Single Player bugs and crashes v37 plus (SVN) - After the 24th of December 2016

[Dancing Hoskuld]

@JosEPh_II : Can you try to identify/confirm exactly what's taking place here? This sounds like it could be a BIG part of why we get nations collapsing after the Industrial era and I'm a little confused as to what the problem is specifically. You're usually very good at disseminating these kinds of domino disconnections. Once we identify exactly what adjustment needs to be made, potentially to Town Halls if that's the issue, then we may be able to get games to stay a lot more balanced post industrial.

Since these are a line of buildings that replace their earlier form it should not, in theory, make them less effective, but this line of buildings has a special ability, having the earlier version reduces the cost of its replacement. This is why I always build the village hall before building the Town Hall and so on.

As I see it there are two alternatives:-

1. Don't let the earlier ones go obsolete.
2. At the tech they do go obsolete have a new building that is given free in all cities. It would be equivalent to the Town Hall, but not have the population requirement, and replaced it. This is a bit more difficult to do as you want it in existing cities as well as new cities.

edit It should be noted I wanted this line of buildings as the gates not population for controlling what other buildings you could access. This is because I come from a rich but sparsely populated country and we build stuff in what we call towns that less rich but much more populous nations would call hamlets.

This is the side of programming that's way over my head. My interest is always focused on game effects and I really get frustrated when I get bogged down in the processing that takes place that players never see anything from. Thus this stuff has always been the realm of Alberts2 and AIAndy (and @n47 if we can keep her valuable input here . That's right n47... I'm telling you directly that I value your contributions!) We now have Raledon also getting involved in some of this kind of thing and I think he'll prove to be exceedingly valuable with this side of the coding. Maybe this is something he or Alberts2 can improve on some. I know I'm the last person who should be looking at ways to do that... I'd just make a mess. We've all got our strengths (and weaknesses.)

My main strengths are Data Model conversions and UI. Unfortunately the game industry has not caught up with mainstream computing and tends to use one data model for storage, game play and user interaction.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Don't let the earlier ones go obsolete.

This building line seems timeless enough for me to say this should be our option imo.

I can see some buildings being pop controlled others being controlled by these admin buildings. As a side note, I don't think this chain should stop when it reaches Metropolitan or capital... there's a lot more future for this chain past that point.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Since these are a line of buildings that replace their earlier form it should not, in theory, make them less effective, but this line of buildings has a special ability, having the earlier version reduces the cost of its replacement. This is why I always build the village hall before building the Town Hall and so on.

As I see it there are two alternatives:-

1. Don't let the earlier ones go obsolete.
2. At the tech they do go obsolete have a new building that is given free in all cities. It would be equivalent to the Town Hall, but not have the population requirement, and replaced it. This is a bit more difficult to do as you want it in existing cities as well as new cities.

edit It should be noted I wanted this line of buildings as the gates not population for controlling what other buildings you could access. This is because I come from a rich but sparsely populated country and we build stuff in what we call towns that less rich but much more populous nations would call hamlets.

I go for #1. As it is the root cause for much of the AI's woe when we get into the late game, starting with Industrial Era. And the woe that new cities encounter as you (the player) try to build them up.

Sidenote: even to this day I don't fully use this line of buildings. To me the "cost" in "gold" generally outweighs the limited (in my view) benefits. I can see why Rev players would want it and use it. The Massive Human vs Human MP game we play has taught me that much. But for those players like me that don't use Rev and don't like Rev, these buildings beyond the 1st one or two are not critical in anyway to my way of play. Afforess, when he made or incorporated these buildings into RoM_AND had them in mind for Rev users. But back then the game ended after the Modern era too. You could play for awhile with Future Era if you really wanted to continue a game.

Sidenote2: Does Space Race Victory condition even work any more for C2C? I seriously doubt if it does. And has anyone been able to access the Space Ship building screen either? To see your progress? Are the Ship's components still in the Mod as well?

 

[Thunderbrd]

Sidenote2: Does Space Race Victory condition even work any more for C2C? I seriously doubt if it does. And has anyone been able to access the Space Ship building screen either? To see your progress? Are the Ship's components still in the Mod as well?

Yeah. It works. Pretty sure it does anyhow. Though it's a little anachronistic. The components are team projects which is why you aren't seeing them in usual building xmls.

 

[Harrier]

Now that Permafrost has been re-added to the mod - the "Artic Combat" promo's need changing. They currently do not recognize Permafrost.

Either add Permafrost to "Artic Combat 3" - with Ice.

Or - make "Artic combat 3" - for Permafrost only and add a new promo (#4) for Ice.

Just checked 9845. They need updating.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Just checked 9845. They need updating.

OK. I'll put it on the prerelease list.

 

[Raledon]

Great generals do not seem to heal all that well.
Initiative II states it will help healing units in the same tile for an extra 10%.
My maceman (sole unit, exceptional quality, company size (0 merges, SM on)) is hurt by 10%, placing him at 140/150. It will take him two turns to heal to full, instead of the expected one.
Am I misunderstanding something about the general's ability?

 

[Thunderbrd]

Great generals do not seem to heal all that well.
Initiative II states it will help healing units in the same tile for an extra 10%.
My maceman (sole unit, exceptional quality, company size (0 merges, SM on)) is hurt by 10%, placing him at 140/150. It will take him two turns to heal to full, instead of the expected one.
Am I misunderstanding something about the general's ability?

Perhaps instead misunderstanding that 10% hurt means you'd be at 135/150?

Note: 10% healing as is reflected by the old healing tags is 10 pts.

There could also be an issue with healing abilities not working if you don't have any defined number of units you can help to heal. This may be an issue with that promotion so yes, there could be a bug there. This would also mean that the first aid promotion may be having the same issue if assigned to a unit that doesn't have a definition to the number of units it can heal.

I also wonder how healing was setup for great commanders. It's possible that it's just handing this additional assistance out to healers within command range. Yeah, there's lots of stuff this could mean.

I'll have to take a look.

 

[Raledon]

Perhaps instead misunderstanding that 10% hurt means you'd be at 135/150?

I also thought it might be the case, but the unit was 140/150 when hovering on attacks. Even at 135/150 I'd expect a one turn (5% base+10% from commander).

 

[Thunderbrd]

I also thought it might be the case, but the unit was 140/150 when hovering on attacks. Even at 135/150 I'd expect a one turn (5% base+10% from commander).

yeah I'll really have to investigate on this one. As I thought about it, I considered a number of possibilities for this.

 

[KaTiON_PT]

@JosEPh_II : This sounds like it could be a BIG part of why we get nations collapsing after the Industrial era and I'm a little confused as to what the problem is specifically.

Another reason AI's might collapse during industrial is probably from crime producing units. I ventured with a couple dogs to see hidden units in their cities and they are riddled with criminals (thiefs, cutthroats, assassins, etc) and all of them have 90 experience with crime producing promotions. Every era adds a number of different crimes so I can see these issues compounding.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Another reason AI's might collapse during industrial is probably from crime producing units. I ventured with a couple dogs to see hidden units in their cities and they are riddled with criminals (thiefs, cutthroats, assassins, etc) and all of them have 90 experience with crime producing promotions. Every era adds a number of different crimes so I can see these issues compounding.

Completely agree. They start building the biggest baddest Criminal they can and they don't have enough internal LE to even start to deal with them. As I've stated before the Criminals at 1.5 x str of an equivalent LE unit just to start is too much. Then add in the promotions these Crims get and it takes more LEs than the AI has or is even able to produce to fight them.

Also the buildings that allow the Crims give more gold that the AI can pass up. Especially when they need the gold to produce the buildings and units they need. So they build more lucrative Criminal buildings. The programming for them seeing this is Bad is just not there or it's too weak. But the AI does not recognize the correlation. In a recent submitted game an AI was building the Highwaymen crime building. Now this AI was using the units to harrass a neighbor (which is good) but they also were keeping some back as defending units (bad). The player of this game started to build the building too. The building was giving ~100 /turn at that time. Now in a 20 city empire with every city building and using this building that's 2,000 /turn. And we had players complaining about the merchant ships giving 1000/turn but with a limited number of ships available. Where's the balance there?

And finally there were broken upgrade chains to getting any usable LEs until recently. And that is still under observation because of the loss of even the Town Watchmen can be detrimental to the AI. All because we had players complaining about too many LE and Healers in a city. Which has been reduced by coding.

Can you see how this is feeding on itself?

 

[Thunderbrd]

but they also were keeping some back as defending units (bad)

If you see this in a game I need to see that game. I'm not saying its impossible. It's not. But if it's happening, I can, and need to, correct that immediately. There are a few AI types that the criminals can take on somehow that would be bad for them to have and if they are taking those AI's, I have to block that in the code or even just in XML. Looking at them in world-builder I can see now exactly what AI they've come to possess that's giving them bad behavior. This has proven to be one of the issues that was causing the greatest problems. I addressed a lot of that earlier and some proof of it working has been received so again, PLEASE throw up any savegame that may seem like this is taking place!

There IS a strategy they sometimes use to train a batch of them and send them in a wave. This only happens on Unlimited National Units though and they shouldn't have cause to hold on to them for long for this before they reach the desired volume of them and deploy. Shouldn't be too bad and if it asks them to build a few extra LE units as a result of the temporary boost in crime to their own cities, it's actually a little helpful, as it gets them to be slightly pro-active about their anti-crime needs and more prepared for other players sending in units to mess with them.

All because we had players complaining about too many LE and Healers in a city. Which has been reduced by coding.

Try not to misunderstand. I recently was reported a game where the AI had cities with some 40-50 healers. Where they had those healers they were some 10s of thousands in the negative on disease and everywhere throughout their nation they had perfectly healthy cities. The problem was that they were reacting so fast to exterior city requests for help with a little disease struggle and by the time they trained the units and got them there and the disease was lowered, they had massively over-reacted. Since this can cause an economic problem to have all those units - so many were queued up each round until the disease issue was solved, not just responded to - this AI was set to have a problem with being able to afford much of anything at all. Crime was doing fine except the AI was overbuilding them in the wrong capacity, city defense, which they would often store outside the city. Helpful that.

Another reason AI's might collapse during industrial is probably from crime producing units. I ventured with a couple dogs to see hidden units in their cities and they are riddled with criminals (thiefs, cutthroats, assassins, etc) and all of them have 90 experience with crime producing promotions. Every era adds a number of different crimes so I can see these issues compounding.

If you're running on the latest SVN, please see my first paragraph here... I'd like to see your savegame. That is, IF you've got the latest assets and have played a significant amount in the last couple weeks. (enough for current coding to have cleared the issues that were fixed)

 

[Septimius]

SVN 9845, dunno if this is wad or a bug.

When you use criminals to trade in a city and they get returned to your own city, your resident law units waste their investigation points finding your own thieves/rogues. This seems to result in the law enforcement units not finding the thieves that occur from thieves guild, at least I've had two of these hanging around for a really large amount of turns.

I'm using the criminals to help alleviate a deficit for a period of around 50 turns, which means they've been sent to my capital regularly. Which is why I've seen this happen on several occasions and guessing that my law enforcement units aren't investigating barbarian thieves.

Savegame included with a thief that just got the wanted promotion.

 

[Thunderbrd]

SVN 9845, dunno if this is wad or a bug.

When you use criminals to trade in a city and they get returned to your own city, your resident law units waste their investigation points finding your own thieves/rogues. This seems to result in the law enforcement units not finding the thieves that occur from thieves guild, at least I've had two of these hanging around for a really large amount of turns.

I'm using the criminals to help alleviate a deficit for a period of around 50 turns, which means they've been sent to my capital regularly. Which is why I've seen this happen on several occasions and guessing that my law enforcement units aren't investigating barbarian thieves.

Savegame included with a thief that just got the wanted promotion.

Not a bug. As designed.

Your investigators don't know the difference between state and non-state criminals (otherwise there's a lot of drug smuggling operations the US law enforcement would turn a blind eye to.) Thus they can and will investigate your own criminals and can make your own criminals wanted and can even arrest your own criminals if you perform an arrest function. ( think of the options this gives the player ) This can be great for generating captives. It can also foul you up a bit if you have multiple criminals in a city, some yours, some not, and you wanted to get rid of those that aren't - when you go to arrest you can't see the national affiliation of the unit you're selecting to arrest on the list of possible units to bust.

Investigators also don't waste investigation points. All criminals are checked equally and all criminals have to pass an investigation check in the city each round they are there to avoid becoming wanted. If you investigate your own criminal, I think you just have to get the criminal out of the city to get it out of wanted status. iirc.

 

[raxo2222]

@Thunderbrd
I skimmed over tech tree. It looks very neat, only few times white line runs under some tech.
There are two "glitches"
Shamanism should be switched to lowest row and mountaineering is stray tech - it stays unselected, when I select future tech.

Spoiler :

Looks like some tech requirements are redundant:
Trapping requires Tracking which requiresa Persistence Hunting which requires Cooperation which requires Deception.
Also Trapping requires Deception, that already is covered by Persistence Hunting -> Tracking.
So there is no need for Tracking having Deception requirement, as it is MUST in chain.

Spoiler :

 

[Thunderbrd]

Shamanism should be switched to lowest row

If Shamanism is switched to the lowest row you have it overlapping the line there and while it CAN, I'd rather it didn't. There are a few places where there are NO OR prereqs because it just was making too much a mess of the OR lines. This was a really important one because if I change the AND prereq on shamanism to an OR then it would violate a rule I never allowed which was to never have a line running under another line that ended at the tech before it. Having it off and floating up there is about the only answer to this scenario, particularly since Ceremonial Burial requires Animism and is NOT a dead end path. Thus the need to draw the line from Animism there took precedence.

mountaineering is stray tech - it stays unselected, when I select future tech.

Mountaineering is actually an option based tech. If you don't have Useable Mountains, it must be allowed to be out of the chain or it fouls up the game. Useable Mountains may not appear as an option but it IS still a valid option to have off if you want to go in and change it in the xml.

Trapping requires Tracking which Persistence Hunting which requires Cooperation which requires Deception.
Also Trapping requires Deception, that already is covered by tracking.
So there is no need for Tracking having Deception requirement, as it is MUST in chain.

There's probably a lot of this sort of thing. As I said, if I spotted it I fixed it but if I didn't I didn't bother. I wasn't auditing for this. If someone wants to DO a full audit on redundant prereqs then it would be appreciated and could all be corrected in the XML at once. Otherwise I'm not wanting to bother with spot fixes.

 

[raxo2222]

I found place, where you can skip entire one column.
Its like these techs and all further ones could be moved one column back (X positions weren't adjusted in this audit).
Edit: It seems like some techs just have their prereqs listed two columns back just like in these screenshots.

Spoiler :

I wonder if its even technically possible to have tech tree that is:
- without redundancies
- without And requirements being on same column
- techs always requiring something from previous column
- no floating techs (shamanism is only case)
- having easily readable arrows
That would displace most techs from their row and column
I guess someone bored could do that (most likely they would also change building costs of tech unlocking buildings changed column)

 

[Raledon]

If Shamanism is switched to the lowest row you have it overlapping the line there and while it CAN, I'd rather it didn't. There are a few places where there are NO OR prereqs because it just was making too much a mess of the OR lines. This was a really important one because if I change the AND prereq on shamanism to an OR then it would violate a rule I never allowed which was to never have a line running under another line that ended at the tech before it. Having it off and floating up there is about the only answer to this scenario, particularly since Ceremonial Burial requires Animism and is NOT a dead end path. Thus the need to draw the line from Animism there took precedence.

Ignoring the level of my paint "art", the below picture may allow a few switches of tech placing, so that there's a line from animism to shamanism. The biggest "issue" is that the atlatl making and slavery lines do not look very pretty.

Spoiler :

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

- no floating techs (shamanism is only case)
- having easily readable arrows

The arrows come from OR prerequisites so floating techs have no OR prerequisites only AND prerequisites.

I see no problem with a tech only having AND prerequisites. Also I see no problem in having an AND prerequisite tech in the same column.