Making Cradle 3+ fully compatible with the Apolyton Edition

[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.

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[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.

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[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]

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.

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[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]

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.

[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.