PROJECT: Playtest (Thread No. 5)

[cap601]

Wouldn't that option be best left to SLIC? It would also only really make sense for nations with military agreements (inc. alliances) rather than mere ceasefires.

[Ekmek]

I guess it could be slic. i dont know much about how slic would do such a thingthough.

i could make it a tileimp flag (UseByFriendly) or something.

[Kynalvarus]

I started a new game with build 735. I have to agree, the Barbs feel very weird with these settings. They never attack units in the field, even when they would be likely to win. Instead, they go exclusively after cities. They also conquered two computer opponents very early on, and have gone on to build both the Pyramids and the Ramayana before 2000BC. Needless to say, this is not exactly Barbaric behavior!

I also did find one bug - when I tried to Set Goal for tech to Monarchy from the Monarchy tech, I kept getting Nano-Assembly - looks like it's an off-by-one bug. Set Goal to Monarchy when on the Government Monarchy page worked.

[Kynalvarus]

While I'm here and delurked...

What's up with the AI almost always placing cities 3-4 spaces apart? Shouldn't the AI try to take into account the first radius increase, unless it's really short on space and has cities left to build under current government?

[Kynalvarus]

Another bug to report...

It seems that barbarians are not properly cleaning up their zones of control after being defeated. I have to save my game and reload after killing them in order to move freely in the spaces that used to surround their units. This is always reproducible in my installation, but if you can't reproduce and need my save file or more info, let me know.

[Ekmek]

THe city spacing is something set in the personality (I believe) it can be changed though

Please post the barbarian bug. was never aware of that

[LemurMadness]

Yup, barbarians are attacking cities, but not the same city on the same turn, even if barbarians surround them.

[Kynalvarus]

Barbarian Zone of Control Bug

Here's a savegame where I encountered the barbarian bug. I left some barbarian huts for you so you can easily reproduce. Once the barbarians have been killed, you should see that you can't move units around the area where they were when they died, until you save and reload.

Also, please note that the savegame does not display a power ranking graph from the save. None of my savegames from this version show one. I don't know if they're not being saved, or not shown in the Load dialog.

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Kynalvarus
I started a new game with build 735. I have to agree, the Barbs feel very weird with these settings. They never attack units in the field, even when they would be likely to win. Instead, they go exclusively after cities. They also conquered two computer opponents very early on, and have gone on to build both the Pyramids and the Ramayana before 2000BC. Needless to say, this is not exactly Barbaric behavior!

Probably that is, because they go for their goal first and ignore everything on their way. That is also a problem with the AI in general.

Originally posted by Kynalvarus
I also did find one bug - when I tried to Set Goal for tech to Monarchy from the Monarchy tech, I kept getting Nano-Assembly - looks like it's an off-by-one bug. Set Goal to Monarchy when on the Government Monarchy page worked.

Not really an off-by-one bug, it is rather a bug caused by the alphabetic sorting of the items. Should be in since I restored the alphabetical sorting in other words for a long time. Anyway I fixed it.

Originally posted by Kynalvarus
What's up with the AI almost always placing cities 3-4 spaces apart? Shouldn't the AI try to take into account the first radius increase, unless it's really short on space and has cities left to build under current government?

Originally posted by E
THe city spacing is something set in the personality (I believe) it can be changed though

Well you can do it but this doesn't prevent the AI from placing its cities on the next quare from a city collection border. Probably such settle goals aren't cleared when a city grows.

Originally posted by Kynalvarus
Also, please note that the savegame does not display a power ranking graph from the save. None of my savegames from this version show one. I don't know if they're not being saved, or not shown in the Load dialog.

I noticed this, too. No idea when that happened.

-Martin

[Kynalvarus]

I was looking through the strategies.txt, trying to understand how it works and maybe why the barbarian change led to so much wonder production. Diffing it against the stock strategies, I noticed a few things.

First, the barbarians seem to have been altered to use normal governments, not anarchy. I assume that this was intentional, but it seems that it would make them quite powerful when combined with barbarian autospawned units.

Second, they have MaxWonderBuildTurns 0. This would appear to be enough to prevent wonder building, but doesn't actually seem to do so.

I dug around some more, and it appears, according to personalities.txt, that PERSONALITY_KHAN is using STRATEGY_MILITARIST_DEFAULT, not STRATEGY_BARBARIAN. This looks like a probable cause of anomalous barbarian wonder-building behavior. Perhaps the barbarians use STRATEGY_BARBARIAN until they get cities, at which point they are treated as a quasi-normal civ and start using STRATEGY_MILITARIST?

It seems to me that I'd like to have some control over this. As has been mentioned before on this thread, an unusually strong and coordinated barbarian "civ" that preferentially attacks cities is likely to stunt growth for other AIs, jump into the production lead, and start building all the militarist wonders. I'd personally prefer to have barbarians be a menace and a source of trouble, but not a real competitor for victory against other civs. I like the idea of barbarian empires taking over empty civ slots over time, sort of like revolting cities do.

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Kynalvarus
I dug around some more, and it appears, according to personalities.txt, that PERSONALITY_KHAN is using STRATEGY_MILITARIST_DEFAULT, not STRATEGY_BARBARIAN. This looks like a probable cause of anomalous barbarian wonder-building behavior. Perhaps the barbarians use STRATEGY_BARBARIAN until they get cities, at which point they are treated as a quasi-normal civ and start using STRATEGY_MILITARIST?

If the AI personality is the first one of the list, the DefaultStartegy from personalities.txt is ignored and STRATEGY_BARBARIAN is used instead of that. I kept it like that for backwards compatibilty. But maybe this backwards compatibility could be improved.

-Martin

[Kynalvarus]

Any ideas why the barbarian civ is enthusiastically building wonders, then?

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Kynalvarus
Any ideas why the barbarian civ is enthusiastically building wonders, then?

Simply because the Barbarians use the build list sequence BUILD_LIST_SEQUENCE_OFFENSE which contains buildings and wonders.

-Martin

[Ekmek]

Originally posted by Martin Gühmann

Originally posted by E
Martin, any chance you could put some "todo" comments in UnitControlPanel and controlpanelwindow on how you make list boxes with graphics? I would like to see Orders and TileImps be handled with a list box much like its handled in the scenario editor when you "cheat" place a tileimp through the scenario editor.

Probably this involves some copy, paste and modification of some code. Something a little bit bigger and a todo can only be a little bit more general like: Turn this into a list box. Well at least on the first look.
Probably this involves some copy, paste and modification of some code. Something a little bit bigger and a todo can only be a little bit more general like: Turn this into a list box. Well at least on the first look.

@Martin I see in scenarioeditor.cpp you changed the number of citystyles from a box of buttons to a listbox. Since this looks like an identical issue to orders (and tileimps)I see most of it is in one method but I cant tell you if you had to change anything outside that method. Any chance you remember all the changes you made? or maybe you can add a few out comments (like added this, deleted that). I know it was pre-rev300 but it would help a lot.

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by E
@Martin I see in scenarioeditor.cpp you changed the number of citystyles from a box of buttons to a listbox.

No E, I didn't change the number of citystyles from a box of buttons to a listbox. Actually I have no idea what changing the number of citystyles from a box of buttons to a listbox means. The only thing I changed was the number of the citystyle buttons the button list box displays.

Originally posted by E
Any chance you remember all the changes you made? or maybe you can add a few out comments (like added this, deleted that). I know it was pre-rev300 but it would help a lot.

That's simple I just removed a hard encoded number and replaced it by g_theCityStyleDB->NumRecords(), so it is now dependent on the number of citystles that you find in the citystyle database and that was all.

-Martin