Trust me, the trade values do always drop upon reload. You just weren't looking hard enough.

If you need any more convincing, please visit http://members.aol.com/davidwamurray/tradebug.htm

Another terraforming related issue: would it be possible to make 2 kinds of forest? One that could only be terraformed to grassland and one that could only be terraformed to plains, that would make more sense than the current setup. If you cut down the trees, the soil underneath it is determined in advance, you can't just choose it. I don't know how well this would work when generating random maps though...

Harlan brings up another point though: the city limit. The more cities a player has, the more powerful he is. But I hardly ever see the AI go over the limit while the human doesn't mind, esp. not since the punishment for this in the MedMod is (deliberately) fairly low. This setup may be more realistic but it hurts the AI. I for one have at times had empires with up to about 25 cities where 10 was the limit (you'll need to invest a lot in happiness but it's quite possible), but you'll never see the AI do this, 13 is the most I ever saw (and that was due to exceptional circumstances).

Harlan, I think you need to build Castles first before you can build a Bastion, could that explain it?
Glad you liked the diplomacy tips though, now I know that my diplomatic successes aren't just all in my head

David,
Wow, you created a DL just to tell us that, you really needed to get that off your chest! (You could have just emailed Wes ) I don't know why you got banned in the first place but I hope the mods were lenient on you for that...

Also, I'll check the embassy code tonight. I didn't realise there was something going on there. I haven't changed it since it was working last, so it might be a conflict with all three scripts somewhere. Will check it out though.

Wes I did the research for these guys, however they do not show up in the building queue.

I think that we have now had the best discussions here in last 4 days. Many, many posts and all are full of good arguments!

Couple of comments about your discussions.

Terraforming:
If AI builds always farms on grassland and mines on plains and that can not be corrected(it should!!!) then I would propose that AI would terraform some of its grasslands to plains or some plains to grasslands. I suppose this would destroy mines/farms on these squares. Then he maybe would build new mines on new plains and new farms on new grasslands. (I suppose that squares have to be empty that AI would build improvement on that square).

No settelers to mountain:
There should not be goody huts in mountain too(I am not sure is it possible now). If I would found settler or city from goody hut we would have problems. Settler could not move or there is a city in the mountain even it should not be possible

My own comments:

I saw that there is now a file MM_const.txt. I have used modswapper and I saved medpack to be the used mod. Then I checked const.txt. AI_GOAL_TIME_SLICE, AI_MAX_TIME_SLICE and AI_TOTAL_TIME_SLICE values are not changed(increased) in const.txt. But in MM_const.txt they are increased. So how does modswapper work? If I start medpack using modswapper does it copy mm_const.txt over const.txt when I am strating game?

What I mean is that would those new(increased) AI_GOAL_TIME_SLICE, AI_MAX_TIME_SLICE and AI_TOTAL_TIME_SLICE values from MM_const.txt be used in medpack definitely even the const.txt says that those values are not changed.

I had an embassy with green AI and I checked intelligence screen. There were in third line a text: "Embassy requred to access priviledged info". But I had an embassy and I could see all his infos even that text was there. A little thing that would need to be corrected.

Funny thing. As I said before AI-AI relations were always or There were actually 2 wars ongoing. AI1 against AI2 and AI3 against the AI2 again. So AI2 had two wars ongoing. And AI2 was diplomacy-minded peacemaker

I had an ally and I built forbidden city. That ally had an noble next to my city. That noble tries every turn establish embassy with me and he fails every time Should there be some kind of check that if I(destination nation) do have forbidden city that is not obsoleted he would not try to establish embassy.

Siege engine's icon is too big! It is ugly on map. It's size could be reduced about 20%

It would be good that last changes in docs would be written in different color. For example the last changes would be in red etc. Now you have to read all docs through every time you get new version.

Is it ok that when I am using spy and he is captured but that spy still stays next to AI city?!? Quite stupid?

It is quite stupid that slaves always goes to the nearest city. Or am I right? That city grows fast when I am in big war against AI. And when slaves will be someday free my city will be in big problems! In my opinion slaves could diverge for example to three nearest cities. So one city would not grow too much with slaves.

I have war agaisnt AI and I took three of his cities. He have not done anything! I have not seen any of his units(of course there were defenders in his cities) trying to come and capture his cities back. And one of his city I captured was his capitol! This is the same subject that was discussed a lot in last days.

first of all, i think there is an error in the historical gl field for the temple of karnak.
second, the new tech tree and units look great! i love it that you can have a noble early on
third, playing on hard level with 8 civs on a normal map, i dont get much of a resistance. i havent had many attacks from an ai, but there are wars between the ai's with mamny cities changing hands.
fourth, on the diplomatic side, it's fun to finally see the ai sending you messages asking you to stop researching something. i would still like to see the ai doing more counter proposals, even impossible ones

I also have pushed the idea of two types of forest, one that turns to plains and one that turns to grassland. Have them look the same, so you don't know which one will turn to what. That would also tie well into the AI's need to have both grassland and plains to have a balanced production.

Also Locutus, ditto on your city limit comments. In the two games I've played, 11 is the most I've ever seen from the AI. I think they need to be more expansionist generally (exploring too).

Your diplomatic tips definitely helped.

Janilxx,
Regarding settlers on a mountain, I think in the unlikely event you got a settler on a mountain from a goody hut, the settler would instantly die. So the only problem would be if you got a city. This could be solved by only giving the settler option, and not the instant city option. Such cities are almost always in a lame spot anyways.

I also noticed that Spies sometimes survive even though there's a message they died, but I forgot to mention it.

Sigh- I feel sorry for Wes- so much to do to make CTP2 work like it should!

Looking into the future, oce the AI is churning out more units, there's a problem that has really stymied my Alex mod. The AI doesn't know how to move past one of its cities if the stack plus the units in the city total over 12. You get a big stack just sitting there, for ever. Locutus, do you think you could come up with a solution to this now? That, plus the inability to have units frozen in place (now fixed) are what caused me to give up on Alex for a while. I imagine it will be a problem in the Med mod, once the AI gets aggressive.

The settler on the mountain thing...I think it's OK for settlers to cross mountains. I will confess that I have not played MedMod for CTP2 yet but I did d/l it yesterday so I'm not exactly sure how the MM2 AI behaves, but I don't often see the AI in my games putting cities in the mountains. They do once in a while but I like that. Historically there are mountain cities and I like the feeling, when I go to war, that a mountain city is going to be tough to take. I (probably like many others who don't really post much about it) have customized my game for me and I like for geography to have a major role in the strategies of the game as it is played. So I use a huge map with the uniform/diverse slider set to max uniform. I get these gigantic mountain ranges and huge rainforests which I think is really cool and adds a new dimension to game play. Now given that I have also made jungle terrain have movementtype: Mountain (to me jungle has been as formidable to the spread of civilization as has mountains...no?) I would be afraid that if the settler unit did not have the ability to move across mountain terrain then if at the beginning of the game, an AI civ had their settler placed on such terrain then that unit would die and the civ would be gone. Jeez I'm a bit wordy. Anyway, it's a simple thing to change if you don't like it. If you guys did get Wes to change it then it would be one of the first things I'd change back for my personal use...but I wouldn't worry about it.

Regarding terraforming: you guys have convinced me. It should occur less often and later in the game. In tileimp.txt, the entries for the terraform tile improvements have an enabling advance. This may sound dumb but does that advance allow that sort of terrain to be terraformed into another type or does it allow you to terraform other types of terrain onto that type (in other words, when you get the enabling advance for grasslands does that mean you can now make grasslands or does it mean that grassland can now be made into something else)?

The thing with the captured spy staying next to the city occurs in the regular game also.

I have seen others post reports of large stacks of AI armies frozen in place because they cannot move past a city or another stack but I don't think I've ever seen this in a game. I have often seen AI stacks break down and reform, for what reason I don't know! I once even recall that I had a small stack of 3 running away from an AI stack of 8 or 9. We both had movement points of one so no problem getting away, right? Wrong. Three mounted units split from their stack and ran me down!

hexagonian and Alpha Wolf had a great thread going on changing AI behavior w/o SLIC but that thread just kind of died out. I've used several of their ideas and also a few I came up with myself and I *think* the game plays much better. If anyone wants to try to plug in my goals.txt and strategies.txt into their game or into MM2 and see if it makes a difference, email me at monoscat7@yahoo.com. The email addy above is dead btw. It should slide seamlessly into MM2 unless Wes added new government types then that might be a problem. Basically, beyond what hex and AW talked about (the thread is here: http://apolyton.net/forums/Forum44/HTML/000549.html check it out) I've also messed with lowering the force matching ratios a bit and (I think this made a big difference) I removed the "NeverSatisfied" flag from GOAL_RETREAT. It could just be my imagination but since removing that flag it seems that the AI fights back against my advancing forces instead of just running away to defend the rest of it's cities. It also seems to come back to try and recapture lost cities. At the very least I'd like to hear from some of you who remove that flag from the MM2 goals.txt file and see if it makes a palpable difference in AI behavior. If you've got the RAM (I had to go out and buy more), I'd also recommend lowering the costs of EVERYTHING (almost). I lowered most unit costs (not settlers or some special units though) 60-65% and building and wonders 30-40%, and also the support costs for units. You might think that the game would move too quickly but it doesn't. You just have lots and lots of units and the AI uses them more effectively IMO. For one thing, they grab all the goody huts especially if you play with over 10 civs. After 30 or 40 turns with 12+ civs there aren't any goody huts left.

quote: Originally posted by janilxx on 05-21-2001 03:08 AM I saw that there is now a file MM_const.txt. I have used modswapper and I saved medpack to be the used mod. Then I checked const.txt. AI_GOAL_TIME_SLICE, AI_MAX_TIME_SLICE and AI_TOTAL_TIME_SLICE values are not changed(increased) in const.txt. But in MM_const.txt they are increased. So how does modswapper work? If I start medpack using modswapper does it copy mm_const.txt over const.txt when I am strating game?

Modswapper will copy the MedMod's MM2_gamefile.txt over the original gamefile.txt. Gamefile.txt contains a list of all of CTP2's text files, so when you use Modswapper with MM2 it will use the MM2_ files instead of the original files.