Clash Demo 4, with Isometric Graphics, Is Now Available!

[axi]

In the one and only game that I managed to carry on beyond turn 40, some interesting things happened. I managed to hold on to the game until turn 682, without ever pressing the 100T button, and using the 10T for only about half the turns. That means that I had my PC turned on for a whole day, since there is no save. Savegame ability is a must for demo 5!

That's what's happened to me: I stuck with this game because it went well for me: I obliterated the two Italian cultures and the bad guy to the south (bad guy 13) and I also took over Greece (sp?). I thought that, if I stayed up all night, I could conquer the world, but then, something spooky happened: there came no more new TFs! I had then about 120 Mil Power and up to that point the armament rate was at it's peak. I waited for centuries, but nothing. All this time, my power dwindled, as my Swiss neighbor was pushing hard on me and I also, in my fury, mindlessly attacked the Corsican guy. After a series of disasters, my power plummeted to 20 and I lost Greece to the belligerent pink Balcan culture. I even tried fiddling with the econ model, though I had no idea what I was doing. And then, surprise again! The TFs started to reappear, and slowly, because I had defensive losses all the time, raised myself to 60. By then however, all my conqueror's pride had blown out, so i shut the thing down and went to sleep...

[Mark_Everson]

LGJ:

Well, I'll try and look into it. I'm not sure I understand everything you say is going on though. First of all, 300 turns is a long time. You should be able to have a pretty big civ by then if you've been expanding while they are just sitting there. Now is it before they exploded their economy is shown as really huge, or afterwords? Have you try using a similar strategy? If you do it again, and the same thing happens, can you send me back some diagnostic information? What you need to do this select a square of the bad guys in question so that it shows as pink in the middle. Then hit the C key. An information box willpop up showing their economic statistics, and some other information. Can you send me the numbers above and below the "Units" label, and also just copy the whole big text box. That will hopefully help me to figure out what is going on.

Axi:

Well, I'm glad it had you thinking about staying up all night! That's very encouraging. Sorry it screwed up on you. There is some old stuff in the models that might have caused your problem, or it may have been some kind of bug. If you should ever try it again, and get to the point where your military power has plateaued, obtain the same kind of diagnostic I asked LGJ for above, and I will see if I can figure out what is going on. And yes, I will try to get to save going for Demo 5...

You attacked the Corsicans! Watch out, I've heard that some of them can be pretty mean ;-)

[Mark_Everson]

Korn469:

Welcome Back korn469! Glad you're back on the net.

First of all you should remember, as it says in the manual, that the defenders get a 50% bonus to their combat power. So you need to remember to account for that. (The MilPower stats shown at the beginning of each combat give the actual power used in the combat) Secondly, just to keep the bookkeeping simple, a single unit takes all the hits until it's dead, and then damage moves on to the next one; so in the more refined combat system, you would have ended up with several mangled but not eliminated units. Third, I guess your commander just had a bad day. It's possible, the way the numbers work now, that even with a large force you can do relatively little damage in any one phase. So if you did lousy in the first phase, and the defender did really well, you could well lose a unit or two when attacking the equivalent of two or three enemy units.

In each phase, the maximum damage each side can inflict on the other is their mil power divided by the number of phases. For right now the number of phases is 3. The actual damage inflicted, is the maximum damage times a uniformly distributed random number from 0 to 100%. This is extremely simplified, and I'm sure will change at some point, but that's the way it is now. So even with an arbitrarily large force if you "roll" close to 0, you won't do much damage. However, I don't think this approach is really unreasonable. A result near zero means that the enemy achieves some sort of tactical surprise in the first battle, leading to one side being rather ineffective. This randomness tends to even out in the long run because there are three individual phases. Hopefully, now that you understand what's happening your combat results will make a little more sense to you.

New military units etc....
Please remember that this was the part of the game you weren't supposed to evaluate There is a lot of old stuff in there that is from when I was just working on the game by myself. I'll describe briefly what I think has happened in the game you paid the most attention to. All this will be changed shortly anyway. Right now all the civs have a setting for essentially guns vs. butter. IIRC the guns percentage going to your economy can vary from something like 40-70%. I expect what happened in the single game, or maybe two that you played, is that your civs setting was very low, and the guys to the south was very high. Perhaps I should have removed this variability for the demo, frankly I just forgot about it. So this is how someone with a smaller economic base can actually outproduce you in troops.

Keep in mind also, that actual economic development is happening. When you seize an underdeveloped square from a culture, it can take a long time for its productivity to raise to the point of what your initial people produce. Tweaking economic settings does in fact have a great effect, you probably were just not doing the right thing. It's no fault of yours that you weren't doing the right thing, since I haven't explained it. However, I think it's rather pointless to discuss something that is going to be history soon. There are better ways to invest our collective time IMO. By the way, research only has effect on economic things in the old model. There are in fact no military affects of technology implemented in the demo. Wait for demo 5.

On the defensive bonus...
Most of the defensive bonus originates in a force that is there being able to dig in and fortify. This has Nothing to do with who controls the province's hearts and minds, it has to do with who is actually there and can prepare defenses. In your example, they could easily have built a series of fortresses while you were regrouping, and have been defending using those. I don't want to take this too far, because all this will obviously be refined when the Real military model in detail gets implemented. This is just a quickie thing that I did in implementation.

Now I agree that what you say is correct for the defenses of the indigenous population, but that is usually small compared to the military force. Your people definitely wouldn't be aiding strongly in the defense of your homeland against you!