Unofficial Patch 0.21 Released

[r_rolo1]

Is AI use of recon actually meaningful?
Doesn't the AI know where all your units are automatically, or is that only with privateers (for which there has been ample evidence)?

The AI units have not full map knowledge. They certainly have some bonuses, but they do not possess omniscience of the map ( see this, especially Dresden posts ).

About privateers.... didn't knew that one. Can you give a link or produce a example, please?

 

[Dresden]

I'm not entirely sure why AI units recon, but they do obviously use it (you can often catch the tail end of a recon animation at the start of your turn, especially with airships) and the AI_exploreAir() mission determines the mechanics of its use. Every AI mission seems to handle line of sight differently so while they often see farther than you and I could see they can't always see everything and so I wouldn't be surprised if there are situations where the extra info comes in handy.

 

[Jaybe]

The AI units have not full map knowledge. They certainly have some bonuses, but they do not possess omniscience of the map ( see this, especially Dresden posts ).

About privateers.... didn't knew that one. Can you give a link or produce a example, please?

Thanks for the link, which is validation enough for me.

Re privateers, I have repeatedly done tests (but not recorded them, sorry), of:
privateer (or another of my ships) spots 'enemy' frigate, runs away or runs and changes vector; followed by successful frigate pursuit, whether it catches the privateer or not.

 

[sabres77]

Just wondering if you guys could help install the 50 civ file. I ran grumbler's installer and it installed Dresden's patch as a mod, which was perfect. How do I install the 50 civ one as a mod as well?

 

[DMOC]

The No Espionage Option:

I'll look at disabling the espionage-related events, disabling the free great spy, and disabling Scotland Yard (is that even necessary if there's no chance at a great spy?) as those seem really obvious and fairly simple fixes. I'll think about disabling purely Espionage-related regular buildings (e.g. Intel Agency & Security Bureau) but doing that in a flexible manner might prove difficult. That'd be about as far as I want to go in terms of No Espionage though, at least for now.

The base No Espionage effect turning of all building EP into culture pts does feel like a ridiculous hack made because of deadlines, but I'm worried that the reason Firaxis went that way rather than the more logical complete disabling of EP is because the latter broke stuff that they didn't have time to fix. My trying to change that sounds like an enormous undertaking that I'd never get properly tested and has high potential for unintended breakage.

BTW, thank you all for your input on these discussions; it's a big help.

You may have to take it a step further (regarding the "empty" Great People Points"). I think that a better idea to fix the wild card Great Spy points would be to simply delete the added Great Person Points that any building generates. Thus, the Great Wall and The Kremlin (any other buildings that inherently generate Great Spy points?) would not generate any Great Person.

I agree with purely deleting Intelligence Agencies and Security bureaus.

I also disagree about the espionage turning into culture that Firaxis put in. The 4 espionage from the palace, for instance, would be better off just deleted and NOT converted into culture.

Good work here on this patch.

On a completely unrelated note, I have the 0.21 patch but never downloaded the 0.19 patch. Does 0.21 contain the changes in 0.19? Again, nice work here.

 

[Dresden]

Just wondering if you guys could help install the 50 civ file. I ran grumbler's installer and it installed Dresden's patch as a mod, which was perfect. How do I install the 50 civ one as a mod as well?

I'll ask grumbler about adding the 50-civ DLL as an installer option. For now, you could take your current mod install, rename the folder, and replace the CvGameCoreDLL.dll there with the one from the 50-civ zipfile. Then run the installer again to reinstall the standard version.

On a completely unrelated note, I have the 0.21 patch but never downloaded the 0.19 patch. Does 0.21 contain the changes in 0.19? Again, nice work here.

0.21 contains all the previous fixes of the unofficial patch. So you can install it on top of a base 3.17 game and you'll still have everything.

 

[jdog5000]

Re: Privateers

Looking through CvUnitAI::AI_pirateBlockade, for certain behaviors an AI pirate absolutely does know about the locations of enemy ships it can't see. In addition, it apparently can also "feel the presence" of stealth ships.

In the first loops of this function, the AI is calculating which plots an enemy ship may be able to reach ... it considers every enemy ship on the same water area as the pirate or in a coastal city. There is no check I can see for whether the pirate has visibility of the unit. This would definitely cause the AI pirate to run from threats it can't see under some circumstances.

The trouble stems from the use of:

CLLNode<IDInfo>* pUnitNode = pLoopPlot->headUnitNode();

without a subsequent check against CvUnit::isInvisible(eTeam).

Since this function is pirate specific, I'm sure it didn't get as much scrutiny as other functions. Other unit AI routines like CvUnitAI::AI_anyAttack (which is used a lot, including by pirates) correctly consider only visible enemy units since it checks:

pLoopPlot->isVisibleEnemyUnit(this)

As Dresden said, determining whether an AI unit "cheats" or not will have to be done on a function-by-function basis in CvUnitAI ... there are several ways these things are handled.

 

[Woody1]

The AI use of privateers is bad enough as it is. You want to cripple the AI further, by taking away its minor cheats?

 

[r_rolo1]

Surely woody, but I can't phantom a reason for the AI privateers ( the only defaul pirate ship in game ) to detect stealth ships.... that part atleast is surely bugged ( c'mon... Drake age ships being more sensitive to stealth ships than radars ? )

 

[Woody1]

If the AI is still using privateers when you're running around with stealth destroyers, it can use any advantage it can get. This falls into the category of "why care?" cheats. It ain't important.

 

[Roland Johansen]

If the AI is still using privateers when you're running around with stealth destroyers, it can use any advantage it can get. This falls into the category of "why care?" cheats. It ain't important.

If you deem it unimportant, then why are you protesting against it? Why are you arguing?

It is also not very important to me, but in cases where I don't care about something and I notice that someone else seems to care (greatly) about it, I typically like to stay out of the debate.




By the way, I do think the AI really needs some 'vision' advantages to be able to function in a somewhat artificially intelligent manner. So I will enter this debate when people start suggesting to remove all the 'unfair vision' advantages from the AI. But this does not seem to be the case. Any changes where the AI will still perform somewhat intelligent and it's behaviour will be a little less artificial are fine with me.

 

[Hawaiian]

Thanks Dresden for all your work.

Quick question: is there still an issue with the overnerfing of culture bombs? If so, is that possibly fixable?

Thanks again for helping Civ4 continue to be playable.

 

[Dresden]

@Privateer Discussion: I don't want to nerf AI privateers, but I also find it nonsensical that they can detect invisible ships. It would be a rare situation normally, but I think the Unofficial Patch ought to be flexible enough to handle simple mods properly; if someone added a modern pirate ship that is essentially the same as a privateer but stronger it would get the same advantage. It certainly sounds like something that I should look into.


@Hawaiian: I don't believe we have done anything in the Unofficial Patch directly related to the Great Artist "Culture Bomb" so if you don't like how the Official 3.17 handles them, it'll probably still be true here. If you can point out a situation where it's broken (preferably with a save) we'll take a look, but if it's more along the lines of "I hate how they changed it in BTS" it's less likely to be something we want to change.

If you read through the above discussions (particularly the one on air recon missions) you'll get some idea of the "is it a bug?" discussion that we go through when evaluating whether something should be addressed in the Unofficial Patch or not. Anyhow, post the details on why you think it's wrong and we'll go from there.

 

[Woody1]

@Privateer Discussion: I don't want to nerf AI privateers, but I also find it nonsensical that they can detect invisible ships. It would be a rare situation normally, but I think the Unofficial Patch ought to be flexible enough to handle simple mods properly; if someone added a modern pirate ship that is essentially the same as a privateer but stronger it would get the same advantage. It certainly sounds like something that I should look into.

That's a good point about mods. I can see it would be of some benefit there. (Close to zero benefit with the game as it is, though.)

But please be aware of the "Solver effect". Fixing stuff that gives very little benefit may break something else that is far more important. That's why I keep chirping in about fixing only what's required.

There may have been a good reason why Firaxis let privateers see invisible ships. Maybe they're treated as barbarians or something? Can barbarians see invisible units as well?

 

[Dresden]

Development Updates...

Regarding recon, I'm testing the simplest fix of having air units ignore underlying terrain... but that might be too big of a change as it will affect all air missions. I may need to scale it back to only do this on actual recon missions since terrain blocking on recon is more obvious a bug than on air strikes or bombing (as we've previously discussed.)

Also, there was a recent report from GravityWave that there are still bugs regarding colonies who use a recycled player spot. The main issue is that the player/civ name shown on the scoreboard (and most other places) still uses the old civ's data; that I've got a handle on fixing thanks to jdog5000's help. Another issue, and one I'm probably going to ignore, is that the history graphs (f9) show the data for both the old and new civs.

Finally, Willem has reported workers set to "build trade network" farming over a resourceless floodplains cottage. If anyone sees anything like that, please make a save and post it.

 

[r_rolo1]

DanF posted a very detailed explanation of a possible solution for the settler iisues on highly fractured landmasses in here

 

[methane]

You may have to take it a step further (regarding the "empty" Great People Points"). I think that a better idea to fix the wild card Great Spy points would be to simply delete the added Great Person Points that any building generates. Thus, the Great Wall and The Kremlin (any other buildings that inherently generate Great Spy points?) would not generate any Great Person.

I agree with purely deleting Intelligence Agencies and Security bureaus.

I also disagree about the espionage turning into culture that Firaxis put in. The 4 espionage from the palace, for instance, would be better off just deleted and NOT converted into culture.

First, I know I 'm late to this, as I haven't looked over here for a month or so.

Second, I have to preface this by saying I've never tried 'no espionage' and probably won't, but I think anything you play with here will reduce the amount of good choices in a no espionage game.

The (main) game tries to give you a variety of ways to go up the tech tree to do different things and buildings were given espionage points partly, I believe, to help balance them as worthwhile investments in relation to other buildings/techs/wonders you can choose to build or research.

I believe the designers saw this and felt that simply removing all espionage points without replacing them with anything would lead to lots of 'bad choices', both in what to tech to, and what to build. I think they switched it to culture simply because they found that less distasteful than replacing it with nothing.

I think they saw some of the problems this would cause, but didn't have the time to make a better fix.

I'm not sure anything you do here (including removing the buildings and GP points) really qualifies as a patch; it will be a redesign. As I said, I don't anticipate playing it, but others might. You might add your intended 'fixes' here as a separate option (so a player can chose no espionage-base version or no espionage-Dresden's version).

Some other possible ways to 'fix' the no espionage game-

1) keep it largely the way it is, remove espionage events, and increase culture values needed to trigger border expansion & get cultural victories, so culture doesn't get out of balance.
2) rather than simply replace espionage with culture, go to each point where espionage is removed and add some value there. Find something else to get at communism. Have castles give you an extra bonus, or make them use less hammers to build. Improve nationalism slightly to make up for its espionage loss. Maybe have the Great Wall and the Kremlin do something new, like occasionally add Great General points. When you're completely removing a building, see if you can put something else at that spot at the tech tree (a building, unit, effect?). In general, try and make the 'no espionage' game as balanced as the main game trys to be.

I know, you're probably not going to do '2', because it will take a large amount of work, but '2' is the way they probably would have done it if they were given the time and told to give it their best effort.

'1' is actually a patch, since it's following their choices (changing espionage into culture was a deliberate choice), but cleaning up effects that they probably didn't have the time to test/fix.

Overriding that decision and simply removing everywhere they switched espionage to culture is actually a new mod to replace their mod, just like '2'.

I will add that not removing espionage events is almost certainly an oversight (or a problem with time).

 

[Woody1]

Methane makes a good point about removing the culture bonuses in no espionage. It makes some of the tech choice unappealing. I like his choice (1), but don't like part about tinkering with the border expansion. (That seems more like a mod than a patch.)

The only thing that really needs fixing is the random events with an espionage part. That is clearly broken in "no espionage". The rest isn't really broken; at most it makes the cultural part of the game a little heavy.

 

[Roland Johansen]

Methane makes a good point about removing the culture bonuses in no espionage. It makes some of the tech choice unappealing. I like his choice (1), but don't like part about tinkering with the border expansion. (That seems more like a mod than a patch.)

The only thing that really needs fixing is the random events with an espionage part. That is clearly broken in "no espionage". The rest isn't really broken; at most it makes the cultural part of the game a little heavy.

I think that the no espionage version of the game should resemble the pre-BTS situation. That was a balanced situation. You can't say that Warlords was balanced because it was made by Firaxis and that BTS with the no espionage option (with espionage points replaced with culture points) is equally balanced because it was made by Firaxis. Both models of the game have a radically different balance, they can't be equally well balanced. Not everything touched by Firaxis is golden and everything else rotten.

Sometimes Firaxis doesn't go for the best option just because it is financially non-attractive. Creating massive patches for an option that few people use for an expansion pack which was created for the fans and not the big public is one of those financially non-attractive actions. That doesn't mean that we, the fans shouldnt' go for the option that we as fans think would be the optimally patched situation. And we, the fans decide what the optimally patched situation is, not Firaxis.

 

[1CrazyCanadian]

I have this .21 installed and I cannot get a single custom scenario to work, 18 civs or 18+ civs. I have it installed as the main patch instead of a mod. I'm also trying to get a mod to work with 18+ civs.

I read your suggestions on what to do and it hasnt worked so far. any suggestions?