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PowerSLICs 1.80 finished and available

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  • PowerSLICs 1.80 finished and available

    Dear all,


    Please find below the feature list of PowerSLIs 1.80 for Call To Power 1.2 which should be ready for downloading very soon at Apolyton. Please read the Readme-File for more details (especially on installing) when downloading. PowerSLICs 1.80 is an intermediate solution to make PowerSLICs patch 1.2 compatible. There will be sooner or later (more later than sooner) a PowerSLICs 2.0 version with a bunch of new features. And here is the feature list for PowerSLICs 1.80:


    1. Public Work reminder
    -----------------------
    I belong to those people who do not look constantly on the public work status and therefore sometimes collect huge masses of PW before actually using them. This MOD will give you a friendly reminder in case you have too much PW unused which is not good for your productivity (working in Market Research, we like to call such things "opportunity costs"). So from now on, CTP will bang on your head as soon as you have too much unused PW. The absolute level needed to trigger this warning depends on the current player’s terrain improvement building abilities. To put it in words, this warning will be triggered in general when having 1000 PW unused. The following Advances will increase the amount of PW needed to trigger the warning as with those advances new and significantly more expensive terrain improvement options will be available:
    Beginning with Stoneworking: 1500
    Beginning with Seatravel: 2000
    Beginning with Electricity: 2500
    Beginning with Intelligent Materials: 3000
    Beginning with Superconductor: 3500
    Beginning with Robotics or Genetic Tailoring: 5000
    I have changed this to my previous MOD as people have correctly telling me that my warnings pop up too often in later stages of the game. This flexible solution should put of the necessary PW level to the ”correct” stage, i.e. reflecting both terrain improvement options and higher absolute PW collection per round due to bigger civilisation size and city improvements like factories.


    2. Warning on bombarding
    ------------------------
    Although the patch 1.2 is promising to deliver a correct auto-centering, that does not refer to bombarding attacks, therefore I implemented a warning as soon as one of your enemies has bombarded one of your units or cities. For your convenience, you will be informed about the type of the attacker and the type of the attacked unit; thanks to some new SLIC code in patch 1.2, you will be given a button to centre the map on the place where the bombarding took place and will see a nice little explosion to increase your emotions a bit. This feature will draw your attention to the places where you may get hurt very much (and easily).


    3. Ranking messages
    -------------------
    Each round, there is a 10% chance that a ranking will be shown in a turn (however only if there have been at least 12 rounds played since the last ranking was displayed). Of course, the player will only be ranked on specific dimensions in case he has researched the necessary advances (Trade for Trade ranking, Undersea Colonies for Undersea Power, Space colonies for Space Power).

    a)In 60% of those cases, the player will get informed on his current ranking for one of the following dimensions: Number of cities, Geographic spread, Amount of gold, Number of advances, Military power, Number of population, Power in Space, Power underseas or Number of trade routes.
    b)In the remaining 40% of all ranking messages, the human player will be informed about his current rankings on all of the above described dimensions.

    I have made this split as my previous version 1.2 of this MOD only made a) possible and I didn’t want to say goodbye to my previous approach. I think that it is somewhat more interesting to have two different kinds of ranking messages available. The 60%-40% chance split will make your heart bump whether you get the big picture about your relative position to competition or only limited knowledge (and thus have to wait for at least another 12 turns for the chance to get the full ranking information).


    4. Updated alertboxes
    ---------------------
    "You have found an advance after entering a goody hut" , "You have found an advance after capturing an enemy city", "You have downloaded an advance from the Internet" and "You have received an advance via Edison’s Lab". I have added a link to the Great Library for above mentioned messages so people can easily look at what they have just found, captured, received or illegally downloaded.


    5. Synchronizing of war messages
    --------------------------------
    Although I am not a friend of real-time warfare at all, I like to watch the war animations in CTP especially as one can learn a lot on optimal stacking by looking at those animations. Unfortunately, with a little bit of experience, you can tell whether you will win a fight or whether you will capture a city (or get captured) by just looking at the icons which pop up before the actual war animation starts. This is a major spoiler, so I fixed it. No worries, you will still get each of those messages, but now after the fight is over.


    6. New messageicons for new messages
    ------------------------------------
    Bombarding and attack warning messages have their own icon. Same is valid for the Public Work reminder and for the small ranking (the big one is displayed via an alertbox). “City Queue is empty” message has an own icon, too. Finally Depp sent me a happyness icon so you will now get a blue smiley if one of your cities starts celebrating.


    7. City Growth messages
    -----------------------
    As soon as a city grows (either be ”normal” citizens or by slavery), a small message will inform you about this (including info on city size and city happiness). You may then take the opportunity and look into the city in detail whether you want to optimise the standard settings on workers.


    8. Disappearing Unit syndrome workaround
    ----------------------------------------
    After I found out that this phenomena may be caused due to a interface inconsistency after you have researched a new advance, this SLIC part will force the user interface to be updated with the game’s internal status each time a human player begins its turn. The patch 1.2 promises that this bug should never happen again, however I decided to keep this feature in here as it does not hurt at all in no ways – so you will be on the safe side.


    9. Attack Replay fixed
    ----------------------
    I have slightly changed a very useful feature of patch 1.2 having the option to replay attacks from enemies by giving this message an own icon and getting rid of the ridiculous sound which gets always played (I have to smile each time two warriors fight against each other with a nice machine gun sound at the same time).


    10. PowerSLICs 1.80 available in German, French and English language.
    ---------------------------------------------------
    Nothing major to say to this point but "Merci beaucoup" to Alanus for the French translation. Future versions of this MOD will not come with the guarantee to be available in other than German language.


    11. Activision’s patch 1.2 Building messages used
    --------------------------------------------
    You may ask yourself "Where are Dominique’s building messages ?". Well, after playtesting Activision’s new building messages in patch 1.2, I decided that their approach ("You have finished building XXX, next object is YYY in the queue".) is a very good one. Therefore PowerSLICs 1.80 and higher will not include the previous building message fixes. Additionally, staying with Activision‘s standard on those messages will make it much easier for other MOD-Makers to implement PowerSLICs in their MODs, especially when adding new buildings.


    TP

    [This message has been edited by TP (edited August 30, 1999).]

  • #2
    Very nice work TP, thanks a lot

    Comment


    • #3
      will be posted later today along with several other files....

      Comment


      • #4
        Thanks TP! I will certainly install the file.

        Comment


        • #5
          I noticed that when you get the population growth message it will tell you the happiness level before the growth. Is there any way you could make it tell the happiness level after the new population is added?

          Comment


          • #6
            something else on the growth message: it says "one new citizen" or something like that. well, in the ancient age it's 10,000 citizens not one! if you can't make the calculation for each age(I think each age has a population factor by which the size of each city is multiplied to get the final population, right?) you could write something "the city is now a 5 size one" or something similar...
            [This message has been edited by MarkG (edited August 31, 1999).]

            Comment


            • #7
              MarkG,

              Theoretically you are right of course. However all Civ players (be it Civ1, Civ2, CTP or whatever) refer to things like "New York, my beloved 32-people city". I never heard them playing back "New York this great 2,500,800 inhabitant city". May be a typical German thing. :-)

              Well, different folks, different strokes. I think that anyone should be able to rephrase the strings in info_str.txt according to their likes and dislikes.


              Paul,

              Unfortunately nothing to do there on that side. I decided to include it as it is because I thought to myself "that's better than having no feeling of the happiness at all".


              TP

              Comment


              • #8
                It's more than sad that I have to write this here, but I think it is necessary...

                IMPORTANT INFORMATION TO ALL
                ============================

                I hereby state copyrights to PowerSLICs, its features, its code and its ideas for future versions offically announced by TP in the CTP creation forum.

                Reason for this is, that I see some MODs with my PowerSLICs worked in or with code stolen from PowerSLICs (e.g. city growth messages) without asking me before or giving me any credits.

                That's not something I like at all, in fact it is 100% annoying and does give a good indication of the character of some MOD-Makers.

                As I wrote in each of my Readme files since the first version of PowerSLICs was published:

                HOWEVER IF YOU SHOULD USE THE WHOLE CODE OR PARTS OF IT IN YOUR OWN MODIFICATIONS OR SCENARIOS, PLEASE BE A FAIR PLAYER AND PUT ME ON YOUR CREDITS. THAT’S ALL I WOULD LIKE TO SEE.

                So again, please ask me before you publish a MOD with PowerSLICs or with adapted code and give me credits in your documentation, that's all I want to. Believe me, PowerSLICs is not something which was written in one hour. It contains the effort of many many hours, week-ends and arguments with my girl-friend.


                TP

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