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

[Thunderbrd]

2) Disbanding a military unit within your own city gives you a sizeable chunk of cash. More important however, if you have Size Matters on, and you split the unit into 9 smaller units, each of these smaller units sell for the same amount of cash as the original unit. Thus building military units, splitting them and disbanding all of them gives an extreme amount of money.

Exploit number (1) allows the player to catch up very fast in tech, which largely negates the research advantage the AI gets on Nightmare.
Exploit number (2) allows IdioticUlt1mara to spam cities in Nightmare mode and get a massive negative upkeep cost (still negative after setting 100% cash + all cities building wealth) but he is able to keep financially afloat by building 2-3 units every turn, split them and sell them, with 100% research and no cities building wealth.

Exploit number (2) should be game breaking in multiplayer too.

I agree with @Noriad2 that the "Splitting up and disbanding units" exploit is kind of game breaking tbh for example after researching sedentary lifestyle you can split any standard unit at least 2 time - 6 for the price of 1 - and sell/delete all 6 for the same price you could sell the original unit, I was making stone axeman and selling them and making 1000 gold each time. As for the worker exploit - a standard Mule Worker is valued at around 3000 beakers so you can trade 6-8 mule workers for 1 late sedentary lifestyle tech or 1 early classical tech

On the first exploit, I really don't mess with trade screen stuff. Someone will need to address that. I'm ok with not allowing trades for units again.

On the second, looks like i'll have to cut off the ability to get gold for disbanding, going back to the original rule on that, at least if you're playing SM. I've always thought we had set things up for this problem to eventually manifest somehow. Not sure where the formula is for how much gold you get.

 

[JosEPh_II]

On the second, looks like i'll have to cut off the ability to get gold for disbanding, going back to the original rule on that, at least if you're playing SM. I've always thought we had set things up for this problem to eventually manifest somehow. Not sure where the formula is for how much gold you get.

It's 25% of the cost of the unit. Iirc it's in one of the Globaldefine files. A New Dawn I think.

But since the upgrade costs were all changed and if you reduce the gold for disbanding how bad is this going to affect the game for players that do not use SM? Not that you have an answer right now but to pose the question.

@IdioticUlt1mara ,
Always someone out to "break" the rules. But Thanks for finding this.

 

[Noriad2]

I think there is nothing wrong with trading your excess units to the AI, just make sure that making new units for the purpose of selling them, is not so profitable that it can successfully compete with the contemporary version of Build Wealth/Build Research. Even when taking unit production bonuses into account. Workers are built with both hammers and food, but you can also build units like law enforcement and catapult units for selling, and they can get unit production bonus (from buildings, civics, even some leader traits)

Regarding disbanding units, perhaps when disbanding, the money yield should also get adjusted to the Size Matters size, i.e. for each Size Matters level below basic size, the financial yield should also be divided by three. This of course assuming that building the basic unit (with unit production bonus) and disbanding it, gives less money than building the contemporary version of Build Wealth to begin with. Something I have not checked.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

But since the upgrade costs were all changed and if you reduce the gold for disbanding how bad is this going to affect the game for players that do not use SM? Not that you have an answer right now but to pose the question.

As I said elsewhere the current cost structure and income means that it is faster to build new units and delete the old. I can build 5-6 new units in the time it takes me to save enough gold (at 60% tax to research) to upgrade one old unit to the new unit. I do not play with SM.

 

[Thunderbrd]

It's 25% of the cost of the unit. Iirc it's in one of the Globaldefine files.

If this is the case, then the problem is that the unit training modifiers are so strong that a city can produce more units and sell them off faster than it can simply generate gold as a process at a 1 to 1 ratio of hammers to gold (or whatever it is at the time this is so manipulable.)

Thus confirming this:

I think there is nothing wrong with trading your excess units to the AI, just make sure that making new units for the purpose of selling them, is not so profitable that it can successfully compete with the contemporary version of Build Wealth/Build Research.

is a problem with the gold value of the units now being higher than the trade system was originall rigged to value the other trades.

Regarding disbanding units, perhaps when disbanding, the money yield should also get adjusted to the Size Matters size, i.e. for each Size Matters level below basic size, the financial yield should also be divided by three. This of course assuming that building the basic unit (with unit production bonus) and disbanding it, gives less money than building the contemporary version of Build Wealth to begin with. Something I have not checked.

Iirc, it's supposed to already do that so that will have to be considered a bug to resolve. I don't purposefully disband for gold ever so I might've overlooked it.

 

[JosEPh_II]

is a problem with the gold value of the units now being higher than the trade system was originall rigged to value the other trades.

Perhaps this is a result of increased unit costs to build. You rob from Peter you are going to pay either Mary or Paul, if you catch my drift.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Regarding disbanding units, perhaps when disbanding, the money yield should also get adjusted to the Size Matters size, i.e. for each Size Matters level below basic size, the financial yield should also be divided by three. This of course assuming that building the basic unit (with unit production bonus) and disbanding it, gives less money than building the contemporary version of Build Wealth to begin with. Something I have not checked.

No single unit disbanded in the game With out SM will ever give you even close to what Lesser Wealth or Lesser Science will yield for a city.

But if a player/AI wants to disband a whole army why is this even a consideration? In the basic game of course. But with getting full disband price though for a single or worse yet a double reduced size unit in SM is a problem for the SM Options.

As I said there is not this problem in basic C2C (ie No SM in play).

 

[IdioticUlt1mara]

@JosEPh_II you know it man always out to find ways to beat the AI <3. Ya always need someone to find new and improved ways of breaking a mod/game in order to fix these.

Also @Thunderbrd building units without SM is not lucritive if you want to sell them for gold it is only when you add in the SM factor that you can make 250ish% Hammers to Gold at sedentary age when you can only build 67% with Lesser Wealth. I was thinking what if you had it so the disband amount was proportional to the unit's strength? That is if there is not a way to make SM reduce the "price" of a unit as it reduces in size.

Tbh the only reason I noticed this was a thing was because whenever I made a larger unit it sold for the same price as a basic unit so I wanted to test out if it worked the same the other way - and well it did

 

[tmv]

I think a few weeks ago someone proposed that the player should be able to specify a size when building a unit. Perhaps that could resolve this problem as well.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Perhaps this is a result of increased unit costs to build.

It makes the unit more valuable to sack. But to make it more worthwhile than the gold process at 100% conversion rate, would take a lot of unit production modifier in the city to overcome that you can sack the unit for 25% gold of the production build cost. With sources of 100% unit production modifiers, I'm not all that surprised and it really wouldn't be any different with more expensive units, just more noticeable.

No single unit disbanded in the game With out SM will ever give you even close to what Lesser Wealth or Lesser Science will yield for a city.

That would depend on the city and what unitproduction modifiers it's been able to develop. (These don't get counted into the production amount when you're on a gold process.)

That is if there is not a way to make SM reduce the "price" of a unit as it reduces in size.

It's supposed to be doing this but I may not have updated that section for Size Matters v2 which we're operating on now.

 

[strategyonly]

pic1 - dont know for sure if i ever got a reason why "fixed" cant be done next to a city that i own, but it looks like still enemy area, but thats why i ask about fixed???

pic 2 - looks like sometimes the "partisan" is not working correctly after i take over a city, it shows the units , BUT the units do not appear all the time??

EDIT: OK looks like only the enemy ones "do not appear" until after next turn, are "invisible till then for some reason???

 

[JosEPh_II]

pic1 - dont know for sure if i ever got a reason why "fixed" cant be done next to a city that i own, but it looks like still enemy area, but thats why i ask about fixed???

pic 2 - looks like sometimes the "partisan" is not working correctly after i take over a city, it shows the units , BUT the units do not appear all the time??

Are you building Any Culture buildings or Artist or Noble Specialists to spread culture to your #1 pic city? That looks like a Realistic Culture thing more than a Fixed Borders thing to me. Or a combo of both perhaps? Personally SO I stopped using FB on any regular basis a long time ago. So I can't really answer your question.

 

[Thunderbrd]

pic1 - dont know for sure if i ever got a reason why "fixed" cant be done next to a city that i own, but it looks like still enemy area, but thats why i ask about fixed???

I'm not too familiar with fixed borders and how it's supposed to work these days. I really have to say, I don't know. I'm sure I will look into the mystery of that system someday.

pic 2 - looks like sometimes the "partisan" is not working correctly after i take over a city, it shows the units , BUT the units do not appear all the time??

Partisans do have some small degree of invisibility and there may be some caching issue with that and the fact that they have just come into play that doesn't clear up until the next round... maybe. It would take some deep evaluating to see exactly what's happening there.

 

[FuzzyEuk]

1) The AI seems to have problems with crime. At least two civilizations (out of the 4 left on my continent) had crime spiral out of control (~1300-1800 crime, 20-40 rogues/thieves).

2) I had a missionary spread religion to a new city and got an error message about an audio file ID 3 error. The religion was the third one to be unlocked, starts with a T.

3) No one has responded to my comment about slow great people production. Great people (military and normal) take about 5x longer than normal to generate. I'm on marathon speed, and in v37 the first great person took 25 xp or ~250 points. In the latest SVN, the required amounts are much higher. Is this an intended change, or a bug?

4) Old save files show an incorrect year when loaded. I'd started a game on v37, and played about 7% of the game. When I loaded it in the latest version, it said the year was 126000 AD. I assume because it records the start year and then decides that 7% = 176000 years after the start year using the latest counting method (start at 200,000 BC).
Also, minor issue, but it said all the tarantulas had their assets removed (I assumed they were just renamed between v37 and the SVN version).


Off topic question: someone mentioned a nomadic start. It sounds like this is a planned feature and sounds quite interesting, if it is what it sounds like. Could I get more information about the planned features for C2C?

 

[JosEPh_II]

3) No one has responded to my comment about slow great people production. Great people (military and normal) take about 5x longer than normal to generate. I'm on marathon speed, and in v37 the first great person took 25 xp or ~250 points. In the latest SVN, the required amounts are much higher. Is this an intended change, or a bug?

Intended. GPs were coming too fast on all Game Speeds.

4) Old save files show an incorrect year when loaded. I'd started a game on v37, and played about 7% of the game. When I loaded it in the latest version, it said the year was 126000 AD. I assume because it records the start year and then decides that 7% = 176000 years after the start year using the latest counting method (start at 200,000 BC).
Also, minor issue, but it said all the tarantulas had their assets removed (I assumed they were just renamed between v37 and the SVN version).

The consequences of changing the Start date from 50,000BC to 200,000BC. The old v37 save games will "mostly play" but the dates will be all messed up.

2) I had a missionary spread religion to a new city and got an error message about an audio file ID 3 error. The religion was the third one to be unlocked, starts with a T.

Someone did not clean up a file correctly for Tengrii.

1) The AI seems to have problems with crime. At least two civilizations (out of the 4 left on my continent) had crime spiral out of control (~1300-1800 crime, 20-40 rogues/thieves).

Was this game also started with stock v37? Or from a later SVN build? Also do you have Revolution On as an Option?

 

[Thunderbrd]

Could I get more information about the planned features for C2C?

This is kinda like asking someone to summarize this whole forum. There's a lot planned and pondered. You might want to just spend some time reading around here.

About the crime issue, when did this start taking place? And was that on v37 stock at the time it did or are we talking about the SVN version? v37 had some severe issues there that have been resolved but I wonder about a few things with the current still.

 

[Noriad2]

Watched some more of IdioticUlt1mara's stream. As he reached another age, and having Size Matters on, he could build a single military unit, split it into 27 sub-armies, and "sell" (disband button) each of those 27 sub-armies for the same price as the original army, for a massive total sum. Then he figured out that he could insta-build armies using the "buy" button in the city screen to get another army for less money than the 27 sub-armies produced. It is a lot of clicking, but using this trick, and the multiple-production feature, a player can generate almost infinite money in a small number of turns.

I also recall an older Let's Play where the player split up a catapult unit into many small units, and was able to lower city defense % by a whole lot. Much more than the original catapult unit. This might also be a good way to farm Great General points.

Apparently, Size Matters is full of (possible) exploits that throw game balance out of whack.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Watched some more of IdioticUlt1mara's stream. As he reached another age, and having Size Matters on, he could build a single military unit, split it into 27 sub-armies, and "sell" (disband button) each of those 27 sub-armies for the same price as the original army, for a massive total sum. Then he figured out that he could insta-build armies using the "buy" button in the city screen to get another army for less money than the 27 sub-armies produced. It is a lot of clicking, but using this trick, and the multiple-production feature, a player can generate almost infinite money in a small number of turns.

I also recall an older Let's Play where the player split up a catapult unit into many small units, and was able to lower city defense % by a whole lot. Much more than the original catapult unit. This might also be a good way to farm Great General points.

Apparently, Size Matters is full of (possible) exploits that throw game balance out of whack.

Thanks for pointing them out. I'll solve em soon.

 

[FuzzyEuk]

Was this game also started with stock v37? Or from a later SVN build? Also do you have Revolution On as an Option?

Revolutions is "ON." The game was started on a recent SVN build (a 1-2 weeks back). Probably 9645.

This is in the prehistoric era, 5-10% of the way into the game.

I opened the save file I attached, it looks like this is the beginning of the problem. From what I counted, the light green civilization (forgot the name) had ~15 rogues in their city. I'd assumed they were barbarian rogues when I was playing, but world builder suggests they were trained by the owner of the city. They were acting as a garrison or something.

In the 100 turns that followed, the cities production shifted to almost 100% watchers to try to counter-act the soaring crime rates.



Thanks for all your other answers. Personally I feel like the number of great people is too few right now, but I agree, there were too many before.

 

[JosEPh_II]

T-brd will need to weigh in on this one as He's the Mad Scientist over the Criminals in the game. Seems the AI valued the Rogue more important than Hunters or melee/throwing units early game. Of course there are more variable like what type of Leader does that Civ have? Deceiver trait perhaps?