Demo 7 Download and Comments

[TheCid]

About annexing territory:

I believe that when having a unit go over a territory should not be enough to keep it in the long term. As things stand now, each tile that a unit goes over, becomes his nation's and as a result, the resources produced benefit its own population. However, in reality, when a raiding army goes through a land (like Hannibal for instance), as soon as he's far enough... the resources (and tile ownership from the game perspective) would revert to the original owner's.

I believe that to keep a territory, we need to keep a military presence within some distance (say 2 tiles) otherwise the tile should automatically revert to original owner's until such a time as the population of the tile has switched allegiance to the new civ. This way, in the Hannibal scenario, Hannibal would only control as much territory as was near his army. No take away all the resource-generating squares from the romans just by having walked on them.

On the other hand, I just love how colonization works, where we can send troops in to escord inhabitants and carry them elsewhere. This more realistically depicts some itnentional colonization of territories, where for instance, rome would settled conquered land with loyal citizens to speed-up their assimilation. Similarly, the population of newly conquered lands, has been frequently disseminated throughout empires for the same purpose... and raids have been made on other nations' lands to seize people to use as slaves. It give a whole lot of realism to Clash, I think.

[Mark_Everson]

Hey TheCid:

I reposted your idea on annexing territory in the From Expansion and Settlement in Clash thread. I hope that's ok with you. That is where the recent discussion on this topic has been, starting around Mid-December 2002. You might want to look at some of the solutions proposed within the last month, and let us know what looks best to you. And of course you can propose any further ideas you'd like.

Originally posted by TheCid
On the other hand, I just love how colonization works, where we can send troops in to escord inhabitants and carry them elsewhere.

Glad to hear it! We think its a strength of Clash that we can include some of the historically-used solutions to the problems of empire.

[Richard Bruns]

Am I the only one who gets totally slaughtered in the Dawn tutorial? I do what they they me to do, getting wheat and horses and making that colony. I fend off two smaller barbarians form the south but then a huge barbarian army comes from the north and wipes me out.

I played the Jericho scenario as the third town and found it incredibly easy to take over the map. Everything was basically undefended, as they were all off attacking Jericho. There seemed to be a bug, though. I was informed about all combats that involved the Jericho civ, even though I had no way of seeing what was happening down there.

[vovan]

Originally posted by Richard Bruns
Am I the only one who gets totally slaughtered in the Dawn tutorial? I do what they they me to do, getting wheat and horses and making that colony. I fend off two smaller barbarians form the south but then a huge barbarian army comes from the north and wipes me out.

No, Richard, you are not the only one. It is funny, I have yet to win the tutorial, even though I was able to win the other scenarios.

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Richard Bruns
Am I the only one who gets totally slaughtered in the Dawn tutorial

I lost it too when I did some testing before D7.2, I'd thought it was a fluke. One thing you should do is Forgo discovering the horses early. Just do something else for about 10-20 turns when you're told to go look for them.

Unfortunately the horses being found is a trigger for the big barb invasions, and if you find them too fast, you can have little chance of survival.

Hope that helps. We'll fix that for the next demo.

[LDiCesare]

There seemed to be a bug, though. I was informed about all combats that involved the Jericho civ, even though I had no way of seeing what was happening down there.

My fault. I disabled the check to show only those which interested you because they were even more buggy (if your unit had left the square, you didn't see the report, that included if you had been wiped out).

I manage to win Dawn, but that is not always easy. Sometimes, I get wiped out, but the scenario remains possible to win, though maybe harder than it used to be.

[Richard Bruns]

I still can´t win the tutorial. They come whether or not I dicover horses, and they have the attack strength of about eight warriors. I wouldn´t be able to fight them off unless I had been building warriors the entire time. Finding horses obviously doesn´t work either, since I can´t raise the tech high enough to build chariots in time. When I tried to uproot my population and run, they hunted me down and wiped me out.

Tutorials are not supposed to be this hard. The point is that winning should be guaranteed if you follow the instructions. By contrast, winning SiegeWars was quite easy. I do like the way that the siege took so long, even though I had a vastly superior force.

A few more comments:

I can always get the game to run no matter where it is on the computer, so you might want to get rid of that notice saying it has to be on the desktop.

The market economy seems buggy. I switched to it on the first turn in Dawn and got some "interesting" results. At one point the wages for the production sector were -3.44. Were the people paying the government for the privilege to work? It also led to insane amounts of growth compared to the traditional economy, 239.4 percent in one case. I think this was related to the expansion into a new square; things settled down after a while but wages were negative for quite some time. Een on turn 12, wages in the production sector were 0.04 and wages in the service sector were 6.52, even though the price of production was higher than both food and resources.

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Richard Bruns
I still can´t win the tutorial. They come whether or not I dicover horses, and they have the attack strength of about eight warriors. I wouldn´t be able to fight them off unless I had been building warriors the entire time. Finding horses obviously doesn´t work either, since I can´t raise the tech high enough to build chariots in time. When I tried to uproot my population and run, they hunted me down and wiped me out.

Thanks for the report Richard. I've verified that it's as bad as reported. . . As you say there are Serious problems I don't know what happened, but my guess is somehow the big barb event stuff got changed accidentally when I edited the scenario last, or a bug creapt into the event stuff. It is sufficiently serious that I'll make it my top mod priority to get a fix out. Unfortunately I've only got a few hour to work this weekend, so a fix may have to wait till early next week. BTW if you want to take a shot at changing the scenario file, in principle you could do it yourself. Just edit delenda.xml.

Tutorials are not supposed to be this hard. The point is that winning should be guaranteed if you follow the instructions.

Well, it wasn't intended to be that way. . .

A few more comments:

I can always get the game to run no matter where it is on the computer, so you might want to get rid of that notice saying it has to be on the desktop.

Thanks, that's useful info.

The market economy seems buggy. I switched to it on the first turn in Dawn and got some "interesting" results. At one point the wages for the production sector were -3.44. Were the people paying the government for the privilege to work? It also led to insane amounts of growth compared to the traditional economy, 239.4 percent in one case. I think this was related to the expansion into a new square; things settled down after a while but wages were negative for quite some time. Een on turn 12, wages in the production sector were 0.04 and wages in the service sector were 6.52, even though the price of production was higher than both food and resources.

Thanks, I'll look into it. Sorry this was more frustrating than it should've been. Thanks for the info!

[Richard Bruns]

It wasn´t frustrating at all. Already playing the Clash demos feels much more like a game than a debugging/testing exercise. I am having fun playing it, and I have seen worse flaws in finished, profesional games. I think that in a few more demos we will easily have something that is good as Civ2.

[Richard Bruns]

I just finished playing as Romans in delenda. I had a lot of fun at first. The fight over Spain was intense, and i never knew what would happen when I pressed the end turn button. I was surprised by how quickly fights went, armies disappeared entirely in one turn. You must have tweaked the military model, because fights used to last a lot longer. I had captured Seville and built walls around it, and it spent a lot of time under siege. Marsaglia changed hands a lot. But I finally emerged victorious. And that is when things started to go wrong.

Roads are incredibly easy to build in this scenario. I built a road from Rome to Marsaglia to Sevile to help troop movements, each section taking only one turn. Then the GUI kept hounding me, saying that I had a lot of road building funds left over. So after a while, I tried an experiment and ordered a road from Seville to Carthage, but set aside no funds. It popped up in one turn, apparently from the leftover funds from earlier roads. That should IMO be counted as a bug/cheat.

I gathered up all of my troops and prepared for the final assault on Carthage. It was a massive army, several massive armies actually. I kept one on the straight of gibraltar while the other marched all over Spain taking over all the squares.

Each turn while this was going on, I would get constant messages saying "Combat in [0, 14] flat won by Romans" Apparently they were sending kamikaze units one at a time against my massive armies, accomplishing nothing.

Then I attacked Carthage on turn 80. Here is what happened:

-----------------------------------------
Running Turn 80, 178AD
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
COMBAT Turn 80, 178AD
Combat in [5, 13] flat Carthagewon by Romans
Wall health at 57 %

  Carthaginian armies 
 lost 40 health in long-range fights
    Attack: 253586 down to 148818
    Defense: 22 down to 22
    Health: 3223 down to 1866
    Cost: 662 down to 351

  Roman armies 
 lost 306 health in long-range fights
    Attack: 3133797 down to 2151257
    Defense: 23 down to 22
    Health: 50901 down to 38708
    Cost: 7795 down to 5844

Turn 80, 178AD complete
-----------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------
Running Turn 81, 183AD
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is null
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
COMBAT Turn 81, 183AD
Combat in [5, 13] flat Carthagewon by Romans
Walls have been breached by besiegers.

  Carthaginian armies 
 lost 87 health in long-range fights
    Attack: 497016 down to 7579
    Defense: 23 down to 22
    Health: 6866 down to 92
    Cost: 1362 down to 15

  Roman armies 
 lost 666 health in long-range fights
    Attack: 2170116 down to 157670
    Defense: 22 down to 14
    Health: 38708 down to 11291
    Cost: 5844 down to 1560

Turn 81, 183AD complete
-----------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------
Running Turn 82, 188AD
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Carthage
Outcome: winner is Carthage
Outcome: winner is Carthage
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
COMBAT Turn 82, 188AD
Combat in [5, 13] flat Carthagewon by Romans
Wall health at 0 %

  Carthaginian armies 
 lost 1227 health in long-range fights
    Attack: 233300 down to 4869
    Defense: 23 down to 22
    Health: 3266 down to 59
    Cost: 616 down to 10

  Roman armies 
 lost 642 health in long-range fights
    Attack: 159596 down to 24888
    Defense: 14 down to 14
    Health: 11291 down to 1827
    Cost: 1560 down to 252

Turn 82, 188AD complete
-----------------------------------------

Notice that I started with a power greater than theirs by over an order of magnitude, and I had over a dozen siege weapons. But I was utterly and completely annihlated. I quit the game then, because by this point it was taking aout half a minute to process each turn. These computers are pretty old, and apparently the game takes up a lot of overhead, which seems to increase the longer the game is played. The computer was reading off the hard disk constantly. So I gave up.

Basically, something is wrong with either the siege model or the GUI, and the game should not be run on anything more than three years old. But it was still fun.

[LDiCesare]

Thanks for posting the log.
Several things happened here that I'll explain. I'll also make the same proposals I just did in the Siege thread:

Turn 80:
Rome attacks even though walls aren't breached. This is silly but is the current state of the code. They shouldn't but if I let them wait, there may be sieges lasting forever without any fight ever occurring. Fights should eventually occur because the defenders will make a sortie or starve. Without starving, I can't model that correctly so I wait for some code to handle food to correct that.

Turn 81:
Walls are breached. That is good. The results are quite correct in this turn, as the Carthaginians are reduced to 92 health against several thousands. They are almost wiped out. So this round is good for me. I could change it however, so that the Carthaginians should effectively be destroyed then (allow flanking around breached walls).

Turn 82:
Carthage health starts at 3000+. This means some units have been built in Carthage this turn. Note this happened on turn 81 too.
That makes a difference, but not all.
The amount of damage taken by Romans is huge, probably because some retreated. They shouldn't have retreated if they had flanked because they'd have dealt more damage and suffered less in proportion.

So I think 3 things can be done to palliate the problems:
1) Don't attack unless walls are breached. This will wait for a better food model, however.
2) Cause breached walls to be destroyed fully, and allow defenders to be flanked if the wall is breached. Should end fights faster.
3) (Need more feedback on this one): Prevent reinforcements to be raised in besieged squares. Units should be built somewhere else, and not miraculously appear behind the walls. (Note: To be really efficient, I'd have to actually know inside a square who is in and who is outside the walls, which, for squares-in-squares reasons, links with the food issue.)

Road building:
I agree with your issues. The UI about wasted econ is annoying. Probably we could make it better by
1- not displaying message if the current econ order is at 0%
2- not allowing builds outside one's territory (though I'd allow planning roads there)
3- putting a minimum time delay between order and construction of the road.

About deadly fights: Fights became deadlier when the elements were changed from an element with a fixed number of men to an element is a variable amount of men (that is very implementation dependant). Do you think it is better this way or was better before? I can tweak either the code or the defense values (or both) in order to get longer fights.

About computer speed:
The game frees little memory because it keeps lots of windows (all the event windows for instance) and logs. There is also some kind of memory leak in the econ UI panels which is particularly apparent on Mac. I'll try to meet Pierre Grignon again to see if we can make some sense out of it.
The good point is we did nothing to have good performance, so things can only get better.

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Richard Bruns
It wasn´t frustrating at all. Already playing the Clash demos feels much more like a game than a debugging/testing exercise. I am having fun playing it, and I have seen worse flaws in finished, profesional games. I think that in a few more demos we will easily have something that is good as Civ2.

I'm Really glad to hear that Richard!

Originally posted by LDiCesare
So I think 3 things can be done to palliate the problems:
1) Don't attack unless walls are breached. This will wait for a better food model, however.
2) Cause breached walls to be destroyed fully, and allow defenders to be flanked if the wall is breached. Should end fights faster.
3) (Need more feedback on this one): Prevent reinforcements to be raised in besieged squares. Units should be built somewhere else, and not miraculously appear behind the walls. (Note: To be really efficient, I'd have to actually know inside a square who is in and who is outside the walls, which, for squares-in-squares reasons, links with the food issue.)

I think we need to work something out on at least most of these issues for D7.3. I think fixing 1 somehow is critical. I'd say lets discuss how to do it the right way of square-within-square for cities, and take it from there. That should also allow solution of 3 with fairly minor code changes. Lets discuss this stuff in the relevant thread(s).

Road building:
I agree with your issues. The UI about wasted econ is annoying. Probably we could make it better by
1- not displaying message if the current econ order is at 0%
2- not allowing builds outside one's territory (though I'd allow planning roads there)
3- putting a minimum time delay between order and construction of the road.

Agree with 1, we'll just get rid of the message for now. I still disagree with #2. That would mean that even a single square of desert or other uninhabitable area cannot have roads. But I guess as a compromise we could only allow building one or two squares outside the civ. I guess we should have done 3 the last time. We decided to skip it at the last minute.

[Martin the Dane]

First I have a comment for the above post: I do not think it should be impossible to build roads outside one's territory, but it should not be possible to build roads on enemy teretory, unless you have an army there to protect the roadbuilders.

Now to the Dawn scenario:

I have played Dawn disregarding the advices, in order to test it, and have a few comments and suggestions. (my notes can be seen at the end of this post)

First I took my time discovering wheat, and did not follow the advice to go searching for the horses, and waited to see what happend. I was attacked by the first northern barbarians at turn 52 killing the last of that unit, after massive spendings on warriors, in turn 57.

Then nothing happend for a long time and by turn 100 I had a thriving population and economy, in my two provinces. So I sent my smallest warrior to the NE in search of the horses, sighting them but not going into the square until turn 116. By then I had a nice sized army, still waiting for those desert tribes.

Shortly after "discovering" the horses I got the first desert warning. A few turns later they kamikazied against my warriors.

I got the Second Northern and Desert warnings 1 and 2 turns after discovering Chariots respectively.

Now to my advices.

First let the player have some time after killing the wheat holding barbarian, to build up the economy, and learn a little about economy, roads, etc. Then either at a set turn or at a population size the first southern tribe is triggered, as the point of this is to learn something about defence.

After killing the first desert unit, the user should hear a rumor that som of the surrounding tribes are getting restless, so it will be a good idea to build some more wariors, after killing either the second desert unit or the first hill unit, some survivors talk about the horses.

By now the player should have explored the surrounding a bit, but not as far as the horses, and should be urged to send a unit to investigate the horse rumors. It might be an idea to have some barbarian unit gard the horses. Then after finding them, a third barbarian should strike emphasising the urgency of developing some war-use for the horses.

Finally leave the player just enough time to build up a substantial army in time to save Numantia from the invaders from the North.

I know some of this is the intention og the scenario, but as it is now is not the case. As the more masive attacks are triggered by discovering the horses, the game becomes a race to build those chariots, and not a learning experience of the game.

After looking at the scenaio .xml I see that the scenario is in fact largely as I have outlined above, but the advices are not in acordance with it.

How do I go about changing the scenario, and would this be any help. I have yet to figure out the economy system of the game, so I would not be able to do anything about that part.

Turn   15:	Defeated the grain holding barbarians. Did not go after the horses to se what happends.
Turn   52:	Northern Babarian, finally killed the last by turn 57, after a massive 200% wariorbuilding.
Turn 100:	Stil no desert tribes, so I'll move a unit NE
Turn 116:	Went into the horse square and discovered them Tech-level Horses 0.3 Due to research into domestication Farming-level: well I forgot to check that
Turn 117:	Horses Level 2.7 Farming Level 3.5 Pop 86707
Turn 119:	First Desert Warning
Turn 121:	Desert tribe does not attack Horses 2.8 Prod 0.3 Farming 3.6000001 Pop 97134
Turn 122:	First Desert tribe kamakazied agains my 2781 warriors killing 124 of my troopes
Turn 123:	Alocated 60% to Domestication research keeping, 30% on Manufacturing Tech, Setting Food to 0%
Turn 124:	Horses 2.9
Turn 125:	Farming 3.7 Metalurgy 0.1
Turn 126:	Horses 3.0 Production 0.4 (econ view bug: no Chariots, until reopening it) Starting to build Chariots (1/turn)
Turn 127:	Built 1 Chariot in main Province
Turn 128:	Built 1 Chariot in each Province That's 2! Econ says 1 Recieved 2nd Northern Warning
Turn 129:	Built 2 Chariots in Provinc 1 and 1 in Province 2. Econ says 1.1/turn Recieved 2nd Desert Warning
Turn 130:	1 Chariots built in each province. Spotted both north an desert tribe
Turn 131:	Northern Barbarians killed my picket and moved opposit, well they split their forces. 2 Chariots built in Province 1 Econ still says 1.0-1.1 Stopped building Chariots
Turn 132:	Wiped out the desert tribe Killed most of the first Northern tribe army
Turn 133:	Killed rest of first Northern army Killed Northern main force one Northern Unit left, went for my northern province (Events window says turn 134 while main window says 133 same as log)
Turn 134:	No fighting, just getting into possition
Turn 135:	Wiped out the last Northern barbarian.
Turn 136:	Victory message. pop 127567

Edited to remove blank lines hope it works

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Martin the Dane
Now to the Dawn scenario:

I have played Dawn disregarding the advices, in order to test it, and have a few comments and suggestions. (my notes can be seen at the end of this post)

First I took my time discovering wheat, and did not follow the advice to go searching for the horses, and waited to see what happend.

Good idea!

I know some of this is the intention og the scenario, but as it is now is not the case. As the more masive attacks are triggered by discovering the horses, the game becomes a race to build those chariots, and not a learning experience of the game.

After looking at the scenaio .xml I see that the scenario is in fact largely as I have outlined above, but the advices are not in acordance with it.

How do I go about changing the scenario, and would this be any help.

Yes, that would be Very helpful, and I'd like to do that as soon as practical. I think its important to put out a fix for Dawn soon. However recent code updates have resulted in Dawn already having been updated for the newly revised tech system. So we need to wait until that is functional to get your changes going.

I'll ship off a version of the Testbed to you as soon as the code and scenario files are ready. The testbed is basically an unzipped version of the jar file, and will allow you to change the Dawn scenario at will for testing.

As you suggest it would be beneficial to stretch things out a bit in the beginning. We sometimes have triple bulletins when the standard should be one or at most two in a turn. I am definitely in favor of making the scenario less frantic, and more of an easy learning experience.

Thanks for doing the research, Martin, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you can do to straighten out the scenario!

BTW the reason for the large blank space in your post is that each end-of-line in your table is read as a CR in the forum softward. If you want tables to not have the leading white space you need to run all the table html together as one long line.

[Richard Bruns]

I think I prefer the old military model, with longer fights. I noticed in this game that units seem to suffer pretty severe attrition even if they won, and that they never replaced the men that they lost. What this led to was "Expendable Unit Syndrone" where all my men are reduced to numbers and cannon fodder. Especially in antiquity, a unit that is not completely destroyed should last for a very long time. Roman legions, for example, had long distinguished histories, and until late in the Empire it was rare indeed for one to be wiped out complely. Is there even any way to heal an injured unit?

Eventually I would like to see units gain experience as they win fights. This could be as simple as a bonus to Military Tactics that only affects the power of that unit.

---

It should definitely be impossible to build roads in enemy territory. After all, if you have an army there to protect the builders, the game calls it your territory. I think that roads through uninhabited land should also be prohibited. A good coherent model for road builidng would be:

You use the current interface to plan a road. Funds are allocated automatically, as per military tactics. If the road is in a province you control, the money comes out of the province economy and it is automatically built. Otherwise, you need to move a unit with engineers over the road builidng spot, and the money for the roads comes out of that unit´s supplies.

Obviously we don´t have unit supplies introduced yet, so until then a road can be built from civ funds if a unit is on top of the planned site.

---

One problem with the game that occurs to me as I play the demos is that we have no explicit way of modeling the scale of a square. A tiny square representing a fraction of the fertile crescent is treated the same way as a square on the world map that represents a vastly larger area. This is why road building is so much easier in the Roman scenarios, because it costs the same even though the squares theoretically represent much more land. The population numbers are bigger, but the cost of a road is still the same. Things like movement time and road cost should scale up as the map scale changes.