[MOD] Age Of Discovery 1492-1792

[Dale]

AoD Announcement!

Beta1 has been uploaded for testing!

Check the first post of this thread for instructions!

Dale

[koningtiger]

Bettatesting as Spain.

[koningtiger]

Ok, first report, most of things i am sure you are aware of them but, well, i will say all.


Before all, i played only as Spain, and the game has been quite fun, i think you are doing a very good job. Above all i like the resource shortage in Old world, only 4 resources for Spain, 3 of them strategic.

-Some of the text are only in english i think, like the choose civ, new units,...

-Perhpaps Spanish leader should be Charles I, but well, i think that for Spanish civ in vanilla too. But for the Otomans, you should put Suleyman or Mohamed II, not Saladin.

-I think the tech tree isnt finished, all techs are named SPANISH and cost the same, no description, only the units they give.

-In the beginning there is a explored square near the canadian frontier.

-Perhaps Portugal frontier takes too much land from upper Spain.

-All cities begin with 1 pikemen and the same buildings, and 5 of them are suffering a food shortage that leave them with only 2 population soon. Bilbao, Oviedo, Cordoba, Cartagena and Palma. There are no "faros" in any city.

-The relations between european powers should be tweaked by time feelings, i.e. Portugal and Spain should be the best of friends, and Spain-England-France, enemies.

-The cultural pressure will do Portugal and France dow Spain allways.

-Perhaps Sevilla should replace Cordoba, and Santiago replace Vigo. Toledo-Madrid and Valencia-Castellón, but i am not sure about this last 2.

-Victory conditions? Diplomatic, cultural and conquest? I think this is the kind of sce where points should give you victory.

-The name of the new cities could be the ones showed in old Colonization.

-Finally, and most important, when Portugal and France dowed me at time, the frogs took Pamplona, of course, the brave tercios retake the city in a pair of turns, but then game frozed and i had to finish process for exit. That was my first city taken.

After all this, i think this will be a great scenario, i think it takes the feeling of colonization. Waiting for next beta.

[Mandla]

Suggestion: You could maybe give the Scots Mons Meg as a UU with a +1 power or +10% collateral damage or something...

Only just about to start a game now so I'll post some thoughts on the scenario later.

[conmcb25]

Great

Ill try this tonight. Anything in particular you want us to look for?

Also in yoiur first post, I would make a note of the date you edited it, in this case Beta1 released on 29Nov05.

[Mandla]

Some initital thoughts. If any of these sound a bit 'nitpicky' then take it as a compliment that I didn't find much else to correct.


(I'm playing on Prince)

Spelling error with Scots (I did warn you about nitpicking)- Scotish. Missing a 't'.

Also, and I don't know how this compares with the other civs in the scenario, the Scots have extremely slow tech to start out with- I think it took me 60 turns to get my first.

New Scottish cities are named after English ones.

Mary Queen of Scots was meant to be quite good looking. ;o)

By about 1530 my new towns in North America were being attacked by barbarian gunpowder units. I don't know if this can be prevented but it seemed strange to me.

And the barbarians attacking seemed to come in a constant stream. At times there seemed to be a queue of 6 or 7 barbarian units reaching to the edge of the visible map- longbowmen, Arquebusiers, archers and warriors lined up to attack, and the ones I defeated always being replaced by new units at the back of the queue- this made it very difficult to improve squares around the new towns as well as making defence of the new cities a real problem.

On the other hand, I'm enjoying the challenge this poses, though I don't know yet whether the difficulty will be prohitive with regards to being able to set up a new empire in N America (already lost one city and the other is under a lot of pressure).

I'll post more if and when I come across problems.


On the positive side- I love the scenario so far. Very nicely done, and it beats most other scenarios hands down simply because it allows so much freedom to build your own colonies etc in a largely empty portion of the map rather than simply having some sort of military objective in an already full world.

Good job.

[Fireb]

I'll try it out later tonight

Edit - I appreciate that you wanted to make the install as 'easy' as possible...but it does seem weird to have folders for all the other mods (desert war) in the zip file...perhaps there is a reason for this though.

[Dale]

Koningtiger:

Texts: Unfortunately I only know English, so all the texts are in English. Thanks for pointing out the tech names though! Will change for next beta.

Civlopeadia: Not implemented yet. I expect some tech tree changes in the future, so no point doing that if I'm going to change it later.

Start situation: I wanted all European nations to start at the same level in military, technology, growth and population. This allows for a more even game and the ability to play as any of the European nations and know you have a chance. Thanks for pointing out the food shortages in Spain. I know England has one city like that too.

Will add scoring victory condition. Though I had it in there.

City names: Will be added to reflect New World names in Beta2.

CTD's: I haven't experienced any CTDs yet. Any other players had any?

Mandla:

I'm still debating whether to have UU's. A few of the nations in the game didn't really have any units you could call UU historically, so rather than making it unfair for those players I might just leave them out.

conmcb25:

Point taken, first post updated.

Mandla:

Thanks for picking up the spelling mistake.

Scots are a minor nation, so you will find it harder to keep up. This is by design, and historically the colonisers became world powers quite fast during the period.

Scottish cities should be in for Beta2.

Barbs in the New World are quite strong, but that's also reflected in history in the agressiveness of some native tribes (Apache anyone?). They can be combatted by using explorers to uncover the map, and taking out any barb cities you find. Also, early colonisation WAS difficult.

Fireb:

Woops! My bad. I did the zip from my Civ4 folder, and then deleted the unnecessary files. I'll make sure the other folders aren't in future releases.

Dale

[hexagonian]

Re: [MOD] Age Of Discovery 1492-1792

Originally posted by Dale
Map: Western Europe + North Africa + Eastern/Central North America + Carribean. [Size: 108*81]

What size map is this, because anything over standard size slows my computer to a crawl.

[Dale]

Sorry mate, it's bigger than a vanilla HUGE map.

Dale

PS: Though with 1.09 patch on my P4 2.4 - 640 RAM I don't have any slowdown.

[conmcb25]

Originally posted by Dale
Barbs in the New World are quite strong, but that's also reflected in history in the agressiveness of some native tribes (Apache anyone?). They can be combatted by using explorers to uncover the map, and taking out any barb cities you find. Also, early colonisation WAS difficult.
Dale

Bingo, I have yet to play it since I had to work today but if you can capture that "feel" I believe you are heading in the right direction.

I dont know how many of you played CIV2 and the scenarios but John Ellis aka "Patient English" did 4 versions of a colonies scenario for CivII. The fourth version I helped him extensively playtest and script. And we spent a lot of time making sure it was hard to colonize (but not impossible), it ultimately made the game a whole heck of a lot more fun and challenging.

I haven't played much CIV II recently but when I did that was only one of two or three scenarios I actually played regularly.

Good luck Dale and keep up the good work

Ill try and take a quick look at this tonight and play a civ that has not been mentioned in the comments thus far.

[Mandla]

Originally posted by conmcb25


Bingo, I have yet to play it since I had to work today but if you can capture that "feel" I believe you are heading in the right direction.

I dont know how many of you played CIV2 and the scenarios but John Ellis aka "Patient English" did 4 versions of a colonies scenario for CivII. The fourth version I helped him extensively playtest and script. And we spent a lot of time making sure it was hard to colonize (but not impossible), it ultimately made the game a whole heck of a lot more fun and challenging.

I haven't played much CIV II recently but when I did that was only one of two or three scenarios I actually played regularly.

Good luck Dale and keep up the good work

Ill try and take a quick look at this tonight and play a civ that has not been mentioned in the comments thus far.

It's fine that they're strong and the Americas are difficult to colonise but I just lost a city to a barb rifleman in the middle of the 16th century. They're currently sending units at me that are more advanced than anything I have, and I'm only a little (technology-wise) behind the english, spanish and french.

I don't know if it's even possible to mod this for barbarian units but I'd like to see some other way of making them tough, such as making the attackers 'special' units with powerful terrain bonuses (possibly even when attacking) to reflect their knowledge of the land etc, but I feel they shouldn't be sending gunpowder units at me within a few years of me landing.

Anyway, I don't want to complain too much because I'm actually really enjoying this scenario as is despite what I've said. The challenge of building up the colony makes it a lot more rewarding when you finally get a functioning little nation together and start sending those luxury resources back home to the motherland.

[Fireb]

Ok, I've played a little, but first I'll comment on what others have said, before adding more stuff:

Language issues:
I can (if it makes a difference for some people) translate the new stuff into french/spanish/german/italian or whatever. Still, it's best to do this from a late beta stage when not so many things will change.

"I wanted all European nations to start at the same level in military, technology, growth and population. This allows for a more even game"
- I'll add a bit more to this later, but when the french/spanish start with 10 cities, and the dutch 1, it hardly seems even Still, it's historical, so it's ok

Barbs - i'll add more later, but : does exploring the map really reduce the barb threat? I thought that they appeared anywhere where there is no player visibility (fog of war) rather than unexplored terrain, so unless there is an explorer on every hilltop, it seems hard to stop them...?

The civ2 scenarios. They came up with some great ideas in those scenarios. One of the things that made Holland, for example, a playable nation were the events and the repeblican govournment. Can civics be fixed from the start in civ4 scenarios (and then later altered by events)?

[Fireb]

First impressions

I've written these down as they came to me, without thought or judgement. Some are negative, some are positive. They're just what I felt or saw.

Civ selection screen: 'Minor' civs can currently be chosen for play.

Whilst loading: Maybe the loading hints could be changed to AOD specific hints, such as 'if the spanish get too strong, hire some bucaneers', or whatever.

Dawn of man: It's not the dawn of man! My chosen civ havn't been living like nomads for 3000 years either

Geography: The rivers and mountains seem to be more or less in the right place. I'm impressed

New world flare: I presume this is so that those with a limited idea of atlantic geography know where to send their caravels? Is it deliberately set next to a resource? Is the 'spot' in the same place for all nations, or a different one for each? Overall it seems like a good idea.

Starting garisons: My knowledge of history is a bit patchy, but I don't think that pikemen made up the city garisons in most of western europe...it was probably a mixture of archers and local militia. Of course...cavalry had to dismount attacking walled cities...which makes some sort of twisted sense in having pikemen...

100% defence levels: This looks good, as european cities were supposed to be harder to take than new world settlements. I'll add more on this later (below).

Unhealthiness: At first the green slime over all my cities looks strange. My next impression is that it is not so strange after all. I've been through some 'medieval' towns in spain, where animal excrement runs through the main streets. They didn't feel 'healthy' - and that was last year!

Size 5 cities: It looks strange to have every city on the map at size 5...I know it's easier than researching relative period population...but it just looks....wrong
Even a few different city sizes would help. I'd also add that some of these (in france), as mentioned above, are starving.

There is (unmined) gold and silver in europe. Is this deliberate? None in England though, and as I'm playing as France I can't complain

Ok, I'm out of time, I'll finish off tomorrow.

[Fireb]

first impressions - continued

Arquebusiers: it's nice to have them in, but they have a lower attack than macemen, and no bonuses vs anything, and they're more expensive to build...other than not being particularly vulnerable to anything...they suck! (that's my impression, anyway). They probably did suck at the time, but maybe they should be cheaper than armoured macemen? 'Macemen' also don't seem to be a very acurate name for the period heavy infantry (if there was any). How about 'men at arms'?

Civics! Perhaps they could be started at something other than 'paganist'

As someone above suggested, perhaps relations should not be set to closed borders +0 with everyone...

Arquebusiers again: having changed to nationhood and theocrassy and drafted one, I understand why they have only 7 strength Still, building them should be cheaper.

It's only by playing this scenario that I've realised how useful nationhood can be (with something like theocrassy) After raising about 10 arquebusiers in 5 turns, it seems like an easy way to dominate. Added to this is the fact that they are gunpowder units....which reduce the tough 100% castle defences to 40% culture defences.

Ok, those are my first impressions.

Overall though, it looks great!

Below is a short DAR of my first game. Let me know if it's helpful.