MedMod II: SLIC code

[Locutus]

Instead of doing all MedMod discussion in one thread, I thought it might be a better idea to split things up. I'd like to use this thread for all SLIC-related discussions: bug-reports, questions, suggestions for improvements, etc. Right now the only SLIC code in the MedMod is the militia code but in the future there will be much more. For one thing, earlier today I sent Wes the Wonder-enabled code, so you might be seeing that sometime soon as well. If anyone else is interested in this code (for your own mod or whatever), let me know.

Currently there are two main problems regarding militia units. If you discover any bugs or have any suggestions for improvement, I'd love to hear them.

One of the problems is that militias seem to be coming from goody huts, which didn't happen in CtPI. Wes, you solved this by editing the advance-tree but I can imagine you're not quite happy with it since it restricts you in creating a good tech-tree. I can probably come up with SLIC code that automaticly replaces militia-units that come from goody huts with their non-militia counterparts, this is probably a more elegant solution. Let me know want me to do this.

One other important problem, which I'd like to have everybody's opinion of, is what to do with newly conquered cities? The problem is that if you get militias too soon after conquering a city you will often find yourself fighting 'your own people' when you try to retake a city you just lost. It also means that someone who conquers a city won't have to leave behind a garrison force to suppress the population and to guard the city and thus give the attacking player (usually the human) a significant advantage of the defensive player, which is IMHO never a good idea.

The way it's currently set up is that militia's are created or killed as soon as a city increases or decreases in size (except immediately after combat - that way new militia's would be created as soon a city is conquered which didn't seem right to me). This means however that it might not take more than a single turn before a conquered city gets new militia (though at other times it may take a very long time).

What I'd like to know is what other people think of this: is this a good system or a bad one and if it's not good, what would be a better way of dealing with this?

BTW, Wes, what the hell is wrong with my spelling of Maginot Line?

[Alpha Wolf]

In CtP1, there was the conquest distress if your government was "worse" than the gov of the city's orig owner. If this exists in CtP2, can you use it to determine whether to build militia? say if the city was originally tyranny and you have republic, i'd think that the people would be happy and would want to defend the new way, thus build militia. But if they went backwards gov-wise, then they'd more likely be rebellious.

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History is written by the victor.

[WesW]

I didn't know that Maginot was the correct spelling. It was the only spelling that came to mind when I made the post, and I thought for sure that it was wrong. French spelling makes no sense to an English-speaker.

Anyway, having two tech preqs for militia units is no problem, since they do not affect their slic-creation. I don't even remember for sure what I put in for the second preq, Classical Ed I think.

AW, I brought up conquest distress when we were initially discussing the trigger. Wouter said that there was no way to check for it via slic, so we decided to just go with what we had at the time, and hold another discussion until later.
I am glad that Wouter started this thread, so that we can all put our heads together and come up with something.

[Harlan]

Come on, AlphaWolf, when any city gets captured, there is distress, especially in this game where you're supposed to have been taken over by a civilization with completely different ways, I'm assuming including religion and language. Any city should experience distress, and lots of it. This is one thing that upsets me about the regular versions of CTP1 and CTP2, how depending on gvmts, you could take over a city and they'd actually have negative conquest distress.

[Alpha Wolf]

I didnt say it was a great solution Harlan, just one possibility of getting around this particular situation. Personally, i wont use the militia, because i dont like the something for nothing concept. But that wont stop me from offering a suggestion if I think its viable to what they are trying to solve.


Happy New years!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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History is written by the victor.

[Savant]

We really need a separate forum for topics devoted to Wes' Medieval mod. It is very difficult to keep abreast of developments.

As more work and playtesting continues on the MM2 this will be totally unmanageable. The webpage for downloading Wes-related files was a great idea. We need follow through for the discussion threads now also.

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'Blood will run'

[Diodorus Sicilus]

Harlan's right in two ways. First, there is always stress in a conquest, if for no other reason than that people prefer the "devil they know to the devil they don't". Second, because adopting this as a working concept should make it easier to implement in the game.
Basically, we're talking about a single discrete event trigger for Non Militia Creation: a city changes civilizations. Now, it seems to me we already have in the game a Duration example, in the period of Anarchy between governments: it lasts a certain number of turns, and at the end of that time A Change Occurs.
Isn't there some way to combine these two things that are already in the game so that:
Event = City changes Civ = No Militia
Event = > X turns = Militia Created
This same sequence would occur even when you retake the city, based on the supposition that you have to spend a certain amount of time 'weeding out the collaborators' before you trust them again. Of course, it would be better if somehow the Original Civ could be recognized so that the period involved is much shorter, or that the differences between the two civs could be recognized and could affect the time. If I had All That I Could Wish For In The Game, I'd make that trigger not the relative "standing" of the government types involved, but the Happiness level in the city under each government: Even under a Tyranny, some people are going to be happy, and if there are enough of them a newly formed Corporate Republic city hall will still have to win them around...

[Locutus]

Well, Diodorus' suggestion of making the non-militia creation a random time period should be fairly easy to implement. I can also make a difference between conquering and retaking a city, presuming you will have to retake it within a certain period of time. So FE if you conquer a city, it takes between 4 and 10 turns before you get militias and every turn there's a 25% chance that you will get militia. If you retake a city within 10 turns of loosing it, it takes between 2 and 5 turns to get militias with a 50% chance you'll get them.

It is probably also possible to take other factors in mind that determine the 'difference' between civs, but I'd need to know in more detail what those factors should be exactly. Just happiness-level? And if so, how should happiness-level be defined? As the average happiness of a civ, as a standard number (e.g. 75) that is compensated to take global happiness-factors such as wages/rations/workday and wonders into account, as a standard value per government, or maybe a combination of these and/or others?

Edit:

Wes,
Oh, ok. Misunderstood you there.
BTW, making Classical Education a prerequisiste for advances looks really ugly in the screen where you choose what advance to research (it names all the militia units as things that come available with Classical Ed, which fills up the entire box) and also is incorrect since no militia comes available with it. Wouldn't it be an idea to create a dummy advance for this purpose and make this a prerequisite for all militia units? Give this advance itself as prerequisite and make it GLHidden and it will look much better.
[This message has been edited by Locutus (edited January 02, 2001).]

[WesW]

I didn't realize that the second enabling advance would have that effect. I have corrected it just for you, Wouter.

Also, on the conquered cities topic, I would advocate choosing the simplest solution. Meaning just pick a set number of turns after capture to award militia units. I think about 15 turns would do. By then, any conquest distress would have about gone away, and the people would have had time to adjust to their new nation.
This is a needed trigger, but it is one of the smaller ones which is going to be in the mod, so I don't want it taking up any more processor time than absolutely necessary.

We still have the Partisan trigger to implement, which will represent the opposition of newly conquered people towards their conquerors, as well as the refugee trigger.

Then we have the big one, the "unit repair" trigger. This is the one which is going to really shake up the way war is fought and supported.

Since I seem to have found a way to make the AIs adjust their unit build lists to adapt to their current situation, by my "inspired" manipulation of the strategies and unitbuildlists texts, we might not need a trigger for that.

By the time we get through with all this, the costs and consequences of waging war are going to be much harder and more realistic than in any civ game created.

[Locutus]

quote: Originally posted by WesW on 01-02-2001 04:44 PM I didn't realize that the second enabling advance would have that effect. I have corrected it just for you, Wouter.

Thanx

quote: Also, on the conquered cities topic, I would advocate choosing the simplest solution. Meaning just pick a set number of turns after capture to award militia units. I think about 15 turns would do. By then, any conquest distress would have about gone away, and the people would have had time to adjust to their new nation. This is a needed trigger, but it is one of the smaller ones which is going to be in the mod, so I don't want it taking up any more processor time than absolutely necessary.

Your wish is my command

quote: We still have the Partisan trigger to implement, which will represent the opposition of newly conquered people towards their conquerors, as well as the refugee trigger.

Ah, yes. I could combine that with writing the code for militia creation in conquered cities, it's basicly the same event. Have you decided yet when it will activate? On tech or gov basis and if so, what tech(s) or gov(s)?

[WesW]

I have Partisans slated to become active with Nationalism. Have you sent me anything with the conquered city code in it? I looked over the last militia code you sent, and it had comments about preventing militias from occurring in newly conquered cities, but I couldn't tell exactly what it did or didn't do.
I have been doing so much lately with separate areas of the game that I can't keep things straight any more.

[Locutus]

No Wes, I hadn't written any code for it yet, I was awaiting the outcome of the discussion in this thread. But I wrote the code last night, as well as the code for the Partisans (I'll include the Nationalism prerequisite in a moment). Still need to test it out and debug it, but as soon as it's done I'll send it your way. (BTW, I also wrote a trigger that makes the biggest city of an AI rush-buy the capitol improvement if that AI looses his capitol, as you requested a while back).

[WesW]

Great, Wouter. I was afraid you had forgotten about the capitol code.

[Locutus]

Well, actually I had, but I was browsing through my email archive to find some details on the Partisan code and accidentally bumped into it. So if there's more code I might be forgetting about, let me know.

[Alpha Wolf]

Please dont hate me for asking. But I'm assuming the first 2 cities of most civs will be their largest and will be relatively close. So if the capiol falls, the 2nd city may not be far behind it. Is it possible to add a distance factor of say more than 10 tiles but less than 50 tiles from the old capitol? Just in case that civ had captured a large foreign city. You wouldnt want to make that your capitol. Also, being that there is a feat for recapturing on of your own cities, I assume that there is a flag to indicate original city founder. Maybe that can be used.

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History is written by the victor.

[Locutus]

Actually, Alpha Wolf, you bring up a good point. Though possible, a distance function IMHO isn't needed (maybe the civ only has a few cities left or only has two big cities and all other cities are very small and vulnerable or 10 tiles away might be on the very edge of it's empire making distance to capitol unhappiness very high in other cities and make the capitol an even easier target for other enemies, etc), but as my code currently works it will fail if the city designated to rush-buy the Capitol is captured before it can complete it (not enough money, captured in the same turn as the capitol, etc), no Capitol will be built after all. I should account for that possibility as well.


Edit:
A max-distance limit might be useful, but I'll leave it up to Wes to decide if that should be implemented as it will considerably slow down the trigger. It'll still hardly have an impact on the speed of the game since it's a fairly rare occurence but to take that into account will force me to cycle through all cities instead of just using the biggest one (which is always stored in the variable player.largestcity).

The flag that stores the original owner of a city no doubt exists in the engine somewhere, but AFAIK it's not available for us, modmakers. You could keep track of the original owner of a city through SLIC, but if it's not really needed it'll only eat up resources.
[This message has been edited by Locutus (edited January 06, 2001).]