Demo 7 Download and Comments

[tniem]

Ok, thanks for the responses guys. When I played, I found the horses but it didn't tell me what to do from there. I didn't get a chance to replay the demo today (will hopefully have time this weekend). When I find the horses, what was I supposed to do? Set up a new colony on the horses? Research them in some way? Or should the game have given me a popup when I found the horses?

[tniem]

I replayed the demo tonight and finally defeated it. Thanks for all the help guys! I found out what I did wrong. I never went directly on top of the horse, I thought by simply seeing it with my unit that was all I had to do. So, wow, was I stupid and the game kept going waiting for me to go directly on that map square to trigger the next event. Besides my stupidity the only thing that I could see you changing is that after so many turns of an idiot, such as my self, wandering around you tell them to go directly on the horse in square ???x???. That would be the only quick suggestion.

The other quick question I have before I start looking into the other scenarios you guys have included is about cancelling movement and road commands. Is there a way to do this? I have been trying to figure that out and cannot. But how do I keep my troops from moving after I accidently hit the wrong square for them to move to?

Thanks in advance.

[LDiCesare]

You can cancel unit orders. Select the taskforce in the taskforce frame, use right-mouse-button, and Cancel Orders. I don't think you can cancel roads, however?

[Mark_Everson]

Hi tniem, glad to hear it worked. We'll have to try to be more explicit next time so we don't torture the playtesters!

Gary did put in a way to cancel road orders! If you are in Roads mode (Roads button has been clicked, and current road orders show) a right-click anywhere will cancel all road orders.

Good Luck! I'm off on vacation and will only be able to visit the forurms sporadically...

Cya, Everyone!

Mark

[Richard Bruns]

More Comments

Jericho:

Why is the farming tech inactive? This would have been the perfect scenario to test this technology.

The bottom part of the map seems cut off. I have a unit in a tile that is halfway visible, and I can't scroll down more.

There seems to be no victory message. I've wiped everyone out and the game is still running.

I have discovered an abusive strategy. It allows one small army to plunder an entire enemy civ. What I'll do is march one warrior into the outskirts of their civ, claiming the square. Then I have the warrior pick up all the people and move to another square. I then pick up all the people in the second square. Since the first square is empty, they will send about a thousand people to colonize it. I then march my warrior back to the first square and pick up those new colonists, leaving the empty second square which will also be colonized again.

This can continue until their population is too low to colonize anymore. At the end of this process, their entire civilization had about 4000 people and my lone warrior was escorting over 11,000 of their people. They had a big task force on their capital, but those armies just sat back and watch me steal all of their people.

Often, they would colonize a square that my armies were actually standing on. That seems wrong.

I eventually took over their civ with a bigger TF, and resettled all their people in the squares I had taken them from. But I could have just as easily hauled all those people back to my civ as slaves, or simply thrown my lone army against their capital TF and watched the majority of their civ's population evaporate.

I know that slave raiding was a historical fact, and we should leave some of it. But this was too easy and too overpowering. This is more evidence that the people of a civ should resist invasion, forming militias and guerilla units. Another possible way to deal with the problem would be to have the people run away from the enemy units and migrate to places where their own civ has armies. At least prevent them from actively migrating onto squares that have enemy armies.

----
The Atilla scenario is horribly slow. It took nearly two minutes for the civ econ orders window to load up. When I did get it up, it took nearly as much time to register the changes. The scenario is basically unplayable. Obviously there are severe scaling problems in the engine. This does not bode well.

[Mark_Everson]

Re: More Comments

Originally posted by Richard Bruns
Why is the farming tech inactive? This would have been the perfect scenario to test this technology.

Hi Richard, we just didn't think of it... most of the focus was on getting the dawn1 tutorial scenario running. It's easy to do, and is a natural to add next time around. If you want to mess with the scenario file, you could do it yourself by copying the tech from dawn1. Thanks for the other bugs and issues, I'll put them on the list when I get back

I have discovered an abusive strategy. It allows one small army to plunder an entire enemy civ.

Good idea, hadn't thought of that exploit. We'll have to discuss how to plug it as design moves forward. If you want, you could put the same points over in the colonization thread for detailed discussion there.

The Atilla scenario is horribly slow. (snip) Obviously there are severe scaling problems in the engine. This does not bode well.

It was slow for me too, although not nearly that bad. The problem is that this isn't a good time for optimization since a lot of things stilll need to be worked out. We need to figure out the best place in which to put our efforts, and in terms of optimizing for speed, I don't think we're where we can make a good decision yet on a lot of factors. I'll work on a faster way to handle the econ orders when I refactor the econ code. We can also keep these issues in mind for the new econ interface so that those issues don't recur. If there are scaling issues, we'll handle them if they become critical. For now, with your computer, I guess just ignore attila...

[manurein]

Hi all !!
Maybe some of you remember me

Just a quick word to let u know that I downloaded demo 7 and could check that it works on my system (an old PII notebook with Win2K), howwever I could not find time to playtest it.

Keep up the good work guys, I left this team for some time now but I'm still very commited to observe your progresses and am waiting impatiently for every new release !!

Best regards - Manu

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Manu! Good to hear from you

I'm looking forward to seeing what you have to say about the demo! Unfortunately the social and government model stuff that is the descendant of your original model isn't ready for prime time yet. It should be there in one of the next two demos though...

Cya,

Mark

[Mark_Everson]

D7.1 Features and Tips

Demo 7.1 is now out! Here is a brief description of what's new and notable. :-)

Features:

1. Ship transport of task forces is now implemented.

There is one ship fleet for each side present in the delenda scenario. You can use them to transport units very rapidly. Here is the procedure for loading be land TF to a naval TF:
a. Select the naval TF that you want to load troops onto
b. Right click on the TF that you want to load, and pick "Load to selected TF"
The loaded land TF will now be greyed out to signify that it is carried on board the naval TF
To Unload, right click on either the carried or carrying TF, and pick "Unload from selected TF"

2. You can now disband units, which is one of the requests we had from Demo 7.

This helps a lot in reducing army supplies support costs for units that are not needed. Usage is described more fully in the Dawn tutorial scenario. You can't disband an entire TF, this command only works on single units which can be within a TF. To disband the unit right click on it, and pick "Disband the unit completely". If you already have people in the square or the unit is disbanded, then part of the unit's manpower will go into the populace. Otherwise the unit's manpower just disappears.

Minor Changes:

1. The Dawn tutorial scenario has been updated in numerous small ways to explain some new features, and further explain the items where we got questions on the Demo 7 version.

2. Moving a TF now works slightly differently. As before, you press the Move button to initiate movement. Now you can select any number of waypoints for the unit movement by clicking on squares. However, at the end of giving each TF its move orders you must click the "End Move" button. For those who have played the game before, we'd like to hear if you think this way is better than the old approach, which didn't require an "end move" button.

Tips:

1. In the Jericho scenario, everyone else hates Jericho. So if the player wants an easy game they should take anyone but Jericho, whereas Jericho is the one to take for a real challenge. It is quite hard to win as Jericho, but it can be done!

2. You shouldn't play Attila unless you have a fast computer or are patient. It can run quite slowly on older computers. We are looking into fixing that.

3. At present you can't win the Delenda scenario. So don't expect a victory message!

4. In the Dawn tutorial scenario you'll frequently need to run five to ten turns after achieving all the objectives before you see the victory message. As before, the Dawn tutorial is the first thing you should play!


The Team really wants to hear what you think about the Demo! Comments and criticisms are solicited. Before you type a lot of detailed comments, you might want to check and see which are already in the bug or feature requests lists near the top of this thread.

Please go to the top of this thread for information on Demo 7 features, and a link to the download.

Temporarily, I'm going to put a link here to the new zip for D7.1. This is Only the zip. To find what you should do with it you still need to read the decription. Just used the links below:

Download Instructions, don't download the zip from there, use the Demo 7.1 Zip.

[Nebula]

I downloaded clash 7 and 7.1 and both run real slow on my computer. For instance when I press the mouse on a square it takes 2 seconds for the cursor to appear. When I try to scroll the map with the minimap it also takes 2 seconds for it to update the screen. This delay happens more when I for instance select a unit an want to move it. It makes the game unplayable.

When I press the right mouse button on units a pop up window appears to the left upper side of the screen.

I havent played it further for the slowdown is really irritating.

I hope this slowdown can be fixed for I want to play this game.

[LDiCesare]

Hi Nebula thanks for trying. What machine do you have, and which jvm (java) do you use? With a bit of luck a better jvm would do the trick. Also, if you tried Attila, it IS slow to the point of being unplayable, but other scens are better.

[Nebula]

I have a AMD 1333 with a geforce 2 mx and 256mb of memory. I have one of the latest Java runtimes installed.

I tried the first and last screnario and these do run at normal speed.

Does the slowdown have to do with the amount of units in the game?

[LDiCesare]

I don't think it is the number of units. I once made so many units I got OutOfMemoryErrors very often and it didn't run too slow. It wasn't in great shape either, but only the new turns took some time. I think it is the economics which take a lot of time. It might have to do with the pahfinding too, but that comes from an old profiling I did, and I can't see who calls that pathfinding. So basically, it is more the number of populated squares than the number of units that causes slowdowns. We know we must investigate that, but since the economics code needs some rewriting (because the architecture of the code is not to the liking of Gary, whose judgement I trust), we hope some of the problems will fix themselves that way. We also know the econ GUI takes some time to show up (particularly on lower end machines), but, again, this is a part of the code that must be rewritten. Unless you tell us it is very beautiful and ergonomic, but, until now, noone did.

[Nebula]

I am playing the 4th screnario and it plays ok. I got beaten at about turn 20 and lost the game. I will need to take my time and learn to play the game for at this point it is just a puzzle.

Keep up the good work.

[Mark_Everson]

Hey Nebula, thanks for checking out the Demo. Your best bet is to play the Dawn tutorial scenario. It doesn't explain everything, but about 80% of what you really need to know is in it. Looking forward to hearing what you think after you've gone through the tutorial...

Cya,

Mark