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

[Timeline]

The avatar looks real nice Wes .

I will keep searching for bugs (Timeline Grits Teeth) , but for some reason there doesn't appear to be many . . . . Oh, wait a minute! I forgot, that is a good thing .

[janilxx]

I had some time to start new game again.

An idea came to my mind. If settlers are not allowed to walk on mountains and building cities is disabled that way. What if we have road there. Settlers should then be possible to walk there. But still there should not be a possibility to build city there(?). So building cities on mountains should be disabled so that when settler is trying to build city the terrain is checked and if it is mountain building is not allowed. And in my opinion settlers should have the possibility to walk on mountains. If there is nig mountainchain and player would like to settle to the other side of that chain it would not be possible if settler can not pass the mountains.

Centering screen. Have someone done something to that. It was awful! I am not sure have it been this awful before. I mean when you even see a very little part of the unit in the edge of the screen the screen is not centered. Could this be corrected?

I aimed to monarchy again. And I got it in 55 turns!!! I still think that this is too fast!!!! Ummm any reasons why I should not change my government to monarchy early?

I think I found a bug that is not related to MedPack. In Build Manager select item in current queue and then for example from units list. GL information is not changed anymore. (at least I got this bug once)

2110BC orange(evil genius): He had only one city where was spearmen militia and 1 spearmen unit. He had no other cities!!! I captured that(bye bye evil genius ). He was building wonder. Why was he doing wonder if he only had built one unit and had one city. And the year was 2110BC. I think that he started building wonder too early? Or what do you think. I usually play without building many wonders(almost not at all) so maybe I am not the correct person to criticize this. By the way he was in "normal" continent and had plenty of places where he had possibility to spread.

Addition to Wes: I have not seen other AIs yet(the year is still about 2000BC in my game)

[WesW]

Thanks for posting the update, David. Don (Skorpion59) emailed me today and said that he cannot access his site here either, so this may be a problem with all the hosted sites. Anyone know about octal, or something similar, and using 3-digit codes to change permission settings? Dan Q emailed me last week with new passwords and so-forth for the site. I have not been asked for the new password, and now the system does not seem to recognize me as the admin for the page.

Wouter, do you know what may be wrong with the Wonder code? The Brokerage has the aqueduct as a preq building. I don't know if this would cause a problem or not. I have not had any problems with the code, myself.

I have noticed the inconsistency with the government rankings. Most are the result of some changes I made to bring consistency to the numbering system used in the govern.txt. I will look into it, and either try and straighten it out, or note it in the readme.

Nice to see Adam back on the boards, and thanks for the compliments.

I guess I have finished with the GL. I added some new concepts to help everyone learn the mod, and added the building preqs for those buildings like the Bastion which require a Castle before they can be built.
I dug around in the Medpack I, and found some historical gls for some of the units. I also wrote up some basic gameplay descriptions to get us by until Charles submits his files. Other than the ones Charles has yet to send in, the GL is complete.

I changed the name of the Cannon to the Field Gun, to try and convey its role in the mod better. I added all the unit special abilities to the GL, and all the Elite units are denoted as such at the top of their file so that you can immediately tell what they are.

I need Wouter or some one to explain one of the terrain settings at the top of the const.txt to me. I have been trying to get a better mix of terrain, which I think I have succeeded in with one of the other settings. I would like to almost eliminate the Swamp terrain, and replace it with Grassland. This is where I am having problems, and I think the answer is in this block of code below:

"# Swamps are placed at humidity levels above what grass? works out to.
PERCENT_FOREST 20
PERCENT_GRASS 45 #WW from 40
PERCENT_PLAINS 30 #WW from 25
PERCENT_DESERT 10
PERCENT_WHITE 15 #WW from 20
PERCENT_BROWN 15 #WW from 20
TEMPERATURE_RANGE_ADJUST 60 # Adjust the temperature height map by negative this amount at the poles, positive at the equator, linear scale in between."

The word grass? in the comment above used to be forest. I think this was a typo that had me confused. I don't know the value range for this block, but I think that values above the highest number listed are made into Swamp. That is why I raised the value of Grassland and Plains.
I also don't know what the "TEMPERATURE_RANGE_ADJUST" is, so if someone could explain that as well it may help.

I have not had any game reports since the last update. What's going on with your games? I did something in the strategies.txt that mayhave messed up the AIs defense. Let me know if the AIs are losing a lot of cities to the barbs, and if they are not garrisoning their cities properly.

Like the Avatar? (I learned how to do a technical thingy by myself!)

[Timeline]

Bug Report: Upon completing the London Exchange, I did not receive the Brokerage improvement in *any* of my cities. The Brokerage improvement was taken out of my build list, and did not appear in my inventory.

[jadlakha]

BUG FOUND!!!
Well its a minor bug albeit, but a bug nonetheless. In the empire screen when comparing goverments often times the wrong thing is red and the wrong thing is green. For example, when comparing CityState and Monarchy, Military support costs is Costly for CityState and Medium for Monarchy. Medium SHOULD BE green and CityState should be red, how ever the opposite (and incorrectly) is occuring. This is only one example and this is happening quite often. Another example is when comparing Monarchy to Tyranny for crime/corruption levels is High for monarchy and very high for Tryanny, however Very High is Green and High is red, and it should be the opposite.

Also when I build the Forbidden City Wonder the nobles camp next to my cities and keep tryign to establish embassies every turn. This is rather annoying.

I dont notice any pauses caused by goodyhuts except for 2 seconds.

Diplomacy is awsome. It is 5x better then previous. The AI is often making proposals to me, however the vast majority of the time its for map trades. Although I did have the AI ask me to stop researching something(in fact every Civ asked me on the same turn) ALot of the AI proposals are asked by all the Civs on 1 turn or at least 3 of the AI Civs in 1 turn. I dont know if this is a good or bad thing. But at least the AI is talking diplomatically. I havent paid attention to AI to AI diplomacy but I will check that out. However there are still alot of wars between the AI.

[hexagonian]

Wes's text file are located at my site too. I don't have the room for the graphics/sprites though (20 mg limit)

http://www.mydocsonline.com

login: hexagonia
password: hextapul

[janilxx]

Dale:

I didn't know anything about DIPs

Your coding style is ok to me if it does not allow errors to appear

For example there should not be a possibility that some code is not executed even it should be.

I do not like while either

But ok here is a new solution:

boolean established = false;

//lets loop throug all cities
//(there might be a city with no land coordinate next to it)
for ( int i = 0; i < player.getCityCount(); i++ )
{
  if ( !established ) //! = not
  {
    city_t tmpCity = getCity( player, getCity( j ) );

    //lets loop through all coordinates next to city
    for ( int j = 0; j < 8; j++ )
    {
      if ( !established ) //! = not
      {
        Coordinate c = getCoordinateNextToCity( tmpCity, j );
        
        if ( c.hasUnits() == false && c.UnitCanBeHere( noble ) )
        {
          //create noble & establish embassy here
          established = true;
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Maybe you can see from my code examples that I am strongly committed to Java language

[Dale]

Jani:
See the DIP_EmbassyCheck section..........

if(DIP_hasemb[(DIP_NumOfPlayers * civ) + civ2] == 0 && DIP_hademb[(DIP_NumOfPlayers * civ) + civ2] == 1 && !(AtWarWith(civ, civ2))) {
          DIP_EstablishEmbassyFunc(civ2);
}

From this, every turn it will check. If the code sees that the above is met, it runs the code you mentioned above. If it finds a unit like you mentioned and skips the inner code, then the condition I mentioned above is still met, as I stop the condition being met during that inner code. Therefore, in the check on the next turn the condition is met and the code you mentioned runs again.

I did it this way because some cities only have one square of land next to it. If a unit is on that square, I didn't want to penalise the AI by saying "Nah, now you CAN'T have an embassy with them" so I kept the condition valid so it'd check next turn when the unit has moved on. It is NOT wrong programming, just my style of programming.

Hope that explains it. Personally I don't like using "while" statements in any of my programming as it's possible to have a situation where "while" is ALWAYS valid. Infinite possiblity loop bug anyone?

[janilxx]

I think I found other possible error situations from Dales code above:

1: if(CityIsValid(tmpcity)) {
2:   GetRandomNeighbor(tmpcity.location, tmploc);
3:   if(GetUnitsAtLocation(tmploc) == 0) {
4:     if(TerrainType(tmploc) < 10 || TerrainType(tmploc) > 17) {
5:       if(TerrainType(tmploc) != 23 && TerrainType(tmploc) != 24) {
6:         CreateUnit(civ, UnitDB(UNIT_NOBLE), tmploc, 0, tmpunit);
7:         Event: EstablishEmbassyUnit(tmpunit, tmpcity);
8:         Event: DisbandUnit(tmpunit);
9:         DIP_hasemb[(DIP_NumOfPlayers * civ) + civ2] = 1;
10:        DIP_hademb[(DIP_NumOfPlayers * civ) + civ2] = 0;
11:      }

• - So in line 2 we will get random coordinate next to tmpcity.
  - In line 3 we will check if there is no units and if there is no units we will continue
  - But if there is units code continues without going to inner codelines. So the embassy is not established.

If there is some kind of looping codes you should use it like:

GetRandomNeighbor(tmpcity.location, tmploc);
while ( GetUnitsAtLocation(tmploc) > 0 ) {
  GetRandomNeighbor(tmpcity.location, tmploc);
}
...code comes here only when GetUnitsAtLocation(tmploc) returns 0 (no units there)

There is still a need to add some kind of
if(GetUnitsAtLocation(tmploc) == 0) {
after -while- because it might be possible that there is water or units in every neighbour coordinates of that city.



There might be many places in code where this is coded wrongly! And this might cause many bugs(reported or unreported).

[jadlakha]

Originally posted by janilxx
I just corrected Locutus webpage url(url to zip worked fine)

Gosh doggit, none of the darn links to locutus sites work, WesW's site isnt working to correctly either, but at least I can access it(the downloads just dont popup when I click on the files to downlaod). Well it looks like I am going to have to hold up on getting Med Pack II.

[jadlakha]

One more thing, I totally disaggree with not allowing settlers to settle on Mountains. I have had my most successful cities on mountains, but the main reason I built cities on them was for production, rather more importantly it made a great defensive position. The defensive positions of the mountains are very important to me, and would subtract alot from the gameplay with the option to settle on mountains removed..

[jadlakha]

Alright, I have a possible compromise for the terraforming issue. I do myself believe it absurdly unrealistic. I think a possible compromise would be to make terraforming outrageously expensive, lets say about 10 to 20 times the original costs???? Also terraforming should take 3 to 5 times longer then normal. This would reflect the fact that we can terraform today, its just that it would take a really long time and be REALLY expensive. Just a possible suggestion.

Now I have another question, I have to admit I havent tried medmod since alpha. Now I was just wondering if I were to start the game in its current beta, and I had a save game going, If there was to be an update, would my save game work? I think this may have been addressed before but I was just curios. See this is the only reason I have been waiting for the final version so I didnt have to worry about this issue(and also somewhat the fact that I didnt want to deal with gaemplay bugs).

[Timeline]

All Is Lookin Good!

Wes, great stuff ... great stuff!

Comments: I love the new settings for unhappiness and revolts, it makes conquest much more realistic. However, I have noticed that with the advance of Drama, the Entertainer Specialist makes conquest much easier, almost too easy. I think these specialist unbalance the game. My suggestion is to lower the strength of entertainers moderately. This way you can still use them to hold off a revolt, but you will need to rush buy happiness improvements if you want to keep the city. Please tell me what you think.

[Rhuarc]

Great work Wes and compny!!

very well put abjera! Even though I bought CTP2 when it first came out, I am also going to send 30 or 40 dollars to them. I know everyone thinks that the mods should be free, and they should, but think about how much work Wes and the otehrs put into it! I know if I did that I would like it if someone acknowledged my contribution of time with something more than a hey thanks. So again, good work Wes and company!

[ajbera]

The series Wes is referring to is "The Complete Idiot's Guide to...", a competitor to the "...for Dummies" books. I think the pejoratives are too tame by far, and am looking to publish a series to enter the fray.

How about "Animal Husbandry for Pinheads"?

"Embalming for '*****"?

"The Freakin' Moron's Guide to Genital Piercing"?

BTW - again, great work Wes (and company.) When the mod is fully polished I'll buy CtP2 on eBay. Should get it for about $10 now. The other $40 I would have spent on the game (had I purchased it when it came out) will go to you (and Locutus and the others), because y'all deserve it.