PROJECT: Playtest Thread III

[Maquiladora]

The AI is still terrible from most of what ive seen. Units fortifying in the middle of nowhere, settlers wandering through enemy territory, no grouping of large stacks... things like that. City settling seems to stop or go very slowly around 10-15 cities too, leaving settlers in its cities when it could build more cities.

By a frenzy-type of AI fix, i meant telling the AI in basic terms what it needs to do, giving it direct goals, how to win etc, doesnt necessarily have to be partly using frenzy itself. Rather than this current AI than wanders through the game, and if you see it do something clever its usually just by accident.

Unless the plan isnt to improve the AI in the default game at all anymore, which i can understand considering AoM is basically the pinnacle of a CtP2 AI, may aswell work on AoM compatibility and call it a day.

[Protra3211]

In my lastest play test 10/23/05 (will use E,s new build and patch soon) the AI is better at building its empire.
More buildings, wonders and tile improvements.
AI is harder to bribe and will not except a treaty without gain.
What I feel is that because the AI to AI diplomacy does not leave the AI stuck in war mode all the time the AI has more turns to build up its production power .
Because of this some factions do keep pace with the human player.
Diplomod and the frenzy code are great but at times feel forced . What will happen if the AI is fighting two wars and the frenzy code is used? Will it leave that AI faction a easy target ?
Have AOM and its almost could called CtP3. But the code updates could produce greater results in the long run if that is the goal in mind.

[Martin Gühmann]

Well one thing I could do is to finish my better AI code and release it for the source code version with an additional modified DiffDB.txt.

-Martin

[Ekmek]

I've been playing a game and had some reasonable diplomacy with ai even was able to get a city from two different civs after offering all my gold and threatening war. so it felt real enough although I like the table format of civ3/civ4 where you can build a deal.

As for war I did find myself at war with the AI a few times and never felt the real threat of invasion. I was plying only medium but couldnt help but feel that if we had AoM's Frenzy code, where the AI got more aggressive RELATIVE to the players aggressive that I would of had bigger threats.

[Maquiladora]

E said it there, you never feel the real threat of invasion, just pillaging and general nuisance behaviour from the AI with very small stacks or single unit armies.

When the AI groups full stacks, even if it doesnt do everything right using them, its still a challenge to defend just one FULL stack and bget rid of it. Sometimes it can be harder to defend against one size 12 army than FOUR size 6 armies, mostly because of flanking ability but also bombarding.

In AoM you always feel threatened by invasion, which might not be right either but it does provide the challenge at least. On the other hand, ive never felt threatened chasing a science or diplomacy victory in any mod.

Originally posted by Martin Gühmann
Well one thing I could do is to finish my better AI code and release it for the source code version with an additional modified DiffDB.txt.

-Martin

Thats certainly better than nothing

[Maquiladora]

Strange bug here, save game attached. I moved the settler onto the river but it wont settle, ive skipped turn twice so its not the move points, it still wont settle with either "b" or right-click > settle. I moved it West onto the grassland and it settled.

Im using:

23rd Oct playtest
E 26 Nov exe
E mod

[Protra3211]

Thats ture about not feeling threatened that you will lose a city if you go to war.
But on the highest level there at least two(somtimes more) AI factions that will keep pace with you by high score and have as many or more cities than you.
The playtest is better than 1.1 verison hands down.
But improvements in war tactics of coures would be great.
AI did threaten me in diplomacy demanding 600 gold eary in the game . But weaker factions will despise you but will not declare war which shows good sense.

The invisable unit bug only happened twice so far but have not run into the problem of not being able to move a unit again. 10/23/05.playtest. Sorry about being behind and next post will be on new patch update.

[Ekmek]

maq,
in my mod settlers can only settle on land not mountains and i believe i set trees, swamps, etc as mountains to hinder tanks from moving there. and it also limits city placement thereby slowing ICS.

i'll make a readme to list all my changes

i will check out your save though just in case this isnt whats happening.so I'm not sure its a bug but I'll check it out.

[Maquiladora]

Ah yeah thats most likely it, the settler is on a forest.

[Ekmek]

Maq,

how did testing go? I noticed in my game elephants and horses were pretty rare so I might beef up the probablity of them showing up. but i did enjoy the better coracle/galley movement and early naval battles. something that was made absent in vanilla civ. I'm thinking about adding the frenzy slic from AoM to it next time...

[Maquiladora]

Havent played any further yet from the save i posted.

I havent noticed any Elephants or Horses yet, so i havent had the opportunity to test that out properly.

The Galley unit makes the start of the game a lot more interesting, not only because of speed for exploring but they carry 2 units so its feasible to invade properly overseas early in the game. Rather than having coracles, which could only carry 1 unit.

It would certainly make playtesting more interesting to have a real challenge too.

[pevi]

Hi, i have some errors beginning the loading of the game.

It gives a error in the database, first with Canadian and then with a lot of lines.

I will try in other pc this week.


Bye

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Fromafar

It probably is the same error. You just managed to find another way of generating it. The error is a combination of the main program (WinMainCRTStartup parts) being busy with the UI initialisation and the Windows message event handler (WndProc parts) trying to handle an AltTab(In). Maybe Windows generates a WM_ACTIVATE message automatically when you start a program from a DOS box?

And indeed it doesn't has to do anything with the DOS-box in the mean time I figured out what the problem is. In the mean time I must have switched the display color depth of Windows to 32bit. However CTP2 requires 16bit.

Now SetDisplayMode mode fails to change the color depth if SetCooperativeLevel was used to set coorparative level to DDSCL_NORMAL instead to DDSCL_EXCLUSIVE | DDSCL_FULLSCREEN | DDSCL_ALLOWREBOOT. This is the case if you use the nonexclusive command.

-Martin

[Ekmek]

I put another playtest (rev505) build in my signature it features:
SneakAttack unit flag - you can attack without having war declared but if you attack a unit that has a flag with a non-sneakattack unit war will still be declared, so its not like hiddennationality in civ3 but close(r)

SneakBombard - now you can bombard without war declared if your unit has that flag

And new battle modfiers - If you are familiar with mounted bonus for pikemen and the woodship bonuses I've expanded it to include attack OR defense for flags like: foot, mechanized, wheeled, helicopter, siege, etc. I'll make this more prominent in my (eventual) civ3 mod where TOW infantry can really hurt tanks but get waxed by foot (kind of, in a stack fight) a well as machinegunners affecting foot and so on.

merry christmas everyone!

[Maquiladora]

Excellent features E, cant wait for a build to tinker with