PROJECT: Playtest Thread III

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Protra3211
I thought you could not do that must be a bug

You can do this, the only difference is that the AI does it now and I have no idea why.

-Martin

[Protra3211]

Thank you Martin. I went back to the saved game and replayed my turns to the point before the AI settled in my land. What I did was to Request withdraw and Offered to withdraw that worked and I saw that same settler move to another spot inside its border.
Also I checked the Goals file in Goal Settle Land
DistanceToHomeBonus
DistanceToEnemyBonus
The nubers seemed differant than any of the mods or 1.1 CtP2. Might not be the problem but might be worth checking.
I also tweaked up the numbers for garrison forces and it helped to improve AI defence of cities.Used the numbers from MY MOD. Only to test it out.
I never report a test while using mods or my own tweaks use playtest as is.

[Uchuu-kun[SM42]]

Uh, I'm getting "File doesn't exist" errors trying to download the playtest files. WTF?

[Maquiladora]

Are you downloading the 3 files linked in the first post of this thread? Theyre all fine to me.

[Martin Gühmann]

Well John maybe you should remove all the links to the previous playtests.

-Martin

[J Bytheway]

Originally posted by Martin Gühmann
Well John maybe you should remove all the links to the previous playtests.

Ah yes, it appears I forgot to do that this time. Now done.

[Carnot]

I've just been playing the latest playtest version (2005-08-02)together with Cradle 1.35. After some adjustments in one or two of the cradle textfiles, I've not seen any severe crashs of the game up to now.
But there seem to be a problem with the animation of some cradle units (warrior, spearman, slinger, etc.). On the main game screen they don't animate at all. In the battlewindow though, their animation is fine.
As far as I can see, this has to do with a missing 'idle' section in the corresponding sprite-files.
I don't believe this problem to be a real bug of the playtest version, but of course, this problem doesn't appear when playing Cradle with the standard game version (w/ activision patch v1.11).

Anyone out there who can give some info about this?

[Protra3211]

Well I played a game with the playtest 8 2 05 on impossible largest map with 10 Civ,s
First off E,s latest tiles look great .A change was needed.
I played as the Hittites with one settler I was off running.
Ran into the Americans first who allowed a trade of maps . I got see that they had 5 cities and already many farm improvemts.
Diplomacy was at a stand still with them so I let things go. Next Civ I met was the Etruscans got the same deal as the other Civ.
Mean while the Americans had started a war with the Etruscans and I could see units going thur my border to fight . Working hard to build another city and keep a defesive hege. All sliders maxed.
America demanded 500 gold which I refused to give.War was then declared by America.I figured America could not fight two wars. At fisrt AI sent small stacks 2 and 3. I took out some of them near my border.
But the AI kept up the pace with 4 and 6 stacks removing border defense then city improvments.
I tried in vain to rush buy as many units to keep my cities as I still didnt have product power to keep up.
Well after 150 turns I was beaten . Its hard when your between to strong AI factions. Maybe more gifts would have helped . I did not see this time as many settlers invade my land .

[Protra3211]

After the game I went back to my last save. About 125 turns . Wanted to see how all the Civs were doing in the 08 02 05 playtest. Most civilizations had between 4 or 5 builds made in each city. Between 12 and 19 cities and around 35 to 50 units.
Its seems that the more aggressive AI Civs were at least fighting two or three wars at a time.
Once the AI,s started fighting each other I never see them offer a cease fire. In the first playtest 2004 04 03
AI to AI diplomacy was very active. Many wars ended after 30 turns . Now there could a downside. If AI,s are to passive with each other it will result in many small empires and a very easy game .
But some tweaking might be needed.
Also looking over the whole reveled map(used cheat) I could see settlers in the middle of another CIv,s border.
This might trigger early wars between the AI,s. Dont know if AI sees a settler in its land as a invader. Or is it like using a diplomat unit?

[Protra3211]

Sorry about the above post on diplomacy. The AI,s are offering each other cease fire just takes more time which is perfect. Started another game . Wil not post till I have a long game this way I will have the in and outs of changes to the AI.

[Ekmek]

speaking of triggering wars, the last game I played I found that if I "attacked" a civ that I had a peace treaty with I didn't get a warning. I know civ3 had this, and I thought ctp2 did but guess I was wrong. Do people think this should be implemented?

[Maquiladora]

Definitely. Ive pressed the wrong key on the numpad and moved the wrong way and attacked a few times.

[Fugi the Great]

Installed new playtest over old one. Moved my old unit.txt to new playtest directory. Restarted old game from earlier with no problem, first AI turn after a reload took forever. Realised that most of the liberated territories were swampy area (no wonder he lost) and would take forever to amass an army fast enough if the one I was using got the crap kicked out of it (lose a nice chunk of them before they even get to the city now that the AI has cannon - I did not yet have any), so played peaceful for a while. Worked great until turn 462 - CTD, CTP.exe was still running using 242 megs. End program from taskmanager, (no crash.txt). Reload from Autosave, again very slow first AI turn, saved game, but continued with no problem until turn 511 - CTD (no crash.txt). Said heck with it and went to bed. Next day I forgot to reload the autosave, but used the turn 462 save again (time travel I guess), very slow first AI turn, worked great up to turn 513, saved game and exited program, program did not want to shut down, According to Taskmanager it was using 449 megs of memory, wallpaper was all blue, everything was acting strange, had to reboot computer.

Still getting attacked by armies that are made up of 50% settlers - is it treating settlers as cannon fodder? Also still getting cities attacked by single units commiting suiside, I suppose that is one way to determine city defences, but very wasteful.

yes to implementing the question as to go to war or not, always got me into one I didn't want when there are many empires that have colors so close to each other. Doesn't even have to be just peace treatys, maybe even nations you may not even have met (assuming you have subs) or they have stealth units in your territory.

According to the GL, AG Rev gives you the ability to terriform swamps, would not let me do that until the next invention (forgot what it was), was this moved on purpose and the GL not updated, or accidently moved? Should also give you the ability to create forests, another one moved? Should almost be able to plant forests/jungles on flat terrain at anytime, or cut them down into plains/grassland. Anyone hear of axes or the guy called Johnny Appleseed?

[Maquiladora]

According to the GL, AG Rev gives you the ability to terriform swamps, would not let me do that until the next invention (forgot what it was), was this moved on purpose and the GL not updated, or accidently moved?

The buttons you see in the "Terraform Land" menu are which terrain you can add. You cant necessarily add this terrain over any other terrain as soon as you get its terraforming advance.

There are advances for removing a terrain and advances for adding a terrain (sometimes same for both) at certain points in the game for gameplay reasons, theyre not entirely unrealistic either.

In the whole game youll only be able to ADD, grassland, plains, forest and jungle, since these are considered positive terrains (you cant add swamp, desert, glacier, tundra etc).

Of course mountains and hills are positive, but you cant create a mountain from nothing and mine nothing, that was a cheap way to increase production before.

Toolmaking > add plains
Agri. Rev. > add grassland
Conservation > add forest/jungle

Toolmaking > remove forest/jungle
Agri. Rev. > remove swamp/plains/grassland/desert/swamp
Explosives > remove hills/polar hills/sand dunes
Conservation > remove dead tiles
Adv. Composites > remove tundra
Fusion > remove mountain/desert mnt/polar mnt
Gaia Theory > remove glacier

[Ekmek]

If you guys seen the recent revision reports Martin added some cool stuff to the national manager etc. I did a build (and included the ldl's). Its more of a "patch" to the latest playtest so you can download it in my sig (but it might be a bit slower than a regular compile).