Single Player bugs and crashes - After the 29th of March

[Necratoid]

-I'd suggest that city defense numbers are color coded then... for instance, green (or standard whitish) for positive defenses and say red for negative defenses. That way we can tell at a glance and not run into a situation where, to avoid confusion, every one is named 'Bruce'. Its not like you can really check an AI's current traits before they research writing if you start as minor civs.

-Great so the automated unit turn order is already controlled by some random option then? If that is what your saying are you willing to share that bit of arcane lore?

 

[strategyonly]

My Ranger just got 2 Promotions needed taken away from him??

Sight II and Hunting Sight(taken) (given) FieldsmanII

 

[AIAndy]

@AIAndy: what would be the reference to use for that call that could be added to CvCity::getNumBonuses that could add a non-enabled resource to the city that's working that tile in its vicinity with an improvement that would give that bonus to the nation if the bonus were 'enabled'?

I guess you might want to use similar code as in CvCity::hasVicinityBonus but without the check for reveal tech in CvPlot::isHasValidBonus.

A known bug. A known complex issue as well.
@AIAndy: is there an ETA on resolution for this?

Not high on my list at the moment.

 

[ls612]

-I'd suggest that city defense numbers are color coded then... for instance, green (or standard whitish) for positive defenses and say red for negative defenses. That way we can tell at a glance and not run into a situation where, to avoid confusion, every one is named 'Bruce'. Its not like you can really check an AI's current traits before they research writing if you start as minor civs.

Even better idea; Prevent city defenses from going below zero. How on earth would even the most bombed out city be less defensible than normal Grasslands?

 

[DRJ]

I think we could see a city with defense of +0% like this

Spoiler :

It is round and every side of it is equally fragile, the whole structure, however is solid.

Now imagine a city that, due to the addition of certain buildings (or large fields between the houses [agricultural -15% city defense]) the network of roads gets jammed up (old cities had many narrow alleys when growing due to the lack of efficient planning - or imagine the expansion to the other side of the river changes its structure into something like this - much weaker to defend now.

Spoiler :

Even with a wall around it it would not be as easy to defend as a city that would not have partly expanded over a river and has walls as well.

Negative City Defense is very interesting I think and I have to stress here that I also like to see negative GP points btw^^ Don't get me wrong, I am a very positive person

 

[Necratoid]

-Without looking negative defense is related to more commerce/diplomacy. So a city with negative defense would be one with lots of easily bribed civilians that will actively hamper defenders. Maybe handy tourist maps stands everywhere. Your in city recon is available in mass quantities. That or the leadership is so lax and annoying that the populous is actively helping you invade the city to get rid of the moron "leading" them.

Negative defense means the city is actively helping you invade it or it means that the city is designed to be easy to move through and show that its full of friends... why invade when the shopping is so good?

An open field of short grass is just there. Easy to see and nothing really hampers or helps you move though the terrain. Granted enough practice and you can get promotions that find ways to use this empty land to combat advantage.

Granted building walls and towers should actively neutralize this negative defense, if not grant as great defenses as a safer built city would.

This is a flaw for a reason.

 

[ls612]

-Without looking negative defense is related to more commerce/diplomacy. So a city with negative defense would be one with lots of easily bribed civilians that will actively hamper defenders. Maybe handy tourist maps stands everywhere. Your in city recon is available in mass quantities. That or the leadership is so lax and annoying that the populous is actively helping you invade the city to get rid of the moron "leading" them.

Negative defense means the city is actively helping you invade it or it means that the city is designed to be easy to move through and show that its full of friends... why invade when the shopping is so good?

An open field of short grass is just there. Easy to see and nothing really hampers or helps you move though the terrain. Granted enough practice and you can get promotions that find ways to use this empty land to combat advantage.

Granted building walls and towers should actively neutralize this negative defense, if not grant as great defenses as a safer built city would.

This is a flaw for a reason.

Those situations sound more like Espionage situations than city defense modifiers. If you do counter-espionage against enemy agents it doesn't increase city defense, does it?

Maybe there should be a spy mission that gives all units +25% vs that city for a little while. That could be easily done with the Effect system once that is in.

 

[Il Principe]

I like these ideas. Both negative defense modifiers, and the spy mission.
But those modifierst should beconsidered carefully. A stretch of open field right in the city mayseem like a palce you can manouver better, bring heavy armour to bear and so on...but it is also a killing field, with clear shots for dug in defenders. There is a reason why cutting the trees around castles andlater military bases is a good idea.

 

[Thunderbrd]

I was thinking about this because you have brought it up before. What f we had an auto-build building that prohibited seafood resources in every city. Then we have a 2nd auto-build building that replaces that building but requires any of the resources to be in the city vicinity? That way only cities with a seafood resource can have access to seafood resources.

Then at refrigeration both buildings go obsolete and trade routes work as normal. What do you think?

I'd like to try to put in place a resource status before 'enabled' that makes it possible to have local only access before the resource can be traded.

-I'd suggest that city defense numbers are color coded then... for instance, green (or standard whitish) for positive defenses and say red for negative defenses. That way we can tell at a glance and not run into a situation where, to avoid confusion, every one is named 'Bruce'. Its not like you can really check an AI's current traits before they research writing if you start as minor civs.

-Great so the automated unit turn order is already controlled by some random option then? If that is what your saying are you willing to share that bit of arcane lore?

I'm not sure what option but I think its a base game option from vanilla civ4. aka in the game options tab.

My Ranger just got 2 Promotions needed taken away from him??

Sight II and Hunting Sight(taken) (given) FieldsmanII

I guess some prereqs have been changed. I think ls612 had a plan here that may have made such a change - perhaps there was an oversight in that plan or something of this may be by design (as in purposefully removed the prereqs for those on hunter units). I'm not sure... ls?

I guess you might want to use similar code as in CvCity::hasVicinityBonus but without the check for reveal tech in CvPlot::isHasValidBonus.


Not high on my list at the moment.

Thanks for the answers. I can understand on that last point - its fairly complex and a bit unfair as it wasn't designed for the way the promos have changed their display compilation.

Those situations sound more like Espionage situations than city defense modifiers. If you do counter-espionage against enemy agents it doesn't increase city defense, does it?

Maybe there should be a spy mission that gives all units +25% vs that city for a little while. That could be easily done with the Effect system once that is in.

Minimum 0 city defense could be easily enforced but I kinda like city defenses being weakened by a leader who has an extraordinary lack of defensive concern. If some thought isn't given to city design for defense, the lackadaisical design (and lack of preparation training, and allowing the troops of units to take undisciplined advantage of the cities fineries even when war is at hand) could easily make a city easier to attack than a force on the open plain. This is because the invading enemy makes better use of the city's strategic positions than the defending forces themselves do.

However, I do really like the espionage mission idea. Though I don't think the Effect system would make it easier or harder to implement though the outcome structure does seem to be able to make it simpler.

 

[Faustmouse]

Ok, turning out automated promotion fixed that bug, so many thanks!!!
I still don't know why it hang. I had the idea that it was caused by my hunter. He has so many XP now that there are no more Promotion available for him! But if so, why don't crashes the game when Worker may get a promotion?

Ah, and I forgot: It's V29, no SVN.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Ok. Thanks for the additional information. I had wondered if perhaps this was somehow taking place because there were no further promos it could get. That helps to suggest a possible cure.



@ls612 & SO: Ok, I've been experiencing the bug SO reported earlier tonight. I did not touch anything about the promotion process in this update so there are some things confusing me about what I'm seeing. I don't know if you've done something strange that was unanticipated in the splitting up of the Combat Classes in Recons and Hunters but something is certainly odd there.

I'm experiencing this problem only with those two classes somehow. Whenever they level their free promotions lose their 'free' indicator in the code and thus begin applying as a normal earned promotion when checked for obsoletion. There's two very odd things about this - that its specific to those two classes which I believe I recall underwent some changes by you (which at this point I'd like you to explain to me in detail so that I can think on how those alterations may have inadvertently revealed this bug) - and that its happening only when they level up.

Anyhow, it does call for some code analysis which I may have some time for on wednesday but probably won't be able to get enough focus to really resolve until the weekend. I'll also try to fully address Faustmouse's bug then as well.

Sorry if I leapt to a misconclusion there at first. I didn't realize the full picture at the time but some testing tonight made things more apparent.

 

[strategyonly]

Via Appia python error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "BugEventManager", line 363, in _handleDefaultEvent
File "AppianWay", line 66, in onBuildingBuilt
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'pCity2' referenced before assignment

 

[Yudishtira]

I'm not sure what option but I think its a base game option from vanilla civ4. aka in the game options tab.

The base game option is "No Unit Cycling". You could then move units in your own manually chosen order (I presume - never tried it). Easy to forget some though...

I kinda like city defenses being weakened by a leader who has an extraordinary lack of defensive concern. If some thought isn't given to city design for defense, the lackadaisical design (and lack of preparation training, and allowing the troops of units to take undisciplined advantage of the cities fineries even when war is at hand) could easily make a city easier to attack than a force on the open plain. This is because the invading enemy makes better use of the city's strategic positions than the defending forces themselves do.

However, I do really like the espionage mission idea. Though I don't think the Effect system would make it easier or harder to implement though the outcome structure does seem to be able to make it simpler.

FWIW that's what I think too. If you have the trait, it must be allowed to work even when it sends defences negative. Apart from outright rebellion, as has been stated it could also represent a culture of corruption, or of gullibility.

 

[Thunderbrd]

@ls612: I think I figured out what's going on with the scouts and hunters... a primary unitcombat must be assigned. If one is not we'd get issues like these. I recall you saying you had a unitcombat that would also unify the two. If that's somehow not fully developed correctly and being eliminated from the game's assets as a result, then they'd be left primary unitcombatless and this sort of thing would ensue. I haven't looked at what you've done but it very much appears to be that a primary unit combat under the <Combat> tag is not active for those units.

This is a relic from the previous singular combat only method that was left in place at the time in many places so that the whole sub-combat thing could be more easily retracted if needbe. It's not entirely necessary now but it would take a bit of effort to remove that requirement on a lot of unit details. Much more than simply making sure those units have a primary unit combat defined. I'll put repairing this design pitfall on 'the list' of things to achieve in the meantime.

 

[Zain]

Hi,
I'm playing on the latest svn, and I've gotten to the middle age, and now the game crashes to desktop every time my turn would start with a conversation with an AI leader. When I load the game from the autosave it works fine, until a new start-of-turn conversation would pop up... Which is nearly every turn.

Help's appreciated

PS. It's been amazing to come yet again back to civ4 and c2c and see all the changes! Fantastic job guys.

 

[strategyonly]

i have another promotion error??

Lost my Woodsman promo??

 

[Zain]

See the Viewports thread, using it on an older 32 bit PC will help out.

Also, i have another promotion error??

Lost my Woodsman promo??

Ahh yes thank you, for some reason I had viewports turned off. After a bit of tweaking it started working again. Cheers!

 

[Stormwind]

I'm still having multiple cases of units simply disappearing. While Barbary Corsairs/Privateers maybe hang out on reefs until they are dead a Warlord Corporal disappeared suddenly without any kill message and terrain damage is off. Only noticing this because national units become buildable again. No savegames so far because it takes sometimes a few turn to notice.
Is there a notice in one of the logs whenever a unit is killed/moved off the map?

Edit: Found the defeat entry in the autolog but not in the actual ingame event log.

Edit2: It seems like color="Red" defending messages do not show up in the ingame log, only in the autolog. Why these message are color="Red" instead of color="DarkRed" I don't know.

 

[Talin2009]

I am sorry if i am being annoying, but since 2 days nobody answered on that bug ...

I tried making new game and i can build cultures there safely. In current game not only me but no one else can build ANY culture (they are showing as nonbuildable ones in city window but no red text saying what requisite is missing). Ones already built have been bulit in previous SVN version.

So can somebody take a look at my savegame please and see what's wrong (is it a bug, or is there some new hidden option) or at least tell me if they can build culture wonders anywhere in my game (Pakistani culture should be able to be built in my capital for example - all prereqs are met).

Savegame is here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=12382776&postcount=442

 

[Flinx]

I am sorry if i am being annoying, but since 2 days nobody answered on that bug ...

No need to worry.

I just loaded your game with the current SVN 5309, did a recalc and was able to build the culture wonders you requested.
See yourself!