Gemini, I missed your earlier post: The aips I marked with ** are the ones listed in the Readme text that were not included in the game (didn't you notice a pattern there? )

Regarding goody huts (ruins); I made some changes to the risks text for the Large Maps version of the mod, and I liked them so much I have decided to use them for regular games. Basically, your chances of getting good stuff from huts is a little lower, with the biggest reductions being on Raging Hordes settings. On Raging hordes, I reduced the chances of getting settlers, reduced the amount of gold you got, and increased the max number of barbarians that can randomly appearing from 2 to 3.

On other matters...
There is a pretty big difference between Emporer and Deity in the post-Renaissance ages. I always play on Restless Tribes and Emporer level.
From what I can tell from posts and the Risk text settings, Raging Hordes was probably easlier than using a lower setting, with its increased opportunities for getting slaves, higher gold from huts, and the damage the Barbarians would do to the AIs. The new settings will hopefully change this somewhat.

As to mining Forests; this change allows for more areas of the map to be able to support successful civs, even if it just the human who can use this ability at the present time.
Before, you just couldn't have a competitive game if you were stuck in a place without sufficient hills and/or mountains to develop. Now, you can make a decent game wherever you are placed, unless it is the polar regions. And the AI doesn't lose the ability to do anything. I have worked with people in the past to try and get the AIs to use the new mining abilities, but to no avail. I wish this could change, but the new abilities are only a positive, to my thinking.

Also, I did increase the science required to research some of the modern-era advances, back when I was fine-tuning the settings for the new advances. The advances in columns 10 and 11 of the Advances Chart, I believe, cost much more now than they used to. This is something that I will look more closely at when I do the next version of the modpack.

The Sphinx bug was relatively easy to fix.

quote: Gemini, I missed your earlier post: The aips I marked with ** are the ones listed in the Readme text that were not included in the game (didn't you notice a pattern there?

Hi Wes, Sorry man, I misunderstood. I thought you were saying that those aip files were included with the original game.
Sorry for the trouble.

While I am at it, what are your thoughts about placing a modified userprofile.txt in the original structure, with the debug already set to "yes"? This would mean that those of you who play with more than 8 civs would have to manually change it again, but it would eliminate the problems everyone has with the SLIC messages.
I have been thinking about this for some time, and, as we have seen, even veteran players sometimes forget to change the debug when installing or re-installing the game.

I am playing on a map of the size 90x180, however, this map size seems to have messed up the rivers settings. What do you change to get more rivers into the game. When I used your Beta on a regular size large map, there river distribution was fine, however, when I changed the large map to size 90x180 something happened to the rivers and they are nolonger evenly distibuted. Could you give me some help on this?

quote: Originally posted by WesW on 06-19-2000 01:08 AM Don and I have made a disturbing discovery the last couple of days: The const.txt, which contains settings for all kinds of things in the game, is not completely read when placed in the scenario section. I have therefore been forced to move it to the original section, where it will overwrite the original file. I have placed a copy of the original const. file with the original aidata files in the readme folder. Golly! I just installed it all ala Skorpion's wonderful instruction set and by god! it works! So now I'll move that cpnst.txt file. NICE WORK Wes! This was my first problem-free installation from scratch of modpack since I started playing mods last summer. You rule Wes ! [QUOTE]While I am at it, what are your thoughts about placing a modified userprofile.txt in the original structure, with the debug already set to "yes"? This would mean that those of you who play with more than 8 civs would have to manually change it again, but it would eliminate the problems everyone has with the SLIC messages. I have been thinking about this for some time, and, as we have seen, even veteran players sometimes forget to change the debug when installing or re-installing the game.

Yes, do that. I agree. I didn't forget bc I remember it from all the other installations I made over the many months, but even Marko has forgotten (as in an earlier post). Just need to advise newbies about the change.

Everyone with an opinion post here quick. I plan to have the next, and hopefully last, beta posted in a few days, with customized aips for the large maps, and the last few standard game changes included as well. Hopefully, this beta will be out for a few days, so that we can get in a game with it, and I can be integrating Don's maps into the pack. Then it will be off to Mark for the public release.[/QUOTE]

Great! I've just started playing and am at 1000 AD.. doing pitifully but the game is doing great after I moved the missing sprite and picture files into their directory (see Marko's problem - again ).

So, if you make changes, you might want to include the:
a. slics=on trip
b. the const.txt where it belongs
c. the missing sprite/picture files

I saw that the cruise missile was set to 'small' so I guess you are caught up on that issue as best as can be.

------------------

You probably already know this but I thought I would pass along some info in case you didn't. (I have been working on correct map generation on larger maps for a week now and much of the knowledge here came from Mr Ogre.)

The only options pertaining to rivers is in the const.txt file. The following options can be changed:

quote: PERCENT_RIVER 25 # percent of land with a river on it RIVER_LENGTH 15 # average river length RIVER_CELL_WIDTH 10 # Size of cells to be searched for river starts RIVER_CELL_HEIGHT 10 # (highest point in each cell)

Unfortunately, this doesn't really do you much good if you don't change the settings in the map.txt file. Let's say you change the Gigantic option in const.txt to 140x280 but make no other changes. The map generation process will create a map based on the setting in the const.txt and map.txt files. Since all this pertains to a 70x140 map, that is what is produced. Then garbage is added to fill out the rest of the map. This garbage consists of random water/sea combinations. (To see this easily, make a 140x280 map this way then do a show map in the cheat mode and look at the map in the lower left. About half the map will have this very obvious water/land combo.) To get around this, you need to change the settings in the map.txt file. It has 11 settings for each map size with the 6th setting saying 'default'. These settings pertain to the island/continent slider settings(0-10) in the map options. So, if you always create maps with the slider set at full continent(10), you need to modify the parameters in the 11th(last) setting section for the map size you are using. Be sure and change the initial gigantic map size from 70x140 to 140x280(or whatever you are creating) in the map.txt file as well. Forgetting about game specific things, added movement points, city size limits, etc, this is how you create a larger map. The map creation process and actual settings are an entirely different subject and one which I haven't totally mastered yet. But here is a brief try.

The map generation process uses 4 DLLs to generate the map. They are found in userprofile.txt and look like the following:

quote: MapPlugin0=dll\\map\\geometric.dll MapPlugin1=dll\\map\\crater.dll MapPlugin2=dll\\map\\plasma2.dll MapPlugin3=dll\\map\\fault.dll *Note* Your last will say plasma2.ddl, I prefer using fault.dll.

The first plugin creates a height map. The "geometric" DLL used by default basically just sprinkles rectangles around the map, trying to do so in such a way that they clump together to form continents. After it is done, it can actually run the same code as fault.dll, but see below.
The second pass acts as a filter on the output of the first pass. The crater.dll that's used places random circular impressions in the height map.
Once the height map is done, the game sets the water at a level that will give the correct percentage of land, and turns the rest into land, hills, and mountains.
The next two plugins control temperature and humidity (actually terrain type via Meridian and Hlevel, see below). They generate height maps the same way as the first 2 plugins. Note: Rivers, Hills and Mountains are a separate entity from Land. Land is made up of Grassland, Plains, Swamps, Forests and Tundra.

The map.txt setting you deal with are as follows:

quote: MAP_NUM_CONTINENTS 15 MAP_MIN_WIDTH 4 MAP_MIN_HEIGHT 4 MAP_MAX_WIDTH 30 MAP_MAX_HEIGHT 60 MAP_BUMP_SIZE 12 MAP_MIN_SUBCONTINENTS 2 MAP_MAX_SUBCONTINENTS 4 MAP_SUBCONTINENT_SIZE 0.6 MAP_SUBCONTINENT_HEIGHT 0.5 MAP_BORDER_SIZE 15 MAP_FAULT_LINES 0 MAP_FAULT_LENGTH 1.0 MAP_NS_BORDER_SIZE 5

The "geometric" dll plops down random rectangles. The numbers here affect how random they are. The number of continents is supposed to be the number of "top level" rectangles it generates. The width and height parameters affect the size. "Subcontinents" are smaller rectangles that get placed randomly around the
continents. The height inside each rectangle varies a little bit (I think
the BUMP_SIZE parameter says how much), and each rectangle adds to wherever it is placed. So the places you get mountains are the spots where several
rectangles combined to make a high point. Changing the "Fault Line" produces a fuzzier or less thready continent.

Now, changing the const.txt settings (in particular, MERIDIAN and HLEVEL) allow you to influence, increase or decrease, specific types of terrain(grassland, plains, forest, swamp).

So, the map.txt basically produces the map layout while the const.txt settings(all settings from the start of the file down through the river portion) produce the type of terrain which is applied to it.

While the whole process is a bit more intertwined than this, there is your Brief Overview of everything you DIDN'T want to know about map creation in 5000 words or less.

I have to agree with Paul on the userprofile.txt issue. I change most all the settings and I don't want to lose those changes when installing a ModPack.

Thanks for the information. I will have to look at it carefully to get everything right, but still thanks for the response. I will try again based on this information.

John, did you check about the "two wonders" bug that you might have found?
I haven't checked the "green me" changes either. I guess I will do it in the next few days.

I spent about three hrs last night working on the mod, and just about everything is ready to go from my end of things.

I was changing some of the terrain settings for the "Large" version of the mod (see the Huge maps thread), and finally figured out that the "env freight" line in the terrian text sets the value the game puts on terrain when deciding on the shortest route for caravans. The value for roads and ocean types were the same, which explains why the game chooses to leave roads and cross sea tiles on your internal trade routes. Well, I changed the value for ocean types from 33 to 50, which should mean that the routes will keep to roads now, and this will keep your internal trade routes safe from Pirates whenever possible. Another annoying bug removed.

I made what aidata changes I thought needed to be made for the Large version of the mod, and figured out a couple more that should help all versions of the game a little.

For the Large version, I made travel on Grasslands and Plains quicker when using rivers, roads and railroads, and made new versions of the appropriate gls texts to show the changes I have made (I also configured the terrainicon.txt to show them).

Finally, I updated many of the readmes to show the latest changes to the modpack, and re-structured the way you go from one version of the mod to another. Now, you simply unzip the version you want to change to into the Call-to-Power folder, like you do when initially installing the modpack. These zips are included in the Readme folder.

I spent some time last night playing with the map settings as Don described in this post yesterday and I have some very positive results to report.

By adjusting the different continent settings higher, I was able to get a very well distributed map set to size 90x180. It worked like a charm.

I also upped the river settings to 95, 25, 12, and 12 respectively in the Const.txt file. The results were very nicely distributed rivers with every decent size land mass having atleast a couple of rivers. This also resulted in some fairly long rivers as well, which I thought was more realistic. After all, the Nile, Mississippi, Missouri, Volga, and several others cross most of various contients. However, most of the rivers created are fairly short, no more that 4 or 5 squares long if that.

More rivers seems to affect the AI in a positive manner as well. I thought I was doing very well, until I took a look at the power graph and the total ranking popups started coming up. Unlike previous game with poorer starting points than this one, I have never been more than 4 on Science, and I only recently was able to come out ahead on number of cities. By using a lot of barbarian slave labor, I have managed to make my capital the largest city in the world, but only by one and the rest of my cities are 5 or smaller, even those with Barbarian Slave Labor of their own.

All in all, I would have to say that these map changes have been for the better as far as the game and AI goes. I also changed the last map dll in the userprofile.txt file from plasma2.dll to fault.dll as Don advised.

On other fronts in the Beta 5 game things are going well too. The AIs seem to have their cities well in hand and are placing them wisely for the most part. The new Garrison setup also seems to be working well.

Wes, you will like to hear that the AI Navies appear to be more effectively used. In my games the AIs tend to use navy stacks now. One configuration they seem to like is to stack a Trieme with a Fire Trieme, thus combining a ranged unit with an unranged unit. Pretty smart in my book.

A further example of smart use of Naval units happened in my last game. At one point I had a stack of 4 Carvels that I was using to disrupt the shipping of the Native American whom I was at war with, so the AI responded by sending a stack of 3 Carvels and a Longship to counter it, along with an independent Carval. The independent Carval bombarded my stack and then the 4 stack assaulted my stack. Pretty smart tactics for an AI. Unfortunately for them, I had 4 Carvels and they only had 3 and a Longship, additionally, atleast one of my Carvels, and possibley 2, I don't remember, was a veteran. I lost 2 Carvels for all 4 of the AI's ships, but both were badly damaged. When I then bombarded the lone Carvel of the AI I lost my most damaged one to the counter bombard. End result, I lost 3 Carvels to the AI's 4 Carvels and a Longship. A great victory that could have gone the other way if the AI had stacked all 5 ships or if I did not have all Carvels and a veteran or 2. Still, it shows a remarkable increase in Naval tactics for the AI.

Another stunt the AI pulled that I had not seen before was used earlier in the game. They had a stack of 1 Trieme and 1 Fire Trieme that had 3 Horse Archers on it. They landed those horse archers right next to one of my frontier cities that only had the Garrison Troops and a Phalanx in it. They took that city right from me! It took me several turns to build up the troops and move them to the taken city before I could get it back. In that time the AI had placed a second unit in the city and started developing around it. Fortunately 2 Horse Archers don't fair well against 4 Catapults and 5 Samurai.

Well that is all for now.

Yeah, I'm playing a game at the most basic level, so's I can be sure to get all of the Wonders to test this. (The Harappans still got one, though!)

It happened again, but only once. I built Colossus, and the city building Silk Road stopped doing so. They retained the production, though, so I just continued. Never happened again, although I have had 3 cities doing nothing but Wonder-building whenever possible.

When you do your readme, please make sure that you assume that the downloader knows nothing! I remember when I discovered Apolyton and tried to load a mod, I did it after just loading the game. Some mod-maker (who shall remain nameless) copped an attitude, telling me that it was my fault that I couldn't find userprofile.txt, and that perhaps I should learn Windows first! No one told me that there is no userprofile.txt until you actually play the game! (BTW, it is no one that is on the Med Mod, nor would I think that anyone here would do such a thing!)

I haven't used the beta 6 yet but it looks like my question is answered in the next post

I said that I would not make any more changes to the mod, but you know me.
I am playing my current game on a "huge" map, with 8 civs, and it is a blast! All the civs are filling out their unit lists, settling every patch of dirt (or ice) on the map, and they are starting to slug it out amongst themselves as well.
I have been at war with two or three civs since the early Renaissance age, and it has been a constant struggle for control of the seas, even with me stacking ships. The AIs often stack them as well, and they build so many, it is faster than I can knock them down sometimes.
With the AIs filling out their unit lists, if you start destroying their navy, for example, then ships will be the only units they build, since they don't need any more land units.
The AIs seem to be more willing to launch amphibious invasions far from home as well. I was invaded twice by an AI who was separated from me by an ocean at least a dozen squares wide. I don't know if any more invasions were sunk before they made it to my shores; probably.
I am no 2 in science right now, am fixing to get Machine Gunners, and even the last place civ has Musketeers-it's that even of a game. I tried to make everyone about equal as far as the map was concerned at the start of the game, and the AIs have really responded.

I can really tell a difference now that the game is using all of the alterations present in the const.txt. I feel so stupid about this. I noticed back last *year* that a change I had made to the number of diplomacy requests you could make in a turn was not implemented in the game. I just put it down to an irregularity, and pretty much forgot about it. If I had checked out the file then, we could have been having better games for about 8 months now. Oh, well.

From my current game, I can see that adjusting the timeline for the Large version was a mistake, so I have put the regular one back in, with the reduction to the starting advances still in place.
I noticed that I had not raised the defensive value for regular Hills from 50 to 75 percent as it should have been, so I corrected that. I also made Railroad a second preq for Chemistry.

Could you release just the files that you have changed as mentioned in your previous post?

Well, anyway, since you asked about how we are doing with our test of Beta 6, here goes. I am using the Large Map setup. I am also playing with 12 civs including myself plus barbarians.

I have looked at the revealed map and the civs seem to be doing a pretty good job placing their cities, both in the area of distance from each other and location in relation to rivers and resources, they aren't just trade goods anymore.

The one exception to this seems to be the Russians. They have 17 cities and 3 of them were placed in very close proximity to each other for some reason. These cities are all only about 3 squares from each other. All there other cities are place well though.

So far only about 4 civs have done a lot of road and PW work though. This may have to do with the new early priorty of getting 9 cities before starting such work though.

I am 4th in the power graph and nobody is all that far from anybody else on the power graph, except of the prerequisite 2 or 3 civs that are always far below everyone else. This time I am not one of those civs. This situation may change soon though. I am currently first in science, but that may not last. I only have 13 cities but several civs have more than that. The Phonecians, who are the largest have 19.

So far, the game has been pretty peaceful, but that recently changed when the Vikings treacherously attacked my poor innocent Trieme that was minding its own business exploring. Those Barbarians! I even had a treaty with them!

Actually, they went about it in a pretty intellegent manner. They were still at Alert Status, but I was at Full Readiness Status. I always keep my military at Full Readiness unless I need PW points very badly. Anyway, even though the Vikings had a Trieme right next to my ship when they attacked, they sent in a stack of 2 Triemes to do the job instead. In the past, the AI would have attacked with the single Trieme. I ended up loosing my poor innocent Trieme because of their treachery at the cost to them of only one Trieme of theirs. A pretty even trade except that I had a Warrior on the boat too and they probably didn't have units on board theirs. At any rate, the point is that they are playing smarter these days. I will let you know more as I play more later.

Regards,

Nice to hear from you, Tim.
Some of the AIs will still plop down cities in amongst themselves if they have nowhere else to go. It seems to be the warlike civs who do this, though I could be wrong. At least it is not like it used to be, when all the types would cram cities in everywhere. (Remember how awful that got late in the game?)
If I see them doing this, sometimes I will kill them, and replace them with cities placed in open areas, with the same units and structures as the dead ones.

Troubleshooting Guide to the Medieval Pack 3.0
By Wes Whitaker

Below I have listed some of the common problems people run into when using the Medieval Pack, or just playing CtP in general.

1)I am getting error messages like "tpcga.tga not found".
This means that the 1.21 hack is not installed, or not installed properly.

2)I receive popup messages like "You're fourth out of [num of civs]" or "Science; [num. rank of civ] out of [total num. of civ]".
This means that you have not changed the line in the userprofile.txt that has "debugSLIC" in it to "yes". See the Misc. readme for details on how to do this.

3)Musketeers look like Arquebusiers.
This means that you did not manually remove the graphics files listed in the first paragraph of the Misc. readme.

If you are having problems getting the modpack to work at all, try following the steps listed below. This is taken from a post by Don Blevins.

Patches require specific exe files AS WELL AS the game to have been played to work properly. The reason is certain files are created or modified ONLY after the game has been played. Since I do a lot of Mod Work/Testing, I have screwed my CtP installation up quite a few times. During the re-install from scratch, I have hit about every concievable 'patch doesn't work' error. The following is guaranteed to work:

1) Uninstall CtP and delete all directories related to it.
2) Reboot your computer
3) Do a Maximum/Full CtP install
4) Reboot
5) Start/save a game
6) Install CtP v1.2 Patch
7) Reboot
8) Start/save a game
9) Install V1.21 Hack
10) Reboot
11) Start/save a game
(Steps 12, 13 and 14 are only necessary if you want to use the No_CD Hack)
12) Install V1.2(5) No_Cd Hack
13) Reboot
14) Start/save a game
15) You are off and running
At this point, all you really need to do is install Wes' latest Med Mod. It encompasses all the other mods plus a lot more.

Martock, if you noticed one of my earlier posts in this thread, I mentioned a file which shipped with the game which listed a bunch of aips that were not included in the game. One of them was killarmy.aip, which I assume would have had specific settings for getting the AI to disband its troops.
As it is now, there is nothing I am aware of where players can directly affect this.

stinks to hear the killarmy.aip was removed. i hate having to go thru the map (all i play is huge maps anyway) to whack all the museum pieces...sigh...oh well...

I have updated the Helicopter gl to note that it now only has 2 turns of fuel.

played a very limited game on the fly w/o any recourse to your documentation regarding improvements etc...had a grand time floundering about...the ai use of naval units is awesome, if initially daunting (was playing w/ 20 civs on gigantic donut)

Garrisons A
Garrison Upgrade A
Build Cue Empty? B+
Diplomatic AI A
New Units A++
New Advances A
et al...

will share more as I learn and grow