Making Cradle 3+ fully compatible with the Apolyton Edition

[Kull]

Revised Food TIMP system:

Similar to Mines, the "Land Food System" did not require wholesale changes, but the alterations were quite significant. The L1 "Pasture" has been enhanced, and while L2 Farms and L3 Advanced Farms are mostly the same, they feature new graphics. L4 Mega Farms is one of the new TIMPs (and will be reviewed in detail) while L5 Hydroponic Domes features several alterations.

Level 1 Food TIMP - "Pasture": The original pasture is still available with L1 Domestication, and can be constructed on Plains, Dunes & Hills. As discussed in the previous post, this TIMP also serves as "Early Farms" and can be built on Grasslands with the discovery of L1 Agriculture. This has a new graphic which features a pair of huts adjacent to a tilled field.

The attachment shows both the original Pasture and the new Early Farms, L-to-R below Miletus:

[Kull]

Level 2 Food TIMP - "Farms": Available with L3 Water Lifts and buildable on Grassland and Desert, the two current TIMPs were taken from the LOTR Mod, but both have been significantly revised. The Grassland TIMP now uses the "in-process" farmland graphic which has 2 green quadrants and two brown, indicating that half the land is fallow. That will be the centerpiece and also replaces houses with huts, adds trees, and removes the "rock border fence" as a further indication of primitive early farming.

The Desert TIMP has been replaced with the "African Village" style previously allocated to the L3 Advanced Farms, with the added change that the trees along the border are now Palms rather than Deciduous.

To simplify the ButtonBank graphic, there's now a new one based on the "green and brown" quadrants in the grassland TIMP, but without the huts and trees (see top image, left column in the "Status Report" attachment).

This attachment shows both Farms (Grassland and Desert), R-to-L below Miletus

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[Kull]

Level 3 Food TIMP - "Advanced Farms": Available with L10 Agricultural Revolution and buildable on Grassland, Plains and Desert. All three TIMPs are from LOTR, except the color of the farmland is different. In addition, the Desert Farm has been modified to add Palm trees along the edge of the field.

The attachment shows all three Advanced Farms (Grassland, Plains and Desert), R-to-L below Miletus:

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[Kull]

Level 4 Food TIMP - "Mega Farms": This is the second of two new TIMPs, thus completing the utilization of all 36 ButtonBank slots (the other being the previously reviewed Advance Trawlers). First available with L18 Corporation, there are 3 new TIMPs (one for each of the Grassland, Plains and Desert terraintypes), all of them heavily modified but based on the CtP2 "Crop Circle" graphic. The original image is used in the ButtonBank (see bottom image, right column in the "Status Report" attachment)

I made fun of it earlier, but there is a proper role for the "Nature Preserve", just not in the Commerce group. Instead it will be the 4th TIMP in the Mega Farms group, available with L20 Conservation, and buildable on Jungle and Swamp terrain. Similar to the approach taken with the "Carbon Sink", Nature Preserves have a very different set of attributes from the other Farm-type TIMPs. Although they provide small Commerce and Food bonuses, their primary function is a -20 to Production, thus providing a small offset to the global rise in pollution.

The attachment shows all four Mega Farms (Grassland, Plains, Desert & Jungle/Swamp), R-to-L below Miletus:

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[Kull]

Level 5 Food TIMP - "Hydroponic Domes": Available with L23 Genetics. The primary change is that Hydroponic Domes used to be buildable on all Land Tiles, but that has been reduced to 8 (no Mountains/Jungle/Swamp/Glaciers). In addition, the original TIMP is only used by 4 terrain-types (Desert/Forest/Grassland/Plains), while the others use a modified version of the CtP1 Hydroponic Space Dome.

The attachment shows both Hydroponic Domes, R-to-L below Miletus

Once again we're adding a lot of new eye candy to the map, although the underlying benefits are largely the same at each level. However, as you would expect the new L4 TIMP provides better gradation between Advanced Farms and Hydroponics. And once again, the PW costs have been reduced to bring them more in line with AE, particularly for the early levels.

PW Cost (Old):
Pasture: Dunes/Hills +600, Plains +600, Grass (N/A)
Farms: Desert +300, Grass +600
Adv Farms: Desert +1200, Grass/Plains +1500
Mega Farms: Desert (N/A), Grass/Plains (N/A), Jungle/Swamp (N/A)
Hydroponics: Polar/Hills/Mtns +900, Forest/Desert/Jungle/Swamp +1800, Grass/Plains +2400

PW Cost New):
Pasture: Dunes/Hills +300, Plains +200, Grass +100
Farms: Desert +300 (No change), Grass +400
Adv Farms: Desert +800, Grass/Plains +1000
Mega Farms: Desert +1200, Grass/Plains +1400, Jungle/Swamp +1200
Hydroponics: All Hills/Tundra +2400, Desert/Forest/Grass/Plains +2000

Files Changed: tileimp.txt, tilerefund.slc, uniticon.txt, traits2.slc, gl_str.txt, tips_str.txt, Feat_str.txt, sounds.txt, Great Library, and the Tech Tree.

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[Kull]

Six "non-ButtonBank" TIMPs added to the Great Library & Tech Tree:

Even though six of the "new" TIMPs are really just aspects of others (since they don't have their own icon on the ButtonBank), each has now been given its own Great Library Entry. This affects the Early Farms (see attached), Radio Tower, Carbon Sink, Undersea Harvester, Nature Preserve and the Shopping Mall. They also appear on the Tech Tree and are "searchable" in the TIMP section of the GL. Not only do the new entries explain what they do, but just as important, indicate which button activates them (along with a link to the "real" TIMP). This also required four new GL images.

Files Changed: tileimp.txt, uniticon.txt, gl_str.txt, Great Library and the Tech Tree.

[Kull]

Commerce TIMP Update: As discussed earlier, the Villages and Towns which are buildable on Plains Terrain are restricted to the hexes adjacent to the city. Unfortunately, testing showed that to be so limiting a condition that they aren't available to many cities. To improve the situation (and since they can't be built outside the ring anyway), both TIMPs can now be constructed on all terrain-types except Mountains and Glaciers (and those allocated to other Commerce TIMPs). Tested and works as expected.

The attachment shows a city surrounded by a Ring of Villages.

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[Kull]

Additional TIMP cost reductions:

1) Port is 1200 in Cradle but 350 in AE. Will drop to 500

2) Airbase is 1700 and 2000 in Cradle, but 1000 in AE. Will drop to 1200 & 1500

3) Drilling Platform is 2800 in Cradle but 800 in AE. Will drop to 1200

4) Fort (and Shipyard) is 3600 in Cradle but 1000 in AE. Will drop to 2000

5) All 3 Undersea Mine levels. Rather than look at them in detail, I'll just note that all are much more expensive in Cradle. That makes sense given they are late-game TIMPs and realistically it would be difficult to build structures such as this, but the build cost will still be reduced by 1000 at every level.

- Files Changed: tileimp.txt & tilerefund.slc​

[Kull]

Polar Hill Tiles don't merge properly with some adjacent terrain-types:

There's a long-standing graphical bug in which "Polar Hill" terrain doesn't merge properly with some (but not all) of the other terrain-types. The most common of these is where the upper edge of a Polar Hill meets a Forest, and what you see on the map is a straight line without the gradual merge one normally sees when two different terrains meet (see attached). And while it's not as frequent, the same thing happens when Polar Hills meet Alpine Mountains.

This issue has been present in the game from the very beginning, and has never been addressed, not even by the Source Code releases. I looked at it briefly a few times, but the solution wasn't obvious (assuming there was one), and since it had no impact on gameplay the priority was about as low as you can go. So why talk about it now? You can probably guess....

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[Kull]

And here's where Polar Hills intersect with Alpine Mountains. Ugly.

[Kull]

Polar Hill Tiles (continued): A few days ago I decided to take a deeper look, and began by digging through the til files using the TileEdit program (the only way to edit Terrains and TIMPs - and hence a tool I'm now deeply familiar with). It turns out that all the terrain files are clean and neat except for five which have extraneous color pixels outside the standard diamond. Of course all five of these were Polar Hill terrain, and - long story short - that had NOTHING to do with the problem. Lost a whole day pursuing that red herring.

The real clue of course is that Polar Hills intersect properly with most other terrain types. Hills? Tundra? Looks great. So that meant it was probably something involving the "Border" files. I'll spare you most of the details because those are very esoteric in appearance and deployment, but eventually I figured out that yes, the border files connecting Polar Hills with Forest and Mountains were missing. But there ARE Border files for very similar intersections - Tundra to Forest and Tundra to Mountains. So I copied both of those, and added them to end of the Border Section of the til file (with new terrain connection codes), saved the til files, opened up a new game and....Voila. Problem solved (see attached).

- Files Changed: gtset555.til & gtset565.til

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[Kull]

Stone Road Graphics Redux:

As discussed way back in 2022, the Cradle 3 "Stone Roads" (a light grey version of the Maglev) were replaced by the Tellius stone roads. The new roads were more natural-looking and seemed fine when built in long stretches without a lot of junctions, but the AI builds road networks of all types around it's cities and the result is a real mess - the Tellius Stone Roads are so wide they cover up the other TIMPs in the same hex, since each stone road is 6-7 pixels wide, double the width of the CtP2 "brown roads".

In addition, many of the pixels in the "Tellius Roads" are exactly the same color as the "shadow" pixels used by the TIMP code, so as a result there are black spots in the middle of these roads instead of the "medium grey" which would otherwise improve their appearance. Lastly, I examined the map from a recent long-running test game in which several civs were building stone roads. Not only do you see the TIMP coverup and the "black spots", but the roads themselves do not line up properly when they meet with "normal" roads, and in some cases don't even align with other stone roads (see attached).

In the final analysis, that is three major problems with these roads, and it would take a lot of work to reduce the width, clean up the "bad pixels", and most difficult of all, fix all the alignment issues. So we're going to do something different.

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[Kull]

New Stone Road Graphics: Before discovering the Tellius Roads, I was working on a "grey" version of the standard CtP2 "brown road", but never finished the project. Fortunately it was nearly complete and after some final edits and tweaks, they have now been inserted as Stone Road replacements (see attachment). That resolves all three of the issues affecting the Tellius graphics, a fix which includes new ButtonBank and GL images.

- Files Changed: gtset555.til & gtset565.til​