Clash Demo 8 Download and Comments

[Max Sinister]

Originally posted by demipomme
But was this ever done by what we would call a civilisation?

Iceland was settled first by a group of Irish monks and later by Vikings, I think you can count them as a civ...

[LDiCesare]

If little icons appeared in squares where battles had happened (and maybe a different icon where they are still happening), this would help out.

I implemented that, but my image doesn't always show very well.
In the image, I show a few examples (blue being the player, green the enemy):
First row: Fight on hill, lost, trireme retreated.
Fight on hill, lost, unit destroyed, fog of war on.
Fight on plains.
These show well imo.
Second row:
Fight on hills, units still fighting, they actually moved from the previous hill square. That may not be easy enough to spot?
Fight on a city: Very hard to see the swords here
Fight on mountain, player retreated.

By the way, you may notice on the fog of war image that the borders are still shown, so you no longer "forget" the owner of a square when your units leave. This information is the last you had, so it's not necessarily accurate (as in civ2 but contrary to civ3's culture map).

Better graphics or suggestions to enhance the crossed swords are welcome.

[shimmin]

In the 'Dawn' scenario, I found the wheat, found the horses, and had a population greater than 10K, when the Northern Horde appears around turn 80. I had 5 chariots by that time, and so I slaughtered them. I did recapture all conquered territories.

However, the scenario did not end, and I spent the rest of the 200 turns looking for something else to do, and not finding it, lost the scenario.

Is victory not implemented yet, or what else might have been the problem?

[Mark_Everson]

Hey shimmin:

I've got no idea. It worked fine in testing. But we all have our own particular ways of doing things, and you might have a method of doing something that causes issues for whatever reason. If you learned what's in the tutorial then I wouldn't worry about it, and just go on to the other scenarios.

Sorry about that. BTW before the release version we would see that problem if an AI bug led one of the barbarians to just sit there. So you never killed it and the victory condition was never satisfied. It could be something similar, or completely different in this case.

[Martin the Dane]

Don't know if it has been reported.

I picked up 1000 pop and dropped them in an empty square adacent to a colonized square, then I pickec them all up again, told the unit to move one square over, and hit "End Turn" this resulted in the game hanging without resolving the turn and thus not progressing to the next turn.

[alms66]

Yes I think I reported it a while back... you can't remove all population from a square, it crashes.

[Mark_Everson]

Thanks Martin. I've added it to my bug list. (It didn't seem to be there from b4, I may have missed Alms' previous report) Should be easy to fix.

As for a workaround. . . "Dont Do That!"

[alms66]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
It didn't seem to be there from b4, I may have missed Alms' previous report.

Or I may not have reported it through proper channels... oh well, it's there now.

[shimmin]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Hey shimmin:

I've got no idea. It worked fine in testing. But we all have our own particular ways of doing things, and you might have a method of doing something that causes issues for whatever reason. If you learned what's in the tutorial then I wouldn't worry about it, and just go on to the other scenarios.

I think I found the problem. When I played, I found the horses by random exploration before withstanding the barbarian assault that happens about halfway through. After surviving the assault, I'm told to go find the horses to the northeast, but of course, they're no longer there and I can't meet that goal.

[Mark_Everson]

Thanks shimmin, that does sound a reasonable explanation.

[alms66]

I wasn't sure where else to put this...

I think I said it when it was proposed, but I'll certainly say it again (and again, until it's changed - either back to the way it was, or either option suggested below), using 'K' and 'M' to substitute for real numbers and real seperators is quite annoying. It's certainly in my top 20 list of most annoying things people do in this world. A simple seperator line in the settings.xml could allow one to customize his seperator to his liking (',' for Americans, and a '.' for everyone else) and it is simple enough to drop a single seperator character into the stream every three number characters, so why not do it? Why was the switch to this made anyway? If it's simply to get rid of long strings of numbers (which it was IIRC), why not round the display, yet keep the real variable at the actual value? That seems like a much better solution than using the 'K' and 'M' approach that was taken for the specific problem given (IIR-the problem-C).

[Mark_Everson]

Hey Alms:

If That makes your top-20 list of most annoying things, I wish I had your life! ;-)

Sorry, I didn't see your complaints wherever we discussed it. I did the change, and it was to get rid of those long strings of numbers. At some point we could make it an option to do ,000 or .000 instead of K and ,000,000 instead of M. I just personally vastly prefer the abbreviations which is why I made it 34M to replace 34062594.32. If more people really care, then we'll up the priority of putting in an option as you outline.

[alms66]

In the example cited, I'd rather:
34,062,594
...a nice rounded and seperated number.

I also wanted to add here that, while I've never been a big fan of power circles, I could certainly live with them, but now the military influence map seems to make them obsolete, don't you think? I mean, the information given by the map is far more nuanced than that given by the power circle. Just something to think about.

[alms66]

I’d like to request a change to the events output window. I would like to see all the entries of the form:
“x has reached level y.”
removed from the output. It’s overly distracting/annoying when you have a scenario with 20+ technologies and growth has gotten to double digits, because you end up with 10+ such entries every turn. Quite frankly, with the new 'application available' entries, I just ignore them anyway.

On a similar note…

Maybe I’ve missed something in the tech model to infrastructure model interaction descriptions, but I think we’ll need to add another tag to the technology structure in the XML file, as an example, I’ll use the plow. It’s a great invention that helped increase crop yields by increasing the area of land a man could farm. In our current tech model, this would be an application by definition because it is something that can be used – but what will the player ever do with it? The player won’t build ‘plow’ units or ‘plow’ infrastructure, so there’s really no place for the plow on the tech tree. It could be defined as a technology that does nothing but help farming, but isn’t it really an aspect of ‘farming’ which already is defined as a technology? And since ‘Farming’ directly influences the output of infrastructure, wouldn’t it make sense that the plow is a farming improvement? Why not name the levels of farming and have one of them named ‘plow’? This way, instead of seeing “Farming has reached level 0.5”, you’d see “Our farming technology is advancing! We have discovered the Plow.” Obviously at .1 increments, there would be far too many levels to name individually, so we’d only define major levels (and only display those major levels in the events output), like so:

<technology>
<name>Farming</name>
<tier>3</tier>
<growthrate>1.0</growthrate>
<upkeep>1.0</upkeep>
<helper>
  <name>Agriculture</name>
  <requirement>0.0</requirement>
  <effect>0.5</effect>
</helper>
<naming> *Start of new stuff
  <namedlevel>
    <level>0.5</level>
    <name>Plow</name>
  </namedlevel>
</naming> *End of new stuff
</technology>

Any thoughts on this?

[Mihai]

There is any way to save on this Demo?
I really want to play around and see more about it, but I cannot stay hours in row at it. And to take it always from the begining is annoying.