Making Cradle 3+ fully compatible with the Apolyton Edition

[Kull]

The "new & improved" Emissary Unit: Looking at the same list of "problem issues" which beset the Scout, here's how they play out with the Emissary:

1) The Emissary is a civilian unit, and as such is not seen as a threat by other civs.
2) It can be expelled
3) There is a marginal increase in cost (from 90 to 110), but the biggest change is that while the Emissary is stealthy, it cannot SEE other stealth units. Thus it keeps the survivability feature so helpful in Exploration, but does not have the unrealistic "Secret Police" aspect which made them desirable as border defenders.
4) The Emissary gains the "Investigate City" special attack, which is appropriate for a unit whose primary purpose is Exploration. In addition, this also aligns with the new upgrade path to a similar civilian unit - the Diplomat.
5) As described in Post #115, the Cradle 3 Trade Emissary (the CtP1 Diplomat) was removed when it was discovered that the "Franchise" mechanism was broken. Accordingly, that sprite (armed only with a scroll) is now available to fill this new role.
6) Lastly we come to the issue which is most important to me personally. Desirable game mechanism aside, what is the historical basis for an Exploration-type unit at this point in time? As outlined in its new Great Library entry, "the Emissary is a unit who carries out the earliest form of ancient diplomacy. Long before resident diplomats were assigned to other nations, rulers would send "gifts" to one another, which - despite claims of being tribute - in most cases were actually a form of elite-level trade. In the process of moving from place to place, these emissaries took the opportunity to explore the regions they traversed and would report their findings when they returned home."

As that implies, historically "Emissaries" carried out both a trade and a diplomatic function, and this was helpful when it came to determining an appropriate Advance. Scouts were available with Toolmaking, but there's no obvious connection between that and this new unit. In fact none of the early advances (those without pre-reqs) seemed like a good fit. Fortunately there was not a "Level One" Advance in the Economics group, so a new one has been added - Exploration (see attached) - and thus the Emissary is buildable very early in the game.

The final task was to run playtests with this new set-up, the last of which ran down to 2550 BC. In that game, 7 of 12 civs had built Emissaries (anywhere from 3 to 5 each), and many of them were sent to border regions and beyond, including quite a few being carried off in Coracles. There was even one instance of an "Investigate City" sound, so the AI is able to use the new skill. In every case, the civs which built Emissaries also deployed Prophets and Slavers, so the new unit is not taking the place of these more valuable Special Units. All-in-all, a good result.

[Kull]

Replacing the Scout Unit: Cradle 3 (and later, Cradle 4) feature the Scout, a very useful unit that is available right from the start (with Toolmaking). The Scout is stealthy and cheap, and is the perfect unit for exploring the map, since the stealth features mean that an encounter with wandering Barbarian units is usually not fatal. However, despite all the pluses, there are a number of issues:

1) The unit does not have Attack points, but it's not actually a civilian, so other civs view any territorial incursions as a military violation and your diplomatic relations suffer accordingly.
2) Scouts cannot be expelled, which means they have to be tolerated unless you (or the AI) want to start a war.
3) Because they are so cheap, the human player inevitably will build quite a few of them to use as "stealth border defense", since they can spot incoming stealth units from other civs. The problem is that the AI is really good at deploying Stealth units but using "Scouts-as-Stealth-Defenders" is an easy counter. Even worse, this defense tactic is used by the human player, but not the AI.
4) Eventually the Scouts upgrade, but when they do, it is to a military unit (Javelin Cav) and the AI immediately uses them offensively against any civ whose borders they happen to be within. The sudden transition from invisible Explorer to military Attacker doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and it results in wars between civs who otherwise were getting along fine.
5) The sprite is the CtP2 "Zulu Warrior", who is carrying weapons. A really minor point of course, but it's misleading to see an armed sprite that is actually defenseless.
6) Historically there's also the issue that a unit with these capabilities has no counterpart in the dawn years of the Ancient World. "Secret Military Explorer" simply wasn't a "thing" in pre-Dynastic times, and using the same unit to detect enemy stealth units is even less accurate.

For all those reasons, I've been playing around with this concept from the very beginning, but could never come up with a solution which addressed all the problems. Five different alternatives were plugged into the test bed at various times, but none of them could solve every issue. I'd even considered just dumping the "Scout" altogether, but MOST of the fun during the early game comes from map exploration, and I wasn't keen on making the game LESS interesting. Anyway, it eventually hit me that there WAS a historical path available, a suitable sprite existed, and the CtP2 game mechanisms could be tweaked to emphasize the desired characteristics while removing the problematic. Accordingly, in Cradle 3+, the Scout unit is now replaced by the Emissary.

[Blake00]

CivFanatics gloms all CtP variants into one marginal sub-forum with a host of non-similar games, and to me that's just depressing. Kudos to you for trying to spark some life into an old game, but I doubt there's even a handful of folks at Civfanatics who are still interested in CtP. You are more than welcome to copy elements of this thread over there, and see if there's any interest. If so, I might put in an appearance to answer whatever questions might arise.

Yeah it is bit, but the good news is I've spoken with the admins and they're happy for CTP to once again have it's own forum there, but only if someone is willing to moderate it and put some effort into growing it, which I'm happy to do down the track (after I've completed my Civ2 projects over this year that eat up most of my time). While there's not much CTP action going there as you say, we've had great interest in some CTP news content across our social media pages (which we also share out to other civ groups containing thousands of members) so there's definitely future potential there for creating and sharing CTP content that might bring some life back into the forums once we've created a dedicated CTP area again. I'll also be working over the coming years to grow dedicated CTP communities on social media too (you've seen my work with Ninja on the CTP Discord and now I've just kicked off a CTP FB group too) so that in the future we won't just be sharing to general civ groups but actual true CTP groups.

Anyway that's all going to take a while lol.. so no worries mate, if you'd prefer to only post here I'll see if I can create a post about your work there in the near future.

[Kull]

I give a lot of credit to Apolyton for maintaining the various CTP sub-forums, and that's really why this thread was placed here. CivFanatics gloms all CtP variants into one marginal sub-forum with a host of non-similar games, and to me that's just depressing. Kudos to you for trying to spark some life into an old game, but I doubt there's even a handful of folks at Civfanatics who are still interested in CtP. You are more than welcome to copy elements of this thread over there, and see if there's any interest. If so, I might put in an appearance to answer whatever questions might arise.

[Blake00]

This is great work! Wish more people could see what you're doing! Do you have a account over at CivFanatics Kull ? Was just thinking you should make a sister thread there to copy and paste your updates into. Like here the CTP area at CFC is a bit quiet, however I hope to work on changing that and if there's a thread about your project over there I can ask CFC admin The_J to consider making a news item out of it which can then be shared by me around the CFC social media groups & other Civ groups we have connections in.

https://forums.civfanatics.com/forums/other-civ-related-games.534/

[Kull]

Settler Sprite & 2D Art: Now that all four Plunder Units have their own unique sprites, the Settler Sprite and Art can be reallocated back to the Settler Unit (which currently uses the "Nomad" Sprite and Art). Previously it was a bit confusing during the game when the player transitioned from building Nomads to Settlers, since both units were identical (including the 2D unit art). Fortunately in this case the Sprite and 2D art already exist, so the change was very simple. In Newsprite.txt the Settler sprite shifted from "111" to "2" while in Uniticon.txt the graphic links changed from "upup111*.tga to upup002*.tga. And that's it!

This series of improvements means that the group of units which once shared a pair of sprites now have 6 unique sprites and 2D art.

[Kull]

Plunder IV - The Truck: In the Modern Era (beginning with Economics), the Plunder IV unit appears. As we see even today in the Ukraine, invading armies rely on vehicles to spirit off their loot - specifically, the "Truck". I looked around for a good truck unit in the various CtP2 mods, but the only ones in existence used a single image. Once again, Sketchfab came to the rescue and I was able to build an "all-direction" sprite using screen captures from a 3D model of a military 2.5 ton truck (see attached). Zooming in on the same model also provided a slightly larger version of the vehicle which worked nicely for the 2D unit art.

Sounds were also necessary, and here Pixabay saved the day. There's a ton of audio clip sources out there, but most of them force you to jump through hoops before making a clip available. Pixabay conversely makes it easy to find and download the sounds you need - in this case a truck in motion (Move), crashing (Death), and even a nice "Engine Start" (Acknowledge).

[Kull]

Plunder III - The Cow: Back in the mists of time (i.e last summer), my exploration into the mysteries of Sprite Development began, and the first unit to fall "under my knife" was the CtP2 "Cow" unit. Apparently the game developers intended to include "cattle rustling" as a game feature, but the whole concept landed on the cutting room floor, and the only tangible benefit was the inclusion of the cow sprite, along with a document which used it as part of the tutorial on sprite building. The unit did not appear in the game but was beautifully designed with lots of great movement. But - as you can probably guess - there was no Idle animation. Long story short, that was fixed and the lessons learned helped enormously as I delved further into sprite deconstruction and creation. But otherwise, the unit remained unused until now.

So why now? Well, Plunder III encompasses the Middle Ages (from Chivalry until Trade Guilds) and while armies might have more professionals than they did way back in the earliest of ancient eras, "Plunder on the hoof" has never gone out of style, as there's nothing easier to confiscate than items which can follow you home under their own power (and can browse for food along the way). Since Plunder III generates more production when disbanded, that calls for a more valuable creature, and the "Cow" certainly fits that description (see attached).

[Kull]

Plunder II - The Captive: Most Plunder units are disbanded in one of your cities thereby providing a Production Boost (i.e. additional shields) to whatever is under construction. But from Bronze Working until the advent of the Dark Ages, you will receive Plunder II units which are "Captives" - not Slaves - and as such when this unit is disbanded it provides new citizens to the city.

Thinking historically, what sort of person goes from captive to citizen in this time frame? And the answer is that while captives typically became slaves, most of the women - whether as wives or slaves - produced children who DID become citizens (a class of perpetual slaves was usually not a feature of this era).

Representing these women is the Mistress sprite from the "Forever Future" mod (see attached). As you may recall from Post #28, that mod already provided the female sprite for the new Assassin unit and they do so again here. Like most sprites developed for Ctp1, the Mistress did not have an Idle animation and thus had no motion, so the sprite was deconstructed (108 images, no shadows) and a 4-image Idle animation was created in which she leans forward seductively. After adding several appropriate sounds, new 2D artwork and an updated GL record, the unit is now in-game.

[Kull]

Plunder I - The Goat: As discussed in Post #37, several of the Cradle Wonder units have the ability to generate "Plunder" after winning a battle. There are 4 different Plunder Units, but all of them used the CtP2 Settler sprite and the 2D art associated with it. Again, there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it was a bit confusing, and since each Plunder unit is "era-specific", it makes sense to look at them individually in the context of the era in which each becomes available.

The earliest is Plunder I, which appears until the discovery of "Copper Smelting". Historically, this was a time when armies were largely composed of poorly trained peasants, and Plunder was whatever they could glean from the surrounding countryside. Of those, the most desirable items would be small or easily transportable. And in that sense, nothing could be more useful than livestock of the sort they knew intimately in their civilian lives. Something like a herd of Goats.

Which is the new sprite which represents the "Plunder I" unit. This is an "all direction" sprite (thank you, Sketchfab), so while there's no moving parts (well beyond my skill level), the goats point in all directions they travel, and you'll hear them trot and bleat as they move.

[Kull]

More Sprites: As a general rule, Cradle tries to avoid situations where different units use the same sprite. The exceptions are:
1) "Elite Units", for example when "Spearman" is upgraded to "Elite Spearman". All of the unit stats, GL text and 2D art is altered but both units continue to use the same "Spearman" sprite. It's not optimal, but there isn't much choice given the limited number of "good" CtP2 sprites.
2) "Wonder Units" also frequently make use of sprites that are used by "normal" units, for example "Hannibal" uses the same sprite as the "War Elephant". This is even less of a problem because each Wonder Unit is both unique and rare, so consequently the player is usually well aware of their location and doesn't confuse them with the "normal" sprites. And, as with "Elite Units", these have different stats, GL text and most importantly - unique 2D unit art.

There were a few other cases, but those have already been resolved so that now the Patriarch and Televangelist have different sprites, as do Cavalry and the Ulysses Grant Wonder Unit, the various Pharaoh/Great King units and the Chariot, and a few others. However, there are two cases in which a total of 6 units share two sprites, but even worse - the 2D unit art is the same. Which makes it very difficult to tell one from the other without seeking out the text descriptions.

The good news is, all 6 units now have 6 different sprites AND all the text and 2D art is different as well. So let's go through them, beginning with....

[Kull]

Goods Improvements (Oil): Lastly, there was the matter of "Tundra Terrain". There's only one Good there (Caribou), but it seemed logical that Oil should be as well. In a purely Ancient Era mod there's a degree of sense in excluding Oil from that sort of terrain, but Cradle 3+ has greatly expanded the opportunities in the Modern portions of the game, so it seemed appropriate to add Arctic Oil availability. But try as I might, the game would simply not display the new Good. Long story short, the "missing link" was found in the terrain.txt file. All terrain-types are listed there, and that includes enumerating the number of Goods available in each. And of course, "Tundra" was set to allow only one....but not anymore!

[Kull]

Goods Improvements (Deer): For some time I'd been thinking about adding "Deer" as a new form of good. They have a long history as a food and trade resource, and exist in almost every part of the planet. But the best location for them would be "Forest" terrain, and that already had four Goods. However, one of those was "Bear" and that animal can be found just as frequently in Mountains as Forest, so.....suddenly it all came together. And now Deer can be seen and heard in the Forests of Cradle 3+ (see attachment) while Bears stalk the Alpine Mountains.

[Kull]

Goods Improvements (Copper): The problem was - and I hadn't really noticed this before - but the "Copper" sprite appeared to be "more gold" than the Gold! Accordingly I created a new granular Copper sprite, using orange tones and mixing in a fair amount of bluish-green to give it a hint of the tarnish-look so common to copper. And as a final touch, I shifted the old Copper sprite to Gold. As you can see in the attachment (Gold left, Copper right), they clearly have a different appearance, even against the same background. So all's well....except for one thing. There was now a gap in the Mountain Good sequence.

[Kull]

Goods Improvements (Gold): This was another one of those ideas which start off with a limited objective and then slowly grow and expand, folding in more "improvement opportunities" along the way. Earlier in the project, after making a number of changes to the graphics and even adding a few new Goods, I proclaimed those changes at an end and moved on to other things (see Post #40). However, in the course of many playtests I couldn't help but notice that the "Gold Good" graphic was almost invisible when seen against the background of Alpine Mountain terrain (see attached).

The first idea was to substitute the "Gold Bars" sprite from Cradle 4, but that is actually a gold-colored version of the gems used by the Emerald Good, and in that context it didn't look very accurate. In addition, all the other metal goods in Cradle 3+ have a more natural appearance (like handfuls of ore), so the gold "Bars" didn't match the other metals.

Of course that took us right back to the original problem, since granular piles of yellow ore aren't visible in Mountain terrain. Accordingly I tested the sprite with several other terrain types and determined that it looks best against the Brown Hill (Sand Dune) background. Which was a logical substitution since Silver was the second, "rare" good in that terrain, and it already was used as the rare good in Brown Mountain terrain. Problem solved, yes? Well not entirely....