You have school coming up and "some other things" huh. Are you by chance one of Activision's 3rd Party Scenario Creators for CTP2 they mentioned? Or are you not allowed to talk about that? Lt. John did say that we would recognize some of the names.

If I were looking for 3rd Party Scenarios Creators, I would ask you, Tom Davis, Harlan, and Nordicus. I would ask you because of how much you have gotten out of the AI. I would ask Tom Davis because he makes the best 3rd Party Sprites out there. Some of Tom's Sprites are every bit as good as the stuff Activsion comes up with. I would ask Harlan because he seems to have a very good handle on what a WW2 Scenario should look like. Finally, I would ask Nordicus because of his experience in improving Diplomacy. But, if I had to pick only 2, Lt. John said a couple, I would pick you and Tom Davis.

Timothy Pintello

From what I know of the scenarios being put together, you need to be pretty good with SLIC, which I am not. Therefore, I am not one of the guys putting together a scenario. I *do* plan on converting the Med mod 4 over to CtP2 when it comes out, so you tell me which you would rather me do?
I do think the CtP2 *boxed* scenarios are going to be very enjoyable, which would make them the first such scenarios to ever come with a civ game (except for maybe the Roman and WWII ones from the original civ2).

I have done everything on my to-do list except package the mod. I should get this done in the next couple of days. As expected, my semester break has been quite hectic. I haven't played CtP at all.

Tim, send in anymore pics that you run across. I will wait until the end to get them in.

I am not really much of a moder. All I figured out was how to add production, food, and gold resources to trade goods. It was left up to Wes and Nordicus to use that discovery in their mods.

I like beta testing though, and I think I would make a good beta tester for Activsion. Wonder if they will contact me? They haven't yet, but then their beta version isn't suppose to be out for another week or so. Oh well, a guy can always dream. Fantasy worlds are so much more predictable than the real one.

Working 75 hours/wk doesn't afford me much CTP time, but I may ditch the after-school job, and if so will load up the Mod Mod!

How's Morgoth and his eye? Is he going to try to one day do the sprites for the Mod Mod, even if only for a CTP2 mod?

I'm sorry I was unable to finish the GLs, but it looks as though they've been in more than capable hands.

Check you folks later!

I made gameplay gls for the new improvements and units, and corrected many of the gameplays for existing improvements whose effects have been changed.

I set the effect of both the Kremlin and Pentagon to a 45% reduction in unit support costs. This should work out to about 10% of total production, which puts it in line with other wonders.

I also made it so that capturing a city will always result in the destruction of one improvement. Bombarding a city has a 50% chance of destroying something.

Finally, I made a change in the aips to try and keep the AIs from making so many settlers when they have no where to send them.

One other production change I totally forgot about - the Incubation Center's 25% is not proportional to the other production enhancements.

This is the last mod I plan on doing for CtP1. I think I have done about all that can be done with the game, with the help of many others here, of course. I haven't played any other computer game, or read a book for leisure since I started mod-making back in July of last year. I plan on doing some of those things in the next few months, as well as school starting back on Wednesday.

I downloaded your Mod and gave it a try. It's looking really good, you (and the other guys of course) did a great job once again
I didn't really come very far in the game yet but I noticed the following problems already:

1) When downloading and unzipping your mod I encountered some CRC errors. This is probably just a one-time thing but if more people report problems in downloading/unzipping the mod you might want to check it out (luckily I already had the damaged files from the previous betas, so there's no real problem for me).

2) ModPicker doesn't like how you named the scenario folder ("Med Pack 4.0"), it won't start the game when I start it up with your mod selected. I solved this problem by renaming it to "MedPack40", which solved the problem (apperently ModPicker, or rather CtP itself, won't take spaces and/or dots as part of a foldername in civpaths.txt). Not really a big deal but it can be quite a pain to find out why the game refuses to start (took me almost 2 hours ), so I thought I'd mention it here (maybe you want to mention it in the readme or on your website as well).

3) Some of the GL-files seem to be missing. I get blank area's when I try to read historical info on the new City Improvements or either historical or gameplay info on the new Advances and the Constitutional Monarchy government.

Well, that's all so far. If I encounter anything else, I'll let you know, now I'm going back to my game, I've got some Greeks to kill (no offence, Markos )

There are some gl files which weren't made for the mod. John was working on the advances' historical gls when he got a second job and had to stop living. I didn't feel that the improvement hist gls were that important. I did make the gameplay gls for them, which do an adequate job of describing them.
I can make a gameplay gl for the Constitutional Monarchy if I upload another version of the mod.

This is the first report of a problem with modpicker, and I don't know why there would be one now if there has not been with all of the betas and so-forth which used a version of Med Pack *.0.

About the Modpicker problems: you're right, I had the same problem. Apparently CTP doesn't like spaces in the paths in civpaths.txt. I had discovered this with Med Mod 3, but at the time I was busy and forgot to post about it.

A CRC (cyclic redundancy check, but don't even try to remember that ) error means that a zipped file is in some way damaged and can't be unzipped anymore. As I already suspected and Paul confirmed it's due to a bad download this time and won't cause anyelse any problems.

As Paul said, ModPicker probably isn't used by too many people and until now no-one thought of posting about it. Up until now I usually unzipped your mod to my desktop and then manually moved them to the CtP folders (using the old 'Medieval' name) so I never noticed it before.

About the help files: oh ok, just making sure you hadn't forgotten about them. Now you mention it, I vaguely remember you posting this before...

I like what I hear about the new SLIC code, seems like a good addition to the game to me. If Gedrin needs any help with the code, or you need any other SLIC-code, I wouldn't mind helping out. You mentioned a while back you didn't want any new SLIC-code in this version of your mod so I never bothered to offer my services before.

Well, back to my game again...

Btw, Hexagonian sent in a 'Collector's Edition' of the Advances Chart, which I posted by the intro link. You need Adobe Acrobat to use it.

Well I did post this back about a month ago in one of the med mod threads I think.
I think it's kind of a cool idea, some sort of plague trigger with a percent chance of decreasing certain populations until a certain advance is discovered, and you could also have a population bonus trigger where cities could have a percent chance of recieving another pop point.

I guess it's only a matter of deciding how much population to increase and decrease and what kind of percent chance and with which advance does it disable.

Here's an idea, okay, 4% chance of increasing or decreasing by one pop each turn. Also maybe a 1% chance that the city might increase or decrease by 3 each turn.

Here's how the code might look.

code:

---

trigger 'popuup' when (g.player){
x = 0;
while(player.cities > x){
setcitybyindex(1,g.player,x);
ronin = random(99);
if(ronin < 3){
randos = random(99);
if(randos < 1){
addpops(city.1,3);
}
else{addpops(city.1,1);}
}
if(ronin > 95){
randos = random(99);
if(randos < 1){
addpops(city.1,-3);
}
else{addpops(city.1,-1);}
}
x = x + 1;
}
}
// this is to disable the above trigger if 
//the player has the certain advance.
trigger 'dismeallthetime' when (g.player && discovery.type == 231){
disabletrigger ('popuup');
}

---

Okay i saw two problems with this. First, once one player discovers the advance that disables the plague/increase trigger all the rest of the players will benefit but I don't think it's a big concern.

Another problem with the code is that if a city is destroyed due to a population decrease the game might crash unless you
there is some way to find out if the city has been destroyed(I can't think of one right now)and then set the value of x accordingly. Anyway this was all written in a rush but I think the fundamentals will work. And I think it would be sooooooo cool.

quote: As far as SLIC, I didn't want to add triggers for individual wonders and so-forth, mainly because I didn't know if they would slow the game down significantly. I am always open to new info about things people have made or are working on, though. I certainly didn't mean that I wouldn't consider adding any new slic stuff.

I don't think it would slow the game down that much, not even a noticable difference, for my scenario I have added alot of triggers with no noticable difference, only when something huge and significant happens, like when france falls when paris is captured and the cities change hand from French to German control was there a slow down on that player's turn but other than that it seems pretty fast.

Anyway I hope you decide to add this.

Also there was an interesting idea posted in the creation forum the other day. A national guard improvement or wonder. If it was attached to a wonder then I thought maybe the player that builds it could get some sort of addition pw to build defence improvements or a free unit in each city(but I think the garrison units pretty much already solve that problem). Anyway just an idea.

Thanks....

code:

---

if(hasadvance(g.player,id_thisone) == 0){
nest the rest of the code in
}

---

That should fix that problem.

That one with Paris and the fall of France is cool.

Could this be extended to something like this:

For every 10-15 cities, one "provinse capital" are allowed (you have to choose one city). This city should have some nice benefits, maybe reduce capitol distance and crime - something like that.

But if this city falls, all cities in a range of say 6-10 tiles this city also falls and join the enemy alternative makes a new civ?

Yes actually I believe what you are asking can be done through the use of regions, I can't really think of anyway else to implement this. So for example if one of your key cities(your largest for example) is captured in a certain region, the rest of the cities in that region, belonging to that civ who lost that city would fall to the player who has captured the key city. It would be interesting but might be alot of work. Of course there would have to be a script written for a specific sized map or adjusted for different sizes of maps I would think.

Btw, I will be posting a new thread soon, I'm putting the finishing touches on my ww2 scenario and after that I will post most of the events that will take place in the scenario(there is alot), and ask for any other ideas at that time, or comments, and during that time I will be doing playtesting so there will still be lots of time to add new events.

Part of that "if paris falls the rest of france falls" is also a percent chance of each of the french colonies in North Africa can either stay under Vichy Control or become free french states. And there is also a percent chance that the Germans may capture french naval assests for thier own use. And tied into that is percent chances that other nations(including spain) may join the Axis at that or around(or before) france falls.

So maybe some of those same fundamentals can be used as a med mod event.

I'm fine, thanks Long time no see, man.

I like your suggestions but there is so much stuff like this that can be done with SLIC you could make a seperate mod for it. In fact, that's exactly what Don and myself (and a couple of other guys) tried to do a few months back but it never quite worked out the way we wanted.
What you're suggestion brings some pretty radical changes to the game and I'm not sure if Wes would like that in this late stadium.

Anyway, I don't think disbanding a city will cause any problems as far as crashing the game goes. However you do have to keep in mind that the cityindices change if cities are destroyed. I'm in a bit of a hurry so I didn't study your code to closely but it seems that you're not taking this into account.

Well, I think I'll have more comments later but I have to run now, CU later.

Yes pretty radical ideas and to late to put in the mod but hey, that's why they call me Mr.Radical!!! Lol.

Seeya,

Oh, come on! I had expected better from you Those indices are pretty easy to get around. Once a city is disbanded, all subsequent cities have their index lowered with one, so you just don't have to add one to x to get the next city. One way of implementing this would be using a temp-variable to keep track of city-size as I did in the example below. (I didn't actually test any of this but it works with units, so why not with cities?)

code:

---

trigger 'popuup' when (g.player){
	x = 0;
	siz = 1;	// init as 1, if nothing changes or city grows, 
			// any siz > 1 suffices
	while(player.cities > x){
		setcitybyindex(1,g.player,x);
		ronin = random(99);
		if(ronin < 3){
			randos = random(99);
			if(randos < 1){
				addpops(city.1,3);
			}else{
				addpops(city.1,1);
			}
		}
		if(ronin > 95){
			randos = random(99);
			siz = city.1.size;	// change to city.size
			if(randos < 1){
				addpops(city.1,-3);
				siz = siz - 3;	// update
			}else{
				addpops(city.1,-1);
				siz = siz - 1;	// update
			}
		}
		if (siz > 0) { // only increase x if size still > 0
			x = x + 1;
		}
	}
}
// this is to disable the above trigger if 
//the player has the certain advance.
trigger 'dismeallthetime' when (g.player && discovery.type == 231){
	disabletrigger ('popuup');
}

---

As far as the other ideas go, I have been thinking about creating a fortress improvement that would add an extra garrison unit to the city for my ancient scenario (which I'm putting on hold until CtPII comes along BTW), that might be an idea. But giving more PW, I don't know, that could be used for farms etc. as well. But if Wes wants to add SLIC-code for individual Wonders/Improvements I could probably come up with about a dozen better idea's.
I like the idea of provincial capitols and having surrounding cities revolt with them if they themselves revolt (this way you can also simulate the independence movements effects (eg. USA declaring independance on Brittain), if one city revolts, others follow. But it might proof difficult to generalize such a thing to normal random games. How did you do this for your scenario anyway? I mean, city improvements and wonders are lost in the process right? But it sure would be very cool if it would work.

CU later,

When I tried to install and use the Celestial Dawn mod, I got the same thing.

Is this specific to these mods, or have I done something wrong?

Locutus, Hey good ideas and good job with the code to.

Anyway, Yes you are correct about it destroying the city improvements and wonders, I did try a work around by spawning units by each city and using the addorder(I think that's what it was called) to make the units move automatically into that city but it only partially worked, if I remember from testing the code it would addorder successfully for the human player but when dealing with the nonhuman players it would not work. So if the ai captured paris the units would get created but they would not move into the french cities. So the only other way was to destroy them.

Two big disadvantages.
1. Wonders and Improvements destroyed.
2. Original City names lost.

Well concerning the improvements and wonders being lost, it wasn't a major concern for my scenario since the game is not structured around wonders or improvements. Infact I don't have any plans to add any at this time. I know, radical idea right? Well not really, the game is really designed around an unconvetional idea to a civ game and revolves around resources on the map(heavy and light industrial zone graphics), like it was in the real war with nations fighting for control of the industries, tech is very important to the game with *alot* of options and *alot* to research, and also events. The events are almost the wonders of the game. For example the Atlantic Wall event. Where once triggered little cement pillboxes will pop up all along the french northern coast and there will be a defense bonus, also of course, the maginot line is in the game. Oh and of course all the units included will keep the player and ai very busy.

Concerning city names being lost, for my scenario with the press of a button all the original city names will pop up again. So that problem is solved.

Sorry for the thread jacking Wes. I'll shut up now.

All these slic triggers sound very interesting, guys. I am going to out out the med mod 4 as is, though, unless people report errors with it. (I hope someone out there is playing it, because I haven't had the time, and am not going to have the time.)
I have been having a real bad spell with my head the last week, and am already falling behind in school. I have a Labor Day trip this weekend, and by then surely to hell that Fed Ex package will have arrived which will keep me busy for the next month or two.
From what I understand, the Activision people are set on getting CtP2 out for the Christmas season, and I can't wait to see what we can put together with the more powerful, easier to use slic2 and the stuff we have all already made for CtP1.

Yeah, I experimented with changing city-owner a while back myself. The AddOrder thing really sucks, it only works for humans (made it necessary to eliminate the space-city garrison from the MedMod, I couldn't get units to launch into space - now with the MakeLocation function it might work after all but I'm not gonna bother since space-cities are pretty rare anyway).

I really like your unconventional (too say the least ) view of the game's focus. It's much more historically accurate, individual cities are still way too important in Civ. I can't wait to have a look at your scenario The 'science-policy' and focus on events sound interesting as well. If the AI can handle all this, it sounds like this is gonna be the best scenario I've ever played.
But this does mean that the 'changing owner'-thing would never work for a regular CtP game. Oh well, we'll see what CtPII has to offer.

Wes,

Don't worry, I'm playing I'm almost done with my current game so I'm soon gonna download your latest build and try that (but I don't suppose there will be too much diffences).
One thing I noticed already is that using a cruise missile attack occationally causes the game to crash, but I haven't figured out when exactly 'occasionally' is, it seems pretty random and I can't find any kind of explanation for it. I know there was a thread about this a while back, I think I'll dig that up and see if it offers any usefull insight. The only solution I know of for now is the same as the one for the AI, don't use it.

I started anothe game with MedMod4 - I was holding off on a new game until it came out.
Emperor (8 civs) - no building mines in forests either for me.

I just hit the Medival age. I exchanged an advance for Republic from another civ and got a couple of spies out. The two cities that I spied on were fully garrisonned with 9 units each (very cool) and my closest rival has a couple of spies lurking about too.

Happiness is a major issue - it seems that I have to build something constantly, and even in the cities that have built every happiness improvement available, its still an issue due to pop. size.

I've been lurking here for about a month and I just installed Med Mod 4 and think it's a great mod but have a couple problems/concerns that I hope WesW or someone can help me with.

Category A (bugs me a little bit but no big deal):

1-when the Global Ranking box comes up I get the text without having the value put in the fields (meaning it says "you are ranked" followed by some code enclosed in brackets).

2-same thing with the city growth box. All the values are missing and instead there are bracketed codes.

3-if 2 Wonders are built in the same turn (I know this rarely happens if you're not cheating, now you know my secret)only one .avi is shown. This doesn't happen with the standard CTP game...it shows both .avi's one after the other.

Category B (somewhat irritating):

1-No one will exchange maps with me if I approach them first.

2-You know how you get that little icon on the left side of the screen letting you know when new units etc are built? The icons for "you're so great, you captured [somepoorciv]'s capital" and for "the city of [insert doomed city here] was ANNIHILATED!" never go away. 3000 years later that icon saying Perth was ANNIHILATED is still there! Why is this?

Category C (I can't deal with this!):

Wes, I love this mod but these two things kill me...

1-when I bombard a unit which is itself capable of bombardment...I take a big hit. For example, a cannon rolled up to the coast and attempted to bombard my two stacked ironclads (this is the part of timeline I am playing right now). The cannon was not succesful in bombarding my units but when I returned the favor, one of my ironclads was significantly damaged. Same thing every time I bombard another unit capable of bombardment itself. I can imagine the reasoning that a bombarding capable unit would counter with it's own bombardment but the game play just doesn't feel real. In real war it is possible for a unit to surprise another and sink it or destroy it without reprisal. Plus, if the game does not allow the land unit to bombard my sea unit then it seems odd that I'd take a hit when bombarding said land unit. I'm finding that a majority of the time I'm better off with direct assault in that I'm taking less of a hit than when I bombard and I think this is the opposite effect intended with the bombard function.

2-This one is killing the game for me! NO ONE will capitulate to my no trespassing demands! This makes diplomacy impossible and I'm pretty much forever at war with everyone because I will not accept foreign units in my city tiles and they will not stay away. I mean...I've got 20 cities and heavy cruisers and some dumb little civ with 5 cities and caravels refuses to stay away from my territory and thus those caravels die. Not at all realistic. I'm really not enjoying the game primarily because of this no trespassing thing. I'm not expecting Wes to change the mod because of me...but can someone tell me where to make adjustments to the code to rectify this?

I used to mess around with making mods with Civ II but never tried it with CTP. Having found this site about a month ago I've gotten excited about the idea of CTP mods and have TONS of ideas but since CTP2 is so close to release I'm not going to even try to learn the programming until the new one is out. My interests are in the years after the invention of nuclear weapons and how the Cold War changed the face of military conflict. My ideas center around espionage and unconventional warfare including guerilla warfare, special ops, war by proxy and terrorism etc. I don't think Civ or CTP give a good feel for the current way that war is conducted. I'm just sad I didn't find this site sooner so I could've put my two and a half cents in for CTP2.

You can remove message icons by right-clicking on them.

I forgot about the debugslic thing. I changed it when I installed Med Mod 3 but I had since reinstalled the original CTP and didn't remember to change it again when I installed Med Mod 4.

As long as I've played CTP I didn't know about the "right click on icon" bit.

I also noticed that most of the units with bombard capability also had the counter bombard flag. I just removed them all except for the attack aircraft (because a dogfight doesn't have to be up close with modern aircraft...they can dogfight with missiles without even being close enough to visualize each other), the battleship (to give it a sort of non-active air defense) and the Leviathan and Star Cruiser. The problem that I was experiencing was that, for example, land units not capable of bombarding sea units were inflicting damage by counterbombardment. Didn't seem right to me.

Mucking around with the units brings up a couple of more questions...I used the easymod app and under the "special" tab for visual flag editing I saw a box labelled "special forces" and a couple of the flags are self explanatory but what is the Special Forces flag, Assisted Drops flag, and Paratr Transport flag? Does Paratr Transport mean that an airborne unit can "jump" from this transport unit? Also, I see a C17 Transport unit (can you see where I'm going with this?), how can I activate this unit? By giving it a production value? Anything else I need to do? Will AI know how to use it?