Medieval Pack II: A Call to Arms

[Apollon]

Wes: Yes, but shouldn't the Kraken and the Dreadnaught be able to bombard surface ships? Since they both are submarines and sub-surface class.
Submarines and Nuclear Submarines can bombard, and the moray striker, but not the other 2.

[Locutus]

Great work, Wes, AI is behaving formidable now and the rest of the mod rocks too (but you already knew that ).

(Minor) bugs:

- GL entry Republic: available with advance Bureaucracy rather than Nationalism.
- Hoplite is missing the * behind its name to indicate its elite status
- Slave revolts were performed by Catamarans, an improvement over Coracle (better stats) but still rather silly. Fairly late in the game (late Medieval/Renaissance, don't remember exactly when) I had 1 other slave revolt and it consisted of Archers for a change. Maybe this stuff uses hardcoded indices from Units.txt?

One other issue: In one of my game I managed to conquer the world (regular map, 8 civs) fairly early (1848 AD) by being very agressive from the very beginning, focussing on war more than anything else. This was *just* possible, near the end I was having mayor happiness problems, science was virtually grinded to a halt, many cities were starving, I regularly had to sell improvements to pay my bills and production was just enough pay my troops. This is exactly as it should be and I had a lot of fun with this, trying to keep my war going and at the same time strugling to keep my empire together, but I fear that on larger maps or with more cities these problems will become too large, making it impossible to conquer the world before Technocracy or other future goverments are available (without having to disband almost all conquered cities). Maybe if I had built more city and tile improvements these problems could have been combated better but I fear that on Gigantic or larger maps and/or with 10+ civs these even that won't be enough (in one of my next games I'll see if I can confirm this). I think that now the mod is public you should soon start to work on a big-maps/many-civs version of the mod, I think a large group of players would be very much helped by that.

The conquest-advance thing can probably be done through SLIC as well if needed.

[Apollon]

Last night I decided to start a unusual game instead. I started a Gigantic map wtih 14 civs on it, small islands. Observed some interesting things about the civs behaviours. Seems the ones' with the smalles islands, tries to expand the most. While the ones' with the large islands with lotsa space, doesn't expand (much) at all. Also, I have encountered a "problem" with slave roits. This has not happened in my previous game I think...
Anyway, in the game I'm running now, I've had 3 slave revolts (ended up on a large island with 3 other civs, tried to and succeeded in conquering them). At each slave revol, a civ was acting as the revolutionists, and, of course, they came in catamarans, even if the city was 2 tiles away from the nearest shore And each time, of course, I won the battle, even with one phalanx vs 6 catamarans. Each time, it said I had conquered a civ, and I gained 500 score... Which, of course, is a huge score boost in the early part of the game. And I ended up having conquered 5 civs instead of the 2 on the island.

Also a thing on elite units, it might just be me who is bloody unlucky, but anyway. The first game I ran with the mod (txt update from 6 June), I got an elite unit on the first try, the Zulu units. Now, since then, I have not gotten a SINGLE elite unit in about 5-6 games, and I changed to the 10 June update after the first game. E.g, take my current game, I discovered atleast 5 advances with elite units that no other AI had gotten. I still didn't get one, I gave an advance to an AI once, and he got the elite units then ... grrr . And the AI does _a l w a y s_ get elite units. But as I said, I just might be bloody unlucky

[Apollon]

Just noticed another problem with the elite units.
As far as I've understood, the whole elite concept is for 1 civ to get a unique unit right? Problem is, in my current game, 2 civ's has gotten the same elite units, Arquebiseur and Bombard. First the Italians got it, now the Vikings got it

Also, I have been unable to terraform deserts. Is this intentional? I haven't seen anything about it in the readme docs.

[WesW]

How in the hell did I get into this...

This game-balancing is HARD. I have been messing with the governments for the last three days now, trying to get them adjusted correctly. I have a lot more sympathy for the game designers after this. It turns out that I had not accounted for the changes in the default slider settings when you moved from one governmental group to the next. This was what was causing most of the tech slowdown in the last half of the game. I bet it took forever to build anything, too.
I have now gotten everything in better shape at least. The modern-day and futuristic governements are much stronger now, so you should be able to research and build things at about the same rate as you could in the first half of the game. I am still in the Industrial age in my current game, so I am guessing some here, but I have Democracy adjusted about right, and I think that the other govs should be alright as well. Besides the slider adjustments, I have tinkered with some of the characteristics of the govs to hopefully make them more even.
I also reduced the cost of the advances in the last half of the game by about 20%. I hope that this finally gets the game to play out as it was desinged to.

Call me stupid, but I thought that the overcrowding improvements would eliminate the population pollution unhappiness. When I saw my size-21 cities about to slip below the riot level, and that the Sewer System had not helped this, I realized that something had to be done.
Therefore I have added two new happiness improvements to the game, the Public Park and the Stadium, and increased the happiness effect of the Movie Theater and VR Amusement Park.
I do not have pics for them yet, but all the texts should be correct.

Could someone tell me again the special steps you have to perform with the mod if you have a non-English version of the game?

I have taken 20 turns from the Renaissance age, and given them to the Ancient age. I have adjusted the years-per-turn so that the game should flow about the same.

I had a game some weeks ago where two civs got the Arquebusier and Bombard units. I am not sure how this happened, but it only seems to happen with those two units. Since these units are more of a tech advance and not specific to one culture, I do not mind this being in the game.

The Desert button was misleading. I have corrected it. You need Conservation to add or remove Desert.

The Slave Revolt action is all messed up in the game. It is not due to the mod. I have heard of the specific bug you describe, though.

I may look for the improvement pics tomorrow, and I have contacted Wouter about a new trigger which will be a big benefit to the game. I will probably have the update posted tomorrow.

Once it seems that the first version of the mod is finally done, I will look into making versions for large civs and maps.

[jackazzstudent]

Wes,

Hey man, I gotta say this is a damn good mod. My check is in the mail as soon as I get some $$ (just graduated and between jobs). I've been using your mod for a week or two and just noticed some probs but can't tell if it's the mod or just ctp2. I started a world map, 5 civs on hard. zulus (me), mayans, hebrews, scottish and arabs. I killed off the hebrews quick, but couldn't find anyone else. So upon checking the cheat menu I found the mayans doing well, but the scottish had only built one city on the British isles, despite having enough naval power to expand on several continents. what is really odd is the arabs started on ireland (not a prob in itself) but never settled, just a settler stranded, no city build as of 1600 AD. I don't know if this has to do with the AI settings, although I did change the recommended expansion strategy to Max. Don't bust your arse if you don't know what I'm talkin about because I havn't had a prob on random maps, but I thought the info may help.

Hope this post makes since considering I'm on the nasty end of a six pack of tall boys.

Adam

[ToonGoon]

I'm dying here! I need help, please. Must....play...MM2:CTA!

I eagerly waited until I could emerse myself into MM2:CTA this weekend. I patiently downloaded everything over the week and sat down Friday night for 48+ hrs (and 5000 yrs) of history. I unzip all the MM2 files into the CTP2 folder and then unzip the Modswapper in the same folder. I then started the modswapper but I only saw a choice for the original game. I tried several other non-productive things to no avail.

Can someone please give me some help? I read the readmes and I thought the process appeared quite easy. I suppose it wasn't idiot-proof!

Many thanks in advance...

[ENGINEER]

Wes,

Don't feel so bad about the balance of the game. So far it is awesome. I heard the others say how good the mod was, but until I played it this weekend, I did not believe. I do now. Anybody who has not tried the public release should do so now. My check is in the mail. (I have money now )

Let me explain to the non-believers why I think the Med Mod II is so good. I ended up next to three civilizations. I'm allied with one against the Greeks and the Zulus. The Zulus are right next to me on the West. I put a new city right next to their territory and started to attack them. I took the smallest cities first and usually disband them or destroyed them. Well the Zulus did not like that. I ended up keeping three of their cites (they had five left). Well about ten turns after that they had taken back all three cities and took over my city closest to them. I have NEVER seen an AI civ do this to me in ANY civ game. They attacked me all the time with anything from a 2 stack to a 12 stack. I could not believe it. I was happy my a** was getting kicked. Finally I had to put all my cities producing units to go and finish him off. Thus my cities are now suffering from a lack of inferstructure, which is the way it should be. My unit cost are up to 51%. Guns or butter? Have to decided. This doesn't even take into account of the cool elite units or the nasty barbians.

I just can't get over the slave and refugees trigger. I hope the new trigger your talking about is to direct slaves to different cities. The only problem I had was the computer AI seemed to build too many siege engines. All of the other civilizations had expanded normally even off of islands and on to the bigger land masses. Keep up the good work and thanks again.

P.S.- I wish slaves would make the city unhappy or something you could see on the city screen. Do slaves revolt only if you don't have enough troops? And how many slaves does one unit guard? 2?

[jackazzstudent]

Hey engineer,

Its a complete longshot but what company do you work for in Dallas? My brother Matt is a civil engineer for Carter and Burgess.

Just curious,

Adam

[Martin Gühmann]

Origannly posted by WesW
Could someone tell me again the special steps you have to perform with the mod if you have a non-English version of the game?

Jsut move every file from the ..\ctp2_data\englisch\gamedata\ folder to the folder of your language. For example I have to move these files into the ..\ctp2_data\german\gamedata\ folder. And than I can play with English city, rhuler and civ names, an English Great Library and some English game messages on a German version.

ToonGoon: What is your unzip program. There are some problems with old unzippers, which cannot rebuild the file tree structure. I guess you have all the files in one directory like C:\Program Files\Activision\Call to Power 2\. You should find after you unzipped the files properly a file called MM2_gamefile.txt in your ..\ctp2_data\default\gamedata\ directory. Isn't there such a file you won't find an entry in ModSwapper. Try Winzip or Winrar to unzip this file.

-Martin

[WesW]

NEW UPDATE POSTED !

You will have to start new games after you install this update, since I have added things to the game. You will also need to use modswapper after installing to update your GL.

I finally made pics for the new improvements and the Rifleman militia.

Here are pastes from my previous two posts which cover all of the other changes in this update:

Radiacal made some good points about the Elite units. Once I got to looking at them with his points in mind, I ended up making several changes.
I have lowered the cost of the Bandit Horseman, and both the cost and upkeep of the War Elephant. I went in to give the Elephants the flanking ability and saw that they already had it! I also changed their obsolete advances to Flintlock and Feudalism, respectively.
I gave the Longbowman increased defensive stats ala the Bowman, so they are a more complete field unit, and raised their ranged attack to higher than that of the Siege Engine's, since as you pointed out they cannot bombard. I think that they are now one of the game's potentially dominating units.

I have also given the slaving ability to Chariots and taken it from Pikemen, since the AIs seem to build only Chariots and never Light Cavalry.

Jani, I understand what you mean now. The stats you refer to are the GL's summary section, which I thought was not even used in the game. I corrected this section for the units. I will try to go in sometime and correct this for everything else.

The modern-day and futuristic governements are much stronger now, so you should be able to research and build things at about the same rate as you could in the first half of the game. I am still in the Industrial age in my current game, so I am guessing some here, but I have Democracy adjusted about right, and I think that the other govs should be alright as well. Besides the slider adjustments, I have tinkered with some of the characteristics of the govs to hopefully make them more even.
I also reduced the cost of the advances in the last half of the game by about 20%. I hope that this finally gets the game to play out as it was desinged to.

Therefore I have added two new happiness improvements to the game, the Public Park and the Stadium, and increased the happiness effect of the Movie Theater and VR Amusement Park.


Thanks for the explanation, Martin. I have included this in the Installation readme.

In Ctp2, workers and slaves are not listed in the pop file along with the specialists. This means that you cannot do anything to change their stats or effects. I wish that you could.

Thanks for the kudos, Engineer. Yes, units only guard 2 slaves now. I mentioned this in the Main readme, but I went ahead and put it in the Misc. readme too. I am glad you like the triggers. I really like them too. The slic guys did an awesome job turning my ideas into reality with all the triggers.

The new trigger will change AI diplomatic personalities every 150 turns or so. Dale has not sat down to do it, yet, but I do not think it will be that hard to do. The trigger will not change the AI strategies, but those are close enough now that there should not be a big difference in them if you put them into a given diplomatic state.

The only other major concept that I would like to get into the game at this point is the Pirates trigger that someone worked on and almost had finished, but seems to have given up on. At least he doesn't appear to post any more. I think Wouter worked with him on that, and I hope that he can finish it.

The other concepts I had in mind were one to add a food bonus when you discovered some of the medical advances like Immunization, to mimic the run-away populations we saw in the 20th century.
The other concept would be Mercenary units, which would be supported by gold rather than production once built. I wanted the Bandit Horseman and Pikemen to be merc units.
I would also like for the leader pics to show up when you encouter a civ for the first time.

Right now, I am about burnt out as far as new ideas. I have not played another game in two solid years, and I am ready to take a civ break. Now that the AIs are doing what they should, and all the other concepts and game-play issues are, hopefully, finished, I think we finally have the game we always wanted, one that will give us a consistent test using random maps game-in and game-out.

If someone has something they would like to see in the game, or something that is not right with the mod, speak up. I am still interested in hearing what ideas are out there. I will try and get a large civs version of the mod out soon, maybe when these last triggers are finished. After that I may take a sabbatical to recharge my batteries.

[ENGINEER]

jackazzstudent,

Nope not C & B, another big engineering firm. I rather not say since I'm kind of at work now. Lunch of course

Toongoon,

I had similar problems. I just deleted everything. Re-installed, put patch on and then put the files in manually and then used Modswapper to move everything into the right files. Everything worked fine after that. It's frustating when something so simple doesn't work sometimes. Good luck!

Wes,

So are you saying there is no way to get the slaves to other cities than the closest one. Even if I couldn't direct it, maybe a even affect over the whole empire would be better than 10 or 20 slaves in one city. I can't just take troops out of a city to get the slave to another city because they might revolt.

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by ENGINEER
So are you saying there is no way to get the slaves to other cities than the closest one. Even if I couldn't direct it, maybe a even affect over the whole empire would be better than 10 or 20 slaves in one city. I can't just take troops out of a city to get the slave to another city because they might revolt.

Haven't tried it yet in CTP2, but in CTP1, you could control where slaves go by building a road next to all cities, vacate your military from the cities where you didn't want the slaves to go, run your attacks, and then march your military back into the cities since they would still have movement left. Of course, you would lose the fortify bonus for that turn, but you can't have everything.

And of course, if you were running a lot of battles with the intent of enslaving a lot of units, you would have a logistical nightmare on your hands.

[ENGINEER]

I remembered that from CTP, but I wasn't sure how the milta units would react since I can't move those. Would the slaves still go to a city with a milta unit? But either way moving units in and out of cities right before every battle would suck.

[jackazzstudent]

medieval pack 2 one city challenge??

Hey Wes,

I downloaded the june 18th update for the mod and soon found that I couldn't build any settlers (new game of course). I discovered a few techs to see if that helped but it didn't. Upon checking the cheat menu I found that the AI civs were unable to build settlers as well. I uninstalled civ2 and modswapper and did a complete install with the patch and your mod (modswapper as well) and still can not build settlers.

Anyone else having this problems or have any suggestions?

Thanks,
Adam