Medieval Pack 3.0

[skorpion59]

MW/Locutus,

Boy, you're gone a few days and the whole world (Apolyton anyways) passes you by.

Nope, the wages thing can't be done. The main reason is because of what Paul said. You can't just multiply population by wages. You also have to take maintenace, crime(unhappiness) and the enemy into consideration. Because of all the variables involved, CtP doesn't even do this.

At the end of each turn, Starvation(food), Maintenance(gold) and Support(production) are checked. There is 3 settings near the bottom of the const.txt file which you can set to specify the conditions in which these messages get triggered. You might try changing these to try to account for all the variables.

Hit F2 and bring up the Civ Status screen. Click on the top Production button (grey cog ?), middle Gold button (gold G) and bottom Food button (piece of bread) to open each individual screen. For the rest of the game, the 3 new screens will stay open and be available when you hit F2. These screens break everything down so you know what you are getting and where it is going. If you will check these screens periodically, you should start to get a basic feeling for how the 3 const.txt entries should be modified.

WesW,
How big is the graphics file going to be, 6m-8M? Keep in mind, a lot of people outside the US pay a Per-Minute phone charge. If it was in small enough chunks, they could download at work/university, put it on floppies and take it home.



------------------
Don,
CtPMaps (Hosted by Apolyton)

[jed]

Hi,
I liked Civ II, and I liked SMAC even more and Alien Crossfire best of all. I always avoided CTP because of the bad reviews, but decided to give it a go because I read about these mods which people seem to like.

I plan to play a quick game with just the patches to get used to the interface, and then go straight to Med Mod 3. Is that reasonable, or should a CTP newbie like me wait for it to be play-tested some more, and start with the already-released mods?

Also, I am curious what people like Paul, who also like Civ II and SMAC, think about the Med Mod 3 AI, and which game they prefer?

[MadWoodster]

Another half done job by activision then!
Forgot about maintenance costs and crime and the like.

Jed my personnal advice would be to jump right in with the Mod Med as it makes the game alot more realistic and the version donwloadable is stable. However, someone like WesW will give you a more accurate answer, probably as I'm typing this.

[WesW]

First of all, you *do* need a couple of tgas to use the 3.0 beta. I have posted them at my site, where the advances chart used to be. Just drop them into the Medieval scenario's pictures folder.

Jed, I would recommend you play the tutorial, and a couple of games on a low setting up to the Renaissance age, just to familiarize yourself with the screens and tabs and such, and the new public works system.
I still remember one guy that posted a few months ago, who said that he had been playing the game for a week, and he *still* couldn't figure out how to get his settlers to build roads.

[WesW]

I guess that the Forge is another bug. I will add its tga to the militia ones at my site. These two items are things I added a week or two ago, and forgot about the tgas being necessary.

Don, and anyone else, what size would the graphics files need to be to fit onto disks?

[Locutus]

Wes, I don't know where you've been the last ten years or so but the last time I checked floppy disks had a capacity of 1.44 MB

But Don's argument of making the files small so people can fit them on disks isn't really that important IMHO. Most zip- (and other compression formats) utilities have the option to continue an archive on a next volume automaticly so the capacity of the disks is irrelevant.

[Locutus]

Wes, thanks for sending those militia-tga's (I was just about to warn you about the problem), they look good and so does the rest of the mod. I see you included the Space Marine Upgrade code as well, are you gonna leave it in or take it out in the final version? (You said you would only put it in the readme-folder). I like the new advances, when are the GL-files ready, that's my favourite part of new things?

quote: Originally posted by WesW on 04-19-2000 07:14 PM I still remember one guy that posted a few months ago, who said that he had been playing the game for a week, and he *still* couldn't figure out how to get his settlers to build roads.

LOL! I must have missed that one.

jed, I understand that OCC (One City Challenge) is a very popular thing in CivII and just a few days ago someone remarked that OCC just doesn't work in CtP because the AI is just too good. That says it all if you ask me

Locutus

[TrainWreck20]

I have recently downloaded the files for the Med Mod 3.0. Everything seems great until I try to build a forge, at which time I get an error when the program tries to get the picture for the production window. It does not crash the game, but causes a series of error messages.

Is there no picture in the graphics download, or did I mess up the installation somewhere (quite possible with my track record)?

Train

[skorpion59]

Wes,

Yep, 1.44MB and Locutus is entirely correct. I use zip programs to span multiple diskettes all the time. However, being in the business, I can tell you most people don't have a clue how to do that. They are doing good to even figure out how to get a file on a diskette (or just move one on a hard drive for that matter). I try to think on the lowest common denominator but forget to sometimes. Fortunately, I can remember well how confused I was when I first started learning CP/M and then DOS.


------------------
Don,
CtPMaps (Hosted by Apolyton)

[WesW]

I thought that you were referring to 1.44M floppies, Don, but I wanted to wait for your reply to be sure. If I were the split the mod into segments that small, there would be half a dozen of them, plus the text files, for that matter.

Btw, I found out from Tim that you need some more tgas for the mod to work properly, so I added them to the "new tgas" file at my site. They are for the last 2 new Wonders, plus I added the ones for the Ironclad. I really hope this is the last glitch; it's beginning to get embarrassing.

Note that the gl texts are not made and/or updated for the mod, so that its info is usually incorrect. You need to go by the advances chart, which I hope everyone is able to print out. The tgas for the new advances are ready, and I will include them when I update the graphics pack with Morgoth's updated sprites.
Also, a couple of the slic triggers don't work properly, namely the ones which upgrade the militias and add extra ones based on city size. Locutus said that he will work on these, so hopefully this can be fixed by the time some of the other aspects of the mod are fine-tuned.

I am going to be adjusting the production improvements, to try and get the right balance ot the game. Also, I will be adjusting the costs of advances to try and get the timeline accurate.
Let me know if the game seems to go too fast or slow in this regard, and any other comments about the mod.

[dbrowski]

Wes, let me start by saying thank you for all your effort. It has helped transform an average game with potential into a really great game. Here are some observations after playing awhile(until about 1650AD I think), with the new advances.

(1) after a slow start I really started flying through the advances. you may want to increase the sci needed to advance. I think that this is due somewhat to the forge(which along with the mill should be turned down to +25% production), but mostly due to the new terain values, which brings me to ...

(2) the forest tiles have become way to strong in gold with the new values and the ability to mine them. I know in the terain readme you observe that with the original values oceanside cities were much stonger than interior cities, and I agree. this is logical, though, as nearly 100% of the major cities around the world are near an ocean, river, or other major body of water. With the new values it is hard to develop oceanside cities unless there are forests or mountains nearby. I would suggest returning the values for all ocean tiles and especially forests and jungles to their original settings(but still allow forests and jungles to be mined). Also why not have the "tropical grassland" tiles have 5 prod and only 10 food to differentiate them a little from grasslands.(They could still be farmed, of course.) These changes would (a) decrease the gold(and therefore science) a little and (b) return the pendulum back towards oceanside cities somewhat, while interior cities would still be superior to what they were with the "out of the box" settings.(I know I could easily make these adjustments on my own if I feel so strongly about it, but I really think it would help the overall game balance, especially the forest tile getting 20 prod, 5 food, and 10 gold, (after a mine) which is VERY strong in the early part of the game).

(3) In the past, playing both the original game and CD's mod I am pretty sure that when you enslaved a foriegn unit it would send the slave to the nearest city that had the necessary garison units to watch over the slave(s). This is not always happening with this mod(i.e. I am getting a fifth slave in city with only 2 garrison units). I can't remember this function not working correctly when I was playing with the 2.1 beta you released a couple of weeks ago, so I wonder if it is related to the new militia triggers not working properly. I will certainly retest this when they are fixed .

(4) I preferred the original way that Galileo's telescope worked. I guess if there is no way to make the A1 build scientists in the city where it is built, though, you might as well leave it the way you have it now.

(5) I doubt there is any way to fix this, but the A1 is still not stacking their units outside cities making it embarrasingly easy to enslave unit after lone unit.

(6) I like the adjustments on the pollution modifiers you made, but I would also go ahead and erase the pollution modifiers for the "futuristic" advances, such as cultural advancement 3 and physics advancement 10 which also will cause the negative pollution bug(if anyone actually makes it that far).

This is all I can think of right now. Thanks again for your hard work.
[This message has been edited by dbrowski (edited April 22, 2000).]
[This message has been edited by dbrowski (edited April 22, 2000).]
[This message has been edited by dbrowski (edited April 22, 2000).]

[WesW]

Let's see if I can reply to dbrowski's points one-by-one...
(1)I am still adjusting the advances. I have made some of the Renaissance ones more expensive, and some of the Modern ones much more expensive. When exactly did you start flying through them, and how many cities did you have?
I think everyone agrees (from emails) that the Forge added too much production. I am trying at setting the Forge, Mill, Factory and Refinery at 30% increase in production, rather than 50%, with similar adjustments to pollution and costs.
(2)The terrain values were set over several months of testing and examination of AI behavior. The readme from the True Terrain 2, available here at Apolyton, explains this in more detail. There are some threads related to this as well from last year that chronicle the development of the settings.
Most all major cities are on rivers and/or oceans. This is mainly because of the fertile river valleys and water trade routes.
The original settings made Beach better than Forests with Beaver on it, for example, which is ridiculus to me. The reason for making forests/jungles and swamps equal to hills and grassland was to make more of the map useable, and I don't feel that they need to be adjusted. Especially with the way the AI uses terrain now.
The 20-5-10 production of mined Forests is exactly the same production as a mined Hill, and the original settings of a mined Forest would give you 25-5-5, which is even more powerful, imo.
(3)From my experience, the game doesn't count militias at all when it comes to slaves. It will not send slaves to cities with only militias in them, and militias do not suppress slaves either.
(5)You must be playing on un-modified maps, with weak AIs. Believe me, the AIs have no trouble stacking either land *or* naval units, if it has enough of them. (I got attacked by a stack of *four* fire triremes in my last game.)
(6) You're right about this, and I have removed these settings from the future advances. They will be in place for the next upload.

Thanks for your comments.

[dbrowski]

Wes, I guess there is no need to quibble over the terrain values, especially if it makes the A1 perform better, which is the most important thing. My point really revolved around the fact that most capital cities in the game are near lots of forest, usually with a river through several tiles. I noticed myself flying through the advances when I was able to get a couple slaves and a few mines and was getting 10 food, 20 prod, and 15 gold from 4 or 5 tiles in my first city.(Not to mention a trade good or two, marketplace, forge, etc.). Btw, a beach getting 10,5,5 is better than a forest(w/beaver) getting 5,20,10?

As far as the slaves being sent to cities w/out necessary garrison. I also noticed that militias do not count as slave supressors, and a slave will not be sent to a city with only militia. My problem was, for example, I had 19 slaves in one city(where the max should be 16, given one militia and 8 garrison units). In the several turns that there was too many slaves, they never revolted, which could just be luck, but it seemed strange. I'll start another game and see how this works.

You may be right about the "single units" roaming around an A1 city that I was at war with. I was playing on diety level, but had forgotten to increase the time slice numbers for the A1 turn length on my older computer, and I'm not exactly sure what you mean by un-modified map.

Thanks for your help and your hard work in putting togither this mod. The game is(or will be when you get the tweaks out) a hundred times better than the original.

[MadWoodster]

On the slaves point:
When I was last editting the const.txt file (think it was that one anyway) I'm pretty sure I noticed that the slaves per unit had been increased from 2 to 3, therefore you would be perfectly fine having 19 slaves to 8 units as you can have upto 24 slaves.

[MarkG]

test, ignore...
[This message has been edited by MarkG (edited April 23, 2000).]