September 7th, 2015, 06:22
(This post was last modified: September 7th, 2015, 06:24 by GermanJoey.)
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Update! I updated the balance tool's simulator so that it now shares food intelligently between cities instead of idiotically dithering it between cities every other turn, which makes a noticeable difference. I also added a debug mode for investigating the balance algorithm's internals at each iteration, fixed a bug related to resources that needed iron-working + another tech to unlock getting ignored, improved the way seafood is handled, and added a bonus to city sites that would claim "new" food tiles.
Anyone get a chance to try this out yet? If I packaged in a .exe that would just ask for a filename and then run the map fixer, the starting sim generator, and then the balance reporter, would people find that useful?
September 7th, 2015, 06:54
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You know the saying thread is useless without pics? Program is useless without graphical interface is probably the laymans term for what this is.
Current games (All): RtR: PB80 Civ 6: PBEM23
Ended games (Selection): BTS games: PB1, PB3, PBEM2, PBEM4, PBEM5B, PBEM50. RB mod games: PB5, PB15, PB27, PB37, PB42, PB46, PB71. FFH games: PBEMVII, PBEMXII. Civ 6: PBEM22 Games ded lurked: PB18
September 7th, 2015, 07:01
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Well, the output is a webpage, that's graphics, right? What else would be the interface, a bunch of buttons and text boxes? Believe it or not, that's actually a lot of work...
September 7th, 2015, 07:04
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Oh no, I know it's a lot of work. I imagine that you working full time would have to spend about 6 months to get a vaguely working version. I'm just thinking of why there aren't more people looking at using it.
Current games (All): RtR: PB80 Civ 6: PBEM23
Ended games (Selection): BTS games: PB1, PB3, PBEM2, PBEM4, PBEM5B, PBEM50. RB mod games: PB5, PB15, PB27, PB37, PB42, PB46, PB71. FFH games: PBEMVII, PBEMXII. Civ 6: PBEM22 Games ded lurked: PB18
September 7th, 2015, 23:16
(This post was last modified: September 8th, 2015, 00:59 by GermanJoey.)
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6 months? nah, I could probably get something done in a few weeks by using a locally running websocketd to act as the server, and then add some buttons and stuff to the html view, which would be in a frame. So, I wouldn't actually need to muck around too much (possibly at all) in converting the tool to have a different front-end. However, I'm just not sure that it'd actually get a lot more people interested... and there's some other stuff I want to work on. I've been planning on using Civ4MC as the map editor for my own civ-like game that I've been making for the past few years (just gotta load different XML/config files), and I'd like to get back to implementing the server for that.
September 8th, 2015, 05:01
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Now that would be interesting.
Current games (All): RtR: PB80 Civ 6: PBEM23
Ended games (Selection): BTS games: PB1, PB3, PBEM2, PBEM4, PBEM5B, PBEM50. RB mod games: PB5, PB15, PB27, PB37, PB42, PB46, PB71. FFH games: PBEMVII, PBEMXII. Civ 6: PBEM22 Games ded lurked: PB18
September 16th, 2015, 01:48
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New update! Easy mode is a go!
0.) Install actveperl, if you don't already have it: http://www.activestate.com/activeperl
1.) download the new version, extract everything to a folder: https://github.com/germanjoey/civ4-mapca...master.zip
2.) put your map in the same base directory (the same directory as mapcad.pl) and rename the map to map.CivBeyondSwordWBSave
3.) double-click on easy_click.pl
4.) press enter twice
5.) wait a few minutes for the thing to calculate stuff
6.) press enter again.
7.) outputs are now ready. the sims for each start, map_fixed.CivBeyondSwordWBSave (the fixed map if it needed fixing) will be in the outputs/ folder, while map_fixed.html (the balance report) and map_fixed.bfc_value.html will be in the base directory.
There's more updates to the balance tool too. It now tries to model tiles getting improved on the fly, which is more accurate but makes the tool run insanely slowly. But, I then ran the code under a profiler and made it more efficient, so now it runs... only a little bit more slowly compared to how it was before the update. 
January 18th, 2016, 04:08
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Joey, your balance tool is kicking my butt. Been reading tutorials for an hour but just want to know how to see the map with neighbor borders filled in. Is that possible?
January 18th, 2016, 04:27
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anyone know what "acceptable" scores are for relative food and lux?
Who has used this tool to make RB maps in the past?
January 18th, 2016, 05:08
(This post was last modified: January 18th, 2016, 05:10 by GermanJoey.)
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Hey man, thanks for giving it a try!
Did you try the easy_click.pl? The instructions are here: https://github.com/germanjoey/civ4-mapca...start-mode
The food and lux scores are supposed to be relative to each other, so, it doesn't really mean anything to compare, for example, the lux scores from PB18 to PB27 or whatever. What you want to compare is player-to-player, and even then, the numbers are really only there to point out "hey, take a look at what's going on in this spot!"
The guy with the most food (or most luxes) should always have a score of 1.0, and the guy with the best luxuries should also have a 1.0. What you want to look at are the guys with low scores. What makes a player score lower? In the case of food, big-yield tiles (e.g. grass pigs, wet corns, etc) are worth a lot of points compared to lower-yield tiles (clams, dry rice, floodplains), but of course having a lot of individual food tiles helps too. For the luxuries, ancient are considered better than classical, and having more different individual types is considered better than having lots of duplicates.
As far as a range goes, you have to use your best judgement, unfortunately. I can tell you that for PB27, the food scores were about normally distributed between 0.75 and 1.0, while the lux scores were more like uniformly distributed between 0.7 and 1.0. But, on another map, numbers been 0.5 and 1.0 might be OK, because a player might have a low food score, but other good things to make up for it (nearby marble, lots of land, better luxuries, more defensible land, further-away strong neighbors, close-by weak neighbors, etc etc etc).
Basically, the balance report is there to help you count stuff and reduce the tedium of staring-unblinkingly at the worldbuilder. At the very least, the distance-between-capitals counter should be pretty helpful, as should being able to toggle resources in stuff in the html view.
As far as other people go, I think only Brick, Krill, and myself have used this tool at RB, but Haram used it to make a map for his offsite, and a few guys from badgame have used it too. Boak just used it to finish our 6th pitboss map on friday, and he also made an extra script to put all the numbers the report spits out in a table that he could paste into excel, which he said was helpful.
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