Your BtS questions

[Jvstin]

Originally posted by MoonWolf
Extra hammers from water tiles with dike? That can be awesome!

As a fan of waterwheels, Dikes do sound awesome as an augment to them to get hammers.

[Ekmek]

Cybershy,

I saw a screen shot at (the website who will not be mentioned) of Justinian's civilopedia and his flag looks grayish, is that the Byzantine culture border colors as well?

[Robert]

Yes. Unless he springs of as a colony (new vassal on a different land mass)
then the border color may be totally different.

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by CyberShy
[q="JimMac "]
A question that I am pretty sure hasn't been asked already: do barbarian boats make a come back?

I actually missed being annoyed by them when Warlords (or a patch?) caused them to stop appearing!
[/q]
Don't think so.

I don't think they were made to be frequent, i.e. they're not going to show up in a pangaea or other low water count map, but they certainly appear in archipelago games.

It is fairly trivial to mod them to appear more frequently; one of the values in one of the xml files indicates the number of barb ships per unowned water tile (i'm not at home so i can't find out which, but it's one of the basic game setup xml files, I think difficulty level perhaps). The default value is fairly high but you can lower it. Just be aware it goes a bit nuts.

http://apolyton.net/upload/view/51359_BarbInsanity.zip

That zip is one example - I did that a while back, so it's not compatible with the current game [probably not 2.09 compatible and definitely not 2.13 compatible] but it did a few things, among them increasing barb boat appearances drastically [it also gave the barbs units they at the time didn't have, so you get some pretty aggressive barbarians that are incredibly hard to deal with].

[Jaybe]

In Warlords, you allowed barbs to build units by removing said units from the barbarians in the Civilizations xml file (don't remember the exact name, but it's obvious, and is in the Civilizations folder). To adjust the frequency of their appearance, edit the Civ4HandicapsInfo.xml file in the General Info folder.

Remember, save your changes into the corresponding folder in CustomAssets (in your documents folder)! Don't mess up the originals (unless you want to risk having to reinstall).

To provide lots of harrassment from "genuine" pirates in Warlords, I have allowed all ships through frigate and in Civ4HandicapInfo changed the variable iUnownedWaterTilesPerBarbarianUnit to 300. Actual appearance will vary with AI civ expansion & naval exploration, of course.

[snoopy369]

Yeah, that's what I was talking about. Thanks for the specifics

300 is a pretty low number... you should have quite a lot at that rate. I think the original number was a few thousand or something?

[Jaybe]

2000 at Noble, 1000 at Deity, snoop.
In Warlords 2.08 the core issue, however, was that all the ships were on the verboten list for barbs. THAT's why there weren't any.

BTW, that 300 number applied to my always playing huge fractal/terra maps. On other maps or sizes, your mileage (or kilometers) may vary.

[snoopy369]

I thought that was fixed in 2.08... guess i'm imagining things. It's possible my attached mod above is for 2.08 then. I made it a long time ago, but 2.08 has been around a long time also, so ...

[onodera]

You all forgot about the most important change: they fixed Jade Emperor/Kublai Khan leaderheads.

[JimMac]

is

Originally posted by Jaybe
2000 at Noble, 1000 at Deity, snoop.
In Warlords 2.08 the core issue, however, was that all the ships were on the verboten list for barbs. THAT's why there weren't any.

BTW, that 300 number applied to my always playing huge fractal/terra maps. On other maps or sizes, your mileage (or kilometers) may vary.

Now that is interesting!

Gameplay has posted my copy of BTS, so it is due to arrive today. I will try making that adjustment to the game files. Thanks for the tip.

[Jaybe]

JimMac, NO! WAIT!! See how things are with normal BtS first!

My experience has varied, due to varied AI development. Some games have had enough barb pirates that early classical fishing was in jeopardy, and naval units gained much experience keeping fishing fleets viable. Exploring caravels have been known to disappear off the face of the earth.

[JimMac]

Originally posted by Jaybe
JimMac, NO! WAIT!! See how things are with normal BtS first!

My experience has varied, due to varied AI development. Some games have had enough barb pirates that early classical fishing was in jeopardy, and naval units gained much experience keeping fishing fleets viable. Exploring caravels have been known to disappear off the face of the earth.

No problem, I am too keen to play BtS start by messing about with the gamefiles. So I'll have a couple of default starts anyway.

Though your description of the barbarian harassment sounds perfect to me!

[Nugog]

Originally posted by CyberShy
The game includes a patch for both Warlords and Vanilla
(copying and pasting from the changed readme files in the warlords/vanilla folders)

Warlords v2.13:

Vanilla v1.74

Will this patch (which was an auto patch - had no choice about installing it) make my pbem saves etc incompatible with people who do not have BtS and/or have not downloaded the patches. (I am presuming here that they are publicaly available.)

Also will they effect my ability to play the current PitBoss Warlords Team DG here on Aployton?

[Hellcat]

Are some civs more likely to spawn as colonies of certain civilizations (e.g. America from England, etc) or is it random?

[Robert]

I'm not sure about the vanilla/warlords patches and the compatability with older savegames. I've kept a 208 directory for Warlords to be able to continue my mp games.

You can do that by first making a copy of your Warlords folder (and rename it in example into Warlords 2.08)
Als copy the Warlords folder in your My Documents\My Games\ folder.
Then install BtS. It'll update the normal Warlords folder into 2.13 and also offer you a 2.08 version of Warlords.