Cradle 1.31

[hexagonian]

DP

[hexagonian]

Due to a death in the family, I will be offline until late in the week (My brother-in-law passed away suddenly today), so if there are any questions, post them here and somebody will be able to answer them.

[Aias]

I deleted everything. I guess it worked, no more major crashes.

[Immortal Wombat]

Originally posted by hexagonian
Due to a death in the family, I will be offline until late in the week (My brother-in-law passed away suddenly today),

wow, I'm sorry to hear that Dave; that sucks

[Dale]

Dave:

Sorry to hear mate. See you when you get back.

[Aias]

Sorry to hear about the loss. I'll post some feedback when you return. I trust that God will comfort you and all of the others touched by this.

[Martin Gühmann]

Sorry to hear Dave. Such a loss always sucks.

-Martin

[Lou Wigman]

OK, we clearly have a different opinion about how the game should be played and I have no particular problem with that although the delay on receiving a unit from a hut is not acceptable me personally.

Here's another one to consider. In const.txt there is provision to get an advance on capturing a city. This doesn't work. Has any thought been given to make this work via SLIC. Some very fancy code would be required and I suspect that it may be in the too hard basket.

CTP2, however, must keep track of all this information in one of its own database files. Does anyone know which file? Does anyone know how to read this file? Lots of SLIC possibilities here if it could be cracked.

[Aias]

I know Hex will be gone for a while, but I wonder if anyone could help. I have tried starting a new game, but after a few turns I get an error message that says:

Unable to find the file M.Lanciere.TGA and the tutorial comes on. Anyone have any thoughts on how to fix this?

Thanks in advance.

[Pedrunn]

It is probably a diplomatic civ leader pic.

[hexagonian]

First off, thanks to everyone for the condolences. My brother-in-law had some optional surgery a couple of weeks ago, and something must have gone wrong, because he was back in the hospital last week after being released. He had a 108 fever, lasped into a coma and never came out of it. He was 48 years old with 4 kids.

Originally posted by Aias
Unable to find the file M.Lanciere.TGA and the tutorial comes on. Anyone have any thoughts on how to fix this?

This is part of Leonardo's graphics enhancement package (BTW, this is not included in the basic Cradle setup but is an add-on). I checked the files, and that .tga file is included in his main download. I think you may only have the update package, so make sure you have the zip file with all of the graphics (approx. 2 MB in size) The main download also includes all updates (the updates are there for anyone who is using the add-on and wants his setup to be compatible with 1.32.

Any takers on implementing the capture city advance code???

[Aias]

That did the trick, thanks

[Lou Wigman]

Cradle 1.32 comments

I have just 'completed' two sensationally good games. Here are some comments/concerns.

Polution from Population
There are plenty of 'growth' improvements in the game so as the game progresses the polution from population goes through the roof. When the time comes to move to 'Democracy' the whole thing becomes totally ridiculous. I think keeping your people happy should be a struggle but I think this is a little bit overdone. A government like 'Corporate Republic' largely solves the issue.

Money
The player should have to work very hard indeed to make money in the game. The problem here is with the money producing improvements. They don't. A marketplace will not make money in a city of less than 10. An agora will lose money but is needed to build a marketplace which will make money. Bank, City Clock, Brokerage and Airport are all financially ruinous. As I mentioned in another thread it is impossible to work out how CTP is actually doing its calculations. By watching your 'net gold' carefully it is possible to see that these structures aren't doing what you think they should. The idea of a % increase in gold is a nice one but in practice it is impossible to determine ahead of time whether the improvement will actually do good. In effect the combination Bazaar/Agora/Marketplace will make money in a city size 12. Because a Bank is needed for a Factory the maintenance on a factory is effectively 17! Don't bother with City Clock or Brokerage at all! Unless someone can work out what CTP is actually doing this area of the game is problematical.

Upgrading Units
This has an intermittent bug. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. There are two specific instances of concern.
If you are doing a partial upgrade (haven't got all the money) it steps through your units one by one. The unit index is out of whack here since frequently it will offer to upgrade only a few before stopping altogether.
The second issue is more serious and concerns naval upgrades. All ship units in port are wiped out!!!! Only units at sea are upgraded. You still get charged for the entire upgrade of course.
In my last game the AI was having problems too. I was fighting spearman well into the mid game.

Spy unit
The Great Library says this can steal advances. It can't.

[Lou Wigman]

Tile Improvements

I have long been disatisified with the Trading Post and Super market tile improvements. Why put a supermaket in a forest tile? Indeed, why put a supermarket outside a city at all? Crazy stuff.
Given what can be achieved by the MODers how about these as suggestions:

Replace Trading Post With 'Timber Mill' targetted for maximum benefit in a forest tile. Reduce commerce value of Latifundia by 5 in a forest tile.

Forest now lookes likes this:
Latifundia + 5 food, +5 commerce.
Timber Mill +10 commerce.

Replace Supermarket with 'Cattle Ranch' targetted for maximum effect in plains.

Plains now look like this:
Latifundia +10 food, +5 commerce
Adv Farm +15 food
Cattle Ranch +5 food +10 commerce

Suggestion only and the numbers are up for discussion. What do you think?

[hexagonian]

Lou,

Thanks for the observations.

IMPORTANT...
Could you send me a gamefile so I can see what is happening - preferably one during Democracy. This will help immensely in analyzing what is happening.

RE: Population Growth
A question - Did you disable the disaster code in your game? The reason why is in my game (turn 650 - 38 cities/Caliphate), I had been hit with several plagues that have kept the population down, so I am not getting hit with huge unhappiness problems due to population yet.

One thing that I really wanted to do is make unhappiness an issue for a player. In the default CTP2 game, it wasn't really a problem. Even in earlier versions of Cradle, it was rather easy to maintain happiness. My hope is to make a player have to use entertainers, and possibly specialists to maintain a balance between happiness/growth. This is intentional. And at the same time, it is also intended that a player may have to take a hit on the global sliders to maintain happiness, or make sure that he stays within the city cap. Again, a hard choice, but one that forces a player to carefully consider what he wants to do. In my current game, I have been near the cap and also have gone over the cap with consequenses, stopping any military pushes. It forces me to carefully consider what I want to do long-term.

One thing that I want to see with your file is exactly what level your unhappiness is at, and whether these other measures will help you to overcome the pollution/unhappiness. If even after implementing these stopgaps, you cannot maintain a stable level of unhappiness, then I can easily fix the buildings to help in that regard.

One other question - are you having Global disasters and destroyed tiles due to pollution? Cradle was initially designed to play through the Industrial Age, so the whole idea of late game pollution may need to be balanced.

RE: Gold
The reports coming in concerning the default game when I was setting Cradle up was that there was too much gold in the game. I had added some additional gold buildings, but also increased the costs of maintenance as a means to reduce the gold taken in.

In earlier versions of Cradle, players were reporting that the Medival/Modern buildings were still creating piles of gold. What I did was reduce the effect of those buildings, but also kept the maintenance costs as they were.

I do believe that the Ancient gold buildings are fine as they are. The purpose of them is to pick the time and the place to build them - so I monitor the gold intake of a city balanced with the maintenance costs. You are right in saying that the time to build a Marketplace is when your city is at size 10. (intentional, BTW) I also hold off on Bazaars until the city is generating at least 12 gold. One thing I do is build a lot of gold-generating tile improvements, like Ports, Trading Posts, Latifundias, and Mines which will help increase city gold intake - in fact Mines/Latifundias are my primary builds.

Changing the names of the Trading Posts/Supermarkets is an easy change to make - any other opinions on this??? But keeping the gold in Latifundias will also alliviate the gold issue.

In my current game, I am doing pretty well in the gold department, but am still in the Medieval Age without building Banks/City Clocks and so forth. I may have to decrease the maintenance costs for those buildings though, and seeing your file will help me analyze just what is happening, and how much I need to do so.

RE: Upgrades
Peter will have to look into both of these issues, as they are SLIC-related. I do not know if there is a way to specifically cycle through the units multiple times, upgrading only the ones you want to until you run out of gold, because it works as a one time cycle. It has been discussed to have multiple times to upgrade a unit, but this reduces the need to pre-plan.

What I can do is make available a SLIC file option that offers a second chance to upgrade units.

One thing is now Cradle 1.32 has a Shipyard tile improvement which will reduce the need to park ships in cities. Still, this needs to be addressed if possible.

RE: Other
Great Library will be fixed.

Also, in looking at the civs in my current game via the cheat mode, I am impressed by the number of buildings each of the AI cities will have. In this regard, the AI is doing a very good job in Cradle concerning this issue. Players will not notice this so much when they take an AI city because there is coding that will destroy buildings during an assault. War is meant to be costly in Cradle...

Again, thanks