"The Ages of Man": A.C.S. Delivers Online Distribution Exclusively

[Vince278]

I have another question related to the plague question above: My map is starting to become populated by razed town squares and I'm unable to fix or terraform these squares. How can I clean these up??? If this takes advanced technology (like dead zones) then having this happen in ancient times is quite a pain.

[Immortal Wombat]

They should repopulate into new suburbs when the city grows again. Sometimes it can take a while though. In the meantime it is incentive to keep enemy units from pillaging

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by Vince278
I have another question related to the plague question above: My map is starting to become populated by razed town squares and I'm unable to fix or terraform these squares. How can I clean these up??? If this takes advanced technology (like dead zones) then having this happen in ancient times is quite a pain.

Since it is a type of Tile improvement, pillage it with a military unit.

[Immortal Wombat]

I thought that pillaging of towns is disabled even for dead ones?

[hexagonian]

Nope - pillaging suburb/dead suburb tiles is enabled in AOM.

[Immortal Wombat]

hm. handy.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by hexagonian
Nope - pillaging suburb/dead suburb tiles is enabled in AOM.

Thanks. I'll try that.

[Vince278]

My empire just collapsed into unrest and civil war from a combination of two things:
1. For some unknown reason happiness was dropping up to a cumulative 10 points a turn. I had some war weariness and events to deal with but that seemed a little steep (and unstoppable).
2. Whenever my stacks take a city they were unable to leave again. This left me wide open. I found a fix for this issue at least.
I've started another game and it is going well so far.

[Aro]

Folks, I need help...

All I've got was this:

[Aro]

...This...

[Aro]

...And this.

[stankarp]

My Apologies, for some reason I have not been receiving email notification of responses to this forum.

I asked earlier that people direct questions to the AOM forum for the time being pending a transfer of that forum to Apolyton.

http://www.interwebgames.com.au/aomforum/

1)Pillaging of dead city tiles is enabled in AOM and costs 500 gold.

2) The original Apolyton upload is missing some files. They can be found at:

http://www.theagesofman.net/index.html

They are in with the new Great Library File.

1. For some unknown reason happiness was dropping up to a cumulative 10 points a turn. I had some war weariness and events to deal with but that seemed a little steep (and unstoppable).

Read about the Dark Ages in the Manual.

Whenever my stacks take a city they were unable to leave again. This left me wide open. I found a fix for this issue at least

Read about Town Watch and leaving cities empty in the manual.

Apologies again for not answering these questions.

[Aro]

Thanks a lot, stankarp, it's working now.

[stankarp]

like, mayhem and massacre would sound good :]

by Evander.

When designing AOM, David Sobotka identified 3 weaknesses in Frenzy and suggested these needed fixing.

1) Frenzy never goes down.
2) Frenzy units often march round and do not attack.
3) AI empires would break up because frenzy armies left cities empty after they captured them.

In response to 1), I incorporated a small decay in frenzy over time (33% chance per turn it goes down by 1), and with Wouter's help, a code that for every 200 gold you give an AI, its frenzy value goes down by 1.

In response to 2), with Wouter's help, a code to make Frenzy armies attack if they are size 10 or above or bigger in number than the human target. I aslo wrote my own attack code that, with an if(atwar) condition, makes normal ai armies do the same.

In response to 3), I wrote a small code that puts a militia in any AI city that is empty.

The net result now is the Ai is aggressive AND very focused and its empires do not break apart as soon as they go on the war path. I had Cradle games where every AI save one or two would start to splinter by turn 250. I also found and corrected an error in code that caused the AI to waste 10% of production.

The AI now, I believes, attacks more like a human albeit a little clumsily and is something to worry about, unlike the original game. And, contrary to some opninions, the AI does not just gang up on the human. The Ai only sends a fraction of its armies against the human at any time unless the human has occupied its territories or got really aggressive.

I recall that CTP2 got the biggest disappointment of 2001 award because it was, even on the highest difficulty level, a total pushover. Ben might recall Steve5304 calling him an idiot over 2 years ago because he was still fiddling with Ctp2. That guy made the "First Days" mod then turned around and canned CTP2 for over 2 years I think on the forums.

However, I have taken comments to heart after 6 weeks of a wider audience playing AOM and agree that the new AI does expose a significant weakness in the original CTP2, the diplomacy.

Diplomacy, apart from trying to get techs, was largely superfulous in Ctp2. Now, getting withdraw agreements is essential, but the intensity of AOM does now leads to much lower trust and regard levels which then make it harder to get the AI to agree to anything.

Fromafar has fixed the withdraw code so that 3 units per turn now withdraw instead of one due to an arrays problem in slic coding.

However, I am also looking at trying to bring diplomacy up to the new level of AOM.

The planned changes to AOM are listed here. Other ideas are welcome.

http://www.interwebgames.com.au/aomforum/viewtopic.php?t=100

As far as the name of the expansion pack goes, I note Dale himself has no problems.

[Vince278]

I'm still in the middle of an AoM game and I have a few comments:

1. The Dark Ages really bites. Can we tone the effects down a little? It was all I could do to hold my empire together sometimes.

2. I'm in the Black Death period now but not seeing anything unusual except for a few cities at the fringes of my empire disappearing for no appearent reason.

3. I have really started to dislike those automatic militia units. They sometimes tie down other units and they sometimes don't stay away when I disband them.

4. Really don't like being stuck on one government track.

5. Those razed town squares that randomly pop up are very annoying. Some have even taken out wonders next to my cities. Can we at least have them ignore wonder squares?

Thanks.