Cradle 1.2

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Gen.Dragolen
And if Civ3 doesn't have a scripting language or multiplayer, CTP2 will remain my game of choice. Now if only we could get PBEM too.

Locutus was working on heavy complicated slic that would fix or rather add the human-human diplomacy thing to PBEM and HotSeat. It is just a small thing in one of the *.ldl files to make these options available but as I said the diplomacy thing is missing. And I have no idea if Locutus is still working on it.

Originally posted by Gen.Dragolen
And if some changes to the gold production for improvements work out right, it should make research a better for the AI if a .slc can't force it to build commerce improvements.

Hey slic can force the AI to build commerce improvements. I allready made this slic file it is already a part of GoodMod and Craddle and the is also a costumized version for MedPack2 available.

A script language is powerfull and that is the reason why CTP2 is still alive of course in combination with the open text files. So far Civ3 has only the open text file or/in combination with a confortable editor.

For me I won't by Civ3 so fast maybe next year, but I know that I will have much less time in comparison to the last year.

-Martin

[hexagonian]

Re: Wait and See

Originally posted by Gen.Dragolen
I'm thinking that Civ3 may be worthwhile getting if it's not as expensive as CTP2 was. I can't afford $70+ cdn for pc game. Bills to pay and people to feed, etc... you know.

Actually I am lucky in that my birthday is in late November and with Christmas in December, I know what to ask for as presents. My wife is always irritated because I never know what I want either. So asking for civ3/Stronghold (and nothing else) ensures that I will get them...

Originally posted by Gen.Dragolen
Considering how much time we all spend making this game worthwhile, it's a shame we couldn't get Activision or a better software company to incorporate the mods and make some much needed additions to the executable to fix what amounted to a sloppy rewrite of CTP.

Well we know that isn't going to happen. BTW, I gotta say that I'm impressed with the screenshot of the civ3 editor. Looks to be easy to edit entries, once you get the raw data entered in whatever text files you have to work with.

But no SLIC...

Originally posted by Gen.Dragolen
One of my goals this winter is to get the AI behaving more like a player would: building commerce improvements ad nauseum, or if their personality is diplomatic, to have them working on peace treaties with the other AI's, or if more militaristic to have their research maxed out and the latest units on patrol.

These may be SLIC type functions. The commerce SLIC fixes provided by player1 and Martin seem to address this issue, and player1 was also working on diplomatic updates for Dale's Diplomod. Some of the science/production settings for the various personalities can be adjusted in strategies.txt. MedMod supposedly added more strategies (or was it goals), and was also supposed to make the AI more fluid in its decision-making. But I have yet to play MedMod.

Originally posted by Gen.Dragolen
The other main goals are to see if I can make the AI make probing attacks with a decent sized force and to balance out the resources research to something a little more reasonable. Too often I see it walk up with a single unit that gets killed by bombardment the next turn. If I can figure out how to set a minimum force size for attacking, that might make it a little more interesting. And if some changes to the gold production for improvements work out right, it should make research a better for the AI if a .slc can't force it to build commerce improvements.

The AI will focus on growth first, so they build farms before anything else. One thing I noted in using the combination of player1/Martin's SLICs was that the AI was building a lot of gold increasing improvements, and there was also a nice mix of production improvements too.

And take a look at my settings in tileimp.txt file, because I would mix in a few food increasing bonuses in the commere improvement and also limited on what types of tiles improvements could be built. This forces the AI to build certain improvements on tiles - once those tiles are filled up, then the AI has to build other types of improvements (commerce-based for example) on other types of tiles. You will have to make adjustments in the ImprovementLists.txt to make sure the AI will build those improvements too. (The default file was incomplete...)

Concerning armies, the Frenzy SLIC is a step in the right direction - most of the units I encounter in Cradle are stacked up. And the nice thing about Frenzy is that it will often send stacks from halfway around the world into human player lands, so the human has to usually deal with them (oftentimes when the player is targeting some other AI civ) The downside is that Frenzy will override the garrison commands if those come into conflict.

If Frenzy could be adapted in some way to fix that issue, that would be fantastic.

Originally posted by Gen.Dragolen
Hopefully by about February I should have a working version that has the best elements from the mountain of work you have all done so far. Be forewarned, it will seem a little odd at first as it will have a set unit scale: divisions and regiments only so an army will be massive.

Good luck on those additions - I know I really enjoyed the process of seeing what I did work. Keep asking me questions too - I'll try to help you out with what I know (or suspect) email: hexagonia@yahoo.com

Originally posted by Gen.Dragolen
This is assuming that Civ3 turns out to be a clunker...

I do not believe it will be a clunker. There are some really good sounding features (goods needed for unit production is probably the best sounding feature, and culture looks like it will add a lot to the game). But there are a lot of CTP style features that I really like, and will miss in civ3. I cannot see myself devoting the same energy to civ3 that I have devoted to the CTP series. (Ironic, because I have only played a total of 2-3 default CTP1-CTP2 games - the rest have been fan-created modifications)

And, as a player, I will get a lot more satisfaction out of playing my own Mod over anything released by a gaming company.

[hexagonian]

Small update

This is a small update that fixes a few of the message boxes.

The first message fix regards Disasters. They are now only reported for a city, rather than both a city and civ. The civ never seemed to match up with the city involved.

The second message fix regards the pollution warning that occurs at the beginning of the game - if you are using a MaxPlayer setting higher than NumPlayer. It is merely an add-on to the normal message that warns the player to ignore the message.

[Pilfur]

I came back from my non-civ games upon hearing about Civ3. I can't play that game due to my low end system (actually due to my poor video card in my laptop), but being in a civ mood I've started playing CTP2 again.

You guys have done some stuff!! A new Med Mod, a new cradle mod. A whole new mod about goods. This is fantastic I gunna play around with all this stuff you guys made. I'm especially interested in cradle mod because I like ancient times.

Thanks for all the effort you guys have put into all this.

[Pilfur]

Hmm, seems you all ran away to play CIV III. I played it at a friends house recently and I was not impressed. You can't combine armies! There's no ranged, flank, and front units. I can't combine arches with knights and spearmen - that sucks!!

So come back to this game

[hexagonian]

So Pilfur,

What's your impression of 'Cradle' so far...

On a different note, Peter is looking into revamping the DiploMod and Frenzy SLICs.

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Pilfur
Hmm, seems you all ran away to play CIV III. I played it at a friends house recently and I was not impressed. You can't combine armies! There's no ranged, flank, and front units. I can't combine arches with knights and spearmen - that sucks!!

So come back to this game

Ran away to play a game that is not available in Germany as a German version? It is just a question of time. At the moment I have to less time, unfortunatly. But I hope to develope my mod any further, therefore I am just hanging around here in the hope to implement some stuff, like parts of player1's AI, into my mod next weekend. (I know I hoped the same thing before last weekend.)

-Martin

[Pilfur]

I am very much enjoying my current game, running under cradle. I found myself in a very difficult start up position, a 12 tile island, but have risen to the challenge and am now in 2nd place. I have noticed the long freeze upon discovering free units (which kind of sucks, but is made up for elsewhere) and an odd discovery of dead tiles. The dead tiles are very rare but do turn up from time to time and in an era long before pollution should matter.

I love the slinger unit btw! Very cool. And all the extra goods (is that goodmod mixed in?) are excellent. I found camels! lol

[Immortal Wombat]

Originally posted by Pilfur
...and an odd discovery of dead tiles. The dead tiles are very rare but do turn up from time to time and in an era long before pollution should matter.

Probably a volcano. Wait until your unit is on top of one when it blows

[kaigun]

Since downloading the latest changes I've been playing the Deity level ..even the arrival of Civ 3 hasnt kept me away from this..Its turn 634 and it just gets better ..my congratulations to everyone involved with adapting this game ..This Mod now simply rocks tha game has been a challange and still is..lots of pillaging and at present the AI is throwing Nukes at each other ..Im trying to stay out of it in my little corner of the map..Till turn 300 or so everyone was fairly even then large gaps arose ...Two nations are now over 50 cities I have 32 ...but the most advanced and the most prone to throw missiles is a measly 24..there are still about another 8 minors left on the board and Im positive a Mayan Ninja nuked one of my cities...excellent Civ3 looks cute but from light play (civ3) this mod seems more fun
try it next i want to try the seafarer version

[kaigun]

furthur thought after playing.....a question is Bombardment an asset or detriment to the AI .....I observed in the early part of the game cities changing hands and the AI assaulting my cities......but later with the development of siege a little and a lot with the addition of artill+bombers..the AI likes to bombard bombard and bombard again until cities are devoid of units before launching an attack....despite more power/ larger empires the AI powers gain and lose considerably fewer cities later in the game .....despite when checking often having minimal garrisons..Ive checked the AI have 2 stacks each of 12 with 3 ranged units begin to bombard a city with 3 units for turn after endless turn...the attacked city keeps getting a (ie1) new unit and it goes on and on.....So Im starting to think bombardment seperate from combat is not agood idea

[Pilfur]

First, I gotta ask... NUKES? You are playing the ancient version of CTP2 and you actually made it to the NUKE stage??? I very very rarely make it that far with the normal CTP2 (or civ for that matter). By the time Nukes would be a factor either I'm dead (rare), or I'm so powerful that the game just isn't fun anymore. I'd love to see a balanced game stretching into the present day and beyond. It just has never happened for me.

Yes. The AI defends itself much better with this mod. AI cities very well protected (these guys seem to go a little overboard on the military actually - which gives the player a bit of an edge).

AI is lacking in the sense that it will never launch a comprehensive campaign to whipe out a region, but it does attack nearby cities from time to time - espescially if they encroach on "its" territory.

[Pilfur]

BTW, anybody care to tell me where the lil icons went? My archer dude has abandoned my posts (which is his post - bad pun).

Oh, and also .... um... why is it May in November?

[hexagonian]

The fact that the AI is using nukes is cool I haven't played the game that far yet though.

kaigun,
I'm assuming that you are using the ultra gigantic map setting in your game. Nice to hear that several civs are expanding to that (50) size too. It's been my impression that AI civ size is limited by the borders. The AI will respect borders when it settles, so it does not expand as large as it could.

Pillaging is working too
In my current game, the AI is proving to be especiallly nasty in pillaging tiles. I have to set up a series of stacks that are specifically geared toward the pillage problem - it also prevents me from a purely expansionistic military policy.

RE:Bombardment
Try this...
Go into the strategies.txt file and look for the following line of text under the
STRATEGY_MILITARIST_DEFAULT {
entry

GoalElement { Goal GOAL_BOMBARD Priority 700000 MaxEval 25 MaxExec 4 }

Drop the numbers to
GoalElement { Goal GOAL_BOMBARD Priority 600000 MaxEval 15 MaxExec 4 }

And then look for the following line of text under the
STRATEGY_SEIGE {
entry

GoalElement { Goal GOAL_BOMBARD Priority 757000 MaxEval 25 MaxExec 4 }

Drop the numbers to
GoalElement { Goal GOAL_BOMBARD Priority 657000 MaxEval 15 MaxExec 4 }

You should be able to use this in your current game - but make a backup just in case.

The Seafarer's Edition is merely experimental - it has, as far as I can tell, not been playtested. The changes are in the strategies.txt to get the AI to focus more on ship construction.

Pilfur
RE: Comprehensive Campaigns
I agree - the AI still lacks what I would call a true 'killer punch' in the military department. I have seen an AI civ from time to time take several cities from me in a short span of time, but it does not push as much as it should, or could. (as a sidenote, I am glad that the AI does not push it's full advantage, especially in the early going, as the game would end quickly for me)

To this end, I had structured Cradle to attempt to make it harder for the human player to pursure a strictly militaristic expansionistic approach himself. Low unit heal rates, various AI boosts, losses by disasters and disease, and now the rougher pillaging factor - by themselves do not hinder the human player too much, but in combo with one another make a big difference.

One thing that does make a difference is to play Cradle with a lot of civs on the hardest setting and Barbarians on the highest level.

Peter Triggs is looking into a rewrite of the Diplomacy and Frenzy code - one of the goals is to get the AI to coordinate attacks. And Frenzy does have some exploitable loopholes which need to be addressed.

I think Apolyton pulled off the logos (avatars) because of heavy traffic.

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by hexagonian
RE: Comprehensive Campaigns
I agree - the AI still lacks what I would call a true 'killer punch' in the military department...

I'll have to qualify that statement after what happened to me last night in my game...

The Mongols and the Arabians went on a rampage though my empire. (Mongols from the east, Arabians from the west.) In a span of 10 turns, they took 6 cities (out of 16). During that time, the Apolyton and the Celts also attacked me, further whittling my armies down so I could not do anything to stop the Mongol/Arab invasion.

Also, a bit of interesting info pulled from the civ3 forum. It has been reported that Soren Johnson, the lead AI designer of civ3 has stated that the AI in CTP2 does not have any inside info regarding the deployment of human troops/stealth units, and that the AI in CTP2 does not automatically know the human player's weak points. As this would be a major cheat, IMO, this tells me how the creators of civ3 managed to get the AI to be so good.

It also tells me that what has been accomplished in the CTP2 Mod community is, in many ways, the greater accomplishment. Kudos to everyone here!!!