Making Cradle 3+ fully compatible with the Apolyton Edition

[Kull]

The Case of the Missing Trade Goods (con):

I'll spare you the torturous testing and all the dead-end theories and take you right to the heart of things: Non-Specialist Citizens (see attached). Enkomi had a total population of 16, including 9 Citizens and 7 Slaves. Two of the Citizens were assigned as Labor Specialists in order to speed up Production. But what happens if we re-assign just one of those Citizens back to the non-Specialist Worker pool?

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[Kull]

The Case of the Missing Trade Goods - Solved:

That's right, Enkomi's Horses have not only appeared in the Trade Manager (attached), but it's now possible to build the Horseman unit (see Abdera at bottom right).

So here's the key. Goods in the Level 1 "City Influence" perimeter (the 8 hexes immediately surrounding every city) are always available for Trade. However, once the Area of Influence expands to Level 2 (the additional 12 hexes gained at population levels 9 thru 20), the rules change. Trade Goods in the expanded area are only available if EIGHT citizens are available as Non-Specialists. And something similar is true when the perimeter expands again at Level 3 (20 non-specialist Citizens for pop sizes 21-32), Level 4 (32 non-specialist Citizens at pop sizes 33-46), and finally Level 5 (46 non-specialist Citizens for all population levels in excess of 47).

Once I realized what was happening, the mechanism suddenly made sense and actually improves overall game play because it means there's a real penalty in place for players who go "all-in" on enslavement as a population expansion strategy. Sure, your cities will grow faster, but there's a catch. If you don't ensure that there are enough Citizens present, those large perimeters are not going to help when it comes to expanding your Trade Networks, which is THE primary method for building up your Gold Reserves.

And it makes sense in a real-world way as well. Slaves might be good for mining and farming, but Trade Networks are the realm of Entrepreneurs (as historical records prove, even in the most ancient of societies), and for those you need true Citizens, not a populace in which most are held in bondage.

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[Kull]

Citizen Concept entry in the GL:

The Great Library has concept entries for Population, Workers and Slaves, but nothing for Citizens. However - as noted above - they are a VERY important component of the game, and accordingly a new Citizen Concept Entry has been added to the GL.

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[Kull]

"MaxWorkers" data element in "citysize*.txt" files:

Post # 5 talked about how the six citysize*.txt files set the population limits which extend the City Influence perimeter. Interestingly, even though AE, Cradle, and other mods make changes to the original CtP2 files, one correlation always remains the same: The "Population" number is always the same value as the one for "MaxWorkers". At every level.

But what was really interesting is the "MaxWorker" values are also identical to those which control access to Trade Goods within the city perimeter (as discussed in Post # 272 above). Which led to the question - can this value be reduced so that Trade Good access doesn't require quite as many non-specialist citizens? And the answer is...Yes! As a test, the "MaxWorkers" value for Level 3 cities (those with populations between 21 and 32) was reduced from 20 to 15 and sure enough, the Trade Goods in the extended perimeter were now available with 15 citizens instead of 20. However...

The HUGE downside was that 15 or more non-specialist citizens IMMEDIATELY caused a gigantic increase in Production Pollution. In my test city, that number rose from Zero to 376, resulting in -9 to city happiness! But if you assigned just one of those 15 citizens to a Specialist task, the pollution completely disappeared. Looking through the many CtP2 text files, I could not find any variable that correlates non-specialist citizen counts with production pollution, so what's causing this is a complete mystery. Possibly a bug of some sort.

Accordingly, this idea will be filed away as "unworkable", and the 1-for-1 correlation between "Population" and "MaxWorkers" has been restored in Cradle 5.​

[Kull]

Slave & Citizen Distribution code:

The Source Code team rewrote the "Slave Distribution" code and added two features. Rather than piling up in the city nearest to the Enslavement location, Slaves are now distributed across nearby cities. In addition, once a city reaches the building-imposed population limit (f/e population is capped at 12 until the Apothecary is built) the code won't send any more Slaves there. There is an exception however. If ALL your cities are at the population limit, then any new Slaves will ALWAYS go to the NEAREST city. In essence, the code reverts back to the old "Slave Distribution" system (i.e. there is no attempt at dispersion when all cities are at the limit). Worth noting that when a city's population increases beyond the building-imposed limit, it will immediately begin to starve. Farming Specialists and Food-providing buildings cannot alleviate the problem and the only solution is to construct the building which sets the new limit....or wait until starvation brings the population back down.

The Free Slaves attack (available to Abolitionists, Patriarchs and the Spartacus Wonder Unit) is similar to Enslavement, except it creates a Citizen in one of your cities. However, this code was NOT modified, and they too will always go to the nearest city. There is no distribution and the code ignores building-imposed population limits. Basically, it's the Citizen version of the old "Slave Distribution" code.

Cradle can't alter any of this as it's part of the executable, but the information is presented here since there are obvious gameplay ramifications.​

[Kull]

Troop Unload issue:

When unit-carrying Naval units are grouped with Naval attack units (no cargo capacity), the TF will not disembark units unless the warships are removed from the group. In the attached example, the top image shows a group of 3 ships led by a Trireme. The "cargo box" tells you that some of the ships are carrying units, and you can even drag the cursor onto a land hex (where the "green asterisk" implies that troops will be unloaded). However, nothing actually happens - all the units remain aboard their ships.

Instead, you have to click on the Task Force and then remove all the warships from the group and only THEN is it possible for the remaining vessels to unload their cargo. A very tedious exercise indeed, especially as the game progresses and you have large numbers of escorted task forces to deal with.

The solution is to add four lines of "Cargo Data" code to every surface warship in Units.txt (see 2nd image) AND to change the "MaxCargo" setting to Zero. You can see the result in the 3rd Image. It's the same Task Force led by the same Trireme, but now it has an "Unload" button. Clicking that will unload all units in the Task Force without having to go through all the gyrations required by the previous system. To be clear, this does NOT allow warships to carry units, it simply gives them an Unload button.

Files changed: Units.txt

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[Kull]

Praetorians:

During the ongoing playtest, I realized that you could build Praetorians even when the gov-type is Republic. That's a problem, but associating them exclusively with the Dictatorship Gov leaves a very narrow window of time before the Tribunal Empire Gov is enacted, and then this unit can't be built at all.

Even so, it seems very weird to have them available to Republics, so the best solution is to remove "GovernmentType GOVERNMENT_REPUBLIC" and change the "ObsoleteAdvance" from "Tribunal Empire" to "Dark Ages". That extends the "buildability" throughout the Empire period (which is at least partly historical), but keeps the unit from appearing too early in the historical timeline.

Files changed: Units.txt & GL.txt​

[Kull]

"Embassies Everywhere" Gap in availability:

After the Cyrus Cylinder expires with Age of Reason, there is a gap in the benefit provided by this Wonder, since the only other EmbassiesEverywhereEvenAtWar Wonder is the late game "World Peace Center".

Rather than add this ability to a mid-game wonder (the Eiffel Tower was a tempting option), a different idea was to add the lesser powered (and completely unused) EmbassiesEverywhere attribute to the "Book" Wonders associated with the three "world religions" (Christianity, Islam & Buddhism) on the basis that these religions have so many adherents worldwide that some of them are present in every nation. This provides the religion's "Home Country" a sustained level of insight into the workings of the various foreign governments. However, this access would be disrupted during war-time since the information isn't being provided by intelligence agents or traitors but rather by normal citizens.

To clarify, the information thus obtained is identical to that visible through an Embassy, but it saves the player (or AI) from going through the trouble of dispatching Diplomats around the world. In particular, it avoids the time-consuming process of sending another Diplomat to re-open an Embassy that was closed during time of War.

Files changed: Wonders.txt & GL.txt

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[Kull]

Feats Concept:

One of the important features in CtP2 is the presence of Feats, which essentially facilitate the use of SLIC events to reward the Player for performing a variety of different actions. Examples include being the first civ to circumnavigate the globe, discover a particular Advance, or build a certain number of City Improvements. Cradle takes this even further by using the Feat System to award a set of unique traits to every Civilization, thus ensuring that each one offers the player a different gameplay experience.

Although the Manual talks about Feats to some degree, there was nothing in the Great Library. But now there is - a new Concept entry for "Feats of Wonder" has been added to the Cradle 5 GL (the 2D art seen in the attachment was borrowed from AOM)

Files changed: uniticon.txt, concept.txt, gl_str.txt, & GL.txt

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[Cyberguy00]

Would you say that what you are doing is making a mod for CTP2 or more than that?

[Kull]

Would you say that what you are doing is making a mod for CTP2 or more than that?

I'm not changing any of the game code (i.e. the executable) so it's definitely a mod. That said, I'm identifying bugs and creating work-arounds so in that sense it's a bit more than just a mod.

[Kull]

New City Sprites: After creating a full set of 19 Mesopotamian City sprites (see Post # 30) I noted that for any future city sprites it would make more sense to create partial sets, primarily for civs to use in the Ancient and Classical era, and then to merge those into an existing path. In addition to the complexity associated with making a complete set of all-era sprites, the biggest issue is the hard code limit of 255 sprites. Adding the Mesopotamian and African City sprites (the latter courtesy of BureauBert) brought the total number of sprites in Cradle 5 to 219, leaving only 36 open slots.

As I commented then, it's enormously time consuming to create new city sprites from scratch, especially since I'm not an artist. Fortunately the modding community inundated Civ3 with city sets for almost every conceivable civilization. Many of those are absolutely beautiful - true pieces of art - but unfortunately most of them are too large to use as-is, so all required editing. Even so, without those baseline graphics this project would have been impossible. Let's take a look at all the new additions:

Greek style (6 graphics): Begins with 3 Mycenean-style cities available in the Ancient Era, applicable to Greece & Macedonia. See attached example (shows 2 of 3 graphics)

[Kull]

Greek Style (con): In the next era the "Greek Style" shifts to the traditional Classical style (see attached example - shows 2 of 3 graphics) and then follows the Roman style beginning with the Medieval era. Greece and Macedonia previously used the Roman style from beginning to end, so this is a completely new look for both civs.

[Kull]

Minoan style (3): Three graphics used by the Minoan civ in the Ancient Era (attached example shows 2 of 3 graphics). They shift to Greek in the Classical Era and then to CtP2 Roman in the Medieval era.

[Kull]

Japan style (6): Yamato will use 3 graphics for the Ancient Era, apply a different # 3 for the Classical Era, and then add a new #4 for the Medieval and a different #4 for the Renaissance. Then shifts to the CtP2 Asian style in the Industrial Era. See attached example (shows 3 of 6 graphics)