Atomic Age preview / request for playtesters

[Grothgar]

Another thing i have found. In CNWO when you irrigated the land enough you got up to the arable land which was by far the best. However in CNWO arable land wasnt in the grassland spot which it is in this scenario. Which means that unless the grassland space has a shield on it building a factory on the square will do nothing to it. It will require a lot of editing but otherwise there is no point in going above grassland.

[Paul Hanson]

Another thing I've noticed: the units are all homed to the wrong cities. Units in Reykjavik are homed to Bucharest (when the game starts, this is; if you build a unit in that city it will be homed to Reykjavik), and units in Brussels are homed to Chicago. This is true for every West European city, but I don't have the time at the moment to draw up a list.

[Grothgar]

Yep i noticed that, but i assumed the chicago units were kinda loans from america But it is quite annoying with all the unhappiness certain units cause when they are away from home.

[winterfritz]

...

[Case]

Originally posted by winterfritz
Also, can I suggest a test pbem?

Fritz did type this, but he's edited it


Good idea! I think that we may need to wait a while untill a Andrew irons a few bugs out of the game, but I'm keen for a PBEM of this

[winterfritz]

Originally posted by Case
Fritz did type this, but he's edited it

Please don't send me this scen yet, I have got to study for my exams

I edited that out cos I didn't want the pbem to start without me If you guys are willing to wait I'll be free within about a week.

[Grothgar]

Im just assuming here but i think paul will want to take the West Europeans, and im having the Americans thank you very much

[Paul Hanson]

I ought to be revising for my A-levels, so you can count me out of a PBEM for at least 2 weeks.

[Panda]

This is what I like...

I've just received this e-mail from Echopapa:

Here are my notes on the first version.

I think the Arab League is an unrealistic idea for this scenario. The Arab states have only really cooperated on one foreign policy goal: the end of Israel. Apart from that, they've lined up on different sides of the Cold War. I'd turn the Arab League into the Eastern Bloc.

After that, the Commonwealth seems too limited. I'd make them the Western Bloc, and here's how I'd divide up cities:
To the West:
Casablanca
Algiers
Tunis
Dakar
Accra
Aden
N'Djamena (see note)
Kinshasa (see note)
Riyadh
Jiddah
Baghdad
Mosul
Tehran
Shiraz
Moshhad
Saigon
Taipei
some of the cities of Central and Latin America
Havana
Japan
Seoul

To Eastern Bloc:
Warsaw
Berlin
Prague
Budapest
Bucharest
Damascus
Cairo
Pyongyang
Hanoi
Ulaanbaator

(Kabul goes to Neutral, Pakistani cities could be either Neutral or Western.)

The Phillippines were independent by 1949. However, you seem to have left out all of the European colonization of Africa. I'd run decolonization and revolutions like this: have barbarian units show up first and capture the city, then the East and West will race to influence (i.e. conquer) the new government.

A few city name revisions. Launda should be Luanda. As it's still the colonial era in 1949, N'Djamena should be Fort-Lamy and Kinshasa should be Leopoldville. On the Soviet front, Samara was Kuibyshev, Yekaterinburg was
Sverdlovsk, Tashkent was Stalinabad. Oh, and don't forget Harare was Salisbury.

Good job using the Wade-Giles transliteration system on Chinese city names, but you forgot to do the same for the leader: he should be Mao Tse-Tung.

I'm uncomfortable with the idea of the non-aligned states as barbarians. It makes imperialism way too easy, and while I wish we had kept all of Mexico when we defeated them in 1848, it's probably not the sort of thing that should happen in a Cold War scenario. Perhaps India should become the largest of the Non-Aligned states (or could go over to the Communist bloc)

Where's Lyon?

City sizing could use some tweaking. The U.S. city sizes appear to be based mostly on current population. For instance, you have two large California cities. The city size order you have is New York, San Francisco, Chicago: it should be New York, Chicago, and I believe St. Louis is next. Detroit should also be larger: Los Angeles smaller, and Phoenix barely a dot on the map.

Likewise, Chinese cities are way too small. Or perhaps you were going to give them the fast-reproduction wonder?

As for Soviet power, it grew very quickly in the 50's, leveled off in the 60's, and stopped by the 70's. Maybe by giving them some sort of economic wonder and making it obsolete when Brezhnev takes power? (Incidentally, Stalin was generally addressed as "Comrade". Mao should be "Chairman", and
Truman "President". And you don't need the period after the S in "Harry S Truman." It's a long story.)

The current setup makes the Vietnam War impossible. I suggest having the U.S. suffer big penalties if Communists take Saigon, but having China go to war with the U.S. if anyone captures Hanoi. This kind of captures the no-win situation.

Other recommended events: the Korean War (of course), the Prague Spring, the Cuban revolution, decolonialization in Africa, the 1956 revolts in Hungary (done with the barbarian method I mentioned above) and Khrushchev's Virgin Lands program (Soviets get 2 free engineers in Kazakhstan).

That's all I've got for now. Hope it's useful.

Now that sets the standard for the rest of you. Aside from the point that this is not a "Cold War" scenario per se, and some points I'll be addressing directly, there are some useful suggestions there. However I am looking to go to release fairly soon, and I can't wait on people's personal schedules to resolve. Sorry.

Likewise, thank you Winterfritz for showing such an interest. I'm not sending you the files for playtesting, but then you will have something to look forward to after your exams (aside from inebriation).

Also, if people want to PBEM this scenario, feel free. I imagine this, like all of my scens, will be perfectly adaptable. But I can't wait for feedback on a full PBEM playtest before releasing.

Lastly, artwork: Goingonit, I hope you won't mind if I pinch your Urban terrain graphic, which is tons better than mine. I have also been working on new art, like these fighters. The Lightning is definately going in as the Interceptor.

[H Tower]

well i was only able to get into this a few hours ago and i played as western europe, and i was plunged immediately into war... i think i captured moscow somewhere in early 1952...

During the war i noticed that the AA guns did some strange stuff. The AI had them attacking my cities! Also, the AA guns didn't have the special +50% vs. air units, although giving it to them would make them all powerful vs air units even more than they already are.

and i think the howitzers defense is too strong, my vet ww2 tanks either died trying to take them out in the open or were badly wounded.

and mentioning ww2 tanks, they were practically worthless on the attack against anything that wasn't already badly damaged.

at one point i had a howitzer and two fortified rifle infantry sitting in a fortress in the mountains, and the unit the computer chose the howitzer to defeat the russian SP artillery that attacked. which it did, the howitzer lost mayeb 3 points of damage.

it generally took 3 prop fighters(mix of vet and green) to kill an enemy prop fighter. i never did manage to amass enough prop fighters to kill a russian heavy bomber but it would have been AT LEAST two vets to do so.

my offensive against the russians became a lot more bloody when the russians got the auto weapon infantry, they actually started killing my howitzers instead of rolling over and dying. i lost more howitzers capturing prague(4) when it had auto weapon infantry in it than i did capturing berlin, warsaw, minsk and smolensk combined. I think that was good though, it made the game harder.

i got very little(practically none) help from my allies during my campaign, and america was forced into peace with russia from OSCE, which I'm not even really sure what that is, but I bet I captured it when I took MOSCOW

Speaking of Allies, I've managed to keep them so far(Sept 1954) by giving them the techs they wanted and declaring war when they wanted me too. I also managed to keep the peace with the arabs by declaring war on india at arab request. not like it meant anything to declare war, i can barely see the suez canal.

it wasn't too difficult to keep the peace, but i did have to make sure that the theaters were built before i could start churning out the hordes of howitzers i used to finally crush the soviets in europe.

Three times I saw a huge window pop up that said, "our city's been taken by the enemy, won't you help us?" or words to that effect, and while i thought they were interesting, i wasn't sure what the two choices i was given meant, one said something like let's go to war with them and the other said the people aren't ready for a foreign war yet. I wasn't sure if that was just a pop up notifying me that a different civ's city had been taken and it was just two different ways to click ok, or whether it was asking me to declare war on the attacking civ or not. i picked both options at different times but nothing happened that i could tell. of course, i was already at war with the attacking civ already so option saying that the people aren't ready for a foriegn war seemed silly.

Didn't the russians have nuclear weapons in 1949? because if they had actually possessed one, they should have used it to protect moscow and or leningrad when my armies came knocking. not once during our uniterrupted war did they drop the bomb.

One of the wonders was almost worthless, the Central intelligence one gives you an embassy with every civ, but most of the human suggested civs already have an embassy with everyone. and the computer cheats in that regard anyways.

What was the .bat file for? I ran it but nothing happened and it didn't seem like it was neccessary to use, there werent' multiple events and units files for it to change.

One other thing, the atomic.txt file was so long that i had to hide my taskbar just so that i could click the ok button so that i could play the game. could you take out a line or two of text maybe?

do you want the save file? i turned on cheat so that i could look around a little at the main map after i had taken leningrad and prague.

after i had revealed the whole map, i noticed that saigon and algiers were independent cities, but both belonged to france in 1949.

one other thing, pollution was begining to be a problem, france has pollution occur about every other turn and there was no way for me to reduce the amount

i think that's about it. i plan on restarting the scenario as the US and playing more peacefully and maybe going for the moon. of course to do that i'll have to abandon western europe to its fate, but who ever cared about it anyways? forget the truman doctrine! which may be an event you would want to put in for the single player version if you ever make one, 100 gold to western europe every 3 turns or something like that.

[Paul Hanson]

I've played about 30 turns as Western Europe so far, and although I'm impressed, there are some things that really need sorting out/adding. You've probably decided to put a lot of these in the events file when you put it together, but I'll mention them just incase.

There needs to be some way of demonstrating the strong link between Western Europe and the US. The psychopathic AI not only set the world at war on the first turn, but the US was obviously falling over itself to break it's alliance with me. You might want to prevent negotiations between the two powers, or combine them into one and have the spare civ slot to put another power in (perhaps the Eastern Bloc, subservient to the USSR, as Echopapa suggested in his e-mail).

There also needs to be a more evidence of the colonialism of Europe, which was coming to an end at this time. For instance, France controlled large areas of land abroad and in Vietnam and Algeria they were eventually pushed out. Maybe you might want to have Europe control cities like Algiers and Saigon at the beginning, then have events causing rebels to appear in the surrounding areas. The challenge for the player would be to try and hold onto them and suppress the revolts through the strategic placing of units, or if playing as someone else, to be the first to come to the aid of Algeria or Vietnam after they win their independence. This could yield advantages (money, military units, for example) and disadvantages (increased tensions with another superpower, for instane).

Some of the units are almost worthless. Unlike H Tower, I found WW2 Tanks to be extremely useful for capturing cities at the beginning, far more useful than Howitzers or SP Artillery. I found these to be practically worthless, especially when it came to capturing cities. Also, heavy bombers were defeated by Rifle Infantry far too often for it to be a lucky fluke, so perhaps you might want to up their strength slightly.

Also, the Civilopedia gave no indication where a unit ignored city walls; I had to check in the Defence Minister window to find out (I assume that a full stop in that window means a unit ignores City Walls).

The .bat file caused no end of problems for me. If I ran Civ from the file, I found that I couldn't access the pedia (the buttons that normally read "Info" and "Close" said something like "ERROR:labels.txt") and the menus were all knackered up (to save my game I had to select "load game" or something like that), and there were additional problems with the menus. The same also happened when you did a similar thing with Crises: I had to quit the .bat file after it had copied the files and run Civ normally for the game to function correctly.

I hope these comments are of use to you.

[Case]

Andrew, I'm really busy with university at the moment & haven't had much time to play this scenario

[Panda]

Updates since alpha

Firstly, thanks for everyone who has posted feedback. This was very helpful. In order to validate your findings I do need to know the following information, so please include this when you send in your saved game files (or post here, whichever's easier):
a) Your o/s version
b) the civ2.exe version you played the scenario with

I'll deal with the unit stats first, starting with the WW2 tanks because I can you that to illustrate my design philosophy. I apologise for the lack of documentation about this: my philosophy is that progress on the battlefield is only attainable when one side has a technological/doctrinal advantage over the other side. Without this you basically have a war of attrition, which should favour the defender in a 1 to 1 encounter (I'm generalising). The modpack incorporates 4 generations of military units, with each generation outclassing the previous one but without rendering those units completely worthless. When the scenario starts in 1949 everyone is using first generation units (the Early Jet Fighter counts in this group). So to initiate a major war in 1949 is to condemn youself to a bloody war of attrition. The stats are tiered in such a way to negate any offensive advantage, so to make advances you need to invest in your infrastructure, and research new military technology (the Arms Race) to afford you an offensive advantage. WW2 tanks are fairly useless...unsupported. But tanks were never used alone, or even in mass tank vs tank encounters. In North Africa, Kursk, etc the most tanks kills were made by artillery and aircraft, which is why Howitzers are so strong against them. It was by deliberate design to encourage the player to use Combined Arms: Heavy Bombers, Paratroopers and Marines on the offensive, normal infantry and AA guns to defend territory. I recommend only using vet. Heavy Bombers against cities, and even then they will take heavy damage and possibly die. I think that's good, so just how easy do you want it? By contrast I think that Nuclear Bombers are way too butch, possibly too early. If I reduced them to 10a,2d,4h/4f instead of 5h/6f, it might fit in better and make upgrading to Supersonic Bombers more attractive. AA units do have the "x2 vs Air" flag (refered to as ECM). There was a problem with the role, which is complicated because of the free upgrades with Military-Industrial complex (see below), and I couldn't use the 1 (defense) role, so I've now opted for the old stand-by of role 3 (air superiority). How the AI will use them now remains to be seen.

You also have to bear in mind that Urban terrain affords a 100% defense bonus (too high? comments welcome), so reducing the WW2 tanks effectiveness against cities further. All units ignore city walls (Area Defences), which are only there to stop mass civilian casualties (population loss). However you'll find that Heavy Tanks (a 2nd generation unit) are very good against Fortified Rifle Infantry (a 1st generation unit) on Urban terrain, but once against less good against Auto Weapon Infanty (a 2nd generation unit) under the same conditions. I trust people will see the wisdom of this. Also people forget that Rivers add an additional 50% defense bonus, so more care is needed when assaulting those cities.

I agree that the defense of most air units was too strong. They all had the "x2 vs Air" ability because I don't like seeing air units defend against ground assault...and win! which you can get a lot of the time. So all units had their defense rates reduced up to 50%.

I'll say this again (and again, and again, and again, because people don't listen): This is not a Cold War scenario! You don't have to go to war because there is an alternative win condition. You can be Douglas MacArthur, or you can be Carl Sagan...you have that choice. I have played a couple of very peaceful games where only the Arab League were dropped out and the others stabilised (too intimidated by the mighty USA, which wasn't even me!).

The Independent cities were a compromise. I can't effectively simulate decolonisation across Africa and Asia, and I didn't want to give the WEU too large a power base with all those cities, so instead I opted for artistic license by granting them independence. This wouldn't be a problem with Britain, which was happy to grant dominion status to her colonies, but it is a problem for France, which treats her colonies as part of the metropol. I'm open to suggestions.

The point about the game text messages is well taken. I have spent some time tinkering for more appropriate pop-ups (a lot of the modern flavour is transferable from CNWO, but not all). The city taken pop-up (I agree the CNWO version is overblown) has been replaced by a more succinct, more professional:


I have edited three files to fully support MGE. The batch file now asks for the version of the civ2.exe (if you know DOS reasonably well you can edit the batch file to point to the locations of different .exes), and uses the appropriate versions of the support files (Game.txt, Labels.txt, and Menu.txt). So now Paul and others can take full advantage of the menuloop and city.gif interface.

I'm continuing my work on the events. These are mostly technology triggered for flavour and in-game hints. I'm steering clear of turn= events because of the predictability in repeat plays. For this reason there is no Korean War in 1950 or Vietnam War (in whichever year you prefer) because a) its too constricting, and b) I don't subscribe to that kind of historical determinism anyway. However I have tinkered and set up conditions which might lead to conflict on the Korean peninsular.

Pollution...especially at that rate...can be annoying. But it should be there. Reducing the bonus of Industry from 5 to 3 helped a lot, and the shield/row ratio reduced proportionally from 15 to 10 (I can't remember why 15 was such a good idea in the first place). I've reduced the support costs of Settlers/Engineers by one food to encourage their use. I've tinkered with the scenario file to rename those cities Echopapa pointed out, and eliminate revolts on the first turn. The problem with the units home cities was caused by me hacking the file to change the order of a couple of cities (I like them grouped by nation, but I made the mistake of founding each capital city first, and some additions afterwards were also out). This caused the trade links to be incorrect, which I did correct, but also the units home cities, which I did not correct for. Apologies all round...this would be a big problem.

My problems with the game have centered on technology. I found in the alpha version that the AI wouldn't research military techs very much, so I've juggled around with the values and I'm happy with the outcome. I'm also thinking of upping the research paradigm: I played a peaceful game as the Indians to the end to test the AI, and the USA launched their spaceship in Mar 1987. That's good, but I wanted this to be possible rather than probable. I also wanted a space race, and the others were far behind. So I swapped Moon landing (Apollo landing) and International Space Station (Statue of Liberty) around to delay spaceship construction. I could also use events to balance out spaceship building tech, possibly reduce the prerequisites to one common tech, or I could conclude that the USA were very lucky and try to hamper them somehow. I have to test play a full game myself to judge how easy it is to complete the research tree. I found that while tech progression was good until the 1970s, thereafter the USA just accelerated away and left the others really far behind. Perhaps this is good. Perhaps the paradigm is too low. Perhaps it means that the tech tree is unbalanced at the end. I noticed that the USA were very expanionist and have taken steps to correct this. Comments welcome...

I like the terrain. These have been organised in this way to co-opt the reverse effects of global warming. I think Arable works best as grassland because most of these squares you will want to use for food production (why else would you want arable land), so the issue of industry only working on certain Arable squares is a very minor issue, IMO.

I'm also looking for suggestions for the Military-Industrial Complex (leo's). This is very powerful and gives a hell of an advantage throughout the game, and perhaps needs an obsolescencee tech to reduce this, but what and when?

Ooh, sounds: I have organised all the sounds into 3 zip files. I've used the CNWO approach: Main files, Unit sounds, and city sounds. If you downloaded the CNWO diplomatic sounds (fanfares 1-8), you can use them here. The setup batch file will prompt you for these: copy them directly into the \sound subdirectory and this will automatically rename them so they're in the correct order. I've got a new fanfare for the Soviet anthem as well:
atomic2.zip
atomic3.zip

Further issues: H Tower, I find that the best way to handle your Allies is to try and ignore them. If they insist on talking to you, and you want to keep them, then by all means give in to their demands. There are no game bonuses or penalties either way. They shouldn't become really stroppy until Stealth Technology is researched (SFl, another brilliant piece of hardcoded idiocy).

Give me a couple of weeks to pump out a beta version, which I'll send to you all for approval. PBEM: I would recommend only a max 4 player game with this version. I did have in mind versions for 2 and 6 players which I'll produce later. In the 2 player version for example, the USA takes over the WEU and Commonwealth, and the USSR takes over China: Your classic East vs West slugfest. For the 6 player version I'll amalgamate the Indians with assorted Independent cities into the Non-Alligned movement, and similarly expand the Commonwealth to include those colonial issues described above.

Lastly, artwork: the only amendments I've made has been to clean up my new F-16. See the graphics workshop for more details...