Introducing the Medieval Pack II v1.0 Alpha

[Pintello]

Hi Wes,

I have done some more play testing and here are my observations.

First off, I have not experienced the save game problem others are mentioning. I am using patch 1.1, not 1.11 and I have Windows 2000 sp1 on my system.

I did some checking on all AI cities this time and I noticed some things.
1) Many AI cities just have the militia in them for protection.
2) The AIs build a lot more ranged units than they do any other kind of unit. I saw some AI cities with stacks of 12 Archers but nothing else except the militia unit. Other AI cities will have 8 or 9 archers and just 2 or 3 Hoplites. I have also seen civs that build lots of mounted archers but don't seem to build anything else. This may be something that needs to be looked into.
3) The AIs don't seem to use Slavers any more. I think they should do that especially if they are inclined that way by their personality. Some examples of this, the Zulus did not have slavers but they had the technology. In the past they used slavers. Also the Romans and the Thia were the same way. They had the tech but they never used it. I also did not see any civ that had any slaves whatsoever. Before the Mod, many civs used slaves.
4) Barbarians seem relucant to attack. They never attack cities even if they are up against them with stacks of 5, which I saw more than once. If the Barbarians have stacks that large they should attack. The Barbarians are more likely to attack individual units, but not always. I had one Warrior fortified and a stack of 3 Barbarian Warriors did not attack him. They did later after I moved him, but they should have attacked him the first time. The Barbarians are also not attacking AI civs either. No where on the map was there a single Barbarian city and this was 546 AD. Before Med Mod there would have been several. I think this needs to be reimplemented. More than once the Barbarians could have taken a city or two of mine, but they never tried.
5) The AIs build and use fewer boats than they used to. They should use those often like they did before Med Mod.
6) On the up side, they do seem to manage there cities better than I do. Some AIs even build extensive road systems while other don't build any. This may be because they haven't discovered Trade yet though. Maybe a new advance needs to be added very early in the game called Road Building that gives the TI of roads, then make it a high priority for the AI to discover it. Seems that once the AIs have a TI they use it.

Miscellaneous issues that I noticed.
1) I got a militia out of a goody hut once this time too. I ended up having to disband it. I also got an archer out of one.
2) I did see an AI conquer a city of a different AI. In this case it was the Romans conquering the city of a different AI, but I don't remember which one it was. On the down side, I have only seen this once.
3) The AIs tend to crowd their cities more when they don't have much land to expand on. If they have plenty of land, they don't crowd them as much though. On the upside, even when they do crowd them, they don't crowd them nearly as much as they did in CTP1.
4) The AIs like to use farms and mines when they have them.

Well that is it for now. I will do some further playtesting and comment on it later, maybe today if I have time once I get home maybe tomorrow.

Regards,

Timothy Pintello

[WesW]

I did some experimenting last night, and boy did I get crashes. As of now, I cannot start a new game, period. When I get to the new game screen, there is the caption "junkstring DESCRIPTION_UNIT_CLERIC" for both the empire name and the leader name. Whatever is wrong, it is a progressive bug that eventually works its way down into the initial pathing. And yes, it does seem to have something to do with strings. Don is working on it, and he thinks there may be more than one bug at work here. That would not surprise me at all.

For those of you play-testing, I strongly advise you not to load from the quicksave or autosave games. Save your games manually, and only load from those games. If you see or become able to build non-standard Ctp2 units, like the Ctp1 Warrior, or a user-created unit like the Fyrdman, then quit the game, re-boot your computer, and try to re-load from your manual save. If the non-standard units are still available, then I would suggest re-booting and starting a new game.

Myself, I am going to re-install the game, something which I never had to do with Ctp1 in the 16+months I played with and modified it, including a few hundred crashes.

Now, as to your posts...
I reviewed the strategies.txt, and I think I found the source of *some* of the odd behavior you have seen.
Barbarians, it turns out, use the default settings unless specified differently. When I altered their settings before, I gave them a siege goal setting, which they didn't have before. However, I forgot to give them maxexec and maxeval settings as well. This should explain why they didn't attack your cities.
I also noticed that the Barbarians were restricted to anarchy as their government, which should mean that they cannot produce new units, or anything else, from cities they capture. All they could do was change whatever the city had been building to Warrior or whatever, and hope there was enough production stored up to construct it. I have changed their government choices to Tyranny and Monarchy, and set them a science percent of 20. They should use the default advance list.
This should produce some interesting results.

A question for you: Does the AI build advanced mines or railroads?

As for things that confuse me:
I have not done anything that should affect the AIs use of slavers. I have changed the personality types of many of the civs. However, I have not changed the characteristics of the personality types themselves.
Example: the Romans might not always be Caesar, but if they are, then Caesar should build the same special units that he always has.

Also, the finding of militia units from goody huts should not be happening, nor should militias be the only units garrisoning a city, unless a civ is in "aggressive start" mode. (I have now altered this mode, btw, so that it too should have a ranged unit in its garrison.) I have not figured out what triggers the start modes, or how many turns they last.

In Ctp1, militias were an slic creation, and the AIs disregarded them when figuring up their unit percentages. If these units are coming out of goody huts, then maybe all this has changed.
I increased the percentage of ranged units the AIs should build, but I also increased the offensive units as well. You should not be seeing a 3-to-1 ratio or more of ranged units to offensive ones. The ratios should be about even.
*I need you guys to use the cheat mode to select the AI civs, and note their unit distribution (how many they have of each type). This should provide answers as to how the militias are being recognized, if at all.

I am going to try some things, and probably post an update to the text files tomorrow. I will name it "text_update.zip", and give the date posted on the website. When I update the entire text.zip, I will note its date as well. This way, people should be able to tell if they have the latest stuff or not.
[This message has been edited by WesW (edited December 31, 2000).]

[Diodorus Sicilus]

The problems of working in a retail bookstore are that just before and just after Christmas yer buzier than a bear in a salmon stream - just got the MedMod downloaded last night and got to play a couple of tests today...
I play my test games at the Medium difficulty level, on the premise that if the timing of advances and historical events are about right at that level, the harder levels should be a real challenge and the easier levels should give the player a genuine advantage over the historical timelines.
First game: Medium difficulty, 4 civs on a small map. At approx 100 AD, largest city on the map was a 9, followed by 2 - 3 7s, rest mostly 5, 4, 3 size. One neighbor was quite aggressive at telling me to avoid trespassing, rest seem to be more 'laid back' about it than in the regular games, but this could be because of the ai leader personalities: this game's civs were randomly chosen, and I usually play games with set up opponents, mostly agressive militarist types.
I got up to 2700 gold at one time, with the help of some huts, but accumulation of wealth is much slower. Barbarians are almost totally non-aggressive. They stack 2 - 5 units high, but never attacked any of my cities, only a couple of siolated units. On the other hand, one ai neighbor lost two cities to Barbs. In my regular games, using the risks.txt from CD's CtPI Mod, this would have resulted in his civ being overrun with raiding Barbarians. Didn't happen this time. I conclude that barbarians are no longer acting like barbarians at all. Diplomacy - ais were reluctant to trade maps, but since none of us have Diplomats yet, it's hard to tell what might happen with more interaction.
Advances. In 100 ad I'm just starting to build Mounted Archers and Samurai. One ai civ has monarchy, everyone else is still Tyranny. There are no Trade Routes anywhere on the map. I averaged 20 - 33 turns between Advances, or about 1/2 to 1/4 the speed in a regular game. Problem is, to handle all the extra units (slingers, swordsmen, light and heavy cav, etc) we're going to have to add a bunch of Advances (I've been playing with 11 - 15 extra Ancient-Renaissance techs in an experimental Tech Tree). Result: most of the ancient/renaissance advances are going to be much slower coming than historically. This also slows down options for the gamer, as in my test: no mobile units until 4000 years into the game?
Conclusions: The wealth and city growth seem to be nicely slowed. Barbarians need to be boosted in aggressiveness somehow (I'm playing on the highest level of barbarian activity, where pussycat barbs should definitely NOT occur!). Tech needs to be speeded up, perhaps 'splitting the difference' between the current rate and the regular game rate.
I don't know what to do about the barbarians, but I've started a second test, using the same (Domestic Alpha test) Tech Tree but with Tech Costs halved. So far (3000 BC, only a few turns in) this seems to result in tech advances every 6 - 10 turns, which is 'in the ballpark' to make historical advances arrive in historical times with a corrected tech tree and additional techs added as mentioned above. If the current trend continues as I get more cities, I'll try a game with the Med Mod Alpha and my corrected Tech Tree thru Renaissance (up to about mid-nineteenth century equivalent tech) for 'time'. If it works, I'll post right after New Year's for more testing. I think I've found room in the corrected tech tree for all the additional units, but that depends on how many and which are going to be Wonder enabled.

[Taliseian]

As for the AI using Slavers (for those inclined to), I'm wondering if that is related to the "Incorrect Civ Bug" -- which I found using the Domestic Alpha.

I tried to start a game and couldn't get the civ I wanted. I chose the Egyptians but kept getting a different civ (can't remember which one now), then I tried the Russians and got a different civ...finally stuck with the Romans who were the Swedes.

So I'm wondering if those civs which were inclined to use specific AI (slavers, roads, etc) aren't using them it's because of this bug ?


Taliseian


=====
The World of Lyrlusa
A Dungeons and Dragons Campaign World http://www.crosswinds.net/~lyrlusa
=====

[WesW]

Nice to hear from you, Diodorus. Hopefully you, I and Harlan can swap some emails on tech ideas soon. See my post right above yours for an explanation of some of the odd Barbarian activity you noticed.

[Pintello]

Hi Wes,

Nice Website. It looks a lot better than your last one.

I have done some more playtesting and I think I can answer some of the questions you posed in your most recent big post.

The ratio I have seen in ranged to offensive units is different from what you said it should be. Ratio seems to be more like 4 or 5 to 1 than 2 or 3 to 1 even when you assume militias are considered as offensive. If you don't add militias in there the ratio is even more badly out of balance.

While many cities seem to have just a militia defending them, there are more cities that have at least a militia and a ranged unit. I think the ratio seems to be something like for every 2 or 3 cities with more than just militia there is one city with just militia. Also it seems that the larger cities are far more likely to have more than just a militia in them than the smaller cities.

I did see a slaver yesterday. The Chineese had built one. Unfortunately for them they were isolated on a largish island that could be considered a small contenient and so didn't have any foreign civilizations to go and raid for slaves with there slaver.

Another thing I noticed is that the AIs don't seem to be building navies like they used to. This may be because the most advanced naval unit any one has is the Corcale.

I think Diodorus Sicilus may be right about the tech going too slowly. You may need to either speed up the tech advance pace or add a lot more turns to the game. I have noticed that as you get more cities tech seems to speed up. I am currently just beyond the 0AD point with 9 cities and still under Tyranny so I will wait to see how things go once I have Monarchy. The reason I am so early in the game is because I loaded your new text files and picture file and started again.

Speaking of Monarcy, I am still trying to discover that even this far into the game because things are going so slowly tech wise. Just an indication of how slow things are going.

This time around, I was located close to the Israelis. They actually started a war with me by pillaging one of my TIs. They even tried to send a small stack against my capital. I took it out with troops in my capital before they had a chance to attack. I think they sent 3 units in the stack against me. I took it out with 4, 2 Hoplite and 2 Archers, not loosing a single one.

If the AI is going to go around starting wars, it needs to be prepared to fight them properly. Aside from this one stack, the most they ever sent into my territory after that was 1 unit at a time. Needless to say, those units didn't last long.

I fairly quickly put together a stack of 12 units and went after their civilization followed by a backup stack of 4 a few turns later. I drew the units from well balanced small defense stacks I had in various cities and a few rush built units to flesh out the stacks. I composed the main stack of 6 Hoplites and 6 Archers. The backup stack had 3 Hoplites and 1 Archer. I did this because gernerally when you loose units it is the Holites that go down first. A main stack and a backup stack to replenish my main stack is my gerneral mode of operations when I go to war whenever I can manage it.

When I got to Jerusalem, I went up against 8 or 9 units defending the city. Two of them were Hoplites, the militia unit and one other, the rest of them were Archers. I lost 4 units and had another 4 or 5 severely damaged. The units I lost were 3 Hoplites and 1 Archer. Jerusalem was walled. I think if they had a better balance of say 5 Hoplites to 4 Archers, the outcome would have been very different. They might have even been able to hold the city. After this, I was able to take out the remaining 3 Israelite cities without too much problem.

I lost 2 at their second largest city of Hebron from a stack of 10, I lost none from attacking the other two cities, each of which only had one Hoplite in them. Presumebly this was the militia Hoplite. At this point I have to say that these two cities were fairly new and so the Israeli AI may not have had time to bring these cities up to strength defense wise because of their priority list.

Well that is all for now. I will update you more later. I also look forward to playtesting the new text files you mentioned. They look like they may add a new dynamic to the game. Could be fun.

Regards,
Timothy Pintello
[This message has been edited by Pintello (edited December 29, 2000).]

[Pintello]

Hi All,

I have now gotten the same saved game error that everyone else has been reporting. The error does not show up the first time you save a game and then load it. The error shows up when you have saved the game a second time and then try to load it at a later time.

Here are some observations I have made concerning the error. 1) It happens on the second saved game. 2) If I load the first game I saved then try to load the second saved game on top of that, the game loads fine, but it is now using the full scenario files rather than the Domestic scenario files that is was created under. 3) If I start a new game using the Med Mod II Domestic Scenario and then try to load the second saved game over it, again, I get the full files rather than the Domestic version of the scenario.

I can tell it is the full files version rather than the Domestic because it includes a lot of units not found in the Domestic version of the Mod.

Wes, could you upload a Med Mod II Pak that just contains the altered files and nothing else? It would be interestion to see what types of behavior the game exhibits with just that type of pack instead of the combined pak that you now use.

Well that is all I have right now. I hope some of it helps with resolving the problem. I will repost this under Skorp's thread so that he can see this also.

Timothy Pintello

[Diodorus Sicilus]

Okay, some good and some bad...
I ran a second test up to about 400 BC. Changes from 'regular' MedModII were, as mentioned above, I halved the cost for Advances. Also went into Strategies.txt and changed the Attack and Harass matching for barbarians to 1.1 instead of 1.2 to 1.6.
Results: Tech now came too %$#@*& fast. Even if I added the extra techs I think will be necessary, it's too fast - had Fuedalism already, so need to slow things up. I'll try again this weekend.
With the change, barbarians now attacked as soon as they had any perceived edge. For instance, one barbarian would not attack a single equal unit (warrior) in the open, but two barbarian warriors would attack a hoplite and a settler in the open (and kill them!) A stack of 7 barb warriors attacked a stack of 6 mixed warriors and archers of mine - they were destroyed, but cost me 4 units. All this is much better than before, so perhaps some more 'tweaking' with the Barbarian Strategies will solve the Barbarian problem.
One problem, or potential problem that has surfaced in two games. With the much slower growth of cities and the more stringent happiness problems, the production value of an individual city is much less than was planned for in the game. Effectively, this meant that as higher level units became available, they took much longer to build. This problem occured all the time in my CtP I games, but only at the latest stages of the game - when a new size 1 - 3 city couldn't possibly build a starting unit in less than 30 - 40 turns. In the latest MedMod II test, because none of my cities was over 7 and most were 3 - 5 in size, pikemen took 13 to 20 turns to build (hoplites 5 - 11 turns) and knights 20 and more. With the number of extra units proposed, the balance between city production levels with the new growth and hours/wages restrictions and the cost of units is going to have to be looked at very, very carefully, or developments in the game are going to slow to a crawl by the Modern Age. I don't see a game being particularly enjoyable to play if it takes longer and longer to get each new unit!
I'm going to "fiddle" with some changed unit costs along with the Advances costs over the next few days and see if I can run a test game that "matches" speed of production and the new "average" city sizes. I work all weekend and then have to ship someone off to Florida at O-dark-thirty the morning of 1 January, so don't anybody be surprised if it takes until Tuesday or Wednesday of next week to finish these next test games and report back in the Forums... Happy New Year to all

[WesW]

Update alert: a new text portion of the mod is now available.

I re-installed the game last night, and played a while this afternoon. I have not reloaded the game more than once so far, so I don't know if I have found any way to avoid the bug. I am simply going to follow my own advice and hope for the best.
I installed the 1.11 patch, then the WWII scenario, then the Med mod. I hope that it was the WWII scenario, which most of us installed *after* the Med mod, which caused the problem.

Anyway, I found the answers to a couple of the other odd AI behaviors. For some reason, I had reduced to 1 the number of transport ships and special units, which includes Slavers, which the AIs were allowed to build. I have now set them to the original settings, except for the Militarist, who was set to build no settlers (!?), and 6 special units.

I think I found a work-around for the hut-militias. In the risk.txt, it specifies how many preqs eligible advances and units may have in order to be allowable from huts. Units normally don't have more than one preq, but apparently they can, because I gave the militia units two preqs and everything seems to work ok. This *seems* to have stopped making them eligible for huts.
FYI, the risks text allowed units with two preqs in the harder settings. This is what gave me the idea. I set the allowable preqs to 1, then gave the militia units each two preqs.
Knowing that units may have more than 1 preq may be something to remember for the future. I read elsewhere where advances may have more than 2 preqs now.

On a Barbarian note, THEY ARE DRIVING ME CRAZY! There has been more than one instance in my game where I felt like I was playing chess. It was a game of movement and terrain. I can definitely tell that the Barbarians are acting smarter, even the randomly appearing ones that I have had to deal with. I have made several changes to the attack settings to take into account the fact that the Barbarians usually outnumber you when they appear from huts, but they are not stacked. I think people are going to be very surprised by this improved behavior.

As far as the proportion of ranged to other units, I observed the unit info of the AIs in my game, and saw pretty much what the rest of you have reported. I am at a loss right now to explain why the AIs are building almost nothing but Archers. I have to admit that I don't really understand how the AI chooses which units to prioritize, either.

Science if definitely moving too slowly, and growth is a little too slow as well. It is interesting, because I have not touched the science part of the game. All of this slowdown is due to the reduced city growth. Wages for Tyranny are the same, 3, as they were in the original game.
When we get into the advances, which will be soon, I plan to make Monarchy, roads, and trading posts available earlier than they are currently. This should help with the science problem.

Paul sent me the units.txt today with all the stats from the Med chart implemented, so I am about ready to move into the beta part of the mod.

[jkadabomb]

I havent been keeping up with the med-mod development but I was wondering what exactly has been done to make the AI more realistic in diplomacy(like following treaties signed with you and actually signing treaties with other AIs) Also what has been done to make the AI militarily better?

[Martock]

Wes

i was tinkering around looking for ways to make barbarians use better units and stealth units in the game (u might recall my desired to have them use stealth units from a previous post). i played around with the strategies.txt file and changed it so they would start to produce "special units" along with the offensive and defensive units. so far though, and this is only with 1 game going at the moment, i've not seen ANY barbarian activity. odd...but it would seem when u go into the cheat menu as i did so i could see where the barbarians were, it defaulted my game to no pollution and pretty safe (aka hut barbarians only) mode. this is rather annoying.

i also changed the settings for the risks.txt to all the barbarians to use all kinds of units. basically set the max and min to 0 and 1 accordingly for impossible level. i'm hoping that by doing that it'll basically choose the best of the best. this however does NOT help with "special units". i do wish mr. orge could clue me in on how to set the barbarians to use ONLY special units later on in the game. perhaps this can be done with SLIC...but perhaps not...well back to my testing.

also, i haven't installed either the patch or your mod yet. just haven't had the time to do the necessary downloading.

Martock - Klingon Barbarian From Hell...i want that title... :P

[WesW]

Thanks for the heads-up on the min/max, Martock. I have lowered those risks.txt settings considerably, but not to 0 and 1.
The Barbarians could only build special units if they captured a city. You could try altering the strategies.txt in the latest text update. It has all the other alterations needed to make this happen. It would be pretty unlikely to see a special unit, though, since the Barbarians would not have the required tech normally.

Tim, I didn't see your second post until now. I am going to begin work on the advances this weekend, after which I will begin adding all the new stuff to the mod, at least up through the Renaissance. This may require a few days. When the beta is ready, we can dispense with the scen0001 setup, and only have the "real" mod.
Harlan is having this same problem with his Alexander mod, however, so I don't think making the mod one-layered will solve the problem. I am still trying a couple of things, and I will try and list anything I can that will help when I post the beta version of the mod.

I will also have to try and work the unit lists the AI uses so that it will make use of all the new units. It does a poor job of using the existing ones, imo. I may need the help of an slic programmer, so once again, if you are out there and want to get involved, please let me know.

I have posted a huge pack of pics from Harlan on the webpage. They are of new Wonders, for you mod-makers out there. More stuff will probably be on the way in the next few days for advances and city improvements.

Woodstock asked earlier about unit sprites. I have tried to include about all the sprites that anyone would want to use for a mod in the graphics already posted. There will be new units people make like the Chariot Morgoth is working on, and maybe some others that I didn't include. I have numbered the sprites consecutively so that those who wish to add on to the Med mod will know where to begin. I don't think there would be any use in saying "if you add a heavy tank, it should be number xxx". There are too many units that people might want to add, and I don't know off-hand what numbers are legal, though I suspect any up to 999.
If you wanted to add units, I am sure that you would be safe starting at 150.

Finally, don't forget to notice if the AIs build adv. mines or railroads. I just need a yes or no on this.

[Avalon_Grey]

Wes its nothing to do with the WW2 scenaio as i dont have that installed..

[preacherman]

I am playing on very hard level Gigantic map 8 civs I found it not very hard. I found the barbarians to be more a pest, could take them out anytime wanted to. Before I had second city had other civ's borders against mine.
The one city I attacked had stack of 12 more defence then range. all I saw at first was archers, but as the game progressed saw hoplights and pickmen, now seeing knight and mounted archers,lots of catapults.(I am at 1928AD)
found in diplomacy that one civ the Amarican's would except the request to withdraw but never did. He even fortafied hard aganst my city. The English excepted ceasfire, but most other civ's rejected my request to withdraw.
Wes I don't have the WWII mod but still could not bring up game after 2ed save. I reloaded you mod new game then loaded the save game seem to work ok.

Spread the word!

[preacherman]

Yes wes, both roads and mine we very much in evadence. also farms and fisheries.