Clash of Civs Demo 3 is Now Available... Comment on it here

[Mark_Everson]

I think you must have ended up with some very passive civs. I have used your strategy sometimes and been trashed by someone screaming in where I have left a mostly open front. But, its true its hard to get out-and-out beaten with the AI it is now. Just Wait. BTW, you'll come in very handy for stress testing the AI in a few months .

As for Victory, If you are at 10% of the world econ and 2x as big in terms of econ as the nearest competitor, just declare victory. Comparison stats for the top civs are posted when you hit 'p'. The AI doesn't know to gang up on the winner yet so once you're in a safe position you've basically won.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Finnaly got a real chance to check it out and here's what i found:

First off u can confuse and overwhelm any of the civs by attacking on multiple fronts with just 1 unit and 1 front with many. The thing is, the civs never seem to beat the other units even if they have tons of other units in that square. I think it would make sence if they were a little better in that area (home ground reason) and also they could force a retreat from the square if they're too powerful.

Also, i don't know if u intended this, but if i fail in taking an inland square next to my civ in can continue marching inwards and take squares in the center of a civs empire.

Finnaly is there a reason when ur attacking with land units u can't move 2 spaces, but can with naval?

[Glak]

Heh heh twice as much eh? I think I either hit those stats buttons randomly or maybe you have them set to display every 50 turns or so. Last time the numbers came up I had 14, the next four had 4,4,3,3 and the rest had ones and twos, I was probably up a little higher when I turned it over to the computer. My army was just average size though because it got used a lot. Yeah I can see what you mean by the agressiveness. Some teams just let you eat them but others try to sneak around your army. Actually when I was trying to conquer spain two of them did sneak around and isolate my army then they went and took some squares in france and switzerland which I didn't expect. That's when my army got isolated so I couldn't do anything anymore. I just let the computer play for 200 turns and he just let the units pile up. I was going to make a big army then but it was taking too long to refresh the screen because he doesn't seem to make TFs.

Oh and if you make four buttons I suggest that they not be allowed to break up other TFs. If I hit the land button then it wouldn't take from my amphibious and vice versa. So you would hit "0" to break up everything in the square and then you would hit a button to make whatever you wanted and then you would hit the appropriate button to deal with the remainder. So then everything would be in two TFs (or one if you hit the button that makes "c" units)

[Mark_Everson]

LGJ:

The reason the defenders never beat the "decoy" ones, is that for now, an attacker that doesn't like the odds, can always break off the attack without penalty. I'd meant to make it like only a 50% or less chance of being able to get away clean, but forgot . I'll have to fix that, seeing as you're clearly able to draw off support that should go to the "main" battle without penalty in this way. Cute tactic, I hadn't thought of it!

>
Also, i don't know if u intended this, but if i fail in taking an inland square next to my civ in can continue marching inwards and take squares in the center of a civs empire.
>

Well, I knew about it, but didn't want to spend the time to implement a fix. that silliness will go away eventually.

>
Finnaly is there a reason when ur attacking with land units u can't move 2 spaces, but can with naval?
>
Without the diagonal moves naval forces would have been of much less use, so I upped their movement a bit. It may be justified, and maybe not, anyway I just did it!


Glak:

Thanks for telling me about "The revenge of the AI", since what you were saying wasn't consistent with what I've seen Not that the AI is great, but IMO it isn't Really bad. Although, LGJ, may have found a trick that abuses the system, which you can see in his post above. This is why I'm excited about the open design and testing concept, we can find most of the flaws in the AI and design long before Clash is ever officially released.
The positions do show up every 100 turns... I think your suggestion for the rearranging TF stuff is good.

[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited November 20, 1999).]

[Glak]

Oh yeah decoys, that's how I killed the guy in the south of italy. I didn't mention that because I think it is a fair tactic. To kill brown I just sent my boat around one side and sent it into his main army. Then I just ran my army in and killed him square by square, sometimes I would have a land decoy too. I mean people fall for that sort of stuff in real life, though after a while they catch on and start making choices which the computer doesn't do. It is also the only way you can deal with their teleporting units. If you couldn't over stimulate the AI then it would just teleport its units in and win every battle. You are also paying for the decoy and money is valuable in the early game.

I also think it is reasonable that you can just keep going instead of staying to fight, though I haven't found a use for this. After all if you move in deeper they just automatically follow so basically you are just trapping yourself

Oh and I was thinking about how the AI protects its borders. I'm not sure how support works but my guess is that (at least for the human player) if they attack a square any unit in an adjacent peacefull square can slide over and help. Because of this it is best to not put your troops directly on your borders but one square in, just like in RISK. Look over at your number pad and pretend it is the map. You own all of the numbes but not the other keys. To protect the whole thing with one unit you would put it on "5", if you have two you could either put them both on 5 but then an attack on 8 would leave 1,2, and 3 defensless, so you would probably put them on 4+6 or 8+2, if you have three put them on 8,4, and 3 making every square protected by two units. Hmm what I am trying to say is instead of having it protect the outside squares have it protect every other square on the inside, but not the deep inside. I know this would probably take a lot of work and other things have priority.

[alms66]

Hi Mark,
I haven't had a chance to play the demo much yet but I see one large problem. When moving your units it is quite annoying to have to search for that one highlighted unit whose turn it is. I suggest by next demo we fix this, kinda like the way civ zooms to the unit whose turn it is, just to where noone has to search the map. When you have a large empire it's especially annoying.

I know it's no big deal right now but it would be a nice addition to demo 4. Unless of course there is a way to do it easier now and I just don't know it.

[Glak]

What I do is look at the minimap right after I move a unit. The square with the next unit will refresh. It is barely noticable but it works.

[Mark_Everson]

Glak:

Feints and decoy tactics are Clearly valid, and will definitely be understood, and utilized by the AI. The problem now, is not that feints exist, but that they can be executed at very small cost...

Staying on the ships and continuing along a coast is Not reasonable IMO. Without disembarking troops being carried can't re-provision, and disease becomes much more likely as time at sea increases (real time scale, not the one year game time scale).

Support Tactics:
What you say would be right if adjacent units always supported friendly ones in combat. However, for Army units there's a substantial chance that they won't be able to make it. (at least in the demo so far) So your analysis isn't right IMO.


TK:
I'll try your suggestion for the next demo. But I don't like the auto-center in Civ much, and suspect I won't like it in Clash either.

[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited November 20, 1999).]

[alms66]

Mark,
Well actually I don't blame you, but we need something in there to make moving units easier. I can't think of anything else right now but if and when I do, I'll post it here.

Glak,
Thanx for the tip, I never thought of that,I'll try it next time.
[This message has been edited by Toubabo_Koomi (edited November 20, 1999).]

[Glak]

>Staying on the ships and continuing along a coast is Not reasonable IMO. Without disembarking troops being carried can't re-provision, and disease becomes much more likely as time at sea increases (real time scale, not the one year game time scale).

What are you refering to? As far as I can tell he wasn't even talking about water. Well whatever you are talking about what are you going to change?

>Support Tactics:
What you say would be right if adjacent units always supported friendly ones in combat. However, for Army units there's a substantial chance that they won't be able to make it. (at least in the demo so far) So your analysis isn't right IMO.

Oh I had no idea that they didn't always go, once I realized the computer could teleport I basically stopped trying to figure out how its units behaved.

>TK:
I'll try your suggestion for the next demo. But I don't like the auto-center in Civ much, and suspect I won't like it in Clash either.

you should probably temporarily put a button in, I'm sure the final interface will be radically different so don't worry about it too much.

[Mark_Everson]

Glak:

Oops, I was referring to this statement:
>
I also think it is reasonable that you can just keep going instead of staying to fight, though I haven't found a use for this. After all if you move in deeper they just automatically follow so basically you are just trapping yourself
>
Though now I see you were talking about land...

[Mark_Everson]

Paul:
you're right that I'm only looking for big problems so far. But if something seems weird, like how combat or movement in general is working, the sooner we know, the better. There are a lot of things that would be easy to change now with the military model, that will be increasingly difficult to change as things progress.

Glak:

On the download page under "miscellaneous" is where the cheat mode info is. You should probably read over the whole download page to make sure you haven't missed something important. The manual doesn't have everything in it yet.

AI...
That's it for now. If I make it more aggressive, its just easier to kill the bad guys because they over-extend. I will make it Much better later, but only after we get the movement AI in there.

Map too big...
Well, that's one of the things playtesting will tell us. When we scale up to the whole world, my guess is it may be twice as big as it should be. Right now I'm not prepared to change it... however, when coding we need to make it so we can accommodate any square size.

[Glak]

Ahh but you see I overextend far more. I could die in a matter of turns if they just realized how weak I am. I have one TF holding italy and southern france, I have another stuck in my colony in greece but that is all. I don't defend anything at all, I don't even have that many troops either. My main tactic is to just send all of my guys in a TF and eat one square per turn until the bad guy dies. If he is one of those cheaters with teleporting units I get one or two support units to confuse him and tie up his units.

So yeah the computer players would die faster if they were more agressive but I would have to worry about them so I wouldn't be able to take advantage as easily. They did seem to attack me last turn. I think two teams were allied and I tried to kill one so they both took back a few squares.

Yeah I know there is no reason to change the map size yet, its just that I wanted to finish the game and it looks like it is going to take quite a while and I can't seem to save the game.

I also like the colored square graphics. Honestly, I do. They have all that information that you need and allow you to see your country at a glance.

[Atahualpa]

As Mark requested I'll posted my comments here (uneditet, just copied, I am quite tired ):

First if I double clicked on it and tried to open it, it didnt work. The Loading Window appeared, but then again disappeared and nothing. Luckily I have the java sdk for myself and so I typed java -jar clash_3d.jar and it worked.
Second, there are no scrolling bars on the main map. I dont know how to scroll around else.

The naval units behave strange. I have a naval unit in a (land) square, but I cant move other naval there too, although one naval unit is already there.

The Yugoslawians (green ones) crossed the adria with "L"s and "~N~"s. How did they do that? Are the naval units transports?

And I would find it better if simultanouse movement would be indicated with lines. So that units that go to the same square are grouped together in the square they currently are and then a line is drawn to the square where they are next turn. So, you completely reduce the error that you sent your men to the wrong place (which occured to me several times, because of the movement queue; land units should be moved first and then naval and not mixed.) and in addition you no longer have the problem of squares showing the wrong number of military strength.

Add an "influence" value. Every square of yours produces influence and if a square with a lot of influence (=high pop and/or military presence) lies next to a "barbarian" square with low influence (low defense value, low pop) then there is a chance the barbarians change to your side.

That map screenshot on the homepage looks nice.

When you print messages like civ thisandthat did something you should print out their name in their color so that you know which civ.

Whats that M[30/30] value in the square? Cause I had some squares with that value.

What does pressing 1 do? Yes I know it creates MSPs but well, what are MSPs. I am not yet into that.

Can I abandon units?

Is it really useful to create TF's? I mean when one TF has 4 attack points it is better to have 2 with lower health (the darker bar in the upper left) than one with better health. If (correct) {out.ask("Whats the sens of TFs then?"); answer hmmwondering=in.answer; } else await.explaination;

When did you start working on Clash?

The doc is in the download section of the new site, right?

Ata

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Atahualpa:

Thanks for copying your post over to the demo 3 thread! I'll kill the old one now...

Most of your questions about things are answered in the docs. There are three places you should look, with different levels of information.... (I know the information is not all that one might hope for. But we are very short-handed, especially on the programming end, so I cut corners where I can )

The most complete source on the demo is the old version 2 documentation. It is on the new web site, under downloads, listed as "game instructions". It says at the top that its instructions for demo 3. That's wrong. It is the instructions for demo 2, but a lot of it is still current. Things like a detailed list of keyboard commands are found in the demo 2 doc. Many of the commands listed in the text part of demo 2, that introduce is how you play, no longer work. They are for the old system where both the player's and the AI's units teleported. So I suggested just skimming that document.

The "what's new" section, part way down the page of the downloads demo 3 page itself, is vital information that you Must read to have any hope of figuring out what's going on. I give information on the new key combinations, how naval and Army task forces work, and which old commands no longer work.

Finally, the demo 3 thread on the forum has a lot of useful information. If you look over all three of those documents, and you still have questions, I'll try answer them. But it was pretty obvious from your questions that you hadn't done that yet...

Double-clicking on the jar file hasn't worked for only a few people. I don't know what the problem is. One guy that had trouble was using Windows 98. What's your OS?

Having smaller groups freely joining your civ is something I have had in mind. But the demo is in a very primitive state compared to where our game models are. I like the suggestion on using the civ's color in any messages. I have noted it down for potential implementation in future demos. I have thought about lines and arrows indicating movement myself. But I wanted things to get a little further along in terms of the demo before trying things like these. It may be with the new map and unit graphics and the "unit box" I'm working on now, such arrows will be unnecessary. If your guys end up going to the wrong square, just used the take back command.

MSPs stand for multi-square provinces. Eventually forming them will be under player control. For now the "1" key is just a leftover of an old diagnostic when I was getting that going.

Task forces are every bit as good as individual units. Sometimes they even give a combined arms bonus. But the main thing you need to know is a unit only has 4 points when it is unwounded. After that the strength of the unit is pro rated by its health. So two half-strength units are only as good as one full-strength unit. You can't abandon units yet, but eventually you'll be able to disband them.

I've been working on Clash for about two years now. The team approach to Clash started about nine months ago.

As you noted in the other post, there are still some bugs in the GUI-handling code. Mostly those are relatively harmless, and only result in transitory map updating errors. I have not gone in to make everything absolutely thread-safe, because the code will probably evolve greatly before we put out the beta. As I said, the real purpose of the demos at this point is to simply check out how game models work, not to validate the code. There are a Lot of bad things hiding in the code that I or someone else will have to clean up at some point.

Mark