Medieval Pack II: A Call to Arms

[ticktock]

Yeah, the zip files for pictures, sounds, and sprite1 are definately corrupt (as Swissy originally reported). I don't think anyone should try again until Wes can get these fixed.

[Swissy]

Originally posted by Starfighter08
Swissy:
Out of pure curiosity, how did you get that nick? No offense intended.

My favorite breed of dog is the Greater Swiss Mountain Dog, a breed resuced by your countrymen in the early 1900's. They are known in north america as the Swissy. Hence the nickname.

[WesW]

I have spent a long and frustrating day trying to correct the corrupted files. I lurker here on the site contacted me about 12 hrs ago with notice of the sounds and pictures files. I used a trial version of an FTP program called Cute FTP to upload the files, and it has turned out to be very slow and very suseptible to timing out. Whenever it timed out, it corrupted the files when I used the resume or overwrite commands without deleting the aborted files first.
I have managed to upload a good version of the sounds, for those of you who have the beta updates and thus do not need the graphics. I am trying to get good versions of the sprites1 and pictures files uploaded. I will post again when I am finally successful.

[WesW]

UPDATE ALERT: New text update posted

I also managed to get uncorrupted versions of the pictures and sprites1 files up.
At least I assume that the sprites1 are good. I used Cute to get the pics up, but then it did its usual with the sprites and cut out when it had about 90% of it uploaded. I went to downlaod.com and got MS FTP, and used it to upload the sprites1 and text update. I have not downloaded these two files to verify their quality, but surely to hell they are all right. I had the connection quit on me for a couple of minutes when MS was 86% of the way through with the sprites, but unlike Cute it kept trying and eventually re-established connection and finished the job.

I played with the map settings some more, and I am really happy overall with the maps I am getting now. I think you will be too.
I gave the Zulu Warrior the Ctp1 Warrior's sounds, which are a better fit, I think.
I increased the penalty for too many cities back to 75% of its original values. It was just too easy to expand to 15 or more cities under Monarchy, and then you can run away with the game.

The big thing, though, is that I looked in the personalities.txt for the first time in a long time, and found some things which should help the AIs to build more cities, explore more, and wage war more often. I hope this addresses some of the last short-comings to AI behavior.

I have not mentioned his work enough, but Dale's diplomacy work has really improved the game. You will see AIs adapting their tone and propisitions to changing situations now. If you start conquering them, they will sue for peace, even attempting to pay tribute in order to get you to stop. You can usually stay on the good side of at least one AI, and continue to swap tech with him.
You should never see the AIs refuse a peace offering when they have only one city left, like you see in the Sid Games (When this happened I always had a flashback to the scene in Mars Attacks! when they shrunk the US general down to pea-sized, and he was still shooting his pistols and giving them the finger before they squashed him.)

Sorry for the bad files, but believe me it has been more frustrating for me than anyone. And get the new texts, as I think the changes are worth it.

Rhuarc, view the Medpack II wonder movie to see what Crusade! is.

Units can enslave after the Emancipation Wonder, and the best we could do is make a trigger which disbands all enslaving units at the end of the Renaissance Age (1800AD). This should be about the time the Eman Wonder is built, so there should not be a lot of slaves around going into the last half of the game. (In reality, slavery is a worse problem today than at any time in history going by shear numbers, but slaves are just too powerful in the game.)

[rooboy]

Good stuff. All files are now fine.

[MarkG]

wes, please post last updated dates(and times perhaps) for all files from now on.....

[jackazzstudent]

Hey, great mod Wes. I like the fact that my game ended in the second turn!! I will never minimize rations and wages to max production at the beginning of the game again! I really do appreciate all the work you fellas have done.

Adam Robinson

[Kyle]

Okay, all kinds of problems here.


Just to make sure I did this correctly....


I did a fresh install (updated to V. 1.1) on my Windows 2k system, Service Pack 2.


As it said in the readme's, I simply unzipped the files into the c:\program files\activision\Call To Power 2 directory.


Changed the slicdebug thing to = No.

Installed the Modswapper and ran it. Selected Med Mod, then hit the start CTP2 button.

I loaded up a 2 turn game I'd started just previously, my Settler turned into a howitzer, some wolf monster like creature was sitting ontop of my city, and nonsense (aka internal game messages a player shouldn't see) messages kept popping up. And the game up and crashed to desktop.

It's quite possible I forgot to do something...

[Rhuarc]

Kyle,

Was the game that you had started previously a MedMod game or was it just a regular game that you ahd started and saved? Because if you started a regular game and saved it then installed the MedMod I don't think the save game from the origional CTP2 will work with the Mod. I'm not completely sure though, anybody know for sure?

[Pintello]

Hi Kyle,

Several things here. One, you cannot load a previously saved game once you have installed the mod unless the game was saved with the Mod installed in the first place. Two, you have to do some additional things to make the mod work with W2K.

Here goes, I will see if I can remeber everything you have to do with W2K.
1) Go to the Gamefile.txt file.
2) Go to the bottom of the Gamefile.txt file and remove the MM2_ from in front of the Great_Library.txt file name and the Newsprite.txt file name.
3) Go to the middle of the Gamefile.txt file and remove the MM2 from the MM2_wondermovie.txt file name.
4) Make backup copies of the following original files. Great_Library.txt, Newsprite.txt, Wondermovie.txt.
5) Delete the Newsprite.txt, Great_Library.txt, and Wondermovie.txt files from the Activision\CTP2\Default\gamedata directory if they are located there.
6) Copy the MM2_Great_Library.txt and MM2_Newsprite.txt files from the Activision\CTP2\English\Gamedata directory to the Activision\CTP2\Default\Gamedata directory.
7) Rename both files by removing the MM2 part of their file names so that they become Great_Library.txt and Newsprite.txt.
8) Rename the MM2_wondermovie.txt file to wondermovie.txt file.

I think that is all you have to do. I too use W2K and it took me a while to figure all this out during Beta and Alpha testing of WesW's mod. But I did figure it out and now it works great for me. The Mod is well worth the effort to make it work.

WesW,

You may want to add the above instructions to one of your install text files so that it can be available for everyone. But mayby we should wait and hear back from Kyle to make sure I didn't leave anything out.

Timothy Pintello

[Kyle]

Yeah, I used a pre Med Mod save game, due to the userprofile thing that needed changing. This part is clear now.


Pintello, I'll try that tomorrow and get back to the thread what happens. Thanks.

[Radical_Manuvr]

I was getting ready to say the slaver unit delete trigger doesn't work right but I usually get to Industrial Age before 1800 so I'm glad I noticed the 1800 in your post. I always think I'm behind or slow with advances so maybe I'm not doing as bad as I thought.

I got the zulu elite units in one game and man those guys are great!

I use WS_FTP LE for uploads but I've never used it for large files so I can't say how it works for that. The website is ipswitch.com in case you're interested. I have an older version than they have available on their site now. Click on download evaluations for version LE 5.08. It says it's only good for 30 days. Mine still works after a year, though they may have put something new in it to stop you from going past 30 days. If you want the old version I could email to you.

[WesW]

Well, I think I have found a bug in the exe file. One of the changes I made to the personalities.txt with the latest update was to set all the AIs to Maximum expansion. I tested a game with all of them set to Minimum, and all the AI built 4 cities, and then settled down to develop things. Well, I have played a couple of test games with the Maximum setting, and all the AIs built 4 cities and settled down to development. I would guess that the code for all three settings was pasted in with the minimum values, and the maximum setting was never inputed for some reason. I have just set all of the expansion settings to Average, which were what most eveyone was before the update. The file is located in C:\Program Files\Activision\Call To Power 2\ctp2_data\default\aidata , for those of you who want to change it yourself.
I plan to go on a short vacation Sunday, and I don't know if I will have enough to warrant another update before then or not, so I would encourage all of you to make this change to your own files.

If TIm's Win2k instructions work for other people (I am looking for someone else to confirm them.), then I can make a file to put into the readmes and perhaps a link on the webpage as well.

[Rhuarc]

Wes,
Do you think the tech tree will be changing at all now? I am just curious so that I can print out a final copy of it when it is completed. Oh, on the tech tree I saw a couple of errors on it in the top middle part. I don't have it in front of me, so I don't know where they are exactly, but it is in the box where there is an arrow at the wrong place, and there are a couple of other things worng I think. You might want to take another look at the tree and double check everything since that could be pretty important! Thanks!

[Pintello]

Hi Wes,

You may be jumping the gun on that expansion thing. Last night I started a game with your latest update and the AI is doing pheonominal. While some civs did indeed never have 4 or 5 cities, some started expanding like mad. The Chineese and the English for two. It may acutally be a combination of personality and expansion rate that affects how fast and how far the Civs expand. Map size may also have something to do with it as well.

I will give you a run down of how the game has gone so far so that you can see what I mean. I was playing on gigantic map at impossible level with 11 civs plus barbs, with barbs set at raging hoards. I also noticed that the barbs were not conquering AI cities this time like they were in the past. They conquered a few cities and I think the Greeks fell to them real early, but still nothing on the scale that I have seen with all your previous releases.

I started out with two settlers. I built two cities but upon exploration I ran into the Chinesees, English, and Austrailians very quickly. In the time it took me to build 2 cites the Chinesees had 5 and the English had 6 or 7. Seeing this situation I decided I had to conquer somebody so that I could expand. I decided on the Chineese. I built a stack of 12 units and went after them. Even though it was early in the game most Chinesees cities had at least 3 units in each one. They also built one more city while I was building up my forces. I had no problem conquering the Chineese but my tech fell way behind in the process. After conquering all 6 Chineese cities, giving me a total of 8, I built two more settlers to give myself the 10 cities permitted under Monarchy and City State. Can't remeber which I was under at this point. Now I set about building my empire and infrastructure. I was expecting no more trouble.

Then I got a real shock. The English took one of my frontier cities with a well mixed stack of 8 units! This gave them 8 or 9 cities! Now I had to shift back to war footing. By the time I built my well mixed stack of 12 units and went to take the city back the English had reenforced it to the point that I lost my stack! Worse the English kept the city! I ended up having to build two stacks of 12 and loosing one against the city before I could send in the second stack and clean up. All this effort to just take back a city that was originally mine to start with.

Finally because I had switched to Theocracy, I decided to take the war to the English. I managed to take out an English choke point city close by, but it took me 4 stacks to do so. I foolishly quicky pushed the attack on the nearest English city thinking that they used most their troops to reenforce the conquered city. I thought, based on past experience, that I would be able to take the next city with only 1 stack. I lost the entire stack in that attack because that city also had 12 units in it. It had 2 flanking Beserkers, 4 defending phalaxes, and 9 ranged units, one of which was a catapult. In other words, it was even better defended than the city they took from me. I built 3 more stacks of Bowmen and heavy swordmen to take the city. I lost 2 of the stacks and took it with the 3rd one. Even then I ended up loosing 2 Heavy Swordmen.

In the time it took me to build up the stacks and conquer this city, the English built 2 more cities. This gave them a total of 9 or 10 cities. The limit under their current form of government.

To further compound my foolishness, I went after one of the new cities with a stack of 12. I thought surely that city would not be well defended. Boy was I wrong. Again I ran into a stack of 12 units in a city. This time 4 flanker Beserkers, 2 phalaxes, 2 or three catapults and various and sundry other ranged units. I lost badly here too and quickly. I think I only took out a single one of the defenders maybe two, but that is all.

At the time I launched the failed assault above, I sent another stack of twelve into their territory thinking to hit one of their rear cities. I ended up meeting a stack of 12 English troops heading towards the city I just conquered from them. They wiped me out. This was a stack similar to the one that I lost my other stack in the failed assault on the new city. This attack came in open grassland/plains and the English were not fortified this time, so I did better this time around. I took out all but 4 or 5 of their units before they destroyed me. Worse, I thought about retreating this time, but because I was not the attacker but the attacked instead, I did not have that option.

Whatever you did with the updates posted yesterday, they have really changed the dynamics of the game. Some civs do just stick with small numbers of cities even on a gigantic map, but others build cities until the either run out of space or they meet the city limits for the government they are under. My guess is that this is a result of several factors. 1) The personality of the civ. 2) The size of the map. 3) How much space they have for expansion.

I have also noticed that the civs nolonger build cities in obviously bad locations too. There were several civs with some bad areas on their continents like tundra and glaciers. Those civs, the Egyptians and the Slav's specifically, did not build cities too close to those areas.

Overall, this is a pheonominal mod Wes. This game is actually a military challenge now. I started out as a conquer this time, something I don't usually do, but I am still behind in every catagory except military. Even there, the English and I are pretty close to each other. We are knocking the crap out of each other's military too, but the English are still ahead. Nobody else in the game has militaries anywhere near as powerful as ours either. Everybody else is quite a ways down compared to us. Then again, nobody else is in a desparate war against the other either. The next big challenge will be the Brazillians. They are at least as large as the English, and they are the closest in military power to us. They are however way ahead in science at least vis-a-vis me.

Well that is all for now. Whatever you did to the files yesterday, please don't replace it with whatever you are replacing it with. At least on the larger maps, it does appear to be making a difference.

Timothy Pintello