Cradle - 1.1

[hexagonian]

The leader pics are tentatively done and are located on my site - I do have to make sure that the civ_str.txt and civilization.txt file does not have any file incompatibilities. However, the pics are also available for personal setups too.

Here is a sample

[hexagonian]

Sorry,

A couple of the pics were not in a tga format, so I had to pull the zipped file off of my site and will correct the problem. The files will be up tomorrow (Thursday - USA). Also, my site will be down on Friday for an Administration update.

[hexagonian]

Leader pics up and ready - and the .txt files are compatible with Cradle. The leaders.zip file also contains the civilization.txt and civ_str.txt file which MUST replace the old files in Cradle.

Located at

http://www.mydocsonline.com

login: hexagonia
password:hextapul

Also, there was an important post on at the end of page 1 of this thread which you may have missed if you are in the habit of logging into the last post on the threads. It is in regard to the differences between DiploMod 3.5 and 3.6. Basically, DiploMod 3.5 should be the version to use in Cradle as it helps make the AI more aggressive. If you have downloaded the text files with Diplomod 3.6, you can download Diplomod 3.5 (Cradle compatible) at my site and overwrite the existing files with it.

It does make a big difference in gameplay too.

[hexagonian]

If you have downloaded the leader pics, there is a change that you have to make in the following file

civilisation.txt

Go to the Aztec entry and locate the line of type
CIV_CITY_STYLE 3

and change it to
CIV_CITY_STYLE 1

I am also in the process of adapting the Martin's CityMod to Cradle, and should have a file ready to go in the next few days.

[Kull]

Hex: My latest stab at Cradle is going much better than the first. Gigantic map, Max Barbarians, 8 civs, Hardest (one below impossible). It's now 1050 AD and my Assyrians are doing pretty well, although I think geography has played the biggest role. I have a small domain on a huge continent that fills most of the Northern Hemisphere, and share it with 3 other civs. In the past they'd come at me from all directions, and destruction would only be a matter of time. The saving grace here is a vast inland sea that essentially turns the continent into an elongated donut. This has been critical to my survival. I built a city on a choke point to the west, and that served to fend off the very aggressive Americans (helped further by a large expanse of uninhabited jungle and desert between our population centers). To the east and north is a large forest and a barren wasteland of tundra and glaciers. Here's where I post a blockading line of fortified "scouts", and they give plenty of warning when the North Americans send stacks at me.

Curious parallel to the first game: These "Indians" are also orange and allegedly peaceful and usually a smiling friend....and just as willing to sneak attack! But now with the early warning system, it's only isolated single units that take the hit, and I have plenty of time to coordinate defensive stacks and sue for peace before their armies reach my heartland. One other bonus. My eastern city is so strong the Americans gave up attacking it, and now send stacks on an epic march north and east through the domains of the Phoenicians and North Americans, wreaking havoc on them first. By the time their diminished stacks reach me, I can gather enough units to take them out despite technological inferiority on a unit-for-unit basis. Plus their guys don't heal in the field....thank you Hex! Anyway, after 7000 years of shrewd tech trading and relationship building, I've eliminated the huge tech deficit and just launched a seaborne invasion of the Nigerian continent directly south of my homeland. I'll spend a bit of time discussing this, because the the action was so remarkably different from normal CTP2 (and even a MedMod2 game).

The Nigerians are powerful and aggressive, but thankfully separated from me by a narrrow strip of ocean (sort of England to my France). In my extremely weak early days, all attempts to befriend them were ignored, and they insisted on attacking my navy and generally hovering about my coast. Once things were solidified on my northern and western borders, I built up two size 12 stacks, a navy large enough to carry all of them in one trip and launched an invasion....it was payback time! Due to planning screw ups, one of my landing sites was occupied by a single Nigerian Praetorian (My first thought: "Uh-oh, I don't have that tech yet...how far ahead are these guys!?"), so I couldn't land both stacks and settled for placing one on a non-road square. That turned out to be sheer luck for me, because two size 12 Nigerian stacks immediately moved into position near my single 12-stack. If I'd been on a road, they could have attacked me in sequence, and my demise would have been certain. (And I know they WOULD have attacked, as you'll see.) As it was, I fortified my men and bombarded the adjacent stack with 5 catapults, killing one unit and weakening the rest such that a Nigerian attack on the following turn was beaten off with the loss of only a few units. Fortunately the other enemy stack was one back on the road, and couldn't attack on the same turn.....but it immediately moved into postion for a folow-up assault. This gave me time to replenish my lost and damaged legions with fresh troops from the offshore fleet (thanking my lucky stars that they hadn't been landed yet), and the opportunity to bombard the new enemy stack. Sure enough it attacked on the following turn and again I won with minimal losses (but severe damage). By the end of two turns, I'd lost 4 units and had 5 seriously damaged units being shipped back to my cities for R&R. Over the next few turns, I demolished a few smaller enemy stacks (always relying on bombardment first) and finally had two big healthy 12's and was able to conquer the city across the strait from my port of embarkation. But it took almost twenty turns, and the AI was vigorous in trying to fend me off. And without luck and close proximity to my home ports, they would surely have beaten me. One more example of how the Cradle Rocks! A few other comments:

Barbarians: I've learned that you really have to be very aggressive against the Barbarians in the early game. Left alone, small bands of 1 or 2 will soon combine into irresistable stacks of 12. And they WILL take your cities! You MUST keep a size 6-8 stack handy to chase down every Barbarian that appears, and slay them without mercy! I cannot overemphasize the importance of this.

Technology: You don't have a prayer of keeping up with the AI during the first 6-7000 years of the game. Find civs whose personalitied don't include the word "aggressive" (because those will NEVER deal with you), and purchase the cheaper techs (because it's doubtful you'll have anything to trade). Keep close tabs on who has what tech, and research techs they don't have. Paying for techs is only affordable early on, and you'll have to get into a mode of trading them even up.

Caesar & Ships: One of the confusions that hit my invasion force was that Caesar was unable to board a ship! What's THAT all about? If the same were true of Alexander, he'd never cross the Hellespont!

AI Expansion: This is something you'll have to look into, Hex. The AI is totally unwilling to ship nomad colonists across the ocean. 7000 years have passed in my game, and not a single AI city has appeared on land which a nomad couldn't walk to from the original homeland. They will send specials (slavers and prophets) and small exploration parties, but that's it. The AI also won't launch even small trans-oceanic military invasions, and I suspect the two problems are related. This is one area in which MedMod2 is clearly superior, so you might want to check with Wes to see which settings control this behavior.

Civ List: I must admit that playing against the "Americans" and the "English" in 6000 BC kinda ruins the atmosphere. Would it be possible to include a list of "Ancient-only" civs and cities? My Assyrians would feel so much more at home if their opponents were the Babylonians, Hittites, Mitanni, Egyptians, Elamites, Hebrews, and Persians! It would take a fair amount of work, but if you're interested, I'd be willing to create the list. I'm also open to suggestions for membership on the "Ancient Civs" list, so folks can feel free to nominate candidate Civs.

[Chris B]

I have Several Comments aftyer playing the Cradle with the new cities and pics mod up to About the Dark Ages (I didn't run off last time, I just forgot to warn everyone I was going out of reach of CTP2 for 2 weeks ).
After I installed the Expansion, I found it undid the fix on the Civs when you start the Game, which had been fixed in previous versions. Also, the Egyptian Pyramid style was either left out or was overlooked when being added. I played as the Egyptians and was shocked when my cities had the Maya/Aztec Pyramid style.
As for the Game- IT ROCKS! The POW trigger seemed so Logical, though all it ever gave me was spearmen. It do not know if this was a bug or if I simply had missed a key advance giving me a new age. I would consider the updater the proudest feature of the mod. Just a few Suggestions: Would it really cost the Full price of a unit to give it new Equipment. This is particularly true with Militia. Btw, Slingers dont Upgrade to archers. This might be a nice touch.
The playability is really good and the AI seemed logical, even on Medium, which I play on because I don't like losing. It nabbed a few of my Cities, and seemed to organize good defenses when I attacked it. The only thing I did notice though I s that when the Ai came up against my cities it teneded to hang out around my City for a few turns, giving me enough time to rush buy the necessary defenses. Had they come right in and Attacked, the outcome would have been substantially different.
Kull really has the right I dea on only Ancient Civs. There was some Package like that for CTP1 hat I think you could use, as unless I'm Mistaken Activision didn't make any changes to civilisation.txt or civ_str.
Thanks for this mod, it really is making a game out of CTP2.

[hexagonian]

Kull,
If you are willing, go ahead and create lists for me of some more ancient civs. I already have the following ancient civs in place.

Egypt
Rome
Assyria
Nubia
Hebrew
Greek
Hittite
Persian
Phonician

30 cities per civ - and I need a leader name for each new civ

I do want to keep many of the European ones in though, since Cradle is designed to encompass the Medival age too. I am also trying to set up an option whereby advances are very cheap, so you will have the ability to play well into the Modern/Future, but I do not know how this will actually play out.

Email list to hexagonia@yahoo.com

RE: Expansion - Naval
As for the AI expansion, this has been an issue that still needs work. I think I know how I can bulk up the naval aspect of the game too - which may also help in the cross ocean expansionistic aspects of the game. As a sidenote, my last few games have had general map settings with very little ocean so I have not been forced to use much, if any navy. I will take a look at the files this week and will email you a set of files to try out.

RE: Caesar
Go into the units.txt file and change the size class of Caesar from large to small. This should fix the problem. I do not know how that got changed to large in the first place, especially when the type I cut and pasted did not have that in there. Gremlins, I guess...

Another thing to change regards Chariots - they may have the ability to attack/move through mountains in one of the older files, which they shouldn't have. Double check in units.txt to see if your files reflect this.

Chris
RE: POW
The POW code is structured to give a player a very weak infantry unit. I looked at the code and as far as I can tell, you may be getting a spearman up until Christianity. However, it was my intent to give you a hoplite at that point. It may be because the text associated with giving the unit based on the advances a player has is an 'and' statement instead of an 'or' statement.

Ben, can you look at the code and see if this is the case - and if so, can this be altered? This is how it should be
Spearman - to Bronze Working
Hoplite - to Dark Ages
Man at Arms - to Flintlock
Infantryman - to Vertical Flight
Machine Gunner - to Chaos

RE: Updater
As for the UnitUpdater, I thought that would be a very good addition - thanks to Peter for that. The cost was calculated to make it expensive for the human player to upgrade - to the point where he may not be able to upgrade all of his forces. Granted, the AI gets it for free, but the AI does need help.

Chris, what you can do is go into the updater.slc file and look for each entry, which will look like the following

enadv[0]=AdvanceDB(ADVANCE_BRONZE_WORKING);
OLD_UNIT_TYPE[0]=UnitDB(UNIT_SPEARMAN);
NEW_UNIT_TYPE[0]=UnitDB(UNIT_HOPLITE);
PER_UNIT_UPDATE_COST[0]=280;

If you are willing, change the cost to something cheaper and see how it plays out - I used the production cost as a base. Since the gold in savings is only there for Rush Buys, this is supposed to force a player to make some choices on how to use his excess gold.

Anyone else have some opinions on this? One thing I do want to maintain is the extreme difficulty on the higher levels. Difficulty involves not being able to do all that you want to do for as long as possible.

RE: City Graphics
Does the MedMod use the latest of Martin's CityMod and does that Mod have the Egyptian Pyramid style? I am using an older version of it which only has the Mesoamerican style - the most current CityMod version that he sent me does not have a readme so I assumed that it didn't. If it does, I do want to incorporate it. Are there other city styles in there too? Martin, are you out there???

RE: Civilization choice option bug
As for the civilization choice problem, when I just tried it with the new setup, I ran into the same problem. I tried to overcome the problem by taking the civilization and civ_str.txt file that I used for my setup and also put them in the default game folders, as well as the scenario/default and scenario/english folder.

(I also had to make sure that I had new leader pics and the city graphics in the CTP2 normal game default folder - so that the normal game would read those new leader pics and city graphics - this may overwrite MedMod/Apolyton Pack files though)

When I tried a new game, this did solve the problem - I think this was the reason why I didn't have that probem in the first place because I had my set of civs in the normal setup since I started modding the game - and I incorporated those changes as part of Cradle.

From a logic standpoint, this civilization choice problem is one that has got me stumped to find an easier and cleaner solution. The game should be reading my special civilzation file - the best explaination I can come up with is when you launch CTP, you are also launching the default game, which will bring you to the screen that has the civ choices. Do you choose your civ at that point and then launch the Cradle scenario, or do you wait until after launching the Cradle scenario to pick a civ? And if the last civ you chose from a previous game is a default civ that is not part of my list, then this may also be causing some kind of conflict between my file and the default files when you start my mod.

Has anyone else run into this problem with the new graphics??? If so, you may have to be prepared to do the above steps - if you are not willing to do that, then do not use the leaders/city enhancement pack. Not using the pack will not affect the game, since all the pack adds is a little more atmosphere.

FINALLY
This may also make it easier for me to convert Cradle to Modswapper. Up until this point I haven't had a compelling reason to do so. The SaveGame bug has not affected Cradle for some reason (and this had been confirmed). The main reasons why I haven't converted was from an ease of modding (the scenario setup keeps the file lists smaller) and now that the diplopictures are possible, I now have a numbering conflict between MedMod and the Apolyton Pack. Plus I have tried to stay consistant with the unit graphics, but I will now have to go in and make sure that I do not have any numbers that are the same as those Mods for the advances/city improvements/wonders tgas. For those of you who have already downloaded the files, this may mean that you will have to redownload everything - something that I do not like to have players do (as my mod is now approaching 10 Mg in size).

Thanks for the input

[Immortal Wombat]

Ben, can you look at the code and see if this is the case - and if so, can this be altered? This is how it should be
Spearman - to Bronze Working
Hoplite - to Dark Ages
Man at Arms - to Flintlock
Infantryman - to Vertical Flight
Machine Gunner - to Chaos

Oh [darn] it

Yes...

[Kull]

The "All-Ancient" Civ List (alphabetically):

Arabians
Assyrians
Aztecs
Babylonians
Carthaginians
Celts
Etruscans
Greeks
Han (China)
Harrapans (Indus)
Hebrews
Hittites
Incas
Kush (Africa)
Macedonians
Mayans
Minoans
Nubians (Africa)
Persians
Phoenicians
Romans
Shang (China)
Sumerians
Yamato (Japan)

I realize you already have several of these, but one of my missions is to remove all redundant city names. Thus Babylon will show up only under the Babylonians. It's a bit of a challenge, especially for Civs that essentially occupied the same lands (such as Babylon and Sumer, Shang and Han, etc.) but definitely worth the effort. For example, the Sumerians could be a trading civ, while the Babylonians would have a more warlike personality. I'm already at 70%, and should have complete set within a few days. If anyone has an ancient civ to add....and you REALLY want it on the list, please supply some of the cities too.

Kudos: The most recent Cradle civ list had lots of good stuff, and I borrowed extensively from a huge Civ list created by Nordicus. The Macedonians are almosr verbatim from Harlan.

P.S. I've got more than 30 city names for most of these civs...do you want the complete list?

[Chris B]

Hex-
Yes, Med Mod does have the Egyptian Pyramid style. Making the Civs ancient ones is certainly a good thing, except I strongly support Adding the Byzantines. I had already found that line in updater.slc and changed as I saw fit, but I haven't had enough time to Playtest the Effects of this.

I also have comments about Ruins: I always get either Gold or Nothing. I would reccommend increasing the chance of getting an advance, army unit or settler but also Increase the chance of Barbarian ambushes.
The other thing that would really help with this mod is a printable Tech Tree.
-CB

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by Chris B
Hex-
Yes, Med Mod does have the Egyptian Pyramid style. Making the Civs ancient ones is certainly a good thing, except I strongly support Adding the Byzantines. I had already found that line in updater.slc and changed as I saw fit, but I haven't had enough time to Playtest the Effects of this.

I'll be looking into resetting up the graphics this week then. The Byzantines are already part of the most current civ lists and will remain in.

Originally posted by Chris B
I also have comments about Ruins: I always get either Gold or Nothing. I would reccommend increasing the chance of getting an advance, army unit or settler but also Increase the chance of Barbarian ambushes.
The other thing that would really help with this mod is a printable Tech Tree.
-CB

IMO, ruins can be very unbalancing - in my setup, if you play with Ruins only, you will get gold only. Playing on the higher settings will give you units, gold, barbarians, and a very slight chance of nomads or cities. No advances however...

As much as I like getting stuff from ruins, it is my opinion that advances and nomad/cities are the easiest way to catch up early in the game - which is something that will actually make the game easier for players. You can go into ruins.txt and adjust your settings to something else.

I do hope players realize that they are free to make whatever changes they want to my files for their own setup, and I am willing to tell players how to do such things. Experimentation is good, because it will make the Mods better. I haven't had the benefit of a lot of playtesters, and I have my own preferences, so I am hoping that players will feel free to go ahead with their own.

A Printable tech tree is in the readme files/pdf folder - it is in a pdf format so you will need Adobe Acrobat - available at http://adobe.com for free

Kull,
That sounds great - send the complete lists and go ahead and give me your input on the personalities for each one.

[Martin Gühmann]

RE: City Graphics
Does the MedMod use the latest of Martin's CityMod and does that Mod have the Egyptian Pyramid style? I am using an older version of it which only has the Mesoamerican style - the most current CityMod version that he sent me does not have a readme so I assumed that it didn't. If it does, I do want to incorporate it. Are there other city styles in there too? Martin, are you out there???

I thought I sent you Ben's English CityMod2 based on the scenario file structure. And later I sent to you a second email that contained the place from where you can download the files, because I got the feeling that you never got my emails about CityMod2.I don't know how old is you version of Citymod but I guess it is the version that is available here on Apolyton but also this version has a readme. On my homepage you can find four files related to Citymod. The first one contains the French version of Citymod. There are two files that contains the English and German version of CityMod2 and final there is a image pack for the Great Library that contains new tech and building pictures, which fit in the CityMod2 age pattern. I plan to merge these three files into one and remove the screencaptures when I release GoodMod. We don't need screencaptures any more since Martin the Dane released his zfs-reader.

By the I made a small soundfix that plays sounds when you build tileimprovements as in CTP1. It can be found here in the CTP2 mod forum or use the link directly:

MG_soundfix

[Chris B]

OK-
I will definately go ahead and change ruins.txt.
I know about the pdfs and have Acrobat reader , but when I print it only about a third of the tech tree comes out. Is there any way I can fix this???
-CB

[hexagonian]

Martin,
I had received a file from you a few weeks back - that was the current City Mod without the Advance graphics. That file did not have a readme - thanks for the link to your site so I could get the current file with the readme. I will not be using the advance graphics, since that means I will have to reformat all of my advances - something that I do not want to do. However, I will be using all of your ages/city styles. I have to refigure out what advance will fall in what age though.

The next graphics release will have Kull's civ additions too. I will wait for those lists and will tie everything together. That should be all on the graphics end of things.

Chris
Does your printer have the ability to tile print?

I had set up the files on a Mac-based system. I also have the ability to tile the poster out on a printer off of my Mac. I will try to reset up the files to fit on a set of 8.5 x 11 sheets, which will allow you to print them out and assemble them into a poster.

[Kull]

Hex: I have some files for you, but everything going to your Juno account bounces back undeliverable. Can you send a different email address?