EitB Dev Journal - Nox Noctis Crash Fix

I finally found some time to take a look at the Nox Noctis crash, and I think I've fixed it.  You should be able to replace your CVGameCore.dll in your /Mods/Erebus in the Balance/Assets folder with the one linked in this post below.

New CVGameCore.dll

The cause and fix itself are somewhat embarrassing   I was treating the unit array of a player as always having valid units in it.  This is not true, and so building/capture Noctis would result in the game trying to pull the attributes of a unit that did not exist, causing a crash.  The fix then, was to check and skip each Null section of the array.

EitB v9 Released

I got everything packed up and ready to go last night.  It's now sitting in moderation at ModDB, but once it's cleared it will be available here:



Until that clears you can grab the build from my dropbox at this link.

The cumulative changelog for EitB v9 can be found in PDF form from my dropbox here.

Formalizing EitB

I've been working off and on again on a mod for Fall From Heaven 2 (FfH), which is itself a mod for Civilization IV: BTS.  How did this happen?

The idea for the mod sprang out of a question that I posed to Realms Beyond one day: given everything that is in FfH, what would you cut? The responses were interesting, and what I took away from that particular discussion was that I was not alone in feeling that the base game could definitely be improved by a method other than adding a ton of new assets.  This particularly appealed to me since it meant that I would not need to create my own art assets, but instead make use of the absolute wealth of art already created for FfH.  I know that my own talents are mostly concerned with code and design, not modeling or drawing.

This was back in February of this year, about 6 months ago.


I've had a general direction to my work this past half year and good characters on the forum to keep me ontask and bring various areas of the mod to my attention.  Hopefully they've been enjoying the experience as much as I have.  I do want to continue working on the mod, but I think now would be a good time to formally establish the scope of the mod.

EitB in a Paragraph:

Erebus in the Balance (EitB) is a modmod for FfH2 which focuses primarily on balancing the game for a multiplayer audience while trying to maintain FfH2's crazy feeling of imbalance at the same time.  Along with the balancing act, the mod applies more polish to the UI and in-game documentation; so that new players find it easier to pick up the Mod and just play without needing to search out tutorials or more information from external sources.  It is built off of the hard work of all who have come before it, and also includes the work of Tholal and his Better Naval AI mod.

Primary Objectives:

1. Balance, so that no one strategy or approach to the game is completely dominant.
2. Polish, so that players can get all the information they need to play well from the basic interface.

Secondary Objectives:

1. Redesign the technology tree to focus on FfH2's main features, Magic and Religions.
2. Redesign the Spell system and it's underlying architecture so that all spell spheres are useful, situational spells and new-player traps are avoided, and choices and their consequences are clear.
3. Revisit each Civilization's unique mechanics and tweak and balance as necessary so that there are no "dud" civilizations.

An Autoplace & Route Tool for Civilization Style Tech Trees

A particular statement in this piece by Derek "Kael" Paxton about technology in Stardock's Elemental: War of Magic stood out:

5. Autolayout- The tech tree draws itself and its lines automatically.  This was needed because the tech tree will be different every time, so it must be able to lay itself out programmatically.  The good news for modders is that they can add techs to their hearts content and they will be automatically added to the tree right where they belong.

I thought that was really cool, and decided to look into how to do such things.

After some literature research, I found this paper out of AT&T Bell Labs By Emden R. Gansner, Eleftherios Koutsofios, Stephen C. North, and Kiem-Phong Vo.

The algorithm looked fairly straightforward so I decided to see if I could implement it first in Excel 2007 (VBA) and then in Civilization IV (Python or C++ depending upon which level I ran the algorithm).

Here is how the tool works:

1. Reads in the Technology Data from a spreadsheet
2. Processes the Technology Data to add missing Parent-Children links (Data originally contains only Children-Parent links)
3. Does a DFS search from every root node and calculates an affinity between each root based on how many nodes they share.
4. Orders the Root nodes based on their affinities, so that roots which share many nodes are placed together
5. Runs most of the Vertex Ordering part of Gansner's Algorithm (Heuristic Based)
6. Determines X and Y coordinates for each technology based on its rank and vertex order.

Limitations:

• I have not yet finished generalizing the code.  I think that if you try it right now on a tree that is deeper than 9 ranks, you'll get an out of bounds error.
• It's not as fast as it could be, there are some inefficiencies I already have in my mind to target.  For now it takes about 2 seconds to generate and draw the placement.
• It requires Excel 2007 and Macros enabled, you trust me right?

The Final Result

Download AutoPlace and Route Tool

A Cvilization IV Combat Calculator

Update (8/10/12): There was a bug in the calculator when calculating battles not at 100% health for both sides.  I've fixed it now.

Download Combat Calculator

In one of my PBEM Civilization games I needed to destroy one particular unit, but none of my units had good odds on it.  Since I outnumbered it 7:1, I decided to go ahead and attempt to mob it to death.  I had no idea what my odds were, but before combat began any one of my units did not get (in game calculator's) odds over 0.01%.  I ended up winning after 4 battles.

I was curious then, what my actual, group, odds were.

Looking online, there were no good current CIV IV combat calculators available, so I decided to build my own.  Working with some of the other fellows at Realms Beyond to understand how the combat system actually worked, I ended up with a decent calculator.

This calculator can be used to find the precise odds for 1:1 unit combats, or X:1 combats with many attackers and a single defender.  It is built on Excel 2007 and requires macros to be enabled.  You trust me don't you?

Limitations:

• Does not properly calculate retreat Chances
• Does not calculate defensive strikes (A Mechanic from FfH)

Multiple Attacker, Single Defender Tab

Single Attacker, Single Defender Tab