PROJECT: Playtest Thread III

[EPW]

I found that many of the slowdown problems that I experienced were do to my computer, not the playtest, so disregard that report.

[Fugi the Great]

Another question that bugs me, is why is it that everytime I take over an enemy city, the screen suddenly jumps to my capital city? Don't remember that happening before.

[Maquiladora]

It does the same when you disband a city too, that didnt happen before either.

[Peter Triggs]

Martin put that recentering thing in recently. What do you think? Do you guys prefer the old way?

[HuangShang]

well when conquering, why not center the new city, when disbanding? idunno

[Maquiladora]

Exactly, I prefer the old way when disbanding and conquering, I dont see how the new way is better? The first thing I do when conquering a city is alter the queue and specialists, and sometimes move units from a disbanded city, although thats less annoying.

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Peter Triggs
Martin put that recentering thing in recently. What do you think? Do you guys prefer the old way?

When should I have added this? Revision? Certain is that there is a problem. But it is more complicated. My first attemp to reproduce the problem did not recreate the falure. I just conquered a city. On the next trial I conquered a city that would be destroyed, because of the conquest. There the game centered on the capital. Same for disband. And I was able to recreate it once when I conquered a city got a message, find myself at the capital, closed the message and the game centered on the conquered city. Unfortunatly I wasn't able to reproduce this again. Unfortunatly I am not sure whether it was a just a war declaration message or a capitol conquest message.

But it is certain this is not a featere but a bug.

-Martin

[Fugi the Great]

I prefer the old way. Unless there is a reason to check the capital city to check moral or something like that, but you usually don't get an external city moral indication that they don't want the new city until the next turn, so I don't see a reason for it.

Anyone have an answer on the PW question above? Was it that way before that I just wasn't paying attention before, or is this something new?

[Fugi the Great]

okay another question, you used to be able to tell a unit that can bombard (cannon, bomber...) to bombard a certain unit/city, even if it was not right next to it, it would still move there and do as told unless it saw something it didn't see before. Now when you do that it moves one space and stops, you hear a "thunk" and big red Ø shows up instead of going where I told it to. You now have to tell the unit to fly/move first and then when it get right next to the area/unit to be bombarded, you have to then tell the unit to bombard. Any reason this was changed? It just adds more unneeded mouse clicks.

[Solver]

It's supposed to make it possible to have ranged bombardment, but I think it's good anyway. The ability to give an order to distant locations, IMO, is bad, you can just mess up that way.

[Fromafar]

Maybe the AI will mess up? When the human player wants to bombard a city with a bomber with bombard range 1, I think Fugi is right. Why is he forced to add another mouse click? I thought the idea was for the code to take the bombard range into account, so the bombarding could be executed from a "safer" point at some distance from the goal - when the units have a bombard range that is larger than 1. The user should not have to execute more commands.

What happened to the basic idea that changes would be implemented as options, with the old behaviour as default?

I was quite annoyed when I found out that my withdraw troops agreements suddenly had expired. I was attempting to test some Slic withdrawal code for AOM, so at first I thought that the Slic withdrawal code was to blame - but the new Slic code was not even fired. Debugging some more, I found some new hardcoded values in Diplomat.cpp that explained it. With my AOM setup, the warnings that should have announced the expiry do not appear at all, because the corresponding messages have not been defined.

And (with the playtest release - so I got the warning messages) when you have multiple agreements, the expiry messages leave you in the dark about which agreement is going to expire.

[Qumad Al-Riyf]

If you look at the Great Library, and look under Plasma Weaponry you will find Leviathan there.
But this I got from Unified Physics.
Leviathan allso sais that it requires Unified Physics.

When I get a new Goverment and the auto message telling me that I got a new goverment and asking me if I want to change to that one, the message dosent display the name of the new goverment.

This last thing might not have something to do with the playtest but with CTP2 generaly:
When you build things like National Shield that gives you/creates a forceshield in every city.
Is there any reason to build the forcefiled in the citys?
(Cuz they are stil avalable in the build manager after I got the wonder)?

[Fromafar]

When you are afraid you are going to lose the city with the wonder to a revolt or (counter)attack, you may want to start/continue building the regular buildings. In other circumstances, it is not very useful.

Martin has corrected the government name display, so that will be solved in the next playtest release.

Thanks for the Great Library bug report. I think the Leviathan prerequisite should be Plasma Weaponry. The English version has Unified Physics here, but the German version has Plasma Weaponry.

New bug reports on revision 346:[list=1][*]I can not find the - cursor - files uc088.tga and uc089.tga.[*]ArmyData::GetCargo has a crash with the Alexander scenario when GetCargoDataPtr() returns NULL. One of those dangerous A ->B->C constructs where the result of A->B is not tested.[*]There is an enormous amount of WorkerCount >= delta Asserts. It looks like the governor assigns too many farmers and gets into a conflict when entertainers are needed. In the AlexanderTheGreat scenario, Philippopolis gets assigned 5 farmers automatically, for a growth of +253. Manually changing this to 4 farmers (+ 1 worker) keeps the growth at +253, and increases all other values.[/list=1]

[Solver]

My report on the latest playtest.

The AI is a lot better. It does use ships to drop groups of units on your land. Previously, no enemy outside your landmass was a threat, now I've seen the AI attempt invasions. Still they're not real invasions, but at least the AI does drop troops on your land. Another observation is that the AI attacks almost every time when it has a sure win. That is, if it has a 7-stack near my 2-stack, it will attack and eliminate my 2-stack. Finally, AI-to-AI conquest seems also to happen more. So, good on that .

I don't have performance issues, apart from when I return to the gameafter it had been minimized and stayed that way for some time. Then the first turn is extremely slow.

As it has been said, some strings don't show. Also, when units are killed without going to the battle screen (like if you attack a settler), the unit's sprite disappears immediately, there is no death animation - but the death sound still plays.

[Maquiladora]

So are we ready for a new playtest?