Introducing the Medieval Pack II v1.0 Alpha

[FALVES]

Wes... Where are you?
Where's that beta?

[Pintello]

Hi Wes and Company,

I have been out of things for a few days now, if anyone noticed. Anyway, I noticed something in the General Forum. They were complaining there, that is what they usually do there it seems, that there was no sprite for the Ocean City, so I checked this out. Turns out they are right!

I loaded a regular game and went into cheat mode. Once there I gave myself a Sea Engineer. I then used that Sea Engineer to found an Ocean City. It gave me a sprite of a regular land city! Talk about looking way out of place, that was out of place! I know the game can create Sea Cities that look like Sea Cities because they have a screen shot of one on the box.

My main question here is two fold. One, were you aware of this problem, Wes? If so, has it been corrected in your Mod already? It would not suprise me if it has been. The second part of this question is, if you were not aware of it, would it be possible to fix it in your mod? If so, how would we go about doing this, or is it one of those things that are unfixable? I am asking, because it would be nice to be able to build Sea Cities that look like Sea Cities both in the regular game and in the much improved game call the Med Mod.

I look forward to hearing your comments about this. I am also looking forward, with great anticipation, to the release the the new civilization game called Medeival Pak II. I believe it is from a very reputable software house called Wes Whitaker and Company, Inc.

Regards,

Timothy Pintello
[This message has been edited by Pintello (edited February 01, 2001).]

[WesW]

About the Sea cities: I found the problem. I could have sworn they used the same system in Ctp1 for city sprites, but I couldn't find the files.
Anyway, the problem is in agecitystyle.txt. Their are two types of cities specified there, type 0, land cities, and type 1, sea cities. I checked against the Ctp1 files, and could not find where things went wrong, but somehow the game is not recognizing that cities founded on ocean terrain should use the type 1 sprites. At least, I think this is the problem.
I checked the sprites, and the sea city sprites are there, and I checked all the files that I could think of, comparing them to the Ctp1 files, and couldn't find anything.
If someone could check out the slic file, maybe the problem is in there.

I also ran into the zoc problem with my testing a few weeks ago, but I didn't have any idea what was causing it, and there were reports of other odd behavior at the time which seemed to disappear from one text version to the next, so I had forgotten about it. Hopefully Wouter solved it.

You guys need to get the file from his website and test it, because I am going to be tied up trying to get the beta ready.

[Radical_Manuvr]

I'm sure Locutus will come up with a solution to the problem (or maybe already has). While/if you're waiting I found a workaround when playtesting the Alex scenario. It's annoying but...

When you encounter the militia ZOC problem save the game and reload. When you get back into the game you can move to the tile that you couldn't move to before saving and reloading.

I only did this twice so no guarantees about it working in all cases. Worked both times for me.

[Pintello]

Hi Wes,

Thanks for your response on this. I am not a programmer, but I will take a look at the Slic tonight and see if anything jumps out at me on the Sea Cities front. If someone more knowledgeable about this could look at it too, I would really appreciate it.

Timothy Pintello

[Pintello]

Hi Guys,

Well I have looked at all the files and all I can say is that I am more impressed than ever with you people who can actually understand them. I was not able to see anyway to obviously put the Ocean City back into the game the way it is supposed to be. If someone in these forums could come up with something I would really appreciate it.

For me, this is one of those must fix problems with the game. If the ocean city isn't in there the way it should be, the game will just be ruined for me, Med Mod or no Med Mod.

I will continue to pursue this, but I doubt I will come up with anything. I hope one of you more knowledgeable people can come up with something.

Regards,
Timothy Pintello

[Pintello]

Hi All,

I have finally found the solution to the whole Ocean City sprite thing. This is somthing that needs to be taken into account when the Med Mod comes out too.

The key to the whole thing lies in the agecitystyle.txt file. Each age has its own set of icons for each city size and style. The problem comes in when you try to build an Undersea city before the 4th or 5th ages. Ocean City sprites don't appear until then.

What I did was I took the sprites for the Ocean City in the 4th and 5th ages and copied them to all the previous ages and styles. This way, when I went into cheat mode and gave myself a Sea Engineer and built an Undersea City, it gave me the proper sprite.

I also noticed another property of this file. The Ocean City sprites only go up to cities of size 40. After that, the sprite reverts back to the equivalent sprite of the equivalent sized Land City for that age and style. The Land Cities allow much larger city sprite size styles than the Ocean Cities do.

One fix for this may be to make equivalent Sea City entries for the different size ranges for Sea Cities after 40 and then just assign the last Sea City sprite to all the following sizes. Alternatively, someone could take it upon themselves to creat new Sea City sprites for each of the remaining Sea City size ranges.

On a side note, if anybody is interested, the largest city size possible in CTP2 is size 200. Don't know if that was already known.

Back to the point. This whole discussion is relevant for the Med Mod, because the Med Mod will be adding 2 more ages to the 5 already existing ages in the game. Unless some alterations are done to the agecitystyle.txt file to take all of this new information into consideration, we could end up with some rather odd looking sea cities when they are first built.

Welp, now that I have resolved this issue, I can finally go to bed, knowing that all is once again well with the world of CTP 2 and the Med Mod Pak II.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to add production and food to trade goods again, since we have all now switched to CTP 2. But that can wait till another day.

Regards,
Timothy Pintello
[This message has been edited by Pintello (edited February 02, 2001).]
[This message has been edited by Pintello (edited February 02, 2001).]

[WesW]

Great work, Tim. Funny, when I tested last night, I gave myself all the advances in the game, and the land cities used the Diamond age sprites. Anyway, your way works, and I have pasted the sea cities block into all the ages.

[Harlan]

I have one way to add production back to trade good tiles, though it may not be the best way. In the updated Alex scenario (the stilll unreleased one I'm currently working on), I have all metal goods give a production bonus. I accomplished this by creating duplicate terrain types as the land they're normally on (for instance, two Hill types), that differ only by the production number. It seems one can add many more terrain types, you just can't have terrain types with NEW graphics.

Of course, this was relatively easy since I could just go through the map and change the terrain under the trade goods on my map, one by one. How to get the above system to work on any random map may be difficult or impossible. Is there some way to detect the presence of a trade good, or add a trade good where there was none before? I'm interested in the second, cos I think it would be great if one could have, for instance, Oil appear only when Oil Refining is discovered.

[MarkG]

wes, you might want to start a new thread soon

[Locutus]

TacticalGrace, you're right, there isn't really a link but I don't see a link between preventing movement and random ZOC problems either. So whatever the problem is, it doesn't make sense. In any case, I *think* I managed to find the problem (it was indeed movement-related: one of the movement-events in SLIC seems to be broken in a weird way), though I need to do some more testing to be sure. I replaced the file on my website with a zip file, it contains the newly fixed scenario.slc file, a text file with messages (prevents errors in loading the scenario) and the Const.txt file that is needed to make the unit repair code work properly.

Just like with Wes's files, unzip it in the main CtP2 folder (and overwrite existing files if you're prompted to do so) and you're ready to play. I'd love to hear what people think of this: are there any bugs with the militia code, does the unit repair trigger work properly, are there any other bugs? Even if all works perfect I'd like to know...

Harlan, it's probably possible to implement your solution in a regular game: add all the extra terrain types that are needed and at the start of a game, cycle through all locations and check if the terrain type is 'legal'. If an extra terrain type exists, terraform it to the regular version and if a trade good exists on a regular terrain type, terraform it to the special type. The main disadvantage of this is that it would probably cause a significant delay at the start of a new game (but only at the start, the rest of the game ought to be unaffected)...

Making Oil appear only when Oil Refining is discovered is probably possible as well, some form or another.

[WesW]

I'm trying, Mark, but there is just so much still to do on the beta. I spent about 8 to 10 hrs. yesterday working on it, and I still have a lot to do. Chris' chop spreadsheet is awesome, btw, and I don't know what I would have done without it. I spent most of yesterday on the advances. Out of almost 300 advances links, there were not more than 15 or 20 that didn't have to be changed, just to give you an idea of how much the tech tree has changed.
I have not begun to work on the units yet, or to place the advances in the timeline, so it will be a few more days until the beta is posted. Sorry for the delay, but I think everyone will agree that it was worth the wait when it finally comes out. (If Activision had taken the time to play-test the game properly, it would probably just now be hitting the stores anyway.)

From the chop wonders page, I was able to get my first good look at the wonders, and I ended up changing a lot of things in that area as well. The changes will be covered either in the GL or in the Main readme.

[Locutus]

Oh, I forgot: the new SLIC file can be downloaded here.

[Dale]

Wes 'n Co.
Just a suggestion about the Australian Civ. Can we PLEASE do something about the city names? I get highly offended by the assumption that Sydney is our nation's captial when it's CANBERRA! My suggestion is do what I did. I changed the city names to the following order:

Canberra
Botany Bay
Brisbane
Port Arthur
Swan River (or Perth if you want the modern name)
Adelaide
Melbourne

and then whatever cities are left.

Just makes it a little more 'proper'.

------------------
Author of Diplomod. The mod to fix diplomacy.

Rommell to a sub-commander outside Tobruk: "Those Australians are in there somewhere. But where? Let's advance and wait till they shoot, then shoot back."

[Pintello]

Hi Locutus,

I just tried you new slic. It seems to work well.

Hi Wes,

While I was using Locutus' new slic code I noticed that the computer still wants to send slaves to cities that are full. It looks like one of two things are happening. Either the computer is treating Militia troops like they can suppress slaves, which they can't, or it still thinks that one military troop can still suppress 3 slaves instead of 2. I think it may be the first one, because when I tried to take all my troops out of a city to get a new slave to bypass it, the slave still went to that city.

That wasn't when I noticed the real problem though. I noticed the real problem when my captiol city had a slave revolt. That city was at size 14 with half or more being composed of slaves. That is when I really noticed a problem with how the computer was handling slaves. That was really disappointing.

That capitol was holding my empire together. It was my empire's real power house. I never was able to take the capitol back because of how many units the slaves managed to keep in the city. Almost all those units were Archers. Massed Archers can really slaughter otherwise well balanced stacks. The slaves had 5 units on the front row, two of which were Hoplites, 5 Archers on the back row, and 2 Archers on the row behind that! I never did figure out how they managed to have a battle line 3 deep, but they all attacked every turn and really tore me up. That triple battle line is what did me in each time.

Regards,

Timothy Pintello