Medieval Pack II v1.1: A Call to Arms

[WesW]

I have uploaded the final public version of the Medieval Pack: A Call to Arms.
I have created a webpage version of the Introduction and Installation text at this link http://apolyton.net/wes/intro.txt . I would recommend that everyone review this page even if you are already familiar with the mod, since this file has been expanded to cover some of the topics players keep asking about.
If you already have the July 18th text update, you only need to get the 1.1 text portion here- http://apolyton.net/wes/1_1texts.zip .
If you have the 1.0 version, but missed that update, you will also need to get the new pictures component here- http://apolyton.net/wes/pictures.zip .
If you have not gotten the modpack before, you will need to go to my site and get the sounds and sprites compoenents in addition to these two components listed above. Here is a link to my index page- http://apolyton.net/wes/index.shtml .

Two new files are included in the readmes folder, one for Windows 2000 users, and another Troubleshooting text that covers the three most common problems that players have reported with trying to use the mod.

Below is a chronology of the changes made since the initial public release:

July 30th- Embassy bug fixed where nobles were establishing embassies before contact was made. One preq of Nanite Factory changed from Fusion Plant to Oil Refinery, and Public School preq changed from Academy to University. AI strategy text changed so that AIs will use more scientists. GL info for spy units altered to show relavent info.

July 18th- It contains the fixes to the Cruise Missile (it works now) and Arcologies advance (re-named Mega-Construction)as well as the 40% reduction in advance costs for the last three eras. The changes to wonder effects mentioned previously is in there (the effects of some were altered to remove a bug which Jules discovered). Dale's personality changing code and diplomatic leader pics are included, plus I also added a soundfix by Martin which adds sounds when you place tile improvements. More civs were given the Egyptian Pyramid city style.

July 3rd- Large Civs version posted. Please see the readme on my homepage. Note that you need to get the updates to the standard version of the mod even if you play the Large version.

June 18th- I have lowered the cost of the Bandit Horseman, and both the cost and upkeep of the War Elephant. I went in to give the Elephants the flanking ability and saw that they already had it! I also changed their obsolete advances to Flintlock and Feudalism, respectively. I gave the Longbowman increased defensive stats ala the Bowman, so they are a more complete field unit, and raised their ranged attack to higher than that of the Siege Engine's, since as you pointed out they cannot bombard. I think that they are now one of the game's potentially dominating units. I have also given the slaving ability to Chariots and taken it from Pikemen, since the AIs seem to build only Chariots and never Light Cavalry.
Corrections to the summary section of the GL made.
The modern-day and futuristic governements are much stronger now.
I also reduced the cost of the advances in the last half of the game by about 20%.
I have added two new happiness improvements to the game, the Public Park and the Stadium, and increased the happiness effect of the Movie Theater and VR Amusement Park.

June 9th- changes made to get the AIs to produce settlers. Changes made to messages and map settings to produce more productive maps, and thus better AI civs and more competitive games. Changes made to the difficulty text to make the AIs harder to beat in the last half of the game.


Stargazer, thanks for the info on the Nanite Factory inconsitency. I noted my fix in the chronology above. However, I would not recommend making changes to the mod unless you are willing to get into serious mod-making. It can be very confusing if you are just dabbling in it. For example, you do not need to change the texts which do not have the MM2 prefix. Those files are the original game files, and changing them will not affect the Medpack, but may damage your ability to play the original game. Also, many things are called one thing in the texts, or their internal name, and another thing in the game, or the external name you see when playing. The Drug Store is shown as the Sewer System, for example.

Thanks to everyone who has been making progress reports. This is the only way that I can know what needs work and what is working well.
These reports can also help you keep trying the mod should your first game with it appear to be disappointing. Keep trying, and I feel sure that you will be rewarded. This game has a lot of replay value, and sometimes that means an easy game, unfortunately.

Btw, thanks to Bluevoss for becoming the third person to send in a donation.

[janilxx]

This thread should be in top of the threadlist now(and old medpack thread should not be anymore). Can you Wes add this to the top?

BTW I would gladly get some comments to my thread(from everyone):

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=23370

(of course you can comment it to here too)

[StarGazer]

Re: Medieval Pack II v1.1: A Call to Arms

Originally posted by WesW
I have uploaded the final public version of the Medieval Pack: A Call to Arms.

Below is a chronology of the changes made since the initial public release:

July 30th- One preq of Nanite Factory changed from Fusion Plant to Oil Refinery.

WES, I just downloaded the 1.1 version and took a look at the Med charts .xls file.

May I suggest that you make changes in the Production section of the Improvements page of the Med charts.xls file in order to reflect the correction of the Fusion Plant/Nanite Factory error? The entries in lines 25 and 26 of Column A should be reversed, and the colors corrected.

May I also suggest that the "v1.0" part of the title of the 1.1 Triggers ReadMe file be changed to "v1.1" since a lot of information has been added to that file? I say this because I almost didn't read the new file since the title was the same, implying that the file itself hadn't changed.

I've just canceled the game I was playing and will now start a new one with MM2 1.1.

Thanks for your dedicated efforts at improving the game!

[Der PH]

AI falling behind in tech

Yesterday I stopped my actual MM2 game (impossible level, huge map), because in 2040 AD all AI civs out of the initial 20 (18 of them still alive) were still in the industrial age, while I was heading towards the information age.

As I read about other players also experiencing the AI civs falling behind in tech after the medieval age resp. the renaissance, here is a little suggestion:

What about randomly giving underdeveloped civs some advances other civs have already invented. This could support the latecomers' technological progress and bring them back into the game instead of making them bystanders waiting for invasion.

In a global community technologies spread very fast even without espionage (which the AI seems not to be good at ). The tech spreading could be restricted to civs having trade routes with the more advanced nations or maintaining embassies with them (or both) and it surely shouldn't begin before the industrial or modern age.

Since I'm not able writing mods myself, I make this suggestion to the ones who are.

[Cube]

Re: Medieval Pack II v1.1: A Call to Arms

Originally posted by WesW
One preq of Nanite Factory changed from Fusion Plant to Oil Refinery

Correct me if I'm wrong won't this make you not be able to build the nano factory since oil refineries still go obsolete with nano-assembly. Won't this cause the same problem we got with the public school not being available to build since you needed an acadamy.

I looked for the population boom slic you talked about, but could not find it. I opened scenario.slc and saw that it said the population boom code is soppused to be there, but I couldn't find it. Am I looking in the wrong place, or is it not there?

I also looked through the militia read me in wouter.slc and it said:

Once a city is founded, it gets one Militia unit and as the city grows more units will be added automaticly. Currently, the city sizes at which you get an extra Militia unit are 9, 21, and 37, the same sizes at which your city radius increases. ....................
As soon as you discover certain key advances that give you new defensive units, your Militia force will be automaticly upgraded as well.

I have never seen this happen. Is it new or was it never implimented?

I just loaded a game from v1.0 of the mod, I got weird messages, and as a result I reloaded slic. When i did that Improvements disappeared from the build screen (the one you go to build things) and i was left with just food silo. i reloaded to see that the were more items, and there where. I continuned without reloading slic and changed research to nano-assembly to see if I could build the nano factory, and I couldn't. It didn't appear in the list at all even though I had a robot plant and an oil refinery in there(before it went obsolete). Do I have to restart a new game, or can I continue my previous games.

[Gen.Dragolen]

Progress and Future Improvements

Well I'm past Y2K in game #3. And it is a science victory in the making. Assuming I don't just get fed up with the Ethiopian settlers... and their spies. But then if I destroy their civ, I have to destroy them all.

I managed to do what the AI's do in games like AC and expanded very rapidly - 36 cities and counting. My closest competitor is at 12 cities and still working on getting to the industrial age. There were 7 AI civs now 6 and one just begging to make it 5...

The game economic model is definitely a greater challenge now: I seem to keep on having the AI's declare embargoes against me, but there is no message to let me know. That and it would be nice to have the Trade gold included in the science points, but since it doesn't... just means I have to pay attention to the Advisors.

So I don't see that we need to do much to the AI's behavior that Wes hasn't already fixed with the latest text files.

I have one other suggestion to make about mixing up the playing field to keep it interesting: I think that having major weather events would force the AI's and humans to become aggressive in the face of some long term disaster. Good example: volcanoes.

Volcanoes that erupt to form new islands, and destroy islands or areas of land. This should in turn cool the climate for several turns, and lead to increased barbarian activity/ settlers from the AI's depending on the severity of the event. Part of what destroyed the remains of the Roman empire around 360? AD was a volcanic erruption on the other side of the world that triggers a prolonged cold spell. The Goths and Vandals wondered west looking for better pastures for the herds. Combine with inflation on food prices because of a dwindling supply and that makes it harder to maintain an empire.

Just a thought for future improvements. Seems like the game allows for this with random events already, but it never happens unless there is pollution.

[Bluevoss]

Actually, what we need to do is to have natural disasters (like earthquakes, plagues, and middle managers) affect random cities (rather than locales). The good thing is that such an addition would work to slow down races way, way ahead.

Wes: Question: I've got the 18th patch and would like to download the new fixes. What files do I need to pull down for that? Given my slow modem, I don't want to pull down stuff I don't need. Thanks!

[WesW]

Blue, perhaps you could talk one of the slic guys into writing some code for natural disasters. Immortal Wombat comes to mind for some reason. Perhaps something I read in the Cradle thread.
You will only need to get the text update that I plan to have posted tomorrow (see below).

Cube, you are right about the Oil Refineries. I thought sure I checked all that out yesterday when I made the change. I have been thinking about making some other changes to buildings as well.
Everyone drop by tomorrow, and I should have a new text update posted with several changes to buildings which I think everyone will like. I cannot get to them tonight.

Thanks for the readme version notice, Gazer. Those files have been gradually changed as updates were made, but it doesn't hurt to have the right title in place.

Der Ph, you have a good idea there, but I do not know if it can be coded. I would like to see if the last batch of strategy changes do not get the AIs to making more scientists and correct this problem that way before resorting to slic, though.

Thanks for the donation, too. Ralph sent a $20 bill in the mail from Germany, which is fine. If anyone else wants to send cash of non-US currency, that is fine too. I plan to forward some of it to people like Wouter or Dale. If I get a lot of it, I can always go to a bank or airport and change it there.
Stargazer contacted me today about making a donation through an online service. I have not used those before, but I would be happy to work with you in that method as well.

[janilxx]

Originally posted by WesW(to other thread(my summer vagation experienses))
I am sorry that you found the game boring. Unfortunately that sometimes happens if you get mostly non-militaristic AIs

I played a little more and discovered that Evil genius is the bad ass that captures cities most(he has now(1920AD) captured total of 4 cities from two different nations(not from me)). There is only one other nation that has captured one city(I do not remember his personality(maybe militarily academic etc)).

In the July 18th update we introduced Dale's personality-changing code, which gives a random chance of an AI to change its personality each turn, about once every 150 turns on average.

Yes I will get the updated version soon.

I requested this code to address exactly the boring games that you describe. I feel confident that this code will accomplish that.

Next question is addressed to everyone:
Have you tried to play so that you do not attack against anyone. Does the other nations really attack against you(attack is not the same as declaring war )? Or does the other players have wars against each others and they are really capturing others cities? BEfore the year 1500AD or 1800AD? How often are they capturing cities?

I just would like to know that this really happens and that I had a boring game by accident


I mentioned in my post that AIs are very poor when transferring units with ships. Is the situation still poor? Could AI for example move one or two army stacks(12 units in each) from his continent to other continent and then attack against other AI's city with those stacks(and at the same time he would transfer more troops from his homecontinent)?

[Der PH]

Originally posted by janilxx
Have you tried to play so that you do not attack against anyone.

Yep!
In the game I started two days ago (impossible, max. barbarians, 20 civs, map 110x220), I had plenty of space in every direction. My expansion has been limited only by the maximum number of cities. So I had no reason to attack anyone and I didn't.

Originally posted by janilxx
Does the other nations really attack against you(attack is not the same as declaring war )?

Yep!
Yesterday my neighbours, the russians, declared war on me sometimes between 1500 BC and 1000 BC (don't remember exactly) and confirmed their decision by sending a stack of 6 swordsmen and phalanxes to one of my cities.
I redirected all my light cavalry-scouts to that city and they arrived just in time to defend it.

Originally posted by janilxx
Or does the other players have wars against each others and they are really capturing others cities? BEfore the year 1500AD or 1800AD? How often are they capturing cities?

In my previous game, which I played till the end of the modern age, the Chinese and the Japanese shared a little continent and battled for it for millenia. I sent spies to this war just to see them both capturing each other's cities, marching forward and backward again and occasionally firing their guns. Not a very effective war (I prefer Blitzkrieg strategies (which a stack of 12 stormtroopers and light tanks is very useful for: 8 Polynesian cities in 10 turns!)), but quite funny to watch.
It ended at about 2030 AD with the Japanese capturing the last remaining Chinese city.

[Immortal Wombat]

Originally posted by WesW
Blue, perhaps you could talk one of the slic guys into writing some code for natural disasters. Immortal Wombat comes to mind for some reason. Perhaps something I read in the Cradle thread.

Or perhaps it was the thread on that topic that I started...

DerPH's suggestion could be coded, if you wanted it, and if it woud help the game.

[Rhuarc]

How soon is work going to start on the Crusade? I am really interested in seeing BlueO's city expansion mod incorporated into the MM2. I think that having true expanding cities is one of the best ideas anyone has had for modifications.

Wes, would it be ok if we make a donation to you using paypal or some other online service? That would make it so much easier! Thanks a lot guys!

[Bluevoss]

I said it in another thread, but I'll post it here too. I think city expansion should be handled just like other tiles. You can chose to let your city sprawl (add more tiles) and chose how you want to to sprawl. These tiles would work just like other tiles, meaning the more effectiveness you have in them (based on specialist selection) the more benifit you have (in terms of growth).

Simple and interesting - thats the way it should be.

[StarGazer]

Attacking

Originally posted by janilxx

Next question is addressed to everyone:
Have you tried to play so that you do not attack against anyone. Does the other nations really attack against you(attack is not the same as declaring war )? Or does the other players have wars against each others and they are really capturing others cities? BEfore the year 1500AD or 1800AD? How often are they capturing cities?

Since my goal is the Science Victory, I play games in which I establish Peace Treaties with all the other civs. None (except the Barbarians, of course) have ever attacked me militarily. They HAVE used Spies to steal tech from me, though, and have sent in Abolitionists.

In these games, the AI civs ALWAYS go to war against each other, wars that last until the end of the game, by the way. And, yes, they capture each other's cities and try (and succeed many times) to recapture them. This back-and-forth capturing and recapturing can go on for dozens of turns. Yes, before 1500 AD. Things seemed to quiet down in the later ages, however, but then I wasn't paying much attention to this particular aspect of the game.

All the above refers to MM2 games played in versions earlier than the new 1.1. Haven't been able yet to play a 1.1 version beyond Turn 111. Hope this helps.

[StarGazer]

City Walls Bug?

I have started two games of version 1.1 of MM2, and in both games, after I had gotten the Stone Working Advance, the option to build City Walls did NOT appear on my cities' Build menu. Other options, e.g., Shrine, Granary, Capitol, did appear, however, when I got the Advances required to build them.

Have any of you experienced this problem?

If not, then I guess I had better uninstall CTP2 and go through the whole process of reinstalling everything (after Wes puts up his modification to version 1.1).