Looking for something different in a Civ style Game?

[Solver]

DP. No, not the kind the perverts think of .

[Dale]

Well I must say that I'm mightily impressed with the feature list of AOM.

I'm definitely waiting for this one.

My CD should be on the way soon I believe.

As for the doom-sayers, and negative comments regarding posting in various forums, I can only say that if this is how the announcement of a new Civ-TBS genre game is accepted then NO WONDER this genre is being so overlooked.

Geeze guys, take it with a glad heart that people can still be bothered making games/Mods for you to play.

[stankarp]

Asmodean said "Stan: I don't think anyone here actually thougt you were violating the rules with intent. "

Reply. My advice (from 2 different lawyers) is that to sue for anything, you must prove a loss. Secondly, it is not a commercial project, I cannot even get a volunteer to ship for me apart from David. Thirdly, read the EULA carefully. It says you cannot charge for anything that Activision did or a person made with their stuff, utilities etc, even if you package that with your material. My advice is it does not say you cannot charge for YOUR own material (ie, not created with their utilities/material). Anyway, as I explained in the costing, no charge is being made for anything other than a minimal one for burning, printing, packaging and shipping the disc. I have successfully sued someone in my life, representing myself, I have a little experience and contacts in the law.

Hexegonian. said. "I think I was able to get Stan to finally see the light "

Sure did, because of Hex's changes both of us have conceded test games of AOM to the AI, having failed to prepare properly for the Dark Ages. I also found the AI was waisting 10-20% of its production because of original settings in Government.txt. With that correction and the new aggression of the AI, watch out, it has more units now to grind you down.


The Barbarian events now add that little uncertainty to the game along with the Dark Ages and the Black Death. The game play graph is no longer one way and predictable. The AI is a lot more aggressive and expands aggressively as well. In the game diary game on the AOM website, the Chinese were 47 cities when us Romans invaded them, and they had lost 2-3 cities to the other AI. They opened the war with a sneak attack with a stack of 12 on a Roman border city, taking it as soon as they appeared. In that game, the Nubians set a nice little empire of over 30 cities by capturing 7 barbarian cities.

I was typing this when Dale's post came in. Thankyou, yes I was upset about the over reaction to cross forum threading rather than looking at what the message was, the old story, shoot the messenger before you read the message

Your disc is next to my left hand Dale and is being posted with other complimentary discs to modders in 30 minutes. Thanks for your support.

For people wh really like history, many of my new sprites are as historically accurate as I could get them, eg, El Cid and Barbaross have the correct coat of arms, the crossbowman is modeled on a picture of a French crossbowman at Agincourt. El Cid's helmet, armour and tunic match other pictures I found. The Janissary is based on the only detail I could find of pre gunpowder Janissaries, etc. The Saphia is pretty accurate too.

[Solver]

Those latest gameplay comments have me drooling again . So, can you answer about cross-water AI invasions?

[stankarp]

Cross water invasions.

We ran out of time to consider that fully. A lot of AOM revolves around exploiting land based resources, especially early in the game, so the recomended settings are for mainly land and continent. To get through the Dark Ages, you need outposts on luxury, medicinal and food goods. Outposts are a land based tile.

[Thamior]

There will be some limitation about people doing mods using AOM as a base? And about some little mods or graphic replacers for the mod?

EDIT: Almost forget, you will keep working in the mod before it's realesed, fixing bugs and doing new implementations?

[stankarp]

I expect to continue development for some time, would like to add a few more units and things at some stage for the gunpowder and modern period.

Under the Activision EULA you can do whatever you like with the AOM material.

[HuangShang]

Originally posted by hexagonian
AOM is probably easier than 'Cradle' in the early game, but AOM becomes harder than 'Cradle' as the game goes on. 'Cradle' had a very hard beginning, but once you got established, you could usually thrive.

Thriving is much harder in AOM...

now perfect... i havent been able to pinpoint this in my mind, but it is definately what i always thought CtP2 modding should be!

also, shouldnt the source code fix the water Xing?

[The Rusty Gamer]

HEre's my questions:

Will AOM require the last official CTP2 (1.1 wasn't it?) patch to be installed?

Will it be used within Modswapper or Modchanger so that we can still use all the other CTP2 variations that we have?

[stankarp]

The patch and modswapper will be in the AOM package as it needs both. I recommend doing a clean install and only having the AOM files loaded. I found it did run better with less files in gamedata etc.

However, there is no reason why you cannot keep running it with everything else, but there is a new tile file and new graphics.

[Solver]

Note: if AoM runs on CtP2 1.11 patch version, it should run on the source code build as well. In which case, that would be recommended, because for single player, the source code build is definitely superior.

Stan - have you perhaps tried that already?

[Immortal Wombat]

Also, if you make a source code version, you should be able to avoid the sprite limit, by making a SourceCode version of spritelist.txt which can then run even with other mods installed.

The tiles will overwrite unless you swap them every game, but unless you've actually moved around or overwritten tile improvements rather than appending them (and used the ACS tilefile as a base I assume) then it shouldn't be a problem with compatibility there either.

[Kassiopeia]

Originally posted by Hexagonian
So I suggested to Stan that he post in several of the main forums here on Apolyton.

Frankly, my opinion of many people on this forum has dropped because of some of the reactions garnered about the invasion of their 'sacred' forums. I would say, 'Hey, lighten up'...and don't take the news about a possible new civesque gameplay experience that is now available to you, the gamer, as bad or intrusive news.

Apolyton has been scourged lately by bots that register as members of the forum and post on several of the subforums simultaniously making the same kind of offers you'd find in spam emails - "Get a free iPod now", "Do you want to get rich by just surfing the internet?" et cetera.

Because of this, when opening a thread titled with a question like "Looking for something different in a Civ style game?" in the mind of an Apolytoner the following thought will run: "Oh, so this is another one of those bots, although this one seems to be specialized in Civilization forums, interesting". That was my first thought at the sight of the thread's title as well.

Thus I don't think it's unusual at all for people to react negatively when someone posts on the forums following parts of the modus operandi of these spam bots. In this case it was an unfortunate coincidence and a misunderstanding, so I think getting all riled up over it is not entirely fair.

I have to say though that the fact that the poster has been a member of Apolyton for three years should have been a clue, but you won't find that out until you actually open the thread, and sometimes people just don't pick up on registration dates like that when it seems to be a spam message.

Especially because on this day and age with fast connections, like has been said before, it is the norm that files that total close to 400 megabytes are merrily made available to download. Shipping discs is comparatively inconvenient and pretty rare. On top of that, when people were asked for money, alarm bells started ringing. On the web you have to be suspicious of just about anything.

So the unfortunate reality is that these threads matched parts of the "Spam message, beware" template an Internet user has in his head, encouraging a quick negative reaction. The work that has been put into the mod is awe-inspiring and respectable in its sheer size, of course.

[Solver]

Yep, and we should so write off the initial negative reaction as a misunderstanding. There has indeed been a lot of bots spamming recently... probably more than most posters notice because of extremely quick work by some mods . So I can understand how this looked suspicious/spammy at first. And Stan deserves our apology for some of the aggressive comments too .

[stankarp]

"And Stan deserves our apology for some of the aggressive comments too ."

Apology accepted(I have apologised as well), matter now closed AFAIC. Thanks.

I have not changed anything in tile file re the numbers or anything, only added or edited tiles. So there is no reason why other mods will not run with my files. All numbers remain the same except for new ones added at the end.

"Note: if AoM runs on CtP2 1.11 patch version, it should run on the source code build as well. In which case, that would be recommended, because for single player, the source code build is definitely superior.

Stan - have you perhaps tried that already?"

I have not as I have been flat out, dropped out of IT college this semester to get AOM finished and public. Last thing I saw were problems with AI turn execution so I did not look into it as I had AOM running pretty smoothly. On my system, no lockups, 3-4 seconds per ai per turn when out of view at turn 400 when there are huge armies and empires going(often the 2 biggest ai have 40+ cities by then and 4-500 units). Delays for entering ruins early in the game down to as little as 4 seconds. NO CTP2 style CTD.

Fromafar is working on a source code build for me with a couple of changes to overcome my pet hate of easy access to cheat editor while in game and to allow more than 8 player selection on gigantic map, but not more than 12, from game setup.

Also, when you name your player (eg Stan), your King and Great King will be called King Stan or Great King Stan. He is doing it up to a certain point as apparently there is a problem with something in a recent build. One reason why I will not release to next month, would like to test it with his source build.