the scoop on public opinion.

So, which do you consider to be the ultimate version of Civ4 between the two? And no, Realism Invictus or Legends of Revolution or the other five gazillion mods that claim to be that don't interest me here.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

I can't speak for Karadoc or the rest of the BUG team, but to my knowledge there is no bad blood between Karadoc and the BAT team (me). There was a problem with myself and the maker of the unauthorized merge for not giving the modders used in BAT credit, but that has nothing to do with Karadoc.

 

[lymond]

BAT for life!

 

[Quoth the Raven]

K-Mod.

 

[Fish Man]

BAT cuz I haven't tried K-Mod. Could someone give me a rundown of the advantages and features of the latter?

 

[Archon_Wing]

The AI is better with their units and often makes quite a lot. They're harder to manipulate and will attack you anyways if you're weak..... sorta like Civ V except they don't try to waddle through a valley and losing everything.

 

[Fish Man]

The AI is better with their units and often makes quite a lot. They're harder to manipulate and will attack you anyways if you're weak..... sorta like Civ V except they don't try to waddle through a valley and losing everything.

Thanks for the answer, but I have to say this is basically...not like Civ V at all.

In Civ V, the AI is absolutely NOT better with their units; it's almost comedic seeing them try to fight. They're VERY easy to manipulate; if Shaka is ready to war you can just pay him 7gpt and a horse to DOW another neighbor. And while they do make numerous units, it's almost never more than what 4-5 bows in the early game or a wall of bazookas with AA support in the late game can't handle.

 

[Archon_Wing]

I didn't say V's were better with the units. I suggested the opposite hence the phenomenon of waddling through some choke point and failing miserably to kill anything.

I meant in the sense that you can't guarantee they can't attack you (getting them to pleased/friendly, beg 1 gold, check wheoohrn etc).

 

[Fish Man]

I didn't say V's were better with the units. I suggested the opposite hence the phenomenon of waddling through some choke point and failing miserably to kill anything.

I meant in the sense that you can't guarantee they can't attack you (getting them to pleased/friendly, beg 1 gold, check wheoohrn etc).

Hmm...while I agree that makes the AI more competitive and winning harder, it might not make the game more fun per se. In IV I like the way there are proven ways to guarantee at least some sense of security, unlike in V where almost everyone is a raving lunatic. I think the won't attack at pleased/friendly is a good feature since it forces the player to work towards a tangible diplomatic goal, with the incentive of not being attacked as the reason.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Hmm...while I agree that makes the AI more competitive and winning harder, it might not make the game more fun per se. In IV I like the way there are proven ways to guarantee at least some sense of security, unlike in V where almost everyone is a raving lunatic. I think the won't attack at pleased/friendly is a good feature since it forces the player to work towards a tangible diplomatic goal, with the incentive of not being attacked as the reason.

That's also part of the joke. Despite the attempt to make a more cutthroat AI, they made one that can't cut butter, failing anyways.

And yes, 4's diplomacy is definitely the best, despite some flaws.

 

[Pangaea]

Not sure how K-mod can be described as minor in scope, when it changes gameplay rather considerably.

Anyhow, I voted for neither. I'm a BUG/BUFFY man, and prefer the look of the original game over BAT's. Also lighter on resources, which is a pretty big boon in the later eras of the game due to the wild lags Civ4 sadly winds up in then.

 

[lymond]

Not sure how K-mod can be described as minor in scope, when it changes gameplay rather considerably..

That's my thought too, not to disparage K-mod at all, but it does make some fairly big changes to basic mechanics, although it does not add stuff to the game like other mods (at least that I recall). It does include so BUG components as well, although I believe Karadoc modified and excluded some features.

Actually, BAT is more optimized than BUFFY. Lemon has maintained BAT long after the last bug/bull release. BUFFY is a beast...at least the current standard version. The beta includes the latest BUG/BULL stuff but still has some bugs and has not become official.

You can turn off some of the BAT graphics features at install like VD and Blue Marble. The nice thing about BAT is it is a complete working BUG/BULL conglomeration, with the optional BULL stuff (that I could never get to work and really like) installed and ready to go. (BUFFY has that too) So really BUFFY and BAT are quite similar except for the HOF mod stuff and the fact that BUFFY is very outdated and poorly optimized.

 

[f1rpo]

I meant in the sense that you can't guarantee they can't attack you (getting them to pleased/friendly, beg 1 gold, check wheoohrn etc).

This refers to Civ V, right? (Which I've never played.) As for K-Mod: The attitude checks for planning war are still there. Once war preparations are underway, attitude is no longer checked – as in BtS. The K-Mod AI is more hesitant to abandon war preparations though. Begging for peace also works in K-Mod, but they refuse if already preparing war. WHEOOHRN works, but "fear their military might", "have nothing to gain", "don't like you enough" and "couldn't betray close friends" take precedence, i.e. if one of these apply, you don't learn about WHEOOHRN. And in any case, no indicator is shown on the scoreboard (although, apparently, you can get the fist indicator back by editing two Python scripts).

DoWs are arguably, and perhaps regrettably, the most noticeable difference in AI behavior, but K-Mod (together with the included BBAI mod) touches almost every part of the AI – citizen assignment, worker builds, whipping/drafting, tech, civic and production choices, city placement, victory strategies, tactical movement, diplo votes, espionage, pathfinding – and fixes numerous AI bugs.

Not sure how K-mod can be described as minor in scope, when it changes gameplay rather considerably.

There's no added content, but, yes, the overall gameplay does change considerably, and not just through the AI – there are also some balance changes. I suppose players who never learned the details about AI behavior anyway wouldn't find K-Mod that different from BUG apart from getting attacked more and maybe having to go down one difficulty level.

 

[Archon_Wing]

So there aren't any Ais that plot at friendly then ? I suppose this is a problem with ais that won't be bribed easy and they like everyone. Gilgamesh is an annoying example since inevitably he gets pleased with most people and that would hide red fists. He can't be bribed to people he is pleased with but he can plot at pleased. Not that he takes bribes until friendly anyways.....

Not that I really care either way. That just changes this game.

Civ 5 and 6 ais seem to be a throwback to older games with opaque diplomacy and designed to screw you. What it means in reality is that it is a bunch of guesswork and you are better off killing them all. To be safe.

 

[f1rpo]

So there aren't any Ais that plot at friendly then ? I suppose this is a problem with ais that won't be bribed easy and they like everyone. Gilgamesh is an annoying example since inevitably he gets pleased with most people and that would hide red fists. He can't be bribed to people he is pleased with but he can plot at pleased. Not that he takes bribes until friendly anyways.....

Well, actually, when an AI gets close to a military victory, K-Mod allows plotting at friendly; I forgot about that when I wrote my last post. About Gilgamesh - yes, I think that's how it works.

More on topic, when I learned about K-Mod three years ago, I read through the changelog, which consists of more than a thousand bullets like these:

Spoiler :

+ The automoves phase for human players now will not automatically activate when one of the automoves units is selected.
+ When choosing an improvement, the AI will now try to anticipate how the improvement will change their future needs - this should reduce the AI's tendency to oscillating between different improvements.
+ The AI will now be less keen to trade for strategic resources that it doesn't yet have the tech to reveal or use.
+ The choose production popup screen will now be postponed if the city is in disorder.

Most of the changes really aren't important, but they do make the game a little bit better, and it seemed a pity not to use them. The flip side was having to relearn how to deal with the AI, and having to deal with a few changes I didn't like, e.g. to revolt probabilities.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Ah, well that's the comparison to V came in. The AI will definitely betray you if it thinks it can win.

Of course, that's strictly only in theory. =p

 

[unas876]

I'd like to get BAT to work, but I can't. As far as I know its pretty much just BUG/BULL in better, with a few extra features that you can turn on or off depending on how you like it.

AZ has done an LP with K-Mod on. It didn't really look too good I thought.

Sure it took AZ a while to figure out how everything worked (thats why hes complaining for no good reason in the beginning), but even after that it kinda looked like the AI was really only better at war, but at most other things they were worse, particularly stuff like expansion. Other people in the comments are also reporting that in their games theres still tons of empty land and AIs stuck at 5-6 cities hundreds of turns into the game (I'm guessing this is Marathon speed the guy is talking about, but still).
Anyways, I just watched this LP at the start of the year and all I can recall is that it wasn't very good advertisement for the mod imo.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Well, better AI + Unfamiliar mechanics typically means you are better off dialing down the difficulty for your first try I think, maybe even a few levels. I mean, the AI bonuses were designed with the default AI in mind.

The other thing is that playthrough is on Fractal which is rolling dice basically. It's generally not a good place to benchmark.... anything as the ease or difficulty is dictated heavily by map spawn.. And this map was terrible. Fractal maps can help you round yourself out because you have to adjust to a number of situations but in general after you have mastered your difficulties (unless of course, you keep rerolling and get carried by your map. Then I can say I can win on immortal!)

I would say the best way to test it is on a very boring and standard pangea map using a very typical expand and tech to lib strategy.

 

[unas876]

About the map in the LP:

Spoiler :

He did reroll two times, didn't he? So three games with a different map each time, IIRCC.

The good thing about Fractal in this scenario is that you actually get some water combat, and that was one of the main points why people asked him to play the mod: it fixes various flaws in how the AI handles and approaches warfare, and that can most notably be seen in water battles.

Anyways, sure you should dial down the level you're playing on, but even if you don't: when checking out a new mod winning the game isn't really the metric you're looking at when judging the mod in the end. And again, just from what I recall from this LP, it really wasn't great advertisement for me to go try it out myself. It left me with the general conclusion that they tried to do too many things, which resulted in some problems being fixed but a bunch of others created, as opposed to just doing more or less minor fixes to certain key problems.
But again, I have not played this mod, so take my opinion on it with a big pinch of salt.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Civ snowballs, and so do complaints. Naval combat usually takes place later on anyways, and first impressions matter.Could have been something like continents too.

I have watched all of it, and I've played K-mod, it is evident that annoyances were piling up due to a combination of unfamiliarity and unavoidable situations leading to frustration. It's hard for anyone to stay objective. And that's why it's not good advertisement. It was set up for trouble.

This is not necessarily the fault of the mod maker or the LPer. It is the nature of the game itself, where luck does play a large factor.