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All,
"TP's PowerSLICs 2.00" is finished and should be soon available for your download in the Apolyton Download section.
That means that the story of PowerSLICs is finished as most of the things I personally wanted to see fixed or added in CTP are now implemented in PowerSLICs. This is the final version, I will not work on new major versions for the time being. It's time to play the game for awhile.
Thanks to all of you who appreciated my work and even more thanks to all of you who stole my work showing that I have done a good job. I am happy that I could contribute a little bit to make a great game a little bit better.
Please find below the final feature list. In addition to that, PowerSLICs 2.00 comes with a totally new installation procedure which should make installing PowerSLICs a little bit easier and still ensure compatibility with other MODs. But please read the ReadMe-File before you click on the installation program to understand the whole installation process (you still need to do things manually, but to a much lesser degree than previously).
I will stop reading the forum on a regular basis as of now. It's time to spend more attention to my girl-friend, to playing CTP and to my profession.
Kind regards,
TP
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 previous PowerSLICs versions 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. Thus, this feature will draw your attention to the places where you may get hurt very much (and easily).
3. Ranking messages
===================
Each turn, there is a 10% chance that a ranking will be shown in a turn (however only if there have been at least 12 turns 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 one of the earlisest PowerSLICs versions 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. A lot of Great Library buttons and Eyeicons added to various messages
================================================== ===
I have added links to the Great Library for a lot of standard messages as well as Eyeicons to centre on cites. It would simply be too much to mention all of the messages here, but be ensured that none of those changes will make you loose anything - each link and each EyeIcon are placed smoothly together with all other things the standard messages provide you with.
5. Synchronising of important war messages work now
================================================== ===
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. 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 optimize the standard settings on workers.
7. New messageicons for new messages
====================================
Bombarding and attack warning messages have their own icon. Same is valid for the Public Work reminder, for the small ranking (the big one is displayed via an alertbox) and for city growth messages. ”City Queue is empty” messages have now own icons, too (depending on whether you have built an unit, an improvement or a wonder). Finally Depp sent me a happyness icon so you will now get a blue smiley if one of your cities starts celebrating.
8. Disappearing Unit syndrome fixed
===================================
After I found out that this phenomenon 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 any way – so you will be on the safe side.
9. Attack Replay fixed
======================
I have slightly changed a very useful feature of having the option to replay attacks from enemies by giving this message an own icon, getting rid of the ridiculous sound which gets always played (a machine gun sound independent on the actual units involved in the fight) and a program error fix (replay took place anyway even if you did not click on ”Show Me”, it just did not centre on the map).
10. Activision’s patch 1.2 building messages used in principal (however updated)
================================================== ============
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 2.00 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.
However I updated the standard building messages by including new icons telling you graphically what just has happened in a city and including links to the Great Library so you can easily jump to the information database there. Finally, Alanus worked on a great special alertbox that pops up whenever you finish building a capitol in one of your cities.
11. Unit building inconsistency fixed
=====================================
Do you ask yourself ”Why is the city queue empty after building a wonder or an improvement but not after building an unit ?”. Due to this effect, it easily happens that you forget to change the city queue after building an unit resulting in a horde of units which you do not need. That’s especially true for those units where you just need one or two for the whole civilisation (e.g. bureaucrats). This feature will empty the city queue automatically in the case you have just built one single unit. Of course, this feature will not empty the city queue if you have decided intentionally to build a set of units in a city by using the city queue feature of CTP (e.g. by defining in a build queue to build two phalanx, then city walls).
12. Menu when clicking on enemy units
=====================================
As soon as you click on an enemy unit, you will have the option to go directly to the diplomatic screen, to the trade screen or to the Great Library where you can learn more about the unit you just have clicked.
13. Auto-close of specific messages on your decision
================================================== ===
Especially in later stages of the game there is a massive overload of messages per turn. Therefore the messages which tend to pop up most often (city growth messages, empty queue messages, celebration messages, attack messages and bombardment messages) now show a button allowing you to automatically close all other messages of the same type for the current turn if you feel the need to do that (I am personally using this to first screen rapidly through all messages of one type, before I then click once on a ”get rid of messages of this type” button - so all messages of that type will vanish with just one click - this saves a lot of clicking).
14. Implemented Civ2-Feature: Add Settler to City
=================================================
Some people have been missing the feature to add a settler to a city and to increase a city’s population this way. This feature will help you when using settlers coming from disbanded cities or when you want to help a specific city to grow without adjusting the global food slider. However there is the restriction that the target city size has to be at least 2 and maximum 6. I implemented these two constraints as I think this feature would otherwise be ways too powerful. With these constraints, you first have to let a city grow by itself (otherwise it would be too easy to found big new cities with two settlers each time) and you don’t have the opportunity to use a settler-producing city to artificially increase city sizes of other cities in an unlimited way (also, the AI will most likely never make use of it, which is not that dramatic as the AI seems to be anyway on an ICS strategy - at least in my games).
15. PowerSLICs 2.00 is available in German, French and English language.
================================================== =======================
Nothing major to say to this point but a big ”Merci beaucoup” to Alanus for the French translation (including many thanks on ideas for PowerSLICs which have been partly reflected here). Future versions (if there will be any) of this MOD will not come with the guarantee to be available in other than German language.
Good-bye.
[This message has been edited by TP (edited September 18, 1999).]
"TP's PowerSLICs 2.00" is finished and should be soon available for your download in the Apolyton Download section.
That means that the story of PowerSLICs is finished as most of the things I personally wanted to see fixed or added in CTP are now implemented in PowerSLICs. This is the final version, I will not work on new major versions for the time being. It's time to play the game for awhile.
Thanks to all of you who appreciated my work and even more thanks to all of you who stole my work showing that I have done a good job. I am happy that I could contribute a little bit to make a great game a little bit better.
Please find below the final feature list. In addition to that, PowerSLICs 2.00 comes with a totally new installation procedure which should make installing PowerSLICs a little bit easier and still ensure compatibility with other MODs. But please read the ReadMe-File before you click on the installation program to understand the whole installation process (you still need to do things manually, but to a much lesser degree than previously).
I will stop reading the forum on a regular basis as of now. It's time to spend more attention to my girl-friend, to playing CTP and to my profession.
Kind regards,
TP
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 previous PowerSLICs versions 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. Thus, this feature will draw your attention to the places where you may get hurt very much (and easily).
3. Ranking messages
===================
Each turn, there is a 10% chance that a ranking will be shown in a turn (however only if there have been at least 12 turns 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 one of the earlisest PowerSLICs versions 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. A lot of Great Library buttons and Eyeicons added to various messages
================================================== ===
I have added links to the Great Library for a lot of standard messages as well as Eyeicons to centre on cites. It would simply be too much to mention all of the messages here, but be ensured that none of those changes will make you loose anything - each link and each EyeIcon are placed smoothly together with all other things the standard messages provide you with.
5. Synchronising of important war messages work now
================================================== ===
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. 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 optimize the standard settings on workers.
7. New messageicons for new messages
====================================
Bombarding and attack warning messages have their own icon. Same is valid for the Public Work reminder, for the small ranking (the big one is displayed via an alertbox) and for city growth messages. ”City Queue is empty” messages have now own icons, too (depending on whether you have built an unit, an improvement or a wonder). Finally Depp sent me a happyness icon so you will now get a blue smiley if one of your cities starts celebrating.
8. Disappearing Unit syndrome fixed
===================================
After I found out that this phenomenon 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 any way – so you will be on the safe side.
9. Attack Replay fixed
======================
I have slightly changed a very useful feature of having the option to replay attacks from enemies by giving this message an own icon, getting rid of the ridiculous sound which gets always played (a machine gun sound independent on the actual units involved in the fight) and a program error fix (replay took place anyway even if you did not click on ”Show Me”, it just did not centre on the map).
10. Activision’s patch 1.2 building messages used in principal (however updated)
================================================== ============
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 2.00 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.
However I updated the standard building messages by including new icons telling you graphically what just has happened in a city and including links to the Great Library so you can easily jump to the information database there. Finally, Alanus worked on a great special alertbox that pops up whenever you finish building a capitol in one of your cities.
11. Unit building inconsistency fixed
=====================================
Do you ask yourself ”Why is the city queue empty after building a wonder or an improvement but not after building an unit ?”. Due to this effect, it easily happens that you forget to change the city queue after building an unit resulting in a horde of units which you do not need. That’s especially true for those units where you just need one or two for the whole civilisation (e.g. bureaucrats). This feature will empty the city queue automatically in the case you have just built one single unit. Of course, this feature will not empty the city queue if you have decided intentionally to build a set of units in a city by using the city queue feature of CTP (e.g. by defining in a build queue to build two phalanx, then city walls).
12. Menu when clicking on enemy units
=====================================
As soon as you click on an enemy unit, you will have the option to go directly to the diplomatic screen, to the trade screen or to the Great Library where you can learn more about the unit you just have clicked.
13. Auto-close of specific messages on your decision
================================================== ===
Especially in later stages of the game there is a massive overload of messages per turn. Therefore the messages which tend to pop up most often (city growth messages, empty queue messages, celebration messages, attack messages and bombardment messages) now show a button allowing you to automatically close all other messages of the same type for the current turn if you feel the need to do that (I am personally using this to first screen rapidly through all messages of one type, before I then click once on a ”get rid of messages of this type” button - so all messages of that type will vanish with just one click - this saves a lot of clicking).
14. Implemented Civ2-Feature: Add Settler to City
=================================================
Some people have been missing the feature to add a settler to a city and to increase a city’s population this way. This feature will help you when using settlers coming from disbanded cities or when you want to help a specific city to grow without adjusting the global food slider. However there is the restriction that the target city size has to be at least 2 and maximum 6. I implemented these two constraints as I think this feature would otherwise be ways too powerful. With these constraints, you first have to let a city grow by itself (otherwise it would be too easy to found big new cities with two settlers each time) and you don’t have the opportunity to use a settler-producing city to artificially increase city sizes of other cities in an unlimited way (also, the AI will most likely never make use of it, which is not that dramatic as the AI seems to be anyway on an ICS strategy - at least in my games).
15. PowerSLICs 2.00 is available in German, French and English language.
================================================== =======================
Nothing major to say to this point but a big ”Merci beaucoup” to Alanus for the French translation (including many thanks on ideas for PowerSLICs which have been partly reflected here). Future versions (if there will be any) of this MOD will not come with the guarantee to be available in other than German language.
Good-bye.
[This message has been edited by TP (edited September 18, 1999).]
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