Single Player bugs and crashes v38 plus (SVN) - After the 20th of February 2018

[Toffer90]

@Dancing Hoskuld @Toffer90
A problem needs to be resolved in python with the captive system. When a captive is earned and the captive shows up on a Sea domain plot, it must check to see if it can load onto a friendly transport there. IF it can, it must be loaded right away. If it can't, it must be destroyed.

Fairly simple I think but I'm not proficient enough in Python to do it myself at the moment.

Are you talking about "captive military" here?
They can only be earned if both the attacker and the defender are units of the land domain type. Can a land domain unit attack a land domain unit from a water plot?
The captive is spawned on the winner, and there may not be enough space on the transport to accommodate the captive and the attacker who made the capture.

 

[raxo2222]

Turn 508 in latest game (Emperor Normal) 7 AI (not 6 ) , Just finished City Planning Tech Classical Era; turn times on my old i7 2600K 3.4 GHz cpu 4 cores 8 threads is now up to 3:51 at EoT wait....
At the rate of EoT wait increase this game may not make it to Med Era before I'm forced to stop. I guess my days of playing up into Ren Era are over.

@Toffer90 maybe we should reduce AI discount for units and buildings too?
@Thunderbrd what are your turn times around here?

No. Beelining has nothing to do with it.

When buildings replace each other, they do so before the one being replaced is obsoleted in case you just never got around to building it for a while. This wasn't an accident. The accident was that the replacement is worse than the original.

And THIS is a RAMPANT problem in the Modern Era. This is only one of some 50 buildings that have this issue. And the reason for the problem is always the same, the tech bonuses were not taken into account.

Personally, I feel the tech bonuses are too strong. I also feel that the progressions should be charted out to ramp things up with much more care.

But making one not replace the other is returning to the issue of the original building being obsoleted at some point and when it does get obsoleted your civ loses it in every city and takes a significant hit, making the tech a bad thing to get. The point of replacement is to eliminate this sensation and allowing for a smoother transition.

Furthermore, as I stated before, allowing both to be concurrently operating in your cities leads to an even greater glut of research and we're already needing to tone it down a bit. It's the # of sources for research * the potency of those sources that is a bit problematic. If we tone down the amount of research each of those sources gives a bit, we will introduce improvements in balance.

Not that this is the only problematic commerce and/or yield. I think they all ramp up a bit too high, too fast and should really be toned down across the board but do so with a charted and better measured sense of progression.

I think Hydro, Pepper, and Azure, would all admit that they were setting up initial values that would eventually have to be rebalanced and tweaked before we'd have a solid sense of game balance in these later eras.

Production problems with replacements were fixed, when I increased minimum +% yields from buildings according to guidelines.
I can do same thing with research.
I should lower research yield of replaced building then.

Geology Lab was OP- it gave 54% of research from bonuses, now it gets flat +54 research - +1 per natural non-living resource.

Commerce providers indirectly boost research too - that is all trade related buildings, that give new trade route or increase current yields increase research rate too.

 

[Toffer90]

@Toffer90 maybe we should reduce AI discount for units and buildings too?
@Thunderbrd what are your turn times around here?

Nah, handicap as a whole has only a minor impact on turn times, that the AI create more units and buildings each turn on higher difficulties is not the big time hog.

 

[raxo2222]

Nah, handicap as a whole has only a minor impact on turn times, that the AI create more units and buildings each turn on higher difficulties is not the big time hog.

Then what slows down game so much at Medieval era for some people?

AI probably has 50% more buildings than it used to at any point of game

 

[Thunderbrd]

Are you talking about "captive military" here?

Yes

They can only be earned if both the attacker and the defender are units of the land domain type. Can a land domain unit attack a land domain unit from a water plot?

Yes, when they are attacking from a ship.

The captive is spawned on the winner, and there may not be enough space on the transport to accommodate the captive and the attacker who made the capture.

Exactly, which is why the captive needs to, once spawned, immediately attempt to check if it can load onto a transport, then do so if it can, and if it can't, be destroyed instead.

As it stands now, they are just standing there on the water tile. And even if there's room on the transports, all too often you'll move the ships out and leave them sitting there walking on water.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Then what slows down game so much at Medieval era for some people?

AI probably has 50% more buildings than it used to at any point of game

Might have an effect that they are constructing more buildings. Could answer to the recent note that things have become slower. But handicap isn't really going to make a big difference on that. Maybe a little. I think overall the AI performing better may be having an impact in general, yes. More units to process is the larger issue. Unit AI takes up a lot of the turn time.

 

[Snofru1]

The Tumen Amugulang Palace gives a free Fountain in every city. But Tumen gets obsolete with Civil Engineering and the fountain only at Virtual Society. That means that at Civil Engineering all of a sudden the Fountains reappear in the build list.
I would suggest to have the Tumen Amugulang Palace also go obsolete at Virtual Society (or the fountain at Civil Engineering which would be too soon IMPO).

 

[raxo2222]

The Tumen Amugulang Palace gives a free Fountain in every city. But Tumen gets obsolete with Civil Engineering and the fountain only at Virtual Society. That means that at Civil Engineering all of a sudden the Fountains reappear in the build list.
I would suggest to have the Tumen Amugulang Palace also go obsolete at Virtual Society (or the fountain at Civil Engineering which would be too soon IMPO).

I guess its general bug then:
X wonder gives free building Y, X obsoletes before Y -> you lose Y buildings in all cities and you have to build them.

 

[Snofru1]

I guess its general bug then:
X wonder gives free building Y, X obsoletes before Y -> you lose Y buildings in all cities and you have to build them.

I will post any occasion where I find these.

 

[raxo2222]

I will post any occasion where I find these.

Well @Thunderbrd could make it so you don't lose free buildings if something giving them obsoletes.

 

[Thunderbrd]

I guess its general bug then:
X wonder gives free building Y, X obsoletes before Y -> you lose Y buildings in all cities and you have to build them.

Not a bug... that's how it works. It should work that way. If you don't want it to then the building giving the free buildings shouldn't obsolete until the free buildings do.

 

[raxo2222]

Not a bug... that's how it works. It should work that way. If you don't want it to then the building giving the free buildings shouldn't obsolete until the free buildings do.

There are around 100 entries, that give free buildable building, so it may take a while

 

[Thunderbrd]

There are around 200 entries, that give free buildable building, so it may take a while

Not all of them should be problematic since many would either not obsolete or would obsolete after the free buildings do.

Fixing it in the code would take as long and would limit us to not being able to do this on purpose.

 

[raxo2222]

Not all of them should be problematic since many would either not obsolete or would obsolete after the free buildings do.

Fixing it in the code would take as long and would limit us to not being able to do this on purpose.

Looks like only few buildngs were like this.

 

[Toffer90]

AI probably has 50% more buildings than it used to at any point of game

Sure, but then it's the amount of content in the game that is the significant factor for long turn times, not the handicap option chosen by the player.

The iAIWeights you added to many buildings will make AI build more buildings regardless of handicap used.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Sure, but then it's the amount of content in the game that is the significant factor for long turn times, not the handicap option chosen by the player.

The iAIWeights you added to many buildings will make AI build more buildings regardless of handicap used.

Which is to say the correlation is there but indirect and somewhat off target to lay blame there. I still say it has more to do with the number of units the AI is staffing and less the number of buildings. Thus SM would help a lot here usually. There's also a lot of optimizing to be done and corrections to be made in the AI that would lubricate turns a lot. We're never going to slash times by more than half of what we have though I don't think.

There are also ways to mitigate long lists in code. By making sub-listing vectors that store smaller more pertinent lists to the searches being made, we can speed some loops up a LOT. But then we still must be a bit concerned about memory limits.

 

[JosEPh_II]

I'll stop posting my turn times. I'll play as long as I can. When it gets to be unbearable I'll just stop playing.

On Record I do want to state this again, I have voiced my opinion and my serious concern that we need to trim the bloat in the mod. That means reducing number of types of units (both regular and Cultural), number of Techs, number of promotions and even will go so far as number of Eras (or provide an alternate end point say after Information Era where a Space race Victory option could be used.). Maybe even Reduce the number of Civs in the Mod and the number of leaders for each Civ (not sure that would make any difference though). Also maybe map sizes need to go back to their old sizes vs their new ones? Which are bigger now. So many places to look at to do trimming.

I also understand that Size matters is an ongoing project to make unit numbers decrease, At given times, to facilitate play. And that it will become the Default way to play C2C. Same with the Combat Mod Options. Though the later does not reduce any usage of in game units but does use more Promotions, so that also means more calculations per unit.

I also know I am not going to persuade anyone to change their ideals concerning the Mods future development. Even so here is my public statement of concern for the Record.

If none of this comes about anytime in the future then players, with computers such as I have, will be forced to stop playing the mod. It is that simple.

 

[raxo2222]

I'll stop posting my turn times. I'll play as long as I can. When it gets to be unbearable I'll just stop playing.

On Record I do want to state this again, I have voiced my opinion and my serious concern that we need to trim the bloat in the mod. That means reducing number of types of units (both regular and Cultural), number of Techs, number of promotions and even will go so far as number of Eras (or provide an alternate end point say after Information Era where a Space race Victory option could be used.). Maybe even Reduce the number of Civs in the Mod and the number of leaders for each Civ (not sure that would make any difference though). Also maybe map sizes need to go back to their old sizes vs their new ones? Which are bigger now. So many places to look at to do trimming.

I also understand that Size matters is an ongoing project to make unit numbers decrease, At given times, to facilitate play. And that it will become the Default way to play C2C. Same with the Combat Mod Options. Though the later does not reduce any usage of in game units but does use more Promotions, so that also means more calculations per unit.

I also know I am not going to persuade anyone to change their ideals concerning the Mods future development. Even so here is my public statement of concern for the Record.

If none of this comes about anytime in the future then players, with computers such as I have, will be forced to stop playing the mod. It is that simple.

If you are playing C2C_World and no other mapscripts, then world size changes didn't affect you, they affected other mapscripts, as world sizes are now standardized to C2C_World.

Number of eras doesn't do anything - just different scaling factors kicking in after player or AI research lifestyle tech.
We could have three eras instead of 13 for example Natural (Prehistoric - Medieval), Technological (Renaissance - Nanotech) and Space (Transhuman - Transcendent), but still there would be 941 techs and a lot of units/buildings and other stuff.

You can throw out cultures and remove half of animals and their myths/story/stories but leave techs and buildings

Still my spacemaps allows for fast gameplay due to Duel sized Earth part.

Anyway aren't units actively being on map biggest cause of slowdown?
Animal spawning should be reduced (stronger reduction within borders) depending on what era tech leader is.

 

[Thunderbrd]

On Record I do want to state this again, I have voiced my opinion and my serious concern that we need to trim the bloat in the mod. That means reducing number of types of units (both regular and Cultural), number of Techs, number of promotions and even will go so far as number of Eras (or provide an alternate end point say after Information Era where a Space race Victory option could be used.). Maybe even Reduce the number of Civs in the Mod and the number of leaders for each Civ (not sure that would make any difference though). Also maybe map sizes need to go back to their old sizes vs their new ones? Which are bigger now. So many places to look at to do trimming.

Very little of this would make the game move faster. The maps would. You'd see a difference over the course of a lot of assets being eliminated but even then, we could have vanilla assets and this mod would be much slower because of more involved AI.

It'll get some focus but the louder people complain the more I harden about it and feel like if you're too impatient for this game, play something else. We've done a lot to speed things up but the mod wasn't made for speed it was made for a quality complex experience. Now that the AI is functioning better, the turn times have slowed tremendously. There are still some major things to correct there that may well have a much greater impact. But honestly, the speedups will come from AI improvements. Period. Nothing else will cut deep enough to make any noticeable difference.

 

[Snofru1]

I am surprised that we have a turn time discussion here, waiting times are much shorter than a few years ago. I currently play on one of my space maps which is gigantic but has a standard size "earth" region. I am in Industrial and waiting time is about 30 seconds. I could reduce that significantly if I had less automatized units, especially sea hunters or missionaries. But then there are no wars going on and every region is settled so there are only very few animals.
I have a pretty good but not very new computer with a six core i7-5820 CPU, not overclocked. Waiting times so far are absolutely no problem for me and that was also no issue earlier in that game when still a lot of barbarians and animals roamed the world.