Probably Improved Gameplay Mod

[PieceOfMind]

for some odd reason i cannot extract 0.75 on XP.

Sorry that's partly my fault. I used a different compression method for the zip this time (LZMA) so assuming you're using the uncompression default utility provided by xp, you've either run out of RAM for extracting it or for some reason it's not supported.

I've re-uploaded the installer in a zip that should work for you. The alternative is for you to download the free 7zip software (which I highly recommend regardless).

Let me know if you still can't extract it after doing one of those two options.

 

[PieceOfMind]

v0.81 uploaded.

Changes:

-Oil well and offshore platform have 1 more added to them.
-Merged Unofficial Patch 1.3
-Merged Better AI v0.82
-AITargetCityValueFix tweaked a little in line with BBAI's logic.

-Had to comment out this line in the SDK, a change made for BBAI in CvPlayer.cpp:
logBBAI("Player %d (%S) setTurnActive for turn %d", getID(), getCivilizationDescription(0), GC.getGameINLINE().getGameTurn() );

 

[essmene]

i had tried winace first and then the default XP and both choked .

 

[PieceOfMind]

Do you mean you still can't extract it? Or did you get it working?

Has anyone else had any issues extracting the zip for 0.81?

 

[TheLazyHase]

Two random thought :
* why oil get +1 commerce ? Flavor or do you think they was a balance issue with them ?
* Don't you find that the actual quote are far less striking than the civ4 quote ? They are too long and most of the time does not mean that much.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Two random thought :
* why oil get +1 commerce ? Flavor or do you think they was a balance issue with them ?
* Don't you find that the actual quote are far less striking than the civ4 quote ? They are too long and most of the time does not mean that much.

Oil: I felt the improvements were relatively weak and pretty unrealistic too (only give 21). Given that oil wells are usually on desert, it would be nice if they were a bit better for working.

Regarding actual quotes, I don't have much of an opinion on them. It adds a bit of size to the download whatever the case. Anyway, I could remove them.

 

[essmene]

City placement.

After invading the Ottmans i found that his first 2x cities were rather badly placed.

Neither did he settle near the coast, nor did he settle his capital near the coast / river.

I am not sure where i should report this.

 

[TheLazyHase]

It look like regular AI placement.

If anything, report it to Better AI.

@PoM : maybe waiting for the opinion of more than one person before removing ActualQuote ?

 

[Dumanios]

Yeah,over to BetterAI.

 

[PieceOfMind]

It look like regular AI placement.

If anything, report it to Better AI.

@PoM : maybe waiting for the opinion of more than one person before removing ActualQuote ?

So far, 100% of the feedback (i.e. yours ) has not been in support, so that's what I'm going on. j/k. But seriously though, as I said above, I'm indifferent and personally I wouldn't care whether actual quotes is in there or not. I'll have to have a skim through and see what actual text they added.

That goes as an invitation to anyone else who wants to keep giving feedback - I'm always looking for suggestions and criticisms because I'm kinda getting near the limit of the things I wanted to put in that are easily done. Most of the changes I want to do now are (EDIT... forgot to finish this sentence lol).. more involved and more experimental and I'm going to tread much more carefully.

essmene,
Those city locations are a little poor but they're not terrible. It's very difficult to get an AI to perform exactly the way everyone wants. If they settled on the coast maybe some would then complain they didn't access a resource or some other problem.

AIs settle cities based on an algorithm that assigns a value to every plot, one that says how good a city would be if built there. If you press ctrl+z to go into debug mode you can even see the spots the AI wants to settle (you must have enabled the cheat code in the .ini file to do this "cheat code = chipotle").

It is a suggestion most fitted for the Better AI forum...

Also, I'm pretty sure the AIs always settle on the square they start on. 99 times out of 100 it's the best spot to settle anyway. If anything, the location of the capital is a problem with the mapscript. I've noticed Tectonics used to (and probably still do) often set capitals 1 square away from a river and instead use an annoying 1tile lake for the fresh water for the capital.

One more thing... In a way the placements are a bit intelligent because he's made it a bit harder for you to invade! Is that why you don't like the placements?

 

[Minor Annoyance]

I've long heard it said that police state is rarely used. If you need troops right away there's nationhood or slavery. If you need units but not instantly you could use State Property or Universal Suffrage for increased production. Also there are other ways to deal with war weariness, some of which are also government civics.
So is this correct? Is police state in need of improvement?

 

[EmperorFool]

I wouldn't consider myself an adventuring player, meaning that I tend to play a pretty standard game most of the time. I have been more experimental lately when I get a chance to play, but I've never used this civic and would love to see it changed somehow.

 

[TheLazyHase]

I don't think police state need a boost, because it's already powerful and have some use. With police state, you can have 0% WW, and go warring for any length of time. And Police state and state property does stack, so the only contender is universal suffrage that is not all that good, especially during war time.

 

[PieceOfMind]

I too very rarely use Police state but LazyHase is right - it's already pretty strong in the right circumstances.

A change to it or one of the other government civics would have to be done with much consideration of the consequences.

 

[EmperorFool]

Regarding AI city placement, I would have put the top city 1W: may as well be on the coast if you're not losing any land tiles, but in this case you gain the full benefit of the Rice instead of just +1 and you gain one grassland. The hill you lose would go to the capital anyway.

While you could have moved the capital 1E to get a hill and exchange some plains for grassland and get riverside for a +6 Levee later, you get another unworkable coast tile and lose the Stone. Plus you have the two floodplains for food to offset the plains tiles. 1SE would also be good even though it destroys a floodplains as you gain a FP 2S and the Rice.

However, I wouldn't consider either of these placements particularly egregious. We've all seen some obviously bad placements that make you wonder what that tile-picking algorithm really does.

 

[usmle]

For what it's worth, I'll throw in a for actual quotes, it's a nice touch.

Another for multiple production mod. Makes quick a whole new game.

 

[JujuLautre]

I did not see that point discussed for a long time, but have you in the end included fractional trade routes ? I really think this would be some could stuff, and I'm sure people build harbours all over the place without realizing that some of them are useless (ofc, health bonus is here but still...)

 

[PieceOfMind]

I did not see that point discussed for a long time, but have you in the end included fractional trade routes ? I really think this would be some could stuff, and I'm sure people build harbours all over the place without realizing that some of them are useless (ofc, health bonus is here but still...)

Yeah it's still on my todo list. Part of the reason I haven't acted on it quickly is that BULL is still not released, though it looks like I'm just going to have to go ahead with the SVN copy of it regardless.

There's also a good chance I'll be removing the trade bonus for walls, or at least modifying it, once fractional trade routes get included.

 

[JujuLautre]

That's good news, thanks for it

 

[EmperorFool]

BULL hasn't changed in quite some time. The only reason I haven't released it is that it is using a very old ACO and UP. If it were a simple matter of merging them I would have done it by now. The trick is that ACO needs to be changed to use BULL's method of grabbing options from BUG, and I've already included some of the UP changes which I rewrote partially.

@PoM - If you could help with this aspect, it would speed up the release of BULL. Fractional Trade is done and working in BULL nicely. Lemme know if you'd have some time to help out. You've already merged the latest UP and ACO into your mod, so maybe it won't be so tough.