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- Keep fixing typos…
- Research: Runtime Error: C:\Users\user\Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\MODS\Covert Operations - Making Spies Great Again (v 6)\LUA\CovertOperations\40_Process_INTREPs.lua:136: attempt to perform arithmetic on field '?' (a string value)
- Continue to tweak EP formulae: increase defensive building effectiveness, add more buildings, and set max success chances lower.
- Factor in Holy Sites into EP? Other TI's?
- There is a bug when a IA makes a cover operation and is discovered by another IA. The affected IA will denounce the innocent player instead of true aggressor.
- Keep working on notifications - every 'X' turns, where X = 5ish? Or introduce "window of opportunity" to OP availability, i.e. "use it or lose it..."?
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- I am 'possibly' considering add the "Intelligence" strategic resource. I am not happy with the way using Gold to limit mission spam is working out. For the human player, it's OK, but the way AI sometimes hoards gold but most of the time is completely broke - it's just not working out. The AI isn't using the more impacting level 4 & 5 missions hardly at all. This makes the mod quite OP for the human player, which was definitely NOT my intention.
If I change that to the "Intelligence" strat resource, I can change the code so there's a better chance to see them use these missions. The resource will be generated along the lines of the Great Spy mod, but I'd have to look more closely at how that's being done. I think it was based on buildings, perhaps tech and policies. And work would be required to balance the formulae for generating/consuming the resource.
Would really appreciate anyone's input on this!
- Am also thinking about adding a mission or two to conduct in your own cities - like (1) a positive propaganda campaign - increase happiness? or in a City State - that improves "friendship" modifier? If I had more confidence that the integration with the game's diplomacy system was working as intended, a such a mission would improve diplomatic modifier with that civ. Second mission (2) would be something like an "Inquisition" - that increases faith (strong chance, decent increase), but has a smaller chance to increase unhappiness by a smaller amount. Perhaps another mission (3) that if successful resets the progress of any spies trying to steal tech from you (if I can figure out how to do this...).
- Other than these, HELP!!!!! Need player suggestions on where to take the mod next.
More to come...
- Should Ideology matter? Maybe Autocracy is better at spying that Order which is better than Freedom? (Added in V5)
- Should the possession of certain Social Policies matter? E.g. Aesthetics /Cultural Exchange might make defending against Covert Ops harder? Liberty/Citizenship makes defending easier? (Added in V5)
- Do we add "Intelligence" as a Strategic Resource like the original "Great Spy" mod did - and then consume those resources to conduct missions?
- Do we add units into the game that conduct Covert Ops, and take this away from the spies?
- Or do we add units into the game, but only let them perform less damaging versions of the missions (mostly to mitigate some of the inherent human OP advantages when it comes to maneuvering units)? I'm thinking some kinds of "super scout" or possible a civilian unit, but that leaves the AI's units much too vulnerable - AI just doesn't protect them properly.
- Do we add new buildings that help bump up the Intelligence Posture (and the Intelligence Strategic Resource if it is also added)?
- Should quality adjustments be made to the unit contribution to the Intelligence Posture of a city. Currently, all units contribute equally to this important stat (civilians, works, great persons, military, aircraft, etc.). Should different unit types add more or less than others?
- Add an Unhappiness tweak to "Spread Rumors/Propaganda" missions? Maybe 1 local for Rumors and 1 global for Propaganda? Would make those missions perhaps way, way OP for an evil human player, though. Hmmmm.....
- Add "Steal" and "Vandalize" Great Works of Art missions?
More to come...
I’ve looked at Toamtekh’s code and his mod doesn’t actually suffer from the maneuvering the unit around the map problem. AI in his mod compare player score to select a target. If the AI has a great spy it conducts a mission against that target; they don’t have to move the spy unit which is instead just consumed like a resource.
One of my play testers made the suggestion about going unitless, and at first I wasn't terribly interested, as I knew it would fundamentally change the mod, but would also require a bit of work... But, as I thought about it more, it started to seem a better approach - more elegant. So, I asked players for their opinions on the matter, and receiving no feedback for a couple of weeks, I figured no one would complain too much, so I started on the unitless version and a few days later - here we are. I definitely think it's an improvement.
And having ran 3 full days of Live Tuner test game - with the mod reporting tons of information in the LUA console, I was able to tweak the settings of the mod to make sure the AI is using the capability just as well - actually better - than the human player (but it helps that they can conduct missions more frequently than the human player, the missions cost half as much gold, and if they're really poor, they get a free Level 1 mission).
Selecting the target civ by game score? Man, that's a quick/effective solution! The function I have tries to be a bit more selective. About a third of the time, the target is truly random - any random civ the attacker knows. The rest of the time, it uses several different data to figure out who a given AI civ hates the most on a given turn (and these data have different weights, which changes the overall total). When they are able to launch a mission, they check all the other civs they've met to see: has this civ taken our capital, have they nuked us before, are we at war, are they denouncing us, are they reckless expanders, have they bullied our protected city states, are they unhappy, are they weaker than us? A random adjustment is added for variety, then the civ with the highest score becomes the target.
I think I'll change that first random 33% to incorporate the highest scorer, as it does seem you often want to slow down a civ that's running away with the game. Maybe 10% truly random, and 23% the leading civ? Think I'll add that now...
Appreciate the feedback/insight!
So I loaded up your mod along with a few others (Smart AI, Enlightenment Era etc) plus the Enhanced User Interface. Only 5 turns into a standard game and we got this popup:
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1295764115
Popup keeps repeating itself in subsequent turns even though I have not unlocked espionage.
UPDATE: Just loaded the same game, and this problem seems to have vanished. Will update again if it happens again.
Yep, couple turns in, and the problem persists.
I've found the problem, and will include a fix in the next version - which should come out in the next few days. You should be able to ignore the Notification and keep playing without problems until I get it fixed.
Thanks for letting me know!!!
EDIT: I fixed this error, and a few more - along with other changes included in V2, which released this morning. Thanks again!
Your welcome, S-Man. After a long hiatus, I'm just glad to see there's still new mod projects ongoing to make CiV greater than ever (or its cashgrab "successor"), so if I can help I'll give it a shot. :)
I'm currently 125 turns in, and I've seen a popup informing me that an unmet civ called Portugal had attempted a failed water poisoning op on some other unmet civ. So far my own ops attempts have been confined to half-a-dozen ops aimed at one of southern neighbors, Pilsudski's Poland, and they've been mostly successful in the beginning (2 water poisonings, 2 rumormongering). As a result of these ops, and a suicide scout attack that set them back by several turns earlier (pillage/"unsuccessful" worker grab), the Poles have been unable to cope and they've been seized up by their other neighbors (Carthage/Shoshone). They're still holding, but only on 1 city (their cap). Currently it seems the AIs have wisened up and started pulling back their spies and my ops attempts have suffered (a couple against Shoshone and three against Carthage, all unsuccessful - Shoshone managed to nab my spymaster dead)
Alright, I'll check this out. Hopefully it won't affect the saved game.
EDIT: Is it still on v.1? It doesn't look like the file is updating itself. :/
EDIT2: Loading the save with v.1 has removed all traces of the CO menu. Oh well, I'll wait this one out for now.
EDITFIN: Ok just got everything to work *beautifully*. Not only has the incessant popups stopped, but I've suffered my first poison wells op (Beijing - 1 pop loss). Not knowing who the culprit was, I lashed out - at my old nemesis, the Poles, with two ops. They suffered -3 pop in one op, and then one of their Pikemen suffered a somesuch accident as well! 0.0
Perhaps also add that unhappiness tweak for rumormongering mid-lategame, like after Printing Press has been researched (so just in time for ideologies, and another useful tool to encourage ideological compeition).
And just I've added (in my test version of V3) the ability to safely disable missions a player doesn't like, so it wouldn't be hard for someone to disable any mission if they wanted to.
The difficulty for me is setting the mission "stats" right - how much damage, or how many tiles get radiated, how much should it cost, chance of success, chance of international response, etc. I just have to guess at the best numbers and rely on players to tell me "too high" or "too low" or "what were you thinking" later... ;)
I was thinking earlier about a local happiness reduction for "rumors" and global happiness reduction for "propaganda", but am concerned it could be abused by a human player - for example, constantly hitting the capital of a rival with rumors for 20-30 missions. The AI wouldn't use it like that, so it could be OP very quickly.
I'm starting to think an additional mission, say "Serious Propaganda" (better name to follow) - that only hits happiness - and is a lot more expensive, lower success chance, higher response chance - this could be a better solution. I can make it late game, but current design enables missions when a civ enters an certain Era, so Printing Press would equal "Renaissance" Era, or Level 2 in this mod's terms. This mission should probably be Industrial or even later.
It's not hard to add a Tech or Policy prerequisite to a mission - just need to think which one to add to what mission.
Nice!
Well, I wouldn't mind testing that suitcase nuke ops for one! :D
Think it would have to be real expensive to reflect the likely amount of cash a player civ would have by that point, like at least 1300 gold, and low chance of success especially if the target city has garrisoned spy or intel buildings or both, and it'll unlock at Information. Perhaps a requirement the spy's civ to have a stockpile of uranium (higher chances of damage/tiles affected with or without the presence of uranium in your resource inventory?). It'll be an endgame tool, so to speak, something for the players (and AIs!) who want to end their games with a bang. My idea here is also to help the AI with its current inability to execute successful nuclear strikes, so perhaps the AIs could get discounted prices for this particurlar ops and maybe a slightly higher chance of success (and be encouraged to do perform this co upon its availability ie. Gandhi ;) )?
Speaking of AI usage, would it be possible to give higher chances for AI civs to successfully perform ops based on the Difficulty level?
Also to offset repeated use of a certain ops, maybe make them less effective if the same spy is repeatedly using it in the same city? After all, its not realistic for folks to just leave their houses getting burglared and then continue leaving it as it is for future robbers...
I like that idea of "Serious Propaganda", and yeah putting it in Industrial sounds more balanced. Its just after the Renaissance/World Congress formation where everyone has met each other and global alliances are forming (or disintegrating), and hits during the time when the ideologies are just coming into play.
I also would not mind seeing Policy prerequisites for certain ops, though I'm not sure which ones personally. :/
(and this is to comment on your first post - I think having the Covert Ops stick to the spy screen is sensible idea. Having units on the field would be too similar to the Great Spy mod, plus the AI isn't the brightest at protecting units even with the Smart AI)
Generally speaking - the cost of the Steal City mission is 5 times the amount of gold it takes to purchase in your capital city the most expansive infantry unit of the Era your civ is in. In this case, you'd be in the Information Era, so the unit is the "Mechanized Infantry." If it takes 1000 gold to purchase that unit, it will take 5000 gold to attempt that mission.
I am starting to wonder: should this mission be available much earlier? Maybe more expensive, but earlier? Seems like they dynamic of getting large chunks of territory to "change sides" through bribery should be most likely to occur before the concept of the "nation state" started to solidify. Just a thought....
I'm adding the Nuke Suitcase in V3 (test) right now. It's working, but I'm experimenting with the actual damages it's causing. I think I'm having a slightly different concept of how to build it. I guess I'm thinking more along the lines of "dirty bomb" instead of a city destroyer.
Current Design:
- Since it's suitcase-sized, it should be less damaging than an Atomic Bomb.
- A small (~25%) population loss, perhaps half that amount if a Bomb Shelter is present
- I'm trying to get the bomb to spread Fallout to 1-5 tiles near the city
- It won't automatically destroy units nearby, but add say 50-90 HPs of damage, so any unit already damaged has a good chance of being destroyed.
- May take out civilian units on a random basis, including Great Persons
- On uranium: initially none is required (it's a small bomb), but I suppose I could make it where a civ would need to have a "free" unit of uranium to employ the mission. It complicates the code a bit, but is doable.
Adding game difficulty to AI mission success isn't difficult, and is actually quite a good idea. I'd probably keep it to a fairly small adjustment, since the AI is already getting missions for half-price (an essential - since they're almost always broke mid-game) and get to launch missions more frequently than the human player.
Adding a test for repeated missions requires a bit more work. Up to now, I've avoided using any design criteria that would require the mod to remember what happens in case of loading a saved game. Keeping track in the same session is easy, but can be defeated if a user wanted to save/load a game every turn. I know it's kind of silly, but it is a consideration. There are tools out there that can manage this, and I've played with them a bit, but haven't gotten one working consistently right yet.
It's probably a pretty smart thing to add - especially if I go with that typical Civ V approach of "the more you use it, the more it should cost" (like Social Policies). Or lowering odds of success - both approaches are good. Just need to make sure I can get the mod to remember what's already happened in previous save games. Maybe for Version 4....
UPDATE: The Suitcase Nuke works - and is kinda cool! ;) Damages lots of units, leaves lots of fallout. Have buffed the response severity (actually doubling it for this mission from the way it is normally calculated). This means lots of wars by the target civ, even a few from other civs.
Have also widened the chances for "permanent" war by narrowing the chances for allied denunciations and DoWs. Just seems more appropriate that there should be a better chance of a permanent war with the target civ if you use a nuke suitcase than there is that all his friends will denounce you.
Haven't added the "1 Free Unit of Uranium" requirement yet. Can't seem to make up my mind on that one.
For fun, I'm playing around with a "mini-movie" - that stops action when you launch the nuke, hides the popups, forces camera to the target city, creates an evil looking unit that goes through a "build animation" (like the Great Prophet when he builds a holy site), then pops the mushroom cloud. Then pauses a couple of seconds, then brings the popups back.
Unfortunately, only about half of it is working, but I'll see if I can get it looking halfway decent - will really add a lot of fun.... Well, in a sick kind of way, that is... ;)