RFC Europe: Small bugs/fixes

[3Miro]

The AI certainly does favor a large army, perhaps even too much. I see more than 20 offensive units sitting in a city on regular base. The problem is that the AI won't actually use them for offensive duties. Independent cities get conquered sooner or later, but the AI never uses it's army to conquer his neighbours. For example, last week I played a RFC game, France conquered Spain and Russia defeated Germany. Such things never happen in RFCE, the AI has no incentive to go on a large campaign.

It might indeed have a base in the war maps. While these are historical, and the AI follows them nicely, there is a point where nothing will happen. If I was the king of France and I see that Germany or Spain is exhausted from a long war / plague epidemic / you name it, what would I do? IRL, it didn't happen, but I'm sure it would happen if they had the opportunity. Therefore, I'd consider expanding the war (settler) maps, so that any civ has at least a large part of the area that his neighbour normally settles. I don't know what value these territories should be given, but that's something to worry about later.

I think the issue might be with the size of the map. If the AI thinks it has a big enough empire already, then it will not try to expand. Consider a combined French-Spanish empire and the sheer size of it. I look into it as much as I can.

 

[3Miro]

One other odd behavior I noticed relates to colonies. It seems like the AI puts a very low (zero?) value on things like South American Access. I have played several games where you can just ask for it from some AI which has built colonies already and as long as they will trade at all they will give it to you for nothing.

I submitted a fix, but can someone please test it. I have been having some trouble with rebuilding the .dll. The code in CvPlayerAI.cpp should be fine.

Before, the AI would put little value to resources giving construction bonus to projects and since access doesn't give much of a bonus, its value was essentially null. Now slaves and access are valued much more and should be more difficult to trade.

 

[ornom0n]

I encountered this one bug yesterday while playing as France: I moved my troops to independent area, but my troops just went inside without declaring war as if i had open borders agreement with them. Was that supposed to happen and is there some way to declare war to them?

 

[micbic]

No, but you can still DOW them by clicking the right mouse button when giving the "Go To" order.

 

[Daffy]

I've had some trouble with the game crashing lately and since i've started to expect it during autoplay for the dutch or swedes, I managed to get a screenshot this time
It's actually not so much the game crashing but it halts until you respond to the promt.
The problem with this is, that in most cases it remains in the backround and I am unable to switch to the desktop anymore. It can occur between turns or during autoplay. I've started to notice that it can happen with pretty much any civ around 1300 and 1500, never had it occur before 1300 though.
Workaround during autoplay is to remain on the desktop until you're sure that the game is finished with autoplay, but that won't work between turns.
It wouldn't be so bad if I wouldn't have to hard reboot my PC sometimes, just because I can't click on 'continue' of some error prompt :/
If you click continue or abort, the game goes on as if nothing had happend.



It appears civ4 has a way of showing which hardware is going to braek down in future
The error was most likely related to a broken harddrive which failed completely a few weeks later. The error mentioned something about not being able to write to disk, so it sounds plausible to me.
My monitor was acting up during civ a few months back (only during civ) a couple of days later it broke down xD

 

[3Miro]

I've had some trouble with the game crashing lately and since i've started to expect it during autoplay for the dutch or swedes, I managed to get a screenshot this time
It's actually not so much the game crashing but it halts until you respond to the promt.
The problem with this is, that in most cases it remains in the backround and I am unable to switch to the desktop anymore. It can occur between turns or during autoplay. I've started to notice that it can happen with pretty much any civ around 1300 and 1500, never had it occur before 1300 though.
Workaround during autoplay is to remain on the desktop until you're sure that the game is finished with autoplay, but that won't work between turns.
It wouldn't be so bad if I wouldn't have to hard reboot my PC sometimes, just because I can't click on 'continue' of some error prompt :/
If you click continue or abort, the game goes on as if nothing had happend.

This reminds me of the joke about that guy in a hot air balloon, who was flying around and got lost. So he saw anothe guy on the ground and shouted: "Where am I?", and the other guys replied "You are in a balloon!". Perfectly accurate, yet completely useless. This is exactly what windows errors usually are.

Currently I cannot even start the mod, but this is probably because of a bad Linux install and unfortunately I don't have the time to fix it right now (regular BtS and RFC work fine for some reason).

The symptoms that you describe sound like graphics glitch. Which leaderhead and/or unit gets loaded around 1300AD. There used to be a RFCE_light version for the leaderheads (it was one file in RFCE\Assets\XML\Leaderheads), this removed all the new leaderheads and made the game lighter and playable for some people. You can check to see if the file is still there.

If the game crashes a lot, you should probably play in windowed mod (My Documents\My Games\Beyond the Sword\CivilizationIV.ini, change the full screen option). That way, even if the game crashes, you will still keep your desktop. This was very handy for me when I was coding in the beginning and the game was crashing every 2 minutes.

 

[sedna17]

The symptoms that you describe sound like graphics glitch. Which leaderhead and/or unit gets loaded around 1300AD. There used to be a RFCE_light version for the leaderheads (it was one file in RFCE\Assets\XML\Leaderheads), this removed all the new leaderheads and made the game lighter and playable for some people. You can check to see if the file is still there.

If the game crashes a lot, you should probably play in windowed mod (My Documents\My Games\Beyond the Sword\CivilizationIV.ini, change the full screen option). That way, even if the game crashes, you will still keep your desktop. This was very handy for me when I was coding in the beginning and the game was crashing every 2 minutes.

Unfortunately I did not update Assets\XML\Civilizations\CIV4LeaderHeadInfos.xml_light when I put in the new leaders, so attempting to use this file will not work. When I get a chance I will update it and post it -- but that may not be for a while (a week?). Until then, hopefully playing in windowed mode will help.

 

[Ringan]

Gents,
Firstly, thanks for a great mod! Had a lot of fun playing it.

I've noticed that at least some of the units that are intended to perform flanking strikes do not do so correctly. This is a problem stemming from changes firaxis made from 3.13 -> 3.17. Two lines for each flank-striking unit need to be changed in UnitInfos.xml. I recently made a post about it here.

I would be happy to perform the correction if you like, let me know (also whether to upload the file here or to the SVN).

 

[ezzlar]

Might already been reported but...

1. My tech tree shows that Industrialism founds Protestantism. However, it is still founded by Printing Press.
2. Plate Armor and Machine Tools both say that they clear "Woodland or forest". Correct should be only Woodland for Plate Armor and Forest for Machine Tools (I think that is a bit too late btw).

 

[merijn_v1]

Might already been reported but...

1. My tech tree shows that Industrialism founds Protestantism. However, it is still founded by Printing Press.
2. Plate Armor and Machine Tools both say that they clear "Woodland or forest". Correct should be only Woodland for Plate Armor and Forest for Machine Tools (I think that is a bit too late btw).

1. Protestantism is found by the first catholic civ that discovers Printing Press. Panopticon changed the code some time ago. But he made a mistake. He made that protestantism spawn a few turns after the start. (about 512AD). He changed the needed tech to Insdustrialism, so the Barbs don't found protestantism anymore and the code works fine.
2. I'll change that. However, it works fine, but the Civilopedia text is wrong. (Woodland only requires plate armor and forest requires machine tools) So it won't change the gameplay.

 

[sedna17]

Gents,
Firstly, thanks for a great mod! Had a lot of fun playing it.

I've noticed that at least some of the units that are intended to perform flanking strikes do not do so correctly. This is a problem stemming from changes firaxis made from 3.13 -> 3.17. Two lines for each flank-striking unit need to be changed in UnitInfos.xml. I recently made a post about it here.

I would be happy to perform the correction if you like, let me know (also whether to upload the file here or to the SVN).

Yes, I see. We have those values correct for some flanking units and incorrect for some. If you could correct it and post the file to the forum (probably easiest) that would be awesome.

 

[Ringan]

It's attached! Let me know if there are any issues with it.

Edit: Forum doesn't permit attaching XML files and txt files must be < 50 kb. Sorry it is in a zip.

 

[Daffy]

Not sure if it's worth mentioning or if the save will help, but yet another oddness
For some reason Hungary didn't seem to spawn in my latest start with Austria.
Or did they possibly just get wiped out at spawn? Didn't even found Budapest.
Also weird is that my spawn date is 1 round later than usual 1164, my other Austrian spawn saves are 1161.

Nevermind this, just noticed that I hadn't been properly replaced RFCEMaps.py after my failed attempt to make some sense of the cityname maps this might have screwed up something in the game.
For some reason I don't see the city name flags when I load one of those city name map wbs files, so I tried editing the .py file directly in notepad, but it's hard to make out the actual city positions

I'd be happy to take a look and fix those things if anyone could tell me how to do so in a halfway decent manner i.e. via worldbuilder
I noticed a few incorrect city names, Brunswick, Cassel etc. Germanys west/southwest also partially seems a bit off.

 

[ezzlar]

When you discover a tech that gives you a new civic you get a pop up asking if you want to change to the new civic. Next to the name of the civic is a small explanation of the civic. That text is not updated for all the civics.

 

[3Miro]

When you discover a tech that gives you a new civic you get a pop up asking if you want to change to the new civic. Next to the name of the civic is a small explanation of the civic. That text is not updated for all the civics.

Those are the strategy tags, none of those are updated for the mod (yet). Go to the Civic advisor for accurate info on the civics.

 

[Jusos2108]

Don't know have you implemented the dynamic civ names completely yet, but in my game with Sweden I was called "swedish peoples" even after I had taken Moskva and had 15 cities.

 

[sedna17]

Don't know have you implemented the dynamic civ names completely yet, but in my game with Sweden I was called "swedish peoples" even after I had taken Moskva and had 15 cities.

Probably there's just a mistake and the XML entries are offset. I had one game with a "Swedish Sultanate" even though they were protestant and not vassaled.

 

[Steb]

It would seem that Charlemagne and Jeanne d'Arc were swapped: the former appears to rule France after the latter.

 

[sedna17]

It would seem that Charlemagne and Jeanne d'Arc were swapped: the former appears to rule France after the latter.

Hmmm, I've never seen this. Do you have a save?

 

[Steb]

What kind of save do you want?

It appears constant that Joan of Arc rules Frankia from the very beginning, in 500 AD. I autoplayed a Turkish game and she's still there in 1300. Apparently she'll be there forever! (until Louis I guess)

In another game, though, I saw Charlemagne in the 1100s. I think it was because of a respawn. So Charlemagne is there only when France respawns... At least in my games. I'll post a save soon if needed.