The Medieval Pack II v2.0: Crusade! Texts Release

[joseph1944]

Originally posted by WesW

Joseph, I think you need to set your debug slic to no. See the installation instructions for that. I had hoped Dale got all the bugs out, though.

Thank You

I just change it to "NO"

Wes that Civ3 mod that you posted in, is it a good mod?

[Locutus]

Originally posted by WesW
I *think* I found out the Civ 3 problems. When you load an autosaved game, it seems to currupt the game, causing it to crash sometime in the future. This reminds me of the problems we faced when we first started making the Medpack II and had to abandon the scenario structure.

The only difference is that with Civ3 you can't fix it

BTW, Wes, do you still follow the CtP2 forums? If not, there's a (topped) thread in General that you might find interesting. I'm no Yin (thank god! ) or Vel but still...

[joseph1944]

Star Trek look good. I have watched every episode of Star Trek since Sept. 1966 on the night it was first showen.

[WesW]

"Wes that Civ3 mod that you posted in, is it a good mod?"

Are you talking about the Medpack III? I also posted in the Balancer mod, which did a good job until the two makers apparently gave up on it during the holidays.

I am still having crashes with the Medpack III, and since Mark changed servers I cannot edit or update my webpage, so the mod is neither ready nor available yet. That said, I have been having fun games until the thing crashes.
I think that a lot of people are adjusting their opinions of Firaxis and Activision after their civ 3 experiences; civ 3 seems about on a par with Ctp2 as far as bugs and instability. And don't get me started on the modding limitations.

When I daydream about civ games nowadays, I have started to envision a hybrid between SimCity, Civ, Ctp, and maybe Imperialism which would closely model how an immortal, but not all-powerful, ruler could grow a tribe into a super power. A Ctp or SimCity terrain development model, Ctp's combat, Civ3's resource model, SMAC's diplomacy with elements of Civ 3 and Ctp 2 with Dale's mod. New things like minor civs, Civ 3's culture influence (with significant modifications).

Anyway, I read Locutus' modwrap. I think that the Medpack adds more slic stuff than Wouter outlined, like the unit repair code and the destroy-building code which can alter conquest significantly. There is also the personality-switching code which should liven up the game.
Unless Dave has further refined the AI settings, I think that the AI performance in the Medpack should be as good or better than anything else out there. I added several slic scripts in the Crusade version which should help the AIs keep up in the second half of the game.
The last time I checked, Cradle used slic code to send the AI into an extremely aggressive state the further the game went, which could give the impression of a better AI if you simply gauge this by aggression. What I tried to do was make the AI make better decisions in all aspects. If it could not win a war, why start one? Anyway, most everyone who has played Cradle gives it high marks for gameplay, so who am I to argue? I just hope people have fun with whichever one they choose to spend their time on.

[Boney]

Wes, Firstly, any progress on the invalid page prob?I was really enjoying both the crusade games I was playing, but I will not start another if there is a possibility that the invalid page syndrome will re-occur. I really would like to be able to compare crusade and cradle, especially after you have added some of the cradle things. It seems that no one has yet compared the best two mods for ctp2.

Secondly, about the AI. I am really talking about medmod2? not crusade. I found them too easy to threaten and force them to give me things. You tried to give the AI some logic 'If it could not win a war, why start one?' this made it a little too passive in my opinion. maybe a weak civ could start a war to just take out the human. In multiplayer if I know I am not going to win then I will try to take down someone with me, usually someone who has annoyed me. Also if a border city has been left defenceless or weak the player should be punished.

Another point is futile AI attacks, I would like to see the AI sometimes hit a city with 3 12stacks sometime. The AI only ever attacks with one stack per city. How about AI retreating sometime too?

If cradle and crusade could somehow join together another interesting hybrid would have been created. Is there any possibility of this happening?

One thing I really like is the upgrade of unit feature in cradle. Sometimes I keep playing a game an extra hour or more just to upgrade before I go to bed. It is similar to the feeling I get when I either get a certain needed advance for a unit or for a wonder.

Have to say that the ctp2 modders are doing a great job, It makes me become interested in modding too. Scenarios would be good, but let's see how far the AI can be taken first.

Well I've rambled on a little too much, time to go.

[joseph1944]

Originally posted by WesW
"Wes that Civ3 mod that you posted in, is it a good mod?"

Are you talking about the Medpack III? I also posted in the Balancer mod, which did a good job until the two makers apparently gave up on it during the holidays.

I was talking about the Balancer mod, however how is your mod and what does it do?

I am still having crashes with the Medpack III, and since Mark changed servers I cannot edit or update my webpage, so the mod is neither ready nor available yet. That said, I have been having fun games until the thing crashes.

I will wait until you are finnish with your mod. The Balancer mod download page is not working.

I think that a lot of people are adjusting their opinions of Firaxis and Activision after their civ 3 experiences; civ 3 seems about on a par with Ctp2 as far as bugs and instability. And don't get me started on the modding limitations.

When I daydream about civ games nowadays, I have started to envision a hybrid between SimCity, Civ, Ctp, and maybe Imperialism which would closely model how an immortal, but not all-powerful, ruler could grow a tribe into a super power. A Ctp or SimCity terrain development model, Ctp's combat, Civ3's resource model, SMAC's diplomacy with elements of Civ 3 and Ctp 2 with Dale's mod. New things like minor civs, Civ 3's culture influence (with significant modifications).

Ask Bill Gates for a loan
so you can buy the rights to all of the above and we could have a ball.

Anyway, I read Locutus' modwrap. I think that the Medpack adds more slic stuff than Wouter outlined, like the unit repair code and the destroy-building code which can alter conquest significantly. There is also the personality-switching code which should liven up the game.
Unless Dave has further refined the AI settings, I think that the AI performance in the Medpack should be as good or better than anything else out there. I added several slic scripts in the Crusade version which should help the AIs keep up in the second half of the game.
The last time I checked, Cradle used slic code to send the AI into an extremely aggressive state the further the game went, which could give the impression of a better AI if you simply gauge this by aggression. What I tried to do was make the AI make better decisions in all aspects. If it could not win a war, why start one? Anyway, most everyone who has played Cradle gives it high marks for gameplay, so who am I to argue? I just hope people have fun with whichever one they choose to spend their time on.

Have you played Empire Earth yet? I have and it is fun, however a little fast for me at the slowest speed. The new Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds is base on EE or AoE and is OK, however at the lower level I can win hands down. I guess I will play at a higher level next game. My current game with EE I have started with 8 Civs and have wipeout 2 civs. 5 more to go. Also my current game of CTP2 is going well. Don't tell anyone but some of the Units in CTP 2 are better than Civ 3. Civ 3 units would be better at 600 X 800 like Ctp 2.
Do you think SC3000 terrain would be better than 3d as in RRT2 or Tropico?
And btw if you ever come to Northen Calif. let me know. Someday I want to go to Huntville to see the space stuff.
Just for your info and who ever I have XP OS on 1.5 g. SC 3000 Unlimited, SMAC and B-17 will not run. ET tech could not figure out why SC would not run. I have not written Firaxis yet. CTP 2, RRT 2, Civ 3, Star Wars, Zeus so far will run. Have not loaded any other programs to see what will and will not run.
Joseph

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by WesW
Unless Dave has further refined the AI settings, I think that the AI performance in the Medpack should be as good or better than anything else out there. I added several slic scripts in the Crusade version which should help the AIs keep up in the second half of the game.

The only porblem is that this is not the real problem: In my GoodMod games I saw that the pollution in late games hurts the AI a lot . It can't react on the pollution unhappiness like the human by using entertainers it has to use the global sliders. And this will reduce AI performance. So I will reduce the pollution unhappiness effect and increase the effect on the environment. That should help the AI.

Originally posted by WesW
The last time I checked, Cradle used slic code to send the AI into an extremely aggressive state the further the game went, which could give the impression of a better AI if you simply gauge this by aggression. What I tried to do was make the AI make better decisions in all aspects.

Dave also modified his strategies.txt and he increased the preority of attack goals and and max evals dramatically. The original settings force the AI to use defence/peace strategies even in war. The AI does not employ its war strategies enoough. So if the AI is on war with someone its army is in front of a defenceless foreign city and it has a defenceless own city, it will mocve its army to its own city instead of capturing the enemy city. And from the Cradle strategies.txt it looks that the AI will focus on war attack goals instead on defence goals even in peace.

Originally posted by WesW
If it could not win a war, why start one?

But why advoid a war if the human can't win and the AI can't win, either. The result is that the human can just wait and build up his armies until he can win. So the better consequence for the AI would be. Start a war now and survive or wait until the humin will destroy you.

By the way I had to cope with this AI strategy (as I used your strategies.txt as a base, but now I have all the good stuff from, Dave, player1, you and me combined into one strategies.txt) and once I got the the huge production cities of the orange player and than I was unbeatable from my military rank, but if you don't have enough troops in a certain region, than your military rank is worth nothing there.

Now to something different, I took a lock on yor last version of your tileimp.txt and I had to notice that you deleted two of my tileimprovements. That was a bad idea as the good improve code is depending on the tileimp database index. So if you remove one TI you will change all the indices of the tileimps. The result is that the good improvemet code won't place tileimps on the good tiles. So I suggest to reinsert the two tilimps that you remove. If you want the boni for the goods. If you need some details about that problem and the aggressive changings just check ot my GoodMod threat.

-Martin

[Locutus]

Originally posted by WesW
Anyway, I read Locutus' modwrap. I think that the Medpack adds more slic stuff than Wouter outlined, like the unit repair code and the destroy-building code which can alter conquest significantly. There is also the personality-switching code which should liven up the game.

Although Cradle has much more SLIC code then the MedMod (rough estimate: about 50-60% more and growing), I agree I somewhat understated the amount of code in the MedMod. So I edited my post there to reformulate that particular sentence a little.

About the AI, I agree that your settings are very good. The decision-making of the MedMod AI might even be better than the decision-making in Craddle (but I don't know the AI files of both mods well enough to really be able to jugde that), but as others have stated, Cradle's AI gives the human a better challenge, and that's in the end what matters most to players. Cradle's AI is much more aggressive and thus puts more pressure on the human player (which is always good). To compensate for the possibly somewhat inferior economical and city management decisions, it cheats more (although I have no idea how much). Of course it would be much nicer to have an AI that doesn't cheat but when extra cheating makes the game so much more challenging I'll be more than happy to make some comprises. Playing on Impossible with the MedMod is interesting, with Cradle it is actually (at least early on) almost impossible... From an academic's point of view, it's quite possible that your AI is superior to Cradle but from a player's point of view it's Cradle all the way... (this is just the AI of course, in other areas the MedMod is better, as I mentioned in my review)

I just hope people have fun with whichever one they choose to spend their time on.

I just hope people are smart enough to play with both!

BTW, Wes, when did you last play Cradle? If it has been a while, I can really recommend you give it a go some time, it's very good. I do believe that if you and Dave would play each others mod a bit every now and then (if you don't do so already), you could learn a lot from each other. You both have some great things in your mod that aren't in the other one (of course, you're no longer working on the MedMod but it'll is still very fun to play Cradle)...

I agree with Boney that an ideal situation would be to create a merger of Cradle and MedMod; but as I exlained in the Cradle thread, I tried this myself but I know that in the long run it would take more advice than I care to devote to it (hopefully someone else will pick it up or perhaps even a group of people)... Oh well, a guy can dream, can't he?

BTW, do you guys mind if I repost some of the comments here in the Wrapup thread? I think some of the comments made by Wes, Martin and Boney would be most useful to people who want to learn more about these 2 mods and compare them...

Edit: Wes, you still didn't answer my question: do you still read the forums (regularly)? For example, if someone posts a MedMod question in the General Forum, will you find it there timely or should we redirect such people to this thread?

[WesW]

Boney, I think you should check the troubleshooting and installation instructions again. I have not seen a report of this particular problem in at least a year, so I would think it has to be something on your end.

As to Wouter's question, I do not scan the general forum any more. I check into the mod forum here depending on how active things are in this thread. All questions about the modpack should be directed here.

I admit that I have never played with the Cradle mod, though I looked over some of its ai files back last year.
It was under the impression that building upkeep was the main problem for the AI in the late game, so I reduced upkeep cost significantly for Crusade. I also tried to do all I could to get the AIs to build pollution-reducing buildings when needed.
I put things like this in the same category as upgrading units, in that these are basic game elements that the AI should be able to perform on its own. Therefore, I conentrated on getting the AIs to perform them, rather than making slic code to cover up their inabilities.
I do think I made one mistake that may account for the AI inability to keep up in the timeline in the late game. When you get into the modern ages, you need to get advances about every 4 turns to keep up. In Ctp1, there was a setting available to us in the aidata files to set the advance rate of the AI. I did notice until after the tech tree was finished that this setting is not available in Ctp2. I think that this setting is about 6 or 7, whatever is needed to follow the original tech tree with its fewer advances.

Martin, I do not remember deleting those two TIs. Could you add those back in, and attach the file here? I have no idea if I deleted them on purpose or accidentally.

Wouter, feel free to post any comments I made in the other thread. I would recommend that prospective players read the Main readme and Triggers readme to get the bulk of the changes made to the game, though the other readmes are also there because they contain needed info. All readmes are in the text portion of the mod.

Sorry, Joseph, I have not played any of those games you listed with the new terrain. All I have been playing, or trying to play, is civ 3 lately. I found the cause of the last crash I experienced, so maybe the mod will be clean now.

Edit: Btw, if someone could send me the Cradle readmes, with explanations of the slic code, I would give them a look-see, along with the aidata files. I think you have to get the big 12.1meg dl to see them, and I don't want to have to do that.

[hexagonian]

The Update file (not the Beta 1.3) at my site has all the text files, as well as the readme files. The update is approx 0.6 Mb.

The link is below in my signature line

[Martin Gühmann]

Ok here is it I basically used the MMX version and made a small modification to the undersea fortification so if you don't the undersea fortification pictures.

-Martin

[WesW]

Thanks, guys, though you might want to re-read your post, Martin. I can't figure out what you were trying to say.

[WesW]

I found a line in the diffdb in Dave's mod for the Impossible level, where he had set AI intelligence from 1 to 25. Does this setting do anything? I have never fooled with it.

Also, I need to know the trick for downloading attachments from the new server. I click on the file, select "save", then rename the file to "attachment.zip" as a document. When I try to open it, I get an invalid archive message for the 5kb file. I get this same thing whenever I try to get an attachment now.

I looked thru the strategies.txt, and not see anything surprising there, as I have raised the attack setting myself.
In the diffdb, Dave has given the AIs more advantages to production, gold and science than I did, though my settings were more than the AIs got in Ctp1. These cheats, along with the unit updater, would give the AIs significantly more advantages than in the Medpack. If the frenzy code makes them more aggressive, then that is what I would account for the AI differences people are reporting.

I have copied Dave's diffdb changes for very hard and impossible into the Medpack's file, and I have attached it here for you to try out. If someone wanted to adapt the unit updater to the Medpack, feel free to post it here. I encourage people to try things with the modpack to create their own variations to it.

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by WesW
I found a line in the diffdb in Dave's mod for the Impossible level, where he had set AI intelligence from 1 to 25. Does this setting do anything? I have never fooled with it.

That's a leftover from CTP1. Actually it does nothing in CTP1 either Peter replaced this number with 100 without any effect.

Originally posted by WesW
Also, I need to know the trick for downloading attachments from the new server. I click on the file, select "save", then rename the file to "attachment.zip" as a document. When I try to open it, I get an invalid archive message for the 5kb file. I get this same thing whenever I try to get an attachment now.

I use Get Right to get the attachments right, but sometimes I had also luck with Internet Explorer.(Althogh I don't like this browser.)
Note that the use of Get Right is not very comfortable as you have at first to enable *.php file downloading as most files in the forum are *.php too you will get some troubler with non attachment *.php files.

Originally posted by WesW
I looked thru the strategies.txt, and not see anything surprising there, as I have raised the attack setting myself.

The different is that his attack increasements are higher than yours and he increased the numbers for MaxEval and MaxExec, too. 25 for both is a huge difference as 25 and 7.

-Martin

[Cube]

Unit Updater for medmod

Well I did the unit updater for medmod a while ago and I posted, But just in case so one doesn't have it here it is.

Here are the slc strings for it. They go in mm2_scen_str.txt

## Unit Updater slc strings ##

MObsUnitsFirst "Great news, Sire! Our recent discovery will allow us to re-train and re-equip some of our military units. We have already switched production to the new units but we have some old units in use. Shall I proceed?"

MObsUnitsCostOKand1unit "We have {NUM_OBS_UNITS} {OBS_UNIT_ARRAY[0].name} unit who is pleading for more modern equipment. It will cost {TOTAL_COST} gold to provide them with it and we have enough gold in the treasury. Shall we re-train and re-equip them?"

MObsUnitsCostOK "We have {NUM_OBS_UNITS} {OBS_UNIT_ARRAY[0].name} units who are pleading for more modern equipment. It will cost {TOTAL_COST} gold to provide them with it and we have enough gold in the treasury. Shall we retrain and re-equip all of them?"

SOME "Not all. Show me them."

MPartialUpdate "Shall we modernize this unit?"

MNoMoreGold "Sire, I regret to inform you that the treasury is bare."

MObsUnitsCostNotEnoughGold "It will cost {TOTAL_COST} gold to modernize those units but we don't have enough in the treasury. Shall we retrain and re-equip some of them?"