Mod-Modders Guide to Fall Further

[scoobygang]

Thanks for your replies. Helps just to know that it's probably not some silly little thing that I've missed.

@Sephi: I've added a couple of buildings in my module already and had no issues, although neither of them alter specialists or commerce.

Yeah, absolutely love the modular system in general.

Can't let my first posts to the forum go without saying a huge thank you to everyone that's put work into FfH and FF (and the mods that have sprung up around them). It's truly fantastic work and I count it as my favourite game. Not just favourite mod(s), favourite game. Full stop.

 

[Schwarzbart]

One thing that I dont like about my curent FF game is that Barbarian groups all of the suden plop up in the LOS. I.e. I haved a Troll Hunter Placed on a mountain and therford haved a LOS of 6 fields away from my boarder but all of the sudden 5 Warriors apeared just 1 Field away from the border.

SO my question now is, if there is a XML way to prefent Barbarians to spawn within the LOS of any Empier?
Even bether would be if Single Barbarian Units still can Spawn in LOS but not groups but I dont think that would be posible.

 

[WarKirby]

barbarians can spawn anywhere in peaceful or neutral territory (peaceful to the barbarian civ, that is)

If you want to stop them spawning, spread your culture. Just being able to see an area isn't enough. otherwise it'd be a bit too easy, I think.

 

[Sephi]

@Sephi: I've added a couple of buildings in my module already and had no issues, although neither of them alter specialists or commerce.

If you only add new buildings, you should be fine. I had problems when I modified existing ones.

 

[Schwarzbart]

barbarians can spawn anywhere in peaceful or neutral territory (peaceful to the barbarian civ, that is)

If you want to stop them spawning, spread your culture. Just being able to see an area isn't enough. otherwise it'd be a bit too easy, I think.

I know that in Base FF it works like this, but means this there is NO XML way here to prefent them to spawn in LOS?

The game might get easyer this way but its still more difficult then disabling barbarians alltogether. And for me its allways the wondering how all of the suden a big Army of barbarians form up so close to my borders when my patrols are out there to search for them. This random Spawn every were thakes away the wort of stratgical placement of the units, but thats my option as a peacfull builder.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

problem is, the default civ4 way means that you just have to place one warrior every 5x5 radius to avoid any barbarian spawning. wayy too easy.

 

[Schwarzbart]

All I whanted to know if there is a way to mod it in XML and so fare I only get answears that people think its to easy then ^^.

 

[Valkrionn]

There might be one in the Defines files, not sure. Check assets/XML, would be the files not in one of the subfolders.

That said, next patch of FFPlus (And maybe FF one day, if just for the mindistance tags), improvements will have new tags enabling them to generate culture. At the moment this is applied to Forts, Enclaves, Bedouin Villages, Pirate Ports, and a few others.

Since forts can be built outside of your borders, you can 'claim' territory and hold it from the barbs. Harder to do than just LoS, and the forts can be stolen by other civs (Including barbs), so I think it works nicely.

As for the mindistance tag I spoke of, you can also set a minimum distance required between improvements of the same type. So Pirate Harbors are no longer a spell, but rather a build order, with the improvement requiring a few tiles between other Pirate improvements to be built.

None of this is actually my work of course. Was done by Jeckel, and then merged to Orbis by Ahwaric, and the to FFPlus by me.

 

[xienwolf]

You have to modify the DLL to disable spawning in visible tiles again. And you would also lose the ability to have them spawn in territory that is friendly with them by doing so, thus once all tiles were filled with culture, barbarians would cease to exist, even if the clan and Archos control 50% of the world.

 

[Schwarzbart]

Thanks for the Infos, so the answear is no. Btw. I will definitv Test the next FF+ because one of the things from Orbis I missed in FF are the cultur spreading forts.

 

[jrandrew]

Is there any way to have a promotion grant a +1 vote in the Overcouncil? I am constructing a Diplomat unit, and after a chain of about 6 promotions I would like to grant that ability on the Final Promotion.

I see

			<DiploVoteType>DIPLOVOTE_OVERCOUNCIL</DiploVoteType>

for units, but putting that in a promotion doesn't seem to do anything...

Thanks!

 

[xienwolf]

You need DLL modification to use that in the Promotions.

 

[jrandrew]

EDIT: So I have been testing my Diplomat and Master Diplomat units out with the <CityBonuses> tags. For example, I have made a special promotion line called "Advocate I", "Advocate II", "Advocate III" which are supposed to insert various levels of culture into an enemy city while at the same time making someone happy there (gives them a reason to tolerate you spreading your nasty culture .). The tags below are for the "Advocate III" promotion:

			<CityBonuses>
				<CityBonus>
					<bApplyRival>1</bApplyRival>
					<fInfectCulture>5</fInfectCulture>
					<fHappy>1</fHappy>				
				</CityBonus>
			</CityBonuses>

However, when I plant my unit in a "rival" city (which I assume means a) not on my team and b) not at war with, also have no agreements of any sort) none of my culture is injected into the city. The happy faces do appear in the city list as "Nearby Units Amuse Us." I know this because I've also given the diplomat units the <bCitySpy>1</bCitySpy> tag and so can see inside their city.

Also, I have created another line of promotions called "Emissary I", "Emissary II", and "Emissary III." These represent parking your unit in a rival unit's city to improve diplomatic relations with them. Example:

		<PromotionInfo> 		<!-- Diplomat - Emissary 1 -->
			<Type>PROMOTION_EMISSARY1</Type>
			<Description>TXT_KEY_PROMOTION_EMISSARY1</Description>
			<PrereqUnits>
				<PrereqUnit>UNIT_DIPLOMAT</PrereqUnit>			
				<PrereqUnit>UNIT_SENIOR_DIPLOMAT</PrereqUnit>			
			</PrereqUnits>
			<CityBonuses>
				<CityBonus>
					<bApplyRival>1</bApplyRival>
					<fDiplo>.1</fDiplo>
					<iBonusRange>1</iBonusRange>
					<fDecayRate>.5</fDecayRate>
				</CityBonus>
			</CityBonuses>
			<UnitCombats>
				<UnitCombat>
					<UnitCombatType>UNITCOMBAT_COMMANDER</UnitCombatType>
					<bUnitCombat>1</bUnitCombat>
				</UnitCombat>
			</UnitCombats>
			<PromotionNextLevel>PROMOTION_EMISSARY2</PromotionNextLevel>
			<Button>Art/Interface/Buttons/Promotions/ArcaneMentor1Comm.dds</Button>			
		</PromotionInfo>

I would think that the stacking bonuses for each level of Emissary would appear summed. E.g. three levels of emissary together would add .85/turn of diplomatic relations with an enemy (yes, I know, after testing this does seem a bit excessive). However, they don't appear as stacked; each appears as a separate bullet point under the unit. See screenshot for example. This is more of a cosmetic, bug, and the same thing happens with adding the cultural bonuses together.

Is it intended that my unit diplomacy bonus be capped at +3? I ask because no matter how long my diplomat hangs out in an enemy city, the relationship bonus never goes higher than that.

END EDIT

Ah, ok, well just asking . Maybe I will just create a "Master Diplomat" unit that allows this ability and is an upgrade from the Diplomat as a workaround.

Would be nice for a future update to have this available for Promotions. Also, to have Diplovotes be available as real numbers, like XP, instead of integers. Imagine, more advanced buildings that grant a Fraction of a diplomatic vote! Pile 10 of them up and you get a vote. Or perhaps leave Diplovotes as integers, but grant each civ in a council 100 of them, Chalid grants 100, Teutorix grants 100, and then other units and buildings can grant 5 or 10 or somesuch.

 

[xienwolf]

The diplomatic effects have a limit of how heavily the hit each leader set in LeaderHeadInfos. To reflect how much they care about how their people feel. Also how quickly these diplo effects wear off is defined in LeaderHeadInfos. Your use of fDecayRate isn't quite right I imagine. That reduces all values of the bonus by the decay rate for each distance away from the unit. Thus your first diplo promotion give +0.1 relations if he is IN the city, but gives -0.4 relations if he is one tile outside of the city. I can't imagine that is quite how you wanted it to work.

The display on seperate lines isn't easily avoided unfortunately. Since each bonus has a range and decay rate, as well as rules of what to apply on, being absolutely certain that any two of them match up completely is pretty hard, so I just opted to leave them each on a line of their own. You could make your promotion line replace the previous promotion and include the value in the new promo instead though (so when you purchase II, you actually lose I, but II has a stronger value to make up for the loss of I)

InfectCulture might be one which was requested and never fully written. I know there are two culture tags, and I am pretty sure the other one lets them build culture of their own in the city when positive (so pure benefit). If you didn't notice a chance in their progress bar, it probably wasn't finished.

In BtS your number of votes is in the thousands. In FfH it is 1 or 2 each. This change causes some serious issues with rounding to determine majority votes. So a system with higher numbers would be ideal indeed.

 

[jrandrew]

Thanks, Xienwolk. I did a search through the source, and I found this in line 10058 of CvCity.cpp:

/*************************************************************************************************/
/**	People's Choice							08/02/08								Xienwolf	**/
/**																								**/
/**			Infects other Cultures into a City with no Culture of the Owner remaining			**/
/*************************************************************************************************/

Looks like the Infectculture tag requires no culture of the native owner to be left. I suppose I could use it in combination with <fCulture> to chip away at the owner's culture to 0 before inserting my own (a la Loki) but I had hoping for more of an effect of inserting my own alongside the already-existing owner.

 

[xienwolf]

Yeah, sounds halfway written to me. It would be intuitive for it to work how you state, and I know that the original culture tag was designed to insert your own culture after the opponent has been reduced to 0.

Either that or it is actually decreasing his culture right now, and will THEN insert your culture after getting him to 0. Check to see if that is happening by using a large test value and seeing if his net culture goes negative.

 

[Valkrionn]

Have an issue I'm not sure how to fix here...

Fall Further Plus 022 is supposed to be standalone, on the off chance that the FF download becomes unavailable while you guys rewrite it... However, if I try to start the mod without FF installed, I get the following error: "Failed to initialize primary control theme", and a crash.

Reasonably sure there's a path out there somewhere that I have to change, but I'm not sure where it is.

 

[WarKirby]

Have an issue I'm not sure how to fix here...

Fall Further Plus 022 is supposed to be standalone, on the off chance that the FF download becomes unavailable while you guys rewrite it... However, if I try to start the mod without FF installed, I get the following error: "Failed to initialize primary control theme", and a crash.

Reasonably sure there's a path out there somewhere that I have to change, but I'm not sure where it is.

I had an issue like that with ff once. I ended up having to completely reinstall bts.

but maybe you don't need to do that. try clearing cache maybe

 

[Valkrionn]

That's what I would think, if not for the fact that with FF installed it loads fine. Something is pointing at the FF directory, that I don't know about.

 

[WarKirby]

That's what I would think, if not for the fact that with FF installed it loads fine. Something is pointing at the FF directory, that I don't know about.

search for the name of the FF directory, perhaps ? start with a windows file search on the mod folder, that'll find it if it's in xml. Failing that, open all python files in notepad++, then do a text search from within there. it has an option to search in all open files.