Version 0.9.7 discussion

[phungus420]

Version 0.9.7 Released 22 Oct 09*

• Updated RevDCM component to 2.6
  • Includes BetterAI 0.81M, significantly improves AI and performance as CAR mod components are incorporated
  • Super spy AI adjustments - AI chooses useful promotions including logistics
  • Updated to BUG 4.1.1, and BULL 1.0
  • Added the Global Warming mod by Minor Annoyance
  • Show Hidden Attitude mod merged and made a controllable interface option
  • The AI now is more Revolution aware and will keep its cities happier to avoid revolts
  • domestic advisor liberate city fix
  • Re-balanced BarbarianCiv for early barb settling as well as Barbarian World option
  • Improved German and Spanish translations, nearly fully translated and fully playable in German and Spanish
  • Fixed issue with "X have chosen to give up their independence" text
  • RevolutionDCM options can no longer be changed in a multiplayer game session
  • RevolutionDCM options from the options screen now update immediately (no longer required to reload when adjusting options in the RevDCM tab, accessible by pressing ctrl + alt + o in game)
  • Revolution watch advisor always shows national effects, and national effects are displayed in the city screen rev bar mouseover
  • Various BUG 4.1 fixes to civlerts and autolog to work with Revolutions
  • Modmodder & Scenario maker update notes
    
    Spoiler :

    
    

    • Fixed "Start as Minors" option in scenarios, this option now works as intended with no adverse consequences in a WBS file (scenario)
    • Interdependent random event fix woc
    • RevolutionDCM "debug" option becomes obsolete
    • Limited religion and choose religion code ported to BUG 4.1 standard
    • Revolution Inquisitions code ported to BUG 4.1 standard
    • Inquisition code adjustments to Revolutions mod and non-revolution mod effects
• Minor changes to LoR leaders
• Repacked Art
• Minor adjustments to some units

Let me know any issues with the current build. Keep in mind that we are nearing the end of beta development. I assume a full release will be out by Christmas, basically we are just waiting on the next RevDCM update which will fully support multiplayer.

Also of note for the 0.9.7 build, a new version 0.9.7a was released today, it's an important release, as it fixes a critical bug found in the LSystem files, reported yesterday (if you notice a critical bug, please report it, so I can squash it, I try to be fast on critical issues if they are found). This bug though has to be pretty rare, since it was in 0.9.6c, and never saw it reported. Simply download the current version, and reinstall to update.

LoR: 0.9.7a changelog

• Fixed rare critical bug reported in LSystem files (full version only, does not effect light)
• Fixed longstanding link issue with Legends Civilopedia Section
• Added new functionality to civilopedia to list mulitple civs for a leader

*version 0.9.7a released 25 Oct 09

Version 0.9.7b Released 27 Oct 09

• Fixed broken Spanish Royal Galleon model (critical art bug on some video cards)
• Added link to FAQ homepage when mod installs, so users can quickly check out LoR's homepage
• Removed AI free techs for hard difficulty levels when Start as Minors selected (AI's will start with defensive archer to guard against cheese rush on high difficulty)

 

[Berenthor]

Good to see you resolved the issues with the Civilopedia, very nice. I don't know if this is the right place to put it, but I started playing the 0.9.7 version yesterday and I noticed that every time I attack in MP LAN or one of the other human players attacks, the game goes OOS. When a unit defends there is no problem, only if a human player attacks himself. It is a really strange bug. I tried every combination of quick combat (on, off, only defense on, only attack on, etc) but it didn't help. In the end we reverted back to the 0.9.6 version and no problems there at all. I've been playing LoR since the start on LAN and never had problems till now. Revolutions was off, only dynamicCiv, standard DCM, barbarian civs and techdiffusion were on as parameters.

 

[morchuflex]

Hello.

I have been playing 0.97a for a few hours, and the first thing I want to say is "thank you!" for enabling features I had been longing for since the begining of Civ4, especially:
- the ability for a unit to sit and heal unless an enemy comes by.
- the cancellation of go-to orders when an enemy is spotted.
I also appreciate the worts enemy on-screen warning.


The suspended project production decay warning is a great idea too. However, it doesn't seem to be working perfectly: I put a settler on hold and it warned me I would start to lose hammers in only 5 turns, while it is actually 10. Later on, it stopped working at all, I can't tell why. This is the only problem I have found so far.

There are many new things I'm eager to explore in this new release. It seems you have modified the cost of some technologies, notably Iron working... I wonder what kind of impact it will have on the game.

Anyway, great job.

 

[phungus420]

A major fix is out for LoR 0.9.7, so LoR 0.9.7b is released, simply redownload and install to update.

LoR: 0.9.7b

• Fixed broken Spanish Royal Galleon model (critical art bug on some video cards)
• Added link to FAQ homepage when mod installs, so users can quickly check out LoR's homepage
• Removed AI free techs for hard difficulty levels when Start as Minors selected (AI's will start with defensive archer to guard against cheese rush on high difficulty)

 

[Uncle Anton]

Phungus - you, Achilles and the rest of the team continue to do a HELL of a frickin job!

I know you've been doubting yourself a bit of late - don't.

Plenty of mods have come and gone since the days of Keymod, Sevomod and others showed just what could be done. The attention to detail, and the quality assurance that you guys put into what's essentially a labour of love is absolutely astounding, and vindicates the potential first invested in those tentative early steps.

You guys are continuing to do the truly incredible... I'm having genuine and pronounced difficulties attempting to vocabularise (is that even a word? LOL) or appropriately define the respect I have for what you guys have accomplished.

Don't stop now, you're nearly at Version 1.0!!!

 

[Allan79]

There is a problem with the forest promotions for melee units. They don't get the extra strength when attacking. even if they are promoted to level 3 they still lose. And there are no recording of this in the combat log.

 

[phungus420]

No, the promotion bonus is being applied. You can check this by World Buildering in Units and seeing the % odds they get with, and without the woodsman promotion in forest. The problem is all combat modifiers aren't being displayed. This is a bug that slipped through in the RevDCM 2.6 core. I found it and reported it yesterday, I'm pretty surprised it wasn't caught earlier. I have it listed in the list of known bugs, and this will be fixed as soon as possible. In fact I have a couple other minor bugs I've squashed, but I'm waiting on the fix for this one before I updated, since it's the biggest deal.

 

[usmle]

Can I still win this

 

[phungus420]

You're in a tuff spot. My advice would be to cut research and try to get money, also consider revolting to Nationalism along with other warmonger civics, like Police State in order to quickly get troops (draft will work well for you). Move about 2/3rds of your troops (siege being the most important) over to your eastern border with Portugal, and mass upgrade as many cannons as you can to artillery in the couple turns it takes you to move your troops. Move the rest of your army (about 1/3 of it) to your nothern border with Portugal, and use that stuck for defense, again siege is the most important part of your army. Strike as soon as you can, try to immediately take his two cities to the west that have oil. Then just try to take as much as Portugal as you can. Once your invasion peters out declare peace and focus on Important war civics, like Industrialism, and try to conquer the rest of Portugal as quickly as you can.

Not sure if that will work, but it's the best advice I can give. Remember, even though you're in dead last place, you're in the Industrial era which is sort of an advantage for humans. But you need to get oil so you can leverage your tactical advantage over the AI.

 

[phungus420]

New version up. It is save game compatible, still a 0.9.7 version. Mainly repackaging and re-releasing the whole chebang because of the red blob issue with Troopers (flanking infantry units for Mech infantry), and a bug with ACO causing combat modifiers not displaying in the combat hover pane. Both these bugs were major enough to warrent a complete new download, so that new users didn't download a bugged version. The next update will incorporate the updated BBAI, and UP releases by jdog in a week or so, and this will be released as a patch as no major bugs will be fixed in it (barring any new bugs being uncovered, I'm crossing my fingers).

Changelog:

Version 0.9.7c Released 1 Nov 09

• 
  LoR: 0.9.7c
• Fixed ACO component. Combat modifiers now display in ACO hover display.
• Fixed bad path in the art defines file for the Mech infantry flanking infantry units (troopers), fixes "red blobs"
• Fixed civilization button in Leader Head screen in the civilopedia. The button now links to the correct civ, instead of always directing to the Zulu
• Fixed top 5 wonders/Cities screen in the Info Screen section. Built Wonder list now properly generates.
• Fine tuned Start as minors starting units code (was granting unequal number of starting defensive units for some AIs on high difficulty with start as minors selected)
• Some minor fixes to BUG UI issues (stagnant city with 1 food left calculating it would grow next turn), and Inquisitor AI logic (AI was not aware it was maxed out with 3 inquisitors and attempted to get more, no real effect to LoR, but a waste of processor time)
• Tweaked Techs:
  • Theology now requires Lit instead of Aesthetics (spread rate of christianity increased, as well as granted extra missionary to compensate)
  • Changed chemistry pre req from Military Science to Gunpowder, units enabled by Chemistry have had Military Science Req added (Grenadier, Ship of the Line). This change should allow more user options in the early Industrial tech selection, while not signicantly changing unit progression
  • To facilitate above change, Steel now requires Military Science. Cannon moved to Steel, instead of Chemistry.
• Tweaks to Units:
  • Removed +10% bonus to archery units for heavy footmen. Pikeman -10% to city attack.
  • Cavalry now ignore first strikes
  • Swapped Retreat promos on Barbary Corsairs (gets Damage Control), and 54th Infantry (recieves commando, and still gets flanking1).
  • King's Yeomanry gets +50% strength in Forests and Hills, looses some first strikes (1-2, instead of 2-4). +100% bonus to Knights and Heavy Footman, instead of just defensive bonus.
  • Barrage promotion line opened up to Naval Units (only effects Bismark), Bismark swaps Drill2 with Barage1 promotion.

 

[phungus420]

I take it the lack of comments is due to the fact no one has been able to break the mod in 0.9.7c yet. That's good.

Anyone have any balancing issues they want to bring up?

Did the change to Techs revolving around Military Science have the desired effect (I was trying to remove the bottle neck along that lower path, while simultaneously not altering the standard unit progression of the game)?

 

[esemjay]

Only thing that I can think of off the top of my head is the paratroopers, that I don't like. Or rather, the fact that they deprecate. I realized, once I was able to build Air Cav and SOF units, I began conserving my Paratroopers like endangered animals. They fill a niche that neither of those units can really fulfill entirely.

I use SOF units to take out workers, reinforcements, lines of communication (Roads), and critical infrastructure (access to Iron, Aluminum, Oil, etc) to keep the defender on their heels as well as cripple their military infrastructure.

I honestly don't use Air Cav much, because I view them as a weaker version of a gunship that can capture cities. It has a use, but I don't usually send helicopters alone, and treat them more as close support for ground forces. I look at their movement range (4) and then the paradrop range (7) and I opt to never upgrade my paratroopers.

As I said, I use Paratroopers as a rapid-deployment forward-presence. What I mean when I say that, is that I use them for targets of opportunity and for quick reinforcement. For example, if I clean out a city, and I (for some reason) have no available forces to capture it- I have paratroopers on reserve for that purpose; Or if I find a weakly reinforced city during an airstrike or recon mission, I'll put troops there to either divert incoming OPFOR or, if they don't divert, to capture the city and hopefully split incoming enemy defenses.

I feel that by obsoleting the Paratrooper with the Air Cav, it may as well be obsoleting the Transport Ship when you get an Air Port.

 

[Guest01]

phungus420

I take it the lack of comments is due to the fact no one has been able to break the mod in 0.9.7c yet. That's good.

I've just installed 0.9.7c light, launched new game and found that:
- there is no interface altogether (i.e. just map with units, nothing else);
- most of the RevDCM options (IDW and below) turned off.

0.9.6 worked just fine :\

 

[phungus420]

Ensure you are launching as an admin. Otherwise revert back to 0.9.6c for now, there are some machine specific bugs that can pop up that could cause this, that wol't be fixed in 0.9.7. I'm going to try a possible solution with 0.9.8 where the installer will split out the User Settings folder from the mod and put it outside of the Program Files directory. This will mean Vista and Windows 7 users will no longer need to launch as admin, and I think it will also fix this bug.

On your end try this:

1)Go into LoR's folder (it will be along the Program Files path in the BtS/mods directory), right click on the User Settings folder and select "cut"
2)Browse back to BtS's main directory, inside you'll see a bunch of files and shortcuts to folders that are Civ4 user folders such as "saves", "Custom Assets", and "mods" click on one of these shortcuts. This will take you into the folder the shortcut is specifying.
3)Go outside this folder into it's main Parent Directory (the BtS directory along the My Games path), you should see all the folders here like "saves" and "mods" and such that there were shortcuts to in the main BtS directory in the Program Files path you were just in, but this time they are the actual folders, and not shortcuts to the folders.
4)Right click and select "create new folder" name the folder "LoR" (no quotation marks), then paste the User Settings folder you previously cut into this new folder.
5)Start up LoR, and see if this fixes your lack of interface issue.

 

[rkade8583]

Here's how I'm doing on my current game. All I can think of is building my attack-stack in case monty gets jumpy (he's been all over the board with wars.)

 

[Guest01]

Ensure you are launching as an admin. Otherwise revert back to 0.9.6c for now, there are some machine specific bugs that can pop up that could cause this, that wol't be fixed in 0.9.7. I'm going to try a possible solution with 0.9.8 where the installer will split out the User Settings folder from the mod and put it outside of the Program Files directory. This will mean Vista and Windows 7 users will no longer need to launch as admin, and I think it will also fix this bug.

On your end try this:

1)Go into LoR's folder (it will be along the Program Files path in the BtS/mods directory), right click on the User Settings folder and select "cut"
2)Browse back to BtS's main directory, inside you'll see a bunch of files and shortcuts to folders that are Civ4 user folders such as "saves", "Custom Assets", and "mods" click on one of these shortcuts. This will take you into the folder the shortcut is specifying.
3)Go outside this folder into it's main Parent Directory (the BtS directory along the My Games path), you should see all the folders here like "saves" and "mods" and such that there were shortcuts to in the main BtS directory in the Program Files path you were just in, but this time they are the actual folders, and not shortcuts to the folders.
4)Right click and select "create new folder" name the folder "LoR" (no quotation marks), then paste the User Settings folder you previously cut into this new folder.
5)Start up LoR, and see if this fixes your lack of interface issue.

I've tried that solution, unfortunately with no effect. BTW, maybe log file would help you? For example, I see following strings at pythonerr2.log:

01:50:59 INFO : BugCore - creating uninitialized mod NJAGC
01:50:59 INFO : BugCore - creating uninitialized mod Scores
01:50:59 INFO : BugCore - creating uninitialized mod MainInterface
01:50:59 INFO : BugCore - creating uninitialized mod CityScreen

Does it tell you anything? I can provide full file if necessary. Also, I wonder maybe problem somehow related to language version of OS, non-latin symblos in name of "My documents" folder?..

P.S. Yeah, I've searched at national civfanatics forum and it seems that lack of interface is related to new version of BUG and cyrillic symbols

 

[phungus420]

Yeah, I've searched at national civfanatics forum and it seems that lack of interface is related to new version of BUG and cyrillic symbols

Interesting information. The best thing for you to do would be to download the BUG mod, and see if you can replicate this with BUG 4.1. If so post it in the BUG mod forums bug reports thread with the same link and same information about cyrillic symbols and the BUG team will fix things. Once it was fixed in the BUG mod, the fix will be folded into the next update of LoR.

 

[Guest01]

Interesting information. The best thing for you to do would be to download the BUG mod, and see if you can replicate this with BUG 4.1. If so post it in the BUG mod forums bug reports thread with the same link and same information about cyrillic symbols and the BUG team will fix things. Once it was fixed in the BUG mod, the fix will be folded into the next update of LoR.

I've tried separate installation of BUG 4.1 mod and interface bug with it is confirmed. I'll write about it at BUG forum, though I doubt that they would bother to fix issue with some localization.

 

[bigfatjonny]

Did the lack of combat info - combat %'s not showing - get fixed yet?
I'm in the middle of a really good game and I would really like to fix it if possible.

Is there a quick or hot fix I can do rather than an install, because i'm using some altered xlm files?

 

[phungus420]

Did the lack of combat info - combat %'s not showing - get fixed yet?

This is fixed in 0.9.7c, yes.

Is there a quick or hot fix I can do rather than an install, because i'm using some altered xlm files?

Sorry no. However you can copy your XML folder over to some other place so it isn't uninstalled when LoR updates, then use winmerge to reapply your custom XML changes.