RevolutionDCM for BTS

[Duneflower]

This:

I just tried to load up a modified version of the Next War scenario View attachment 272009 in NwT v0.95, which uses DCM v2.51, and got the following two errors:

Any idea what's causing this error, or if a more-recent version fixes it?

 

[glider1]

Eh Duneflower
Ok so you do have Nextwar going for RevDCM 281 yes? You have tried world builder just to see if you can build a simple test scenario? The scenario posted above is out of date but if I look at it in notepad, so long as you have the appropriate leaders (Mr Big etc) it should be ok.
Cheers

EDIT:
Loaded your attached scenario up and briefly tested it. Came up with the following understandable errors:
Can't find type enum for type tag LEADER_THE_LADY
Can't find type enum for type tag CIVILIZATION_SOUTHERN_EMPIRE
Can't find type enum for type tag LEADER_THE_GLORIOUS_LEADER
Can't find type enum for type tag CIVILIZATION_ASIA
Can't find type enum for type tag LEADER_HIS_EXCELLENCY
Can't find type enum for type tag CIVILIZATION_EUROPA
Can't find type enum for type tag LEADER_MR_BIG
Can't find type enum for type tag CIVILIZATION_AMERICA_INC

Other than that it fired up fine in RevDCM281/Nextwar but haven't checked out the details.
Cheers

 

[Mattygerst]

Question:

I've played RevDCM forever. With the new release I'm noticing one thing (maybe something with the settings is different, I'm not sure).

When I start a new game - the DynamicCivNames is unchecked as well as Holy City Relocation being unchecked. I click them both to turn them on, yet neither take effect (dynamic civ names do not work, and I cannot purge a holy city at any time during the game). I suppose this means I need to start the game with them checked???...but if thats true...thats the issue...bc whenever I start a game both options start unchecked.

Any thoughts, or am I missing something?...

 

[glider1]

Matty, will have to check it you might well have a point. I've played RevDCM forever as well! The options screen has changed a lot over the last few months as has the holy city relocation code. I'll take a look and perhaps Phungus can comment. There are a lot of combinations to check in this mod!

EDIT: what do you or anyone think of the late game AI these days? Tried a few changes to Better BTS AI and the results were really good with a very proactive AI that was able to collect up aberrant rebels groups and keep them under the thumb. I was also amazed to see that the top AI was able to switch production in and out of the space race depending on military priorities. These options seem pretty interesting and that's what I'm taking a look at over coming weeks:
BBAI_DEFENSIVE_PACT_BEHAVIOR 2 : Turns defensive pacts into alliances, so they are now also offensive pacts. Plus pacts do not cancel when war is declared. Does not change name/description in game.
BBAI_ALLIANCE_OPTION 1: Turns defensive pacts into something more like an alliance, the pact does not break on war declaration.

Cheers

 

[CellKu]

glider1, your ideas regarding pacts/alliances sound very interesting!
Do I understand you correctly that these are two different kinds of pacts/alliances? So, the first one is a more aggressive sort of pact (even though its called "...DEFENSIVE_PACT...") and the second one something in between the current def pacts and your new "agressive" pact? I am very curious how you will set the thresholds and how you balance it (so that on the one hand the AI will actually accept to enter into such agreements, and on the other hand the player isn't able to exploit that by forcing the AIs into wars only to weaken them). Does the player have to ask the allied civ before declaring war on another civ or can he/she just start wars as he/she pleases?
Anyhow, good luck!! I will follow your attempts with great interest!

 

[phungus420]

Matty, will have to check it you might well have a point. I've played RevDCM forever as well! The options screen has changed a lot over the last few months as has the holy city relocation code. I'll take a look and perhaps Phungus can comment. There are a lot of combinations to check in this mod!

Man, I'm sorry if any change I made flubbed that functionalty. The Holy city relocation code had comments on it in the source code in CvCity that I did not change, and always assumed it was still working. If it's not, that's definitely something we need to fix. That might take time, but not too much, so thanks for bringing it to our attention. Not sure who among us will pick that up, but since you're posting this bug one of us will for sure take a look at that, and at the very least throw it on the ToDo list, there are just so many options now it's hard to make sure all of them work correctly, and it's always good when we get told something is messing up.

 

[Mattygerst]

Thanks for the quick response. I've gone thru a few different games just to be sure & as of yet, I have yet to be able to purge a holy city - and I've made sure that there are at least 2 cities with that religion in another civ, etc.

Also - DynamicCivNames is also not working. I am unsure if these are related, but I do doubt it.

I am simply wondering if these options need to be clicked "on" the moment the game starts. Because I will go in before every game, and before turn #1, I will check and both are clicked "off", so I will then turn them on, and the changes do not take effect.

Also, if this matters - I will click the options on. Then I will play a few turns, save the game, turn the game off and restart & upload the game and the options are turned back off.

Not sure if that matters, just figured I'd present you with the information as I'm seeing it and any details you may need.



EDIT**
Per glider's post:
Things I notice is that the AI in more recent versions has very few revolutions to deal with as compared to the past versions of the game. I would assume this is due to the AI knowing the scrope of how revolutions works better. This is an asset, to me, because a stronger AI makes for a better game. I REALLY like that a powerful AI will declare war on multiple AIs at a time when it has a power advantage and can conduct multiple wars.

 

[glider1]

Thanks Matty and Phungus. I will take a look at these options as well. We do what we can.

@Cellku
These are not my ideas but are already existent within the mod! They are Jdog and Fuyu's ideas buried inside Better BTS AI. I suspect that always in the back of the mind of jdog's wonderful thinking during his work on Better BTS AI has been ways to get the AI to work better with Revolutions. This is why I am experimenting with their supplied options. You can get to these options via the xml file:

BBAI_AI_Variables_GlobalDefines.xml in the assets/xml/ directory

What I am experiencing is similar to Matty, that the AI is holding itself together through a better appreciation of multiple fronts and what to do with breakaways. It is more able to mop up the dissidents, destroy them, keep them under the fist or even to liberate them and give them a right to exist. There is more work to do to see how it all pans out. Keep asking questions. Sometimes simple changes have big implications.

Revolutions are still happening but you can control the way that they happen with various options and the way that the AI handles them as well. There are a variety of ways to experiment with that including Limited Religions and other ways. This mod is quite amazing in the extent of it's flexibility. There is still so much to learn about it and to possibly improve in it. The way that we want Revolutions to behave is very much a question of taste. It is just a game. Ultimately the Revolutions concept is that as a player we learn that we do not get things always our way and must hold it together within and without.

There might be ways that Revolutions game play might be enhanced further. The imperative is that the mod reaches a point where the AI is able to get a grip on Revolutions and take the game in positive victory paths never-the-less. We may then be able to introduce late game concepts like terrorism and counter terrorism. If it were the case that the AI is desperately confused about those victory paths like in the old days, then introducing more complexity to the AI would be just troublesome. But the news is looking more positive on the AI front it appears.

Cheers

 

[Duneflower]

Eh Duneflower
Ok so you do have Nextwar going for RevDCM 281 yes? You have tried world builder just to see if you can build a simple test scenario? The scenario posted above is out of date but if I look at it in notepad, so long as you have the appropriate leaders (Mr Big etc) it should be ok.
Cheers

No, glider1, I'm currently using 2.51; that was why I asked if a more-recent version had fixed any issues with it. Really don't wanna update an already-old version of NwT if I can avoid it. Out of date? Howso?

Edit: To clarify, the release version will have whatever the current DCM version ends up being once I compile it, but there's some stuff I wanna do in .95 to prepare for the 1.0 release, and I don't wanna update .95 when I'm not gonna rerelease it.

 

[Carwyn]

Hey, can anyone tell me if RevDCM is working smoothly in MP? I've been gone a while and there's so much to read I can't find all the info.

Also, if RevDCM is working well in MP, has that version been added into Rise of Mankind and is that MP compatible at this time?

Thanks!

 

[phungus420]

Hey, can anyone tell me if RevDCM is working smoothly in MP? I've been gone a while and there's so much to read I can't find all the info.

Also, if RevDCM is working well in MP, has that version been added into Rise of Mankind and is that MP compatible at this time?

Thanks!

We haven't had enough feedback from people playing MP games to know. I posted here in the RoM multipler forums:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=398659

The response made it sound like the last versions of RoM: AND seems to be working, which means RevolutionDCM for sure would be as well. Like I posed in that thread though, we simply cannot support RoM for obvious reasons, so it would be awesome if a few people playtested RevDCM itself, or Legends of Revolution as that's pretty much an unaltered RevDCM core, and gave us any feedback and posted a save game if anything goes wrong. We could debug RevDCM or LoR and playtesting is really what we'd need right now to fix multiplayer.

 

[Carwyn]

I'll see if I can get something going and try to take notes. What is the best way to log errors? Do you want screen shots? If I am logging and my friends are not, will that cause OOS? (I read somewhere that having different settings on the options can cause OOS - I'd like to know more about that too.)

Thanks for your response. I'll watch the other forum too.

 

[phungus420]

Best thing to do would be to set your CivilizationIV ini to enable python exceptions, and set it or BUG to autosave every turn (only one of you needs to do this - and it wol't cause sync issues, unless there is a Python exception, in which case we'd need to fix that anyway). If you get a Sync or other issue, post the save game from the turn before for us to look at, and if there is a python exception post the Python Error log (it's a text file in your logs folder - the logs folder will be created by Civ4 when you enable logging in the CivilizationIV ini file). That would be very helpful, playtesting is what we really need now to advance multiplayer.

 

[glider1]

Hi Carwyn
Yeah different options can cause OOS so try to keep the options the same. I think Phungus is working on an enforcement system to ensure that they are but that it is not yet going. When do you intend to play your multiplayer session? In theory I would like you to have the latest bug fixes for RevDCM before you do.

Cheers

 

[phungus420]

Hi Carwyn
Yeah different options can cause OOS so try to keep the options the same. I think Phungus is working on an enforcement system to ensure that they are but that it is not yet going. When do you intend to play your multiplayer session? In theory I would like you to have the latest bug fixes for RevDCM before you do.

Cheers

I checked in the MP enforcement code to ensure RevDCM, BULL Actions, and Revolution options are all the same into the SVN. So it's there already. It doesn't allow the user to change any options in the RevDCM tab, it simply sets them to default settings and locks them; that's the only way I really think you could get that to work. Every other method proposed required the users to alter their files directly and ensure they are all the same, but that's impractical, and likely wouldn't happen. With the new system you could do that as well, all users would need to change their settings in RevDCM.xml and Revolution.xml in the config folder to what they wanted (and ensure they are all the same), that would allow user customization; it's just now by default the game assumes that users wol't do that, and thus enforces compliance for all options for all players to default. This is one of those things where I know the system isn't perfect, but it's the best option, kinda like Democracy.

 

[Carwyn]

...With the new system you could do that as well, all users would need to change their settings in RevDCM.xml and Revolution.xml in the config folder to what they wanted (and ensure they are all the same), that would allow user customization; it's just now by default the game assumes that users wol't do that, and thus enforces compliance for all options for all players to default. This is one of those things where I know the system isn't perfect, but it's the best option, kinda like Democracy.

So, when we set up a MP game, all the options are locked on default? We are quite capable of all setting our files exactly the same actually, we often change things with a few settings and one member just walks us through it on the phone. We've messed with our own mods and sometimes upload certain files and download them and replace stuff in mods - that sort of thing isn't a problem. Maybe I can talk my husband into trying a RevDCM game, he doesn't play a lot, but will have time this upcoming weekend. Otherwise we might try something this week with my friends - depends on what we decide. It's a pretty short download, not like some of them! I really like the smoothness of play in single player, it moves right along and doesn't bog down my system.

 

[phungus420]

So, when we set up a MP game, all the options are locked on default? We are quite capable of all setting our files exactly the same actually, we often change things with a few settings and one member just walks us through it on the phone. We've messed with our own mods and sometimes upload certain files and download them and replace stuff in mods - that sort of thing isn't a problem. Maybe I can talk my husband into trying a RevDCM game, he doesn't play a lot, but will have time this upcoming weekend. Otherwise we might try something this week with my friends - depends on what we decide. It's a pretty short download, not like some of them! I really like the smoothness of play in single player, it moves right along and doesn't bog down my system.

You would still be able to change your settings, you'll just need to change them in the RevDCM.xml and Revolution.xml files, rather then the Revolution.ini file as is required now (and as usual they will all need to be set the same for all players). But yeah, the RevDCM tab will be locked out in multiplayer games.

 

[glider1]

Would you be prepared to play just your first multiplayer game on default settings? That would make it a lot easier all round just for the feedback of that MP experience to us on the first attempt. Once that first game is through, then you can start experimenting with how to share options between players. Just a thought, please do what you need to.

Cheers

 

[glider1]

Didn't Afforess introduce a system to RevDCM for transmitting settings across the network to keep all the settings synced? I honestly would have to check what happened to that system.
Cheers

 

[Carwyn]

I'm not really in charge of what we do, though I can sometimes talk my friends into things... On the other hand, if we can use RevDCM, ROM or AND for a basis for making some tweaks and expect decent playability, that would save our modder a lot of work and he's the one that drives the changes to what we play. Right now we've been playing a small mod he made - mostly changes in balance of government civics, some units, etc - that works quite well for playability. I'm sure we'd love something between RevDCM and Rise of Mankind with our own balance and speed to it (slow and hard and no tech trading for instance).

A system to keep settings synced would be awesome, let me know about that.