MOD Discussion: Ages of Man!

[Dale]

Okay, so it's official. I'm working on a new MOD.

Title: The Ages of Man!

Type: Full-scale historical MOD

Span: 8000BC to 2000AD (no future)

Design Doc: Here

Progress: The first complete new concept is finished. Colonisation works. It may be changed slightly during the course of AOM's development, but at this point it works perfectly.

This thread is for discussion on the project, and I'll be making regular updates to the progress, and allowing some playing around with scripts, etc.

[Dale]

Colonisation......

Colonisation is complete. At this point, the script works with the default CTP2 setup (no MODs) because my development is starting from clean.

If you do want to play around with this script, it's best to disallow building of settlers. You can do this by setting the following under UNIT_SETTLER in units.txt:

EnableAdvance ADVANCE_ADV_URBAN_PLANNING

Any comments welcome.

BTW, the attached picture shows the AI at 2000BC using this colonisation script on a huge map.

[Dale]

Here's the .slc file.......

[Immortal Wombat]

Very nice so far

If I get this straight, the script sets up the ColPols so that you should average a new city every third pop point, with ColPols 1 or 4, where 4 is the default AI one, and the starting human one, and also the "coastal cities" policy.
All civs start off aiming for the sea... cool.

Using ColPols 2 and 3, you get a 1/6 chance and 1/9 chance respectivly, (I guess there's also a ColPols 5 and 6 which are coastal versions of 2 and 3?) and ColPol 0 is an all stop - no colonising.

And the AI is then kicked into ColPol 0 when it reaches it's city limit under its present (likely) governement. Doesn't the code also at this point prevent the AddPop event from happening? That sounds a bit harsh, not only can you not expand further, you're stuck with the same population to get you to the next government.

The one thing that seems to be missing is a way for the human, and the AI to alter their ColPols depending on circumstances.

Have I got that right? It looks very good anyway. I'll try it out.

Those pink guys seem to have done rather well (above) whereas the light blue ones are a bit stuffed. How come the dark red one spread so far away?

[mapfi]

This idea is just so cool!

Well tried it out and here's what I found, and no I didn't read the code, sorry:
I got one city near 3 glacier tiles even though there were lots of other better spots around. I got another city right beside a barbarian stack - would be better to check for that before it's placed. I saw the cities of two AI's very close and entangled. Shouldn't the borders be respected or is that deliberate? If so, what about only allowing placing a city one tile into another players borders? The barbarians were also using colonisation. Why not...
City placement is in my opinion two close. There should be at least two tiles between the cities' radius.
If you'd like to see the game I'll mail it to you.

As I said, I'm very much looking forward to this and gladly test anything you put into the forums.

[Dale]

IW:

Yeah, you got the ColPol's correct. There is a 5 & 6 equivalent for coastal. Now the question about changing policies comes later with gov policies (not written). BTW, you don't lose the pop-point when you reach city-max. It adds on to the original city it grew in.

Mapfi:

I didn't say it was by any means perfect. But that's for the comments.

[Dale]

BTW, the barbs took a couple of light blue cities, and then pink and dark red took them from the barbs. That's why light blue is stuffed, and dark red is spread.

[centrifuge]

Dale, It's great to see you back into the *Evil* world of CTP2 modding. You're mods are one of the main reasons that I've become addicted to this game, and I can't wait to see this new one in action. Thanks for all of your work.

[mapfi]

Did my post sound like I expected it to be perfect and was dissapointed of it not being so? That's certainly not the case - I just wanted to mention the things I saw that needed to be improved because I thought that's why you posted it in the first place.

[Immortal Wombat]

BTW, you don't lose the pop-point when you reach city-max. It adds on to the original city it grew in.

Oh, ok, that would make more sense. The "return STOP;" confused me.

[child of Thor]

Dale you 'bewt'

Interesting design doc - i'm looking forward to how the religion aspect works out, could be very bloody!

Some thoughts so far:

The bit about adding to your units stat with the invention of some kind of improvement, without a complete new sprite.
I remember Hex thinking through something along the lines of using the sprite tile background in some way(like it changes colour for the 'elite' unit types of craddle) , to help out. Maybe you could use something like that, a small coloured star in one corner of the tile to indicate the upgraded unit?

And for Map sizes - if you are going to have a huge span of time it might be nice to keep the huge Apolyton maps as it will be more likely that you can fill them up with the civs cities, especially as you can do the colony thing, and also as there could be alot of religious war and thus lots of conquest going on? And if people want to play it with 27 civs. Or maybe you have other idea's on this?

It sounds great so far - i'll have another 2000 years of ancient history to play with

[Pedrunn]

Hi close is your religion project from mines and Mapfis. We are almost done with the work and we want to know what do you have in mind.

[Dale]

Centrifuge:

Thanks. It's appreciation like yours (and many others) that keeps us modders going.

Mapfi:

Yeah that's cool, that's how I took it. I just didn't say it that way.

IW:

Remember, "return STOP" just ends the current function being run, not the entire event. Therefore, since there's still a pop-growth point, CTP2 would still run the normal AddPop function giving you the city growth.

CoT:

Yeah, religion could be very messy if you ignore the Pope. BTW, your suggestion on units is good, but I don't want anyone to know the different upgrades. EG: If you're looking at an AI's tank, untill you fight it, how are you supposed to know it has Laser-Radar-Guided-Nuclear-Tipped-Copper-Plated-High-Explosive rockets to your standard HE round? It adds to the suspense.

Pedrunn:

I think our religions are different. Mine's focusing only on the high-level religion. I'm not having any city-level/pop-level religion. The Civ has a state religion, and bands towards other Civs of the same religion.

[HuangShang]

^_^ know i know

[Pedrunn]

Originally posted by Dale

Pedrunn:

I think our religions are different. Mine's focusing only on the high-level religion. I'm not having any city-level/pop-level religion. The Civ has a state religion, and bands towards other Civs of the same religion.

Actually in my code every civ starts with its religion and the religion level is only the percentage of the world population converted to this religion. The higher the number of converted pop more money and happiness will be given to the cities with this religion. Plus regard to others plyers with same religion.
Every player can only have one religion although he can change to another religion as the game goes.