Demo 7 Download and Comments

[Mark_Everson]

Just sheer laziness on my part. Since Demo 8 is coming up fairly soon, I'm inclined to wait. I think the BB software has gone through several revisions since we had problems with 150+ post threads, so it may be a non-issue. But I do agree its probably safest to keep up the old practices.

[ssfsx17]

The road interface is kinda clumsy. I found that creating road routes was a )(*#$*&) pain in the butt. I liked the original Civ style of simply either having roads in a tile or not, and the road graphics automatically show connectedness. I mean, if you want to reduce micromangement, the current road interface is a bit of a failure.

I discovered that, as long as you make sure that you have about 7 warriors or so by turn 50, you can basically avoid getting the horses and build up your civilization into a really humongous powerhouse. Then, by, say, turn 175 when you finally decide to get the horses, you can actually finish off the invaders with floods of warriors.

I think a good idea for the next Demo is to include a "sandbox" scenario where there are no invading threats. Instead, the player simply develops his/her nation up and can explore the map for various special resources all around the world.

[Mark_Everson]

Thanks for the feedback ssfsx17! We are probably going to go to a civ-like road indicator soon. (But not requiring all those Annoying workers.) It's discussed around here somewhere.

[Martin the Dane]

ssfsx17 the sandbox sounds like a good idea, Mark, what about using that idea, coupled with an intro to economy and population migration?

And btw, ssfsx17, don't count on the dawn scenario staying as cooperative as it is now the idea for that scenario is/will be defence, so ......

I'd like to get back into the scenarioes soon, as I don't speak java, and don't have a current testbed version, I feel kindoff ... outside the loop.

Martin the Dane.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Martin, good to see you 'round these parts again. I will make a new testbed version soon. How soon would you be ready to use it? If it's immediate, I will make every effort to do it this weekend. If not, just let me know when you're likely to be able to get to it.

[Martin the Dane]

I'll not have any time this week-end, but from some time next week, I'll be able to start. For the two weeks around easter I'll probably have quite a lot of sparetime that I can devote to Clash.

[Stormbeard]

Since I have been instructed to post my issues about getting the demo (or as I would prefer to call it, Version 0.7.2) to work, I will post them here

Well, I have tried to do it long before, and failed. Now, I have tried more recently and met with more success. However, I now have a dilemma.

Section 1; Windows is EVIL:

Because I had gotten the impression that this game was oriented at Windows, I had attempted to follow the instructions on the Download page on the site. Then, I had issues with unzipping (don't ask) which were solved by using my GNU-Linux Fedora Core computer. Then I looked at the 2 emerging files and did not know what to do with them- running the BAT file did nothing, because my #(@&%^Windows failed to get that .jar file open. I had downloaded the JRE package as instructed. Installed it as it wanted.

Section 2; The dangers of Sun Microsystems.

I then tried attacking it in my Linux mode. I managed to manually open the .jar file, but now I am faced with another dilemma. I know not what to do next. The jar has extracted into a folder tree that apparently contains all needed to run clash (from images to scenarios). However, it lacks something to run.

[Mark_Everson]

Once you have installed the JRE you should be able to double-click on the .jar file, and it should run the demo. What flavor of Windows are you running?

[Dale]

Have no idea if this has been listed or not, I checked the bug list and couldn't see it.

Dawn scenario, built my 3rd warrior and in the same turn allocated 1000 colonists to it (to move up near the wheet as instructed).

The colonists turn up on a different warrior, not the selected unit.

Piccy attached to show you what I mean.

Otherwise, thumbs up.

Dale

[Stormbeard]

I had Windows 2000. I had in fact installed JRE, I decided to blame it on Windows (my windows doesn't have WinZip, so it's really skeletal) and move on. Now I'm trying to get it to work on Linux.

As I said, I extracted the ".jar" file, and then looked inside and found no central executable file. What do you do to run clash in a testbed?

[Mark_Everson]

Thanks Dale, I'll try to fix it this weekend. No guarantees though!

Originally posted by Stormbeard
As I said, I extracted the ".jar" file, and then looked inside and found no central executable file. What do you do to run clash in a testbed?

The .jar file is Itself executable once you have installed the JRE on a Win system. Just double-click on it. The testbed runs Clash starting with a batch file. If you'd like I can send you that. It is a zip that needs to be unzipped.

[LDiCesare]

If you can't run the jar by double clicking it, inside the zip there's a class called game.manager.GameMain (it must be written in a file called manifesto or something like this). You can run 'java game.manager.GameMain' if you set the classpath variable correctly (depending on java version, under unix, it can be export CLASSPATH=whatver:thejar.jar, or java -classpath blah.jar).

[Reynard]

I just started playing CoC a little before midnight...it's 4 am now hehe. I finished the tutorial scenario(after finding out that you don't follow it) and then tackled the fertile crescent, first with one of the easy ones and then Jericho. It was a bit tricky playing as Jericho but I found it much more interesting than Civ-style strategy...it was exactly what I was looking for.

But I noticed what seems like a huge flaw in the current tech design doing the fertile crescent scenario....(dunno if anyone has mentioned it yet, there are so many replies in this thread)

Basically, if you get enough food tech, it'll snowball and you'll start gaining population absurdly quickly, which means more tech, etc.. By turn 200 or so I was able to set my warrior production to 1 percent and pump out 20 or 30 of them. Similarly, your provinces soon crawl out to cover the map at a rate of one or more every turn. My population, when I finally decided to call it quits, went into the hundreds of millions, maybe the billions. Obviously not a very realistic result, considering that it was still ~4000 BC

[Mark_Everson]

Hey Reynard, thanks for your feedback, and glad to hear you basically liked the demo. Yeah, we know that the tech approach in the demo isn't balanced. There didn't seem to be much point to doing extensive balancing until more of the tech model was fleshed out. Achieving balance so that there aren't opportunties for tech run-away will indeed be a challenge with the model as designed, but we'll get it right!

[LDiCesare]

Althoug Reynard's point is relevant, I think the flaw is not so much in the tech system as in the pop growth model. The current pop growth is dependant on food only and should be kept in check by plague when overpopulation occurs. Even simple limits on growth a la CtP2 could work here: You'd have a max population in a square based on some sanitation tech level, and growth would be stunted progressively as you come near the max population.