New and Modified Scenarios

[alms66]

No offense, of course, but I didn't expect any kind of major fix so soon. Even with the fix, however, I've realized that the natives as I had them in the file I sent you removed some of Clash's functionality. By having every square populated, the automated settling that we see in dawn could never occur (remember I want to include every feature of Clash in the tutorial version). Thus, I’ve decided to break the natives apart anyhow, something like what was originally planned, leaving some room for the civs to expand on their own. The performance increases you’ve implemented should still prove useful though. The jump from 25 to ~50 civs will certainly need all the help it can get.

As for the Sumerians, I'll see what I can do.

[alms66]

ACME Update:
It's been shelved for various reasons, though I'm going to reuse some of it in other scenarios.



These "other" scenarios are actually the reason I'm writing. As Clash grows in complexity it would be nice to have the tutorial scenario(s) grow with it. To that end, I'd like to see what every one thinks about having the following scenarios (and adding more as needed in the future):

Clash of Civilizations Tutorial: Economy
Clash of Civilizations Tutorial: Military
Clash of Civilizations Tutorial: Technology
Clash of Civilizations Tutorial: Social

Each of these would focus on an individual model, giving detailed accounts of how to use the interface and whatnot. If necessary, we could even break them down further, though I don't think it will be needed. I'm starting to think that these mini-tutorials would be a better approach than the one taken in Dawn (the all-in-one tutorial), both for the player and the scenario designer.

Dawn is a good scenario (although over-played by myself and probably others as well), but it misses many things which would be easier to add to a smaller scenario than the behemoth that Dawn is, so I think replacing it (and the social test, siege wars, etc.) with mini-scenarios, as described above, would be a good move for future development. What do you guys think?

Note: demo 8.1 could be a good place for em

In addition to these 'tutorial' scenarios, we would have others which give no advice, but are actual scenarios, that use all features of Clash, rather than teaching tools.

[LDiCesare]

Having separate tutorials is a good idea. Replacing dawn is ok if the tutorials prove better. But then Dawn could also be used as a "final tutorial". Replacing siegewars is not something I want because this scenario also acts as a very useful test for both sieges and militias.
The social scenario is intended to show how the social model works. If you can do it better, that's all right for me.
There is one thing that's worth noting, which is the order in which these tutorials should be played. If you do it this way, you should name the scenarios tutorial 1 - economics, tutorial 2 - military, etc. As hinted above, Dawn could be the "last", summary, tutorial.
It would also be good to have a separate button in the startup:
Currently you have "Select a scenario" and "Select a random scenario". We could expand that to ass a "Tutorial" button. This can't be done in xml right now though. There could even be a "Select a test scenario" button in which the reinforcementTest for instance would fit well (since it is totally uninteresting to play as a game), and maybe the siegewars too.

[Mark_Everson]

I think the deep-dive tutorials are a good idea. That will help a lot on covering the details of each model and interface. Personally I think we should maintain Dawn as an initial overview scenario. The purpose would be to introduce all the general functionality so that the player knows the foundation elements when doing the deep-dive tutorials. We could cut way back on some things in Dawn, esp the over-heavy econ discussion. That could be handled in an econ tutorial.

The reason I think we should keep Dawn first is that some people won't want to go through a bunch of tutorials to get the flavor. They will want to see if they like it after one quick test-drive.

I think that I should start a Demo 8.1 Planning thread, and we should pour the discussions about d8.1 goals into it. . .

[alms66]

I like your take on it Laurent, though Mark does bring up a good point about Dawn. If Dawn were the final scenario though, people could just skip ahead to it, I guess.

-Edit-

I'll go ahead and move this over to the 8.1 thread then.