Making Cradle 3+ fully compatible with the Apolyton Edition

[Kull]

"Fixed" Polar Climate Zones:

As every CtP2 veteran knows, it can be a little disconcerting to find grassland or forest tiles on the top tier of tiles (i.e. the "North Pole"), and likewise to discover that your "Temperate Zone" start location includes some Tundra and a few Glaciers. It's not common, but that sort of thing can happen due to the hidden workings of the map creation algorithm. While researching this, it turns out that the Const.txt file allows the player to delineate climate zones (for example, the "MERIDIANA 5" setting means that the northern 5% of the map is polar terrain), but the mapping program uses that more as a guide than a rule. So even though polar regions in Cradle are currently set at 5% north and south, it's normal to find arctic terrain outside those limits.

However it IS possible have "non-deviating" polar climate zones, as explained by Martin Guhmann in the CtP2 Faq.
- To set this in your game, open the userprofile.txt file and change MapPlugin3=dll\\map\\plasma2.dll to MapPlugin3=dll\\map\\fault.dll
- The result can be seen in the minimap files below. The one on the left has the normal setting while on the right you see what happens when climate zones are "fixed".

The problem is that "fixed" zones mean there's absolutely no deviation above or below the line, and the result looks very artificial - a firm line in which terrain to the north is tundra or glaciers while one row below it's temperate or even tropical (same is true of the Antarctic zone). Personally I prefer the look of maps created with the standard settings and that will be the Cradle 5 default, but - as you can see - it's very easy to implement fixed zones in your own game.

[Kull]

You still need the Nano Assembly Advance to get Sea Engineers (basically the "Settler of the Sea"), and that remains in the same place on the Tech Tree. If anything, it will take a bit longer to get them because the two new Advances (Advanced Composites and Undersea Construction) are precursors to Nano Assembly. Taken as a whole though, the late game moves at a quicker pace so it's not a major delay.

The primary issue for me was dealing with the fact that we had two levels of sea mines that could be researched "out of sequence", plus I liked the idea of plugging in some "future theory" that gives more grounding to the story of how one gets to Sea Cities in the first place. Similar in a way to the earlier changes that add a "back story" to the Ecotopian movement and government.

[alexmercury]

The change to Undersea Mines sounds interesting! How do you think the new tech tree will impact the strategy for advancing to Sea Cities?
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[Kull]

Undersea Mines:

Undersea Mines and Advanced Undersea Mines (see inset, top left of attachment) are both available from a Level-25 Advance, and it's actually possible to research the Advanced version before the basic. Part of the problem is that Undersea cities first become available at L24 (with Nano Assembly), so this portion of the game is compressed into the last 4 levels.

In order to solve the issue, the first level of UnderSea mines is now available much earlier, and is only buildable on a single terrain-type (the ocean shelf). That means they can provide production benefits to land cities, and will serve as the technology pre-cursor for "Sea Cities". This makes sense, since you would expect the Technology needed for underwater cities would first be deployed on a smaller scale (in this case by an ocean mining facility) in order to demonstrate its feasibility.

Shaking up the Tech Tree helps make this possible. For example, Advanced Composites will now be a new L22 Engineering sequence tech while the previous Advance with that name remains in the Flight sequence and is renamed Stealth Technology (see attached). Going one step further, another new Advance (L22 Undersea Construction) will be the pre-req for Undersea Mines.

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

[Kull]

Risks.txt:

This is the file which controls the appearance of Barbarians and also has the "percent chance" for everything that comes from Goody Huts. The AE team uses a completely new style of code for everything in this file (f/e HutChanceGold 0.3 in AE is the same as GOLD_HUT_CHANCE 0.30 in the original CtP2). Even though Martin Guhmann notes that the game can still parse the old language, I'm going to switch in the new AE file to replace the one from Cradle, retaining some of the Cradle settings, but mostly using those from AE. The biggest issue was that some of the Cradle values for the various Barbarian difficulty levels didn't increase from one setting to the next, so that has been fixed.

Files Changed: risks.txt

[Kull]

Carbon Sink:

Interestingly, there is not a new Tile Improvement called the Carbon Sink, but rather it's an alternate form of the Mega Mine (see attached). When you select that from the button-bank and hover the cursor over a section of Mountain Terrain (bottom right of the attachment), you see a green representation of the Mega Mine graphic along with the cost and changes (mostly Production increase) that go with it.

However, if the same cursor hovers over Tundra or Glacier terrain, you see an alternate green TIMP and the cost and Production values are significantly different. That is the effect of a Carbon Sink. Not only does it feature a different graphic on the map, it operates to reduce the total Production value of the owning city, thus providing a diminished contribution to Global Production Pollution.

Realistically that's not going to be a major impact on the Global Pollution numbers, so think of this primarily as a "proof of concept" which shows that it's possible to get radically different uses from the same TIMP.

[Kull]

Polar Terraforming:

As often happens, something that seemed unusable does offer at least some utility on closer examination. In this case, while there are 12 slots on the buttonbank for Terraforming Land, there are actually 14 land terrain-types with "Add" Advances. Which means that while the game technically allows all of them to be terraformed, both Tundra and Glacier do not have the button-bank slots which would make it possible.

Admittedly there aren't many reasons for terraforming a tile into Tundra or Glacier, but since you can do that with Polar Hills and Polar Mountains, it does suggest that all four could be made available with their own button. Accordingly, the Terraform Ocean button has been changed to Terraform Polar, and all four terrain types are grouped under it (see bottom of attachment).

These are all activated by the new "Polar Terraforming" Advance (see top of attachment), which also activates a new TIMP, the Carbon Sink. More on that next.

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

[Kull]

TIMPs that can't be pillaged:

One of the new features in AE is the CantPillage flag for TIMPs, and Cradle 5 assigned that to Pastures and Nets. Unfortunately the AI does not "know" what that means, and extensive playtesting has shown that un-pillageable TIMPs cause AI units to sit on them for multiple turns, constantly trying to pillage without success. That means they operate like flytraps, holding AI units in place instead of allowing them to attack or explore.

Anything which adversely affects the AI is a problem, so the flag will be removed from both TIMPs, but the PW costs will also be reduced so it's cheaper to replace them.

The downside of that removal is particularly applicable to Nets, because they are extremely hard to protect. AI naval vessels spend a lot of time in your waters, especially during the initial Exploration phase. The new flag prevented a lot of unnecessary early-game warfare, since the AI tries to pillage any Ocean TIMP they find, even when you have good diplomatic relations. Accordingly, we'll mitigate the issue by removing the CanPillage and CanPirate flags from Coracles, which also means the AI will use them as they should - purely for troop transport and exploration.

Files Changed: Units.txt, tileimp.txt and the GL

[Kull]

"Excludes" tag in tileimp.txt:

This next bit literally made my head hurt, so I'll describe the issue using examples and try to keep it as simple as possible (The good news is that Cradle players can ignore the whole post, since it's primarily of interest to modders). As noted earlier, there are two open slots remaining on the Tile Improvement "button bank", one of which sits between the "Sea Tunnel" and "Maglev" (see top of attachment). Should be easy enough to just create a new tile improvement and plug it right in, yes? Well, no. But to "keep it simple", let's notionally move an existing TIMP (Sonar Buoy) into that spot and walk through the ramifications. But first, we'll look at the Excludes tags in the Maglev entry, to help you understand what they do.

As you can see at the bottom of the attachment, there are two "Excludes" settings, Road and OceanRoad. This refers to a pair of "Class" columns on the Land and Ocean buttons. Looking just at "Road", that column contains 3 slots for building a Road, a Stone Road or a Railroad. When Maglevs assign the "Excludes" tag to the Road column, it means "if you build a Maglev in a tile containing a Road, Stone Road or Railroad, the Maglev will replace that tile improvement". Conversely, if you build a Maglev on any tile containing a TIMP that is NOT excluded, the two will coexist. Which, for example, is why you see Roads in the same tile as Farms and Mines.

Returning to the Sonar Buoy, if that is placed in the "OceanRoad" column, it will need the same "Excludes" values as the Sea Tunnel, meaning it will coexist with all the other ocean-type improvements, instead of replacing them as it does now. In addition, the Sea Tunnel will now REPLACE the Sonar Buoy (and vice versa) instead of co-existing with it.

All of which means that it's going to be a little tricky to utilize the open slot in the OceanRoad column.

[Kull]

TIMP Control files:

"Big Dividends" eh? Such as? Well, one of the earliest Cradle5 game improvements was focused on revising the Advances associated with Terraforming. As just one example, the ability to remove Dead tiles was now associated with the Tribunal Empire Advance instead of the late-game Conservation:

TERRAIN_DEAD {
TilesetIndex 17
Icon ICON_TERRAIN_DEAD
InternalType: Dead

RemoveAdvance ADVANCE_TRIBUNAL_EMPIRE
TransformRemove {
Time 3
Materials 1000
} 

Seems pretty clear. In fact, all the changes mentioned in that post were made to the terrain.txt file, after which I moved on to other things, confident that all was well. But it wasn't. According to Martin Guhmann, changes to CtP2 tiles require the adjustment of TWO files, "tileimp.txt and terrain.txt, if I remember correctly you have to modify both files."

Uh Oh. And sure enough, the tileimp.txt entry for TILEIMP_TERRAFORM_GRASSLAND still included this segment of code:

TerrainEffect {
Terrain TERRAIN_DEAD
BonusFood 300
EnableAdvance ADVANCE_CONSERVATION
TilesetIndex 1
} 

While you could now transform a Dead Tile into "something else" after Tribunal Empire was discovered, the only option was terraforming it into Grasslands and that would not be possible until Conservation. In other words, nothing had changed. Ugh.

OK, why are there two files, and how do they work? The terrain.txt file identifies a type of tile and provides the basic values (food, gold, movement points, etc) and also lists the Advances which allow this terrain-type to be added and/or removed via terraforming. However, in order to know what it can be transformed into, you need the tileimp.txt file. And THAT had not been modified to match the new changes implemented in Cradle5.

So yes, a big problem, now identified and fixed.

EDIT: Or.....not. Gah. After running a series of tests to conclusively establish the role of each file, it turns out that part of the above is incorrect.

The tileimp.txt file assigns a "TerrainEffect" to every entry in that file, which includes a line for "EnableAdvance". That code is necessary for non-terraforming TIMPs (such as Farms or Mines), but it has no effect on terraforming - all those Advances are assigned by the terrain.txt file. Which means the Terraforming Advances listed in tileimp.txt are confusing and meaningless. For that reason, I'm going to change them all to the late-game "ADVANCE_HEXTAPUL" (which exists simply as something to research when all other Advances have been discovered)

[Kull]

Terraform Ocean Button (con.):

Unfortunately, this particular sub-project came to naught because there's a fundamental difference between "standard" TIMPs and the "terraforming type". When you look at the controlling file (tileimp.txt), a standard TIMP has TWO button location identifiers: "Level" (the row number of the TIMP) and "Class" (one of 12 column names for each of the 3 TIMP placement groups). For example, the "Port" icon (see top of the attachment) is on "Level 1" (first row) in the "Class:OceanATM" group (the 3rd column of the "Ocean" button group).

By contrast, the Terraform group has THREE button location identifiers: "Level" (the row number of the TIMP), "Column" (the column number of the TIMP), and "Class" (the name of the button group). An example of this system is "Terraform Desert" (see bottom of the attachment), the icon for which can be found at "Level 3" (third row) of "Column 0" (first column) in the "Class:Terraform" group (the Terraform Land Button).

The problem is that "standard" TIMP icons will not appear in the Button Bank if they have three location identifiers, and the new "Terraform Ocean" button will not accept any TIMPs that have only two. So the new button only works if you are creating additional terraforming-types, and the only remaining candidates for that sort of activity are the various ocean-type terrains, none of which are being modified in Cradle.

Apologies for the long dissertation, but hopefully this clarifies the limitations associated with the new "Terraform Ocean" button. More to the immediate point, it means my grand project for adding new TIMPs is restricted entirely to the last two remaining "standard" TIMP slots. Disappointing, but there was a silver lining - the research expended in trying to make this work provided a much deeper insight into the workings of the Tile Improvement control files. That will pay big dividends as we proceed.

[Kull]

Terraform Ocean Button:

Tile improvements are an important facet in the game, and Cradle 5 already features a number of new options in this area. Examples include the new "Trawlers" level and a 4th level for roads. Although the number of SLIC-created tile improvements is essentially unlimited (for example the Natural Wonders feature), those which can be placed by the players (AI and human) are limited by the number of slots in the Tile tab on the Control Panel (bottom right of the game screen).

In the base game the Tile Tab has 3 buttons for the placement of TIMPs, each with 12 slots, and currently most of those are used (34 of 36). The 4th button is fully assigned to Terraforming, and has no open slots. However, the Source code team added a 5th Button ("Terraform Ocean") along with the following message in the Apolyton Edition Readme file: "Added: TerraformOcean button in tile bank. This allows modders to use up to 60 of the 64 available tileimp slots".

Based on that information, I kicked off a large sub-project which aimed to re-name and restructure the TIMP buttons (see before and after button names on the attachment), while also examining ways to greatly expand the number of tileimps in Cradle5.

[Kull]

TIMP Project:

After completing the City Graphics project back in September, I've been running an extended playtest that's uncovered a few issues along with some under-the-hood improvement opportunities (most have been reported along the way), but otherwise the game has been quite stable and is working largely as intended. Behind the scenes however, work is proceeding on the last big project - Tile Improvements. It's been a multi-faceted and challenging exercise, and there's still a long way to go, but it's time to start pulling back the curtain to give you a look at some of what's been going on.

[Kull]

TurnsAcceptedForOnePop:

This is a new setting in Const.txt (not previously available in Cradle or even AE) which tells the AI to add Farmer specialists if city growth requires more than the specified number of turns. This flag can also be referenced in the strategies.txt file. The format is: TurnsAcceptedForOnePop ** (choose any number to replace **)

The chief benefit is to reduce the AI's single-minded focus on production (which I've been unable to achieve with other game file settings). Now in Cradle 5 with a value of 40.

File Changed: Const.txt

[Kull]

AI Intelligence Factor:

According to Protra3211, he changed the AI_INTELLIGENCE_FACTOR in DiffDB.txt to "25" (normally "1") since "All the mods have this changed to 25 and some post it helps the AI." To see how others have handled this, I looked at the AE Mod scenario and they keep it at 1 in the earlier difficulty settings, but then raise it to 25 with "Hard" and "Very Hard" and increase it again to 35 for "Impossible". MoT doesn't change it at all, while AOM uses 25 only for "Impossible".

For Cradle 5, we'll alter the settings to 10 for Medium, 25 for Hard and Very Hard, and 35 for Impossible

File Changed: DiffDB.txt