Buteos always fly around ... also above villages

[Lucky Luke]

I only bought ToT 2 mnths ago. Just reached a new level of existence in a extended game but a try-out of the Fantasy world proved to be disappointing : Buteo wingmen can only explore nests in the cloudlands ? I need to create land units to benefit from the same advantage on the surface world. I thought the Butoes to be equivalent to helicopters ? (which can explore villages and gain benefits if the flag is set on 1 in the 'rules' file).

PS By the way, I acually experienced the same problem with helis is an ext and/or ori game.

[The Mad Monk]

I'm still trying to understand how they got helicopters to behave differently on different maps! RULES.TXT appears to only have that single, global flag, but the maps obviously have different parameters...

I've NEVER gotten a city from a nest, BTW.



------------------
The Mad Monk

"Oh, the morning it stumbled, right in through the window
And this getting up early, gets old anyway
And if you listen closely, the crying that you hear
Is the night time lamenting the start of the day."
-Lyle Lovett, "Icewater/Fly Swatter Blues"

[tobyr]

Hope you enjoy this note, it's full of interesting bits of info:

I believe the idea is that the Buteo would have too much of an advantage if they could get more out of nests and huts. First of all, they get all the nests in the clouds, since no one else gets up there much. Second, the ability to move your first unit (hawks) three squares at a time means you would also get most of the huts on the surface early in the game. As it is, hawks can explore both the clouds and the surface simultaneously (switch maps at every move, be careful to wind up the third move on the safer of the two maps), so you can FIND lots of huts on the surface.

Buteo must establish some foothold on the surface in order to win. Playing at deity level, you will be lucky to hold and defend three cities close to each other (within six squares so sorcerors can provide mutual defense) and preferably also close to cities in the clouds. At lower levels of difficulty, buteo can establish a larger presence on the surface and hold on to it.

After scouting out the terrain with hawks, you want to build a city on the surface and create a diplomat as fast as possible to go pop nearby huts, and hope it survives ok.

Note also that nests in the clouds virtually never give you a city; your hope is to get useful knowledge and money.

Early in the game, your hawks can also give you an advantage by either:
- stalking AI settlers and killing them when they are on terrain that gives no defensive advantage.
- stalking settlers and occupying a city, immediately after they create it.


At deity level, it is really hard to make much of the buteo because their sky resources are pitiful. If you change the @secondary_maps line for the sky like this:

3, 18,40, 4,2, 0,0,0,0 0,0,0, 0,0,0, 0,0,0

You will get more and larger clouds (usually) and therefore more nests, which really helps.

Using the above parameters, I won a game as buteo by creating many cities in the clouds and establishing heavy trade routes in the sky. This was the most boring civ game I have ever played, becasue the buteos engaged in hardly any contact with the other six tribes.

Oh, you are asking how I managed to trade heavily, aren't you. Well I created a pecualiar trade unit for the buteo to use (and never got it to display properly, by the way). Here it is:

(replace the flag unit, which is not used in the fantasy game):

B Ambling Egg, MP, 0, 1.,0, 0a,3d, 1h,1f, 5,0, 7, Tra, 000001000000101

In @units_advanced:
10000000, 00000101, 0, 0000000000000000,0000000000000000,0000000001000000 , 00000000 ;Ambling Egg

And I modified the great eagle so it could carry the egg:

B Great Eagle,nil, 2, 4.,0, 6a,3d, 1h,1f, 3,2, 0, Whe, 000000001010101

10000000, 00000100, 0, 0000000000000000,0000000000000000,0000000001010000 , 00000000 ;Great Eagle

These changes weaken the great eagle as an attacker. It can divebomb underwater, but can no longer move across land terrain.

Since the egg and the great eagle have different native transport abilities, the eagle cannot dive underwater carrying eggs; instead it takes them to a good spot, and the egg drops underwater by itself.

How do they do that, you ask? I added an additional transport type, to enable moving between the sky and underwater directly:

@MAP_TRANSPORT_RELATIONSHIPS
0,2
0,2
0,2
0,1
0,3
0,2
1,3 ; directly between the surface and the sky

- toby



------------------
toby robison
criticalpaths@mindspring.com