MNAI-U: unofficial build & bugfixes

Do you have any ETA on the next release? I'm thinking some people may be impatient to play with my newly added Unique Features and the Imprimatur Council members that can be resurrected from some such sites, but I'd rather be able to incorporate your latest fixes first unless that would mean waiting a month or more.

 

I will not have time to work on this for the next month or so, so it will take longer than that.

 

If this is a repeat, sorry, I didn't read the whole thread, but the current installer ("More Naval AI unofficial (Installer) 2.9-beta2u") won't work for an unconventional installation location. The .zip file still works, however, now that the installation instructions have been updated.

Just a heads-up. Thanks for your continued work!

 

I have a few notes/observations for the mod. This is based on a recent Let's Play that's available on YouTube:

1. Hill Giants from Pact of Nilhorn - AI loves to send them to take a look at Acheron city. End result - Hill Giants get roasted by fireballs.

2. Early AI rushes with Shock warriors are quite disparaging. Immortal+ (where the AI gets 6+ free XP points for units), denser maps, incredibly hard to pull a good game. Big maps with lots of space, not a big deal, but not everyone plays like that. Needs to be balanced somehow.

3. Later in the game the AI loves to promote troops with City Raider and more or less stops taking the op Shock and Cover promotions. Makes it easier to kill their stacks, that can't even reach the cities to make use of those City Raider promotions. In this situation they better have most of their troops with Combat and a few with City Raider.

4. AI clearing goblin forts early and aggressively removes the aspect of early rushing with Goblin fort troops as a Barbarian leader by a Human player. So one fun strategy is removed from the game. Consider tweaking the AI to ignore goblin forts unless inside their culture borders.

5. Civilopedia models: Correct thumbnails for units in the tech tree and Civilopedia, that's great. But in many cases the 3d models are generic and don't correspond to the thumbnails. As a player: I want to have a cool-looking dude running around from a research, but if the dude looks standard in the Pedia, I'm not sure if I need it. Also Civilopedia states the Clan can upgrade chariots to Knights, but that's not possible, because the Clan has no Knights.

 

I have some experience in Vox Populis, a community mod for Civ V. This mod is very famous. I believe it is the most famous mod of Civ V. It is somewhat similar to the Kat mod of Civ IV since it greatly increases the AI and thus the difficulty of the game. It also changes the balance a lot though, but this is not the focus here.
Anyway, this mod has a very interesting design philosophy regarding game difficulty. In VP, difficulty is progressive. At the very beginning, AI don't receive full bonus but the bonus increase as the game go on. In this way, it results in a more varying early game strategy choices and a competitive late game challenge at the sometime. This progressive difficulty does not limit the early game strategy into turtling for every civilization.
In higher difficulty, Emperor and above, experienced player is able to do early rush. So warmonger nation which benefits from early game unique units and building can utilize their unique feature well. Player is also able to finish one or two early game wonders in this setting.
I watch the Orc Clan LP of Vintage Strategist and I agree to his opinion. If orc need turtle to do war in middle game, then there is not difference between orc and other civs. Taking Vox Populis for example, we could make free XP progressive to enable early rush.
Also, I would suggest Vintage Strategist to play your next game with
Increasing Difficulty enable. That feature increase the difficulty by one until Deity for every 50 turns. You could choose Emperor and see if the game would be more fun in this setting.

 

I get a "load error"(*) after installation (by unpacking etc (**)) - it doesnt even start up fully - I dont get to the menu screen. Fiddled around a bit and the only thing which appears to fix it is to have/leave the "Beyond the Sword\Mods\Fall from Heaven 2" directory in addition to the "More Naval AI" one. Before I just renamed it. It seems to be working now so there may be some kind of link/dependency issue. (And the game uses the .dll from the 'More Naval AI' directory according to the version info at least.)

(*) The "load error" gives me no further info though.

(**) https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/more-naval-ai-unofficial-archive.28252/

 

A minor thing.
In Vintage Strategist's LP, Clan was unable to pick up the wand of wind,since wand of wind is a barbarian unit. Clan need declare war against barbarian to pick that wand up.

Also a minor suggestion.
In higher difficulty, AI would rather die than surrendering their techs. I think AI is stubborn in this regard. For the sake of realism, I am suggesting a new feature. After conquering cities, player or AI get random tech progress for the techs which city owners know about. It is similar to getting gold from sacking cities. You get some knowledge from sacking others' cities too. It is a feature in Realism Invictus, a civ iv mod. That mod disable tech trading on default and have a 40% tech transfer rate though.

 

That's working as intended. If you want to take things from the barbs then you need to be at war with them.

 

LFGR has already said several times he isn't going to be doing balance changes unless it's a necessary change. You are welcome to create your own fork of the mod and add those features in if you want. You might even get someone to help you if you ask nicely and are willing to learn.

 

See this post. ExtraModMod continued

 

Did some test games on 'Immortal' (as Capria/Bannor, Erebus Continents, 1 more AI than default, all else default/unset) and happened to get this: I killed an AI (Balseraph) on turn 3 with a Scout because it was too slow to move its units into its first/only city.

 

Sorry for the late reply, and welcome to the forum!
Did you have the same problem as described in this post? Otherwise, I'll need more details on what went wrong.

I will check that.

@Vintage Strategist, @swapoer, @Sezren: Thanks for the feedback, I'll get back to you in two weeks or so when I have time for modding again.

 

Mushroom event seems to happen for me almost always directly on the starting city. This may be an older issue. Depending on base tile yields this results in an improvement or not. Note that I almost always build starting city on a hill.

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Had at least one instance of getting a unit killed (by a named barbarian unit probably) without getting a message. It still showed in the combat log though. May have the save file still.

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Had this happen several more times - so not an isolated issue.

Starting position and leader/nation are too important for dense maps. I dont think the game is reasonably balanced for dense maps. Unfortunately map scripts dont seem to consider this. I dont want artificial AI (behaviour) nerfs though. OTOH: The AI doesnt seem to benefit from those rushes either. If an AI benefits its the dogpiling ones and not the first rusher. It very much hurts the target but it also hurts the rusher if unsuccessful.

Also have seen the AI do this (mass city raider) in a situation in which it was unwarranted.

 

Something that I've just seen playing the latest version is that the health impacts of blight are declining even though I'm affaected by the illians world spell, stasis. I don't know if that's intended or not ( I probably shouldn't complain).

 

i would say that it's one of the rare perks of being submitted to Stasis.
I've seen another game where declaring war and having mass units out of borders and summoned as mercs / slaves upgrades (with a huge maintenance) ... didn't cost anything, and cities went through their rebellious phase (where there is cost but no gain) during stasis.
the war was "easy" on the financial side.

 

So in the current game that I'm playing there's a couple of things that have come up.
I thought that having dies diei guaranteed eligibilty for over council election. I was running order and the over council civic (with possesion of the empyrean holy shrine) and although I'd been the chief the most recent election did not include me as one of the candidates.
The other item is that although I have an embassy with Basium I can not see his capital city even if I park a unit on it, it just remains fogged out, although the units are visible (screen shot attached).

I'm playing with advanced tactics enabled

 

I've experienced similar problems. I will probably simply remove that embassy feature.

 

Hi there! I finally dug up my account to comment on this thread.

First off, many thanks to you for maintaining the mod, lfgr!

I have a bug report to make, which contains two bugs:

• Adepts with Life I (or Sun I, Water I) can sometimes be automated, to automatically cast sanctify, scorch or spring to terraform the land. However, when this button appears seems to be very unreliable, and I can rarely get it to appear on more than two adepts in a game. Similar case exists for priests of leaves with the bloom ability. The AI also sometimes seems to get stuck on some places, idling around and possibly waiting for further commands despite more work being available.

• An automated adept can cast the world spell. I had this happen in a game of Sheaim, where I automated a Life I adept to push back the hell terrain, when all out of sudden it used Worldbreak. I don't think this should happen, with any world spell. Might happen for other automated units, too, but I have only seen it with the adept so far. It happened more than once over the course of that game (after I reloaded to not have that happen), so I had to stop all my automated adepts and manually send them around.

Edit: Second bug report:

• Require complete kills game option keeps players alive that have only a treasure chest. Being invisible, this renders them immortal. (Also, who would think of this? I only figured it out after loading a MP save as the defeated Lanun AI to see where they might still have units after we searched the entire map. There are probably similar units that could cause such a situation.

 

QoL suggestion: consider work boats non-military units - for Pacifism civic (so that the malus to building military units doesn't apply).

 

why not, but then bannor might not be able to build any in crusade..