Hegemony Gold 1.5.6 beta 2

It's been a while since Hegemony Gold got this much love! After the release of 1.5.6 beta 1, we made the AI too aggressive toward slaves, so we've released a new beta which tones that back. Download it here.

Changes:* AI now compare threat vs value when attacking non-combat units, making them less likely to target your slaves than in 1.5.6 beta 1.* AI are now much more likely to target your princesses.* Game now automatically turns off sound on computers with no sound card to avoid a crash.* Fixed the sound detail displaying "Custom" instead of matching the proper setting.* Fixed Bardylis forgetting his target if you save and reload while he's marching on Pella.* Fixed AI brigade miniatures sometimes showing up when they shouldn't.* When upgrading from a truce to an alliance, the cost of the truce is now factored in.* The diplomacy buttons now show a tooltip with the faction's assets.

'Shared Suppliers' is just the term I used in code to identify the algorithm units use to share food with other nearby units so that they all have similar amounts. In contrast, 'Transfer Suppliers' is what I called farms, fort or cities that only move food one-way from the building to the unit.

The error was simply due to too many units being within sharing range of each other. I've rewritten that section so there's no longer an absolute max.

Yeah, I did it at the time to prevent dynamic allocations under the guise of improving performance. I placed the check there to see if it ever went out of bounds and in 2 or 3 years no one had reported exceeding that limit so I hadn't really thought about it again. The update will now expand that default limit if necessary so for the few of you guys who have really, really big armies it should no longer be a problem.

Any hope of getting a patch in to deal with my (and a few others) odd crash when using non-custom Intel drivers?

Unfortunately, other than figuring out that the issue was tied to Intel hardware, we were never able to find out what was actually causing the problem. None of our hardware can duplicate the problem and I ran the game through Intel's graphics analyzer and it didn't throw any errors so unfortunately that means I have no idea what actually needs to be fixed.

Really, really big armies? I actually have three spartan hoplites, four peltasts and two greek cavaliers in that scenario, while running through the world with about 30 battleline troops in the Philip scenario. So or the AI has many, many, MANY guys out there to get those sheep standing within their empire's borders or it had the brilliant idea to send out some dozens of workers to build walls (and the guys that were getting the sheep were the straw that broke the camel's back - or rather the game...)

I have just found another bug: If you try to create an allied brigade, you have to be able to afford the brigade with the price of mercenaries, although the allies cost only half of that. So, it isn't possible to hire allied troops (which is more or less inevitable in the Ionian War scenario) if you haven't got much money left, because you must have twice as much as the amount that is really needed to upkeep the brigade before you are able to build them.

Unfortunately, other than figuring out that the issue was tied to Intel hardware, we were never able to find out what was actually causing the problem. None of our hardware can duplicate the problem and I ran the game through Intel's graphics analyzer and it didn't throw any errors so unfortunately that means I have no idea what actually needs to be fixed.Well hopefully Rome won't have the same issue. If it does though, starting in July I'll be only ~6 hours from Toronto, so I could always head up there and let you see what's going on.

I have just found another bug: If you try to create an allied brigade, you have to be able to afford the brigade with the price of mercenaries, although the allies cost only half of that.

Thanks for the report. Unfortunately, I couldn't seem to duplicate this when testing in the sandbox. Do you know if the tooltip listed the correct cost or was it just that the button was disabled? What kind of unit was it? If you know the steps to reproduce it or can send me a savegame, that would be much appreciated.

Well hopefully Rome won't have the same issue.

We'll do our best to make sure it doesn't. If there is something we can do to fix it on our end we certainly will, but driver issues are something that is a little out of our control and unfortunately we aren't really big enough to warrant a driver patch like they do for some of the big studio games.

Sorry, but it seems that I was a little bit hastily with that statement: The reason why I wasn't able to build the brigade although I had something about 2800 income and about 2740 expenses was, that after reloading the savegame I had got only about 2740 gold income and 1720 expenses, so it seems that it was caused by a false calculation (or report) of my balance sheet, not because of too high prices... ( I'm sure about these numbers, because I was looking at them about twenty times to avoid a false bug report... Hm, irony of fate ;). )

The balance sheet and messages like the "Truce violation" are generally still a little bit buggy. After longer game sessions (2-3 hours) they begin to show the coded texts like "the truce between %FACTION1% and %FACTION2%" and "%UNITLIST%" in the truce violation message and something with %BASE...%, %CITY...% etc. in the balance sheet.

EDIT: After "Homecoming" I get the command over all guys of the Peloponnesian League, but one Peltast can't be controlled by the player, because, these guys seem to have the sacred duty to accompany some sheep to a city (one quite far away...)By the way, could you give all cities on the Peloponnese, let's say, 100 tonnes of food when my guys arrive and I get the full commando? Otherwise I have about 1000 peltasts there without any food or morale when arriving...

Addition to the post above: Not only the shepherd-peltasts seem to ignore my orders, ALL groups of more than one brigade, that I haven't brought from Asia Minor, but are under my command since I had discovered the greek "mainland", seem to be still under the control of the AI, but operate in a very passive way, they only stand around (even though they are already out of food for a while). Every try to separate them, ends with an instant regrouping of the two brigades at the position they are at the moment. And a movement order is cancelled after some metres...

Thanks for the report. It turns out there was an preexisting issue with the AI handing over control when the Homecoming objective was completed and this has become more noticeable now that the AI is actively going after the sheep. Previously, the AI would try to finish up what they were doing at the point you took control, but it looks like this wasn't always reliable and could result in situations where the AI was battling the player for control. So, we've changed it now so that any units under AI control will immediately stop what they were doing. This may mean you'll need to tidy up a few loose ends, but it should be a lot safer.

I've heard reports about the tooltip issue before, but unfortunately the cause isn't clear and I haven't been able to duplicate it. I'll keep looking into it, but if you can reproduce the behaviour please let me know.

It looks like they'll be a beta three to test some of these things so stay tuned for news.