Making Cradle 3+ fully compatible with the Apolyton Edition

[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 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 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]

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.

[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]

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]

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]

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.

[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]

Hero Promotion Bug: As I reported back in Post #89, "elite.slc" is an important Cradle file since it contains the code which upgrades eligible units into their "Elite" counterparts, along with Elite-to-Hero and Hero-to-Great General. However there was a nasty bug which allowed one promotion from Hero to Great General, yet all further "Hero Promotions" killed the Hero but did not give you the Great General. I couldn't see anything obviously wrong with the slic code, but didn't know how to pursue it further.

Anyway, recently I've been working on a different project, part of which necessitated some changes to the elite.slc file, and decided to take another look at the "Hero Bug". A lot of the Cradle slic code comes from similarly named files in AOM, so this time I decided to compare the two files, and immediately spotted something interesting.

In AOM, the code is identical to Cradle right up until the point where it uses "KillUnit" to remove the Hero Unit. After that however, it has 8 different promotion possibilities, starting with "if(HeroChance==1){" (the same code used by Cradle), but then runs through SEVEN other possibilities from ==2 thru ==8. In fact, the code appears to be designed so it only works 8 times, after which it stops. That's why in Cradle it's always successful the first time, because HeroChance starts off as "1" and increases incrementally from there. In Cradle however, the only choice is "1", which means that every subsequent promotion has a number of 2 or higher, so it does NOT create the new unit after destroying the Hero! Thus all the "HeroChance" code is not required in Cradle, since the whole purpose in AOM was to create 8 different kinds of Generals based on the sequential increase in the HeroChance value.

Accordingly, the next step was to alter the code so that Hero Promotion-to-General is IDENTICAL to Elite Promotion-to-Hero.

For test purposes I made that change and also improved the chance of promotion and then used cheat mode to run 40 battles (mostly 3 on 2) in which every one of my armies had at least one Hero. The result was 6 promotions to "Great General" (see attached), and all of them worked. So the "fix" is a success, and that's one more bug banished forever.

[Kull]

Altering the CtP1 Pikeman: This unit is very similar to the CtP2 Pikeman, but has several noticeable graphical differences. The CtP1 unit has orange sleeves, pants and a white neck-cloth while the CtP2 version has blue sleeves, pants and a black neck-cloth (and greater detail on the armor). However both carry the same weapon and use it the same way. Which suggested an interesting idea.

The fact is that neither unit carries a true pike. Like the "sarissa" carried by the Macedonian Phalanx, the pike is a long spear which is designed to keep cavalry at a distance. And in fact, neither of the CtP pikemen are carrying pikes, but rather "halberds", which are similar weapons except they have an axe blade and a hook near the tip; adaptations designed for hacking off the limbs of enemy knights and pulling them from their mounts.

Interestingly, the halberd was an invention of the Late Middle ages whereas the pike has antecedents stretching back into ancient times. Accordingly there is an opportunity to have both a pikeman and a halberdier in-game, and to have one available very early while the other arrives much later in the Medieval era. I'll explore those ramifications in a subsequent post, but for now lets talk about the process of turning the CtP1 Halberdier into a true pikeman.

There are two animations (Move & Attack), comprising 96 images (plus another 96 shadow files). I opened each image and edited out the axe-head and the hook, turning the halberd into a pike. Likewise I edited the CtP1 unit card and did the same thing (see top image in the attachment). The attack still used a "chopping-and-then-stabbing" animation, so I edited the sequence, and now the CtP1 pikeman assumes a "crouching-and-stabbing" position and maintains that throughout the entirety of a battle action. As you can see in the bottom two images of the attachment, the CtP 2 "Halberdier" has a completely different attack animation, so there's no confusing them, even when they encounter each other in battle.

Lastly, the CtP1 unit did not have an Idle animation (and thus did not "walk" when moving across the map), so I added a small sequence in which the unit fidgets with it's pike, and now the new CtP1 Pikeman is a fully functional sprite.

[Kull]

Revised Medieval Unit structure: As part of the Military Unit reorganization (see posts #33 and #34), the Man-at-Arms was chosen as the Medieval-era "cannon fodder" infantry unit. At the time that seemed like a logical choice since the sprite represented an early Medieval Northern European armored axeman of the sort one might encounter during the Dark Ages. The only other choice was the CtP2 Pikeman but his halberd weapon clearly came from a much later era. However, the choice was still troubling. The Man-at-Arms is heavily armored, which is the antithesis of the poorly armed infantry one would expect to see in this role. And even his very name is often used as a synonym for "knight". However, the conversion of the CtP1 Pikeman into a spear unit (see post above) changes the dynamic completely, and allows for a number of game-play improvements. Let's go through them, one-by-one:

1) Pikemen: The new Pikeman sprite is the logical successor to the Man-at-Arms as the generic infantry unit available with Dark Ages. It's probably a bit early for a unit which looks like this, but it uses an old technology which is not much different from the Phalanx (except obviously in tactics). In the initial Cradle 3+ system, the stats for Man-at-Arms were significantly reduced in order to be more of a logical upgrade from Spearman, so they will be assigned as-is to the new unit.

2) Pikemen Militia: The Medieval Militia Unit was the Man-at-Arms, but with Pikemen becoming the new "basic" unit with Dark Ages, that also means replacing the Man-at-Arms Militia with Pikemen Militia. No change to any of the stats.

3) Halberdier: The CtP2 Pikeman will now become a new unit, the late Medieval Halberdier, which historically was an improved type of pikeman and carried a weapon specifically designed to deal with mounted knights. This unit will fit into a new upgrade path which progresses as follows: Spearman > Pikeman > Halberdier > Infantryman. Under the old system, the Man-at-Arms was still prowling the battlefield into the early Modern Era, but the upgrade to Halberdier (with the discovery of Gunpowder) is a better fit, since historically they DID co-exist with primitive matchlock infantry of the Arquebusier-type. Also, none of these units are "disbanding", so we can chain the availability-to-obsolescence Advances together (and even have gaps) without any worries.

4) Man-at-Arms: As noted above, the Man-at-Arms sprite has the look of a Viking-style armored axeman, and would have been available around 900 AD. Accordingly it will be associated with the Feudalism advance, and the stats will revert back to those in the original Cradle 3. The Pikeman unit it replaces was gov-specific and available only to Monarchy and Theology, but some changes are needed. In order to build this with the discovery of Feudalism, it has to be available under Tribunal Empire, or it can't be constructed before the other two govs are discovered and implemented. Fortunately there is a solid historical analogue in the "Varangian Guard" (axe-wielding Northmen employed by the Byzantine Empire), so it's clearly appropriate as a "Late Empire" unit. And thus definitely a "disbanding gov" unit, and NOT a "special". That also means it cannot upgrade but it can be promoted to Elite, and will become obsolete with Caliphate. Lastly, we'll remove the "bonus vs. mounted" attribute, which isn't appropriate for a unit bearing an axe of this sort.

5) Raider: All of that looks good, but it highlighted the previous (and continuing) inconsistency in Gov-specific unit allocations. The reality is that even this new set-up provides two Gov-specific units to Theocracy (Teutonic Knight & Man-at-Arms) but only one for Caliphate (Janissary). The previous "work-around" was to make it theoretically possible for the Caliphate to employ the Raider unit, but it was a kludgy mechanism and unlikely to work in-game. However, with all these changes it makes sense to revisit the Raider, and the solution is to change its expiring advance from Feudalism to Gunpowder. That way the Raider will still disband if the player implements Monarchy or Theocracy, but it will be buildable again if the player changes govs to Caliphate. Kind of unusual for a unit to disband and then come back, but it DOES work, and solves the "units-per-Gov-type" discrepancy.

[hexagonian]

OK, so this is very unexpected. Someone is actually playing and fixing my mod.

The last time l played this was in 2013.

[Kull]

Hey Dave, glad to see you here! It's been a very interesting project - hopefully you like what's been presented so far.

[hexagonian]

It looks very good so far. I never would have thought that anyone would be playing Cradle 20+ years after I first created it.

I burned out on computer gaming about 9 years ago. Other than a few months of playing computer games during the pandemic when I was laid off, I just cannot get myself to start playing any game anymore. I do think about getting back into it from time to time, but it seems like I have so many other interests.

Right now, I spend a great deal of my free time creating artwork.
My website: www.dsobotka.com.
Check it out.

To be honest, I actually enjoyed the Modding process more than actually playing it. Probably because the majority of playing Cradle was actually play-testing and bug smashing.

But I am intrigued with what you are doing. I do not know how much help I can be in advising you on files, since I have forgotten most of the ins and outs of those files. But, I will probably download it when you are done. Sadly, I made the switch from PC to a Mac 2 years ago, but I do have a laptop gathering dust. I was using it back in 2020 for my few months of gaming, using Steam and Epic Games since I do not have a CD drive, and I am not sure where my CTP2 CD is.

Some questions...
- Does the Apolyton Pack work with the GOG download? I had a version of the Apolyton Pack on my old computer, but not on my laptop.
- Does the setup you are currently modding support all of the Cradle 3 gaming variations that I included with the Cradle 3 download?
- I did have a Cradle 4 setup, released in 2013, but I could never get that version to work with the Apolyton Pack. That version had a Genghis Khan scenario, which had a lot of interesting stuff in it.
Did you ever use that version?


I really like how you now have sprites for everything. I used the sprites that were available, and I would use sprites that had a certain level of quality. Many of the sprites used in AOM did not meet that criteria. My workaround was setting up a set of .tga files that were color coded and with stars that indicated Elite/General/Great Leader status. My logic was that a stack would only show one sprite anyhow.

The main issue and frustration I had with CTP was that the AI could never execute an attack with any coordination at all. It never would attack a city with multiple stacks in the same turn, and if it did take a city, it would vacate that city, usually within the next turn. My assumption was that AI did not have the coding to understand the unit limit on stacks (splitting, merging) and once a stack attacked in a turn, that tended to void out any other attacks from other stacks that it had.

In the same vein, if an AI city was full of units, then it couldn't produce units because when the produced unit was done, it couldn't be created. Ideally, the unit should then be created in an adjacent tile, but game mechanics prevented it. So for me, the game became a slow grind of intercepting incoming stacks, and ramping up your production capabilities to get to the point when you could take cities from the AI.

Civ may have had the hated Stacks of Doom, but at least the AI could take cities and provide the player with different paths to victory.

DS