Version 0.78 Discussion Thread

[jdog5000]

You can always get the latest stable release from the download thread or sourceforge. Development versions and updated source code can also be checked out from sourceforge. There will also sometimes be development versions on CFC, see the development thread for more info.

Fixes hammer overflow bug in 3.19 and bug introduced a little while ago which could cause endless "Waiting for ..." in certain circumstances. A couple of other tweaks and changes. One interesting one, the Barbarian player will no longer always consider themselves in financial trouble (barbarians don't actually pay maintenance ... not really part of their m.o.). This should free up their cities to produce more units and might make a late entrance to the new world on a Terra map a bit more dangerous.

Also, since I spent the time to make it more useful, here's a snippet from the updated readme:

New User Interface Features
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- Holding down SHIFT+ALT and clicking on a leader in the scoreboard toggles your civ's warplan between WARPLAN_PREPARING_TOTAL and NO_WARPLAN. This feature can be used to signal to your vassals that they should begin preparing for war with a particular player as well, allowing them to be much better prepared when you declare. Any warning you can give your vassals will help, but enough time to build one to two units in a city is best. WARNING: Use of this feature is not multiplayer compatible, WARPLANs are not sent across the network since they're otherwise only used by the AI and so it will lead to OOS errors if you have vassals.
- The scoreboard will show WAR in yellow instead of red when you have declared you are planning a war using the above feature.
- Added line to contact help text explaining that SHIFT+ALT clicking toggles war preparation plans.
- Air units can now be set to explore, they use the same explore logic as AI planes and then have additional logic if that doesn't push a mission. Note that planes on auto explore always move at the very beginning of your turn!


Customization
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Some mod options can be enabled or disabled by changing settings in GlobalDefinesAlt.xml. Here are the important options in that file:

- BBAI_AIR_COMBAT: Controls modification for air v air combat to make veteran units more valuable, especially when wounded. Air v air combat is now more much more similar to land combat. Defaults to ON.
- BBAI_HUMAN_VASSAL_WAR_BUILD: This setting makes vassals of human players build more military units, anticipating that their human masters will engage in more wars. In single player, it's better to use the new SHIFT+ALT click feature to set war preparation plans described above, this is intended mainly for multiplayer where that feature should not be used. Defaults to OFF.

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Finally, the change logging system has been, well, changed. The full change log from plain BTS is in changelog.txt. There are numerous bug fixes and hundreds of places where AI logic has been overhauled, tweaked, or better integrated with other pieces. Only the changes since BBAI 0.77 are listed below.

New in Better BTS AI v0.78

Spoiler :

Bugfix
- Brought over rest of hammer overflow fix from UP which was accidentally dropped in merge
- Fixed bug (introduced) causing endless "Waiting for ..." when AI had mixed stack of galleys and galleons under certain circumstances
- Fixed bug where cityAcquiredAndKept event reported wrong player in some circumstances (thanks Maniac)

War strategy AI
- AI now begins accelerating war plan if it has 1.5x as much power as enemy, instead of only accelerating at higher than 2.0x

City AI
- Production of planes for carriers now happens when AI has empty carriers, independent of whether AI is launching invasion. Should better fill carriers built outside of invasion logic which were often useless before

Naval AI
- When AI naval units retreat from threatened cities, they now do a better job of escorting transports
- UNITAI_MISSILE_CARRIER_SEA units won't run all around the world just to shadow an assault transport

Barbarian AI
- Barb player no longer feels like it's in financial trouble, meaning it won't spam cottages around it cities or build banks on Terra maps

Customization
- Added BBAI_HUMAN_VASSAL_WAR_BUILD to GlobalDefinesAlt.xml

Debug
- In debug mode, score and demographic graphs now show info for all players

 

[MaxCiv]

Great job! Thanks.

 

[Roland Johansen]

Good job on the fixes and the improvements to naval and barbarian AI.

 

[Cybah]

hm. now I'm getting compiling errors:

1>CvPlayerAI.cpp(1244) : error C2039: 'AI_seperate' : is not a member of 'CvSelectionGroup'
1> e:\--- base gamecore ---\für 3.19\cvgamecoredll\CvSelectionGroup.h(16) : see declaration of 'CvSelectionGroup'

seems you made some typos. there must be AI_sepArate. I don't know whats spelled correctly, but you should always use seperate or always use separate.


well, therefore, sure you fixed the bug?

 

[PieceOfMind]

There's a rat in separate.

 

[Lone Wolf]

"Seperate" is not a valid spelling.

 

[jdog5000]

Firaxis had a mix of sepErate and sepArate for different function names ... I tried to fix it earlier, but picked the incorrect spelling. In the BBAI sourcecode they're now all separate.

 

[jdog5000]

BTW, I'm going to be on vacation for the next couple weeks, so I won't be around much. Enjoy playing!

 

[TopDog]

TY so much! Enjoy a deserved holiday.

 

[Glovz]

sorry newbie question...
Just so I'm clear - BBAI contains al UP fixes as well or do they have to be merged?

 

[Cybah]

yes, no. BBAI contains all fixes.

 

[Woody1]

Well, there is no UP for 3.19, so BBAI is all there is atm.
Are there even any plans for a 3.19 UP? It doesn't seem like it's needed. BBAI seems the way to go.

 

[MadmanAtW]

It seems that people feel that a 3.19 UP would be a fine idea (the overflow fix, there's a fun colony bug people are talking about on the UP forum) for those people who want the fixes without wanting Better AI. Trouble is, no one has volunteered to take up the mantle of the UP, so for now it looks DOA. But we'll see.

 

[phungus420]

(there's a fun colony bug people are talking about on the UP forum)

Having read the reports on this, I'm wondering if this was introduced in the 3.19 patch, or if this has been going on since day one, and it was finally noticed. Causing it is rare in default BtS, and jdog said Revolutions created this bug in earlier BtS versions, so I think this actually may go all the way back to warlords and was finally caught. It's not something you would really notice (all players who's player number is over the dead civ that is replaced by a new colony effectively get two turns), and it wouldn't happen very often in default BtS.

 

[MadmanAtW]

That had occurred to me as well. It's more that it's a bug that could use fixing than that it's 3.19 specific, but I find it unlikely that it was introduced in 3.19 unless that bit of code about turn order was just introduced. It's more likely that it happened any time a colony was inserted earlier into the player order, and was only noticed now because someone happened to be playing a game with max # civs and had an enemy army 2 turns away, which made it obvious that it had gone twice.

 

[Maniac]

I play my first game ever with BBAI (and 3.19) and jdog just leaves, meaning I might not get an answer for weeks.

I'm playing a game on a standard-sized map using the Tectonics mapscript. I'm at turn 250 or so now and I occassionaly run into Memory Allocation Failures when trying to load a saved game while already in the game. Never before in these four Civ4 years have I experienced a MAF. I thought MAFs were caused by playing with heavy graphics or huge sized maps. But BBAI doesn't have that. My laptop has 1.3 GHz processor and 2 GB RAM for the record.

Also I'm wondering if the following are normal:
The AI spends more time than in unmodded Civ in between turns. I guess that's to be expected for a better AI mod.
But also it takes much longer to load a game, more particularly the first phase 'Initializing'. Save file size at turn 250 is 750kb. This also seems much larger than usual, but I could be wrong: I don't usually pay that much attention to save file size.

I'd love to include BBAI in Planetfall, but not if it's gonna cause frequent MAFs.

 

[MadmanAtW]

Hmm, I don't know how to respond to the rest of your post but I've been playing BBAI for rather a while now and I've never seen a MAF.

I haven't played unmodded civ in so long I don't know about the time differences between turns.

 

[Woody1]

I used to have memory allocation failures when I only had 1GB of RAM. When I upgraded to 2MB, they are extremely rare. I have seen at least one, though. If you save and reload a lot, that seems to cause them. The fix is to quit the game and then restart it; that clears it up for many more save&reloads.

Yeah, I cheat alot.

 

[BobTheTerrible]

Maybe you're accidentally using the debug .dll or something?

 

[Cybah]

Firaxis had a mix of sepErate and sepArate for different function names ... I tried to fix it earlier, but picked the incorrect spelling. In the BBAI sourcecode they're now all separate.

well. no? your sourcecode is still the same in svn/download file. there is still the error in CvPlayerAI.cpp. any other files affected?