The Medieval Mod II Alpha version is posted at http://apolyton.net/wes .

It is in 4 parts: sprites1, sprites2, pictures and texts. It is a total download of 16megs(!), and you must have Winzip to decompress the files. If things go as I plan, you will not have to download the sprites portions of the mod ever again. As you will notice when you sample the mod, however, I still need many more pictures.
Unzip the files into the Scenarios folder. This is a different place than you unzipped the Med mod I files, so take note.
You will see several other files on the site. Most of these are place-holder files Mark put up until I get my real webpage. The three that people might be interested in are:
1)The Gedrin v1.0, which is the spreadsheet he put together for his mod,
2)The Med mod 4 update, for those of you still wanting to play that mod or perhaps compare it to this one, and
3)The Ctp2 Adv. Chart, a copy of which is included in the texts zip.

Once you have unzipped the files, you need to go into the Medieval Pack II scenario folder, and find the Med readmes folder. This folder, as the name implies, contains all the readmes and charts for the Modpack. The files in it are in various states of disorder right now, since I am just getting things figured out as far as the mod goes. The readme folder will become more important and helpful as the mod progresses, so you need to become familiar with it right away.

Order the files by date modified. The three modified most recently are the ones you *need* to read at this point. A couple like the Med 4 readme and Med 4 Adv. chart are there for you to cover for a better understanding of my attitudes towards certain areas of gameplay and to see what I did in the Med mod I. The two text files are there if you want details on Harlan's graphics mod or a listing of slic stuff that Locutus sent me a couple of weeks ago.
*Note: the Med 4 readme gives a detailed description of the Militia units.

As for the three that really matter, the Terrain and Tile Improvement readme describes the changes made to those two areas of the game, while the Miscellaneous readme retails changes made to the const.txt, civs, and various other odd things that don't fit into any other readme (there will probably be additional readmes added once we get further into the mod).

The most important file, however, is the Med charts spreadsheet. This file lists the current settings for terrain types, governments and city improvements as well as proposed settings for the standard units in the game. There is a page for the Wonder units, but you can see that it is simply a list of their names and the age they belong to at this point.
I have not started to place the standard units with their advances, since we have not decided what we are going to do in that area of the game yet. Please study the unit stats, though, and give any opinions/suggestions that you have.

Once you start the game, you will see two versions of the Medieval Pack II.
The top version is for using the cheat mode to look at the proposed new units. This verison is NOT meant to be used to play-test the mod. You will notice that many of the pictures do not match the sprites. This is something that I will be working on soon. If you hold your cursor over the unit, however, its proper name will show up onscreen.
This leaves the bottom, "Domestic" version of the mod as the one to be used for play-testing. The only changes made to the units in this verison are a reduction in Caravan and Freight costs, and the implementation of the Militia triggers. All the other changes discussed in the first Intro thread are contained here.

Things to look for:
1)Overall changes to AI behavior, except for unit choices and use.
2)City growth and development, especially in the areas of city size, production and commerce.
3)Diplomacy. I fooled around with the diplomacy files tonight, trying a few things. Tell me if you see any noticable changes to AI behavior. Also tell me if you don't.
4)Barbarian occurrances and prizes from goody huts.

Balancing the game may be pretty rough in the early going. Expect frequent updates to the website as we go along. I will put a notice in the thread here when that happens, probably at the beginning of a post.
I am sure there are things I should have covered here that I overlooked. If you get confused, try covering the readmes again, and you can even peruse the various text files. I have marked my changes in some of them with "WW from ...". If you can't figure out what is going on, let me know by posting here, and I will address your questions.

Looks like alot of work went into the pack.
But either 2 things have happened either
1) Im an idiot
2) houston we have a problem

After unzipping the 4 files (Sprites 1 and 2, Pictures and texts) into the med directory which i placed under the scenario directory. I launch Cpt2 go to scenario's and choose the med 2 scenario choose the bottom version and it loads..

Durring loading i get these errors..
DB Error
ICON_TILEMP_PILLBOX not found in icon database
ICON_TILEMP_BARBEDWIRE not found in icon database

of course this stops the loading, so i figure ok lets try to bypass it go back to the selection screen after clearing the errors by pressing ok, notice the bottom says the scenario name launch the scenario and GPF CTP2 after a DB error.

Hope this helps

The pillbox and barbed wire were not supposed to be in the domestic version of the mod. I put those two things in yesterday, and checked the "units" version to make sure it worked. I didn't think to check the domestic version for conflicts.

You will notice that the scen0000 folder is empty. This setup allows you to have a "default" version of the mod, and use the other scen**** folders to contain only those files which are differnet from the default version of the mod, in the same manner that scenarios only require those files which are altered from the original game files. This allows myself and others to make variations of the basic mod without having to copy all of the graphics files, or even those text files which are not changed. This should come in handy if any of you want to tinker with my tinkerings, or try out your own ideas and concepts.

Just a sugestion..please dont shoot me..

So far what ive seen great job, having a problem loading after the latest update going to re-install from scratch and see if that helps, was an error loading chinease city #31 or something expected number of civs not found..will update if it still occurs after the re-install...

Ok works fine after the re-install..

Played till 1AD here is what i noticed

- Growth for cities is WAY slower, my largest city is size 6 at this point, this is partialy due to me not having more than 3 hex's of grasslands in my 9 city empire

- Barbarians seemed more agressive

- Food was actualy for the first time in my CTP2 history almost a problem in a few city's

- The AI for the most part kept its distance, except for one race who declared war on me for no reason, but did not attack in mass it was still early at that time and im sure he did not have the units, I was able to get 2 defensive units to a landblock and was able to keep them at bay

- Monarcy was my first goverment, usualy i skip over it, i was unable to skip it so i went for it and got it a bit before 1ad

- Keeping people happy is hard, work week can not be maxed without some major re thinking of my build order at monarchy a max was -12

- I find myself deleting the milita units after i build two of my first defensive units, the milita alter the build order a bit and the starting strategy im not sure if i like them or not, although its nice to have at least something in the way of defense to start.

- The overall pace of the game seems slowed which is a good thing in my opinion. I was able to get some huts with some tech at start but still the most advanced tech I have is monarchy.

Unfortunatly i did not see a AI city yet so i dont know how there doing. And im of the anti-cheeting type

According to the power graph I am in the top jumble of lines

I have played your alpha mod to about 400 AD.

Some observations:

Militia units work fine. It is nice to finally have them back.

Barbarians are tending to use stacks, but they don't attack every city in site any more. Bummer, because that is how I get most my slaves. Good because it shows the game is playing smarter. Barbarians still attack units out in the field so that is good too.

Civilizations are more chatty now. They will actually offer Peace Treaties and such earlier in the game depending on their personality type and how week I am. They will also threaten me for money. I had the Brazilians do the. I told them no, but before they could follow up on their threat, they were attacked by someone else and went to war. Later in the game I saw what looked like a mixed stack of 5 Brazilian troops nosing around my capital, but they didn't attack, at least not yet. They would have probably lost because I had 4 units in that city including the Militia unit and one ranged unit, all were fortified, and the city was on a forest square, so they were probably playing it smart.

City growth is much slower and food is now actually a concern in the game. I had to use food specialist in some cities because of the nearby terrain, so over all I would say this is a good thing.

AI cities also grow slower, but they also seem to do a better job than I do at it. I have cities of 4 or 5 while they have cites of 5 to 7 or 8. This is around 400 AD, so again this shows that you have accomplished your objective in this regard.

AIs also seem better at getting more cities more quickly than I do also, but this could be a combination of several factors. 1) In the test game I played, I ended up with just one settler to start with while the AIs all seem to have had at least two. This is a random thing, but it did affect it. 2) Because of more initial cities they may have been able to find more Goody Huts than I did. 3) The Goody Huts I got to first contained money or nothing for the most part, so I did not get the random settler or city that the AIs might have gotten. 4)I had mostly swamp, forest, and mountain tiles near me. This also probably resulted in my slow start comparted to the AIs. It will take more games to determine the reason for the few cities, but I think the 4 I outlined are the most likely. Oh, I also ended up on a large but not huge size continent with 4 other civs that got out troops and explorers faster due to the issues discussed above. That may have had somthing to do with it too. This resulted in my being forced into a relatively small area. Much smaller than I usually am forced into. At most I would have been able to build one 7 or 8 cities. When I quit, I only had 5 with room for 2 or 3 more.

I did not see the AIs using slaver units. This suprised me because in the past they have used them. This may have been due to several factors also. 1) They may not have yet discovered the prerequisite tech yet. I didn't get it until much later than usual because of the much slower tech rate. 2) They were at war with each other fairly early so they may not have had time to get them out once they discovered them because there were in hot war at that point. 3) Your giving it a lower priority in the AI Strategy files may have limited it as well. At any rate, I am glad they didn't because I would have been in big trouble if they had.

This last post brings up a new question. Is there some way to bring back the trigger that says if you have walls slavers cannot capture slaves from within you cities? I think this is an important flag. Otherwise, it becomes very hard to survive if you are near a slaver type civ.

Can't think of anything else to discuss right now. As I playtest more, I will give you more information.

As Pintello points out, the AI gets more cities, sooner. This is because I was playing at the second to most difficult level, and at the higher levels you have the AI start out with lots of extra good stuff. I happened to start the game in an ideal spot, but before I could even build a second warrior unit, AI units were already wandering near my only city. I used the cheat editor to peek, and saw the AI civs already had 2 to 4 cities each, a decent number of units and PW, while I was still working on my second unit.

That's when I quit. I would really like to see much less up-front cheating by the AI, and more long term cheating. The end result should actually be better. Instead of the game starting tough and getting easier, leading people to quit once they see they're dominating, it should start relatively easier, and get tougher as it goes along. I'll wait to play it more until this area is improved.

After 2 saves Im now getting this error trying to restart my saved game

Paths Error
GC104.spr not found in asset tree

Not sure why this comes up after this being the second time ive saved the game..

Do NOT delete your militia units! They are the same strength as regular units of their type, provide martial law, and cost half as much to upkeep as regular units.

Barbraians should act like they have half a brain now, rather than just mindlessly attacking. Normal civs should also not attack unless they have a realistic shot at winning.

I don't remember doing anything to affect slavery, so you might have been in with civs who don't use them.
Yes, you can set City Walls to prevent slavery completely, as well as conversion. Since you can get Walls so early, it may be better to leave it as is, or perhaps raise it to 75% prevention. Anyone else have opinions on this?

The choosing civ problem I noted at the bottom of my initial post in the thread. I have never heard of getting a militia unit from a goody hut. I will have to check into this. The sprites for militia units are the same as those for regular units of their type, so you need to try and move it to be sure.

Harlan's comment were odd. I have done nothing to the diffdb except line up the columns for easier viewing. I checked the advantages given to the AIs on Very Hard level, and they didn't seem too much, certainly not enough to explain what you saw.

AG, are you sure you downloaded and properly unzipped both sprites portions of the mod? If you have, check the default\gamedata\graphics\sprites folder to see if gc104 is in there.

Ok I jump started the game, what i did was start a new game, selected the mod and then when in that game loaded the save I had which bypassed me from the error.

Now the msg's in the msg tab are well for lack of a better term F'd up..

Alot of them say just
"Turns" with the eye graphic, clicking on it centers to a city..(i belive that city had built something)

Also i get in the msg window
[madlib.dip_res_head] rejects your [madlib.emote_demand_r] [madlib.res_demand_piracy][madlib.res_restall.attatude]

I have done no diplomacy! nor any piracy
clicking the eye graphic centers me to my capitol.

gc104.spr IS in my
F:\Program Files\Activision\Call To Power 2\Scenarios\Medieval_Pack_II\default\graphics\sprites

Lets see 560 AD all my citys have 2 farms at least, a few nets if there close to the water 2 mines and full roads, infostructure is growing slowly but shurly and it seems to be slowed well in constant with the rest of the game.

When my milita "upgraded" to pikemen it just about scared the hell out of me, i guess to do it in slic you have to kill the unit well i heard all these death sounds jumped trying to figure what went wrong

AI seems to be occupied elsewhere and is respecting my borders I have a good view of the indians (mad genius ai type) who flucuates between hating me, and liking me and sending maps..he's an odd cookie, he also hates diplomacy...

He has 9 cities of size 1-10 very varied while my cities are between 4-8 his cities are also closer together than i would have placed them and has a few with mostly mountains in there radius and no farms in the space that is non mountains im wondering how those will ever grow..(there size 1 now)

Gold seems to be working on line with the other slowdowns while its not been a problem i dont have 1 billion gold lying around its been borderline to low..causing me to micromanage gold and trade a bit more, which is good!..

Than in this 50 turns, there were 4 different barbarrinas and one in a 2 unit stack, and twice a heavy swordsman unit. They didn't seem to want to attack me or the AI. (ok 1 did attack)

out of 4 goody huts, i got gold 4 times.

now the AI, when i wondered down the river with my first warior, I found Assyrians in a city size 2, I attacked them, and there was no defensive unit in the city, so I just walked in!!! - that was maybe after 25 -30 turns... i built a fyrdman, and a heavy swordsma, in that city, while wondering with the warrior which found the other Assyrian city, - sent the warrior and heavy swordsman to attack the other city - It had an archer inside now, but my units just managed to beat him (the warrior left with 1 - 2 hitpoints left) - and Assyrians were destroyed. i have seen one other Assyrian unit wandering near my first city before that.

With three city's and two of them near river - i had 14 science per turn - science is surely slow...

i am wondering why I didn't get militia units in the city straight??? not did the AI.

-city's were definitly less happy, and expanded to two citizens in the first 50 turns - even though i had some grassland in the city radius.

-I couldn't check money - goody huts brought too much...

And than I saved the game... but that is not all...

This morning when i tried to open the saved game, it loadead almost fully, and than crashed just before the end of the loading. This happened twice. The error said: CTP2 caused an invalid page fault in module ... and than it listed registries etc...

After that i tried to start a new MED Mod II game(or a new game, I am not sure anymore) and than CTP2 listed as the empire name - 'BADSTRING' - and as the leader name junkstring_DESCRIPTION ... the other butons were OK...

Than i left, when i get back from work this evening, I will try and see, perhaps I will have to reinstall MED MOD II or even CTPII. We will see...

[guess why wes is calling it a alpha ]

So far I love what ive seen of it..

My guess is that when a file is loaded the mod that it is under is for some reason not fully loading in, im not sure why its happening i'd love to see if activision had anything to say..

The AI is more agressive and actually took one of my cities. (First time I am happy when that happens )

Regarding the diplomacy:
So far all I get are reguests to share maps. I would like too see more early sharing of advances (also between AI's) but then you would need to move the diplomot unit in tech tree cause now it becomes available too late. Maybe it should be available with the writing advance....

In the original game the AI hesitated to make embassys and so they were never able to make alliances and gang up on you. I have not seen this happen yet in the mod cause it is still early in the game....

Avalon_Gray, which version of the mod are you using. Wes included 2 versions in his Alpha. The first contained lots of changes that weren't fully implemented but there so you could get an idea of what the Mod may be like eventually. It sounds like this is the one you are playing with. The second one, Wes called "Domestic" is the one you should be playing with. That is the one I used and I didn't have any of the problems you mentioned.

Wes, gold is working well in the Mod. Don't know why I didn't think to mention that when I wrote my first post. Gold comes at a slower rate and you don't build up huge reserves of it now. That is a good thing. Also, even though it came at a slower rate, it didn't come at such a slow rate that it was constantly causing problems. Again this is a good thing. One last question, why did you call the playtesting version of the Mod Domestic? Still haven't figured that one out. :-)

quote: Avalon_Gray, which version of the mod are you using. Wes included 2 versions in his Alpha

Using the bottom scenario i belive its called domestic.

After the last upgrade of militia units, there should be continual 'updates' to increase the numbers of militia where appropriate, and place them in newly-conquered cities. These could be just like the existing triggers, but tripped with subsequent advances.

Increasing vision radii for more advanced militia units - has effect of allowing cities to see farther, regardless of their size.

A problem with the militia units in CTP1 was that when you disbanded the city, the militia would remain in place. Has this been corrected in this mod? I suppose, this would mean adding ane extra line in the code that
prevents the militia being moved,

HandleEvent MoveUnits ... (or whatever), {
Get location of the militia_unit,
If location has a city on it,
movement not allowed (STOP?)
else
movement allowed
end

of course this is not the best way to handle the problem. There may be a way to disband the unit when you disband the city itself ...

Coflek, if you are seeing new units in your game, like Fyrdmen, then you are using the wrong version of the mod. The reason I called the lower one "Domestic" is because it doesn't introduce any new units into the game, nor does it affect which units the AIs build. The mod deals primarily with non-military, or "domestic" issues. (I think this is the proper terminology.)

I am glad to hear that gold seems to be well balanced, but the bigger and more developed your cities get, the harder it will be to balance your income verses expenses. I am very interested to hear what happens when you get into the Modern eras.

I have been working on making pictures for the Ctp1 units the last day or so, and have succeeded by using a program called HyperSnap available at www.hyperionics.com . I ran the unit videos from Ctp1, and used hypersnap to capture a screenshot of the video. They worked out beautifully. Thanks go out to Harlan for telling me about the program.
I also noticed that the Trireme showed the Catamaran sprite from the Alexander scenario. They fooled me by naming it "Trireme" in the Alexander units.txt. Anyway, I copied the Trireme sprite from Ctp1 and put it in with the pictures portion of the mod, which I will upload shortly.

Harlan told me that we was converting the background of all his new units to the Ctp2 brown background (the Ctp1 units and those created by users had a black background). Myself, I don't mind that some have brown backgrounds and others black. What do the rest of you think?

With the new unit arrangement, you will have graphics for two units which are not slated to be in the mod at all at this point: Morgoth's "Br. Swordsman", and the Ctp1 Cavalry, the "Dragoon". If we decide we want or need more units someday, remember that those two are in there.
Other notable Ctp1 units that are not included in the mod are: Marine, Paratrooper, Combat Engineer, C-17 Transport (used like Ctp2 Cargo Helicopter), Cyber Ninja (I think the new one looks stupid), Cleric, Cattle, Sub-neural Ad, and most all of the space units.

I think Locutus is still working on what to do regarding militias in newly conquered cities. If the original owner re-takes the city a few turns after losing it, it would not make sense to have him fighting militias of his former people. This is something we need to debate.
I didn't know that the new trigger updated the militias by killing off the old ones. Oh, well.
With the new city settings, you should be able to see to the radius of your city at all times, regardless of any unit effects.
Militias should be immediately disbanded along with the city. Locutus called this the Maginot Line (bad spelling, I know), and told me that this had been fixed.

Do we still have a hardcoded limit of 200 on units - would the game accept units having fx. number *****283.tga or **283.spr?

If it is, then I think ALL units should have it's own unique number - maintain a list with the units name, type, number, era and creator - something like this:

Tank medium, land, 284, WW I, nn
Tank heavy, land, 285, WW II, yy
Tank heavy, land, 286, late, xx

Then we (the rest of us) could just download a unit with all corresponding files. Add it to the units.txt (and several other files if you really want the AI to make use of the unit, I know) and copy the files to their respective folders. No need for changing the numbers (filenames).

If I don't remember wrong - you (the modmakers) had to re-use some numbers in CTP which from time to time gave a little extra work - I can remember that once, I had launched a medival spy as satelite

I do know, that we cannot say "This is an official mod - no one else must use that number for any other unittype". But I'm nearly sure of, if we had such a list, most of the modmakers would stick to it.

I am sure, that I could express my thoughs better in another language (my own )- but I hope this will do.

Out of 10 goody goody huts - out of 10 three times nothing - two settlers - two militia units (they look as warriors, but you can't move them, and dissapear once you build a city over them)- one normal warrior, science, and 351 gold. No barbarrians, but i guess they come later on in the game.

I have been attacked by barbarrians only once, even when i wandered around a lot, there are barbarrian units around but they don't seem to be agressive enough. I even came by mistake with a settler next to a stack of 2 barbarrians, and they didn't attack me??? they just followed me once I tried run away ... and eventually fought against my hoplite that i send to stop. (hoplite was easily killed? by a warrior - maybe just bad luck). Anyway they didn't attack any of my cities. - they used to in the normal game i played.

I met three civs, and they (two - I attacked one) were glad to exchange maps with me, (perhaps they do it normally too) once i was asked for a cease fire agreement, and once to move units off their territory - but that should be normal as well.

It took 38 turns to discover the first science (with three cities at the end- 66 turns would be with one (with no gold boost on the empire slider). AI was naturally a lot better in science trough this 80 turns.

Afet 80 turns I was the last economically - on the powergraph, even though i found one goody hut with gold, and i had 1450 gold at that time (without spending).

One civ that i attacked had only the militia unit in the city again (enough to kill my hoplite, but if there was only a warior around i would beat him, so this might be a concern early on in the game) I think that AI should defend with two units early on - just leave on extra in the city. In order not to loose straight to opportunistic humans.

At turn 45 Italians had 5 cities vs my three (with two settlers from goody huts)
Italian city sizes 4 (two farms) - 4 (one farm) - 2 (one farm) - 2 - 1
My city sizes 1-1-1 no farms but two extra settlers just produced.

At turn 54 Japanese had 5 cities sizes 4-2-2-2-1 12 archers scaterred (no stacks) around + three settlers, and a few farms. (scary)

And the last - a city size one on 8x grassland + one beach tile = 740 food per turn - good,

city size 2 on 9x plains = 30 food per turn - and city size2 on 9x-plains but river on 4 tiles is around 150 food per turn. So it seems that it is now really importand where you build your cities.

So at eighty turns i managed to get to 7 cities, the biggest size 2 (but i was building settlers). I am the last on each graps - as it should be. But it seemed that the game would have been more interesting than the normal one - pity for the save game bug. So I wouldn't change any of the start bonuses for the AI, and it should be cheating in the long term as well, to make it a true challenge beating it on the impossible level. (I don't mind stepping down the level, as don't the rest of us - i think )

I have done some more play testing and here are my observations.

First off, I have not experienced the save game problem others are mentioning. I am using patch 1.1, not 1.11 and I have Windows 2000 sp1 on my system.

I did some checking on all AI cities this time and I noticed some things.
1) Many AI cities just have the militia in them for protection.
2) The AIs build a lot more ranged units than they do any other kind of unit. I saw some AI cities with stacks of 12 Archers but nothing else except the militia unit. Other AI cities will have 8 or 9 archers and just 2 or 3 Hoplites. I have also seen civs that build lots of mounted archers but don't seem to build anything else. This may be something that needs to be looked into.
3) The AIs don't seem to use Slavers any more. I think they should do that especially if they are inclined that way by their personality. Some examples of this, the Zulus did not have slavers but they had the technology. In the past they used slavers. Also the Romans and the Thia were the same way. They had the tech but they never used it. I also did not see any civ that had any slaves whatsoever. Before the Mod, many civs used slaves.
4) Barbarians seem relucant to attack. They never attack cities even if they are up against them with stacks of 5, which I saw more than once. If the Barbarians have stacks that large they should attack. The Barbarians are more likely to attack individual units, but not always. I had one Warrior fortified and a stack of 3 Barbarian Warriors did not attack him. They did later after I moved him, but they should have attacked him the first time. The Barbarians are also not attacking AI civs either. No where on the map was there a single Barbarian city and this was 546 AD. Before Med Mod there would have been several. I think this needs to be reimplemented. More than once the Barbarians could have taken a city or two of mine, but they never tried.
5) The AIs build and use fewer boats than they used to. They should use those often like they did before Med Mod.
6) On the up side, they do seem to manage there cities better than I do. Some AIs even build extensive road systems while other don't build any. This may be because they haven't discovered Trade yet though. Maybe a new advance needs to be added very early in the game called Road Building that gives the TI of roads, then make it a high priority for the AI to discover it. Seems that once the AIs have a TI they use it.

Miscellaneous issues that I noticed.
1) I got a militia out of a goody hut once this time too. I ended up having to disband it. I also got an archer out of one.
2) I did see an AI conquer a city of a different AI. In this case it was the Romans conquering the city of a different AI, but I don't remember which one it was. On the down side, I have only seen this once.
3) The AIs tend to crowd their cities more when they don't have much land to expand on. If they have plenty of land, they don't crowd them as much though. On the upside, even when they do crowd them, they don't crowd them nearly as much as they did in CTP1.
4) The AIs like to use farms and mines when they have them.

Well that is it for now. I will do some further playtesting and comment on it later, maybe today if I have time once I get home maybe tomorrow.

Regards,

I tried to start a game and couldn't get the civ I wanted. I chose the Egyptians but kept getting a different civ (can't remember which one now), then I tried the Russians and got a different civ...finally stuck with the Romans who were the Swedes.

So I'm wondering if those civs which were inclined to use specific AI (slavers, roads, etc) aren't using them it's because of this bug ?

Taliseian

For those of you play-testing, I strongly advise you not to load from the quicksave or autosave games. Save your games manually, and only load from those games. If you see or become able to build non-standard Ctp2 units, like the Ctp1 Warrior, or a user-created unit like the Fyrdman, then quit the game, re-boot your computer, and try to re-load from your manual save. If the non-standard units are still available, then I would suggest re-booting and starting a new game.

Myself, I am going to re-install the game, something which I never had to do with Ctp1 in the 16+months I played with and modified it, including a few hundred crashes.

Now, as to your posts...
I reviewed the strategies.txt, and I think I found the source of *some* of the odd behavior you have seen.
Barbarians, it turns out, use the default settings unless specified differently. When I altered their settings before, I gave them a siege goal setting, which they didn't have before. However, I forgot to give them maxexec and maxeval settings as well. This should explain why they didn't attack your cities.
I also noticed that the Barbarians were restricted to anarchy as their government, which should mean that they cannot produce new units, or anything else, from cities they capture. All they could do was change whatever the city had been building to Warrior or whatever, and hope there was enough production stored up to construct it. I have changed their government choices to Tyranny and Monarchy, and set them a science percent of 20. They should use the default advance list.
This should produce some interesting results.

A question for you: Does the AI build advanced mines or railroads?

As for things that confuse me:
I have not done anything that should affect the AIs use of slavers. I have changed the personality types of many of the civs. However, I have not changed the characteristics of the personality types themselves.
Example: the Romans might not always be Caesar, but if they are, then Caesar should build the same special units that he always has.

Also, the finding of militia units from goody huts should not be happening, nor should militias be the only units garrisoning a city, unless a civ is in "aggressive start" mode. (I have now altered this mode, btw, so that it too should have a ranged unit in its garrison.) I have not figured out what triggers the start modes, or how many turns they last.

In Ctp1, militias were an slic creation, and the AIs disregarded them when figuring up their unit percentages. If these units are coming out of goody huts, then maybe all this has changed.
I increased the percentage of ranged units the AIs should build, but I also increased the offensive units as well. You should not be seeing a 3-to-1 ratio or more of ranged units to offensive ones. The ratios should be about even.
*I need you guys to use the cheat mode to select the AI civs, and note their unit distribution (how many they have of each type). This should provide answers as to how the militias are being recognized, if at all.

Nice Website. It looks a lot better than your last one.

I have done some more playtesting and I think I can answer some of the questions you posed in your most recent big post.

The ratio I have seen in ranged to offensive units is different from what you said it should be. Ratio seems to be more like 4 or 5 to 1 than 2 or 3 to 1 even when you assume militias are considered as offensive. If you don't add militias in there the ratio is even more badly out of balance.

While many cities seem to have just a militia defending them, there are more cities that have at least a militia and a ranged unit. I think the ratio seems to be something like for every 2 or 3 cities with more than just militia there is one city with just militia. Also it seems that the larger cities are far more likely to have more than just a militia in them than the smaller cities.

I did see a slaver yesterday. The Chineese had built one. Unfortunately for them they were isolated on a largish island that could be considered a small contenient and so didn't have any foreign civilizations to go and raid for slaves with there slaver.

Another thing I noticed is that the AIs don't seem to be building navies like they used to. This may be because the most advanced naval unit any one has is the Corcale.

I think Diodorus Sicilus may be right about the tech going too slowly. You may need to either speed up the tech advance pace or add a lot more turns to the game. I have noticed that as you get more cities tech seems to speed up. I am currently just beyond the 0AD point with 9 cities and still under Tyranny so I will wait to see how things go once I have Monarchy. The reason I am so early in the game is because I loaded your new text files and picture file and started again.

Speaking of Monarcy, I am still trying to discover that even this far into the game because things are going so slowly tech wise. Just an indication of how slow things are going.

This time around, I was located close to the Israelis. They actually started a war with me by pillaging one of my TIs. They even tried to send a small stack against my capital. I took it out with troops in my capital before they had a chance to attack. I think they sent 3 units in the stack against me. I took it out with 4, 2 Hoplite and 2 Archers, not loosing a single one.

If the AI is going to go around starting wars, it needs to be prepared to fight them properly. Aside from this one stack, the most they ever sent into my territory after that was 1 unit at a time. Needless to say, those units didn't last long.

I fairly quickly put together a stack of 12 units and went after their civilization followed by a backup stack of 4 a few turns later. I drew the units from well balanced small defense stacks I had in various cities and a few rush built units to flesh out the stacks. I composed the main stack of 6 Hoplites and 6 Archers. The backup stack had 3 Hoplites and 1 Archer. I did this because gernerally when you loose units it is the Holites that go down first. A main stack and a backup stack to replenish my main stack is my gerneral mode of operations when I go to war whenever I can manage it.

When I got to Jerusalem, I went up against 8 or 9 units defending the city. Two of them were Hoplites, the militia unit and one other, the rest of them were Archers. I lost 4 units and had another 4 or 5 severely damaged. The units I lost were 3 Hoplites and 1 Archer. Jerusalem was walled. I think if they had a better balance of say 5 Hoplites to 4 Archers, the outcome would have been very different. They might have even been able to hold the city. After this, I was able to take out the remaining 3 Israelite cities without too much problem.

I lost 2 at their second largest city of Hebron from a stack of 10, I lost none from attacking the other two cities, each of which only had one Hoplite in them. Presumebly this was the militia Hoplite. At this point I have to say that these two cities were fairly new and so the Israeli AI may not have had time to bring these cities up to strength defense wise because of their priority list.

Well that is all for now. I will update you more later. I also look forward to playtesting the new text files you mentioned. They look like they may add a new dynamic to the game. Could be fun.

I have now gotten the same saved game error that everyone else has been reporting. The error does not show up the first time you save a game and then load it. The error shows up when you have saved the game a second time and then try to load it at a later time.

Here are some observations I have made concerning the error. 1) It happens on the second saved game. 2) If I load the first game I saved then try to load the second saved game on top of that, the game loads fine, but it is now using the full scenario files rather than the Domestic scenario files that is was created under. 3) If I start a new game using the Med Mod II Domestic Scenario and then try to load the second saved game over it, again, I get the full files rather than the Domestic version of the scenario.

I can tell it is the full files version rather than the Domestic because it includes a lot of units not found in the Domestic version of the Mod.

Wes, could you upload a Med Mod II Pak that just contains the altered files and nothing else? It would be interestion to see what types of behavior the game exhibits with just that type of pack instead of the combined pak that you now use.

Well that is all I have right now. I hope some of it helps with resolving the problem. I will repost this under Skorp's thread so that he can see this also.

Timothy Pintello

I re-installed the game last night, and played a while this afternoon. I have not reloaded the game more than once so far, so I don't know if I have found any way to avoid the bug. I am simply going to follow my own advice and hope for the best.
I installed the 1.11 patch, then the WWII scenario, then the Med mod. I hope that it was the WWII scenario, which most of us installed *after* the Med mod, which caused the problem.

Anyway, I found the answers to a couple of the other odd AI behaviors. For some reason, I had reduced to 1 the number of transport ships and special units, which includes Slavers, which the AIs were allowed to build. I have now set them to the original settings, except for the Militarist, who was set to build no settlers (!?), and 6 special units.

I think I found a work-around for the hut-militias. In the risk.txt, it specifies how many preqs eligible advances and units may have in order to be allowable from huts. Units normally don't have more than one preq, but apparently they can, because I gave the militia units two preqs and everything seems to work ok. This *seems* to have stopped making them eligible for huts.
FYI, the risks text allowed units with two preqs in the harder settings. This is what gave me the idea. I set the allowable preqs to 1, then gave the militia units each two preqs.
Knowing that units may have more than 1 preq may be something to remember for the future. I read elsewhere where advances may have more than 2 preqs now.

On a Barbarian note, THEY ARE DRIVING ME CRAZY! There has been more than one instance in my game where I felt like I was playing chess. It was a game of movement and terrain. I can definitely tell that the Barbarians are acting smarter, even the randomly appearing ones that I have had to deal with. I have made several changes to the attack settings to take into account the fact that the Barbarians usually outnumber you when they appear from huts, but they are not stacked. I think people are going to be very surprised by this improved behavior.

As far as the proportion of ranged to other units, I observed the unit info of the AIs in my game, and saw pretty much what the rest of you have reported. I am at a loss right now to explain why the AIs are building almost nothing but Archers. I have to admit that I don't really understand how the AI chooses which units to prioritize, either.

Science if definitely moving too slowly, and growth is a little too slow as well. It is interesting, because I have not touched the science part of the game. All of this slowdown is due to the reduced city growth. Wages for Tyranny are the same, 3, as they were in the original game.
When we get into the advances, which will be soon, I plan to make Monarchy, roads, and trading posts available earlier than they are currently. This should help with the science problem.