1.35 Cradle game repots request...

[hexagonian]

I have had a couple of reports about gamecrashes in Cradle 1.35. Both reports came at about the same time in the game (between 0AD and 600 AD) In looking at the gamefile that was sent to me, I cannot figure out why. In addition, the game crashed on a civ that was comperable to the other civs in tech and units. If it had been far ahead, this would of given me a possible area to look for a problem.

The difficult part of all this is, unlike many errors, this error cannot be easily pinpointed.

What I want is reports from players who have been playing Cradle 1.35 and if they have been able to get past the timeframe reported above. If this is occuring with great frequency, then the problem can be localized to either the Visible Wonder SLIC or something within Leonardos graphics package, since these were the additions to 1.35

Also requested are reports from 1.34 games - if those are proving to be stable, then I will recommend players to go back to 1.34. All you will need to do is unzip 1.34 over existing files, as that will overwrite all of the necessary 1.35 files.

1.35 games cannot be continued in 1.34 though.

[HuangShang]

i am currently on a cradle 1.35 game... forgot the year....

[child of Thor]

well i got 1.34b at the mo, but i am free this weekend so i don't mind having a go at 1.35. I hope it isn't either Visable wonders or Leonardos - they are nice things to have in a mod.

[stankarp]

I have been playing 133a mainly, gigantic maps with 9-12 opponents. In all games I occassionally get a crash in the first 200 odd turns, usually only 1 or 2. It happens when I execute a turn or save a game. Auto save gets me back to the start of thast turn although sometimes the science is mucked up and PW in progress seem to reset to zero and PW that were completed that turn, reset to build stage. I know this because I remember usine a freshly completed road durin the turn then when it crashes and I reload from autosave, the road is not there, just the icon indicating it is being built.

After about turn 200-250 crashes become more frequent, mainly in saving games. By the time I get to just after gunpowder, it can get to be a major problem.

In one game I reached a turn where EVERY time I executed end of turn, it crashed during the Brown civs move (cant remember who it was). I re did the turn several times, changed some moves slightly and it still happened. Eventually I tried re-loading slic and I was able to complete the turn but each subsequent turn, if I did not relaod slic the game crashed.

I am playing another epic at the moment and if I get the same problem at a particular point, I will send you the game file.

In the meantime, what does re-load slic do?

[Martin Gühmann]

stankarp are you usding DiploMod 3.5. Is in that turn after the crash a new civ created?

-Martin

[stankarp]

Hi Martin,

I have not taken notice of whether a new civ was created during that turn, there are no messages to that effect. I remember there used to one in CTP1. It would be nice if we could have the same message in cradle and that way we could also tell if this was possibly causing the problem.

However, having said that, the serious crashes later in the game mainly occur when I save the game, in fact nearly always when I save untill I get to infantry and cavalry, and then execution crash seems to start occuring.

What does re-load slic do?

[Martin Gühmann]

To relaodslic open the chat window by typing the apostrophe key (') and inter: /reloadslic

After reading your post I doubt that will help. Another question what are your system specificytions?

-Martin

[hexagonian]

Several questions...

What version of Cradle were you previously playing with that seemed to be more stable? I can say that 1.33 was very unstable, and was pulled soon after I posted it because of problems with the city Expansion code. (...You did say that you are using 1.33a) I would venture a guess that 1.34 is more stable (in 1.34, the problem SLICs were pulled from earlier versions), and may even be more stable than 1.35.

Are you using the Ultra-Gigantic map or the normal Gigantic map?

Did you change Maxplayer in userprofile.txt to a number greater than the Numplayer number in that file? I usually have Maxplayer at 24, and I also tend to play with the default number of 8 civs. Seems to cause less problems.

/reloadslic reloads all of the SLIC files - if you have changed a setting in the SLIC file, this will allow the game engine to activate that change. Theoretically, players can add/subtract SLICs during the course of the game, but I wouldn't recommend it.

New/altered SLICs mean new games to me...

[stankarp]

Answers to questions.

Martin. System specs, Pentium 3, 667 ghz, 128mb ram, windows 98. I only use reload slic, through the cheat mode/editor if I have had a save failure.

Hex. I am playing 133a, ultra gigantic, 10-14 AI, max player set higher to get break away civs (but cant remember how high).

I am playing 133a because I like the city enslavement option. I agree it is a bit unbalancing but it seems to me the AI gets plenty of bonuses anyway and I think you should get rewards for achieving things in the game. I regularly have small/medium AI coming at me with 3-6 stacks of 10-12 units and thats a big enough challenge, especially when they are nearly always fully updated units. I have never been first to iron working or barracks yet.

Martin does your city enslavement option work with cradle 135 ?

One thing the AI does in 133a is to strip cities of defences entirely to counterattack and retake a city it has lost. I found a good tactic is to take a city, heavily fortify and defend it while cavalry or seaborne units penetrate to the rear of the AI where many cities are left lightly or undefended. I would like to play 135 but with the enslavement option, but I think 1 slave for 1 pop point is a bit excessive, can the code be altered to one slave per 2 pop point?

I am just trying med mod at the moment after finally managing to figure out how to get it to run. My feeling is that it lacks the epic proportions to a good cradle not withstanding the errors in the units and library.

[hexagonian]

Stankarp

Based on your game parameters, I would guess that it could be a number of reasons why you are having crashes.

There have been reported crashes that may be linked with the Ultra-Gigantic option. Part of the problem is that Ultra-Gigantic has been a part of Cradle since pre-1.3, and since later versions of Cradle are merely updates, I cannot remove the option, since the file that activates the option is already in 1.3. There is a warning in one of the readmes that does tell of the possible problems with Ultra-Gigantic though.

The second problem in 1.33 is that there is a SLIC code in 1.33 that inadvertantly allows the AI to move garrison units. This was added in 1.31, and based on the upswing of reports of game crashes in 1.31-1.32, might have been the culprit, since 1.3 was very stable. Its just that it was hard to track down why the game was crashing. I'm still not sure that this was the cause of the problem - there were a lot of SLICs added in 1.31-1.33.

The real purpose for garrisons is to help the AI maintain a slave population, since the Cradle AI does enslave effectively. As you have noted, the Frenzy code forces the AI to move troops toward the human player - often stripping cities of defensive units. This has been an ongoing issue with Cradle (basically I'd like to get a better balance between offense/defense) but the pros of Frenzy (an aggressive AI) outweigh the cons, and no-one has been able to give me an alternative file. It is a tradeoff that I have accepted.

To some extent, I have been able to overcome this issue in my War of the Ring Scenario, but it is based on the ability to pre-place garrisons.

Back on topic though - without the garrisons, the cities will revolt and cause splinter civs. It is entirely possible that AI cities are revolting and because the MaxPlayer number is not set high enough that this is causing a conflict in the code. Even during the course of a game, you may not have the full allotment of splinter civs at one time, but the total amount of splinter civs that rise and fall may have exceeded the total MaxPlayer number (this is just speculation on my part)

Having an occasional splinter civ is not a bad thing, but having a lot may be screwing things up. And if you start out with a lot of civs at the beginning of the game, you compound the chances for the rise of splinter civs.

1.34 addressed this problem by deactivating the SLIC code that was affecting the garrisons (pirate) and raising the slave/military ratio to 20 (from 3). In limited playtests, splinter civs were down to a vey manageable level.

There were also unintended conflicts with the City Expansion/GoodMod codes in 1.33. Although possibly not causing gamecrashes, I pulled City Expansion because of these conflicts, and have added City Expansion to 1.35 as an addon, not as an official part - use at your own risk...

It might very well be stable, but I am no longer updating Cradle, so I cannot guarantee its stability.

The other major SLIC addition to 1.35 is the Visible Wonder code, which may be the culprit in the reported gamecrashes for 1.35, since there has not been a great deal of reports on the stability of that file.

In my mind, both the City Expansion and Visible Wonders codes are nice concepts, but they fall more along the lines of adding aesthetics and atmosphere to the game, and are not critical to the game itself.

At this point in time, I would guess that 1.34 should be more stable than 1.33 or 1.35, but I have not had any reports from players who have played 1.34, so I canot say this with certainty.

If the main feature that is holding you back from playing 1.34 is the Raze city option, there is an easy fix to this. Simply replace the file found in 1.34...
CRAI_KillCityOption.slc
with the file found in 1.33...
CRAI_KillCityOption.slc

This should not cause any problems. Unfortuantely, I do not think that your current game is salvageable.

And I'm still interested in what versions of Cradle seemed stable to you, based on your game parameters. If you had been playing 1.3 through 1.33 without any problems, what was your setup. (map size, number of civs, etc)

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by stankarp
Hex. I am playing 133a, ultra gigantic, 10-14 AI, max player set higher to get break away civs (but cant remember how high).

Well that could be a problem, I played a GoodMod game on a gigantic map with a lot of land the AI was conquereing a lot of land and had a lot of difficuilties with happiness management. However they were nearly before taking my only Barbarian city, unfortunatly. I can hardly switch my production witout a crash. But I think it is not your problem as you would notice a dramatic slow down before.

Originally posted by stankarp
Martin does your city enslavement option work with cradle 135 ?

Of course it is possible. And if you think one poo == one slave like in the default game is a little nit overpowered you could try the latest version of that code available here in one thread of Apolyton. With that code you could lose some cities. I think I should submit it soon to the database, as noone complaints so far, unfortunatly the only way to deep test it is to integrate it into GoodMod.

-Martin

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by Martin Gühmann
Well that could be a problem, I played a GoodMod game on a gigantic map with a lot of land the AI was conquereing a lot of land and had a lot of difficuilties with happiness management. However they were nearly before taking my only Barbarian city, unfortunatly. I can hardly switch my production witout a crash. But I think it is not your problem as you would notice a dramatic slow down before.
-Martin

This may not be a problem with Cradle though, because there is a government.txt file specifically set up for Ultra-gigantic maps (more city allowance for caps). However, this may have to be finetuned (make the caps even higher), since I had adjusted CRA_strategies.txt to coax more city building from the AI.

[Martin Gühmann]

Actual I played with UG setup of GoodMod on a land mass gigantic map. That teaches me to use Dales settings again.

-Martin

[stankarp]

I am starting to follow the gamedata files a bit better and have already started a 1.35 epic, ultra gig, very hard, barbs max, 11 ai, max player 16, and altered the city enslavement file (searched through 1.33 until i found it). Included city expansion mod. See how I go.

I have played about 12 1.33a epics, only finished 1 though because if time commitments. I had to leave it for a while and started again rather than try to pick up the peices. Settings similar to above. I found that if I had more than 11 AI, later in the game my 667 mghz processor took up to 20 minutes to execute a turn. With 11 AI, later there are about say 5 civs, turn execution is a tolerable 2-3 minutes.

I like the aesthetics of visible wonders and city expansion, add a real nice new dimension to the game along with the wonder units. Just love Charlemagne and Mohammed. I use them to invade civs later in the game with a small army while I threaten across the main frontier. They gradually recruit up a good army and gut the rear of the ai empire, and bingo, the AI impoldes under the pressure. The best I got was 28 AI units disband in one turn because it ran out of gold I presume.

[stankarp]

Martin was right.

I started a new 1.35 with ultrta gig map, 11 AI, max player 24. Only once after over 150 turns so far did an AI splinter into a new civ. The same turn I tried to save and it crashed. I reloaded from autosave and without making any moves, tried to save the auto save file as a normal file and it crashed a straight away.

A few turns later I saved it fine.

So Martin was right, the turn that a new AI is created by splitting off from an existing AI then you cant save. I did not try to save next turn, but about 3 turns later it saved OK.

[itsamic]

I had a similar problem with a "normal" game, means no mod installed, but changed the map size to 200x400. At about round 350 it was not possible to save via the menu nor >shift + s<. Only a quick save was possible. A reload of the game was not helpful. About 25 turns later a normal save worked w/o problems. There was no civ splitting or something similar that could affect this problem...??

[hexagonian]

I'm curious to see if this type of thing is happening on the normal-sized maps.

[stankarp]

Normal size maps are for wooses.

Cradle is bigger than Ben Hur and should be played that way, ultra gig maps, very hard, max barbs and plenty of opposition.

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by stankarp
Normal size maps are for wooses.
Cradle is bigger than Ben Hur and should be played that way, ultra gig maps, very hard, max barbs and plenty of opposition.

Guess I'm a wuss then...

[stankarp]

"Guess I'm a wuss then..."(hex).

Seems like it

[itsamic]

I never had such a problem on a normal sized map, but on a extra large map w/o any other modifications this problem seems also not to appear. OK, sometimes a crash, but I'm afraid this is normal whether the game is moded or not. I had some strange errors with diplomod before I set debugslic to no (array out of range or something like this) and I'm not sure if there could be a problem with diplomod and a higher number of AI (22).

[stankarp]

I just remembered that the original CTP2 game was shipped with a save game bug. Patch 1.1 was issued fairly quickly and one of the first things it fixed was a "save game crash bug".

After thinking about it, as far as I can remmeber, when Cradle crashes for me it occurs differently, ie. when I press save game. With the pre patch original game, the save files were corrupted. However, I mentioned one cradle big game that crashed repeatedly during turn execution phase. The curious thing is that the crashes occurred about the same time as the original game crashes, ie, just after you got gunpowder, cavalry and canons.

I get the occassional crash for no apparent reason, but that happens with all games with windows, ie freezes or crashes just out of the blue occassionally.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

really abandon slavery!

With the building of the emancipation act, slavery should be abandoned, as are all slavers/slavemasters and all existing slaves are converted into regular citizens. unfortunately that doesn't count for enslaving wonder units. so if some of them are still alive and kicking around, you will find yourself rather soon with a bunch of slaves with the only way to turn them into regular citizens is to overthrow town authorities before, which is rather unsatisfactory. is there some way to give the wonderunits the "pow" ability and steal them the slavery ability via slic?

[hexagonian]

Here's my take on why the slavery setup, as it stands in Cradle, is actually a good thing and reflects history and the present world...

It can be argued from a historical standpoint that slavery did not end with Emancipation. First of all the actual proclaimation did not resonanate with the South - it was seen as a worthless scrap of paper. Slavery ended because the North won the war...

The purpose of the document was tied into ulterior and pragmatic motives as much as the noble purpose of restoring human dignity. The North used the Proclaimation more as a weapon to possibly incite slave rebellions in the South and thus weaken the infrastructure and military of the South.

And we have seen that slavery has been in effect in different forms throughout the 20th century. The one that jumps to mind is the the treatment of Jews and various other races that were exploited and then killed by Germany during WW2. This, to me, is slavery of the worst kind because these people had no rights and eventually were worked to death or destroyed. They were not POWs, but citizens who were denied even their basic rights - robbed of their possessions and their dignity. The sad thing is that I can point to numerous other instances where this still goes on today.

To me, the civ-style games are not only about defeating the AI, but also are about creating a history that is determined by the choices you make. If you do not like slavery at all, don't build units that enslave and try to win with those parameters. At the same time, if you feel compelled to stop slaving after Emancipation, disband the units that enslave, or retire them to some nice villa in the countryside as an antique of a more barbaric time.

What I find interesting is the decision to continue slaving even after Emancipation is completed. It says something about the desire in mankind to continue to exploit a situation even after the moral high ground has been established. As a player, I would find it tempting to continue slaving because of the payoff. I have not played Cradle up to that point, but I've thought about it as an interesting dilemma. Sure its a game, but it is a reflection of human nature, and a reminder that as much as we may argue against it, we may have not progressed as far as we think we have from a moral standpoint.

As for the revolting city/recapture/citizen exploit, the decision is up to you to use it or not.

The Cradle setup as it officially stands now, will not change. But feel free to alter your own setup.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

Originally posted by hexagonian
What I find interesting is the decision to continue slaving even after Emancipation is completed.

well, it wasn't a real decision, just didn't think about what the wonder units still in some offensive stacks would do after the wonder is built and was rather suprised what happened. but i believe you are referring to the truly sad history and state of the world (given the fact that slavery is still in use in some parts of what we call the third world, even much more, if we don't use that expression in a narrow meaning ), not to my style of gameplay.

Originally posted by hexagonian
As for the revolting city/recapture/citizen exploit, the decision is up to you to use it or not.

well, was only exploited accidentally.

Originally posted by hexagonian
The Cradle setup as it officially stands now, will not change. But feel free to alter your own setup.

i'm already experimenting a bit. in my current game (which i just decided to have become boring after owning about half of the world, being best friends with everybody except 2 dumb ai-nations who continue plundering trade routes while i continue conquering their lands) i tried out cityexpansion, the new updater, martins new city capture slic and a few minor changes of myself. all of them work fine but need some finetuning for cradle, for eachother (especially citycapture vs. cityexpansion). which brings me to another question: while i'm tinkering around a little, i try to keep most changes in line with your truly great mod: how do you calculate the update costs for units? is there a formula or something?

[Peter Triggs]

Zaphod,

What do you think about killing off the Wonder Units that have the 'VictoryEnslavement' flag when the Emancipation Act is completed?

Also, if you're adding the updater code to Cradle, you might find the following attachment useful. It doesn't refer to Cradle's units but it should be fairly clear what's going on.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

Originally posted by Peter Triggs
Zaphod,

What do you think about killing off the Wonder Units that have the 'VictoryEnslavement' flag when the Emancipation Act is completed?

killing the brave heros of my nation? the people might kill me and elect a new leader

Originally posted by Peter Triggs

Also, if you're adding the updater code to Cradle, you might find the following attachment useful. It doesn't refer to Cradle's units but it should be fairly clear what's going on.

thanks, will have a look at it right now

[hexagonian]

Update costs, for the most part, were 1:1 - (Gold Update Cost = Production Cost of new unit)

[Peter Triggs]

killing the brave heros of my nation? the people might kill me and elect a new leader

I meant with SLIC. Another possibility is to give them a fixed life-span (say 50 turns).

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

well, i was thinking about updating them into a nonenslaving version triggered by the building of the emancipation act.