[MOD] More Naval AI

[Nor'easter]

BUG = Bts Unaltered Gameplay, basically a mod involving interface improvements without changing the game's rules (hence the "unaltered gameplay"). Just search the forums, easy enough to find.

It's been incorporated into many other mods, including the main FfH modmods: Fall Further, RifE, Wild Mana, and Master of Mana.

 

[Kiech]

BTS Unaltered Gameplay (BUG)

Its a conglomeration of mods that provide you with information that you can already get via your advisor screens, but puts it on your main screen. For example, it tells you when an AI is willing to trade rice with you or when they found a city. Really, it lets me avoid some of the more tedious parts of the game so I can concentrate on playing the game. I am currently using Danev's mod, but it doesn't contain the AI fixes (or patch "o") that the game really needs. WildMana has it standard, but I think WildMana has too many gameplay changes for me right now.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=331029

 

[Valkrionn]

BUG = Bts Unaltered Gameplay, basically a mod involving interface improvements without changing the game's rules (hence the "unaltered gameplay"). Just search the forums, easy enough to find.

It's been incorporated into many other mods, including the main FfH modmods: Fall Further, RifE, Wild Mana, and Master of Mana.

Eh... Not quite. It WAS incorporated into FF, but they trimmed much of it out; The result of that trimming is still in RifE. We're looking at some more aspects (mainly modifications to the city screen), but that's about it.

 

[Nor'easter]

Eh... Not quite. It WAS incorporated into FF, but they trimmed much of it out; The result of that trimming is still in RifE. We're looking at some more aspects (mainly modifications to the city screen), but that's about it.

My mistake. I saw BUG features in FF and RifE, but I've never played the "pure" BUG mod with BtS, so didn't know that aspects of the BUG mod hadn't been incorporated.

 

[Valkrionn]

Just wanted to make it clear it's not all there, so there aren't any posts about it.

 

[Jarrema]

It would be wonderfull to see BUG (or parts of it) merged with your mod, Tholal. I love your mod, but I also love BUG! (and sooo many mods have it)

 

[Aline]

+1 on this BUG thing.

 

[Kiech]

Sorry, I misspoke before about what mod I am currently using. Its Danev's Advanced Rules modmod, which is basically FFH2 with BUG and a few fixes. It DOES work with patch "o".

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=342018

 

[Tholal]

Merging BUG is not really on my priority list (though I may do some small tweaks such as adding a GP bar).

What parts of BUG do you find the most useful?

 

[Aline]

I do love the global GP thingy.

 

[Valkrionn]

All we really use is the GP bar and then notifications.

I would look at the modifications to the city screen as well, particularly the modifications to the trade panel (IE, the ability to show either trade, or yield breakdowns for the city).

 

[Egregius]

I do love the global GP thingy.

+1

That's the thing I missed most tbh. But then again I never looked deeply into BUG.

Aside from this, to get back to the Doviello/Illian terrain thing, a question: is there special code in place for the Illians to decide where to build their cities? It 'seems' they're not always using their snow tiles. As in: in my current game they settled in the tundra/ice, while there's snow/ice to their north with at least a fishing and a marble resource, and they're not settling there in spite of running out of space.

 

[Kiech]

GP Bar, Notifications (will trade, worst enemy, found city, your capital will be unhappy next turn), advisor screens, map drawing tool (to plan out city locations), the extra unit icons (sentry until you spot water units, sentry until you heal, etc), scoreboard, turn counter w/time...I think thats it. Sorry I guess I use most of it...

 

[Broken Hawk]

The found city "thingy"

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

power rating next to leader name in the score chart, and the lovely buttons to keep cities from growing into unhappiness ( those are not BUG per se, but still ) and of course civ4alerts

 

[Valkrionn]

Well, those buttons were added by Jean Elcard, IIRC. They're also quite useful.

 

[ChrisAdams3997]

Definitely the blue 'promotion available' frame on units in the plot list. When you have 10 units and one can get a promotion, it's all too nice to know which unit you're giving the promotion to. I'd added that into my own copy of FfH (with a little trial and error) it was so handy.

Another nice item most people take a bit more for granted I think from BUG is the actual building affects in the help text for a building. But it's not as much of a necessity.

 

[Egregius]

Definitely the blue 'promotion available' frame on units in the plot list. When you have 10 units and one can get a promotion, it's all too nice to know which unit you're giving the promotion to. I'd added that into my own copy of FfH (with a little trial and error) it was so handy.

I'd *LOVE* that.

 

[ChrisAdams3997]

Hey Tholal,

With my DuneWars AI work, I was having a time trying to get a handle on what kind of values the AI was returning when deciding techs to research. The BetterAI team, or it might have even been from vanilla, had added code to the plot help text while in debug mode holding 'ctrl+shift' showing all the possible techs a player can reach within 3 path steps and the AI_techValue() for it. Unfortunately... they failed to account for the fact that that function adds all kinds of random values (so the displayed values in the help text weren't even close to constant, e.i. constantly changing as the screen updated), it had no order, and the values returned have no absolute scale, so you could be looking at one tech with a value of 33,572 and another with 12,342. So even without the numbers all changing on you, it was nearly impossible to draw any useful information from it with a jumble of 20 or so techs all in random order with no rhyme or reason to the values.

So I added an argument to AI_techValue (called bAddRandom) and coded it to just add the average of any random ranges that would have been added (so it's constant) for use in the game text display. From there I used a vector to sort the tech values from highest to lowest, then scaled the returned values by the highest value so the highest value is always 100.0, where all the other techs display their respective % of the highest value. This gave me a sorted and readable list so I can actually get a much better idea of what kind of values AIs are getting from the function when making tech decisions.

Spoiler :

Since techs are weighted by how many turns it'll take to reach them, the values are most accurate while the AI is about to choose one (as if they already have half of the current tech researched, it's value is shown artificially high compared to all others). You can see in the score board that the Artredies (who I'm looking at in the screen shot) are in between techs that turn, so it'll show all the possible techs on even footing in the plot help.

I thought this might be useful to you as well. It's been very handy for finding out what techs are consistently over or under valued (based on the AI's current situation) and what adjustments might need to be made. I'd be happy to merge this into your DLL if you think it will be helpful.

 

[Tholal]

Hey Chris. I ended up just putting in a bunch of log output throughout the AI tech functions. Not quite as elegant as your solution, but I was able to add in details such as how much the AI was valuing individual units, buildings and builds for each tech. I've found all sorts of interesting issues such as...

• the AI was still valuing wonders that had already been built
• the AI was valuing units for other civilizations
• the AI was valuing War Elephants, and thus weighting too heavily towards Horseback Riding

.. just to name a few.

I'm pretty heavily invested in my edits of the tech functions at the moment, but I may take you up on that offer for help installing your code once I get to a point where I'm ready to check in my changes.