2 questions

[ahenobarb]

Okaym two newbie questions about game play.

1) How do you upgrade your units? I am using Cradle Ultra Gigantic maps and I discovered Dark Ages. I was then asked to upgrade my legions and I was $3000 shy of having enough gold. I was going through unit by unit until one of the pop-up boxes had no (yes/no) boxes to click. I closed the window, hoping to jumpstart the process again and nothing happened. I went through the manual and it says nothing about upgrading units. What do I do now?

2) Slavermasters? I included 1 slavemaster in each of my armies in order to capture defeated units. I have won several battles, but no slaves. Am I using these guys right or I am just losing attack/defense points by having them in my army.

I hate to drop out of the game to ask these, but I'll be back for the answers.

[Immortal Wombat]

1) You can't trigger an upgrade except by discovering an advance. If it had no yes/no buttons, it probably means you either did all the units, or ran out of gold. Its not in the manual because its not part of the standard game, its a mod. There should be a readme though...

2) They should capture slaves.

[ahenobarb]

Originally posted by Immortal Wombat
1) You can't trigger an upgrade except by discovering an advance. If it had no yes/no buttons, it probably means you either did all the units, or ran out of gold. Its not in the manual because its not part of the standard game, its a mod. There should be a readme though...

2) They should capture slaves.

1) bummer.

2) bummer.

I'll try the slavemasters again and see if anything happens. Could it be that none of my units were killed in the battle? Since my army is size 12, maybe there wasn't room to include them?

[Immortal Wombat]

the slaves go to your nearest city, not to the army

[Wise Ass]

Your not capturing enemy units you are enslaving people from cities. In which to do so you have to send the slaver to a enemy city and hit the capture slave button or what ever.

[Immortal Wombat]

In Cradle there are two "slavers"

One is called simply a "slaver". This you send to cities, and capture slaves from, at the cost of 250 gold or something. You can also capture settlers with it as they pass by.

The other is called a "slavemaster". This one assumes the other role that default-game "slavers" have: when you stack them with an army, and then win a battle, a population point is added to the nearest suitable city, as a slave.

hex separated the two because the AI never used the second ability. By adding a "slavemaster" unit, and giving it some attack and defense stats, it could be added to the AI attack build list, and be used as intended.

[ahenobarb]

Originally posted by Immortal Wombat
The other is called a "slavemaster". This one assumes the other role that default-game "slavers" have: when you stack them with an army, and then win a battle, a population point is added to the nearest suitable city, as a slave.

hex separated the two because the AI never used the second ability. By adding a "slavemaster" unit, and giving it some attack and defense stats, it could be added to the AI attack build list, and be used as intended.

Okay, I'm still not certain if it's working, but at least I now know to look for them in the nearest city and not in the stack. BTW is there supposed to be a pop-up screen stating that "You have taken prisoners", or something?

At any rate, I'm thoroughly enjoying CTP2 and especially Cradle (because I'm an ancient history nut). It really has me hooked. I'm still in the middle of my first full-fledged game (where I'm not just trying to learn the interfaces) and I've got tons of questions.

One comment though, is that the AI still is not agressive enough. I had an outlying city with 2 denfeders and a Japanese (who I am at war with) force of 12 units walked up and promptly pillaged everything around the city. This gave me enough time to send enough units over to the city to defeat them. Perhaps there's a future .slc here telling the AI to go straight for the cities?

[Locutus]

Originally posted by ahenobarb
BTW is there supposed to be a pop-up screen stating that "You have taken prisoners", or something?

No, your Slaves will simply be sent to the nearest city with sufficient military units in it to surpress the slaves. Keep an eye of the sizes of your cities: when a city gets a slave, its size will increase with 1 (and also a 'slave symbol' will appear next any city that has slaves in it).

At any rate, I'm thoroughly enjoying CTP2 and especially Cradle (because I'm an ancient history nut). It really has me hooked. I'm still in the middle of my first full-fledged game (where I'm not just trying to learn the interfaces) and I've got tons of questions.

That's always good to hear

One comment though, is that the AI still is not agressive enough. I had an outlying city with 2 denfeders and a Japanese (who I am at war with) force of 12 units walked up and promptly pillaged everything around the city. This gave me enough time to send enough units over to the city to defeat them. Perhaps there's a future .slc here telling the AI to go straight for the cities?

Hmm, that's very odd. I think you were just lucky there, not often does the AI pass upon an opportunity like that (in my experience anyway)...

[hexagonian]

Re: 2 questions

Originally posted by ahenobarb
1) How do you upgrade your units? I am using Cradle Ultra Gigantic maps and I discovered Dark Ages. I was then asked to upgrade my legions and I was $3000 shy of having enough gold. I was going through unit by unit until one of the pop-up boxes had no (yes/no) boxes to click. I closed the window, hoping to jumpstart the process again and nothing happened. I went through the manual and it says nothing about upgrading units. What do I do now?

There is a pdf file in the readme folder (if you have 1.31 or 1.32) that spells out what units are upgraded and when that occurs. Upgrading is a one-time event per upgrade, so it takes a bit of planning to make sure that you can upgrade all of your units when you get the opportunity. The setup could be structured to allow multiple times to upgrade, but the one-time upgrade option makes for more careful planning, and I prefer the need for a player to preplan (should a player research an upgrade advance if he does not have the gold, or should he delay to get the gold he needs)

When you finish researching an upgrade advance, you will get the dialog box that will cycle you through your units. One thing you cannot do is cycle through the units multiple times to pick and choose the units you want to upgrade if you do not have the cash on hand to cover all of the upgrades. (I do wish this was something that could be fixed). Other things to remember is that if you trade for an advance that allows you to upgrade, you will not be able to upgrade your units, and units being transported on a sea unit will be lost in the upgrade process.

Generally, I hang onto my gold and do little RBing during the game to make sure I have the funds I need for upgrading. And Trade routes are very important now to build up those funds.

Ben covered the slaving aspect - All the Medieval+ Leader units will capture a defeated unit and convert it into a infantry-style unit.

As for the aggressiveness of the AI, there is somewhat of a fine line on whether the AI will siege a city/attack forces in the field. There is a way to increase the priority of whether the AI will attack/pillage/seige in CRA_strategies.txt. The simplest way is to look for the entries similar to this - there will be a bunch of these throughout the file too

GoalElement { Goal GOAL_SEIGE Priority 605000 MaxEval 25 MaxExec 12 }

(the Priority numbers are usually different from entry to entry too)

A simple way to adjust the AI is to change the Priority numbers to the following (or even higher...)

GoalElement { Goal GOAL_SEIGE Priority 855000 MaxEval 25 MaxExec 12 }

This could possibly have adverse affect on gameplay, as the early game AI is more than capable of fielding large stacks of units before the human player, and then has the potential to roll through the human player, as the AI in Cradle does have a hair-trigger warmongor mindset.

I would say that overall, the AI is probably more likely to attack units out in the field rather than cities - this is not to say that you may still lose cities to the AI, as players have reported that the AI will take cities.

[ahenobarb]

Thanks for the note Hex (I like the new avatar BTW). I will try to tweak the agressiveness of the AI (It seems only fair to ajust the AI to combat my style of play).

I'll wait for the next unit upgrade opportunity to see if anything strange happens (Most likely it was user error, since I new at this).

Locutus mentions a 'symbol', what does that look like?

[Wittlich]

Originally posted by ahenobarb
Locutus mentions a 'symbol', what does that look like?

It is a picture of two hands chained together. It will show up on the upper-right corner of the city with slaves in it.

[Locutus]

The white arrows at Sais and Aphroditopolis both point at the symbol I was referring to.

[Solver]

What the? How dare you laugh at the gods? I'll see that you face the wrath of Set, and his brother Osiris!

[ahenobarb]

Originally posted by Locutus
The white arrows at Sais and Aphroditopolis both point at the symbol I was referring to.

I found them over come of my cities. Looks like it was working afterall. I had toggled 'c', so the names of the cities weren't listed above them. I toggled it back and there wree the icons.

I've just tweaked the AI's agressiveness, so we'll see what are the results of that.

No word on the upgrades, yet ...

[Locutus]

Good to hear it's okay now

And good to hear you're already modding the AI - very promosing

Solver, you obviously don't follow the Succession Games...