Clash Demo v2 now available for Download - See parts of the alpha-1 Mil. Model

[Mark_Everson]

Clash of Civilizations Demo v2


It is an early demo of Some of our Game Concepts,
Not the final game...


Disclaimer:


Although it is somewhat playable at this point, Demo v2 is not anywhere near a real game yet. It has something like 5% of the required functionality in it. For instance the 'graphics' only a mother could love. Or perhaps a proud father...

What we're looking for out of the demo, is to allow people to test out many of the innovative features in Clash before development gets too far. This should allow us to identify "Turkey" aspects of our current design, and come up with something new to replace them.

IMO playtesting our features often, and brutally, is the way to go.

We are primarily looking for feedback on:

The general 'Light Touch' needed to play vs the heavier micromanagement required in Civ2,

Simultaneous Movement for Military Task Forces (TFs),

TFs Supporting others,

Standard commander decisions to attack/defend or not depending on odds.

Whatever you feel like telling us about.

This Demo is for Windows. There are possibilities for most other OSs, and I'll try to enumerate them in the near future.

To learn more about it, and download, go to:
Clash Demo v2.

Post here which alternative installation worked for you , and about any problems...

For your responses on the questions I asked about our models, if your point is on military, the first person should start a thread called "Demo Military Issues" or something. If your post is on a simple question or issue you don't expect too much discussion on, please put it in this thread. When you post refer to the demo version you're talking about, because I hope to have a new, better version available every two weeks or so. I will try to post a list of links as soon as new comment threads regarding Demo v2 are up.

For those of you who have previous demo versions, this is New and supercedes them all.

I also have put up the java source for the demo on the page with it.

-Mark

[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited October 30, 1999).]

[Mark_Everson]

Help Requested:

Java programmers in the project who use OSs other than Windows...

Can you write up instructions for what people using your favorite OS need to do to run the demo? I have kept the demo to java 1.1 so I think support is available for pretty much every operating system.

We need IMO:
Unix (as many flavors as needed)
Mac OSs " "
Linux
OS2
Whatever else people want.

Thanks,

The MGT

[Kull]

The Clash.bat file generated an error message (Bad command or file name), but the Clash_b.bat worked fine. The game loaded up in 8 seconds, which was nice. The first couple times I played, Bad Guys #1 wiped me out, as I wasn't playing much better than one of the "cultures". The third game was OK, once I figured out a strategy.

A few comments:
1) I never did do any diplomacy, just rejected all the peace offerings. My enemies never paid any attention to them anyway. (The first two games, BG1 would conquer one of my provinces, agree to "peace", and then attack on the next turn!)
2) I couldn't muster more than one attack per turn....how do you split up your armies to attack several provinces on one turn?
3) Fairly primitive looking, but the AI enemy seemed to have decent attack and defense strategies, which was nice to see.
4) I played game 3 until it stopped responding (@ turn 447, I think). It took about 45 minutes to play.

[Blade Runner]

Mark,

The system works for me for usually 280-290 turns. The system always halt with java.lang.NullPointerException
The system works well and very clever. I can manage 2-3 times to survive from 10 games!

Blade

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Blade Runner:

Yeah its tough to win. (Frequently even tough to survive, as you found out) The key is to catch the guys to the south overextended at some point and take them over quickly. The player has a lot more detailed information about the enemy here than in a real version of Clash. It is much easier said than done to actually kill the guys in the south. However, introducing naval operations will change that dynamic a bit I think. I'm about half way through the alpha-1 naval stuff now.

On the crashes: Your play style must have found a lurking bug It usually goes at 500+ turns for me. As I said I'm not too worried about bugs like that at this early stage. But since you're a java coder, If you can get me a stack trace I'll fix it. (you may have to do this in a dos window, type "Set JAVA_COMPCMD=STA" which should enable the stacktrace. Then hopefully you can get me a line number for the null pointer. You may have to run it under the non-JIT version of java to get a line number.

Any thoughts on the big questions I asked in the demo sheet, like whether simultaneous movement works ok, the support system, automatic breakoff, etc? If its all Perfect (as far as you can tell at this stage) thats great, but just let me know...

Thanks for checking it out!

Mark

[Blade Runner]

Hi Mark,

I was clicking around randomly 1turn, 10turns and 100turns, when the system crashed between 250 and 300. When I stick myself to the 100turns it crashed after 500 turns. I try to find the reason of the crash problem tomorrow.
Anyway, I love this game!
I have a few days work with the text file reader modul. I'll send it ASAP. (Sadly I need more time to switch myself to Java from Delphi.)

Blade

[Paul Crocker]

I had the same problem as Blade (crashing after about 250 turns) and I too was switching about between 1, 10, 100 turns. I found that one of my best "games" was when I let the AI run the country! Must say something about my intelligence or something (actually, I wasn't focused as much on winning as in figuring out what everything was doing...)

[Kull]

The Player AI really is quite good, albeit conservative and not given to "blitzkrieg" tactics. I played one game where it mounted a creditable defense against BG#1, while successfully conguering many of the "cultures" to the north.

I was not able to mimic the AI's ability to spread out it's forces, however. All I could do was gather a big army and attack one province at a time. This had the unfortunate side effect of leaving me utterly defenseless everywhere else. The Spanish were more than happy to take advantage of that fact while I was pacifying the Gauls and Germans!

[Mark_Everson]

Hi All:

First, thanks to all of you for trying it out. It looks like you're having some fun with it, which is a good sign given the early stage of the thing. I'll try to take out some of the bugs that cause program crashes by demo 3. I just ran one at home looking for bugs, and got to 750 turns with no problem. Of course I just let it run with the AI rather than actually doing things. The only help I can offer at this point on the crashes, is to halt the turn, and wait for the halt check box to become unchecked, before taking any actions.

Blade Runner: I'm really glad you like it. Our first satisfied customer

Paul: I put the AI together by hand, and know all its intricacies, and I still lose a majority of the games I play. As Kull says, it's pretty conservative, but it gets the job done. I'd like to hear what you think about it when you have a little more time to play, and can actually try to win rather than just see how things are put together.

Kull: Thanks for the complement on my quickie AI. In the brief fine-tuning that I did, I had it more aggressive at some points. However, when more aggressive, it was prone to "glass jaw" strategies, where it would expand explosively, and then collapse as a new enemy appeared. I could make it a lot better, but it's really designed for the demo as-is with teleporting units, territory changing hands by one square at a time, and all. As soon as we get most of the alpha-1 models coded up I'll begin to shoot for an AI that can handle the game we're all designing. I'm really looking forward to that!

If you leave your units in your home territory, the AI will spread out yours just like it does its own. Probably you frequently had your units in someone else's territory, and so it didn't have too much to re-distribute. Of course, the interface isn't really set up well for leaving a fraction of your units at home yet.

Not to worry. Demo 3 will have real troop movement for the player. It will be much easier to leave garrisons manning other fronts then. Until then, I'll tell you about a trick I use. Never attack to turns in a row! The reason is, the way the AI is set up now it looks at your squares on the it's border and sees if there are any that are poorly defended. If you are off conquering for to turns in a row, it will be able to both sense your weakness and exploit it. If you alternate attacks with "resting" turns, when it thinks it is attacking your weakness, you will be back with the cavalry already. That's my guess why you had a hard time with your defenses...

BTW, Any feedback on the main questions I designed the demo to answer? You know, the stuff about the alpha-1 military model... I take from the fact that no one has groused about any of these issues that they seem to work reasonably well, at least within the context of the crude level of the demo.
What do your "fresh eyes" say about simultaneous movement, support orders, setting commander attack and defense levels, etc.?

Cya,

Mark

[Lord God Jinnai]

I tried out the second model and it is more agrressive atleast the enemy #1.

Anyway, i don't know if these are the bugs ur looking for, but here is what i found.

After taking over a certain province of culture 1 the rest becomes green...take note of this as it will pop up later.

The areas that become "grey" after u counquer them and as far as the games concerned useless because u keep counquering them but they need to be blue to get further seem to be associated with the landforms that appear grey when viewing the landtypes.

Anyway after about several hundred turns i ended up conquering spaces and they became green, not blue. These still said if i left my units there that they were attempting to couquer it and added it to the territory, though there was no differance. This happened more and more as the game progressed.

[Mark_Everson]

Yeah, the color-change thing is a known bug. The culture thinks its dead for some reason and so all the squares revert to the terrain color.

The reason they won't turn your color when you conquer them is you don't have the money to move people in! Once a square is vacant (which that bug makes it think they are) the only way to posess the land is to move people in, which costs $100 right now. If you don't have enough money the square will Never turn your color. If you do have enough, then it happens automatically.

I have spent several hours trying to find that particular bug, and just haven't got it yet. I stopped because it is involved with multi-square province formation, which may change soon with the new econ model. So I didn't think it was worth pursuing further at this point...

[Mark_Everson]

Color-Change Bug, where cultures collapse, fixed

Since I was getting tired of talking about it, I went ahead and invested another hour to find it.

So it won't be there in demo 3.


Kull:

I missed your first post in this thread. Sorry about that. The way you attack with less than whole force is to use the 'm' command.

As I said in the 'manual' the diplomacy is very Machiavellian. But usually it won't make peace unless it really means it. The circumstances might have changed since it made the offer. Right now there is a five-turn grace period for the player to respond. If you get much weaker in the interim it could attack the next turn.

[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited October 22, 1999).]

[alms66]

To answer you questions,Mark:

1...This is the first game, though primitive,
where I've actually seen a "light touch" approach actually work. It's great!(Although personally, I prefer heavy micromanagement, but I'm probably the only one!)
2...The simultaneous Movement, I really didn't even notice it.(Maybe because of the teleporting units thing.)
3...The supporting TF's is really cool. I don't have to worry about doing it myself atleast.
4...The odds thing is O.K.,but sometimes I found it annoying. Then again, it's better to be annoyed than to loose half of my army.
5...I was just wondering If people have been able to get it to run in Windows or not, because I got it to work fairly easily.
6...I've found that if I don't kill the BG#1
off the game doesn't crash, but if I do kill him, It crashes around turn 120 or so...Is this another bug?
7...Just thought I'd mention how much I love the cultures on every square,Great Idea!! Only one suggestion for later demos, keep the cultures but have some comepletely empty squares on the map.(Humans are prolific, but they didn't conquer the world in the Stone Age...)

[Mark_Everson]

Toubabo_Koomi:

>To answer you questions,Mark:

Woohoo, Somebody actually answered the questions...
For that I will bestow upon you as much micromanagement as you'd like

>1...This is the first game, though primitive, where I've actually seen a "light touch" approach actually work. It's great!(Although personally, I prefer heavy micromanagement, but I'm probably the only one!)

Don't worry, soon there will be plenty of micromanagement. Give us till the new year, and you'll be wallowing in it if you like.

4...The odds thing is O.K.,but sometimes I found it annoying. Then again, it's better to be annoyed than to loose half of my army.

Did you read the manual? You can use the 8 and 9 keys to adjust the odds that commanders are willing to fight at. If you want to be aggressive you can reduce it all the way to 1:1 odds, or even lower. However, your armies won't last nearly as long.

5...I was just wondering If people have been able to get it to run in Windows or not, because I got it to work fairly easily.

Only one person that I know of has had problems.

6...I've found that if I don't kill the BG#1
off the game doesn't crash, but if I do kill him, It crashes around turn 120 or so...Is this another bug?

I don't know, I've killed off BG #1 numerous times, and never noticed a correlation with crashes. But who knows...

7...Just thought I'd mention how much I love the cultures on every square,Great Idea!! Only one suggestion for later demos, keep the cultures but have some comepletely empty squares on the map.(Humans are prolific, but they didn't conquer the world in the Stone Age...)

You know, I think the information is buried on the web site somewhere, but the game starts at 1000 B.C. - perhaps that explains it . At least for the moment I'm leaving it like that for a good reason. If we want to game to be somewhat realistic, its IMO, almost impossible to win if you start before 1000 B.C. That's because waves of barbarians swept over virtually the whole old world between 1200 and 1000. They destroyed, or severely perturbed the evolution of virtually every civilization extant before then. There will, of course be multitude of starting variations for people who would like to start earlier, later, or whenever. But it will be virtually impossible to win with an early start under "realistic" conditions. (We'll probably give the player one or more realism level sliders to set before the game starts) Under an early start population will indeed be significantly more sparse.

[Lord God Jinnai]

That is true to some extent, however many civs were able to survive such as China, Sothern India, and parts of Greece/Persia (not all were safe however in the latter).