Medieval Pack beta 5.0+

[skorpion59]

The 'CtP1 & Patches' is to fix patch-related problems so it will not help you.

You have an installation problem. Unzip all 3 files into a temp directory to make sure you are doing this right. If you are, then xcopy all the Med Mod files to their appropriate directory in the DEAULT CtP dirs. This will take the scenario aspect out of the picture. Alternately, download the 3 files again. They could of been corrupted during the download. Make sure you use Winzip and make sure you recurse the directories.

[ticktock]

Doh! I didn't realize that you had to run a modpack as a scenario! As Gilda Radner used to say "Never Mind" (you gotta be real old school to remember that).

Thanks for the help guys. The game is running fine now and looks great.

Sorry for the mix up.

[WesW]

Glad you got straightened out, John.

Just a post here about my current game, which is pretty different from your typical game.
I was going to be real brave at the outset of the game, and place myself in the middle of a large, arching continent, with an AI on either side of me, and an isthmus to the continent of a third AI in the northwest of my territory.
Well, I drew the Hebrews and Indonesians as my neighbors on the continent, and they have both *loved* me the entire game. I have an alliance with the Hebrews (a mistake, since they have units all over my territory, including some chokepoints, forcing me to build alternate road routes around them), and I have excellent relations with the Indos, in spite of the fact that the Indos built the Forbidden City (this was the first time I can remember that relations had not deteriorated to the point of war when a civ built this wonder).
The Hebrews have bought a trade good from me, and a have bought two from the Indos, who have not pirated these routes once, again a first I believe. These examples really point out how Nordicus' diplomacy half of the AAips have affected the game.
I am at war with the civ with whom I have the isthmus connention with, the Mexicans, and have been at war on and off with the other two civs in the game, the Zulus and Russians. I am gradually conquering the Mexicans, though it has not been easy. The AIs will attack targets of opportunity, like if I leave a unit or two near to one of their troop concentrations. The Russians also landed six units on my home territory once, declared war the next turn, and later used these units to wipe out a small stack I had sent to engage them. The Mexicans once wiped out a stack of seven Jav Cavs and Horse Archers I had sent on a deep raid into their home territory with Bombards and Musketeers, again showing excellent tactical decisions.

I am thinking about reducing the cost of the Cineplex by a large amount, and reducing the cost of the Cathedral to match the cost of the Hospital. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

[ticktock]

Thanks Paul,
I printed out Scorpions instructions and followed them to the letter. AND IT STILL CRASHED!! I don't see how anybody is getting this mod to work at all. I have re-installed it at least 15 times on two different PC's re-booting and playing between patches and still get the same thing. I can play the game fine with the 1.2 patch and the 1.21. I unzip the three files, reboot, and try to play again, and after about 3 or 4 turns, it crashes. I only get enough time to play games, once every few weeks, and this time was wasted in frustration! Oh well, time to give up and wait for CTP 2.

[Paul]

When you start a new game, do you click on "select scenario" and select the Medieval Mod? Or do you just start a new default game?

The Med mod installs its own aidata files in the default CTP folder, overwriting the originals. So if you play a default game of CTP it will still use the Med mod AI files which include the new units and other stuff for the Med mod. I tried this on my own computer and it would also crash just like yours.

The solution is to make a backup copy of your original aidata folder (including the aip subfolder) before you install the Med mod. Now you can switch between the folders depending on whether you play with the Med mod or a default game. Or you can copy the aidata folder (including aip subfolder) into the scenarios\medieval\default folder and install Modpicker. Look at http://members.home.nl/paulvdb/modpick.htm for more info about what Modpicker does and how it works.

[Ganja]

I just came across an error !!!!!!

I just fired 4 cruise missiles at an enemy city and got the error "no object id", something like that anyway. They were fired from a stealth sub.

Can you please advise or correct this error.

Thanks

[Ganja]

BTW the game crashes to desktop when this error comes up....Just to think I hadn't saved the game for 3 hours either

[BigJ]

Wes, I was just wondering about something. Looking through one of the readmes there are details about advances and units and so on that are not implemented but will be in a 'modern mod'. I was just curious, are there any plans to go forward with these features? By the way, I love your mod. It is great.

[dbrowski]

Wes, definately agree on the cineplex. Although it can be a plus if you are maintaining a huge army, I always found it to be to expensive for the benifit.

As far as the hospital/cathedral, I think it is about right. The marginal extra expense of the cathedral is probably worth it because it is a marginally better improvement(because of the Sensorium and Hagia Sophia possibilities).
[This message has been edited by dbrowski (edited June 12, 2000).]

[BigJ]

Yeah, I remember reading something about the modern mod awhile back, but I wasn't sure if anyone was still planning to go forward with it.

The modern mod would fix one of the problems I have had with ctp- the lack of any separate groups of units for the 20th century. It seems strange going from SOTL's to jet fighters. I've just always thought that there should be a group of units and such for the first half of the century and another for the second half. After all, warfare now is quite different from how it was just 50 years ago.

I've also spent awhile myself adding a few advances, units, and so on to add another 'period' to ctp (added to the med mod, of course). It was a quick job, I'm sure the unit values and so on aren't balanced right. I did add the units to the ai files, but didn't add the advances, instead making them required before the key first futuristic advances (mainly space flight). By the way, is there a quicker way to adds units and so on to the ai files? It is a real pain having to edit each main ai file unit list (cleric, slaver, etc.) one by one.

BigJ

[WesW]

Ganja, I saw your post right after you reported your crash. The only thing I can think of that might have caused this crash is the Cruise Missile fix that Locutus made via SLIC a week or two ago, and which was included in the 5.0 beta. Unfortunately, SLIC is not my thing. I contact Locutus, and he puts it together, either by himself or in concert with some of the other programmers here. I had expected that either he or one of those other guys would have chimed in with an answer by now. Be patient, and lets see what they say.
Btw, once you get into a game, turn on the autosave feature, and save the game manually every few turns. It will save you a lot a frustration.

BigJ, you might want to search the forums for a Modern mod thread started by myself a few months ago. This was going to be the monster mod that the Med pack 3.0 turned out to be. I had all the files written for it too, except for gls, but there was a bug somewhere that crashed the game after about 20 turns, and on one could ever figure it out. I finally gave up on it, and started what turned out to be the Med pack 3.0. It will end up being better this way, since I found out that there was so much that needed to be done between the Medieval and Modern ages. I have kept all the files from the Modern mod, and when the Med pack 3.0 (or Apolyton Pack 2.0) goes public, I hope to be able to come out with what will now be called the Med mod 4.0 a few weeks afterwards. This mod will have all the Modern mod stuff that has not been implemented yet, plus some more things that we have thought up since I abandoned the original. I hope that this mod will finish out the game (especially since CtP2 will be only a few months away at that point).
Btw, I expect that, while CtP2 will be much better out of the box than CtP1, many of the changes made in the Med Pack will have to be re-done for CtP2, so I don't plan on throwing anything away when the new game comes out. Hopefully most of the text files will be very similar, so that we can easily modify them to create a CtP2 version of the mods here. The flis and aips may be less alike, but surely they won't be more complicated than those in CtP1, so I hope those will turn out alright as well.

[WesW]

"By the way, is there a quicker way to adds units and so on to the ai files? It is a real pain having to edit each main ai file unit list (cleric, slaver, etc.) one by one."
In a word, no. I can usually copy-n-paste sections from one to another, but it's still a pain. Also, you can't transfer the entire units queues from one to another, either, since they differ in the special units sections.

In other news, I spent about three hours today combing the bowels of the flis and aips (lovely imagery, ain't it). I re-read about all of CD's comments during this time, which I had not done in far too long. Did you know that about half the code blocks contained in the Inputs fli are NOT USED by any of the other files? Included in this are about all of the blocks that I had spent time adjusting the last few weeks.

My biggest adjustment to the files was in the following code block...Background: Units and buildings are given equal priority when build troops is "on". When they are off, troops have a lower priority. I had noticed that the AIs were spending large portions of their production on units by the Industrial Age. I hoped to find a setting to get them to disband units more than they currently do, but was unsuccessful.

Original:if((i_am_stronger_2x_to_4x_than_strongest _human
or i_am_stronger_2x_to_4x_than_strongest)
and not_ancient_time
and zero_at_war
and not yes_focus_on_units )
{
yes_build_troops_off_aip
}


New:if((i_am_stronger_1halfx_plus_than_strongest_h uman
or i_am_stronger_1halfx_plus_than_strongest
or costly_army_pcr
or ouch_army_pcr
or slow_slow_science) //Edited by TLL: WW added army_pcr & sci
and not yes_few_cities //WW replaced ancient time with few cities
and zero_at_war
and not yes_focus_on_units )
{
yes_build_troops_off_aip
}

Now, this block is not easy to follow, but this is what "should" happen: If
1)The AI is the stonger than the strongest human, or strongest AI, by 50%, OR
2)The percent of produciton spent on units is above 20, OR
3)The number of turns to the next discovery is above 6, AND
4)They have 12 or more cities, AND
5)Are not at war with anyone, AND
6)Their ratio of units to cities is greater than 2.5, THEN
Turn units off (give them a lower priority then buindings).
Welcome to the wonder world of flis. (And yes, I *should* get paid for this.)

Improvements upon old code block:
1)CD made the change from twice as strong to 1.5x as strong as the best human, and added best AI as well.
2)The inputs of how costly the AIs army was, which I had spent time adjusting lately, were not used *anywhere*, it turns out. I had wondered why my adjustments were not affecting anything; well, they should now.
3)Ditto for turns to next advance. I spent a lot of time looking into having the AI adjust worker placement based upon this setting as well, but ultimately decided that it was too complicated.
4)I had adjusted the "few_cities" setting last week in an attempt to get the AI to expand a little more than it was currently, only to find out that this block was unused as well. Well, at least now *something* is using it.
5)The original block specified "not ancient time" for when to use this block, which meant after the first 120 turns. It made more sense to me to go by how many cities the AI had, since units includes settlers. When an AI has trouble with unit support, it is always when it can no longer expand, so the block kicks in now only after the civ has enough cities to survive in a normal-sized map game.
The last two settings made sense, after I tracked down exactly how the unit focus setting was used, so they were left alone.

In other findings...
The "green me" aip was not loaded by anywhere, which greatly surprised me. When AIs sign an eco-pact their pollution *does* go down, but I don't know if it is because of shifts in worker placement, or what. Anyway, I have now added a line to load this aip. I will check to see what effect it has.

Finally, I read the README text file that accompianied the game, and noticed that almost half the aips listed in it that are not included in the game! Below is the file's list, and I have noted the absentees. Some of the files not included were probably absorbed into some of the other aips, but a few really stood out to me.

fallback.aip -
gather.aip -
getarmy.aip -
**gohome.aip -
**gotohim.aip -
highdist.aip -
**impatient.aip -
**islandsettle.aip -
**killarmy.aip -
**leavehome.aip -
**limited_explore.aip -
lowdist.aip -
**manycaravans.aip -
masssettle.aip -
naval.aip -
no_settle.aip -
nosally.aip -
noscience.aip -
**patient.aip -
**pulse.aip -
**runfromhim.aip -
sally.aip -
supernaval.aip -
survival_mode.aip -
takecity.aip -
**transport.aip -
**twosettlers.aip -
**unlimited_explore.aip -
**verypatient.aip -
yes_settle.aip

The ones that stood out to me were "killarmy", which I was looking for earlier today; and "gotohim", "leavehome" and "transport", which I believe would have instructed the AI in how to conduct amphibious invasions with large forces. We can only hope that the programmers have figured out how to get these files to work for CtP2.

One final change: I switched the second preq of Fascism from Nationalism to Repeating Rifles. This keeps you from getting Fascists before you get Machine Gunners.

[gemini]

Wes, I don't seem to have some of those aip files you talked about. Here is the list.
**gohome.aip -
**gotohim.aip -
**impatient.aip -
**islandsettle.aip -
**killarmy.aip -
**leavehome.aip -
**limited_explore.aip -
**manycaravans.aip -
**patient.aip -
**pulse.aip -
**runfromhim.aip -
**transport.aip -
**twosettlers.aip -
**unlimited_explore.aip -
**verypatient.aip -

Did Nordicus add those in when you guys did aaip's?

That's interesting about that greem_me aip file. I never noticed that it was never set to load when yes_i_agreed_to_stop_polluting. I wonder if that was an error on activisions part or if it's handled some other way. Interesting anyway.




------------------
Gemini

[Bazman]

While we are talking about Med pack beta 5.0, I was just wondering what aspects of the game the AI don't take into account? What units don't they use, or building don't they build or wonders or whatever?

e.g. I believe they don't use Cruise Missiles?

I would just like to know because I would like to play as fair as possible game with the AI. I don't believe I saw anything like this mentioned in the documentation.

Also, while I'm here, how can a play a map in save game style and still be using the Med Pack rules and units etc? e.g. I want to use the World Maps by Zaz (I think thats who did them). Also, aren't these maps meant to be packaged with Med Pack? I couldn't find them anywhere. Perhaps I'm just wrong and blind

Thanks,
Baz.
[This message has been edited by Bazman (edited June 15, 2000).]

[MadWoodster]

Put simply the cruise missile is not used by the AI, as it is not told to build it in any of the AIPS.
The reason for this, is due to the cruise missile being a bombard unit (this is explained in the thread discussing the errors with it) the AI never actually knew how to use the missile, and therefore it was a waste of space.