If there are no new sprites in the WWII scenario then they may as well just keep it as far as I'm concerned.

Wes, would you consider having the militia units be one step behind the current defense unit? Militias tend to be more along the lines of armed citizens and thus would not have state of the art weaponry. If you just discover machine gunners then all your cities get infantry militia etc.

How about losing the "City Wall" graphic in the modern age? You can keep the defense bonus effect but a wall surrounding a modern city looks weird.

quote: Originally posted by wheathin on 12-11-2000 10:22 AM To keep the AI in the game (or help a straggling human), Harlan's got some good ideas (catch-up wonder, etc.) Here's more: 1. The tech-sharing from CtP1 MedMod 2. See my thread on upgrading obsolete units 3. Bigger DiffDB.txt bonuses for AI in late game 4. Increase the odds that AI starts with two or more settlers (can the AI start with three?!) 5. SLIC: every wonder increases the rate of tech diffusion from the civ that builds it? Each wonder attracts tourists and pilgrims - it enhances tech transfer from that advanced civ as the pilgrims return home. I.e., each wonder functions as a Great Library in reverse. 6. Feats of Wonder geared towards the AI? We tend to want feats of wonder that reflect our own building styles, but surely there are AI play strategies that could be rewarded. First to move a unit into and out of the same city for 20 turns in a row. Seriously though, there's gotta be something... 7. One wonder per age per player

It may be easier to adjust the penalty given the human in the diffdb than to try and slic a bunch of stuff to help the AI. Btw, the feat of wonder proposal is hilarious.
I am getting worried about having to use slic for any and every adjustment we want to make to the game. I am going to try and find other means to solve problems whenever possible, and save the slic for big things that can't be addressed any other way.

Also, I have found out how to implement Harlan's new city styles into the game. I am going to wait about adding the Industrial age for now, unless Harlan or someone else figures it out, then I would be happy to drop it in the mod.

I started a new game last night to test out the city styles, and it was immediately apparent that setting wages to a base of 12 was too high. Therefore, I have set them to a base of 8 with each notch changing the level by 2, which is midway between 12 and the original setting of 4. This should give good results, and we can tinker with building settings to further refine things.
I also reduced the base workday from 10 to 8, with each notch representing a change of 2 hours. This was what things were in Ctp1. Unit, building and other costs are going to be changed in the mod anyway, so we can adjust them to fit this new setting.

Finally, if someone would change the necessary text files so that each pop only worked an average of one tile in the first radius, I will put this in the mod, and see if helps address the issue of cities growing too fast early on in the game. I think the settings are in strategies text, but I could be wrong. If you do send me something, please specify what changes you made to which lines.

Btw, can anyone confirm or deny colorme's statement that the Min and Max ahead and behind bonuses are applied linearly throughout the game, rather than being triggered either on or off when the AI crosses the specified threadhold? This is a big deal.

For initial city growth, if there is not a net positive amount of food in the first 8 squares + center, the city can't grow. So, if you give certain types of terrain *negative* food values, you might be able to tailor better which terrains will support cities? I.e. give tundra a negative value high enough so that if a city has 4 tundra squares adjacent to it, it just can't grow at all, no matter what kind of land it's on. After all, any city located near that much tundra is just too cold - odds are it's nearby beaches, climate, forests, etc. are too hostile to support a multi-million pop city...

In DIffDB, I read a comment line which talked about the interpolation business, and hence my suggestion.

Also, I mentioned this in some other thread, that in most CTP2 games I've played, the AIs seem to have huge ups and downs in their power graph, often over just a few (50 or so) turns. It isn't clear to me why this should be so. I usually end up with a pretty linear power graph, usually with minimal downs.

Do the AI do badly because they fight with each other a lot? But then, given that they're incapable of a massive attack, whereas their defense is pretty good, the huge ups and downs in power don't seem right.

Do the AI do badly because they fight with each other a lot? But then, given that they're incapable of a massive attack, whereas their defense is pretty good, the huge ups and downs in power don't seem right.
---------------------------------------------
I've noticed this in my graph after losing major battles, or the lose of a city, especially a powerful one containing one or more wonders. BTW, I have been attacked by a stack of 8 which totally caught me by surprise.

Taken from DiffDB (Impossible)
----------------------------------------------------
AI_MIN_BEHIND_PERCENT 1.8
AI_MAX_BEHIND_PERCENT 0.8
AI_MIN_AHEAD_PERCENT 2.0
AI_MAX_AHEAD_PERCENT 3.0

AI_MIN_BEHIND_GOLD_ADJUSTMENT 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0
AI_MAX_BEHIND_GOLD_ADJUSTMENT 1.5 1.5 1.3 1.3 1.1
AI_MIN_AHEAD_GOLD_ADJUSTMENT 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0
AI_MAX_AHEAD_GOLD_ADJUSTMENT 0.9 0.9 0.9 1.0 1.0
----------------------------------------------------

wich means i believe: if the AI is rated at 3 times or more the strenght of the human then use AI_MAX_AHEAD_GOLD ==> the AI will have a 10% penalty for gold.

if the AI is in between 2 and 3 times the strenght of the human then AI_MIN_AHEAD_PERCENT is use ==> no bonus or penalty.

if the AI is in between 1.8 and 2 times the strenght of the human then nothing special.

if the AI is in between 0.8 and 1.8 times the strenght of the human then AI_MIN_BEHIND_PERCENT is use ==> no bonus or penalty.

if the AI is less then 0.8 times the strenght of the human then AI_MAX_BEHIND_PERCENT is use ==> the as a 50% bonus for gold.

It's the same principle with Science & Production. Me to i have won the first game i played (at impossible) but like i mentionned to WesW before, the AI is not as bad as it looks but with those settings it simply can't and will never compeat with a human player.

In my game I play with:
----------------------------------------------------
AI_MIN_BEHIND_PERCENT 1.5
AI_MAX_BEHIND_PERCENT 0.85
AI_MIN_AHEAD_PERCENT 1.5
AI_MAX_AHEAD_PERCENT 2.5

AI_MIN_BEHIND_GOLD_ADJUSTMENT 1.1 1.25 1.4 1.55 1.7
AI_MAX_BEHIND_GOLD_ADJUSTMENT 1.4 1.6 1.8 2.0 2.4
AI_MIN_AHEAD_GOLD_ADJUSTMENT 1.0 1.05 1.1 1.15 1.2
AI_MAX_AHEAD_GOLD_ADJUSTMENT 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0
----------------------------------------------------

Wes, the scope of your mod looks great! I am in agreement with Harlan however as far as the "less is more" approach - minimalist changes are better in this case if the timeline isn't going to be extended.

CtP timeline seems to have a lot more turns, so adding one or two units here and there shouldn't be problematic. However, you're talking about lots of new units ... it'd be better I think to start with a few, and then scale the timeline up progressively as you add more - and only if necessary ... don't want game to be too long.

And my humble suggestion - perhaps basic game balance should be addressed first before worrying about adding new units ...

That said, can't wait

re:fire. that is a great idea. i suspect that it would invovled slic, but having fires (set or otherwise) as well as other natural disasters triggered randomly would mix up the game a bit. they (i am thinking earth quake) could affect terrain, cities and improvements too!!

pillboxes would basically mix tile improvements with unit abilities. ?? the only way i know of doing this is locking a unit to one location. the auto-defenders in cities that would die when moved are a good example. not really what you are suggesting as you could even hear them die when you moved em

xmon: your ideas are very good. the idea of tweaking combat strategies (flanking, etc) is good. this could also be used to introduce combined arms tactics if it were reliable.. (modern units working better together than seperately)

ship to ship combat seems like a pirate kind of thing to me esp the potential to damage/lose the ship, etc, potential gain cargo (gold), etc... pirates could be a barbarian only unit, along with other "anarchy" types (bandits, etc..)

wesw: i think it is a very good idea to pre-package the sprites ahead of time. even going so far as to pre-define empty sprites that have redundant graphics for later extension ... (free variables) if its that much easier to package at once..... this would also allow for a degree of flexibility if people were ever going to try and combine mods.

I also really like the idea of tying certain special units (e.g. the legion) to city improvements or wonders. It is something which gives you a sense of achievement and separates you from the other civs. Perhaps the building of this type of unit could be a feat of wonder as well?

Btw, at this point, I think I am going to post two separate portions of the Med mod II. One portion will simply have all the proposed new units for people to look at, ala Harlan's WWII pack. The second will be the first beta, and will contain all the changes to terrains, TIs, improvements, growth, etc. There will be more than enough in these areas to evaluate without adding the units as well.

Check out the "Add Lakes and Beaches" Thread. Someone over there has figured out how to add or remove beach Terrain tiles as a Terraforming option. This might be a good thing to add to your MedMod2. Especially if you can teach the AI how to use it correctly.

This seems to resolve the problem of not being able to build canals or to reclaim land from the sea a la the Netherlands. The only catch with this fix is that it does not work with rivers correctly. But if you don't try to add land at the end of a river or a beach where a river already is, you shouldn't see any problems. Even if you do, apparently the problem is merely estetic in nature anyway.

Regards,

About terrain, I agree that changing one value is best, but I also think there needs to be some relative changes on top of that. I'd like to see what should be the really poor terrain less attractive in relation to the good stuff. So both you and the AI don't feel inclined to build to cover every single tile to beat the other civs to it. And if someone does build a city in a totally stupid spot, it should starve to death. For instance, have glacier actually have negative 5 food, so if you build a city on a large field of glacier it should die in short order. Historically, there has never been even a village built on glacier- it would soon be ground into bits since glaciers are rivers of ice. Duh. Nor should one build any kind of tile improvement on that terrain- its a slowly moving river of ice crushing all in its path! Other places like Desert should have food growth of 0. Its a friggin' Desert for crying out loud!

I have also reduced the env score (the sum of which has to be at least 600 for the 21 squares around the city) of beach and other terrains to match their reduced production. For Beach, the reduction is from 90 to 50, which means the AIs will be much less likely to choose terrain with nothing else going for it other than coastline.

Lastly, I have increased the max number of citizens by 2 for each radius size, and I will look at changing any other numbers so that a pop only gathers an average of one tile's resources.

On another topic which hasn't been covered in a while; building costs and effects.
I have set Food, Commerce, Science, Production, Crime, and Pollution improvements to cost 1 gold per pop for maintenance, and set the upkeep cost to zero. The effects of these improvement types I have set to a uniform 20%, except for Pollution, which I set to 40%. The construction costs I have generally left alone.
This means that the maintenance cost and commerce effects of a Bazaar and a Bank are going to be the same, but the Bank will cost more to build. Ideally this increased cost will parallel the growth in produciton capacity of cities as the game progresses. This is going to have a huge effect on gameplay and choices, and we will have to do a lot of studying to balance this new approach, an approach which I feel is much closer to the real world than the old system.

I want to get the militia triggers into the mod for the initial release, since not having to build that initial garrison unit will have significant effects on game flow. The other triggers can wait for now until we get these domestic issues adjusted.

Finally, I will adjust the goals in the strategies.txt to bring about some improved AI behavior in exploration and military conduct, among other areas.

There will be no new units nor changes to unit settings in this initial release.

Best case scenario would be for farms close to water to produce more than those not near water.

I am posting so soon becauseI have been working all night on some things. Did I mention that my exams are finally over, and I am going on a trip Saturday morning which will probably last at least a week, during which time I will not be able to play Ctp2 or upload graphics files to my new, soon-to-be-announced website? (No, I don't really expect you to answer.)

I have been working on the citysize files, which were really screwed up. If some of you have been keeping track of city production beyond 18 workers, you may have noticed some readings which didn't seem to make sense. Well, that's because they in fact didn't make sense. The number of tiles in the city's vision, which should have matched the number of tiles being worked, did not in fact match each other.
Basically, the programmers forgot to include the size 3 settings, and you went from working 21 tiles with 18 workers, which was how it should be, to working 45 tiles with 32 workers. The max worker settings were messed up from size 3 on as well. I find it very hard to believe that the settings were intentional, even though there was something of a pattern to it.
I remembered from the beta-testing that there used to be no size 0 that flashed when a city was founded. I think that the screw-up might stem from that late addition.
Anyway, here are the new pop ranges for the various city radiuses:
1-8, 9-20, 21-36, 37-44, 45-56, 57-68

The max number of tiles worked for each radius is one more than the max pop, so that each pop collects an average of one tile's rsources, plus the city tile.
Ideally, it would go 20-32-44, but there is a hitch in the geometry that can't be avoided at that point. You can go 20-28-44 if you want. Any opinions on this?

I wonder about your city bonuses. In my playing, I've done just the opposite. I've lowered the food while leaving prod and gold higher. The reasoning being that if land has a building on it, its hard to grow food there. However, cities by default will create a certain amount of production and commerce just from daily activities. Plus I found that when I lowered prod even the slightest, it took forever to build anything unless the city was in a great location. And lowering the gold caused huge delays in discovering new advances.

BTW, are you going to include the terraforming to/from beaches? I havent had any bugs yet, except that when first completed, if under fog, it'll look funny, but looks perfect as soon as a unit removes the fog.

I haven't looked at adding Gold, Production, and Food to goods in CTP2 yet, but in CTP1, you make these changes in the Terrain.txt. Under the Good setting in the Terrain.txt file you go to the Good for the Terrain Type and add the EVN Gold = whatever. This is the way it worked in CTP1. You could also do the same thing with Production and Food. Again, like I have said, I have not checked this in CTP2 yet. If may not work this way there.

This game will be a great game if we fix these issues. CTP 1 had "to many problems" and CTP 2 have problems.

I think the thing that would make CTP 2 really great is play balancing and thanks to the files this should be much easier than CTP-1.

I have incorporated your terrain fixes and seem to work well. I have disable specialist except entertainers and scientist. And the growth of cities is under control.

Some ideas/questions
If you change the value of water tiles wont we just have inland cities for the AI?

The Units file needs a complete overhaul. I realised another important factor thats the upkeep cost this cost need to be balanced. The middle game with musketeers and cannons seems to cost to much in upkeep so the AI can't have enough units. There need to be diffrences in the upkeep cost. Infantry needs to be realy cheap compared to tanks/fighters/ships. So defensive can be cheap. That way the AIs defensive side will not dominate there production.

Although offensive war needs to be expensive. We could have higher start cost because this can be lowered for the AI in diffdb. The AI needs more units.

One more idea. There is definetly hope for the AI they can attack just needs to do it more often. And seems they favor to attack other computer players we need to fix that.

Diplomacy somebody really needs to fix this area of the game. There are a system its not finished. They definetly got rushed by activison here.

There are now diffrent responses in the files when rejecting not used. There are slic code now commented to change advances and so on.

I really hope they fix this.

/Mathias

quote: Originally posted by Daniel Frappier on 12-11-2000 10:16 PM Hi, Taken from DiffDB (Impossible) ---------------------------------------------------- AI_MIN_BEHIND_PERCENT 1.8 AI_MAX_BEHIND_PERCENT 0.8 AI_MIN_AHEAD_PERCENT 2.0 AI_MAX_AHEAD_PERCENT 3.0

Daniel (and Wes),

I think you're incorrect there. The way you've explained it, there is no need for 4 parameters; min-behind, max-behind, min-ahead and max-ahead. Two of these would suffice to create the effect you explain.

I believe on the impossible level, if AI is 1.8 times better than human, bonus applied is
AI_MIN_BEHIND_GOLD_ADJUSTMENT 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0
while if it is .8 times as good as human, bonus is
AI_MAX_BEHIND_GOLD_ADJUSTMENT 1.5 1.5 1.3 1.3 1.1

In between these two (0.8 and 1.8), there is (quote from DiffDB)
"scale values linearly between max-min when amount behind/ahead are between min-max"

Thus, there is plenty of bonus applied to the AI as it is without giving it even more bonus. Of course if we do give the AI more bonus, it WILL look better!

Currently they improve the Food Production the same in any square they are allowed in. You get the same +10 or whatever.

I've been thinking about changing that to give a Farm in Grassland a bigger increase in Food over a Farm in Plains. And if you continue to allow Farms in Desert, they'd give an even smaller increase.

The game does this with Mines already, I'd like to give Farms the same treatment.

Something like

Farm, Grassland +15, Plains +10, Desert +5 food.

This would help the cities built on the good grasslands areas.