Demo 8 near to completion ?

[alms66]

Abdul,

The random map scenario isn't ready yet. It generates the map, but doesn't place civs, ethnic groups, etc. IMO, this type of scenario is going to be a long way off still. There are many radical ideas throughout the Clash project, all of which need to be tested for playability, feasibility, and the "fun factor" as Mark likes to say. I think all of these radical ideas will be thoroughly tested before a true random map scenario exists for Clash. These are just my ideas and opinions on it though. Mark, Gary and Laurent (the coders) may have something else to say about that.

There is more diplomacy in 7.9 than previous versions, though it's still not "functional." If I'm not mistaken, the person who was working on it has vanished?

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by alms66
I played Jericho & neither I, nor any of the AI civs could conquer land.

That's odd, they were conquering land of mine in my abortive attempt to play as Jericho. Some squares changed hands numerous times as I tried to conquer back squares originally settled by my people.

[alms66]

It appears to be some sort of combat bug. In all other attempts at the Jericho scenario I played as byblos & found a single square where the AI was "fighting" even though no combat results popped up.

I just made another attempt at it, this time as Jericho. This time I was caught in the "fighting" & couldn't move the unit at all, though I could disband it.

So I tried Jericho again, this time as Jericho. I ended up "winning" though I never got a victory message. In this game I spent 20-30+ turns with a power circle covering the entire square and then some, while the enemy had a single unit of low power trying to win fights. I spent over 100 turns hunting down these little units until they were all gone, but as I said, no victory message.

[alms66]

General comments on 7.9:

-Need to add the ability to select multiple units and combine them into a TF, which currently isn't possible

-Need to add "Center on Selected Tile" in the right click menu when over the main map

-Shouldn't desert have some sort of farm or resource site so people colonize desert? After all, the earliest civilizations grew up in deserts (granted they had river vallies, so this may be moot).

-Need to add some indication of when the next unit will be built (Edit: Noticed this is on the feature list as f69). Same for next tech discovery, road segment built (Edit: See f155), and wall built. For the road segments and walls, a graphical overlay could be displayed showing that it is "under construction." For the tech, I'm not sure without having to rebuild the entire interface, that there is an easy way to do it. And for units, again I have no ideas on this one, other than a progress bar on the current econ interface.

Edit -
I reformatted the post to a single list. Several comments were added regarding the current feature list (that is the one in the demo 7 thread). Also I'm going to start a thread with an interface proposal that may make many of these suggestions moot, if the team adopts the proposal.

[LDiCesare]

About onslaught: I forgot I had lef thtis one in... It's based on a scenario made by Richard but since I lost the good military file, it's full of unit references which aren't even there. If Richard sent the good military file, it would probably run.
The first error log for Jericho I get. I was trying to tell a unit which had received all reinforcements they needed that they needed no more, so it said to the command above it that it didn't need any and the poor command didn't expect any so it crashed. I'll fix that one easily. Thanks for the log.
The movement flashing log I don't get as easily but I'll check. It sure tries to draw a path, so I understand that it can cause a lot of flickering. Apparently a pathfinding problem. I'm checking that one.

I just made another attempt at it, this time as Jericho. This time I was caught in the "fighting" & couldn't move the unit at all, though I could disband it.

Yes, fighting will prevent the units from moving. Since destroying even weakened units takes a lot of time and fleeing also takes some time, this results in locks sometimes. I have lots of ideas to change the way combat is handled but it's really low priority on my list, as it would require lots of rewriting. A way to get rid of small units without their surviving too many turns would probably be welcome.

[alms66]

I assume I should repost the above comments I made into some comments thread, if so, a new demo 7.9 comments thread or the current demo 7 comments thread? I'm asking because I have more comments to make and it would be pointless to put them here if they belong over there.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Alms, thanks for all the constructive comments and also sending the logs to Laurent. For now I guess you can put your comments here. My reasoning is that I don't want to start a new D8 thread until we release D8, and the code you have has now moved rather far beyond the D7 code in the thread up top. If it works for you, what I suggest is that once D8 launches you scan this thread for comments that are still relevant, and paste them into that thread.

Thanks for all the good work and playtesting!

Laurent, is there a simple fix we can use to patch the problem with fights taking forever sometimes? I know we need to do it right, but FE can we just kill any unit that goes below 10% strength? (If that would be enough to help) Certainly units that are extremely mauled tend to lose combat effectiveness anyway, so I wouldn't consider something like that too unreasonable. Or can the chance of flight be linked to the ratio of military power, such that overpowered units will have difficulty fleeing and tend to die quicker?

[alms66]

*I edited my previous list too.

More General 7.9 comments

-Need to add a Population/Social/Demographics (whatever you want to call it) interface to be able to see the breakdown of ethnic group populations, their general happiness & their happiness towards all the gov’t policies by the square, province and civ levels. This will allow a player to determine when/where riots may occur. As it is now, playing the social test, it is nearly impossible to please everyone, rioting is extremely severe and there’s nothing I can do about it, until the rioting starts. Then quickly send military units to suppress the rioting, while Persia moves in and takes my capital.



-Roads - These should not automatically begin on the tile selected, you should select start and finish. Even though it involves that dreadfull "extra" click, it somehow seems more "right" to me.



-When rebel units form & I “repair” the cause that brought them forth (I'm assuming the cause is that listed under the riots entry in the events panel on the turn the unit was created), I expect to see the units disband back into the population eventually, though I never have.



-Hyperlinks
Add Hyperlinks as in the Events Panel to the following:
-Civ/Province Econ Panel (military elements) - link to info on strength and such here, currently can't tell which is the stronger unit to build.
-Tech Panel - link to tech info showing new applications available and obsolete ones also.



Comments on old feature requests from demo 7 thread:
(some could be resolved already)

-(f138 - movement path drawn over or under units)
I vote over... not a high priority though, since I can figure out how long the trip will take myself.

-(f163)Multiple events popping up isn't really a big issue for me, though some scenario designers might demand the "fix" suggested by Mark here, so I vote yes.

-(related to f135b)It looks silly to have riots[x,y] listed 20+ times in the events box, and it sometimes makes the box too long to fit on screen, if there are lots of riots. Would be better to have a single "The people are rioting!" entry, and the player clicks that for more info. The reason this is related to f135b is the same would happen if you built that many units in a single turn. IMO this extra 'click' is justified.

-(related to f108) For the units box, rather than showing the hundreds of icons of each unit type present in the square as now, we should show a single icon for each TF present within the square, with the relevant combat info besides each (attack / defense / Health / Personnel/ Transport Capacity). If the player wants to manage the TFs/units in that square, have an army management screen where the player can combine units, split units, ditto for TFs, disband units, etc. Doing this, I would hope, could allow the units box to get smaller (or eliminate it entirely, preferably), while showing more useful info, and allow us to add more info to the detail frame. Things that come to mind for the Detail Frame are the general happiness level of the square’s population, Specials present, trade route present, or growth rate of the square. I'm sure there are lots of other things we can think to include here.


Features currently not explained/mentioned in the tutorial:

-Unload option from naval units (also don't know how many units naval units can hold - see suggestion for the unit box reworking above for a temporary solution.) I saw this mentioned while going over the bug list, though I never knew it existed.

-Disband Unit/TF settles the current square if unsettled/adds back to population otherwise (we should probably tell people about this in the demo)

Edit - Removed reference to Interface Proposal - that is on hold for now.

[alms66]

Edit-

Moved to Scenario thread...
See link in Laurent's post below.

[LDiCesare]

Laurent, is there a simple fix we can use to patch the problem with fights taking forever sometimes? I know we need to do it right, but FE can we just kill any unit that goes below 10% strength? (If that would be enough to help) Certainly units that are extremely mauled tend to lose combat effectiveness anyway, so I wouldn't consider something like that too unreasonable. Or can the chance of flight be linked to the ratio of military power, such that overpowered units will have difficulty fleeing and tend to die quicker?

Simple I don't know, but it can be tried. I used to do something like that, but it used a fixed number rather than a proportion, and that drew some complaints. If I retrieve the unit from the element it should be feasible easily. I'd base the threshold on the morale value.

-EDIT- I actually already coded that, but I used 1 + morale somewhere when morale is around 10 when I wanted a final figure between 1 and 2. You could mod the xml files by dividing all morale values by 10 or 20. I've corrected in the code and it looks better.

-Need to add a Population/Social/Demographics (whatever you want to call it) interface to be able to see the breakdown of ethnic group populations, their general happiness & their happiness towards all the gov’t policies by the square, province and civ levels. This will allow a player to determine when/where riots may occur. As it is now, playing the social test, it is nearly impossible to please everyone, rioting is extremely severe and there’s nothing I can do about it, until the rioting starts. Then quickly send military units to suppress the rioting, while Persia moves in and takes my capital.

Yes. There is however some feedback in the government panel cliking on the various faces. I put the starting policies values to something that would spawn dicontent. I found it easy to avoid the riots after they happened once, but then it's indeed hard to avoid them beforehand. A lot of work though, particularly since I don't like coding UIs.

When rebel units form & I “repair” the cause that brought them forth (I'm assuming the cause is that listed under the riots entry in the events panel on the turn the unit was created), I expect to see the units disband back into the population eventually, though I never have.

I think it would be far too easy and not realistic. However, since it's quite hard to guess that people will riot in the first place, I understand your concern. I think that a panel which gives you information on possible riots per ethnic group/region/... would help prevent many riots and thus alleviate the need for this. Now repairing does prevent additional units from coming to be in other squares with the same kind of population.

It looks silly to have riots[x,y] listed 20+ times in the events box, and it sometimes makes the box too long to fit on screen, if there are lots of riots. Would be better to have a single "The people are rioting!" entry, and the player clicks that for more info. The reason this is related to f135b is the same would happen if you built that many units in a single turn. IMO this extra 'click' is justified.

Agreed. I must check how to group events together.

About the scenarios folders, I guess Gary's editor will make the point moot. There will be resource files that the editor will compile into a single scenario file. Better discussed in the scenarios thread .

I'm mostly neutral or don't have enough time ( )to check your other points right now. Interested in seeing your interface proposal.

[LDiCesare]

There are far too many riots in the current code. I am tuning the threshold for events to happen and the formula (using an euclidian distance rather than abs for policies) in order to limit the number of riots. I'll be checking the events panel after that.

[LDiCesare]

I realised most of the problems with the social test came from a bug in the migration code which created a new EG every time people migrated from one square to the next. This led to a ridiculous number of ethnic groups, and enhanced the opportunity for riots by as much. It could also augment the number of concurrent modification exceptions already sighted, though I'm still at a loss what causes them.
Any suggestions for how to display ethnic groups among civ/province/square would be welcome. I think we'd need a civ manager/province manager/square manager UI, but that's a lot of code.

[alms66]

Add this to the right-click menu over the main map:

Domestic Advisor
-Empire Details
-Province Details
-Tile Details

Each one prefixed with "-" brings up a dialog of text output for the necessary variables. It will do for now.

[LDiCesare]

I don't like right-click because it's not obvious. I suspect many people never found out you can in fact change capital. I'd rather have a domestic advisor button somewhere between econ and ruler, with maybe the same behaviour as econ (drop down with the choices you mention).
Then the UI of 'list of figures' the way the ruler panel has them would be enough for a start?

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Laurent:

Sorry to hear about the extreme EG proliferation. Aside from doing it accidentally, we also need to keep a lid on the number of social objects so they don't explode, and kill the game.

Originally posted by LDiCesare
Any suggestions for how to display ethnic groups among civ/province/square would be welcome. I think we'd need a civ manager/province manager/square manager UI, but that's a lot of code.

A simple text popup would do for now IMO, initiated FE like alms says. The code for the province level would iterate through the squares to generate a list of EGs and total the population for each. Then just output the list. This might be easier if EGs had unique names. The name could be Ethnicity name plus a unique # for now. Below the short name-population list could be a text output that shows details for each EG. There are already text outputs for most of the social settings. I had them under toString() but Gary may have renamed those since toString is supposed to be short. The output might be very long for civ though!

I think this isn't too much to code, and will at least allow some diagnostic output to ID problems like the one you ran into.