C3X: EXE Mod including Bug Fixes, Stack Bombard, and Much More Release 16

[Takeo]

Flintlock,
Have you seen anything that reveals the possibility of changing the frequency or chance of the scientific/military leaders? and the chance of unit promotion?

Thanks for all your work! Appreciate it!

 

[Flintlock]

Here are two more head scratchers:

I'll add these to the list. I haven't dug into the guts of the offensive or defensive unit AI so I don't know how difficult it would be to change those behaviors, my guess would be quite difficult but who knows. Problems like #2 are why it's tempting to overhaul the unit AI. Currently the code loops over every unit and moves each one individually, so for units to cancel what they're doing to defend a city, each one needs to notice, individually, that it's in a city being threatened and decide to do something about it. It would be much better if the AI would start by analyzing the whole battlefield then assign units to accomplish important tasks like first defend cities, then attack where possible, etc.

Have you seen anything that reveals the possibility of changing the frequency or chance of the scientific/military leaders? and the chance of unit promotion?

It should be easy to change those things. I've already touched the scientific leader spawning code when I was working on the science age bug. I temporarily modified it to trigger a spawn with 100% chance so I could get a leader to use to test my fix. I've never looked at the unit promotion code but modifying the chances is probably similarly easy.

 

[Flintlock]

C3X Release 7
New in this version:
- Buttons on trade screen to quickly switch between civs
- Ask/offer gold popup autofills best amount
- Adjustable minimum city distance

This one's smaller than the last version but it's got a nice set of changes IMO. The trade screen improvements remove a major source of tedium, especially for games on larger maps and higher difficulties, and it's something I've wanted to do ever since I started work on this mod. I tried to make an animated GIF showing off the new features but I wasn't able to get it under 10 MB so this picture of the trade screen arrows will have to do as a teaser:

Click them to quickly switch to negotiating with the next/previous civ in the list. The other changes are: when you ask for or offer gold the set amount popup is automatically filled with the best amount so you don't have to try 10 different values while you hone in on the most gold you can get or least you have to offer, and the minimum city distance is now adjustable upwards or downwards.

Link: https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/c3x.28759/

I don't have any plans for the next version after this one so I can't say what it'll contain or when it'll be ready. I'm going to work on it like I did R6, that is I'll tinker with various things and package up a new release once I feel it's worth it.

 

[haluu]

Great Job Flintlock! I'm already enjoying saving money without having to do too much trial and error on the diplomacy screen!

I have a wishlist, some of which are more Tides of Crimson specific, but might still benefit the original game and other mods. Let me know if you think these can be done in future versions, if it wouldn't be too difficult. I'm also not sure if you've implemented some of these already, but didn't see them specifically in the log. My apologies if I missed something!

Just food for thought in case you are bored. I don't think i'd ever expect these all to be done. =)

- AI ability to try to detect and attack invisible units that are pillaging improvements (if it has detector units)
- AI ability to strategically attack undamaged army units
- Allow AI to use "Join City" when it is the only action a unit can take (0 attack, 0 defense, 0 ranged attack, 1 movement, not a worker, not a settler, not an explorer, not a leader). I have 'crops' and 'livestock' in my game that the human player can use to add population points to a city. But the AI does not seem to want to use them correctly.
- A fix for Trade route calculations (e.g. Harbors) slowing down the game and causing lag in between turns

Thanks!

 

[vmxa]

The harbor is a killer on 250x250 31 civs. CCM deals with it by removing harbors and using small wonders to replace them. That way you do not 100's of harbors.

 

[Vuldacon]

Excellent Additions Flintlock... This will seriously help with Trade and Time in Game

 

[Civinator]

Excellent Additions Flintlock... This will seriously help with Trade and Time in Game

I completely second this!

Flintlock you are working faster than me with the German update of C3C (this weekend I posted another preview of one of the C3C Conquests updates in German language).

 

[Barret]

Fantastic stuff! Been away from Civ3 for ages, but this certainly brings back the old spark! I wonder if it's possible to remove the corruption, or rather fix the "Corruption Off" setting in the editor (under governments) not working in practice? I recall this being an issue. Was thinking about a government that wouldn't generate any corruption. But I guess it might be too embedded in various mechanics to work the way it should?

 

[Flintlock]

Great Job Flintlock! I'm already enjoying saving money without having to do too much trial and error on the diplomacy screen!
I have a wishlist, some of which are more Tides of Crimson specific, but might still benefit the original game and other mods. Let me know if you think these can be done in future versions, if it wouldn't be too difficult. I'm also not sure if you've implemented some of these already, but didn't see them specifically in the log. My apologies if I missed something!

Thanks. Glad to hear you're enjoying my mod. I'll add your wish list to the huge master list, some thoughts about it:
- I haven't tried it yet, but I expect modifying unit behavior in a fine-grained manner would probably be difficult.
- Here again there's the problem of unit coordination, each unit decides what to do individually, so it's hard to make many of them work together reliably. The AI should be able to bombard armies to soften then up, so the mod should already help with this problem by letting the AI build & use artillery.
- This would be a straight forward modification, similar to making the leader AI look for a good location to rush production but even simpler. What AI strategy is assigned to these units, if any?
- I can't say anything specific about the trade route calculation before looking into it. In general I expect optimizing the game would be difficult because Firaxis already plucked the low hanging fruit, but who knows, maybe they missed something. One problem with doing this sort of thing is that the code my mod injects gets compiled with little to no optimization. Currently this isn't a problem b/c the mod doesn't replace anything performance critical but it means replacing a function with a faster version is not practical unless the base version is extremely bad.

Fantastic stuff! Been away from Civ3 for ages, but this certainly brings back the old spark! I wonder if it's possible to remove the corruption, or rather fix the "Corruption Off" setting in the editor (under governments) not working in practice? I recall this being an issue. Was thinking about a government that wouldn't generate any corruption. But I guess it might be too embedded in various mechanics to work the way it should?

Thanks. I haven't looked into how corruption is applied in detail, but my understanding is that the rate is determined by a single function, so it should be easy to zero it out. Also I think Antal created an EXE modded to remove all corruption so it should definitely be possible.

 

[haluu]

Hi Flintlock,
Thanks so much for your reply on my suggestions!

- This would be a straight forward modification, similar to making the leader AI look for a good location to rush production but even simpler. What AI strategy is assigned to these units, if any?

Great to hear ti would be simple! Below is the current settings I have for 'crops'. AI strategy was 'defense' to try to keep them in cities so that they would 'join city'. I'm not 100% sure if they do, but from looking at the large # of these types of units the AI still has at the end game in debug mode (the crops are autoproduced from buildings), i'm guessing the AI does not correctly use them to join city at all. Even when a city is size 2 and the population cap is 6, they do not use crops to 'join city'.

I have tried other AI strategies like 'terraform' or 'settle' or 'explore' without the actual ability to do any worker or settler actions, but this did not result in the behavior i wanted either. =(. Overall, I think the "Defense" AI strategy might still the best way to make this work, if you are able to correct the AI behavior.

 

[Barret]

Thanks. I haven't looked into how corruption is applied in detail, but my understanding is that the rate is determined by a single function, so it should be easy to zero it out. Also I think Antal created an EXE modded to remove all corruption so it should definitely be possible.

Great, sounds promising!

 

[Predator145]

A few ideas for the next patch:

1.) Anarchy time: Option to set number of Anarchy turns.
2.) AI cruise missile and tactical missile use. Can you get them to use these flags the same way they do with artillery units?
3.) AI transporting all of its assets for overseas invasion including artillery, cruise missiles.

 

[register]

And from me small reminder:
• units delete stack
• more culture groups

 

[ThERat]

Hi there, what an amazing mod this is

I simply had to try this out, I especially appreciate the ability to execute worker actions for a whole stack and bombard using the whole stack. Funny thing here is, the stack function differentiates betwenn normal workers and slaves, for bombards it also needs inputs for each class of siege units.
The alert for disorder is priceless too.

Since I played always war to test this mod, I saw the enemy using an army, unfortunately a LB army which was easy to be killed. And another new thing, the enemy came with a mega stack of 50+ unit pairs of defender +siege units in a whole stack. That took some serious cracking of my head how to deal with it. Tough!

 

[Civinator]

Flintlock, another great move in improving the trading informations would be to bring back some features from the tool CivAssist II, especially the information about technologies that can be traded.

To bring back the information in CivAssist II about the remaining turns of the Golden Age of the player could be a nice feature, too.

CivAssist II can be found here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civassist-ii.118540/

and here is the link to the Online Help of CivAssist II: http://gotm.civfanatics.net/civassist/help/introduction.htm

As can be seen in many of the last posts in the thread of this tool, unfortunately nearly nobody was able to install CivAssist II under Win 10, 64 bit and it would even be better, if these informations can appear directly in the game.

 

[tjs282]

To bring back the information in CivAssist II about the remaining turns of the Golden Age of the player could be a nice feature, too.

Since the unit-box already includes a line which appears during a Golden Age, if that could somehow be modified to give the elapsed turns, turns remaining, or both (e.g. "Golden Age turn/xx", where "turn" is the current turn of the GA, and "xx" is the GA-duration [turns] value set in the .biq), that would probably be sufficient...?

 

[Predator145]

A couple more ideas:

1.) Airlift function. I'm not sure if the AI knows how to use that function at all. It certainly doesn't airlift artillery units even after you give them the function. It would be nice for the AI to airlift all units that have the function enabled. It seems like the AI ignores the special orders flags and would execute things regardless based on what AI strategy flags it has. Preplaced aircrafts would rebase off carriers even if they only have operational range and no rebase function if they're tagged as air bombard for example.

2.) Many worker functions. The AI would only build fortresses in bottlenecks and ignores crucial border high ground. It will also never use the "build airfield" function and guards its radar towers often with offensive units.

 

[Flintlock]

The list of suggestions continues to grow. I've already been keeping many of the straight-forward suggestions in the back of my mind, like more stack buttons, adjustable anarchy length, removing corruption, etc., basically things that I'm confident I could do. I haven't gotten around to them because I find it more interesting to tackle new and unknown problems. Maybe I'll get around to them soon, but no promises. For the past couple of days I've been looking over the code that opens the right-click unit menu with the idea of grouping up the units listed. I don't have much to say about it except making that happen does not look like it will be easy.

Great to hear ti would be simple! Below is the current settings I have for 'crops'. AI strategy was 'defense' to try to keep them in cities so that they would 'join city'. I'm not 100% sure if they do, but from looking at the large # of these types of units the AI still has at the end game in debug mode (the crops are autoproduced from buildings), i'm guessing the AI does not correctly use them to join city at all. Even when a city is size 2 and the population cap is 6, they do not use crops to 'join city'.
I have tried other AI strategies like 'terraform' or 'settle' or 'explore' without the actual ability to do any worker or settler actions, but this did not result in the behavior i wanted either. =(. Overall, I think the "Defense" AI strategy might still the best way to make this work, if you are able to correct the AI behavior.

Alright. I was thinking terraform would make the most sense because I know the AI can join workers into its cities, but if none of the strategies work it doesn't matter.

Flintlock, another great move in improving the trading informations would be to bring back some features from the tool CivAssist II, especially the information about technologies that can be traded.
To bring back the information in CivAssist II about the remaining turns of the Golden Age of the player could be a nice feature, too.

For finding out what techs are available for trade, the trade screen scroll arrows already help a lot. Having it all laid out in a table would be even better, I expect making that happen would be tedious but not exactly difficult. Interface programming is in general very tedious and the way it's set up inside Civ 3 doesn't help with that. Showing golden age turns remaining would be easy though, probably the easiest way to do that would for the domestic advisor to mention it like she already does for anarchy length.

A couple more ideas:

The problem with altering one aspect of AI unit behavior is I wouldn't know how to integrate it with the rest of the unit AI. Take airlifting for example, it's difficult enough to figure out when it's a good idea to airlift and where, but in addition I would have to balance that with whatever else the unit is doing or might do. With the leader unit AI it was easy because I just replaced the entire thing.

 

[haluu]

Alright. I was thinking terraform would make the most sense because I know the AI can join workers into its cities, but if none of the strategies work it doesn't matter.

Ah I see what you are saying! I suppose terraform would indeed make the most sense. Do you know if the AI will "join city" at all with it's worker units in the standard game? Maybe they occasionally do this in my mod without me realizing. If so then maybe a quick tweek on your end + "terraform" AI strategy flag could get the AI to join city with "crops" units!

 

[tjs282]

Do you know if the AI will "join city" at all with it's worker units in the standard game? Maybe they occasionally do this in my mod without me realizing.

Definite "yes" to the question of AI joining Workers. See this short thread:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...efdom-not-a-modded-game.604294/#post-14551407

Regarding ToC specifically, IIRC you increased the assimilation probabilities for most of the Spheres well above the base-game values, so you'd likely only spot joined foreign citizens in AI-towns if you captured (or investigated) them relatively soon after it happened.