jdog5000
Revolutionary
Hi all!
So, it's been quite a while since the last new release, and particularly since the last real update to the Revolution logic. Some things have been happening behind the scenes, so I thought it'd be a good idea to give you all an idea of what's going on and what to expect.
First, the big news: glider1 and I have joined forces and are working together on RevolutionDCM. This means that future versions of Revolution will come with a slightly customized version of BUG, Dale's Combat Mod, Influence Driven War, and other optional extras already built in. A lot of people have been playing Revolution this way since RevolutionDCM was launched, several other modpacks use this as a base as well. If you haven't played with BUG before, it's really cool. As always, all the various features can be disabled so if you're a purist you can keep to just the Revolution experience. Integration of course allows these pieces to work better together.
As a part of this merger, the mod has a new home on sourceforge:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/revolutiondcm/
This means that those who are interested can follow what's happening with the mod code and check it out using svn. The whole mod is on there, not just the SDK sources, so you can try out the development version if you want ... be warned though, while we try to check in stable code the development versions may not have been tested much yet and subsequent changes will break savegame compatibility occasionally.
The other aspect which is going to make the mod better over time is how much about the inner workings of the AI I've learned while working on Better BTS AI. The CivIV AI is fairly robust, but to get it working as intended requires careful coordination between quite a few different pieces.
As an example, I have just finished updating the BarbarianCiv component, it's now feature complete meaning it has all the new pieces I had planned for it and that we've discussed here on the forums, though it of course needs to have the balance checked. At times in the past militaristic barbs, even though they were given substantial armies, wouldn't use then or would bring several separate small groups which could be easily handled. With tweaks to what kind of UNITAI barbcivs are given, and a few customizations to the unit logic for newly created civs, they now are much more of a force and can climb the scoreboard. These same kinds of changes are also coming for rebels, so they should do a much better job of creating attack stacks and keeping momentum against the mother civ after their initial gains.
So that's some of what's been going on. Progress on the main planned changes to the Revolution system has been slow while Better BTS AI and lately BarbarianCiv have been the focus. I won't be around too often over the next month or so as I have some travel and looming deadlines in RL. After that we'll have the first official release of glider1 and my combined efforts on RevolutionDCM, it should be a very exciting new version.
So, it's been quite a while since the last new release, and particularly since the last real update to the Revolution logic. Some things have been happening behind the scenes, so I thought it'd be a good idea to give you all an idea of what's going on and what to expect.
First, the big news: glider1 and I have joined forces and are working together on RevolutionDCM. This means that future versions of Revolution will come with a slightly customized version of BUG, Dale's Combat Mod, Influence Driven War, and other optional extras already built in. A lot of people have been playing Revolution this way since RevolutionDCM was launched, several other modpacks use this as a base as well. If you haven't played with BUG before, it's really cool. As always, all the various features can be disabled so if you're a purist you can keep to just the Revolution experience. Integration of course allows these pieces to work better together.
As a part of this merger, the mod has a new home on sourceforge:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/revolutiondcm/
This means that those who are interested can follow what's happening with the mod code and check it out using svn. The whole mod is on there, not just the SDK sources, so you can try out the development version if you want ... be warned though, while we try to check in stable code the development versions may not have been tested much yet and subsequent changes will break savegame compatibility occasionally.
The other aspect which is going to make the mod better over time is how much about the inner workings of the AI I've learned while working on Better BTS AI. The CivIV AI is fairly robust, but to get it working as intended requires careful coordination between quite a few different pieces.
As an example, I have just finished updating the BarbarianCiv component, it's now feature complete meaning it has all the new pieces I had planned for it and that we've discussed here on the forums, though it of course needs to have the balance checked. At times in the past militaristic barbs, even though they were given substantial armies, wouldn't use then or would bring several separate small groups which could be easily handled. With tweaks to what kind of UNITAI barbcivs are given, and a few customizations to the unit logic for newly created civs, they now are much more of a force and can climb the scoreboard. These same kinds of changes are also coming for rebels, so they should do a much better job of creating attack stacks and keeping momentum against the mother civ after their initial gains.
So that's some of what's been going on. Progress on the main planned changes to the Revolution system has been slow while Better BTS AI and lately BarbarianCiv have been the focus. I won't be around too often over the next month or so as I have some travel and looming deadlines in RL. After that we'll have the first official release of glider1 and my combined efforts on RevolutionDCM, it should be a very exciting new version.
