Introducing the Medieval Pack II v1.0 Alpha

[FALVES]

Wes... Where are you?
Where's that beta?

[Pintello]

Hi Wes and Company,

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

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

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

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

Regards,

Timothy Pintello
[This message has been edited by Pintello (edited February 01, 2001).]

[WesW]

About the Sea cities: I found the problem. I could have sworn they used the same system in Ctp1 for city sprites, but I couldn't find the files.
Anyway, the problem is in agecitystyle.txt. Their are two types of cities specified there, type 0, land cities, and type 1, sea cities. I checked against the Ctp1 files, and could not find where things went wrong, but somehow the game is not recognizing that cities founded on ocean terrain should use the type 1 sprites. At least, I think this is the problem.
I checked the sprites, and the sea city sprites are there, and I checked all the files that I could think of, comparing them to the Ctp1 files, and couldn't find anything.
If someone could check out the slic file, maybe the problem is in there.

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

You guys need to get the file from his website and test it, because I am going to be tied up trying to get the beta ready.

[Radical_Manuvr]

I'm sure Locutus will come up with a solution to the problem (or maybe already has). While/if you're waiting I found a workaround when playtesting the Alex scenario. It's annoying but...

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

I only did this twice so no guarantees about it working in all cases. Worked both times for me.

[Pintello]

Hi Wes,

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

Timothy Pintello

[Pintello]

Hi Guys,

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

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

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

Regards,
Timothy Pintello

[Pintello]

Hi All,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regards,
Timothy Pintello
[This message has been edited by Pintello (edited February 02, 2001).]
[This message has been edited by Pintello (edited February 02, 2001).]

[WesW]

Great work, Tim. Funny, when I tested last night, I gave myself all the advances in the game, and the land cities used the Diamond age sprites. Anyway, your way works, and I have pasted the sea cities block into all the ages.

[Harlan]

I have one way to add production back to trade good tiles, though it may not be the best way. In the updated Alex scenario (the stilll unreleased one I'm currently working on), I have all metal goods give a production bonus. I accomplished this by creating duplicate terrain types as the land they're normally on (for instance, two Hill types), that differ only by the production number. It seems one can add many more terrain types, you just can't have terrain types with NEW graphics.

Of course, this was relatively easy since I could just go through the map and change the terrain under the trade goods on my map, one by one. How to get the above system to work on any random map may be difficult or impossible. Is there some way to detect the presence of a trade good, or add a trade good where there was none before? I'm interested in the second, cos I think it would be great if one could have, for instance, Oil appear only when Oil Refining is discovered.

wes, you might want to start a new thread soon

[Locutus]

TacticalGrace, you're right, there isn't really a link but I don't see a link between preventing movement and random ZOC problems either. So whatever the problem is, it doesn't make sense. In any case, I *think* I managed to find the problem (it was indeed movement-related: one of the movement-events in SLIC seems to be broken in a weird way), though I need to do some more testing to be sure. I replaced the file on my website with a zip file, it contains the newly fixed scenario.slc file, a text file with messages (prevents errors in loading the scenario) and the Const.txt file that is needed to make the unit repair code work properly.

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

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

Making Oil appear only when Oil Refining is discovered is probably possible as well, some form or another.

[WesW]

I'm trying, Mark, but there is just so much still to do on the beta. I spent about 8 to 10 hrs. yesterday working on it, and I still have a lot to do. Chris' chop spreadsheet is awesome, btw, and I don't know what I would have done without it. I spent most of yesterday on the advances. Out of almost 300 advances links, there were not more than 15 or 20 that didn't have to be changed, just to give you an idea of how much the tech tree has changed.
I have not begun to work on the units yet, or to place the advances in the timeline, so it will be a few more days until the beta is posted. Sorry for the delay, but I think everyone will agree that it was worth the wait when it finally comes out. (If Activision had taken the time to play-test the game properly, it would probably just now be hitting the stores anyway.)

From the chop wonders page, I was able to get my first good look at the wonders, and I ended up changing a lot of things in that area as well. The changes will be covered either in the GL or in the Main readme.

[Locutus]

Oh, I forgot: the new SLIC file can be downloaded here.

[Dale]

Wes 'n Co.
Just a suggestion about the Australian Civ. Can we PLEASE do something about the city names? I get highly offended by the assumption that Sydney is our nation's captial when it's CANBERRA! My suggestion is do what I did. I changed the city names to the following order:

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

and then whatever cities are left.

Just makes it a little more 'proper'.

------------------
Author of Diplomod. The mod to fix diplomacy.

Rommell to a sub-commander outside Tobruk: "Those Australians are in there somewhere. But where? Let's advance and wait till they shoot, then shoot back."

[Pintello]

Hi Locutus,

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

Hi Wes,

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

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

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

Regards,

Timothy Pintello

[Locutus]

That's great to hear, Tim (well, the SLIC part anyway). Thanks for letting me know.

I guess it's save to say it works then, I ran some more tests myself and couldn't recreate the bug myself either. Best thing is that the final solution turns out to be even better than the original one: it used to be possible to give militias move-orders (you'd be able to see a gray movepath, but the militias would of course never move), now that's not possible anymore.
[This message has been edited by Locutus (edited February 06, 2001).]

[WesW]

Tim, it may be that parts of the const.txt are not read when placed in the scenario section, just like in Ctp1. Hopefully this will be corrected when I place the files in the default section.
I did not have a problem in Ctp1 with militia units coming out of goody huts, either, so we may have to do something about the slaves eventually.

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

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

Also, please see my new threads in the AI forum, and help out if you can.

[Dale]

Wes:
I'll do the Aussie cities for you, but I have no idea on Canadian timelines. Anyone else to do Canada? When do you need updated city lists by? I'll come up with 40-50 based on when they were founded.

------------------
Author of Diplomod. The mod to fix diplomacy.

Rommell to a sub-commander outside Tobruk: "Those Australians are in there somewhere. But where? Let's advance and wait till they shoot, then shoot back."

[Alpha Wolf]

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

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

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

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History is written by the victor.

[WesW]

Dale, there is no rush on the cities.

AW, this would be a fine question for Richard, but I think that you have already figured out the answer.
From what I can tell, flanking units are placed first, then front-and-center units based on either attack or defense strength, then ranged units.
I think the game matches up a unit from your force to match each opposing front-line unit, then fills up the second line with remaining ranged units. If extra ranged units are available, they are then placed in the third row.

[Alpha Wolf]

quote: Originally posted by WesW on 02-07-2001 09:05 PM AW, this would be a fine question for Richard, but I think that you have already figured out the answer. From what I can tell, flanking units are placed first, then front-and-center units based on either attack or defense strength, then ranged units. I think the game matches up a unit from your force to match each opposing front-line unit, then fills up the second line with remaining ranged units. If extra ranged units are available, they are then placed in the third row.

I think we are close, but too many unexpected battle lines makes building efficient stacks more difficult than it should be. Every time i see hoplites BEHIND archers, or flankers in the middle, it drives me crazy. And I'm having alot of trouble getting pikemen to stay in front of infantrymen. For instance, I had a stack of 2 pikemen, 2 infantrymen, and 2 cannons that was attacking 2 of something, I expected to have 3 lines in the order I described, but they dont always line up that way (I cant remember the exact lines, but one cannon was in front and a pikeman was in the second row) I wish that vet status was shown during battles as it would help pinpoint which unit was where.

I had to resort to making all naval units flankers, because thats the only way I could get them to combine their firepower onto a single ship (poor AI finally stacked 2 SoL and my one SoL took one of them down with me, forcing the change). It also seems (about 90% sure) that if 2 ranged units with different ranges, attack a single unit, they will line up in 2 lines, but if they have the same range, they line up next to each other. Can anyone else confirm this theory?

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History is written by the victor.

[WesW]

I think that much of the battle-line problem stems from the fact that there are not enough units in the game. The unit values increase gradually, but there are not enough units to fill out the unit types. Thus you have flanking units from one age and attacking units from another age. This is how you get flanking Tanks with higher ranged settings than Artillery, the last available ranged unit before you get Tanks.
In the Med mod, there will be enough units, with enough specialization in their stats, that you should not have this problem.

Also, I made all naval units with a ranged attack flanking units several weeks ago.

In another area, I think I have some up with a way to have special Barbarian units from huts, though I have not tested it yet.

Chris has informed me that I have screwed up his Chop sheet with my alterations, and he is working to correct the damage. I don't know when he will get the Chop back to me, but I have other things to occupy me anyway.

I have contacted Harlan about getting the last pics needed for the mod, and Paul about re-naming the unit pics to match the new sprite numbers.
Charles (Diodorus) is working on the historical gls for the units, though I don't know if they will be ready for the initial beta.
Locutus has been doing a lot of work on the slic triggers.
Tom is making some new units for the mod, though I don't know when they will be ready.
I read through Dale's diplomod readme, thread and mod files tonight, and I hope to integrate his work into the mod as soon as we make sure everything else is working alright.
I have not fully digested everything that Richard told me in his letters, though I did manage to get them posted in the AI section so we can act on and think about his comments.

I hoped to have the beta out by now, but as you can see, things are still coming together for it, and when it does come out it will be better than it would if it had come out earlier.

While you guys are waiting, you can check a couple of things for me by testing default games.

1)I have read that the scoring system does not correctly in the game. Try and find out exactly what doesn't work, and what the problem is. I think that the math settings in the diffdb are probably off, and if so we can correct this fairly easily.

2)Does the conquest distress recovery rate work correctly in the game? I didn't work correctly in Ctp1.
The decay rate is 0.2. I don't know if this is supposed to be 0.2 happiness points or a 20% decay rate each turn.

On the slic front, I would like a trigger to keep units from bombarding submarines unless they can also attack submarines.

[Dale]

Wes:
From all reports diplomacy is now stable and balanced. There's been no problems reported with the diplomacy script/txt files (except for bug reports coming in from old versions still which are now all resolved). The only problem found in the last release (V3.2) was the logic error I found in the withdraw script which is packaged with the diplomacy mod. I put a bandaid fix on the error to stop the desktop crash, while I gained the info for "teleporting" units out of your territory the best way. Thanks to heardie and locutus for the help here. This will go into withdraw this weekend.

That brings it up-to-date on that front.

------------------
Rommell to a sub-commander outside Tobruk: "Those Australians are in there somewhere. But where? Let's advance and wait till they shoot, then shoot back."

[WesW]

UPDATE ALERT: I have finished the readmes for the beta, and posted them at my site. They contain the finished Advances chart, the Med chart spreadsheet which lists the vital stats for most items in the game (units, wonders, etc.), the Triggers readme which explains all the slic code, and several other files covering other aspects of the mod.
Players need to familiarize themselves with these files so that they can understand, and hopefully appreciate, the changes made to the game.
This folder is normally part of the texts portion of the mod, but I have posted it separately now so that you can dive right into the beta once it is ready for testing.
Feel free to post comments and/or questions about what you read.

Ok, Dale, I am taking your word on the Diplomod. I have integrated it into the Med Pack. I kept my changes to regard penalties for the default setting, which you had not altered, but everything else is yours.
I put your slc code together with Mr. Ogre's PW mod in a file scenario2.slc. The scenario.slc will contain all of Locutus' work, while the scenario2 will contain all code from other people.

Paul sent me the re-numbered pics today, and I finished up that chore, so the unit pics all match the new sprite setup. Once I get the last couple of pics from Harlan, all the pics will be in, and it will be a matter of linking them with the texts generated by the Chop spreadsheet.

I went through Richard's letters again in the AI section, and ended up generating another list of questions which I have sent off to him. I think there are some errors in the Orders.txt, which I had never paid attention to before, which may be causing the AI to malfunction in a couple of small areas. There were several other things I asked about as well, so hopefully he will get back with me in the next few days.

I also adjusted the strategies.txt to make the primary goals easier to see, plus I fine-tuned some of these goals to make them standardized for the different personality types.
I adjusted a couple of the building settings since I have gone back to a more traditional upkeep cost for buildings.

Note to Omni: The sprite labeled 101 in the sprite nos. thread should be 102.

Once I get the Chop sheet back from Chris, I can finish plugging in all the values and generate the mod texts. That is about all that still needs to be done, though it will take a lot of work to do this.
Once the texts are generated, I will develop the new naming system and place the mod in the default section of the game to see if that works. Then I will do some quick play-testing to check for bugs before posting the beta.

[Bluevoss]

Wes,

A quick question - I've been out of the whole CTP2 thing for a couple of weeks. Been touring Tunisia and looking at Carthage and Roman ruins and really getting my blood up for some of those good CTP2 early historic chashes (big Civ2 problem is that you never really fight early in history).

So what is the status of the mods? Are they ready for download at this point?

Also, has any work been done to the citys so that unhappyness is a factor of size? In looking over the Roman ruins of El Jem and Dougga, you really get an appriciation of how much effort the Romans put into keeping their cities happy. Good heavens - the size of some of the temples and colloseums is enough to make anyone realize how important this is.

BTW, does your mod give coracles an attack value? I've set mine to 10, and like it - it helps simulate early trireme actions.



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Bluevoss-

[hexagonian]

Wes

Have you run into a problem with how many city improvements you can add in your Mod. The last two improvements on my lists in my mod are showing up in the Build queue, Great Library and so forth, but when they are completed in the game, they do not show up in the city inventory lists. Everything else shows up though...
[This message has been edited by hexagonian (edited February 14, 2001).]

[WesW]

Blue, you need to read the Readmes that I posted. You will find the answers to all those types of questions in them.

Hex, I have not had any reports of problems with buildings. To get the buildings to show up correctly in the GL, you have to put them in alphabetical order in the buildings text, so the last two are the same in my mod as they are in the standard game.

Chris still hasn't gotten the chop sheet back to me, so I have been working on other things related to the mod. I have been feeling really lousy the last few days, so I have not missed squinting at the spreadsheet very much.
I have been developing some new ideas with Charles and Harlan which would improve the mod and the game as a whole, but I need someone to make the slic for me.
Locutus is happy to help, but he is tied down with school and other things already requested, so I really need someone, or someones, to step up and lend a hand.

I am going to make a thread in the Creation system listing all the triggers I would like to have.
Most of these triggers would benefit the game as a whole, and could be used with any mod, so it's not like you would be abandoning your own projects.

[TacticalGrace]

couple of things that are still puzzling me:
1) the readmes don't match up with what is in the text files. Is there an update on the way?

2) where have all the graneries gone? I have the option to build a granery at the beginning of the game but once I've built one I don't get a chance to build any more for the rest of the game and there are none in the inventory.



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Do not be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed...

[Bluevoss]

Wes,

Downloaded all the components (Text, Pictures, Sprite1 & 2) and unzipped them into the scenario folder. Start the game and pict that scenario, then try the Alpha version (non domestic). The next thing I know, the game is dumping to desktop with dialogs reading "Virtual democracy not found in advance table".

Did I get a corruption in my download? If so, what do I need to do to fix this.

Thanks,



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Bluevoss-

[skorpion59]

Hey Wes, I hope you are saving a copy of this thread to your hard drive since it is getting rather long.