New and Modified Scenarios

[Richard Bruns]

Post your creations here! I´ll start:

---

I have altered the Dawn technology so that it is much easier to research all techs, and especially Chariots. This unit now comes at knowledge 1 instead of 3. I also altered the events that tell about the chariots, so that they match the new progression. In addition, I altered the chariot element and unit. Previously, it was less expensive than warriors but not much more powerful. I made them a little more expensive and a lot more powerful, and made a unit consist of 500 elements rather than 2500, so the player can actually build several, as the tutorial suggests.

Finally, I gave the player ten more turns between chariot discovery and the arrival of the huge tribe, and bumped the size of each horde unit down to 750 warrios so the player can actually win, if a couple chariots have been built.

I also made combat less deadly and added a small amount if unit healing, so most fights take 2 turns now instead of happening instantly.

Finally, the population requirement is now 10,000 so the player wins the scenario around turn 60 to 70 by following the instructions. I have playtested it several times, and it is fairly easy to win, although some of the fights can be close calls. I may have missed something, however, so try it out and tell me what you think.

The new file is moddawn1.xml. The enclosed zip file contains this in a folder, as well as a new scenarios.xml that includes a reference to it. Unzip this file in the scenarios folder and let it overwrite the existing scenarios.xml

[Mark_Everson]

Thanks Richard! Sounds really good.

I'll check it out in a few days. (My computer migration and networking are ending up more complicated than I'd hoped, so my Clash time is screwed for the near future.) You might want to email or PM Martin to make sure he knows about this, since fixing Dawn is what he volunteered to do, and we want to avoid wasted effort.

I think the target for Dawn is to make as few as possible stacked tutorial bulletins, and make it winnable about 98% of the time by a first player. It sounds like you're probably reasonably close on the latter.

[Richard Bruns]

I have been trying to get all of the earth history scenarios to read all of their military, technology, and activity data from the default resource files. That way the game would use consistent data instead of having differrent things in each scenario.

However, I have been comepletely unable to get any of these scenarios to run. There is no error file; the game simply starts loading the scenario but never finishes, no matter how long I wait. I have meticulously checked all of the altered files for missing or erroneous tags, but cannot find anything wrong with the files. I have also made sure that all build orders and unit placements are updated to the new files.

SiegeWars still runs properly, and it even uses the changes I made to the images.xml file. But if I add the:

<files>
  <all/>
</files>

tag to the start of it, then it too will not load, so there must be something wrong in one of those three altered files.

I already discovered that the game does not want to let technology alter the Movement and Mobility numbers of any element. When I tried that I got an error message. I also got error messages if I made mistakes like mismatched image names. But I am not getting anything now, and I can´t find out why.

Can seomebody tell me what is wrong here? I have attached all the altered files, and the problem should reproduce itself if you use these to replace the existing ones.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Richard, no good deed goes unpunished

I'm at work and only have a few minutes, so I can't speculate on what the problem is. . . It is likely something fairly simple, but who knows. Hopefully Laurent will have some insight as to what might be happening, he has more experience with the xml stuff than I. No pressure there Laurent . And obviously we need to put some kind of diagnostic into the xml load procedure so at least one knows which part it is bombing in, and hopefully more. This could be activated with a command line switch, or we could just have an xml.txt file that reports on what the xml input is doing and includes any errors.

I suggest that you just put this approach aside for the moment and focus on getting a single new scenario to work with an extended tech tree. You could then return to your worthwhile endeavor when we've got a fix and better error diagnosis available.

[Richard Bruns]

Yes, I should have thought of that sooner. The default file I built already has an extended tech tree, so I will try moving all those new files into one scenario.xml file and seeing if they work. But first:

---

I got tired of seeing huge numbers attached to all of the military units, so I decided to try and see what combat would be like if thery were all smaller. I started altering the Jericho scenario, giving each element fractional values so that the units were given progressively smaller and smaller values. I wanted to see what happened to combat as a result of this. To keep things as simple as possible, I took away their distance attack and got rid of technology effects.

To make a long story short, I could not tell any difference in the combat system once I balanced the numbers right. If I hadn´t been looking at the numbers, I wouldn´t have known whether my units had 10,000 attack or 1 attack. And the numbers are much easier to read when they are smaller. I think that we should consider making these smaller numbers the standard for Clash in the future.

Take a look at the attached scenario file to see for yourself. Just replace the standard Jericho with it. Or if you want to make the changes yourself, do the following:

Change the warrior element so it has an attack value of 0.001, a defense of 1, armor of 1, no distance attack, and a health of 0.001. Get rid of the tech effects if you want the numbers to look cleaner.

Change its cost to 0.01 food, 0.02 production, and 0.01 services.

Change the Warriors unit so there are 1000 elements in a unit.

Add the MilitaryConstants to the jericho.xml file and change healAfterFight to zero and damageDivider to 10.

Finally, change the powercircle value at the top to 750 so they are the right size.

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Richard Bruns
I got tired of seeing huge numbers attached to all of the military units, so I decided to try and see what combat would be like if thery were all smaller. I started altering the Jericho scenario, giving each element fractional values so that the units were given progressively smaller and smaller values.

Yeah the humongous numbers are tough to read. How about we just scale them in the gui to manageable size? Seems a lot simpler to me than changing the whole system around. For now we could do with a single scale since units are of crudely the same power level over all antiquity. When we make the transition to the modern age we will probably need a different set of derating factors.

Laurent, what do you think? Richard, could you cross-post this in the mil thread?

[Richard Bruns]

I fixed the xml files; they all load up properly now. The problem was due to a cut and paste error in the Mangonel unit.

The way I discovered this was to add a series of tags with names like <Marker7></Marker7>and look at the messages about "uninteresting tags" as the program loaded up. When it froze between Markers 7 and 8, I knew it was something in the units list. But even then, I was not able to see the error until I had put an unintersting tag between each unit.

Of course, this does not mean I am finished. I still need to do a lot of playtesting and balancing to make the new tech tree work with everything. But there is a problem with that. Neither the requirement nor the obsolete tags seem to be working, which means that every unit in the tech tree shows up on the econ GUI on the second turn, once all the techs become active. Since I am on 600x800 computers and there is no way to scroll the GUI, it is impossible to invest in roads and walls, and anything else in the middle of the GUI list (Reordering gives me all the infrastructure investments at the bottom.)

The attached file contains the Jericho scenario, modified with the new tech tree and units. All you have to do is replace the jericho file, no other changes to the testbed are needed.

---

Mark, I don´t like any situation where the GUI shows something different than what is actually three. Altering the system wasn´t much effort, and coder time is IMO better spent on other things. Now that everything is all in one file, I can easily change them around so they all show up as small numbers.

[Martin the Dane]

Just a little note that actually belongs in the econ-GUI thread, but is relevant to the discussion of strength numbers: With the large numbers it is not practical to put strength and cost values in the Econ-GUI. But I don't se any reason why numbers in the GUI should absolutely be the same as in the xml-files.

[LDiCesare]

Attack values could be divided by 500 or 1000 without problem in the files. The figures were initially for 500-man elements, and now they are for 1-man, thus the scale problem. Fixing them in the xml files is the way to go.

[Martin the Dane]

I have a short comment to Richards remake of Dawn:

It has become even more of a race to build those Chariots.

What I'm planing to to is to give the scenario a more lesury pace, making it doable in something like 100-150 turns. The main reason for this is to give the player time to familiarize him/her self with the GUI, and the main consepts of the game. After all that IS the main purpouse of the scenario. I'll post a detailed description soon.

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Richard Bruns
I fixed the xml files; they all load up properly now. The problem was due to a cut and paste error in the Mangonel unit.

The way I discovered this was to add a series of tags with names like <Marker7></Marker7>and look at the messages about "uninteresting tags" as the program loaded up. When it froze between Markers 7 and 8, I knew it was something in the units list. But even then, I was not able to see the error until I had put an unintersting tag between each unit.

Good idea!

Mark, I don´t like any situation where the GUI shows something different than what is actually three. Altering the system wasn´t much effort, and coder time is IMO better spent on other things. Now that everything is all in one file, I can easily change them around so they all show up as small numbers.

As Laurent said, go ahead and change 'em.

But eventually we will get to modern units and I think we will Need to reduce the numbers in the gui. Otherwise any scale that gives "reasonably" small values for ancient units will give "too big" numbers in modern times. But for now I agree your fix is best.


Martin:

Your plan to calm it down a little sounds good, but don't go overbored . Some people will get frustrated if not enough happens. Probably 100 turns is about right. I think 150 would bore many. At least that's my call, YMMV. Anyone violently disagree?

[Richard Bruns]

I thought I was actually slowing down the attack. Originally, the babarians appeared right after discovering the chariots, but now they come ten turns later. If the player doesn not research Domestication, then the big tribe does not come.

It should be easy to have the player decide the pace of the scenario. Just tell them that discovering horses will trigger all the battles, so if they want to take their time then they can stay away from horses, and if they want to finish fast then they can grab them early. There is currently one only one barb attack that depends on the turn, not the horses.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Richard, I checked out the new Jericho. I haven't gotten far enough along to see much tech action yet, I'm looking forward to it.

But the fights with all those mobs take Forever. It really detracts from the game. One problem is that a mob shows up basically every turn. So by the time you have reduced the defenders another is bound to be produced, leading to very extended slogging conquest. Of course I am running lean on forces so as to put most of the resources into tech, so that might be part of it.

Also the AI is meant to have more consequential single units, so I think it would help to make the mobs bigger in size if nothing else.

I am puzzled about your comment about not being able to give orders. When I give orders in Jericho there are only twelve total choices in the econ menu. What am I missing?

Anyway, back to tech! Things seem to work fine. I put basically everything into the Food activity since it has the highest leverage (since most people are farming at the start). The economy starts taking off pretty well after 100 turns or so. However I can't build any new military units since Military Tactics never gets above 0. I think you should have some Military activity in there to remedy that.

I got farming up to 5.6 which is quite substantial, and the rest are spread from below 1 to about 2.5.

Looking forward to the next installment!

Cya,

mark

[Richard Bruns]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Hi Richard, I checked out the new Jericho. I haven't gotten far enough along to see much tech action yet, I'm looking forward to it.

Sorry for the confusion, but the scenario I posted is meant primarily to be looked at, not played. It is not really balanced for tech growth and a proper game. I am still working on a single tech tree where growth is balanced across all the scenarios without artificially altering the growth rate for each civ. I am almost there, but there will probably be no way to avoid making Dawn tech growth artificially faster.

But the fights with all those mobs take Forever. It really detracts from the game. One problem is that a mob shows up basically every turn. So by the time you have reduced the defenders another is bound to be produced, leading to very extended slogging conquest. Of course I am running lean on forces so as to put most of the resources into tech, so that might be part of it.

This is what is supposed to happen IMO. In order to take out a province capital, you should have to to conquer most of the rest of the province, and then strike with overwhelming force. I never had problems in conquest once I got a good army.

I made the mobs small so that even the smallest civ should be able to build one. They should become obsolete quickly, once the AI learns enough to invest in tech and build Warriors. But I have bumped up the cost and upkeep of units since then.

I am puzzled about your comment about not being able to give orders. When I give orders in Jericho there are only twelve total choices in the econ menu. What am I missing?

Your computer must be acting very differently than mine. When I play this scenario, I get orders to build every single unit in the tech tree, which takes up all of the GUI window at 600x800 resolution. When I hit reorder, I get the orders for technology, education, all of the infrastructure investment, and finally road and wall building. If I add any Activities that the user can invest in, it becomes impossible to invest in roads and walls, no matter how the window is ordered. So I had to take out all the Activities.

But I got the requirements tags working properly, so part of the problem is solved. But playing as Romans gives the same problem, since stuff does not go obsolete. I will add Activites once the GUI and obsolescence are fixed.

As hinted at before, I am in the process of a major reorganization of the files and scenarios. In a few days I will finish, zip up the entire testbed, call it Clash 7.6, and upload it to my website.

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Richard Bruns

I am puzzled about your comment about not being able to give orders. When I give orders in Jericho there are only twelve total choices in the econ menu. What am I missing?

Your computer must be acting very differently than mine. When I play this scenario, I get orders to build every single unit in the tech tree, which takes up all of the GUI window at 600x800 resolution. When I hit reorder, I get the orders for technology, education, all of the infrastructure investment, and finally road and wall building. If I add any Activities that the user can invest in, it becomes impossible to invest in roads and walls, no matter how the window is ordered. So I had to take out all the Activities.

I think the difference may be that I grabbed Only the scenario file, not your technology.xml file. Would this explain the difference?

[Richard Bruns]

That scenario doesn´t reference the technology file; it has a copy of it, which is about ten revisions out of date by now. But the difference is probably due to the fact that I gave Jericho tech of 1 in everything. This meant that they could make warriors, so they could make everything. If you are playing any other civ, they won´t have that tech, so all they make is mobs.

[Martin the Dane]

Hi I have run into a few minor problems while modifying the Dawn scenario. I desperately want to have an event trigger at the turn after another event. For some reason if I use a delay of 1 the event triggers two turns after the previouse event, but if I use a delay of 0 (or ommit the delay tags) the event never triggers.

The reason I ran into this problem is that there is no <unitmoveevent>

What I use is

  <eventaction>
    <condition>Is Size 2</condition>
    <delay>1</delay>
  </eventaction>

[LDiCesare]

What do you mean by unitmoveevent? I will try to check the delay stuff, but if you need another event, it'd be well to code it. Can you elaborate a bit?

[Martin the Dane]

What I was originally looking for was an event that would trigger when a (specified) unit was moved. The reason for this is that I cannot be sure the player follows the instructions in the tutorial.

When we instruct the player to move the first unit two squares to the NW I want to have a message show up on the next turn to give further instructions and to tell the player that the unit has reached the destination. (provided the unit got there) If the player moved the unit in the wrong direction it could be good to inform him/her about that.

The event could have a number of conditions, like start and end location, unit-path-end-point, unitname, civ, etc.

The workaround I use for Dawn is to use a ≶singlevisitevent> The problem with that is that I have no way of knowing if the player moved the unit but did it the wrong way. I could add a conditional event to check if the unit was moved to far away from the desired point. But that will not work properly unless the delay can be set to one turn. (but I might do it anyway.)

[Martin the Dane]

Oops found another eventbug.

The <buildunitevent> can only be used once, as it is always true if a unit has been built. So it's not actually an event but a condition. I was trying to have a message pop-up to remind the player to stop producing wariors after building the second additional warior, but it fired prematurely.

[Martin the Dane]

An update to the above: It seems most events stays fired even if the conditions are not met any longer. Take the <destroyarmies> event. This is always true if the civ in the <civilization> tag has at some point had no armies. In the Dawn scenario this is always true for the barbarian tribes, since their armies are created by events during the game.

This would not be so critical if the barbarians could not occupy land, but they do, and I want to tell the player how to get back that land.

[Martin the Dane]

Ok Here is my attempt at a Dawn scenario, there are still a few isues that I would have liked to cover in the scenario, but either the events model does not allow it or I'm to dumb to figure out how to achieve what I want.

What I have changed is as follows:

Victory condition now requires a pop of 15 k, this should be achieveable around the same time as the major northern barbarians arrive.

The personell requirements for all units have been reduced , so Wariors are now 250, BarbarianArmy (the northern barbarian units) are 500, and Chariots are 1000. To keep the balance I have changed the costs and strengths as well.

Chariots are available at Tech 2, and research is speeded a little to make it all doable in ~80 turns.

Finally I have moved the hint about horses to a little later in the game, and changed most of the events, so now there is mostly only one message per turn. Furthermore I have tried to avoid long stretches without events.

Unfortunately I have not been able to add the events I wanted for the late game. I would have liked to add a few extra econ-instructions to the late game, but I have not been able to come up with any sensible things to tell the player so that'll be my next project.

Please let me know what you think.

[LDiCesare]

I just downloaded the new dawn scenario.
I checked the events and am a bit surprised by what you said, Martin. The buildunitevent data is normally reset every turn, and the destroyarmies event looks at all units present at a given time. This means destroyarmies is true when there are no armies, not when they have just been destroyed. Making a conditional event (spawning of barbarian units AND destroyarmies -> save a condition) should work for that one.
I'll check more in depth, but the buildunitevent should work the way you want.

[LDiCesare]

Martin, the scenario plays well and is easy enough to complete by following the steps.
I found a few things which may need correction:
One is a title for a panel: Horses is confusing. "Horses rumours" or something like that might be better. When I saw "horses", I thought I had found them even though it was not the case.
Another point is my unit stopped 3 squares from its start position after the second move when I gave it the order to move 2 squares NW. The message didn't fit the situation well. Also, the direction in which the squares expand is random, so the target square (2 squares NW) may not be in the black, depending on which area the population would expand.

[Martin the Dane]

Thanks for the comments. The one about horses, well I should have thought of that, but well I didn't. About the movement message, this is where I wanted to have a unit-moved-event. So I could show the right messages, depending on the move. But I'll try to think of a better text.

[LDiCesare]

I corrected the bug for buildunitevent. The correct code was not called because the superclass method wasn't called by the subclass... I sent a new code bunch to Mark, so this should be fixed soon.

[Martin the Dane]

Thanks Laurent,

I figured a way to get a more correct message for the move instruction, so now the message varies depending on the way the settlement expanded, and the move message, dosn't mention wether or not you reach your destination, just that the unit moved.

[Martin the Dane]

I have been looking at the <destroyarmies> event, again. As I want to use it inside a <eventunion>, but I get the following error: "Setter not found for destroyarmies in game.events.EventUnion"

Another thing I'm looking for is a way to delete a condition from the conditions list, this however might not be nesecarry if all events could be nested inside the four container-events, and they themselfe could be nested.

[Mark_Everson]

I have just sent out a Testbed V7.6! Here is the new stuff from the readme. Please be sure to look over the bold parts of my post. We need to take action soon on unifying the various scenario approaches or we'll have a train wreck!

As usual if someone else wants it other than Richard and Martin, just email me and I'll send you a copy. I will send off the new unified codebase to the programmers in a few minutes.

Good work Everyone!

Clash Testbed 7.6 (post-Demo 7.2.1 code) Feb 16, 2003

Please delete the entire old version of the clash testbed (if applicable) before installing this one.

New info:

v. 7.6 Is the post-Demo 7.2.1 code made available so that Richard, Martin, and others can mess with the scenario files. This version has bug fixes and new small features. Also Laurent is making good progress on the real AI, and some small improvements from that are starting to make it into the game.

IMPORTANT: This version of the testbed uses the old-style (before Richard's recent changes) scenario files. It does have Martin's new version of Dawn.

We need to figure out our new scenario standard and come up with a merged version soon, before drift between them causes wasted effort! I suggest that be a priority for the immediate future.

For now, to use Richard's scenario versions, just replace everything in the class subdirectory of this zip EXCEPT class\game with the equivalent from the Testbed 7.5.1.

New features:

1. Laurent has been charging ahead with the new AI. In this version enemies don't make boneheaded attacks. Sometimes unfortunately when they are stymied they just sit there though. Hopefully that can be remedied soon.

2. Owen has done a number of fixes involving colonization. The most noticeable are that colonies next to existing provinces are added to that province, and that you can now form colonies by disbanding military units.

3. I have gotten the econ orders working more-or-less properly for military unit obsolescence now. When Cohorts replace Legions the Legion order disappears and an equivalent Cohort one takes its place. For now you lose any Legion investment that remains, I'll fix that soon.

4. Laurent put in fixes for builtunitevent for Martin.


Thanks for all the hard work! I'm hoping we can get Demo 7.3 out in a few weeks. If Laurent can get the AI significantly better soon, I think between the tech advancements and AI we could just call it Demo 8.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Martin, I finally had time to check out the new Dawn scenario. It seems pretty good overall. You have certainly included a bunch of things that we didn't have in there before that should help out newbies. You had said in your post that you are looking for other Econ items to include later in the tutorial. One idea I had is that if we can get an event to turn on ROI in the Econ GUI, going over how ROI works would be a useful thing. One thing we could demonstrate that with is to have a chariot production automatically turn off as Army supplies gets above 80% of taxes or so. There is already a right up of how ROI works in the economy section of the demo 6 manual.

Some other comments...

You did a good job on thinning out the bulletins, but it seems there are still an awful lot of turns where two come up at once. It may be that I did things in a slightly different order from you, and so things that were spaced evenly for you became bunched up for me. A long time ago I requested Gary to make an event class that was turn-based but fuzzy, such that if another event were fired that turn it would wait up to a turn or two before firing. Unfortunately he never got around to it.

There were an awful lot of grammar errors, and I realize that part may be hard for you because you're not a native speaker. There is certainly no point in you spending large amounts of time getting the grammar right when someone else can fix it fairly quickly. But lets see if we can get any volunteers to do it!

I thought the first barbarian attack was too soon. I had just started building roads, and then needed to switch off the road-building orders to make military units to fight off the invasion. It seems to me if that attack were delayed by five turns or so things would be much smoother.

I may be wrong about this, but I didn't notice an instruction that says about the tech button to see where technological knowledge is. If the comment isn't in their we should have that.

Population growth is much slower now then he used to be in the original version of Dawn. I think that is because the amount of Army supplies needed changed, and Army supplies pull food from the economy. You might want to try starting out with extra people, something like 8000, and see if the whole thing doesn't work better. That would also allow us to have a higher population target for winning than the fairly measly 15,000.

I got the "We Survived" bulletin more than once during the game. You might want to look into that.

Another bit of instruction you can give late in the game, is after all the barbarians are dead and you are trying to maximize population growth, you can suggest investing in Food Tech, which makes the farming sector more productive and therefore population grows faster.

I really appreciate all the work you put into this, and am looking forward to seeing the next version.