Medieval Pack beta 5.0+

[Pintello]

Hi Wes,

Could you release just the files that you have changed as mentioned in your previous post?

Well, anyway, since you asked about how we are doing with our test of Beta 6, here goes. I am using the Large Map setup. I am also playing with 12 civs including myself plus barbarians.

I have looked at the revealed map and the civs seem to be doing a pretty good job placing their cities, both in the area of distance from each other and location in relation to rivers and resources, they aren't just trade goods anymore.

The one exception to this seems to be the Russians. They have 17 cities and 3 of them were placed in very close proximity to each other for some reason. These cities are all only about 3 squares from each other. All there other cities are place well though.

So far only about 4 civs have done a lot of road and PW work though. This may have to do with the new early priorty of getting 9 cities before starting such work though.

I am 4th in the power graph and nobody is all that far from anybody else on the power graph, except of the prerequisite 2 or 3 civs that are always far below everyone else. This time I am not one of those civs. This situation may change soon though. I am currently first in science, but that may not last. I only have 13 cities but several civs have more than that. The Phonecians, who are the largest have 19.

So far, the game has been pretty peaceful, but that recently changed when the Vikings treacherously attacked my poor innocent Trieme that was minding its own business exploring. Those Barbarians! I even had a treaty with them!

Actually, they went about it in a pretty intellegent manner. They were still at Alert Status, but I was at Full Readiness Status. I always keep my military at Full Readiness unless I need PW points very badly. Anyway, even though the Vikings had a Trieme right next to my ship when they attacked, they sent in a stack of 2 Triemes to do the job instead. In the past, the AI would have attacked with the single Trieme. I ended up loosing my poor innocent Trieme because of their treachery at the cost to them of only one Trieme of theirs. A pretty even trade except that I had a Warrior on the boat too and they probably didn't have units on board theirs. At any rate, the point is that they are playing smarter these days. I will let you know more as I play more later.

Regards,

Timothy Pintello

[WesW]

Martock, I have run into the map thing before. It seems to increase the longer the game goes. I think that, if the AI already has a map that shows most all of the world, it has less interest in trading than it had earlier.
The pirating surprises me a little. Will you refer to the misc. readme, and post the personality type of the civs doing this?
The refusal of the AIs to stop tresspassing is an unfortunate side-effect of correcting some other problems in AI behavior that were done in the Awesome Aips last year. Nordicus worked hard trying to solve this problem, but it was either have it, or some other, worse problems; a lesser of two evils choice.
He did put in a "second-chance" setting that should allow you to attack a peaceful (science or cleric) civ once, and be forgiven. You don't get this from warlike civs, however.

Nice to hear from you, Tim.
Some of the AIs will still plop down cities in amongst themselves if they have nowhere else to go. It seems to be the warlike civs who do this, though I could be wrong. At least it is not like it used to be, when all the types would cram cities in everywhere. (Remember how awful that got late in the game?)
If I see them doing this, sometimes I will kill them, and replace them with cities placed in open areas, with the same units and structures as the dead ones.

Tim, putting out those couple of files I changed would actually be pretty complicated, since they are in different versions of the mod. They are trivial changes, and I will be out with the public release in a couple of days.

[WesW]

Here is the text from the Troubleshooting Guide I put together this afternoon. Look it over, and let me know if I have forgotten anything.

Troubleshooting Guide to the Medieval Pack 3.0
By Wes Whitaker

Below I have listed some of the common problems people run into when using the Medieval Pack, or just playing CtP in general.

1)I am getting error messages like "tpcga.tga not found".
This means that the 1.21 hack is not installed, or not installed properly.

2)I receive popup messages like "You're fourth out of [num of civs]" or "Science; [num. rank of civ] out of [total num. of civ]".
This means that you have not changed the line in the userprofile.txt that has "debugSLIC" in it to "yes". See the Misc. readme for details on how to do this.

3)Musketeers look like Arquebusiers.
This means that you did not manually remove the graphics files listed in the first paragraph of the Misc. readme.

If you are having problems getting the modpack to work at all, try following the steps listed below. This is taken from a post by Don Blevins.

Patches require specific exe files AS WELL AS the game to have been played to work properly. The reason is certain files are created or modified ONLY after the game has been played. Since I do a lot of Mod Work/Testing, I have screwed my CtP installation up quite a few times. During the re-install from scratch, I have hit about every concievable 'patch doesn't work' error. The following is guaranteed to work:

1) Uninstall CtP and delete all directories related to it.
2) Reboot your computer
3) Do a Maximum/Full CtP install
4) Reboot
5) Start/save a game
6) Install CtP v1.2 Patch
7) Reboot
8) Start/save a game
9) Install V1.21 Hack
10) Reboot
11) Start/save a game
(Steps 12, 13 and 14 are only necessary if you want to use the No_CD Hack)
12) Install V1.2(5) No_Cd Hack
13) Reboot
14) Start/save a game
15) You are off and running
At this point, all you really need to do is install Wes' latest Med Mod. It encompasses all the other mods plus a lot more.

If none of these suggestions solve your problem, place a post in the Medieval Pack 3.0 Public Release thread, and we will do our best to help you.

[Paul]

quote: 1)I am getting error messages like "tpcga.tga not found". This means that the 1.21 hack is not installed, or not installed properly.

This could of course also mean that the graphics were not installed properly.

[Martock]

Wes, i'll probably post an update to the personalities of the AI's in my game but it is all but 1 who are pirating my trade routes. the only empire that seems to not pirate them is the united states. though they love me, they are not my allies and my allies have from time to time pirated my routes. granted i expect the computers who don't like me to do so but not those who love me or are allied with me. the trade routes do seem more logically pathed now though.

another thing, i've always hated seeing warriors and phalnax troops late in the game. it's a common thing to find an empire with machine gunners and warriors side by side in their army. is there a way to tell the computer it's time to retire the ancient units?? i don't know if SLIC will allow this or not. it'd be nice though if this could be implemented.

[WesW]

Paul, if the graphics were not installed properly, it probably means that the user didn't unzip the files into the Call-to-Power directory. Or could there be some other common problem?
I will make a note of this in the readme, as well as the use of Winzip.

Martock, I had a civ who loved me pirate one of my routes last night, right after I had responded to your post. I asked them to stop pirating, which they agreed to, and they have honored that agreement so far. Try this in your game. If they break that agreement, then they are most likely spoiling for a fight with you anyway, and you might as well get on with it.

[Paul]

It could be that people installed only the zip with the text files. Or will the release version be one big zip with everything in it?

[WesW]

Paul, I don't know how Mark is going to package the mod for release here. I am going to leave it as is on my site. I assume he will get it from there, and put it together on his computer, then upload it here as one big zip.

Martock, if you noticed one of my earlier posts in this thread, I mentioned a file which shipped with the game which listed a bunch of aips that were not included in the game. One of them was killarmy.aip, which I assume would have had specific settings for getting the AI to disband its troops.
As it is now, there is nothing I am aware of where players can directly affect this.

Btw, my current game is still very exciting. I think I finally succeeded in getting the AIs to grow their cities properly. I am at about turn 200 in the game, and all the AI cities are at approximately the same size as my own. Every civ has several in double digits.

[Paul]

Wes, there are some problems I noticed when I started a game with a flat map. First, the med_str.txt is an older version which means that the dummy wonder isn't in it. Second, it has a file med_str.additions.txt, but since that's not in strings.txt it won't be loaded. Since it contains only one line I suggest adding it to med_str.txt.

[Martock]

Wes, i have done the "stop pirating" request with them and it works from time to time. :-)
the AI's seem to hold to it for a bit and then eventually turn even though they may be allied or love you. not a biggie i guess.

stinks to hear the killarmy.aip was removed. i hate having to go thru the map (all i play is huge maps anyway) to whack all the museum pieces...sigh...oh well...

anyway i'll be starting the game over again as i want to increase the number of players from 8 to 16. hopefully this won't cause much of a hiccup. i'll keep you posted if i see any oddities cropping up.

[WesW]

Re: Flat-map
I must have just forgotten to update the med_str for it. I ran into the bug last night, and made the necessary corrections. I wrote Locutus, blaming him for the mistake at first, but obviously I forgot that this version had a med_str in it that had to be updated separately when I changed the Standard file.
I can send the corrected file to anyone who wants it between now and the public release.

[Ganja]

I'm still a little confused with the extraction process of the med mod beta 6.0.
I have extracted to my CTP directory and the files have been placed in the appropriate scenario directory. I have 3 zip files in the med 3 readmes directory (large aidata, standard aidata and original aidata). Do I need to extract these files or are they already done ? as I see the folders with the same names also in the med 3 readmes directory.
I am wanting to start a new game on a huge map with 12 civs including myself and barbarians with the possibility of there being a total of 15 civs in the game. I have set up my userprofile.txt file to reflect this but I still am unsure if I need to further extract or change my aidata folders.
Sorry if this has all been said before but I am unsure of the extraction process.

Thanks for any help

[WesW]

Ganja, you need only to unzip the Med Large zip into the Call-to-Power folder to use the "Large civs" version of the modpack. I noted in the 1st readme that I considered large civs to be ones with more than 16 or so civs in the initial expansion phase of the game. I have now repeated this in the Large civs readme.
I have to use you own experience to determine how much room there is per civ on your map. I am currently playing on a huge map with 8 civs, and it would qualify as a Large game. 12 civs would probably qualify as a Standard game, though, imo.
I should have removed the Standard and Med Large folders from the readme folder, to avoid confusion.

I have updated the Helicopter gl to note that it now only has 2 turns of fuel.

Finally, I have decided to re-structure the mod somewhat. I am going to change the name of the Medieval folder to the Medpack 3.0. This will clear up a few problems with files in the current setup. Players will not have to manually remove the unneeded 2.1 Arquebusier files, and I have found that all the changes for the flat-map version of the modpack, except for the scenario.slc, can be included in the Standard version of the game. This will make things much simpler for me, especially when I start into the Med mod 4. If I left the mod structure as it currently is, players who have downloaded the current beta version of the modpack would have to manually remove these files as well. I also plan to move the videos from the text component of the modpack to the pictures component.

[Ganja]

Thanks Wes, just one more question for now

I just downloaded your 3 zip files sprites and all and extracted them to the ctp directory. I noticed the graphics zips extract into scenarios\medpack3.0\ folder like you have just said. Will these graphics be used in the game even though the main batch of files are still being zipped into the scenarios\medieval\ folder ?
Oh yeah I forgot to say this, but I was playing the game last night and the game crashed when I went to click on save game, not re-tried it since so I'll give it ago soon.

[Ganja]

Wes - Started a new game 12 civs with possibility of there being 15, clicked on standard and also tried large in the scenario selection screen. Used a huge map then the gigantic map but when I put on the cheat to display the whole map I noticed the terrain was a little strange. There didn't seem to be a definative polar region at the northern and southern points of the map, very little grassland, lots of plains and desert, but the most weird thing - in the desert (which was placed correctly in the centre of the map) there were lots of polar terrain squares.
Has this anything to do with the fact I have installed the large aidata zip when perviously I was using the standard file ?