Planetfall

[Maniac]

Hmm, I'm already running in a persistent crash.

 

[Maniac]

Patch v5a released. It contains a new DLL to fix the aforementioned crash.

 

[arkham4269]

Well I've crashed twice and I have the patch. I like this mod...but it does have one fatal flaw.

It makes me want to play Alpha Centauri instead. So I do.

 

[Maniac]

Do you have saves of the turn before the crash?

 

[Ahriman]

Very interesting mod.
Can you explain better (or link me to a post; I havent read this entire thread) how the planet counter works? Is this basically an Armageddon Counter, with xenofungus spawns
I'm getting spawns of 3+ sea unit spawns very often, which annihilate any cities I try to build offshore. What effects increase the counter? How do I reduce it?
I spend way more time fighting off the naval alien units than I do actually dealing with enemies.

Loading a saved game while still in a game seems to cause a CTD quite often.

Restarting vanilla BTS generates a "Failed to load python module Planetfall" error, and Python traceback "File "<string>", line 1, in ?
ImportError: No module named Planetfall"

I have error traceback on for bugtesting.

 

[Maniac]

Very interesting mod.
Can you explain better (or link me to a post; I havent read this entire thread) how the planet counter works? Is this basically an Armageddon Counter, with xenofungus spawns

Currently the Flowering Counters is affected by the percentage of fungus on the map. More stuff should be added later though. A thread on the matter.

The Flowering Counter does affect the strength, but not the frequency of native life spawning however.

I'm getting spawns of 3+ sea unit spawns very often, which annihilate any cities I try to build offshore. What effects increase the counter? How do I reduce it?
I spend way more time fighting off the naval alien units than I do actually dealing with enemies.

Do these sea unit spawns attack you from elsewhere (in other words, are they random spawns), or are they the consequence of fungal blooms?

If they are random unit spawns, that's annoying. I've switched unit AI of random spawns to Animal AI instead of Attack AI. I hoped that would reduce the directed sea attacks, which I've experienced as well. Not working if it's random spawns you're fighting.

If they are caused by fungal blooms, then the problem is you have a negative Planet value in your bases. You can increase it by having fungus nearby (causes negative health though), building biology lab or temple of planet, having a monolith resource, or using Empath specialists. More methods will be added later, eg a Centauri Preserve improvement increasing base Planet.

Loading a saved game while still in a game seems to cause a CTD quite often.

Ouch. Could you please attach a save where this is happening? It makes it much easier to find the cause of a problem. (I hope you don't play on large maps )

Restarting vanilla BTS generates a "Failed to load python module Planetfall" error, and Python traceback "File "<string>", line 1, in ?
ImportError: No module named Planetfall"

Ah yes. The problem is that the game remembers which mapscript you've last used. For Planetfall you should use the Planetfall mapscript, but that mapscript doesn't exist in the general BtS/PublicMaps folder. Thus giving an error message. An immediate solution would be copying the Planetfall mapscript in the BtS/PublicMaps folder. However you shouldn't use the Planetfall mapscript for vanilla games. So don't forget to switch mapscripts.

I'll have to check if placing the Planetfall mapscript in PrivateMaps instead of PublicMaps solves the problem.

 

[Ahriman]

Also, sea colonies cultural borders don't seem to expand. Annoying bug.

The spawns are from fungal blooms, not random spawns. Really annoying though when they spawn and instantly pillage the slow-to-build tidal batteries.

A save is attached (which demonstrates the 1-ring sea colonies).

So, I should aggressively clear fungus to lower the flowering counter, and this will reduce the number of fungal blooms. Is the "negative planet value" displayed somewhere? I have "no bad planet modifiers" in the mouse-over on city health.

Is there any reason not to build boreholes everywhere I can? These seem to provide much more in the way of resources than other improvements. Boreholes + farms everywhere feasible. Or is this causing the planet penalties which are spawning fungal blooms all the time?

 

[Maniac]

But an easy one to fix. Must have missed that in the conversion to 3.17. Will release another patch sometime soon. Thanks for telling!

 

[Ahriman]

Replied before edit completed; see post above.

Also, is it intended that damaged aquaformers have massive upkeep costs?

If you look at the save above, some of the AIs are pretty crippled; the Gaians in particular seem to have no idea.

Putting the Planetfall map in public maps seems to have solved the problem.
But loading a save while in game still causes a CTD.

The AI factions are still pretty pathetic. They seem unable to realise that they need to chop jungle, so are plagued badly by unhealth.
You're going to have to work very heavily on worker AI in order to get opponents that can put up a decent fight, and possibly give them build speed improvements.
Terraforming is much more important in this mod because of the huge tile yields it grands and the reliance on particular tech paths.

 

[Maniac]

Will reply later, but for now:

Patch b, the Ahriman patch , is available. Changes:

1. Sea bases can now expand their culture radius.
2. Loading a save game in-game no longer causes a crash.

 

[Maniac]

The spawns are from fungal blooms, not random spawns. Really annoying though when they spawn and instantly pillage the slow-to-build tidal batteries.

So, I should aggressively clear fungus to lower the flowering counter, and this will reduce the number of fungal blooms. Is the "negative planet value" displayed somewhere? I have "no bad planet modifiers" in the mouse-over on city health.

The fungal blooms are probably caused by your nearby land bases which do have a big negative Planet value.
Removing fungus will not reduce fungal blooms. The Flowering Counter and a base's Planet value, while related in some ways, are different. The Flowering Counter increases the strength of native life, but not the frequency of blooms.

You could research towards the Temple of Planet for instance, and use an Empath specialist.

There are probably too few ways to increase Planet at the moment though.

Native life should be a challenge however. The trick is in doing this without native life becoming simply annoying instead. My current line of thought is in making fungal blooms less frequent, but when one happens, even more native life spawns at once. Then it may be a real combat challenge, instead of whack-a-mole. Perhaps I've not gone far enough in this.

On another note, one could say that it's simply not a good idea to try and build an empire of sea bases, when you're running a Terraformed ecology. Also, unlike vanilla Civ, bigger cities are not per se better, precisely because of the fungal blooms caused by high population. An empire of small, but many, bases is a valid alternative. This has a synergy with the Hybrid ecology civic.

If you do want be a Terraformer, one strategy could be not to found sea bases, but instead seek out highlands and build land bases there. Fungal blooms simply can't happen on Highlands until the Flowering Counter reaches 60. So you can safely pollute all you want there for quite some time, without your terrain improvements being pillaged.

Is there any reason not to build boreholes everywhere I can? These seem to provide much more in the way of resources than other improvements. Boreholes + farms everywhere feasible. Or is this causing the planet penalties which are spawning fungal blooms all the time?

At the moment not, but in the future boreholes and farm will indeed cause more fungal blooms. Indirectly this is already the case because more foods obviously means more population.

In the near future, you'll also be unable to build two boreholes adjacent to each other, thus limiting how many you can build.

Also, is it intended that damaged aquaformers have massive upkeep costs?

Yep, intended. Aquaformers not being destroyed but instead being temporarily turned into damaged aquaformers, is part of the general "make native life a challenge, not an annoyance" plan. Having to rebuild your formers is annoying. There should of course still be a penalty for letting your units be destroyed. This comes in the form of a huge upkeep cost, "used to repair your former units".

If you look at the save above, some of the AIs are pretty crippled; the Gaians in particular seem to have no idea.

The Gaians started on a peninsula cut off by peaks from the mainland. A human would in that situation turn his Unity Supplies into a Unity Foil, or build sea bases. Unfortunately there's no AI yet for colonizing the seas, leaving the Gaians crippled.

The AI factions are still pretty pathetic. They seem unable to realise that they need to chop jungle, so are plagued badly by unhealth.
You're going to have to work very heavily on worker AI in order to get opponents that can put up a decent fight, and possibly give them build speed improvements.

Now that I can compile DLLs, I can do that eventually.
Though in my experience the biggest problem with the worker AI is that they build expensive boreholes, while not at all their worked plots even have one of the cheap terrain improvements.

Monsoon Jungle gives +1 food with Retroviral Engineering btw. If anything, they're too powerful right now.
(unfortunately this rather important piece of information doesn't show up on the F6 screen at the moment )

 

[Ahriman]

Awesome, thanks for the the replies.
I tried another game with the Gaians, and used Hybrid forests and the Voice of Planet religion and such and got many many fewer fungal blooms. Is this just because my cities are smaller than they were with the Hive? Or does the fact that they are healthy (whereas they were quite unhealthy in my Yang game) make the main difference.

So the Planet rating is a property of a city, rather than an empire, and is primarily based on population size? Does the planet rating of a city display correctly somewhere?

I'll continue to explore the mod, it has a lot of promise.

It might be really helpful to create multiple map scripts, that change the starting fungal cover, level of continents vs islands and altitude. There are no Highlands areas really that you can hide from fungus in.

*Edit*
Wait, is healthiness/unhealthiness the *same* as Planet? So, anything that gives health bonuses will also reduce the chance of fungal blooms? And population matters only because it creates unhealthiness? And eventually by spamming atmospheric processors everywhere I can conquer Planet?
Oh, I think I've figured it out. Some positive health counts as positive planet. But not most. And fungus within the fat cross counts as negative health but positive planet. Jungle counts as negative health but doesn't effect planet. Forest counts as positive health but not positive planet. Hybrid forest?
Its a pretty confusing system, it needs to be clearer which health bonuses are planet bonuses and which aren't.

 

[Maniac]

Awesome, thanks for the the replies.
I tried another game with the Gaians, and used Hybrid forests and the Voice of Planet religion and such and got many many fewer fungal blooms. Is this just because my cities are smaller than they were with the Hive? Or does the fact that they are healthy (whereas they were quite unhealthy in my Yang game) make the main difference.

If they're smaller, that helps of course. Other reasons:
Gaians have an inherent +2 Planet for each base.
Each Hybrid Forest (or fungus, for that matter) in your base gives +0.50 Planet.

So the Planet rating is a property of a city, rather than an empire, and is primarily based on population size?

Currently you can only get negative Planet from population, yes. Later some other stuff will/might be added. Foremost negative Planet from certain terrain improvements. And perhaps from some industrial buildings.

Does the planet rating of a city display correctly somewhere?

To the right of your happiness and health numbers in the city screen.

It might be really helpful to create multiple map scripts, that change the starting fungal cover, level of continents vs islands and altitude. There are no Highlands areas really that you can hide from fungus in.

Unfortunately mapscript creation is currently beyond my abilities, and IMO there are bigger priorities for stuff to learn myself. Most of the Planetfall mapscript was not written by me. If you don't mind digging into the mapscript python file yourself, you can however easily change percentage of highlands and peaks etc yourself, by editing "Finetuning Constants" near the top of the file. If you do so, your experiences with alternative mapscript values would certainly be interesting to hear.

Its a pretty confusing system, it needs to be clearer which health bonuses are planet bonuses and which aren't.

Yeah I know. Unfortunately it is very hard if not almost impossible to find people willing to do some new icons and other graphics for Planetfall.

 

[Ahriman]

Sadly, I couldn't code my way out of a paper bag or figure out how to draw a stick figure using a computer.
Happy to help a little with design decisions though.
The mapscript works well enough for the moment that I agree it should be a low priority.

I figured out the planet thing, eventually. The single best thing you could do to make this easier is to get a separate icon for Planet bonuses and penalties. Create an icon for positive Planet and an icon for negative planet, and stop using the Health bonus icon for these bonuses. They're entirely separate things. It would be very useful for new players to have a clear updated design document that describes how the flowering counter and planet values work in the mod; what effects they have, how to increase/decrease them, and some basic overall strategies.

There's a lot of rebalancing that needs to be done. I assume that eventually Boreholes and Condensers will have a planet penalty, whereas mines and farms and windmills/solar panels won't. Farms actually seem weak; at their best after hundreds of turns they are only equivalent to a condenser, and don't help adjacent tiles. Forests seem weak; they seem to be dominated by mines and farms. Tidal turbines might be a bit strong; there should still be a preference for land over sea IMO.

The enclosed Biosphere civic seems really weak.

Solar panel uplinks are confusing. Why make them a unit, not a building?

Obviously many units and upgrade paths are missing at the moment.

 

[Magma_Dragoon]

Failed to load, and I think I removed all the old stuff.

 

[Maniac]

Failed to load, and I think I removed all the old stuff.

Let's start with the usual drill:
Do you have patch 3.17? Is your Planetfall folder called Planetfall and nothing but Planetfall? Did you install the main file and the patch, and not just the patch? Are you using Windows Vista??

Failed to load? Can you be more specific? Upon loading Civ4 itself, or upon starting a game?

 

[Magma_Dragoon]

Sorry, had it in the wrong directory.

 

[Magma_Dragoon]

Several buildings using the observatory model erroniously give the same bonus as observatory.
Arcology, Brood Pit, Empath Guild, The Merchant Exchange, Nanoreplicator, Neural Amplifier, Paradise Garden, Park, Telepathic Matrix, Thermocline Transducer, and Transit System.

I'd suggest using the Babylonian garden for the paradise garden and NP for park, and using mass transit graphic for transit system. No need to reinvent the wheel for graphics.

Does not work with tectonics mapscrips. Makes all coast with one or two tiny islands.

 

[Maniac]

Those buildings aren't part of the game or tech tree yet. I just added them for future use after some tech tree revision. They will be given appropriate effects then.

You should only use the Planetfall mapscript for Planetfall.

 

[Maniac]

Patch v5c is available. This patch needs to be installed on top of the version 5 main file.

Changelog:

1. Upgrading Unity Supplies costs nothing.
2. 'Colony' maintenance removed.
3. Material Supplies can settle to a Citizen specialist. AI understands this.
4. Plasma Thrower upgrades to Cyborg.
5. Cyborg and Gravebringer gets bonus against infantry, mind worms and spore launchers.
6. Condenser gives +2 instead of +3 nutrients.
7. Genejack Factory gives +2 minerals per Citizen specialist. (thanks to Impaler[WrG] & EmperorFool)
8. "Highlander" promotion added.
9. Rudimentary Aquaformer AI added.

Please post save games of any persistent crashes you may encounter. At least as long as you don't play on Large sized maps.

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