God's Obvious Design

[Henrik]

Hey Morten! I still have a list of things I noted while playing the latest version you sent me (with those storms and all) I don't think I ever sent them to you Do you want them?

[hardjoy]

Yes, please very much!

Do you still need that map btw for the joint ww2 scen, btw?

[Henrik]

You've got a PM waiting for you

[hardjoy]

Henrik, I've just sent you a reply... Posting your comments and my replies here as well (hope you don't mind), since I prefer to discuss the scenario here than the clumsy pm system

Henrik wrote on 20-05-2003 20:49:
Here is a short list I made while playing earlier:

I recomend placing a Courthouse in Flushing to prevent the Spanish from bribing it so easily early on...

---good idea, I have now removed the english from the continent again, since the treaty of Nonsuch (the one ceding Flushing and 3 other dutch cities to english) was signed only in 1585 ---now the conquest of Flushing forms a "protection pact" with England... in one way or another it will give England a bonus to take the city (or other dutch harbors) -not sure if its gonna be wonder based or something else

Ther storms seems to be to comon imho.

--noted... the reason why they're so common is to make it vital to seek ports for ships in between turns... -they happen in different parts of the map, and not in the med or smaller waters, such as the english channel. But they might be too frequent anyway. Of course the AI won't notice any of this

You should add a sound for cannons that are being "shot down" after having been left at sea.

--yes... still missing

Why is England and Holland affected by church opinion when signing deals with Spain? They're protestants!

--The spanish have the Catholic Unity wonder [oops I was wrong -its the Papal Reliquary (UN)], and even if the English and Dutch are protestants, they still had many catholic nobles of influence (especially the strongly divided dutch), and Spain was a power of extreme influence in Europe at the time (btw, the english even had an ambassador in Paris selling information to the spanish because he was out of money)... but you're right, I have to find a way to show this -or certain actions that will put this wonder out of action

Watch those storms! I had Lincoln flooded by one of them!

--woah! ;D gonna check the coordinates again, since I made some map changes after doing the storms

Lower the defence of hills or alternatively remove those that are beneath cities, some cities become virtually impossible to take becouse of hilly terrain.

--which ones in particular?

[hardjoy]

Henrik, I've just tested the hills with fortified veteran musketeers behind city walls against siege cannon, bombards and field cannon.

The siege cannons were quite effective, where the bombards and field guns failed, getting only a few hits.

The bombards are okay for smaller cities and the field guns for smashing troops outside cities, but you really need the siege cannon to take cities.

Which units did you use in attack and which were the defender? -And what were their stats in your version?

[Henrik]

I used several (well for england anyway, I used 3, which is about as many as they can build in one scenario) veteran seige cannons to attack the Musketeers based in Edinburgh.

All cannons where lost. Not a single hit was dealt to the defenders.

Musketeers: 4a,8d, 1h,6f

Seige Cannon: 24a,2d, 2h,8f

Hills= dx2, city walls=dx3

Musketeers on hills:
Defence 40 (or 64 even, depending on whether the city wall bonus is multiplied by the original defence value or the defence value as it is after having been augmented by the terrain).
Thankfully the fortify bonus isn't added for units behind city walls, otherwise the defence bonus would be even bigger.

Imho the stats are ok, just make sure that there are no hills beneath cities...

[hardjoy]

Hmmm...

I need the hills to differentiate cities defences. Some cities should be naturally harder to take than others, especially Edinburgh, since the Scots are paralyzed if they lose their capital. So it should be tough. Have you thought about using a galleon for subduing the scots? -Another thing to consider : the faster one goes for the scots the easier it will be, since they cannot produce musketeers from the outset (they have 2 preplaced). They depend strongly on spanish tech trades.

In the latest version I've made the siege cannon dramatically better (att 36 with ign. walls) and slightly cheaper, and I also improved the defences of the defensive ground units (to prevent too easy bombardments). Musketeers now defend with 14, and 28 on hills, which is okay for the siege guns to take out, most of the time. I'll send you the latest version when its ready for final rounds of adjustments

In the latest version, I've found that limiting the prebuilt naval units for Spain makes spanish AI produce a much larger fleet of all kinds of ships, which is quite pleasant to see. They also build a huge army of arquebusiers. I've also added all kinds of neat surprises, if I can get them to work.

Ran into a lot of trouble with the no,no techs and events. Civ2 crashed on me time and time again and I had to patiently track down which error caused the crash. Seems it was the derived no,no tech (catholic plots) that the english was researching, but I am not sure. I am having second thoughts about the storms too. I really like the idea, but its messy to have english naval guns or ground units lying around in the sea after such a storm. And it seems the maprect coordinates are handled quite loosely by the events and sometimes cuts off land even if its not supposed to.

[Henrik]

What I did eventually was to use a spy to sabotage the city walls

As for galleons, the brittish cannot afford a lot of them...


On the tech issue, it's my experience that civ 2 only crashes due to techs if the future tech isnt available to everyone all the time.
Make sure future tech is named to something fitting and make it a nil, nil tech and all should be fine.

[hardjoy]

Thanx Henrik, but making future tech a nil tech didn't solve the problem. Civ2 still crashes on me. I guess something else is ****ed up in the tech tree, after messing around with no,no techs etc.

[hardjoy]

Managed to solve the problem by going back to an older version of rules.txt. Still haven't really understood why...

I got another problem, however. The events seem to refuse to build barbarian diplomats (wrecks). Is there certain things to consider for creating barbarian leaders with the events? -Do they have to be outside a city's radius, for example, or occupy specific slots?

The strange thing is they were created fine by the events as long as they were sea based units, but once I changed their domain and locations, they ceased to appear.

[Henrik]

If you're creating them on sea tiles they have to be sea units. Is that it?

[hardjoy]

At first I thought that too, but I have made sure I updated all locations to land tiles, so that can't be it. Changing the role from diplomat/barb leader to something else doesn't seem to work either.

Here's the stats (using the diplo slot) :

Wreck, nil, 0, 0.,0, 0a,2d, 1h,1f, 8,0, 6, no, 000000000000000

Still working on that crash/stack error problem, btw... now civ2 suddenly crashed negotiating with the dutch. Going thru a trial and error process to find the root of the problem. It looks like a tech problem of some sorts.

[Henrik]

It would make sence to have those wrecks as land units
Being as wreck plundering (is that the term in english as well?) was mostly done by people living in coastal towns... Not by the regular navy.

I'd try domain 3 for the wrecks, should work on both land and sea.

[Henrik]

Also make sure no units have 0 hp, that'll make the game crash (I see the wrecks do have 1 hp though).

[Boco]

Where's the latest version of this scenario posted (sorry if I missed a link earlier in the thread)? Maybe some fresh eyes could help with the tech tree problem.