Apolyton Tile File Request

[Dale]

I'd like to put in a request for additions to the TileFile.

I believe that the gap between roads and railways is desperately long. Also, it's something I want to put into Ages of Man.

I propose a new set of tiles called "Highways". Basically, they are the road TI's, but black and a little thicker. Paved roads (by stone) were around in the Roman times, and it seems stupid that the only "road" you can build right through the game is a windy dirt track.

So vote away! I vote YES! We need "Highway" tiles.

Join me Son's of CTP2!

[mapfi]

That banana option is very attractive... but yes, I'm with you on this.
So what movement bonus do you want to give those highways? One thing that always bothered me is the simple 1/3 movement for roads anywhere. That windy track through the mountains can't possibly let you move as fast as on the plains. Could that be changed somehow?

[Pedrunn]

Would be nice if you had a grphic for us to compare. But I do believe this is big since i dont believe we can do this without replacing the original graphics (At least this is what i think i may be wrong though)

[Martin Gühmann]

First I would try to put them after the undersea tunnels in the same pattern like the other ones.

-Martin

[Pedrunn]

But that is impossible since the 600 series starts at 608 and not 600 as it should to have this as a addition.
The Apol tile file does have all starting 600 numbers (608-624) filled. So i went test with it though setting railroads number to 600 intead of 300. The game crash when it should appear in the map. So there may be a hope after all since the game does try to look for numbers in the 600 series. Maybe the 700 or 800 or upper may work after all but it needs to start from *00 to *17.

[SMIFFGIG]

Mapfi
I agreee with you about the road on mountains and road on Plains giving the same movement bonus. Little silly (LOL but not compared to Civ3 where railroad alows you to move indefinitly LOL)

Dale
Good idea, my vote was yes. Who will make the graphics though

And is there anyone out there who has got time and is really good at making or adding terrain graphics, I gave it a go and just got stuck everywhere


JUST IMAGINE CTP1 TILES, MIXED IN WITH CTP2 TILES

CtP1 mountains where way better in the fact they towered over everything else and the forests and jungle looked good too

[Dale]

I hope this turns out a possibility, cuz I'd like to have highways in Ages of Man.

As to movement, it'd be fairly simple to change the MoveCost value of each terrain type for roads in tileimp.txt. I'd already sussed this bit out.

Highway movement, I propose this: roads would be 50% movement (two squares per movement point), and highways be the current 33% movement (three squares per movement point). Well, that's what I want for AOM.

The graphics can be simple, the current road with an extra pixel width each side to show "wider", and a different colour, maybe dark grey? As for who's the best graphic artist here? Hmm..... I dunno..... *looks at Hexagonia*

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

well, talking about infrastructure:

what i'm always missing is the ability to build canals!

those were also built in ancient times, though not as big as the panama canal for instance.

but i guess that would require a field which is both sea and land terrain. is that possible?

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Zaphod Beeblebrox
well, talking about infrastructure:

what i'm always missing is the ability to build canals!

those were also built in ancient times, though not as big as the panama canal for instance.

but i guess that would require a field which is both sea and land terrain. is that possible?

Techincally building channels could be simulated by terraforming the terrain into an aquatic terrain type. But to have real channels would be better. In this way we would have an equivalent of the undersea tunnels on land.

-Martin

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

its offtopic but it reminds me of what a friend and i did to the original civ-game (yes, THAT game): enabling settlers to terraform sea to land. it worked fine, though underseatunnels are better of course

[Immortal Wombat]

800+ should work in the file. Only problem being the comparativly large numbers of images needed.

Shouldn't be too difficult though.

[J Bytheway]

Originally posted by mapfi
One thing that always bothered me is the simple 1/3 movement for roads anywhere. That windy track through the mountains can't possibly let you move as fast as on the plains. Could that be changed somehow?

Another chance for a plug - I changed this in my CTP Mars mod, river halved square movement, road divided it by 3, rail by 5, maglev by 10 (IIRC). This worked out pretty well, I think.

[Pedrunn]

800+ should work in the file. Only problem being the comparativly large numbers of images needed.

Shouldn't be too difficult though.

Did you tested???

[Immortal Wombat]

Do I ever? no, I didn't. Previously I had never tried over 727. Maybe more won't work at all.

I'll test it later. Could be fun.

[Pedrunn]

I'll test it later. Could be fun.

[Immortal Wombat]

Maybe fun wasnt the best word. Interesting certainly.

My findings were thus:

1. You can have 3 'Level's of roads in the PW placement box (duh...) so I assume Dale was planning to remove maglevs.

2. By default, roads are Class:Road, level 1; railroads, level 2, maglevs, level 3

3. Even when you have no Maglev TI, any improvement with Class:road, Level 3, shows up as a maglev

The problem seems to be to render Maglevs ineffective without removing them.

So (as far as I can see) there are two, maybe 3 different solutions:

1. Set Maglevs to OceanRoad level 2 (unusuable, but this doesnt matter) and Highways to Road level 3 - doesnt work, highways still show up as maglevs

2. Set Highways to Road level 4. Even if this was placeable by conventional means, nothing I have tried with road level 4 has even shown up on the map

3. Remove Maglevs from Tile File, replace with Highways.

This I have tried with great success. It is possible to render maglevs completely absent from the game, and include a third "Road" TI - Highways.

Unfortunately, this would mean all ApoTileFile-using mods would also be devoid of maglevs.

So AoM would need a separate Tile File, and the stupid complications that the ATF was set up to avoid would begin because of it.

This is however, the only workable solution I have found.



Incidentally, Pedrunn, I have got the highways to show up using 700+ and 800+ TileID numbers, so I don't quite know what happened there...

My test graphics:

[Immortal Wombat]

oh, the screwed up centre tile on the right is because I had the last two images the wrong way around in the file, this is now corrected.

[Martin Gühmann]

Did you try to use instead 500 800 in the tileimp.txt for the maglevs?

-Martin

[Immortal Wombat]

Oh yeah, that would be the other solution. Switch maglevs to where Road level 4 would be (800+) and have highways as Road level 3 (500+).

This would render maglevs unusable in other mods...

[Dale]

IW:

Okay, here's what I wanted to do in AOM. I see railroads as something that should be completely seperate from roads. Therefore, I wanted to setup that railroads cannot be built on roads. Another thing I wanted to do was have railway stations in cities, and then SLIC automatically links the two cities with railroads (take it out of the player's control). So essentially, I don't want the railroad in the tile box. But to do all this, I need an upgrade to roads, hence my "highways" idea. Oh, I wasn't even considering maglevs, so that one's not important.

But if this is going to cause problems (two tilefiles, etc) then I'll just rethink it.

[Immortal Wombat]

sounds cool

Unless anyone can come up with another idea, I don't think adding another 'Road' tileset will work, without being a replacement of some kind, forcing another tile file

[SMIFFGIG]

IMO I no way think you should take out maglevs, no way or any other road kind for that matter

P.S. I really do like that idea of yours dale, where you build rail stations and they auto join. However this would have to be with a 20 square radius or something cause i think it would be silly if they connected across the whole map if you know what I mean

Oh and I love your idea of the support costs outside your terrain being really high. But ive mentioned this before and its offtopic.

EDIT:
Is it just me or do people around here really not care for the modern and future ages in CtP2. Personally I really love them and always look forward to getting to them (which I rarely do)???

[Immortal Wombat]

I think the (which I rarely do) but that puts modders off. There is little point pouring effort into the endgame if people go and win my the renaissance all the time

[SMIFFGIG]

(which I rarely do)

No, I meant this cause I rarely get time to finish the game and more commonly I get killed before I get there.
People do complain about the AI, but I with frenzy always get slaughtered by the AI

P.S. Just remembered (off topic) a thing I SOOO hated it civ3 was the way the AI colonized the world by like 100BC on gigantic map

anyway thats what I mean

[Dale]

SMIFFGIG:

My opinion on the future techs is they are a waste. I'm a history fan. I want to re-write history. CTP2, IMO, does a crap job on future anyway. If I want to play future I load up SMAC.

Just one little modders opinion. And since I'm writing the mod, you get what I tell you.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

ok, just to say something again:

i'm interested in at least modern times as much as in the "historic" part, though one really can argue where the line is, if there is a point where one can be drawn at all, which i much doubt.
and i would also be interested in the future, but both ctp1 and 2 rather suck there.
actually they even aren't very good in our times. to put the focus on the military aspect (though i remember reading this a couple of times before and guess it has been written alotmore often in those nearly two years i hadn't been at apolyton)
in reality you just don't go (to just pick one branch) from fighter to jet fighter to stealth fighter to space fighter or something like that. there are is an uncountable amount of small improvements or completely new ideas beeing developed all over the time in the engines, in the aerodynamics, evasive capabilities, in the fuelconsumption in the countermeasures against radar detection, on board weapons systems are always developing to higher accuracy and so on and so on. it really should make a difference whether you arm the same plane with lots of ww2 bombs which only possess the ability to react with gravity and explode when hitting something hard (or not, there are still alot of failed bombs lieng around from that time) or with a harm or a "daisycutter" or laserlinked "smart" bombs.

and this is true for every aspect of warfare, and of course for civilian aspects as well, i mean for instance at some you get public transits to reduce your cities pollutions, but it makes a difference as well if you use steampowered trains, electric trains or busses (though of course the question arises, where the electricity comes from, in most of the last decades from that big coal plant on the citys edge, so that actually just moves the highest density of pollution to another spot) or those cool tubes featured in futurama

i guess the same insufficiencies are true for the earlier parts of the game, though we (or at least i) don't notice them as much, because these times are more alien to us.

the question about how long to play(talking about vanilla game experience here): until its boring or really useless, the first arrives normally in late modern/early future times when you just got more cities, better tech and better infrastructure than anybody else and just don't want to waste some other hours to conquer all those badly defended underdeveloped regions, the other one (rather seldom) when i got a really bad starting position, too long endangled in useless fights with dumb neighbours who just have the benfit of starting with more cities and better tech than yourself and at some point i see its just only a matter of time before somebody finishes me off only because he got handed everything on a silvertablet. if this occurs its normally somewhat between the late ancient time/early medieval age (for me) and early modern age to them.

which brings me to the point of what kind of ai i'd really like to see: not a frenzy one, because its just dull, if everybody hates you though you haven't done anything except perhaps defending succuesfully against the same warmongering bastards that have always attacked the others, who now hate me for freeing the world of that threat.

i want an ai which only seldom goes to war, but if so, with real effort.

what i really dislike is that, especially when playing with more than 8 civs, soon almoszt everybody will be on war or in a pre-/post-/between-war state if mistrust and hate for most of the time with almost everybody else. i never saw something like a real coalition or pact with states abc against defg and maybe some others outside of that system or not totally fit into. but what am i telling? i guess most of you have the same complaints.... perhaps i just should try to get some sleep