Realism Invictus

[Walter Hawkwood]

But the turn right before the crash, then?Now I’ve added a debug before the problematic line.

Yes, if possible.

 

[globosud]

Yes, if possible.

I can't reproduce it for now, but I'm saving turn by turn so that when it happens I can send you the save

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

BTW, if you're an SVN user by now you probably think "Some unit art updates" is just a default sign-off for a revision. While I've added almost no new flavour units since 3.72, I am systematically overhauling some of the older units for a more consistent quality and style. As the mod is approaching its second decade milestone, you can imagine how many different authors and sources are included by now - and in some cases, even the work from the same author can be quite dissonant.

For instance, as some of you may know, a lot of units in RI were made by Bakuel (in his later period, many specifically for RI). But he constantly grew as a unit maker - so a lot of his earlier work, while historically accurate, as was always his custom, is far less technically sophisticated than his later units. If you compare, for instance, his Vikings or Hungarians (some of his earlier work) to his Russians or Indians, you'll notice how much better he got at textures later on, but also that his actual style shifted somewhat, from a flat and cartoony vanilla Civ 4 style to a more realistic / darker one. This means that, among others, I am currently revisiting his earlier units, and try to "upgrade" them to match the standards of his later ones, adding details, shading and better gloss maps where possible. Today I noticed I had his original unit open at the same time as the reworked one - so I decided to make a before/after picture that illustrates what I'm doing (when I'm not replacing older units outright with totally new versions, such as with both mounted and dismounted Celtic knights, for example): https://imgsli.com/NDA3MTQx. With his units, I generally don't change much in terms of the underlying texture, but try to give it more "definition", as he himself did in his later units.

 

[AspiringScholar]

When reading "some unit art updates," I always just want to know what was changed, since those fine details are often fascinating.

On that note, though, I noticed that the English in RI don't currently have a distinctive modern carrier (though the Illustrious certainly lives up to her name, there). MatteM just posted some beautiful carriers for the Russians, US and UK here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...xturing-workshop.637596/page-20#post-16855099. The Queen Elizabeth on the middle-right of the UK set looks great. Might it be a good substitute for the generic carrier that they currently get?

 

[Alekseyev_]

That's pretty cool, thanks for the insight!

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

When reading "some unit art updates," I always just want to know what was changed, since those fine details are often fascinating.

Glancing at the list of changed files usually gives you a pretty good idea of which ones, as most unit art is stored relatively logically.

On that note, though, I noticed that the English in RI don't currently have a distinctive modern carrier (though the Illustrious certainly lives up to her name, there). MatteM just posted some beautiful carriers for the Russians, US and UK here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...xturing-workshop.637596/page-20#post-16855099. The Queen Elizabeth on the middle-right of the UK set looks great. Might it be a good substitute for the generic carrier that they currently get?

I have a ton of respect for MatteM and what he does with the unit conversions, but unfortunately a lot of them are much "heavier" than the upper limit of unit file size I stick to in RI to keep the total asset size at least somewhat manageable. I don't know how big Queen Lizzie is - @MatteM if you could send it my way, I'd check if it was proper RI material, at least after some cut downs. It would indeed be nice to have a modern carrier for the UK.

 

[Ahnarras]

How often does everyone use Craft Guilds? I don't think I've ever adopted it, since it has such a small bonus and Merchant Princes becomes available one technology later.

I stayed with Craft Guilds for almost all of my Medieval / Renaissance Era, too, as I'm trying to squeeze every little hammer I can due to the "the more units you have, the costier they get" mechanism.
I have only switched out for the few times where I had nothing to build anymore and all my cities where in Research mode.

But I also have a lot of towns and many stone/marble quarries (making the Craft Hall worthwhile). I'm also playing on a low difficulty compared to most people on this forum + I usually have a huge bonus to Tech thanks to Open Borders with 10-20 differents Civ (as I'm still on an ancient SVN before the latest changes to how much a new Civ with open border boost your science).

A good new on the crash subject : I'm a little after turn 1300 and my savefile sits at 5,8Mo so far, and I've yet to encounter a single crash. It just run smoothly and happily.
The time between each turns start to be long enough for me to notice (~40s), but I do remember a game I've done a few years ago where I had a 2-3 minutes downtime between each turn (and that was in late classical/early medieval !).
Big up on your work once again Walter, as it's clearly a lot more enjoyable that way !

 

[MatteM]

Glancing at the list of changed files usually gives you a pretty good idea of which ones, as most unit art is stored relatively logically.

I have a ton of respect for MatteM and what he does with the unit conversions, but unfortunately a lot of them are much "heavier" than the upper limit of unit file size I stick to in RI to keep the total asset size at least somewhat manageable. I don't know how big Queen Lizzie is - @MatteM if you could send it my way, I'd check if it was proper RI material, at least after some cut downs. It would indeed be nice to have a modern carrier for the UK.

Here you go, you could probably delete the 30mm DS30M Mark 2s to cut down .nif size

 

[MatteM]

I don't think I added any CIWS to it, she doesn't seem to have much in the way of defences anyway

 

[Ahnarras]

Quick little report : the Technology "Civil Liberties" requires both "Stock Market" and "Labor Specialization".
But the Stock Market already requires Labor Specialization to be researched.

Also, I have finally started to look at the Industrial technologies, and the whole period is massive !
It's easily two ages in one, with the number of tech to discover.
As my playtime will take a serious hit in the coming months, I'm starting to think the next update will be out before I'm able to reach Modern Age

 

[Alekseyev_]

Talking about tech requirements, there's exactly 2 techs (Animal Husbandry and Priesthood) with variable precursors. I remember how that was advertised as a big new thing when Civ4 came out, but in most mods it's cut back nearly all the way, just like here. I wonder if there's potential for a few more such things for later techs as well.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Quick little report : the Technology "Civil Liberties" requires both "Stock Market" and "Labor Specialization".
But the Stock Market already requires Labor Specialization to be researched.

Thanks, fixed a couple more cases like this along the way too.

Also, I have finally started to look at the Industrial technologies, and the whole period is massive !
It's easily two ages in one, with the number of tech to discover.

Indeed, this is the intended "flavour" of the industrial era, as that's when actual technologies (as opposed to inventions, social advances etc) start coming into play in earnest. I was going for a feeling of progress speeding up dramatically.

Talking about tech requirements, there's exactly 2 techs (Animal Husbandry and Priesthood) with variable precursors. I remember how that was advertised as a big new thing when Civ4 came out, but in most mods it's cut back nearly all the way, just like here. I wonder if there's potential for a few more such things for later techs as well.

Yeah, I am rather reluctant to use those, as they are quite poorly signposted in the UI (and no, I don't want to rework the tech tree graph!). I feel that adding more of those would simply increase players' confusion.

 

[[Y]]

As I wrote, it might have. Or it might simply be how K-Mod's AI functions, always preparing for the next war. All I know is the exit clause for exiting limited war preparation plan was there, but there was no actual command to discontinue the preparation, and two other similar clauses for other war type plans had those - so I feel that it should fix something, in theory, unless I missed something else in the code (which is not impossible, as war plan AI code is really convoluted).

In the few games I managed to get going in the past week, it feels like civs are doing much less war prep and much more expansion and settling. On a large map with 16 starting civs, the AI civs all have between 7 and 12 cities by turn 250, and with no consideration for distance from capital or diplomacy (the latter part isn't new, but I thought distance used to be a factor). Well, all have between 7 and 12 cities except for Seleucus, because the barbs keep taking his cities, because the AI leaders keep thinking that one archer and one militia is enough to defend a city as they mindlessly expand across the map.

The rapid expansion tends to kill the game for me, since it's so aggressive and confrontational, and eliminates the more natural expansion phase of the game, which is one of the funnest parts. And the AI doesn't seem to handle it well, since the cities are so vulnerable. I think the constant war prep may have helped cub this behavior because it meant fewer resources dedicated to building settlers, and AIs choosing to invade other nations instead of expanding, which then encouraged other civs to fortify more instead of expand. Wars have been very few in these past few games.

Is there a place in the code with logic for what the AI considers reasonable defenses for a city? I'd be glad to experiment and report.

 

[globosud]

I’d like to understand why the civilizations that get attacked and lose several cities before the Medieval era (so before vassalage) stop progressing. They fall behind in everything. Is there a reason for this? For example, in my game Hannibal is stuck in 1000 BC with only one city in Sicily. At that point, he falls behind by an entire era in technology, and therefore also in military units.At least up to the 1000th turn that I’ve reached.Another thing I noticed: I haven’t experienced any espionage missions, neither successful nor attempted.

 

[Alekseyev_]

@[Y] Could it depend on the selection of leaders? Some are far more warlike than others, and maybe you got a lot of peaceful ones in that game?

 

[globosud]

Yeah, I need the save with the crash so I can debug it properly.

Here’s the save file right before the crash.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "BugEventManager", line 363, in _handleDefaultEvent
File "SlaveryRebellion", line 202, in onCityDoTurn
RuntimeError: unidentifiable C++ exception

 

[[Y]]

@[Y] Could it depend on the selection of leaders? Some are far more warlike than others, and maybe you got a lot of peaceful ones in that game?

I don't think so. That's definitely an impact, but comparing to previous games, I felt a definite change in pace and AI behavior. Case in point, Seleucus, a conquerer, was having his cities conquered by barbs. He wasn't even retaking them, it was Baibars who then destroyed the barb city and Seleucus would resettle it.

And if it is just a matter of leader personality, then I'd still suggest a change to AI behavior. Whether it was leader personality or lack of war planning, it wasn't a fun experience.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

In the few games I managed to get going in the past week, it feels like civs are doing much less war prep and much more expansion and settling. On a large map with 16 starting civs, the AI civs all have between 7 and 12 cities by turn 250, and with no consideration for distance from capital or diplomacy (the latter part isn't new, but I thought distance used to be a factor). Well, all have between 7 and 12 cities except for Seleucus, because the barbs keep taking his cities, because the AI leaders keep thinking that one archer and one militia is enough to defend a city as they mindlessly expand across the map.

The rapid expansion tends to kill the game for me, since it's so aggressive and confrontational, and eliminates the more natural expansion phase of the game, which is one of the funnest parts. And the AI doesn't seem to handle it well, since the cities are so vulnerable. I think the constant war prep may have helped cub this behavior because it meant fewer resources dedicated to building settlers, and AIs choosing to invade other nations instead of expanding, which then encouraged other civs to fortify more instead of expand. Wars have been very few in these past few games.

I'm afraid you won't like what I have to say on that, but if it is indeed true (and it feels like my hands-off games show that it is), then it's working exactly as intended and fixes a fundamental problem K-Mod always had, namely, hyper-aggressive AI that builds a ton of units. It feels like a fundamentally broken part of AI has actually been fixed. On barbarians specifically, it might be world-map-specific, if you were playing on that, as they were obviously balanced for an AI that tended to overbuild units - but I haven't seen any AI barbarian woes on random maps in hands-offs.

Is there a place in the code with logic for what the AI considers reasonable defenses for a city? I'd be glad to experiment and report.

If only it were that simple.

Here’s the save file right before the crash.

What's the SVN revision number? I can't open the save on the current one.

 

[[Y]]

I'm afraid you won't like what I have to say on that, but if it is indeed true (and it feels like my hands-off games show that it is), then it's working exactly as intended and fixes a fundamental problem K-Mod always had, namely, hyper-aggressive AI that builds a ton of units

I am happy to hear you say that. The aggressive AI has always been a problem (though various iterations have softened it over the years, and thanks for that). The frustration is that it seems that it's a binary between aggressive military AI and aggressive expansion AI, and that feels like a lose/lose. But of those two, I'd take the aggressive military AI. That one at least lets me feel like I'm able to settle my empire, enjoy the expansion phase, and engage militarily with the AI, which is what lots of the game is built around in the first place. Aggressive expansion, on the other hand, feels suffocating, and there isn't much room to engage with it, since there's no diplomatic options regarding territory disputes.

That's a personal preference, though, so I'll likely just re-instate the "always preparing for war" situation for my local game.

 

[globosud]

I'm afraid you won't like what I have to say on that, but if it is indeed true (and it feels like my hands-off games show that it is), then it's working exactly as intended and fixes a fundamental problem K-Mod always had, namely, hyper-aggressive AI that builds a ton of units. It feels like a fundamentally broken part of AI has actually been fixed. On barbarians specifically, it might be world-map-specific, if you were playing on that, as they were obviously balanced for an AI that tended to overbuild units - but I haven't seen any AI barbarian woes on random maps in hands-offs.

If only it were that simple.

What's the SVN revision number? I can't open the save on the current one.

5509