Cattle

[SMIFFGIG]

I was just wondering about the cow unit. yes the misterious cow unit, which was apparently the first unit made for ctp1 could be added to ctp2 and made useful?and not like the workers in civ3 on every tile. Would be interesting to have specially if the hustle function could be made to work

oh and look at this post I thought it was interesting

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18561&highlight=Cattle

There where going to be 3 different kinds of mine for each sea, land and space terrain

[Pedrunn]

mines and its effects can be easifully added to the game. There even is alredy graphics for the sea and land mine in the original CTP2 tile set.

The problem is that the effort to make the AI know how to deal with it is enormous. Any slicer so far wanted to take this task.

How does the Cow adds food in CTP1 ??? In others words how does the rustle event work.

Note: Just notied that I have already reached more than 1000 posts
I am a king

[J Bytheway]

Cows added food with the BONUS_FOOD field. In CTP2 there is still a HasBonusFood field, but AFAIK noone has ever tried to use it. If you add cattle you should certainly give them a high upkeep (and make them special forces) to prevent the map being flooded with them. It might also be a good idea to make cattle reduce city population when built.

IIRC, one of the Activision programmers said that the rustle event has been removed from the exe, so the only way to implement that would be through SLIC, in the same way the build fort order etc. have been added.

[Pedrunn]

I asked because there is no add food event or function.
So I wanted to know we could increase food in a city with the RustleOrder event.

[SMIFFGIG]

Im not 100% sure about this but as far as I know

The rustle order was used bit like slaving order only on cows, u would use it and steal the cow ( I think )


Pedrunn how about this for an Idea:
In Civ3 when you attack a settler or worker with a combat unit u take the worker over and with the settler it turns into 2 worker units that are yours.

In CtP2 through SLIC could you make it so when you attack a settler with a combat unit, a message box pops up asking if you want to kill it or want to take it over (just an idea)

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Pedrunn
mines and its effects can be easifully added to the game. There even is alredy graphics for the sea and land mine in the original CTP2 tile set.

Actual the default CTP2 tile file doesn't contain a graphic for the sea mine. What you find there is an x-ray mine the mine for space. I added the sea mine graphic fromCTP1 to my purple hill tile file.

-Martin

[Immortal Wombat]

mines and its effects can be easifully added to the game.

But the AI won't be able to handle it in a million gazillion years.

[Pedrunn]

The rustle order was used bit like slaving order only on cows, u would use it and steal the cow ( I think )

Not what i expected

In CtP2 through SLIC could you make it so when you attack a settler with a combat unit, a message box pops up asking if you want to kill it or want to take it over (just an idea)

unit_t SettlerToGet;
int_t CanBattle;
HandleEvent(Battle) 'GetTheSettlerToYou' pre {
int_t i;
int_t num;
unit_t tmpUnit;
	num = GetUnitsAtLocation(location[0]);
	if(num == 1) {
		for (i = 0; i < num; i = i + 1){
			GetUnitFromCell(location[0], i, tmpUnit);
			if(tmpUnit.type == UnitDB(UNIT_SETTLER)
			|| tmpUnit.type == UnitDB(UNIT_URBAN_PLANNER)
			|| tmpUnit.type == UnitDB(UNIT_SEA_ENGINEER)){
				if(CanBattle == 0) {
					SettlerToGet = tmpUnit;
					message(g.player, 'GetTheSettlerToYou');
					return STOP;
				}
				else{
					CanBattle = 0;
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

messagebox 'GetTheSettlerToYou' {
	Show();
	text(ID_DO_YOU_WANT_THE_SETTLER);
	Button(ID_YES){
		CreateUnit(g.player, SettlerToGet.type, army[0].location, 0);
		Event: DisbandUnit(SettlerToGet);
	}
	Button(ID_NO){
		CanBattle = 1;
		Event: Battle(army[0], location[0]);
	}
}

create this a message to this DO_YOU_WANT_THE_SETTLER "" in the info_str.txt

And copy this in the same file

YES "Yes"
NO "No"

Not tested even to find syntax errors, maybe tomorrow i do this if you dont.

Note: The code will only trigger if there is only one unit (the settler itself) at the settler location.

[SMIFFGIG]

Thanx for the code pedrunn, you should eventually release all your codes as part of one big pack


What about cows then? Are they never comming back or could they be put to good use?

I think the fundemental ideas of them are good, but the way you would mass build them is just dumb. Its would be the Civ3 worker situation all over again.

Maybe if you built cattle at a high cost (Like J Bytheway mentioned) and then the cows would have a special order in the menu bottom right. U would use it and it would make the cow turn into like a trade good (like the cattle in civ3). So it would be a trade good that you could essentially move around, although as it was moving around (within a friendly city radius) it would give you a food bonus.
It would be nice if you could then click on the trade good (like you could on ctp1 and it made a noise) and then give it an order again to be able to move around again (undeploy) but this im not really bothered about and im sure it cant be done anyway, so just take notice of the first part

What do you think? Could it be done?

[Pedrunn]

Thanx for the code pedrunn, you should eventually release all your codes as part of one big pack

My mod beta is almost ready, Just some balance and minor changes required. But i think i will add all to the CTP2 database.
The problem is that my classes will start today. So i will only have time to mod now at night if i have.

What about cows then? Are they never comming back or could they be put to good use?

Personally i dont like the idea. I rather have cows as regular goods. And the moving goods is probably impossible

[SMIFFGIG]

I was looking at this screenshot and thinking if cattle could be used in moderation they would be a great unit, you could shift them around to help out growth in smaller cities etc


Maybe if you could limit the amount of cattle that has effect to 1 or two a citie (so u cant fill every tile with cattle) like in the screenshot below

http://www.cdmag.com/articles/017/180/shot7.html

[Peter Triggs]

SMIFFGIG,

You'd have to limit it as per your suggestion. I'm sure it could be done, but it would be a bit tedious if not downright difficult. That's why they dropped the unit in the first place:

HOW THE COW GOT SLAUGTHERED
(15 May 2000, 04:08 | CtP) One of the most discussed units that never made it on CTP, was the cow unit. If you dont remember, the cow units looked like a... cow, and could boost the food production of a tile. Since it was a unit you could move it wherever it was needed. In the end, the unit was cut, but the sprite was there(check out Mr Temba's Cow Mod that enables it).

Today, Mr Ogre of Activision, when the question of whether the cow unit will be back was posted, answered negatively and explained how it got... slaughtered the first time...

We all got a real kick out of it too, and it was useful for its intended purpose, but it was also far too useful as a defense against stealth units. No, it couldn't see stealth units, but you could build cows all around your city and effectively stop stealth units from getting to it. We called it the Wall of Beef defense. We could have made cows more expensive to make that unreasonable, but then you'd have been better off just building more farms. So they had to go. -

MarkG

Mr Temba's Cow Mod must still be around and I guess could easily be adapted (just for fun) to CTP2.

[Devil of Truth]

Wall of beef Steak security. Hoof hedge. Ok. I’ll stop.

The whole cow idea is great, but it comes down to the AI again. I have a serious problem with adding anything to the game that would tip the scales in favour of the human (cow tipping anybody? ).

Is there a way to enable the AI to implement this properly?

[Martin Gühmann]

The better way to implement them would have been to not put them on the map add them to the cities as extra food directly. You should collect them like caravans and distribute them all over your empire.

-Martin