What's New:
There are two big things that are new in demo 3.

1) Real movement of military units
2) Addition of naval units.

Check it out and comment below...

I would especially like to hear from people on whether the overall system, despite its current obvious flaws, has a good "feel" or not. Are you worried about it being fun?

Does it seem like the military system is heading in the right direction?

Do you like the "light touch" capabilities that are still there in the system? Have I screwed them up from what you saw last time, or is this clearly heading in the right direction?

Special thanks to Anton for getting the .jar file to work.

For Background Info... (added 11/28/99)
There are three places you should look, with different levels of information.... (I know the information is not all that one might hope for. But we are very short-handed, especially on the programming end, so I cut corners where I can )

The most detailed source on the demos is the old version 2 documentation. It is on the new web site, under downloads, listed as "game instructions". It says at the top that its instructions for demo 3. That's wrong. It is the instructions for demo 2, but a lot of it is still current. Things like a detailed list of keyboard commands are found in the demo 2 doc. Many of the commands listed in the text part of demo 2, that introduce is how you play, no longer work. They are for the old system where both the player's and the AI's units teleported. So I suggested just skimming that document.

The "what's new" section, part way down the page of the downloads demo 3 page itself, is vital information that you Must read to have any hope of figuring out what's going on. I give information on the new key combinations, how naval and Army task forces work, and which old commands no longer work.

Finally, the demo 3 thread, right here, has a lot of useful information. If you look over all three of those documents, and you still have questions, I'll try answer them.

I think we're headed in the right direction, Mark. I like your idea of tackling the graphics next, as that's my big hang-up right now (course that IS my major contribution as well, so I'm biased!)

Thanks for the thoughts. I think we're on the right track too, but its easy to be myopic when you're this close to something!
On econ and tech, I took you as saying you don't understand what's in there Now. If that's the case don't worry, my old models will be replaced fairly soon...

A news item marking the occasion will be made in our Alt. Civ sections sometime in the next few days.

You guys are too fast! I have on my list to let you and Markos know... Cool, I can cross something off without having to Do anything.

Read the section on what's new. You're not going to be able to provide any useful ideas or criticism unless you do...

In the doc you'll find:

E) I use a move queue for the TFs like in civ, and use the same key commands: like spacebar for hold, s for Sentry, w for wait, etc. the active task force is highlighted with a red outline. If you want to change the active moving task force you should right-click on the one you want to move. The move queue is not implemented flawlessly yet. If you have units left to move and none show as selected try hitting the W key. That usually works.

But What I forgot to mention specifically is you Move using the Arrow Keys

(I can read the docs but can't write 'em worth... )

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Also sometimes when I attack they just bring in their naval units and change the odds dramatically. Oh and sometimes the computer has my navy go help defend. Now all of my water units are landlocked.
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?? When you attack they're supposed to try and bring in any adjacent units to change the odds. You mean change the odds on an inland battle? I'll go ahead and fix it so that naval units won't support inland. It needs to be that way in the long run anyway

Its a bug when Your naval units support inland. I'll try a little harder to find that one. However, if your water units end up high and dry, just use the movement cheat mode to fix it.

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A nice feature would be a button to form an amphibious TF and leave the surplus units out. Oh and a button for land and water ones too. Yeah there could just be a button for each type and it would make the biggest one of that type possible.
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Good ideas! I'll implement them for the next go around.

Glak:

On the download page under "miscellaneous" is where the cheat mode info is. You should probably read over the whole download page to make sure you haven't missed something important. The manual doesn't have everything in it yet.

AI...
That's it for now. If I make it more aggressive, its just easier to kill the bad guys because they over-extend. I will make it Much better later, but only after we get the movement AI in there.

So yeah the computer players would die faster if they were more agressive but I would have to worry about them so I wouldn't be able to take advantage as easily. They did seem to attack me last turn. I think two teams were allied and I tried to kill one so they both took back a few squares.

Yeah I know there is no reason to change the map size yet, its just that I wanted to finish the game and it looks like it is going to take quite a while and I can't seem to save the game.

First off u can confuse and overwhelm any of the civs by attacking on multiple fronts with just 1 unit and 1 front with many. The thing is, the civs never seem to beat the other units even if they have tons of other units in that square. I think it would make sence if they were a little better in that area (home ground reason) and also they could force a retreat from the square if they're too powerful.

Also, i don't know if u intended this, but if i fail in taking an inland square next to my civ in can continue marching inwards and take squares in the center of a civs empire.

The reason the defenders never beat the "decoy" ones, is that for now, an attacker that doesn't like the odds, can always break off the attack without penalty. I'd meant to make it like only a 50% or less chance of being able to get away clean, but forgot . I'll have to fix that, seeing as you're clearly able to draw off support that should go to the "main" battle without penalty in this way. Cute tactic, I hadn't thought of it!

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Also, i don't know if u intended this, but if i fail in taking an inland square next to my civ in can continue marching inwards and take squares in the center of a civs empire.
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Well, I knew about it, but didn't want to spend the time to implement a fix. that silliness will go away eventually.

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Finnaly is there a reason when ur attacking with land units u can't move 2 spaces, but can with naval?
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Without the diagonal moves naval forces would have been of much less use, so I upped their movement a bit. It may be justified, and maybe not, anyway I just did it!

Glak:

I also think it is reasonable that you can just keep going instead of staying to fight, though I haven't found a use for this. After all if you move in deeper they just automatically follow so basically you are just trapping yourself

Feints and decoy tactics are Clearly valid, and will definitely be understood, and utilized by the AI. The problem now, is not that feints exist, but that they can be executed at very small cost...

Staying on the ships and continuing along a coast is Not reasonable IMO. Without disembarking troops being carried can't re-provision, and disease becomes much more likely as time at sea increases (real time scale, not the one year game time scale).

Support Tactics:
What you say would be right if adjacent units always supported friendly ones in combat. However, for Army units there's a substantial chance that they won't be able to make it. (at least in the demo so far) So your analysis isn't right IMO.

What are you refering to? As far as I can tell he wasn't even talking about water. Well whatever you are talking about what are you going to change?

>Support Tactics:
What you say would be right if adjacent units always supported friendly ones in combat. However, for Army units there's a substantial chance that they won't be able to make it. (at least in the demo so far) So your analysis isn't right IMO.

Oh I had no idea that they didn't always go, once I realized the computer could teleport I basically stopped trying to figure out how its units behaved.

>TK:
I'll try your suggestion for the next demo. But I don't like the auto-center in Civ much, and suspect I won't like it in Clash either.

you should probably temporarily put a button in, I'm sure the final interface will be radically different so don't worry about it too much.

First if I double clicked on it and tried to open it, it didnt work. The Loading Window appeared, but then again disappeared and nothing. Luckily I have the java sdk for myself and so I typed java -jar clash_3d.jar and it worked.
Second, there are no scrolling bars on the main map. I dont know how to scroll around else.

The naval units behave strange. I have a naval unit in a (land) square, but I cant move other naval there too, although one naval unit is already there.

The Yugoslawians (green ones) crossed the adria with "L"s and "~N~"s. How did they do that? Are the naval units transports?

And I would find it better if simultanouse movement would be indicated with lines. So that units that go to the same square are grouped together in the square they currently are and then a line is drawn to the square where they are next turn. So, you completely reduce the error that you sent your men to the wrong place (which occured to me several times, because of the movement queue; land units should be moved first and then naval and not mixed.) and in addition you no longer have the problem of squares showing the wrong number of military strength.

Add an "influence" value. Every square of yours produces influence and if a square with a lot of influence (=high pop and/or military presence) lies next to a "barbarian" square with low influence (low defense value, low pop) then there is a chance the barbarians change to your side.

That map screenshot on the homepage looks nice.

When you print messages like civ thisandthat did something you should print out their name in their color so that you know which civ.

Whats that M[30/30] value in the square? Cause I had some squares with that value.

What does pressing 1 do? Yes I know it creates MSPs but well, what are MSPs. I am not yet into that.

Can I abandon units?

Is it really useful to create TF's? I mean when one TF has 4 attack points it is better to have 2 with lower health (the darker bar in the upper left) than one with better health. If (correct) {out.ask("Whats the sens of TFs then?"); answer hmmwondering=in.answer; } else await.explaination;

When did you start working on Clash?

The doc is in the download section of the new site, right?

Thanks for copying your post over to the demo 3 thread! I'll kill the old one now...

Most of your questions about things are answered in the docs. There are three places you should look, with different levels of information.... (I know the information is not all that one might hope for. But we are very short-handed, especially on the programming end, so I cut corners where I can )

The most complete source on the demo is the old version 2 documentation. It is on the new web site, under downloads, listed as "game instructions". It says at the top that its instructions for demo 3. That's wrong. It is the instructions for demo 2, but a lot of it is still current. Things like a detailed list of keyboard commands are found in the demo 2 doc. Many of the commands listed in the text part of demo 2, that introduce is how you play, no longer work. They are for the old system where both the player's and the AI's units teleported. So I suggested just skimming that document.

The "what's new" section, part way down the page of the downloads demo 3 page itself, is vital information that you Must read to have any hope of figuring out what's going on. I give information on the new key combinations, how naval and Army task forces work, and which old commands no longer work.

Finally, the demo 3 thread on the forum has a lot of useful information. If you look over all three of those documents, and you still have questions, I'll try answer them. But it was pretty obvious from your questions that you hadn't done that yet...

Double-clicking on the jar file hasn't worked for only a few people. I don't know what the problem is. One guy that had trouble was using Windows 98. What's your OS?

Having smaller groups freely joining your civ is something I have had in mind. But the demo is in a very primitive state compared to where our game models are. I like the suggestion on using the civ's color in any messages. I have noted it down for potential implementation in future demos. I have thought about lines and arrows indicating movement myself. But I wanted things to get a little further along in terms of the demo before trying things like these. It may be with the new map and unit graphics and the "unit box" I'm working on now, such arrows will be unnecessary. If your guys end up going to the wrong square, just used the take back command.

MSPs stand for multi-square provinces. Eventually forming them will be under player control. For now the "1" key is just a leftover of an old diagnostic when I was getting that going.

Task forces are every bit as good as individual units. Sometimes they even give a combined arms bonus. But the main thing you need to know is a unit only has 4 points when it is unwounded. After that the strength of the unit is pro rated by its health. So two half-strength units are only as good as one full-strength unit. You can't abandon units yet, but eventually you'll be able to disband them.

I've been working on Clash for about two years now. The team approach to Clash started about nine months ago.

As you noted in the other post, there are still some bugs in the GUI-handling code. Mostly those are relatively harmless, and only result in transitory map updating errors. I have not gone in to make everything absolutely thread-safe, because the code will probably evolve greatly before we put out the beta. As I said, the real purpose of the demos at this point is to simply check out how game models work, not to validate the code. There are a Lot of bad things hiding in the code that I or someone else will have to clean up at some point.