I also really like the idea of tying certain special units (e.g. the legion) to city improvements or wonders. It is something which gives you a sense of achievement and separates you from the other civs. Perhaps the building of this type of unit could be a feat of wonder as well?

Btw, at this point, I think I am going to post two separate portions of the Med mod II. One portion will simply have all the proposed new units for people to look at, ala Harlan's WWII pack. The second will be the first beta, and will contain all the changes to terrains, TIs, improvements, growth, etc. There will be more than enough in these areas to evaluate without adding the units as well.

Check out the "Add Lakes and Beaches" Thread. Someone over there has figured out how to add or remove beach Terrain tiles as a Terraforming option. This might be a good thing to add to your MedMod2. Especially if you can teach the AI how to use it correctly.

This seems to resolve the problem of not being able to build canals or to reclaim land from the sea a la the Netherlands. The only catch with this fix is that it does not work with rivers correctly. But if you don't try to add land at the end of a river or a beach where a river already is, you shouldn't see any problems. Even if you do, apparently the problem is merely estetic in nature anyway.

Regards,

About terrain, I agree that changing one value is best, but I also think there needs to be some relative changes on top of that. I'd like to see what should be the really poor terrain less attractive in relation to the good stuff. So both you and the AI don't feel inclined to build to cover every single tile to beat the other civs to it. And if someone does build a city in a totally stupid spot, it should starve to death. For instance, have glacier actually have negative 5 food, so if you build a city on a large field of glacier it should die in short order. Historically, there has never been even a village built on glacier- it would soon be ground into bits since glaciers are rivers of ice. Duh. Nor should one build any kind of tile improvement on that terrain- its a slowly moving river of ice crushing all in its path! Other places like Desert should have food growth of 0. Its a friggin' Desert for crying out loud!

I have also reduced the env score (the sum of which has to be at least 600 for the 21 squares around the city) of beach and other terrains to match their reduced production. For Beach, the reduction is from 90 to 50, which means the AIs will be much less likely to choose terrain with nothing else going for it other than coastline.

Lastly, I have increased the max number of citizens by 2 for each radius size, and I will look at changing any other numbers so that a pop only gathers an average of one tile's resources.

On another topic which hasn't been covered in a while; building costs and effects.
I have set Food, Commerce, Science, Production, Crime, and Pollution improvements to cost 1 gold per pop for maintenance, and set the upkeep cost to zero. The effects of these improvement types I have set to a uniform 20%, except for Pollution, which I set to 40%. The construction costs I have generally left alone.
This means that the maintenance cost and commerce effects of a Bazaar and a Bank are going to be the same, but the Bank will cost more to build. Ideally this increased cost will parallel the growth in produciton capacity of cities as the game progresses. This is going to have a huge effect on gameplay and choices, and we will have to do a lot of studying to balance this new approach, an approach which I feel is much closer to the real world than the old system.

I want to get the militia triggers into the mod for the initial release, since not having to build that initial garrison unit will have significant effects on game flow. The other triggers can wait for now until we get these domestic issues adjusted.

Finally, I will adjust the goals in the strategies.txt to bring about some improved AI behavior in exploration and military conduct, among other areas.

There will be no new units nor changes to unit settings in this initial release.

Best case scenario would be for farms close to water to produce more than those not near water.

I am posting so soon becauseI have been working all night on some things. Did I mention that my exams are finally over, and I am going on a trip Saturday morning which will probably last at least a week, during which time I will not be able to play Ctp2 or upload graphics files to my new, soon-to-be-announced website? (No, I don't really expect you to answer.)

I have been working on the citysize files, which were really screwed up. If some of you have been keeping track of city production beyond 18 workers, you may have noticed some readings which didn't seem to make sense. Well, that's because they in fact didn't make sense. The number of tiles in the city's vision, which should have matched the number of tiles being worked, did not in fact match each other.
Basically, the programmers forgot to include the size 3 settings, and you went from working 21 tiles with 18 workers, which was how it should be, to working 45 tiles with 32 workers. The max worker settings were messed up from size 3 on as well. I find it very hard to believe that the settings were intentional, even though there was something of a pattern to it.
I remembered from the beta-testing that there used to be no size 0 that flashed when a city was founded. I think that the screw-up might stem from that late addition.
Anyway, here are the new pop ranges for the various city radiuses:
1-8, 9-20, 21-36, 37-44, 45-56, 57-68

The max number of tiles worked for each radius is one more than the max pop, so that each pop collects an average of one tile's rsources, plus the city tile.
Ideally, it would go 20-32-44, but there is a hitch in the geometry that can't be avoided at that point. You can go 20-28-44 if you want. Any opinions on this?

I wonder about your city bonuses. In my playing, I've done just the opposite. I've lowered the food while leaving prod and gold higher. The reasoning being that if land has a building on it, its hard to grow food there. However, cities by default will create a certain amount of production and commerce just from daily activities. Plus I found that when I lowered prod even the slightest, it took forever to build anything unless the city was in a great location. And lowering the gold caused huge delays in discovering new advances.

BTW, are you going to include the terraforming to/from beaches? I havent had any bugs yet, except that when first completed, if under fog, it'll look funny, but looks perfect as soon as a unit removes the fog.

I haven't looked at adding Gold, Production, and Food to goods in CTP2 yet, but in CTP1, you make these changes in the Terrain.txt. Under the Good setting in the Terrain.txt file you go to the Good for the Terrain Type and add the EVN Gold = whatever. This is the way it worked in CTP1. You could also do the same thing with Production and Food. Again, like I have said, I have not checked this in CTP2 yet. If may not work this way there.

This game will be a great game if we fix these issues. CTP 1 had "to many problems" and CTP 2 have problems.

I think the thing that would make CTP 2 really great is play balancing and thanks to the files this should be much easier than CTP-1.

I have incorporated your terrain fixes and seem to work well. I have disable specialist except entertainers and scientist. And the growth of cities is under control.

Some ideas/questions
If you change the value of water tiles wont we just have inland cities for the AI?

The Units file needs a complete overhaul. I realised another important factor thats the upkeep cost this cost need to be balanced. The middle game with musketeers and cannons seems to cost to much in upkeep so the AI can't have enough units. There need to be diffrences in the upkeep cost. Infantry needs to be realy cheap compared to tanks/fighters/ships. So defensive can be cheap. That way the AIs defensive side will not dominate there production.

Although offensive war needs to be expensive. We could have higher start cost because this can be lowered for the AI in diffdb. The AI needs more units.

One more idea. There is definetly hope for the AI they can attack just needs to do it more often. And seems they favor to attack other computer players we need to fix that.

Diplomacy somebody really needs to fix this area of the game. There are a system its not finished. They definetly got rushed by activison here.

There are now diffrent responses in the files when rejecting not used. There are slic code now commented to change advances and so on.

I really hope they fix this.

/Mathias

quote: Originally posted by Daniel Frappier on 12-11-2000 10:16 PM Hi, Taken from DiffDB (Impossible) ---------------------------------------------------- AI_MIN_BEHIND_PERCENT 1.8 AI_MAX_BEHIND_PERCENT 0.8 AI_MIN_AHEAD_PERCENT 2.0 AI_MAX_AHEAD_PERCENT 3.0

Daniel (and Wes),

I think you're incorrect there. The way you've explained it, there is no need for 4 parameters; min-behind, max-behind, min-ahead and max-ahead. Two of these would suffice to create the effect you explain.

I believe on the impossible level, if AI is 1.8 times better than human, bonus applied is
AI_MIN_BEHIND_GOLD_ADJUSTMENT 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0
while if it is .8 times as good as human, bonus is
AI_MAX_BEHIND_GOLD_ADJUSTMENT 1.5 1.5 1.3 1.3 1.1

In between these two (0.8 and 1.8), there is (quote from DiffDB)
"scale values linearly between max-min when amount behind/ahead are between min-max"

Thus, there is plenty of bonus applied to the AI as it is without giving it even more bonus. Of course if we do give the AI more bonus, it WILL look better!

Currently they improve the Food Production the same in any square they are allowed in. You get the same +10 or whatever.

I've been thinking about changing that to give a Farm in Grassland a bigger increase in Food over a Farm in Plains. And if you continue to allow Farms in Desert, they'd give an even smaller increase.

The game does this with Mines already, I'd like to give Farms the same treatment.

Something like

Farm, Grassland +15, Plains +10, Desert +5 food.

This would help the cities built on the good grasslands areas.

quote: Originally posted by marc420 on 12-16-2000 09:25 PM One thing about FARMS that I've been thinking about changing. Currently they improve the Food Production the same in any square they are allowed in. You get the same +10 or whatever. I've been thinking about changing that to give a Farm in Grassland a bigger increase in Food over a Farm in Plains. And if you continue to allow Farms in Desert, they'd give an even smaller increase. The game does this with Mines already, I'd like to give Farms the same treatment. Something like Farm, Grassland +15, Plains +10, Desert +5 food. This would help the cities built on the good grasslands areas. marc

Yep, you are very correct. I even went so far as to modify travel times using roads and railroads. If you are in mountains, there's no way you'll travel as fst as on flat terrain. Same thing for rivers. Rivers in grasslands altho beneficial, are no where near as beneficial as it is in a desert.

I made so many changes that I had to put together a spreadsheet to tell me what improvements had what effects on which terrains. And thus, I've now created more useable documentation on CtP2 than Activision has.

quote: Originally posted by GAMEOVER on 12-17-2000 01:29 AM Any way we could get a cannal build feature? I think this would add imensly to the strategy in the game. I also agree that the diplomacy and trade portions of the game need to be revamped. Trade is just too simple and insignificant. I can amass millions(exageration) without it so why even bother. Diplomacy seems to be flawed too, as so many have already pointed out so i woulndt go into it. Lastly, would it be possible to create a colony in a mod? Instead of completly destroy a civ, could we force them into submisson and thus a pact where we get all their science, trade, can take any citeies remaining, etc. LIke in Alpha centauri. I think this is adds a whole other dimension to the game. Thanks for the time. 1

It depends on your definition of canal. You can turn land in beach (http://apolyton.net/forums/Forum44/HTML/000167.html?10). Then i changed it so that roads (http://apolyton.net/forums/Forum44/HTML/000189.html?4) can be built over beaches. Not as clean cut as I'd like, but it works well, altho you have to wait for certain techs first.

I have been scribbling some numbers on a notepad to try and figure out how the new improvement costs based on pop are going to affect the game. It's obvious that they are going to at least triple the current costs of improvements' maintenance, since the cost per pop has to be an integer, rather than a fraction as I initially intended.
I need someone to implement this new cost structure as I detailed it above, and play a quick game, and compare the percentage of income going to buildings with that in plain games.
If costs eat up too much commerce, then we may have to raise the effect of commerce improvements, which may neccessitate changes to science improvements and rush-buy rates.
If you could also note the percent going to wages, I would appreciate it. I am fairly certain that the wage rate will need to be reduced from my earlier 8 to about 6 on average, but I can only guess at this point.

I spent Friday night working on the new unit values for land units. I thought that having the Med mod 4 chart as a guide would help, but it didn't much since I changed the ratio that costs increase from half the stat increase to 2/3rd's of the stat increase. And when you factored in Armor in the last two eras, it complicated things even more.
All the units are pretty well balanced in relation to one another, we will have to see if the settings are right for cities' production capabilities. Generally speaking, costs are lower while upkeep is higher.

I am happy to hear Colorme's comments about the diffdb, though I am disheartened that these bonuses still don't seem to be enough for the AIs to give a decent game. I had them playing with almost no bonuses in the Med mod, and giving great competition. We can look at this after all the other proposed changes have been tested.

AW, if you could make a thread detailing what you changed in the TI area, I would be interested in seeing it.