Achievements

[Crossark]

Does anyone have an idea why any achievement besides those based solely on using a mod doesn't work in a game in which a mod is being used?

[Drevin]

I can only assume that the reason behind this is the fact that mods could make many achievements trivial.

[Crossark]

Originally posted by Drevin:

I can only assume that the reason behind this is the fact that mods could make many achievements trivial.

Yeah, but if someone wanted to cheat in their achievements that badly, they'd find a way.

[Citronvand]

I could just use Steam Achievement Manager to unlock them all. It's a damn shame since I use achievements for personal goals and I cannot use them if I fix the horrible Ai-always-plays-on-chieftain-and-have-nearly-unlimited-happiness.

[Staryn]

I assume it was to limit exploits in mods. Of course, with saves, acheivement manager, and a few interesting tricks, it seems a little pointless.

Of those methods, I don't recommend achievement manager, because for one I think it's cheap (certainly takes the point out of some of the stuff I've written, making it a waste of time), and for two, I don't recommend using third-party software to modify your Steam account.

[Citronvand]

Is it possible to directly edit the XML files and thus circumvent the mods-disables-achievement problem? Someone said that you could change:

<Row Name="AI_HANDICAP">
<Key>HANDICAP_CHIEFTAIN</Key>

to

<Row Name="AI_HANDICAP">
<Key>HANDICAP_PRINCE</Key>

in GlobalAIDefines.xml. But it doesn't seem to work.

[Staryn]

I've never tried it. I've wondered about that though.

[Staryn]

If you make it work, let me know, and I'll mention it in the achievement guide.

[Citronvand]

It seems that I've changed it for vanilla? I found that you have to go to Assets -> DLC -> Expansion2 -> XML to edit The New World.

[Staryn]

Yes, there's separate xml files for each of the expansions.

[Citronvand]

I've looked through the files now for the new world. It seems that the AI has been given a new difficulty. So instead of it playing on chieftain, it plays on AI_Default. Here's the changes to the happiness:

Instead of 12 the AI now starts at 15 happiness. But the AI will no longer recieve an extra happiness for each luxury goods. I guess that "<NumCitiesUnhappinessMod>" is the amount of unhappiness you get from the number of cities in %. If so the AI now recieves 90% unhappiness from number of cities and population. Before when it played on chieftain it only recieved 60% unhappiness from cities and population.

I have yet to try and change the values.

[Citronvand]

Ok. I tried changing <HappinessDefault> for Prince to 50 directly in the XML and it definitely works. The question remains though, can I still unlock achievements? I need to find some easy achievement to try and unlock.

[Staryn]

BNW changed a lot of how happiness worked for the AI. You'll even see the AI actually unhappy in the late game with ideologies sometimes. I'm not sure what the new formula is. It's still higher than the player by far.

[Staryn]

The victory achievements are easy. The easiest way is to start a game with an AI teammate, the other AI on their own, and set a low turn limit. Even a turn limit of 1 will work.

[Citronvand]

I tried to get the achievement for losing as Korea but I'm afraid I didn't get the achievement.

[Citronvand]

Nevermind, I just picked a tiny map with Korea, put 1 turn max and 3 allies. Got 3 achievements! That's with 50 happiness. So, it works! Not sure why I didn't get the "Lose as Korea" achievement though.