Quick Questions and Answers

[MarqFJA87]

I've come to the conclusion that the AI is prone to being suicidally stupid about when to declare war, whether it be against me or another AI. Time and again, the AI players in my current game would DOW me or another AI despite it being plainly obvious that the DOWer is too weak to defend itself from its target, let alone attacking said target.

I assume this is an endemic problem in this game? Civ5's AI was a lot smarter when it came to this.

 

[vorlon_mi]

I've come to the conclusion that the AI is prone to being suicidally stupid about when to declare war, whether it be against me or another AI. Time and again, the AI players in my current game would DOW me or another AI despite it being plainly obvious that the DOWer is too weak to defend itself from its target, let alone attacking said target.

I assume this is an endemic problem in this game? Civ5's AI was a lot smarter when it came to this.

I've seen similar behavior, and yes, it is different from the Civ5 AI. I'm not sure how or why they changed the logic for declaring war from Civ5, but it is very puzzling.

For me, it happens at two distinct parts of the game --
Mid-game (turns 90-200) one of the smaller AI decides they don't like me and declares on me. Sometimes this happens because our affinities differ, sometimes this happens because I don't have lots of veteran units. They DOW, I fight them, and they refuse to accept peace for...a...long...time.

End-game, once I've started my victory wonder. They are blinded by the rage of war, regardless of our relative military strength. More than a few times, I have taken all but 1 or 2 of their cities, destroyed their army, and they still re-declare after a few turns.

I've also seen AI fighting each other in the latter stages of the game. Big AI stomps on the little AI, leaving them with one city. Little AI waits just enough turns to build 2 offensive units and declares war, trying to get their original capital back. Hopeless case.

 

[MarqFJA87]

Makes me wish that someone would make a mod that fixes such glaring issues with basic AI gameplay, but from what I gathered, CivBE isn't as modding-friendly in such regards as Civ5 is.

 

[vorlon_mi]

Since we don't have a "Funny Screenshots" thread, here's some gold ... in them thar hills ... that I can never get to improve.

 

[MarqFJA87]

Since we don't have a "Funny Screenshots" thread, here's some gold ... in them thar hills ... that I can never get to improve.
View attachment 646976

Ugh, I hate it when this happens; one of my relatively recent Civ5 games had a few tiles surrounding by mountains where a Barbarian Camp spawned and I couldn't deal with it to fulfill quests until I finally got paratroopers. There should be a subroutine within map generation that checks for the accessibility of non-mountainous tiles.

---

BTW, remember when I talked about the weird submarine exposure thing? Here is a screenshot. No, there were no inaccessible tiles around, nor any enemy submarines.

 

[legalizefreedom]

Yep. Was a real oversight not to have floating workers and Explorers.

There is one biome reward that the entire map is visible, but I wouldn't think that should extend to invisible units. It's probably just a bug.

 

[MarqFJA87]

Yep. Was a real oversight not to have floating workers and Explorers.

Or to not make mountains passable. Because, you know, they are IRL. CivBE's canyons I could swallow being impassable, since they looked like nigh-fathomless chasms than proper canyons; still, one of the LEV-related techs should've made workers and explorers able to pass normally impassable terrain (representing them having access to their own levitation engines).

 

[vorlon_mi]

I totally agree about mountains. They *are* passable in Civ3. One can build roads, railroads, and mines on them. I remember thinking that impassable mountains was a dumb idea in Civ4 and Civ5; I have not changed my mind in BERT. Civ6 offers some kludgy tunnel mechanics that don't really fix the problem. Both armies and civilians have been crossing mountains since the "Ancient Era," so they should be able to cross them in a Sci-Fi game set hundreds of years in the future.

 

[MarqFJA87]

I totally agree about mountains. They *are* passable in Civ3. One can build roads, railroads, and mines on them. I remember thinking that impassable mountains was a dumb idea in Civ4 and Civ5; I have not changed my mind in BERT. Civ6 offers some kludgy tunnel mechanics that don't really fix the problem. Both armies and civilians have been crossing mountains since the "Ancient Era," so they should be able to cross them in a Sci-Fi game set hundreds of years in the future.

Thankfully there are at least a couple of mods that rectify this in Civ5, one essentially standalone and the other as part of a much more extensive plethora of changes. Sadly, with the state that CivBE modding is in, I don't expect one for this game to be made anytime soon.

 

[legalizefreedom]

Thankfully there are at least a couple of mods that rectify this in Civ5, one essentially standalone and the other as part of a much more extensive plethora of changes. Sadly, with the state that CivBE modding is in, I don't expect one for this game to be made anytime soon.

What state is it in? No interest or the tools aren't sufficient?

 

[MarqFJA87]

What state is it in? No interest or the tools aren't sufficient?

The latter, leading to the former as a side-effect. For some reason, Firaxis/2K made CivBE far less modding-friendly than its immediate predecessor and coding template Civ5.

 

[vorlon_mi]

Q about the planets included in the Exoplanets pack, that came out around the same time as Rising Tide.

My understanding is that many map options -- such as pangaea or continents in Civ3/4/5 or Protean/Terran in BERT -- are scripts. They run to generate a random planet that meet certain criteria, coded into the map script.

What about the Exoplanets pack? Are they also scripts, or could they be fixed map files? That is, the end product or output of a script?

My reason for asking: in a recent game, I specified one of the planets that had a name, which I think means it was part of the Exoplanets pack. My first starting location was fair/poor, so I went back to the main menu and created a new game with the same planet name. The second starting location was worse, so I repeated the process. Third time, I got a decent starting location so I played on.
Here's the weird part -- during the game, as I met the various AI sponsors, I recognized those two starting locations. NSA got the fair/poor one (in the water next to a 5-6 tile skinny island) and INTEGR got the worse one (a single tile island!!) I would have thought that map scripts would have generated more viable starting locations. But a fixed map, with N preset starting locations, would give them to sponsors, even if they really stink.

 

[legalizefreedom]

I wouldn't know, but I wouldn't doubt one bit if the named ones were fixed maps.

 

[Darsnan]

Q about the planets included in the Exoplanets pack, that came out around the same time as Rising Tide.

My understanding is that many map options -- such as pangaea or continents in Civ3/4/5 or Protean/Terran in BERT -- are scripts. They run to generate a random planet that meet certain criteria, coded into the map script.

What about the Exoplanets pack? Are they also scripts, or could they be fixed map files? That is, the end product or output of a script?

My reason for asking: in a recent game, I specified one of the planets that had a name, which I think means it was part of the Exoplanets pack. My first starting location was fair/poor, so I went back to the main menu and created a new game with the same planet name. The second starting location was worse, so I repeated the process. Third time, I got a decent starting location so I played on.
Here's the weird part -- during the game, as I met the various AI sponsors, I recognized those two starting locations. NSA got the fair/poor one (in the water next to a 5-6 tile skinny island) and INTEGR got the worse one (a single tile island!!) I would have thought that map scripts would have generated more viable starting locations. But a fixed map, with N preset starting locations, would give them to sponsors, even if they really stink.

IIRC the Exoplanets DLC came out the same time as BE did back in 2014, and per the below screen capture of the Vulcan.lua file I believe 2014 is correct.

As far as map versus script is concerned, I believe the Vulcan.lua is the script for generating the "82 Eridani e" Map Type (which is one of the named maps, IIUC). And thinking about map versus script, how could this map be customized for the Bodies of Water or World Age options if it was just a map? I also looked thru the BE assets and didn't find any map files (at least I didn't see anything that jumped out at me "I'm a map!").

HTH,

D

 

[vorlon_mi]

Many of you probably know this already. I suspected it, but had it proven in my game last night.

I had declared war on PAC, taking her 4 core cities. She refused a peace offer. I moved towards her last remaining city... and... Elodie conquered it.
They were at war before, and she moved on the last city before I could get there.

I had a really nice war score, but received ZERO rewards. I suspected that would happen, but I just verified it.
To be honest, the rewards/spoils that one gets when eliminiating another sponsor are usually technologies. They don't have a lot of energy or diplo capital left, when one conquers the last city. So I guess I didn't miss much.

 

[legalizefreedom]

So only the sponsor that eliminates the player gets any spoils and if they snipe it at the end, they don't have any score/spoils either, so no one gets them. That's a good point. I guess it doesn't come up very often, and I'm not usually in a war for the spoils, but I'm sure this has happened to me a couple times.

 

[vorlon_mi]

Yes, it's a key difference between early-game wars and late-game wars. In the early or mid game, I will often take a small city from the other faction/sponsor, rather than techs. I can get more benefits from it over the course of the game. Sometimes that comes back to bite me; the sponsor declares on me and takes thee city back when I haven't put sufficient defense in there.

But late-game wars are often wide ranging, where the AI sponsor is reluctant to agree to peace. My spoils are the cities that I conquer, effectively. The techs in a final peace deal are just frosting on the cake.

 

[Darsnan]

So I deployed an Orbital Laser over a recently conquered city on the fringe of my empire. My expectation was that, because some of the hexes within the Orbital Laser's range had not been previously explored by me, that they would then be revealed. But they weren't. Question is should the unexplored hexes be exposed by the Orbital Laser? This is a BE game in case this matters.

 

[legalizefreedom]

So I deployed an Orbital Laser over a recently conquered city on the fringe of my empire. My expectation was that, because some of the hexes within the Orbital Laser's range had not been previously explored by me, that they would then be revealed. But they weren't. Question is should the unexplored hexes be exposed by the Orbital Laser? This is a BE game in case this matters.
View attachment 690913

You would expect the laser to revel hexes within its attack range at least, but it's not surprising since satellites still needed some work.

 

[MarqFJA87]

Here's a weird discovery that happened in a very recent playthrough: For some reason, adding miasma to two of the many copper tiles on that particular map improved their yield by +1 production and +1 energy; this is even appeared in the tooltip, so it appears to be intentional. But I could not figure out why those particular tiles exhibited this.

At first I thought it was any copper tile, but that was quickly disproven by the lack of the tooltip. Then I looked at those tiles, and seeing that they're both on tundra terrain, I assumed that was why, only to be yet again proven wrong when I moved a worker on a third tundra terrain tile with copper. And they're both in different cities, so it couldn't be some overlooked effect of a local wonder. And I'm pretty sure there are no buildings that grant any such effect either. Does anyone have any idea what was going on?