The best thing since sliced bread

[Lou Wigman]

I have been playing the Cradle MOD very solidly now for almost a month. (Deity Slayer - Impossible level... impossible it ain't). This is by FAR the BEST civ game so far.

IMHO the greatest weakness of this MOD is in relation to money. There is far too much of it. Strategy games are about making choices. In its present form I can buy anything I want. I can have huge standing armies. No choices required here. It also makes trade irrelevant. If money is kept tight then the trade goods truly become 'strategic resources'. To emphasise the point, I am almost never able to build a wonder because I am too far behind in tech. When I finally catch up sufficiently to have a crack at one I buy it outright! This is largely a play balance issue that can be resolved through play testing.

There are also changes I would like to see in the diplomatic area as well as the military AI.

Another major issue is play balance after mid game. Provided you survive the initial onslaught your civ becomes unstoppable. Once you've got on top that's it. The AI civs never seem to be able to claw back up to your level. The best experiences are those where this point is reached well into game. Despite having played around 6 games (and started many more only to be thwarted early by the AI) all these games have ended circa 1500 AD.

We are stuck with the CTP2 engine and hence are limited in what can be done. I am not a SLIC programmer and have come to the MOD scene too late to be of much use here. I am however more than willing to participate in discussions about changes and to play test whatever is done. Is there enough interest out there to do this?

[hexagonian]

Lou - Regarding gold,

Here are a few suggestions to try at your end - they are easy fixes and can be done in a few minutes. Please try them out and report back as to how they worked.

The thing to remember is that Trade puts a lot of gold in your coffers, so here are some steps to raise the cost of all the things tied into gold. Trade does not help your science rate though, as all gold raised by trade goes directly into your Rush Buy account.

Go into the constr.txt files for Cradle (They will have the CRA_, CRAB_, CRAI_, and so forth prefix on the file name.) There are several of these types of files, based on the version of Cradle that you are using to check which version you want to alter, open the various (CRA_)gamefile.txt files to see which const.txt file is listed in that gamefile.txt file. Look for the line

BASE_WAGES 5.0 # gold per person when slider is zero (was 4)

And change it to

BASE_WAGES 7.0 # gold per person when slider is zero (was 4)

This will increase the wages that you pay to each worker from 5 to 7, meaning less gold for you.

Then you can go to the CRA_govern.txt and/or the CRAB_govern.txt file for Cradle (its the same type of setup as the const.txt file) and look for the lines for each government entry that will correspond to the ability to Rush Buy Wonders. These lines of text will be in a block of copy that looks like this

UnitRushModifier 4
BuildingRushModifier 3
WonderRushModifier 6
EndGameRushModifier 6

Double or triple the numbers, based on what you want to do.

Finally, look for the SLIC file named CRA_updater.slc. There will be a series of entries that will look similar to this

enadv[0]=AdvanceDB(ADVANCE_BRONZE_WORKING);
OLD_UNIT_TYPE[0]=UnitDB(UNIT_SPEARMAN);
NEW_UNIT_TYPE[0]=UnitDB(UNIT_HOPLITE);
PER_UNIT_UPDATE_COST[0]=280;

Double or triple the number in the last line of those types of entries to reflect a higher upgrade cost for your units.

Still waiting for Peter's update on the Diplomacy files - hopefully that will help in that area.

One thing I will be updating in the near future is a reduction in the Martial Law effect and an increase in the distance unhappiness factor in the govern.txt file, so unhappiness becomes more of a problem for the player. In my games, it hasn't been too much of a hinderance.

Again, I'm glad to hear that you are enjoying the Mod.

[Peter Triggs]

IMHO the greatest weakness of this MOD is in relation to money.

The thing to remember is that Trade puts a lot of gold in your coffers

If the money is coming from Trade then there's some data down at the bottom of const.txt:

TRADE_DISTANCE_COEFFICIENT 1
MIN_LIKE_TILES_FOR_GOOD 1
MIN_GOOD_VALUE 0.01
MAX_GOOD_VALUE 0.05

that, as I recall, controls what you get. But I don't remember how it works.

Still waiting for Peter's update on the Diplomacy files - hopefully that will help in that area.

o: Blush. There'll be more things to spend money on: for example the AI should sell you advances more often. And it should counter some of your requests it's own requests for gold. But I don't know how much of a difference this will make in the long run.

We are stuck with the CTP2 engine and hence are limited in what can be done.

Some of us were talking about this over at CivFanatics, while Poly was down. I think you'll be surprised once we get into it.

I am however more than willing to participate in discussions about changes and to play test whatever is done. Is there enough interest out there to do this?

I've been really tied up with this Diplomacy thing for ages, but it's pretty well done now and the AI is what I've always really been interested in. So count me in.

[Lou Wigman]

Let me be a bit more specific.

Money is very tight in the early part of the game but after a while this changes dramatically. I wouldn't like to see less money early but definitely later. Some of the money producing buildings are perhaps a bit too generous.

The 'problem' with the diplomatic AI is in relation to weak civs. These behave very inappropriately. They should do everything in their power to survive and if possible expand. In the expansion part of the game this means that they should be aggressive. Later however they should have peace treaties with all civs more powerful than they. They should readily accept trade agreements to try and strengthen their position. They should make alliances with powerful, peaceful neighbours. They should, however, avoid being dragged into wars on behalf of these neighbours. At present weak civs seem quite happy to suicide themselves and completely ignore my overtures.

More generally, I find the diplomatic module quite unsatisfactory. The AI doesn't engage in meaningful diplomacy with the human player. This is a pity since this means that an important element of the game is largely neglected.

Finally I have noticed a reluctance on the part of the AI to attack cities with single armies. It will do so but frequently it simply hovers without committing itself. I don't think that the AI knows about the garrison since I have frequently had size 12 armies outside virtually undefended cities. I hasten to add however that the aggressive AIs are superb. I fought a 4000 year war with the Greeks. They repeatedly sent 3 or 4 size 12 armies my way seeking to isolate a city and overwhelm it. In this particular war a population 36 city changed hands repeatedly over the course of the game. When the dust settled it was down to a size 2!

[Boney]

I tend to agree with Lou, by mid game my coffers are overflowing, but for the first quarter I am struggling.

As to the wonder question, would it be possible to bring in something that prevent rush buying a wonder unless it is already 50% complete. This would make things a little more interesting.

Diplomatically I always seem to find there is one civ willing to trade science, but only after I threaten it with war. This civ seems to trade science throughout the game, but not one single other civ will, even if the tech I am giving is much more advanced than the one I am asking for.

Alliances between civs would add a lot of interest, I think someone is already working on this.

I have not noticed any reluctance of the AI to attack cities with single armies, but I rarely leave a city with a single army exposed to attack.

One thing that peaced me off happened a couple of nights ago. I wanted to go to bed, but decided to wait until the tech enabling units to upgrade to legions was researched. It duly came and units were upgraded, I turned everything off happy in the knowledge that aotosave was working. The next day I found that not only did autosave not keep the upgraded units, they had reverted back, but I had to research the tech again. I was a bit tired that night so i checked to see if it was my mistake or a bug. Low and behold the next time an upgrade arrived I saved manually also. The autosave did the same thing again, but the manual save kept the upgrades.

I seem to notice that if a tech is discovered by a spy no upgrades occur. Is this a bug or deliberate?

Cradle really is the best yet, though wes's medmod for ctp was a challenge at first. I haven't tried wes's crusade? upgrade for ctp2, can anyone give any info.

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by hexagonian
One thing I will be updating in the near future is a reduction in the Martial Law effect and an increase in the distance unhappiness factor in the govern.txt file, so unhappiness becomes more of a problem for the player. In my games, it hasn't been too much of a hinderance.

One thing you should consider Dave is if you reduce the happiness benifits for the plyer you will also reduce the happiness benefits for the AI. And that will the hurt more than the human as the AI can't use entertainers the human can use them. I notice this in MedPack2 and also in my last GoodMod game that the AI suffered by a lot of unhappiness, because of pollution.

-Martin

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by Lou Wigman
Let me be a bit more specific.
Money is very tight in the early part of the game but after a while this changes dramatically. I wouldn't like to see less money early but definitely later. Some of the money producing buildings are perhaps a bit too generous.

The suggested adjustments can be started at a specific point too, so they would not affect the early game.

For instance you can make the Rush Buy Modifier adjustments for the later governments only, as well as a boost in upgrade costs for late Ancient/Medieval and beyond units. This will have an inflationary effort on your coffers, so you will have a lot of gold, but it will also cost a lot in order to do things with it.

Another suggestion that might work in this regard. You can also go into the Medieval/Modern Buildings and reduce the benefit of Gold production buildings buildings, as well as increase the maintenance costs of them.

As for the unhappiness issue, the thing I had noted in my games was that I did not have to build Temples for a long time, which made them an almost useless Improvement. Eventually I would have to build them to get to the later Religious structures, but from a historical standpoint, Ancient Religion played a HUGE role in societal structure. The AI is scripted to build them though, so it may not be such a huge problem for them.

What I want to do is reduce an already powerful Martial Law effect that is in place in 'Cradle' now. As it stands, I can ride the Martial Law effect for at least 400 turns without a Temple being built. Since a player has more of an incentive to maintain a garrisonned city in 'Cradle' because of the AI, the need for Temples was greatly lessened.

Diplomacy is being worked on (by Peter), and I refer you to some threads in the Creation Forum. It's a long process though, because the whole diplomatic process is very complex.

The Autosave problem is one that just recently cropped up on my system, after a year of playing/testing. One thing I did differently is use the extremely huge map setting for my current game. Boney, is this the case for your game?

Anyhow, I am also hoping that players will take the initiative to get into the 'Cradle' files, make adjustments on their own and then report back and post their findings and adjusted files.

If you see a flaw, please feel free to experiment. This will help make the process a lot easier, because I do not have as much time to devote to 'Cradle' as I did in the initial creation stages.

[Lou Wigman]

I have a suggestion to boost the AI civs from mid game if the human player is running away with the game. If it is possible at all it will require some fancy SLIC work.

The idea is to combine two AI civs to form a single larger civ. Historically this is not at all uncommon. Examples that immediately spring to mind are the creation of Spain in the 15th century from two separate kingdoms (by marriage). The union of Scotland and England is another as well as the formation of modern Germany from its constituent kingdoms. There are plenty of other examples.

The main issues appear to be...

How do you decide whether the human player is winning by miles?

Are there enough AI civs left?

How often do you check?

How do you decide which two civs to combine?

The actual mechanics of the union.

[Immortal Wombat]

How do you decide whether the human player is winning by miles?

if(MilitaryScore(1) >= 2*MilitaryScore(tmpPlayer)){
    ConsiderStrategicState(OMG_THE_HUMANS_KICKING_OUR_ASS);
}

Or similar...

[hexagonian]

Re: The best thing since sliced bread

Originally posted by Lou Wigman
Another major issue is play balance after mid game. Provided you survive the initial onslaught your civ becomes unstoppable. Once you've got on top that's it. The AI civs never seem to be able to claw back up to your level. The best experiences are those where this point is reached well into game. Despite having played around 6 games (and started many more only to be thwarted early by the AI) all these games have ended circa 1500 AD.

One thing I do want to say regarding the timeframe is that translates into over 900 turns - which actually makes for a good game IMO.

Cradle was originally designed to focus more on that type of timeframe too - however, I had left it open-ended because I wanted to allow players the option to continue to play through all of the tech tree if they wanted to do so.

You can go into CRA_const.txt and set the ending year to 1500AD - or an earlier year to try to beat the Mod in a given timeframe.

Generally, it has been my experience that in all of the civ-style games available, the more turns you have to play, the easier it is to win, if you take the trouble to play the entire game.

I have already figured out a way to alter the endgame to fit within the Cradle Medieval setup, where a civ has to build the obelisks in order to win, but it will take a bit of work to set up. The setup will have to have an early endtime though. I will need reports where players are at techwise at that point of the game (1300-1500AD)

An updated Gold adjusted file is posted in the Cradle 1.2 Creation Forum thread.

[Lou Wigman]

As I said, my games tend to finish around 1500 AD since I am usually well on top by then. The game which I just finished ended in 1275AD. My troops have just been equipped with artillery. This seems fairly typical of other games too. Perhaps ending with Industrialisation. I still think that my suggestion for extending the game is worthy of consideration. Any SLICers out there up to the challenge?

[Immortal Wombat]

Do you want 'similar' civs to merge (eg England, Scotland or Greece, Rome), or based on the game status (eg. 2nd best and 3rd best combine to kill 1st place human)?

[Peter Triggs]

I agree, Lou, it's a nice idea.

The actual mechanics of the union

In the thread 'Getting Civs to Surrender' there's some code that can easily be adapted to do this. Instead of just killing off the units of the lesser civ, we'd have to replace them with units of the civ we're merging into.

Are there enough AI civs left?

If the human is winning by miles, what about taking it down to the last pair of AI civs that are not friendly to the human?

How often do you check?

It should certainly trigger a check on the remaining players' strength whenever a player is killed. But that won't be enough; if fact maybe even triggering a check on the victor's strength whenever a human captures a city won't be enough. But I don't think this is a real problem.

How do you decide whether the human player is winning by miles?

Again, not really a problem. There's a whole bunch of Ranking functions (see that other thread) that can be used.

How do you decide which two civs to combine?

This is the only thing that strikes me as an immediate problem. Really we'd want them to be as close as possible to each other, ideally next to each other. I've got some code from the 'Call to Bloodlust' mod I started to work on last summer that might be useful here, but I'd have to drag it out. It's been a long time since I looked at it.

But my main problem would be finding the time to do this. If anyone wants to make a start on it I'd be happy to help out but I wouldn't want to start a new project on my own just now.

[Immortal Wombat]

dFp

[Immortal Wombat]

Originally posted by Peter Triggs
But my main problem would be finding the time to do this. If anyone wants to make a start on it I'd be happy to help out but I wouldn't want to start a new project on my own just now.

Unless my early-morning brain is playing me false, I have just written some code that will swap all of a civ's cities, units, PW and gold to another civilisation.
Just got to figure out when to call it now...

Getting Civs To Surrender - should we continue over there as it is getting to be a mod thread, or do you want to start a new thread Lou?