Pie's Ancient Europe

[westinator]

re brettschmitt's long turn times:

There's a lot I don't understand about how AI turns work, but:

1. the 14-minute turn appears in the log to have ~33% more workers stuck in loops than the 3-minute turn
2. the mplog updates in real time, and this sequence of worker loops, from mplog14 lines 5750 to 5765,

Player 44 Unit 48145582 (Diodotos von Baktrien's Worker) moving from 126:101 to 127:102
Unit stuck in loop: Worker(Diodotos von Baktrien)[119, 95] (worker)
Unit stuck in loop: Worker(Diodotos von Baktrien)[119, 100] (worker)
Unit stuck in loop: Worker(Diodotos von Baktrien)[122, 98] (worker)
Unit stuck in loop: Worker(Diodotos von Baktrien)[124, 98] (worker)
Unit stuck in loop: Worker(Diodotos von Baktrien)[121, 96] (worker)
Unit stuck in loop: Worker(Diodotos von Baktrien)[120, 98] (worker)
Unit stuck in loop: Worker(Diodotos von Baktrien)[120, 93] (worker)
Unit stuck in loop: Worker(Diodotos von Baktrien)[117, 90] (worker)
Unit stuck in loop: Worker(Diodotos von Baktrien)[118, 92] (worker)
Unit stuck in loop: Worker(Diodotos von Baktrien)[122, 94] (worker)
Unit stuck in loop: Worker(Diodotos von Baktrien)[124, 94] (worker)
Unit stuck in loop: Worker(Diodotos von Baktrien)[123, 96] (worker)
Unit stuck in loop: Worker(Diodotos von Baktrien)[121, 91] (worker)
Unit stuck in loop: Worker(Diodotos von Baktrien)[121, 89] (worker)
Player 44 Unit 46294065 (Diodotos von Baktrien's Worker) moving from 122:69 to 121:68​

takes my machine several minutes to get through, during which the game is frozen and not responding

3. When I deleted all workers in the 14-minute save, turn time went from 14 to 6 minutes

other things to note:
there are ~40 trade wagon and merchantman units in loops on both turns - this is probably not good
xml.log is filled with 90000 lines of this: "[2028.515] info type NONE not found, Current XML file is: xml\Events/CIV4EventInfos.xml" - I have no idea what this means, but it seemed interesting
there's a lot going on in Lsystem.log - it seems like this is probably bad
the map is incredibly awesome, even with long turn times

 

[brettschmitt]

Wow... great investigation west! Problems with trade wagons were already known, but what the hell are all the workers trying to do?
Thanks! This will probably help our bug-team alot...

And thank you for liking my map

 

[pie_at]

Wow! Thx! If only I could now how to fix that all....

 

[westinator]

separate issue:

this happened when the Parisian capitol was destroyed by an earthquake

might be because doCheckCity is checking for the status of a building in a city that no longer exists, so maybe the first check is failing?

 

[keldath]

Unit loops usually caused by movement rules that cause the ai code to run over and over without solution, or a skip mission.
I would looked at the specific units and debug the dll.

 

[pie_at]

@West: strange....

@kel: never did debug the dll before... I would not know how to do the next step, by the way, I still don't use the dll except for the amount of 52 civs.

 

[keldath]

Hi,

Well, the benefits of using dll, are supirior.
If you didnt change it, i wonder what rules causes the loop.

Maybe you should consider using kmod.
I might be able to help some.

As for the loop,
With a save,, i cant do some debugging in your behalf.

 

[westinator]

@keldath
saves attached, go wild!

more discussion here:
https://www.civforum.de/showthread.php?68369-Bugs-Abst%FCrze-Probleme/page234

 

[Ramkhamhaeng]

Maybe you should consider using kmod.
I might be able to help some.

Besides the current bug this is also in general a good idea. Because Pie never touched the DLL AI improving mods like KMod maybe improve PAE a lot (or leading to unexpected behavior).

 

[westinator]

I made a macro that clicks fast, and I was able to turn 1 onager into 4 fire catapults

also, persia is 1000 points ahead in this game, and founded Christianity in 800 BC

 

[brettschmitt]

@westinator
The click macro is a real cheater nonsense
I love to see the Persians as a Leader on the Eurasia XXXL map. Never had that so far... Looks like a good game! What difficulty level are you playing?

[edit] why is your country so small (red area on the minimap)? Even looks like an OCC.


And @keldath
really cool, that you want to help! This would be a great step forward, if the worker bug could be nailed down!

 

[westinator]

update: macro can make 10 FC from 1 onager, just doing my part to test for bugs

always play deity because AI sucks at war

generally play quasi-occ because:
1. a single city can be very powerful if you stack it with wonders, reservists, great people, slaves etc
2. I get bored of personally managing a large empire
3. I figure my deity AI vassals can do more with the land than I can, they produce and research and grow faster, which is why I will give back Dacia's cities as soon as I finish conquering him:

with four armies like this:

 

[brettschmitt]

But how do you get enough research with only a few cities? Crazy tactics, really! And whole South Italy is left alone? LOL

You probably play much more effective than I do... Playing on deity? omg
I see it a bit more like a single player roleplay-citybuilding-diplomacy game than a war game

bug testing is an honest work! Funny stuff with the click generator!

 

[westinator]

this economy puts me ahead of everyone except persia, egypt, and some of their vassals, and I will probably never catch up, but I will still destroy them with praetorians...

or not. we;ll see! now that I check demographics, situation seems tough... maybe persia will research Dark Ages x100 and destroy himself by the time my armies reach him? this is the most advanced I've ever seen a civilization in any of my games - he founded christianity at 800 BC. hmm

 

[westinator]

every time** I kill a unit in this city, this appears - it seems like it's failing to make the city renegade, and the city has been besieged for many turns and is surrounded by ~100 hostile units.


could be something to do with the fact most of the surrounding hostile units are on ships; and/or that some are, but there's also a sizeable land army; and/or that the hostile units are of different civilizations; and/or i have no idea



** actually, every time it should successfully renegade, it gives me the gold I "conquered" but doesn't give me the city

 

[westinator]

i figured out how to timestamp the mplog, which is attached for your perusal, along with my save

in my game on deity, with 37 AI civs remaining, turn 869:

took 21 minutes 31 seconds (with timestamper running, which might slow it down but maybe not, because...)

the persian's turn took 12 minutes 29 seconds
the 37 persian workers in loops took up 10 mins 55 seconds by themselves (!!!)

other interesting things:
worker movement generally takes a lot longer than anything else, even when they aren't in loops
the merchantman and trade wagon loops don't delay anything - they don't matter and don't seem to need to be fixed
other civs also have worker loops, but they don't take as much time - I think it might have something to do with the number of land tiles owned by the civilization

persia is very big:

I know karadoc's kmod does some worker-related bugfixing - maybe integrate that, like keldath said

I don't have any solutions to the bugs, but I helped identify and classify them - maybe I'm a digital entomologist, not a true debugger

 

[brettschmitt]

OMG!!! 21 minutes? That really is a sad record... My longest turn was the 14 minutes save a few posts above.

I think the worker-loops might even be a stone old problem of Civ4 BTS and not related to PAE. Maybe it is in the dll itself. It would be really great if someone could figure that out! No problem that you cannt fix it yourself! You did enough to nail it down to workers. Thank you for helping alot! Now probably the real pros should take over (hope there are a few with the motivation to solve this)

 

[pie_at]

keldath! It would be a great honor, if you spend time bringing the best dll into PAE, you can find. It seems to be the K-mod. But I don't know if K-mod is compatible because I deleted all modern units and lots of modern resources. It just has to have 52 civs. this is all I have in my dll

Would you have a try?

 

[keldath]

Hey hey,
Sorry i got a bit busy in RT.

I got the saves and all, so ill get to try and debug.

As for kmod im working on updating my kmod doto platform.
Adding plain kmod to pie should be hard, just some minor xml changes, some python.
Up until 2 years i didn't know nothing on c++, I recommend you try, it will be beneficial.

Anyway, ill try some pie dll merges soon i hope.

 

[keldath]

well,
i began working on a kmod mod merge.
started off with the xml.
thats the easy part.

kmod comes with bug mod. i guess you did major changes to your UI from what i can tell.
im thinking - can you port these to kmod bug?
im documenting the xml additions and files additions.

fyi:
above 48 civs per game, there are performance issues...
your world size (from a save above) extremely large, that hinders performance allot.
very long turn times.
kmod heps with that, but still.

will take me some time to finish what i can .