Introducing the Medieval Pack II v1.0 Alpha

[Thomas Rahm]

Thanks for the response, Wes, such early on saturday morning.
As I am already 6 hours further in the day, here are another 2 shillings (we dont have cents until next year with the Euro).
My opponents do build railroad but no trading posts so far. To limit trading posts/shopping malls to some kinds of tiles only, is the answer to a question I wanted to raise now. Later in the games (after shopping malls are available) you can easily cope with financial requirements by placing tons of those trade/commerce boosters. I noted that I never needed more than two tiles for farm improvement and two for mines, because the city growth has to relate somehow with the speed of counter-owercrowding-inventions (no, this word doesnt exist in Austria either). And the production supported by two mines (advanced mines) pushes the pollution beyond the limit anyway. So the rest of city squares is avilable for shopping malls, destroying the balance unless the AI could use the same strategy.
The way to limit these improvements is a great solution. No, actually it is a must.
On the other hand in later stages of the game, upkeep of improvements becomes really expensive. Is there a way to make some builings (of those which are calculated by cost per citicen) obsolete with the invention or building of new versions.
(I have in mind things like auto-selling granary after a city has built food silo, or auto-selling mill after building factory etc.). This would of course mean to increase the value of the new buildings as replacement of the accumulative effect of building types of different eras (as is now!?? isnt it?)
This approach would seem more realistic to me and the upkeep might be a little easier to survey.
What about restricting mines and farms (no farms are already i think) as well, so that mines would go only for mountains and hills?

Can't wait for the new files,

Regards

Thomas

[Alpha Wolf]

quote: Originally posted by Thomas Rahm on 01-13-2001 08:30 AM Is there a way to make some builings (of those which are calculated by cost per citicen) obsolete with the invention or building of new versions. (I have in mind things like auto-selling granary after a city has built food silo, or auto-selling mill after building factory etc.). This would of course mean to increase the value of the new buildings as replacement of the accumulative effect of building types of different eras (as is now!?? isnt it?) This approach would seem more realistic to me and the upkeep might be a little easier to survey. What about restricting mines and farms (no farms are already i think) as well, so that mines would go only for mountains and hills?

You can make any building obsolete upon discovery of a certain advance. I was thinking about this very idea this morning becasue I have mills being obsolete upon getting nuclear power. Altho I know to go sell the mills, the AI doesnt. the it occurred to me as to who would buy an obsolete building. I was wondering if SLIC could be used to put out a message when you change to a tech that will make something obsolete. In my case, when i change to nuclear power, i'd get a popup meesage that warned me that mills would become obsoleted and destroyed (killbuilding), or even to automatically sell them when the tech is 2 turns away from discovery. the second choice seems a better choice as the AI would have it none for them automatically. Just remember to increase the output some for the new buildings to compensate for the loss of the output from the old building.

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History is written by the victor.

[Alpha Wolf]

Wes,
I was more interested in a viable AI than I was in new units or advances, so I've been play testing alot of changes in strategies and goals files. Not sure if you've taken a look at the files on my 'homepage' but they might be helpful. Alot of my changes are identified by '## JAW' altho some early ones and really late night ones arent commented. I've got very aggressive barbarians now which falls more in line with reality. Altho what I'd really like to see them do is build a few of their own cities then use a sacking strategy where if a city wasnt founded by the barbarians but was conquered by it, they'd destroy all buildings then leave a few turns later. And the city would revert to the original owner, even if thats not who they took it from.

Hope they help.

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History is written by the victor.

[Thomas Rahm]

Referring to my post above, I just figured out the reason for the discrepancy between my total empire savings and the sum of the cities accounts. It's the pyramids which give exactly +100bugs. Could have been mentioned in the Great Library, though !!!

[Savant]

"All this is untested, but I feel better about it than I ever have since I started fighting with the AI files over a year ago in Ctp1."

It's good to hear you are making progress on the AI tweeks, Wes. I've been playing CTP1 the last few weeks as I couldn't stand the AI, advances, and techs of the new one. Frankly, CTP1 with the MM4/5 is much more enjoyable than CTP2 out-of-the-box. I can't imagine now how bad it was to play CTP1 out-of-the-box!

Good editing!

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'Blood will run'

[WesW]

Thanks, Dr. Villanova, everything is untested right now, but I feel really good about the prospects.

Yes, the mod works with the patch.

Basing improvement cost upon pop is not the same as upkeep, and therefore is not listed in the details of your empire settings.

I think that as long as I restrict the gold TIs to separate terrain from the food and production ones, we will be ok. The AI should be able to decide whether food or production is best for the terrain types which can have either of those.

Have any of you ran tests to see what happens when you obsolete buildings in Ctp2? In Ctp1, you could obsolete buildings, but that just meant that new ones couldn't be built once the obsoleting tech was discovered. Buildings already built remained active.
I just ran some tests with the cheat function, and things seemed to have changed in Ctp2. Apparently, the obsoleted buildings disappear in Ctp2. Do any of you know if this is true when you don't use the cheat function? If it is, then I would use Thomas' suggestion, since I originally wanted the per-pop cost to be less than 1 for most buildings. The flag requires an integer, though, so I had to use 1.

I have finished making links in the advances chart, and sent copies off to Harlan and Charles for review. I am also waiting on Chris to get me the chop sheet so I can start implementing the links and such for the beta. Finally, I will wait a few more hours on Wouter to get back with me on the slic code. He said that he had ran into more bugs than anticipated, but would try to get it done for me.

[Thomas Rahm]

Wes,
although I am not entirely sure which buildings make respective older ones obsolete, but I noticed that building of food silos has no effect on the continued existance of granaries. The same is true with mills, factories and oil refineries. In other words, if any of those are built, the old ones do still continue to exist. This is true for the AI as well. If you have other buildings in mind pls tell me so I can go for them specifically.

BTW, the AI defence is overwhelming! in cities beyond 15 I am always facing mixed stacks beyond 10, and even adjacent squares are defended heavily making it impossible to go directly for the city.

[tdean001]

Don't know how many are interested by this, but here goes...

CTP2 apparently doesn't have an important function that CTP1 possessed. When beginning a multiplayer game in CTP1, you had the option of loading a scenario. Unfortunately, I have yet to find this option in CTP2.

Maybe I'm just slow, but I think that this could prove to be quite a problem for those of us interested in multiplaying MedMod.

[WesW]

UPDATE ALERT: A new version of the texts portion has been uploaded.

All of the changes to AI & Diplomacy are included, as well as the new buildings. The new governments are technically in the game, but are not meant to be used, as I have not made the planned governmental changes yet, and will not before the beta comes out.

I spent close to an hour trying to visualize the effects of obsoleting buidings, and how this would affect the flow of the game. In the end, I decided to leave the current setup in place, and see how the new gold buildings affect things.
Remember, the new Harbor is a gold type only available in coastal cities, and the City Clock is the same as in Ctp1. The Bastion is a Renaissance age City Walls type.

According to Wouter, there should not be any more problems with the militia code, unless it is something due to a player's computer setup.
The Partisan code and the capital code are not operative.

Dean, that is very bad news, if that is indeed the case. People may have to make up their minds as to what they want to do regarding this dilemma.

This should be the last Alpha version of the mod, so we need to key in on AI behavior and income, especially gold.
I would like for you to check on the AIs about every 50 turns, using the cheat mode, and see how they are doing. Check to see what their percent science settings are, what their slider settings are (are they having to change things due to a shortage of income, for example), what their gold income is, and what buildings they have in their cities.
I need to get an overall picture of their growth and development. I also need to know what things look good, not just those that look bad.
Don't forget to notice what types of tile improvements they are putting down, and the relative precentages of the different types.

[Locutus]

My apologies, Wes, I should have made myself clearer: all known bugs in the Militia code are fixed, but it's not impossible (that there are still 'unknown' bugs, which I'd love to hear about if anyone finds any...

[Thomas Rahm]

Wes,
thanks a lot for the new text file and the work you and the other guys have put into this endeavour.
I had the opportunity to go for a first run and will try to figure out some details according to your request above.
I took info out of the game at 2500 BC, 1000BC and
5 AD.
Empire settings: As there is not much of a choice at the beginning of a game, the AI ( all five opponents,
Korea, Greece, Russia, Arabia, Inca,) went for
9 Food, 8 or 10 hours, 3 wages, 20 or 25 for PW.
BTW how do they put 25?).
all countries made use of their PW with a reserve of about 400, exept for Korea which took aside a lot pW up to 3000.

Cities: Korea, Russia and Arabia went for 4 cities very early and then stopped expansion and developped their cities, while the other nations continued an agressive expansion all the way long ending up with 8 cities (5 AD).
Tiles:A common behaviour of all nations was the extreme development of the squares of one particular city,(6 farms/fish or 6 mines) while leaving the others with only one or two farm improvements(or fish respectively). This particular city had in all cases built all available city improvements while the others had concentrated on happiness buildings, the courthouse and your famous harbour).

Additional observations:
Although the AI goes for happiness improvements as first priority, they dont make use of empire sliders to adjust any gained happiness points. (their aim is obviously a happiness around 78/79).
No city made use of specialists.
The AI obviously loves one-tile peninsulas.
Russia was the only nation connecting its cities by roads.
Defense was always in line with city size (i.e. major cities (those with all improvements) = up to 12 units,
cities with pop 2-5 =3 units.)

The AI obviously goes for any trade good with its first two cities and looks for at least 2 gras tiles. This is not longer true for cities 3, 4 and so on.

In summary the AI was way ahead of me in all aspects and could prove to be a challenge in the long run.

Hope these first impressions help in the assessment of your changes. Tommorrow I will come back with more information of the eras beginning 1 AD as it might be more interesting to watch the AI when changing governments and go for diplomacy.

PS: What the hell did you to the Barbarians. I was used to ignore those two red guys hanging around in my empire but today all of a sudden they attacked and took two of my three cities. (I shouldn't go for wonders without considerable defenses any longer)

Thomas

[Thomas Rahm]

me again,

WES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I just invented horse riding,

WHERE ARE MY TRADING POSTS????????

Thomas

[WesW]

UPDATE ALERT: A new version of the text files has been uploaded.

(Guess who had pests in his code?)

Thomas, the Trade Posts *do* show up with Horse Riding. I am currently playing a game, and I have them now.

Btw, great post. This is just the type of thing that I am looking for. One thing I forgot to mention, though. When you give the opponents, I need to know their personality type. Since each nation can have two types, saying that they are the Russians doesn't tell me what I need to know.
For example, the civs that only put down 4 cities and stopped to develop is not good, imo. I am pretty sure this is an attribute of their personality, and I know what to change, but I need to know which types exhibit this behavior.

When I started playing last night, I had to restart twice because of Barbarians, and they will be more trouble in the beta when Warriors are flanking units.

[overflow]

Wes

Is it your intention to not let Nets and Fisheries be built on KELP? I added it back.

Thanks for all the work.

[overflow]

Wes

Is it your intention to not let Nets and Fisheries be built on KELP? I added it back.

Thanks for all the work.