Patch 1.17 not available currently?

[notyoueither]

I was wondering when the voices of darkness would make an appearance. 2 days. Woohoo.

Salve

[yin26]

These days I'm only acting as a result of Union Contracts, which clearly state: "In the event that Words of Darkness are not spoken at opportune moments, Yin shall, in accordance with Paragraph 4, Subsection D, post such a response no later than three (3) calendar days from the moment of said event's public appearance."

If I don't comply, the Prince of Darkness makes me sit down to playtest the latest Civ3 patch.

[Libertarian]

Thank God you're here, Yin. I should have listened to you about stacking. But the list seemed so ... glamorous.

[notyoueither]

Love the new Avatar Yin.

Yeah, contracts are a b*tch. Especially with THEM.

Salve

[notyoueither]

Lib.

[NYE puts fingers in his ears.]

You don't like stacking? I haven't had time to get so far into a game to need it yet.

Salve

[yin26]

NYE: Thanks for noticing the avatar! I think it captures most of my posts nicely.

Lib: WHAT?! C'mon, don't tell me there are problems with the stacking. I thought it worked nicely with your style of play?

[Libertarian]

I do like stacking, Salve. I'm just disappointed with its implementation here. As it turns out, to coordinate stacking of workers (for which the feature was most needed) they must be engaged in identical tasks, else the stack will split out into one subset of working workers and one subset of idle workers.

For example, say 5 workers are on a grassland tile, and you are an industrious civ. You put one of the workers to the task of building a mine, and stack-move the other 4 to a nearby hill. on the following turn, you build a road on the hill. Later, the worker you left behind will, without warning, follow the moves of the other 4 to the hill.

In other words, as it turns out, you must coordinate not only likeness of units, but likeness of tasks.

Moreover, key to making stack movement useful was sensible unit activation sequencing, which was allegedly fixed. But it does not appear to be the case. Setting aside the ambiguities pointed out by Soren, the sequencing doesn't even work the way it is designed. The stack from which you activate is supposed to be reordered, so that activation does not move to some other unit outside the stack before the stack's actions are depletion. Lo and behold, it is just like it was before. If you select a unit from a stack and do something with it, the next unit activated might or might not be in that same stack, and it might or might not be anywhere at all nearby.

So, the short of it is that, while the intention was good, and the list looked promising, the features don't work or don't work right.

Yin, see above.

[notyoueither]

I think the old one was more, welll, you.

Salve

[notyoueither]

Ahhhh. Lib. You found a bug by the sounds of it. Pain in the *ss that they are cropping up now. Do we know any of the *testers.*

Unit sequencing. Yeah, I am disoriented by this from time to time. However, going back to my last conquer-a-thon, which was pre first patch, I mostly found right-clicking-stack picking-bottom-unit kept it fairly focused. Not all the time though.

Is it any better? I'm just creeping up to 10bc in my first 1.17 game. Too busy working and kibitzing here. How far have you gone?

Salve

[yin26]

NYE: Yeah, I liked the old one quite a bit, but Markos chose it for me (I posted the full photo of the dog, he cropped it and slapped in on me without asking me using his Godly mod powers). This one from SimGolf, I guess you know, and looks a little 'lighter' compared to that pitbull, don't you think? See, I'm getting happier in my old age.

Lib: I see. Please keep offering them your input and proposed fixes so they can get it down at least come x-pack time.

[Libertarian]

Well, Salve, I stopped fairly early on. Already, with merely five workers, a warrior, and a couple of scouts, I had discovered that stack-moving the workers was counter-productive and that units refused to activate in a sensible order. There was no reason to believe that the problems would spontaneously clear up as the game increased in complexity. And I certainly had no desire to re-experience the tedium that the "fixes" were intended to address.

I shudder to think how I might have reacted had I continued, fighting these new interface complexities, and the Domestic Nag suddenly appears insisting that I build aqueducts. I might have shot my computer.

[notyoueither]

Yin. You mean Mark picks your Avatar. Hehehehe. Ohhhh Mark....

Happier, yeahh. I see it. Really. Golf is doing you good. Hehe.

Salve

[notyoueither]

Lib. Sorry to hear it.

Oh well, you'll have to rely on reports from the front.

notyoueither
In case you didn't notice a difference between a handle and a statement

[Libertarian]

Thanks for clearing that up. These days, it's hard to tell.

Shaneequa

[Dan Magaha FIRAXIS]

Originally posted by ColdFever


Thanks Dan, it is really good no have you around.



civ3.com runs on an Microsoft-IIS/4.0 and your authoring software probably as well, so you possibly might be interested in this free software:

http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/

I regularly use VNC as an admin to connect to our WinNT/2K computers at work from home in case of need (there even is a client for WinPocketPC). Although a VNC connection is not very well secured, the VNC service is protected byWinNT/Win2K. So I keep the VNC service usually terminated and start it remotely via dialin just in case of need.

Thanks Kai, but it's little more complicated than that, civ3.com is Infogrames' server (actually it's three load-balanced servers), and I have a few things I have to do in sequence to upload files and publish them to the production servers.

Does VNC work with WinXP? I just upgraded to WinXP at work and the version of pcANYWHERE I was using is now "not recommended" by Microsoft

Dan