314) (again)
(You might already have fixed this then.. Guess you posted 15 min faster than me)
Was just offered to buy a "Sword of Sevary" ingame.
It had +6 something. But it did not have Elemental Armor, Exorcist or Invulnerability as mentioned in items.ini
I have the setting "more random items" active, can it role random items with the same names? I have 10 death books, 2 chaos and 1 life. I can buy items with flying, lionheart, haste, teleportation, pathfinding and immolation without any problems. But have seen zero items with the other affixes.
Hmm.. When I am comparing the items I have bought ingame vs the items.ini there is quite some differences..
Valkyrie Lance (167) is missing its Lightning
The Forceful Healer (63) is missing its Death
Mars Earrings (198) is missing its Flaming and Immolation
Unicorn Horn (174) is missing its Teleportation
Queen of Death (161) is missing its Death
Suit of Power (202) is missing its Insulation
Caduceus (218) is missing its Invisibility
Staff of Doom (233) is missing its Doom
Just a few exampels.. I at the least should have the death affix with all my death books..?
So far I haven't found more bugs worth mentioning in V1.2, but I'll post the notes here anyway:
- Sometimes a random neutral unit is displayed in the capital after starting the game. It will disappear if you click back and forth.
- The proposed name for the capital is always barbaric, no matter what race you start with.
- The manual still has a few typos: e.g. the Ranger hero starts with 25MP not with 15.
Lo pan cast survival instinct and doom mastery with wrong image, with a book instead of horses or monsters. I believe that nameless cities were also his.
(September 2nd, 2021, 17:05)Cruel100 Wrote: All this discussion reminds me of a video from civilization 4 developer Soren Johnson, which I leave the link here. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJcuQQ1eWWI)
Thanks. It was a good refresh to watch this video again from 2010. I don’t think mainstream 4X TBS AI development changed much in the past 30 years.
A few highlights from the Civ 4 AI programmer’s presentation that I find relevant:
“Go AI is much worse than chess AI.”
That was true in 2010. It is no longer true.
“Good AI playing to win. Fun AI playing to lose”
Yes, but I find this AI development attitude sad. I get most fun if I win a fair game. I get equal or more fun if I narrowly lose a fair game due to my mistake or a brilliant opponent move that I learned.
A more appropriate way of dividing these computer programs into 2 groups would be Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Stupidity. Some people enjoy playing vs the first, while other people enjoy playing vs the latter. It is much easier to design and code Artificial Stupidity than Artificial Intelligence. To market Artificial Stupidity as Fun AI is distracting to say the least. But sure, it is better for business, I get that.
“Limited options for AI”
Sad and betrays the challenge seeking players.
“Player types: Challenge, Sandbox, Narrative.”
AFAIK, AI is missing from the entire official Civ series for Challenge type players. I keep reading articles and keep trying the new mods, but every time I get disappointed.
“We want the AI to fall for traps to give the players satisfaction.”
This reason is already enough for me to lose interest in playing vs an AI like that.
“Is there a difficulty level in Civ 4 where everything is completely even and the AI is playing the exact same game?
It’s an academic question I am not concerned about.”
To me, this attitude is shocking, but I already knew this. It is not his fault. Company policy to not develop strong and fair AI. And this is not unique to the Civilization series.
“Leave your city empty to lure a large AI attack. When it gets close, defend it and lure the AI to another city with same tactic.”
AI works for a while. Seems dumb AI once a human finds it out. This highlights the AI development approach for 4X TBS in general. Cheat first by knowing the whole map, then make a predictable move that a human can easily exploit once learned it. (COM II has the same thing about nodes, etc.) Expert human play is mostly about finding out then exploiting the hundreds of similar AI triggers and mistakes. So instead of playing the game, we spend time to exploit the known AI behavior.
“Cheating is for challenge, which is one source of fun.”
Sad for me. Cheat and play dumb to entertain players in a deep-thinking strategy game to give them the illusion that they are super smart and beat AI at the emperor and deity levels. Feed people’s egos instead of playing a fair game. Congratulations to all of you emperors and gods for learning about the exploits of a cheating dumb AI. Keep playing single player so your bubble will never burst.
“AI programmer is a core game designer.”
I agree and nice that they had it that way. Game design and AI development go hand in hand. And if the rules change the AI code need to change too later.
“AI is 2% of the code.” Shows how unimportant AI is for them and how little time and money they spent on it. Nevertheless AI code does not always have to be long and is frequently replaced. AI quality or worth is not measured by the number of lines of code.
“Improved AI mod. We paid him for it.”
Nice that they allowed an outsider to develop AI for them. If they make it easy to plug in an external AI code, that is huge. The burden of development is shared and shows how difficult the strong AI development really is. It also shows that at least they are trying to satisfy the challenge seeker players too. Ideally without need to have the company's work to hook external AI up.
“Too hard. It’s beyond our resources.”
“It would be really nice.”
“It’s the matter of developer resources.”
These confirm what I already stated in my earlier posts.
“We make mistakes all the time. That’s what game development is all about.”
Yep. That’s how it goes. In AI development it is even more true.
Sadly none of the mainstream 4X TBS AI learns. Not that I know of at least. When they asked him a basic question if Civ 4 AI learns, he dodged the question.
Thanks for the info on K-Mod (Karadoc) for Civ4. I think Civ 4 itself is a poor game. Adding a strong AI to it would help a little, but can't fix the underlying fundamental other problems with it. It will need a mod first with different rules, etc. I will check it out when I get some time...
Good placements and comments. I hope AI will develop around here too.
Quote:Lo pan cast survival instinct and doom mastery with wrong image, with a book instead of horses or monsters. I believe that nameless cities were also his.
That should happen if they used Spell Binding.
It should say "Lo Pan has bound ... Doom Mastery" instead of "Lo Pan has cast".
There are only 20 default city names per race and 14 races for a total of 280 names. Large games can have more cities in which case the game has no other option than start naming cities as "Noname".
We'll need more default city names if we want to avoid that.
Slingers>
You are right, the ranger start with 25 MP and also have two random abilities. Weird. Well.. I have just checked all the other heroes through, everyone else have the correct starting MP.
Cruel100>
Lo Pan often plays sorcery, and that image is from the 'spell binding' spell where he steals a spell such as doom mastery..
Here is a picture where he just stole Armageddon in my test game just now. So if your Lo Pan is a sorcery wizard in your game that is prolly the explanation.. If not please upload a savegame.. https://www.dropbox.com/s/92dq611j0kh5wp...l.png?dl=0
His point with city names is that everytime you create a new game, your starting fortress is named from the barbarian list only. No matter what race you are.
[0]
0=Norport 1=Bradenburg 2=Bromburg 3=Bamburg 4=Burglitz 5=Deventor 6=Danzig 7=Freiburg 8=Flensburg 9=Hamburg
10=Hannover 11=Konstanz 12=Kufstein 13=Linz 14=Strassburg 15=Rostock 16=Schleswig 17=Stettin 18=Zwolle 19=Soest
Just testede with Orc got Stettin, Klackon got Zwolle, Highmen got Bromburg, etc etc.. Fortress names are not from race list but from barbarian list..
Shouldn't be any reasons why it can't pick from race list instead when creating the fortress?
(Lategame there is no choice of course, but that is not the problem here).
