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**solo** · December 22, 2005, 12:00

Well, a quick test worked for me on my own city taken from an 2.42 save of an OCC game, but failed on any of the AI cities I tested. For them, information such as city size, or techs were often missing and the demand lists were wrong. So, is it supposed to work for them, too?

By the way, this is so much more easier to use that I love what you've done so far. No more laborious counting or searching for input info! Great!!!

Attached is the file I ran my quick test on. Cardiff, my own city worked. None of the AI ones tested did.

Attached Files

cu_a1561.sav (73.7 KB, 182 views)

**StuporMan** · December 22, 2005, 13:49

I have briefly looked over the problem at my end over my lunch break and figured out the problem. It seems I got the source from one version prior to my last version and had included a bug in setting city values. I have corrected this bug and now things should work better. I also included code to make MPE work properly, I had forgotten to include it in my list of Wonders to be concerned with (more on this below).

There may be more than meets the eye on why the foriegn cities do not produce accurate results. Since I do not want the calculator to have any semblance of being able to cheat by knowing information the player does not know, the foreign civ's tech list and count will be empty. This is to prevent the player from gaining information about that foreign civ they do not have privy to. So you must have an embassy or an ACTIVE MPE to get tech info for free.

The new version should be up now!

StuporMan

**Scouse Gits** · December 23, 2005, 17:51

Got it - it claims to be v1.012?

Must admit to being uncertain just what this is doing?

Stu

**civic** · December 24, 2005, 01:29

Well it certainly works on the v2.42 files of saved games played from a fresh start - including the various and sundry ones downloaded from Apolyton.

Not that it matters, since it rarely becomes an issue, the scenario save files I tried as well, cause it to error.

Nice work Stuporman, you have far more patience than I ever had in sorting it out.

**StuporMan** · December 26, 2005, 23:46

Sorry I went AWOL there for a while. I left town for Christmas Holiday and have been unable to get back to Poly until right now.

Stu,
As to the version number, I simply failed to change that. This is still a beta version, there still will likely be some bugs!

As to your other question, what this program endeavors to do is to calculate the supply and demand products that a city will produce under certain circumstances. The latest version, more specifically, attempts to load the city information from a Civ 2 save game file to avoid the arduous process of entering all of the cities information by hand.
At the same time, the calculator does not allow the player to learn information that he/she should not know at the moment. For instance, if you do not have an embassy with a civilization, you will not know the number of technologies that they have. Likewise, if you have not found a particular city, it will not appear in the cities list (with the exception of the first city founded in the game, as this shows up as discovered by all civilizations in the save game file). You also will not get a complete list of terrain for cities that you have not explored all the city squares. (I also did not have the calculator do any "black clicking" so continent sizes will not be accurate unless the whole island has been explored.
After the information is loaded, you can edit the information to be more in line with what you already have discovered. Likewise, you can do some looking ahead to see what the city will supply and demand as the game progresses. This can help you make good technology choices and can allow you to discover some beneficial terrain changes you can make to get commodities that you want. (IE, trade a grass for a forest and get to keep hides as a supplied commodity for 10 more techs).
Oh, one more thing to keep in mind. The calculator does not factor in the Copper/Dye bug as of yet. So this assumes that the bug has been taken care of. Hopefully, the bug will come to be better understood so I can handle that in the future.
I hope this adequately answers your question.

civic,
I am glad that this works from a fresh start. I am curious if this implies that it does not work from a later saved game or if the error is specific to scenarios?

Could you please post the scenario file that you had an error on (if it is not included in 2.42 by default). Also, were these scenarios created in 2.42 or some other version of the game? Note, I have not yet been able to test FW, MGE, or TOT saved game files, so I do not know if they work properly or not. I intend to work on these as I have time and plan on each of these being included in the "official" 2.0 release of the calculator. (along with some other features like city prospecting). So any Civ 2 save game files that you find that error would be good to post here along with any useful comments you might have. (I know my error messages are less than descriptive

)

Thank you all for your help and your kind words. Hopefully, with your help, I can help us all understand a little more of Civ 2's trade system, and make those delivery payments all the more lucrative!

StuporMan

**solo** · December 31, 2005, 11:26

I tried the newest version out, using the same save file posted earlier. Now Cardiff's supply was incorrect, not having Oil as the middle commodity. I tried Bremen, a small AI city and its demand list did not match at all, and I do not think the dye/copper bug was the reason.

So something is probably still not quite right.

One thing that would be nice to add, if you are looking for even more to do, is to also list how many more turns it will be until a city's next cycle date.

**StuporMan** · January 1, 2006, 20:04

Thanks for the help solo!

The cities solo cycle was one of the things that I had planned on adding in one of the later beta versions. I just wanted to get all the bugs out of loading a file (at least 2.42) before I went and added more features.

As to the errors in the supply and demand calculations in the sav file you were loading, were these values correct in the previous verison or were they incorrect?

Also any help in narrowing down which calculation was incorrect would be useful if you have the time. I have also noticed that there are a few errors in the supply and demand calculations on other cities and have not been able to figure out why (the calculations appear to me to be correct based on what samson wrote in his supply and demand opus).

I have also narrowed down the Scenario errors that were happening earlier. This is due to cities being on the map borders. I should have a fix for that problem out this week sometime.

StuporMan

**solo** · January 1, 2006, 23:23

The file I used was the one attached in a previous post, cu_a1561 AD.

When testing my city Cardiff, your program’s results were:

Final: Dye, Gold, Beads
Uranium, Coal, Silk

Top 3: Dye, Gold, Beads
Uranium, Oil, Silk

The supply and demand wildcards are both Coal.

Actual Civ 2.42 values were:

Dye, Oil, Beads
Uranium, Coal, Silk

Coal acts as the demand wildcard, replacing Oil on the demand list. This frees up Oil to act as the secondary wildcard on the supply list, where it replaces Gold.

(Oil substitutes for the primary wildcard when the original wildcard (coal in this case) is eliminated as a duplicate.

I will use Bremen as an AI city example:

If I go into the cheat menu and become the Germans, I can see Bremen’s lists are:

Dye, Oil, Salt
Beads, Spice, Wool

The answers given by your program are:

Dye, Salt, Wool
Hides, Copper, Cloth

Wildcards are: Hides for supply and Copper for demand.

Top 3 listed in your program were:

Dye, Salt, Wool
Hides, Beads, Cloth

I will check the calculations for hides:

Supply: forest(6) x 4 = 24
# techs = 41, no changes
city size 1, so 24 x 2 for a final value of 48

(Your program gives a value of 192! Perhaps it mistakenly assumes the Germans have no techs)

Demand: forest = 6
Location: 40 – 18 = 22 x 3 = 66/2 = 33 + 6 = 39
Techs: Industrialization 39/3 = 13
# techs = 41, no changes
city size 1, so 13 x 2 = 26

(Your program gives a value of 312, perhaps again not taking into account the number and types of techs)

It looks to me that when you “hide” some values from your program’s user, they are not retained correctly for commodity calculations. Techs are one of the items that you have hidden.

**Ell_man** · January 2, 2006, 00:25

Wow, this is amazing! Great Job!

This is definately a 100 on Ell_man's cool factor list

**StuporMan** · January 2, 2006, 09:29

Ell_man,
Thank you so much for your kind words!

solo,
Thanks for the quick help on the calculations. I will have to look into how my program handles secondary wildcards.

As to the AI cities, you are correct in that the calculator assumes that the AI does not have any techs for AI Civs you do not have an embassy with. I do not actually hide these values, I do not retrieve them from the .SAV file. I did this to avoid any semblance of cheating via the calculator. As I have thought on this further, there really would be no way to cheat with the values in the calculator being hidden for AI cities (where the information was not known by the player).

I will attempt to add that in the next calculator version. In the mean time I will go ahead and check your cu_a1561.sav file again to see if I add an embassy if the AI cities produce the correct results.

Thanks,
StuporMan

**solo** · January 2, 2006, 13:09

In answer to your other question about the accuracy of Samson's formulas, I should note that they have been tested a lot, but not exhaustively. I believe you and I uncovered a slight error a while back in one formula, where an extra set of parentheses seemed to be needed to make a formula match the actual results seen in the game.

Most of the formulas are fairly complex, so I'm sure there are still many minor bugs that remain. It's too bad Samson has not been around to see your great program (something he requested, by the way) or to assist in testing it out. His method for deriving the formulas is still a mystery to the rest of his. Something about "simple algebra", is about all he mentioned!

**Sharkbait** · January 2, 2006, 20:40

I'm getting that error re not having a dll file . i've tried installing the VB6 runtime file mentioned in the other thread, with no success. Is there any other trick to it?

Thanks - would love to try this out!

**StuporMan** · January 3, 2006, 08:34

Hmm, last time I tried it I had no problem. What OS are you using? I am guessing that you are using WinXP so I will go ahead and try on my XP machine tonight (I have only been using my 98 and Win2K machine so far for development). The only other thing I use is Microsoft Scripting Runtime which can be downloaded HERE or you can search for Windows Script 5.6.

Let me know if this helps.

StuporMan

**Sharkbait** · January 3, 2006, 09:42

I am indeed in XP. The missing dll is MSSTDFMT.DLL, if thats of any help (isn't to me!).

I installed the scripting with no impact.

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