Introducing the Medieval Pack II v1.0 Alpha

[skorpion59]

Avalon,

Can you email me a copy of the saved game file which is causing the errors when you try to load it? Send to donhb@netzero.net.

[Coflek]

I started a gams as well, Impossible, huge map, 8 civs, with CTP 2 1.11. I have done only around 45-50 turns, and, managed to build one city, and conquer three!!! i the city bild queue I have
Settler
Warrior
Swordsman
Br. Swordsman
Fyrdman
and heavy Swordsman as the choice for units from the beginning. Settlers are 34 turns to build, all the other units are 11 turns??? - and they all show the same detais - 10-10-1-0-1-1 as if they were all the same, perhaps this is not sorted jet, but just to tell you.

Than in this 50 turns, there were 4 different barbarrinas and one in a 2 unit stack, and twice a heavy swordsman unit. They didn't seem to want to attack me or the AI. (ok 1 did attack)

out of 4 goody huts, i got gold 4 times.

now the AI, when i wondered down the river with my first warior, I found Assyrians in a city size 2, I attacked them, and there was no defensive unit in the city, so I just walked in!!! - that was maybe after 25 -30 turns... i built a fyrdman, and a heavy swordsma, in that city, while wondering with the warrior which found the other Assyrian city, - sent the warrior and heavy swordsman to attack the other city - It had an archer inside now, but my units just managed to beat him (the warrior left with 1 - 2 hitpoints left) - and Assyrians were destroyed. i have seen one other Assyrian unit wandering near my first city before that.

With three city's and two of them near river - i had 14 science per turn - science is surely slow...

i am wondering why I didn't get militia units in the city straight??? not did the AI.

-city's were definitly less happy, and expanded to two citizens in the first 50 turns - even though i had some grassland in the city radius.

-I couldn't check money - goody huts brought too much...

And than I saved the game... but that is not all...

This morning when i tried to open the saved game, it loadead almost fully, and than crashed just before the end of the loading. This happened twice. The error said: CTP2 caused an invalid page fault in module ... and than it listed registries etc...


After that i tried to start a new MED Mod II game(or a new game, I am not sure anymore) and than CTP2 listed as the empire name - 'BADSTRING' - and as the leader name junkstring_DESCRIPTION ... the other butons were OK...

Than i left, when i get back from work this evening, I will try and see, perhaps I will have to reinstall MED MOD II or even CTPII. We will see...

[Avalon_Grey]

Yea there seem to be some stability issues with the mod, i sent my save game to the person that asked, wes if you want it as well just hollar and its yours. Hopefully it can be tweaked out..

[guess why wes is calling it a alpha ]

So far I love what ive seen of it..

My guess is that when a file is loaded the mod that it is under is for some reason not fully loading in, im not sure why its happening i'd love to see if activision had anything to say..


[This message has been edited by Avalon_Grey (edited December 27, 2000).]

[GreatDane]

I have started a game on impossible level with the mod and so far I am impressed. I am at about 1000 AD in the game.

The AI is more agressive and actually took one of my cities. (First time I am happy when that happens )

Regarding the diplomacy:
So far all I get are reguests to share maps. I would like too see more early sharing of advances (also between AI's) but then you would need to move the diplomot unit in tech tree cause now it becomes available too late. Maybe it should be available with the writing advance....

In the original game the AI hesitated to make embassys and so they were never able to make alliances and gang up on you. I have not seen this happen yet in the mod cause it is still early in the game....

Nice work so far. Keep it up.

[Pintello]

Hi All,

Avalon_Gray, which version of the mod are you using. Wes included 2 versions in his Alpha. The first contained lots of changes that weren't fully implemented but there so you could get an idea of what the Mod may be like eventually. It sounds like this is the one you are playing with. The second one, Wes called "Domestic" is the one you should be playing with. That is the one I used and I didn't have any of the problems you mentioned.

Wes, gold is working well in the Mod. Don't know why I didn't think to mention that when I wrote my first post. Gold comes at a slower rate and you don't build up huge reserves of it now. That is a good thing. Also, even though it came at a slower rate, it didn't come at such a slow rate that it was constantly causing problems. Again this is a good thing. One last question, why did you call the playtesting version of the Mod Domestic? Still haven't figured that one out. :-)

Regards,
Timothy Pintello

[Coflek]

I used the bottom scenatrio, or the domestic version, and still got the crash...

[Avalon_Grey]

quote: Avalon_Gray, which version of the mod are you using. Wes included 2 versions in his Alpha

Using the bottom scenario i belive its called domestic.

[wheathin]

Suggestion for the Militia units - some things I noticed from the last version of the Med Mod for CtP.

After the last upgrade of militia units, there should be continual 'updates' to increase the numbers of militia where appropriate, and place them in newly-conquered cities. These could be just like the existing triggers, but tripped with subsequent advances.

Increasing vision radii for more advanced militia units - has effect of allowing cities to see farther, regardless of their size.

There were also several problems with the placement of militia units for space cities... but that's just FYI - those are obviously no longer relevant.

[GreatDane]

Now I also got the GC104.spr not found in asset tree error when I tried to load the game. This was after two saves just as Avalon_Grey.

Is this a bug in the Mod or in the game?

[skorpion59]

Great Dane,

Please see my questions in the GU???.SPR thread.

[colorme]

Wes,

A problem with the militia units in CTP1 was that when you disbanded the city, the militia would remain in place. Has this been corrected in this mod? I suppose, this would mean adding ane extra line in the code that
prevents the militia being moved,

HandleEvent MoveUnits ... (or whatever), {
Get location of the militia_unit,
If location has a city on it,
movement not allowed (STOP?)
else
movement allowed
end

of course this is not the best way to handle the problem. There may be a way to disband the unit when you disband the city itself ...

[WesW]

Let me reply to the other stuff before getting around to the crashes...

Coflek, if you are seeing new units in your game, like Fyrdmen, then you are using the wrong version of the mod. The reason I called the lower one "Domestic" is because it doesn't introduce any new units into the game, nor does it affect which units the AIs build. The mod deals primarily with non-military, or "domestic" issues. (I think this is the proper terminology.)

I am glad to hear that gold seems to be well balanced, but the bigger and more developed your cities get, the harder it will be to balance your income verses expenses. I am very interested to hear what happens when you get into the Modern eras.

I have been working on making pictures for the Ctp1 units the last day or so, and have succeeded by using a program called HyperSnap available at www.hyperionics.com . I ran the unit videos from Ctp1, and used hypersnap to capture a screenshot of the video. They worked out beautifully. Thanks go out to Harlan for telling me about the program.
I also noticed that the Trireme showed the Catamaran sprite from the Alexander scenario. They fooled me by naming it "Trireme" in the Alexander units.txt. Anyway, I copied the Trireme sprite from Ctp1 and put it in with the pictures portion of the mod, which I will upload shortly.

Harlan told me that we was converting the background of all his new units to the Ctp2 brown background (the Ctp1 units and those created by users had a black background). Myself, I don't mind that some have brown backgrounds and others black. What do the rest of you think?

With the new unit arrangement, you will have graphics for two units which are not slated to be in the mod at all at this point: Morgoth's "Br. Swordsman", and the Ctp1 Cavalry, the "Dragoon". If we decide we want or need more units someday, remember that those two are in there.
Other notable Ctp1 units that are not included in the mod are: Marine, Paratrooper, Combat Engineer, C-17 Transport (used like Ctp2 Cargo Helicopter), Cyber Ninja (I think the new one looks stupid), Cleric, Cattle, Sub-neural Ad, and most all of the space units.

I think Locutus is still working on what to do regarding militias in newly conquered cities. If the original owner re-takes the city a few turns after losing it, it would not make sense to have him fighting militias of his former people. This is something we need to debate.
I didn't know that the new trigger updated the militias by killing off the old ones. Oh, well.
With the new city settings, you should be able to see to the radius of your city at all times, regardless of any unit effects.
Militias should be immediately disbanded along with the city. Locutus called this the Maginot Line (bad spelling, I know), and told me that this had been fixed.

Finally, as to the crashes, I am just as dumbfounded as the rest of you. The 104 sprite, which everyone says is not being found, should not be the first new city sprite loaded by the game. The 104 sprite is for the 5th city style. Both the 4th and 5th styles are new. My question is why are the styles for the 4th style apparantly being loaded correctly if those for the 5th style aren't?
I had an odd thing happen once when I was play-testing the mod. I was playing the Germans, who use the troublesome 5th style. Once when I loaded the game, it showed the Diamond-age city sprites. This was at a time when I was having some message string problems similar to those listed by Avalon. The answer to the message problem was to move the strings I added from the ldl.str to the med.str. I didn't have the city sprite problem again, either, so I assumed it was connected to the strings in some way.
About all I have been doing the last week is making sure the mod loads. I have not been saving and re-loading games. I will do some of that, and let you know what I find out, if anything. I think there may be a bug in the paths relating to loading scenario saved games, since there have been problems of this type with Harlan's work on the Alexander scenario.

[Avalon_Grey]

Well Wes I certanly dont mind playtesting it for you so you can concentrate on geting everything in order im sure most of us dont..

Is there a work around or fix for the string bug?

[TheBirdMan]

Hi Wes.

Do we still have a hardcoded limit of 200 on units - would the game accept units having fx. number *****283.tga or **283.spr?

If it is, then I think ALL units should have it's own unique number - maintain a list with the units name, type, number, era and creator - something like this:

Tank medium, land, 284, WW I, nn
Tank heavy, land, 285, WW II, yy
Tank heavy, land, 286, late, xx

Then we (the rest of us) could just download a unit with all corresponding files. Add it to the units.txt (and several other files if you really want the AI to make use of the unit, I know) and copy the files to their respective folders. No need for changing the numbers (filenames).

If I don't remember wrong - you (the modmakers) had to re-use some numbers in CTP which from time to time gave a little extra work - I can remember that once, I had launched a medival spy as satelite


I do know, that we cannot say "This is an official mod - no one else must use that number for any other unittype". But I'm nearly sure of, if we had such a list, most of the modmakers would stick to it.


I am sure, that I could express my thoughs better in another language (my own )- but I hope this will do.

[Coflek]

Well i guess that the firt time i started the non-domestic version, though I still think I didn't (I swear that I clicked the botom scenario the first time too???), but who cares... yesterday, I tried again and it was definitley the domestic version (at least i got the same save game error as everyone else, after the second save, which i described in scorpions GUxxx thread)
So to give you just another account of the early game progress...
I played 80 turns,version 1.11, 8 civs, huge map, so this is what happened.

Out of 10 goody goody huts - out of 10 three times nothing - two settlers - two militia units (they look as warriors, but you can't move them, and dissapear once you build a city over them)- one normal warrior, science, and 351 gold. No barbarrians, but i guess they come later on in the game.

I have been attacked by barbarrians only once, even when i wandered around a lot, there are barbarrian units around but they don't seem to be agressive enough. I even came by mistake with a settler next to a stack of 2 barbarrians, and they didn't attack me??? they just followed me once I tried run away ... and eventually fought against my hoplite that i send to stop. (hoplite was easily killed? by a warrior - maybe just bad luck). Anyway they didn't attack any of my cities. - they used to in the normal game i played.

I met three civs, and they (two - I attacked one) were glad to exchange maps with me, (perhaps they do it normally too) once i was asked for a cease fire agreement, and once to move units off their territory - but that should be normal as well.

It took 38 turns to discover the first science (with three cities at the end- 66 turns would be with one (with no gold boost on the empire slider). AI was naturally a lot better in science trough this 80 turns.

Afet 80 turns I was the last economically - on the powergraph, even though i found one goody hut with gold, and i had 1450 gold at that time (without spending).

One civ that i attacked had only the militia unit in the city again (enough to kill my hoplite, but if there was only a warior around i would beat him, so this might be a concern early on in the game) I think that AI should defend with two units early on - just leave on extra in the city. In order not to loose straight to opportunistic humans.

At turn 45 Italians had 5 cities vs my three (with two settlers from goody huts)
Italian city sizes 4 (two farms) - 4 (one farm) - 2 (one farm) - 2 - 1
My city sizes 1-1-1 no farms but two extra settlers just produced.

At turn 54 Japanese had 5 cities sizes 4-2-2-2-1 12 archers scaterred (no stacks) around + three settlers, and a few farms. (scary)

And the last - a city size one on 8x grassland + one beach tile = 740 food per turn - good,

city size 2 on 9x plains = 30 food per turn - and city size2 on 9x-plains but river on 4 tiles is around 150 food per turn. So it seems that it is now really importand where you build your cities.

So at eighty turns i managed to get to 7 cities, the biggest size 2 (but i was building settlers). I am the last on each graps - as it should be. But it seemed that the game would have been more interesting than the normal one - pity for the save game bug. So I wouldn't change any of the start bonuses for the AI, and it should be cheating in the long term as well, to make it a true challenge beating it on the impossible level. (I don't mind stepping down the level, as don't the rest of us - i think )