quote: Originally posted by WesW on 01-21-2001 06:43 PM I believe that I can give the mod files customized names, like MMunits.txt, and simply replace the gamefile.txt, which tells the game which files to load, and in what order.

i created a units-markg.txt in the defualt folder with only one change: the sprite of the settler changed to the sprite of the pikeman. a change of units.txt in the gamefile.txt to units-markg.txt and this is the result

On a more positive note, Gedrin is doing the chop spreadsheet today, so I should be able to begin the final phase of the beta soon. I am guessing, but I hope to have it up by the weekend.

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W.C. Fields, and his niece are falling down a cliff in a basket:
"What I wouldn't give for a Maxwell Parachute."

"What is a Maxwell Parachute, Uncle?"

Quick question about pollution/happiness...

What files did you have to go into to make the following changes. I was able to to locate the other file changes that you recommended.

1. raise the amount of pollution generated by each pop from .3 to .4.

2. lowered the crime threshold by 5

3. lowered the max pop for cities to 8

4. lowered the possibility of getting a dead tile to offset the increased production in the game

The ammount of pollution generated by each population point is set in DiffDB.txt - it varies by difficulty evel; default is 15 pollution per person over the limit. The limit is at the same place in DiffDB.txt.

The max populations for cities are in the citysizeXX.txt files. Each of the six files corresponds to a different level (easy, hard, impossible).

The deadtile flag is in the const.txt (see my notes in the latest text version).

For the pollution per pop, I had to run some experiments. Take the diffdb number and multiply it by .02 to convert to the pollution per pop (don't ask me why).

This is what I've been waiting for all this time.

The save-game bug has got me once though.

One big problem is the gold situation. At the beginning of the game everything is fine. But later on when I'm in republic, just coming into the industrial age and have built lots of city improvements my cash flow starts running negative. Now this can be solved by lower science a bit and dropping wages but I can't really understand where all the loses are coming from. How do the costs for city improvements work? are the listed values in the city screen per population point? This is the only explanation I can think of - I should be drawing in loads of cash from trading posts, caravans and bazaars/banks.

still, better than the situation without the mod - endless millions without any effort.

anyway, cool mod. Wes, you deserve the cash I shelled out for CTP2 as much as Activision...

Also I'm confused with trade - the advice screen says that my profit from trade is 1000 gold but looking at the trade summary, I'm making a total of about half that. What's going on?

My experiment with a new way of improvement upkeep is what is throwing off your gold calculations. I am going back to the standard system for all but 2 improvements in the beta, so this should not be a confusing item anymore.

Charles (Diodorus) is working on historical gls for the mod, but they probably won't ready until the public release. They will explain the seeming oddities in the tech tree. Everyone is going to be amazed when they see how everything fits together.
Harlan and I have been trading emails today making further refinements to the tree, mainly links and so-forth, and even he is amazed at how well everything is shaping up. For you history buffs out there, I believe that the more you study the tree, the more impressed you will be.

The version of Med Mod appears to have a big fat bug though, and I've not seen it in the unmodified version of CTP2. When I'm moving troops into a city area of influence (white dotted line) or skirting round this area I sometimes cannot move the unit onto an empty square. The "move vector" is green indicating that it is a valid move (and I've been playing CTP/civ for years and I know a valid move when I see one) but the unit just sits tight. It's very strange and quite annoying - I had to give up on taking a city yesterday because I couldn't get to it.

Yes, I have seen this problem too. Whenever it happens, I just move the unit/units around to a different position and try again. Eventually you will be able to get into a position to attack the city. Also, if I remember correctly this problem does not occur every time and I have never seen it occure when the troops are on a road. This indicates that the problem may somehow be related to terrain.

I would be much more suspicious of the "prevent Militia units from moving" code. but then again that doesn't entirely make sense either (because you can still move into certain squares).

If the fix doesn't work it might be worth putting in user notifications into some of the SLIC events just to see what's being triggered.

When you encounter the militia ZOC problem save the game and reload. When you get back into the game you can move to the tile that you couldn't move to before saving and reloading.

I have been out of things for a few days now, if anyone noticed. Anyway, I noticed something in the General Forum. They were complaining there, that is what they usually do there it seems, that there was no sprite for the Ocean City, so I checked this out. Turns out they are right!

I loaded a regular game and went into cheat mode. Once there I gave myself a Sea Engineer. I then used that Sea Engineer to found an Ocean City. It gave me a sprite of a regular land city! Talk about looking way out of place, that was out of place! I know the game can create Sea Cities that look like Sea Cities because they have a screen shot of one on the box.

My main question here is two fold. One, were you aware of this problem, Wes? If so, has it been corrected in your Mod already? It would not suprise me if it has been. The second part of this question is, if you were not aware of it, would it be possible to fix it in your mod? If so, how would we go about doing this, or is it one of those things that are unfixable? I am asking, because it would be nice to be able to build Sea Cities that look like Sea Cities both in the regular game and in the much improved game call the Med Mod.

I look forward to hearing your comments about this. I am also looking forward, with great anticipation, to the release the the new civilization game called Medeival Pak II. I believe it is from a very reputable software house called Wes Whitaker and Company, Inc.

Regards,

I also ran into the zoc problem with my testing a few weeks ago, but I didn't have any idea what was causing it, and there were reports of other odd behavior at the time which seemed to disappear from one text version to the next, so I had forgotten about it. Hopefully Wouter solved it.

Thanks for your response on this. I am not a programmer, but I will take a look at the Slic tonight and see if anything jumps out at me on the Sea Cities front. If someone more knowledgeable about this could look at it too, I would really appreciate it.

Well I have looked at all the files and all I can say is that I am more impressed than ever with you people who can actually understand them. I was not able to see anyway to obviously put the Ocean City back into the game the way it is supposed to be. If someone in these forums could come up with something I would really appreciate it.

For me, this is one of those must fix problems with the game. If the ocean city isn't in there the way it should be, the game will just be ruined for me, Med Mod or no Med Mod.

I will continue to pursue this, but I doubt I will come up with anything. I hope one of you more knowledgeable people can come up with something.

I have finally found the solution to the whole Ocean City sprite thing. This is somthing that needs to be taken into account when the Med Mod comes out too.

The key to the whole thing lies in the agecitystyle.txt file. Each age has its own set of icons for each city size and style. The problem comes in when you try to build an Undersea city before the 4th or 5th ages. Ocean City sprites don't appear until then.

What I did was I took the sprites for the Ocean City in the 4th and 5th ages and copied them to all the previous ages and styles. This way, when I went into cheat mode and gave myself a Sea Engineer and built an Undersea City, it gave me the proper sprite.

I also noticed another property of this file. The Ocean City sprites only go up to cities of size 40. After that, the sprite reverts back to the equivalent sprite of the equivalent sized Land City for that age and style. The Land Cities allow much larger city sprite size styles than the Ocean Cities do.

One fix for this may be to make equivalent Sea City entries for the different size ranges for Sea Cities after 40 and then just assign the last Sea City sprite to all the following sizes. Alternatively, someone could take it upon themselves to creat new Sea City sprites for each of the remaining Sea City size ranges.

On a side note, if anybody is interested, the largest city size possible in CTP2 is size 200. Don't know if that was already known.

Back to the point. This whole discussion is relevant for the Med Mod, because the Med Mod will be adding 2 more ages to the 5 already existing ages in the game. Unless some alterations are done to the agecitystyle.txt file to take all of this new information into consideration, we could end up with some rather odd looking sea cities when they are first built.

Welp, now that I have resolved this issue, I can finally go to bed, knowing that all is once again well with the world of CTP 2 and the Med Mod Pak II.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to add production and food to trade goods again, since we have all now switched to CTP 2. But that can wait till another day.

Just like with Wes's files, unzip it in the main CtP2 folder (and overwrite existing files if you're prompted to do so) and you're ready to play. I'd love to hear what people think of this: are there any bugs with the militia code, does the unit repair trigger work properly, are there any other bugs? Even if all works perfect I'd like to know...

Harlan, it's probably possible to implement your solution in a regular game: add all the extra terrain types that are needed and at the start of a game, cycle through all locations and check if the terrain type is 'legal'. If an extra terrain type exists, terraform it to the regular version and if a trade good exists on a regular terrain type, terraform it to the special type. The main disadvantage of this is that it would probably cause a significant delay at the start of a new game (but only at the start, the rest of the game ought to be unaffected)...

Canberra
Botany Bay
Brisbane
Port Arthur
Swan River (or Perth if you want the modern name)
Adelaide
Melbourne

and then whatever cities are left.

Just makes it a little more 'proper'.

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Author of Diplomod. The mod to fix diplomacy.

I just tried you new slic. It seems to work well.

Hi Wes,

While I was using Locutus' new slic code I noticed that the computer still wants to send slaves to cities that are full. It looks like one of two things are happening. Either the computer is treating Militia troops like they can suppress slaves, which they can't, or it still thinks that one military troop can still suppress 3 slaves instead of 2. I think it may be the first one, because when I tried to take all my troops out of a city to get a new slave to bypass it, the slave still went to that city.

That wasn't when I noticed the real problem though. I noticed the real problem when my captiol city had a slave revolt. That city was at size 14 with half or more being composed of slaves. That is when I really noticed a problem with how the computer was handling slaves. That was really disappointing.

That capitol was holding my empire together. It was my empire's real power house. I never was able to take the capitol back because of how many units the slaves managed to keep in the city. Almost all those units were Archers. Massed Archers can really slaughter otherwise well balanced stacks. The slaves had 5 units on the front row, two of which were Hoplites, 5 Archers on the back row, and 2 Archers on the row behind that! I never did figure out how they managed to have a battle line 3 deep, but they all attacked every turn and really tore me up. That triple battle line is what did me in each time.

Regards,

Dale, how would you like to do the entire city lists for Australia and Canada? Harlan's mod added 20 more city names to the civs, but he replaced these two civs in his mod, and he has declined to make extra cities for them.
I also need the extra cities for the Native Americans if someone wants to volunteer.

As far as the mod, it is still coming along, but I had not realized just how much work there was to do, so it will be this weekend at the earliest before the beta is ready.

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Author of Diplomod. The mod to fix diplomacy.

quote: Originally posted by Pintello on 02-06-2001 09:08 AM The slaves had 5 units on the front row, two of which were Hoplites, 5 Archers on the back row, and 2 Archers on the row behind that! I never did figure out how they managed to have a battle line 3 deep, but they all attacked every turn and really tore me up. That triple battle line is what did me in each time.

I'm also trying to figure out how battle lines are figured. In your battle, how many units/types did you attack with? It seems that battle lines are not onlydependant on your forces but also the opposing forces. The weirdest one I've seen had 3 lines, but alot of the ranged units were in the front line while non ranged were in the back 2 lines. Best i can figure out so far is that my unit with the highest attack (or defense if defending) will be front center regardless of range or flanking ability.

Wes, is this an ok question to pose to our CtP2 contact?