RFC Europe playtesting feedback thread

[st.lucifer]

I may be wrong but I think our basic WB save was created before the latest upgrade of BTS. Vanilla BTS version 3.13 ships with the game disc. The 3.17 patch (based on Bhruic's unnoficial patch) was released by Firaxis on 19.06.08 and is available through the forums and the Downloads section of the CivFanatics homepage. A good way to check is go to the main BTS game menu, go ADVANCED and check if any updates are available. I don't know whether any changes in 3.17 affect our mod or not. Same with RFC. Depends on whether people are running the old 1.181 or 1.182 versions. Esp. with the new 1.183 version released by Rhye this month. Just an idea.

I'm not sure if this is the same issue, but I couldn't get the mod to load at all about a month ago. After reinstalling civ4, bts, and patching all of them to their most recent versions, everything worked.

I've gotten crashes in the later part of the game due to what seems to be too much going on, but they aren't consistent. It's a pain to reload everything, but it might be worthwhile if it keeps happening.

 

[micbic]

I also got a crash in 15th century-1416 AD. I could do many things (open civilopedia, change tech research, travel through the map) but not diplo, no production change... It wasn't exactly a crah, it just kept on ''waiting for other players'' loading. It was a pity, since I had already the first and third UHV (at Monarch!!!) and had already launched a plan for the second one, which I expected to complete at 1600 AD.

 

[jessiecat]

I'm not sure if this is the same issue, but I couldn't get the mod to load at all about a month ago. After reinstalling civ4, bts, and patching all of them to their most recent versions, everything worked.

I've gotten crashes in the later part of the game due to what seems to be too much going on, but they aren't consistent. It's a pain to reload everything, but it might be worthwhile if it keeps happening.

Just had 2 more crashes on the new version (Dec. 20) so in desperation, I've taken your advice. I've uninstalled everything, Civ., BTS, RFC, RFCE, the lot even including hidden files and folders. Reloaded everything incl. all patches (that took 2 hours!). Playing a game now. Fingers firmly crossed.

 

[jessiecat]

Just had 2 more crashes on the new version (Dec. 20) so in desperation, I've taken your advice. I've uninstalled everything, Civ., BTS, RFC, RFCE, the lot even including hidden files and folders. Reloaded everything incl. all patches (that took 2 hours!). Playing a game now. Fingers firmly crossed.

After all that effort to fix the problem, I've now had 2 more crashes both in the early 1400s. If it isn't the respawnings, what is it that changed after the Dec.13th version?? And it can't just be me. Lots of others have had this problem. Every time I get an error message that looks something like this.

Exception Information

CORE 0xc00005

FLAGS 0x0000000

RECORD 0x000000000000

ADDRESS 0x000000000 23c9f40 (always these last numbers as an address)

Files LOCALS -1\Temp\dc76\appcompat.txt

I've included a save game below of the last crash.

 

[st.lucifer]

I have no problem getting through the early 1400s, but crash sometime just before the Swedish spawn.

Here are the last autosaves from the latest load attempt.

 

[ecv]

Thanks to everyone involved for their work on this, it looks like its gonna be great!

I played a game as the Norse with the december 17th version. Here's some feedback on it.
- My game crashed right after 1446, I downloaded the newest version and loaded my newest save, but the it still crashed at exactly the same time.
- When i made my first contact, which was with the germans, my game crashed from some "unable to allocate memory" error, the crash was perfectly repeatable, but if i lowered my resolution from 1280x1024 to 1024x768 it worked fine.
- I didnt play for UHV, since the Norse UHV is focused entirely on a somewhat small timeperiod, which isnt in my taste. I would however think that its fairly difficult to do it as it was done in real life, meaning through conquest of other civs/independents cities. I read the Jessiecat did it by spamming settlers and archers, but that is hardly the Viking way!
- With my fairly peaceful approach to the Norse, I found teching to be too fast. I would say I was ahead of the real history by something like 100 years when my game crashed - and it was the same for the AI. Btw has the academy been disabled, or is that a mistake?
- I didnt get around to the swedish spawn, but I would suggest to place some native cities in Sweden which will flip to Sweden when it spawns. That would better than just having Sweden and Finland as empty lands - And if Norse/Denmark conquers the cities they will ofcourse lose them at the swedish spawn. Pretty much as in real life! Sweden was what can be considered a vassal of Denmark from 1397 to 1523.

It was great to come back to the forum, and see that this mod was (finally) happening!

 

[Barak]

Trying something new. Playing as the Ottoman empire.

Right from the start I notice a lack of health resources and an uphill climb to stay healthy, grow my economy and fight back Byz culture.

Ismid flips to me, but is immediately surrounded by Byz culture.

I expect this to be quite a challenge to get anything going.

 

[jessiecat]

Thanks to everyone involved for their work on this, it looks like its gonna be great!

I played a game as the Norse with the december 17th version. Here's some feedback on it.
- My game crashed right after 1446, I downloaded the newest version and loaded my newest save, but the it still crashed at exactly the same time.
- When i made my first contact, which was with the germans, my game crashed from some "unable to allocate memory" error, the crash was perfectly repeatable, but if i lowered my resolution from 1280x1024 to 1024x768 it worked fine.
- I didnt play for UHV, since the Norse UHV is focused entirely on a somewhat small timeperiod, which isnt in my taste. I would however think that its fairly difficult to do it as it was done in real life, meaning through conquest of other civs/independents cities. I read the Jessiecat did it by spamming settlers and archers, but that is hardly the Viking way!
- With my fairly peaceful approach to the Norse, I found teching to be too fast. I would say I was ahead of the real history by something like 100 years when my game crashed - and it was the same for the AI. Btw has the academy been disabled, or is that a mistake?
- I didnt get around to the swedish spawn, but I would suggest to place some native cities in Sweden which will flip to Sweden when it spawns. That would better than just having Sweden and Finland as empty lands - And if Norse/Denmark conquers the cities they will ofcourse lose them at the swedish spawn. Pretty much as in real life! Sweden was what can be considered a vassal of Denmark from 1397 to 1523.

It was great to come back to the forum, and see that this mod was (finally) happening!

A couple of points. You say you crashed right after 1446 and "right after my first contact" with the Germans?? Even if you did no exploring at all, how come it took over 600 years for someone to find you?

I've never been the tech leader as the Norse but it's easy to be pretty advanced if you keep your no. of cities and unit costs low. Prob. not very historical but it's only a game after all..

The first UHV is doable as I described ealier but does depend on settling a lot of cities early in the game. Definitely not "the Viking way" as you describe. I'd keep the 2nd UHV and change the other two. Maybe the first to conquest and the third to gold pillaged? Just a thought.

The Academy should come quite late in the tech tree, after Scientific Method I think. I'm glad you had some result from changing your screen resolution. I've always had mine on 1024x768 anyway.

 

[jessiecat]

Trying something new. Playing as the Ottoman empire.

Right from the start I notice a lack of health resources and an uphill climb to stay healthy, grow my economy and fight back Byz culture.

Ismid flips to me, but is immediately surrounded by Byz culture.

I expect this to be quite a challenge to get anything going.

I agree about the Ottoman start. The health resources in that area are very much lacking. Byzantine culture is just too powerful for you to flip more than a couple of cities. We haven't given the Ottomans enough troops to conquer much. And the Arabs are a powerful brake on Ottoman expansion. In short a pretty crappy start for them. Needs a lot of work. I'm sure you agree.

 

[ecv]

A couple of points. You say you crashed right after 1446 and "right after my first contact" with the Germans?? Even if you did no exploring at all, how come it took over 600 years for someone to find you?

I've never been the tech leader as the Norse but it's easy to be pretty advanced if you keep your no. of cities and units low. Prob. not historical but its only a game.

The first UHV is doable as I described ealier but does depend on settling a lot of cities early in the game. Definitely not "the Viking way" as you describe. I'd keep the 2nd UHV and change the other two. Maybe the first to conquest and the third to gold pillaged? Just a thought.

The Academy should come quite late in the tech tree, after Scientific Method I think. I'm glad you had some result from changing your screen resolution. I've always had mine on 1024x768 anyway.

It wasnt that clear from what i wrote, but I had a crash at around ~980 when I made the first contant with another civ (the germans), but when i lowered my resolution to 1024x768 the crash didnt happen.

I had another crash at 1446, and that crash i havent been able to work around (I've considered trying to delete some units in the world-builder and see if that might help - I dont think its the problem though). At that point I did ofcourse have contact with other civs.

I'll put some thought into what I think would be great a UHV for the Norse. I'll come back with those later.

For now I think I will try out a few other civs.

 

[micbic]

I had another crash at 1446, and that crash i havent been able to work around (I've considered trying to delete some units in the world-builder and see if that might help - I dont think its the problem though).

Don't worry about that. It is the Satan-come-to-Europe bug and always happens around 1450. Perhaps it is because of mod feature overload.

 

[jessiecat]

Don't worry about that. It is the Satan-come-to-Europe bug and always happens around 1450. Perhaps it is because of mod feature overload.

And I've just had another crash. This time I lasted until 1464. At this rate we might eventually last until 1500. Maybe sometime in February?.

 

[micbic]

1464? Well done!!!

 

[micbic]

Woo-hoo!!! I got my game with Ottomans at 1512 AD!!! So, some off-this-bug observations.
1) How do you want me to capture 5 Byzantine and 3 Arab cities in 70 turns with that starting force and that research rate?
2) And I thought the buggies were over... Old favourite ''nation Dows itself'' has come back!!! Prepare for suicide battles and civil wars.
3) And when I thought I could get Nicaea or Constantinople (I was actually very near to capture them both), plague hit my units. Needless to say, UHV is lost.
4) Worldbuilder observations at the dawn of 16th century (or cheat to learn what's going on):
a) Two categories of collapse: Barbarian-took civs (Kievan, Hungarian, partially Moskva and Poland) and self-led-to-total-collapse-civs (Burgundy and Burgundy)
b) The best Norse game observed so far. Aarhus, Rostock (hmmm) and a nice number of cities in Scandinavia (5 to 7). Sweden spawned some of them, and I suggest renaming Norse to Danes (since the territory left to them is much alike to what it was in 1453, as I remember from my few hours of Europa Universalis)
c) With the no respawn feature, Eastern Europe has reverted to a much alike status to what it was at 4th AD century, despite a belief between 900-1200 that it would become a proud European place.
d) Frankia is also well-expanding, and Iberia is cut in two. Abd-Al-Rahman is wanted for the murder of Joao II in Lisboa, but he believes that the bullet hit somewhere before Joao and changed its route. Anyway he won the court and the territory.
e) Austrians out of their shell. If Prag hadn't been razed by barbs, I would talk about an Habsurg-approaching-empire.
f) Genoa-Venice 3-3, none in Sardinia for first, none in Adriatica (Trieste doesn't count I think) for latter.
g) Byzantium is a small empire I should be sorry for, closed in Greece and Asia Minor. Arabs have a more Turkey-orientated than Magreb-orientated game, their only African city being Cyrene.

 

[sedna17]

It wasnt that clear from what i wrote, but I had a crash at around ~980 when I made the first contant with another civ (the germans), but when i lowered my resolution to 1024x768 the crash didnt happen.

I had another crash at 1446, and that crash i havent been able to work around (I've considered trying to delete some units in the world-builder and see if that might help - I dont think its the problem though). At that point I did ofcourse have contact with other civs.

That first (memory allocation error) crash, is perfectly understandable and a long-standing bug in Civ. In fact, I would expect just restarting Civ (or, possibly, Windows) would clear it up. I think your idea of deleting a lot of units via WorldBuilderSave from an autosave before your second hard-crash is an excellent idea. If you can, please try this. I will try some similar experiments with some of other people's crashes, but may not get to that right away.

 

[st.lucifer]

Got a game to load as the Swedes.

Observations on startup:

-I need to improve the starting point. Stockholm is relatively resource-poor, while there are other areas nearby with many resources available. I'll probably re-allocate some of these in the next map update.
-Austria has expanded quite well, and has taken Hungary.
-Poland has a high population and is 4th in culture, whereas previously I've seen them collapse more often than not.
-Kiev has collapsed due to Mongol invasions; Moscow has been razed but the Muscovites retain a decent-sized empire with Riga as the capital.
-Portugal has 4 small and not very impressive cities in its small area, and is still alive. Unlike some games I have seen, they haven't colonized the Azores or Madeira.
-Spain has a city in Sardinia, which is the first AI city I've seen there.
-England has built Stornoway in the Western Isles, but still hasn't made a move on Ireland. I haven't seen AI England go for Ireland at all in any of my games.
-Genoa and Venice haven't really expanded at all.
-Arabia has packed Libya and Egypt with small, crappy cities. I deliberately nerfed the Maghreb to make it less hospitable than it actually was, but this doesn't seem to deter AI Arabia.
-France and Burgundy are still standing and viable. Germany is still around, despite having lost their capital.
-The only civs to disappear completely are Hungary and Kiev.

 

[Hitti-Litti]

Is RFCE slower than normal RFC for you people too? Started a game as the Arabs, then switched to Germans, and noticed, that the game is as slow as normal RFC in the 18th century. Do you have this problem too, or am I doing something wrong?

 

[ecv]

Here are some impressions from a couple of games I tried.

I started a game as Frankia and played till ~1075, at that point I had bin hit by 4 plagues. I dont think I lost any units to them except all my workers every time. I also lost alot of population and all hamlets/villages/(towns) were pretty much reduced to cottages every time.
Well, it seems as if the plague is too harsh except in the one area where it serves a purpose, namely killing military units. The number of plagues should also imo be reduced (one could perhaps then keep the current hit on cottages and city-pop). But it should be harder on military units.
Besides that, Frankia in its current incarnation seems to work ok.

I also tried to start game as Sweden (and it worked), but I only played a couple of turns. Sweden imo has some issues, here's a list:
- Your cities are unhealthy when you build them. That is should imo be changed, maybe give them an aquaduct and/or apothecary for free in each city?
- Add a timber resource to the Stockholm area. The area is really low on production, and I think its easily justified that Sweden has a fair amount of this resource.
- Add stone somewhere.
- They should be given a protestant missionary for each settler imo.

In both the above mentioned games, I noticed that the Norse did really poorly and were at the bottom of the score. In the game as Frankia they had build Århus and Stavanger on the Norwegian coast, but besides that they just sat there. In the game as Sweden they had Århus, Malmo and Kalmar.
800-1100 should be the golden age (in non-game terms) for the Norse, but it hardly is. If its too overpowering for them to be able to conquer the british isles and Normandy, they should atleast settle the danish-norway area in a satisfactory way. But in the two games I have seen, they dont. And btw, why is Århus the starting point and not København?

 

[Barak]

Is RFCE slower than normal RFC for you people too? Started a game as the Arabs, then switched to Germans, and noticed, that the game is as slow as normal RFC in the 18th century. Do you have this problem too, or am I doing something wrong?

I have also noticed that the game is a bit slower than RFC. I always assumed it was due to the AI building so many units. Lots of workers and military running around!

 

[st.lucifer]

I also tried to start game as Sweden (and it worked), but I only played a couple of turns. Sweden imo has some issues, here's a list:
- Your cities are unhealthy when you build them. That is should imo be changed, maybe give them an aquaduct and/or apothecary for free in each city?
- Add a timber resource to the Stockholm area. The area is really low on production, and I think its easily justified that Sweden has a fair amount of this resource.
- Add stone somewhere.
- They should be given a protestant missionary for each settler imo.

In both the above mentioned games, I noticed that the Norse did really poorly and were at the bottom of the score. In the game as Frankia they had build Århus and Stavanger on the Norwegian coast, but besides that they just sat there. In the game as Sweden they had Århus, Malmo and Kalmar.
800-1100 should be the golden age (in non-game terms) for the Norse, but it hardly is. If its too overpowering for them to be able to conquer the british isles and Normandy, they should atleast settle the danish-norway area in a satisfactory way. But in the two games I have seen, they dont. And btw, why is Århus the starting point and not København?

Thanks for the feedback.

I'm fixing resource allocation for Scandinavia in the next map update - while there are currently a lot of resources in Sweden, there's not much within the logical city radii.

I didn't get very far in terms of gameplay with the Swedes either. Maybe 15 turns.

I'm open to giving them a health building to begin with, but nobody had founded Protestantism when they spawned. I'm not sure that having them start the game with missionaries is necessarily appropriate, although it's been proposed by at least one person that Protestantism should be founded upon the Swedish spawn.

I've rarely seen the Norse as a major power. There are two reasons they start in Aarhus and not Copenhagen - first, we tried to coordinate spawn dates with the best estimate of the founding of the first Norse cities. We came up with Aarhus and Tonsberg, which is supposed to flip to them at spawn to encourage settlement of both landmasses.