Seeking advice for El Aurens v2

[Boco]

Uh-oh!

Ouch! There are a lotta gotchas with no-city-present-cities. If they're in famine they never seem to starve out of existence, but the starving pop-up shows up every turn. I created events to turn these cities into ocean (0 shields). As Allard discovered, the cities aren't razed, but there is a deficit of shields. The affected units were mostly disbanded, but @SUPPORT pops up for every one. In one particularly bad month, there are 36 withdrawals to click "Zoom" or "Continue". That might send a player ballastic.

So-o-o-o...it's back to conventional cities and dialogless razing. So I have a few dozen no-city-present-cities to convert to regular cities via CivEngineer (is the date of the current version Nov 4, 2002?), but...

[Boco]

Merc, in case you want to debug, here's the file. If you don't have time, I'll hex edit by hand.

[Mercator]

Can't you just make sure that the cities don't starve? Or am I thinking too easy.
Is that "control panel" on a separate map? Because if it is, you could simply adjust the terrain types to give just the right amount of food so that the cities have exactly enough food right? Or am I missing something?

But...
I won't have time till tuesday evening at least... I can't even check if you got the latest CivEngineer version. Explorer hangs when I right-click... Oh wait... No I don't think that's the last version... Not sure where I posted that one, or if that'll fix the problem, though..

Um, I'll just attach it...

Edit: Or add a download link...

Download CivEngineer

[Boco]

Thanks. Adjusting terrain values will let a careful player grow larger cities on the control panel, which would gain free victory points. The big killer, though, are the several dozen withdrawal notification dialogs. I had hoped that they would be informative. They are that, but they're too tedious to go through.

I'll check the newer version tonight.

[Boco]

New version of CivEngineer choked, too. Everything's hexed now, though.

[Mercator]

I was afraid of that... I'll have to check later...

[Boco]

Got careless!

I ran across a very strange bug. On turn three, all the Allied cities on map2 gained a 50% shield bonus. Yep, it was linked to Hoover, which is situated in Turkish Aleppo on map 0; I could prevent the bonus by making Hoover obsolete.

So then I got to looking at sav files with my hex editor. City indexes were shifting between turns 1 and 3! On turn one, the first city started with idx=F4 (yes, it should 01), but shifted to F1 on turn 3. That probably corrupted all the WoW assignments.

I'll see if I can correct the indices so that they are correct and stable. If not, I've got to go digging through old backups until I find the latest with uncorrupted city indices.

Wanna bet I screwed things up with my +city-present edits?

Fairline, this'll set me back a few days. Don't rush to finish any artwork for me.

[Boco]

City numbering got corrupted on 3 July. I think this is the sequence:

• Deleted a dozen Turk cities from map4. Somehow this must be the key.
• Saved the file. City Number Codes appear okay.
• Made two minor terrain changes on map1 made via Shift-F8.
• Saved the file. Cairo's city number changed from 01 to E5.

All of this occurred before I played with hexing city-present codes. Makes no sense at the moment, but one thing's clear: I've got to redo a lot of map changes. After 3 July, I made major edits to map2 (and Events.txt) to ensure that goto commands worked well.

Simply hexing in the correct city number codes into the latest SAV file doesn't give a stable solution. The hexed file loads okay, but the codes get corrupted after a turn.

One possible symptom that can be seen without hexing: at the beginning of a turn in the game (often turn 3), the announcements of city x completes y improvement appears to cycle through many cities twice. Seems quite possible with corrupted city numbering info.

Fairline, this'll set me back a few days. Don't rush to finish any artwork for me.

More like at least a week. Merc, I'll be putting off playing with SpriteGen as well.

[fairline]

@ Boco: OK, I'll finish up the Riverwar gfx first instead. Nearly done with those anyway.

[curtsibling]

Bump!

Boco, I have some cities for you, in case you miss them in the city thread...

[Sarsstock]

Curt those might be the best cities you've produced to date!! This might just be one of the most graphically superior scenario's in ages.

Let me know again if there's anything I can possibly contribute.

[Boco]

I did overlook them in the other thread. Many, many thanks! You improve with every building!

I've started to reconstruct an uncorrupted sav file, but I have to admit that playtesting River War sounds much more fun than continuing the recontruction.

Sarsstock, let me review my Impxx.bmp/Improvements.bmp/Icons.bmp collection. Would you be interested in replacing parts?

I'm also planning on an alternative spaceship. It'll represent transfers from the EEF to the Western Front. When I'm at that stage, I could use some artistic contributions. The palette is likely to be very limited!

Any suggestions for a theme? Hopefully a screenie is attached.

[Boco]

Btw, does anyone know where the A.S.S. label comes from? I know, I know ... I don't know an A$$ from a __, but I'd like to tailor the ship name to something more appropriate to EA. My guess is that it is derived (hard-coded) from Allied Space Ship. Might just have to 'white it out' with an image background of the same color, if that's possible.

[Sarsstock]

Well I'd love to take a crack at the icons so needed, though I fear I might not be as good as Curt is at making spectacular new ones.

As for the alternate to the spaceship, my only suggestion would be some sort of photograph or painting or other piece of artwork featuring an army travelling by foot, by rail or gathering for transport at a port. The image would be broken up in Photoshop perhaps, and as each spaceship improvment is built a new element will be added to the artwork to represent whatever has been added. Such as a new train car full of supplies added to an image of a train parked at a railyard, or a small freighter loaded with supplies being added to an image of a ship convoy gathering in port.

I hope that idea makes at least some sense as its the only thing I could think up. I remember I had made a similar sugestion to HT for Gold Gultch.

[Mercator]

ToT has an alternative to the spaceship too though. The Midgard game, I believe, uses completely different graphics. Something with a siege engine. I'm not quite sure how you can get ToT to use that set of graphics though.