The Medieval Pack II Beta: The Gathering (Part 2)

[Dale]

Hey guys. Sorry for the quietness of my posting. Been busy.

Anyways, an update report of the diplomacy settings and withdrawal settings.

1. Withdraw
I've changed the script so now when a unit is expelled under the withdraw treaty, it will find the nearest home city and find a spot "near" that city to withdraw to. There is still a chance that the unit won't find a spot to withdraw to and in that case it will be disbanded.

2. Diplomacy
I've tweaked a couple of settings within the AI's relationship settings. With these tweaks I've found that war-monger AI's now actually get REALLY angry with other civs. I also found this helped the AI do proper wars against you as now it can hit that "I MUST KILL" level. I know this was a bit of concern for some of you. As for the "more than 4 proposals" mentioned before, it's not the changes I've made. I have no idea where that's come from. I believe I've always been able to do more than 4 proposals though, even before the patch. But can't say for sure. I've also made a couple of other tweaks with the diplomacy strategies to balance out a couple of other factors too. Friendly strategies ARE now friendly, neutral strategies are mid-relation and war-mongers get pissed off at ya now.

Hopefully will get the update to Wes tomorrow. Catch ya!

------------------
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."

[WesW]

As far as the slaver issue, I have found that the new setup does not give me many more slaves than I got before, while it does give the AIs a good many more, especially if they are warlike.
As it is now, the AIs only get slaves from attacking cities or settlers. This usually comes out to only a couple per civ per game. The new setup should give them several more per game.

Nobles cannot see stealth units (they are just rich guys who talk to other rich guys- see the GL).

I believe that anyone can build abolitionists, even if they have slaves themselves, so the more slaves there are, the more effective ab's can be.

To address Wouter's excellent post:

The AIs already have special war-time strategies, defined in the strategies.txt, which do the things you suggest. I have found that these settings are more suggestions to the AIs rather than rules, so sometimes they will do dumb things regardless of the settings.

I agree that the Warrior is a little too powerful, but it is very difficult to change it due to a number of factors. I have reduced its attack and defence values from 10 to 8, and raised its price to match that of the Spearman (from 105 to 120). This is all I can do, and I think it is pretty well balanced now.

Barbs should be pillaging when they are not strong enough to attack, but I have adjusted their values some more to try and improve things.

Changing the Anarchy settings is an excellent idea, though not the max cities setting. I have changed the empire distance settings to a little more severe than they are for Tyranny. Large civs will experience up to 5.5 unhappiness during anarchy now, so you had better station troops in your cities to take advanage of the martial law abilities to avoid riots or even revolts.
Lowering max city values can make changing gov's impossible when you have large civs in the latter stages of the game.

The SDI problem is too far into the game for me to properly comment on it right now. If someone wants to make code for your idea after we get the first public release out, that would be fine with me.

Your description of the Incan invasion was very welcome news to me. From what I can tell, the Incans were prompted to attack because your overall power was less than theirs. Perhaps this will come in handy sometime.

I changed Stonehenge so that it obsoletes with Railroad (nice catch). I also made Sanitation a preq for Modern Medicine, so that you always get Sewers before Hospitals.

I think you misunderstood the intent of the Drug Rehab Act. The Act represents a fundamental change in the conduct of the war on drugs. After its passage, people who abuse illegal drugs will be sent into mandatory treatment programs rather than public jails. Drug enforcement agencies will concentrate on reducing the demand for drugs via school and public service campaigns, rather than conducting military-style interdictions and raids which cause so much death and destruction. Drugs will become cheap and readily available, but they are already readily available to those who want them. Becoming cheap will take the enormous profits out of drug selling, and thus reduce most of the crime that users and sellers commit.
The end result will be a better informed society, in which those who succumb to drugs get help rather than incarceration and isolation from society.

[Immortal Wombat]

quote: Originally posted by Locutus on 04-28-2001 02:24 PM First on the militia movement bug. Making the movement value 0 doesn't help, 'cause the units will still be able to move, this is a bug in the CtP engine itself.

Damn, my cunning plan has failed.

[Locutus]

First on the militia movement bug. Making the movement value 0 doesn't help, 'cause the units will still be able to move, this is a bug in the CtP engine itself. Of course Wes could have just as well gave them 0 movepoints or 200 if he wanted to, but why should he bother if it doesn't matter anyway? (or at least isn't supposed to). Anyway, I think I may have found a way to solve it, but I need to do some testing to make sure. Not that it matters, with the new code that Wes already mentioned movement restrictions are no longer needed, but it might still be useful for future mod- and scenariomakers who may want to limit movement of certain unit for some reason. For that same reason I'm gonna do everything to track down exactly what makes the Militia code buggy and the unit repair code (among other things) work perfectly fine (in other words: why does the savegame bug affect the militia code but not the unit repair code?). I'll post here the results of my tests later.

Now, I keep postponing this 'cause other things keep coming up so I'll just write it down right now (even though I still should be doing something else) so I can't postpone it any longer: a gameplay report (my apologies for the length of it ) In order to find that militia bug I had to play the game an lot, usually up until the Modern or late Industrial Age. A couple of comments on the most striking things I noticed during my testing:

(Possible) Bugs:

1) The Stonehenge wonder obsoletes with Agro Industry while the Stonehenge SLIC code 'obsoletes' with Railroad.

2) If slaves in a city revolts they (at least in my games) always attack with an army of Coracles, even if it's a non-coastal city. Not only looks rediculous (Imagine Spartacus defeating entire Roman armies of Legions, fighting with nothing but oars, roaps and pieces of sail ), but also makes it way too easy to defend against them or conquer any revolted cities back.

3) Not sure if it's a bug but it's confusing in the least: Hospital requires Sewer System as a prerequisite building but Sewer System are only available after Hospitals (at least in my games), so there's a time where you have the tech to build Hospitals but you can't build them yet, not even in your most advanced cities. The whole relationship between Hospitals and Sewer Systems isn't quite clear to me anyway.

Gameplay/balance flaws/suggestions:

1) First of all, I can't comment too much on things like AI or Barbarian level, amount of gold in the game, speed of tech, etc, as I played my games on King/Hard level, on one of the lower Barbarian settings and only from very good starting positions (all for testing purposes) while normally I'm a Deity (or at least Emperor) player. I wouldn't say the game was a cakewalk but it wasn't exactly very challenging either.

2) The AI does, even on this fairly low difficulty level, an excellent job with it's economy : good growth, science and production; Wonder races are rule rather than exception, I actually hardly ever get to build all Wonders myself. However, sometimes it's building Wonders when it should really be working on other priorities, such as military or settlers. The AI is all too often so busy building Wonders that it's cities are very weakly defended or that it only has 1 or 2 cities when I already have 5 or more, thus making it very easy for me to conquer those few Wonders that I don't build myself. Even when I'm at war with the AI and kicking it's ass, it at times still chooses to build wonders rather than units or city defenses. Maybe you should define special war-time strategies that makes the AIs focus much more on military and production when it's being threatened? Using some very basic SLIC code, this strategy could be loaded everytime the AI is at war with either a certain number of opponents or with very strong opponents (human?).

3) The Warrior is too powerful IMHO. I know it's so good to help out the barbarians (which I haven't seen too much of BTW, but that's most probably because I played on lower Barbarian settings), but it's helping me out even more in the current setup. It's supposed to be the most primitive and useless unit in the game (which is also reflected by it's cost to build and maintain), but the high vision range and esp. the flanking ability make it in fact one of the most usefull units in the Ancient/Classical Age, esp. because they're so cheap. In the early game I build as much of them as possible and send them out on recon, grouping them together if threatened by barbarians and only attacking when the odds are strongly in my favor. Once I've found other civs, I stack 3 or 4 of them with 1 or 2 Hoplites and as much Archers (and a Slaver if I have it) as I can afford and I end up with a stack that can pretty much take out any city I encounter (that early in the game most cities only have a handfull of units defending them and no city walls or other city defenses). Cutting down on their vision of 2 would help, since they will need much more time for recon (hexagonian did this in his Cradle mod and methinks it works quite well) and thus I'll be much less likely to use them for attack (I need those goody huts and a good overview of the map as much as I need to destroy the nearest 1 or 2 civs). An even better solution would of course be to (also?) remove their flanking ability, but that would once again reduce the thread of barbarians. Is it by any chance possible to give the barbarians a Warrior with flanking ability and give all regular civs a Warrior without that ability? (same pic, different stats) I don't know how barbarians get their units when they come from goody huts or are randomly created, but if they ever conquer a city, SLIC's mod_* functions could give them the flanking Warrior while always denying it to other civs.

4) Is it me or do Barbarians never pillage? Often they are too weak to actually attack my cities but if that's the case they just wander around aimlessly and wait for me to send in a stack of units and kill them off. In MedMod1 I was forced to keep a strong defensive army at home to protect my terrain improvements and trade routes but now the Militias alone plus a single medium-sized stack of units to kill off and enslave any barbarians is sufficient. Maybe this is different on higher difficulty settings though...

5) I think it was Omni who suggested a while ago that it would be cool to reduce the maximum number of cities for Anarchy from 1000 to a very low number (5? 10?). This way, changing government would actually cause a lot of upheaval and unhappiness and would esp. in large empires make the breaking off of cities in faraway corners of the empire almost inevitable. Have you considered adding this to the MedMod? It would not only be much more realistic, but also make the game much more challenging, esp. since changing governments every now and then is inevitable.

6) I had this idea just this morning. I was browsing through the Civ3 forum (the herecy! ) and read how Harlan (yes! he's back! or at least on the Civ3 forums...) once again brought up the MAD issue. It was ruined in CtP2, he argued, because SDI is 100% effective. This, combined with Chris's new Militia idea, got me thinking. What about this: make the SDI building do nothing at all and add a dummy building that doesn't show up in the buildlists and that actually protects a city from Nukes. Using SLIC, check right before a Nuke strikes a city if it has SDI and if it does, there's a chance (let's say 50%) that the dummy building will be created and protect the city, otherwise the Nuke strikes normally. (Possibly you could also add the option that SDI can partially protect the city by limiting the amount of pop that gets killed, i.e. increasing citysize right after the Nuke struck.) What do you think?

7) (Warning: very long point coming up! ) Not sure if this is useful for anyone to know but it made me fall flat off my chair in amazement so I just had to share this with you all: in one of my test games the AI launched a large-scale (for an AI) amphibious invasion against me! It were the Incans (High-minded Patriot), who didn't have any cities on my contitnent and were totally pissed off after I had killed a couple of their slavers and spies who had been harassing my cities relentlessly (note that I only had 3 cities during most of the game, this was for testing purposes). The main attack was in 3 waves, each wave taking about 2 or 3 turns (not all boats arrived simultaneously) and the seperate waves something like 5-10 turns apart (forgot to keep track of that, so I don't dare to give exact numbers). The first wave consisted of 7 units (2 or 3 Knights and 4 or 5 Horse Archers), the second of 5 (3 Horse Archer, 1 Chariot, 1 Heavy Swordsman) and the third of 8 (2 Fyrdmen, 1 Knight, 3 Heavy Swordsmen, 1 Siege Engine, 1 Spy). Before, during and after these waves a lot of Incan Slavers were present in my empire, whether I just didn't see those landing or whether they came from the Scottish empire (the core of which was north and north/east of me on the same continent), I don't know. The target of almost all attacks was a tiny coastal city I had conquered from the Scots (only the first wave had a different target as I hadn't conquered the Scottish city yet that early on). After those 3 waves the Incans unfortunately changed their strategy and rather than sending in large armies at once they sent in only one or two units at a time. At the same time though they started to attack my coastal city with their boats. During several dozen turns they sent 8 units at me (1 Heavy Swordsman, 5 Siege Engines, 2 Pikemen) and attacked me with 10 Triremes. Also, a stack of 7 ships sailed by without doing anything (they weren't carrying any units either). This was odd because with 7 units he could probably have killed all units in my coastal city and also because they were stacked, until that moment most ships didn't stack. Once he had apparently invented and built Cogs, he started with to attack in (smaller) waves again: first a wave of 6 (3 Pikeman, 1 Slaver, 2 Siege Engines) plus an attack of a Cog on my coastal city, then one of 3 (1 Pikeman, 2 Siege Engines), then a wave of 2 Siege Engines and a Cog, then a wave of 3 (2 Pikemen and 1 Siege Engine) plus a Cog, followed by another 3 Pikemen. Then he had apparently invented and built Carracks and attacked with 3 of those and a Cog (though one by one and not as a stack), for the first time actually killing one of my defenders. At the same time he landed 2 Pikemen. After that he was very quite and eventually we signed a cease-fire (and much later even an Alliance). I slaughtered of course all units before they could do any serious damage, but I did end up loosing a few tile improvements (due to pillaging), citizens (due to slaving and attack) and (as I said) one of my defenders (I think it was a Musketeer but I'm not sure). The strategical layout: the Incans had 2 cities on a small continent dead south of my empires, a narrow street of about 5 water tiles seperated us and their main continent was about 12 water tiles south-east of my continent (with only a few deepsea tiles so he could easily cross his boats)). My empire was situated on a medium-sized continent and consisted of only had 3 cities. The rest of the continent was occupied by the Scottish (but the core of this empire was situated in the north-north east). Though I had provoked the Scots (Populist Zealot) and the Incans in the same way (killing their unconventional units, rejecting all diplomatic proposal and starting the war (without declaring it first), the Scottish never really did anything (sent one or two units every now and then but esp. after I conquered one of their cities early on they were very quite and limited themselves to defense (though they did that excellently). One other interesting thing is that my scientific superiority (both in advances and in military units) didn't seem to bother the Incans, though it may have discouraged the Scots (who were even further behind than the Incans). I hope all this info helps anyone in understanding the AI's decision making better, so that it can be tweaked to do such incredibly cool things moreoften in the future

Misc issues:

1) Could you possibly add to the Great Library what other buidings every building has as prerequisites? That would make things a lot clearer (yes, I could print out the charts and keep those handy but my desk is such a chaos I would spend more time looking my the right papers than I would actually be able to play the game ).

2) (Warning: long rant coming up ) The Drug Rehabilitation Act wonder is rediculous. First of all, Rehab is more something for a city improvement (Rehab Center) than for a wonder. But more importantly, it's in itself by far not enough to classify as a Wonder. The GL argues that decriminalizing drug use dramaticly decreases crime. This is absolutely not the case. Legalizing drug use alone reduces crime only by a small amount. Since drug production and trafficing are still illegal (in themselves forming a significant portion of all crimes in many countries) and drugs are still socially unacceptable, the prices of drugs and the number of users are both still sky high. This in turns is responsible for many other related crimes (mugging, stealing, robbing, violance, murder, extortion, corruption, gang-wars, etc, etc) altogether keeping drugs by far the most important cause of crime. Only legalizing drugs altogether will solve all these problems: as distribution and production of drugs is taken care off by governments and possibly companies rather than criminal organizations, many of these organizations will fall apart (some will find other goals to pursue, but many won't) and the prices drop radically (making drugs no more expensive than smoking or drinking), causing all aforementioned crimes to disappear like snow for the sun (sure, muggeries and murders still take place, but all the drug-related cases no longer occur). Combine this with a whole program to make drugs more socially acceptable (making it less attractive to experiment with for teenagers) and to solve the social problems it causes (i.e. by building rehab centers and otherwise helping ex-junkies reintegrate in society) and drugs will become less of a danger to public health than smoking and drinking currently are (contrary to what many people seem to think, the effects of using most softdrugs in itself are harmless compared to the effects of smoking and drinking, it's the whole mess surrounding it all and the harddrugs that cause all the problems). It's true that total legalization of drugs has not been fully realized yet anywhere on the world (not even in the Netherlands), but the idea is getting more and more support, even in conservative countries like France and the US, and will inevitably happen (and soon too). So the Rehab Act currently in the MedMod is way too limiting, representing a view that's been obsolete for years. It would be much more appropriate to rename it Legalization of Drugs and adjusting the GL accordingly (I'd be more than happy to write the entries for it).

[hexagonian]

quote: Originally posted by WesW on 04-28-2001 12:45 AM As to the slaver question: David, go back and read your proposal again, and tell me how this is going to make things simpler for the ai (or the human for that matter). The military slaver proposal effectively turns slavers into a regular unit, so why not just give regular units the slaver ability? You also propose slaver units for each age, with new graphics. This makes things more complicated for the AI, and that is a bad thing to do, in my experience. In the game I play-tested with the enslavement flag given to regular units, I still built slavers in order to detect enemy slavers. I usually don't get Bureaucracy until the end of the classical age, which leaves a long time with no other unit capable of detecting stealth units. I always had slavers with the barbarian-hunting armies I created early in the game, so it really doesn't take away from the game strategy. It does give the AIs more slaves, and in ctp2 slaves are very powerful (and there is no way to reduce their effect like I did in ctp1).

Did you give the ability to all early-game infantry/flanker units?

Actually, our proposals are not that far apart, except I am creating a new unit, while you are giving a benefit to existing ones.

I guess my concern was on a couple of issues.

Given that most players tend to be more war-mongoring than the AI, giving slaving abilities to units that already would normally be built by a player would only make the gap wider in terms of slaves - especially if you have a lot of barbs in the game and like to go barb-hunting. The AI does not actively seek out barbs.

So creating a new unit that would, in effect, cost a great deal of production, might reduce that perceived gap somewhat - I already know I can get the AI to build certain military units. And given the huge benefits of slaving (and I slave a lot), I wanted it to have a cost to a player.

I didn't see the use of a regular slaver in your setup, other than a glorified stealth unit. (but I too, use a lot of stealth units). I'm assuming that your noble unit has the ability to see slavers though, so from a defensive standpoint, you have an anti-stealth unit in place.

Plus, this automatically locks everyone (AI as well as human) into slaving, if they fight any battles. Will this also obsolete the abolitionist? (Since I slave all the time, I have never built one, but other players use them). Granted, my suggestion would also do the same, but it would exempt a player from slaving, because a player would have the option of building that unit.

Anyway, keep up the good work!

[Immortal Wombat]

Ok, for anyone who has PaintShop Pro 6 or 7, the free trial version:

After the 60 days working time are up, you can still use it if you get in by windows explorer. Go to Jasc software/PSP 7/images, and open pspbrwse.jbf. From there, you will get the error message, and you can click quit twice, and still get into the program. Then close pspbrwse.jbf, and open the files you want.

One trubechet coming up. (Assuming the script works )

If Morgoth (or anyone who has made a unit with attack graphics) is reading this, could you please send me a sprite script from one of your units, I can't get the attack animations to work. Thanks.

Ben

[Immortal Wombat]

quote: Originally posted by WesW on 04-28-2001 12:45 AMBen, let me know if can get the Trebuchet working any time soon.

My PSP free trial ran out
aaaarrrrrgh.

I'll keep you posted, but it might take a while.

[WesW]

quote: Originally posted by janilxx on 04-27-2001 04:02 AMPS. It is nice to be in work in hangover :-/

Oh, so that explains the poor english.

I have been tinkering with the trade settings some more. The last update's settings made routes too valuable, so I have the current settings somewhere in between. I have made the same moderation to the caravan distance reduction I made a couple of updates ago.
I have increased the richness setting for goods so that they are more plentiful.

I have also made some more changes to the strategies.txt in the hopes of getting the AIs to attack more once they are at war.

As to the slaver question:
David, go back and read your proposal again, and tell me how this is going to make things simpler for the ai (or the human for that matter). The military slaver proposal effectively turns slavers into a regular unit, so why not just give regular units the slaver ability? You also propose slaver units for each age, with new graphics. This makes things more complicated for the AI, and that is a bad thing to do, in my experience.
In the game I play-tested with the enslavement flag given to regular units, I still built slavers in order to detect enemy slavers. I usually don't get Bureaucracy until the end of the classical age, which leaves a long time with no other unit capable of detecting stealth units.
I always had slavers with the barbarian-hunting armies I created early in the game, so it really doesn't take away from the game strategy. It does give the AIs more slaves, and in ctp2 slaves are very powerful (and there is no way to reduce their effect like I did in ctp1).

In summary, I like how this idea is working out, and I plan to leave it in place.

As to the current problem of slavery in the real world in 2001, I just think that the way the game currently handles the situation, with the Emancipation wonder, is the best thing to do.
I am a white southerner, with our history of using slaves until 1865, and I can tell you that slavery is a bad foundation for a society, for a number of reasons. Slaves in the game are a much more a powerful tool than they are in real life, and getting rid of them in the game at some point is a good thing.

Joseph, if you want to contact Winnie, tell her that she left her four-letter frustrations written in the slic files, and that we have all had a good laugh from them.

We are working on the militia bug, and hope to have a new code setup to play-test by the end of the weekend. Chris (Gedrin) has come up an idea of creating militia in a city only when that city is attacked, and to disband them after the battle if the defenders win. (Wombat, the ability of settlers to move is another bug, apparently due to the keypad behaving differently from the mouse.)
Chris has also written up an initial version of the elite units code.

If Huysmans and Dale can get their triggers finished in the next couple of days, we can a big slic update to try out.

Ben, let me know if can get the Trebuchet working any time soon.

I have finished the last of the mod's pics, so once we get the slic triggers and GL finished, we will be ready to commence the final round of play-testing before the public release.

[Anarkix Wrex]

Re slaving and SPQR. There are a couple of problems in using the same approach elsewhere. Unless you roleplay the SPQR scenario with self imposed limits on how you use the victory enslavement, you can grab enormous populations very quickly in your border cities. Also the AI is vastly inferior at using the enslavement units, so they unbalance the game towards the human player by a large amount. Putting FreeSlaves on every wonder, is fine for turning the huge accumulated slave population into citizens, but it also eliminates abolitionists. So you can only have abolitionists in SPQR until the first wonder is built. If you do include victory enslavement units, on the basis of my experience of playing SPQR, I recommend diminishing the number that a garrison can guard to 1 or possibly 2 per military unit. This will force a human player to be careful about using them or they will suffer a slave revolt.

[XMon]

Immortal One...I believe it's so that they can attack an enemy unit that wanders next to the city. That's just from memory though so I could be wrong...

[Immortal Wombat]

I'm sorry to ask again, but why do the Militias have movement points?

Am I being excessivly stupid, but surely without movement points they would and could not move? ?

[Greyhawk]

On the subject of slavers. Has anyone taken a look at Hannibal ad Portas' scenarios on Dacia and the Punic Wars? He has some higher level military units there that have victory enslavement. The key to not having too many slaves in your cities is twofold. The unit has to be expensive to build, and he has a great feature where when a Wonder is built it frees slaves. This might or might not take a little reworking of the Wonders, as I have noticed that a lot of Wonders get built early and then they only get built once in awhile.

[janilxx]

quote: Originally posted by Locutus on 04-25-2001 10:42 AM If there's enough people who want it or if Wes requests it, I could make a trimmed down version of the code that only creates a militia in every city and never upgrades or anything, could probably even make it so that it wouldn't take more than changing a single in MM2_scenario.slc to switch from the current version to the reduced one.

One thing is sure and it is that I want to have the chance to use current version! I can learn to use /reloadslic in every load but I do not like that!

Jani

PS. It is nice to be in work in hangover :-/
[This message has been edited by janilxx (edited April 27, 2001).]

[Huysmans_666]

Hi Y'all,

Locutus is back !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Cheers.

Well, that indeed sucks bigtime, but if that's what it takes then ...

Gonna try it out today, see if it works !
The trimmed down version doesn't sound good to me, reloading the SLIC isn't that tedious is it ?

Well gotta go, have to catch...ehhmmmm, well something, i dunno....
Bye

[Locutus]

Time for a more elaborate response... (just noticed that last night's post was my first post in this entire thread :eek

I'm sorry to hear people don't like having to reload SLIC everytime they load a savegame (he, I don't like it very much myself either!), but I'm afraid there's simply no way around it. To my knowledge it's not possible to reload SLIC automaticly, but even if it could there could be all kinds of side effects I wouldn't want to have to deal with.

If there's enough people who want it or if Wes requests it, I could make a trimmed down version of the code that only creates a militia in every city and never upgrades or anything, could probably even make it so that it wouldn't take more than changing a single in MM2_scenario.slc to switch from the current version to the reduced one.

In any case, I still need people to try this out, to confirm that it indeed works for everyone, esp. the people who had problems with it before. I'm gonna try it out some more tonight and also try it on hex's mod to see if the same problem exists there as well and if so, if it can be solved in the same manner.

On a different note, I too found the movement bug now, never noticed it before but I could have overlooked it. I will see if anything can be done about it but I wouldn't count on it too much. The SLIC code catches any movement orders that are given to Militia units and cancels those. Apparently the orders given through the keypad are in some way different from the mouse orders, but I don't know if I can catch those too. It might seem more logical to catch the actual movement event instead of the order but that causes all kinds of ZOC problems, as you'll all remember.

Anyway, I'll have more to say later, but for now I have a bus to catch...