I think its not a good idea to wait for me to include any of your further workings any time soon, I will definitely take a longer break from EL. Only exception would be obvious gamebreaking bugs. Better make your own mod ;). You can still talk to me ofcourse and I cvan have a look at your changes.

No problem, I know you are a bit burnt out with EL right now. I will make a standalone mod anyways, and there's no rush, like at all :)

If the issue is reproducabler, just attach a save and I will have a look. Typically this is an AI-pathing issue. It may disappear after a while.

LeaderEnemyBoss wrote:

Hey everyone, ELCP is back! Remember to join my [Discord Channel], if you want to have a chat. Further information for newcomers in the [official forum thread].

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About a year ago I released the first version of ELCP. The changes were tame back then, most of my time was spent figuring out how to do stuff. Since then the patch has grown enormously, I got help from other community members* and I think I can finally say, that most of the things I wanted to achieve are now part of ELCP. Over the year I have received a lot of feedback, most of it positive. I currently estimate the userbase to be somewhere between 1500 and 2500**^. For a small community like EL this is quite a feat, and I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you, the users. Without you, this wouldn't have been possible.

As for ELCP's future: I consider the mod as mostly finished. I still have some minor ideas left, however I doubt there will be more huge patches like this one. Currently I am a bit burnt out with EL, but who knows, maybe you will see my name again, be it in EL or in another game.

As for the new changes: The Mykara received another round of tweaks. The most prominent one being the changes to how their Towers work. Mykara Towers can now exploit additional hexes early on, this should provide them a smoother growth curve. On the other hand I fixed a bug that could massively inflate their lategame FISDI gain. We will see how fixing this bug plays out, maybe they'll need another compensatory buff.

In other news, handicaps can now also be assigned to AIs. I have received a lot of feedback, that boils down to "normal difficulty is too easy, but hard is too difficult, halp!". With the ability to assign positive or negative handicaps to individual AIs, you can now finetune the difficulty to your liking!
 

* Shoutout to fellow modders Morgoth, Ninakoru, Cornebre/GATC, Fluffiest, CeltiK and also to the regular beta testers jojo_Fr, HighLordGrim, VoidInsanity, Soulinor and many more (sorry, I probably forgot someone). Special shoutout to the youtuber SB, his instructional videos helped shape the mod in numerous ways.

** The largest userbases come from USA (obviously), Germany and .... Canada? In relation to their population count Canadians love ELCP! Must be the affinity for cold climates!

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Downloadlink (Installer) || Downloadlink (Zip) || Downloadlink (Mac)

Note: Multiplayer saves from older versions are not compatible with newer versions (Singleplayer saves are fine)

Changelog for v2.4.1:

...

Thank you LeaderEnemyBoss for all your hard work on this. The ELCP really made a big difference to how much I could enjoy the game, going well beyond merely fixing things and adding several new, clever ideas. I is an outstanding game now.

Any idea what you will do now? Are there any other 4x games you are looking forward to play more?

Maybe one more idea, which would probably be fairly easy to change, if others thought it a good idea: what about lowering the threshold for the expansion victory? At 80% of all regions it does seem a little absurd and will just involve lots and lots of mop up at the end. And since there are two other, related, victory conditions it doesn't seem to add anything. 50% + would seem to already show total dominance in all games except maybe 2-3 player small maps. What do you think? For reference, civ IV had a domination victory condition based on population and territory owned. For a moderate number of players, both parameters were well below 50%, so something like that can work.

Shadowhal wrote:

Maybe one more idea, which would probably be fairly easy to change, if others thought it a good idea: what about lowering the threshold for the expansion victory? At 80% of all regions it does seem a little absurd and will just involve lots and lots of mop up at the end. And since there are two other, related, victory conditions it doesn't seem to add anything. 50% + would seem to already show total dominance in all games except maybe 2-3 player small maps. What do you think? For reference, civ IV had a domination victory condition based on population and territory owned. For a moderate number of players, both parameters were well below 50%, so something like that can work.

 I dunno, seems like just playing on a smaller world would resolve that issue

Thank you for the kind words. I already lowered the threshold for expansion victory to 70%, If I ever make another version, I may lower it once more. The  main reason for it existing is probably for that rare case, where a cultist is in a super fortified city and basically unconquerable (which can happen especially with the ELCP ruleset).

I dont think I will play any 4x in the near future, there are other genres to enjoy ;).

If you fill whole 'province' with Buroughs you will still have option to build next one, but well - not. If you buy hero then sell hero then buy another then sell then try to inspect any hero you will end with locked empty hero properties screen.

Kathrys wrote:

Is it just me or after a while playing (50+ turns) and a large map with 8 AIs there seems to be a microstutter every 2 seconds, non-stop.

I tried messing with Vsync and it didn't work.

My FPS is constant 60+, my CPU1 and CPUtotal are at 50%, my GPU is at 50%... it seems the patch is making the game microstutter.

Anyone getting this?

im also getting the non-stop micro stuttering on large 8-player maps. it didnt get really bad until around turn 150, but i think it started long before that it just gradually got worse as the game went on.  

here is the save, a turn or two after it became too much for me to handle: 

KEEP THIS SAVE! MICRO STUTTER JUST STARTED.sav

i played for a while after that point and conquered a few AI cities to see if it would go away and it did not get better. Leader, i know you've moved on from this game and we're all very thankful for your work, but i really hope you can take a serious look into this before leaving the mod in this state. im just a player, not a modder, but if theres anything i can do to help pin this down please let me know.

anonymous1 wrote:

Kathrys wrote:

Is it just me or after a while playing (50+ turns) and a large map with 8 AIs there seems to be a microstutter every 2 seconds, non-stop.

I tried messing with Vsync and it didn't work.

My FPS is constant 60+, my CPU1 and CPUtotal are at 50%, my GPU is at 50%... it seems the patch is making the game microstutter.

Anyone getting this?

im also getting the non-stop micro stuttering on large 8-player maps. it didnt get really bad until around turn 150, but i think it started long before that it just gradually got worse as the game went on.  

here is the save, a turn or two after it became too much for me to handle: 

KEEP THIS SAVE! MICRO STUTTER JUST STARTED.sav

i played for a while after that point and conquered a few AI cities to see if it would go away and it did not get better. Leader, i know you've moved on from this game and we're all very thankful for your work, but i really hope you can take a serious look into this before leaving the mod in this state. im just a player, not a modder, but if theres anything i can do to help pin this down please let me know.

Don't worry, I am still reading here and will fix bugs that I deem critical and can reproduce, ideally with a save like you provided. I created a beta version that contains two small AI fixes. It should alleviate the issues you are experiencing. [Check it out!]

great, thank you very much. i will test it out as soon as i can and report back with the results.

LeaderEnemyBoss wrote:

Don't worry, I am still reading here and will fix bugs that I deem critical and can reproduce, ideally with a save like you provided. I created a beta version that contains two small AI fixes. It should alleviate the issues you are experiencing. [Check it out!]

Thank you for your efforts.

I'm trying this mod for the first time! For the moment, I haven't detected all the differences yet, but there is already an improvement that I think is absolutely brilliant and that was missing: being able to accelerate the movement of units on the general map!
I have coupled my two mods and am currently testing their updates: WGFC and Progressive Difficulty.
Everything is fine and there is no problem! I avoid increasing the difficulty because I read on this forum that the AI of the game was very good with ELCP, so I stay at least "Serious". I certainly should have tested ELCP long before, but it must have been at least two years since I last played Endless Legend.
Thank you for this gigantic work!

Ty for the kind words! Hard or Serious is a good starting difficulty for newcomers that are used to impossible/endless on vanilla. You should specifically notice a more tense lategame as the game goes on.

anonymous1, thank u for testing and report. It is encouraging

anonymous1 wrote:

reporting back after having played a while with the new beta patch. was going to post yesterday but wanted to come back with as much information and as accurately as possible.

i fired up the save i provided you with and the constant stuttering every couple seconds appeared to still be present though greatly improved, but after i ended the turn it cleared up and was gone. to make sure i wasnt just seeing what i wanted to see, i started a new 8-player game on a large map. i played until a bit after turn 150, and so far the issue for the most part seems to be resolved. some turns are worse than others as the game progresses, but as you suggested previously it usually improves shortly after on its own. all in all, i'd say whatever you did was effective because it is a night and day difference from what it was prior to the beta patch you pushed out.  im talking the difference between playable and unplayable here.

i have no idea how the coding you do works or what you did to alleviate the issue, but if its possible to "turn the dial" a little bit further so to speak, without breaking anything, that might be a good idea. the overall impact the AI adjustments have performance wise seem to be pretty taxing, so any additional optimizations you might be able to throw in would be much appreciated. either way, i want to thank you for responding and patching so quickly.

There are different kinds of stuttering in the game. 

1. Engine related stutter when many units are present. It manifests in a small hitch every few seconds that occurs once the game enters "lategame". I cant do anything about it
2. Effect related stutter. Some machines have difficulty with displaying screen effects like the winter or eclipse graphics. Sadly I cant do anything about that either
3. There is the stuttering that is caused by late game AIs having loads of units (especially on higher difficulties). It typically occurs at the start of the turn and gets better as the turn progresses. I have done something about that in the past, but I will never fully be able to fix it with the current architecture of EL. The silver lining is: it only affects the start of turns, and doesnt lead to constant stutters.
4. AI pathing related stutter. This is what occured in the posted save (a settler wanted to settle a region that it couldnt reach due to it being surrounded by other empires with closed borders). This is the instance that I can reliably fix, HOWEVER, I cant just flip a switch to solve the issue. There are tons of weird circumstances in the game that can lead to a situation where the AI pathing fails. I can only fix each and every single instance of them when I actually see them occuring. Thats why I need savegames to reliably reproduce the issue. This also means: there will probably be more instances of these issues in the game, I just havent encountered them yet. So if it happens again to an extreme degree, just attach a save where the issue can be reproduced reliably.

LeaderEnemyBoss, as I said some time ago, finally got a Difficulty mod up and running.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1781851243

If you have the time/will to take a look at it, I pushed some information regarding the "why" in the mod itself.

Plenty aware you are a bit out of EL modding right now, this post will be my only pressure on the matter :)

Thanks for all your constant work.